Death in Comics Rarely Lasts
By Dan Brown I’m not a regular reader of the Batman titles, so it was news to me that in the current DC continuity, Alfred – the Dark Knight’s butler ally – is dead. And has been dead since Bane killed him in 2019. That’s why, in a recent issue over the summer, Alfred was replaced by his blond great-niece, Verity. Which got me thinking. Not about the finer points of butlering in Gotham City, but about death. Alfred being unalive for so many real years is an exceptionally long span for a comic character to spend in the afterlife. Death is a constant in comics. As is its inevitable reversal. “O death, where is thy sting?” was a question posed in the Bible, and in comic books death is usually treated like a wasp sting – momentarily painful, but hardly insurmountable. So while dying may be permanent for us mortals, it’s a passing phase to most comic heroes. Just look at the most consequential death in my time as a comic reader: In 1980, the creative team of John Byrne and Chris Claremont killed off the X-Men’s Phoenix/Jean Grey after the dark side of her nature took control. Realizing she was a threat of universal proportions, she zapped herself with a ray gun. Then, six years later, she was resurrected (due to internal Marvel politics, not in the pages of The Uncanny X-Men) and has been killed and reborn regularly since then. I guess that’s to be expected of a character named after a mythical bird whose superpower is to rise from the dead. But here’s the thing: When they brought Phoenix back the first time, I was so disillusioned. Her death held meaning for teen readers like me. We bought into it. She was toast. She was gone. Never to be seen again. Or so we thought. I remember a panel maybe two issues after her death in which one of her teammates, Nightcrawler, works through his grief for Phoenix. Having limited experience with death as a 13-year-old, it was a moving moment. So when Marvel brought Jean Grey back, it cheapened her sacrifice. I was so distraught, I gave up reading Marvel comics for a couple years. Since then, a long list of superheroes have temporarily died, like Superman in 1992, Captain America in 2007, and the Human Torch in 2011. The other problem is, when these characters inevitably do come back, it’s usually in a ham-fisted way. Granted, having a character expire is an interesting storytelling tool. There wouldn’t even be a Batman if Bruce Wayne’s parents hadn’t been shot dead. Thomas and Martha Wayne are on the short list of deceased comic characters who have stayed that way. Portraying the grief of the remaining survivors is also a fantastic opportunity for a writer looking for a meaty challenge, but I’ve yet to see a hero brought back from the grave in a “realistic” way – likely because coming back from death is not a real thing. There’s just no good way to explain why your favourite hero is no longer six feet under. Yet it must be nice to live in a world knowing that if someone you know dies, they can come back, and they likely WILL come back. I just wish the other heroes would acknowledge this. Why doesn’t Robin or Wonder Woman or one of Batman’s other friends turn to him and say, “I know you’re missing Alfred, buddy, but there’s no need to fret – I’m sure he’ll be back among the living one day soon.” Does anyone doubt it? If you have any thoughts about the topic, I'd love to read them in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Pye Dubois, Canadian Wordsmith
By Dan Brown Not many people know the name Pye Dubois. But odds are, you’ve heard his lyrics. Dubois – who died at his home in London on September 15 at age 77 – helped create the soundtrack for my generation of music fans in Canada. After growing up in Sarnia, he wrote lyrics for 1970s rockers Max Webster, then paired with band frontman Kim Mitchell when the long-haired singer launched his solo career in the 1980s. When I think of Dubois, I think of being in the cafeteria of the old Strathroy District Collegiate Institute listening to the crunching guitar of Go For Soda or driving the backroads with the gentle nostalgia of Patio Lanterns playing. How big of a part did Dubois’s work play in Canadian culture? Patio Lanterns was used by Tim Hortons in one of its TV commercials back in the day. He captured that youthful patio magic we all have stored in our summer memories. And where does he rank in the pantheon of homegrown songwriters? I would argue his contributions as part of a songwriting duo with Mitchell rank up there with Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman, or Jim Vallance and Bryan Adams. But he didn’t write exclusively with Mitchell. Max Webster’s A Million Vacations, with its sardonic chorus of “You can only drive down Main Street so many times,” was co-created with the band’s drummer, Gary McCracken. Dubois – who never appeared on stage as a performer but was considered a full member of Max Webster – was a standout talent in a group that had no weak links. Keyboardist Terry Watkinson penned the number that is arguably Max Webster’s signature song, Let Go The Line, including this immortal observation. “Life has been likened to a poker deal, or a poor, brief candle, or a karmic wheel.” Imagine trying to compete with poetry like that! The Canadian music world being as small as it is, Dubois also collaborated with prog rockers Rush back in the day. The FM radio classic Tom Sawyer started out as a poem by Dubois. “His original lyrics were kind of a portrait of a modern-day rebel, a free-spirited individualist striding through the world wide-eyed and purposeful. I added the themes of reconciling the boy and man in myself, and the difference between what people are and what others perceive them to be,” Neil Peart once told a Rush fanzine. Dubois deserves deep thanks from Canadians for that one legendary tune alone. I’ve interviewed Mitchell twice, but was unable to get any insights out of him into his work with Dubois. The music business being what it is, they had a falling out that ended their partnership in 1995. What a loss. Dubois lived his life off-stage. He wasn’t a presence on the public scene, but he can go to his reward knowing his words are imprinted on the minds of a generation of Canadians who grew up in the 1970s and came of age in the 1980s Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
GRAPHIC-NOVEL COLUMN: Really good Thundarr the Barbarian adaptation
By Dan Brown If you watched Thundarr the Barbarian as a kid, you should check out the six-part comic series the post-apocalyptic cartoon has inspired. It’s really good. The Thundaar comic is a rare adaptation that stays true to the source material while introducing new layers to the story. Published by Dynamite, the graphic novel collecting all six issues is out this week. The TV show ran 21 episodes on Saturday mornings starting in 1980. It was aimed at geeky kids like me – I watched it from my childhood home in Poplar Hill on the Detroit ABC affiliate. The fact the reception was dodgy on our TV set just added to the murky atmosphere of each episode. Taking place in “a world of savagery, super-science and sorcery,” Thundaar is a barbarian whose motto could be “Kill all wizards.” He wields the magical Sunsword and is joined on his adventures by Princess Ariel and Ookla the Mok. The starting point for the series came in the then-futuristic year of 1994, when a rogue planet flies too close to the Earth, shattering the moon and leaving human civilization in ruins 2,000 years later. The look of the series blew my young mind, largely because Jack Kirby – after he left Marvel for the second time – worked on the production design. His fingerprints are all over the show. The comic, on the other hand, was written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by Kewber Baal. They have a hard job, because those of us who love Thundaar have had decades to yearn for more of his adventures. It’s tough to compete with nostalgia. And to make things more challenging, they decided to set the comic in multiple timelines – including 1994. Aaron does a remarkable job adding new layers to Thundarr’s origins and lore without making anything feel forced. He maintains the original spirit of the characters while also growing the world Kirby and others imagined. If you missed mutant rat men or pig men, don’t worry. If you have a hankering to see arrogant wizards in action once again, fret not. This creative team has you covered. Baal also plays a crucial part in pulling the whole thing off. He draws each timeline in a different style – it’s a subtle but noticeable visual cue for the reader as the narrative shifts from scene to scene. And the variant covers! I especially loved the one for Issue No. 5 by Francesco Mattina, which shows Thundarr rafting by a partially submerged Statue of Liberty, a very knowing wink at the cover of Kirby’s own Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth No. 1 from 1972. Other variants include Kirby-drawn animation cells and model sheets. Michael Cho is also well-represented. The hardcover Thundarr lands Wednesday, with a trade paperback planned for early next year. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: The Summer of IMAX
By Dan Brown Now that fall has arrived, the question can be asked: Who, or what, had the best summer this year in the entertainment industry? Was it Ella Langley, who’s ubiquitous number Choosin’ Texas was clearly the song of the season? Was it the suffix “-maxxing,” which got added to virtually every noun and verb in the English language during the warmer months? Was it Tomdaya, the celeb couple du jour who seemingly appeared on every red carpet on Earth? Nope, it was none of these. The hottest summer personality/event/trend/franchise was . . . IMAX. Out of all the people and things that make up the entertainment business, the one that had a better summer than anyone or anything else was a formerly obscure film format that has transcended its weird origins – this summer, it moved to the centre of the cultural conversation. If you didn’t know what IMAX was before this summer, by the end you may have been an expert. That’s thanks largely to two summer releases, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and Marvel’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Just look at the numbers. Of the more than $1.7 billion dollars The Odyssey has grossed since it was released on July 17, $521 million of that amount has come from the sale of IMAX tickets – which makes it the highest-grossing IMAX movie ever, higher even than Avatar. Of the $360 million that Brand New Day pulled in on its opening weekend at the end of July, fully 24 per cent came from IMAX and other PLFs (premium large formats). It’s fair to say more people paid more money to see films in IMAX this summer than ever before. This column won’t go into the technical specifics of IMAX, except to note that Nolan had to have a special camera built to realize his dream of adapting Homer’s epic. Nolan has been working his way toward filming an entire movie in IMAX, previously filming select sequences in movies such as The Dark Knight Rises. IMAX has been around for decades, but it went mainstream in 2026, along with other premium formats. For a long time IMAX seemed like a curiousity that was limited to nature documentaries and the NASA space shuttle. There have even been moments when the company’s future was in doubt. It has met its moment. And you can bet, come awards season, IMAX will be getting thanked in multiple acceptance speeches. Why the mass appeal? The explanation may be as simple as, there are now entire generations who grew up watching motion pictures on their laptops and cellphones. Those movie lovers are hungering for as big a picture as possible, and IMAX is a revelation to them. The big brains in Hollywood have been trying new ways to get people back into movie houses. 3D movies were a thing for a while, but then the studios got so desperate, they even tried guilting people into watching movies in the theatre. Even before COVID-19, movie fans were shifting away from the traditional movie-watching experience. Now theatres are back, in a big way. And there is a hunger like never before for specialized formats. You might even say movie fans were IMAX-maxxing all summer long. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
DC Experiments with Size of its Comics
By Dan Brown In the comic industry in 2026, it’s all about the format. I don’t mean e-comics versus paper ones, I mean the many different sizes that printed superhero tales come in today. Gone are one-size-fits-all comics. The point is to make stories available to readers in a format that suits their lifestyle and budget. DC, in particular, has been leading the charge as far as alternative formats go. Surprise, the Distinguished Competition is actually doing something smart! I’ve reviewed the company’s Compact Comics editions in this space, and I noted that for a classic book like Watchmen, the reduction in size doesn’t affect the reading experience as much as the cheaper paper used in mini-editions. That said, I understand Compact Comics now account for a significant chunk of DC’s sales. Apparently, readers love them (and the lower price point). I’ve bought a handful, and I’m not a DC guy by nature. How small can comics get? Maybe you remember the mini-digests of Archie comics that were a staple offering at supermarkets back in the day. But Archie stories were so anodyne, it never mattered how big or tiny a page they appeared on. At the opposite end of the size spectrum, DC is also coming on strong with its larger, magazine-shaped digests. They typically centre on one character and contain classic stories taken from different stages in DC’s history. I recently read Batman: Three Acclaimed Comic Book Stories. I appreciate how DC blows up ordinary comics pages because for my feeble fiftysomething eyes, it makes the action pop. DC also leavens the panels with painstakingly positioned circular trivia bubbles, like the one that informs readers, “Batman’s origin story was first told in Detective Comics No. 33. The murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents, and how it motivated him to become a superhero, was covered in a two-page sequence.” Another one talks about the Dark Knight’s screen legacy, noting the character’s first appearance at the movies came in 1943 in the form of a 13-part serial. So what you get is a reading experience akin to watching Pop-Up Video, the VH1 series that dressed up old music videos with trivia and gossip. None of the factoids will come as a surprise to longtime DC fans, but that’s not the target audience for these magazines, which are chock-a-block with ads for other Batman graphic novels. The goal is to create news fans. There’s even some correcting of the historical record with an admission in the magazine’s introduction that Bob Kane, “long considered the sole creator of Batman,” didn’t work alone. Kane collaborated with Bill Finger, the company admits. Now if only Marvel would follow DC’s lead by acknowledging Jack Kirby’s writing contributions to such company staples as The Fantastic Four! That would be a positive development, in any format. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: How Canadians Have Enriched American Culture
By Dan Brown The United States of America doesn’t need Canada. That might be true. But in these tense times, a gentle reminder may be in order. Such a reminder could help to repair the fractured relations between our two nations by listing all the ways Canada (through individual Canadians) has enriched American culture over the decades. You can probably come up with your own list, so consider this one a starting point. It’s in no particular order. *Mary Pickford: America’s Sweetheart was born in Toronto. Hollywood’s first millionaire, she was one of the co-founders of the United Artists film studio, which was designed to be a haven for creative types where they didn’t have to answer to the studio bosses. She also helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which lives on to this day in the form of the Oscars. James Cameron, to name just one example, is a Canadian who followed in Pickford’s footsteps, becoming a modern-day titan in Tinseltown. Imagine how many American jobs Canadians have created in Los Angeles! *The SCTV gang: John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis, and others. They reflected a slightly skewed version of smalltown America – Melonville – back at American viewers, making them laugh and think about their own lives and institutions. *Dan Aykroyd, the Kingston funnyman who was on a mission from God to save the blues. The 1980 comedy the Blues Brothers came at a crucial time in the history of the blues, one of America’s truly original art forms. It helped to reignite interest in rhythm and blues music at a time when disco ruled. Aykroyd and his American partner John Belushi famously returned the royalties from their cover songs to the original artists, who had not been treated kindly by the record companies. If not for Akyroyd and Belushi, who knows how music history would have turned out. *James Naismith was born before Confederation and went on to be a McGill University educator before inventing basketball. Arguably the second-most popular spectator sport in the United States, basketball has generated billions of dollars in revenues for U.S. individuals and companies – where would Nike be without hoops? Professional basketball has now grown into a business with a global presence, inspiring leagues around the world. *Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, Tommy Chong, and others. They all make America laugh, which is no small feat. *Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. Yes, the Americans claim him, as do the Scottish, but let’s go ahead and lay claim to him anyway. The cellphone – evolving through the decades off of Bell’s origins designs – is arguably the most-used, most important invention on the planet today. Canada had at least something to do with its inception. *Justin Bieber was born in London and raised in Stratford, and went on to conquer the world of popular music at the beginning of this century! And he’s still at it! *Filmmaker Norman Jewison directed a long list of movies, becoming one of the most influential figures in 1970s America. If you zero in on just one of those films, In the Heat of the Night, you can see how he helped bridge the racial divide in the United States at a time of high tension between black and white Americans. For that movie alone, he is surely owed some props. *Lorne Michaels is one of the most powerful people in show biz. He took his idea for a late-night variety show to the TV powers-that be in the United States and turned it into an American cultural institution that has launched the careers of countless actors, writers and producers. I would love for a business-type person to try to calculate the economic impact of more than 50 years of Saturday Night Live, including the movie spinoffs the series has spawned. Honorary mentions: Neil Young (ally to one side or the other of the political spectrum), Margaret Atwood (warned against a theocratic future America), Marshall McLuhan (visionary media thinker who came up with the term “global village.”), Celine Dion (what would Las Vegas be without her?). When you look at a list like this, it’s hard not to conclude that Canada has had a bigger impact on the United States than any other country. Remember, the above are just a few examples. But who would you add? Leave your candidates in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 34 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
