Most people are exposed to the classics at the worst time of their lives.
When they are teenagers.
Young people typically have no patience or interest in the best works in literature and regard them, alas, as a slog to get through to graduation.
Part of the blame has to fall on school systems, which present these works about as appealing as the municipal tax code.
Continue reading “‘Recalled to Life’: A Case for Re-reading the Classics”
DC and IDW Publishing’s “Love is Love” welcomes the best and brightest comics creators today to honor the victims of the Pulse shooting in Orlando in June.
Marc Andreyko (“Batwoman”) has gathered such talents as Paul Dini, Gail Simone, Phil Jimenez and Brian Michael Bendis as well as a few folks you don’t typically associate with comics: Patton Oswalt, Taran Killam, Morgan Spurlock and Matt Bomer.
Most of the stories in this 144-page trade paperback run just one page.
One page?
What kind of impact can one page deliver?
Continue reading “DC/IDW’s ‘Love is Love’ Honors Pulse Victims”
The news came via a handful of flimsy postcards.
Four beloved fiction magazines were altering their formats to print only “double issues.”
The catch?
They were dropping down to bimonthly releases.
The quality quartet – “Analog Science Fiction and Fact,” “Asimov’s Science Fiction,” “Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine” and “Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine” – have all been monthly publications, more or less.
For the last several years, they’ve been published 10 times a year – in eight regular-sized issues plus two double-sized issues.
But now current owner Dell Magazines, a subsidiary of Penny Publications, best known for its monthly flood of crossword and puzzle magazines, decided to switch them to bimonthly status and so notified its subscribers in postcards.
Is the change because of declining sales?
My favorite era in “Batman” comics – actually all of DC – is the late ’50s and early ’60s.
Oh, these weren’t the comics I grew up with.
By the time I came along, Batman was already years into his “New Look” – the artistic reboot that pushed for realism, jettisoned most of the Bat-Family and made for a dull crime-fighter.
Over the years, I have gone back and tried to collect as much as I can – not much, all things considered – of “Batman,” “Detective Comics” and “World’s Finest” during this era.
The stories are just so much fun.
Many comics fans – and certainly DC itself – disagree.
Some moments in comics are just so goofy, they can never be forgotten.
Even by the heroes themselves.
In the current issue of Marvel Comics’ “Jessica Jones,” No. 2, cover date January 2017, in a flashback to happier times, Luke Cage distracts his baby mama-to-be Jessica Jones with one of his less than great exploits as she struggles through labor.
Continue reading “Because You Demanded It! The Sequel to the Silliest Scene in the Marvel Age!”
Mark Perigard 