Tag: Kaiju

Personal / Website News

June was my birthday month. Happy birthday to me! It was not an overtly productive month with only one article published at my website, but I got some other projects done, such as my cocktail recipes for this year’s New Edge Sword and Sorcery issues. Excited about that!

Review of Cavewoman “Snow” #2

New comic book review up at my website here! I continue going through my Cavewoman collection and revisiting these old issues. I am continuing with the “Snow” story arc, which puts me at issue #2 now.

My write up of this issue can be read right here. It is a pretty good one, both in content but also in looking at themes and just, damn, people are people, and people suck, even when they live in a town that has been transported to the prehistoric past and everyday is basically life or death.

PangoBooks Bookstore

I have opened up a bookstore online at PangoBooks! I have been working on clearing shelf space, culling dups, and so on, which is resulting in me having a pile a books I no longer need. I have quite a few odd, unique, OOP, and weird stuff, so do check my store out. Purchases help me out greatly! Michele also has a store, so check that out as well.

Panthans Journal #349

The June issue of the National Capital Panthans Journal has been published. This issue contains a reprint of my review of issue nine of Vanya: The Lost Warrior. The original can be read here. If this looks sort of duplicated, it is. This review was also republished in #348 of Panthans. So, folks can enjoy it twice!

Paraphrased from the zine: The National Capital Panthans Journalis a monthly publication issued as a .PDF file on the Saturday before the first Sunday of each month. Contribution of articles, artwork, photos, and letters are welcome. Send submissions to the editor: Laurence G. Dunn at laurencegdunn AT gmail.com in a Word document for consideration.

Sincere appreciation to Laurence for the opportunity to have my work published in the journal.

Scholars from the Edge of Time – Hundreds of Beavers

For the June episode of Scholars From the Edge of Time, Michele and I venture way off course from peplum films and into the world of slapstick. We watched Hundreds of Beavers (2022) and enjoyed it immensely.

The episode can be watched on YouTube. Check it out to hear us talk about something a tiny bit off topic.

Publishing Recap

Below is a recap of my external publishing endeavors so far in 2026.

Calls for Papers/Proposals

Here are some new pop culture CFPs that have crossed my path or I am sharing on behalf of my colleagues. Links to these will also be in the CFP page on the navigation bar.

Re-Analyzing Mad Men – Critical Essays on the AMC Series’ 20th Anniversary

2027 will mark twenty years since the ground-breaking series Mad Men aired its first episode.  Since then, the world of Sterling Cooper – led by the universally talented “Mad Men” of them all, Don Draper (John Hamm) – has become synonymous with a glamorized mid-century culture, characterized by three-martini lunches, men with skinny ties, large fedoras, and huge egos; anxious women with Jackie Kennedy hairdos, form fitting skirts and bold ambitions to break the ubiquitous glass ceiling.  AMC’s episodic drama still ranks in the Top Five of all television series mainly due to the fact that Mad Menbecause a cultural phenomenon, detailing America’s preoccupation with commercialism and image in the Camelot era of 1960s America while self-consciously exploring our own cultural paths with image and self-reinvention.

In 2007, the television series and cultural phenomenon Mad Men broke ground, establishing AMC as a major competitor to the likes of HBO for prestige dramas. In 2027, twenty years after its original release and twelve years since it ended, its legacy endures.

In 2011, my book Analyzing Mad Men, brought together critical approaches to, what was then, an emerging series, capturing its immediate impact and pioneering the wave of scholarship that came after its publication. In anticipation of these anniversaries, I am looking to re-analyze the series in full, presenting a new collection of essays examining the many facets of the series as it moved from those halcyon days of America’s Camelot, the 1960s, though to the end of that decade, marked by Viet Nam, the culture wars, the rise of youth culture, and the move of Madison Avenue from the streets of New York to the sunny coast of California.

Building on the continued scholarly interest in Analyzing Mad Men and the enthusiasm of its original publisher, McFarland & Co, I issue the following call for chapters with the aim of eliciting new chapters and approaches to the series and its legacy. Suggested topics might include:

• New Historical examinations of how the series uses the “Age of Camelot” and the “Death of the Sixties” to compare to our own times, particularly in respect to advertising, commerce and capitalism;
• Psychoanalytic approaches to the series, particularly in the respect to the conclusion of Don Draper’s storyline; his marriages to Betty (January Jones) and Megan (Jessica Pare), and his relations to the industry shifts;
• Mad Men’s approach to the selling of “self”, selling commodities, and the drastic shift in the culture toward the series’ end;
• Sterling Cooper as a microcosm of culture mores, sexual politics, and changing attitudes toward capitalism;
• The storylines of Peggy Olsen (Elizabeth Moss) and Joan Holloway/Harris (Christina Hendricks) who begin the series as office assistants, and end the series as representatives of the new woman in business;
• The series’ approach to advertising and the shift from Madison Avenue to Los Angeles;
• Mad Men’s continuing effect of fashion merchandising and furniture / décor;
• Pete Campbell’s (Vincent Kartheiser) and Roger Sterlings’s (John Slattery) efforts to confirm images as “self-made” men of success and how their subsequent marriages and divorces affect their abilities as “self-made” men;
• The series’ use of “the edge”: How heterosexism, homosexuality, drug culture and gender politics influence characters’ behaviors within the corporate atmosphere and in their private lives – particularly as the series progresses through the decade;
• Theories of management at Sterling Cooper, reflected in Roger Sterling’s approach, Bertram Cooper’s (Robert Morse) new age tactics, and the hostile takeovers that challenge the company through the decade;
• The series embracing of nostalgia in selling the series to a new (and supposedly evolved) contemporary audience. What is the legacy of Mad Men?   And why has the series remained in the Top Five of all television series?

Abstracts of 500 words concerning any of these ideas or any others should be sent via email to sstoddart@saintpeters.eduby 15 August 2026.  Final essays will be due by 15 December 2026 so as to make the publisher’s 01 March 2027 ideal date for release.

Geographies of Horror

Department of English Studies (University of Zadar) in collaboration with The Society for the Study of the American Gothic (SSAG)

Keynote speaker: Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University)

May 20-21st 2027, University of Zadar (Zadar, Croatia)

The study of horror has always been inseparable from the question of space. From the shadowed corridors of Gothic castles to contemporary digital voids, spaces in horror are never just passive backdrops. They function as active agents that shape perception, destabilize subjectivity, and collapse the distinction between interior and exterior, revealing how fragile our sense of spatial coherence can be. This conference seeks to understand how spaces become haunted – materially, symbolically, psychologically, and technologically, and how these hauntings articulate broader cultural anxieties, historical traumas, and epistemological uncertainties.

In Gothic and horror traditions, fear unfolds through space, guiding perception, and encounters with the unknown. Early Gothic forms, such as castles and monasteries, establish models of spatial excess, enclosure, and architectural anxiety, while the haunted house transforms domestic familiarity into something uncanny. In modern and contemporary horror, this logic extends to urban environments, where entire cities and infrastructures become haunted. While urban legends and other unsettling narratives embed fear in everyday life, abandoned malls, transit systems, and brutalist structures evoke concepts such as “non-places,” characterized by transience and anonymity.

At the same time, horror increasingly stages the breakdown of spatial logic itself. Non-Euclidean geometries, infinite corridors, and paradoxical environments destabilize perception and challenge epistemological certainty. In these instances, space becomes fundamentally unknowable, aligning with cosmic horror and philosophical pessimism. These concerns extend into digital and virtual environments, where video games, online narratives, and immersive technologies generate new forms of spatial horror. Phenomena such as The Backrooms exemplify liminal, endlessly reproducible environments that evoke both familiarity and existential dread. Simultaneously, haunted space becomes internalized within the body and mind, as psychological and body horror depict interiority as fragmented and invasive.

With all this in mind, we welcome papers from across disciplines and media that examine the spatial dimensions of horror, including but not limited to:

• Gothic and classical haunted spaces
• Urban and infrastructural hauntings, including “non-places”
• Non-Euclidean, paradoxical, and incoherent spatialities
• Digital and virtual environments (games, online narratives, immersive media)
• The body and subjectivity as haunted spaces
• Ecological and environmental horror
• Spatial storytelling across literature, film, television, comics, and interactive media

The keynote speaker for the event will be Professor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (Central Michigan University). He is a Professor of English at Central Michigan University, where he teaches a range of courses on American literature and popular culture. He is the founder and president of The Society for the Study of the American Gothic, the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association Gothic Studies Forum. He also serves as the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books and is currently the general editor for Bloombury Publishing’s six-volume Cultural History of Monsters series.

His research focuses on the “cultural work” performed by the Gothic in its various manifestations – the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. This interest has led him from considering, for example, how nineteenth-and early twentieth-century American women made use of Gothic conventions as a strategy to express discontentment with their circumscribed roles to thinking about the ways contemporary monsters reflect shifting American fears and aspirations.

To date, he is the author or editor of 34 books and more than 100 essays and book chapters on the Gothic, American literature, cult film, and popular culture.

Abstracts of 250–300 words, accompanied by a short bio (approximately 100 words) and 3-5 keywords, should be submitted to geographyhorror@gmail.com.

The deadline for the abstract submission is October 1st 2026.

Selected papers focused on American Gothic and horror themes will also be considered for publication in the peer-reviewed journal, American Gothic Studies Journal.

New Sword and Sandal Acquisitions

The ever growing peplum research library grows with these recent sword and sandal acquisitions.

Conquest

I have seen a lot of Lucio Fulci movies (Zombi 2 4 evah!) but Conquest (1983) has eluded me. Blue Underground put out an edition a long time ago, but I just never got around to doing so.

That changes now because I have plucked up this incredible limited edition UHD/Blu-ray version from Cauldron. It even came with this rad sticker set:

I think a watching for an episode of Scholars from the Edge of Time is in order! I can also consult one of my bible-books: Stephen Thrower’s Fulci book!

News from Friends

Cool kids I know have been busy lately! Here are some signal boosts I’d like to give out.

New Ride the Stream Episodes

New episodes of Michele Brittany and Travis Lakata’s vidcast, Ride the Stream, are online. The duo begin the month with taking a break from television stream to tackle a ,movie. An epic movie. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring!

Here is their part one discussion:

Part two:

Part three:

Make sure to subscribe the Ride the Stream YouTube channel to see when new episodes drop. There is also a BlueSky social media as well.

New Fan2Fan Episodes

Brand new episodes of the Fan2Fan podcast are now online. Bernie and Pete continue with episodes focused on their Monster Mania series.

First, Monster Mania: Kaiju vs. History:

Next it is Monster Mania: Atomic Age Trivia:

Then Monster Mania: Monster Toys of the 1960s and 1970s:

And Monster Mania: Cartoon Creatures:

Older episodes of Fan2Fan can be found at its Libsyn page or via your podcast app of preference. There is also the Fan2Fan Facebook page. Give them a like/follow!

New John 3:16 Album

John 3:16, the primary music outlet of composter Philippe Gerber, just dropped a brand new album earlier this month!

The album is called The Beast and it was, appropriately, released on June 6th, 2026 (6-6-6!). The album can be purchased for $6.66 at Bandcamp, so make sure you check it out and pluck it up!