Peter Sanderson's "Comics in Context"

[Space Pirate Roberts]

This guy worked for Marvel for years (as a continuity checker IIRC), then became the foremost scholar of comics as literature. Don't laugh, it's amazing the stuff this guy can point out in superhero yarns that seem to most people to be just trivial fluff entertainment. Basically his stance is that superhero stories serve the same functions for us today that stories of the gods did for the ancients and legends of Robin Hood, King Arthur and the like did for folks in the middle ages, and every week he writes a column online detailing his thoughts on this and other topics relating to comic books as well as other forms of cartoon art. The column started out at IGN Filmforce, then was moved to IGN Comics when it went up, then when he got fed up with the management style there he jumped ship to Kevin Smith's Quick Stop Entertainment. (I didn't know about this for the longest time, thinking he had quit the column.)

Comics in Context at its current home, new columns posted weekly

Archive of Comics in Context columns published @ IGN

Right now he's doing a nice series on what exactly defines a character as a superhero.

[bloodyarts]

This all sounds very interesting, and it's not the first time I've heard of comics being compared to the myths and adventures that were once told by the village or tribe storytellers of old.

Comics really are (or can be) much deeper than garishly-garbed adventurers punching away life's evils.

I'll be checking this out regularly.