Category: Blog

Devil In The Details: Ghost Rider vs. Marvel

I finally caught the 2007 version of Ghost Rider over the weekend, and gave it two searing-hot thumbs up. It had the proper balance of pulpy horror fun that made the original comics such a joy. But an episode back in the real world has overshadowed the release of the sequel, out on Friday–and this is one battle that Johnny Blaze, and the man that brought him to life, are set to lose.

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Logopolis

A new year and a new logo. I can’t help myself, I’m afraid. Farting around with the look and feel of X&HT is one of my pleasures. The place is like a shed, and every so often I get the need to shift things around and clear out the cupboards. Inevitably, I’ll find a dead mouse somewhere in a dark corner, but that is the nature of spring cleaning.

I thought it might be nice to wander through the different logos I’ve designed for X&HT over the years, and something about why I made the choices that ended up on the site.

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A Tale Of Two Girls: X&HT watched The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

It’s typical behavior in Hollywood to take an outstanding foreign language film and hack out a mediocre rehash for the American market. David Fincher’s take on the Steig Larssen novel does nothing to buck the trend. More worryingly, it takes one of the strongest female characters to come out in years and does everything it can to dilute her power.

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Habibi: Tales Within Tales

Stories are the framework that we build our lives upon. Our beliefs, our fears, our relationship with the world, with birth, with death, with fate, all come out of the tales we whisper to each other, huddled round campfires in the dark. We have taught ourselves to respond to myth and legend, fable and saga. Fantasy used as a way to understand and codify the callous, bewildering universe around us.

In Habibi, Craig Thompson takes the idea of the story as key to survival and runs with it. Riffing on Islamic and Christian mythology, the Thousand and One Nights and the ways in which language can both divide and unite us, the book is an astonishing, bravura example of how the graphic novel can do things with a story that no other medium can touch.

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