Gareth S. Young - - 1000 Trillion Suns

Comic books! Okay, technically C is for comic books, but I'm going to spend the next month blogging my way through the alphabet and talking about comic series, characters, or creators along the way. So, where was I? A is for... ...Alpha Flight The Alpha Flight team was created in the late 70s by legendary X-Men artist John Byrne. Initially, the Canadian super-team were introduced to battle the X-Men and take their Canadian berserker - Wolverine - back home to Canada, however, a few years later, Marvel approached Byrne to write and draw the team in their own ongoing series. Thirty years ago, whilst on vacation, in Florida, in a mall, in a bookstore, I found a selection of Marvel comics on a rotating wire rack near the back of the store. It was here I picked up the first comics of what would become a thirty year collection. One of those comics was Alpha Flight (volume 1) #45. What I enjoyed from the get-go was the hugely diverse and exciting group of characters in the ...

Pop-stars People often ask, "what type of music do you like?" If pushed, the first thing I'll say is pop, but that's like saying I read books with words in them. Pop is generally interpreted as the colorful, shallow, but totally catchy stuff that dominates the music charts. Pop-stars are seen as empty shells with pretty faces, unable to play their own instruments and programmed to generate screaming fan-bases. The songs are written by mysterious, faceless, mole-people and shared out amongst the talent, turning all music into one nebulous, well-choreographed mass of annoying howler monkeys. Pop Music Well, that's not really fair. Pop is just popular music. Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are pop artists. Miss Swift arrived via country music and Mrs Z is often considered R&B, which nowadays incorporates everything from Hip-Hop to Soul. The Beatles, Marvin Gaye, Rod Stewart, Queen, The Eagles and Fleetwood Mac are all basically pop-stars. They write four-minute songs...