Read Comics

This episode of the ReadComics Podcast is Florence, Jason, Mike, Marty and Susie discussing The Unwritten issues #1-5 (the first arc). We go off on tangents about meta-fiction (including Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, Fables, and The Magicians by Lev Grossman), and talk about The Unwritten’s obvious comparisons to Harry Potter and Books of Magic. We do spoil these early issues, so you’ll want to stay away if you mind that. They’re well worth reading, so go pick up the TPB if you haven’t already!

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #041 (37 MB, 120 minutes)

I don’t know how long this has been out, but this Kick-Ass trailer I just found on youtube mostly features Hit-Girl… kicking ass.

I don’t really know where this came from, but I think it’s way more interesting than the official trailer, personally.

No introduction can describe what will follow in this podcast. Mike says: “Listen, and godspeed.” Jason says: “Listen and god help you.”

This is actually only fifteen minutes of podcast #40, and the rest is podcast #41, since we lost everything of the first podcast after a hard-drive write-error. Mike, Jason, Susie, Florence and Marty all read and discussed the recent Marvel adaptation of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written by Eric Shanower and drawn by Skottie Young.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #040 (35 MB, 77 minutes)

Yet another fascinating and tantalizing podcastical tribute to comics! This book club issueissode focused on the awesome Echo, by veteran comic creator Terry Moore.

Marty, Florence, Mike, Jason and Susie wax your ears off with unquestionable eloquence, only straying satirically from the subject for brief but satisfying interludes. (We’re segue savants, so of course you probably won’t even notice.) This episode is best enjoyed in the company of a well trained room full of monkeys with typewriters.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #039 (27 MB, 58 minutes)

Jackson Ferrell, of This Week in Webcomics has interviewed the co-creators of the Blank It webcomic, Aric and Lem. He is going to post this interview tomorrow in webcomic form, and was kind enough to send over a sneak-preview for ReadComics.org readers. (Unfortunately, I didn’t check my email all day, and it’s not much of a preview anymore, but hit the jump below for a couple of images from the interview.)

Update: The full interview has been posted, so you should go over there and read it!

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This book club episode of the podcast was composed of the melodic and intellectual voices of Marty, Florence, Mike, Jason, and of course the disembodied Susie, whose choice it was to read American Born Chinese & The Eternal Smile, by Gene Luen Yang (with Derek Kirk Kim on The Eternal Smile). Both books are well worth a read, and we go into great detail about their plots and allegories and meanings contained therein. As with all our bookclub episodes, it’ll be a more entertaining listen if you’ve already read the books in question. Feel free to leave your own commentary and opinions in the comments.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #038 (24 MB, 52 minutes)

While I was out of town, a co-worker sent out a link to these awesome one-liner comics inspired by spam email subject lines. As you can see, an ironic meaning is often illustrated, rather than the one the often broken english subjects are meant to invoke. The illustrations/comics are drawn by graphic designer Elliott Burford, whose other projects (in the site’s navigation) are well worth checking out.

Also in my inbox this morning, (or, perhaps in my twitter stream) was a link to Opertoon’s iPhone/iPod Touch app Ruben & Lullaby, which is a self-described: “digital comic/game (we call it an “opertoon”) that lets you shape the emotions of a quarreling couple with a touch”. I haven’t downloaded this yet, but I will be checking it out sometime in the near future. It looks quite interesting.

I finished my cover-to-cover reading of this amazing book this morning on my way to work. Upon first glimpse, I figured I would simply be reading the cartoons and be done with it, but when I dug in, I actually found the commentary by Richard H. Minear to be so integral to the viewing and understanding of Dr. Suess’s political cartoons that I simply couldn’t proceed without devouring every paragraph. (I even read his analysis at the end, which while it was not quite as entertaining as the guided tour of Dr. Suess’s brilliant cartoons contained within, was still quite entertaining and enlightening.)

Essentially, Dr. Seuss was the editorial cartoonist for a New York political magazine called PM, for two years from 1941 to 1943. In that time, he was incredibly prolific, and wrote/drew over 400 cartoons.

One thing I took away from this book was the evidence that Dr. Seuss was unfortunately, not immune to the plague of racism that he himself rallied so strongly against. His treatment of the Japanese, even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor was pretty despicable, (although some might argue justified given the circumstances, I would tend to disagree). However, to his credit, and at least partial redemption in my eyes, he actually visited Japan in 1953, and subsequently wrote Horton Hears a Who.

This book is a must read for fans of Dr. Seuss, and I think it’s also a very handy history lesson (from the perspective of someone who has never successfully completed an American History course). If you want to just read the cartoons, or supplement the book material, the University of California San Diego’s website hosts an awesome archive of all 400 of Dr. Seuss’s political cartoons. (Only 200 are reprinted in the book.) I wish they’d been scanned (or made available) at a higher resolution, since the details really are what makes this work stand out, but nonetheless it’s an awesome archive of an absolute master of the art.

Today we sat around and shared our impressions of the Annihilation series. This was Chad’s pick for the book club, and he, Florence, Marty, Mike, Jason, Susie (and Tony, who joins us after a while) all give their impressions of the series, or what they read of it.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #036 (36.1 MB, 78 minutes)

More photos of this awesome mural (and some backstory) over at Mission Mission. Additional photos on my old friend Doctor Popular’s blog and flickr stream. And some more over at what I’m seeing.

Sharyn (whose birthday it is today, happy birthday Sharyn!!!) sent me a link to this crazy relationship map. Click the thumbnail to see it full size. She found this over at UncannyXmen.net, which appears to have a whole crap-ton of x-men comic synopses, as well as loads of other x-men content.

Jason points out that, in all those characters, he could only find one same-sex relationship in the whole map, and two same-sex crushes.

This is another “what are we reading” podcast, touching on the following topics: Bean World, The Unwritten, (and various other black-haired bespectacled wizard boys), Chew, The Gaylaxicon booth at Pride this year, Jan’s Atomic Heart, by Simon Roy, Richard K. Morgan’s sci-fi novels, including Altered Carbon and Market Forces, Hawkeye’s new limited series, The New Mutants, Garage Band by Gipi, Gigantic, Ignition City (Warren Ellis), Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil, Civil War, and the deaths and subsequent rebirths of various super heroes, including Captain America and The Flash.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #035 (34 MB, 75 minutes)

This comic book book club had us all reading Green Lantern. This book was selected by Jason J, who forced Chad to join our regular cast, Marty, Florence, Mike, Jason T. and Susie. We shared our opinions about the comic, and the many decades of backstory leading up to this run. We also allowed Chad to choose next month’s book club pick: Annihilation. Finally, special thanks to Ookla the Mok, whose song Theme from Super Skrull we use to close out the episode.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #034 (42 MB, 91 minutes)

The usual cast of pods in this episode: Florence, Marty, Jason, Mike and Susie. We hope you enjoy listening to this as much as we had fun making it. Topics in rough order of appearance:

• Handknit Heroes
• Love and Capes
• Piperka
• the new Star Trek Movie
• Star Trek the original series (on hulu and off)
• Wolverine
• possible Deadpool Movie
• Marvel Zombies
• Tony Kushner this Saturday
• superhero musicals, including spiderman
• Batman Cacophony, written by Kevin Smith
• Dollhouse & Fox TV
• various Simpsons comic topics

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #033 (22 MB, 49 minutes)

The next ReadComics book club is planned for Saturday, May 16th, or two weeks from this coming Saturday. We hope to have all the regulars, and some supporting cast for this book club, when we’ll talk about Green Lantern, The Sinestro Corps War, volumes 1, 2, and if you can get your hands on it, Tales of the Sinestro Corps, which collects the final (auxiliary?) bits.

Green Lantern: The Sinestro Corps War (Vol. 1, 2, etc.)
Saturday, May 16th 3PM
Florence & Marty’s apartment

Jason, Marty, Mike and Florence are mostly all drunk, talking (slurring) about the following comic-related subjects (and many others less so): twitter and comics and facebook, Scott Pilgrim, Bomb Queen, New Mutants, Dark Avengers, Grant Morrison, Runaways, Frank Miller’s Daredevil, The Webcomic List, piperka.net, Susan Boyle and Marty’s mom. We hope you enjoy this rambling masterpiece.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #032 (17 MB, 37 minutes)

Forgive me ReadComics, for I have sinned. It has been AGES since my last post.

I’ve read tons of stuff lately. Two TPBs by Grant Morrison, in particular. First was Batman R.I.P., (pictured) which was basically about convincing us that Batman might die, or at least go insane, no maybe even die, no, just loose his mind, no, just die. I think in that order, although it hardly matters. It was only slightly more coherent than Kid Eternity, which was essentially about some folks in hell trying to get mankind to grow up and figure out this whole living on earth thing sucks. At least, I think that’s what the story was about… in the end. Both stories had lots of WTF moments, and neither really ties everything up to any satisfying degree. Both had incredible art, however, that, at least in the case of Kid Eternity, really went a long way toward making the trade worth consuming.

There have also been numerous single issues in the last few weeks. Florence and I have kept up on our pull, and last week in particular there were at least four new comics to read, including Sword, Echo, Doctor Sleepless and a new one by Warren Ellis called Ignition City. I’ll admit that I devoured Sword, (which had a satisfactory, if not overwhelming amount of content again this month) and Echo (which unfortunately didn’t) right away, but have yet to get to the Warren Ellis stuff. I’m behind on Freak Angels too, and in general have a lot of webcomics to catch up on when I get around to it.

I also want to announce that we know what comics we’re going to be reading for our next book club, even if we don’t know when it’s going to take place yet. Jason J has announced that we’ll be reading the Sinestro Corps War stuff. He hasn’t let me know exactly which comics yet, but wikipedia says it’s an “11-part saga was originally published between June and December 2007“. It goes on to say that “in addition to the main storyline, four supplemental “Tales of the Sinestro Corps” one-shot specials and a Blue Beetle tie-in issue were concurrently released.” So there are potentially sixteen comics for us to read. It looks like there are at least two trade paperbacks, and possibly a third with the supplemental stuff. Anyway, we should know soon enough when the Book Club will be, and there’ll probably be another post about what books to read then.

Tonight’s podcast was just Marty Florence and Jason when we began, but then Susie joins us about ten minutes in. It’s a shorter one, but we manage to at least mention offhandedly the following topics: The Muppet Show Comic Book #1, Boom Studios new Pixar licensing, DC’s After Watchmen …what next? campaign, Ex Machina TPB #7, Batman RIP, old standby topics: Grant Morrison and Walking Dead, Angel: After The Fall, Blank It webcomic, Menage A 3, Piperka, Sister Claire, Promethia, and all female comic book podcasts: Comic Racks and Birds of Geek.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #031 (18 MB, 38 minutes)

This bookclub podcast was all about Thor, issues #1-600 (all 13 issues). BRAKKA-DOOOOOOM! We have Florence, Marty, Jason, Mike, Susie (actually present!), and Jason Johnston with us for this lively discussion of Straczynski’s run of Thor.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #030 (26 MB, 57 minutes)

Thanks to Jason, I actually knew when MarsCon was this year (for the first time). I went to a few panels, and the highlight of the ones I made it to was the WebComics Panel, with Rob Balder. Rob is the writer for Partially Clips, which I had seen before, and Erfworld, which I hadn’t. I hadn’t been particularly interested in Partially Clips when I discovered it the first time, and a re-visit today confirmed that it’s amusing, but again holds very little interest for me. Erfworld, on the other hand, is now something I’m totally going to devour in little chunks until I catch up to the 131 pages they’ve got in the archives thus far.

Once I do catch up (and even before), I’ll be using the awesome Piperka to keep track of my progress! Rob mentioned Piperka in the panel, and it’s basically a very light-weight site designed to do nothing more than keep track of your progress in all the webcomics you read. The sweet thing is that it lets you know which comics have new entries since you last visited, making it a perfect one-stop location for webcomic reading.

Rob (and the other panelists) also mentioned a bunch of other webcomics, including Menage a 3 (which florence and I just read all the way from the beginning–contains mild nudity). If I find more good ones, maybe I’ll post them here also.

In this episode of the ReadComics podcast, Marty, Florence, Jason and Susie talk about the biggest comic book event of the week: the Watchmen movie. Marty and Florence saw a sneak preview of the movie last night, but we took pains not to spoil anything. (Short review: It’s AWESOME, go see it!!!) We also discussed the following topics: Marty and Florence’s visitor Flat Stanley, movie special effects and CGI (at length, including Watchmen, Star Wars, Hellboy II, Pans Labyrinth, the Oscars and Batman), Dr. Manhattan’s BIG BLUE PENIS, other movies we want to see this summer (Super Capers, Wolverine, Harry Potter, Year One), the possibility of an Elfquest movie, Johnny Hiro, Scott Pilgrim, a bunch of comics we have read recently (Wonder Woman, Tek Jensen, Ender’s Game, Batman), Kevin Smith’s batman, the trend toward comic book continuations of TV shows (Farscape, Buffy, Veronica Mars, Pushing Daisies), and Jason gives a shout-out to the GridCycle GeekCast, a new video game podcast.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #029 (30 MB, 66 minutes)

Those who know me realize that I haven’t been posting much on here because I’ve been focusing most of my extra-curricular efforts on developing a puzzle game for the iPhone. But that’s not why I’m writing today! I actually just read over at massively.com that there is going to be a Watchmen game for the iPhone released at the same time as the movie (this Friday). As far as I know, this is also going to be the first MMO (massively multiplayer online) game for the iPhone. There is also a video of some interviews with the developers, and it shows some of the gameplay too. Interesting stuff.

This podcast/book club features Florence, Jason, Mike, Susie and Marty, and is all about PS238: Volume 1, With Liberty And Recess for All, written and drawn by Aaron Williams. We stay mostly focused for the first 45 minutes or so, then veer off on a Dr. Who tangent in anticipation of Jason’s upcoming convention trip.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #028 (30 MB, 65 minutes)

Marty, Mike, Jason and Florence got downright philosophical tonight as they discussed the following topics: Smallville (Jason went on at length about the recent episode featuring the Legion of Superheroes, written by Geoff Johns), Smallville and Harry Potter “HoYay” and fanfic, the current Spiderman issue featuring Obama which none of us had read (and Jason’s idea for Oba-Man), Battlestar Galactica and The Walking Dead and which one is more “soap opera like”, Rasl, Kick-Ass (and the movie… not this, but this), Gaylaxicon, Prism Comics, I Hate Gallant Girl, Shirtless Superheroes (a website for hot male images in comics… we couldn’t remember the name of it), gay characters of Star Trek (including this fan-made episode written by David Gerrold, writer of the “Trouble With Tribbles” episode), Love and Capes, Invincible (and other stuff we dropped from our pull this week, including Gravel), Doctor Sleepless, and a rather long discussion about whether comic book creators should listen to their fans. We talked for quite a while tonight, but surprisingly, it never felt like there was a lull in the discussion.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #027 (33.9 MB, 74 minutes)

Tonight we had a rollicking good time. Florence, Marty, Jason, Mike and Susie (via Skype) all sat down to talk about what we’ve been reading. Topics included: Jack Kirby, Grand Morrison, Black Panther, Dwayne McDuffie, boom tubes, Fourth World, Reginald Hudlin, Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, Zombie Unicorns, Scott Pilgrim, Farscape (& other TV shows continued as comics), The Messiah Complex, Buffy, Breakfast of the Gods, Mike’s desire to make a comic out of Mr. Roger’s make-believe neighborhood, Life Sucks, by Jessica Abel, Anders Loves Maria, Pax Romana, Transhuman, Astro City, and our opinions on THE BEST COMIC BOOK SERIES EVER MADE.

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #026 (23.8 MB, 52 minutes)

Tonight Jason, Mike, Susie, Florence and Marty talk about Scott Pilgrim, our comic book Book Club selection of the month(s). We briefly touch on MANY other topics, from libraries to a pregnant Mystique.

Apologies in advance about the volume. I realized about 2/3rds of the way through that the input was turned way down, so you may have to turn your volume up to hear us. Sorry about that!

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #025 (25.5 MB, 55 minutes)

My co-worker Sheldon sent me a link to Splash Page, a blog about comic book movies. They’ve got a lot of great stuff on there, and (presumably because they’re owned/operated by MTV) updates are quite frequent, with some of them even featuring real reporting. (As in, original stories, or real interviews, that sort of thing.) Here’s what it says in their sidebar:

You’ve turned the page to the place where panels and popcorn meet. From coverage of comic-inspired flicks to that buzzed-about graphic novel that’s being primed for the big-screen, you’ll find it all here at MTV’s Splash Page. Check throughout the day for breaking news, exclusive chats with Hollywood stars and comic legends, and first looks at the blockbusters of tomorrow.

Thomas Scioli (of Godland fame) did their header and logo and background graphic (pictured above). As you may have noticed, I’ve added the link to our sidebar.

Jason, Florence and Marty talk about a bunch of stuff this time, including: Buffy: Season 8 #19, comic books at the Library, Umbrella Academy, Astro City, The Authority, the Luna Brothers and Sword, I Hate Gallant Girl, Superman: Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, superdickery.com, Neil Stephenson and Anathem, The Last Will and Testament, Jason’s new G1 phone purchase, and how sick we all are.

Somewhere in the middle, Jason tunes out and Florence and Marty launch into Married with Comics and talk about this week’s comics (Authority #5, Sword #13 & I Hate Gallant Girl #2).

Listen to ReadComics.org Podcast Episode #024 (23 MB, 51 minutes)

Read it now at dark horse presents! (Thanks Susie.)

For our next book club, we’ll be discussing Scott Pilgrim, a comic by Bryan Lee O’Malley. There are four trade paperbacks out, and some of us will have definitely read all of them (you’ve been warned).

Comic Book Book Club
Scott Pilgrim, by Bryan Lee O’Malley
Tuesday, December 30th 7 PM
Marty and Florence’s apartment