An alien and his human are traveling through space. What does the alien do when his boss strongly suggests he should ditch the idiot human? Tim and Mulele discuss Joey Cruz and Michelle Nguyen’s Reckstar, as well as some realizations Mulele made about podcasts and comics. Oh, and, of course, Star Wars.
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This year’s International Comics Festival (Kaigai Manga Festa) in Tokyo was bigger than ever! Plenty of familiar faces from past years gave it a sense of community (long sought by many foreign comics creators feeling rather isolated in Japan), but there were plenty of new faces, too, many of whom flew in from Europe and North America to be here. Tim once again procured a media pass and went booth-to-booth gathering interviews! Photos and Web links for all interviewees are below.
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You may have heard Matt Seneca on the podcast Comic Books are Burning in Hell (and, hey, he was on our show once, in the persona of a mild mannered comics shop manager!), but he’s also a comics creator in his own right. His comics are deep, dark, and very honest in expressing his opinions. This week he talks with Tim about the lack of sports in American comics, why he needs to feel hate for something to make a good comic, and more.
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You may have heard Matt Seneca on the podcast Comic Books are Burning in Hell (and, hey, he was on our show once, in the persona of a mild mannered comics shop manager!), but he’s also a comics creator in his own right. His comics are deep, dark, and very honest in expressing his opinions. This week he talks with Tim about the lack of sports in American comics, why he needs to feel hate for something to make a good comic, and more.
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Back in Critiquing Comics #25, we discussed the first issue of comics anthology mag Ugli Studios Presents. This time Tim and Mulele are looking at issue 2, finding some interesting ideas and art but some missed opportunities and places where crucial establishing shots don’t appear, leading to confusion. Maybe these creators just needed more pages to tell their stories?
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Brian Schirmer, a comics educator in San Francisco and writer of Ultrasylvania and the forthcoming Image series Black Jack Ketchum, joins Tim this week to talk about the difference between writing screenplays and writing comics; how he turned his comics script into a for-credit class for artists; tips that have led him to have both successful crowdfunding projects and good sales at conventions; and more.
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Tim and Kumar meet in person for the first time! This calls for a podcast, but… what to review? We discuss the movie Crumb, which features not only the expected discussion of R. Crumb’s work (including an objective look at the question of whether some of the … discomfiting subjects of his work should really have been published as “art”), but also a fascinating portrait of the dysfunctional family he grew up in.
Then, Tim and Brandon clash over Sean Murphy’s Punk Rock Jesus, in which a former Irish Republican Army member acts as a bodyguard in a reality show claiming to be creating the clone of Jesus Christ. Is it objective and well-written, or a promo brochure for atheism?
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As long as there has been erotic reading material, there have been people trying to make it harder to find. We might have expected that the brave new world of the Internet was going to make everything accessible to everyone whenever they wanted it, but as it becomes more controlled by certain big corporations, the situation has become more complicated. Our friends John Roberson and Dale Lazarov have both found that they seem to have more trouble with digital versions of their erotic (or even just semi-erotic) work getting pulled from digital comics stores than they’ve had with the print versions of their work!
So this week we hear from both of them about the issues they’ve faced, and then for the big picture, we’ll consult British author Tim Pilcher, whose two-volume history of erotic comics includes the work of both John and Dale! Tim discusses the ongoing problems for erotic comics in digital distribution, including seemingly capricious and inconsistent removals of some erotic works; the limitations to what the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund can do; and what both creators AND fans of these works can do to keep them available!
See below for Tim Pilcher’s BBC appearance discussing the child pornography law in Japan.
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In Patrick Yurick’s Hipster Picnic, being a zombie serves as a metaphor for… what, exactly? Having anger issues? Does the metaphor work? Tim and Mulele discuss.
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Time travel is a fascinating topic to many, and Fred Van Lente‘s current Ivar, Timewalker series from Valiant is timesurfing at both its most fun, and most scientific, with nods to Stephen Hawking’s writings on the subject. Van Lente did his own time jump to the past a couple years ago in The Comic Book History of Comics. This week Tim discusses both these works with him, along with Spider-Man, Archer & Armstrong, reassessing Fredric Wertham, and more.
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