Sewer Mutant An earlier version of this article appeared on Indie Creator Explosion in May 2020. Intro In this article, I delve into the work of Barry Blair, a controversial figure in alternative and independent comics in the 1980s and 1990s. I want to preface this piece by saying that as a kid I was a fan … Read more
Dark Age Milestones Part 1 tldr; For purposes of this series I define the Dark Age of Comic Books as running from 1985 with the publication of Crisis on Infinite Earths # 8, the death of Barry Allen, to 2000 with the publication of Ultimate Spiderman # 1. But we’ll be looking at a number … Read more
DC just announced a Vertigo Comics revival with 10 new titles. To mark the occasion, here’s what I wrote about Vertigo in my June 25, 2019 newsletter. Last Friday DC confirmed that it’s sunsetting the Vertigo imprint, along with some other brands like Zoom and Ink. Instead, there will just be three brands: DC Kids, … Read more
Faust: Love of the Damned co-creator David Quinn is back this July with The Addiction, his first new comics work published since the final issue of Faust in 2012. Quinn is joined for this crime/horror/superhero/food series by co-creator/co-writer Vincent Zurzolo (co-owner of Metropolis Collectibles) and Claudia Balboni (known for Killer Queens from Dark Horse). The … Read more
Since the release of the first photos of Bill Skarsgård as The Crow, he’s been compared to the Jared Leto Joker. Which is fair enough: It was the first thing that crossed my mind as well. But I soon remembered an older touchstone: The Crow: Wild Justice mini-series from 1997. The new Crow film is … Read more
The Crow and the Caliber Years: James O’Barr Part 2 Part 1: The Crow Creator James O’Barr’s Early Years Part 2: The Crow and the Caliber years Part 3: After The Crow: The Works of James O’Barr James O’Barr has published around 416 pages of sequential art in his life, not counting things he wrote … Read more
Sewer Boyz Sewer Boyz (No relation to Sewer Mutant!) is a bootleg TMNT comic featuring a bunch of different artists doing their take on the Turtles orchestrated by Erwin Papa. The book tells a brief story about the Turtles taking on the Shredder. Some pages are drawn by two or more? artists, showing wildly different … Read more
tldr; As of October 24, 2023 Grant Morrison’s stated preference is: “I’m much happier being described as ‘they’ but I won’t give anyone a hard time for using any other pronoun.” (Source: This essay on their Substack. It’s behind a subscription paywall but anyone with $10 can verify. For a more public but less recent … Read more
You’ve probably heard by now that webtoons are the future of comics. They’re designed to be read easily on mobile phones. Have massive global audiences. The demographics skew young and female. But where should an aging indie comic book fan start with this new-fangled format? The webtoon medium is dominated by various combinations of YA, … Read more
I spend so much time excavating comics history that I often neglect to follow what’s happening in the present. So this is the first in what will be a series of collections of “mini-reviews” on more current comics. This time around I’m looking at some fairly mainstream “direct market” comics, but I’ll also dive into … Read more