Dwayne McDuffie passed away this morning. Unless you’re a diehard fan of comics or animation, it’s unlikely the his name means anything to you… But he had a huge impact and did a lot of amazing work in those fields;…
Author: Patrick A. Reed
Overlooked Treasure: The Real Jamaica Ska (1964)
I’ll freely admit it: I love classic Caribbean music. Calypso, Ska, Rocksteady, Mento, Bluebeat, Reggae, and other cross-pollinated and intermingling classifications take up a lot of space on my shelves and hard drives. There’s something I find endlessly fascinating about…
Stretch And Bobbito Reunion at Le Poisson Rouge, 2/10/11: Photos and Review
Sometime around 1990, two guys went into a college radio station late at night and spent the next few hours playing hip-hop records and cracking each other up. They called themselves Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Garcia, and both went on…
Single Review: The Strokes- “Under Cover Of Darkness”
It’s a new Strokes single. And it clearly attempts to play the audience, coming on a little too strong, full of the impulses of old pals trying to pack all the everything in all at once and remind you why…
Comic Review: “Banimon”.
Banimon is a three issue comic from Rocket North Publishing that I ran across at last year’s New York Comic Con, and after a quick flip through, I purchased all three issues from the creators. It’s a beautiful little publication, and…
The Great Unknowns: Freshco & Miz
It was a single mp3 in a folder of old rap tunes I’d gotten from somewhere. I was scanning through, looking for good tracks to DJ with, listening to snippets, hoping for a single beat or a bassline to grab…
From The Archives: Rolling Stone on Marvel Comics, 1971.
Rolling Stone No. 91, September 16, 1971. This is something I’d been wanting to track down for ages, as an interesting historical document, a missing piece of my pop culture education, and just something fun to read. When it was…
Album Review: “The Music Of DC Comics: 75th Anniversary Collection”
Well, this is something. It’s a fairly impressive, 31 track compilation of superhero theme songs from various films and TV shows, covering nearly the entire 75-year history of DC Comics. The oldest track here is the “Superman March” from the…
Graphic Novel Review: “Return Of The Dapper Men”
Firstly, it’s beautiful. That was my immediate impression when I picked this book: it’s absolutely lovely. Finely detailed, deeply textured paintings; a rich pastel color palate; deeply charming character designs; gold embossed text across the cover; huge sweeping panoramas stretching…
Roger Ebert, Huck Finn, and me.
It seems there’s a new edition of Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn being published, with all instances of “the N-word” replaced with “slave”, and it’s stirred quite the controversy. In particular, there was a mini-commotion over a post that Roger Ebert wrote…