When I was a teenager and first reading poetry, I inherited (basically stole) my mum’s copy of The Penguin Book of Love Poetry. It’s from the 1970s, has her name written in the front in blue pen, and the cover focuses on a detail from Bronzino’s Allegory with Venus and Cupid. Here’s a photo of…
Iron Woman: Natasha Stark, Earth-3490, and the Case for Canon Genderswaps
One of my favorite things about the clamor of excitement surrounding any new comic-related movie is that every time a new film is released, more and more of my friends get interested in reading the comics a movie is based on. Captain America: Civil War is no exception to this, and Marvel’s first Civil War…
Burnside or Elsewhere, We Need a Bi Batgirl!
We need a bi Batgirl? I don’t mean that; it’s too specific, but that alliteration was impossible not to use. What we need is a queer heroine, and not just any sort of heroine. She needs to be different.
Udon a Bad Thing: Frank Cho, Anuses, and Visual Impact
Much like many other areas of culture, monthly direct-market comic books are an industry, a scene, which is largely hostile to women even now, a place where harm is produced and reproduced, and objections are seen as shrill lies told for cheap thrills. I know it’s dull, but let’s talk about Frank Cho.
Fainted When She Saw My Body: Social Construction of Monstrousness in Saga
What is a monster? The easy answer is an “unnatural” being—your zombies, ghosts, or vampires. Stories from Frankenstein to The Walking Dead showcase the idea that humans can become monstrous through action, perhaps even more monstrous than the undead. Critics like David J. Skal and Stephen King argue that fictional monsters are metaphors, vehicles to…
Masamune Shirow and Brandon Graham: A Dirty, Dirty Pair
Porn comics! I wish I could say I’m a bigger fan of them than I am. Sex unbound from just about everything up to including the laws of physics and the capitalistic forces that keep real live porn mired in racism and misogyny! What a concept. I’m sure there’s plenty of material out there for…
If It Fits: Shoes, Sex, and Eroticised Withdrawal in Okazaki Mari’s “&”
Okazaki Mari’s romance comic “&” is about romance as a connection that springs from sensual experience. Its heroine, Kaoru, works in a hospital and is attempting to build her own business as a nail technician in her own time, and at the site of each job, she has a suitor.
Build Your Own Mountain: A Conversation with a DIY Comics Writer-Publisher
Review copies are nice, but review copies that you’d be excited to buy are better. Zachary Clemente sent me two comics that he self-published, with Arielle Soutar on lettering, and Kelsi Ricks (Remnants) and Ricardo Lopez Ortiz (Immolation) putting image to page. I wanted to know more about the connections between these two books, and, lucky…
Three Women Having Sex On A Boat: Ghost in the Shell’s Sex Scene
Commercialised Suffering Is Easy: Lemaitre’s Irene
Irène is crass, coarse, and shallow. Pierre Lemaitre’s novel is like the work of Jo Nesbø, in this way. Preoccupied with torture and awfulness, reluctant to engage with humanity or emotion beyond the ways that happiness can be revoked or twisted; used to make a person miserable; and underbaked as progressing narratives, these author, in…
A Study in Black and A Study in Blue: Cartooning Cumberbatch
Benedict Cumberbatch is a handsome man. This is empirical. Benedict Cumberbatch is a weird-looking man; this is too. Of course, one could argue that handsomeness, as a marker of especial masculine niceness, is weird in its own right. But that is not the sort of strange that Cumberbatch’s evidential handsomeness is. He’s an odd-looking fucker….
Alison Rapp and Speech We Hate: Disentangling an Ugly Mess
When Alison Rapp was hired to work at Nintendo of America, her 2011 undergraduate honors thesis, Speech We Hate: An Argument for the Cessation of International Pressure on Japan to Strengthen Its Anti-Child Pornography Laws, had been publicly available in the Honors Review for more than a year. Then, as now, it was available freely for public, and certainly…