Night of the Walking Dead
I can only imagine what Southern U.S. moviegoers must have been thinking when Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s seminal zombie horror film, lit up the screens in late 1968. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated earlier in that same year and the Fair Housing Act had just been enacted during … Continue reading
Law and order on trial
The morality of comic book characters never used to be up for debate. If you were a superhero, you wore a bright costume, helped kids rescue kittens and shook hands with the police when you dropped off the criminals you apprehended, sometimes without even having to land a punch. If you were a supervillain, you … Continue reading
My summer stack of comics
Did you know that scientists recently calculated how much we actually read in our work and personal lives? It seems a typical person today consumes the equivalent of 174 full newspapers a day in information — nearly five times as much as 25 years ago. Between email, print material, internet browsing, and advertising, we are literally inundated with text … Continue reading
Drawn out
If there were a single lesson to be learned from the collective knowledge unleashed at University of Chicago’s Comics: Philosophy and Practice conference, it would be that drawing is deeply democratic. To hear many of the 17 world-famous cartoonists in attendance tell it, no other action exists that retains as much validity without the burden … Continue reading
Drawn in
What the %$#! Happened to Comics? With these five words (and four cleverly chosen symbols) began a fascinatingly unique event in comics history. Under the shadow of the massive NATO conference that overtook the Windy City for the weekend of May 18-20, the University of Chicago mounted a historic meeting of the minds entitled Comics: … Continue reading
My youth in a comic book Detroit
Beginnings, in life and literature, make or break a story. Writers can agonize over their first line (as I, not coincidentally, just did) to ensure the reader is hooked immediately into a world about to unfold. Challenging, yet convenient, is the ability to rewrite, revise, and retcon your story until it is the perfect synthesis … Continue reading
How do you solve a problem like Siobhan?
Superheroes are for boys! With these four words, my five year-old niece Siobhan cut right through my chest and pulled out my heart. She was so adamant when she said it, you’d think it had been on the news or something. Admittedly, five year-olds tend to be adamant about everything, from why the purple crayon … Continue reading
Recreating the Golden Age
Oh, it was… err… big and bright and great and easy to understand. The world was simpler. “No adventure went on for too long, I do recall that. Things were more open and shut. And no one died. At least not often. Nowadays you fly off for a moment, you come back and two or … Continue reading
Speak softly and carry a big sword
If there’s any truism worth adapting to the pastime of reading comic books, it’s that a good shop is hard to find. Last summer, after several years of ordering my comics online, I decided it was time to go back to shopping locally. Sure, I was saving a few bucks by buying through a website, … Continue reading
Mutants and misfits
You should know right away that I am not a fan of black-and-white comics. Oh, make no mistake — it doesn’t matter to me whether or not a book is printed on four-color pages. What I mean to say is, I like stories I read to move past the traditional good vs. evil, light vs. … Continue reading
