Is it just us, or is it unspeakably flimsy speculation on the part of the Italian prosecutor in the Amanda Knox trial to make "specific references in court to rocker Marilyn Manson and the violent, sexually charged Japanese manga comics Sollecito was fond of"? Giuliano Mignini is trying to draw a link between the fact that murdered student Kercher dressed as a vampire for Halloween and one of Raffaele Sollicito's graphic novels has to do with someone killing vampires on Halloween. Whereas Mignini has set himself the task of describing how an apparently crazy-ass threesome slaughtered Kercher without leaving anything besides circumstantial evidence behind, Knox's lawyers argue it was just one attacker. We have the uncomfortable feeling we're learning more about Mignini's psyche than we really wanted to. more ›

HIS NAME IS SPIEGELMAN: Maus-keteer Art Spiegelman has a new graphic memoir out, Breakdowns: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*! The book "traces the artist’s evolution from a MAD-comics obsessed boy, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents’ memories of Auschwitz on his own son." He's at Town Hall for what you'd hope is a multimedia "reading," otherwise it seems like, you know, the graphic part would be lost in translation. more ›

Yes we do. Ever since moving to Seattle in '93 and discovering "I Was Seven in '75" in, we're pretty sure, the Weekly, back when we read anything but the movie times in the Weekly. more ›