Just about any parent in American who has a five year old girl knows about the Disney Princesses. Between Frozen, Tangled, Moana, and the others, the “House of Mouse” has stumbled upon a multi-billion dollar industry from films and toy sales alone, and far more when adding in other merchandising sales. However, there may be…
Category: Comics
Call For Comments: Sex and the Disney Princess
From Mav: There’s an article that appears in the textbook I use when teaching Freshman Composition 101 that I find quite fascinating. It’s called “Little girls or little women? The Disney princess effect” and was written by a woman named Stephanie Hanes in 2011 and is reprinted from the Christian Science Monitor. I use it to…
Episode 23: Comic Studies-301: Course Syllabus
When everyone knows that you are a comics geek, it turns out people ask you quite often “so what should I be reading?” When your job is literally “be a comics geek” or moreover “teach other people to be a comics geek” then you get this question pretty much constantly. Since Wayne and Mav are…
Call for Comments: Comics Class Canon Syllabus
From Mav: We like comics. We love comics. If you’ve heard at least two seconds of the show, you probably picked that up on that. It’s one of the reasons this show exists. Of course, we’ve gotten away from comics and started talking about some more important cultural issues the last couple of weeks. But…
Episode 20: Monster Mash
“The Monster” and “The Monster Hunter” may be among the oldest figures in popular culture. It is the most basic of stories. Some great evil is threatening the community. Someone go kill it! It is a theme that has played out in countless books, movies, tv shows, comics and video games. The monster is a…
Episode 19: Cosplayers of Color
It’s pretty well accepted in contemporary geek culture that “representation matters.” At least, it’s accepted by everyone except for the evil corners of the internet that we don’t really care about. And thankfully, because of this, recent years in geek culture have seen the addition of many diverse characters that have become cosplay favorites at…
Episode 18: She-Ra and the Male Gaze
If you happened to see a mid-tier 1980s cartoon superheroine get a costume update that was less objectifyingly sexy for a modern day reboot of the series in the last couple weeks and you were shocked to see a bunch of angry middle-aged men complaining about it… well then, “hello there! You must be new…
Call for Comments: Cosplayers of Color
From Mav: Usually we try to mix topics on our show up from week to week; one week generally has very little to do with whatever happened the week before. This week is a little different, but only slightly. Last week, while I was prepping the Call for Comments for the She-Ra and Male Gaze/Superheroine…
Call For Comments: The Death of the Author and the Birth of the Critic
September 28, 2018
From Mav: In the last couple weeks, we’ve done a couple shows that have dealt with interpreting the non obvious sexual subtext in children’s media (Disney Princesses and Sesame Street Muppets). Obviously, we don’t think that those things are front and center. That’s why we said subtext. But that leads us to an obvious question:…