Back in 2001, a yesterday that is suddenly over twenty years in the past and an entire lifetime ago, Marvel Comics readers were treated to a surprisingly special title featuring — yet decidedly not featuring — Spider-Man. The cool concept here was that they would tell stories about people in Spider-Man’s orbit, or more specifically […]
I grew up in the 1980s, in the lengthening shadow of the Vietnam War and well before the days of mobile phones and the Internet. I was deeply into action movies and adventure fiction at a time when a booming entertainment sub-genre had been established around the mythology of The ‘Nam. Not specifically war storytelling, […]
Have you ever noticed that in Korean crime movies, there’s a shit ton of street fighting with blades and blunt objects, but a distinct lack of gunplay? When guns actually do come into action, it’s a shocking moment and generally game-changing. This is markedly different from their Chinese brethren, which have made a signature of […]
Some of the first crime stories I experienced were from the venerable private eye genre; in fact the acknowledged granddaddy to the mystery story, Edgar Allan Poe’s Murders In The Rue Morgue is as much a P.I. story as anything. Oh, and Consulting Detective is just super British-y for Licensed Dick, I shit you not, […]
There are more sub-genres in crime fiction that you can quantify, and there’s one wonderfully ADHD little crime-action love child that when done right, is sublime. It’s a ridiculously over the top premise, usually crime-related and played half-straight/half-surreal, with insane action, absurd humor and runaway pacing. There’s usually a race against the clock element that […]
