The Oh Gosh, Oh Golly, Oh Wow! Podcast

This week, we reckon with change and cosmic constants like the fact Charles Xavier is still a jerk in Excalibur #81, “Beginnings, Middles, and Endings,” in which Brittanic and Meggan rekindle their bonds, Kitty and Douglock forge new ones, and Charles and Moira cheat on their partners. (Maybe? It's complicated.) Joining us on this jolly journey through melodramatic tropes is comics scholar Bryan B...

Excalibur #80 might be “Out of Time,” but we’ve got all the time in the world to talk about a bunch more cyberpunk (and a little cybersex!) in and around the conclusion of the Douglock Chronicles with returning guest Dr. Clare Wall ! THRILL to our analysis of capitalism’s appropriation of cyberpunk. WONDER at our cogent analysis of the politics of otherness in the Legacy Virus plotline. And MARVEL...

What twisted logic brought us here, to Excalibur #79, “Twisted Logic,” in which the main characters aren’t member of Excalibur and child-size flatscans are more open-minded than a queer-coded Jewish mutant who’s sometimes a robot but hates them, apparently? We try to puzzle it out with the help of our returning guest, comics scholar Matt Linton ! Plus—cultural contexts of the Legacy Virus and cybe...

Things got tecno-organic so quickly, we didn’t notice until it was too late to separate our Dougs from our Warlocks. That’s right—it’s the debut of Douglock in Excalibur #78, “Fire in the Wild,” and we’ve got a great guest to help us sort out this epic/tragic romance (or lack thereof) between selfsoulfriends turned selfsoulmates! Jim Roberts , aka the very unofficial, very knowledgeable PR Manager...

If you’ve ever wondered what Kurt Wagner would look like as a kid, Excalibur #77, “Lowest Common Denominator,” has the answer, which is—either extremely cute or creepily cute depending on who’s penciling and inking which page! Our returning guest, comics and pop culture scholar John Darowski , helps us unravel Nightcrawler’s broken continuity while finding hope in what we’ve got, which is an uneve...

When you can teleport and so can your foster sister/girlfriend, going home again should be easy. But when you’re a persecuted mutant and a witch with a manipulative even-more-magical mother, it probably won’t be. So it is with Nightcrawler and Daytripper, who take a jaunt back to Germany and land right in the middle of a demon-spawned race riot. But this issue’s not all getting hit in the head wit...

We’re relatively sure the team won’t fire Anna for making them talk about this outrageous and sometimes-funny but also eye-searing and fairly nonsensical comic book. In her defense—you wanted us to! In another victory for democracy, you voted, so here we are, discussing X-Men Unlimited #4, “Theories of Relativity,” aka the one where Mystique yeets baby Kurt over a waterfall and everyone is yelling...

This week, we’re talking about Excalibur #75, “Hello, I Must Be Going,” and trying not cry through the loss of a beloved character who’s been with us since the beginning. But X-Men comics have taught us it’s best to face grief with good company, and we’ve got some fabulous company with us in writer and transfeminist activist Daisy Letourneur ! We talk through trans readings of Rachel Summers and w...

We’re not always in love with 90s superhero art but we are in love with analyzing its ins and outs and twists and turns and complex cultural contexts with super-awesome guests who know a thing or three about it, so… that’s exactly what we’re doing this week, talking excess, the creator-owner revolution, a little Excalibur #74, “In the Name of Love,” and lots of Rob Liefeld with comics and literary...

We have always lived in the ‘90s. Or so it seems, when we’re this Ken-and-Barbie-doll-crotch deep in strange and violent and occasionally baffling eroticisms that challenge the vocabulary of our stalwart crew a time or two. But like the heroes we are, we persevere, combining our powers with those of fabulous returning guest Dr. Charlotte J. Fabricius to unpack all the non-existent packages in Exca...

Your regular Upstarts are joined this week by Dr. Hailey “Stone Cold” Austin to talk about good and bad buts/butts in the totally radical Excalibur #72, “Oohhh... Siena!” In which the team moves to Muir Island and nothing will ever be the same again, including our eyeballs and eardrums after this barrage of bodacious badonkadonks and phoney phonetic accents. The one good infection is infectious la...

For better or worse and death 'til us part—Excalibur is an X-Men comic now. It’s also definitely a 90s comic, with all the explosive melodrama that implies But it’s not all bad (in fact, some of it is even good!) in Excalibur #71, “Crossing Swords,” the tail end of the “Fatal Attractions” crossover in which Colossus doesn’t understand the difference between atheism and nihilism and one good Jean/R...

For the crime of podcasting about Excalibur for 126+ weeks, we're being punished with reading one more issue about kissing Cerise goodbye... if in fact it is Cerise, and not a 90s Bad Girl who just happens to have the same fondness for pink armor and fuzzy blue elves. In any case, we've blackmailed returning guest Dr. Michael Hancock into joining us on this backwards journey into irrelevance, disc...

A sexy little number can’t save Excalibur #69, “Blight and Fog,” from living up to its title. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun writing better (and queerer!) stories about everyone’s favourite Warrior of the Ghrand Jhar Shi’ar war criminal with the stalwart support of a writer who’s also Cerise’s Biggest Fan, Hunter Felt ! We talk might-have-been’s and could-still-be’s and wonder what a good...

After a brief sojourn lost in a temporal wave, we’re back and ready to talk you through Excalibur #68, “Facades”—a comic that maybe shoulda stayed lost in a temporal wave. But it's not all grim ‘n’ gritty griping and mourning the loss of more than one character we used to love. We also have lots of fun talking 90s tropes and reboots and transmedia transformations with comics & games scholar and al...

The 90s have arrived in 2015 and Excalibur is a gun now... but actually, Excalibur is still Excalibur, which is to say—a beautiful story about love saving the multiverse

This week, we’re going back to “Back to the Present,” and by present we mean future, and by future we mean the far-flung year of 2015, when the world was/will be run by Sentinels and a dude obsessed with Rachel Summers, Moby Dick, and thigh-high boots. Joining us on this journey is returning guest Nola Pfau , fresh off an Eisner Award hat trick for her Editor-in-Chief-dom of Women Write About Comi...

Andrew got lost in the timestream this week, but we learned from the best that when you lose a founding member to cosmic forces beyond your control, you gotta solider on with new friends. So here we are, doing our first annual discussion of the first Excalibur Annual, accompanied in this heroic endeavor by educator and fellow podcaster Jason Hundey, co-host of the Requiem Metal Podcast ! We hash o...

Some truths are dark and many lies are white in the not-aptly-named Excalibur #65, “White Lies, Dark Truths.” We talk about that plus KISSING with scholar, educator, and psychotherapist Dr. Valentino Zullo ! Do Cerise and Kurt really love each other? How can we tell? What does love mean, anyway? We're not sure, but Alan Davis sure draws it pretty

Fresh off winning a freakin’ award , your very genetically stable team of comics scientists is back! Talking superheroes and science and why mutants are like vaccines in Excalibur #64, “Ascension,” with multi-talented researcher, writer, game designer, and educator Alison Humphrey ! Plus a perfect Nightcrawler panel, Anna’s favourite Rachel sequence, the glory of nine-panel grids, and (gasp) discu...

Don’t let the cool Kylun cover fool you—Excalibur #63, “Denial,” is in denial about being about Kylun because it’s clearly a Nightcrawler comic, in which Kurt Wagner superfan Alan Davis delivers a super-scientific sermon about all the super-scientific ways Kurt is super-scientifically awesome. Here to celebrate this momentous achievement is our first guest from a country where Kurt's called Diablo...

We're in (and on!) Cloud Nine talking Warpies, Warpies, and more Warpies in Excalibur #62, “Of Birth, Death and the Confused, Painful Bit In Between,” with educator, scholar, and expert in posthuman science fiction, Dr. Clare Wall ! We explore whether superheroes are posthuman (or transhuman, or metahuman) and talk through different types of monstrosity plus whether Alan Davis' monsters are too cu...

Gosh Golly Wow Returns! And so does Rachel Summers! Sort of! All that and the pod’s most anticipated guest of all-time, writer and founder of the Phoenix Force Fan Club, (as featured in Excalibur #51), Jason Grey ! We talk (natch) lots of Rachel and Phoenix, and work through lots of complicated feelings about Galactus’ pro-life politics. Plus! Meggan and Brian get engaged, Kurt gives some advice w...

We’re trying to emphasize the positive this week... while still doing plenty of griping about part 2 of a crummy colonial sojourn in Wakanda known as Excalibur #60, "Braddock of the Jungle." We’re joined in our journey through tribulations and tropes by Dr. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley , author of the critically acclaimed book Black Women in Sequence: Re-Inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime! We ta...

We sure hated this week’s comic, but we sure love this week’s episode, talking hip hop, comics, Black Panther, and Afrofuturism with scholar Dr. Michael B. Dando ! We do a little griping about the team’s colonial jaunt to Wakanda in Excalibur #59, “Enter... the Panther!” But we also talk about better stuff you can do with comics, Vibranium, race, power, poetry, and supers who save the world with f...