I love idiosyncrasy. Even if I’m not as into Idea X as a creator is, the fact that creator is so into it is appealing – I like to see the things creators are passionate about, the things they have to do, even if it doesn’t make commercial sense. P. Craig Russell adapts operas into…
Literary fiction is identifiable in any format: the story of unhappy people told with care and grace and close attention, from outside. It’s not necessary that it be set in the recent past, but that helps: sometime just long ago to be before the working lives of the audience, but still familiar – say, fifty…
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a world-famous 1963 semi-autobiographical novel, and the 1977 movie based on it, about one woman’s mental illness and survival. It’s also a bland 1970 country song by Lynn Anderson. And a number of other books as well. Probably other things. Titles can’t be copyrighted; the evocative ones…
I’m not crazy about adaptations , by disposition. I’d generally rather see new stuff in Creative Format X, rather than a Format X version of a story that worked well in Format Q. I seem to be in a pretty small minority in that, though. The world demands movies from their comic books, TV shows…
We all live in the worlds we build for ourselves. For most of us, that’s deeply metaphorical. For people who tell stories for a living, well, it can be more complicated. Take the Bronte family: the three sisters who lived into adulthood (Charlotte, Emily, Anne) all wrote novels, important books that are still read and…
Any author would agree that a book tour has the potential for horror. It could be wonderful, of course — but what in human life is ever purely wonderful? There’s going to be something that goes bad. And there’s always the chance it could all go bad. Which brings us to Andi Watson’s graphic novel…
So this is how it goes: two years ago I had the urge to re-read Slaughterhouse-Five, possibly Kurt Vonnegut’s best novel [1]. And I did . It was still a great novel; it was still deeply sad about humanity. About a year later, a graphic novel adaptation of Slaughterhouse-Five came out. It was adapted by…
In our timeline, the Bronte siblings created several fictional worlds — they started with Glass Town, which grew (mostly from Charlotte and Branwell) into the somewhat separate Angria, while younger siblings Emily and Anne invented the entirely separate land of Gondal. All of those were explicitly set in odd, “exotic” corners of the real world…
Two years later, here’s a one-shot I Love (And Rockets) Monday — because the Brothers Hernandez have kept making comics, and those comics do make their way into books eventually, and even more eventually I will read them. Is This How You See Me? collects a Jaime story that ran from the end of the…
Is Tom Gauld our most erudite cartoonist? From the evidence of his work, he well could be — there’s a parade of authors both classic (Shakespeare, Austen) and genre (Ballard, Gaiman) and modern literary (Franzen, Mantel), and a dazzling awareness of tropes and ideas and genre furniture in his work, and it’s hard to think…
I’m a huge (or as our president would say, YUGE) fan of John le Carré, the English writer specializing in espionage stories. le Carre’ is the pen name for David John Moore Cornwell, who was a member of the Secret Intelligence System or MI6 so he brings a great deal of first hand knowledge to…
In my recent Dragon Con Round-Up I shared that this year’s Dragon Con kick-started a new fascination with puppetry for me (which, if you can imagine, may someday even rival my obsession with voice actors!). This was due to two panels I attended, Brian Henson’s Evolution of Puppetry, and The Puppetry of Star Wars’ BB-8….
