Bashar al-Ghul? The Real Scarecrow?

Is Bashar al-Assad really The Scarecrow? A Levantine villain hell-bent on chaos releases a potent, airborne fear gas upon a metropolitan population with the intent of reducing citizens to deluded, hallucinating lunatics. Sounds like the fiendish plot of Ra’s al-Ghul and his cohort Scarecrow from the movie Batman Begins, right? But it also describes the…

Daredevil’s Long Goodbye

Daredevil has been a sort of generational touchstone at Marvel Comics since Frank Miller took over the title in the late 1970s. His initial work on the title–especially when collaborating with inker Klaus Jansen, was (for a time) considered the best comic book run in the long history of the superhero. His revisitation of the…

A Valiant Effort Rewarded

The new Harbinger (#6) The story of the Valiant Universe is a brief and convoluted tale of greed, double-crosses, and espionage–and that doesn’t even address the comics they published! In 1989 former Marvel CEO Jim Shooter found himself a persona non grata in the industry he helped shape and flourish. After a failed attempt to…