Sunday, July 14, 2013

Elsewhere

In addition to the work I do here on Comics Matter, I occasionally write for other sites as well. Up to now, this has primarily just meant my bi-weekly feature over at The Chemical Box on comicbooks from 1987, the year I was born. But recently, I've also been fortunate enough to be added to the review team at read/RANT, and offered a weekly Iconographies piece at PopMatters. So I figure once a week or so, I'll throw up a post on here with links to the work I've done elsewhere.

My first PopMatters column won't be published until next week, so in the meantime, here are my first 3 read/RANT reviews, two from a couple weeks ago on the debuts of Larfleeze and Lazarus, as well as one from this week on Six-Gun Gorilla #2. On top of that, I've got my two most recent Chemical Box columns, on Matt Champion (also published two weeks back) and Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters from this past Friday.

Something I Failed to Mention
I'm also going to do my best to include a small bit of original comicbook criticism in these posts, because a) In an ideal world everything I put on Comics Matter would include fresh material, and b) As hard as I try to write comprehensively, there's almost always going to be one idea or detail or character or creator or something from any given comic that I don't find room to include in whatever I write about it. Something that doesn't line up with the points I'm trying to make, or that I simply forget to mention, or even sometimes a bit that doesn't occur to me until the column in question is complete.

This time out, I wanted to take a second to point out that, in The Longbow Hunters, Mike Grell wrote Oliver Queen with an amazingly strong and impressive love for Dinah Lance. He respects her and admires her enough to let her do her own thing, cares about her enough to drop everything and risk his life when he realizes she's in danger, and generally treats her as an equal and tries his best to give her what she wants, to make her happy. And Dinah's love for Oliver matches his for her. This kind of legitimate, two-way, mature romance is depressingly rare in any fiction, let alone superhero comicbooks, where men often get to be outright assholes and still have the women they're with remain loyal to them. See Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Superman in current continuity if you need examples. Even though Dinah gets brutally tortured in Grell's mini-series (see the original column for more on that), the relationship he establishes between her and Oliver is admirable, and it lays the groundwork for his excellent treatment of both characters in the Green Arrow ongoing that followed.

That's it for now. More links to outside writings to follow soon.

2 comments:

  1. I barely have enough time to write for my blog, how can you collaborate with other blogs? Anyway, just like you, I'm a huge fan of Young Avengers, and I'm glad to see Gillen and McKelvie are doing such an extraordinary work. If you read issue # 4 check the letters section (mine got published under my real name Arcadio BolaƱos).

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    1. It's definitely a time crunch, and as you can see based on how much I've put out this month on Comics Matter, writing for other sites sometimes pulls me away from here. Basically I do it by having several things in progress at once. While writing a piece for one site, I'll be reading the comics for another, and planning what to read for a third. It's a juggling act that I am still fine-tuning.

      I'll definitely go back and check out the letters page for YA #4. That book gets better and better all the time.

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