Hatch, Match & Dispatch – March 2022

It's an ancient Celtic tradition that every February 26th we take a look at the comics that will be celebrating an important anniversary in the coming month...

Most Popular Posts of 2021!

Looking back on Rusty Staples' most popular posts of 2021!

Richard Donner, 1930-2021

Richard Donner, rest in peace.

Rusty Staples: Year Three

April 15th is the Feast of St. Aples, the patron saint of writing about comics, which is why I chose this date -- exactly three years ago -- to launch my comics blog, which was of course named after St. Aples himself. Happy Birthday to us! Hooray!

Falling for Superman

On 26 September 1938 -- a little over eighty-two years ago as the crow flies -- issue six of Action Comics (cover-dated November of that year) featured the Superman story "Superman's Phony Manager" (full disclosure: that title didn't appear in the original issue and has been applied retroactively). Action Comics was an anthology and Superman …

Noncomics: Superman – Last Son of Krypton

In the 1970s and early 1980s streaming a movie was called "reading the novelisation" (except in America, where they instead had novelizations, with a zed, which they pronounce as "zee"). Every major movie -- and an awful lot of minor ones -- was given a second life in the form of a prose adaptation. And …

Oddities: Superman coasters

So, remember those X-Men coasters I featured last year? Well, guess what? That's right, you guessed correctly, even though there's a pretty big clue in this post's title... Today we're looking at Superman coasters! But these are no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination, no beermat-like cardboard discs churned out as a cheap promotional …

Rusty’s Reviews Round-Up

To save you literally whiles of searching through this blog, here are all of Rusty's reviews in one place! Updated: 3 July 2021 Comics: The Bank Street Book of Science Fiction -- 7 Feb 2020 Batman Monthly -- 26 Jun 2020 Battle Picture Weekly -- 2 Jun 2019 Bea -- 15 Aug 2017 Boy's Cinema …

Pocket-Money Comics: Batman Monthly

You'd think that for a relatively recent comic (say, from the late 1980s) it would be easy enough to track down all the info. But not so! The publication life of London Editions' Batman Monthly is annoyingly vague. The majority of the evidence suggests that it ran for fifty-six monthly issues, then it was relaunched …

Pocket-Money Comics: Look-In

Look-In Publisher: ITP / IPC First issue: 9 Jan 1971 Last issue: 12 March 1994 Issues: 1210 In print for EXACTLY two decades, two years, two months and two days -- and another day, and another year -- Look-In was a hybrid of magazine and comic, quite unusual for its time, though not entirely unique. …