Longform

It’s been over a year since we got a new Marvel movie.

Kane made his own treatment for a Batman movie, and you have got to read it.

You can't talk about Russian comics without discussing Bubble. Since its inception in 2011, this little-engine-that-could has grown into the largest comic book publisher in Russia. Shepherded by CEO/publisher Artem Gabrelyanov and editor-in-chief Roman Kotkov, Bubble has a growing stable of titles, and an influence that is only beginning to reach across the Atlantic. ComicsAlliance spoke with Gabrelyanov and Kotkov about censorship, propaganda, and Russia/US relations, and we even got around to talking about comics.

This weekend the live-action Ghost In The Shell film starring Scarlett Johansson hits theatres. Early reviews haven't been kind, and the audacious whitewashing at the heart of it all irritates me so much that I don't plan to see it. Instead, I decided to dive into the West's favorite chapter in the long-running GiTS franchise: Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex!

It's been a long, hard road for comic books in Russia. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, attempts to build a comics community consistently met with economic hardship, and failed. It's only over the last several years that Western comic books have become a popular medium in Russia, and in that very short time, there have already been three highly publicized incidences of comics censorship.

There's no getting around it; Danny Rand, the Immortal Iron Fist. the champion of K'un Lun, is an insensitively conceived character; a white guy who stumbles on an immortal race of Asian people and turns out to be better at their whole existence than them. That's the bedrock any creator has to deal with when crafting his stories. A similar challenge faces the blaxploitation-themed Luke Cage, who became Danny's partner in 1972 in Luke Cage, Hero For Hire, which became Power Man & Iron Fist, in order to save both characters from cancellation. Originally written by Chris Claremont, the book passed to Jo Duffy when he left to focus on the increasingly popular X-Men franchise. Duffy's solution to Iron Fist's problematic backstory? Make him an idiot.

As Russia and America circle each other in this rapidly evolving Cold War 2.0, combat is waged in multiple theaters: cyber war, spy war, proxy war, cultural war, and an information war fueled by a persistent flow of disinformation and propaganda that hijacks narratives and distorts reality. In this series of articles, John Parker examines the common spaces in the strange Venn diagram where propaganda, culture wars, and information wars intersect with the world of comic books.

Comics and gorillas have gone hand in furry hand since the earliest days of the medium, and this statement goes beyond simply superhero comics. While these great apes have certainly flourished within the superhero genre, they can also be found in numerous jungle action, science fiction, and horror stories in every era of comics. With the release of a new King Kong movie in theaters this week, it's a perfect time to take a survey of the history of gorillas in comics.

My recent list of the most dated parts of the original X-Men movie included things like Hugh Jackman’s comparatively non-huge, non-jacked-man physique, Wolverine’s non-stop smoking, and the heroes’ black leather costumes. The list also included the relative lack of Easter eggs; even with about ten major roles in the film, the first X-Men movie is, at least by contemporary standards, a small movie. There’s no sense of a wider Marvel Universe beyond the edges of the frame, there’re few appearances by (or references to) other mutants, and there’s no post-credits scene to tease future films. It is a movie unto itself.

This weekend sees both the long-awaited debut of Nintendo's latest game console, Nintendo Switch, and the even longer-awaited release of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In a change from Screen & Page's usual focus on anime, we thought we would use this occasion to look at the media history of perhaps the greatest Zelda game, A Link To The Past!