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Magazine Archives for:
April 2015
Arrow Season 3 Episode 17 Review
It’s becoming harder and harder to talk about the third season of Arrow without sounding like a broken record. The season keeps circling improvement but never quite manages to sort out its disparate pieces into… [more]
Sifting Through the Ashes: Analyzing Hellblazer, Part 25
Issue #29 “Sick at Heart” Writer: Jamie Delano Art: Ron Tiner & Kevin Walker Colors: Tom Zuiko Letters: Gaspar Saladino Cover: Kent Williams While being comprised of many styles of stories that can be grouped… [more]
Community Season Six: “Laws of Robotics and Party Rights”
Episode five of the sixth season of Community, “Laws of Robotics and Party Rights”, might be the best episode of the season yet. I say “might” because it still has a few problems. Let’s get… [more]
Notes on Casanova: Acedia #1-2
This year I wrote a book, published by Sequart, called The Future of Comics, The Future of Men: Matt Fraction’s Casanova. That book argues that Fraction’s science-fiction spy series offers both a critique of capitalism,… [more]
Better Call Saul Season Finale: The Path Less Travelled By
Jimmy McGill is angry, Saul Goodman isn’t. Jimmy always has a joke, Saul doesn’t. Jimmy is all charm, Saul is all artifice and business. That first shot of the season, and the series, showing Saul… [more]
A Countless Number of Small Items: King Kong vs Godzilla and Akira Ifukube Pt. 2
I visited temples in Rehe and saw numerous Buddha statues embedded all over the wall. Even though each statue was humble, seeing all of them together on the wall impressed me greatly. [more]
Arrow Season 3 Episode 16 Review
Television series tend to be lumbering beasts, built to move in a specific manner and slow to change course when problems arise. Series can evolve and shift direction, so it’s essential that shows figure out… [more]
Rat Queens #10: Their Finest Hour
Let’s briefly review the strongest qualities of Rat Queens as a comic. Great dialogue, rich characters whose emotional journey is completely relatable, even as their environment is a classic action-packed magical fantasy world and conflicts… [more]
How Movies Stereotype and Demonize College Professors
British and American films about college professors tend to depict them stereotypically—as atheistic alcoholic egomaniacs with social anxiety disorder and an uncontrollable desire to have sex with their students. Independent American films such as Smart… [more]
A Countless Number of Small Items: King Kong vs Godzilla and Akira Ifukube
Be done with rote learning and its attendant vexations; for is there distinction of a “yes” from a “yea” comparable now to the gulf between evil and good? What all men fear, I too must fear… how barren and pointless a thought! [more]
Jane Austen, Art, and Women in Comics: A Conversation with Janet K. Lee
Do I have to drink hot tea in order to talk about Jane Austen? That’s the question that kept running through my head as I made my way to Sip Café in East Nashville. I… [more]
The Good and Bad of Diversity in Comics
Diversity has always been a problem in comics. In the early days, minorities were nigh invisible, and women were usually relegated to romantic interests/damsels in distress. In the modern era, however, DC and Marvel have… [more]
Such Beautiful Miniatures: Yasuyuki Inoue and a New Age for Toho
Earth Defence Force is the start of an important transition in Ishir? Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya’s techniques, a transition that wouldn’t reach its peak until a new decade arrived. The bright and colourful space film required Eiji Tsuburaya to focus more on optical effects then he had to date. [more]
Robots Are Taking Over Hollywood
2015 is being called “The Year of AI” and “The Year of the Robot” due to the abnormal number of high profile sci-fi movies, featuring robotic and AI characters, being released this year including Avengers:… [more]
Better Call Saul: Poor Jimmy
I come away from every episode of Better Call Saul these days saying, “Poor Jimmy”. This, the second-to-last episode in the season, “Pimento”, is certainly no exception. We frankly haven’t seen all of Jimmy’s past… [more]
Sifting Through the Ashes: Analyzing Hellblazer, Part 24
Issue #28 “Thicker Than Water” Writer: Jamie Delano Art: Ron Tiner & Kevin Walker Colors: Tom Zuiko Letters: Gaspar Saladino Cover: Kent Williams Following the brief tenure of Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman on the… [more]
Community Season Six: “Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing”
So by this point in a season Community has normally had at least one great episode. Not this season though. It hasn’t had a bad episode either, just average episodes. Episode four, “Queer Studies and… [more]
Lesser Known Kurosawa: The Bad Sleep Well
Japanese director Akira Kurosawa is best known for his samurai epics. Now I’ve only actually seen two of those: Yojimbo and Rashomon. Sometimes people are prone to forget that Kurosawa’s output ranges in genre and… [more]
Defending the Much-Maligned X-Files I Want to Believe
With the recent announcement that there will be a new X-Files miniseries, the internet exploded this week with people aching to see Mulder and Scully in action again. It has been some time since we… [more]