I really didn’t expect to like Spider-Man as much as I do. I’ve been reading Marvel comics for, say, 27 years. And I’ve never been into Spider-Man. In hindsight, it’s because Spidey as a guest-star is basically a comic relief quip machine. But focusing on Spider-Man as the main character, and even more importantly focusing […]

I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed keeping up with blogging for the last few weeks. I’ve had an urge to go back and re-read stuff from this and other eras of my comics-reading life, to slow down and really analyze a few books–or a few pages–but I also have a competing urge to keep pushing […]

Under discussion: Akira 1-6 by Katsuhiro Otomo Pairs well with: Speed Tribes by Karl Taro Greenfeld; Blade Runner; “Alleys of Your Mind” by Cybotron; the charred wreckage of a bombed-out, burned-down Yoshinoya. When I try to explain to people why I moved to Japan, I usually talk about it in terms of repulsion, not attraction. […]

Under discussion: Good-Bye by Yoshihiro Tastumi Pairs well with: The Metamorphosis and Other Stories by Franz Kafka; Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness by Kenzaburo Oe; an antipathy toward modernism; and an 11,000 yen tab at a hostess bar. Yoshihiro Tatsumi is probably the most famous practitioner of gekiga, a form of Japanese comics that […]

Under discussion: Various trades featuring Guardians of the Galaxy from the time between the launch of the Brian Michael Bendis run and the end of Secret Wars, including The Black Vortex, Guardians Team-Up: Guardians Assemble, Guardians Team-Up: Unlikely Story, Legendary Star-Lord: Face It, I Rule, Legendary Star-Lord: Rise of the Black Vortex, Rocket Raccoon: A Chasing Tale, Rocket Raccoon: Storytailer, Groot, Guardians 3000, Korvac Saga/Warzones, Guardians […]

Under discussion: The first five trades of the Brian Michael Bendis Guardians of the Galaxy series including Cosmic Avengers, Angela, The Trial of Jean Grey, Guardians Disassembled, Original Sin, and Black Vortex.  I’m a heavy reader of everything: magazines, books, and–yeah, sure–comics, too. But even so, I really don’t get all that much in the way […]

Under discussion: Guardians of the Galaxy by Abnett and Lanning: The Complete Collection Vols. 1 & 2 and The Thanos Imperative, including Guardians of the Galaxy #1-25, The Thanos Imperative: Ignition, The Thanos Imperative #1-6, and The Thanos Imperative: Devastation. There’s a conceit at the  beginning of The Hypernaturals, the creator-owned space opera superhero comic by […]

We are all our own graveyards, I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we’re healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived, and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the […]

Under discussion: Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow’s Avengers Vol. 2.  Includes issues: Thor Annual #6; Avengers (1963) #167-168, #170-177, and #181; Ms. Marvel (1977) #23; Marvel Team-Up (1972) #86; Marvel Two-In-One #61-63, and #69. The main emotion that one experiences reading the issues contained in the Guardians of the Galaxy: Tomorrow’s Avengers Vol. 2 trade paperback […]

Under discussion: “Community Standards: The View from Outside” from Reinventing Comics by Scott McCloud. Chapter 4 of Reinventing Comics deals, ostensibly, with public perception of comics–the good, the bad, and the changing–as well as the response of institutions such as universities with regards to comics studies and comics-adjacent research and production. This means that the […]

VITA RAYS is an occasional series about superheroes. I have a theory that there are three bedrock, foundational, without-this-there’s-no-MCU reasons why the first Iron Man was such a success. The movie is rightfully described as the “Big Bang” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it needed three things in order to be the genre-defining, industry-transforming […]

So there are, periodically, these projects that I have. There was the Book of Genesis project and the Gilgamesh project and the Herman Melville project and a dozen more. I binge read, researching what books I need to read to really be on top of a subject and then reading between a quarter and a […]

  Late last year I started reading again. It had been awhile, almost two years since personal issues (happy ones, you should know) started to really cut into my free time enough that I stopped being able to read as much as I like to. And reading for me is the kind of thing that […]

The One I Love (2014), dir. Charlie McDowell The acting is great. The direction is great. The writing is great. But the map is wrong. Not the map of the retreat grounds, but the map of the human heart that those grounds—with their main house, their guest house, and their “roost” recording studio—are meant to […]

It was probably inevitable. There are too many similarities for me to not identify with Gordon Clark (played with fearless severity and determined gloom by Scoot McNairy). There is the beard. There are his oblique, haunting dreams: of a flower growing out of a motherboard, of his face on a dead man. There is the […]

Every once in awhile I do something for the blog and think, “Should I have been doing this all along?” That’s what I’m wondering right now. The next section in Brian Boyd’s book On the Origin of Stories deals with what advantages the ability to tell stories conveys on human beings. This section isn’t as […]

There’s a moment when you’re reading a book and you notice more and more the way in which the author is making their argument–whether it’s fiction or non-fiction–and you’re not noticing the argument itself as much. It’s not a good place to be, really. Despite being in that place with Brian Boyd’s On the Origin […]

There’s something great about listening to an orchestra as it warms up. There’s the violins getting tuned, bows scratching over the strings as the violinists tighten and loosen their pegs. The flutes trilling up and down, pausing, trilling again. The drums rumbling in the back. Then slowly and then all at once, silence, applause for the […]

I make my coffee in the morning and 32,000 years ago. I use a chemex. I got it for my birthday. What the chemex coffee-making process lacks in brevity, it makes up for in delicious, aromatic coffee free of the bitterness that you get from a French press that never gets clean enough, which is […]

When I lived in Japan, I played taiko and learned and performed traditional Japanese folk dances the entire time I was there, all three years. It was great. I went and hung out with my crew, the Takenoko Taiko Budo Dance Circle, twice a week to practice. Then we would have one performance (okay, sometimes […]

TEXT: I’m pretty this is that scene from that one movie where the bad guy, Megatron-Hans Gruber or whoever is like, “Our first catch of the day,” and the Hobbits hide under the tree until he’s gone, and then, just to rub it in, Mega-Gruber decides to go to Cloud City and there, in the […]

The response when I first started making bagman videos was so strong that I just stuck with it until I couldn’t. It’s funny how powerful getting positive feedback is. No more than a dozen or so people tweeted about bagman, saying they loved it, retweeted my tweets, left youtube comments, and that feeling was so […]

Looking back on this photo diary, which happened just a few days after the “Macro Digital on South Main” set I posted a few days ago, I can see some pretty similar strategies going on. There’s still at least one shot that’s abstract, mostly concerned with composition. There are a lot of strong lines leading […]