I went, partially, out of curiosity to the IBBY conference at Roehampton at yesterday which was themed around Graphic Novels and comics. I find it slightly odd going to these events as I’m not a professional scholar/researcher nor do I work as a librarian – I do it for fun since my day job is currently [...]
Ian Rankin’s Dark Entries is a locked room crime novel with a haunted house twist. Or is that a haunted house novel with a crime twist. Whatever, it is good. One of the first publications in the Vertigo Crime list (Filthy Rich is the other by Brian Azzarello) and it makes for a fun read.
John [...]
I approached the Greek Street series by Peter Milligan a little warily but it seems to fit into an emerging patterns about comics doing meta-fiction and musing on the recurrence of narratives, what with Mike Carey’s The Unwritten as well.
Eddy picks up a stripper and has sex with her, not realising that she is his [...]
The Independent has an article on the new Coroners and Justice Bill which is being introduced to parliament this week and a possible effect on graphic novels. The Bill contains a clause that is targeted towards hardcore paedophiliac pornography but my understanding is that the terms are vague enough to catch a book like Alan [...]
I’ve just caught this interview with Alan Moore on the Guardian website where he talks about the Watchmen film, Lost Girls (which Top Shelf are bringing out in one volume in May) and a sequel to Voice of the Fire which sounds very much like an Iain Sinclair type endeavour but set in Northampton.
From the department of overreaching readings comes an article by Hugh Rifkind in the Times titled “Of Course Tintin’s gay. Ask Snowy” which trots out some ‘evidence’ that he was gay. It is sloppy writing and research by somebody either having a bit of a giggle or simply wanting to add in some controversy to [...]
The Boston Globe has a quick article on the sanitisation of fairy tales in Disney films. Its not a new idea but as I begin thinking about Tintin and Asterix, I realise how like fairy tales they both are, in the original sense of the form.
Herge and Goscinny & Uderzo reimagine their version of Europe [...]
I’ve been reading Matthew Screech’s Master of the Ninth Art and he makes a valid point about Tintin and Asterix.
Hergé engaged with the rise of Fascism in The Black Isle and mainly in King Ottakar’s Sceptre. Screech argues that Black Isle is not political but the way that the villains are agitating through currency destabilasation [...]
One thing that has puzzled me for ages is the opening of the Asterix books. In each on there is a paragraph about the only Gaulish village being surrounded by four Roman camps. Is this an exaggeration of the Resistance or part of general French culture.
Reading the post war literature chapter in Kay, Cave [...]
David Fickling, the excellent publisher of children’s books, is launching a new comic according to the Independent. Philip Pullman will be writing a strip called “The Adventures of John Blake”. Not sure who else is joining in yet.
You can sign up for the email news letter for the launch on the site but the contents [...]