Courtesy of the Criterion Collection’s Twitter feed, which says this is from a 1971 issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. No. 101, cover date March ’71, it turns out.
I so enjoy referencing the title of this 1967 arthouse film, which was banned for a while in the U.S., that perhaps one day I’ll actually watch it.
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged comics, Criterion, I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW), Image of Zen, Spider-Man
Great Scott! Book critic, comics blogger, and friend-for-life Glen Weldon — the Green Lantern to my Green Arrow — invited me to participate in an exegesis of SUPERMAN VS. MUHAMMAD ALI, an essential cultural artifact of the 1970s. I’ve had a framed copy of the cover hanging in my apartment for years, in my bathroom in point of fact. But as with so many of the classics, I never actually read it until assigned to do so.
Anyway: Read all about it on your National Public Radio!
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged boxing, comics, Monkey See, Muhammad Ali, Neal Adams, Superman, The 1970s
I’m not much of a list guy. Because it’s universally agreed we’ve just closed out a year, and somewhat more controversially posited that we have in fact, cut the lights and bolted the door on an an entire decade, critics both pro and semi- have been gunking up the interwebs with their lists of the year and decade’s best movies, albums, songs, whatever.
I get it. People read these. Moreover, unless one takes the list-making enterprise to an absurd extreme, lists are the easiest things in the world to write. The biggest problem of writing — structure — is already solved for you.
I tend to react more strongly, to movies, plays, albums, and concerts than most people I know. (Yes, I read, but I seldom get around to books in the year they’re published). But to the list-making, I am resistant. Maybe if I’d made a few more lists I’d have got myself somewhere in life by now. But that’s all spilled milk under the bridge. Continue reading
Posted in music, navel-gazing, Uncategorized
Tagged CD reviews, cinema, comics, music, pop music, theater
Wherein what is intended as a brief endorsement is buried ‘neath seven longish paragaphs of rambling reminiscence.
Less than six hours until the blessed day arrives, the Christmas Spirit is upon me.
I wish I could say the Christmas Spirit is an impulse towards charity and forgiveness. As an unmarried, childless, over-30 boy, however, I am forced to admit that I have more often thought of the Christmas Spirit the way I’m thinking of it now: as the odd pairing of tranquility and giddy excitement Christmas engendered within me as a child. The reason I’m feeling an echo of that sense of wonder is at least partially because of a cynical, violent, profane comic book, one with a heart as black as the finish on a Glock pistol.
I started reading comics in 1987, and my personal celebration of Christmas -– my holiday gift to myself, delivered faithfully each December regardless of whether my year’s conduct could be classified as “naughty” or “nice” –- has incorporated a comics binge ever since. Continue reading
Amy Quiggins as Ofelia.
Years ago, when he started making movies in the United States, the great director of Hong Kong action films John Woo enumerated in an interview the many similarities between the brand of hyperkinetic shoot-‘em-ups in which he specialized, and musicals.
There’s nothing that revealing in director/fight choreographer Casey Kaleba’s production of playwright/fight choreographer — you begin to see the problem — Qui Nguyen’s Living Dead in Denmark, which picks up the story of Hamlet 1,828 days later. Elsinore has been overrun by zombies, and the self-slaughtering Ofelia (a limber Amy Quiggins) finds herself, like Jean Grey, mysteriously resurrected. Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged cinema, comics, geekery, Hamlet, John Woo, pop culture, Rorschach Theatre Company, Shakespeare, The Washington Examiner, theater
No surprise, surely, that there’s a certain benign, solar-powered alien to whom the management of this fine publication is partial. Maybe more on account of his iconography, and for the way he was was so generously embodied by the late Christopher Reeve in the movie-and-a-half directed by Richard Donner in the late 70s — and for the uber-salient fact that his newspapering alter-ego shares my initials — than for the actual comics.
Continue reading
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged Captain Marvel, character history, comics, geekdom, superheroes, Superman
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