Deconstructing Comics

While the 2005 film Fantastic Four gives us, debatably, a well-casted group of heroes, with plenty of comics-accurate details, the script does no favors to Dr. Doom . What are his goals, other than “taking everything back” from Reed? Why is he a CEO instead of a despot? Who the heck gives a frightening metal mask as a thank-you gift?? This time, Tim, Kumar, and Jordan (in a crossover w...

The Star Tide Shores is an action space adventure comic that isn’t afraid to get a little deeper emotionally than, say, Star Wars. Tim and Adam enjoyed reading the first volume, by Henry Goeldner and Illuminated, and are here to give you the scoop.

After the fiasco of the 1994 unreleased Fantastic Four movie , development proceeded on a big-budget FF film, which finally hit theaters in 2005 — a better film than the ’94 attempt in some ways, but frustratingly as bad or worse in others. This week, in another crossover with the Comic Book Movie Oblivion podcast, Tim is joined by Kumar and Jordan to begin a two-part look at this film...

Captain America was the obvious choice of a character to help Marvel celebrate the USA’s bicentennial in 1976. The job of doing that went to Jack Kirby , co-creator of the character. Naturally, that meant a story full of hard-hitting moments, and one that gets a bit treacly at the end, but also doesn’t back away from difficult moments in US history. This week, Tim and Emmet discuss the...

Oni are mythical monsters similar to the ogres of Western tradition. Like many of the legendary Japanese creatures, their characteristics are often adopted for manga characters, including series such as Lum , The Promised Neverland , and Demon Slayer . Our own Patrick has compiled a lot of data on them, and he’s here this time to fill us in. He also discusses the main points of monster theor...

The second omnibus volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game focuses largely on a scrimmage between the varsity team and the “portables”, which doesn’t go how anyone expects it to. Things are shifting subtly under the surface; we’re pretty sure what the series is leading up to (it’s a baseball manga, after all), but it’s fun to watch it develop. And of course,...

When Hugh D’Andrade was ten years old, his next door neighbor was mysteriously murdered, and he saw the body. In his forthcoming graphic memoir The Murder Next Door , he explores the trauma this caused him as the experience stuck with him over decades, and he explores the question: If someone else has had a worse experience than mine, does that mean my trauma is less important than theirs? I...

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...

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 no...

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 Cele...

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...

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...

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 fa...

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&#821...

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 &...

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 fi...

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...

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...

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 underrate...

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 is...

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...