Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • A dream

    A dream

    I’ve known the story of Gawain and the Green Knight for a long time, initially from Roger Lancelyn Green’s King Arthur And His Knights Of The Round Table, then from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, both of which I read as a child. Most recently I read Simon Armitage’s ‘translation’ (I think of it as Read more

  • Aesthetic constructions

    Aesthetic constructions

    Bryan Talbot is a national treasure of British Comics, with a career that stretches from his underground Chester P. Hackenbush strip in the 1970s, through some of the most iconic stories in 2000AD, his extraordinary science-fantasy epic Luther Arkwright, and a whole range of work for major publishers, to a continuing output of self-penned comics Read more

  • Stop and look

    Stop and look

    I’m still undecided what I think the precise aesthetic or narrative effects are of using anthropomorphic animals as characters in comics. They clearly invoke a long tradition, which is dominated by materials produced for children, but that tradition is so varied in its contents that the mere presence of such characters doesn’t tell you one Read more

  • Action stations

    Action stations

    Kim Stanley Robinson keeps coming back to what might be described as ‘environmental fiction’, and ecological themes are never far from the surface even in his more fanciful SF writing, but I would guess that it was his Science In The Capital series that put him on the map as an environmental writer. Almost all Read more

  • Risks and growth

    Risks and growth

    There are a few bands or musical artists of whom it’s possible to say that ‘their first album is the best’. It can happen that the first chance that someone gets to record, they do so with a combination of energy and creative clarity that they will not match again—and I suspect that this becomes Read more

  • Truth is no fun

    Truth is no fun

    This one-shot comic, which is the first book I’ve pulled at random out of what is to be the last box from Shortbox Comics (although the imprint will continue to release individual titles) could be summarised, I guess, as an allegorical body-horror short story. As allegory I feel it stumbles somewhat, since its allegorical topic Read more