Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

From Mav: In the last few days an interesting meme of sorts has popped up on Facebook: people posting their “Facebook Avatars,” stylized cartoonish self-made images generated with Facebook’s mobile app. They’re cute enough, but rather innocuous and I didn’t think much of it. I did play around with it for 5 min and made…

e110. Comic Studies-350: X-Men Course Syllabus

Way back on episode 23 we did our first syllabus episode. We got a bunch of comic scholars together and asked the question “if we wanted to teach a class about comics and graphic novels, from scratch, what would be on it?” One of the ideas we had back then was “what if we wanted…

e109. Scores & Soundtracks

What makes a good soundtrack to a movie? What makes a good score? And actually, what is the difference between a score and a soundtrack anyway? The answer to that question may not be as clear as you think. Sometimes a great soundtrack is one that you find yourself singing for weeks after you see…

Call for Comments: The X-men Syllabus

From Mav: Back when we did our first comics syllabus episode, we went out of our way to make sure that we had a breadth of topics and genres instead of just focusing on superheroes. We wanted to make sure we showed the versatility of comics and not just “here are some superhero stories.” I…

Call for Comments: Things We Still Aren’t Over

Note: This post contains spoilers for Game of Thrones, Toy Story 4, Frozen 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Downton Abbey, Mockingjay, and Grey’s Anatomy. From Hannah: A year ago, Game of Thrones was airing its final few episodes. And, well, we all know how that went. And if you’ve listened to our Game…

e108. Bad Things We Love

Way back on episode 86, our four hosts got together and talked about “Good Things We Hate” Hannah, Katya, Wayne and Mav discussed the idea of taste and high brow and low brow entertainment and talked about a selection of books, movies, TV shows, music and other media that is commonly accepted as great but…

Call for Comments: Scores, Soundtracks and Needledrops

From Mav: I was thinking about a conversation with my wife from a couple years back where she out of nowhere exclaimed to me that her favorite song from the movie Grease was in fact the song “Grease.” I was incredulous because … well, because no one’s favorite song from Grease is “Grease.” Well, except…

e107. Senior Year in Quarantine

As we continue this never ending battle with COVID-19, a lot of our socializing takes place on the internet… even more than it already had been. As such, there’s been an uptick in memes as people grab on to … anything… just to have something to make a human connection. One of the memes you…

e106. COVID-19 & the Death of the Comic Shop

We live in strange times. Obviously, the number one problem right now is that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic that has ground the WHOLE DAMN PLANET to a halt. This is a big problem for everyone in and of itself. As the whole world is basically under “stay at home” orders (or…

Call for Comments: Senior Skip Day Semester

From Mav: A funny thing about being trapped in your house, along with the rest of the world, for a nigh global quarantine… people’s reliance on social media has gone way way up. And in doing so I’m seeing way more memes passing around than normal. One of the most recent that I’ve seen populating…