Confessional time: I didn’t like The Lost Boys the first time I saw it. Now this could be because, as an ’80s-born ’90s kid, I hadn’t yet cultivated enough nostalgia as an early teenager to appreciate a platinum-mulleted Kiefer Sutherland, or a beach-bod sax solo, or any of the other things too soppingly ’80s for my nu-metal blerd to get a grip on. I grew up loving horror and worshiping the concept of vampires, but that aesthetic threw me. I couldn’t believe in the movie’s horror and menace because I was too distracted by all of the leopard print and fishnet. As an early, occasionally-shallow teenager, I didn’t really give horror the room to be about more than its monsters. I had a very straitlaced understanding of what was and wasn’t cool (a rarity among teenage traits, I’m sure!), and The Lost Boys was one of the worst casualties.

Because, revisiting it now, in my early 30s, I am staked to the core by what this movie was and still is doing. Maybe that’s because I’ve now got a couple decades of sipping that millennial brew of angst and existential vagrancy to root me into its narrative, but the concept of nocturnal horrors banding together and calling each other home is pretty much all I look for in pop culture now. To be reflected so sympathetically, to have my wounds illuminated by--not the torches of a mob looking for monsters to burn--but in pink neon instead. That’s a joy through and through.  And if there’s a better metaphor for the poetry community, and for FreezeRay specifically...I don’t know if it’ll ever be found.

Rodney Wilder is a biracial nerd who bellows death-metal verse in Throne of Awful Splendor and writes poetry, with previous work appearing in Poets Reading the News, FIYAH, HEArt Journal Online, ALTARWORK, Words Dance, FreezeRay, and others, as well as his newest, geek-themed collection, Stiltzkin’s Quill. He likes nachos, analogizing things to Pokémon, and getting lost in Oregonian forests. Find him on Instagram @thebardofhousewilder.

MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana and Baruch Porras-Hernandez, (writer, performer, gay Mexican comic book nerd) are putting out a call to creators for a new Latinx Super Hero project We Can Be Heroes!

We Can Be Heroes will spotlight 5 brand-new LGBTQ Latinx superheroes and YOU have a chance to be one of the creators! We are calling on all queer Latinx folks who identify as comic book nerds to enter!

We invite you to submit your original Latinx queer superhero creation for a chance to be a participating artist on this project. Winning artists get to create a brand-new queer Latinx superhero with us, become part of the We Can Be Heroes project, and receive an honorarium. Winning short stories get published with us and designed by a real comic book artist! All of this will culminate into a large comic book anthology/graphic novel with your character’s story, in which all new queer, Latinx superheroes meet at the end, and save the day!

To submit, simply write a 4-6 page, double-space, prose short story featuring your own superhero creation, along with a character description of that hero. The winning writers’ short stories will be published and be used as inspiration to introduce your character into a team comic book illustrated by a talented artist to be published by MACLA. We will check in with you twice and ask for your input: once with your character’s design and once with your character’s storyline in the graphic novel. Finally, excerpts from the final product will be read out loud, narrated to a live audience at MACLA in San José.

This new project at MACLA is made possible with support from the Creative Work Fund, the Fleishacker Foundation, and the Horizons Foundation and MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana.

Who is eligible?

In order for you to enter for this section you must identify as queer, this includes, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and genderqueer Latinos. You must be Latino, or Latinx, which includes people from Panama, Dominicanos, Mexicanos, PuertoRiquenos, Cubanos, Chicanos, Salvadorenos, Gutemalans, Chilenos, etc.

What we need from you:

YOUR BIO, or ORIGIN STORY: Who are you? Please tell us as much as you can about yourself as a writer, person, and as a superhero comic book nerd. Not a comic book nerd, but love super heroes? That’s fine! This contest is open for all queer Latinos, so hey, go read a comic book, challenge yourself, you might write a story with a Latinx character so good, we will have to choose you!

STATS: Your writer’s resume, or C.V., if you got it. Or just a list of publications with links will also work. Being previously published is not a requirement, but if you have been published, tell us about it! Please also include links to your website if you have one, or Instagram page, or blog if you happen to have a superhero blog, or a social media space where you nerd out with other fellow comic book super hero nerds.

CHARACTER DESCRIPTION: Describe your character as much as you can. Height, appearance, hair, attitude, costume, superpowers, how do their superpowers work, what they do, do they have a catchphrase? Do they fly? How do they identify in the queer spectrum? Bi, queer, lesbian, pansexual, trans, non-binary, etc.?

SHORT STORY: Submit a 4 to 6 page (double-spaced) short story about your brand new original queer Latinx superhero. The main focus of this contest is the writing (aside from the art, the colors, and the fancy and/or sexy costumes). Great writing/storytelling is what has carried comic books as far as they’ve come, into our souls, into the mainstream, and even onto the Broadway stage. Make this story as creative as you want. We want to push the boundaries, we want you to have fun, and we want a new hero to inspire us all. Show us the action shots, bring us right to the splash page of this new hero’s story, show us the queer Latinx superhero we need.


Rules:

Origin Story must be included somewhere in the narrative. Does not have to be the main part of the story. How did this character get their powers? Was it cool? Was it an accident? Okay to make your character just be born with their powers, but tell us about it.
Character must speak about their Latinindad at one point in the story, or throughout the whole story. Totally okay to make your character monolingual Spanish speaker, or a Latina American who does not speak Spanish, immigrant, undocumented immigrant, third or sixth generation, etc.

Character must have a super power. We challenge you to create something new! Or adapt/innovate an already existing superpower to make it more interesting. We just want a good story. If you write a character who can control the weather (That’s Storm, she’s African, already exists, already world famous) or a Latina who has metal claws and is short and grumpy (that’s Wolverine, he’s Canadian, and says he’s good at what he does and like most white men won’t shut up about it) it might not catch our eye.

Character’s queerness must be present in the story and their actions. Pero, like, they don’t have to fly around with the rainbow flag, but also we’re interested in out loud and proud queer characters. There are not enough queer superheroes out there, especially not Latinx ones, (go read America Chavez, it’s GREAT!). Help us bring a new Latinx queer superhero to the world. This is a sex positive project, though the comic book will not be able to be too sexual, or show naughty scenes, show us some queer love, how do two queer superheroes find the time to make out, hold hands while they are flying, or how does our hero hold sit next to her girlfriend or partner to watch “One Day at a Time” on Netflix after saving the world?

Winner must either live in the San José/San Francisco Bay Area or be able to travel to MACLA to work on the project throughout 2018/2019 and be present at all three performances Aug 16-18, 2019 at MACLA.

Winner understands that their short story is just the beginning part of the project and will work with Baruch Porras-Hernandez on edits and rewrites to come up with a finished story together before it is published and handed over to the artist.

Participating creators understand that we are not adapting your character from your short story into a comic book of their own, we are including your short story as inspiration to introduce your character to the other heroes when they meet in the final graphic novel. Participating artist will have input in how their character appears, is designed, and drawn, but the participating artist understands that the final decisions on the characters will be made by the lead writer Baruch Porras-Hernandez and MACLA.

Submission deadline is on FEB 11, 2019.

All submission must be entered via Google Form: https://goo.gl/forms/XBe65yQCDSNdiQ5b2


Check list:

YOUR ORIGIN STORY
YOUR WRITER STATS
YOUR CHARACTER’S CHARACTER DESCRIPTION
YOUR SHORT STORY.

Questions? Contact [email protected]

Artwork by Zip Alegria https://www.patreon.com/zipdraw
For more info, the MACLA page can be accessed RIGHT HERE!
The Facebook event page is RIGHT HERE!

FREEZERAY FIVE: Adrienne Novy

1. You've said this book is "a celebration of everything I have survived and the music that
helped me get here" and has a gorgeous endorsement from fellow musichead Hanif Abdurraqib.
Following one of Hanif's favorite questions: We wanna hear what your Top Five Albums are, right now.

!!! I’m still geeking out about getting a blurb from Hanif in the first place. None of this feels real to me at all. I’ve been listening to Composure by Real Friends a lot lately, but here are my top five albums as of now. I’ve been listening to music that is calm and soft yet has an edge to it sometimes, and I feel like some of these albums fit that:

Grandfathers by Tigers On Trains
Bury Me at Makeout Creek by Mitski
Harry Styles by Harry Styles
You by dodie
The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats


2. You've created a soundtrack for this collection called "this mixtape is for sinners" which is one of the miracles of creating ekphrastic art in the modern era; this ability to instantly link your readers to the music you're referencing. As a mixtape enthusiast, I know how painstaking it can be to construct these. Apologies, then, for this challenge: If you had to deconstruct the soundtrack to one artist/band, one album, what album would it be and why?

Oh, definitely The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance. It’s such a clever and intense concept album, and it sure had its influence on my book as a whole. I also have this memory from high school marching band where I tried to convince one of the band directors to have us play a My Chemical Romance halftime show. Our school’s band department didn’t have a lot of money, so he turned down the idea but I still dream it will happen one day.

3. Crowd Surfing with God becomes a major motion picture. Who stars in it?

CSWG: The Movie would really be a collection of old home videos where the people we love and miss are still alive in them, as well as phone recordings of the bands we love playing our favorite songs that we recorded so we could always have those good memories to play back to.


4. You've become part of the great FreezeRay tradition of contributing to the pop culture conversation as a poet before becoming part of the team, with poems about Deadpool and Jessica Jones in our archives
putting the meta in metaphor. Any other supers you'd like to cover in the future?

They’re not supers exactly, but I really want to write a poem about Barb from Stranger Things, the impression that it gives to see always see the queer character die on screen or have them be the one that gets killed off first, or the way that small towns sometimes view queerness as the real monster.

I also want to write a poem about Elise Wassermann just really about the crime drama The Tunnel in general. I’d love to write a poem in both French and English since the show is also bilingual in this way, and I took French from eighth grade through to my freshman year of college. I would love to get back into learning the language again. I don’t have the space in my schedule to keep taking French courses, and I honestly really miss it.

If I did have to pick a superhero to cover, however, I’d like to write a poem about Peter Parker showing my mom around the neighborhoods she lived in when she grew up in New York. My friend Adina and I also strongly believe that Peter Parker is Jewish, and I find a lot of comfort in that.

5. Your bio says you want to start a band with [us]. All-poet band! Who's in it, who plays what, and what is a must for the band to cover live?

Lip Manegio would be in the band for sure! I think they’d be playing bass, while my friend Ry Irene would be on rhythm guitar and K Lange would be on lead guitar. Myles Taylor would be on keyboard. Emma Bleker would be on vocals (she’s a singer in a really cool band called NAH., so this is a given in my brain at least), and I think Adina Burke would be too depending on what songs we do. Jess Rizkallah is in the band too, but would instead find a way to turn the moon into an instrument. I can also imagine Bianca Phipps coming in with an incredible tambourine solo, and I think Lyd Havens definitely would too. I’d play clarinet with them sometimes, but my role would also be being their number one fan.

I’ve also thought about what what would happen if there was an all-poet marching band made up of poets who did marching band in high school or college and just really miss it.

It’d be such a joyous disaster and I’d love every minute.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:

Crowd Surfing With God is available via Half Mystic Press:
​http://www.halfmystic.com/product/cswg/

Addy's playlist:
https://open.spotify.com/user/1264294069/playlist/3lEsUWP09IYKNlCHBtd41P?si=3S0tKVlKTWGBoNnGv0aNxA
​

1.  CONGRATS to Sam Bailey and Fatimah Asghar for making the FORBES 30 Under 30 List for their Emmy nominated series Brown Girls!  Check out the entire list here:

2. Isobel O' Hare is taking celebrity apology statements and making erasure poems of them, and we are happy to also applaud their remixes:  

Fast Company article here!

3.  FR Poetry Editor Malcolm Friend has a new chapbook, mxd kd mixtape, and mayhaps you should pick it up directly from Glass Poetry here!
​

We here at the Watchtower do like Magnolia, but beyond that, we stand with Wil Gibson as he counts the ways.  Video taken at Union Square Slam, NYC, NY and posted by Erin Anastasia.

If you watch the CW series The Flash or are just a comic nerd in general, you will know of the concept of a multiverse. Parallel Earths, vibrating at different frequencies, but all existing within one space.  I would like to submit to you that after reading Nicole Homer’s first full-length poetry collection Pecking Order, that Homer may be the newest multiverse in existence.  There are many Nicoles in this book but they are all one Nicole Homer.  

You may best know Nicole from her Walking Dead recaps and other pop culture goodness over at Black Nerd Problems (including the only movie review show you’ll ever need, “Nicole and Omar Hate Everything”) and to discover her poetry is to pull up a seat at the Real Talk Table and be blown away by the sheer force of her honesty.  What is it like to be a mother? A black mother?  A black mother affected by colorism inside and outside of her home?  Poems like “Things Only A Black Mother Can Prepare You For” and “The Colorist” shed insight via story and dialogue in a way that is both compelling and unflinchingly honest.

Pecking Order is peppered with dialogues and monologues from many perspectives in the motherhood universe, specifically existing in Black American motherhood (“The Children Speak”, “Portrait of My Grammama on her Grammama’s Lap, Neither of Them Smiling”, and the acerbically perfect “The Woman Who Is Not The Nanny Answers At The Grocery Store Concerning The Evidently Mismatched Children In and around Her Cart”) via many voices threaded through the same family.  In “Townies”, Homer states “No one lives in The Town of Motherhood/ but me/ says every mother/ including me” and through these poems, we are given a tour of this town (which is many towns, which is many mothers, but only one--the multiverse of motherhood).

This tour is not always and often very deliberately not pretty.  “The Paper Trail” begins with the narrative:

In the driveway, the soft and squeaking toys and jagged gravel press into each other. In the kitchen, the dishes, dirty and chipped, are piled in the sink. The dining room the table is almost imaginary, under the crayons, pencils, papers...

And this kind of earnestness in the face of owning her role as a mother and woman and human continues on in addressing depression and fatigue in poems like “Threshold” “Hunger” and the succinct power of “Motherhood”:

Motherhood is like
                                                    being pecked
                               to death
                                                                                 by my
              favorite birds
                                                                                made from my
                                                                                body, torn
                         by beaks sharpened
                                                                               on the woman
                                                              I was
                                                                                when I slept more
                                                              or sang the song I stole
                                                                              out of
                                                              my mother’s mouth
 

And in poems like “How I Became A Mother Contemplating Loss”, the strength that lies beneath in all mothers is summed up by these lines:

That is the scariest thing:

that we do it anyway.  The blood, the screams, the milk.

The dynamics of Homer both being raised in and raising a multiracial family are addressed throughout the book, from outside perspectives like “Casual Racist” to inner monologues like “The Lottery”; in “Things I Want To Say To Rae Dawn Chong”, the poet to the actress:
     
 But you and Arnold in Commando. Oh, Rae, you two were unlikely and perfect and snapshot one-liner. You were the first people on TV that I understood. You had nothing in common. My father hated grits. My mother is from the south, Rae. Do you understand? What do the Chinese and Scottish or the Africans and the Canadians have in common except you?

For every question asked and examined throughout Pecking Order, family inevitably answers back, as in “When I Had Children With A White Person”:   

...in our house / we say family in both of our mouths with every tongue we have

Homer ends this collection with the poem “I Wish I Was More Mothers (after Brenda Shaunessy}” and as we are left with this wishlist anthem, we realize that these words vibrate at such a necessary frequency that, even if Nicole Homer doesn’t realize it, she is more mothers.  One and all.

      --Rob Sturma
​
Pecking Order is available from Write Bloody Publishing and from the author’s website at nicolehomer.com.

by Mikkel Snyder, Multimedia Editor

If I was asked to described Multiplex, a long running webcomic that spanned over 12 years, the simplest explanation is that it is a comic about a movie theater. However, that explanation doesn’t really do the series justice. Multiplex is about the workplace antic that Gordon McAlpin’s characters partake in as they work in a theater. It’s a romantic comedy, looking at how people change (or don’t) over time and find the people they need at the times they need to. It’s a critique on cinema, with movie reviews and commentary about trope. And at times, particularly during Multiplex: The Revenge, it’s corporate thriller with kinetic action sequences. But I suppose at its core, it’s a character study. McAlpin even concedes that in the preface of his newest book, he wanted to explore “the kind of changes that happen to people (and businesses and industries) not overnight but over the course of several years.”

Multiplex: The Revenge is the third print installment of the Multiplex webcomic. It’s a collection of Chapters 11-15 of the series, covering a period of time between March 2008 and March 2009. McAlpin’s introduction to the book serves as the perfect recap of Chapters 1-10, seamlessly introducing the cast of characters and their dynamics through evocative scenes that perfectly capture the core duo of Jason, the film critic archetype, and Kurt, the movie fanboy. While I fully recommend picking up Books 1 and 2, McAlpin takes great effort in making sure the series is accessible and you don’t experience continuity lockout, a common occurrence with any long running piece of media.

The book starts with Jason reaccelerating to life at the theater after he attempted to distance himself from the place due to his messy relationship with coworker Becky. Jason is not the most sympathetic character when we meet him. He is snarky, caustic, a bit of a know-it-all, and needs to be the right side of the argument to be happy. He is also one of the most relatable characters this mixed Filipino American has had the pleasure of reading in all of my pop culture consumption. Jason is largely situated from McAlpin’s own experiences, and in his annotations during the first chapter about the atheist Jason dating the very Christian Angie, we see Jason slowly taking steps in order to become a better person, and a journey that we see slowly unfold over the next chapters.

As the book continues, we also see the dynamics of the theater playout. We get an insider’s look into what the employees do after hours. We see the joy they take in dressing up for major theater releases and interacting with parents and adults. We see them in advanced screenings of film, and watching a wide ranges of movies from blockbusters to smaller indie joints. McAlpin says in his autobiography that he’s never worked in a movie theater, but you’d be easily forgiven given that amount of detail and evidence of research that he has put to make it feel like an authentic theater. You can feel McAlpin’s love of cinema in every panel; all of the jokes and criticism come from a place of wanting better media, of wanting better stories for everyone.

As the book continues, we also see one of the defining arcs of Multiplex unfold as Gretchen, a would-be journalist who is a bit confused between the difference of truthful news and sensationalism, throws wrenches into the theater through a combination of snitching, prying, and “reporting.” Her actions have massive ramifications throughout the book, but her character is less outright villainous and more overtly antagonistic. The actual big bads of the story find more subtle ways to interfere with our lovable ragtag bunch of misfits, and we see the seeds of future story arcs cleverly planted, and the final set piece is a perfect conclusion to this particular saga.

McAlpin’s style is visually stunning and unique. He manages to show a wide range of talent, as he alters his stylistic presentation to match the medium he is telling in. His crisp, elegant character design of the Multiplex staff stands in contrast to the flowing, kinetic black and white depictions of video games. His Mario Kart is one of my personal favorites. This collection effortlessly translates the single strips into a beautiful book, creating a much more active pacing, while still maintaining the punch necessary of individual jokes. 

Having been a fan of the original webcomic, I was/am really excited for the opportunity to share this with our FreezeRay fanbase. And if you’re a long term fan of the comic, the additional strips and commentary are more than worth that purchase. There is an authenticity and honesty in this story that is sometimes hard to find. But McAlpin manages to capture the cinematic year and create a cast of characters that feel familiar. Multiplex: The Revenge succeeds where many other period pieces fail. It is grounded in its present, but still remains timeless. Still remains truthful. If you are a fan of workplace comedies, of romantic comedies, of slice-of-life, of movies, of comics, I can pretty confidently say you’ll be a fan of Multiplex. McAlpin has created a diverse cast of characters, and you’ll be right at home.

Multiplex: The Revenge is available now.  And if you liked what you read, consider supporting Gordon McAlpin at his Patreon.

Welcome to the first episode of Broadcasts from the Watchtower, a FreezeRay free-for-all where we get extra passionate about our fandom. We kick off the first show with Rob Sturma talking to wrestling journalist extraordinaire The Lady J (The Lady J Says, Facelock Feministas, #pwgrrrlgang) about the glory that is pro wrestling fandom and what she's doing to champion independent and inclusive spaces in the professional wrestling community.
 
                                                                       Click on the purple links to learn more!

I used to say, pretty fervently, “escapism is my favorite coping mechanism.” However, recent events have made it painfully clear that we can’t just disengage with the world. We have to live in it daily and we have an obligation to make it better. As a mixed race cishet male, I work well in the current capitalistic system that we currently have in place, but the reality is that many of my friends are not and will not feel or be safe in the coming years. And there is work that needs to be done on a variety of levels.

I’m making a decisive change to my mantra. I’m going to be saying “pop culture is my favorite coping mechanism.” Because pop culture is truly indicative of the change we want to see in the world. Pop culture is grounded in the world. And now, it’s more important than ever to support the artistic work of queer and PoC communities. And now it’s more important than ever to make sure we are doing all we can to make sure their voice is heard in every medium.

So, here at FreezeRay Poetry and Press, we’ll be compiling a a list of queer and/or PoC content creators (and in a few cases, ones that actively promote Queer and PoC rights) that we have gathered over the last couple of weeks. The list is going to keep growing. But it’s a start. It’s a start.

This is not a comprehensive list, although we will update it regularly. This list is meant to be a starting point, a quick reference guide of sorts. We started this list based off a lot of google searches, friends’ and friends of friends’ recommendations, and random assortments of social media posts.

And you can find that list here.

So as we close out this <Insert Adjectives of Your Choice> year, take some time to look at some really cool content creators out there. With a special shoutout to Steenz and Ray Nadine, two really talented St. Louis artists who indirectly inspired the creation of this list.