A Mike Del Mundo cover is a burst of candy-coated creativity. The colors are bright, but often there’s something horrifying going on at the same time. Or at the very least something interesting. The ones I come back to are the covers he did for Ed Brisson’s run on New Mutants, during the arc where…
You know what’s cool? That scene in a movie where the monster or the enraged, vengeance-seeking protagonist – or the enraged, vengeance-seeking monster protagonist – picks off the bad guys one by one from the shadows. Just dudes disappearing left and right, screaming for their lives while some unseen force drags them to hell. That’s…
A lot of Marvel’s classic villains have had face turns over the years. Magneto became the headmaster of Xavier’s school. Doctor Doom has saved the entire multiverse (for his own nefarious ends, but still). Heck, most of your Steve Ditko-created Spider-rogues have tried being a good guy at least once. But the Red Skull? The…
Thwip. Snikt. Bamf. ZARK. Thanks to sound effects both hand-drawn and lettered, we know the sound certain Marvel characters make when they do their iconic moves. But only one of them is the sound of red beams of concussive force escaping from a man’s eyeballs. When did ZARK become that sound? No idea. The internet…
Wanna feel ancient? Tom King and Gabriel Walta’s The Vision is 10 years old. The 12-issue series in which the android Avenger builds himself a family and they slowly erode in a malaise of existential funk – just like humans! – was launched Nov. 4, 2015. Kind of makes me want to sit here and…
In 1983, Marvel released a promotional comic called The Uncanny X-Men at the State Fair of Texas, in which Professor X and Magneto compete to recruit a mutant named Danny Wiley who has the power to transform into a winged centaur. It is his first and only appearance. Next week, the Uncanny X-Men go to…
It’s crazy how much Age of Apocalypse there’s been since the original Age of Apocalypse story. We wrote about it once. Based on this variant cover by Marco Checchetto to X-Men of Apocalypse Alpha, out Sept. 3, we were inspired to do a quickly googly on what the Storm of Earth-295 got up to after…
House of M, the Marvel event in which the Scarlet Witch, then a mutant and the daughter of Magneto, rewrites reality to create a world where Magneto rules and mutants are the dominant social class, turns 20 this year, which doesn’t sound right but is also painfully true. Also more than 20 years old? The…
Hot town, summer in the cityBack of my neck gettin’ dirty and gritty Summer is in full swing: Temps are rising, fireworks are exploding and pools are bustling! We here at ComicsXF love to cool off with some sexy bods, which makes us especially excited for the return of the Marvel swimsuit specials with next…
The last story arc of Laura Kinney: Wolverine brought the ever-delightful Honey Badger into the series (and back into our lives). Now, another character from Laura’s past is set to kick off the next story arc: Haymaker! Debuting in Erica Schultz’s 2023 X-23: Deadly Regenesis retro miniseries, Haymaker makes the jump from retroactive continuity to…
As Logan’s first teen-girl mentee, Kitty Pryde and Wolverine used to be close. Not in a sexual way – it’s not like Logan was one of the girls in the mansion – but there was a brief period where they had sort of a Batman-and-Robin thing going. Writer Chris Claremont is currently revisiting that period…
Set aside the whole body swap thing for a second. You wanna know how we know Psylocke’s come a long way? In late 1992/early 1993, Marvel published a three-issue story in X-Men in which the team went to Siberia for Colossus family/Omega Red stuff, and Psylocke (then Betsy Braddock in Kwannon’s body) is depicted on…
We’ve gotten a lot of new mutants (lowercase) in this first year of From the Ashes. Do you think they’ll ever meet? There’s room for story in throwing together three groups of young mutants raised by different mutant teachers: Rogue and Gambit’s Outliers, Kitty Pryde and Emma Frost’s Exceptional students and Cyclops’ Alaskan misfits. Maybe…
There’s a whole lot of time traveling going on in the X-books lately. Cable ended up in the far future town of Salvation Bay, where he fell in love with someone who, like him, had the techno-organic virus. Ms. Marvel is currently gallivanting around the X-Men’s greatest hits, fighting an amalgamation of Legion’s remaining personalities….
I have strong sense memories of the original Adult Swim lineup on the Cartoon Network. To a half-drunk, half-sleepy college kid like myself, it was animation by way of fever dream. Hey, look at those kids playing soccer, they’re so squiggly – nod off – why’s Brak’s dad so tiny – nod off – HOLY…