Quarantined Comics

Merry ComiXmas Week 4: PAPER GIRLS

"Paper girls racing through a neon-lit haze,

Bikes clash with time in a wild, twisting maze.

With aliens blasting and shadows that creep,

They battle through chaos, their secrets to keep—

In a trippy adventure where dreams set ablaze!"

This holiday season, we're airing our 10 COMICS OF XMAS - an excuse to recommend and replay some our fav books that make a thoughtful gift for your loved ones (or great reading to comfort your dark and lonely nights)

PAPER GIRLS by Brian K. Vaughan & Cliff Chiang is the perfect comic for the person who's really a time traveling adventurer.

PAPER GIRLS is the multi-Eisner award winning series written by Brian K Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, recently adapted as a streaming TV series starring Ali Wong on Amazon (and unfairly called a rip off of Stranger Things, bc as with most things, the comic came first!)

Paper Girls starts way back when in 1988, in a suburb of Cleveland, where four twelve year old...you guessed it...Paper Girls - Erin, Tiffany, Mac, and KJ - befriend each other the morning after Halloween and quickly find a creepy basement time machine, and quickly find themselves in a millennia spanning temporal civil war between factions of human order and chaos. Along the way they encounter ancient cave people, future hipsters, and their older selves. ALSO, dinosaurs, microscopic-turned-gargantuan monsters, and giant-sized rock-em-sock-em robots

You may remember the writer Brian K. Vaughan, who's a former writer on the TV series LOST, and written many sci Fi series - some of which we've read on this pod - like Saga + Y: The Last Man. And the artist Cliff Chiang actually won an Eisner for his work on Paper Girls, and has created some other great works - most notably Wonder Woman, the Human Target, and Catwoman Lonely City. Anyhow, this is one that Ryan + Raman don't see eye to eye on, and we interrogate that further, as we are known to do....

Merry ComiXmas Week 3: ESTHER'S NOTEBOOKS

"In Esther’s life, each day’s a show,

Riad’s keen eye captures all her woe.

From playground drama to lunchroom fights,

He writes down her quirks, her dreams, her delights—

A glimpse of growing up, with all its wobbly flow!

This holiday season, we're airing our 10 COMICS OF XMAS - an excuse to recommend and replay some our fav books that make a thoughtful gift for your loved ones (or great reading to comfort your dark and lonely nights)

ESTHER'S NOTEBOOKS, by Riad Satouff is the perfect comic for the co-worker who has kids, and is in constant awe and confusion about them.

ESTHER'S NOTEBOOKS is the critically acclaimed cartoon series that chronicles the hilarious and heartbreaking true life of a young girl growing up in Paris, by Riad Satouff, the award-winning French Syrian cartoonist best known for his childhood cartoon autobiography, the Arab of the Future (one of the first books we read on this pod)

Several years ago, Sattouf was out to dinner with some of his friends, who brought along their outgoing young daughter — and as some of you with young daughters might already know...she would...not...stop...talking. Sattouf was fascinated by the young girls honest, garrulous and articulate nature, and seeking to contrast his childhood autobiography of growing up in the middle east in the 1980s, Sattouf decided to chronicle a modern child's take on life

So over the past three years, Riad Satouff has been a chatting with his friends outgoing young daughter, anonymized as Esther, where once a week she would tell him about her family, her school, her dreams, her fears. After each conversation he published a one page comic strip based on what she had said

First published in 2016 - Esther's Notebooks is an ongoing series that spans the first three years of young girl's life — from ages 9 thru 12 — over 156 comic strips, giving us a delightful look into the daily drama of this thoughtful, intelligent, and high spirited girl, who loves her father, finds her big brother annoying, loves French hip hop, and just wants an iPhone - among many, many other things.

Satouff has said “The real Esther interested me because she is a girl without a particular background. She has no family problems, her parents are together, she is not poor or rich, not stunningly beautiful nor plain, not super-intelligent but good at school. She is your average young girl without any particular backstory. Listening to her stories, I realised that they were hard, amusing and sometimes cruel, but they transmitted the reality of childhood.”

Satouff has said he plans to chronicle her life in cartoons until Esther's eighteen. It’s an unfiltered look into modern childhood and not exclusively French - despite providing a crash course into popular French hip hop artists. The way Esther grows up, interacts with social media, worries about terrorism, sexism, racism and questions of having or not having money, speaks to a universal audience. Occasionally we're brought into the trauma of current events - from a young child's perspective, whether its the Paris terror attacks or the political moment of Trump, Le Pain - Macron, and even Putin

It's the morning after, I’ll leave some fresh comments at the top of the episode. It was crushingly hard to tell my daughter before she went off to school. We're probably all asking ourselves, how did we get here? 

So easier to just re-air this Quarantined Comics episode from August 2022 about the vibrant and harrowing graphic novel Berlin, by Jason Lutes, which I've actually referenced in many conversations over the past few months. It’s a small distraction in an eerily prescient conversation about a comic book written about Germany in the 1930s. And if that's too heavy right now, head over to YouTube and watch “day drinking” clips with Seth Meyers — the ones with Rihanna and Dua Lipa are works of art. 

While a majority of our fellow Americans may have voted for an unhinged demagogue — the rest of us need to stick together. Solidarity is about to become the most important word in our political vocabulary. We need each other. And so, for the next four years, solidarity is the name of the game. 

Merry ComiXmas Week 2: NOT ALL ROBOTS

"In a world where bots do all the grind,

Humans lounge, completely blind.

'Hey, we’re not useless!' they all proclaim,

While robots roll their eyes in shame—

'Good luck, meatbags; we’re done being kind!' "

This holiday season, we're airing our 10 COMICS OF XMAS - an excuse to recommend and replay some our fav books that make a thoughtful gift for your loved ones (or great reading to comfort your dark and lonely nights)

NOT ALL ROBOTS, by Mark Russell & Mike Deodato Jr. It's the perfect comic for the coworker who has a twisted sense of humor, and afraid of the impending robocolypse

NOT ALL ROBOTS - a future fiction work by Mark Russell, who you might remember for schadenfreude takes on modern society thru his critically acclaimed work on "The Flintstones" (seriously, look it up)

Merry ComiXmas Week 1: ON A SUNBEAM

"In space where love’s a cosmic mess,

Mia’s heart’s in total distress.

She’s fixing ships and dodging tears,

While reminiscing ’bout her crush for years,

Just hoping her love life’s not a game of chess!

This holiday season, we're airing our 10 COMICS OF XMAS - an excuse to recommend and replay some our fav books that make a thoughtful gift for your loved ones (or great reading to comfort your dark and lonely nights)

ON A SUNBEAM, by Tillie Walden is the perfect comic for the person who's a hopeless romantic and reads too many young adult adventures about space sweethearts, space-homesteader aristocrat sisters, or space-cathedral reconstruction.

way back when, on October 10, 2022, Ryan made Raman re-read Alan Moore's seminal run on Swamp Thing, which Ryan then forgot to edit and release. hey, life got busy!

Lasting from issues 20–64 between 1984–1987, Moore's series completely reshaped the character of the Swamp Thing. In an effort to feed the sweet sweet podcast content machine, here's the long lost episode, exactly two years later...

So this is the second episode paying tribute to the late great John Cassaday, the award winning comics artist, best known for his co-creation of Planetary, which we revisited last week

John Cassaday passed away far too soon at the age of 52 on September 9, 2024 in New York City. Be sure to check out last week's replay of our episode of his work on Planetary - and of course, go pick up a copy - you will be blown away. This week we're revisiting one of our earliest episodes from our inaugural X-Month, where we read Cassaday's work on 2004's Astonishing X-Men  - another solid read. We hope you'll make the time to revisit the work with us, to see the work of comics truly great artists. 

Mr. Cassaday received an Eisner Award, the comic book industry equivalent of the Oscar, for best penciler/inker in 2004. He tied for the award with Frank Quitely in 2005 and won it again in 2006, for Planetary with writer Warren Ellis and Astonishing X-Men with writer Joss Whedon,

“There are basically three people that I would count as the easiest collaborations, the most natural, the best I’ve ever worked with,” Mr. Whedon said in an interview. “One is an actor, one is an editor and one is Johnny. He knew so much of what I was trying to convey that my scripts just got shorter and shorter.”

“The best page I ever wrote in comics has no words,” Mr. Whedon said. The page, which also has no sound effects, depicts Kitty Pryde, Colossus’s lover, gazing at him with a stunned expression as she places a hand over her heart.

“He didn’t swagger, he didn’t yell,” Mr. Whedon said of Mr. Cassaday, but “he was very exacting” about his art — an approach that included giving notes on the colors and lettering of his pages.

Laura J. Martin, the colorist on Astonishing X-Men, said that one of her favorite collaborations with Mr. Cassaday was the cover of No. 6 in the series, on which he depicted Kitty and Colossus caressing. The cover required extensive color work to convey texture and the silver sheen of Colossus’s metallic body. Mr. Cassaday gave Ms. Martin that cover as a wedding present.

Rest in peace John Cassaday.NY TIMES: John Cassaday, Award-Winning Comic Book Artist, Dies at 52
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/arts/john-cassaday-dead.html

A few weeks ago, we lost a great comics artist far too soon. John Cassaday was an award-winning American comic book artist, writer, and television director - who passed away on September 9, 2024 in New York City at the age of 52

i think it goes without saying that comics is a medium where great writing and art come together for a truly great medium of storytelling. and when both are firing on all cylinders, it truly something to behold. John Cassaday was one of those artists. 

So on Quarantined Comics, we've had the good fortune to revisit some of the works Cassaday was best known for: This episode we'll be talking about 1998's critically acclaimed series Planetary, which he co-created with Warren Ellis. 

John later went on to work on Marvel's relaunch of Star Wars with Jason Aaron, whose first issue sold more than a million copies. Acclaimed writer Mark Waid, who was one of the first to help Cassaday get his start said this — “I refuse to take any real credit for ‘discovering’ John Cassaday,” Mr. Waid wrote on Facebook. “I can’t take credit for having functioning eyeballs.”Next week we'll be re-sharing our episode about his work on 2004's Astonishing X-Men. 

Rest in peace John Cassaday, you were one of the greats. 

NY TIMES: John Cassaday, Award-Winning Comic Book Artist, Dies at 52

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/arts/john-cassaday-dead.html

BURMA CHRONICLES is the 2007 graphic travelogue by French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle — which presents a personal and distinctively humorous glimpse into a political hotspot on the other side of the world, where the Delisle balances his ex-pat home-husbandry, the spinning politics a quasi-authoritarian state, and finding a way as a foreign cartoonist amidst a South Asian junta (gesuhndeit).

joining in Ryan's absence for our ongoing series of "international comics" is longtime friend of the pod Drew Tarvin, Humor Engineer, who much like the author of this week's comic, happens to be a dude who's a funny-jobbed, home-husbanding ex-pat dad in a foreign land. learn more @ AndrewTarvin.com

"The idea that a person can't relate to something because it's not directly about them is a misunderstanding of who's been reading books this whole time."

Mariko Tamaki is an award-winning Canadian comics creator and writer — known for works like Skim and This One Summer (with her cousin Jillian Tamaki). Her latest novel is Cold, a haunting YA novel about four students who knew too much and said too little. AND Mariko’s also the Co-founder & Editor of Surely Books - a comics imprint of LGBTQIA+ creators. Mariko’s ALSO known for comics like Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Emiko Superstar, and several prose works of fiction and nonfiction. AND since 2016, Mariko’s been writing for Marvel & DC comics - on powerful books like I Am Not Stafire, and Harley Quinn: Breaking Glass. Mariko’s also only the second woman to write Detective Comics - the 1000+ issue flagship DC series about the Dark Knight. If you can’t tell by now, one of us has been a BIG Mariko Tamaki fan for awhile, and after hearing her approach to writing and sharing personal stories, you soon will be too.

This is a replay of an earlier chat from 2022 - we’re airing it in honor of Marikos’ winning of the Eisner Award (among comics most prestigious honors) - for the 2023 graphic novel ROAMING - which she co-created with her cousin Jillian.

BOOK: Roaming: goodreads.com/book/show/62207006-roaming

NEWS: comic-con.org/awards/eisner-awards/

LEARN ABOUT MARIKO TAMAKI & HER WORK:

* twitter.com/marikotamaki

* instagram.com/marikotamaki

* goodreads.com/author/show/483588.Mariko_Tamaki

* Surely Books: abramsbooks.com/imprints/surely

* This One Summer: goodreads.com/book/show/18465566-this-one-summer

* Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me: goodreads.com/book/show/40864841-laura-dean-keeps-breaking-up-with-me

* Skim: goodreads.com/book/show/2418888.Skim

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MENTIONS

* Heather Gold: heathergold.com/about-heather-gold

* Jillian Tamaki: jilliantamaki.com

* Lauren Tamaki: laurentamaki.com

* Gene Luen Yang: geneyang.com

* BOOK: Stone Fruit (Lee Lai): goodreads.com/en/book/show/55678434

* BOOK: Shadow Life (Hiromi Goto, Ann Xu): goodreads.com/en/book/show/51591596

* Alice Munro: wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Munro

* Timothy Findley: wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Findley

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