Comic Reviews vol 1 – Wonder Woman: Earth One, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, RoboCop vs The Terminator, The Eltingville Club, Empowered vol 1, Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing, Wanted
Comic Reviews vol 2 – Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage, Challengers of the Unknown, Wonder Woman by George Perez vol 1
Comic Reviews vol 3 – Animal Man by Grant Morrison, Dirty Pair Manga, DC Finest: The Origin of Plastic Man
Comic Reviews vol 4 – Nocturnals: Black Planet, The Wrong Earth, DC Finest: Batman – Red Skies

More reviews of more comics. I re-read Batman: Year One while reading the DC Finest: Batman – Year One & Two volume. A review of that book will be posted soon.

1. Batman: Year One
2. Superman: Space Age
3. Filth & Grammar

Batman: Year One

I have a story about Year One. A long time ago I was taking a Japanese class in highschool. A group of Japanese students came to visit our school in Texas for about a week, and we hung out with them in class.

I knew that American comics are extremely expensive in Japan, and so I wanted to give one of them an American comic. I decided to give away my copy of Batman: Year One, because it’s a book that’s always cheap on the used market that will never go out of print.

I realized a few days later I’d made a huge mistake; all of Batman’s internal monologue captions are written in cursive, and would probably be impossible for an English novice to parse.

I often wonder whatever happened to that book. Did I give the book to a guy who I knew was a manga fan? I can’t remember. He probably gave it to someone else who he knew would enjoy it more. Anyways, that was a long time ago, and I hadn’t read Year One since then.

A big part of the reason I never re-read Year One was that I didn’t love it when I first read it, and so the cost of buying a replacement volume seemed too steep. I thought the book was fine, but I realize now I was too young, and not sophisticated enough, to recognize certain qualities of the book. I thought the narrative of the book was too small-scale, I didn’t appreciate its crime / police procedural elements, and I think some elements of the book relating to police / governmental corruption went over my head.

Batman: Year One was Batman’s official post-Crisis origin story. Unlike Superman and Wonder Woman, Batman didn’t start over again from square one after Crisis on Infinite Earths. And, within a few years, elements of Year One began to fall out of canon. But it remains the most famous telling of Batman’s origin story, and basically everything related to Batman is semi-apocryphal to some degree, and so it doesn’t really matter.

Year One was released less than a year after a retelling of Earth-2 Batman’s origin roy thomas wrote for Secret Origins #6. And here we can see what Year One brings to the table; it lessens the “pulp” feel of Batman and makes everything feel grounded in a more contemporary crime fiction way. Year One also makes Commissioner Gordon, and to a much lesser extent Harvey Dent, key players in Batman’s origin. It also made Selina Kyle into a sex worker, but that’s something we’ll circle back to.

Frank Miller’s writing in Year One is mostly unimpeachable. His script knows how to juggle characters and plotlines, and it’s truly impressive how much narrative he’s able to fit into a comic that’s only about a hundred pages.

David Mazzucchelli’s artwork here is great, but only half as revolutionary as history remembers it being. Mazzucchelli used what he called a “dumb line”, which is to say inked lines that have a mostly even weight, instead of trying to get the weighted lines that inkers use brushes for. Mazzucchelli brought that specific innovation to superhero comics, but the general gist of what he was doing was not unfamiliar to comics readers of the day. Just a few months before Year One Trevor Von Eeden did an issue of Batman with a similar art style.

The real innovation of Mazzucchelli’s work here is its consistency. One gets the impression this book was produced with significant lead time, because relatively minor details never look phoned in. In that Eeden illustrated issue I just mentioned there are some things that are imperfect; for instance, floor tiles are clearly eyeballed instead of having the perspective worked out properly to make sure they’re all the same size. Mazzucchelli does cheat a few times, but for the most part he puts in the extra work.

Mazzucchelli is also great at making immersive panels. Panels with foregrounds and backgrounds. Panels a reader wants to get lost in, aided by the fact that they often have a level of environmental consistency with the panels preceding and following them. Year One is a masterclass of technique and storytelling.

The version of Year One included in the DC Finest volume uses Richmond Lewis’s original coloring. The original coloring is quite good, and I didn’t miss the more nuanced recolor while looking at the “four color” version. I’m not saying it’s better, but looking at some comparisons online, in many instances the original colors offer a completely different and more stylized take on the material. The original colors often go for impressionistic neon tones when the recolor goes for a more naturalistic palette.

Batman: Year One portrays Selina Kyle as being a sex worker, specifically a Dominatrix, who becomes Catwoman. And this is complicated on multiple levels.

The idea of Catwoman stealing because she enjoys stealing, without a ton of extrinsic motivation, is what most people enjoy. It’s cool when women are bad when they don’t need to be. Considering how thoroughly Miller’s take on Catwoman was retconned, this seems to be the predominant take.

The implication in Year One is that Selina is a Dominatrix because she has to be, and that doesn’t exactly project strength. It feels like a lot of people don’t consider that someone rising out of a position of weakness displays an immense amount of strength.

“My thoughts on Frank Miller’s version of Catwoman’s origin will become clear in the near future . . . I think it worked very well when Frank Miller did it in the context of Year One . . . but I have never felt that it was a viable origin for a character who is going to be, if not a hero, then certainly a protagonist on a long-term basis . . . As far as I’m concerned, the character I am writing may very well have posed as a prostitute along the way, or been friends with prostitutes, or lived on the seamy side of the street at one time. But I’ve always been certain this is just something she did as a maneuver on the way to some big score. Perhaps she was pretending to walk the streets in order to get closer to the diamonds.” – Jo Duffy, Wizard Magazine #33

It’s worth noting that Dominatrices don’t usually allow their clients to touch them; this is something that I think is lost on a lot people¹.

The fact is that a lot of subsequent Catwoman writers didn’t like Miller’s take because they simply thought it was gross for Catwoman to be a former sex worker. It’s obvious that they believe it taints the character in some way, because the explanations for why Catwoman shouldn’t have been a sex worker in her past ultimately boil down to “because she shouldn’t’ve”.

Catwoman, for example; I love Catwoman because she enjoys what she does. So few comic characters do, they’re an unhappy bunch. She’s not, she loves life and likes what she does, and she’s a joy to write. So that’s my take and I don’t stray far from it. Now other people will say she has this in her background, and that. Well, not in the Dixonverse she doesn’t. – Chuck Dixon, Writers on Comics Scriptwriting vol 1 pg 53

Context is important here. Comicbooks always had a problem with female characters being objectified, and it’s important to take that into account. Everything involving Selina Kyle in Year One is surprisingly non-salacious, but it makes sense that people would project stuff onto the fairly benign scenes that focus on Selina Kyle.

And it also needs to be noted that, while the scenes focusing on Kyle aren’t leering or highly sexualized, the comic never really goes out of its way to “justify” Kyle being a sex worker on a narrative level. There’s no real pro-sex worker element to her scenes, but there is a poverty porn adjacent thing happening between her, her roommate, and her pimp.

A writer named Mindy Newell did a Catwoman miniseries in 1989 that takes place during the same time frame as Batman: Year One. It basically stands as the only Catwoman-related thing to treat the Catwoman-related events of Year One as canon, and I think it does a great rehabbing sex worker Selina Kyle as much as possible. A lot more depth and nuance is added, and by the end of the miniseries I found myself feeling a lot more positive about sex worker Selina Kyle as a concept.

But it would almost immediately become a footnote. Jo Duffy started writing Catwoman in 1993, and it’s not unlikely that the writers of the main Batman books had already started headcanon-ing that Catwoman had never been a Dominatrix even earlier. Either way, this was an extremely unpopular addition to Catwoman’s lore and it was gone the moment she got her first ongoing. It’s a shame, because the reasons for this retconning were, in a word, regressive.

It wasn’t a bad idea in itself to have Catwoman originally be a sex worker. And while Frank Miller brought the concept to the table, his lackluster execution of the idea in Year One is half the reason it got retconned so fast. The other half was whorephobia.

Frank Miller’s writing, paired with David Mazzucchelli’s visual storytelling, make Year One an incredible read. The number of scenes in Year One that aren’t genuinely iconic can be counted on one hand; this is a book filled with substance. Read it if you haven’t; it’s a classic for a reason.

Superman: Space Age

It is Superman as he should be presented—as a symbol of hope
– George Gene Gustines, back of book pull quote.

Something I’ve been thinking about recently is how Superman has changed over the last few decades. He has gone from being a largely unserious character capable of poignancy when necessary to “a symbol of hope”.

Ron Edwards wrote a post on his blog about a decade ago where he questioned when “decency” became a part of Superman’s character. He argues that the 1978 film was a bit of an anomaly, and that it really wasn’t a part of his character in the comics on a textual level before a certain point, certainly not before All-Star Superman. In the comments he notes that a lot of the comic stories that seem to emphasize Superman’s decency from the 20th century seem to be ones where Superman is dying, or people are mourning his death.

It definitely wasn’t a heavily emphasized part of Superman’s character during the pre-Crisis era. That was, in fact, when Superman was often kind of a dick, if not by the mores of the 50s, 60s, and 70s then certainly by the standards of the present day. And in the 90s animated series and especially Justice League Superman is a stern guy a lot of the time, not the bastion of warmth he’s often imagined as being today.

Lois & Clark is a very modern take on Superman in this sense, because he was meant to be a bit of a heartthrob; a Superman designed for women to enjoy was the one that was ahead of the curb.

I mention all of this because, over the years, it feels like Superman has increasingly become the place for superhero comic writers to do their profound prestige-seeking work. Sometimes this lands, and other times it puts into stark relief the surreality of a Superman limited series being the comics equivalent of an Oscar-bait movie. Superman: Space Age does the latter.

Written by Mark Russell, Space Age has a narrative stretching from the 60s to the 80s, when Crisis on Infinite Earths occurs. Despite being about pre-Crisis Superman, the Superman within these pages is a definitively post-Crisis take on the character.

The writing is pleasant enough, and there are some great moments. But the book is essentially constructed of brief vignettes involving different characters, mostly between two and four pages long, in which characters share some kind of conversation about hope that ends on a note that’s meant to be profound. Once I consciously noticed the book was written in this way it started to feel, well, prestige-seeking and a little obnoxious.

The thing that struck me the most when reading Superman: Space Age was Mike Allred’s artwork. Around 12 years ago I read X-Statix for the first time, and was extremely impressed by Allred’s work. Here was a guy making visually appealing and uncluttered artwork that looked very pleasing relative to what I saw as the predominant art style of that time (stuff like Jim Lee’s Justice League art, but worse).

I’m now struck by how Allred doesn’t feel like the unique talent he used to; his sensibility has won the war, in a sense. There’s a lot more space in mainstream comics for work that’s less realistic and more, well, “cartoonish” now than there was over a decade ago. Not work with the exact same kind of pop-art vibe as Allred’s, but work that feels less indebted to Neil Adams and more indebted to Jack Kirby, Alan Davis, John Romita Sr, etc. And it’s worth noting I was a bit uneducated at the time, because artists like Amanda Conner, Todd Nauck, Adam Warren, Mike Wieringo, Terry Dodson, John Romita Jr, Ryan Ottley, and others were doing mainstream work like I was describing when X-Statix was being published as well.

I’m not saying that I no longer enjoy Mike Allred’s artwork, but I recognize now that he was never truly the oasis of taste that I viewed him as being. And I now have a lot more appreciation for guys who do more realistic looking work; I’m loving Leonard Kirk’s Supergirl art at the moment. There is still a kind of art that was prevalent in Marvel and DC books that I dislike—I never bothered to learn the names of those artists, because I never bothered to read their books—but I realize there were a ton of alternatives to that style, both back during the aughts and especially now.

I need to mention Laura Allred’s coloring work, which is incredible, and augment’s Mike’s artwork perfectly. Laura Allred’s work here got me thinking about color holds, and I’ve been practicing using them in the weeks since.

There’s something beautiful about how writing Superman can inspire guys like Garth Ennis and even mark millar turn in some of the best works of their careers. But some comics can make the narrative that Superman is a beacon of hope and such feel a little forced. Space Age is one such book. It’s not bad, in the same way most films nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards aren’t bad. It’s just . . . bait.

Filth & Grammar

Comicbook editors are undoubtedly important figures. For instance, Julius Schwartz was responsible for reinventing a handful of DC characters, specifically The Flash and Green Lantern. Most of Marvel’s output during the 70s was terrible. Jim Shooter comes in and, after a few years, Marvel’s output is at a far more consistent level of quality. Len Wein wasn’t doing a terrible job editing Batman, but the Bat family of books wouldn’t be what it is today if it weren’t for Denny O’Neil coming in.

All that being said, what exactly it is that a comics editor does outside the context of shared-universe maintenance is not entirely obvious. Filth & Grammar reveals that a comics editor does things that are obvious—like reviewing comic scripts—and not obvious—like acting as a veritable art director.

Filth & Grammar was written by Shelly Bond, a former Vertigo editor. The book makes it clear the degree of influence Bond had on the Vertigo line. Bond is a hardcore anglophile, to a degree that’s a little cringe, and she’s also a big alternative music fan. If you were ever wondering why music and anglophile related comics were represented so strongly throughout the Vertigo catalog, you now know why.

Filth & Grammar essentially provides a quick run-down of every step of the comics making process, with notes for editors on what mistakes they need to be looking for, which also act as notes for artists, letters, colorists, etc on what they shouldn’t be doing. Bond’s book reveals that the professional comics editor in many ways exists to help a monthly comic get completed on schedule. The editor adds iterations to the creative process within a tight schedule and acts as a coordinator of creative teams.

I don’t agree with everything in Filth & Grammar on a philosophical level. For instance, you get stuff about how it’s bad to regularly use more than five panels on a page, and stuff about thinking of the page as a graphic unit instead of just focusing on raw sequential storytelling. There’s an implication that using a grid with any regularity is poor form. If six panel grids were good enough for Kirby and Toth; if nine panel grids were good enough for Ditko and Watchmen; if the sixteen panel grid was good enough for The Dark Knight Returns . . . basically, I just think this is bad advice.

Editors are good . . . rather, good editors are good. In my experience, it’s rare to work with a good editor. And the interesting thing about comic editors is that there are probably well below a hundred people able to make a full-time living as comic editors in North America, and a majority of them work for Marvel and DC.

What Filth & Grammar really did for me is illustrate how the editor mostly exists to maintain the editorial standards and vision of a publisher. Which sounds obvious, and like something I should’ve already known, seeing as I’ve acted as an editor for NEET Ozma contributors before. But it also made me realize how creating an improved end product is, in many ways, a secondary concern. And it makes me question if it’s always desirable to have an editor.

Filth & Grammar is probably a solid book for the twenty-four people in North America who are able to be employed full-time as comic editors. For anyone else it’s a decent curiosity. As far as books about comics craft go, I’d place it below McCloud’s Making Comics and Chelsea’s Perspective! for Comic Book Artists.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

1. This is not only a power move that plays into the fetishism a Dominatrix is selling, it’s also something that keeps pro-Domming firmly in “legally not sex work” territory. ︎

This is both a review of the Supergirl DC Finest volume Body & Soul, as well as a more general overview of the first quarter of Peter David’s Supergirl run. Further entries covering the rest of the series will follow. There are spoilers here but they are kept to a minimum.

In the early 80s DC Comics was struggling. And it needs to be specified that the comics were struggling; Warner made a ton of money by licensing out DC’s characters. But the comics themselves, relative to Marvel’s offerings, sold abysmally. Marvel had roughly 70% of the market share, DC around 18%.

This is what led to the Crisis on Infinite Earths event. For the unfamiliar, Crisis was an event designed to get rid of the DC multiverse, which was deemed confusing to potential new readers, and create a new blank slate. Superman, Wonder Woman, and many other characters started over again from square one, with new creative teams and slightly revamped origins.

Crisis on Infinite Earths worked; it didn’t cause DC books to sell as well as Marvel books, but it did reinvigorate the company.

During Crisis on Infinite Earths the Supergirl that had existed within DC continuity since 1959 was killed. This wasn’t necessarily a huge deal in itself; a lot of characters were killed off during Crisis, and a lot of them were brought back soon after the reboot. But killing off Supergirl was a statement of intent, because the idea was that she would never come back. This wasn’t just something Marv Wolfman, writer of Crisis wanted; this was something DC editorial wanted as well.

Killing Supergirl was my idea, approved by DC in order to make Superman the sole survivor of Krypton for his new relaunch. Everyone was in agreement but I was the first to suggest it. – Marv Wolfman

There was a feeling that too much Kryptonian stuff had entered Pre-Crisis Superman continuity. Between Supergirl, Krypto, the Bottled City of Kandor, the Phantom Zone criminals, various other characters, and Superman regularly time travelling to Krypton, it often felt like Krypton may as well have never exploded.

DC editorial felt that Superman should be more “alone”, in the sense that he should be the last remaining vestige of Krypton. Which meant that Supergirl had to go. DC found a willing accomplice in john byrne, who at the time was an extremely popular talent¹.

Just as Supergirl’s advent was emblematic of Superman becoming one of the gang, Supergirl’s demise was one of the first steps in transforming the Man of Steel back into the Last Survivor of Krypton. And she was done away with about as comprehensively as any character could be obliterated. She was wiped right out of existence. Not only was she dead, but thanks to rebooted continuity, she had never lived in the first place. Fans howled, fans raged.

What they did not do, of course, was support her from a sales point of view in the first place.

In terms of sales success, Supergirl was right up there with Hawkman and Aquaman as someone who had a following, but never sufficiently large enough to wield any sort of sales clout. No one ever seemed to know quite what to do with her. – Peter David

From what I’ve gathered, Supergirl was not a disliked character before she died. She was not the Wesley Crusher of Superman comics. People weren’t petitioning for Supergirl to be removed from DC continuity². That being said, many people were happy to see the broader changes that john byrne introduced when he rebooted Superman continuity.

There was a weird anti-immigrant ideological motivation behind john byrne scrubbing the Kryptonian elements out of Superman comics. But a lot of comics fans didn’t particularly care about that and were just excited to read Superman stories more situated in Metropolis, more focused on Earth-based happenings, and less engaged with the Kryptonian cruft I mentioned earlier. After years of Kandor being a going concern in Superman comics, the new status quo was a breath of fresh air³.

For what it’s worth, Supergirl was missed more than Kandor or Krypto. But DC was steadfast in their refusal to bring her back.

john byrne ended up bringing Supergirl back into Superman continuity, except the version he introduced had an only superficial resemblance to the original Supergirl. byrne’s Supergirl was a synthetic lifeform from a pocket universe. “Matrix”, or “Mae”, wasn’t Kryptonian and only shared flight and super strength as powers with Superman. She could shape-shift, with the rest of her abilities being psychokinetic in nature.

But when Supergirl did return, it seemed to fans like a massive tease and cheat. In name and general appearance she was Supergirl; in reality, she was a protoplasmic blob from a “pocket universe” (whatever the hell that is) that, in subsequent continuity, had never existed in the first place. She’d gone from living in Superman’s shadow to living in his shape (when she impersonated Clark Kent). – Peter David

byrne claims his motivation was to help DC protect the copyright of Supergirl’s name. It’s been suggested that he was mostly trying to disincentivize future creators from bringing back the original Supergirl. The Supergirl story was the last major story byrne would do before leaving Superman, which lends credence to the idea that introducing Matrix Supergirl was a territorial pissing.

Once again it needs to be iterated that DC editorial was behind byrne with these choices; even if byrne hadn’t introduced a Supergirl, nobody else would’ve been allowed to bring back Kara Zor-El.

I’ve read that DC’s licensing department was part of the reason that Supergirl was brought back, although I unfortunately cannot find a source for this. But it does make a certain amount of sense, considering how much money licensing brought in.

What the editors and writers didn’t consider when killing Supergirl, a firm C-stringer within DC continuity, was that she was one of DC’s most financially lucrative characters. Supergirl appeared on a ton of merchandise, and alongside Wonder Woman was one of DC’s most profitable female characters. Her real world popularity did not reflect her lack of prominence in the comics.

In this licensing narrative, Supergirl needed to “matter” in the sense that she was a going concern in the comics, even if they weren’t comics that were going to be read by eight year old girls.

The new Supergirl was not a popular character. As stated earlier, the original Supergirl was not disliked by comic fans, and thusly this new impostor Supergirl was not widely embraced. Even ignoring the “no more Kryptonians” mandate, a lot of post-Crisis versions of Superman characters had changes made to them, essentially for the sake of being different, and almost all of these changes were eventually undone.

I’m not sure what the specific impetus was to give Matrix Supergirl her own ongoing series in 1996, the better part of a decade after she was introduced. It’s possible that someone felt Supergirl had been without an ongoing for too long; her last one was cancelled in 1984. It’s possible someone felt there should be another comic with a female protagonist on shelves. I’ve read and listened to many Peter David interviews, and the most he says about the inception of his run is that john byrne was originally asked to make an ongoing, but he passed on it.

The history of Supergirl is all the richer for it.

Eight years after Matrix Supergirl was introduced she received her own ongoing series, written by Peter David, which takes us to the DC Finest volume being covered here.

I vaguely understood going into this volume that the post-Crisis Supergirl was a synthetic life form, and so I wasn’t entirely lost. But I found myself annoyed that there wasn’t a page of two of editorial text explaining this stuff before the book proper started, because this is the kind of book that would be great to recommend to comics newbies. I know the DC Finest line is a budget line of books, but seriously, they couldn’t pay someone at the office $50 to write 500~ words about “Matrix Supergirl”? That would be more money per word than I’ve ever been paid to write, if you think that number sounds too low.

Maybe explaining some of the finer details would’ve just made things more confusing when explained in brief. But, come on, “Supergirl is a synthetic life-form”, just to get people up to speed. The early parts of the book do have some subtle bits of exposition outlining things, and I think this mostly works as a stand-alone volume. But I’m not sure how much of that impression is what I brought to the table.

The volume opens with a story illustrated by Terry Dodson where Matrix Supergirl essentially laments that she doesn’t have a soul. This was released in an anthology book preceding the beginning of David’s Supergirl run proper⁴. The actual Supergirl series begins with Supergirl having no memories of her past and trying to remember what recently happened.

Linda Danvers is a devil-worshiping young woman who is estranged from her christian parents. Linda’s parents believe she’s in trouble, and call Supergirl to do something. Supergirl finds Linda, brutally wounded from a sacrificial ritual, on the brink of death.

Impulsively, Supergirl decides to merge her body with Linda’s, causing Supergirl to gain all of Linda’s memories. Subsuming Linda also causes some of Supergirl’s shapeshifting abilities to become nerfed; Supergirl can now only transform between being Linda and being Supergirl.

Is Linda Danvers dead? Is Supergirl just pretending to be Linda, stealing her life and puppeteering her identity? Or is the combination of Danvers and Supergirl more genuine?

These are questions that are gradually explored, and not entirely exhausted, within the confines of this volume. They feel a bit under-explored, in fact, although this is because Supergirl is viewing her life and circumstances with certain preconceptions. That being said, it feels like a real missed opportunity that we don’t see a certain kind of evolution from Linda Danvers / Supergirl; she’s immediately virtuous, and doesn’t “grow” into being Supergirl, at least not to a degree that I’d like. Once she has combined with Supergirl, she’s no longer a rebellious devil worshiper. There are lore-related reasons for this, although they were invented by Peter David in the first place.

It also feels like a missed opportunity that Linda Danvers and Matrix Supergirl never really talk to one another, or at least they haven’t thus far. I understand it would need to be a major conceit of the book if Linda Danvers and Supergirl conversed with one another on a mental level. But it feels like something is missing; they seem to share the same brain on every single level. Once again, these are my findings thus far⁵, and it’s possible that Peter David will reveal that things are not what they seem later. But it feels like the way the story has progressed thus far means this space—the relationship between Linda Danvers and Supergirl—cannot really be explored in the future, at least not in certain ways.

Supergirl opens with a nine issue story arc illustrated by Gary Frank. The arc concerns Supergirl adjusting to her new status quo; learning about her new parents, the small town of Leesburg, and meeting some new friends. It also concerns Supergirl having to deal with Buzz, the man who led the cult Linda Danvers was a member of.

Peter David strikes a perfect balance in Supergirl between serialization and telling discrete stories. Almost every issue of the comic can be said to be “the issue where X happens”, but there’s still a clear continuity from one story to the next.

Something that adds a lot of appeal to Supergirl is that the book is interested in people talking. Fight scenes never feel like they take longer than they need to, and never feel like they’re taking away space from the human stories in the narrative. A particularly memorable issue features Linda Danvers being set up on a blind date by her mom. The entire issue is “just” a well-written conversation between four people.

Even when people do fight in Supergirl, the narrative doesn’t grind to a halt until someone goes down. Character stuff continues to happen. There’s a lot of teachable stuff here that genre fiction people could afford to learn from.

Gary Frank has an incredibly clean art style. His characters feel wonderfully polished and there’s not a flub to be seen in his work. In a sense, it’s impeccable. Unfortunately his panels, on a compositional level, are not very impressive. Generally there’s a subject and a flat background that doesn’t require any serious mathematical perspective to draw; Frank often uses axonometric and oblique projection in place of “real” perspective frequently. His storytelling is clear and easy to parse, which is above-par for the 90s. And so it’s once again regrettable that his compositions are lacking in the visual depth that would take his work to the next level.

But it needs to be iterated that there’s something very attractive about Frank’s work. To put it more bluntly, he draws attractive women. He’s good at drawing people in general, but especially drawing Linda Danvers . . . and also Linda’s mom. There are a ton of women wearing flannel in Supergirl, btw, if that’s a thing you’re into.

The opening nine issue arc of Supergirl is what people used to call “a real page-turner”. It’s not flawless, but it’s compelling, singular, and it always left me wanting more without dragging things out. Unfortunately there’s a little turbulance before the series returns to this level of quality.

This era of Supergirl is known for its religious themes. There’s a lot of christian stuff in the book, although I think it would be inaccurate to say that the book is promoting anything. Peter David was Jewish, and the religious stuff in Supergirl is very specifically christian in nature. When asked about the religious content of Supergirl, David said it was part of “an attempt to give the book a unique and different tone and feel”.

It also needs to be noted that a significant number of christians would find issue with the portrayal of certain religious elements in this book. For instance, the fact it portrays demons at all, even if they’re explicitly evil.

What I’m essentially saying is that the christian stuff in Supergirl is not unlike the Greek mythology stuff in Wonder Woman in terms of how “earnest” it’s trying to be in promoting a faith. Of course, the difference is that few people practice Hellenism while christianity was a relevant faith in the 90s. christianity is definitely used as a vehicle for some political discussion, with preconceptions people have about christians being a minor theme⁶.

Something some people find issue with in these comics, and much of Peter David’s work, is a certain impulse to portray both sides of every issue. To some degree the religious themes of the comic are a part of this “project”; comic readers even in the 90s were likely less religious than most, and there were probably few things less appealing in concept than a comic about christianity to some degree that isn’t explicitly negative.

An early story, guest starring Mary Marvel, is about sexual assault accusations⁷. Mary Marvel, in her non-superpowered form, alleges that a police officer tried to molest her. The police officer claims he was trying to pat her down because he suspected her of shoplifting. The comic ends on a note of ambiguity, where the police officer breaks down in private, and it can’t be said for certain if it’s because of his guilt or the knowledge that an accusation like this will always cause people to view him with suspicion.

I don’t think nerds in the 90s needed “sometimes accusations are false” reading material. But I do think the story, taken on its own merits, is decent enough. It’s a vastly better take on its subject matter than the Voyager episode Retrospect, which came out about a year later. Retrospect made Seven of Nine look foolish for accidentally accusing someone of violating her, and made the EMH look like an overzealous jackass for supporting her. The Supergirl story doesn’t do the same to its characters.

One of the stories that is especially pertinent to this “both sides-ing” topic involves conservative speakers being allowed on college campuses. In Supergirl #23⁸, a racist speaker is invited to a college campus. Steel, a black superhero, doesn’t think he should be allowed to speak. Supergirl supports free speech. It’s worth noting that this issue came out in 1998, which just goes to show how long this stuff has been going on.

Peter David talks about this specific issue of Supergirl in his book Writing for Comics and Graphic Novels (pgs 32-33). Under a section titled Represent the Opposition, David says the following:

In my general reading, I stumbled across a book by essayist and journalist Nat Hentoff. Entitled Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other, it detailed the ongoing attempts by people at both ends of the political spectrum to suppress opinions they don’t like. What particularly caught my attention was the growing trend in colleges—supposedly liberal colleges—to try and shut down invited speakers who espouse viewpoints with which they disagree. Common sense tells you that if you don’t like what someone has to say, don’t attend his speech.

Remarkably, colleges and universities, which should be pressure cookers of opposing viewpoints and discussion, are populated by students and faculty members who have not only made up their minds that they don’t want to be exposed to opposing viewpoints, but they also want to make sure no one else has the opportunity. So I decided to drop this hot button of a topic into Supergirl #23 in a story entitled “Double-Edged Sword”, drawn by Leonard Kirk and Robin Riggs.

Someone on reddit said that they had to stop reading Supergirl after this issue because it was “an insufferable morass of smug centrism”; I completely understand where they’re coming from.

Steel’s viewpoint, that hate speech should not be protected speech, is represented accurately for the most part. David said in this issue he studied actual arguments used by people of this political persuasion and put those arguments into Steel’s mouth.

It’s always important to present all sides equally for dramatic purposes, but it’s never more so when a guest hero is espousing a viewpoint that is opposite to that of your central character. To play it absolutely safe, I moved beyond my own attempts to present opposing views. I obtained actual opinion pieces form learned professors who held the views that I wanted Steel to have. Obviously I didn’t use their statements word for word, but I patterned Steel’s commentary on what they said. Massaged the exact phrasing a bit, but the core, the essence of what they said, was presented intact.

I do think there’s an instance where Steel’s argument is presented a bit reductively. It’s worth noting this exchange happens during a fight scene, and it can be interpreted as Steel being a bit frustrated/sarcastic. But, on the whole, I think Steel is portrayed in a dignified way that doesn’t make him look unreasonable.

Supergirl: And what will happen when people don’t say what’s on their mind? Then what have you got?

Steel: A more polite, more thoughtful, and more responsible society.

The moment the issue really fucks things up is with its ending. It turns out the black woman leading the student organization against the racist speaker invited an anti-Semitic Nation of Islam speaker to the campus for a talk. And this is handled with a complete shit-eating lack of grace that the rest of the comic doesn’t have. There’s something to be said about this specific topic, but Peter David’s deployal of it in this context, essentially as a punchline, is extremely lame.

Peter David didn’t update his blog during the last few years of his life, due to medical complications that made writing difficult. And so I don’t know how his perspective here may’ve changed. It is obvious when reading his editorials that free speech was something he felt strongly about.

I can only hope that, after seeing where “just asking questions” got American society, David realized he was wrong.

Supergirl takes some time to find its footing after the opening arc ends, in part because the book doesn’t immediately find a new permanent artist. Leonard Kirk does one issue, followed by greg land (yuck) doing two issues, before Leonard Kirk returns to draw most of the rest of Supergirl . . . except there’s also a one-off filler issue written by Darren Vincenzo that needs to be dealt with first. Fine on its own merits, but this chunk of four issues is a real rough patch in terms of pacing.

It doesn’t help that Leonard Kirk was learning on the job here. Kirk had already been illustrating comics for roughly three years at this point, but his growth is visible from issue to issue. By the end of this volume his artwork gets solid, but coming off of Gary Frank’s extremely polished work it’s a whiplash to adjust to an artist who’s still finding his footing. Even Peter David wasn’t sure of Kirk at first:

When I was first looking at Leonard Kirk’s pencils and saying, “Gee, I’m not sure,” [Supergirl editor] Mike McAvennie was the one saying, “Trust me, he’ll work out great,” and he was absolutely right.

It’s worth noting that Leonard Kirk eventually became one of the three artists that Peter David felt most closely captured the visuals he had in his head while writing, which is probably a big part of why he stayed on Supergirl for so long.

Peter David wrote using an outline method most of the time, according to an interview from Writers on Comics Scriptwriting. Except unlike a guy like stan lee, who provided his writers with a one paragraph synopsis, David would provide his writers with detailed breakdowns of every scene, with all of the dialogue he intended to be in the final story included⁹.

The area where Leonard Kirk surpasses Gary Frank is with his layout work. Frank often went for splashier layouts. Nothing gratuitous, nothing “extreme 90s”. But Kirk often uses a nine panel grid, and gets a ton of narrative economy out of his pages. He uses bleeds in smart ways to keep certain moments feeling “open”. Considering the storytelling density of David’s scripts, Kirk ends up feeling more suited to Supergirl than his predecessor did.

As Supergirl continues past the confines of this first DC Finest volume Kirk just gets better and better, and I found myself not missing Frank’s work the way I initially did. I even began to prefer Kirk’s more naturalistic, less supermodel-esque way of drawing Linda Danvers and the other female characters¹⁰. And, once again, he puts a lot more effort into situating characters within enviornments.

There are two Supergirl Annuals included in this volume. The first is all Elseworlds stories, imagining characters in the future remembering Supergirl long after she’s faded into myth. The first story in this volume, The Surrogate, is about a young woman who loves Supergirl being brainwashed and forced to control a robot for an evil mining company. Through sheer will she manages to turn the liquid metal robot into a Supergirl, and she successfully uploads her consciousness to it.

Written by noted right wing crank chuck dixon, there’s a thing here where the evil scientist insists that his people misgender the Supergirl robot. Feels more than a little ironic in hindsight.

The other two stories, The Legend Lives On and especially Shootout at Ice Flats are nothing to write home about. They’re filler, not only in the sense that they don’t exist in any kind of canon that matters, but also because they don’t feel like stories that needed to be told in any sense. I don’t hate anything that exists outside of canon on principle, but stand-alone non-canon stories need to work extra hard to have some kind of a point that justifies their existence. All stories do, but the non-canon ones especially.

I recommend skipping this first Elseworlds annual and circling back around to it, by the way, because it doesn’t help with the pacing of the ongoing when read straight through. The second annual is much better. Both of its stories exist in canon, even if Peter David never acknowledges either of them throughout the rest of his run.

Secret Hearts is a story written by Tom Peyer, creator of The Wrong Earth. It’s a fun romantic comedy-type story about Brainiac 5 interacting with Supergirl. It’s cute, funny, and feels surprisingly simpatico with the sensibility of Peter David’s writing. It’s worth noting Peyer was the writer of Legion of Superheroes around this time, and so he’d done a lot of stuff with Brainiac 5. The second story, this one again written by chuck dixon, is about a girl with a crush on a guy who has a crush on Supergirl. Also cute, also fun. On the whole, a vastly improved Annual relative to the first one.

I already mentioned that there’s a rough patch after the first nine issues due to changing artists and a fill-in issue. But there’s some more turbulance that comes in the form of the book setting up some new plot-threads after the more insular opening arc is wrapped up.

There are a string of issues that feel like episodic monster-of-the-week stories at first, but later turn out to be setting groundwork for long-lasting plot threads. These stories can perhaps be faulted for not immediately making a good impression, but in hindsight that’s easy to forgive.

There are also a lot of bold choices made during this period. We find out a supporting character is the christian god, which I’m surprised DC editorial allowed, considering the ramifications it has on the rest of DC canon¹¹. A demon tells Supergirl she’s one of three earthborn angels, a significant revelation to make about the protagonist of a book.

It feels like these aren’t explored with a certain level of gravity when they’re first revealed. They get a lot of attention later, as you might expect, but the way each of these things with huge ramifications is brought into the narrative can feel a bit sudden.

It’s also during this period that some awkward shared-universe stuff is felt. There’s an issue mentioning a line-wide crossover, which also features one of the split-up Supermen when that arc was happening. And there’s a two-parter featuring Despero that I imagine feels especially inelegant to anyone who doesn’t already know who Despero is.

This stretch of 10~ issues after the first arc concludes is disconcerting upon an initial read, to say the least. But, with a knowledge of where the series is going, it reads a lot better. Supergirl being an earthborn angel is given plenty of attention and scrutiny in later issues. Forced crossovers and such become a lot less frequent, and when they do occur they fold into the narrative a lot more gracefully.

Essentially, it’s normal and understandable to feel like Supergirl has lost its way after the opening arc concludes. But, trust me, it’s going somewhere.

Something I was curious about going into Supergirl was its target audience. Was it a comic for the assumed comic reader (adult white man)? Or was it a comic for teenage girls? It is worth noting that Peter David had teenage daughters when he was writing Supergirl.

What I’m trying to do with SpyBoy is write a series that I wouldn’t say is aimed at young readers, but is certainly something that people can feel that their kids can pick up and they don’t have to worry about it. Not all of the books that I write fall under that category. Supergirl, for example, is a much more adult oriented book. DC has let me push the envelope on that to the point where it’s a borderline Vertigo title. – Peter David

I think Peter David was mostly writing the book he wanted to write, but the supernatural (hah) elements in this comic were tapping into something similar to The Craft and Buffy. Supergirl, The Craft, and Buffy all began in 1996, and so it seems there was something in the air. David was quite clear that Supergirl wasn’t inspired by Buffy, incidentally. The dates verify this.

Peter David was a good comics writer, and he’s fondly remembered by most comics readers. Unfortunately he’s remembered in much less favorable terms by snobs, I believe because he got into some scrapes with The Comics Journal. A handful of times I’ve seen David’s name essentially used as a punchline, I guess because almost everything he did was diametrically opposed to the sensibility of alternative comics, including the way he presented himself as a public figure. Unlike a lot of comics writers people are supposed to take seriously, Peter David didn’t seem particularly conflicted about the validity of superheroes. He was unpretentious about the wrong things, according to some people.

Many people have written about how Peter David was fucked by the comics industry. He invented “Smart Hulk”, a major component of some of the highest grossing films ever released. He created the interpretation of Aquaman who appeared in the Aquaman film. There are a lot of things that Peter David created that have appeared in various Marvel and DC adaptations.

His reward for all of this hard work was that he had to use a Gofundme the last three years of his life to pay for his medical expenses. If he’d had more money, he probably would still be alive.

The lesson here isn’t that Peter David should’ve done more creator owned work; most creator owned books go out of print and don’t get turned into TV shows or movies. No, the lesson here is that Warner and disney let him die. And America’s lack of public healthcare, of course.

There have been a couple of highly regarded runs of Supergirl over the years. The 80s run is well-liked. Some parts of the 2005-2011 volume are well regarded. There was a Red Lantern thing that has its fans. I know a lot of people love Sophie Campbell’s currently ongoing run on the character.

“Bring back Kara.” It’s probably the most oft-repeated (if I were cynical or in a bad mood, I’d say “tired”) refrain that I hear as the current writer of the Character Currently Known as Supergirl (and Formerly Known as Kara Zor-El.) – Peter David

A lot of people dismiss this era of Supergirl because it’s about Linda Danvers instead of Kara Zor-El. That’s definitely unfair, and it’s something that needs to be looked past. Danvers is an interesting character, and Supergirl is an interesting book. Other runs might reach higher in short bursts, but I don’t see how this one doesn’t win for its sheer volume of consistently good writing and art, not to mention how singular it feels with its religious intrigue.

In the coming weeks you can expect to see more coverage of Supergirl, as well as Fallen Angel, its spiritual sequel.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

1. john byrne was a talented writer and artist during his prime. He also is a relentlessly transphobic, racist, misogynistic, and generally unpleasant person who made a lot of enemies for reasons unrelated to those aforementioned three things. ︎
2. It’s almost like the hatred a lot of modern comic fans have for female characters exists because of a manufactured hate movement designed to extract money from white men who feel aggrieved for no reason. ︎
3. Kandor specifically had been enlarged and was no longer a recurring location in Superman comics a few years before Crisis, but this in itself illustrates that people were getting tired of this stuff. ︎
4. It’s worth noting that Dodson shows massive artistic growth here relative to the Mantra comics he was doing a few years earlier. ︎
5. As of this proofread pre-publication I’m 43 issues in. ︎
6. I feel like I should clarify this is a minor theme at best in the book, or perhaps an incredibly oblique one, something for the readers rather than the characters in-universe. This book does not have a weird axe to grind about christians being marginalized people, or anything to that effect. I think this element of the book is most obvious in how the reader likely assumes that Linda Danver’s mom is going to be a judgemental and awful evangelical but she turns out to be a neat person. ︎
7. This story takes place in Supergirl Plus #1, not in the main Supergirl book. It’s worth mentioning that this Plus 1 issue slots into the main series perfectly and is worth reading when it appears in chronology. ︎
8. Issue #23 of Supergirl takes place a few issues after the end of this volume. ︎
9. Fun Fact: Peter David also gave his artists photo reference.
   Because it’s always been my feeling that the artist should be the last person in the chain to have to find the reference. I think it should start with the writer. Writers should allow for the notion that no matter what they’re writing about, someone out there is going to be an expert in it, and the expert is entitled to read the story with as much enjoyment as the person who knows jack-all on the subject. If you’re going to do it, do it right. The second person in the “chain” should be the editor. Either the editor or assistant editor should serve not only as a fact checker (to make sure the writer got it right) but also should be providing reference where necessary. Ideally, I think, the artist should get a nice package with everything he needs to draw the story so he can go ahead and start penciling the thing. ︎
10. I’m aware this is all relative in the world of superhero comics. ︎
11. I’m aware that characters like The Spectre already confirmed that the christian god exists in DC continuity, but still, god is a supporting character in this book. ︎

The premise of Voyager is simple. The Federation starship Voyager is chasing after members of a terrorist group known as the Maquis. Both ships are pulled into the Delta Quadrant by an alien force, and due to the casualties sustained on both ships, the opposing crews are forced to work together if they’re to have any hope of making it back home. The trip is projected to take decades, but a lot of weird stuff happens in space; perhaps they’ll make it back home in just seven years (seasons)?

The problems with Voyager are so well known that just about anything that can be said about the show feels like a cliche. But let’s rehash some of the more popular talking points anyways.

For starters, it initially seems like the mixture of Starfleet and Marquis personnel working together on a ship is going to cause a lot of problems. But, aside from token episodes about Starfleet and Marquis tension, there’s close to zero conflict that arises from this.

The prospect of a Starfleet vessel having to traverse hundreds of thousands of lightyears by itself stirs the imagination. It’s easy to imagine Voyager undergoing a Ship of Theseus transformation as it’s damaged and subsequently repaired using foreign alien technology. And, likewise, it’s easy to imagine the composition of the crew changing, as the Alpha Quadrant members die and the ship is forced to take on new members.

What kinds of people would be willing to leave their homes to travel across the galaxy? What kinds of conflicts would arise, and what kinds of compromises would have to be made, when aliens who don’t believe in Starfleet’s moral codes are integrated into a Starfleet crew?

Both of these things are ripe for dramatic potential, and neither of them are exploited. Voyager improbably stays the same the entire duration of the trip, and aside from Neelix joining the show in its first episode, and Seven of Nine joining in the fourth season, nothing particularly interesting happens with the crew either.

The biggest issue with Voyager, that results in most of the aforementioned issues, is that continuity is not nearly as important to the series as it should be. Things do change from season to season, but while Deep Space 9 was expertly balancing lengthy arcs and one-and-done episodes, Voyager was firmly engaged in the latter school of television writing. Even The Orville, a show that had “let’s make Star Trek episodic again” as its mission statement, utilizes continuity in a vastly more intelligent way than Voyager does.

And none of those things touch on how the first season of Voyager is mostly terrible, even on its own “TNG but different” terms. Many of its episodes relate to boring space phenomena and are completely inert on a dramatic/storytelling level, and the Delta Quadrant setting deprives the show of the dense political intrigue that TNG-era Trek had developed over the preceding decade.

So, I stopped watching Voyager, and never felt a reason to revisit it. Until my friend Leaf Tilde began to post about rewatching Voyager on bluesky. Her postings made me decide to start watching the show again, but starting with season 4, the point most people agree that Voyager starts to get good in earnest.

Unless you’re a hardcore Trek fan you probably won’t remember what all of these episodes are solely from their titles. Here’s a link to the page on Wikipedia that has a description of every Voyager episode, so that I don’t have to provide a brief recap of every episode I comment on. If you’re at a desktop I recommend dividing your screen in half and looking at this article and the Wikipedia page on two separate windows.

Scorpion – S03E26 – S04E01
Something that I think a lot of long time Trek viewers forget is that Seven of Nine’s introduction to Voyager feels extremely contrived in a way that isn’t unlike someone’s fanfic character being shoved into a show. It was a writing misstep that the Borg made a temporary alliance with Voyager to begin with, and the de-borgificaiton of Seven of Nine felt silly. After the two-parter that introduced the Borg in TNG it was already clear that Borg stuff could be reversed, and so from the beginning the Borg were being defanged. But everything relating to Seven of Nine’s introduction made the problem worse.

Over time the Borg became less of the unflinching monolith they’d been in the past, and it was also eventually revealed that Seven of Nine had been given to Voyager as part of a long-term Borg plot to learn humanity’s secrets. And so in hindsight Scorpion felt less ridiculous than it did initially, but it did feel ridiculous.

But Seven of Nine was exactly what Voyager needed. A new science character with a new niche. A character who could explore the theme of discovering humanity in a way that Data had on TNG. A character that gave the other characters, particularly Janeway, B’Ellana, and the EMH a new and interesting relationship.

In short, the ends justified the means.

Mortal Coil – S04E12
Hot take? The moment Kes is removed from Voyager and there are no longer weird episodes about Neelix being possessive of Kes, Neelix becomes an unobjectionable character. He’s goofy, sure, but he’s a welcome bit of variety. Neelix is a kind of guy that exists in real life, a very pleasant kind of person who’s maybe a little much but also well-meaning and friendly. At a certain point, if someone hates Neelix, it says more about them than the character. Mortal Coil is an extremely effective episode of Voyager, and Neelix realizing his life has worth is perhaps the only time I’ve cried watching Star Trek.

Retrospect – S04E17
It’s entirely possible that Retrospect is the all-time worst Star Trek episode. The episode is about how a woman can have false memories and wrongly accuse someone of sexual assault. The topic of false accusations should not be off-limits in fiction. But sci-fi fans in the 90s did not need more encouragement to not believe women, and the general handling of the topic in this episode is legitimately nauseating.

Vis à Vis– S04E20
This episode is decent enough, but there really could’ve been more gender-related stuff happening with all the body-swapping here.

Unforgettable – S04E22
Here’s another hot take: I don’t hate Commander Chakotay. He’s usually regarded as being one of the worst main Trek characters. It definitely sucks that a lot of the elements relating to Chakotay being Native American were messed up by a scam artist consultant; that certainly blemishes a lot of Chakotay-centric episodes. But, taken as a member of the Voyager ensemble, Chakotay is a welcome personality, someone who’s as cool as a cucumber at basically all times. I can understand how that registers as being boring or unexciting, but to me it registers as being variety.

The problem with Chakotay is that almost all of the Chakotay-centric episodes are bad. Unforgettable is one of the better ones, and it’s a slightly above-par 45 minutes of Trek. Which says everything about the quality of other Chakotay episodes, unfortunately.

Night – S05E01
A big problem with Voyager is that something always has to happen. Going into Night I was excited to see a character piece about the Voyager crew coping with the last four years of life in the Delta Quadrant and a long period of inactivity. Unfortunately an obligatory complication that could potentially destroy the ship is shoved into the episode and an interesting story is cast aside.

Another example: Drive in season 7 could’ve just been a story about Tom Paris and B’Ellana Torres participating in a peaceful alien race, instead of a terrorist plot also being a factor of that episode.

I think a problem with a lot of new Trek is that an entire generation of Trek viewers-turned-writers share my opinion. But their takeaway of wanting more episodes like Data’s Day is that they create ridiculous concept episodes that go too far into an unserious direction.

Timeless – S05E06
I can understand how saying this maybe makes me sound like I lack imagination or whatever, but I dislike Timeless on the basis that, due to time travel, the chunk of the story that takes place in the future never actually happened and has no bearing on continuity. The episode does have a chunk that takes place in the “present”, and there is a poignant bit at the ending but . . . yeah. When a show has as much trouble with its status quo being inert as Voyager, every episode that feels irrelevant to the plot moving is that much worse.

Nothing Human – S05E08
Aside from it being weird that the EMH chose a Cardassian hologram to begin with, Nothing Human is an almost perfect episode of Star Trek. A lot of times stories about principles end up arguing against the pragmatic yet morally compromised position in ways that end up making the principled position look ridiculous (see: Maximum Carnage). Nothing Human ends with Janeway and the EMH doing the “wrong” thing and feeling bad about it; I guess that’s the way.

Thirty Days – S05E09
Tom Paris being an ecoterrorist once is never really brought up again, outside of referencing the resulting demotion. But it does a lot to elevate the character regardless.

Counterpoint – S05E10
It’s kind of weird that Captain Janeway finds herself developing such a rapport with an alien who’s a nazi in all but name, but otherwise this is a great episode.

Bride of Chaotica! – S05E12
A lot of the funniest Voyager episodes relate to the EMH. It could easily be said that Bride of Chaotica! is the funniest episode that focuses on a different character. It’s worth mentioning that Tom Paris having a fascination with 20th century Earth culture was a brilliant bit of characterization that saved an otherwise bland “hotshot” pilot character. And, relatedly, Paris being a holonovel expert was another cool bit of dimension.

Dark Frontier – S05E15 – S05E16
It’s not exactly a hot take that Voyager ruined the Borg, a process that had begun in earnest with First Contact. The thing that’s left unsaid, or maybe is just implied, is that almost every episode that focuses on the Borg as antagonists sucks. They’re boring, the Borg Queen is surprisingly unexciting, and in general the primary antagonists of Voyager are one of its weakest links.

The Borg were exciting because of what they represented and how people responded to them. Once they’re treated as more verbal and “human” opponents they lose a lot about what made them exciting to begin with. In other words, they never should’ve been used more than a handful of times.

11:59 – S05E23
It’s incredible how Voyager had the capacity to morph into a Hallmark channel original film on the drop of a hat.

Equinox – S05E26 – S06E01
The relentless status quo of Voyager often hurts episodes, because the viewer knows that the outcome is going to be whatever returns things to normal. And Equinox is perhaps the episode, or rather, pair of episodes that’s hit the worst. It could’ve been really interesting to add some new blood to the show, or maybe even a second Federation ship. Instead four members of the Equinox crew join Voyager and are never referenced again.

Alice – E06E05
This episode should’ve been a lot hornier.

Riddles – S06E06
It really bothers me that Tuvok doesn’t thank Neelix at the end of this episode, considering how vital Neelix was to Tuvok’s mental rehabilitation.

Dragon’s Teeth – S06E07
This feels like an episode that was purpose built to address the problem of Voyager not being able to have recurring antagonists outside of the Borg, due to how Voyager is essentially moving in a straight line as fast as possible towards Earth. A lot of time is spent explaining how these villains would be able to move quickly across vast distances of space. But the aliens introduced in this episode never appear again. Which I guess is fine, because they didn’t have much to them.

The Voyager Conspiracy – S06E09
Seven of Nine inventing ridiculous conspiracy theories makes this episode one of the funnier Voyager episodes. At least one of the funnier Voyager episodes that isn’t an overt comedy; it does a great job not underlining the humor of Seven’s long conspiracy rants.

Pathfinder – S06E10
Nearly every Barclay episode simultaneously condemns some of his behaviors while predominantly acting as apologia for antisocial nerds, and so this episode rubs me the wrong way. Especially since marina sirtis said that Texans deserved to die in the 2021 Cold Snap.

Fair Haven – S06E11
Fair Haven and Spirit Folk are easily the most over-hated Voyager episodes. Sure, I guess the Irish stereotypes here are a bit irksome. But otherwise I’m not sure what’s supposed to be so shit about these episodes. Is it because Fair Haven is about a woman being horny? Regardless of the objections, neither of these episodes are boring, and there is no shortage of boring Voyager episodes.

Blink of an Eye – S06E12
If Voyager had ever received a film, the premise of Blink of an Eye definitely would’ve been a great foundation. The episode contains a lot of untapped potential due to its 45 minute runtime and isn’t dull for its entire duration. I’m not sure if it’s the best Voyager episode but it’s certainly up there. All that being said, it’s a bit damning that this easily could’ve been a TNG episode, or really an episode of just about any Trek series.

Collective – S06E16
I don’t hate the Borg kids, but it is insane how adding some precocious kids to the show was the thing that the writers decided to do, considering how otherwise averse Voyager was to status quo changes. This was the thing they settled on? Really?

Ashes to Ashes – S06E18
I feel like I’m missing an extremely obvious metaphor here; maybe this is an episode about cult deprogramming, I’m not sure. But Ashes to Ashes wins a lot of points for having a very affecting downer ending. There’s something very dramatically powerful about how Janeway essentially just says “We can’t start a major diplomatic incident by rescuing this woman against her will”.

Good Shepherd – S06E20
This could’ve been an amazing episode if it had a five minute denouement.

Unimatrix Zero – S06E26 – S07E01
I haven’t seen every Voyager two parter, but I can’t imagine any of them being worse than this one. Not only is this about the Borg, but the the conceit about some Borgs hanging out in a psychic environment together would be barely exciting enough to anchor a 45 minute episode’s A plot.

Critical Care – S07E05
Something about the classification “competency porn” rubs me the wrong way, but I have to admit, you put the incredibly competent EMH into a shitty dystopian hospital filled with dumb bureaucracy and have him start being competent . . . well, it’s immensely satisfying.

Body and Soul – S07E07
The Emergency Medical Hologram goes into Seven of Nine’s body! As a premise it’s fun. In execution, the way the episode skirts around certain sexual topics relating to consent while also staying within the confines of a TV-PG rating can be a little awkward. Idk, do it right or don’t do it at all. But this is a decent episode aside from those specific scenes.

Shattered – E07E11
This is the best Chakotay episode, and even then it’s about as good as a solid EMH episode.

Lineage – S07E12
I’ve heard some mixed reactions about how one of B’Elanna’s big character traits is that she hates being mixed-race. I didn’t find a lot of episodes focusing on this aspect of her character particularly compelling, speaking as someone who has no personal investment in this topic. But, speaking as someone who dislikes other things about themself, I thought Lineage was a great episode focusing on a kind of self-loathing.

The Void – S07E15
I’ve already talked about how stories that focus on having flawless principles can sometimes argue against themselves. The Void doesn’t, and is the best Trek episode I can currently remember on the subject of arguing for the principles of the Federation.

Workforce – S07E16 – S07E17
It’s a lot of fun to see characters stripped of their professions and presented in new contexts with their personalities intact. And it’s even better that the Workforce two-parter is one of the stronger ones the series ever had.

Human Error – S07E18
The problem with introducing a character halfway through the life of a series is that a character piece showing some evolution like Human Error makes sense with the pace that Seven of Nine was developing, but also feels weird considering how close the series is to concluding.

Endgame – S07E25 – S07E26
I imagine this finale was controversial for time travel and Borg related reasons. I don’t really care too much about the time travel, and I care even less that the Borg take a huge blow during the conclusion of this episode. What does bother me is that there’s no denouement here; the moment Voyager arrives back at Earth the show ends. No reunions, no ruminations. Really shows a lack of faith in the audience that we got an action-packed finale instead of one that allowed for some quiet reflection.

It’s difficult to make a case for Voyager being a better show than TNG, DS9, or arguably even Enterprise. Between all of those shows Voyager is the one that least utilizes its premise, takes the longest to hit its stride, and it can only really be considered a better show than Enterprise because Enterprise was cancelled before it was able to complete its seven seasons; seasons 3 and especially 4 of Enterprise are stronger than most, if not all, seasons of Voyager.

All that being said, Voyager is an easy show to love. Especially relative to TNG it’s easy to appreciate it for its underdog character. And I know a lot of people appreciate Voyager for having the most female-dominated cast of any Trek show, at least before the newer ones. I think we all know that the Bechdel test is an imperfect measurement of whether or not a piece of media is “feminist”, but it’s not a coincidence that Voyager has the highest volume of episodes that pass the Bechdel test by a significant margin.

Voyager is the least significant show from the Next Generation era. But it’s still worth seeing . . . at least the pilot and seasons 4-7 are.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

Note: Moving forward I’m no longer going to put comic reviews / analyses / whatever above a certain length in Comic Review collections. Anything less than roughly 1,000 words will continue to be placed within the collections, and longer pieces will be published as stand-alone articles.

This DC Finest volume collects the first four years of Supergirl appearances, starting in 1959. Supergirl would only receive a solo book in 1972. Everything in this book is a backup feature starring Supergirl, or a story focusing on another character that heavily features Supergirl, from Action Comics, Superman, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane, and Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen.

If you’re not familiar with Supergirl, her origin in simple. When Krypton exploded, a chunk of the planet happened to not get too heavily damaged, with a completely intact town existing on it. Kara Zor-El was born on this chunk of Krypton, daughter of Superman’s uncle. Unfortunately, the chunk of rock on which the town exists is Kryptonite, and is slowly killing all of its inhabitants. Kara Zor-El’s father builds a rocket to send her to Earth after discovering a Kryptonian named Superman lives there. Kara, now roughly fifteen years old, leaves for Earth while everyone she’s ever known dies.

Kara Zor-El is greeted by Superman once she arrives on Earth. She tells Superman what’s up and they discover they’re cousins. Superman feels like Kara Zor-El isn’t ready to be a public superhero yet, and also wants a “secret weapon” that his enemies won’t know the existence of. And so he has Supergirl move into an orphanage and makes her promise to live a life of complete secrecy until he believes she’s ready to live a public life.

Yeah, Superman is kind of a dick here.

Silver age Superman’s dickery aside, these original Supergirl appearances are not as misogynistic as you might expect. Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane was all about Lois Lane trying to trick Superman into revealing his identity so that he would marry her, which is an incredibly dated premise for a comic about a journalist. Don’t get me wrong, being horny for Superman to freakish degrees is part of Lois Lane’s character. It’s just that it was done better and with more nuance in Lois & Clark than the comics from the 50s.

The thing about Supergirl is that, while she does meet a couple of boys, she doesn’t spend all of her time desperately pining after them. The only super (hah) objectionable thing in the early stories is that Supergirl unquestioningly follows Superman’s incredibly strict and isolating decree that she keep her existence hidden from the world.

Having read Supergirl’s origin, there are a bunch of things you’re probably expecting to see in these stories. Seeing as Supergirl arrived on Earth as a teenager, you’re probably expecting some fish-out-of-water humor, some lamenting from her that Earth culture is not the same as Kryptonian culture. And with the element of Supergirl not being ready to reveal her existence, you’re probably expecting some physical humor relating to Supergirl not having a handle on her abilities.

Supergirl does make some superheroing mistakes in these early stories, but they’re always things that are incredibly trivial, that just make Superman look like a jackass for fixating on them. But the culture clash elements? They literally don’t appear in this volume, at all. It’s a real missed opportunity. I’m interested to see if later takes on Supergirl emphasize this stuff more, but I fear that, because it’s not baked into her earliest appearances, it never truly becomes a part of her character.

If you’re not familiar with Supergirl, it’s worth noting that she’s able to reveal her existence to the world towards the end of this volume, and so it thankfully didn’t become a decades-long conceit of her character, like Lois Lane taking over 30 years to discover Superman’s secret identity.

That being said, Supergirl’s isolation does cause some problems in this volume. Her existence is a secret to everyone except Superman, and so she doesn’t get to interact with people on a regular basis as Supergirl. This doesn’t stop her from interacting with people in her secret identity at the orphanage . . . except there are no real characters at the orphanage.

Supergirl doesn’t have a supporting cast to speak of at the orphanage, so her stories usually involve her interacting with various one-off characters. The best stories in the volume, by far, are the ones that use other established characters such as Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane. One gets the impression that Jerry Siegel and Otto Binder had gotten so used to working with the Daily Planet crew that they took it for granted that Supergirl would need a proper supporting cast herself.

So yeah, a lot of storytelling elements baked into Supergirl’s origin are left on the table, and her vow of secrecy causes some problems for her stories. But it can’t be said that writers Jerry Siegel and Otto Binder don’t take this phase of Supergirl’s existence as far as it could go; we get plenty of stories where Supergirl, sometimes with the help of Superman, go to ridiculous lengths to hide her existence.

There are some real highlights in this volume. For instance, there’s a story where Supergirl travels to a planet that’s almost exactly the same as Earth, but slightly different, so that she can prove to Superman she’s ready to be a public superhero. This story is filled with a lot of goofy bullshit, such as how icebergs on this alternate planet are made of congealed salt instead of frozen water.

There’s also a story where Superman has a nightmare about becoming a powerless old person, triggered by him thinking about what his place in the world will be after Supergirl becomes an adult. There’s something wonderfully morbid about how shitty Superman imagines his future life that makes this story essential. Oh, and how could I forget the story where Superman and Supergirl get married?

The Jimmy Olsen stories in this volume probably have the highest batting average. The first time Olsen meets Supergirl he’s been temporarily blinded, and nothing Supergirl does can convince Olsen that she’s real. In another story Supergirl disguises herself as a green-haired alien girl and starts going on dates with Olsen to make his unfaithful girlfriend jealous.

The Lois Lane stories usually reflect the era in which they were made in ways that are both disturbing and hilarious. In a hypothetical story where Superman marries Lois Lane and Supergirl becomes their adoptive daughter, Lane finds herself depressed because Supergirl is so good at helping with housewife duties that she has nothing to do.

Towards the end of this volume an arc begins involving an evil Kandorian scientist named Lesla-Lar. Lesla swaps places with Supergirl and also robs her of her powers. This was apparently one of the earliest comic stories to be serialized beyond two or three parts. The story starts quite strong, but eventually loses steam and ends in an anticlimactic fashion after some irrelevant time travel hijinks.

It’s worth noting that there are no supervillains in this entire book. Brainiac appears in a few flashbacks, and Lex Luthor makes a small handful of appearances, but that’s it. The Superman comics of this era were comedies first and foremost, and while a comedy can obviously feature supervillains, that would imply these are “action comics”. And, despite one of the Superman books of this era literally being called Action Comics, there isn’t a lot of action in these stories. Super powers are almost exclusively used for things like repairing objects at super speed and time travel.

While watching the 2025 Superman film I had the thought that it perfectly captured the comedic sensibility of the Richard Donner Superman films. But it turns out the very specific comedic vibe in these films does come directly from the silver age Superman books. The lineage from the silver age comics, to the Donner films, to All-Star Superman, and finally the Gunn film, is quite direct.

The majority of these early Supergirl stories are illustrated by Jim Mooney. Mooney would grow as an artist, but speaking solely about the comics in this volume, he’s the least good Superman artist of the era. It’s always a highlight when Kurt Schaffenberger, Wayne Boring, or Al Plastino step up to plate. Schaffenberger was great at drawing expressive female faces. Boring had a very charming and aged style, reflecting his vintage. Plastino’s work had a real cleanliness to it. It’s difficult to say what makes Mooney’s work stand out; he’s mostly good at drawing Supergirl specifically, because he drew her more often than anyone else.

Curt Swan, who was emerging as the most significant Superman artist during this period, really makes an impression. The quality of his draftsmanship is a cut above relative to the other artists, who weren’t slouches themselves. The best way to appreciate Swan’s talent is to see how, during this era where Superman books were dominated by a very specific house style, Swan’s abilities still made themselves known. Well, the actual best way is to look at his work from the 70s and 80s, when he was paid more to draw less.

There’s only one real qualm I have with this book on a production level, which is that it doesn’t include Superman #123, which contains what’s essentially a pilot Supergirl story illustrated by Dick Sprang. Sprang was mostly known for being a Batman artist, the best of his time, but he did illustrate this notable Supergirl story, and it has been included in prior Supergirl collections, specifically the black and white Showcase volume that mostly overlaps with this DC Finest volume. Thankfully Sasha of Casually Comics covered this specific story here.

If you’ve ever seen a list of weird Superman powers you’ve probably seen super ventriloquism show up. This ability not only allows a Kryptonian to project their voice out of distant objects; it also allows a Kryptonian to build a giant puppet using super speed and then puppet it expertly. You probably assumed it was something that happened once in an old comic as a one-off gag. While reading Supergirl I was surprised to see that super ventriloquism happened fairly often.

Across the book’s 620~ pages super ventriloquism, by my count, is used six times. It’s worth noting that things slow down after a while, because four of those uses happen within the first 260 pages. No matter how you slice it, super ventriloquism used to be a major Kryptonian power, one that has been abandoned in post-Crisis continuity.

An interesting thing about these stories is that you get some science-y things dropped into the stories that feel vaguely educational. It’s nothing approaching edutainment, but Supergirl will regularly mention that she can’t move too fast while wearing regular clothing or else the friction between the clothes and the air would start a fire, things like that.

Circling back around to the subject of Supergirl’s portrayal here, there are some elements that feel surprisingly ahead of their time. Supergirl is, essentially, the second strongest person on Earth after Superman, and the stories acknowledge this. Sometimes in the form of gangsters expressing anxiety about the prospect of being defeated by a teenage girl, which maybe sounds a little regressive, but these gangsters are regressive people, see.

Spider-Man is usually considered the first teenage superhero, specifically the first teenage superhero who wasn’t a sidekick. The thing about Supergirl is that she isn’t really a sidekick to Superman; the number of times she goes on her own adventures in this volume dwarfs the handful of times she specifically helps Superman do something.

Supergirl could’ve been remembered by history as the first solo teenage superhero. The reason she isn’t, really, is because her material wasn’t good enough.

Reading this volume, I get the impression that these early Supergirl features were not the best of the silver age Superman comics. The highlights in this volume are the stories that feature Supergirl in a supporting capacity starring Jimmy Olsen, Lois Lane, and/or Superman. There’s a different DC Finest volume called The Giant Turtle Man that collects “Superman Family” comics from the same era as this Supergirl book, and it’s likely a better place to explore silver age Superman if you don’t specifically want Supergirl material.

Do I recommend this volume of Supergirl stories? Only if you’re a Supergirl fan. If you’re looking for the specific variety of mid-century Americana that Superman comics of this period represent, you’re better off not reading Supergirl. If you’re taking an academic approach and want to see how women have historically been depicted in comics, Superman’s Girlfriend Lois Lane is probably a better place to look.

Girl of Steel is not entirely without merit. There are some great stories in here, but the good:boring ratio here is not favorable. I’m glad I read this, because it seem that Sophie Campbell’s current run on the character is referencing a bunch of things that happened all the way back here. And it will be interesting to compare and contrast the material here with Peter David’s 90s Supergirl book. I don’t regret reading this book, but it’s definitely not for everyone.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

This has turned the cinephile community against superhero movies, and largely for good reason. The thing that’s regrettable is that there have been some brilliant superhero films, movies that show the true potential of the genre. These are films that stack up against the best tentpole and genre films from cinema’s history, and if superhero films were still made like these, the genre would probably be held in much higher regard.

As a rule, I’m only including one film per director per character. So, I can’t include Batman (1989) and Batman Returns on this list, because both are directed by Tim Burton. I’ve also, quite arbitrarily, decided not to include any animated films. Even if I did allow the Spider-Verse films, neither of them would be topping this list.

And, one last thing; I haven’t seen the Snyder cut of Justice League. I watched a couple of movies specifically as research for this article, and I didn’t especially enjoy any of them. I think it’s entirely possible that I would enjoy Snyder’s take on Justice League, but after watching The Batman, Blue Beetle, The Phantom, and Birds of Prey I don’t have it in me to watch another superhero movie for a while, especially not one that’s four hours long.

Honorable Mentions

Flash Gordon
Flash Gordon was an incredibly influential and popular comic strip in its time, and so it definitely has a place in comic history. But “comic strip” is revealing here; superheroes were born in the pamphlet comicbook format, not in the newspapers. It feels dishonest to call Flash Gordon a superhero film; it’s more science-fiction, or space opera. Flash Gordon is, as Queen put it, “just a man”, not a superhero.

RoboCop
In the past I’ve said that RoboCop is “the best superhero film to contain an origin story”. But I feel like it’s a bit of a stretch to describe RoboCop as a superhero; he’s not a vigilante, he’s programmed to do the things he does instead of doing them out of a sense of altruism or obligation, he doesn’t give off a cape feeling, etc. One or two of these things would be subversions, but taken together, it feels like RoboCop breaks too many genre conventions to accurately be called a superhero. Maybe if he had his origins in comics it would feel more justifiable, but being a film-first character also works against him.

Note: A list of films that you shouldn’t expect to see here on the basis that they’re films based on comics but not superhero films: Dredd, Hellboy, The Punisher, The Crow.

Hulk
Instead of making its source material more “adult” with profane language and excessive violence, Ang Lee’s Hulk was an adult take on the superhero genre by taking its themes relating to trauma and parental narcissism extremely seriously. Hulk is one of those movies that it’s easy to want to love, because of how hard it tries, because of how admirable its ambitions are. There are definitely a lot of good things about the movie; its screenplay covers its themes extensively, and there are a handful of powerful moments in the film. But it’s also overlong, some of its action scenes get long in the tooth, and the film has a tendency to overuse flashbacks and dreams. Hulk simultaneously takes its source material seriously while also being light on fanservice [Hulk only appears 41 minutes into the movie], which is cool. But there are too many flaws here.

Blade II
You might be asking how Hellboy isn’t a superhero but Blade is; I can’t really give you a good answer. Blade II was directed by Guillermo Del Toro, and so it’s incredible on a filmmaking level. It’s a movie that moves beautifully, and its production design is great as well. But unfortunately its David S. Goyer screenplay is awkward and frequently inert, which prevents this one from being an all-timer. Still, Blade II makes for an enjoyable enough two hours.

The Top 10

9 (tie): Superman Returns
There’s something admirable about Superman Returns. The first hour or so of the movie, with its achingly sentimental tone and melancholy, is affecting. The comedic touches, such as the opening scene with Lex Luthor, are hilarious. And while the film’s devotion to having Superman be the “real” personality gives the film an uncanny feeling at times, it also gives it something very unique.

Superman Returns is far from being perfect. The latter half of the movie is poorly paced and overlong, it’s weird how Superman never reveals his identity to Lois Lane despite this having a more grounded tone than its predecessors, and the basic premise that Superman would leave Earth to fend for itself for five years rings false. But despite all its problems, there’s something special about it. I realize this is an extremely controversial thing to say, but I’d argue that Returns is a stronger movie than the Donner films it’s meant to be a sequel to.

9 (tie): Superman III
I’m not sure if it’s entirely accurate to call Superman III a misunderstood film. There certainly are generations of comics readers who have no idea that Superman’s comics used to be more so comedies than anything else, which is what Superman III is emulating. But, when the movie was initially released, this was very much in living memory for 20-something comic fans who knew exactly what Superman III successfully was doing and didn’t like its aims.

Superman III doesn’t always succeed, but for the most part it’s a brilliant distillation of silver age Superman. It’s essentially eight different 10-pagers shoved into a blender and turned into a movie, and it’s brilliant. If you watch this movie on its own terms you’ll probably enjoy it.

8: Batman Forever
Batman Forever is a much better film than most people give it credit for. This is a movie that does a great job splitting the difference between the Adam West Batman, Batman Returns, and the impulses that informed Schumacher’s later Batman & Robin. The production design here is incredible; compare and contrast this with any MCU movie and be scandalized by the decline in quality. While Forever‘s screenplay is a bit overstuffed there really isn’t anything else that’s obviously wrong with it. Batman Forever is a bit much . . . but that’s part of its charm.

7: Watchmen (Director’s Cut)
Pretend Watchmen isn’t an adaptation of a specific comic. Ignore Alan Moore’s naysaying. Ignore the handful of frequently overstated things that Watchmen gets wrong on a tonal level about the book it’s adapting and judge the film on its own merits.

What you’re left with is a visually sumptuous movie with an interesting and atypical narrative. It cannot be overstated how Watchmen exists on a completely different level of cinematic craftsmanship than basically every MCU movie; its colors are deep and bold. The characters wear real costumes instead of having them grafted onto the characters using CGI [barring Dr. Manhattan]. In part because of how the film uses its source material as a storyboard, every shot feels purposeful and motivated.

Watchmen is one of the greatest comics ever made, and its film adaptation isn’t even the best film in its genre, this is true. There is obviously something lost in the translation, but taken on its own merits Watchmen is a solid movie.

It’s not perfect. The ending used by the film is worse than the space squid ending from the comics. A lot of the things that push Watchmen the comic over the edge simply can’t fit into a film of any reasonable length. But there’s a reason Roger Ebert felt compelled to give this one a perfect 4/4 star rating.

Note: I didn’t forget to link to a Watchmen review; I haven’t seen this movie in a long time and don’t have a review logged into my Letterboxd.

6: Batman (1966)
While there had been superhero serials shown in theaters before Batman, Batman was the first superhero film designed to be a feature; it’s a strong debut for the genre. Produced in response to the massive success of the Batman TV show’s first season, the film adopts the same memorably campy tone. There are a bunch of solid bits in this movie, and there’s something special about seeing a superhero wearing a costume that didn’t cost thousands of dollars to make.

5: X2
There had been massive superhero films in the past, such as Superman and Batman. But the first X-Men film proved that relative newcomers without the recognition of those names could have massive success at the boxoffice. The problem was that X-Men was only a decent film, with a lot of significant flaws that were hard to overlook.

Its sequel, X2, was the arguable peak of the entire X-Men film franchise. The film has a ton of great individual scenes, using the premise of God Loves, Man Kills for a mostly original story that improves on the previous film. X2 remains one of the few superhero films that works on a political level; it brought the allegorical elements of X-Men to the fore and has explicitly anti-cop elements. And, despite the scope of the film, there’s something oddly cozy about it, perhaps because of its brilliant ensemble cast.

X2 has its problems. bryan singer infamously didn’t know how to direct action sequences, which doesn’t serve the latter half of the film well. There were also some mistakes inherited from the original X-Men, such as its interpretation of Rogue. And a lot of the stuff relating to Stryker’s son (?) reads as being a little transphobic. And it’s these flaws that prevent X2 from placing higher on this list, despite how great it is relative to the MCU’s output.

4: The Dark Knight
Many of the most annoying people you’ve ever met consider The Dark Knight to be the greatest film ever made. The problem is that it is a brilliant movie, not as unimpeachable as they think, but still brilliant. The Dark Knight has a sense of momentum so powerful that its epic 150 minute length feels earned and necessary.

The movie has some issues. The film’s editing is virtuosic but the blocking of scenes and other staging-related elements are a little mediocre. It feels implausible that the Hong Kong sequence didn’t cause an international incident within the world of the film. When one considers that district attorneys are not especially famous people relative to other politicians, a lot of stuff about Gotham’s hopes relating to Harvey Dent feels unlikely.

But there’s a reason The Dark Knight is remembered as a modern classic. The film is referenced so frequently because of how many memorable scenes it has. The dialogue is iconic, even when it feels silly and overcooked. Heath Ledger is so brilliant that nearly twenty years of parodies and other imitations haven’t managed to diminish it. This is a good one, as painful as it is to say it.

3: Batman Returns
Much like X2, Batman Returns is a film that used a decent first installment as a foundation for a much better sequel. Burton turned Batman and his rogues’ gallery into a vehicle for his personal fixation on the nature of freakdom. The end result was something atypical relative to the Batman comics, but on its own merits an incredible movie. This is an immensely horny film, filled with massive sets and a very personal set of pet themes. They don’t make ’em like they used to, in part because of the backlash Returns received from some parents, despite how much money the film made anyways.

2: Superman (2025)
I remember some English guy on reddit said that he found the discourse around Superman confounding, that the film’s reception seemed to represent some sort of spiritual struggle within American society.

That guy wasn’t entirely wrong. People needed the defiantly optimistic tone of Superman as criminals began to dismantle the government in earnest. There was something telling about how right-wing grifters tried to mobilize against this movie, to zero discernable effect.

Ignoring all that, Superman is the best produced superhero movie to have been made in years. Its wide-angle visual style is discernable and interesting, and its visual effects don’t look like they were produced by a micromanaged team on a time crunch. But, most importantly, its screenplay is solid. Superman is a well-written movie that keeps things moving along while making space for its characters.

It needs to be acknowledged that something about Superman captures how comicbook universes feel more than any preceding film. The scene where Metamorpho unexpectedly appears reminded me of how characters will show up in Marvel and DC books. And one might argue that the MCU has been doing this stuff for years, but comicbook stores have been reporting massive increases in sales accompanying the release of Superman that they never saw with Marvel films; there’s a palpable difference. Something about Superman is getting people excited about comics, which is great to see; the MCU never really managed that, despite how Marvel’s comics bent over backwards to more strongly resemble their films.

1: Spider-Man 2
Spider-Man 2 is a perfect movie. The preceding Sam Raimi Spider-Man film was already brilliant, but this sequel manages to hit new emotional heights. I can’t really talk about this film on a consise way; if you’d like to read a few thousand words of my thoughts on Spider-Man 2, I wrote a piece for its 20th anniversary, which I’ve linked to. But, in short, Spider-Man 2 is my all-time favorite movie; I really love this one.

If you enjoyed this list, you might be interested in my ranking of superhero cartoons.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

Comic Reviews vol 1 – Wonder Woman: Earth One, Iron Man: Hypervelocity, RoboCop vs The Terminator, The Eltingville Club, Empowered vol 1, Marshal Law: Fear and Loathing, Wanted
Comic Reviews vol 2 – Spider-Man: Maximum Carnage, Challengers of the Unknown, Wonder Woman by George Perez vol 1
Comic Reviews vol 3 – Animal Man by Grant Morrison, Dirty Pair Manga, DC Finest: The Origin of Plastic Man

More reviews of more comics.

1. Nocturnals: Black Planet
2. The Wrong Earth
3. DC Finest: Batman – Red Skies

Nocturnals: Black Planet

Nocturnals is a painted comicbook series created by Dan Brereton. Someone showed me the cool monster women on the cover of the book and I ordered the first collection; that’s how you get me to buy a book. Unfortunately it hasn’t satisfied thus far.

This miniseries was a chore to read. I took a long break in the middle of reading this one and had to force myself to jump back in after about two and a half weeks because I didn’t want to forget what was happening, and also because I own a Nocturnals collection in physical form and I’m hoping the later stories are of a higher quality. In total, it took exactly a month to read these six issues . . . which isn’t good.

I’m coincidentally covering two different comics published by Malibu in this entry. The original Black Planet miniseries was published by Bravura, the imprint for creator-owned comics at Malibu Comics. Partway through the publication of Black Planet Malibu was acquired by Marvel, but the rest of the issues still were released. Brereton would take Nocturnals to Dark Horse for the next entry in the series.

This comic has a weird title, because I can’t not think of Public Enemy when I hear “Black Planet”. Fear of a Black Planet had only been released four years prior. Anyways,

It’s difficult to explain what Nocturnals is about, because due to the way the story is presented I would be spoiling things to explain basic parts of the comic’s premise. In short, it’s about outcasts and weirdos. Mostly animal human hybrids, with some other monsters in the mix as well. It’s also about Mafia stuff, I guess, although I’d hesitate to call this a crime comic.

There’s a lot of horror stuff out there that really dabbles moreso in horror aesthetics than actual scares. These works, for instance, might have a focus on Universal Horror iconography without trying to build real suspense. Nocturnals goes a step further by not only evoking the horror genre in style, but by having a very “Halloween-core” quality. And the comic isn’t subtle about this; there’s a character literally named Halloween Girl. Protagonist Doc Horror looks like Tim Curry if he was super jacked.

This is a painted comic, as I was saying earlier. It’s interesting to compare and contrast Dan Brereton and Alex Ross’s work. A lot of comic artists said that Alex Ross’s work has a labored, overly referenced quality, and that his storytelling was mediocre underneath the flash of his painted artwork. The criticism that Ross’s work is all based on photos of models is obviously something that a person is allowed to not enjoy, but that’s very much the raison d’être of Ross’s art. But it is true that, at least back when Ross was doing Kingdom Come, he occasionally made visual storytelling flubs.

Just about every comic artist uses visual reference to some degree; it ain’t no sin. Brereton uses photo reference too, but I get the impression looking at his work that more of his stuff is painted directly from his brain. Brereton’s men often have a Kirby-esque quality to them, with proportions that you don’t really see in real life. And that’s not even getting into how half of his primary characters are monster people.

While Brereton’s artwork on a base level is more palatable to a certain kind of cartoonist ideology, the visual storytelling falls noticeably below Ross’s already shaky work, at least on Black Planet. Despite Brereton not indulging in 90s-style layouts, the panel-to-panel storytelling in Black Planet is poor, with vital actions often not being portrayed in a coherent way.

The visual storytelling gradually improves over the course of Black Planet, but the general storytelling still has an awkward quality. Nocturnals is one of those books that throws the reader right into its world and essentially expects them to catch up through inference and context clues.

The story in Black Planet is good, or at least it seems like it might be. The problem is that the storytelling is bad. It’s one thing to have some faith in your audience and not explain everything immediately. It’s another thing when information that doesn’t really benefit from being withheld for so long is withheld because it has the patina of smart storytelling.

There’s something about Black Planet that’s painfully inert. After it became clear that the comic is enormously flawed, I stopped looking forward to what might happen next. The book’s characters are, at most, one dimensional; many of them are nothing more than a cool design. The plot feels formless. The moment-to-moment storytelling is compromised. If I hadn’t bought the book I wouldn’t have continued reading after the first 25~ pages.

In the afterword of Black Planet Brereton says he received a lot of “unflinching critique” from other cartoonists. So, I have some hope that the later Nocturnals stories improve on the foundation set here. You can expect another Nocturnals review in the future, after I forget how bored I got reading Black Planet.

The Wrong Earth

I’m going to quickly break down, in a vague no-spoilers fashion, everything that happens in the second volume of The Wrong Earth. Ok? Six issues of comics. Here goes:

-The two main protagonists travel through a tunnel together.
-They find the skyscraper operated by a villain.
-They go up the skyscraper and listen to the villain’s plan.
-They escape from the building and something happens that would be a spoiler to reveal, but it doesn’t take long for it to happen.

That’s essentially everything important that happens across those six issues, and those aren’t even six bullet points. And they found the skyscraper almost immediately in my recollection. There are a few small things that happen with supporting characters, and there are some character beats shared between the two protagonists across the events I listed out.

But, on the whole, The Wrong Earth is a perfect object lesson in why decompression is bad for comics storytelling. Because the events of The Wrong Earth volume 2 could easily be adapted into a single 45 minute episode of a TV series, with no abridgments. And that’s just not enough substance.

Before I continue talking about decompression, I should explain what The Long Earth actually is.

The Wrong Earth is about Dragonflyman and Dragonfly. The former lives in a world that evokes the tone of the 60s Batman show. Dragonfly lives in a grim and gritty world modeled after post-1990 Batman comics. Both characters accidentally swap worlds and have to deal with being out-of-sync with the way things operate.

In many ways this comic is a high concept premise where the jokes write themselves. It helps that Tom Peyer, writer of The Wrong Earth, was one of the writers of the Batman ’66 comic, which lends an expert quality to Dragonflyman’s world.

The strength of The Wrong Earth is that there are some bits of genuine emotion that ground the characters and make them worth investing in. The problem is that there’s never enough of these moments.

There’s a nuance to the concept of decompression in comics that some people don’t really understand. For instance, it’s true that a six issue arc of Bendis and Bagley’s Ultimate Spider-Man could be squeezed down into two issues if done in the idiom of Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man. But the thing that people sometimes don’t get is that there’s a different kind of density in those Ultimate comics.

The individual plot beats take longer in Ultimate, but it’s not just that they last more pages. There’s also more dialogue. There are more wrinkles shared between characters. Small things that would’ve been left unsaid in a compressed comic from the 60s are able to come to the surface. Scenes that would’ve been edited out due to space limitations are able to occur.

The Wrong Earth has a particularly bad form of decompression. It takes more issues for events to happen, but it also feels like the micro-level details, those aforementioned scenes of dialogue, are never as juicy as they should be.

Most pages of The Wrong Earth do have at least five panels. This isn’t a book with layouts that are too open. But, somehow, things never feel granular enough.

I enjoy The Wrong Earth in premise. And I enjoy the substance of the stories, but the problem is that the substance:compression ratio is completely skewed. Reading The Wrong Earth feels like being blueballed because of how close it always is to reaching its potential.

There’s nothing bad about what’s in The Wrong Earth. It’s just that it never feels like there’s enough of the good. I need to mention that Jamal Igle’s artwork is incredible, and he does a great job differentiating the different worlds the comic takes place on without needing to adopt a silver age-influenced artstyle for Dragonflyman’s world, which is a real feat.

Is The Wrong Earth worth reading? Probably, but it never reaches the heights I wish it did. I read The Wrong Earth and Night and Day before writing this review; here’s the reading order if you’d like to check out the series:

The Wrong Earth -> Dragonfly & Dragonflyman prequel miniseries -> Night and Day -> five one-shots -> We Could Be Heroes -> Dead Ringers

I found out about The Wrong Earth by reading I.M. Baytor’s excellent Gotham Calling blog, which I highly recommend if you’re a fan of genre comics, not just Batman books.

DC Finest: Batman – Red Skies

DC Comics has started a new line of reprints, called DC Finest, which are essentially their take on Marvel’s Epic Collection format. These books collect every story featuring a given character, team, genre, etc, in publication order. More info can be found here, and a list of volumes can be found here.

The DC Finest line has been focusing heavily on Batman, as you might expect. The primary area of focus has been the beginning of the Pre-Crisis era onwards, with volumes from 1986 to 1989 already released or planned. But DC has started working backwards from that point as well, with Red Skies collecting material from 1985-1986, the end of Pre-Crisis Batman.

This Red Skies volume contains roughly the last third of Doug Moench’s lengthy stint as writer of Batman. With a few exceptions the entire volume is illustrated by Gene Colan and Tom Mandrake.

There’s something that makes this volume a little awkward, which is that it more-or-less begins in the middle of an ongoing story arc. These comics were released back when newsstand distribution could be unpredictable, and there was a certain obligation to make sure readers were always up to speed in case they missed an issue. So, you’re not going to be lost here. But there’s obviously something unsatisfying about not reading a story from its very beginning.

This is an inevitable problem with volumes collecting an ongoing serialized comic like this. Thankfully, as you get deeper into the volume, the plot threads continue to churn and eventually you’re getting to stuff you were at the inception of.

The titular Red Skies arc, on a thematic level, focuses primarily on Batman’s love life, specifically his thirst for dangerous and morally ambiguous women. At the beginning of the volume Batman has four love interests (Vicki Vale, Catwoman, Nocturna, Julia Pennyworth), and it seems this arc was designed to give Batman some focus.

Batman is often portrayed as being so emotionally constipated that he comes off as having no sexual feeling. And so it’s a nice change of pace to read a comic where Batman thinks about the women around him and expresses some romantic feelings.

The plot surrounding all of this has its ups and downs. The title alludes to an environmental phenomena that may be a metaphor but might also be something Crisis on Infinite Earths related. A serial killer is taking out the remaining members of the False Face Society, and Catwoman is worried she’ll be framed. A woman’s husband falls becomes thrall to Nocturna, and Detective Bullock needs to investigate. Robin is calling Nocturna his mom for some reason.

The arc does get a little long in the tooth, and it’s an arc that suffers from the introduction of Nocturna being not being included in the volume. But, with the way Batman processes his romantic feelings in the arc, it unintentionally functions as a statement of intent, that you’re getting a volume of distinctly pre-aughts, even pre-90s, Batman material.

The Batman in these comics is not the guy who could kill Superman if he had enough prep-time. This is not the Batman who is always sure of himself. This Batman has some doubts and concerns about things, mostly his relationship with Catwoman. Early in the volume Batman has a wonderful interaction with Robin about Detective Harvey Bullock, who is in need of rescue.

It’s quite fascinating how Batman has changed so thoroughly in the public consciousness that the Pre-Crisis Batman is legitimately unrecognizable to many comics readers. I did some reading about this volume, and a lot of Batman fans were surprised to see a Batman that more strongly resembles a regular human being.

There are a lot of one-shots and brief arcs in this book, and if I listed off everything it would be tedious (I tried). So I’ll mention a handful of things; I’m not necessarily saying these are the best stories in the volume, just that I have things to say about them that sometimes reflect on the rest of the book as well.

The Red Skies arc is immediately followed by Batman #392, in which Batman tries to have a peaceful evening with Catwoman. Unfortunately, they find crime everywhere they go. It’s a fun yarn that’s managed to find its way into two separate volumes of Catwoman stories. Batman’s relationship with Catwoman is a major focus throughout this entire volume.

This book contains a one-shot where Batman teams up with Green Arrow. Batman’s often legalistic take on justice is criticized heavily in this story; writers have been criticizing Batman within the pages of his comics for decades. The two-parter that follows has Batman teaming up with a Soviet spy to thwart an agent who has gone rogue. This story contains some nuanced views of the Soviet Union.

Also included is the first arc to feature Film Freak, a criminal whose crimes are all movie references. Doug Moench includes a ton of movie references throughout this volume, mostly delivered by in-universe film buff Detective Bullock. But everyone gets in on it here. The film nods are a lot of fun, and even outside of this arc moviegoing seems to be the go-to recreational activity. Moench’s references don’t feel irritating because he’s referencing old noir movies and The Color Purple instead of . . . well, it wouldn’t have been too embarassing to reference a lot of tentpole movies of the mid-80s, relative to today.

The penultimate issue in the volume, Batman #400, is often cited as being the final pre-Crisis Batman story. The issue that follows this one is the actual final issue published before Denny O’Neil took over as editor of the Bat books, but this is clearly intended to be the finale.

In the comic Ra’s al Ghul breaks all of the prisoners out of Arkham Asylum and Gotham State Penitentiary. It makes for a story heavy on action and character beats featuring Batman’s rouges’ gallery. It’s an entertaining story, but it’s nowhere near as poignant as Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, the last Pre-Crisis Superman story¹. And its “Batman’s crusade will never end” conclusion is not as definitive as one might hope for. But it’s a solid sendoff to an era of Batman comics, even if some plot threads from the preceding issues are ultimately left unresolved.

The true final Pre-Crisis Batman comic is a one-shot written by Harlan Ellison. It’s an amusing story where Batman keeps trying to stop crimes, but the people being attacked either help themselves, or it turns out he’s misinterpreting what’s happening. The night in Gotham turns out to be peaceful. It wasn’t meant to be an ending, but it works as a coda to Batman #400.

It does need to be noted that the publication of Crisis on Infinite Earths, in actuality, happens towards the beginning of this volume . . . and it’s basically only acknowledged by some editorial captions.

If there’s one thing this volume makes clear, it’s that Frank Miller did not “give Batman his balls back”. Firmly before The Dark Knight Returns or Batman: Year One, we can see a Gotham where it’s almost always nighttime and the streets look shabby. Batman still smiles every now and then, sure, but that’s a good thing. It’s a mistake of many modern interpretations of Batman that the character is often incapable of experiencing any kind of levity, unless he’s being a sadist.

This shouldn’t be news to anyone with a real understanding of comics history, or at least Batman history. Batman started to get serious again back in the 70s, arguably even in the 60s², long before the mid-80s stories in this volume. But it’s worth mentioning that the narrative of The Dark Knight Returns “fixing” Batman is completely ahistorical, and I say that as a fan of TDKR.

As stated earlier, 90%+ of this volume was written by Doug Moench, who previously had been a writer at Marvel. The writer before Moench was Gerry Conway, another Marvel guy. I always wonder if Marvel writers who moved to DC continued to “write” using the “Marvel Method”. My guess is that, because DC’s editors were actual editors, they were forced into writing full scripts, or at least outlines comprehensive enough to be properly edited before being passed off to artists. I need to do the deep dive on this and find out if my assumptions are correct.

The pacing and general storytelling between the artists in this volume feels similar enough that I’m inclined to believe they were working from full scripts.

The artists in this volume draw in wonderfully sketchy styles. Tom Mandrake and Gene Colan are both loose with perspective, never hesitant to go for it and illustrate things with dynamic angles. With the inkers of these books, Mandrake and Colan fill their panels with brusque, imperfect lines; tableaus illustrated without rulers; drapery defined with thick brushstrokes. The panels in these comics have a borderline Dionysian vibe to them. It’s surprising how loose these guys were allowed to be in one of DC’s flagship titles. I don’t wish every comic looked like this, but it’s a good reminder to any artist that they can loosen up sometimes, and it also is interesting that this was practically Batman’s house style for a time.

Gene Colan is always an interesting artist, because he drew comics using a bunch of pencil gradients and such, in a way that couldn’t be inked without a lot of interpretation from inkers. I wonder if any editors ever tried to get Colan to draw in a more normal style, because a lot of the time you get some very weird compromises between what Colan illustrated and what the inker was able to convey using pure black and white values.

Even ignoring the non-traditional penciling style, Colan was still a distinct artist who used a ton of dramatic angles in his work. And so it’s surprising that the other artist here, Tom Mandrake, has a style that’s so simpatico. You wouldn’t expect another artist to share a visual continuity with Gene Colan, but Red Skies is a remarkably consistent reading experience on an art level.

The 80s and 90s eras of Batman comics are beloved, and so it’s exciting that they’re being collected in an affordable color format that’s easy to follow. It would be exciting to see these formats continue to go into the past, however, because 70s bronze age material has always been collected spottily, and I know there are a lot of fondly remembered stories from that time.

Is this book worth reading? If you’re a serious Batman fan, the answer is definitely yes. If you’ve never read a Batman comic before, but are a fan of the animated shows, Arkham games, and/or movies, the answer is a softer “maybe”.

A newcomer to comics is probably better served by Year One & Two, the DC Finest volume following this one. Not only does that book begin after a soft reset of Batman continuity, it also contains two notable Batman graphic novels, plus a bunch of serialized ongoing material. Which allows a comics newcomer to experience both highly accessible material (the graphic novels), and also get a safe taste for the stuff a lot of people can find impenetrable in the beginning (the serialized issues).

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

1. I’m aware that Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? is not the actual last Pre-Crisis Superman story. ︎
2. When Julius Schwartz became editor of the Batman books in 1964 he got rid of some of the sillier elements that had crept into the Batman comics, but two years later the Adam West show would premiere, so it was a winding path. ︎

Last year I was disappointed that I didn’t see a lot of films. This year I saw more movies, but something else happened; my standards got a lot higher. I’m not sure why, but I viewed movies a lot more critically this year. I rarely gave films above a 3/5 star rating, and even then I often found myself feeling like I overrated movies.

I thought my end-of-year candidates list would be a lot longer, but instead it’s sixteen movies long, and some of the films would not have made the cut during prior years.

I didn’t watch a lot of movies during October or November because I was watching Star Trek: Voyager. And I’ve just started watching Halt and Catch Fire, and so I know I’m not going to be watching a lot of movies during December either. The cutoff date for this list is December 21, 2025.

• Top 5 Rewatches
• Dishonorable Mentions
• The 15 Best First Time Watches

Top 5 Rewatches

Like with my previous lists, these are not necessarily the best films I saw that happened to be rewatches. Rather, these are films where my opinion changed, or it stayed the same but I had some doubt I would still enjoy the film. These are in no particular order. If you’d like to hear more about an individual film click on the title of the movie to be taken to my Letterboxd review.

Pulp Fiction
Currently Quentin Tarantino is getting a lot of attention because of some shitty things he said about Paul Dano. Tarantino, within cinephile circles, has always had a mixed reputation for various reasons relating to his jackass nerd persona and frequent use of pastiche. Pulp Fiction, a movie I hadn’t seen in over a decade, was something I suspected I would find some issue with. But, yeah, it’s still good.

Ocean’s Thirteen
I used to think this was a weightless and surprisingly slapdash conclusion to the Ocean’s Trilogy. Now I appreciate its charms; almost all of its characters were already established in prior films, and so the movie is now able to focus all of its energy on another ridiculous heist filled with moving pieces. Something about the way it’s put together reminds me of Grant Morrison’s JLA comics, and that’s high praise.

Superman Returns
There are so many things wrong with this movie, but I really appreciate its achingly sentimental / nostalgic tone, as well as the things that it does right (eg casting Parker Posey). Between my watching this in September and today I’ve read a lot more silver age Superman material, and I think I might enjoy this one even more now that I have a better investment in its distinctly pre-Crisis conception of who Superman is as a character.

Sucker Punch
I enjoyed this the first time I saw it, and my opinions didn’t really change. I mostly thought I would maybe have my opinion lowered because people are always talking shit about it, even people I trust. But Sucker Punch is good! It’s kind of like Showgirls, and that’s high praise.

Rebel Without a Cause
This is a movie that requires an understanding of history. Not only an understanding that “teenager” was a relatively new concept when this film was made, but also that Rebel Without a Cause was made during a transitional period for screen acting and Hollywood in general. The film’s conception of mixed-up kids can feel silly at times, but what the film is trying to convey is admirable. And no qualifiers are needed for Nicolas Ray’s incredible widescreen compositions and blocking. This is worth seeing, not only because of its status as an iconic film, but also on its own merits.

Dishonorable Mentions

Before I talk about the best of the year, let me share some of the films where I have interesting bad things to say about them; not necessarily the worst I saw.

Hellraiser, Hellraiser II, Hellraiser III
I feel like a lot of people who are really into the Hellraiser franchise are enjoying imaginary films that do not exist. The sesuous depictions of BDSM stuff that people always mention in relation to these movies simply do not appear within the films themselves, and the films are boring and not good. The closest the franchise comes to getting good is with the sillier third one, but even then that barely impresses. I’d love to see the film that resembles the Hellraiser people keep describing.

Grace of My Heart
This is a film about a female songwriter who has a bunch of shitty boyfriends/husbands, and the narrative is about her learning that she’s strong and can stand on her own. A perfectly fine and good message, but the film using a Brian Wilson analogue, and making that segment of the film about the protagonist enduring his mental health struggles, which are presented as a misogynstic affront to her life, demonstrates incredibly poor taste. It’s a creative decision that captures a lot of shortcomings with non-intersectional feminism, and it’s genuinely repulsive.

Vixen!
A bizarre, accidentally (?) racist satire that would still be regressive and right-leaning even if it wasn’t racist. I understand the kitsch appeal of this movie, but it’s flat-out wrong to call this Russ Meyer’s best film.

Blue Beetle
A superhero film not just built out of cliches, but built solely out of superhero movie cliches. Not necessarily an awful movie, but certainly a creatively bankrupt one.

Umamusume: Pretty Derby – Beginning of a New Era
Genuinely feels like the death of culture if an anime based on a gacha game, itself based on something sports betting related (how meta) is able to become a minor cultural sensation.

Love Lies Bleeding
An incredibly overrated film that can’t turn style into substance. It doesn’t manage to create any emotion with the lesbian romance at the core of the film, which is impressive given how much screen time it has. I’m starting to turn on Kristen Stewart, because she brings the same affectations to every performance she does.

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Frozen Empire is easily the worst film I saw this year. It’s nearly two hours of 80s nostalgia and “kids on bike”-pilled bullshit. No creative decision in this film is creative. It’s a film that only exists to make manchildren with react channels scream while they watch trailers.

The 15 Best First Time Watches

Once again, these are in no particular order, and links to my Letterboxd reviews are provided here as well.

Strait-Jacket
Strait-Jacket is a perfect mixture of “legitimately good” and “schlock”. I think it’s doing the film a disservice to call it a “good-bad film”, but it’s definitely one of the best examples of those I’ve ever seen. Joan Crawford’s performance carries a lot of scenes that probably wouldn’t have gotten by without her, and William Castle is a punchy filmmaker who knows how to move things along, at least here. Strait-Jacket has merit as a sensationalistic post-Psycho horror yarn, but also is worth seeing in general.

The Mist
The Mist is an effective horror movie, based on Stephen King’s novella of the same name, directed by Frank Darabont, who previously had adapted King’s Shawshank Redemption. The Mist isn’t quite as good as that movie, but it’s still a movie filled with smart dialogue and suspenseful sequences. Definitely watch the black and white version, if you’re able to find it.

Living in Oblivion
Funny in painful ways, Living in Oblivion is a look at the struggles that come with independent filmmaking.

No Country for Old Men
I didn’t enjoy this that much while I was watching it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about certain moments from the film. Of course the coin toss scene at the gas station is a highlight, but like with any Coen brothers film there’s a lot of attention to detail here that results in a nuanced and layered end result.

The Wrong Guy
The Wrong Guy is an amiable 90 minute comedy, often described as having a comedic sensibility and pacing that makes it feel like a live action episode of The Simpsons. The film has a smart sense of humor without being mean to its characters, a surprisingly rare combination for this variety of comedy. The Wrong Guy didn’t receive a proper theatrical release in America and subsequently hasn’t received the level of popularity it deserves. Definitely seek this one out if you’re a comedy fan.

Salt / Wanted
Sure, why not? Neither Salt nor Wanted are films I gave above 3.5/5 stars, but both films feature Angelina Jolie shooting people. Both films are eminently watchable and surprisingly well crafted. I wouldn’t consider either of these great art, but they’re a reminder of how solid tentpole action films could be. Films not based on preexisting IP, in the case of Salt.

The Lair of the White Worm
Making deliberate schlock is a delicate balancing act, and Ken Russell’s Lair of the White Worm understands it perfectly. No matter how ridiculous things get in this film, and they do get ridiculous, Russell never really shows his hand, never indulges in zany camera movements designed to underscore the silliness of the events transpiring. That isn’t to say the film is poorly filmed or boring in its style; it’s just that he lets the substance of what’s happening speak for itself. And, if you’re an evil woman appreciator, you owe it to yourself to see this one. ESPECIALLY if you’re transfem.

Batman
The Adam West Batman film is brilliant. A lot of what I’ll say also applies to the TV series; the effect this had on comedy writing is immeasurable, the deadpan humor is delivered flawlessly, and the show/film understands Batman more than a lot of modern fans might realize or want to admit. If you don’t intend on ever watching the show, at least dip your toes in with the movie . . . and inevitably find yourself watching the show as well.

Child’s Play, Bride of Chucky, Curse of Chucky, Cult of Chucky
I watched all of the Chucky films this year. It’s difficult to choose a favorite, and so I’m not going to. The original is mostly a straight 80s slasher film, expertly made and devoid of the kinds of narrative contrivances so many horror films have. Bride of Chucky is probably the best film in the franchise; due to its queer camp elements and when it was made, it feels like a movie that needed to happen to advance the culture.

Curse and Cult of Chucky are films that emphasize serialized storytelling to such an extreme extent that they aren’t entirely satisfying as standalone movies, but I still love the specific kind of bullshit (non-pejorative) that these films embody. The Chucky series might be the strongest franchise in horror history, and if you’re a fan of the genre you owe it to yourself to watch all the movies; the TV series that exists in the same canon is unfortunately a bit of a mixed bag.

Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
The 70s Bodysnatchers film is almost too prescient, having elements that feel pertinent to things ranging from America’s complete distrust of public servants to the horror of AI slop. And if that wasn’t enough, Kaufman’s direction feels completely discrete, with no rote cinematic elements to speak of. When people talk about the great horror remakes they always mention the 80s trifecta of The Fly, The Thing, and The Blob; Invasion of the Bodysnatchers came a little early.

Honey Don’t!
I think a lot of the discourse around this film is mean spirited. Don’t get me wrong, if you dislike the movie you’re entitled to your opinion. But when I hear people saying “Ethan Coen, what the fuck are we doing here?”, it seems insulting to Tricia Cooke, co-writer and uncredited co-director of the film. I might be off-base here, but I get the vibe that she’s the artistic nucleus of this film, seeing as she’s the lesbian and this is a film about lesbians. And I think her movie is good.

Honey Don’t! is a queer genre film that’s, well, a queer genre film. It’s not granola core, it’s not highfalutin, it’s not some kind of queer coming-of-age or trauma thing. It’s a lesbian detective story . . . nice, we don’t get enough of this.

The Dark Knight
This is an annoyingly good movie, considering how it has the worst fans in the world. Unlike Matt Reeves’s film, The Dark Knight earns every minute of its extended runtime, with a dense plot and propulsive editing making the epic length of this movie feel exciting instead of tedious. This movie has at least ten genuinely iconic scenes that have only been slightly diminished by how frequently they’ve been referenced by annoying people. The Dark Knight; it’s good.

Memories of Murder
The slow disintegration of principles within Memories of Murder felt a bit trite while watching it initially, but the craftsmanship of the picture gave me a lot to chew on after finishing it. The more I thought about this one after viewing it, the more I enjoyed it. It wasn’t just the craftsmanship, but also the subtle (and not so subtle) bits of character work that stuck with me.

Barbarella
I didn’t enjoy Barbarella as much as I enjoy Flash Gordon, but it’s the same variety of horny space opera camp, and we don’t get enough of those.

Superman
I’m hesitant to say that James Gunn’s Superman is my film of the year, but I did love it. There have obviously been many great films adapted from superhero comics, with Spider-Man 2 being my all-time favorite movie. But Superman is the first film to capture something specific about the essence of superhero comics, perhaps because it’s not making any attempt to “normalize” the material for a mainstream audience. The film captures the distinct comedic pitch of silver age Superman comics, the Donner films, and All-Star Superman perfectly. The film’s optimism was genuinely moving to see this year. Superman is a movie I’m excited to see again, whenever the UHD finally dips below thirty euros.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

I want to keep this intro short and get to the recommendations, but first I want to take a minute to explain this format. Generally, these will be my favorite games this year, but I wanted this to expand beyond my particular tastes, so I’m pulling two twists on this. First, instead of an ordinary “best games this year” format, I’m selecting one game from each month to highlight. Second, each game must have under just 300 reviews. This way, I get to highlight more games outside my own sphere, and I have to dig deeper to find games worthy of sharing. So, not every one of these are my favorites – many still are – but I think they all do cool things and are compelling in their own right. I do love all of these games, and it’s easy to see the vision and care put into them by their smaller teams. Finally, for each game, I selected two additional recommendations if you liked it, or wanted something similar but different.

JANUARY – AI Learns to Drive

Part idle plaything, part tech demo, and part impregnable puzzle, AI Learns to Drive is a sandbox that’s not common in gaming. It’s whatever you want it to be. It’s really fun to watch the chaos of cars move and crash randomly, like adorable idiot ants. It’s super satisfying to watch them improve generation to generation into something coherent. It’s nice to leave in the background and just be mesmerized by the ghosts of hundreds of cars. And some of the unique challenges are tough nuts to crack as you tweak reward structures to try and elicit the behavior you want, whether it be driving backwards or drifting as much as possible.

As a simulation, it’s very accessible. That’s to say, as a piece of software it’s pretty easy to approach it and get started with playing and tweaking stuff. There are helpful tooltips that cover a lot of the training details, which you’ll be using pretty frequently, but less helpful information about building your own neural networks. They’re very much a black box of information — It takes whatever raw inputs you put into it, filter it between however many middle layers you want, and use a bunch of math and theory to turn it into output in arcane and non-obvious ways.

If you like seeing gradual improvement driven by randomness, check out Q-UP

If you like watching idiot creatures mess up and be weird, check out Wobbledogs

FEBRUARY – Copper Odyssey 2

Respect the craft. Copper Odyssey 2 is an open-ended RPG in a dissonant world. Being an indie RPGMaker game released in 2025 that looks like, well, this, you’ll probably be able to quickly tell if this is right for you. It’s wonderfully bizarre and painfully evocative in its art and dialogue alike. It’s stylish and in your face, screaming just to be heard. It’s excellent on all counts and compelling the whole way through. I will concede that you do miss a lot of context if you skip the original Copper Odyssey, but this sequel is bigger and more smartly designed.

In Copper Odyssey 2, you play as a little girl on your first job as a print studio. Your task is to turn 30 empty canvases into completed paintings, and along the way you’ll interact with a cast of confounding and serious allies and foes. Each painting is its own adventure, all somehow feeling distinct. It isn’t full of surprises, just lots of stunning stuff.

For a more sarcastic and louder RPGMaker game, check out Bad Bitch Blasters

For a first-person RPG in a sinister world, check out Dread Delusion

MARCH – MainFrames

MainFrames is a tech-themed platformer where you play as an expressive floppy disk trying to save their PC. Each level is packed with friends to rescue, minigames to complete, and occasional secrets to discover. This game is just a delight to play. The base platforming is tuned very well; with the mechanics it introduces being fun to use and gratifying to learn. This game makes excellent use of its digital theming. Each platform that you use is its own computer window, and you get to manipulate the size and position of platforms as a mechanic. Obstacles and activators alike typically take the form of application icons.

As much as I do have good things to say about MainFrames, I will add that it’s very what you see is what you get. It’s a pretty nice platformer with great game feel, expressive pixel art, and a steady difficulty curve. If you like platformers, give this one a look, and if you don’t, I don’t think this will sway you.

If you want an RPG that goes all-out on the computer aesthetic, check out Kingsway

But if you do like awesome platformers, also check out Ghoulscrapers

APRIL – Lab Rat

Let me cut to the chase with this one: Lab Rat is the funniest game I’ve played in a long time. Its humor is meta and ridiculous and constantly being delivered by robots with deadpan delivery. Jokes are frequently integrated directly into the mechanics of its puzzles; One section of color-matching puzzles is inexplicably contained within a noir gumshoe detective subplot, which naturally turns the screen to black and white, forcing you to deduce the colors you’re working with.

Mechanically, Lab Rat is a block pushing puzzle game. The puzzles on display are generally excellent and sometimes challenging without being too hard. Instead of ramping up to bigger and tricker rooms, it escalates in complexity by constantly presenting new ideas and twists. This game never dwells, which keeps its gameplay and humor alike fresh.

If you like block pushing puzzles, check out Isles of Sea and Sky

If you like absurd humor, check out An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

MAY – The End of Gameplay

The End of Gameplay isn’t a Game. It’s an anthology of poems about game design wearing a trenchcoat. An experience that meanders about, questioning established conventions of Play, fairness, and mechanics, through its prose and gameplay. The graphics are rudimentary in service of this. It’s not a Game, it’s a discussion. It’s an art piece that literally asks why Games should be this way.

Of course The End of Gameplay is a Game. It’s an experience you Play, going through several levels to progress and unlock more content until you reach the end and see everything. You Play as a bunny with a triple-jump. It has rules and mechanics that shape the behavior of your character and interactions. You do Game things, like collect coins and improve your score.

If you want a more antagonistic game, check out Hostile User Interface

If want a game that isn’t a game, check out Blippo+

JUNE – 10S FOREVER

10S FOREVER is a mishmash of pickleball and bullet hell. You have to aim and swing to hit enemies and bosses, while at the same time dashing and weaving through their volley of attacks. And it’s cool as hell. Every second is another panicked moment as you assess your priorities and and the risks, a decision you make on borrowed time because any hesitation will leave you dead. And you will die a lot in this one.

This game is also a masterclass of juice. The music is entrancing, the sound effects are punchy, and the visuals are striking. The whole game uses a restricted color palette in a low-resolution court that makes its strange enemies pop. The bosses have these crunchy synthesized voice lines that they mock you with, egging you on to keep playing until you can beat their sorry butts.

If you want to evade your own bullets, check out Duck Paradox

For another two-button boss rush, check out BOSSGAME: The Final Boss Is My Heart

JULY – DISCOPUP

DISCOPUP sold me on its premise alone; you play a seal trying to sneak into a dogs-only party. It’s cute, stylish, surreal, and over the course of the time-looped night you’ll get some heebie-jeebies too. Be aware that the late David Lynch is cited as an inspiration for the developers. There are some genuinely unsettling moments in this. Its package of funky tunes, charming characters, bizarre world, and unexplained mysteries make this an unforgettable experience.

DISCOPUP plays like an adventure game, where you talk to characters to get items and use those to do other things, usually by talking to different people. The game takes place over a single-night time loop, and most actions move the clock forward a little bit. At 2AM, the club closes their doors, and you have to try again. It felt pretty natural, and since you gain knowledge over which people or actions are helpful over the course of the game it never felt grating to mess up a loop.

For another cute-looking surreal game, check out Video Hole: Episode 1

If you want a game that doesn’t hide its body horror, check out Traumacore Violence

AUGUST – Super Drift Blade

You know there’s some bullshit going on when you inspect an item and “You found a clue to a clue” appears in the corner. Super Drift Blade begins as an action roguelike game, but early on shows its hand as a deduction and exploration game. Throughout this degrading world are puzzles and upgrades, mysteries and shortcuts. In order to get permanent upgrades, you have to find spirits hidden across the map and emancipate them. In order to get permanent progression, you have to be strong enough to survive and decode clues left behind. In order to complete your mission, you have to open up secret shortcuts and see this through.

Knowledge gated puzzle games like this one are among the trickiest to design, so I was impressed to see a small game swinging for the fences like this. But Super Drift Blade has several smart design decisions that make it a simpler task. The game is pretty strictly linear, so it can unfurl clues and story in a predictable order. There are enough permanent upgrades strewn about that you can afford to miss some, and your reward for getting more of them is making the action easier and easier. I did have a pain point with one puzzle in particular stopping me in my tracks, and I don’t think the English localization is the best, but overall, I found Super Drift Blade to be very competent.

If you want a whimsical knowledge-gated puzzle game, check out Öoo

If you want a more conventional action roguelike, check out Go Mecha Ball

SEPTEMBER – Quality Dreams, Reasonably Priced

Quality Dreams, Reasonably Priced is about dystopian transhumanism. In this game, you play as a consultant working on commission at a body modification shop. Your goal, as stated by your boss, is to decide if the clients are fit for the mods they ask for, and if so, upsell them on additional purchases. Your character’s goal is to save up enough money to afford treatment for your sick rabbit. It’s also decidedly queer! The very first customer is seeking gender affirming mods, and the queerness inherent in changing your body for your own gratification is embedded within the premise.

This visual novel is treading a tightrope. It paints an unscrupulous behavior in a sleek veneer and asks you to go through with it. But it doesn’t force your hand, it works because it gives you discrete choices about going through with the procedure and what to add on. It works because you see the clients again, and they have to live with the choices you made, whether it was right for them or not. I have one big gripe with this game, though. There is a canonical optimal path for each client, where they’re so happy with you that they become your friend. I think that’s a little too mushy and relieves the weight from the decisions you’re making.

For my own indictment on the body mods process, check out Neovagina Dilation Simulator

If you want a visual novel that’s whimsical but frank, check out Speed Dating for Ghosts

OCTOBER – Vampire’s Best Friend

Vampire’s Best Friend is a phenomenal example of design through reduction. It’s a fast and tight precision platformer with just one verb: Flapping. Managing your momentum and timing becomes crucial, as you only have a few seconds of flight in your small bat body. Navigating the world at all with this novel control scheme is at first a challenge, but each screen is packed tight enough that it still feels manageable. As you accumulate experience and eventually mastery, this movement only feels more satisfying.

The excellent pixel art is a perfect match for the game’s feel. It’s dark, but colorful, at times brooding but always cute. The sound effects are punchy, and the music is befitting of the vampire castle setting. Together the aesthetic comes together to make a wonderful and fun package.

If you want a linear unconventional platformer, check out Bat to the Heavens

If you want more girls in castles, check out Yurivania 1: Uhaul of the Night

NOVEMBER – Sliding Hero

Sliding Hero might have been made for me, specifically. It’s a sliding puzzle metroidvania with movement-based combat, sparse realtime elements, and a fantastically bizarre world. You slide around rooms, finding the best position to slide into enemies to kill them. Through the course of the game, you unlock new weapons and blessings that allow you to approach enemies in new ways, opening up more areas to explore. The puzzles are satisfying to solve, usually the right amount of tricky, well paced, and sufficiently varied. You have four hearts, which affords you a modicum of leniency in most puzzles to find suboptimal solutions. 

Sliding is tuned such that movement itself is engaging. Backtracking didn’t get boring, and exploration was always rewarding. The game is set in a sinister Venetian villa scattered by undead creatures, derelict statues, unusual plant life, striking architecture, and one enormous well-dweller all depicted with understated pixel art. This place is also the home to a cast of mysterious characters rendered in detailed, sometimes grotesque, illustrations.

If you want another take on sliding puzzles, check out Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure

If you want a detective game that’s as JJBA as this looks, check out Dice Eater: A Supernatural Mystery Card Game

DECEMBER – Angeline Era

I’m convinced Angeline Era was plopped into our world from an alternate timeline. It breaks and mends gaming conventions, like a bone growing stronger. It’s a PSX-styled action-adventure game featuring robust bumpslash combat, a novel secretsearch system, and a historied world which draws from Irish and Christian mythology. Every bit of design either feels fresh and unique, or obtuse in just the right way – frequently, both. I didn’t love every bit of Angeline Era, but I loved seeing things I hadn’t before in games.

The majority of the game takes place within action stages, where you have to clear several rooms in sequence. Your primary mechanisms for this are your trusty sword, which you will automatically slash when you bump into enemies, and an unscrupulous gun which explicably only shoots up. Every encounter is designed around these systems, so you’ll have to learn enemy patterns to bump and remain unscathed. Meanwhile, there is a button dedicated to search, which you use in suspicious-looking spots in the overworld to find stages, and in stages to find secrets.

For a golf game that defies conventions, check out Mini Mini Golf Golf

For a Sokoban game that defies conventions, check out Super Blockbuster

Before I continue, I should emphasize I have no problem with The Transfeminine Review, speaking broadly. I’ve been following Bethany since before the site properly launched. I’ve read many of her articles, and I think she’s done a ton of good for transfeminine authors. She’s one of the pillars of the commnuity, and I mean that genuinely.

The Transfeminine Review is great. But Bethany Karsten doesn’t fully understand the comics medium if she’s not including a category for comics that were illustrated but not written by transfeminine people.

If you asked me which of these choices had the lowest level of transfem authorship,

1. Written and illustrated by transfem artist
2. Written by transfem writer but illustrated by cis person
3. Written by cis person but illustrated by transfem artist

I would legitimately be torn between choices #2 and #3. To people who don’t read comics, and people who don’t understand how comics are usually made, this might sound strange. So, allow me to elaborate.

When people imagine what comics writing looks like, they usually imagine a comic script is not unlike a screenplay. Every panel is numbered and detailed, with a description of what happens, with all of the dialogue and captions included. And, indeed, many comics have been written this way. It’s what’s known as a “full script”. But many comics are not written this way.

Historically there have been many credited writers of comics who were barely writers. The most famous instance of this is easily stan lee. When working with artists such as Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, lee would provide each of them with the germ of a story. Sometimes this was a page or two of text explaining what would happen in the narrative. Usually it was little more than a short verbal description. After the artist illustrated the entire comic, making hundreds of choices relating to pacing, and filling in the inevitable holes that such a short summary would provide, lee would come in and add speech bubbles and captions. The artists would often leave rough dialogue on the bristol board to help stan lee understand what was happening.

Ask anyone who wrote The Amazing Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and the other comics from Marvel’s heyday, and most people who knows the facts will say that the authorship belongs to Kirby, Ditko, and the other artists. The only people who really seem to go to bat for lee are, mysteriously, other comic writers.

The working arrangement I just described is known as “The Marvel Method“. Over the years the Marvel Method has evolved into something a lot more equitable. Instead of providing writers with an outline with no dialogue that’s only a few hundred words long, it’s now a lot more common for a writer to give an artist an outline that’s multiple pages long, detailing every scene that needs to be in the comic, with all of the dialogue and captions included.

Excerpts of Frank Miller’s outline for The Man Without Fear, with John Romita Jr.’s notes in pencil.

This still leaves a massive amount of interpretation to the artist, but I think it’s fair to say that any writer working at this level of granularity is a “real” writer, unlike someone like stan lee. And many artists prefer to work from detailed outlines like this instead of using a full script, because they usually understand the finer intricacies of visual storytelling better than writers do.

It needs to be emphasized again that, even with the method I described that uses a longer and more detailed outline, the artist is doing a lot of work. There are no hard numbers on how comics are written, but from what I’ve gathered, a plurality of comics are written this way, and have been for at least the last twenty years.

It might sound like I’m saying that artists should be considered as co-writers when a working method derived from the Marvel Method is involved. But I’d say this is even true of works made from full scripts.

Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen, famously wrote incredibly long and verbose scripts for his comics. The first page of his Watchmen script, where he spends an entire page detailing just the first panel, regularly makes the rounds on social media.

The thing is, even with a writer as thorough as Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons still added a ton of stuff to the story. Not only did Gibbons design all of the characters and logos within the world of Watchmen, but he also emphasized a smiley face motif in the backgrounds of panels, and did a ton of work in defining the slightly futuristic (relative to the 80s) look of Watchmen‘s New York to reflect the super scientists living in the comic’s world. If another artist had illustrated Watchmen, it would not be the same book, not only on a visual level, but a textual one as well. And, in comics, those are basically the same thing.

Comic artists and writers usually talk to each other (which was true of Watchmen, incidentally). In the past, when communication wasn’t as simple as it is now, a writer generally handed a script to an editor, and then the editor passed it on to the artist. Sometimes artists and writers worked “together” for years without ever actually meeting. But, in this internet age, it’s not uncommon for an artist to essentially be a sounding board for their writer, and for an artist to even pitch in ideas.

All this talk and we haven’t even started talking about taste and sensibility yet. The left image is Supergirl illustrated by some guy, the right image is Supergirl illustrated by transfem artist Sophie Campbell. Notice how the left artist illustrates Supergirl with an insipid bimbo face, while Campbell draws her in a much better way.

And here’s a diagram showing the variety of ways in which Catwoman can be drawn. Taste matters. Sensibility matters. These are things any artist is going to bring to the table, and the sensibility of transfem artists especially needs to be highlighted.

There’s one final thing that needs to be mentioned, which is the amount of labor that goes into writing a comic versus illustrating a comic. A twenty page comic can comfortably be written within the space of two or three days. It will take an artist the better part of a month to illustrate it. A writer working with an ergonomic keyboard isn’t risking anything. Many comic artists have destoyed their hands and wrists due to the physical demands of their work.

If a writer with no clout presents a script to a comic artist and asks if they’ll illustrate it for free, they’ll be ignored at best, insulted at worst. And for good reason. The opposite is not true.

To speak in the parlance of stan lee, “’nuff said“.

So, here’s my request. The next TFR Reader Choice Awards form should have four options:

1. Best comic with a transfem writer
2. Best comic with a transfem artist
3. Best comic written and illustrated by a transfem creative
4. Best comic by a transfem team

I think this properly covers all of the bases.

SloaneTVBand can be found @sabrinatvband.bsky.social on Bluesky. Her articles can be found a week early on Patreon for just $1.50 a month.

Hulk is a character who has had many peaks and valleys. Created by Jack Kirby in 1962, the character originated in a short-lived solo book. After that false start, Hulk quickly cemented himself as a regular part of the Marvel Universe by appearing as a frequent guest character in other books. After a few years, Hulk once again received an ongoing series, and his fortunes rose further when he became possibly the most visible Marvel character during the airing of the Lou Ferrigno Hulk series in the 70s.

The character then declined in relevance once again, to the point that Peter David was essentially given complete editorial freedom when he began writing the character, due to how low-selling the Incredible Hulk book was. And it was David’s run that established a lot of important Hulk lore, such as the concept that Bruce Banner has multiple personalities, which manifest as different Hulks.

David returned Hulk to prominence in comic circles. In 2003 the character became popular in the mainstream again with the release of Ang Lee’s Hulk, a divisive film, devoid of fanservice, that heavily emphasized Bruce Banner’s trauma and his relationship with his abusive narcissistic father.

Radical Entertainment created the licensed game for Ang Lee’s film. The game was what it needed to be; a solid, if unexceptional, linear action game featuring the Hulk. The game was a sales success, which allowed Radical to create a sequel.

II

Radical Entertainment had previously entered the open world space with 2003’s Simpsons Hit & Run. The team that developed Ultimate Destruction was a different team within Radical, but they were able to use the tech that had been developed for Hit & Run to create their new Hulk game. Ultimate Destruction was developed in less than two years, between eighteen and twenty months, and so the extra time afforded by having tech already designed undoubtedly helped a lot. It’s also worth noting that the Hulk-related gameplay iterated heavily on what had come before in the prior movie tie-in game, allowing Radical to devote time to refining mechanics and creating new ones instead of starting from square one.

Many people view Ultimate Destruction as being inspired by Spider-Man 2 due to it being another open world game based on a superhero. Director Eric Holmes has cited GTA III as being a big inspiration. He also has cited Spider-Man 2, although I imagine this was a less significant inspiration, when one considers that Spider-Man 2 was released in the middle of Ultimate Destruction‘s development.

The core team that developed Ultimate Destuction consisted of roughly 32 people, which was a small number, even for the era. For reference, GTA III was developed by roughly 23 people, Destroy All Humans by about 50, and Spider-Man 2 by 86¹.

The game was written by Paul Jenkins, a comic writer who’d written about two years worth of Hulk comics prior to writing Ultimate Destruction. Bryan Hitch, hired due to his work as artist of The Ultimates, did some concept art for the game, as well as its box art.

III

The plot of Ultimate Destruction is basic. Bruce Banner is in a cabin somewhere, working on a device that will allow him to suppress his emerging Devil Hulk personality. Unfortunately General Ross finds out where he is and destroys his lab. Banner moves into a church where Doc Sampson helps him rebuild his equipment. Sampson has also designed a piece of gear that can implant instructions into Hulk’s mind, which will allow Banner and Sampson to command Hulk to steal pieces of equipment they need for their research.

Unfortunately Emil Blonsky is on the scene, has integrated himself into Hulkbusting operations, and he happens to get mutated by gamma radiation as well. Worse, he’s becoming increasingly mentally unstable . . . and he outranks General Ross.

IV

When Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was released in 2005, the total number of open world games, as we understand them today, could be counted on two hands. And so the open world elements of Ultimate Destruction are a big part of why the game was not only viewed as being superior to its predecessor, but also viewed as being a great game in general.

The game is like Destroy All Humans in the sense that the game uses “zones” instead of having one continuous map. In Destroy All Humans there are six distinct areas to visit that are located in entirely different parts of the US. Ultimate Destruction only has two zones, technically three if you count the area that essentially exists as a mission hub, and both are close enough to each other that Hulk can easily jump to them.

An attempt was apparently made to have the entire map be one continuous space, but that didn’t happen for technical reasons. If other games from this period are any indication, it could’ve been done. But it probably would’ve required making engine changes or something that would’ve eaten up valuable time, better devoted to other parts of the game’s development.

(Also, this just bugs me a little, the game clearly takes place in Nevada, New Mexico, or Arizona, but the city in the game is surrounded by a giant ocean? And it’s also not a specific city, just a nameless made-up place. Anyways,)

The open world seems to have opened up a lot of possibilities for mission design in Ultimate Destruction. Many of the game’s missions involve traversing large distances. These missions would’ve been impractical to design if they required building discrete single-use locations. But, because the locations are built for multiple purposes, development time was able to be saved by not only reusing certain areas, but also by doing things that simply wouldn’t have been feasible otherwise; in what world would it make sense to model an entire city for a single mission?

And so the open world in Ultimate Destruction does serve a significant purpose. That being said, there isn’t much reason to explore the open world instead of only playing through the story missions.

There are small challenges littered around the map that can be completed to earn points, which can be used to buy new moves for Hulk. The number of moves that can be learned simply by playing through the story missions can already be a little overwhelming, and so there’s almost never a reason to earn extra points on top of that.

The challenges can thankfully be amusing in themselves. There are time trial races, a golfing minigame, a football punting activity, and some other tasks that do provide a little amusement, but nothing that rivals simply doing the story missions.

There’s also a wanted meter that Hulk can ramp up by destroying vehicles, but the encounters aren’t always compelling, and Hulk can set the meter back to zero by defeating all the enemies, which means you don’t get to have the fun of seeing how long you can last.

Ultimate Destruction is a game that reflects how the rules of open world game design had not yet codified in 2005, for good and ill. There aren’t any quotas of side content the player has to meet in order to advance the narrative of Ultimate Destruction. The game can comfortably be completed within ten hours, and these things are directly related. The problem is that the side content that does exist within the game is quite underwhelming, and there’s little reason to engage with it.

This is almost more of a problem with Ultimate Destruction‘s writing than anything else. The game’s story is written in a way that could be adapted to a more linear game with no real changes, and there’s no openness in the narrative that would allow for more substantial side missions.

This isn’t a major mark against the game; the open world material in the game was what it needed to be in 2005, and twenty years later it’s nice to play an open world game that’s completely devoid of content for the sake of there being content. But nobody would release a game like this in 2025.

V

Ultimate Destruction has a reputation for being an extremely difficult game. I don’t entirely agree with this perspective, because I’m not especially good at videogames and I still managed to complete the game in nine and a half hours, which is the exact projected length on How Long to Beat.

That doesn’t mean I’m saying the game is easy. The truth is that the game expects the player to interact with it in very specific ways, and if the player deviates too far from those expectations it will become borderline impossible. That isn’t to say the player has no agency, because as the player advances more options open up, provided the player can memorize the new moves they acquire.

The first real non-tutorial mission in the game is cited as being the first difficulty spike. The player must defend a building from an army of tanks for three and a half minutes. This is an almost impossible task, unless you turn a car into a pair of boxing gloves for Hulk, something the game is going to want the player to do more-or-less whenever possible. Once the player does this, the mission becomes a lot easier.

There are things that make the game more difficult than it needs to be. The player gains heath from defeated enemies, but the gamma drops from enemies aren’t as magnetic as they should be, which means it can be a frustrating risk to pick up health. It’s also worth noting that, unless Hulk is doing the boxing glove thing I mentioned earlier, his attacks are basically useless unless they’re charged. Because Hulk is often surrounded by swarms of enemies, it can sometimes be almost impossible to charge attacks without being interrupted.

The thing that adds a lot of unnecessary confusion to certain levels is an ambiguity over whether or not enemies in that mission will endlessly respawn or not. It can be impossible to discern if the best choice of action at a given moment is to grab an item and run like hell, or to take a stand first and then complete the larger objective after the coast has been cleared.

The game’s difficulty spikes and valleys suggest that too much of its playtesting was done internally by developers who were experts at playing the game, and/or that there wasn’t enough time for balancing during the home stretch of development.

I almost bought this game when I was a kid, and a small part of me is glad I didn’t, because it would’ve been too brutal for me. It’s a game that requires the player to think about strategies and approaches in a way that I probably would’ve struggled with. As an adult I often appreciated its challenge, but I do still wish Hulk was a bit less of a glass cannon.

VI

An issue with Ultimate Destruction is that Hulk can feel a little too fragile. If the game wasn’t about the Hulk this wouldn’t be a problem, but in the source materials he’s basically described as being impervious to damage. The missions are often designed around the philosophy that Hulk has so much health that the challenges need to be built around defending, escorting, and/or transporting things, the same approach devs take with Superman . . . except Hulk doesn’t have that much health.

The game has some problems with mission design. There are a lot of missions where, due to the constantly respawning enemies and objectives involving moving objects from point A to B, the player does things that feel like cheesing the game, avoiding combat as much as possible while constantly being under heavy fire.

But there are also moments where the game truly comes to life. Around halfway through the game Hulk has to face a guy in a mechsuit. The battleground is a city filled with tall buildings. As the mech flew from rooftop to rooftop, I careened after him, feeling something in my stomach every time I fell short of a building and descended fifty stories to the ground.

The best moments in Ultimate Destruction are the ones that split the perfect balance between straightforward combat and other miscellaneous objectives, but only a handful of missions get the balance correct. I definitely understand the reasoning for not making a game that’s just raw combat all of the time, but it does feel like the missions don’t indulge the simple desire to smash enough.

VII

The narrative of Ultimate Destruction disappointed me. At first there seemed to be an element of moral ambiguity to the game’s story. Bruce Banner, in his quest to cure himself of being Hulk, causes a ton of collateral damage and kills many people. The hope is that, once the world is rid of Hulk, there will no longer be a concern of Banner losing control. The cost seems incredibly high, to put it mildly.

The problem is that the game goes out of its way later to imply that the only people Hulk canonically kills in the game are military personnel, which is something dumb that recent post-disney acquisition Marvel comics have done as well. And when that component is made irrelevant, there really isn’t much to the game’s story. It’s a bog standard Hulk narrative that tries to avoid getting too weird with comic stuff, sticking almost exclusively to the military and Abomination as antagonists. Even worse, a significant beat in the story is delivered through a text entry instead of being something portrayed through gameplay or a cutscene.

Something I did enjoy is Mercy, the game’s token evil woman. Mercy looks cool and has psychic powers. When she fights Hulk she makes taunts that imply Hulk exists because of Banner’s insecurity about his masculinity, which is a good wrinkle. Mercy is cool.

VIII

The original score of Ultimate Destruction underwhelmed me. The best Hulk music has a dramatic horror movie edge. Some of the music in the game does have that angle, specifically the menu theme. But a lot of the music doesn’t go hard enough into the horror angle, and worse, a lot of the music sounds the same. I was surprised to discover the number of distinct pieces of music on the OST, because I thought the game only had three or four pieces of gameplay music.

The original score is ultimately solid, if unexceptional. But Ultimate Destruction did play an important role in Hulk’s sonic legacy, because it contains Fred Tatasciore’s first voice performance as Hulk.

Tatasciore’s Hulk is the definitive take on the character; his guttural growls and screams are so visceral and powerful that he has voiced Hulk in nearly everything for the last twenty years. These kinds of associations usually start with someone voicing a character in a TV show or movie first before migrating to games, but Tatasciore’s vocal performance was simply undeniable.

IX

An area where Ultimate Destruction really excels is the amount of unlockable content it has. These range from expected things, like alternate costumes, to video filters and things that change the in-game physics. Perhaps the most notable alternate costume is Joe Fixit, Bruce Banner’s gangster alternate personality. While playing as Joe Fixit the player gets to listen to unique bits of dialogue that Hulk doesn’t have, performed by Michael Donavan, the actor who portrayed Fixit in the 90s cartoon. His dialogue isn’t particularly funny, but I’m not sure if Fixit is supposed to be a little lame, like Spider-Man 3 Peter Parker. Still, it’s an enjoyable and meaty bonus.

Ultimate Destruction also has a new game plus mode that allows the player to play the game over again, but will all of their purchased moves already available. I do feel tempted to start over again with Hulk’s full arsenal.

X

Ultimate Destruction was well-received upon its release, and is still remembered as being one of the great superhero games. When Edge of Reality made an Incredible Hulk game that also used an open world format, almost every one of its reviews negatively compared it to Ultimate Destruction.

Unfortunately, Ultimate Destruction sold worse than its movie tie-in predecessor. But, luckily for the team that developed the game, they had a new game they were going to be working on, that wasn’t dependent on the commercial viability of the Hulk IP. Eric Holmes and his crew would begin work on Prototype, a game that heavily iterated on the gameplay of Ultimate Destruction.

XI

I have to admit, I had some trouble writing this piece, because I didn’t have much to say about Ultimate Destruction. It’s a fine game; fun combat, mediocre mission design, a little underwhelming after hearing it hyped up for so many years. That being said, I did enjoy the game, probably more than the tone of the piece implies. I’d give it a 7/10; I enjoyed it more than the remake of Destroy All Humans 2. I’m definitely glad I finally played Ultimate Destruction, but I don’t know if I’d ever have a reason to recommend it to someone, unless a Hulk fan asked me for some videogame recs. Hopefully the next open world game I play inspires writing that’s a little less rote.

Sources
The Making of The Hulk: Ultimate Destruction – https://youtu.be/PHGFiyrbXKQ?si=OXet0Hz7mGjs1MdP
Nintendo World Report interview with Eric Holmes – https://www.nintendoworldreport.com/interview/2263/hulk-ultimate-destruction-interview
Game Brain interview with Eric Holmes – https://youtu.be/cMLDbpzd4v0?si=x7fotURvfDll4Qw0
Matt McMuscles interview with Eric Holmes – https://youtu.be/HoeGgiNuLHw?si=er3HP-8vU58XHdBR

1. It’s worth mentioning these counts probably use slightly different metrics. I know that the GTA count doesn’t include people like voice actors, and the Spider-Man 2 one might. ︎