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We emerge from our collective winter hibernation, stretch and flex our collectively atrophied muscles, crack and snap our collectively creaky bones and gargle tunes of wistful spring with our collective mouthwash to discuss, at long last, what we’ve been up to since the last time our dulcet tones graced your earbuds. As it turns out, Eli has been up to his local comic store... and back again! He’s got some positive reviews for Star Wars, vol. 1, East of West, vol. 4 and Batman: Endgame, all of which hail from our dependable stable of favorite comic creators; Lizzi spent a glorious two weeks catching up on Gearbox Software’s much-lauded Borderlands series, which she greatly enjoyed, as well as trying out Image Comics’ Morning Glories and Zenescope’s Grimm Fairy Tales: Alice in Wonderland- thumbs up for Morning Glories, not so much for dear Alice; Zack Ray has dived head first into the world of comics, getting caught up on quite a bit- positive reviews going out for The Walking Dead, vol. 1, Knightfall, vol. 1, Star Wars, and The Court of Owls, and slightly more nuanced reviews of Maximum Carnage, described as ten issues of madness, and DC’s New 52: Earth 2: World’s End, a title with more colons than a proctologist’s nightmare; for my part, I’ve been loving the heck out of and preparing for the tournament season of FFG’s Star Wars: The Living Card Game from Eric Lang and Nate French, and I geek out very loudly (seriously, though... sorry about your ears) for Season 1, Part 2 of The Flash on the CW.

You might recall Maximum Carnage as that one SNES game with the red cartridge. As a child, you likely remember calling the game with the red cartridge The Only Thing You’ve Ever Wanted.

We then take a trip back a few years to the heady days of the early aughts for a long and frankly quite stimulating discussion of adaptations. Drawing somewhat from a previous episode, we talk high level about the differences between an adaptation and a spinoff- and a spinoff and a story extension- and trade details of what we think were the best and worst translations of stories in one medium to another. Mention is made of the successes and failures of well-known works such as Ender’s Game, Bryan Singer’s X-Men, Ella Enchanted, Timeline and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. We try to arrive at some constants, and do our best to pick apart the subtle distinctions.

Pictured: the aforementioned subtle distinction.

Peter Jackson’s Middle Earth Saga (the body of work he started in 2001 with The Lord of the Rings and ended last year with the last Hobbit movie) is our anchor for this discussion, and was our primary source material, since it represents both a critically and commercially lauded adaptation (the original three films) and one that has seen a far less consistent reception (the most recent three). We try to figure out why, and some of the ideas we stumble upon may surprise you.

Mostly we figure out that Thranduil is just the worst kind of thing.

We hope you enjoy this week’s OPUB- we had a blast being back in the hot seat, and the hot seat was just thrilled to receive our asses! As usual, we’d love to hear from you- what have you been up to so far this year? And what are your thoughts on the differences between adaptation, spinoff and extension? Is Peter Jackson just an excitable nerd with a massive budget, or did he really fall prey to the whims of greedy studio execs and the Shadow in the East?

Be sure to join us next week for this season’s first Overbudget- a lighthearted b-side for those of you who’ve always wondered what would happen if there were an Avengers team in the Dark Horse universe. ‘Till then, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or stop by and say “hi!” on our forums at d20Radio.com/forums. Shower us in your delicious, decadent praise for the grand scope of our achievement, or belittle us and drown us in shame for our sinful crime of hubris- either way, we’d love to hear from you!

We begin, as auld acquaintances are wont to do, with what we've been up to since we last recorded. Eli has started tackling the extremely well-received downloadable expansion to Ken Levine's blockbuster game Bioshock Infinite, Burial at Sea, with a positive review so far. Recommendations also abound for your monthly comic list; Lizzi admits the true reason she reads the Grimm Fairy Tales anthologies from Zenoscope, and is surprised by the high quality of Disney: Infinity 2.0, the latest challenger to Activision-Blizzard's money-printing license Skylanders; Zack Ray has been getting his Tolkien on, logging over a day of playtime in Monolith's Game of the Year contender Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor and picking up Tolkien's Book of Lost Tales I, edited by Christopher Tolkien, known in LANDO Studios as The Great Enemy; finally, I picked up BioShock Infinite and have some slightly reserved praise for it, as well as more praise for the current representation of Batman on your comic stands.

Pictured above: the definitive Gotham City.

In the meat of our show, we tackle the most overproduced and the most underbudget of 2014- translation? Our best and worst pieces of pop culture from this year. Lizzi remembers the feeling of pure excitement on her way home from seeing James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time, and that high puts it over the top for her. We also take a moment to revisit the thematic content of the film. Eli has an honorable mention for the inimitable Yahtzee Croshaw but overwhelming praise for Bruno Cathala's Five Tribes from Days of Wonder. Zack Ray lends some nuance to his repeated assertions that Michael de Plater's Middle Earth: Shadow of Mordor from Monolith is the Game of the Year. Lastly, I have some super-spoilery, very winding but careful praise for season 4 of HBO's Game of Thrones, heralded by Dave Benioff and Dan Weiss.

Mention is made of Tom Vasel's piercing insight. Pictured above: Tom Vasel's piercing insight.

On the low end of things this year, Zack Ray gives honorable mention to Brock Lesnar's unseating of twenty-one-time champion The Undertaker at WrestleMania XXX, but focuses his ire on the current season of AMC's The Walking Dead, now halfway through its fifth season. Eli absolutely cannot abide Gillen and McKelvie's The Wicked + the Divine from Image Comics and gives it quite the shellacking. Lizzi was completely let down by the highly anticipated and poorly regarded Angelina Jolie vehicle Maleficent from Disney. Finally, I do my best to completely lay in to "The Simpsons Guy," Seth MacFarlane's latest attempt to prove to America that we're not as intelligent as we'd like to think we are.

Somewhere in an attic there's a portrait of Seth MacFarlane that's slowly turning into Aaron Sorkin.

From all of us here at LANDO Studios- OPUB's own Dan, Kyle, Zack Ray, and Lizzi, Hosts Emeritus Colby and Max, as well as Eli and myself, thank you so much for listening to the Overproduced and Under Budget podcast this year. It's such a blast for us to put the show together for you, and we sincerely hope you have as much fun listening to us talk as we have listening to us talk. That's a wrap for Season 1- stay tuned for a bonus episode featuring the return of the OPUB Pop Culture Pop Quiz and our return for Season 2 later on in January. Until then, find us on Facebook or Twitter, or come say "hi" on our forums at d20Radio.com. Happy New Year, everyone!

02:22 What We've Been Up To This Week

10:18 Bang your Drum

11:08 Our most Overproduced of 2014

39:00 Our most Underbudget of 2014

59:05 See You In 2015

1:00:25 Sappy 8-Bit Music

1:00:45 One Last Blooper For The Road

(image credits: The Great Eye, Lidless, Wreathed in Flame, via theonering.net; Tom Vasel by Pat; Peter and Homer Car Wash via Hulu on tumblr; Colbert Waving Goodbye via Blogspot)

Join us for another week of geeky goodness.

We start things off this week, welcoming friend of the show Lizzi Gunn to the assortment of voices in your head, with what we've been up to this week. Eli was super relieved that Southern Bastards #5 is up to the same standards of quality as the first arc (which we all enjoyed quite a bit), and really wants you to know how good the (sadly, now-limited) Bob's Burgers run is; Zack continues his descent into the madness of The Evil Within from Bethesda Softworks and the venerable Shinji Mikami and, likely as a result of said madness, has difficulty discerning reality when giving his first impressions of Bungie and Luke Smith's much-lauded Destiny; Lizzi is a few pages into Southern Bastards but already has good thoughts, just finished Lock-In and Agent to the Stars by the inestimable Jon Scalzi (and it was the power of Scalzi's words that finally melted her frozen heart for noted Geek Paragon Wil Wheaton), and has been playing a lot of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare, because awesome; continuing my Doctor Who odyssey, I really quite enjoyed the mid-season finale "Angels Take Manhattan," with one caveat that shows up often for me regarding Doctor Who in general, was surprised by how much I enjoyed the quietly subversive Loki: Agent of Asgard, Vol. 1, and am giddy with frothy fanboyish excitement over speculation about Aaron Sorkin's forthcoming adaptation of Steve Jobs's biography.

Knock that shit off. You're better than that.

Next, spurred by noted underground cartoonist Alison Bechdel's recently-awarded MacArthur Fellowship, we talk about the medium in which she is most famous- the graphic memoir. Taking a look at what are widely held to be the two best examples of such, Art Spiegelman's 1986 Holocaust epic Maus and Bechdel's 2007 family tragicomic Fun Home. Our sources this week comprise some seriously heavy stuff, but gosh are they good and, frankly, recommended reading for folks who support the notion that really are a mainstream medium and not just a genre. We talk about the good and not-so-good parts of both works- what can graphic memoirs do, exactly, that a traditional text memoir simply can't? Are there stories that just wouldn't work in this medium? In general, we wanted a lens to get to know the work of someone who's doing really great mainstream work in comics, but it did seem remiss of us to consider Bechdel's work without at least entertaining a brief discussion of her well-known eponymous test. You can imagine that the discussion was less than brief, but also quite interesting.

Yeah, kind of.

How far can you go with something like the Bechdel Test, and do we tend to go too far with it today? What are some surprising movies that don't pass the test, and a few that do? We take a stab at all these questions, as well as J.R.R. Tolkein's actual vision for the Lord of the Rings.

This. It was this.

We're happy to welcome Zack Ray back this week, and to introduce the sublime thrill of Lizzi Gunn's words to your eager, thirsty ears. I mentioned during the show that I checked out an awful lot of stuff in preparation for our Bechdel Test bit, and in addition to what's referenced above, I also recommend reading Bechdel's own blog post, which I reference at one point, Rebecca A. Moore's Doctor Who study, Dani Coleman's much-shared piece for Medium, and Robbie Collin's op-ed from telegraph.com. As always, we'd love to hear your thoughts- is the graphic memoir a cool new exploration of what's possible in the comic medium, or are they self-serious indulgences? Did you pick up on Spiegelman's deep, post-modern cues on your first read of Maus (which, for many of you, was probably in high school)? What's your opinion of the Bechdel Test and the manner in which it is applied these days?

Be sure to don your cape and cowl and join us later this week for a mini episode featuring our thoughts, as well as those of another Friend of the Show, on DC's newest superhero comic-to-television adaptations, The Flash, a cheeky and thrilling adventure with a lighthearted touch, and Gotham, a dark, gritty, and somber meditation on the dark grittiness of somber meditation. 'Till then, find us on Facebook and Twitter, or stop by and say "hi!" on our forums at d20Radio.com/forums. Shower us in your delicious, decadent praise for the grand scope of our achievement, or belittle us and drown us in shame for our sinful crime of hubris- either way, we'd love to hear from you!

-Patrick

Hello again everyone. I’m back again this month to talk about great games for your Halloween parties or just for any creepy game night. These games can really drive home the theme of your event and leave you and your friends still thinking about it 28 days later.

I have a confession to make. Halloween is not a day for me- it's a whole season. I love the smells and the feels of Fall, as well as the mischief and intrigue of Halloween. So in this, my Halloween season, there are a couple of traditions that I compulsively follow.  I’ll save you from the boring details of watching Nightmare Before Christmas, drinking an Imperial Pumking, and nibbling on candy corn to get straight to the telltale heart of what I’m talking about today.  

"...and I want this pun, and this pun, and this pun..." -Eli

The first game that sprung to my mind when I decided to make this list was Gloom.  Gloom is a fantastic game by Keith Baker and Atlas Games that puts you in control of an “eccentric family of misfits”.  The main goal of Gloom is to have all of your family members die when they are the most depressed. Gloomy? Exactly. This game is cooperative-yet-competitive storytelling experience with a fantastic dark comedy feel. If you want to know more about Gloom, I strongly suggest watching the Tabletop Episode that Geek and Sundry put out on the Youtubes.

This next game is easily the game that I’ve played the most year round; Halloween is just another great excuse to break this one out. Sometimes there is nothing better than banding together with your best friends and taking on the Old Ones head on.  The game I’m referring to is Eldritch Horror by Corey Konieczka and Fantasy Flight Games.  Eldritch Horror takes the ideas, themes, world and characters of H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth that Arkham Horror focused on and expands them to a global scale. The mechanics are tight and he game play is wonderfully cooperative with a deeply immersive theme. There is nothing like fighting Cthulhu on an eerie Halloween night.

...shutup.

I’m going to cut to the chase here. If you want to play out a Horror movie, then Mansions of Madness, also from Konieczka and FFG, is the game for you.  In Mansions, one player acts as the villain, controlling zombies, cultists, and monsters, setting traps and driving the story for the heroes of the movie, while the remaining players try to figure out what is going on in an old mysterious house.  I’m too much of a Fantasy Flight fanboy to not suggest that if you haven’t played this game, then you are missing out.  

A Touch of Evil is another fantastic game for the season. The best way for me to explain this game is to imagine Eldritch Horror light.  It is set in not-so-Sleepy Hollow, and you as players again band together to fight villains, this time classics like the Headless Horseman.  This game has an unique, "costume party" art style that is known to turn some people off to the game, but I think the fact that it comes with a soundtrack more than makes up for the art choices.

If you have to fight Orson Welles, the only way to defeat him is by offering him a big enough paycheck to voice Unicron in the Transformers movie. Or offering him literally anything to eat. Are Orson Welles jokes still funny?

I have two more Halloween games to speak on, so bear with me. Betrayal at House on the Hill is a cult favorite in the board gaming community that's achieved more mainstream success after it was featured in a two-part episode of Tabletop. If you search for Halloween board game lists, (which I totally didn't do for this article) you'll see that Betrayal tops most of the lists. In this game everyone starts together trying to solve a mystery in a mansion, a la Mansions of Madness. Roughly half-way through, one player will be named the traitor and attempt to murder the rest!  (Full disclosure... I haven't played this yet, but I hear only good things about it and can't wait to give it a try.)

Listen, I have one last word of caution for Halloween gaming. Be wary of Zombies!!!. If you are looking for a good, cheap, and shallow game, then this certainly achieves that goal, but I would recommend checking out any (and all) of the games I previously mentioned before this one. But you don't have to take my word for it.

Us too, Josh.

One last note before I wrap this up, Fantasy Flight Games is about to release a new line of roleplaying games called "The End of the World," based on horror movie tropes like Zombie Apocalypse, Alien Invasion and Machine Uprising. I believe they are using a system that is similar to the one they used for their Star Wars Roleplaying line, and I couldn't be more excited. So as this Halloween season comes to a close, look for those games to scratch that itch all year long.

These games are great on their own, but one way to avoid the silence of the lambs is to use tabletopaudio.com. It is a great resource to really make the atmosphere even more thematic. I’ve started incorporating this resource whenever possible, and I really think that it pays off.

This is the part where I wrap up my tumblrbook and wish everyone a Happy Halloween!

May your trick-or-treat bags be ever full of king size bars, oyster crackers and packets of hot sauce.

Well, thanks everyone for reading this and really genuinely thank you for listening to our show. It really is the emotional high that we crave and chase. Well, have a spooky and safe Halloween everyone, and we can't wait to show you all the things we've been working on.

-Eli

Night Moves by zombiegod on Boardgamegeek; Touch of Evil via Pamela Geller; Brad Whitford Likes Mermen via NotTheGuyYouKill on NeoGaf; Full Bars via reddit; gifs by Pat

This week sees a quicker opening, wherein we discuss what we've been up to since we last recorded: Eli has picked up the mega-hit PlayStation game God of War and Bunn & Del Ray's The Empty Man, finding both to be less-than-fulfilling; Colby has tried, on Max's suggestion, Brubaker's The Fade Out from Image Comics and loves the way the creators have transplanted the noir murder story into the comic book medium; Max and Colby put down their snifters of brandy and copies of The New Yorker to briefly discuss A Good Man Is Hard To Find by Flannery O'Connor; thanks to our four-week lead time, I'm still really stoked about joining the d20Radio Network, and I suggest one of our fellow podcasts for your listening pleasure; and Max has finally caught up on East of West, Southern Bastards and Dark Horse Presents, with Southern Bastards' conclusion to Volume 1: Here Was A Man, giving East of West a run for its money.

Southern Bastards, Volume 3: Here Was A Horseman.

Our first discussion topic is one that has been surprisingly overlooked by us for all the month's we've been recording: nerd icon Joss Whedon, notable as the creator of works like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, Dollhouse, Titan A.E., Dr. Horrible, The Astonishing X-Men and, of course, he was the director of the Avengers film. We're interested in the consistent popularity of his catalog, as well as its and his effect on the pop cultural landscape. We also use the term Strong, Female Characters roughly 1,037,996 times and try to figure out what's up with Dollhouse and Firefly, two works of Whedon's that are generally well-regarded but either took time to or never did reach mainstream appeal.

Southern Bastards, Volume 4: Here Was An Iron Man.

We then talk endings. Colby takes us through our least and most favorite endings in pop culture, and we get a really great breadth and depth of answers, from speeches that you carry with you for your life as a mantra, to twists that reveal something new about the story every time you watch it, to theme trumping mythology, to how satisfying it can be for an ending to be "just another episode" of your favorite show. We cap it off with another appearance of the Shiner Pop Culture Quiz- this one's kind of weird, but it winds up being really fun.

Southern Bastards, Volume 5: Here Was A Madman (With A Box)

So the reason we brought endings to the table this episode is due to an announcement that's been brewing for a few weeks now- in order that they can pursue some very exciting, non-podcast-related projects, this will be Max and Colby's last regular episode on the Overproduced and Under-Budget Podcast. It's really impossible to overstate how sad we are to see them go (even though I try to stumble through it in the episode), but I speak for myself and Eli, and hopefully all of our wonderful listeners, when I wish them mountains- nay, planets- nay, galaxies- of success in their projects. This show is nothing if not the sum of the efforts of all four of us to create a fun, engaging dialogue about popular topics in nerd culture, and we will definitely miss both Max and Colby's voices, both practically and creatively. From the bottom of my heart, thanks guys.

Southern Bastards, Volume 6: Here was a feel

That brings us to the end of this week's OPUB. Stay tuned for our next episode, which will air on a slight delay, when Eli and I, along with a special guest host, will be discussing hoooorrrooorrrr and its various manifestations in literature, film, television and video games in a Halloween special! Look forward to some new voices on the show as we work to bring some new perspectives on board for future episodes! As always, you can find us on Facebook at Overproduced, and on Tumblr and Twitter @overunderpod, as well as our forums at d20Radio.com/forums. Tell us what you think about Joss Whedon's immense popularity, or let us know what your favorite ending is- either way, we'd love to hear from you!

Our discussion about Fraction and Zdarsky's Sex Criminals from last week's episode brought us to some very interesting areas of discussion, and one that we hit on in Colby's introduction to the topic is this idea that Sex Criminals received a lot of negative feedback from retailers. Apple banned an issue from the comiXology app, and brick and mortar retailers have expressed hesitation to stock something with such explicit content. So does the title's success tell us something about the modern comic book market? I'm reasonably sure it does.

About a year and a half ago, I was still living in the Greater Orlando area in Florida and shopping for my comics at a really great local joint called Heroes Landing, just off 27 in North Clermont (a fine place to purchase your comics and games if there ever was one). The shop is owned by Todd Merrick, who is a genuinely great dude (the type of retailer who gets to know customers and what they shop for- "Hey, good to see you, Pat, the new such and such came in this week" and so on), and he and I were chatting once and we somehow got on the subject of Image Comics' at-the-time-forthcoming title Bitch Planet. He said it just wasn't possible for him to put it on his wall. Can you guess why?

Clearly it's because of the gang-related content.

That was really the first time this kind of thought had ever crossed my mind- just who is a comic book shop for, anyway? I've spent a lot of time in these shops throughout my life, but never given a whole lot of thought to who else is in there next to me. When comic books were first entering the American mainstream as a medium, well before I was even born, the modern comic book shop was really not a thing- you got your monthlies from a newspaper stand, or other purveyor of periodicals. It wasn't until the development of the direct market, which Neil Adams tells the story of very eloquently in his Fatman on Batman interview, that we had this cave-like, stereotypical environment that gets lampooned by Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons, and then throughout the last few decades is when you see more comic book shops evolve into clean, brightly lit, well-staffed, cross-merchandised emporiums, like Heroes Landing (and Midtown Comics, and Mile High Comics, and Coliseum of Comics... you get my point). These warm, inviting shops are, I think, a physical manifestation of a market that is reaching more mainstream appeal in a world where it's not really that uncool to be into niche stuff- in fact, it might even be cool. As such, they serve a ton of different customers and demographics, more than I think we realize sometimes, and certainly more than ever before.

So of course there's a cost associated with that wider appeal. In retail, everything you do is a signal of something, and the most successful brands are always the ones who realize that what creates their brand is the aggregate of signals they send through their daily actions. That includes (but is not limited to) things like is your sales staff friendly, how is your customer service, how's your social media presence, what hours are you open, and yes, what products you choose do you carry and where do you put them? Do you carry comics with explicit sexual content? If not, why, and if so, where and how? Are they in a curtained-off area? Are they on the shelves but behind those opaque, plastic dividers, the kind you see at airport news stands covering the adults-only magazines? That's why I find the runaway success of Sex Criminals to be such an interesting case from this perspective. Some of the covers on this series are just plain blatant- the sexual content is obvious, and the subject matter is front and center. So as stores continue to serve a broadening and diversifying customer base that is hungry for content that is more broad and diverse, shops need to weigh the pros and cons of having this title on their wall. I think we make a really good case in our episode that what's between the covers of this book is worthwhile and engaging, if risky. So will carrying Sex Criminals satisfy those new customers; will it damage the brand of a shop that wants to make its appeal as a family-friendly store?

It will definitely increase the number of bathtub firearms on your new issue wall.

It's with all of that in mind that I reached out to Todd for his opinions on a few of these questions. We spoke via email, and he had some great insight about comics that are explicit or violent, books he just wouldn't carry at all for one reason or another, and what he wants his store to look like.

Patrick: So, in your experience and opinion, is there an increased market for mature content books today?

Todd Merrick, Owner, Heroes Landing Comics: I would say there are many customers looking for something new or different and not traditional capes comics.

PS: Have you had any challenges balancing the popularity of books like "Saga" and "Sex Criminals" (and plenty of others) with the aim of running a store that is a "safe, friendly environment?" (from your website).

TM: Yes.  I have brought this up with publishers, specifically Image. As titles become more and more blatant or cover art becomes racy, it makes it difficult to make room for them. Of course I don't want to miss a sales opportunity, but sometimes you have to go with your gut. I may try a title at first and see how it goes.  I don't want to have certain titles behind the counter or in a curtained area.

PS: Is there a difference between what's labeled as mature content today and what would have been labeled mature content in, say, the 90's early-Image-Wildstorm era? (I'm thinking specifically of the jarringly violent early Spawn and WILDCATS content. If so, what do you think is that difference?)

TM: I think violence has always been in comics but to a certain degree. You could say the same thing with movies. I think with the rise of torture porn films like Saw, we have seen the same in comics (e.g. Crossed). Also, sexual content and nudity as well as cursing are becoming more mainstream.

PS: Have there been any titles you've consciously decided not to carry due to content or cover? Why or why not?  

TM: Only a few come to mind.  One is "God is Dead". I believe in my market a title like this would not go over well. I have also stopped carrying the Crossed comic though I still have the trades. It just felt too much. Too violent. Gore for the sake of having it. I do not put out Sex or Sex Criminals just because the cover often is too racy. I recently did not order Auteur. This is mostly because I don't like eyeballs and the cover had a guys eyeball popping out of the socket. Ewwww.  However, I will get in anything a customer requests for their sub pull.

Pictured: Yikes.

PS: Have you ever considered using those opaque, plastic "shields" to cover mature content on your shelf space? Why or why not?  

TM: It has come to mind. I have not pursued it as I feel it makes it even more obvious. I am sure that it may increase interests and perhaps even sales, but it is not the direction I want to take my shop in.

PS: Do you think there's a difference between mature content of a violent nature, of a language (e.g. swearing) nature and of a sexual nature?  

TM: Yes, a comic like Walking Dead typically is violent with occasional swearing. Then there are comics like Crossed that take it more extreme. Marvel Max has even done this in which you have a regular Punisher and a more extreme Punisher with nudity, gory violence, swearing, etc. Sexually, you can get implied content which Deadpool has been known to have with innuendos and such or very graphic depictions.  I find this to be even more common with manga. I have to double check when I order these titles as many times it is not clear what the content may be.

It was a pleasure to speak with Todd, and I think his insight as a store owner who is clearly very cognisant of his customer and his brand is so interesting and valuable to the discussion. I want to thank him for his time! I'd be very interested to hear, as well, from any of you- what are your thoughts on mature comics and their place in the modern market? As always, you can find us on Facebook, Twitter, or our (newly constituted) forums on d20Radio.com.

-Patrick

(image sources (not to be confused with Image sources): Sex Criminals Mature Content Warnings via fuckyeahsexcriminals, Bitch Planet #1 cover via Image Comics.com, Sex Criminals Variant Cover via Image Comics, Auteur #1 via This Is Infamous)