Happy 30th Birthday, Judge Dredd Megazine!

(Bear with me, folks... this one is going to ramble a bit. For a change.) Long before Judge Dredd The Megazine was launched in 1990, the words "Judge Dredd comic for older readers" were being whispered in the hallowed halls of comicdom. Although only around since 2000AD's second issue in 1977, Dredd had proved to …

Euphobia

Comics come and go, as we all know. No publication lasts forever, except maybe The Beano which is still going strong after eighty-two years (with over 4000 issues published) -- long may it continue. But I'm sure that just about all comic-book fans know the sting of discovering that one of their favourites has been …

Noncomics: Superman – Last Son of Krypton

In the 1970s and early 1980s streaming a movie was called "reading the novelisation" (except in America, where they instead had novelizations, with a zed, which they pronounce as "zee"). Every major movie -- and an awful lot of minor ones -- was given a second life in the form of a prose adaptation. And …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – September 2020

Welcome to the twelfth monthly Hatch, Match & Dispatch feature here on Rusty Staples! It's a hefty one this time, chums, and took me a rather long time to compile (I'd like to thank the decision-makers at WordPress for forcing me to use their new editor and thus making the process even longer). Standard disclaimer: …

Altered Images: Not exactly Johnny Blaze…

Oddities: “Hero” Lawman Found Topless in Tabloid Mag!

One of my first glimpses of Sylvester Stallone in the role of Judge Dredd came from a copy of The National Enquirer, dated November 15, 1994. I've never been the sort of person who normally reads mags of that type -- I'm just not that interested in suspect "miracle cures" or the mundanities of the …

Oddities: Superman coasters

So, remember those X-Men coasters I featured last year? Well, guess what? That's right, you guessed correctly, even though there's a pretty big clue in this post's title... Today we're looking at Superman coasters! But these are no fantasy, no careless product of wild imagination, no beermat-like cardboard discs churned out as a cheap promotional …

Rusty’s Reviews Round-Up

Angry news first: WordPress -- the content management system on which this blog runs -- has decided to force me to use its absolutely horrible, baffling and extremely user-hostile new editor, which I utterly hate and despise and hate again. And what's more, I also hate that I don't have the option to switch back …

Comics on TV: Life on Mars

In the 2006 TV show Life on Mars (named after the David Bowie song that was released on the 1971 album Hunky Dory) Manchester-based police officer Sam Tyler is struck by a car and wakes up in the year 1973. He doesn't know whether he's going crazy, in a coma, or has travelled back in …

Enfari’s Syndrome: School Fun

At first, the very idea seems ludicrous: a school-themed comic! That's like... chocolate-coated cauliflower or a puppy made of pointy gravel. Comics are for enjoyment, school is for enduring. How can the two possibly be combined? Well, back in the ancient olden days when the story-papers ruled supreme, a huge proportion of child-targeted publications were …