I’ve started a new site about comics. Some very old fans may recall a mag called FA, which I edited decades ago, so I’ve revived it as a website. Old FA readers will recognise some names, and there will be some overlap with FT too. I&#821[…]

It took me a while to get the hang of my first kabuki show. A lot of it is very alien. The music is drums, very loud clappers and samisen, which sounds like an out-of-tune banjo, which is clearly my problem with their very different scales rather tha[…]

I completely fell for Tina Fey when she pulled her sweater off as a schoolteacher in Mean Girls, accidentally lifting her shirt with it. This of course was strongly reinforced by the wonderful 30 Rock, and she was soon by far the biggest celeb crush […]

Ronald Searle turned 90 earlier this month, and to celebrate that, the Cartoon Museum here in London has an exhibition of his work.
He joined the army in 1939 and his first St Trinian’s cartoon was published in 1941. The following year he was t[…]

I neglected comics aimed at girls when I wrote the first 25 parts of this series. I’m male, and I read few comics for girls when I was young. I have had some entertainment looking back later, from the extraordinary extremes they went to to tort[…]

I put one together on Spotify for my own entertainment over the holidays, but others might enjoy it too: my Xmas playlist. It includes jazz, pop, reggae, soul, R&B, hip hop, rock, funk and country, among other things. It’s nearly four hours[…]

I’m not very good at writing about pubs – my excuse is that I tend to care a hundred times more about the company than the place. Nonetheless, this was a regular haunt of mine for many years before I even moved to London. For no particula[…]

Two recent results from the South African Vodacom Second Division:
Young Pirates 2 Real Madrid (not that Real Madrid) 26
Namaqua Stars 50 Kakamus Cosmos 0
Extraordinarily, the South African FA is suspicious, and is investigating. They’ve alrea[…]

Lem was a Polish SF writer, occupying a strange place within the genre. He despised most SF (Dick was the only American SF writer he admired – an opinion that was not remotely reciprocated) for its vacuity and shallowness, which accurately impl[…]

I like a writer who defies real comparison with anyone else in their genre. The closest to Jim Thompson would be Dostoyevsky, I think, except Thompson is far bleaker, far more negative about human nature. He’s also a stranger and more experimen[…]