Talkies, or “You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet”

Recently I’ve been dipping into the early days of talking pictures. As usual, a very specific question led me down unexpected rabbit holes. For once, I wasn’t surprised by the depth of my ignorance. Everything I knew about the first “talkies” came from the film Singin’ in the Rain—a movie that I love but that…

Read More

From the Archives: Blood Sisters

I have started and abandoned three blog post topics this morning. Two of them were based on pieces of information that turned out to be not quite correct when I looked at them more closely. And the third was a little known moment within a well-known story: the moment was too small to support a…

Read More

Josephine Baker–a Graphic Biography

It took me several months to work my way through Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet’s graphic biography of Josephine Baker. Not because it wasn’t interesting or well done, but because it is the graphic equivalent of a Big Fat History Book, with 460 pages of densely packed graphic story and another 100 pages of supporting…

Read More