Welcome to The Gutter Review! We are a guerrilla culture site whose entire jam is celebrating and re-examining comic books, film, and oddities of pop culture that have been forgotten or fallen under the radar of the modern day audiences. What that means in practice is that we’re not interested in talking about the latest Marvel movie, 10 times that one character would or would not have done something you do or not like, or which Kyle MacLachlan character Timothy Chalamet is rebooting for a Christmas blockbuster.
We’d much rather tell you that not enough people are talking about the weird techno dub of Gamera from 1995, why counting on the X-Men to be your queer rep in comics is the greatest trick the devil ever pulled, the MPreg gangster comic from the same mind who created Judge Dredd; or just sharing AI art talks with Simon Bisley, drunken ramblings about punk with Glenn Fabry, the slippery slope of censorship with Denis Kitchen, and the interview with Grant Morrison you haven’t already read seven thousand fucking times.
We’ve been up and running since July 2020, and in that time we’ve published what we think is some of the best critical writing on the internet and — more importantly to us — some of the most fun critical writing on the internet, as well. To get you up to speed, here are some favorites from the last few years:
–How Todd MacFarlane’s Spider-Man Reads as a Riff of Twin Peaks
–Milestone Comics and the Tightrope of Respectability Politics
–The Gooey 20th anniversary celebration of Takashi Miike’s Gozu
–John Smith as the master of gay code switching in comics
–Where Black and White teaching Fails Underground Comix history
-40 Years of Berni Wrightson’s Frankenstein
–The bygone and much-missed value of comics house ads
–The hilarious moral outrage of Video Nasties
–the romance of Troma doing Shakespeare
–the history of the wonderfully lecherous Eros Comix
and dozens of creator histories and spotlight galleries.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. Go and explore the rest of the site; we’re pretty sure you’re going to find things you’ll want to keep reading in the months ahead.