A month or two ago there was some random twit spouting off on social media about how Jim Aparo was a terrible artist. Now (as my friend Michael Bailey is fond of saying) you can't argue taste, but you can school an snot-nosed little fanboy on what art quality really means, which is what most …
DC Retroactive: The 1980s — Justice League of America and Green Lantern
Around the time that DC was getting ready to launch The New 52, a continuity reboot experiment that in my opinion was a pretty bad idea, they published specials featuring marquee characters and teams called "RetroActive." Each one featured a new story that took place during those books in a particular decade (the 1970s, 1980s, …
Continue reading DC Retroactive: The 1980s — Justice League of America and Green Lantern
Justice League of America #258-261
The End of the Justice League of America. With a Legends crossover banner and four covers that got increasingly dramatic (the final one being my favorite with "JUSTICE LEAGUE of AMERICA THE FINAL CHAPTER" in huge letters behind and below Vixen), this was a story I originally owned way back in the early Nineties, having …
Justice League of America #250
Justice League Detroit is one of those weird things that you know happened but always have to go back and check to see if they did. As a concept, they were only around for 2-1/2 years and would be unceremoniously cleared out (and mostly killed off) during the Legends event to make way for what's …
Justice League of America # 198, 212, 217, 218, 219, 220
Before I get to the review of these comics, I am going to offer up some commentary about writing reviews of comics for this blog and the blog itself. I mean, I'm sure this could be its own post entirely and maybe I'll expand on this point in another reflection, but I was prepping another …
Continue reading Justice League of America # 198, 212, 217, 218, 219, 220
Green Lantern Corps #207 and Firestorm #55
Two comics that aren't from the same title get reviewed here because they're both Legends crossovers and were published pretty close to one another (GL Corps is "Chapter 3" of Legends and Firestorm is "Chapter 7) and I believe that puts them in the first third of the series, although I think that GL Corps …
DC’s 5-Star Super-Hero Spectacular
Man, this was a treat. I fished this out of a cheap bin at a a comic convention a few years ago--I wasn't looking for it and it's in pretty terrible condition, but it was cheap and the Neal Adams cover was enough for me to throw it on the pile. It's a dollar comic …
Secret Origins #2
This is the last issue of Secret Origins I'm reading for a while--I've decided to dive into some other comics in my longboxes--and was one that I kind of shrugged at both before and after I read it. And it's not that I have anything against any version of the Blue Beetle; I think that …
Personal Archaeology 1: Prepping the Dig
My grandmother was a hoarder. This is something we discovered at its fullest extent after her death, but when I think back to the years spent at her house, the signs were there--TV Guides piled by the guestroom bed, at least one room where there were a lot of things all over the place, knickknacks …
Secret Origins #1 and #6
I'm going with a two-fer this time because out of all of the issues of Secret Origins that I have read so far, these have been two of my favorites and for very specific reasons: they feature the origins of the Golden Age Superman and Batman. Oh, there's an origin of Halo from The Outsiders …
The Uncollecting 