The first thought: It’s tricky. Obviously, Marvel has provided a blueprint on how to create a blockbuster film that acts both as a standalone film and as a sequel to numerous other standalone films featuring the origins of the cast of your current movie (so that you don’t have to spend the first ten hours [...]

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It has been pointed out to me, on occasion, that I spend many of my blog posts (here and elsewhere) complaining about things that frustrate me and irritate me about comics. This is, to some extent, a fair criticism; I do spend more time talking about the things that I want to stop than the [...]

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Free Comics Day has changed a lot for me since my daughter came into my life. It used to be something I almost casually ignored; after all, I was already shopping at my local comics store. I didn’t need a neat holiday to get me through the doors, and whenever the folks at Mind’s Eye [...]

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…is this. Not the article. The pictures. It really does seem, based on not just this but all the publicity pictures I’ve seen, that everyone in the Nu52 has only one expression, and it’s “perpetual grimace”. Seriously, you could make an animated gif of nothing but DC characters making inadvertently hilarious facial expression, and it [...]

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Of course, realistically speaking, this post should really be titled, “Empirical Reasons Why The Silver Age Was More To My Personal Taste”, or perhaps if I wanted to come on strong, “Empirical Reasons Why The Silver Age Catered Better To A Mass Audience”. But this is the Internet, and we have proud traditions here. Stating [...]

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Back in 2005 or so, when I actually cared enough about DC to pay attention to them, it occurred to me that there was an interesting vacancy created by the departure of Wally West as the Flash and the arrival of Bart Allen. Specifically, it meant that the identity of Impulse was just floating around [...]

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It’s become an overused and empty catchphrase with almost depressing speed; faced with sexist caricature after sexist caricature, feminist comics fans said that they wanted strong female characters as an alternative to women who serve no purpose other than to be the eye/arm-candy for male protagonists. And seemingly within days, every character was being described [...]

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Every time I hear about Geraldo Rivera’s comments on the Trayvon Martin shootings, I always picture him talking to the victim’s family. I picture him sitting there, an expression of Sincere Concern on his face (the one he’s practiced over years of TV “journalism”), perhaps putting a hand on one family member’s knee in a [...]

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The other day, I was reading a book called “A Galaxy Not So Far Away”, a book of essays about ‘Star Wars’. The essays varied wildly in quality from “kind of mediocre” to “crimes against the English language”, but one of the things that stuck out about them was the way that they all talked [...]

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I suspect that very few of you know what ‘The Shining’ is really about. You might think you know; you might talk about themes of isolation, claustrophobia, and the darkness in the human spirit made manifest as a “haunted” hotel. But you’d be wrong. You probably aren’t aware of the hidden messages about the dangers [...]

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I suppose someone’s going to have to talk about this, aren’t they? Personally, I can get neither excited nor outraged about this. DC, in response to what they have to believe to be popular demand for this, is publishing a prequel that will be subject to more scrutiny than the ‘Gone With the Wind’ sequel. [...]

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Everyone’s talking about MGM, Paramount, and Universal this summer, but for some reason, nobody but me has the inside scoop on this summer’s films from indie horror/sci-fi titan The Asylum! Well, I know you all wanted that rectified, so here’s the inside scoop on their upcoming releases! Read more right here… » FEBRUARY: February is [...]

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Recently, the whole “Nice Guy” topic came up again, well after the initial post had become a thing of legend. Many people jumped in on the new discussion, but it always seems like the same people respond in the same way. The phrase, “Yes, they’re being jerks, but they’ve got a point…” keeps getting bandied [...]

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When you think about it, ‘Doctor Who’ should really have ended in 1966. After all, the star of the series was involved in protracted and angry disputes with the show’s producer, and was also suffering from the first visible symptoms of the arteriosclerosis that would take his life less than a decade later. Sure, the [...]

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Recently, Rob Shearman and Toby Hadoke embarked on a marathon project, the kind of thing that is only really ambitious for Doctor Who fans: They agreed to watch the entire series. It’s amazing to think about, really; what would be the baseline for fans of most other science-fiction/fantasy show, “Have you seen every episode?”, is [...]

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