Labor Day is behind us and we’re moving right along through the year, straight towards the holiday season. As we wish Summer 2016 a fond-ish farewell, here are some links and articles to sustain you through a long, post-three-day-weekend afternoon.
If you spent any of your high school or college years studying Victorian lit, you’re probably familiar with the Brontë sisters (Emily, Charlotte, and Anne, of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall fame, respectively — okay, maybe y’all don’t know Anne but trust me, you’ll love her; pick up Tenant of Wildfell Hall. You won’t regret it). What you might not know is that they wrote under androgynous pen names and successively died, one after the other, until only Charlotte remained. BRB, crying forever at Charlotte Brontë’s grief.
Some of us love the bralette trend, while others of us prefer (read: require) bras with suspension bridge-levels of structural integrity and there’s nothing wrong with that.
A roundtable about teaching Bitch Planet in an academic setting:
http://womenwriteaboutcomics.com/2016/08/26/comics-academe-roundtable-teaching-bitch-planet/
Freddie Mercury is now an asteroid!
Sarah Winifred Searle’s Fatness, Femininity and the Media We Deserve: a beautiful illustrated essay on the power of representation.
ATTN: grotesquely taxidermied Victorian kittens in people clothes. There is nothing else to say about this article, just take a look and enjoy the 19th century macabre vibes.
A few weeks ago, Marvel honored legendary comics creator Jack Kirby through a special “Jack Kirby Week” that highlighted his work and achievements in the medium. However, Marvel chose not to highlight the decades of bullshit they put him through.
This is just the tip of the iceberg:
The contract offered a parade of indignities, Dean wrote: Kirby would have no ownership of the physical artwork, would be unable to copy, reproduce or sell any portion of it, and in effect had only the right to store the work for Marvel. Marvel could call the work back at any time to be “revised” or “modified.” More galling, signing the contract would not only turn over Kirby’s legal rights to his characters, it would force Kirby to surrender any rights Marvel wasn’t already entitled to, forbidding him from assisting others in disputing copyrights or complaining—even in private—of the document’s unfairness. Worst of all, the contract only offered 88 pages out of the thousands of pages of work Kirby had produced for them. By signing, Kirby would acknowledge that he was entitled to nothing more.
Yikes. Comics, everybody.
What have y’all been reading this week? Drop us some suggestions in the comments!