Join Brian every other Tuesday as he talks comic books from a reader’s perspective, both his new experiences with the medium and reflections on over thirty years of enjoying the finest in sequential art. The “uncanny valley” is a term used in robotics (and, more generally, in the science fiction community) to describe the phenomenon […]
Author Archive
Reading Marvel in the ’60s, Part 1: The Uncanny (X-Men) Valley
Posted: 3rd July 2012 by Brian in Comic Books, The Comic SpinnerTags: Avengers, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Jack Kirby, Martin Goodman, Marvel Comics, Spider-Man, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko, X-Men
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Ray Bradbury: What We Really Lost
Posted: 10th June 2012 by Brian in Science FictionTags: Fahrenheit 451, Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
On Tuesday, the world lost pioneering science fiction author Ray Bradbury at age 91, and since then everybody and their mother has (quite correctly, in my view) been making all sorts of bereaved noises about his passing being a tremendous loss not just to our ghettoized little genre of science fiction but to literature and the […]
Music Preview: Rush’s Clockwork Angels
Posted: 23rd May 2012 by Brian in Music, Music ReviewTags: Alex Lifeson, Clockwork Angels, Geddy Lee, Kevin J. Anderson, Neil Peart, Nick Raskulinecz, Rush
When a band is well into the fifth decade of its career, with its members pushing sixty years of age, they’re usually relegated to the nostalgia circuit—you know, playing sold-out shows to aging baby boomers at outdoor concerts with one or two other “retro” acts, and coasting on the success of the back-catalog. If such […]
It’s the Avengers’ World Now, We Just Live in It
Posted: 16th May 2012 by Brian in Comic Books, Film, Film Review, Up on The Soap BoxTags: Avengers, Batman, Captain America, DC Comics, Green Lantern, Hulk, Iron Man, Joss Whedon, Justice League, Marvel Comics, Superheroes, Superman, The Flash, Thor, Wonder Woman
Real life conspired to delay my gratification, but yesterday, ten days after its nationwide American release, I finally saw The Avengers. By now, reams* have been written about how good the movie is, how thoroughly it entertains on multiple levels thanks to its snappy Whedonesque dialogue, its insightful Whedonesque explorations of character relationships, and its […]
A Woman Scorned (A review of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio play The Wrath of the Iceni )
Posted: 19th March 2012 by Brian in Audio Review, Doctor WhoTags: Big Finish, Fourth Doctor, John Dorney, Leela, Louise Jameson, Nia Roberts, Tom Baker
With a couple of straight-up sci-fi stories under their belts, Big Finish Productions continues its long-awaited series of Fourth Doctor Adventures with something different from the Doctor Who toolbox: the historical adventure; more specifically, the historical adventure in which an injustice from Earth’s past leads to a debate about the ethics and desirability of changing history. The Wrath of the Iceni drops […]
Knowledge Is Power (A review of the Big Finish Doctor Who audio play The Renaissance Man )
Posted: 9th February 2012 by Brian in Audio Review, Doctor WhoTags: Big Finish, Fourth Doctor, Ian McNeice, Justin Richards, Leela, Louise Jameson, Tom Baker
In January, Big Finish Productions kicked off its long-awaited series of Fourth Doctor Adventures with Destination: Nerva, a flawed but listenable audio drama that overcame its shortcomings through the novelty and excitement of hearing Tom Baker and Louise Jameson back in the Doctor Who saddle. In light of that admittedly underwhelming debut, I feared its […]
Boardgame Review: Carcassonne
Posted: 22nd January 2012 by Brian in Game Review, GamesTags: Carcassonne, Eurogames, German-style boardgames, Klaus-Jürgen Wrede
Say the words “game” and “gaming” and most people these days will think about controllers and consoles and periodic downloadable content updates. But it wasn’t all that long ago that the default definition for those words was the good old fashioned boardgame. Coming from a pretty tight-knit family with a passion for mentally stimulating pastimes, […]
Podwit Profile: Sherlock Holmes Solar Pons
Posted: 14th January 2012 by Brian in Literature, Podwit ProfileTags: August Derleth, Pinnacle Books, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Solar Pons
In our discussion of the world’s greatest detectives on the most recent Podwits podcast, you might have heard me drop the name of Solar Pons. In fact, I made a pretty big deal out of him. And, chances are you’ve never heard of him before. So who the heck is this oddly-named fellow anyway? Not […]
The Fourth Doctor Lives! (A review of Destination: Nerva )
Posted: 10th January 2012 by Brian in Audio Review, Doctor WhoTags: Big Finish, Fourth Doctor, Leela, Louise Jameson, Nicholas Briggs, Raquel Cassidy, Tom Baker
In 1999, a company called Big Finish changed the world of Doctor Who forever when they released their first audio play, The Sirens of Time, a fully licensed, legitimate Doctor Who adventure starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy as the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Doctors respectively. In the twelve years since then, they […]
Final Fantasy Film Follow-up
Posted: 16th December 2011 by Brian in FilmTags: Errata, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Hi, everyone. Well, we Podwits are nothing if not self-correcting. In our last podcast I spoke somewhat ill of the 2001 film Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, voicing my theory, based on the film’s apparent lack of relation to the vaunted Final Fantasy video game series, that Square (the production company) had produced a fairly independent science-fiction […]