So farewell then The Dandy (Sort of). Publisher of generally not as good strips as the Beano. Home for many a waif and/or stray from Beezer, Topper, Whizzer and/or Chips. A rag which saw limitless comic potential in a man who eats cow pies and has di[…]

I have now read 48 of DC Comics’ “New 52” launch titles and a bunch of the second issues: when I’ve finally slogged through the lot of them I’ll post some kind of belated quality scorecard maybe, but I don’t know if the quality of the boo[…]

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[…]

There is a sequence in Werner Herzog’s Encounters At The End Of The World, where we see the Camp McMurdo safety training procedure. There is a large proportion of it that involves people wearing buckets (which the recruits have painted happy sm[…]

Superhero Perfume Ad
Saw this in a comic last week. Had to be scanned it is so preposterous.
I cannot for the life of me imagine who this is aimed at. Except children. And children
a) don’t buy comics anymore
b) don’t buy eau de toilette
[…]

In “Comics as Culture”, M. Thomas Inge posited that comics and jazz were the two art forms that “perhaps represent America’s major indigenous contribution to world culture.” A throwaway line; as you can tell by the title[…]

Comics Should Be Good links to my old Pitchfork essay on THRILL-POWER, a term I use a lot without ever having managed to give a good summary of what I mean by it. (“Earthlet, if you have to ask, you’ll never know”)
This awesome comm[…]

Obviously I have an attraction to crazy quixotic blogging projects*, but I have to take my hat off to Laura Hudson and Leigh Walton, who are planning to blog EVERY ISSUE OF CEREBUS. On the one hand, there are ‘only’ 300 of ’em. On t[…]

I’ve not even opened it yet (it’s a collection of 1950s DC SF comics) – I just wanted to show everyone the cover.[…]

Almost all the talk these days in comics is of graphic novels, mostly meaning collections of the continuing traditional 24-page monthly comic. Writers create story ‘arcs’, i.e. they write for later collecting, most often in six-issue chun[…]