Category Archives: Comics

You may remember when I looked back at 2025, I was displeased by how fewer comic books than usual I’d read. As you can see, I’m workign to up my game for 2026.

THE FAFHRD AND THE GRAY MOUSER OMNIBUS reprints the Bronze Age DC series Sword of Sorcery by Denny O’Neil and Mike Mignola and Marvel’s series from two decades later with Chaykin writing and Mike Mignola’s art. In the introduction, Chaykin tells how he worked on the DC series with no idea of what he was doing and little familiarity with Fritz Leiber’s characters, whom he later came to love (he describes them as fantasy hardboiled-crime stories and I think there’s some truth to that). For that reason he jumped at the chance to get a second shot.

I remember passing this up at the time, possibly because money was tight, possibly because I didn’t trust Chaykin to do it better. It’s excellent, with a much better sense of character and of the world, and Mignola’s art is perfect in its grotesque style. The only story that doesn’t quite work is “Lean Times in Lankhmar,” an amusing one in which the lack of any adventures or treasure to steal forces the two swashbucklers to get day jobs. It’s one where Leiber’s narration is really needed to carry off the humor.

As the Chaykin/Mignola stories include “The Price of Pain-Ease” a sequel to the heroes first encounter (in “Ill Met in Lankhmar”), I reread the first Sword of Sorcery story, which tackles the same material. In the context of the original series, this is a downbeat one that has the guys dealing with, and overcoming, their grief for their murdered first love. That carries over in the Marvel story but O’Neil’s script for some reason makes it a straight swashbuckler with no emotional heft. And he way overwrites the dialog — Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser can’t seem to do anything without quipping about how amazing what they’re doing is. Still, most of the book is made up of the early series and that’s very good indeed.

MURDERBURG by Carol Lay is a comedy set in Muderburg, a Maine coastal town whose mayor, Leo Scazzi, is a professional hit man and most of the town seems to be underworld adjacent (providing fake IDs, disposing corpses). Over the course of several stories, Leo and his beloved wife Antonia deal with unwanted visitors, rivalries with the neighboring town, people trying to bump one of the Scazzis off and similar trouble. This was a lot of fun; if Lay wasn’t influenced by The Addams Family I’ll be surprised (the lead couple have very much a Gomez/Morticia vibe).

Al Ewing and Steve Lieber do an absolutely amazing job with the six-issue METAMORPHO, THE ELEMENT MAN — not simply reviving the Bob Haney/Ramona Fradon creation from the Silver Age but recreating the madcap style of the original, with some updated details (AI, Sapphire as a social media pop star) and cameos from multiple later iterations such as Element Dog and the New 52’s Element Woman. It’s incredible fun, though as I discuss over at Atomic Junk Shop it’s the fourth version of Metamorpho in the past decade and it bugs me there’s no continuity between them.

ALPHONSE MUCHA: The Artist and His Masterpieces by Terasa Barnard is a coffee table book devoted to the Czech art deco painter/sculptor/glass-worker, lavishly illustrated as such books are and covering his life as well. Mucha was a passionate supporter of the Slavic revival of his day (a movement I’m not familiar with) which explains things like him designing currency for the new nation of Czechoslovakia. As a fan of Mucha’s work I enjoyed this, though some of the Slavic figures and stories he’s working with are unknown to me.

Rights to all images belong to current holders.

THE MAGIC OF ATLANTIS was an anthology edited by Lin Carter collecting various Atlantis-set fantasy stories from the pulp era. On the low end we have Carter’s own contribution (okay, nothing special) and a Robert E. Howard King Kull story (I don’t find Kull brooding about the nature of reality terribly interesting). On the high end we have one of Clark Ashton Smith’s Poseidonis stories and an Edmond Hamilton fantasy, “The Avenger from Atlantis,” in which a bodysnatching Atlantean scientist spends centuries hunting down the bodsnatching schemer who caused the sinking.

Overall the collection is fun but the sexism annoyed me. Not that I’m unfamiliar with the sexism of that era’s specfic, but having the women be either sex objects with no personality or bad girl sex bombs got old fast. The only exception was Nictzin Dyalhis’ “The Heart of Atlantis,” which has a female protagonist (it’s one of the middle-ground stories in the book).

I’m a sucker for the old Julius Schwartz SF comics Mystery in Space and Strange Adventures so it was inevitable I pick up the collection DC FINEST: Gorilla World from the early 1950s (it also includes the space adventures of Tommy Tomorrow, a backup in Action Comics). This includes a number of series characters (superhero Captain Comet, scientist Darwin Jones, the Space Cabbie and Interplanetary Insurance agent Bert Gordon) and a lot of standalone stories. Not the best of the series but still fun for me despite the frequent absurdities (a road crew accidentally turns a road into a moebius strip, for instance).

Sometimes they’re quite clever. In “The Counterfeit Earthmen,” the inhabitants of Saturn’s moon Titan refuse to believe Earth astronauts are from Earth — if there’s intelligent life that close to the sun’s light it would have to be blind and navigate by sonar! In “Gorilla World” (shown by Murphy Anderson above) a couple get sucked into a parallel timeline where gorillas have evolved to the equivalent of humans. The couple go on display in a freak show but it turns out they’re very happy — the husband was a sideshow act on our Earth and the gorillas treat him a lot better. Definitely not for everyone’s taste but it is mine.

The first SUPERMAN SILVER AGE OMNIBUS isn’t as much to my taste — Mort Weisinger’s stable of creators always aimed their stories slightly younger than Schwartz seemed to. That said, this covers a wildly creative period including the debut of Brainiac (captured by Curt Swan above), the first appearance of the Arctic Fortress of Solitude, the introduction of Bizarro, Supergirl, Metallo, the first Earth-One Mxyzptlk appearance — well, it’s a creative time for the mythos, as I blogged about here. Balanced against that we have the sexist treatment of Lois Lane and a lot of Wayne Boring art (once considered the definitive Super-artist, I’ve never been able to get into his work). As always with old comics, you pays your money and you takes your choice. I certainly don’t regret spending the cash.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

It’s been two years since Tracy Deonn’s second Legendborn book, Bloodmarked, came out but OATHBOUND was worth the wait. In the aftermath of being almost possessed by Arthur’s spirit, Bree — a black teenager, linked to Arthur by blood (his slaveowning descendant raped her ancestor) flees the Order of the Table and strikes up a deal with Erebus, sorcerer of the order and secretly a demon. He’ll use her and train her both, but the cost is partial memory erasure — she no longer recognizes anyone in her life.

And what of the two boys Bree’s possibly into? Selwyn’s demonic side is eating him alive. Nick, the descendant of Lancelot who thought he was the Scion of Arthur, is out looking for them both. Inevitably Bree and Nick wind up meeting; unfortunately it’s undercover at a demonic collector who’s offering an artifact Erebus needs. Can they help each other get out alive?

This was a bit too sprawling — Selwyn’s scenes (more his mother’s scenes) were mostly “remember I’m a character in this!” — but overall it was another excellent volume. I know Tracy but my admiration for her work is neither bought nor paid for.

COLORIZATION: One Hundred Years of Black films in a White World by Wil Haygood looks at the great and not so great moments of black filmmaking and acting (looking back from 2021 when this came out): Sidney Poitier, Denzel Washington, Oscar Michaux, Stormy Weather, Friday Foster, John Singleton, Spike Lee … And also the racial history happening in the real world as these movies were coming out. And the constant frustration by black moviegoers, creators and actors that no amount of money seems to convince Hollywood making black-centric movies is a winning strategy.

This wasn’t as good a read as I expected, partly because I know a lot of what Haygood has to say (which is absolutely not his fault). Partly because I’d have liked less politics and black history and more on the movies — there’s much more material worthy of coverage that doesn’t get any (nothing about The Color Purple, for instance). The conclusion, like The Black Guy Dies First, is surprisingly upbeat that the dam has finally cracked.

AQUAMAN: Amnesty by Kelly Sue DeConnick and Viktor Bogdanovic faded from my memory almost as soon as I’d read it. Primarily that’s because it’s a post-New 52 reboot that spends most of its pages establishing what is and isn’t in continuity and filling in an amnesiac Aquaman on his secret origin.

OMNI: The Doctor Is In by Devin Grayson and Alitha E. Martinez is the first (I think) in the new Ignition! universe: protagonist Cecilia, always bright, now discovers she’s super-intelligent because she’s somehow been ignited (equivalent to the jumpstart in the Ultraverse, I’m guessing, though that may mean diddly squat to you). With her heightened intelligence comes the certainty that more ignited are on the way and the governments of the world may not respond well … Too much set-up for me, and not that different from Heroes or the CWverse on TV.

Jeff Lemire’s FISHFLIES has a panicked petty crook kill a boy, hideout in a grain silo, befriend the abused daughter of the farmer and then turn into a giant bug. Switching from crime drama to a riff on Metamorphosis is an odd choice but overall this worked for me, though it didn’t work hugely.

Comics cover by Brian Bolland. All rights to images remain with current holders.