Tag Archives: comics

Roy Thomas and Gil Kane’s Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung

It never would have occurred to me to make a graphic novel out of Wagner’s Ring cycle, but on reflection, it’s a natural — I mean, who is more a superhero than Siegfried, the son of a god, running around … Continue reading

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Hyouta Fujiyama’s Ordinary Crush, Vols. 1 & 2

Hyouta Fujiyama has become one of my favorite mangaka doing BL, mostly because of her strong, clean graphics and charming stories. (For some general remarks on BL, see my comments on Dash!.) In Ordinary Crush we have the core of … Continue reading

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Isaku Natsume’s Dash!

Isaku Natsume’s Dash represents an excellent example of the genre in shoujo manga (“manga for girls”) known in Japan as BL (boys’ love), bishonen-ai or shonen-ai, or, as is generally the case in the West, yaoi (pronounced, if one is … Continue reading

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Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates: Flesh and Bone

Flesh and Bone is a prequel to The Surrogates, taking the story back fifteen years to the anti-surrogate riots of 2039. The incident that sparks the crisis is the beating death of a derelict by three teenagers who are using … Continue reading

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Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele’s The Surrogates

Robert Venditti’s The Surrogates, drawn by Brett Weldele, is right up among the top graphic works I’ve run across recently. Set in a near-future megalopolis, it’s a fast-moving crime drama with a couple of unique twists. The central motivator in … Continue reading

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Joss Whedon’s The Avengers

I’m generally not a big fan of translating superhero comics to live-action films. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films, so far, have tended to collapse under their own weight. Bryan Singer’s X-Men should have been titled Wolverine, and was a waste of … Continue reading

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Keith Giffen’s Lobo: 100 Page Spectacular

Lobo is another of those DC characters with a somewhat checkered past. Introduced in 1983 as a hardened villain (with, in that incarnation, a short shelf life), he was resurrected in the early ’90s as one of a growing number … Continue reading

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Geoff Johns and Ivan Reis’ Blackest Night/Geoff Johns and Peter J. Tomasi’s Brightest Day, Vol. 1

Blackest Night and Brightest Day mark another DC “crossover event” in which pretty much everyone gets reinvented. These have become almost a requirement in superhero comics, I suspect because of the periodic necessity of reconciling the various universes occupied by … Continue reading

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Grant Morrison’s Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

Batman has probably been rethought and retooled more than any other superhero, and The Return of Bruce Wayne, a six issue mini-series here collected in a hardback edition, gives us an extended reconstruction as Wayne works his way through history … Continue reading

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Tony Bedard and Kevin VanHook’s Oracle: The Cure

You don’t really need tights and a cape to be a superhero. You don’t need super strength or mutant abilities. You don’t even have to have your body surgically or chemically altered. (Willingly or otherwise.) Mind, these things don’t hurt, … Continue reading

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