In Memory of José Saramago

Jesus is dying slowly, life ebbing from him, ebbing, when suddenly the heavens overhead open wide and God appears in the same attire he wore in the boat, and His words resound throughout the earth, This is My beloved son, in whom I am well pleased. Jesus realized then that he had been tricked, as…

Colour in Line

I haven’t talked much about my Ph. D. dissertation, “Colour in Line — Titian and Printmaking”, here at the Bunker, despite it having occupied my life more than any other intellectual project for the last five years or so. I guess because it is still very much a work in progress, but I figure it…

Gary Shider RIP

Gary Shider of Plainfield, NJ and long-time funkateer of Parliament-Funkadelic fame, has passed away. He was the one in the diaper, rocking the guitar. Plus he was one of the architects of the P-Funk sound, overshadowed in the earlier years by fellow guitarist Eddie “Maggot Brain” Hazel but was just as important a constituent of…

Al Williamson RIP

Just paying respects to one of the great illustrators of comics, one of the masters of texture. The above story, “Food for Thought”, drawn in collaboration with Roy Krenkel for EC’s Incredible Science Fiction (full story available here) is a case in point: though never a great naturalist, Williamson brings the alien world to teeming…

Asterios Polyp: Beyond the Binary

The past week-and-a-half or so has seen David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp debated and dissected over at the Hooded Utilitarian, with discussions shooting off in a multitude of directions, amongst them the words-image binary in comics and the potential of comics as literature and the development of comics through modernism to the present day. Today I’ve…