comics, comics criticism, no context comics, writing

No Context Comics: A Look at 3 Books I Don’t Read from the week of 4/26

Happy birthday to me, your illustrious guide to the comic books I don’t read, Urbane Turtle. As always, life finds a way to interfere with this hobby. Thank you to the haters who continue to make Spider-Man and Mary Jane a perennial click-machine.

In celebration of my 34th birthday, I’d like to see the site churn out some real work this week. I’ll be working on a new Rearview Mirror piece in honor of the new Joshua Williamson Green Arrow series. I’ve never read Green Arrow before, but have just read through The Longbow Hunters and have thoughts. Something arrow-related should be up by the end of the week. Patreon supporters will get it a bit early.

This last week of April and first of May are fairly light weeks in terms of books out from the big publishers, which made finding issues that fit my admittedly loose criteria kind of difficult. We might hit a point soon where I’ll need to revisit some series that I touched on previously.

What’s the Furthest Place From Here? #12

Image. Matthew Rosenberg, writer. Tyler Boss, artist. Roman Titov/Shycheeks, colors. Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, letters.

Here’s what I know about this book: it’s written by Matthew Rosenberg, who I’ve never read but had a controversial run on X-Men, with art by Tyler Boss, who drew an extremely cool issue of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Universe. Also Bendis drew a variant cover for it and they wear pig masks maybe?

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comics, comics criticism, marvel, writing

Panel x Panel #49: Thor! Jane Foster! Job! Crohn’s Disease!

Extremely proud to say that my essay on Thor by Jason Aaron & Russel Dauterman is out in PanelxPanel today! As always, the issue is a beautiful package, but I think this issue in particular looks great. This is a particularly special release for me both because PanelxPanel is such an excellent periodical, but also because, while I’ve been published since submitting this article a long while ago, this was the first pitch that got accepted & the first time I got paid for my writing. So I’m grateful to Hass for taking a chance on this piece. It’s both very personal and highly analytical about the medium. I got to talk theology and superheroes: two of my favorite things, and reflect on my own journey with Crohn’s. You can purchase the issue by clicking on the slick image below. It goes live and to email inboxes in a couple hours.