Friday, December 18 2009
The Big Nowhere: Rudy Wurlitzer’s Rediscovered Trilogy and Bob Dylan Revisited
The myths of unspoiled frontiers and the freedom of the open road, lives played out on the margins of society, attachment and detachment, wrestling matches with the ghosts of Samuel Beckett and Louis L’Amour…
Thursday, December 10 2009
Forget McCloud (or Maybe Not, Baudrillard)
Scott McCloud's text does not make any concessions to doubters. It gives people permission to start from the presumption that comics are 'real' art, as well as 'real' literature.
Friday, November 20 2009
What We Talk About When We Talk About Supergirl’s Shorts
Supergirl's summer costume change -- which included concealing shorts under her skirt as she flew about, kicking butt -- reveals a lot about our changing superheroes.
Tuesday, October 13 2009
Are Comics Like Reading with Training Wheels?
Reading a comic requires multiple forms of literacy and levels of interpretation. Every movement from word to image and back again so as to create a coherent, narrative whole engages the reader’s brain in distinct ways.
Friday, September 18 2009
Comic Re-Imagining
Not all comic book adaptations are created equal, especially not when comparing our own imaginings with what actually happens when books are moved from print to screen.
Thursday, August 27 2009
G.I. Joe’s Future Hangs on the Unbalanced
The fate of 'The Rise of Cobra' (both the toys and the movie) might depend on something completely out of Hasbro’s control: nostalgia.
Wednesday, August 12 2009
Comics, Art for the Idiosyncratic
With little pressure to conform to storytelling or visual norms, comics are rife with artists like Jason Shiga, who bends and splices genres, and whose aesthetic sense is readily identifiable as his own.
Thursday, July 9 2009
Barbara Thorson, Giant Killer, is Within Us All
We needn’t substitute our daily fears with the supernatural to understand what it means to adopt different identities for different purposes and to feel both tied to and apart from others, but in Barbara’s case, it helps.
Tuesday, July 7 2009
Truth Against Truth: The Work of Adrian Tomine
Tomine has a gift for capturing body language and facial expressions -- his characters often say more in a silent panel than most say with an entire word balloon.
Tuesday, June 2 2009
Is the ‘New York Times’ Tracking Porn Sales Now?
That “comics” persists in connoting “pulp” and “graphic novels” implies something “literary” is purely a matter of convention, and is not because those are the inherent meanings or implications of the terms.
Thursday, May 14 2009
Meaningless Landscapes: G. Willow Wilson’s and M.K. Perker’s ‘air’
Airports and airplanes are extreme manifestations of a placeless McWorld, and Jihad is a backward-looking form of resistance to that placelessness, but we need not be limited by those choices.
Friday, May 1 2009
Like Movies—with Buttons
Like Edwin S. Porter realizing that a series of shots was how you structured a film, games have to abandon the presumption that they need to obey a linear narrative or controlled message and just let the player loose.
Thursday, March 26 2009
English-Only? Not Quite: Linguistic Difference in Jessica Abel’s La Perdida
The interaction between cartoonist, language, and reader is unusually subtle and complex in Jessica Abel's La Perdida
Wednesday, February 25 2009
Getting Through Hard Times: Re-visiting Andi Watson’s Breakfast After Noon
In our sobering economy, Breakfast After Noon is more relevant than ever, as it addresses the psychic and emotional toll of unemployment.
Thursday, January 29 2009
Metabots and Deconstructicons: Transformers Goes Postmodern
I am happy to report that after 25 years, the 'Transformers' franchise has finally gone postmodern… no thanks to 'Transformers Energon'.
Thursday, January 15 2009
Convergence Culture: the Many Faces of Hellboy
Different media means different Hellboys. Mike Mignola's versus Guillermo del Toro's.
Tuesday, December 16 2008
Capturing the Abstract in the Concrete
What do the worlds contained within comics, within and between panels, tell us about the worlds in which we live out our lives?
Friday, November 21 2008
From a Fluid Culture to a Culture of Steam: Alan Moore
For all the self-serious Deep Thoughts and the sometimes unsettling material in DeZ Vylenz The Mindscape of Alan Moore, Moore can be a startlingly funny host.
Monday, February 25 2008
Missing Places I’ve Never Been: A Love Letter to Alex Ross
The appeal, the madness of Ross' painting is that it makes a scene involving a fight between spandex-clad do-gooders seem almost as important as Rockwell's depiction of the first step to end racial segregation.
Wednesday, June 6 2007
Who Will Watch the Watchmen?
To reduce Watchmen to just another superhero movie is to miss the point entirely, and one can't help but anticipate that the result will have all the cultural relevance of a supermarket paperback novelization of Citizen Kane.
