Category Archives: SPYCRAFT & WARFARE

Some thoughts on 21st-century spy shows

Posted on April 17, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

Secret agents and international intrigue have really come back with a vengeance in the past decade or so. The War on Terror and, later, the renewed tension between the West and Russia seem to have stimulated the public’s appetite for … Continue reading →

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Spotlight on the Unknown Soldier, 1997

Posted on March 20, 2024 by I.M. Baytor

After being absent from the stands for about eight years, in 1997 the spy/war comic Unknown Soldier got the Vertigo treatment. By then, the Vertigo imprint had come to specialize in getting edgy (usually British) creators to reimagine third-tier DC … Continue reading →

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Another couple of British spy novels

Posted on March 8, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Along with Eurocomics and old TV shows, I also like to use Gotham Calling to highlight cool spy novels. Here are a couple of British contributions to the genre that should please any self-respecting afficionados: BERLIN GAME (Len Deighton, 1983) … Continue reading →

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Catching up with war comics

Posted on January 18, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

Every once in a while, Dead Reckoning – an imprint of the U.S. Naval Institute’s book-publishing division – sends me graphic novels to review in Gotham Calling. Last year they sent me The Lions of Leningrad and The Stretcher Bearers, … Continue reading →

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More cool episodes of Mission: Impossible

Posted on January 11, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

This is Gotham Calling’s 600th post! As usual, I like to signal these benchmarks with longer listicles (a hundred posts ago I listed my favorite westerns), so today I’m doing a follow-up to the post from last September ranking the … Continue reading →

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A couple of 21st-century spy novels

Posted on October 26, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Another post based on my summer reads… Besides science fiction, as always I also spent part of my break reading spy yarns. The last time I wrote about this type of books in the blog I focused on a couple … Continue reading →

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Gotham Calling’s top Mission: Impossible episodes

Posted on September 15, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

Today is Gotham Calling’s eighth anniversary! Since I celebrated the blog’s previous anniversary with a list of my top 50 film noirs, this time around I was going to do a list of my top spy films, but I ended … Continue reading →

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A couple of vintage spy novels

Posted on May 12, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

I’ve written extensively about John le Carré in this blog, but today I want to go further back into the roots of spy literature. Here are a couple of very different novels by a couple of very different writers who … Continue reading →

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Spotlight on The Unknown Soldier, 1988-1989 – part 2

Posted on March 10, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

As I started to discuss last week, 1988-9’s exhilarating The Unknown Soldier limited series is miles apart from Joe Kubert’s original iteration of the character. For one thing, instead of a fully-committed agent of an unquestionably righteous American war effort, … Continue reading →

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Spotlight on The Unknown Soldier, 1988-1989 – part 1

Posted on March 3, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

At a time when pavlovian pundits and politicians seem keen to revive Cold War rhetoric and imagery, (mis)applying it to the conflict taking place in Ukraine, perhaps it is worth remembering that even during the Cold War itself there were … Continue reading →

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