Okay, I know that the clues and teaser scenes in all those Marvel movies over the past few years have been intrusive and irritating, but nevertheless I admit that I’m totally sold on this Avengers scheme, now that the Joss Whedon (!) payoff movie is actually in production. (It had seemed like one of those […]

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Barney Miller’s and my supernatural teen thriller 7 Souls was just published in Germany, so I awoke to a big thick bubbly envelope containing two German hardcover first editions of Seven Souls (They kept the English title). Wow! I have never in my life been in a situation like this: I’m flipping through a book […]

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Tex Avery’s cartoons combine high-speed slapstick and vaudevillian characterization with existential surrealism, which called for extreme technical and stylistic precision. In particular, the cartoons feature richly-detailed background paintings (until the style was deliberately streamlined in the 1950s) that belie the ridiculous story-lines and somehow make everything even funnier. You won’t see anything like this in […]

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