‘Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer’ Is The Comic Series We Need Right Now
'Harriet Tubman: Demon Slayer' blends historical dystopia with fantasy and horror to tell gripping stories of adventure and peril, rooted in the very real evil of chattel slavery. Harriet Tubman is a remarkable individual and historical figure for a number
Briana Lawrence on ‘Magnifique Noir’ Book Two and Queer Black Girl Magic
Briana Lawrence's 'Magnifique Noir' is for Black girls who realize that they're fine being themselves and that there's no singular way to be. Briana Lawrence is the creator, writer, and one of the illustrators of the magical girl inspired illustrated novel
Netflix’s ‘Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ is Another Settler-Colonial Narrative
The roots of Black and Indigenous spiritual practices and witchcraft carry Sabrina's narrative and many other white witch-centered narratives.
By Briana L. Ureña-Ravelo This essay contains spoilers for “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” When I first saw the trailer for Netflix's "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” before it was released last week, it piqued my interest. Though I haven’t read the comics the series is based on, I grew up watching “Sabrina The Teenage Witch” and reading the Archie comics in the mid to late 90s and early 2000s. I’m not a huge fan of horror, as I find many creators in the genre cannot ultimately escape the monstrous trappings of dominant culture in their storytelling and I could tell the show was going to be a considerably darker departure from the characteristic telling, but it caught my attention nonetheless. It looked like it would deliver a more diverse cast and potentially feature smarter, more intentional, culturally, and socially rich storytelling than the high school horror/supernatural “Magical Chosen Girl” lore I had grown up with. I was also intrigued out of pure cynicism, knowing the show would do what most shows and media featuring young white female witches or even supernatural female characters do. These narratives take up the legacy of the Salem Witch Trials and other historical instances of non-European, non-Pagan, African and Indigenous spiritual practices and the religious repression and violence the practitioners experienced at the hands of European colonizers. In doing so, they falsely represent and conflate varied complex practices with “devil worship”. And “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” does exactly this. [caption id="attachment_50197" align="aligncenter" width="800"]
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6 BIWOC Comics Writers You Should Know
In honor of Women’s History Month, check out the work of these BIWOC comics writers. As a medium and an industry, comics aren’t always kind to women, especially women of color. Mainstream comic book companies seem to hire them once in