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I love Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For, and have from the day I came out and picked up my first GO-Info (strip # 140, “The Last Tango”, where Mo and Harriet have sex one last time before breaking up for good). Until it ended earlier this year, it was the first thing I read when picking up Xtra! West, and I could always count on it to make me laugh make me think, or both. I own all the collected books, including The Indelible Alison Bechdel.

But, there was one book of hers missing from my collection: a non-DTWOF book I didn’t even know existed until this summer, when I saw it as part of an exhibition on animation and comics at the Art Gallery. I read it all the way through in one sitting, absolutely captivated.

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!

And who, as the champion of the common worker, fights a never-ending battle for Stalin, socialism and the international expansion of the Warsaw Pact.

What if?

What if Superman’s ship did not land in Kansas? What if, instead of the heartland of America, it landed in the heartland of… the Ukraine? What if this Superman was raised to fight for truth, justice, and the Soviet way?

I admit it. I love Death. Have from the first time she appeared in The Sandman. She’s beautiful, perky, compassionate, and not afraid to tell it like it is. If she’ll pardon my saying so, she’s the most human of all the Endless… and it seems there’s a good reason for that.

The year was 1994. Up until that time the only comics I read were mainstream superheroics (mostly Marvel, with just a little bit of DC), and pretty infrequently at that. I never committed to any series (with a few exceptions), just reading a few issues here and there as the mood took me. In hindsight I wonder if it’s because the mostly tedious and formulaic stories these comics contained paled in comparison with the sci-fi and fantasy I had been avidly reading for years and years. But that summer, something very special happened:

Seventeen years ago when he was a teenager, Warren Gale made a choice that cost him his soul. Never noticing its absence, Gale went on to have a perfectly safe, dull and predictable life, while his soul—a lonely, hungry shadow—drove hundreds of people to suicide. But now his soul wants to rejoin with him… and for the first time in a long while Warren’s life is about to become very interesting.

They say confession’s good for the soul, so here goes:

I’ve read The Celestine Prophecy.

Yes, that’s right. Me, the hard-nosed skeptic. Well, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time when I was a bit more interested in the woo-woo side of things. And in my defense, I didn’t really know what the book was about until I actually read it.

I recently bought Showcase Presents: Justice League of America, reprinting the first 20 adventures of the JLA, from 1960 to 1962. I already had a reprint of The Brave & the Bold #28 (the JLA’s very first adventure together) from a few years back, as well as a few other reprints from that era, and I decided it was time to expand my collection a bit.

Now that I’ve got that off my chest… Spoiler warning.

I finally went to see X-Men: The Last Stand last weekend. It was pretty good as an action flick, and a standalone X-Men movie. But as a sequel? Ehhh.

A savage murder in ancient Britain brings on the vengeance of the Hecateae, Goddess of Witches, She who is Maiden, Mother and Crone. From the Middle Ages to the Victorian Era to the 1990’s, the wheel of death and rebirth brings the victim and her killer ever closer to a final confrontation.

I really enjoyed this six-part Vertigo miniseries when it came out in 1995. The art was very good, and though the plot wasn’t terribly deep it was engagingly written, with themes that spoke to me. Ten years later I’m less forgiving of the comic’s flaws, though I still find it an entertaining read.

Meet Moonshadow, the son of a Jewish hippie girl and a madly grinning alien light globe. Raised in an intergalactic zoo, he is kicked out at fifteen with only his cat and a sex-crazed furry weirdo as companions. This 12-part series, originally written by J.M. DeMatteis in the 80’s and republished under the Vertigo imprint between July ’94 and June ’95, is the story of his journey to maturity and awakening.

The Books of Magic was an ongoing series published under the Vertigo imprint from 1994 to 2000, spanning 75 issues. It told the story of Timothy Hunter, a thirteen-year old dark-haired, bespectacled British boy who learns he is destined to become the most powerful magician of his era. The Books of Magic followed Tim as he learned to handle the usual problems of being a teenager, all the while growing into his power, learning about his heritage and future, and dealing with supernatural enemies.

Shadow Cabinet was part of Milestone Media’s second generation of comics, one of the two series introduced during the Milestone universe’s “Shadow War” crossover event. The Shadow Cabinet is a secret organization of superheroes thousands of years old. Its operatives, in constant rotation from mission to mission, have sworn to fulfill its mandate: “To save humanity from itself”, whether humanity wants it or not.

Xombi was one of the two series introduced during the Shadow War, the first crossover event of the Milestone universe. It’s also the only one in the whole lot that looks nothing like a superhero comic. With its unusual artwork and mindbogglingly weird plots and characters, Xombi is in a class all by itself.

Static is among the first generation of titles put out by Milestone Media. I bought the first issue when it came out in April ’93 but, stupidly, did not immediately keep reading the series. Then again, I guess I was lucky I picked up Static at all: back in those dark days, I hardly read anything but big-name Marvel titles, and even then never committed to any particular one. So I forgot about Static for about a year and a half.

So I’m hearing through the grapevine that in Wolverine #25 (due out later this month), a brainwashed and evil Wolverine will kill Northstar. Yay. Terrific. This’ll be the perfect end for Marvel’s token gay superhero. He was kept in the closet for years, summarily dropped from Alpha Flight, picked up again, brought out of the closet for one freaking month (only as a desperate move to boost flagging sales, I hear), disappeared for a while more after Alpha Flight folded, and only in the last few years allowed to be out. Jerked around and treated like crap for most of his 20+ year career, yet still managing to be an interesting and multidimensional character and, yes, a trailblazer, now he gets to die a stupid death.

This series was part of Marvel 2099, a short-lived line of comics started in the mid-90’s which featured familiar-looking heroes in a gritty, futuristic, extremely cyberpunk setting. They all take place in—yep, you guessed it—the year 2099, and the world is a very different place. The Age of Heroes is long over, and costumed crime fighters only a distant memory. But now a new Age of Heroes is dawning; new legends are being born, in a world sadly lacking in legends.

Michael Collins was a pacifist and cybernetics expert, who believed his work was being used to develop advanced prostheses for handicapped people. When he discovered that his employers were really building a superpowered killer cyborg code-named “Deathlok,” Collins was murdered and his brain placed inside Deathlok. His mind was thought to have been destroyed; the brain was simply to serve as “wetware” support for the cyborg’s operating system. But Michael Collins was still there, inside, and eventually he regained control of Deathlok. Vowing never to use his powers to kill another living being, he set off to make a new life for himself.

What originally got me interested in Alpha Flight was the fact that (a) it was a Canadian superhero group (in fact, the only Canadian superhero group in the Marvel Universe), and (b) it was the only series I knew of then to have an openly gay main character. Being gay myself, I was naturally curious to see how a superpowered queer would be treated. I got into the series only a few months before it folded in early 1994 and, over the next couple of years, collected most back issues, the two annuals, and a couple of team-ups with the X-Men.