What, “filled with a profound sense of embarrassment and regret you’ll either psychically bury or use as the stuff of cruel self-mockery a couple of decades later?” Mission fucking accomplished. It is my sincere belief that the funnybook scene’s decades-long push to exhibit a caricature of “maturity” has done more damage than either the Comics […]

I’m not a fan of the “Marvel cinematic universe,” but I do appreciate how the films have guided the publisher’s choice of reprint material. Absent a tenuous association with a multi-billion dollar media franchise, it’s hard to imagine a dedicated trade collection of the Avengers’ “Trial of Yellowjacket” arc. Spanning Avengers #212 to #230, the […]

When I launched the Nobody’s Favorites feature (over ten years ago, apparently) I made a public point of striving for more than just a “Mort of the Month” angle where I’d find lazy ways to snark on soft targets. Instead of a litany of smug cheap shots, I forced myself to find some angle — […]

Every few months, the BBC releases a new installment of Top of the Pops: The Story of…, spotlighting a specific year through lens of the venerable pop music program. The format is strictly documentary-lite, generally apolitical, and typically focuses upon whoever accepts their invitation to provide commentary. (Think VH-1’s decade-themed specials from the Aughts — […]

The Watergate break-in. Nixon’s re-election. Bloody Sunday. The terrorist attack at the Olympics in Munich. Hurricane Agnes. The Christmas bombing on North Vietnam. The year of my birth had no shortage of horrors and tragedies, but one of the most disturbing of the lot took place in countless bathrooms across America. To ask “why?” is […]

About two months back, a drunken idiot plowed his pick-up truck into a group of motorcyclists in New Hampshire, killing seven of them. It soon came out that the driver of the truck shouldn’t have been behind the wheel — neither drunk nor sober — because he’d been picked up on Connecticut on a DUI […]

I really wanted to write a detailed analysis about how the Cool World soundtrack manifested from a space-time fold which curved above and below the temporal brane of the Grunge Era, past and future coexisting as pits on photonically agitated polycarbonate… …but I can’t stop wincing about the separate listings for the Thompson Twins and […]

I have read a lot of dystopian fiction in my forty-seven years. Some of it has been good, a lot of it has been terrible, but none of it has been as utterly disturbing as the copy from this International Paper Company ad… But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was […]

Christmas is less than a month away, which means the slew of hot takes about That One Problematic Holiday Standard should start arriving at any moment. In previous years, I’ve striven to keep above this circular debate, but the sheer number of wrong-headed reads of the subject matter had compelled my to weigh in on […]

Because I am old and jaded and the old bag of tricks doesn’t cut it for me anymore, I have to find my horrific thrills from fresher venues — like running a search for “Halloween” on the Bradford Exchange’s online portal. Let’s face it, no existential terror Lovecraft ever dreamed up could possibly compete with […]