SIEGE OF TROY

SUPER-ARTICULATE: YOUR COLLECTING TIMELINE (The original version of this piece appeared on Graphic Policy on February 7, 2020 as part of my ongoing column for that site, Super-Articulate. I'm going to use the Figure This label for when I talk about the topic here. But this is a great intro to how I got started and why I continue. Enjoy.) I was posed this question by a co-worker yesterday. He asked, “ How and when do you decide what to collect? ” He meant specifically in terms of figures, but I suppose you can apply it to anything. I had a multi-year period where I collected baseball cards due to an increased interest I had in baseball around junior high. I’ve been getting comics nearly my entire life. But figures is an interesting question, and I think I can break that down. First thing, I’m going to subtract just “generally getting toys” from the timeline. I had Fisher-Price Adventure People, for example, but I couldn’t say that I actively “collected” them. I’m only going to incl...

 ROCK SOLID .38 Special performs during the sixth annual Air Force Materiel Command Freedom's Call Tattoo June 25, 2010, at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. (Photo by Ben Strasser, U.S. Air Force; Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons) Hey, a new feature! ROCK SOLID is going to be the semi-regular music column, but it's overall mission is going to be a little different. Sure, it'll have overlooked stuff, and classic material, and more, but for a while, it's going to be devoted a bit to one idea: in the pursuit of cool music, I think a lot of us become snobs. We don't mean to do it. Hell, a lot of us gravitated to our music tastes BECAUSE they were outside. It's history, really. Kids gravitated to rock and roll because it was different than what their parents liked. Metal, punk, goth, hip-hop, disco, college rock, alternative, fucking ska . . . there's a bit of that in almost every genre. Music was (and still is to a lot of kids) central to identity. The ...

SPARKSHOOTER! If you don't what the oft-referred to Sparkshooter is, it's one of the longest ongoing creative projects of my life. Launched in 2012 (and currently on hiatus . . . news pending), it's a long-running webcomic about the ups and downs of a local Indianapolis band circa 2003. Following is a bigger explanation and deeper look the first chapter. Enjoy! If you've never read Sparkshooter before . . . welcome to it! If you have, welcome back! Here's a quick history lesson ... What's it about? What do you call romantic rivalries, tested friendships, strained creativity, and a battle for the ultimate prize? Rock’n’roll, of course. Sparkshooter is written by Troy Brownfield with art by Sarah Vaughn (Ch. 1-2), Ben Olson (2), Enkaru (3-13), Dotstronaut (14-15), and Malik O. Smith (16). Letters by Steve Ekstrom (14-15) and Jim Campbell (15-present). When did it start? Sparkshooter started dropping roughly one page a week since 2012. As you see above, it's al...

  From the Shotgun Reviews Archives By Troy Brownfield 5.31.02 – The Graduation Story Note: Portions have been edited from the original version. Graduation, then. Recently on our message boards, frequent guest Joe D. noted his own impending graduate status (Congrats, Joe) and asked if any of us had any good graduation stories. Boy, do we. Shawn Delaney, Terry McCammon, me - 1991 Setting the Way-Back Machine:  Here's the deal. It's May of 1991. Webmaster Shawn Delaney and I are seniors at Terre Haute North High School in Indiana. Shawn sings and plays guitar for a band called The Ravenous Doorknobs. We frequently hang out with a large group of guys, including but not limited to, Terry McCammon, Brent Poole, Mike Timmons, Tim Laitas, Ross Cadick, Eric Higgins, and Ryan Rusk (a junior at that time). Terry's neighbor is a sophomore named Dave Halpern. The other members of Shawn's band...

I always look at horror films in three ways (in addition to whether or not I enjoyed them). I look at them for genre, the time in which they were made, and what the overall message or context might be. I do that with other movies, but I do it with horror in particular. Part of that is because I write it, and part of that is because I’ve formally studied it. In addition to reading A LOT about the genre (Robin Wood’s criticism, David J. Skal’s books, Stephen King’s Danse Macabre , etc.), one of my professors was the great Sharon Russell; Doc Russell wrote The Stephen King Companion and authored great articles on the witch figure, vampires, and more. Part of this is because (I believe, anyway) that most horror filmmakers are trying to illustrate a larger point about society. Horror is a really flexible medium, but it’s also a chameleon; you can explore an issue without it seeming like you’re making an “issues” film. I think it’s pretty obvious, for example, that John Carpenter is makin...

Welcome to an experiment that I've been thinking about trying for a while. It's not like I don't have an outlet. I get to do quite a lot at The Saturday Evening Post . But, obviously, there are things that I wouldn't do there or things that aren't within the mission. If you just found your way here or you "know" me on social (but not very well, or not IRL), then please allow me to (re?)introduce myself. I'm Troy Brownfield. I'm a writer. On any given day, that includes journalism, comics, short stories, at least one novel, trading cards, and more. I also spent a lot of years teaching, which includes college, high school, and the correctional system (from the outside, not the inside). A few of you might remember me from several years at Newsarama, or Newtype USA, or maybe even ShotgunReviews.com (we can refer to that as The Day). At any rate, I started a newsletter to catch people up on things in the Pre-COVID days. That was called City of Troy, but...