In its long, storied existence, ‘Dragon Magazine’ really did a lot to create “gaming humor” as a legitimate subgenre. Think of all the great tabletop gaming comics out there, from ‘Yamara’ to ‘What’s New With Phil and Dixie’ to ‘Dork Tower’ to ‘Knights of the Dinner Table’, and odds are they showed up in ‘Dragon’ […]

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The Matrix: Given that we perceive the world entirely through our senses, the ultimate nature of reality will always be subject to irreconcilable doubt. The Matrix Reloaded: Why yes, the Wachowski Brothers would like large sums of money, thank you very much. The Matrix Revolutions: If your agent is good enough, you can get a […]

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“See, the thing is, I’m not sexist. I respect women just as much as the next person. But as a male, I have certain basic biological instincts, and it’s not like they can expect me to simply ignore them. That’s setting aside millions of years of evolution. “I mean, I don’t even think I’m that […]

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The logic in my head went thusly: 1. Edward Norton was utterly wasted in ‘The Incredible Hulk’, a movie about a man with a split personality who was destructive and at odds with his ‘primary’ self. 2. Prior to that, Norton was probably best known for ‘Fight Club’, a movie about a man with a […]

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This summer, over the 4th of July weekend, I will be at CONvergence in the Twin Cities, for the benefit of anyone who wants to attend and geek out with me. (Paul Cornell will also be there. I won’t be upset if you tell him that you came for him and not for me. We’ll […]

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(with a tip of the hat to the wonderful ‘Room 237’…) The key to understanding the Kubrick movie ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ is to understand that Kubrick was a notorious perfectionist, one who never left anything to chance. The reshoots that Kubrick undertook, reshoots that scrapped an already-filmed and extremely expensive ending, were explicit in […]

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I’ve thought for a long while that any long-running series eventually stops being about anything other than itself. Each individual story might be about something; “Let This Be Your Last Battlefield”, for example, is about the absurdity of racial prejudice. But that’s not what ‘Star Trek’ is about. Other episodes of the series were about […]

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There are some comics out there that for some reason just didn’t get the kind of success they deserved. ‘Leave It To Chance’, the series by James Robinson and Paul Smith, was a huge critical success that won the Harvey and the Eisner Awards for Best New Series in its first year, and yet it […]

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I’m watching ‘Babylon 5′ for the first time this year. (What can I say, it’s not exactly something you do over a weekend.) It’s funny, because I remember all of my friends and most of my acquaintances absolutely rhapsodizing about the series when it was on, while I kind of didn’t get into it because […]

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Yes, I’m posting about the new Doctor Who. Because if I do have a “thing” on this website, which I’m quite prepared to entertain arguments that I don’t, it’s that I’m the “Doctor Who guy”. And there’s a new half-season on, because the BBC is too cheap to fund more than about six episodes a […]

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I originally wasn’t sure if I wanted to write about the Steubenville rape trial; I imagined that everything I want to say on the subject would be pretty obvious, and it’s not exactly a fun topic of conversation. But my wife pointed out that the people who need to hear most about the subject are […]

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‘Smash Up’, by AEG, is pretty much a do-it-yourself version of all the “high concept” stories out there that slap two memes together as a substitute for actual creativity. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? The ones where some screenwriter says, “Oh, zombies are big right now, and steampunk is very […]

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I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got […]

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As I’m given to understand it, Sony announced the other day that the astonishing perfection of the CD-based Playstation, which had been superseded by the even more astonishing perfection of the DVD-based Playstation 2, which had then been rendered obsolete by the Blu-Ray vision that was the Playstation 3, had in turn become an outmoded […]

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…Robo-Rally. For those of you that have never played, it is one of the most chaotically fun board games ever, pound-for-pound. You steer a robot through an obstacle course (one that involves, over the course of the various expansions, lasers, flamethrowers, radioactive waste, crushers and bottomless pits, among other things) using your hand of cards […]

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