Opinions

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…

It’s November 8th, 2016. My wife and I are at my father-in-law’s house picking up our ten month old son after seeing the film Doctor Strange. The anxiety of the last few weeks is washed away by an enjoyable, but ultimately empty, 115 minutes of popcorn and CGI. I’ve intentionally avoided checking my phone this…

We’re all acutely aware of the rise of Marvel as a brand over the past dozen years, powered by the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the company’s acquisition by Disney. However, growing in parallel with the superhero film industry has been the hobby board game one. With over 4000 games published in 2019,…

Ryan is currently a Senior completing a degree in Media and Cinema Studies at the University of DePaul, which unfortunately does not rest on top of a living island.  In 2014, Wolverine died. The character, I mean. The moniker and title of Wolverine was readily stripped off Logan’s adamantium-coated corpse and taken on by a…

In September of 1998, millions of kids were racked with a decision. Pokemon Red or Pokemon Blue. The difference was 11 exclusive monsters to each version. You could still catch 139 unique little buggers, but those last few were lost to you. Cleverly, the marketing folks sold the game with a call to action for…

As the decade comes to a close it is a time to reflect. A time to look back at some of out most cherished memories of the years past and celebrate their achievements. So in that spirit, I have taken a look at the best stories from each of the past ten years. As comics…