Editor's Note: In my past life, I used to spend some time talking about poetry in classrooms. One of my favorite poems to offer classes was "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens. In that poem, Stevens basically writes thirteen mini-poems, all ostensibly--you guessed it--about blackbirds. I liked using this poem because on the surface, it's not really … [Read more...]
The Sanctum Sangiacomo: Trade Secrets! Let’s Get Graphic! PUNS!
This is a fine time to up and abandon us. For some crazy reason, comics have been relegated non-essential during our tine of viral crisis! Seriously? Non-essential? Clearly, the people responsible for that decision never read comics. The latest news is Diamond Comic Distributors has announced that they will not be shipping comics to shops until further notice because … [Read more...]
The Sanctum Sangiacomo: Bloodshot Is a Spondaic Word!
Bloodshot is a far better movie than you would expect it to be. Director David Wilson took writers Jeff Wadlow and Eric Heisserer’s interpretation of a middling 1992 Valiant Comics hero and turned it around with some clever, unexpected twists. The movie gets the basics down. Just as the character was conceived by Kevin Van Hook, Don Perlin and Bob Layton, Bloodshot is a … [Read more...]
The Sanctum Sangiacomo: Of Things Unseen, Seen
The Invisible Man strikes a new genre in film – superhero-horror. Actually, it’s more like supervillain-horror movie, since the brilliant scientist who creates an invisibility suit is an evil sadist. It is his live-in girlfriend, Cecilia, played to perfection by Elizabeth Moss (The Handmaid’s Tale), who is the true hero of the film. Australian director Leigh Whannel, the … [Read more...]
The Sanctum Sangiacomo: Airboy!
YES! Airboy is back in comics for the third time in 75 years and it is the book that we fans longed for. Even better, the guy who wrote the entire 50-issue 1980s run for Eclipse Comics, Chuck Dixon, has returned and picked up exactly where he left off in 1989. And while I don’t agree with Dixon’s politics at all, I love his work on Airboy. In the last series' 50th and … [Read more...]