e85. Digital Acting (and Deep Fakery)

(Repost! This is a repost of an earlier posted blog that was lost in a server crash and upgrade) We live in the future. We live in a world where we carry supercomputers in our pocket, we have cars that talk, and we can bring long dead actors back to life to star in movies.…

e84. Comics, Sci-Fi, Fantasy: What is Geek Culture?

Live from MAC Charity Con 2019. Comic book conventions stopped being about comic books a long time ago. In fact, the comic book subculture stopped being about comics a long time ago. Today, it’s more “geek culture” and it includes comics, sci-fi, fantasy, role-playing games, and many other things. But somehow, there are many pop…

e83. 🙂Watching Watchmen😵

Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen is one of the most popular comic books of all time. It’s been a best seller since 1987, has never been out of print, has been adapted into a movie, video games, role playing game, and now a TV show. It is the single comic book appearing on Time…

e82. Love, Politics and Jane Austen

Usually our show looks at pop culture produced in the relatively recent past. However, that’s not what “popular culture” really means. Really, what this show is about is looking at massive cultural influences and analyzing how and why they happened. And some of that media was produced at longer periods in the past. And some…

e81. Stephen King and Horror

It’s Halloween. And in classic podcast fashion that means it’s time to do a theme episode. Halloween is about many things, but one thing it’s about is horror. Horror movies. Horror books. And the master of horror, is Stephen King. Or at least that’s what everyone says… for some reason… But why? What makes Stephen…

e80. Irredeemable Characters

A couple of weeks ago, the movie Joker was released in cinemas. Even before it came out, there was a lot of concern and controversy about the tone and message behind the movie. Would it cause violence from copycats? Isn’t it just an homage to classic films by Martin Scorsese? Are those problematic too? Does…

e79. Crowdfunding Creative Culture

Technology has allowed us to live in the future. We live in a future where creators and artists can market their product directly to their fans, cutting out the middle man, by using innovative online software to… ummm… be a different middle man?!?! That can’t be right? But it sort of is. Between crowdfunding sites…

e78: Monster Studies-201: Course Syllabus

Happy October! it’s the beginning of Halloween month so we have something a little special. Just over a year ago, we had a show where we invited a bunch of academic friends who teach comics and we developed a course syllabus for a theoretical comics studies course on the air. It was a lot of…

e77. Pop Culture Etiquette

We live in a society and there are rules of polite behavior. But what are those rules? Well, that’s not exactly clear. For the most part the basic ones like saying please and thank you, most of us know. And then there are others like where do you put the forks when setting the table…

e76. Music Back in MY Day…

You know what the best music is? The music we listen to. It’s obviously better than everything else and everyone agrees. And the stuff we don’t like is trash. We can all agree on that, right? The problem is… none of us agree on what music WE listen to. Why does that happen? Why is…