Here we are in the United States of America, having just gotten past yet another July 4th holiday weekend, where you are required to show your official fandom as being an American patriot through draping yourself and your belongings with the flag, eating and drinking as much as you can with the people you love, and crowing over the explosions […]
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I didn’t start reading superhero comics until the 1990s. In fact, I didn’t get interested in superheroes at all until after the animated series for The X-Men and Batman. I vaguely recall the Superfriends cartoon (and notice that I make a difference in calling it a cartoon), but if you remember it or have ever seen it, then you’ll probably […]
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The theory goes that the term “fan” originated as a shortened form of fanatic. Fanatic comes from long, long ago, when the only fanatics were of the religious type, as a way to describe such people with excessive zeal, enthusiasm and passion, as if driven mad and consumed by the madness. Due to its etymological origin, the term fan, when […]
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With C2E2 almost set to launch from the McCormick Place in downtown Chicago, I wrap up my three part series on superheroes with this entry, in which I attempt to answer this question: do religious figures and the heroes of legend fall under the definition of “superheroes,” as outlined in part I? First, let’s look at the heroes of legend […]
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As a lead up to the Chicago pop culture extravaganza that is C2E2 (where I will be officially stalking John Barrowman, Val Kilmer, and John Cusack), I started a series in my last article that focuses on one of the current driving forces in American pop culture: superheroes. In the previous article, I focused on working out just what exactly […]
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In April I will be attending C2E2, the Chicago-based comic books, comix, graphic novels, and all around pop culture convention. As a lead up to that event, which I’ll write about in this column, I thought I would delve into a topic that, while the scholars may be in agreement, fans the world over are not. And that topic is: […]
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I’ll admit it. I liked Joss Whedon’s 1992 Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie. I did not see the movie when it first premiered: I saw it a couple years later. When, I do not recall completely. What I do recall is that I had already been watching The X-Files and had fallen completely in love with the series. For me, […]
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