Welcome back to our post-millennial analysis of the current state of fandom. Today we’ll discuss queerbating. While we’ve come a long way since the time where “gay” was a dirty word, even today, pop culture carries unfortunate baggage regarding homosexuality, especially when it comes to women.
Welcome back to our post-millennial analysis of the current state of fandom. With the Wachowskis both coming out as trans women, their breakout film Bound, a pulpy movie about a lesbian couple, takes on new significance in the conversation about the subversion and upholding of tropes about minorities.
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…
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…
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…
An exposition on the subversive sub-genre of heavy metal and its use in cinema that exudes the provocative, violent, terrifying, and esoteric.
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…
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…
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.
Sonata of the Screen and Grid is an exposition on film and animation directors’ work and compositional comparison of the musicians and composers who scored them. For this piece we’ll look at the evolution of speculative fiction cinema scores and “Rise of the Synths”, dissecting their flirtation with cyberpunk style synthesizer riffs.
