Latest news with #comicbooks
CTV News
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- CTV News
New comic book shop on Bank Street helping to revitalize Centretown
Products on display at Nefarious Comics on Bank Street in Ottawa. (Dave Charbonneau/CTV News Ottawa) A new shop in Centretown is giving comic book fans a place to connect, collect, and celebrate the art form they love, and it's helping to revitalize an area that has seen several business closures in recent years. Inside Nefarious Comics on Bank Street, owner Ryan Jordan has built more than just a store, he's built a community. 'I really wanted to give a community, a sense of belonging where you can come in, you can hang out, you can chat about your comics, your Pokémon cards, your Magic cards. You can come play cards at a table, grab a drink, listen to some music, and just connect with members of the community,' Jordan said. The shop is part of a wave of new additions to Bank Street. 'We are seeing businesses leave and new ones come in. This is just going to drive more traffic, more tourism, and even the aesthetic of the outside of that comic book shop is something to see,' said Sabrina Lemay, executive director of the Centretown BIA. Nefarious Comics Nefarious Comics, at the corner of Bank and James streets, is a new business helping to breathe new life into Centretown. (Dave Charbonneau/CTV News Ottawa) Nefarious Comics opened about a month ago and is already popular among die-hard fans. Residents say places like this new comic book shop are good for the community. 'People putting in the effort into opening a store like this in a place that needs brick and mortar shops and jobs and work, yeah, it's really good for the community, I think,' said Dave Moncur, a comics fan. Luke Hodge, a comic and Pokémon collector, said he visits the shop almost daily. 'It's awesome. I honestly come in almost every day on my way to work,' Hodge said. 'I've been collecting since I was a kid. But I did stop for a little bit. And then once I saw the shop, I kind of got back into it. But Pokémon, I have been collecting for a couple of years now.' Fans say they love every aspect of the new spot. 'It's the art. It's the stories. The simplicity of it all and maybe just a little escapism,' said Jeff Taylor, a comic collector. Jordan says owning a shop was always the dream. 'When we were children collecting comic books, you're like, what do you want to be when you grow up? And like, I want to own a comic book store,' he said. Nefarious Comics A collection of rare comics, signed by legendary comic book creator Stan Lee, is the crown jewel of Nefarious Comics. (Dave Charbonneau/CTV News Ottawa) The store's crown jewels are a collection of extremely rare comics, some worth a small fortune. One collection, with some issues signed by legendary comic book creator Stan Lee, is so valuable that it is kept off site in a safety deposit box.
Geek Dad
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- Geek Dad
Review – Zatanna #6: The Final Curtain
Zatanna #6 cover, via DC Comics. Ray: Jamal Campbell's solo writer-artist debut has been characterized by brilliant art and a dense but coherent story, but it's also adding one key thing to Zatanna's mythos – our first look at her mother Sindella and her role in Zatanna's upbringing. In most versions, she dies very early and Zatanna's father plays a much bigger role. But the main threat here ties right back to Zatanna's mom. Over the course of this series, we've been following Zatanna as she deals with threats from villains including Brother Night and the mysterious Lady White, as well as Clayface and a possessed Blue Devil. But this issue reveals that the true threat is a mysterious dark sorceress named Princess Allura – who holds Sindella responsible for splitting her from her twin sister all those years ago, and is taking out that grudge on her daughter. Of course, we all know that villains' perceptions of reality are always very accurate. Last call. Via DC Comics. This final issue does make extensive use of the backwards-speak device, which makes it a little trickier to read through, although I think it does it well – and that provides an excuse to linger more over Jamal Campbell's stunning art. This issue does a great job of balancing Zatanna's more ruthless nature when going up against a truly evil villain with a sense of compassion that she shows when she's up against an enemy who's been confused or corrupted against their will. In the end, it does end a little abruptly, with Zatanna spending about 90% of this issue dispelling the main threat and then quickly resolving a few things before heading on to her next show, but that works because this is essentially just a day in the life for the character. We haven't had many stories that really capture the oddball adventures of a magical superhero, especially at DC, and I expect this will be an evergreen classic for the character. To find reviews of all the DC issues, visit DC This Week. GeekDad received this comic for review purposes. Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!
Gizmodo
14-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Gizmodo
Watching ‘X-Men' 25 Years Ago Was a Game-Changing Moment
It's hard to describe what it was like to sit down, 25 years ago today, to watch X-Men. I was born in 1980 and grew up loving and adoring superheroes. The Christopher Reeve Superman movies were everything to me. Posters and toys for Tim Burton's Batman films were all over my room. And each week, I'd go to the local comic book shop to pick up new issues of X-Men, X-Force, X-O Manowar, Spawn, and so many others. The 1990s in particular were a golden age for comic books, but on the big screen, there wasn't much there. Then, on July 14, 2000, a movie was released that had Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Jean Grey, Professor X, Magneto, Mystique, Sabertooth, and more, all on screen at the same time, in the same movie. Quite simply, there had never been anything like that before, and nothing would be the same ever again. Of course, in the six decades or so between the rise of the comic book superhero and the release of X-Men, Hollywood had many, many attempts to bring superheroes to the big screen. And some, like the aforementioned DC films, really worked. But in the case of Marvel, all we had were campy, hard-to-see Captain America or Fantastic Four movies. We were still two years away from Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. Still eight years away from Robert Downey Jr. as Iron Man. But, on that fateful July day, Marvel's most famous team made its big-screen debut, with incredible results. I remember sitting down for the movie not knowing what to expect. The internet, of course, existed in 2000, and people had lots of thoughts on these new, dark costumes for the characters. It would be many, many years before film studios were okay with giving these characters more comics-accurate costumes. So it was hard to know whether or not this film would be true to those characters and comics or treat them like playthings. Then the movie starts, and the first thing we see is a young boy being separated from his parents at Auschwitz. That made it very clear this was taking these characters incredibly seriously and treating them with the respect they deserved. That then carried over into the story about mutants being outcasts, about Wolverine finding a place among his people, and so much more. Looking back on the film, not only was its mere existence groundbreaking, but the casting, sets, and so much more have impacted what came later. Just last year we saw Hugh Jackman return to Wolverine in an R-rated movie that grossed over a billion dollars. It doesn't get much more obvious than that. Unfortunately, you can't talk about X-Men without mentioning the shadow cast on the film now. X-Men was directed by Bryan Singer, a once beloved filmmaker who was later accused of numerous accounts of sexual assault and misconduct. Admittedly, those horrors can make it difficult to separate the art from the artist, especially when three years later he directed the even better sequel, X2. But even so, X-Men wasn't just Singer's creation. It was all the actors, writers, producers, craftspeople, studio executives, and more who worked on it. One of whom was a little-known associate producer named Kevin Feige, who would take the experience on to much bigger and better things at Marvel. He'd even get control of the X-Men decades later when Marvel's parent company, Disney, purchased Fox. A new X-Men movie, the first under that banner, is now in the works. Eventually, X-Men went on to gross about $300 million worldwide against a production budget of $75 million. It was a hit and gave 20th Century Fox confidence to move ahead with both the X-Men and other characters. We got Daredevil movies, Fantastic Four movies, and beyond. It also gave other studios, Sony in particular, proof that audiences would show up to movies that didn't just have Superman or Batman in them. Two years later, Spider-Man was released and had the largest opening weekend of all time. So as we sit here in 2025, with a new Superman movie in theaters, a new Fantastic Four movie coming in mere weeks, and a fifth Avengers movie in production, we can trace every one of those seeds back to July 14, 2000, when the X-Men made their big screen debut. The film shouted to the world that audiences everywhere love all superheroes, and the rest is history. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what's next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who.
New York Times
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
My Problem With Superman
Superman might be one of the most recognizable characters in the world, but before I immigrated to the United States from the Dominican Republic, I didn't know him at all. But as a 7-year-old kid in New Jersey, I couldn't get away from him, what with the 'Super Friends' cartoon firing full blast and his comics on every corner store spinner rack. And then a couple of years later, in 1978 — while I was still trying to wrestle my English into something approaching fluency — Richard Donner's 'Superman,' a box office sensation, blew the zeitgeist up like Krypton itself. You might think an immigrant kid like me — who loved comic books and studied them for clues as to how I should conduct myself in this new world, an immigrant kid who was as bedeviled by his lost home world as Clark Kent is bedeviled by his spectral connection to Krypton, an immigrant kid who also thought of his island as a Krypton of sorts (though mine was destroyed not by cosmic apocalypse but by the banal logistics of immigration), who also labored under three identities (I was someone in English-speaking America, someone else in my family's Spanish-only apartment and someone else in my memories of the Dominican Republic) — would have fallen hard for Superman. I didn't, though. Not like I fell for, say, Spider-Man. In fact, I was something of the neighborhood anti-Superman. Always ready to inveigh against the Last Son of Krypton, always ready with long arguments laying out why he was dumb. What can I say? From Day 1, dude just rubbed me the wrong way. There was the obvious stuff, like how goofy Superman was as a hero, how ridiculously dated his star-spangled patriotism was — Supes loved a country I'd never seen. My landfill America was way more supervillain territory. You would think Superman's immigrant/refugee background would have represented a point of connection, but even that rankled me. Sure we both came from other worlds, but Clark Kent's complete assimilation, his passing, seemed to me as impossible as flying fast to reverse time. Superman might be the Man of Tomorrow, but it was a tomorrow that didn't seem like it would ever arrive for someone like me, who got spat on in the street by complete strangers or got called the N-word and the S-word on the daily. People literally snarled when they saw my brown face or heard my Dominican accent. But if I had just disliked Superman, full stop, that would have been easier. The problem was that while dude hit me in a lot of wrong ways, he also hit me in a lot of weird ways that I couldn't just brush off. I ran my mouth about Superman, but I also couldn't quite get quit of him, no matter how hard I tried. For all his four-colored simplicity, Superman is a perversely fraught figure. He is impossibly human, but he is also an actual extraterrestrial. He is the most American of Americans, but he's also an alien migrant. He is bumbling Clark Kent and supreme Superman and haunted Kal-El, and each identity simultaneously reinforces and erases the others. He is an alien invader who fights alien invaders, a child of the apocalypse who repeatedly saves the world and himself from apocalypses masterminded by his villains. He is a figure of cataclysmic agency who is constrained from experiencing or enacting real change, trapped like nearly all comic book heroes in what Umberto Eco called an 'oneiric climate,' a timeless, dreamlike environment that forbids systemic transformations of any kind. (That's why the all-powerful Superman doesn't end all war and the emergence of Wakanda alters zero about its world.) He's a Mr. Rogers who mourns endlessly his lost Krypton. He is the true Angel of Immigrant History, blown by an exterminating storm from his old world into a new one, but always trying to glimpse the catastrophe behind him. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
Geek Dad
09-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Geek Dad
Review – Superman Treasury 2025: Hero For All #1 – Return of the Legend
Superman Treasury: Hero for All #1 cover, via DC Comics. Ray: It's the Summer of Superman, as the character's biggest movie in well over a decade is coming out in days – so it's only fitting that we're getting some epic comics to celebrate. While other writers have had more high-profile runs, I don't think anyone has done more to define the Man of Steel in the last few decades than Dan Jurgens – he wrote him for over ten years post-John Byrne and shepherded him through some of his most iconic stories. So it's a great choice that for this oversized annual of sorts (over 60 story pages!), Jurgens is back to do a story that feels like a celebration of his entire era. It seems to be set in a sort of middle ground – back when Jon was still a kid, but after the Kents returned to Metropolis. Man of Action. Via DC Comics. And it kicks off in a big way – with a massive-scale alien invasion hitting Metropolis. This has happened before, of course, but Superman is taken aback by the scale of the attack, which seems to have a personal edge to it. He manages to defeat the giant robot that launches the attack – but then disappears as the true mastermind of the attack is revealed. It's an alliance of Maxima, whose resentment over Superman choosing a human over her has curdled over into hatred, and Hank Henshaw, who she's taken as her consort and never refuses an opportunity to target Superman. They've found a semi-willing ally in Queen Glynna, the shady alien princess who manipulated Jon Kent in one of Jurgens' backups. But as the other heroes of Earth battle to stay alive, Superman is otherwise occupied – finding himself in a vision of another world where he never became the hero he was supposed to. In this one, Jonathan Kent was killed in a tornado when Clark was a child. That left Clark feeling more tied to the farm, hesitant to leave Martha alone. The only one who tried to convince him to leave was…Lex Luthor, his childhood best friend. And in this world, Clark does make it to the Daily Planet, but he's working for Lex, living a quiet life, and watching as Lex gets everything he ever wanted. It's an interesting little side-take on classic stories like 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?' It's fascinating to watch Superman rediscover who he's meant to be, and Jurgens takes over the pen for a multi-page segment that has Superman regain his memories – and take us through the entirety of Jurgens' run, including characters like Conduit and stories that I never thought we'd see revisited. The final showdown is dramatic, if a bit abrupt after the more character-driven stories that start this issue, and Jurgens' Superman is note-perfect as always. Bruno Redondo, who draws 90% of the issue, is just as good here as he was on Nightwing, and this issue is a perfect capper to the hundreds of Superman stories Jurgens has written over the year. Let's hope this coming movie is as good as the comics DC has been putting out lately. To find reviews of all the DC issues, visit DC This Week. GeekDad received this comic for review purposes. Liked it? Take a second to support GeekDad and GeekMom on Patreon!
