Quarantined Comics
171 episodes - English - Latest episode: 6 months ago -Comics aren't just about superheroes in capes. Each week we'll discuss, debate, and nerd out on some of the medium's greatest, latest, and strangest works. From Alan Moore to Uzumaki, to everything in-between, we aim to smash, and talk for far too long on the books we love.
Hosted by reporter/podcaster Ryan Joe and recovering marketer Raman Sehgal. We're setting phasers to...fun?
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Episodes
VISION ...a synthezoid tragedy, or just poor decision-making?
November 16, 2023 02:00 - 1 hour - 49.9 MBV is for... VISION, 2016's Eisner award winning series by writer Tom King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta. King should be a familiar name to you by now, as we've read more than a few of his works on this podcast, including Mister Miracle and the Human Target, two stories about troubled superheroes. And this book is no different. The Vision actually debuted in the Avengers way back when in 1968, when he was first designed to kill Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but soon became one of them...fall...
UZUMAKI (revisited) ...Junji Ito's still scary manga treat
October 31, 2023 04:00 - 40 minutes - 36.9 MBdo you want to hear a scary story? well have we got a Halloween treat for you! U is for...Uzumaki. Uzumaki is manga legend's Junji Ito's seminal horror series from 1998. The entire populace of a small seaside town becomes obsessed with spirals. If you're into bodily, psychological, and cosmic horror, then step into the fog-shrouded streets of Kurozu-cho and see how long you can hold your mind - and your body - together. this is an oldie but a goodie — a replay of one of our very FIRST episode...
TOMINE ...the Modern Minorities conversation
October 29, 2023 04:00 - 1 hour - 50.2 MBT...is for Tomine! that is Adrian Tomine, one of our all time favorite graphic novelists, who we've covered on this podcast before (The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, etc). We recently had the privilege of sitting down with Adrian Tomine on Raman's OTHER podcast, Modern Minorities, where superfan Ryan tagged along for a chat...
SABRINA... murder in a post-truth world
October 27, 2023 23:00 - 27 minutes - 24.9 MBIn today's world, solving a crime often isn't the end. Everyone has their own version of events and the means to amplify that version, whether true or not. Nick Drnaso's eerie graphic novel "Sabrina" takes place in mundane environments: offices, homes, restaurants, but beneath it all is this feeling of incredible insecruity and of a world in upheaval. "Sabrina" is perhaps one of the most unconventional murder mysteries ever written.
ROAMING... helping us feel both very old and very young
October 24, 2023 02:00 - 31 minutes - 27.1 MBThis week, Raman and I look at "Roaming," the latest graphic novel from our favorite comic creator cousins: Jillian and Mariko Tamaki. We previously reviewed their coming-of-age collaborations "Skim" and "This One Summer." "Roaming" is in fact three coming-of-age stories in one. Three young women take a trip together to New York City in 2009 (we say 2005 in the podcast. We are wrong). Two of these women, Danny and Zoe, are old friends who have planned this trip for a long time. The third, Fio...
QUEENIE ...Harlem mobsters of questionable character
October 01, 2023 04:00 - 34 minutes - 30.3 MBQ is also for QUEENIE, GODMOTHER OF HARLEM, Elizabeth Colomba and Aurelie Levy's historical graphic novel inspired by the life of Harlem's legendary mobster, Stephanie Saint-Clair. Queenie follows the life of Stephanie Saint-Clair—the infamous criminal who made herself a legend in Harlem in the 1930s. Born on a plantation in the French colony of Martinique, Saint-Clair left the island in 1912 and headed for the United States, eager to make a new life for herself. In New York she found success...
PATIENCE... a blast into the past
September 25, 2023 01:00 - 41 minutes - 37.9 MBIn our last episode, we looked at "On a Sunbeam," about an intense love through space. This week, we look at "Patience," about an intense love through time. Part romance, part mystery, and all sci-fi trippiness, "Patience" came out in 2016 and marks one of Dan Clowes's most ambitious graphic novels yet. Jack and Patience are young, very much in love, with a baby on the way. But one day, Jack comes home from "work" -- you can read the graphic novel to figure out why that's in scare quotes -- t...
ON A SUNBEAM ...get in your goddamn goldfish spaceship
September 02, 2023 22:00 - 41 minutes - 39.5 MBHave you ever thought about enrolling in an space-Hogwarts, falling in love, only for your high school sweetheart to get wisked away by her space-homesteader aristocrat sisters, and deciding to join a space-cathedral reconstruction crew living and working on a space salamander eating chili and playing board games while making your way to your lost love? If so, then have we got a book for you: "O" is for ON A SUNBEAM, Tillie Walden's star crossed lovers' tale of Mia, Grace, and all their rad f...
NOT ALL ROBOTS ...what AI can teach us about toxic masculinity
August 18, 2023 21:00 - 45 minutes - 45.2 MBN is for NOT ALL ROBOTS - a future fiction work by Mark Russell, who you might remember for schadenfreude takes on modern society thru his critically acclaimed work on "The Flintstones" (seriously, look it up) In Not All Robots, writer Mark Russell + artist Mike Deodato, Jr. drop us into the 2056 bubble city of Atlanta, where robots have replaced human beings in the workforce worldwide. An uneasy co-existence develops between the newly intelligent robots and the ten billion humans on earth. A...
MAUS ...keeping the stories alive
August 06, 2023 23:00 - 38 minutes - 34.2 MBCartoonist Art Spiegelman began serializing the tale of his father's Holocaust surival in 1980, famously depicting the Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. The strip ran from 1980 to 1991, and was eventually collected in two volumes. In 1992, it became the first graphic novel to win the Pulitzer. Even today, the book has a rare power, providing a visceral and incisive look on the daily and often hourly struggle to survive as the Nazis invaded Poland and continued their systematic extermination...
IN LIMBO ...reliving our teen trauma, one eyelid at a time
July 09, 2023 04:00 - 36 minutes - 32.1 MBHave you ever wondered what its like to be a asian teenage artist coming of age in the suburbs of the big city, with an unpredictable and often unbearable mother, while also saddled with a sense of regret and enui? this week we're reading IN LIMBO, the debut graphic memoir by Deb JJ Lee. Our story introduces us to Deb, a young Korean American teenager, trapped in a inescapable feeling of otherness. For a while, their English wasn’t perfect. Their teachers can’t pronounce her Korean name. Thei...
KARI ...melancholy and the infinite, indian sadness
June 30, 2023 18:00 - 48 minutes - 39.9 MBK is for KARI, the 2008 debut by Indian graphic novelist Amruta Patil, who's since gone on to become a leading voice in the Indians comic scene, illustrating a number of projects - including a reimagining of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. In Kari, we meet the eponymous protagonist upon her surviving a heartbroken suicide attempt, and we follow her to at work and at and home in the hustle and bustle of smog city. A marketing and advertising exec who turns her creative eye on the world, she li...
J: TIME ZONE J ...Whatever you do, don't answer the fan mail
June 25, 2023 10:00 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBCanadian cartoonist Julie Doucet is most famous for her indie strip from the 90s "Dirty Plotte," about her struggle being a young woman in the indie comics scene. More than 20 years later, Doucet has returned with "Time Zone J," where Doucet, now middle-aged, recalls a torrid romance she had with a fan during her youth, when she was still churning out her indie strips. "Time Zone J" isn't just about her memories, it's also about how memories work, and their tangled unreliability. As such, Do...
TIME ZONE J ...Whatever you do, don't answer the fan mail
June 25, 2023 10:00 - 30 minutes - 27.8 MBCanadian cartoonist Julie Doucet is most famous for her indie strip from the 90s "Dirty Plotte," about her struggle being a young woman in the indie comics scene. More than 20 years later, Doucet has returned with "Time Zone J," where Doucet, now middle-aged, recalls a torrid romance she had with a fan during her youth, when she was still churning out her indie strips. "Time Zone J" isn't just about her memories, it's also about how memories work, and their tangled unreliability. As such, Do...
INSIDE ZOE THOROGOOD'S HEAD... a portrait of the artist as a young woman
May 25, 2023 21:00 - 32 minutes - 29.6 MBZoe Thorogood is just about to turn 25 and she's already an artistic force. She burst onto the comics scene with "The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott," published in 2020, about a young artist doomed to go blind. She followed that up with her brilliant memoir "It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth," about her struggles with depression. If "Billie Scott" was an announcement of an intriguing young talent, "Centre of the Earth" all but solidified it. But one of the most intriguing things ab...
POLITE SOCIETY ...Good Pop Culture Club
May 21, 2023 22:00 - 1 hour - 65.6 MBThis month to celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month in Asian hosted podcast, we're bringing you an episode from Good Pop Culture Club, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective. Good Pop Culture Club is a regular discussion about the good pop that gets us through our days. Each episode hosts Marvin, Jess and Han discuss what they've been watching their opinions on recent media news and discuss a featured pop culture topic with an emphasis on diversity and representation....
HUNGRY GHOST ...featuring Books & Boba
May 07, 2023 23:00 - 56 minutes - 48 MBThis month to celebrate AAPI heritage we're featuring an episode from Books & Boba, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective - a podcast group we're part of that features unique Asian American voices and stories. Books & Boba is a book club dedicated to books written by Asian and Asian American authors. You can find more eps at booksnadboba.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. On this episode -Books & Boba hosts Marvin + Reera chat with HUNGRY GHOST creator ...
HUMAN TARGET ...what's wrong with noir fan service?
April 28, 2023 04:00 - 37 minutes - 31.4 MBThis week, we're reading the 2022 Human Target limited series by Tom King and Greg Smallwood. You'll remember how much we love Tom King from multiple previous episodes like Mr. Miracle and Superman Woman of Tomorrow. In this latest series, Christopher Chance, aka the Human Target, is on his latest cases protecting Lex Luthor when things go sideways. An assassination attempt Chance didn’t see coming leaves him vulnerable and left trying to solve his own murder, as he has 12 days to discover ju...
THE HUMAN TARGET ...what's wrong with noir fan service?
April 28, 2023 04:00 - 37 minutes - 31.4 MBThis week, we're reading the 2022 Human Target limited series by Tom King and Greg Smallwood. You'll remember how much we love Tom King from multiple previous episodes like Mr. Miracle and Superman Woman of Tomorrow. In this latest series, Christopher Chance, aka the Human Target, is on his latest cases protecting Lex Luthor when things go sideways. An assassination attempt Chance didn’t see coming leaves him vulnerable and left trying to solve his own murder, as he has 12 days to discover ju...
GENE LUEN YANG's ...American Born Chinese
April 14, 2023 04:00 - 50 minutes - 41.6 MBSo with Asian American Heritage Month, we decided that G should be for Gene Luen Yang ...mostly as an excuse to read AMERICAN BORN CHINESE, Yang's Eisner Award-winning, seminal graphic novel soon to be released as a Disney+ streaming show with a bevvy of Oscar winners. American Born Chinese is Gene Luen Yang's was first released in 2006 - written and illustrated by Yang, and also colored by cartoonist Lark Pien. American Born Chinese consists of three seemingly disparate tales... First, the ...
FAMILIAR FACE... it's like being in a Radiohead album
April 06, 2023 01:00 - 34 minutes - 31.6 MBIn Michael DeForge's Familiar Face, the world is always changing, commutes are being altered, and peoples' bodies are constantly being transformed, or "optimized." The citizens of this world exist in an environment that they cannot control or even begin to understand. Sound familiar?
ESTHER'S NOTEBOOKS ...your guide to kids, parenting, and french hip hop
March 11, 2023 02:00 - 42 minutes - 36.6 MBAs we continue reading our way thru the alphabet — E is for Esther's Notebooks, the critically acclaimed cartoon series that chronicles the hilarious and heartbreaking true life of a young girl growing up in Paris, by Riad Satouff, the award-winning French Syrian cartoonist best known for his childhood cartoon autobiography, the Arab of the Future (one of the first books we read on this pod) Several years ago, Sattouf was out to dinner with some of his friends, who brought along their outgoin...
DOOM PATROL... Grant Morrison's laundry list of weird ideas
February 26, 2023 01:00 - 35 minutes - 35.3 MBThe Doom Patrol debuted in 1963, just a few months before the X-Men. The two titles had a lot in common: a group of superpowered misfits led by a man in a wheelchair. But while the X-Men soon found their way into the pop cultural canon, the Doom Patrol could only muster a cult following — and only recently started rising into the mainstream due to the eponymous HBO TV series. But Doom Patrol still had a succession of heavy hitting talent inventing consistently weird challenges for the team to...
CATWOMAN ...rad goggles and criminal noir.
February 06, 2023 13:30 - 44 minutes - 43.6 MBC is for...CATWOMAN! Catwoman is much more than a feline-themed criminal in a cat-suit. Despite sexy portrayals by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, Anne Hathaway, Camren Bicondova, or Zoë Kravitz would have you believe, Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman has the potential to be a much more nuanced character in modern comics. Way back back in 2002, now acclaimed crime-fiction writer Ed Brubaker attempted to do just that - redefine a sexual icon into a feminist ...
BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL ...violent and improbable
January 29, 2023 22:00 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBOn the surface, the samurai epic Blade of the Immortal is all about the violence, with its gorgeous splash pages of kaleidoscopic dismemberment. Created by Hiroaki Samura, a manga artist about whom very little is known, Blade of the Immortal follows a familiar outline: a young girl named Rin seeks to kill the group of swordsmen responsible for the murder of her family. But Samura's ambitions are greater, and as Rin and her hired hitman Manji make headway into her quest, her feelings about her...
AKIRA ...manga, motorcycles, mutants...Oh My!
January 07, 2023 19:00 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBA is for...AKIRA. For 2023 we're reading our way through the alphabet! AKIRA, the seminal Japanese cyberpunk post-apocalyptic manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo. This revolutionary Japanese comic ran from 1982 to 1990, serialized biweekly in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Young Magazine, with its 120 chapters collected into six tankōbon volumes. The work had an outsized influence on not just comics east and west, but its landmark anime film adaptation from 1988 shaped a...
YEAR END EXTRAVAGANZA ...sifting the dusty gems from a dumpster fire
December 30, 2022 05:00 - 1 hour - 52 MBAs the year comes to a close, we reflect on more than a few new adaptations of comic book stories in the Cinematic Universes, multiplexes, and streaming services of our hearts — like the dutiful corporate citizens of the republic we are. longtime friend of the pod and frequent guest Paresh joins us for our shenanagins of hot takes and reflections of the years nerd/pop culture adaptations, including (listed in order of 2022 release): Hawkeye Spider-Man: No Way Home Book of Boba Fett Peacema...
FABLES V7-11 ...it's great and all, but isn't it also pretty Euro-centric?
December 24, 2022 15:00 - 45 minutes - 43.1 MBLast week, we discussed how awesome FABLES is. And it's still a rip roarin' good time, but also... how does it hold up in a modern context, almost fifteen years after the first volume was published? Its debut was just a few short years after 9/11, so it has a certain political and Euro-centric sensibility that was more fashionable at the time. How does that read today?
FABLES V1-6 ...world-building's not afraid of the big bad wolf
December 09, 2022 05:00 - 39 minutes - 35.7 MBFABLES, by Bill Willingham, is a multi-Eisner award-winning comic telling THE modern-day story of the legends of folk and fairy tales - living in our modern, mundane — or mundy — world. We're talking Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Rose Red, Prince Charming, Cinderella, Jack, Goldilocks, the 3 little Pigs, Santa Clause, Beauty & the Beast, Pinnochio, and many more. And while Fables definitely sounds like some weird shit - don't worry it is - Fables combines the narratives of many characters fro...
DUCKS: TWO YEARS IN THE OIL SANDS...the cost of an MFA
December 04, 2022 12:00 - 30 minutes - 31.3 MBThe cartoonist Kate Beaton is known for her incisively funny and parodic takes on everything from Aquaman to Hamlet in her series "Hark! A Vagrant!" But earlier this year, she released her memoir "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands," a harrowing account of the isolating, infuriating, and at times terrifying job that Beaton took after graduating in order to pay off the $40,000 debt from her arts degree. Even as a young woman in her early 20s, Beaton is tough and confronts each conflict with wi...
HOW TO UNDERSTAND ISRAEL IN 60 DAYS ...and not get us cancelled
November 20, 2022 05:00 - 45 minutes - 39 MBIf you're like us, you've not taken your Birthright Israel tour. But you know who did The cartoonist Sarah Glidden. And you know what else she did? She chronicled it in her 2007 memoir “How To Understand Israel in 60 Days.” Glidden is Jewish and progressive, living in New York City, when she departs on her tour. She goes in with some preconceived notions and by the end she’s far less definitive in her point of view. Using rich water colors, Glidden details the day-to-day aspects of her tour w...
BERLIN... this is how your country ends
November 07, 2022 01:00 - 38 minutes - 38.7 MBPost WWI Berlin was both a place of great creative energy and a city about to tear itself apart. In a 700 page opus 20 years in the making, the artist Jason Lutes chronicled Germany's embrace of the Nazi party through the lens of then men and women working and toiling, celebrating and politicking, throughout Berlin. It's a book both exhilarating to read and frightening, given how closely the society that Lutes chronicles mirrors our own troubled world of America in the 2020s.
COMICS ...Industry Evolution by Meteor Strike
October 21, 2022 04:00 - 11 minutes - 11.3 MBSince Ryan's stuck in a well saving puppies while battling conniving co-op boards, and Raman's buried in the demands of fatherhood and an international life of crime, we enlisted friend-of-the-pod BRAD BERENS to fill the gap (and your earholes). Like us, Brad's a sophisticated nerd with a way with the words. In Brad's latest "weekly dispatch" e-newsletter, Brad dropped some interesting thoughts about the state of the modern comic book industry, and how it tracks against the broader trends i...
ESSEX COUNTY... it's cold in Canada when you're all alone
September 26, 2022 01:00 - 34 minutes - 34.7 MBJeff Lemire's "Essex County Trilogy" is one of those rare books that's quiet, with very little happening from a narrative standpoint, but that leaves a tremendous emotional punch. At the time, Lemire was working as a line cook from 4pm to midnight, and he'd work on his comics from the morning to afternoons. "I had been struggling with my work, it was all very derivative and lacking," he said in a previous interview. "And I just stripped it all down and decided to work on a story that was muc...
PAPER GIRLS ...uneasy conversations with our younger selves
September 09, 2022 04:00 - 45 minutes - 42.8 MBThis week, we read PAPER GIRLS, the multi-Eisner award winning series written by Brian K Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, recently adapted as a streaming TV series starring Ali Wong on Amazon (and unfairly called a rip off of Stranger Things, bc as with most things, the comic came first!) Paper Girls starts way back when in 1988, in a suburb of Cleveland, where four twelve year old...you guessed it...Paper Girls - Erin, Tiffany, Mac, and KJ - befriend each other the morning after Hall...
ULTRASOUND ...also a journey within
August 27, 2022 15:00 - 34 minutes - 35.1 MBConor Stechchulte's "Ultrasound," which was made into a 2021 movie, is about memory, gaslighting, and psychological terror. It's hard for comics to convey a sense of interiority, but Stechchulte has some graphical tricks that really create the same sense of unease and discombobulaton in readers that his characters are going through. Whether that's a good thing or not. "Ultrasound" begins on a dark and stormy night, as these things often begin, when a man gets a flat tire and is invited into a...
KRISHNA: A JOURNEY WITHIN ...explaining blue gods to Ryan
August 18, 2022 16:00 - 41 minutes - 42.3 MBthis week we're reading KRISHNA: A JOURNEY WITHIN - by Abhishek Singh. Singh is Indian graphic novelist acclaimed for his unique interpretations of myths and ancient philosophies - who first made his mark for the acclaimed series Ramayana 3392. AND he was first Indian comics artist published in mainstream American comics. Singh's 2012 comics interpretation of the Lord Krishna was a searing, human portrayal of one of the great Hindi deities. To many in the west he became a popular god in the 6...
SANDMAN V1-5 ...the required reading of your dreams
August 07, 2022 04:00 - 40 minutes - 43.6 MBWhen you ask people what the Greatest TV show of all time is, folks say things like "the Wire," or "the Sopranos." When people ask what the greatest movie of all time is, folks say things like "Citizen Kane" or "the Godfather." And when it comes to comics, most will say this week' book, Neil Gaiman's "The Sandman." So for the next two weeks, it's all sandman, all the time (well, at least just 2 episodes) The Sandman chronicles the eponymous character, also known as Dream, or Morpheus. He's o...
SUPERGIRL WOMAN OF TOMORROW ...space horses, space racism, and true grit
July 15, 2022 04:00 - 42 minutes - 63.6 MBThis week we are reading SUPERGIRL: WOMAN OF TOMORROW, by Tom King and Bilquis Evely. The 2021 limited series from DC's Black Label - which is basically DCs new mature / Elseworld's imprint. Most just assume that Kara Zor El is simply Superman's girly cousin - which is probably how she was created years ago. But in this cosmic adventure, she is anything but. Yes there is girl power, but as we tag along for a girls trip for justice - basically True Grit in space - we are brought to face the be...
GENDER QUEER ...banned books, awkward adolescence, and pronouns.
July 08, 2022 04:00 - 31 minutes - 46.8 MBThis week we're reading Maia Kobaba's GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Created in 2014 - by Maia Kobabe, who uses e/em/eir pronouns - created a cathartic autobiography of Eir's experience with gender identity — from crushes to fan fic, from coming out to making out. What started as a series of Instagram posts to explain to the author's family what it means to be nonbinary and asexual, Gender Queer becomes so much more than a personal story: it is a useful and touching guide on gender identity—what it ...
MEGG, MOGG, & OWL ...coping with the bad times
June 30, 2022 12:00 - 35 minutes - 35.5 MBIt's hard to find optimism with the end of Roe, yet another curtailing of the civil liberties that once defined America. While the Megg, Mogg, and Owl series by Simon Hanselmann won't exactly restore any sense of optimism, it will at least make you feel less alone by plunging you into the misadventures of others who are also flailing through life. In this episode, we'll review two collected works from the series: "Megahex" from 2014, and "Bad Gateway," published in 2019. While "Megahex" ver...
BATMAN WHITE KNIGHT ...social commentary with action figures
June 24, 2022 04:00 - 47 minutes - 73.4 MBThis week we're talking about BATMAN: WHITE KNIGHT - Sean Murphy's 2017 alternate universe mini-series that flips the status quo for Batman - and asks some hard questions along the way. In the book, the Joker cures himself of his psychosis, and reverts to Jack Napier - upon which he begins a campaign to interrogate WTF the city of Gotham has been doing all these years, with law enforcement allowing a masked vigilante and some teenagers with military grade equipment take the law into their ow...
MARIKO TAMAKI ...Surely chats on Modern Minorities
June 17, 2022 04:00 - 53 minutes - 71.7 MB"The idea that a person can't relate to something because it's not directly about them is a misunderstanding of who's been reading books this whole time." Since June is Pride Month and we're cos-playing in our favorite rainbows spandex, we decided to share our Modern Minorities chat with award winning comics creator Mariko Tamaki - who's work we've covered a LOT on Quarantined Comics - from Skim & This One Summer, to I Am Not Starfire, to Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me - Mariko's work i...
MS. MARVEL ...fighting for truth, justice, and time management?
June 10, 2022 23:00 - 58 minutes - 55.2 MBThis week, we're REPLAYING our re-read MS. MARVEL - written by award winning novelist, and Muslim American G. Willow Wilson. Some would argue that MS. MARVEL was one of the most important books - and new characters Marvel comics has released in a decade. While her name might be familiar, everything else is "all new, all different" - because we're introduced to Kamala Khan, a Pakistani-American teenage girl - just trying to get her homework done, write fan-fic, play MMORPGs, figure out her rel...
HOLY BI-ROBIN ...exploring modern sexuality in comics
June 04, 2022 04:00 - 1 hour - 97.7 MBHoly (Bi)Robin! Tim Drake Comes Out _“Why change Robin? It was a no brainer. It happens to a lot of bisexual people, it seemed like natural character development.” Since it's Pride Month and we're taking a week off to paint ourselves in rainbows, we figured we'd feature a super easy conversation about sexual identity in mainstream comics (from Raman's OTHER podcast Modern Minorities). Recently, Batman's partner, Robin discovered his own queer identity on my other podcast, modern minorities. W...
THE KILLER... an assassin in a crisis
May 31, 2022 02:00 - 41 minutes - 40.6 MBFrom 1998 to 2013, the French writer Matz and the illustrator Luc Jacamon told an epic story of an unassuming man who kills people for money. But as he does so, he begins to question what he's doing and why he's doing it. In this week's episode, we'll take a look at the entire saga of "The Killer." Overwhelming in scope and ambition, Matz and Jacamon aren't content with just detailing their eponymous killer's inner workings. In fact, it seems as if they quickly bore of what seemingly starts ...
GENE LUEN YANG ...chats on Modern Minorities
May 20, 2022 04:00 - 45 minutes - 64.7 MBwhile Raman & Ryan are off saving the multi-verse, here's Raman's Modern Minorities conversation with award-winning comics creator Gene Luen Yang... Gene Luen Yang’s (comic book) American dream “Being an immigrant kid - your experience and your parents’ and your grandparents’ experiences are in three completely different worlds.” _** Gene Luen Yang is an award-winning cartoonist, storyteller, and teacher - whose been creating comics since the fifth grade. His 2006 graph_ic novel American Born...
PALESTINE ...cartoon journalism that's required reading
May 13, 2022 04:00 - 46 minutes - 70.8 MBPALESTINE is Joe Sacco's seminal work of cartoon journalism - which we're reading to commemorate Al Nakba* First published in 1993, PALESTINE covers Sacco's travels thru occupied Palestine territory - and Israel - to embed himself with the Palestinian people - hearing their stories first-hand to understand how they lived their every day lives. Sacco wanted to get around the sanitized story the Western Media was potraying — to emphasizes the history and plight of the Palestinian people, as a ...
DR. STRANGE: TRIUMPH & TORMENT and THE OATH ...these relationships are DOOMED.
May 08, 2022 13:00 - 35 minutes - 35.8 MBDid you know Dr. Doom had a mom? He did! She made a pact with Mephisto (Marvel's version of the Devil) and now she's in hell. And Doom needs Dr. Strange's help to free her. In celebration of Mother's Day and the release of "Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness," we'll check out "Triumph and Torment" by the writer Roger Stern and the illustrator -- a very young Mike Mignola, before he went on to create Hellboy. And we'll also read "Dr. Strange: The Oath," which is like the movie "Quest fo...
SQUIRE ...girls with swords (feat. grounded geeks)
April 30, 2022 00:00 - 57 minutes - 83.2 MBThis week for Ramadan (~kinda?) we are reading SQUIRE by Sara Alfageeh and Nadia Shammas - a comic set in an alternate history Middle East and North Africa. Squire follows Aiza, a 14 year old girl training to become a knight for a war-torn empire while hiding her true background as a girl from conquered lands...which could be any major world civilization. Born Ornu - a second-class citizen of the once-great Bayt-Sajji Empire, Aiza dreams of a better life of glory and citizenship - by leaving ...