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With Great Power #357... 22 Panels with Nate Powell · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels returning for… I forgot to look out how many times? At least the fourth time, I think.
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: to 22 Panels is Nate Powell.
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: whose new book, Diana, is right around the corner.
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: If you know the date off the top of your head, Nate, tell us, and if you don't, I'll have it in a minute.
• 0:24
  Nate Powell: October 6th, along with.
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, hey.
• 0:26
  Nate Powell: Missions that fall through and come again, coming out all on the same day.
• 0:29
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, all three of them are coming out together? That was… that was wise. Make people broke all at once, rather than staggering it over months or years, and letting them forget.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: C.
• 0:43
  Tad Eggleston: I like it. It's both cutthroat and smart.
• 0:49
  Nate Powell: We do what we can.
• 0:51
  Tad Eggleston: So give me the front… front counter pitch for Diana.
• 0:56
  Nate Powell: Well, and essentially, Diana… Is a standalone, novel of, you know.
• 1:04
  Nate Powell: of its own, as well as being a prequel to my previous book, Fall Through.
• 1:09
  Nate Powell: And these two books combine with Come Again to make kind of an interconnected triptych.
• 1:14
  Nate Powell: So Diana shares the same town, the same core characters, as in Fall Through, centers around this, this Arkansas band in the 1990s called Diamond Mine, part of the underground punk community. And the band is really kind of like.
• 1:33
  Nate Powell: fronted and… And pushed along creatively, by its vocalist, Diana, and the bass player, Jody.
• 1:41
  Nate Powell: And so there… a lot of it has to do, just like with Fall Through, has to do with the interpersonal, creative, and social dynamics of people, especially young, idealistic, do-it-yourself people trying to build up something together. Something undefinable,
• 2:00
  Nate Powell: Being sort of at a moment of creative transition, within a subculture like punk.
• 2:07
  Nate Powell: as a prequel to Fall Through, Diana kind of takes place in the year, year and a half before the events of Fall Through, and it leads us up to the doorstep of that book.
• 2:18
  Nate Powell: So without giving away too many spoilers, a lot of the wild stuff
• 2:24
  Nate Powell: And a lot of the, like, darkly emotional and, like, richly semi-romantic stuff that's pushing through Fall Through, is sort of visited in a new light, as we switch from Jodi being the protagonist of Fall Through to Diana being the central character of this book, obviously.
• 2:43
  Nate Powell: And with that, you know, comes a really character-centered exploration.
• 2:49
  Nate Powell: of self, of where she's coming from, of the motivation behind the events of Fall Through. But beyond that, it's just a very kind of, like, emotional, deeply moody story.
• 3:03
  Nate Powell: That ties in a lot of the horror components and the mystical elements of Come Again, and revisits and brings some of those characters back to the forefront within this book, and sort of ties it all together, in a nice little package.
• 3:19
  Dan Newland: Nice.
• 3:20
  Tad Eggleston: Gee, you can tell he's practiced his speech.
• 3:23
  Nate Powell: Not enough, though. I'm still…
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's why I have you on. Thank you. Another opportunity.
• 3:29
  Nate Powell: It makes.
• 3:29
  Dan Newland: It's a lot to explain, too, though, so…
• 3:32
  Nate Powell: Indeed, indeed. There is a lot. There's a lot to chew on.
• 3:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I, this… This is both… So, Nate Powell.
• 3:46
  Tad Eggleston: And… At the same time.
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, it feels… feels deeper in a way that… that I… maybe some of your… you know, I haven't finished, but… but you put out…
• 3:59
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's on… on Comixology Unlimited, a collection of, like, your early…
• 4:04
  Tad Eggleston: shorts. And I feel like a level of…
• 4:11
  Tad Eggleston: Character intimacy that would sometimes pop up in those, but that hasn't been…
• 4:19
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to say that it hasn't been in the pieces since then, because you're very good at character development and whatnot, but like…
• 4:27
  Tad Eggleston: I… I… it would fall through as well, but with Diana in particular, like, the way you look at relationship dynamics.
• 4:38
  Tad Eggleston: really, really comes through. What,
• 4:43
  Nate Powell: Well, no, that's… I mean, that's a good point. I also, like, now that the book is done, and I'm sort of, like.
• 4:51
  Nate Powell: processing a lot of it in order to be able to talk about it in this way, it has occurred to me that, precisely what you just said is true.
• 5:01
  Nate Powell: In a lot of ways, for me, Diana feels…
• 5:05
  Nate Powell: more like my later self-published work, the stuff that would be, you know, reprinted in Sounds of Your Name or Tiny Giants.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: That was… that was the collection that I was looking for in my head.
• 5:17
  Nate Powell: talkies series, mostly.
• 5:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 5:19
  Nate Powell: And actually, one of the main characters from this book, Todd, is the central character of an old self-published comic I did called Conditions, back in the late 90s. And it was one of those things where slowly all my solo fiction has been, you know.
• 5:34
  Nate Powell: integrating itself into a shared universe, and so he was one of these outlying characters where I'm like, he belongs in this world too, and it's just a matter of finding a spot for him. But, yeah, the difference really being, like.
• 5:47
  Nate Powell: Self-publishing these weird, kind of intuitive, personal stories, but being, like, 20 to 25 years old, not really understanding how to use concreteness and clarity to tell a story, and not really being comfortable with
• 6:06
  Nate Powell: genre, comfortable with some of the structural elements of storytelling, just not being there yet as a young adult. It is kind of nice, because I feel like I have made some progress book by book, and in some ways, like, Diana is my most novel-y, story I've ever done.
• 6:23
  Nate Powell: But, in other ways, it's a return to form, to the older walkie-talkie stuff, as far as,
• 6:32
  Nate Powell: kind of just pursuing curiosities and giving myself the breathing space that I'm looking for to let certain moments happen. And it shares a lot of similarities in that way with, like, any empire and Swallow Me Whole, I think.
• 6:47
  Tad Eggleston: That's a good…
• 6:52
  Dan Newland: Interesting. So… so what percentage of your books would you say now are… are shared universe, essentially? Is it…
• 6:58
  Nate Powell: Yeah, well, yeah, with these.
• 6:59
  Dan Newland: Pretty much all of them?
• 7:00
  Nate Powell: Yes, all 5 of my solo fiction books, Swalami Hole, Any Empire, Come Again, Fall Through, and Diana, all take place in,
• 7:11
  Nate Powell: this fictional Arkansas that's linked by this town called Wormwood, which we first saw in Swallow Me Whole. And there's actually a page towards the end of… toward the end of Come Again that explicitly links
• 7:25
  Nate Powell: all of the characters from these books. And that was sort of my springboard, for,
• 7:32
  Nate Powell: utilizing that shared universe as much as I could. No spoilers, but towards the end of Come Again, this page right here, where some characters move into a certain neighborhood and meet their neighbors, and this winds up being
• 7:50
  Nate Powell: Kids from any empire, and then…
• 7:54
  Nate Powell: making a link to one of them to Swallow Me Whole, and then realizing that the next-door neighbors are actually the main family from the book Swallow Me Whole. And they're actually… Ruth, the main character, is a baby here, being tossed up in the air by her still-living father.
• 8:11
  Nate Powell: And stuff like that, you know, I do it because it's fun and satisfying for me, but then a seed is planted, and you're like, oh, what can I do with this? What does this mean for everything that might come in the future, and how does it allow me to reassess what I've made in years past?
• 8:31
  Dan Newland: So, does this explain why the box set I've got of your omnibus has Diamond Mine on the back of it?
• 8:38
  Nate Powell: Yes, actually, that is the first appearance of Diamond Mine, is that box set. And I think they only made, like.
• 8:43
  Dan Newland: Interesting.
• 8:44
  Nate Powell: they made, like, a thousand of them, possibly as, like, some light money laundering. Like, they didn't print new books, but they, you know, they had a bunch of stock of books, and they're like.
• 8:54
  Dan Newland: Really?
• 8:54
  Nate Powell: They're like, if we print books, if we print a box and just put the books in it, the books might, like, I guess they, like, disappear on paper, and it becomes this new product?
• 9:04
  Nate Powell: So…
• 9:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 9:06
  Nate Powell: you know, a tax write-off. I think it's cool to have a box set. But it was nice, because I had just…
• 9:12
  Nate Powell: I guess I… yeah, I had drawn them into the book, Come Again, but I wasn't… I don't even think I had inked the pages yet. It was still, like.
• 9:22
  Nate Powell: a year or two before that book came out, and
• 9:26
  Nate Powell: I got to do a AA side cover, and so I was like, wait, I'm gonna tie together… you'll notice in the crowd scene on that box set, like, John Lewis is in there, a bunch of characters from my short stories. I think some people, like, I think I snuck Ed Piscor in there at the time, there were a couple of, like, fellow cartoonists I put in there.
• 9:44
  Dan Newland: And,
• 9:45
  Nate Powell: But yeah, as the central characters, that box set cover is the chronological first appearance of, Jodi, Diana, and the band Diamond.
• 9:57
  Dan Newland: Here you go, Tad. Check it out.
• 9:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's true.
• 10:01
  Dan Newland: really interesting.
• 10:01
  Tad Eggleston: Now I need the box set.
• 10:03
  Dan Newland: Did I forget?
• 10:04
  Tad Eggleston: I don't have the box set. I considered the box set and went, I think I have one of those, so should I get the box set and give away my one?
• 10:13
  Dan Newland: I was worried I was going to be phoned out, because I'm like, I don't remember these guys from any of the books in this box.
• 10:19
  Tad Eggleston: I did, I did.
• 10:20
  Tad Eggleston: I did.
• 10:21
  Tad Eggleston: I very much appreciate, though, that Sufi Nun Squad made an appearance in Diana.
• 10:28
  Nate Powell: Yes, that was, it's funny, because, yeah, like, Diana is set between late summer 92 and summer 93, and,
• 10:37
  Nate Powell: So, like, I mean, in the broader sense, culturally, like, this is really this transitional moment where we're dealing with, our entry point into a true post-Cold War, pre-9-11, you know, bustling 90s, the…
• 10:52
  Nate Powell: falsely touted triumph of liberal capitalism and Western democracy as the final form of government.
• 11:01
  Nate Powell: But also, this is a transitional moment within underground punk, in terms of new ideas, new sounds, new approaches to,
• 11:12
  Nate Powell: community building and music making. This is also when my main band started playing music. Our first show was in April 93, strangely, on the back lawn of the Arkansas governor's mansion.
• 11:26
  Nate Powell: With a bunch of other bands, but I knew that these… that the two main bands in Diana needed to have a first show, and that that would be highly significant for them. And I was like.
• 11:37
  Nate Powell: I might as well do this for myself. I might as well have Sufi's first show be somewhere within this book. And so yeah, it's… it's as we were. We were between 6th and 10th graders, and
• 11:50
  Nate Powell: we just played an atrocious first show, just 4 songs, and really did not have it together. So I tried to stay true, to our nerves, our awkwardness, and just really recognizing how incredibly young we were at the time.
• 12:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I appreciate that, and I will confess to having what Little Sufi Nun Squad is available on YouTube bookmarked, because it will occasionally
• 12:21
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I think when you sent me Diana, that that meant, okay, I'm gonna start reading this now, and my hallway soundtrack.
• 12:31
  Nate Powell: Oh, yeah.
• 12:31
  Tad Eggleston: stand the number of people in the hallways at school, so, like, the headphones go on when I walk during passing periods. My hallway soundtrack for the day was definitely some Sufi nun squad.
• 12:42
  Nate Powell: Oh, right on.
• 12:43
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know well enough to, like, know your words or sing along with, but I always just enjoy the vibe. You know, it's good hallway music.
• 12:53
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
• 12:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah. And I'm glad that Tyler remembered that the first time we talked to you, because otherwise I never would have known about it.
• 13:02
  Dan Newland: I've now found the Wikipedia page for this, and it sounds like, according to this, you did vocals and puppets with the band.
• 13:10
  Nate Powell: Yeah, and we were…
• 13:11
  Tad Eggleston: We were a…
• 13:12
  Nate Powell: a band like no other at the time. I mean, we were within this kind of…
• 13:16
  Tad Eggleston: the time.
• 13:18
  Nate Powell: Well, yeah, yes, specifically, especially at the time. Like, yeah, we were essentially, like, a hybrid of…
• 13:25
  Nate Powell: The Big Boys, Public Enemy.
• 13:28
  Nate Powell: And, The Muppet Show. Like, the whole Muppet Show. But that did include, by the late 90s.
• 13:34
  Nate Powell: Actually having kind of like a campfire bedsheets and flashlight style story with puppets, lighting.
• 13:43
  Dan Newland: Oh, boy.
• 13:43
  Nate Powell: Sort of the point of the band was to remain, to be as creative as we possibly could
• 13:51
  Nate Powell: while not spending money on any resources or materials to make it happen, and being able to do it on the fly, and work collectively to make really weird, cool stuff happen in the actual space where we were playing. So, we actually have an entire, like.
• 14:09
  Nate Powell: puppet-oriented song called The Drawbridge,
• 14:14
  Nate Powell: And, yeah, a lot of that was just, like, over a period of time, especially being embedded with… within, like.
• 14:22
  Nate Powell: Fairly serious, you know, the personal is the political, emotional, hardcore, bands.
• 14:29
  Nate Powell: being the weird band that would put on Daisy Dukes and, like, Straw Hats or whatever, and sort of break down the notion that coolness was a thing that even existed, and sometimes that meant making people sit down
• 14:44
  Nate Powell: To… so that we could do an entire puppet show song. And a lot of it was very agitating and uncomfortable for people, and that just gave us more fuel. So a lot of it was just sort of breaking down microcosmic…
• 14:59
  Nate Powell: Social conventions within a tiny… subculture-like hardcore punk.
• 15:07
  Dan Newland: That is awesome.
• 15:09
  Dan Newland: I'm going to have to obviously check some things. Are there… are there, there are videos of the puppet show online somewhere?
• 15:14
  Nate Powell: I'm not sure if the drawbridge has video to it, but we have some, like…
• 15:19
  Nate Powell: there's some… there are some pretty good short video clips that are… you know, I'm… all of our songs are… our songs are not epics, obviously, so they're all gonna be short. But yeah, there's a decent amount of video footage from…
• 15:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but I think at least a couple of the things up are, like, whole shows, so they're, like, 16 whole minutes.
• 15:39
  Nate Powell: Oh, awesome.
• 15:40
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, 7 songs that you lapsed through.
• 15:44
  Dan Newland: That explains one of my questions, is there one point where they're getting the cops after them in one of the books, where they're like, you only get 5 minutes, and they're like, alright, we gotta find 5 songs to play.
• 15:55
  Nate Powell: Yes, this, okay, so that's the climactic scene of Fall Through. And, they're playing in somebody's front yard in Columbus, Ohio, in the middle of the night. This is something that Sufi Nan Squad actually did in Columbus at 3 in the morning.
• 16:13
  Nate Powell: one of our most memorable shows, and really, like, the show that made people across the country talk about us, over the course of that summer. But…
• 16:24
  Nate Powell: in Little Rock, when we would play, something we did learn, because most of our shows
• 16:30
  Nate Powell: as evidenced and fall through, most of our shows in Little Rock were outdoors, they were public, they were free, and they were pirated. And so we constantly had to deal with the police presence, even in these ignored, overlooked spaces.
• 16:44
  Nate Powell: And learn to navigate at times,
• 16:49
  Nate Powell: diplomacy with the city itself. Other times, like, just faking permits. But we did learn when cops explicitly came to bust a show, as long as you
• 17:02
  Nate Powell: kept playing the music. For us, they weren't going to stop the song in mid-song.
• 17:10
  Nate Powell: So, there was often a telepathic agreement amongst everyone at the show that the music simply had to continue.
• 17:18
  Nate Powell: And about 50% of the time, the cops would get annoyed or bored or whatever, and they would decide it wasn't worth it, and they would just go on their way. So it was effective, and I thought I would address both of those in one moment and fall through.
• 17:35
  Tad Eggleston: See, like, these books come… this is why I like talking to Nate about the punk rock books, because we sometimes get the stories. I think, I think…
• 17:45
  Tad Eggleston: Last time, he was telling us about the…
• 17:48
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't you have, like, the network of where all of the pools were, and some way of knowing who was out of town?
• 17:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, so…
• 17:59
  Nate Powell: Like, especially within Southern punk scenes.
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: Ms.
• 18:02
  Nate Powell: At the time, swimming pools and hot tubs were a big part of post-show culture, but especially in Little Rock.
• 18:11
  Nate Powell: And a lot of that had to do with, like, from the mid-90s to the mid-2000s, you know, if a new spot was discovered, especially, like, with this kind of, like, mid-90s sprawl and redevelopment of residential areas.
• 18:28
  Nate Powell: You'd be like, oh, there's a new apartment complex that just went up here, and then you'd go into the apartment complex one night, and you'd scout it out, you'd see if they had a pool, you would see what the deal was. You're basically casing the joint, but you're not taking anything, you're just seeing if it's going to be possible to go have fun and swim with your friends for free.
• 18:46
  Nate Powell: And yeah, so we had this entire network of pools and hot tubs, and they all had codenames.
• 18:54
  Nate Powell: And so after the show.
• 18:56
  Nate Powell: as soon as the bands were done and were packing up, a whole separate contingent of showgoers would be like, oh yeah, we're headed over to this apartment complex for the pools. There's a super hidden one known as Fern Gully.
• 19:10
  Nate Powell: That I still can't find. When I go back home to visit my parents, I'll drive down in the area of Fern Gully, and I can sort of, like, see… it's like hidden in the woods, way up on a hill. There's this apartment complex, but it's sort of like the Lost Woods in Zelda. I can't exactly figure out how to get
• 19:30
  Nate Powell: to Fern Gully, even though I can see it, like, from one road, I'm like, there it is! It's Fern Gully! And I'm like…
• 19:38
  Nate Powell: The knowledge is just lost at this point.
• 19:42
  Dan Newland: So this is almost… it's autobiographical, almost, these books, but also kind of like an anthropology study of the punk scene in Little Rock around the time that you were growing up. A lot of that same events. People who went through that would read these books and really go, oh yeah, I remember this world.
• 20:00
  Nate Powell: Without a doubt, there was a very strong response when Fall Through came out, not just from people in Arkansas, but because Little Rock was one of the main hubs for touring bands in that network at the time, people from all over the country who were, like, who had played in Little Rock had distinct
• 20:19
  Nate Powell: vivid memories of a lot of this stuff intersecting with their stay. Also, I've really arrived, I think.
• 20:28
  Nate Powell: starting with Come Again, with the recognition that fiction is the best possible way to communicate the truth about things, and to not be beholden to, like, this is my story.
• 20:40
  Nate Powell: this is what happened. It's really about finding the core of what's important that you want to express, that you want to communicate, and then allowing
• 20:48
  Nate Powell: the writing to let all those things come forth. And it's also just more fun. Like, who cares about me talking about me? But yes, especially because
• 21:00
  Nate Powell: Punk itself, the thing we call punk.
• 21:04
  Nate Powell: It's sort of like… it's analogous to a lot of the stuff I bring up involving, like.
• 21:09
  Nate Powell: you know, the armchair version of how I talk about, you know, quantum physics issues, throughout these two books, in terms of…
• 21:23
  Nate Powell: things… in terms of things being different depending on what your vantage point is to observe it or be a part of it, certain things not being noticeable, or perhaps not even existing to others if they can't observe it, punk?
• 21:39
  Nate Powell: it has always struggled because it is so multifaceted. It's sort of like little pods that exist in dynamic with each other, but there is no one monolithic
• 21:52
  Nate Powell: cultural component that makes punk a single thing that can be described. Which is really… this is the central theme of Fall Through, and this is sort of what I set up in Diana, is the notion that in these transitional moments where new voices.
• 22:06
  Nate Powell: new ideas are coming forth, you're sort of reopening an undefined space, which is sort of what
• 22:13
  Nate Powell: sort of an ideal that I feel punk pursues. But as those ideas take hold, and people adapt them and experience them, in order to talk about them.
• 22:24
  Nate Powell: Naturally, as people, we kind of codify things and simplify them, we mythologize them, and it loses a lot of that… a lot of the weirdness that makes it so hard to define.
• 22:36
  Nate Powell: So, it's about that dynamic tension between undefined spaces, and when things begin to kind of crystallize, and they're no longer that thing.
• 22:44
  Nate Powell: So, Diana…
• 22:47
  Nate Powell: Sort of sets us up in the transitional moment itself, where things are beginning to develop within this subculture and amongst these people that haven't been explored yet, and they can't be defined at all.
• 23:07
  Tad Eggleston: I can't remember how much the…
• 23:12
  Tad Eggleston: Witchcraft isn't the right word, because it's like sorcery via music was…
• 23:18
  Tad Eggleston: Was it part of Fall Through, or was that something you introduced here?
• 23:24
  Nate Powell: Yes.
• 23:25
  Tad Eggleston: And talk to me about, like, the genesis of that, because it's, like, one of the cooler things I've ever seen in comics.
• 23:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, thanks!
• 23:33
  Nate Powell: And a lot of this is because of the, you know, what makes comics cool to read and experience. Like, as we have all…
• 23:40
  Nate Powell: As we've all said before, you know, comics can do…
• 23:44
  Nate Powell: stuff that no other mass storytelling medium can do. It simply would not communicate, it wouldn't be believed. I really like the…
• 23:55
  Nate Powell: to rip off somebody's phrase, you know, like, if it can be drawn, it can be believed, and I love that comics is such an accessible, cheap form of taking $100 million ideas and being able to do it for $100 worth of paper and ink.
• 24:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, frankly, comics…
• 24:13
  Tad Eggleston: can do ideas that they… that aren't $100 million ideas. They're… they're… they're still priceless ideas, because they haven't figured out how to do them in…
• 24:23
  Nate Powell: That's right, that's right. So it means you're able to try out really weird, ambitious things, and if they don't work, it's no big deal, but if you're able to actually catch on to something and communicate it in a certain way, yes, it is priceless. So…
• 24:37
  Nate Powell: Yeah, fall-through sort of propels us into the fact that, like.
• 24:43
  Nate Powell: in 1994, as this band, Diamond Mine, was sort of in their last few months, they had released a 7-inch record. They were going on one tour in their minivan, but Diana, the vocalist.
• 24:56
  Nate Powell: Had embedded a spell in the lyrics of one of their songs, and when that song was played, at shows, often, when the conditions were right.
• 25:10
  Nate Powell: Basically, you know, like, a rip in the fabric of spacetime would occur, and they would find themselves often shuttled into a kind of parallel or bubble universe, that was virtually indistinguishable from the universe that they occupied, and that we occupy.
• 25:26
  Nate Powell: But essentially, a month-long tour became of indeterminate length. They were locked into this tour forever.
• 25:34
  Nate Powell: And, as the interpersonal dynamics come into play.
• 25:38
  Nate Powell: many of them are working to get back home and end this curse, even though that is going to mean the end of the band, the end of this beautiful thing they've built up together. And that's in tension with Diana, who has sort of put everything in her life
• 25:54
  Nate Powell: after many other things have been ripped away, into this experience she can have with these beloved friends of hers, perhaps even at the cost of their friendship, being able to remain in this beautiful moment forever.
• 26:09
  Nate Powell: And so, in terms of writing and structuring that, this is where I've really come to the conclusion that writing is mostly problem solving.
• 26:18
  Nate Powell: And, especially with come again and to fall through into Diana.
• 26:23
  Nate Powell: The fact that, it's… all of this as a triptych of stories is built on
• 26:30
  Nate Powell: things not making sense. So, in Come Again, when the band Diamond Mine first appears in kind of a random 10-page scene, and that was a one-off tribute to some friend's band who I really liked.
• 26:44
  Nate Powell: At the time. They weren't developed characters, really. It was… it was for me. It was for fun. But I was so struck by this band, by these characters, that when they literally rode off into the sunset, I was like, wait, that's all?
• 26:59
  Nate Powell: who are they? Where do they come from? Where are they going, and why don't they seem to make sense in time or in their place at that moment?
• 27:10
  Nate Powell: And in following my curiosities, that… that intersected with
• 27:15
  Nate Powell: finally re… finally feeling like the time was right to talk about my experiences in my era of underground punk, and what that meant, the creative process, the dynamics, etc.
• 27:29
  Nate Powell: And so a lot of that meant that in pursuing the answers to the questions, why don't they fit in? Why are they out of time? Why are they out of place here?
• 27:38
  Nate Powell: The answer sometimes is, what if they ARE out of time? When I was trying to place these characters originally from
• 27:47
  Nate Powell: A book that takes place in 1979,
• 27:50
  Nate Powell: into my world of 1994, you're like, but there's no way that'll work, because they would probably be, like, 35 years old. That's absolutely ridiculous for a hardcore band at that time. So the answer is, oh, they weren't supposed to be…
• 28:06
  Nate Powell: In 1979 in the first place.
• 28:09
  Nate Powell: And so, okay, there has to be a time paradox. And then, simply, it involves, like, exploring what you have developed with characters, and how that could possibly make sense, and then the ramifications that may have. And a lot of the fun of Diana
• 28:26
  Nate Powell: is simply that, as a prequel to Fall Through.
• 28:30
  Nate Powell: Which came out 2 years ago.
• 28:33
  Nate Powell: Fall-through is the definitive end of this saga, so recognizing that we have an endpoint that has already been established.
• 28:41
  Nate Powell: In some ways, it takes a little pressure off, because you just have to get to the front door of Fall Through.
• 28:47
  Nate Powell: But that limitation also proposes a lot of challenges when you're trying to build and develop story, and flesh out these characters more. But the kind of playfulness required when considering a lot of those parameters was incredibly fun,
• 29:06
  Nate Powell: And a lot of that simply has to do with kind of reverse engineering the conditions within the backstories of these characters, which allow all of this to coexist and make some sort of sense.
• 29:21
  Dan Newland: Okay, so now I've got a question.
• 29:22
  Nate Powell: You bet.
• 29:23
  Dan Newland: Because this did… and I read them this weekend out of order, because I read Diana first, then I went back to Kim again, and then went to the fall through, right? So…
• 29:32
  Dan Newland: when I got to come again, and I saw the band playing, and, like, they come into town, and then the two lead characters, the two cheating spouses start, you know, dancing or whatever, I'm like, okay.
• 29:45
  Dan Newland: what the heck's going on here? And that was my question, is that when I've been reading…
• 29:50
  Dan Newland: when I got to fall through, I was getting the idea that they were on an eternal tour, but now I'm seeing they're actually going backwards. Were they… were they playing some of that tour in other times as well? Is that kind of what's implied by all of this?
• 30:03
  Nate Powell: Yes, that… that moment in Come Again always… once I figured out what was going on with this band as I was constructing things for Fall Through, the eternal…
• 30:14
  Nate Powell: The eternal writing problem was that their mere existence in Come Again in 1979,
• 30:22
  Nate Powell: didn't make logical sense, and so it was going to be the largest stretch possible.
• 30:28
  Nate Powell: But, yes, essentially, and this, this is revealed in a very important conversation at the end of Diana, but,
• 30:39
  Nate Powell: the… the movement, like, on this eternally looping tour in Fall Through, is often not only through, like, these parallel universes at the same moment, the same night as the show they're playing, but occasionally involves hops through time.
• 30:56
  Nate Powell: like, now that I'm looking back at Fall Through, it's interesting because the opening scene of Fall Through is supposed to be New Year's Eve, you know, 1993 into 94.
• 31:09
  Nate Powell: And it's obvious, well, this is a local show that they're playing, but it also appears that they're on tour, and Jody, the protagonist of Fall Through, has her excellent short haircut.
• 31:24
  Dan Newland: search.
• 31:25
  Nate Powell: That chronologically, she does not give herself for another few months in the book.
• 31:30
  Nate Powell: And so…
• 31:32
  Nate Powell: retroactively, as, like, as I was tying the whole room together, I'm like, wait a minute. So, the opening scene of Fall Through is actually still yet another bubble universe
• 31:45
  Nate Powell: on their endlessly looping tour, where suddenly they have found themselves back in their own hometown on New Year's Eve.
• 31:53
  Nate Powell: And…
• 31:54
  Nate Powell: they, yeah, their show only lasts to the count of four when they find themselves falling through the floor, and we move along. And some of that has, like, personal significance. We broke a lot of floors in house shows in Little Rock, and so that was my main interest, was,
• 32:14
  Nate Powell: Was making sure the floorboards broke.
• 32:16
  Nate Powell: But, yeah, it's interesting, because when you reread it, that scene with the knowledge, it sort of…
• 32:24
  Nate Powell: you know.
• 32:25
  Nate Powell: This is where writing is problem solving, and so, like, making sure that, everything was set up so that it can be interpreted that they are still on tour, works as well.
• 32:37
  Dan Newland: And the tour's become sort of so endless, and so…
• 32:41
  Dan Newland: just sort of overwhelming to their senses. They're not realizing they're out of time. They just think they keep going to more and more cities. And they're not realizing that they're in the wrong entire… that essentially the, you know, the world in small towns looks enough the same in the 70s, 80s, and 90s that they're just not really realizing what's happening to them.
• 33:00
  Nate Powell: Correct. And this is… this is the part of the story that is both… It… It has a correct…
• 33:08
  Nate Powell: a correct analog to this, you know, just, like, basic Michio Kaku quantum theory at the level that I can process and read and understand, but also, it's not meant to be literally.
• 33:22
  Dan Newland: You know.
• 33:22
  Nate Powell: Taken, because this is really,
• 33:26
  Nate Powell: This is… this itself is really kind of metaphorical for the experience of being on tour in a minivan with your friends.
• 33:36
  Nate Powell: And in which you do, especially in pre-internet
• 33:41
  Nate Powell: America in the 1990s, you lose contact, you know, like, with, like, a reference point back at home, and time does not seem to be important. Having a direct connection does not seem to be important. You become unrooted from space-time.
• 33:58
  Nate Powell: At least when you were touring, you know, into the 1990s.
• 34:01
  Nate Powell: And so, yes, you would develop this sense of internal consistency. The only thing that was real, that could be perceived, was you, your friends, band, and what was… and your van.
• 34:16
  Nate Powell: And hounds often seemed interchangeable.
• 34:20
  Nate Powell: there were little moments that would stick in your memory, and those are the ones you would return to on the next tour. But it was very easy for any particular moment to be mis… you know.
• 34:32
  Nate Powell: mistranslated or miscategorized as being from another time, another town, another tour. It all became an interchangeable kind of jumble of collective memory.
• 34:44
  Dan Newland: Very cool. Yeah, that… actually, it's… it's interesting, because the come-again scene bothered me, because it was a point at which I was like.
• 34:52
  Dan Newland: Are we to expect this is really magic, or that it is literally just a bunch of people who've gotten so overwhelmed by being on tour that they're almost feeling like somebody's a witch in their midst trying to keep them from ever getting home?
• 35:05
  Dan Newland: You know?
• 35:07
  Nate Powell: very well articulated, and I appreciate that you're actually asking that question. Like, one thing that I noticed,
• 35:16
  Nate Powell: I try really hard not to read, most reviews, most comments,
• 35:24
  Nate Powell: once my books are out, I find them to be very unhelpful, and the people who type the most about it seem to have very rigid ideas and expectations of, like.
• 35:33
  Nate Powell: To me, this is, like, to the detriment of a lot of stories, is that people…
• 35:39
  Nate Powell: Enter a story with an expectation of what they want it to be for them.
• 35:44
  Nate Powell: And when you make the type of story, which naturally kind of refuses that expectation, a lot of people don't know how to handle it.
• 35:52
  Nate Powell: Sometimes that shows up musically, like I was saying, with punk, people bring to the table their one notion of what punk is, and so that would really… that would drive people insane with Fall Through, because they were arriving with a single, rigid.
• 36:07
  Nate Powell: Context for where punk might fit into this.
• 36:12
  Nate Powell: But yes, the other part is, it would drive people crazy that I was not giving them a clean-cut answer, when in fact.
• 36:22
  Nate Powell: Like, the major theme of Fall Through is disorientation.
• 36:27
  Nate Powell: And so, this is where I always kind of push back, like, the important thing is that you're asking that question, you're feeling disoriented, you yourself are actually experiencing what the main characters are experiencing. And to me, that is a successful way
• 36:46
  Nate Powell: to experience this book, or this saga of books. But Fall Through is really the centerpiece of that feeling. With the band's first appearance in Come Again, however, it's funny because, like, I drew them in a way that
• 37:00
  Nate Powell: reflected how undefined
• 37:03
  Nate Powell: punk as an aesthetic was in the late 70s, especially, like, for the first punk band out of Arkansas. And so I… I definitely wanted a member to be, like, leaning on the hippie side.
• 37:17
  Nate Powell: I wanted a member to be, like, you know, like a gay black rockabilly cowboy guy. I wanted kind of a jock, with, like, running shorts, and then I wanted kind of like a first wave.
• 37:31
  Nate Powell: hunk-adjacent aesthetic for the other, but the point was that Arkansas never quite gets it right. You know, it's like, the fact was that, you know, like.
• 37:42
  Nate Powell: the Sex Pistols…
• 37:44
  Nate Powell: who ended the first wave of punk, on their ill-fated US tour, they played a number of towns around Arkansas, but they actually drove, like, a neat line around the entire state of Arkansas. So historically.
• 38:00
  Nate Powell: Punk scenes immediately started in the South, where the Pistols would play. Memphis, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, various towns in Texas, Tulsa, Oklahoma. But Arkansas didn't get a scene until 1986 on Black Flag's last tour. There were a couple of bands and stuff.
• 38:19
  Nate Powell: But Fayetteville, Arkansas, in the Northwest, near Tulsa, they got the first
• 38:26
  Nate Powell: Arkansas punk band in 1979, because the Pistols played in Tulsa. And that's why Jody, in Fall Through, grows up in Tulsa.
• 38:35
  Nate Powell: the whole scene with the Sex Pistols happening occurs, all this is tied into Arkansas' own underground history, but pointing out that, like, Arkansas is a weird place, and what makes it so special.
• 38:47
  Nate Powell: is that people are, like, misfits and creative people are figuring out a way to make it work, even without, like, the same kind of points of reference that more established towns may have, and that's what makes Arkansas so special.
• 39:09
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 39:11
  Dan Newland: Tad, you got anything on that? I've got a list of weird questions, but I don't want to…
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: Keep going! Keep going. I've talked to Nate many times, and find myself, like.
• 39:20
  Tad Eggleston: not in the zone that I often am. I will definitely jump in if there's a good reason to, but there's a reason I bring co-hosts, Dan.
• 39:30
  Dan Newland: Alright. Nate, talk to me about eyeball licking.
• 39:33
  Dan Newland: What the heck?
• 39:34
  Nate Powell: Thank you, okay.
• 39:35
  Dan Newland: With eyeball licking.
• 39:37
  Nate Powell: Okay, so Diana also occupies a weird space, because…
• 39:42
  Nate Powell: In some ways, it's a mu… it's, like, my most serious… Heavy, moody, emotional, grief-stricken book.
• 39:54
  Nate Powell: And a lot of that, you know, like, if fall-through is about connection, Diana is very much about loneliness, about the self-isolating impulse. It's about pushing away the love and support from the people closest to you, and resisting.
• 40:11
  Nate Powell: people's attempts to give you a hand and check in and see how you're doing. But at the same time, Diana is also
• 40:18
  Nate Powell: sillier and weirder and hornier and funnier than my other books. And a lot of that is, like, just really getting to make the book I wanted to make. So there's a house party scene that happens in Diana on election night, 1992.
• 40:33
  Nate Powell: Now, in Arkansas, this is the night that our boy, the governor of Arkansas, became the President of the United States.
• 40:40
  Nate Powell: That was in my town at the time. I was a 9th grader.
• 40:44
  Nate Powell: it was a… obviously a huge deal. Most people were one Kevin Bacon away from the Clintons. And so this was very… this felt very personal and very real. And so, there's a whole sequence, there's a street party happening for the election night victory, all of that was…
• 41:03
  Nate Powell: real. You can see news clips on YouTube from the election night festivities, but there's a house party at a punk house that night, and, you know, people are having fun, dancing, drinking, whatever, and they decide to play a classic, gross game
• 41:21
  Nate Powell: Lick the eyeball, which is basically, like, the bond of friendship. You know, like, my friends and I have a lick the eyeball phase, I think, for one summer, but a lot of this is how, like.
• 41:34
  Nate Powell: Yeah, basically where, like, it's sort of like, you know, like, having whatever kind of, like, spit bond between people, or like, you know, like a blood oath, where then you, like, shake hands after you cut the palm of your hand.
• 41:46
  Nate Powell: whatever, it's just as gross, but it involves licking each other's open eyeballs, and you're like, now we're bonded for life. So I've licked my share of eyeballs as a teen.
• 41:58
  Dan Newland: Tad, how was this in Chicago? Is there a… is there a big eyeball-licking culture up there?
• 42:01
  Tad Eggleston: This, this was totally new to me.
• 42:04
  Dan Newland: This is not a… this is not a northern, or Midwestern, or.
• 42:07
  Tad Eggleston: And it was also during the part that I'd gotten through, like, a week, two weeks ago, when he sent me the book, so I'd almost forgotten it.
• 42:17
  Dan Newland: And…
• 42:18
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't know that I'm upset about that, but I'm not upset that you reminded me either.
• 42:22
  Nate Powell: You bet.
• 42:23
  Tad Eggleston: It was… it was kind of weird, but also kind of cool.
• 42:26
  Dan Newland: Maybe that's an Arkansas thing.
• 42:28
  Tad Eggleston: Very high school, early 20s. Yes.
• 42:31
  Dan Newland: I understood exactly what it was about, because it's exactly like you said, that… that gross sort of thing to just, you know, prove friendship and the like, but it's still… I'm like, that's not one that we did a lot back up at, Nefolden High in, in, you know, northern Minnesota.
• 42:47
  Nate Powell: Well, for our crew.
• 42:49
  Nate Powell: So my, my band, Sufi Nun Squad, had a lot of people in it, but we were also, we were basically a gang before we were a band. So, essentially, the band itself is a crew, and we were together so much that we had a semi-cult
• 43:07
  Nate Powell: essence about us, and a lot of this has to do with that tension within underground punk of exclusion and inclusion. And sometimes that plays itself out locally, you know, like, we would all go to the same parties, the same shows, everyone would be hanging out doing stuff.
• 43:24
  Nate Powell: Playing kickball together, going, yeah, breaking into swimming pools together. But this was specifically this kind of, like.
• 43:33
  Nate Powell: cult-adjacent North Little Rock Sufi Nun Squad crew activity that we did a few times, probably just in one summer. But, you know, like, thematically with Diana, because there is, like, bootleg magic, and a lot of Diana's origin story is that she
• 43:52
  Nate Powell: grew up through and escaped a very rigid, kind of fundamentalist, cult-like Christian sect as a kid that was, like, abusive and repressive, but
• 44:05
  Nate Powell: intention with Jodi and her worldview, Diana often, you know, like, she left one rigid, cult-like set of beliefs and struggles with kind of falling back into a new, rigid, cult-like set of thinking.
• 44:19
  Nate Powell: And she's very charismatic, so people kind of fall in line with what she's doing. But also, in the microcosm, like.
• 44:30
  Nate Powell: I think punk and youth culture are…
• 44:33
  Nate Powell: Have a lot of that type of, like, micro-group mentality and a very ritualistic, cult-adjacent, mode of…
• 44:44
  Nate Powell: belonging or experiencing something together, which will further bond you. And I also love that, like, the eyeball-licking thing is, like, it's gross and funny, but there's also, like, a vaguely horny component about it, if you're, like.
• 44:58
  Nate Powell: 18 to 21 or something? And so there are characters in the background who are like, oh, this took a turn.
• 45:05
  Nate Powell: And then, like, and then everybody's like, woo! That eyeball licking that got me all hot and bothered. And to me, like, the fact that it's all of those things at once really gets to the truth of what it's like to be a young adult. I feel like, from a writing perspective.
• 45:24
  Nate Powell: my, my writing for Diana was really…
• 45:31
  Nate Powell: transformed in the years prior by getting way back into X-Men. Like, I didn't read X-Men for 25 years. When the pandemic hit, I went way, way deep in, and I… and…
• 45:43
  Nate Powell: specifically, it was Brian Bendis' riding on his double run in the… throughout the 2010s, that I really appreciated in terms of
• 45:54
  Nate Powell: a le… In terms of Bendis allowing characters
• 45:59
  Nate Powell: to find or not find their words. I really appreciated his conversational tone, and…
• 46:07
  Nate Powell: just speaking specifically about his X-Men double run, the fact that he would let characters kind of, like, stumble on their words and try to find it in the word balloon as they went, and I was like, finally, this feels like what it's like
• 46:22
  Nate Powell: When 18 to 24 year olds are trying to articulate their big ideas, they're trying to be forthright with each other, but they can't quite do it.
• 46:31
  Nate Powell: So, a lot of the dialogue that's happening in Diana, I think, is really a result… the way that it works itself out, to me, feels more real, but it owes a debt to what Bendis
• 46:43
  Nate Powell: kind of… was able to point out to me as a reader in that X-Men run.
• 46:48
  Dan Newland: That's awesome. So, so I have a follow-up that kind of dovetails those two things together.
• 46:54
  Nate Powell: Right on.
• 46:55
  Dan Newland: Page 142. I'm reading along.
• 46:59
  Dan Newland: a room, as I do, because a lot of these pages.
• 47:03
  Dan Newland: They were, like, the last of the forest ones were, like, Bev Doolittle prints, where I'm like, are there hidden animals in here, or whatever? Should I be looking in these shadows? Because they're just lush to just, you know, nice full-page spreads. But on that one, I'm looking at the wall, and I'm like, is that a magic poster? With, like, with, like, the Dark Child and the like?
• 47:20
  Dan Newland: And then, I read the next few pages, and I'm like, oh yeah, that was definitely a magic poster. So, she's got a copy of magic number 4.
• 47:28
  Dan Newland: like, the Salbissima written or drawn, book from, like, the early 80s.
• 47:34
  Dan Newland: Where, essentially, Ileana escapes Hell and Belasco. She's got a chance to, like, kill him, and become him, and instead, she runs away and gets out of there.
• 47:45
  Dan Newland: And I'm like, that really mirrors… and I said, maybe that's why you put it in there, it mirrors the beginning of Diana, where she's got almost like a Belasco-type figure in her grandmother. And if she just stuck around, she probably becomes her, and instead, when there's that chance to…
• 48:00
  Dan Newland: sticker with the, the mirror, or whatever knife she had, or something. She just runs away, and she's like, I gotta get out of here so I don't become that, with the cult level, or the overly religious level, and the like.
• 48:11
  Dan Newland: Did you put…
• 48:13
  Dan Newland: that book in there, specifically so people would make that connection between the two origins? Or was that…
• 48:20
  Dan Newland: I mean, you had to have.
• 48:22
  Nate Powell: Well, a lot of it was, and here's… here's one of the panels. There's a whole… yeah, there's a whole, like, magic-adjacent sequence that's part of Diana's origin story.
• 48:31
  Dan Newland: don't exist.
• 48:31
  Nate Powell: But a lot of it simply had to do with, On one level.
• 48:38
  Nate Powell: Recognizing inspiration within me. Being moved
• 48:43
  Nate Powell: throughout my life, like, from age 12 on, being moved by, Ileana's entire arc, and so that means
• 48:51
  Nate Powell: prior to 2020, when I started reading the books again, like.
• 48:56
  Nate Powell: Ileana post… you know, like, from… from Inferno, her beautiful sacrifice, her regression to childhood, her actual death.
• 49:06
  Nate Powell: as a kid, which is heart-wrenching. Like, every component of that is heart-wrenching. But the incredible leaps and bounds of her character since then,
• 49:18
  Nate Powell: really, like, struck something in me, but a lot of it had to do with recognizing, again, like.
• 49:26
  Nate Powell: So much about…
• 49:29
  Nate Powell: Young adults figuring it out, and even within the context of music, has to do with recognizing influence as a mode of self-definition and self-actualization, of figuring out how to be the type of person you want to be, how to make the kind of art you want to make.
• 49:47
  Nate Powell: And so, I think, another kind of, like, foil point between Diana and Jody has to do with how they reckon with
• 49:57
  Nate Powell: inspiration points. And, within Fall Through, I'm a… this is sort of, like.
• 50:04
  Nate Powell: where I lay out, like, my general themes and my thesis here, as far as, like.
• 50:09
  Nate Powell: That… that dynamic between…
• 50:12
  Nate Powell: these undefined moments and spaces, slowly crystallizing and becoming less weird as they're defined, and sort of, like, losing that, that element. But the dangers of mythologizing
• 50:27
  Nate Powell: Some of… some of those key moments, those people, those contributions, sort of gets us away from the truth.
• 50:33
  Nate Powell: As those cultural exchanges occur.
• 50:36
  Nate Powell: So Diana definitely has a problem with self-methologizing, but with mythologizing the people, the bands, the music, the art, which is personally important to her.
• 50:49
  Nate Powell: So along the way,
• 50:52
  Nate Powell: you know, I was like, okay, I was like, she was born in 71, so I need to have her run away from home as a teenager, you know, she needs to find her own life, and as all of that was working itself out, it just kind of presented itself to me. I was like, wait, she would be, like, 13, like, 12 or 13, when…
• 51:12
  Nate Powell: Magic as a character would have had her big coming out moment, origin-wise. And all of a sudden, I was like, wait a minute, can I do this? This is almost like two… two perfectly proposed,
• 51:26
  Nate Powell: And a lot of it had to do with what happens if I just embrace that. What does that mean in terms of my responsibilities as a writer, and how it impacts the characters? But also.
• 51:37
  Nate Powell: That… that mythologizing… Sort of, like, self…
• 51:45
  Nate Powell: I don't know, like, it's not self-aggrandizing, but, like, the way in which external inspirations are mythologized and directed back towards herself is also intended as a reference to her other major inspiration point, which is Patti Smith.
• 52:03
  Nate Powell: And, you know, if you… if you read a lot of Patty Smith's books, her own accounts of her life growing up, but especially read…
• 52:14
  Nate Powell: certain sections from within, Please Kill Me, of, like, other people in the 80s and 90s talking about Patty's role within the scene, and her… her vision by the early 70s of how all these pieces, these inspiration points put together.
• 52:32
  Nate Powell: Patty Smith.
• 52:33
  Nate Powell: in the 1970s, and even before, had this very strong tendency to kind of canonize and mythologize her inspiration points, whether it was Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, but
• 52:48
  Nate Powell: as…
• 52:50
  Nate Powell: these individual artists would… would gain personal significance for her. She started to develop this kind of, like, vague cosmology. She would mythologize these characters and kind of, like.
• 53:03
  Nate Powell: magically absorb what they had to offer. And that's really how… that's how I feel about bands and music and art. The difference was that she…
• 53:14
  Nate Powell: at the time, it seems like she's able to acknowledge that she was very serious about the magical absorption of those inspiration points. So later in Diana.
• 53:24
  Nate Powell: We sort of established, like, well, early on, you'll see, like, in her room.
• 53:28
  Nate Powell: we have those twin inspiration points here. We have, like.
• 53:33
  Nate Powell: she did, like, a photo, of, like, a Xerox blow-up of one of the interior photos from Patty Smith's…
• 53:42
  Nate Powell: Radio Ethiopia album, which winds up being a self-defining, like, mythologizing point within her life. And then, yes, we have the Inferno promo poster, which features,
• 53:54
  Dan Newland: That is…
• 53:55
  Nate Powell: Ileana Magic, and the Dark Child. And then later in the book.
• 54:00
  Nate Powell: She kind of explicitly outlines
• 54:03
  Nate Powell: Being guided by twin saints in a cult of one.
• 54:08
  Nate Powell: And so, I'm… yes, I'm making religious, connections here to explain how she's processing those inspiration points.
• 54:20
  Nate Powell: And for her, she owes her life. She owes her freedom. She owes every decision she has made since then.
• 54:26
  Nate Powell: to the impact that Radio Ethiopia had on her, and the impact that magic had on her. And, you know, both, like, Patty and Ileana are both important to me, but a lot of it is, as a writer.
• 54:40
  Nate Powell: Letting the character do what they're going to do, and letting her own her relationship to those figures.
• 54:49
  Dan Newland: I think, actually, it was page 85 and 86 of Diana. You were talking about
• 54:54
  Dan Newland: what looked to be sort of like the… you've got a little paddy point, and then it branches out like a… like some sort of a spider web on the like. And then by the… by the next page, there's that whole idea of…
• 55:05
  Dan Newland: what looks almost like a neural net of things spidering out. And I actually had on my thing, I'm like, are comics the trees? And obviously, comics are part of what's going on within those branches, as well as the music and everything else. That is kind of the inspiration taking hold and deviating off and making new things.
• 55:23
  Nate Powell: Yes, and yeah, this outlines the fundamental, like, this is one of these things that can really only work in comics, I think. So, yeah, this is Jody and Diana.
• 55:35
  Nate Powell: having their minds blown by, listening to the first Bikini Kill 12-inch for the first time, then basically talking about their… their divergent…
• 55:46
  Nate Powell: concept of what it means to be a part of the thread of this creative, subculture, and what it means to tap into that. The main difference between these two characters really is that Diana
• 56:00
  Nate Powell: Because she's coming… she has this tendency to have this mythologized, kind of rigid, cult-like concept of…
• 56:09
  Nate Powell: of there being, like, true and false. She thinks it's a matter of there being a single true path that you can really follow through, like, through punk, or through art.
• 56:21
  Dan Newland: He's a fundamentalist punk, essentially.
• 56:23
  Nate Powell: Yes, these inspiration points, and if you stay on that path.
• 56:28
  Nate Powell: Then you can keep it real, and you can, you know, really tap into this. Jody, comes from a much more, like, interconnected perspective. It's very, like, being involved with
• 56:41
  Nate Powell: a creative subculture like this is a matter of connection. It's a matter of building weird stuff together. It's a matter of not having the security, of having these defined points and moments. So, her notion of it is, again, getting into,
• 56:57
  Nate Powell: quant… like, basic, basic quantum physics. It's this notion that
• 57:02
  Nate Powell: Instead, there's an infinite number of inspiration points which converge into an infinite number of things happening at any given time, and it depends on where you are in relation to those points in terms of whether or not you see it.
• 57:19
  Nate Powell: And in punk, it's very… yeah, it's very similar to that. There might be, like, 10 different sub-genres of music happening simultaneously, and all those communities are interconnected. They are part of the same thing, but they can look very different depending on where you are.
• 57:33
  Nate Powell: And so her analogy is, like, looking at inspiration within a movement like this is like looking at a tree and seeing it both above ground and below ground at the same time, where you have branches, you have roots.
• 57:47
  Nate Powell: and then the point where the tree touches the ground is where you are right then. And then as… as we move through time, that point shifts, and it always branches off into new things, but there is no one single way of considering
• 58:03
  Nate Powell: what punk is, or what your relationship is to this whole community, because there isn't just one thing. So yeah, that was basically them having…
• 58:13
  Nate Powell: You know, a philosophical conversation, in order to, like, establish what their divergent worldviews were, and establish what their different values were within making this thing together.
• 58:25
  Dan Newland: Which I suppose also helps to explain how later, once she's found the tour that's working, Diana's like, this is… this is the way. We just want to keep doing this same thing every night for the rest of our lives, because we've gotten there. And the rest of them are like.
• 58:40
  Dan Newland: Yeah, this is one star, let's go find another one someplace, we gotta get moving with our lives.
• 58:44
  Nate Powell: That's right, exactly.
• 58:46
  Dan Newland: Fantastic.
• 58:46
  Nate Powell: That's the primary conflict, yes.
• 58:48
  Dan Newland: I need to find a few beers and sit down and just look at these two pages for a couple hours, probably.
• 58:54
  Dan Newland: truth within them. That… that sounds excellent.
• 58:57
  Nate Powell: Well, thank you.
• 58:58
  Dan Newland: Hmm.
• 58:58
  Tad Eggleston: We're starting to run up on time. Dan, do you have any other important questions?
• 59:03
  Tad Eggleston: Or not important, but cool questions?
• 59:06
  Dan Newland: I, I have one question and one request left, if you don't have anything,
• 59:11
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I have my two closing questions, and I was gonna.
• 59:13
  Dan Newland: Quickie.
• 59:14
  Tad Eggleston: run through his tour, because it's not often that somebody has a laid-out tour, so we should tell our handful of listeners where he can be found over the next couple of months.
• 59:25
  Dan Newland: Alright, so the question?
• 59:27
  Dan Newland: Having read these out of order.
• 59:30
  Dan Newland: You know, I'd read them ages ago, but it largely, you know, it's been a couple years since I'd read previously the first two books.
• 59:38
  Dan Newland: I read Diana, then I went to Come Again, then I went to Fall Through.
• 59:42
  Dan Newland: But now that you've written all 3 of them, and considering they are pretty timey-wimey.
• 59:48
  Dan Newland: what is the right viewing order for these books, now that they're all compete? If someone hasn't started them yet, do they just go back chronologically to come again? Or where do they start? And…
• 59:59
  Nate Powell: I'm glad you asked that. As it happens.
• 1:00:02
  Dan Newland: Do you have a looper, like an XKCD looper diagram? Because I would love one of those as well.
• 1:00:07
  Nate Powell: I… yeah, I actually made… Hold on, I think it's actually in this… It's in this bag here Well…
• 1:00:15
  Nate Powell: Thankfully, it's in the back of the book. I do have a recommended reading order, so these are standalone stories, you can read them in whatever order, but what I recommend.
• 1:00:26
  Dan Newland: He's reading, reading false quotes?
• 1:00:28
  Nate Powell: I read, yeah, start with Come Again.
• 1:00:30
  Dan Newland: All right.
• 1:00:30
  Nate Powell: This is in the shape of Diana's sigil that you'll see on her spell book, etc. But you start with come again, then you read Fall Through.
• 1:00:40
  Nate Powell: Then you read Diana, and then after you read Diana, for extra fun, read Fall Through Again, and it's a slightly different book.
• 1:00:49
  Nate Powell: And a lot of that is the payoff of just the joy of making a story that I thought was over, and then Diana happens, and I realize that there are moments all throughout Fall Through that I assumed were just kind of straightforward.
• 1:01:05
  Nate Powell: But recognizing that the space in between panels, again, the magic of comics, the space in between panels
• 1:01:13
  Nate Powell: is often assumed to be fairly immediate, but it can be, like, 6 months in between 2 panels. And so there are a lot of points within Diana that were previously established in fall-through, but you're now seeing that in fall-through, you only had a very limited perspective on what was happening.
• 1:01:32
  Nate Powell: And often there are entire chapters that happen in between panels.
• 1:01:36
  Nate Powell: So that's the payoff, is yes, it's a slightly different story if you reread Fall Through afterwards, but…
• 1:01:42
  Dan Newland: it would come through, go to Diana, and then fall through. You want to hit fall through before Diana, still.
• 1:01:48
  Nate Powell: I believe so, yes. It's also, I think, it's been interesting that, like, this debuted last weekend at SPX, and so for people who
• 1:01:57
  Nate Powell: have had a chance to read it. There are… there… you know, there are some people who just started cold with Diana, and I've enjoyed
• 1:02:06
  Nate Powell: that it works at that level as a standalone book, but, you know, like, these different combinations of reading order are very interesting to me, and I'm really fascinated to see how that actually plays out.
• 1:02:20
  Dan Newland: There you go.
• 1:02:21
  Dan Newland: And then my request is I really think you should get a printout of page 168. It's the one… it's the one, essentially, where Jody's holding her base up in the lake.
• 1:02:30
  Nate Powell: Well, absolutely.
• 1:02:32
  Dan Newland: Or are they there already? Is this already done?
• 1:02:36
  Dan Newland: You are so far ahead of me! Where do I get this?
• 1:02:39
  Nate Powell: Okay.
• 1:02:39
  Dan Newland: Sir, do I…
• 1:02:40
  Nate Powell: Oh yeah, you can actually get these from my site, they're, like, 10 bucks.
• 1:02:43
  Dan Newland: Alright, I will go out, and probably you'll have an order in the.
• 1:02:47
  Nate Powell: Interestingly, so this moment was the very first scene that I had in my head for this book. The whole book is built around this scene.
• 1:02:57
  Nate Powell: But… and this is the moment that Jodi acquires her beautiful Rickenbacher base that she uses throughout the rest of these books.
• 1:03:06
  Nate Powell: This moment, fishing this base out of the Arkansas River, actually happened, I saw it with my own eyes, in October 1994.
• 1:03:17
  Nate Powell: So, in real life.
• 1:03:19
  Nate Powell: My band, Sufi Nan Squad, was playing a show with this band Class of 84, and this other band, The Big Cats. This is, like, an all-local show. There was one touring band, but they don't…
• 1:03:33
  Nate Powell: they are utterly insignificant in this story. The big cats were playing, same bass player as the band that's in the book, Substance, but at the end of the set, I don't know why, Josh, the bass player.
• 1:03:47
  Nate Powell: through his base in the river. I don't know if it was malfunctioning, or if he was upset about something else. We're still friends and acquaintances to this day, but I kind of like the mystery that existed when I was 16. He chucks it in the river.
• 1:04:02
  Nate Powell: And in real life, Rhett Peak, the bass player of Class of 84, same age as me, he's like a 16-year-old kid.
• 1:04:10
  Nate Powell: He jumps in the river, and the Arkansas River has dangerously strong undertow, so everybody's like, Rhett, no, what are you doing? He dives under, he finds the base, it does work once it's dried out, and he uses that base
• 1:04:27
  Nate Powell: for at least, like, the next 6 years or so. And so…
• 1:04:32
  Nate Powell: Diana was built around the fact that I had too much coffee one morning in 2023, and I just started, like, sketching some things in my sketchbook, and I was like, wait a minute. I was like.
• 1:04:43
  Nate Powell: this moment would be really interesting, as Jody's kind of Excalibur-like
• 1:04:48
  Nate Powell: Lady of the Lake acquisition of her magical device, this Rickenbacher base. And from there, I was like, wait, is there more to this story?
• 1:05:00
  Nate Powell: And this scene served as the explosion point from which all of these other ideas came forth and gave us the book Diana. But yes, I have prints.
• 1:05:10
  Dan Newland: Absolutely fantastic.
• 1:05:14
  Dan Newland: Alright, Jay.
• 1:05:15
  Nate Powell: Tad… Quickly.
• 1:05:16
  Tad Eggleston: Quickly, before we hit closing questions, we're gonna run… run through the schedule. I'm not actually gonna give all the dates. People can go to seemybrotherdance.org to see the dates, but you will be in Chicago, Ann Arbor, Bloomington. Well, I mean, you're always in Bloomington, but you'll actually be, like, signing stuff there.
• 1:05:36
  Tad Eggleston: Columbus, doing a talk with Caitlin McGurk. I so wish that that was on a day that I could get out there, but you went and did it on a Thursday night, and, like, I'll have to teach on Friday morning, Nate. Come on! It's true.
• 1:05:50
  Tad Eggleston: Detroit at the Vault of Midnight, Little Rock, very fittingly.
• 1:05:55
  Tad Eggleston: At Wordsworth Books, Memphis, at Novel, Fayetteville, Arkansas, at the Public Library. I love it when people do Public Library.
• 1:06:05
  Tad Eggleston: signings, though I gotta… I gotta say.
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: maybe I don't know my architecture, or my… not my architecture, my geography well enough, but, like, from Little Rock to Memphis to Fayetteville in one weekend, you're just going back and forth?
• 1:06:24
  Nate Powell: Yeah, my family still lives in Little Rock, so, basically, yeah, I get to do my thing in Little Rock, go to Memphis, come back that night, hang out with my parents, go to Fayetteville, and then go to St. Louis from there. Yeah.
• 1:06:36
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay, there we go. St. Louis at Betty's Books, then Erie, Pennsylvania at the Gannon University, hanging out with Andrew Iden, say hi to Andrew for me. I will.
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: Bloomington, Indiana, Morgan Stern Brooks, Cleveland, Ohio, Superscript, books with John G.
• 1:06:57
  Tad Eggleston: Columbus, Ohio, again, at Space, and then down to Miami for the Miami Book Fair, and you are working on New York City and West Coast events.
• 1:07:07
  Tad Eggleston: As well. You weren't kidding in terms of being away from your family for a longer time. It looks like you're gonna be, like, away from home.
• 1:07:17
  Tad Eggleston: Thursday through Sunday of, like, every week.
• 1:07:21
  Nate Powell: starting.
• 1:07:22
  Tad Eggleston: at the beginning of October, going through Thanksgiving.
• 1:07:26
  Nate Powell: Yeah, so, I mean, a lot of this, this is… it's part of the big experiment in terms of doing what I can to make sure this weird indie graphic novel can gain some momentum.
• 1:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: some traction, you know?
• 1:07:39
  Nate Powell: very, very difficult for indie fiction, like, adult-oriented fiction to have any kind of sustainability these days.
• 1:07:49
  Tad Eggleston: Which drives me up the wall, because it's amazing.
• 1:07:51
  Nate Powell: So, a lot of the…
• 1:07:52
  Tad Eggleston: It's yours. So many of them are amazing, like…
• 1:07:56
  Nate Powell: Yeah.
• 1:07:58
  Dan Newland: So is the change from Diamond to sort of all the new ones helping that sort of fiction, or hurting, or…
• 1:08:03
  Nate Powell: I'm not sure.
• 1:08:04
  Dan Newland: Don't really know.
• 1:08:04
  Nate Powell: That's the thing, like, I don't really think anybody knows, and that's one reason that sort of compels… like, all this is happening in real time. So I check in with my local shop owner and kind of, like, see how things are going with him.
• 1:08:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and you've always lived in that weird space where, like.
• 1:08:25
  Tad Eggleston: Half of the local comic shops know you, and the ones that focus mostly on floppies and don't have a deep…
• 1:08:33
  Tad Eggleston: graphic novel selection, you're not as well known, but, like, also half of the independent bookstores know you.
• 1:08:41
  Nate Powell: Yes.
• 1:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: And March is actually in the history section at Barnes & Noble.
• 1:08:46
  Nate Powell: Yeah, a lot…
• 1:08:47
  Tad Eggleston: It's not even in the comics! It's in the history section, which I… Love!
• 1:08:51
  Nate Powell: Yeah, and a lot of it's been learning how to…
• 1:08:55
  Nate Powell: how to reach out to different fields of people who have a different context for what I do.
• 1:09:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:01
  Nate Powell: basically trying to get them, again, to give comics a chance if March and John Lewis is their… is their reference point, being like, this works because it's a comic, give these comics a try. So that's part of my ongoing mission, and Andrew's as well, you know, since.
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:09:19
  Nate Powell: It's.
• 1:09:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:09:21
  Nate Powell: You… you… you love this book, but you love it. You may not know it, but you love it because it's a comic, also.
• 1:09:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, you do.
• 1:09:28
  Nate Powell: Please extend that love to other comics.
• 1:09:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And thankfully, thankfully the librarians are all over you guys.
• 1:09:34
  Nate Powell: Yes, gotta love those librarians.
• 1:09:36
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, the librarians are all over comics, period.
• 1:09:40
  Nate Powell: Yes, yes they are.
• 1:09:42
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately, people aren't all over libraries as much as they once were, and that, that, that makes it not as…
• 1:09:49
  Tad Eggleston: frustrating world. It's, like, the sales… the sales dynamic has always been interested in… or interesting in comics. It seems like we go through a major…
• 1:10:00
  Tad Eggleston: A major fulcrum shift every couple of years or so, but this last one is huge, just because…
• 1:10:09
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly for small business owners, to have to go from one distributor to two to five.
• 1:10:16
  Nate Powell: Yes, yes.
• 1:10:17
  Dan Newland: big deal.
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: is… is… is a challenge. Yeah.
• 1:10:19
  Nate Powell: Especially places that are manned, that are…
• 1:10:23
  Nate Powell: That are helmed by a single person.
• 1:10:25
  Tad Eggleston: Which is, like, half of them.
• 1:10:27
  Nate Powell: Yes, it's an overwhelming Sisyphean process, and so, yeah, a lot of it is, like, I've been reaching out a lot on my own end, independent of all the hard work my publisher is doing.
• 1:10:41
  Nate Powell: I did a series of mail-outs where I was sending prints like this and like the book cover to any
• 1:10:48
  Nate Powell: comic book shop that requested them, with, like, stickers and postcards and stuff, just recognizing that, like.
• 1:10:56
  Nate Powell: I can, you know, it'll cost me a little money, but I can play an active role in maybe giving my.
• 1:11:02
  Tad Eggleston: In your own marketing.
• 1:11:03
  Nate Powell: A chance, if not, you know, like, indie graphic novels as a whole, but a lot of it is, like, give people the resources that they need to be like, yeah, we will give some space to this.
• 1:11:14
  Nate Powell: Right. So a lot of it is just recognizing that, yeah, all of this is interconnected, we are all very much a part of it as readers, as creators, as retailers, as comics gatekeepers in a positive way, like librarians, educators, and a lot of it is, like, just doing what we can to help keep comics
• 1:11:33
  Nate Powell: A thriving, healthy place.
• 1:11:35
  Tad Eggleston: So, my next question, you don't necessarily have to ask… answer, or certainly don't need to answer it in full if you're uncomfortable, but I think… I think it's one worth asking, because you are…
• 1:11:49
  Tad Eggleston: Among the top adult… indie graphic novel creators. You have that…
• 1:11:59
  Tad Eggleston: Experience, you have the catalog, you have the name recognition.
• 1:12:04
  Tad Eggleston: this tour, how much of it is being financed by your publisher or the shops, and how much are you having to put up on your own?
• 1:12:13
  Nate Powell: Oh, I mean, that's a very… that's an important question for people to know. I mean, really.
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:12:17
  Nate Powell: My publisher is putting a lot of money into, like, you know, on their own budget, like, promoting things, doing advertising, helping out with a couple of events, especially, like, book festivals.
• 1:12:29
  Nate Powell: some Comic Cons, but a large… I mean, like, this is across the board. Any type of event like this, unless you're talking about, like, a hugely successful
• 1:12:39
  Nate Powell: graphic novel, it's the creator who's organizing and, you know, putting up the money for hotel rooms or whatever. Right.
• 1:12:49
  Tad Eggleston: And that's why I was bringing this up, because, like, you say, unless it's hugely successful, and I'm saying, not because I want to scare people off, but because people should understand that Nate Powell has to say this as, I'm not necessarily hugely successful enough that I'm not putting up my own gas and hotel money.
• 1:13:11
  Nate Powell: And so what I'm saying is, at the level of, like, putting out the March books.
• 1:13:17
  Nate Powell: Right. That's where the shift occurs, whereby.
• 1:13:20
  Nate Powell: People are like, oh, got this event for you, got a TV spot, got a hotel room, we'll pay you to talk.
• 1:13:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:13:26
  Nate Powell: And a lot of that is like, oh, we ordered…
• 1:13:29
  Nate Powell: 2,000 books for our community, or whatever, over and over again. Right. The math is simply different
• 1:13:36
  Nate Powell: When the goal is to sell
• 1:13:39
  Nate Powell: 20 books or 40 books at a signing, and… Right.
• 1:13:43
  Nate Powell: But to be fair, the math is also different, because I'm working with a book trade publisher, and I get a nice advance, which helps supplement my living. But it also means that in the long term, like, in the life of the book, some of that money goes into things… I mean, it's in my pocket at this point.
• 1:14:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:03
  Nate Powell: But it's going back out to getting hotel rooms, paying for gas, printing up my own postcards and promotional materials. So, it is coming out of my pocket, I am organizing it myself, but a lot of that is, thankfully, I'm able to do that because.
• 1:14:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because of the advance money.
• 1:14:21
  Nate Powell: advance. Yes.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:24
  Nate Powell: Oh, you're connected.
• 1:14:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I know it is, and again, I, I don't, I don't like to…
• 1:14:29
  Tad Eggleston: While I desperately want creators to get paid better, I desperately want there to be more advances, and I desperately want there to be greater sales.
• 1:14:38
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, like, I also…
• 1:14:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, as a parent of young adults, you know.
• 1:14:45
  Tad Eggleston: I like… well, for that matter, a teacher. I like as much transparency as can be out there for budding cartoonists to understand that, like, when they read about you as an on-the-road punk rocker, you as an on-the-road,
• 1:15:02
  Tad Eggleston: Cartoonist who's won major awards is different only in that you're sleeping in slightly more hotel rooms than… than, like, friends' couches.
• 1:15:14
  Nate Powell: That's exactly right. That, that, that is a perfect way to illustrate, the, the kind of, like, strata,
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right, and knowing And what's not is hard.
• 1:15:27
  Tad Eggleston: It's hard, you know?
• 1:15:29
  Dan Newland: Is there a network, sort of like with your punk buddies back in the day, where you'd have towns? Are there… are there cartoonists you've got arrangements with all over America, where you go to a certain town, you know, you've got a place to stay, somebody comes to your town, they've got a place to stay?
• 1:15:45
  Tad Eggleston: I can even answer this one. Yes, there are.
• 1:15:48
  Dan Newland: Fantastic!
• 1:15:49
  Nate Powell: And a lot of this is really… it's also, just like with music and stuff, it's tied into age and circumstance. So, when I was younger.
• 1:15:58
  Nate Powell: Before I became a parent, but in those first few Top Shelf books, as I was still touring more, it was very punk in terms of, like, the connection I had and the frequency by which I would just sleep on couches.
• 1:16:12
  Nate Powell: as I grow older, as a parent, and then I'm like, oh, this is my one night I get to sleep for 9 hours, I can't wait to get in the hotel room.
• 1:16:20
  Nate Powell: Also, the people I know, the people I've grown with as cartoonists, many of them are parents now, their life circumstances are different. So you kind of just lose those opportunities.
• 1:16:32
  Tad Eggleston: The way it seems is the cycle is…
• 1:16:35
  Tad Eggleston: When you're young and you don't have kids or spouses.
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: or it's still early in the relationship or whatnot, then as long as somebody's got a couch, they'll put you up. Once people start pairing off, and it's not just their space, that sort of thing.
• 1:16:51
  Tad Eggleston: they're more stingy about their couches. Once there are kids around, and or you have kids, like, the idea of getting a good night's sleep for everybody becomes much more valuable. And then, if you're lucky.
• 1:17:05
  Tad Eggleston: Enough of your friends will start having guest rooms that you can stay at their houses again.
• 1:17:10
  Nate Powell: Yeah, that's the fourth stage, you're right.
• 1:17:14
  Tad Eggleston: Because if they actually have a bedroom to give you, that's a different thing than if they're just letting you be on the couch of their one-bedroom apartment that they share with four other people.
• 1:17:25
  Nate Powell: You bet.
• 1:17:27
  Tad Eggleston: All right, Nate, you've been through the closing questions before, at least the last one. I don't know if I've asked you this one, but I'm really curious as to your answer. This is… we're, we're…
• 1:17:42
  Tad Eggleston: Quickly approaching the end of our fifth year of 22 Panels. Our fifth anniversary is coming up in…
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if it's late October or early November.
• 1:17:52
  Tad Eggleston: And I feel like I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. I get to say my friend Nate Powell. I get to talk with all sorts of people, like… I've slept on some of those couches!
• 1:18:07
  Tad Eggleston: But I find that's true of, like, everybody in comics
• 1:18:11
  Tad Eggleston: to a certain extent, everybody in the arts, period, but certainly everybody in comics. It's such a small, tight-knit community that, like.
• 1:18:20
  Tad Eggleston: All of us have those experiences that if you told 15-year-old Nate, oh, this is gonna be your life, you would have been like, on what fucking planet? Are you high?
• 1:18:32
  Tad Eggleston: So I started… I've started collecting those experiences. Tell me… tell me one of those…
• 1:18:37
  Tad Eggleston: One of those experiences, whether it's with somebody that you never thought you'd meet, or an experience with a fan, or, you know, just one of those experiences that the younger you would have gone.
• 1:18:52
  Tad Eggleston: That's gonna be something that… I do.
• 1:18:55
  Tad Eggleston: And or that you still look back on and, like, have to pinch yourself a little to go.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: That was… Me?
• 1:19:05
  Nate Powell: I,
• 1:19:06
  Nate Powell: there… I mean, there… I feel like there are still, like, the most surreal moments like that still come from the March days, and a lot of that had to do with, like, really feeling like the work we were doing, which we were doing every day.
• 1:19:21
  Nate Powell: concurrent with our travels together to talk about our work as it was being published. So it sort of was wrapped up into this feeling that everything was building and growing and changing at the same time.
• 1:19:35
  Nate Powell: But there were… you know, there were, like, weird moments. The first one, just, like, the first one that comes to my mind, and there were many, was simply, like.
• 1:19:44
  Nate Powell: 2016, this is at San Diego Comic-Con, so, you know, it's peppered with famous people, but, having, you know, just, like, walking around with
• 1:19:56
  Nate Powell: Congressman Lewis and Andrew and Lee, just one morning, it was like 9 AM, we were…
• 1:20:02
  Nate Powell: I don't think we had just eaten breakfast, but we were, like, headed to or from something, in the gas lamp quarter somewhere. It wasn't super crowded or anything. We had just seen R2-D2, and so that was kind of, like, weird to hang out with John Lewis.
• 1:20:16
  Nate Powell: interacting with R2D2 on the streets of America, but then.
• 1:20:21
  Nate Powell: You know, being like, oh, that was humorous. Out of nowhere.
• 1:20:26
  Nate Powell: Sean Astin from The Goonies and Lord of the Rings, literally, like, jumps out of a crowd of people, like this fully formed.
• 1:20:37
  Nate Powell: you know, this fully-formed Samwise, or whatever, and he just jumps out and emerges in front of John Lewis. He's like.
• 1:20:45
  Nate Powell: He's like, Congressman, I just want you to know, that this is one of the greatest thrills of my life, to finally meet you. It's so inspiring, like, you're truly a hero for our time, you're a hero of the people.
• 1:20:58
  Nate Powell: just sending you all my love, keep doing what you're doing. And he jumps back into the crowd, Spring Heel Jack style, and it was so fast that Andrew and I were watching, you know, unblinking.
• 1:21:13
  Nate Powell: as all of it was going down, but, like, we couldn't even process what was happening, and then we just watch him disappear again.
• 1:21:21
  Nate Powell: Lee, our editor and publicist at the time, was actually sending an email or something for whatever we were about to do, and he was just like this the whole time. But it only took, like, it was like 10 seconds tops, and he was like, and, like, Sean Astin was right here, like, 3 feet in front of him. But he's like, oh, hey guys.
• 1:21:41
  Nate Powell: And he looks up, and Andrew and I were like.
• 1:21:44
  Nate Powell: you just missed that, didn't you? He's like, what do you mean?
• 1:21:47
  Nate Powell: And just having to convey that, and then, like.
• 1:21:50
  Nate Powell: I'm pretty sure John Lewis being like, no, who was that?
• 1:21:54
  Nate Powell: And then we're like, Congressman, Congressman!
• 1:21:57
  Nate Powell: Have you never seen the Goonies? I… I assume maybe you've never seen the Goonies.
• 1:22:02
  Nate Powell: And having to catch up everyone with what… with just how bizarre that moment was.
• 1:22:08
  Tad Eggleston: You so aged yourself there, though, by saying Goonies rather than Lord of the Rings.
• 1:22:13
  Nate Powell: Indeed, yeah.
• 1:22:14
  Tad Eggleston: Without a doubt.
• 1:22:17
  Nate Powell: That was the kind of, like, dizzying, disorienting moments that would happen fairly often in March, but to me, it was just so fast, that that was one of the weirdest.
• 1:22:28
  Dan Newland: That's awesome.
• 1:22:29
  Nate Powell: Is this my life? Yes, it was, my life.
• 1:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: That's a, that's a fantastic, fantastic moment. All right.
• 1:22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Closing question, the same as it's always been, and you literally reminded me earlier on that you revisited the X-Men recently, and that was your answer last time, so you can't do it again.
• 1:22:50
  Nate Powell: Can't do it, alright.
• 1:22:52
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something… you love.
• 1:22:57
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 1:23:00
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
• 1:23:05
  Tad Eggleston: But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to.
• 1:23:11
  Tad Eggleston: So they have more people to talk about it with. And while you're thinking, I will point out that you and Andrew actually represent the two examples I will give people when they're really having trouble, because I'll say, Nate Powell said Jonathan Hickman's X-Men. And he even acknowledged the fact that, like.
• 1:23:30
  Tad Eggleston: it wasn't that, like, under the radar or whatnot, but the people around him weren't talking about it. Wasn't the world he lived in at that moment.
• 1:23:40
  Tad Eggleston: And Andrew actually said his tomatoes.
• 1:23:44
  Nate Powell: It's tomatoes!
• 1:23:44
  Tad Eggleston: So, so that's, that's the, like, spectrum that we will absolutely allow.
• 1:23:49
  Nate Powell: That's great.
• 1:23:51
  Nate Powell: I especially appreciate that, because I just tried to make a classic, like, one of my favorite foods is, like, the Deep South tomato sandwich, which is bread.
• 1:24:03
  Nate Powell: Mayonnaise.
• 1:24:05
  Nate Powell: tomato slices and salt and pepper, and that's it. When you get a good tomato, the tomato sandwich cannot be beat. I tried to make a tomato sandwich, like, 2 hours ago.
• 1:24:16
  Nate Powell: And it was just, like, the shittiest, most flavorless, like, gritty tomatoes, and it didn't happen. So, tomatoes have been on my mind, and if somebody's like, no.
• 1:24:27
  Tad Eggleston: See, so why isn't North Carolina on your list of places to go, and or you need to tell Andrew to bring some up with him?
• 1:24:36
  Nate Powell: Oh, well, yeah, I mean.
• 1:24:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:24:39
  Nate Powell: Tomatoes!
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: Tad was reminding me that you have tomatoes.
• 1:24:44
  Nate Powell: It's neither Saturday.
• 1:24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, it'.
• 1:24:45
  Nate Powell: My answer for this is going to be TV-oriented, so…
• 1:24:49
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:24:49
  Nate Powell: My wife Rachel and I, you know, we watch TV every night. Rachel is also, like.
• 1:24:54
  Nate Powell: We both love storytelling. She has a much sharper mind than I do, as far as reading comprehension and being able to, like, process story… complex story elements.
• 1:25:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you had all of the loud music just blasting the brains through your ears, so, you know…
• 1:25:11
  Nate Powell: Well, yeah, I mean, she…
• 1:25:13
  Tad Eggleston: She's my go-to.
• 1:25:14
  Nate Powell: to first wave editor on every book that I do, and it's extremely helpful, but our experience watching long-form TV together at night is all… it's informative to me creatively, it's personally.
• 1:25:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:25:26
  Nate Powell: etc. Okay.
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: Great.
• 1:25:28
  Nate Powell: So, in our little world, our world of two.
• 1:25:32
  Nate Powell: the… a lot of the shows that either we missed the boat on, like, earlier in parenthood, or in the pandemic, or whatever, we're always like, this show's great! Do, like, 6 people know about this show? What's the deal? So…
• 1:25:45
  Nate Powell: like, a show that has gotten its flowers very recently that 100% deserves it is Widow's Bay.
• 1:25:53
  Tad Eggleston: But it goes back.
• 1:25:54
  Nate Powell: And, like, we both just loved Widows Bay, and recently went on a little family trip to Newland and actually went to one of the beaches where one of the scenes in Widows Bay is. It's as close as we could get, but we were like.
• 1:26:09
  Nate Powell: Oh yeah, no, this is good, this is good. But adjacent to Widow's Bay.
• 1:26:14
  Nate Powell: there's, like, a… there's, like, a Tasmanian Widow's Bay, that… I don't even know when it actually came out. I don't think it's brand new, but it's called… I think it's Deadlock?
• 1:26:26
  Nate Powell: It's an Australian show, but it takes place in Tasmania, but, you know, Tasmania, being an island off the mainland, it's very Widows Bay-ish. Deadlock…
• 1:26:37
  Nate Powell: was…
• 1:26:38
  Nate Powell: awesome, and a great kind of slow burn of character. And another show that we missed that was on for several seasons, but I had never even heard of until a few months ago that we watched all of, and were really sad when it ended that there was no more of these characters. Was this show Evil?
• 1:26:58
  Nate Powell: Which we… which we refer to as Haunted Matlock.
• 1:27:04
  Nate Powell: And that's what evil is. It's haunted Matlock. It's, you know, an episode-oriented mystery show.
• 1:27:12
  Nate Powell: with a, you know, quirky but moving interplay between a small group of characters, but it opens up a lot of, like… it has, like, a touch of Buffy in there, too. It's religious-themed, but the supernatural and demonic elements
• 1:27:28
  Nate Powell: you know, you're supposed to take them seriously and take them with a grain of salt, but the char- again, the long-term character development and interpersonal dynamics, were really moving and believable and touching. So, Widow's Bay, Evil, and Deadlock have kind of kept me going this year.
• 1:27:46
  Tad Eggleston: Very cool, very cool.
• 1:27:49
  Tad Eggleston: As always, Nate, it is a pleasure to get to speak to you, pleasure to see you.
• 1:27:55
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait for CXC to come back next April, and likely get to see you again, though I'll probably make it out to Howling Pages. It's certainly my goal.
• 1:28:05
  Tad Eggleston: Greg and Fake are also regulars on the show, and I write for American Nature.
• 1:28:13
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know, it's always fun to be able to hang out with them as well.
• 1:28:18
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, for 22 panels, this has been Nate Powell, and we will see you after the next page.