Michael Docherty – författare

No city occupies as many paradoxical positions in the popular imagination as Los Angeles. It is the new frontier and the end of the trail; it is American Eden and Babylon by the Pacific; it is by turns celebrated and condemned for its diversity; it is the city of perpetual renewal and the city of imminent apocalypse. This collection reveals LA in all its contradictions by documenting a literary tradition as kaleidoscopic and cacophonous as the city itself. The writings explored by Los Angeles: A Literary History record how a dusty cow town morphed into a global metropolis within a matter of decades, and how this unprecedented transformation came to define the experience of modernity. Los Angeles's literature has long gone underappreciated, the city's culture dismissed as flat and frivolous: this volume upturns that narrative, reshaping American literary history by resituating LA as its beating heart.

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.The Recursive Frontier is an innovative spatial history of both the literature of Los Angeles and the city itself in the mid-twentieth century. Setting canonical texts alongside underexamined works and sources such as census bulletins and regional planning documents, Michael Docherty identifies the American frontier as the defining dynamic of Los Angeles fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contrary to the received wisdom that Depression-era narratives mourn the frontier's demise, Docherty argues that the frontier lives on as a cruel set of rules for survival in urban modernity, governing how texts figure race, space, mobility, and masculinity. Moving from dancehalls to offices to oil fields and beyond, the book provides a richer, more diverse picture of LA's literary production during this period, as well as a vivid account of LA's cultural and social development as it transformed into the multiethnic megalopolis we know today.

Shows how the myth of the American frontier persists as an ever-present, oppressive set of ideas about space, mobility, and race in the mid-twentieth-century literature of Los Angeles.The Recursive Frontier is an innovative spatial history of both the literature of Los Angeles and the city itself in the mid-twentieth century. Setting canonical texts alongside underexamined works and sources such as census bulletins and regional planning documents, Michael Docherty identifies the American frontier as the defining dynamic of Los Angeles fiction from the 1930s to the 1950s. Contrary to the received wisdom that Depression-era narratives mourn the frontier's demise, Docherty argues that the frontier lives on as a cruel set of rules for survival in urban modernity, governing how texts figure race, space, mobility, and masculinity. Moving from dancehalls to offices to oil fields and beyond, the book provides a richer, more diverse picture of LA's literary production during this period, as well as a vivid account of LA's cultural and social development as it transformed into the multiethnic megalopolis we know today.

Volume 3 of the Conan the King Omnibus program pairs writers Jim Owsley and Don Kraar up with John Buscema, Mike Docherty, Judith Hunt, Geoff Isherwood and Mike Manley to continue this bold era of Conan's life... as a KING!HAIL KING CONAN! LONG MAY HE REIGN!Conan the barbarian, the thief, the mercenary, and now... Conan the king!Big John Buscema is back! Included in this 900+ page volume is one of the more rarely collected stories from the conclusion of John Buscema's first long tenure on the Conan line of books as presented here and in the Conan of the Isles graphic novel. An older, wiser Conan relinquishes the throne to his son for one final glorious adventure!While Conan of the Isles serves as a wonderful appetizer, the real meat of this collection includes the remaining run of issues of Conan the King as penned by Don Kraar and then Jim Owsley (aka Christopher Priest) with notable artistic runs by Mike Docherty and Geoff Isherwood. Stories include 'The Road to Empire', 'Of Sorcery and Steel', 'Caliastros', and 'Conn, Son of the Barbarian King'.This collection also features the usual assortment of superb pin up art by some true greats of the comic book form as well as up-and-coming talents of the time.Collecting: Conan the King (1984) #36-55 and Conan of the Isles graphic novel (1988) Marvel Graphic Novel #42

The 13th International Conference on Virtual Systems and Multimedia was held in Brisbane, Australia in September 2007. This was the first time that VSMM was sited in Australia. The Australian conference theme reflected the country’s cultural heritage, both recent and past – Exchange and Experience in Space and Place. Of the many papers submitted under this theme we were able to identify three core sub-themes: Virtual Heritage, Applied Technologies and Virtual Environments. With a truly international flavor, these sub-themes covered the diverse areas of heritage site and artifact reconstruction and analysis, Australian Aboriginal cultural heritage, training, notions of spirituality, human – computer interaction in virtual environments, 3D modelling, remote collaboration and virtual agents. This made for rich, varied and lively conference session debates. Ninety-seven papers were submitted. Of these, 56 were accepted for inclusion in the general conference proceedings. Of these, 18 were further reviewed and selected for this Springer publication. The authors of these papers were invited to revise their papers following feedback from the conference before inclusion in this volume. Many people contributed to the conference. We first wish to thank the Virtual Systems and Multimedia Society, who provided strong support to the whole process of the preparation of the conference. In particular, we would like to express our thanks to Takeo Ojika, Mario Santana Quintero and Hal Thwaites for their generous support and guidance.