“Anywhere can be paradise as long as you have the will to live,” is a surprisingly hopeful quote from an incredibly depressing place at the end of the film The End Of Evangelion. It has inspired me to keep living, and keep trying to live, through a manner of situations on countless days over the…
A Look at the Finale of Superior Spider-Man (2019) Twilight will come for the gods, and the status quo will be reset; Batman will be young again, Spider-Man will become unmarried, and everything begins anew. The idea of this Ragnarok for these characters is divisive for many. Conceptually, losing out on years of progress and…
Star Wars. Conan. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Firefly. Usagi Yojimbo. Alien. Predator. Did I miss any? The above is a list of licenses Dark Horse Comics has lost since 2014.The last two happened just this past week, as Marvel announced Thursday it had acquired the Alien and Predator licenses with an eye toward publishing comics based on them…
Welcome to Bonus Reading, a weekly feature in which Matthew Lazorwitz looks at four (or so) comics linked by a common character, creator or theme. Patreon backers of the WMQ&A podcast can request a custom Bonus Reading column built around their fave. Sign up here. Comics have always been political. Even during the years when…
Looking Back at Denny O’Neil’s Iron Man, and Marvel’s First Black Flagship Hero The first time I encountered Denny O’Neil’s Iron Man, he was wandering New York in the snow on a December night. His hair was shaggy and unkempt, a wild beard hanging off his chin, and his stained dress shirt was dangling loose…
Hi, Xavier Files friends, family and fiends — I’m Will (a Libra, bourbon fan and fake doctor), and I’ll be here every Monday with your weekly planner, the thing that’s gonna keep you on track for success. Or keep you informed. Or something. Look, I can’t figure out for this bit whether I’m your secretary…
A proud New Orleanian living in the District of Columbia, Jude Jones is a professional thinker, amateur photographer, burgeoning runner and lover of Black culture, love and life. Magneto and Cyclops (and Killmonger) were right.Find more of Jude’s writing here. It always begins the same. They arrive. They are different – some in ways barely…
God Loves, Man Kills II (2003) isn’t a great story. It’s part of the larger X-Treme X-Men line, in which Chris Claremont got to do Claremontian things with the characters Grant Morrison wasn’t using for New X-Men. Like much of X-Treme, the arc suffers from inking and coloring that make characters look glassy, inert, a…
Dear Comic Creators: Wow. What a year, right? Brexit. Impeachment hearings. Remember when we almost went to war with Iran back in January? That was crazy. And now here we are, months into global pandemic, isolation orders implemented across the country amid crazy protests, and no real end in sight. Some of us are coping….
For centuries, man has looked to the stars to find glimpses of the future using the artistic science of astrology. The original symbols were based often on stories and characters from antiquity that few but the biggest mythology geeks are familiar with today. For the sake of updating them for common use, and because Marvel…
Comics, especially X-Men comics, and trading cards have a long history together. The X-Men trading cards, followed by the larger Marvel sets, started right as the comics hit their most financially successful period. Trading cards were included in some of the biggest launches, like X-Force #1 and X-Cutioner’s Song. Marvel’s acquisition of the trading card…
X-Force, they are like the X-Men, but with attitude. If they X-Men were just all Wolverine but also guns right? While this is both reductive and incorrect, this is what society expects of X-Force. There have, however, been many iterations of this squad, and today, we’re going to rank all of them, from worst to…
I don’t play Animal Crossing, so the last few weeks on social media have been Greek to me. However, I have been playing a lot of Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and I’ve discovered something. Isabelle rocks. I typically race as either Toad or Toadette. The small, compact characters (or Light) take turns better, especially on…
We’re going to be talking about a few terms from the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, a 20th century Russian literary critic and semiotician. First of all, “heteroglossia.” Heteroglossia is: “the base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time,…
Over the last few months, us X-Fans have gotten accustomed to island life. Krakoa has become our home. We visit tiki bars, hang out on beaches, and enjoy a political system that is questionable. With the recent global pandemic, Krakoa has been taken from us. Comics aren’t coming out this week, we don’t know when…