Tag Archives: politics

Spotlight on Fury: Peacemaker

We kicked off this year’s Spy Fiction Month with a comic set in World War II and we’ll finish with one as well. Like I mentioned last week, in 2001 Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson reinvented Marvel’s war-hero-turned-super-spy Nick Fury … Continue reading

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Spotlight on Fury MAX

Way before Samuel L. Jackson embodied the role, Colonel Nick Fury was already a household name for Marvel fans, having starred in a string of seminal psychedelic spy comics by Jack Kirby and Jim Steranko back in the 1960s… Strange … Continue reading

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A couple of excellent spy novels

Shifting gears for a bit, today let’s talk about a couple of cool books without drawings that came out almost a decade ago… OUR KIND OF TRAITOR (John le Carré, 2010) “At seven o’clock of a Caribbean morning, on the … Continue reading

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Spotlight on The Unknown Soldier, 1975-1976

In the early 1970s, the Unknown Soldier feature of Star Spangled War Stories told exciting spy adventures set in World War II, starring a disfigured operative turned master-of-disguise who undertook secret missions under direct orders from Washington. As I explained … Continue reading

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Spotlight on The Unknown Soldier, 1970-1974

There is a whole branch of spy fiction focusing on World War II going back to the time of the conflict itself. In cinema, the British kicked things off with thrillers such as Night Train to Munich and Contraband. Hollywood … Continue reading

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Batman comics on drugs – part 2

If you read the last post, you know I’ve been looking at Batman comics about drugs. Today I want to briefly discuss two stories from the early 1990s that approached this topic in extreme ways. In his many adventures, the … Continue reading

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Batman comics on drugs – part 1

Drugs have traditionally played a substantial role in Batman comics (hell, in the whole medium). The Dark Knight has put away his share of drug dealers – from run-of-the-mill villains (your prototypical crime fiction trope) to the kind of outlandish … Continue reading

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More brilliant sci-fi short stories

Jordan Peele’s The Twilight Zone has started off on the wrong foot. It’s not just that most episodes so far have been weaker than 90% of Rod Serling’s original series  (or, at least, 90% of the first three seasons, since … Continue reading

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Two-fisted cyberpunk comics

Every once in a while, the zeitgeist hits the world of cinema with just the right creative force for it to spit out a bunch of simultaneous gems with a similar mood. For example, 1981 was clearly one of the … Continue reading

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John Ostrander’s expanded Batman

John Ostrander has written more cool comics than most of his peers. Some of them feature Batman and other Gotham citizens, although those projects don’t always play to his strengths, since they tend to be short fill-ins or mini-series. Ostrander … Continue reading

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