Batman & Robin #7: the annocommentations
February 2nd, 2010
Bob: This is not only the best issue of B&R yet, but the best single issue of Morrison’s batman run by some margin, and as dense and full a piece as he’s written since Seven Soldiers #1, with which it shares many links and referents, both deliberate, accidental and incidental.
Zom: Tan’s a nice chap, some of us around here were quite keen on his work, but if you ask me thank God for Cameron Stewart: Batman & Robin is back at long last. This isn’t my favourite issue and I’ll get into some of the reasons why later, but it’s a bloody good one.
Tuesday is reviewsday: Batrob #3 the annocommentations
September 1st, 2009
Heroic hype: the Batcave
August 21st, 2009
As adults we forget how strange things are. Take caves, for example.
On a recent holiday, my wife, son, and I found ourselves on a guided tour through a cave system. The group was large, and the cave as well lit as the intersection between health and safety and the management’s sense of theatricality would allow. The guide’s patter was honed and confident, glinting with comfortable jokes that didn’t require laughter, and just the right blend of folklore and history to keep us interested. The package offered no reason this side of phobia to feel unsafe, or uncertain. No-one was going to get lost, and no-one was going to get hurt, even boredom was unlikely to be much of a problem given that the tour was, quite sensibly, rather short.
But somewhere in the darkness beneath the spotlit consumer experience the real appeal rustled. Awe. It went unspoken of course only ever hinted at or skirted. The guide spoke of a gigantic network of which ours was but a fragment, of divers who had squeezed their way through small spaces in the deep and discovered gigantic caverns, one of which was thus far inexplicable to the geologists and engineers that had pored over the photographs, the mega-tonnage above the vast cave roof apparently unsupportable. The guide also spoke of deeper passages still, of underground lakes and streams, and of tunnels yawning forever into the earth. Even the history of the place hung like a heavy shadow. The caves had been sacred to the Celts, who offered up sacrifices to the dark. Later the Christians came and banished the old religion, a conflict hinted at in the local legend of a witch turned to stone by a priest. The guide showed us the rock where, if the light is right, the witch’s petrified profile can still be seen glaring into the blackness, and claimed, as a good tour guide should, that late at night her mordant laughter can be heard echoing in the depths.
Perhaps from sub-level 7, perhaps deeper
Mindless Bollockry
June 15th, 2009
This is what last Friday afternoon looked like if you are a Mindless One (macrophageous Gary Lactus and the doughty, doughy Tymbus excepted, for some reason.) It was one of those doldrummy days, and this is how we killed the time: Email Style! I’ve caught a few of the bigger tyops, changed names, put a few links in, cut mean or downright slanderous comments, and excised one-and-a-half shitloads of Ron Smith jokes for reasons of taste and such, and the following cascade of slurry is what remains.
5 thoughts on Batman & Robin #1
June 11th, 2009
Batman and Robin #1: Never rains in Gotham
June 9th, 2009
The leading, upper-outer edge of the page’s porous membrane extends outwards into the reader’s domestic reality-space, super-imposed on an imaginary plane nearly a foot distant from the paper-thin physical boundary, roughly on a level with the occipital lobe, back there at the back of the brain. Looking forwards, the page’s fluctuating inner boundary is theoretically infinite, a vanishing point occurring wherever the texture gradient of the eye-line happens to converge in that now-frozen, now-fluid moment, caught there in the net of the panel borders.
Bat/Rob #1 - the highwire
June 7th, 2009
You could listen to the similarly titled Motley Crüe song to accompany this post, but I’d advise against it. Bit rusty, hold on:
It’s all been done before, of course.
Gary Lactus’ Vault of Tymbus #4
March 26th, 2009
Here we are in the vault.
Tymbus is saying “Respect my fandom!” and I’m saying “Keep it cosmic”. It looks like I’m having a good time but I’m not because I’m with Tymbus. Anyway, in this podcast we talk about Batman: Battle for the Cowl, written and drawn by Tony S. Daniel and inked by Sandu Florea. We also talk about The Complete Peanuts (1971 to 1972) by Charles M. Schulz.
The great sock weekender - loft
February 22nd, 2009
So you’ve skanked a hole in your Batsocks. It’s time to leave the basement. Head on up the stairs - feet light and stomach fluttering two steps ahead. Things go a bit strange and your head slides away into the ringing in your ears, just for a second, but when you pop out the top of the stairwell again, something very strange has happened. You’re not in the basement of some boring britshit revivalist toilet in an imaginary town in Northern England anymore. Like a fearless innovator of some time-tripping new dance move you’ve jumped up two storeys, spun through thirty three years, and flipped sideways three thousand odd miles. A downtown loft. New York. 197Something. It’s time to put your Spidey Socks on.
The great sock weekender - basement
February 20th, 2009
The Mylestones - The Joker
There’s talc on the floor. A bag of ‘blues’ in your pocket, or so you like to think – dexys, mandys, but mainly ripoff caffeine pills. Door receipts are down - times are lean, leaner than the waists. Even the youngest acest faces are deep lined, adorned with feather cuts starting ever further up the head. The tribes have had to pull together and mingle even though the soul boy purists hate it, so for you, in those socks, it’s the basement mate – ska, rocksteady, and, of course, 2tone.
