Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Doris V. Sutherland
Cram Comics #5 - The Comics Journal
Lillian Ansell’s cover art to the fifth issue of Cram Comics gives us a partial idea of what to expect: a nude Bacchus sings while drunkenly slouching amidst a pastoral scene, all rendered in a loose style of cartooning straight out of a 1960s underground comic. This is going to squarely be a not-what-the-corporations-have-to-offer title, that much is clear; but will the contents necessarily be as colourful and carefree as the scene implies?
How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes
I suppose I should begin this review by mentioning that I have never, in my life, been a smoker. Reading How to Quit Smoking Cigarettes, a graphic memoir in which Nick Bunch charts his efforts to give up tobacco, gave me a creeping sense of survivor’s guilt. Starting on June 1, 2024, Bunch began charting his experiences at the rate of one page a day.
Renegade Royale - The Comics Journal
"Oh my God, fuck off , you Anne Rice-LARPing douche nozzles! " So says Sasha as her virtual reality avatar, a gun-toting bounty hunter, confronts a pair of vampire-themed foes in a forest. The casual swearing is typical of the dialogue in Renegade Royale , as the competitive VR players who comprise the cast rarely make it through a double-page spread without the word "fuck" escaping their lips.
Annihilator: Rainbow of Death #1
"Here in the rainbow temple, we work to eliminate as much brown-gray as possible. We want hyper, vibrating pinks and yellows and acid greens and sexy purples. We want fun and sunshine and glory. Lazing about and heroin nights and so much more. God, how good it's gotten in this world, how easy to sink into pleasure and fantasy. You need hardly come up for air. I enjoy fucking people in their mouths, pussies and assholes. I enjoy getting fucked in my mouth and asshole.
Amazing Histories, May 1929: Enter T. O’Conor Sloane
Two astronauts leap across the low-gravity environment of Earth’s moon. We can see that they are astronauts in that their spacesuits, although crude and antiquated, are still broadly recognisable in concept. In detail, though, the two men look less like spacemen of the 1960s and more like deep-sea divers of the 1920s. This is inevitable, as it was May 1929, and the first issue of post-Hugo Gernsback Amazing Stories had reached the newsstands. New editor T.
ESSAY: Alices: Lewis Carroll in Wonderland
This year marks the 160th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was originally published in 1865. Very few works of English-language children’s literature have had such a lifespan. 2025 also marks the 160th anniversaries of Mary Papes Dodge’s Hans Brinker, Mary White Sewell’s Mother’s Last Words, and Jean Ingelow’s Stories Told to a Child, but it is hard to imagine many people taking note.
ESSAY: How Naomi Kritzer's Science Fiction Strips Away Cyberspace
We have entered an era of AI slop. Periodicals are struggling with floods of submissions cooked up by ChatGPT rather than human imaginations, while readers downloading ebooks from Amazon are faced with the possibility of their latest purchase being the churned-out product of AI masquerading as actual creativity or scholarship. While science fiction is no more affected by this than any other genre, its duty to predict the future (albeit often through an escapist lens) puts it in a unique position.
REVIEW: Emily Tesh's Some Desperate Glory is a Space Opera for Today
Humanity has lost a war with the majoda, an interplanetary association united by an artificial intelligence called the Wisdom. Earth has been destroyed, and a space station called Gaea now houses a remnant of humanity in a rigid militaristic society.
2024 Ignyte Awards: The Saint of Bright Doors & Kill Your Darlings Among Winners
Friday, 8 November saw the presentation of the fifth annual Ignyte Awards. Originally attached to the virtual convention FIYAHCON, these awards, which celebrate science fiction, fantasy, and horror by diverse creators, have continued to take place every year despite the convention being on hiatus since 2021. Here are the highlights of the 2024 Ignyte Awards. One of the works honoured was The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera which won in the category for adult novels.
ESSAY: Lestat's Precursors: Four Faces of American Vampirism
Some readers may feel that, so far, the stories covered in this series on nineteenth-century American vampire literature have shown an insufficient quantity of fangs. The first part covered stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Ambrose Bierce that dealt with the theme of the seductive revenant – but, strictly speaking, none were about vampires.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Survival of the Dead (2009)
Concluding a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. And here we come to the end of the line. George A. Romero’s Living Dead series – a series that lasted long enough to see official sequels, semi-official splinters, Italian mutations, and the birth of the splatterpunk movement – reaches the final instalment of its six-film canon with Survival of the Dead.
ESSAY: Lestat’s Precursors: Cora Linn Daniels and Sardia
Continuing a series examining the early days of American vampire fiction: Part 1 looked at the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Ambrose Bierce; part 2 discussed a story by James Kirk Paulding. Now, let us meet another author… Vampire literature saw two major periods of flourishment in the nineteenth century. The first came early on, during the height of the Romantic era, when Byron and Polidori laid the groundwork for the genre we know.
ESSAY: Lestat's Precursors: The Vroucolacas in America
The previous post in this series examined stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Washington Irving, and Ambrose Bierce that explored the themes of macabre resurrection and twisted sexuality, thereby helping to pave the way for later generations of American vampire literature. However, none of these stories directly addressed vampire folklore. James Kirke Paulding’s 1846 story “The Vroucolacas,” which ran in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, is a different matter.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: John Russo at Avatar Press (2005-2011)
Content warning: This article contains illustrated scenes of graphic violence, including sexual violence. Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Anyone who takes a close look at Night of the Living Dead must surely feel pity for the film’s co-writer, John Russo. After all, it was Russo who suggested that George A.
ESSAY: Lestat's Precursors: Vampires in the American Canon
AMC’s Interview with the Vampire saw its second season this year, along with news that it had been renewed for a third season. There is evidently still life in the Anne Rice books which formed the basis of the series and gave the world the vampire antiheroes, Louis and Lestat. Rice is credited with doing more than any other author to popularise the notion of the vampire as a sympathetic protagonist, rather than a monster to be destroyed as in the works of Bram Stoker and J. Sheridan Le Fanu.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Day of the Dead Remake (2008)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The great zombie springtime of the 2000s saw the Night of the Living Dead family tree grow back branch by branch. Romero’s series was revived; Return of the Living Dead returned; and even the Book of the Dead series had its long-delayed third volume.
2024 Dragon Awards: John Scalzi and Rebecca Yarros Are Winners While AI Art Loses
The Dragon Awards are presented annually at the Dragon Con convention in Atlanta, and the ninth iteration of the awards ceremony was held on Sunday. Eleven works of science fiction, fantasy and horror, as decided by a public online poll, were awarded with trophies. The ceremony saw some repeat winners.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Diary of the Dead (2007)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. From today’s perspective, we see Land of the Dead and Diary of the Dead as the fourth and fifth installments of George A. Romero’s six-part zombie series. But this obscures the drastically different circumstances in which each film was made.
2024 Hugo Award Winners Explore Spacefaring Futures and Technological Doubts
This year marks the turn of Glasgow to host the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon), and Sunday saw the convention’s best-known event: the presentation of the Hugo Awards. Controversy of one sort or another has become something of a tradition at the Hugos, and this time around, award-watchers were still reeling from last year’s disorder. The 2023 Hugo Awards, handled under the eye of now-disgraced award administrator David McCarty, saw multiple finalists unjustly disqualified.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Night of the Living Dead 3D (2006)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. 2005 gave us a high in the form of Land of the Dead, but it also gave us lows in the forms of Day of the Dead 2: Contagium and the Return of the Living Dead revival. The following year gave us still another low in Night of the Living Dead 3D.
ESSAY: Hugos, Heavenly Kings, and Chinese Science Fiction
Last year, Flame Tree Press published Adventures in Space: New Short Stories by Chinese & English Science Fiction Writers. In this anthology, consulting editor Patrick Parrinder and honourary editor Yao Haijun assembled a set of Chinese stories, all newly translated by Alex Woodend, and placed them alongside new (or, at least, fairly recent) English-language work by American and European authors.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Mondo Zombie (2006)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. John Skipp and Craig Spector’s Book of the Dead series can be claimed as the horror equivalent to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions trilogy: each series began with an influential, zeitgeist-capturing first volume, begat a sequel within a few years, and then had a projected third instalment slip into the limbo of publishing delays.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Return of the Living Dead 4 & 5 (2005)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. With the twenty-first century zombie boom having brought Romero’s official Living Dead series out of retirement for 2005’s Land of the Dead, it should come as no surprise that Return of the Living Dead was close behind.
Is Anime Transing Our Teens? Inside a Moral Panic
Anybody familiar with the weirder corners of Reagan-era pop culture must surely be aware of a notorious group by the name of Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (BADD). Founded in 1983 and incorporated as a non-profit entity the following year, BADD was built on the premise that fantasy role-playing games were turning youngsters towards black magic and Satanism.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Day of the Dead 2 (2005)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The millennial zombie glut may have brought with it the triumphant return of George A. Romero’s Living Dead series, but it also revived the strain of soulless cash-ins on his work.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Land of the Dead (2005)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Throughout the nineties, horror aficionados had been tantalised by the prospect of a fourth Living Dead film directed by George A. Romero.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Toe Tags (2004-5)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Less than a year before George A. Romero made his long-awaited return to zombie cinema with Land of the Dead, comic fans had the opportunity to see him take his living dead in a rather different direction.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Barbara's Zombie Chronicles (2004)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. An early sign of the millennial zombie glut can be seen in the world of comics. After FantaCo’s efforts fizzled out in the mid-90s, other publishers seem to have been uninterested in putting out Night of the Living Dead comics.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Dawn of the Dead Remake (2004)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The twenty-first-century zombie film renaissance began in 2002 with the twin commercial successes of Resident Evil and 28 Days Later, although each of these was a step removed from Night of the Living Dead and its sequels.
The 2024 Hugo Awards Heralds the Clearing of Corruption
The finalists for the 2024 Hugo Awards were announced on Friday, and as is typical for the Hugos, the ballot has a mixture of the familiar and the fresh. Established Hugo favourites such as John Scalzi (Starter Villain), Ann Leckie (Translation State), Martha Wells (Witch King), Nghi Vo (Mammoths at the Gates, On the Fox Roads) and Naomi Kritzer (“The Year Without Sunshine,” “Better Living Through Algorithms”) are all present.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Children of the Living Dead (2001)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The twenty-first century brought with it a new era for cinema zombies. Before the renaissance, however, came a miniature dark age in the form of 2001’s abysmal Children of the Living Dead.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: georgearomero.com (c. 2000)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The early days of the World Wide Web were, as the cliche goes, the Wild West.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Night of the Living Dead 30th Anniversary (1998)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. There is a recurring joke online that, according to statistics, the relative popularity of horror monsters corresponds with whichever political party is in the White House: under a Republican administration, zombies are in vogue; but when Democrats take power, zombies retreat and vampires take centre stage.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: FantaCo’s Night of the Living Dead Comics (1991-5)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. As mentioned earlier in this series, zombie cinema owes something to the world of comics. The imagery of rotting zombies rising from their graves, embraced by the likes of Zombi 2 and Return of the Living Dead, was a central motif in the EC horror comics of the 1950s.
Breaking Down the Chengdu Hugo Awards Ineligibilities
Every year brings with it a new World Science Fiction Convention, or Worldcon. And every year brings a new set of Hugo Awards, voted for by the convention’s paying members. And, so it seems, every year brings a fresh controversy connected to the convention, or the awards, or both. This year, we have already seen a Hugo-related controversy that, depending on how we look at it, arrived either early or late: it actually concerns last year’s Worldcon, which was held in Chengdu.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Return of the Living Dead 3 (1993)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. While the mainline Night of the Living Dead sequels were consistently helmed by George A. Romero, the Return of the Living Dead sister series had no consistent auteur.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Still Dead (1992) [wip]
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. After the seminal Book of the Dead came another zombie-themed anthology from editors John Skipp and Craig Spector, Still Dead: Book of the Dead 2, published in 1992.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Night of the Living Dead Remake (1990)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Any film will have a few production oversights, in the case of Night of the Living Dead, a small error had a major impact. The original title Night of the Flesh Eaters was scrapped on the grounds that it had been taken by another film, and so the crew prepared a new title card for the renamed Night of the Living Dead.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Book of the Dead (1989)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. 1988 saw the twentieth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead, but the celebrations were hardly enthusiastic. The year’s attempts to follow up on the various strands of the series – Return of the Living Dead Part II, Zombi 3 and Flesheater – were a trilogy of disappointment, and a fourth Romero-directed sequel had yet to solidify.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Flesheater (1988)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. While John Russo, Rudy Ricci and Russell Steiner wrote the script that eventually mutated into The Return of the Living Dead, they were not the only Night of the Living Dead personnel to embark on their own, Romero-free sequel.
REVIEW: T. Kingfisher’s Nettle & Bone is a Hugo-Winning Halloween Read
There were once three sisters in Nettle & Bone, all princesses of a small city-state called the Harbour Kingdom. The eldest, Damia, married Prince Vorling of the Northern Kingdom. Five months later Damia was dead. The middle sister, Kania, married the now-widowed Prince Vorling, while the youngest of the three, Marra, was sent to a convent by their mother, freeing her from the world of marriage and political alliances. Years have passed since then, and Marra is concerned for her surviving sister.
2023 Ignyte Awards: N. E. Davenport, Nghi Vo and John Chu Among Winners
Although the virtual convention FIYAHCON has been on hiatus since 2021, one of its draws has carried on unabated: the annual Ignyte Awards. The 2023 iteration of these awards, which celebrate diverse science fiction and fantasy, took place on Saturday 21 October. The Ignytes have three novel categories, divided by age range. The category for adult novels was won by N. E. Davenport’s The Blood Trials, the story a magical heroine taking part in gladiatorial combat to solve her grandfather’s murder.
Space Opera, Social Commentary and Twisted Fairy Tales Win at China's First Hugo Awards
The winners of the 2023 Hugo Awards were announced this Saturday. A whole year’s worth of science fiction and fantasy talent as voted for by members of the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) were duly honoured with gleaming trophies in the shape of a panda with a rocket. The winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel was Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher (the adult fiction pen name of author Ursula Vernon).
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Zombi 3 (1988)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. While American zombie films were growing increasingly silly, as seen in the Return of the Living Dead series, their Italian counterparts were also facing problems.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. How appropriate that The Return of the Living Dead, itself an alternative to Dawn of the Dead, would beget an alternate Zombi 2 – namely, the awkward quasi-sequel that is Return of the Living Dead Part II, released in 1988.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: The Return of the Living Dead (1985)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. While George Romero was building his trilogy, his former collaborator John Russo was following a tangled route towards the production of his alternative sequel, the details of which are covered in the book The Complete History of The Return of the Living Dead by Christian Sellers and Gary Smart.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Day of the Dead (1985)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Nine years passed between Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, after which another seven years went by until Day of the Dead was released in 1985. Unlike certain sequel-makers, George A. Romero can hardly be accused of rushing his zombie trilogy – and a trilogy it would remain until the twenty-first century.
Timothy Zahn and Martha Wells Among Winners of 2023's Rejigged Dragon Awards
The Atlanta convention Dragon Con handed out its eighth set of Dragon Awards on Sunday. Voted for by the public via an online poll, the awards have been a fixture of the annual convention since 2016 and celebrate science fiction and fantasy storytelling across a variety of media. The Best Science Fiction Novel category was won by Timothy Zahn’s The Icarus Plot, a sequel to his 1999 novel The Icarus Hunt. The victory marks the fifth novel written or co-written by Zahn to win a Dragon Award.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Zombi 2 (1979)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. Back in the seventies and eighties, if a genre of action or horror film left its mark, then there was one sure testament to its success: a slew of Italian imitations.
ESSAY: Dead at 55: Dawn of the Dead (1978)
Continuing a series that celebrates the fifty-fifth anniversary of Night of the Living Dead with a look at the classic zombie film and its many follow-ups. The 1978 film Dawn of the Dead is, in certain quarters, regarded as belonging to that hallowed category of sequels better than their originals.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Doris V.
Contact Doris V., search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack