Author: Elayne Riggs

Hot Enough For You?, by Elayne Riggs

Hot Enough For You?, by Elayne Riggs

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!)

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MoCCA Catches Fire!

MoCCA Catches Fire!

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!

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

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

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…

Safe Space, by Elayne Riggs

Safe Space, by Elayne Riggs

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.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending June 1, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending June 1, 2008

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 KistlerWorst Moments in Skrull ‘Invasion’ History
  2. April 9: Alan KistlerWhy Marvel’s ‘Secret Wars’ Was Better Than ‘Civil War’
  3. April 17: Martha ThomasesTop Political Campaigns in Comics
  4. April 24: Alan KistlerThe Worst Superhero Names in Comics
  5. May 6: Chris UllrichThe Worst Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  6. May 14: Alan KistlerThe Worst Supervillain Names in Comics
  7. May 21: Chris UllrichThe Best Movies Adapted from Comic Books
  8. May 28: Martha ThomasesBiggest 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…

Touchstones, by Elayne Riggs

Touchstones, by Elayne Riggs

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.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 25, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 25, 2008

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!

Hereville, Thereville and Everywhereville, by Elayne Riggs

Hereville, Thereville and Everywhereville, by Elayne Riggs

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.

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ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 18, 2008

ComicMix Columns for the Week Ending May 18, 2008

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!

In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs

In the Pink, by Elayne Riggs

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.

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