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I’m a straight man, but I’ve never felt comfortable performing masculinity in the way that’s most commonly been proscribed to me. Growing up in suburban Texas, I felt the constant pressure to conform to a certain identity–watch football, like cars, find a certain kind of woman attractive. It didn’t help that my hooked-nose and sometimes-curly […]
About Shea Hennum
About Shea Hennum
Shea Hennum writes for Loser City, Paste Magazine, The AV Club, and Playboy. He co-hosts the monthly manga episode of The Comics alternative, and he's contributed backmatter to Shutter by Joe Keatinge and Leila Del Duca.
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Lights, Camera…Action?: A Dialogue That Asks “Are Superhero Movies, Action Movies?”
Shea Hennum and Christopher M. Jones spend a lot of time arguing the rules of genre. So instead of letting them continue to distract us here in the imaginary Loser City offices, we forced them to get together and attempt to settle one of their biggest semantic conflicts: are superheroes action movies? Shea Hennum: So, […]
Good Morning Karachi Review
Good Morning Karachi is cleaved in two. The action of the film is conducted in both Urdu and English, and the separation is nearly discrete. English is coded as the language of progress, civility, luxury; it’s the language spoken by the elites, the beautiful people. Rafina, the lead character, quite literally sees learning English as […]
Growing Pains: The World of Kanako Review
The World of Kanako is the most precise and complete cinematic representation of adolescence ever committed to film. That’s not to say that it renders a compelling portrait of adolescent characters—the movie is actually about a middle-aged alcoholic searching for his Tony Montana of a daughter. What I mean is that the film itself, its […]
Speak On, Not Over: Strange Fruit and Critical Dilemmas
In 1773, when an 18-year-old Phillis Wheatley attempted to publish her first collection of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious, and Moral, she was interviewed by a panel of 18 men who sought to verify whether or not the poems were actually written by Wheatley. The reasoning was that a black woman was simply incapable […]
What We Talk About When We Talk About Money In Comics
Last week, Big Trouble in Little China artist Brian Churilla made a post on his Tumblr regarding the financial realities of making comics. He writes: So you want to be a comic book artist..? Here’s some sobering information. One year. 12 issues. 264 pages. 4 covers. […] This was a strictly work-for-hire job on a […]
Advance Review: Fight Club 2 #1 Fuck Your First Rule
I used to love Chuck Palahniuk. His prose was well-groomed—coiffed and manicured. I discovered Fight Club and Survivor my sophomore year in high school, and my teenage brain, so desperate to intellectually Other itself from its banal and ephemera-focused peers, confusing superficiality and accidental satire for meaningful substance, latched onto his oeuvre. I gorged myself […]