Once upon a time, there was a little boy with a sugar-bowl haircut and a plaid Garanimals turtleneck whose grandmother used to drag him along to craft fairs at one of the roughly billion Protestant (never Catholic, no sir) churches in Boston’s northwest suburbs. This little boy was bored to tears by these trips, but [...]

Where were you when the internet was broken in half? I was lurking in the comments section of Fanboy Rampage, unwittingly initiating a chain of events that would lead to this site as I joined in the snark-a-thon surrounding Marvel’s House of M event. While comics publishers have since copped wise to the fact that [...]

When most folks — and by “folks,” I mean aging geeks who are unable to let go of their childhood infatuations — hear “Automan,” they tend to think of schlockmeister Glen Larson’s 1983 attempt to mimic Tron‘s modest box office success on a network TV budget. Roughly two decades before that chroma-keyed and blowcombed hologram [...]

This, my children, is Ultraa… …who should not be confused with Ultra, Ultra Boy, Ultragirl, Ultraman ( Japanese or American version), Captain Ultra, Ultra the Multi-Alien, the Ultra-Humanite, Gary Concord the Ultra-Man, Ultraforce, or Lords of the Ultra Realm. Ultraa was the first superhero of Earth-Prime, which was the plane of existence where we readers dwelled in [...]

Sometime back in the summer of 1985, I came home from a D&D all-nighter to find my little brother hovering over a massive pile of funnybooks stacked in the middle of our bedroom’s orange shag carpet. The bewildering haul was a gift from my uncle, who’d discovered Jesus and/or the realities of married life and [...]

There was a time when I used to post long rants about current trends in superhero comics, but that era has long since passed. Complaining requires caring, and I stopped giving a shit somewhere around the Civil War and Identity/Infinite/Final Crisis debacles. As my dad is fond of saying, “when something gives you more headaches [...]

Some comics are remembered for being good, some comics are remembered for being terrible, and some comics are remembered solely because of a stategically placed house ad. Oh, sure, it’s possible to find the planet’s biggest and only Slash Maraud or Electric Warrior fan with some extensive digging, but good luck finding someone who will [...]

There are eight million forgotten supporting characters attached to the Superman franchise… …but few are as forgettable as the aptly named Scorn. The Boring Blue Behemoth was a scion of Kandor (not the Kryptonian one, but the barely remembered Cynosure-as-Mega-City-One incarnation of the bottled city) whose dedication to the YOLO lifestyle caused no end of [...]

As entertaining (and easy) it may be to mercilessly mock some ill-conceived backbenched dredged up from the dregs of funnybook history, that was never intended to be the purpose of Nobody’s Favorites. There’s no denying that facile snark brings in the readers, but this feature was supposed to be a response to the “SO LAME [...]

We’re going to kick off our return to regular updates with a vile character who cast a long, slimy shadow over the 1980s and beyond… …Margaret Thatcher, a.k.a. The Iron Lady. “But Andrew,” I hear you saying, “Thatcher was a real person, not a funnybook character!” Regrettably, but Maggie has also made a number of [...]