Hey there,
Today Joe McCulloch brings us the week in comics, with bonus Avatar press diversion.
The chain of events is like this. I wrote a review of the Avatar Press anthology Cinema Purgatorio where I suggested that despite the much-heralded participation of Alan Moore, the project was better understood in terms of its publisher’s tendencies. That, however, made me paranoid that I didn’t have an adequate enough grasp of Avatar’s history, which led me to cataloging most of the artists who worked for them in the 1990s, which naturally (NATURALLY.) led me to tracking down many related comics from the 1990s horror/goth/’Bad Girl’ comics scene. By chance, and through an enormous outlay of generosity, I also recorded an episode of the Inkstuds podcast with one of those artists, Trevlin Utz, which went up yesterday; let the emphasis lay on the fact that *I* recorded it, because the audio gets weird and out of sync at parts, a significant flaw entirely attributable to me.
And Rob Kirby reviews Talk Dirty to Me.
Talk Dirty to Me opens with its protagonist, Emma Barns, nervously interviewing for a job as a “sex hotline” operator. The interviewer, a middle-aged man, assures her that she doesn’t need to be “amazing” or give him a lot of backstory. “All I need to know,” he concludes bluntly, “is if you can sound sexy enough to make a guy cum over the phone.” Emma gets the job, and this sets the narrative in motion: Will its forbidden allure satisfy Emma’s inchoate yearnings? And are those yearnings of a sexual nature or something more elusive?
Rather than offering up Trina Robbins-style role-model feminism, Talk Dirty to Me presents a shaded, unglamorous mini-portrait of a woman’s life via her sexual history, and examines how those experiences have shaped her current liminal state. Emma’s story, in fact, is a conduit to a larger subject: the boundaries our culture places around sexual agency and notions of desirability, and the impact of conforming to and/or challenging those boundaries.
Elsewhere:
A new feature over at Comics Workbook looks to be featuring images from Carol Kovinick Hernandez's archive. Here's a great one of the brothers playing barbies.
Here I am discussing comics-related artist Susan Te Kahurangi King at Modern Painters.
And, in case you were curious, Captain Britain would oppose Brexit.
