Quarantined Comics

This week we're continuing our "subversive superhero series" and reading Matt Fraction's 2020 reboot of "Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson," illustrated by Steve Lieber. Fraction's an Eisner award winning writer is known his unique, sometimes edgier, realistic take on books like Hawkeye, Iron Man, Iron Fist, and Sex Criminals. Sure, Jimmy Olson is an ace photographer,...

DC's Young Animal imprint, developed in 2016 by Umbrella Academy writer Gerard Way, gave visionary creators a platform to put their stamp on existing DC properties. As part of this initiative, Way recruited acclaimed sci-fi author N.K. Jemisin to spin up her unique take on the Green Lantern mythos. Her take: Sojourner Mullein, a young black woman who grew up in post 9/11 NYC and who went throu...

What's more American than Apple Pie and Baseball? Up in the sky - it's a bird, it's a plane...it's Superman RED SON, which reimagines the Man of Steel had he been raised in Mother Russia. Sign me up Komrade! We continue our subversive superhero series ...with Superman REDSON, the 2003 miniseries that reimagined the Man of Steel had he been raised in Mother Russia Written by Mark Mi...

In our second episode of SUBVERSIVE SUPERHEROES, we'll try to unpack the enigma of ARKHAM ASYLUM. Grant Morrison's and Dave McKean's disorienting ride takes its cues from haunted house narratives, classic horror stories of escaped prisoners visting their former keepers, and Alice in Wonderland, to deliver a Batman tale the likes of which you've never read before. Arkham Asylum is h...

SUBVERSIVE SUPERHEROES! This will actually be the first in a series of QTD episodes where we talk about some of the more...subversive takes on some of DC Comics greatest heroes. What happens when you're a war veteran, were in the CIA, saw some shit, decided to start making PTSD-inspired, superhero comics? This week we're talking about 2018's "MISTER MIRACLE" by Hugo award win...

The late Satoshi Kon is known for his anime like Perfect Blue and Paprika - movies where both the characters and the audience must constantly question the reality of what they're experiencing. But before Kon directed movies, he was a manga creator, and the unfinished Opus is his last work before jumping careers. In many ways, Opus feels like a wind up to the metafictional playfulness of Kon&#3...

It's the mid-90s in New York City. Adam Kline is teaching a deadend job at a midtown fashion college, trapped in a loveless marriage, angry that his art career never took off. And then the black outs start happening. The hallucinations. The floating eyeballs. The zombies. Kevin Mutch's THE ROUGH PEARL taps into your midlife anxiety and takes you down a psychedelic journey where the decisio...

Over a century ago - on the foggy Hudson, our Sailor Twain - a riverboat captain with his own problems is just doing his job, when he finds himself rescuing, and becoming enamored by an injured mermaid. Toss in a fornicating french nobleman, a no notoriously reclusive author, and a cast of weirdly wonderful window dressing characters - SAILOR TWAIN is an emotionally dark and mysterious story that&...

We look at the first four of cartoonist Riad Sattouf's six-volume epic memoir about growing up in France and Syria (the fifth volume came out in November 2020 in French). A unique, nuanced, and disturbing look at a childhood that takes place between two very different cultures.

on the eve of WW2...the big city, a sleepless dame who is as cruel as she is beautiful... what happens when you take a washed up, reformed cowboy-bandit-turned-comic book writer, who's down on his luck, flat broke, got a rotten ticker, and can't leave his old lady hangin...? YOU PUT HIM ON A MISSION TO STEAL MONEY FROM THE NAZIS! grab your cowboy hat, and break out your typewriter for PULP...

Just read this book. It's amazing.

Unlike the previous DC Extended Universe movies, WW84 is a fun, campy romp - but that still doesn't absolve it of some fundamental storytelling problems. In this episode, we'll take a break from reading weird, obscure comics like Jim Lee's X-Men in favor (kidding) in favor of watching WarnerMedia's presumptive blockbuster WW84, the sequel to 2017's Wonder Woman. What worked? Wh...

There were once these three cousins, who done got run out of town. One was a con man, the other a doofus, and the third, a journeyman. they descended into a valley, found themselves a friendly dragon, a talking bug, and a beautiful young woman who could walk between her dreams. ...sounds like a 60s folks song written while tripping on acid? Not quite...this week we're talking about BONE - the...

Have you ever wondered what a conversation would be with your bi-racial kid, reflecting on everything that's going on in the world - the good, the bad, and the ugly? Have you ever had a conversation about race with your spouse of another race? This week, we're talking about what might have been Raman's all time favorite BOOK of 2018. Mira Jacob's autobiographical memoir "Good...

The artist Jillian Tamaki and her cousin the writer Mariko Tamaki each have dynamic careers in illustration and comics. You might have seen Jillian's art in The New York Times, or on the covers of Penguin Classics. And Mariko has sharpened her pen writing a variety of superhero comics including Harley Quinn, Hulk, and Supergirl. Most recently, DC Comics appointed her as lead writer on its stor...

Somehow, Adrian Tomine still feels like a young cartoonist to me, yet he's had a long and varied career - from his experimental strips in the self-published Optic Nerve, to his studies of loneliness, alienation, and simmering rage in... well, most everything he wrote afterwards. In his most recent work however, Tomine seems to be more charitable to his characters (which, in The Loneliness of t...

Imagine a world, where only BLACK people have super powers... This week we're talking about "BLACK" and its sequel "BLACK AF" by Kwanza Osajyefo + artists Tim Smith 3 and Jennifer Johnson (respectively). The books made quite an impression on the industry when they came out from 2017-2018, and was recently announced to being adapted to film by Warner Brothers. But we ask...w...

The people in Eleanor Davis' stories strive to find solace only to often find it tantalizing out of reach. How do you find peace in this world? That question seemed to permeate Davis' 2014 collection How To Be Happy and arises again in her 2019 graphic novel The Hard Tomorrow, which takes place in a dystopic future yet feels at home in the middle of the Trump era. Seems depressing, but Dav...

Whereas the first half of The Sandman were rousing adventures, it's in the final volumes where Neil Gaiman uses the character to explore familial responsibility and the nature of dreams. But don't worry, it's not a slog (Tell that to Raman) - there's still tons of bloodshed.

Chester Brown breaks down his thoughts on human relationships and the economics and morality of prostitution. Do we agree with him? Sometimes. Do we disagree with him? Sometimes. We'll interrogate Chester Brown's interrogation of a taboo topic.

This week we fill some airtime by revisiting a later work from the French superstar Moebius - the World of Edena. In 1990, the French car manufacturer Citroen commissioned Moebius to create a short piece to celebrate...a marketing campaign. A quick commissioned commercial piece...quickly went of the rails. What stared as an innocent little ditty became a much larger, universe spanning, genre-defyi...

The game is afoot! Watson & Holmes is 2013’s urban re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson - as contemporary Black men in Harlem (this one ain’t about Benedict Cumberbatch & Lucy Liu). The series was created by writer Karl Bollers with art by Rick Leonardi, and crowdfunded initially on Kickstarter. Book One, “A Study in Black” - features the e...

The Incal is an epic sci-fi by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and the legendary French artist Moebius. A madcap adventure that involves acid lakes, a boy turned into a spaceship, and a naked woman riding a rat, it's also a book that can be confusing and frustrating to read if you come into it not knowing what to expect. Or it can be a magical romp. Or maybe some of column A, some of column B....

"Proximity and closeness are not the same.” We're getting a little heavy (and non-fiction), with THE BEST WE COULD DO - Thi Bui's illustrated memoir of her family's history and exodus from Vietnam to America. Joining us is Raman's OTHER podcast co-host-with-the-most, Sharon Thony from MODERN MINORITIES (modmypod.com) This book - Bui's first graphic novel - is a moving one:...

The indie cartoonist Chester Brown started making a name for himself in the 80s, with the publication of his self-published Yummy Fur. From those pages originated the short, four panel cartoons that eventually became Ed the Happy Clown, a crude made-up-on-the-fly adventure about... well, a naked vampire lady, religious guilt, Ronald Reagan's head on the tip of a penis, and an inter-dimensional...