Lots of people who enjoy sci-fi/ fantasy may've heard enough negative things about the subsequent efforts to continue the Star Wars saga, to pass. The Clone Wars cartoon seems to get the most consisten Thumbs-Up from diehard Star Wars fans, but maybe you just prefer live-action material. (I haven't gotten into the cartoon myself, but I only watch about two hours of TV a day on average, movies, included.) But as a lover of well-told stories across any medium, what can we say about Star Wars: The Manadalorian ? ? For layered world-building from a single, unconfusing perspective and timely characterization scenes amidst breath-taking action, with awe and a natural sense of humor, this is the way. There's a magic, awe, and sense of wonder that should live in all of us. Wrapping your head around Reality, especially in a year that brings you down-to-Earth like 2020- like no other-can be a jaded, cynical, and yes, depressing journey. I haven't seen such universal accl...

Angry America's brooding zeitgeist, in the shadows of the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Not like anything you ever heard from me. A character study, rambling up from a post-election morning (after listening to the latest from Flux Oersted). https://creatingmarvels.podbean.com/e/civil-warriors-a-song-of-the-restless-militia-men-1604856292/ "One hundred percent behind our guy." My 1st listen to this slightly-haunting was incomplete, https://soundcloud.com/robitron/new-day-in-plain-sight and I cut off at a point in the lyrics where the singer's making an effort to say something to someone with which he disagrees. I couldn't finish listening at that moment, but I felt a stong need to make no-excuses and go sit down with my wife's acoustic guitar, "Pretty Baby," and start a song from no idea- only a mood. So, I took off from the dark shades of the flourescent tone of your song, and gathered voices of terrorists. I was like, ...

Many people feel like they are on a roller coaster erected at a county fair. Will it hold up? Will the election system deliver America actual freedom? We would only need to cast 42.9 million more votes to equal the totals of 2016. That would be less than half as many as were cast in 2016: 79-plus million. Due to the pandemic, it’s overall good if those who need to, want to, or see it as sensible in any way, have cast their ballots already. That relieves the lines, potentially, for socially-distanced, hygienic voting. But I think those conditions will have to be maintained in numbers, likely somewhere beneath the total of in-person election day voters in 2016. I eyeball it and would think Biden wins about 50 to 55 million of those early votes. A remainder of 38.6 to 43 for the Republicans sounds about right. They are just so much more likely to be today’s in-person voters. I can foresee thirty million of them turning up, easily, today. But if I’m wrong about the percenta...

Let's plunge into the catacombs of a story with lots of super creeps, with the writer of The Dig, Mark S. England.  We talk about the recent uncoverings of Egyptian tombs, and see how a cat starts all the trouble. Happy Halloween! Here's some photos from the recent discoveries: Link?

Ever wanted to be an audiobook narrator- you know, get into the characters, really bring it to life? Danielle Procter Piper's living your dream. From her palm tree log cabin outside Tampa Bay, Florida, she tells us how visions have inspired her to create art, which you can find as Taka Gare on Deviant Art. I ask her how she got into reading as a voice talent for audiobooks, and she tells us about her own narrated projects. Hear about her books, and grab some Lebanese cuisine & self-care advice before you go. Find her work on Red Bubble, at Plaid Rat, She's the author of twenty-one books, as well as an accomplished dancer. She's been drafting a novel in the space of a month, so she can create a new one every three months. Wow!!! She's used a few aliases, Sound interesting? Press Play! Happy Halloween! Enjoy! https://www.podbean.com/ew/pb-bzinu-ed8626 Or enjoy the embed player below! For more:

Denny O'Neil always said he needed to relate to the heroes he wrote, and Tony Stark was more-or-less antithetical to Denny's values as a social crusading Catholic and veteran of the Bay of Pigs conflict in 1962.   But Stark shared a vulnerablity Denny understood intimately.  So, the mainstream superheroics are given human dramatic stakes by Tony's manipulation by O'Neil creation Obadiah Stane, back into sorrows of the bottle and self-loathing.  Now, Denny had two stories to tell, with down-to-Earth James Rhodes standing in as Iron Man.  Now one of Marvel's best-known heroes- maybe the highest-profile character who could be tried this way- was a Black American, but most of all, a loyal friend, with a different approach and skillset to bring to the twenty year-old character.  Here's my podcast, with limited space remaining, quickly hitting the key insights I uncovered.  It really must've been torture to see Tony, and eventually Rhodey, in their personal d...

Hey, if Mike ever needs a scripter, I was one IDW President away from my professional debut!  But I guess he's got this one figured out.  Check him out?  Vozcomix: MAD MUMMY Gris Gris Girl Pt. 1 : No good deed goes unpunished. This week Adam does a favor for his friend Colon who works in Egyptian antiquities at the museum and he gets m...

Some well-done, street-level adventure comics, here. Blind attorney Matt Murdock's the Devil of Hell's Kitchen in Frank Miller's tone-changing run, an echo of the approach in Denny O'Neil's Batman stories a decade earlier.  That's, of course, a Barry Windsor-Smith cover- the coloring gives it away, right? Ever realize Denny pioneered the 'secret identity slip' that keyed in Miller's Born Again  storyline with Mazzuchelli?   Art: Klaus Janson  First as editor, then as writer, here's some insights about what made Denny's Daredevil, click. And on Apple: Creatng Marvels: Daredevil

So, in his initial series, Spider-Man, Denny has the most ideas, initially, bringing in new characters the first few months.  Calypso, Madame Web, Hyrdo Man recur in later stories- such as Todd McFarlane’s smash-selling vehicle Spider=Man title in 1991, and the Madame and Hydro Man even return in cartoons.  Peter even gets an opponent at the Daily Globe, photographer Lance Bannon- before O’Neil abruptly shifts gears and does away with the Daily Globe newspaper era started by Marv Wolfman in a single issue, #210. However, those characters do not generally add much to any ongoing saga.   In some ways, while the stories in the middle do continue into each other, from 213-218, most O’Neil Spider-Man stories exist in an almost stand-alone fashion.  Hydro Man- who suffers from the most glaring flaw in this era’s villains, his obstinate motivation of revenge, like the Wizard in the next issue- does come back for a sort of humorous rivalry with Sandman ov...

Now it is time we were going, I to die, you to live; But which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God. – Plato, “The Apology of Socrates” That’s a quote from a Daredevil story, written by Denny O’Neil. When Denny offered a perspective through literature, as with his quotes, he gave his work a sense of sharing a humble place alongside its more canonical literary family. He had a smart way of making comics relevant and artistically vibrant, despite their underestimated standing- at least, in the years he wrote Batman, Green Lantern/ Green Arrow, Iron Man, and here, Daredevil. But he also helped bring them out of pile of discarded juvenilia. After all, when he got into the business, barely anyone thought of comic books as more than kid’s stuff, or something to pass the time of bored soldiers. If we came to think of them as legitimate reading material for smart people of any age, I’m confident we can thank Denny for his part. “These be the words you read and re...

1. In a distinct shift away from the campy 1960s Batman, which was how I chiefly knew the character as a boy, featured Batman mostly as an athlete and martial artist and detective, but rarely depicted him using any of his special devices from his utility belt. Gone are the various gadgets and gimmicks that Batman might have with him on his person, to solve his various dilemmas. Now along with this point, we do see Batman with a cool old Roadster Batmobile a couple of times. But the bat helicopter for example and any of the variety of equipment and transportation vehicles that he was known to keep in his Batcave I have vanished. It's worth noting, along with the move in Batman #217 to finally move Dick Grayson (Robin) off to college, where he was featured in his own solo adventures in a backup story in most issues of Batman, the Batcave with also closed off, so that Batman and Alfred instead move in the center of Gotham City. So while this move was probably mostly dictated by ...

Imagine a time when you first learned what a star was. When you didn’t know what a war was. It could've been one summer or fall day, in 1977, when I had my own image from Star Wars, with Leia, Luke, and I do believe, Threepio, courtesy of a cereal box. You can literally say the images are iconic. I am this little boy, looking at everyone, dressed like no one I'd seen, with some vague intimation of mystic energy, nowhere found in my mundane life. I didn't know anything else about the story of this man and woman, or this robot (I only recall the humans, clearly, there could've been Chewie, too). I felt awe. They were alien to my experience. I think they scared me just a bit. They hinted at a Force beyond my frame of reference. Their clothes weren't like anything I knew, until I'd seen a proper bathrobe, maybe. Some of my earliest sexual memory is me trying to understand the discomforting entertwining of the male and female figures. The icons of Star...

I actually don't know at what point the Silver Age creations were being made specifically to play off the others: rather than just a great variety of titles/ attempts to catch readers with something novel. I realize I'd never pinpointed when the shared world might've emerged from that 'at first' condition. Sort of like looking back into the creative Big Bang of Marvel. Certainly by 'Daredevil' in 1964, the way a character fits into the bigger Marvel picture's becoming part of the thought. (from Captain Marvel #29, 1973, pg. 8 ) Thanos and the company of Titan are generated to play with the rest of the MU. The Avengers title (cover date, Sept. 1963- so, summer of '63) is made to fit the line-up together. Characters are being made for stories, to play off title characters, always. Later characters like Deathlok and Killraven in the 1970s, and Dreadstar in the 1980s, are created as 'stand-alone' storylines- so creativity did eventually...