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 […]
Trina Robbins shares free downloads of her book, Lily Renée, Escape Artist, at her website. Robbins writes about Renée, a comics creator who had fled Vienna in 1938. Renee worked on comics like Werewolf Hunter and Señorita Rio.
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 […]
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 […]
At The Toast, Mo Moulton watches Downton Abbey and discusses its portrayal of Neville Chamberlain. “Here, then, is Neville Chamberlain in 1925. He is fulfilling the expectations set by an extraordinary political family. His father, Joseph Chamberlain, ran a screw factory in Birmingham, where he became passionate about […]
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 […]