Deconstructing Comics Podcast, published every Monday, features comics creator discussion and comics reviews.
Our friend Kristin Tipping is back, this time as the artist on a graphic novel written by Jason Vandervort called The Ferocious Five. Their recent attempt to Kickstart the project failed; what should they do differently next time?
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This week Koom wraps up London Super Comicon with more interviews.
First, TPub Comics’ Neil Gibson talks about the publisher’s ongoing series Twisted Dark (a series discussed in Critiquing Comics episodes 59 and 85!).
Then, Amrit Birdi (at left in above photo) and Ram V talk about the attraction of comics, the relative merits of various books on the medium, and how (or whether) being from India affects their comics work.
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Derf Backderf, author of My Friend Dahmer and a onetime garbage man, is back with Trashed, a book that defies pigeonholing. Part history, part awareness-raiser, part fictionalized reminiscence, part gross-out humor fest (and a few other “parts” as well), Trashed seems like a book that shouldn’t work, but does. In this episode, Tim interviews Derf about Trashed, the Dahmer movie, and more; plus, Tim and Kumar review Trashed!
Derf will be headlining at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus later this month!
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At London Super Comicon last month, Koom got to sit down with Paul Gravett, a comics journalist and exhibition curator. Gravett is currently preparing the touring Asian comics show Mangasia, which will debut in Rome next month. This is a guy who’s read a lot of comics; do they all become a blur after a while? Koom asks him about avoiding burnout, the amount of progress comics have (or haven’t) made toward being accepted by the “art world”, and much more.
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This time, Koom travels to Cardiff, Wales, to talk to David Roach, an artist who’s done work for 2000 AD, Dark Horse, and DC, and is currently working on Dr. Who Magazine in the UK. He’s also a comics archivist and historian, and has written several books about Warren Comics artists of the ‘70s, and one about great British comics creators. He tells Koom what inspired him to be an artist and how he broke into comics, and whether living the dream has lived up to the hype. |
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DC recently launched a new Mister Miracle series, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads. Well and good, thought Emmet, but then he saw a certain CBR headline that set him off. “King and Gerads have redefined comics”? Hyperbolic much?
So Emmet recruited Kumar to review both Mister Miracle #1 and the hype surrounding it. Is the use of suicide in the story meaningful? Hackneyed? How accessible is this comic to readers who don’t know the character? And, why does everything in comics have to be super-hyped nowadays?
Donate to the Ed Siemienkowicz Memorial Scholarship (Choose it from the pulldown menu)
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Look who Tim (center) ran into in Columbus: Derf Backderf (My Friend Dahmer, Trashed), Tom Spurgeon (The Comics Reporter), Stephen Bissette (Swamp Thing, Tyrant), and Craig Fischer (English professor and occasional contributor to The Comics Journal)! (Click the photo to enlarge!)
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In this episode, Tim talks to Steve and Craig about their summer research tour that brought them to Columbus and the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and how it relates to Steve’s revival of his ’90s comics biography of a Tyrannosaurus rex, Tyrant! |
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Then Tom talks about the upcoming Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC) event he’s organizing for the Billy Ireland, and the current state of mainstream comics. |
As for Derf — that interview is coming later this month!
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At the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum in Columbus, Ohio, curator Jenny Robb has what most of us would consider a dream job. But she and other staff members recently had an unenviable task: choosing which 40 items to include in the museum’s fortieth anniversary exhibit. In this episode, she talks about that decision process, and answers some burning questions: Why was the comics field so male-dominated in the 20th century? How were Windsor McCay’s colors for strips like Tale of the Jungle Imps transmitted to newspapers? And much more.
Meanwhile, in Arkansas, Mike Curtis is helping to keep alive another classic comic, Dick Tracy. He’s the current writer of the strip, which won the Harvey award for best syndicated strip for three straight years through 2015, and in this episode he describes his work process on the strip. He’ll also tell us about being one of Harvey Comics’ last writers, his long-running “furry” comic Shanda the Panda, and his Superman memorabilia collection. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s a cheese box!
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More Minneapolis comics creators!
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Christopher Jones has done a variety of work for DC Comics (including The Batman Strikes and one story in Batman ’66) and other animation adaptations), a few things for Marvel, and Dr. Who comics for Titan. How did he break in, and why is so much of his work of a more “cartoony” nature? |
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Lucid is making her living from crowdfunding in support of her webcomic, Avialae, a “boy’s love” story with an emphasis on consensual couplings. She talks about how “living the dream” can sometimes be a double-edged sword. |
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Is it a comedy strip? Is it a soap opera? Tim and Mulele discuss Alana Tran’s Tong Hua/Assimilation.
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