There's this funny thing that happens with TV shows. Because of the nature of human actors, TV shows are the one type of serialized media where a natural change to the series might be FORCED to occur because forces outside of the narrative require the change of the narrative. That is to say that in a comic book, the Spider-man can go on from issue to issue as long as Marvel wants him to be. If the writers decide to replace Peter Parker with Ben Reilly or Miles Morales that is for storyline reasons and they can change it back whenever they want. But on TV, actors die or move on to other roles. There are contract disputes. People age out of roles. There are budgetary considerations. There are any...
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Call for Comments: Gaming an Empire
From Katya: Previously, we’ve have gaming episodes on direct violence in video games (I stab/shoot/punch/explode/magic the enemy.) This time we want to turn to another common theme in gaming: empire. Civilization VI Risk, Command and Conquer, Axis and Allies and other strategy games— analog and digital — allow players to command armies waging war, claiming/reclaiming…
Call For Comments: Cinematic Franchise “Endgames”
From Mav: (No worries, no spoilers in this post) Well, it’s finally time… we’re in the endgame now… and all that. In a couple hours, Avengers Endgame opens in theaters, and I assume a large number of our listeners are going to go see it (please, NO SPOILERS in the comments of this post). By…
e54. The Unbearable Whiteness of being Batman
Do you remember all of those great Batman supporting characters of color. You know… Batman’s black, latinx, asian and other ethnic sidekicks and villains like… errr… uh… you know… yeah… ummm…. It’s actually hard to come up with some, isn’t it? Well, there’s probably a reason for that. There are actually several, and have been…
e53. PCA/ACA 2019 Preview: Comic Studies
On last week’s episode, Katya and Hannah shared the topics of their papers for this year’s upcoming PCA/ACA. Now it’s Wayne and Mav’s turn to do the same. As we prepare to head off to the conference this week, Wayne shares the basics of his topic, a Jungian psychological evaluation of the Kevin Matchstick, the…
Call for Comments: Great Expectations for Disappointing Endings to the Game of Thrones
May 16, 2019
From Hannah: Game of Thrones ends Sunday and, based solely on audience opinion of the last two-to-three seasons (particularly the penultimate episode ever), it’s going to be bad. Depending on who you ask, it may be the worst finale of a television show ever (except maybe Dexter). There are a lot of reasons people are…