Quarantined Comics

J: TIME ZONE J ...Whatever you do, don't answer the fan mail

June 25th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  30 mins 21 secs

comic, graphic novel, julie doucet, time zone j

This week on Quarantined Comics, J is for Time Zone J. Published in 2022, Time Zone J is indie cartoonist Julie Doucet's first comic since she retired from sequential artwork during the 90s. We'll take a look at Doucet's oddball return.

INSIDE ZOE THOROGOOD'S HEAD... a portrait of the artist as a young woman

May 25th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  32 mins 19 secs

inside the head of zoe thorogood

In this episode, we'll look at the two books indie creator Zoe Thorogood both wrote and drew: her debut graphic novel "The Impending Blindness of Billie Scott" and her follow-up, the brilliant autobiography "It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth."

POLITE SOCIETY ...Good Pop Culture Club

May 21st, 2023  |  Season 4  |  1 hr 8 mins

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

HUNGRY GHOST ...featuring Books & Boba

May 7th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  56 mins 11 secs

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.

HUMAN TARGET ...what's wrong with noir fan service?

April 28th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  37 mins 22 secs

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.

GENE LUEN YANG's ...American Born Chinese

April 14th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  50 mins 2 secs

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.

FAMILIAR FACE... it's like being in a Radiohead album

April 5th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  34 mins 33 secs

comics, familiar face, graphic novel, michael deforge

This week (or month lol) we dive into Michael DeForge's Familiar Face, which is both distopic and completely reflective of the world we live in today.

ESTHER'S NOTEBOOKS ...your guide to kids, parenting, and french hip hop

March 10th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  42 mins 21 secs

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. 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. 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

DOOM PATROL... Grant Morrison's laundry list of weird ideas

February 25th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  35 mins 11 secs

comics, doom patrol, grant morrison, graphic novels

The Doom Patrol has recently had a major resurgence, thanks to its ascension as a TV series. This week, we'll look at one of the most influential runs on the comic, from the mind of the always-unconventional Grant Morrison.

CATWOMAN ...rad goggles and criminal noir.

February 6th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  44 mins 4 secs

C is for CATWOMAN. Reading Ed Brubaker's 2002 seminal run, and 2022's acclaimed "Lonely City" miniseries by Cliff Chiang

BLADE OF THE IMMORTAL ...violent and improbable

January 29th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  44 mins 29 secs

This week, we sample a slice of the mysterious creator Hiroaki Samura's Mountain Dew samurai epic Blade of the Immortal. Violent, fantastical, but also a striking meditation on the nature of revenge.

AKIRA ...manga, motorcycles, mutants...Oh My!

January 7th, 2023  |  Season 4  |  45 mins 1 sec

A is for AKIRA, the seminal Japanese cyberpunk post-apocalyptic manga series written and illustrated by Katsuhiro Otomo. This revolutionary Japanese comic ran from 1982 to 1990, serialized biweekly in Kodansha's seinen manga magazine Young Magazine, with its 120 chapters collected into six tankōbon volumes. The work had an outsized influence on not just comics east and west, but its landmark anime film adaptation from 1988 shaped a generation of storytellers. Almost across between Blade Runner meets Mad Max — with a little bit of 2001 A Space Odyssey thrown in, the FILM Akira was listed as one of the 10 essential animations. And it wasn't until the early 2000s that Dark Horse finally adapted the original manga for western audiences like us to READ.

YEAR END EXTRAVAGANZA ...sifting the dusty gems from a dumpster fire

December 30th, 2022  |  Season 4  |  1 hr 1 min

FABLES V7-11 ...it's great and all, but isn't it also pretty Euro-centric?

December 24th, 2022  |  Season 4  |  45 mins 27 secs

comics, fables, fairy tales, graphic novels

This week, we continue our discussion of FABLES, reading up to the conclusion of the saga's first big story arc.

FABLES V1-6 ...world-building's not afraid of the big bad wolf

December 9th, 2022  |  Season 4  |  39 mins 48 secs

FABLES, by Bill Willingham, is a multi-Eisner award-winning comic telling THE modern-day story of the legends of folk and fairy tales - living in our modern, mundane — or mundy — world. We're talking Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, Rose Red, Prince Charming, Cinderella, Jack, Goldilocks, the 3 little Pigs, Santa Clause, Beauty & the Beast, Pinnochio, and many more. And while Fables definitely sounds like some weird shit - don't worry it is - Fables combines the narratives of many characters from popular literay legend and smooshes them into a multi-versal tale with stakes and consequences, unlike a lot of modern superhero comics.

This is a 2-part episode reading, where this weeek we cover FABLES Vols 1-6 - setting up almost all of the major characters - living in exile from their countless Homelands, after a mysterious villain known only as “The Adversary” appeared with an unstoppable army and began conquering Fable worlds one after another. Hundreds of our years ago, the main Fables of our story came up with a desperate plan: to hide in a world The Adversary would never even want—a world so boring and utterly mundane that magic doesn’t even exist there: our own. New York City, to be more specific.

Fables finds itself mostly set in the oft-overlooked, and soon-to-gentrified neighborhood known only as "Fabletown" - but spans the centuries and worlds, to weave a long tale. While the first couple of volumes get off to a slow start world-building and setting up the main characters, it soon starts to speed up the stakes and drama for an entertaining romp. The first 2 volumes are a slog, but then shit gets real...really good.

DUCKS: TWO YEARS IN THE OIL SANDS...the cost of an MFA

December 4th, 2022  |  Season 4  |  30 mins 46 secs

canada, cartoonist, ducks, graphic novel, kate beaton

This week, we take a look at Kate Beaton's graphic memoir "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands." Beaton is a cartoonist known for her shorter, more light-hearted fare. But while this graphic novel is much darker, dealing with what it's like to work in isolation with a bunch of men fixated on any woman who crosses their path, it's also a masterful showcase of graphic storytelling.