Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image: Marvel Comics. Art by Steve McNiven, Jay Leisten, Matthew Wilson, and Travis Lanham. The road Marvel Comics has taken to Secret Empire has seen Steve Rogers turn from sleeper agent to full-on supervillain. But Secret Empire #1, out today, goes well beyond that: it makes Captain America complicit in horrors so extreme it’s hard…
Image: Marvel Comics. Art by Andrea Sorrentino. Today sees the release of the second chapter of Marvel’s Secret Empire, the event series that has seen Steve Rogers fall from one of Earth’s mightiest heroes to the leader of a fascist, totalitarian Hydra ruling over the United States. Except the issue also hurls a wrench into…
Netflix and Marvel’s Iron Fist is not good TV. It is bad and boring TV with terrible fight scenes and a lead actor who comes from the “petulant grimace” school of acting. The only reason to watch Iron Fist is so you can be prepared for The Defenders, the epic series that will cross Iron…
Marvel has been in its share of hot water over the past few months— including when a VP of sales said diverse characters were causing its sales to slump, or when artist Ardian Syaf’s contract was sacked for putting controversial messages in X-Men Gold. The latest hotbed is an image that some claim was on…
Marvel Mjolnir, Thor’s magical hammer forged by dwarven blacksmiths out of the enchanted metal uru, has a history of being picky about who can pick it up. If the hammer thinks a person is worthy of its power, hefting it’s no big deal. So how the hell the Hydra fascist formerly known as Captain America,…
GIF Thor’s latest villain—Hela, the Goddess of Death—is already proving to be his biggest rival yet in our first look at the next Thor movie. Mjolnir is gone, Asgard is sundered, and most shockingly of all: the God of Thunder’s been given a haircut. Okay, so we knew about the haircut already—it’s part of Thor’s…
GIF Image: Disney/Marvel Studios. Peter Parker’s best bud in Homecoming might have the name of a familiar comics character—Ned Leeds—but his role in the film and his appearance are far more in line with another Spider-Man character: Ultimate Spider-Man’s Ganke. Fans are confused as to why Miles Morales’ best friend is now Peter’s… and turns…
This has been a banner week for comics, my friends. A banner week. If you haven’t been following the Ardian Syaf scandal, don’t bother; it’s not worth the brain cells. If you’re already elbows deep, however, you will have come across his easter egg reference “QS 5:51″ in X Men Gold #1, with ‘QS’ apparently being an Indonesian…
Image: Marvel Comics. X-Men Gold #1 art by Ardian Syaf, Jay Leisten, and Frank Martin. Marvel has announced that it will remove some artwork from X-Men Gold #1, as well as take unspecified disciplinary action against artist Ardian Syaf, after it was discovered that he included coded references to an ongoing religious and political conflict…
This past Friday, genre culture outlet ICv2 published an interview with David Gabriel, in which the vice president of sales of Marvel Comics blamed an October-November sales slump on “changing tastes.” In his opinion, those changing tastes came from readers who were tired of “more diversity” and “female characters.” “any character that was diverse, any…