On Thursday, Bleeding Cool reported on the latest DC Comics defection of writer Joshua Hale Fialkov leaving two Green Lantern books before he started due to a surprise editorial plan to kill off John Stewart, one of the medium’s most definitive black characters.

Thanks to the immediate online reaction to the news, Bleeding Cool is now reporting that this plan has been scuttled. But why was it brought up in the first place?

[Cross the line]

To be a fan is to place oneself apart—or perhaps to be apart is to find a community of what enthuses you while the mainstream passes by. This is a model that forms a natural affinity between the outlying culture of comics and the outcast social status of queer identity. As both of those communities assume a central place in society while they retain their fringe perspective, it’s worth examining the unnoticed path they took and the widened futures it points to.

[It’s contemplatin’ time]

I know the old year is over and I have to accept it. But certain pop-culture concepts are timeless, and even consciously cross eras. Late in 2012 I surveyed some exceptional modern comics that would not continue past the new year; around the same time several period-piece or updated-classic comics were just getting to the end of their beginning, or being given promising new starts. These aren’t ones that got away, but we need to be thankful that they’re there.

[Step away from the calendar]

The Ruling Class is one of those movies you hear of all your life without seeing, adding to its aura as something you can’t quite believe actually happened at all. A 1972 satire of British class-war and religious delusion, it’s the kind of movie that soon after couldn’t have been made, and only more recently could have been again, with the 2000s’ relaxed ideological restrictions and heightened command of post-reality.

[One true path]

It’s the special sorcery of serial fiction that it can make you look forward desperately to the very point at which there will nothing left of it. Having enjoyed successive cliffhangers, you’re happy to be taken just short of the last ledge, while the story leaps into history and you’re left with a lifetime memory.

In periodical fiction, there’s a lot a lot to be said for succeeding in finishing your story—we all have our fave TV dramas that were cancelled before their natural conclusion and comics suspended with years of tales left to tell.

So it was that 2012 offered more than its share of comic series with finales well worth there being literally nothing more to look forward to.

[Only the Beginning]

The rivalry between master inventor Thomas Edison and visionary conceptual scientist Nikola Tesla runs through the Animal Engine Theater Company’s Age of the Android, and the mystery of what gears mesh or lock up in the clockwork of our lives, and what sparks of imagination leap free and which aspirations just fall into the void, are questions central to the play’s human drama.

[Just don’t click that blue link]

Some of the easiest cultural influences to trace are the hardest cultural artifacts to track down. I’d heard of Carnival of Souls most of my life, but didn’t see it until five days before Halloween, 2012. The first-time rewatch was staged in the fittingly phantasmal setting of the Lowe’s Jersey, a shadowy movie-cathedral from 1929 in somewhat better shape than the ghostly Victorian pavilion that Carnival’s heroine is drawn to. That once-merry shell is found in the middle of the Utah desert, and the movie had to cross a similar limbo to arrive in the graces of several generations of filmmakers and enthusiasts. 

[step right this way]

The bleak days of autumn are a time for both the wandering spirits of Halloween and related holidays, and the free-floating anxieties of election season. This vanishing-point of thrill and dread converges on the campaign trail and in Paul Cornell’s Saucer Country comic book from Vertigo (created with artist Ryan Kelly and in its first collection Nov. 21). A saga of modern UFO mythology and what it says about our minds, Saucer Country follows presidential candidate Arcadia Alvarado, who swears (in private) that she was abducted by aliens. It’s a charged campaign, where her own “alien” origins as a Hispanic American are at issue, and where distrust of government is embodied by a group of competing conspiracy theorists who either aim to undermine or aid her. It’s an epic of the elusive truths America envelops, and the enduring possibilities it represents. Soon after Cornell’s cross-country capsule had passed the half-year mark and a few days before America’s real-life election sent us down the next path of possible futures, I called him for a field report on what’s really going on in the metaphysical America….

[Look no further]

For the adrenaline-drunk super-professor known as The Plaid Avenger, knowledge is his power…though certainly not judgment, or moderation, or, y’know…power. Avatar of real-life Virginia Tech don John Boyer, the Avenger crosses the globe for a good cocktail and an empty thrill and leaves geographical literacy and political reasoning in his wake.

Created to convey a sense of global citizenship through humor and graphic immediacy, the star of illustrated textbooks, comics, and the blogozone infiltrates climate-change hotspots and spirit-squashing dictatorships clad in the garish prints and louder attitudes of a bygone kind of planet-trotting alpha-male secret agent, which throws into high contrast the need for more nuanced pursuit of a healthy world.

[Saved by the bell]

The past isn’t what it used to be, because nothing stays down anymore. The drab decline of 1970s dystopias—all whimper and no bang—has had a fruitful flashback in recent years, especially this one, as the idea of the future bleeding out rather than blowing up has hit home again in the dry-up of our economy and the dribble of our winding-down military diversions.

Looper has the look of Soylent Green’s vandalized, neglected New York (an extrapolation that was all too believable at the time that film was released), and the glaring, smudged outdoor cinematography and plastic gameshow glitz of the Hunger Games movie harkened back to the deep grimness and cheap gleam of the ’70s end-of-the-world as well.

[Nothing ever ends]

Everyone complains that today’s Hollywood-heavy comic conventions aren’t for comics fans anymore. But for me it’s just a question of how far they are from comics – and how far into other worlds comics can stretch.

Dirt Candy by Amanda Cohen (with Grady Hendrix and Ryan Dunlavey) is a graphic novel/cookbook that tells the story and shares the secret recipes of the (ahem) groundbreaking New York gourmet veg-centric restaurant. 

[Next course]

Science fiction has always wished for something to look forward to, and left unspoken its self-preserving anxiety about the future becoming now, of events advancing faster than you can speculate.

For writers like William Gibson and George Saunders, our high-speed century has produced the genre and fact of the real-time dystopia, in which they’ve decided that you can no longer keep ahead of the future, just try to keep pace with it.

In The Dark Knight Rises Jonathan Nolan was fighting the last class war, but in his CBS series Person of Interest, which rose again for its second season last month, the lens is sharply focused on the live feed of our unsuspecting domestic takeover.

[Uncover more]

October is a chilly season for science fiction. The sleek surfaces of spaceship chrome and bright glow of laser-blades don’t lend themselves to the shadows we crowd around at a time of year we celebrate the nostalgic darkness and lurking mysteries of a bygone age when we knew a lot less than we do now.

The secret satisfaction of the horror genre is that, while we have no idea what will happen next, we fear most that nothing ever will, and in horror, whether better or worse, the other boot comes down.

[The other boot]