Comic Book Couples Counseling Podcast
Join married couple Brad and Lisa as they explore the various dynamics of comic book relationships throughout pop culture and publishing history.
Episodes
The Gill-man just does it for us. Or Lisa, more specifically. You can have your Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, Wolf Man, and Invisible Man; we'll take the wet and wild one off your hands any day of the week. Creature from the Black Lagoon Lives! And no more ravishingly than in our hearts.
Where other Universal Monsters ...
It's been a week. You've had a minute. The sixth and final issue of Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees is out there, living its life, rattling around our collective imaginations. We need to talk about it. You need to talk about it. Let's talk about it together. And drag cartoonist Patrick Horvath into the chat, crack his melon open, and root around in all of his delicious secrets. Yep, it's ti...
He's back—like you've never seen him before. Kyle Starks, the writer behind I Hate This Place, Peacemaker Tries Hard!, and Where Monsters Lie, just released an original graphic novel at First Second that's all-ages and without swears. Karate Prom is a heart-forward action adventure about two teens who find love in the ring, or after it, when Sam knocks Don "TheDragonWilson" Jones out cold.
March 5th, 1984. Forty years ago, three thousand copies of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #1 hit the newsstands. The title was impossible to ignore. Born from a joke between fresh collaborators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, it sparked an instantaneous passionate response. Many quickly dismissed the concept or rolled their eyes, but those who actually read that first issue recognized the love for ...
For this week's podcast, we're digging out a treasure from the CBCC Patreon Feed: our deep-dive conversation with Daniel Warren Johnson about The Nam # 9. This thorough discussion launched our "Married to Singles" Patreon exclusive series, where we examine the favorite single issues of various comic book creators and critics. It's one thing to dissect an artist's work alongside or in front of t...
When people dare to complain about modern Transformers stories, they often single out the human characters and how they drag the spotlight away from the glorious Cybertron titans they paid their money to see. Optimus Prime is enough. Bumblebee is enough. We don't need Spike or Sparky to stretch the narrative. Just give us the 'bots.
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How many words belong on a page? How many panels? In this week's podcast, we uncover the answers by chatting with Pornsak Pichetshote and Jesse Lonergan about their new Boom Studios series, Man's Best. It's a radically personal work about three emotional support animals lost in space, and it forced its creators to rethink their collaborative impulses to achieve the best comic possible. And we're...
We've dreaded this moment for more than a minute. The Death of Comics Bookcase is here. Journalist Zack Quaintance has assembled a mighty fine coffin in the form of a comic book and put his old self into it. Having written for his old site, we'll miss him, but we also recognize this death as a rebirth loaded with possibility, and we can't help but be excited, too.
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A story is never one story. A story is several stories. It's the story imagined by its author or authors, as is often the case in comics, and it's the story imagined by its many readers. They can be similar or significantly different, but none of them are the same. Never have we been more aware of this phenomenon than when we were talking to Becky Cloonan and Tula Lotay about their new comic,...
Walk into your local comic book store and give it a good browse. These days, you won't find too many Western comics. When a publisher like Image Comics grants a person the opportunity to make one, they must seize it and run wild. Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips cram The Enfield Gang Massacre with everything they love about the genre. It's got bank robberies, shootouts, and Gatling guns, oh my...
Who are we? Who do we want to be? Sometimes, the truth is a lie well told. Tom King returns to the podcast for his most in-depth conversation, breaking down the themes of his iconic Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow run and why so much of his personal history wound up within it.
Explore no further if you have not already re...
This week's episode is the conversation we've wanted to have with Tyler Crook from the moment we first read The Lonesome Hunters. Despite already having two wonderful chats with Crook on the record, we couldn't let him rest there. After Dark Horse Comics released the second volume, The Wolf Child, we needed to go full-spoilers, and it appears Tyler Crook needed to do the same thing. We start at...
Some birthdays are bigger than others. To properly celebrate the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hitting their forties this year, IDW Publishing is determined to make a fuss regarding our favorite comic book siblings, including, but not limited to, inviting heavyweight scribe Jason Aaron onto their flagship title. The main monthly comic will relaunch with a new number one in July but remain faith...
All biography is autobiography. Nowhere is this more evident than when discussing Tom Scioli's back-to-back books, Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics and I Am Stan: A Graphic Biography of the Legendary Stan Lee. Since his earliest works, Scioli has found himself through his reverence, study, and subversion of the King. Kirby's collaborations with Stan Lee shaped much of our curren...
What's in the box!? Scott Summers invites Emma Frost into his mind palace and shows her his special black cube, constructed with a little help from his ex. Gulp. This week, we reach the halfway point in our ScEmma Counseling Session series, discussing Dark X-Men: The Confession as well as Uncanny X-Men issues 518 and 519, which mark the height of their functionality. Yup, it's the top of their hill, and we're not ready to look on t...
The initial mission was to create a character who would outlast him. Todd McFarlane stared down Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man. He knew he had a character within him that could last beyond his own lifetime; he just had to pull him out. Spawn might not have outlived his maker yet, but he has survived and thrived these last thirty-plus years. As has Todd's action figure empire, McFarlane Toys, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary ...
Today, we get serious about ScEmma. After years of teasing it, we're finally tackling the complicated romance between the X-Men's Scott Summers and Emma Frost. It's a relationship born out of pain and surprise. Maybe it was not meant to last, but we can't ignore the lessons found within their passion.
We begin our counseling session at the end of Grant Morrison's iconic New X-Men run, discussing the Assault on Weapon Plus, Planet X...
Regret is a poison we too often sip from in our lives. Resisting its toxin should be easy, but it's a practice we must continuously endure. Thankfully, we have writers like Jadzia Axelrod, who offer stories as gauntlets for us to charge through in our imaginations. Hawkgirl: Once Upon a Galaxy, the latest saga from Axelrod and artist Amancay Nahuelpan, forces Kendra Saunders to reflect on her life and the many past lives that came ...
Ninety years after his creation, Flash Gordon continues to soar in syndication. Helping us celebrate Alex Raymond's fearless champion this week is current Flash Gordon cartoonist Dan Schkade. Together, we explore why the confident space jock remains relevant and why the electric sexuality associated with the eighties cinematic adaptation is simply an extension of the raw heat present in Raymond's original strips.
We can't put 2023 to bed without releasing our very last episode of the year, The Stampies: The Best Comics of 2023 (Part Two). Continuing the celebration from last week's Part One, we push into several other major categories, highlighting the exceptional art birthed into the universe by this beautiful medium. Aiding our love-in our numerous friends from the comics journalism and podcasting community. Frankly, too many wonderful co...
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