Read Comics

Yesterday my daughter Colleen sat down at the library with this book Robot Dreams, by Sera Veron and started singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. I thought nothing of it until I spotted a copy of Comic Book Nursery Rhymes on the shelf (which we own), and put two-and-two together.

She only “read” this book (there aren’t many words, if any), for a few minutes, but we also spent some time paging through some of the Muppet Show comic anthologies they have in the kid’s comics area. An area that we will definitely visit again.

(Gee, wouldn’t it be cool if we started writing on here again. Maybe we will start reviewing kid-appropriate comics.)

This podcast, Marty, Jason, and Florence are joined by Justin from The Film Confessional Podcast, as they talk about movies they’ve seen recently, especially the latest blockbuster comic book movie, Thor.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #051 (47.3 MB, 98 minutes)

In this unstructured podcast, Susie, Marty, Jason and Florence start out by talking briefly about the science fiction convention they all attended this weekend, Minicon, and jump from there to talking about comic book conventions in general and specific. (MCBA‘s SpringCon is right around the corner!) We then discuss the Elfquest fan trailer.

Marty grills Jason’s encyclopedic knowledge of Doctor Who for details and history of Doctor Who comics, and then we discuss The Ten Doctors and the Torchwood Babiez. Jason mentions in passing that there is a podcast about Doctor Who comics. Maybe he’ll post a link in the comments, or you could start your search for it at the Doctor Who Podcast Alliance. We make sure Jason plugs his daily doctor who blog over at Doctor Who Every Day.

Much ado is made about the forthcoming Wonder Woman TV atrocity.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #050 (35 MB, 75 minutes)

Tonight I created a new banner image for ReadComics.org. It’s one I’d been meaning to make for a long time… instead of featuring panels from print comics, it’s all panels from webcomics I love. It joins the other three banners in rotation, and should randomly appear if you hit refresh enough times.

Here’s the new banner:

I had to make some hard choices while making this, what to pull from and what to leave out. Here are the comics, from right to left:

• XKCD‘s geek anthem needed including, of course.
• User Friendly was probably one of the first webcomics I read with any regularity.
• Don Hertzfeldt‘s famous Rejected video is probably the outlier here. It feels like a webcomic to me, but maybe just because I associate it with that early-internet-days “thrill of discovery” you got whenever you found a new link of note.
• Rounding out the top row, Jesus and Mo is a new-to-me webcomic that’s both hysterical and irreverently poignant.
• Axe Cop, another new-ish webcomic, is notable for both its hilarity and the fact that its author is a 5 year old kid.
• Dr. McNinja is both a doctor… and a ninja.
• I managed to squeeze a tiny frame of Penny Arcade in there. In case you’ve somehow been living in a webcomic void, it’s mostly about videogaming, and sometimes features snarky comments reviewing the latest games. This frame is from one of their first comics, and if you follow the link, you’ll see that they were all about the reviews right from the start.
• Underneath Penny Arcade is a piece of Scott McCloud‘s very early webcomic, My Obsession With Chess.
• PvP is another classic videogame webcomic. Notably different from Penny Arcade in that it has characters that do stuff.
• Order of the Stick is an awesome D&D parody. I almost replaced it because its bright colors made it stand out, but I spent a lot of time finding a panel with all the main characters in it (that I liked). Plus, it was great to get the fighter saying “.org”.
• It’s possible I thought myself really clever when I positioned these characters from Sinfest underneath Jesus and Mo. Sinfest is a webcomic that I found looking through old bookmarks. I was happy to see they still appear to be coming out.
• Finally, Little Gamers is another comic I had in my aging bookmarks file. (And no, I didn’t do the right corner last, it just happened that way.)

This book club podcast about the first ten issues of the comic book So Super Duper features Marty, Florence, Jason, Angela, and Susie. We talk about our impressions of the comic.

“So Super Duper” is a cute story about a character named Psyche, a new-ish Super Hero who isn’t quite as super as everyone else on his team. Psyche slowly discovers that his lack of superheroness may not be the only thing that is different about him.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #049 (23.3 MB, 49 minutes)

I’m sad to say that I missed Tony DiTerlizzi yesterday at our local kid’s bookstore, The Wild Rumpus. However, my co-worker Tony (who did actually tell me about the event a few hours before it happened), was in attendance, and his son, Odin, and had these questions for DiTerlizzi:

“How much do you like drawing?”
“Oh I really like drawing.”

“Do you like to draw comics?”
“You mean like Batman and Iron Man? I used to draw them all the time when I was about your age. I really liked Iron Man.”

Apparently DiTerlizzi is also the artist for some of his books, and he was giving away sketch books filled with art from his new novel The Search for WondLa. Here is a picture of the stack of books Tony brought in to work with him today:

You might have to see the image full-size to make it out, but I love the dragon sketch on the inside cover of Kenny & The Dragon, which I have added to my reading list. Tony also had this to say about the event:

He was great. Told stories about being a “highly imaginative” kid and did drawings like he did back then. (Dinosaurs vs. Aliens: The T-Rex & Triceratops team up. “Not on our watch!”) He spoke about wanting to create a heroine, like Alice Little, Dorthy Gale and Wendy Darling, for a long time and that is where The Search for WondLa came from. He also mentioned his little daughter when he was engaging Isla during the signing.

“Well hello Isla. What a pretty name. What do you like to do?”
“I like to play.”
“Oh, isn’t playing fun! My daughter is about your age too. She loves to play. And collect bugs!”
“Yeah I like bugs and aluadsr hasde hasd areaagdre bbfeard…” (That last part was unintelligible tired 2.3 year old speak for yeah, but they are a little icky too.)

I think it’s great that fathers my age are writing books for their daughters with strong female characters.

I also think it’s great. And I can’t wait to read The Search for WondLa to Colleen.

In this episode, Marty, Jason, Florence, Sharyn and Susie talk about the Minneapolis Indie Expo, a one-day comic book festival/convention that took place in Minneapolis on August 21st, 2010. We plug far too many artists and creators to list them all in this blog post, and we probably only listed half of the cool stuff we saw at the con.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #048 (25 MB, 54 minutes)

This podcast, featuring Marty, Florence, Jason, Angela, and Susie, was actually recorded over the course of two nights. We talk about our impressions of the first Hellboy TPB, Seed of Destruction, and also some about the second TPB, which only some of us had read. Additionally, we do go into how it compares to the first Hellboy movie, which loosely follows the same storyline.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #047 (18 MB, 40 minutes)

In this episode of the ReadComics Podcast, Marty, Jason, Florence, and Susie revisit the world of Scott Pilgrim, giving Florence and Susie a chance to weigh in with their unique thoughts and opinions.

Susie also shares her list of ten nine black and white movies that Marty should watch, and Jason finds and shares a recipe for Tequila Mockingbird.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #046 (25 MB, 55 minutes)

This Pink Tentacle article has a ton of wacky subway posters from the late 70s. I thought these three with superman were pretty hilarious.

This episode was a joint podcast with our friends (and cohorts) over at the Film Confessional podcast. Jason, Justin, Angela, and Marty discuss at length the recent release of Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, which is, of course, the movie adaptation of the much loved Scott Pilgrim comics by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

Angela and Marty also share their experience seeing a very sneak preview of the movie RED, which is based on a short comic series by the same name written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Cully Hamner.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #045 (105 MB, 114 minutes)

Check out all the cool links on this blog-style New Frontiersman website. There’s some fun photoshoppery in there. I’m (continually) getting more excited about the movie.

According to this interesting article, WB and 20th Century fox have finally reached a settlement, and the movie should come out as scheduled (March 6th). We’ll see! (The article also contains a bunch of other interesting comic news, including DC folks getting laid off.)

Mark Waid, editor of Boom Studios is giving away issue #1 of Hexed, a new comic written by Michael Alan Nelson and drawn by Emma Rios. It’s a good read, and well worth a look (more so because it’s free!). With a hot female protagonist who has some sort of magical powers, set in a christian mythos, it was a bit reminiscent for me of Strange Girl.

Click on the cover, or click here to go to the blog post and see the full issue. You may have to scroll down some before you get to the images. There’s a video about how Boom Studios is promoting the comic above the actual comic.

(Via Boing Boing.)

I’ve only just discovered ShortPacked!, a webcomic more or less about a bunch of toystore employees. It’s pretty good stuff, and if I weren’t at work right now, I’d probably waste a few hours reading it from the beginning.

(Via MinnPost, who got permission to reprint a really great recent comic about Clark Kent in the newmedia age.)

Tonight we had Jason, Mike, Florence, Marty, and a couple of new voices: Stephanie and Konrad. We talked at unusual length about The Walking Dead. Our focus was the first TPB, (Issues #1-6), but we definitely get into details from the second TPB, and even delve a bit into what’s happening in the series now (Issues #49-53). We highly recommend reading this book before you listen to this podcast unless you don’t mind spoilers.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #021 (47 MB, 102 minutes)

I picked up the new Bomb Queen (issue #3 of 6) last week, having been pretty well sucked in by the first two issues in the recent series, and I have to admit that I am sort of grudgingly liking it for reasons other than the T&A, (which is certainly present, and more realistically why I like it). Normally I don’t really enjoy when the bad guys are the focus of a story, but for some reason when you dress that bad guy up in next to nothing and make sure it gets ripped off of her every once in a while… well, lets just say it changes the tone quite a bit.

Bomb Queen is essentially a really hot female super-villian who runs her own town somewhere in middle america. Apparently the authorities (ie, federal and state government) are willing to let this one town be governed by a supervillian because… it’s good for profits or something. Essentially Bomb Queen has a puppet Mayor who does whatever she asks, and she creates zones of the city that are lawless, and where the police can’t actually charge you for committing a crime. It sounds horrific, and honestly is even more horrific in the comic (rape and pedophilia are both referenced relatively frequently, if not, thankfully, shown), but it’s all done in a relatively humorous style that glosses over the horror and focuses on the hyper-sexualized Bomb Queen herself.

To be honest, Bomb Queen is a completely guilty pleasure. So much so that I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I picked up the first four TPBs of Bomb Queen at Wizard World a few weekends ago. So after reading the latest individual issue, I went ahead and read the first TPB, Bomb Queen: Woman of Mass Destruction. In it, we are introduced to Bomb Queen, given a bit of back story, and then we get to the guts of the story where her reign is being threatened by a politician running for mayor against her puppet the incumbent. The whole thing is pretty ridiculous, and pretty much neither more or less than exactly what I expected. The TPB has some fun extras at the end of the book, including a B&W comic that all takes place from Bomb Queen’s cat’s perspective called Ashe’s Day Out.

We’ve talked a bit about Wizard World on the podcast, and I’ve mentioned it some in the various blog entries since then, but I wanted to just post this photo of us with some of the other Comic Book podcasters we met in Chicago.

From left to right this is Florence, Myself (Marty), Sean Whelan (from Raging Bullets), Chris Neseman (from Around Comics), Jim Segulin (also from Raging Bullets), Matt Kramer’s wife, Matt Kramer (from Shade’s Journal), Mike, Jason (poking his head up over Mike’s shoulder), and Susie.

There are some other photos from the trip posted on flickr.