Wednesday, March 24 2010
Beneath the Great Wave: Azzarello and Morales Return to the Roots of Comics
Azzarello and Morales tap the roots of modern popular culture to offer a highly stylized view of the birth of comic books.
Friday, March 12 2010
Oscar Afterglow, “American Century” and a War of Popular Cultures
Oscars hopefuls Up in the Air and An Education offer different but complementary views on popular culture. "American Century" throws this neat paradigm into question.
Wednesday, March 3 2010
Sorry I’m Late: The Real Return of Barry Allen
Racked by delays, pushed aside by creative commitments, and years after the phenomenal Green Lantern: Reborn, Flash Reborn couldn't really matter. Could it?
Wednesday, February 24 2010
Lone Wolf and Cub Part 3: Artwork and Swordplay
The third installment of Shawn O'Rourke's series on Lone Wolf and Cub. This feature examines the way Goseki Kojima brilliantly uses different artistic devices to draw the reader into the story.
Wednesday, February 17 2010
Another Chance: Fox’s Reboot of DC Comics’ “Human Target”
Primetime TV may prove to be a necessary rescue of a classic DC character.
Thursday, February 11 2010
A Modern Promethea: Mike Carey and Peter Gross Pen the Unwritten
Story these days is a battlefield, and Mike Carey and Peter Gross are the new generals.
Thursday, February 4 2010
Life During Wartime: The Cultural Catharsis of Brian Wood’s DMZ
DMZ creator Brian Wood offers a cultural catharsis for our times, one that is enduringly artistic, despite being overtly political.
Friday, January 29 2010
Die With Your Mask On: The Grim Superheroics of Rick Veitch
Rick Veitch wonders where the next step in superhuman evolution will take us.
Thursday, January 21 2010
Lone Wolf and Cub Part 2: Revenge in the Epic Narrative Tradition
For something to be an "epic", it must be replete with cultural significance and deal with important themes on a grand scale, just like Lone Wolf and Cub.
Thursday, January 14 2010
Iconic Spider Jerusalem and The New Journalism
There’s someone every journalism student should know. The iconic, irascible and deeply compassionate Spider Jerusalem has proven to be darkly prescient of the decade that lay immediately ahead.
Wednesday, January 6 2010
What’s Past Is Prologue: The Best Comics of the Past Decade?
Could Matt Fraction and Salvador Larroca have produced six perfect comics pages in the recent "Counting Up from Zero" issue of The Invincible Iron Man?
Wednesday, December 16 2009
Good Memories of Bad Times: Wolverine Under the Boardwalk
Under the Boardwalk taps hidden micro-genre in Wolverine, reaffirming the inexhaustible inventiveness of the character, and delivering hard comment on the need for human resilience.
Wednesday, December 9 2009
The Sociology of Superheroes: Andi Ewington and 45
Andi Ewington's 45 appeals to an audience that transcends 1970s Batman, and even the phenomenal Watchmen.
Wednesday, December 2 2009
Lone Wolf and Cub Part 1: History and Influences
This unparalleled tale of honor and vengeance illustrates the full scope of human drama. In this introductory feature, appearing monthly, a brief overview of the series is sketched.
Friday, November 20 2009
Masters of Horror Manga: Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino
Perhaps more so than any other artists, Kazuo Umezu and Hideshi Hino defined the genre of horror comics in Japan, an influence that extends to the West, and also to the world of J-horror films.
Friday, November 13 2009
We Few, We Happy Few, We Bandaged Brothers: Jeff Lemire’s The Nobody and the Quest for Self
A touching, heartfelt meditation on identity and isolation in a small town, Jeff Lemire is able to redress an H.G. Wells classic and make it as timely and disturbing as ever.
Wednesday, November 4 2009
Celebrating the Death of the Dark Knight – and His Rebirth
With the recent passing of Bruce Wayne, can the Batman character escape the tragedy of Bruce Wayne's life that originally birthed it?
Wednesday, October 14 2009
Beautiful and Unique Snowflakes: Warren Ellis’ ‘Planetary’
Warren Ellis, once thought of by many as comics’ resident Orson Welles, an angry, embittered artist, is actually the industry’s Kurt Vonnegut, sent here to make us feel as if "everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt".
Wednesday, October 7 2009
Hollow “Victory”: J Michael Straczynski ‘Reboots’ the Mighty Thor
J Michael Straczynski's storytelling stands out as one of the most inventive in recent mainstream superhero comics.
Wednesday, September 30 2009
The Devil’s Due: What Ed Brubaker Did to Reinvent Daredevil
Could Ed Brubaker have written the definitive version of a character renowned for its production of 'definitive' visions?
Wednesday, September 23 2009
Maximum Carnage: A Look Back
I was a kid when I first read Maximum Carnage and it became my favorite comic book series. How well does the story hold up over time? Is it still as good as I remember or was my innocent childhood love misplaced?
Thursday, September 17 2009
Abstract Comics
If nothing else, it seems that Abstract Comics makes explicit that the line between comics and high art is beginning to disappear.
Wednesday, September 9 2009
Fear of a Mouse Planet: What Disney’s Acquisition of Marvel Means for the House of Ideas
The fears of a Disney planet are fears that these characters we cherish will be tinkered with or even taken away from us.
Wednesday, September 2 2009
Explainers: Back to the ‘50’s and Up to the Present
Jules Feiffer's groundbreaking Village Voice comics delivered a satirical take on current events and paved the way for many contemporary strips.
Friday, August 28 2009
The Devil You Know: Mignola’s Hellboy in the Chapel of Moloch and the Old Debate
Modernist drama around the popularizing of the cultural archive, or postmodernist deliberation on the redemptive value of art in world awash in mass consumerism, the story of Mignola's Hellboy is also the story of comics' struggle for legitimation both as art-form and industry.
Monday, August 24 2009
The Boy Who Would Be The Beast of the Apocalpyse: Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, Mythology, and the Human
Hellboy essentially argues that biology indeed need not be destiny, and that to exist as a human means something more than possessing a certain normative appearance.
Wednesday, August 19 2009
Red Menace in the Mirror: Identity, Politics and Identity Politics in Superman Red Son
In writer Mark Millar's visionary recasting of Superman as a Soviet dictator, questions of personal and social identity become the staging point for a central drama around global justice.
Wednesday, August 12 2009
The Legacy of Mike Wieringo: The Flash Years
The true legacy of Mike Wieringo is his radical redefining of the comics industry's obsession with navel-gazing.
Wednesday, August 5 2009
Manga and Minimalism: The Shared Visions of Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Raymond Carver
One is an acknowledged master of the modern short story, and the other is an influential figure in the world of alternative Japanese comics.
Wednesday, July 29 2009
Jack Knight’s First Team Up
The Starman is a generational tale of a young hero assuming his father’s mantle, which takes the reader on an educational journey through DC Comics’ past.
Wednesday, July 22 2009
I Saw You: Comics, the Internet, and Everyday Life
In this Iconographies feature, I Saw You will be used as a spring-board to understanding how the internet might be examined and made sense of through comics.
Wednesday, July 8 2009
Collapse: 1989’s Legion of Super-Heroes
This comic offers a profound meditation on the far-reaching effects the confluence of a literary revolution, engineering miracle and scientific doctrine would have on popular culture.
Thursday, June 18 2009
The History of Comic Conventions
This edition of "Iconographies" looks at the rise in popularity of the comics convention, and the pop-cultural changes conventions have brought to comics.
Wednesday, June 10 2009
The Death of Captain America
"The Iconographies" is a series of weekly features focusing on iconic moments, creators, characters or publications in the ongoing 'biography' of graphic literature. This edition looks at the 2007 death of Marvel superhero, Captain America.
