In 1958, London's Daily Express newspaper started running a comic strip adapting Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. This was well before the first James Bond movie (Dr. No, 1962), so cartoonist John McLusky created the first non-literary published images of the fictional spy. — Read the rest

The post The comic strip that may have cast Sean Connery as the first James Bond appeared first on Boing Boing.

I knew I was going to like Lynx the moment I encountered the cybernetically-enhanced, be-goggled, crime-fighting talking cat. Sometimes you just know.

Lynx, the new tech-noir manga from writer Samuel Sattin (Unico, Buzzing) and Tokyo-based artist tokitokoro (Jeff the Land Shark), is out now on VIZ Originals. — Read the rest

The post In Lynx, a cybernetic cat solves murders next to killer angels appeared first on Boing Boing.

Ten years after Star Wars joined Marvel at Disney, and just in time for the 50th anniversary of A New Hope, the two franchises will get their first-ever crossover, in comic form.

Kevin Smith, who made us consider the fates of the independent contractors on the second Death Star, has been tasked with writing the five-issue series. — Read the rest

The post Kevin Smith writes first Star Wars/Marvel comic crossover appeared first on Boing Boing.

The ComicBooks.com Reading Room is a free online library of old comics that you read in your browser, one deep-zoomable page at a time. Open Culture pointed to it this week. The counter on the front page listed 20,109 books. The site promises "No login, no paywall, no catch." — Read the rest

The post Read 20,000 restored golden-age comics free in your browser appeared first on Boing Boing.

Just a little over one month after the Magic: The Gathering Marvel Super Heroes set released, Magic’s Play Design Team is officially banning and restricting one of its most powerful cards from two tournament formats.

The Fantasticar Is Banned and Restricted

Magic: The Gathering’s Marvel Super Heroes set arrived in early June and quickly became another major hit for Wizards of the Coast. The Universes Beyond IP crossover brought plenty of Marvel fans to the Magic: The Gathering scene and helped expand the popularity of the decades old collectible card game.

Now that the Marvel Super Heroes cards have been around long enough for a new metagame to shake out and for some major tournaments to take place, it has become clear that one card has become too dominant in the Legacy and Vintage formats. To help solve the metagame issue, Magic is updating the Banned list to remove the Fantasticar from Legacy play and to restrict it from Vintage play.

Here is the fully update banned list, as of August 11, 2026:

Standard
Badgermole Cub is banned.
Stormchaser’s Talent is banned.
Gran-Gran is banned.

Pioneer
No changes

Modern
No changes

Legacy
The Fantasticar is banned.

Vintage
The Fantasticar is restricted.

Pauper
No changes

Alchemy
No changes

Historic
No changes

Timeless
No changes

Brawl
No changes

Competitive Brawl
No changes

For those who aren’t familiar with the decks that have been using The Fantasticar, they essentially take advantage of fast mana cards and the multiple 0-mana spells available in the Vintage and Legacy formats to very quickly generate four 4/4 colorless Constructs in one turn.

The combo is a lot of fun for players who can pull it off, but it has become so dominate that it is ruining a bit of the competitive spirit of Legacy and Vintage tournaments at the moment. Hopefully these updates in the Banned list will help rebalance things and shake up the metagame.

Updates to the Banned list are not uncommon for Magic: The Gathering, so it isn’t too surprising to see the team responding so quickly to adjust the rules in response to the popularity of The Fanatasticar strategy.

Be sure to check back in the near future for more news and updates on Magic: The Gathering.

Magic: The Gathering is available now at local game shops and digitally through Magic Arena.

The post Magic: The Gathering Bans Powerful Marvel Super Heroes Card appeared first on VICE.

In less than a week, Spider-Man: Brand New Day raked in $1 billion worldwide and had the biggest box office opening weekend in Hollywood history. The feature has been a reminder of why Sony is probably never going to give up the Spider-Man film rights, and highlighted how Marvel Studios was smart to strike a deal to bring the character into its own films. But as successful as Brand New Day has been, the larger MCU has been stuck in a confounding slump for the past few years. And while this latest Spider-Man movie was truly excellent, it's not necessarily a sign that Marvel has figured out how to get things back on track.

Though Brand New Da …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Today's links

• Lee Lai's "Cannon": A beautiful, subtle, long-lingering tale of duty, sex, and working for a shitty restaurant boss.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: Ebay paying to run newspaper classifieds; Chuck Tingle v Sad Puppies; FBI v TOR; Daycare v Goldman Sachs; Scammers re-used covid nose-swabs; "The Adventures of Mary Darling."
• Upcoming appearances: Guelph, Barcelona, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye, London, NYC, Edinburgh.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

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Lee Lai's "Cannon" (permalink)

Lee Lai's Cannon is an extraordinary graphic novel that turns out a beautifully told, subtle and ambiguous tale about Lucy (Lucy -> "Loose" -> "Loose Cannon" -> "Cannon"), a queer Chinese-Canadian chef at a Montreal restaurant whose messy family, work, personal and sex life are all falling apart in ways that are powerfully engrossing:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/cannon/

This is the second outing from Lee Lai, whose debut, Stone Fruit, swept many of the field's awards and won major critical acclaim. When a debut comes out that strong, it's sometimes followed with the dread "second book syndrome" in which a creator who has poured everything they ever thought about putting in a book now has to write another book, from scratch. But Cannon avoids any hint of that second book malaise; rather, it is jammed with dense and densely connected ideas, character beats and graphic signifiers that are brilliant in so many ways:

https://www.fantagraphics.com/products/stone-fruit

Cannon is a thirtysomething chef in a Montreal restaurant run by Guy, an instantly recognizable hustler who praises Cannon for her culinary abilities and her pliability, talks over her, demands the impossible from her kitchen colleagues and periodically breaks out into soliloquies about his own martyrdom to the hardships of entrepreneurship.

Cannon cares for her grandfather, who has been abandoned by her mother, who has been traumatized by the abuse he meted out to her during her upbringing. Now in decline and unable to care for himself, Cannon's grandfather continues his abusive ways, scaring off all of his home help, which means Cannon must devote even more time to him (she can't bring herself to put him in a care facility that will inevitably be full of white people who don't speak Chinese).

These familial duties leave Cannon isolated, with only one important friendship: Trish, an up-and-coming novelist whom Cannon has known since their school days in Montreal's suburban Eastern Townships, where they were the only queer Chinese girls either of them knew. Trish owes her professional acclaim to her own neurotic social instincts, which she polishes on the page with the help of an old writing teacher who serves as her mentor. Trish may be Cannon's oldest and best friend, but she's not actually a very good friend, and now that they're both in their 30s, neither Cannon nor Trish is entirely sure where they'd make new friends.

This is where Cannon starts, as Cannon tries to resolve all these bad situations, each of which is only worsening. Trish disapproves of Cannon's sexual affair with the new front-of-house woman at the restaurant – even as Trish begins a friends-with-benefits arrangement with a guy from her fitness club who clearly wants more than the odd tumble. Guy the restaurateur positions Cannon as his hatchet-woman and confidante, driving conflict in the kitchen that she is meant to hold the bag for. Her grandfather enters a terminal decline, and still her mother won't answer her calls and texts about it. And then, Cannon discovers that Trish has violated her in a way that is intimate and appalling.

These may sound like the beats that you'd find in a melodramatic soap opera, but Cannon's affect is so stoic, and her interiority is so beautifully and inventively depicted – Lai deploying the unique strengths of the graphic novel form here with total virtuosity – that the vibe is more David Lynch than Dallas.

The result is something that's beautiful, sharp, critical and lingering. Long after I closed the cover, I found myself mulling over the delicate ways that Lai raised the contradictions, sorrows and beauty of queer love, racial identity, camaraderie, self-control, and self-indulgence. Lai's characters have no answers, only questions that can never be fully resolved. Instead, these questions are the defining puzzles, defeats and triumphs of their lives.

It's a magnificent, sensitive and innovative work of storytelling.

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Hey look at this (permalink)

• Here’s Every Single Death Linked to Immigration Enforcement Since Trump’s Raids Began in 2025 https://lataco.com/ice-death-tracker

• We only win when we’re singing https://www.absurdintelligence.com/we-only-win-when-were-singing/

• Native Apps Should Be Avoided Whenever Possible https://nooneshappy.com/article/native-apps-should-be-avoided-whenever-possible/

• The Last Comic https://www.thelastcomic.com

• Heartland Institute Podcast Questions Whether All Americans ‘Should Have the Right to Vote’ https://www.desmog.com/2026/05/05/heartland-institute-limiting-voting-rights-lee-zeldin/

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Ebay paying newspapers to run listings in the classifieds section https://web.archive.org/web/20010506063910/http://www.business2.com/news/2001/05/ebaypapers.htm

#20yrsago Airline spoons of the world photo-gallery https://www.flickr.com/photos/airlinespoons

#20yrsago Coach passengers arrested for moving to first class http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/4980364.stm

#15yrsago Hidden cognitive costs of doing stuff https://web.archive.org/web/20110507154653/https://us.lifehacker.com/5798202/the-cognitive-cost-of-doing-things

#15yrsago Syria’s man-in-the-middle attack on Facebook https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/05/syrian-man-middle-against-facebook

#10yrsago Weird erotica author who was dragged into Hugo Awards mess pulls off epic troll https://web.archive.org/web/20160506175535/http://www.dailydot.com/lol/chuck-tingle-trolling-hugo-zoe-quinn-genius/

#10yrsago FBI has been harassing a Tor developer since 2015, won’t tell her or her lawyer why https://blog.patternsinthevoid.net/fbi-harassment.html

#10yrsago 2,000 US doctors endorse Sanders’ single-payer healthcare proposal https://web.archive.org/web/20160506095034/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/05/05/2000-doctors-say-bernie-sanders-has-the-right-approach-to-health-care/

#10yrsago Community college evicts daycare center to make room for Goldman Sachs https://www.golocalprov.com/news/daycare-center-being-moved-out-of-ccri-for-goldman-sachs

#10yrsago Data-driven look at America’s brutal, racist debt-collection machine https://www.propublica.org/article/so-sue-them-what-weve-learned-about-the-debt-collection-lawsuit-machine

#10yrsago Homeland Security wants to subpoena Techdirt over the identity of a hyperbolic commenter https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/06/homeland-security-wants-to-subpoena-us-over-clearly-hyperbolic-techdirt-comment/

#5yrsago NY AG attributes Net Neutrality fraud to telcos https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#pais-lies

#5yrsago Ed-tech apps spy on kids https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#i-spy

#5yrsago Scammers recycled covid nose-swabs https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/06/boogeration/#up-your-nose

#1yrago The Adventures of Mary Darling https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Guelph: Musagetes Lecture, May 8
  https://riverrun.ca/whats-on/guelph-lecture-on-being-2026/

• Barcelona: Internet no tiene que ser un vertedero (Global Digital Rights Forum), May 13
  https://encuentroderechosdigitales.com/en/speakers/

• Virtual: How to Disenshittify the Internet with Wendy Liu (EFF), May 14
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-enshittification

• Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
  https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 18
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow-in-der-friesenstrasse-23-kreuzberg-praesentiert-von-otherland.html

• Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
  https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html

• Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
  https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2

• SXSW London, Jun 2
  https://www.sxswlondon.com/session/how-big-tech-broke-the-internet-b3c4a901

• NYC: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Jonathan Coulton (The Strand), Jun 24
  https://www.strandbooks.com/cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaur-s-guide-to-life-after-ai.html

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• Enshittification (99% Invisible)
  https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/666-enshittification/

• Artificial Intelligence: The Ultimate Disruptor, with Astra Taylor and Yoshua Bengio (CBC Ideas)
  https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-23-ideas/clip/16210039-artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disruptor

• When Do Platforms Stop Innovating and Start Extracting? (InnovEU)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cccDR0YaMt8

• Pete "Mayor" Buttigieg (No Gods No Mayors)
  https://www.patreon.com/posts/pete-mayor-with-155614612

• The internet is getting worse (CBC The National)
  https://youtu.be/dCVUCdg3Uqc?si=FMcA0EI_Mi13Lw-P

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

• "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

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