From Mav: In the last few days an interesting meme of sorts has popped up on Facebook: people posting their “Facebook Avatars,” stylized cartoonish self-made images generated with Facebook’s mobile app. They’re cute enough, but rather innocuous and I didn’t think much of it. I did play around with it for 5 min and made…
Tag: comics
e110. Comic Studies-350: X-Men Course Syllabus
Way back on episode 23 we did our first syllabus episode. We got a bunch of comic scholars together and asked the question “if we wanted to teach a class about comics and graphic novels, from scratch, what would be on it?” One of the ideas we had back then was “what if we wanted…
Call for Comments: The X-men Syllabus
From Mav: Back when we did our first comics syllabus episode, we went out of our way to make sure that we had a breadth of topics and genres instead of just focusing on superheroes. We wanted to make sure we showed the versatility of comics and not just “here are some superhero stories.” I…
Call For Comments: What’s Happening to Comics Retail (and most other retail), in a pandemic?
From Wayne: For awhile now we’ve talked about doing an episode where we discuss the changing face of comic book retail. I have believed for some time that the retail side industry has been going through a seismic change. The last change of any real magnitude was the introduction of the Direct Market in the…
e96. Mask Theory
In the 21st century, when we think of masks, we think of superheroes. But the idea of superheroes as a concept is only about a century old. Masks have been around forever. They have a long history in theatre, professional wrestling and costume balls. Beyond that they have a cultural tradition that dates back to…
e93. Golden Age of Comics
If you’re at least a casual comic book fan you probably know the terms Golden Age, Silver Age, Bronze Age and Modern Age. If you’re a massive comic geek, you probably even know when those ages are. But why do they exist? What’s the relevance of splitting things up like that? What the cultural relevance…
Call For Comments: The Golden Age of Comics
From Mav: Now that we’re done with all of the end of the year and beginning of the year stuff it’s time to get back to business as usual on VoxPopcast. One of the things that always surprises me about our show is that we do comparatively little with comics given that it is theoretically…
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…
Call For Comments: Minor Characters
May 22, 2020
From Wayne: Ostensibly, every story has a protagonist or two, those characters who we are meant to focus and root for, the focal point through which we experience the story. By definition, anyone else in the narrative is a minor character. So, what we want to talk about here is why do we care so…