or These Britons are crazy! It’s become a holiday tradition at Major Spoiers – after we awake from the Turkey Sleep, we stagger to the keyboard and tell you of the adventures of Asterix the Gaul. This year the first volume to catch my eye was Asterix in Britain. Does the book stand up to the other great Asterix stories out there?
Browsing: Retro Review
Or – “Justice, Like Lightning, Should Ever Appear, One If By Land, Two If By Sea…” The Bronze Age of comics brought the winds of change, and though Luke Cage, John Stewart, T’Challa and others preceded him, Jefferson Pierce was DC’s first African-American headline character… Is his first swingin’ 70’s appearance Dy-No-MITE, or will this issue be a jive turkey?
Or – “Verily, Milady. It Doth Ring The Clobbering Hour…” Every comic book is somebody’s first comic book, and sometimes your personal concept of a character can be defined by the first time you interact with them. Thus it is for me with the Fantastic Four, as the first interaction I ever had with any of them was an issue that perfectly defines The Thing, even 25 years later…
Or – “The Musical Question: Has Death In Comics EVER Meant Anything?” With the recent revelations about the loss of the newest Captain America, comics fans are once again opining on death in comics and making the usual snide remarks about how nobody ever stays dead (save Thomas Wayne, his wife Martha and Ben Parker.) Thugs and mooks have been croaking in comics since the earliest pulp-inspired tales, but where did the endless merry-go-round get its start?
Or – “A Collector’s Item For Our Dear Fiends!” Greetings, fright-fans! Give the man your grimy little dime, if you haven’t done so already, and step into the Crypt of COMICS! I’m your host, the Longbox-Lifter, with a quartet of loathsome gems from that heyday of fear and loathing, the repressed and recessed decade known as the nineteen-fifties! Hang on to your heads, Faithful Spoilerites, and mind your other organs too as we present a Halloween treat for boils and ghouls alike, featuring your recommended daily allowance of Halloween terror! **This Retro Review comes from a time before the Comics…
Or – “Because Last Week’s Review Made Me Remember It Fondly…” For all my love of unofficial crossover madness (like Nick Fury/John Steed), occasionally we see two companies working together in an official capacity to tell a story featuring two beloved icons. Usually, this results in a watered-down tale that doesn’t do justice to EITHER property… And then, there’s Batman/Captain America.
Or – “Before Marvel & DC Editorial Got All Passive-Aggressive…” Long before the actual Marvel DC crossovers of the 90’s (most of which were pretty banal affairs, with the exception of the awesome Batman/Captain America), there were a number of unofficial blink-and-you-missed-it crossovers from the creative teams that made the comics. Steve Skeates used the Sub-Mariner’s book to wrap up a plot leftover from an issue of Aquaman he wrote a couple years earlier, while the story of Roy Thomas’ trip to Rutland Vermont crosses multiple universes (a long story I’ll probably get to sooner or later.) But this, my…
Or – “The Viewers Are Those Who Make The Painting…” I had a completely different Retro Review on tap for today, which (due to a series of circumstances filled with annoyance and vitriol probably best left undiscussed) will have to be postponed to a later date. I scanned my wall of comics looking for a suitable replacement, and my eyes immediately locked on the box marked “Howard The Duck/Tales Of The Beanworld/Zot!” and remembered something that my grandfather probably never actually said: “When life gives you lemons, sometimes you have to go read about beans…”
Or – “A Strange Relic Of A Bygone Era…” Often times, the conventional wisdom is taken as pure fact and repeated as though it were the only possible truth… This is doubly true in comics fandom, where conventional wisdom takes on a whole new meaning and common knowledge is the coin of the realm. Thus, many of you are going to scoff when I say this: The New Universe? It was actually pretty cool.
Or – “Here’s Why I Prefer Some Characters Dead….” I have a real problem with the fact that comics death is never final. It’s a problem that I have had to learn to live with, much like my day job requires me to get over my aversion to stupidity, drama and what is almost certainly serious meth addiction… When a batch of 90’s comics showed up for processing on my desk, I flipped through the pages of this one, and was reminded of one of the few times after 1984 that Hal Jordan was in any way interesting.
Or – “More Things In Heav’n And Earth, Horatio…” There is a lot more to the history of comic books than Amazing Fantasy, Detective Comics and Hulk #181. Those big dogs may get all the press, but there are other heroes, lesser heroes (but heroes nonetheless), who work where they cannot. Men and woman and cyborgs and the occasional canine, alien, robot or what-have-you who are proud to stand up and say, “Hey! I’m a caped crusader , too!” And then… There’s Tod. Tod HOLTON. TOD HOLTON: MOTHA$&$@IN’ SUPER GREEN BERET!! WITH SILLLVER WINGS UPON HIS CHEST! MAKE HIM ONE…
Or – “Believe It Or Not, Relaunches Are Nothing New…” With the beginnings of the New 52 in stores, internet wags have already sounded the death knell for DC and for comics in general, and there are some who cite restarts/relaunches/reboots and such as the work of Mephisto. The truth, Faithful Spoilerites, is that relaunches have always been the way of the comic book world, dating back to the earliest days of cheap newsprint. Case in point: Captain America – Commie Smasher!
Or – “The Storyarc That Started It All…” People sometimes like to ask me what my favorite comic book is, and it’s a difficult choice to make. There are hundreds of books that I love, even those that I have complete runs of, but none quite like Hellblazer. In the spring of 1988, I drove to Hays, Kansas and picked up Hellblazer #1 from the stands at Gulliver’s Tattered Covers, and have purchased every single issue of the book (and many crossovers and miniseries and such) ever since. Though the first issue is a good one, this is the book…
One of the great shames of the last decade of comics is the seeming compulsion to break all the traditional taboos. Resurrecting Bucky, getting Aunt May some action, even the fate of poor Sue Dibny are unpleasant examples of this phenomenon, but no one has been quite as a big a target as young Mary Marvel. The need to somehow corrupt Mary with evil and/or sexuality has led to no fewer than three instances of Dark Mary Marvel, each of which utterly failed to feel like much more than schoolyard bullying, picking on the sweetest girl just to make her…