Megan Purdy

No, that’s not a joke headline.
A Spanish scientist, Dr. Sergio Santos, who builds sex robots as his side hustle plans to father children with his sex robot girlfriend.
No, that’s not a joke either.
Dr. Santos says that he could, essentially, build a baby – a young looking humanoid robot with a learning AI that he could “raise” to adulthood with the help of his sex robot girlfriend. The robot baby would be 3D printed and combine his traits with that of his robot girlfriend’s – the girlfriend ...

The Marvel Cinematic Universe sometimes seems locked in a haphazard game of Final Destination with Tony Stark. Over the years, Tony has narrowly avoided death, or worse, retirement, in Iron Man 1-3, Avengers, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Captain America: Civil War. Each of his major appearances could have served as an exit point, providing enough character growth and closure to give Tony’s story a satisfying end. But just when Iron Man 3 promised an end to Iron Man, if not to Tony Stark, Marve...

Magdalene Visaggio and Sonny Liew make their Young Animal debut with Eternity Girl #1, out this week. The six-issue series from DC’s pop up imprint follows superpowered agent Caroline Sharp as she tries to get back on the roster at Alpha 13, after being benched following an “incident.” Caroline is depressed and traumatized, and Eternity Girl doesn’t hold back with either. It’s a brutal, beautiful comic that uses superheroics and the super-body to explore dissociation, suicidal ideation and dy...

Corpus: A Comic Anthology of Bodily Ailments is one of those projects you hear about and wonder why it’s only now being made. The anthology contains 40 stories by new and established creators (including Christopher Sebela, Vita Ayala and Tina Howard) about living with physical and mental illness — everything from allergies to chronic illness to struggling for adequate healthcare.

In superhero comics, it’s common for the hero overcomes illness or disability through a miraculous transformation ...

First Match is an emotionally complex coming-of-age story about a Black teenage girl wrestler seeking the approval of her father. Monique’s (Elvire Emanuelle) father Darrel (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is a former high school and college star wrestler whose career ended with ...

Testről és lélekről / On Body and Soul
Ildikó Enyedi (director and writer), Máté Herbai (cinematographer), Károly Szalai (editor)
Géza Morcsányi, Alexandra Borbély, Réka Tenki, Zoltán Schneider, Ervin Nagy, Itala Békés, Júlia Nyakó, Zsuzsa Járó, Tamás Jordán (cast)
Released February 10, 2017 (Berlin), February 10, 2018 (Netflix)
Content Warning: Discussion of animal harm and death.
On Body and Soul is a film I’ve struggled to describe to people. It’s a romance set partly in a slaughterhouse, ...

Call Me By Your Name
Luca Guadagnino (director), Sayombhu Mukdeeprom (cinematographer), Walter Fasano (editor), James Ivory (writer)
Adapted from Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman
Armie Hammer, Timothée Chalamet, Michael Stuhlbarg, Amira Casar, Esther Garrel, Victoire Du Bois (cast)
Released January 22, 2017 (Sundance), November 24, 2017 (USA)
Call Me By Your Name is a beautifully crafted film about a sweet summer romance between an adult and a teen. That fact colours everything else about...

The Wilds, the new zombie apocalypse comic from Black Mask Studios, has a very big twist: instead of decaying shamblers, or fast-moving infected, the zombies in The Wilds have become host to flowers. How these Abominations, as they’re called in the comic, actually work isn’t explained in the first issue. Instead we learn about the chaotic early days of the new plague and the new world that’s grown in its wreckage. The flower zombie Abominations have taken over the countryside, with humanity h...

Anthologies are back and romance comics are too, but Image Comics’ Twisted Romance, a February-debuting romance comic anthology, does both of these a bit differently. The Alex de Campi-led four-issue miniseries pairs the writer with four different artists, shifting romance subgenres from noir to science fiction to fantasy.

Those teams are backed up by a second original comic and a prose story, each of which is fine tuned for the Twisted Romance vibe. As the organizer, curator, and lead writer...

Firebug is about myths, magic, family, doubt — it’s, well, about a lot of things. It’s about a group of idealists, devotees of the Goddess of the Fiery Mountain, trying to change the world for the better and discovering that making history is messy. It’s about balancing love, ego, ambition, kindness and necessity. And it’s about creating a unique, recent-history fantasy world that centers blackness, one built on elements of writer and penciller Johnnie Christmas’ years of mulling over creatio...

Content warning: Discussion of sexual assault and serial murder.
I saw My Friend Dahmer back in October at the After Dark Film Festival. I was impressed by it, especially the performance by former Disney Channel star and lead here, Ross Lynch. But it’s late November as I finally sit down to write about the film which looks at the last high school years of serial killer, Jeffrey Dahmer. It’s a restrained and humane portrait of a killer and the community that raised him; one that some reviewers...

God’s Own Country
Francis Lee (director and writer), Joshua James Richards (cinematographer), Chris Wyatt (editor)
Josh O’Connor, Alec Secareanu, Ian Hart, Gemma Jones (cast)
Released October 25, 2017
The first time I saw Brokeback Mountain I got pre-emptively high and sobbed through the first third of the film, the happy parts. I spent the latter two thirds sobered up and empty, watching the tentative relationship between Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist blossom and then immediately wither; watc...

According to a recent survey by Indeed 43% of tech workers are worried they’ll lose their jobs when they age out of tech’s ideal. All workers worry about ageism, especially as they get closer to retirement age, but what’s different about tech is how young those worries set in.
Older Millennials, that is, those in their early 30s, are already concerned they might be edging over the hill into irrelevancy – no matter how much more skilled they are than their younger selves. Indeed found that 46%...

High Fantasy
Jenna Bass (director and cinematographer), Kyle Wallace (editor)
Qondiswa James, Nala Khumalo, Francesca Varrie Michel, Liza Scholtz (cast)
September 10, 2017 (TIFF)
The fantasy in High Fantasy is South Africa’s rainbow nation. The film, shot entirely on an iPhone by director Jenna Bass, follows four friends on a trip to a defunct farm. The film explores questions of race, gender, ownership, and power. It’s a fantasy film in the sense that a road trip story takes a sharp turn int...

Mudbound
Dee Rees (director), Rachel Morrison (cinematographer), Mako Kamitsuna (editor)
Adapted from the Hillary Jordan novel by Dee Rees and Virgil Williams
Carey Mulligan, Garrett Hedlund, Jason Clarke, Jason Mitchell, Mary J. Blige (cast)
January 21, 2017 (Sundance), September 10, 2017 (TIFF), November 17, 2017 (USA)
Mudbound is a raw, historical family drama with a Faulkernian cadence. The film is a domestic epic that tracks the lives of two intertwined families, one Black and one white,...