Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
[Featured image is a Buffy cross-stitch created by my friend, Elin Malmqvist, after we bonded over the series during the pandemic] In every generation there is a chosen one. She alone will stand against the vampires, the demons, and the forces of darkness. She is the Slayer. Twenty-five years ago today, viewers were welcomed to…
Review: Rockstar and Softboy by Sina Grace
Picture it: New York, 2018. It was summer, I was between semesters of my graduate program at NYU, and I was attending Flame Con, the world’s largest queer comic convention, for the first time. A bunch of creatives I loved were going to be there, and I was eager to meet them and buy (more…
Speaking with the Lawterature Podcast about The Fascinators by Andrew Eliopulos
Hi everyone! Instead of a written review this week, I have something special to share. I was fortunate enough to guest star on my sister-in-law Brooke Bove’s podcast Lawterature, and the episode is out today. We talk about the YA novel The Fascinators by Andrew Eliopulos and LGBTQIA issues, as well as other random things…
Review: Nimona by Nate Stevenson
Ever since it was announced in February that Disney was closing Blue Sky Studios—which they acquired in their purchase of Twentieth Century Fox—and was canceling the animated film adaptation of Nate Stevenson’s webcomic-turned-graphic novel Nimona, I haven’t been able to put the series out of my mind. It is one of my favorites, and in…
Review: The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
(originally posted 19 March 2021) *Note: There are light spoilers in this review, but nothing is said that cannot be surmised by the blurb on the dustjacket of the book* “What’s the point of living if you only do it how others want you to?” This is one of the themes at the center of…
Review: Red, White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston
(originally posted 22 March 2021) “Sometimes you just jump and hope it’s not a cliff.” Red, White & Royal Blue (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2019), the debut novel by Casey McQuiston, begins less with a jump and more with a trip and tumble as Alex Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States, causes a diplomatic disaster…
Tales of Gothic Horror: Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo
From Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic Frankenstein to Shirley Jackson’s 1959 novel The Haunting of Hill House and beyond, gothic horror novels have captivated readers for generations with their use of the mysterious, the supernatural, the psychological, and the grotesque. Mexican Gothic (Del Rey, 2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and What Big Teeth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,…
Prologue
12 March 2021
Hello! And Welcome to my new site for all things personal, professional, creative, and scholarly. It feels so strange to be starting a blog in 2021. This is more evidence for my theory that time collapses in on itself as you get older, until you’re in the present, experiencing things from your past, while working on things for the future. For example, I spent my day working on this website (a throwback to the Myspace, Blogspot, and Tumblr of yore) and some abstracts for conference CFPs that are due in a few days (future), while listening to The Donnas (teens) and Selena Gomez (20s and 30s); and now I’m having a Mountain Dew (decidedly a drink from my undergrad years) and watching Felicity (definitely a series from my pre-/teens, which I shockingly have never seen until a few days ago). I could say today’s events are unusual, but the truth is I very much live in a constant state of artifactual all-at-once-ness.
I’m starting this website for a few reasons. First, it’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while. I’ve been thinking about how I want to present myself professionally, and it’s impossible to separate the different parts of myself. It didn’t make sense to me to start a creative website and a professional academic website, when so much of my academic work is interdisciplinary and creative (i.e., scholarly comics, collage posters, etc.). It’s also uncomfortable to compartmentalize. When I was younger I used to be so weird about different friend groups mixing; like I didn’t want my school friends to hang out with my neighborhood friends, and I didn’t want any of my friends to hang out with my family. It was probably because I was a different version of myself around everyone—and because I was queer, whether I knew it or not, and that plus social anxiety made the co-mingling of groups awkward for me. As an adult I’m a very open, very honest person, and to have to fragment myself again into different boxes according to creative and professional identities and skillsets seems disingenuous to myself and my work. So on this site you’ll find everything—my publications, my artwork, my comics, my zines, my writing, some photographs—all of the bits and bobs that make a Bryan.
Second, I want to use this site to share artwork for sale. I’ve been drawing from a young age, but I’ve been drawing digitally (regularly) for the past four years and constantly trying to improve. I don’t draw every day, because of my PhD program schedule, but I do my best to draw when I can. Because I’m a PhD student, my income is limited – so I’d really like to sell my work if there are any interested buyers! Prints for any completed artwork are $20, and commissions start at $20 and vary depending on the piece you want. I will be adding new prints for sale to my Artwork tab regularly, and posting updates in the Blog section about them.
Speaking of the Blog, the third reason I wanted to start this site is to write more frequently. I’ll post movie, music, and book reviews here, and probably some other life updates as well. This will be a space for me to write more formally than I do in my physical journal (although not too formally—I’ll save that for class assignments).
If you are reading this, thank you! I hope you’ll continue to visit my page and share it with your friends. Now I have to get back to Felicity, but until next time—
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