RiYL

It’s been nearly five years since we sat down with Julia Wertz, and naturally plenty has changed. Her latest book, Tenements, Towers and Trash is a veritable love letter to New York City, written after the cartoonist had moved back home to California. The book is a history of the city, told through obsessively detailed architectural renderings of buildings. It the same funny cartoon story telling...

Vancouver-born and Toronto-based, Laila Biali has toured with some of the biggest names in music, from Sting to Suzanne Vega. The pianist/singer is also a well regarded color performer in her own right, having released seven albums, including a new eponymous record, which debuted in January. The album’s first single, “Refugee,” follows the plight of a child, the same age as her son, caught up in t...

A decade after releasing Some Loud Thunder, Clap Your Hands Say took the album back on tour. A lot has changed for the band in the intervening ten years, of course — not the least of which is the fact that frontman Alec Ounsworth remains the band’s only consistent member. The short stint of shows kicked off after the band finished touring for The Tourist, the group’s most critically acclaimed reco...

2018’s Uncle, Duke and the Chief finds Born Ruffians performing with their original lineup for the first time in half a decade. Such a return is always an important turning for a band, but it takes on an extra weight for the trio, who began performing together as 15-year-olds in a small Ontario town. It’s a clearly joyful experience for the band, who managed to tap into the initial excitement that...

In May of last year, Land of Talk returned after a seven year hiatus. At the height of her powers, following tours with bands like Broken Social Scene and The Decemberists, Elizabeth Powell took a break. Between her vocal polyp and a laptop crash that result in the loss of an album’s worth of demos, it was time to step away. Of all things, however, it was yet another personal tragedy that ultimate...

Five years between in records is a drop in the bucket for many groups. For Minus the Bear, however, it marks the longest gap between albums in the band’s 17 year history.  The making of Voids was marked by both personal and professional changes, as the group shuffled members and began to settle down and have kids. But there’s a fresh energy on the record, kicked off by “Lass Kiss,” which find the...

The track list for Playing Chess is nothing if not bold. The 11 tracks that make up Elise LeGrow’s debut LP represent some of the legendary Chicago Record’s biggest names, including Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Etta James. The collection of covers is both and a risky and savvy move for the singer. Of course, LeGrow’s not exactly new to the industry — the Canadian musician signed with Sony back in 2...

When I first encountered Gina Wynbrandt’s work at MoCCA Fest a few years back, the Chicago-based cartoonist seemingly came out of nowhere. Here debut book, Someone Please Have Sex With Me was the hands-down hit of the show — and for good reason. The book is an unflinchingly and often brutally hilarious look at sex that turns some of alternative comics’ most unshakable tropes on their head. “I read...

“Do not listen to people’s idea about what you can accomplish,”  Emil Ferris insists as we wrap up our interview. “ You must do the thing you were sent here to do.” We’re short on time during the quick conversation. Someone’s stopped by to whisk her off to her next appointment. But, she adds, it’s important that she get that one simple and powerful message across. Ferris’ brief career as a cartoon...

I’ve been eagerly awaiting Joseph Remnant’s debut graphic novel since he began collaborating with underground comics pioneer Harvey Pekar for the online Pekar Project anthology back in 2010. The moment finally arrived last year when Fantagraphics published Cartoon Clouds, the tale of recent art school graduates grappling with the realities of adult life. Of course, the cartoonist has been busy in...

“Without nostalgia,” Torquil Campbell explains, “I don’t know how you make pop music.” It’s an inescapable dimension of Stars music, if only because the band essentially grew up together in Toronto.  Plenty has changed, of course, in the nearly 20 years since the group formed. Two members married one another, and Campell became the sole member to move away, relocating part-time to Vancouver and a...

“The thing that is the product is the excrement,” Emily Haines posits, loosely paraphrasing English writer, Jeanette Winterson. “The thing that is of value is the experience.” We’ve only got half an hour for an interview, as she rolls through town to promote her latest solo project, Choir of the Mind, and by the end it feels as though we’re racing to cram as many ideas as possible into that brief...

I was first made aware of Jay Rosen when he began to pop up in my Twitter feed. As the last presidential election neared, he began to show up more and more often through the retweets of friends and colleagues. Now that Donald Trump has declared an all-out war on journalism, Rosen’s voice is ever more essential in the national conversation. A week after the President issued his “Fake News Awards,”...

Recorded on the eve of a pair of celebrating the 20th anniversary of his first Best Show call, we managed to catch Jon Wurster at the perfect time to reflect on his work. It’s been a strange career — the musician has drummed for some of the biggest names in indie rock, from his longstanding gig as a member of Superchunk, to on-going work with The Mountain Goats and Husker Du frontman, Bob Mould. B...

“I never thought i’d making a living doing this,” Chris Ware explains, candidly. “I just thought i’d be a weird guy on the street shuffling around with tattered notebooks.” Maybe he’s half-kidding, or at least winkingly slightly. It’s hard to say. He’s hard person to read. But the cartoonist is nothing if not candid to a fault when it come to discussing his art and the work that goes into it. As w...

“Sometimes I’ll write something and I’ll weep while I’m writing it,” Cecil Castellucci explains, as we wrap up the interview with one final question. “It’s like I’m getting as close as possible to being human.” She gets close to that state just answering the question. Creation is a pure process for the writer. It’s one that sometimes feels like banging her head against the wall, but it’s an essent...

We sit down on a pair of chair in the First Second booth, smack in the middle of a crowded New York Comic Con show floor early on a Saturday. Nidhi Chanani is still high from the release of her debut graphic novel, Pashmina, which only hit store shelves a few day prior. The book tells the sort of a young Indian-American girl’s fantastic journey, as she reconnects with the homeland she left at a yo...

Founded in 1990, Tales of Blarg became one of the longest running and most influential zines out of the East Bay punk scene that gave the world Lookout Records. Over the years, the it published the work of such Northern California punk rock luminaries as Aaron Cometbus, Iggy Scam, Lawrence Livermore and Robert Eggplant. Janelle Hessig (née Blarg) hasn’t published an issue since 2006, but the write...

“My life makes no sense,” Mimi Fischer says with a laugh. The 64-year-old comedian recently put on her first solo show, “A Late Bloomer” at the PIT theater in New York City. She is, of course, the titular late-bloomer, discovering the world of hoop dancing in 2007, after years of bouncing from job to job. In 2011, she entered the comedy world, at age 58, enrolling in an entry-level course at UCB....

“I don’t want to go back to the bird shit,” Simon Hanselmann explains, reminiscing not-so-fondly about about jobs past. From all appearances, life is pretty good for the Tasmanian cartoonist. He’s making a living with comics, living in a nice Seattle home he shares with his wife, Jacq, a dog and a basement full of recused rabbits they lovingly refer to as “the bungeon.” His series, Megg, Mogg and...

Blush’s debut album is the culmination of nine years worth of songs. Singer Maura Lynch spent the last decade playing in bands and working day jobs for startups like Kickstarter and Birchbox, all while writing music on the side. What sort as a solo project ultimately coalesced into a proper group, a collection of long time friends (and a pair of siblings) turning those demos into proper songs. Bas...

Ron Turner is running late. It’s impossible to find parking in North Beach this time of night. I’m nursing a whiskey upstairs as Cafe Vesuvio, the historic San Francisco bar, best known as a famed beat generation water hole. The crowd’s already getting noisy, but the founder of the legendary Last Gasp publishing house couldn’t have chosen a more perfect location for our conversation. An unfamiliar...

Toward the end of our conversation, Nicole Georges takes a moment to point out that her latest book, isn’t the downer this interview might have made it out to be. But then, when you start down the road of dog deaths, it’s a bit hard to the right the ship. Which is to say, the subject matter of this episode gets pretty heavy, pretty early on. But like Fetch itself, the interview provides plenty of...

“As long as one can walk one can protest,” Trina Robbins explains, over the white noise of a nearby espresso machine. “And as long as i don’t have to take too many hills, I can still walk.” The cartoonist’s assessment of the current political climate is equally pessimistic and hopeful, as the actions of the Trump administration have caused many Americans to loudly declare their support for women’s...

The last time Anders Nilsen was on the show, we were huddled on a patch of grass out behind the San Diego Convention Center with pedicabs carrying cosplaying show attendees whizzing by, playing top 40 songs at maximum volume. Thankfully, things are much more subdued this time out. The Big Questions artist joined us in New York, during a mini-tour for his new series, Tongues. The first issue of the...