One thing about comic books I could never stand: All the damn vampires The constant one-upsmanship. For a time in the 90s, Rob Liefeld’s comics literally featured a series of heroes whose first action was the defeat the strongest hero in his cast, who had himself defeated the previous toughest guy earlier. Certain chatrooms and comics stores are constant streams of “Who’s stronger”, which is pretty silly given that we’re dealing with fictional characters and also Wildfire is totally a walking nuclear furnace and the most powerful, ASHLEY! Either way, the immovable irresistible debate gives us something to talk about…
Author: Matthew Peterson
Matthew Peterson
Once upon a time, there was a young nerd from the Midwest, who loved Matter-Eater Lad and the McKenzie Brothers... If pop culture were a maze, Matthew would be the Minotaur at its center. Were it a mall, he'd be the Food Court. Were it a parking lot, he’d be the distant Cart Corral where the weird kids gather to smoke, but that’s not important right now... Matthew enjoys body surfing (so long as the bodies are fresh), writing in the third person, and dark-eyed women. Amongst his weaponry are such diverse elements as: Fear! Surprise! Ruthless efficiency! An almost fanatical devotion to pop culture! And a nice red uniform.
Sometime last week, entirely by chance, Widget and I caught an episode of ‘Steven Universe’. Immediately afterwards, we set the DVR to record the next one, and in the past few days we have been binge-watching as much as we can, including the big revelations in some of the recent new episodes. I am really stunned at how quickly the show has become our favorite, especially after a year or two of seeing promos and such and feeling no real interest in the show. It’s always wonderful when something suddenly leaps to the top of your metaphorical read pile, especially…
Your humber MS-QOTD has an admission, Faithful Spoilerites: I have never flown. I exist at the nexus of a peculiar Venn diagram of “Usually Broke”, “Drives Everywhere” and “Fatter Even Than Kevin Smith Who Was Legendarily Too Fat To Fly.” My travels within the U.S., thus, have involved a lot of long drives while singing, leaving me wondering how I might deal with commercial airlines. In a fit of what probably isn’t irony at all, my eleven-year-old daughter has been flying regularly since she was a tiny baby, and I’m routinely in airports dropping her off or picking her up.…
The thing about comic book art is that it’s all subjective. For every person who mocks Rob Liefeld’s shortcomings, there is someone who loves his work, ankles be damned. I love the work of Gil Kane, but understand that not everyone does, even though to me, he is the only Hal Jordan artist that matters. (Weellll, maybe early-80s Dave Gibbons.) Likewise, when it comes to the pre-Satellite Justice League of America, it’s all about Mike Sekowsky, whose shaggy-haired, wild-eyed villains all seem to look like Jack Elam, and whose Hawkman is a terrifying creature boring through us with his terrible…
There are a lot of power-conveying weapons, accessories and trinkets in the various fictional universes we love, but more than a few of them seem to have things in common… Some fictional heroes are about the head, some heroes are about the fist, but for a special few, the gimmick is all in the wrist! Welcome to Ten Things!
Logan is dead, but his legacy lives on in the form of his friends and family, now tasked with protecting a new batch of Weapon X test subjects. Of course, that was an easier plan before a member of the Imperial Guard arrives from deep space with questions about Wolverine’s demise… Your Major Spoilers review of Wolverines #9 awaits!
As I write this, I’ve just completed a full weekend of cleaning, cooking and basic domestic daddery, and I could really go for something sweet. For the last week, we’ve been eating a maple cake with maple frosting that my daughter made as a test run for her upcoming birthday party, and its cloying sweetness has left my palate craving something different, maybe something with more of a kick to it, like a nice lemon cookie or something with bitter undernote, like cranberry. If I had my choice, it’d be a cranberry-white chocolate chip cookie, but more than likely I’m…
With the upcoming (hopefully temporary) end of Fantastic Four drawing near, we may be entering a strange new Fantastic Four-free world for the first time in decades. Seems like a good time to check out the issue that made the team what it is today. No, not Fantastic Four #1, that’s just the origin, I’m talking about the REAL beginning… Your Major Spoilers (Retro) Review of Fantastic Four #3 awaits!
Launched in the middle of the Spider-Verse giant crossover event, the first few issues of Spider-Woman were tied up in universal madness and controversy about her backside. Now, Jessica Drew enters a new era, with her first new look in like 30 years, but what brings about such monumental change? Your Major Spoilers review of Spider-Woman #5 awaits!
I’ll be honest: I have no idea from whence today’s MS-QOTD image comes, but I want to go there and watch it, especially when it crosses over with the DS9 animated series. It also raises the awesome idea of getting the original actors (many of whom have done extensive voice-over work in animation already) to voice their animated counterparts, with maybe even cameos from Shatner and company, because why not? And while we’ve got the studios drawing anyway, we might as well get them to kick in on more Clerks animated as well, which leads us to today’s in-betweener query……
With Firestorm, the animated Vixen, NFL SuperPro A.T.O.M. and the title characters of Flash and Arrow in play, CW has a lot of superheroes already appearing in their shared superhero universe. Of course, it’s barely the tiniest fraction of the available characters in DC Comics’ arsenal, which includes no fewer than seven characters called Starman, three or four Solomon Grundies and more Toymen than you could shake a stick at. Heck, The Legion of Super-Heroes alone usually has more than 20 active members at a time, so it’s natural to want more from our TV super-friends. Live-action Zatanna would be…
Full disclosure: I am in an ongoing torrid love/hate relationship with the comic book ‘Invincible’, and it’s generally bull-headed protagonist Mark Grayson, the titular Invincible. His earliest adventures were of the ‘young man coming of age’ variety, but as the character has grown up, he has been in a number of disruptive behavior cycles. He’ll distrust an authority figure, then turnabout and trust them, then get burned by them, then start the cycle anew. Nearly every scene involving his fiancee, Atom Eve, is a fight that he could easily avoid with the most basic of interpersonal communication, and he’s shown…
Dozens and dozens of our favorite comic book characters are created as homages of, tributes to, or blatant rip-offs of previously existing characters. It is, by this point, the nature of the beast, and leads us to more than a few interesting stories. There are many ways to acknowledge your literary influences, but sometimes it’s best to just own up to it… Your Major Spoilers (Retro) Review of Eclipse Monthly #8 awaits!
A world where robots are as real as men has a number of unexpected consequences. Case in point: D4VE’s mid-life crisis… Your Major Spoilers review of D4VE #1 awaits!