Every week, we list our recommendations of new music, books, comics, movies and TV to check out. This is Recs in Effect:

New Book

Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human by Grant Morrison

Grant Morrison is the man of theory that people like to put up when defending comics. A man interested in investigating, deconstructing, destroying, reinventing and adhering to the fundemental aspects of storytelling and comic books, Morrison can be the Tarantino of comics when he works. He can also be the Spike Lee, an artist with so much to say that he tries to say it all at once, creating whiplash inducing tonal shifts that make it easy to lose focus. In either case, Morrison appears to approach comics as a medium in a very solemn way, respecting all that has come before him, while trying to just finding the constant vein of having fun and creating the impossible that he relishes so. A book by him on the medium, including meditations on Superman and X-Men, the two franchises that he completely rejuvenated, is a must grab for anyone that is interested in media studies, literary theory and where Batman gets those wonderful toys.

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Via She Walks SoftlyIt's been said that heroes are only as good as their villains. In order to have an interesting hero, he or she must face an interesting and truly threatening adversary. In genre fiction, this is usually done by one of two ways. Either having the villain be a threat so large that it seems unlikely anyone can stop it. Or else have the threat be of a complimentary nature, the flip side of the coin of the hero (dark vs. light, etc.). In either case, when the villain reveals his or her potential for destruction and true horror, it makes the heroes seem even mightier and their (inevitable victories) that much sweeter.

Unfortunately, that doesn't always work out. This can be especially true when the budget limitations of films are coupled with the imagination limitations of most film producers. Toss in the need to adhere to certain formulas (or to create another line of toys), and suddenly you have an impotent villain who is not the definition of threatening but instead the definition of wasted potential. These are the top 5 worst offenders, the supervillains who seemed cool but were just...just awful.

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There's a recent spate of books being culled from blogs where an author can reach a wider audience while preserving their voice.  Of course, the intimacy and accessibility that comes from a free blog found by fans on the net is sacrificed for the sake of monetary compensation and greater exposure.  But the fans will continue to follow the artist as long as that artist doesn't change his voice or whatever ineffable qualities he exhibited that attracted people to him in the first place.  But is it worth paying money just to get something that's mostly free online?  True, many authors add some previously unreleased material - but that usually doesn't count for the majority of the text.

Enter Brian Cronin's Was Superman a Spy? from Penguin Books.  Based on Cronin's column "Comic Book Legends Revealed" that he writes for the Comics Should Be Good Blog at Comic Book Resources, the book is an examination of the comic book industry - with particular interest in superheroes, the business aspect of comic books and the cultural impact that they've had since World War II.  Cronin uses some key characters from the "Big Two" comic companies (DC & Marvel) to act as a gateway into the evolution of the medium and the industry, and examines the various changes and interesting anecdotes that have befallen them over the years.  In particular focus are Superman, Batman, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, Captain America, X-Men, The Incredible Hulk and Walt Disney comics.  There are extenuating chapters on bits of comic book arcana covering other characters, with interesting and curious stories of particular creators or characters.

I tend to think of myself as a person fairly well versed in comic book lore, who knows a lot of the storied history of these iconic characters - their fictional origins as well as the inspirations their creators drew on to give birth to these figures of the new mythology.  Even with that snobbish background, this book is incredibly accessible and packs a lot of information into a sparse few chapters. 

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