Geekomancer Under Glass – 2014 in Geekdom
Happy New Year! Mike Underwood again with some thoughts on what lies ahead for Geekdom in 2014. There’s far more than I could possibly cover here, but please find below a few of the bits of Geekdom I’m most excited for in the first part of 2014. Return of new TV Three new SF/F series have caught my interest this season, which is more than I might have expected. I’ve talked about them before, but I’ll go over each, in brief, with my hopes for the back half of the season.
Confessions of a Comics Junkie: Identity, Obsessions, and Everything
I buy quite a lot of comics — probably not as many as some, but enough that my collection has started to get a little overwhelming. There are currently two long boxes of comics in my closet. Full. And on top of those long boxes are two stacks of comics that are likely to fill a third long box. That’s a lot of comics to have collected in only a few months. Lucky for me, I am good at finding deals, and my local comic guy gives me a discount on new comics if I pre-order them.[1] On top of that, I easily read fifty or sixty comics a month when I’m busy. Right now, I’m 11 comics into Marvel’s The Ultimates, which I mostly read during the shortest third leg of my flight from Florida to California.[2][3] On a good month, I can go through a crossover event or two in a week — Flashpoint and Avengers vs. X-Men events took me less than a week each. [4] So not only am I buying the heck out of comics, I’m also reading them
Geekomancer Under Glass: Beyond the Capes (Part Two)
Hello! This is S&F’s own Geekomancer, Mike Underwood, back again to talk about more comics outside the supers genre. Today, I’m going to talk about one classic and a couple of more recent up-and-coming comics. Hinterkind One of the new offerings from Vertigo following the departure of long-time executive editor Karen Berger, Hinterkind (Writer: Ian Edginton, Artist: Franceso Trifogli) is pitched as The Inverse Fables. In this world, Faerie creatures have returned and overthrown humanity, who now live in small enclaves hidden away, like Angus and Prosper’s group, which has ironically holed up in Central Park. When their closest human neighbors in Albany
Geekomancer Under Glass: Beyond the Capes (Part One)
Hello, my lovely Skiffys and Fantys! I just got back from a delightful evening of talking about comic books at Atomic Books in Baltimore, so I was inspired to start a Geekomancer Under Glass sub-series about comic books. To start, I want to highlight some comics series outside the superhero genre. A lot of people still conflate comics with superheroes, but there’s incredible storytelling being done in the sequential art/graphic novel form outside the supers genre, in and out of SF/F. Hopefully, this series will expose people to some new titles and expand their horizons. It also gives Shaun a chance to come into the comments and tell me how I’m wrong about everything I say about comics. 🙂
Confessions of a Comics Junkie: The Racial Politics of Mutations (or, Mutant Passing)
One of the reasons I have always preferred Marvel over DC is the fact that it’s world, however absurd at times, at least tries to explore what might happen if a bunch of people with extraordinary powers popped up in our neighborhoods. In short, humans have a tendency to freak out. In a weird, unexpected way, the Marvel Universe (Earth 616, not the other versions, which I’m not currently following) is an exploration of evolutionary change, the likes of which we haven’t seen because the last major change in our species “group,” as far as we know, was before written records. I’m talking about the Neanderthals.[1] We’ll never know exactly how humans reacted to those funny-looking humanoids, though we’re pretty sure there was some violence, some sex, and probably some group hugging in certain parts of the world. And in a similar way, we don’t know exactly how humans would react to the rise of mutants; instead, we
Confessions of a Comics Junkie: Rooting for the Underdog (or, Characters Marvel Forgot to Love)
Readers of my personal blog will recall that I recently got back into comic books. And by “got back into” I mean “I now have almost three long boxes full of comics.”[1] It’s an obsession. So sue me. One of the things that has been most interesting to me on this journey back into comics is discovering how much has changed since I was a lax reader in the 90s. I don’t mean in terms of the narratives, mind you (though those have changed, too), but rather in terms of the characters who have stuck around, moved to the background, or (supposedly) left us for good.[2] Things have really changed. The most alarming change for me was the realization that some of the characters I loved as a kid have since taken a sideline to more “popular” folks. Oh, hell, let’s face it. The characters I liked as a kid, and the characters I have since started to cling to in the now, will never be as popular as Wolverine or Batman or Captain America or Iron Man or most of the folks gracing our movie screens these days. They are, and probably always have been or will be, the underdogs. But they’re also the characters for which I can’t help rooting.
