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‘Mad Men’ Characters and Their Comic Book Counterparts

By Alison Nastasi on

Today is Free Comic Book Day, which promises exactly what it advertises: you get a free comic book just for showing up at your local shop. The offerings have been specially selected, but nothing is preventing you from browsing while you’re there and spending a few dollars to support an oft-overlooked art form that has brought joy to many. To celebrate the occasion, and with a new Mad Men episode approaching, we wanted to combine two of our favorite things: 1960′s ad execs crippled by existential angst, and awesome comic book heroes and villains. The resemblance is greater than you think. See our pairings, and leave your own suggestions, below. … Read More

Art

Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You

By Emily Temple on

In Alex Law’s awesome new project/Tumblr, Little Girls Are Better at Designing Superheroes Than You, which we spotted over at The Rumpus, the undergrad biology student/artist (!) takes pictures of little girls dressed up like superheroes and turns them into awesome drawings. Law writes: ”Kids are more impressionable than you, but kids can also be less restricted by cultural gender norms than you. Kids are more creative than you, and they’re better at making superheroes than you.” Fair enough. Check out some kick-ass little girls and their superheroine counterparts after the jump, and then head here to see more of Law’s work. … Read More

Design

Clever Posters That Cast Superheroes in Famous Films

By Judy Berman on

How can you improve a movie as perfect as The Godfather? With superheroes, of course. Well, OK — perhaps Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece wouldn’t benefit from being relocated to the comic-book universe, but the notion certainly adds some levity to the poster. In a well-executed series of minimalist reimaginings, Brazil-based designer Luiz Arthuso has inserted beloved superheroes into a selection of appropriate movies. See what might happen if Superman starred in Back to the Future, or Wolverine in Kill Bill after the jump. … Read More

Film

Old School Film Serials You Can Watch Online Right Now

By Alison Nastasi on

Henri Langlois, co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, once said of Louis Feuillade’s 1915 silent crime serial, “I am convinced that surrealism preexisted in cinema. Feuillade’s Les vampires was already an expression of the 20th century and of the universal subconscious.” The ten-part, subversive serial runs a whopping eight hours, but it’s easy to lose track of the time when you’re following the exploits of a vampy Parisian gang — including proto-goth starlet Musidora as the infamous Irma Vep.

It’s great to see companies like Kino International bringing old-timey serials like Les vampires to Blu-ray, keeping the low-budget, action-packed chapter plays alive. These early movies are where many film tropes and characters evolved — including several of the superheroes audiences go crazy for, today — and where moviegoers grew to love (and sometimes hate) them. Click through to watch several entertaining serials that are online right now (follow the video links for other parts in the series), and school yourself on an essential chapter in cinema history. … Read More

Design

The Helvetica Alphabet as a Squadron of Heroes

By Emily Temple on

Here at Flavorpill, we’re pretty big nerds about typography, and you know we love superheroes, so we’re always going to bite when we see the two cleverly combined. We recently saw superheroes matched with their typographic counterparts, but graphic designer René Mambembé has another vision — that Helvetica works for everyone. In his clever series Helvetica, My Hero, which we first spotted over at Neatorama, Mambembé recasts pop culture heroes (and villains) as letters in everyone’s favorite font, from an upside-down B for Batman to a debonair J for James Bond. Now if only we could turn this into a functional typeface. Click through to see Mambembé superpowered alphabet — and then be sure to head over to his Behance page to see even more from the series. Fonts to the rescue! … Read More

Design

Superheroes and Their Typographic Counterparts

By Heba Hasan on

After enduring the SATs, we weren’t too fond of analogies in any form. Thankfully, artist Matthew Olin has all but erased our negative connotations with the semantic riddle. Olin, whose work we spotted on Design Taxi, uses analogies to make connections between famous fonts and even more famous superheroes. “The most distinguishing factor of any font is its characters,” Olin says of his typographic classifications. “Hidden beneath these characters, each typeface also has character — its own unique characteristics.” See a selection of Olin’s superhero-and-font pairings after the jump, and be sure to check out more of his thoughtful, analogical work here. … Read More

Web

What’s On at Flavorpill: The Links That Made the Rounds in Our Office

By Alison Nastasi on

Today at Flavorpill, we met amazing teenage inventors. We read the top 10 literary quotes from The Simpsons. We got scientific with a Slinky. We showered 20 times after reading about the most contaminated surfaces in hotel rooms. We saw a new line of superhero-themed… Read More

Books

Gay Characters in Comics

By Alison Nastasi on

The world’s first all-gay superhero team fights a 50-foot lesbian, teams up with a group of deadly (pink!) ninjas, battles zombies, and tries to cope with the dramas of their own love lives in the award-nominated comic book series, Martin Eden’s Spandex. Titan Books’ new story hits shelves June 19, and the Brighton-based heroes have already won the hearts of many in the British indie comics scene.

Eden conceived of the super-powered team while working on his popular comic soap series, The O Men, aiming to make something more self-contained and more, well, gay. A glamorous transvestite, a powerful lesbian, and other rainbow-friendly characters dive into drama, action, and romance like no other superteam before them. “This comic has been a labour of love for me — it’s fun and experimental, and I’m really excited about taking the characters and the comic to a much wider audience,” Eden said.

Since DC Comics recently revealed the identity of one of its newest gay superheroes — Alan Scott, the original Green Lantern — we thought it was a prime time to ask Eden about his favorite gay comic heroes. We shared his picks past the break, including one of Eden’s characters who you can meet when Spandex: Fast and Hard publishes next week. Tell us about some of your favorite gay characters below. … Read More

Film

Let’s Cast the ‘Justice League’ Movie

By Jason Bailey on

Considering the speed with which Hollywood usually cashes in on a smash hit, we were frankly a little surprised that it took a full month for the staggering opening weekend of The Avengers to get the long-gestating film version of DC’s equivalent all-star superhero franchise going. But as Variety reports, it’s not that it just happened, it’s that it just broke — Warner Brothers, which holds the film rights to the DC characters, put screenwriter Will Beall (who penned the forthcoming Gangster Squad) on the job of writing a film version of Justice League last year, a “top-secret hire” which, according to the industry paper, “was more in anticipation of — rather than a reaction to—the box office success of The Avengers.” So the Justice League movie is happening — but filling it with superheroes will be easier said than done. Who should play them? We’ve got some ideas after the jump — and we’d love to hear yours. … Read More

Photography

The Unglamorous Lives of Fallen Superheroes

By Emily Temple on

Having superpowers isn’t all fun, games, and attending fancy parties that are impossibly easy for villains to crash. Eric Curtis’s photo series Fallen Superheroes, which we first spotted over at i09, imagines the daily lives of second rate superheroes, who may have put on a few pounds here and there. Disheveled, worn out, or simply mildly deranged, Curtis’s superheroes indulge in life’s simple pleasures — just in slightly wilder outfits than your average bear. Click through to check out a few fallen superheroes, and if you can’t get enough, many more of Curtis’s photographs from the same series are collected in a recently released book entitled — you guessed it — Fallen Superheroes, along with funny tongue-in-cheek accompanying stories by Scott Allen Perry and Adam Mock. … Read More