From the Rooftops

From The Rooftops is a podcast about superheroes. Join Corey, Clay, and Talen as they talk not about specific issues and individual stories, but rather about the mechanisms of superheroic storytelling, what it lets you do, and where it can fall down as they shout about what they love, from the rooftops. This episode, we look at the role of the Mastermind, and manage to not get too waylaid by Homestuck.

Hey, this one was thanks to a listener asking questions, and we avoided mentioning Heidegger. But other Nazis who can bus off into the sun get mentioned!

But not really! This week we're going to talk to you about reboots in comics!

You know what you need? you need two former churchboys who dealt with apocalypses talking about the way comics handle the idea of gods and their presence in the world. Why not hear Clay tackle the phrase 'Modern Myth' and Talen bring up 'lusury attitudes?'

What do we mean when we mention 'mercenary?' It's not just someone who does something for themselves. This privatised personalised military force is something the superhero setting is filled with, so it's probably best to get a good handle on how they work and what they can do in a story.

We talk about gangs as used in superhero comics, with some talk about real world racism, the role of the gang and what causes them to flourish and even some of that fancy-pantsy academical stuff! Also, Clay goes the whole episode forgetting that Blood Syndicate exists, the silly.

In this episode, we talk about the big spooky dude out of space, the ruler of something, This is where we talk about the ways a story can use a powerful external force, with a different ideology, and what you can use it for in a story! Hey, by the way, there was a tiny bit of audio problems, Talen's mic was set up wrong, so he's kinda echoey and weird. Sorry!

And we're back, with a single day turnaround and technical issues hopefully sorted! This week, we talk about characters-within-a-character, the idea of the Passenger. This covers characters like Hulk and Venom, but also Moon Knight, and of course, Moon Knight. Passengers can be helpful or mendacious, proactive or uncooperative, and we talk about them as a story tool and what you can use them to do.

Holy heck does this even work any more. Clay and Talen talk about superheroes and their fundamentally creative nature and how refusing to use a superhero name reflects that.

Holy hell we're still here! With a few weeks of preparation to get this one solved, after some DREADFUL technical issues, Clay and Talen talk about The Karate-Man as a superhero comic archetype!

Fandom, boy, I don't know. It's a beast of a problem, something that we use to connect ourselves to our world, things that give us metaphors and common spaces and also, at the same time, something some people use as a reason to hate people. Good news, though, we solve it forever in this podcast (we don't).

Now, it's time to count up your sins! Since there's a recent groundshaking event in superhero fiction - ie, Talen watched a Toku series - we felt it's time to talk about it! There's something about hoppers.

Oh, we know you're reading this. There are a bunch of characters in comics who play with the fact that they are, in fact, in comics. This time, we talk about them! Sorry it's late, the editor was busy!

Superhero media isn't limited to comic books and movies! Clay and Talen have played a LOT of games that let them make and play superheroes, so in this episode, we talk about our conception of superheroes as you can express through play!

Hey, what if we talk about the kind of comic book thing that is like, just another term for 'something happened?' We talk about the way comic books try to structure the 'idea' of an event and compare it to Movies and whether or not there's any There There.

Since we talked about rogues, and villains, in true City of Heroes style, we wanted to add to this and talk about Vigilantes. The nature of the Vigilante is as a character who can push the story in different directions than a hero or villain might, recontextualising villians and opponents. But at the same time, the Vigilante can be handled badly, and often intersects with uncomfortable things about the way cultures regard violence. As a content warning, we do discuss some elements of modern news with guns, and the idea of arming teachers.

We've talked about groups of enemies opposing a hero, but we haven't spoken about the idea of the Villains, of larger, story-shaping opposition that the narrative bends around.

You want to learn about barking Jabari? You want to hear the concepts underpinning the storytelling praxis of Killmonger as a character vs Killmonger as a storyteller? You wanna hear about the music, the style, the tone, or just what Clay thinks of the movie BLACK PANTHER? Well, Talen hasn't seen it, so here we go! "I'm Black Y'all" comes from the movie CB4, and is included here for educational and parody purposes, © Universal Pictures

Clay and Talen aren't just great heroes in their own right. They're also defined in part by the villains that oppose them. This week, we talk about the Rogue's Gallery, ways they form, what they're good for, and why we're stuck with some of the ones that suck.

There's a realm of realms out there, thousands of parallel worlds, and this podcast is coming to you from Earth-1. You, the listener, are on what we call Earth-2, or, more often, Earth Poo. Clay and Talen talk about the multiverse and all the ways it's pretty ordinary and silly.

We here at From the Rooftops are a pair of boys, one of whom is good and pure and the other of whom is a peddler of filth - literally - and so it seems this is a perfect cohort to discuss the important and sophisticated topic of superheroes doinking and the people who care about superheroes doinking. So, come along and see as we talk about the origin of shipping, its application to media and then try - badly - to talk about ships that interest us. Fact: This will not end well.

Hey there folks! It's a new year, so new episodes! Don't ask about what happened to the Vigilantes episode. We'll get back to that. Anyway it's an episode where thanks to television doing Superheroes, we decide to talk about the way superheroes are reflected in television, and one of the ways those series can have problems: Extrinsic Factors.

Hey there, folks! How you doing? You had a nice break? We get talking about character design, the superhero costume, realise how DEEP we can go into it, and then we make fun of Hawkeye a bit.

There's a lot of talk to be had about whether or not heroes should have them but what does a sidekick actually mean? Are sidekicks always the same? Are they irresponsible, or do they give you access to a new dimension of storytelling? And is Clay Talen's sidekick, or vice versa?

We reminisce about the game City of Heroes, which has been shuttered now for five years, today (2017/12/01). It gets sad. We get testimonials from others.

There's a fundamental power to the mask in superhero comics, and we decide to talk about them. We talk about masks that work well across different media, complaints about how masks are sometimes handled, and at some point conclude that Blade is a cop.

With all our talk about setting elements we figure it was high time we sat down and talked about the setting itself and how it interacted with characters. Why it being modern matters, what it can say, how it can change and how reflecting reality isn't as important as feeling reality. There's also some talk about France, and a surprise Comboman appearance. Now we're having some technical problems lately, in part because one of us had to evacuate to avoid a Hurricane, so there will be some pop and it's a bit uneven on sound. Very sorry about that!

This time, it's a bit of a crossover episode; we talk about teams that bring together larger groups of characters, and in turn, some of those smaller characters with things going on. Then, to demonstrate that we're not too proud to write fanfiction, we talk about our lineups for the Avengers and the Justice League!

Superheroes step in where the authorities aren't doing their jobs, but what are those authorities? How do characters represent them, or interact with them?

THE HORRORS OF THE VASTNESS IN ALL PLACES! Clay and Talen, winding down October Spooktacular, talk about the horror in vastness; as a pair of former religious fundamentalists, they have their own grappling to do with the pulp horror that underpins comic book superheroes, and why Necron, Unicron and Galactus aren't... quite... the same thing.

Where there are monsters, there are monster hunters, those who look into the abyss and stand on the precipice and patrol the border and whatever liminal metaphor you want. We talk about doing them well and the ways to identify the archetype, and also, talk about Blade.

IT CAME FROM BEYOND OUR UNDERSTANDINGS! Clay and Talen discuss a term they've used in the past, the _Science Monster_, a type of character that represents fears and anxieties about science, and how you can use these characters as lenses to look back on older stories, times and places, and see what really mattered to people. Also, Sandman and some bonus radioactive crocodiles.

Talen finally vents his spleen about how mad he is about all those characters who want to insist that they don't need to be superheroes to be superheroes. Don't worry, there's plenty where that came from. We talk about unpowered humans and how they frame superhero stories.

Wally is probably wrong, and that's why today we're discussing the Superheroic tropes of magic and science, and the way those two intersect and oppose one another, or rather, don't. What do they do for a story? How can you use them well? We tell professionals how to do their jobs, and we're right.

Let's talk about power levels! Not the challenge of measuring them, but about how different types of power, different levels of power, change your stories and change the way your stories work out!

Sometimes we talk about topics that make us mad, sometimes we talk about topics we love. This time, we're talking about something we love: Our love of found-family superhero structures. Batman is mentioned, from time to time.

In this episode we talk about the Mutant as a metaphor, specifically how it's sometimes used to represent some idaes that don't work, and how you can break away from things at those failure points. Vampires eat people.

Expanding on our thesis from last time, we discuss the idea that a superhero needs something of a secret identity, some duality of self, that allows them to connect to the universe that we already live in. We talk about Moon Knight!

Clay and Talen introduce themselves and the podcast. In order to talk about superheroes, we figure it best to start out by explaining just what we mean by superheroes. In this podcast, we discuss way superheroes require connections to the real world, to a modern framework, and some form of secret identity.