Our Blog

What if some of the greatest authors in the history of literature, all born this month, could celebrate their birthdays together? There's only one way to find out: SUPER AUTHOR BIRTHDAY FUN ACTION SQUAD!

There are so many of us who are fans. Whether you are a fan of a sports team, director, author or radio personality, you want to see the very best of what they have to offer. This goes for comic book fans as well. In recent years, comic book movies have owned the box office. There has never been a greater time to be a comics fan.

However, there is nothing worse than going out to see the film adaptation of one of your favorite comics only to find that it is a huge disappointment, or watching the property linger in development hell.

What with the epically dark Power Rangers fan film circulating around the Internet lately (which sadly just got pulled), I thought I'd round up some of the great comic book fan films. Because there are a lot of them. While they may not have the production value of a major studio, fan films can truly the best interpretation of their characters ever.

Quirk Books is linking up with The Broke and the Bookish for Top 10 Tuesday! This week we’re sharing our favorite fictional heroines… the kick-butt female types, not the drug. The internet told me that a heroine is “the principal female character in a story, play, film, etc.” That wasn’t good enough for me, so I searched online a little deeper (I just clicked the next link, but no one really needs to know that) and found a much better definition: “a woman of distinguished courage or ability, admired for her brave deeds and noble qualities.” Yes. That sounds good.

(image via Tooth Soup)

"Have you ever wondered why we talk of 'spelling'? There is a spell word implanted in the brain of every English-speaking child, the root mantra of restriction, the secret name of a mighty hidden demon: 'eybeesee-dee-ee-eff-geeaitcheye-jai-kayell-emenn-ohpeequeue-are-ess-tee-youveedouble-you-ex-wyezed'. That name and all the names it generates were designed to set limits upon humanity's ability to express abstract thought. What you see depends entirely upon the words you have to describe what you see. Nothing exists unless we say it."

I love comic books.

I’ve published poetry, plays, fiction, essays, but more than anything, I have always loved comic books. I taught myself how to read with comic books; I taught myself math and computers by using the power ratings on my the Marvel trading cards that my dad used to buy me as incentive after tee-ball and basketball games. This was around 1991, and I’d take those numbers and plug them into Excel or FileMaker Pro on our Mac LCIII and compare and contrast the traits of various characters and basically use those statistics to run my own games of pseudo-D&D/Fantasy Marvel Heroes Trading Cards in my head.

For those who scoff: “A comic book could never scare me!” – there’s something about the way good writers and illustrators use the space on the page and in the frames that can make comics and graphic novels absolutely chilling. It’s the anticipation, the quietness, the occasional first-person perspective.

It’s the way your mind fills in the blanks, maybe by adding sound – the click of heels on an empty, dark street, the sound of something crawling across the attic floor – or allowing one scene to bleed into another.

Since Halloween is right around the corner, what better time to test your mettle than with these classic horror comics and graphic novels?