Author: Christopher "Mav" Maverick

A shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist. Chris Maverick, drifter searching to tap into the hidden strengths that all humans have…
Comics Literature Movies and Film Podcasts Television

e115. Why Do We Love Minor Characters?

by , , , and
June 22, 2020
12 Replies

Every story (well most stories) have a protagonist that we follow throughout the narrative. Usually we are meant to identify with them; they are our link to the plot and the world of the story. Typically, their worlds are fleshed out by any number of supporting characters that they interact with: friends, lovers, enemies. These…

Culture Internet Podcasts Politics Race and Class social media

e114. Your Black Friend is Tired

by , , , , , and
June 15, 2020
32 Replies

A few years ago, in an interview with Stephen Colbert, Will Smith said that he believed that racism isn’t getting worse — it’s getting filmed. While it may be hard to quantifiably judge the first part of that statement, the second part is certainly true. In the last couple of weeks, the public availability of…

Comics Podcasts Race and Class Sex and Gender social media Video Games

e113. Cartoons vs. Avatars

by , , , and
June 8, 2020
4 Replies

A couple of weeks ago, in order to placate the masses during a worldwide quanrantine, Facebook released their new “Avatar” system — a tool to allow users to create little cartoon characters of themselves for use in profile pics and stickers. Other technology companies have similar system. Apple has one built into its messaging system…

Call For Comments Internet Politics Race and Class

Call for Comments: Your Black Friend Is Tired

by
June 5, 2020
11 Replies

From Mav: Well, it’s been a week. If you’re in America (or probably if you’ve simply bothered to watch the news at all anywhere else in the world), you know that in addition to the now standard “we shut down the world for a global pandemic,” we’ve also been dealing with “and then we went…

Culture Internet Podcasts Politics social media

e112. Social Media and Free Speech

by , , and
June 1, 2020
3 Replies

If you’re unlucky enough to live on the planet Earth, you probably know that it’s not doing terribly well lately. We’ve had a global pandemic sweeping through every corner of the globe that has largely shut business and commerce to a halt, tanking the economy. And if you live in America, and the people dying…

Comics Literature Movies and Film Podcasts Television

e111. STILL Not Over It!

by , , and
May 25, 2020
5 Replies

Some things are hard to get over. Your first love. The death of a beloved pet. That time your team lost the Super Bowl. And… apparently that season finale of Game of Thrones last year. We probably can’t help you with those first three, but the last one is kind of our thing here. Why…

Call For Comments Comics Culture Internet

Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

by
May 21, 2020
5 Replies

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…

Comics Podcasts

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

by , , , and
May 18, 2020
34 Replies

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…

Movies and Film Music Podcasts

e109. Scores & Soundtracks

by , , , , and
May 11, 2020
11 Replies

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 Comics Education

Call for Comments: The X-men Syllabus

by
May 7, 2020
18 Replies

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…