Jimmy Gownley is the award-winning creator of Amelia Rules, Tanner Rocks, The Dumbest Idea Ever, and more, as well as a co-host of the Unpacking Peanuts podcast. This time, he talks with Tim about why the earliest stuff sells the best (never mind how much his art has improved since then), ergonomics, putting comics on Substack for free, and, of course, Peanuts!
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In 2023, King Features Syndicate decided to bring Flash Gordon, originally created by Alex Raymond and first published in 1934, back from rerun purgatory with new strips, written and drawn by Dan Schkade. Dan was also the artist on Dynamite Entertainment’s Will Eisner’s the Spirit Returns in 2016, and is also known for his original work Lavender Jack, which ran on Webtoon. This week, Tim talks with him about Flash Gordon and some of the trickier aspects of doing a newspaper strip, including refreshing readers’ memories and getting new readers on board while also moving the story forward a step every day. And, in 2025, how do you handle a great villain (Ming the Merciless) who’s also a terrible racial stereotype?
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Michael Cohen has created comics such as Strange Attractors and Tangled River, and is credited with helping to create the first known comic book price guide. He’s also co-host of the Unpacking Peanuts podcast, and his talk with Tim includes discussion of Charles Schulz’s strip, including about the reason why Michael has no interest in Peanuts animation!
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Brad Guigar, creator of Evil Inc., has been putting his comics on the Web for over 20 years, and this week he’s here to talk about how he made that his day job, the challenges of promoting your work in a changing media environment, how making an erotic comic (his Patreon-only spinoff Evil Inc. After Dark) forced him to up his game, and his new project to help NSFW comics creators support each other and find new readers!
Waaay back in 2008, we reviewed How to Make Webcomics, co-authored by Brad
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Samuel Edme’s comic The Shapes is… a bit hard to pin down. It looks like notebook scribblings, it has its faults, but it seems to have found an audience, which is all a comics creator can ask for. Bad? No. Not for us? Probably. Tim and Adam attempt to describe it anyway.
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If you’ve ever felt like your city left you before you left your city, Jason McNamara’s Ghost Band is for you. Tim and Emmet discuss this post-apocalyptic look at San Francisco. Jason then taps in to explain the inspiration for the book and what happened to artist Vincent Gladnick 2/3 of the way through.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the Grim Reaper has an apprentice, and he saves a girl’s life — temporarily. Grimm’s Assistant, by Mamode Ogbewele and Chigozie Amadi, might be a little too stingy with important story info, but sharp art and interesting ideas make it worth Tim and Jason’s time reviewing it.
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Friend of the show Irene Strychalski, former artist of such Marvel titles as Gwenpool and Silk, has been focused on her original title Fiendish, a lushly drawn (and colored, by Carlos Nicolas Zamudio) fantasy story. This week, Tim and Patrick discuss the first two volumes.
Also, Tim presents a mini-review of Safer Places by Kit Anderson, another book from our friends at Avery Hill.
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Back in 2009, Tim talked with web cartoonist Tracy Butler about her beautiful, sepia-toned 1920s-with-cats strip Lackadaisy, and whether she’d ever quit her day job to focus on the strip. Since then, she has gone full-time on the comic, and recently embraced her first love, animation! The Lackadaisy 27-minute animated “pilot” has attracted a lot of attention the past few weeks, and the quality of the production had Tim thinking, “How was this even possible??” So this week, Tracy returns to the podcast to talk about the pilot, the now-full-color strip, and what the future of the title might be.
Watch a video clip from this interview
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Here’s a video preview of this week’s show!
What happens when a group of people must work in the middle of nowhere, with virtually no supervision or accountability? Generally it’s not a good situation, as Kate Beaton, now well-known as the creator of the web comic Hark! A Vagrant, found in her younger years when she got a job on Alberta’s oil sands. This week, Kumar and Dana discuss her memoir of the experience, entitled Ducks: Two Years on the Oil Sands.
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