Call For Comments: Serialization Technology

From Katya: It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a game scholar, comics scholar, and Victorianist walk into a bar, they must instantly bond over their shared study of serialization. Except… we never recorded it. It’s rather astounding that we haven’t already; serialization cuts across all of our fields from comics to games and…

Call For Comments: We Always Said “With Drinking…”

From Mav: The promise of our show was always that it was “a weekly pseudoacademic pop culture analysis round table with drinking and swearing.” It’s never really THAT much swearing and honestly… but the drinking has never been all that explicit. It’s more that I just kind of drink a beer during ever show to…

Call for Comments: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love F9

From Mav: I’m a guy who loves movies. I really love going to the movies… A LOT! Not being able to go out to the movies was actually one of the things I missed most during the last year and a half of lockdown. I remember a time early on when Chris Nolan decided that…

Call For Comments: Why Are There Still Superhero Costumes?

From Mav (with Monica Geraffo): This is going to be about superheroes and fashion. But it’s not going to seem like it at first and there are a billion concepts that I want to tie together, so bear with me. So, it shouldn’t be a surprise at this point that I love superheroes. I love…

Call for Comments: She’s Not Like Other Girls! Introducing the Fanboy Gaze

From Mav (with Matt Linton): We’ve talked a lot on our show about Laura Mulvey’s theory of the “the male gaze”. In short, the male gaze describes the tendency of narratives to position female characters primarily as objects of desire to be consumed by male protagonists and readers. It argues that regardless of the reader’s…

Call for Comments: The Male Gaze and its Discontents

From Katya: This week we’re revisiting the Male Gaze. I know we’ve been here before but we have a string of guests coming up offering their own spin on various “gazes” and related subjects so we thought it was worth a revisit. (If you’d like to check out our previous conversations, check out some of…

Call For Comments: Why Are Plot Twists?

From Mav: It’s the episode you’ve been waiting for. After Katya’s sudden and surprising death via plot device, on next week’s show we’re going to explain which of Hannah, Wayne or Mav is the secret traitor and did her in!!! Will the others make it out alive? Or will they fall prey to the VoxPopKiller…

Call for Comments: American Girl

From Hannah: As a kid growing up in the nineties, I loved American Girl, especially its historical characters and books. I still remember excitedly reading the adventures of Kit Kittredge and Kirsten Larson and Josefina Montoya … and really any character introduced between the company’s inception and about 2000. So when I discovered that American Girl is re-releasing…

Call for Comments: Thoughts on Falcon and Winter Soldier

From Mav: So, we’ve been watching Falcon and Winter Soldier, because of course we have. We weren’t sure if we were going to do a show on it. We’re not really a recap kind of show. On the other hand, we’ve sort of fallen into a pattern of doing … not so much recaps… well,…

Call For Comments: Memory Triggers In The Digital Age

From Wayne: I think about memory a lot. I’ve always had a pretty good one, enough so that people comment on it. My ancient mother has lost a lot of her short term memory in recent months, so that’s on my mind. I’m getting old enough to feel nostalgia for stuff. I’ve been going through…