Juliet Kahn

We here at ComicsAlliance know a thing or two about loving (and obsessively analyzing) Nickelodeon’s groundbreaking action fantasy saga. We’ve expounded upon everything from its depiction of fascism to its value as progressive entertainment. So you can bet we’re excited for today’s Blu-Ray release. You can check out an exclusive clip from one of the disc’s featurettes right here; a funny little insight into the show's New York Comic-Con panel that reveals the voice team’s behind-the-scenes rituals.

You can’t keep a good Teen Titan down. On the screen, on the page, in and out of feathered disco unitards --- the public gobbles them up and asks for more. DC’s Convergence event will unite classic Titans writer Marv Wolfman with artists Nicola Scott and Marc Deering for a trip back to the 1980s in Convergence: New Teen Titans, a tale which promises to pit the adolescent do-gooders against the Tangent Universe’s Doom Patrol. Will Robotman and Cyborg square off in a battle for riveted supremacy? Will Beast Boy’s history with the Patrol find him trapped between his past and present? Will Starfire’s legendary ultra-perm emerge from the chaos unscathed? With these issues in mind, ComicsAlliance sat down with the creative team to discuss the Titans’ various eras, their enduring appeal, and what the future holds for the classic super team.

Though she’s best known as a seductive jewel thief, Catwoman has long been a protector of the unprotected. Justin Gray and Ron Randall will continue this tradition in the two issue Catwoman miniseries during DC's Convergence event, wherein the erstwhile villainess becomes Suicide Slum’s watchful eye --- only to encounter the Batman of the Kingdom Come universe standing in her way. What’s a bad-girl-gone-good to do? ComicsAlliance sought out the creative team to discuss the past, present, and future of DC’s feline fatale.

Madéleine Flores’s Help Us! Great Warrior begs the question: must great power always come with great responsibility? Don’t get our heroine, the eponymous Great Warrior, wrong -- it’s totally important to help people, slay monsters, loot dungeons, all that stuff. But can’t you take a break sometimes too? Can’t you celebrate your victory with some pizza bagels and a stack of trashy magazines instead of brooding over the cruel paradox that is your life? Responsibility is great, but every good hero needs to know how to treat herself and her friends. It is this commitment to fun and fearlessness that defined Help Us! Great Warrior as a webcomic and now enlivens its pages in print. In the wake of the comic’s inaugural issue, ComicsAlliance sat down with Flores to discuss fun, friendship, and fantasy.

Death Note, Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s wildly popular tale of good, evil, and perfectly mussed hair, has been adapted into an anime, three live action movies, a prose novel, and various video games. In my foolishness, I’d thought we were done. I'd thought the consumption of 2007 anime clubs everywhere was enough to sate Death Note's ravenous appetite. But I was wrong—and, believe it or not, happily so. From April 6th to the 29th, Death Note The Musical will run at Tokyo’s Nissay Theater. Further performances have been scheduled in Osaka, Nagoya, and South Korea.

I don’t really do escapism. It’s not that the media I consume isn’t described as such, nor even that I have something against the concept. I just rarely feel as though I….escape. I mean, I enjoy the books I read and the games I play. And I suppose they keep me from considering the quotidian details of my life as I engage with them. Like, no, in the most banal sense, I am not thinking about groceries as I play Portal. But there’s a power people invest in the concept of escapism—whether they celebrate or deride it—and I just never seem to get it. It’s not a big deal, really. It’s never a metric by which I measure anything. I shrug and move on. I escaped into The Legend of Korra.

In her new memoir Tomboy, Liz Prince explores the thorny world of gender expression, puberty, and girlhood, as experienced by someone who bucked every norm of it. It’s not always an easy read, but it is one of the most necessary comics published this year. Prince’s work is tender, wry, and above all, honest. It is this honesty that so illuminates her work, from the single travails of Alone Forever to her chronicles of the punk scene. As Tomboy makes the rounds of Best of 2014 lists, ComicsAlliance spoke with her about autobiography, internet fame, and being “not like other girls.”

Forgive me Gloria Steinem, for I have sinned: I love sexy anime. Panty and Stocking. Kill la Kill. The Woman Called Fujiko Mine. If it has booty shorts and the slightest patina of satire, I’m not just on board—I’m conducting the train. So of course I loved Sidera, a newly released short created by French team Catfish Deluxe and Japanese studio Yapiko Animation for the movie Lou! Journal Infime.

Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag, creators of the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist, are passion incarnate. They love their readers. They are ecstatic that Top Shelf has decided to distribute the successfully-Kickstarted first print volume of SFP. They are exasperated by the state of women in comics today. And they’re out to do something about it. Through Alison Green, the eponymous strong female protagonist, Mulligan and Ostertag explore a world of stark imbalance—a world where our heroine, once a superhero, is now a disillusioned college student searching for truth in a complex world. Do powers make the woman? Does strength only come in one form? ComicsAlliance sat down with Mulligan and Ostertag to discuss these questions, memories of LARP camp, making sure each and every henchman gets a backstory, and more.

I'm not excited for Sam Wilson as Captain America, and I'm not excited for a female Thor. Now, I don't think these are totally wrongheaded things to do. I admire the impulse behind these changes, and I believe they come from a good place. In the abstract sense, I love the idea of Marvel featuring, in big, bold style, the adventures of a black man and a woman against the hordes of iniquity. I believe at least part of the motivation behind these changes is genuine in its altruism, and that it is not entirely invalidated by profit-seeking impulses. I want to believe in this initiative. I want to be excited. I do not want to be the curmudgeon in the corner, needlessly nitpicking everyone else's good time to pieces. But it feels like a gimmick, and functions like a gimmick, and that’s because it is a gimmick. I give it perhaps two years — two years that only the most hard-core aficionados will end up able to recall, alongside their recollections of the foil covers era and that one time Doc Ock was Spider-Man.