Excalibur #2: “A Warwolf Possessed”

Excalibur #2 “A Warwolf Possessed” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Alan Davis Inker: Paul Neary Colourist: Glynis Oliver Letterer: Tom Orzechowski Editor: Terry Kavanagh  Publication date: November 1988 In this episode, Anna, Mav, and Andrew discuss Excalibur #2, “A Warwolf Possessed.” Topics include how comics communicate agency within sexualization, the politics of retributive justice within fantasy…

Excalibur #1: “Warwolves of London”

Excalibur #1 “Warwolves of London” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Alan Davis Inker: Paul Neary Colourist: Glynis Oliver Letterer: Tom Orzechowski Editors: Ann Nocenti and Terry Kavanagh Publication date: October 1988 In this episode, Anna, Mav, and Andrew discuss Excalibur #1, “Warwolves of London.” Topics include Excalibur’s sophisticated (maybe even postmodern!) pacing, its revolutionary genre-bending, its playfully mature sexuality,…

Episode 0: Origins & “The Sword is Drawn”

Excalibur Special Edition #1 “The Sword is Drawn” Writer: Chris Claremont Penciler: Alan Davis Inker: Paul Neary and Mark Farmer Colourist: Glynis Oliver Letterer: Tom Orzechowski Editor: Ann Nocenti Original publication date: April 1988 In this mega-sized debut, the regular team—Anna, Mav, and Andrew—explore the origins of Excalibur in Marvel UK, the X-Men franchise, and Excalibur:…

e149. Let’s Talk About SuperSex

Happy Valentine’s Day! If you had a podcast devoted to pop culture with a penchant for discussing comics with some bit of regularity and a holiday came up that was devoted to beauty of love and dating and you wanted to do something nice and sweet to commemorate the holiday, what would you do? Obviously…

Call For Comments: Supersex in the Gotham City!

From Wayne: Superheroes are sexy, right? Skin tight costumes, rippling muscles, big boobs, and a near total lack of genitalia… what’s not to like? But for all of the suggestiveness of their idealized physiques, actual sexuality was a taboo topic in comics for a very long time. Some of this was due to a generally…

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…

e97. Fictional & Celebrity Crushes

Happy (Belated) Valentines Day! You know what that means? It means time to do a “very special episode” where we somehow try to tie in the holiday concept to the kinds of stuff we normally do. Academic cultural analysis of popular culture… but with beer! Last year we talked about the “shipping” and the secret…

e93. Golden Age of Comics

If you’re at least a casual comic book fan you probably know the terms Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Modern Age. If you’re a massive comic geek, you probably even know when those ages are. But why do they exist? What’s the relevance of splitting things up like that? What the cultural relevance…