Initial Thoughts on Lanterns - With Probable Spoilers

I just finished the season finale of Lanterns, so I thought I'd put down some thoughts on the show, including where it fits with my knowledge of Green Lantern from the comics and where it fits with James Gunn's vision for the DCU. There will likely be some spoilers, but I'm not really talking about who killed Hal in the first episode or anything like that - still, proceed with caution.

The first thing to mention is, in fact, the death of Hal Jordan. When I saw the first trailers, featuring Kyle Chandler as Hal and Aaron Pierre as John Stewart, I was excited but also apprehensive about how they'd remove Hal to make room for John. The show looked good, and I liked that it focused on the Manhunters, and most importantly, I have a lot of time for Kyle Chandler, ever since I watched the first few seasons of Friday Night Lights. I also have a lot of time for John Stewart, since I loved GL: Mosaic, back in the 90s, and more recently, the Justice League/Justice League Unlimited cartoon.

My concern was that they'd kill of Hal to make room for John, because that's kind of how these stories go: the grizzled mentor dies so that the younger protagonist can have a cause for revenge spurring him to greatness. My concerns were amplified as the first episode went on, because they seemed to be establishing that there could only be one Green Lantern on Earth.

So I was pleasantly surprised to learn that, although they did indeed kill Hal off, it was done in an interesting way: after spending much of the first episode following the characters when they'd just met in 2016, it flashes forward to John finding Hal's body in 2026 - long after the meat of the story we're being promised, of John learning how to be a Lantern. It felt like an elegant way around it, by showing that Hal's death wasn't related to the 2016 action we'd just seen, and it provided a big, central mystery that would hang over the show for the next few episodes... and crucially, that the writers wouldn't need to come back to until the 2016 business was sorted out.

That's also important because the trailer for upcoming episodes that went with Episode 1 showed that John would meet Guy Gardner, who'd been established as GL in the Superman movie. Going by the show's own rules, they needed to figure out a way to bypass Guy, and to the writers' credit, they came up with a good answer to that (here's the SPOILER): they essentially gave John his own custom lantern, meaning he's not tied into the succession for Hal's ring the way Guy was, but has the same powers.

Some of the reviews and discussions I read about the show likened it to True Detective, which is probably fair, since it's a two-hander focused on John's relationship with Hal, and there's a lot more sex, violence and swearing than in the original comics. Though I wouldn't necessarily put it up there with True Detective's best seasons (the first and third) - where those were meticulously crafted 10-hour films, where everything was put in place with a craftsman's care, this had some bits that didn't entirely add to the show, specifically the classic GL villain Sinestro.

The show has him already established as Hal's greatest foe, a GL who dared to kill a Guardian and was imprisoned. He later shows up to nudge John in the right direction, but I found that a little underwhelming. In the comics, Sinestro eventually takes on a yellow power ring, which gives him an advantage over Hal, whose ring was then powerless against yellow - here Sinestro is built up as a big villain but doesn't necessarily live up to the billing.

My other concern is the "Surf Dracula" aspect, which I was talking about with a friend last week. For those not as online as me, go look up the original Surf Dracula meme, but for brevity, it refers to shows that unnecessarily drag out the main character's origin story. One example is Netflix's Daredevil, in which the code name and costume don't appear until the very end. There are others, but the point is that you're not getting the stuff you tuned in to see.

And so it is here: we get a lot of setup of John's upbringing, like how he learns art and design because his parents have been grooming him to be GL after Hal, but we don't get much of John showing off that design knowledge. For the last two episodes or so, he can't even use the damn ring because its charge is too low.

Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression. These aren't tiny concerns about the show, but they're also not fatal. The final episode, if not a tour de force that leaves you in a heap in front of the TV, is a satisfying ending to the mysteries posed in the first episode. We've learned about the chain of events that led Hal to his death on those high school bleachers, and the fraught relationship between him and John because of John's father being passed over for the ring. We've also, most crucially, seen John's understanding of his lifelong quest to be GL evolve over the course of the season.

I remain a little suspicious of these streaming shows that feed into the movie universe - there are a lot of good MCU shows, but I find the edges don't always join up perfectly with the films - and this also feels a little like those. But taken as its own story, without referring to how audiences will react to John the next time he shows up in a DCU movie, it's a satisfying one - the acting is great, the effects and the design are good, and it wraps most stuff up really well.

Now that John's on the loose with his own ring, I'm eager to see what he does with it - to reference the MCU again, please don't let there be another four-year gap between this and his next appearance, the way we got with Anthony Mackie's Sam Wilson taking over as Captain America. That may not have been fully intended, because of the writers' and actors' strikes of 2023, but Brave New World wouldn't have been a great movie even if they'd released it a year or two earlier.

Anyway, here's hoping that James Gunn gives John a good next appearance, preferably in the next Superman movie. We're owed a good GL film, and a better GL than Guy Gardner (though I can speak at length about him too, if you're ever foolish enough to ask me about it).

Goodbye to Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men

I know I'm horribly behind the curve, but I only learned the other week that Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men would be coming to an end. I remember seeing an episode appear in the feed that said they had a big announcement, and then I noticed that they were doing the Grant Morrison run of New X-Men but not Joe Casey's (and then Chuck Austen's) Uncanny, but I thought nothing of it - after all, I've only gotten up to 2021's episodes, so I had a long way to go.

So imagine my surprise when I saw them announce on Bluesky that their final episodes had just been recorded. I went back and checked, and yes indeed, they were wrapping up - they did their final episodes of continuity, and then their proper final episode, and that was done.

In their announcement and on their blog they talked about how the relationship of fans to the comics changed around then, as well as the whole concept of the X-Men, when Morrison finished up their run in 2004, and it's true - after reading Here Comes Tomorrow, I kind of thought Marvel could have finished the series right there.

On the other hand - and without begrudging Jay or Miles a well-deserved rest after 12 years of weekly episodes and interviews with some great creators - you could argue that the post-Morrison X-line is what really needs X-plaining. When I got to that point, I realized that there were a ton of books I knew nothing about, like New X-Men: Academy X and the New Mutants reboot, as well as whatever was happening in X-Force, the new X-Factor and solo books like Wolverine's. Hell, around that time is when they even introduced the character who'd later become the new Wolverine, Laura Kinney.

I also think that the Casey run deserved some extra scrutiny. I read the first couple of issues when it came out in 2001, but quickly lost interest, despite the art by Ian Churchill and then by Sean Phillips. When I got to that period in early 2025, reading alongside Morrison's New X-Men, I felt that the most interesting stuff was happening in Morrison's book, but there were definitely interesting ideas on Casey's side. And I always thought Austen had created the oddly reviled character, Stacey X, but no - it was Casey, and he made her more interesting than I'd expected her to be.

The other run I'd have loved to see Jay and Miles X-Plain was Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men... though possibly they weren't looking forward to giving Whedon more airtime (or Warren Ellis, who took over the book next). Still, Astonishing benefited from not being strictly in continuity, at least as far as crossovers, and so the creative teams on that book could do more interesting things than a lot of the rest of the X-books.

That said, you can look at Jay and Miles as a Chris Claremont-centric podcast, and in that light, finishing with New X-Men feels like the right moment. There was a lot of drift in the 90s, after Claremont left Uncanny X-Men, and so much of that decade was lost in trying to ape his style of storytelling. It took Morrison's singular voice to send the X-Men into a new direction, which held until about 2019 when Jonathan Hickman changed the status quo a second time. Post-Morrison, the book is governed less by the way Claremont told stories and more by how the wider comics industry had evolved, thanks to the more mature storytelling of Vertigo and Wildstorm, among others.

For my part, Jay and Miles became a go-to podcast, particularly for when I do cardio at the gym, very early in 2024, after I'd rediscovered the books and started Uncanny from the very first issue. I picked up X-Men: First Class (the comic) on their recommendation, and Season One as well, and I gained an appreciation for 1980s New Mutants because of their coverage - I already had a lot of early X-Factor, but grew to appreciate it more thanks to Jay and Miles. I even picked up Walter Simonson's Thor because of Miles, and it became one of the highlights of my comics-reading of 2026.

I'd also say that Jay and Miles affected my own writing a lot. When I embarked on my X-Men-inspired romantasy novel, their discussions of the Mutant Metaphor informed large parts of how I portrayed my characters and the world they live in - my hope is that, whenever it's finished (as in, ready to query; I finished the first draft back in May), the final product is something they'd approve of.

So I'm writing this blog to pour one out for my favorite podcast. I'm lucky that I'm far enough behind that I'll still be listening to them for a while to come, and I'm lucky that I got to tell them on Bluesky how much their show meant to me. I'm also in the market for more X-Men and comics-related podcasts, so I hope to find something as entertaining and wide-ranging in its interests.

And maybe I'll get to say hello to them in person one day, at a con or something. Here's hoping - but in the meantime, I hope when I get to that final episode they sign it off as Claremont always did, with "Fin".

RIP Gerry Conway

Just saw the news yesterday that veteran comics pro Gerry Conway had passed away at the age of 73. That feels a bit untimely, given how long he's been in the comics biz, and the fact that a lot of other celebrity deaths these days come later in life.

I know Conway's work indirectly as the creator of Marvel's Punisher - a character that he initially seems to have intended as an antagonist, and about whom he was unhappy that the right wing had coopted the skull motif. I also knew he was the writer behind the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man, a story that I haven't read in its original form but which is so iconic that it formed the basis of several Spider-Man movies.

One place where I did encounter his work directly was his run on the Justice League of America in the 70s and 80s - I have a bunch of issues he wrote of the team in its original-ish incarnation, as well as the Detroit  era team that gave the world characters such as Gypsy, Vibe and Vixen, all of whom had some role on the CW's Arrowverse shows.

I'm also currently reading Conway's work on Daredevil, from the early 70s. He was the third main writer on that book, after Stan Lee and Roy Thomas, and if Conway's run isn't as heralded as the later run by Frank Miller, it's still fascinating, given that he made Daredevil and Black Widow a couple for a while, even going so far as to give her top billing alongside Daredevil the original series.

Another fun fact is that Conway wrote a bunch of TV scripts, including for Law & Order. For me, the TV credit I'm most excited about is the Batman: The Animated Series episode Appointment in Crime Alley, which is one of the best episodes of that show.

More recently, I followed Conway on Twitter (before I left that platform), and loved seeing his takes on politics, which were always pretty spot-on.

As I mentioned, Conway worked for Marvel and then DC way back in the 70s, making him just a generation or two removed from the classic Silver Age cohort of creators. That longevity meant, as Kurt Busiek noted on Bluesky yesterday, that Conway ended up writing almost every major character or team from the Big 2, as well as for a great many publishers over the decades. He may not have been one of the biggest names in the business, but that impressive bibliography means he knew what he was doing.

It's just a shame he's not acknowledged in the credits of the new Daredevil show! I hope for the last episode of Season 2 they'll acknowledge him - it'd be a nice gesture.

RIP Sam Kieth

It feels like there have been quite a few notable deaths recently (former FBI chief Robert Mueller, Nicholas Brendon of Buffy), but the one that struck me the most was comics artist Sam Kieth, whose death I saw announced by a fellow penciller, Kelley Jones.

I didn't know Kieth's work too well beyond a few issues of various books and pinups that popped up on posters or the internet. But he had such a notable style, evinced partly in his issues of the first Sandman storyline, Preludes and Nocturnes, but even more in his creator-owned Image series, the Maxx. I had that first issue of the Maxx, or the Maxx's appearance in the sole published issue of Darker Image, but it disappeared in one of the many clear-outs I had over the years, but I remember how the line art in it was unlike basically anything else in mainstream (ish) comics.

As for the Sandman issues, I have them on hand and was able to look through those issues Kieth drew, and he was able to change tone from issue to issue and page to page, going from brooding horror and the landscapes of Hell to traditional superhero work and even down to a Jack Kirby homage. Mike Dringenberg remains the artist I associate most with early Sandman, but Kieth did so much to bring the look of the book to life, which set the bar for subsequent artists.

To put it another way, if my mental image of Dream is drawn by Dringenberg, my mental image of Cain and Abel (and Goldie) is by Kieth.

It's sad to see such a talent go so young (he was 63), but it's even sadder that there's not that much of his body of work, and I don't know where to find most of it. Still, having been on the Sandman's greatest storyline (along with the Season of Mists) is a hell of a legacy to leave.

Finally Getting to Grips With Avengers Vs X-Men

Spent the last week or so reading the 2012 crossover event that pitted Marvel's two biggest teams against each other, and that heralded a big change in the status quo for the X-Men in particular (I'm assuming, though I haven't read the Avengers books from around that period). I've read that it wasn't universally loved as a story, and I kind of have to agree, since it feels like a number of characters have to act weird for it to work.

Before I get to that, I wanted to consider that statement, that the Avengers and the X-Men are Marvel's two biggest teams. I'm old enough to remember when the X-Men really were Marvel's biggest property, and when nobody really cared about the X-Men, so that feels weird to say. But by then, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had started in earnest, and the crossover came amid the first Avengers movie, which was a big success and seemed to live up to expectations, at least in terms of forming a template for later MCU phases. To put it another way, the Avengers were on the upswing, finally living up to their billing as a top team and pulling in decent sales (I presume).

The X-Men could be said to have been on the opposite trajectory: their most influential writer, Chris Claremont, was long gone from the books (and crucially, from setting the tone editorially) by 2012, despite a couple of returns in the previous decade or so. The two most innovative runs, Grant Morrison's New X-Men and Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, were over by then too, leaving the mutants in the hands of writers who weren't worse, necessarily, but whose runs don't seem to have captured the imagination of fans as much. I didn't like Peter Milligan's run, for example, while Mike Carey's was good but maybe not as spectacular as I'd have liked. Same with Matt Fraction and Kieron Gillen's respective runs, though both have a lot to recommend them (apart from when the art was done by Greg Land).

The premise of the story felt like it came out of nowhere, a bit: without much foreshadowing, the Phoenix Force is headed toward Earth, and its presumed new host, Hope Summers, the mutant messiah. The Avengers want to stop the Phoenix, given that it eats planets, while the X-Men, against their history, see it as a force of rebirth for the mutant population, which had been cut down to 198 after the House of M crossover. I thought Cyclops's position was particularly strange, since the two previous Phoenix encounters, the early 80s Phoenix Saga and 2004's Planet X storyline, both ended in the death of his girlfriend-then-wife, Jean Grey (she got better in 1986, died in 2004, and got better again in 2018 or so).

On the other hand, given that the Avengers line had expanded to a bunch of new books and teams, it was nice to see how the rest of the Marvel universe reacted to these events. A storyline that I really found intriguing was the Phoenix's ties to Iron Fist's history, since a previous Iron Fist had fought the Phoenix off with the help of Leonardo da Vinci (but of course!). I also quite liked the storyline in Avengers Academy, the book focused on younger heroes, like Wolverine's clone/daughter X-23, in which the younger mutants from the X-Books were held at the Avengers Academy and the two groups debated their own agency. That may have been the most interesting philosophical debate in the entire crossover, given that it hinged on X-23's own experience of being controlled and manipulated by adults.

Not that it was always easy to follow the storyline across the various books. Marvel Unlimited is usually good at gathering these crossovers into reading lists and funneling you through the story, issue by issue, but this crossover was an exception. The reading list put the VS miniseries first, which was focused on individual fights without regard to the overall plot, then the main AVX miniseries came next, and after that the tie-ins that ran in individual series. That would have meant reading the main storyline in the AVX miniseries, then going back to the beginning with the first of the tie-ins, which made it a little more confusing than it should have been. At any rate, there was a lot of going back and forth in time, so it wasn't always clear where a given issue fit in the narrative.

The other thing that came to mind as I read through the crossover was how interesting it would be for one or more MCU phases to focus on this storyline, or something similar. The X-Men are meant to be joining the MCU in the next couple of movies, Doomsday and Secret Wars, which means there could be a big fight between them eventually. I found myself wondering as I read how Marvel might go about it, but it's probably too convoluted and pie-in-the-sky, and would probably be unfair to the X-characters, since they'd have a lot less backstory to make you root for them.

On another note, an MCU version of AVX would probably turn the Scarlet Witch into the villain again, since the whole thing came from her whispering "No more mutants" and depowering them all, which led to this situation. I feel like she's been through enough.

Still, it's a fascinating artifact from the previous decade, when Marvel was on its way to becoming the entertainment juggernaut that we now know it as, and I feel like it has the epic sweep that could be fun as the big crossover movie that caps a few years of individual movies. Though I worry it would turn into a character assassination of Cyclops, featuring him taking on the Phoenix Force and almost destroying the world. He's a favorite character, so I don't like to see him done dirty this way.

In any case, I'm excited to see how the next phase of X-Men comics plays out - I've already read a few of those books, but not in an organized way, so putting them all into context will be like reading them anew. And I'm interested in eventually getting back to AVX via the Avengers books, which should provide a different perspective.

As I said, I don't think it was always fully successful, and it made the X-Men overall look bad, but I have to give Marvel points for ambition. It was developed by all the big Marvel writers of the time, including Brian Michael Bendis and Jonathan Hickman, who went on to be so influential in later X-books, so it's also neat to see their first work on these characters.

Thoughts on Wonder Man

I just finished Wonder Man on Disney Plus, and I think it was pretty great. I wasn't expecting to be so captivated by it - I wasn't even really planning on watching it right now, but decided to check it out earlier this week, just to see how it was. And, to be honest, to give it kind of a pity-watch - I expected the bad-faith review-bombers to get to work on it, since it changes the lead from a white guy in the comics to a Black guy.

But I took to it immediately, in part because the episodes were short - only about half an hour each, growing to about 35 minutes toward the end. But also in part because of the two leads: Yahya Abdul-Mateen II is great as Simon Williams/Wonder Man, and Ben Kingsley reprises his role as Trevor Slattery/the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 and Shang-Chi. Abdul-Mateen commands the attention in the lead role, especially when Acting. Meanwhile, Kingsley's portrayal of Trevor grows better and more layered every time we see him, with this show casting him first as Simon's friend and then (early on) revealing that he's got his own agenda.

In between we get a lot of enjoyable business about what it's like to be a jobbing actor in Hollywood, contrasting Simon being at the beginning of his career and Trevor being, if not at the end, certainly defined by his most notorious role as the Mandarin. As a creative person myself, it was particularly enjoyable to watch them navigate that life, even toward the end, where they find themselves in a different headspace than at the start.

As far as the changes to the character of Wonder Man himself, I've already referred to the change of ethnicity - though it's interesting that they gave Simon a Haitian background. The other big change is that, instead of getting his powers through some energy nonsense, as in the comics, their origin is just... unexplained. There's some suggestion that he's always had them, or that they emerged during puberty, which would imply that he's a mutant, which Marvel's been seeding through the movies and shows for a while (Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Ms Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine and the Marvels all refer to mutants in some capacity).

But this show isn't about superheroes or their origins. It's about getting out of your own way to reach your goals, and about how you lift yourself up by connecting with others, rather than focusing constantly on yourself. This eventually becomes... literal? You'll know what I mean if you've watched the last scene.

The important thing is that Wonder Man doesn't do the usual superhero pyrotechnics (even if most of the best MCU shows, like WandaVision and Loki, also didn't), preferring instead to tell a character-based story. I've seen some reviews suggesting it might even be Marvel's best show? I don't know if I'd go that far, as WandaVision (and yes, Loki, just to mention both again) were probably richer overall, but as I said, I watched it just to see what it was like, and ended up bingeing it in half a week.

I don't know if we'll get to see Simon (or Trevor) again, but I hope so. He's not a huge character (one of the reasons why I was a little reluctant to start the show), but he's always been associated with the Avengers in some way, so it might be fun to see him pop up in Doomsday or Secret Wars. Or, while we're thinking pie-in-the-sky, an Avengers West Coast movie?

RIP Sal Buscema

Just read the news that comics artist Sal Buscema passed away last week at the age of 89. I might not have remarked on it, if I hadn't been revisiting some of his work in the last few weeks - I just wrapped up a long-awaited read-through of Walter Simonson's run on Thor from the 80s, the last half of which Buscema drew. Reading it, I was reminded of Buscema's classic style, which I recall from reading books like Spectacular Spider-Man back in the 90s.

As some of the posts I saw noted, Buscema was one of the last remaining creators who were present in the early years of what we now know as Marvel comics. In addition to his long run on Spectacular Spider-Man, he also drew the Incredible Hulk for ten years, and I'm sure I've come across his work elsewhere. He was also the younger brother of John Buscema, who's associated with formative runs of so many Marvel characters - but ironically, I feel like I've encountered more of Sal's work over the years.

The timing is sadly ironic, because his work on Thor reminded me what a good artist he was, and I found myself considering reading Spectacular Spider-Man just to see his run on the book - I'd even looked him up on Wikipedia a week or two ago to find out what else he'd done. I'll definitely read Spectacular Spidey now - and looking again at his body of work, it looks like I have extensive runs on Daredevil and the Avengers, among others, to look forward to.

My condolences to his family and coworkers, and all the fans - it's sad to see one of the old pros go.

What I Read and Watched and Listened to in 2025

With the winding down of another year comes the chance to think about the stuff I've enjoyed (more or less) throughout the year. I found myself reading more books this year, but watching fewer movies, and I think my TV watching was also slightly down on previous years, for a number of reasons.

In terms of comics, I've mentioned a few of the books I've been reading this year, but the main thread remains the Uncanny X-Men. If I spent 2024 reading one issue of that series each day, from 1963 onwards, this year the question was reading through it until I got to the end of its original run, which I did the other day. That makes Uncanny volume 1 the first comics series I've read from its beginning in the 1960s to its end in the 2010s. Marvel subsequently relaunched it with new numbering, so I'll be checking those out in the year to come, but it's definitely the end of an era - when I was a kid I liked seeing those ever-increasing numbers and the increasingly ludicrous milestone issues (#500! #750! etc).

Quality-wise, it was a weird year for reading X-Men comics, quite apart from what's happening in the books at the moment. As I finished 2024, I reached the reboot that saw Grant Morrison take over New X-Men, something I'd been looking forward to since signing up for Marvel Unlimited. I liked Morrison's New X-Men, and I still think it's the second-most important point in the X-Men's history, but I suppose it didn't hit the same as in 2004, when I first read Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow.

I had a similar feeling when I went back and read the original Age of Apocalypse event. I remembered a lot of it, but I'd just been reading the core X-Men books, and hadn't read much of the X-Factor or Excalibur or X-Force tie-ins - which may have been the wise choice back in 1995. I wasn't super impressed with the sequel miniseries from 2006, either, though Chris Bachalo's art on it was pretty good.

The other notable comic for me this year was an Epic Collection of the original run of Master of Kung Fu, the title featuring the original conception of Shang-Chi from back when Marvel owned the rights to Fu Manchu. It's not on Marvel Unlimited, and the Epic Collections are out of print, so I was super excited when I found it at one of my local comics shops. It's pretty dated, both in terms of Chinese representation and in terms of storytelling and art, but reading it, I can see why Douglas Wolk highlighted it in All of the Marvels. The book I have is the second collection, and I'd love to find the first and third, which apparently both exist - I don't know if I'm ready to go looking for individual back issues.

In terms of books, I stuck with my usual mix of SFF and history, for the most part. I read the second of Genevieve Cogman's Scarlet Revolution novels, which I quite enjoyed and I'm looking forward to reading the third, Damned, in the coming year. The first in her new trilogy was announced in January as coming out in October of 2026, so I'll be eager to snap that one up as soon as I can.

And I've spoken about romantasy, having started A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas and Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I'm really interested in the storytelling potential of this genre, which is why I figured I needed to do some research.

I also spent a few enjoyable months reading John Julius Norwich's histories of Byzantium and Venice. I liked the one on Byzantium better, it must be said, because it was a good summary of that empire's long history, and because I feel like there's more drama to it than to the Most Serene Republic, though I liked getting an understanding of how Venice came to be such an important power in the Mediterranean.

But by far my favorite history book that I read this year was Unruly, by David Mitchell. The prose was entertaining, because he's a very funny man already, but I also appreciated that Mitchell really knew his stuff, providing insights into how the English understanding of the monarchy changed over the years. I'd love to see a similar book on the kings of France or the US presidents, written in the same tone, but I appreciate that Unruly will likely have to remain a one-off.

Outside of those genres, the Slow Horses series occupied a lot of my reading time. At some point this year I bought books 5-8, and ended up reading them all in quick succession, with book 9 pinch-hitting admirably after its release in September. Mick Herron has become a surer hand with his plotting, and even if certain tics seem to have insinuated themselves in his writing, they're still super entertaining in their glorious put-downs, skewerings of British politics, and generally twisty-turniness. I was happy to also get some background on certain Slow Horses secondary characters in the Secret Hours, which is set in the same universe.

Speaking of, I got Apple TV late this year so that I could watch the latest season of Slow Horses, and stuck around to watch Down Cemetery Road. The former was a solid entry, modified from the book in ways that make sense, and I'm looking forward to whatever else they do on the show. With regard to the latter, it was similarly twisty and paranoid, and entertaining enough that my dad also got really into it (he doesn't watch much of the same TV I watch). I'm curious how it differs from the book, but hopefully we get another couple of seasons to fully adapt the rest of the series.

Apple TV was on a bit of a hot streak this year, since I got into Severance with the approach of season 2. I tend to think Season 1 was better, but that final image of Season 2 was amazing - hopefully it doesn't take too long to come back. I liked Murderbot even more than Severance, having read a couple of the early novellas in the series (and it's another one my dad loved). I'm still about halfway through Pluribus, but I'm quite taken with it, even more than with Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul (though my dad's less into it, so make of that what you will). I hope to write something clever about Pluribus when I finish it.

I didn't only watch Apple TV, though. Alien: Earth was well-made, but I don't think I loved it as much as many others did. It really came alive for me in the 5th episode, which flashed back to all the monsters running loose on the ship. Boy Kavalier and the other stuff on Earth was a little less of a draw, in the end. I got caught up with The Boys and Gen V, both strong entries though I found the parallels to current real-world politics wearing. I'm looking forward to the new season of the Boys, though, as well as Fallout.

I've already called Andor the best Star War in years, to the point that it overshadows Rogue One. This may seem like it's in contradiction of my complaint about the Boys, but at heart, Andor's less nihilistic and it's not rubbing your face in the comparison. Same with Daredevil: Born Again, which revisits and expands on the original Netflix show so well, while giving us a similar parallel in Wilson Fisk's ascent to NYC mayor. That said, I prefer the one we got in real life. As for Ironheart... I wanted to like it, but it came to a screeching halt for me when they had Riri get mixed up with magic, though I'll admit that the fabulous crew of bank robbers also felt like they belonged in a different show - preferably one that would give them more of a spotlight and not come off as box-ticking.

Another disappointment was Season 3 of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. In contrast to last season, it didn't feel like it pushed as many boundaries or played with the structure, preferring instead to work in as many references to older Trek in place of storytelling (see "Wedding Bell Blues", where Rhys Darby plays Trelane). Where the show did play with the formula, the results could be... uneven. The "documentary" episode "What is Starfleet?" is an example, and ranks - for me - as the worst hour of Trek I've ever seen. I think part of the reason I was so disappointed was that I'd spent the year studying the show deeply while writing my spec script, so my expectations may have been too high. There's only two seasons left, and they've wrapped on the fifth, so I guess I won't be seeing my little script onscreen, but at least I hope they right the ship in the home stretch.

The main show that characterized my year though was Line of Duty - incidentally, another show that held my dad's attention. Keelie Hawes as Lindsay Denton in Season 2 was the best adversary, in my opinion, but every season's been a banger, and I'm glad that it's coming back for a seventh go. In the same vein, I've gotten into Blue Lights, which is sort of like the Wire but set in Belfast. I took out a subscription to Brit Box expressly for those two shows, just to give you an idea.

As mentioned, this wasn't a big movie-going year. I think I went to the cinema three times, all for superhero flicks? Whether at home or in the theater, old or new, my standout was Superman, imperfections and all. It certainly surpassed both Captain America: Brave New World and Fantastic Four: First Steps, which may have been better than Eternals or the Marvels, but still felt drifty to me. I'm getting excited about the next Avengers movie, though.

Turning to music, I listened to a shitload of it, but very little new stuff, though I appreciated some of the singles by Sabrina Carpenter and Addison Rae - wonder what that's about, eh? Something I got obsessed with late on has been Vince Guaraldi's Peanuts soundtracks - his Linus and Lucy seems to be on permanent repeat in my head.

My big British rock listen-through reached the Britpop era, which was great - I got to revisit Blur, Pulp, Oasis, Suede, plus other lesser-known faves like Ash and Supergrass. I was also weirdly taken with Cast and Sleeper - the fact that I kept listening to Cast's first few singles was not something I'd ever have predicted, but here we are. I then spent October listening to Apple Music's goth playlist, so I got acquainted with the Sisters of Mercy, and I quite enjoyed some of their stuff too.

Looking back right now, it feels like there wasn't much going on this year, but I've written a lot more than I expected to, so I'm clearly consuming more than enough media. TV is clearly my big thing, given how many strong opinions I have, but this year I've also learned about how it's produced, so I think that's given me extra appreciation for the good stuff.

Anyway, here's to an equally fecund and watchable 2026! As long as there's more than one studio left, and the output isn't all AI slop paying homage to David Ellison at Skydance, it should be an interesting year. We'll see.

The Weird Longevity of Certain Comics Characters

Most of what I'm reading these days on Marvel Unlimited is X-Men related, primarily the original Uncanny series but also X-Men: Legacy, Astonishing X-Men and various other titles. However, I've also been following a couple of other books, the main ones currently being Walt Simonson's run on Thor and the original Daredevil comic from the 1960s.

Daredevil's a character I've always loved, having read snippets here and there of Frank Miller's take in the early 80s, plus a bit of Ann Nocenti's run after that, and then DG Chichester's 90s books. I was conversant enough with the character's history to know what was going on in Kevin Smith's Marvel Knights run on Daredevil, in the late 90s/early 2000s, but apart from a few issues translated in Italian, I didn't have much sense of what Daredevil was like in the 60s, when Stan Lee was writing him.

So at the start of the year I started reading Daredevil from the first issue, which was written by Lee and drawn by Bill Everett. I was interested to learn that Lee continued writing Daredevil until issue #50, in 1969, especially given that this early incarnation of the character isn't great. The book at this stage has certain Stan Lee hallmarks, such as Daredevil bemoaning the fact that he can't be with the woman he loves, Karen Page (which echoes the romantic drama in the X-Men between Cyclops and Marvel Girl). But it also feels underbaked, like Lee and his co-creators had this idea for a character concept but didn't really know what to do with it.

Most of the villains are pretty lame. The most notable one is Killgrave, the Purple Man, who would appear to such chilling effect in Brian Michael Bendis's Alias and in the Jessica Jones Netflix show. On the other hand, the villains DD tangles with the most are Stilt-Man and Gladiator, the latter of whom is a costume-designer with a chip on his shoulder. Both appear as minor characters in Daredevil's own Netflix show, but those are more easter eggs than loving tributes to fondly remembered characters.

The interesting thing is that, for all its lack of direction, crap villains and weird story directions (like when Matt Murdock pretended to be his own twin brother Mike), Daredevil went on, unbroken, until the late 90s. I've still only read to issue #51, when Roy Thomas took over, but I've glanced ahead and the 70s seem like a lost decade for Daredevil, until Frank Miller came along and turned him into something akin to Batman.

Daredevil wasn't the only character whose adventures continued despite nobody really caring. The Hulk is the most notable, because basically every issue until the 80s was the same: the Hulk would arrive somewhere, cause trouble, wake up as Bruce Banner and then feel bad, before moving on again. The Fantastic Four lost their creative momentum after Jack Kirby and then Lee left the book, and they never quite recovered it.

I find this fascinating because the X-Men were the only book that really seems to have been unloved among these early Marvel stories. Lee spent the exact same amount of time writing the X-Men as he did the Avengers (1963-1966), but in that period he wrote only 19, mostly bimonthly, issues of X-Men, whereas he wrote 34 issues of the Avengers. Lee then wrote Captain America until 1971, Thor until 1972, Spider-Man until 1973, the Hulk until 1968, and the Fantastic Four until 1972. The Hulk's original book was canceled after just six issues, but then the character came back in Tales to Astonish, which eventually was retitled as the Incredible Hulk. Compare that with the original X-Men book, which was published continuously until 2011 but which ran nothing but reprints between 1970 and 1975.

I'm more of an X-Men fan than a Marvel fan, so I find this all oddly suspect, but it does point to an interesting quirk of the comics industry in those years. Even books that weren't selling particularly well and that nobody seemed to care about were kept alive through the 60s, 70s and into the 80s, when they all seemed to undergo creative renaissances. Compare that with now, or indeed with the industry in the 90s, when a book that didn't sell could get cancelled without mercy after less than a year - the latest versions of X-Force and X-Factor, launched in 2024 after the end of the Krakoan Age of the X-Men, lasted just 10 issues each, for example.

Not that Marvel was so averse to canceling books in the 60s. Doctor Strange didn't get his own full book for a long time, and his was cancelled in the early 70s, before he came back to sharing books with other characters. But again, it's fascinating that Marvel didn't cancel more of their underperforming books in that period - although it's possible that, boring as Daredevil, Iron Man or the Hulk were in those years, they were still outselling most of the books DC and other publishers were putting out.

On the other hand, DC was definitely canceling books more frequently in the 60s and 70s - I don't have any concrete numbers in front of me, but a lot of features like Animal Man, the Doom Patrol and, er Swing with Scooter, lasted only a few years. Would-be big names like the Atom or Hawkman weren't able to hold down their own books until the 80s or so (if then), but would get the occasional reboot.

But back to Daredevil. As I mentioned, I've now read through the entirety of Stan Lee's run on that book, apart from a backup story he wrote in 2001, so now I get to see what Roy Thomas made of the character, as well as whoever followed him. I'll get to see the book retitled to Daredevil and Black Widow, when the two characters were in a relationship, and then, hopefully, I'll get to connect the dots to Frank Miller's run.

In his book All of the Marvels, Douglas Wolk says not to read each of these series in strict chronological order, but in the case of these books, be they the X-Men, Daredevil or Spider-Man, I find it interesting to see how they changed over the years. X-Men had some distinct flavors based on who was writing or drawing it, and I look forward to seeing the different directions that subsequent writers took Daredevil down. At the very least, they'll have to introduce better villains than Stilt-Man, but I don't really have high hopes.

Marvel's Dark Reign Was the Perfect Trump-Era Preview

When I read Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels last year, I noted how Wolk drew a comparison between the Dark Reign storyline, in which Spider-Man's arch nemesis Norman Osborn becomes the de facto ruler of the US, and the first Trump administration. This past week I got to see for myself what Wolk was talking about, when I read the X-Men issues that took place during Dark Reign.

Wolk makes the point that Dark Reign is just an imagining of how to apply the authoritarian playbook, which I think accounts for the similarities. But the similarities really are striking: Osborn responds to a flashpoint of political violence in San Francisco by sending in his fake Avengers (similar to the Thunderbolts, a group of villains disguised as heroes). He then uses that as an excuse to suspend civil rights and puts the city on lockdown, portraying SF as an ungovernable hellhole that only he can solve.

Obviously in real life this stuff has happened elsewhere, mostly Portland and Washington DC. And as far as I can tell, none of the things the Trump administration is responding to involved anti-mutant protests or the introduction of bio-Sentinel robots designed to trigger when in the presence of mutants.

But as I say, the similarities are striking, especially when they're rendered against the backdrop of Union Square and other parts of SF that I know. Reading these issues I didn't get a sense that this was back in 2009, long before most people were worried about the far-right or about fascist takeovers.

It's also a good encapsulation of how Wolk sees the various modes of resistance: fighting back doesn't work, especially when it's a small group, like when Hellion gathers a bunch of mutants together and they get their asses kicked by Emma Frost's Dark X-Men; hunkering down also doesn't work, as when Cyclops first locks down the X-Men's base in the Marin Headlands and then raises Asteroid M to serve as a separate mutant state; nor does Emma Frost's attempt to moderate the chaos from the inside do much, as she finds herself arresting Hellion's group and delivering them to Osborn's base to be tortured.

It doesn't come up in the X-Men parts, but Wolk notes that what brings down Osborn at the end of Dark Reign (apart from getting beaten up by Iron Man, Thor and Captain America) is journalism. That is to say, documenting his administration's misdeeds, who they hurt, and where they're getting their funding from, among other questions, is what lays bare the truth of Osborn's plan. The implication is clear: exposing everything they're trying to hide is the main thing that'll help us.

Too bad Obama can't step in at the end, like in Dark Reign, and put a stop to it in one fell swoop.

Marvel's Ultimates is Weird

The latest comic in my reread of my whole collection is the collected first storyline of the Ultimates, the Ultimate Marvel version of the Avengers, from 2002. I'm three issues in, but it's a weird book, in both good ways but perhaps more bad ways. It's one of very few Ultimate Marvel books I still have from back then, and I'm not sure I'll keep it after this read.

To start with, it's written by Mark Millar, whose work I don't particularly enjoy, apart from Superman: Red Son and a couple of issues of the Authority. It's drawn by Bryan Hitch, whose work I do enjoy, and who brings the same widescreen sensibility to the Ultimates that he evinced in his run on the Authority with Warren Ellis, and in his run on JLA with Mark Waid. Overall, the book looks gorgeous, with some beautiful splash pages and some good action - the first issue, where we see Captain America's last mission in WWII, is colored a bit oddly, so that it all looks muddy, but the rest looks amazing.

The team consists of Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, the Wasp and Giant Man, plus the Hulk in a support role (as Bruce Banner) and as an antagonist (when he inevitably hulks out). That provides one of several cognitive dissonances, because I'm reading this with the memory of the first MCU Avengers movie. There are definite overlaps between these versions of the characters and the movie versions, but they're not totally the same, which accounts for the whiplash. This book also has the version of Nick Fury that looks like Samuel L Jackson, which was brought to life in the actual movies.

Part of why I don't like Millar's writing is that everything is extreme and amped up. Iron Man is pretty recognizable from the movies (I'm not sure if he's meant to look like Robert Downey Jr, but there's at least one reference to the actor), in terms of his womanizing and partying. Giant Man is on prozac, because I guess Millar thought that would be modern or something? Thor is positioned as an environmental activist who's suspicious of Fury's motives, which I suppose allows Millar to claim he's putting his own politics into the book.

The portrayal I find least easy to enjoy is this book's version of Captain America. He's described as having "John Glenn's buzz-cut cool and John McCain's politics", which even back in 2002 was a red flag for me. There's a lot of comments where Cap calls people sissies or girls or whatever, and he's generally an asshole (cf that panel where they finally turn Hulk back into Banner and Cap kicks him in the face).

Obviously a guy from the 1940s who suddenly wakes up in 2002 (or 2012) wouldn't be a weekly guest on MSNBC or Air America, but this version has none of the vulnerability that Chris Evans brought to the character in the movies. Instead of the skinny nerd who became Cap because he hated bullies, this version feels like a bully himself.

I blame all this on Millar because he's that kind of self-proclaimed left-of-center person who uses that as a smokescreen to write a lot of gross stuff. Of course there's a difference between the art and the artist, but Millar always seems a little too pleased with himself when he's transgressing.

And more to the point, all this stuff dates the book horribly. In the third issue, SHIELD unveils the Ultimates and Cap in his new uniform, and there's an appearance from George W Bush. Hitch's drawings of Bush are weirdly stiff, because they're taken from photos, but even with all of Trump's outrages, just seeing Bush is off-putting. The regular Marvel Universe generally did a better job of not putting actual politicians into the books (the less said about that time Spider-Man hung out with Barack Obama, the better), and I wish Millar had done the same.

Anyway, it's a flawed book, but it's fascinating as a time capsule of what Marvel thought was cool in 2002, as well as an embryonic form of the Avengers we'd later see in the movies. It's also an attempt to make the Avengers cool, something that they definitely weren't in the regular Marvel Universe up until then. In fact, the best description of the 90s version of the team that I've heard is as a repository for characters whose books have been cancelled - that came from Max Carleton speaking on Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men, and it feels so right.

I lost touch with the Ultimate Universe not long after this, and I no longer have the Ultimate Spider-Man and Ultimate X-Men issues I bought when they came out. I'm given to understand that it was a weird time (apparently Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch were in an incestuous relationship, which was treated as "modern" by the characters at the time, rather than deeply fucked up. Blame Jeph Loeb, who was writing it by then), but on the positive side it gave us the Miles Morales version of Spidey, so I can't complain too much.

But one of the pleasures of reading old comics is seeing how they fit into their cultural milieu, and the first arc of the Ultimates definitely transports me back to the early days of the War on Terror. Your mileage may vary as to whether you want to be transported back to then.

A Mid-Term Report on X-Men Evolution

My usual rule is not to write about a show that I'm watching until I've finished it, but there are extenuating circumstances this time around. I'm only halfway through X-Men: Evolution, the second animated show about Marvel's mutant flagship, but given that I'm probably going to let my Disney Plus subscription lapse next week, I figured I'd write down my thoughts so far.

I think I've gone on record as not having been the biggest fan of the original animated series from 1992 (hereafter to be called X92). Whereas Batman: The Animated Series had a bold new design for the characters and a visual aesthetic borrowed from the Tim Burton movies, X92's visual language was a bit more nondescript - the character designs were the then-current looks that Jim Lee came up with for his and Chris Claremont's 1991 relaunch, but the animation style was pretty generic 90s Saturday morning. At least for the first four seasons: season 5 featured a notable decline in animation quality, as 10 new episodes were ordered and animated by a cut-rate animation house.

X-Men Evolution was meant to be a complete reimagining: instead of a team of adults, the core team (Cyclops, Jean Grey, Nightcrawler, Shadowcat, Rogue and new character Spyke) would be kids learning how to use their powers and navigate teenage life. Storm and Wolverine were teachers at the Xavier Institute, which was also a nice touch, and they'd be joined by Beast later in the second season. A new set of younger characters, mostly based on the New Mutants, would also join in Season 2.

The bad guys, or antagonists, were a group of mutant misfits drawn from the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants (just the Brotherhood here), led first by Mystique and then by Magneto. But they weren't "evil mutants", because characters would switch between the X-Men and the Brotherhood, and there were themes like Shadowcat's kinda relationship with Avalanche that meant the relationship wasn't just trying to kill one another.

The big thing I like from this show, at least so far, is how it treats Cyclops and Jean. Cyclops is the victim of character assassination in the movies and X92 - if someone hates him, it's a good bet that they first encountered him in the original animated series. Here he gets more personality, kind of a dork, kind of a regular kid who likes cars and is in love with his best friend, but he's not the authority figure and killjoy from X92. Jean, meanwhile, is the popular girl who's also cool, but who's still prone to making mistakes and getting jealous (like when her friend Taryn moves in on Cyclops - meow). This version of Jean is quite a bit better than the X92 version who just yells "Scott!" and faints whenever she uses her powers.

I can't deny it: the development of their feelings for one another is my favorite plot thread in Season 2 of Evolution, and I can't wait to see how it plays out in the third and fourth seasons.

The other thing I like is the theme of the characters choosing whether to be X-Men or Brotherhood members. Avalanche tries to join the X-Men once, Boom-Boom joins the Brotherhood (and then leaves), and the two teams have to work together a couple of times. That question of how to be, and how to use their powers, is central to the X-theme in a way that X92 never really managed, as far as I could tell.

Now, I don't want to over-romanticize this show. It's clearly a kids show from the early 2000s, with sometimes dodgy animation, character designs and writing. Boom-Boom looks off-model most of the time, there are times when the movement looks cheap, and some of the plots make little sense.

But if you can get beyond those issues, it's a good reimagining of the concept that highlights the themes well. And it introduces one of my favorite characters, X-23, although not until Season 3. I'm looking forward to seeing if the subsequent seasons are as fun, as well as the 2009 follow-up, Wolverine and the X-Men. I have to do something while I wait for season 2 of X97, but as I got to the midpoint of Evolution, I couldn't help thinking that this show would also be ripe for a reboot. 

Anyone at Marvel want to take that on?

Fantastic Four: First (Tentative) Steps

It's over a week now since I saw the Fantastic Four movie, at the same Vue Cinema on Finchley Road where I saw Iron Man and Black Panther. I'd just arrived in London from Italy, and was enjoying some free time and mobility (living out in the country has its advantages, but the drawbacks are needing a car to get anywhere), so I took an afternoon to finally catch the movie.

There's two ways I can discuss it: first off, I can (and will) discuss it on its own, and then I'll talk about how it fits into the MCU. There are some spoilers, as usual, so read on carefully after the jump.

James Gunn's Punk as F Superman

I just saw the new Superman movie yesterday, marking the first time in... gosh, years... that I've watched a movie on opening day. Of course, it's easy to do that when you're funemployed and able to hit the 3.30pm show at your local cineplex. I'm gonna write without fear of spoilers below the jump, but just in case you're skimming, my overall verdict is that this is a way better movie than we had any right to expect, and better than any other attempt this century. I'd say the original, 1978 movie with Christopher Reeves is still better, but this absolutely holds its own.

RIP Jim Shooter

I heard about Jim Shooter's death last week, and I've seen obituaries almost every day since from comics professionals who got their start under him in the late 1970s and early 80s. Every obituary talks about what a divisive figure he was, but every obituary also talks about his kindness to them personally. There might be some survivorship bias here, in that the people who really had problems with him are probably keeping their thoughts to themselves, but it's still interesting that so many comics creators have banded together to praise him.

I always knew of him as the guy who got his start, aged 13, writing for the Legion of Superheroes for DC. When I was 13 myself, that was kind of mind-blowing, the thought that someone like me could do something like that. And while I never got to that level, that story is probably buried somewhere in my writing DNA, as one of my influences. Certainly it helped that he was associated with one of my favorite books.

He was also editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics in the 80s, which is where his reputation as a difficult person comes from. On the one hand, Marvel created some of its best comics under his leadership, like the Chris Claremont years of Uncanny X-Men and various sagas in the Spider-Man books. Daredevil got dark and gritty under Frank Miller and the Punisher became one of Marvel's most popular characters (for better or for worse), and big crossovers became a thing, starting with Shooter's own miniseries Secret Wars.

On the other, a lot of that period has been criticized as unadventurous both in terms of plotting and art. I've heard rumors that Shooter insisted on strict 2x3 grids with figures confined to each panel, and while Todd McFarlane has disputed it, it's true that panel layouts grew more adventurous after Tom DeFalco replaced him as editor-in-chief. 

Plotwise, Shooter has been blamed for the lack of LGBTQ representation in Marvel until the 90s - to hear Claremont tell it, Shooter was instrumental in vetoing any same-sex relationships between Kitty Pryde and Rachel Summers or Illyana Rasputina, as well as Claremont's (frankly bonkers, but in the best way) idea for Nightcrawler's parentage: that the shapeshifter Mystique, who'd been implied to be his mother, was actually his father, and that Mystique's long-term lover Destiny had been Nightcrawler's birth mother. This plot point has since become canon in the comics, but you have to wonder where the characters could have gone if the creators had been allowed to tell these stories back then.

On the positive side again, a number of tributes to Shooter have also highlighted how he worked to get royalties and fairer contracts for freelancers at Marvel, and how those contracts were then abandoned after he left. Given how many creators were left out in the cold while the characters they created made millions for Marvel, it certainly adds some nuance to the controversy over Shooter.

In the end, being editor-in-chief of Marvel at that time must have been a pretty thankless job: riding herd on a bunch of fractious creatives who wanted to tell more advanced stories than what superhero comics usually featured, while also fighting his bosses in corporate over spending. There may have been some poor decisions on his part, or they may have seemed heavy-handed to creators who didn't get their way. That said, given how Marvel nearly went out of business in the 90s amid the speculator boom and an attempt to buy the main distributor, Diamond, maybe Shooter wasn't that bad?

Whatever the truth of the matter, it's notable that the stories I've read about him this week have highlighted those same points: Shooter gave a lot of people their breaks in the business, and he made sure various people got the credit they deserved for ideas that made it to print. He wasn't perfect, as so many of these tributes point out, but then, who is?

Daredevil Born Again Mostly Sticks the Landing

When I previously wrote about the show, I was three episodes in and we'd just seen the culmination of the White Tiger storyline, along with a tease of things to come in the shape of the assailant's Punisher logo-bearing shirt. Since then we've gotten the real thing, and in a fairly prominent role, as well as hints of the wider Defenders and/or MCU continuity. I'm pretty happy with how it's turned out, but if you haven't seen it yet, be warned of spoilers ahead.

Daredevil Born Again Is Off to a Good Start

Once again I'm breaking my rule about not writing a post about a show that I'm currently watching. But I've been considering the first three episodes of Daredevil: Born Again, and I'm interested to capture this moment and see where the show goes.

Obviously, I'm covering big spoilers, which come after the jump, so don't read on if you don't want to know what happens.

2024 In Review: Media Consumed

One of the things that struck me this year was just how much media I consume at the moment. At any given time I'm watching a few TV shows and movies (based on interest and on feeling like I'm getting my money's worth from the various streaming services I pay for), reading a number of books and comics, listening to music and podcasts, and maybe playing video games. Which all makes it odd when I consider that it doesn't feel like it's been that good of a year for it all, somehow?

In fairness, I have kept up with a number of shows, particularly from Disney Plus. Of those, X-Men 97 was the clear standout, both because it was a good treatment of the characters and because it dovetailed well with the comics I was reading this year. Echo was decent, though maybe not as memorable as Hawkeye, where Maya Lopez originated, and the Acolyte had some promise but didn't necessarily live up to it. Its cancellation feels like capitulation to the toxic review bombers, but I also don't feel like I'll wither and die not knowing what happens next. 

Agatha All Along was another promising one, which did a very nice job of playing a long con on its viewers, at the same time that it was pulling the con on its characters. Its seventh episode, "Death's Hand in Mine", was the standout, but somehow I felt like it whiffed at the end - not in undoing Agatha's death, but rather in failing to really explain her motivations. I liked the fact that the Witches' Road never really existed, though.

That said, there was one other big standout, and that was Shogun. I already wrote about it, so I won't go on at length here, but it was probably the most compelling show I watched all year. Honorable mention also goes to Slow Horses, Fargo and Fallout, while Bel Air remained the most fun cheesiness. I'm expecting Slow Horses and Fallout to get more seasons, but I'm also hoping for more from Fargo and Bel Air.

In terms of movies, I feel like the one standout was Deadpool and Wolverine, which is the only film I watched twice. It held up just as well on the second viewing, on Disney Plus, but I'd have even been happy to catch it in theaters a second time. Dune Part Two was pretty good, though maybe not the visual feast that the first part represented, while the Maxine Minx/Pearl trilogy of horror movies from Ti West was good, trashy fun - particularly the first two movies. The Zone of Interest was so different from the book that it might as well have had a different title, but it was a fascinating, harrowing watch. And for ongoing comfort watching, I started the year with Fox's X-Men series and continued with a new MCU rewatch, which let me re-evaluate a couple of films and confirmed my opinions of the others.

Turning to books, the one that was most influential was Douglas Wolk's All the Marvels, which has brought me into the world of critical analysis of American superhero comics. It led me to The New Mutants, Ramzi Fawaz's review of how postwar comics informed progressive activism and imagery, and vice versa, as well as Guy Mankowski's Albion's Secret History, which I picked up because of its references to music but was pleased to see that it talked about other cultural aspects of Englishness.

I also read a lot of Richard Osman and Mick Herron, and I'm debating picking up Osman's latest, even though it's not in the Thursday Murder Club series. Other than that, history was a big part of my reading, particularly the Shortest History series, as I took in the volumes on Italy, Japan and India.

For comics, I mostly read X-Men related books, though Wolk's book convinced me to try The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, which turned out to be a great read. A friend lent me Image's W0rldtr33, and that was a nice change from the superhero stuff. I'm still debating whether or not to get the DC Universe Infinite app, but somehow the pile of physical comics beside my bed isn't diminishing fast enough for me to go ahead with that one.

For podcasts, I finally finished Revolutions, which I started in 2022, just as it was ending. Ironically, just as I was finishing its final series on the Russian Revolution, Mike Duncan started it up again, but this time with a speculative story about a possible Martian Revolution. I don't know if I'll check it out, but it might have to wait until it's done - somehow I found it harder to retain information from the Revolutions format than I did from Duncan's History of Rome.

Keeping the X-Men theme going, however, the standout podcast for me this year was Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men. I've mostly been listening in order from when they started, so I'm only up to the episodes from 2016, when they were covering Inferno, though I made sure to listen to their more recent review of X-Men 97 and their interview with Lenore Zann, who played Rogue. Their show's given me a taste for more comics-related podcasts, so I've started exploring Wolk's Voice of Latveria, and at some point soon I'll be checking out the Cerebrocast for more X-related goodies.

And finally, my video gaming has been limited primarily to various Kingdom Rush tower defense games on my iPad. I've been playing them off and on for about a decade, but my interest really took off when the Youtuber Voduke published his magisterial ranking of all the heroes in the series. That led me to buy a few heroes and towers across the various games of the series, including the DLC levels for the fourth installment, Vengeance. 

The big news for this year was the launch of Kingdom Rush Alliance, the fifth tower defense game in the series; for the first time I was there from the start, though on some level I found it a little underwhelming - I still haven't been able to figure out if that's because it only offered the main campaign at launch, whereas I discovered all the other games after they'd been out for a while and had released a lot of elite levels. Alliance has its charms, though, so I won't say it's terrible or on the wrong path, but it does feel a little lacking in replayability. I'll have to see how I feel when the next elite levels and its first DLC drop.

Looking ahead to next year, I'm hoping for big things from Marvel's new offerings, particularly the fourth Captain America movie, Brave New World. Having watched the MCU's Infinity Saga again, it's clear that Marvel dropped the ball a bit in the Multiverse Saga by not giving us more glimpses of the core characters - if you think about it, this is the first time we're seeing the new Cap since 2021's Falcon and Winter Soldier, and we're not getting a new Avengers movie until 2026, so it'll be a gap of seven years since Endgame. That means Brave New World will have a lot riding on it, particularly since Marvel had to pivot away from the Kang storyline they were doing.

I'm also hoping for a good new season from Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which will hopefully make up for the end of Lower Decks next week. I'm sure other, unheralded shows will come up, and I'm looking forward to being pleasantly surprised by them as they launch.

Overall, though, I'm hoping to spend a little less time consuming media and more time... I dunno, doing stuff? I wouldn't say my media diet made me stay home more, but now that I'm not really sequestering myself like I did during Covid, I think I can go out and explore the world more again.

Or maybe we'll be stuck inside again thanks to the new administration? I'll explore some of those concerns in my next blog, which will be a rundown of my 2024. Though I'll spoil the main theme for you here: 2024 sucked, just like the eight years before it, and like the four years that are coming now. But next time I'll explain just how 2024 sucked. Lucky you!

RIP John Cassaday

As if the passing of James Earl Jones wasn't bad enough for the nerdosphere, I learned today that comics artist John Cassaday also passed away yesterday. He wasn't as much of a household name, even among comics fans (I believe), and I don't even know the full range of his work, but I did know his work on Planetary, and honestly, the craft on that is enough to cement his place as one of the greats.

I first encountered his work back in 2000 or 2001, when Planetary was a going concern and Warren Ellis was revitalizing the hell out of the Wildstorm line. And while Bryan Hitch was giving the Authority the widescreen comics treatment, Cassaday's ultra-detailed style was doing something equally interesting on Planetary, which was Ellis's sort of meta-commentary on how superhero comics (and especially Marvel) erased the pulp characters who'd come before.

Each issue dealt with a different aspect of either 20th-century adventure fiction (like the Shadow, Doc Savage, Victorian horror literature) or 60s comics (the Hulk, the Fantastic Four, Superman and Wonder Woman), and Cassaday's style accommodated all of them. He could do beautifully craggy faces, which was notable after the 90s, when certain artists couldn't seem to depict different ages to save their lives. But he could also imply action without undue bombast - this is a talent that Hitch has, and Frank Quitely also does it quite well.

I also liked that if Hitch's Authority looked like Alan Davis, Cassaday's work on Planetary reminded me of a slightly less cartoony Kevin Maguire. Incidentally, the reason Hitch's work looked like Davis's is that he was being inked by Paul Neary, who inked some of Davis's most famous work (and who, sadly, also passed away earlier this year, a fact I only learned today when looking for reputable sources about Cassaday's passing).

I did experience a little of Cassaday's non-Planetary work, in the form of one issue of Astonishing X-Men, which he did with Joss Whedon. I didn't stick with the book, because I couldn't see how anyone could follow up Grant Morrison's New X-Men, but I've since heard that Astonishing was almost as good, so I have that to look forward to. And I've been seeing some panels from Cassaday's Captain America work, so that's another body of work to get stuck into.

But I'm sad that, having passed away at 52, Cassaday leaves behind much less than if he'd had his allotted threescore and ten. Ellis may have conceived of the strangeness of the world in Planetary, but Cassaday brought it to life, and he'll be missed.

Chris Claremont's X-Men and What Came After

As part of my ongoing reread of the X-Men, I've finally arrived at the moment when Chris Claremont, the book's most influential scribe, left. This was in 1991, when the X-Men were at the height of their popularity, spawning a new flagship title and inspiring toys and the X-Men animated series. It's also the inflection point for the X-books, where they went from the bestselling titles of the 80s to the sprawling mess that made podcasts like Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men necessary.

This post isn't so much an explanation of what happened (which I've pieced together via Wikipedia pages and comments on podcasts), but more how I saw it play out then, and how I see it now.

The first thing to say is that Claremont's departure after X-Men #3 was the first time that I realized how important writers were. I bought that issue soon after it came out, and continued on with the book for a couple of years, but I must have noticed something was off, because I kept coming back to X-Men #3 and its farewell to Claremont, and I put two and two together that Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza weren't quite as good.

Thinking back, that must also be the point at which I became a fan of writers rather than artists, to the point that for years I barely noticed the actual art. It's only in the last few years, with my overall reread of my old collection, that I've forced myself to study the panels in many books. As a result, some artists don't hold up like they did for me back then, while others, like Jim Lee, do look as good as I remember.

Claremont's departure is likely also involved in my switch to DC. The JLA books that hooked me at that time were well-drawn, with one of Adam Hughes's earliest ongoing commitments, but overall the writers, Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis, were the standouts powering the book. I had a similar whiplash when Giffen left both JLA and Legion of Superheroes, which drove home how important the writer's voice was to my enjoyment of a book (even if, in those specific cases, Giffen was doing the plot rather than the script).

What I didn't realize until I reread my physical copies of Claremont's old issues is how full of tics and idiosyncrasies his writing was. Much has been made of how every character always repeated their powers in the course of an issue (likely a result of the old adage that every issue is someone's first), or of how they repeated certain phrases (doing something "fit to burst"; yelling "Glory!"; and so on). 

I was also struck by how wordy his pages were, from 1975 to 1991, as he described everything and had the characters deliver long monologues. Those are probably also the result of a certain way of doing comics, in which he was plotting the book with the artist and then writing the script after the pages were drawn. It meant Claremont had to adapt his wording to whatever the artist had drawn; most notably, John Byrne drew the Dark Phoenix destroying an inhabited world, which meant Claremont had to adapt the rest of the story to that, leading to the death of Jean Grey, something he hadn't intended on at first.

I like to jokingly wonder whether Chris Claremont is the best bad writer or the worst good writer, but both are unfair. He managed to create a richer world for the X-Men than either Stan Lee or Roy Thomas had before, and having unchallenged control of that world for 16 years meant that he could introduce characters and concepts that are still playing out now, whether in the comics, in the movies or in TV shows. Wolverine is essentially his character, even if he didn't originally love Logan as much as Byrne or other collaborators did; same with the more complicated understanding of Magneto's motivations. 

In terms of Claremont's legacy, I'm still figuring that part out. I have bad memories of the issues in the 90s after he left, but now that I'm embarking on reading that era, I'll have a better sense of how it all played out. I still haven't quite forgiven Lobdell and Nicieza for (as I saw it) ruining books that I loved, but I'll be interested to see how I see their run going forward.

One problem with them and some of the other writers who followed Claremont is, as Jay and Miles put it in an episode that I listened to recently, Claremont had been writing the X-Men so long that Lobdell, Nicieza and whoever else thought that was just how you had to write them. Anybody would have trouble replicating such an imposing voice, even if they were a good writer themselves, so it's fair to say that the deck was stacked against them. And even more so when you consider that, as the flagship Marvel title, X-Men was subject to a lot more editorial interference than it had been in 1975, when Claremont, Len Wein and Dave Cockrum rescued it from the obscurity of being a bimonthly book of reprints.

Since I'm reading one issue of Uncanny X-Men per day (and now also X-Men, the series launched by Claremont and Jim Lee), I've calculated that this first year will take me through to the very eve of Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men. As I recall, there were a few reboots and new directions in that time, including Claremont coming back, and Warren Ellis being given control of the non-core X-books. But Morrison's run - divisive as it is - still strikes me as the short, sharp shock the X-line needed to move on from Claremont's influence.

I've heard some stuff about Morrison's pitch when they were plotting out what they wanted to do with the book, and it sounds bad when they talk about disregarding the existing fans. But I also think of the context, when creators, including Ellis, were just getting to grips with the internet and how easy it was to hear about how pissed off certain fans were that someone was doing new stuff with a book. I don't know how much of a link there is to the toxic fandom of today, but it certainly seems to prefigure stuff like Comicsgate, which has also served to radicalize a bunch of nerds to be culture warriors. If that link really is there, then I kind of wish Morrison's run really had driven all the old fans off. But I'll have to study it myself in more detail when I get to those issues...

The other thing to consider is that, influential as Morrison's run was, they also became something of an albatross on the characters after they left. At the very least, Joss Whedon's Astonishing X-Men is meant to be a good continuation of New X-Men, but in the 20 years since Morrison left, there haven't been that many notable characters introduced - certainly not many that stuck. As far as I can tell, the exceptions are Hope Summers and Pixie, but I'll have a better sense of it when I get to those issues.

As for Claremont himself, I'm kind of looking forward to X-Treme X-Men, but also not. My sense is that he's never really recaptured the lightning in a bottle of his first X-Men run, so that series may end up just complicating the continuity further. But we'll see.