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[…]

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[…]

Here is a link to the story, which you might want to read instead of the first 900 words of this and here is a link to a word about our Hauntography project.
Firstly, mostly to get them out of the way, two boring anecdotes.
Semi-irrelevant anecdote #[…]

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[…]

You probably want to read The Treasure of Abbot Thomas before you read this.
In M R James’s universe everyone who matters is fluent in Latin. It’s not so for the modern reader – or at least this modern reader – and there&#8217[…]

Well I must have been onto something in my last audition roundup because Roland Muldoon has echoed my observation that today’s young comedians eschew, by and large, political or social commentary. Muldoon – the guy who ran the Empire for […]

For any fans of old horror monsters and/or the stylings of Roy Thomas, here’s a three pager I originally wrote for the horror issue of Solar Wind, that finally found a home in Duke Etrange’s World Of Weird. Art by Brian Coyle.
Full images[…]

One oddity about this year’s hopefuls* is that not one has done political material. What are the chances? This is a fairly catholic smattering of forty or so comedians from all over the UK (though mainly London) and after a few nights of hearin[…]

Stand-up comedy, like all art forms, has a few hardy perennials. In the plastic arts you’ve got landscapes painted with oils, for example. In standup you’ve got jokes at the expense of disabled people. In theatre, say, you’ve got bi[…]

The last big event the Hackney Empire will put on before it goes dark for an indefinite amount of time next year – thank you Arts Council – is the New Act of the Year. Theoretically anything goes, but “new act” has come to pre[…]