New England Comics shuttered its Cambridge store on Sunday.
A mainstay of Harvard Square for more than 30 years, the store closed because of a precipitous decline in foot traffic in this post-pandemic era.
Despite its proximity to Harvard University, the store was no longer profitable.
I had been a customer almost as long as the store was open.
Continue reading “Sanctuary Lost”
Never meet your heroes.
You’re bound to be disappointed.
Isn’t that what we are told?
But years ago, while working for the Fishrag That Shall Not Be Named, I got the chance to interview Kevin Conroy.
Continue reading “Forever Our Dark Knight”
There have been many books about the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Doubtless there will be many more to come.
But you will be hard-pressed to find one more visceral, more frightening, more damning that Michael Fanone’s “Hold the Line: The Insurrection and One Cop’s Battle for America’s Soul.”
Fanone, in video footage of that day seen round the world, was a Metropolitan Police Department officer defending the Capitol when the angry mob of Trump supporters yanked him out of the building and almost killed him.
He was repeatedly Tased, beaten with a Blue Lives Matter flagpole, and kicked.
Continue reading “Can America ‘Hold the Line’?”
American TV shows are rubbish when it comes to depicting gay relationships.
Take, for example, ABC’s “General Hospital.”
The long-running serial features a gay character who appears about once every two months to provide comic relief to his bestie.
The love of his life, his now ex-husband, a legacy character no less, has been working on another floor of the hospital and hasn’t been seen onscreen in two years.
Tokens and time-fillers. That pretty much sums up the wasteland of American TV.
Not so across the pond.
Continue reading “‘EastEnders’ Ballum Beats Everything on American TV”
In the late ’60s, the mighty maestros of DC Comics had a brainstorm: Spin Robin and Batgirl into solo adventures in the back pages of “Detective Comics.”
If you were a fan of the Bat-sidekicks hoping to see them take on some of Batman’s notorious rogues by themselves or perhaps even develop their own gallery of colorful enemies, you had to be disappointed.
Robin fought campus crime, and the stories were even more boring than this sentence suggests.
Batgirl battled run-of-the-mill thieves and killers.
But there is one Batgirl story that stands out, even after all these years.
It’s a Gotham City-sized crater of stupidity.
Continue reading “That Time Batgirl was Almost Killed by a Wig”
Mark Perigard 