Horror comics are back. The genre hasn’t really raised its severed head since the 1950s, when an atmosphere of falsehoods, fears, and frightful foreboding infested our nation. And now that clandestine forces have managed to make America grating again, illustrated tales of terror have also once again become a thing. Return of the Scary Thing from the 1950s Graven Image Back during McCarthyism 1.0, our country experienced a glut of comic book publishers – Fawcett, Key, Atlas, e

Okay, so Wonder Woman’s CGI can probably beat up Doctor Strange’s. Still, Strange’s spirited, Academy Award-nominated effects easily outshone Benedict Cumberbatch’s less-than-magical performance, still memorable six months after its release. And we should also remember that ILM and Strange‘s other effects studios owe an inspirational debt to Marvel’s dazzling Steve Ditko. It was Ditko who first gave artistic form to the Sorcerer Supreme and his kaleidoscopic inter-dimensional

Those underground comix artists of the 1960s may have been renegade outlaws, but they didn’t escape the “90% of everything is crud” law. Even at the peak of their popularity, I’d flip through most pages of their comic books and simply see a bunch of bland, uninspired visuals blurring into a background of crosshatching chicken-scratchings with little or no sense of design. Only about a dozen stood out, but ah, what a dozen. There were Crumb and Spiegelman, naturally. And of co

Cartoonist Will Eisner was such a life force that it’s difficult to believe that he’s not with us to celebrate his 100th birthday on March 6th. For seven decades, he was vitally instrumental in creating and shaping the comic book form, in elevating the quality of its writing and art, in revealing and expanding its graphic potential, in popularizing its respectability on a global scale, and in educating and inspiring generations of aspiring comics artists. And yet he died in e

If you’ve been captivated by the bold, atmospheric cinematography of Daredevil‘s first season on Netflix, you might want to seek out the similarly stunning comic book version by Alex Maleev. Series executive producer Jeph Loeb credits Maleev as a key visual influence: “With Alex’s art, we looked at that and said ‘that’s the look of the show.’ And that really captures it.” And even if you haven’t tuned in, and like your action-adventure tales on a human rather than super-power