The Geeks OUT Podcast: It’s a Winter Wonder(Woman) Land

The Geeks OUT Podcast

Opinions, reviews, incisive discussions of queer geek ideas in pop culture, and the particularly cutting brand of shade that you can only get from a couple of queer geeks all in highly digestible weekly doses.

In this week’s episode of the Geeks OUT Podcast, Kevin is joined by Geeks OUT President, Nic Gitau, as they get into the spirit with a new queer holiday movie trailer “Dashing in December” and the early X-mas miracle of “Wonder Woman 1984” coming to theaters and HBO Max on 12/25, and celebrate The CW developing a Yara Flor centric “Wonder Girl” series for our Strong Female Character of the Week. 

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BIG OPENING

KEVIN & NIC:  Wonder Woman 1984 will hit theaters and stream on HBO Max on Xmas

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DOWN AND NERDY

KEVIN: Underwater, Lego Star Wars Holiday Special, Adventure Time: Distant Lands – Obsidian, Marvel Voices: Indigenous Voices
NIC: His Dark Materials S2 premiere, Animaniacs reboot!,1 week countdown to The Happiest Season];  [everything royal (White Queen, The Crown, The Princess Switch 2)

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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

The CW developing a Wonder Girl series centered on latinx character Yara Flor

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THIS WEEK IN QUEER

New trailer for Dashing in December

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CLIP OF THE WEEK

New trailer for Chaos Walking

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THE WEEK IN GEEK

MOVIES

• New trailer for Godmothered
• New teaser for Canvas
• Yet another trailer for the director’s cut of Justice League
• New trailer for Tom & Jerry
• New trailer for Batman: Soul of the Dragon

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TV

• Hulu renews Woke
• New trailer for The Wilds
• Mattel is developing a gameshow based on the card game Uno
• New trailer for the Minions Holiday Special
• HBO Max orders limited series of DMZ based on the comic & The Last of Us
• New teaser of season 2 of Batwoman
• This will be the last season of Black Lightning
• Charmed and The Conners casts trans actor J.J. Hawkins & Alexandra Billings in recurring roles

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COMIC BOOKS

• Vault Comics releasing queer sci-fi horror book Hollow Heart in Feb. 
• SiriusXM announces new set of Marvel podcasts 
• Marvel announces Marvel Voices: Legacy for Black History Month

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SHILF

• KEVIN: Beth Harmon (The Queen’s Gambit)
• NIC: Queen Elizabeth (White Princess) 

The Geeks OUT Podcast: Star Trek Discovering Gender

The Geeks OUT Podcast

Opinions, reviews, incisive discussions of queer geek ideas in pop culture, and the particularly cutting brand of shade that you can only get from a couple of queer geeks all in highly digestible weekly doses.

In this week’s episode of the Geeks OUT Podcast, Kevin is joined by President of NYCGaymers, Raffy Regulus, as they discuss the new trailers for Adventure Time: Distant Lands – Obsidian & HBO Max’s Superintelligence, and celebrate CBS featuring new Star Trek: Discovery trans pride merch (with proceeds going to GLAAD) in This Week in Queer.

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BIG OPENING

KEVIN: After a small COVID outbreak on set, production on Chicago Fire shuts down
RAFFY: Nonbinary option in Call of Duty – also don’t vape into your Xbox

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DOWN AND NERDY

KEVIN: Over the Moon, We Are Who We Are, Legendary, Dash & Lilly, Punchline
KATE: Mandalorian, Miles Morales, Genshin Impact, X-Men X of Swords

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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

New trailer for Adventure Time: Distant Lands – Obsidian

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THIS WEEK IN QUEER

Star Trek: Discovery debuts new GLAAD benefiting merch

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CLIP OF THE WEEK

New trailer for Superintelligence

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THE WEEK IN GEEK

MOVIES

• New trailer for Happiest Season
• New trailer for Princess Switch 2
• A sequel to Bloodshot is in the works
• Dwayne Johnson announces a reboot of The Scorpion King is happening

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TV

• NBC announces their next musical will be The Grinch Musical!
• Wentworth Miller say’s he’s only playing gay roles, ending a Prison Break revival
• The CW is developing a Black Lightning spinoff centered around Painkiller
• New trailer for the second season of Pennyworth
• WandaVision will now premiere in January
• New trailer for The Hardy Boys
• New poster for AHS season 10 and American Horror Stories
• Netflix renews The Umbrella Academy
• New trailer for season 4 of Big Mouth
• HBO cancels The Outsider
• New trailer for The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse
• Disney+ developing a Darkwing Duck revival

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COMIC BOOKS

• DC Comics names Marie Javins as new editor-in-chief
• Webtoon to begin producing Anime and live action series
• ReedPop announces the return of C2E2 & Emerald City Comic Con late 2021

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SHILF

• KEVIN: Sheik – Smash Bros.
• RAFFY: Diluc – Genshin Impact 

Interview With Author K. Ancrum

K. Ancrum is the author of  the award winning thriller THE WICKER KING,  a lesbian romance THE WEIGHT OF THE STARS and the upcoming Peter Pan thriller DARLING. K. is a Chicago native passionate about diversity and representation in young adult fiction. She currently writes most of her work in the lush gardens of the Chicago Art Institute. I had the opportunity to interview her, which you can read below.

First, how did you come to realize you wanted to be an author

 I’ve written books since I was 13, but I never really considered it to be a viable professional option until I was around 19. At the time I was writing on tumblr at lot and had started to write a web-book on there that was gaining a surprising amount of popularity. An agent who predominantly represented non-fiction began following the story and eventually reached out to me and encouraged me to consider submitting my work to agents who represent fiction. I think if she hadn’t approached me I probably would have continued writing just as much as I do today, but it would probably just be for my own satisfaction, instead of as a career

Who or what stories inspired your own personal realization as a writer?

A WRINKLE IN TIME was extremely influential and was the reason I started writing in the first place. I read it when I was 12 and I remember thinking “I want to make something that makes other people feel the way this book made me feel.”. I’ve mentioned this one quite a lot in interviews, but HOLES was also massively influential to me in regards to understanding that writing can be an intensely technical skill, from a very young age. 

A large theme in your books, especially in The Wicker King, is on negligent adults who either refuse to recognize teens in need or are oblivious to it? Could you expand on this topic?

There are so many ways that parents can be “not there” for their children and I think that a lot of the time only a few ways are discussed. 

The Wicker King was unique in that it showed many kids without present adults and how that impacted them, rather than orphaning the main characters for convenience. August had a mother who was physically there but emotionally unavailable in a way that wasn’t really her fault. Jack’s parents were physically absent and emotionally absent, but provided for him financially. Roger and Peter’s parents absence was more periodic but they formed a bond between each other that didn’t allow for outsiders very similar to Jack and August’s but less destructive. Rina’s parents straight up moved away to England and left her living in squalor as a barely-adult teenager.  She’s perilously lonely and friendless and pushes people away.  This book is filled with isolated children trying to make a house into a home: Rina letting August and Jack into her apartment and integrating them into her routine. August and Jack playing house and clawing each other to the bone searching for warmth. Peter and Roger letting August into their world and slowly forming a bond of trust with him. 

I had a lot of friends in similar situations and a lot of them didn’t make it out okay in the end. It was a bit of a relief to have this make believe space to pretend that there could have been a world where they were okay.

Your books, while all grounded in the real world, seem to contain otherworldly elements, relating to magical realism like in The Wicker King, literally being out of this world in The Weight of the Stars, or even fairy tale elements like in Darling. Did you intentionally set out for this or did the style organically evolve this way?

Its intentional. I like fabulism and I feel more comfortable there than in strictly fantasy or contemporary. A lot of real life seems to straddle the ordinary and extraordinary and I enjoy playing with that in my own work. 

Your upcoming book, Darling, is said to be a modern twist on the classic Peter Pan story. In what ways will the story touch upon the original tale and what ways are you planning to invert it? Also, fellow queer author, Aiden Thomas, is also coming out with a Peter Pan based novel, Lost in the Never Woods. Any theories for why this story seems to be resurging all of a sudden?

This is going to sound strangely straight forward, but it’s because the Peter Pan book copyright expires January of next year. There’s going to be an explosion of Peter Pan content for probably a year after. I plotted DARLING in 2013 and have been waiting for this to happen to release it. 

Hypothetically speaking, if the characters of your books or you yourself could interact with characters from any fictional universe, where would they be from?

This is less characters and more about the fictional universe but, I’m very enamoured with Narnia and the melancholy freshness of the worlds in that IP. The concept of life-supporting worlds/universes at different life stages: Some barely budding with small creatures in the light of a weak young sun and some in desolation and burdened under the weight of time cast red in the light of dying stars. The newness of creatures trying to find a home in these places, living their own individual creation myths. There is a lot about the books that is worth giving one disapproving pause. But I think I would like to be that place in the magician’s nephew where the world was so new that anything you plant becomes a kind of tree.

Within your writing and work in general, what messages do you want to give to your readers? What do you wish you had received from books as a young reader yourself growing up?

I wish there had been more LGBT  content. I actually went into this in a paper I recently wrote about fanfiction and I want to include an excerpt: 

We are in an interesting age of resurgence of mass produced LGBTQIAP+ media. As you all know, progress isn’t linear and its a bit too early to boast that “Things have permanently changed”, but currently we’re doing a lot better than we were just ten years ago. It’s recent enough for me and many other LGBTQIAP+ YA authors to vividly remember the time before these changes. It has also existed briefly enough that we can dubiously envision a time in our future without it. The maintenance of a place where marginalized communities can create and share artwork is vital, and has always been a part of LGBTQIAP+ culture. Fan fiction, small indie publishers and self publishing communities have been supporting marginalized writing for almost a century and show very little sign of being eroded by the shifting tides of public moral opinion or whims of mass production. Fan fiction in particular, is the cheapest and lowest risk form of community building within this art form. It is not a mistake or coincidence that nearly all of the mainstream published authors who admit to their past participation in fan fiction culture are women, people of color and LGBTQIAP+ people. Groups that have been historically underserved by mainstream media. Fan fiction isn’t a stepping stone to “real writing” or a place where people write weird NSFW. It’s a hurricane shelter: A place we can play in on an average day, and the most important place for our survival when the weather begins to look dangerous.

Are there any other projects or story ideas you are currently nursing and would be at liberty to say?

Yes! I’m working on an UNTITLED  Train Heist Novel. A cool UNTITLED cult novel for Scholastic and an adult novel about immortality called  WE STOOD ALONE, that hasn’t been purchased yet but my fingers are crossed!

Finally, what are some LGBTQ+ books or authors you would recommend to the readers of Geeks OUT?

Please please please buy Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas and Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. They are both stunning and written with so much love.

The Geeks OUT Podcast: Supernatural(ly) Queer & Problematic

The Geeks OUT Podcast

Opinions, reviews, incisive discussions of queer geek ideas in pop culture, and the particularly cutting brand of shade that you can only get from a couple of queer geeks all in highly digestible weekly doses.

In this week’s episode of the Geeks OUT Podcast, Kevin is joined by Kate Moran, as they discuss Supernatural problematically confirming a character’s queer identity, check out the new trailer for Shonda Rhimes’ Bridgerton, and celebrate Grant Morrison coming out as non-binary in This Week in Queer.

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BIG OPENING

KEVIN: Latest episode of Supernatural confirms a queer shipping
KATE: Kotaku publishes list of video game company execs and what campaigns they donated money

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DOWN AND NERDY

KEVIN: The Dead Don’t Die, Star Trek: Discovery, Queen’s Gambit, Legendary
KATE: Kipo, Korra, Steven Universe, Mandalorian, ACNH, Sims, Among Us, Phasmophobia

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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

New trailer for Shonda Rhimes’s new Netflix series Bridgerton

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THIS WEEK IN QUEER

Comic writer Grant Morrison comes out as non-binary

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CLIP OF THE WEEK

New red band trailer for Icelandic gay vampire movie Thirst

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THE WEEK IN GEEK

MOVIES

• New trailer for the Lego Star Wars Holiday Special
• Jordan Peele is producing a remake of The People Under the Stairs
• Ryan Reynolds’ Free Guy delayed
• Johnny Depp asked to leave Fantastic Beasts sequel
• New trailer for What Lies Below

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TV

• New teaser for Fox’s new animated series The Great North
• AMC announces a Walking Dead holiday special
• Hulu has canceled Castle Rock
• New trailer for HBO Max spanish language series Veneno

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VIDEO GAMES

• Due to COVID, Playstation 5 will sell exclusively online at launch
• Among Spider-Man: Miles Morales areas of representation, includes a deaf character

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SHILF

• KEVIN: Bolin
• KATE: Asami

Interview With Maia Kobabe

Maia Kobabe is a nonbinary, queer author and illustrator from the Bay Area, California. Eir first full length book, GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR, was published in May 2019. Maia’s short comics have been published by The Nib and in many anthologies including THE SECRET LOVES OF GEEKS, FASTER THAN LIGHT Y’ALL, GOTHIC TALES OF HAUNTED LOVE, SHOUT OUT, ADVANCED DEATH SAVES and BE GAY, DO COMICS. Before setting out to work freelance full-time, e worked for over ten years in libraries.

When did you first realize you could tell stories through words and images? What drew you to the graphic novel art form?

I think I internalized the combination of words and images at a very young age, from children’s picture books, which remain one of my favorite forms of media. I started reading graphic novels (specifically, Japanese manga) when I was in junior high, when they started to trickle onto my local library’s shelves. I love both writing and drawing, so graphics novels seemed like the perfect merger of my two loves. 

Your book, Genderqueer, features one of the first discussions of asexuality I’ve seen in comics. If you feel comfortable, can you expand on your relationship to your asexual identity and what the process was like in depicting it?

Asexuality can be very hard to define or explain to people who haven’t spent time thinking about it, since it’s the lack of something, rather than the presence of something. I’m actually aromantic as well, which I think is maybe an even more important factor in how my life has developed. I received so much passive messaging from basically every single book and movie that eventually I would both fall in love with someone and also want to have sex with them. Though I did get crushes as a teen, I never had any desire to act on them. I think I kind of just kept waiting, thinking, well, is this romantic urge going to just hit me out of the blue at some point like I’ve been taught to expect? But it never did. By age 30 I felt confident saying “okay, enough time has passed that I think I can firmly say that romantic partnership is just something I don’t care about at all, and sex is interesting only at the level of curiosity.” I tried to depict this partly through trial and error experiences that helped me fumble towards greater clarity. 

Within the course of your graphic novel, you discuss how your identity has changed and evolved over the years, showcasing the beautiful and often frustrating reality of gender/sexuality identity exploration. Can you expand on that?

I spent a lot of time not knowing what I was, not having a label for how I felt. I can’t tell you how many countless pages of journal entries I wrote asking, “Am I gay, am I bi, am I a lesbian, am I a boy, am I a girl, am I neither, am I half and half” etc. This questioning took up a huge amount of my mental space, and I definitely wanted to hold the readers in that period of uncertainty, in that undefined grey area. 

In Genderqueer, pop culture plays a very big role, whether being mentioned within the form of comics/manga, figure skating, fantasy literature, etc. How as queer individuals do we respond and relate to the pop culture around us in terms of conceiving and understanding our own identities?

As a young queer person who only knew two or three out queer adults, and was uninterested in dating and sex, consuming queer media was my main form of exploration and discovery of queer identities. I think lots of young queer feel this need to research who we are, especially if we don’t see any role modes in our family or community. Many of the queer books I read as a teen remain my very favorites to this day because of how intensely intimate and emotional it felt to read them.

What’s a question no one has asked you yet or that you wish was asked more?

I wish more people asked me, “Should I write my own memoir?” so I could tell them yes!

What are some of your favorite elements of comics/graphic novel medium? What craft elements/techniques stand out to you the most?

One element I love is called a non-adjacent sequence. It’s a series of panels or even pages which are repeated, with a new twist, two or more times in a book. The idea is that the reader will either consciously notice this call back and flip back in the book to find the first example, or else be unconsciously influenced by the repetition and better understand that the two scenes are linked. In “Gender Queer” I used the same panel layout for pages 125 and 219. I also repeated the same plant motif on pages 66, 67 and 191.

Aside from Melanie Gilman, the queer/ non-binary mentor stated within your book, who are some of your other creative/artistic influences?

I am influenced by a lot of other cartoonists, especially ones who draw from their own lives: Mari Naomi, Lucy Knisley, Lucy Bellwood, Erika Moen, Raina Telgemeier, Alison Bechdel, Dylan Edwards, Ajuan Mance, Thi Bui, Sarah Mirk and Shing Yin Khor immediately come to mind. The comics journalism website The Nib has also impacted me a lot- I am both a reader of and a contributor to their site, and their latest anthology “Be Gay, Do Comics.” Many of my very first nonfiction comics were published by The Nib and I benefited greatly from working with their all-star editorial team. 

As a creative person, what advice would you give to other aspiring artists/writers?

Go forth! Be recklessly honest, be gentle, be bold, be strong, be soft. If you tell your own darkest secrets with a spirit of compassion towards your younger self, you will help readers heal their own wounds.

What are some things you wish to say to your trans/non-binary readers?

I love you, and we are family. 

Are there any projects you are working on at the moment and are at liberty to speak about?

I illustrated a YA prose novel called “We Are The Ashes, We Are The Fire” by Joy McCullough which is due out from Penguin Random House in Feb 2021. It’s got some very heavy themes, but also a renaissance-fair obsessed nonbinary teen character who I love very much. I am also developing my next full length graphic novel in collaboration with the nonbinary cartoonist Lucky Srikumar.

Finally, what are some LGBTQ+ comics or books you would recommend to the readers of Geeks Out?

Buckle your seatbelt, I have a lot of recommendations. I post 100 book reviews per year on Goodreads, so feel free to follow me on there if you want even more! But here are some comics with trans and nonbinary characters which I really loved: Grease Bats by Archie Bongiovanni (a slice of life comic – nonbinary main character) (author is also nonbinary)  

Heartwood: Non-binary Tales of Sylvan Fantasy edited by Joamette Gil (anthology of short comics, all with nonbinary authors)

The Avant-Guards by Carly Usdin and Noah Hayes (an ongoing comic series, one nonbinary character, one trans character)

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me by Mariko Tamaki and Rosemary Valero-O’Connell  (a slice of life comic – a nonbinary secondary character)

Mooncakes by Suzanne Walker and Wendy Xu (fantasy YA comic – a nonbinary main character)

Snapdragon by Kay Leyh (a trans secondary character)

Stage Dreams by Melanie Gillman (trans character, nonbinary author)

As The Crow Flies  by Melanie Gillman (trans character, nonbinary author)

The Deep and Dark Blue by Niki Smith (trans main character)

O Human Star by Blue Delliquanti (trans secondary, nonbinary author)

Wandering Son by Takako Shimura (a manga series, multiple trans characters)

Paradise Kiss by Ai Yazawa  (a manga series, one  trans character)

On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden (sci-fi comic – a nonbinary secondary character)

Happy reading 🙂


You can follow Maia Kobabe @redgoldsparks on instagram and tumblr

The Geeks OUT Podcast: Watching the Mandalorian’s Timothy OnlyFans

The Geeks OUT Podcast

Opinions, reviews, incisive discussions of queer geek ideas in pop culture, and the particularly cutting brand of shade that you can only get from a couple of queer geeks all in highly digestible weekly doses.

The Geeks OUT Podcast returns this week as Kevin is joined by Bobby Hankinson, as they discuss Cartoon Network’s new anti-racist PSA, swoon over Timothy Olyphant in the new season of The Mandalorian, and with election day looming we celebrate AOC reaching out to voters while playing Among Us as our Strong Female Character of the Week.

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BIG OPENING

KEVIN: Cartoon Network releases new Steven Universe Anti-Racist PSA
BOBBY: HBO Max orders 2 seasons of Tiny Toons Looniversity

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DOWN AND NERDY

KEVIN: The Connors, Superstore, Helstrom, Dept. of Truth
BOBBY: The Mandalorian, Hocus Pocus – Search for the Sanderson Sisters, NXT Halloween Havoc … Degrassi

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STRONG FEMALE CHARACTER

AOC reaches out to voters playing Among Us

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THIS WEEK IN QUEER

CW developing adaptation of Tom Swift as a gay black billionaire inventor

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CLIP OF THE WEEK

New trailer for the Saved By the Bell revival

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THE WEEK IN GEEK

MOVIES

• New teaser for Halloween Kills
• New trailer for The Midnight Sky
• New trailer for Songbird
• Amazon announces 2021’s Welcome to the Blumhouse movies

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TV

• New teaser for the second season of the Are You Afraid of the Dark reboot
The CW announces 2021 premiere dates
• First look at Javicia Leslie as Batwoman
• First look at Red Hood in the new season of Titans
• HBO brings in Clive Barker for their new Hellraiser series 
• Peacock cancels Brave New World
• New teaser for the final season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
• Oscar Isaac in talks to play Moon Knight

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VIDEO GAMES

• Gaming meets anime as Sony is buying Crunchyroll 
• Ellen Page to play gamer coach in 1UP

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SHILF

• KEVIN: Marc Spector
• BOBBY: Moon Knight