RiYL

“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...

In 2008, Dash Shaw arrived seemingly out of nowhere and the indie comics community feel in love almost immediately. His Fantagraphics debut, the 720 page opus Bottomless Belly Belly Button, was a wide ranging, following the lives of a family over the course of three generation, which landed the young artist on numerous book of the year lists. Since then Shaw has regularly bounced back and forth be...

I’d known Alex Segura for a few years, before I found out about his not so secret passion. We’d work together in the comics world, we as a journalist and him as a PR rep, first for DC and then for Archie. We were drinking together at some comics after party, when he casually mentioned that he was about to head down to Florida for a crime writers convention – and not just as a casual observer. This...

I was excited when I first saw Pepe popping up on strange corners of the internet. After years of spotting Matt Furie’s work at indie comics shows like SPX and MoCCA, the online community was starting to take notice of his work, albeit in that idiosyncratic internetty way. But after years of bizarre and benign appearances on body building forums and Kim Kardashian’s Twitter feed, the stoned frog c...

This one took a while to get out, unfortunately. Long story, but it dates back April, around the release of Faith Erin Hicks’ most recent book, The Nameless City. Thankfully, the new title is just the tip of the iceberg for the Canadian cartoonist, as the first of a three-book series for First Second, a period piece exploring an unlikely friendship set against the backdrop of an ancient city inspi...

Frank Portman sends me his new record a few hours before we’re set to meet up at a coffee shop on Market Street. The whole thing came together at the last minute at the tail end of a three week long work road trip, and I only have time to listen to three or four songs before checking out of the hotel and meeting him down the street. But it’s enough. It’s new and familiar. It’s self-deprecating and...

We’re back after an unexpected bye-week (sorry, I’ve been traveling a lot) posting up a fascinating interview with Laura “LP” Pergolizzi. The LA singer-songwriter has released a string of critically acclaimed albums, including, most recently, Death Valley, a five song EP released on Vagrant in June. In spite of such acclaim, the singer has struggled to maintain the commitment of major labels in a...

Up to now, Miss Lasko-Gross and Kevin Colden had never professionally collaborated in any official capacity — not out of any conscious decision, the pair had just never found the proper vehicle. After all, there hasn’t been a tremendous amount of overlap between the married couple’s respective output. Lasko-Gross’ best known work is the autobiographical Fantagraphics series, Escape from Special an...

Somewhere between the first LP and last year’s self-titled EP, things really started getting serious, so Potty Mouth did what any self-respecting rock and roll group would, packing up things in their small Massachusetts scene and moved to Los Angeles. New York, it turns out, just wasn’t in the cards for reasons they were happy to explain on the hot summer day we sat down in the band’s midtown publ...

Back in 2008, two funny guys saying funny things into microphones with an optional third funny friend was the concept a podcast needed. But we’re living in the age of Serial, a time when show need a central idea to set themselves apart from millions of like-minded shows. Eight years after launching Stop Podcasting Yourself, comedian comic duo Dave Shumka and Graham Clark are giving their loyal aud...

Ruben Bolling should have been a lawyer. He graduated from Harvard Law School, he married a lawyer, and he even does some work in the field. But after seeing an ad in a school paper, the artist’s fate was sealed, creating the first installment of Tom the Dancing Bug in a flash of creative inspiration. This week, the comic celebrates its 1,300th installment. Thirty-years after its Harvard Law Schoo...

I feel obligated to say that I was very tired when we record this. I had just gotten off a plane from New York to LA, and Carrie Poppy was kind enough to let me crash on her couch for the night. We turned on the mics and started podcasting almost immediately, because hey, why not? We sat at the dining room table, which was littered with all manner of herbs and over the counter remedies. Research f...