Deconstructing Comics Podcast, published every Monday, features comics creator discussion and comics reviews.
Chad Bilyue is on a roll! No sooner had he released issue 4 of Chad in Amsterdam than he was releasing issue 5 on its coattails. CIA 5 turns out to be a theme issue, on a bizarre and rather offensive aspect of Dutch culture. It’s about what happens when an entire country convinces itself that one of its customs isn’t racist, while it looks that way to nearly everyone else.
Also in this episode, big programming announcements from both Mulele and Tim!
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Mark Russell has been one of the standout comics writers of the past five years, in part because he’s possibly the only mainstream comics writer doing satire (or, he would argue, fables). Since he burst on the scene with Prez and The Flintstones, he’s written a number of comics for several publishers that aren’t just comedy or action, they express his views and have deeper meanings.
This time, Tim’s interview with Mark. How did he get into comics, and start out in a Big Two book? Why did he use ’60s Hanna-Barbera character Snagglepuss to tell a story of gays in the 1950s? How do you “punch someone in the beef”? What inspired his latest, Billionaire Island
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Tim and Patrick discuss the third chapter of Fullmetal Alchemist, “The Mining Town.” Why are alchemists hated as “the dogs of the military”?
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Telling a story without dialogue can be difficult. Telling your story entirely with pictures takes excellent storytelling skills. What are the stakes? What are the characters’ motivations? What, exactly, is going on here?! Tim and Mulele discuss two submitted comics which partially or entirely rely on wordless sequences: After the Fall, by Jacqueline Goldfinger, Keni Thomas, and Taylor Esposito; and Organic But Not Mental, by Pier Dola.
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We’ve talked about several of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga series over the years, but this time we go back to the beginning with her first big hit, Urusei Yatsura, sometimes known in English as Lum. Tim and Kumar discuss the history of the strip, the gags you wouldn’t get without knowing Japanese, and what’s odd about it for being ostensibly a kids’ comic.
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Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga series The Drifting Classroom is a taboo-busting series: it was aimed at kids and employs kid logic and exaggeration to a story depicting outrageous violence being done to and by kids. Even if you’re into horror, that description may have you asking: “Is this for me?” In this episode, Kumar and Ryan try to answer that question.
Umezu in red and white. (Source: https://www.jprime.jp/articles/-/18187)
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Over the years there have been some attempts at augmented reality comics — where a smartphone app pointed at a comics page will reveal a bit of animation. One issue with these projects is that they’re labor-intensive, and require several different skill sets to produce. Sam Noir and Andrew Dorland are Kickstarting an augmented reality comic called Ballyskillen, and Andrew has multiple necessary skill sets for the endeavor, which he’ll apply to the project in proportion to the amount of money raised. In this mini-episode, Tim talks with Sam and Andrew about the project, and also about Sam’s series of comics anthologies called Cauldron.
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The latest installment of our beloved Chad in Amsterdam is here! As always, Chad combines some incisive but casual observational and philosophical discussion with the work of his great artist friends, but this time the focus is less on Amsterdam and more on Chad himself. Where is he from? What makes you “from” a place? Will Tim and Mulele like this issue as much as the others? (Well, what do you think!?)
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This week we present the second installment in a proposed new podcast series: The Law of Equivalent Exchange, a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the manga Fullmetal Alchemist. Tim and Patrick discuss chapter two of the series; while we remembered it as not having much of an impact on the overall story, the chapters in volume 1 turn out to do a lot of orientation to help prepare us for future volumes. We point out these signposts.
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Last episode, we mentioned how writing a short, tight story can be more challenging than writing a sprawling epic. Right on cue comes Spider Forest Webcomic Anthology 4, an engaging collection of short comics by 17 creators of web comics. Tim and Mulele discuss which are the best (and which are merely good!), and whether perhaps some of these stories are a little too short.
Spider Forest Kickstarter – beginning October 12, 2020
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