Hanging With Heroes

When I was 11 or 12, at the variety store near my Grandma’s house, I made a life-changing purchase. It was probably Christmas and I was probably killing time until I had to go back to a room full of adults. When I did return to the festive […]

Supercilious Heroes

Not long ago,
you’d have been escorted out with a stifled laugh had you come to the Toronto
Reference Library looking for comic books. Today you’re led into a hushed chamber,
softly lit, where comics are spread lasciviously in glass cases and their artists’
original drawings are hung on the walls like rare insects.

Pushing Kim Jong-Il’s Buttons

I’ve done my share of North Korea mocking. My favourite story? When I was living in the South Korean countryside in 1996, there had been a recent drama aired on South Korea’s KBS network that characterized North Korea in some way they didn’t like. The North Korean radio […]

Mike Sterling takes a brief look at the (possibly one-joke) comic, Here Doesn’t Come the Flying F—!: “The eponymous hero is a slovenly sort, fighting for truth, justice…well, actually, just fighting for his right to watch television uninterrupted, mostly.”

Stories Never Fail Us

She’s eighteen and she’s getting a little impatient with life at her boarding school. She doesn’t see her stepdad very often. She knows more about magic than the teachers at Wyverly College, but even though the school is within twenty miles of the Wall that separates mundane from […]

Ah, the perennial music nerd topic, Desert Island Discs. On the Beatles’ Help: “This album falls on the trailing edge of their original Beatlemania phase and the beginning of their brief folk-rock/art-pop phase (a phase I wish had lasted a little longer before they went pepperdelic).”