Thumbnail: The Mystical World of Marvel's Crazy Headdresses
Womenswear in superhero costumes hasn’t always been about skintight, sexy unitards. In the early Silver Age of comics, readers saw the inception of the mystically-inspired heroine; one imbued with...
View ArticleThumbnail: In Praise of the Superheroic Male Miniskirt
There are many things you can point to in superhero comics as examples of sexism and gender essentialism. Today we will ignore those. Today, we come not to bury comics and their handling of gender...
View ArticleThumbnail: Yoshihiro Togashi, Master of the Fight Scene
Hunter x Hunter is about people classified as “Hunters” that specialize in finding and hunting things. Sometimes these things are rare jewels, and sometimes they’re human corpses. Over almost 20 years,...
View ArticleThumbnail: The Distillation of Ideas in Mike Del Mundo Covers
Comics covers are strange beasts. While comics themselves are sequential art --- pictures arranged in just the right order to tell a story or convey an emotion --- covers freeze that process into a...
View ArticleThumbnail: Pacing And Violence In 'Stray Bullets'
As endemic as violence is to mainstream comics, it's rare when you see a representation of it that inspires an appropriate level of shock. That's to be expected in superhero comics, where the gap...
View ArticleWhat 'Steven Universe' Teaches About Being Between Two Worlds
Being mixed race is an endless, exhausting lesson in liminality. There are days you’re unshakably confident in who you are and your place in the world, followed by days you are wrecked by the ambiguity...
View ArticleThumbnail: How 'No Mercy' Gets the High School Experience Right
I took six AP classes over the course of my high school career. I was president of the Readers’ Club. I won awards for poetry and public speaking. But because I was not uniformly incredible at...
View ArticleThumbnail: The Epic Sound Effects of Russell Dauterman's Asgard
There is probably no superhero comic better known for the lettering of its sound effects than Walter Simonson's 1983-1987 run on Marvel's Thor. John Workman's lettering on that seminal, still-beloved...
View ArticleThumbnail: The Heroic Villainy of Professor Moriarty in Comics
Professor James Moriarty, the “Napoleon of Crime” and the arch-nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, is one of the most iconic villains in fiction. And that’s always been a little odd. As any die-hard...
View ArticleThumbnail: The Arrogance and Endurance of Doctor Doom
It’s been said that Doctor Doom is not just one of the greatest supervillains of all time but rather that he’s the supervillain, the one that defines them all. Whenever Doom appears, he's always a huge...
View ArticleThumbnail: The Eclectic Cast Of 'Contest of Champions'
The core concept of Marvel’s Contest of Champions ongoing series is based loosely on an app based loosely on a comic from 1982. In the game, by developers Kabam, The Collector tasks you as a summoner,...
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