The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Even longtime comic book/graphic novel devotees might admit to some fatigue with the apparent overkill of Hollywood translations at the multiplex, but the prodigious visual imagination, droll humor and sincere themes entertainingly weaved together by Guillermo Del Toro in Hellboy II: The Golden Army distinguish it among its peers.

To be honest, I didn't know who Hunter S. Thompson was until after he killed himself. It was a miserable year in college. Bush had slithered his way into the White House for the second time and winter at Carleton seemed even more bitter than usual. Our anger had given way to numb depression as we shuffled about our lives. Not that I was alive then, but I couldn't shake the feeling that we had lost something over the past 40 years. In the '60s and '70s, Hunter S. Thompson embodied the kind of restless anger the country needed during the Bush years. What happened?