Berserker Monk is a violent, but slightly humorous, comic that’s been pitched as “Tarantino meets The Last Airbender.” The creators — Josh Thompson, Gabriel Roldan, Leland Bjerg — are currently kickstarting it. How are Tim and Jason feeling about this comic? Listen and find out.
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What are the people like on the other side of the mountain? Are there any there? Where does the stuff, the objects, the food we enjoy in our daily lives come from? These questions are central to Shanti Rai‘s first graphic novel, Sennen. In this episode, Tim and Jason review the book, and then Tim talks to Shanti about how her bicultural background helped inspire the book, and the unexpected obstacle that slowed down its creation.
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In the mid-’90s, Grant Morrison’s innovative run on Doom Patrol was followed by that of Rachel Pollack, who took advantage of Morrison’s legacy, the greatest variety of sexual minority characters of any mainstream comic at the time, to express her feelings about being trans and a lesbian herself. Her run also examines a number of standard comic book tropes. This run, which was far ahead of its time, has been unavailable in a collection for some time, but these issues (64 to 87) are finally to be made available this month in an omnibus. Kumar and Emmet discuss this gender-bending run.
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After leaving DC’s Jimmy Olsen book, Jack Kirby needed something else to keep his monthly page count up to the level he had contracted for. One of the books he came up with was The Demon, the result of his being asked to do a “monsters and mystery” book. But Kirby didn’t have a lot of interest in that genre; was that to the disadvantage of the book, or to its advantage? Tim and Emmet discuss this 16-issue series.
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Alexandra (her friends call her “Ax”) is trying to get in touch with hero team Steamgear Defenders; she wants to become a member. But will they turn out to be all they’re cracked up to be? Will she even get there, with so many people getting in her way? The comic is Steamgear Inc. by Snuffy Sam, with the most unusual art Tim or Adam have ever seen. Does that mean it’s good? We discuss.
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Marta Chudolinska (who-doh-lean-ska), the child of Polish immigrants to Canada, makes comics and other art in Toronto. Koom talks with her about her ongoing project Babcia, about her grandmother and her family’s history in Poland.
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This time, we critique the fifth installment in David Dye‘s “Amazing Tales” anthology series. In the main story, we again join the troops of Dropship Fifteen, in a story that gets a bit harrowing… but not without some humor. Adam joins Tim to talk through the issue.
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While Netflix’s Sandman series has gone over well with many fans, not everyone is pleased. This week Emmet talks with comics commentator Elizabeth Sandifer, who has found the series to be vastly inferior to the original comics, and gives us her reasons in a very entertaining and informative way.
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Suzanne Lenglen was a trendsetting tennis star in the 1920s, among the first to challenge the notion that tennis players had to be amateurs, running themselves into debt to keep competing, in order to participate in tournaments. Tom Humberstone‘s first full-length graphic novel Suzanne: The Jazz Age Goddess of Tennis, soon to be released, is a finely honed work of historical fiction on her life and influence. Tim and Jason review the book in this episode; then, Tim interviews Humberstone about the process of making the book, why he was inspired to focus on Lenglen, and what he hopes to do next.
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Patrick Ijima-Washburn (a.k.a. “Patrick W.”) has been doing some deep research on certain themes used in manga. Last year, he told us about scary cats in manga; this time it’s (mostly scary) mermaids — or, to be gender neutral, “merfolk.” Thinking it would be a topic easily covered, he was soon caught in a tsunami of manga fish-people, from adaptations of “The Little Mermaid,” to creepy human-like creatures that live in the water, Creature of the Black Lagoon style. He shares his findings here, focusing on merfolk in the works of (clockwise from left) Kazuo Umezu, Rumiko Takahashi, and Osamu Tezuka.
Patrick’s video about mermaids in manga
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