Deconstructing Comics Podcast, published every Monday, features comics creator discussion and comics reviews.
While Kamandi‘s exorcism story in issue 24 leaves something to be desired, never mind that: the subsequent four issues, as discussed in this episode, deliver the kinds of interesting concepts we’ve come to expect, as Kamandi and Ben visit the Dominion of Devils, fight Sacker’s Co. and their environment-destroying activities, and find out what the intelligent animals of Europe have been up to. Oh, and there are flying sharks!
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In this segment of Jack Kirby’s Kamandi series, we visit a version of 1920s Chicago that seems to be drawing on, or prefiguring, various other pop culture stories, and then move on to Monster Lake, home of intelligent, talking — and sometimes romantically inclined! — dolphins and killer whales. Kirby’s war experience again figures in a story, perhaps a fantasy about what he’d have liked to say to a warmongering general. Tim and Emmet try to get their sea legs for some very wet stories.
 Jack Kirby, from Kamandi issue 1 |
 Don Ahe |
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Translation is a topic seldom covered on this show (Kumar has talked about it several times, most notably here). This time Emmet talks with French-to-English comics translator Evan McGorray about translating Catherine Castro and Quentin Zuttion’s Call Me Nathan, about a trans teen.
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Colorist Jose Villarrubia had trouble getting work from Marvel because his style was “too artistic” — but then other creators started asking for him, and he’s colored many Marvel titles since then. He’s also done photo art for Alan Moore‘s Voice of the Fire and The Mirror of Love. This August, a new edition of Richard Corben‘s Den, with color corrections by Villarrubia, will be released by Dark Horse. What can Corben fans look forward to in this new edition? And, why do recolored comics sometimes look Gaudy? Villarrubia covers all this in a talk with Kumar.
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This week we continue our look at Jack Kirby’s run on Kamandi, another of the DC properties he created. Tim and Emmet find that issues 11 through 18 include a giant insect, a violent horse race, another standout issue in the mode of issue 7’s King Kong story, a clue as to how the animals became intelligent, and more.
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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!
Berserk abruptly ended when creator Kentaro Miura died two years ago, later resurrected by Miura’s assistants and his friend Kouji Mori. Neither Tim nor Kumar had read this violent, complex manga, but it lingered on our to-do list the past two years until a gag news story about who was going to wrap up Berserk (which Tim didn’t immediately recognize as a gag!) inspired us to take the plunge. What we found is an addictive manga that answers the question “What if Fist of the North Star were a fantasy “graphic medicine” comic about trauma?
Yup, Al Plastino did some “in case of emergency” Peanuts strips
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If you can’t get the rights to Planet of the Apes, do the next best thing: get Jack Kirby to come up with a concept that’s Apes-adjacent! That was DC Comics’ strategy in the early ’70s. What resulted was Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth, a series with multiple intelligent animals lording over caveman-level humans, and plenty of sci-fi elements and references to the Apollo program and other features of real life in that era. Join Tim and Emmet exploring the significance of the multiple intelligent mammals, the Kamandi drinking game, and more.
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In most time travel stories, there’s an imperative to fix any paradoxes created by the time travel. But in Rachel Pollack and Chris Weston’s Time Breakers, paradoxes are embraced rather than explained away or repaired. This week, Kumar and Emmet discuss this five-issue 1997 miniseries, the most popular series of DC’s canceled imprint Helix.
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