Travis McElroy on Bubble, The Adventure Zone and MBMBaM podcasts

Alex Biese | Asbury Park Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Six Flags Great Adventure new Cyborg ride: We get exclusive look Alex Biese and Felecia Wellington Radel, co-hosts of our Fan Theory pop culture podcast, check out "Cyborg Cyber Spin," the DC Comics-based new ride at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson.

Travis McElroy is fighting monsters.

McElroy, part of a prominent podcasting family hailing from West Virginia, currently can be heard on a pair of podcasts that center on the idea of finding, fighting and defeating monstrous creatures: “Bubble” and “The Adventure Zone.”

Speaking with “Fan Theory,” the USA Today Network and Asbury Park Press’ pop culture podcast, McElroy discussed why he thinks such themes are resonating with audiences at this moment.

(For more from "Fan Theory," watch hosts Alex Biese and Felecia Wellington Radel ride the new Cyborg attraction at Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson in the video at the top of this story.)

“There was a while there where I think on some level, be it conscious or subconscious, everybody kind of felt like, ‘Everything is going pretty OK right now in the bigger picture of the world and politics and socially, and so the stories we’re going to tell are post-apocalyptic and very scary,’” McElroy said. “And they were like, ‘Oh, what if everything went wrong?’

“And I think we’re at a point now where socially, politically, culturally, everybody is feeling very scared. There’s a lot of violence going on, there’s a lot of both giant socioeconomic issues that (need to) be dealt with and individual stuff that people are going through, and there’s a lot of helplessness that I think is connected to that. And so, I think that there’s something where people are looking for how they can fight back, how they can help, what they can do. They’re looking for the monster that they can stop and make something better.

Created by Jordan Morris, “Bubble” launched its eight-episode inaugural season in mid-June via MaximumFun.org.

The scripted, narrative series is a quippy, insightful comedy about hip, young monster hunters in the modern metropolis of Fairhaven and stars Alison Becker, a native of Allamuchy Township, Warren County.

New episodes of “Bubble” post every Wednesday; McElroy and his brothers, Justin and Griffin, appeared on the series’ July 4 episode, "Home Brew."

The concept of imperfect heroes banding together to fight for a greater good is territory the McElroy brothers and their father Clint have worked in since the 2014 launch of “The Adventure Zone,” an improvised narrative series that utilizes tabletop role-playing game mechanics to craft original tales.

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The first arc of the “Balance” campaign of “The Adventure Zone” has made the shift from the audio to the visual with the new graphic novel “The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins,” set for release Tuesday, July 17 via First Second Books.

The family will celebrate the release with a sold-out show that night at The Town Hall in Manhattan.

“I think that that’s something that is fairly universal and maybe a little bit eternal in storytelling, the idea of the greater-than-the-sum-of-their-parts group of people coming together, not being alone, standing against the darkness, finding not only strengths within themselves but strengths when they share their lives with each other,” McElroy said. “I think there is something that is incredibly universal and inspiring about that, because it’s a thing that on a very granular, independent level, we feel every day.

“I mean, I think that a lot of who I am now is from spending time with my brothers and my friends and my wife. … I learn more about myself and I grow more as a person when i connect with other people. I used to think that it was all about introspection and looking within yourself and finding the power within and all that stuff, but for me I didn’t really start to be comfortable with myself and really become happy until I allowed myself to open up to other people and connect more with them and become reliant on other people to help me and stuff like that.”

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The McElroy brothers first entered the podcasting world with the comedic advice series “My Brother, My Brother and Me” launching in 2010. But Travis McElroy told “Fan Theory” that despite his theatrical training background, said he needed some time to adjust to the format.

“When I was growing up and in college I kind of hated the sound of my own voice,” McElroy said, “which is funny because I love talking. It’s not that, it’s like in recordings and anything like that I just couldn’t listen to my own voice, it sounded so differently in the recording than it did in my head. So when we started doing ‘My Brother, My Brother and Me’ I was really nervous about putting the sound of my voice out into the world because I just didn’t like it.

“And now through the years it has not only become my main mode of supporting myself and making a living, it is also the thing about me that I would say is most identifiable to people, and so it’s very strange now. I remember in college in an acting class we did like mock auditions, and one of them was for voice-over, and I kind of opted out of it, and the teacher asked why and I said, ‘Because I’m never going to make a living using my voice, my voice is terrible.’ And now, no joke, eight years, 10 years later, I’m literally doing exactly that.”

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It was his older brother Justin, Travis said, who helped him overcome his initial vocal misgivings.

“The first episode of ‘My Brother, My Brother and Me’ that we put out, Justin kind of snuck it up on me and said we were just going to do a test episode so I wasn’t nervous,” McElroy said. “And then when we finished recording it he was like, ‘OK, cool, yeah, I’m going to put that out,’ and so it kind of saved me from ever being too nervous about it, because I didn’t know it was coming.

“And then the episode went out and people liked it and nobody really commented on my voice, and in fact if anything the comments that I got were that Griffin and Justin and I sounded all alike, which isn’t true when I hear it. And then over time, from doing it so much and hearing myself back in recordings, because I would edit stuff or I would listen back to episodes that we would put out, ... it became weirdly dissociative, where i would be like, ‘that is not me, that’s the Travis that’s on “My Brother, My Brother and Me,”' and I would listen to what we were actually saying instead of critiquing my own voice. And over time I stopped worrying about it.”