Sidebar Forever

From 2010, we present our Classic interview with comics legend Whilce Portacio. With a career spanning close to four decades, Portacio's kinetic and stylized artwork has graced the pages of Uncanny X-Men, The Punisher, Iron Man (Heroes Reborn) and many more! He is the creator of X-Men character 'Bishop' and one of the seven original founders of Image Comics; under which he published his creator-owned title 'WetWorks' in 1994.

In the halcyon days of the early 1990s, Jim Lee's Wildstorm Studios boasted an amazing crop of young talent, but one would rise meteorically to the heights of the industry — Travis Charest. On the pod, we discuss Charest's beginnings on DC's Darkstars, his run on WildCATs with writer Alan Moore, as well as the book that cemented him one of the comic art greats, WildCATs/X-Men: The Golden Age. We end things on The Dreamshifters, which many consider to be Charest's masterpiece. Was it worth the three-year wait? Did Charest exhaust the limits of his talent working on that book?

Director Steven Soderbergh says his 1998 film Out of Sight saved his career. After the success of his debut, Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Soderbergh went through a drought and needed a hit. This week, we discuss the terrifically entertaining Out of Sight including its cast led by George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, screenwriter Scott Frank's adaptation of the original Elmore Leonard novel, and the movie's brilliant use of color, music and time shifting. We also note that even though Out of Sight wasn’t a box office smash, it set up Soderbergh and Clooney for the hugely popular Ocean’s trilogy a few years later.

Original films featuring superheroes have been around for decades and show no signs of stopping. On this week’s pod, we run down hits like Darkman, Unbreakable, and Chronicle, as well as a few misses such as The Toxic Avenger, The Meteor Man, and Hancock. Where did Hollywood's fascination with original superhero concepts come from? Because these films aren’t adaptations, are they freer to subvert certain tropes and clichés? We end the pod with an age-old debate: Is The Matrix a superhero movie?

It’s been 15 years since the first Iron Man movie officially launched Marvel Studios. In that time, Marvel has done billion dollar business at the box office, and Hollywood became obsessed with all things superhero. But nothing lasts forever. Despite still getting butts in seats and eyeballs on screens, superhero movies and TV shows are not the pop culture touchstones they once were. Are we at a saturation point with masks and capes? Have plans to revitalize the DCEU come a little too late? Are mainstream audiences beginning to lose interest in superheroes?

Cartoonist or comic artist? TV or film? Rock, hip-hop or jazz? In the podversation, we debate the importance and relevance of categories. Do they help an audience find what they’re looking for, or do they put creative types in a box? Are categories mostly in service to companies who want to sell us things? In nerd circles, categorization definitely matters. Try calling Star Wars an action movie or refer to The Mandalorian as a superhero, and see what kind of looks you get. We close out the pod by debating in which categories a few movies, TV shows, musicians, and artists should be placed.

Here is our classic interview from the 'Barchives' with comic book writer/artist Howard V. Chaykin (1970-2022). Chaykin is known for his creator-owned American Flagg and TIME2; in addition to his reinventions of The Shadow and Blackhawk for DC Comics. Chaykin has worked in the comics industry for over 50 years and has no intent of slowing down. 
This episode continues our re-presentation of classic interviews and roundtables from our previous incarnation as SiDEBAR: The Pop Culture Podcast into our podcast feed.
We hope that our listeners, both new and old, will enjoy these vintage back episodes and follow us here for new episodes of Sidebar Forever!

In 1992, the Hong Kong crime-thriller Hard Boiled was released internationally and blew the minds of audiences everywhere. The film established actor Chow Yun-Fat as a worldwide star and director John Woo as an absolute master of cinematic action. We discuss Hard Boiled’s influence on American moviemakers, the electric performance by Fat playing a Dirty Harry-styled cop, the film's somewhat fraught production, and other movies in the gun fu subgenre such as The Killer, Equilibrium, and John Wick. We also debate Hard Boiled's legacy against the long and vast canon of action films. 

Our Bad Boys episode was so much fun that we decided to keep chatting about prison movies. Covered in the conversation are prison movie themes like revenge and redemption, tropes such as the guy who can get anything or the inevitable shower scene, and how great prison films like The Longest Yard, The Shawshank Redemption, and Starred Up have more to say about the human condition. We also chop up films that have elements of prison movies within them like Deadlock, Face Off, Tango & Cash, and Out of Sight.

Sean Penn, Esai Morales, and Clancy Brown are amazing in the 1983 prison film, Bad Boys. In our playback review, we discuss the rest of the cast including Ally Sheedy, Jim Moody, and Reni Santoni, the movie's gritty portrayal of prison culture, and how this film established Penn as a serious young actor in Hollywood. We close it out by ranking Bad Boys against other prison movies like Escape from Alcatraz, The Longest Yard, and The Shawshank Redemption.