Opinion

With almost 300 issues in the core series, Archie's Sonic The Hedgehog stands as the longest-running uninterrupted American monthly comic book that's currently being published. In Hedging Your Bets, I attempt to get up to speed on Sonic the Hedgehog, challenging the odds to hopefully make it all the way to the finish line. This week, it's Sonic meets WrestleMania, and how do you screw that up?!

One of the ideas explored by Scott McCloud in Reinventing Comics is the notion of the comics page as infinite canvas, doing things a print comic could never hope to do. Many comics makers from the 2000s online comics scene took up the challenge, and one of the standouts was --- and is --- UK artist Daniel Merlin Goodbrey.

It’s election season in book three of Transmetropolitan, "Year Of The Bastard," and the worst sicknesses of politics are bubbling to the surface. There’s reactionary monsters in suits, there’s heartbreak for Spider, and there’s the hot question of the moment: which politician in Transmet most resembles the current US head of state, and is the answer less obvious than it appears?

My favourite thing about writing Strip Panel Naked every week is getting the chance to be surprised. A smarter man might have a better plan to tackle this article routinely, but mine is always the same: read comics, be surprised. This week it was the first comic on the pile that caught me off-guard, with Tom King, David Finch, Danny Miki, Jordie Bellaire and John Workman's Batman #17, as part of DC's Rebirth. There's a technique Finch employs throughout the issue to create a sense that everything is slowly unravelling and falling apart, in that he lets the panels start slipping away on each page. You can see how the pages aren't formulaic in their approach to panel layout; there's not really any grids, and panels are constantly overlapping.

This week’s episode, “Camelot/3000,” finds the team flung into the distant future and a not-historically-verified past in search of pieces of the Spear of Destiny. Battles are fought, minds are controlled, and character development is wildly uneven. Antonio Negret directed the episode, which was written by Anderson Mackenzie.

It's only a few episodes deep, but there's already something very clear about FX's new X-Men spin-off show Legion --- it's staunchly independent in it's execution and vision, and very clearly the work of showrunner Noah Hawley (of the excellent Fargo), and feels at odds with a lot of more recent comic adaptations. For that, we should be grateful.

This week, it’s the second week of Valentine’s Day in National City, so, of course, everyone is having dramatic relationship-related misunderstandings! Also, spell check’s most hated super-nuisance is here attempting to marry Supergirl! “Mr. & Mrs. Mxyzptlk” was directed by Stefan Pleszczynski from a script by Jessica Queller and Sterling Gates.

I’m happy to say that, after a rough start with Kevin Keller in the Riverdale pilot, last week's episode, "Chapter Four: The Last Picture Show," was the first really good episode for Kevin, played by actor Casey Cott. The dialogue felt like a better fit. His lines are still snappy, but there’s less leaning on the "quirky gay best friend” trope and more fleshing him out as a supporting character.

Welcome to Together Breakfast, the feature where Elle Collins and Katie Schenkel come together to dig in and relish every last drop of Cartoon Network’s Steven Universe. With the show back on a weekly schedule, at least for now, we’re keeping up with it once a week. In this episode, Steven comes face to face with Rose Quartz for the first time. Storm in the Room was written by Colin Howard and Jeff Liu, and directed by Joe Johnston and Ricky Cometa.

The first X-Men movie opened on July 14, 2000. A child born early that year would have just turned 17 by the time the tenth entry in the X-Men series, Logan, hits theaters next month. That is fortunate – viewers are going to need a driver’s license to get into this movie, which possesses the hardest R rating of any American superhero movie in history. In the past, Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine would swing his razor-sharp adamantium claws and bad guys would simply fall to the ground. There was never any visible evidence of his brutality. There’s more graphic violence in Logan’s first scene – severed limbs, gruesome disembowlings – than in all of the other of the Wolverine and X-Men movies combined.