Deconstructing Comics

Brad Guigar , creator of Evil Inc., has been putting his comics on the Web for over 20 years, and this week he's here to talk about how he made that his day job, the challenges of promoting your work in a changing media environment, how making an erotic comic (his Patreon-only spinoff  Evil Inc. After Dark ) forced him to up his game, and his new project to help NSFW comics creators support each o...

Tim is now completely caught up with the MCU! Mulele joins him to discuss the most recently released (as of this episode's recording) Marvel Cinematic Universe film, last summer's  Spider-Man: Far From Home ! ( Originally published on Patreon March 28, 2020) Brought to you by: The Law of Equivalent Exchange: A Fullmetal Alchemist manga podcast Our supporters on Patreon

Now that we've become familiar with  Jack Kirby 's original Eternals comics, repeatedly referring to the 2021 MCU film along the way, it's time to sit through all two hours and 37 minutes of it again and evaluate it anew. Unfortunately, as a movie, it still has just as many problems, but at least now Tim and Emmet can get a better idea of what those problems were. And also take note of the bright...

Samuel Edme's comic  The Shapes is... a bit hard to pin down. It looks like notebook scribblings, it has its faults, but it seems to have found an audience, which is all a comics creator can ask for. Bad? No. Not for us? Probably. Tim and Adam attempt to describe it anyway.

We've reached the end of  Jack Kirby 's Eternals series. Sure, it was a weird series, but introducing a Hulk robot apparently did little for the sales numbers. How did Kirby wrap things up? For a series that featured so many characters (though not as many as the freakin' movie, which we'll get to soon!), he took the odd step of giving us an Ikaris solo adventure, with a Celestial-in-the-machine en...

The 1994 film  The Fantastic Four seems to have been made with the expectation, at least from producer Roger Corman on down, that it would be released. While some interested parties have claimed that it was only made to help Constantin Film's Bernd Eichinger keep his option to make an FF film from expiring, others say that someone stepped in to kill it after the film was made. In part two of our F...

By the early '90s,  Superman and Batman were blockbuster movie franchises, but Marvel had yet to find a way to get a big-budget film made based on their characters, let alone succeed at the box office. Bernd Eichinger of Constantin Film owned the film rights to the Fantastic Four , but those rights were soon to expire. So he teamed up with B-movie producer Roger Corman to bang out an FF film -- wh...

Jack Kirby 's The Eternals was not a conventional superhero book. It didn't even seem to take place in the Marvel Universe. By issue 14, it appears that Marvel editorial must have been pressuring him to make it more Marvel Universe-y, which would account for the appearance of the Hulk in issues 14-16 ... except it's not really the Hulk, leaving plausible deniability to the fact that this is really...

This week we catch up with the work of two DCP favorites,  Chad Bilyeu and David Dye ! Chad's series The Re-up , about his time as a pot dealer 20 years ago, continues and has overcome the skepticism Tim had of the series at the start. David has released three more issues of Amazing Tales and gone in various directions: a Beowulf adaptation, a Burroughs-esque time travel story commenting on Russia...

If you've ever felt like your city left you before you left your city, Jason McNamara's  Ghost Band is for you. Tim and Emmet discuss this post-apocalyptic look at San Francisco. Jason then taps in to explain the inspiration for the book and what happened to artist Vincent Gladnick 2/3 of the way through. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, the Grim Reaper has an apprentice, and he saves a girl's life -- tempo...

Tim gets ever closer to catching up with the MCU! Tim and Mulele discuss Avengers: Endgame 's time-travel explanation (and problems), Captain Marvel's relative irrelevance to the film, how this movie set the stage for the upcoming TV shows, and much more. ( Originally published on Patreon March 14, 2020) Brought to you by: Bat Bits podcast on Patreon, featuring our research on Batman '66 Our suppo...

FLASHBACK!  Sports have rarely been subject matter for comics in the US; perhaps comics' inherent static-ness has seemed antithetical to an activity with so much movement. But Japan has seen comics about various sports, and some of them have been quite popular, even iconic.  Takehiko Inoue's Real is not only about basketball, but about physical handicaps, relationships, and more. Kumar and Ilango...

Most Americans know little about the Crimean War (1853-1856). Adam McGovern and Bruno Letizia's  The Night Brigade may go some way toward filling us in on that conflict, and it does give us several historical figures, including Florence Nightingale - but it also features a werewolf. Tim and Adam critique. Asante Amani 's Joe Mallard gives us short detective stories that feel a bit like Matt Kindt'...

We left the Eternals joined together in the Unimind. The 1977 Annual doesn't clearly fit into continuity, but features only one Eternal, Thena, together with Deviants Karkas and the Reject against a time-traveling threat! Back in the regular series, issue 13 gives us exactly two Eternals, trying to stop a Deviant attack on the Celestials. In spite of the lack of Eternals, these are two of the most...

Chester Brown 's work has come up on this show a number of times over the years. We've discussed Ed the Happy Clown , Louis Riel , and Paying for It . He's actually published 10 graphic novels since 1989, some of which are collections of his comics series. In connection with the recent premiere of the movie version of Paying for It at the Toronto International Film Festival , our own Koom got a ch...

FLASHBACK! A comic strip gag can be a deceptively simple thing. Once you take it apart -- "deconstruct" it, one might say -- you find that it actually has many moving parts. (Click to enlarge) Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden 's How to Read "Nancy" takes a close look at each of those parts -- as well as arguing persuasively for Bushmiller's underrated artistic chops, and giving us some comic-strip...

What does an 11-year-old do when her "only friend" moves away? In Coco Fox's "sorta" memoir  Let's Go, Coco , she joins the basketball team. But when you're a pre-teen, everything's fraught with challenges. Tim and Adam discuss this book - aimed at middle schoolers, but recommended for all ages. As far from that world as possible is the first issue of King Klaus' Digital Bardos (now live on Kickst...

FLASHBACK! It's been more than 70 years now since the debut of Archie comics, featuring (though not quite from the beginning) America's favorite love triangle of Archie, Veronica, and Betty. Along with Jughead, Reggie, and the rest of the gang, these characters keep us coming back for more, changing with the times while still presenting an idealized America where drugs, booze, and sex seem not to...