Making fun of intentionally bad or weird characters wasn't my aim, at least. Those guys are rad.

I'll have you know that I kid the Human Fly only out of the deepest affection.

Bret Blevins is awesome.

One "L."

The guy who wrote this article is ABD in an English PhD program, just so ya know.

Guys; it was Chuck Austen who dredged it up again in the early 2000s.

Guilty as charged. Usually for an article of this length there's some repeated phrase that I keep coming back to but don't notice it until it's already up.

There was a bit in there about the Martian Manhunter at first, but again, only so much time I could afford to spend on background given size limitations. FWIW, since I've been reading about comics in any capacity, 1956 is usually the hard-and-fast like for the beginning. The end is harder to put down, but 1970 is a…

I agree with your assessment, but there is only so much space, even in a 2500 word article.

I was trying to avoid characters already covered in Jon Morris' excellent LEAGUE OF REGRETTABLE SUPERHEROES book, which has entries on Superpro, US1 and Slapstick. We've got an interview coming up with him in the next couple days so I didn't want to completely steal his thunder.

The piece was overlong as it was - I would have loved to talk about O'Grady, Lang's time with the Fantastic Four and the FF, more about the Wasp, his death, Stature, etc, but there just wasn't space.

Alright: cut his hair, shave that goatee, and throw away the costume. Put him in a well-tailored suit, give him only one knife, something small. Suddenly he's an undercover agent of S.W.O.R.D. working for Abigail Brand to track down Shi'ar sleeper agents across the globe.

>ahem<

To be fair, there was a bit in there about how JFM defined the book and a lot of what Ellis did was just taking his ideas to the logical next step, but it got cut to make the piece read more streamlined. JFM's run IS very good, and deserves to be reprinted.

Both my parents are bipolar and I have taken psychiatric medication every day of my adult life.

Lobo was already a sex symbol of a kind. Women like badass biker dudes.

I take issue with the perception of bias. I read pretty much everything Marvel and DC publish as part of my job for this site. As someone who has been reading comics for over three decades, it is my "expert opinion" that DC for the past few years has mostly been a garbage fire, only leavened by a few critical…

Difference is, DC never owned Milestone. Milestone licensed its IP to DC, it never sold anything.

The citizenship renouncing thing was not in Grounded. It was in a backup story for an anniversary issue, a bit that no one expected would ever catch-on. Just a comment about how Superman needed to be able to stand with foreign protestors during the Arab Spring without needing to get permission from the State dept.

I'm actually pretty fond of LAF myself. It has its moments, and like you say, even second-rate Kurtzman is still Kurtzman. But it's always going to be compared to whatever awesome imaginary books Kurtzman could have done on his own. Is it a disservice to call it T&A when it was proudly T&A?