Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

Into the Spider-Verse is well-deserving of its good reviews and as animated superhero movies of 2018 go, it's  better thought-out than The Incredibles 2.

It's a little slow getting started, but once it starts it moves pretty quickly to a very exciting climax.

A new Spider-Man (barely a teenager) teams up with a bunch of alternate universe Spider-Men and women to defeat the Kingpin's plan to possibly destroy all the universes.

The film closes with a subtle tribute to Stan Lee that might get you a little teary.

But I'm not here to review the film, I want to discuss the whole alternate universe thing.

This whole concept was introduced to the world of comic books by Gardner Fox in DC Comics way back in the early '60s. This became an incredibly popular idea that inspired the annual JLA-JSA team-up, sometimes the best selling comics of each year.

Gardner Fox and Julius Schwartz laid the groundwork for decades of logical and fun story developments

And everything was great.

Until the mid-80s, when the editors at DC thought "y'know, the whole multiverse concept is really popular with our readers ... let's piss on it!"

So they had the Crisis on Infinite Earths, the muddled, not-terribly-thought-out miniseries to discontinue the whole multiverse conceit.

Later they introduced Elseworld stories. These books had alternate versions of our favorite characters but the stories weren't canon, otherwise a reader might get emotionally invested in a character or storyline. The last thing you'd want is for a reader to get emotionally involved in a story.

It's as if the editors had long meetings debating how to further disenfranchise readers.

They since then had reboots to fix all the mistakes, then more reboots to fix mistakes they made while fixing those mistakes, brought the multiverse back again and again with countless reboots, each time pissing on it just a little more.

Meanwhile, at Marvel, they simply picked up the ball and ran with it.

How exciting: A legion of alternate universe Spider-Men. And it's canon! It counts. It's not a hoax or an imaginary story. At the end they gave credit to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, but y'know, they probably should have given a little credit to Gardner Fox.

This is why DC has such a hard time trying to duplicate the success of the Marvel Universe films. Deep down they really don't respect their characters or readers.

A very funny line

I was watching the Justice League with my son, and Hawkwoman and Dr. Fate were duking it out over some misunderstanding (why can't superheroes ask simple questions first before beating each other up?), and Hawkwoman is charging at Dr. Fate with her hammer, and she says, "I want hear what that bell on your head sounds like."

Classics of Western Literature Part 1

I saw Phil Seuling talk at one of his conventions in Philadelphia, and he said the Golden Age of Comics wasn't the 1930s, or 40s,  it was the first year you started reading comic books. JLA #112 is probably one of the first books I bought and it was just amazing. Beautiful Nick Cardy cover. Dick Dillin and Dick Giordano doing the main story. And reprints of the JLA, the Seven Soldiers of Victory and a Starman story. I had just started getting acquainted with the DC universe, I had catching up to do and the reprints were just what I needed. 100 pages of pure magic for 60 cents. Was there ever a better bargain in the world?

I begged my dad to write a check so I could subscribe.

And I got my first issue, (#117) in which, the page count was cut to 32 pages, Frank McLaughlin replaced Dick Giordano on inks, Mike Grell did the cover. I would get twice as many issues but, the Golden Age for me was officially over.