Tag Archives: Cold War

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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On Santa Prisca

Posted on January 5, 2023 by I.M. Baytor

I’ve long been obsessed with the DCU’s fictitious geography and the way it condenses, combines, and caricatures cultural stereotypes – just like Gotham does for New York and other urban centers of the USA (over time, the city has become … 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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If you like Barton Fink…

Posted on April 28, 2022 by I.M. Baytor

By 1991, Joel and Ethan Coen had done three very different pictures, but they all shared some connection to crime fiction, not to mention a fondness for labyrinthic plotting. With their next project, though, the Coen brothers truly defied everybody’s … 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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Spotlight on The Adventures of Tintin – part 2

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

If you just look at the artwork in The Adventures of Tintin, it’s hard to deny the series’ ethnocentrism, since Hergé’s drawings – as was usual at the time – tap on recognizable stereotypes. If you look closely at the … 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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