RiYL

For Katie Skelly, comics have always been something of side hustle — something she’s never expected or even wanted as a full-time career. During the days, she works at a beloved New York City film house, a gig that gives her front row access to some of cinema’s most impactful work. The influence has clearly bled into her comics work, perfectly exemplified in her new work,  My Pretty Vampire, which...

When Frankie Rose began work on Cage Tropical, she was living in Los Angeles, employed as a caterer — the struggling actor, Party Down kind. Not exactly the triumphant rock start victory lap of the artist who released one of of the best LPs of the best half-decade. But, then, these things rarely work out as planned. But the former Vivian Girls/Dum Dum Girls/Crystal Stilts managed to pull things to...

Every so often, my work obsessions bleed into my extracurriculars, and Annalee Newitz was more than happy to help me geek out about robotics. We sat down a few months back in New York, while she was visiting for Book Expo America, in advance of their first novel, Autonomous. The book tackles questions of civil rights in a world where people own machines that are virtually human, exploring the cros...

In 2014, Manchester Orchestra released Hope, a new album with an identical track listening as its predecessor, Cope, released the same year. The two albums represented dramatically different musical takes on the same songs — the first was the band’s hardest edge record to date, and the second wholly stripped down. The pair of albums was the work of a band looking to shake things up a decade into i...

Here’s a conversation recorded a while back and initially intended for publication. While the story never actually appeared in print, the subject matter was just too interesting to let it languish, so I’m presenting it to you as a bonus episode. Cartoonist Mike Diana is known less for his work itself as the fallout it caused, when he became the first artist in the US to receive a criminal convicti...

Comics are hard — doubly so when you live in a place like New York, where holding down a day job is a necessity. By their early- to mid-30s, most opt to pack it in. It’s not a personal failure or flaw, so much as an admission that the world just isn’t equipped to support its artists, particularly in a field as marginalized as indie comics. A few years back, Julien Fitzpatrick found himself at a cr...

Kate Stables’ Earl of Lemongrab wallet is on the table when I sit down for our interview at Baby’s All Right — so naturally, we spend the first several minutes of the conversation discussing Adventure Time. It was some she discovered independently, but it’s since become a nice source of bonding for Staples and her daughter. Stables happily discusses the ways in which having a child have impacted t...

On the heels of the second issue of Resist, we hopped on the line with publishers Francoise Mouly and Nadja Spiegelman to discuss the free comics protest newspaper. The first issue arrived alongside the Presidential inauguration in January, as a broadsheet process and sequential catharsis. Eight months later, issue two finds the paper exploring similar themes in a world where the reality of Trump...

No Resolution is an album about heartbreak. It’s raw and real, delving into break ups and fears of settling down, topics that Tim Kasher is set to explore even more deeply in his upcoming film of the same name. His directorial debut (soundtracked by the accompanying album) tells the story of an engaged couple breaking up over the course of a New Year’s Eve. For his part, however, the sometime Curs...

Of course Catherine Burns has a good story about getting her current gig. It involves MTV and 9/11 and parents in Alabama who were slightly befuddled that their daughter had moved from a planned career as a documentary filmmaker to something called “storytelling” (“like for children?). The Moth’s long-serving Artistic Director helped shepherd the storytelling event from New York City curiosity to...

When I hit up cartoonist Jim Rugg before a quick three day trip to Pittsburgh, he sent his apologies. He was leaving town the same night I arrived, but helpfully sent along a list of fellow cartoonists in the city. The city’s comics community is a diverse but tight knit one, and the artists will champion their fellow Pittsburghers any chance they get. I’d totally forgotten that Frank Santoro lived...

Before it helped elect a president who teetered on the bring of nuclear war with every subsequent tweet, Twitter was an important testing ground for young comedians, honing their one-liners 140 characters at a time. Ashley Bez will be the first to admit that she owes much of her career to the social medium platform. Through Twitter, she’s found steady work and writing gigs for online magazines and...

Scott Westerfeld didn’t move to New York expecting to become a writer. He’s dabbled in politics, music and software design, but after 18 novels, it’s pretty safe to say that he’s found his calling. Over the years, his work has largely gravitated toward the young adult end of the bookstore, most often dealing with science-fiction themes, as is the case with his best known series, Uglies and the Lev...

Everything is running about an hour late, and the opening band has already started by the time two-thirds of The Coathangers show up back stage for the interview. Complicating things even further, bass player Meredith Franco has a nasty cough. The life of a touring rock and roll band is pretty far down the list things any rational individual would want to do for a could. But it’s already cycled th...

We’re back from a brief hiatus for a conversation with cartoonist David Lloyd. Recorded at an Irish Pub a few blocks from the MoCCA Fest art show that brought him into town, Lloyd discusses his on-going work as the editor of Aces Weekly, an online anthology he believes hold the key to post-paper comics reading. Lloyd is, of course, best known as the artist on the seminal 1988 Alan Moore collaborat...

“My method is slowly eliminating my style from the work,” R. Sikoryak explains during our long and wide-ranging interview. As with nearly every other creative pursuit, style is one of the key elements of expression, but the cartoonist has spent much of his life working against developing his own. After all, his best known pieces like Masterpiece Comics  work in opposition to original stylistic sig...

“I’m a Texan and I don’t dislike Texas,” Frank Stack explains. “But I don’t like those sons of bitches.” The artist’s first major work sums up his feelings toward attitudes in the Lone Star State. First published in the pages of University of Texas paper, The Texas Ranger, The Adventures of Jesus is often regarded as the first underground comic. The strip is seen through the eyes of a Jesus newly...

You’re bound to raise some fan suspicion when the first track off your new album A Band Is Something To Figure Out has a title like “What do the People Want,” particularly when the thing is released on the 10th anniversary of your band’s existence. Hallelujah the Hills frontman Ryan Walsh admits that the album’s name was intended to raise some questions about rock music in general. And for full ef...

“[Depression] is something I’m comfortable with now,” Los Campesinos singer Gareth David explains during our conversation backstage at the Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He’s remarkably open and funny about the subject, adding, “the best thing for my mental health has been Pokemon Go.” It’s clear that his time serving as the lyrics writer for the joyfully woeful seven-piece has gone a ways toward...

“We never make a decision because we want to alienate the audience,” Tim Kinsella explains. “But we also never make a decision according to what we think the audience wants.” That sums up the musician’s career as any review. Though it only accounts for a bit of the outright animosity found in pieces like Pitchfork’s take on Joan of Arc’s latest opus, He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in Hi...

After touring around with prominent outfits like Yeahsayer and Of Montreal, Sinkane’s Ahmed Gallab really come into his own on 2012’s Mars. The breakout record found the multi-instrumentalist embracing musical selections as diverse as his background, from the polyrhythms of Sudan to the punk, indie and funk of the midwest. Released in February, Life & Livin' It builds upon his myriad influences an...

Tommy Stinson is exhausted. It’s the tail end of a long day of interviews, with appearances on high profile outlets like Fox News, and the Bash & Pop frontman isn’t not entirely sure he’s going to make it through one more. Things get off to a rough start, and for a while only get rougher from there, tethered only by the calming force of friend and Cowboys in the Campfire co-conspirator Chip Robert...

Reverend Jen Miller was a Lower East Side fixture when I moved to New York more than a decade ago, an elf-eared, chihuahua-toting being who seemed to show up everywhere in those first few years, from The Village Voice to cable access. She ran a Troll Doll museum and wrote books, served as the sec columnist for nerve.com, starred in low budget films with names like Elf Panties: The Movie and Lord o...

Jon Ronson confesses with a laugh that he feels at least partially responsible for the rise of Alex Jones, the once-fringe Texas-based radio show host who since has become a central figure in Donald Trump’s political rise and the development of his subsequent White House policies. It’s a strange claim coming from the This America Life contributor behind The Men Who Stare at Goats. Ronson speaks in...

Punk rock resumes don’t get much better than Kid Congo Powers’. The Southern California-born musician has been playing music professional for nearly 40 years, since the then-president of the Ramones fanclub was recruited by Jeffrey Lee Pierce for the band that would soon become the Gun Club. Soon after, Powers was recruited by fellow punk rock weirdos, The Cramps as rhythm guitarist, staying with...