New England Comics shuttered its Cambridge store on Sunday.
A mainstay of Harvard Square for more than 30 years, the store closed because of a precipitous decline in foot traffic in this post-pandemic era.
Despite its proximity to Harvard University, the store was no longer profitable.
I had been a customer almost as long as the store was open.
Continue reading “Sanctuary Lost”
In the late ’60s, the mighty maestros of DC Comics had a brainstorm: Spin Robin and Batgirl into solo adventures in the back pages of “Detective Comics.”
If you were a fan of the Bat-sidekicks hoping to see them take on some of Batman’s notorious rogues by themselves or perhaps even develop their own gallery of colorful enemies, you had to be disappointed.
Robin fought campus crime, and the stories were even more boring than this sentence suggests.
Batgirl battled run-of-the-mill thieves and killers.
But there is one Batgirl story that stands out, even after all these years.
It’s a Gotham City-sized crater of stupidity.
Continue reading “That Time Batgirl was Almost Killed by a Wig”
Any casual visitor to this site might guess that I have a deep affection for DC’s Justice Society of America, the first and greatest superteam.
Maybe it is because I talked about how the 1970 Justice League/Justice Society team-up pretty much got me addicted to comic books.
Or how I finally tracked down the elusive issue long missing from my collection.
Or how the Justice Society just lent themselves to the best holiday stories.
But I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d live to see the Justice Society star in a TV show.
Continue reading “We Have a Justice Society TV Show. This Is Not a Drill.”
It just had to happen.
Batman gained a female counterpart in 1956 in Batwoman, just in time to head off these freaky academics who were convinced Batman and Robin were P-Town buddies.
Readers had to wait five years for the next obvious addition to the Bat-Family.
In “Bat-Girl!” in “Batman” No. 139, cover date April 1961, written by Bill Finger and drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, the Bat-Family has been cornered by those dastardly fiends, the Cobra Gang.
Continue reading “Brace Yourself for the Billion Dollar Debut of Bat-Girl!”
DC released this week a facsimile edition of “The Flash” No. 123 featuring the Silver Age classic “Flash of Two Worlds.”
In this timeless tale, Barry Allen’s Flash travels to Earth 2 and meets his idol, the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, making his first appearance in a decade.
You can make the case that this comic book from the fertile imagination of the legendary Gardner Fox is the single most significant comic book of the Silver Age, at least for DC Comics. It introduced into mainstream canon the notion of parallel worlds and the multiverse, igniting thousands of stories and what later came to be the hallmark and sometimes the curse of the DC Universe.
Continue reading “What You Might Not Know about ‘Flash of Two Worlds’”
Mark Perigard 