Episode
Show Notes
[00:00:00] Intro and outro music composed by my fabulous production team over at Podcast Fast Track!
[00:00:55] I love you, Mockingbird! Too good for this world, too pure.
[00:01:06] For a great discussion of gatekeeping in the world of comics, see this article on Medium.
Transcript
Megan Farnel: Hey everyone, and welcome to the trailer episode of The Invincible Iron Pod! My name is Megan, and I’ll be the host of the show, in which I will recap and discuss the over 2000+ comic appearances made by one Tony Stark, also known as Iron Man.
You might be asking, why would I listen to such a thing? Well, to answer that, I’ll need to tell you a bit about me and my history with comics. A few years ago, I decided I was going to get into comics. Should be easy, right? Yes, I’ll hold now for laughter. [laughing noise] It’s definitely not easy to just pick up and read comics for all kinds of reasons. You’re trying to keep track of different print runs by different authors and artists, sometimes you get really excited about a character or storyline only for it to be suddenly discontinued (*cough* Mockingbird *cough*), and then there’s all the universes you’re trying to keep track of. It’s…I mean, it’s a lot. And there’s also a lot of what is called gatekeeping in comics, meaning that there are groups of individuals who seem to devote excessive amounts of time and energy to keeping new people out of comics communities, in part by making them feel wrong or silly for asking questions, or not having already memorized the entire back-catalogue of every comic in the history of ever. Being naturally kind of a contrary person, my reaction to feeling sort of pushed out by comics was to want to create a space that felt more open and welcoming for myself and for others. Why Tony Stark is the person I chose is a different question entirely, and one I’ll definitely get into during episode one.
So what can you expect from this show if you decide to give it a listen? Well, every week I’ll be talking about at least one issue (sometimes potentially more than one) of a comic involving Iron Man. I’ll be going in chronological order by publication date, and the podcast will also be spoiler free. This means that if you’re reading along with me, I’m not going to talk about any upcoming events that I’m aware of. We can discover the joys and frustrations and hilarity of these stories together! For the first little while it’ll just be me hosting, though I definitely hope to have guests on for later episodes, and maybe to include some special episodes about particular topics or debates. Structurally, the show will follow the general narrative arc of each issue or issues, though there will also be special segments devoted to things like historical political context, print and publication history, and a bisexuality metre in which I will rank just how bisexual Tony Stark is being at any particular moment. (Spoiler: it will often be high.)
So that’s The Invincible Iron Pod in a nutshell! If you’re at all interested, I really encourage you to subscribe on whatever platform you use. You can also help out by spreading the word about the show; you’ll find me on Twitter and Tumblr @InvinciblePod, and if folks are interested in continuing some of the discussions from the show I’d also be open to creating a Discord server somewhere down the road too, if we want to treat this like a bit of a book club. For now let’s get going and see where this takes us!
Invincible Iron Pod 