Art is one of the most crucial factors for me in game design. Obviously, the way a game plays is important, too. But If I’m going to be spending a few hours staring at a game, the art better be something I like.
Get Out (Of Your Comfort Zone)
Get Out Jordan Peele (director/writer), Toby Oliver (cinematography) Daniel Kaluuya, Allison Williams, Catherine Keener, Bradley Whitford, Caleb Landry Jones, Lil Rel Howery, Keith Stanfield (cast) January 23, 2017 (Sundance), February 24, 2017 (United States) It is inaccurate to call Get Out a horror film. There is horror — on multiple levels, but that’s not all there is to the movie. It’s more of a horror suspense melange with so…
Saying Their Names: A Review of THE HATE U GIVE
The Hate U Give Angie Thomas Belzer + Bray February 28, 2017 Long ago, in the days when we bought CDs, we also bragged about who got whose new CD and learned the words to all the songs. We used liner notes to help us understand the lyrics the first time and then learn them…
Black Comix Returns
The Black Comix Returns Kickstarter has just a few days to go, but it has already more than doubled its funding goals. Unsurprising, considering the success of the first volume, published seven years earlier. If you’re lucky, you might find a copy of the latter on Amazon for a cool $300. As of writing this…
Review: R. Sikoryak’s Terms and Conditions
Terms and Conditions R. Sikoryak Drawn & Quarterly TPB March 7, 2017 Disclaimer: Terms and Conditions was reviewed with a copy provided by the publisher. Many elementary school students, when confronted with a chunk of text beyond their previously experienced reading level, are advised to break up said text in order to make it easier…
100 Days 100 Women: A Feminist Portrait Series
If you’ve been paying attention to Wikipedia lately, you might have noticed some new portraits of lesser-known feminist figures on the online encyclopedia. They’re all a part of the “100 Days 100 Women” series created by Rori, a St. Louis graphic designer and freelance illustrator. Although originally a personal project started with no press or…
Oscar Animated Shorts: Birds, Booze, and Bands
The Oscar animated shorts category has a few familiar faces and one director who adapted his own graphic novel into an animated short. “Borrowed Time” (7 minutes) Andrew Coats, Lou Hamou-Lhadj (directors) USA This is a short, silent Western about guilt and grief and dads, and it does that very well. The animation is made…
Oscar Shorts: Singing, Baking, and Assimilation
One take away from the live action Oscar shorts this year is that they’re not really that short these days. Only one film comes in under the twenty minute mark. While a few of these films could have really done more with less, overall, it’s a year of strong contenders covering a broad range of…
Crime and Patience: Witchblade Animated
Witchblade Animated was never an animated product. It was, as were many things from the Image founders’ personal studios and the American comic book industry of the later ’90s in general, a cypher, a simulacrum of a possibility or alternate reality. “Wouldn’t it be cool if there was a Witchblade cartoon (eventually there was) just…
What is Journalism? A Review of Rolling Blackouts
Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq Sarah Glidden Drawn + Quarterly October 2016 A review copy was provided by the publisher. What is journalism? This is the primary question cartoonist Sarah Glidden pursued while traveling through Turkey, Iraq and Syria in 2010. Glidden’s friends and co-founders of The Seattle Globalist, Sarah Stuteville and…
Jackie: History Has Its Eyes On You
Jackie Pablo Larraín (dir), Stéphane Fontaine (cin) , Noah Oppenheim (wri) Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard, Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, John Hurt (cast) LD Entertainment, Fox Searchlight Pictures September 7, 2016 (Venice), December 2, 2016 (USA) We are midway through Jackie, and Jacqueline Kennedy, standing in all black, is talking to a priest. “Was God in the bullet that killed my husband?” she asks, angry but still pointedly polite. When…
The Summer of Self Discovery or The Education of Margot Sanchez
The Education of Margot Sanchez Lilliam Rivera Simon & Schuster February 21, 2017 Margot Sanchez is a girl torn between two worlds. The first is her home in the South Bronx where she was raised and where her family owns a pair of grocery stores, Sanchez & Sons. The other is the mostly-white, private school…
