Quarantined Comics

a comic-book book-club discussing (some of) the medium's great works.

About the show

Comics aren't just about superheroes in capes. Each week we'll discuss, debate, and nerd out on some of the medium's greatest, latest, and strangest works. From Alan Moore to Uzumaki, to everything in-between, we aim to smash, and talk for far too long on the books we love.

Hosted by reporter/podcaster Ryan Joe and recovering marketer Raman Sehgal. We're setting phasers to...fun?

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Episodes

  • SHANG CHI ...kung fu, double dragons, and daddy issues

    September 16th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  42 mins 52 secs

    This week we're talking about Shang Chi & the Legend of the Ten Rings, the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Based on the 1972 comics of the same name based on a VERY different context / pretense, Marvel's Shang Chi is a completely new story, carrying over only a some surface level elements of the source material. Shang Chi was directed by Destin Daniel Cretton, and features ALL the Asians -Simu Liu, Akwafina, Tony Leung, Michelle Yeoh, Meng’er Zhang, Ying Nan, Ronny Chiang, and even SIR Ben Kingsley (HALF INDIAN!), the movie tells the story of an exiled assassin martial artists moonlighting as valet parkers in the Bay Area to avoid their dark mysterious past. You know, the typical Asian American story. It’s basically Asian Black Panther, or is it?

  • DRAGON HOOPS ...hard choices + high school sportsball

    September 10th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  44 mins 2 secs

    This week we are FINALLY reading DRAGON HOOPS, written and illustrated by Gene Luen Yang. DRAGON HOOPS won a 2020 Eisner Award (the Oscars for comics, and not Yang's first). The book is a nonfiction account of the high school basketball team - Oakland's Bishop O'Dowd Dragons - where Yang was a teacher before we went full time into comics. Yang's not a fan of the sportsballs - which is what makes it such a great book about sports, and taking big steps.

  • NO LONGER HUMAN ...clowning around with other peoples' lives

    September 6th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  42 mins 44 secs

    Manga artist Junji Ito — famed for his horror comics — adapts Osamu Dazai's "No Longer Human," one of the most famous novels from Japan. A disturbing depiction of depression, the graphic novel is an improbable mixture of psychological turmoil, body horror, and slapstick comedy. For real.

  • I AM NOT STARFIRE ...teen angst (not) for the trolls

    August 29th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  45 mins 32 secs

    "I Am Not Starfire" written by Mariko Tamaki and artist Yoshi Yoshitani. tells the tale Mandy, a 17 year old who is NOTHING like her of super-famous superhero Starfire....a tall, gorgeous, sparkly, hot blooded hero, beloved by all...which Mandy is NOT. She has no powers, dyes her hair black and hates everyone but best friend Lincoln, and longtime crush Claire. To Starfire, who is actually from another planet, her daughter Mandy seems like a distant, angry alien, from light years away....

  • YEAR OF THE RABBIT ......a waking nightmare, that actually happened

    August 20th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  48 mins 8 secs

    This week we are reading "Year of the Rabbit" - written and illustrated by Tian Veasna. The book is an autobiographical depiction of the author's family journey in Cambodia, from the moment he Khmer Rouge took power...three days before his birth. Taking place in the late 1970s, the book is a harrowing, triggering account of one family's journey to make sense of, attempt escape, and survive what is now regarded as one of the great human disasters of the 20th century, that most people don't know, or don't talk about.

    This book put us both in a very uncomfortable reflection...especially given history seeming to continuously repeat itself, most recently in Afghanistan with the Taliban resurgent...

  • GRASS & THE WAITING ...'the past is never dead. it's not even past.'

    August 15th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  37 mins 8 secs
    graphic novel, grass, keum suk gendry-kim, korea, the waiting

    The Korean graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim confronts the traumas created by World War II and its immediate aftermath in these two books.

  • Y: THE LAST MAN ...how bad could a pandemic get?

    August 6th, 2021  |  Season 3  |  52 mins 40 secs

    Y: THE LAST MAN is an award-winning, post-apocalyptic series by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra from 2002-2008 (soon to be adapted to a live-action TV series on FX / Hulu) — that imagines what if a global pandemic wiped out every male on earth...save one (+ his monkey). Featuring amazons, astronauts, agents, assassins, actors, antagonistas, androbots, atheists, angry Arizonans, and a whole mess of lesbians - you are taken through a # of seemingly realistic outcomes...of what would happen in our society if all the men in a male dominated world really did disappear. Airplanes would crash, (most) army's would fall, ...and neo feminist cults would arise to burn it all down?