2023 Trek to America – The Comics

For the last couple of months my family and I have been on holidays (that is, “on vacation” for the Americans amongst us) in the United States. The USA is the in which I was born and bred, but for about half of my life now I’ve been living in Australia. Normally we get back her for a visit about ever two years, but owing to various policies in both the USA and especially Australia related to recent global events, this is my first time back with my whole family for nearly five years.

My time in the US has been filled with many blessings and many things to be grateful for. One of them is the chance to get some comics for less than they would cost in Australia. This is not the major blessing, or the most important one, but it’s something I enjoy about my visits to the States nonetheless.

Fictional Initials (… so far)

The title is a bit misleading.  I’m not talking here about initials that only exist in fiction.  That doesn’t really make any sense.  Instead, I’m talking about initials of fictional characters.  That does made sense even though it may seem a bit of a random topic.

Anyway, it occurred to me sometimes (as such things do) to wonder if I could come up with a fictional character for every two letter initial combination that’s possible in English.  In other words, A.A., A.B., A.C., and so on.  That’s a total of 676 combinations, and thus 676 characters.

Thriller #5

We continue to look at Thriller, the out-of-continuity experimental comic that DC Comics produced in the early-mid 1980’s.  Thriller #5 has a publishing date of March 1984, and is one I read a looooong time after I read #4.

It’s from here that I’m really wondering how what was going on in this series, so this will be interesting.    Thriller is one of the more dense and oblique mainstream comics I have read, so this series is really me journalling my own attempts to understand it.

Thriller – Issue 3

We continue to look at Thriller, the out-of-continuity experimental comic that DC Comics produced in the early-mid 1980’s.  Thriller #3 has a publishing date of January 1984, and is one of the issues I bought back when it first came out.  It’s one of the more dense and oblique mainstream comics I have read, so this series is really me journaling my own attempts to understand it.

Thriller – Issue 2

We continue to look at Thriller, the out-of-continuity experimental comic that DC Comics produced in the early-mid 1980’s.  Thriller #2 has a publishing date of December 1983, and is one of the issues I bought back when it first came out.  It’s one of the more dense and oblique mainstream comics I have read, so this series is really me journaling my own attempts to understand it.

(Making Sense out of) Thriller – Issue 1

So back in 1983, DC published a very out-of-the-box comic called Thriller, originally by Robert Loren Fleming and Trevor Von Eeden.  It ran for 12 issues all together, though I only read four issues back in the day.  Since then, I’ve managed to get ahold of the rest, and have only finished reading the whole series recently.

It’s a dense story that benefits from multiple re-readings, and indeed, has often left me confused.  So I thought…let’s read it through and journal the experience, and see if I can make sense of it all.  So let’s start with Issue #1.

Weekly Geeky Question #8: Bad Adaptations

Every week in 2018, the plan is that my friend Rod is going to ask me some geeky question that will answer in a post. This week is Week #8, and the question is a simple one…

What are the ten most atrocious, terrible adaptations to TV or film of either a storyline or character from comic books, novels, or other forms of media?

Weekly Geeky Question #7: An Epic Comic-Book Movie Adaptation

Every week in 2018, the plan is that my friend Rod is going to ask me some geeky question that will answer in a post. This week is Week #7, and the question has to do with the grand-daddy of all comic book line-wide crossovers:  Crisis on Infinite Earths

What would the plot be of a live action film adaptation of Crisis on Infinite Earths?

Superman’s Anniversary – 75 Things

According to Brian Cronin, who seems to know so much about comics that I think we should really just trust him, today is the 75th anniversary of the first Superman comic being published!  I just found out about this a couple of weeks before the big day.  How could I have missed being aware of this, I wonder? 

Star Trek / The Legion of Super-Heroes

A story in five reactions.