Check out Jessica Evalyn Valle’s interview on Playtime Magazine, or head over to her personal photography website or Viyay Comics. You can also find more of her photography on Jessica’s flickr stream. Images selected and arranged by Zach Grizzell and Tracy McCusker.

Once in awhile, you come across a natural creative talent of sorts.  Jessica Evalyn Valle is one of those natural talents.  Some days you can see her at the range firing her guns–that’s right, a girl that knows how to shoot you if you mess with her.  Some days you have to bi-pass the fact that you have been waiting for said bio on your artist for weeks now and have to wing something.  You know how those artist get busy with their work, or watching Beauty and the Beast, …

To me, the Chronicles of Prydain were a revelation. Until then, I had never been enthusiastic about reading, seeing it more as a chore than as a pleasure….It wasn’t until my dad came home from a library sale with that battered copy of The Book Of Three that I discovered not only a true passion for reading, but for all things fantasy.

Tabitha Grace Smith and Kim Butler, writer/producer and co-producer of fan-community radio hit Buffy Between the Lines were kind enough to take the time to answer a few interview questions I emailed them on behalf of Playtime Magazine. (You can read my review of Buffy Between the Lines here.)

Alex M: This project strikes me as being a massive undertaking. Simply writing and editing that number of scripts into a cohesive season is a huge job, let alone finding a cast, recording, producing and marketing the season.  How did the idea …

Fanfiction has always been a dirty word.  Maybe because a lot of fanfiction is actually very dirty.  Maybe because a lot of it is complete rubbish.  Let’s face it: as much as Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans love the show, it’s always been a bit of a leap to go from Joss Whedon’s snappy, witty and smartly written TV drama to a format generally believed to be badly written, hurried, ill-conceived and generally very poor.  Actually it’s a bit of a leap for most to go from Whedon’s series to …

I have nothing to contribute. I’m like a deadbeat dad of writers. Article? Fuck that! You’ll have to take me to court. It’s not that I don’t want to write something. It’s just that I can’t. I’ll start out, and within a half a sentence the words become nonsense, strung together in an even more nonsensical way, eventually breaking down into a string of frustrated expletives.  “It was a dark and klattu snozberry, makes weeble hoopla fuckity crapdamn shit!”
Once I start down this road, it’s usually hard to get off, …

In one of this decade’s masterpieces, Craig Thompson weaves a delicate tale of first love, faith, family, and loss, all with a stirring and fresh honesty, humor, and hard-won acceptance.

Some critics of Francois Truffaut’s 1962 film, Jules et Jim have argued that the film’s central character, Catherine (brought to life by the incomparable Jeanne Moreau), is an impulsive and unpredictable force of nature. You cannot anticipate what she will do, and perhaps that’s why she is so enchanting to her male friends. Though there is something to this idea, I think there are too many patterns in her behaviour to it off as completely random. To the audience, she is not enchanting because she is impulsive, but rather because …

As terrible as the filmmaking is, I find myself in the eye of a storm of dewy, good-ol’-days memories, an affinity for the likable cast, sympathy for the themes, and the fact that I’m a sucker for good-natured pictures about normal folks on a crazy adventure, where they end up piling in a camper with a cute dog and saving the world.

Behind the small door in the wall, in the far corner of the Room Where No One Goes, is another world where children are not supposed to go. Venture where you like in this disappointing world, the sad, drab, gray house, where your friends are close to you as you sleep, waving motionless from the picture frame; visit your sad, deluded neighbors, whose lives have whisked right by; avoid the boy from over the hill, who talks too much, who talks to his charcoal cat, whose old grandmother lived in your house; venture where you like, anywhere but the world behind the small door where children are not supposed to go…