Humor

Since romance comics had gone out of style well before I was born, I had no idea just how popular and prolific the genre had been. I had always assumed it was some kind of short-lived craze that fizzled out like other comic fads, but then I started noticing how high the issue numbers were on so many of the covers I selected. Turns out romance comics enjoyed an incredibly successful three-decade run from the late 1940s to the late 1970s. I also learned that the comic that launched the genre, 1947’s Young Romance, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby! You know, the guys that created Captain America a few years earlier. This was without question the easiest one of these galleries I’ve ever had to pull together, because almost every single cover I came across was a home run. They’re all just amazing! There was no sorting and sifting and really trying to get through all the underwhelming garbage to get to the good stuff. It’s all good stuff.

It's Valentine's Day, and that means that our thoughts here at ComicsAlliance are turning inevitably to our favorite romances from comics. Well. Maybe that's not the right word, since I'm not sure that a high school love triangle between an indecisive klutz and two girls who would be better off without him really qualifies as romance, but you get the idea. Love is in the air, and when Betty and Veronica are involved, that's naturally going to include a little bit of competition. That's certainly to be expected, but sometimes, it gets a little too intense. Like, say, that one time back in the '90s when Veronica turned to the darkest sorcery in order to win Archie's heart, and Archie wound up in the hospital.

The 1989 Avengers West Coast Annual featured an unusual short story by Mark Waid and then-newcomer Amanda Conner called "Rate The Hunks," in which Wasp and She-Hulk offered their expert assessment on the sex appeal of their male Avengers colleagues. Almost thirty years later, we've assembled our own experts to repeat the exercise, with an updated twist.

Things were weird for everyone in the Silver Age, but they were all the weirder for Aquaman. Living under the ocean, surrounded by sea life, and in an era when accurate science was even less of a priority for comic book storytelling, basically anything could happen to Aquaman as long as it involved water. This gallery showcases some of his strangest moments from the Silver Age, featuring material from Adventure Comics and Aquaman's solo title.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving!, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving! is all about.

You know how every now and then, you'll see a cover on an old comic, and it'll stick with you even if you don't actually read the issue? That happened to me with Detective Comics #365. Ever since I spotted it on the wall at the comic book store where I used to work, I've held on to that image of that Carmine Infantino image of Batman and Robin attacking a house shaped like the Joker's face, a brick facade shaped into the ramshackle rictus of their arch-nemesis, with guns emerging from his eyes and mouth. It's an amazing image, but it wasn't until I saw it floating around Tumblr the other day that I realized I should actually read the comic --- and it turns out that it's one of the weirdest stories with one of the most fun ideas that I've ever seen in a Silver Age Batman comic.

For as much as I love the madness that was the comics of the 1990s, I cannot even imagine how incredible it must have been to be a comic-loving kid (or weird comic loving adult) in the 1950/60s period known as The Silver Age. Within this gallery, I've put together only the smallest of fractions of some of the entertaining, out-of-context fun that Batman's 75 years of non-stop published stories have afforded us. Try your best to make sense of them.

This week, Cisco vibes with a lady, Iris and Wally crack a case, and we throw some shade at Tom Felton's hairline.

This week’s episode, “Legion of Doom,” takes a closer look at the working relationships between this season’s team of bad guys, while the Legends try to work some stuff out on and around the Waverider. Eric Laneuville wrote the episode, which was written by Phil Klemmer and Marc Guggenheim.

I'm a sucker for stories that explore what life in a superhero universe is like for the regular people who live there, so I've been pretty interested in the DC superhero sitcom Powerless, debuting February 2 on NBC, ever since it was announced. The thing is, while I knew it was set in a superhero-adjacent business in the DC Universe, and that relatively obscure characters like Crimson Fox were going to show up, there was one connection to the larger DC that I was extremely surprised to hear about; Vanderveer "Van" Wayne, Bruce Wayne's terrible, terrible cousin, played in the show by Alan Tudyk. That dude is an extremely deep cut, showing up in one issue back in 1962, but really? If you're looking for a grandstanding and somewhat oblivious boss for a piece of the Wayne family's corporate empire, he's pretty much perfect.