e183. How to Read All of the Marvels

If you’re a comic book fan, one of the things people often ask you is “I want to get into comics. Where do I start? What should I read?” This is especially true if you’re someone who reads comics for a living. It’s even more true this last decade or so of box office dominance…

Call for Comments: Something Wicked This Way Comes…

From Hannah: October is here, meaning spooky season is here, meaning VoxPopcast once again bring you vaguely Halloween-related episodes! In October 2018, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix and the Charmed reboot on the CW premiered. The Magicians was still on air, and some streaming service really wanted me to start watching The Good…

Call for Comments: All the Draculas, er, All the Draculi

From Hannah: Dracula (1897, Bram Stoker) is a novel about reproduction. (And not just the reproduction of the heteronormative family/biological reproduction or the reproduction of the nation-state or even those disruptions through the infiltration of and reproduction of the vampire. Although, yes that, and so much more. But I’ll save that for the actual episode.)…

e182. I Fixed That for You, Now GTFO!

If the internet is good at anything, it’s dumping on asked for criticism at other people. Everyone does it. In fact, in a very real way, that’s pretty much what this whole show is. We’re cultural critics. This is cultural criticism. But is there a point when that criticism can go too far? Are there…

e181. Entertainment and Other Unions — IATSE Solidarity

Over the past year, our viewing consumption habits have changed a lot. We spent months indoors streaming everything — including new release films — largely through new media platforms like Netflix and Disney Plus. These new production models have drastically changed box office results, profit models, and production budgets that reverberate across the industry —…

Call For Comments: All of the Marvels

From Wayne: As a comics retailer for twenty-three years, one of the questions I was asked most frequently by new readers of Marvel Comics was, ‟Where do I begin?” It’s a fair question. With decades of history, thousands of characters, and tens of thousands of pages of intertwined stories and continuity it can be more…

e178. Pop History vs. Public History

How do we learn history? The easy answer is to say we learn it from history books, but is that true? How many of us ever read a history book after 10th grade? It’s more likely that we get the majority of our history either from museums or from historic entertainment… things like Hamilton… or,…

e177. Deconstructing the Chair

It’s been a while since we devoted a whole episode to one TV show. We’ve done it with a couple of the Marvel shows as well as stuff like Game of Thrones and Watchmen. We did a show on the Queen’s Gambit, and we loved Bridgerton enough to do TWO episodes on it. We talked…

e175. Game Studies: Ludology vs. Narratology

We don’t talk about games as much as we should on this show, but arguably they’re one of the most enduring mediums of popular culture. They’re certainly one of the most popular. There’s much comparison of modern video games to movies. This makes sense… if we want people to consider games to be a legitimate…

CFC: Pop vs. Public History — Why Do We Love Nonfiction?

From Monica: I want to talk about Seabiscuit.  Being an archetypal precocious horse girl, at age 9 Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit (1999) was the first nonfiction book I remember reading. It was the first time I was conscious of the popular weight attributed to the New York Times bestseller list, and for once my childhood interests…