On Location - General Comics Talk at Collected Comics and Games - a podcast by Stergios Botzakis & Derek Royal

As he does every month, Derek is back at his local shop, Collected Comics and Games in Plano, TX, to talk with customers and employees about what they are reading. For March, the topic is open and with no particular theme, so anything goes. And anything does go when Derek sits down with Shea Hennum, a long-time contributor to The Comics Alternative and, actually, the only customer who turned up to talk at the shop that evening. (For some reason, it was a very slow night at the store, for employees and customers alike.) The two guys cover a wide variety of topics, but they spend a little over half of their time discussing Scott McCloud's The Sculptor (First Second). It begins when Derek asks Shea about a recent review he wrote for Paste magazine, something that Andy alluded to in the last episode of the podcast. Shea was quite critical of McCloud's new graphic novel, and Derek wanted to  know why, and so for over thirty minutes the guys go back-and-forth over the contexts and merits of The Sculptor. In some ways, this could be seen as a follow-up to this week's regular episode where Andy and Derek reviewed McCloud's work. But Shea and Derek discuss other topics and creators as well, including Jacques Tardi, Joe Sacco, underground comix, First Second's recent release of Last Man: The Stranger, and, because Derek is talking with Shea, several manga titles, including Naoki Urasawa's Monster, Seiichi Hayashi's Red Colored Elegy, and Rumiko Takahashi's Ranma 1/2. So despite the heavy critique that Shea brings to The Sculptor, there are plenty of good vibrations to be felt from this month's on-location episode.

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