How is Elektra suddenly "scarier" than Punisher and Wolverine?

According to this brief on Softonic about new Daredevil issues, Elektra takes out a whole villainous mob without killing them:

In Daredevil #6 and #7, Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett fold Elektra into this new Marvel run by making one thing immediately clear: she’s dangerous in a way that has nothing to do with piling up the highest body count. “Of Moles & Owls” doesn’t sell her as deadlier than the Punisher or Wolverine in the usual numbers game. What’s unnerving about her is something else. She’s so exact, so disciplined, so tactical that she cuts through Mister Negative’s Inner Demons and leaves every last one of them alive. That’s the real point. Elektra decides exactly how much damage gets done, and she never loses control of it.

The issues also have her outplaying multiple factions as she works to secure Wilson Fisk’s ledger during a Hell’s Kitchen war that pulls in Silvermane, Tombstone, Hammerhead’s goons, and the Inner Demons. It makes the city feel like a live-fire chessboard, with Elektra still thinking several moves ahead of everyone else on it. If you’ve been following the noir-leaning, street-level direction Daredevil has taken since Stephanie Phillips and Lee Garbett launched their run in March 2026, these issues are easy to recommend. Even if Elektra’s return reads more like a sharp cameo than a full-blown comeback, issue #8 is already lining up Mister Fear, a drug threat at Empire State University (E.S.U.), and more questions tied to Wilson Fisk’s ledger.

Unfortunately, that doesn't make the story immediately entertaining. There's plenty of other superheroines who could've been written doing the same thing too, like Wonder Woman, Jesse Quick, Spider-Woman, Donna Troy, Invisible Girl, Psylocke, and Kitty Pryde. All that matters is whether it's written well, and at Marvel today, it's much too late for that. Plus, what if it turns out the artwork in this DD run is as terrible as some of the past decade's offerings?

This brief also ignores that there were times when the Punisher refrained from killing in order to appease Spider-Man, and it's not like Wolverine was depicted killing in all instances either. So why does Softonic think this news is going to automatically impress anybody, especially when the article doesn't seem written on merit?

Spider-Man comics sadly can no longer define Marvel as they used to, because of PC and editorial mandates

A writer at ComicBook continues the site's unfortunate leanings towards tabloid superficiality, this time taking an almost hilariously superficial look at Spidey's history and whitewashing the mistakes made since the turn of the century. For example:

Villains are one of the most important parts of superhero comics; as they say, a hero is only as good as his enemies. Marvel has been the home to some amazing villains over the decades and if we’re being honest, the Wall-Crawler has some of the best antagonists out there. Spider-Man’s villains have been amazing from the start, animal-based gimmick villains who take the idea of “science gone wrong” that is so important to Peter Parker’s mythos and use it in novel ways. Villains have played a massive role in making Spider-Man as popular as he is. Spidey is constantly playing off his enemies and he needs to have villains that make for both exciting stories and great character interplay with the webslinging hero. Spider-Man books have proven Marvel’s most fertile ground for villains, with bad guys springing up that have changed comics forever. The Marvel Universe would be very different without his fantastic rosters of foes and not in a good way.

Umm, there's plenty of other Marvel series where formidable villains were created, and with talented writing to accompany them, an entertaining story could result. I love Spidey as much as the next person, but I'm not going to say no other Marvel comic produced villains as durable as those seen in Spidey's comics. Though I should remind that villains alone are not the reason to read such books, and shouldn't be placed on a higher level of appreciation than the heroes. And telling us heroes are only as good as their enemies is no substitute for merit-based writing.

Oh, and since we're on the subject, by the mid-80s, the Kingpin, who first appeared in Spidey around 1967, was starting to make more appearances in comics like Daredevil. Wilson Fisk may have begun as a Spidey adversary, but later on became more notable as a recurring villain in DD's stories. And Kraven the Hunter was later written committing suicide in 1987's "Kraven's Last Hunt" storyline, so it's not like all villains lasted forever at a time when Marvel had meaning. That said, they do cite supporting casts:

Supporting casts have been important since the beginning, when characters like Lois Lane, Perry White, Jimmy Olsen, and many more added some much-needed spice to superhero stories. Over the years, readers have come to expect amazing supporting casts from their favorite books, especially at Marvel. The House of Ideas has always showcased more human heroes, with the trials of their superhero life coloring their civilian lives, and the best example of a stellar supporting cast in the Marvel Universe comes from Spidey’s comics. We’ve gotten numerous best of all-time supporting characters from his books – Aunt May, Mary Jane, J. Jonah Jameson, Robbie Robertson, Harry Osborn, Ben Urich, Ned Leeds, Betty Brant, Liz Allen, and so many more – with the best of them showing why supporting casts are so important to superhero comics. Spidey’s supporting cast has added so much to his books, allowing creators to take the stories in directions they couldn’t have otherwise went. One of the main reasons you expect so much from Marvel supporting casts is that the Spider-Man comics have been spoiling readers with the best supporting cast in the business for decades.

Interesting they should bring this up, because if memory serves, J. Michael Straczynski made very little use out of the most notable recurring cast members in Spidey in his overrated 2001-07 run, and Mary Jane Watson was kicked to the curb nearly 2 decades ago, while all these propagandists waffled around, and, while it obviously wouldn't be something to be happy about doing, they said nothing about whether a boycott would be the best direction to take if that could help get the Spider-marriage restored, and any or all undeserving staff members dismissed from Marvel.

And what's this about more human heroes? That too was massively destroyed in the past quarter century or more, as heroes and co-stars actually had humanity stripped from them by ways of contrived writing, and having cynicism and other shoddy character traits forced upon them. IIRC, Marvel may have been trying to convince the audience to dislike Mary Jane by forcing an irritating personality upon her in 1999, and in the end, One More/Brand New Day really buried whatever convincing personalities Marvel once had for their casts. If the editors and writers wanted to turn MJ into a villainess for real, it's entirely possible they'd do it, and certainly came close with the shoddy story where she was forced into the Venom glop.

With the rise of cinematic superhero universes and geek culture, you’d assume that it’s easier than ever to become a comic fan, but this isn’t the case. Not every town has a comic store and that’s merely the first of some rather large hurdles you have to get over. Another rather large one is just how daunting comics can be to the average fan. Marvel Comics has some amazing gateway books, but even after reading those, it can be hard to pick out who to start with. Spider-Man, though, has proven to be one of the best characters to kick off your comic journey with. To begin with, he was given one of the greatest origins in comics, one that’s simple to understand and can be the catalyst for the best stories you can imagine. He’s an extremely relatable character – a guy with low self esteem using his powers to fight crime as his life falls apart around him is basically how everyone is living in 2026. His supporting cast makes you feel at home immediately. The Amazing Spider-Man is one of those books that is always among the first books that any comic fan buys, the perfect primer on why superhero comics so much fun to read.

In that case, why not recommend the Epic Collection archives collecting Spidey's adventures from the past century, or even the Omnibuses? If they believe only the newest items in stores matter, they're not serious about recommendations. Also, what's "relatable" about a character who made a deal with Mephisto in One More Day? And then, they even fawn over the Ultimate line, and the DEI propaganda it wound up emphasizing:

I have a friend who mostly only buys comics when he think they’re going to be “key issues” and I remember him being one of the first people to talk to me about the death of the first Ultimate Spider-Man in the early ’10s. Ultimate Spider-Man had always been the most popular Ultimate characters and lots of fans were reticent about his death; the Ultimate books were already mostly dead and a lot of fans figured that this would be the end for them. However, instead, we got an all-new Spider-Man in Miles Morales. Miles was able to grow his fanbase on his own in a universe where he was the main Spider-Man and it worked better than anyone could have imagined. Fans loved him so much that he would end up surviving the end of the Ultimate Universe and joining the 616. There was the chance that this wouldn’t work out for him, but instead of losing his popularity, he became bigger than ever. The Spider-Man books were able to do something that few other comics have – introduce a second character that stays popular even when readers can just read the adventures of the original instead. It’s a huge achievement that we don’t really praise enough.

This is all we need to know just how biased they are, and all delivered without sales figures to prove their empty point. What next, will they sugarcoat and recommend Jason Aaron's own woke pandering? And then, lastly:

Being a Spider-Man fan isn’t always great. There’s something about Spider-Man’s comic in that when things get bad, they get really, really bad. A big part of this is the simplest – his books sell regardless; there’s no reason to listen to fan complaints as long as they’re still buying the book. Anyone out there who has been a part of the online comic community for any period of time has encountered the often hyperbolic hatred for the hero’s comics, especially since “One More Day” did away with his marriage to Mary Jane. In the last 19 years (yes, it’s been that long), fans hated Spider-Man comics more than anything, especially if you were just going by the stuff said in comment sections. However, when you went to the sales charts, The Amazing Spider-Man was always one of the bestselling comics out there. It’s only been in the last year or so that it’s not been consistently at the top of the sales charts; now, it’s merely in the top ten. Spidey comics are able to survive fan ire like no other. There’s no other character that could have fans as angry as The Amazing Spider-Man has and survive. It’s one of the most interesting things about Spider-Man – when his fans are complaining the loudest, his book is usually selling like hot cakes.

Well at least here, they hint at a leading problem explaining why things got so bad: because you have only so many fools out there, doubtlessly including tons of speculators, who won't judge by merit and keep buying Spidey no matter how much this makes it impossible to ever see the Spider-marriage restored. That said, even Spidey sales have long plummeted, and I remember that, when sales figures were visible at ICV2, the sales appeared to have dropped under 100,000 copies allegedly sold. Unfortunately, Marvel's modern management is so blatant, they're clearly willing to keep churning out Spidey and other now maligned comics no matter how poorly they sell in the end.

And what's this about "hatred" for Spidey's comics? That's only in the context of that the story in a current issue is bottom of the barrel, and they still force a mandate forbidding restoration of the Spider-marriage, and improving respect for Mary Jane as a character. It's obvious MJ's of no value to the columnist, or he would've championed the Spider-marriage, pro-MJ supporters long ago instead of writing such drivel. So why write such fawning garbage? All it does is compound how unserious ComicBook really is as a news site, and how creatively bankrupt they are themselves. They're an utter embarrassment. They're yet another reason why Spidey no longer defines pop culture itself.

New X-Men film director appears to be adapting writings of Jonathan Hickman

According to this IGN article, Jason Schreier, the director of a new X-Men movie (and previously the Thunderbolts), is basing his screenplay on not one, but two sources, the 2nd not a good one:

The filmmaker leading the charge on what seems to be the first post-Avengers: Secret Wars movie spoke about some of the corners of the mutant universe he and MCU boss Kevin Feige have already started digging through during an interview with Good Morning America. The conversation followed the film's explosive D23 2026 X-Men cast reveal, which included announcements for characters like Rogue, Storm, Professor X, and Mister Sinister.

With its May 2028 release still almost two years away, Schreier, who previously helmed Marvel's Thunderbolts*, stopped short of revealing too much about the movie's plot. Instead, his comments suggested fans may want to brush up on the work of comic book authors Chris Claremont and Jonathan Hickman.

"One of the great things about the comics is there is such a rich and broad history," he said. "That was one of the first things that Kevin and I talked about when I came in; they made many great movies in this world, and they've made so many great things. Let's find the things that haven't recently been done well. All these other corners of the universe…"

"Digging back into those comics like 20 years, the whole Chris Claremont run, the newer Jonathan Hickman stuff. There are so many stories that are still untold, to honor and to reach into, and then to meet this cast and try to do something new, I think you always want to see something that reveres where it came from and then is still taking a new spin on where we want to go."

Considering the Thunderbolts movie, spelled as it is with an asterisk, is one of those things that hasn't been done well, I'm not sure what Schreier's point is. Hickman's run was overrated, right down to the part where he turned Moira MacTaggart into yet another mutant, which takes away the uniqueness of the character as a civilian co-star. Does Schreier intend to make use of that?

In any case, I've long grown weary of these non-stop live action adaptations, and Schreier's claim there's a rich and broad history is another example of failing to make distinctions between any era. He likely doesn't care that X-Men began to lose mileage when crossovers like Age of Apocalypse came about. Or that Scott Lobdell was considered a very mediocre writer back in the day. Or that the X-books overall began to lose any meaning or significance by the turn of the century, and even Claremont's talent plummeted post-2000. So what's the use of keeping on with the films, when the comics are in such bad shape as it is due to editors like Joe Quesada bringing them down years ago?

For Spider-Man's 1000th issue, Aunt May forgets who Peter Parker is

Comic Book Club tells the premise of the thousandth issue for Amazing Spider-Man:

In the cliffhanger of the last issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Peter Parker’s beloved Aunt May had a stroke. Well, thanks to a new preview from Marvel of Amazing Spider-Man #1000, we know what’s happened: she’s forgotten Peter Parker.

Alongside the preview pages, which include an appearance by May’s biological son Cormac, who has been appearing recently in the series, we’re also getting covers for the second printing, which will arrive on October 28 with pencilled versions of the covers by Pepe Larraz and John Romita Jr. (check out if the controversial cover looks better without the coloring). That’s because the issue has already sold over 400,000 copies to comic book stores [...]

Spider-Man faces his greatest fear and his most frightening new villain in decades… RAVAGE! Plus, some of the greatest creative minds on Earth honor one thousand issues of THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN! NOAH HAWLEY (Alien: Earth, Fargo, LEGION) makes his comic book debut, Frank Miller and Peach Momoko collaborate for the first time, Stuart Immonen and Brian Michael Bendis return to Spider-Man together, and some of the best ASM creators return to the title!

It's much too late for introducing new relatives of the Parkers to the title, and with Bendis aboard, something's obviously wrong. Even Miller's involvement does nothing to improve what's clearly just more publicity stunts. I don't know if Mary Jane Watson shows up, but if Bendis and/or Miller are allowed to script a story where MJ appears, it's only plain dismay.

Just like it's long too late for there to have been a 1000th Superman issue, it's too late for a 1000th Spidey issue, and besides, what are the chances they'll soon be resetting it to a number one, as became a sad staple in the years since a number of Marvel titles were first relaunched in 1998? The customers have hopefully long learned why it doesn't pay to buy all these brand new relaunch premieres that won't amount to much on the speculator market.

A sloppy article about Frank Miller's work on Daredevil

When it's not the Dark Knight Returns that's the overemphasized focus of so many puff piece news articles, it could be Miller's work on Daredevil instead, and that's what Inverse wrote about recently, since some recent TV shows drew from Miller's stories, but this is yet another news item that's decidedly not interested in maintaining consistency, let alone assuring us that Miller's work, good enough as it was there, isn't the beginning or end of what we could find impressive about Hornhead's original series, in sharp contrast to what came post-1998. First:

Whenever people discuss superheroes who have it rough, there are a couple of names that usually stick out. Spider-Man’s day-to-day life is notoriously bad, so the term “Parker luck” was coined because of it. Batman has had his back broken, several of his sidekicks killed, and consistently fights monstrosities and aliens all while just being a normal human being.

But it’s safe to say that few comic book characters have trials and tribulations comparable to those of Matt Murdock, aka Hell’s Kitchen’s own Daredevil. Those who love him can’t quite seem to stay alive, those who hate him can’t quite seem to stay in jail, and the Man Without Fear himself can’t quite seem to keep a handle on his own secret identity (a problem that has just recently followed him to the MCU in Daredevil: Born Again). But 40 years ago, one of the most celebrated comic book writers of all-time took it upon himself to drag Matt Murdock through hell and back, and in the process wrote not just one of the best Daredevil stories ever but one of the best comic arcs of all-time: the original 1986 Born Again.

Did it ever occur to them that if they describe DD's life as that bad, it could actually become less appealing to the audience? Also, since Batman does come up here, yes, there were a few, but if Spoiler's the one who matters, interesting there's no objective take here on a character who was a more notable recurring cast member of the Robin series begun by Chuck Dixon in 1993. And how Stephanie Brown was initially turned into a sacrificial lamb in the War Games/Crimes crossover, before this was eventually reversed 3 years later, and there were a few other bad directions that came at the time of Identity Crisis that were reversed later as well, though still too late at this point.

Since they speak of lovers, even Batman had at least one who was turned into a forced sacrifice in 2002 for the sake of a shoddy crossover, Bruce Wayne: Murderer?/Fugitive. Her name was Vesper Fairchild, and if there's any way to handle such a curtain call for a character that's less than organic, it's crossovers. So it's not like DD's the only one story-wise who underwent such incidents, whether the writing was good or bad. And of course, even overrated writers like Kevin Smith have turned out some of the worst storylines in DD based on exactly what Inverse unobjectively spoke of: wiping out Karen Page in the Marvel Knights imprint just 5 issues in. And to Inverse's writers, it means nothing. By the way, if any of DD's adversaries were written cheating death, doesn't that make Karen's death extremely hypocritical?

When Stan Lee and Bill Everett first created Daredevil all the way back in 1964, they were responsible for many of the character’s everlasting traits: he’s a blind lawyer named Matt Murdock, his father was a murdered boxer named Battlin’ Jack, and he works alongside Foggy Nelson and secretary Karen Page at a legal firm named Nelson and Murdock. But the original depiction of the character was a quippy, lighthearted Spider-Man-adjacent swashbuckler – it wasn’t until the late 70s and early 80s, when the title was in danger of cancellation because of declining sales, that Frank Miller took over as writer and forever changed the perception of the book. Instead of fighting vampires or villains pulled from science fiction B-movies like Stilt-Man, Miller emphasized the psychological turmoil of a Catholic vigilante and fleshed out the contours of Hell’s Kitchen’s criminal underworld (converting The Kingpin from a Spider-Man villain into a Daredevil villain), ultimately giving the book a hard-boiled, seedy film noir atmosphere that was instantly popular and has influenced other Daredevil writers to this day.

Umm, I think even before Miller came about, it was dark enough. And while it may have come with a bit of a twist, Stilt-Man did make an appearance in DD during Miller's run, though a crook Miller introduced stole Wilbur Day's mechanics so he could make use of them himself. Even Dr. Octopus made one appearance in DD at the time. So let's not think the series ever strayed far from more sci-fi oriented concepts.

What's more, how is it Ann Nocenti, who succeeded Miller in writing later, didn't provide an enjoyable perception too? I think Miller's DD run is good, but I'm not buying that favoratism at all costs. And IIRC, didn't Mark Waid at one point write DD with a brighter perspective in the past 15 years? It may have been at a time when Marvel's artistic quality collapsed, but the lecture Inverse delivers again becomes sloppy. And one more thing about Waid's run: whether he wrote DD bright or dark, he did a terrible disfavor at the time with heavy handed leftism.

After briefly stepping away from the title, Frank Miller returned with what is maybe his greatest narrative contribution to the Daredevil mythos: 1986’s Born Again storyline, which played out from February to August in the pages of Daredevil #227-233. A culmination of everything he'd built up over his original five years writing the character, Born Again opens with the reveal that Karen Page, who had been absent from Daredevil comics since 1969 (she left Nelson and Murdock to become an actor after discovering Matt’s secret), has become an adult film actor and heroin addict. In the throes of her addiction, Karen sells Matt’s secret identity for a fix, and that information ends up in the hands of The Kingpin, who decides that if he can’t defeat Daredevil the vigilante, he’ll defeat Matt Murdock the civilian by systematically destroying his personal life.

Here too, we have quite a flaw in history. Karen made appearances in DD at least until 1972 and issue 86, and afterwards, she made several appearances in comics like Ghost Rider and Marvel Two-In-One (and one more guest appearance in DD 138 from 1976) until about 1978, before going into limbo for 7 years. Inverse has just confirmed ever further they're unqualified for history jobs. Also, notice how they refer to a woman becoming an "actor" instead of actress? I've seen that woke PC tactic in the past few years, apparently their whole sick idea of how to belittle the fairer sex in an era where LGBT ideology was pushed all over the place. One more problem undermining this puff piece. Near the end, it says:

Frank Miller didn’t just write arguably the greatest Daredevil story ever told, but he also changed the way that superhero stories deal with human drama. Matt Murdock is a running joke for comic book fans because he’s a character who can’t escape his own suffering, but over four decades ago, Frank Miller showed us that the reason why Daredevil can handle it is that the hero is the man underneath the costume, not the bright red costum he’s known for.

If Matt can't escape suffering, isn't that a problem? It's also one if Marvel's adamant about keeping Karen in the grave, after what happened to her in the Knights imprint. Supposedly, Aquaman's been a running joke because he could communicate with undersea animals, but I don't recall Hornhead ever been described as a joke. Are they aware the original costume was yellow in 1964, changed after 6-7 issues? You might think that's a joke, but the problems Matt faced as both superhero and lawyer certainly weren't. What's certainly a joke are the inaccuracies in the puff piece, decidedly another example of somebody who doesn't want to say a word in depth about the runs coming before and after Miller's. Seriously, what's so hard about discussing Nocenti's run in the late 80s-early 90s at length? This elevation of one specific run at the expense of others has long gotten way out of hand. There's also plenty about Spider-Man that hasn't been brought up by these tabloid news sites. On which note, maybe early Hornhead was "lighthearted", but "quippy" was something he could've been written as even well after Stan Lee relinquished the job to other writers. I assume they mean DD could be written dishing out wisecracks like Spidey and the Thing, and in the stories I read, Matt certainly came close.

So let's be clear. Of course I recommend Miller's DD run, but I'm not going to say what came before and after wasn't worth the effort and the price you could pay for the reprint archives. Just because there've been TV shows adapting notable Hornhead storylines is also not a reason to focus almost solely upon Miller's run either. The original comics scripts are what should count, far more than any two-bit TV adaptation.

Actor Andrew Garfield repeats insult to Spider-Man, and Mary Jane Watson

The Daily Wire says actor Andrew Garfield, who'd played Spidey in the past decade, has repeated a woke pitch for how to tell the story:

Former “Spider-Man” star Andrew Garfield still thinks the character should be gay.

The 43-year-old actor said his mind hasn’t changed since the infamous interview in 2013 when he pitched that idea for the first time.

Garfield reflected on his initial comments during a press tour for “The Uprising,” as Entertainment Weekly reported earlier this week.

“It was an exercise in rebellion that I felt passionate about,” Garfield told the outlet of his previous comments. “I just still believe that anyone can be in that suit. That’s the point of why it’s such a kind of universally beloved character, one of the greatly beloved characters in the history of fiction is because you don’t see skin color, you don’t see gender, you don’t see sexuality. Anyone can project themselves into that suit.”

This is stupid. Even Black Panther's original costume was similar, and there are a number of superhero costume designs from past decades where you don't see what they look like at all, although, if the artists wanted to, they could draw breasts on a female protagonist to differentiate whether men or women are wearing the costume. But I guess in an era where women's sexuality is desecrated, Garfield must think insulting the fairer sex is easy.

“I like the idea of a place where everyone is being honored and everyone is being included, and it was just a kind of act of saying, ‘Well, why not?’ And you’ll be telling on yourself if you have a strong opinion either way,” the actor went on.

This was a reflection on his suggestion in 2013 that Spider-Man could be gay. Garfield even had a love interest picked out for the character.

“I was kind of joking, but kind of not joking about MJ. … I was like, ‘What if MJ is a dude?’” the actor said at the time, referencing Spider Man’s love interest, Mary Jane. “Why can’t we discover that Peter is exploring his sexuality? It’s hardly even groundbreaking! … So why can’t he be gay? Why can’t he be into boys?”

I think this sums up 2 terrible things. He's insulted MJ's womanhood, and he also implies Spidey should be into underaged youngsters?!? Where has Hollywood's moral compass gone these days?

One of the commenters on the article said:

Andrew Garfield is the Spider-man superhero that never should have been and we never needed.

I will never watch his entries in the franchise ever again. He's just another two-bit actor who clearly lacks the confidence to sell his movies by merit, and clarifies this bankruptcy by following up on Joe Quesada's desecration of Stan Lee's creations. Assuming Garfield reads the modern comics, it wouldn't be hard to guess where he stands on the destruction of the Spider-marriage. What occurs in the comics has extended in a way to the movies.

Marvel failed the X-Men long ago, yet Collider thinks it's only recently this happened

Collider argues that Marvel is now failing the X-Men, as if it hadn't already happened, though it's interesting they take issue with one of the most overrated, pretentious leftist writers of modern times, Gail Simone, in their look at what she wrote in recent X-Men stories. The article doesn't begin well:

Comic books have come a long way since their advent in 1933, but they have evolved significantly over the last ten years as the industry has grappled with writing stories in a post-Comicsgate era. Still, some of the most celebrated titles have found themselves falling into familiar and oftentimes uncomfortable patterns.

When the writer starts subtly blaming Comicsgate, something's obviously gone wrong. That's just a distraction reducing the seriousness of the subject.

Few writers embody this evolution more uniquely than Gail Simone, whose early commentary helped redefine how gender and agency are understood in mainstream superhero media. In 1999, prior to her professional writing debut, Simone launched the website "Women in Refrigerators," coining a phrase that forever altered comic book criticism. Sparked by the infamous death of Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt (who was murdered and stuffed into a refrigerator in Green Lantern #54) the term described a pervasive industry trope where female characters were routinely killed, maimed, or otherwise de-powered purely to advance the emotional arcs of male heroes.

Simone’s sharp critique propelled her into the industry itself, where she swiftly became a powerhouse writer for both DC and Marvel, crafting acclaimed runs on titles like Birds of Prey, Wonder Woman, and even Deadpool while proving that female characters could anchor the same complex narratives as their male peers.

That legacy makes the last two years of her run on Uncanny X-Men all the more jarring. As the first woman to be the mainline’s sole writer, Simone benefited from a degree of “plot armor,” so to say, which allowed her early missteps to be given a pass. However, this run has slowly become a depressing descent into the very creative pitfalls she spent decades dismantling.

Rather than propelling the mutant flagship forward, Simone's work succumbs to clunky prose, dated characterizations, and a frustrating reliance on regressive tropes that feel out of character for not only the franchise, but Simone as a writer. Perhaps most glaring is how the narrative falters under the weight of subtle microaggressions and tone-deaf interpersonal dynamics, which begets the question of how an icon of feminist comic commentary could deliver a story so strangely out of step with her own established standard.

Unfortunately, she continued to work with DC even as they performed many of the same offensive acts she was supposedly against, and even her work on Birds of Prey may have contained allusions to Identity Crisis and Infinite Crisis, which dampens the impact of whatever she was supposedly trying to reverse. It's also worth considering her real life politics are another contradiction that make a joke out of her alleged mission. Even the artwork in some of her later projects became noticeably bad. So why do they suddenly say she's stumbled into "creative pitfalls"? She was sadly always a left-wing phony, and her attacks on J.K. Rowling only made things worse. And the writer appears to have forgotten one more chilling trope: when a girl is turned into a villainess for the sake of it. Another something I don't think Simone ever made a convincing effort to dismantle in her scriptwriting, and she never made a convincing effort to give ladies a complex narrative to rival the male cast members.

The most immediate, and perhaps least egregious, casualty of this run is the regression of Rogue and Gambit, whose iconic relationship is flattened into a hollow caricature. Rather than leading the team as a formidable leader in her own right, Rogue is reduced to little more than a domestic "tradwife" existing solely in relation to her husband. It quickly becomes evident that the narrative prioritizes making Gambit look effortless and cool instead of allowing Rogue to command respect as an actual leader.

Let me get this straight. The writer believes Simone turned Rogue into a "conservative" stereotype? Something tells me the columnist's not being altruistic. Besides, Rogue's potential as a character was damaged 3 decades ago, and Scott Lobdell could be considered the culprit. It's one thing to pair up 2 superhero figures, but another to do it in such sloppy fashion as Lobdell did it, which undermined characterization. It's interesting though, that the woman who wrote this Collider item actually feels Simone's doing stuff that's allegedly anathema to a leftist agenda, when she claims there's "microaggressions" in the script, and the talk of a "tradwife" also gives strong clues where this is really going.

Rogue's dialogue (and Remy's, admittedly) is weighed down by heavy-handed, exaggerated Southern phonetics that read more like mocking stereotypes than authentic regional voices. Compounding this domestic imbalance is the awkward insertion of Calico; forcing an infantilized teenage mutant into their immediate living situation pushes Rogue further into a suburban foster-parent trope, taking her even further away from the frontlines of mutant leadership. The narrative comes across as off-putting as Calico is written in a deeply juvenile way which includes seeing the teenage mutant crawling into bed with Rogue and Remy — a couple she has only known for a few months.

This superficial obsession with making Gambit look cool constantly sacrifices basic narrative logic for cheap, unearned hype. A glaring example occurs during a major battle sequence in Uncanny X-Men #32, where Remy abruptly transforms into the "Wyvern" — a monstrous form that has been teased relentlessly for nearly ten issues and hyped up on promotional art. Instead of delivering a dramatic, satisfying payoff to all of that teasing, the transformation arrives suddenly at a moment that makes little sense within the flow of the story.

The panel they presented doesn't show Gambit in bed while Calico's there, and Rogue's role in that segment is clearly meant to play something like a big sister figure who cheers up a protege who'd been suffering from a nightmare. I don't find Simone's writing appealing today, but it sounds like the columnist's looking for cheap excuses to tear down on motherhood/sisterhood. Nor does it show Gambit looking cool, which I assume means he's battling baddies. But that's not what happens in the material I've seen so far. In any case, if the writer's delegitimizing Gambit as a character by acting as though he's a real person, she's just perpetuating the rock bottom lapse in logic that's been going on for decades.

Most striking is the treatment of Monet St. Croix, a Black Muslim woman whose established characterization has always centered on bodily autonomy and a fierce opposition to incarceration. Reducing her to the temporary warden of Graymalkin — a fascist concentration camp where mutants are detained until human authorities arrive — completely guts the core of her identity, reframing a hero of liberation as an enforcer of state-sanctioned violence.

Monet, from what I know, was not created as a Muslim adherent in 1994. I think it was Peter David who was allowed to force that retcon onto the former Generation X cast member, 15 years ago. What occurred is similar to how heterosexual characters like Obsidian in Infinity Inc. were retconned into homosexual characters. What happened to Monet is atrocious in the extreme, and that the columnist appears to be fine with that also speaks volumes. In the Islamic world, women are treated as 2nd class citizens, and we're being lectured about "bodily autonomy" and opposition to incarceration? I'm sorry, but what's written sounds so deliberate, and again, like a lecture. If the writer's going to take such an accepting view of the Religion of Peace, then this article is politically motivated, though it does have some eyebrow raising details to tell:

Another recurring pattern in Simone’s Uncanny X-Men run is the abundance of cultural insensitivity and subtle microaggressions woven into the dialogue. Asian characters are routinely subjected to lazy, exoticized tropes. Of note, Logan casually refers to the young Japanese mutant Deathdream as a "manga kid,” which Simone glibly responded to criticism by framing it as Wolverine “incorrectly” calling him that. This casual bias rears its head again with Calico’s most recent interactions with Pietro Maximoff. Calico treats Pietro — a character of Romani heritage and a man of color — with a smug, condescending superiority (despite being in a moment of crisis), dismissively refusing to even view him as a true mutant.

Rather than celebrating the rich diversity that has long defined the franchise, these characterizations alienate readers, reducing an ambitious flagship era to a series of uncomfortable missteps. While there is some narrative explanation for Calico’s behavior, it is nevertheless jarring to see a blue-eyed, blonde-haired white woman othering a character who is, historically, the son of a Holocaust survivor. Coupled with the optics of tethering her to the franchise’s most cookie-cutter Southern couple, it feels as though Simone is doubling down on an inherent and accepted bias about Southern ideals.

Watching an industry titan like Gail Simone, whose entire legacy was built on dismantling harmful tropes, fall into these exact creative traps is a deeply disheartening turn for modern comic criticism — especially as she argues with fans of her writing on social media. Yet this failure does not rest solely on her shoulders; Marvel shares equal responsibility for allowing one of its most iconic flagships to languish without editorial discipline or vision.

Honestly, it's hardly a surprise if Simone doesn't respect any of the better qualities of X-Men from the past. Let's recall said quality definitely collapsed since the early 2000s, along with cohesion of continuity, and characterization. But truly, Simone never "dismantled" any harmful tropes, and she added insult to injury for the Atom by fully accepting the assignment of writing a DEI-pandering character of Asian background shoehorned into Ray Palmer's costume in 2006. It was cancelled about 2 years later, and 2 decades later still, nobody cares about a social justice pandering production. But if Simone really is resorting to harmful tropes, should this be a surprise? What it can suggest is that, if she was part and parcel of DC and Marvel's earlier embarrassments, and never took issue with what DC did to any female character not written by her, then she never had faith in her alleged positions to begin with. No wonder she's so overrated.

Since the X-Men is a subject, here's also an article on IGN telling why the X-Men don't have a role in a Wolverine video game:

While there are many mutants famous for being members of the X-Men in Marvel’s Wolverine, in the video game’s story the X-Men do not exist. Rather, Logan is a former member of Team X, the mutant black ops unit that includes the likes of Sabretooth and Mystique. Yes, Jean Grey is in the game, but she is not part of any group called the X-Men because it hasn't been formed yet. Put simply, don’t expect Cyclops to turn up in his comic accurate suit, dropping from the Blackbird under orders from Professor X back at the X Mansion.

But why? Why not have the X-Men exist in Marvel’s Wolverine? In an interview with IGN, narrative director Walt Williams said Insomniac was keen for the mutants in the game to not have a safe place to go to, to not benefit from being superheroes, but rather remind players that mutants exist on the outside — and Wolverine himself, who this game is all about, is perhaps the biggest outsider of them all.

“So Team X is canonical,” Williams began. “It is Logan's first team in his history. It was a black ops team from the '70s made up of wetworks mutant workers. So in telling Wolverine's story, we wanted to bring it back to the beginning of where his story really began in that long string of teams. Because as we know, he's been a member of many teams by this point in his 50-plus year history.

Well that's part of the problem with the comics since the early to mid-2000s, if we take the terrible Brian Michael Bendis' work on Avengers as an example. Several mainstay characters were dropped in favor of hilariously obvious choices like Wolvie and Spider-Man, with Scarlet Witch the biggest victim of jettisoning, yet the same people doing these interviews don't take an objective view of that, and it's no excuse for forcibly omitting his own team from reference. If they want to make this game a solo adventure, so be it, but I don't see why the X-Men have to be downplayed, or written out that forcibly.

“But really what we were looking to do is, because superheroes have become so mainstream at this point in just pop culture and everything through TV shows, comics, movies and everything, that even especially with our own Spider-Man games, these are characters with superpowers that a lot of the world has accepted, that they are celebrated. They have parades, they are honored and stuff. But mutants at the core are outsiders, even within the Marvel universe.

He acts like this has to be the norm at all times, and cannot be changed. Another decided problem. It's exactly what led to the Spider-marriage being thrown out with bath water 2 decades ago, and Mary Jane Watson paying a heavy price in the process.

It’s a detailed answer to a question that fans have been wondering about ever since Marvel’s Wolverine was revealed. And so, while you’ll get co-op gameplay with Jean Grey, she’s not in the story as Marvel Girl or wearing a suit we’ve seen from the X-Men comics. And without the X-Men knocking about, Logan and Jean are free to explore their own romantic relationship — assuming the game itself goes that far — free from Cyclops’ death stare.

Indeed, Williams confirmed to IGN that there is no Logan, Jean, and Scott Summers love triangle at play in Marvel’s Wolverine.

“I don't want to get too much into spoilers because obviously there's a whole story that we want everyone to experience as they play through it,” Williams said. “But I think it's safe to say that we are focusing on just Logan and Jean's relationship in Marvel's Wolverine.”

Gee, so that's what is considered a big deal? Up to the turn of the century, I can't recall if Wolverine was ever seriously seen pursuing a relationship with Jean, and Chris Claremont wrote Logan noticing she and Scott were an item in the late 70s, to the point where Logan quietly discarded some flowers he'd brought her in a trash bin at a hospital when Cyclops was around. It was only when Mark Millar being helming Ultimate X-Men that all of a sudden, exploring a love triangle became a big deal, because in this alternate universe, practically depicting Logan as morally bankrupt was somehow a great idea. But that alternate universe line was little more than one of the most overblown tales of its sort, and came at a time when mainstream was declining.

And it's a shame we once again have examples of MSM sources not admitting the X-Men went downhill long ago.

Spider-Man being exploited for tennis-based collectible covers

US Open's announcing that Marvel's made another deal with the tennis movement for another sports-based story involving one of Marvel's most famous characters, and the special they're producing appears to be another publicity stunt for collectibility's sake, even if it's allegedly for free:

The US Open and Marvel are continuing their groundbreaking collaboration for a third consecutive year with a new and original Spider-Man comic book that champions the theme of the 2026 US Open, “Celebrating Our New York Story.” More than 40,000 print copies of the comic book will be given out to fans for free throughout US Open Fan Week at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, with a limited-edition run of rare, collectible covers featuring one of New York City’s five boroughs given out in a surprise bag to the first 1,000 fans each day August 24-28.

The unique comic follows Spider-Man as he chases and battles supervillain Scorpion across all five boroughs en route to the US Open, visiting iconic landmarks and encountering quintessential New York experiences along the way. All 40,000-plus print copies of the book will be given out on a first-come, first-serve basis for free during US Open Fan Week to those fans who scan their Fan Access Pass at the giveaway tent inside the main entrance.

Rare collectible covers featuring Spider-Man in one of the five boroughs – the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island – are limited to 1,000 copies each and will be given away at random in a blind bag to the first 1,000 fans on-site who pick up their comic book Monday, August 24, through Friday, August 28.

And that's all you need to know this is just another farce that doesn't even seem to have been printed in high numbers, undoubtably as an attempt to get new readers for their output with no emphasis on merit. What are the chances Mary Jane Watson won't figure prominently in this stunt either? Also note that it sounds like they're relying upon the "blind bag" tactic previously employed by Image. Regardless of whether these specials are free, what they're doing still reeks of pandering to the speculator market, and that's one more reason why this is another unappealing example of how Marvel's going about business today.

For every person and generation?

El Pais recently wrote about Spider-Man history, claiming there's one for every person and generation, and predictably, they sugarcoat even the wokest, DEI-pandering products that have only stripped Spidey of any genuine meaning, and have nothing critical or objective to say about the resumes of some of the worst writers to have worked on what has surely become the most editorially mandated franchise, for all the wrong reasons, coming out of Marvel in the modern age:

Spider-Man is always present. The philosopher Grafton Tanner coined the term “foreverism” to refer to phenomena like the Star Wars saga (which never ceases to explore its own intricacies), or those veteran rock bands that never stop reuniting and never quite break up.

These are cultural expressions that have transcended their era. They remain relevant, generation after generation, making nostalgia impossible (and business always possible). Such is the case with Spider-Man: the industry surrounding this character continually offers products for people of all ages and backgrounds. He’s still, quite literally, a kid at heart. And to demonstrate his enduring appeal, the latest installment in the franchise, Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026), is premiering between July 29 and July 31 around the world.

Yes, and how they remain relevant and enduring, with endless publicity stunts and other alienating tactics that divide the audience, like the time when Joe Quesada forcibly undid the Spider-marriage through contrived circumstances, having Peter Parker make a deal with Mephisto and then in the following years, Mary Jane Watson was repeatedly insulted, and they even tried to "placate" audiences by putting her in solo books that ultimately didn't work out. Unfortunately, Spidey's appeal has not been able to endure increasingly leftist ideologies forced into the books, and they also ignore that Star Wars has succumbed to the same, one of the reasons why it's largely collapsed as a franchise today.

“What’s interesting is that he’s a character who feels timeless,” says Julián M. Clemente, author of the seminal book Untold Tales Of Spider-Man (2015), published in Spanish by Panini Comics. “If you’re a kid from the 1970s or 1980s, if you grew up with the cartoons from the 1960s, you’ll see him as someone who’s always been around. But a kid carrying a Spider-Man backpack today sees him as something very current. He’s managed to metamorphose; he doesn’t seem outdated to the new generations.”

No, but the modern stories are. One More/Brand New Day was insulting to the intellect, and again, the forced erasure of the Spider-marriage, which they don't have the courage to discuss here, has only led to a situation where Spidey has become pretty dated in terms of storytelling, because the stories are increasingly stilted and contrived. What's so current about even a story where Mary Jane becomes a female Venom?

The Spider-Man franchise just kept getting bigger and bigger. The 1980s and 1990s saw numerous milestones, including the black suit, the appearance of Venom, as well as the 1994 animated series. And, in the 21st century, he would be embodied by another character who wasn’t Peter Parker (something previously unthinkable): in 2011, after Peter Parker’s death in a branch of the Marvel Universe, writer Brian Michael Bendis and artist Sara Pichelli created Miles Morales, a young man of color. Half African-American and half Puerto Rican, he resonated with the era’s focus on diversity.

Later, in 2014, writer Dan Slott came up with a wild idea: the Spider-Verse comic book series, which also focused on diversity. Spider-Men of all kinds emerged, from a Spider-Punk to the futuristic Spider-Man 2099. One version was inspired by cowboys of the Wild West, while another was inspired by 1930s film noir. There was even a Spider-Ham (Peter Porker)!

“These [were] fresh ideas that worked out really well; they led to a series of highly-original animated films. [The many versions] demonstrated the character’s resilience, allowing him to reach another generation,” Clemente explains.

When they turn to this kind of stupidity that doesn't even emphasize merit in writing and art, it just explains all the more why the franchise has been as dulled as it's been dated. Why is it such a big deal virtually every "generation" have a Spidey, but not create new characters, and not have the guarantee of story merit? Do they even pay any attention to what sales figures are, or try to find out just how much any particular comic sells in copy units? All that aside, they predictably sugarcoated some of the era's worst writers like Bendis and Slott, right down to how the former mistreated Scarlet Witch horribly in Avengers: Disassembled. And what good was the original Ultimate line, which lasted about a decade, but whose ongoing series were largely cancelled, the Ultimate Spidey version included? They don't get into any of that either.

While there’s a wide variety of Spider-Man stories aimed at younger audiences, there are also options for those in middle age: Dan Slott’s Renew Your Vows series focuses on a 40-something-year-old Peter Parker’s married life with Mary Jane Watson. In that parallel universe, they have two children together, a situation also found in Jonathan Hickman’s recent Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series. “[This scenario] really connects with the audience that came to Spider-Man in the ’80s and ’90s,” Clemente points out. Going even further, Spider-Man: Reign shows an older, gray-haired Peter Parker, who’s around the age of 70. His eternal love, Mary Jane, has already died. He now lives under the rule of an authoritarian regime, in an atmosphere of darkness that seems inspired by Frank Miller’s aged Batman in The Dark Knight Returns.

I think this is equally telling of where this puff piece is going, when they go so far as to sugarcoat DKR's dark influence, and act like alternate dimension versions of Spidey's world are a literal substitute for the 616 universe. And they don't even question whether it was in good taste to write Mary Jane out of the picture and into the grave. Does that connect with the audience? It should be noted that although MJ gets mention here, it's superficial, and doesn't offer any serious focus on her as a character as opposed to Peter, and again, the writer and interviewee don't have anything objective to say about what happened with the Spider-marriage in 2007. So what's their point about Spidey becoming timeless?

The truth is that Spider-Man is, by a long shot, the superhero who has best conquered cinema. While Superman certainly paved the way for major adaptations — and even though Batman influenced several generations — the wall-crawler is the character who has been consistently successful for more than two decades.

Well isn't that because the filmmakers managed to convey some entertainment value? Although if Zendaya's of mixed descent, a case can be made that the Spidey films where she co-stars are a product of the DEI propaganda era. Was that really necessary? And even before that, what about the 2011 reboot? I'd argued before that the problem there was that I already knew the story as it originally began in 1962, so it didn't have the impact it could've.

...we can add the animated saga that began with Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), considered by many to be one of the best superhero movies ever made, with its revolutionary visual style and a story that turned Miles Morales into yet another icon of the franchise.

The truth is that Spider-Man’s dominance in film goes far beyond the character’s movies. For years now, Sony, which owns the film rights to the character, has tried to build a parallel universe, starring some of the villains and supporting characters (without including the hero himself). The result has been mixed: productions like Morbius (2022), Madame Web (2024) and Kraven the Hunter (2024) have received a lukewarm reception from critics and audiences alike. However, there is one major exception: Venom, the oil-like symbiote that bonds with people and grants them powers similar to Spiderman’s. The version starring Tom Hardy resonated with audiences, thanks to its more irreverent tone. It was so popular that it became a highly-successful trilogy.

Gee, I wonder why we're supposed to care about the villains, if anybody, being pushed to prominence? Sorry, but that was in poor taste, and another example in motion of too much emphasis on villainy and even glamorizing it. IIRC, the sequel, "Let There be Carnage", wasn't as successful, but in any event, it's a shame whenever audiences buy into that kind of embarrassment.

“Spiderman triumphs because the true protagonist isn’t the superhero: [in fact], it’s Peter Parker. There [have been] many superheroes, but people became fans of the person beneath the mask,” Jorge Iván concludes. “He’s a profoundly human character: he’s constantly worried that his Aunt May will discover his identity, he has precarious jobs and he barely makes ends meet. Unlike other heroes, his everyday problems are just as important as the villains [he faces]: if he gets fired, he doesn’t have money for food.”

It sounds like some propagandist doesn't want him to have any. In any case, even the part about lack of food is exaggerated, and this all ignores that the writers are responsible for the storylines turned out, which in recent times have become utterly pointless and dated the series all the more. This kind of stupid lecture is exactly what led to Mary Jane getting kicked to the curb, because some selfish, entitled propagandists want Peter to remain something close to a pauper in the stories till the end of time, who's not allowed, in their mindsets, to find a successful career in photography or university teaching, and his being married to a girl who became a model/actress is somehow implausible and the worst thing that could happen. If they say they respect Stan Lee, they lie.

Ultimately, deep down, he’s not a hero. He is, as the wall-crawler reminds us, just “your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.”

Well neither are the real life J. Jonah Jamesons who reduce this all to a form of PC propaganda that throughly fails to distinguish between the good and bad stories over the years, and won't ask whether the real descent into tailspin began around the turn of the century, when J. Michael Straczynski became writer. What they don't get into is how Peter and MJ's status has become horrendous over the years, with Marvel's upper echelons subjecting them to some of the worst editorial mandates possible, and despite what they say, when they start sugarcoating the DEI pandering, it's clear that despite any claims to the contrary, we are supposed to care more about the costume than the character. Peter and MJ have been done such injustice, as have even other recurring veteran cast members in Spidey's world, since the turn of the century, and these propagandists don't care a bit. Nor do they admit that all the DEI/SJW pandering they're gushing over is exactly what's made a joke out of Spidey as a creation, because they actually reduce the original's significance without offering anything solid for storytelling.

And if the day comes when Marvel goes out of business as a publisher, they're bound to act like nothing happened, and won't ask whether the degradation that began at the turn of the century had any part in bringing down Spidey. If there's anything that isn't for every person and generation, it's the sad lack of merit, which they unsurprisingly obscured.

Eisner awards nominated pretentious scribes

Perhaps I was being too optimistic when I hoped earlier that the Eisner awards was coming off their biases of the mid-2000s. Oregon Public Broadcasting says 3 local scribes, one who's definitely overrated, were nominated:

Three of Portland’s prominent comic book creators, Rupert Kinnard, Kelly Sue DeConnick, and Sarah Shay Mirk, are nominated for Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards — the Oscars of the comic industry, named for one of the first comic artists in American history. This week, they’re traveling to San Diego Comic Con to speak on panels, sign books, and attend the awards ceremony on Friday night. [...]

While DeConnick’s book FML is up for Best Continuing Series, both Mirk and Kinnard are nominated for Best Comics-Related Book, which Mirk described as “the nerdiest, wonkiest category.” For DeConnick, this nomination is one of many throughout her career after winning the award for Best Single Issue in 2022. For Mirk, this marks nomination number four.

DeConnick's one of the scribes who ruined Carol Danvers as a superheroine in the past decade, all for the sake of "feminist" agendas, and wokeism. And what's this Kinnard known for?

Kinnard created the first Black queer comic strip characters, although he didn’t know he was first at the time. Born in Chicago in 1954, Kinnard moved to Portland in 1979 and helped start the queer newspaper Just Out.

He created The Brown Bomber, a nineteen-year-old superhero sporting basketball shorts and a home-made cape, and Diva Touché Flambé, a mystical grade school teacher who knocks sense into closed-minded streetgoers with her power of slapthology.

Together, the duo form Cathartic Comics, a strip that ran in newspapers in Portland and San Francisco, calling out injustice with wit, wisdom, and pride through an intersectional Black queer lens.

What's so special about that in the view of the leftists now running the Eisners? This is all woke cliche by today's standards. And then, here's what Mirk's known for:

Sarah Shay Mirk is a nonfiction comics journalist, publisher, and teacher at Crucial Comix living in Portland since 2008.

Their book Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison chronicles the experiences of former Guantanamo Bay prisoners and staff in the form of a graphic novel.

There's something mighty fishy about this book. What if it's apologia for terrorism, since many Islamic terrorists were incarcerated at Guantanamo, to keep them away from the USA's borders?

Kelly Sue DeConnick is a New York Times Bestselling comics author, known for her reimagining of the character Carol Danvers/Captain Marvel.

Her 2026 nomination for Best Continuing Series is shared with David López, the co-writer of FML, a graphic series from Portland-based publisher Dark Horse Comics.

"Reimagining" is precisely the problem, since, not only was Danvers made to look alienatingly masculine in the past decade, her background was forcibly changed as well. And forced, abrupt retcons were becoming pretty common beginning in the early 2000s, with some of J. Michael Straczysnki's machinations in Spider-Man just the beginning. Also notice how they don't refer to Danvers as Ms. Marvel, which is what she was originally titled in the late 70s when the late Gerry Conway first launched the original series at the time. What's so special about scribes who don't care about the source material? This only clarifies the Eisners continue to remain corrupted in whatever values they once had, and serve leftist causes more than anything else. That's why they're not worth paying attention to, any more than the Oscars in Hollywood.

A review of Frank Miller's new biography

Open Letters Review looked at Miller's new biography, Push the Wall, which may not be that long a book, and in the beginning paragraph, and the editor reviewing it appears to be disappointed, and certainly makes clear what they think of one project that years ago, I wanted to think was Miller's way of telling he'd found a valid subject to write about, until he sadly went the defeatist route several years after:

Writer/artist Frank Miller is legitimately legendary in the field of comic books, firmly stationed in a company of three dozen or so men and women who did landmark work. Miller was the creative genius behind black, nihilistic oddities like Ronin or Sin City, the genius behind signpost superhero stories like Batman: Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, and the genius behind black, nihilistic masterpieces like 300 or the “Elektra saga” run in Daredevil. Any one or two of these would guarantee a creator immortality in the comic book field, so Miller’s status is secure no matter what sloppy, downright cracked work he might add to that body of work, incomprehensible things like Dark Knight Strikes Again or, God forbid, Holy Terror.

Sounds like the reviewer believes Miller should never have tackled the issue of Islamic terrorism, ever. And that's the problem, past, present or future. With the biggest one being that the reviewer doesn't even have the courage to make himself clear about that.

But with that said, is Miller really that "legendary"? Hardly. His obsession with the darkness - which today apparently stops at the most challenging of issues like the aforementioned - is honestly dispiriting, and if he didn't succeed in screenwriting in the long run, why must we believe he's that much of a legend? Lest we forget, he acted as apologist for somebody who definitely won't be one now, and the way he noticably remains fixated on a certain president for cheap reasons is dismaying and divisive.

This kind of status imbues his new memoir, Push the Wall, with inherent interest. The many thousands of comics readers who’ve enjoyed their work would very much like to see similar memoirs from all the other greats of the comics world. How fascinating and valuable it would be, for instance, if we had honest, grappling, detailed memoirs from figures like Bill Everett or Gil Kane or Jack Kirby.

Finishing Push the Wall, some readers will be thinking about how fascinating and valuable it would be if we had an honest, grappling, detailed memoir from Frank Miller. This sure isn’t that.

If the book's a disappointment, I can't say I'm surprised. When a guy turns as defeatist of recent as Miller has, you probably can't expect him to deliver the best of biographical material either, nor for that matter a good instruction in how to illustrate. And his art style's been so mediocre for years, whereas even Kane's art style was more comprehensive just years before he passed on at the turn of the century. But the reviewer's right about one thing: if we had serious biographies about Everett, Kane and Kirby, that could be a lot more interesting than what Miller has to offer at this point.

Miller organizes the book around 18 “lessons” about both life and working in the comics industry, and he fills in the inevitable pabulum of old-man-imparting-lessons with glimpses from his own autobiography: boyhood in Vermont, formative exposure to gritty New York and specifically the Greenwich Village of bygone decades, the initial scrambling in the comics industry, the burgeoning success after Elektra and Dark Knight Returns. And sometimes some of these memories, though decked out in the hack-purple prose that’s characterized Miller’s writing for fifty years, are interesting, particularly the Horatio Alger bits before he hit it big, when he was wandering around a pre-Bloomberg New York that would be all but unrecognizable to the city’s current wall-to-wall 1% inhabitants. “I arrived wide open to the strange gifts of the city’s seedy decline,” he writes in one such passage, “the Sodom and Gomorrah of Times Square, the hard-up characters hanging around fleabag hotels by Port Authority, the graffiti and urban dross in the subway, the misfits skulking in the East Village parks after dark, the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all.”

Miller might not be the most eloquent of writers, but he’s articulate and sure as hell prolific; instead of tarping over the subject with something like “the crumbling, uneasy feeling of it all,” he could have written that feeling. His book is barely 200 pages; Saga Press would certainly have sprung for another 100.

Gee, that's not much of a page count. Whether this is a biography or an "educational" book, one would think a lengthier book would serve the goal better. Perhaps this does say something about Miller's otherwise overrated talents indeed. Interesting the reviewer alludes to NYC's current residents as "one percent", since based on where they're going lately under Zohran Mamdani, and reelected the disastrous district attorney Alvin Bragg by a comfortable margin, some could make a reasonable argument something is definitely wrong with the Big Apple today, though wealth surely is the least of the problems.

So what’s left are the lessons, and the bits about Miller’s professional life. But the lessons are mostly things Miller himself has very publicly, very repeatedly not followed. “Sometimes you have to work with others to grow,” he writes, for example. “You have to put yourself back into learning, back into wonder, back into some spooky action.” And the anecdotes from the professional comics world are so bland and sanded-down as to be virtually press releases. About his decision to kill off his massively popular character Elektra, he writes:

Exit Elektra. When it came to my decision to end her life, I have to say, it just felt like the right thing to do. Bringing this storyline to a conclusion was the most dramatic thing I could do for the story: the narrative demanded an exclamation point, so I gave it one, in the most lapel-grabbing way possible.

Not mentioned here, however, is that he actually revived her the following year, perhaps because some readers took issue with this, though afterwards, she was mostly in limbo for at least another decade before being put to serious use again, in Daredevil or other comics. By which time, she was depicted as having fully reformed, more or less. And Miller, to my knowledge, was unhappy about the new use for Elektra by that time. But considering how overrated he is in the long run, that's why his complaint is decidedly not worth listening to. And his favoratism for Batman over Superman has long become a cliche among some writers:

Or this, about his decision in Dark Knight Returns to turn Superman into a fascist lapdog:

At the time, Batman suited my creative vision for a superhero much more than Superman. I grew up reading and idolizing Superman. He was my first favorite superhero. But, truth be told, I had gotten pretty sick of the guy. He was just so ridiculously powerful, and his invulnerability reached the point of limiting him as a character for me.

Obviously, “it just felt like the right thing to do” and “I had gotten pretty sick of the guy” are serious disappointments, especially coming from an author who’s gotten a good deal of profitable mileage out of the crafted public image of a straight-talking maverick. There’s precious little maverick straight-talking in Push the Wall, and we’re unlikely to get a more satisfying follow-up. Although it’s at least theoretically possible that Frank Miller could strike again.

So long as he remains as absurdly biased as he's been for goodness knows how long, he won't deliver anything satisfactory, and probably hasn't for longer than we think anyway. I do recall Ronin had a decidedly mediocre ending where the demon called "Agat" turned out to be a robot who was possibly crafted subconsciously by the main protagonist?!? Seriously, that was pretty underwhelming, and defeated whatever fantasy-based premise the miniseries was supposedly built on. And in the end, Ronin was little more than an empty shell.

But what's really disappointing is Miller's superficial view of Superman, one that completely obscures the weaknesses to Kryptonite and magical energies that were established decades ago, if we go by what's quoted from the manuscript. If Miller wanted to, he could've written up a Superman script building on stuff like that for real, and in the end, all he does is insult plenty of hard-working writers and artists who came before him by practically depicting the Man of Steel as minion for fascism. He did something like that with Wonder Woman too in the All-Star imprint title spotlighting Batman & Robin from the late 2000s that only lasted a few years. Miller's inability to acknowledge that the writers are at fault for Superman being "ridiculously powerful" is telling, and if that's how he approaches the whole matter, he's made clear he comes from a generation that didn't make any proper distinctions between reality and fiction.

Another problem with Miller is that he sounds like the kind of scribe who only cares about his own work, and doesn't give a damn what happens with others' work, or how. That's another reason why comicdom fell into such dire straits; nobody respects the past efforts of previous writers and artists with better resumes from up to the turn of the century, and now we have a whole shambles devoid of consistent continuity and characterization in the mainstream for starters. Of course, even those creators have faults, like not showing the guts to take issue with their former workplaces if they feel something wrong was done, or worse, they practically enabled it by participating in degradation of their own creations, as Kane sadly did when he drew 5 of 6 parts of the first, very repellent Green Lantern story in Action Comics Weekly from 1988, where Carol Ferris as Star Sapphire slaughtered Katma Tui, whose death to date was never fully reversed. I don't think Miller's ever complained about whether his own work on Daredevil was disrespected by successive scribes, and so, even though he may be the kind of artist/writer who only cares about his own stories, there's plenty to suggest he still doesn't put much value on what writings he has that did matter. And those writings are decidedly way too few.

As for this new "biography", I think it's worth passing on. It sounds too short, and like Miller hasn't provided enough to think about. Which has got to be another problem with modern creators in the long run.

Marvel moves from NY to CA, and replaces C.B. Cebulski with Stephen Wacker as EIC

The Hollywood Reporter's announced changes are being made at Marvel, none of them anything to be optimistic about, in both location and staffing:

After calling the Big Apple home for almost 90 years, Marvel Comics is moving out of New York City. And heading to Hollywood.

The relocation was revealed to staff at a town hall Thursday at Marvel’s New York office in Midtown, where employees were informed that its publishing division will be pulling up stakes and transferring operations to Burbank, California, the current headquarters of Marvel Studios and corporate parent, The Walt Disney Company.

Just like DC, right? Considering how artistically and politically bad their owner became over the past decade, this is nothing to take pleasure at learning, unfortunately. Nor is the news of who'll replace C.B. Cebulski as EIC, after he retained the role for nearly a decade:

The development is accompanied by a changing of the guard at the top. Stephen Wacker, a respected veteran comics editor who also earned an Emmy nomination for his work in the company’s forays in animation, has been named Marvel’s new editor-in-chief, replacing outgoing chief C.B. Cebulski, who had steered the division since 2017. Cebulski will still remain part of the family, however, as he will be moving to Japan to spearhead the company’s push into manga, among others things, as editor, Asia originals.

Both changes are meant to reinvigorate the comic book side of the company, which has been overshadowed in recent years by the success of Marvel’s movies, and by a creative slump that saw it lose its position as comics market share leader for the first time this century. Marvel chief Kevin Feige’s installing of the new leadership and the relocation of its comics side to Disney’s Burbank base represents a long-term investment in what he believes underpins the source of Marvel’s storytelling. [...]

Among those joining the Burbank headquarters will be Wacker, who is making his Marvel return after leaving the company in the early 2020s to lead Jonathan Hickman’s worldbuilding project 3W3M and then co-founding the entertainment studio Stone Kite.

A beloved editor with strong talent relationships, Wacker spent over fifteen years at Marvel, overseeing Spider-Man comic runs that included the best-selling “Brand New Day” and “Superior Spider-Man” eras. He was also editor on Daredevil and Hawkeye when those titles won Eisner Awards and was involved in the introduction of Kamala Khan, also known as Ms. Marvel.

"Respected and beloved"? Wacker's the same editor who was part and parcel of the effort to run the Spider-Man franchise into the ground, and they shamelessly gloss over one of the worst editorial mandates Joe Quesada forced upon Spidey when he was EIC. It's just like them to distort and obscure the worst of what was brought about. And all these years, they kept repeatedly dangling carrots as to whether Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson would be reunited as a married couple, which they never did, and Cebulski recently allowed things to become worse by approving a story where MJ's turned into another Venom host. These kind of shock value stories don't improve a dire situation, and that's going to be part of Cebulski's "legacy" going out.

Since Wacker, of course, was party to the degradation of Spidey, he's unlikely to reverse any of Quesada's worst steps of the past quarter century, and unlikely to restore the Spider-marriage. And even if he does, that alone won't make Spidey's adventures readable again. For all we know, Wacker could ramp up the wokeness by galaxies, as though it weren't bad enough already, and he was instrumental in shoehorning Islamic propaganda into the MCU with a character whose instant solo series wasn't marketed on merit, and at least 3 projects translating the Muslim Ms. Marvel into live action films, TV and video were flops, with the Marvels movie becoming a huge dud. Of course, the MSM will doubtless not have anything critical to say about his upcoming run as EIC, and chances are that, much like the now outgoing Cebulski, Wacker won't give many press interviews, if at all. At least that'd be a comfort in a sense, since Quesada gave only so many years ago where he was unendurable. Forbes also addressed the move, and said:

In one way, it is unsurprising that Disney is uniting Marvel’s publishing and film units in Burbank. Comic-based movies, media and games supplanted comics publishing as the economic driver of the business two decades ago. Longtime rival DC decamped from New York to Burbank in 2015, a move also accompanied by a change in company leadership. An internal Marvel company survey revealed that more Mavel creators now hail from the West Coast than from the region nearby New York, and in any case, geography has become largely irrelevant to the production of comics. [...]

Cebulski’s departure was also not a surprise. Though the Marvel editor could claim a range of creative and commercial successes in his decade-long leadership of the company, Marvel’s sales have slipped in recent years, falling behind DC for the first time in a long time according to industry sales data. With longtime Marvel President Dan Buckley stepping down in May, replaced by Brad Winderbaum (head of TV, animation, comics and franchise) and David Abdo (general manager, comics and franchise), it seemed likely that Marvel would get new editorial leadership sooner rather than later.

Wacker will step into the role once held by industry legends Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Jim Shooter among others. Wacker has been behind some of Marvel’s most interesting and popular comics of the past few decades, including Brand New Day and Superior Spider-Man. He is well-liked within the industry and well-regarded by creative colleagues both at Marvel and on other stops in his professional career including at DC and Jonathan Hickman’s 3W3M.

As surely expected, they too sugarcoat the worst atrocities to come out of the Quesada era at Marvel, and it wouldn't be the least bit shocking if they're fully in the boat for the worst of the overabundant company wide crossovers that're doubtless coming up in Marvel's schedule now. I'm sure there's something to the claim Wacker's "well-liked" inside the industry, since he's bound to be a knee-jerk leftist who could do everything they consider acceptable. But after the Spider-marriage was thrown out so blatantly, do they really think he's popular and well-liked within Spider-fandom? Naturally, the real-life J. Jonah Jamesons at Forbes won't acknowledge that issue.

Anyway, hiring a new EIC doesn't guarantee fortures will improve, if no merit or respect for fandom and past creators isn't emphasized. Sales of mainstream comics have been declining for years, to the point where it's bewildering Marvel and DC are even still in business as publishers. I'd noticed rumors Disney might shut down Marvel as a publisher, but for all we know, they're bound to continue pointlessly for still another decade or so. And within that time, sales, along with "merit", are bound to fall ever further.

What the Comics Journal says about Gerry Conway

The Comics Journal wrote about the history of the late Gerry Conway's career, and among the subjects in focus, it includes the death of Gwen Stacy in Spider-Man during 1973, and a most interesting part that came afterwards, which hasn't always been noted clearly in history items coming in later decades:

A year into Conway’s run, that push toward adulthood took its most celebrated and controversial form with “The Night Gwen Stacy Died,” in which Conway and co-conspirator John Romita killed both Peter Parker’s long-running love interest Gwen Stacy and longtime arch-nemesis Norman Osborne. The book became an immediate sensation: so shocked and distressed was the fan response that Stan Lee would briefly demand Conway bring back the character from death immediately (he did, kind of, in the form of a clone), and decades later it was still being used as a kind of critical shorthand for the moment Silver Age innocence in comics gave way to 1970s angst. But the scene that has always haunted me from that story isn’t about Gwen Stacy or the Green Goblin at all: it’s of Peter’s roommate Harry Osborne, delirious and desperate as he recovers from a drug overdose, begging his best friend not to walk away.

While TCJ may be one of the most left-wing periodicals around, it's amazing the writer would point out something most mainstream newspapers didn't: while Gwen wasn't resurrected, they did compromise with a clone. Strange why some MSM sources don't clearly acknowledge that. But the article fails to be clear about something else:

His output at DC was vast, peppered with an endless supply of new characters, from the successful (Firestorm, of TV’s Super Friends fame) to the less so (the streetwise era of the Justice League Detroit). “He was just always creative,” Harris said. “I remember in our plotting sessions, he would say, ‘Well, we could introduce a new character at this point.’ And he always had something in mind. I don't know if he had a backlog of them in his head, or if he created them on the spot. But it was fun to watch him come up with something.”

Wonder why they didn't discuss how Vibe and the Steel character created at the time were thrown under the bus by 1987 because George Perez didn't like the absurd accent applied to the former, in effect punishing the character instead of the writer? That was a very sad example of placing blame squarely on a fictional character, and it's one of the leading ways and reasons the industry's been brought down. And then, here's where, sadly enough, political bias shows up when the Punisher comes into focus:

Oddly enough, the Hollywood caste system being what it is, Conway was seldom involved with movie and TV projects based on his own comic book creations — one of whom in particular had been growing up without him. In 1974, Conway, along with artist John Romita, had created the Punisher as a vigilante antihero in the model of Don Pendleton’s Executioner novels. The Punisher appeared initially as a recurring foil for Spider-Man, and in later years Conway would maintain that the character was imagined as a one-off villain, and certainly not a hero in his own right.

To be sure, this wasn’t entirely ingenuous. The Punisher as originally conceived wasn’t a moral paragon, but he wasn’t a villain either, and when the character showed enough success to warrant a spinoff stories in Marvel’s black-and-white magazines, Conway obliged by writing him with the kind of hard-bitten grittiness that had made Dirty Harry a hit at the box office.

But during the early 2000s, the Punisher took on a second life of his own, becoming a kind of mascot for the American far right: “American Sniper” Chris Kyle boasted of putting the Punisher’s skull logo on his unit’s gear during the Iraq War, and by the time Donald Trump was in office, the image and character had become a meme on military and police-centric kitsch. By 2025, Kash Patel was putting the logo on challenge coins handed out to agents at the FBI.

Conway, whose own politics by then skewed toward the left, wanted none of it. “It’s as offensive as putting a Confederate flag on a government building,” he said. In 2020, amid the wave of protests following the murder of George Floyd, he decided, vigilante-style, to take matters into his own hands, selling a line of shirts bearing the logo with all proceeds donated to Black Lives Matter. A few decades earlier, it might have been different. Roy Thomas recalled that in the early ‘80s, Conway was something of a “definite Reaganite, not unlike myself.” In a field not always known for the capacity of its creators to grow and change with the times, Conway was a model of graceful evolution.

It is surprising if Conway supported Reagan back in the day, but sad then that he changed considerably, and sadder still that the writer's gushing over all that, and sugarcoating the whole Floyd affair. But of course, not surprising.

As for what's said about how Conway approached the use of the Punisher - both character and symbol - in later years, that's nothing new by now, but that the magazine would gush all over his pivot to the far-left is appalling. As I've said before, there were positive and decent moments in Conway's writings up to the early 90s, prior to the time he shifted to TV scriptwriting, and that's why it's a shame he had to go out of his way to follow an increasingly far-left narrative that did more harm than good for comicdom, and also Hollywood. At least now that he's gone, it's easier to separate art from artist, and perhaps to attribute the Punisher's creation more to Romita than Conway. In any case, it's a shame that even years before Conway disowned Frank Castle, writers and artists like Frank Miller and Bill Mantlo weren't doing any favors with the questionable way they approached the character, no doubt with Conway's approval. Yet all the while, Wolverine gets a free pass on what the Punisher didn't. Come to think of it, even Jason Todd, the 2nd Robin in the Batman books, didn't get a free pass on supposedly killing a sexually violent criminal in 1988. Todd, IIRC, was also created by Conway, and his apparent acceptance of what DC and Jim Starlin did to that character could easily say something about whether he really cared about his creations too. Even if certain fictional characters are created for corporate ownership, does that mean a creator should remain quiet? Of course not.

So it's regrettable Conway had to follow a position even Stan Lee did, and not speak negatively about the places he worked for. Now, we're long seeing the terrible results of all that silence.

Marvel turns out the latest modern swimsuit special

Following up on the revived swimsuit special of the past year, Marvel's now publishing one for 2026, and Flickering Myth's got preview pages, but again, there's signs this'll be anything but a celebration. For one thing, as AIPT notes:

Kicking things off is Daniel Kibblesmith and Alessandro Miracolo for “Beach Bashed,” featuring a beach party hosted by Namor. A great opening page shows off a ton of heroes enjoying a pool, including the Watcher. Kibblesmith gets plenty of nods to Marvel events and character relationships throughout the story, with a main focus on Namor’s attempt to find Sue Storm. It’s a light tale for sure, but one that ends in a way only Namor could pull off.

If memory serves, Kibblesmith's one of the SJWs they employed earlier, and while it may seem like he's now willing to abandon that kind of stance, there's still signs the artwork is uninspired and otherwise sexless, and they still rely on the panel format used in the 2 earlier specials. It reminds me that, while some of the artwork in the Winter Break Special was marginally better, that special was still undermined by how they kept interrupting the artwork pages with a "story" that took up at least 15 pages, leaving the overall special with barely 16 or 17 pages of winter-based illustrations of various Marvel cast members, considerably less than the original swimsuit specials had over 3 decades ago. And the drawing of Elektra in the Winter Break special was particularly dull.

So again, I'm not sure why they're keeping on with this now, as they fail, beyond contributions from artists like J. Scott Campbell for variant covers, to offer anything that's seriously impressive. It underscores how poor the art world's becoming these days, at least according to how the mainstream hires them. And what do they mean by Namor being the "only one who can pull it off"? Isn't that provided the writer actually does a good job? Something that's been terrible lacking for over 2 decades now.

What John Byrne has to say about his new X-Men: Elsewhen story

Before I begin, while I've made clear in the past that the Phoenix Saga is not one of my favorite storylines - not on its own anyway - I am aware that terrible SJW Heather Antos actually attacked Byrne over bizarre accusations that he's supposedly homophobic/transphobic, even though he was the creator of Alpha Flight's Northstar, and it was originally his intention to emphasize that Jean-Paul Beubier was homosexual. From what I can tell, Antos must've attacked Byrne more out of bizarre jealousy along with virtue-signaling, and she does seem to have embarrassed herself with her employers over that.

But with all that said, does that mean I have to like the Phoenix Saga, or even the premise of Byrne's new alternate continuity story? Of course not, and seriously, what he's written up today is, IMO, distasteful, based in part on my being a fan of Jean Grey, and would I be taking this position if I weren't a fan? Anyway, Byrne was interviewed by the NY Times (archive link), and here's what's brought up in discussion:

Now 76, Byrne has re-emerged with what he’s calling his swan song: “X-Men: Elsewhen,” an alternate reality hardcover which revisits the X-Men at the point where he left, without his former collaborators but with a big plot twist: Phoenix was not killed.

Viewed within the specific context, if Jean was rescued from the Shiar and brought back to Earth as though nothing happened, after she allegedly wiped out billions, is that in good taste? Hardly. That told, what comes up next in the main interview is eyebrow raising:

For readers who may not be well-versed in the long history of the X-Men, can you briefly talk about the controversy around the Phoenix character?

There had never been a case where a superhero created by Stan and Jack had been turned into a villain. And we did that. We had her go out and blow up a whole planet and destroy an entire alien race. [Then editor in chief] Jim Shooter knew this was coming, but for some reason he said, “She must be punished” — that Phoenix had to be taken to a “prison asteroid,” and horribly tortured for all eternity. I said, “I’d rather kill her.” So that’s what we ended up doing.

What?!? Shooter thought Jean should be tortured?!? As though it weren't bad enough he wouldn't lift a finger in defense of her dignity as a character based on how she was being forced into the role of a criminal/murderess, he thought it okay to put her in a position where she'd end up being tortured to the end of time? Well, I knew there were sadly some very serious downsides to Shooter's MO, and Secret Wars was surely just the icing on the cake. What I did know years ago was that one of the story proposals was to have Jean put in a position similar to an actual Phoenix, where she'd revive but then be destroyed again repeatedly. I'm not sure if that's what Byrne's alluding to, but let's be clear: I just didn't find the whole premise appealing, and when the lead up to where Jean would be obliterated told that she'd wiped out 2 billion residents of an alien solar system...that made me sick. What's more, this whole storyline itself kept getting dredged up again and again, with Chris Claremont writing something vaguely similar when he got a job writing Justice League in the 2000s. What's so special about a story where a decent woman's turned into a monstress, but not one where she spends time with a loving family or something like that? And then, look what bizarre, questionable comment Byrne makes next:

But later, after you stopped working on X-Men books, Jean was brought back. So is anything ever really at stake in mainstream comics?

When Mark Gruenwald, my friend and editor, died unexpectedly, I mentioned it on my website and the first response was, “Oh, that’s terrible. I hope he recovers.” I thought: Oh my God, we’ve trained fans to expect that no death is actually permanent, even in the real world!

But this wasn't the real world they were dealing with! This was science-fiction/fantasy! And the later 1988-98 Excalibur was one of the most surreal series of all in Marvel's output. Resurrection is part and parcel of science-fantasy whether Byrne likes it or not, and he acts like it's some kind of calamity if handled otherwise? I'm sorry, but no. Resurrection in science-fantasy is not the worst thing that could happen, and to restrict it even in the Marvel/DC universes, or single them out as though they alone aren't allowed to employ the concept is insulting to the intellect, and offensive. Why, if you know where to look, there's undoubtably stories about resurrection of fictional characters in science-fiction/fantasy that are very enjoyable, in otherwise good taste, and we're being lectured that it's somehow a crime? Good grief. And then, look who he says he enjoyed writing most:

Which of the characters is the most fun to write?

Cyclops was always my favorite X-Man, from when I first started reading the book. Wolverine, of course. I often say Wolverine is my fault because [when I came on] Chris told me that he intended to write him out of the book. I was Canadian at that time and said, “No way are you getting rid of the only Canadian!”

But Jean wasn't fun at all? Perhaps not even Storm, Kitty Pryde, Scarlet Witch, Lois Lane and Lana Lang when he later wrote and drew Superman, or even Wonder Girl and Big Barda? Byrne unfortunately had a questionable approach to women at the time, and that he had 3 or 4 of the leading ladies drawn with short hair in his stories was probably the beginning. I recall a Superman story where an alien from Apocalips named Sleez mind-controlled Barda and Superman, and put them in a bizarre fanfiction situation where a snuff filmmaker would record them in something like a porno flick. I once read that Jack Kirby disliked that story because he considered it an insult to his wife, whom Barda was meant as a tribute to (and IIRC, there was a scene where Superman implied she looked like glop?!?). Superman may not have fared much better in that tale, and it was decidedly a low point in Byrne's run. And again, it doesn't always seem like he had much affection for some of the women in his stories, not even Aurora in Alpha Flight. Honestly, in hindsight, some of that stuff comes across as quite ludicrous, and has to be taken with a grain of salt.

Is Byrne correct though, that Claremont wanted to jettison Wolvie? I don't know, but some history items tell that Claremont wanted to put Wolvie in the grave and revive him as a villain. You could reasonably ask there if Claremont really loved Logan as a character, and of course, whether he actually loved Jean too, considering where he took her in the late 70s as the X-Men writer.

When people talk about giants of the era you came up in, you and Frank Miller are often on similar footing. Thoughts about his treatment of Wolverine?

This will get me in trouble, but I didn’t care much for Frank’s Wolverine. In terms of creating a hugely popular character, he did the right thing. My gut reaction was: beautiful artwork, but I don’t know this guy.

Well, based on Miller's appalling leftism, that's why I don't think I know him either, and he sure didn't give much reason to have faith in his ability to stand by his stories.

There’s a page in Elsewhen where you depict Wolverine brutally attacking Magneto. The backgrounds are bright red, his eyes are bright red, he’s in a murderous rage. Is this a new kind of ferocity for this character?

Well, it was always what we had in mind. There’s a scene, that I would never, in a million years, do. It’s Wolverine sitting at the breakfast table and Kitty Pryde [the youngest of the X-Men] comes in and says, “Hey,” in just the wrong tone of voice. And he guts her without a second thought and then goes on eating his Cheerios. Because he is quite literally a homicidal maniac.

Seriously, that's what he believes Logan should be?!? Strange. From what I'd read years ago, he wanted Wolvie to have a more likable persona, and this certainly is enough to wonder if Byrne's taking a contradictory position. He also makes it sound like he's taking the fictional-characters-are-real-life-people approach, which again, is utterly grating, illogical and brought down comicdom practically years ago.

And then, wouldn't you know it, an allusion to Byrne's leftism turns up:

It almost feels like we’re living in a comic book world today.

It feels like evil has won. I look at Washington and go, oh my God, this is the [guy] who I modeled my Lex Luthor in part on, back when he was just a big noise in business in New York.

Sigh. So he considers Trump a baddie and nothing else. A real shame. As though there weren't any better examples of bad billionaires out there at the time. On which note, as this Popverse article tells, if Byrne's take on Luthor was based on Trump, it was only partially, since there were other examples of billionaires at the time he'd drawn ideas from, including Ted Turner and Thomas Edison. But now, despite a suggestion to the contrary, Byrne sounds like he wants to claim Trump's literally the problem, and not the others. How odd. As a result, he's not all that different from Miller, so what's his point? At the end of the interview:

What do you consider your legacy?

When I look at my work, all I can see is the influences. There’s Neal Adams, there’s Joe Kubert, there’s Bernie Wrightson, there’s Jack Kirby, there’s Gil Kane. When people tell me they’re huge John Byrne fans, I go, “What are they seeing?”

I would like to think that when people see my work, it’s believable. If it’s two guys sitting at a bar, or if it’s two planets crashing into each other, I like to think that people will believe what they’re looking at. Just verisimilitude. There’s the word.

While there are several examples in his portfolio that're great, including his overall run on Fantastic Four, Byrne later stumbled by the turn of the century (his Spider-Man: Chapter One miniseries didn't get a good reception, IIRC), and I can't say he'll ever have as big a legacy as Kirby, Kane and Wrightson. Interesting that somebody who alluded to Kirby would've risked alienating him with a take on the aforementioned Barda from New Gods that was questionable at best, and ludicrous at worst. And Byrne's inability to avoid leftist political allusions will certainly for now make it difficult to decide how well his legacy can be admired overall.

Now again on the subject of Antos' recent attack on Byrne, what's really appalling is that she may have boosted sales for a story that I don't think should be considered a big deal, and alternate reality or not, it strikes me as tasteless. Interesting that she didn't attack Byrne because she cares about Jean, but rather, because she perceives his politics as incompatible with hers. That's got to be saying something. I don't like her MO, but even so, I'm not going to buy what Byrne's promoting as possibly his last writing and art project, because the whole premise was in questionable taste to start with, and became such an irritating cliche over the following decades. Even Colossus, if memory serves, was turned crooked in the early 90s, but he was never burdened with the kind of indignity Jean was when she was originally written obliterating citizens of an alien solar system, incurring the wrath of the Shiar. So why must Jean have suffered something that could make it difficult to use her as a character in later years? I know the setup was retconned with an alien lifeform disguising itself as Jean in 1985, but even so, that doesn't mean Claremont, Shooter, Byrne and company couldn't have created a new character in the mid-70s to take the role of the Phoenix instead of Jean being shoved into it. Now, we've since wound up with an embarrassing situation where the premise was repeatedly dredged up by bankrupt creators who can only think of emphasizing the darkness in the worst ways possible, and it's hurt comicdom very badly.