Articles by elayne-riggs

Displaying 31-45 of 535
Previous1234567Next

Wed Jun 25, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Hold the Phone, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good

I've admitted it before, I have no idea how to text message. Oh, I think I understand the basic principle behind texting; it's like IM'ing using a handheld device, right? Only, I've never done it. I've sat through television shows that use instant polling via cell phone text devices for viewers to cast pointless votes for their favorite this-and-thats, but it all seemed like so much mysterious, impenetrable jargon. "Text 12345 to 67890"? In what world is this plain English?

In the world of the "late aughts," apparently. By the way, I've never used a PDA either, although I've "hot-sync'ed" my ex-boss' Palm Pilot with a PC. Again, I get the principle, but the idea somewhat alarms me. During my recent 6-month job search I saw so many ads for executive assistants that required knowledge of a Blackberry that I was seriously considering taking some sort of tutorial just to familiarize myself with exactly how it worked. As it is, we don't even have a text messaging plan for our cell phones. Every time I get a text message, which 90% of the time is a spam offer from T-Mobile, we get billed 5 cents. That's right, they get to spam me and charge me for the privilege. Shouldn't that be illegal or something to do to customers who have opted out of texting?

I'm still getting used to the idea of the ubiquity of cell phones on the New York City streets. The last time Robin and I visited England, that's the main thing he noticed about Londoners that hadn't been present when he lived in the UK, all the folks who had a cell phone practically attached to their ears. I was in the East Village last week, and just from a quick glance around at pedestrian traffic I approximated one of every three people was using a cell phone as they traversed the intersections. (This is something comic book artists, particularly at Marvel as so many of that company's titles are based in New York City, should note if they're going to draw a lot of city scenes.)

I have a theory that there are probably fewer cigarette smokers in urban areas now than there were even a few years ago because, if you need one hand free to swing as you walk or to hold a shoulder bag or briefcase, and therefore you leave your other hand the choice between lighting up and dialing up, more people will currently choose their electronic toys to satisfy their oral fixations than the drag on the cancer stick. Plus, if you're smoking you're going to be too short of breath to be able to carry on a phone conversation while you walk!

Continue reading Hold the Phone, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (9)

Sun Jun 22, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 22, 2008

Shaking things up, as always!

You know the recent dire rumors floating about in the comics industry are heating up when they've made it to Nikki Finke's Deadline Hollywood Daily blog, alongside a huge photo of Dan DiDio.  DHD was an indispensable resource during the recent writers' strike; let's see how Finke helps raise the profile of the funnybook business, for better or worse.  Meanwhile, our columnists and feature writers will keep bringing you what we do best!  Here's what we have for you from this past week:

Stay tuned for more news and views!

PermalinkComments (1)

Wed Jun 18, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Gainfully Employed, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good

Kids, it's been a rough six months for me. Well no, I take that back, it hasn't. I should start off by saying that I've had a lot of advantages to take me through my most recent period of unemployment. I was eligible to collect over $300 a week in unemployment insurance (thank you, FDR!). My former job kept me on COBRA so I also had health insurance, of which I took full advantage during my involuntary extended vacation to get all my medical and dental check-ups out of the way. The premiums rose considerably a couple months ago, but the unemployment payments (which ran out two weeks ago) helped a lot, as long as Robin took care of the rent and bills. Which he did, as fortunately he's been employed during the entire time (thank you, DC Comics!). Plus, my mom has been there to help out when I've needed it.

Even with all that, even with the other built-in advantages (living in a big city, having a college degree, cultivating a pretty solid set of skills), it's been scary. My heart goes out to people who don't have that second income, that familial support system, that safety net for when stuff goes wrong. I can't imagine how they get through it. My stress level was through the roof.

The illusion of job security has always been very important to me. I'm married to a freelancer, but I couldn't see adopting that lifestyle myself. I'm a creature of habit, I like having set routines; in fact, I like having other people set them. Being a freelancer takes too much self-discipline. I tried catching up on my writing during this last six months, but couldn’t manage more than my usual ComicMix column, weekly roundup, and daily blog post. I was just too consumed with anxiety over my workless state.

Fortunately, I was able to summon up enough wherewithall to undertake an extremely detailed and organized job search, an avocation in and of itself, but the thing about looking for work is, it's never in the same office from one day to the next, is it? And it's exhausting, rather like I'd imagine it would be when you're finishing up an assignment and your brain is busy worrying about where the next assignment is coming from. Nope, one freelancer in the family is quite enough!

Continue reading Gainfully Employed, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (10)

Sun Jun 15, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 15, 2008

Hefty reading on Dad's day!

This week we've brought you a man-sized portion of columns and features by our intrepid band:

Strong enough for a man, but made for -- well, everybody!

PermalinkComments (0)

Wed Jun 11, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Hot Enough For You?, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good

With any luck, this morning the heat wave that has gripped New York since last weekend will have finally broken.

I've never cared for extremes of temperature, but all in all I'm much better equipped to deal with winter than with summer. Winter has its hazards -- for instance, our apartment is situated among a row of houses recessed from the main street with a long U-shaped gravel driveway between our stairs and the street itself, and when it ices over there's never a clear pathway to walk to the street, so unless I drive I'm pretty much trapped in the house. But that generally happens for only a few days, and most of the time I'm more concerned with layering. Which seems to be a lot easier for a person like me with, shall we say, natural padding.

Summer's a whole different ballgame, though. It's pretty easy to layer on clothing when you're cold; it's a lot harder to strip it off when you're warm. Leaving aside societal proprieties and whether or not it's fair or just for topless men to be acceptable but topless women to be verboten (my opinion: as long as women taking off their tops elicits a reaction of "look, boobies!" from the minds of most onlookers, I continue to agree with the status quo here), the fact remains that most of us can't strip past our skin, y'know? And it's more and more dangerous to leave skin exposed for long periods of time. SPF one thousand, anyone?

By the way, you do know that once you get past SPF 30 your additional so-called protection from UV rays is negligible at best? And that there are tons of assertions that sunscreen is actually bad for you and even carcinogenic? (Oh, the fun things you find out about when you set out to write about heat waves! That's at least two articles I now wish I'd never read!)

Continue reading Hot Enough For You?, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (7)

Mon Jun 9, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

MoCCA Catches Fire!

Puck Building evacuated

Smoke in the sub-basement, fire in the sky...  As if this weekend's MoCCA Art Festival weren't already the hottest ticket in town during the hottest couple of days so far this year, there was a fire condition around 3 PM on Sunday that wound up causing an evacuation of the building.

An earlier video of the event was taken down from YouTube for some reason, but Brian Heater of The Daily Cross Hatch posted one of his own. Have a look:

According to MoCCA founder Lawrence Klein, there was apparently a "smoke condition" in the building's sub-basement, nowhere near either of the convention floors or window-based air conditioning units. Attending professionals and fans were probably not all that thrilled to be ushered out into the 90-degree heat, but better safe than sorry!

PermalinkComments (3)

Sun Jun 8, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns/Features for the Week Ending June 8, 2008

Would you like some MoCCA with that?

Greetings from the MoCCA Art Fest, where ComicMix will be out in force today!  We're probably having the time of our lives, having prepared this roundup well beforehand.  Good thing, too, as we keep adding more new features!  Here's the scoop on what our columnists and feature-ists have brought you this past week:

Back to the fun at the Puck Building!  Or is that the pun at the F-- no wait, that can't be right...

PermalinkComments (0)

Wed Jun 4, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Safe Space, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good

I first came across the concept of "safe spaces" for women when I was in high school. I went to an all-girls religious school (yeshiva) in 9th and 10th grades. The idea didn't make sense to me at the time, separating boys and girls just when they were beginning to find out about each other, to really relate to one another as fully-realized people. I was convinced then that the segregation could only come to no good, that we'd grow up completely lacking in social skills regarding how to communicate with the opposite sex, and that it was all doomed to end in tears.

And while I think I was partially correct, at least in my case, Bruriah was the first place I remember feeling this inexplicable sense of female safety (at least when the male instructors weren't around), of proto-feminist solidarity. It even (temporarily) helped me break some bad personal habits, I'm pretty sure that was the first time I stopped biting my nails for an appreciable period. There was just something amazing about having all that support around me that made it seem anything was possible.

At Rutgers University in New Brunswick, I minored in feminism, which at the time was called Women's Studies. So naturally, everyone assumed, and still does, that I attended not Rutgers College, but the University's "female auxiliary" affiliate, Douglass. I didn't go to Douglass, which by that time was trending from all-female to co-ed anyway. But it was still considered a relative safe space for women, and there were a number of Douglass students in my feminism classes. There, we learned that "safety" didn't just mean shelter from potential violence (rape awareness was a big part of my curriculum, and I never did figure out why more of it wasn't aimed at the gender that committed the most rapes -- i.e., the guilty party -- rather than the gender that was raped most often) but from male aggression in general, even when that aggression took the form of vigorous debate. We analyzed how women in co-ed classes and curricula tended to be more withdrawn and reticent than the men, who interrupted far more and were paid more academic (rather than prurient) attention by the instructors. Without so many men around to hog the limelight and make us feel scholastically intimidated, we were able to blossom more into our own diverse personalities.

Continue reading Safe Space, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (3)

Sun Jun 1, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending June 1, 2008

Now with more regular features!

As readers doubtless have noticed, we've been adding a lot of regular features to ComicMix in addition to our columnists.  So it's time to add Van's Weekly Haul comic reviews to our rotation!  Here's what we've done for you this past week:

In addition, here's the listing of all the ComicMix Six fun we've come up with so far:

  1. April 2: Alan Kistler - Worst Moments in Skrull 'Invasion' History
  2. April 9: Alan Kistler - Why Marvel's 'Secret Wars' Was Better Than 'Civil War'
  3. April 17: Martha Thomases - Top Political Campaigns in Comics
  4. April 24: Alan Kistler - The Worst Superhero Names in Comics
  5. May 6: Chris Ullrich - The Worst Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  6. May 14: Alan Kistler - The Worst Supervillain Names in Comics
  7. May 21: Chris Ullrich - The Best Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  8. May 28: Martha Thomases - Biggest Tease in Comics (Male)

And with that, we bid our numbering goodbye!  Next week we'll start adding in our Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica reviews (from Rick Marshall and Chris Ullrich respectively) to the roundup...

PermalinkComments (0)

Wed May 28, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Touchstones, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good #67

Has anybody here seen my old friend Bobby
Can you tell me where he's gone
I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill
With Abraham, Martin and John.

Well, last time I did an actual comic book review, and as expected it received almost no comments. So I don't want to hear from anyone about how this column isn't about comics!

I could probably make it about comics. After all, I'm going to be discussing the '60s, which were about many things. Many people my age cut their fanboy and fangirl teeth on Marvel comics of the '60s. (Me, I didn't start reading until the mid-'80s or so, even though my late best friend Bill Marcinko tried pretty hard to get me interested in the Marvels of the late '70s.) But, despite my trepidation about the kind of Google ads this column will attract, today I want to write about something else that happened in the '60s, and about the persistence of memory.

Last week on the campaign trail, in an interview given to South Dakota's Argus Leader, a frustrated Hillary Clinton reiterated her response to the "why won't that bitch just quit?" crowd of media pundits that she'd initially articulated in a Time magazine interview back in March. Her original words: "I think people have short memories. Primary contests used to last a lot longer. We all remember the great tragedy of Bobby Kennedy being assassinated in June in L.A. My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until June. Having a primary contest go through June is nothing particularly unusual."

This time around the phrasing was only slightly different: "My husband didn't wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June. We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know I just don't understand it," the "it" in question being the pundits' incessant and unprecedented calls for a leading candidate to step aside (as if the media were orchestrating the process rather than the voters of each state). In March, nobody seemed to notice; this time, with the anti-Clinton hysteria ratcheted up as high as it's been since the Whitewater nonsense, suddenly all sorts of folks were up in arms.

Continue reading Touchstones, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (9)

Sun May 25, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 25, 2008

Throw another one on the barbie!

Hope everyone's having a nice three-day weekend, and that we all remember that the real focus on Memorial Day ought to be putting an end to the sheer folly of war, so that someday we won't have to mourn all those whose lives have been lost in its perpetuation.  Oh, and of course, outdoor grilling and summer movies and retail sales. 

Here's what our columnists have been selling you -- for free! -- this past week:

Remember the barbecue sauce!

PermalinkComments (0)

Wed May 21, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

Hereville, Thereville and Everywhereville, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good #66

Oregon has become the latest state to garner the national spotlight in this Democratic Presidential campaign "silly season." Just about every liberal blog I read had effusive reports of the huge turnout at last weekend's rally for Barack Obama in Portland's Waterfront Park. Now me, I can't think of Oregon without thinking of two things: the annual Stumptown Comics Festival, which I've never attended but which sounds pretty neat; and the person who first introduced me to the idea of Stumptown, my friend of many years, Barry Deutsch.

Barry and I go back so long that, like ComicMix commenter Vinnie Bartilucci, he knew me before my first marriage. As I recall, he visited me a few times back when I worked in the East Village, we probably even shopped at St. Mark's Comics together, and he was an utter delight to be around. He still is, whenever he comes back east to visit. But he currently makes his home in the wilds of Oregon, so I pretty much see him around MoCCA time and that's it. Fortunately, I get to see his art whenever I want to.

Barry's been sketching and doing comic strips for awhile now. His political work reminds me a lot of Matt Wuerker's style, the way it relies on gentle caricature and well-thought-out illustration to get his points across easily and without straining the reader's credulity. He'd been bending my ear for awhile about a special long-form project of his, and that project has finally come out. It's called Hereville.  You've probably seen lots of reviews about it online already. Here's another one.

Continue reading Hereville, Thereville and Everywhereville, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (1)

Sun May 18, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 18, 2008

Functional and aesthetically pleasing!

According to The Google, today marks the anniversary of the birth of Walter Gropius, founder of the Bauhaus School of Design, whose influence can still be felt daily by urban workers every time they look up at a skyscraper featuring way too much glass.  Meanwhile, here's what our designer columnists have created for you this past week:

Sure to keep your eyes from glazing over!

PermalinkComments (0)

Wed May 14, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs

It's All Good #65

I visited my mom's house for Mother's Day, which always seems to include watching baseball, as Mom and I are both fans of the game. No, honest, this isn't another column about sports! It's about pink.

You see, every year on Mother's Day, Major League Baseball provides its teams with pink bats, pink ribbons and so forth. It's all Komen-driven, of course.  The Susan G. Komen Foundation has become the country's largest breast cancer charity due largely to its habit of painting things pink.

And so we watched not only pink bats, but pink-ringed bases and pink home plates and pink wrist bands and pink caps in the crowd and Jose Reyes even had pink shoelaces for the occasion. It was, as always, very cool.  It would have been even nicer if the Mets announcers had actually noted the real reason for the pink; instead, the disappointingly misogynist Keith Hernandez said it was for Mother's Day. 'Cause, uh, Moms like pink, I guess, Keith? Seriously, do you know the difference between "for" Mother's Day and "on" Mother's Day at all?

I was surprised to find out that Komen isn't the only charity focused on pink. Apparently a number of other less reputable places engage in "pink washing," where it's not as clear where your breast cancer charity money's actually going. In fact, Breast Cancer Action has a website called Think Before You Pink which reminds folks that "breast cancer is about women's lives, not a marketing opportunity," and that there are a lot of places riding the bandwagon just to make a profit.

Continue reading In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs ›

PermalinkComments (8)

Sun May 11, 2008 — by Elayne Riggs

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 11, 2008

Come to Momma!

Greetings from Asbury Park the wilds of New Jersey, where I'm visiting my Mom for Mother's Day!  Hope all you moms out there are having a good one.  Here are some loving presents we've given you, and every other ComicMix reader for that matter, this past week:

Hey, why not take your Mom to see Speed Racer today?  After all, Susan Sarandon plays the protagonist's mom, doesn't she?

PermalinkComments (0)

Previous1234567Next

Latest Comments on News

Active Conversations

ComicMix Podcasts

this gets replaced with a player