| This week, Graeme Virtue chooses five of the best podcasts on comic book culture, from a six-part dissection of Black Panther to a history of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and company Unpacking Peanuts
This delightful series celebrates the cartoon strip that turned kid worrywart Charlie Brown and his daydreaming beagle into global icons. Three professional cartoonists – Michael Cohen, Jimmy Gownley and Harold Buchholz – are working their way through Schulz’s output chronologically from 1950, and with the entire Peanuts archive free to view online, listeners are encouraged to read along. The veteran trio and their producer Liz Sumner have an easygoing rapport, and offer perceptive insights into author Charles M Schulz’s artistic development and empathetic sense of humour. With eight seasons banked, the epic read-through has already reached the mid-1980s. War Rocket Ajax: Every Story Ever
If keeping tabs on the Marvel Cinematic Universecan feel like a full-time job, then trying to fathom the long and sprawling history of comics is even more intimidating. One way to get a handle on decades of serialised storytelling might be to compile a whopping great list of comics ranked from best to worst, which is what the long-running US podcast War Rocket Ajax does every month with its bonus Every Story Ever episodes. To date, dynamic duo Matt Wilson and Chris Sims have compiled an ever-growing league table of over 1,500 comic stories, providing exuberant analysis of everything from Judge Dredd to cult online strip Achewood. Newcomers: Batman
Each season of the raucously entertaining Newcomers sees hosts Nicole Byer and Lauren Lapkus put themselves through a different pop culture boot camp. Earlier this year the pair immersed themselves in Bruce Wayne’s world with 14 episodes examining the Caped Crusader. A murderer’s row of Batman obsessives – including former Saturday Night Live star Taran Killam, podcast kingpin Scott Aukerman and whip-smart comic Patton Oswalt – dropped in to explain how every movie adaptation raided various classic comic stories for inspiration. Byer and Lapkus politely took all that geekiness on board, but seemed just as interested in calculating which screen Batman was the horniest via their own Bat poll. House to Astonish
The UK’s longest-running comics podcast – 15 years and counting – is a relaxed chinwag between Edinburgh-based experts Al Kennedy and Paul O’Brien, whose scholarly knowledge of their chosen subject is permeated with flashes of daftness and dry wit. Each episode provides a snapshot of current comics culture as the pair break down the latest hyped-up publishing announcements and put recent new issues under the review microscope. Since early 2021, Kennedy and O’Brien have alternated standard episodes with a book club rereading Marvel’s Thunderbolts, an influential 1997 series about supervillains masquerading as heroes (and secretly starting to enjoy it). With a Thunderbolts movie starring Florence Pugh and Julia Louis-Dreyfus out next year, you could hardly ask for a better primer. The History of Marvel Comics: Black Panther
Marvel’s first Black superhero had already been around for more than 50 years by the time 2018 blockbuster Black Panther became an Oscar-garlanded, billion-dollar phenomenon. Originally created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1966, the hands-on warrior king of African tech-utopia Wakanda has been rebooted and relaunched multiple times over the decades, each new incarnation challenging the prejudices of the times. This slick six-part series presented by YA author Nic Stone charts the evolution and cultural impact of the character. Stone’s enthusiasm is infectious as she hears from those who shaped the Black Panther mythos, including veteran artist John Romita Jr and award-winning writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Why not try … BBC Sounds’ new crime strand begins with Death on The Farm, which looks into an unsolved murder in 70s Wales.
Brainwash Me with Poppy Hilstead sees the comic become an expert in her guests’ passions and interests in 40 short minutes. The final series of the late Rob Burrow’s Seven podcast will be released from next week, with one bonus episode already available. | 