I love ranking things. Everyone loves ranking things. We’ve built a social media empire around the idea of ranking things. So lets rank all the X-Men titles in the Dawn Of X era, shall we? This is not just one opinion, this is the definitive opinion. We polled out writing staff and got twenty members…
Click. Journey back with us for a moment, back through the decades, to February 2020. A young coronavirus had just notched its first recorded U.S. death. The Senate voted against impeaching President Donald Trump. Kansas City won its first Super Bowl since 1970. Sonic the Hedgehog whizzed into theaters, those places we used to go to watch…
Sister Act Captain Marvel #17 (2004): Peter David (writer), Paul Azaceta (pencils), Chris Sotomayor (colors) Captain Marvel #18 (2020): Kelly Thompson (writer), Cory Smith (pencils), Adriano Di Benedetto (inks), Tamra Bonvillain (colors) All Captain Marvel families are alike, but every Captain Marvel family is unhappy in its own way. Two years ago, Margaret Stohl and…
High noon in a desert town. Two men face off, hands on the butts of their holstered revolvers. [Grote’s note: Heh heh, butts.] A blur of motion, a crack of gunfire, and one (or both) falls. This scene is a hallmark of the American Western, a genre that was popular in comics throughout the 1950s…
Just when you think you have all the answers, it’s time to change the questions. The Splash In the fracas between writer Tom King, artist Jae Lee and comic book fans who want works created by people who aren’t intolerable assholes, there are no winners. Not King, who now looks like a bully for taking…
When comics fans now think about Marjorie Liu, we may think about her creator-owned book Monstress. When we think about who made the X-Men the X-Men, we may think first of Chris Claremont, Louise Simonson and collaborators in the 1970s and 1980s. And if we think of Liu’s work for Marvel, we might think of…
When A Series Relaunch Doesn’t Stick Its Landing Warning: The following contains spoilers for Champions (2018-2019), Doctor Strange (2018) The most important issue of a comic is its first. Not all comics get to see their intended last issue, but they all get to see their first. First impressions are key when introducing — or…
IDW went through a bit of a leadership shakeup last week, as President, Publisher and Chief Creative Officer Chris Ryall was announced to be stepping down to develop his own publishing venture. A day later, IDW said Jerry Bennington and Jud Meyers had been tapped for Ryall’s previous roles as president and publisher, respectively, while…
Rise and Fall of the Roamin’ Empyre Three years ago, I made a terrible decision. High on youthful exuberance, and unwilling to dip my toe back into the world of comics except in the most obsessively completist way imaginable, I decided to read every Marvel comic published since 1961. Not just the big ones: everything….
Dracula, as created by Bram Stoker, is one of the most written about and filmed literary characters. As with Sherlock Holmes, it feels like everyone has a Dracula story. Sometimes they’re comedies (Mel Brooks’ “Dracula: Dead and Loving It”), sometimes they’re rooted in history (Elizabeth Kostova’s novel “The Historian”) and sometimes they’re… odd choices (“Blade:…
Matt Fraction, David Aja, and eventually Annie Wu, changed the superhero comic landscape in 2012 with the debut of Hawkeye. Effortlessly cool, equal parts a laugh and a gut punch and, above all, incredibly distinct, the series met with such universal acclaim and sales success that the re-writing of Clint Barton’s character passed by with…
Big, big news that I am proud to break this week. Let’s get right to it. Today (July 20): DClassified: Week of Announcements Begins After last week’s news that DC will be releasing Rorschach, a 12-issue maxiseries by writer Tom King and artist Jorge Fornés that represents a mystifying return to the Watchmen well, the…
Each week, Xavier Files staff offer their recommendations for what to read. New DC comics come out Tuesdays, everything else Wednesdays. DAN’S PICK: Chu #1: Tony Chu’s criminal sister Saffron steals the spotlight – and other stuff – in the debut issue of this prequel to John Layman and Rob Guillory’s classic Image series “Chew.”…
Pandemic or no, change was always coming. According to ICv2 and Comichron, the North American comics and graphic novel market topped more than $1.2 billion in sales last year, an 11% increase over 2018. It was a heady year, topped by bestsellers like Detective Comics #1,000, Spawn #300 and a new X-Men #1. But those were comics. And in comics, comics…
We are all the hero of our own story. It is an idea hammered home from an early age, with countless books, TV shows, movies and other media showcasing noble figures we can see ourselves in, knowing we would be just as heroic if given a chance. (This is not to say that everyone deserves…