What’s creator Ron Randall been up to since we talked with him last? He’s continuing his comic Trekker, now 35 years since its inception, and is up to his seventh Kickstarter for the series. He’s back to talk about that, plus he and Tim talk about the rise of decompressed storytelling in American comics over the past few decades, what caused its rise, and its pluses and minuses.
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Jim Rugg is known for his indy hit Street Angel, for being half of the duo hosting the super-prolific Cartoonist Kayfabe videos series, and for illustrating other works such as Cecil Castellucci’s The Plain Janes. Now he’s about to be known for the Hulk retrospective Hulk: Grand Design. This time, Kumar talks with him about how the Hulk work came about, the development of Street Angel, his ever-changing artistic process, the making of Cartoonist Kayfabe, and more!
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Ghosting is about a bus driver in a budding relationship with a woman who suddenly disappears from his life. Has he simply been ghosted? Or is there more to it? Emmet was captivated by the book (winner of the 2020 Best Irish Comic award), and this time he chats with its author (and fellow Ireland native), Debbie Jenkinson about this book and her forthcoming followup, the Dublin comics scene, how being an outsider affects the art one produces, and more.
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San Diego Comicon has always been about more than comics! That’s the contention of producer and journalist Mathew Klickstein, who joins Tim this week to tell us all about his audio documentary podcast “Comic-Con Begins!” Mathew talked with dozens of people who were there at the birth of the con and celebrities who have appeared there over the years, and reaches back decades before SDCC’s birth in 1970, to the earliest rumblings of geekdom. He’ll also give us some idea of what’s in the future for this history project.
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Cathy Guisewite‘s longrunning comic strip Cathy is still a topic of discussion, 11 years after it ended. While it may sometimes seem as if topics like sexual harassment and body image are new fields discovered in the last five or ten years, Cathy was bringing them up in the ’80s and ’90s.
Comedian Jamie Loftus wanted to dig in and have a discussion about this classic strip, so she started a podcast miniseries, Aack Cast, in which she talks with Cathy readers, other cartoonists, and even Guisewite herself about many of the issues raised in the strip. Emmet talks with Jamie in this episode.
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After fifteen years of cartooning for The New Yorker, Joe Dator has a deep catalog of published work – and a pretty deep catalog of UNpublished work as well (it’s a competitive business!). So in his new book Inked: Cartoons, Confessions, Rejected Ideas and Secret Sketches from the New Yorker’s Joe Dator, Joe includes not only some of his best New Yorker work, and why he seems to get stuck on certain topics (birds, anteaters, arguably nightmarish faces made of bacon and fruit on top of a pancake) but his favorites of the work that hasn’t seen print before. Joe returns to the podcast this week to chat with Tim about the book.
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Most people have some dreams of fame and fortune. A certain portion of those people make their way to Hollywood in hopes of getting that big break. But how much are you willing to give up to achieve that goal? And what if the fame isn’t as great as you expected? These are the questions arising from the forthcoming graphic novel Everyone is Tulip, by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux. This time, Dave and Nicole tell Tim about their collaboration style, how comics writers are (often unfairly) seen as more important than artists, why rejection doesn’t really exist in the publishing field, and more.
Then, Tim and Jason review Everyone is Tulip!
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Comics, of course, are not just for entertainment. They’re a great medium for educating. This week we feature two examples:
Sequential Potential is a company which helps academics get their points across in comics form. Co-founders Darick and Emily Ritter walk us through the process of conversion from dry, boring text to eye-catching comics.
The town of Minamata is one of several well-known examples of industrial waste leading to a massive tragedy visited on a community in mid-20th century Japan. That is, well-known in Japan. Sean Michael Wilson and Akiko Shimojima have set out to draw more attention from English speakers to the human cost of the Minamata mass mercury poisoning, with their new book The Minamata Story: An Eco Tragedy. Tim and Adam review.
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A comics series that’s sadly hard to find these days is Smax by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, and Andrew Currie. Emmet has been waxing nostalgic for this spinoff of Moore, Cannon, and Gene Ha’s Top Ten, so this week he calls up Cannon to chat about it – the meaning of the handprint on Smax’s chest, how the collaboration on this book (and Top Ten) worked, controversies in the fantasy genre, and more.
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Tim and Emmet begin a series on Stan Lee biographies with the 2003 book Stan Lee and the Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book by Jordan Raphael and the late, great Tom Spurgeon. What’s the tone of this book, and how does it portray Stan? How much of the Marvel Universe is he actually responsible for, and what were his motivations for taking more credit than he deserved? We discuss, and then Tim gets some background on the making of the book from co-author Jordan Raphael!
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