With the Women’s Marches, the #MeToo movement, and the important conversations we’ve been seeing recently about sexual assault and consent.Women have certainly made their voices heard. And in the current political climate, not only is anger—and even rage—from women understandable, it can serve as a catalyst for real change when funneled into productive action.
All I Want For Christmas is a Spider-Man Holiday Special
If there’s one thing I love in comic books, it’s a holiday special, and if there are two comic book series I love above all others, it’s Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four. Lucky for me, those two things overlap a lot. Marvel loves a holiday special, and Fantastic Four’s family nature and Spider-Man’s traditional Parker…
Superpose’s Heavy Light: How to Make A World Out of Neon
Over the past couple years, neon has come into some serious vogue. Posters around town flash fierce magentas upon cyborg-seeking cops, gritty mystery teens, women wrestlers. From Riverdale ads, cobalt rim-lights hit figures leaning over a diner table. Just now, a city bus passing me billed two different movies in hyper-chromatic light.
Despite Being Its Influence, the Western Comics Industry Remains Silent on My Hero Academia
As the political and social climate feels more alarming day by day, it is not a coincidence that we have been living in a zeitgeist filled with the saturation of superheroes in our media for people to turn to for guidance. Although superheroes have been a prevalent norm in comics, the genre has recently found…
Prism Stalker: A Primer on a Sordid Past
Content Warning: Generational/Historical Trauma I am not North American Indigenous. However, the least I can do as someone who lives on occupied land is to learn the history of, and about, the peoples who are Native to the North American Continent and advocate for others to learn more through my academic research on Native American boarding…
Aliens, Immigration, Race, and Assimilation in DC: The New Frontier
I love Darwyn Cooke’s DC: The New Frontier. I think it’s a love letter not just to the superhero genre, but also to its medium: the comic book, even though my 520-page 2016 paperback edition neither looks nor feels like a floppy when I pick it up to read. There is a sequence in The…
Found in Translation: Anthea Bell
My brother is eleven years older than I am. When I was born, he took it upon himself to raise me, from diaper changes, to teaching me the names of important dinosaurs. He fostered in me the greatest gift a sibling could give: the love of reading. While his X-Men collection is why I’m the…
The Problem With Generation X Was Editorial
On the 12th October, a Friday, writer Chuck Wendig announced via several threaded tweets that he had been fired from the Darth Vader miniseries he had been working on thanks to editorial displeasure with his personal linguistic conduct. The editor in question was Mark Paniccia.
Cookies & Christ in Gene Luen Yang’s Boxers & Saints
When I started writing about religion and literature for my dissertation, I never dreamed that I’d also get to write about comics. I loved comics and knew that they were finally being taken seriously at an academic level, but I still couldn’t connect them to religious studies. That is, until I came across the work…
So, Why Don’t We Have a Robin Movie?: Teen Sidekicks and the Relegation to Relation
Underneath the butt jokes and ‘80s flashbacks (and more butt jokes), Teen Titans Go! To the Movies poses a valid and complex question: Why don’t we have a Robin movie? Robin (the Dick Grayson iteration) was introduced before Wonder Woman, Captain America, and a host of other superheroes who have been given their own films….
Justice 4 Johnny Storm
Disclaimer: This article contains spoilers from The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #1 released on September 19th, 2018. Johnny Storm fans have had a rough time of it these past few years. First, our fave fam was banished from the comics due to petty bullshit over movie rights, which meant that Johnny was essentially abandoned by his…
Eddie Brock’s Body: An Artistic Overview of the Venom Symbiote
No matter where you look these days, listicles about the sexiest characters in comics all look the same. You’ve got your Gambits and your Thors, for example, characters whose canon beauty is basically an explicitly listed trait on their wiki-pages. Some fans swoon over Clark Kent’s earnest farm boy persona, while Emma Frost’s fierce and…
