Crying in the Book Club

After an episode in the manga-zone, the Book Club makes their glorious return to the most western comics possible: a Superman book. And not just any Superman book, but the 2004 Stuart Immonen-drawn, Kurt Busiek-written Superman: Secret Identity a (sort of?) Elseworlds take on the character. The crew dives deep into what makes Superman tick, and how altering the character, even in small ways, affec...

This week, it's finally time for Crying in the Book Club crew to leave American comics behind. Y'know, for one episode, to finally talk about Battle Angel Alita . Next, on Crying in the Book Club: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's... an episode of the show about Superman! For their ninth episode, Jean-Luc introduces the hosts to the classic Superman: Secret Identity . Our theme song was composed by...

Alex is back Alex is back Alex is back! And with him, he's brought many wonderful gifts from the land of DC Comics, proprietor of the most popular superhero the world has ever seen.......that's right.......and episode devoted entirely to........BOOSTER GOLD! Just kidding, it's Batman. Y'know, the guy what has the pointy ears. That's right, for this episode, Alex curated a collection of six issues...

This week on Crying in the Book Club: Alex runs to the hills and hides from Jean-Luc and Emily hunting him with copies of In Keeping Secrets of Silent Earth: 3 and Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV Volume I: From Fear Through the Eyes of Madness. They didn't hunt him for very long though, because they're both lazy and got tired. Instead, we welcomed Emily's Imagine Me and Utena co-host Alice on for...

Welcome to the inaugural "one of the hosts gets drunk before recording" episode of Crying in the Book Club! This week, the hosts are discussing the 2019 graphic novel Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me . There's a lot to tackle--everything from complicated relationships to how the book handles its queer representation. Oh, and Jean-Luc (because he was drunk) talks about Quinlan Vos a lot. Next,...

This episode, Alex brings Brian K Vaughan and Niko Henrichon's critically acclaimed 2006 graphic novel Pride of Baghdad for Jean-Luc and Emily to cry about. Vaughan has been a staple of American comics ever since the early 2000's, and returning to the writer behind Saga and Paper Girls in 2022 proves to be a fairly jarring experience for our hosts. It's a fascinating case study in how western pop...

This week on Crying in the Book Club, it's time for our hosts to be introduced to the greatest villain in Batman history: Alexandre LeRoi. Despite reading comics for the better part of their respective lives, none of the hosts of this show had ever read Gotham by Gaslight, the seminal elseworlds story from Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola. coming to it decades after its release, the trio interrogat...

Welcome back for the second installment of Crying in the Book Club! Someone actually stuck around for episode 2, which we did not expect. For this episode, we discuss one of the most psychically damaging (positive) comics to Jean-Luc and Emily's "young" psyches, and a series Alex had never read before: Bryan Lee O'Malley's magnum opus Scott Pilgrim. The conversation is pretty wide-ranging, from Al...

Hello! And welcome to listeners new and old. Or I suppose just new, given this is our first episode. And what better to launch a podcast about comics than with one of the most iconic works in the medium, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. There is, of course, much to discuss, from the political situation of the world Watchmen takes place in, to the interiority of the book's wide-ranging cast,...