Mental health was always one of those things where people would ascribe moral weakness to describe a mental condition that might have complex or unexplained origins. People used to think sin caused schizophrenia or homosexuality, then they blamed it on masturbation or whatever else made them feel morally superior to people with different mentalities. Depression still gets that kind of treatment. “Stop being so depressed, you’re such a whiner!”—for its part, depression is typically thought of as a temporary sadness that only miserable losers prolong by dwelling on problems. It’s a lot more complex than that, obviously. There are some people who just have a bad day, and then there’s others whose brains are literally a different shape because of depression, leading to a chronic diagnosis. It’s a spectrum, really, not an either/or deal. Still, even the guys who need medication just to get out of bed get tagged as people who just need to man up and stop being a “pussy”.

So in politics there’s two types of majorities: political majorities and population majorities. A state might have a population that is 80% non-white, but while that could be a popular majority, it would be considered a political minority if the state legislature is filled with white guys making decisions that only affect white guys positively. This obviously was a description of Apartheid South Africa. Now, imagine what it would be like if a political majority only consisted of a single dude capable of destroying cities. Well, okay, that’s a dictatorship obviously, but imagine it’s a little more complicated than that.

I’ll admit, a lot of my criteria for choosing a book to review boils down to “does the name of the book make me curious?”. When the books arrive at my doorstep, nine times out of ten I know barely more than that they exist. I guess I’ll just say that I’m really dedicated to objective criticism. Am I judging a book by the cover before I’ve even read it? Who knows! On the one hand, every book becomes an interesting surprise, like a mini-Christmas. On the other hand, Beth will probably take advantage of my complacency by mailing me something that makes my eyes scream one of these days, and I’d probably deserve it.

It took me a long time to understand that intelligence isn’t strictly an attribute endowed to us by genetics or some kind of cosmic rule. I mean, aside from learning disabilities, intelligence was often a matter of work habit- if you found something interesting enough, then you found the drive to learn about it, and so you became intelligent through your own efforts and practice. People would often compliment someone’s intelligence as if it were some kind of inbred quality, like hair color. Really, though, anyone can be smart if they just practice. Most of the time.

I took a macroeconomics course in college and it was pretty interesting, but it was the only education I ever got on the subject. I learned about supply and demand, nominal GDP versus real GDP and all this other stuff that I’ve largely forgotten. My teacher was awesome though. That’s all I remember. So really, it’s great when someone comes along and writes a primer on economics that is both highly informative and easily accessible. Dan Burr and Michael Goodwin did that here, and they did it in comic form. Heck yes.

Everyone loves polytheistic wars. Monotheism is pretty boring because all you ever get are good/evil metaphors and one-on-one boxing matches, but with polytheism you can really mix things up. You can base your morality on a spectrum instead of a either/or dynamic. You can have alliances and subterfuge. That’s why the Greek Pantheon played out like a [...]

Gaming comics as a whole are kind of worn out at this point. If there were a map of the webcomic landscape you’d have Penny Arcade’s political boundaries crowding out a massive chunk of the paper, like those obscenely large profiles of the Soviet Union back in the day. Any newcomers back then would automatically [...]

Whugh. Now that the Small Press Expo coverage is done, looks like it’s about time I get on with a new title from our friends over at Fanboy Comics. This new one, called Identity Thief, came out on September 25th (my birthday!) but I got a free copy from them a couple days before which [...]

Coffee is too damned expensive in the city.

Stan is a veteran journalist and amateur historian who just finished work on Taxes, the Tea Party and Those Revolting Rebels, a graphic history of the Boston Tea Party and the circumstances that led to it. It was an attempt, in his words, at a “bottom-up” narrative, focusing less on the famous movers and shakers [...]

Good lord, it’s the last week of SPX coverage! Better get what I can in now before the clock strikes midnight and the moon monster steals– That got away from me fast, I apologize. I’m trying to convey my sense of urgency and the words not exit mouth good. So one of the things I [...]

After Nick Abadzis made me feel good about myself I walked away with a copy of The Magic Skateboard, which is book 3 in his Pleebus Planet series. Honestly I bought it at random because I just wanted to buy something, anything from him, as a way of saying “Laika was cool and I want [...]