I have been trying to figure out the best way to keep my life organized for years. I tried Evernote and Remember the Milk when they came out. I have several day planners that were well used until about April. I’ve added endless, never completed items to the little pop-up Tasks section in Gmail. I have…
Get Your Game on Wednesday: Gen Con Gender Wins
Happy Wednesday, gaming lovelies! Fresh off my weekend at the fabulous inaugural Granite Game Summit, I’m here to report on all the week’s news. So let’s get to it! Equal gender representation for Gen Con 2016’s Industry Insiders Welcome to the future, gaming friends! Last week, Gen Con, one of the oldest and largest tabletop…
Living Dead Boy: Jason Todd vs. The Culture That Killed (And Resurrected) Him
Here’s the thing: Robin was never intended to be a legacy character. There were no real reasons to assume or suspect that Dick Grayson, the original Robin, was going to give up the mantle. Sure, as Dick progressed in age, thanks to some very specific cultural anxieties, there were reasons to assume that he might…
TCAF 2016: Festival Diary
I love the Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) and I’ve gone every year since 2013. The 2016 festival was fantastic and I’m still recovering from the exciting things that went down. TCAF is a free event that focuses on independent comics and creators with guests from not only Canada but all over the world. Its primary location is in…
The Misrepresentation of Daredevil’s Elektra
Just after the title sequence, and eleven minutes into episode nine, Elektra Natchios is cleaning up the previous episode’s mess: Matt Murdoch gets shot with a poisoned arrow and Elektra slits the throat of a young ninja. She saves Matt’s life using the same concoction that Stick used to save hers and brings in what…
2014 Hugos Versus 2015 Sad Puppies: What Could Have Been, Part 2
In the previous post in this series, I looked at the short stories and novelettes that were in the running for the 2015 Hugo Awards and may have reached the final ballot had the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies campaigns not taken place. Now, for the final post, I shall look at the candidates for…
Comics Academe: Teaching Ms. Marvel Part 2
This is part two of my account of teaching G. Willow Wilson’s Ms. Marvel to honor students at a large southern university. Part one can be found here.
Con Diaries: Chicago Zine Fest
It’s been two weeks since I attended the Chicago Zine Festival (CZF), but I still feel the aftershocks of love, community, excitement, and exhaustion. In my experience, zine festivals and alternative comics expos are designed with accessibility in mind. There is no entrance fee or admission cost is very low, events take place during typical…
Mighty Marvel Monday: Darwyn Cooke, #BlackPantherSoLIT, and more
Welcome back to another Mighty Marvel Monday! This week I have two big things to point to, and then a few smaller things to highlight. Firstly, it’s always sad when the comics community loses a beloved member, but it’s especially sad to lose someone like Darwyn Cooke, who was an amazing talent. And although most…
Dita Von Teese’s Opium Den: Consuming Problematic Media
My partner recently surprised me with tickets to see Dita Von Teese’s Burlesque: Strip, Strip, Hooray!, purported to be a revue of high production-value, best-of-the-best burlesque performed by Dita and a cast of striptease superstars. Though I’d never seen Dita in person before, many of the supporting cast were performers I had seen in the…
Dear Amanda: Letters of Caution
Cathy G. Johnson’s Dear Amanda plays catch with you for a while. Then it knocks the ball out of your hands. You thought you were reading a simple diary comic? You were reading a rather complex meditation on perspective, in fact. It knocked the ball out of my hands, I should say. Reading experiences may…
Funko and Marvel’s Women of Power
I’ve been diligently avoiding subscription boxes for quite a while now, vicariously living through my friend’s subscription instead. The field has become so saturated with subscription boxes there’s now one available for everything you can imagine. But what if you don’t want everything you can imagine? What if you want to be a bit frugal, even as…
