Category comics

League of Extraordinary Oddballs: THE RED BEE

When it comes to vigilante justice, why should millionaire playboys, off-duty cops and crackpot scientists have all the fun?  In HIT Comics #1, beekeeper Richard Raleigh gets into the act with an M.O. that combines his skills as a brawler…

League of Extraordinary Oddballs: STARDUST

Things have been kind of slow around here, so I thought I’d start a series of posts on some of the weirder superhero comics I’ve come across.  In recent years, many of these long-forgotten oddities have fallen into the public…

Superman, 2020

I’ve always been interested in the ways comic books imagined the future, especially when I was living in the “future” in question.  As a kid, I read a reprint of an old Captain Marvel (“Shazam” variety) tale that featured a…

Exit Stan Lee

I didn’t grow up as a fan of Stan Lee. In fact, it’s fair to say that as a kid, I didn’t “get” Marvel at all.  Weaned on Superman and Batman, I viewed superheroes as unflappable paragons of confidence, competence…

RIP Steve Ditko

One of the key architects of the “Marvel Age of Comics,” Steve Ditko passed away last week at age 90.  I was going to write that he “left us,” but for most of his career he wasn’t really among us,…

Bat-Signal Over LA

The city of Los Angeles arranged a nice tribute to Adam West yesterday, flashing the bat-signal on the side of City Hall.   The cool part is they got the symbol right: there have been several iterations over the years,…

Dr Strange on the big screen

Last month I got got to see my personal “most anticipated” Marvel film: Dr Strange.  The good doctor has always been my favorite Marvel character, and while I don’t know if I’d call this entry my favorite Marvel film, I was very…

Murphy Anderson, RIP

Comic book artist Murphy Anderson passed away on Oct. 23, and while I always knew I liked his work, it hadn’t occurred to me until now just how many of the most powerful and best-remembered images of my childhood flowed from his brush. I…

Hitting 50: Lois Lane, Nut Case

Superman’s one-time supremacy on the newsstands meant that by 1965, girl reporter Lois Lane was well-established as the first (and I think, still only) character to headline a comic by virtue of being the girlfriend of a superhero.  Given that…