The Ottawa Comic Book Guy

Well, as a recap, we have described the contents of the two Men of Steel series so far, and both stories contain a lot (for comic stories, anyway). Below is the best cover from both series, as far as I'm concerned: I begin by saying, that although both stories are about different parts of the Superman mythos, there is some commonality. The first series completely met its goal of introducing a new backstory to Superman, and eliminating all of the factors that DC was wishing to with regards to the new continuity of the DC Universe going forward. With a history spanning almost fifty years at the time (and with the character of Batman who was only a year "younger" having a major part of his story remain) Byrne did a heck of a job redefining the important parts going forward, especially establishing that the Kents live on to Clark's adulthood. (I have to say that as one of my not-so-favourite things about Pre-Crisis Superman, they had managed to de-age the Kents by al...

Good day, and I hope everything is well for you. I am happy, just cracked open my new edition of Overstreet Price Guide (this year is the 48th edition). I like looking at it before it gets all dog eared and used being in my knapsack for the next 360 days or so. I smirk as I look because a quick perusal of the book show that the Wasp turns 55 this year, with an accompanying story (been there, done that.) Today I shall continue with the review of the Man of Steel second series, 2018 edition. BOOK One The book begins on Krypton, where a figure by the name of Rogol Zaar is addressing a council made up of members of many alien races. He is delivering a speech which will potentially culminate in the end of Krypton. Cut to Metropolis, where Firefly and Killer Moth (two known Bat-villains) are discussing their move here and whether they are scared of...as Superman himself scoops them up. Superman then patrols Metropolis performing super-deeds, and ends up helping rescue people from a fi...

Good day, and welcome to our Man of Steel comparison as promised last time. Firstly though, long time readers of this space will remember my reaction to the announcement of the Buffy reboot. I am pleased that they have backed off of the idea of replacing Buffy and that they are going to have a new slayer telling stories in Buffyverse. It makes me think that this was the plan all along, and that they had announced it differently so that they could get some publicity out of it all (nothing generates more publicity these days then manufactured outrage) considering the environment the network was in when the news was revealed. Now on to the show.\ When we left off last time, John Byrne had come over from Marvel to DC to create the Man of Steel. Marv Wolfman, the writer of Crisis on Infinite Earths , and an old colleague of Byrne's from their joint time on the Uncanny X-Men , convinced Byrne to do it based on conversations they had before Byrne made the switch where Superman woul...

Good day, and I hope summer is treating you well. Thursday was an exciting day for me as my Kickstarter finally arrived, a collection of strips from the webcomic Irregular Webcomic!. Created by noted physicist and avid gamer Dr. David Morgan-Mar of Sydney, Australia, the strip itself features Lego mini-figurines and gaming figs as protagonists for various subjects such as Fantasy theme (which was the subject for the first collection which I also purchased), Space theme, Mythbusters, Steve Irwin vs Cthulhu, Pirates, Star Wars, and the like. But the theme that this book was based on was from the Indiana Jones franchise,which he has named Cliffhangers . The title of the collection I have received is Prepare for the Wurst! . It is hilarious and I recommend people check out this strip at:   http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/ . It's worth it. Now on to our topic for the day, the Man of Steel serieses. (I don't know what the plural here is. Is it series, like the singular, serie...

Good day, today begins the story I have to tell about the differences and similarities of the two Man of Steel series, the famous one from 1986 (right after Crisis on Infinite Earths) by John Byrne and 2018's version written by Brian Michael Bendis. Both represent new starts for the character in new eras. They contrast in that the original one was a hard reboot, and the newest one a soft one. Before we get too far into it today, the first thing we need to discuss is: why reboot? Usually, the reboot of a character is tied to the possible financial gains of a character. A new story (like movie reboots and resets), means you basically get to start over a character, and, at least at first, you don't even to try that hard as you are basically retelling the origin of the character (see Batman reboots and Spider-Man reboots; all have them have cleared insane amounts of dough at the box office, and I am guilty of falling for it myself. A reboot is usually done with a character th...