Topic: TV/Game Production

  • Superheroes in Flux–Watchmen Part 2

    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.

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  • Heavy Metal and Horror
  • Warts and All

    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.

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  • The Paragon & The “Psycho” Pathologist

    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.

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  • Soundtrack to Your Escape

    Soundtrack to Your Escape

    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.

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  • The Dark and Haunted Prince

    The Dark and Haunted Prince

    I whole-heartedly believe that comics, movies, and television shows are imbued with all the power and meaning of the classic works we read in university classrooms—and as such, deserve to be written about critically, and linked to the pillars of literary theory. In this new series, a collection of academic close-studies of popular culture, I aim to do just that. For my first installment, we will examine the connections between the characters of Batman, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and the true burdens of vengeance.

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  • Franchise Feature: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
  • Asian Architecture, Italian Plumbers
  • Content May Be Graphic – Series Conspectus

    Content May Be Graphic – Series Conspectus

    An introduction to our look at the graphic design, presentation, artistic rendering, and evolution of the digital artforms of video games and film, with an additional focus on the visual continuity between various cross-media brands and products.

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  • Chasing At Shadows–Series Conspectus

    Chasing At Shadows–Series Conspectus

    Join us for the first in a series of close studies of popular culture viewed through an academic lens, showcasing just how deep and diverse these texts, often unfairly dismissed as simple kid’s stuff, can be when it comes to the serious issues of today.

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