Tuesday, April 24 2012
Comics to Film (and Film to Comics): The Two-Way Street Between Page and Screen
Movies like The Avengers are better thought of as character adaptations than adaptations of specific books. When seen that way, we recognize the characters as transmedia creations.
Wednesday, March 28 2012
Pulp, Bricks and Mortar: Why Local Comics Shops Still Work in the Digital Age
Many comics stores have adapted in the same way that many comics conventions have: by developing new aspects of their business in related, but still distinct, areas of pop culture and fandom including comics-related merchandise, role-playing games, and genre entertainment.
Wednesday, February 15 2012
Digital Comics and the Limits of Sharing
Digital publishing and distribution not only changes the nature of reading for readers/consumers, it also has implications for another important aspect of American comics culture: sharing.
Tuesday, February 14 2012
Some People Have a City Instead of a Life: The Work of Tim Hall
Tim Hall possesses the uncanny gift to compress startling insight into short phrases with such care and concision that he could likely turn a Twitter feed into a system of philosophy.
Thursday, January 12 2012
Killing the Page: Comics’ Digital Conundrum
There are thorny creative and artistic questions to be addressed in the development of comics for e-reading; we'll have to get beyond models that see the digital as little more than an adaptation of the analog.
Wednesday, November 30 2011
Hard to Make a Living: Kickstarter and Comics Creators
Comics writers and artists are turning to Kickstarter both to fund specific projects and to buy themselves time to create.
Wednesday, October 19 2011
Comics Needs Women: Why Marvel and DC Should Have Been at Geek Girl Con
There is goodwill to be spent and good faith conversations to be had about the place of women and female characters in the DC and Marvel universes, and an event like Geek Girl Con is an ideal place for that kind of dialogue.
Thursday, September 15 2011
The Comics Writer and the Fall of the Superpowers
We often think of comic books as the height of escapism, but recent events point to an industry in a death spiral, due in no small part to how badly it mistreats the writers on which it depends.
Tuesday, September 6 2011
Show and Tell: On Words and Images in Comics
While there are prose books that use pictures for illustrative purposes, only in comics are stories actively told through both written words and drawn pictures.
Wednesday, July 6 2011
How Intricate Can Marvel’s Storyworld Become on Film?
Marvel producers are attempting to create a film analog to the Marvel Universe that knits together the publisher's mainline titles. Will moviegoing audiences keep coming back for the next story, and the next?
Monday, May 23 2011
Comics Superheroes Leap Across the Great Cultural Divide
Bounding from the pages of comic books onto the screens of films and TV, our superheroes unite formerly divided interests -- comics geeks vs. everyone else.
Wednesday, March 30 2011
BOOM! Studios’ CBGB Anthology: The Magic and Banality of Place
Whether CBGB had a special poetry to it or was nothing more than a decent rock club is less interesting than the debate itself.
Wednesday, March 9 2011
Quantum and Woody’s Mildly Postmodern Gags
Are Quantum and Woody a dynamic duo, or just another wearying odd couple with a duo dynamic?
Tuesday, March 1 2011
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ as Motion Comic: Paper Doll or New Art Form?
Will motion comics become the digital equivalent of the film strip? Merely an interesting artifact of a particular period of media production? Or are they the crude beginnings of a new art form?
Monday, February 14 2011
Punk Rock? It’s a Black, Jewish, Southern Thang
Punk is no vacuum, no airtight, sealed white music form. It's a repository of culture -- magnetized, manifold, and chock-full of merit – that was, and is, impacted by Jewish, black, and Southern experiences.
Wednesday, February 9 2011
Raimi’s Last Hunt: A Brief Reappraisal of the ‘Spider-Man’ Trilogy
Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy is like his Evil Dead trilogy: the first entry is self-conscious, the second is more of a remake than a sequel, and the third is so different from the first two that it almost qualifies as a different genre.
Friday, February 4 2011
Lynd Ward and Walt Disney: Illustrators of America’s Tumultuous History
Much as Walt Disney would do with his famed television programs of the '50s and '60s, Lynd Ward used his talents with watercolor, oil, brush and ink, mezzotint, and lithography to illustrate hundreds of inspiring historical biographies of true-life American heroes for children to admire and emulate.
Friday, January 21 2011
The Year in Review: The Best Comics of 2010, Part II
Regardless of format, what seems unlikely to change is the use of comics for serial storytelling. In the future, this may take place on the web, or in e-editions, it may not follow a monthly publishing schedule, but like television, comics is both historically associated with serials and well-suited to making and delivering these kinds of stories.
Wednesday, January 19 2011
Mighty Morphin’ Masterpiece: One Man’s Inexplicable Love for ‘Power Rangers: The Movie’
The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers TV series was after my time, and a passing glance at any given episode was enough to convince me that it was, well, 'stunted'. So why have I seen Power Rangers: the Movie five times?
Tuesday, December 14 2010
The Year in Review: The Best Comics of 2010, Part I
Through some of the best comics of 2010, we look at how stories are told in comics, and how the medium benefits from being a subcultural or marginal form of narrative art.
