Comic Reviews

Best known for his seminal work on his creation Hellboy, Mike Mignola put together The Amazing Screw-On Head in 2002 as a great one-shot comic. As he himself describes, the character started out as a toy concept, “a robot head, threaded like a light bulb, that you could screw into different robot bodies.” (Story Notes, 2009). It combined with his love of dusty Victorians, strange machines, and a dash of the supernatural, and came out into this winner of the 2003 Eisner Award, for Best Humor Publication. In 2009, it was collected with a handful of Mignola’s other short-stories...

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Much like our modern times, those living at the turn of the nineteenth century were facing a cold war: an “armed peace” where the major powers of the world had the military strength to wipe each other out.   In 1899, Mark Twain wrote memorably of “peace by compulsion.”  He theorized that if four of the major powers agreed to reduce armaments by 10%, and in turn “thrashed” the others into doing the same, it would achieve that peace.  He was an ardent supporter of the Armistice Movement in Vienna, and concluded this was the only way to attain any...

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