Spider-Man Before Spider-Man Was Born – On Comics-Related Carelessness In Steven Tyler’s “Does The Noise In My Head Bother You?”

1. Writing in Rolling Stone about Steven Tyler’s 2012 autobiography Does The Noise In My Head Bother You, Rob Sheffield suggested that ‘If you can find a single coherent sentence in this book, write and tell the publisher, so they can correct this error in future editions’. It’s in no way a snarkish comment. Tyler, after […]

August’s Declaration Of Interest: 23 Comic-Related Reads That The Blogger Has Been Enjoying In Recent Weeks

While you’ve been reading all the comics that you’ve been reading over the past month or so, I’ve been reading these. Or at least, these are the ones that I most enjoyed. Or at least, the ones I found the most interesting. Those that I felt less positive about … can be left for another […]

The Best Historical Graphic Novel Pages That Never Were.

The above page comes from Jim Harter’s ‘Transportation – A Pictorial Archive From Nineteenth-Century Sources’ (1984). It’s a collection of more than 500 largely anonymous and copyright-free illustrations from a variety of American and British publications of the period. I picked it up some weeks ago from a charity shop for the meagre sum of […]

I Have Slipped The Surly Bonds: A Modest Gallery Of Fine Comicbook Pages Featuring Military Airpower.

Sometimes a week’s comicbook reading doesn’t immediately suggest a common thread. But on consideration, the closest to a shared thread over the past seven days has been air power. Hence the examples in the modest but admiring gallery below; 1. from 1972’s The Incredible Hulk #148, by Archie Goodwin, Herb Trimpe, John Severin. and Artie […]

Maximum Impact! Speedy, Impactful Storytelling In Gerry Finley-Day & Dave Gibbons’ Dan Dare, from 1978’s 2000 A.D. #50

It’s common to hear that the storytelling of a particular period in action/adventure comics is all of one piece. ‘I don’t like the comics of today’, goes the lament, ‘but I still like the way that they used to be’. A few qualifiers might be added to explain the more obvious differences – country of […]

‘The Thing That Makes Captain America Great’: On ‘Captain America Comics’ #1 (Part Two Of Two)

Continued and concluded from yesterday’s piece, which can be found here. 2. Worst of all, Robinson’s script displays a fatal misunderstanding of how Steve Rogers needs to be portrayed in the period prior to his transformation into Captain America. There are, after all, limits to how far a reinterpretation can go before it starts to […]

What Not To Do With Captain America’s Origin: On 2009’s ‘Captain America Comics’ #1. (Part One Of Two.)

James Robinson, Marcos Martin, Javier Rodriguez and Cory Petit’s What Makes The Man, from 2009’s Captain America Comics #1, is a fond and respectful tribute produced for the 70th anniversary of Marvel Comics’s precursor publisher, Timely. Fleshing out the period immediately prior to Steve Rogers’ transformation into Captain America, it strives to add to his […]