When Titans Clash: Kirby vs Tezuka
Jack Kirby is known as the King among fans of American comics, and it’s fair enough. He was there at the start of superheroes (creating Captain America), he created the first romance comics, the first mystical[…]

Wrestlemania 20
This year’s mega-event from World Wrestling Entertainment had the tagline “Where it all begins…again”, of which I can make no sense, but there were hints towards one interesting development. Larger men, brawler[…]

Heartwood by James Lee Burke
I wrote an item months ago suggesting that genre writers in general, taking crime as a good example, are still undervalued by the literary critics and academics, and by extension by most readers. Then I was especially tal[…]

Consciousness and quantum physics
There are very few more interesting and dfficult subjects than the nature of mind and consciousness. It doesn’t seem to resemble anything else in the universe. What is it? What is it made of? Is it distinct fro[…]

I am not very Charmed
Someone I was shagging a couple of years back was friends with the script editor on Charmed. I found it difficult to find a single good thing to say to him about his friend’s work. The episode rerun tonight is a particular[…]

Gerhard Richter at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
I’ve never seen so many images in one show – there are several thousand – so on that basis maybe this justifies the high ‘8.50 admission. It’s dominated by his long-term, co[…]

Donald Judd at Tate Modern
I think one of the more interesting artistic phenomena of the Twentieth Century was the move by many artists away from the valorising of the artist’s touch and of craft. This was started by Duchamp with his readymades[…]

‘Sports Entertainment’
That’s what they call the wrestling in America now – they’ve abandoned all attempt to position it as real sport. There is a bit of different repositioning going on just now. As ILE’s expert D[…]

Catterick
The new Reeves and Mortimer (writers and stars) sitcom, on BBC3 at present, is for the most part as odd an affair as you’d guess. Lots of strange characters played by a great cast including Matt Lucas, Dennis Healey, Charlie Higson, M[…]

Tyrone Davis and a genre’s 10th percentile
I was listening to a fine old soul twofer, Tyrone Davis’s Can I Change My Mind/Hold Back The Hands Of Time (a bargain at £5 from Fopp) and thinking of recommending it here, which I guess I&[…]