Category Archives: Uncategorized

Poster for “Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back” (Special Edition, 1997)

20th Century Fox.

“Solitude,” Gyula Basch, 1892

Oil on canvas.

Liverwurst is evidence of a loving god.

Liverwurst.  With thinly sliced tomato on top.  (Okay, I can’t slice tomatoes to save my life.)  Or a smattering of onions.  That’s even better, in fact.

No, this is not disgusting — it is DIVINE.  You just can’t appreciate that because you’re a Philistine.

You say to-MAY-to and I say to-MAH-to and all that.



“Forest Park Sunset in Winter,” photo by Maud Newton, 2019

Forest Park in Queens, New York.

Maud Newton, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0&gt;, via Wikimedia Commons

Throwback Thursday: the fabled rotating comic stand!

Yep.  When I was in kid on Long Island, it would be either war comics (especially Sgt. Rock), Conan the Barbarian (or his himbo spiritual cousin, Ka-Zar the Savage) any of the various Archie titles, or a horror comic.  (I thought superhero comics were stupid when I was a kid.  In order for a comic to entertain me, it had to include war, swords, Archie or monsters).

When I was in the fifth or sixth grade, my dad would occasionally  pick me up titles that only seemed available in Manhattan, where he worked as a bus driver — books like the 1980’s iteration of the Blackhawk Allied commandoes or (joy and rapture) The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones.  (Maybe Indy’s title adhered more loosely to the rule of thumb I cited above, but that was forgivable, because it was the greatest comic book ever created.)

The last time I saw a rotating rack like this was … 1993?  1994?   For a while, it was neat little fixture of the 7-11 along Route 1 just outside Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  You could make a run for coffee or nachos at any hour and snag a comic while you were at it.  By then, I was thoroughly entrenched in the DC and Marvel superhero pantheons.  (A really cool goth kid in my freshman dorm had shown me Frank Miller’s work, and I was hooked.)



Variant Cover to “Catwoman” #38, Yanick Paquette, 2022

Cover A.  DC Comics.

“Remorso de Judas,” José Ferraz de Almeida Júnior, 1880

Oil on canvas.