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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]
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]
A Journey Through Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: Modern Times
In “Modern Times” we don’t get any answers to the previous chapter, or even new questions about the things that we already know. One hazard in writing these “reader impressions” of mine for each chapter… [more]
A Journey Through Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: X Marks the Spot
A lot of events occurred in Jerusalem’s “Rough Sleepers” chapter. Moore’s nature of time, at least with regards to Northampton and the Burroughs had been revealed as eternalism: as space and time existing simultaneously in… [more]
A Look at the Brazilian Comic Dora
Dora, by Brazilian wonder Bianca Pinheiro, is not yet available in English (if Pinheiro keeps growing, in about 15 years Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly will print it in a big book called “Bianca Pinheiro:… [more]
The Brilliance of Bill Everett’s Sub-Mariner, Marvel’s Superman
Bill Everett tribute for Marvel’s 75th and Daredevil’s 50th anniversaries (2014) by Stephen Sonneveld, featuring William Blake’s “The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea” (1805-1810) Bill Everett was an expert storyteller, whose… [more]
A Journey Through Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: Rough Sleepers
I didn’t know what to make of this chapter at first. To be honest, it’d been a while since I’d read Jerusalem after taking time to undertake some other projects. Certainly the preceding chapter “ASBOs… [more]
A Journey Through Alan Moore’s Jerusalem: “ASBOs of Desire”
There are a few things worth noting before I go on here. I might have mentioned this earlier, through my impressions of the previous chapter but unlike Alan Moore’s previous novel Voice of the Fire,… [more]
Why I Admire Rogue One
First, a warning: here there be spoilers. Seriously, spoilers. Spoilers… Okay? Still here? Good. Let me start by admitting that Rogue One is an imperfect movie. Ian Dawe has done his usual excellent job talking… [more]
Revisiting Crimson Empire
Written by Mike Richardson and Randy Stradley and illustrated by Paul Gulacy, Crimson Empire first premiered in 1997, and followed the exploits of a former Imperial royal guard Kir Kanos, as he tries to seek… [more]
Rogue One Stumbles, then Soars
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is appropriately titled. It isn’t a “Star Wars movie” in that it isn’t about the Skywalker family, nor is it about the specific large mythic arcs that define that… [more]
Can Shape-Shifters Change Into God-Like Beings?
The answer to the titular question is yes and no. However, in order to properly explain how I have come to this conclusion we first have to define the type of shape-shifter. There are the… [more]
Darth Vader – Office Bully
It wasn’t until I recently rewatched the three original Star Wars movies (and The Force Awakens) that I realized the Rebels win because of their diversity. They have women in positions of power and non-white… [more]
The Road to Rogue One
This time last year, as we were preparing to dig into the delights of The Force Awakens, long-time fans knew that at the very least the thought of doing a seventh episode and a third… [more]
Money and Trade at the End of the World
Every video roleplaying game has basically the same setup: shops offering increasingly powerful items and equipment accompany the path toward the final boss. You sell your junk there, make repairs, upgrade cloth armor to leather… [more]
The Present Future: A Critical Examination of Contemporary Science Fiction and its Connection to Current, Historical, and Social Events
Great science fiction is not defined by space operas or interstellar warfare, it is defined by its execution and integration of social, historical, and contemporary issues and whether it instills a specific message or conveys… [more]
Revisiting The Left Hand of Darkness
Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness in Freshman English during college was a formative experience. Only, I wasn’t prepared yet as an eighteen year old to fully appreciate how so until years… [more]