“The Forgotten Female Action Stars of the 1910s”
“The film scholar Ben Singer estimates that between 1912 and 1920, about 60 action serials with female protagonists were released, totaling around 800 episodes.” More at The Atlantic.
“A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction”
At Fantastic Stories of the Imagination, author Nisi Shawl offers “A Crash Course in the History of Black Science Fiction.” In 1909 Harvard’s president, Charles W. Eliot, issued a 51-volume anthology he claimed could provide its owners with a complete liberal arts education. In the same vein, I’ve pulled […]
“Fool’s Journey: The Fascinating Live of Patricia Colman Smith”
At Autostraddle, Beth Maiden writes about the life of Patricia Colman Smith, illustrator of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck and an innovator in Tarot card design. “Colman Smith studied to be an artist at the experimental, avant-garde Pratt Institute in Brooklyn but didn’t graduate — nonetheless she became an […]
The Amazing Jackie Ormes
Jackie Ormes drew comics for Black newspapers from the 1930s through the 1950s. She was popular and well known, even friends with people like Lena Horne, who might’ve influenced her most famous creation, Torchy Brown, and Eartha Kitt. But Ormes disappeared like so many talented women and men […]
“Reel Romance: Favorite Film Discoveries of 2015”
Nitrate Diva shares her favorite classic film discoveries of 2015! “A theme that connects most (though not all) of these movies is unlikely or unexpected romance. In Second Floor Mystery, two strangers flirt through coded messages and elaborate fictions, modeled on potboiler clichés. In Heaven Can Wait, a […]
“Goodbye to Japan’s Manga King”
At The Daily Beast, Jake Adelstein writes about comic creator and folklore scholar Shigeru Mizuki, the astounding breadth of Mizuki’s work and Mizuki’s challenge to revisionist history. “Mizuki rose to fame through his popular comics, but starting in the seventies, he created a variety of controversial works which […]
The Cultural Gutter 