Comics are a lot like life. Sometimes you feel like you’re on cloud nine, swinging through the world without a care in the world. Kinda like Spider-Man. Sometimes you feel like you’re the Good Lord’s personal cat toy. Also kinda like Spider-Man! And sometimes? Sometimes things are so screwy and tangled up that the only solution is to hack through the metaphorical knot with a metaphorical sword. That was the big problem DC Comics was faced with in 1985. Decades of publishing had created a conundrum. Sales of comics had been declining since the 1950s.* Attracting new readership was difficult... Read More

Zack Snyder’s Justice League is streaming on HBO Max Second chances don’t come around too often. That’s just as true in the movie business as it is anywhere else.* For filmmaker Zack Snyder, his 2017 film Justice League seemed to be firmly in the rearview mirror. Can you blame him? The Marvel Cinematic Universe had producer Kevin Feige coordinating everything. The MCU made money — lots of it. Warner Bros. very quickly realized that a) they owned the rights to the DC comics characters and b) they also loved money. In short order, they rushed to create the competing DC Extended Universe.... Read More

We’re all scared. Can you blame us? There’s a pandemic cutting through every corner of the world. The guy who’s supposed to be in charge doesn’t appear to know what he’s doing. People are hoarding toilet paper, for God’s sake. As a species, as a country, and as individuals, we’re living in a time of great uncertainty, and it might feel like we’re going to hit bottom any minute. What are we supposed to do? You know who knows a little something about that? Ben Affleck. It wasn’t easy for him, growing up with a father who was an alcoholic and the eventual split that took place between... Read More

Movies make a promise. Good movies keep them. In one of the early scenes in John Wick, a dipstick gangster and his boys break into the home of a nobody. They beat the nobody, steal his car, and kill his dog. Just another day at the office, right? Not quite. The gangster’s father is a crime lord. He explains to his son that they just made an enemy of the most feared assassin alive. “John wasn’t exactly the boogeyman. He was the one you send to kill the f—ing boogeyman.” That scene sets up an expectation for the audience. It tells us: You just saw an absurdly cute... Read More

In the end, it’s all about the buy in. Maybe you can accept a grown man running around in an American flag costume smashing people in the face with an indestructible shield. Perhaps you absolutely can’t accept that, yet you’re okay with a Catholic married couple who are also ghost hunters. You might have a positive or negative reaction to a trailer. You might even hear just the premise of a film, and you make a split-second decision. It’s hard to say what we’ll accept when it comes to movies. My good friend Devila loudly and unapologetically scoffs whenever she... Read More

The age of the superhero arguably began in 1938,  when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman. Slightly less than a year later, Bob Kane and Bill Finger devised Batman.  Both characters have passed their 75th anniversaries, and both of them have appeared in pretty much every entertainment medium. They have changed a great deal over the years. We’ve seen iterations of Superman as a paternal authority figure, a socialist crusader, and a Soviet hero. We’ve seen Batman as a revenge-driven psychopath, a bloodthirsty vampire, and a pop art goofball. Like any timeless character,... Read More