Off Panel: A Comics Interview Podcast · SKTCHD

Why We Love Comics with Kazu Kibuishi, Ryan North, and Lucy Knisley

May 26, 2025·46 min·4 clips

Kazu Kibuishi explains how Bill Peet's drawings and Mort Drucker's art made characters pop off the page, sparking his comic career.

Juneau changes the usual rhythm. David Harper says Alaska Robotics Mini Con gave him a reason to make Off Panel feel less like its standard interview setup. The event comes across as small, warm, and slightly unreal: major comics names close by, but the draw is the scale, the mood, and the chance to talk about comics without turning everything into shop talk. The 500th episode matters, though Harper does not milk it. He treats the milestone as a nudge to step outside the regular work conversation and ask why the medium keeps pulling people back. The answer circles around discovery. Host and guest talk about the charge of finding a comic that makes the form feel bigger than it did a minute ago. The creator-reader divide gets blurrier there. The guest says the first reaction is basically the same whether someone reads for pleasure or makes books: surprise now, usefulness later. Formal play gives the conversation its spine. Adventure Time and Squirrel Girl sound like spaces where experiments had air. Fantastic Four is tighter. A big science-fiction idea, character work, a twist, and an emotional beat all have to fit inside 20 pages, so there is less room to wander. Longer books change the math. Slaughterhouse-Five becomes the example of a project whose shape can carry more structural invention. The talk is comics-literate but not sealed off. Eddie Campbell's Alec, Fantastic Four, and adaptation craft sit next to the simple pleasure of seeing a page and thinking, wait, comics can do that? Then Off Panel clicks back into its regular ending: supporters, theme music, and next week.

As heard by us

A loose, reflective comics conversation about why the medium keeps drawing people in.

Off Panel uses its 500th episode to slow down and think about why comics keep pulling people back in. David Harper keeps the conversation loose and grounded in a Juneau trip and Alaska Robotics Mini Con, then turns it toward the medium itself: shorter books, formal experiments,…

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Why you'd press play

For when you want comics talk that starts in Juneau and keeps widening.

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