Take aways from the publicity surrounding the “reboot” of DC’s line of comics:

– Starting over as issue #1 means not being bound by previous story line.  So maybe Lois and Clark aren’t married. Now what? “Part of the nature of culture is that we retell stories that are meaningful to…

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The Time of the Sun, Tom Harrell; HighNote, 2011. Trumpeter Harrell’s fourth album with saxophonist Wayne Escoffery, keyboardist Danny Grissett, bassist Ugonna Okegwo and drummer Jonathan Blake is a sweet, smooth exercise in unique rhythmic accessibility and lyricism. The disc opens with sounds produced by the magnetic field of the…

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When did cartoonist Chris Ware lose his sense of humor and  turn all Eleanor Rigby on us? Ware has always veered towards the lonely, pathetic, side of life. The Acme Novelty Library, Number 20: Lint follows in the footsteps of Rusty Brown, Jimmy Corrigan and the half-legged woman from Acme Novelty…

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A number of comics websites are calling for a boycott of Marvel Comics, specifically any Marvel product (and that includes a lot more than actual comics) that have anything to do with characters or stories created by the late, great Jack Kirby after a federal judge in New York declared that Kirby’s heirs had…

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Welcome news today that Philip Levine has been appointed Poet Laureate of the United States. I enjoyed Levine’s 2010 collection News of the World with its recycled memories and working class tales as well as its plain-spoken language , something often required of American poets; see Ted Kooser but, not so much,…

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