Questionable Taste: An Introduction

What's going on, everyone? Kiel Phegley here.

As Ben explained in his all too kind introduction, I make my beer money working as a "comic book journalist," which earns me endless amounts of high fives from my hometown friends and endless amounts of fretting over health insurance from my mother. I was a staff writer at Wizard Magazine for about three years, and I still write features for those fine gents as well as stories for Comic Book Resources, MTV's Splash Page blog and, of course, Marvel.com.

However, I've never really done a lot of comic book blogging independent of what's required for my regular gigs. Part of the reason for which has been a lack of time, but more so, I never really felt I had much to contribute to the comics blogosphere. By the time I came onto the comics internet scene, all the terrain had been mapped out pretty well. Still, in the months ahead, I'm going to be ignoring my better judgment and launching what I hope will be a slightly different kind of comics blog, so in the meantime I thought I'd take Ben up on his offer and contribute something here to warm up.

Now, like I said, there are already plenty of comics blogs out there offering every conceivable kinds of comics coverage imaginable way better than I could do it. The best of those sites look at comics and the comics marketplace with a smart critical eye, giving everything a more or less equal chance to succeed or fail by their own merits. The majority of them either spend their days praising comics they perceive to be good or snarkily tearing apart comics they perceive to be bad. Rather than jump on one side or the other out the gate, I thought I'd employ the not-so-original twist of praising comics which I perceive to be bad.

Welcome to "Questionable Taste," gang!

Over the next few weeks I'm going to be pulling some comics out of my long boxes with little to no artistic merit and which may often also offer very little base pop entertainment value. Still, I love these odd little mutant comic books in a way that isn't entirely driven by nostalgia like so many of our oddball comic loves, and by looking at their myriad flaws and failings, hopefully we'll find an interesting counterpoint to the "Writer X is a genius!" and "Book Y sucks balls!" debates that take up so much bandwidth.

In the next installment, we'll get the ball rolling in earnest with our first of a few entries on the Archie superhero characters collectively known as The Mighty Crusaders, but until then, here are some random panels from the books I'll be targeting as we go along...can you identify what these awesomely bad comics are?

















Whoever gets the most correct answers in the comments section, I'll send you a prize by U.S. Mail.