[Podcasts] Exploring Bédé #2
Now online! Recording these is becoming a highlight of my month, along with seeing how seasoned comics-readers are now starting to discover and explore bédé.
Now online! Recording these is becoming a highlight of my month, along with seeing how seasoned comics-readers are now starting to discover and explore bédé.
Recorded the second in the Exploring Bédé series of podcasts with Bryan Deemer last night. The focus this time is the Trondheim/Sfar magnum opus Donjon (Dungeon in English) — easily among my favourite series, and one of the most ambitious world-building projects in the history of the Ninth Art.
The podcast features a lengthy interview with NBM’s Donjon translator, Joe Johnson, and Bryan gets some good questions in before I start geeking out about multilingual minutia. Should be online fairly shortly.
In passing: the Donjon series is currently being bundled at most Quebec booksellers in 3-for-2 packs by series: you can pick up the first three volumes of Zénith, Crépuscule, Poitron-Minet and Parade for about CAD$30 in respectable bédé shops. I picked up the first Parade bundle at Planète BD when I was in Montréal two weeks ago — it’s an incredible value, and worth the shipping if you don’t live close enough to Quebec to pick books up first-hand.
Right here. This podcast focuses on a general overview of bédé (also the subject of the first Comics Now! column, due out in early July). Obviously, it gets into more detail than the column can, and is evidently a bit chattier.
Post some comments on the Comic Geek Speak site if you like the podcasts; encouragement is always welcome!
In a move that I’m now having some second thoughts about, the podcasts (Exploring Bédé) that I’m going to be doing with Bryan Deemer are going to be following a different sequence than the column subjects for Comics Now! and only tangentially relate to the capsules and reviews presented here.
The first podcast is going to be on bédé in general (this will match up with the CN! column), but from then on we’re going to go in a different direction, with less focus on establishing the classics and more on just finding good, recently translated material for Bryan to read. So the second column is going to be about Donjon, and beyond that we may actually re-sync with the CN! column with Bryan reading the recently released Largo Winch translations from Cinebook.
Maybe — now that I’m thinking about it — that would be ideal for scheduling, since CN! is a quarterly magazine… synch up the podcasts with CN! column subjects and do podcasts in the interim on different subjects. Hm.
Did a first recording session last night, via phone, with Bryan Deemer for an upcoming regular podcast on bande dessinée, called “Exploring Bédé.” It’s a simple concept: Bryan, a lifelong fan of North American comics in the more mainstream tradition, is starting to see what’s available from our Franco-Belgian brethren, and I’m the tour guide. The initial podcast will be up within the next week or so; I’ll keep you posted.