There have always been female fans of comics, even if the business hasn’t played to that audience very faithfully. But for a brief moment, teenage girls and young women were one of the biggest demos in the industry. Specifically, during the 1950s boom in passionate, dramatic, tear-stained romance comics.
Boundless, a new collection of stories by the Canadian cartoonist Jillian Tamaki, refracts the world into strange miniatures. Helen inexplicably shrinks down to sub-atomic proportions, more bemused than alarmed; Jenny starts following a doppelganger on the “mirror Facebook,” consumed with parasitic envy towards…
Jacqueline Frances, aka Jacq the Stripper, is twirling around the pole. She is certainly dressed like a professional dancer in her powder blue bodysuit, enormous gold hoop earrings, and day-glo platform heels. Usually when she does this, she’s making her living in front of a club full of male patrons. Tonight, she’s…
Despite the enthusiastic response to Netflix’s Jessica Jones—the whiskey-swigging, doesn’t-give-a-bag-of-dicks Marvel heroine we so dearly needed—she has remained strangely absent from comic-book stands. Now, however, Marvel plans to correct this oversight with an upcoming series featuring Jones as the lead character.
When I came back to school at 29, after spending most of my twenties as a civilian, one thing I noticed was that it’s fun to laugh there. It’s fun to laugh in a classroom setting.
First off, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the top entry in the Jenny Craig songbook is 1-800-97Jenny. Can’t touch those syllables.
Over at Esquire, Stephen Marche—who you may remember from that time he described one single Megan Fox eyebrow as “the sublime, a force of nature, the patterns of waves crisscrossing a lake, snow avalanching down the side of a mountain, an elaborately camouflaged butterfly”—did a great thing by getting a nine-year-old…
"What is the clothes person you are most scared of becoming?" was the question. I can't remember how it came up, but my friend Daoud and I were both able to answer quickly. His description of the Asymmetric Belt Problem was so complete. It fell right out, a perfect thing. That's what made me want to find more…
You have no idea how many times I have tried to draw myself naked.
In 2008, The New Yorker published a piece called "The Itch." It was about a woman who picked through the skin on her scalp until she touched her own skull. Then she picked through her skull and touched her brain.
The toy aisle, as we've discussed many times, is so thoroughly divided by gender it's like walking onto the set of some heavy-handed Star Trek episode about the folly of prejudice. Well, one store is a little less stereotype-driven today, thanks to one little girl's very annoyed face.
Over the weekend, New York Comic Con saw the usual crowd of geeks, nerds, cosplayers, and other pop culture enthusiasts. But it also saw a huge shift in the discussion about representation in comics and other media.
Hey comics fans! This weekend at New York Comic Con, DC Comics announced a new Wonder Woman series, Wonder Woman '77 (similar to the Batman '66 title), which will be based on the Wonder Woman TV show starring Lynda Carter that aired from 1975 to 1979. You know what that means: skateboarding Wonder Woman!
The comic book industry is not particularly well-known for portraying women in a non- insanely-sexualized manner (you can't fight crime without a boob window, as we have all observed over the years). Even given that, a recent Spider-Woman cover somehow managed to slink under the world's already-low expectations with…
Alison Bechdel, the cartoonist behind Dykes to Watch Out For, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, and Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, and, of course, the ever-relevant Bechdel Test, has been named a recipient of this year's MacArthur Fellows, also known as the "genius grant." AWESOME.
Okay folks. Marvel's superhero/unlikely heroes movie game on point. DC has taken their dark-ish reboot game to television with shows like Arrow, The Flash, Gotham, and Constantine. And while we all await the announcement of a super heroine movie, DC has just announced that their next TV adaptation of a comic book…
Since news dropped that Archie Andrews will be killed off in one of the summer issues of the "Life with Archie" series, there's been buzz about how exactly it was going to go down. Archie Comics co-CEO and publisher Jon Goldwater stated that he would die selflessly as a hero in a way that "epitomizes not only the…
Archie Andrews, the namesake of the 73-year-old comic book franchise, will meet his demise in a forthcoming issue of Life With Archie. According to Archie Comics CEO Jon Goldwater, "This isn't a random one-off or 'what-if' story that we're doing as a gag… It's a once-in-a-lifetime event, and we are being very…
Last year, DC Comics' Jeff Lemire announced he was developing a new superhero character for the Justice League United (formerly known as Justice League Canada) title —a Cree teenage girl inspired by Shannen Koostachin, the late Attawapiskat activist in Canada who was nominated for an International Children's Peace…
Fans of Girls and fans of Archie comics unite and rejoice—Lena Dunham is slated to write a four-part story for the classic comic series.
