(The following review kind of contains spoilers for Office Christmas Party. Trust me… you really don’t care. I’ll try to keep them vague anyway. But they’re not ruining anything for you.) When I was but a wee lad, there was a TV show called USA: Up All Night. It was a Friday night movie show…
Now that my class on comics is over, I can get back to focusing on some of my own work. It’s another one of those times where I am doing some research for a comics paper and so it’s totally useful for me to just outsource some of my research to the internet. In this…
Since people said they’d be interested, I said I’d try to do more movie reviews of stuff that wasn’t necessarily geek movies. So I’m going to ease into it with a movie that has a mild comic book connection. Here goes. Last night I went to see Edge of Seventeen, a film I’d been looking forward to…
In my continuing plan to ignore the election for this week, I now present to you the final in my series of student guest blogs from my class on Sex, Violence and Comics. This one is from Danielle Vecchione. Dani is a sophomore Education major. Since the assignment was to write about either gender bending or…
Who wants to talk about something non election related? How about some good old fashioned gay talk? I actually specifically chose to not post about the election at all yesterday. At least not on my own blog. Some people wrote and asked me my opinions and I commented some other places, but I just kinda wasn’t…
I hope everyone is enjoying voting and bringing about the downfall of American democracy today. And if you’re not doing so, then you should totally go out and do so because voting is important. In the meantime, why not take a break from it and check into my continued series of “what Mav’s students are…
A bunch of people have asked me about the comic book class that I’m teaching this semester (no surprise, since I talk about it here all the time). So, I decided that it might be fun to borrow a page out of Chris Gavaler’s book (err… well, blog) and turn my blog over to four…
Last night I went and saw the new Doctor Strange movie. It was… fine… That’s almost a weird review for me to give a Marvel movie. There’s this weird thing about fans of superhero movies. They tend to be very territorial. There’s an assumption that if you don’t love every movie then something is wrong…
You know what’s sad? Push-pollers. Push pollers just don’t have the right kind of sticktoitness to be really effective. They need to take lessons from the phone scammers who normally call me. They have to work harder and really dig in there and try to convince me. Because this just went poorly. INT. PITTSBURGH HOME…
Way back when I started teaching my Sex, Violence and Comics class, the students actually requested a class focusing on cosplay. Then a couple days ago I asked for people’s thoughts on the homework that I’d be giving for that class. We did it on Halloween. Some people asked if I could share some of…
So, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, a couple of my students requested that we have a lesson on costumes and cosplay on Halloween. Since that’s theoretically a lot of the research I’m doing for my dissertation and because frankly it just sounded fun, I agreed. Now I’m putting together that assignment and lesson plan.…
I started the PCA/ACA paper I did last year with an anecdote about a little girl that I met at Baltimore Comicon a couple years ago. She was three years old and dressed as Harley Quinn. Here’s an excerpt from the story: In September of 2012, while attending Baltimore Comic Con, I met a three-year-old…
Honestly, this may be the greatest week in the history of American politics. I always find it fascinating living history. But right now, I don’t so much want to live history. I want to fast forward. I want to jump to thirty years in the future and i want to read a 2046 middle school American history…
I am a black man, born in the 1970s, who grew up as such a comic book nerd that I decided to go out and get a Ph.D in it. Today, Luke Cage has his own TV series. I just got home from work, so I have not watched a single episode yet. More so…
Starfire It’s another one of those times where I had a snazzy idea for teaching a concept in my comics class and realized “hey, you know what would be fun? Why don’t I outsource my materials gathering to the internet?” And really, I don’t have a good reason. In fact it’s…