Holy hell we’re still here! With a few weeks of preparation to get this one solved, after some DREADFUL technical issues, Clay and Talen talk about The Karate-Man as a superhero comic archetype!

Fandom, boy, I don’t know. It’s a beast of a problem, something that we use to connect ourselves to our world, things that give us metaphors and common spaces and also, at the same time, something some people use as a reason to hate people. Good news, though, we solve it forever in this podcast (we don’t).

Now, it’s time to count up your sins! Since there’s a recent groundshaking event in superhero fiction – ie, Talen watched a Toku series – we felt it’s time to talk about it! There’s something about hoppers.

Oh, we know you’re reading this. There are a bunch of characters in comics who play with the fact that they are, in fact, in comics. This time, we talk about them! Sorry it’s late, the editor was busy!

Superhero media isn’t limited to comic books and movies! Clay and Talen have played a LOT of games that let them make and play superheroes, so in this episode, we talk about our conception of superheroes as you can express through play!

Hey, what if we talk about the kind of comic book thing that is like, just another term for ‘something happened?’ We talk about the way comic books try to structure the ‘idea’ of an event and compare it to Movies and whether or not there’s any There There.

Since we talked about rogues, and villains, in true City of Heroes style, we wanted to add to this and talk about Vigilantes. The nature of the Vigilante is as a character who can push the story in different directions than a hero or villain might, recontextualising villians and opponents. But at the same time, the Vigilante can be handled badly, and often intersects with uncomfortable things about the way cultures regard violence. As a content warning, we do discuss some elements of modern news with guns, and the idea of arming teachers.

We’ve talked about groups of enemies opposing a hero, but we haven’t spoken about the idea of the Villains, of larger, story-shaping opposition that the narrative bends around.

You want to learn about barking Jabari? You want to hear the concepts underpinning the storytelling praxis of Killmonger as a character vs Killmonger as a storyteller? You wanna hear about the music, the style, the tone, or just what Clay thinks of the movie BLACK PANTHER? Well, Talen hasn’t seen it, so here we go!

“I’m Black Y’all” comes from the movie CB4, and is included here for educational and parody purposes, © Universal Pictures

Clay and Talen aren’t just great heroes in their own right. They’re also defined in part by the villains that oppose them. This week, we talk about the Rogue’s Gallery, ways they form, what they’re good for, and why we’re stuck with some of the ones that suck.