Sociology

"The Winds of Winter," the finale to the sixth season of HBO's Game of Thrones was one of the most thrilling episodes of television ever. It was triumphant, revelatory, sad, powerful - all the...

Years ago I found myself in Sofia, Bulgaria as part of the production team on a Dolph Lundgren movie I had written (in three days because that’s how the low-budget action kingdom works), kept around to do last-minute changes as is sometimes the case in filmmaking. Bulgaria was a remarkable place, a country with a much older history than America, a history you felt in the architecture, in the manner and the speech of people who had not forgotten the old ways.

The firing of Shelly Bond after more than 20 years of loyal service to DC has had an unintended consequence. Although referencing incidents utterly unrelated to Bond's dismissal, it did stir outrage among those...

The second of the Matrix moviemakers, and sometime comics scripter/publishers (they had their own comics company called Burlyman for a while), has now come out as trans, introducing herself as Lilly Wachowski to the...

When I saw an item about a new book in TwoMorrows Modern Masters from Paolo Rivera in my feed I thought "Oh cool! Rivera is such a good artist. "And then I wondered "Have...

We've been writing quite a bit in the last year about the slow death of comics media, and one of the reasons is that it's hard for a small, passion run site to compete...

Gunfire at the Ft. Myers charitable event created a real-life running zombie herd, but the organizers' security safeguards may have helped prevent further harm. Shootings have become a depressing fact of life here in the...

Last week, the cartoonist Julia Wertz wrote about the street and online harassment she's received in recent years, and the disparate response to it: A lot of men responded by asking me if I was...

In light of the incident involving Scott Allie and several attendees of the Boom! party at San Diego Comic Con that was brought to light earlier today, Dark Horse president Mike Richardson has released...

At the recently concluded Small Press Expo in Bethesda a very cool thing happened. A bunch of awards were presented to several talented, unique cartoonists who are turning out though provoking, beautifully crafted work, influential work. The winners were all popular and well deserved. And they all happened to be women. It was a thing, for sure, and much talked about. What struck me, first off, was just how strong the work was–Sophie Goldstein's multi leveled future history of a world where having a baby became a rebellious act, Emily Carroll's mastery of horror and structure, Eleanor Davis's powerful examination of self-sabotaging quests for self-esteem in many settings. The other thing that struck me was the contrast with the other conversations I was having at the show. Talking with people I used to work with in the "mainstream" comics industry about the long lists of men who would never have given Goldstein, Carroll or Davis a shot at telling their stories. Because they are women, and those people didn't think women could make good comics.

There is no matter more important in the United States right now than the matter of race. Between mass incarceration, permanent economic disadvantages, lack of access to health care and education, police shootings and...

A new French language website called BD Egalite (more or less "comics equality") has launched to address rampant sexism in the French comics market. The charter has been posted in English with a few...