Call for Comments: Do we really like holidays anyway?

From Mav: As I finished teaching one of my Friday only classes, one of my students wished me a “Have a Happy Thanksgiving… or whatever” on his way out the door. It struck me that he was not just trying to be nice; as he was finishing the statement he realized the relative futility of…

Call For Comments: The Virtual Office (Only Avatars Please.)

Image by Jan Vašek from Pixabay From Katya: We’ve recently all been spending more time in virtual space — conference calls on Zoom, happy hours on Hangouts, and I guess somewhere, someone has been making a good old fashioned phone call. Probably. 2020 has made remote living more commonplace for many of us but remote…

Call For Comments: What is the Meaning of Horror?

From Wayne: Recently on Voxpopcast we discussed the intersection of horror and humor. It’s still Halloween season, so we’re going to keep talking about horror. And, we’re Voxpopcast, so we’re going to keep talking about genre. When is a horror story not really a horror story, but it is really? One of our regular listeners…

Call for Comments: Dying Laughing! Connections of Comedy & Horror

From Hannah: We all desperately need a laugh right now. Which is why you should fire up your spookiest Halloween-themed movies (and television shows and stories and novels). I’m deadly serious! There are horror movies that are laughably bad (M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening might be the best example of this). But camp classics like…

Call for Comments: Freshman Year in Quarantine

From Mav: Way back in April — so you know basically a million years ago in the COVID world —we did a show about what it was like to finish up your senior year of high school during a worldwide pandemic lockdown. Back then (seriously it really does seem like forever ago) we had on…

Call for Comments: Corsets, Torture Device of the Patriarchy or Comfy Back Brace of Vintage Glamour?

From Katya: Or, perhaps, a little of column A, a little of column B depending on historical context and use? I know you were all waiting with bated breath for our next fashion-centered episode (I mean, I was). Listeners that have ever checked out my Instagram account (@JustThatNerdKid) know that it mainly documents my vintage…

Call for Comments: Pop Culture Pet Peeves

From Hannah: A long time ago in a reality that now seems far far away, we did an episode on Media Addiction that discussed hate consuming media. We thought through why, exactly, fans continue to still engage with TV/book/comics/film franchises that disappoint them (Star Wars comes to mind). I’ve wondered, in the time since we’ve…

e125. It’s the End of the World as we show it…

It’s 2020 and the world is ending… or maybe it’s not… or maybe it ended months ago and we just can’t tell anymore. Honestly at this point it’s pretty much just impossible to tell. With what seems like one disaster after another shaking the planet, we decided to take a look at apocalypse and disaster…

Call for Comments: How to Reconstruct Deconstructed Superhero Media

From Mav: A couple weeks ago, our good friend Matthew Brake of Pop Culture & Theology, posted about appearing on another podcast about deconstructing comics. Matt was really just pimping his discussion on that show talking about Animal Man (which is a good conversation and you should listen), but it got me to thinking about…

Call for Comments: It’s the end of the world … no, I don’t feel fine

From Hannah: As we’ve said in just about every blog post and podcast since March, 2020 is a waking nightmare. If Twitter is any indication, a large majority of the U.S. population has gone from joking about it being the end of the world to wishing for that event to occur. Good Omens, this is…