Category Archives: SPYCRAFT & WARFARE

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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Animal war comics – part 2

Posted on December 29, 2021 by I.M. Baytor

If you read last week’s post, you know I’ve been discussing war comics that prominently feature animals. This week, let’s start by looking at 2004’s science-gone-wrong mini-series We3, about a trio of weaponized animal cyborgs (a dog, a cat, and … Continue reading →

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Animal war comics – part 1

Posted on December 23, 2021 by I.M. Baytor

Once again, the folks at Dead Reckoning have sent me one of their graphic novels to review: Four-Fisted Tales: Animals in Combat, in which Ben Towle spotlights the historical role of different creatures in various wars. Like last time, I … Continue reading →

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