David Harth

3 days ago | comicbook.com | David Harth

Reed Richards is the hero known as Mister Fantastic, and he’s about to have a banner year. The Fantastic Four have been going through something of a renaissance in the comics recently, and Fantastic Four: First Steps is about to reintroduce the Fantastic Four to more casual fans. Reed Richards’s origin has changed over the years — he was originally a veteran of the Korean War — but one thing that hasn’t changed is his intelligence.

3 days ago | comicbook.com | David Harth

Marvel and DC Comics have done a lot of things to get sales over the years, but the most fruitful was the crossover. Before superhero comics came about, there were character crossovers, but they’d become a much bigger deal with the large superhero universes that started developing in the Golden Age, with teams like the Justice Society, the Allies, the Young Allies, and the World’s Finest Team all forming the clay that would become the crossovers of the future.

4 days ago | comicbook.com | David Harth

Continuity is both comic book fans’ favorite thing and the bane of their existence. Marvel and DC Comics have created massive universes with histories that reach back into the far distant past and can run until the future. Fans like to have a history of events that they can point to, and that’s where continuity comes in. Marvel and DC have both used continuity in different ways, however they both use the same tool to “fix” continuity — the retcon.

4 days ago | comicbook.com | David Harth

Marvel has long been known as the House of Ideas, and that has helped define the publisher. Marvel took the idea of the superhero and injected all-new ideas in it. It give readers the shared universe, put real world issues into the comics, and created characters that felt like the readers. Marvel definitely didn’t come up with every idea it used, but it was able to find a way to bring in ideas that made superheroes better.

5 days ago | comicbook.com | David Harth

The X-Men are one of Marvel’s most popular properties, enthralling readers for decades. There are some brilliant X-Men stories, books that changed the face of comics. Right now, however, the X-Men are in something of a slump with the “From the Ashes” storyline underwhelming fans. The worst part about this was that the X-Men had just come off the most inventive X-Men era ever: the Krakoa Era.