Special All Saints' Day Post - ONE DAY EARLY

Yes, it's Halloween, and Gaelic harvest tradition thereby commands the appearance of an essay on pre-Code horror comics at the Los Angeles Review of Books (the Angels in question no doubt circling in anticipation of the holy day of obligation to follow). For optimal effect, imagine me reading this post aloud dressed as a vampire on a local television set with pauses every paragraph and a half for scenes from The Mummy's Hand. Pleasant screams!

I am a team player.

1. The Comics Journal recently held a roundtable discussion of Craig Thompson's Habibi, and I was among the participants. Guaranteed to the be the first comic book review post you'll read this year to reference the 2011 Pankaj Kapoor Hindi movie flop Mausam. I also threw in a mini-review of Frank Miller's Holy Terror; be sure to read the comments for a piece of art reference I totally missed.

2. In conjunction with the October 2011 Horror Manga Moveable Feast, I was invited to submit an essay on Kazuo Umezu's survival horror classic The Drifting Classroom to the Hooded Utilitarian. I decided to massively abridge the series in such a way that virtually everything with the story's perpetually imperiled children is eliminated, nonetheless leaving a potently full work with some surprising similarities to other Umezu works. It was a sensation I picked up on during my very first reading, and I was glad to explore it at fuller length.

The Mystic World of Cinema

HEY. I have a new essay over at MUBI on Terrence Malick's recent The Tree of Life, out today on home video. MANY THANKS, SORRY I YELLED.