Magazine Archives for:

January 2017

Down A Dark Path of Bibliomancy – The Necronomicon in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence, Part 2

In Part I of “Down A Dark Path of Bibliomancy: The Necronomicon in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence” we looked at how Alan Moore incorporated and reinterpreted H.P. Lovecraft’s “History of the Necronomicon” and… [more]

Down A Dark Path of Bibliomancy: The Necronomicon in Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence, Part 1

“My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax.” – H.P. Lovecraft to Clark Ashton Smith (17 October… [more]

Star Trek Nemesis: The End of an Era

Star Trek Nemesis, released 15 years ago at this time of year, is the nadir of the entire franchise. The 1998 Trek instalment, Insurrection, was also very weak, but weak within the normal parameters of… [more]

Necropolitan #1: The Geography of Hell

We all think we know what hell is. (Ironically, heaven is much more difficult to define or describe, as George Carlin once pointed out.) But somehow, we all seem to “get” hell. Fire, suffering, screaming… [more]

Watching a Serial of Strange Aeons: Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence

A lot of people, and I do mean a lot of people, are writing about Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence and have been for quite some time. You can look at Joe Linton, Robert… [more]

The Goddamned #5: No Happy Endings

“I’m Cain, the man who invented murder. But God invented me, so ask yourself: who’s the real asshole here?” If readers expected the story of Jason Aaron and r. m. Guera’s The Goddamned to take… [more]

Professor Nancy Wang Yuen on Her Career, Pop-Culture Studies, and Her Book, Reel Inequality

Professor Nancy Wang Yuen is a sociologist, documentary producer, and pop culture geek who has made a career examining how mass media represents Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. She has recently published a book titled,… [more]

Descender #18: Back to Business

In its latest issue, #18, Descender gets back to business, driving the plot of this story forward after taking some time to develop the characters in recent issues. This issue is classic space opera science… [more]

Smorgasbord #57: Yabba Dabba Don’t

Shawn is possessed by the spirit of Soraya Montenegro and spends the entire episode raging out over Gerard Jones, Rob Liefield, Ike Perlmutter, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Fred Flintstone’s war veterans group. Tom heroically… [more]

Manifest Destiny #25: Who Are The Demons?

It’s a very special issue of Manifest Destiny as the 25th issue makes its appearance this week. The journey of Lewis and Clark has entered a different phase, as the Corps of Discovery settles down… [more]

Reconsidering Rogue One

Ever since the release of Rogue One, and its undeniable box-office success, and the tragic death of Carrie Fisher, there’s been much discussion about the future of Star Wars. The Force Awakens re-started the franchise… [more]

An Interview with Jayson Paul, WWE’s “JTG”

More popularly known as JTG, one-half of the WWE tag-team Cryme Tyme, Jayson Paul is a lifelong fan of pro-wrestling. After spending about eight years in WWE, Paul has published two books, Damn! Why Did… [more]

A Myth of Love and Metals: Gem Fusion in Rebecca Sugar’s Steven Universe

“So we thought, why don’t we all marry each other?” “Ta-da!” “And if that’s not human enough for you, we throw in a little being born and some dying …” “We’re very sorry for your… [more]

Southern Bastards #16: Moving the Goalposts

There are eerie and tempting parallels between Coach Boss and a certain American President-elect. Both are brutal, simple-minded, deeply insecure tyrants, and both have a tendency to move the goalposts and declare victory when an… [more]

The Demon With a Thousand Names and One in Toby Fox’s Undertale, Part 2

In Part I of The Demon With a Thousand Names and One in Toby Fox’s Undertale, we focused on some of the game’s background, its medium and genre tropes, and began the process of illustrating… [more]

Doomsday, the 90′s, and Comic Book Innocence

Superman dies in Lois’ arms in the denouement of “Superman” no. 75 (1992) by Dan Jurgens and Brett Breeding. Source: https://comicbookclog.com/2015/06/05/comic-book-classics-revisited-the-death-of-superman-part-7/ The fall For a brief moment in the autumn of 1992, the Doomsday monster had… [more]

Descender #17: Connections

Descender takes a turn in issue #17 (released just before Christmas last year). This innovative and emotional science fiction comic has spent its past five issues on “singularity” stories, focusing on one character at a… [more]

Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All! The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks

In the first of two forewords to Turn Loose Our Death Rays and Kill Them All: The Complete Works of Fletcher Hanks (Fantagraphics), Paul Karasik describes the cult Golden Age cartoonist Fletcher Hanks as the “village… [more]

Smorgasbord #56: The Smorgie Awards 2016

It’s that most wonderful time of year again! Tom and Shawn welcome special guest Max Nestorowich to review the year in comics and help us hand out the Carrie Fisher Memorial Award for Best Female… [more]

Sequart Podcast #4: Humans and Paragons

For this 3-hour mega podcast, the contributors of Sequart’s latest book, Humans and Paragons: Essays on Super-Hero Justice, got together to reflect on their essays. Have super-hero comics become more nuanced at exploring social issues… [more]

Arrival: Science Fiction for Grownups

Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve, has the structure of a magic trick. It slowly, carefully, shows us something in its first few minutes, then gives us about 70 minutes of misdirection before showing us what… [more]

Sequart Releases Humans and Paragons: Essays on Super-Hero Justice

Sequart is proud to announce the publication of Humans and Paragons: Essays on Super-Hero Justice, edited by Ian Boucher. Super-heroes, said to represent justice, have saturated popular culture at a time when the American criminal… [more]