Years ago, when the Scott Pilgrim series was only half-finished, Tim and Brandon discussed it on this show. Since the series was completed, we’ve discussed Bryan Lee O’Malley’s other books (Lost at Sea and Seconds), causing Tim to reconsider Pilgrim, what O’Malley did right (and wrong) in the series, and what it all means.
This week, Tim and Kumar take on the whole six-volume series. Was it really necessary for Ramona to have so many exes? Did Scott end up with the right girl? These questions and more!
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Did you think Love & Rockets was over?! Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez continue to release new work about once a year, and in this episode Kumar and Matt sit down and discuss some of it, with particular attention paid to Jaime’s The Love Bunglers. (Spoiler warning!)
Sports have rarely been subject matter for comics in the US; perhaps comics’ inherent static-ness has seemed antithetical to an activity with so much movement. But Japan has seen comics about various sports, and some of them have been quite popular, even iconic.
This week a look into the world of toy-based comics! Kumar and his brother Ilango discuss two recent IDW Transformers books, More Than Meets the Eye volume 1, and Transformers vs. G.I. Joe.
Israeli graphic novelist Rutu Modan has won acclaim for her books Exit Wounds (2007) and The Property (2013), both of which are so tightly plotted, with a number of twists and turns, that Tim and Kumar find them difficult to review spoiler-free. What’s remarkable, though, is the emotional depth in books that are so plot-driven, as well as their social commentary on Israeli society, how violence there has become banal, and the popularity of Jewish tours of Polish sites of the Holocaust. With all this going for the books, we simply have to talk about them! (With few spoilers!)
Big sweaty muscles, huge breasts, decapitations, and general dark ages carnage. Sounds like another everyday barbarian comic. That is, until you find out about the feminism, Celtic folklore, unreliable narration, matriarchy, humor, and unpredictable art. Kumar and Dana hew and cleave their mighty battle axes through Pat Mills and Simon Bisley’s 2000 AD classic Slaine The Horned God.
Chris Ware’s 2012 work Building Stories attracted a lot of attention because of its unusual format: a box of 14 publications of varying shapes and sizes, which can be read in any order. Ware says the work is about memory, in various ways, and reading the story in various non-chronological ways can give us different points of view on how its characters remember (or mis-remember, or forget) various things.
Nearly three months ago, way back before “Tim Across America,” Kumar and Dana discussed Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s classic graphic novel “From Hell.” Now they’re back with a discussion of last year’s From Hell Companion, which includes an annotated script and a lot of other behind-the-scenes information, inspiring our guys’ repeated forehead slaps and exclamations of “How come I never noticed THAT bit of symbolism before?”