Mini Comic Reviews: October, 2025

This month I'll be taking a look at the Scarlet Witch's first ongoing solo series, John Byrne's famous run on Fantastic Four, some classic Batman tales, that time the X-Men hung out with the New Teen Titans, and the adventures of Tom Strong.

X-Men (2000)

"We are the future, Charles, not them! They no longer matter!"

Despite being one of the biggest comic publishers in the industry with some of the most iconic heroes, Marvel long struggled to successfully bring those same characters to the big screen. They had a few hits on TV with The Incredible Hulk and some animated series, but its movies were routinely terrible, low budget embarrassments like Captain America, The Punisher, Howard the Duck, and the Fantastic Four movie that Roger Corman made for tuppence just to hold onto the screen rights and never released. But then one movie changed all that, gave Marvel the critical and commercial hit it had long craved and set them on the path towards becoming a giant of the industry.

And that film was... Blade.

Oh, and a few years later X-Men came out and did okay.

Mini Comic Reviews: June, 2025

This month I'll be taking a look at Saga, The Department of Truth, Absolute Green Lantern, JLA/Avengers, and X-Men comics past and present.

Mini Comic Reviews: May, 2025

This month I'll be looking at the New 52 Wonder Woman, Absolute Flash, Grant Morrison’s The Mystery Play, the Glory reboot from 2012, and latest series of X-Men.

Mini Comic Reviews: April, 2025

This month I'll be taking a look at Ultimate Wolverine, I Am Legion, Excalibur, 20th Century Men, Alan Moore's Supreme, and the classic comic adventures of the Fourth Doctor.

21 Comics I Read in '21

For multiple reasons I really haven't watched a lot of TV this year, so instead of my usually irrelevant rundown I'm going to look back at the 21 most memorable comics (old and new) that I read this year.

An X-Men Retrospective: Part 5

"I am not ashamed of what I am. Let them try and stop us this time."

In the final part of my journey through the wild and crazy history of the X-Men I'll be looking at that weird period in the mid-2010s when Marvel tried (and failed) to make Inhumans the new X-Men. After that I'll be bringing us right up to date with the massive success of the Hickman reinvention.

An X-Men Retrospective: Part 4

"Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction. And every time this team goes into the field, we remind the world that we do."

In the penultimate instalment of my journey through X-Men history I'll be championing the brief, brilliant and criminally overlooked tenure of Kieron Gillen, before navigating the many highs and lows of Brian Michael Bendis' divisive run.

An X-Men Retrospective: Part 3

“No more mutants.”

In the third part of my X-Men retrospective I'll be looking at the works of Grant Morrison, the second second coming of Chris Claremont, the astonishing work of a writer we now know to be less than astonishing, the fallout from House of M, as well as the ups and downs of the team's big move to the West Coast.

An X-Men Retrospective: Part 2

“We are all but bit players in a tragedy far larger than any of us...”

This is where I started reading X-Men so I have something of a nostalgic soft spot for this era, but I'll be the first to admit that it is far, far, far from the best.

An X-Men Retrospective: Part 1

"To me, my X-Men."

This all started as a follow up to one of my Doux Five posts about classic comic book runs. I wanted to do something more detailed covering both Marvel and DC. That eventually evolved into doing a separate piece for X-Men because there was so much I wanted to write about it. X-Men is a comic I've had an on-off relationship for almost 30 years now. It wasn't the first comic I read, but it was the first one I read seriously. And then that continued to evolve into this multi-part retrospective. Which is all rather fitting considering X-Men is all about change and evolution.

Five Classic Comic Book Runs

Five memorable comic book runs by some of the industry's best writers and artists starring some of the world's greatest superheroes.

Five Fictional Schools You Wouldn't Want to Send Your Kids To

A few of the survivors of the graduating class of '99.

Despite what Pink Floyd might think, children really do need an education. They also need things like beating hearts, working lungs, and attached heads. And that is why you should never send your children to any of these educational death traps.

The Movie Industry Might Be Broken...

But I don't think it is going anywhere.

Articles and opinions are being circulated around the internet with alarming speed about how the movie industry is in trouble, with claims that if the next blockbuster (specifically Pacific Rim, which is an original property) isn't a massive success, we'll be doomed to nothing but reboots, remakes, adaptations, and sequels until the eventual and inevitable decline of the movie industry into nothing more than a century long blurb in the history books. I call bullshit.