From a purely critical standpoint, Louis L’Amour’s The Walking Drum is a gruesome mess. It’s a historical novel that constantly hits the reader on the head with blocks of exposition. The hero, Kerbouchard, is not only a nigh-invulnerable fighter, he’s one of the finest scholars of the twelfth […]
It’s funny. I knew today was the anniversary of Elvis’ death. I didn’t realize it was the 30th anniversary of Elvis’ long black limousine sliding into the beyond. A good hunk of his afterlife has been in comics. Let us take a moment of silence for the man […]
A feeling’s been gnawing deep inside me for a while. A feeling that maybe Frank Miller’s hypermasculine antiheros and faceless, breast-thrusting women are exactly what they seem, not just sketchy parody. After reading 300, Miller’s 1998 account of the Spartans at Thermopylae, I don’t have any doubt: Miller […]
Sometimes you find something just in time for it to die and the best you can offer is a good death. Once my roommate found a pigeon with a broken neck and brought it home. It spent a night in our bathtub before we took it to wildlife […]
What makes a compelling book tick? Sometimes I find it hard to tell, especially if the story works so well that I don’t even think about the craft involved. A good way to get to know a book, especially for an otherwise quick reader like myself: listen to […]
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The Cultural Gutter 