In a situation that is truly comic, political correctness has come to the kettle as well as the pot.  This piece posted on Yahoo News highlights the wringing of  Tea Bag hands over a demonstration illustrated in Marvel’s Captain America #602.  Although the illustration seems to ring true with what we…

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UPDATED (at end): Since the death of J.D. Salinger, there’s been scads of comment declaring his books as life-changers (or not) and plenty of speculation on what waits in his safe to be published or what might be made into a movie and even some of that personal, David Copperfield kind…

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One way we laymen understand economics and how it affects our times is to think of it in schools. The clash between these schools– between Keynesians and Freidmanites, Harvard and Chicago, fresh and saltwater, free markets and countervailing powers, Roosevelt and Reagan–often become heated and personal giving economics the same…

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Did the past century belong to Tintin? That’s the suggestion in Pierre Assouline’s new biography Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin when Assouline, using redundant hedges, writes, “some speak with some justification of a ‘Tintin century,’ signfying the 20th.” Writer and Vanity Fair editor Bruce Handy, writing in The New York Times…

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There’s much to quibble over in Abram’s big, beautiful The Art of Harvey Kurtzman (the “man” in Kurtzman isn’t spelled out but drawn as  simplistic balloon-stick figure). Why include the complete “Superduperman” from Mad no. 4 (1953) instead of  samples from “Dragged Net!,” the parody of television’s cigarette-selling, L.A Cop promoting…

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It’s New Years Eve on a closing decade and we’re feeling a certain obligation, though not because of any clamoring demand to, to….. We’ve never liked top-ten lists,- year-end lists, best-of-the-decade lists, that sort of thing. And for all the usual reasons. Now, as the old song goes, everybody’s doin’ it. …

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The Rabbit, nose a wiggle, is aghast that Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice hasn’t been included in any “Best Of” year-end lists he’s seen. It’s Thomas Pynchon for Carrot’s sake! Full disclosure: The author has been at the top of the Rabbit’s living-writer list since the dumb bunny first read Gravity’s…

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Jeanette Winterson’s review in the New York Times of Joan Schenkar’s biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith draws a connection between not only Highsmith’s plot sequencing and the six-panel comic but Highsmith’s–and her characters’–personalities as well. Highsmith, who died in 1995, wrote Strangers…

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The best thing about The Best American Series’ The Best American Comics is that it reminds us of comics we enjoyed a couple years ago. Anyone who stays half-way current  with alternative comics and graphic novels will have seen a good portion of what’s in each edition of this four-year…

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Viewing the original of C.G. Jung’s The Red Book may be more affordable–if not as convenient for some– than buying a copy. With computer and refrigerator repairs forcing the Rabbit towards the almighty credit limit (oh, the cruelties of the Technological Vortex!), it’s unlikely I’ll be purchasing the facsimile edition released…

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