The Pod Delusion episode 122, Resonance FM at 11am on Sunday 12th February, podcast here

This week we explore UN reform with a former ambassador to the United Nations, get the latest on the Twitter Joke Trial, build a moon base and keep filibustering to pass the time. Correspondents include James O’Malley, Carl Gardner, Alex Fitch, Jessica Metheringham-Owlett, Craig Lucas, Tom Williamson and Sarah Angliss. The Pod Delusion is a weekly news magazine radio programme and podcast about interesting things. From politics, to science to culture and philosophy, it’s commentary from a secular, rationalist, skeptical, somewhat lefty-liberal, sort of perspective. A bit like From Our Own Correspondent but with more jokes.

Panel Borders: Exhibiting Comics, Resonance FM at 8pm on Sunday 12th February, podcast on Panel Borders afterwards

Continuing our month of shows about about non practitioners’ love of comics, Alex Fitch talks to Lord Baker of Dorking about his contributions as lender and patron of The Cartoon Museum to their latest exhibition ‘Her Maj: Sixty years of unofficial portraits of the Queen’ and to John Huddy, founder and curator of The Illustration Cupboard about the gallery’s history of exhibiting art from picture books and graphic novels. Also, from last week’s Manga Jiman awards ceremony at the Embassy of Japan in London, Cultural Officer Simon Wright and Minister Hiroshi Suzuki, the director of the Japan Information and Culture Centre, introduce this year’s winning entries to the comic book competition.

Recent podcasts

Panel Borders: Searching for comics with DJ Food

Starting a month of shows about non practitioners’ love of comics, guest presenter Robin Warren talks to musician Strictly Kev about collaborating with Henry Flint on the artwork for his new LP The Search Engine and the three EPs that make up the release. Robin and Kev talk about the latter’s interest in British anthologies, especially 2000AD, and how a love of comics in his formative years compliments his music production as DJ Food and with The Cinematic Orchestra.

Comics and Conflicts podcast: Pat Mills on Charley’s War

Imperial War Museum educator Grant Rogers talks to Pat Mills about his seminal wartime strip Charley’s War, serialised in Battle Action comic in the 1970s and 80s. Grant and Pat Mills discuss the history of the strip, working with Joe Colquhoun and the real life events that influenced the comic. (Recorded in front of an audience at the 2011 Comics and Conflicts conference at the Imperial War Museum, London.)

Online magazine:

ELECTRIC SHEEP ISSUE SIXTY – FEMMES FATALES: Deadly dames and murderous man-eaters

To mark the restoration of Otto Preminger’s magnificentLaura, we celebrate femmes fatales, including Peggy Cummins’s gutsy bank robber in Gun Crazy and Barbara Stanwyck’s sassy social climber inBaby Face. We have a feature on female action heroines and a terrific Comic Strip on Twin Peaks temptresses by Richy K. Chandler, while Reel Sounds is enthused by a wild jazz scene in The Phantom Lady and in Alter Ego Katy Darby is Bridget Gregory in The Last Seduction.

New cinema releases include the intelligent, creepy cult victim tale Martha Marcy May Marlene, the excellent James Ellroy-scripted LA crime thriller Rampart, Polanski’s ferociously funny middle-class satire Carnage, and Cronenberg’s disastrous A Dangerous Method. And we have a feature on doyenne of queer cinema Barbara Hammer, who is the subject of a retrospective at Tate Modern.

In the DVDs, we review 70s Vietnam vet vigilante drama Rolling Thunder and Bulgarian neo-noir Zift, and to give context to the latter’s interest in bodily waste, we have an article on toilet scenes in cinema.

In Short Cuts, we review the screening of Swedish feminist porn shorts Dirty Diaries at the London Short Film Festival while Cine Lit peruses the latest film books. In the Film Jukebox, soulful, dreamy chamber popsters The Tindersticks pick their favourite films.

(art meet life, life meet art: Moore with some of the Occupy protestors outside St Paul’s London)

“At the start of the 1980s when the ideas that would coalesce into V for Vendetta were springing up from a summer of anti-Thatcher riots across the UK coupled with a worrying surge from the far-right National Front, Guy Fawkes’ status as a potential revolutionary hero seemed to be oddly confirmed by circumstances surrounding the comic strip’s creation: it was the strip’s artist, David Lloyd, who had initially suggested using the Guy Fawkes mask as an emblem for our one-man-against-a-fascist-state lead character.

When this notion was enthusiastically received, he decided to buy one of the commonplace cardboard Guy Fawkes masks that were always readily available from mid-autumn, just to use as convenient reference.

To our great surprise, it turned out that this was the year (perhaps understandably after such an incendiary summer) when the Guy Fawkes mask was to be phased out in favour of green plastic Frankenstein monsters geared to the incoming celebration of an American Halloween.

It was also the year in which the term “Guy Fawkes Night” seemingly disappeared from common usage, to be replaced by the less provocative ‘bonfire night’.

At the time, we both remarked upon how interesting it was that we should have taken up the image right at the point where it was apparently being purged from the annals of English iconography. It seemed that you couldn’t keep a good symbol down. ”

(members of the Polish parliament don V masks recently in protest at economic, repressive copyright & web intrusion laws and other measures. V is no longer just for the street activist)

Sarah McIntyre, along with Emma Vieceli, headed off last weekend to France for the Paris Manga and Sci-Fi Show – naturally Vern and Lettuce had to go along with them (and thankfully French chefs didn’t see them as ingredients for dinner!). As well as more of the cool Vern and Lettuce special strip about the gig (the first panels of which I shamelessly borrowed to post above) Sarah has posted up a neat report on the gig, with plenty more art and photos as she usually does. Emma was there with the the shiny new – or should I say nouveau? – French language edition of her lovely Dragon Heir Reborn, part of a series which we’ve told you a number of times you should be reading. There’s a new Indy French publisher called Aaltaïr, and Guillaume Bresch and Patrick Chaduc are the men behind it and the French version of Em’s book.

Guillame also told Sarah something about why he started a new independent publisher and it is refreshing to hear that he not only loves books but he believes they have been around thousands of years and will be around for a long time to come – nice to hear when many worry about what will happen to books and reading in an ever changing publishing and media world. He’s got a couple of imprints for comics and for manga (which leads to a sidebar discussion on the difference between comics and manga – as Emma points out, manga really just means comics, not a specific form of big-eyed talking magical panda comics), he’s considering children’s illustrated books (I’m sure talking to Sarah would help persuade him to that idea! And our own Richard has reviewed several younger readers works that blur the line between comics and traditional picture books, looks like an area ripe to expand for young readers) and he has already done a chapter book version of Peter Pan with illustrations by Charles Vess (and yes, he is open to submission ideas). There’s a bunch more pics comparing the French cosplayers with some of the London event ones and loads more art, go and have a look, may be a new event to add to your comic calendar, even if it isn’t in the nicest part of the city.

Drunk Batman and Robin Animated Short 1- Smart Phone from Spencer Scott Holmes on Vimeo.

Drunk Batman and Robin Animated Short 2- Why Robin Can’t Wear Pants from Spencer Scott Holmes on Vimeo.

And the famous Dali original (I think this was the first ‘proper’ art print I ever had on my wall as a young teen, replacing the previous batch of posters I had in my room, always liked it) …

And how cool is John Mattos’s reworking of Pablo Picasso’s Three Musicians …

Restyled into the musicians from the famous Cantina Band scene in Star Wars: A New Hope …

There’s a pile more on the Tor blog, go and have a look. (tip of the hat to BoingBoing for the link)

A reminder for all Glasgow peeps, Charlie Adlard, the man who brings the brilliant Walking Dead comic to visual life, will be signing in our store in the city’s Buchanan Street (right by the Underground) on Thursday February 23rd from 5 to 6pm, so zombie fans, stop munching those brains and stagger your undead way down for a chance to meet him.

The excellent Bill Griffith, creator of, among others, Zippy the Pinhead, talks to Mr Media in a nice, long video piece. Fantagraphics have just released a very fine retrospective collection of Bill’s work, Lost and Found.  (link via Tom Spurgeon at the indispensable Comic Reporter):

(Somersault is (c) Richard Cowdry; if you want to reproduce any part of it you should ask him first )