Books and Mark Robertson

Mark Radcliffe - Thank You for the Days

2 Apr 2009

Showbiz is, as many will attest, a fickle business. Radio DJ, TV presenter, musician and all-round music boffin Mark Radcliffe has managed to exist on its periphery, trousers and dignity both relatively intact, for over two and a half decades. That’s…

Leander Kahney - Inside Steve's Brain

19 Mar 2009

BUSINESS ANALYSIS Bill Gates may be king of the computer geeks, but Steve Jobs shall ever remain the electronic consumer’s guru. Jobs started Apple in the 80s from a garage full of spare parts and a desire to do something different. This book…

David Heatley - My Brain is Hanging Upside Down

11 Dec 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY Its not unusual for an artist to use their life as source material, David Heatley has taken this autobiographical conceit to an altogether more meticulous end: he has taken entire hunks of his life and reproduce them in their entirety…

Neil Rafferty and Paul Stokes - Halfwit Nation

27 Nov 2008

HUMOUR While Private Eye and The Onion remain the cornerstones of written news satire in print and online respectively, and Mock the Week and Have I Got News For You keep our square eyes tearing, the joyous silliness of spoofing website The Daily…

Adrian Tomine - Sleepwalk and Other Stories

18 Sep 2008

COLLECTION There is a lightness of touch and simplicity that is both brave and endearing in the work of Adrian Tomine. He created Optic Nerve, an outlet for his stories and art from his university dorm in the mid 90s and was picked up by underground…

Irvine Welsh - Crime

3 Jul 2008

CRIME DRAMA (Jonathan Cape) Irvine Welsh has never shied away from the seamy side of life, and for his ninth novel he crosses the Atlantic to the balmy climes of Florida, only to uncover a cesspit of evil that would put some of his previous local…

Matt Groening & Various - Big Brilliant Book of Bart Simpson

22 May 2008

COMEDY (Titan Books) The boast that The Simpsons is now the longest running animated TV series of all time is a bit of a double-edged sword. For as it rolls out episode after episode, into the multiplexes and beyond, the permutations for new plot…

Mark E Smith with Austin Collings - Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith

8 May 2008

MUSIC BIOGRAPHY (Viking) The real joy of Mark E Smith and The Fall has always been expecting the unexpected. His music has always stuck to a rigid formula but is somehow never formulaic, and he’s survived every British musical subculture since punk…

William Shakespeare - Macbeth

13 Mar 2008

REIMAGINED CLASSIC (Classical Comics) Some stories are so good they permit retelling again and again. Classical Comics knows this and these books – the fifth in their series – recreates Shakespeare’s tale of ambition, betrayal, delusion and power in a…

Taylor Clark

28 Feb 2008

Full fat? Half fat? Skinny? A shot of eggnog syrup maybe? Since the coffee house revolution of the 1990s, your morning cup comes in an endless myriad of permutations. It wasn’t always like this of course, there was a time PS (Pre Starbucks) that coffee…

Mark Millar & Steve McNiven - Civil War

31 Jan 2008

Having dealt with DC’s ambitious crossover we have to mention Marvel’s equivalent, Civil War, a far more user-friendly prospect for the casual comics fan. The outbreak of unrest within a people is rarely less than tumultuous, and bloodshed is a tragic…

Charles M Schulz - Small world

15 Nov 2007

It’s the little things that make the difference. In the case of the Charles M Schulz cartoon strips, that could mean the smallest of pen strokes for a raised eyebrow, an extra crease on a forehead, the downward bend on the ends of a mouth. Schulz…

Nicolas de Crecy - Glacial Period

Graphic novel

4 Oct 2007

Being branded an enfant terrible is too often faint praise for some artists but it poses no problems for Nicolas De Crécy who goes to great pains not to conform to stereotypical comic boy clichés and in doing so has produced a distinct body of work that…

Adrian Tomine

6 Sep 2007

GRAPHIC NOVEL The fine lines that comprise Adrian Tomine’s expressive monochrome frames may seem spindly, but they hold a weight of meaning. It is the spaces between the action and dialogue that make Tomine’s stories so effective – the pregnant…

Peter Wild

2 Jul 2007

It is always the first thing that strikes you. The song titles. Before you even take the vinyl out of the sleeve or the CD out of its jewelcase, it’s those militant statements of verbosity, those acid-dipped, verbal conjugal visits, those florid…

Mister i

Comics

21 May 2007

SLAPSTICK SKETCHES Legendary French cartoonist Lewis Trondheim has been in self-imposed retirement for some years now claiming he didn’t want to make a job of his passion. He does however sporadically indulge us with one off, large format…

Andy Martin

Stealing The Wave (Bloomsbury)

26 Feb 2007

SPORT HISTORY For a surfer, life’s major battle is mainly between board and wave, body and gravity. But often it’s one surfer against another. In the 1980s the biggest surfing battle was between two men: Mark Foo and Ken Bradshaw. Foo was young…

EC Segar - comic review

EC Segar

19 Dec 2006

CLASSIC COMIC STRIPS Mainly remembered for his eating habits rather than his comic prowess, Popeye has been about since 1929, as a character in the cast of Thimble Theatre, EC Segar’s farcical, vaudevillian comic saga that was initially published in…

Julian Rothenstein & Mel Gooding

Dr Clock’s Handbook (Redstone)

11 Nov 2006

COMIC MANUAL It’s a novel idea this, a mis-guide book. And if there’s anyone more suitably equipped to publish a tome on the magic and sparkle of the absurd, it’s Redstone, the company that unleashes David Shrigley’s books on us at irregular…

John Ostrander & Various

Star Wars: Honour & Duty (Dark Horse)

28 Sep 2006

SCI-FI Given the epic scale of the Star Wars universe, George Lucas has afforded comic book writers an almost endless stream of possibilities for potential spin off publications. The downside to this is, to remain faithful and true to the films, and…