From Mav: One of my favorite comic book characters when I was a kid was The Mighty Thor. One of the reasons Thor fascinated me was because he was entrenched in mythology outside of the comics. To me, it was cool being able to read a story by Walt Simonson and then later pull out…
Category: Call For Comments
Call for Comments: Generation X and Coming of Age Movies
From Mav: If you know me, you know I love movies. It’s one of the reasons I do this. If you know me, then you might also know that maybe my favorite movie last year was Lady Bird (I even wrote a review about it… cheap plug for my other site). Wayne watched it recently and we…
Call for Comments: Toxic Fandom
From Wayne: Last week actress Kelly Marie Tran, who played Rose Tico in Star Wars: The Last Jedi, deleted her Instagram account because of the constant abuse she was receiving from people who consider themselves “fans” of the Star War franchise. She was ridiculed for her race, her body, her performance, and basically took the…
Call for Comments: Impossible Bodies and the Spectacle of Violence
From Mav: We often watch action movies and talk about how realistic or unrealistic the fights are. Everyone always says “oh, I love John Wick. The action is so realistic!” No it’s not! In real life, fights are really kind of boring. At least most people would probably think they are. In real life a bar…
Call for Comments: Biography, History, Memoir, and Chutz-POW
Wayne Here: This week we’re going to engage in a little shameless self-promotion, or at least I am. A few years ago I was asked to participate in a comic book project. The Pittsburgh Holocaust Center was looking for a new way to teach Holocaust studies. Rather than talk about the horror and tragedy they…
Call For Comments: The Long Con
Comic Book conventions began as small gatherings of fans in the days before comic book stores and the internet provided a community for those in the hobby. The earliest shows were mainly places to find back issues to buy and trade. Professional writers and artists began to be featured as guests and many people wore…
Call For Comments: Teenage Wasteland: the adolescent sex narrative
I love the show Riverdale. I didn’t think I would. By all rights it should be absolutely horrible. I imagine that the pitch for the show went something like this… there where was a meeting where a 90 year old executive called in a producer and said: CW Exec: So all these comic book properties…
Call For Comments: Pop Culture and Religiosity
One of the fun things about doing a dissertation on comic books is that I get to spend some time lurking in random forums on the internet (Facebook groups, Redit, Tumblr, that sort of thing) just observing subcultural behavior in fan culture. Anyway, one particular group I monitor had a very odd interaction about a week ago…
Call for Comments: The Captain America Birthday Special
July 3, 2018
From Abby: The Fourth of July is nearly upon us and so that means it’s time to discuss Captain America because it’s his birthday. In the late 1930s and early 1940s there were plenty of Star-Spangled heroes running around in comics, but we don’t hear much about American Ace or Mr. America these days. And…