Before he wrote Watchmen, Alan Moore picked up an obscure 1950s superhero and rewrote him as one of the greatest tragic heroes anywhere in comics. Miracleman — originally called Marvelman— is a middle-aged journalist named Mike Moran who is in the process of gradually remembering that he was once, and still can be, a superhero. As he rediscovers his powers, and figures out what happened to his memory, he reinvents every tired cliché of the Superman-style hero into something strange and new and somehow deeply sad.
In 1990 Moore handed Miracleman over to Neil Gaiman (yes, that Neil Gaiman — seriously, it’s like watching Bach and Mozart improvise a fugue together) whose run on the title is as strange and astonishing as Moore’s in a totally different way. It’s infuriatingly difficult to find Miracleman today, because the rights to the character are part of a long and bitter legal dispute. But if you find him, read him.
Alison Bechdel’s father was 44 when he was hit by a truck, which he may or may not have stepped in front of. Fun Home is the story of what led up that moment: the author’s childhood in small-town Pennsylvania and her gradual realization that she is gay, and that her father probably is too. The narrative isn’t linear, it’s more like a looped tape — she goes back and back over her own story, adding new details, mustering maps and photos and journal entries and allusions to Wilde and Proust and Fitzgerald and Joyce, each time deepening our understanding of it, and at the same time adding more layers of ambiguity. She never shies away from complexity, never forces a theory that doesn’t fit. And all this is conveyed by line drawings that are simplicity itself.
Richard Dawson, the wisecracking British entertainer who was among the schemers in the 1960s sitcom “Hogan’s Heroes” and a decade later began kissing thousands of female contestants as host of the game show “Family Feud” has died. He was 79.
As we prepare for the Game of Thrones finale, we recognize Joffrey and nine other baddies who showed us that terrible, horrible things can come in small packages
