Megan Purdy asks the questions in this round table discussion responding to several comics tackling mental illness, and its resultant behaviours. Sara Lautman’s comic Some Notes on Compulsive Hair Pulling is beautiful and affecting. The comic is about Lautman’s struggle with trichotillomania: how she got her diagnosis; how she deals with it; how she relates,…
Pokemon: Past, Present, and Potential
I have never caught every single Pokémon in any game throughout the entire series. I sort of feel like I’m coming out of the closet again saying that. I know it’s the case for many people, but it still feels like I’m admitting to some wrongdoing of mine. As if some tribunal will come down…
The Bloodied Vagina: Why the Batgirl Variant Cover is No Joke
Content Warning: Rape, Sexual Violence, discussion of the meat of bodies.
Wonder Woman’s New Outfit: Crotch Flap and Confusion
Wonder Woman has a new outfit! A full coverage outfit! We ought to be happy about this, right? Getting her out of panties and into something more demure is what we want, right? Well… actually…
Starfire’s New Costume: A Reflection of Her History and Personality
If you haven’t heard the news about Starfire getting a much needed costume update—not to mention her own on-going series by powerhouse team Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti, of Harley Quinn fame, along with Emanuela Lupacchino—then buckle up because I’m going to break it down for you.
Mortal Kombat Is A Bad Franchise And Nothing About It Is Good: A Character Design Discussion
It must have happened, but I don’t remember a time before I felt encroached upon by Mortal Kombat. I was five when the first game was released, and I was seven when the ESRB rating system was introduced in response to parents’ response to the game’s “fatalities.” This means that parents were alarmed by characters…
Jason Momoa: Wet Naked Poster Child For The Narrative Revolution
On Friday, Zack Snyder dropped new photographs of Jason Momoa as Aquaman and, as I’m sure you all have realized, it is everything we deserve. There was a lot of talk on Twitter about how the new Aquaman was sexy—to his detriment to some but to his improvement for others—and, for some people, to whom…
Wanna Hear A Grown Woman Rant About POWER/RANGERS?
Okay, Power Rangers was always a bootleg. Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, as you probably know, began life as Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger, a Japanese Saturday morning show, latest in a long line of similarly colour-coded superhero shows stretching back to the seventies. One per year. Saban took (yes, they paid, it was a business agreement, so…
You Are What You Watch: Which Five Anime Shaped Your Life?
Whenever I’m asked about my favorite books, movies, anime, or video games, I hesitate to answer. For me, comparing my love of Haruki Murakami to J. R. R. Tolkien, for example, is like comparing apples to oranges or choosing between chocolate and vanilla. Murakami and Tolkien, apples and oranges, and chocolate and vanilla are all…
Beauty in the Breakdown: The Wicked + The Divine
The Wicked + The Divine is a pretty cool comic, guys. You know this, I know this—hell, I’m pretty sure Jamie McKelvie, Kieron Gillen, and Matt Wilson know this. Lots of people have lots of different readings of it and Gillen has been kind enough to provide Writer’s Notes about his work. Still, I thought…
Cute Is Not Always Safe! Cover Stories: Judge a Book on Whether You’d Buy It
This time on Cover Stories, where we judge a book by the first face it presents… Ani-Imo: Volume 1 Haruko Kurumatani Yen Press The spine White! White looks clean and stands out. It’s confident. The font choices are all cute and the colour scheme is pleasant. I love a very round font; it looks so comfortable!…
What Jonathan Jones Gets Wrong About Comics
…Pretty much everything. On the Guardian‘s Art and Design blog, art critic Jonathan Jones slammed the art of “the comic-book universe” for being “banal” and “lack[ing]…ambition and verve.” A reasonable criticism, if he’d given evidence to back it up. After all, many comics fans suffered through the epidemic of Greg Land SameFace Syndrome that swept…
