Hi there, I'm Natalie Zutter! I'm a playwright, pop/geek culture blogger, and aspiring comic book writer living in New York City. Since graduating from NYU's Gallatin School of Individualized Study, I'm trying to figure out how to apply that same interdisciplinary format to my post-college life in the arts world.
I write about female friendship, superheroes, and sex robots. My work has been developed and performed through festivals and installations around NYC.
My pop culture writing has appeared on Tor.com, Crushable, Barnes & Noble, Bookish, Read It Forward, Den of Geek, BlackBook, and elsewhere.
‘Tis the season for scary! It’s almost Halloween and it’s the time of year when haunted houses and monsters are particularly hungry. I’ve put together some handy tips to avoid getting caught in a horror movie of your very own this All Hallows’ Eve.
1. Don’t Try to Escape Your Past
Do you have a dark past? A tragic past? Maybe a tragically dark past? Don’t try to escape it by going “to start a new life” somewhere. We all know how this plays out. Work out your issues. Go to therapy. You’ll need it anyway after you have to fight off whatever ghost comes to eat your feelings (and your soul).
2. Get a Good Realtor
As with most things in life, like bras, or plumbers, you get what you pay for. Don’t trust cheap real estate, and get a good realtor. Some lady with bad shoulder pads trying to make a quick buck isn’t going to let you know that 55 people were murdered in your new living room. She’ll let you figure out on your own that the walls bleed during full moons, and only after you sign the deal.
3. Stop Accepting Weird, Vintage Gifts
Everyone knows that “vintage” is just another word for “haunted”. You think you’re being cool and hip, until a demon slithers out of that 100-year-old office chair and takes up residence in your tiny Brooklyn apartment. You don’t even have room for a couch, let alone an exorcism. Why don’t you get a Pinterest account and start crafting instead?
4. No More Remote Vacations
When your friend enthusiastically tells you about her cousin’s neighbor’s babysitter’s dog walker’s cabin in the middle of the Maine woods that you can totally party in for vacation, text her back some pictures of Paris, or London. Nothing good ever comes with a free vacation in a remote cabin. You might as well walk around the woods with a sign stuck on your back that says “Eat my soul”. Just remember, murderers and ghosts hate wifi.
5. Listen To That One Guy
Lastly, it may seem like a drag, but this is the time of the year to listen to that friend that’s always worried about everything. This is the friend that is least likely to investigate a weird sound in the basement, or read aloud from an ancient text you happened upon, or forget to keep fresh batteries in their kitchen flashlight. You might miss out on a few rad parties, but you definitely won’t die, either.
According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.
My daughter’s adventures cosplaying as Ms Marvel (Kamala Khan) at bostoncomiccon with me as her Lockjaw. She loved getting to pose with other folks doing Kamala and Carol Danvers, as well as a Squirrel Girl (Pro cosplayer bellechere) and a Billy Batson (Marvel/DC crossover)
Edit: A bunch of folks asked us where we got her embiggened fist - it was part of a Wreck-it-Ralph costume I did last year (they were briefly available at Disney Stores)
This is so precious. It was a delight to see these two at the con!
And this reminds me why I love comics.
The best part of this is that she used a Wreck-It Ralph fist for Kamala.
I honestly don’t understand why there aren’t more people who, when given the platform to discuss minimum wage, don’t simply distill it to the simplest of facts:
A forty hour work week is considered full time.
It’s considered as such because it takes up the amount of time we as a society have agreed should be considered the maximum work schedule required of an employee. (this, of course, does not always bear out practically, but just follow me here)
A person working the maximum amount of time required should earn enough for that labor to be able to survive. Phrased this way, I doubt even most conservatives could effectively argue against it, and out of the mouth of someone verbally deft enough to dance around the pathos-based jabs conservative pundits like to use to avoid actually debating, it could actually get opps thinking.
Therefore, if an employee is being paid less than [number of dollars needed for the post-tax total to pay for the basic necessities in a given area divided by forty] per hour, they are being ripped off and essentially having their labor, productivity, and profit generation value stolen by their employer.
Wages are a business expense, and if a company cannot afford to pay for its labor, it is by definition a failing business. A company stealing labor to stay afloat (without even touching those that do so simply to increase profit margins and/or management/executive pay/bonuses) is no more ethical than a failing construction company breaking into a lumber yard and stealing wood.
Our goal as a society should be to protect each other, especially those that most need protection, not to subsidize failing businesses whose owners could quite well subsidize them on their own.
I don’t judge anyone who enjoys handy-around-the-farm, family-man Clint Barton, but my Clint Barton will always be the coffee-pot-chugging, sweatpants-wearing, band-aid covered shitshow crapsack of a human being who would probably manage to order none pizza with left beef.
So I was the last person on the internet to find out about this little op-ed by Jill Lepore. When Harvard professors are throwing shade on you from the rarified heights of the New Yorker, you have officially arrived in life, or at least in comics. So I was rather chuffed by this piece, though I do want to respond to some of the points raised, because they tie into some of the broader conversations we’ve been having lately in the comics community. I’d like to give a shout-out to Valkyrie Leia Calderon for drawing my attention to this piece–you can read her thoughtful and candid open letter to Dr. Lepore here.
If you are an avid comic book reader and/or follower of industry trends, none of what I’m about to say will be news to you. However, for those of you who are new to the medium, returning to the medium, or just interested in the continuing debate on the role of gender in pop culture, I hope what follows will be useful and help flesh out the conversation.
First off, a funny tidbit: Dr. Lepore and I have met, though she probably doesn’t remember, as I was a scrappy teenager with a fauxhawk at the time. Way back when I was an undergraduate, she gave a guest lecture on the French and Indian Wars in an American History colloquium I was taking at Boston University. She struck me as very intelligent and thoughtful, a passionate historian.
So I was a bit surprised that someone who obviously values rigorous scholarship would analyze the first issue of a crossover event without any apparent knowledge of what a crossover event is, or what the heavily tongue-in-cheek “feminist paradise,” Arcadia, represents in the context of the Secret Wars and the wider Marvel Universe. (Does she know about the zombies? Somebody please tell her about the zombies.) Thus decontextualized, what Dr. Lepore is left with is a cover depicting a bunch of characters about whom she admits to knowing nothing, and one fifth of a story, which is perhaps why her analysis reads as so perplexingly shallow, even snarky.
A really classy response from G. Willow Wilson to Jill Lepore’s pieces in The New Yorker comparing the heroes of A Force to porn stars. It is appalling that Lepore clearly did not do appropriate research for her piece, and that no one at The New Yorker felt the need to fact-check any of what she said against what’s actually out in the industry.
