I’ve been a parent for nine years, and I’ve yet to read a single parenting book. I know I should. Parenting is complicated. Like most parents, I’ve read articles here and there, latching on to catchy titles that scroll through my social media feed. But, I find that each article written by parents, or parenting…
Mad Max and The Tribe: Who Killed the Patriarchy? Men Who Love in a World Gone Wrong
Post-Apocalyptica is easily mistakable for a genre designed to uphold and deify patriarchy. Looking at the classics of the genre, your Mad Maxes, your Hokuto No Kens, Double Dragons, even your Tripods, it’s plain that a man with a downturned mouth is the icon we’ve made most obvious. And the MRAs grumbling about Furiosa’s imagined…
Fail Better: Fake Geek Girls BE YOU
When I was younger, I bought into the Fake Geek Girl thing pretty hard. I didn’t know anybody who observably read comics, nobody at all, and to get into my local comic shop I had to take this journey: Down an alley of dilapidated commerce, turn right, into another small alley where you can see…
Hungry for Definition: xxxHolic’s Addiction to Food
xxxHolic Omnibus editions vols. 1–5 CLAMP (mangaka studio); William Flanagan (adaptation and translation); Dana Hayward (letters) Kodansha 2014–2015 (first published 2003–2009) Note: this essay contains some light spoilers; review copies were provided by Kodansha. Watanuki Kimihiro sees spirits. Even worse, they want to eat him, and so they chase him. All the time. Big, scary,…
My Worst Fears: Arachnophobia in Games
I am petrified by spiders. [Editor’s Note: There are no images of spiders in this article.]
I’m Not Charlie, and Neither are You. So Who ARE You? Where’s Your Stand?
Using cartooning to provoke and punish people makes cartooning an instrument of cruelty. It’s easy to say that nothing can devalue or tarnish a form of art or a medium, but it’s harder to sit down your human emotions and sense of connection and tell it that a scene isn’t souring and widely dangerous. Headlines…
Wayward’s Rori Lane: An Introduction to Liminality
Liminality: a concept elaborated on by Victor Turner to represent the state of being betwixt and between, especially social or physical states; for example, not a child but not yet considered an adult. Wayward is a comic via Image, set in modern Japan and intended for older readers, that explores the danger of the supernatural…
LEAVE DAZZLER ALONE! A Closer Look at the Early Years of Marvel Comics’ Most “Infamous” Superheroine
Before writing this article, I decided to conduct an experiment. I plugged the words “Dazzler” and “worst superheroes” into Google. The search gave me about seven articles from publishers ranging from Cracked.com and Buzzfeed to The Guardian that took Alison Blaire to task for her converting-sound-into-light powers, her already-dated-when-it-was-made disco-inspired outfit or her overall superheroism….
ESSAY: Disability in the Dystopian Future of Mad Max
Approximately 15% of the world’s population has some kind of disability, but in pop culture people with disabilities are rarely seen: only 1% of characters have some kind of disability in American television shows.
Literal Dehumanization: Erasure of the Black Face in Hollywood
Erasing the faces of black people, with a handful of notable exceptions, has been the way Hollywood works for years. If they weren’t villains or criminals, buffoons or drug addicts, Hollywood found other ways to bring black people onto the silver screen only to get them off again as quickly as possible. The term “dead…
Fail Better: How Nerd Insecurity Becomes Abuse
You know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. And because of this, I date a lot of nerds of a particular kind. Guess what, nice guys? I have shyly fostered crushes on a ton of you. And you know what I’ve found after a 15-year career as a champion…
Control Your Gun In Comics: Don’t Put the Muzzle There!
If you’d like a frank discussion over gun legislation, Second Amendment rights, or violence in comic books, this is not the article for you. There is a place for each of these, but what I’d like to bring to the table is a discussion about the respect given to the representation of firearms in comic books….
