Episode 48 – Sin City

“I grab myself one last lungful of night air. Then I trade it in for a smoky soup spiced with sweat and vomit and booze and blood. I know the flavor well.”

After more than two years, we’re back with another panel episode! And this month, we’re tossing back some cheap booze at Kadie’s Saloon and making some bad decisions with Joe Preti, and Kit Laika, and get our filthy mitts on Frank Miller’s hyper-stylized, two-fisted neo-noir comics franchise that defined all things grim and gritty in the 1990s: Sin City!

After a rise to comics superstardom with Daredevil and Batman, Frank Miller turned his trademarked hard-boiled style up to eleven with a series of interconnected hyperbolic crime stories, set in the fun house mirror world of Basin City, a desert town populated entirely by lowlifes, mobsters, prostitutes, corrupt businessmen, assassins, creeps, killers, crooked cops, dirty politicians, and one hulking unkillable brute named Marv.

Illustrated in a stunning highly contrasted black and white, Sin City was a perfect distillation of everything comics readers loved and hated about the comics of a controversial and often problematic master of the craft.

Music: 
“Cool Vibes” from Film Noire by Kevin MacLeod

Fun Size Episode 58 – A Human Soup of Band-Aids and Pee

We continue our chat with Michael Warbington, as we look at the trajectory of big-budget franchises and the knee-jerk fan anger that Martin Scorsese’s criticisms of “theme park” movies vs. “cinema”….and maybe he has a good point?

And maybe we should really stop complaining about the apparent theatrical monopoly of blockbusters and start championing smaller independent films, like The Paper Tigers instead.

And finally, has toxic fandom finally drifted into a form of self-harm for some people, as one Disney fan on social media starts drinking water out of Walt Disney World’s public fountains and rating its taste?

Episode 23.5 – Do We Need to Get Racist, Casey?

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In the afterglow of our Star Trek: the Next Generation panel, Mike and Casey continue their chat with Ryan Chaddock and Greg Hatcher for some off-topic conversation.

We dig into why Mike totally doesn’t have pink eye, the use (or non-use) of secondary Star Trek characters, our hopes and fears for Star Wars: the Force Awakens, the Blade Runner and Mad Max sequels, inter-fandom schadenfreude, and 1980s slasher movies.

And we ponder: why don’t we get any hate mail?