My late Fourth of July post: Captain America in the Age of Trump
What do you do with a symbol of America in an American era like the one we have now? I give Ta-Nehisi Coates credit for trying to tackle that question …
Author: frasersherman
True confessions: I like Gunfire.
No, not the sound of bullets, I like Gunfire the 1994-5 comic book and its eponymous protagonist. I’m aware that’s a minority view. Gunfire is usually, and not unreasonably dismissed …
The Organization of Active Anthropologists Wants You!: The Brain Boy Archives
Some years back, Scott Shaw!’s column on CBG covered a bizarre-sounding story in which a teenage psi spy battles a psionic T. rex for the fate of the world. It …
A world without superheroes: The birth of the Silver Age
Intellectually, I’ve known for years that between the Golden Age ending and the debut of Barry Allen in Showcase #4, superheroes were mostly dead in the water. My recent rereading …
After the Crisis: Comic Books on DC’s Post-Crisis Earth
Crisis on Infinite Earths not only upended DC’s continuity, it upended the Earth-One and Earth Two comic-book industries. In the aftermath of the multiverse merging, comics changed radically and ended …
“Corpses are part of our business”: The Terror of Dr. Mabuse
As a kid, German filmmaker Artur Brauner slipped out of the house to catch Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse and fell in love. He wasn’t able to convince …
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 …