RiYL

We’re back from a brief hiatus for a conversation with cartoonist David Lloyd. Recorded at an Irish Pub a few blocks from the MoCCA Fest art show that brought him into town, Lloyd discusses his on-going work as the editor of Aces Weekly, an online anthology he believes hold the key to post-paper comics reading. Lloyd is, of course, best known as the artist on the seminal 1988 Alan Moore collaborat...

“My method is slowly eliminating my style from the work,” R. Sikoryak explains during our long and wide-ranging interview. As with nearly every other creative pursuit, style is one of the key elements of expression, but the cartoonist has spent much of his life working against developing his own. After all, his best known pieces like Masterpiece Comics  work in opposition to original stylistic sig...

“I’m a Texan and I don’t dislike Texas,” Frank Stack explains. “But I don’t like those sons of bitches.” The artist’s first major work sums up his feelings toward attitudes in the Lone Star State. First published in the pages of University of Texas paper, The Texas Ranger, The Adventures of Jesus is often regarded as the first underground comic. The strip is seen through the eyes of a Jesus newly...

You’re bound to raise some fan suspicion when the first track off your new album A Band Is Something To Figure Out has a title like “What do the People Want,” particularly when the thing is released on the 10th anniversary of your band’s existence. Hallelujah the Hills frontman Ryan Walsh admits that the album’s name was intended to raise some questions about rock music in general. And for full ef...

“[Depression] is something I’m comfortable with now,” Los Campesinos singer Gareth David explains during our conversation backstage at the Warsaw in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. He’s remarkably open and funny about the subject, adding, “the best thing for my mental health has been Pokemon Go.” It’s clear that his time serving as the lyrics writer for the joyfully woeful seven-piece has gone a ways toward...

“We never make a decision because we want to alienate the audience,” Tim Kinsella explains. “But we also never make a decision according to what we think the audience wants.” That sums up the musician’s career as any review. Though it only accounts for a bit of the outright animosity found in pieces like Pitchfork’s take on Joan of Arc’s latest opus, He's Got the Whole This Land Is Your Land in Hi...

After touring around with prominent outfits like Yeahsayer and Of Montreal, Sinkane’s Ahmed Gallab really come into his own on 2012’s Mars. The breakout record found the multi-instrumentalist embracing musical selections as diverse as his background, from the polyrhythms of Sudan to the punk, indie and funk of the midwest. Released in February, Life & Livin' It builds upon his myriad influences an...

Tommy Stinson is exhausted. It’s the tail end of a long day of interviews, with appearances on high profile outlets like Fox News, and the Bash & Pop frontman isn’t not entirely sure he’s going to make it through one more. Things get off to a rough start, and for a while only get rougher from there, tethered only by the calming force of friend and Cowboys in the Campfire co-conspirator Chip Robert...

Reverend Jen Miller was a Lower East Side fixture when I moved to New York more than a decade ago, an elf-eared, chihuahua-toting being who seemed to show up everywhere in those first few years, from The Village Voice to cable access. She ran a Troll Doll museum and wrote books, served as the sec columnist for nerve.com, starred in low budget films with names like Elf Panties: The Movie and Lord o...

Jon Ronson confesses with a laugh that he feels at least partially responsible for the rise of Alex Jones, the once-fringe Texas-based radio show host who since has become a central figure in Donald Trump’s political rise and the development of his subsequent White House policies. It’s a strange claim coming from the This America Life contributor behind The Men Who Stare at Goats. Ronson speaks in...

Punk rock resumes don’t get much better than Kid Congo Powers’. The Southern California-born musician has been playing music professional for nearly 40 years, since the then-president of the Ramones fanclub was recruited by Jeffrey Lee Pierce for the band that would soon become the Gun Club. Soon after, Powers was recruited by fellow punk rock weirdos, The Cramps as rhythm guitarist, staying with...

“I think about music as joy” sounds like one of those things that musicians just say. But then you go see Adele Bertei live, and there’s really no other way to describe. She ought to be rusty, out of shape and out of practice after a long hiatus, but when she took the stage at Le Poisson Rouge in Manhattan a few nights after out interview, she was a goddamned force of nature at 5’0 tall and dresse...

The latest Fuzz and Pluck (last year’s The Moolah Tree) begins with a rough visual — one I’m admittedly a bit hung up on during my conversation with Ted Stearn a few months ago. In it, Fuzz, the hapless teddy bear character, is unraveled until he’s little more than a long thread and a pair of eyeballs. I’d seen in before in an old issue of the Fantagraphics anthology Mome, and it had stuck with me...

When I arrive backstage at Le Poisson Rouge green room, Charles Watson is digging into a pre-set dinner, with  Rebecca Taylor seated in the back on the phone with another interview. He’s asking her about Brexit — seeking advice, really, a mere day or so after our own shattering electoral upset. The duo flew in on election day, the whole thing feels like an unwelcome bit of deja vu — but they’re ha...

It was important to me that we have a special guest for episode 100. They Might Be Giants fitted the job perfectly, a band that played an incredibly important role in the early development of my musical tastes, as strange and idiosyncratic as they might ultimately become. With episode 200, the camera gets pulled make even further, to a man and a magazine that, for better or worse, let an indelible...

Mari Naomi sat down for an interview a matter of days follow the election, a fact that unavoidably colored the conversation. It’s pretty clear listening back almost two months later that we were only beginning to process our thoughts at the time — not that most of us have made all that much progress in the meantime. For a cartoonist whose work deals so often with issues of cultural and sexuality i...

Dame Darcy’s got a great comics show gimmick. While cartoonists look on sad-eyed as show goers flip through their work and move on, the artist offers up tarot readings through her own custom deck, giving curious parties insight into their future and perhaps selling some books in the process. She’s engaged and curious, and even if she didn’t manage to move any books at Comics Arts Brooklyn, she cle...

There’s no real podcasting precedent for Welcome to Night Vale. In the decade or so since I started podcasting, I’ve never seen a phenomenon like it. The show seemingly came out of nowhere and shot to the top of the iTunes chart with loyal fanbase built up around Tumblr communities, creating fan art and fiction and dressing up as their favorite characters whenever the show rolls through town. The...

We struggle to find a decent spot to set up shop on the New York Comic Con show floor — finally opting to do the whole thing standing, leaned up against the reception desk at the Dark Horse booth. Baker is fresh off a signing with Fifth Beatle collaborator (and past guest) Vivek Tiwary. The conversation quickly turns to the business — the hustle of comics, something that’s seemingly always at the...

Neutral Milk Hotel two albums surely cast a long shadow on all involved. Multi-instrumentalist Julian Koster has never shied away from his role in the band — both reuniting with the group and supporting frontman Jeff Mangum in recent years — but all the while the musician has been building a singular body of work all his own, both as a solo artist and through his on-going project, the Music Tapes....

Bobby Rush is a storyteller. At 83, he’s no doubt told many of his best ones hundreds if not thousands of times, but as the consummate perform, he spins each one as it were the first time – even something as old and simple as the tale of how the son of a pastor became one of the foremost bluesmen of his generation. And while the musician has never taken himself too seriously, from his 1971 gold re...

Vivien Goldman’s New York City apartment is a shrine to decades of music journalism, bookshelves overflowing with seemingly every title ever published on the subject. This particular evening, former Chantage bandmate Eve Blouin is over for a visit, discussing their days in Paris and the myriad ways in which even Queens has become virtually unlivable for artists. The two still perform music when th...

I must have been 12 or so when I first saw the Pansy Division. The band was opening for Green Day at a benefit show in Oakland, a return to the Bay Area following the triumphant Dookie tour. I had no idea what to make of the band at the time — and my dad, who’d kindly agreed to chaperone, was, I believe amused. He may or may not have said, “don’t tell your mother about this.” But that was always t...

Of all of the bizarre sights at this year’s New York Comic Con, you’d be hard pressed to find one more serendipitous than the droves of show goers milling around IDW booth in bright orange cardboard Donald Trump masks – including, in one moment of heightened verisimilitude, a Darth Vader sporting the face of the Republican nominee.  The masks were being handed out to promoting Tom Tomorrow’s lates...

Sometimes you finish an interview not quite sure how things went. Other times you just know. With Sarah Assbring, it was pretty clear from the first seconds, when she belted out a song when asked to do a soundcheck. With all she’s been through in her life, the driving force behind El Perro Del Mar clearly sees no point in holding back. Assbring’s new record KoKoro, which dropped last week, is the...