Blog Posts

Month of Joy: Miraculous by Feliza Casano

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I was at the end of fifth grade when the Spider-Man film starring Tobey Maguire premiered in the US. That wasn’t the start of my love for heroism in storytelling: as a preschooler, I pretended to be a fire fighter like my grandfather had been; in third grade, I fell in love with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone; later, I obsessed over shows like Cardcaptors and Sailor Moon. But it was in fifth grade that I was brought into American superhero comic stories, and Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker did it. After watching the movie with friends, I checked out the novelization from my library. I devoured it and watched superhero cartoons – Teen Titans came first, then Static Shock. I ended up secretly writing Teen Titans fan fiction in junior high.

Blog Posts

Month of Joy: The Joy of Living in an Actual Freaking Golden Age of Comics by Stephen Geigen-Miller

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This, right now? This is the real Golden Age of comics, and that makes me very happy. If you’d asked me about the ideal future for comics, 25 years ago, as I was learning about the medium and the industry, preparing for my own foray into it? (Part of my secret origin is that before I fell in with a bunch of people who were making comics, and got excited about doing them myself, I really didn’t know much about them!) Or if you were a fly on the wall for the conversations between me and my friends about what comics could and should be? Or if you’d distilled all the Usenet and message board debates over what was wrong with comics, and what would make comics better, not just for us frustrated independent comics readers and creators, but for everyone?

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Month of Joy: The Last Jedi by Jeannette Ng

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It is astonishingly difficult for me to discuss how much I love THE LAST JEDI. I stumbled from the cinema, face utterly aching from all the ridiculous expressions I had pulled and mind a haze of images, but I was a different person. I say THE LAST JEDI is transformative because it transformed me. And that is very, very hard to quantify. My years and years of critical and analytical training fall by the wayside, not because I am incapable of seeing its flaws (this isn’t “turn off your brain” entertainment), but that whatever else one says about its negative qualtities, I could but numbly point to myself as testimony to its power: For the first time, I felt seen, truly seen by another in the medium of fiction. I felt reborn. The voices of doubt that have haunted me for so long are muted. I felt braver than I have in years and more able. I felt more at peace. I felt balanced.

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Paul Weimer’s Month of Joy: Sometimes Image IS Everything

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27 years ago, I remember seeing commercials for the Canon Rebel film camera, with tennis player Andre Agassi saying “Image is everything”. And since the Internet remembers and stores everything, that thirty-second commercial from 1990 is on Youtube. Go ahead, watch it. At the time, I thought “Well, that’s dumb. Photography is dumb. Image is not everything, substance is. How shallow, how banal.” Heck, I didn’t even know what an SLR (Single Lens Reflex) camera was. Cameras could…change lenses? Who knew?

The Skiffy and Fanty Show Podcasts

345. Looking Back, Moving Forward: The 2018 Edition

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https://media.blubrry.com/skiffyandfanty/dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/archive.org/download/SandFEpisode345LookingBackMovingForward2018/Sandf–Episode345–LookingBackMovingForward2018.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadWow. It’s finally here! Our first episode on our new website, using our new feed! Hopefully everything works out and it ends up in your ears, because it’s time for the team to talk about what they loved in 2017 and what they’re looking forward to in 2018! We had reason to be a bit down about 2017. Last year was tough for many of us, but it still brought with it some amazing speculative fiction and some amazing growth on the Skiffy and Fanty Show. Our Patreon supporters allowed us to start 2018 fresh and shiny and new, and that brought with it a renewed sense of hope! For the last couple of weeks, many of our previous guests have been sharing what brings them joy. Hopefully, their joy has inspired some of your own. But sometimes it’s a struggle to find joy, to embrace joy. Our theme this year is “hope,” but hope often starts from a dark place, a place of struggle, fear, and pain. That’s where we leave 2017 and how we’re going to tackle 2018.

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Helen Lowe’s Month of Joy: From the Color Blue to “The End”

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“These I have loved:         White plates and cups, clean-gleaming, Ringed with blue lines; and feathery, faery dust; Wet roofs, beneath the lamp-light; the strong crust Of friendly bread; and many-tasting food; Rainbows; and the blue bitter smoke of wood…”     ~ from The Great Lover, Rupert Brooke, 1887-1915   This excerpt from Rupert Brooke’s poem, The Great Lover, captures how seemingly small things can encompass joy. I recognize many if not all of the items contained in The Great Lover—from “the cool kindliness of sheets” to “blue-massing clouds”—but of course I have a list of my own…

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