Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A Solid David Geffen Biography

The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood by Tom King

by Leave a Comment

I read this after the second volume of James Kaplan’s magisterial biography of Frank Sinatra, so I was in the mood for reading about more horrible men with bad tempers. The Operator is a biography of David Geffen, who has had an extremely broad and influential career in show business. I knew only about Geffen Records going into this book, and it broadened my view of everything he’s been involved in, from helping produce Cats on Broadway to being one of the founders of DreamWorks. […]

We Can Be Heroes

by Leave a Comment

I provided a bare-bonesed introduction to the basic plot of this story in my review of volume one. Vision was created by Ultron to be a robo-destroyer with no agency. Vision was curious, and didn’t want to be a destroyer, so he rebelled from his creator and fought for good alongside the Avengers. In this book, he has created a wife and children. They live outside of Washington, D.C., and they try to live as others do – going to school, going to work, meeting […]

Who Knew Riddler Was an A-Lister?

by Leave a Comment

My favorite comic book store is Austin Books and Comics. They always give me interesting recs, and they’re the reason that I’ve been soaking in all the Tom King stories that I can lately. (Sorry for that, by the way! I usually try to mix up my reviews.) This book was pitched to me as making The Riddler a cool villain, and someone you should be scared of. It worked.  In this particular continuum, Bruce Wayne/Batman “like likes” Selina Kyle/Catwoman, but for their relationship to […]

“There’s not a choice…you just have to.”

by Leave a Comment

There’s a quote early in this book that perfectly summarizes my favorite version of Batman. Lucius Fox to Bruce Wayne: I once tried to talk your father into coming into the business. Told him being a doctor drives you crazy. Whatever you do, people just get sick again. You make no progress. He looked at me for a bit, got real quiet, stern almost. It’s a look I’ve only ever seen once again. And it was in the face of a masked man. Finally, in […]

Lit-Level Comic Writing

by 2 Comments

While I’m an avid comics reader and a believer in the medium, I guess I’m also guilty of a little bit of self-hate. I can tell because when I first read Tom King’s comics, I thought to myself This guy is too good for comics. That’s a weird thing to say if you think comics are great. I suppose what I was thinking is that King writes with a depth one expects more from an Oscar-nominated screenwriter or a bestselling author. His Batman work has been […]

If only there were some kind of adage to warn me

by 2 Comments

… but damn that’s a beautiful cover.  I mean look at it.  It’s so pretty.  And that title! And it’s about comics and the nature of heroism with the loss of supernatural powers by someone who actually likes comics! (And writes them – I didn’t connect the dots that this is the same Tom King that wrote the truly excellent Vision for Marvel, but once I did it was really obvious, just as he uses Shakespeare as a through-line in that series, he uses Dante’s […]



Help Our Mission

You can donate to CBR via:

  1. PayPal
  2. Venmo