Amidst the din of the Sunday after show floor, I headed to the Visual Novel Reading Room in the Indie Megabooth at PAX East to meet up with Aevee Bee and Mia Schwartz, creators of the indie visual novel game, We Know the Devil. In typical go-with-the-flow PAX fashion, we hold our interview standing around…
Canada Reads 2017: The Defence
It’s that time of year again! Canada Reads is back with five new books and the Canadian celebrities who plan to defend them. Every year, Canada tunes into CBC to watch four days of painstaking debate on the book that Canadians should be reading right now. We’ve assembled three of our Canadian book lovers to…
Daddy Issues #1: Batman – The World’s Finest Terrible Dad
To “celebrate” Father’s Day, I’ve written a selection of essays on some of comics worst ever dads. From adoptive fathers to absent ones, from rich and fascist to poor and useless, I’ve got ’em all! So strap in, grab your daddy issues, a stiff drink, and get ready to realize that pretty much all of…
Fail Safe and The War That Left Its Box Office Cold
There’s an interesting phenomenon in Hollywood: films get made to satisfy a timely cultural zeitgeist, causing a glut of movies with the same topics or themes to come out around the same time. Deep Impact came out so close to Armageddon in 1998 that many misremember it as a cheap imitation despite the fact that…
A Whistle-Stop History of Fanfiction
Welcome to a Whistle-stop History of Fanfiction. Love it or loath it, many of us nerds know about fanfiction. It’s a huge part of modern fandom that ranges all the way from 200 word flash fiction to epic multi-chapter novels, but when did fanfiction start being part of the way we view fandom, and what…
Does “Star Wars: The Editor Strikes Back” Hold Up?
Back in 2012, Topher Grace edited the three Star Wars prequels, The Phantom Menace, The Clone Wars, and Revenge of the Sith, into one 85 minute movie and called it Star Wars: The Editor Strikes Back. After Rogue One, we wanted to see if held up. (Or, honestly, if it was ever good.) So Kat,…
The Wedding Issue: A Flash Double Wedding!
Aside from “Who would win in a fight?” nothing gets comic fans more heated than the question of whether or not superheroes should marry. In this mini-feature, Bride-to-Be Rebecca Henely and her Maid of Honor Kayleigh Hearn take a trip down memory lane to the most significant times comic companies took the plunge and got…
Mass Effect: Perfect Digital Romances
Given the impending release of Mass Effect: Andromeda and my longtime devotion to the original trilogy, I’ve been thinking a lot about my experience with the Mass Effect series lately. My two playthroughs differed wildly; I was all about the rookie mistakes the first time through (RIP, Wrex), and though my Shepard was a more…
Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story Misses Its Target
Fire!! The Zora Neale Hurston Story Peter Bagge (Writer and Artist) Drawn & Quarterly March 2017 When a call was put out asking who would like review the new graphic novel, Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story, my response was “Who wouldn’t?” Zora Neale Hurston was a remarkable female anthropologist, folklorist and writer. She was…
Book Beat: Mental Health, Feminism, and Dissent
Hello again, readers! The week before last, I suggested borrowing books with both female protagonists and authors. This week, I suggest reading for mental health, but I don’t necessarily mean self-help books. For instance, I recently went by my local library’s book sale and bought a book of Irish myths, a copy of The Alchemist…
Power and Magic Anthology Review: The Magic of Queerness
Power & Magic: The Queer Witch Comics Anthology Joamette Gil (Editor) P&M Press January, 2017 Inside all queer people is magic. When honed correctly we can cast our magic out and spread a rainbow that can save others. One such spell has been cast and I have had the pleasure to have fallen under it….
Erase the President: 5 Anti-Trump Colouring Books
So you hate Trump. (I mean, obviously, since you’re reading this site?) So you hate Trump and rather like colouring. Good news! There are now more anti-Trump colouring books on the market than I could reasonably fit into this listicle. Want to tell the president-un-elect to fuck off? There’s a colouring book for that. Want to…
