Platypus of Truth

It's been a few years since I last dipped in to the world of Robert E. Howard's sword-swinging barbarian, Conan. While the writing is always high quality, the racism and sexism that riddle Howard's oeuvre is hard to handle in large doses. After a good, long break, then, I decided that it was finally time to have a go at finishing my annotated edition of the complete works. The Servants of Bit-Yakin : The Servants of Bit-Yakin  returns us from the microcosmic novella that is The Hour of the Dragon  to the world of the standard Conan adventure story. Once more, we return to the pseudo-Africa that so dominated Howard's imagination. This tale, with its ruined city created by a lost race of white men who were able to perfectly preserve their corpses, and its eternal queen apparently owes its inspiration to H.R. Haggard's She . Rather than give us another She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, however, Howard evolves the adventure in his own way with the mysterious element  coming i...

After reading Glen Weldon's book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture,  I decided to add my second encounter with the Dark Knight to our Netflix queue. What I knew of Batman as a kid came from the Adam West t.v. serial. Seeing Tim Burton's Batman  was a revelation. It cemented my love of the character for years to come. I think it's been well over a decade since I last watched the film, so it was with not a little trepidation that I popped the DVD into our home computer this past weekend. I'm glad to say that after all these years the 1989 Batman  is still a treat. The first thing that struck me was the art direction. Gotham looks like New York felt before Giuliani cleaned it up. There's that run-down Art Deco aesthetic crushed under the weight of steel girders and Brutalism all covered over with a thick patina of filth. We can feel the weight of urban decay. The helplessness of Gotham's dedicated civic leaders, the Mayor, Harvey Dent, and Co...

There's nothing quite like arriving late to the conversation. It's why I don't like being late to Christmas parties if I can help it. When I began reading Inklings scholarship (Tom Shippey on Tolkien, Doug Gresham on Lewis), I knew that I'd arrived late to the party. Things were being referenced or scoffed at that I didn't fully understand. Over time, I began to pick up on elements of the earlier conversation and orient myself. Recently, however, I've been able to go back and look at that earlier part of the discussion; specifically, the parts before the coming of Humphrey Carpenter and his monolithic J.R.R. Tolkien , and The Inklings . The particular works in question come not from Oxford insiders or authorized biographers but academics on this side of the pond who were willing to risk professional scorn by asserting the literary greatness of the Inklings and their associates. They are, respectively, Understanding Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings  (copyright...

Ok, so I couldn't resist... I've been fiddling around with Paint for my own amusement and using it to dress up a few of my pen and ink drawings. Spending time around the local comic shop with a few coworkers recently has also put comic book layouts are on the brain. My own efforts are about as far from Hellboy  or Rai  as I am from Pandemonium or 4001 A.D. Still, it's fun to play around with a little zero-risk creativity. Often we wish our hobbies were jobs. Jobs can be wonderful things when we love what we do, but they are also work. There are deadlines to meet and customers to satisfy. We may enter a business in one department and drift inevitably over time into another. In other words, when we're tied to the paycheck, we have to follow the money. In our unpaid hobbies, however, we are free. No one penalizes us for puttering away at side projects. The labor is unprofitable by definition. Henry David Thoreau worked for six weeks a year and then lived simply so th...