Category Archives: WEBS OF FICTION

On Richard Lester’s Musketeers

For a long time, when critics talked about ‘comic book movies,’ they used to just mean silly, exaggerated action films. In the past couple of decades, the term is more likely to refer to a movie that is a direct … Continue reading

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Expanding The War of the Worlds – part 2

If you read last week’s post, you know I’ve been discussing comics that expanded H.G. Wells’ classic novel The War of the Worlds. Today I want to start with The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s fun … Continue reading

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Expanding The War of the Worlds – part 1

A couple of months ago, I recommended (re)visiting H.G. Well’s The War of the Worlds. This classic sci-fi horror novel became a massive influence on pop culture as the urtext for books, films, television shows, theatre plays, and video games about … Continue reading

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COMICS CAN BE AWESOME (15 June 2020)

Lately I’ve been using the COMICS CAN BE AWESOME section to spotlight nifty covers, mostly of old, Cold War-era series, from war/horror hybrids to pulpy fantasy anthologies (usually with the words ‘weird,’ ‘strange,’ and/or ‘mystery’ in the title)… I’m not the … Continue reading

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Spotlight on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – part 2

If you read the last post, you know what’s going on. This time around, let’s look at the set of volumes of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen dealing with the last hundred-years-or-so, starting with the bleak Century trilogy. Century: 1910 … Continue reading

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Spotlight on The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – part 1

If Master Race and other stories was Gotham Calling’s 2018 book of the year, this time around that questionable honor goes to The Tempest, the collection that marks the ending – twenty years after the first issue came out – … Continue reading

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On Todd Phillips’ Joker

It turns out the most satisfying way to appreciate Todd Phillips’ Joker was to almost forget that it was a Joker movie. Taken as a DCU entry, the project didn’t particularly appeal to me: a Joker origin story (when the … Continue reading

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Alternative Batmen

          The Dark Knight and his supporting cast have become so deeply familiar to comic book readers – and to consumers of pop culture in general – that sometimes the mere gesture of recontextualizing their imagery is enough to generate … Continue reading

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On the Joker’s broken reflection

If you read the last posts, you know what’s going on. Each day this week I’m focusing on a specific aspect of Batman comics that really appeals to me. As any fan of this blog can tell, I love finding … Continue reading

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On the discreet BATMAN DIES!!! event

In November 2000, the ‘Next Issue’ blurbs in the Batman family of comics announced that something big was about to go down… Batman #585 Catwoman (v2) #88 Robin (v4) #84 The premise of a story in which the Dark Knight … Continue reading

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