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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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In this episode, Tim and Mulele discuss:
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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.
More from TCAF this Thursday!
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A comic strip gag can be a deceptively simple thing. Once you take it about — “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.
PLUS: Roland Mann, Dean Zachary, and Kevin Gallegly join Tim to talk about the return of Cat and Mouse!
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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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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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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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Why read a biography of a fictional comics artist? What if it’s also a history of Singapore — done in a style that apes more than a dozen seminal 20th century comics creators? Tim and Kumar take a look at the awe-inspiring (yet sometimes puzzling) Sonny Liew graphic novel The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye.
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This week, Tim talks with with cartoonist Joey Alison Sayers. She’s done work for MAD magazine, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, the Nib, GoComics and more, plus a couple of books about her coming out as transgender. Why did she disappear for a few years? Why did she come back to comics? Plus the best advice she knows for new creators, and more.
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The unidentified creator of the strip Ned & Annie promises to “bring back funny comics.” Does the comic succeed on those terms? What makes a comic funny (or not)?
Also, responding to a comment on CCP #102 comic “Yiffing in Hell“, Mulele on “Mindgator“, Tim on “To the Batpoles!” and a followup on last Monday’s DCP on how the podcast might evolve.
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