Fred McNamara

If you tuned into our grand team-up with Pipedream Comics and ComicScene counting down our joint top 50 indie comics of 2019, you may have thought we extinguished the best of the bunch, right?
Wrong, I say!
It’s nigh impossible to craft an authoritative list of indie comics from any year, let alone the best ones. The amount of sequential content produced and our own subjectivity when judging what counts as the “best” can be rife with implications, resulting in lots of titles getting left behi...

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1967-1968), the sixth television series produced by AP Films/Century 21 to be filmed in “Supermarionation,” is a blitzkrieg of old school science fiction action that touches upon moral and psychological ambiguity within the explosive, action-driven framework that was second nature to the production team at this point. Who the real enemy is in Captain Scarlet is a question the series dabbles in without directly asking it. Is it the Devil-like Mysterons, whose...

It’s quite easy nowadays to take for granted the precise, individual reasons why TV21 was such a popular read throughout the 1960s. A mixture of wide-eyed art and action-driven story-telling cemented TV21’s appeal in the minds of young readers, but what drew them into the comic’s stories in the first place was its exaggerated, sensationalist covers.

Tomorrow’s News Today

Stylised as a newspaper of the future, these front covers forged the shared continuity between the Anderson-themed strips f...

Taemons effortlessly blends fantasy with mental health.

Recently, the cultural discussions of transgender and gender-fluid people have increased, and with it conversations of how trans and non-binary people are represented in the media. Eve of Extinction therefore becomes a timely comic. One of the four titles that form TKO’s second wave of comics, the publisher that proclaims to shake up the manner in which comics are consumed has delivered a comic that appears, from its premise, to contribute to our ongoing discussions of transgender and non-bin...

In this digitally-enhanced society we live in today, the blending of reality and fantasy via digital technology continues to remain a popular trope in science fiction. Vault Comics’ Queen of Bad Dreams takes firm hold of that trope with a slick, confident sharpness that wins in its political commentary, but feels oddly lacking in its world-building aesthetics. Released originally as a five-issue series throughout 2019, biting social metaphor and boistrous artwork rapidly become the winning el...

There are only three things that will survive the apocalypse: Keith Richards, cockroaches, and Zack Snyder revealing more details about his original plans for Justice League and the wider DCEU, each revelation more candid and sweary than the last. The latest of these revelations came during a live Q&A back in March after a screening of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, in which Snyder revealed several intriguing plot points that fix some of the more befuddling moments in that film. In a nut...

The sci-fi Supermarionation shows produced by Gerry Anderson’s AP Films/Century 21 Productions offer something for every generation, and contemporary celebrations of them focus on what made them popular in the first place: the painstaking and glorious depiction of futuristic, wildly imaginative mecha—space rockets, supersonic jets, submarines, tunnelers, all capable of breathtaking maneuvers and armed with explosive firepower—that effortlessly tapped into the minds of a generation rapidly bei...

Tadao Tsuge's collection is a much-welcome body of work.

A round-up of some stirringly good indie titles.

We Have To Go Back presents readers with a deceptive twist on post-apocalyptic story-telling.

Should Avengers: Endgame kill of the group's leader?

Examining Captain Marvel's depiction of villains in a franchise often slated for its two-dimensional villains.

By Fred McNamara, British Science Festival
For decades, science fiction has tasked itself with projecting a vision of the world that traverses fiction and reality. Whether that be the socialist, utopian space exploration of Star Trek or how the Supermarionation worlds of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson depict futuristic technology as the great unifier, sci-fi has always had fun fusing the reality of science with the fantasy of fiction.
Beyond depictions of the future, science fiction can help us to...

David Thomson’s absorbing and authoritative history of television is an invigorating if hefty read.