Geekklesia

A friend of mine loaned me his copy of Identity Crisis , and I finished it in one sitting. It is a heartbreaking story about the toll being a superhero can take on your personal life and the lives of those around you. Also, as a friend on Facebook pointed out to me, it was a very intimate story, as worlds were not at stake. It was personal, and yet, the tension was still high, because you cared about the characters enough to want to solve the mystery and resolve the titular "crisis." I have been a fan of Brad Meltzer, surprisingly enough not from his books, but from his History Channel television series, Brad Meltzer's Decoded and Brad Meltzer's Lost History . The latter program identified artifacts that had been lost, misplaced or plain stolen and asked for viewers to aid in their recovery. The first episode detailed the story of the "911 Flag" that was raised over Ground Zero.  Toward the end of that single season, it was reported that someone had come f...

Update: There have since been some further "big reveals" from issue 1 to issue 2 that have clarified my position somewhat. Read on, then see below . So the first issue of Steve Rogers: Captain America, I think the heat from the firestorm raging on the Internet is contributing to the global warming crisis. While I have not read the comic, there is a pretty big reveal at the end: Steve Rogers has been a Hydra sleeper agent almost his entire life. I'll let that sink in a little. Steve Rogers, the sickly. scrawny young man who volunteered for the top-secret Super Soldier program of the US Army, the kid who hates bullies and just wanted to help the war effort, and as Captain America, the only successful recipient of the Super Soldier Serum, he punches out Hitler a full year before the United States enters the war, was actually aiding and abetting the enemy the whole time. There are plenty of blog Twitter and Facebook posts on this with most on the side of this being ...

Now that season one of Supergirl is in the books, and the initial back and forth over the merits or crimes present in the film Batman v. Superman: the Dawn of Justice  has died down, I have an observation I wish to share: The best presentation of Superman on screen today is in Supergirl . There.  I said it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that the near-mythical blur that pops up every so often to prove the Man of Steel exists in this universe, or exchanges text messages with his cousin is what many die-hard Superman fans have been clamoring for. Nope. The best Superman on screen is, in fact, Kara Zor-El, Supergirl herself. Why do I say these things? Well, it's only slightly based on my own readings of comics from the seventies, a small but eclectic collection of DC and Marvel titles that my aunt had at her house for her grandkids to read when I was very young.  I've also done some reading on various histories of the comics and even one specifi...

  Oh, my.  I'm actually giddy with anticipation.  I just received word that a character that I'd considered nigh-legendary in the sub-sub-genre of speculative fiction, that of the Weird Western, has been rebooted.  I speak, of course, of none other than Six-Gun Gorilla . Regular readers of the stuff I throw up on this virtual wall will recall that I have a short list of characters that I would love to see rebooted .  As of now, what I have written about are radio characters, like Chandu the Magician, Rocky Jordan and the lead characters from the Ghost Corps.  I never expected that Six-Gun Gorilla would get a reboot in the form of a comic, because, while I loved the idea, I thought he was such a niche figure that almost no one else would be interested in him.  In my mind, he would remain a lone pioneering figure, back when the idea of the Weird Western had not been fully articulated as it is now. The plot is simple. An old west miner has a pe...

I tell people that when it comes to comics, "I am conversant, but not fluent." What I mean by that is that I am familiar with most of the mainstream superheros (and a few lower tier ones), but I don't regularly follow them on a monthly basis. I remember as a child visiting my aunt and her family. In their home were dozens of comics, featuring characters from both DC and Marvel, and I read them all for years.  I discovered Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, the Avengers, and many others for the first time this way. From this humble introduction, I watched the Super Friends as a Saturday morning cartoon and the Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman as live action network TV shows. As I grew older, I supplemented my awareness of comic book heroes by buying certain books (Spider-Man was always a favorite), or picking up used copies of others.  As a science fiction fan, I enjoyed Marvel's serialization of the original Star Wars film, even though they lost me in the following sto...