Category: Criticism

You could do worse, as law enforcement in a superhero universe, than putting everyone on a watchlist who’s ever publicly proclaimed “I’ll show ’em! I’ll show ’em all!” This half of the Jack-in-the-Box concerns the 1960s supervillain Mister Drama, whose origin is that he was rejected from a Shakespeare play

Jack-In-The-Box! Jack-In-The-Box!!                  Everyone, I love Jack-In-The-Box. Always have. When you look at Jack-In-The-Box, you immediately think Spider-Man – urban acrobatic crimefighter who immobilizes people with string he shoots out of his hands? Obviously. But the character is so much more than an ersatz Spider-Man, or even an ersatz Steve Ditko

Now that’s a cover. Issue #34 concludes this three-part reunion with Steeljack by having him confronting the villain, in an underground lair that is directly underneath his restaurant (this is a superhero comic, after all. Our villain is a fan – that kind of fan – and what interests me

We live in the age of the pop culture revival, and the arrival of the eternal film and movie franchises, all born or borrowing from the model of superhero comics storytelling. Astro City, one of the most storied and beloved superhero comics of all time, went through a revival of its own in 2013, and that it came back as strong as ever was a miracle in and of itself. Over the course of a year, Charlotte Finn will be examining this miracle – all 52 issues – as she spends A Year in the Big City.

“Why don’t they just get a job?” It’s one of the oldest questions that get asked of supervillains; if they have technology or powers that can do that, why rob banks? Why not change the world with it? The real answer is “because then you don’t get two fights and

(What a month this week’s been. Sorry this fell behind. If you don’t know why, trust me: it was a good reason.) This week’s issue is focusing on a creature who is 50% face… … which is appropriate, considering what happens. The Living Nightmare is about as close to iconic

There’s a saying, that no plan survives contact with the enemy. The same could be said for propaganda. When we left off last week, Zozat – our young bug-boy empath – had met an injured member of the First Family, and this week it’s clear that he’s hesitated to hand

The one thing that everyone hates, yet is seemingly inevitable, is the monoculture alien race. You know the one – the one where all the aliens are either warriors or capitalists or poets or masters of space magic and there’s one government, one religion, and so forth. The moment you

You know exactly when you’ve run into a non-American superhero when you encounter the cliché about their national identity. The best example is Alpha Flight, the Canadian starring the guy named after six ounces of frozen, vulcanized rubber and the other guy whose superpower is “what if the flag was