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Of fear, loathing, & stunning large animals
By Warren Ellis – Okay, so I get to write about what I like and what influenced me then and now. Fair enough. Shut up at the back there. I’m attracted, in my reading, to use of language and interesting ideas. Nobody uses language quite like Hunter S. Thompson—like an iron bar on your kidneys and dangly bits, hitting you until you either give in or pee blood for the rest of your days. He’s a journalist, though he behaves more like some violently hallucinating idiot savant slumped in a gutter, and his was the first journalism I ever enjoyed just for its writing. Fear And Loathing On The Campaign…
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Keith Giffen ambushes us with books
By Keith Giffen – I’m not really good at this. No, not reading, I’m fine on that front. I’m talking about these “my preference, what the other guy likes blows” columns. Not that that’s what this “Recommended Reading” column is all about—far from it. Actually, it’s a pretty good idea, letting the fans in on the types of reading material the average comic book creator turns to after anywhere from eight to 12 hours spent dealing with characters whose idea of a fashion statement is wearing their underpants on the outside. Which is why you won’t find many comic books listed below. Not that I don’t like comics, mind you;…
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Dave Rawson revs up his eclectic guitar
By Dave Rawson – A mind once stretched can never return to its former size. Powerful stuff, comics. At best and worst, they provide us with images that feed our experience, reinforce our sense of self, and allow our subconscious to subtly choose what we will become. My first stories were from the Old Testament: Samson the mighty warrior, blinded and humbled, yet able to destroy the enemies of his people with a burst of self-sacrifice. David, the teenager who slew the giant Philistine, Goliath. These were lessons to struggle against the odds, because who knows what can happen, really, when you put your heart into it? From there it…
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Shi’s Billy Tucci’s Crusade for knowledge
By Billy Tucci – North Babylon, Long Island, was a great place to grow up. I spent the summers of my boyhood playing with my friends, making movies with my brothers, and romping through playgrounds and backyard barbecues. A few years later I was bombing down Deer Park Avenue with my 1966 Mustang Fastback piled with maniacs looking for girls and mischief. I played hockey in the winter, baseball in the summer, and basketball any time of the year. The only thing missing was fantasy and adventure in the worlds of the imagination. That I found in books. Sidney Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur, with incredible illustrations by N.C. Wyeth,…
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Gene breathes fire into some old tomes
By Gene Simmons – Stranger in a Strange Land. Robert Heinlein certainly had a big impact on me. I must have read this when I was in my early teens. Being a foreigner myself, I knew just how it felt being from a different place and never quite fitting in. The fact that a serious film of this book has never been done (despite The Man Who Fell to Earth, which was very psychedelic and missed the point) is something I never understood. Forrest Gump isn’t too far away from Stranger in a Strange Land. Read it. • The Great American Bathroom Book series. This is really a sort of…
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Steve Englehart, witness for the defense
By Steve Englehart – My choice would have to be Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason books—or at least the first 80 of them. (Gardner wrote 84, but he was slowing down at the end.) They don’t aspire to be great literature, but they do aspire to be—and succeed at being—highly entertaining. If I tell you there’s at least one murder, and often more, in each book, the parents among you may wonder if comics really do rot brains, but murders to Gardner were just off-screen pegs on which to hang Mason’s feats of deduction: There’s no overt violence. I devoured these books as a kid, surely starting at around age…
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Visit dark and twisted minds
By James Chambers – With Tales Of Ordinary Madness, Malcolm Bourne and Michael Allred take us down the dark and twisted paths of the human mind and into a world of people who dwell in their own personal realties, where even the most mundane activities can be a passage through Hell. With the experiences of several characters, they explore the nature of madness and its possible causes. Linked together by their nameless Doctor, each patient struggles to overcome illness and return to health, but even those working to help them are not immune. Each story offers an unsettling glimpse into these people’s lives and the establishment that is often helpless…
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DC’s combat legends team up
By James Chambers – It’s the height of World War II, and the Nazis have developed a weapon so devastating that nothing is safe from its deadly threat. Only the Unknown Soldier, the man of 1000 faces, can slip past the Germans’ veil of secrecy concerning the project and defuse the lethal forces set in motion. Can he stay alive long enough to succeed when his only allies are a woman who wants him dead and the wounded topkick of the legendary Easy Company? Robert Kanigher, a veteran comic book scripter and a veteran of war, crafts a fast-paced tale of intrigue and deceit as he follows the Unknown Soldier…
Fan site for the late, lamented Combo Magazine (1994-1997)
