Raritania

Recently writing about the popularity of superheroes in contemporary culture I emphasized that this was a matter of film above all, and in ...

I remember that when reading RJ Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars I was impressed with it as a hugely impressive work offering pretty m...

It is difficult to speak frankly and substantively about the "higher learning in America" for many reasons, the one that seems to...

Not long ago I returned to the depressing activity of perusing recent bestseller lists . I say depressing because of how consistently they c...

The series The Critic was part of that early '90s boom in "not just for kids" American prime time animation that followed the...

Those who have remarked the backlash against the Disney-era Star Wars saga--and certainly its more political component, which has been the o...

Back when I was just starting to move beyond the lowbrow in my cinematic tastes I discovered the films of Jean-Luc Godard--largely by way of...

When I have written about the 1990s I have tended to focus on the post-Cold War triumphalism, the tech boom, and altogether the vision of ex...

As Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions "the world at large declines to believe in any man's superior intellect until he has achieved so...

Reading Alan Moore's comments about the politics of the superhero film, and what he thinks may be behind the genre's box office popu...

In his recent interview with the Guardian Alan Moore reiterated his discomfort with the way contemporary culture has received the idea of t...

Alan Moore's much-publicized recent interview had me thinking again of other critical statements he has made about the legacy of superhe...

I remember that not so long ago we generally expected critics to be tougher on movies than the general audience, and that there seemed abund...

A long time ago I decided to try and make way through the history of superhero comics in the systematic way I went through the history of pr...

While it remains a commonplace to picture the 1950s as an era of consensus and conformity that was, among other things, a time Before Femini...