Comics. Have they been demoted to coffee break Facebook ephemera, or are they alive and kicking butt out in the Darwinian thunderdome of the litsphere? Regardless, some of the comic fodder found online right now is goddamn brilliant.

For example, check out The Oatmeal. Here’s a teaser (click the banner).
More serious comic book fare would include […]

Let’s say you decide to write your own supernatural thriller. When this happens, you may want to refer to the index of SUPERNATURAL COLLECTIVE NOUNS as you’re deciding which genre of supernatural being you are going to focus on for your five part series and eventual film adaptations. We all know that vampires, zombies and […]

Instant Happiness.

April 14, 2010 | Comments Off

Happiness isn’t a warm gun and it’s not created out of money, nor is based on romantic luck. According to Dan Gilbert (TED TALKS - see video below), our advanced pre-frontal cortex can synthesize happiness. So, as it turns out, we’re just as happy when our brains make us “happy” after not getting what we […]

Female Force

March 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment

I have not been keeping us up on comic book news, I apologize. In the meantime, I could not avoid the hype surrounding Michelle Obama’s appearance in the Female Force comic series - the Michelle Obama comic is due to out in April. There has been so much regarding President Obama in the news, it’s […]

In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth, here is sampling of some of the many new books on Lincoln that are available right now (from The Book Room of the Chicago Sun Times) -

 
 
In Lincoln’s Hand: His Original Manuscripts, edited by Harold Holzer and Joshua Wolf Shenk (Bantam, 196 pages, $35): Check out […]

A tic-tac-toe bandit on the loose and winning. A forbidden lesbian romance circa 1917. A stepsister’s selfish blackmailing scheme.
Just a few of the ramblings found on old postcards.
But we want to know the rest of the story and editor Jason Rodriguez did too, so he dug around antique stores, thrift shops, and flea […]

I’ve always had a soft spot for mysteries. Perhaps it’s the 70’s children’s television programming of the multicultural/multilingual Bloodhound Gang from 3-2-1 Contact on PBS or classic Scooby-Doo with Phyllis Diller and The Harlem Globe Trotters making guest star appearances, but there’s something of an advanced and cultural cognitive level of understanding that I […]