Thor: The Dark World opens in America this weekend, bringing attention back to the Asgardian corner of the Marvel Universe. Thor is one of my favorite Marvel characters so I’m very excited to see the movie—excited enough that I’ve had my tickets for a month. It’s a very good time to be a Thor fan between his presence in the theater and the excellent work being done by Jason Aaron in Thor: God of Thunder. Thor: God of Thunder was one of the new titles launched as a part of the Marvel NOW last year and I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that it’s the reason that I’m currently as immersed in Marvel comics as I am. The Marvel Cinematic Universe reignited my interest in comics and when I saw that Thor was getting a new title I went out and bought issue one. The next thing I knew I had a pull list at my local comic shop full of titles.

I loved Rick Remender’s run on Uncanny X-Force and I enjoyed his run on Venom. He has a new series coming out 27 November that looks creepy and amazing! I can’t wait to read it! Here’s Image’s Press release: Prepare yourselves: writer Rick Remender, artist Matteo Scalera, and colorist Dean White are ready to unleash BLACK SCIENCE #1 on the world. Grant McKay, former member of the Anarchistic Order of Scientists, has deciphered Black Science and punched through the barriers of reality. Now, trapped in an infinite ocean of alien worlds, Grant must find a way to get his team home safe and intact. ...

I’ll be honest: I went into Damian: Son of Batman with more than a little trepidation. There are a few reasons for this. The first – and most obvious – is that Damian is no longer with us, and since he was killed off in Batman Incorporated earlier this year, my affection for the character has only grown. It’s not that I’ve come to distrust DC’s handling of characters that aren’t the Trinity, but… okay, no, that’s exactly it. I went into the book wary of what DC was going to try to pull. The second reason is that the book is both written and drawn by Andy Kubert. Doing double-duty as writer and penciller means that the book is entirely Kubert’s vision, but the sword is double-edged; he has to handle a lot with this book, and I worried going in that it would be too much to tackle. Even knowing Kubert’s history with the character – he was the artist working with Grant Morrison when Damian was created – I worried that something would fall through the cracks. The third reason that I was nervous is that this story doesn’t happen in canon. It’s essentially an Elseworld, a DC-sponsored alternate universe that takes place in a world in which Damian didn’t die. That means that the rules are a lot more lax, and Kubert would be allowed a lot more leeway with what he could and couldn’t do in the story. Add to that the fact that Kubert revealed over the summer that he’s been planning this series for years – and thus, that it’s not something that grew organically out of the character’s story as we now know it – and I was understandably apprehensive about the book. As it turns out, my fears were justified.

The Private Eye, Brian K Vaughan’s indie comic book, is two things at once. It’s primarily a noir private investigator story - a broad who may not be all she seems comes into a PI’s office and hires him for a case that goes deeper than you thought it would at first. But, much like Saga, which could be described as a story about being parents in the middle of a war zone, it’s also a science fiction story. I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the best science fiction shines a light on the present; this takes many forms. The form used in The Private Eye is the of extrapolating of the present to some future conclusion to show where things might end up if we continue on this path. With The Private Eye, Vaughan takes a look at what might happen if we continue to live our lives in the cloud. Since my other job involves technology, I’m constantly reading the tech press and people on there are always predicting a day of reckoning when we’ve given so much away that we lose all control of our lives. The first issue arrived just a month or two before Edward Snowden decided to do a huge dump of top secret National Security Agency documents, and so the comic has an entirely different feel to it as though we are even closer to the future depicted in The Private Eye than we thought. Of course, the self-sharing to places like Facebook and Twitter that form the premise of The Private Eye are more insidious than any nebulous government agency. You have no control whether or not you are observed by the government, but you are indeed in control of whether or not you post those drunk photos to Facebook. The future of The Private Eye takes place when people currently in their 20s and 30s are represented by PI’s grandfather. Here’s how PI retells the story to Gramps:

I always have a hard time figuring out which new comics I want to pick up. There are some choices that are easy, sure – I already know that I’ll be picking up Damian: Son of Batman when it’s released starting next week, and I’m just as sure that I have no interest in jumping into any of the X-Men titles – but the choices aren’t always that simple. I find it especially difficult to decide what, if any, indie books I’m going to check out. A lot of them are fantastic, and I’d never say otherwise, but there are so many ongoing titles from publishers that aren’t the Big Two that it seems even more daunting to figure out what to read there than it does to catch up with the first run of Detective Comics.

Daredevil is a title that has been blessed with many excellent writers over the years. There are so many exceptional stories that it can be hard to pick favorites, but today I thought I would revisit one of mine. The five issue Decalogue arc written by Brian Michael Bendis with art by Alex Maleev is one of my favorite Daredevil stories because it shows us how Daredevil fits into the lives of ordinary Hell’s Kitchen citizens. Decalogue is different than most comic stories because it shows us Daredevil through the eyes of the people whose lives he’s touched. The story opens in a church basement where a community support group is meeting. The people have convened there to discuss Daredevil (aka Matt Murdock) and his impact on their lives. The idea of a support group to deal with super hero encounters is a brilliant idea and an interesting look at how ordinary people might actually react to living in an extraordinary world.

note on all the image scans: they are correct manga-style so they are read right to left Spend enough time doing critical readings of media and you come across the assertion that all media tells you about the culture it was written in. Sometimes, as in contemporary media, this is easy to tease out. Other times, as with science fiction, it’s by extrapolation. So I thought it might be interesting to re-read Love Hina, by Ken Akamatsu, as a way to to understand Japanese culture. Part One can be found here. Story This time we start off with the Cherry Blossom BBQ. Although, as we’ll soon see, Akamatsu has some evil plans for Keitaro up his sleeve, for the time being he has finally earned the respect of the women and girls of Hinata House. He has passed his exams and gained entrance into the prestigious Tokyo University. Even Motoko, who’s often been the harshest to Keitaro, goes to him for some advice on passing her university entrance exams. It’s nice, after eight books, to see Akamatsu giving us something a little different. However, Love Hina is definitely a romantic comedy that has leaned way harder on comedy than romance and Keitaro ends up having a building fall on him. While he does display superhuman strength in not dying, he’s not Wolverine and so he has to go to the hospital. Unfortunately, his injury causes him to have to withdraw from his first semester at Tokyo University. So while he and Naru have both gotten in, Keitaro is now at least a semester behind her for graduation. Naru is scouted to be Miss Tokyo U, but as of the end of this book, it didn’t appear to have any effect. I think the anime plays this up more, but we’ll get to the anime in good time.

Here’s something you probably don’t know about me: I’m blind. I’m not completely without sight; with glasses and magnification, I see well enough to read and write. I get almost all of my comics digitally for this reason. Computers are wonderful things that let me enlarge the comics until I can see the illustrations and read the text; without digital comics, I’d be hunched over each issue with a magnifying glass and a headache. As I’ve said in previous articles, comics are a form of escapism for a lot of people, myself included. They’re a look into a world where people with incredible power work for and protect normal citizens, where justice is something that happens whether it’s through the legal system or not, and where, no matter what happens to our heroes, they almost always get better. It’s something that I struggle with reading or seeing in a lot of different mediums; while it’s great to encounter characters that I love recovering from things that I haven’t been able to beat, it’s also frustrating, because I’d like to see situations like my own handled with a touch of realism, too.

Iron Man 3 has just been released on DVD, which makes now the perfect time to discuss some of the controversy surrounding its primary antagonist. The way the movie handled the character of the Mandarin upset some long-time comic fans and relieved others. When I first saw the trailers for Iron Man 3, I was concerned about the inclusion of the Mandarin. He’s been one of Iron Man’s greatest foes for decades, but as his name suggests, the character was created without much sensitivity during an era when the US was deep in the Cold War. The fact that the trailer showed a British actor of Indian descent dressed in very stereotypical fashion did not assuage my fears.

The newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe is here: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. had its one-hour premiere earlier this week, and it was a solid start to what I feel is a really promising show. A lot of people have already written up their reviews of the program itself, and I agree with most of the prominent positive reviews, so I’m not going to waste my time or yours by repeating what’s already been said. Instead, I want to look at where the show could possibly go, what they could pull in from the comics, and how Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. could change both the MCU and the comics universe as we know them. ...