Nexus: The Origin by Mike Baron & Steve 'The Dude' Rude Some comic-reading history first. I got the bug in my teens, in the mid-to-late '80s, reading superhero comics, like most other people. For me, it was the X-books; I couldn't get enough Claremont and mutant soap opera. However, by…
Suicide Squad (Volume 2) #1–12 by Keith Giffen & Paco Medina The original Ostrander/Yale Suicide Squad had a lot of charm and took a great idea and played with it. This revival plays on that charm and history, but bypasses a lot of grounding and characterisation to try something that…
I Die At Midnight by Kyle Baker The Cowboy Wally Show and Why I Hate Saturn are sublime in their beauty, wit and charm. Baker need never work again, if the quality of work was rewarded. In the real world, artists need to create to live. I want to support…
(I don't know – you get a pain on the coccyx and the next thing you know, you're in hospital. Life is strange, isn't it? Anyway, this might seem a little late, but this would have been my post had I not been unable to do anything for the last…
Or, Ruminations on Elektra, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, and Lemony Snicket's An Unfortunate Series of Events Apart from the fact that I saw these films recently, and they are of varying levels of poorness, they are linked by an underlying question: what were the makers hoping to achieve by…
Just A Pilgrim (series 1) by Garth Ennis & Carlos Ezquerra Even if Ennis wasn't a great writer, he demands attention for having written Preacher and Hitman, among many others. So, the chance of seeing him let loose on his own creation seemed like an obvious choice, and it had…
MirrorMask is what I imagine it is like inside the head of Dave McKean. It feels like the three-dimensional realisation of what goes on inside the mind of a gifted artist, who sees the world ever so slightly different to the rest of the world. Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) is a…
Well, I may have wished to see the show live, but it doesn’t appear I missed anything, based on the always-funny minute-by-minute blogging by Tom, the lovely folks at Empire magazine and dear old BBC. It also meant I didn’t stay up late fruitlessly, which would’ve fucked me up for…
Superman: Secret Identity Kurt Busiek & Stuart Immonen Although this story is based on an obscure tale from DC Comics Presents #87 by Elliot S Maggin and Curt Swan about the Superboy of Earth-Prime, this is a wonderfully moving and beautiful tale about what it’s like to be human, told…
Teen Titans: A Kid’s Game (collecting #1–7) Geoff Johns & Mike McKone Before I start, I just wanted to make a point of mentioning the Turner cover above: it's so depressing to have the butt shot of Starfire, along with her unfathomable breasts, yet still being able to see her…