Category: Blog

My review of the Broadway musical Kimberly Akimbo, for Chelsea Community News: Over the last decade the “Sick Lit” genre of young adult fiction has grown in popularity. Tragic tales of teenagers with terminal illnesses have filled stages, pages, and movie screens, but Kimberly Akimbo has a clever twist: Its teenage heroine has a rare aging disease, and she looks like a woman in her 60s, even though she’s really 16. With this story, there is an excuse to replace the waifish ingenues with a leading lady. This story was first presented as a play (written by David Lindsay-Abaire) in 2001, before the teen Sick Lit trend had even begun. Now the play has been recreated as a Broadway musical (Book & Lyrics also by Lindsay-Abaire, Music by Jeanine Tesori) starring Tony Award winner Victoria Clark as Kimberly. Continue Reading at ChelseaCommunityNews.com.

If you were raised on Sailor Moon, your kids are watching a thing abut a guy with a chainsaw for a head. This was abundantly clear by the Chainsaw Man cosplayers at this year’s Anime NYC, which was held November 18-20 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. While classic anime characters like the sailor scouts and Gundam mechs are eternally popular, it was clear that a new generation of Anime franchises are on the rise.

This convention drew a smaller, and younger, crowd than last month’s New York Comic Con (NYCC), which was also held at the Javits. The anime fans were much more prone to cosplay. In fact, most of the people attending were in costume, or wearing cute “Kawaii” Japanese street fashion. Not to mention a swarm of people in maid dresses, cat outfits, and schoolgirl uniforms. Also present were Japanophiles in flashy Japanese street fashions not associated with any particular fictional character. Continue Reading at Chelsea Community News.

Each October, New York’s Jacob Javits Center becomes a nerd mecca for comic book enthusiasts. As with many large gatherings, New York Comic Con 2022 (NYCC) had a rocky return last year as the city struggled to recover from the COVID lockdowns. The major comic book companies were nowhere in sight on the convention floor last year. Attendance was down in 2021, when compared to 2019. But this year the October 6-9 con still felt like it was starting to recover from a nuclear apocalypse: Alive, but mutating into a new form.

Each year the comic industry publication ICv2 holds an Insider Talk for comic and games industry professionals on Thursday afternoon at NYCC. Milton Griepp, the founder of ICv2, started off with the good news that comic book sales are up, and that Trade Paperbacks, which collect several issues of a comic into a single book, make up the largest portion of those sales (as compared to sales of single issues). Japanese manga was the best-selling form of comic book, as well as the most prevalent presence on the show floor of the convention. Traditional American superhero comics continue to be overshadowed by the likes of Naruto, Dragonball Z, and newcomer Chainsaw Man. Continue Reading at Chelsea Community News.

Over the last 20years it has been a joke at Comic Con that the comics themselves were becoming increasingly irrelevant. Movies, TV shows, and video games adapted from comic books have made the print comics a mere side hustle for superheroes. The New York Comic Con reached the apex of this absurdity when none of the major comic book companies had any presence at all on the show floor of the convention center. Continue Reading at ChelseaCommunityNews.com.

Tonight on PBS they’re running a documentary on NFL Cheerleaders. I caught this at the Tribeca Film Festival last year. Here’s my review:

Being a “professional cheerleader” isn’t quite what people think it is. The job comes with fame, social status, and a great outfit. But “wealth” isn’t part of the package. NFL cheerleaders have filed several lawsuits claiming they were underpaid for their work, and “A Woman’s Work” chronicles several of these suits, and the women behind them. Continue Reading at ChelseaCommunityNews.com.

Charles [Charli] Battersby is a Game Designer, Journalist, and actress.

I wrote an Interactive Fiction video game for Choice of Games. You can play a free demo of Kidnapped: A Royal Birthday HERE.

I am also known for my plays The Astonishing Adventures of All-American Girl & The Scarlet Skunk, and That Cute Radioactive Couple.

I am also  the screenwriter and co-creator of the animated webseries The Storyteller: Fallout.

I have written for sites including Chelsea Community News, Geek.com, Complex, and Joystiq.

I’m also an actress and a former cheerleader.

Here’s an article I wrote about the time I went on patrol with the Guardian angels!

It’s the sunny Saturday afternoon of Oct. 10, and Chelsea is filled with people enjoying the kind of warm fall day we’ll be seeing less and less of. What’s more, with COVID-19 restrictions loosening, there are plenty of shoppers and pedestrians on the street at this time of day. This isn’t what I thought “Patrolling for Crime” would look like. Continue Reading at ChelseaCommunityNews.com.

An article I wrote about “Virtual Cons” in the video game industry: “Among the fringe benefits of being a journalist in New York City is the opportunity to attend industry conventions, with full access to things the general public doesn’t get to experience. My last con was February 2020’s Toy Fair, at the Javits Center. Most of the companies I spoke to said they expected a slight delay, about two months, in getting their products to market, due to some virus that was affecting parts of China at the time. In that same week, there was a Boston-based video game convention called the Penny Arcade Expo [PAX] East, which was 2020’s last big convention targeted at the gaming and comic subcultures. Soon after, there was cascade of canceled cons in March, then April, and May. Continue reading at Chelsea Community News.”