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Opinion

On the End of Krakoa X-Men Comics

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Note: This Column was originally written in October 2023 for the CBH newsletter. Minor edits have been made to reflect publication again in May 2024!

Close to 5 years ago, I awaited the birth of my second son, and was so caught up in House of X / Powers of X fever, that I spent downtime in the hospital reading as many Marvel Comics involving the Phalanx as I could think of. I did this because the Phalanx had recently appeared in Jonathan Hickman and R.B. Silva’s Powers of X, and I was writing out Krakin’ Krakoa episode #4, a complete history of the Phalanx. I had just started posting the series to Youtube and the CBH podcast a few weeks prior with a complete history of Professor X, and couldn’t have been having more fun. The obsessive excitement of deep-diving into every element of X-Men lore as a new instant classic spawned fans everywhere is oddly ingrained in my memories of my second-born’s first moments.

The boy is even named Douglock. [Read more…] about On the End of Krakoa X-Men Comics

Pax Americana and The Infinite Loop Of Imperiums

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It is often said that Watchmen is the most influential comic ever to be released. That comics wouldn’t be where they are without it, for good and for ill. But how did we get here, exactly? More to the point, just what influence did Watchmen provide to the larger world of comics? What, ultimately, is the legacy of Watchmen? Who watched the Watchmen?

Rebirth hadn’t yet happened.

Doomsday Clock was not a thing.

Rorschach and the Watchmen TV show didn’t exist.

Only Before Watchmen did.

DC had only made one serious attempt to milk Watchmen and cash-in on it before. And it had bombed, big time. Nobody liked it or cared for it. It was over. They knew it. Everybody did.

And so there was that brief period of time- the quiet calm, the gap between the first big attempt and the next big attempt-wherein it felt like we could perhaps move forward from Watchmen nostalgia. Wherein we could get past it all. And if we were to engage with it, it wouldn’t be literally, by sequelizing it or using characters from it, but rather through the challenges it offered via its formal daring and political critique.

And so let us journey backwards, into that frozen moment, that small gap of time, where the prospect of creators reckoning with Watchmen held a spark of real intrigue.

Welcome to The Multiversity: Pax Americana #1.

A one-shot story utilizing the original Charlton characters upon whom the Watchmen characters were based, constructed for an all new post-Watchmen, post-9/11 world and climate.

Brought to us by the creative team of Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Nathan Fairbairn, and Rob Leigh.
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Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part III

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What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there?

We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off….

[Read more…] about Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part III

Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part II

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What on earth was Morrison’s take on Judge Dredd? And why is it something that seems to almost never come up when people talk about their work? Why is it almost buried and forgotten? What did they even try to do there?

We’ll explore that here, picking up where we left off….

[Read more…] about Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part II

Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part I

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Grant Morrison has done pretty much everything. In a career spanning 4 decades, starting from their late teens into their now early-sixties, Morrison has trekked across most of the Western comics landscape. They’ve done a great deal of work, both big and small. Whether it be redefining major flagships like The X-Men or Batman in Big Two superheroes,  helping pioneer the Vertigo weirdness with The Invisibles and The Filth, or being part of the wave of new creator-owned books of Image and Boom in the early 2010s with Nameless and Klaus, they’ve been around and done it. They’ve done Original Graphic Novels, they’ve done mini-series, they’ve done maxi-series, they’ve done one-shots, and lengthy ongoing series, and they’ve even done zines. They were a Musician, with much music of their own, they’ve performed with Gerard Way in MCR Music Videos like Na Na Na and SING. They were even a comics critic and columnist back in the day. And now they work in Hollywood as a screenwriter, as they have done for over a decade now.

Much has been, and continues to be, said about their work.

And yet there is a gap.

There is an odd little gap.

A gap that exists not because nobody’s noticed it, but because it is seen and then brushed past.

Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd.

[Read more…] about Grant Morrison’s Judge Dredd, Part I