(This is the third part of a series about Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark. As before, I’m not trying to get you to read this comic, just scratching a discursive itch, so it’s spoiler-heavy and artwork-light. Church And State, the th[…]

(The second part of a series reconsidering Dave Sim’s Cerebus The Aardvark on the occasion of me actually finishing it. As before, I’m not worrying too much about spoilers or trying to draw attention to particular moments or bits of art: […]

As I said in the intro post, I’ll be posting expanded – in this case vastly expanded – versions of my Cerebus reviews on here. These aren’t really meant to advertise the comic, so I’m keeping actual images to a minimum, […]

So. I’ve finished Cerebus The Aardvark. Twenty years after it ended, as promised, with its 300th issue, thirty years (roughly) after I gave up reading it, thirty-seven years (I think) since I saw my first issue of it.

At the time I stopped r[…]

One thing about the streaming revolution in pop is that it gives us a pretty accurate tracker of the UK’s changing tastes in Christmas songs. Now, by “tastes in Christmas songs” it’s probably fairer to say “what goes on Christmas playlists�[…]

(The third part of the 3-part piece about the 1000th Number 1, the charts, and 20 years of writing about them. Part 1. Part 2. See also the pieces on #999 and #1000 on Popular.)

Here’s the thing, though. I still really like pop music.

When I […]

(This is Part 2 of a 3 part piece around the 1000th No.1. Part 1 is here but you might also want to read about the 999th Number 1)

Dr Manhattan is on Mars, some time before he leaves our Universe at the end of Watchmen to become a meme. It is 1958[…]

(This is part 1 of a 3-part piece designed to fit around the 999th and 1000th Popular entries, which will go up on the Popular site.)

Almost my first memory of the charts is of the charts being broken. Broken hearted; collapsed by shock and grief […]

The #FearOfMu21c selection struggle reaches its end – two years once again dominated by the pop polls and then bang up to date with the sounds of 2023. These have also been years of gradual personal improvement after 2019-2020 were bin-fires fo[…]

A bunch of things happened in 2020 but the most consequential (OK, the most consequential FOR ME) is that I started doing pop polls on Twitter. I think I can state at this point that there is nobody better at creating and running track-based Twitter […]