This is the preview sample for MIRROR MIRROR II, edited by me and Julia Gfrörer, coming from 2dcloud next year.

Featuring new and unpublished comics and art by Lala Albert, Clive Barker, Heather Benjamin, Apolo Cacho, Sean Christensen, Nicole Claveloux, Al Columbia, Dame Darcy, Noel Freibert, Renee French, Meaghan Garvey, Julia Gfrörer (with Claude Paradin), Simon Hanselmann (with Sean T. Collins), Aidan Koch, Laura Lannes, Céline Loup, Uno Moralez, Mou, Jonny Negron, Chloe Piene, Josh Simmons, Carol Swain, and Trungles, with an introduction by Gretchen Alice Felker-Martin.

“A thought-provoking, richly entertaining collection from some of the most exciting comic artists working today. A must read for fans of the horrific and perverse.” —Bryan Cogman, co-executive producer/writer, Game of Thrones

“An impressive collection of beautiful depictions of grotesque things and grotesque depiction of beautiful things.”—Alan Resnick, writer-director, Adult Swim’s Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It

“Mirror Mirror II invites the most innovative creators working in the form today and proves just how expansive the pornographic and gothic can be, encapsulating the pop cultural, fantastical, and realistic in one fell swoop.” —Rachel Davies, Rookie Magazine

“Editors Sean T. Collins and Julia Gfrörer have assembled an exquisitely creepy and seductive new collection of comics with Mirror Mirror II. From Uno Moralez’s pixilated noir to Dame Darcy’s ornate Gothic ghost stories, the wide range of horror here is fantastic, as characters creep and fuck in the shadows of unimaginable darkness throughout. It’s certainly the perfect, freaky anthology for you, your lover, and all the demons in your mind.”—Hazel Cills, MTV News

“We can boil fascist ethics down to one word: Dominate,” says professor Stephen Olbrys Gencarella of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who has taught about the show as well as written about it for the academic journal Horror Studies. “It’s true that fascist aesthetics anchor many shows and films, especially in the sci-fi and fantasy genres. And of course violence is nothing new; it’s the norm in American media. Other shows out there are hitting similar themes, and that shouldn’t surprise us given the anxieties of our times. But so many of those other shows demonstrate the consequences for violence or debate the ethical complexities of living with others who are different, or show the moral turmoil of people who enact or suffer violence. The Walking Dead is the only show that actively courts, rather than critiques, fascist ethics, and suggest that it’s the only viable solution to perceived threat.”

What do those ethics entail? “In fascist mentalities, kindness, empathy, and sympathy are seen as weaknesses, critical self-reflection is seen as a danger to security, and discussion and negotiation is seen as failure,” Gencarella says. “Existence is a tragic struggle to be won or lost.” This mentality can be traced back to the fascist Ur-text, The Doctrine of Fascism, ghostwritten for Benito Mussolini by his Minister of Education Giovanni Gentile. “The Doctrine is clear that perpetual war is the preferred mode of existing with others who are different, and especially to crush the weak in order to demonstrate that one is strong,” Gencarella says. “Fascists want the apocalypse. And the history of actual fascist movements has always been cemented by the kind of storytelling that TWD valorizes and perpetuates.” It’s this perspective, and the political doctrines likely to be appealing to those who respond to it, that the Trump campaign seemingly recognized when targeting the show’s viewers. “Watching Trump and Negan on television at the same time makes perfect sense,” Gencarella says. “I don’t say that because I think all Trump supporters are fascists. But it’s also telling that the campaign thought The Walking Dead viewers would readily equate immigration with an apocalypse for which violence is the only solution.”

I wrote about the fascism of The Walking Dead for Vulture. This is a longstanding bugbear of mine as you know, and this is the first standalone piece I’ve written about it.

2dcloud, the publisher that will be putting out me and Julia Grörer’s MIRROR MIRROR II next year, is currently kickstarting its Fall 2016 collection. Pitch in some money and come away with comics that push against the boundaries of what comics can be.

The makers of Unedited Footage of a Bear and This House Has People in It are back with a new project called The Mirror for IFC. I don’t want to give much away, but let’s just say that given my recent reading habits as discussed elsewhere on this blog, I was very, very excited by this. Perhaps you will be too.

Those nice boys of online at the Chapo Trap House podcast had some very kind words for Julia Gfrörer’s new graphic novel from Fantagraphics, Laid Waste, on this week’s episode. Oh yeah, they also interviewed some guy named Adam Curtis, I think he makes movies? Anyway please listen, and visit Julia’s webstore if you’d like to know more.

And while this is a relatively minor problem, given how few of the dramatic fireworks it’s his responsibility to set off, Louis C.K.’s limitations as an actor are absolutely an obstacle. I know that he’s built up a formidable critical reputation with his all-but-DIY Louie, but try as I might, I’ve remained as immune to his charms as a performer as a woman in a hotel room. From where I’m sitting he has two facial expressions cum emotional poles, exhausted and bewildered; since every person and situation he encounters is exhausting and/or bewildering, he shuffles back and forth seemingly at random. C.K. is quite famously far from the first comedian-auteur to have a relatively restricted range of expression as an actor, but watching him here is like seeing Jerry Seinfeld try to write, direct, and star alongside the finest actors of his generation in Death of a Salesman. “What is the deal with despair?” My sinking suspicion is that a show this plodding and strident will not have the answer.

Now that it’s available on Hulu, I’m reviewing Louis C.K.’s Horace and Pete for Decider, beginning with the first episode. It’s not good.

Finally, not every difference between Alison and Cole’s perspectives is as nuanced as how their argument and their kiss is handled. And I’m not just talking about the fact that Joanie has a pony at her party during Cole’s half of the episode and a freaking bronco during Alison’s. During Cole’s POV, he holds Luisa off and lets Alison comfort Joanie after the kid falls off the pony. During Alison’s, Luisa tends to Joanie while Cole tends to Alison herself, in the throes of a PTSD hallucination in which the fall is potentially lethal. (This is itself an echo of two versions of the same playground scene, one in which Cole sees Alison freak out and demand Joanie get down off the monkey bars, the other in which Alison powers through and lets Joanie walk on top from end to end even though Cole never notices.) Who took care of a wounded kid is not the kind of thing simple coloration of memory can alter that dramatically — we’re in the same territory here as we were during the pilot, when Alison either did or didn’t save Noah’s daughter from choking, or during the confrontation at gunpoint later in that first season, when Cole was either suicidal or homicidal. These kinds of discrepancies are maybe the most compelling thing about The Affair as a work of storytelling. Walt Whitman contained multitudes; The Affair implies that people contain multiverses.

I reviewed this week’s episode of The Affair for Decider. I could talk about this show all day. Someone has to!

I’ve read as little as possible of anything other than Lovecraft and books about glam rock for the past month or so, but when I stumble across essays on the intersection of politics and popular culture, it’s always “Why X Matters Now More Than Ever in the Age of Trump,” where X is always the exact same fucking things everyone said mattered before the Age of Trump. Maybe they did, maybe they do, but maybe we should be looking for something else.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times and it’s a pattern: On the strength of the third excellent “Empire” episode in a row, it’s now safe to declare the show on a hot streak.

I reviewed tonight’s fun, smart Empire for the New York Times.

SPOILER ALERT

We’ve reached the center of the Maze. It’s not a physical location, a place in the park where the safety catch comes off and the guests can play for keeps. It’s a metaphor for consciousness, the inward journey required for an android to become truly alive. In the case of Dolores, it’s also the downward spiral to her buried identity, i.e. Wyatt, the genocidal maniac destined to create a new robot-friendly world from the human blood of the old.

But tonight’s movie-length season finale – “The Bicameral Mind” – proves that the Maze isn’t such a bad image for the show itself. For all its faults, Westworld‘s first season wasn’t an affront or a disaster. There’s enough entertainment value in each episode, particularly if you just so happen to enjoy sci-fi thrillers, no matter how skeptical you are of their overall philosophical or dramatic merit. But the journey from the starting point to the center of it all reveals just how distant “enjoyable” can be from, you know, good. Right up to the end, the show’s inaugural season was watchable – and ultimately dismissible.

I reviewed last night’s season finale of Westworld for Rolling Stone. Like I said, it was never a show I dreaded watching — I was never like “oh god, here we go, time to watch another fucking Westworld,” you know? I actually kind of looked forward to it each time. I just never looked backward to it afterwards.

Anyway, as I try to explain in the review, the show succeeded best as a straightforward genre thriller and foundered in its attempts to be more than that. In terms of the twists and revelations, the problem was less their existence and more the simultaneously slovenly and byzantine way in which the storylines that led to them unfolded. Basic structural stuff.

Mixed in with all this, importantly, is Juliette’s revelation to Noah that she’s a) married to a b) older man whom she met when she was his student. The cycle of sleaze perpetuates itself, right? Ah, but things are never that simple on this show. When Juliette facetimes with her cuckolded husband back in France, we discover he’s not just older but elderly, and suffering from Alzheimer’s-induced memory loss and dementia. Suddenly the skeevy, predatory student-teacher sexual relationship the past several scenes have conjured in our minds is complicated by this picture of how such a romance can evolve through the years into something not merely mature but shot through with devastating sadness and loss. Juliette’s tears during her “conversation” with her husband and his nurse come laden with any number of possible regrets: mourning the man she used to know, remembering the heat of the forbidden they once shared but which is now barely recognizable, grieving over how much he’s suffering, regretting her infidelity, regretting that her ongoing marriage forces any sexual component of her life to be infidelity, wishing she’d slept with Noah and not Mike as part of that infidelity, wishing that her husband could still experience those same pleasures and desires…not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s more that’s of genuine human interest and experience going on in this single scene than Westworld can muster in any five-episode stretch.

I reviewed last night’s excellent episode of The Affair for Decider. This show’s capacity to surprise, delight, and fascinate just keeps growing.

You might want to sit down before you read this oh-so-shocking revelation: When “Empire” put Cookie Lyon at the center of an episode, it got the best episode of its third season so far. Largely pushing Lucious and the constant conflicts he engenders between his sons to the side, this week’s focus was squarely on the queen as she attempted to bring her scatterbrained family together to impress the family of her once-again boyfriend, the New York City mayoral candidate Angelo DuBois. Taraji P. Henson’s unerring ability to find the core of Cookie’s every interaction and mine it for all it’s worth is the show’s greatest renewable resource.

I reviewed last night’s fun Empire episode for the New York goddamn Times.