When Arkham Asylum was comedy gold: The Joker, Clown Prince of Crime
Until I reread the 1975-6 The Joker series (now collected in the Joker: Clown Prince of Crime TPB) I’d forgotten that Arkham Asylum was once a fun place to be …
Author: frasersherman
Earth One, where comic books are just like ours, only different
Roy Thomas transformed Earth-One’s comic books without even trying. Or probably even thinking about it. Up until Thomas wrote All-Star Squadron, it was canon that Earth-One in the 1940s had …
Art takes practice. This shouldn’t surprise people.
One of the things I love about Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is that it acknowledges that being a successful performer takes work. Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) is a 1950s …
A product of its time, but not in a bad way: Skull the Slayer
Usually “a product of time” identifies books (or people) with unsavory qualities such as the antisemitism and racism in H. Rider Haggard’s The People of the Mist. While Skull the …
Just shoot him already! Morgan and Mace of the Suicide Squad
Successful formula fiction requires two things. First, a formula that works when it’s reused over and over. Second, characters who make the formula interesting; as Roger Ebert once put it, …
The loneliest miser: another look at Christmas Carol
Last year Greg Hatcher discussed why he loves A Christmas Carol despite a general distaste for Christmas because “someone finally convinces a rich asshole to stop being a jerk to …
Christmas as a black hole
Over the years Christmas has become the black hole of movies, drawing them to the season by the gravitic pull of its marketing power. As my colleagues were discussing in …