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 “Will Eisner” from The Cultural Gutter
The History of Black Comic Book Heroes Through the Ages
Dart Adams Presents: Black Like Me: The History of Black Comic Book Heroes Through the Ages, Part One (1900-1968)and Part Two (1969-2008). (Click it! It's amazing).
"People
don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."--Malcolm
X / Malik El-Shabazz, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told To
Alex Haley)
My feeling about Ebony, for what little that's worth, is that he's a character best left alone. I enjoyed Mr Cooke's take, for example, but the truth was that he wasn't Ebony at all. Any attempt to give weight to Ebony only seems to accentuate how horribly racist the original character was. Ebony as originally portrayed is so thin a person, so pathetic a comic relief, so ignorant a stereotype, that trying to turn him into even a two-dimensional character seems to me quite futile. The only endearing qualities he had were his friendliness, loyalty and determination, all of which only worked as "positives" if we view his friendliness and loyalty as "positive" components of his subservience to the Spirit. He's lovable because he's the type of Black boy that racists like to believe in: the black servant boy who's fulfilled by service to his master.
There's so much of The Spirit which I adore. I have the whole run of the Archives on my shelf. But Ebony isn't recastable as a character because there was never anything but a racist fantasy there to begin with. There's a great fondness for Ebony - though even that name is hard is type! - because The Spirit was so fine, and the tone of the surface of the stories so affable in their apparent humaneness. But Ebony's biography is already written, I think, in the very regret and shame which Mr Eisner to his credit expressed in later life. He knew there had been - and was - no excuse for perpetrating on Black Americans the prejudice which was so appallingly disastrous to his own ethnic grouping. Mr Eisner apologised and moved on. And I think the Spirit franchise should move on to; just having an Ebony draws the attention to what was, and rather than try to redemn such a character, why not create new ones? I certainly see no point in changing the characters gender. Move on. It's shameful, it's gone, move on.
But then, what do I know? If Mr Cooke believed that reworking Mr E was a good idea, then perhaps it was. And given how you obviously believe that such a project is worthwhile, then I'll be happy to engage with it when and if it comes. But still, if there was nothing more than racism there, why add anymore? What was there to save in the first place?
Wicked posters for Raleigh, North Carolina's Cinema Overdrive film series.
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Here are some pictures of the ladies reading comics for Read Comics in Public Day. As Gail Simone writes, "Take note everybody in comics!" (For the record, Carol read Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service 5 on a sidewalk bench, but there's no photo).
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48 vs. 61 in Rintaro and Katsushiro Otomo's excellent bicycle racing short where the racers look kinda like Rintaro and Otomo. Also, damn fine music and possible steampunkery.
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Klingon opera has finally happened. Get an earful at Cinematical. (The musical part begins at about 2:15).
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 
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..."
"People
don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book."--Malcolm
X / Malik El-Shabazz, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (As Told To
Alex Haley)