Superhero comics have many well-worn motifs which have been popularized, subverted, and scoffed at over the decades, like secret identities, reporter girlfriends, and radioactive everything. In Tropes in Capes, I’ll look at the history of these elements: how they got started, when and if they fell out of favor, and where they are now. First up: the kid sidekick!

The first proper kid sidekick in superhero comics is not going to come as a surprise to anyone: it’s Robin, of course. Robin the Boy Wonder debuted in 1940, created by Bob Kane, Bill Finger, and Jerry Robinson. The cover of his first issue declares him “The Sensational Character Find of 1940!” and for once, the hype is not overblown: Robin coined and defined a crucial aspect of the genre almost overnight, and remains one of the most beloved superheroes in the world over 80 years later.

From the perspective of someone trying to sell comics in the 1940s, the kid sidekick makes a ton of sense. First of all, the hero needs someone to talk to — Sherlock Holmes has Watson, and now Batman would have Robin. (In fact, there’s a popular but unsourced quote by Bill Finger floating around the internet making this exact comparison.) Second, the hero needs a regular someone to rescue. Superman had Lois Lane, but Batman had an inconsistent love life, so why not give him a ward with a propensity for getting tied up?

But most importantly, the kid sidekick is a kid, and in the 1940s, so were almost all comic book readers. What could be cooler than living vicariously through Dick Grayson while he lived in a mansion and fought ne’er-do-wells and never ever had to go to bed when he didn’t want to? The dream!

Robin paved the way for a host of other Golden Age sidekicks. By the end of 1940, the original Human Torch had gained a sidekick, Toro. By 1941, sidekicks were already so de rigeur that some new superheroes were given one right off the (pun intended) bat: the first appearance of Captain America is also the first appearance of his sidekick Bucky, and ditto Green Arrow and Speedy, while Sandman’s makeover from a The Shadow-esque pulp vigilante to a spandex-clad superhero came complete with a new sidekick, Sandy the Golden Boy. The trope was even already being subverted, as with the Star-Spangled Kid and Stripesy, where the kid was the hero and the adult was the sidekick. Even Jimmy Olsen, absolutely a kid sidekick despite his (usual) lack of spandex, made the jump from the Superman radio show to the comics in 1941.

Being a woman in ones twenties might feel like walking through fire at times. When we are on the verge of a societal collapse, we can do very little to evade the feeling of being doomed. While nothing alleviates the heartbreaks of that challenging decade, books do in fact tell us that our grief and anxieties stem from the world around us and are not just makings of our own. In times of despair, we can always resort to them and find a deep sense of sisterhood in the world of our literary counterparts.

Have you ever felt that everything you’ve been working towards has been a lie? Well, our twenties are the time of constant learning and unlearning and then relearning. This is when the illusions fall off and we are left to contend with cold hard reality. Ingrid, from Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut novel — Disorientation, is going through something similar. She is a final year PhD student, struggling with her dissertation on a Chinese American poet named Xiao-Wen Chou. Through the larger-than-life characters and humor, Chou has highlighted the exclusion, frustration, and identity crisis 29-year-old Ingrid is going through. Her fiance turns out to be a gaslighter who fetishizes Asian women and the Chinese poet she has been researching for ages turns out to be a white man in yellowface. As Ingrid navigates the perils of academia and her interpersonal relationships, readers can feel that her uncertainties and stubbornness are a direct impact of a deep sense of self-resentment.

Ingrid’s self-loathing doesn’t exist in a vacuum. The separation of the exterior self from her inner self is what many Asian Americans face considering the racism hurled at them daily. Ingrid is unaware of all the potential she carries as she has been raised in a society that benefits from her self-negation. Ingrid wrestles with estrangement from her Chinese culture. She is always gaslighting herself into believing that maybe she is meant to be satisfied with the crumbs thrown at her. Despite being smart and strong, it takes her years to see through her fiance’s emotional manipulation.

Disorientation also sheds light on the importance of female friendships. Eunice, Ingrid’s best friend, has been quite a force, pulling Ingrid out of the consequences of her actions time and again. Even though Vivian and Ingrid have their differences, they do come through for each other in times of need. As much as the outside world tries to wreck Ingrid, ultimately she revives the strength within herself that has been lying latent all along.

In Coco Mellors’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein, we meet beautiful twentysomething Cleo. She marries Frank, who is decades older than her, after six months of dating him. But being married to an entire person is too much for Cleo. She is all alone in the tyranny of her mind. Attraction cannot be helped, as Cleo listened to the heat of passion and plunged into a marriage that is far from ideal. Her terrible childhood and apathetic father make her life more vacant, adding to the hollowness inside her. She doesn’t have the means to heal herself just yet.

Trends in fiction are often a contentious topic. How many times have we heard “YA is dead” or “dystopia is overdone?” Despite this, publishing and the broader bookish world are always discussing the latest trending genres and topics, trying to work out what will be hot or not in upcoming publications.

The London Book Fair took place earlier this year, for the first time in two years. Following the fair, The Guardian published an article asking “What will we be reading next year?,” going through the broad upcoming trends in books that we can expect to see on the shelves in the near future.

One of these trends was “darker women’s stories,” focusing particularly on thrillers and dark historical fiction. A stark contrast from upbeat romance or cosier fiction, which has enjoyed popularity in previous years, these darker stories explore murder, abuse, postpartum depression, sexual violence, and other difficult topics. While some readers might wonder why darker stories are gaining popularity during a pandemic and during an increasingly frightening political climate, this does seem to tie into broader trends of changing literary interests, particularly amongst women: for example, the boom in true crime reading that we’ve seen amongst women in recent years.

But why are women drawn to these dark stories? The answer may lie not only in the books, but in the social and political background against which these books are written.

Are you looking for hardcovers out right now with a clever design under the dust jacket? You have come to the right place. The excitement of buying a hardcover book, bringing it home, and realizing it is even more gorgeous under the dust jacket is unmatched. I want to be shocked, awed, amazed, and bewildered. The assignment was to wow me, and these books did not mess around.

Book cover design has become a vital part of book sales. Although there was a time in print history when you would go to your local binder, drop off the loose pages of your new book, and come back to find them bound per your specifications, now we expect our books to come with the bindings. Although beautiful books can come in all shapes and sizes, today we are talking about the hardcovers out right now with the cleverest designs under the dust jacket that I could find.

My methods were chaotic but as comprehensive as possible. Because most online listings for books do not include what is underneath the dust jacket, I had to conduct some field research — the field in question being my local Barnes & Noble where I proceeded to look at the design under the dust jacket of every hardcover book they had in stock. I took pictures of the interesting covers and narrowed my list down when I got home.

In the last stretch of auctions staged in London this week, Phillips held an evening sale offering works of modern and contemporary art evening at its U.K. headquarters, bringing in a combined total of £17.5 million ($21 million) with fees.

The 33 lots offered spanned works from mid-career artists like Shara Hughes and Caroline Walker to less valuable pieces by historical figures like Cy Twombly. Thirty-one works sold, with two withdrawn in advance. Six pieces, including examples by Flora Yukhnovich, Damien Hirst, and Stanley Whitney were secured with irrevocable bids.

The total hammer price for the entire group before fees came to £14.3 million ($17.5 million), landing at the low end of its combined presale estimate of £13.5 million–£18.4 million ($16.4 million–$22.4 million). The total with premium was $21 million.

The energy for the hour-and-a-half-long sale, led by auctioneer Henry Highly, was higher than in sales led by its larger competitors—Christie’s and Sotheby’s this week—whose sales are twice the size. More than in the other London sales, which were anchored with top lots by canonized male artists, Phillips relied on some of the market’s youngest artists to activate momentum with bidders.

Including the return of Jordan Peele and Thor

June 2 – July 8, 2022

May 19 – July 2, 2022

The Hagia Sophia, a Byzantine-era religious building in Istanbul, Turkey, was reportedly damaged last week when heavy cleaning equipment cracked the marble floors. It is just the latest incident in recent years that has seen the site damaged.

The Hagia Sophia, constructed by the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I between 532 and 537, served as the largest Christian cathedral in the world until Constantinople was taken over by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. It was then turned into a mosque and subsequently into a museum by Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1935. Considered one of the most important religious and cultural sites in the world, it was deemed a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985.

In 2020, the Turkish government decided to convert the structure from a museum back into a mosque. The decision sparked controversy both globally and locally, and required that the Department of Religious Affairs take over control of the Hagia Sophia from the Ministry of Culture’s Department of Antiquities.

Since 2020, reports have documented other kinds of damage at the site. The Imperial Gate, also known as the Door of Repentance, which dates back to the sixth century, is one such example. The doorway stands at roughly 23 feet tall and is, according to the Byzantines, constructed of oak from Noah’s Ark. Above the door is a mosaic depicting Jesus alongside the Theotokos, or mother of Jesus and Saint Mary of Egypt—all of which were brought from the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. The Imperial Gate would have been used solely as an entrance for the emperor.

Earlier this year on April 18,  a group called the Turkish Association of Art Historians documented vandalism to the gate in a Twitter post. “We discovered that the historic Imperial Gate of Hagia Sophia is in such a state and we photographed it, around 20:45 tonight,” they wrote. The photo accompanying the post shows deep gouges in the wood surface.

On Thursday afternoon, Beyoncé unveiled the cover for Renaissance, her newest album, and many fans immediately took to social media that it looks a lot like a famed painting from the 19th century.

The cover, which was shot by Carlijn Jacobs, features a scantily clad Beyoncé atop a silvery horse. It bears more than a few similarities to John Collier’s 1880/98 painting Lady Godiva, which depicts a nude woman who figures prominently in Anglo-Saxon lore.

As legend has it, Lady Godiva rode a horse in the buff sometime during the 11th century as a protest against plans from her husband Leofric to impose a harsh tax on the citizens of Coventry, England. Leofric said he would call it off if she appeared in town naked and on horseback, and she took him up on the dare. (She is believed to have told all the citizens to stay home so she could retain her dignity, and all but one, a man now known as Peeping Tom, did, although this part is thought to be apocryphal.)

The painting by Collier, an artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, is currently held by the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in Coventry, England, which owns a collection of works that depict Lady Godiva.