“A good salesperson has to be a psychologist,” Mel Rapp says, sitting at the back of his College Street optical shop, legs crossed alertly, riding a tangent in his distant, foggy voice. “I use all my experiences to try to inform the attitudes and feelings — the psychology […]
Adrian Tomine in one word? Clean. His unofficial uniform is pressed khakis and an oxford shirt, hair fastidiously parted, black-framed glasses polished to a glow. Clean, too, is his top-selling comic series, Optic Nerve. Not that he doesn’t curse; his comic is full of four-letter invectives and frank […]
When I got Sudeki for review, I sighed. An anime babe smiled out from the cover, her armoured boobs thrust forward and her arms upstretched as she cast a spell — presumably on the teenage-boy market. The following two strikes were the five-star recommendation from Maxim and the […]
A few weeks ago, Guelph cartoonist Seth was giving a scripted talk on the art of comics to a worshipful crowd at the Rivoli. He accompanied himself with slides projected onto a screen behind him, ringing a bell between each slide like a performance-art concierge. Once, he rang […]
While I wait in the lobby of one of the largest game studios in the world, I watch someone go through to the inner sanctum. The shiny barrier, with transparent doors that whir apart at the wave of a card-pass, looks familiar — I think I’ve seen the […]
I’m fairly suspicious of nostalgia, and I hate how advertisers leverage our emotions to sell us the same products twice. So while I’m happy that people are rediscovering videogames from their youth, and that the games and their blocky aesthetic are mushrooming up all over the culture, I […]
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The Cultural Gutter 