I’ve got a story in the November issue of The American Prospect about how comic books (mostly, though not exclusively, mainstream superhero comics) have responded to the War on Terror and the Iraq War—and how the implicit political premises of the superhero genre itself end up complicating writers’ intended messages. Subscribers can read “The Revolt of the Comic Books” online now; presumably the full article will be available to the general Web audience sometime fairly soon. And if you want to pick up a dozen or so copies when the issue hits newsstands in a week or so, well, who am I to stop you? It actually is worth it, since the print version has tons of purty picksherz from some of the books I discuss.

As a full-fledged comics geek, naturally, I had lots of thoughts that didn’t make it into the final version of the article—the subtext of the regnant mainstream drawing style; World War Hulk as a blowback allegory; some comments about The Boys, the relaunched Supreme Power, and a whole slew of non-superhero books that get (at most) a cursory mention here. So over the next few days (at least) I’ll probably be doing a lot of posts elaborating on those… maybe a vlog, even! So stay tuned, true believers.