What was the Dark Age of Comic Books?

Punisher outside an apartment window, carrying a big bazooka

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

When the Room Stops Spinning

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

Life after Faust: David Quinn talks The Addiction and bao buns

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

James O’Barr Part 2: The Crow and the Caliber years

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, Soaked in Blood, Fourth Dimensional microreviews

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

The Saga of Grant Morrison’s pronouns

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

Mini-Reviews: Horror/Thriller Webtoons edition(Uriah, Bastard, Counting Sheep)

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

Mini-reviews: Damn Them All, W0Rldtr33, Lovesick

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

An Outlaw Comics Taxonomy

Having touched at least briefly on the “Big Three Outlaw Comics,” I’m now moving forward in this article series to what I call the “Outlaw Comics Explosion. I still have some articles to backfill, such as the missing second part of the James O’Barr series, but over the next few months I’ll be covering Poison … Read more