This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter. Our Guest Stars shine here
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Contact us here.
Recent Features
Disconnected Viewing
I don't have cable right now so I'm rewatching old shows and movies. A lot of them are animated. Such is my way. I'd like to have a nobler reason for rewatching them--something like when James revisited his favorite childhood books. And it's true—he did inspire me. But it's also true that I don't have cable.
Let's say you're the newly-sentient internet. How would you decipher
the meaning of all the bits and bytes whizzing past you? And what about
the real world outside your electronic realm?
Former Comics Editor, Guy Leshinski
has very kindly given us permission to reprint a prophetic interview
with Bryan Lee O'Malley in 2005. Will Bryan Lee O'Malley attain the
Holy Grail of cartoonists? As Bryan says, "We'll see..."
There’s a girl sitting on the subway.
She’s 16 or so, in a brown corduroy jacket and a pair of faded
sneakers, her feet propped on the seat across from her. She’s
absently brushing on lipstick, absorbed by Bryan Lee O’Malley’s
graphic novel Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life: Volume 1.
Results tagged “Godzilla Jr.” from The Cultural Gutter
Would You Let Your Daughter Marry Godzilla?
When Godzilla first waded out of the ocean to trample Odo Island in 1954, he was a monster for the times, serious as radiation poisoning. Japan was still rebuilding in the wake of WWII. Wartime traumas were still fresh. The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were only nine years past, and there was a new social class in Japan: the hibakusha.
i find this idea of godzilla as a 50 meter tall representation of something that can't be ignored but must be ignored facinating.
also, the whole idea of minilla being a cuted up hibakusha--and hence, sort of social mask, is really interesting too. "everything's fine--everybody look at minilla caper!"