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Profiles 51 - The Popeye Formula (Dec 2001)
Somehow, from an obscure role as a supporting character in 'Thimble Theater,' Popeye came to take over the feature and become a popular-culture icon.

Profiles 50 - The Nick Fury Formula (Dec 2001)
Comics frequently succeed or fail, both aesthetically and commercially, on the merits of the formula by which they define a concept; and the Nick Fury formula worked on a combination of technology, superheroic intrigue, and Kirby-era loudness.

Profiles 49 - Comics beyond Genre (Dec 2001)
Not all that matters in comics occurs within the borders of established genre definitions; for as comics mature, rules provide a starting place rather than a destination.

Profiles 48 - Educational Comics (Dec 2001)
We might consider as one of the tragedies of the form the lack of aesthetic credibility that attends the educational comic, an approach to comics that potentially could address the significant weaknesses of the remainder of the medium.

Profiles 47 - Adventure Comics (Dec 2001)
The adventure strip once provided the face of comics to the greater culture, and still resonates in places in the modern comic book.

Columns from 2001

Profiles 46 - Funny Animal Comics (Oct 2001)
The funny animal genre, in spite of its marginal place in the contemporary comics market, may offer opportunities that transcend genre as we know it.

Profiles 45 - Underground Comics (Jun 2001)
Of many genres of comics to develop, sometimes spontaneously, over the decades of history of the medium, the undergrounds tried hardest to provide something different from the fare of mainstream publishers.

Profiles 44 - Crime Comics (Jun 2001)
Though mostly an artifact of the period between the end of the Second World War and the beginnings of the Silver Age of Comics, the crime comics left an imprint on modern material, and on the history of the form.

Profiles 43 - War Comics (Mar 2001)
The war comic, with its ability to provide exotic or mundane settings, variegated ethical problems, and deeds on a scale of individual human beings or of whole nations, once enjoyed a robust and tenured place among mainstream comics.

Profiles 42 - Humor Books (Feb 2001)
Once upon a time, the humor comic occupied a respectable and significant piece of the comics market, encouraging the flowering of talents and skills difficult to market today.

Profiles 41 - Romance Comics (Jan 2001)
Changing times and an increasingly monolithic superhero monoculture combined to bring to an end the romance comic, after more than two decades of the survival of that form.

Profiles 40 - Western Comics (Jan 2001)
The western comic represented a rare instance of an independent genre forging its way into the medium rather than a concept original to, and dependent on, comics.

Columns from 2000

Profiles 39 - Horror Comics (Nov 2000)
Horror comics, in the vitality of their youth, combined a kind of fatalistic moral payback with deliberate gut-punches to the sensibilities of readers, and, in the process, had them coming back for more.

Profiles 38 - Science Fiction Comics (Sep 2000)
From the EC Revolution until the close of the Silver Age, science fiction comics explored the Grand, Wild Notion.

Profiles 37 - Monster Comics (Aug 2000)
Once upon a time, in the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, one found many fewer superheroes and the odd and short-lived monster book form.

Profiles 36 - Comics Go as Music Went (Aug 2000)
Some of the artistic forces shaping recent trends in comics reflect what happened to popular music decades ago.

Profiles 35 - Baiting the Censors (June 2000)
While perhaps tame by today's standards, after almost fifty years of subsequent dulling of practiced moral outrage, the Mad Comics of the fifties worked hard to push the buttons that would get censorial blood boiling.

Profiles 34 - Behaviordelia Comics (May 2000)
An earlier generation saw - probably rightly - the potential of comics as an educational tool.

Profiles 33 - Disposing of Comics (Apr 2000)
What can you do with those moldering heaps of comics once the thrill of that old-paper smell buzz wears off?

Profiles 32 - Revisionist Costuming, Done Wrong and Done Right (Apr 2000)
Superheroes created after-the-fact to appear in Golden Age-styled stories frequently abandon their credibility to flaws in their least important components: their costumes.

Profiles 31 - Comics Gimmicks through the Decades (Mar 2000)
Comics historians may remember the 1990s as the Age of Gimmicks, but gimmicks have a venerable history in the comics medium.

Note that columns 24-30 explore a theme developed in common with a parallel study on Juzda's Just Another Comics Page (see here for another treatment of the same topic, with some common conclusions and some notable differences).

Profiles 30 - The Superhero as Avatar VII: Cable (Feb 2000)
When cultural historians of the future consider what superheroes best personified the 1990s, we can expect Cable to appear at the top of the list.

Profiles 29 - The Superhero as Avatar IV: Reuben Flagg (Feb 2000)
Though we tend to think of the eighties as the age of the pessimistic and noir-ish comic book, Reuben Flagg reflects an equally legitimate strain of the comics of the period and feels like he belongs in the era that produced him.

Profiles 28 - The Superhero as Avatar V: Luke Cage (Feb 2000)
The era that produced Marvel's Power Man so clings to him that wherever he travels, there also travel the seventies.

Profiles 27 - The Superhero as Avatar IV: Spider-Man (Feb 2000)
Marvel's reinvention of the superhero in the 1960s saw no better expression than the character Spider-Man.

Profiles 26 - The Superhero as Avatar III: Fighting American (Feb 2000)
The Fighting American combined a number of fifties themes, including anticommunism and the fact that his book got the axe.

Profiles 25 - The Superhero as Avatar II: Superman (Feb 2000)
Though born into the superhero comics of the 1930s, Superman would father the explosion of highly diverse, yet derivative, costumed superheroes of the 1940s.

Profiles 24 - The Superhero as Avatar I: Batman (Feb 2000)
Of the conceptually complete superheroes spawned by the 1930s - figures who had the look and played the complete game - Batman best defines the period in which he first came to print.

Profiles 23 - Comics Chat Rooms (Feb 2000)
If you think that folks enter a comics chat room solely to discuss comics, you haven't seen the whole picture.

Profiles 22 - Things To Do on a Comics Message Board (Feb 2000)
Comics message boards host a variety of activities, some of which actually relate to comics.

Profiles 21 - Silver Age Animals in Spandex (Feb 2000)
Few things reek of abandoned experiments of the Silver Age of Comics more than the notion of super-pets in costume.

Profiles 20 - Bad Costumes of the 1960s (Feb 2000)
The heady experimentation of the sixties, in the days when professionals sought to reinvent superhero comics for a new generation, gave rise to costumes that could have frightened new readers into more conventional literary pursuits.

Profiles 19 - Bad Costumes of the Seventies (Jan 2000)
The sometimes-lame superhero costumes of the 1970s showed that the spark of inspiration that drove the Silver Age of Comics had begun to wane. With the workable prototypes all already adorning the shoulders of established superheroes, new designs had to cater to (dated) fads or resort to strange experimentation.

Profiles 18 - Bad Costumes of the Nineties (Jan 2000)
The 1990s saw a rare crop of bad costumes, driven partially by the excesses of the New Comics and partly by the trashy tastes of artists (and some readers). View some samples from the era of killers in epaulets and tarts in thongs.

Columns from 1999

Profiles 17 - Bad Costumes of the Eighties (Dec 1999)
The 1980s produced a precious crop of truly dreadful superhero costumes.

Profiles 16 - Adventures in Retro (Nov 1999)
Comics at the end of the second millennium seem inclined to rediscover themselves through tribute to the comics of the 1960s.

Profiles 15 - Absent without Leave (Nov 1999)
Superhero comics in the Silver Age dealt in a number of ways with the reintroduction of long-absent Golden Age superheroes.

Profiles 14 - Faces of Cheesecake I: The Nimbo (Nov 1999)
At the end of the 1970s, comics introduced a new and recognizeable cliche: the Nimbo.

Profiles 13 - Black Proteges (Apr 1999)
Superhero comics seem inclined consistently to introduce, and consistently to mistreat, Black protege superheroes.

Profiles 12 - Weird Fandom Pages (Mar 1999)
Strange comics fandom gives comics readers a sometimes-deserved reputation for weirdness and even dementia.

Profiles 11 - Where the New Comics Blew It (Mar 1999)
The New Comics began with all the advantages and still failed to deliver.

Profiles 10 - Ends of the Silver Age (Mar 1999)
What defined the beginning and the end of the legendary period of superhero comics called the Silver Age?

Profiles 09 - The Imaginary Story (Mar 1999)
Recent and older comics recognized the potential of a number of forms of the imaginary tale.

Profiles 08 - The Superhero Cartoon (Mar 1999)
But for a recent upturn owing to the likes if Timm and Pini, the superhero cartoon enjoys a long history of missing the mark.

Profiles 07 - The Age of Team-up Books (Mar 1999)
The Silver Age and its aftermath supported a variety of entertaining superhero team-up comics.

Profiles 06 - Unnecessary Vices of the Silver Age (Feb 1999)
Some of the conventions of Silver Age comics represented annoying and ludicrous excesses - see several special ones here.

Profiles 05 - Superman and Virus X (Feb 1999)
A classic Silver Age Superman story held just the right mix of details to shock the most steadfast three-year-old.

Profiles 04 - The Faces of Luthor (February 1999)
Superman's nemesis, Lex Luthor, has gone through a series of transformations since the early forties to the present day.

Columns from 1998

Profiles 03 - The Coolest Bad Seventies Character (1998)
One bad seventies character had everything over a broad field of dated competitors: Razorback!

Profiles 02 - The Best Luke Cage Story (1998)
One Power Man story from the eighties showed the potential inherent in the Luke Cage character.

Profiles 01 - Giant-Man Costume Gallery (1998)
Henry Pym has served as a one-man fashion show through his menagerie of Giant-Man costumes.

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