Nathan's Movie Reviews

  The Tom King Retrospective/ Why I'm Largely Done With Comics      Superhero comics have always meant a lot to me. I'll never forget finding some DC and Marvel trade paperbacks at my local library and falling in love. I had seen the heroes on tv in some of the best cartoon shows of all time, but the world of comics was something else entirely. I have been collecting comics since 2014 and I have done deep dives and discovered so many great stories, characters  and creators. 10 years on though and I feel very different about it. I don't have any drive or passion for comics or for any comics that are coming out right now. This could be just burn out that can come when one naturally overdoes a hobby, but if feels like something more. I feel that I have read almost everything that I wanted to in the field of mainstream American superhero comics. After almost 10 years of collecting I'm throwing in the towel and cutting way back. I am still reading some every now and ...

 Love Everlasting   (2021) Written by Tom King Drawn by Elsa Charretier      The first in my ongoing Tom King reappraisal is one of his most recent series. I wanted to pick this, because a lot of my previous disdain had to do with King's reinventions and reinterpretations of superheroes. So what did I think of the first independent thing I'd read from him and my first review in this series? It is... ok. The concept is really great. A woman is forced to fall in love with new people in new time periods/scenarios only for the romances to fall apart tragically and a mysterious person to kill the woman and reset the loop. The time periods and scenarios are all sends up of classic romance comics tropes which is done really well. The artwork by Charretier is very classic looking, almost Darwyn Cooke-esque. The biggest problem for me is that despite the great premise and artwork, overall the book just wasn't that fun to read. The repetitive cycle establishes the un...

  Tom King      I read a lot of comics and have a lot of favorite writers and artists. I even have some creators that I don't care for. Without a doubt one of the more recent examples is Tom King. He started writing independent series at Vertigo like Sheriff of Babylon, but he really exploded onto the scene after writing the 12 issue maxi series Vision at Marvel. From there he went to DC to work on Batman, and lesser known characters like Mister Miracle and Adam Strange.      My familiarity with Tom's work was down to hearing about how awful his Batman run was. I have not read any of the 85 issues he wrote for the character, but I think that he had some interesting ideas for the character that ultimately fell apart in execution. Something that I would could say the same thing for his 12 issues on Mister Miracle, which I have read all of. There are a lot of great character ideas and storytelling devices in that series to explore the troubled trauma of M...