By Zhu Bajiee
Warhammer is held up by the far-right as a shining example of a fictional property that enshrines the authoritarian ideal of “might makes right” and encapsulates an exclusionary worldview that seeks to justify intolerance and violence against the Other while enforcing strict social hierarchy, making mockery of egalitarian values and ideas of social progress. Yet it was not always thus…
Broadcast television and nuclear fission: two technologies with their origins in the early 20th century study of particle physics, two technologies whose early development was situated in the years before the outbreak of World War II, and two technologies whose global prominence and predominance rose in the years immediately following the war…
From the early ’70s through the early ’90s, Canadian artist and activist Carl Chaplin produced and exhibited a series of paintings depicting the atomic destruction of major cities from around the world “to point out the horror of what would happen to all of mankind in a nuclear war.” The series was called Art Nuko, and it became quite controversial…
In 1957, as the first artificial Earth satellite was launched into an elliptical orbit from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in present-day Kazakhstan, American science was suffering a crisis in self-image. No one in the Federal Government had predicted that the Soviets would claim the gold in the race to low Earth orbit…
In the mid-twentieth century, women’s bodies found themselves altered in strange ways by the ubiquity of radiation and attendant discourses about the power of the atom. In films such as Attack of the 50 Foot Woman (1958) and The Wasp Woman (1959), female anatomy is altered by external contagions or pathogens…
Gentlemen, this is our third Christmas here at We Are the Mutants. 2018 has been particularly rough on all of us. Our “real” jobs have been punishing, we’ve lost loved ones, we’ve been sick as dogs, our significant others have been sick as dogs, one of my kids was in the hospital (she’s okay!), and Donald Trump is still the motherfucking President. But we’re still here…
If you’re possessed by the devil, you’ve been corrupted—and if you’ve been corrupted, that means you were innocent to start with. Demonic possession isn’t so much about the evil that enters you as it is about asserting that the evil comes from outside. The devil exists to tell us we’re pure…
By K.E. Roberts
After many years of dabbling in snippets, I finally watched all 29 minutes of Kenneth Anger’s cult occult film Lucifer Rising. Shot between 1966 and 1972 but not distributed until 1980, the short is about, according to the director in 1966, “the Rebel Angel behind what’s happening in the world today”…
High Times arrived on newsstands in 1974, initially intended to be a single-issue lark by founder Tom Forçade. But the magazine ended up becoming an underground institution, a harbinger of increasingly liberal points of view among the Baby Boomer generation on cannabis consumption and the increasing establishment of a domestic American hemp production market…
As part of this year’s holiday “festivities,” my fellow US-based Mutants have mockingly given me a couple of the toy pages from a 1979 American catalog to look at in the hope of stimulating some idiosyncratic British take on the very different world of US toys, and possibly provoking a bit of retrospective seasonal gift envy. I can almost hear them now, chortling away mirthlessly in their La-Z-Boy recliners in their respective dens, or wherever the fuck it is that North Americans go to chortle. But they won’t break me; I’m made of sterner stuff…
“Unwrapping” the G.I. Joe U.S.S. Flagg aircraft carrier playset that Kelly put under the (virtual) tree for me this Christmas is a bittersweet reminder of childhood desires scuttled. I think, even at age 10, I knew that I’d never receive this giant (seven and a half foot long!) Nimitz-class aircraft carrier that retailed for $110 in 1985 (that’s over $250 in today’s dollars). But, ahem, I did actually end up getting the Cobra Terrordrome for Christmas ’86, which retailed at about half the cost…
So this week we’re each going to talk about a toy from Christmas past that one of the other guys has figuratively “gifted” us. I volunteered Richard to be my secret Santa because I expected a gift so quintessentially representative of the forlorn British ’70s of his youth that I could simply rag on him and his homeland for a few paragraphs…
Despite a tragically short life, and despite still being almost completely unknown, Greg Irons has exerted an extraordinary influence on the course of underground and mainstream comics, graphic design, and the tattoo world, where he is regularly cited as a legend. Irons was born in Philadelphia in 1947 and moved to San Francisco during 1967’s Summer of Love, where he immediately found work designing event posters for music promoter Bill Graham…
Thanks to the record covers he drew for Rudimentary Peni, the band for which he was vocalist and guitarist, artist Nick Blinko’s initial audience was mainly confined to the members of the thriving British anarcho-punk scene of the early 1980s. Despite apparently operating in the same aggressive idiom as their peers, however, it was immediately clear that the Peni were unique…
Back in high school in the early ’90s, I often found myself haunting the aisles of the big record shops in Harvard Square in Cambridge—HMV, Tower Records, and most importantly Newbury Comics—for any and all available rare import CDs from my favorite local bands: Pixies, Throwing Muses, the Breeders…
