The Punisher MAX #60 hits comics stores this week, marking the end of Garth Ennis's run on the series. His earlier Punisher work on the series put the character back on track after some disastrous wrong turns, but it was the Marvel MAX series that striped the Vietnam vet turned vigilante's war on crime of all extraneous elements and turned it into something dark and brutal. The evocative covers of Tim Bradstreet (also leaving the series) matched the interior darkness, with Ennis toning down his humor to let the Frank Castle become a monomaniacal psychopath in a corrupt world. Adversaries included the resourceful and violent Barracuda, a kind of anti-Punisher based on the song Stagger Lee. It's not over for the Punisher - screenwriter Gregg Hurwitz and artist Laurence Campbell are taking over the series, and Ennis will be returning to the character with a miniseries in the lighter tone of his Marvel Knights work or The Punisher Kills The Marvel Universe.
posted on Aug 12, 2008 - View this thread

Iron Man, who represents an imperial America, can only win Pyrrhic victories. Spencer Ackerman of Tapped Online has a nice history of the Iron Man comics that reads the character's alcoholism, Civil-War overzealousness, and persistent blundering "into a hell of unintended consequences" as a symbol and subtle critique of American exceptionalism and what Jonathan Schell among others has called "impotent omnipotence".
posted on May 16, 2008 - View this thread

For over the past year, John Seavey has been reading through Marvel's Essentials and DC's Showcase Presents reprints in order to examine the title comic's storytelling engine. From classic characters to barely-footnotes, much of the bedrock of Silver Age heroes are represented in the column's archives.
posted on Mar 18, 2008 - View this thread

Marvel vs. the BMI (one-link, but fun.)
posted on Mar 4, 2008 - View this thread

Back in 1983, before crossovers and limited edition covers ruined the industry, Marvel had a really great idea for a special month of comics.
posted on Feb 23, 2008 - View this thread

I may not know art, but I know what I like.
posted on Jan 16, 2008 - View this thread

"Marvel has put the power in the hands of the fans by making thousands of comics—ranging from Golden Age classics to the most recent Marvel masterpieces—available online, including the first 100 issues of FANTASTIC FOUR and AMAZING SPIDER-MAN plus so much more." If Marvel's not your thing, you can always while away untold hours here.
posted on Nov 13, 2007 - View this thread

Scratchboard artist Scott McKowen was a successful designer of theater posters when Marvel Comics hired him to create the covers for Neil Gaiman's 1602. He recently completed new covers and illustrations for old classics like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Surprisingly, he has no entry at Wikipedia.
posted on Sep 26, 2007 - View this thread

Co-creator of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko is famous for weird, distinctive art, his 1966 departure from Marvel Comics, and granting very few interviews in the course of his decades-spanning career, preferring to let creations such as The Creeper, the Objectivism-inspired Mr. A, and Squirrel Girl speak for him.
Okay, Squirrel Girl not so much.
Jonathan Ross turns the spotlight on the artist in the BBC4 documentary, In Search of Steve Ditko. Did they find him? Well, that's The Question, isn't it?
posted on Sep 23, 2007 - View this thread

The Official Marvel Character Bios will clue you in on Marvel characters from the obscure to the world famous. To find out about the really, really obscure you have to visit The Appendix to The Handbook of the Marvel Universe, where you can learn about such characters as Glowworm (a.k.a. Race Killer), Thunderhoof (part of Force Four) and human/amoeba hybrid Half-Man.
posted on Sep 15, 2007 - View this thread

Hi, I'm a Marvel...and I'm a DC. A collection of videos on youtube targeting both the Mac/PC ads and comic book based movies. Ten videos so far, with more coming "Soon. I promise."
posted on Jun 7, 2007 - View this thread

Captain America, RIP. Marvel kills off Captain America. Obviously this is Civil War (previous post) fallout, but how long can they honestly expect this to last?
posted on Mar 7, 2007 - View this thread

The premise of Marvel Comic's Civil War storyline is that after a hero-related disaster, the government decides to force all superheroes to register, causing a split in the hero community. While heroes debate and decide which side to join, fans debate whether or not the cross-over series is actually any good. Clearly, Christopher Bird falls squarely on one side and has attempted to "improve" the story by starting a project to edit the dialogue of the series. (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
posted on Feb 9, 2007 - View this thread

Polite Dissent rings in the new year with the best and worst in comic book medicine from 2006. While this entertaining blog's subjects are not limited to four color minutiae, it is the source of some of the most entertaining posts. Please to enjoy Flatlining, Hippocrates, Originitis, and the scourge of a generation, Metal-Eating Disease!
posted on Dec 31, 2006 - View this thread

Peanuts Meets Marvel. Peanuts characters as Marvel Comics superheroes.
posted on Dec 10, 2006 - View this thread

David Cockrum has passed on. The cause of death was apparently complications from diabetes; he died peacefully, in his sleep. Comics fans would know him from a number of projects, amongst them Giant Size X-Men #1 where he helped introduce Colossus, Storm and Nightcrawler to the world, his run on the Legion of Super Heroes, and possibly his self-published work The Futurians. You can find some nice retrospectives on his career and what he did for Marvel and for DC Comics.
posted on Nov 26, 2006 - View this thread

Election day 2006 - Whose side is your favourite superhero on? "The Spirit of Vengeance, Ghost Rider is the ultimate protest voter. He always votes against the incumbent and anyone who endorses helmet laws. Vengeance is his." [via]
posted on Nov 8, 2006 - View this thread

IGN's top 50 Marvel Comics covers including this wonderful farmgirl She-Hulk (well, she DOES have two green thumbs!), this amazing Wolverine Origins painting, and...umm...superhero zombies?
posted on Sep 24, 2006 - View this thread

Comic Book Urban Legends. Would you believe ... that a Marvel Comics editor became a Pet Shop Boy? that Wonder Woman's creator invented the real-life lie detector? that the first-ever Marvel / DC Comics crossover was The Wizard Of Oz? that the King of Rock & Roll found hairstyle inspiration in Captain Marvel, Jr? Three of these are true, one is false, but all of the behind-the-scenes tales compiled by Comics Should Be Good could prove blissfully detrimental to your afternoon productivity.
posted on Sep 20, 2006 - View this thread

It’s your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and he’s ready to boogie!
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread

Just Imagine Stan Lee's Watchmen! Back in 2002, DC Comics extended an olive branch of comics industry peace to Stan "Excelsior!" Lee, the founder of rival Marvel Comics. The result was the Just Imagine line, wherein we find several DCU heroes reimagined in one-shot comics as only Stan Lee could. Some titles were good. Some were okay. Most were just so. But never in a million issues would DC have let him take on Watchmen -- perhaps the most critically-acclaimed and analyzed series this side of Maus. So since Stan couldn't or wouldn't, Kevin Church has.
posted on Aug 25, 2006 - View this thread

An official comic book adaptation of the 9/11 commission report is due to hit bookstores this month. The U.S. Army seeks an Arabic-speaking comic book creator. Meanwhile, an Israeli blogger suspects a Kuwaiti company of misusing Marvel and DC comics. These are just the latest incidents in a long-running history of using comic books for propaganda purposes, ranging from Mussolini and Hitler to Captain America vs. the Nazi-affiliated Red Skull to anticommunist comics for Catholic parochial schools to a phony Black Panther comic book created by COINTELPRO to a comic book of the American invasion of Grenada. However, my favorite site of comic book propaganda tends to focus on more innocuous domestic issues such as bicycle safety, USDA nutrition standards, and fighting crack cocaine. (OK, that last issue isn't so innocuous, but comic book propaganda about health & safety issues still generally blows.)
posted on Aug 4, 2006 - View this thread

Girl-Wonder.org is a new site tackling the portrayal of women in comics, written in the same vein as Women in Refrigerators and sequential tart.
posted on Jun 15, 2006 - View this thread

Superman marries Lois Lane. Superman dies. Batman's back is broken. Robin dies. Spider-Man gets married. But one storyline taboo, revealing one's secret identity, has never been broken with a major comic book character. Until now (big-time spoiler alert).
posted on Jun 14, 2006 - View this thread

Jimmy Olsen is a Lutheran. Really. And Clark Kent? Methodist, it seems. Daredevil, Gambit, Huntress and The Punisher? Catholics, all of them, though I have to wonder when Frank Castle last went to Confession. With about half of DC Comic's line-up heading to church in the latest issue of Infinite Crisis and knowing that Civil War is imminent in the House of Marvel, what better time than now to contemplate the particular faiths of our two-dimensional heroes.
posted on Mar 7, 2006 - View this thread

Spider-man , for many of us, has been a tried and true character which many of us have grown up with. For my fellow comic geeks, I'm sure many of you will agree at having enjoyed the stories for many years. However, the recent "The Other" storyline has harped on a series of evolutions(literally, not figuratively) that our webslinger has undergone of late. Of which an upcoming costume change is the least.
posted on Jan 31, 2006 - View this thread

Dr. Doom Is Gangsta.
posted on Jun 19, 2005 - View this thread

How Marvel convinced us to cut up our comics “The program destroyed the value of countless Marvel comics of this era, and missing value stamps are the bane of serious Bronze Age collectors.”
¶ I was ten years old and I collected all 100 Series A Marvel Value Stamps, so I totally grooved on this remarkably comprehensive site. Ironically, the coolest artifacts are the empty collector’s books, which show off the artwork best, in glorius black & white & red, without the crappy colour printing of the era.
posted on Jun 7, 2005 - View this thread

Marvel Comics sues NCsoft and Cryptic Studios, the makers of the online game City of Heroes for player created content they feel infringes on their copyright. If Marvel wins the case, all game developers can expect to be held responsible for the behavior of their players. This case covers similar ground to the proposed Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, which is before a Senate Judiciary Committee. Introduced to crack down on illegal file sharing on peer-to-peer networks, the bill would hold technology companies liable for manufacturing products that encourage people to infringe copyrights. The language of the bill caused an uproar among technology and consumer advocates who claimed it would kill innovation. If successful in their lawsuit, would Marvel be able to sue the makers of pens and pencils for producing products that allow people to create pictures of copyrighted characters?
posted on Nov 16, 2004 - View this thread

A particularly dark period in the life of Spider-Man. Or, an insider's look at the infamous Clone Saga. Or, When Comic Book Marketing Executives Attack.
posted on Jun 30, 2004 - View this thread

The Marvel Directory: from Abomination to Zzzax. On the other side, here's the Unofficial Who's Who in the DC Universe, from Abel to Zauriel.
posted on Jun 1, 2004 - View this thread

My Marvel Years. [via, via]
posted on Apr 29, 2004 - View this thread

"We know one another, we Marvel boys." Jonathan Lethem, author of DC-referencing "Fortress of Solitude" ponders recent novels inspired by comic books and notes more allusions to the "iconographic" superheroes of DC even though Marvel, with its messy, never-ending, teen angst plots and imperfect schlub heroes, was always somehow cooler. Why? [Thx to Not the Beastmaster]
posted on Mar 22, 2004 - View this thread

Enter ... the Rawhide Kid! Marvel is about to unveil the first openly gay gunslinger. Name's the Rawhide Kid. Its creators say it will likely be campy. With a name like that, how could it be anything but?
posted on Dec 9, 2002 - View this thread

Thai company employs Spider-man to deliver cooking gas. Marvel sez: "use monkey suits because monkeys don't have intellectual property rights." 'Nuff Said?
posted on Aug 27, 2002 - View this thread

Captain America - Black Man. Marvel has had its share of classics and stinkers this year - but this historical look how Captain America might have come to be sounds really smart.
posted on Jun 25, 2002 - View this thread

Want to read Marvel comics without paying for them? Sign up for dotComics, a flash based comic download manager/viewer. You can read Spider-Man, X-Men, Elektra, Incredible Hulk and even issues of the new Wolverine Origin series all without the racking guilt of media "piracy". Ahoy, matey!
posted on Jun 5, 2002 - View this thread

Comic books on the web. So Crossgen comics is starting their fee-based webcomics initiative, and for the first few weeks, EVERY comic they've published is online for free. Does this turn those of you who couldn't care less about comics onto something? Would it get you into your local comic book store? Can these replace physical comic books? And is the interface better or worse than on Marvel's dotcomics?(Main link does not seem to support Mac.)
posted on Feb 25, 2002 - View this thread

Marvel Comics ditches the Comics Code - I haven't been with it in terms of comics for about 10 years now, but I found this article to be fairly interesting. Apparently, "Marvel is growing up with the rest of the country" (according to editor-in-chief Joe Quesada) by ditching the CCA and introducing its own internal "ratings system." I can't decide whether to stodgy and support the campiness of what I grew up with (DC's "Crisis On Infinite Earths," for one) or agree that comics should change (Captain America in a "compromising sexual situation," though?)...or perhaps I shouldn't really care, considering the last "comic" I picked up was the Watchmen graphic novel...and I have an inkling that not much out today could compare...
posted on Oct 25, 2001 - View this thread

Marvel Comics Movies It's about time. Being in college and having grown up with action cartoons like he-man and thundercats in the 80s it sickens me now to watch kids having to watch crap like power rangers and japanese anime. Where are these kids heroes??? Now that Michael Jordan is coming back to the NBA and now that these movies are being made, hopefully kids these days will have someone to look up to. A hero...something America could use right now.
posted on Oct 17, 2001 - View this thread

Ang Lee to direct "Hulk" Now that's a "green destiny" I can't wait to see. Sure hope it comes to fruition before the estimated theater date of 2003. And they're going to set it in Berkeley, Calif. -- schweet!
posted on Jan 12, 2001 - View this thread

Big Changes for the Web-Slinger and Children of the Atom!
In an effort to lure kids back to the quiet, almost antiquated pastime of reading paper magazines filled with stories about do-gooders, Marvel Comics announces an AMAZING re-organization of the X-MEN and SPIDER MAN. Yes, loyal arachno-fans, Peter Parker is going to start life anew as a "webmaster" for the Daily Bugle! The X-Men will go back to high school ... for MUTANTS! (PS: Captain America to be laid off.) Marvel's editor in chief announces other changes.
posted on Nov 30, 2000 - View this thread

COMICON.com Splash is reporting that the DC Comics company has pulped the entire print run of the fifth issue of LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN because it reprinted an actual Victorian-era ad for a douche syringe that included the word 'vaginal'. The maker of the syringe was the MARVEL CO. It's not clear whether DC publisher Paul Levitz destroyed the comic because of the term or the reference to Marvel. Marvel Comics is, of course, DC Comics' main competitor.
posted on Apr 28, 2000 - View this thread

Excelsior True Believers! I have to hand it to that old bastard. Marvel's been a bit late in the game and they're still rather overboard design-wise, but Stan Lee's little hole in the wall on the 'Net ain't none too shabby. 7th Portal is just as cheesy as Stan Lee's always been, and just as heartwarming for an old comic bum like me. Anyone else like 7th Portal? Or am I the only one who has a copy of "Contest of Champions" 1-3?
posted on Mar 17, 2000 - View this thread