Luke Healy’s How to Survive in the North presents two different early-20th-century expeditions to the Arctic, and how they were connected. Well, except some of the connections are unclear, and Tim and Kumar both had the same misunderstanding about the book the first time through! Yet the book does present some amazing people and incidents. Here’s our review.
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Join Kumar and Koom as they discuss Alan Moore’s run on the palladium paragon, the alabaster avenger, the archetypical archetype: Rob Liefeld’s Supreme. Kumar tries not to lose it over the Image era ‘artwork’ while Koom attempts to reconcile supremium with revisionist theory. Supreme was Moore’s last outing with a true blue superhero in the classical mould. Both postmodern and nostalgic for lost comic values at the same time, this run sits Janus-like between Moore’s early work and his modern period.
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The epic space opera Queen Emeraldas from Kodansha is the first release of manga in English by legendary cartoonist Leiji Matsumoto since 2002. Kumar and fellow Matsumoto advocate Ryan Cecil Smith dig into the recently-released first book of the 2-volume series and discuss Matsumoto’s relative obscurity in the West, the brutal morality of life in space, and potato heads on the sea of stars.
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The Fade Out is Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser‘s nuanced, subtly told, complex story of Hollywood in 1948, revolving around a secret deal between a writer who can’t write because of PTSD sustained in the war and another writer who’s been blacklisted as a communist. We touch on some of our favorite little-noted details in the story.Why is Brubaker repeatedly attracted to “noir”-type stories? While Sean Phillips’ art is great, and he digests photo reference into his art better than some do, do some of the limitations of that method still show through? Tim and Brandon discuss. |
| Kumar journeyed so San Diego for the Comic-con this year, for the first time in twelve years. How has the event changed in that time? Who did Kumar get to meet this year? How did he work around the crowds? We get his report. | |
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A fantastically undermanned operation is laying the groundwork to take over the world — starting with Fukuoka, Japan! That’s the premise of Rikdo Koshi’s Excel Saga, which ran in Japan from 1996 to 2011, and started in North America in 2003, where three volumes made it into the top 50 graphic novels chart. But now, with the manga boom long past, it seems to have faded to obscurity. Tim and Kumar take a look at the first three volumes to decide whether its current obscurity is fully deserved.
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Paul Chadwick’s Concrete first appeared in Dark Horse Presents #1 in 1986. While its hero is a human whose brain is transplanted to a huge stone body by aliens, the stories are otherwise very realistic and emotional, and often center on real-world problems. While the series had some success, and theoretically the next volume should still be on its way, Concrete does not seem to be so widely remembered.
This week, Kumar and Koom take a look at a couple of their favorite Concrete stories: Think Like a Mountain, which focuses on environmental issues; and The Human Dilemma, about overpopulation.
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One Punch Man was originally a crudely-drawn Web comic by a guy calling himself “One”. But then the story, with art by slick manga artist Yusuke Murata, was picked up for publisher Shueisha’s Young Jump Web Comics website in 2012. It subsequently became an anime, and the manga is available in English from Viz.
This week, Tim and Kumar take a look, to discuss whether the story is really served by Murata’s typical manga art, and the good and bad points of the comic as it exists.
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Jason Shiga’s Demon is one of the craziest comics you’ll ever read. The cartoony art makes it look unassuming, but frankly the darkly comic mayhem of this story probably wouldn’t work with a more realistic style of art. The story is about… Wait! Did you read it? You’d better do so before listening to Kumar and Dana talk about it, because this episode is — unavoidably, with a comic like this — full of spoilers. Listener beware!
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Kumar talks with both Emmet O’Cuana and John Roberson about Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice. How does Zack Snyder see these characters, and how is his vision at odds with the established ideas about these characters? How can we think about the events in this movie in a way that makes sense?
Music:
“Superman’s Song” – Crash Test Dummies
“I Whipped Batman’s Ass” – Wesley Willis
“(Wish I Could Fly Like) Superman” – The Kinks
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Alex and Ada is Jonathan Luna and Sara Vaughn’s critically acclaimed 15-issue series about human interaction with A.I. It raises some interesting issues, but does it handle them well? Have the same ideas been explored better elsewhere? Tim and Kumar open up the machine and take a look.
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