One of the biggest questions circling around FX’s TV adaptation of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man was how it would update a 20-year-old story about gender for a less gender-essentialist era. The first issue of the comic introduces a cataclysm that abruptly kills off all...
The jeweler who forged the One Ring never got to see it
Practical. Strong. Ageless. Unadorned, until heated to reveal the Tengwar script of the Black Speech of Mordor. Able to morph to fit its wearer without losing integrity of shape. These are Peter Jackson’s “Rules of the One Ring,” recalled by Dan Hennah, supervising art director on the Lord of the...
One of tabletop gaming’s most prestigious awards has gone missing
The Diana Jones Award trophy, one of tabletop gaming’s most prized objects, has gone missing and is feared lost. After changing hands for more than 20 years, the trophy, whose name is a derivation of the adventuring archeologist Indiana Jones, has disappeared for a rather mundane reason: It got lost...
Find dozens of Easter eggs in this Katamari artwork
[Ed. note: For the second issue of high-end independent game magazine A Profound Waste of Time, illustrator Doug John Miller, editor Caspian Whistler, and game designer Keita Takahashi put together a fold-out cover packed with references to Takahashi’s career, featuring games like Katamari Damacy, Noby Noby Boy, and Crankin’s Time...
Video game culture owes a lot to hidden object games
The act of noticing something, with your eyes or hands or nose, comes naturally to humans. When you start playing a video game, it’s one of the first things you do: notice things. What buttons do I press? Which way do I go? What items can I grab? Hidden object...
Three decades of Wario all started with a name
We all know of Wario. As the greedy, ill-mannered, sometimes downright gross foil to Mario, he spends time profiting off the microgame business, sporting and karting with people he proclaims to hate. In between all that, you can probably catch him picking his nose or digesting his garlic dinner. We’re...
Venom is a good couples therapist, according to Andy Serkis
Andy Serkis is no stranger to characters that share a body like irritable roommates. The mild-mannered English filmmaker and actor is beloved for his dual performance of Gollum and Smeágol in the Lord of the Rings films, two warring personalities inhabiting a single computer-generated body thanks to a visual effects...
The race to save Kirk and Spock’s fanfiction legacy
Archive of Our Own has always been more than the hottest fanfiction destination on the internet. In 2007, after years of struggling with fragmentation, lack of preservation, and legal threats, a group of fanfic creators came together to launch a nonprofit dedicated to tackling those issues. They built the Organization...
‘I wish there was a plan’: The oral history of DC Comics’ infamous New 52 reboot
On Aug. 31, 2011, the comic book industry was supposed to change forever. The release of Justice League #1 wouldn’t just relaunch the premier superteam of DC Comics with a new origin story, but be the first of 52 new comic book series that would establish a fresh incarnation of...
How to decide if the Apple’s chaotic drama The Morning Show is for you
The Morning Show, created by Jay Carson and inspired by a book by CNN reporter Brian Stelter, was one of the first hints that Apple TV Plus could become a thing: Not only did the backstage drama feature two of the biggest TV stars of sitcoms given new life in...