Black Blizzard was published in Japan in 1956, leaving its mark on the emerging Japanese comic book industry with its longer narrative and adult-oriented story. The manga is like a Hitchcock film on paper: two convicts handcuffed together try to evade police in the middle of a snowstorm. The dated artwork looks a little too […]
Shannon Fay
Posted inArts + Music
Sweet Tooth Vol. 1: Out of the Woods
Gus is a young boy with deer ears and antlers. He’s a hybrid—a child born with animal features after a great plague killed most of humanity. When Gus’ father dies, Gus ventures out into the world in search of a fabled haven for hybrids called “The Preserve.” What makes Sweet Tooth: Out of the Woods […]
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Grave business
Holy Cross Cemetery was founded in 1843 and it’s been falling apart ever since. The Irish-Catholic cemetery lies in disrepair on a hill in the south end of Halifax. Tombstones have toppled over, sunk into the earth or lie in pieces on the ground like broken china. A sign near the entrance proclaims: “Warning: Gravestones […]
Posted inArts + Music
Collapse
Michael Ruppert lives in a world where the end is always just around the corner. Over the course of the documentary (and what seems like 300 cigarettes) Ruppert explains that oil production has peaked and the world as we know it will soon cease to exist. It’s easy to get swept up in Ruppert’s dystopic […]
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Saturn Apartments, Volume 1
Saturn Apartments is a strange mix of hard sci-fi, childlike art and sentimentality. Mitsu is a window washer on a space station orbiting an abandoned earth. Life on the station is highly stratified: the rich get windows and natural sunlight while the poor live within the station’s core. This volume sets up some interesting dichotomies […]
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Meet your manga
Running a convention dedicated to Japanese animation and comics comes with a lot of responsibilities. Top of the list is warning the locals. When the Westin Nova Scotian was secured as the location for Halifax’s first-ever anime con, convention chair Lissa Pattillo decided it was important to let the hotel’s staff know what they’d be […]
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Solanin
Meiko is adrift in Tokyo. She hates her job, her boyfriend is freeloading at her apartment and all her friends are as directionless as she is. When she impulsively quits her job, she’s forced to figure out exactly what she wants in life. Solanin is a deceptively simple manga about 20somethings at a crossroads. While […]
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The Room
The Room isn’t the first movie to feature awful acting, a tissue-thin plot and weird editing choices, but the extremes that it takes them to is what makes it one of the best worst movies. Tommy Wiseau not only wrote and directed but also stars as Johnny, a nice guy whose girlfriend cheats on him […]
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GoGo Monster, Taiyo Matsumoto (VIZ Media)
Matsumoto’s works that have been released in English are often met with high critical praise and low sales. His style, manga with a heavy European comic influence, has earned him a following, but the surrealistic nature of his stories might scare off more casual readers. GoGo Monster manages to showcase both the uniqueness of his […]
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Blood: The Last Vampire
Blood: The Last Vampire is a live-action adaptation of an anime of the same name. The movie expands on the anime’s plot but fails to add any deeper meaning or themes to the story of Saya, a half-human, half-vampire demon killer. Then again, when the main selling point of a film is the “kickass schoolgirls” […]
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Trick ‘r Treat
Trick ‘r Treat lingered in limbo for two years before finally being released on DVD this October. The long wait helped build anticipation amongst horror fans, though many may be disappointed now that they finally have a chance to see the film. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t that gory and even less scary, but it’s fun […]
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Everywhere’s a sign
Local artist Scott Saunders was walking down a street in Halifax when he passed a man with a sign that read “Will accept verbal abuse for spare change.” Saunders did his best to ignore the man and kept walking. “When I got 15 feet down the street I thought, ‘What a curious thing that was.’ […]
