By: David Smay

He dragged horror out of black and white into color.

By: David Smay

Brecht’s strategies vs. his oeuvre, which matters more, in the long run?

By: David Smay

The writer best known in his time for Sailor Steve Costigan and Breckinridge Elkins conjured something more rare when he created Conan the Barbarian: a pop cultural icon. ROBERT E. HOWARD (1906-36) might be the […]

By: David Smay

There’s no point being dainty about it; Dirty Plotte means dirty cunt. Which evokes the blunt pleasure of JULIE DOUCET’s (born 1965) most famous work, but undersells its artistry and gleeful humor. Her cartoon “If […]

By: David Smay

TOM WAITS (born 1949) turns sixty today — and it’s not his fault that NPR wants to stick a bronze plaque on him and declare him a National Landmark. He’s been making little teratomas of […]

By: David Smay

The 1960s was a terrible decade for film and television comedy, but it did produce a stellar class of comedians working the beatnik demimonde: Mort Sahl, Phyllis Diller, Jonathan Winters, Joan Rivers, George Carlin, Bill […]

By: David Smay

TERRY GILLIAM (born 1940) first worked with John Cleese (and Gloria Steinem) in the early 1960s, on Harvey Kurtzman’s Help, collaborating on a fumetti: “Christopher’s Punctured Romance.” After Help’s demise he moved to England where […]

By: David Smay

Is it possible that BJÖRK (born 1965) is not an unreasonably talented singer and video artist, but just a typical Icelander who bothered to leave her homeland? How to judge the genius of Björk’s Oscar-night […]

By: David Smay

She lacerated the enemies of pleasure.

By: David Smay

The world’s foremost contemporary comic theorist led a teenage breakdance crew, and wrote his Cambridge thesis on the American Civil Rights movement before he planted his ass in Eminem’s face. After university SACHA BARON COHEN […]

By: David Smay

Buster Keaton begat two great cinematic heirs, both of whom embraced the elaborately set-up visual gag: Jackie Chan and JACQUES TATI (1907-82). Like so many French icons of the 1950s and ’60s (Serge Gainsbourg, Anna […]

By: David Smay

We at HILOBROW are all alumni of JAY WARD’s (1920-89) Wossamatta U. After being well versed in the lowest form of humor, matriculates may choose from such intriguing course offerings as: Dim Canadian Gallantry, or […]

By: David Smay

What is it about GRETA GARBO (1905-90) that set her apart from the other great Hollywood beauties — that makes us fetishize her, if a bit uneasily? She wasn’t a better actress than Sophia Loren […]

By: David Smay

He helped free science fiction from 19th-century (or any) values.

By: David Smay

Insanely prolific, unbelievably vital, formally inventive.