As one of the rising voices in comics today, Olivia Stephens’s approach to story, art, and relationships reveals a raw look at the human experience. Steve Morris at Comics Alliance recently said he doesn’t “think there’s anybody in comics right now who captures the human spirit like Olivia.” I caught up with Olivia via email to…
Our Future Can Be Better: In Praise of Relative Utopias
Flying cars, teleportation, robots–the future, if not a dystopia, is generally played as a land of wonders. We have an obsession with the future in comics. Alternate realities posed as potential futures are played with all the time. Yet so many “ideal” futures are not ones I’d want to live in. Webcomics are giving us…
Craft in Cartooning: Five Slices of Octopus Pie
Octopus Pie won Meredith Gran an Ignatz, and maybe you don’t know why yet. Or maybe you’d just like to bask in the quality of this comics? Sailor, either way, I’m here to help ya. I have made a list. It’s five points long and I’m sure you can’t believe what I left off—but that’s great too!…
Trading Outpost: Genre/Gender/Generic
Hello! And welcome back to another of The Trades, the world’s only comic podcast by people who don’t know anything about pen nibs. This month, we swear off literacy in order to better live out deconstructionism. Also, Aaron reads award nominated comics, while Webtoons is taking over my life, and I don’t know how to…
Trading Outpost: Growing Up Is Hard To Do
Hello and welcome back to Trading Outpost, with me, FST, co-host with the co-most of The Trades, a comics podcast for people who like comics and podcasts. The other half of The Trades is Aaron, who can’t write here, because Aaron’s a dude. You can find the previous installment on WWAC here, and you can…
10 Years of Sorcery 101: An interview with Kel McDonald
I ran across Sorcery 101 in its youth. I was reading it back in the aughts until the death of the ancient computer I was using took my bookmarks with it. When the assignment came up, I was pleased to have a chance to revisit a comic I had lost connection with. I believe in…
Oracle: Voices and Silence
Welcome to the second installation of An Adventure in Small Games (you can read the first one here), a monthly series focused on games that cost less than $20, ideally less than $10. In this series Eve Golden Woods will focus on the indie game and what it has to offer the world of gaming.
Choosing Horror: Playing Emily Carroll’s Webcomics
The best horror comes from the tense intermingling of expectation and inevitability. We know that something bad will happen. We anticipate it, waiting for the moment of revelation, when the narrative strips itself bare and shows us its hideous underbelly.
Sfé Monster talks about his genderqueer webcomics
Sfé R. Monster is a cartoonist focused on the internet. With the help of social media, he has gathered around him an audience very concerned with queer and genderqueer issues. His readers want to see another side of the stories available in mainstream media. His previous works include Seven Stories From The Sea, a heartbreaking…
Webcomics Capsules: Superheroes and Feminists
Webcomics Capsules is all about short webcomics reviews—more like recommendations, actually. See what our writers are enjoying around the web, choose your favorites and get to reading! This edition has two of my favorite things: superheroes and feminism. Laugh with (at) Jean Grey and Scott Summers in Max Wittert’s parody, or the folks at The…
Kickstarter of the Week: forgive me, it’s a Patreon
Paul Duffield’s work–with Warren Ellis writing and Kate Brown colouring–on Freakangels won him not one, but two Eagle awards. Freakangels is available in collected editions, released by legitimate publishers, but it is and was available page by page online, for free. That’s becoming a more common practice for creator-owned projects, and it’s the same model…
An introduction to comics academia in the form of a letter to my past self
Dear Past Amanda (upon your graduation from high school), Hang on to your hat! Setting aside the fact that these are all spoilers, let me tell you what’s going to happen next: You’re going to live in a castle (what?!) and during your extensive trawling of the internet, you’ll find out about these things that are today…