Quarantined Comics

Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist, activist and author who’s created more than 200 magazine covers for the likes of Time, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Der Spiegel - which are singular and striking given our current political climate. Edel’s latest work is the graphic memoir "Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey" - telling the story of his childhood in Cuba and his family's decision...

to close out 2023's alphabetic soup of comics, we're closing the year with a cheat and reading “XYZ Comics,” by cartoonist legend R. Crumb. “XYZ Comics,” published in 1972, is more of a 28 page pamphlet that reflects Crumb’s rather interesting state of mind at the time. Crumb was a few years out from doing a massive, year-long LSD trip that began in 1965. It greatly impacted his work. He w...

No one was more influential in pushing what sequential storytelling can be than Will Eisner, the so-called godfather of the graphic novel. His legendary body of work started when he was just a young buck in the 1940s trying to capture the superhero craze with "The Spirit," through the early 2000s when he was exploding the comics form, all while telling rich, nuanced stories of people mes...

V is for... VISION, 2016's Eisner award winning series by writer Tom King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta. King should be a familiar name to you by now, as we've read more than a few of his works on this podcast, including Mister Miracle and the Human Target, two stories about troubled superheroes. And this book is no different. The Vision actually debuted in the Avengers way back when...

do you want to hear a scary story? well have we got a Halloween treat for you! U is for...Uzumaki. Uzumaki is manga legend's Junji Ito's seminal horror series from 1998. The entire populace of a small seaside town becomes obsessed with spirals. If you're into bodily, psychological, and cosmic horror, then step into the fog-shrouded streets of Kurozu-cho and see how long you can hold yo...

T...is for Tomine! that is Adrian Tomine, one of our all time favorite graphic novelists, who we've covered on this podcast before (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, etc). We recently had the privilege of sitting down with Adrian Tomine on Raman's OTHER podcast, Modern Minorities, where superfan Ryan tagged along for a chat...

In today's world, solving a crime often isn't the end. Everyone has their own version of events and the means to amplify that version, whether true or not. Nick Drnaso's eerie graphic novel "Sabrina" takes place in mundane environments: offices, homes, restaurants, but beneath it all is this feeling of incredible insecruity and of a world in upheaval. "Sabrina" is p...

This week, Raman and I look at "Roaming," the latest graphic novel from our favorite comic creator cousins: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. We previously reviewed their coming-of-age collaborations "Skim" and "This One Summer." "Roaming" is in fact three coming-of-age stories in one. Three young women take a trip together to New York City in 2009 (we say 2005 in...

In our last episode, we looked at "On a Sunbeam," about an intense love through space. This week, we look at "Patience," about an intense love through time. Part romance, part mystery, and all sci-fi trippiness, "Patience" came out in 2016 and marks one of Dan Clowes's most ambitious graphic novels yet. Jack and Patience are young, very much in love, with a baby o...

Have you ever thought about enrolling in an space-Hogwarts, falling in love, only for your high school sweetheart to get wisked away by her space-homesteader aristocrat sisters, and deciding to join a space-cathedral reconstruction crew living and working on a space salamander eating chili and playing board games while making your way to your lost love? If so, then have we got a book for you: &quo...

N is for NOT ALL ROBOTS - a future fiction work by Mark Russell, who you might remember for schadenfreude takes on modern society thru his critically acclaimed work on "The Flintstones" (seriously, look it up) In Not All Robots, writer Mark Russell + artist Mike Deodato, Jr. drop us into the 2056 bubble city of Atlanta, where robots have replaced human beings in the workforce worldwide....

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman began serializing the tale of his father's Holocaust surival in 1980, famously depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. The strip ran from 1980 to 1991, and was eventually collected in two volumes. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer. Even today, the book has a rare power, providing a visceral and incisive look on the daily and ofte...

Have you ever wondered what its like to be a asian teenage artist coming of age in the suburbs of the big city, with an unpredictable and often unbearable mother, while also saddled with a sense of regret and enui? this week we're reading IN LIMBO, the debut graphic memoir by Deb JJ Lee. Our story introduces us to Deb, a young Korean American teenager, trapped in a inescapable feeling of other...

K is for KARI, the 2008 debut by Indian graphic novelist Amruta Patil, who's since gone on to become a leading voice in the Indians comic scene, illustrating a number of projects - including a reimagining of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. In Kari, we meet the eponymous protagonist upon her surviving a heartbroken suicide attempt, and we follow her to at work and at and home in the hustle and...

Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet is most famous for her indie strip from the 90s "Dirty Plotte," about her struggle being a young woman in the indie comics scene. More than 20 years later, Doucet has returned with "Time Zone J," where Doucet, now middle-aged, recalls a torrid romance she had with a fan during her youth, when she was still churning out her indie strips. "Ti...

Zoe Thorogood is just about to turn 25 and she's already an artistic force. She burst onto the comics scene with "The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott," published in 2020, about a young artist doomed to go blind. She followed that up with her brilliant memoir "It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth," about her struggles with depression. If "Billie Scott" wa...

This month to celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month in Asian hosted podcast, we're bringing you an episode from Good Pop Culture Club, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective. Good Pop Culture Club is a regular discussion about the good pop that gets us through our days. Each episode hosts Marvin, Jess and Han discuss what they've been watching their opinions on rec...

This month to celebrate AAPI heritage we're featuring an episode from Books & Boba, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective - a podcast group we're part of that features unique Asian American voices and stories. Books & Boba is a book club dedicated to books written by Asian and Asian American authors. You can find more eps at booksnadboba.com or wherever you...

This week, we're reading the 2022 Human Target limited series by Tom King and Greg Smallwood. You'll remember how much we love Tom King from multiple previous episodes like Mr. Miracle and Superman Woman of Tomorrow. In this latest series, Christopher Chance, aka the Human Target, is on his latest cases protecting Lex Luthor when things go sideways. An assassination attempt Chance didn’t s...

So with Asian American Heritage Month, we decided that G should be for Gene Luen Yang ...mostly as an excuse to read AMERICAN BORN CHINESE, Yang's Eisner Award-winning, seminal graphic novel soon to be released as a Disney+ streaming show with a bevvy of Oscar winners. American Born Chinese is Gene Luen Yang's was first released in 2006 - written and illustrated by Yang, and also colored b...

In Michael DeForge's Familiar Face, the world is always changing, commutes are being altered, and peoples' bodies are constantly being transformed, or "optimized." The citizens of this world exist in an environment that they cannot control or even begin to understand. Sound familiar?

As we continue reading our way thru the alphabet — E is for Esther's Notebooks, the critically acclaimed cartoon series that chronicles the hilarious and heartbreaking true life of a young girl growing up in Paris, by Riad Satouff, the award-winning French Syrian cartoonist best known for his childhood cartoon autobiography, the Arab of the Future (one of the first books we read on this pod) S...

The Doom Patrol debuted in 1963, just a few months before the X-Men. The two titles had a lot in common: a group of superpowered misfits led by a man in a wheelchair. But while the X-Men soon found their way into the pop cultural canon, the Doom Patrol could only muster a cult following — and only recently started rising into the mainstream due to the eponymous HBO TV series. But Doom Patrol still...

C is for...CATWOMAN! Catwoman is much more than a feline-themed criminal in a cat-suit. Despite sexy portrayals by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, Anne Hathaway, Camren Bicondova, or Zoë Kravitz would have you believe, Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman has the potential to be a much more nuanced character in modern comics. Way back back in 2002, now acclaimed cri...

On the surface, the samurai epic Blade of the Immortal is all about the violence, with its gorgeous splash pages of kaleidoscopic dismemberment. Created by Hiroaki Samura, a manga artist about whom very little is known, Blade of the Immortal follows a familiar outline: a young girl named Rin seeks to kill the group of swordsmen responsible for the murder of her family. But Samura's ambitions a...