One of my all-time favorite comics is Grant Morrison’s run on the weird superhero comic Doom Patrol (which has been collected in a series of graphic novels, but they are unfortunately not in the Library’s collection). Morrison really played up the weirdness, throwing in all kinds of surreal and absurd characters and situations, while always […]

It’s true to say I’ve been a Superman fan as far back as I can remember, but it’s also true to say I haven’t been a fan. Because there are really many different characters called Superman: the original Golden Age character who didn’t fly and was much less of a Boy Scout than the character […]

I knew about the character called the Scarlet Pimpernel–usually referred to as one of the first superheroes–for a long, long time before I finally got around the reading the novel. From the way the character and the story is generally portrayed in pop culture, I was expecting a thrill-a-minute tale full of swashbuckling swordfights. I […]

Â
In the mid-1990s, Alan Moore (yes, the guy who wrote Watchmen) took over writing a comic called Supreme and completely reworked it, turning it into something amazing and fun. His Supreme stories have been collected in two volumes, Supreme: The Story of the Year and Supreme: The Return.
Supreme was a ’90s version of Superman, […]

The movie Watchmen is out now, and I’m really excited to see it. The comic originally came out as a twelve-issue limited series when I was in high school, and I read every issue many, many times. I even studied it for a class in college. I highly, highly recommend Watchmen.
In some ways, Watchmen is […]

Scott McCloud, author and illustrator of Understanding Comics, made his name with his comic Zot!, which premiered in 1984. Written, illustrated and owned by McCloud (which was much less common then than it is now), Zot! began as a brightly-colored, quirky and light superhero comic. Zachary T. Paleozogt, also known as Zot, is a teenaged […]