I don’t know. Do you now or have you ever liked Marvel comics? If the answer is no, I’m probably not gonna be much help here. Valiant’s Harbinger Wars 2 is straight outta Westchester, a Mutant Registration Act battle for America over whether or not it’s OK to kill teens. It feels rude to relegate…
Marvel’s Silver Surfer Knocked Off Doctor Who, Becoming Great in the Process
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: An alien with a haunted past travels the galaxy with a human companion who helps him learn to love again. They visit strange worlds, filled with even stranger people, and manage to save the universe a few times along the way.
Bloodstrike: Cable and the Rainbow
Bloodstrike #1 Rob Liefeld (art and story), Dan Fraga (art), Eric Stephenson (story), Danny Miki (art), Byron Talman (color), Brian Murray (color), Kirt Hathaway (letters) Image Comics 1993 Bloodstrike’s team leader Cabbot is Cable by another name. This is not a controversial or vindictive statement; Liefeld’s LEGO-like sense of superheroic character creation (a source of…
Cyber Force #1: The Tin Men Evolution Continues
Cyber Force #1 Matt Hawkins (writer), Bryan Hill (writer), Troy Peteri (letterer), Atilio Rojo (artist), Elena Salcedo (editor), Marc Silvestri (creator) Top Cow Productions, Inc. March 28, 2018
The Castle Offers Fictions Within Fictions
If you’re going to read a comic co-written by Brian Michael Bendis and Kelly Sue DeConnick and edited by Sana Amanat, you probably want them all to be pretending to adapt a novel written by a fictional character from a television show. Right? Isn’t that what people want? That’s what happened in 2011, when Marvel…
Youngblood: Teen Titans with None of the “New”
When we decided to do “Year of the Knockoff” here at Women Write About Comics, I decided to jump in front of the bullet and cover a knockoff of my favorite team . . . that also happens to be one of my least favorite comics. That is, of course, Rob Liefeld’s oft-delayed, multiple-publisher magnum…
Rick and Morty and The Vindicators Superhero Comics Event Event
Rick and Morty Presents The Vindicators #1 J. Torres (Writer), CJ Cannon (Art), Nick Filardi (Colors), Crank! (Letters) Oni Press March 7 2018 I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading this issue. I’ve watched Rick and Morty on Adult Swim and found it amusing, but never read the comic before. How close would…
Jim Lee, ’92: Trying to Herd WildCATS
Somehow, despite thoroughly being a child of the 90s, I had never read WildCATS. I was always aware of it; my friend Justin had a stack of those early issues, and I imagine I probably flipped through them while we played Sega games, but I didn’t really read them. It’s sort of strange looking back,…
The Shadow Hero’s Shadow is New Super-Man
Welcome to the non-negative Year of the Knockoff on Women Write about Comics! Long ago in the wilds of October 2016, I wrote a guest post for the American Studies blog that discussed how Gene Luen Yang’s 2014 graphic novel The Shadow Hero seems like a rhetorical successor to Superman, particularly because its hero, Hank,…
Be Exceptional: Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon #1-3
Erik Larsen’s Savage Dragon #1-3 was a 1992 miniseries that served to launch Larsen’s cartoonist career under the brand-new Image banner. Already a professional, having worked on various indies and as a penciller (and even cartooned Spider-Man) at Marvel, his “Dragon” was also previously “established” in 80s indie publications Graphic Fantasy and Megaton. Larsen takes great…