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A quick roundup of the last week and a half before I don my camouflage coverall, smear my face with dirt, and go hunting for wild turkeys with my bare hands. Just kidding–who am I, Ted Nugent? Good old cranky Robert McCrum–why, he even scowls in his headshot! Last week, took books to task for ballooning [...]

I really don’t have anything against mash-ups. I loved Classic Comics as a kid, and only a few years ago I saw a version of King Lear at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre that was set in an unnamed Balkan country. Lear, played by Stacey Keach, was portrayed as a Slobodan Milosevic-like dictator ready to retire and [...]

In “Before the Flood,” Margaret Atwood describes what made her go back to the dysopian future in “The Year of the Flood” (by Guy Dixon, The Globe and Mail): One of the things people are working on now, and were working on in 2001 when I was actually halfway through Oryx and Crake, is the [...]

Harvey Pekar, one of the founding fathers of underground comics, died this morning in his Cleveland home at the age of 70. His ongoing autobiography, American Splendor, is among the finest examples of what I internally refer to as neurotic comics curmudgeonliness, but more than that proved that the map of what comics can tackle, [...]

Last Thursday we did a pretty neat webinar–Let’s Get Graphic: Kids’ Comics in Classrooms and Libraries–sponsored by TOON Books, Rosen Publishing, Scholastic Graphix, and First Second. In fact, we were having such a lovely time spreading the good word that we ran over the planned hour, and didn’t have a chance to get to some [...]

So Sam Raimi is making a movie out of Dennis Lehane’s 2008 novel The Given Day. You know Raimi from the Spider-Man movies, the Evil Dead movies, and Darkman, but wait: you think of those as horror or fantasy movies, but all of them feature well-drawn characters and stories that revolve around the characters. Raimi also [...]

Ready? All together now: Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday dear Tony! Happy birthday to you! Tony Stark, better known as Iron Man, debuted in Marvel Comics in March, 1963. Two years later, in April, the man who plays him in the movies, better known as Robert Downey Jr., made his own [...]

So, the iPad is here (yes yes, total namefail) and all the geeks are mad because it does what everyone’s been conjecturing it’ll do for months if not years, but fails to do anything that no one thought of. Do people think that Apple has people coming up with ideas from different dimensions? Is it supposed [...]

A coupla-three week ago I wrote about using my brand-new iPhonish-like device to read comics. Well friends, it’s become a verifiable obsession, and it seems like every day there’s a new reader app or comic designed specifically for mobile devices. Of the applications, comiXology seems to have the frontrunner, offering comics from some pretty reliable indie [...]

As you might know from reading 10 inches below this post (or, if for some reason you gets infos from somewhere else other than our little Likely Stories, you already know from anywhere else), the National Book Award nominations were announced yesterday. And while the NBAs are no stranger to odd picks, especially in the [...]