Blog: Pints Of Knowledge (slight return)

< previous

On Wednesday evening I headed once more to distant South London - WANDSWORTH to be precise, where I was due to do a talk about Superhero Storytelling at The Alma for Pints Of Knowledge. I had written myself out a PLAN to get as far as the station, thinking I'd work out the way to the pub once I got there, but it turned out the pub was directly opposite the entrance anyway. It was an OMEN of an evening of ease and delight yet to come.

Once inside I popped upstairs where I met Ben, one of the organisers, and Merlin, the barman. The last time I met a barman called Merlin was in the last century when that was the name of the bar manager at the legendary Magazine in Leicester, who famously (NB if you drank in there) did the accounts on an Oric-1 or Dragon 32, depending upon who you asked, so this was another good omen.

We had a quick chat about how it was going to work and then I went downstairs to get some tea. Last time I did one of these shows the journey there had been FRAUGHT with PANIC due to trains etc, so this time I had left PLENTY of leeway, giving me a good half hour to have an extremely delicious CAULIFLOWER CHATEUABRIAND. I've just looked up what "chateaubriand" means and I guess that means it was a big cauliflower cooked between lesser vegetables (broccoli?) but either way it was very nice.

Then I went back upstairs and met Isaac, who was going to be doing my introduction, got a drink from Merlin, and sat at the side to watch people coming in. CRIKEY but there were actually SEVERAL of them, with the room getting close to filling up!

These nights start with a question for the audience, which this time was "what are the iconic aspects of a superhero to you?" which got some VERY interesting answers, all of which I managed to come back to in my actual talk which, not to put too fine a point on it, seemed to go really well. Cor, it was a HUGE amount of fun - I felt a lot more comfortable doing it this time, probably because I didn't need to use a microphone so could waft from side to side to the stage using both hands to explain things and NOT panic about whether I could hold it correctly.

The talk itself was a massive re-write of the last one, taking out most of the Doctor Doom and Batman stuff (but not all of it) and digging into the three act structure, American Monomyth, Umberto Eco and his Oneiric Climate, and all that sort of thing. As it went along my BRANE got into it and I started thinking up NEW BITS, and then when we got into the Q&A section the huge range of EXCELLENT questions really got me thinking and opened up all sorts of new IDEAS too.

It was basically like the most fun academic presentation EVER, except that the questions after were all ACTUAL QUESTIONS that people wanted ACTUAL ANSWERS for. There were so many questions, in fact, that when the evening itself ended I spent another twenty minutes or so talking to people who had yet more things to ask, which was utterly and entirely lovely.

As I think I have remarked before, it is a wonderful idea to have evenings in the pub where people with curious minds can come out and FIND OUT ABOUT STUFF, especially as it means that the person who is telling them (e.g. me) gets to find out more themselves too. I would HIGHLY recommend getting to one of these events if you can, they are GRATE!

posted 15/10/2026 by MJ Hibbett

< previous