After all, Steampunk as a genre of literature, fashion, film or even music is a truly young being, hardly older than 30 years, if we consider William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s novel The Difference Engine (1990) as one of the very earliest works of fiction now considered part of the movement and probably its kick […]
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Author: Dr. A. Ebert
Saying It With Songs: Popular Music and the Coming of Sound to Hollywood … by Katherine Spring (2013
It may be hard for us today to imagine what moviegoers in the 1920s must have felt when they watched their first talkies in the cinemas. By now, there have been a number of movies describing just this peculiar sensation. But what the audience must have experienced when suddenly their movie stars uttered words could […]
Dream West. Politics and Religion in Cowboy Movies by Douglas Brode (2013)
The myth and cultural legacy of one of the most powerful American symbols, the cowboy, is at the center of Douglas Brode’s volume Dream West. While it is not so much the cowboy itself that is analyzed and put in relation to other national icons, it is the set of values and the way the […]
Winsor McCay. The Complete Little Nemo by Alexander Braun (ed.) (2014)
Not just comic art fans but any student of popular culture or architecture will be delighted by this edition. Winsor McCay’s inventions of perspective, his psychedelic and fantastic renderings of breath-taking strange environments are presented here for the first time ever in the complete edition containing all (really every one!) 549 episodes of Little Nemo, […]
Homer Simpson Ponders Politics: Popular Culture as … by Timothy Dale and Joseph Foy (eds.) (2013)
For many centuries stories, tales, parables and myths not only have been sources of inspiration or simple methods of entertainment; those creations were models to live and judge by and inspirations of how to react in certain situations (as well as guidelines of how not to). Tales and stories told over and over again finally […]
Houses of Noir: Dark Visions from Thirteen Film Studios by Ronald Schwartz (2014)
For the connoisseur of old wine, it is not impossible to determine origin, year and characteristics of a certain brand or region by taking a sample. The same goes for noir films, which due to lighting, editing, setting, or simply by their respective casts can be traced back to a particular studio or production year […]
75 Years of Marvel Comics. From the Golden Age… by Roy Thomas and Josh Baker (2014)
After two big books on DC Comics, Taschen presents a heavy, heavy book on the other major name in comic publishing: Marvel Comics. Both publishers together dominate the US comic book market, approximately up to 80 percent of all superhero comics sold come from these two big players. The book on 720(!) pages commemorates not […]
Comic Book Crime: Truth, Justice … by Nickie D. Phillips and Staci Strobl (2013)
Since superhero comic books often display in their stories characters, settings, possible problems and wishful thinking of their readers, even if the location is on another planet, it is only natural that also a sense of justice and the following punishment as felt by the readers is transported through the action heroes. There is a […]
A Companion to Film Noir by Andrew Spicer and Helen Hanson (eds.) (2013)
This edition of mostly recent texts on the style, genre and aesthetics of film noir covers a huge variety of themes such as technical details and production modes, elaborates on the roots of many noir films in American (hard boiled) detective fiction and pulp stories, and expands into the survey of the many “victims,” so […]