e160. Remembering Thought & Thinking About Memory

Do you remember the song that was playing when you had your first kiss, lost your virginity, or danced at your wedding? Do you know what movie that you crowded around the TV to watch as a family every holiday as a kid? Do you have fond memories of the vacation you took in the…

e149. Let’s Talk About SuperSex

Happy Valentine’s Day! If you had a podcast devoted to pop culture with a penchant for discussing comics with some bit of regularity and a holiday came up that was devoted to beauty of love and dating and you wanted to do something nice and sweet to commemorate the holiday, what would you do? Obviously…

e126. Reconstructing Deconstructed Superheroes

Ever since the mid 1980s and the publication of Watchmen comics, their creators, and their fans, have been obsessed with the idea of “deconstruction.” Director Zack Snyder is extremely fond of the term. He argues that he is “deconstructing superheroes” every time he gets the chance. But what does that really mean? To most fans,…

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…

e115. Why Do We Love Minor Characters?

Every story (well most stories) have a protagonist that we follow throughout the narrative. Usually we are meant to identify with them; they are our link to the plot and the world of the story. Typically, their worlds are fleshed out by any number of supporting characters that they interact with: friends, lovers, enemies. These…

Call For Comments: Minor Characters

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…

Call For Comments: Avatars and the Virtual You

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…

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…

e106. COVID-19 & the Death of the Comic Shop

We live in strange times. Obviously, the number one problem right now is that we’re in the middle of a global pandemic that has ground the WHOLE DAMN PLANET to a halt. This is a big problem for everyone in and of itself. As the whole world is basically under “stay at home” orders (or…