Call For Comments: FantasySci-FiSuperheroGeekiness and MAC Charity Con

From Mav: Next weekend, Wayne and I will be returning to MAC Charity Con at Mt. Aloysius College in Pennsylvania to tape a live show (I’ll also be doing a solo talk there about the male gaze and how superhero and fantasy costumes are depicted… that’s right… we’re going to talk boob armor!). First of…

Call For Comments: Good Stuff We Hate

From Mav: Back on the Pop Culture Etiquette episode, Hannah and her boyfriend Josh mentioned in passing that they don’t like the movie The Shining. The rest of us quite predictably told them that they were wrong and somehow they consider to live amongst us today rather than having been stoned to death. That said,…

e81. Stephen King and Horror

It’s Halloween. And in classic podcast fashion that means it’s time to do a theme episode. Halloween is about many things, but one thing it’s about is horror. Horror movies. Horror books. And the master of horror, is Stephen King. Or at least that’s what everyone says… for some reason… But why? What makes Stephen…

Call For Comments: Watching Watchmen

From Mav: When I was a kid a very special comic came out. Something that immediately seemed different from everything else before. Something that seemed to change the whole game. That comic was Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen. Everyone felt it. Every comic fan knew that it was something special. It became a New…

e80. Irredeemable Characters

A couple of weeks ago, the movie Joker was released in cinemas. Even before it came out, there was a lot of concern and controversy about the tone and message behind the movie. Would it cause violence from copycats? Isn’t it just an homage to classic films by Martin Scorsese? Are those problematic too? Does…

e79. Crowdfunding Creative Culture

Technology has allowed us to live in the future. We live in a future where creators and artists can market their product directly to their fans, cutting out the middle man, by using innovative online software to… ummm… be a different middle man?!?! That can’t be right? But it sort of is. Between crowdfunding sites…

e78: Monster Studies-201: Course Syllabus

Happy October! it’s the beginning of Halloween month so we have something a little special. Just over a year ago, we had a show where we invited a bunch of academic friends who teach comics and we developed a course syllabus for a theoretical comics studies course on the air. It was a lot of…

Call For Comments: Joker and Irredeemable Protagonists

From Mav: As I write this, we are about two days away from one of the most highly anticipated comic book movies of all time being released, Todd Phillips’s Joker. I admit that I am very curious about it. Even though I haven’t seen it yet (though I will have by the time we record…

Call for Comments: The Legacy of Jane Austen

From Hannah: This show is, according to our tagline, “a podcast about pop culture discussion, critique and analysis with beer and swearing.” For the most part, in our seventy-something episodes, we’ve covered contemporary topics because that’s what most of us think popular culture is. As the co-host whose main periods of study are the eighteenth…