I just finished Charles Hatfield’s new book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, which is the latest addition to the University Press of Mississippi’s “Great Comics Artists” series. I’m not a Kirby expert or acolyte, though I’ve always appreciated the manic, insane energy of Kirby’s work–most especially of his Fourth World...
I recently returned from my trip to the UK. Before going, I’d read an article in the Globe and Mail about how Canadians have the worst culture shock when we go to Britain because we somehow expect everything to be the same in the mother country. I mean, we have the same Queen, how...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=fRZJpX4AdAM “Winter is coming,” and so is HBO’s adaptation of the first novel in George R. R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, A Game of Thrones. For those of you unfamiliar with the series, A Song of Ice and Fire is about the Realpolitik of a fantasy kingdom called Westeros. Its inspiration is...
A few years ago, I started trying to dress like a grown-up. I’d always had an interest in the accoutrements of traditional masculinity–in things I saw men wearing in old movies, in felt hats and sleeve garters and suspenders–but I’d always felt constrained by budget and lack of knowledge and the relentless casualness of...
Colleagues and I just completed reading Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. We had all been seeing scads of references to this book and were quite keen on reading it. However, we were all rather underwhelmed by Hardt & Negri’s account of the emergent possibilities...