Blog: Pints of Knowledge
On Wednesday evening I had a DREAMLIKE journey across London to distant Chiswick, where I was due to give a TALK for Pints of Knowledge. I say "dreamlike" because it was a series of delays, errors (on my part), more delays, and lots of other trains overtaking us as we tried to get to An Important Appointment with time running out. If my legs had turned into tree trunks and/or I had forgotten to wear any trousers then I would not have been AT ALL surprised.
Still, we got there in the end with approx 7 minutes to spare to find the lovely people who run Pints Of Knowledge entirely unruffled, possibly because this was NOT technically a gig and so there wasn't any real need FOR me to be there until the whole thing actually started. On the way there I had rung them and said "I'm playing at Pints of Knowledge tonight", and The Acts On My Bill pointed out that this probably wasn't the correct terminology. In related news, I also spent about half the journey realising I hadn't got my guitar, panicking I'd left it somewhere, and then remembering I didn't need it.
Professor Steve Cross was also there, wielding a camera for some snazzy pictures (some of which are BELOW), and after a quick chat with him and a hello to the organisers the show... sorry, TALK, began with the host asking if this was anyone's first time at Pints of Knowledge. To my surprise/delight about two thirds of the audience put their hands up, meaning they had come to see ME! Gosh!
I then took to the stage with clicker and microphone in my hands to begin talking about "Why Doctor Doom Is Better Than Batman (and How We Can Prove It)" and realised that OH NO I did not have access to Presenter View. For those who have not done PowerPoint presentations, this is a facility where the current slide is shown on the screen but on your laptop you get a smaller preview of what's coming NEXT as well. This is VERY useful if, like me, you tend to build a talk around the slides and have indeed come to RELY on it, so it was a bit scary to have to try and remember what was coming next, but I think I just about managed it. Also I remembered that many years ago I had gone to TRAINING with Steve at UCL where he spent ages trying to get academics to understand that you need to hold the microphone NEAR YOUR MOUTH, and was now highly aware of exactly where I was placing it. AND that the fact that the screen was MASSIVE meant I kept almost falling off stage in an effort to get out of the way!
Hopefully my multiple internal PANICS did not distract the audience too much, who were ATTENTIVE, ENGAGED and also GRATE. I talked about my Doctor Doom research but then veered off into discussion of how superhero storytelling differs from the conventional three act structure and why that causes problems for Hollywood adaptations, based on last year's book chapter Supervillains are the real heroes (which you can read for free at that link). I also did my usual bit asking for suggestions for characters to try out the unified catalogue of transmedia character components on, which got lots of fab suggestions (we did Wolverine in the end, which I don't think I've had before) and then when we got to the end there was a series of BRILLIANT questions.
My only disappointment was that I think I may have overrun slightly, and so there wasn't a huge amount of time for the Q&A session, which I'd been v much looking forward to. However, after it was over I was joined by a GROUP of people who all wanted to ask questions and we ended up having a BRILLIANT session of DISCUSSION about matters raised. I must say this made me very happy indeed, and also relieved that I have been doing some REVISION e.g. reading the first volume of "Absolute Batman" as there were lots of pertinent and also CURRECT points being made.
It was a pretty amazing evening all round, extraordinarily well organised, even in the face of me panicking, and attended by an overwhelmingly YOUNG audience who were there to expand their BRANES. Cor, imagine if things such as this had existed when I was in my twenties, where you could go to an EVENT and have speakers EXPLAIN interesting stuff to you and then DISCUSS it with other like-minded types - it would have been GRATE!
posted 7/8/2026 by MJ Hibbett