Back in Critiquing Comics #25, we discussed the first issue of comics anthology mag Ugli Studios Presents. This time Tim and Mulele are looking at issue 2, finding some interesting ideas and art but some missed opportunities and places where crucial establishing shots don’t appear, leading to confusion. Maybe these creators just needed more pages […]

Brian Schirmer, a comics educator in San Francisco and writer of Ultrasylvania and the forthcoming Image series Black Jack Ketchum, joins Tim this week to talk about the difference between writing screenplays and writing comics; how he turned his comics script into a for-credit class for artists; tips that have led him to have both […]

Tim and Kumar meet in person for the first time! This calls for a podcast, but… what to review? We discuss the movie Crumb, which features not only the expected discussion of R. Crumb’s work (including an objective look at the question of whether some of the … discomfiting subjects of his work should really […]

As long as there has been erotic reading material, there have been people trying to make it harder to find. We might have expected that the brave new world of the Internet was going to make everything accessible to everyone whenever they wanted it, but as it becomes more controlled by certain big corporations, the […]

In Patrick Yurick’s Hipster Picnic, being a zombie serves as a metaphor for… what, exactly? Having anger issues? Does the metaphor work? Tim and Mulele discuss.

Time travel is a fascinating topic to many, and Fred Van Lente‘s current Ivar, Timewalker series from Valiant is  timesurfing at both its most fun, and most scientific, with nods to Stephen Hawking’s writings on the subject. Van Lente did his own time jump to the past a couple years ago in The Comic Book […]

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas… but how much is really happening in this comic that’s set there? Tim and Mulele discuss Bullets and Angels, by Brian Lee Byrd, Sarah Hollis, Saint Yak, Robert Nugent, and HdE. Also up for discussion in this extended episode: Why are we having trouble lately finding new […]

This time we examine issues 2 and 3 of the Aussie anthology magazine Aussie Aussie Aussie Oi Oi Oi!

While early 1950s anti-comics hysteria eventually resulted in the cancellation of nearly all their books, EC Comics still had one thing going for them: MAD! Written by Harvey Kurtzman and drawn by some of the best comics artists of the age, this parody comic set the template for much that came after it. But can […]

On a world with two suns, a young couple leave their city in a bubble and go to live in a small rural community. Is it the freedom they’ve been looking for? That’s the premise of Sophie Goldstein’s graphic novel “The Oven”. This week Sophie talks with Tim about “The Oven”, readers who have varying […]