Color Bleach+: The Bleach Official Bootleg Viz Media; $14.99 Tite Kubo’s [[[Bleach]]] franchise is vast and never-ending, at once very playful and utterly serious. The latest addition to it to be translated into English by Viz Media is [[[Color Bleach: Bleach Official Bootleg]]] (U.S., July ’10, Japan ’07). The conceit of this jam-packed volume, presented…
Fred Van Lente is the New York Times bestselling author of Incredible Hercules (with Greg Pak) and three entries in the Marvel Zombies series, as well as the American Library Association award-winning Action Philosophers. His original graphic novel Cowboys & Aliens (co-written with Andrew Foley) is being adapted into motion picture form by Dreamworks and…
Last October, a horn player and otaku friend recommended a shojo anime. OMG. Cute. I don’t do cute. But she persisted and I was curious – a smart, geeky, poor girl gets into an elite academy for rich kids on a full scholarship, feels totally out of place, and accidentally becomes associated with the six…
Released on May 11th, eight years after we’d bid our misanthropic heroine escapee from [[[Beavis & Butthead]]] and beloved Lawndale adieu, we have Daria: The Complete Animated Series on DVD. Well, almost complete. They did not get the rights to all the really cool songs that had once perfectly punctuated every episode – too expensive…
For part 1 of this article, click here. The Soul Reaper Academy (every society needs an academy – see Plato, Aristotle, Hogwarts), founded 1000+ years ago by Commander-General Yamamoto, graduated the youngest person to ever become a captain, Hitsugaya Toushiro. Serious in countenance, sharp of mind, fierce in battle, child-like in stature (brilliantly voiced by seiyuu Romi…
Being a Philosopher, I see Philosophy everywhere and talk about it all the time. But sometimes I am surprised by where I find it and in what abundance. And rarely do I find in one body of work ideals that cover Aristotle’s thoughts on friendship and justice (Nicomachean Ethics), Confucius’ ideas of Right Association (Great…
Diana Laurence’s How to Catch and Keep a Vampire: A Step-By-Step Guide to Loving the Bad and the Beautiful (Sellers Publishing, 10/23/09, $14.95 trade paperback) is advertised as non-fiction and humor. It’s 160 pages, complete with FAQs, myth busting, case studies, cutesiness with perhaps a nod to Sex and the City, references to the latest…
Picture a world where people gather and interact in joy and harmony, where groups of gaily-clad youths break into spontaneous song and dance at regular intervals, where spontaneous conga lines of diverse peoples stretch for blocks and wind through the market stalls, where merchants sell and people buy with easy affability and business is brisk,…
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95 Despite the modern framing at the end of this book arguing about whether or not this was a tragedy or a happy ending by bringing computers into the whole thing to support the side of happy, which puts a…
In a popular and academic marketplace where everyone wants and needs to learn better, smarter, faster, we have series upon series of things that have titles that are playfully self-deprecating in the hopes of our being brave enough to channel our inner superhero and dive in and learn something that might have seemed a bit…
For parts 1 and 2 of this article, go here and here. Watchmen and Philosophy: A Rorschach Test , edited by Mark D. White from CUNY’s College of Staten Island and a veteran of Wiley’s (Blackwell’s) Philosophy and Pop Culture series, is a volume with results as mixed as the characters in its subject matter,…
For part 1 of this article, go here. If Alan Moore, in his alternate universe that is not so far from our own, invokes Nietzsche’s übermensch, the hyper-evolved, extra-moral being, each one of our main masks, individually, embodies some stage to that goal as we explore our Nite Owl’s-eye view of things as Moore presents…
