The fame and the legend of the Peanuts started on October 2, 1950, and the newspaper comic strip became a success almost immediately: at its peak, it ran in more than 2,600 newspapers simultaneously and made Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Lucy household names. 1952 saw the first edition of the Peanuts in paperback editions, where […]
Marvel Comics Library. Silver Surfer. Vol.1. 1968–1970 by Stan Lee, John Buscema, Douglas Wolk (2023
Marvel invented many great and impressive superheroes. Some were allowed their own comic book series; some ran for years or even decades. Compared to other Marvel characters and exclusive series, the Silver Surfer, main actor of the XXL title at hand, archived legendary status after a very short (comic book) lifetime. He was around for […]
The Soundies: A History and Catalog of Jukebox Film Shorts of the 1940s by Mark Cantor (2023)
The small-screen world of the short musical film, a form of media presentation usually associated with coin-operated cinematic machines of the 1940s and later decades, keeps fascinating historians, media researchers, music experts and sociologists. Even if nowadays media, video clips, music in all variations and formats, and modes of presentation are easily available on a […]
The Politics of the Marvel Cinematic Universe by Nicholas Carnes and Lilly J. Goren (eds.) (2022)
Marvel Comics, or rather, Marvel Entertainment as the corporation now has expanded into various companies responsible for diverse media enterprises, started out as one of many American comic book publishers. The many story arcs, story backgrounds, locations, family trees and so forth developed originally by Marvel‘s artists are by now complicated and span hundreds of […]
Hollywood Screwball Comedy 1934-1945: Sex, Love, and Democratic Ideals by Grégoire Halbout (2023)
With the possible exception of the Western movie and Film Noir, the American screwball comedy, that hilarious, often chaotic and highly witty style of making excellent and funny entertainment, probably is the third best liked or popular genre associated with movies made in 1940s US. It Happened One Night (Frank Capra, 1934) is very likely […]
Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story by Caroline and David Stafford (2023)
Authors Catherine and David Stafford’s new title on one of Britain’s most important bass players, Ronnie Lane (1946-1997), successfully fills some information gaps rock music lovers may have encountered, concerning show biz and London’s music scene of the 1960s and 70s. Their Anymore for Anymore: The Ronnie Lane Story tells of his humble beginnings as […]
Marvel Comics Library. X-Men. Vol. 1. 1963–1966 by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Chris Claremont, Fabian Nic
With the fourth installment of the Marvel superheroes edition in XXL size, another one of Stan Lee’s impressive lines of comics is available now: Marvel’s “The X-Men.” A name related to the eXtraordinary or simply X-tra powers the protagonists at hand possessed; without the help of lab accidents, misdirected sun rays or cosmic powers of […]
Funkiest Man Alive: Rufus Thomas and Memphis Soul by Matthew Ruddick (2023)
Memphis, Tennessee, will always stand out as a city important for popular American music. Here W.C. Handy was a work here, later music history was written by quite a few local musicians who excelled in blues, rock’n’roll, soul and funk. One of them was singer/songwriter and master entertainer Rufus Thomas (1917-2001) who now with this […]
American Film Noir Genres, Characters, and Settings by Harold Hellwig (2023)
Strongly influenced by domestic hard-boiled novels of the 1920s and 1930s, one of the most American film genres, film noir, had its boom time in the 1940s. Generally believed to have mostly vanished from studios and theaters by the late 1950s, the genre briefly resurfaces every few years in the so-called “neo noirs” of various […]