Quarantined Comics

The late Satoshi Kon is known for his anime like Perfect Blue and Paprika - movies where both the characters and the audience must constantly question the reality of what they're experiencing. But before Kon directed movies, he was a manga creator, and the unfinished Opus is his last work before jumping careers.

In many ways, Opus feels like a wind up to the metafictional playfulness of Kon's later work. But how does it stand as a story on its own? Raman and Ryan argue it out again.

It's the mid-90s in New York City. Adam Kline is teaching a deadend job at a midtown fashion college, trapped in a loveless marriage, angry that his art career never took off.

And then the black outs start happening. The hallucinations. The floating eyeballs. The zombies.

Kevin Mutch's THE ROUGH PEARL taps into your midlife anxiety and takes you down a psychedelic journey where the decisions you make might very well be an alien infestation. Or maybe you're just crazy.

Over a century ago - on the foggy Hudson, our Sailor Twain - a riverboat captain with his own problems is just doing his job, when he finds himself rescuing, and becoming enamored by an injured mermaid.

Toss in a fornicating french nobleman, a no notoriously reclusive author, and a cast of weirdly wonderful window dressing characters - SAILOR TWAIN is an emotionally dark and mysterious story that's equal parts Poe, Hemingway and world mythology - illustrated in a moody charcoal finish.

SAILOR TWAIN or "the Mermaid of the Hudson", by Mark Siegel, Founder of First Second press, one of my favorite semi-indie comics publishers. The book just has a haunting atmosphere that pulled me in and still haunts me to this day.

We look at the first four of cartoonist Riad Sattouf's six-volume epic memoir about growing up in France and Syria (the fifth volume came out in November 2020 in French).

A unique, nuanced, and disturbing look at a childhood that takes place between two very different cultures.

on the eve of WW2...the big city, a sleepless dame who is as cruel as she is beautiful...

YOU PUT HIM ON A MISSION TO STEAL MONEY FROM THE NAZIS!

grab your cowboy hat, and break out your typewriter for PULP, by the longstanding writer / artist duo of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. To many, Brubaker's best known for revitalizing Captain America with his "Winter Soldier" storyline...but to TRUE FANS, we know and love Brubaker's frequent team-ups with Sean Phillips for any # of NON-superhero, crime drama. If you want some good comics reading, i'd recommend any # of the duo's pairings - like SLEEPER, THE FADE OUT, FATALE, and their long-standing series CRIMINAL.

this was a brand new read for me by some of my favorite creators. And we had a LOT of fun with it. hear how Ryan still finds a way to shit on something we really enjoyed...

Just read this book. It's amazing.

Unlike the previous DC Extended Universe movies, WW84 is a fun, campy romp - but that still doesn't absolve it of some fundamental storytelling problems.

In this episode, we'll take a break from reading weird, obscure comics like Jim Lee's X-Men in favor (kidding) in favor of watching WarnerMedia's presumptive blockbuster WW84, the sequel to 2017's Wonder Woman. What worked? What didn't? And to what extent did viewing it on a streaming platform in our living rooms, rather than being enraptured in a theater, dampen our enjoyment?

There were once these three cousins, who done got run out of town. One was a con man, the other a doofus, and the third, a journeyman. they descended into a valley, found themselves a friendly dragon, a talking bug, and a beautiful young woman who could walk between her dreams.

Not quite...this week we're talking about BONE - the comics masterpiece epic by Jeff Smith. Bone was the indie comics darling of the 90s, released sporadically over 55 black and white issues from 1991 to 2004. It tells the story of ....

When the story begins, the 3 cousins have been run out of Boneville for one of Phoney's many shenanigans. The 3 find themselves in a scenic valley where things are not what they seem. There's rat creatures, a great cow race, and so much more. With a supporting cast - the beautiful Thorn, the persnickeny Gran'ma Ben, and the righteous Lucius - all of whose mysterious pasts unravel into an expansively epic story - you're never sure where things are going to go. In recent years - through a re-release in color, it's found a new audience for nephews, nieces, and friends' kids around the world - and a welcome break out of the superhero genre that the kids are drawn to. Bone is a masterpiece of comics art.

Joining us this week is my personal friend of the Pod, and host of the Distiller Podcast, Brandon Dawson

Have you ever wondered what a conversation would be with your bi-racial kid, reflecting on everything that's going on in the world - the good, the bad, and the ugly? Have you ever had a conversation about race with your spouse of another race?

This week, we're talking about what might have been Raman's all time favorite BOOK of 2018. Mira Jacob's autobiographical memoir "Good Talk." Jacob - of Indian descent was already an acclaimed author for her debut NON-GRAPHIC novel - "The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing" - is a novel about a patriarch who starts talking to ghosts. It's a heartbreaking story that recounts with some realism, a daughters relationship with her immigrant father in the last days of his life. ...and their wacky extended Indian family.

But for GOOD TALK - Jacob went full-on reality - depicting in a uniquely simple graphic retelling of conversations about work and life with her young son, her Jewish husband, her parent-pleasing brother, her Indian parents, her extended family in India, her two best friends, and her very Trumpy in-laws.

This book - all told through a lens of race and gender - hit some of us a little too close to home (eyes...leaking), which is probably why we loved it so much. So Raman thought it might be a good idea to bring back friend of the Pod, Sharon Lee Thony, Raman's co-hostess with the mostess on his OTHER podcast - "Modern Minorities" - where they have conversations on work and life thru the lens of race and gender.

Break out the painful memories and Kleenex...

The artist Jillian Tamaki and her cousin the writer Mariko Tamaki each have dynamic careers in illustration and comics. You might have seen Jillian's art in The New York Times, or on the covers of Penguin Classics. And Mariko has sharpened her pen writing a variety of superhero comics including Harley Quinn, Hulk, and Supergirl. Most recently, DC Comics appointed her as lead writer on its storied "Detective Comics" title.

But the cousins have collaborated on more grounded fare - and This One Summer from 2014 and Skim from 2005. Each depict a turbulent, volatile, and confusing coming-of-age. In This One Summer, Rose and Windy, on the cusp of being teenagers, start to become aware of the adult problems that surround them. In Skim, the title character in her mid-teens deals with the reverberations of a suicide, and her growing social isolation.