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Carol

Carol Borden was editor of and a writer for the Toronto International Film Festival’s official Midnight Madness and Vanguard program blogs. She is currently an editor at and evil overlord for The Cultural Gutter, a website dedicated to thoughtful writing about disreputable art. She has written for Mezzanotte, Teleport City, Die Danger Die Die Kill, Popshifter and she has a bunch of short stories published by Fox Spirit Books including: Godzilla detective fiction, femme fatale mermaids, an adventurous translator/poet, and an x-ray tech having a bad day. Read and listen to her other shenanigans at Monstrous Industry. For her particular take on gutter culture, check out, “In the Sewer with the Alligators.”

The False Consciousness of the X-Men

Matthew Yglesias says “Magneto Was Right”:  “The mutant pride message is a radical one. It’s too radical for those whose WASP male privilege in their non-mutant lives makes them instinctively want to identify with existing power structures. But a mutant who’s also a Jew, or a woman, or […]

Manga Eiga: Old Japanese Animation

The Japan Society had a program featuring Japanese animation from the 1910s-1940s.  Even if you missed it, you can still see some shorts —a beautiful 1929 silent featuring Tengu; sing along with a 1930 papercut animation village festival; an unfortunate butterfly from 1931; tricks between a fox spirit […]

The Disturbing Nature of Ultraman

A meditation on Ultraman and Ultraman in manga form, drawn by “horror comics auteur” Kazuo Umezu:  “The boys who read this would grow up to read even more outlandish and violent mens’ comics; the girls would have a whole sub-genre of girls’ horror comics, jam-packed with beheadings, defenestrations, […]