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The core concept of Marvel’s Contest of Champions ongoing series is based loosely on an app based loosely on a comic from 1982. In the game, by developers Kabam, The Collector tasks you as a summoner, forced to compete against Kang The Conqueror by pitting heroes against each other, and plays…

It’s been said that Doctor Doom is not just one of the greatest supervillains of all time but rather that he’s the supervillain, the one that defines them all.

Whenever Doom appears, he's always a huge threat. That’s evident from his very first appearance in Fantastic Four…

Professor James Moriarty, the “Napoleon of Crime” and the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, is one of the most iconic villains in fiction. And that’s always been a little odd.

As any die-hard Sherlockian could tell you, if you go strictly by "the Canon" — the fo…

There is probably no superhero comic better known for the lettering of its sound effects than Walter Simonson's 1983-1987 run on Marvel's Thor. John Workman's lettering on that seminal, still-beloved run was so integral that it's difficult to imagine those comics without it. Work…

I took six AP classes over the course of my high school career. I was president of the Readers’ Club. I won awards for poetry and public speaking. But because I was not uniformly incredible at everything I attempted, and because I did not go to what my school considered an impressive college,…

Being mixed race is an endless, exhausting lesson in liminality. There are days you’re unshakably confident in who you are and your place in the world, followed by days you are wrecked by the ambiguity of your existence. Genetic caprice digs gulfs of experience between cousins, siblings, even…

As endemic as violence is to mainstream comics, it's rare when you see a representation of it that inspires an appropriate level of shock. That's to be expected in superhero comics, where the gap between art and reality is wider, but even in books that maintain a closer relationship with t…

Comics covers are strange beasts. While comics themselves are sequential art --- pictures arranged in just the right order to tell a story or convey an emotion --- covers freeze that process into a single static image. But Mike Del Mundo's work at Marvel shows that they can be much more than pr…

Hunter x Hunter is about people classified as “Hunters” that specialize in finding and hunting things. Sometimes these things are rare jewels, and sometimes they’re human corpses. Over almost 20 years, author Yoshihiro Togashi has been making the best fight comic on the stands -…

There are many things you can point to in superhero comics as examples of sexism and gender essentialism. Today we will ignore those. Today, we come not to bury comics and their handling of gender issues, but to praise them. Today we salute those brave men who stare down a world of gender-coded clot…