• Medill still owns the bulk of my time right now, but work has been interesting lately, what with today’s story about ChicagoQuest (a.k.a. Chicago’s new video game charter school), this video story I did about a teddy bear built to fight diabetes and other such things. • Andersonville has a new comics shop, and … Read moreLink Sausage: 5/12/2011
Big budgets and special effects have not always been kind to Marvel movies. Ang Lee’s “Hulk” (2003), for instance, featured an utterly and profoundly abstract transformation by Nick Nolte’s character into a hodgepodge of Zzzax and the Absorbing Man. Jon Favreau’s ending for “Iron Man 2” (2010) opted for a shock’n awe treatment that was … Read moreReview: ‘Thor’ (2011)
Three episodes into HBO’s “Game of Thrones,” I feel like I’m finally ready to have a fair opinion about it. The first two episodes, “Winter is Coming” and “The Kingsroad” really seemed to wander for me. If you’re curious to know how the series deviated from George R.R. Martin’s original work, I recommend starting out … Read moreTV Reception: ‘Game of Thrones’ Episodes 1-3
• I’ve been busy doing all manner of things recently in my graduate student capacity, but I have slipped in some time to look at some dandy artwork by Jack Teagle, Justin C. Orr and Hebru Brantley recently in my daily posting at ComicsAlliance. • And speaking of ComicsAlliance, I’d seen Gail Simone and Marjorie … Read moreLink Sausage: 4/11/2011
I’m happy that #100 gets to be a Captain America book. Yes, maybe I should have selected something riskier to end this review series, but issue #614 by Ed Brubaker and Butch Guice allows me to bow out of “100 Days, 100 Comics” with a pleasant taste in my mouth. From Dr. Faustus’ courtroom escapades … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #100: ‘Captain America’ #641
Nick Spencer has really skyrocketed up my list of writers to follow the last few months. Existence 2.0 never did it for me back in 2009, but Morning Glories made me a believer, and the owner of Evil Squirrel Comics up in Rogers Park recommended that I pick up his first issue of this new … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #99: ‘T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents’ #1
At their worst, X-Men stories completely glaze over their characters’ uniqueness and let the mutant class issues that Uncanny X-Men was built on dissolve into bland, sanitized adventures that stare down “God Loves, Man Kills” from an opposite corner of the storytelling spectrum. When writers really understand what they’re doing, as Kathryn Immonen and Phil … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #98: ‘Wolverine and Jubilee’ #1
SPOILERS IN HERE, FAIR WARNING: Well, marketing-wise this issue did everything Marvel wanted it to for me. The 11th-hour pre-release hype about the death of the Human Torch made me want to know how Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting were going to dispose of him, and I stained my fingers black stretching and wrestling with … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #97: ‘Fantastic Four’ #587
Link Sausage: 1/2/2011 Happy New Year, everyone. Stuff’s going to be changing gears on my end Monday as I step into the MSJ program at Northwestern’s Medill School for 2011, but just because I’m not freelancing full-time, it doesn’t mean that the gears are going to come to a complete stop pay-work-wise (thank goodness!). Anyway, … Read moreLink Sausage: 1/2/2011
Of the big three pamphlet comics publishers who launched their own comiXology apps in 2010, Image Comics came the closest to achieving the storefront and selection that I would like to see as a reader and iPad owner. $1.99 is pretty much the ceiling for what I’m willing to pay for a 24-page digital edition … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #96: ‘Morning Glories’ #’s 1-3