In the early ’00s, few web endeavors seemed less bound for long-term glory than CollegeHumor.com. The site launched in 1999 as a video and sight-gag repository “dedicated to grinding your academic efforts to a halt.” Early on, that meant lots of bro-friendly distractions, like photos of students passed out on lawns, naughtily titled JPEGs, and […]
You wouldn’t necessarily know it, but Thor: Ragnarok features three queer characters. One is Valkyrie, the female warrior played by Tessa Thompson. Another is Korg, the Kronan gladiator who befriends Thor and is played, via motion-capture and CGI, by the film’s director Taika Waititi. Then there’s Loki, the Asgardian god of mischief, played by Tom […]
As the end of Net Neutrality looms large—it ends on June 11, although some states are continuing it on their own—it says a lot about the internet that people got much more agitated about the cancellation of Brooklyn 99 than anything else last week. Look, we love the show too, but there are more important […]
Hardcore comic book fans complaining that Valkyrie—the breakout character in Thor: Ragnarok played by Tessa Thompson—isn't the blonde, white goddess of Marvel's comic book mythology are missing an important point: Valkyrie's only constant is that she's always evolving. Related Stories Indeed, the first appearance of Valkyrie didn't actually feature Valkyrie at all. In 1970's Avengers […]
"When I found you," growls an ominous narrator at the opening of the new trailer for The Last Jedi, "I saw raw, untamed power." That's the voice of Snoke, the little-seen baddie from 2015's smash Star Wars sequel The Force Awakens, and while he's likely talking about his dark-helmeted protege Kylo Ren, he may as […]
For Gerard Way, the third installment of his comic Doom Patrol couldn’t have dropped at a more opportune time. Set in a world where misfits are superheroes and everything is just a little bit sideways, his take on the DC Comics series started hitting shelves right as America’s highly divisive election was dominating news feeds […]
Last Saturday, Logan Smith, the man behind the Twitter account @YesYoureRacist, began posting photos of alleged white supremacist protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia—and gained over 300,000 followers in a single weekend, some of whom helped him expose the identities of the protesters. One of the people Smith outed has since been fired from his job at […]
During a book tour stop in Portland, Oregon earlier this year, author Jeff VanderMeer (Borne, the Southern Reach Trilogy) met up with two speculative-fiction contemporaries: Omar El Akkad and Lidia Yuknavitch. Like VanderMeer, both had recently published dystopian-ish novels set against a backdrop of climate change. El Akkad's American War chronicles a fossil-fuel civil war […]
Consider this the calm before the stormtroopers come—or, at least, a rare moment of quiet in the galaxy far, far away. September began with Force Friday II, and all signs point to a full trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi dropping soon, but right now it's looking fairly peaceful out there now that J.J. […]
The Punisher—the latest in Netflix’s line of super-gritty Marvel adaptations—has piqued fans' curiosity for a while. But it’s also been something of an outlier. The story of vigilante Frank Castle (Jon Bernthal) overlaps with those of Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, and Daredevil, but he’s not really part of the Defenders, or The Defenders. His show […]