This site is updated Thursday afternoon with a new article about an artistic pursuit generally considered to be beneath consideration. James Schellenberg probes science-fiction, Carol Borden draws out the best in comics, Chris Szego dallies with romance and Ian Driscoll stares deeply into the screen. Click here for their bios and individual takes on the gutter. Our Guest Stars shine here
While the writers have considerable enthusiasm for their subjects, they don't let it numb their critical faculties. Tossing away the shield of journalistic objectivity and refusing the shovel of fannish boosterism, they write in the hopes of starting honest and intelligent discussions about these oft-enjoyed but rarely examined artforms. Contact us here.
Recent Features
Tumbling for Boy George in Baghdad
This month the Cultural Gutter features the first of two articles by Katarina Gligorijevic about growing up with Western pop culture in Baghdad and Belgrade.
My first time setting foot on North American soil was in 1989, when my family arrived in Toronto. It has remained my home ever since, and I credit the ease with which I took to life here in large part to the traveling we did when I was a child, but also to the early education I received in “western life”from the random assortment of films and television programs broadcast in the cities where I spent my childhood - Baghdad, Iraq, and Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia, back then).
There are reasons I left alternative comics for superheroes and there are reasons I keep going back. They each have their wonder and joy; they each have their irritating and sadly heartbreaking points. Nothing's perfect, not Superman, not Jimmy Corrigan. But there is a way to find comics that you love and avoid ones that make you disike comics: collections. I've gone alternative again, even for just a while, with Top Shelf's AX: Alternative Manga (2010), compiled by AX Magazine editor Matsushiro Asakawa and edited by Sean Michael Wilson.
The director’s cut is a familiar term in the world of film, but an equivalent “author’s cut” in the realm of
books is not a widespread notion. Why might that be?
Lady killers get their revenge in this Vaultcast from Vault of Horror interviewing I Spit on Your Grave director Steven Moore and actress Sarah Butler. Vault of Horror also debates misogyny in the film with producer of both the original and the remake, Meir Zarchi. Meanwhile, ladies serve up their revenge hot in the game "Hey Baby," a first person shooter where guys who harass ladies on the street are the target.
~
"Once again, a [film-making] technique progresses from 'innovative' to 'standard procedure' to 'OK, please stop doing that.'" (More teal and orange madness, here).
~
Gloria Stuart has died at 100. Most of the media remembers her as the elder Rose in Titanic. The Gutter remembers her in the James Whale classic, The Old Dark House. The New York Times obituary discusses her many accomplishments outside film here.
~
Yellowback novels were pulpy Victorian reading. Emory University has a bunch of them for you to download. (via @houseinrlyeh)
~
View all Notes here. Seen something shiny? Gutter-talk worth hearing? Let us know!
This month the Cultural Gutter features the first of two articles by Katarina Gligorijevic about growing up with Western pop culture in Baghdad and Belgrade. 
There are reasons I left alternative comics for superheroes and there are reasons I keep going back. They each have their wonder and joy; they each have their irritating and sadly heartbreaking points. Nothing's perfect, not Superman, not Jimmy Corrigan. But there is a way to find comics that you love and avoid ones that make you disike comics: collections. I've gone alternative again, even for just a while, with Top Shelf's AX: Alternative Manga (2010), compiled by AX Magazine editor Matsushiro Asakawa and edited by Sean Michael Wilson.
The director’s cut is a familiar term in the world of film, but an equivalent “author’s cut” in the realm of
books is not a widespread notion. Why might that be?