24 Pages

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...