Category: Comics
What I am reading: The League of Regrettable Superheroes
I’m also still reading The Gospel of Loki but on my phone Kindle app I also have this semi non-fiction book – The League of Regrettable Superheroes by Jon Morris
http://www.quirkbooks.com/book/league-regrettable-superheroes
It is a humorous account of various not-so-big time genuine attempts at comic book superheroes that you may never have heard of. My current favorite being Bozo the Iron Man who is a charming robot rather than Tony Stark.
I shan’t be doing a review of this one as it pretty much does what it says on the tin or the tin man maybe. You can see a lot more of it on the link below. [Update: Cool – I didn’t know a Scribd link does that]
The Last War in Albion: Book 2
Philip Sandifer‘s long running blog series chronicling the twin careers of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison has hit the BIG ONE i.e. Alan Moore’s most notable work Watchmen. http://www.philipsandifer.com/2015/07/art-that-cannot-move-people-effectively.html
Sandifer is an indefatigable critic who examines works in both fine detail and in a four dimensional 360 degree perspective that takes in the political, social and mystical landscape in which works are written. His Tardis Eruditorum did this over several year episode by episode of Doctor Who (plus novelizations, spin off series and related works). The Last War in Albion is, if anything, even more ambitious.
Book 1 was a challenging read but satisfying. It took in the early careers of Moore and Morrison as well as Britain’s economic and political changes through the 1970s and 80s. Their careers naturally reflected changes in British comic publishing (hence lengthy chapters on Marvel UK and 2000AD and hence chapters on Judge Dredd and Captain Britain) but also British music, popular culture and, inevitably, the rise of Margaret Thatcher.
Book 2 has reached Watchmen and offers a similar mix of social commentary, artistic insight, occult imagining, probably William Blake somewhere and occasional humor.
Read it. It will be good.
Looking forward to this…
Tom Gauld is a cartoonist who produces whimsical commentaries on writing, fiction and a range of other topics. His most important contribution to the world of science fiction and fantasy is this cartoon:
He has an excellent Tumblr here http://myjetpack.tumblr.com/ where you can browse through his cartoons.
Anyways…this has just been announced https://www.drawnandquarterly.com/blog/2015/06/dq-25-dq-publish-mooncop-tom-gauld
I’m excited 🙂
Daredevil review
The recent dominance of the Marvel Cinematic Universe at the box office has been accompanied with some attempts at achieving similar wonders on television. After a shaky start Marvel’s Agents of Shield has managed to be a consistently entertaining show set in a world were some people have super powers. However Agents of Shield is not groundbreaking television – it is an action show that almost feels nostalgic for a past age of television. It is like a 21st century Six Million Dollar man but with our modern taste for ensemble casting and on-going story arcs.
Daredevil is different. Firstly is available via Netflix and streamed over the internet. Netflix, as is there current model, made all the episodes in the series available at the same time. Consequently watching the show is more like watching a box set of DVDs and that presents its own challenges – cliffhangers at the end of an episode can be resolved immediately by the viewer for example. This gives the whole show a book like feel, with episode more like chapters at which the viewer can take an optional break. Continue reading
Logicomix
I forgot to add in my post on Aristotle et al, the fabulous Logicomix -which is an appalling oversight given the combined interests of this blog.
It tells the story of some of the key characters (in particular Bertrand Russell) in the form of a graphic novel, with some interesting meta-textual twists.
Read more about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix
