Big Thoughts on Small Panels
In this episode, we talk about the big spooky dude out of space, the ruler of something, This is where we talk about the ways a story can use a powerful external force, with a different ideology, and what you can use it for in a story!
Hey, by the way, there was a tiny bit of audio problems, Talen’s mic was set up wrong, so he’s kinda echoey and weird. Sorry!
And we’re back, with a single day turnaround and technical issues hopefully sorted! This week, we talk about characters-within-a-character, the idea of the Passenger. This covers characters like Hulk and Venom, but also Moon Knight, and of course, Moon Knight. Passengers can be helpful or mendacious, proactive or uncooperative, and we talk about them as a story tool and what you can use them to do.
Holy heck does this even work any more. Clay and Talen talk about superheroes and their fundamentally creative nature and how refusing to use a superhero name reflects that.
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.