I’ve been forgetting to link to my posts over at Black Gate, so let’s do a bit of catch-up now.  Just before Christmas I put up a post about Ursula Vernon’s Hugo-winning webcomic Digger. Then I followed that with some thoughts on Sean Howe’s interesting, if flawed, Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. And the most […]

I’ve started reading Charles C. Mann’s book 1491. I’m really just a few pages into it, but so far it’s quite well-written. I came across a mention of something that surprised me: in discussing the Olmecs and their accomplishments, Mann mentions that the idea of “0” (zero) as a number didn’t reach Europe until the […]

So I’ve begun slowly reading The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a classic Chinese historical novel. It triggered a thought, which I expect I’ll be considering more as I read further. That thought is this: modern western fantasy frequently seems to imagine a setting in some ways much more like historical China (and Chinese fantasies […]

I got a dozen books for Christmas this year (among other things). Here’s the list:

Happy New Year to all and sundry! Here’s my latest post at Black Gate, a look at Sean Howe’s recent book Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. Worth looking at, I thought, for people interested in the field.