Quarantined Comics

Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet is most famous for her indie strip from the 90s "Dirty Plotte," about her struggle being a young woman in the indie comics scene. More than 20 years later, Doucet has returned with "Time Zone J," where Doucet, now middle-aged, recalls a torrid romance she had with a fan during her youth, when she was still churning out her indie strips.

"Time Zone J" isn't just about her memories, it's also about how memories work, and their tangled unreliability. As such, Doucet's work takes on a really weird form — although its collected in a book, it's meant to be read as one long scrolling piece of art. Tedious and gimmicky? Innovative and feroicous? Or maybe both at different stages... We'll have a go of it in the latest episode of Quarantined Comics.

Zoe Thorogood is just about to turn 25 and she's already an artistic force. She burst onto the comics scene with "The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott," published in 2020, about a young artist doomed to go blind. She followed that up with her brilliant memoir "It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth," about her struggles with depression.

If "Billie Scott" was an announcement of an intriguing young talent, "Centre of the Earth" all but solidified it. But one of the most intriguing things about "Centre of the Earth" is how it changes the reading of "Billie Scott." In this episode, we'll take a look at Thorogood's two works, how they interact with each other, and how Thorogood uses comics to face her demons.

This month to celebrate Asian Pacific Heritage Month in Asian hosted podcast, we're bringing you an episode from Good Pop Culture Club, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective. Good Pop Culture Club is a regular discussion about the good pop that gets us through our days. Each episode hosts Marvin, Jess and Han discuss what they've been watching their opinions on recent media news and discuss a featured pop culture topic with an emphasis on diversity and representation. Learn more about, Good Pop Culture Club @ podcastpotluck.com

On this episode of Good Pop we put on our finest butt kicking shoes as we check out Polite Society, the new film from Nida Manzoor that follows a young teenage girl who dreams of becoming a stuntwoman, as she takes on an evil auntie trying to take her sister away in a sinister arranged marriage. And in What's Popping? — The Met Gala, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3, Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers, and Top Chef

This month to celebrate AAPI heritage we're featuring an episode from Books & Boba, one of our sister podcasts from the Potluck Podcast Collective - a podcast group we're part of that features unique Asian American voices and stories. Books & Boba is a book club dedicated to books written by Asian and Asian American authors. You can find more eps at booksnadboba.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

On this episode -Books & Boba hosts Marvin + Reera chat with HUNGRY GHOST creator Victoria Ying. Hungry Ghost, is a coming of age story about a Chinese American girl dealing with adolescence, parental expectation, and eating disorders. You'll also hear Victoria talk her background in animation as well as her semi-autobiographical inspirations behind the story of Hungry Ghost.

This week, we're reading the 2022 Human Target limited series by Tom King and Greg Smallwood. You'll remember how much we love Tom King from multiple previous episodes like Mr. Miracle and Superman Woman of Tomorrow. In this latest series, Christopher Chance, aka the Human Target, is on his latest cases protecting Lex Luthor when things go sideways. An assassination attempt Chance didn’t see coming leaves him vulnerable and left trying to solve his own murder, as he has 12 days to discover just who in the DC Universe hated Luthor enough to want him dead by slow-acting poison. And the prime suspects happen to be…the Justice League International? In this hard-boiled, seemingly detective noir story Chance find himself interrogating the cast of characters from the famed 1987 series by Keith Giffen. We're talking Ice, Fire, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Guy Gardner, G'Nort, Martian Manhunter, Rocket Red, and even...the shadow of the Batman. There are twists and turns, a little bit of love-making, and a whole lot of drinking.

So with Asian American Heritage Month, we decided that G should be for Gene Luen Yang ...mostly as an excuse to read AMERICAN BORN CHINESE, Yang's Eisner Award-winning, seminal graphic novel soon to be released as a Disney+ streaming show with a bevvy of Oscar winners.

American Born Chinese is Gene Luen Yang's was first released in 2006 - written and illustrated by Yang, and also colored by cartoonist Lark Pien. American Born Chinese consists of three seemingly disparate tales...

First, the legendary Chinese Monkey King from the classic 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West. However, blink and you might miss it, but Yang replaces the Buddha with a Christian influenced deity.The second storyline is the all-too-familiar Asian American coming of age story of a young American Born Chinese man Jin Wang, who befriends a new arrival from Taiwan, Wei Chen. As with any story of teen drama, romance is afoot with Jin's American crush Amelia Harris. And the third story depicts an American TV sitcom with All American boy Danny and his cousin visting from Chin-kee, who if you couldn't tell from the name alone, is meant to be an amalgam of racist stereotype, from the outlandish costume, heavy accent, buck teeth, and yes, predilection for putting pee pee in your coke. Eventually these three tales become come together into a poignant lesson of culture and self acceptance.

In Michael DeForge's Familiar Face, the world is always changing, commutes are being altered, and peoples' bodies are constantly being transformed, or "optimized." The citizens of this world exist in an environment that they cannot control or even begin to understand. Sound familiar?

As we continue reading our way thru the alphabet — E is for Esther's Notebooks, 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.

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

The Doom Patrol debuted in 1963, just a few months before the X-Men. The two titles had a lot in common: a group of superpowered misfits led by a man in a wheelchair. But while the X-Men soon found their way into the pop cultural canon, the Doom Patrol could only muster a cult following — and only recently started rising into the mainstream due to the eponymous HBO TV series.

But Doom Patrol still had a succession of heavy hitting talent inventing consistently weird challenges for the team to fight through, from John Byrne to Gerard Way to Grant Morrison. This week on Quarantined Comics, Raman and Ryan will review half of Morrison's 45-issue run, which started in 1989.

Morrison established themselves as one of the hottest writers during the 80s, bringing his odd sensibility from the pages of the British sci-fi series 2000AD to DC superhero stories, including a long run writing the series Animal Man and the one-shot Batman: Arkham Asylum.

But with his their run on Doom Patrol... well, maybe it was just a little too much Morrison for Ryan and Raman to handle...

C is for...CATWOMAN!

Catwoman is much more than a feline-themed criminal in a cat-suit. Despite sexy portrayals by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt, Michelle Pfeiffer, Halle Berry, Anne Hathaway, Camren Bicondova, or Zoë Kravitz would have you believe, Selina Kyle, AKA Catwoman has the potential to be a much more nuanced character in modern comics.

Way back back in 2002, now acclaimed crime-fiction writer Ed Brubaker attempted to do just that - redefine a sexual icon into a feminist one - in his seminal run and reboot of Catwoman. Brubaker created a more low-key, street level portrayal of the character, returning to the East End of Gotham, a forgotten, working class part of the city. Paired with a # of artists - including the late Darwyn Cooke, Cameron Stewart, and Mike Allred - ironically also all dudes - who masterfully create a less sexualized version of Selina. She's joined by her best friend Holly, private eye Slam Bradley, and Dr. Leslie Thompkinz to confront the demons of her past and present.

But we ALSO decided to read 2022's Catwoman Lonely City - the acclaimed miniseries by Cliff Chiang - which ventures into the not-too-distant future to follow a middle-aged Selina Kyle, as she investigates a conspiracy related to the death of Batman some 10 years prior. Almost all of the Bat-family is gone, and she's left with her wits, and a handful of super-criminal friends and foes, some of whom have infiltrated city hall.

both series ask us to re-examine not just how our society defines crime, but who are the people who define what crime is, and what are the circumstances that drive those we deem criminals to choose the life they do. but also, just a romping good time with a lady in a cat suit.