Comicsly Podcast: Recent Episodes
Comicsly.com
A sister and brother becoming better friends by talking about the games, books, TV, and other things they're interested in. Also, they make a podcast along the way.
It’s finally here! Our discussion of the second half of Itaewon Class. Previously we talked about episodes 1-8 on the podcast, we are going to be finishing that discussion by going over episodes 9-16 and also discussing the series as a whole. This was a really fun episode to record and pushed us to look at something new and consider TV made in another part of the world and how it compares with our normal expectations of TV made in the US. Thank you for listening to this episode of our podcast and we hope you join us again next week.
This week’s One-shots
Angela – Only Murders in the Building S1
Joseph – Reservation Dogs S1
Follow Angela on Goodreads: Angela Glowacki Letterboxd: congli Twitter: @congliwastaken
Follow Joseph on Twitter: @joeyglowacky
If you haven’t yet, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast-listening app.
You can also get in touch with us via email by sending your feedback or questions to podcast@comicsly.com
Or you can listen to the podcast on Youtube on the Comicsly Youtube channel. There you can find all past episodes of the show as well as past streams from our ComicslyPlays Twitch channel and other great videos.
The music in this episode is a Lof-Fi Remix of the song Concerning Hobbits by PatrickMoonBird. You can find their music on Spotify and Soundcloud.
Thanks for joining us for another episode, I think you going to like this one. Today we are talking about Bo Burnham’s newest ‘comedy’ special on Netflix, Inside. It’s a big departure from Burham’s previous stuff and a piece of work that is trying to wrestle with everything that is happening in his world right now. It really stretches the limits of what a comedy special is and might not be for everyone, maybe not even us and we watched and recorded a podcast about it. But on a more serious note, I do want to put a content warning here that if you are struggling with depression, suicidal thoughts or just feeling bad maybe skip this episode and make sure to join us for another episode next week.
This week’s One-shots.
Angela – Harvard Lecture: Justice – What’s the Right Thing to Do
Joseph – Radiolab: No Special Duty
Follow Angela on Goodreads: Angela Glowacki Letterboxd: congli Twitter: @congliwastaken
Follow Joseph on Twitter: @joeyglowacky
If you haven’t yet, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast-listening app.
You can also get in touch with us via email by sending your feedback or questions to podcast@comicsly.com
Or you can listen to the podcast on Youtube on the Comicsly Youtube channel. There you can find all past episodes of the show as well as past streams from our ComicslyPlays Twitch channel and other great videos.
The music in this episode is a Lof-Fi Remix of the song Concerning Hobbits by PatrickMoonBird. You can find their music on Spotify and Soundcloud.
We’re back with another episode, and this one is about a book. Yes, We both actually found the time to read a book and I (we) can’t recommend it highly enough. The book is Almond (A Novel) by Sohn Won-pyung. I don’t want to give away too much in this description because there is a lot to talk about and we get into all of it. In short, it’s a book about trying to grow up in spite of what people think you are or are not capable of. The format of the novel, the language, and its translation is also very unique and something we get deep into. Aggh, there’s so much to talk about and I’m very excited for you to hear this episode. We hope you enjoy it and join us again next week.
This week’s One-shots.
Angela – 30 Days With Bretman Rock
Joseph – The Bad Batch
Follow Angela on Goodreads: Angela Glowacki Letterboxd: congli Twitter: @congliwastaken
Follow Joseph on Twitter: @joeyglowacky
If you haven’t yet, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast-listening app.
You can also get in touch with us via email by sending your feedback or questions to podcast@comicsly.com
Or you can listen to the podcast on Youtube on the Comicsly Youtube channel. There you can find all past episodes of the show as well as past streams from our ComicslyPlays Twitch channel and other great videos.
The music in this episode is a Lof-Fi Remix of the song Concerning Hobbits by PatrickMoonBird. You can find their music on Spotify and Soundcloud
We are back with the fourth and final movie in our short stroll through (some of) the films of Wes Anderson. Rushmore (1998) is an interesting piece of his early filmography for the way it points to some of the flourishes he will become famous for and the ways it has little to do with what will come after. It is Anderson’s first collaboration with Jason Schwartzman and features a memorable performance from Bill Murray that we spend a bit of time trying to understand. There are a lot of creative decisions to puzzle through in this one and we hope you enjoy it and will join us for our next episode.
This week’s One-shots.
Angela – Inside (Bo Burnham)
Joseph – What Remains of Edith Finch
Follow Angela on Goodreads: Angela Glowacki Letterboxd: congli Twitter: @congliwastaken
Follow Joseph on Twitter: @joeyglowacky
If you haven’t yet, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your preferred podcast-listening app.
You can also get in touch with us via email by sending your feedback or questions to podcast@comicsly.com
Or you can listen to the podcast on Youtube on the Comicsly Youtube channel. There you can find all past episodes of the show as well as past streams from our ComicslyPlays Twitch channel and other great videos.
The music in this episode is a Lof-Fi Remix of the song Concerning Hobbits by PatrickMoonBird. You can find their music on Spotify and Soundcloud.
One of my favorite moments from season one of the Serial Podcast is a small digression from the central whodunit mystery. I can’t remember exactly what episode it happens during (it is directly mentioned in this post) but it involves the host (Sarah Koenig) trying to run down public library internet logs from January 1999. As part of her investigation into whether Adnan Syed was correctly convicted of the murder of a classmate in 1999 Koenig follows up on an alibi that wasn’t used by Adnan’s defense during his trial. A witness states that he was on a library computer checking his Hotmail account during the time the crime is supposed to have happened. Koenig checks if there is a local record from the library or activity log on the Hotmail servers that would corroborate. But any record of him logging onto the library computer or logging into a Hotmail account doesn’t exist. Our collective archive of human digital knowledge and interaction (the internet) does not contain evidence of Adnan’s presence on that January afternoon. It’s a lead that goes nowhere but provides an opportunity to reflect on what the internet does and doesn’t remember. Koenig doesn’t allow the moment to pass without thinking about how this runs counter to how we think about the internet. That all those ones and zeros are recorded somewhere, but they aren’t and they never could be. You can find anything on the internet, but not everything. This is tangential at best to the core story Koenig and her team are telling but it is also emblematic of the way many moments in Serial are used to expand the story and reflect on the larger world.
Serial blew up when it came out in 2014 in part because of its true crime focus, but people who came for the murder mystery something more. They got a show that was as interested in investigating how we got to this point in our criminal justice system as they are in ‘solving’ the case. Serial was created by the same people who make This American Life (TAL), a show that uses the most mundane moments to reflect on the way people and systems work. The show is more interested in describing the way the world is now and thinking deeply about how it got that way than being prescriptive about what needs to change. These are the types of moments I love to find in podcasts and the potential for that got me excited to listen to America’s Girls, the new podcast and journalism project from Texas Monthly. It’s probably unfair to compare every well-reported show that has a knowledgable host with a great voice to TAL, but it’s also not not unfair and is very much audio aesthetic America’s Girls is working in. It is an eight-episode show that digs into the origins of the modern version of the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders beginning in 1972. The show moves forward from their formation into the present and examines how the job of a Cheerleader has or hasn’t changed. The first episode begins with the host Sarah Helopa talking to the first Cowboy Cheerleader to wear the iconic uniform at the site of what used to be Texas Stadium, and tells the contradictory story of how they formed in the early seventies. Despite the cultural and moral values that gripped Dallas, (and really the whole bible belt) that is the moment when they emerged. In Dallas after the signing of the Civil Rights Act but still clinging to the legacy of Jim Crow, and after the assassination of President Kennedy.
The mechanics of how the group was formed is the focus of episode one, and the strength of that episode (and the series as a whole) is the conversations Hepola had with the cheerleaders who were there when it happened. Hepola has her own personal connection and a lot of scholarship that she can draw on, but these interviews with the Cowboy Cheerleaders (the ones who would/could talk to her) lend a warm yet authoritative voice to the podcast as former cheerleaders speak soberly about what they went through. The cheerleaders exist in a particular way in the cultural imagination. They are maybe the ultimate intertwining of sport and sex appeal creating an opportunity to see what we are told is the ‘idealized’ male and female form on display at the same time. But it’s so important to hear from the actual cheerleaders because they present an entirely different conception of themselves. They discuss what they created with pride and talk about the work, fitness, and toughness required to endure in a job that cheered them on Sundays and diminished them the rest of the week. Whether it was the meager pay, patronizing morality rules, or the massively unfair double standard they were subject to within the Cowboys organization (players and cheerleaders are not allowed to date but only cheerleaders are punished for not following this rule) and the culture at large. The show treats its subject with respect and admiration by letting former cheerleaders talk uninterrupted about why they loved the time they spent as a Cowboy Cheerleader and all of the many things that frustrated them. It is a needed foil to the sanitized and corporate-approved vision that is present on the long-running reality show about the cheerleaders. An opportunity for the women who went through this to say what their experience was. For that reason alone this is a necessary and valuable podcast, but the recent actions of our elected leaders and their continued insistence that women in the U.S. cannot be trusted to make decisions about what to do with their own bodies only further drives home the previously mentioned discussion of what cheerleaders are actually subject to. That they are celebrated for the job they do and then punished for actually doing it. The people making the show did not know that it would have to exist in our post-Roe world, but it does, and it serves, for those willing to see it, as an almost too perfect metaphor for how women can be/are treated in the U.S.
I left my experience listening to this show with a better understanding of the Cheerleaders and a lot to think about with regards to how their story is both unique and (sadly) familiar. There were also a lot of questions. One specific moment that I would’ve loved Hepola to go more in-depth on is the discussion of the cultural background that the cheerleaders came out of in Dallas in the early seventies. She mentions the contrast of a city full of churches and strip clubs, but that doesn’t tell the audience anything about what it was like to be in Dallas. What influence did religious institutions have on people’s lives? How did that interact with a changing culture that had a less rigid relationship with sex and sexuality and insisted on bodily autonomy (which led to Roe vs Wade in 1973)? In the same breath, Hepola also mentions the effect that the assassination of President Kennedy had on the city of Dallas. Assuming that most of her audience was born after 1963 (probably true), what were those effects? What does an event like that do to a place, and in what ways are the Cheerleaders a third, fourth, or fifth order response to that as the host implies? These and other tangents (like why professional cheerleading attached to sports teams/events has such cultural significance) go unremarked on. In the same way that the moment from Serial podcast discussed at the beginning of this piece expanded what that story could be about, there was space for America’s Girls to broaden out the roots and scope of this story. To further interrogate the ways the Cowboys Cheerleaders are unique to a place, time, and culture. The questions I was left with did not in any way affect my enjoyment of the podcast and its significance but are instead proof of that enjoyment. This is a fascinating story that was well told and I wanted to spend more time with it.
Hi all, sorry for the (checks notes) five-month break. No real excuse except for everything and nothing at all. Working through an editing backlog so hopefully will get a number of episodes out over the next few weeks as we start recording new episodes. This one here though is a good listen. We get into one of Angela's favorite K-drama's and I fall pretty hard for it too.
Lesbian Experience with Loneliness by Kabi Nagata. This Manga has a strong personal connection for each of us because of when we both read it for the first time about five years ago. Angela was in high school and I was in college and neither of us were where or who we wanted to be.
It is finally here. All episode thus far have been leading up to this moment. No not really but we have been looking forward to this episode quite a bit in our Wes Anderson series. This is the Wes Anderson film we are most familiar with and something that we have been talking about in our episodes is the re-watchability of these movies, so movie was a good test of that for us.
This episode is being posted a little bit later than expected but here are our final thoughts on the full season of WandaVision. This is the episode where Angela makes lots of really great points that I struggle to respond to cause I get really in my feelings about this show. Or I would be really in my feelings if I was a little bit clearer about what my feelings are?
We take a look at Inside this week and try to see what's in this horror-puzzle-2D-platformer from 2016. Turns out there is quite a bit in there for us to get into. It wouldn't be a video game episode if Angela and I didn't have at least slightly disagreeing viewpoint or opinions.
We are back with another episode in our ongoing Wes Anderson Series. This time is it 2018's animated movie, Isle of Dogs. We get into all the issues that the internet settled a couple of years ago and try to figure out our feelings on the orientalism and the way it aestheticizes Japan without seemingly having any point of view. We also wonder if it has the enduring charm and attraction that we found in The Grand Budapest Hotel.
This podcast is sometimes just a podcast but sometimes it isn't just a podcast. That was utter nonsense, don't mind me. This podcast is always at least a podcast. But is Alice isn't dead just a podcast? If you are slightly confused then maybe you will empathize with us during our conversation about the first season of the podcast Alice Isn't Dead.
When you check into the Grand Budapest hotel you can never leave... I think I got my references mixed up there, but you may never want to leave anyways based on how much we enjoyed our time with The Grand Budapest Hotel.
This podcast is about the friends we made along the way, and also how capitalism tried to tear us apart. Okay that's not exactly true but also not exactly false. Kentucky Route Zero contains multitudes and so does our podcast about it. At least I hope it does.
We have finally come to the end our Studio Ghibli series of Podcasts. We get into what turned about to be a surprising, funny and decidedly anti-war movie. This is maybe our broadest discussion around one of these movies but these movies, but the speaks to all the different ideas and themes that woven into this movie, all there for you to pay attention to or not.
Hello, we are back after a week off, with maybe the most topical episode that we done yet. We are talking about a TV showing that is still coming out! We still have a throwback spin though. We are talking The Vision comic book series from about five years ago in conjunction with the the newly released WandaVision TV show.
We are here at the end of the year and we think that is worth noticing and celebrating. We spend sone time on this episode reflecting on what brought us joy, what distracted us, what we struggled with and how we changed over the course of a year that continuously felt unprecedented.
We are back after the holiday break with another episode in our Studio Ghibli series. This time it's Spirited Away, the only Studio Ghibli movie to win an Oscar. This is widely considered their best movie for reasons that we try to figure out during our conversation.
It's a musical mashup episode in which we mash up two genres that have basically nothing to do with each other. For the first half of the episode We talk about the pop music sensation BTS and their new-ish album Be. We follow that up in the second half of the episode with a a thorough, or at least as thorough as we could be, discussion of the Christmas and holiday music of Sufjan Stevens.
We are back with another Studio Ghibli movie! This time we watched Kiki's Delivery Service and then we tried to talk about it. This is an extremely funny and pleasant movie but in way that's different from a movie like My Neighbor Totoro and we tried to get at exactly why that is.
Episode nine is here and this one is definitely not bad! No, it's actually really good and we are proud of it. Angela and I discuss the recently released graphic novel adaptation of the Slaughterhouse Five. We were both a little nervous that we were going to struggle to find something to latch onto in here and really analyze. It ended up that we both dug into this question of how do you adapt a novel into a similar but still crucially different medium. What gets brought along and what is left behind.
We are back for episode eight with our second Studio Ghibli movie. This week we watched the 1997 movie Princess Mononoke. I think we both expected something a little bit different based on the last Ghibli movie we watched but we both very much enjoyed the complexity we found here.
Ohhh it's a bit of spicy one. Episode number seven and we are already talking politics. This is our best episode yet though I think. We talk about the Recent Apple TV+ movie Boys State, where a bunch of teenage boys don't learn how politics actually work, or maybe they do, we'll get into into. Hope you enjoy.
It's time for us to get very meta, by doing a podcast about another much more popular podcast. No but really this is a good one. Mystery Show occupies an important space for both of us but also kind of in what podcasts have become. It's an interesting time capsule of that moment in podcasting but it definitely has many enduring qualities.
Episode five, half way to ten! This week we talk about the Studio Ghibli movie My Neighbor Totoro. This is the first of a series of Ghibli movies that we will be watching over the next few months. This is very much an introduction to the works of Studio Ghibli for both of us and a process of learning how to talk about these movies.
We did it, or Angela finally made me do it. We watched The new(ish) Judd Apatow movie made with comedian Pete Davidson and released earlier this year on the internet. This one gets a little heavy as we try to figure out exactly what this movie is trying to do and does it succeed.
Episode Three is here. I know it's too early to have a long lost episode but this is our lost first episode. We weren't sure if we wanted to re-record the episode but we thought it was worth it, we hope you do too.
Episode 2 of the podcast is here! We get into the new album from Sufjan Stevens, The Ascension. You're going to hear us struggle with these first impression and react to Sufjan's opinions about his past work and how this album critiques that work. e first impression and react to Sufjan's opinions about his past work and how this album critiques that work. I hope we did his work justice because he really is one of our favorite artists and his work has meant a lot to us over the years.
Our first episode, and it's international podcast day no less! We get into the narrative/interactive game Oxenfree and try to figure our what it's all about.