Nothing like a trip to Eel Island in Steve Canyon Comics (circa October 1951). Here we discovered the cruel anarchist resistance leader, Sookie Susie, who took the trouble to kidnap the US officer’s
The interesting cover on Arthur Sellings The Uncensored Man attracted my eye in a San Francisco bookshop on Polk Street several years ago. It featured a sort of typical 1960s collage of a man’s face
Five years after the invasion of Iraq, with hundreds of thousands dead, I can’t help but think of the original assessment by the brilliant Bush-Cheney team, that the operation would be a cakewalk. Af
Too bad I didn’t get the chance to meet Prof. Shoji Yamada, who was trying to meet me before returning to Japan tomorrow. Among other interesting projects, he has worked on data-mining faces in Ukiy
Muchos kudos to Joel Johnson, who not only saved from obscurity the original paste-up of Wally Wood’s 22 Panels that Always Work, but scanned it and made it available for the Universe. Way to be, Joe
Interesting article on BBC about an exhibition of Mainland Chinese comics. The curator of the show is Paul Gravett, probably London’s most famous comics aficionado, and author of Manga: 60 Years of J
Rediscovering this brilliant story from Mickey Rat Comics #3 (1980) by Robert Armstrong reminds me of how important [perhaps even CRITICAL] it was to my development. Not only did I discover the true
This year at Boskone, there were some interesting panels, great painting demos by Bob Eggleton and Omar Rayyan, and a nice gallery of paintings from Boskones past and present alongside works by the Artist GOH, Dean Morrissey. Anthropology, SF, and Chad Oliver The first panel I attended was on the works of Chad Oliver, the great anthropologist / SF author from Texas. Amy Thomson, whose work on the encounters between humans and aliens (and between robot girl and humans) remarked that, in fact, she was not influenced by Oliver before writing the Color of Distance and Through Alien Eyes, and only came to appreciate the anthropological aspects of Oliver’s science fiction in retrospect. George Zebrowski told of his long working relationship with Chad Oliver. When he worked with Crown Books as editor for their Classics of Modern Science Fiction series in the mid-1980s, Zebrowski was asked what the first ten volumes should be, and he told them that the three of those ten should include Chad Oliver’s novels: Shores of Another Sea, Shadows of the Sun, and Unearthly Neighbors. Three out of ten? By the same author! Was Zebrowski out of his mind? But, in fact, Crown ended up supporting the suggestion and those novels did appear as the 3rd, 8th, and 9th volumes in the series.
Okay, it’s not exactly a panel, but it is sort of weird… And it did clue me into the some arcane tidbits of film history. For example, I didn’t even know about the fifteen part-serial Nyoka, the Jungle Girl (1941), which claimed to be based on an Edgar Rice Burroughs 1929 novel, Jungle Girl, even though ERB’s book takes place in Cambodia, and Nyoka (“snake” in Swahili) is clearly set in the Hollywood mythos Africa.
Let’s ponder this odd cover by Russ Heath, which somehow perfectly describes the mood of the current administration’s Cabinet meetings. Just when it seems that everyone who knows too much has been stu