24 Pages

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...