So, You Say You Want a Revolution? It’s Gonna Be Alright, Just Buy Something.

The Nike commercial is simply a recapitulation of the song’s co-opting of revolutionary affect to sell popular music itself as a commodity and line the Beatles’ pockets.

Days of Future Now: Reflections on X-Men Comics & “Days of Future Past” (Part Two of Two)

This is Part Two of a two-part series of posts on the classic X-Men comics arc, “Days of Future Past.”

Days of Future Then: Reflections on X-Men Comics & “Days of Future Past” (Part One of Two)

This is Part One of a two-part series of posts on the classic X-Men comics arc, “Days of Future Past,” which originally appeared in X-Men issues #141 and #142.

Reviews in Brief (4/16 to 5/14 – 2014)

The Who’s “I’m a Boy” as Transgender Anthem

Gender identity is over-determined.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier as Liberal Fantasy – A Review

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is part of the ideological state apparatus

XX-Men: The Failures of Brian Wood’s All-Woman X-Team

X-Men’s record of including women is still only good in relation to the rest of superhero comics.

Reviews in Brief (3/19 to 4/09 – 2014)

Sympathy for “Sympathy for the Devil”

The finest trick humanity ever played was persuading itself that he devil was real.

Reviews in Brief (3/12/2014)

“Movies, Museums and the Hall of Fame” – Beat Street & the Past Future of Hip Hop

Hip Hop got up big time, and I love that, but its focus on cultural production left its political potential untapped.

Reviews in Brief (2/12/2014)

Brief reviews of: Hawkeye #16 | Ms. Marvel #1 | She-Hulk #1 | Superior Spider-Man #26 | Thor, God of Thunder #18

“Let’s Rewrite Some History”: Captain Marvel & Feminist Revisionism

The first major story arc in DeConnick’s series is an attempt to write Ms./Captain Marvel into a revisionist feminist text – a laudable attempt to make manifest the purported feminist subtext of the character.

On the Interpretation of Mind MGMT

Matt Kindt’s Mind MGMT unfolds like a dream, but what do dreams mean, if anything?

Rock On and Drive: Songs in Conversation

Rock n’ roll songs about rock n’ roll disillusionment.

2013: Reviewing The Year It Wasn’t

An overview of all the posts I planned to write or started writing but that never quite came together.

Oglaf: Sexual Phantasmagoria (NSFW)

The shock of the queer in Oglaf undermines a genre where uber-masculine hyper-hetero adventures are the norm.

Robert Mayer’s Superfolks: Grist For The Mill

A resource that better writers can mine to develop something more sophisticated.

Dan Slott’s She-Hulk: Derivative Character as Meta-Comic

At the heart of Dan Slott’s run on She-Hulk is a alternately critical and nostalgic concern with continuity and rupture in serialized superhero comic books.