Horror in Anime and Gaming
Today’s Zen and the Art Screaming examines the methods and techniques employed by Japanese content creators to produce unique horror that spans numerous genres.
Artifact: Cinema
Building a Better Predator: Werewolves
In today’s installment of Zen and the Art of Screaming, we explore the origins of werewolves and Lycanthropy and examine how werewolves came to represent the Other, fear of self and loss of agency.
Horror in Music
In today’s installment of Zen and the Art of Screaming, we examine the role of horror in music—from musicians selling their souls to the devil for fame & fortune, to artists whose appearance and sound conjure images of demons and hellfire.
Unpacking the Myths
In this, the fourth installment of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, your host Jeromy Foberg discusses the many differences between pirates and piracy as they exist in fiction and how they existed.
J-Rock Invasion
A retrospect on the J-Pop, J-Rock, and Jazz fusion and other musical sub-genres featured in anime.
Superheroes in Flux–Watchmen Part 2
Authorship in comics is a tricky business. Superheroes and the trajectory of their identities, more often than not, take on lives of their own. The legendary ones are written by slews of authors and drawn by dozens of different artists. At peak popularity, they go on to live in video games, movies, TV shows, and even the covers of lunchboxes. This is both the modern norm and this is how it has been for decades; it is the art and business of comic books as we know them. But what happens when the author fights this process tooth and nail, and what does that indicate for the meaning of his work? This is exactly the case for Alan Moore over his long career.
Heavy Metal and Horror
An exposition on the subversive sub-genre of heavy metal and its use in cinema that exudes the provocative, violent, terrifying, and esoteric.
Superheroes in Flux–Watchmen Part 1
Comics, as a genre, are deeply rooted in history and pop culture. In order to understand any part of modern comic books (or graphic novels) one must first understand the history behind them. The two works I will focus on in this essay are Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a story of remarkably normal superheroes, and, to a lesser extent The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s surrealistic work on the nature of dream, imagination, and collective memory revolving around Morpheus the King of Dreams. Like any pieces of literature, comic books such as Watchmen and The Sandman come out of a storytelling tradition with historical implications and a variety of ideological frameworks.
Warts and All
The comic book as a storytelling medium is a remarkable and unique creature. Comic book icons have a flexibility and a capacity for redirection. Characters with solid decades-long histories and worldwide popularity, paradoxically, do not achieve it through a rigid retelling of the same stories, but through their endless ability to adapt their meaning. Well-known heroes and villains are very different people from one decade to the next, or in the hands of different writers and artists. When the way comic books are written undergoes a sea change, it inevitably ripples into all the other storytelling mediums.
The Paragon & The “Psycho” Pathologist
In this week’s installment of Chasing at Shadows, we’ll address the characters of Wonder Woman and Harley Quinn: their hidden similarities, their stark differences, and the importance of their influence on what it means to be a well-rounded, well-written female character in comics.