Oliver Arditi

Blog archive

  • Doubling and singling

    Doubling and singling

    This is the second cook-book that I’ve read simply because it happens to be a comic published by Shortbox. Like the other one, Lucie Byron’s Food Baby, it’s aimed mainly at young people without a huge amount of culinary confidence or experience, cooking on a budget. In every parameter, I am not this target audience!… Read more

  • Deniable plausibility

    Deniable plausibility

    I’ve been on a mission recently to catch up with the output of two of my favourite writers, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson. With Termination Shock, Stephenson makes a foray into territory more usually to be associated with Robinson—which is to say that the book is a piece of near-future climate fiction. Like Robinson’s… Read more

  • Party in the temple

    Party in the temple

    I spent a while back there in the early noughties thinking that all the fusions had been tried, and that whatever new forms were going to emerge in music would be so outlandish I might find it hard to grasp them. Actually, it turns out there’s a lot of mileage left in the old stylistic… Read more

  • 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