#also i think the parallels between king and alan would be fun

[i3utterflyeffect]

anyway imagine how terrifying visiting selkie!alan's house would be for purple and king in the case of avm happening normally. imagine you visit these kids house and you see a giant fucking cursor navigating the house

[emblazons]

hELLO do you have any fun specific hopes/theories/headcanons for st5?

HELLO STRANGER 😂

Honestly I am not like super headcanon forward as a watcher because I think I have expectations trust issues from other television and therefore stick to what I can see on screen before speculating, BUT!

Headcanons + some things I would love to see explored (that aren’t just aggressive amounts of pining byler)?

The whole “Will is suppressed in his queerness being attached to soteria/suppression of powers” is like. 11/10 concept imo. It goes along with horror history so well (shout out @pinkeoni for that analysis) and plays so well into the whole relating to “Alan Turing” bit that we were introduced to start of S4, given his history as a gay man.

re, the last point: the contrast in queerness between Mike and Will being explored as someone who shows more blatant attraction to men but struggles to accept it as an identity versus someone who accepts their identity while suppressing their attraction (by outside forces or not) is also a dynamic I think would be cool to explore. I am not an ace Will truther at all but. I do think he shies away from his own sexuality a lot in a way they don’t do with Mike.

I really want “samfro caught on mount doom together while the rest of the fellowship fights an army” byler vibes—something about El and Lucas as Aragorn & Legolas with Dustin (Gimli) and Erica (Merry/Pippin) while Will struggles with feeling alone carrying the heavy burden of a connection to Vecna? Some “I can’t carry it for you, but I can carry you” heroism from Mike? El getting a moment to reunite with Max (Arwen) at the hand of Lucas, just like in Return of the King? Fucking mint lmao

I need scenes of Max in whatever place she’s still alive in like I need oxygen. Working from “the inside” to do exposition on Henry + the UD while she’s in a coma while the party sorts through it in Hawkins feels like such a phenomenal writing opportunity I’ll be desperately sad if they don’t explore it. I hope they include some elements of like. The duality of presence a la The Talisman in that given Lucas was reading it to her in the hospital? But 🤷🏽‍♀️

GIVE ME TIME FKERY OR GIVE ME DEATH. I know it’s pretty much guaranteed at this point but. I need Mr. Clarke back stat, with some convoluted ass theory explained on a paper plate again. I need the most elaborate UD reality just, absolutely borderline nonsensical lore for like a full episode so I can watch this series back again and see it from SECOND ONE (or minute 8:15) and giggle like a schoolgirl knowing the duffers really are smart/the haters were wrong.

I want more Wheelers! I know Nancy is central to the supernatural given she was the only other one pulled in by Vecna and not killed—just sent as a messenger—but. I have so many Wheeler and Creel thoughts at this point I don’t know where to start, but. They are the PERFECT family for exploring picture-perfection against horror themes (just like the Creels) and I want it. Like “don’t care how, I want it now” level focus on them, along with their Byers.

I said it before but: an exploration of motherhood as a theme makes so much sense to me, and it seems to be important to The Duffers too, so. I want it.

Kinda want RoVickie as the couple who introduces the idea of the supernatural + queerness v Hawkins element at the start of the season, and for byler to be the ones who “end it.” I think that would be a fascinating way to parallel them more, though…I haven’t much thought this through.

If they don’t make Finn Wolfhard sob his little eyes out this season I’m going to feel betrayed. I need him like. Noah level pressed at least once next season, for the culture (Finn said he wanted to do more dramas. Let him defeat the bad actor allegations here so they let him LMAOOOO)

That’s all I can think of for now! I’m sure there are more, but. Those were the firsts that came to mind haha.

Thanks for the ask!

[libraryleopard]

I was procrastinating on my homework by thinking about how much I want a New Mutants animated show and occasionally my sister @kazz-brekker​ and I bounce ideas for it off of each other, so I made some New Mutants characters on picrew.

Doug (left) and Warlock (right) are at the top. My sister and I call Doug a “Very Nice Boy” a lot (Alan Davis draws a very cute, huggable-looking Doug in particular) so I gave him a sweater because that kind of fits the vibe for me. Warlock takes on a human form a couple of times in the classic New Mutants comic so I made him in that form, with yellow eyes to indicate that’s there’s something not-quite-human about him. 

Roberto (left), has a Hawaiian shirt. I know he wears it as a reference to Magnum, PI, a show that a current-day teenager probably wouldn’t be into, but I just enjoy the vibe of that outfit for him. (The other day I was talking to my sister about how you’d update the New Mutants as modern teenagers and tormented her with cursed idea that the equivalent of Beto being into a detective show nowadays would be BBC Sherlock, but that’s mostly a joke.) 

I gave Sam (right) freckles and kind of shaggier hair because you can’t do much with face shapes on icon makers, but I’ve always liked that he and Doug have distinct looks from each other despite both being white teenage boys with blond hair. Beto and Sam’s relationship doesn’t read as romantic to me in the original New Mutants comics (I read them has having a three-year age difference in the Claremont run, which can be a significant maturity difference when you’re a teenager) but I do think there’s a vibe between them later on in X-Force (I still haven’t read Hickman’s New Mutants yet), so I think of them, and especially Beto, as bisexual. 

Dani (left) has her hair in her two iconic braids, of course. I think she and Sam have somewhat similar fashion choices as well as being co-leaders of the team, so she’s wearing overalls like he is. I imagine she’s wearing her Cheyenne belt just outside the frame of the picture. I think she should get to be the kind of central viewpoint character for the introduction of the team because 1) I love her and 2) I think it’s interesting that she’s not completely on board with Professor X at the start. She’s younger than Sam, but her age is never explicitly given that I’ve seen, so I think she’s about 15 when she joins the team.

Rahne (right) has her short hair and a hint of fangs to give a sense of her wolf form. I know Rahne has had a string of very bad stories in the 2000s, but in the Claremont run of New Mutants I very much read her as a baby lesbian with a crush on Dani whose struggles with being rejected by her religious community for being a mutants very much parallels and is intertwined with her sexuality. My hot take on New Muutants is that Rahne is not the baby of the team, that’s Beto (early on it says she’s 14 and Beto is 13, though I think that might get retconned later), and she’s just kind of short and naive so she comes off as younger.

X’ian (left) has her hair in the bob haircut with bangs she got in the early issues of the Claremont comics. (I do think her pink buzzcut from X-Force is kinda fun, but I think that’s very much something she would evolve as a character to get.) Also, since her name is actually incorrect by Vietnamese naming conventions, I think an adaptation should have the freedom to call her Xuyen instead. (I also think a lot of her storylines in the early comics, like the grossly fatphobic Shadow King storyline, should be discarded and writers could create new stories for her in an adaptation of the comics. Also, she’s a lesbian, of course. (God bless Vita Ayala for finally giving her a girlfriend.)

Illyana (left) is another member of the overalls gang because she wears them sometimes as a teenager. I know she’s all goth as an adult, but I think that’s less present in her character design as a kid. Designing these characters is also making me realize that in my ideal world like half of the New Mutants are lesbians.

Amara (right) looks completely different from her comics version because I hate the comics version of Amara! In this version, she’d be indigenous Brazilian and…not Empath’s girlfriend. I think, like Xuyen, an adaptation could rewrite a lot of her stories and be the better for it (I believe X-Men: Evolution did, though I’ve never seen it).

I included Tabby (left) because I think she’d be a fun character to join the later seasons of a New Mutants cartoon. She’s not an original member of the team, but she and the other X-Factor kids do end up joining the New Mutants after the events of X-Terminators. 

Rictor (bottom because I ran out of regular image spaces) would also join the New Mutants later. I know he was being a baby punk in this era, but the clothing options didn’t include that, so I gave him a Star Trek t-shirt because he does canonically like Star Trek. He also has long hair because I enjoy when Rictor has long hair! Out of all of these characters, he’s the one I’m incapable of calling by his civilian name because canonically doesn’t let many people call him that. Anyway, I think he and Tabby are tight best friends and I like their relationship.

I also included Shatterstar because 1) he is technically a New Mutants character since he was introduced in the final issue before it relaunched into X-Force and 2) I like him. In this version, he’s biracial because Dazzler’s original character concept had her be a Black disco singer, though I kept his red hair because it’s an iconic part of his character design. I do like how Yasmin Putri drew him on the covers of the Tim Seeley Shatterstar solo series (even if I didn’t like the writing or some of the interior art), so I very badly gave him a glowing eye and a star mark. Also I gave him a little braid because I like when he has a little braid :)

Anyway, I have a lot of other thoughts about a New Mutants cartoon and in particular how a lot of their superpower would translate better to animation than live action, but I’ve spent enough time procrastinating by making this.

[arecomicsevengood]

TOP TEN OLDER MAINSTREAM COMICS I READ THIS YEAR

I kept track of all the comics I read this year, and not all of them were new. I have no idea who this will help or benefit but at least the circumstances of me only listing the completely arbitrary older work I read for the first time this year will deter anyone from arguing with me. However, for the sake of possibly being contentious, let me mention two comics that fall outside the top ten, because they’re bad:

Trencher by Keith Giffen. David King did a comic strip about Keith Giffen’s art style on this book in issue 2 of But Is It... Comic Aht that everybody loved, and made me be like, ok, I’ll check it out. But it’s basically just a retread of Lobo in terms of its tone and approach, but without Simon Bisley. I don’t really know why anyone wouldn’t think Bisley is the better cartoonist. Also, those comics are terrible. Thumbs down.

The Green Lantern by Grant Morrison, Liam Sharp, and Steve Oliff. I bought the first year of these comics for a dollar each off a dude doing a sidewalk sale. Found them sort of incoherent? I haven’t liked a new Grant Morrison comic in ages, with All-Star Superman being really the only outlier since like We3. This is clearly modeled off of European comics like Druillet or something, and would maybe benefit from being printed larger, I really dislike the modeled color too. But also it’s just aggressively fast-paced, with issues ending in ways that feel like cliffhangers but aren’t, and no real characters of interest.

As for the top ten list itself, for those who’ve looked at my Letterboxd page, slots 10-8 are approximately “3 stars,” 7-4 are 3 1/2 stars, slots 3 and 2 are 4 stars, with number one being a 4 1/2 star comic. The comics I’m listing on my “Best Of The Year” list that’ll run at the Comics Journal alongside a bunch of people are all 4 1/2 or 5 star comics. This is INSANELY NERDY and pedantic to note, and I eschew star ratings half the time anyway, because assignations of numeric value to art are absurd except within the specific framework of how strong a recommendation is, and on Letterboxd I feel like I’m speaking to a very small and self-selecting group of people whose tastes I generally know. (And I generally would not recommend joining Letterboxd to people!) But what I mean by all of this is just that there is a whole world of work I value more than this stuff, and I’ll recommend the truly outstanding shit to interested readers in good time.

10. Justice Society Of America by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck. Did some quarantine regressing and bought these comics, a few of which were some of the first comics I ever read, but I didn’t read the whole thing regularly as a kid. Parobeck’s a fun cartoonist, this stuff is readable. It’s faintly generic/baseline competent but there’s a cheap and readable quality to this stuff that modern comics lack. Interestingly, the letters column is made up of old people who remember the characters and feel like it’s marketed towards them, and since that wasn’t profitable, when the book was canceled, Parobeck went over to drawing The Batman Adventures, which was actively marketed towards kids. It’s funny that him and Ty Templeton were basically viewed as “normal” mainline DC Comics for a few years there and then became relegated to this specific subset of cartooning language, which everyone likes and thought was good but didn’t fit inside the corporate self-image, which has basically no aesthetic values.

9. The Shadow 18 & 19 by Andy Helfer and Kyle Baker. I’d been grabbing issues of this run of comics for years and am only now finishing it. Kyle Baker’s art is swell but Helfer writes a demanding script, these are slow reads that cause the eye to glaze over a bit.

8. The Jam 3-8 by Bernie Mireault. I made a post where I suggested Mireault’s The Jam might be one of the better Slave Labor comics. Probably not true but what I ended up getting are some colored reprints Tundra did, and some black and white issues published by Dark Horse after that. Mireault’s art style is kinda like Roger Langridge. After these, he did a crossover with Mike Allred’s Madman and then did a series of backups in those comics, it makes sense to group them together, along with Jay Stephens’ Atomic City Tales and Paul Grist’s Jack Staff, or Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, as this stream that runs parallel to Image Comics but is basically better, a little more readable, but still feeling closer to something commercial in intention as opposed to self-expression. Although it also IS self-expression, just the expression of a self that has internalized a lot of tropes and interests in superhero comics. If you have also read a lot of superhero comics, but also a lot of alternative comics, stuff like this basically reads like nothing. It’s comfort food on the same level of mashed potatoes: I love it when it’s well-done but there’s also a passable version that can be made when depressed and uninspired. But drawing like Roger Langridge is definitely not bad!

7. WildC.A.T.S by Alan Moore, Travis Charest, et al. I wrote a post about these comics a few months ago, but let me reiterate the salient points: There’s two collections, the first one is much better than the second, and the first is incredibly dumbed-down in its nineties Image Comics style but also feels like the best version of that possible, when Charest is doing art. Also, these collections are out of print now, a friend of mine pointed out maybe they can’t be reprinted because they involve characters owned by Todd McFarlane but Wildstorm is owned wholly by DC now.

6. Haywire by Michael Fleischer and Vince Giarrano. I made a post about this comic when I first read a few issues right around the time Michael Fleischer died a few years ago, but didn’t read all of it then. This feels way more deliberately structured than most action comics, with its limited cast and lack of ties to any broader universe, but it’s also dumb and sleazy and fast moving, and feels related to what were the popular movies of the day, splitting its influences evenly between erotic thrillers about yuppies and Stallone-starring action movies. The erotic thriller element is mostly just “a villain in bondage gear” which is sort of standard superhero comics bullshit but it’s also a little bit deeper than that. The first three issues, inked by Kyle Baker, look the best.

5. Dick Tracy by John Moore and Kyle Baker. These look even better! A little unclear which John Moore this is? There’s John Francis Moore, who worked with Howard Chaykin and was scripting TV around this time, but there’s another dude who was a cartoonist who did a miniseries for Piranha Press and then moved on to doing work for Disney on Darkwing Duck comics. Anyway, Kyle Baker colors these, they’re energetically cartooned, each issue is like 64 pages, with every page being close to a strip or scene in a movie. I’m impressed by them, and there’s a nice bulk that makes them a nice thing to keep a kid busy. (For the record, my favorite Kyle Baker solo comic is probably You Are Here.)

4. Chronos by John Francis Moore and Paul Guinan. I was moving on from DC comics by the late nineties, but Grant Morrison’s JLA was surely a positive influence on everyone, especially compared to the vibe there in the subsequent two decades. These are well-crafted. There’s a little stretch where it uses the whole “time-traveling protagonist” thing to do a run of issues which stand alone but fall in sequence too and it’s pretty smooth and smart. The art is strong enough to carry it, the sort of cartoony faces with detailed backgrounds it’s widely agreed works perfectly, but that you rarely see in mainstream comics. The coloring is done digitally, but not over-modeled enough to ruin it.

3. Martha Washington by Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons. A few miniseries, all of which sort of get weaker as they go, but all in one book it doesn’t feel like it’s becoming trash as it goes or anything. When Miller dumbed down his storytelling in the nineties it really was because he thought it made for better comics, the tension between his interest in manga and Gibbons’ British-comics classicism feels productive. I do kind of feel like the early computer coloring ruins this a little bit.

2. Xombi by John Rozum and JJ Birch. Got a handful of these on paper, read scans of the rest. This is pretty solid stuff, not really transcendent ever, but feels well-crafted on a month-in, month-out level. I read a handful of other Milestone comics, and a lot of them suffered from being so beholden to deadlines that there are fill-in issues constantly. This is the rare one that had the same creators for the entirety of its run. There was a revival with Frazer Irving art a decade ago but I prefer JJ Birch’s black line art with Noelle Giddings’ watercolors seen here. They’re doing an early Vertigo style “weirdness” but with a fun and goofy sense of humor about itself. I haven’t read Clive Barker but this feels pretty influenced by that as well. (The Deathwish miniseries is of roughly comparable quality. I read scans of the rest of that after I made my little post and, yeah, it does actually feel very personal for a genre work, and the JH Williams art with painted color is great.)

1. Tom Strong by Alan Moore, Chris Sprouse, etc. I got bored reading these as a teen but getting them all for cheap and reading them in a go was a pretty satisfying experience. It’s partly a speed-run through Moore’s coverage of the concept of a comic book multiverse seen in his Supreme run, minus the riffing on Mort Weisinger Superman comics, instead adding in a running theme of rehabilitating antagonists whose goals are different but aren’t necessarily evil. It’s more than just Moore in an optimistic or nostalgic mode, it also feels like he’s explaining his leftist morality to an audience that has internalized conflicts being resolved by violence as the genre standard.

[tangledbea]

(Part A of a looong ask) I just saw the ask about the Broadway version of tangled, and I would like to add my opinion on the subject (I don't know a thing about making musicals, I just have OPINIONS to share) The main thing to improve from the cruise version is that it condensates an hour and a half of a movie into just one hour of show and it's SUPER rushed.

(Part B) The other issue is that it tries too hard to recreate iconic animated scenes that do not have the same impact when you don't rely on shots and editing; when making a musical show you have music, choreography and lighting as the main tools for enhancing the emotional impact of scenes.

(Part C) Broadway adaptations usually add LOTS of songs for this reason so let's imagine the following songs for emotional/visually charged parts of the story:

(Part D) 1)"Flower of gold" is a great addition, they should keep it 2)a song for Rapunzel seeing Eugene for the first time, exteriorizing her fears and starting thinking of her escape plan 3)an extension/different song for "when will my life begin reprise" that shows us more of the first things Rapunzel experiences out of her tower, instead of the contradiction montage

(Part E) 4)another reprise of "Mother knows best" when Gothel comes back to the tower (and, as you suggested, for when she plots with the stabington bros) 5)this is not song-related but they could change the flooding cave to just a collapsing cave (bc is just too much effects work that don't add emotional impact) and maaaaybe a song would fit in this scene 6)a song about Eugene and his feelings, I suggest a sad reprise of "Wanted man" that takes place in the campfire scene

(Part F) (think about the new meaning, when he explains that Flynn was the man he wanted to be as an orphan kid) 7)"when she returns" is good but it shouldn’t have the king and queen singing joyfully, instead 8)an intimate sad song for them, taking place before releasing the lanterns, about their dream of finding their daughter, and being paralleled by Eugene and Rapunzel in the boat talking about the lanterns and finding a new dream

(Part G) 9)the "I see the light" reprise when Rapunzel realizes she is the lost princess is great, let's keep it 10)when Rapunzel reunites with her parents it should be kept as the movie: no songs, no narration, just intense body language. idk about technical aspects or plot changes, I’m usually flexible to that (that was long, thanks if you read it)

I like “Flower of Gold,” but the reason I suggested a different song is because I like to have new songs. lol It’s kind of like, “If you could do this again, how would you do it different?” to Alan and Glenn (since they also wrote the new cruise musical songs). That was why I wanted a different “introducing Eugene solo/chorus number.” Just to have something new and fresh and see how they could do it differently. (Though I’m not gonna lie, the line, “You gotta love the way his trousers stick, plus--” is ICONIC!!) Same for “When She Returns.” Different and/or lengthened, intertwined with Rapunzel soloing about “this world is new and beautiful and kind and fun and not dark or scary at all” with and Eugene soloing about “look at this girl, she’s opening my eyes to how bright and beautiful the world can really be, I forgot all about that in my cynicism.”

As for the campfire scene, I would like it if they took the flute melody that’s on the soundtrack but not in the movie (the flute solo was removed, I think because it distracted from the dialogue) and based it around that, rather than a reprise of “Wanted Man.” 

For your king and queen/lantern dream song idea, what if it was a four-part thing? Like, two duets that counterpoint each other to make one gorgeous tune?

I’d also like a confrontation song between Rapunzel and Gothel. It can be brief, but I’m seeing it after Rapunzel realizes she’s the Lost Princess. I’d always wanted a little more... emotion there. We know by the way that Rapunzel reaches for Gothel as she falls out the window that she didn’t want her to die, that despite everything, her love for her mother didn’t just shut off. I’d like that explored in song a little more.

[theshitireadincomics-blog]

Comics in College.

After an amazing Christmas break, it is back to school time. I currently teach first-year composition at a university and community college in the St. Louis area and I am currently prepping my lesson plans and syllabi for the coming spring semester. In addition to the writing classes, I have what has become my “fun class.” This is a college reading class that is designed to bring student’s reading comprehension levels up to whatever the system calls “standards” this year. The reason this class is my most enjoyable is because it is a sixteen week semester in which I am allowed to plan the entire course reading list. Now, I try hard to fill the schedule with classics you traditionally find in college and readings with vital social and educational issues, but I save a couple of spots for the literature that made me who I am today—comics. 

Now, saying “made me who I am” is not some great claim. I am only been teaching college for five years and have yet to find my greatness and often question if it is even out there. But I know I would not be in front of a college classroom without finding comics as a child—hell, I would probably never made it into college as a student either, as I hated reading before figuring out that Batman and Spider-Man weren’t just cartoons. My goal with using comics as a learning tool is to try to show these students that there are other forms of literature and reading that are not in those intimidating old books with hundreds of pages. Not that these students can’t handle “regular” books. They can. Most of the students in my reading class kick ass, but struggle on their reading testing because they become easily distracted or just have always hated the idea of reading. Or, they are just bad test takers. I know how it is first-hand. I came from the same reading class when I started college and did not place well either. That is why I try to create a nice blend of traditional literature with comics, science fiction, memoirs, and other writings that will hopefully grab someone’s attention (that is a glossed over summary of the course, as there are other parameters and aspects of the class that are far too monotonous to mention here). 

When I say that comics are my favorite form of literature, it comes with a disclaimer. I understand that the groundbreaking works of Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and others have brought comic books and graphic novels into academia, but I am not necessarily talking about those stories that are commonly accepted as literature. I argue constantly that me sitting down and reading a random issue of Green Lantern can be as beneficial and literary as when I sit down to read Shakespeare (which should be soon, since it’s been ages). Granted, I may not be able to find as many perplexities in a fight between Hal Jordan and the Sinestro Corps that lie in King Lear, but there will usually be something that will enlighten me or someone else! 

This is where I am not a fan of the college graphic literature classes that I have seen. They are full of awesome books like Maus or Understanding Comics—and that is great! But the closest these classes usually get to superheroes is Watchmen. I love Watchmen and think it is a one of the greatest stories of all time, but I also have to count it as being overrated. How can one thing be praised that much without there being an alternate view or reaction? Kind of like the Beatles (which I personally hate). Even more vital to the discussion of Watchmen being the sole representation of superheroes in a class curriculum, is the notion that the story itself cannot be completely understood or appreciated without understanding the groundwork of traditional superheroes that inspired it. Sure you can read, enjoy, or digest the story, but without that super-hero dynamic in your consciousness you are missing out (this idea is also shared by Walter Hudsick in his essay “Reassembling the Components in the Correct Sequence: Why You Shouldn’t Read Watchmen First,” which can be found in the book Minutes to Midnight: Twelve Essays on Watchmen). I am not arguing that these college classes be stripped of their copies of Persepolis and replaced with dollar bin issues of Cloak and Dagger, but maybe that the superhero comic should get its own class and focus. There are many schools out there that do use these types of stories. I am just throwing out my two cents for more of that, as I was looked down on for reading those types comics in school as a kid, and told the comic stories I wrote in college were not “literary” enough. 

In the aforementioned class that I use comics in, last semester we tackled Batman the Killing Joke and the first volume of the Walking Dead. Both readings were well received and I had a few students that had never read a comic before. Both of these books have many different aspects and facets that we discussed throughout the sections. In Killing Joke, we discussed the parallels of the characters Batman and Joker and the complexities of their relationship. We looked at the stereotypical usage of Barbara Gordon/Batgirl and how she was impacted by the events in the story and we questioned what happened in the ambiguous ending (check out the Grant Morrison episodes on Kevin Smith’s Fatman on Batman podcast for his awesome take). While we dissected these aspects in the same way we examined Poe’s “the Black Cat” a month earlier, we still stopped to look at how badass it was to see Batman leap out of the Batmobile to rescue Commissioner Gordon. We discussed the coolness of seeing that final slugfest between Batman and Joker—maybe for the final time. When looking at the Walking Dead, we discussed the people in the story and their constant need to recover their civilization and humanity, but we also made time to stop and talk about our fondness of flesh-eating zombies and those types of films! 

My point is that all of this can be done (and maybe should be done) together. You don’t have to read your comics with the purpose of analyzing Deadpool’s commentary on the human condition—but you can! I would like to see more comics (of any genre or type) used as educational tools. Just because something is fun, colorful, and relevant in pop culture does not eliminate it from being scholarly. That is a ridiculous idea, yet I would get frowns from college creative writing instructors when I mentioned writing a comic and I was once told that a play with zombies in it was not serious enough. I had an entire class laugh at me when I made the comment that I would be happy getting a job writing a Conan the Barbarian novel. I don’t even know enough about Conan to fill a novel, but who the hell wouldn’t take a job being paid to write about that shit?!? Maybe the fact that our summer theaters and television screens are flooded with superheroes can translate into a little academic love for our spandex wearing characters. You can find a lot about humanity, society, and yourself when reading about these godlike people who constantly fight between good and evil.

 I haven’t written one of these posts in a while, but I am feeling a little bit like giving it another go. Next, I intend on digging into some of the stuff that has inspired me to create this blog, exploring some of the greatness and garbage I have ran across during my days reading comics.

 - Stephyn.