The Protagonist Podcast

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First time guest Andrew Deman joins Joe to discuss Forge and Storm from Uncanny X-Men #186. Andrew is the project lead of The Claremont Run, a project exploring Chris Claremont’s sixteen year run on Uncanny X-Men, its impact on gender and sexuality in comics, and long continuity in modern media. He is an expert on this subject, and also an experienced podcaster as a co-host of The Oh Gosh, Oh Wow! Podcast, a podcast that goes issue by issue through Excalibur, a Marvel comic book about a team of mutants co-created by Chris Claremont. In this episode, we’re discussing Forge and Storm, in a story where Storm has recently been de-powered by a weapon that Forge invented.

Show Notes

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Protagonist Podcast co-founder Todd Mack joins Joe to play a game of Elevator Pitches. Producer Andrew draws elements from hats, and then Todd and Joe must a quick pitch for a story based on those elements.

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Returning guest John Darowski joins Joe to discuss Menolly from Dragonsong. Dragonsong is a science-fantasy novel by Anne McCaffrey. It is part of a very large series of novels set on the world of Pern, where a acidic fungus called thread periodically falls from the sky, but dragonriders are able to fend off the thread if they burn it in the sky.  It was published in 1976 tells the story of Menolly, a musically gifted girl growing up in a fishing village who accidentally bonds with a group of fire lizards. Happy birthday to listener Colleen!

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First time guest Jacob Olson joins Joe to discuss Vasyl Petrovych Globorodko from Servant of the People. This Ukrainian television series starred Volodomyr Zelenskyy as a high school teacher who, rather unintentionally, gets elected president of Ukraine. In real life, Zelenskyy would go on to be elected President of Ukraine as a part of a new political party called Servant of the People. He is currently leading and defending his people during an invasion by the Russian military. We discuss the show, the current situation in Ukraine, and the trope of ordinary people saving political systems.

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Joe and Producer Andrew are discussing a class novel by Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea. After discussing Hemingway’s surprising life (and multiple brushes with death), we talk about his most famous work and its modernist themes.

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Returning guest Rachel Armstrong joins Joe to discuss the film Kitchen Stories. Kitchen Stories is a 2003 Norwegian film. The director, Bent Hamer, came across Cold War era research that was performed tracking the movement of Swedish housewives in their kitchens so that efforts could be made to maximize efficiency in kitchens. This film imagines what would have happened if researchers were paid to study the movements of single men in their kitchens.

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Author Douglas Wolk joins Joe to discuss his book All of the Marvels: A Journey to the Ends of the Biggest Story Ever Told. Wolk read more than 27,000 Marvel comics and in his book he attempts to make sense of the sprawling narrative that has been told in the pages of Marvel comics since the 1960s. We talk about his book as well as the insights he gained into one of the longest, largest stories ever told.

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Returning guest Virginia McAlister joins Joe to talk about Beth Harmon from The Queen’s Gambit. Anya-Taylor Joy’s performance as a chess prodigy won immediate (well-deserved) praise, and provides plenty of areas of discussion in this episode. 

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Returning guest Christopher “Mav” Maverick joins Joe to play a game of Comic Book Casting. We’re taking well-known works, and assigning comic book characters to play the various roles, sort of like a Muppets-style adaptation of a classic work. What comic book characters would you assign as the main characters from Hamlet or Gilligan’s Island or Titanic?

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Returning guest Rachel Armstrong joins Joe to discuss Shannon Hale’s 2005 novel The Princess Academy. The novel tells the story of a group of girls from a small mountain town who are all recruited to attend a royal academy with the opportunity to win the hand of the prince in marriage. The book was a bestseller and won a Newberry Honor award. Two sequels have subsequently been published.

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Show Notes