The Hooded Utilitarian is a quasi-blog/quasi-magazine hybrid devoted to cultural criticism. We mostly focus on comics, but talk about other things whenever we feel like it, which is not infrequently.

I’ve written a kind of statement of purpose here. I talk about our commitment to women writers here. I talk about why we write about romance novels and wine and video games when we claim to be a comics blog here.

HU is edited by Noah Berlatsky (that’s me). You can see a list of our other bloggers, columnists, and contributors if you look up there on the bar under the lovely banner created by awesome artist Edie Fake.

We also host every Thursday an independently edited comics blog called Pencil, Panel, Page. You can read complete info about that here.

Besides the folks on the masthead, we often publish guest writers. If you’re interested in writing for us, or if you just have something to say about the site, you can email me at noahberlatsky at gmail. Or you can find us through twitter or facebook (links to our pages are over on the right side and down a bit.)

Or write us a comment! We’re friendly, at least intermittently. Flame wars occur…but I will prune comments if things get too trollish, or if things veer catastrophically or unpleasantly off-topic. Aliases are fine for commenters, though if I have banned you and you try to come back as a sock puppet, I reserve the right to expose you. So be warned or comforted, depending on your predilection.

If you think you’ve seen other incarnations of us, you may well have; we were on blogger, for a bit (but we have since moved all those posts to this site.) And then we were at tcj.com for a year or so from December 2009 to February 2011. But now we are here. Thanks for visiting!