Steven Smith

Avondale

Media Critic and Editorial Director, Events at MediaPost

Host at The Brand Insider

Media Critic, Conference Programmer, Pop Culture Historian

Articles

Reframing Star Wars: From Manning to Williamson

2 weeks ago | panelsandprose.com | Steve Smith |Steven Smith

Even taking a superficial glance across Russ Manning’s introduction of Star Wars to newspaper comics and Al Williamson’s subsequent pick up of the series is a contrast in different talents. Manning, heralded for his years on the Tarzan beat, was self-conscious of how the strip had to translate the film epic into the language of strips. He launched the series deliberately with the familiar movie characters, if only so they could ease the audience into his new stories and creations.
The Hundred-Year Circus

4 weeks ago | albertaviews.ca | Steven Smith

In a “Playwright’s Preface” to The Hundred-Year Circus, a wild poetic collage of a book, Sarah Gibbs writes: “Were I a real writer I would forge it: a play of nationhood. But I can only manage a Tall Tale, some Bob Dylan B-side, when time bends like a mountain switchback so you can race through years or spin moments into decades.”As ringmaster of an “apocalypse cabaret”—subtitled “An American Tragi-Comedy”—Gibbs jams 100-plus years into her tent in four acts.
EC Sci-Fi At Scale: Taschen’s XXL Weird Science

1 month ago | panelsandprose.com | Steve Smith |Steven Smith

The EC science fiction titles hold a special place in American pop culture. The titles that ran from 1950 to 1955 (Weird Science, Weird Fantasy, Weird Science-Fantasy) were indispensable waystations for the still-niche genre of science-based speculative fiction. I would argue they were the crucible in which pop sci-fi as we have known it I was forged. These comics not only popularized and proliferated some of the foundational tropes of the genre.
Open Book Blog Hop - 17th February 2025

Feb 17, 2025 | authorstevensmith.co.uk | Steven Smith

Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!Today’s topic is: What has been the hardest format to write for you? Remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have created. You can find their works here!I’ve been very fortunate in my writing life. Much of what I’ve written or am writing has come easily to me. My two steampunk novels are in a genre I love, so fall into seamlessly.
The Fabulous Furry Revolution

Feb 9, 2025 | panelsandprose.com | Steve Smith |Steven Smith

The United States has never made a bold move forward without anchoring it in a reading of the past. Our “Founding Fathers” have been carted out regularly to sanctify everything from The Civil War to Progressive and New Deal reforms, the Civil Rights movement to Reaganism. Americans like to frame changes in our politics and culture not as radical breaks from the past so much as realizations of original principles. It is self-evident in our own time.
Open Book Blog Hop - 27th January 2025

Jan 27, 2025 | authorstevensmith.co.uk | Steven Smith

Welcome back to another Open Book Blog Hop!Today’s topic is: Who is your favourite artist? Remember to visit my fellow writers to see what they have created. You can find their works here!I wracked my brain on this one. First, what makes an artist? Are we talking only about visual media – painting, sculpture, photography? Isn’t music and writing also art? And film, how can I forget film? So with all of these factors considered I’ve settled on one person – Tim Burton.
How Star Wars Books Help the Saga Live Forever

Jan 21, 2025 | youtini.com | Karl Sander |Eric Eilersen |Steven Smith

Like many people who read or write for a Star Wars website, I don’t remember life without the saga. I was only about a year and a half when the first film hit theaters; to my ever-lasting regret, my parents elected not to take their infant to see a movie about space wizards and laser swords in 1977. I’d have to wait for a network airing that preempted my usual Friday night viewing, which I vaguely remember was initially upsetting … until that legendary opening shot.
Peak Segar: Plunder Island (1934)

Jan 17, 2025 | panelsandprose.com | Steve Smith |Steven Smith

The Plunder Island sequence of Thimble Theatre Sundays that ran from December 1933 to July 1934 was E.C. Segar’s signature epic. It concentrated most of this master’s diverse talents and blended the many genres Thimble Theatre traversed into the strips most impressive run. Fabulism, farce, adventure, sentiment, venality, romance, screwball — all and more are here. And along the way, Segar even fleshes out and distinguishes among his key characters.
Rockwell Kent: Accidental Cartoonist

Nov 2, 2024 | panelsandprose.com | Steve Smith |Steven Smith

Rockwell Kent (1882-1971) was not a cartoonist in any typical sense of the genre. He was insanely prolific across all media and seemed oblivious to formal silos that bother art critics and scholars. He worked in book and magazine illustration, painting, greeting cards and postage stamps, bookplates, murals, and, yes, comics (under the playful pseudonym, “William Hogarth, Jr.” for Vanity Fair). He was a working artist who liked to turn a buck, as entrepreneurial as he was genre agnostic.
World Cup 2014: Today's the day - get ready for England v Italy

Sep 3, 2024 | bournemouthecho.co.uk | Steven Smith

DAY three of the World Cup and the day that most of us have been waiting for – England’s first game. The Three Lions kick off in a tough opener against Italy at a somewhat unfriendly 11pm tonight as their Group D campaign gets under way. But, before that, Columbia play Greece in the first Group C match at 5pm, before England’s group rivals, Uruguay and Costa Rica, go head-to-head at 8pm.