Tag: Pop Culture
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Manga Miss
Manga publishing is a huge industry in Japan, which has the largest and most diverse comics industry in the world. It’s really beginning to gain a foothold here in the US, if the library shelves and bookstores are any indication. I was introduced to it in Raw Magazine in the early 80s, a special section…
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Zine But Not Heard? Hardly.
This blog is about art matters and books. The ‘intellectual’ mediums (movies, theatre, opera, literary novels) and the media once reviled as ‘lowbrow’- comics, TV, genre lit, both interest me. Do they intersect? For me, they do, and for many they always have. An influence on my thinking about pop culture was Hermenaut, a now…
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Collected Thoughts
The gentleman does not give away his thinking easily. Though he is purposeful, confident, even swaggering, and seems to be going places. Still he is hard to read. Staring intently into the space ahead of him, arms swinging as if to launch himself, he is strangely rooted, though he has 4 legs. A bit ghostly,…
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Besties 2025
My annual list of the best things I read in comics got a little lost in the shuffle this year. I read many comics, more than most years, though these were the clear leaders. Final Cut, Burns, 2024: Burns is well known and justly celebrated for his teen horror comics. These are hyperreal clear line…
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Ask Me About My Feminist Agenda: A Reading List
Spring rains and reading go together like April and May. Throw in some dark roast, or a red blend, and you’ve got a respectable lifestyle, except in MAGAt-land, of course. It struck me how many of this diverse list at least touched on women’s roles, which continue to evolve, despite the fascist backlash. Prose first,…
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Pop Go the Besties
It’s been a year. Filled with event, not all of them positive. We forge on, after a crazy summer of family matters, and my usual art show scramble. Not to mention the Red States’ massive brain fart in November. I survived the summer family drama, and then got through the art show rush, then I…
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Besties Be On My Way
I had a lot more time than usual to read this year, and I took it, sometimes ignoring my TV for days into weeks. I read quite a bit of prose this year ( finally finishing The Sot-Weed Factor), but there are reams and megapixels devoted to that, and so I return to my niche,…
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The Resties
Each year end, to join in the fun of year end book lists, but also to sort of process what I’ve read, I put out a favorites list I call Besties. It’s actually two lists; one features recent or recently discovered books, with a Bestiest as top title; and the second dwells mostly on collections…
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It’s Beginning To Look a Lot Like Besties
Besties, if you’ve been living in a MAGA echo chamber, are my breathlessly anticipated yearly list of best comics. Or, as Marvel called their comics for a brief moment during the Stan Lee fever dream of superhero magic that jump started the Marvel Cinematic Universe many decades ago when bell bottoms were wide, and colors…
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Fast NonFiction
It’s in the nature of comics to feel like light reading. I’m not sure that’s true- I have a Yoshiharu Tsuge book of seminal manga stories that is still waiting for me to settle into a slower routine after MoPrint, as I just don’t feel I can give it the focus it needs. Manga is…
