There is a quiet joy in being surprised by a book. What you suppose it will be like when you pick it up in a bookstore and are intrigued enough by the back cover blurb to add it to your TBR pile – in my case, a towering mountain that Continue Reading
Comics review: Midas
Diving headfirst into a truly-imaginative, brilliantly-executed story like which inhabits Midas by author Ryan North (Squirrel Girl) and beloved illustrators Shelli Paroline and Braden Lamb (One Day a Dot: The Story of You, The Universe, and Everything) with an equal touch (deliberately chosen word; you’ll see why soon) of menace Continue Reading
Fear the Walking Dead: “Leave What You Don’t” (S5, E13 review)
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND OILY ZOMBIES, REGRET AND LOSS AND SOCIOPATHS ON HORSEBACK … “Oh, the humanity!” First uttered by reporter “Herb” Morrison as he watched in horror as the Hindenburg burned on 6 May, 1937, taking 36 lives with it, this expression is normally associated with lamentation and sadness. Continue Reading
Knock! Knock! Lucas the Spider tries to make a new, rather frantic, friend
How could you not want to be friends with Lucas the Spider? The creation of Josh Slice, and voiced by his nephew, is sublimely, delightfully innocent, a spider who firmly believes friendship comes before everything else. Thing is, no one has the fly he once tried (successfully) to befriend, and Continue Reading
Book review: What If It’s Us by Adam Silvera and Becky Albertalli
Falling in love is a glorious thing. All that newness! All that possibility! All the promise of a bright and shiny future hand-in-hand with someone more special than anyone else alive. It’s heavy exclamation use territory and 16-year-old Arthur, one of the lovestruck protagonists in What If It’s Us? by Continue Reading
A killer second act: Thoughts on Barry season 2
SPOILERS AHEAD … AND MESSY, MESSY, MESSY LIFE … If your only guide to life was the one-note, morally-simplified world of much of television or movie programming, you could be forgiven for thinking that this thing called living is a relative walk in the park. Got a major issue? It’s Continue Reading
Happy 60th anniversary Asterix! Here’s a celebratory book to mark the occasion
When I first began reading Asterix way back in the ’70s when I was but a young boy, had hair (my six-year-old niece begs to differ) and dinosaurs ruled the Earth (also my niece’s firm belief and she shall be dissuaded), I was blissfully unaware of the fact that it Continue Reading
Weekend pop art: Aligned with the Sleeveface project
SNAPSHOTSleeveface is an amusing participatory photo project in which people from all over the world strategically pose with matching album covers, creating the illusion that the original picture is complete. The photos bring the inert photo to life, much in the same way that has been done with books and Continue Reading
Who put the ’80s into Stranger Things? Why the Russo brothers, of course!
SNAPSHOTIf you’ve ever seen the show Stranger Things, you’ve probably noticed a movie reference or two. Series creators Ross and Matt Duffer are huge film buffs, and they’ve used every opportunity they can to reference some of their favorite movies in Stranger Things. (synopsis via Laughing Squid) One of the Continue Reading
Book review: The Rig by Roger Levy
There is something utterly beguiling about walking (literally or figuratively) into what feels like nothing and watching it grow and grow until it is most definitely something. This is true of novels as much as anything, and especially true of Roger’s Levy deceptively simply-titled The Rig, an economically-named book that Continue Reading