I'M STILL ALIVE...

Well! Things have certainly dried up around here since a year ago, when I thought I'd be able to manage one post a month! I managed January, February, and March, skipped April, posted in May, skipped June, posted in July, and then vanished for the remainder of 2025. I can make no excuses, though I feel like one of those 90s comic artists you would read about in WIZARD, who constantly missed their deadlines because they were playing videogames or whatever. That's about where I am... as I said around this time last year, I still want to do this blog; I just have a hard time lately finding the motivation to do it. I haven't even mustered the effort to reply to some comments that have rolled in over the past half-year!

So at this point I don't know what to say. I don't think I'm officially retiring or throwing in the towel, but despite my own wished to the contrary, I am most likely on a long-term sabbatical. And who knows; maybe that sabbatical will turn out to be permanent? I can't say for certain. I wouldn't be surprised to see a new post pop up at some point around here, but by the same token, I also wouldn't be surprised if this is the last word at this site! I guess we'll all just have to wait and see what happens next...

A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO MY FINAL POST...

...I couldn't pull it together! I started writing it, more than once. I had the thoughts in my head, but I couldn't get them out in a coherent fashion. I think partly it was simply because I didn't want to admit to myself that I was bringing this thing to an end. But also, I think on some level it was because I really and truly wasn't ready to stop. Like I said last month, I still have the desire and interest to do this. It's just been hard to find the will to do it.

Which got me thinking: maybe it's not that I'm burnt out on blogging. I absolutely still want to blog. Maybe I'm just burnt out on the grind of writing about long runs, one issue at a time. In fact, I think I'm burnt out on writing about short runs too, in the more freewheeling format I have employed on occasion for mini-series, one shots, etc.

So maybe what I really need is not to retire from blogging entirely, but rather to change my format and schedule. To that end, I've been thinking. When I first started this site, it was absolutely primarily intended to discuss comic books. But there was also other stuff. Occasional posts about Marvel movies or various TV shows or even once or twice, a novel. All that stuff fell by the wayside pretty quickly as I decided to focus entirely on comics, but it was there originally.

So now I'm thinking that maybe I get back to posting about whatever. An occasional comic, something I've watched, something else I've read, and so forth. And on a less demanding schedule than once a week. Right now, I'm imagining something like once a month or every few weeks. Heck, I don't even think the schedule would be set in stone. The posts would likely be longer, and in more of a "catch-all" vein -- rather than each post being about a single subject, it would be a number of things on my mind at that particular moment.

Now -- I think (or perhaps I should say that I know) a lot of people came here for the comic book stuff. After all, that was, as I said, this site's ultimate raison d'etre once I settled into my groove. So to those who aren't interested in sticking around to see where we go from here, I understand completely. But if you've come to like my writing over these past twelve or so years, then I hope you'll at least stick around to give the new format a chance.

And to be sure, there will always be comic book (or comic book adjacent) content here. Just not the way it used to be. So let's give it a try, shall we? A bold new era for "Not A Hoax" begins next week, and I hope you'll join me for it!

THE END...?

I think I've known this day was coming for a while now, but I had trouble admitting it to myself. However, I've reached a point where I havd no choice but to "rip off the Band-Aid" and just come out and say it -- "Not A Hoax!" is coming to end.

I suggested things were going this way in a comment on BATMAN #357 a couple weeks ago, and today I'm confirming it. But for those who are curious as to how and why, I figured I might as well throw a few more words out there onto the web before I call it a day (or a decade, as the case may be).

For many years, whenever time permitted, I have worked pretty far ahead of schedule on this blog. There was a period, shortly after the birth of my son, where that wasn't possible, and I was stringing together posts basically the night before they were to be published for a while. But eventually I corrected course (partly due to scaling back my output from two days a week to one; a schedule which had itself been reduced from a whopping three days a week when the blog first started), and got back to a point where I was way ahead of schedule again. All those posts on AVENGERS by Bob Harras and Steve Epting? Every single one was written before the first one even went up here. And the same held true for Gerry Conway's Batman. I had all the posts written somewhere around the fall of 2023 -- and as such, I decided, as I often did when I found myself with a large enough cushion, to take a brief break before moving on.

The problem is, the break never ended! I was going to get back in the saddle at the beginning of 2024 to start whatever my next project might be, but when January rolled around, I wasn't ready yet. But I figured it was no biggie; I was still a full year ahead of schedule, so I'd take a few more months off. Then before I knew it, it was spring and then summer, and I still wasn't ready to start! But again, I knew I still had half a year left, plenty of time. Yet I still just never did anything.

And so, as of last week, I exhausted my full cushion and have nothing to follow it. And while the above may sound like procrastination, I don't think that's the right word to describe it. I still want to do this. I have any number of series and runs that I would love to read and write about! I spent much of the past year thinking about what to do next, bouncing around between two or three ideas, and fully intending to commit to and start one of them. But the issue is less that I've been putting the work off and more that I just don't have, I dunno, the will to do it. I absolutely and unequivocally want to do one of those handul of ideas I was bandying about -- I just don't feel like doing it.

I think maybe I'm just burnt out on the whole process... the reading, the writing, and the work that goes into gathering and uploading screencaps. (And yes, I'm saying this with a straight face after mocking up that fake Spider-Man cover you see above. If nothing else, I do want to go out with a bang -- and doing that took far less time than it might have taken to read and prepare a full post about the same issue!)

But -- I did stick that question mark in my post title up top. Is this really the end? I don't know. Maybe it's just an extended hiatus. Maybe I'll find that motivation I've been missing, and want to get back into this in another six months or a year or whatever. Or maybe I retool my format and do something else with this blog. But if it is over, eleven-plus years, looking at many long runs and countless short ones, across multiple titles and publishers, seems like a pretty good body of work. I've never considered myself a particularly scholarly or professional reviewer, and I have always worn my heart on my sleeve with regards to the stuff I love (and for that matter, the stuff I hate), so there is absolutely bias of some sort in nearly every post you'll find here. But people seemed to like what I did, and I had a lot of fun doing it (until I finally ran out of steam).

All that said, I've got one post left. I have always begun each year with a "Happy New Year!" post that functioned as sort of a combination year in review and look forward, and I see no reason not to do the same this year, as a way to cap things off. So I'll be back in two weeks, on December 30th, to do just that. Let's save our tearful goodbyes until then, okay?!

BATMAN RETURNS

Back in 2019, for the bulk of the year, I took a "curated" look at BATMAN IN THE SEVENTIES, by means of several major stories available via DC collected editions or digitally. We looked at material from Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, Dennis O'Neil, Neal Adams, Archie Goodwin, Steve Englehart, Marshall Rogers, Don Newton, Len Wein, Jim Aparo, Marv Wolfman, and others. The final issue I looked at was BATMAN #335, the end of Wolfman's brief run on the title, which was actually published in 1981.

Now here we are five years later, and I've got another Batman itch to scratch -- and fortunately, I know exactly how to do it! We're essentially going to pick up where we left off, by way of DC's three-volume TALES OF THE BATMAN: GERRY CONWAY series. This is another one of those runs I've wanted to read for years. Indeed, I've gone so far as to avoid as many spoilers about it as I could, knowing I would someday check it out. All I'm really aware of is that Conway writes both BATMAN and DETECTIVE COMICS almost as one biweekly series, he brings back Englehart & Rogers' corrupt city councilman Rupert Thorne for an extended engagement, and introduces Killer Croc and a new Robin. (Oh, and the stories run contemporaneously with the NEW TEEN TITANS stories I looked at several years ago.)

Conway's run begins on DETECTIVE COMICS with isue 497, cover dated December 0f 1980 -- which places Conway's DETECTIVE alongside Wolfman's BATMAN for several months. Conway then takes over BATMAN as well with the July 1981 issue, 337, just a month after Wolfman jumps ship. Conway's primary collaborators for his time with Batman are pencilers Don Newton and Gene Colan, two artists I'm always happy to see more from.

So next week, we're jumping back over to the DC Universe after spending several solid years with Marvel. As near as I can tell, Conway wrote about fifty issues of BATMAN and DETECTIVE combined, so this will be another year-long project, at a pace of one issue per week, for the most part. So as the old saying goes, be here next week -- same Bat-time, same Bat-... uhh... website!

Available on Amazon:
TALES OF THE BATMAN: GERRY CONWAY vol. 1 | vol. 2 | vol. 3

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

And that's another (calendar) year in the books, folks! It's hard for me to believe, but I'm still going after ten years of this thing! Yes, it's true -- I stopped making blog anniversary posts some time back, but if I hadn't, I would've celebrated a full decade of NOT A HOAX! back in August. I started this site in 2013 as a way to "discuss" comics I was reading, even if it meant hollaring into a void (but thankfully I've had many readers and commenters in all this time, so that hasn't been the case). First it was Marvel's CAPTAIN BRITAIN and EXCALIBUR, then it was IRON MAN by Michelinie, Layton, and Romita Jr., then Spider-Man by Roger Stern, and then on and on and on, running a gamut of creators, publishers, and content.

Now, I hesitate to say at this point that I'm still "going strong" after ten-plus years. There have been points, particularly when my son was a newborn and toddler, where I was barely able to hang on by a thread! And I've long since moved away from more than a single post a week; even when I think I'll be able to manage more, something always happens to prevent it. But I'm okay with that! I'd rather be going one post a week after ten years than not at all.

So as usual for these year-end posts, let's have a quick rundown of what we covered in the past year, as well as the now-annual tradition (down from once a month many years ago) of The Unboxing.

The first part of that is pretty straightforward, of course. It was the Avengers. That's pretty much it. I started reading the Bob Harras/Steve Epting/Tom Palmer run late last year and it carried us through November of this year as well. Then we wrapped things up with James Bond in December, closing a hole which has bothered me for several years, as the Bond newspaper strips were my only cancelled/unfinished series in all this time.

LOOK UP! LOOK DOWN! LOOK OUT!

JAMES BOND IS BACK!

(With all due apologies to the THUNDERBALL movie poster.)

Back in 2018, I started looking at the James Bond newspaper strips originally syndicated in Britain's Daily Express in the 1950s and '60s. I got about halfway through the series, and then was forced to stop due to a number of factors in my life at the time. It was the first retrospective series I ever failed to complete, and it has bothered me ever since. I vowed at the time that I would finish my originally intended run (all of the strips that adapted Ian Fleming's original novels) someday. And now, five-and-a-half years later (seriously?!), it's time.

There are eight storylines left, but a few are based on short stories -- so I've broken it out to three posts in total, which will take us right up to the end of the year. And I know we're going to sail right through to the end of this thing, because unlike last time, I've already written up all the posts! As previously, the main crux of these posts will be to compare and contrast the quite faithful newspaper adaptations with the typically more loosely adapted (or in some cases totally made up) films.

For those who need a refresher, or perhaps weren't even born yet those many years ago when I started this project, here are the first five posts in the series:

JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 1
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 2
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 3
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 4
JAMES BOND NEWSPAPER STRIPS PART 5

And with that, we'll reconvene next week to get to it. See you then!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled AVENGERS coverage for the annual "State of the Blog" address. And my friends, for the first time in years, I can report that things are looking great around here. Mind you, I'm still only doing one post a week. At this point, that seems unlikely to change for a while (but at the same time, I never say never). One a week seems to really work for me. It's manageable alongside my personal commitments and professional workload, not to mention my desire to occasionally read something for fun that I don't want to write about! I don't feel deadline pressure to get too much done when I'm doing posts at this frequency. All I need to do in order to stay on schedule is read and write about one single issue each week -- and to get ahead of schedule, I only need to read/write two posts a week and I've doubled my output!

Which is exactly what happened this past year -- I started reading the Bob Harras/Steve Epting AVENGERS somewhere around... May, maybe? And I was was so into it that I plowed through at a rate of several issues each week, until I was finished with it by the end of summer! That's more than fifty issues of the core title, plus a few annuals, mini-series, etc. -- all fully read, written up, and ready to post. Which means there will be absolutely no interruption to my posting schedule for well over a year at this point! And beyond that, I have also started the next long-term project to come after AVENGERS! I'm going a bit slower on this one, mainly because I have the luxury to do so -- but nonetheless, you heard right, folks -- it's the second day of 2023, and I'm already a few months into 2024 in terms of fully written posts. Such a massive cushion is unheard of in the history of this blog.

Now again, I've found that one post a week works great for me, but given how far ahead of schedule I am, don't be surprised to see some posts come back on Fridays, as well. Probably just randomly here and there, when something strikes my fancy and I don't want to wait a year or two for it to trickle out as part of the ongoing schedule!

At some point in these New Year's posts, I usually do a recap of the year in review. But given that I've kept to exactly one post a week this year for the first time ever (seriously; check out the sidebar -- precisely fifty-two posts in 2022!), it's fairly linear and straightforward. We opened the year by continuing up our look at INVADERS, and that took us halfway through the year. Subsequently it was a very brief excursion into the world of SKULL THE SLAYER, followed by another short run -- the 1980s TRANSFORMERS manga. Which brings us to the ongoing AVENGERS by Bob Harras, Steve Epting, & Tom Palmer run. And next year's year in review will be solely that run, unless I do manage to crank out a few Friday posts over the next fifty-two weeks!

One last order of business... though I discontinued THE UNBOXING (first informally in 2021 and then defnitively at the start of this year) due to the simple fact that I wasn't buying as many trade paperbacks and hardcovers, I did note last year that I would turn it into an annual feature as part of these year in review posts. So here we go! It was another very light year... and as I've said in the past, it's not for lack of interest on my part. While my "runs I'd like to own as hardcovers" list had shrunk considerably over the years, there are still a number of books I would buy if Marvel (or in some cases, DC) would just release them! But that's a topic for its own post someday. For now, here are the Marvel titles that I procured over the past year:

• AVENGERS: THE GATHERING OMNIBUS: Not much to say about this leadoff volume here, since I'm covering its contents on a weekly basis as we speak. But picking it up way back at the beginning of 2021 with a Christmas gift card was sort of the impetus for blogging about the run it collects!
• MOON KNIGHT OMNIBUS volume 2: I can't get enough Doug Moench/Bill Sienkiewicz MOON KNIGHT, and this volume concludes their run on the character. I've been a Moon Knight fan since I discovered him circa 1999 or so, but really only of the material written by his creator, Moench. So don't expect me to pick up the MARC SPECTOR: MOON KNIGHT Omnibus, reprinting Chuck Dixon's nineties take on the character, when it releases later this year (but I likely would buy it in Epic Collection format).
• THUNDERBOLTS OMNIBUS vol. 2: Last year around this time, I revealed that I had Unboxed the first book in this series. Now it's book 2, which came along earlier in the year. And next year I'll be raving about volume 3, which is coming in a few months! It's no secret that I love late nineties Marvel, and the tandem of the Kurt Busiek/George Pérez AVENGERS and Busiek/Fabian Nicieza/Mark Bagley THUNDERBOLTS is the cream of that crop for me. So the fact that Marvel has fast-tracked THUNDERBOLTS, reprinting the entirety of the classic series in three books across three years, is like a dream come true for me. My only complaint is that it took them so long to get around to it!
• WARLOCK BY JIM STARLIN GALLERY EDITION: I'm not exaggerating when I say that I adore this material. I've quintuple dipped on it over the years. I bought it as reprint comics in the nineties, when I first got into Starlin's "Infinity" stuff. I bought the Marvel Masterworks volume in the 00s. I bought it in Omnibus format in 2019's THANOS WARS: INIFINTIY ORIGIN volume. And now, this year, I purchased it again in the extra-oversized Gallery Edition format! Starlin's WARLOCK is, and ever shall be, one of my all-time favorite comic runs. This is the first and, so far, only Gallery Edition I own, but I plan to pick up one more later this year: the SPIDER-MAN BY JEPH LOEB & TIME SALE volume, which will reprint the duo's SPIDER-MAN: BLUE in that special format (and this one will be a triple-dip for me on the single best Spider-Man mini-series ever made).

And beyond those, I'm still collecting Fantagraphics' Carl Barks Disney Library books, with two volumes, ISLAND IN THE SKY and BALLOONATICS, making it onto my shelf this past year.

Thus we reach the end of our recap/look forward. Next week it's back to the Avengers, smack in the middle of "Operation: Galactic Storm", as we continue into 2023!

AVENGERS BY BOB HARRAS, STEVE EPTING, & TOM PALMER

We spent the majority of this year (and going way back to mid-2021, in fact) in Marvel's 1970s, so I was thinking it's time to skip ahead a couple decades to an era I've surprisingly visited very rarely around here, considering it's when I did the majority of my formative comic book reading: the dreaded 1990s! And specifically, we're going to look at a run which is weirdly near and dear to me, though I've read precious little of it: The multi-year AVENGERS saga by writer Bob Harras, penciler Steve Epting, and mainstay inker Tom Palmer.

See, when I was a lad in middle school (around 13-15 years old), these were the Avengers: Black Knight wielding a lightsaber, Sersi dressed in red and black, Crystal in white and black, clean-shaven Hercules, and more -- and all wearing matching leather bomber jackets! I didn't read the AVENGERS series, but I saw this group in things like Jim Starlin's INFINITY trilogy, the X-Men's "Bloodties" crossover, and more. And my best friend back then did read the book, so I would peruse issues at his house -- and I liked what I saw! Not enough to start reading the title myself, but that was most likely simply due to the fact that my limited comic budget was tied up mostly with Spider-Man and the X-Men.

Still, I never forgot this run. (I even told Bob Harras how much I had enjoyed what I'd seen of it when I met him at the San Diego Comic-Con in 1999!) And back at the beginning of the year, I used a Christmas gift card to buy the AVENGERS: THE GATHERING Omnibus, which I had regretted passing on when it was first released in 2020. On top of that, I've also picked up digital editions of the Epic Collections covering this run in various Comixology/Amazon sales in recent years. So I'm pretty well armed at this point to delve into the Avengers of the nineties.

SKULL THE SLAYER

Back in my look at INVADERS #4, I called out a needless and convoluted plug for Marvel's SKULL THE SLAYER series. Then, in the comments to that post, I considered reading SKULL next after I finished with INVADERS. It is, after all, only an eight-issue series (plus a 2-part finale in MARVEL TWO-IN-ONE), and I unboxed the trade paperback collection way back in 2015, but I've never touched it since. So, why not? I've long had a curiosity about this series. Three writers over the span of eight issues feels like a trainwreck in the making (and yet is somehow not at all surprising coming out of 1970s Marvel), but there's something about the series' premise -- a puply, "Doc Savage" type having adventures in the mysterious Bermuda Triangle -- that speaks to me.

At nine or ten weeks (I'm not sure yet if I'll do the TWO-IN-ONE issues separately or as one single post), this will take us up into mid-late September, and serve to wrap up a solid year-plus of seventies Marvel (INVADERS began last September, and SONS OF THE TIGER before that started in May). After that, we'll move into something non-Marvel for the autumn months, and then I've got something very, very big planned for the remainder of the year, into 2023 -- and probably even beyond.

Be here next week as Skull's adventures begin!

Available from Amazon.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Hey, gang! We're taking a week off from the Invaders for my annual "Year in Review"/"State of the Blog" post -- and I have to say, things are looking pretty good around here at the moment. Though it seems like a lifetime ago, when the year started, I was still watching the first season of AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES. That took us all the way through March, and I somehow managed to get back to my old schedule of posts on Mondays and Fridays for that entire first quarter of the year! The Fridays brought us looks at a few DRAGON BALL SUPER volumes, followed by Marck Schultz's XENOZOIC TALES and some European comics (namely, RIC HOCHET, MISS OCTOBER, and BOB MORANE) -- all of which can be found on the Manga Reviews and Miscellaneous Reviews pages linked at right. From there, it was back to one post a week for the rest of the year, with a focus on 1970s Marvel: the Sons of the Tiger and White Tiger, followed by the still-ongoing INVADERS.

And like I said, I think things are looking good at the moment. I actually finished the INVADERS series a few months ago, and that backlog of posts is scheduled to go up all the way through June. I think this is the furthest ahead I've been on the blog since the end of 2016, when I had the entirety of Frank Miller's DAREDEVIL, in the queue before the year even began! I've even finished and moved beyond the project that will follow INVADERS at this point, though I won't give it away just yet.

So what this means is that, at some point, Friday posts will return again. i don't know exactly when, and I'm not sure I'll keep up Fridays all year, but I think I can at least manage a full quarter of them like I did last year.

Unfortunately, there was one casualty to my posting schedule this year. I've quietly discontiued The Unboxing. I did one in January, and then before I knew it, I realized it was October and I hadn't done another! As I've mentioned before, this was due to a couple of reasons: the first being that, quite simply, Marvel hasn't put out that many books I've wanted lately! Yeah, I still grab things in digital sales at Comixology, but even that happens less frequently than it used to.

And as far as physical volumes? Well, I've basically quit trade paperbacks at this point, preferring to "Omnibus wait", since nearly everything I'm after reaches that prestige format eventually. And I'll admit that I did Unbox a few Omnibuses this year -- specifically, for those who might be curious, AMAZING SPIDER-MAN volume 5, CAPTAIN AMERICA BY DAN JURGENS, THUNDERBOLTS volume 1, and UNCANNY X-MEN volume 4 -- but I just never found the time to photograph them and write up posts.

(And by the way, for those who are into such things, watch for the THUNDERBOLTS OMNIBUS vol. 2, coming in just a month or so! I love that Marvel is fast-tracking this long-overdue series.)

Huh. My year in review turned into a mini-Unboxing all its own. Heck, maybe that's what I'll do from now on: one annual Unboxing every January, to cover whatever I acquired throughout the year. It's just crazy enough to work...!

Anyway, that about sums it up, folks! Watch for our manga announcement this Friday, and then we'll return to our regularly scheduled INVADERS coverage one week from today!

THE INVADERS

CAPTAIN AMERICA AND BUCKY! THE SUB-MARINER! THE ORIGINAL HUMAN TORCH & TORO! During the darkest hours of World War Two, these five heroes have banded together as THE INVADERS--to battle the Axis Powers to the death, in the name of freedom!

Having just wrapped up one Marvel run from the seventies, I think I'd like to stay in that decade a bit longer, to examine a series that's been on my radar for some time: THE INVADERS, by Roy Thomas, Frank Robbins, and more.

The Invaders is one of those groups where, at least for me, the legend is greater than any actual knowledge. I know the basics: a team of World War II era characters, banded together for a team book in the seventies to tell retroactive stories set during "the Big One". I've seen many Invaders flashbacks and reunions over the decades, but I've never read so much as a single issue of the original series.*

But I've always had an interest in it. Though I tend to be a little trepidatious about jumping into any series written by Roy Thomas, who I love as an idea guy/plotter but whose overblown purple prose I often can't handle as a scripter, I still want to give this series a try. The fact that it's drawn by Frank Robbins doesn't hurt, either -- as I mentioned when I looked at Batman in the Seventies a couple years ago, I really like Robbins' quirky, cartoony style.

So, armed with INVADERS CLASSIC: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION Volume 1 and Volume 2 (which I unboxed here years ago, in July and December of 2014 (!), I'm about to go through the saga of the Invaders on issue at a time, beginning right here next Monday.

---

*Okay, that's not entirely true. I owned one single, solitary issue of INVADERS as a child -- but I never read it! I think I got it before I could read, and just didn't pay it any mind in my collection over the subsequent years. Honestly, I have no idea how, at that age, I wound up with a comic that had been published a few years before I was born. It couldn't have been a hand-me-down, because there was no one to hand it down to me! Anyway, at some point, I lost it. I do remember which issue it was though, so I'll call it out when we get to it.

THE SONS OF THE TIGER

Okay, this is something I've wanted to read for decades. Back when I was a kid, Marvel used to cram every year's annuals with backup stories. In Spider-Man's case, that usually meant short tales starring characters in his orbit. Not necessarily always members of his supporting cast, but sometimes other heroes he ran into, but who didn't have their own series. One of these was the Prowler, who featured in two or three annual backups in the late eighties/early nineties. And one of the Prowler backups, "Jaded Perceptions" from 1993's SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN ANNUAL #13, featured the Prowler's brother, Abe Brown, who co-owned a martial arts dojo with his friend Lin Sun -- and who, it turned out, had been a hero-type himself years earlier, alongside a group of his fellow martial artists.*

See, the Prowler's real name, long establsihed since Stan Lee and John Romita introduced him in the sixties, was Hobie Brown. And in the seventies, Marvel published a serial in their DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU magazine called "The Sons of the Tiger". (Bear with me here; this will all make sense in the end. I hope.) That serial starred a trio of martial artists: Abe Brown, Lin Sun, and Bob Diamond. So eventually, circa 1989, somebody at Marvel realized that they had this character named Hobie Brown and they had this character named Abe Brown. Both were black men. They had the same last name. Why not make them brothers?

Yeah, it seems weird on its face. Brown isn't exactly an uncommon last name that would make you think two characters of the same ethnicity sharing it simply had to be related. But if that hadn't happened, I never would've learned about the Sons of the Tiger. That story I mentioned, "Jaded Perceptions", features Abe and Lin explaining their backstory from DEADLY HANDS OF KUNG FU. And I don't know why, but twelve-year-old me just thought the Sons sounded really cool. Three martial artists with magical jade amulets doing kung-fu on the mean streets of San Francsico and New York (among other places) -- what's not to love? (It should be noted that I have long been a fan of "exploitation" cinema, but apparently I was a fan of it in comic book form before I even knew what it was!)

RIC HOCHET & MISS OCTOBER

I've delved into the realm of various European comics once in a while over the past couple years, starting with MUSE in 2016, then BARBARELLA in 2017, then GYPSY and RAPTORS in late 2018/early 2019, and finally LADY S. in 2020. (All of these can be found at the bottom of my MISCELLANEOUS REVIEWS page under "European Comics".)

I'm keeping the tradition alive this year with two shortish series (at least as far as English translations go; I can't find whether either of these goes beyond the volumes Comixology carries in my native language): three volumes of the Franco-Belgian RIC HOCHET (or, more properly, RIC HOCHET'S LATEST INVESTIGATIONS, as I've learned this is a twenty-first century revival of a series that ran for many years beginning in 1955), and the French MISS OCTOBER, a four-volume set. Both series are set in the 1960s, and I love period pieces from around that era (basically anything from, say the '30s to the '60s is right up my alley) -- so I'm pretty excited to check them out.

I'll do one volume a week beginning next Friday, so this should take us up through the end of April. After that, I'm considering something "Marvel"ous, but we'll see if that's still my mindset in seven weeks!

For those who wish to follow along, all volumes of both series are available digitally on Amazon: RIC HOCHET's LATEST INVESTIGATIONS | MISS OCTOBER

(And hey, if you can read French, you'll find digital editions of a bunch of the original RIC HOCHET stories on Amazon as well! It'd be cool if some company were to translate those as well...)

XENOZOIC

So I've had this on my bookshelf for probably four or five years now, always intending to get to it, but never quite managing to crack it open. It was something I found when I was really getting into newspaper adventure strips. Though not a strip itself, it does have that "adventure strip feel", being drawn in a realistic style, and in black-and-white. From what I've gathered, XENOZOIC TALES was an independant comic that begin in 1987 and ran up until 1996, releasing a whopping fourteen issues in that timeframe. This seems to have been the thing for indies back then; at least I recall from my look at THE ROCKETEER a few years back that Dave Stevens released an even smaller amount of material over a longer period of time!

But in any case, it was the artwork of creator Mark Schultz that first attracted me to XENOZOIC TALES, then when I learned a bit about the premise, I was totally sold. The funny thing is, in restrospect I realize that I was tangentially familiar with this series going back many years. Back in 1993, CBS aired a Saturday morning cartoon called CADILLACS AND DINOSAURS, and Marvel published an adaptation of same -- and as it turns out, CADILLACS was itself an adaptation of Schultz's world (if not his exact stories) to small-screen animation!

Now, I admit that I never actually watched the series or read the comic, but I was at least aware of them. And now I plan to take a look at the source material! Over the next few weeks, we'll cover the entirety of XENOZOIC TALES, all collected in a nice, sturdy paperback volume by Flesk Publications a number of years ago . So be here next Friday as we journey to the post-apocalyptic thirtieth century for the adventures of Jack "Cadillac" Tenrec and Hannah Dundee as they make their way through the savage world of tomorrow!

(This is where I'd normally drop in an Amazon link for anyone interested in checking the book out, but unfortunately, it appears to be out of print and quite pricey at this point. However it looks like a new printing is forthcoming in March and is available for pre-order directly from the publisher, so if my upcoming posts tickle your fancy, you can at least pick it up afterward!)

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As is tradition, the time is upon us for the annual Year in Review post, with a glance at what's upcoming. And I don't think I need to mention that it's been an... interesting and unusual year in the real world. But fortunately for all of us, this blog is about as far divorced from reality as is possible! So with that in mind, let's recap the past year's worth of posts.

It's been no secret that I had trouble keeping up my normal twice-weekly posting schedule beginning the middle of 2019. So 2020 started out with (mostly) one post per week, on Mondays -- and as I try to do every year, I opened things up with some manga, looking at DRAGON BALL SUPER and a couple of other DB items of note. That was followed with a "Springtime Grab Bag" consisting of a European comic series called LADY S and an assortment of items from DC, Dynamite, Dark Horse (by way of Marvel), and IDW, running a gamut of characters such as Conan, Red Sonja, Wonder Woman, He-Man and the ThunderCats, and the Transformers and the crew of the starship Enterprise.

Then we looked at Joe Casey's AVENGERS mini-series from the mid-to-late-00s, EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES I and II, and AVENGERS: THE ORIGIN. After that, we stuck with Marvel, but went a different direction, examining several years worth of Spider-Man newspaper strips by Stan Lee and a variety of artistic collaborators.

The newspaper strip motif continued as we moved into the adventures of SECRET AGENT X-9 by Alex Raymond, and then checked in on that strip again decades later after it had become SECRET AGENT CORRIGAN by Archie Goodwin and Al Williamson. That strip wrapped up last month, which led into a Monday hiatus for the final few weeks of the year as I geared up for 2021.

And around the same time I started looking at X-9, I also finally brought back Friday posts, looking for the first time ever at a TV series on an episode-by-episode basis -- and in keeping with the subject matter of this blog, it was a comic book-inspired show, AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES. In fact, that run of reviews is still ongoing (we haven't even finished season one yet), and should contnue well into 2021. But beginning next week, when we look at the comic book tie-in mini-series, I'm moving it to Mondays for the rest of the run, which should free up Fridays for other posts, assuming I can keep the twice-weekly schedule going.

As far as that schedule goes, my plan is to start off with a repeat of the year we just looked back on: that is to say, we'll continue DRAGON BALL SUPER and get through all volumes available to date, which should take us into February -- and then I want to look at another European series. I have a few in my digital backlog, so I just need to choose one (or maybe two). After that it will be springtime, and I think I want to get back to looking at a comic series issue-by-issue, after more than a year of not doing so. But rather than a specific run from an ongoing title, I'm thinking maybe I'll just cover the entirety of a series that only ran a couple years before being cancelled. I have a few candidates in mind, all Marvel, but I haven't settled on which to look at just yet.

After that, who can say? Though my time is more limited than ever before, I still enjoy running this blog, and I look forward to another year of whatever I wind up posting about. Thanks to everyone who reads along, and I hope you'll stick with me as we continue!

AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES

And now for something a little different! I'm enjoying my dip into the newspaper strip realm of Secret Agent X-9/Corrigan, but I know that sort of thing isn't everyone's cup of tea. A lot of people (probably most people) read this blog for superhero comic book posts. The Spider-Man strip sort of fit into that mold, but X-9 definitely doesn't -- and in the past, when I looked at things outside the purview of superhero comics, I was typically putting up two posts a week, so you still had the super-stuff on Mondays and the "grab bag" stuff on Fridays. That hasn't been the case for some time now, but I've decided to try and get back to two posts a week in a fashion that feels more "doable" to me than all comics, all the time.

I've tossed around the idea of posting about a TV show for years, but it never really happened. However, I'm at a place now where I think I can manage it. And, for a few reasons, I've decided that my first trip to TV-land around these parts will be via one of my all-time favorite animated series, AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES (not to be confused with the Joe Casey-written mini-series that I wrote about here a few months back). For one thing, the advent of Disney Plus has the series right at my fingertips, on whatever screen I'd like to use. For another, it turns out that next week (September 22nd, to be exact) marks the ten-year anniversary* of the series' premiere on Disney XD! (Technically, that would be the debut of the "microseries" that preceded the series proper, but I'm not gonna split hairs here.)

When EMH premiered way back when, it seemed to be Marvel's way to introduce kids to the Avengers before the big upcoming movie. Remember, back in the fall of 2010, there were only three entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: IRON MAN, IRON MAN 2, and THE INCREDIBLE HULK. THOR was still half a year away, and CAPTAIN AMERICA was slated for the following summer, with AVENGERS still nearly two years in the future. But Marvel Studios was already planting seeds in their films, and a TV tie-in would be a fine way to get the characters out into the hearts and minds of a major chunk of the movies' audience.

SPIDER-MAN: THE FURTHER NEWSPAPER STRIPS

Nearly three years ago, I read and posted about the first four years of the syndicated Spider-Man newspaper strip by Stan Lee and John Romita, by way of IDW's Library of American Comics reprints. Well, I finished up that run and even though I had another volume on my bookshelf, I decided -- at least for the time -- to call it quits with the newspaper version of the Web-Slinger.

Since then, I've picked up the next couple volumes in IDW's series, bringing us to a total of five books -- and I've decided that now is the time to crack them open and continue with Spidey's funny-page adventures. I'm going to run through all three of these books, which will take us from January of 1981 through 1986, and feature Lee working with his brother, Larry Lieber, plus newspaper strip veteran Fred Kida, as well as TRANSFORMERS TV series character designer Floro Dery, on art.

Unlike the first run of strips we looked at, where I was familiar with some of the storylines from a book I had as a child, this material will be nearly entirely new to me -- I believe only one full storyline from this era was presented in THE BEST OF SPIDER-MAN, along with one storyline that had only its Sunday strips collected. So I look forward to seeing where Lee took Spider-Man's adventures following Romita's departure.

Incidentally, I remember that our local paper picked up the Spider-Man strip somewhere around 1991 or so, and -- I'll be blunt -- I found it pretty lame, compared with the comics of the time, in terms of both story and art. But those are the memories of a teenager reacting to material that was published a decade after the stuff we're about to read. I don't know if my thoughts on the strip in the early nineties was right or wrong, but at least as late as his final few story arcs with John Romita, Stan was still his usual entertaining self (even if some of the plots were a little iffy).

I guess we'll find out soon exactly what to make of these stories, as I intend to spend the next several weeks on them. How many weeks? I'm not exactly sure. On my first go-round, I looked at two story arcs per week, and the two books took eleven weeks to cover. Now we're looking at three books, so going at the same rate, this could very well take us more than four months.

It all begins Monday, Web-heads -- be there!

LADY S

As mentioned in December's Unboxing, late last year I picked up the first five volumes of a European series called LADY S. I'm not sure exactly what prompted me to get it, other than a bargain price and some intriguing covers. It looked like a political spy series of some sort, and I liked the art style, so I went for it.

And now the time has come to read it! Beginning Monday, at a pace of two books per week, we'll check out those five installments (and if I like them enough, I'll probably buy the sixth and final volume as well to cover that in the final post).

...and usually I have more to say in these announcements, but since I have literally no idea what to expect from this series, that's all I got. See you on Monday for LADY S vol. 1: HERE'S TO SUZIE and vol. 2: LATITUDE 59 DEGREES NORTH!

DRAGON BALL SUPER

(And a couple related items.)

The beginning of the year is manga time around here, and in 2020 I've decided to look at the latest iteration of a series that's near and dear to me: DRAGON BALL. I think I got into DRAGON BALL Z somewhere around early college, when it aired weekday afternoons on Cartoon Network's Toonami programming block. Not too long after that, I started reading the manga upon which the series was based -- first "scanlations" found online, and later official releases from Viz. It was in the manga format that I fell in love with the original DRAGON BALL, which followed the main characters as kids and teenagers, and I still prefer that iteration to this day over "Z".

But right now, we aren't talking about the original series or its anime adaptation. Because in recent years, after a couple decades of very little new material, there's been a DRAGON BALL resurgence in Japan, with tons of new content which has naturally found its way to America as well. It started in 2013 with a theatrical film called BATTLE OF GODS, which was followed in 2015 by a sequel, RESURRECTION "F". also in 2015, a new TV series debuted: DRAGON BALL SUPER -- and its earliest storylines adapted the two films into a serialized format before moving along into new material.

Alongside SUPER, a new DRAGON BALL manga series with the same title premiered... and that, dear reader, is what we'll be looking at here over the next few weeks. The SUPER manga follows the same general plot as the show, but with some tweaks here and there. It's written by the series' creator, Akira Toriyama, with artwork from Toyotarou. (The TV show also follows a general outline from Toriyama, though I understand the two series have diverged here and there in certain ways, and the manga has now passed the anime to move into original territory.)

But! Before we jump into DB SUPER, we're going to make one quick detour to check out a manga Toriyama wrote and drew in 2013, JACO THE GALACTIC PATROLMAN. I'm not sure anyone expected it at the time, but the series' title character would become a recurring presence in SUPER, so that seems like a good place to kick things off.

So -- one week from today. DRAGON BALL. Be there.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

(A couple days early...)

It's time again -- already -- for that annual tradition where I put up a combination "Year in Review"/"Looking to the Future" post. And this year, there's not all that much to review. I had started off with some pretty high hopes, but it became evident very early on that I just wasn't meeting my posting deadlines like I used to. I began my Mondays this year by finishing off the DC post-CRISIS Superman and Wonder Woman runs that had filled all of 2018. Then, immediately after, I stayed in the DC Universe for Batman in the Seventies, which filled up Mondays for the remainder of the year (ending just last week).

But it was the Friday posts, the "grab bag" sort of stuff that I do to supplement the usually much longer Monday series, where I fell short. I began the year as always, with a manga series -- in this case, GUNSMITH CATS: BURST, the sequel to GUNSMITH CATS, which I had looked at in early 2018. After that I jumped into the world of European comics with RAPTORS, and then it was a mixed bag of Marvel stuff with CAPTAIN AMERICA: SENTINEL OF LIBERTY, SPIDER-MAN: LIFELINE, CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE 1940s NEWSPAPER STRIP, and X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN vol. 1 and vol. 2.

And then -- things fell apart. I announced I was taking a brief hiatus, which I called my "Spring Break", with the intention to return on Fridays over the summer. That never happened. Come August, I came clean and stated that I had nothing in the pipeline for the fall, either. Life and other hobbies had eaten into my blogging time to a considerable extent, and while I was able to keep up with my Monday posts, that was the best I could manage.

Which brings us to today. Monday posts will continue as usual, but for now, Fridays will remain the empty void they have become over the past several months, aside from things like announcements, The Unboxing, or whatever else may pop into my mind. This is a little frustrating for me because Fridays used to be my way to read and post about other smaller things when I was in the middle of doing longer runs on Mondays. However at this this point, I'm thinking that what I may do is alternate -- start into a long run, but break periodically for something else before getting back to it.

At any rate, I intend to begin the year with a manga series, as has become tradition, and then I'm going to go into some European comics after that, around the beginning of March. Following those, I will jump into my next long-term Monday series, and we'll see how far it takes us. So -- one week from today comes our first announcement of the year (the manga series), and then the following Monday, we'll dive right into the first volume. I may have drastically cut down on my output, but I don't intend to go away anytime soon... so thanks, as always, for sticking around and continuing to follow along with whatever random stuff I happen to read.