Comics

  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

  If I was the multiverse I’d been looking for a new PR agent. The idea that there are multiple versions of our reality sitting cheek-by-jowl in the wilds of space and time – and yes, I’m not a scientist so this is a fantastically wobbly explanation for the concept Continue Reading

  When news first emerged that DC Comics were going to re-interpret a sizable array of Hanna-Barbera’s most iconic stars such as The Flintstones and Scooby Doo and give them a modern makeover, there some doubt expressed that this could be achieved with any sort of creative substance. After all, delightful Continue Reading

  Most of us will far too young to recall those headily optimistic days when everyone envisaged the future as a time of limitless potential, a paradise-in-waiting given form by flying cars, machines doing all the drudgerous tasks that take us away from the doing the things we love, and Continue Reading

  One of the great delights of Rocko’s Modern Life, one of the great cartoons of Nickolodeon’s ’90s line-up which is finding new life in comics and on the screen again, has always been its devotion to anarchic silliness. Taking a leaf out of the manic hilarity of Looney Tunes Continue Reading