While we at Kill Screen love to bring you our own crop of game critique and perspective, there are many articles on games, technology, and art around the web that are worth reading and sharing. So that is why this weekly reading list exists, bringing light to some of the articles that have captured our attention, and should also capture yours.
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Gender and mutilation in myth and horror goes deep, but there’s something more grounded and eerie about how it is captivated in the work of Julia Gfrorer, one of the alternate comic world’s best masters of fear. Claire Napier writes about the succinct way that Gfrorer’s men are doomed.
What Happened to Kate Lanphear’s Maxim, Theodore Ross, Jezebel
At the end of 2014, fashionable icon Kate Lanphear was tasked with a dramatic rebranding of Maxim, once the dominating men’s lifestyle magazine that was bleeding readership. Many saw her direction as a feminist and modern vision for the frat boy’s periodical, but as noted by Theodore Ross, who worked there as the transformation occurred, these priorities may have been more projected upon Lanphear than truly being her prerogatives. With Lanphear’s short tenure over the publication over, Ross examines how Maxim changed publishing, and may have damned everyone in the process.
Maxim, March 2015
The Playboy Interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bomani Jones, Playboy
Speaking of rebranded men’s lifestyle magazines, Playboy’s Bomani Jones sat down with Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the most prominent voices in America. Discussing his book, Between the World and Me (2015), his groundbreaking “The Case for Reparations” story from The Atlantic and, yes, Marvel’s Black Panther, this chat with Coates is necessary reading.