Ricky Sprague's Blog

SHARTBOOM No 1

Available now from Amazon and other places is the first volume of my (probably) ongoing comics series, questionably titled SHARTBOOM. It has some funny stuff. Here is the front and back cover:








The cover depicts me and my imaginary friend/spirit companion/possibly real manifestation of all that is good in the universe, the Flying Robot Tickle Poodle, who makes at least one appearance in

HANDS OF ORLAC and MAD LOVE

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Once again I had the pleasure and privilege of appearing on the vastly entertaining and informative FOUR BRAINS ONE MOVIE podcast, featuring the inimitable Bradley J Kornish and Dan Pullen. This time we discussed two films that are very dear to me

Jeff Rice and THE KOLCHAK PAPERS

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Warning! While it’s impossible to “spoil” great art (we all know that Charles Darnay and Elizabeth Lavenza get married at the end of “Romeo and Juliet,” but that doesn’t stop us from continuing to listen to the opera), this post does contain

Doomsday Clock is the Walden 2 of major publisher event comics

Watchmen is the greatest superhero comic book of all time. It forms, along with Kazou Koike and Goseki Kojima’s manga Lone Wolf and Cub and Alejandro Jodorowsky and Juan Gimenez’s The Metabarons, my personal holy trinity of graphic fiction. It is a dense, frustrating, moving, powerful, disappointing, valuable work of art that rewards re-reading. I’ve probably read it all the way, from beginning

The highly personal reasons I was wrong about the third season of "Twin Peaks"

This post contains spoilers about my life.



I wrote some pretty snarky stuff about the third season of Twin Peaks, which is to be released on DVD December 5, 2017. In particular, I singled out the character commonly referred to as “Dougie Cooper,” whom I called “Stupor Cooper,” for special derision. 



Basically, I saw the character as everything that was wrong with the third season of Twin

Billy Joel's "Piano Man" is full of nightmare visions if you take it literally

When I was a small child, my mother was a huge Billy Joel fan. She listened to his albums just about every single day; as such, I developed a very high tolerance for his music. This tolerance remains with me to this day, at least through An Innocent Man.



But, I had some trouble with some of his songs. I was very literal minded. “Piano Man,” in particular, was problematic for me. That song was

What is wrong with Twin Peaks? The revival is going disastrously, sadly wrong.

Actually, it’s not a total disaster. There’s plenty to like about it. There was a lot of fun to be had watching Cooper escape the Black Lodge, for example. The scene in which we meet Wally Brando was inspired. I liked the scene in which the new Sheriff Truman’s wife ranted about the leak, and the bucket. I liked the glass box in the first few episodes, but I don’t like what they’ve done with the

Can leftists be artists?

In the last episode of Seinfeld, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer watch an overweight man get robbed in a small town in Massachusetts. Kramer videotapes the incident. Rather than to anything to help the overweight man, the four friends make jokes about the victim, in particular the victim’s weight. He’s not part of their circle—their sophisticated, ironic, well-to-do, elite circle—and so he’s

Steve Ditko as Baron Mordo

FYI: This post contains “spoilers” regarding the Doctor Strange movie and the final chapter of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's famous Eternity storyline. This shouldn’t bother you, as great art can’t be “spoiled” (everyone knows that Macbeth creates Frankenstein’s monster, but that doesn’t stop us from re-reading Gulliver’s Travels) but, regardless, you’ve been warned.



Dr. Strange was the first

Live It Down available now!

Duke Redmond, former professional wrestler, lives a solitary life in Los Angeles in 1976. His body is broken and battered from years of entertaining the masses during wrestling's golden age of the 1950s and '60s, when he wrestled as the flamboyant heel "Duke Continental."

Sara Sota, the widow of Duke's former colleague Larry, known in the ring as "Steele Trapp," asks Duke to look into the