I’ve had the pleasure of attending author appearances in smallish venues – I saw Terry Pratchett in a small hall somewhere in Canterbury back in the early 1990s, and Neil Gaiman (promoting the novelisation of Neverwhere) on the second floor of a Waterstone's in London in the mid-1990s (back before…
By Steven T Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen I'll get to the point: this is a quite beautiful graphic novel that you should read. Seagle uses a semiautobiographical tone to tell a story that is about the creative process, the analysis of Superman and what he means (this is a Vertigo…
Uncanny X-Men: Lovelorn (Uncanny X-Men #504–507 + Annual #2) by Matt Fraction, Terry Dodson (Mitch Bruweiser/Daniel Acuna) Can my thoughts on a book be considered unbiased if I got the book cheap in a sale? I’m not sure, but it’s a factor in the discussion. I read some of Ed…
I think that Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a great film (I was pleasantly surprised when it was ending up on so many of those premature Best Of The Decade lists), and Being John Malkovich and Adaptation are two of the most original and smart films I’ve seen.…
Defying Gravity shot itself in the foot with tagline of ‘Grey’s Anatomy in space’ – you can’t afford to have such a negative start to a television series in the current TV climate. It’s tough enough to survive without an inaccurate description creating inaccurate perceptions before the show even starts,…
Is an hour too long a distance to travel to buy half-price comics and graphic novels from a comic book shop that is going out of business? Is 8am too early to get up on a Sunday morning to do this? Should I feel guilty and a little sleazy for…
From good Punisher to not-so-good Punisher, which is ironic considering how much this film took from the Ennis Punisher run ... I'm amazed that they made a sequel to the underwhelming (and missing the point) Thomas Jane-starring version, especially as they seemed to have ignored it completely, returning to the…
The Punisher #55–60 by Garth Ennis and Goran Parlov I started reading Garth Ennis' Punisher Max series in the comic books but I stopped after a year when I realised it would read better in trade form, especially as Ennis seemed to be deliberately writing six-issue arcs. I still haven't…
Would Brüno be a funnier film if Borat hadn’t existed? Would Brüno have been made if Borat hadn’t been so successful? I ask because the film can be summed up by the sentence: Brüno is funny but it’s not as funny as Borat. (I thought I'd reviewed Borat on this…
Batman and Robin #3 This is a gorgeous comic book – Frank Quitely provides that dirty edge to his beautiful-looking people that's amazing. The first panel alone is great. When Robin escapes from Professor Pyg ('You just redefined “wrong”.') and the fight scene begins, the action just leaps off the…