WTF Is A Podcast With Marc Maron
Cartoonist: Brian Box Brown
Publisher: Z2
Publication Date: August 2026
I don’t remember how I first heard about WTF With Marc Maron, but it was relatively early days for the show. It was the spring of 2012, and I was working a bad job that gave me a lot of silent time to sit and fill. I had always been a comedy fan/nerd, and so I probably came to it that way, maybe via a recommendation on Twitter or a write-up of the show somewhere.
What I do remember is that the show was a revelation. I had listened to plenty of talk radio in my life, but had never really gone all in on listening to a podcast week in and week out. It feels strange to think about that now, with podcasts being such an intrinsic and nigh-unnoticed part of life, but back then it was relatively new. And WTF was the first podcast I listened to with regularity that had nothing to do with sports or music.
And Brian Box Brown’s new book about the origin and trajectory of the show brought me right back to that moment. I think that in itself is a major achievement, albeit an unsurprising one from Brown, who is to me comics’ best biographer, especially when it comes to figures, games, and other things who have had an outsized influence on the pop culture of the day, including previously André the Giant and Andy Kaufman, as well as Tetris, toymakers, and weed.
Brown is a journalist and researcher of the highest order with a finely-honed knack for organization that plays well with visual storytelling. He knows when to use his subjects voice, when to hit his reader with facts, and when to deploy his keen sense of humor. All of which made him the perfect choice to tell the story of WTF.
Brown clearly spent time with Marc Maron himself and, perhaps, a lot more time with the show’s producer Brendan McDonald. He also clearly listened to a lot of the podcast over again. The book is brimming with anecdotes, remembrances, and key on-air moments that shape its story.
But it’s what Brown chooses to center that story on that really makes this book about something more than just the podcast. Brown goes deep and does a great job of recreating the early days of the podcast, which he then follows on through to the high watermark for the show, an appearance by sitting President Barack Obama.
But within that structure he also conveys just how influential WTF was to 2010s Internet culture, how it fought for and achieve independence and integrity that made podcast feel more like an art form that it otherwise would have had WTF never existed.
And in this way, Brown also finds a story that in 2026 ultimately feels bittersweet. The days in which WTF existed already feel bygone, even though the show ended in 2025. There’s some exploration of the decision to keep it all audio, to not go all-in on the 10-second video clips of dudes behind chunky radio microphones that have (inexplicably) come to dominate Internet culture today. The book will, perhaps, remind you of a time when the Internet felt more organic, less dominated by its algorithms, and like a net force for good.
While it’s tough to sit here and feel any of that today, it’s nice to have a story like this one to take us back to a different, better era. And hey, on top of that this is an absolutely wonderful read for fans of Maron and his show. In addition to an excellent graphic novel, it’s got a fairly in-depth conversation with Maron as backmatter.
I found this to be a great read both as a fan of well-done graphic novels and of WTF from back in the early days.
WTF Is A Podcast With Marc Maron is available now via Z2
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