'Nuff Said: American Graphic Media

"How Janelle Monáe turned Harriet Tubman’s legacy into an Afrofuturist sci-fi epic... "

The CBS Radio Workshop was an experimental dramatic radio anthology series that aired on CBS from January 27, 1956, until September 22, 1957. It was a revival of the earlier Columbia Workshop, broadcast by CBS from 1936 to 1943, and it used some of the same writers and directors employed on the earlier series. The premiere broadcast was a two-part adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World , introduced and narrated by Huxley.

Octavia Butler: The Body Envisioned                        A recent essay on how we discuss Octavia Butler from The Hooded Utilitarian .

In a smart move, the X-Men: Apocalypse will continued the periodization established by the X-Men: First Class film.  Setting the film in the 1980s will allow the film to reflect the social issues of the era.

  Producers and interviewees discuss "Superheroes: A Never Ending Battle" during the San Diego Comic-Con in July 2013.

Superheroes made real? #WetheGeeks Google Hangout from the White House.

On January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appeared on television to deliver his farewell address. Broadcasted from the Oval Office of the White House, Eisenhower framed his closing remarks as “a message of leave taking and farewell” to his countrymen. Far from a nostalgic reminisce of national service, Eisenhower provided a cautionary narrative about the dangers of military buildup in the United States.  Eisenhower's remarks frame a debate about U.S. defense policy since 1945. Namely, he spoke openly of the need to find balance between forces that desired to spend, at all costs, to secure the United States from attack and those forces that advocated for negotiation and disarmament. These ideas inform the meta-textual narrative found in the pages of Iron Man. Debuting two years after Eisenhower's address, Iron Man can be seen as continuation of the pro-American and anti-communist dialogue found throughout Marvel's Silver Age revival. Yet, the narrative als...

The new trailer for Iron Man 3 features a not so subtle engagement with post 9/11 geopolitical uncertainty. Will Iron Man win? Of course, the trick is how the narrative handles the complexity of applying U.S. values to global landscape where issues of race, class, and power are not defined by American views alone.

The trailer for CW's Arrow is pretty good. The production team cut its teeth on Smallville, so that is not a surprise. Still, the meta-narrative of Arrow, based on DC Comics Green Arrow is a very interesting choice with a big election looming in 2012. As any (some? a few?) fan of comic books knows, the Silver Age story of Oliver Queen/Green Arrow started out as a Batman replica (instead of a Batcave, you have an Arrow cave...you get the idea). The character did not inspire a rabid following:-) All that changed in the 1970s when writer Denny O'Neil rebooted the character and paired him with Green Lantern. The legendary Green Arrow/Green Lantern run featured a Green Arrow re-imagined as a socially conscious activist who challenged Green Lantern's simplistic "law and order" worldview. Since that transformation, Green Arrow has kept a focus on challenging authority and fighting for the "have nots" in society. In an era of uncertainty a hero out to ta...