Quarantined Comics

Somehow, Adrian Tomine still feels like a young cartoonist to me, yet he's had a long and varied career - from his experimental strips in the self-published Optic Nerve, to his studies of loneliness, alienation, and simmering rage in... well, most everything he wrote afterwards.

In his most recent work however, Tomine seems to be more charitable to his characters (which, in The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, is mostly himself) while charting their insecurities. Perhaps that's the benefit of knowing that, in the end, things turn out okay - while the younger characters depicted in books like Sleep Walk, Summer Blonde, and Shortcomings aren't so sure.

The other thing about Tomine is that his work often feels like a catalyst for self-reflection. At least, for us...

Imagine a world, where only BLACK people have super powers...

This week we're talking about "BLACK" and its sequel "BLACK AF" by Kwanza Osajyefo + artists Tim Smith 3 and Jennifer Johnson (respectively). The books made quite an impression on the industry when they came out from 2017-2018, and was recently announced to being adapted to film by Warner Brothers. But we ask...was the book as good as the hype/concept?

The book posits that in a world that already hates and fears them - what if only Black people had superpowers? In book 1 we meet the protagonist - a young man gunned down by the police, who miraculously survives, and discovers a long held conspiracy held secret over the years, that the powers that be - and the powers that have - don't want the world knowing - for very different reasons. You can probably guess where that goes.

Book 2 has a pretty unique take in the already established universe, as we follow a young woman with a very Small-vill-ian origin story - as she navigates the brave new world.

The usual superhero fisticuffs aside - BLACK makes room for a commentary with a pretty unique premise. It's at times ambitious, at times revolutionary, and sometimes even cringe-inducing, but regardless of how you feel, the book leaves its mark.

We're not going to pretend we are even MARGINALLY qualified to comment on the Black experience in America.- but the past several months of a dumpster fire of 2020 has our country having a long overdue conversation about race. Joining us for our conversations is friend-of-the-pod, and fellow not-a-Black-person Paresh.

Special Guest: Paresh Jha.

The people in Eleanor Davis' stories strive to find solace only to often find it tantalizing out of reach. How do you find peace in this world?

That question seemed to permeate Davis' 2014 collection How To Be Happy and arises again in her 2019 graphic novel The Hard Tomorrow, which takes place in a dystopic future yet feels at home in the middle of the Trump era.

Seems depressing, but Davis is a virtuostic visual storyteller and her work is often sad, mysterious, and breathtaking all at the same time.

Whereas the first half of The Sandman were rousing adventures, it's in the final volumes where Neil Gaiman uses the character to explore familial responsibility and the nature of dreams.

But don't worry, it's not a slog (Tell that to Raman) - there's still tons of bloodshed.

Chester Brown breaks down his thoughts on human relationships and the economics and morality of prostitution.

Do we agree with him? Sometimes. Do we disagree with him? Sometimes. We'll interrogate Chester Brown's interrogation of a taboo topic.

This week we fill some airtime by revisiting a later work from the French superstar Moebius - the World of Edena.

In 1990, the French car manufacturer Citroen commissioned Moebius to create a short piece to celebrate...a marketing campaign. A quick commissioned commercial piece...quickly went of the rails. What stared as an innocent little ditty became a much larger, universe spanning, genre-defying epic.

After 2 androgynous space buddy pilots find an abandoned space station, Crash land on a barren planet, drive around in an antique car, the pair soon find a mysterious space pyramid surrounded by couterie of way-fairen alien species, one of them merges with said space pyramid, and transports everyone a Arc style... to a paradise planet (an Edena, if you will). The original duo start eating the local fruit, go native, get separated, and soon encounnter a weird societal evolution of their long evolved fellow travelers featuring full body, hermetically sealed outfits...with trunks (and eventually psychic dragons, and clones...just because)

Throw in some garden of Eden references and a veiled commentary on our society's increasingly repressed, sterile nature, and you've got a corporate marketing client deliverable pretty far off brief.

The game is afoot! Watson & Holmes is 2013’s urban re-imagining of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson - as contemporary Black men in Harlem (this one ain’t about Benedict Cumberbatch & Lucy Liu).

The series was created by writer Karl Bollers with art by Rick Leonardi, and crowdfunded initially on Kickstarter. Book One, “A Study in Black” - features the eponymous Dr. Watson - an Afghanistan war vet - a former army medic now working as a surgeon in an inner-city clinic, and of course - Holmes is a peculiarly observant “consulting detective” to NY’s finest. As you can imagine, fate brings this unlikely duo together to team up, bump egos, and bust some heads - in a labyrinth of drugs, guns, gangs and conspiracy. Beyond some interesting takes on technology, race, and modern crime - It’s worth noting that the series decides to put Dr. Watson at the forefront, with Holmes as a strong supporting character.

The series was critically acclaimed for it’s unique take on a classic - and nominated for multiple awards including the Eisner and the Glyph. But it wasn’t until it’s SECOND book - where the characters were handed over to a bevy of creators like Brandon Easton, Lyndsay Faye, and Steven Grant. Issue #6 actually WON an Eisner for a single issue…that was focused on the issue of sex-trafficking.

Joining us to talk about BOTH books is a new friend of the pod, Chris Walker - experienced comic book artist, colorist, marketer, and founder of Urbanime.

Whatever remains must be the truth?

The Incal is an epic sci-fi by filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky and the legendary French artist Moebius. A madcap adventure that involves acid lakes, a boy turned into a spaceship, and a naked woman riding a rat, it's also a book that can be confusing and frustrating to read if you come into it not knowing what to expect. Or it can be a magical romp. Or maybe some of column A, some of column B.

Pop a special chocolate and come on in.

"Proximity and closeness are not the same.”

We're getting a little heavy (and non-fiction), with THE BEST WE COULD DO - Thi Bui's illustrated memoir of her family's history and exodus from Vietnam to America. Joining us is Raman's OTHER podcast co-host-with-the-most, Sharon Thony from MODERN MINORITIES (modmypod.com)

This book - Bui's first graphic novel - is a moving one: covering love, war, and the refugee's journey — with an intimate focus on one family: her own. Rather than simply retelling her own memories - which are shown through the eyes of a scared child - Bui also chooses to illustrate the stories of her parents, from their youth to the estranged present.

If you want to better see the Vietnam War from the perspective of one Vietnamese family - and feel what so many immigrants endure, I can not recommend a better book to start your own journey. As the cover says, it will break your heart and put it back together.

The indie cartoonist Chester Brown started making a name for himself in the 80s, with the publication of his self-published Yummy Fur. From those pages originated the short, four panel cartoons that eventually became Ed the Happy Clown, a crude made-up-on-the-fly adventure about... well, a naked vampire lady, religious guilt, Ronald Reagan's head on the tip of a penis, and an inter-dimensional portal in someone's butthole.

We'll talk about these madcap elements, but we'll also confront some of the more troubling aspects of Brown's graphic novel, like his racist depiction of pygmies.