This is the first part of a four part review of the four elements  of T H White's Once and Future King.

I reread this book once every couple of years and love it more every time.  It's a composite of four books that make up an Arthurian Cycle.  The first book is probably the most famous, being the basis for Disney's Sword in the Stone.  It's the fairly light but at times dramatic early life of Wart, or Arthur, raised by an uncle and tutored by Merlin (along with Kay, his tormentor, nemesis and...
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Walter Mosley wrote a children's book, what is now called a YA (young adult?) novel. I've read much of Mosley's work and been impressed by it all, his Easy Rawlins novels are some of the finest examples of crime fiction on the market and books like The man in THe Basement" make him stand out even more as a writer. Mosley gives me, a middle-aged white man, a brief glimpse of what it would be like to have been black in the 50's and 60's in the Southern USA, a look at the fear and the r...
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Anyway, money is tight and if I want a comics fix that's left me with anything I can get for free. Not being a gamer, a techie or a furry 70% of webcomics I looked at sailed through the outer atmosphere and over my head. I read a manga on line (Mushi Shi) which was absolutely superb and I want to purchase it asap, but I won't bit torrent stuff so little worth reading was left to me on that front.

So I started fishing around for free, downloadable pdf comics. Amid a whole load of rubbi...
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For a while in my mid twenties I took a liking to a subgenre of fantasy called, among other things, Urban Fantasy, one of the leading proponents being the wonderful Charles De Lint.  The books were urban myths of magical beings living in small communities among regular human beings.  At somepoint something large and magical would happen that drove the story and at this point it often got more traditional with the sea, the desert or woodlands becoming central.  The books had a lot of charm but...
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Map of Dreams is ostensibly, a children's book by a Caldecott medal winner and one of the most distinguished picturebook creators in the USA.  I have to admit I'd never heard of Shulevitz even though he's written nearly 40 children's books since 1963.  If Map of Dreams is any indication I've really missed out.

Map of dreams is an autobiographical tale of his childhood when he and his family fled Poland for Turkestan at the start of the Second World War.  As his name suggests Shulevitz is Jewis...
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I wanted to operate an experiment on digital comics and compare them with an identical printed copy.  I don't generally hold with downloading comics and have limited my use of torrents to work that is unavailable in printed form and pretty old.  Mostly it's been 50's DC stuff like Bob Hope and some of their westerns and some of the Richie Rich books to get a better feel for stuff of historical value and fantastic artistic quality.

But there's been a lot of talk about digital delivery of comics...
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Jonathan Cape are a fabulous and eclectic publisher, even now as part of Random House, bringing us everything from James Bond to Tamara Drew to Alice in Sunderland to the works of J G Ballard and a multitude of other great books.  The one I am currently most pleased about is their volume on illustrator and writer John Burningham.

Mr Gumpy on the cover, bearing a strong resemblance to Mr Burningham

I first came across Burningham in a Walker books Children's anthology.  The story, Mr Gumpy's (no...
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I wanted to experiment with drawing and try out different ways of lettering.  My hand lettering is usually poor but I'm not a big fan of computer lettering so the following five pages nominally constitute a review of Manu Larcenet's Ordinary Victories, a very good but both over-rated and under-rated book depending on the reviewer.  The review was lettered by computer, in both capitals and lower case, and by hand.

And cleverly I've saved the files too small and they're unreadable.  Better chang...
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Things change, the people who brought you comics that weren't just for kids anymore, Francoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, have now decided comics aren't just for grown-ups anymore.  Perhaps attempting to balance the situation once more, Mouly and Spiegelman were the editors of Raw which, alongside Watchmen and Dark Knight returns, was a a major player in moving public perception away from comics as a medium for kids entertainment.  Perhaps recognising their part in this Mouly in recent years f...
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Posy Simmonds has been much in the comics news of late with the reviews of her book Tamara Drew and has almost become an overnight superstar after some 30 or more years of cartooning.  She still seems best known for her more recent adult work and her children's books seem almost unknown.  This is a shame because her kid's books are probably her most accessible work.

The Chocolate Wedding is one of two books featuring a little girl, Lulu, and her baby brother Willy and their visit to a family w...
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Wednesday Comics is DC's latest entry into the weekly comics following on from 52, Countdown and Trinity.  It's an impressive looking book with each of its 15 stories getting a page a piece, a page 4 times the size of the average comic.  Each piece is cleverly put together so it lies within continuity but is not built on knowing continuity.  If all you know about Batman is the bare minimum you will find a story you can enjoy and the same goes for all the other characters from Hawkman to Kaman...
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Walter Mosley wrote a children's book, what is now called a YA (young adult?) novel.  That's a hard idea to wrap your brain around if you're familiar with Mosley's adult writing. I've read much of Mosley's work and been impressed by it all, his Easy Rawlins novels are some of the finest examples of crime fiction on the market and books like The man in THe Basement" make him stand out even more as a writer. Mosley gives me, a middle-aged white man, a brief glimpse of what it would be like to h...
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Finance has been tight this month so purchases have been minimal.  Being laid off has made me much more selective about what I read and what I buy.  Mostly I'm raiding the local libraries for my comics fix but sometimes you just want to own something.

So I started fishing around for free, downloadable pdf comics and amid a whole load of rubbish I found something truly outstanding, "The Story of an Idea". A twelve page comic by Moebius, yes that Moebius, about the foundation of the Red Cross an...
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I bought Kampung Boy about a year ago and have really wanted to review it. Trouble is I can't find anything to add to the superlatives others have written about the book. Lat's writing is honest and affecting. His artwork is totally perfect for the material, tales of his boyhood, growing up in a tiny village in 50's Malaysia. Each page is one picture with text in a style somewhat similar to the British cartoonist Giles with a line quality like Charles Shulz and an energy to his work that brou...
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