The Beat posted a breakdown of the “DC Entertainment Essential Graphic Novels” promotional magazine that came out recently.  It contains 25 titles in the list and is full of titles that deserve the “essential” tag (“Sandman” vol. 1, “The Dark Knight Returns,” “Saga of the Swamp Thing” vol. 1), some that are just good (“American […]

I said over a year ago that the finale of Grant Morrison’s “Batman” run was shaping up to be nothing less than awesome, and this latest/new/unrebooted volume of “Batman, Incorporated” goes a long way towards proving that.  With the mastermind behind the globe-spanning criminal organization known as Leviathan revealed to be Talia Al’Ghul, the true […]

Reading this volume makes me wish that Nick Spencer would take some time and read through all of Naoki Urasawa’s “20th Century Boys.”  Though both of their series are very different in style and tone, at their cores they deal with mysteries that slowly unfold over a long period of time.  What gives Urasawa’s series […]

Grant Morrison got the chance to rebuild Superman from the ground up in the first volume to entertaining, if not spectacular, results.  In the second, he digs deeper into the Man of Steel’s status quo and we get a story that takes a look at what happens when he feels that Clark Kent’s identity is […]

There’s no more land on Earth to discover.  Short of a major undersea earthquake or volcanic eruption forming a new island somewhere, every square inch is accounted for and spoken for.  But what if new land was somehow created?  The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a real thing and writer Joe Harris has taken it […]

Spoilers be damned!  Any story that involves Captain America getting his ass handed to him by Dennis “D-Man” Dunphy is automatically in the running for “worst story of the year” around here.  I don’t care how tragic his situation is, the character is so terminally lame that there’s no benefit for using him the way […]

The last time “Uncanny X-Force” did a story that spanned two collected volumes, it was “The Dark Angel Saga.”  That was the rare superhero epic that was as good as its hype, so the “Final Execution” storyline has a lot to live up to in that regard along with the fact that it represents writer […]

There are some who think that making a comic book as a movie pitch is an inherently bad thing.  After all, the idea is to get the idea out there in some form, attract the attention of Hollywood, and ride the ensuing wave of box-office success and merchandising to a pot filled with cash at […]

Now I liked the first volume of this latest take on the character well enough, but something just felt off here.  Maybe it’s because writer Scott Snyder burns through the conflict in the four issues from the title proper in a way that doesn’t allow the events contained inside to resonate.  Yes, there are some […]

Now I’ve talked before about how writer Robert Venditti has been getting work at DC on projects both low-profile (“Demon Knights”) and high (“Green Lantern”).  This comes in spite of the fact that he hasn’t been a very prolific or well-known person in the industry, though his best-known project “The Surrogates” was adapted into a […]