The New 52 hits UK newsagents with an anthology featuring Justice League, Action Comics and Green Lantern.

The relaunch of DC Comics’ entire line as ‘The New 52’ has generated sales, it’s generated discussion, and put DC firmly in the spotlight. One of the big talking points, though, has been that something has gone very wrong with its depiction of women.
It didn’t help DC’s case that they launched two books in the [...]

At long last, ‘Action Comics’ #1 is here. Which is something, considering the last time that legitimately could be said was in 1938.

‘Justice League’ #1 comes across like the prologue of a novelization of a terrible, terrible movie.

As a first issue for the new DC universe, ‘Justice League’ #1 is unexpectedly understated.

A reasonable compromise between the simplistic entertainment of Batman video games, the pop art spectacle of the 1960s TV show and Nolan’s more adult approach.

Is the status quo of an unmarried Clark and Lois in the DC reboot all that it seems?

‘Knight of Vengeance’ is very good work, a beautifully assembled comic that just happened to leave me cold.

Green Lantern is a briskly entertaining and enjoyably broad superhero flick that doesn’t seem to know quite which audience it’s aiming for.

Jarringly, it’s nearly eight years since I posted a breathlessly enthusiastic review of Vertigo’s Human Target on this site. I’ve just been revisiting the series for an upcoming encyclopaedia of comics from Salem Press: it also happens to be coming out again in a new set of trade paperbacks. When I wrote that review I [...]

Six months ago, I reviewed ‘Superman’ #700, which had the prologue for Grounded, the new story in which Superman decided he needed to connect with ordinary people and so began to walk from the East Coast of America to the West. I quite liked it.

‘DC Universe Presents’ is the latest UK title to reprint US comics for the UK newsstand, and with one great story and two quite good ones it represents very good value for your three quid.

‘Under the Red Hood’ manages the surprising feat of taking a comic book story mired in sprawling continuity and turning it into a highly enjoyable, accessible action thriller.

I think the rise and fall of the WildStorm Universe titles (cancelled as of December 2010) tells us something about the role that novelty, rebellion and that nebulous, ‘Wizard’ magazine-backed idea of ‘Hotness’ plays in the comics industry.

Now into its ninth and penultimate season, belated showing on E4 in the UK, ‘Smallville’ is definitely not fresh produce.

The iPad makes e-comics a more viable proposition, but print comics aren’t dead just yet.

‘Detective Comics’ #866 marks the return of Denny O’Neil to Batman comics, and it’s cracking stuff.

‘Superman’ #700 marks the launch of a new direction for Superman, under the aegis of J. Michael Straczynski, who’s kept himself busy, but is probably still best known as the creator of Babylon 5.

Superhero team books are a big part of Marvel and DC’s publishing schedules, but does their style of storytelling stand up when taken out of the weekly churn of periodical publishing?

Paul Levitz’s first issue of ‘Adventure Comics’ invokes the Silver Age and has a charm, directness and clarity that most DCU books simply don’t.

Writer Paul Levitz revisits the future of ‘Batman Beyond’ in a story that, in spite of being set in a dystopia, provides an upbeat and refreshing alternative to most of DC’s current books.

‘King Tut’s Tomb’ collects three issues of ‘Batman: Confidential’, smartly re-inventing a villain from the 1960s ‘Batman’ TV show as a far more serious threat in a story well-served by the gorgeous pencils of José Luis García-López.

If Grant Morrison’s introduction is to be believed, the comics chosen for DC’s ‘The Black Casebook’ – a collection of Batman issues from the 50s and 60s which influenced Morrison’s run – are generally unpopular among Batman fans, owing to their supernatural and sci-fi content.

The latest animated incarnation of Batman has been running in the States for a while and is, I believe, shown in the UK at an hour in the morning that I refuse to acknowledge the existence of. Thankfully, it’s being very slowly released on DVD, four episodes at a time.
With ‘The Dark Knight’ providing a [...]

I really loved the Great Ten – a Chinese super-team with an outlook pointedly different from Western groupings like the JLA – from the moment they first appeared in the pages of ‘52′. Their mini-series has been anything but disappointing.

Lipstick vigilantism.

Or ‘Thursday Comics’, for readers in the UK.

Fun with Dick and Damian… oh, and Azrael too.

A review of this week’s ‘Batman: Gotham Knight’, and a bit about ‘New Frontier’ and ‘Superman: Doomsday’ while we’re at it…

Ignore the ‘C’ word, this is actually good…

Tim Burton’s sequel to ‘Batman’ is riddled with perverse decision making – not only is it a big summer movie set at Christmas, but it’s also loaded with bleak moments of humorous violence and fetishistic relationships…

Just in case you thought this advent calendar business was all going to be dewy eyed nostalgia about the movies we used to watch on TV when we were still young… here’s something new.

Grant Morrison’s take on one of Image’s most recognisable properties crossbreeds the two most notable previous ‘eras’ of the book to incendiary effect.

Well, I never expected that.

It’s that time of decade again – DC’s premier super team needs a conceptual spring clean and relaunch…

Like ‘All-Star Superman’, this is a series Grant Morrison has been preparing to write for his entire career, and it shows…

Wonder Woman is one of those characters whom nobody has ever really got right…

Sadly, Superman’s Return seems to have been eclipsed by the far-less-delayed reappearance of Captain Jack Sparrow…

Comics’ oldest continually published title has a new, super-star creative team and by the look of this first issue, it’s going to be an outstanding run.

Call me a heretic but, outside of ‘Year One’, Frank Miller’s Batman has never gelled for me. He is, in the writer’s own words, not a human being but ‘the god of vengeance’. He’s also ethically to the right of Nietzche.

It’s a confused and empty sentimental spectacle with a few good moments here and there but a central core of story that is muddle-headed and painful.

The fist issue of ‘Ion’ finds erstwhile ‘Green Lantern’ (that title now belongs to a 70s retro mass-murderer) Kyle Rayner both on his own and in his own book again.

‘One Year Later’ brings new launch issues for ‘Checkmate’ and ‘Blue Beetle’…

‘Green Arrow’ has been one of DC’s best, and most consistent, titles since its Kevin Smith-penned relaunch back in the dim and distant.

Far be it from me to second-guess the opinion of somebody more notable than myself and employ that opinion for my own purposes, but if I was Ed Brubaker I don’t think I’d be overly impressed with the last few issues of ‘Catwoman’.

Paul Levitz is a smart writer of comic books and, on this form, he’s been away from that game for far, far too long…

It’s ‘One Year Later’ in Gotham, and everything new is old again…

Alan Moore did what almost no British comic creator had done before, and what almost every British comic creator would do from that point, and started working for American comics companies.

When the ‘Justice League’ cartoon started a few years ago, it was a good show, but not a great one…

If 2004 was, as we said at the time, the year of late arrivals and revivals, 2005 was a year of completing, and contrasting, circles.