Quarantined Comics

In honor of ROAMING sweeping this year's EISNER's, we're revisiting this previous episode about a GREAT work

ROAMING is the graphic novel winner of three 2024 EISNER awards for best graphic novel, best writer, and best penciller/inker - by cousins Mariko + Jillian Tamaki. It's a book about three young women touring New York City in the late aughts, and it's both a love letter to New York City and a nostalgic look at the relationship between three friends who are about to follow very different paths in life. You can’t read this book and not see yourself in it at a younger, more awkward phase of your life - whether or not you’ve even spent any time in NYC.

We've actually covered some of Mariko’s other award-winning work like Skim, This One Summer, and morein this feed. So be sure to check out those episodes, ALL of Mariko Tamaki's work wherever you get your favorite books

LEARN MORE

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

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

MARIKO: instagram.com/marikotamaki

AUTHOR: goodreads.com/author/show/483588.Mariko_Tamaki

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

During a worldwide Quarantined Comics and Rabbit Fighters podcast REVOLUTION, Raman + Josh (two non-Persian dudes doing a Persian protagonist podcat) got the ORIGINAL band back together to talk about a comic that somehow NEITHER of us had read before, PERSEPOLIS, by Marjane Satrapi, an award winning, now banned graphic autobiography from the early 2000s about a young girl growing up in Iran, and becoming a woman overseas, returning home, and dealing with everything in between. The book was originally published in French, and has sold millions of copies worldwide. Its creator Satrapi later produced an award-winning film of the same name

In Persepolis, we meet young Marjane “Marji” Satrapi growing up in Tehran just before and during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, as well as thru the start of the Iran + Iraq War in the 1980s. Her parents, are secular, upper-middle class activists, who worry for their precocious daughter's safety in the increasingly conservative and dangerous Iran, so send her off to Austria to become a teenager. Her teen years are fraught with all the drama you can expect from such an experience, but Marji - now becoming a young woman - always maintains the experience of an outsider looking in - with her feet in both worlds. Marji eventually returns to Iran to find that not only has her mother country changed, but she as well. This book was a surprise and illuminating for us in many ways, making us question - what would WE do in such a situation? 

“What happens after we've survived? What's our responsibility to somebody suffering more than I am? For kids it’s like, ‘Let's just go over and help them — like, why wouldn't we?’ “

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With summer here, and QC still on hiatus while Raman + Ryan tend to their day-jobs, we wanted to feature a chat from Raman's OTHER podcast MODERN MINORITIES - featuring conversations with authors of historical fiction NOVELS about the 1957 Partition of India + Pakistan

Veera Hiranandani is an award-winning author of several books for young people - one of the most recent of which is THE NIGHT DIARY - a must read. While the novel is a historical fiction geared for adolescents and young adults, it’s a a heart-warming read that will pull you into a singular story through the eyes of a young girl experiencing one of history’s greatest traumas.. Veera went on to win the prestigious Newbery Award for the book, as well as the 2019 Walter Dean Myers Honor Award, the 2018 Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children's Literature, and several other honors and state reading list awards. Veera’s work speaks to the power of stories to spark conversations. Veera’s written a number of other award-winning books - including “How to Find What You're Not Looking For,” and “The Whole Story of Half a Girl. ”Her latest novel - AMIL & THE AFTER, is a follow-up to The Night Diary and it does what not many other books do - it examines the immediate AFTERMATH of a generational - and historical trauma. Again, through the eyes of a child. Veera’s journey - and story is a one that crosses cultures and generations - and it’s interesting to see how she pulls at the threads of her life to inform her work, and ask lots of hard whys - and why nots.

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”Being a writer is just bloody hard work and passion. It is a kind of madness, which compels you every day to go to say, ‘OK, let's do it again today’ “

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With summer here, and QC still on hiatus while Raman + Ryan tend to their day-jobs, we wanted to feature a chat from Raman's OTHER podcast MODERN MINORITIES - featuring conversations with authors of historical fiction NOVELS about the 1957 Partition of India + Pakistan

Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s the author of nine novels - including the Long Walk Home, Radiance of a Thousand Suns, and most recently the Partition Trilogy - a historical fiction novel series which Raman is a BIG fan of. Manreet’s  articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the International Herald Tribune, and the South China Morning Post, among others. She has taught for the New York Public Library and the City College of New York - and she’s a former corporate citizen having done stints in Asia, and a parent grappling with the world our kids will inherit. Manreet’s recently complete Partition Trilogy - a series of 3 books titled Lahore, Hyderabad, and Kashmir - are a historical fiction set during, before, and immediately after the Partition - and independence of - India and Pakistan of 1947. Partition is among the the great humanitarian disasters of the 20th century - and the largest mass migration in history

The history of Partition is a topic near and dear to Raman - and impacts and informs much of what is happening today, in both Asia, and the United States - from the tensions between India and Pakistan, and the rise of nationalism / extremism in our politics around the world. Manreet’s unique voice focuses not just on the personal musings of these larger than life historical figures - like India’s founding fathers Gandhi & Nehru, but she also breathes life into characters who represent the stats and figures that we sometimes gloss over when we hear of a tragedy (including the role - and subversion of women by history). We talked a lot about the weaponization of history, and how storytelling - and fact-checking - have to work hand in hand. You’ll enjoy this candid and thoughtful conversation with Manreet, who's using her creative drive to make a statement for the world today - including the next generation.

LEARN ABOUT MANREET

Raman joins longtime friend of the pod Josh (whose past episodes include Dune, Black Science, and Red Son) on HIS podcast RABBIT FIGHTERS. The topic? their long, complicated relationship with the band WEEZER - alongside fellow Rabbit fighters Greg and Brian. Rabbit Fighters is a show where three friends revisit the movies and music that shaped their past - but one of them has never explored it. sound familiar? Subscribe to RABBIT FIGHTERS wherever you get your favorite podcasts - for weekly shenagins while you wait for Ryan and Raman to get their act back together.

Edel Rodriguez is a Cuban American artist, activist and author who’s created more than 200 magazine covers for the likes of Time, The New Yorker, Newsweek and Der Spiegel - which are singular and striking given our current political climate. Edel’s latest work is the graphic memoir "Worm: A Cuban American Odyssey" - telling the story of his childhood in Cuba and his family's decision in 1980 to join a hazardous flotilla of refugees, the Mariel boatlift. This may be one of the best (comic) books Raman read in 2023, so on his other podcast MODERN MINORITIES, he reached out for a chat. In WORM - which is a term Castro used for Cubans who chose to leave the country - Edel uses his own life to capture what it's like to grow up under an authoritarian government and to sound a caution - from the runup to the 2016 US election to January 6, 2020 — to the future we are facing THIS election year. In our conversation we go deep into - and beyond Edel’s personal story - to get at the why for his activism and storytelling approach...

to close out 2023's alphabetic soup of comics, we're closing the year with a cheat and reading “XYZ Comics,” by cartoonist legend R. Crumb. “XYZ Comics,” published in 1972, is more of a 28 page pamphlet that reflects Crumb’s rather interesting state of mind at the time. Crumb was a few years out from doing a massive, year-long LSD trip that began in 1965. It greatly impacted his work. He was already known at the time for strips like Fritz the Cat, Mr. Natural and Angelfood McSpade - much of which is quite problematic. Starting in the mid-1960s, Crumb's work really started to reflect what he described as the seamy side of America's self-conscious, and drawing these strips almost as stream-of-consciousness. As he said in his eponymous documentary "it didn't have to make sense, it could be stupid, it didn't make any difference” — and “XYZ Comics” really magnified all this because it was created literally while Crumb was on a road trip, which is, “partly why it’s such a jumble of disconnected images.” So close out the year with us with an LSD trip of a comic, and bring your toothpaste.

No one was more influential in pushing what sequential storytelling can be than Will Eisner, the so-called godfather of the graphic novel. His legendary body of work started when he was just a young buck in the 1940s trying to capture the superhero craze with "The Spirit," through the early 2000s when he was exploding the comics form, all while telling rich, nuanced stories of people messily colliding in New York City. In this episode, we'll take a look at the impact of some of Eisner's most powerful graphic novels and comics.

V is for... VISION, 2016's Eisner award winning series by writer Tom King and artist Gabriel Hernandez Walta. King should be a familiar name to you by now, as we've read more than a few of his works on this podcast, including Mister Miracle and the Human Target, two stories about troubled superheroes. And this book is no different. The Vision actually debuted in the Avengers way back when in 1968, when he was first designed to kill Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, but soon became one of them...falling in love with the Scarlet Witch along the way. This same story arc also played out on the big screen in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the Vision was played by Tom Bettany...and pretty much had his girlfriend rip his brain out of his head...

But this isn't really a story about WandaVision, in THIS comic Vision just wants an ordinary life ― with a wife and two children, a home in the suburbs, perhaps even a dog. So he built them. Sound familiar? Only this time Vision literally built his wife, kids, and dog. As in they are sentient robots. WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

do you want to hear a scary story? well have we got a Halloween treat for you! U is for...Uzumaki. Uzumaki is manga legend's Junji Ito's seminal horror series from 1998. The entire populace of a small seaside town becomes obsessed with spirals. If you're into bodily, psychological, and cosmic horror, then step into the fog-shrouded streets of Kurozu-cho and see how long you can hold your mind - and your body - together.

this is an oldie but a goodie — a replay of one of our very FIRST episodes from the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. what's even scarier? how new we were to podcasting about comics we love — before i knew better than to trust Ryan to NOT freak me out. but this would be the first of many comics we'd come to love from Junji Ito. and boy is this a creepy one. make sure you read - and listen - with the lights turned on...