Why have I been kept ignorant of a main thing in the popular arts that has been going on for several years at least? Asterix the Gaul has apparently had several of these adventures before. Everybody in France has known about him. Everybody of any moment in the world has known about him. And I was left out. As a quick follow-up to the post on silent slapstick and Lafferty, here is something on The Adventures of Asterix, which Lafferty reviewed in 1970. The comic was created in

John Logie Baird demonstrating a Nipkow disk in 1927 It is worth preserving as a remnant of that early era when there were giants on the earth. And, if it is preserved, someday someone will gaze into the old kerosene-powered receiver and cry out in astonishment in the words of the Greatest Bard: "—what poet-race shot such Cyclopean arches at the stars?" Whoever you are, and whenever or whereever you read this first story in the book, it will be best story you will r

Harry Langdon (1884-1944) Whenever someone thinks of Lafferty and silent movies, the story that comes to mind first is "Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies," one of his stone-cold masterpieces. He graded it himself in September 1978, reporting to a correspondent "a fair story in Orbit 20, a fair story in Shadows (Doubleday, edited by Charles L. Grant), and a very good story ('Selenium Ghosts of the Eighteen Seventies') in Terry Carr's Universe Eight." If that story is L