“We don’t care to be understood, to understand is to lie.” – Implied Violence mission statement The only real constants to avant-pop act Parenthetical Girls were front man Zac Pennington’s melodramatic, ever-reaching vocals and taboo lyrical fixations. Throughout Parenthical Girls’ career, the band shifted line-ups and aesthetics, utilizing ornate instrumentation at first, then wielding increasingly more electronic […]
Black Cloud #1 is a Promising Political Fantasy Bogged Down by Exposition
When you get down to it, America essentially willed itself into being a global superpower by hyping up and commodifying the collective dream of America. The Industrial Revolution saw rogues and con artists and thieves rebrand themselves as entrepreneurs, who sold their fellow Americans and the world at large on the idea of themselves as […]
Drugs & Wires is a Clever and Flashy Cyberpunk Alt-history
For the most part, I never got the appeal of alt-histories. I had nerdy high school friends who would carry around hefty Harry Turtledove tomes about “the second American civil war” or apocalyptic visions of a Nazi-run America. Given that we’re currently living in what feels like a spin on that latter alt-history, maybe I […]
Questionable Comics: Boy Akkerman and Iain Laurie
Questionable Comics is a series where Dan Hill surveys professionals from every corner of the comics industry about their methods and experience. Boy Akkerman is a Dutch artist who co-created Captain Ultimate and also co-founded the Eurocomics mag DutchMetal. What current projects are you working on? I set up a new anthology style comicmagazine called DutchMetal. It […]
Crime Beat: On American Crime and the Terror of Desire
The third episode of the third season of American Crime is the best episode of this show that’s been broadcast to date and by extension one of the greatest episodes of television ever to air. For this installment of the column I’m not going to talk about what it was so much as what it […]
Dueling Auteurs: Kong: Skull Island vs Godzilla
Because we’re geeks, we frequently find it’s easier to understand an artist’s work when comparing them to another artist, finding out the common or antithetical traits that bind them. Hence Dueling Auteurs, a column where we take two auteurs from any medium and compare and contrast them. This month, we pit Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ new Kong: Skull Island […]
All Time Comics: Crime Destroyer is an Incompetent, Garish Insult to Readers
As a dumb kid without much in the way of allowance, most of my early comics acquisitions came from the bargain bin. I was painfully out of the loop when it came to the events of the ’90s and my knowledge of comics history was fragmented and sparse, cribbed from backmatter and little yellow editor […]
The Brand New Testament Is A Surreal, Inventive Take On Mortality And God
The Brand New Testament, as its premise, poses a question everyone has pondered: What would you do with the rest of your life, if you knew exactly when it was going to end? Would you continue as normal or drop everything to live exactly as you’ve always wanted? The film considers this question in the […]
Crime Beat: American Crime “In the System” is a Little Too Narratively Utilitarian
“Anyone we know?” is one of the first lines of dialogue spoken in the latest episode of American Crime, regarding a fire that killed 15 workers employed by the farming company that Jeanette (Felicity Huffman) has married into. From there we begin the long arc of the episode’s central theme: desensitization from those exposed to […]
Crime Beat: Network Television’s Best Show is Off to an Expectedly Promising Start
American Crime is a jewel of a program, not only for its harrowing performances and sophisticated narratives but also for its ability to disabuse its audience of the necessity of HBO’s patented Tits-and-Viscera formula in making compelling prestige television. It flows with the purpose of classical tragedy, and as such manages to pack incredible things […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- …
- 64
- Next Page »