This review first appeared in the Comics Journal. “[S]uper-hero comic books…aren’t taken seriously in the critical community,” Timothy Callahan claims in the introduction to his monograph *Grant Morrison: The Early Years.* If that’s true, books like this are the reason. Instead of in depth analysis, Callahan provides his readers with lists of themes, like *chaos* [...]
Blogs are all about self-promotion, so what the hey…. I’m currently looking around for freelance writing opportunities. If any blog readers have leads or ideas, let me know. My email is noahberlatsky at hotmail. Thanks all.
Finally found another decent John Carpenter movie; Escape from New York isn’t exactly great, but it’s entertaining and intermittently thought-provoking. It’s especially interesting in light of all the women-in-prison movies I was watching recently. The plot (Manhattan Island turned into a huge isolated prison in a miliaristic/crime-ridden near future) seems more-or-less lifted from Stephanie Rothman’s [...]
This piece is so out of date because it’s reprinted from The Comics Journal. This year I thought I’d use the Journal’s best-of issue as an excuse to go through some of my wife’s giant, teetering piles of manga. Of course, that makes this more a “best-of what I read recently” list than an actual [...]
I saw two critically acclaimed masterpieces of world cinema recently: Bergman’s Virgin Spring and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu. I can more or less understand why they make the critics go “ooooo” — they’re beautifully shot, slow-paced, and larded with BIG SPIRITUAL THEMES. Exploitation for the intelligencia, basically. Another reason for the critical enthusiasm may be that, in [...]
This week in the Chicago Reader I compare discs by folkie Karen Dalton and Korean black metal genius Pyha.
This review first appeared in the Comics Journal.I have enormous affection for writer Andy Helfer’s classic run on DC’s Shadow series in the 80s, so I was intrigued to hear he was working on a series of graphic biographies. Nor have I been disappointed. Helfer’s first effort, on Malcolm X , was, despite the difficulty [...]
Jaime Hernandez’ work told me that I could and should draw comics about where I live, the things I did everyday, and the people I know and love.
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