I hate this sort of thing. I should probably be disqualified from commenting on comics this year on account of only really reading ‘Astonishing X-Men’. Likewise my lit reading is woefully behind with only ‘The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code’ being published in 2004. I very nearly [...]

Hughes lived, he did some exciting things, he went mad. There are no lessons to be learned…

Geof Darrow is clearly not a man to let mere sanity stand in the way of his artistic vision. His ‘Shaolin Cowboy’ is unadulterated psychotic nonsense. Good work, Geof!

In 1998 Peter Biskind’s ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’ was published, taking as its subject the explosion of innovative, eccentric and electric filmmaking in 1970s America…

Can the Wachowski Brothers redeem themselves through the medium of comics?

‘Blade Trinity’ is a natural development of what we’ve seen before in this series, but with a quirkier sensibility…

Watchmen for kids.

It is three years since Danny Ocean and associates successfully robbed the Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, and after three years of searching, the casino owner has found Ocean and wants revenge…

Nicholas Cage returns with a brainless yet fun action adventure that asks ‘what if a treasure map was hidden on the back of the Declaration of Independence?’…

Gene Roddenberry was no visionary. What he was a first rate screenwriter of serial television who came up with a cracking idea for a series.

From the off it’s important to note that anyone who has seen ‘Man Bites Dog’ will have difficulties taking ‘The Last Horror Movie’ seriously as an original construct…

Some kind of error has meant that this issue of ‘Batman’ has gone out with Judd Winick’s name on the cover when he didn’t write that which is inside it.

Only a naive writer would attempt to write this comic without considering what Cap’s words and deeds might mean in a wider sense. The character represents America, but whose America?

Mean spirited retro-grade trash, written to a shopping list….

It’s quite hard for me to express just how bad, and just how fundamentally wrong headed, ‘Green Lantern: Rebirth’ # 1 is.

The Marvel universe is a busy, complicated place. This is clearly an attempt to create a fun, entry-level book to the wider Marvel universe for readers only really familiar with the big characters…

Quite peculiar watching this light comedy-drama in the knowledge that it comes from the pen of the man who’s doing the new series of ‘Doctor Who’…

My name’s Wally West, I’m The Flash, the fastest man alive…

For some reason, this year the New TV Season arrived one week in the middle of November, but better late than never I suppose…

Brad Bird has been a fanboy favourite since his cult classic ‘The Iron Giant’, but with ‘The Incredibles’ Brad has gone from being an outsider on the fringes of feature animation to the major player in town…

A number of recent Marvel revamps have clearly had one eye on the movie version. You can almost see Marvel editors handing them round a Hollywood pitch meeting and saying ‘how about this?’.

I can easily imagine how exciting this would have been if I’d watched it when I was ten years old: I’d have taped it, and by the following afternoon I would have watched it at least three more times…

Big ideas, big action scenes and good human writing crash together in a technology and conspiracy heavy book each issue of which really needs a couple of read throughs before it all sinks in.

‘The Smoking Room’ has been deemed a failure already as it arrives on BBC2 from BBC3, with the trailers tossing around quotes from glowing reviews in a desperate attempt to win higher ratings than its BBC3 run…

The notes in the back of the first issue by author, and former ‘Infinity Inc’ hero, Roy Thomas make clear the writer’s great pleasure in this comic book being the most faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel in any medium.

Grant Morrison has a tendency to talk big about his work, but he can afford to – as a writer he has a tendency to takes comics, both mainstream superhero titles and more personal books, into new areas…

1960s ‘Doctor Who’ is the bomb. ‘Lost in Time’ is therefore to be welcomed with open arms, a pleasant smile, and a round of drinks…

Over the course of four series ‘Teachers’ has replaced every member of its core cast. This kind of turnover just doesn’t work, especially in such a character-driven series…

I’m partially reviewing this because some of the series biggest laughs, and most spectacular gross-out moments, are still lurking near the top of my subconscious nearly a week after a single viewing.

A glance at the front cover, back cover and first two pages of ‘The Timewaster Letters’ reveals that I am comfortably the least famous person ever to praise this book…

This is a quantum movie: the very act of describing it – whether in a review or to an unaware friend – effects the result…

Ooh hoo, that Lovejoy eh? Tink, Eric, Lady Jane, antiques, Suffolk. Bit of a laugh wasn’t it? All mullets, jeans and leather jackets on a fifty year-old man. What were they thinking?

For anyone whose familiarity with Chinese/HK cinema reaches as far as Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, wuxia is a slightly different form of martial arts film…

Jeph Loeb continues to demonstrate his remarkable grasp of DCU characters: I’m starting to believe that he could even make ‘Wonder Woman’ work, although naturally writing ‘Wonder Woman’ is not a fate I would wish on anybody…

I have a theory about good movies, which has two propositions, which run: 1) you can never have enough robots in a movie…

In 1970 a young film academic and teacher called George Lucas, whose previous filmwork had been restricted to documentaries and prize-winning shorts, made a very strange film about LA in sixties.

It’s easy to understand the origins of this film in a five-minute showreel dreamed up by wrtier director Kerry Conran of giant robots menacing Manhattan. It’s a classic pulp sci-fi concept…

As an obsessive ‘Resident Evil’ player, I feel less like a reviewer and more like a guest academic, wheeled in to provide learned analysis on how this movie fits in with the wider context of ‘RE’ lore. Turn to page 11 in your workbook now…

So what if Robert Kirkman created the Marvel Universe?

The second season of ‘Millennium’ is one of my favourite seasons of any TV series, and as such its not just a pleasure to see the season released on DVD, but also to at last get an excuse to write about it…

What felt a bit hit-and-miss at first is now producing far more hits than misses…

Hellraiser was an odd kind of horror film, but it was an even stranger basis for a franchise. With parts five and six on the way in the US, here’s a DVD collection of the first three instalments to remind us how it all began…

To my great alarm and not inconsiderable shock, I now live in a town without a comic shop…

It’s “Batman: The Anime Series” essentially with an palette of colours and backgrounds seemingly drawn from Japanimation and character designs that seem to come via ‘Digimon’ or ‘Ultimate Muscle’.

Trailers for movies and blurbs on the back of the DVDs often throw around superlatives. The ‘Star Wars’ boxset is almost self-effacing.

This boxset – nice and shiny with four amaray cases with uniformly bad covers inside it – contains two five star movies and one four-and-a-half star movie which, between them, constitute half of cinema’s premiere own-generated property.

Well, that was all a bit of a waste of time, wasn’t it?

It’s a consistently funny, constantly surprising riot of in-jokes, familiar designs and glorious character moments if you’re a late twentysomething manchild.

Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Edison, together at last through time and space. Say what?

British superheroes are gaining a bit of attention these days. Here’s a perfectly formed A5 comic from writer Ian Carney and artist Will Kane…