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Ragnarok And Roll
The Mighty Thor, by Walt Simonson I got into comics in the 80s, a copy of Walt Simonson’s Thor was one of the first Marvel Comics I bought with my own pocket money. (#359, where Thor is ensnared by a...
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WHAM! POW! Polls Aren’t Just For Pop Anymore!
B-but Shako… you weren’t eligible… n-no… HELP MEEEEEEE As well as the Freaky Trigger pop poll, masterminded by Kat, I thought I’d try something else – a Freaky Trigger COMICS POLL. This will work in...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2014: #38-#26
Inside the Arctic Base, the men from the website peered nervously out as SHAKO paced the snow. The giant bear showed no signs of tiring. But what could it want? All they had were the Freaky Trigger...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2014: #25-#11
“Wotcher, HUMES! Sewer robot RO-JAWS here, taking time out from cleaning THARG’S CLUDGEY to bring you the second part of the 2014 Freaky Trigger comics poll. And MANKEY MOSES, it’s taken some...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll #10-#1
Breaker breaker, Trigger Digger buddies! You got the Big A, Ace Garp, the tucker trucker so tumshy they had to croak him twice, comin’ in atcha with the top ten of the Freaky Trigger comics poll, no...
View ArticleEXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW! The Soulful And The Arcane
We promised we wouldn’t write about the Freaky Trigger #1 comic of 2014 any more, but luckily a MUCH MORE AUTHENTIC AND REAL comic has come along for us to write about instead, thanks to this interview...
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Marvel Comics: A Character Guide
Marvel Comics’ famed innovation in the 1960s was introducing characters who were “human” with “relatable flaws” as opposed to the super-icons of rivals DC. These relatable flaws gave each Marvel...
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I Hope You Can Kill Me Before Graduation
Graphic novel reviews, originally posted on goodreads.com ASSASSINATION CLASSROOM, Vol.1 (Viz Media) This first volume unfussily sets up the hit manga’s premise – an octopus being has destroyed the...
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What A Magical Young Lady You Are
More comics reviews originally from goodreads.com SUPREME: BLUE ROSE (Image Comics) The 1990s saw a rash of metafictional superhero comics by British writers – Grant Morrison’s Flex Mentallo and Animal...
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Is Japan’s Bathhouse That Unusual?
More comics reviews, this time focused on manga. Contains spoilers in places! Thermae Romae I (Yen Press) Surely the greatest time travel/bathhouse design manga ever written, Mari Yamakazi’s charming...
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From Beyond
NEW THRILL! This is an origin story. Thirty years ago, give or take a day, I went to my local newsagent and I bought a new comic. The next day I asked the newsagent, Mr.Mann, he of the back room full...
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Send A Limousine Anyway
1978: The Shooting Star It’s the spider I remember. In The Shooting Star, boy reporter Tintin is investigating an apocalyptic threat, a star on a collision course with our world. He visits an...
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Left Me Standing Like A Guilty Schoolboy
“It’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the Election.” – Margaret Thatcher, 4 May 1979...
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You Think We Make Dreams In This Town
More comics reviews from goodreads.com THE FADE OUT Vol 1 (Image Comics. Ed Brubaker/Sean Phillips/Elizabeth Breitweiser) SATELLITE SAM Vol 2: Satellite Sam And The Kinescope Snuff (Image Comics. Matt...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015
Back by popular demand! (Kat asked) As last year, we are running a COMICS POLL. This was an intimate occasion in 2014 with a small but magnificent body of voters, so if you want to vote in a poll...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #50-#38
“OINK! GNURF! SLURP!! SLOO!! GNAROOSH! GRUNT! SNAFFLE!! CHOMP! SNORRT!” Translation: “Good morning, everyone. I’m Rasher, the porcine companion of that young shaver Dennis, and I’m delighted to...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #37-#25
“Greetings people of Earth. It is I, Servitor Vek of the Doomlords of Nox. My all too convincing alien visage has come among you to pass final judgement on your species. I expect to reach a guilty...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #24-#13
“Hi Readers! It’s WHACKY here from COR!!, the weekly mag that thrashes the others. You’ve not seen much of me in comics lately, which is a bit of a sore point. I used to have to beat the offers away,...
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The Freaky Trigger Comics Poll 2015: #12 – #1
“Hi, we’re Jay, Mike, Cheryl and Bobby, better known as Bucks Fizz, stars of LOOK-IN magazine – oh the mischief we got up to! Nothing risque, you understand, it’s a children’s paper. Of course we’re...
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Love And Rockets: Notes On A Re-Reading (I)
Repurposed and edited Goodreads reviews of the Love And Rockets Library (by Los Bros Hernandez; published by Fantagraphics). Heartbreak Soup (Gilbert Hernandez) This is my third or fourth time reading...
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Canoe: Dig It?
La Belle Sauvage by Philip Pullman Philip Pullman has an enviable knack of getting critics to dwell on the high-flown literary allusions in his books – Paradise Lost in the His Dark Materials trilogy;...
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Good Comics I Read In 2017
I’m not doing a comics poll this year – the slack is being admirably taken up with Pete’s new TV poll – but I still read a LOT of comics last year. Here, in no special order, were some of the best...
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Read Harder Challenge (1 of 24): SIX TO SIXTEEN
Six to Sixteen: A Story for Girls by Juliana Horatia Ewing Read as part of the Book Riot Read Harder 2018 Challenge (Category: “A children’s classic published before 1980”) She’s no relation, but I’ve...
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Read Harder Challenge (2 of 24): HORTUS VITAE
Hortus Vitae: Essays On The Gardening Of Life by Vernon Lee (Read as part of the 2018 Read Harder challenge. Category: A book of essays.) Vernon Lee, pseudonym of Violet Paget, was an essayist, story...
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Read Harder Challenge (3 of 24): DATURA
Datura, or a Delusion We All See by Leena Krohn (Read as part of the Book Riot Readharder challenge 2018. Category: A single-sitting book.) An anonymous woman in an anonymous (though clearly Nordic)...
View ArticleKid Loki and the Braek Haerts
This is just a coda to Tom’s brilliant (but spoiler-y! Very spoiler-y!) piece on Journey into Mystery. This is less spoiler-y and much more ramble-y and nothing like as in-depth but Tom asked me to...
View ArticleBedtime Story Watch I
At the weekend I finished reading The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe to my kids – audience L (almost 6) and D (3 1/2) liked it, or maybe they like the ritual of bedtime stories and found it tolerable...
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Cantos Stop Won’t Stop (1-5)
Introduction New series! Recently I have been suffering from insomnia, and to give a sense of routine to my bedtime (which should help) I’m trying to read a short amount before I go to bed every night....
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Blimey Guv’nor It’s The Avengers Assemble #15AU Annotations Post
This week Avengers Assemble #15AU came out, by Al Ewing (yes relation) and Butch Guice. The comic is, as Hazel has pointed out, the most British thing ever published (at least by Marvel) and it is...
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How to be Awesome, by Diplomatic Ensign Noh-Varr age 23 1/3 (possibly)
When the previews for Young Avengers #4 came out, there was quite a lot of hand-wringing from the Tumblr zone about Noh-Varr’s line in this panel. I guess there was probably a lot of hand-wringing...
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Let’s talk about Kate
I love Miss America. She’s really fucking angry, she likes punching things and she’ll tolerate a great number of things for barbecued pork belly. She’s also sensible and intuitive and curious and has a...
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The Jackpot
A Brief History Of Teen Superhero Comics, Part 4 It’s probably the most famous panel in 60s Marvel history. A gag, a cliffhanger, a revolution. A young woman standing in a doorway, smiling, in total...
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Young hearts run free
It’s the 13th issue of Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie’s run on Young Avengers tomorrow. Aside from a foreboding moment for triskaidekaphobic fans, it’s the start of the end of this season. A...
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All Our Friends: The Marvel Tumblrwave
(Important disclaimer. I am something of a partisan, in that my brother is writing two monthly comics for Marvel. This partly explains why I’m so interested in their strategy, but I haven’t mentioned...
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State Of Decay
THREE #1-#5 (Image Comics) by Kieron Gillen, Ryan Kelly and Jordie Bellaire Kieron Gillen, Ryan Kelly and Jordie Bellaire’s THREE is a political comic on every level. The level on which it got most of...
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Everyone should try it
I’ve spent the last month or so quarter of a year thinking a lot about what I’m going to write in my last thing about Young Avengers. I had thought I was done, mostly in the sense that although the...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E01: Two Swords
It’s back at last! The highly anticipated Game of Thrones has returned to our televisions and computers, promising boobs, dodgy accents, great costumes, boobs, murder, betrayal, heartache, boobs,...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E02: The Lion and the Rose
Well, that escalated quickly. One of the huge benefits of watching the HBO series over reading the books is that the story cuts to the chase much, much faster. The Purple Wedding seemed to take a...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E03: Breaker of Chains
Oh, GoT. Much has been written about “that scene”. I was pre-warned, thanks to Tumblr and deftly avoided watching it altogether. It genuinely upset me, because otherwise this might have been one of the...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E04: Oathkeeper
I was really happy to see the title of this week’s show, as it was (and still remains) one of my favourite moments in the whole series. Not to say that last week’s episode doesn’t still frigging smart,...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E05: First Of His Name
This week kind of felt like a slog, to be honest, despite zipping back and forth between locations and characters at a rapid pace. I almost felt like nothing happened by the end of the episode, even...
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Bedtime Storywatch: Harry Potter III – Back In Training
Prisoner of Azkaban, the third Harry Potter book, is also the third I’ve read to my 7-year old. The rule has been “one a year”, mostly because I know the series ramps up the level of darkness and...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E06: The Laws of Gods and Men
We’re on the home stretch now with only a handful of episodes left. This week was another hour of rapid-fire scenes catching and setting up, with the last thirty minutes focussed on the Story A proper....
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E07: Mockingbird
Ooh, it’s all going to kick off spectacularly and soon! This week is all about the build-up and the antici…pation. If only previous table-setting episodes had been like this – and I’m not just saying...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E08: The Mountain and the Viper
Aw jeeze, Lester! A beloved character dying is all part and parcel of GoT, and dying REALLY horribly is the doom cherry on the grimcake, I know this. I also know there’s only more awfulness to come,...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E09: The Watchers of the Wall
It’s wall-to-wall Wall action this week, with Jon Snow ‘n’ Pals finally facing Mance Rayder’s United Army of Free Folk. There’s not actually a lot of story to tell (or recap) to be honest. It is,...
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Is It Is It Wicked?
The Wicked And The Divine #1, by Freaky Trigger friends and favourites Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, is out this week. There’s going to be a bit of coverage of it here, partly because I...
View Article10 reasons it’s okay to not like The Wicked and The Divine #1
Coronations are dull things You read enough Vertigo comics in your youth (or, last week) and you have had sufficient for the next decade of ingénue audience identification figures having a world of...
View ArticleGame of Thrones S04E10: The Children
Well, friends – here we are at the end of the series. Most of the loose ends have been tied up, and I take back last week’s grumble regarding frustrating cliff-hangers. For the most part, I’ve been...
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Squees! Hammer Goin’ Her (Temp)
Avengers NOW! and Marvel in the 2010s Marvel Comics’ announcement that its new Thor is going to be a woman has attracted plenty of froth and comment – especially since it turned out that this was part...
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