the Fifth Line: Championship Time Nears

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Everything is accelerating now. Bubble teams are on their last ditch efforts to make the NHL playoffs, while playoff-bound teams jockey for position. Every little defect of a team is worried over, whether by paranoid fans or bookies.

Meanwhile, the NCAA teams have been seeded for the men’s national tournament. The Golden Gophers from Minnesota have already claimed the women’s national title. But we’ll get to them later. We start here in Chicago. [Read more…]

J&STAC: She-Hulk

-J. Michael Bestul is a writer for the Addison Recorder. Stephanie Ruehl is an artist who works in a comic book shop. They’re married and have a lot of discussions about comic books and graphic novels. Combine all that into a biweekly feature and you get “J. & Steph Talk About Comics.”

One of the more celebrated titles of last year was She-Hulk, a new ongoing series starring lawyer-Hulk Jennifer Walters. After twelve issues, though, Marvel cancelled the series to the dismay of many. They tried to clarify that the goal had always been to publish the first twelve issues and see if it got enough traction to keep going, but that’s not how they sold the series.

The second (and final) volume of She-Hulk issues was released today, so we decided to look at the final arc of She-Hulk’s short-lived series.

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cover art by Kevin Wada

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Unscripted Moments: The Bird Girl at Mercy Street Theater

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(Photos by : Christopher Semel)

For this Segment of Unscripted Moments, we’re sitting down with Julia Rohed the director of  The Bird Girl a brand new play. The show was written by resident playwright EJC Calvert, and is being put up by Mercy Street a new company in their first season here in Chicago.

A little about the show:

Living a life of solitude in a remote asylum, Amity’s world is shaken when she’s scooped up by an enterprising ringmaster and finds herself the centerpiece of a traveling freak show. …..The Bird Girl is a look at the intense pressure of public gaze, how it effects self-image and becomes a driving force in Amity’s life. The play was developed in workshop with Jon Robin Baitz at the New School for Drama in 2009, and had a reading with NYAC’s Casual Reading Series in August 2010.
(Mercy Street Website)

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