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When I was about 12 years old I told my grandpa that I was going to take over Calvin and Hobbes when Bill Watterson died. In an especially bitter moment, he gently chastised me, saying that it was likely that his family would take it over, and that Watterson probably wouldn't want anyone else to draw it anyway. Now I know for a fact my grandpa knew nothing about Bill Watterson, but damn if he wasn't right. Watterson HATED legacy strips, and felt he was the only one who could ever tell Calvin and Hobbes' story. That's just one thing I learned in Nevin Martell's new book, Looking for Calvin and Hobbes. The book is subtitled "The Unconventional Story of Bill Watterson and His Revolutionary Comic Strip", and true to that it's part biography and part love letter. Anyone who fell under the trance of Watterson's comic strip will find lots of interesting tidbits about its origins and author. That's the good part. Martell's research is above reproac

For several years, the indefatigable Brian Cronin has been addressing comic book urban legends on his Comics Should Be Good blog. He has written over 200 entries, each one tackling 3 legends. That means he's researched and proved or disproved over 500 stories from comic book history. They're required reading for serious comic fan. Now, Cronin has released Was Superman a Spy? , a collection of legends previously-covered and newly-revealed. Some minor quibbles aside, it's just as essential. There are a couple of jarring things about the book for those who've followed Brian's work on the blog. For one, the book is not structured the same. The blog poses each legend as a question and then attempts to give a definitive true or false. It's a very effective structure. The book abandons this approach and tells the legends in a sequential, narrative form. This results in what feels almost like "the secret history of comic books." However, the book is more org

News came through this week that Dwayne McDuffie has been fired from his post as writer of Justice League of America. Make no mistake, it's bad news. McDuffie , co-creator of Ben 10 and the Milestone line of comics, is a talented guy who obviously isn't getting the respect he deserves. Consider that he put together a very good run on Fantastic Four a couple of years ago with artist Paul Pelliter , and then was shuffled aside in favor of the hit-or-miss Mark Millar . And now this. McDuffie says he was fired, believe it or not, because for the last two years he has given fans truthful answers to their questions about the behind the scenes decisions that go into a high-profile book like Justice League of America . Maybe the higher-ups at DC wouldn't have minded if they had made good decisions. Instead, after letting novelist Brad Metzler set the table, DC plagued  McDuffie's run with editorial mandates out the wazoo, forcing him to use the flagship title as a set

Check this out: I don't get that excited about comic book movies anymore, because it's just so hard to get them right. But if this was the actual trailer for the upcoming Green Lantern movie, I'd be in line already. If nothing else this makes the case that Nathan Fillion would be a perfect Hal Jordan. In reality, they probably won't cast him because of his age. They'll want someone young enough to reprise the role over the next 10 years in potential sequels and a Justice League movie, and its potential sequels. This mindset has overtaken comic movie planning and, I think it's a misguided approach. All that energy should go into making the first film as good as possible, instead of taking success for granted. Also, the guy who made this, Jaron Pitts, should get a job working on the actual film, or at least a chance to make the real trailer.

I was always a Marvel kid. The first comic books and characters I loved were Marvel books and characters. But since returning to comics reading in the last few years, the love just hasn't been there. I still follow a couple of Marvel books and enjoy reading older issues, but overall, I don't like the current direction of the line. The recent Avengers Free Comic Book Day offering is a perfect example of why. I won't complain about the size (it's significantly smaller than a modern comic, which is already significantly smaller than golden age comic), as some have. Nor will I complain about the art. Jim Chueng is a great draftsman (his work looks like Chris Bachalo and Oliver Coipel genetically spliced together) and a pretty good storyteller. The problem lies with the script by Marvel it-writer Brian Michael Bendis. The basic story is good enough: The Avengers face a pissed-off Norse ice giant called Ymir who has just taken out Thor. The problem is in the execution. Spider

Welcome to a new ongoing feature on 24 Pages. The idea is simple: I read a comic book and tell you about it. The inspiration for the idea isn't as easily summarized. Last fall my wife and I were on a weekend vacation to Two Harbors, Minnesota. In the hotel room, we came across an episode of the AMC TV show Mad Men. We had heard many good things about it, but both thought it would be ideal to get the first season on DVD and catch up on the second. However, there in the hotel room we made a daredevil decision: We would watch the episode despite a lack of knowledge of the characters or what had come before. After watching (and enjoying) the episode, we talked about how it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to watch a show, you just watched. You didn't worry about not having seen earlier episodes. If you missed an episode you just had to hope they'd repeat it soon. There was no DVR or DVD or Internet. I bring this up because it kind of reminds me of being a comic book

Bill Willingham is a comic book writer currently most noted for his fabulous series Fables , a modern-day look at characters from various folk, fairy, and tall tales. He has also been announced as the new co-writer of one of my favorite DC Comics team books, Justice Society of America . Recently he wrote an editorial piece for the blog Big Hollywood with the unwieldy title: Superheroes: Still Plenty of Super, But Losing Some of the Hero . In short, Willingham's point is that he's going to start writing with a clear delineation of good and evil in his superhero comics. He claims that the heroes he writes will be courageous and patriotic and virtuous. He doesn't define what these words mean to him, nor does he acknowledge that they can have different interpretations, but he does offer some examples of the opposite tack. Willingham first laments that Superman "no longer seems to be too proud of America," but he doesn't provide any specific incidences. Oh, he d

Writer/artist John Byrne was my favorite in my halcyon collecting days. I would buy anything with his name on it. I especially enjoyed his work on Namor , Superman: The Man of Steel , Fantastic Four, and the few X-Men issues I had (they were always expensive and hard-to-find). In 1991 Byrne jumped into the "creator-owned" arena with Next Men, a multi-layered sci-fi superhero epic from Dark Horse comics. The draw, besides Byrne's usually excellent art and writing, was a "Mature Readers" tag that freed the book up from the Comics Code Authority constraints. So, if Byrne wanted to show two characters having sex or a bullet going through a brain, he did. If he wanted to throw a "shit" or "bitch" into the dialogue, he did. The Next Men were Danny, Jack, Nathan, Jasmine, and Bethany, the subjects of a genetic engineering project. Nurtured since childbirth in a virtual dreamworld, the 5 are abruptly brought into the real world when the project is

If you want to see something that's both disturbing and amusing all at once, go to a comics news website, find a story about a publishing delay, and read the comments section. There you'll find poor souls absolutely losing their minds about the fact that a comic will be released 2 weeks later than originally intended. They will rail against the editor-in-chief of the company in question. They'll blame the artist. They'll blame the writer. They'll blame the dark, cold unfairness of life itself. The most recent of these incidents involves DC Comics and their big event Final Crisis . Months before the first issue was scheduled to come out, an interview with artist JG Jones revealed that he was about halfway through said first issue. The comments section of the interview was afire with doom and gloom prophecies about him being too slow and how he would never be able to complete the issues on time. Fast forward nearly a year later, and it turns out they were right. Jones

With the movie coming out soon, I thought I'd share these original Watchmen advertisements I came across recently in some 1986 issues of Legion of Super-Heroes . Enjoy! Click on each image for a bigger version.

In a recent feature on Newsarama.com, comic book creators were asked what they thought was the biggest opportunity for comics in 2009. More than one answer involved digital comics, and the comments section of the article struck up an interesting debate about the topic. So the question is, is it sensible or feasible to move comic books into the digital age? We've already seen at least one industry balk at the notion of embracing technology and end up regretting it. Now that it's been proven that people are more than willing to pay for music downloads (and fancy devices to play them), there's no question that the record companies should have embraced the digital age much sooner than they did. TV and movies have changed in their own ways, piggybacking onto iTunes, but also using websites and DVRs to keep pace with their consumers. Photography has also evolved quickly and efficiently into something we can all agree is infinitely easier, if less mysterious and lasting. Most new

As a 13 year-old one of my favorite series was Jim Valentino's Guardians of the Galaxy . Turns out my 13 year-old self had good taste. The Guardians of the Galaxy (Charlie 27, Yondu, Nikki, Vance Astro, Martinex, and Starhawk) were the heroes of the Marvel universe, 1,000 years in the future. They had appeared several times in the 1970s, mostly in the team-up book Marvel Two-In-One and several issues of The Avengers . They briefly had their own feature in Marvel Presents , as well. Marvel reintroduced them in 1990 as part of a spate of new books. In re-reading the series I found numerous things to be impressed about, none more than the fact that Valentino wrote and drew 22 straight issues plus an annual on a monthly schedule! After a fill-in by Mark Texiera (not the baseball player), Valentino completed four more issues. That consistency led to an enjoyable series of interconnected stories. Valentino obviously planned far ahead, and was thus able to drop hints about and lay ground

Note : I wrote this about a year ago, but the latest news that the Spider-Man newspaper comic strip has followed the misguided lead of the comics has reopened fresh wounds. I also thought it would be appropriate to kick off a comics-obsessed blog, since it tells some of my history as a reader. One of my most vivid childhood memories is of waking up Christmas morning at my grandparents house in Bowling Green, Kentucky to find 4 sets of Underoos displayed across the fireplace mantle. I was ecstatic. Green Lantern, Batman, Boba Fett, Spider-Man. The latter was, hands-down, my favorite. I would have liked nothing more than to BE Spider-Man. Underoos were the closest I could get. Spider-Man had it all, cool powers, weird villains, a sense of humor, an everyman relatabilty, and after 1987, when he jumped the broom with childhood friend/supermodel Mary Jane Watson, a beautiful wife. He was completely enviable. Not surprisingly, considering my childhood ardor for super heroes, I spent my teen

I've loved super heroes since I was 4, when I faithfully watched David Banner get angry every Friday night. I've loved comic books since I was 12 and bought my first issue of What If... . That set off an obsession that burned brightly for 10 good years. At many points during this time I'm pretty sure I thought about nothing but comics. I followed almost everything (Marvel, DC, Image, independents) and became a student of the medium. In college I lost some interest, but my mom faithfully sent me my subscriptions each week and I always looked forward to them. I drifted away from comics somewhere in 1999. Part of it was what I perceived as growing up. I had just graduated college and moved away, and I left most of my comic book collection in my parents' basement. But I don't remember deciding to quit comics. I just had other things on my mind. I found myself in a comic shop once and again, and I'd pick a book or two up. And I always enjoyed going through my collect