En Ecosse
November 10, 2009
A Scottish poem about cows, possibly by McGonagall:
On yonder hill
There stood a coo.
It must have moved.
Because it’s no’ there noo.
Big Top
November 9, 2009
Over a year ago I started playing around with the idea of an inter-dimensional circus, home to misfits so out of sych with their time and place that they runaway to a carnival on the fringes of existence. The Sad Teddy Boy Clown andhis Poodle, the Mental Gymnast, Penny Dreadful… they’d all have their stories, and all of their stories would gravitate around the enigmatic ring leader Eloise.
And then I start watching the new series of Heroes and it turns out the writers have had pretty much the exact same idea. Ish.
Bah.
Hero Worship – interviewing Zhang Yimou
November 6, 2009Now I’ve interviewed a few directors over the past two or three years, Bafta winners and everything, but – amazing and talented though a lot of them are – until today I don’t think any of them could be described as a personal hero. Zhang Yimou – also the director of Hero. Coincidentally.
Here Come the Ghouls
November 6, 2009A tad late perhaps, but here’s my take on Halloween. I may not be news editor any more, but dagnabbit if I can’t resist a good pun…. even if i’ve sort of used a similiarish headline already…
Selkie
October 12, 2009According to Scottish folklore, a selkie is a creature able to switch between human and seal form – they do this by the wearing of or removal of a seal skin. Quite often, these were beautiful women, and with their soft brown hair and seal-cow eyes it was not unheard of for a human man to fall in love with a selkie and marry her. These marriages would start off happily enough, but sooner or later the sea would call to her and she would yearn to return to the world of the seals. The only way to stop his wife abandoning him for the ocean was to steal her seal skin and hide it.
Selkie
Selkie page 2
The Graphic World of Salem Brownstone
October 11, 200901 October 2009 – www.shots.net
When shots.net heard that Watchmen guru Alan Moore had tipped writer John Harris Dunning’s debut novel as the future of comics – well, we just had to find out more.
On the cusp between brownish green and sienna, the autumn leaves signal that it’s still just early October. Said leaves are certainly less New England crisp than Old England soggy, yet thanks to a certain package that dropped through the letterbox we’re grooving on the idea of a stateside Halloween.
Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtowers is the debut graphic novel from writer John Harris Dunning and artist Nikhil Singh. It’s the tale of a dapper Laundromat owner who rocks up at a shadowy manor house to uncover the secrets of his dead father. With its Amityville architecture it’s an outsider’s view of an American dream, a fantastic, hyper-real myth. Noirish, Victorian, rococo, hallucinogenic, magical, dense, burlesque, Lovecraftian – any attempt at a coherent description collapses into a stream of adjectives.
To read the whole of the article click here.
