“She could never love me!” Comics and disability cliches
For me, the best kind of film reference book is one that makes me see movies with fresh eyes. Even movies that weren’t covered in the book. For example, Heather …
Category: Villains
The Kiss of the Kobra
Back in 2014 (this is a repost from my own blog that year), as part of rereading my comics collection, I came across a Kobra story from the 1990s. On …
“The Three Jokers” is a perfect Christmas gift for comics fans. That’s a joke
If you find The Three Jokers in your Christmas stocking, blame Krampus. Jason Fabok’s art is good, but Geoff Johns’ story for the three-issue miniseries embodies everything wrong with the Clown …
We didn’t see it coming: fiction and pandemic
Living through 2020 makes me appreciate that novelists and screenwriters aren’t clairvoyant. While we’ve had plagues in history, and several accounts of what they were like — hell, most of …
Twentieth Century Geopolitics and East-West Relations in the Shadow of Dr. Fu Manchu
Rereading Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series the past year or so (this is a rewritten 2011 post from my own blog) has been a fascinating experience. Not always the reading. …
More Missing the Point
Recently “Le Messor” had a post here about “Things Geeks Aren’t Supposed to Think,” which included comments on Watchmen; in the comments section, somebody remarked, “I think people really took the wrong lesson from Watchmen.” That got my brain going in a bit of a different direction from what they intended, and the comment I began to draft in response quickly revealed that it wanted to be a post. So here we are. Following in the wake of Greg Hatcher’s dissection of points missed in media, I find myself adding to his list.
Harley Quinn and “Definitive” Characters
Harley Quinn turns 26 this year. That’s why rebooting characters back to their “definitive” version is usually a bad idea. As probably everyone reading Atomic Junk Shop knows, comics make …