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: Media
Which of the blistering array of transmedia forms does your tale manifest in? Is it a book, a film, a play? A tv show we’ll marathon for days and days?
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.
The Sandman, Part 2
In this instance, we’ll explore how Gaiman revitalizes the roles of women and trans/queer characters (a segment of the comic book population which has been trampled by sexist expectations in the comic book medium previously). We will also explore how he resuscitates the roles of family identity (an age-old and worn-out theme in the hands of other authors). Familial identity and gender identity are two of the strongest threads of the entire series, and they take on a new and vivid existence through The Sandman texts.
Ballad of the Blue Bomber
A musical history of the Mega Man X and other spinoff franchises.
The Sandman, Part 1
We owe one of the greatest sea changes in comic book history to the “British Invasion” of the 1980s and ’90s, from the likes of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman. Watchmen and The Sandman ushered in a new era of comics as a legitimate storytelling medium, not just a shallow arena for tights-clad muscle men secure in their abilities to the point of cockiness.
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.