Since releasing her debut comic The End of Summer in 2015, Tillie Walden has become one of the most prolific, influential, and awarded cartoonists of our time. She’s created some of the most affecting and powerful comics of this century, from her sprawling queer science fiction epic On a Sunbeam...
Overwatch 2’s new hero, Junker Queen, is the embodiment of Blizzard’s sequel
Overwatch’s newest hero, revealed just a few days ago, has been a presence in Blizzard’s hero shooter for nearly five years now. As the disembodied voice of Junkertown’s ruler, she’s only been seen, officially, in scraps of artwork. But Junker Queen was finally, fully, and thoroughly revealed on Thursday, and...
Joshua Williamson killed the Justice League to make a point about how many times the Justice League has been killed
Earlier this year, Joshua Williamson had the curious experience of watching his fiction become reality. By the time DC Comics announced that the Justice League would die a spectacular death in Justice League #75, the writer had already finished writing the issue and writing introductory issues of Dark Crisis —...
Doomed Forgotten Realms is the darkest possible Dungeons & Dragons timeline
Wizards of the Coast launched the 5th edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2014 with the adventure Tyranny of Dragons, where players must stop a cult from summoning the evil dragon goddess Tiamat into the Forgotten Realms. Doomed Forgotten Realms: Sword Coast Gazetteer, a new setting book from Quill &...
Meet the streamer who helps PS5 buyers beat bots and scalpers
Join one of Jake Randall’s streams and he appears, in the corner of the screen, sitting with his back against a bookshelf that’s overflowing with video game jewel cases. He’s staring down an online retailer in the nervy minutes before a PlayStation 5 restock. Today, the target is Amazon, and...
Alex Garland says the ending of Men is whatever you make of it
Alex Garland’s Men — his horror-movie follow-up to Annihilation and Ex Machina — ends without any cut-and-dried resolution. It’s unclear from the movie’s final moments exactly how the conflict resolved, or how real any of the action was. The movie is packed with Biblical and pagan symbolism, but scholars have...
The real history behind Stranger Things 4’s Satanic Panic plot
In the first episode of Stranger Things season 4, Eddie, the leader of Hawkins High’s “Hellfire Club” of Dungeons & Dragons players, gleefully reads from a Newsweek article about how the game is for Satan-worshippers. “The devil has come to America,” he reads out. “Studies have linked violent behavior to...
The startling story behind Hatching’s horrifying puppet-monster
Two things particularly stand out about Hanna Bergholm’s creepy horror feature Hatching: the emotional performance from Siiri Solalinna as a wide-eyed preteen under the thumb of a perfectionist mother, and her co-star Alli, the dripping, toothy, gradually mutating bird monster she hatches from a giant egg. Where it’s been standard...
Does Multiverse of Madness prove there’s a hell in the MCU? The writer explains
Is there a hell in the MCU? And does that imply the existence of demons, God, Lucifer, and who knows what else? All these things certainly exist in Marvel Comics, but the MCU has been fuzzier on the question. Black Panther makes it clear that Wakandan rulers go to a...
Claiming Spuffy: 20 years after its most hated episode, fanfic moves Buffy forward
[Ed note: This article discusses attempted rape and sexual violence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.] Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s 25th anniversary is this year, but this May presents another, darker milestone. Twenty years ago this month, UPN aired the 19th episode of season 6, “Seeing Red,” in which a beloved...