wwac posts
Posts: 91
Files: 34
2022 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Graphic Story, Part One
By Doris V. SutherlandWelcome to the first of a two-part series exclusively for WWAC patrons, covering the six contenders for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Reviewed in this post are Monstress Volume Six, Once & Future Volume Three and Lore Olympus Volume One.Monstress Volume Six: The VowMonstress has long been a favourite at the Hugos, the first three volumes each winning the award while the fourth and fifth became runners-up. And now, we have a sixth Hugo-nominated trip to the fan...
2022 Eisners: And the Award Goes To….
THREEPEAT BABY!!!!She's once, twice, three times an Eisner Award-winning lady...Did somebody say...hat trick Eisners?Not that we're excited over here or anything. Well, the people on the west coast are. The other time zones were sadly asleep to glory in our awesomeness, but you know what? That's okay. Because you amazing, incredibly, Eisner voters did NOT sleep on those Eisner ballots and once again, for the third year in a row, WWAC has won the Eisner for best online journalism.We a...
Prepare Yourself, Mutant: Memories of Neal Adams’ X-Men
By Kayleigh HearnI never met Neal Adams. But I’m looking at his signature, scrawled across the front page of Marvel Masterworks: The X-Men volume 6 with an exhausted black Sharpie, one of countless books he signed at a New England comic book convention in the 2010s. It’s simple enough:FOR KAYLEIGHNeal AdamsNeal Adams died on April 28, 2022, at 80; the comic industry immediately mourned a legendary artist, a fierce proponent for creators’ rights, and (I can’t forget) an ardent believer in...
NSFW: Fumetti Nightmares: Ulula the Werewolf Woman
As a warning, this article is most certainly not safe for work. The comic discussed here includes explicit sex and violence, including a combination thereof that some readers may find uncomfortable or upsetting.Note: This article incorporates material originally published in two posts from 2015 that have since been removed from the site.By Doris V. SutherlandOne of the most memorable anti-heroines of Italian erotic-horror comics is the lycanthropic femme fatale Ulula, whose exploits were drawn p...
Nightcrawler is a Sex-Positive Superhero. Here’s How—And Why It Matters
Collage of Nightcrawler images, 1989-2019, penciled by (left to right) Robertson, Davis, Frigeri, Wagner, Davis, RobertsonBy Anna PeppardIf you care about seeing inclusive sexiness in your stories, reading superhero comics can be challenging. And yet, I continue to love them, for reasons that are, ironically, directly related to their depictions of sexuality. I’m drawn to stories starring flamboyant mutants, aliens, robots and plain-old-regular humans in brightly colored spandex posing and str...
Youth in Crisis: Looking Back at Marvel’s Outlawed
By Doris V. SutherlandThe superhero comic convention of the “event” story can be divided into two main categories. The first consists of cosmic-scale storylines like Crisis on Infinite Earths and Infinity War, where worlds and realities are threatened by godlike beings and universe-destroying menaces. The second, meanwhile, includes the likes of Civil War and Identity Crisis, where the conflict is framed as moral or ideological rather than existential. Typically, the latter story type will k...
2022 Eisner Awards
Submissions are open and so we have once again thrown our hat into the ring. Here are just a few (lol) highlights from another year of writing about comics. Seriously. A lot.Essays and FeaturesWe feature articles and essays that entertain and amuse, and those that come from a place of pain shaped by the harm caused by stories that ignore, co-opt, or deny the representation every fan deserves. We provide in-depth opinion pieces that can cut deep or make our readers smile because they feel that th...
Getting Sorted
The new year is off to a rollicking start with lots of ups and downs including convoys, lockdowns, and good old omicron. But there's one thing we can always rely on, and that's comics, amirite? We are cautiously hopeful for what this new year will bring. For example, we hope that this year sees a safe return to conventions so that we can get out there and see everyone again!The WWAC Editorial Team has been busy this month doing some house cleaning, role shuffling, and getting ourselves o...
10 Years of WWAC
December 21st is a pretty auspicious day, what with it being the 10th anniversary of WWAC. As we look back at where it all began, it's amazing to see how far we've come. Over 300 contributors have shared their passion for comics through WWAC and we are grateful to all of them and especially proud to see them spread their wings in the comics industry and beyond.Here's a little walk down memory lane, spotlighting some of the best writing at WWAC over the past decade.Universal FanCon: P...
Jem & The Holograms And The Balancing Act of Multiple Identities
By Latonya PenningtonOriginally based on a line of dolls of the same name, the '80s cartoon, Jem and the Holograms tells the story of a young business woman named Jerrica Benton who inherits an advanced holographic A.I. named Synergy from her deceased father. Together with her biological sister Kimber and her foster sisters Shana and Aja, the four of them form the titular band in order to raise money for Jerrica's foster home, The Starlight Foundation, and end up becoming huge stars. Wit...
Revisiting the MCU's Blip From a Pandemic Perspective
By Jameson HamptonIn comics, a crossover event is when something happens that’s so big, the implications from it are felt across the entire shared universe, rather than just a single comic series. People like crossover events because it’s fun to see characters who aren’t normally together interact with each other, and it makes the setting feel more real when you can see the rippling cause and effect from world-shaking events that disrupt the status quo. Of course, while crossover events ar...
Gangland Dreamland: Batman in 2020
By Doris V. Sutherland2020 was not a good year to be Batman. In the pages of the comics, he had his own company and all of the gadgets that come with it swiped from under his nose by his archenemy – the premise of “Joker War”, a big-event storyline spearheaded by writer James Tynion IV and artist Jorge Jiménez. In the real world, meanwhile, the character faced adversity of a different sort. Not only was the latest Batman film delayed by lead actor Robert Pattinson catching COVID-19, but t...
Blow a Kiss, Fire a Gun: The Complete Kirby War & Romance
By Kayleigh HearnLet us set the sultry Silver Age scene: a beautiful woman in red, her brunette hair a buoyant flip, gazes adoringly at the gun in her hands. She doesn’t see the man in a suit coming up behind her. Eyes shadowed by the brim of his hat, he pulls her close: “Here, let me show you how to load that, Anne!”With a knowing smirk, Anne slides into his embrace. Four hands now caress the steel barrel of the rifle, that gleaming phallic symbol. “Mmm,” Anne murmurs. “You make it ...
2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story Part 2
By Doris V. SutherlandAs an exclusive for our Patreon subscribers, here is the concluding part to Women Write About Comics’ examination of the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story finalists…Once & Future Volume 1: The King is UndeadDuncan McGuire’s date is interrupted by a phone call telling him that his grandmother has wandered out of her care home. When he tracks her down, the elderly-but-robust lady reveals a cache full of heavy-duty firearms and a life full of big secrets. It turns o...
Comic-Con@Home: The Importance of Representation in Comics Journalism
Kate Kosturski summarizes the 2021 Comics Journalism panel from Comic-Con@Home, featuring WWAC folks.Comics Journalism 2021: Representation Matters: How do we promote greater representation in comics journalism? Whether making sure that writers from marginalized groups are heard, engaging with work from diverse viewpoints, or confronting institutionalized biases, comics journalists and editors have more responsibility than ever to make sure that their sites and staffs reflect the diversity of th...
2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story Part 1
By Doris V. SutherlandSince 2009 the Hugo Awards have had a category for Best Graphic Story. Although overshadowed to some extent by dedicated comic awards like the Eisners, this corner of the Hugos nonetheless remains a prominent honour in its field, with a handful of contenders and one winner chosen each year from the mass of published comics. As an exclusive for Patreon subscribers, WWAC presents the first instalment of a two-part series that will examine each of the six comics contending for...
Apologies
We have determined that the piece we recently published re: queer representation at Marvel and Marvel Voices: Pride required much more editorial scrutiny before publication and as such, have pulled the article for further review, as well as review of our practices going forward. Apologies to our author, whose passion and work we greatly appreciate.We apologize for the harm this piece may have caused. It certainly was not our intention, but we acknowledge our responsibility to do better.- Wendy B...
The Many Ages of DC Comics: A Sequel
By Corinne McCreeryThree years ago, I got annoyed on Twitter and wound up writing a long article about the various different “Ages” of American comics. Well, I recently had a conversation with our delightful Editor-in-Chief, Nola Pfau, about how close the various DC Golden Age omnibuses are getting to the transition from Golden Age to Silver Age when we realized that that’s harder to pin down for the three characters in question. So here I am again, to write about this topic.The Golden Age...
Star Beasts and Spider-Gods: Doctor Who Comics of the Tom Baker Era
By Doris V. SutherlandA science fiction series as long-running as Doctor Who could hardly avoid spawning its fair share of comics. By the same token, comics tying in with a science fiction series as long-running as Doctor Who could hardly avoid being just a little erratic.From 1964 through to 1979, Doctor Who strips appeared primarily in Polystyle’s TV Comic, a publication that also carried the adventures of various other television characters; this led to some amusing crossovers on the covers...
Wild, Weird Writing: Charlotte Brontë, Welcome to Die
By Kayleigh HearnBrussels, 1892. In a second hand book stall, a professor finds the leather-bound manuscript of High Life in Verdopolis, a novella set in the fantastic kingdom of Glass Town imagined by a teenage Charlotte Brontë. How the manuscript made its mysterious journey to the Belgian bookstall remains unknown.Rehoboth Beach, 2009. Browsing the shelves at Atlantic Books, I find Tales of Glass Town, Angria, and Gondal by the Brontës. I’ve read and loved Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, ...
Transforming the Narrative: An Analysis of The Transformers: The IDW Collection - Infiltration
By Nola PfauAfter my dense commentary on the Megatron Origin story, it’s easy to believe that might be the majority of what comprises the first volume of the IDW Collection, but that’s far from the case--it’s not even a third of the book! It’s just...the most dense, by far.As I noted then, these books aren’t in publication order, nor even chronological order, so the next chunk of story are a series of six stand-alone character one-shots under the Spotlight banner--Blurr, Cliffjumper, S...
Hey, It's Eisner Time Again!
2020 was a rough year for all of us, but in spite and because of that, we are proud to have been able to keep giving our readers some comics joy by continuing to produce our very special brand of content. From reviews to essays to listicles and more, we are pretty happy with what we had to offer for 2020. Here are some of the highlights that we've included in our 2021 Eisner Award submission:SeriesOver the years, we have developed a number of special series. Focusing on everything from acade...
She Who Must Be Obeyed: Wonder Woman’s Secret Origin as Victorian Villainess
By Doris V. SutherlandSomewhere in a remote corner of the world is a land known to outsiders only in legend. It is a matriarchy, ruled for thousands of years by a queen who has obtained the gift of immortality. The modern West eventually makes contact with this hidden land, leading to a clash of cultures. The matriarchy and its immortal queen have their own attitudes towards the concepts of power and obedience, towards the roles of men and women – attitudes that strike visitors from the outsid...
WWAC Contributor Spotlight: Dani Kinney
Dani Kinney joined WWAC early last year, hitting hard right out of the gate with an essay entitled New Intersections: Queer Futurism and the Krakoan Body Politic. As part of WWAC's secret Krakoan society, Dani has lots of thoughts on the new run of X-Men comics and has shared them in our ongoing review coverage of the many, many new titles in the Dawn of X series. They have also interviewed X-Plain the X'Men's Jay Edidin, who gave us a whole new way to look at Cyclops in his issue of...
Infinite Crisis: Fifteen Years Later
By Doris V. SutherlandThis year marks the fifteenth anniversary of DC’s Infinite Crisis event, which itself was published to coincide with the twentieth anniversary of Crisis on Infinite Earths. That notorious series, published between 1985 and 1986, saw the DC heroes band together against the evil Anti-Monitor in a battle that destroyed a multiverse, leaving only one universe – and one continuity – for DC’s superhero line.Infinite Crisis was the sequel, and aimed to provide a similar le...
Magik and Shadows: How Kate Pryde and Ilyana Rasputin Made Me a Better, Gayer, Comics Fan
By Zoe TunnellHi. My name is Zoe Tunnell, and I was an awful comics fan. To be clear, I don't mean I liked awful comics. (I still do! They're trash, but they're my trash.) The type of awful I'm referring to is one probably all too familiar to a lot of you. When I was a teenager, and even into my twenties, I was The Comics Nerd. It was my all-consuming identity, and being the person who could answer any question about the latest Marvel Movie when asked at a party was my lot in lif...
[NSFW] Fumetti Nightmares: Belzeba, Italy's Intersex Imp
By Doris V. SutherlandThe erotic-horror fumetti published in Italy through the seventies and eighties may seem arcane to outsiders. The plots of these comics are built around sex, violence and combinations of the two, depicted in such graphic detail that any discussion – this very article included – requires a severe content warning: do not read any further if you are liable to be disturbed by comic-book depictions of sexual violence.Those who press on, meanwhile, will find themselves in a c...
Mahou Josei Chimaka Embodies Me As An Adult Magical Girl Fan
By Latonya PenningtonPublished on the digital comics magazine Sparkler Monthly, Mahou Josei Chimaka is a magical woman webcomic and graphic novel created by cartoonist Kate Rhodes and animator Jennifer Xu (known together as Kaiju), edited by Lillan Diaz-Przbyl, copy edited by Lianne Sentar and Rebecca Scoble, and digital toning assistant Lillana Diaz. Starring an adult ex-magical girl named Chimaka Shi, the book is a queer slice-of-life fantasy novel that is both satirical and original. Fifteen ...
Sneak Peek
Here's a peek at what's coming very soon to WWAC!
WWAC@ComicCon@Home Wrap Up
The pandemic has forced a lot of changes in everything we do. Early on, we lost a few comic conventions due to uncertainty leading to cancellations, but conventions that occurred later in the year had the opportunity to pull things together with virtual options.We've been covering some of the many panels that ComicCon@Home had to offer from July 22-26 and, not gonna lie, we are pretty fond of the accessibility, the opportunity to watch things at our leisure, to visit or revisit archived pane...
