With the recent passing of cartoonist Geneviève Castrée, I thought it would be a good week to skip regular scheduled programing and revisit this interview. I really enjoyed it and got a lot out of the conversation. We discuss her graphic novel from Drawn and Quarterly, Susceptible.  It’s a Canadian great. I found it really impactful personally on a number of different levels. Geneviève had a unique role in comics, following a variety of personal artistic applications, not just visually, but also with haunting and beautiful music. All of her work seems to compliment one another. Geneviève leaves behind a husband and young daughter. He had organized a gofundme campaign that is still accepting donations. I strongly suggest doing so. Health and social care in the united states are horribly lacking in supporting the basic human needs of vulnerable peoples.

I had been a fan of Brendan McCarthy’s work for quite a long time. Back when I was a teenager working in a comic store in the mid 90s, seeing the Shade covers he was doing were a revelation of this other weird world in comics that we weren’t seeing in my suburban-Canadian-West Coast comic store. I had followed his work as it appeared across my hands, in his own DC Solo book and the eventual massive  Milligan/McCarthy Collection from Dark Horse, featuring a wide range of their weirdo collaboration comics (all the while not knowing that he had spent several years living in Vancouver working on the ReBoot cartoon). He has since been a key hand in the design and look of the latest Mad Max movie, Fury Road. Most recently is the Dream Gang graphic novel, collecting work that originally appeared in Dark Horse Presents. Brendan has a lot to say about comics, life and a variety of wide topics.

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We’re back to talk to Gabby Schulz aka Ken Dahl, author of the collection WELCOME TO THE DAHL HOUSE published by Microcosm in 2007, the Ignatz award-winning book MONSTERS from Secret Acres in 2009, recently back in print in a handsome new edition, and SICK, out this month from Secret Acres.

SICK is the story of the author being laid down by an illness in his cramped Brooklyn apartment. The story begins as a Kafka-esque exploration of the trials and tribulations of trying to attain treatment without having the insurance or money to do so, but soon morphs into a brutally frank self-assessment of not only the narrator’s personal failures, but also the failures of predominantly white Western culture and the systems and structures we’re all beholden to and a part of.

There was a lot to talk about with this book and I thank Gabby for taking the time.

Full disclosure – Secret Acres also publishes my work and they paid me tens of dollars to give SICK a review through rose-colored lenses. YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.

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You can only see her through a telescope anymore. Or is it a rifle scope? In diegetic terms, it is a telescope, but they can seem very much like the same thing. Regardless, it is now the only way to see her.

Trevlin Utz drew comics professionally from 1994 to 1998. For the first three years he worked collaboratively, at a Virginia publisher he outlasted. For the last two, he worked alone, for an Illinois publisher still prominent today. Almost everything he made related to Donna Mia, “a Demoness to make you forget other girls,” and her picaresque swagger through a United States flush with vampire swells and human gluttony. She is a succubus, in part, and often she is naked. This was called the “Bad Girl” era, though Donna Mia did not want to be bad. One time at a party she met a man who was dating Truman Capote. One time at a carnival she met a veteran of World War I. Another time in a diner she met Neil Gaiman, but Neil Gaiman wasn’t quite Neil Gaiman in 1995.

It was the time of the comic book industry crash, and this is an interview with somebody who was there, until he wasn’t.

-Joe McCulloch

Note from the broadcaster. Something weird happened with Joe’s audio where he was recorded quicker than the guest, so as the interview goes on, there is some overlap in voices. These kind of things unfortunately happen with live recording. I once had an interview that didn’t record anything the guest said. I also once had an amazing in person interview with Ho Che Anderson where the recorder wasn’t turned on.

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Tom Ellard is the main mind behind Australian music project, Severed Heads. Their work in the early 80’s was well ahead of the curve for electronic music. Albums like Since the Accident have aged quite nicely 30 years later. This interview was conducted last year in advance of a north american tour.

I recorded this interview last summer. I had lofty ambitions of doing a podcast interviewing experimental musicians. It’s still something I would love to do, but just honestly don’t have the time. Preparing for this interview was really challenging, listening a whole lot of music and reading what i could to some up for podcast conversation. I am so used to my comics interviews, that a music interview is a whole different part of the brain that I haven’t exercised. I doubt this is anywhere near to one of my finest interviews, but it’s still interesting in some aspects. I felt pretty defeated by it though. I could that Ellard did not get much out of it as being a guest. I was supposed to follow up to continue the conversation, but honestly didn’t see a point. So here is a fragment conversation. This was to originally run in Island Magazine, but that fell through.

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Tim Hensley is among the many great living underappreciated cartoonists. His work is impeccably crafted, witty, inventive, it feels at once frozen and alive, questioning constantly the language, the medium, the relationship between drawings and words. There’s no one like him.

Dan Clowes described Wally Gropius as “a work of unassuming genius that rewards on ever-deepening levels on each re-reading” and this quote applies just as well to Tim’s two other books, Ticket Stub and, most recently, Sir Alfred Number 3, a comic-strip biography of Alfred Hitchcock that is unlike anything you may expect from the phrase “comic-strip biography.”

Read these comics with care and patience that they deserve. We could end it at that–the books speak for themselves, but I did talk to Tim for quite a while about writing, high and low culture, literary influences, found texts, punchlines and weather, so go and press the play button below. Bye.

– inkstuds note, this interview was conducted by another fantastic cartoonist, Roman Muradov.

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As a follow up to last weeks show, this weeks is the second panel, this time featuring Brandon Graham, David Brothers, Adam Warren, Meredith Gran and Farel Dalrymple. And of course, all this was hosted by the great and inquisitive Sloane Leong.

The topic of this panel was about manipulating narrative time and space on the page through paneling styles, drawing styles, narration, staging and pacing.

Below is a messy gallery I threw together from images that Sloane provided.

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This weeks studs is a little different. Inkstuds regular guest host, Sloane Leong did a couple of really interesting panels on comics with some great folks at Emerald City Comicon in March. This is the first. It features Brandon Graham, David Brothers, Jen Wang, and Meredith Gran. An amazing crew of fantastic cartoonists.

The panel said that they would discuss alternative story structure, story theory, the legacy of Western storytelling, and how to expand beyond it.

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Prolific web-cartoonist, Evan Dahm, joined me to talk about hist latest self published work, Vattu. Evan’s work is extremely enjoyable to read. I really liked seeing where his work went, eschewing standard fantasy tropes to fully explore these weird world’s he has created.

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Malachi Ward makes beautiful, intricate science fiction and fantasy comics. The stories are set in richly illustrated, fantastic landscapes, addressing existential questions and carrying a certain dark edge that I appreciate and associate with some of the very best science fiction writing in prose or comics. I was eager to talk about his recent work: a new short story collection from Alternative Comics called FROM NOW ON, and the serialized story he’s working on with Matt Sheehan in the ISLAND anthology called ANCESTOR. We also talked about time travel, why people explore strange new worlds, religious cults, and why we love Vancouver so much. I think Malachi is doing some really interesting comics right now and I hope you’ll check them out.

Interview by Sean Ford

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