WE HEREBY REFUSE: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration with Bruce Rutledge
John talks to Bruce Rutledge, founder of Chin Music Press, about running an independent Asia-focused press, the origins of the company in Tokyo, and the move to Seattle, where Chin Music now has a boo...
19 Aug 34min
Vincent Haddad, "Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise" (U Minnesota Press, 2026)
Since its debut in 1984, Dragon Ball has become one of the most popular, influential, and lucrative media franchises in the world. In Next Time on Dragon Ball: Playing with a Manga and Anime Franchise...
18 Aug 52min
A Conversation with LeUyen Pham illustrator of "As I Dream of You" (First Second, 2026)
As I Dream of You (First Second, 2026) illustrated by LeUyen Pham and written by Jennifer Lee. Falling in love is supposed to hurt. That’s what Franny and Sam, two cynical teenagers raised on tales of...
26 Juli 57min
Michael D. Nichols, "Batman and the Classics: Echoes of Mythology, Literature and Philosophy in the Comics and Films" (McFarland, 2026)
Fans of Batman are used to seeing the Caped Crusader associate with the likes of Superman and Wonder Woman, but what if one were to put the Dark Knight into the company of figures such as Beowulf, Rob...
18 Juni 44min
Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte, "In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2025)
In the mid-1930s the amateur French ethnographer and filmmaker Bernard de Colmont ventured into the mountainous state of Chiapas to study the Lacandón people and broadcast their way of life to a curio...
2 Maj 48min
Everything Is Fine, I'll Just Work Harder: Confessions of a Former Badass
In Everything Is Fine, I’ll Just Work Harder: Confessions of A Former Badass (Street Noise Books, 2025), Professor Cara Gormally draws us into the familiar academic world of chronic busyness. In pan...
16 Jan 39min
Colin Williamson, "Drawn to Nature: American Animation in the Age of Science" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
What do technical renderings of plant cells in trees have to do with Disney’s animated opus Fantasia? Quite a bit, as it turns out: such emergent scientific models and ideas about nature were an impor...
25 Dec 202551min
Julian Schmid, "Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century" (Edinburgh UP, 2025)
Marvel, DC and US Security: The Superhero Genre and Foreign Policy in the Twenty-first Century (Edinburgh UP, 2025) by Dr. Julian Schmid considers how the long-standing superhero genre has been reinvi...
12 Dec 202544min
