Call for Comments: Kaiju A-Go-Go

From Wayne: If you’re a regular listener to our show you know that we talk about monsters. A lot. Somehow we have never done a show about giant monsters, or as they are known in fandom, from the Japanese, Kaiju(怪獣). This was prompted by seeing Godzilla: Minus 1 in the theaters last month. It was…

CFC: Superhero fatigue and the Illusion of Change

From Mav: If you’re the kinda person who reads pop culture think pieces on the internet (which, I assume you must be if you’re reading this) you’ve probably come across some that talk about the impending death of the MCU. In fact, if Tatiana Siegel of Variety is to be believed, even Marvel is a…

Call For Comments: Black Friday and the Conspicuous Consumption Shopping Event

From Mav: I love shopping. It’s fun. First of all, spending money is fun… at least if you have it. Because having a bunch of new stuff is fun. But also, I actually love the thrill of going and looking at stuff, deciding you like it and even searching for a good deal. It’s like…

Call For Comments: Listening for Leitmotif

From Mav: I could swear we’ve done more soundtrack episodes. Like… I really thought we had. We’ve got one generally about what makes for a fun soundtrack from the beginning of the pandemic, but that was more about needle drops. We’ve talked about musicals and the about how music affects specific films like Josie and…

Call For Comments: Publishing the Public Domain

From Mav: So if you don’t live in the tiny corner of the internet that follows creators rights within the comic book publishing world, you probably missed a story a couple weeks ago that few of us who do live in that corner were obsessed with. Bill Willingham, creator of the comic Fables, decided to…

Call For Comments: So How About That Harley Quinn?

From Mav: So I want to talk about Harley Quinn. Why? Because I think she has a very interesting and near unique (maybe along with Deadpool) place in current superhero fandom. I’ve had this ongoing conversation with Wayne about the difficulty in creating major new comic characters for the Big Two (Marvel and DC) in…

Call For Comments: The End of The Greatest Show on Television

From Mav: In a way, the CW’s Riverdale is sort of ingrained in the DNA of this podcast. We talked about it at length on the sixth episode and it has been a constant refrain that I have returned to ever since. I say “I”… not we… because the truth is, everyone else has bailed…

Call For Comments: The Theory Of The Band Of Theseus

From Mav: Time for a little thought experiment. Recently, I came across an article on the Guardian called “‘I’m the only one that can say I never quit’: meet the bands with no original members left”. In it, Michael Hann interviews long-standing members of old rock bands who don’t have any original members left. For…

Call for Comments: Is Sucker Punch really a bad movie?

“To be frank, the people I’ve run across who’ve come to me and said ‘Sucker Punch is my favorite movie’ are normally angsty teenage girls.” -Zack Snyder, 2023 From Monica: In 2011, I was a deeply depressed femme goth who was assaulted by a man, subsequently realized I was gay, tried coming out, and was…

CFC: No Country For Old Men

From Wayne: I had been noticing a trend in a lot of recent media that hadn’t really fully formed in my mind until a couple of weeks ago when we recorded our Indiana Jones episode. Dial of Destiny was very much a movie about an old man, facing the ravages of time. Indy is o…