Oh really.

It's not really the same kind of discussion it was twenty years ago. Now, books either tie-in to CIVIL WAR II or whatever, or get canceled in six months instead of twelve months. It's all playing for time if you're anywhere near the mid-list.

Technically, at the outset of the most recent SECRET WARS, Dr Doom defeated the Beyonders (plural) who are different from the Beyonder (singular) who was the antagonist of the first (1985) SW and protagonist of the second (1986) SW. The Beyonder did not appear in the most recent SW other than misleadingly on a handful…

I try.

No, you can't, which is why it was a comedic exaggeration. But it's failure did put a nice punctuation mark on the first era of comic book (superhero) movies, before the genre was completely transformed by Marvel's success.

I'll accept the criticism. I was doing something a little different than my usual "run down the comics history" for Character X, and I don't know if it was entirely successful. I'll be doing more of these, I'm already on tap to do one for SUICIDE SQUAD, so constructive criticism is valuable.

THE PUNISHER never received a theatrical release and went directly to video, at least in the United States. Same with CAPTAIN AMERICA. FF was never released legally at all.

Watch / listen to anything Schumacher has said about his Batman movies. He knows they are reviled, especially B&R. He is apologetic, to a point - he knows he could have made a film people would have liked better, and probably would have preferred to make that film over what he actually did make. But when the word came…

Not cherry picking at all. BATMAN & ROBIN killed superhero films dead - for a year, at least. It's the dividing line between all the stuff that comes before, a list which includes outliers like THE CROW and SPAWN, and the stuff which comes in a trickle that turns into a deluge once Marvel movies started making a lot…

Oh you mean besides having read just about every X-Men comic book ever published

Well, somehow or another they made Groot a household name.

T_T

Only 2500 words, can't cover everything . . . plus, although I saw every episode when it was being broadcast new, I really haven't revisited the animated series more than watching a couple episodes on Netflix a few years ago.

If I can just butt in myself - O'Brien is one of my personal favorite writers about comics, and he's criminally underrated.

I was casting about for something write about and it seemed as if now was the time, since the updates have been going pretty steadily for a while now, to maybe risk jinxing its return by talking about it. If he had come back for two months' worth of updates and left again there wouldn't have been much point in writing…

We aren't suddenly doing it, we just don't do it as often as we should. What we review is largely up to the individual reviewer. I've also been known to write about stuff that is specifically recommended in the comments section on occasion. (ON OCCASION.)

Fair point, but the book also alternated that with stories like "Streets of Laredo," which was a dead-on Larry McMurtry pastiche that was also, tonally, a dry run for what came immediately after in the MAX book.

We aim to please.

Oh, yeah, that's the worst.

Good question. Yes, that is the first superhero fight, and maybe even the first real comics "event" in the way we consider it now. But it was also 1940, and "Marvel" didn't exist yet, certainly not the Marvel we think of when we think of it today.