Books and Miles Fielder

Mike Mignola gets back to the drawing board with Abe Sapien, Hellboy and BPRD

24 Jun 2010

Miles Fielder chats to writer and artist Mike Mignola about the expanding world of his demonic offspring and literally getting back to the drawing board

Alan Moore - Lost Girls

5 Feb 2009

‘What we wanted to do with Lost Girls was to come up with a different form of pornography. We realised we had the ideas for something enormous and wonderful.’ Alan Moore, who’s widely considered to be the finest writer working in comics today and is…

Nicolas de Crécy - The Celestial Bibendum

Gorgeous reprint and translation of artist/writer de Crécy’s often bizarre comic

27 Apr 2012

Knockabout, the UK publisher/distributor that’s been making Transatlantic underground and alternative comics available to the turned on and tuned in since the 1980s, has more recently been in the business of translating and repackaging into oversize…

Mark Haddon - The Red House

The Curious Incident author delivers a mature domestic drama for grown-ups

24 Apr 2012

(Jonathan Cape) Prolific author of children’s books and part-time writer of novels for adults, Mark Haddon’s latest is his most mature work to date. It’s mature in terms of both content and style, and reading The Red House there’s a sense that this…

Daniel Depp

Noir author related to you-know-who

7 Aug 2009

California author and bookstore owner Daniel Depp’s first professional writing credit was shared with his famous step-brother Johnny on the latter’s 1997 directing debut, The Brave, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Twelve years later…

Howard Chaykin - American Flagg!

28 May 2009

With a penchant for eroticism and violence, US comics visionary Howard Chaykin is releasing another groundbreaking work. Miles Fielder chats to him.

Bryan Talbot

The Pilgrim’s Progress

26 Mar 2007

North of England born and bred comics creator Bryan Talbot is credited with writing and illustrating the very first British graphic novel. The Adventures of Luther Arkwright is a science fantasy epic initially serialised in 1978 and first collected in…

The Hot 100 2011: 100-50

The definitive list of Scottish creative talent

16 Dec 2011

100: Gordon Ferris. Kilmarnock crime author makes good. The already packed Scottish crime writing field has finally found a bit of elbow room for another burgeoning talent. Joining the likes of Rankin, Brookmyre, McDermid and co is this Ayrshire-born…

Hot 100 2011 - No. 49 to 1

The definitive list of Scottish creative talent

16 Dec 2011

The Hot 100 is the definitive list of Scottish creative talent. From fashion designers to performance artists, everyone who has made a sizeable splash in 2011 has a place in this countdown. It’s for people who’ve created a buzz, but it’s also about…

Eric Skillman and Jhomar Soriano - Liar's Kiss

Unpredictable crime noir graphic novel from new writer and artist team

12 May 2011

Top Shelf Comix. Featuring a real loser of a protagonist and devolving around a series of misunderstandings and bad coincidences, this stylish, noirish hard-boiled crime graphic novel recalls, among other things, certain films of the Coen brothers. In…

Frank Miller & Jim Lee - All Star Batman and Robin

14 Aug 2008

COMIC (DC/Titan) Frank Miller and Jim Lee tackle the world’s greatest detective and the boy wonder in this sister title to Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s All Star Superman. The first nine issues of the ongoing series are collected here, and like…

George Pelecanos - The Way Home

11 Jun 2009

SOCIAL DRAMA Having long since established his credentials as a chronicler of life on the mean streets of Washington DC, George Pelecanos more recently broadened his fanbase as screenwriter and story editor on The Wire, the Baltimore-based TV show…

Dock Life - The Leith Festival

28 May 2009

So what’s The Leith Festival, then? It’s an annual community celebration that takes in comedy, dance, film, literature, music, storytelling theatre, visual art and children’s events – in other words everything. A small affair, is it? Hardly. Its…

GF Newman - Crime and Punishment

2 Apr 2009

(Quercus) GANGSTER NOVEL This London gangster novel doesn’t aspire to the lofty literary allusions of its Russian namesake. Eschewing Dostoevsky’s musings on the moral dilemma of murder, crime writer and TV producer Gordon Newman (Law and Order…

Daniel Depp - Loser’s Town

19 Feb 2009

(Simon & Schuster) CRIME DRAMA Daniel Depp’s claim to fame to date is being the half-brother of movie star Johnny and co-writing The Brave, which was nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or prize at Cannes in 1997. As a former Hollywood…

Mike Mignola & John Byrne - Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

21 Aug 2008

Cinema-goers flummoxed by the lack of backstory in the new Hellboy film should take the chance to go back to the supernatural hero’s origins, with this timely re-release of a four-part comic first published in 1993. Without spoiling the plot, it…

American Literature

Born fighting

24 Apr 2007

At the exact moment Chuck Palahniuk greets me with a hushed ‘Hello?’ his home in south-western Washington State is being invaded by a group of unfamiliar men who are chanting in unison at the author: ‘His name is Robert Paulson!’

Joost Swarte: Is That All There Is?

Compendium of the Dutch cartoonist’s satirical alternative comics

3 Feb 2012

Apparently so. Or almost so. Is That All There Is? collects virtually all of the Dutch cartoonist’s alternative comics from way back in 1972 to the present day, translates them into English and assembles them, under Swarte’s own supervision, in this…

Geoff Dyer - Zona

The multi-talented humourist turns his able hand to film criticism

27 Jan 2012

(Canongate) Having previously mashed-up fiction, journalism, essay, biography and travel writing, polymath and humourist Geoff Dyer once more defies genre with a book that’s one part film criticism, one part autobiography and several parts random…

Preview of 2012 - Millennium Trilogy comics

Scottish crime author Denise Mina adapts Stieg Larsson’s bestselling classics

6 Jan 2012

There’s not a lot left to say about Stieg Larsson. The three homegrown film adaptations of the late Swedish author’s novels – The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played With Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest – along with David…

Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows - Neonomicon

Moore takes some liberties with Lovecraft's stories, but as ever, does a grand job of it

5 Jan 2012

(Avatar) While we wait impatiently for the final instalment of the latest The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century (see our review of part two), we have this new graphic novella from the grand magi of comics to be going on with. Neonomicon is…

Metaphrog - Louis: Red Letter Day

Reissue of the Glasgow-based graphic novel duo's 2000 Louis debut

12 Dec 2011

(Metaphrog) A year after the publication of the fifth Louis book, Night Salad, the Glasgow-based writer-illustrator partnership Metaphrog celebrates a decade of their series of graphic novels for kids and adults. To mark the event, Scot John Chalmers…

The Art of Joe Kubert

Wonderful collection of comics art from one of the legends of the medium

21 Nov 2011

Edited by Bill Schelly (Fantagraphics) Alongside the ongoing and consistently groundbreaking efforts of Fantagraphics Books Inc to publish the work of new and cutting edge cartoonists (beginning with Los Bros Hernandez's Love & Rockets in the late…

Will Self

The author on his upcoming reading of Fleck with Alasdair Gray

19 Aug 2011

I’ve known Alasdair Gray for a long time now, nearly 20 years. We had the same publisher in England and he came to one of my events in Glasgow, probably in about 1982 or ‘83. We did some other events together around that time and struck up a…

Chuck Palahniuk - Damned

Religion-targetting novel fresh and funny yet also more of the same

19 Aug 2011

(Jonathan Cape) Like the preceding 11, Chuck Palahniuk’s latest novel is a black comedy that satirises a taboo subject, features a protagonist with a malleable identity who is indoctrinated into a bizarre cult and is structured around repetition…