comic books

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The Secret Lair of Dr. Strange, His Creators, and a Ghost of Christmas Past

All week, we’re bringing you a series of deep dives into the surprising histories of storied addresses. Back to our usual after the New Year.

A passerby casts a typical Dr. Strange magical spell.

A passerby casts a typical Dr. Strange magical spell.

If you walk past 177 Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and see a middle-aged guy in black clothes and a flowing red cape making a horn sign with both hands, watch out for the multi-dimensional mayhem about to be unleashed.

To us mere mortals, 177 Bleecker may be a stately Queen Anne-style apartment building that rises five stories above a busy Manhattan street. But in the Marvel universe, the building has long been the home of Dr. Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who’ll be played by Benedict Cumberbatch in a hotly anticipated film. Since Marvel introduced the master magician to the comic world in the 1960s, he has lived in his Sanctum Sanctorum at 177 Bleecker Street, and much of the universe-threatening action perpetrated by the forces of darkness against our unsuspecting world has taken place within these walls.
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3 Comic-Book-Inspired Dramatists Name Their Favorite Comics and Plays

Mining the Moon

Mining the Moon

Just in time for the opening night of the Comic Book Theater Festival tonight at The Brick in Williamsburg, we asked three writers to tell us about their three very different plays, and to name their favorite comic books and theatrical productions.

MATTHEW THURBER, “Mining the Moon”
June 8, 10, 21 and 26
The play: “It’s fantasy-based story about the president, who is a werewolf, and who has halted the spinning of the moon, so the moon’s always full and he can stay in power. He’s deposed, and with the help of his friend, who’s a talking horse, he tries to find his way back to the moon and to the source of his werewolf people. It’s very much a satire and a fantasy in a humorous way, about power and corruption and environmental themes. It’s a weird blend of puppet theater and kabuki theater.”
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Forget Thor and Pick Over Some Highbrow Comics This Weekend

While theater-goers watch a comic book-based movie about a Norse god who smashes things with a hammer this weekend, a different kind of comic book will be celebrated in Williamsburg. Comic Arts Brooklyn is having its first festival Saturday at Mt. Carmel Church and The Knitting Factory, replacing the now defunct Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival.
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‘Bowery Boys’ Reimagines the Really Bad, Really Old Days of the Lower East Side

BOWERYBOYS pg 4Crooked political machines, race-tinged violence, rampant disease, and a gross disparity of wealth: just another day in Five Points in 1853. “Bowery Boys,” a new comic written by Marvel editor Cory Levine, inked by South Williamsburg resident Ian Bertram, and colored by Rodrigo Aviles, brings the dirtiest, bloodiest corner of 19th-century Manhattan back to life. The story follows a father and son through the Lower East Side as they brace for an impending labor strike, and is being released for free online in serial format at three pages a week. We caught up with author Cory Levine to talk about online publishing, “Gangs of New York,” and the ends of the subway lines.
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