Cover Story - Top 12 John Constantine Covers

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider joining my Patreon.

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.

Panel Vision - Giant-Sized Man-Thing #4

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

So, as I write this one of the big cultural deals of the moment is a new Netflix series called 13 Reasons Why.  It’s a teenage melodrama revolving around the suicide of a young woman and the collection of cassette tapes she left behind explaining her 13 reasons why.  It’s gotten quite a bit of controversy, mostly from groups of actual experts on suicide prevention who are mad that the show misrepresents the actual circumstances that can lead to suicide as well as prevents a graphic depiction of the act itself.  

However, being a massive geek, this format of gritty high school realism, post-mortem messages to the living, and deconstructing the performance grief mandated in the wake of a tragedy reminded me of one of the best forgotten comic stories of all time.  Coming to us from way back in 1975, it’s an extra-long comic story under the name of The Kid’s Night Out, courtesy of one of the greatest comic book authors of all time alongside his most underrated creation- Steve Gerber’s Man-Thing. 

10 Characters We Might See in Dark Universe (Justice League Dark)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

Edited by Robert Beach 

Well, I don’t think anyone saw this one coming. If you asked me or anyone else last week what was happening with the Justice League Dark movie, they would’ve told you it was probably dead, especially when WB premiered that animated adaptation at SDCC.  The fact that the project is alive at all is pretty shocking, but that it’s poached Gambit director Doug Liman and is getting ready to enter casting comes completely out of nowhere. 

Also, the film is now being titled Dark Universe. No doubt this name change will set it apart from the light, cheerful, wholesome universe of the previous DC films. I don’t mind the name shift given the JLD has always included pretty much every magic user in the DCU, but it’s not like DC was bereft of names to apply to that group. As you’re about to see, DC has a long history of magic teams like this one. 

Panel Vision - Uncle Sam

If you like this post or want to support the blog, please consider donating

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. 

Justice League Action Character Roster Revealed

Edited by Robert Beach 

By now, you might’ve heard there’s a new Justice League animated series in the works called Justice League Action. Even though there hasn’t been an official Justice League show since the end of Justice League Unlimited, the team has been represented in subsequent media like The Batman, Batman: Brave and the Bold, and Young Justice.  

This new show will, apparently, be taking the team in a new direction, looking to bridge the gap between Justice League Unlimited and Batman: Brave and the Bold’s emphasis on obscure characters and the more cartoony and wacky animation styles of current superhero hit Teen Titans Go. Not much is known about the show, but we seem to have a tentative character line-up in the form of a character sheet leaked from the folks working on the series.

Comics Rainbow - Marvel's Legion of Monsters

Edited by Robert Beach

Well, it’s October: the Goosebumps movie is about to come out; Halloween is just around the corner, and I have a crippling addiction to ‘70s comic books. Let’s talk about Marvel's Legion of Monsters. As I’ve mentioned before, the ‘70s was a time of serious upheaval and horizontal expansion at both DC and Marvel. The young readers the companies had attracted over the Silver Age were growing up to be young adults with disposable income and a continued interest in comic books, a relative first for the medium. 

This ended up fueling a rush to diverse the story market with stuff beyond the straightforward superhero fair of the previous decade.  Marvel had always prided itself on creating stories and content that was beyond the boundaries of the superhero genre. Many of their core characters like the Fantastic Four or Thor sprung out of weird science and epic fantasy respectively. 

When it came time to diversify, they were ahead of the game on DC and came out of the gates strong with a whole slew of new, horror-based comics. This was right around the time the Comics Code, a self-imposed industry code of censorship, was losing its teeth, so the horror genre was finally getting its fangs back after being neutered for well over a decade. 

Marvel cranked out all sundry manner of demons, vampires, zombies, mummies and anything else they could come up with and, occasionally, they all teamed up to become the Legion of Monsters. Since then, the title has been resurrected multiple times for new monsters of the Marvel universe. So this is your full spectrum look at the Legion of Monsters in all their shades, shames, and successes. 

Movie Monthly - The Serpent and The Rainbow

Edited by Robert Beach

August of this year, the world of horror lost one of its last great legends when Wes Craven, creator of Nightmare on Elm Street and co-creator of Scream, passed away at the age of 76. Craven was one of the greatest masters of horror to ever grace the screen, standing tall in the genre beyond his two major corporate successes. 

He first broke onto the horror scene with the harshly uncompromising Last House on the Left followed by the ugly, grindhouse classic The Hills have Eyes. I’ve also previously discussed his very enjoyable B movie horror/action Swamp Thing flick that helped give us Vertigo Comics. Today, we’re talking about yet another amazing installment in one of the most impressive horror filmography ever seen: Serpent and the Rainbow.

 

Panel Vision - Swamp Thing '82

Edited by Robert Beach

So by this point you’ve probably heard that over the weekend we lost horror legend Wes Craven. Of the many titans of horror, Craven looms incredibly large, having completely redefined the horror landscape on no less than 4 separate occasions. His impressive body of work includes classics like Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream.

In addition, his work includes as bizarre-yet-iconic cult classics like The People Under the Stairs, The Hills Have Eyes, Serpent and the Rainbow, and Last House on the Left. Craven also had a wide body of stranger and unfairly looked over installments, including the one I’ve chosen to spotlight today in memory of this film legend: Swamp Thing. 

(this print by Francesco Francavilla)