#279 Do your comics skills match your ambitions?

Just starting your comics career? Got a story to tell? Are you starting big — maybe too big? Or are you starting really, really small — say, a comic about guys who like to get small?

Tim and Mulele discuss comics from listeners that go to these extremes: City of Walls v. 1 by Shaun Noel and Abede Lovelace, and Hippy Jonny by Ryan S. Dodd.

UPDATE 6/2/11: Here’s a PDF with selected pages from City of Walls. Thanks to Shaun Noel for providing!

#278 “Jimmy Corrigan”, the Densest Comic Book on Earth

Jimmy CorriganChris Ware‘s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth started as a jokey, weird, serialized comic and evolved into a densely packed tale of betrayal, loss, and recovery. Not only that, but Ware’s extraordinary cartooning captures the mundane moments of everyday life as well as it utilizes symbolism on multiple levels. And not only that… Well, unlocking everything gathered into this 380-page tome is a task that can’t be completed in a one-hour podcast, but Tim and Kumar do their darnedest to cover all the bases.

#277 “Daytripper” & Mike Maihack (“Cleopatra in Space”) interview

A double-header episode this week!

First, Tim and Brandon discuss Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba‘s Daytripper. No, it’s not a time travel story (is it a story at all?); it’s a reflection on life and death. Is it fantastic, or trite? Depends on your point of view…

Then, Tim talks to Mike Maihack, the talented creator behind Cleopatra in Space, about motion lines, Web comics as a business, and more.

#276 Two Emerald City Exhibitors: A Closer Look

Hominids and Over the SurfaceNot wanting to leave Emerald City Comicon behind without giving a closer look to at least a few of the creators he met there, Tim chooses Web comics by two of those creators to critique with Mulele: Hominids by by Jordan Kotzebue, and Over the Surface by Natalie Nourigat. Plus: Panels for Primates (link is to Tim’s favorite selection), and the Web comic creator Tim regrets overlooking at Emerald City!

#275 Slott Super Stories

Amazing Spider-Man 655This week we veer off into the superhero lane, as longtime webhead Tim compares notes on recent issues of The Amazing Spider-Man with Kumar, who hadn’t read ASM in years & wondered what all the fuss was about over Dan Slott’s ongoing run. Slott does his best to stick to the axiom that “every issue is someone’s first”, so you have to make the bones thrown to fanboys understandable to newbies; how did Kumar fare? Also discussed are the wisdom (or lack thereof) of trying to explain the unexplainable, e.g. “spider sense”, and other things that did or didn’t work for us in ASM 654-657.

Plus, a shoutout to Gerry Alanguilan, author of the newly published Elmer.