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postmordor.bsky.social
Post Mordor
@postmordor.bsky.social
160 followers 97 following 540 posts
He/Him. Comics fanatic, and archiving enthusiast. Pfp is Scrounge from Transformers.

Fan of IDW Transformers? Check out Revisitation: https://thesolarpool.weebly.com/revisitation
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postmordor.bsky.social
This scene is even funnier when you read the comic itself. Bill Mantlo perfectly captures the spirit of Silver Age melodrama madness.
A full page from ROM: Spaceknight #15. ROM the Spaceknight crashes the wedding ceremony of Brandy and Steve because the latter is a hidden Dire Wraith. Story by Bill Mantlo, art by Sal Buscema.
November 9, 2025 at 11:14 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
I find it really amusing that in the first issue of Amazing Spider-Man, Peter struggles to find a job so he can make money, and meanwhile the page right after is full of ads promoting real-life job opportunities. These facsimile editions reveal some fascinating and unintentionally funny stuff.
A double-paged view of the very first Amazing Spider-Man comic from 1963. On the left side, Peter is struggling to find a job to make ends meet. On the right side is a page full of advertisements promoting job opportunities to the comic's readers.
November 8, 2025 at 1:57 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Aside:

I've been thinking a lot about how, in light of the uselessness of the UN with its hollow cries of condemnation without action, I'm reminded of a brilliant piece by Charles Fredrick Alford about Natural Law, and how the authority of human rights isn't universal.
godblog.org/two-stories-...
What if someone rejects the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? We were talking about the foundations of morality in one of my classes, and several students mentioned the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. I figured I had better go take a serious look at it. The Declaration was adopted in 1948, shortly after the Second World War, shortly after the Holocaust. It says what one might expect: Article 1: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person. Article 18: Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. And it goes on, a total of 30 articles, all about like these. I found myself in almost complete agreement with the UN Declaration, but then I started wondering. What if someone simply said: “No, some humans are superior to others, some people deserve to be tortured, and freedom of thought and expression are too dangerous to be left to anyone but an elite few.” What would I, what would anyone say to this person? The UN Declaration offers absolutely no help here. It asserts these rights, but it offers not a single argument for them, unlike the United States Declaration of Independence, which refers to “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” which maintain that “all men are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” Still, even about the U.S. Declaration one wonders what one might say to someone who replies “No they’re not; there’s no Creator and no rights, just power.”
November 7, 2025 at 6:29 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Still the gayest Optimus x Megatron moment.
Megatron: This is how I like it. Despite the long-range weaponry at my disposal... I prefer things up close. They say the moment of another's passing... holds the secrets of life itself!
October 19, 2025 at 9:58 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
The difference between the heightened senses of Daredevil and Wolverine (and a few others). From Daredevil Annual #5, 1989.
Splash page with several Marvel characters in comparison to Daredevil to explain the different ways each character's heightened senses work. Featuring Daredevil, Stick, Mole Man, Wolverine, Sabretooth, Puma, Heimdall, and The Watcher.
October 19, 2025 at 8:33 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Oh my God, somehow until today I never knew that Mark Bright, the artist who did this story, also did the iconic painted Shockwave cover for Marvel Transformers #5!
The iconic painted cover for issue 5 of the original Marvel Comics Transformers series, featuring the Decepticon Shockwave.
October 18, 2025 at 4:33 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Unintentional or not, Christopher Priest follows Byrne's description of Logan perfectly in Spider-Man vs. Wolverine.
Wolverine: They added the claws when they "fixed" my skeleton. That hurt, too. I'm a guy who's been thoroughly messed over by the "human" race. You won't find me crying in my soup, though. I am what I am. I LIKE what I am. End of story.
October 18, 2025 at 3:40 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
John Byrne on Wolverine's personality. From The Comics Journal #53, page 21.
Since Chris Claremont didn't seem to cover it in his interview in the Journal #50, I thought I'd add my own voice to the matter of Wolverine's personality and motivations as discussed in Carol Kalish and Richard Howell's article in #49. First off, the incident of his cold-bloodedly killing the guard in the Savage Land was entirely my doing. It wasn't in the plot, and I fought tooth and claw with Chris to keep in the "snickt" sound effect in the offending panel. So far the vote seems about 50-50 as to whether I did the right thing, but, since many of the negative votes came from people whose opinions I respect (Len and Glynis Wein, for instance), I would like to take this opportunity to justify myself and Logan. For one thing, Wolverine is not a homicidal maniac who struggles to keep that side of his personality in check. He is a homicidal maniac, period. He likes killing. He enjoys disemboweling folk. That was established long before I even got on the book. But somehow, because of his gradual mellowing toward the other X-Men, this misconception of his struggle to stay in control has arisen. I would advise critics to check X-Men #96, page 22, panel 7. These are not the words of a man fighting with inner demons. These are the words of someone has confronted who and what he is, and likes what he sees.
October 18, 2025 at 3:25 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
“I was married, but I’m not married anymore. Women don’t like the vehicle.”
Spider-Man driving the Spidey-Mobile as he's being chased by the cops.
October 16, 2025 at 7:54 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Tolstoy, eerily everlasting.
All the nations of the so-called Christian world have been brought by patriotism to such a degree of bestialization that not only the men who are put to the necessity of killing or being killed wish for and rejoice at murder, but also the men who calmly live in their houses in Europe, who are not threatened by any one, thanks to the rapid and easy means of communication and to the press – all men in Europe and in America – during any war are in the position of spectators in a Roman circus, and just like them rejoice at the slaughter, and just as bloodthirstily cry, “Pollice verso!”
October 16, 2025 at 5:23 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
This comment really hits close to home for me. I'd love to one day start writing criticism or analysis of whatever art I experience but it's hard, and I think now I know why.
Transcript of a YouTube comment for a video about why unopinionated artists are boring: Born in 1999, I've observed that younger members of Generation Z, those who grew up fully immersed in the internet, often exhibit heightened anxiety and risk aversion. Their social interactions and self-expression are heavily shaped by online platforms, where much of life becomes a kind of performance. As a result, emotions like love and hate, which naturally require depth and personal investment, now seem increasingly detached. It feels as though many people no longer truly understand why they like or dislike something. They're simply reacting to the prevailing online narrative. This goes for more "underground" scenes as well.
October 12, 2025 at 10:07 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Now reading: Calvin and Hobbes
Calvin and Hobbes play around with a water balloon. Calvin starts by explaining the rules: each time they toss the balloon they must take a step back until the balloon bursts. Hobbes tosses first to Calvin, and as Hobbes takes a step back Calvin immediately throws the balloon at his face and soaks him in water. Hobbes retaliates by soaking Calvin in a water barrel.
October 11, 2025 at 1:44 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
5 million... that's a lot of Spider-Girl fans!
Excerpt from the letters column of Spider-Girl #61 (for context, the series was meant to be cancelled and end on issue #60 before fans wrote in an outpour of support): Hello, hello, hello, As your newly appointed editor, it is my pleasure to respond to your letters. Unfortunately, due to the news of our girl's cancellation, the five million people who wrote in were sooooooo enraged and sooooooo passionate that 99% of them forgot to mark their letters “okay to print.” This leaves me with very few letters that I can run. So, in the future, everyone be sure to mark all the letters you write to Marvel with a resounding “okay to print” somewhere in the heading or the body of the letter.
September 29, 2025 at 12:00 AM
postmordor.bsky.social
Gary Groth, in this interview from Sequential Tart, on why it's pointless to “reform” mainstream comic publishers like Marvel or DC from the inside.
www.sequentialtart.com/archive/feb0...
Excerpt from an interview with comic book publicher and critic Gary Groth, from the Sequential Tart website: Sequential Tart: You wake up one morning and discover you're not the head of a small but highly respected company ‘ you're the president of Marvel Comics. What do you do? Gary Groth: Commit suicide? That's a funny question, but the interesting reductio absurdem, I think, is that neither I nor anyone else, irrespective of our good intentions, could do anything salutary in that position. You can't turn the clock back; you have stockholders whose profits must be your highest priority; you have a dwindling, middle-aged fanboy customer base; you have a megalomaniacal celebrity professional base who must be continually pampered, which is increasingly hard to do in a penny ante business And so on. It's hopeless, really. Anyone who thinks he can subvert this corporate behemoth from the inside and turn out good kids' comics is deluding himself. All we can do is watch it sink.
September 22, 2025 at 1:40 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Well this is news to me. Apparently Stan Lee wanted Steve Ditko to create Spider-Girl shortly after they created Spider-Man, and of course long before the Tom DeFalco version arrived.

I wonder what a Ditko Spider-Girl would be like?
popculturesquad.com/2019/03/16/s...
“[Steve] Ditko said [Stan] Lee wanted a Spider-Girl after just a few issues. He had no long-term vision for Spider-Man. He never thought about what he would do with the characters from one issue to the next. He’d just say, “Let’s make Attuma the villain,” and Ditko said he would have to talk him out of it. Ditko said he started doing the plots all by himself “around issue 18 or so.” At around that same point, he said Lee stopped talking to him, so he plotted the remaining issues in his Spider-Man run with no input from Lee.”
August 30, 2025 at 10:36 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Paul Jenkins has always been an expert in making me emotional for Marvel characters. Mythos: Ghost Rider is one such example. It distills the classic origin story by Gary Friedrich to focus more on Johnny Blaze's sad background and state of mind. It is ultimately a meditation on The Problem of Evil.
The front cover of Mythos: Ghost Rider, showing a flaming skeleton (Ghost Rider) in a biker suit driving a motorcycle. Story by Paul Jenkins, and cover art by Paolo Rivera. Snippet of Mythos: Ghost Rider by Paul Jenkins (story) and Paolo Rivera (art). Transcript: “It was fun. For about five minutes. Life, I mean. The first five minutes were fun. After that it got to be a lot of meaningless days wrapped around a bunch of tragedies.” “So this is me: Johnny Blaze. Waiting out the meaningless, empty days until the next tragedy. An accident waiting to happen.” “And the answer is ‘I don't know.’ Where I'm going, or why. That's up to The Devil to decide. The days will be meaningless and empty. Merely the gaps in between. At night I will ride. Like a bat out of Hell into darkness. Knowing what I've known all along: that it's God who creates all of our tragedies. But it's The Devil who makes us care.”
August 30, 2025 at 9:48 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Kinda sucks that there's no ideal way to read the older Golden Age or Silver Age Hawkman tales digitally, unless resorting to those terrible low-quality scans from piracy sites. Bizarrely both DC Universe Infinite and Kindle/Comixology are missing issue 35 of The Brave and the Bold.
Screenshot of the Amazon Kindle page for The Brave and the Bold series from DC Comics, listing every available individual issues. The first 24 issues and issue 35 is missing from this list. Screenshot of the DC Universe Infinite page for The Brave and the Bold series from DC Comics, listing every available individual issues. The first 24 issues and issue 35 is missing from this list.
August 30, 2025 at 4:48 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Picked up Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor from the Comixology sale and it was surprisingly good! I never read that many Superman comics but I decided to start reading more material recently and well...you can't go wrong with a duo like Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch.
Clark Kent a.k.a. Superman and Lex Luthor in a final flashback scene set on their hometown of Smallville. From Superman: The Last Days of Lex Luthor by Mark Waid and Bryan Hitch.
August 29, 2025 at 11:37 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Been really excited this morning after learning that the final issues of the original Johnny Blaze Ghost Rider volume are being collected for Marvel Masterworks. This was the creative high point of the character, and had it not been tragically cancelled it could've been one of the all-time greats.
Cover for Marvel Masterworks: Ghost Rider, Volume 7, with credits to J.M. DeMatteis and Bob Budiansky.
August 29, 2025 at 2:54 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
It reminds me of “The Demon Downcast” by Mikhail Vrubel. It's a similar portrayal of the fallen angel archetype, but instead of Satan/Lucifer it's based on a nameless demon from a Mikhail Lermontov poem about a poor fallen angel and his tragic love of a princess.
“The Demon Downcast” by Mikhail Vrubel.
August 24, 2025 at 3:09 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Gene Philips' essay “Death Comes for the Arachnid” from The Comics Journal #52 examines the way character deaths were handled in the early days of The Amazing Spider-Man comics, and how Gerry Conway undermined the heavy and careful role it played in the series by making it wanton and pointless.
Spider-Man was a harbinger of death. Stan Lee lost much of the Spider-Man concept after Ditko's departure, but to his credit as a craftsman, he always retained at least a superficial sense that death had profound ramications. Not so Gerry Conway. Though the idea of killing Gwen Stacy came from Thomas and Lee, the execution was Conway's; sponging off secondhand avant-garde attitudes in “New Wave” science fiction, Conway wanted to portray death as disjointed, brutal, and pointless. Someone like Barry Malzberg might make this part of a holistic vision, but for Conway, it was only an excuse not to contemplate the individuality of the doomed one. Stan Lee, if only for dramatic effect, at least killed off even villains with a sense of who they were, what they had been — the Crime Master shooting it out with the police, Silverman consumed by his own obsession with youth. Gerry Conway threw Gwen Stacy off a bridge and impaled the Green Goblin with his own glider.
August 14, 2025 at 2:36 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Today's Sunday reading is a fascinating interview with Harold Bloom. I gotta wonder what the scholarly consensus about that last part is.
romantic-circles.org/sites/defaul...
Relevant passage from Harold Bloom: [...] But I wanted to make clear in the book that there is no such thing as a Judeo-Christian tradition. That is absolutely ridiculous. And fascinatingly enough there are two things that I've said throughout my life when I've addressed Jewish audiences, say at the Jewish Theological Seminary or such places, and they always get furious at me. But they're both true. One is that nowhere in the whole of the Tanakh does it say that a whole people can make themselves holy through study of texts. That's a purely Platonic idea, and comes out of Plato's Laws. That simply shows how thoroughly Platonized the rabbis of the second century were. The other one, which I say in this book and it has already given some offense, is that in fact not only is Judaism, which is a product of the second century of the common era—and it's worked out by people like you know Akiba and his friends and opponents like Ishmael and Tarphon and the others, is a younger religion than Christianity is. Christianity in some form exists in the first century of the common era. What we now call Judaism comes along in the second century of the common era. Christianity is actually the older religion, though it infuriates Jews when you say that to them.
July 27, 2025 at 8:19 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
It might be a stretch on my part, but I just can't shake off the feeling that Jason Aaron secretly wrote a First Nations-coded Wolverine. I like the idea, although the stereotypical heavy drinker/smoker and “noble savage” aspects present in the character might make that a horrible idea in execution.
Mystique chastises Wolverine after he hunts her down for betraying the X-Men, referring to him as a “Reservation Indian” for staying along with the team in what she claims is a last shot at redemption for his horrible past. From Wolverine Volume 3 (2003-2009) issue 75. Story by Jason Aaron, art by Ron Garney, colors by Jason Keith, letters by Aubrey Sitterson and Cory Petit. A double-page spread from Wolverine Volume 3 (2003-2009) issue 74, titled ”A Mile In My Moccasins“, which is apparently a common proverb in Native American groups. Pictured is Spider-Man sitting beside a disgruntled Logan at a bar. Story by Jason Aaron, pencil art by Adam Kubert, inks by Mark Farmer, colors by Edgar Delgato, Morry Hollowell, & Paul Mounts, letters by Cory Petit. A page from Astonishing Spider-Man & Wolverine #6, showing Logan/Wolverine and Peter Parker/Spider-Man shaking hands and becoming blood brothers, surrounded by a camp of indigenous folks with tipis in the background. Logan has put on a Native American headdress/bonnet. Story by Jason Aaron, pencil art by Adam Kubert, inks by Mark Roslan, colors by Justin Ponsor, and letters by Rob Steen.
July 26, 2025 at 8:15 PM
postmordor.bsky.social
Tim Truman on how he developed Hawkworld, from an interview by Gary Groth in The Comics Journal #144:
Partial transcript of an interview with comic book writer and artist Timothy Truman by Gary Groth for The Comics Journal magazine (issue #144), revealing details behind the creation of Truman’s Hawkworld comic: Groth: How did you come to do Hawkworld? That must have been the first thing you did for DC, except for those backups at the Kubert School. Truman: I met Gardner Fox at a gaming convention back when I was still working at TSR. Gardner had been writing a few short stories for TSR’s magazines and he was their guest at the con. We started writing letters back and forth, and I asked Gardner if he was interested in working on a fantasy Hawkman with me. He said, “Great, I’ll work up the plot.” Unfortunately, I got involved with Scout and didn’t hear from him for a long time. About a year later, I started a letter to Gardner, saying, “Let’s brush off this Hawkman idea and see if DC likes it.” I waited a few days before mailing the letter and found out that Gardner had died the very night, the very hour, I had written it. The whole thing deeply affected me. I promised myself I’d do a Hawkman story and that I’d dedicate it to Gardner Fox. Sometime later, I mentioned that Hawkman idea to John Ostrander. I guess he told Mike Gold, and the next thing I knew, Gold was saying, “Hey, I’d like to see the story.”
July 24, 2025 at 12:59 AM
postmordor.bsky.social
(also, that Kingdom Come review is great. please read it. the final paragraph really hits home about what's wrong with american superhero comics)
“That is the legacy of Kingdom Come: the cosy pleasures of the familiar codified as the aesthetic apogee. Predictability has always been the underlying ethos behind superhero comics, but now it was overt scripture. The new overriding narrative became atavism, the conscious desire to return to the past, a desire that overwhelms any superhero comic that stops to linger on its own metatext. Superhero comics have become superhero comics about superhero comics, which are themselves stories about superhero comics in a fallen world. We are forever trying to return to the purity Hesiod's Golden Age, and we - like Socrates in The Republic - can't understand that heterogeneity is not merely a sign of weakness and inevitable torsion but an inevitability as well.”
July 12, 2025 at 10:25 PM