Comic Book Couples Counseling Podcast

Hopefully, you've had some time with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 by Jason Aaron and Joëlle Jones. The record-breaking comic seemingly found its way into everyone's pullbox last week. Despite San Diego Comic-Con taking over much of the discourse, the IDW Publishing relaunch snatched tremendous attention and fueled equal excitement. As promised, it's a comic for the loyal continuity consumer, cu...

Reporting live from San Diego Comic-Con, we're chatting with Gail Simone about everything she has going on at the moment, including the incredible Misty 2024 Special from Rebellion Publishing . When editors first approached her with the project, she'd never read the previous British series. However, after a few issues, Simone was hooked and saw her way into Misty's world, so some updates would hav...

It's easy to despair. Fear and frustration spread quickly, and their hold has hooks hard to shake. Don't fall into the discourse trap; free yourself by following the light radiating from the medium's champions. Find folks like Deb Aoki and Christopher Woodrow-Butcher and grab firm. Through their Mangasplaining podcast (co-hosted with David Brothersand Chip Zdarsky), they've become beacons of what...

There is power in putting your life on the page. Cartoonist Maurice Vellekoop discovered it when making the internal external, crafting a massive graphic novel memoir over eleven years. I'm So Glad We Had This Time Togethergorgeously and nakedly splays his experience for EVERYONE to consume, and while his audience could/should find it healingly reflective, the act is entirely selfish. He's found t...

When it comes to cool collaborators, Matt Kindt has had quite a few. He partnered with CBCC all-star Matt Lesniewski on Crimson Flower. He and David Rubin gave us the blazing sci-fi adventure Ether. And with Ron Garney and Keanu Reeves, Matt Kindt birthed the This Is Spinal Tap version of Conan the Barbarian. Don't deny it: BRZRKR is proudly cranked to eleven. The partner from Hollywood might attr...

Are you ready to meet our new favorite henchman, Barfly? Jordan Blum, Patton Oswalt, Kyle Starks, and Ryan Browne are eager to make introductions. Their new series, spun "from the world of Minor Threats," drills even deeper into the philosophical pursuit initiated by the original run that began two years ago. The lowliest punk in Twilight City has a rich inner life, and he'd love to share it with...

What's the ideal environment for making a comic? We toss the question to Sean Phillips and Jacob Phillips, and they ponder it for a moment. They've never experienced it, and they're not sure it's possible, or if it was, that they'd want it. Deadlines loom over all, making every comic an emergency. This urgency helps them accomplish their craft, and it must be working since, undoubtedly, everyone r...

We get serious with Jordan Morris, whether he wants us to or not. He returns to the podcast with his new graphic novel, Youth Group, done in collaboration with artist Bowen McCurdy. It's a wickedly winky narrative about a young goth girl named Kay reluctantly following her mother's instructions to join a Christian youth group and discovering that they actually battle demons. Morris returns to the...

How you define your relationship determines its trajectory. If you see your romance as a triumph over adversity, you will triumph. This is one of the many lessons we took from our long ago exploration of Drs. John and Julie Gottman, and we discuss their philosophy thoroughly on this week's podcast with Maria Bamford and Scott Marvel Cassidy. Their new graphic novel from Fantagraphics, Hogbook and...

The Gill-man just does it for us. Or Lisa, more specifically. You can have your Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Wolf Man, and Invisible Man; we'll take the wet and wild one off your hands any day of the week. Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives! And no more ravishingly than in our hearts. Where other Universal Monsters stem from rich, lurid literature and folklore, the Creature is a far more con...

It's been a week. You've had a minute. The sixth and final issue of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is out there, living its life, rattling around our collective imaginations. We need to talk about it. You need to talk about it. Let's talk about it together. And drag cartoonist Patrick Horvath into the chat, crack his melon open, and root around in all of his delicious secrets. Yep, it's time...

He's back—like you've never seen him before. Kyle Starks, the writer behind I Hate This Place, Peacemaker Tries Hard!, and Where Monsters Lie, just released an original graphic novel at First Second that's all-ages and without swears. Karate Prom is a heart-forward action adventure about two teens who find love in the ring, or after it, when Sam knocks Don "TheDragonWilson" Jones out cold. As Star...

March 5th, 1984. Forty years ago, three thousand copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 hit the newsstands. The title was impossible to ignore. Born from a joke between fresh collaborators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, it sparked an instantaneous passionate response. Many quickly dismissed the concept or rolled their eyes, but those who actually read that first issue recognized the love for th...

For this week's podcast, we're digging out a treasure from the CBCC Patreon Feed : our deep-dive conversation with Daniel Warren Johnson about The Nam # 9. This thorough discussion launched our "Married to Singles" Patreon exclusive series, where we examine the favorite single issues of various comic book creators and critics. It's one thing to dissect an artist's work alongside or in front of the...

When people dare to complain about modern Transformers stories, they often single out the human characters and how they drag the spotlight away from the glorious Cybertron titans they paid their money to see. Optimus Prime is enough. Bumblebee is enough. We don't need Spike or Sparky to stretch the narrative. Just give us the 'bots. And yet, Daniel Warren Johnson, the virtuosic cartoonist behind E...

How many words belong on a page? How many panels? In this week's podcast, we uncover the answers by chatting with Pornsak Pichetshote and Jesse Lonergan about their new Boom Studios series, Man's Best. It's a radically personal work about three emotional support animals lost in space, and it forced its creators to rethink their collaborative impulses to achieve the best comic possible. And we're e...

We've dreaded this moment for more than a minute. The Death of Comics Bookcase is here. Journalist Zack Quaintance has assembled a mighty fine coffin in the form of a comic book and put his old self into it. Having written for his old site , we'll miss him, but we also recognize this death as a rebirth loaded with possibility, and we can't help but be excited, too. Having dipped his toes into comi...

A story is never one story. A story is several stories. It's the story imagined by its author or authors, as is often the case in comics, and it's the story imagined by its many readers. They can be similar or significantly different, but none of them are the same. Never have we been more aware of this phenomenon than when we were talking to Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay about their new comic, Somn...

Walk into your local comic book store and give it a good browse. These days, you won't find too many Western comics. When a publisher like Image Comics grants a person the opportunity to make one, they must seize it and run wild. Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips cram The Enfield Gang Massacre with everything they love about the genre. It's got bank robberies, shootouts, and Gatling guns, oh my. Whe...

Who are we? Who do we want to be? Sometimes, the truth is a lie well told. Tom King returns to the podcast for his most in-depth conversation, breaking down the themes of his iconic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow run and why so much of his personal history wound up within it. Explore no further if you have not already read Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow. We spoil everything. We've wanted to have this...

This week's episode is the conversation we've wanted to have with Tyler Crook from the moment we first read The Lonesome Hunters. Despite already having two wonderful chats with Crook on the record, we couldn't let him rest there. After Dark Horse Comics released the second volume, The Wolf Child, we needed to go full-spoilers, and it appears Tyler Crook needed to do the same thing. We start at th...

Some birthdays are bigger than others. To properly celebrate the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hitting their forties this year, IDW Publishing is determined to make a fuss regarding our favorite comic book siblings, including, but not limited to, inviting heavyweight scribe Jason Aaron onto their flagship title. The main monthly comic will relaunch with a new number one in July but remain faithful...

All biography is autobiography. Nowhere is this more evident than when discussing Tom Scioli's back-to-back books, Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics and I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee. Since his earliest works, Scioli has found himself through his reverence, study, and subversion of the King. Kirby's collaborations with Stan Lee shaped much of our current cu...

What's in the box!? Scott Summers invites Emma Frost into his mind palace and shows her his special black cube, constructed with a little help from his ex. Gulp. This week, we reach the halfway point in our ScEmma Counseling Session series, discussing Dark X-Men: The Confession as well as Uncanny X-Men issues 518 and 519, which mark the height of their functionality. Yup, it's the top of their hil...

The initial mission was to create a character who would outlast him. Todd McFarlane stared down Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. He knew he had a character within him that could last beyond his own lifetime; he just had to pull him out. Spawn might not have outlived his maker yet, but he has survived and thrived these last thirty-plus years. As has Todd's action figure empire, McFarlane Toys, cel...