CRISIS ON INFINITE PENCILSHARPENERS

(Click for obscene bigness plus obscene fiddliness).
Crisis On Infinite Earth was the big crossover event. It was the first big companywide one, over at DC-Comics and was in itself relatively nonsensical and remar[…]

Why have all the great children’s comics of yesteryear vanished, asks Brandon Robshaw of the Times
Bit of a “Phil Space” article for the Times. Published Jan 1st from “the file” before proper journos came back off holida[…]

Will Eisner, RIP
Vic Fluro, from the recent Top 100 Comics thread: “If you think about Pulp, or Noir, or Detective, or Storytelling, or Action, or Emotion, or Cool, or Titles or Words or Pictures or Anything that actually Works in Comics…[…]

The Last Battle by CS Lewis
I re-read this book over the xmas holiday because the slip-case collection of Narnia books that I read as a child turned up in a relative’s garage, and because of a coincident interview with Phillip Pullman on the S[…]

Tom Wesselman
1931-2004
His work lacks the cool arrogance of a Warhol or the theoretical complexities of johns at his best; but he has something else–he has a formalism, and a sense of space that amazes–his layers and levels are the firs[…]

I was surprised that Star Of The Sea was so little about the actual voyage of a ship from Ireland to New York during the potato famine, and rather an attempt at a literary pastiche to try and fill in a lack of nineteenth century Irish literature. For[…]

The Big U by Neal Stephenson
This was Stephenson’s first novel, before the PoMo blockbusters. Unsurprisingly therefore, it’s a campus novel, but it’s not like any other campus novel I’ve read. There are comically useless profe[…]

by way of farewell to a complicated (and intermittently awful) (but with good bits) year
i guess i think of contrarianism more as a tool than a principle – i like it for its effects not its “morality” – except i also know say[…]

Thankyou Santa
This kind of thing is why Grant Morrison is my favourite comics writer:
“The Fortress appears in issue #2, stuffed with a ton of new toys and gets haunted by the bandaged ghost of the Unknown Superman of 4500 AD. The Kandorians f[…]

The Scavenger’s Tale by Rachel Anderson
This is an interesting and impressive novel. It’s slim and simply written: she also writes children’s novels, and brings that clarity and precision here, but this would surely be too harrowing[…]