I have never liked Christmas. I’m a child of divorce. Any fall or winter holidays in my childhood consisted of being passed back and forth because of custody agreements, regardless of what I, the child in question, actually wanted. Christmas especially was a nightmare of being shunted between three sets of grandparents and two parents,…
Merry Scary Christmas: The White Heteronormative Horror of Hallmark Christmas Movies
Within the grand history of storytelling there are many terrifying alternate universes. The Skynet apocalypse of the Terminator franchise, the X-Men’s Sentinel-laden “Days of Future Past” reality, the devolved, ultra capitalism of The Running Man and the brainwashed secret civilization of They Live. But perhaps none are as harrowing and vacuous as the one created…
Watching Krampus During a Very Scary, Not So Merry Holiday Season
Why don’t we have more Christmas horror movies? American horror movies are rife with jerks who get what’s coming to them and Krampus is the perfect Christmas twist. Krampus, for the uninitiated, is a demonic goat creature who, instead of enticing children into good behavior with the metaphorical carrot like Santa does, goes for the…
Not Gaming: Always On My Mind
Recently, I haven’t had a lot of time to game. I don’t mean that I haven’t thumbed around on a phone game or two, because we all know I’m obsessed with certain brightly colored addictive interactives, but I mean really game. There’s just been too much going on, what with the US election, my dissolving health, and my…
Women in British Animation: Candy Guard
“I just want to make people laugh. Not by being silly – but by being truthful.” —Candy Guard In her student days at Newcastle Polytechnic and St Martins School of Art, Candy Guard hoped to enter live-action filmmaking. But instead, she found herself being tugged towards the world of cartoons. “I started to put ideas…
Black Narratives; Or, Why Insecure and Atlanta Are So Awesome
When I grew up, black narratives that resonated with me came in the form of classics like Sister, Sister and Moesha. As I got older, I couldn’t find examples of black narratives that were relatable to my experience. I wasn’t asking for the exact same experience, but something that I could relate to.
My First Game: Alone in the Dark (1992)
I was into video games before it was cool. In 1994, I was six years old, and my favourite pastime was watching my babysitter, a teenage boy named Mark, play games on our home PC. It was a huge, white, clunky thing that ran Windows 3.1 and was mostly purchased so my dad could play…
Trading Outpost: Fight! Fight! Fight!
Hello, it’s The Trading Outpost—bonus tapes for The Trades, a podcast about comics and comics adjacent topics! With me, FST, is Aaron LaRoche. We recorded this episode before the US election, so if you would like to travel back to a more innocent time to hear Aaron and I squabble about if you should sign your…
Comics Academe: Hellos and Hildebrand
Editors Note: I am pleased to introduce the first article by a new Comics Academe contributor, Tiffany Babb, who will be sharing with us the view from inside academia, and specifically, the how she tackles the common academic dilemma of how to study comics when your institutional program does not have a comics studies program. Since…
How Emily Gilmore Taught Me To Appreciate the Corporate Wife
The first thing I said to fellow WWAC writer, Kate Tanski, when I saw the trailer for Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life was: “Emily’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt!” Emily Gilmore is a corporate wife of high society, she does not wear jeans! Hippies wear jeans, at least according to Rush Limbaugh. But,…
A Right to Be Hostile: The Boondocks in 2016
It’s been twenty years since Aaron McGruder’s daily comic strip, The Boondocks, first appeared on Hitline.com in 1996. It’s been ten years since it ended, after being syndicated in over 300 U.S. newspapers and transformed into a successful animated TV show. Twenty years since it started, ten years since it ended and–not much has changed….
Welcome to the X-Men – Hope you Survive The Experience: How Geeks Can Help
My name is Jamie Kingston. But for the next four years, you can call me Storm. My queer friends? You can call them Northstar, Prodigy, Moonstar and Wolfsbane. Or Anole, Shatterstar, Rictor, Karma and Iceman. My chronically ill friends? You can call them Strong Guy, Cable, Husk. Siren or Sunspot. My Muslim friends? Call them M or…