Blue Nexus #67 - Meaning of a Mage

               What must it have been like in that moment, in those milliseconds, as the golden light flashed in front of Clarke’s eyes before all she was, good or evil, all that power she had, restrained or wild, suddenly vanished? Staring into the eyes of someone she swore to defeat, the person she was so confident against? And yet, while she thought of Clarke and that mere blink where Rafael vaporized her, Brenda could not escape the thought that he could just as easily have ended her as well.

                She’d had her hands on the rut formed from her crash for a while. She’d managed to get all the rubble together and create a small little healing square over it. She just could move, couldn’t use her magic. Not physically incapable, but she couldn’t will herself to it. She sat, hollow, staring at the broken bits of ground while the red sky around her tumbled down and the blue skies of Rome retook their place.

Blue Nexus #66 - Rivals

            Brenda rebounded off a barrier she placed up at the last second and managed to avoid another of Clarke’s attacks. The barrier she put up also softened the blow for the aged Colosseum, which had taken quite a beating. Whatever reinforcements had been put up over the years wouldn’t be enough.

            She watched as Oz and Rafael took their magnificent battle to the sky. Oz’s magic flared the six colors of the magic spectrum, while Rafael’s brilliant gold light shone everywhere. Brenda could hear people confused as to who was on whose side. Last they had likely heard, Rafael had just saved an entire town of people from some strange illness. Did he fight with Shindari, or this crazy red-witch lady?

Halftime Report: 2017 Comics

2016 was an absolutely magical year for comics. Even if you were a Marvel fan for the back half of the year or a DC fan for the first half of the year, on the whole 2016 proved to be one hell of a year in terms of revitalizing both DC and Marvel for some of their stranger characters or concepts. Valiant and Image continued to see creative success, last year in particular for Valiant with Ninjak and the two “Divinity” series. So, now that the year is halfway done, how is 2017 holding up? In short: pretty damn well.

Blade (1998) Review

I think it's incredible how common, how household, so many super-hero names have become. Iron Man, Captain America, Thor; they're all some of the most popular characters in the world right now thanks to the success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. These characters, once so obscure, now make billions of dollars annually from various sources. Obviously, they were brought out of obscurity thanks to the contributions of their creators. The Punisher is an obscure character that's only being brought into the light thanks to good writing on Daredevil, not the catastrophic films from the 2000s. Deadpool is one of the most popular characters in the world right now, but I'd be hardpressed to say how popular he was outside of a comic book store pre-2010. And what if I told you that one of the most obscure comic book characters in the world is the very reason that we have such celebrated movies today? People attribute X-Men and Spider-Man to being the modern superhero movie...but even they must acknowledge that it is Blade that helped push the genre to what it is today.