Episode 3 - Frames Per Second and Panels Per Onion, with Jesse McManus

Wake up, get dressed! It's the Big Roman Muradov Episode! This one is guest-edited and guest-produced by the guest himself and filled with aural wonders. Roman is a brilliant and accomplished illustrator and cartoonist, author of (In a Sense) Lost and Found (Nobrow), Jacob Bladders and the State of the Art (Uncivilized), Resident Lover (Kuš) Vanishing Act (Fantagraphics), On Doing Nothing (Chronicle), and many other works. Roman's new and in-progress comics -- Terrible Father, Foghorn, and All the Living (Fantagraphics) -- provide the vehicle for our doomed quest for truth across the corpses of legions of writers, artists, musicians and thinkers. Innocence and cruelty! Artifice and sincerity! Free indirect style for comics! Repetition! Repetition! Repetition! This episode is not titled "Pretty, Ugly, Stupid, Smart." The Horse Scene Theme Song is performed by the apparently ingenious Dory Bavarsky. Additional soundy stuff by Roman Muradov as noted, and occasional xylophone by past guest and great person Tana Oshima. Thank you as always to the show's beloved regular producer Jason Butler.

Today I am joined by the great Kevin Huizenga, author of graphic novels such as The River at Night, Curses, The Wild Kingdom and Gloriana (all published by Drawn & Quarterly), the ongoing series Fielder, and many other comics and zines. Kevin's work often tackles zones of human experience rarely touched in comics, such as consciousness, the nature of time, and other Big Questions of Philosophy. (One of Kevin's most affecting stories is about a theologian writing an essay.) We get into the impulse and process behind this kind of work. We also discuss the trouble with interviews, the uses of a cartoon avatar, and much more. Grateful to Kevin for his thoughtful answers. And grateful as always for Jason Butler for producing the episode.

Today my guest is New York cartoonist Elizabeth Bethea, whose comics include Book of Daze and Francis Bacon (Domino Books), All Killer No Filler, and Forlorn Toreador. She's also appeared in anthologies like Peep and Crease. Elizabeth is one of the great comics poets, and I loved learning about how she composes her work over time through daily writing. We also get into Elizabeth's hometown of New Orleans, her recent forays into digital cartooning, the love life of Susan Sontag, the dreaminess of still lifes, pictureless poems, and more! Thank you to Jason Butler for producing the episode!

Buckle up, gentle listener, for a whirlwind tour of the comic art (and life & times) of Lummi Island's Golden Boy, Brooklyn's Hottest Dad, and Art Comics' Secret Weapon, Matthew Thurber! Matthew is the author of 1-800-MICE, Infomaniacs (Picturebox), Art Comic, Mr. Colostomy (Drawn and Quarterly), Vector Hugo, Pirates of the Condominium -- and most recently Looking for the Cat, an ongoing series published by Neoglyphic Media. We begin with Looking for the Cat, set in Matthew's childhood home of Lummi Island, and then travel back in time to the twilight of the George W. Bush era, when 1-800-MICE was being conceived. From there we move through two decades of Matthew's oeuvre, and recirculate, Finnegans-Wake-like, to his latest work. Along the way we get into life as a young NYC art handler, the heady days of Picturebox, the writing of Thomas Pynchon and Raymond Roussel, Children of Men, stories with and without endings, making comics in quarantine, and making comics when your baby was just born and you've lost your cat. Grateful to Matthew for spending so much time with me revisiting all this work! It was a lot of fun. Thanks to Jason Butler for producing the episode!

I am joined today by the brilliant and hilarious Sam Szabo, author of Momix Presents: DADIX (Cram Books), Enlightened Transsexual Comics (Silver Sprocket), Girl Hell and lots more. Sam and I talk about the intersection of memoir and gags in her work, being a briefcase kid exposed to boomer esoterica in Mad Magazine, the crutch and the ecstacy of fourth-wall breaking, the sublime banality of cousins, and so on. I had a ton of fun chatting with Sam, and look forward to all the new stuff she's cooking up. Thank you to our beloved producer Jason Butler!