Comics

  Going on an adventure is generally a good thing. But not it appears in RuinWorld by Derek Laufman, where cities are few and declining, brigands abound, artifacts are scarce and worth their magical weight in gold, and not if you’re Rex, a half cat/half fox Ruin Hunter who is Continue Reading

  As cases of mistaken identity go, The Weatherman is a glorious technicolour-fabulous doozy. Well, mistaken in the mind of the weatherman himself, Nathan Bright, outrageously fun, good-naturedly lovable bad boy of Martian news some 750 years in the future where Mars and Venus are heavily-populated outposts of the human Continue Reading

  There is a tendency in apocalyptic literature to go for the frenetic juggler narrative-wise. Given the scenarios usually at play, this is reasonably understandable since we’re generally talking epic fights for survival and not a stroll in the park on Sunday. The problem with going hard and big, a Continue Reading

  Depending on where and who you are, Cannons Cove is either the site of your greatest, fondest childhood memories or a backwater with little to offer but boring jobs and creative nothingness. For fans of The Gloomies, an iconic film that defined many peoples’ childhoods, including dismissive uber-fans who Continue Reading

  As a writer who is, naturally enough, most comfortable with moving words merrily around a page, I am endlessly fascinated by the way artists, whose talents I most assuredly do not share alas, exercise their creative gift. This fascination increases inestimably when it is an artists drawing a comic Continue Reading

  Brain Pickings, a fascinating website run by the supremely-dedicated Maria Popova which she describes as “an inventory of cross-disciplinary interestingness, spanning art, science, design, history, philosophy, and more”, and Bill Watterson’s masterfully-clever, exuberantly funny and visually imaginative comic strip Calvin and Hobbes are a perfect match. Even more so Continue Reading

    The apocalypse is big business these days. For some reason, and it may have something to do with the fact that ever since the optimistic blush of post-World War Two idealism wore off in the early 1970s that we’ve become more and more convinced the world is going Continue Reading

  Childhood is a magical, wonderful time. In the world of Wallace the Brave, drawn by Will Henry, the pen name of Jamestown, Rhode Island-based Will Wilson, it’s all that and more, a whimsical, fabulous place where you can muse on what it would be like to “heroically [ride] a Continue Reading

  One of the things I have long-loved about the European style of storytelling, and the reason why I have consumed everything from Agaton Sax and the Moomins as a child through to The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery as an adult, is that it is not afraid Continue Reading