Year-End Meta 2020: Additions, Corrections, Updates & Announcements

Cleaning up loose ends from the last year and making some announcements about the next.

Reading Comics at the Threshold: A Round Table on Letter Columns & Other Comics Paratexts (Part 2)

Part two of our round table on comics paratexts looks at ads, peritexts, and disruptive backmatter.

Brief Comic Book Reviews (Dec 19, 2018 to Jan 16, 2019)

Brief review of comics released between (mostly) December 19, 2018 to January 16 – including Runaways #16, Bitter Root #3, and Fantastic Four #5.

Brief Reviews of Comics (July 4 to 25, 2018)

Brief review of comics released in July 2018, including Astonisher #9, Captain America #1, The Quantum Age #1 and Paper Girls #22.

Brief Comics Reviews (March 7-21, 2018)

Brief reviews of comics that came out between March 7 and 21, including Marvel Two-in-One #4, Black Bolt #11, and the Mighty Thor #705.

Girl, You’ll Be an Invisible Woman Soon: Defining Serial Characters

Thinking through how readers conceptualize a character and the degree to which such a characterization can be independent of how the character acts in the actual stories she appears in.

“Lo, There Shall Be An Ending:” Meditations on the End of the Fantastic Four

Marvel Comics hasn’t published a Fantastic Four title in over a year, and its absence marks a serious lack of imagination.

“Yo Soy Yancy Street!” El Thing About Place & Identity

A recent Marvel story connecting Groot to Puerto Rican culture via a visit with the Thing to Marvel’s Lower East Side analog, Yancy Street got me thinking about place and identity.

Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Derivative Character as Meta-Comic

At the heart of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk is a alternately critical and nostalgic concern with continuity and rupture in serialized superhero comic books.