Tim and Patrick discuss the third chapter of Fullmetal Alchemist, “The Mining Town.” Why are alchemists hated as “the dogs of the military”?

Telling a story without dialogue can be difficult. Telling your story entirely with pictures takes excellent storytelling skills. What are the stakes? What are the characters’ motivations? What, exactly, is going on here?! Tim and Mulele discuss two submitted comics which partially or entirely rely on wordless sequences: After the Fall, by Jacqueline Goldfinger, Keni Thomas, and Taylor Esposito; and Organic But Not Mental, by Pier Dola.

We’ve talked about several of Rumiko Takahashi’s manga series over the years, but this time we go back to the beginning with her first big hit, Urusei Yatsura, sometimes known in English as Lum. Tim and Kumar discuss the history of the strip, the gags you wouldn’t get without knowing Japanese, and what’s odd about it for being ostensibly a kids’ comic.

Kazuo Umezu’s horror manga series The Drifting Classroom is a taboo-busting series: it was aimed at kids and employs kid logic and exaggeration to a story depicting outrageous violence being done to and by kids. Even if you’re into horror, that description may have you asking: “Is this for me?” In this episode, Kumar and Ryan try to answer that question.

Umezu in red and white. (Source: https://www.jprime.jp/articles/-/18187)

Over the years there have been some attempts at augmented reality comics — where a smartphone app pointed at a comics page will reveal a bit of animation. One issue with these projects is that they’re labor-intensive, and require several different skill sets to produce. Sam Noir and Andrew Dorland are Kickstarting an augmented reality comic called Ballyskillen, and Andrew has multiple necessary skill sets for the endeavor, which he’ll apply to the project in proportion to the amount of money raised. In this mini-episode, Tim talks with Sam and Andrew about the project, and also about Sam’s series of comics anthologies called Cauldron.

 

The latest installment of our beloved Chad in Amsterdam is here! As always, Chad combines some incisive but casual observational and philosophical discussion with the work of his great artist friends, but this time the focus is less on Amsterdam and more on Chad himself. Where is he from? What makes you “from” a place? Will Tim and Mulele like this issue as much as the others? (Well, what do you think!?)

This week we present the second installment in a proposed new podcast series: The Law of Equivalent Exchange, a chapter-by-chapter discussion of the manga Fullmetal Alchemist. Tim and Patrick discuss chapter two of the series; while we remembered it as not having much of an impact on the overall story, the chapters in volume 1 turn out to do a lot of orientation to help prepare us for future volumes. We point out these signposts.

Last episode, we mentioned how writing a short, tight story can be more challenging than writing a sprawling epic. Right on cue comes Spider Forest Webcomic Anthology 4, an engaging collection of short comics by 17 creators of web comics. Tim and Mulele discuss which are the best (and which are merely good!), and whether perhaps some of these stories are a little too short.

Spider Forest Kickstarter – beginning October 12, 2020

This time, two books by Neil Gaiman: Black Orchid, with art by Dave McKean, and The Books of Magic, drawn by John Bolton and other artists. The challenge of Black Orchid can be to simply figure out the backstory, and how Gaiman changed it! The Books of Magic‘s Tim Hunter character is Harry Potter before Harry Potter; coincidence? Kumar and Jordan look at the evidence.

In a flooded New York City of the future, a corporate whistleblower is in a hurry to skip town. Tim and Mulele wish they understood more about the plot of The Solar Grid issue 1, by Gazeer, but this issue is more concerned with the comic’s world than its plot. So we critique what’s there!