Category Archives: Comics

Last month the Genre Book Club’s topic was cozies, which got me to read THE INNOCENCE OF FATHER BROWN by G.K. Chesterton. As I thought, reading this shows how much the style of cozies has changed over the years. Modern cozies like From Beer to Eternity have big supporting casts and play up community and setting. This short-story collection has two recurring characters — Father Brown and the thief turned detective Flambeau — and no fixed setting. The 1970s Father Brown TV series did likewise; the more recent TV show has a much larger supporting cast.

Chesterton is a frustrating man, capable of great insight, great turns of phrase (“Where do you hide a dead leaf? In a dead forest.”) and great bigotry. His anti-Semitism doesn’t figure into these stories but there’s a discussion in “The Wrong Shape” of how all Eastern art is unnatural, wrong and inherently creepy.

At the same time, Chesterton’s storytelling and sense of humor are otherwise delightful. In the opening story, “The Blue Cross,” Flambeau — still a thief — assumes this middle-aged, benign, obviously harmless priest will be easy prey. He’s genuinely shocked to discover that by listening to criminals make confession Father Brown is fully informed about the ways of the underworld (“You — you know about the spiked bracelet?”). Chesterton has a keen understanding of human nature (part of what makes “The Invisible Man” so good) when he’s not blinded by his own biases. Obviously this won’t work for everyone but it still has enough charm I’m glad I reread it.

BLACK MAX Volume III by Frank Pepper, Ken Mennell and Alfonso Font wraps up the saga of WW I ace Maximilian von Klorr who in V1 created a squadron of giant bats, obedient to his every command — now nothing will stop “Black Max” from driving the Allies out of Germany! Alas, British pilot Tim Wilson did indeed stop him, becoming Max’s hated nemesis, a clash that continued on into Volume 2.

V2 worked some changes on the formula and this volume goes even further afield (as I mentioned writing about Von Hoffman’s War, that sort of soft reboot is common enough in British comics). First Black Max strikes an alliance with Gratz, a German scientist with superweapons and an agenda of his own. After Max eventually falls into British hands, he strikes a new alliance with a subterranean race of bat people. It’s a bit too off-brand to be peak Black Max but it still works, though the continued lack of any female characters is not a plus. While the ending leaves the series open for further adventures (if you don’t see the body, they’re not dead) I’m not sorry it ended here,

In WHO COOKED ADAM SMITH’S DINNER? A Story of Women and Economics, Katrine Marçal takes issue with Smith’s explanation for how self-interest moves the world. According to Smith, the grocer and the butcher put dinner on his table because he pays them. This ignores that his widowed mother, who lived with him, cooked Smith’s dinner and otherwise cared for him his entire life.

This leads into a general discussion of how women’s economic contributions — caregiving, cooking, cleaning — are undervalued, if not invisible. This in turn makes it easy to undervalue women and delegate anything too soft and nurturing for ruthless capitalism as women’s work. It’s an interesting book, though some reviews say modern economics is better on these issues than Marçal claims.

Black Max art by Font; all rights to images remain with current holders

Ever since reading Jackie Morse Kessler’s Hunger, I’ve been meaning to follow up with the sequel. I finally got around to RAGE: Riders of the Apocalypse 2 which continues the premise of having Death — a Kurt Cobain lookalike — recruiting teenagers for the remaining three slots of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (though the protagonists of both books are girls). In Hunger, an anorexic becomes Famine; in this one, Missy is a teenager who relieves a boatload of emotion (bad relationship, death of her cat) by cutting; then Death shows up and suddenly she’s got a much bigger sword and the option to cut other people. The book establishes there’s a high turnover rate in War, Famine and Plague, hence the need for new recruits

From some of the reviews on Goodreads, Kessler does a good job capturing the impulses that lead to cutting. However where anorexia feels connected to Famine, cutting yourself hardly mirrors War. Nor does the book deal with war as much as the first book did starvation — it focuses much more on petty feuds, resentments and small-scale violence. Missy’s big struggles with bullying and slut-shaming at school, plus with her family, don’t connect with the main plot other than to add to her stress. The book does better in the straight Y/A stuff, which is not what I expect to enjoy (I am after all, way aged out of the target market). Not a bad book — I do like that Missy’s family really does have some dysfunction, rather than just her misreading everything, everyone was nice all along (a reveal I rarely like) — but a drop from the first too.

THREE LITTLE WISHES by Paul Cornell and Steve Yeowell is an amusing riff on both rom-coms and three wishes fantasies. Kelly, the protagonist, is a lawyer and a stereotypically sensible, head-centered romantic comedy protagonist, the kind who clearly needs to loosen up and become more of a manic pixie.

Acting on a suggestion by her best friend, Kelly impulsively buys the contents of a storage unit in an online auction, then discovers they include the bottled spirit of Oberon, the faerie king — and releasing him gives her yes, three little wishes. Or big wishes. Well, that can’t possibly go wrong, can it?

In this case, it doesn’t. Cornell asks us to imagine what if the protagonist uses their wishes wisely? What if you don’t regret what you wish for? What if being sensible and thinking before you act is a good thing? I don’t think I’m giving too much spoilers — the fun is in how the creators execute all this — but in any case, the story is fun and worth a look.

Covers by Nick Cardy and Yeowell, all rights to images remain with current holders.

It’s been a while since I read anything written rather than co-written by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. THE SERPENT IN THE GARDEN: Ed Grey and the Last Battle for England by Mignola, Ben Stenbeck and Dave Stewart reminds me how gloriously weird he is. Like a conversation between a disgruntled fae and the good half of Morgan leFay’s soul, which is now a goldfish (trust me, it makes sense).

The story, set in England after the apocalypse that ended the world in Ragna Rok, concerns Hellboy’s old foe the Gruagach regaining his former power; can Edward Grey, happy in retirement, defend England once again? I loved it.

FRANKENSTEIN: New World — Sea of Forever by Mignola, Christopher Golden, Tom Sniegoski and Peter Bergting is a sequel to Frankenstein: New World with Frankenstein and Lilja traveling across the post-apocalyptic Earth pursued by the monstrous Murk. It turns out some of the vampires hiding underground at the apocalypse survived; a trace of ancient evil found them and created the Murk, which exists to suck out the light of vril. As our two protagonists set out across the sea in search of a mysterious spirit, the Murk follows, despite the risk of being caught on the ocean in daylight. I’m enjoying this spinoff series — and both this and the Edward Grey book have been added to my Hellboy Chronology.

Kieron Gillen has turned out some great stuff, but he also wrote the dreary Rue Brittania. POWER FANTASY: The Superpowers by Gillen and Caspar Wijngaard is one that did not work for me. I’ve read that Gillen wanted to write a book with superheroes but no fisticuffs and in that he succeeded. However while the discussions of politics and power work in small doses, by the end of the book they’re quite tedious (I skipped over one character giving a long speech about the nature of power). I won’t be back for V2.

ARDEN HIGH: Twelfth Grade Night by Molly Horton Booth, Stephanie Kate Strohm and Jamie Green is the first in a series of Y/A takes on Shakespeare, set at the eponymous high school. As I love Twelfth Night (and played Malvolio years ago), I was hooked by the premise: new kid in school Viola crushes on Orsino, but she dresses very tomboy so he thinks she’s gay and so does Olivia, the school beauty he’s crushing on. Meanwhile Viola’s still dealing with the fact her identical twin Sebastian chose to stay in boarding school instead of changing schools with her.

Unfortunately the rom-com complications don’t get going until late in the game. Most of the book is about general high school stuff and, I assume, setting up for the series (the kids have fae classmates even though that doesn’t play the slightest role in the plot). I’m not the target audience but even if I was I think I’d find this a little disappointing.

THE CHARLTON COMPANION: A History of the Derby, Connecticut Publisher and Its Comic Books by Jon B. Cooke is a fascinating read even though I never got into Charlton’s output as a kid or a teen. Its offerings were much closer to DC and Marvel than, say, Harvey Comics or Gold Key but the look and quality of the printing were off-putting, as was the lettering (I learned from Cooke that for years the company avoided paying letterers and simply typed directly onto the finished pages). Nevertheless, this was fascinating — Charlton turns out to be more colorful than, say, Quality Comics.

Company founder John Santangelo was an Italian immigrant who broke into publishing by printing songbooks, a hugely popular field a century ago. His business was more profitable than most due to the simple expedient of not paying royalties; he was eventually caught, served some time and paid up from then on. He was a generally sharp operator; after a flood wrecked the company’s offices and printing press he slashed pay rates for freelancers without mentioning all the money they’d received as relief from the government

As the songbook market slowed, Santangelo turned to all sorts of other options: music magazines, skin magazines, paperbacks and of course comics. Love stories by the ton

Horror anthologies such as The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves.

Superhero books such as Steve Ditko’s Captain Atom and Blue Beetle, a short-lived line that inspired Watchmen (Dick Giordano, the former Charlton editor who convinced Moore to come up with new heroes instead, says in hindsight he wishes Moore had used the Charlton characters as they’d have a much higher profile now). And war comics, racing comics, kaiju comics such as Konga and Gorgo … While the pay rates were crap, that left Santagelo and his crew open to using a lot of newbies (Len Wein, Steve Skeates, Denny O’Neil and others who’d go on to bigger and better things) and several interviewees said they enjoyed the freedom that went with the low rates. Though I don’t see many examples of creative freedom involved — even Ditko’s heroes aren’t radically different from DC or Marvel. Was “creative freedom” just a euphemism for “I could turn my story in and never have to change anything”? Which a number of the creators freely admitted they were doing.

Charlton could have been much bigger than it was. It had an advantage in that as part of a bigger publishing company they had their own printing presses in house; over the years though, that meant it was more expensive for them to upgrade the presses than DC or Marvel, who outsourced. And Santangelo didn’t like expensive; he was cheap. One of the many anecdotes mentions one hallway that was almost unusable because it was stuffed with old, worn-out printing plates; rather than sell them and free up space, Santagelo was determined to wait until the scrap metal price rose.

A colorful company to read about, even if the comics turned me off.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Captain Atom and Blue Beetle covers by Ditko, the other two are uncredited.

More than a decade ago, I listed Steve Englehart’s Captain America run as one of my top 10 favorite comics. It was an unpleasant shock when he left the book, Cap-creator Jack Kirby took over and proceeded to ignore everything Englehart had developed in favor of doing his own thing (for reasons explained here, Kirby wanted to ignore the rest of the Marvel Universe as much as possible). I’ve been following Alan Stewart’s recounting of the Kirby run and I can safely say I don’t like it any better than I did at the time. While I admire a lot of Kirby’s Silver Age and Fourth World work, at this point nothing he was doing impressed me (e.g., Devil Dinosaur).

Discussion on Alan’s blog got me to check out CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES, one of the big treasury-edition books DC and Marvel were putting out back then — bigger size, bigger price, more profit per issue.

The story, such as it is, has the mystical Mr. Buda challenging Captain America about his belief in America, then sending him across time to experience it: the Chicago fire, a boxing bought with heavyweight legend John L. Sullivan, helping John Brown’s son protect a runaway slave, inspiring Betsy Ross in her design for the new flag she’s working on. There’s no plot, just a set of set pieces followed by an uninspired Why America Is Cool message. Like most of Kirby’s work after his return to Marvel, this had my wondering why people thought Kirby was such a genius.

I had more fun with ULTIMATE OZ UNIVERSE: The Lost Lands by Cullen Bunn and Mike Deodato. It’s the kick off of a new Oz series, adapting Land of Oz with Ozma of Oz to follow (I’m curious if they thought the ur-book was done too much, worried about flak from MGM which made the ’39 movie or what). It looks good —

— stays close enough to the story to satisfy me and the changes (adding a special ops Oz team working for Glinda, amping up Mombi’s powers) don’t annoy me. The exception is that I’d have preferred the Hungry Tiger and Cowardly Lion as animals rather than biped beast-men, and that in stripping Wogglebug of his personality as pompous academic, they’ve made him utterly blad. I’m also surprised given the reveal, that they don’t lean into the trans overtones. Still, a solid start.

Art by Kirby and Deodata, all rights to images remain with their owners.

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.