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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
Why wait ’til 2016? It was better in 1949.
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…
Fifty years ago this month, the world met Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD. Okay, so technically we’d already met Nick a couple years earlier as a tough-as-nails three-striper in “Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos,” but that book was set in…
To my eye, there’s little if any difference between Marvel and DC Comics today, but in 1965 the difference was fairly pronounced. Two books on the stands in April of that year, DC’s Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen and Marvel’s Tales Of…
