Seaside towns are nothing but collections of endings. The land runs out into the beach which runs out into the sea and the towns are full of nets designed to catch the people who are washed downstream along with the river water. It sounds worse than it is, but that idea, of this being the …
The two great lies we tell ourselves about the future are that it will be here soon and it will be a clean break. The first is a lie because, the Jonathan Coulton song notwithstanding, the future is already here and has been here for a while. Five years ago, I interviewed one of the …
Clark Kent is one of my patron saints. The quarterback-sized reporter with the calm manner and the dogged refusal to back down from a story is an ideal I find very attractive, arguably far more than the whole blue suit/cape/superpowers thing. Clark’s a working journalist, a journeyman reporter. He’s Cary Grant in a good hat …
Music Past The Redline: Clark Kent and Lois Lane 75th Anniversary Special
Steampunk is producing some really interesting things at the moment. Not only do we have one of the legitimate creators of the genre, James P Blaylock, working again but there’s Cherie Priest, Guy Adams, the incomparable Professor Elemental of course and now, Resurrection Engines. An anthology of fifteen stories edited by Scott Harrison, it …
Firing Up The Resurrection Engines: A New Anthology And A New Approach To Steampunk
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcaQQZVjXQs] There are two phrases which tend to get a Pavlovian reaction from horror fans. The first is ‘torture porn’, and the second is ‘found footage’. I actually just heard a couple of you shiver. Here’s the thing though, both of them have their place. Horror, like any genre is when it …
Certain phrases are rich with meaning and far imply more than show. Like “Exhibit A”. It speaks of courtrooms, of mountains of evidence, of judicial red in tape and claw grinding its way through someone’s life, rightly or wrongly. Exhibit A means just the beginning, and with that in mind it could refer to both …
The sheer variety in any given issue of 2000AD is both its greatest strength and weakness. It’s a strength because no other comic I’ve ever encountered has the same willingness to experiment and shift tone, strip by strip. It’s a weakness because, inevitably, strips tend to start together which means it can be difficult for …
SEAL Team Six aren’t quite real anymore, in fact, they haven’t been for a while. The unit was officially disbanded in 1987 and replaced with the United States Naval Special Warfare Development group. Being the military, this unit has two official designations, NSWDG and DEVGRU. Also being the military, it has a third name; …
Back when The X Files was a going concern but in the process of winding down, I used to joke about my ideal final episode. It would open with Mulder, standing at the front of a classroom, next to a blackboard. His first words be ‘So, we start here…’ and he’d begin explaining the entire …
Every conspiracy theory, and every conspiracy show, has a Slump. Sometimes it’s the moment where you realize that the person explaining the theory to you is actually advocating, seriously, that reptilian aliens make up the world’s governments and that these aliens are regularly enhancing human soldiers for combat on alien worlds reached via stargates. It’s …