Crash Course: Introduction

GateCrashers has been introducing you to new worlds for over 3 years now, all with the goal of helping people find their way into things like comics, prose, music, and so much more. The podcast has always been focused on starting points and will continue to be so. But what about after? What do you do once those gates are blown off the hinges and you’re barreling down the path looking for more?

Enter Crash Courses.

Crash Course is a new series meant to help you find starting points for an array of interests. But don’t worry, they won’t leave you hanging at the beginning, because Crash Course is designed to be your guide and navigate where to go long after you grasp the basics. With the help of our incredibly talented team, who have a multitude of interests, Crash Courses are going to cover things from all corners of the universe including superheroes, Kafka (no, really) and so much more. The goal is to help you find a few recommendations with a personal touch of where to begin. If you like those, then you can continue to the rest of the list to keep going further.

These articles are going to follow a format of something everyone loves, sandwiches. You know how important sandwiches are to us. The reason we ask every guest about them is because food is the great connector in my opinion. You learn so much about a person when sharing a meal. A sandwich is the most versatile of meals, so we are going to be building Crash Courses like a sandwich. Each will include three levels:

The bread is the foundation of the sandwich. It’s the building block upon which all other items are placed and held together by. This level is where you will find recommendations that are fundamentals. Each of these will be like a taste test to see if you actually like the topic the Crash Course is covering.

For example, let’s say you were reading a Batman Crash Course and none of these stories tickled your fancy. That may mean Batman isn’t for you and that’s okay! Just means you gave it a shot, ate a tasty loaf of bread, and moved on to find something else that was more for you.

The Meat refers to the sandwich fillings, the hearty things inside the sandwich. It doesn’t need to be the actual meat! It can be tofu, onions, lettuce, and so on. It’s what you add on top. These are things that dig further into the Crash Course topic. They can range from classic stories or albums or things that you may have heard of but never had a chance to really check out. They’re typically topics that need a bit more background knowledge to really get into. So once you have the foundation of your bread, you move on to the meat because it builds on top, get it?

This is where you get to the part that makes this unique for whoever is writing. Have you ever had a sandwich where one tweak made by the deli makes it a life changing experience? This is where those types of recommendations live. This is where you will see the deep cuts. The special sauce that has made this subject linger so long in the writer’s mind. These are the recommendations that the writer typically holds dear to them because they’re special. The secret ingredients that make whatever they’re talking about special to them.

My example is that if I were talking about DC Comics, I would put Resurrection Man here, Is that a book everyone reads? No. Does anyone really know him? No. But is that book super special to me and I think it’s a good rec to see how weird the DC universe can be? Absolutely.

So, I hope your seat belts are buckled because you’re going to be put through a lot of Crash Courses. Hold on tight.