#475 International Comics Fest 2015, pt 2

Kaigai 2015

This week our coverage of Tokyo’s International Comics Festival concludes with creators from Finland, Brazil, France, Japan, Indonesia, and the U.S., including a chat with podcast co-founder Mulele on what he’s learned in the past year of convention tabling.

Continue reading #475 International Comics Fest 2015, pt 2

Critiquing Comics #081: Reckstar

ReckstarAn alien and his human are traveling through space. What does the alien do when his boss strongly suggests he should ditch the idiot human? Tim and Mulele discuss Joey Cruz and Michelle Nguyen’s Reckstar, as well as some realizations Mulele made about podcasts and comics. Oh, and, of course, Star Wars.

#474 International Comics Fest 2015, pt 1

Kaigai easelThis year’s International Comics Festival (Kaigai Manga Festa) in Tokyo was bigger than ever! Plenty of familiar faces from past years gave it a sense of community (long sought by many foreign comics creators feeling rather isolated in Japan), but there were plenty of new faces, too, many of whom flew in from Europe and North America to be here. Tim once again procured a media pass and went booth-to-booth gathering interviews! Photos and Web links for all interviewees are below.

Continue reading #474 International Comics Fest 2015, pt 1

#473 Matt Seneca on sports, hate, and religion

Matt Seneca from AffectedYou may have heard Matt Seneca on the podcast Comic Books are Burning in Hell (and, hey, he was on our show once, in the persona of a mild mannered comics shop manager!), but he’s also a comics creator in his own right. His comics are deep, dark, and very honest in expressing his opinions. This week he talks with Tim about the lack of sports in American comics, why he needs to feel hate for something to make a good comic, and more.

#473 Matt Seneca on sports, hate, and religion

Matt Seneca from AffectedYou may have heard Matt Seneca on the podcast Comic Books are Burning in Hell (and, hey, he was on our show once, in the persona of a mild mannered comics shop manager!), but he’s also a comics creator in his own right. His comics are deep, dark, and very honest in expressing his opinions. This week he talks with Tim about the lack of sports in American comics, why he needs to feel hate for something to make a good comic, and more.

Critiquing Comics #080: Ugli Studios Presents #2

Ugli Presents 2Back in Critiquing Comics #25, we discussed the first issue of comics anthology mag Ugli Studios Presents. This time Tim and Mulele are looking at issue 2, finding some interesting ideas and art but some missed opportunities and places where crucial establishing shots don’t appear, leading to confusion. Maybe these creators just needed more pages to tell their stories?

#472 Brian Schirmer and “Black Jack Ketchum”

Black Jack KetchumBrian Schirmer, a comics educator in San Francisco and writer of Ultrasylvania and the forthcoming Image series Black Jack Ketchum, joins Tim this week to talk about the difference between writing screenplays and writing comics; how he turned his comics script into a for-credit class for artists; tips that have led him to have both successful crowdfunding projects and good sales at conventions; and more.

#471 “Crumb” and “Punk Rock Jesus”

Crumb
Punk Rock Jesus

Tim and Kumar meet in person for the first time! This calls for a podcast, but… what to review? We discuss the movie Crumb, which features not only the expected discussion of R. Crumb’s work (including an objective look at the question of whether some of the … discomfiting subjects of his work should really have been published as “art”), but also a fascinating portrait of the dysfunctional family he grew up in.

Then, Tim and Brandon clash over Sean Murphy’s Punk Rock Jesus, in which a former Irish Republican Army member acts as a bodyguard in a reality show claiming to be creating the clone of Jesus Christ. Is it objective and well-written, or a promo brochure for atheism?