After the fiasco of the 1994 unreleased Fantastic Four movie, development proceeded on a big-budget FF film, which finally hit theaters in 2005 — a better film than the ’94 attempt in some ways, but frustratingly as bad or worse in others. This week, in another crossover with the Comic Book Movie Oblivion podcast, Tim … Continue reading #830 The Fantastic Four on Film: “Fantastic Four” (2005) pt 1: “I am hot, and I’m not afraid to cry”

Captain America was the obvious choice of a character to help Marvel celebrate the USA’s bicentennial in 1976. The job of doing that went to Jack Kirby, co-creator of the character. Naturally, that meant a story full of hard-hitting moments, and one that gets a bit treacly at the end, but also doesn’t back away … Continue reading #829 Jack Kirby’s “Captain America’s Bicentennial Battles”

Oni are mythical monsters similar to the ogres of Western tradition. Like many of the legendary Japanese creatures, their characteristics are often adopted for manga characters, including series such as Lum, The Promised Neverland, and Demon Slayer. Our own Patrick has compiled a lot of data on them, and he’s here this time to fill … Continue reading #828 Japan’s mythical “oni” in manga

The second omnibus volume of Mitsuru Adachi’s Cross Game focuses largely on a scrimmage between the varsity team and the “portables”, which doesn’t go how anyone expects it to. Things are shifting subtly under the surface; we’re pretty sure what the series is leading up to (it’s a baseball manga, after all), but it’s fun … Continue reading #827 “Cross Game” Omnibus 2: Subtle Shifts

When Hugh D’Andrade was ten years old, his next door neighbor was mysteriously murdered, and he saw the body. In his forthcoming graphic memoir The Murder Next Door, he explores the trauma this caused him as the experience stuck with him over decades, and he explores the question: If someone else has had a worse … Continue reading #826 Hugh D’Andrade’s “The Murder Next Door”: Your trauma is your trauma

Brad Guigar, creator of Evil Inc., has been putting his comics on the Web for over 20 years, and this week he’s here to talk about how he made that his day job, the challenges of promoting your work in a changing media environment, how making an erotic comic (his Patreon-only spinoff Evil Inc. After Dark) … Continue reading #825 Brad Guigar talks promoting your webcomic, even (especially?) if it’s NSFW!

Tim is now completely caught up with the MCU! Mulele joins him to discuss the most recently released (as of this episode’s recording) Marvel Cinematic Universe film, last summer’s Spider-Man: Far From Home! (Originally published on Patreon March 28, 2020) Brought to you by: The Law of Equivalent Exchange: A Fullmetal Alchemist manga podcast Our … Continue reading “Spider-Man: Far from Home” (2019)

Now that we’ve become familiar with Jack Kirby‘s original Eternals comics, repeatedly referring to the 2021 MCU film along the way, it’s time to sit through all two hours and 37 minutes of it again and evaluate it anew. Unfortunately, as a movie, it still has just as many problems, but at least now Tim … Continue reading #824 “Eternals” (2021): Where it went wrong (and right!)

Samuel Edme’s comic The Shapes is… a bit hard to pin down. It looks like notebook scribblings, it has its faults, but it seems to have found an audience, which is all a comics creator can ask for. Bad? No. Not for us? Probably. Tim and Adam attempt to describe it anyway.

We’ve reached the end of Jack Kirby‘s Eternals series. Sure, it was a weird series, but introducing a Hulk robot apparently did little for the sales numbers. How did Kirby wrap things up? For a series that featured so many characters (though not as many as the freakin’ movie, which we’ll get to soon!), he … Continue reading #823 Jack Kirby’s “Eternals,” #17-19: Lots o’ Ikaris (or Ikarus?)