Another chapter read this very morning in two sittings separated by trip to the local store for bread and a newspaper! I find Ulysses less a pea-souper fog to find my way through and more an actual pea-soup to eat  – tasty! I’m not sure where we are in Sirens or what time it is either – however, eventually I do fathom the position of the characters. Initially I mistakenly thought we were in a tea room with all the talk of tea, but it appears we are in a bar and the ladies I thought were taking tea are … what? Barmaids. The bronze and the gold are later joined by several of the men we have met previously and both Simon and then Ben sing a song. The blind guy who has been wandering about turns out to be a piano tuner who has mislaid his tuning fork and is on his to retrieve it. (more…)

I was beginning to despair that no one quite understood or wanted to understand my last post on the myriad problems with comics (web or otherwise) – that is until one commentator (and collaborator on this site) put his finger on the problem in regard a review of Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Well not just a finger – to my mind he hammered home another nail in the coffin of the comicbook medium. The comment by Chad Rutkowski is here. Although it doesn’t say everything that needs to be said it does give a great big clue as to what the outside world thinks of comix. That outside view is almost certainly more trustworthy than any view held by long-time fans of the medium like myself.
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Or not. It IS December and it is down to that fact that I put the case that no one has said anything remotely interesting about James Joyce this week. I think everyone including my good self deserves a break and it is rather the time to be thinking about how better you might have spent 2009. You’ll never see it again!

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Well, as some you of you get the weekly email updates, you probably know that we held off on giving you four pages of the comic last week because I was waffling. It seems that every time we make a change in the environment, no matter how slight, it raises new questions for me about how to best present the work as well as the methods I and Josh are using. We’re closing in on the end of the Telemachus chapter now, and I’m starting to miss Buck Mulligan already. This next bit is kind of a spotlight on Mercurial Malachi as we handle ‘The Ballad of Joking Jesus’ just in time for the holiday. Last week I decided to hold the pages we had so we might deliver an eight page update this week that pulls off the whole of the joke. (more…)

We are very pleased to have been given mention (however brief) on professor and media commentator Margaret Soltan’s “University Diaries” blog. Thanks, Margaret!