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One of the very first podcasts recommended to me while I was getting back into comics was Geektress.
There's nothing fancy about the podcast. It's just three ladies sitting around, having fun, and talking about the comics that they love. Though a number of other female-oriented podcasts have joined them over the years, they're still as entertaining as they ever were, and still come highly recommended by one of their biggest fans, comics creator Gail Simone.
Brenda Kirk, one of the podcast's founders, says it's hard to break down exactly why the podcast gained strength so fast but she has some good guesses.
"I would describe our podcast as a completely disorganized conversation among friends who love comics and televison. We don't do interviews and we usually don't even provide structured reviews or anything. But people seem to like it because it seems inviting, probably because it really is just like eavesdropping on one of our phone calls."
Among their most popular recent episodes concerned the age-old question of who would win in a fight? The discussion started in an earlier podcast and just steamrolled from there.
Unfortunately, their website hasn't had as much smooth-sailing as their podcast. They've been hacked twice recently, creating a lot of expense in time and money. To compensate, they're asking people to visit their Etsy store, which includes items such as the t-shirt above–versions retail for as little as $5–as well as a men's t-shirt of Power Girl's famous (or infamous) boob window, to allow the men to get in on the Power Girl cosplay action. My favorite is the robot monkey knit cap, which does look dashing on Lord Darth.
I talked to Brenda Kirk last week about the site, how it was created, how Smallville helped create the podcast and why she keeps letters from female soldiers stationed overseas next to her computer.
GeekMom: What's a Geektress? Why was it created?
Brenda: Rania, Laura, and I were all on the Television Without Pity Smallville message boards, back when TWoP wasn't owned by Bravo. Also, at the start of Smallville, most of the people who watched the show – at least on those boards – didn't really read comics. We kept watching for whatever reason and we realized that (at the time) there weren't many websites where women talked about comics. In fact, I think [Pink Raygun](https://contextly.com/redirect/?id=DDeYbVOvJk&click=inbody "Pink Raygun.com | "Sometimes I think if I hear that word frequency") and Sequential Tart might have been the only sites we found.
So we decided to blog about comics, and sci-fi, and fantasy books, and generally all the things we'd always loved, but never knew other women loved, too. But putting a website together is pretty hard when you have a full time job, so it took us almost a year of planning and writing and many, many phone calls. We recorded a lot of those phone calls in order to keep track of things – since I'm in Ohio and Laura's in New York and Rania's in Pennsylvania – and that's what most of our early podcasts are, basically our phone conversations.
The podcast took off way before the site ever did, thanks to Gail Simone giving us a positive review.
In fact, by the time we were ready to launch, IO9 had gone online, and we noticed it was edited by a woman (Annalee Newitz), so it was cool to see something that we wanted to do take off right away on a professional level, but it was frustrating to realize we'd fallen behind the curve a little bit.
Now there are dozens of "girl geek" blogs, and other great general geekery sites like our friends at Gamma Squad and Geeks of Doom. There are also a couple of really great all-female comics podcasts, so we're like the old farts at this point.
GM: Is it just the three of you involved still or are there more geektresses?
Brenda: Originally it was just Rania, Laura, and I, with Laura and I doing most of the website-writing duties because we had access to computers while we were at work. Then we picked up some guest writers and recappers along the way, and now we've permanently added Carey and Francene on writing and podcast co-hosting duties.
Of course, since we're doing this for the fun of it, we can't cover every convention, so sometimes people volunteer to do interviews or
review video games or write up events like Dragon*Con for us. We really wouldn't have coverage of that sort of stuff if it weren't for
other women who don't mind writing for the site out of the goodness of their heart.
GM: What's the most fun thing you've done as part of Geektress?
Brenda: It's really pretty hard to narrow it down, actually. We've gone to a lot of conventions together and a lot of not-geeky-related-events together, and there's never been a bad time. We've also met some amazing people, like the Comic Book Queers and Iz McAuliffe (formerly of Comic Racks). A couple of years ago we had a charity drive at New York Comic Con to send comic books to American soldiers serving overseas, and the response was amazing. Not only did fans and friends of our podcast turn up with piles of donated comics, professionals at the con gave us things out of the blue to auction or send in care packages.
If I had a long time to think about it, I could probably narrow it down to just one thing, but it would more than likely be from the first New York Comic Con or the first C2E2. Conventions in their first few years are always the most fun.
GM: What's the most rewarding thing?
Brenda: When we started sending comics to soldiers, it just seemed like a fun thing to do with the comics we didn't want anymore (because we'd bought the trade, or had duplicates).
At first we picked military units that specifically had females asking for comics. The first one I think was a woman who said that apparently Batman comics were deemed "too violent" and so they couldn't get them in Iraq. We sent the first 10 issues of Batman & Robin, plus everything else we could put our hand to. Then people kept donating and we kept sending stuff, and that's when the letters from female soldiers started coming back to us, telling us they had no idea that there were other women out there who read comics, too. I keep those cards next to the computer where I keep my podcast notebook.
GM: What has been the most frustrating?
Brenda: When we started sending out care packages to anyone who was requesting comics, not just the female soldiers, we came across a group of 20 marines embedded in Afghanistan, and their only request was socks. A lot of the other units want stuff like DVDs or iTunes cards in addition to the comics, and these guys just wanted socks. Twenty American soldiers in Afghanistan couldn't get socks.
I wanted to throw something against the wall.
As far as the site goes, we seem to have a bunch of technical issues that set us back. If it's not someone's microphone dying, then it's our website getting spammed or the podcast just not recording correctly. I think one time we tried three times over the course of a week to record one podcast, and by the third time it failed we just gave up and started fresh the next week. Stuff like that can make it more of a drag and more like a job than just calling each other up and having conversations about the website, like it used to be.
GM: If you had Joe Quesada (Marvel) and Dan DiDio (DC Comics) sitting at a roundtable with you, what would you like to ask them? Tell them?
Brenda: I wish there were more all-ages comics. I love the grownup stuff like American Vampire a lot, but I like when I can hand off an issue of Tiny Titans or Brave and the Bold to a little kid and have them enjoy it just as much as I did. (I guess that shows how much of a comic collector I'm not – I like giving away most of my single issues to someone else after I'm done reading them.)
I am sad that DiDio was at an after-party we were at once, and I really wanted to tell him Gotham City Sirens had become an amazing book for me, but this was right before it was announced that the Universe was being rebooted and that title was going away. I guess I'd still tell him that Pete Calloway is one of the best writers they've got. And that I want Xombi back.
At any rate, none of us know what it's like to run a comic book company, so suggesting ways for them to do their jobs isn't something we'd do.
All we can do is vote for the kind of books we want to read, and which creators we'd like writing them, by buying them.
