Black X’s chief is wondering about all the corpses in their cells.
Smash Comics #9
E.M. Arnold (April, 1940)
I’ve been making a proper list of comics to avoid and which to keep reading. This so far has been good reading so I can pop it up on my “read” list, which is nice. Anthologies means you never know what you’re going to get or if it will be worth it. Imagine buying the comics at the 2026 equivalent of $2.39…wait, given what comics go for right now that would still be better. Still, pretend you’re a kid because they still made comics for kids, or you just want something for the train ride home or the dentist waiting area. The Great Depression is over but the fallout hasn’t quite cleared out and now you’re in a war where everything is precious.
You want something that is going to give you enough entertainment, and serialized storytelling in comics are limited while shared universes are nonexistent. You want your anthology to be more good stories than bad or you just waisted perfectly good money that could have gone to something more important. Let’s see if it was worth it this issue as well.
BW Media Spotlight 
[VIDEO] The James Gunn Superman Cataclysm
You can be a James Gunn fan. You can like James Gunn’s Superman By James Gunn. I’m not stopping you, but from everything I’ve heard, be it official promotion to painstakingly deep dive reviews like the one below, I will not be joining you. I knew going into Man Of Steel that it was going to be a lousy adaptation of Superman, but between this site and getting access to the special Walmart early screening I couldn’t pass the opportunity up. I still maintain it was a decent superhero movie but as terrible a Superman story as I was expecting. Any enjoyment I had came from the low expectations being worse than the movie, not the movie being good. It still maintained Zack Snyder’s misunderstanding of superheroes, but divorced from the source material it wasn’t terrible.
I’m not hearing that out of Gunn’s movie. Terrible motivations, unnecessary side taking in real world events the film clearly has no understanding about, and a twist on Superman’s parents Gunn swears is accurate and a good story moment that is so bad fans have actually done a head retcon because it so breaks their character even more than Snyder’s, if that’s possible. So just as Snyder’s continued defenses of his Superman makes me MORE negative to his movie rather than less, Gunn’s take stopped me from wanting to see it altogether.
The following video goes over every bad decision, comparing it to better attempts at the same ideas in other superhero movies. If you only watch from 3:26 on you’ll see comparisons to The Incredibles, the good period of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and even the Richard Donner movie, so if nothing else I encourage watching that. Yes, the video is four hours long (not the longest video I’ve posted to this site, right Doctor Who fans?), so no commentary from me other than there’s one aspect of Lex’s lack of character I plan to make a whole other article about. The video comes from The Little Platoon on YouTube, and even if you watch it in pieces, it is very worth watching as he takes on the movies, the defenders, and the critiques of James Gunn’s treatment of Superman and the DC Universe.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on September 17, 2026 in DC Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, DC Gunnverse, DC Studios, James Gunn's Superman, movie review, The Little Platoon.
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