Summer, our fickle friend – are you going to cooperate with us now? No more depriving us of our fun in the sun, our picnics, our tans, our leisurely strolls through parks and convivial afternoons spent barbequing? Because if not, look at all the other lovely things we have to keep us busy. Like books. Books don’t require that every time we go out, we bring both hot- and cold-weather clothing, both umbrella and......

This Saturday London’s comic lovers can pop out to Mile End and discover what’s lurking in the UK’s small comics scene. The fifth year of the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing is happening at Queen Mary, and it should be a grab bag of indie delights. A look at the list of stuff on show reveals a pretty good menagerie: you can check out comics about friendly beavers, depressed dinosaurs, ninjas in various......

After a 2-month hiatus spent reading Finnegans Wake (alright, would you believe rubbish romance novels?), The Book Grocer returns, with a continually evolving format and its diary stuffed full with book-ish events. Here are our picks for the week: Tuesday: Anne Sebba, author of Jennie Churchill, Winston’s American Mother, in conversation with Hugh Whitemore, playwright and writer of the Emmy-award winning Winston Churchill drama The Gathering Storm, at Waterstone’s Notting Hill Gate store, 7pm,......

The London International Comics Festival is halfway over, so if you haven’t seen any of it yet you owe it to yourself to investigate some sweet action with paper, ink and speech bubbles. The festival continues to tackle a nicely wide range of topics, so this week the highlights we’ve chosen offer Halloween horror, an indie invasion and germane geopolitics. If the festival were a comic book itself, it would be coming to the......

London’s got its very own comics festival, and it’s kicking off this weekend. But don’t let yourself envisage flocks of overgrown adolescents in ill-fitting capes – Comica’s appeal is that it casts its eye more broadly, bringing in arresting art and affecting stories from around the world. Normally it’s the heroes in tights hogging the spotlight. Comica gets them to step aside for a couple of weeks a year in favour of the unusual......

You want entertainment in London, you say? And you want it for free? Well, good sir or madam, you've come to the right place. Anyone who's lived in this fair city for a while knows that free entertainment is actually all around us. From our world-class museums to almost uncountable numbers of galleries; hear talks by some of the planet's great thinkers, and japery from the best new comics. It's all free, and it's......

In the UK, Joe Rogan is probably best known for playing Joe Garrelli in the sitcom NewsRadio, as a presenter on the American reality show Fear Factor, and as a commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship. What us Londoners may not be aware of is that Joe is also a prolific stand-up comedian, gigging regularly to huge audiences around America for over fifteen years. He mixes traditional stand-up with political satire, a dissection of......

Hello Jeff! I've only written two proper columns abut the London comedy scene for Londonist, but already I'm getting offers of work from excited parties. For example, the guys at 'What Man?' magazine have asked me to cast a wry eye over the week's men, and I'm particularly excited by an offer from a notable tabloid, to write a column called 'Beef Review'. As the title suggests, it'll be me reviewing bits of beef......

Throughout July, London's comedy scene will be packed with comedians trying out new material to take to the Edinburgh Festival in August. It's the perfect time to see big name comics in small venues, for even smaller prices. Here's a list of shows to see each night for the next six days, with a mix of established acts and up-and-coming sketch troupes. Thursday 5th - Simon Amstell will be at the Arts Theatre, near......

Hey, check me out - I've got my own account for the Londonist blogging software! Look, my name's at the bottom and everything! This level of trust is genuinely almost too much for me to handle. What if I accidentally reveal that the editor's a shoplifter, or I write something that offends all our readers with big, big chins? Also, I'm used to blogging using LiveJournal, a website renowned for angst and misery. So......

London's live comedy scene is the best in the world. That's a fact! Admittedly, it's not a fact that I can back up with evidence, because I've only ever been to one other country. And to be honest, it's not so much a fact, as something I often hear other people saying, and that I have copied. But doesn't it feel like it should be true? After all, last Monday alone there was over......

OpenStreetMap is a map of the world created, like all the best things, by amateur enthusiasts. Farting in the general direction of professional mappers, these collaborative cartographers prowl the streets collecting GPS data and building up their wiki-based map. We caught up with charter-in-chief Steve Coast, to find out why they're bothering. So what's it all about? OpenStreetMap exists because map data is very expensive in the UK. It's owned by a monopoly provider......

Are there really any Star Wars fans left after the last trilogy of bowel movements? Apparently enough to warrant something called Star Wars Celebration Europe. To be held in quadrant OU812 of the Fanboydra System aka ExCeL London at Canary Wharf. To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Star Wars, Lucasfilm Ltd. and The Cards Inc Group will throw Europe’s largest Star Wars party ever! Taking over ExCeL London in July 2007 for 3 days......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... Got a comics geek you need to shop for? Not sure which issue of The Amazing Adventures of Testicular Chancer and Goatmonkey they're up......

Londonist stumbled across DeathBoy a while ago now through numerous mentions over on Warren Ellis dot com (you can read our interview with Warren here) and have been meaning to sit down and have a natter with the band for ages. We finally got the chance to have a few beers with Scott Lamb (vocals) and Jason Knight (guitars) ahead of their FuturePunk gig tonight and found them to be disarmingly self deprecating and......

Frightfest have teamed up with the ICA to put on a bit of a Halloween bash: It’s time to put on make-up, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time to get things started on The Feebles show tonight! Yes, Peter Jackson’s grotesque Muppet-style marvel Meet The Feebles returns to shock and offend again. Before Team America and Avenue Q, and in a gore guffaw galaxy far, far before The Lord of the Rings,......

This day in London’s History 1818 The first human to human blood transfusion is thought to have taken place, at Guy's Hospital. Dr James Blundell successfully transferred four ounces of blood into a mother who was haemorrhaging after giving birth. The sanguineous lifesaver was taken from her husband’s arm and speedily (to prevent clotting) injected by syringe into the patient. Despite complete ignorance of blood groups, the transfusion was a success. And not just......

Hey, have you all been using our new "Recommend this" feature at the bottom of each post? This week we're bringing you the "Most Recommended" posts from across the -ist world, as well as recommending some of our own. Phillyist thinks that readers recommended this post the most because "most of our quieter readers (probably) agree with us that rude commenting sucks." Know what else sucks? Philly's not getting the Olympics, but they are getting......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. To start us off, 3AM Magazine has an interview with Tom McCarthy whose debut novel, Remainder, has just been published by Alma Books, and whose critical essay, Tintin and the Secret Literature, is reviewed in the Guardian. And sticking with comics, Free New Books provides an eclectic library of downloadable reads, of most interest......

We'd like to start writing more about comedy here at Londonist. We have (arguably) the best comedy circuit in the world yet it has gone thusfar unwritten about by us at Londonist HQ. But fear not, we have changed our ways. We kick off with an interview with comedian, Richard Herring and a comedy recommendation for the week. Richard Herring is probably best known for his television work with Stewart Lee, 'Fist of Fun'......

Set your alarms, get your diaries out, write a reminder on the back of your hand with a biro, because Alan Moore is on the gogglebox tonight. BBC2's The Culture Show is featuring the bearded warlock and undoubted genius tonight in a 'rare television interview': In a row of terraces in Northampton lives a tall, bearded man called Alan Moore. You might never have heard of him, but he’s an internationally loved writer credited......

We all remember the adverts in the back of our childhood comics that promised superhuman abilities for the price of a postal order and stamped addressed envelope. And we all carry the eventual disappointment that rose in our hearts when we realised that, well, they didn't really work. Of course these days the closest we've got is the terrorist-thwarting X-Ray machines on the Heathrow Express but we're pretty certain the relevant authorities would frown......

If you hadn't noticed cartoons are big news right now. And while no one's accusing the people behind London's very first Cartoon Museum of orchestrating the recent controversy as a bit of free publicity, they couldn't really have picked a better time to open their doors. We're pretty sure the Cartoon Museum will continue to do brisk business once all the current trouble has died down though. Punters will have 4,000 square feet of......

Did we already say just how excited we are about the 2000AD exhibition coming to London next month? Well it bears repeating since the kind folks at Rebellion invited us along to the launch night. Rubbing shoulders with 2000AD artists and shaking the green hand of Tharg the Mighty is something of a fanboy's wet dream, but don't worry about us making fools of ourselves. The elected Londonist ambassador to Betelgeuse will be a......

There comes a point in every child's life when they look upon the toys they once cherished and decide that they've outgrown them. We've all done it: Star Wars figures given away to ungrateful siblings; Action Men forced to retire and return to civilian life; comics left uncerimoniously at the local dump (this is before the days of enforced recycling you understand). We still remember the day that we condemned a huge archive of......

God botherers haven't had much to moan about theatre-wise since their little outburst over Jerry Springer: The Opera so praise be that Satan has had one of his minions dare to bring another 'controversial' piece of theatre to London. A new play by Howard Brenton has already resulted in 200 letters of protest and that's even before it starts. The play simply entitled Paul is all about that chap who had something of a......

Let's just dive right into the cess pool this week shall we, with a look at the reviews for Dukes of Hazzard...we need a laugh. Now you don't get a medal for predicting a one star review from James Christopher in The Times. It's a "a ghastly nightmare" according to Jimmy, "a catwalk of threadbare nostalgia, expensive smashes and craven greed", during which "several thousand police cars accelerate into trees or belly-flop into the......

As regular readers will know, we at the Londonist love comics. So you can only imagine our excitement when this week's Beano found it's way to the Londonist sports desk featuring none other than the mighty Queens Park Rangers. Not only are the R's second in Division Two, but this week we find they've been playing Beano Town. Of course, we won't tell you what happened - you'll have to buy it to find......

Another week and another bit of Alan Moore news. No not that Hugo Weaving has taken over as V on the stupid movie of 'V for Vendetta'. This is much better. The trailer for The Mindscape of Alan Moore is online. It's a bit of a tease really as Shadowsnake Films have yet to secure a distributor for the documentary, although talks are underway to get it out on DVD. We saw it last......

Londonist would have loved to have seen a faithful rendition of Alan Moore's V for Vendetta make it to the big screen, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen anytime soon. Moore has not only distanced himself as far as possible from the movie he's gone a step further and withdrawn his future work from DC Comics. This is big news in itself for the comic fans out there, but as happy......