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Recycling Bin 57 - Superhero Comics and the Divided Man (Dec 2001)
Superhero comics keep returning to the notion of the man pulled alternately to polar extremes of human nature or split along aspects of personality, guided by a model set down by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Recycling Bin 56 - FF1234 and the Book of Job (Dec 2001)
Grant Morrison, ever eager to bring ideas into superhero comics, has recast the conflicts of the Fantastic Four in a form familiar to students of the Old Testament.

Columns from 2001

Recycling Bin 55 - Echoes of Wally Wood in Tom Strong (Sep 2001)
A tribute can serve its central purpose just by reminding you of talent lost to the world, as does Hilary Barta's tribute to Wally Wood's humor work in a recent Tom Strong.

Recycling Bin 54 - Evoking the Pinocchio Theme (Sep 2001)
Comic-book robot characters act out the fundamental sentient quest for self-worth in their own pursuit of humanity, playing out the Pinocchio Theme.

Recycling Bin 53 - Double Duty for Two-Face (Sep 2001)
In a neat inversion of the normal flow of material, the Dick Tracy seems to have reached backwards into old Batman material for the prototype for the Tracy villain Haf-n-Haf.

Recycling Bin 52 - Superman / Madman Hullabaloo and "Reservoir Dogs" (Jul 2001)
Referential material in comics sometimes treads a territory between the gag and the homage where it needs to seek one pole or the other, lest it flounder.

Recycling Bin 51 - Retro That Failed (Jun 2001)
The period-derivative pieces by Byrne and Larsen initially showed great promise, but proved that it takes more than the bones of a body to create life - especially when operating under the constraints of an art form peripheral to commercial comics.

Recycling Bin 50 - The Fantastic Four and the Four Elements (Jun 2001)
At the core of the Fantastic Four, the notion of a tetrad of elemental components provides both a central theme behind their powers and a source of their resistance to change.

Recycling Bin 49 - Superman, Satire, and Immortality (Jun 2001)
Sometimes a good razzing conceals considerable affection, as one might detect in various rubs at Superman over the decades - and, more importantly, it reflects the kind of cultural penetration that turns human inventions into enduring cultural symbols.

Recycling Bin 48 - The Roots of Adam Strange (Jun 2001)
Adam Strange, true to the form of a syncretic hero, builds upon traditions inherited from previous space comics and science-fiction pulp literature.

Recycling Bin 47 - Royal Roy, a Derivative Boy (May 2001)
Marvel's Star Comics line seems to have grabbed at Harvey Concepts with both hands in the creation of Royal Roy - but the failure of this borrowing might bode ill for comics in general.

Recycling Bin 46 - Claw the Unconquered: Cliche and the Perfect Genre Piece (May 2001)
For some, a comic that strings together a series of likely cliches inspires little more than boredom; but to the student of comics, such a piece can serve as a textbook for genre definition.

Recycling Bin 45 - Myth and the Superhero Comic (Apr 2001)
For good and for ill, superhero comics frequently turn to mythological source material for inspiration - so frequently that a distinctive set of vices attends the practice.

Recycling Bin 44 - Defenders, Seuss, and Faint Praise (Apr 2001)
Tributes which fail in their delivery may come off as something less than complimentary.

Recycling Bin 43 - Suicide Squad and "The Dirty Dozen" (Apr 2001)
Borrowing from a classic World War II film, Yale and Ostrander's Suicide Squad managed to hit all the strengths of the original plus find additional mileage through casting low-powered villains and second-string heroes.

Recycling Bin 42 - The Red Skull: Sick Galatea (Apr 2001)
An unlikely cultural vector may have connected ancient Greek myths to the Silver Age origin of Marvel Comics' resident national socialist, the Red Skull.

Recycling Bin 41 - Too Many Dystopic Futures (Apr 2001)
Superhero comics have particularly overused the notion of the future gone horribly wrong.

Recycling Bin 40 - The Invisibles and "The Matrix" (Apr 2001)
Not all information flow concerning comics runs from comics to comics or from the outside to comics - occasionally, a comics piece will stamp an impression outside the medium, even where, as in the case of The Invisibles, the makers of "The Matrix" choose not to acknowledge sources.

Recycling Bin 39 - Nodding to Popular Culture: "Fantastic Voyage" and Avengers (Mar 2001)
Comics provide a vehicle in which to embed homages to particular moments of popular culture, as Roy Thomas and Neal Adams demonstrated in their tribute to the Movie 'Fantastic Voyage' in Avengers.

Recycling Bin 38 - We Have Met the Enemy (Mar 2001)
The physical manifestation of the Struggle with Self may serve as a cathartic storytelling tool and a means to gain insight into characters, but it also covers the same storytelling ground over...and over...and over.

Recycling Bin 37 - Casting the Gauntlet: Action Comics and The Authority (Feb 2001)
Action Comics recently took an unusual approach to derivative comics in a piece that imitated not as tribute or well-mannered satire but deliberate malice for the ethos that underlay another piece by the same publisher: The Authority.

Recycling Bin 36 - Independents and the Mainstream Umbilicus (Feb 2001)
The independent comic, at least in theory, serves as a venue to explore the new rather than rehash the old, in spite of the recurring temptation to treat the familiar.

Recycling Bin 35 - The Martian and the Chocolate Monkey (Feb 2001)
DC Comics managed to strip the last remaining scrap of dignity from the Incredible Hulk concept by connecting it to Martians and double-stuf cookies.

Recycling Bin 34 - Capes, Masks, and Perdition (Feb 2001)
Do comics writers reuse ideas - particularly the notion of the superhero trapped in hell - to give the reader a little taste of hell beforehand?

Recycling Bin 33 - Meeting of the Swamp Critturs (Jan 2001)
Occasionally derivative material attempts to attach the reverence for a departed talent to a personal cause, as when Alan Moore turned the cast of Pogo into a morality play about vegetarianism in Swamp Thing.

Recycling Bin 32 - Exceptional Recycling in Legion Stories (Jan 2001)
The youth-oriented branches of the Superman franchise often saw fit to attempt the occasional act of self-pilferage, sometimes lifting whole sequences from earlier stories.

Columns from 2000

Recycling Bin 31 - Universe X, Eschatology, and the Messianic Vision (Dec 2000)
Comics sometimes use recycled material in order to provide depth and scope, as in the case of Alex Ross' touching on Biblical eschatology in Universe X.

Recycling Bin 30 - Ultra Boy, Old Testament Superhero (Nov 2000)
Sometimes when comics decide to recycle preowned stories, they pilfer from places in plain sight, as evidenced by Ultra Boy's Biblical origins.

Recycling Bin 29 - The Convoluted Lineage of Gladiator (Sep 2000)
In a medium in which ersatz Supermen abound, one derivative character outdoes them all by owing to Superman twice, and twice more to Superman/Superboy copies.

Columns from 2000

Recycling Bin 28 - Ragging on Roddenberry (Aug 2000)
Comics provide a venue for a number of guilty pleasures, including such out-of-context satire as Peter David's take on Star Trek in late Dreadstar comics.

Recycling Bin 27 - Crossing the Line with Big Bang Comics (Jul 2000)
At some point, tribute moves beyond into simple iteration of what went before; has Big Bang Comics crossed this line?

Recycling Bin 26 - Copping the Image Style (Jul 2000)
Once upon a time, the Big Two began an abortive experiment in remodeling themselves after Image Comics; in the end, however, they turned against the style they once sought to emulate.

Recycling Bin 25 - Agent: America and Litigation (Jul 2000)
Sometimes recycling the competition does more than evoke nostalgia - as Rob Liefeld discovered, it can land you in court.

Recycling Bin 24 - Self-Cannibalism (Jul 2000)
The ethics of borrowed concepts becomes unclear when considering the issue of creators who cannibalize their own creations.

Recycling Bin 23 - The Remaking of Luthor (Jul 2000)
When John Byrne refurbished the Superman franchise in the 1980s, did he do some of his work with pre-owned components?

Recycling Bin 22 - Ur-Avengers in The Authority (June 2000)
Millar and Quitely run a stake through the heart of the Lee-Kirby Avengers in a recent issue of The Authority.

Recycling Bin 21 - Kingdom Come and Squadron Supreme (June 2000)
Although both stories move along similar tracks - perhaps too similar - Kindom Come and Squadron Supreme take very different approaches to a common plot.

Recycling Bin 20 - Echoes of Neal Adams (June 2000)
Neal Adams had an impact on comics that left a trail of imitative material in comics of the years after he moved beyond the mainstream publishers.

Recycling Bin 19 - Cap'n Strong (May 2000)
Within the pages of Action Comics, Cary Bates once explored a figure ancestral to the comic book superhero, recast for DC in the form of Cap'n Strong.

Recycling Bin 18 - Absolving the Tick (Apr 2000)
Do claims about the Tick owing his creation to a borrowing of Don Simpson's Megaton Man hold water?

Recycling Bin 17 - Superhero Families (Apr 2000)
As demonstrated by numerous mainstream superhero franchises, something about particular heroes frequently invites creators to spawn single characters into derivative super-powered families.

Recycling Bin 16 - Alan Moore, Hall of Famer (Apr 2000)
Borrowing material frequently implicates the exhaustion of imagination, but for Alan Moore it simply provides a starting point to take iconic concepts and characters to the fulfillment of their potential.

Recycling Bin 15 - The Passion of Adam Warlock (Feb 2000)
Comics frequently borrows themes from itself and other forms of literature; but seldom do we see appropriation so blatant as Marvel's attempt to lift the Passion cycle from the Gospels and graft it onto Adam Warlock.

Recycling Bin 14 - Giffen's Mr. Nebula (Jan 2000)
Mr. Nebula, cosmic interior decorator, showed the folly of Marvel Comics' overuse of its character Galactus in another wicked parody Keith Giffen pulled back in his Justice League days.

Columns from 1999

Recycling Bin 13 - Marvel, Mar-Vell, and Genis (Dec 1999)
Marvel Comics once again attempts to sell the adventures of its eponymous superhero, carrying on the name of a Golden Age icon.

Recycling Bin 12 - Reign of the Elvises (Apr 1999)
Keith Giffen either pays tribute to or puts away DC's Reign of the Supermen.

Recycling Bin 11 - Wolverine's Prototype (Mar 1999)
Marvel's Wolverine may owe his most interesting features to a renovated Golden Age superhero made legend by the efforts of Walt Simonson and Archie Goodwin.

Recycling Bin 10 - Recycling Plastic (Mar 1999)
Plastic Man may not enjoy a following adequate to support his own title, but his classic stature appears in the number of imitations and duplicates that later superhero comics would spawn.

Recycling Bin 09 - The First Corps (Mar 1999)
The Silver Age produced the Green Lantern Corps, a comics concept that reflected DC talent's addiction to classic science fiction of the 1940s.

Recycling Bin 08 - Speedster Pogrom (Mar 1999)
DC Comics seems intent upon milking the death of its speedsters, and milking again, and again, and again.

Recycling Bin 07 - Vengeance Is Redundant (Mar 1999)
Before him and after him, other characters would echo the same concepts as Conway and Romita's Punisher, a character that became more insipid with each generation of duplication.

Recycling Bin 06 - Blended Universes (May 1999)
In the age of the intramural and extramural megacrossover event, the blending of universes has become one of the preferred crises to rationalize the meeting of superheroes.

Recycling Bin 05 - Miraculous Births (Mar 1999)
Superhero comics sometimes don't know what to do with second-string heroines, and all too often they show the exhaustion of their imaginations by involving these characters in ludicrous miraculous pregnancies.

Recycling Bin 04 - Fake Kirby (Feb 1999)
The degree to which the work of the late Jack Kirby inspires imitation attests to his mastery of the medium and his seminal role inspiring other talent to excellence.

Recycling Bin 03 - Too Many Clones (Feb 1999)
While many stories in comics drift into disposability by misuse of the concept of cloning, the Reign of the Superman positively teemed with replicants, duplicates, and genetic experiments.

Recycling Bin 02 - Recycling the Competition (Feb 1999)
Superhero comics often find fertile ground in reinterpreting the properties of the boys across the street.

Columns from 1998

Recycling Bin 01 - Evil Future Selves (1998)
Comics shows a startling willingness to unselfconsciously revisit its cliches, as demonstrated by its reuse of the Evil Future Self.

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