QUEER EYE ED: Hello again, one and all! I’m back with another of my exclusive interviews done with “family” values in mind. Today, I’ll be talking with one of my favorite villains, who’s just arrived via time machine from the Silver Age. Please join me in welcoming that marauding mechanized menace, the original Brainiac! BRAINIAC: Greetings soft, squishy sack of protoplasm. QEE: I’ve been called worse! Let’s start at the beginning. How did you come to be? B: I was assembled by the Computer Tyrants of the planet Colu. QEE: Who created you in human form so that you could spy on other worlds and gather samples from them in preparation for the Tyrants’ plans to conquer the universe. B: Exactly. Such a conquest was the only way to assure the sanctity of marriage. QEE: Say what?! B: Indeed. The ultimate aim was to make certain that weddings would only occur as intended by the Creators. QEE: And who would be allowed to marry? B: Only a robotic being of at least  [Continue reading...]

"Madam, God Himself could not sink this ship."--A steward on the Titanic April 15, 2012, is the 100th anniversary of the RMS Titanic's super-sad super-sinking. The tragedy's main cause, according to apocrypha, wasn't the notorious, compartment-crushing iceberg, per se, but J. Bruce Ismay, the White Star Line grand poobah, whose directorial edict pressured Edward J. Smith, the Millionaire's Captain, into speeding through an iceberg field so that the passenger liner's precocious maiden docking would generate even more free publicity than had its whorishly public launch. And that end was certainly achieved. The big ship did indeed dock precociously, two and half miles beneath the North Atlantic's surface, in a binomial of big pieces accented with lots of mean pieces, and the press was more than a little interested. The Titanic's demise, despite its cold, hard, factual nature, comprises, in its way, a wretched crazy quilt of every fictional genre: the worldly wonder of a Western film,  [Continue reading...]

A Parody of Madonna’s "Vogue" Look around, everywhere you turn there’s mutantsThey’re everywhere that you goYou try everything you can to escapeThe way of life that you know When all else fails and you long to beSomeone different than you are todayI know a place where you can get awayIt's called Xavier’s, and here's what it's for, so Come on, RogueGet your body out to the east coast, hey, hey, heyCome on, RogueLet your powers go with the flow, you know you can do it All you need is your own determinationSo use it that's what it's forGo inside for your highest inspirationYour team will open the door It makes no difference if you're blue or whiteIf you're a boy or a ghoulIf the x-gene’s pumping, it will give you new lifeYou're a superhero, yes, that's what you are, you know it Come on, RogueGet your body out to the east coast, hey, hey, heyCome on, RogueLet your powers go with the flow, you know you can do it Muties where you find themNot just where you hunt and find  [Continue reading...]

As someone who considers himself well-rounded, relatively educated, and rather open-minded, I happily agreed to immerse myself in the one realm of comic-dom I had yet to (ahem) expose myself to: gay erotic comics. Class Comics, the bastion of print and digital hardcore comic porn bearing the slogan “Heroes With Hardons,” publishes a number of scintillating sex-filled titles, many of which I’ve recently had the chance to sample. Where to start, though? Tug Harder? Space Cadet? But oh! What better title to break my gay porn comic cherry than their take on the ever-popular, classic horny frat boy tale, The Initiation: Higher Sex Education #2. There’s a lot to be said about the gay male psyche as represented in porn. It constantly revisits the classic themes of male bonding, i.e. fraternities, strapping farm hands, or the interesting dichotomy of dad-son relationships. Now, I have not the scholarly background, nor is this the forum, to delve too deeply into whatever  [Continue reading...]

For a brief and shining moment, Phyla Vell, daughter of Captain Marvel, donned the Quantum Bands and took on the mantle of Quasar. It was a tumultuous time in the Marvel cosmos. The Annihilation War had ended, and Wendell Vaughn, the sort-of-but-not-quite-original-Quasar was killed in a raid against Annihilus, the big bad bug responsible for the war. Phyla managed to wrest the bands from the bug, wrap them around her wrists, and wield their vast cosmic powers. She even carried a bad-ass sword composed of the hard light quantum particles (whatever that means). During the war, Phyla also found love. She got moony-eyed over Moondragon, A/K/A Heather Douglas, a former Avenger and future Guardian of the Galaxy (that, kiddies, is a story for another time). After the war, the two hoped to go off together and find peace, but another threat was around the cosmic corner. The robotic despot Ultron conquered the Phalanx and was determined to destroy all life in the universe. It was man  [Continue reading...]

You know, today I'm feeling old. No, not just old...OLD!!! That's right, I'm all the way into full capital letters with several exclamation points! That's just one step short of "Hand me my walker, sonny, it's time to go to Denny's and have something easy to chew". And why am I feeling old? It's because I've had a part of my long-gone, misspent youth that I had to try and explain to someone... Gold Key Comics. I'm not sure of the average age of the comic fans out there on the other end of this cyber-tale, but I'm sure that there are a ton of you who are saying "Gold What comics? Is that a Vertigo reboot?" Youngsters! In a nutshell, Gold Key was a comic book line that started out basically as Dell Comics but also reprinted some of their comics as Whitman Comics. Yes, Gold Key suffered from multiple-personality disorder. A large number of their titles were licensed comics from movies and tv shows, such as Lidsville, the Banana Splits, Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, Buck  [Continue reading...]

What's it about? French Toast Comix is an autobiographical webcomic by a lady who works as a cruise ship musician.  She's Jewish, gay and draws pretty much anything that happens in her life.  Strips might appear about a coffee shop, her mum, cruise ship culture, new places that she's visited, her art class, anything (also - stealing giant porcelain cows)! It's not as linear as a lot of web comics, in that it mostly reads more like stand alone events.  However, you can buy more structured print mini comics if you like (see the more information section at the end of the review). Many of the entries have a text blog accompanying them, giving more information about the events being depicted. What's good about it? This web comic is what we used to call 'a giggle'.  Ms Hawkins has a dry wit about her and can pull out the important elements that make a situation funny, then reproduce them concisely.  It's a style that makes you warm to her and all her friends, even if  [Continue reading...]

Reality TV--that bizarre, animated, audiomated, semi-scripted, overproduced amalgam of schadenfreude and wish fulfillment--inarguably sends echoes throughout this geocentric Petri dish we call popular culture: Jersey Shore Christmas ornaments, five figure Kardashian tweets, and even the name of this very column are just some of the nouns which originate from Reality TV. These nouns must surely be mere side effects of Reality TV. What, then, is the purpose of modern Reality TV? In its original form, Reality TV was meant to inspire, to challenge, and to stimulate the viewership. And the echoes of olde, ruther than merely inspiring the name of a weekly comic column, actually inspired a regular comics feature. "Roy Raymond: TV Detective" ran as a backup series in DC's Detective Comics. The titular character presided over his own show, Impossible...But True! which was an ersatz version of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, itself an early sample of Reality TV.   [Continue reading...]