Comic Book Herald

A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

Reviews

“X Fated Warriors of the Sacred X” – Knights of X #1

by Leave a Comment

[Yanick Paquette and Alejandro Sánchez Rodríguez cover]

The tense, fiery opening pages of Knights of X #1 doesn’t just manage to immediately grab reader attention; as the heroes flee to the safety of a vast castle mantling an island in flight over a high-fantasy landscape, writer Tini Howard manages an admirably concise recap of the end of the last Excalibur series, which ended, unlike several other Krakoa titles, with nary a glimmer of hope: “The gate home has been destroyed.” And Merlyn, the creator of Otherworld long ago, has usurped Omniversal Majestrix Opal Luna Saturnyne and turned the Starlight Citadel into the grim Lunatic Citadel.

Masterful high-fantasy Excalibur colorist Erick Arciniega returns for Knights of X, and while Marcus To, who drew every single issue of Excalibur’s 26 issues, is off to Shang-Chi with Gene Luen yang, let’s hope that rising talent Bob Quinn (of Way of X) is here for an even longer run (although we should always be happy to see such hardworking artists catch a breather for a month here and there😊).

[Read more…] about “X Fated Warriors of the Sacred X” – Knights of X #1

“Hail Thanos”: Catching up with the Eternals Before Judgment Day

by 1 Comment

[covers by Esad Ribic]

All Your Eternals Needs in One Title

For any Marvel heads, especially X-Men/Krakoa fans, who have felt some trepidation at diving into Eternals from legendary comics scribe Kieron Gillen (The Wicked + The Divine, Phonogram, Young Avengers, and many more, most currently Immortal X-Men) and largely drawn by the master of god epics, Esad Ribic (of Hickman’s Secret Wars and Jason Aaron’s Thor: God of Thunder)—just dive right in if you haven’t!

Especially do so alongside Free Comic Book Day, May 7—when Gillen’s A.X.E.: Judgment Day prelude drops, drawn by another extraordinary talent on such classics as Hickman’s S.H.I.E.L.D. and most recently Eternals: Thanos Rises, which we’ll look at below. The event’s acronym stands for Avengers, X-Men and the Eternals, and it’s these latter folks that most modern readers will likely be familiar with only from the recent blockbuster movie or maybe even as the strange, “high-concept” subject of what might be one of Jack Kirby’s duller projects, from 1976 (a rarity for King Kirby). Well, guess what? That’s perfectly fine!

[Read more…] about “Hail Thanos”: Catching up with the Eternals Before Judgment Day

Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 2

by Leave a Comment


Our attempt to decide how Marvel should ideally collect all of Thor comics in omnibus format continues, with all the Silver Age and Bronze Age material already covered in the first part. Thankfully, things get much easier to work out from here: after Simonson, whose work on Thor received a dedicated omnibus back in 2011, writer Tom DeFalco and artist Ron Frenz collaborated on the title and a few spin-offs for nearly a decade, taking Thor well into the nineties. [Read more…] about Omnibussin: Give Thor Some Love (and Thunder), Part 2

Who Watched the Watchmen? ‘From Hell’ Review!

by Leave a Comment

It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Alan Moore’s From Hell is, in all honesty, one of his only works I can reread. Most of his works have such a skewed and odd response to violence against women, it’s interesting that the one work that is explicitly and almost only about that very thing is the one that I’m able to revisit. Amidst his books about Lovecraftian frogs raping women in bathrooms, ancient dieties who raped the universe into existence and Watchmen’s quiet love story that expresses itself most fully in a child by rape, the book about a serial killer who butchers women… it seems almost quaint in comparison to the Invisible Man’s sexual escapades in a children’s boarding school.

The book begins with white and black stark lines clashing – Eddie Campbell’s art appears to me like a mountain coming into view only at the last moment – you see the rocks, and then you see the boulder, each bit unfolding like origami in reverse, and then you see the cliff it’s on is on a row of them, like noticing the bottom of a snowman before seeing the whole, like seeing the forest for the trees, the work unveils itself, starting with what it really, simply is, harsh scratches of black on white… forming a world. [Read more…] about Who Watched the Watchmen? ‘From Hell’ Review!

What Might Have Been: An Examination of 1970s Ms. Marvel

by 5 Comments

Stan Lee, as he so often does, takes credit for coming up with the name “Ms. Marvel.” In 1977’s The Superhero Women, a collection of female-centric Marvel tales, he says that he wanted Marvel to have a signature lead female character; he and Roy Thomas proceeded to come up with the name “Ms. Marvel” for that character. The “Marvel” portion was a nod to the company, of course, and “Ms.”, in Stan’s words, “represented the new, liberated, upbeat spirit that we wanted the strip to represent.” But neither Stan nor Roy Thomas would be involved in the actual creation of Ms. Marvel, the character. That would fall to writer Gerry Conway and artist John Buscema. And while Conway and Buscema are credited as the creators of Ms. Marvel, neither would stick with the character for long.

Instead, the creative voice that would most come to define the initial iteration of Ms. Marvel—and, ultimately, guide the character for roughly fifteen years—is Chris Claremont’s. Best known as the definitive X-Men writer, Claremont took over Ms. Marvel’s series from Conway with issue #3 and stayed with it until its somewhat complicated end. In the course of his run on Ms. Marvel, he would define Ms. Marvel as a character, developing an affection for her such that, even after the series concluded, he continued to write her as an occasional supporting player in his X-Men stories, and introduced several characters and concepts that echo louder in comic book history than the events of the series itself. While Ms. Marvel would eventually become the character Stan Lee wanted her to be in terms of her place within the Marvel pantheon, her original series is ultimately more notable for the way it impacted the storylines of the X-Men—and the ways it didn’t—while leaving the actual ascendancy of Ms. Marvel to superstar status for later. [Read more…] about What Might Have Been: An Examination of 1970s Ms. Marvel