The Politics Of The Future I: Science fiction is often not THAT speculative about science. Postulating future politics is almost as much fun. Perhaps for satirical effect, or for plot reasons, or just for fun: mooting a future society does mean gett[…]

Joe Sacco watch your back. After allowing an admittedly sluggish time for your Sacco’s graphic novel journalism of Palestine to be diseminated, the Israeli’s strike back with HOMELAND: THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE STATE OF ISRAEL.

And […]

CBB5*: PUBLIC IMAGE LTD:
i. treble turner prizes all round ii. i spose to be on top of the FACTS i shd actually read everything written by and abt GG’s involvement and exit: from a semi-distance (ie i only watched the tv bits) i deduce that (c[…]

I can’t remember who it was who recommended Pelecanos to me, but I had the impression he was well worth a try, that he might just be someone to join my other big favourite current crime writers. This is pretty good, but nothing has really made […]

Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez
My favourite Christmas present from last month was this collection of all of Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar stories from the original run of Love & Rockets, a hardback volume with over 500 pages of comics. Like mo[…]

h.potter rural industry salvation shockah:
“Unexpected factors come into play, such as the buoyant country house market, the rise of ‘green’ consumerism, the influence of TV gardening personalities – even a welcome boost to b[…]

Light by M. John Harrison
It’s hard to avoid wordplay in talking about this: it’s a dazzling, brilliant novel. It’s the most successful fiction I’ve ever seen at embedding quantum physics, on every level – it’s dee[…]

Cartoonist ‘jailed’ over Jesus comic: Comics in the US are often picked as easy targets for testing offence and blasphemy laws – disappointing to find that the same may be true in the EU. Of course, based on the news story’s s[…]

There is little point in linking this HA HA – ART IS RUBBISH story on the BBC website, except for the fact that it appears that house style has been driven to extremes. The actual story itself is a classic Philstinian piece about dustmen being […]

COMICS: AN INTRODUCTION
(If you already read comics, you know all of this anyway. Let this serve as a warning to the curious.)
I’ve been reading Marvel and DC comics – ‘mainstream comics’, if you like – again for a few m[…]