Alex and Joe talk about what they watch on Youtube, and how incredibly unhandy we are. Which was entirely unplanned, and very much a conversation that we forgot was being recorded.
You can reach us at the following locations if you feel the need:
Alex and Joe can be found on X respectively @karcossa and @FirstRonin4.
You can also find Alex on Bluesky @karcossa.bsky.social.
Alex is on threads @Alex_K_Cossa.
ThoseTwoGeeks@gmail.com
This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way. This week: The Phantom.
First appearing in newspapers on February 17, 1936, the Phantom was the first character to wear the skintight costume that has become emblematic of the superhero (inspired, it turns out, by stage productions of Robin Hood). He was also the first character to wear a mask with no visible pupils; the Phantom’s creator, Lee Falk, explained that Ancient Greek busts inspired the idea of the not showing the Phantom’s pupils when he was wearing his mask, incorrectly believing that the statues had no pupils, when instead it was just that the paint had faded over the centuries. But Falk felt the pupil-less eyes gave the statues an inhuman, awe-inspiring appearance – ideal for the Ghost That Walks.
The Phantom has been in continuous publication since he debuted as a newspaper strip in 1936, with Lee Falk continuing to write the character until his death in 1999 (let that sink in for a moment. That’s sixty three years on the same character), although before he died, Falk dictated his final Phantom story to his wife from his death bed.
The essence of the Phantom is that he is an undying ghost destined to protect the fictional country of Bengala, located in Africa, from the evil Singh Brotherhood – originally a gang of pirates, though they manage to evolve with the times. The Phantom’s reputation as The Ghost That Walks comes from his longevity – Bengala has been protected by the Phantom since the early 1500’s, but it hasn’t always been the same man. Son takes over the mantle from father, over and over, giving the impression of immortality to his enemies (establishing the character as the first true legacy hero in comics).
The reason I’ve gone in to such detail about the character is because I have finally found the 1996 movie on DVD from Amazon. I say finally because I’ve been looking on and off for this movie for quite some time. It hasn’t been on any streaming service that I subscribe to, and it comes and goes from online stores – usually for more than I want to pay for a Blu-ray. In the end, I needed to bulk up an Amazon order for free shipping, and the DVD was $7* or so – well worth the price for the movie.
*(Before you ask, my wife has Amazon Prime, so I could have gotten free shipping, but for some reason the item I wanted, a low end drawing tablet, gave me a coupon and not her so in the end the DVD was closer to $2 – which is an absolute bargain).
It had been nearly twenty years since I had seen this movie, and after the glut of big budget super hero films, and so I was curious as to whether it would hold up as more than a nostalgic diversion or whether it would still be a good film in its own right. Billy Zane’s performance is solid enough, though the script doesn’t give him much to do; Treat Williams commands the screen as a wonderfully camp comic book villain with just enough of a sinister bent to make you nervous; Kirsty Swanson and Catherine Zeta Jones are both able to play strong, if fairly one dimensional characters; and James Remar is James Remar – an actor who will never give a bad performance (you may see a bad movie with him in it, but it wasn’t bad because of him).
You might think that I’m going to start ragging on the movie, but I genuinely enjoyed it. It was exactly what I hoped it would be, and indeed remembered it as; a good movie that stuck to the core concepts of the Phantom (as I remembered them); the Phantom doesn’t shoot to kill, his horse and wolf are in the movie, the stunts and effects haven’t aged brilliantly, but they’re still not terrible (the only time that you really notice anything is anytime a vehicle crashes into a ball of flames; everything else is forgivable or still holds up).
Yes, it’s a kitschy movie, and the Phantom isn’t the one man wrecking machine that super heroes have become in movies today – which oddly keeps the flick pretty grounded – but it is a really fun film.
I am absolutely going to watch the movie again. And again.
If you’re curious about the Phantom in the comics, well although the character has been in continuous publication in newspaper strips from the 30’s, The Ghost Who Walks has also appeared in several comic books throughout the last few decades – the most recent of which was Dynamite Entertainment’s The Last Phantom, a fantastic 12 issue modern take on this legendary character that I highly recommend. You can find the issues collected under The Last Phantom: Ghost Walk and Jungle Rules.
Join us next week when we look at something else that is, for whatever reason, Underrated.
Alex and Joe talk about Joker: Folie à Deux, praising the villain and (of course) wrestling.
You can reach us at the following locations if you feel the need:
Alex and Joe can be found on X respectively @karcossa and @FirstRonin4.
You can also find Alex on Bluesky @karcossa.bsky.social.
Alex is on threads @Alex_K_Cossa.
ThoseTwoGeeks@gmail.com
Joe, Alex and Matthew follow up on last week’s idea to give Joe a reading list. Will he read them all? We’ll check in periodically throughout the year.
Appaloosa by Robert B. Parker
Batman Resurrection by John Jackson Miller
My Captain America by Megan Margulies
The Shining by Stephen King
Traitor’s Blade by Sebastien De Castell
Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler
A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Back
Manhunt: The 12 Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer by James L. Swanson
Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchet
You can reach us at the following locations if you feel the need:
Alex, Joe and Matthew can be found on X respectively @karcossa, @FirstRonin4 and @matthewklein316.
You can also find Matthew and Alex on Bluesky @matthewklein316.bsky.social and @karcossa.bsky.social.
Alex is on threads @Alex_K_Cossa.
Matthew’s on Instagram @macktheknife1116.
ThoseTwoGeeks@gmail.com
Matthew’s book Crashing is available now through IDW Publishing. His webcomic The Rhyme Scheme is available for free here.
Joe, Alex and Matthew Klein hang out and talk about movies, books, comics… almost everything over the course of an hour and a half.
You can reach us at the following locations if you feel the need:
Alex, Joe and Matthew can be found on X respectively @karcossa, @FirstRonin4 and @matthewklein316.
You can also find Matthew and Alex on Bluesky @matthewklein316.bsky.social and @karcossa.bsky.social.
Alex is on threads @Alex_K_Cossa.
Matthew’s on Instagram @macktheknife1116.
ThoseTwoGeeks@gmail.com
Matthew’s book Crashing is available now through IDW Publishing. His webcomic The Rhyme Scheme is available for free here.
This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way.
This week: the multi-part crossover event X-Men: The Onslaught Saga.
If I’m totally honest, my Golden Age of X-Men comics is from the mid 90’s to the early 2000’s. This wasn’t exactly when I first started reading the X-Men, that was around 98/99, but because I was largely reading UK reprints, I wasn’t reading the current comics – they were probably always a good two to five years behind what was being published and sold in comic shops depending on the story being presented in the magazine. The reprint magazine had space for three comics in it – this wouldn’t always be three concurrent issues, but was often an issue of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men that were published within the same month and an issue of Uncanny from the 60’s or 70’s). These reprint magazines are actually responsible for the weird dichotomy in my head of knowing the stories very well, but having no context for what issue they came from (yes, the reprint did tell you what comics they were reprinting, but it was much like a tpb; you don’t really notice unless you look in the fine print if the covers).
Over the years, I’ve slowly been picking up and working on completing a run of X-Men comics from issues 100-500, though my focus for years was around 250-400, but because I’ve been largely focused on Uncanny X-Men, I don’t have a lot of the issues that form the giant crossover – if I even have all the Uncanny issues (look, I was often going by cover art and price when picking books up, not sequential numbering, so I have holes everywhere in my collection), so for a story that I really want to read I’ve been picking up collected editions just to be able to read or reread them. There’s collecting for the joy of the hunt and collecting to (re)read the stories – sometimes those things are one and the same, and sometimes they’re not, because I have no intention of risking damaging the early Uncanny issues I own, I’ve also been looking for collected editions of The Dark Phoenix Saga and so on.
Despite having several issues of Uncanny X-Men that comprise the Onslaught Saga, there was a lot I didn’t have, and won’t be getting any time soon, so when I saw this trade for sale at my comic shop I decided to pick it up so I could scratch the itch I had to read it in its entirety.
The Onslaught Saga was a story that came was featured in the reprint magazines just as I had started to read them, and so I ended up missing most of what took place in the story (everything, honestly, other than the aftermath), and so consequently a lot of it was relatively new to me. Sometimes the journey is as important as the conclusion (especially given how two decades later most of the characters in the story are still around).
The basic plot of the story focuses around Xavier losing control after the events of Fatal Attractions (you don’t need to worry about having read that – I still haven’t, though it is in my To-Be-Read pile), and the combined efforts of New York’s heroes to put a stop to his rampage. It’s pure 90’s awesomeness – there’s more destruction that you can shake a stick at, but the story never pulls away from the core focus of the intimate struggle that the heroes face when dealing with an evil Xavier.
The version I read was the X-Men: Milestones trade (pictured above), and it told a very comprehensive story. There was at least one issue missing, but it was tangentially related (Wolverine #105 was a story about Wolverine helping rescue civilians during the battle), so I assume there could be other tie-ins skipped that don’t further the plot, which keeps the tale on point. Which is good because it’s a big trade, clocking in at over 200 pages (closer to 300, I’d guess without counting/checking). It’s easily the best way to read the story, unless you already have the single issues in your collection.
Which I don’t – yet. Oddly, despite my love of the X-Men from the 90’s, I’ve got a lot of holes to fill, which should be pretty easy given how many are in the back issue bins. After all, 90’s comics aren’t all bad, there’s just a huge number of them in longboxes across the country because so many were printed to satisfy a demand that disappeared almost over night. So that just makes them worth less than the comics from the 70’s and 80’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re not any good.
X-Men: The Onslaught Saga eventually leads into Operation: Zero Tolerance, another story I’m also fond of from that era of X-books, and likely subject of another column at some point in the future, as it holds up fairly well to this day.
Join us next week when we look at something else that is, for whatever reason, Underrated.
Alex and Joe geek out about toys. Again. But this time it’s all about what figures they want (and both forgot to prepare).
You can reach us at the following locations if you feel the need:
Alex and Joe can be found on X respectively @karcossa and @FirstRonin4 or by email at ItsThose2Geeks@gmail.com.
You can also find Alex on Bluesky @karcossa.bsky.social, and threads @Alex_K_Cossa
This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way.
This week: the multi-part crossover event X-Men: The Shattering.
If I’m totally honest, my Golden Age of X-Men comics is from the mid 90’s to the early 2000’s. This wasn’t exactly when I first started reading the X-Men, that was around 98/99, but because I was largely reading UK reprints, I wasn’t reading the current comics – they were probably always a good two to five years behind what was being published and sold in comic shops depending on the story being presented in the magazine. The reprint magazine had space for three comics in it – this wouldn’t always be three concurrent issues, but was often an issue of Uncanny X-Men and X-Men that were published within the same month and an issue of Uncanny from the 60’s or 70’s). These reprint magazines are actually responsible for the weird dichotomy in my head of knowing the stories very well, but having no context for what issue they came from (yes, the reprint did tell you what comics they were reprinting, but it was much like a tpb; you don’t really notice unless you look in the fine print if the covers).
Over the years, I’ve slowly been picking up and working on completing a run of X-Men comics from issues 100-500, though my focus for years was around 250-400, but because I’ve been largely focused on Uncanny X-Men, I don’t have a lot of the issues that form the giant crossover – if I even have all the Uncanny issues (look, I was often going by cover art and price when picking books up, not sequential numbering, so I have holes everywhere in my collection), so for a story that I really want to read I’ve been picking up cheap collected editions just to be able to read or reread them. And because I have no intention of risking damaging the early Uncanny issues I own, I’ve also been looking for collected editions of The Dark Phoenix Saga and so on.
The Shattering was a story that came out just as I was transitioning away from reprints and into the single issues for most series, and so where parts of the comic is familiar to me, a lot of it is relatively fresh – or fresh enough. I’ve got an obvious soft spot for this period of the X-Men, but I acknowledge that not everybody will enjoy the way that Alan Davis tells the story here – though this isn’t the end of the story by any means because the book ends on a cliffhanger that’s already got me scouring online retailers for the next volume (my LCS didn’t have it – I picked this book up from them and didn’t see any others), because I feel the need to follow up on just how this tale ends and I don’t have all the single issues just yet.
I remember reading bits and pieces of this years ago, and was shocked at the time about the revelation on the final page; I won’t reveal it here in case you’ve never read the story and choose to, but reading the trade knowing what was coming does give you an interesting insight into what’s to come.
Oddly, despite my love of the X-Men from the 90’s, I’ve got a lot of holes to fill, which should be pretty easy given how many are in the back issue bins. After all, 90’s comics aren’t all bad, there’s just a huge number of them in longboxes across the country because so many were printed. That just makes them worth less than the comics from the 70’s and 80’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re not any good.
X-Men: The Shattering leads into The Twelve, a story I am reasonably sure I’ve never read, but seems to be full of all the characters I loved the most when I first started reading about Marvel’s merry mutants. Something I was more than happy to do with a story that is far more Underrated than I ever expected.
Join us next week when we look at something else that is, for whatever reason, Underrated.
Alex and Joe geek out about toys.
You can reach Alex and Joe can be found on X respectively @karcossa and @FirstRonin4 if you feel the need to tell them they’re wrong individually, or by email at ItsThose2Geeks@gmail.com.
This is a column that focuses on something or some things from the comic book sphere of influence that may not get the credit and recognition it deserves. Whether that’s a list of comic book movies, ongoing comics, or a set of stories featuring a certain character. The columns may take the form of a bullet pointed list, or a slightly longer thinkpiece – there’s really no formula for this other than whether the things being covered are Underrated in some way.
This week: the multi-part crossover event X-Cutioner’s Song.
The first chapter of X-Cutioner’s Song was published in November 1992 in Uncanny X-Men #294, with subsequent eleven parts coming in issues of X-Factor, X-Men, X-Force and Uncanny X-Men. With the series being billed as revealing the origin of Cable (it didn’t – that came in 1994), there was significant hype and buzz around the comics when they were hitting the shelves nearly thirty years ago, but because I wasn’t into comics at the time, I never heard any of it.
Instead, I noticed a cover when restocking the boxes at my LCS and decided to pick up the arc after the shop owner gave it a quick recommendation. Fortunately, we had a full set (or seven) in stock, so I grabbed the individual issues rather than hunting down a collected edition (partly because I am also building an X-Men and Uncanny X-Men collection, but also because I wanted to read it as it was originally presented in comic form. Complete with the polybags still sealed for some off the comics (I won’t lie, I was tempted to leave them sealed, but at only a couple bucks a comic it didn’t seem worth it.
Plus, I wanted the feeling of cracking those bags and getting to be the first person reading these comics.
Without question, comics from this era were technically published before I started buying single issues, but that doesn’t mean that these issues didn’t kickstart a sense of nostalgia for the old UK reprint magazines that I first came across this arc in. The first issue felt oddly familiar, but beyond that…? It was pure 90’s joy.
After all, 90’s comics aren’t bad. There’s just a huge number of them in longboxes across the country because so many were printed. That just makes them worth less than the comics from the 70’s and 80’s, but it doesn’t mean they’re not worth reading.
“If mankind waited for the ‘right time’ to address the winds of change it’s unlikely we’d ever have crawled from the primordial ooze.”
Scott Lobdell, Uncanny X-Men #294
I don’t know if I had forgotten about the amount of times characters within X-Men comics in the 90’s spouted pearls of wisdom, but I was less than halfway through this first part of X-Cutioners Song and I already had enough one liners to make me sound like I a semi professional couch philosopher thanks entirely to the less than subtle messaging. Messaging that seems just as relevant today as it ever did (and I’m sure we’d all hoped that would be different).
The main plot of X-Cutioner’s Song isn’t fully revealed in the first issue, but there is more than enough information here to reel you in hook line and sinker. The crossover cost me less than $20 to put together, and it was worth every penny to do so – not only because of the nostalgia factor, but primarily because this is a damn good story that holds up today (even the funky fashion choices for the street clothes the X-Men wear don’t detract too much).
With any story crossing over four series, the creative team is, as expected, pretty hefty. There are names that at the time were relatively new faces to the X-Men, but now… well now we consider them as creators who have made significant contributions to the comicsphere, frequently drawing large crowds at conventions;
But despite the big names, the characters and import associated with the story, it’s an arc that can easily get overlooked when when you’re looking in the longboxes because the story came in the early 90’s, before the big bust in the comics market. Despite having heard a little about it over the years, largely through comments in UK reprints, I had never actually read the book before. Something I was more than happy to do with a story that is far more Underrated than I ever expected.
Join us next week when we look at something else that is, for whatever reason, Underrated.
