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…
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e116. Copaganda, Cartoons, and You

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June 29, 2020
15 Replies

One of the most interesting side effects of the recent #BlackLivesMatter protests sparked off by the George Floyd murder has been the #DefundPolice movement gaining national attention. Obviously that’s a big complicated issue that goes beyond shouting hashtags online (or probably should). Some jurisdictions are beginning to take the call seriously, but in the meantime…

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Call For Comments: Post-Release Censorship and Revisionism

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June 25, 2020
2 Replies

From Mav: There was an article a few weeks ago that I wanted to address with a show… and then the world went to hell and we had to deal with other things (racism, sadly, is always topical). So now I want to get back to it… and sort of expand it with some other…

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e115. Why Do We Love Minor Characters?

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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…

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e114. Your Black Friend is Tired

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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…

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e113. Cartoons vs. Avatars

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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…

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Call for Comments: Your Black Friend Is Tired

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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…

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e112. Social Media and Free Speech

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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…

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e111. STILL Not Over It!

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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…

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Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

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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

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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…