Strike a blow! What Sam Houston knew, Muhammad Ali knew…
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW Strike a blow! What Sam Houston knew, Muhammad Ali knew. And it's that same strange mix of insight and endurance, of arrogance and urgency that presents itself in rededication of Lucifer.]]>Before Sandman, huh? Well that must mean there's at least a Sandman before, Before Sandman. So let's start at the beginning…
Like the legend of the phoenix All ends with beginnings What keeps the planet spinning The force of the beginning -- Daft Punk, “Get Lucky” (featuring Pharrell Williams & Nile Rogers) When I first pitched covering Before Sandman, my first thought was, “that is a lot of comics I need to read, right now.” I felt intimidated by the breath and depth of the series. Sandman is a large modern, horror comic, spanning 75 issues, one…]]>With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters' Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers' community.
With the intent of providing continued intelligent and entertaining content in the PopMatters' Columns section, we are looking to broaden our staff of columnists and the voice of our writers' community. We're particularly interested in writers who live and work outside of the US, but that is not a deciding factor; in all cases, no matter the writer's locale, we're looking for those who can approach an array of cultural subject matter from their patch…]]>While Hugo Chávez preached and promised, ruling with media savvy but blind indifference to details from the obfuscating labyrinth of Caracas ministries named ‘El Silencio’, Venezuela itself rotted.
In 2007, Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez had an idea: the whole country should set their clocks back by a half hour. His idea was that this would allow schoolchildren to wake up in daylight, not darkness. Since he was comandante, and the only person in the nation’s power structure whose opinion mattered, this edict went into effect. In 2011, the Guardian’s Latin American bureau chief Rory Carroll was visiting the Ciudad Guayana industrial zone: "A…]]>As the apotheosis of feminine charm and American careerism, the stewardess subtly bucked traditional gender roles and paved the way for the women's movement.
Excerpted from The Jet Sex: Airline Stewardesses and the Making of an American Icon (footnotes omitted) by Victoria Vantoch. © University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher 1 •• Flying Nurses, Lady Pilots, and the Rise of Commercial Aviation When Ellen Church was growing up in Iowa during the 1910s, her parents took her to county fairs to…]]>Why do modern adaptations of Shakespeare work? Yet Baz Luhrmann's adaptations of period pieces don't?
PopMatters seeks feature essays (min. 1,200 words - no max. limit) arguing the pros and cons of anachronism in film, literature, video games, music and other products of pop culture.]]>If you have ever doubted science, Darryl Cunningham's clever graphic exploration of controversial theories and ideas will set you on the course to realizing that ideology, not facts, create controversy.
Publishers regularly draw on comic books for new ways to engage readers. The lives of Anne Frank to Darwin have been penned and paneled, though not always to good effect. Investigative journalism, however, hasn’t crossed the pen-and-ink chasm much, until now. With How to Fake a Moon Landing, author and illustrator Darryl Cunningham takes on the science deniers in an entertaining, fact-filled book that…that I don’t know what. Here’s the problem. For those who already…]]>If you have ever doubted science, Darryl Cunningham's clever graphic exploration of controversial theories and ideas will set you on the course to realizing that ideology, not facts, create controversy.
Publishers regularly draw on comic books for new ways to engage readers. The lives of Anne Frank to Darwin have been penned and paneled, though not always to good effect. Investigative journalism, however, hasn’t crossed the pen-and-ink chasm much, until now. With How to Fake a Moon Landing, author and illustrator Darryl Cunningham takes on the science deniers in an entertaining, fact-filled book that…that I don’t know what. Here’s the problem. For those who already…]]>With an acclaimed career in writing TV shows and videogames, Christy Marx was practicing transmedia long before the term became popularized. Her reimagining of DC's classic Amethyst stories only underpin her mastery…
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.” World building sounds a whole lot more glamorous than it tends to become. True development of a whole fictional world can be daunting; it goes beyond just character development and demands the creator design whole cultures, traditions, fashions, customs, architecture, as well as the various meanings behind those elements. J.R.R. Tolkien spent much of his professional career adding more and more to his Middle Earth. And…]]>In 2001, author Roche's three siblings were killed in an auto accident en route to her wedding. She brings this tragedy to bear on Wrecked's Elizabeth.
Author Charlotte Roche is a well-known German celebrity whose accomplishments include singing, television presenting, writing, and behaviors intended to shock the public. Her first novel, 2008’s Wetlands, is an exploration of bodily fluids alternately hailed or excoriated as erotica or pornography. Her second novel, Wrecked, appeared in Germany in 2011, again to mixed reviews. Some find Roche’s descriptions of graphic sexual acts repulsive and demeaning to women, while others celebrate them as liberating to both…]]>Howard Kaylan recalls his days as part of a hit-making band, a friend to a musical giant, and his tenacious grasp on his dream.
Shell Shocked opens with Howard Kaylan––then a member of the Turtles––snorting cocaine off Abraham Lincoln’s desk inside the Nixon White House and ends decades later with Kaylan, a sometimes sadder and sometimes wiser man, reflecting on all that life has afforded him. His may not have been the most anticipated rock autobiography of the last two––or three––decades, but it’s an entertaining read that allows us a glimpse into the world of a ‘60s pop star,…]]>The Fearless Defenders book has been a welcome surprise among the Marvel NOW! Push. But the art…
The Fearless Defenders book has been a welcome surprise among the Marvel NOW! push. The concept of the book dated back to the Fear Itself: Fearless an epilogue limited series to the "Fear Itself" event that Cullen Bunn wrote. At the conclusion of the Fearless limited, Valkyrie is assigned to build a team of shield maidens from Earth’s mightiest female heroes and, well, hasn’t gotten around to it yet at the beginning of the Fearless…]]>Disparate threads appear united at first only by certain themes—sex, commerce, the threat of violence—but become progressively enmeshed in ways both clever and disturbing.
Santiago Roncagliolo's Hi, This Is Conchita is an audacious novel—novella, really—that is made up solely of telephone conversations. The Peruvian-born Roncagliolo, who now lives in Barcelona, eschews not only descriptive passages and narration, but also any sort of attribution ("he said", "she replied") or non-dialogue information whatsoever. The trick comes off as slightly gimmicky at first, but soon reveals itself as a clever, engaging way to convey the necessary information without superfluity. The passages read…]]>Can we escape our fate? And is doing so only a question of substantiation? The substantiation by means of a certain weight of money, or maybe the transubstantiation of piety in a hyper-noir landscape…
Establishing Shot. "How much blood must I bathe in, before I'm clean?" It's a nothing line, from a forgotten movie called the Hunted. Not the 2003 movie the Hunted in which PTSD-riddled ex-Spec Forces operative Benecio del Toro goes crazy in the Pacific NW and gets hunted by his erstwhile trainer, Tommy Lee Jones (who else, since 1993's the Fugitive). But an earlier the Hunted, from 1995, where businessman Paul Racine while in Tokyo falls…]]>New York University art historian Alexander Nagel talks with PopMatters about how art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is tied to modern and contemporary art in more ways than we might think.
The cover of Alexander Nagel's Medieval Modern features a striking black and tan image of a woodcut by the early 20th century German-American artist, Lyonel Feininger. The image is of a towering Gothic cathedral stretching out into the sky buttressed by shooting stars—“The Cathedral of the Future” as Feininger called it in the Bauhaus Manifesto (1919). Feininger’s vision of the medieval German cathedral was an emblematic one, wherein a country’s vision of itself was tied…]]>Raised on a lifelong media diet of “good” and “bad” foods, some Americans tend to approach the dinner table in a state of panic.
Harvey Levenstein was inspired to write Fear of Food while researching American tourism in France. There he noticed some Americans' feared French foods, and by extension, of eating in general. This led him to study the seesaw-nature of American nutritional information, and how that seesaw created persisting anxiety about what we eat. Levenstein’s book isn’t for everyone.That’s not a criticism. Fear of Food is an interesting, thorough review of American food phobias, but it’s neither…]]>As with many marketing books, Contagious verges on pop psychology.
If you think you've read contagious before, don't be surprised. The ideas in Jonah Berger's Contagious aren't new, but they are contagious. Contagious enough that he decided to write about them again. Contagious is a synonym for viral, which, in the parlance of the Internet, means something becomes very popular, very quickly, and like a virus, it spreads to all who come in contact with it. But contagious isn’t the only marketing metaphor over the…]]>There's a certain kind of betrayal that comes with friendship. It conspires around how much you're willing to see the other person change.
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW I hate Seneca. I hate Seneca and I still do, even to this day. And you would too if you'd known him before It happened to him, and if you had to watch what It Happening had done to him. And, please believe me Dear Reader, it has absolutely nothing to do with him saying "Everything that has a beginning, also has an end…". That, was pure Nero, a consequence of what Seneca…]]>This is one of the best books about music ever published. It's an absolute delight to sink into and thrash around in, and it comes with a rigorous and righteous sense of wild-eyed-and-eared enthusiasm, and enough exuberant 'motherfuckers' to make Tarantino blush.
"It's a slow-burning truth that Copendium peddles not a single Roman blow to the bonce, but instead seemingly endless Keltic pummels to the body... until the reader -- worn down by evidence and exhaustion -- screams, 'Enough already, Cope! I get it, now just leave me [the fuck] alone!'" -- Julian Cope, 'Introduction' to Copendium Julian Cope is a lot of things: Musicologist, antiquarian, occult historian, and published expert on Neolithic culture and megalithic stone…]]>“She should never have come to Romania... Damn me for a Fool...”
Image Comics began with the X-odus, so named because so many of its founders worked on Marvel's X titles before defecting to form their own company. Over the years the company has gone from a struggling shared universe to a collection of imprints to a remarkably well-respected company, championing creator-owned series and taking chances on strange new series. These strange and unexpected series, each in their own continuity, range from Westerns to Fantasies to Science…]]>A pretty good food book from a guy who doesn't enjoy cooking, will eat almost anything, is cheap, and doesn't much care for food books.
“I’ve always thought there was something vaguely pathetic about people who were obsessed with food. It was like they didn’t have enough to do.” Bill Heavey, author of It’s Only Slow Food Until You Try To Eat It: Misadventures of a Suburban Hunter-Gather, is nothing if not honest. Other points of candor in the book’s introduction: Heavey doesn’t enjoy cooking, isn’t a picky eater, is cheap, and doesn’t like most food books. “I had actually…]]>Orci, Johnson and Messina get the fan base prepped with plenty of action and enough open questions to drive a starship through them.
Something is amiss in the United Federation of Planets. Klingons conspiring with retired legends. Planetary genocide and planetary genocide (hints at spoilers but no real spoilers). Starships with unknown backdoors. Lying and cheating and stealing. Promises made that cannot be kept. And at the heart, the crew of the Enterprise, caught unawares. Each member of the crew checks his or her own moral compass and then they calibrate against the others. The prime directive lives…]]>Why would Neil Gaiman return to the proverbial scene of the crime, the scene of his greatest, grandest, longest-running comics success, the Sandman? Perhaps the answer lies in the work itself…
When @NeilHimself announced his return to Sandman at the San Deigo Comic Con in 2012, I, like many others -- including Forbes and Wired -- shuddered a little with excitement. Gaiman’s announcement at the ComicCon was perhaps more poetic, gentle, and interesting than any announcement I’ve ever seen. He explained in a video address to the con-goers that his inspiration for “Before Sandman” initially evolved from one panel in Brief Lives, in issue #47 of…]]>The moral outrage felt by the Foreign Service whistleblowers in John le Carré's 23rd novel isn't matched by their corrupted superiors.
The dirty business of modern espionage gets a glancing look in John le Carré's 23rd novel. Le Carré has long operated as a shadow Ian Fleming. For all the lone-man heroics of the Bond stories, with their (of late) painted-on world weariness, le Carré's men and women operated in murkier territories. They root about in cavernous bureaucracies where the deadly game of spying, information-trading, and executive actions are handled by committee meetings no more dramatic…]]>In a career that took him from the cotton fields of East Texas to the concert stage at Carnegie Hall and beyond, Lightnin’ Hopkins became one of America’s greatest bluesmen.
Excerpted from Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin' Hopkins by Timothy J. O'Brien and David A. Ensminger (footnotes omitted). (Copyright © 2013) Appears by the permission of the University of Texas Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. For more information visit www.utexaspress.com. ONE East Texas Cotton Picking Blues The blues is born with you. When you born in this world, you…]]>While the Cold War might be over, for the creative teams behind Winter Soldier and Suicide Squad, the Cold War itself becomes a powerful metaphor.
Octave: Winter Is No Time for Childhood It's maybe during the bar fight or maybe just after (Wallace Stevens might wonder on whether this is the power of inflections, or of innuendo) that I'm carried off to a different place. This isn't the usual self-loathing that I've come to love about Winter Soldier. It's issue #15 and writer Jason Latour has big shoes to fill, having stepped into writing duties on Winter Soldier, having taken…]]>James Salter has waited several years to publish his most recent novel. The result is unusually intelligent and graceful storytelling.
"James Salter", the name, hovered in the back of my mind for several years. I would see a paperback copy of A Sport and a Pastime, or maybe Salter's name would come up in a review of a Philip Roth novel. (Roth and Salter are both aging American men who have devoted a good deal of ink to the subject of complex heterosexual relationships. Both are also known for writing frankly erotic passages.) Salter has…]]>With a reserved, laconic style that relies heavily on simple declarative sentences and striking imagery, Olmstead's voice is at times reminiscent of fellow superstar Cormac McCarthy, although somewhat less bleak.
Robert Olmstead is one of American literature's big guns. Since his first collection of stories, 1987's River Dogs, Olmstead has shown the versatility of his interests and subject matter—from short tales of contemporary rural and blue-collar workers to historical novels like 2007's Civil War story Coal Black Horse and 2009's Far Bright Star. Along the way he's amassed his share of awards and prizes, among them a Guggenheim fellowship and NEA grant. With a reserved,…]]>As an issue that comes just prior to the culmination of the current arc, and on laced with artist Symon Kudranski's beautifully neonoir chiaroscuro, Batman: the Dark Knight #19, "the Pool of Tears," comes with the highest praise…
My admiration for Jeph Loeb and Jim Lee's Batman: Hush lies in how flawlessly it wields disappointment, almost like a weapon that cuts through time. This was a time before Batman R.I.P., before Grant Morrison's take on Batman as a mythic Batman. It was a time when Batman was dealing with Lex Luthor, perhaps the ultimate DC villain having been elected as President. It was a time, and you remember it clearly, back when Batman…]]>War is not just fought between armies, as the characters on Sal Mal Lane choose to believe, but it's fought in the home, at school, and at work. In fact, every character here is at war with himself or herself in some way.
Ru Freeman’s On Sal Mal Lane does not whittle war down to statistics or gory clashes; instead, it provokes deeper discussion of its manifestations and complexities by chronicling the lives of ordinary citizens living in pre-war Sri Lanka, a not-so-ordinary political climate. Be sure to keep a box of tissues handy: it's the kind of book that makes your heart sink with every turn of the page, continually transforming your perspective on true love and…]]>Kathryn Schulz’s failure to appreciate F. Scott Fitzgerald’s masterwork, as professed on Vulture.com, is a contemporary case study for how not to assess literature.
Kathryn Schulz has seized the occasion of the newest --and probably not the last-- screen adaptation of The Great Gatsby to take the great American novel down several pegs. Indeed, she is not content to critique it; the title of her provocative piece is Why I Despise The Great Gatsby" (Vulture.com, 6 May 2013). Naturally, any critic, any reader, is more than entitled to his or her opinion; art is useless unless it is capable…]]>This text is more about the history of Peggy (Benedict Arnold) and Lucy (Henry Knox) in concurrence with their husbands, rather than focusing on the women’s autonomous identities.
Nancy Rubin Stuart’s Defiant Brides: The Untold Story of Two Revolutionary-Era Women and the Radical Men They Married is the double-biography of two revolutionary-era women. The first is Peggy Shippen, the daughter of a wealthy Philadelphia business owner. Despite the family’s reservations, Peggy married Benedict Arnold, who would betray his American loyalties and sell information to the British. Arnold’s treason “implicated Peggy as a fellow traitor” (108), yet she demonstrated a dedicated and unflagging loyalty…]]>“To Be Continued...” springs back into action with Daredevil, the remarkable Bart Hill, supplanted by history, reinstated by fate.
Continuing the story of “T.O.D.D.” (The Original Daredevil) requires a rewind to the history of comics where a very different superhero met his cancellation and resurrection. Ever hear of “Shazam”? What's he look like? If you said something along the lines of “Like Gandalf.”, then you're right. If you said “He's a big dude in red with a lightening bolt on his chest.”, then you haven't paid much attention. The “Big Red Cheese” with the…]]>There's an anger towards women in many liberal, sophisticated, erudite men. It's important to be reminded that resentment is usually anchored in a feeling of similarity with the resented.
We constantly read discussions of misogyny, rape culture, and the sundry, methodical new ways women are given to the male gaze in the media. With the seemingly interminable, ever resurgent reminder of violence toward women one might forget that we all had mothers. Perhaps it starts early. Many mothers these days seem to be the thankless servants of their children. How often do you see old women giving up their seats on the subway for…]]>Believe me, I wanted to like this book. I loved the cast, I was excited about the creative team of Sam Humphries and Ron Garney, and it was being sold as an action adventure series with emphasis on the action…
Uncanny X-Force is one of my bigger disappointments of Marvel NOW!. Believe me, I wanted to like this book. I loved the cast, I was excited about the creative team of Sam Humphries and Ron Garney, and it was being sold as an action adventure series with emphasis on the action. There wasn’t really anything that could kill my enthusiasm for it… Those are the famous last words of a comicbook fan. The fundamental flaws…]]>Philip F. Gura corrals all range of material into a coherent literary history with an overarching theme: The ongoing tension in American fiction between the individualized pursuit of happiness and communal values grounded in old-time religion.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) -- Talk about an old boys’ club: Exactly 50 years ago, Floyd Stovall justified his choices for “Eight American Authors” — a study of Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Twain and Henry James — by stating that “doubtless most readers will agree” that they’re “the most important American writers.” Times sure have changed, as is clear from Philip F. Gura’s new literary history, Truth’s Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel. Spanning the period…]]>Watch Bryan Hitch take those first steps into becoming Bryan Hitch, again…
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW It was hard to stand in the cathedrals of Europe, to stand in Paris and and in Rome, and not be lulled (just a tiny little bit) into the idea that there was indeed something grander than the world we know. Just looking at the raw splendor of such houses of worship as the Notre Dame, and imagining the wealth and the power it must have taken 1,000 somesuch years ago to produce…]]>The story of the biggest British band to never make it in America gets a thorough, honest, and fair recounting.
There's arguably no more frustrating group in the history of pop music than the Stone Roses. Here is a band that, for a brief period in the late '80s and early '90s, seemed to be untouchable. They were brash, confident, and innovative, as they were among the first rock bands to embrace rave culture and incorporate it into both their musical style and their fashion sense. It’s a shame, then, that they lost the plot…]]>In just one issue, Ales Kot has turned Suicide Squad into one of my must-read titles each month.
A major challenge both DC and Marvel face on a regular basis is how to highlight lesser-known characters. It’s a lot easier to sell a Superman comic because everyone already knows who Superman is, what his powers are, who he fights, his perspective on justice, and generally what to expect when you pick up an issue. In this sense, writers don’t necessarily have to spend time building up backstory or detailing personality elements because they’ve…]]>Many people assert axiomatically that "the book is always better", while others have suggested that bad books make good movies and good books make bad movies. But do films adapted from books, good or bad, give books a longer shelf-life?
You may have heard there's a new movie of The Great Gatsby. Directed by Baz Luhrmann in 3D, it's opening at the Cannes Film Festival with much hoopla. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as the mysterious social climber Jay Gatsby, with Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan, the love of his life. Most surprising is that Bollywood superstar and '70s action icon Amitabh Bhachhan appears in a minor role as the disreputable Meyer Wolfsheim. Based on F. Scott…]]>John Baxter, an Australian writer living in France, is distressed at the death of haute cuisine, and thus sets out to discover France's remaining "real" foods. It's an onerous task.
John Baxter, an Australian living in France, wrote The Perfect Meal in response to what he sees as a decline in authentic French food. To read his unhappy description, French restaurants and cafés are serving customers foods bought prepackaged, requiring only a warm-up in the microwave, while the bouillon cube has replaced genuine broth. Determined to get to the bottom of this terrifying trend, he undertook planning a classic repas, or fine French in meal…]]>Last time “To Be Continued...” introduced Bart Hill, the Original superhero to go by the name of “Daredevil”, published not by Marvel Comics, but by Lev Gleason Publications. So with him around how did Marvel create their more famous, latter-day hero?
In 1982 when the team of Frank Miller and Klaus Janson were pumping new life into Marvel's blind superhero, a company called Fantaco Enterprises produced a oneshot magazine called The Daredevil Chronicles, about the Marvel hero, but Lev Gleason's Daredevil was featured on both the first and the last interior pages of artwork. The second appearance, containing a comparison and contrast between Bart Hill and Marvel's Daredevil, Matt Murdock, revealed that Gleason's Daredevil Comics achieved…]]>Just as westerns in the 1950s addressed the role US geopolitical concerns during the Cold War, the superhero and pulp-hero movie seems to have slid comfortably into that same popcultural space.
The cinematic superhero has come to define the summer movie season. A genre that blurs boundaries, the characters offer something new (yet familiar) to an audience escaping terrorism, economic worries, and fractious politics. While decades of popculture exposure and technological advances explain some of the cinematic superhero’s success, these reasons do not explain the more profound impact for US viewers. Distilled from a uniquely US perspective, the cinematic superhero translates contemporary sociopolitical circumstances in a…]]>There is no bias here, no leftist or conservative agenda. This is simply an exhaustive history of napalm, from its beginnings as kind of a scientific puzzle for technocrats to one of the most widely despised symbols of war.
Before “The Big Bang Theory” made science cool -- well, cool enough that hipsters could talk about Schrodinger’s Cat and the Chandrasekhar limit and sound brilliant – there was the National Defense Research Committee (NDRC), a group of Ivy League and major university research scientists given the task of developing new weapons. Some were veterans, but the vast majority were just boy geniuses, charged with an exciting new proposition: building a new era of American…]]>This insightful and entertaining look at the history of music piracy offers invaluable background to the hot-button issue of creativity and the law.
Reprinted from Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (footnotes omitted) by Alex Sayf Cummings with permission from Oxford University Press USA. © 2013 Oxford University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher. || 1 || Music, Machines, and Monopoly Music lends itself to reproduction. A musician composes a song by fumbling for the right chords,…]]>Great literature is instantly recognizable, regardless of how its stories are relocated in historical context. Brian K. Vaughan's Saga reminds us that the same is easily true for the medium of comics…
Since it seems like all the saber rattling, name-calling, and fear mongering is finished, I think it is time to actually talk about the content of Saga #12, in context with the rest of the series. Although I had an opportunity to write on the subject recently, Saga #12 is about much more than a couple scenes of presumably homosexual sex acts; #12 is the culmination of the series thus far and sheds light on…]]>"I was always drawn to the simple and the well proportioned rather than the flashy." Naomi Yang's aesthetic speaks for her band in this handsomely assembled presentation of words and depictions about their memorable music.
This collaboration expands an oral history from participants and observers, one of whom, bassist Naomi Yang, crafted the visual content enhancing this careful indie-rock band's image a quarter-century ago. That span surprises her, as she reflects in this compilation's final sentence: "I am grateful for not letting my youth go to waste and I am looking forward to adventures to come." Even before they formed what began as a shambling, untutored Galaxie 500, together from…]]>Popular culture creates its own nostalgic image of a time period that is both fact and fiction. When combined with the shaky foundations of our own memories, who can really tell what happened? How will pop culture translate the tragic events of today?
There are certain moments that define generations to come. Certain moments have become fixtures of culture, popular and otherwise. They serve as benchmarks for all our hopes and fears. These moments often are turning points, that instance that everything changed. Why do people want to return to a time before these moments? Where things really that different? Do things just appear better in retrospect? Memory is not truth, especially when wrapped up with nostalgia. History…]]>Charlie Cullen is the most prolific serial killer in American history. Here is his appalling, all-true story.
Few genres are more fascinating than true-crime books. My favorite examples of this type of book are the bizarre and gripping works of Janet Malcolm. Again and again, Malcolm has taken a case of criminal behavior and explored the characters from every angle; she has used moments of aberrant decision-making to unsettle us, to test our certainties, to make us think about what it means to be human. The Good Nurse is far from the…]]>It's the idea of a literary phenomenon thrown 1,000 years into the future, but more a story about our present values…
EXCLUSIVE PREVIEW It's the coincident magic of shuffle. As I begin to write, Guns N Roses' "Breakdown" off of their Use Your Illusion (Blue) begins to play. And I'm reminded of what it takes to make it big, to make something that lasts, to say, "This is my team. This is who I'm with and where I'm from." And I'm reminded, just days after Cinco de Mayo, that the story of the rise of the…]]>Shouldn't Hawkeye face up against a villain not only every bit his equal, but also in it for more than just money? He really should…
Two months ago, I reviewed Hawkeye #8, a Valentine’s Day-themed issue that found our hero, Clint Barton, attempting to deflect a cadre of women who actually care about him so he can help one woman who has ulterior motives. I enjoyed Hawkeye #8 quite a bit, as it was a bastion for character development and overall thematic subtlety. In fact, I was positive that Matt Fraction had a very clear and purposeful direction going forward…]]>The King of Good Intentions depicts scenes that have not yet vanished, although most of its record stores have, on shady blocks off Melrose or Wilshire.
After 17 albums, The Black Watch's singer-songwriter-guitarist steps aside from his Los Angeles gigs and, in what must be at least semi-autobiographical, narrates the indie-rock predicaments of a certain John, who falls for musical prodigy Jenny. It's a brisk, bittersweet novel. Propelled by the wry, overly clever, self-mocking, playfully second-person address John adopts for his picaresque tale of The King of Good Intentions (also an album title by the author's band), his energetic patter revives…]]>Each page that comics creator Matt Kindt produces is marked by an ability to communicate nostalgia that is immediate and striking.
When Matt Kindt's characters aren't planting themselves at Red Wheel Barrow's lonely diner counters in the Eisner and Harvey Award-winning comics writer, artist, and colorist's Red-Handed: The Fine Art of Strange Crimes, they mull paintings or true love, or debate whether victim-less crimes are in fact malicious at all. Only there is no shortage of deviousness in this dark and beautiful book, where art links a set of vignettes as compelling as their visuals and…]]>The creator of The Chronicles of Narnia disliked denominational squabbling and literary theory; he stood in favor of animals, alcohol and reading old books.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) -- C.S. Lewis (1898-1963), the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters, was far from a perfect human being, and, Christian that he was, would have been the first to admit it. Nonetheless, in a new biography of the writer and scholar, Alister McGrath quickly piles up good reasons for a reader to like Lewis. The writer disliked denominational squabbling and literary theory; he stood in favor of animals, alcohol and…]]>Invincible has always been marked by its unique style where comicbook consequences are actual and ongoing. But with creator/writer Robert Kirkman stepping away from writing duties on Invincible Universe, the series hits on the essential truth of the comics industry--that ideas are often larger than their creators…
Originally, Invincible just seemed like Robert Kirkman’s “superhero book” where he was most likely just going to run off the standard “teen with super powers, trials and tribulations” stories we all grew up with reading Marvel Comics in the 80s and 90s. A funny thing happened on the way to the end of the first storyarc, though, and Kirkman played his hand: he was going to spin the types of superhero tales we were used…]]>For all of her meticulous research and personal communications with fans, Sanrio employees, authors, and others, Christine Yano does an exceptional job of mining the Hello Kitty multiverse.
Here's the truth: I never gave much thought to Hello Kitty until my young daughter became aware of her. Then, without warning, I was buying Hello Kitty t-shirts, bedroom slippers, band-aids, toothbrushes, and almost any thing else that bore her cherubic face and yellow nose. Then, and only then, did I realize that Hello Kitty was so ubiquitous, so unavoidable in popular culture, that she rivaled the pinnacle of Western culture in presence: Disney. Despite…]]>This book is going to play with your preconceptions. It will shift on you, turn on you, and it will be as difficult to pin down as a wisp of smoke.
Los Angeles Times (MCT) -- Ruth Ozeki opens her third novel, A Tale for the Time Being, with a small deception — or, more accurately, a sleight of hand. Forgoing context or explanation, she plunges us into the diary of a 16-year-old Japanese girl named Nao. The language is excitable, breathless even: “(I)f you decide to read on,” Nao exclaims, “then guess what? You’re my kind of time being and together we’ll make magic!” Yet just as we start to…]]>There were almost too many question going into Marvel NOW!'s reboot of Young Avengers, but the dream-team of Gillen/ McKelvie delivers beyond expectation…
I’m incredibly glad that this is the issue of Young Avengers I’ve gotten to review. Usually when you’re handed a comicbook in mid-arc (with nothing significant about the assignment) you’re just catching up on the storyline, admiring the creators and characters, and just all around pointing out why someone should buy the comic. With Young Avengers #4, though, I’m getting the opportunity to highlight just why this is one of the best Marvel NOW! books…]]>"With the meaningless luxury of hindsight", Wilson Neate echoes back at the band its own detachment -- and its dry wit. This reverberates with his own sharp, honest, but affectionate reaction to Wire's sounds and moods.
"When the words run out, it stops." -- Bruce Gilbert A long study of a band best known for frenetic bursts, like its subject, this surprises. Rather than rehashed discographies, press-kit rewrites, or gushing song-by-song trivia, Wilson Neate keeps a cool distance while he intimately probes, by interviews and interpretations, the three stages of this enduring, thoughtful, and fractious group. Hung with the albatross of its 1977 debut LP Pink Flag, still its best-known recording,…]]>In her debut novel, Grace McCleen treats heavy subjects with a light hand, showcasing her talents through an endearing narrator and thoughtful story.
If you go by the Bible, Earth was a place we humans (and other living things) were exiled to. Logically, we should be merely enduring life, showing gratitude for the gifts life does bring, but mostly waiting to get into Heaven. Most of us, though, whether we believe in Heaven or not, don’t think about the afterlife all of the time. We distract ourselves with relationships and jobs and ice cream and television, and manage…]]>