In honor of Vivica A. Fox‘s birthday, I wanted to take a deep dive into her Lifetime movie catalogue with director David DeCoteau — because why not?
ComicCon@Home: Disney’s New Mutants Panel Sent Us to Limbo
In the face of the global pandemic, Comic-Con International has put together what seems to be a near-overwhelming selection of panels and programming that anyone with an Internet connection can enjoy. Alas, the reality of the virtual con has been a strange, sometimes surreal selection of what feels like Zoom work meetings, with some not…
Leaning on the Closet Door: X-Men+Fantastic Four and Trans Allegory
Content Warnings: Suicide, Depression, Dysphoria, Transphobia, Gaslighting, Anti-Trans Legislation, Murder
Comics Culture: Visiting a Comic Book Store in Russia
Back in the Before Times when people could still go outside and interact with each other in close proximity, I went to Russia to visit my relatives, whom I haven’t seen in several years. From December 2018 to early January 2019, I stayed at my aunt and cousin’s apartment in the southwest end of Moscow,…
3 Reasons to Re-Read Bleach
Tite Kubo’s sweeping manga finished up in 2016, but the final arc was never adapted into the anime. Fans were left wanting when the anime ended in 2012 and have always hoped to see the final arc be adapted, myself included! It was recently announced that Studio Pierrot is going to be adapting the “Thousand-Year…
What Fence! Didn’t Learn from Sports Manga
So, Fence!. This limited series about high school fencing, written by CS Pacat, drawn by Johanna the Mad, and published by Boom! Studios is getting a prose novel tie-in by Sarah Rees Brennan in September 2020, bringing new life to a series that ended in November 2018. But why aren’t more critics talking about it?…
Patreon Exclusive: Subterranean Mutant Semiotics: Morlocks, X-Factor, and the Privilege of Passing
Our monthly Patron-exclusive essay series continues. You can read all of these incredible analyses for as little as a dollar a month on our Patreon. Content Warning: This essay includes discussions of transphobia, anti-trans violence, trans-medicalism and passing.
Depictions of Fascism and Missteps of the Metaphor in X-Men: Red
This essay includes discussions of fascism, the alt-right, Charlottesville, the death of Heather Heyer, The Third Reich, Nazi ideology, and xenophobia.
My Sex-Positive, Feminist Graphic Novel, Tracy Queen, is Being Shadow Banned
You may have heard whispers about shadow banning—that thing social media platform do where they block or partly block users and/or their content in a sneaky way so that, as Wikipedia puts it, “it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.” The practice seems to have started as a…
The Magik of New Mutants’ Illyana Rasputin
When an image of a horned demonic girl in armor crossed my Twitter timeline in 2018, I felt drawn to her. Illyana Rasputin looks like an untamed demon and a battle hardened human. In the recent trailer for the New Mutants film, I feel like we see a glimpse of both demon and human in…
A Knives Out Sequel Shouldn’t Prioritize Benoit Blanc
Knives Out was easily my favorite movie I saw in 2019. I’m a sucker for a good mystery, lavish set design, and biting social commentary, particularly when it plays with form as much as Knives Out does. I saw it twice, the first time hooked by the premise and carried along on exhilaration, the second…
New Intersections: Queer Futurism and the Krakoan Body Politic
With the advent of House of X and Powers of X, both mutants and X-Pedagogy have experienced a paradigm shift. Even the ways in which the mutant-metaphor is discussed and engaged with has shifted as digital spaces such as “ X-Twitter” carve out their own Krakoan Community.