Megen de Bruin-Molé

Obsessed with Apocalypse. Also with words.

Penny Dreadful versus The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

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Penny-Dreadful-Vanessa-Ives

[EDIT: I penned a running review series of Penny Dreadful season three for the Victorianist. Click here for direct links.]

This article contains (very) minor spoilers, so if you haven’t yet seen Penny Dreadful or read The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you may want to steer clear.

When the Showtime/Sky television series Penny Dreadful was announced, many fans and critics accused it of plagiarising Alan Moore and Kevin O’Niell’s comic book series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. It does, after all, feature a very similar cast of characters and draw from similar nineteenth-century texts, especially if you count the abysmal film adaptation from 2003. Both mashups feature characters plundered from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, though LoEG showrunner Mina Murray is replaced by her father Malcolm (played by Timothy Dalton) in Penny Dreadful, as the unofficial ‘leader’ of the band of monsters. Sir Malcolm Murray, like LoEG’s Allan Quatermain, is a hunter and explorer who spent much of his life in Africa.

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Giving the Past a Photographic Afterlife

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I’ve long been a fan of Jo Teeuwisse’s Ghosts of History project, where she overlays present-day locations with old archive photographs. I’m also a big fan of the recent trend where contemporary artists insert monsters and pop culture icons into thrift store paintings. In that same trend, while researching my current chapter, I came across the image series ‘Dancing with … Read more

The 5 Stages of Revision

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About two months ago I had what will likely be the first of many experiences with negative feedback, something that is part and parcel of working in academia (or anywhere, really). I submitted an article to a book collection over the summer of 2014, and after giving it very little thought for the following nine months, it … Read more

There and Back Again: Or, What I Learned About Pop Culture at the 2015 General Conference Session in San Antonio

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And we’re back! After a long and much-needed holiday in the USA, I’m in Cardiff and working on my thesis again. My post this week is going to be a long one, and it’s going to contain a strange mix of topics (religion, politics, and popular culture), so consider yourself forewarned. Those of you who follow me … Read more

Angels and Apes on Summer Hiatus

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The time has come – the sun is shining, the plants are pollinating, and here in Rotterdam (my former place of work), where I’m volunteering at the 46th Poetry International Festival, walking outside in flip-flops and a short sleeves is almost comfortable. Today, among many exciting readings, workshops, and master classes, we’ve got a programme featuring … Read more

Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman

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As I write this post I’m sitting at Starbucks in Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, waiting for my flight to Switzerland to start boarding. I’ll be at the Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman conference in Geneva from 4-6 June, presenting a paper on monsters in remix culture, mingling with the other international attendees, and listening to what promises to … Read more

Everything is a Remix

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This week I’d like to share a short, four-part documentary on remix culture that I recently watched (for free) over on the ‘Everything is a Remix’ website. Not only is it brief, well-researched, entertaining, and well-edited, it also offers an excellent introduction to my own research, which focuses specifically on how studying remix culture changes the way we look … Read more

Victorian Monsters? Strategies of Appropriation in the Neo-Victorian Mashup

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This post originally appeared on the Victorianist, the postgraduate blog of the British Association for Victorian Studies, on 18 May 2015. It is reposted here with the kind permission of the editors. I should probably preface this post by admitting that I’m not a real Victorianist. The Victorians were one of my undergraduate passions, and … Read more

The Lighter Side of Apocalypse

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Today’s post will be quick, as I’m in the middle of conference mania, and also of a major overhaul of my thesis focus and methodology. Because I’m a bit tired of both monsters and the Victorian at the moment (hard to believe, I know), this week I decided to briefly share a couple of somethings … Read more

Anatomy of a Cover

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We’re always told that we should never judge a book by its cover, but the truth is that a lot of work goes into making sure we do. A cover generally gives us an immediate idea of the genre, register, and target audience of a book. A good cover will also generate excitement and interest, … Read more