New Non-Comics Blog!

Exciting news, readers! No, not that Rusty Staples has caught Enfari Syndrome and is merging with another blog and it's going to gradually disappear... Yer Uncle Rusty has launched a brand-new blog! There's not a lot on there yet, but it'll grow in time, I promise! It'll mostly be about writing, and it'll be packed …

Retro interview: Steve Dillon, 1990

This interview was first published in issue #7 of FTL -- the magazine of the Irish Science Fiction Association -- in October 1990. It was reprinted in issue #33 of Journey Planet in December 2016. Steve Dillon is a young British comic artist living in Dublin. Well, perhaps “artist” is too limiting a term – …

Hatch, Match & Dispatch – Nov 2020

Here we are again with a super-streamlined version of Hatch, Match and Dispatch, readers! Just pure data, almost no filler! (See also Oct 2019, Nov 2019, Dec 2019, Jan 2020, Feb 2020, Mar 2020, Apr 2020, May 2020, Jun 2020, Jul 2020, Aug 2020, Sep 2020 and Oct 2020.) Update 20201027: The great Rob Kirby …

Falling for Superman

On 26 September 1938 -- a little over eighty-two years ago as the crow flies -- issue six of Action Comics (cover-dated November of that year) featured the Superman story "Superman's Phony Manager" (full disclosure: that title didn't appear in the original issue and has been applied retroactively). Action Comics was an anthology and Superman …

In-Shallow Profile: Marvel Super Specials

The Marvel Super Specials series was a collection of one-shot comics published from September 1977 to November 1986, most of them featuring adaptations of then-current movies. I have no doubts that the series was inspired by the tremendous success of Marvel's Star Wars specials: their six-issue comic-book adaptation of the movie was repackaged as a …

Comics That Never Were #3

Welcome, readers, to the long-unawaited third episode in our sporadic and unreliable series in which your Uncle Rusty takes a look at comics that didn't actually exist in this universe but should have... In the 1970s (a sort of prototype version of the 1980s, but with wider ties, longer hair, and orange and brown wallpaper) …

Oddities: Goody Goody comic

Long before The Young Ones deigned to (dis)grace the TV airwaves, and longer before I'd even heard of Monty Python's Flying Circus, my comedy heroes were Bill Oddie, Graeme Garden and Tim Brooke-Taylor, AKA The Goodies. They were silly, inventive, childish, slightly subversive, much more accessible to younger people like myself, and above all they …