This is weird…. So you know how Youtube tries to make recommendations based on what you watch? So Steph sometimes watches youtube videos on our AppleTV. I love AppleTV, but the most annoying thing about the Youtube app on it is that it doesn’t have multiple users like the Netflix app does. You just log…
So we’re a week into the 2016 Olympics and there are a couple things that have been bothering me. These aren’t necessarily things that have never bothered me before. But they are things that I have just been keenly aware of this Olympiad and I just had to write them down and get other people’s…
I don’t think I was ever looking for a Suicide Squad movie. I don’t think anyone was. It’s not like Batman v. Superman. There’s no point as a kid where I was growing up saying “God, I hope one day there’s a movie of this.” That was a huge advantage to WB. Because, a year ago…
Hmm, now here’s something that I really kinda want feedback on but I wonder how many people are going to be willing to comment given the subject matter. Ah well… lets see. Let’s talk about geek porn! A few weeks back, I tweeted that I was watching porn or academic research but that it was totally 100%…
(This is a review of the Batman: The Killing Joke animated movie adaptation that was just released. I’m going to mostly avoid spoilers if I can, but they will be there. But the book is from 1988. Honestly, there isn’t much to spoil… but if you’re worried about that… well, i guess that’s your damn fault for waiting…
So, with my most recent book I’m reading, I’m getting into a domain of comic book (well, in this case more properly geek culture in general) study that I don’t really know as much about, at least not formally. Fan culture. Specifically, so called “fanon” and “fanfic” communities. I’ve come to really like just posting…
Now here’s a concept I haven’t given much thought to. People who follow my Goodreads updates might have noticed that I’ve been spending this summer reading a lot of academic theory books on comics and superheroes. I’m currently reading The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines by Mike Madrid. Good book very…
So obviously something horrible happened with the mass shooting in Dallas yesterday. And as I predicted when in my last post, that pretty much meant that my renewed faith in humanity could shrivel up and die. If Micah Johnson proved anything he proved that racist killings are not limited to white people and not limited…
This is another one of those posts like my last couple based on random thoughts I’ve had while doing my current research. Right now, I’m reading Jeffrey A. Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans. It’s a very interesting book. I’ve had it for a while and read part of it before but never read…
So, as sort of an addition to my last blog post (about racial representation in superhero comics)… I’ve been reading a book called Dangerous Curves, by Jeffrey Brown. Mostly it is about gender and fetishization of female characters in action stories (movies mostly, but also comics, TV and novels). In other words, the kind of…
One of the nice things about my academic research being focused on comic books is that it’s a lot easier to have random people respond to my thoughts (or spark them) than it would be if I were into something like medieval lit or something. When I asked people to give me ideas on gender…
So my cousin, Denna reshared this meme on Facebook last night and it’s been weighing on my mind ever since. It features pictures of Halle Berry, Janet Jaclson, J-Lo and Kim Kardashian in lingerie with captions showing that each has been married three times and then a picture of David and Tamela Mann posing in their…
Just about two years ago, I wrote a blog post about how I didn’t really like the idea of making Sam Wilson, the Falcon, into the new Captain America. I actually stand by that. My reasoning at the time (and now) wasn’t the typical geek reasoning which basically boils down to a fear of change…
I was perusing Facebook a little bit ago and my friend Dan mentioned that he’d recently bought the DVD of Cannonball Run, a great film classic if there ever was one (yes it is! Fuck you!) This got him talking a bit about Cannonball Run vs. Cannonball Run II and it made me ask if…
So this fall, I have been given the opportunity to teach a class of my own design at Duquesne University. I’m calling it “Sex, Violence and Comics,” and in a way, I guess I’ve basically been preparing for this all of my life. I mean, I like sex, I like comics, I like viole… umm…