Cover Story - Top 12 John Constantine Covers

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This is actually an article I was planning to do last October but that turned out to be a busy month.  That’s sort of the thing about Legends of Tomorrow, it’s a delight of a show with a ton of deep cut geeky heroes but it can be hard to keep up with how often they feature characters that could demand a whole number of articles, reviews, and lists.  Today we gather to celebrate John Constantine, everyone’s favorite blonde cockney street wizard and trench coat wearer.  

I joke but John is among a handful of mystical and urban fantasy characters at DC, and their adjacent imprint Vertigo Comics, who call themselves The Trench Coat Brigade, so just know that’s where we’re starting from with this dive into the top 12 Constantine comic covers.  I’ll be drawing from John’s first solo comic entitled Hellblazer, which began life as part of DC’s mature readers imprint Vertigo Comics and ended after 300 issues when they decided to import John to the main DC universe.  That’s a lot of titles to get through so let’s get down to it and get the cover story on the top 12 John Constantine comic covers.

Marvel Announces Eternals Film

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So, let’s talk about The Eternals.  These folks are, allegedly, going to be Marvel’s next big thing going into phase 4 and the 2020s.  I use the word “allegedly” there because I feel like we’ve definitely been here before and done the “next big thing” dance enough times for it to feel decidedly old hat by now.  In particular, we were last here in 2017 when Marvel spent 2 years and countless comics trying to make the Inhumans into their next big thing only for the property to completely flame out after ½ a season of subpar television.  

Even if you LIKED the Inhumans TV show there’s no denying the concentrated effort to rebrand the Inhumans as the new it thing from Marvel was both a failure and embarrassment, especially with how much they’ve receded from the public eye at this point.  One wonders if the Eternals, a very similar group conceptually, aren’t just Marvel’s new flavor of the month, to be forgotten within a few short years of their culmination? 

Panel Vision - Uncle Sam

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It’s Fourth of July Weekend here in the US and, given my obsessive need for topicality, that means reviewing something American.  This Independence Day I’m going to be focusing on one of my all time favorite comics starring one of my all time favorite superheroes: Uncle Sam.  I’ve already covered Uncle Sam’s history on this program but if you need a refresher: Uncle Sam was a 1940s superhero version of the famous propaganda character.  He doesn’t really have an origin in the conventional sense, but rather just exists as a persistent embodiment of the American Spirit.

That’s a weird set-up for a superhero at the best of times so Sam’s always had an eclectic history in comics.  Case in point, in the late ‘90s, one of the most fertile times in DC Comics’ entire history, the people running DC decided to give Uncle Sam over to their newly formed imprint Vertigo Comics for a 2 issue prestige graphic novel.  The result is one of the most challenging and politically charged works to come out of superhero comics this side of Civil War or that one time it turned out Nixon was part of the Secret Empire. 

Panel Vision - Dr. 13: Architecture & Mortality

Edited by Robert Beach 

Well, May is almost over. The thermometer is headed skyward, and blockbuster movies are hitting the multiplex. It all adds up to one thing: Summer is officially here. For comic nerds, the arrival of Summer is more or less synonymous with the arrival of event comics, the massive cross-universe stories smashing heroes together and reshaping  continuity as we know it for about 9 months till the next one.  

Obnoxious and overused as they are, event comics are basically just a force of nature in comics, which makes our relationship with them a little complicated. While endless retcons and shock deaths are certainly tedious staples of the event comic, fans have become so inundated with them we’ve come to appreciate the subtle differences between garbage event books like Fear Itself and the at least interesting ones like Secret Wars (2015). 

For DC, their event comic this year is called DC Rebirth, a universe-reshaping retcon comic that’s already been spoiled. However, I’m not here to discuss those spoilers, but rather a sister comic to DC Rebirth. The actual plot of DC Rebirth is all about what happens to heroes who’ve been rendered non-canon by the events of a reality-reshaping crisis, a concept that was also explored by one of the greatest comics of all time Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality, by Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang. 

Cover Story - Top 10 Lucifer Covers

In case you hadn’t heard, Fox is premiering a new show entitled Lucifer, allegedly based on the Vertigo comics of the same name.  I say “allegedly” because by all evidence Lucifer the show is about Satan coming to Earth so that he can help the police solve mysteries whereas Lucifer the comic was an exploration of mysticism, cosmology, faith, and identity.  

I get that for a lot of folks Vertigo’s Lucifer was hardly required reading but it stands tall alongside works such as Hellblazer, Fables, and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as some of the comics that put Vertigo on the comic book map.  Understandably, I’m pretty disappointed the TV adaptation has settled on the most generic stock plot to fill things out, however that doesn’t mean we can’t celebrate the original comics.  That’s what I’m here to do today, bringing you the top 10 Lucifer comic covers.  So, let’s dive into the shallow end and get the cover story on Lucifer.