Critiquing Comics #128: “Osaka Mime” and “Pantheon’s End”

Tokyo Mime and Pantheon's End

Tim and Mulele progress through the 2018 Irrational Comics PITCH page in this episode with Tokyo Mime, featuring two cops going up against a monster that takes the form of the last person it ate, and Pantheon’s End, in which a superhero team is faced with an apparently unstoppable end to the world.

#586 Flirting with death, and recovering your life

This week Koom interviews Prabal Purkayastha, author of Flirting with Death, about how he tried to use the structure of a comic to communicate music, and how his next project is just the opposite of this one.

Then, what would you do if you found yourself on a park bench along a city street, and you knew where you were but you didn’t know who you were? Your home, friends, family, job, all forgotten. Tim and Eugenia review the French graphic novel Blank Slate, by Boulet and Penelope Bagieu, in which a young woman in Paris encounters exactly this problem.

Critiquing Comics #127: “Planet Wrestletopia” and “Dreamtime”

Planet Wrestletopia and Dreamtime

Invasion from Planet Wrestletopia #1 presents a washed-up wrestler who, though he doesn’t know it yet, is about to have to defend his 15-year-old claim to being “the champion of the universe”! Is this comic by Ed Kuehnel, Matt Entin, and Dan Schkade also a champion, or another also-ran?

Irrational Comics is again presenting its annual PITCH page, in which five writers submit eight-page scripts, drawn by the publishers artists, and then users vote for their favorite. In this episode, Tim and Mulele discuss the first of the five, Shaun Kang’s Dreamtime, in which a man uses the Aussie Aboriginal “dreamtime” state to solve murders.

Attend the upcoming CANVAS Sequential Art Meetup on Comics & Visual Storytelling in Tokyo on February 15 at 7 pm, featuring Raul Trevino, and this podcast’s own Mulele Jarvis and Tim Young!

#585 The Phantom’s surprising reach

The Phantom

The Phantom was introduced by Lee Falk in 1936, and appeared in comic books and funny pages for decades. Now comes a new book by Kevin Patrick, The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero.

In this episode, Kevin Patrick tells Emmet about the character’s global popularity, especially in Sweden, Australia, and India — and how “The Ghost that Walks” made his first appearance in all three countries in the same unlikely way. Why did the setting change in the early years from an urban situation to a jungle? What does it say about the situation in the former British colonies, especially in Africa? Why is the Phantom that Emmet remembers considered “wrong” by fans? All this and more.

Attend the upcoming CANVAS Sequential Art Meetup on Comics & Visual Storytelling in Tokyo on February 15 at 7 pm, featuring Raul Trevino, and this podcast’s own Mulele Jarvis and Tim Young!