Before there was a Blog@Newsarama, there was The Great Curve … a now-defunct blog that was scattered across the four winds of the internet when we transitioned to Newsarama. So we thought we’d dig into the archives of the old site and feature some of the more “evergreen” content every so often, in a feature I like to call “Great Curve Classics.”

This time around we’re reprinting a post that helped put The Great Curve on the map … and one that just seems very timely, given the whole Mary Jane statue controversy. It’s a post called “Hurt Comics,” written by Lea Hernandez. You can still buy the “I’m Hurting Comics” at Lea’s webstore.

Back in the old days, when the Warren Ellis Delphi Forum was open, there was an outbreak of manifestos. That’s exactly the way I mean to say it: it was like a rash. The first one was okay, but all the ones that followed were as much fun as wiping with poison ivy, and as painfully squirm-inducing.

There was a lot of “saving”, “bettering”, building a moat around, being gentle to tender little geniuses, and RAHHH COMICS-ing.

But no one ever suggested that what comics needed was a really good ass-whipping. Or maybe what comics needed was for people to stand up and say, “Hooray! I’m for the other team!”

Comics need hurting. Go on, hurt them.

When you don’t like something everyone likes, in lockstep, and you say so: you’re hurting comics.

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For April Fool’s Day last year, The Great Curve crew did a series of posts “written by” various comic characters, like Dr. Doom, Bizarro and Delirium. Below is one of Tom Bondurant’s contributions, as he took on the guise of Zatanna. Yojne!

Gib ecnartne!

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen! Zatanna here, taking a break from magic and superhero stuff to talk a little comics.

You might think it’s been a rough couple of years for ol’ Zee, after being Miss Mind-Wipe 2004, but thanks to my new best friend Grant, I’m back in the high life again. I now have cred with the mega-crossover crowd and the hipsters, without the editorial hassle of going back and forth across imprints! How great is that?

(Big ups to my manager for putting together that deal, by the way. I didn’t know if DC would go for it, but he just said “Hey, I’ll ‘ekam ti neppah!’”)

(With finger quotes.)

(Sigh.)

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All of us here at the Newsarama blog extend our deepest sympathies to the family of Marshall Rogers.  It is probably not a stretch to say that for many fans of superhero comics, Rogers is best remembered for the six issues of Detective Comics (#s 471-76, May 1977-March/April 1978) which teamed him with writer Steve Englehart and inker Terry Austin.  Back on April 22, 2005, one of my first posts at The Great Curve, this site’s predecessor, was an appreciation of the Englehart/Rogers/Austin run, so what follows is adapted from that post.  Like the sign says, let’s “peruse the pencilography of Marshall Rogers.”

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Once again, we’re back with another “Great Curve Classics” … and another of Kevin Melrose’s At Sixes & Sevens feature. Enjoy!

Coming up with a nifty base of operations has to be the toughest part of being a supehero. Well, after saving the Earth while holding down a paying job.

I mean, most of the cool headquarters are generally spoken for, or out of reach: The Fortress of Solitude isn’t convenient to public transportation and, bad ’90s story ideas aside, Dr. Strange isn’t putting his Sanctum Sanctorum on the market anytime soon.

So, what’s left? The dregs, apparently …

JLA: Secret Sanctuary
It’s difficult to imagine a team that eventually would be based in a satellite 22,300 miles above the Earth — mind you, it did resemble a big nipple — and in watchtowers on the moon started out in a cave in Happy Harbor, R.I. Yes, Rhode Island. Sure, it was a spacious cave with showers and a trophy room. But still, Rhode Island?

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Before there was a Blog@Newsarama, there was The Great Curve … a now-defunct blog that was scattered across the four winds of the internet when we transitioned to Newsarama. So we thought we’d dig into the archives and start featuring some of the more “evergreen” content from the Curve over here every week or so, in what I like to call “Great Curve Classics.” To start us off, here’s the very first post Kevin Melrose did for the site, his first At Sixes & Sevens feature. Enjoy!

Welcome to At Sixes & Sevens, a new weekly feature in which I’ll get my list-making fix by selecting the six or seven best, worst, greatest, or what have you, in comic books.

You see, I have a list infatuation that rivals the idiosyncrasies of the lamest Batman villain. Grocery lists, to-do lists, hit lists — it doesn’t matter. I’ll read them all.

So, At Sixes & Sevens is all about enabling, really.

Enough about you, you say, What about the robots? All right then: What about the robots?

The Metal Men
God bless the 1960s, when creators like the late Robert Kanigher rolled out undeniably absurd concepts with irresistible appeal, such as The Haunted Tank and The Metal Men. The former is, well, a haunted tank. But the latter is a group of six robots made of six different metals, created by pipe-smoking scientist Will Magnus. (Why did so many ’60s comic-book scientists smoke pipes, anyway?) Thanks to the good doctor’s “responsometer,” each of The Metal Men — Gold, Iron, Lead, Mercury, Platinum and Tin — has a distinctive and quirky personality to go along with his or her element-based power. Oh, how I love Silver Age science.

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