Call for Comments: Social Media and Free Speech

From Hannah: At the end of March (so basically, an entire decade ago) we released our episode “News By Meme,” which dealt with how social media spreads news and the consequences with this — especially content that is inaccurate. Briefly in that episode, we discussed the policies social media companies like Facebook are adopting to…

Call For Comments: Minor Characters

From Wayne: Ostensibly, every story has a protagonist or two, those characters who we are meant to focus and root for, the focal point through which we experience the story. By definition, anyone else in the narrative is a minor character. So, what we want to talk about here is why do we care so…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Call For Comments: What’s Happening to Comics Retail (and most other retail), in a pandemic?

From Wayne: For awhile now we’ve talked about doing an episode where we discuss the changing face of comic book retail. I have believed for some time that the retail side industry has been going through a seismic change. The last change of any real magnitude was the introduction of the Direct Market in the…

Call for Comments: The Cozy Games Stress Vaccine

From Katya: Animal Crossing: New Horizons dropped on March 20th, much to the relief of a lot of folks gaming through the COVID-19 pandemic. In the tradition of the OG Animal Crossing on GameCube or Animal Crossing: Wild World, players build up a small community of cute animal neighbors, cultivate and collect natural resources, and–…

Call for Comments: Birds of Prey and Women in Film

From Hannah: Birds of Prey premiered a little over a month ago to less fanfare than it deserved. I, admittedly, was hesitant to see it because of both how bad Suicide Squad was and questions about how the film would handle the character of Harley Quinn. I went in with zero expectations and had an…