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.
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.
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…
Welcome back to our look at the graphic design and evolution of games. Today we’ll discuss a retrospective of the various video games spawned under the TMNT franchise.
Join us for our second look at the graphic design and evolution of games. Today we review Asian Architectures & Italian Plumbers: the Mario, Sonic, Ninja Gaiden, MegaMan, & Castlevania franchises.
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.
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.
