Friday Fun Links: Geek Culture Edition
1. The Batman version of Crime and Punishment. Weird and hilarious. It originally appeared in the art-comics anthology Drawn and Quarterly 3, which also includes some lovely reprints of Frank King's Gasoline Alley Sunday strips of the '20s and '30s.
2. Prisoner-era Doctor Who. Or, strictly speaking, some Doctor Who that came out a year before The Prisoner but obviously was part of the same acid trip cultural gestalt. It's pretty awful, and I say that as a Prisoner fan with a high tolerance for '60s sci-fi camp. But if you enjoy pop surrealism you should check it out anyway.
3. New England and the Bavarian Illuminati. You'll find no sunken cities, talking gorillas, or anarchist submarines here. Just the classic account of the Illuminati panic of the late eighteenth century, when prominent Federalists accused the Jeffersonians of being pawns of the secret order. Originally published in 1918, the book is now in the public domain and can be downloaded for free from the Internet Archive.