Newspaper comics – Deconstructing Comics

#708 Aaack! “Cathy” is still relevant!

Cathy

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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#707 Joe Dator and “Inked”

Joe Dator's Mrs. Robinson cartoon 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years of cartooning for The New Yorker, Joe Dator has a deep catalog of published work – and a pretty deep catalog of UNpublished work as well (it’s a competitive business!).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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Critiquing Comics #187: “Bear With Me”

A retro-style daily strip about a talking bear! This time Tim is joined by comics colorist Jeremy Kahn to discuss Bob Scott‘s strip Bear With Me.

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#640 Kristin Tipping

Evil Witch Allie

This week, Critiquing Comics favorite Kristin Tipping talks about the background to Evil Witch Allie and A Book for Sad Pets. Why did her art style change on Evil Witch Allie, and why did volume two seem more confident than volume one? Why is the tone of A Book for Sad Pets so desperate? Plus, her experience in going to school to make comics, and more.

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Critiquing Comics #159: “A Book for Sad Pets” and “Spencer and Locke 2”

A Book for Sad Pets - Spencer and Locke 2

In this episode, Tim and Mulele discuss:

A Book for Sad Pets, by Kristin Tipping. Is it a comic? Is it for kids, or would it go over their heads? Is it cute, or dark?
Spencer and Locke 2, by David Pepose and Jorge Santiago, Jr. The noir version of Calvin and Hobbes is back, but does this version take the joke too far?

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#594 Campbell and Niffenegger and their “Bizarre Romance”

Audrey Niffenegger and Eddie Campbell

In town for the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, comics power couple Eddie Campbell and Audrey Niffenegger talk to Koom in this episode about their new collaboration, called Bizarre Romance. We also get some tidbits about Audrey’s work on the sequel to her novel The Time Traveler’s Wife, and Eddie talks about coloring From Hell and his recent book The Goat-Getters.

#593 Reading “Nancy”, plus “Cat and Mouse”!

How to Read Nancy

A comic strip gag can be a deceptively simple thing. Once you take it apart — “deconstruct” it, one might say — you find that it actually has many moving parts.

Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden‘s How to Read “Nancy” takes a close look at each of those parts — as well as arguing persuasively for Bushmiller’s underrated artistic chops, and giving us some comic-strip history as well. Tim and Patrick review.

Cat and Mouse

PLUS: Roland Mann, Dean Zachary, and Kevin Gallegly join Tim to talk about the return of Cat and Mouse!

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#585 The Phantom’s surprising reach

The Phantom was introduced by Lee Falk in 1936, and appeared in comic books and funny pages for decades. Now comes a new book by Kevin Patrick, The Phantom Unmasked: America’s First Superhero.

In this episode, Kevin Patrick tells Emmet about the character’s global popularity, especially in Sweden, Australia, and India — and how “The Ghost that Walks” made his first appearance in all three countries in the same unlikely way. Why did the setting change in the early years from an urban situation to a jungle? What does it say about the situation in the former British colonies, especially in Africa? Why is the Phantom that Emmet remembers considered “wrong” by fans? All this and more.

Attend the upcoming CANVAS Sequential Art Meetup on Comics & Visual Storytelling in Tokyo on February 15 at 7 pm, featuring Raul Trevino, and this podcast’s own Mulele Jarvis and Tim Young!

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#563 Jenny Robb and Mike Curtis: Classic comics preserved

Classic comics preserved

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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Critiquing Comics #114: “Spencer and Locke”

Spence and Locke

A noir thriller… that seems very reminiscent of a very different comic strip! Tim and Mulele discuss “Spencer and Locke” by David Pepose and Jorge Santiago Jr.!

Also, we talk about Marvel and the backlash toward “Secret Empire”.

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