FEBRUARY 2025

Happy belated New Year, everyone! Today is the first day of the rest of this blog's life. I'm still trying to figure out the new format, but at present I think I'm going to go with sort of an "Items of Interest" approach with little mini-headlines. For example...

A BOLD NEW ERA CALLS FOR A BOLD NEW BANNER!
Which is what I'm working on my spare time at the moment. I've been using those ol' John Byrne corner box heads from the late seventies/early eighties for quite a few years now, but I feel like it's time to retire them and sort of... personalize things a bit more. See, I don't talk about it all that much around here, but I like to draw. And so I figured maybe the banner should reflect that. To that end, I'm doing brand-new corner box heads in my own style, which will adorn the new banner once they're finished. Here's a sneak peek at the penciled versions of some of them:

(You'll note that I've started with the "unafilliated" characters and the Fantastic Four plus FF-adjacent characters. But there are more coming! I'm working on the Avengers right now.)

Now when I say "my style," I should clarify what I mean. I generally draw more cartoony than this, but I want to keep with the general aesthetic I've had here since the beginning. So cartoony is out, at least for this project, as I utilize my seldom-employed "super-hero" style -- which looks vastly different from my "everyday" drawings, and which takes about three times longer to boot! You may be able to tell that I'm obviously heavily influenced by Byrne (as well as some of my other favorites; Alan Davis and Mark Bagley top of the list), so ultimately what you see up top will not look all that drastically different from what you're used to. The main difference will be that I drew it myself!

But the other difference is that I'm changing up some of the looks and characters you'll see up there. I thought, after so long with the Bronze Age dominating the banner, that perhaps it's time I presented this blog adorned with the stars of "my" Marvel -- which is sort of a mix of eras. So you'll see the X-Men of the nineties, Avengers of various eras, some characters (chiefly Power Man, Iron Fist, and Moon Knight) who had their heydays in the seventies and early eighties, and some characters very much of the period when I read Marvel religiously in my teens, such as the Scarlet Spider, "Professor" Hulk, and the Thunderbolts. It'll be eclectic, but I think it will nicely represent my ideal or "iconic" Marvel Universe. I'll go into more detail when the banner is finished and published.

In other news...

WHAT HAVE I BEEN READING LATELY?
This site was always, first and foremost, about examining comics, graphic novels, and the like. And just because I've decided to retire from writing long-term in-depth posts about same, doesn't mean that I've stopped reading them! So as I put up these monthly-ish posts, I'm going to try to mention things I've read lately. We'll start with a tome I finished a while back: FLASH GORDON VOLUME 4: THE STORM QUEEN OF VALKIR from Titan Books. This installment picks up where my Flash Gordon review of a number of years past ended. Creator Alex Raymond has left the strip, turning artistic duties over to his former assistant, Austin Briggs. Scripter Don Moore remains aboard.

This was an odd one. For those who read along with my Flash posts way back when, you might recall that when Raymond departed, all seemed well for our hero and his friends. Ming the Merciless had been vanquished some time earlier, and more recently, Flash had also defeated a new warlord named Brazor to restore peace yet again to Mongo. Thus the next volume, which collects all of Briggs' run on the Sunday strips, begins with a bit of a clean slate, and an odd status quo -- Flash is the president of Mongo.

You may be wondering, isn't there someone more qualified to be president, like maybe Prince Barin and/or his wife, the reformed daughter of Ming, Princess Aura? When we last saw them, they were indeed leading a council that ruled over Mongo following Ming's overthrow. But Barin and Aura are nowhere to be seen in these stories. At all. They were regular recurring cast members for years while Raymond was on the strip. True, they'd drop out of sight for (sometimes very long) stretches at at a time while Flash went off his various expeditions, but they always came back. Yet here, in a run of four years, we never see or even hear of them once. It's bizarre, especially considering the original scripter is still on board!

So instead we have President Flash ruling Mongo and battling the latest warlord to challenge the peace: this time, it's Ming's heretofore unknown son, Kang the Cruel. Kang is the regular antagonist through Briggs' full run, though there are many stories interspersed between his run-ins with Flash. Stories in which Flash and Dale find themselves in strange lands, where strange princesses fall immediately in love with the dashing Flash. I guess even with a new artist, some things never change!

In the end, Flash defeats Kang and once again restores peace to Mongo, and continues on as president. Oh, and Professor Zarkov, as always, drops in and out of the story, frequently disappearing just long enough that you think the creators might have forgotten his existence, until suddenly reappearing.

Like I said, it's kind of odd, and it's just a long rehash; four more years repeating everything Alex Raymond did during his decade on the strip. I get that newspaper strips were disposable entertainment; you read your daily paper and threw it away, and I get that there would always be new readers who might have missed all this stuff the first time around. And further, I get that Raymond's run was a full ten years long, and Moore's is four or so. But nonetheless, the blatant reptition is kind of crazy! You'd think they'd at least try to do something different now and then.

ANYTHING ELSE?
For now, I don't think so. I'm easing into the new format here, so I'm going to keep this post fairly brief. (This was brief?!) Next month, I think I'll have more to talk about, so I hope you'll join me!

I BOUGHT A FONT

Typically in my amateur graphic design endeavors, I use whatever free fonts I can find out in the world. Blambot is one of my favorite sites for this; they have a bunch of great freeware options to choose from, and I browse their wares often. But I've never felt the need or desire to actually purchase a license for one of their pay fonts until recently, when I stumbled across Might Makes Right while browsing their site. It's a font created to mimic the bombastic style of Bronze Age lettering, and I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.

Image via Blambot.

So I bought it. $25.00, plus a 10% off coupon to make it $22.50 -- and I couldn't be more satisfied with the purchase!

Now at this point you may have noticed all the crazy colorful blurbs that appeared up and down the blog's two side columns earlier this week, and you've probably deduced that the above is my long-winded way of explaining that I used Might Makes Right to create most of them. After updating the masthead over the New Year, I decided to go one step further and renovate the entire blog. It now looks the way I always kind of hoped it could look in my head, but was never sure I could pull off. There's now some more color in this thing, which I've long wanted, and I even found space for a few more John Byrne heads (including a certain Trinity at right, to finally give this place some DC representation)!

Oh, and while most of this stuff is intentionally trying to evoke the Silver and Bronze Ages of comics, the "Table of Contents" at the upper right is a deliberate attempt to homage Marvel's "Comicraft Age" of the late nineties (though since Comicraft fonts are crazy expensive, it's done with some freebies that resemble Comicraft's work of that vintage).

(The links still work, too -- clicking on the "Written by..." box at the upper left will take you to my Blogger profile, clicking on the Twitter blurb below it will take you to my Twitter profile, and clicking on the Amazon ad at the upper right goes to Amazon.com.)

I'm extremely pleased with this new look, so hopefully it's appealing to readers, too. The idea was to make this blog look like the love child of John Costanza, Joe Rosen, and Richard Starkings, and I like to think I accomplished that goal with some degree of success. However I'm also happy to solicit feedback if anyone cares to drop in a comment below. If you like it, that's great -- but if you think it's too busy/cluttered, too colorful, whatever, I'd love to hear about it.

THE OLD MASTHEAD CHANGETH...

Merry Christmas, everyone! No review post today. I'm mostly taking this week and next off, aside from finishing up the Devil's Due G.I. JOE/TRANSFORMERS stuff on Friday. Sunday will bring a New Year's post, and next Monday and Friday will feature announcements for what's coming up to begin the year around here.

However, today -- in the spirit of the season -- I've decided to bequeath my blog a gift. But first, because I'm one of the most self-indulgent people you're likely to meet, a brief rundown of the history of the masthead up above. Back in 2013 when I started this thing up, it looked like this:

Pretty sparse and simple. The idea was to have the classic X-Men and Avengers corner boxes, with heads by John Byrne, on either side, with corner boxes from several of my favorite comic book runs in a row beneath -- or, in two cases, boxes from runs I wasn't necessarily huge on, but which were considered pretty important/iconic (those would be the seventies HULK, which I've read none of, and Byrne's FANTASTIC FOUR, which I've read but have never been blown away by).

NEW HEADER

Spruced up the ol' blog header last night, to make it look both a little less plain and a little more like a Marvel comic masthead that might accompany the various corner boxes I use for decoration. I think it turned out pretty nicely.

For those who are curious, the letters in "NOT A" are repurposed and rearranged from the words "GIANT SIZE" on an old Marvel cover from the seventies (the "O" was created from the "G"), while the words "HOAX" and "DREAM" are typed in BadaBoom and DamnNoisyKids, respectively -- both of which are free fonts available from the good people at BlamBot. The "Matthew Blogging Group" is of course a reference to my own name.

For posterity, if anyone cares, a comparison between the old, in retrospect lame, header, and the spiffy new one: