Above-the-Board Recommendation: Guardians of the Galaxy vol. 1:  The Final Gauntlet There were a few things that I was considering for this spot.  However, I’d either just mentioned them a few months ago or was planning on issuing a backhanded recommendation, which would defeat the purpose of the whole thing.  So I settled on this […]

In the afterword to Howard Chaykin’s roman a clef about the comics industry, he does his best to explain why he didn’t make it more obvious who the characters were based on — Stan Lee and Jack Kirby excluded.  He essentially says that the point of the story wasn’t to have it be a game […]

Over the course of “The Wicked + The Divine’s” run a series of six specials were released.  They were loved. They were hated. They were finally collected into one volume before the series wrapped up.  All of them, save for one story in the last were written by series writer Kieron Gillen and featured art […]

There’s a moment early on in this volume that portends the worst for this series.  It involves Lucy Weber, who picked up her father’s hammer at the end of the previous volume to become the new Black Hammer, and how she’s finally remembered everything and is going to tell the cast how they can finally […]

When Bendis brought the original five X-Men — Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel, and Jean Grey — to the present day in “All-New X-Men” there was only one way their story was going to end.  That would be with them going back to their original time. This is something that the writer never demonstrated that he […]

Doctor Chelli Aphra is the “Star Wars” equivalent of Indiana Jones with more flexible moral standards.  When given such a character to write you’d think that most writers would settle for having her find a lead on an old Jedi/Sith/Republic artifact and come up with some clever moral/physical complications for her to overcome in pursuing […]

The Odinson may be back on the job as Thor, but he’s still without a Mjolnir.  Good thing that he’s got his friends in the League of Realms to make him all the hammers he needs.  He’s going to need them too after Loki shows up with an offer to send him right where he […]

Nick Spencer and Ryan Ottley delivered a solid reason to keep reading “Amazing Spider-Man” in the post-Slott era with the previous volume.  Ottley is off for this volume and veteran Spider-artist Humberto Ramos is on for this volume, but he and Spencer keep the good times rolling here.  He gets on my good side almost […]

“Rogue & Gambit:  Ring of Fire” was one of last year’s most pleasant comic surprises in that it managed to make the title characters’ romance seem interesting again.  To the point that their surprise wedding in the pages of “X-Men: Gold” actually made a certain amount of sense. Now they’ve got their own ongoing series […]