Exploring the effects of clothes & costumes on our understanding of gender, sexuality, and identity, and how our gender, sexuality, and identity helps us to understand, idiosyncratically, clothing and costumes in comics. With special attention to fantastic proxies and to the straights, cis, trans, queers, and transvestites in comics, making comics, and reading comics.
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Many comics fans need a new issue every month. Many comics fans love stats and rigid continuity. They want collections and canons. But, to love comics, do you have to crave new successive issues, memorize numbers, file everything, then get furious at writers who don’t marry characters the way you wanted? What is it to love comics outside of serialization, characters outside of their histories?
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Ian Edginton, Whilce Portacio, Ariel Olivetti, Warren Ellis, Jorge Lucas, and Gerry Alanguilan turned X-Force into a farcical, loud, fashion-forward spyfy smash-up for fourteen months, and nobody was ready for it.
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The Tempest, the final volume of Kevin O’Neill and Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is a six-issue illustration of how language infects and affects us, a strange mix of how fiction and telling can harm us and indulgence in “harmful” representation as harmless fun.
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Lauren Myracle, Jeremy Lawson, Isaac Goodhart, and Deron Bennett present a tale of an abused teenager making sense of the world by becoming a thief. A surprising look at misogyny, immaturity, homelessness, class and gender imbalances, written and drawn for a YA audience, but with value and excitement for all.
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Jeremy Whitley, Gurihiru, Elsa Charretier, and Megan Wilson’s The Unstoppable Wasp is a moving, caring, fun, sad, adventurous comic about superheroes, mental health, family, friendship, love, tacos stress, wrestling, trauma, and girls doing awesome science.
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Oldguy! The Mirror of Love! Nancy! Late Bloomer! Street Poet Ray! The merger of poetry and comics, with examples from the work of Tim Mayer, William Trowbridge, Alan Moore, Maré Odomo, José Villarrubia, Junko Hosizawa, and Michael Redmond.
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Exploring the origins, re-codification, and uses of the term, Mary Sue, from Star Trek to Gargoyles, Captain Marvel to Batman to Squirrel Girl and Sally Floyd.
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Elektra was brought back at the behest of a toy company. Mike Deodato and Peter Milligan are beloved comics talent, and Christie Scheele has always been under-appreciated as a great colorist and fantastic painter. It was 1997 and Marvel decided to launch its first Elektra ongoing series, its first solo series and some of the first work, at all, featuring the character without creator, Frank Miller, in tow.
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Comics are wonderfully suited to showing lies, misunderstandings, and individually held truths. A look at personal lies, systemic obfuscation, and good will conflation in Cheat, Female Furies, Mek and more, with attention to Gene Ha, Cecil Castellucci, Christine Norrie, Adriana Melo, Warren Ellis, Felicia Day, Bruce Willis, et al.
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Religion, pop music, class, culturism, code-switching, prostitution, recreational drug use, fashion, tabloid journalism, trauma, drama, and fascism chic: The Joe Casey Uncanny X-Men is a run that aimed high and shot about crotch level. An interest blip on the X-Men radar screen, that really stands out, but maybe we still don’t know what exactly it was.
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Franklin Richards could be Woody Allen’s son in any Woody Allen production.
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