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Walking home from The Independent last Sunday, we espied the new-to-the-hood Hub Comics, from which we emerged with a slightly-inconvenient-to-carry-home mix of goodies.
They had a couple compliations of Mike Allred’s Madman, and I bought both in a fit of nostalgia.
If you don’t know Madman, “the world’s snappiest comic magazine”, the titular protagonist is one […]

In increasing order of magnitude:

Yesterday I gave a busker a couple bucks for the first time since moving to MA. Why? He ‘d just played Lou Reed’s “Romeo Had Juliette,” from New York — certainly not my favorite Reed solo tune, but maybe my favorite Reed solo album — and got enough of the words […]

Pretty much ever since the genres science fiction, fantasy, and horror have existed as distinct marketing categories, there have been periodic movements seeking to un-define them as such. In the 60’s there was “The New Wave.” In the 80’s some bruited about the awkward, demi-hemispherist phrase “North American magical realism.” And more recently, an unruly […]

I liked Timothy Zahn’s Star Wars novels a lot, even if they were a somewhat guilty pleasure. Many other people apparently liked them too, because LucasFilm and Bantam Spectra cooked up a chronology spanning some fifteen years after Return of the Jedi and found writers to fill it in with dozens of novels. The back […]

Once upon a time (in the 1940s), Mssrs deCamp and Pratt teamed up to write a series of short novels about the magical misadventures of one Harold Shea. The tales had a proto-post-modern spin to them: Shea would get transported into myths and pre-copyright stories like Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The Shea stories have an absurdly […]

well, kinda.

Jack Vance’s fiction and (mostly ’50s) pulp art

on lane on sith