Veteran comics writer Larry Hama is best known for his work on Marvel’s G.I. Joe franchise, where he took what could have been a cynical toy line marketing tie-in and created a dynamic and hugely popular universe where salty commandos do battle with snake-themed terrorists in a neverending covert ouroboros of action…
In the almost-two decades between Blade Runner (1982) and The Matrix (1999), a particular form of cyberpunk existed across various medias. It was an era in which William Gibson and Bruce Sterling novels reigned supreme, Max Headroom was on the air in America, while the Bubblegum Crisis anime was being produced in Japan…
A little over two years ago, theorist and cultural critic Mark Fisher took his own life at the age of 48. I remember feeling numb at hearing the news; not out of sadness but more a sense of deja vu, of familiarity…
Assassin, spy, organizer of literary journals: Yakov Grigorievich Blumkin could only have been created by the Russian Revolution. An early member of the Cheka, or secret police, Blumkin spent his short life engaging in political conspiracies and travelling the globe…
By The Mutants
Steve Barron may not be a household name, but if you grew up watching MTV in the 1980s, you definitely know his work. Creator of some of the most iconic and memorable images of the music video network’s first five years, Barron was one of the early innovators who turned music video into a real art form…
By Tom G. Wolf
Death is a touchy subject for most people. Intellectually, we know it’s inevitable, and yet it’s almost never discussed—until necessity intervenes. And for those of us who have spent time contemplating how we’ll depart this mortal coil, it tends to be in a fairly hopeful fashion: we’re lucid, surrounded by friends…
One of the most irksome things about my drizzly homeland of the United Kingdom is the widespread domestic habit of mistaking the material benefits of industrial and Colonial wealth, post-war socialism, and a happy lack of mass violence—all of which, for a good half century, guaranteed a relatively safe and stable life, good opportunities to better your lot, free healthcare, welfare, and a relatively graft-free state—for something as ineluctable as rain…
By Jake Pitre
The loss of filmmaker Nicolas Roeg at the age of 90 in November was deeply felt by cinephiles. Roeg was one of the most singular voices in movies for much of the twentieth century, influencing directors as varied as Christopher Nolan and Steven Soderbergh. When considering his legacy, it’s worth highlighting his most accomplished decade: the 1970s…
The 1980s saw the gradual ascendancy of cyberpunk narratives in popular science fiction. The genre projected Western societal trends seen in the decade—corporate conglomeration, the rise of computer networking and global media, and the ascendancy of Pacific Rim economies, most prominently Japan—into a vision of the future bursting with high technology controlled by a few neo-feudal corporate interests…
Resistance to Trump has been led by women in various forms: protesting, volunteering, donating, contacting elected officials, and becoming elected officials. As I’ve observed and participated in these activities, I’ve frequently wished that more people had the opportunity to appreciate All I Wanna Do, a 1998 film that subverts ‘80s sex comedy tropes through a distinctly female lens…
