Three Panel Contrast threepanelcontrast

Awash in the Halloween spirit, the panel compares two wildly different adaptations of Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein:" Junji Ito's manga adaptation and Bruno Enna/Fabio Celoni's Italian Disney adaptation. Topics include visceral monstrosity, dramatic irony in adaptation, and the extent to which the Frankenstein myth informs the superhero genre at large.

In this episode, we compare the sexy beasts of Mirka Andolfo's "Unnatural" to the sexy monsters of Sarah Andersen's "Fangs." Topics include sexual gazes defined by elite women creators, animalization, and representations of millennial sexual culture.

In this episode, the panel goes cosmic existentialism with a look at Jim Starlin's "Magus Saga" starring Adam Warlock, and J.M. Dematteis's run on Silver Surfer, starring everyone's favorite chrome cosmos-cruiser. Topics include superhero sex/romance, Marvel's variation on Greek tragedy, and the bizarre connection between outer space and inner self reflection.

In this month's episode, the panel goes noir with a comparison of "Criminal: Last of the Innocent" by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips to "Astro City: The Tarnished Angel" by Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson. Topics include the juxtaposition of familiar comics genres with noir detective stories, the bounds of protagonist relatability, and the always tricky relationship between nostalgia and creative freedom.

In this month's episode, the panel embraces the dark side for a comparison of Gillen and Larocca's "Darth Vader" and Stern and Mignola's "Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment." Topics include the narrative challenges of telling stories around traditional antagonists, the artistic challenges of emoting through silence and masks, and the ethical culpability that lies in programming a torture-bot to do your dirty work.

In this deeply romantic episode, the panel compares Steve Englehart and Richard Howell's "The Vision and the Scarlet Witch" to Ann Nocenti and Don Perlin's "Beauty and the Beast." Topics include queer subtext, machine sex, and the complex genre bending that occurs when mixing superheroes and soap operas.