Deadpool’s Totally Boss Trip To The 80’s

Nancy (of Graphic Novelty² fame) has been on vacation with her family and, as a result, asked if I’d be up for writing a guest post for her blog.  Um, how about YES?!?!?!?  Nancy and Kathleen’s Graphic Novelty² was one of the very first blogs I found as I entered the world of WordPress and blogging and I love their posts.  As a result I couldn’t have been more excited to add something to their catalogue.  My choice?  Well, like a babysitter who lets the kids watch something a little inappropriate while Mom and Dad are out for the night, I figured we’d look at Deadpool!  However, as is always the case when Deadpool’s being written by Cullen Bunn, Deadpool’s Secret Secret Wars gives us a lot more than just the Merc with a Mouth at his inappropriate best.  Bunn drops Deadpool in the original Secret Wars of the 1980’s and offers another master class on why we’ve come to love and need Deadpool so much.  So maybe you should click over to Graphic Novelty² and check it out?!?  C’mon, it’ll be rad!  I promise.  As a bonus, you can also spend more time perusing all of Nancy and Kathleen’s amazing posts too.  It’s a two-for!  Yay!

The Vision, The Other, and a Way to Communion

Okay, so obviously I’m late to the game with Tom King and Gabriel Hernandez Walta’s The Vision.  I started it when it came out but (honestly) it made me heart hurt a bit too much to read monthly.  But thankfully Kalie got me both trade paperbacks for Christmas!  Yay!!!  I’m happy I read this in one sitting as a complete, beautiful, tragic novel.  You know those novels that, once read, you can’t get out of your head?  Well that’s The Vision.  This story will haunt me, yes, but it also moved me – as we all need to be moved – by making me feel the experience of the other.

‘X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills’ Is As Relevant As Ever…

While cross-company promotional policies may have shifted the X-Men to the sidelines in Marvel’s comic catalogue of late (as Fox, not Disney, owns the rights to make X-Men movies), I’d argue the X-Men are as relevant now as they’ve ever been.  “Mutants in the Marvel Universe,” as master X-Men writer Chris Claremont says in his introduction to X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, “have always stood as a metaphor for the underclass, the outsiders, they represent the ultimate minority.”  The X-Men then are both those who we reject and those who stand up to give a voice to those rejected.  As such, their stories and their message are desperately needed right now.