I suppose the Hitchhikers‘ ground has been thoroughly salted at this point – I’ve seen the movie; you don’t need to tell me – which is why we’ve gotten two Dirk Gently TV series and these comics over the past decade. But even leaving aside how much Douglas Adams was a writer of voice to…
Some comic strips have ongoing stories – adventure strips are rarer these days, but long continuities still exist, here and there. Some have recurring gags, done slightly differently each time – Lucy and the football, the possibly imaginary Ernesto Lacuna, a sergeant viciously beating a private. Those are things to grab onto, when you are,…
Don’t tell anyone, but I think this is a stealth reprint collection. If it were in prose, I might even go so far as to call it a fix-up. Roz Chast is one of the giants of contemporary cartooning, a New Yorker mainstay since the late ’70s and the author of the major memoir Can’t…
When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in…
“I like the stock.” If only the world of high finance could accept things as simply as that. As we learned in 2021, the so-called masters of the universe had written off GameStop, the venerable supply of used video games and assorted tech gear. The only one, it seemed, who still believed in them was…
At a time when syndicated science fiction was just Star Trek series, it took some guts on Warner Bros’ part to try something darker and more experimental with J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5, designed to tell a sprawling epic that was more political than it was space opera. The show arrived thirty years ago and…
20th Century Fox wasn’t sure what it had in Star Wars, and apparently, neither did George Lucas. The director was building up his company, Lucasfilm, and unleashed his secret weapon: Charley Lippincott. He whipped people into a previously unknown frenzy by working the fans at science fiction and comics conventions. He saw to it DelRey…
I’m running close to a decade behind reading Peter Bagge’s books – but, the weird thing is, I seem to still be reading all of his books, just with that big time-delay. I have no explanation, and may catch up one of these days: cartooning is time-intensive work, and even someone as prolific as Bagge…
It’s not usual for a creative team to accrete members over time. OK, sure, you can think of bands that got bigger as they got successful enough to add, for instance, a horn section, but those accretions tend to be semi-separate: The Fantastic Desperadoes with the Horns of Doom! People get replaced, of course. But…
This book was shorter than I expected, so today’s post should be quick. Last time around with Jim Benton, I read and enjoyed his all-ages graphic novel Attack of the Stuff but noted that I might be getting to the end of the all-ages bits, leaving only the definitely-for-middle-graders books. (And, don’t get me wrong:…
I fight with my tags, here on the blog. They tend to proliferate, with a core that I use a lot and a loose penumbra of things that I thought I’d use more often (Circles of Hell! Class War Follies! High Finance! Kids Today! Pedantry!) but just have a few random posts. And there are…
First of all: this volume contains two things, which it does say pretty clearly: the title is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist , after all. There’s one new book – Campbell dislikes the term “graphic novel,” so I’m going to see if I can consistently avoid it…
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