fantasy week

Barbatos is the ancient bat demon summoned by Thomas Jefferson, which later turned out to an Apokoliptian monster that Darkseid sent to hunt Batman through history. It’s a whole thing, but it ultimately ends up being completely crucial to the creation of Batman and the evolution of Gotham as we know it.

John Constantine has fought many a monster. He's faced everyone, from the First of the Fallen to renegade demons causing football riots and beyond. But of all the villains he's fought, probably my favorite is one who only ever appeared in three stories: the King of the Vampires.

A few weeks back, my colleague Elle Collins wrote about Wonder Woman, specifically an interview Greg Rucka gave about her sexuality. The article was about how having an explicit statement of sexuality in an interview, and an implicit statement in the comic, were two ends of a rope that are infuriatingly close to meeting, but remain unspliced. Gender identity and sexuality aren’t the same thing, but they’re often treated the same along one critical vector: treating one mode of gender or sexuality as the default, and others as exceptions to that rule. So I couldn’t help but think of it as I reflected on the character of Sir Ystin, from 2011’s Demon Knights.

Caitlin R. Kiernan is, according to Neil Gaiman, “the poet and bard of the wasted and lost.” She’s one of the most respected, and amazing, writers of dark fiction out there, but she's nowhere near as well known as she deserves to be. In an effort to correct that oversight, we've put together an introduction to the works of one of the most unique talents in fiction.

Every October, I like to scour my own archives for the spookiest back issues available, but this year, one found me. It's like something out of a scary movie --- I went to my barber for a haircut and, mixed in with the regular magazines in the waiting area, they had an issue of The Brave and the Bold. It was one that I'd never read before, a terrifying team-up between Batman and the Spectre where they confront a mad sorcerer who wields the eldritch power of the Dragon God. And when I looked up from reading it, I discovered that the barber shop had closed down... ten years ago this very night!

The woods are a dark and scary place. Anything could be out there, prowling, circling. But wherever monsters, aliens, demons, and fantastical menaces go, so go Cindy & Biscuit, wielding a tree branch and ready to chase down evil whenever it appears. Sure, nobody else has ever seen the fiends that Cindy and her stalwart canine companion regularly do battle with --- but that’s no reason to suggest that none of it ever happened!

It feels almost too clichéd to be worth saying: whether you're naming a favorite superhero or a favorite comics monster, the Thing is no surprise for the top of either list. In fact the archetype of the monster as member of a superhero team started with him, and with Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, who introduced the character in Fantastic Four #1. He wasn't exactly the first superheroic monster, but he was the first one who wasn't a loner, and the first whose gruff but self-conscious demeanor contrasted with the sunnier dispositions of his non-monstrous teammates.

It's Fantasy Week here at ComicsAlliance, and it's also one week until Halloween, so what better way to celebrate both than with a look at an anime and manga about a young shrine maiden waging a war on monsters. This is Blood-C, a spinoff of a spinoff of a movie that got its own movie!

It’s Fantasy Week here at ComicsAlliance, but I’ve got a confession to make: I find it hard to get into fantasy stories. I often struggle to connect with their conflicts and invest in their struggles without a grounding in something real and a representation of something I can recognize as true. I hate to say it, but I need more than elves, dwarves and orcs to commit to a fantasy story. Skybound’s Birthright manages to take classic fantasy tropes and tell a very real and very human story across two worlds. In a very modern portrayal of the genre, Joshua Williamson, Andrei Bressan, Adriano Lucas and Pat Brosseau have established a fantasy world with something very real to say about our own.

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of duplicate knock-off Supermen serving as his villains, since once you’re defined as the top dog of the universe, the only way to match you is to literally match you. My favorite isn’t Zod, or Cyborg Superman, or the Eradicator; my favorite will always be Bizarro.