The way I remember it, sometime during the summer of 1975 I picked up a copy of Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics for 25-cents from the local pharmacy. The cover depicted the ghostly apparitions of a coonskin-cap-wearing frontiersman and an Indian with a mohawk clenched in mortal combat. Behind them a stunned night...
Pyramid Magazine has published a brief article I wrote on the femme fatale archetype, which is found most commonly in film noir and hardboiled crime fiction. The article also considers attributes and other elements of the femme fatale character that are applicable to role-playing...
Paul Simon wrote “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d Into Submission)” during a period of time when he was frequently traveling between the US and the UK. The lyrics are a parody or homage to the style of folk song...
You don’t have to be a genius to recognize that in the United States politics works along a binary axis of “left” or “liberal” ideologies pitted in a tense...
The Magician King by Lev Grossman is the sequel to The Magicians, his 2009 novel about a young man and his magical education at Brakebills College, a secret magical...
A girlfriend gave me my first copy of Watchmen. I had never heard of it and she declared that if I loved comics I must, must, must read it....
Stephen King’s latest novel is not a horror novel. It is not another entry in the dark fantasy of Roland and the Tower. It is not another Bachman book,...
As he finished putting gas in the car, she asked if she should buy more water. He said it was up to her. It depended on whether she wanted...
Please. No more vampires. My friends, please don’t recommend to me any more books that feature vampires as characters, vampires as symbols or metaphors, or vampirism as a...
