“This is the real world, Mr Majors. Everything you knew is now going to change... what you believed will alter dramatically. Things that once appeared seemingly ordinary will now be seen for what they really are – Extraordinary...” After finding the mysterious Book of Power, Jack Majors is coming to terms with the possibility that he has super abilities. However, how can he possibly hope to master them when he is dealing with his school work, his love for “it-girl” Wanda Starling, her boyfriend Frederick Rolley, a gang of bullies led by Donnie Chisel, quarreling parents and the very real threat of being pursued by Donnie’s older brother – underworld stand-over man, Danny ‘The King’ Chisel. Can Jack finally learn the true reason why the world still needs heroes?
What do the comic book figures Static, Hardware, and Icon all have in common? Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives an answer that goes far beyond “tights and capes,” an answer that lies within the mission Milestone Media, Inc., assumed in comic book culture. Milestone was the brainchild of four young black creators who wanted to part from the mainstream and do their stories their own way. This history of Milestone, a “creator-owned” publishing company, tells how success came to these mavericks in the 1990s and how comics culture was expanded and enriched as fans were captivated by this new genre. Milestone focused on the African American heroes in a town called Dakota. Quite soon these black action comics took a firm position in the controversies of race, gender, and corporate identity in contemporary America. Characters battled supervillains and sometimes even clashed with more widely known superheroes. Front covers of Milestone comics often bore confrontational slogans like “Hardware: A Cog in the Corporate Machine is About to Strip Some Gears.” Milestone's creators aimed for exceptional stories that addressed racial issues without alienating readers. Some competitors, however, accused their comics of not being black enough or of merely marketing Superman in black face. Some felt that the stories were too black, but a large cluster of readers applauded these new superheroes for fostering African American pride and identity. Milestone came to represent an alternative model of black heroism and, for a host of admirers, the ideal of masculinity. Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans gives details about the founding of Milestone and reports on the secure niche its work and its image achieved in the marketplace. Tracing the company's history and discussing its creators, their works, and the fans, this book gauges Milestone alongside other black comic book publishers, mainstream publishers, and the history of costumed characters.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a complete guide to over 50 years of superheroes on screen! This expanded and updated edition of the 2004 award-winning encyclopedia covers important developments in the popular genre; adds new shows such as Heroes and Zoom; includes the latest films featuring icons like Superman, Spiderman and Batman; and covers even more types of superheroes. Each entry includes a detailed history, cast and credits, episode and film descriptions, critical commentaries, and data on arch-villains, gadgets, comic-book origins and super powers, while placing each production into its historical context. Appendices list common superhero conventions and cliches; incarnations; memorable ad lines; and the best, worst, and most influential productions from 1951 to 2008.
Considering a variety of female superhero narratives, including World War II-era Wonder Woman comics, the 1970s television programs The Secrets of Isis and The Bionic Woman, and the more recent Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Education and the Female Superhero: Slayers, Cyborgs, Sorority Sisters, and Schoolteachers argues that they share a vision of education as the path to female empowerment. In his analysis, Andrew L. Grunzke examines female superheroes who are literally teachers or students, exploring examples of female superheroes whose alter egos work as schoolteachers or attend school during the workday and fight evildoers when they are outside the classroom. Taking a broader view of education, Grunzke argues that the superheroine in popular media often sees and articulates her own role as being an educator. In these narratives, female superheroes often take it upon themselves to teach self-defense tactics, prevent victimization, and encourage people (especially female victims) to pursue formal education. Moreover, Grunzke shows how superheroines tend to see their relationship with their adversaries as rehabilitative and educative, trying to set them on the correct path rather than merely subdue or dominate them.
A truthful, gritty, sometimes heart-wrenching look at the life of an overcomer. Join an everyman on his own odyssey from dysfunction, addiction, and near-death experiences to a life of peace and helping others find their way. A story that truly shows that no matter how dark the day, there is light and someone will hear your whispers.
Junior year has come for the remaining students of Melbrook Hall, and it promises to be the most difficult one yet. With one of their own gone and another under serious investigation, none of the former Powereds knows how many days remain for them in the Hero Certification Program. The time they do have will be filled with more trials and classes, honing their skills as they work toward the increasingly difficult goal of becoming Heroes. Ample new challenges await them, and not all of them can be met on the safety of Lander's campus. Fallout from last year's final exam has stirred the interest of many parties, not all of them friendly. With enemies pressing in from all directions, it's going to take new alliances, dedication, and countless hours of training if they want to last another year.
A crisis is coming for everyone who uses math and science. For decades now, the classical model of probability (the indifference principle and the Gaussian distribution) has been breaking down and revealing its limitations in fields from economics to epidemiology. Now a new approach has revealed the underlying non-classical principle behind all these 'anomalous' laws: — Pareto’s law of elite incomes — Zipf’s law of word frequencies — Lotka’s law of scientific publications — Kleiber’s law of metabolic rates — the Clausewitz-Dupuy law of combat friction — Moore’s law of computing costs — the Wright-Henderson cost law — Weibull’s law of electronics failures — the Flynn Effect in IQ scores — Benford’s law of digit frequencies — Farr’s law of epidemics — Hubbell’s neutral theory of biodiversity — Rogers’ law of innovation classes — Wilson’s law of island biogeography — Smeed’s law of traffic fatalities The general law behind all these particular laws (and countless others) is the "decline effect". As a system ages or grows in size, the rules of probability subtly change. Entropy increases, rare items become rarer, and average performance measures decline. The human meaning of a decline may be positive (decreasing costs, falling epidemic mortality) or negative (lower customer loyalty, decreasing efficiency), but the mathematical pattern is always the same. The implications are enormous, as these examples show: All epidemic diseases decline in infectiousness and in lethality. HIV-AIDS went from a highly infectious, 95-percent fatal disease, to a survivable condition with a latency of decades. COVID-19 went from a death rate of 7 percent in early 2020, to under 2 percent in 2022. Hereditary dynasties around the world declined smoothly in lifespan, from hundreds of years to tens of years. When democracies replaced monarchies, the decline (in spans of party control) continued.
Collects Amazing Spider Man: Full Circle (2019) #1. A summons from S.H.I.E.L.D. leads Peter Parker into a globe-spanning adventure that will test him as never before — and the future of all mankind lies in his gloved, webbed hands! Who is the mysterious prisoner in the steel box who keeps propelling the wall-crawler onward? Nick Spencer and an all-star team of Marvel’s biggest writers and artists take up the challenge to create the wildest, maddest, most unconventional AMAZING SPIDER-MAN story of all! Guest-starring Nick Fury, Wolverine and Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham! Experience the amazing adventure in an action-packed collection with a sensational array of surprises and extra features!
Winner of the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Comics-Related Book The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale “Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. . . . Wolk proves to be the perfect guide for this type of adventure: nimble, learned, funny and sincere. . . . All of the Marvels is magnificently marvelous. Wolk’s work will invite many more alliterative superlatives. It deserves them all.” —Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the hundred highest-grossing movies of all time are based on parts of it. Yet not even the people telling the story have read the whole thing—nobody’s supposed to. So, of course, that’s what Wolk did: he read all 27,000+ comics that make up the Marvel Universe thus far, from Alpha Flight to Omega the Unknown. And then he made sense of it—seeing into the ever-expanding story, in its parts and as a whole, and seeing through it, as a prism through which to view the landscape of American culture. In Wolk’s hands, the mammoth Marvel narrative becomes a fun-house-mirror history of the past sixty years, from the atomic night terrors of the Cold War to the technocracy and political division of the present day—a boisterous, tragicomic, magnificently filigreed epic about power and ethics, set in a world transformed by wonders. As a work of cultural exegesis, this is sneakily significant, even a landmark; it’s also ludicrously fun. Wolk sees fascinating patterns—the rise and fall of particular cultural aspirations, and of the storytelling modes that conveyed them. He observes the Marvel story’s progressive visions and its painful stereotypes, its patches of woeful hackwork and stretches of luminous creativity, and the way it all feeds into a potent cosmology that echoes our deepest hopes and fears. This is a huge treat for Marvel fans, but it’s also a revelation for readers who don’t know Doctor Strange from Doctor Doom. Here, truly, are all of the marvels.
The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history -- Marvel Comics – and the outsized personalities who made Marvel including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby. “Sean Howe’s history of Marvel makes a compulsively readable, riotous and heartbreaking version of my favorite story, that of how a bunch of weirdoes changed the world…That it’s all true is just frosting on the cake.” —Jonathan Lethem For the first time, Marvel Comics tells the stories of the men who made Marvel: Martin Goodman, the self-made publisher who forayed into comics after a get-rich-quick tip in 1939, Stan Lee, the energetic editor who would shepherd the company through thick and thin for decades and Jack Kirby, the WWII veteran who would co-create Captain America in 1940 and, twenty years later, developed with Lee the bulk of the company’s marquee characters in a three-year frenzy. Incorporating more than one hundred original interviews with those who worked behind the scenes at Marvel over a seventy-year-span, Marvel Comics packs anecdotes and analysis into a gripping narrative of how a small group of people on the cusp of failure created one of the most enduring pop cultural forces in contemporary America.
