from hell

This 90 minute doco may look dated now -- and it is rather superficial in some respects -- but it offers a useful comicshistory.001 overview of the US major players from just before the Second World War (given scant attention) and into the more interesting, diverse and controversial period of the Fifties and mid-Sixties. Looked at from this...
> film/3346/comic-book-confidential-a-documentary-by-ron-mann-dv1-southbound/

Sex fascinated Stanley Spencer. But so did angels, the transcendence of the spirit through faith, and life in his home village of Cookham where, as a child, he believed biblical events had taken place and been witnessed by local folk.This confluence of religious and rural influences, and his belief that sexual and spiritual desire were...
> culturalelsewhere/233/sir-stanley-spencer-essayed-2003-of-angels-and-dirt/

Age has not wearied him -- and nor can it. The little adventurer with a distinctive flick to his forelock, oddly unfashionable plus-fours and rarely a change of clothes, is frozen in time. As he globetrots from the old Orient to the Land of the Pharaohs - and even the Moon - he looks as he ever did. Yet in 2004 he turned 75. However he...
> writingelsewhere/384/the-world-of-tintin-the-timeless-boy-2004/

At the launch of the long overdue local publication of his graphic novel Hicksville in Auckland recently, Dylan Horrocks said he grew up in two places: In New Zealand and in comics, and both were on the edge of the ‘real world‘. “This was stuff I thought after I finished Hicksville,” he says later. “It...
> writingelsewhere/3005/dylan-horrocks-interviewed-2010-the-graphic-novelist-as-social-commentator/

In interviews Dylan Horrocks, the 43-year old New Zealand writer and artist of the graphic novel Hicksville, is candid enough to note that more people in his home country know about his book than have actually read it. That's because it was serialised in his own magazine Pickle over the years from '92 but when the final episode was due he was...
> writingelsewhere/3006/hicksville-a-graphic-novel-by-dylan-horrocks/

Some men cross deserts of ice and others sail solo around the world, but New York journalist Jacob’s endurance test was more demanding. Because he felt he had been smarter at university than he was working as an editor at Esquire (where he knew details of Britney's life) he decided he needed to arrest his long, slow slide into increasing...
> writingelsewhere/1980/the-know-it-all-by-aj-jacobs-smartening-up/

The Japanese phenomena of manga (comics) and anime (animated films) have long commanded Westerners‘ attention: they are often violent and sexual graphic, some explore arcane myth, others are hopelessly romantic, and some are social documentaries. There have been numerous attempts at penetrating their layers of meaning (Frederick L...
> writingelsewhere/2027/wrong-about-japan-by-peter-carey/

Some time in 1996 I did a phone interview with the guitarist Egberto Gismonti in advance of him appearing at an Arts Festival in Wellington which, for reasons of language and a poor connection, just didn't work out. There was no decent way to salvage the piece but then a thought occured. I contacted comic artist Dylan Horrocks whose work I...
> jazz/2002/egberto-gismonti-an-interview-illustrated-by-dylan-horrocks/

When the English author Thomas DeQuincey was describing nightmarish drug-induced visions in his early-19th-century autobiography Confessions of an English Opium Eater, he reflected on curious and compelling images he had never seen. They were a set of engravings by Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi, and DeQuincey referred to...
> culturalelsewhere/1883/piranesis-engravings-exploring-the-dark-discomforts-of-roman-ruins/

You know how it is, you see Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and you think, “Man, I should read that book. It looks kinda neat.” Or you watch Michael Jackson: The E! Hollywood True Story and decide you’d love to read a biography of that troubled and troublesome soul. Right now there is a glut of bio-flicks in cinemas...
> writingelsewhere/1876/the-book-of-the-film-of-the-man-2006-from-silver-screen-to-serious-stuff/

Art Spiegelman – like many authors one suspects – can’t resist looking for his book in stores. But the categories bookshops have are seldom very useful he says, and his book Maus, a 160 page paperback-sized comic, defies convenient pigeonholing. Store owners think it is “humour” because it’s a comic...
> writingelsewhere/1760/comix-artist-art-spiegelman-interviewed-1991-the-maus-that-rawed/

Roger Corman is the King of the B Grade Movie. He has directed and/or produced hundreds of films, claims he shot his cult classic Little Shop of Horrors (1960) in two days and one night, and usually brought in a movie in less than 10 days. He would often shoot sequences for two films simultaneously to save on costs and actors would also work in...
> film/231/roger-corman-interviewed-2006-its-a-gas-gas-gas-s-s-s/

"These are the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, not exactly the boy next door," yelps a breathless-sounding Reed over dramatic, grinding guitar riffery at the start of this guest-heavy collection of diverse songs and spoken-word sections which explore the works of that peculiar, melancholic American writer with whom Reed feels...
> music/1976/lou-reed-the-raven-reprise/