Some some of you may have heard that story about the venerable Canadian history magazine The Beaver changing its name because of the confusion it caused over exactly what kind of magazine it was, and apparently also because a lot of school Internet filters blocked it.
It was a funny enough story that even the New [...]

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Well, it was inevitable: US politicians are using the recent blizzard in Washington DC as proof that global warming doesn’t exist. I’m going to pass over this for now, save to mention in passing the strong resemblance between climate change denialists and creationists in their tendency to seize on any evidence against the other position [...]

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As we await the airing of the first episode of Lost’s final season, our minds naturally drift back to other, similar experiences… other times we’ve seen the final seasons and episodes of complex, episodic shows… final episodes which often sucked. Like Battlestar Galactica.
Shows like Lost and BSG (my fingers are getting tired) have a particular [...]

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So, having just heard that they’re making a movie of Eagle of the Ninth – which when I had to read it in Grade Six I though was the coolest book ever – I fully expect every other book I have ever had to read for school to be adapted to the screen, post-haste, starting [...]

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Retrospectives, whether of a year, decade or century, are really predictions: what willl still be appreciated in ten years or longer? What will history forget, and what will it view kindly? With that in mind, I’m going to nominate the past ten years as the decade non-fiction comics went mainstream.
So far as the last comics [...]

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In an act of shameless self-promotion, I’ve posted my short story “The Coldest War” (which originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction) online here. If you’re a Canadian citizen (not necessarily living in Canada) or a permanent resident, you can follow the handy-dandy links to the Aurora Awards nomination page once [...]

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So far the revival of V has been fairly reliably dull and nonsensical, but this week’s episode brought the first throw-the-remote moment when Our Heroes discover that a key part of the alien invaders’ plan is… flu shots. In what may be the most needlessly convoluted plan in the history of convoluted plans, the Visitors, [...]

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Last week, as you may have heard, Fox cancelled Dollhouse. Also last week, as you probably didn’t hear, whatever network aired Hank cancelled it too. Neither was a surprise: they were both solidly bottom-of-the barrel performers — Dollhouse was considered a worse bet than reruns of House to run during Sweeps Week, while Hank was [...]

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You can read an interview I did with Larry Gonick, author of (among many other books) The Cartoon History of the Universe, over at the Talk Media Blog.

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IP Osgoode has a sane and reasonable summary of the Jack Kirby copyright reversion case here.

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Iggy Popped
Poor Michael Ignatieff. For months he’s been neck-and-neck with Harper in the polls, and people have been warning him that if he doesn’t force an election soon it’ll make him look weak. Then no sooner does he say he won’t support the government any longer but his support drops by ten points, because people [...]

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I don’t know if anyone but me reads comic strips anymore, but here are my thoughts on a few I follow:
Pooch Café: Bill Watterson once called Pogo “the last of the enjoy the ride strips,” by which he meant that while it often had continuing storylines, the point wasn’t to get to the end but [...]

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If you have ever thought “The one thing that would improve Montreal is more people in Starfleet uniforms,” you would have been mightily pleased by this year’s Worldcon. Possibly the funniest thing about the con was that it was held in a really staid part of town, at a convention centre that normally hosts business [...]

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It’s an odd feeling to realize you’ve been reading a comic for more than twenty issues based entirely on inertia. As I flipped open Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season Eight #27 yesterday it occurred to me that I had no real memory of what had happened in the last issue, or much genuine interest in [...]

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