Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Plausibly grim

    Plausibly grim

    I found my way to the Snowpiercer comics by way of Bong Joon-Ho’s excellent 2013 movie, but they are legendary in their own right. These pioneering adult bandes dessinées, despite their fanciful science-fiction setting, are distinguished by a gritty and low-key style that was rarely found in comics in 1982 when the first volume was… Read more

  • Necessary questions

    Necessary questions

    Fifty Degrees Below takes over more or less exactly where Forty Signs Of Rain leaves off, but it shifts focus slightly, both in terms of which of its characters are given the most time, and in the way it examines the impacts of climate change. This time, we are still in Washington D.C., but we… Read more

  • True history

    True history

    This small book, published in 404 Ink’s ‘Inklings’ series, covers a subject close to my heart—since starting to listen heavily to hip-hop I’ve always been drawn to women MCs, mainly because the mainstream of the music has been dominated by such egregiously toxic patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality. There have always been alternatives and… Read more

  • So bad it’s… bad

    So bad it’s… bad

    We were on holiday in Northumberland, near Hadrian’s Wall, visiting lots of Roman archaeological sites, so we thought we’d watch a movie set in that part of the world and that sort of time. The film Centurion is based on the story popularised by Rosemary Sutcliff in The Eagle Of The Ninth (1954) that the… Read more

  • Roman holiday

    Roman holiday

    It’s a long time since I’ve been to a museum or a gallery, what with global pandemics and everything. We didn’t really set out to do so when we went to the English Heritage site Corbridge Roman Town, and to be honest we didn’t realise there was much of a visitor centre alongside the ruins.… Read more

  • Founding a field

    Founding a field

    Finally, an academic has written a book about what I spend most of my time doing. Well, I say finally… it would be more to the point to say that I’ve finally got around to reading the book I bought several years ago. However, it is a very new thing that world-building has become the… Read more