Pop Culture « Jennifer de Guzman

Jennifer de Guzman is a writer and comics editor living in the San Francisco Bay Area. She writes stories about sad girls, seawater, bottomless wells, airborne plagues, and horses. You can find links to some of them them in the Selected Works section or read them at her Scribd page.

She also writes "Life in Comics," a monthly column for Publishers Weekly Comics Week, and collaborates on "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now," a comics column on Robot 6, with her husband, artist Brian Belew.

Portrait by Brian Belew.

Who Gothed Up Men's Figure Skating?

Vera Wang, apparently. She designed the fantastic all-black costumes that Evan Lysacek work in his gold-medal-winning routines last week. (Last season, his costume designer was the late Alexander McQueen.) The short program costume featured a high collar, black feathers at the cuffs, black gloves, irregularly criss-crossed strips of black sequines, and, I don’t know, some kind [...]

Art Arising Out of Craft

All Things Considered, which, along with Morning Edition, makes up the entirety of my non-satiric news consumption, is having a short story contest. Stories for the “Three-Minute Fiction” contest have to be no more than 600 words and based on the photograph at the link. I’m intending to write something for it, but, unfortunately, the picture [...]

New Publishers Weekly Column

My latest Publishers Weekly Life in Comics column is up — and of course it has to do with the baby. It’s fascinating to me how the little creature has managed to wrap my whole existence — for now — around his little tiny pinkie finger. It’s necessary, of course, the result of ample oxytocin coursing [...]

Pride and Prejudice and Marketing

When Pride and Prejudice and Zombies was published, I bought it on my Kindle and found it pretty amusing. It seemed a spontaneous uniting of two elements I like — Jane Austen and zombie survival stories — more of an homage than a high-concept gimmick.

Then the publisher, Quirk Books, announced Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters [...]

The Allure of TV Judge Shows

I’m officially on maternity leave, with hours at home to while away. I have grand ambitions to do as the author of this 1912 pregnancy handbook, The Prospective Mother advises:

Such then is the influence of the mind over the body that anyone who wishes to cultivate good health must correct the faulty habit of always thinking [...]