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Fourth World Book Club #14 · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back for the penultimate episode of
• 0:08
  Tad Eggleston: the… the Jack Kirby Fourth World Book Club on 22 panels.
• 0:14
  Tad Eggleston: after next month, we're gonna have to choose something else to meet and talk about on a monthly basis, because I don't want to let you guys go.
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: And I know that you're in the pulp water too, but, like, I like the every-other-week thing, so…
• 0:27
  Tad Eggleston: unless you're abandoning me, we're gonna figure out another comic. I'm just… I'm informing you, not in the mood to ask, I'm just telling you. Benevolent dictator type thing.
• 0:38
  Mark Pracht: Well, that's… that's fine. I mean, like, you know, we could… .
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: Just not log in.
• 0:47
  Mark Pracht: No, no, I've been, I've been, I actually have been reading some of the other, Kirby DC books.
• 0:56
  Mark Pracht: Those are interesting.
• 0:58
  Mark Pracht: Kind of suffer from some of the same problems, but…
• 1:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I, I think, I think…
• 1:04
  Mark Pracht: You're done?
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna ask for a Kirby break. I think I would like to, at some point, come back for Commandee.
• 1:11
  Mark Pracht: Mandy would be fun.
• 1:13
  Tad Eggleston: I have some interest in the demon.
• 1:16
  Sean Harklerode: I have the demon.
• 1:18
  Tad Eggleston: that sort of thing, but I…
• 1:19
  Mark Pracht: I, you know, I… I will… I'll be honest with you, I… I finished OMAC,
• 1:25
  Mark Pracht: Because it's a quick read, man, because it's only, like, I don't know, like, 6 issues or whatever.
• 1:32
  Mark Pracht: just, it, it…
• 1:36
  Mark Pracht: That book, you know, I've talked about the Roddenberry effect, and the, you know, everybody tells you you're a visionary.
• 1:43
  Mark Pracht: That book is all Jack going like, yes, I am a visionary. This is what the future will be. And, and…
• 1:52
  Mark Pracht: And it's,
• 1:55
  Mark Pracht: And it's another, you know, it's another one of Jack's patented super soldiers, you know. The weakling dude gets turned into a, you know, powerhouse super soldier. But my favorite thing about the whole deal is that there is, like, I'm reading it, there is a cliffhanger, and that's it.
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that…
• 2:17
  Mark Pracht: I plugged in that pretty quick.
• 2:18
  Tad Eggleston: It's not completely unlike… Mr. Miracle. I mean, he wrapped up
• 2:25
  Tad Eggleston: Some things, but he also, like…
• 2:28
  Mark Pracht: Well, I think what's really interesting about what we read for this time around is that, you know, you have Mr. Miracle, which is really
• 2:37
  Mark Pracht: The end of what he was doing.
• 2:41
  Mark Pracht: Like, in real time, shall we say, right?
• 2:45
  Mark Pracht: And then, we get to see this… this… first attempt.
• 2:50
  Mark Pracht: To kind of wrap the whole narrative up.
• 2:54
  Mark Pracht: And I'm really interested to see what… hear what you guys think about that.
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: I'm finishing reading it right now, so why don't you guys talk, Mr. Miracle? As I, wrap up.
• 3:08
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 3:09
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, like…
• 3:09
  Tad Eggleston: I do have some thoughts.
• 3:10
  Sean Harklerode: Hickory.
• 3:11
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 3:12
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Yeah, it is 48 pages, but it is a quick read. I mean, because in… in… in one of.
• 3:18
  Sean Harklerode: A lot of flashes, and…
• 3:20
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, one of the famous lines, the famous lines from early in this, in this little series, the words don't matter.
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: I have been skimming the words way more today.
• 3:35
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, look, I… I will say this. Those, so we had… we had…
• 3:41
  Mark Pracht: The final issue, Mr. Miracle, and then, if I'm remembering correctly, the first two…
• 3:45
  Sean Harklerode: 17 and 18.
• 3:46
  Mark Pracht: 16, 17, 18. 16 and 17 are… Nothing.
• 3:53
  Sean Harklerode: Well… .
• 3:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, like, they're, they're fine, they're fine, just one-off stories, but… There's not much…
• 4:05
  Sean Harklerode: But,
• 4:07
  Mark Pracht: Go ahead. No, I'd love to hear what you have to say.
• 4:09
  Sean Harklerode: I… First of all, I don't know what it is about, 17, or issue 16.
• 4:18
  Sean Harklerode: to me, this is an FF story.
• 4:23
  Sean Harklerode: It looks like an FF comic.
• 4:26
  Sean Harklerode: I'm just looking at the… the first page…
• 4:31
  Sean Harklerode: The second page… the second page…
• 4:34
  Sean Harklerode: Where we have, it's a two-page spread.
• 4:39
  Sean Harklerode: Barda has a car over her head.
• 4:42
  Sean Harklerode: She's holding a… I like that.
• 4:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 4:47
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, this, to me, I could… I…
• 4:51
  Sean Harklerode: I did not go back through the FF and find what he was swiping from himself, but this could be…
• 5:00
  Sean Harklerode: an FF page, she's the thing.
• 5:04
  Mark Pracht: Yes. So…
• 5:05
  Sean Harklerode: And
• 5:08
  Sean Harklerode: I think it would be more… so, if it were a lesser artist, I would say that he went back and swiped his own stuff.
• 5:17
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 5:18
  Sean Harklerode: But… I think for Jack at this point, that would be more work.
• 5:23
  Sean Harklerode: Than just churning this out.
• 5:25
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 5:26
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean, like…
• 5:28
  Mark Pracht: I just… like, I don't want to dismiss these books, because it's Jack Kirby. They're always… there's always something interesting.
• 5:36
  Mark Pracht: I'm just saying, like, yeah, you're 100% right. This feels like an FF concept that has been…
• 5:46
  Mark Pracht: re… regurgitated, or whatever.
• 5:49
  Sean Harklerode: Well, it also, you know, with Shiloh, I feel like… He's trying to give…
• 5:57
  Sean Harklerode: DC what he thinks they want.
• 6:01
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 6:03
  Sean Harklerode: And… it's to the… complete detriment
• 6:08
  Sean Harklerode: Of everything that the comic had going for it.
• 6:13
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 6:14
  Sean Harklerode: Right? We introduce… it's the worst trope in the world. It's Cousin Oliver, right?
• 6:20
  Sean Harklerode: you have this genius kid now.
• 6:26
  Sean Harklerode: Who, all of a sudden, and this is particularly in issue 17, Mr. Miracle is a putz.
• 6:35
  Sean Harklerode: All of a sudden, Mr. Miracle, who always has the mother box on hand, can always get out of every single thing, all of a sudden, he can be duped, and Shiloh has to come save him.
• 6:49
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 6:50
  Sean Harklerode: And… I think it's what… Jack…
• 6:54
  Sean Harklerode: I don't think it's what he wanted to do, but I think it's what he thought they wanted him to do.
• 6:59
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that, I think that you're 100% right. I think that, I think that, in a way.
• 7:07
  Mark Pracht: It's very clear here that he feels like… Whatever he was building.
• 7:13
  Mark Pracht: with the Fourth World, and we've talked, you know.
• 7:17
  Mark Pracht: On and on and on about how, sort of,
• 7:22
  Mark Pracht: disjointed and unconnected so many of the things felt, but…
• 7:29
  Mark Pracht: What this… these two issues really kind of show you is that without that Seeming point.
• 7:39
  Mark Pracht: it just sort of rambles. I mean, like, it's all… all of the things that didn't work.
• 7:45
  Mark Pracht: Are even more, front and center.
• 7:50
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, I think, you know.
• 7:54
  Mark Pracht: it's really interesting how… because you're 100% right about Shiloh. Like, it is… it is cousin, you know, cousin Eddie, you know?
• 8:03
  Sean Harklerode: No offense to Robbie Rist.
• 8:06
  Sean Harklerode: Lovely guy.
• 8:09
  Mark Pracht: no offense to anybody, right? But, I mean, it does feel… it feels like, you know, there's also kind of a sense of, of,
• 8:20
  Mark Pracht: you know, I wonder…
• 8:23
  Mark Pracht: I wonder… I do wonder, because, like, I've brought this up on a couple of occasions, is, you know, these are all post…
• 8:30
  Mark Pracht: Hard Traveling Heroes and the… the Adams…
• 8:34
  Mark Pracht: you know, Adams O'Neill, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, and, like, did somebody at editorial go, like, hey, you know, do something that's…
• 8:44
  Mark Pracht: feels like it's saying something about society or whatever, and… and this was, you know, okay, then I'm gonna give them a black sidekick.
• 8:53
  Mark Pracht: And that was his solution to that, or something. And it feels… it feels completely disassociated. I get, again, like, this idea, like, they're training Shiloh, but we never really see them training. He seems to just, like.
• 9:08
  Mark Pracht: between two issues have developed all of these skills and powers. Like, I love how… I love how Barda is, like, I can… I can train you into having super strength. Which I guess would… I guess that would be… I guess that… that… that… that… like, if that was…
• 9:24
  Mark Pracht: the origin
• 9:28
  Mark Pracht: I guess that could be interesting, you know? If it's like, I'm gonna give you the apocalypse training situation here, and that's gonna help you become stronger. Great. But it's also… but it also just feels, like, incredibly, like.
• 9:42
  Mark Pracht: lazy, you know?
• 9:44
  Mark Pracht: Because he wants to make… I mean, and I… I have to assume that… that…
• 9:51
  Mark Pracht: he thought it was gonna keep going, because it really does feel like it's becoming the Shiloh Norman show, and…
• 10:00
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 10:02
  Mark Pracht: And then, obviously they, you know, the last issue, they obviously said, okay, this is the end. And he knew it was the end.
• 10:10
  Mark Pracht: And We get a really… like, we're gonna bring back everybody, and… Do a wrap-up.
• 10:19
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 10:19
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, that I love. I mean, that… that felt like a… that was a relief to me.
• 10:24
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 10:24
  Sean Harklerode: Issue 18.
• 10:26
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, I will say, it was a relief. It was a huge relief. I was happy to see all of those characters come back, but it did feel like… it felt like something that was supposed to happen over, like, 3 or 4 issues jammed into one issue.
• 10:39
  Sean Harklerode: Absolutely.
• 10:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 10:42
  Tad Eggleston: That was… my thoughts on 18 that I alluded to earlier, is that
• 10:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I don't feel as harshly about the Shiloh Norman stuff as you do. I actually think that, like, if you separate it from the rest of the series, it… it wasn't a bad two and a half part story.
• 11:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it had flaws, but, like, not different… not mostly different from the flaws that the entire series and Jack's writing in general has.
• 11:17
  Sean Harklerode: I think I just objected to the fact that all of a sudden it became the Shiloh Show.
• 11:21
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I…
• 11:23
  Sean Harklerode: Whereas Mr. Miracles You know, you could… you could never…
• 11:27
  Sean Harklerode: get the jump on Mr. on Scott for you.
• 11:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 11:30
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Right. No, no, no. Or you could never get the… you could never get the jump on the mother box, because… Right.
• 11:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right. It absolutely doesn't feel like a Mr. Miracle comic, but in some ways, there are parts of it that feel like a better comic than some of the other Mr. Miracle comics. It's just that, like, the Mr. Miracle part becomes the, why isn't this a Shiloh Norman comic, rather than a.
• 11:56
  Sean Harklerode: Well, there… I think I know where you're going, and I think there's a vulnerability to Shiloh, that there is never really a vulnerability.
• 12:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 12:04
  Sean Harklerode: Scott, yeah, okay, I can see that, I see that.
• 12:07
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 12:07
  Mark Pracht: I think that's… I think that's 100% fair, and I think that… I don't think that… I don't think that, Sean or… I don't think either Sean or I object to Shiloh as a character.
• 12:16
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't think.
• 12:16
  Mark Pracht: I think it's that the storytelling seems to suggest to me that this was something that was asked for…
• 12:26
  Tad Eggleston: Or… It's entirely possible.
• 12:29
  Mark Pracht: Or our desperation move, yeah, to try.
• 12:31
  Tad Eggleston: In some ways, that plays into what I've always said, that, like, Jack needs an editor.
• 12:38
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
• 12:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because I… I mean, in terms of the characterization, like, I…
• 12:44
  Tad Eggleston: felt Shiloh more than I often feel the characters that he enjoys writing, or clearly enjoys drawing or whatnot, because he spent more time on him as a character. It was almost like he was learning who the character was. I think the other characters are so fully in his head that he forgets that he has to show them to us.
• 13:03
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
• 13:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 13:04
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 13:04
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas he was figuring out who Shiloh was on the page, so we got to figure out a little bit about who Shiloh was, too. And then that abruptly ended, and…
• 13:15
  Tad Eggleston: With, like, no more, I liked the way he'd been playing the romance between
• 13:24
  Tad Eggleston: Scott and… and… and Barda, and… and… and the way that it had been kind of a slow burn, and that sort of thing, and then, like, just… BOOM! I love you! Let's get married! Right now!
• 13:39
  Sean Harklerode: Well…
• 13:41
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, look, to me, to that point, I mean, like, okay, so…
• 13:47
  Mark Pracht: A couple of thoughts that I have is that I feel like every time Jack gets in a corner.
• 13:54
  Mark Pracht: He drops back to shit that's worked for him before.
• 13:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:58
  Mark Pracht: And… and, you know, Shiloh… there's a lot of, like, Bucky, or Sandy, you know.
• 14:08
  Mark Pracht: Or whatever, you know, it's like, oh, okay, the sales are flagging
• 14:14
  Mark Pracht: we'll just throw a sidekick in there. And it's not…
• 14:19
  Mark Pracht: like, I understand it, but again, it kind of goes back to that, where I talked about it kind of feels like Golden Age thinking, you know? It's that… that there is sort of a man-out-of-time element to these Kirby stories.
• 14:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 14:33
  Mark Pracht: He is operating in a way that the rest of the industry is kind of moving past, sometimes to their detriment, but not…
• 14:42
  Mark Pracht: you know, like, I… and I… I take a lot of joy in the Golden Age storytelling, and look, I've said a lot of critical things about Jack and these books and everything. I… I really enjoy reading these books.
• 14:56
  Mark Pracht: It's just that it… the frustrations come back in, especially after you've read them, like, 3 or 4 times, you know? You're just like…
• 15:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, what do you… I mean, but…
• 15:06
  Mark Pracht: Here's the thing, here's the thing about the Scott… to the Scott and Barda point.
• 15:14
  Mark Pracht: maybe I'm… maybe I… I am a dirty-minded old man, but…
• 15:20
  Mark Pracht: I thought Scott and Barda were knocking boots, like, all the way through the series, you know?
• 15:26
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah! No, no, I don't, I don't disagree, but, but, but, like…
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: But… but he hadn't played the… the… the…
• 15:35
  Mark Pracht: The love card.
• 15:36
  Tad Eggleston: Love angle, rather than… And something just occurred to me.
• 15:44
  Tad Eggleston: Have either… either of you either read or seen the Netflix documentary on…
• 15:50
  Tad Eggleston: there was a Salinger documentary and book that came out.
• 15:55
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. I watched it a long time ago, so…
• 15:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 15:59
  Sean Harklerode: J.D. Salinger?
• 16:00
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Yeah.
• 16:01
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things…
• 16:04
  Tad Eggleston: that it… it made me… one of the… the biggest way that it made me look at Salinger's works…
• 16:12
  Tad Eggleston: differently.
• 16:17
  Mark Pracht: All hundreds of them.
• 16:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 16:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I've… I've read all the…
• 16:24
  Tad Eggleston: The uncollected stuff, too, so, like…
• 16:27
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah, I, I may, I'm being…
• 16:29
  Tad Eggleston: For me, it's more than some people.
• 16:31
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 16:32
  Tad Eggleston: But I think this plays to Jack, too.
• 16:38
  Tad Eggleston: He idealized… The innocence of the time before.
• 16:46
  Mark Pracht: I mean, it made me completely, I mean…
• 16:52
  Tad Eggleston: Catch in the Rye for a long time was my least favorite Salinger work, and it's still not my favorite Salinger work.
• 16:59
  Tad Eggleston: But after discovering that, like, it was in his pocket.
• 17:06
  Tad Eggleston: as he was landing at Normandy, the first three chapters, after discovering that he was among the first people in and last people out of Europe.
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: That he was at the Battle of the Bulge, that he was at the Marne, that he was at… you name it, right?
• 17:23
  Tad Eggleston: It's suddenly like, oh…
• 17:26
  Tad Eggleston: that puts Holden Caulfield in a very different light, because Holden Caulfield is desperately… so, I think there's an element of that with Jack and latching onto those Golden Age stories, because one of the biggest differences between those Golden Age stories and the hard-traveling Heroes is, even if…
• 17:50
  Tad Eggleston: It's your answer.
• 17:52
  Sean Harklerode: Oh no, I think you glitched.
• 17:54
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, you did. Did I glitch?
• 17:57
  Tad Eggleston: I said, like, with the hard-traveling Heroes, like, one big part of it is that we're dealing with real-world stuff right now, but I think the bigger part of it is, like, we're dealing with
• 18:09
  Tad Eggleston: with Ollie, and… And…
• 18:13
  Sean Harklerode: How?
• 18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, actually being human beings.
• 18:17
  Mark Pracht: Sure!
• 18:19
  Tad Eggleston: The biggest difference between Golden Age and Silver Age, and particularly Marvel Age, is, like.
• 18:27
  Tad Eggleston: like, like, the original Superman, like, dealt with crooked politicians.
• 18:32
  Tad Eggleston: you know, captain America punched Hitler, so it's not like they didn't deal with real-world issues in real time, but what they never did was be human.
• 18:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right, you never, you never… Siegel and Schuster never wrote about, like, Clark Kent trying to decide who's the real person, you know? Right.
• 18:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 18:53
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I've never really thought of it in this way before, but it feels like the Golden Age, yes, they dealt with these real-world…
• 19:02
  Sean Harklerode: issues. The Silver Age kind of became more sci-fi…
• 19:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 19:07
  Sean Harklerode: cracked.
• 19:08
  Tad Eggleston: And then… and then the Bronze Age kind of came back.
• 19:12
  Sean Harklerode: to…
• 19:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right. But also, I think, started to add humanity to the hero.
• 19:17
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 19:18
  Sean Harklerode: Never really thought of it that way.
• 19:19
  Mark Pracht: when we talk, like, that humanizing thing, like, I think that Silver Age definitely started that, and I mean, I think that, you know, Jack was at ground zero of that, but I mean, I think that
• 19:30
  Mark Pracht: I really do think that if you… if you… if you objectively look at these books, you do start to see what Stan brought to those Marvel books, you know? And,
• 19:42
  Mark Pracht: And it ain't… it ain't nothing.
• 19:44
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's not! And I don't think I've… I don't think… I know that I'm one of the biggest Stan critics out there, and I want to make it clear that I don't think it's nothing. I am annoyed at the fact that Stan writes really cheesy, bad dialogue and too much of it.
• 20:00
  Mark Pracht: But that is humanity.
• 20:04
  Sean Harklerode: Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
• 20:07
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. But, but what I'm saying is that then you had other writers, because, like, Denny O'Neill.
• 20:17
  Mark Pracht: you know, like, I think Sean is absolutely right. It's the Bronze Age when we start to see these things like Hard Traveling Heroes, where it takes the political thing and puts it with the humanizing of the characters, and then suddenly it's not…
• 20:32
  Mark Pracht: It's not just preaching itself, it's actually, let's talk about, like.
• 20:37
  Mark Pracht: why do I feel this way, and why do I,
• 20:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, let's struggle with it. I mean, it's the first place where it's not just good and bad.
• 20:47
  Mark Pracht: Well, and the other thing is, the other thing is when you talk about hard travel and heroes as opposed to, say, the politics of the Golden Age, the politics of the Golden Age is Superman sees a slumlord, takes him up to the top of the building, and drops him off of it, right?
• 21:00
  Mark Pracht: like, that's a story, that's in Action 1, and that's a really simplistic way of looking at it.
• 21:08
  Mark Pracht: Ollie and Hal roll into a town, and some guy starts asking him why, you know, you've saved all these people on other planets. It's basically interrogating that idea of making these political questions very simple, right? And, like.
• 21:24
  Mark Pracht: let me be clear, I'm not saying that it's, like, a deep and nuanced take on things like racism and stuff, but I mean, it is trying to grapple with more
• 21:36
  Mark Pracht: the complexities of it, rather than saying.
• 21:42
  Mark Pracht: Like, and this goes back to what you just said, that this… this grand, perfect.
• 21:47
  Mark Pracht: person, usually a man, is gonna fly in and fix everything by… you know.
• 21:54
  Tad Eggleston: Hitting something.
• 21:55
  Mark Pracht: a job. Yeah.
• 21:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 21:56
  Mark Pracht: And that's… and that's… that's the… that's the thing. I think that's… where…
• 22:03
  Mark Pracht: Jack struggles in this period, because… I mean, it really, like, it is really interesting how it's this period, it's the 70s, when Jack struggles, right? He… he struggles at DC, he struggles when he goes back to Marvel.
• 22:20
  Mark Pracht: And then, once we hit the 80s.
• 22:23
  Mark Pracht: And again, and it does have to do with the direct market opening up and things like that. Suddenly, there's more…
• 22:31
  Mark Pracht: reverence for him again, you know? But I mean, during the 70s, there was a real…
• 22:37
  Mark Pracht: Like, it was a shrug.
• 22:39
  Tad Eggleston: Just playing armchair psychologist again, and you're the history guy, did any of his sons get sent to Vietnam?
• 22:49
  Mark Pracht: I don't think so. I think they were both… I think his…
• 22:55
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, no, I don't think any of them did.
• 22:56
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I'm just, like, I'm just thinking of… like…
• 23:03
  Tad Eggleston: Because, you know, just because of how my brain works, how much
• 23:09
  Tad Eggleston: Maintaining my own psychology matters to me so much.
• 23:13
  Tad Eggleston: etc. I have trouble looking at comics and not thinking of The personal motivations behind that.
• 23:20
  Tad Eggleston: And there's a lot of…
• 23:22
  Tad Eggleston: the good versus evil, there's a lot of the horror of war, but there's also a lot of, I can't let it out, and I was wondering, particularly as you brought up that the 70s seemed to be a particularly tough era for Jack, I wondered if it… if, like, the fact that
• 23:42
  Tad Eggleston: I wondered how close the fact that we were in another war, only one that didn't make sense.
• 23:48
  Tad Eggleston: made.
• 23:49
  Mark Pracht: I mean, that's…
• 23:49
  Tad Eggleston: him.
• 23:50
  Mark Pracht: I th- I think,
• 23:53
  Mark Pracht: you know, famously, you know, Stan and Jack struggled with what to do with Captain America.
• 23:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right. During…
• 24:00
  Mark Pracht: Vietnam, and I mean, I think… I think that…
• 24:07
  Mark Pracht: the pervasiveness of Vietnam and Watergate and all of that stuff, I think that, for us.
• 24:15
  Mark Pracht: It's really hard, like, that… The early to mid-70s probably felt…
• 24:22
  Mark Pracht: Exactly like we feel right now.
• 24:24
  Mark Pracht: to the people living in it, right? When we talk about things like politics, I always think it's all cycles, man. It's all.
• 24:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, yeah, absolutely.
• 24:35
  Mark Pracht: And the thing is, is that, I think that but I, personally…
• 24:40
  Tad Eggleston: Not entirely natural cycles. That's one of the reasons that I look at them.
• 24:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yay.
• 24:45
  Mark Pracht: I don't, I don't…
• 24:46
  Tad Eggleston: They last longer or shorter a lot based on…
• 24:50
  Mark Pracht: Well, of course. But… but yeah, no, I think that… but I think that… that… the reaction to things is… is… it's a natural thing. You have something that pushes too far this way, and then something pushes too far this way, and then you hope that we can maintain an equilibrium. But I… No, I'm just…
• 25:09
  Mark Pracht: I don't necessarily… I think if I'm gonna play armchair psychologist, I don't necessarily think that… I think that Jack was aware… I think everybody in the country was aware of that stuff, but I also think that he was…
• 25:25
  Mark Pracht: This is my think. This is my thinking. I think that
• 25:29
  Mark Pracht: what Jack did worked for him for so long, right? We're talking from the 30s all the way through the 60s, right? And it was popular, it was successful, it sold. Every time you read an interview with Jack, he's just like, I hope it gets sales, right?
• 25:48
  Mark Pracht: Like, that was his obsession, right?
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 25:50
  Mark Pracht: And it was… it was about, you know, caring for his family. And the thing is.
• 25:55
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 25:56
  Mark Pracht: He was very good at it, because, like, no matter what, like, you know.
• 26:01
  Mark Pracht: Jack Kirby is not Bill Finger. Jack Kirby was never destitute. Jack Kirby had a nice house with a pool in Southern California. He… all of his kids went to college, which I think answers your question about Vietnam. I think they all went to college.
• 26:15
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 26:16
  Mark Pracht: So, And… But I think…
• 26:23
  Mark Pracht: it was just that there was a different time. You had all these kids that… you had all these kids that were now coming into the business who had cut their teeth on Stan and Jack, right? And now they wanted to make it… they wanted to, you know…
• 26:38
  Mark Pracht: doing some research right now about the late 70s into the 80s at Marvel, right? And, like, there's this rise of the idea of the writer-editor who is writing their stories and editing the books, and how
• 26:53
  Mark Pracht: Chaotic that made the company.
• 26:56
  Mark Pracht: You know? And they also couldn't keep an editor-in-chief in place for… you know, like…
• 27:02
  Mark Pracht: famously, Jerry Conway was, like, editor-in-chief for, like, 3 months, and then he was like, fuck this, you know? I mean, like, and
• 27:12
  Mark Pracht: But I also… but, you know, that's…
• 27:16
  Mark Pracht: it… it is this time when Jack keeps
• 27:19
  Mark Pracht: Jack keeps trying to do the same stuff.
• 27:23
  Mark Pracht: And, and… he… like, that doesn't take anything away from Jack.
• 27:29
  Mark Pracht: The artwork is always brilliant, but the storylines always kind of fall into the same sort of thing, right? And, not…
• 27:37
  Mark Pracht: the plotting and everything, and like… like I said, Shiloh Jones, hey, it's… the book's flagging, give him a sidekick, you know? And it's just sort of a… it's sort of a playbook
• 27:49
  Mark Pracht: that at this point, I think that the industry as a whole was sort of like…
• 27:55
  Mark Pracht: especially on the creative end, was like, we can do all sorts of other stuff. We can… we can do Howard the Duck.
• 28:02
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 28:04
  Tad Eggleston: But that doesn'.
• 28:04
  Mark Pracht: And… And…
• 28:07
  Mark Pracht: You know, and that book… that book is, like, when you just look at it, when you look at it as a concept, it's insane.
• 28:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 28:15
  Mark Pracht: And, like, and there's stuff, like… and that was sort of the glory of the writer-editor era at Marvel, was these kind of crazy ideas, but it also, you know, became chaotic. But, I mean, I think that Jack…
• 28:33
  Mark Pracht: was sort of just doing the same thing that Jack had been doing for decades and decades, and it just was diminishing returns until the worm turned… as we were talking about cycles, the worm turned again, and suddenly people
• 28:47
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 28:48
  Mark Pracht: Famously… famously, I think the worm really turned for Jack when Jeanette Kahn became the, publisher of DC.
• 28:57
  Mark Pracht: And she looked at these books and said, these… there's great stuff here, why are we not…
• 29:02
  Mark Pracht: Why are we not working with Jack?
• 29:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right? And then…
• 29:06
  Mark Pracht: you know, that's when they did the Superpowers touring line that used all of Jack's designs, and then, you know, and he got a bunch of money, you know, and that's…
• 29:17
  Mark Pracht: That's sort of the bottom line, you know, because, like.
• 29:21
  Mark Pracht: Jack's… Jack's attitude always seemed to be, I am a commercial artist. I am a…
• 29:27
  Mark Pracht: I am… I work under contract, I do the work, and I turn it in, you know?
• 29:32
  Mark Pracht: That was a long digression.
• 29:35
  Mark Pracht: But… You know, like, there…
• 29:39
  Mark Pracht: I think there is something about these last three issues of Mr. Miracle that…
• 29:45
  Mark Pracht: I think Sean said it earlier, you know, Jack feels kinda checked out.
• 29:50
  Mark Pracht: And I feel like that last book is kind of this desperate…
• 29:55
  Mark Pracht: Desperate grab to tie everything together.
• 29:58
  Mark Pracht: And… It is… it is not… like, it's a good book.
• 30:05
  Mark Pracht: like, I enjoyed seeing all those characters, but it is not a satisfying wrap-up to this whole…
• 30:10
  Mark Pracht: Fourth World Apocalypse…
• 30:13
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I would say… I, I think… Yes, the two before that
• 30:21
  Sean Harklerode: felt kind of checked out. I…
• 30:24
  Sean Harklerode: Although, you know, there are some really striking images in it.
• 30:27
  Mark Pracht: Oh.
• 30:28
  Sean Harklerode: and we haven't even… we haven't even delved into the,
• 30:34
  Sean Harklerode: The coincidence of, the tricky trio looking just exactly like…
• 30:41
  Mark Pracht: Because…
• 30:43
  Sean Harklerode: Because there's… it's such a common, you know. But yeah, you've got… got a… a huge, large woman, you know, Della the Dinosaur.
• 30:55
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 30:55
  Sean Harklerode: And, mad Merkin, and, Little Bullets.
• 31:00
  Mark Pracht: Yep.
• 31:02
  Mark Pracht: I mean, look, I would say…
• 31:05
  Sean Harklerode: When I… when I… when they first appeared, I was like, wait, did they go into costume and I didn't…
• 31:13
  Sean Harklerode: Did… are they in disguise now?
• 31:15
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 31:16
  Sean Harklerode: And then, no, it's just 3 people who mysteriously look just like Barta, Scott, and Moshina.
• 31:24
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, yeah, I mean, I particularly struck… oh.
• 31:30
  Mark Pracht: Bye.
• 31:31
  Mark Pracht: No, go ahead, finish.
• 31:32
  Sean Harklerode: So.
• 31:33
  Mark Pracht: Fair.
• 31:33
  Sean Harklerode: where… when BARDA is blasting, della…
• 31:41
  Sean Harklerode: With the files from the file cabinet?
• 31:46
  Sean Harklerode: That's a great… It's a great shot, it's to the top corner.
• 31:51
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 31:51
  Sean Harklerode: 19, and that is…
• 31:53
  Mark Pracht: That is a… That is a… that is a pure Kirby panel.
• 31:58
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 31:58
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 32:00
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, that is… that's what I was saying, it was like, that is all Kirby, even though there's no real crackle.
• 32:06
  Sean Harklerode: But there's… Lines of force.
• 32:10
  Mark Pracht: You know, just that idea that, that, that BARDA
• 32:14
  Mark Pracht: Could slam a filing cabinet on the ground, or whatever she's doing, or pound on the top of it, and make the drawers shoot out, like.
• 32:25
  Mark Pracht: like… like, missiles is… Right.
• 32:28
  Mark Pracht: And then when… on the next page, when it hits Della, it's like… Yeah, I, I…
• 32:35
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. Like, I will say.
• 32:38
  Mark Pracht: I loved Murder Lodge much better than the other one, which had the weirdest ending ever.
• 32:47
  Mark Pracht: Where, you know, where it's like, this is Professor X, Or whatever. Which…
• 32:54
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I agree.
• 32:55
  Mark Pracht: has to be Jack taking a crap at Marvel there, you know?
• 33:02
  Mark Pracht: when, yeah, Professor Egg shows back up in the real world, and then it's like.
• 33:08
  Mark Pracht: who is this guy? And I'm like, oh, okay, the next story must continue this, and then it's like, hey, it's Murder Lodge! And I'm like, okay.
• 33:22
  Mark Pracht: But, like, that's… I mean, to be clear, these stories do have joys in them. Lots of them. But it's just sort of like…
• 33:33
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. But I do…
• 33:34
  Sean Harklerode: Anyway…
• 33:35
  Mark Pracht: I do agree with Sean, like, Scott Free kind of becomes a simp, you know, he's just sort of like…
• 33:43
  Mark Pracht: Oh, I don't know what's going on.
• 33:45
  Mark Pracht: But… Anyway.
• 33:48
  Sean Harklerode: But… It, you know, 18, to me, was a joy
• 33:55
  Sean Harklerode: And it was, it's kind of like, hey, here are my old friends.
• 33:59
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 34:00
  Sean Harklerode: And… I feel like this was…
• 34:04
  Sean Harklerode: maybe it's not as satisfying. I mean, it wraps up very quickly.
• 34:09
  Sean Harklerode: But… I think probably for Jack, he probably…
• 34:17
  Sean Harklerode: It seems like he loved bringing these people back.
• 34:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 34:21
  Sean Harklerode: It feels like a reunion, and it feels like it's Shakespeare. We end on a wedding.
• 34:27
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 34:29
  Mark Pracht: Well, and the thing… the thing… I mean, my only thing about it is that there… that it sort of…
• 34:36
  Mark Pracht: by making Scott and Barta's wedding, which I'm sure was always part of something that he was thinking about, right?
• 34:44
  Mark Pracht: It sort of, like, takes this whole grand battle, like.
• 34:49
  Mark Pracht: you know, Orion just sort of stands around, you know?
• 34:53
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 34:54
  Mark Pracht: And, and,
• 34:57
  Mark Pracht: And that's it, but that's the nature of the beast. That's the nature of the fact that he finds out that the book's ending, and he has to wrap it up.
• 35:04
  Mark Pracht: In one issue.
• 35:06
  Mark Pracht: And what is… What do you do?
• 35:09
  Mark Pracht: You can't… I mean… I do…
• 35:14
  Mark Pracht: kind of wish that he'd sent everybody to Apocalypse, you know?
• 35:18
  Mark Pracht: To have some sort of face-off, but…
• 35:22
  Mark Pracht: I will say, the last page with Oberon and Shiloh seeing Darkseid is pretty awesome.
• 35:33
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 35:34
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and that's… that… I think that that really is a… really…
• 35:41
  Mark Pracht: interesting statement about the complexity of Darkseid that a lot of people don't get, you know?
• 35:49
  Mark Pracht: that…
• 35:53
  Mark Pracht: that… You know, there's…
• 35:59
  Mark Pracht: like, the dude's got eyes that could stop a clock, but not a wedding. Like, and I'm like, wow. Like, there's something deeply sad about what's happening here, you know?
• 36:11
  Sean Harklerode: Right. But life is, at best, bittersweet.
• 36:15
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 36:19
  Sean Harklerode: And that's, you know, Dark Side Laughing, which is… That's just a great ending.
• 36:27
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 36:28
  Mark Pracht: Well, and the thing is, is I kind of wonder if Jack isn't projecting himself into Darkseid in this moment, you know? Like…
• 36:36
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 36:38
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I think.
• 36:38
  Mark Pracht: dinner.
• 36:39
  Sean Harklerode: To say… to end it saying, life is at best bittersweet.
• 36:42
  Mark Pracht: Sweet.
• 36:44
  Sean Harklerode: That's gotta be Jack's statement on the whole Fourth World.
• 36:48
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 36:50
  Mark Pracht: I mean, You know, and then… and then Jeanette Kahn rolls in and says we should reprint these.
• 36:58
  Mark Pracht: We should get Jack to do more.
• 37:01
  Mark Pracht: And that we go into that story, which…
• 37:08
  Mark Pracht: I don't…
• 37:09
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, my first comment is, it's the… Best…
• 37:15
  Tad Eggleston: storytelling art I've seen from Jack in this entire time that we've read.
• 37:20
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 37:21
  Mark Pracht: Well, it's… it's… I think that he's finally…
• 37:26
  Mark Pracht: I think that Jack is fine… but I think that Jack is seeing people like Frank Miller, is seeing people like Neil Adams, is seeing people, you know, like.
• 37:36
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, but also, I think he's got more time, because some of this stuff…
• 37:42
  Tad Eggleston: is clearly from Jack and some of those backup
• 37:47
  Tad Eggleston: like, reminiscence of some of the stuff that we saw in, like, the newspaper backup store… newspaper…
• 37:53
  Tad Eggleston: or Newsboy Legion backup stories in some of these. Like, so it's not like Jack hasn't done storytelling art of this level
• 38:01
  Tad Eggleston: BEFORE.
• 38:03
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, yeah, but I'm also saying, like, his layouts are… are not…
• 38:09
  Mark Pracht: I think that there is a freedom in the layouts.
• 38:12
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, but I was talking about the layouts.
• 38:15
  Mark Pracht: So, sure.
• 38:15
  Tad Eggleston: Some of the early Newsboy Legion.
• 38:18
  Tad Eggleston: more creative and more free layouts. I think he takes it to another level on this… this book. Right. But… but what he really doesn't do is the strict 4- and 6 panel
• 38:29
  Tad Eggleston: No. Grids that he does through almost everything we've read so far.
• 38:33
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 38:34
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I will say there were times during this.
• 38:36
  Sean Harklerode: later? How much time allows?
• 38:40
  Mark Pracht: I can…
• 38:40
  Tad Eggleston: 1984 is when it came out, so 12 years later, so it probably wasn't started for at least 10 years, and or he'd been working on it the whole time, who knows?
• 38:51
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I would… I would hazard a guess that he had not been working on it, because, the… the… the…
• 38:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, certainly he's probably drawing these characters, he was certainly doing convention sketches and stuff like that, but I mean, like, I think that…
• 39:10
  Mark Pracht: My… my impression of Jack as, I get a job, I do a job.
• 39:15
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah. Once the job is over. I mean, I… he may have been thinking about what he could do.
• 39:22
  Mark Pracht: But I don't think he really sat down and tried to figure it out until Jeanette came and said.
• 39:27
  Mark Pracht: We're gonna… we're gonna give you one more shot at it.
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: I guess when I say working on it the whole time, it really comes down to, I don't know if Jack's the type of guy that would sometimes think on paper, whether he had…
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: rough thumbnail-type things. I would not have expected him to have done any finished art, or anywhere near finished art during that time, but I could totally see him as the type of guy who
• 39:55
  Tad Eggleston: Could have a… a idea…
• 40:00
  Tad Eggleston: And need to sketch it to get it out of his head, and then throw it in a file cabinet.
• 40:05
  Mark Pracht: You know, it's certainly possible. I'm willing to bet, like, things like the, the…
• 40:10
  Mark Pracht: The dog cavalry and stuff like that, these really kind of… I'm sure, like, he… he…
• 40:18
  Mark Pracht: you know, okay, so… Jack famously, you know, people would say Jack could create a character in 5 minutes, you know, he'd just… and that's like, yeah, he could draw something.
• 40:29
  Mark Pracht: that's not… fundamentally, I don't think that just having a drawing is a character. Like, there's nothing… there's no context to it. That doesn't… that doesn't mean it isn't amazing, and it doesn't mean that I'm trying to denigrate it, it's just that, you know, that you have to contextualize what that character is.
• 40:46
  Mark Pracht: did he have designs and stuff? I'm sure he did. But I think that… this…
• 40:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and the other thing is, I haven't read enough of the stuff in between. Maybe some of the layout styles is just stuff that he developed
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: In his in-between comics.
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: you know… What, what it… Yeah.
• 41:09
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, you know, like, at this point, he had been doing animation.
• 41:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 41:14
  Mark Pracht: He went over, and he was working for, I think Hanna-Barbera.
• 41:21
  Mark Pracht: Working on, well, famously, he was working on Thundar the Barbarian.
• 41:27
  Mark Pracht: Doing designs and stuff for that.
• 41:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 41:30
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 41:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which I think is back in shops this week with, Jason Aaron writing.
• 41:36
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 41:37
  Mark Pracht: And, and TurboTeen, which is about the most… Bizarre.
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: I guess, more than anything, this book shows,
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think the same breakneck speed of writing, or not writing, not drawing. I know, 100%. I feel like he was able… this feels like a book that was more a page or two a day, not six pages a day.
• 42:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, 100%. Yeah, no, no, no. And I think that that's a factor of they're probably paying him more because.
• 42:12
  Tad Eggleston: And or he's made more in-between, and he doesn't feel like he's gotta, you know… if the kids are done with college, he might…
• 42:19
  Tad Eggleston: not have the same overhead. They're a million…
• 42:23
  Mark Pracht: Well, and also, I mean, you have the Jeanette Kahn factor, in that she had come in and instituted things like royalties.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 42:29
  Mark Pracht: And ownership percentage, and things like that. And had…
• 42:34
  Mark Pracht: specifically brought in Jack to work on that stuff so that he could… they could give him some money. Like, I think it's… it's been fairly well documented that, like, the Superpowers storyline was focused on Darkseid and the New Gods characters because…
• 42:55
  Mark Pracht: DC… in the persona of Jeanette Khan had
• 43:00
  Mark Pracht: wanted to give Jack these opportunities to…
• 43:05
  Mark Pracht: not only be creative, but also to make money, so…
• 43:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 43:09
  Mark Pracht: and that, But… I, I, I…
• 43:17
  Mark Pracht: I'm… I'm gonna be really curious to see how…
• 43:22
  Mark Pracht: Sean, have you read The Hunger Dogs?
• 43:24
  Sean Harklerode: I have not.
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I haven't either, but I'm more excited to read it than I would have been a week.
• 43:30
  Mark Pracht: real interested to see what you guys think about Hunter Dogs, because I will tell you, I almost think that this story
• 43:40
  Mark Pracht: is… My preferred ending.
• 43:45
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 43:46
  Mark Pracht: I think that… It does…
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: weren't separate.
• 43:53
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I don't know if in your version.
• 43:56
  Tad Eggleston: like, because one of the things I read was the letter that he wrote at the end of… of…
• 44:05
  Tad Eggleston: this story when it was in New Gods number 6. Right.
• 44:11
  Tad Eggleston: And it mentions hunger dogs, so, like…
• 44:14
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean.
• 44:15
  Tad Eggleston: I think to him, they were two stories together.
• 44:19
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, he, he, I think that… It does carry on.
• 44:27
  Mark Pracht: there was quite, if I'm remembering correctly, there was quite a gap.
• 44:32
  Mark Pracht: Between this and when Hugger Dogs came out. And I think that's… that's a number of factors. I think that… I think that Jack was just a lot older, and…
• 44:42
  Mark Pracht: Moving a lot slower.
• 44:44
  Mark Pracht: And also trying to take his time with it.
• 44:47
  Mark Pracht: But.
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of release… The gap was… A year.
• 44:55
  Sean Harklerode: Hello.
• 44:55
  Tad Eggleston: Less than a year.
• 44:57
  Mark Pracht: Wow.
• 44:57
  Tad Eggleston: November of 84 to March of 85.
• 45:00
  Mark Pracht: Wow, I'm completely wrong, then. But.
• 45:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, again…
• 45:06
  Tad Eggleston: release and working on… I mean, if they… if they commissioned this story when they started reprinting.
• 45:15
  Tad Eggleston: new gods. Yeah. And depending on what… what the, the release…
• 45:24
  Tad Eggleston: length was for the… I mean… There's lots of…
• 45:31
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't have to be right on top of each other, but… but there was a relatively…
• 45:37
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 45:37
  Tad Eggleston: Small period in between them.
• 45:41
  Mark Pracht: Well, I will say this. You can certain… I… for myself and the artwork, I definitely miss Mike Royer.
• 45:50
  Tad Eggleston: Droyer, not the…
• 45:52
  Mark Pracht: is not.
• 45:53
  Tad Eggleston: anchor on your gods.
• 45:55
  Mark Pracht: D. Bruce Banner.
• 45:57
  Sean Harklerode: worked on hunger dogs.
• 45:59
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 46:00
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 46:01
  Sean Harklerode: But, yeah.
• 46:02
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, I'm always fascinated by this Mike Royer-Jack Kirby relationship, because, you know, they worked, you know, in many ways, I think Mike Royer is the perfect Jack Kirby anchor, and,
• 46:17
  Mark Pracht: Probably… in many ways.
• 46:20
  Mark Pracht: I could almost… I think I should just say it. Jack Kirby… the 1970s and later Jack Kirby, Mike Royer is the perfect nicker.
• 46:29
  Mark Pracht: And, I remember reading somewhere that they actually never met.
• 46:34
  Mark Pracht: until, like, sometime very close to Kirby's death, you know? That they never actually spoke in person, or… or, not in per… like, face-to-face.
• 46:44
  Mark Pracht: And that… I find that fascinating.
• 46:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, Kirby's been reading some, and I'm just flipping through the first couple of pages of Hunger Dogs, and, like, what I will say with absolute certainty is he read some European comics.
• 47:02
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 47:03
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, I mean, I think that… I think that…
• 47:07
  Mark Pracht: he's… he had several things that he said that I think he really, really was, envious of, like, what Mobius could do, and the… the…
• 47:18
  Mark Pracht: the quality of the printing, and I think that, you know, doing a graphic novel at that time was a way to try to do that in the U.S.
• 47:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I, I, I, like, noticed it some with the, the issue that we just read, the, the, what, even gods must die?
• 47:34
  Tad Eggleston: Where it's clear that, you know, you can see the backwards influence of
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: Roy Crane, Winsor McKay, like, full-page comic strip artist.
• 47:50
  Tad Eggleston: But… but also the contemporary forward influence of… of, kind of, the European… Band-Aid to snay.
• 48:01
  Tad Eggleston: going on, but… but just in the opening pages of… of Hunter Dogs, I see it, like.
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: to the nth degree, while still having all of the best of his own stuff and American superhero comics. So, like… Sure.
• 48:19
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, look, that's what it's supposed to be. It's supposed to be these influences going back and forth, you know?
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, literally, other than… Other than the… the… The Newspaper Legion backups.
• 48:37
  Tad Eggleston: That, that were more detailed, etc. The reprints.
• 48:42
  Tad Eggleston: These are the first things that I've seen that… that…
• 48:49
  Tad Eggleston: really, really speak to Jack as a fine artist, rather than a… master draftsman… quick artist, innovator. Right.
• 49:04
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, again, you can't be that, and, I mean, in general… in general, you have to be able to be a fine artist before you can be a commercial artist, so, so, like…
• 49:15
  Tad Eggleston: It's not… It's surprising that he had it in him. It's just really awesome that…
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: He's given an opportunity to do it.
• 49:24
  Mark Pracht: Right. Oh, no, and like, look, that…
• 49:27
  Mark Pracht: That speaks to the change of leadership at… I don't really want to get too much into hunger Dogs, because we do have a whole episode to talk.
• 49:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no, no, I went back.
• 49:36
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. But.
• 49:38
  Tad Eggleston: the first couple of pages, but anyway…
• 49:40
  Mark Pracht: And I didn't read any of them, just the… Yeah, no, no, no.
• 49:45
  Mark Pracht: No, it's fine. Like, I flip forward, too. So, but, you know, look.
• 49:52
  Mark Pracht: I think it is really, really, really hard to understate how… important.
• 50:02
  Mark Pracht: Jeanette Kahn was to the industry in the way she took over DC and the way she changed how they did what they did.
• 50:11
  Mark Pracht: without Jeanette Kahn, you don't have vertigo, you don't… like, she saw the value in wooing Jack back to comics on some level. She…
• 50:23
  Mark Pracht: you know, no matter what Jim Shooter says, it was Jeanette and Paul Levitz who
• 50:30
  Mark Pracht: Made the direct market a thing, you know?
• 50:34
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, from… I…
• 50:37
  Mark Pracht: should say, from the publisher end of things, because it was, you know, you know…
• 50:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and they were also very instrumental in getting more royalty.
• 50:48
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, 100%.
• 50:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 50:51
  Mark Pracht: You know, famously.
• 50:52
  Tad Eggleston: And not just royalties from their books, but as you brought up, like, the toy line, the.
• 50:57
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: You know, Paul did a lot of work to get creators, at the very least, credited in the movies that were heavily based on their stuff.
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: Internet.
• 51:08
  Mark Pracht: 100%, yeah.
• 51:10
  Mark Pracht: God bless you, Paul Levitz.
• 51:13
  Mark Pracht: He said with… he said with… some desire.
• 51:23
  Mark Pracht: Look, but God bless both of them, and like, you know, look, this story we just read doesn't exist without Jeanette Kahn and Paula.
• 51:31
  Tad Eggleston: I believe it.
• 51:32
  Mark Pracht: the, Hunger Dogs doesn't exist. Like, look, I think that… I think that…
• 51:43
  Mark Pracht: As we've talked about on several occasions, two things can be true.
• 51:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 51:47
  Mark Pracht: And I think that the truth is that
• 51:50
  Mark Pracht: those Kirby books, when they were originally released in the 70s, didn't sell as well as what
• 51:58
  Mark Pracht: Carmen Infantino and the team at DC hoped that they would. And that Jack hoped that they would. They just didn't, right? And we can come up with all sorts of weird conspiracy theories about people trying to screw Jack.
• 52:13
  Mark Pracht: you know, like… but, like, nobody… nobody publishes a book to lose money, or to have it not sell, right? And if it had sold like mad, they would… they would have continued publishing it, right? But it's also…
• 52:26
  Mark Pracht: It is that there is a different kind of market in the 80s. It is that there is a different leadership that… that…
• 52:33
  Mark Pracht: Probably was also highly aware of… how valuable
• 52:40
  Mark Pracht: this… this material could be as an IP?
• 52:45
  Mark Pracht: Right. I mean, like, look at it. This all happens, and then Paul Lovettz does the Great Darkness Saga.
• 52:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 52:52
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 52:53
  Mark Pracht: So, I mean, like, like, there is… there is certainly an idea, like.
• 52:57
  Mark Pracht: DC is not just turning the characters back over to him, but they're also like, hey, look, I think if you finish this out, we can re… we can energize these characters as part of our…
• 53:08
  Mark Pracht: shared universe, you know? And I think that… I think that all of that stuff is true, all of it is, you know, like, but it's these two… like, the other side of it is true, too, and, like, we've had… like, we've been talking about, like, there was… the Bronze Age was not…
• 53:25
  Mark Pracht: 1940, it wasn't 1950, it wasn't 1960. It was… you know, look, it was a bunch of pothead kids sitting around going like, hey man, the duck… the duck talks, man, you know?
• 53:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he did cool things with that.
• 53:42
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean, and I'm not, I'm not…
• 53:45
  Tad Eggleston: Have the talking duck run for president.
• 53:47
  Mark Pracht: Right. I am not… I am not denigrating that, but it's just that that was… that was the world that we were in, and, like, a lot of people have talked about that. A lot of people… you know, it's so funny, because, like, it is funny, because, like, when I do readings about, like, the late 70s and early 80s, and some of the frustrations that…
• 54:05
  Mark Pracht: specifically Jim Shooter talks about.
• 54:09
  Mark Pracht: It's funny how it kind of coincides with the late 90s, early 2000s, where, you know, they would talk about all the artists
• 54:19
  Mark Pracht: were so busy playing PlayStation.
• 54:24
  Mark Pracht: that the, you know, the deadlines kept getting blown, and, you know, whereas Jim is sort of talking about, like, there's a lot of guys who are indulging themselves in various ways, and, you know.
• 54:37
  Mark Pracht: the book was supposed to be in on April 1st, and we get it in May, the end of May, you know? And it's like…
• 54:45
  Mark Pracht: And that… that…
• 54:51
  Mark Pracht: it's interesting to look at, like, Levitz and Kahn running DC in this sort of, like, we have to get back to business, you know, that we have a business model. Right.
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: But it's, like, it's another thing that you probably know more about than I do, but I'd be curious to be able to read a history of the era from a more…
• 55:13
  Tad Eggleston: economic perspective, because I almost wonder if part of what happened is comics died so hard.
• 55:21
  Tad Eggleston: that the businessmen had abandoned them. The people keeping them alive were the people who loved comics, and they didn't get business. Because so much of what we talk about just sounds like…
• 55:31
  Tad Eggleston: like, anybody who understands business, and I'm not even talking about people who understand business and want to screw people, I'm talking about people
• 55:39
  Tad Eggleston: Who just want to have a sustainable business.
• 55:41
  Mark Pracht: If you're gonna… if you're gonna run a business, you have to have profit, right? You have to be able to make money, because they.
• 55:47
  Tad Eggleston: But I also don't think… I mean, and, like…
• 55:51
  Tad Eggleston: You hear lots of stories about how pre-direct market, they'd start getting, you know, because comics were still returnable, but they stopped having them
• 56:01
  Tad Eggleston: cut, you know, send the covers back, because it was too much, it was affidavit returns, and there were times where they'd have more books returned than they sold, but the newsstands were moved up, so they didn't know how to handle that, blah blah blah, and, like.
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: On one side, yeah, that's all good reasons for this, and on the other side, like, real business people?
• 56:24
  Tad Eggleston: Who also believed in comics as a product.
• 56:28
  Tad Eggleston: would have found ways to have a lot of those things. You know, I mean, for that matter, like.
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of sales, the thing that's always really gotten to me is that…
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: they sent stuff out in bundles to newsstands, not just, like, in bundles of one comic. I have no idea how they were tracking individual comic sales. I wonder how much they were tracking independent comic sales by positive fan mail.
• 56:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, look, like, the pre…
• 57:03
  Mark Pracht: The pre-direct market world
• 57:07
  Mark Pracht: is really… it… like, look, it is full of corruption, you know? Right. Like, the distributors were all run by the mob, and they had their deal, and they were gonna get as much money, and like, you know…
• 57:21
  Mark Pracht: Cadence owned Marvel, Warner Bros. owned DC, and nobody felt like they were screwing anybody, because they used these massive companies, right? But, you know, at the same time, like, you do have to, like, you know, each division has to figure out how to make it good.
• 57:36
  Tad Eggleston: When did Warner Bros. buy DC?
• 57:38
  Mark Pracht: It was, early… early mid-70s? I think it was 74, 73, I think?
• 57:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that is still.
• 57:48
  Mark Pracht: I may… I may be wrong about that.
• 57:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but that could still be after all of the Kirby era.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: The original Kirby era.
• 57:57
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but…
• 57:57
  Tad Eggleston: And that's what I'm talking about, is like…
• 58:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm certain that overall DC sales weren't what they hoped they would be, and I bet you that, like, the people who try to say that Jack was just screwed and New God sales were through the roof, blah blah blah, they're overstating it too, but what I… Sure.
• 58:16
  Tad Eggleston: what I haven't seen anything is, like, any convincing evidence that anybody in the DC business offices, or even the Marvel business offices at the time, had any good way to know what sales were, period. Much less sales on an individual book.
• 58:33
  Mark Pracht: I think… I think that… I think that there was a lot of guesswork, but I mean, it also was, like.
• 58:38
  Mark Pracht: It's sort of… look, I… I fall back… I fall back on that somebody there knew what was happening. Somebody had to, and maybe… maybe it was… maybe it was about family, I don't know, but I mean, it's sort of like…
• 58:55
  Mark Pracht: When you have an institution, like a business, an industry, right, that operates in a certain way.
• 59:05
  Mark Pracht: For decades and decades, and it's been profitable, it's been non-profitable, things… it… it ebbs and flows.
• 59:13
  Mark Pracht: it's really hard to change the paradigm, right? Right. It's the same thing, you know, like, and that the paradigm is developed
• 59:24
  Mark Pracht: Not just through people saying, oh, yeah, this is how we can screw people, but just that…
• 59:31
  Mark Pracht: you know, I always go back, you know, the original… the return of original art, I always go back, it's like, there's multiple things where they have… they're talking to these people from the Golden Age, and they're like, did you ever get art back? And I said, no, I didn't want it.
• 59:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:44
  Mark Pracht: You know? And the thing is, is, like, that… The real paradigm shift
• 59:51
  Mark Pracht: and I… I truly believe this, is… organized fandom, right?
• 59:58
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. With this idea that there was… there was an audience that wasn't just a greasy-finger kid that just walked up to a spinner rack at the newsstand and looked for the
• 1:00:13
  Mark Pracht: The cover with the most colors on it, you know?
• 1:00:15
  Tad Eggleston: But… but part of it is also…
• 1:00:19
  Tad Eggleston: you know, and Phil and I were talking about this on the regular episode a minute ago, like, history doesn't happen
• 1:00:28
  Tad Eggleston: In a vacuum, and we don't look like… so, a lot of better bookkeeping comes from computers, and the ability to store more information, the ability to look at things differently.
• 1:00:38
  Tad Eggleston: for that matter, better sales, they might not have been talking about sales on the streets at all, they might have been talking strictly of how easy it is to sell ads in this book.
• 1:00:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know, how much of their revenue was from ad sales versus… and the ad sales, you know, how are… how are…
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: Now, just from knowing people who've been in business a long time, they're…
• 1:01:03
  Tad Eggleston: There's a lot more that we have data and keep data on over the last 15 years that was just done by gut, and there are some people that go, oh, our guts were great, and there are other people that go.
• 1:01:17
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know that my gut was that good, but it was a lot better than the other guys. Yeah, sure. And at the time, that's all I needed to do. All I needed was for my gut to be better than the other guy's, but my god, if you'd given me this data…
• 1:01:31
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. No, no, no. I mean, like, I'm not trying… look, I just… I've always found these questions interesting. I don't have answers.
• 1:01:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't either.
• 1:01:40
  Mark Pracht: I have, I have.
• 1:01:41
  Tad Eggleston: I, I am… Asking the questions, not…
• 1:01:44
  Mark Pracht: I'm trying to.
• 1:01:44
  Tad Eggleston: provide the answers. I'm trying to think of the larger context that this all lives in, is that…
• 1:01:52
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I could.
• 1:01:53
  Tad Eggleston: be as simple as people who didn't like Kirby's books decided that they were Y…
• 1:02:00
  Tad Eggleston: overall numbers were down, because they really only had overall numbers. They didn't have a good way to know.
• 1:02:08
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think… I think that there were people who did not like Kirby's art. Right. That's very cool. There, I mean, there were people like Marshall Rogers.
• 1:02:17
  Mark Pracht: was one of my favorite Batman artists ever. There were people, like.
• 1:02:21
  Mark Pracht: people as famous as Paul Levitz were like, this is terrible.
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:02:25
  Mark Pracht: And I look at that art, and I'm like, how can you even think that? But,
• 1:02:31
  Mark Pracht: But the thing, you know, and… but that's… that's the shifting tides, you know, like, that's the shifting tides. Like, I… I think.
• 1:02:38
  Sean Harklerode: Herb Trimp. Herb Trimpey. Yeah. Talked about how he was terrible.
• 1:02:44
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:02:45
  Mark Pracht: But I mean, and I think… I think the water…
• 1:02:48
  Sean Harklerode: Central Hulk artist, man. Well, I mean…
• 1:02:52
  Mark Pracht: I mean… But, I mean, I think that the ground zero detonation, as far as comic book artists.
• 1:02:59
  Mark Pracht: And comic book art really is Neil Adams.
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:03:04
  Mark Pracht: The idea that somebody who was a trained
• 1:03:07
  Mark Pracht: Maybe not fine artists, but a trained commercial artist would jump into this business and be so dominant that.
• 1:03:17
  Tad Eggleston: Who was also completely happy to jump away for periods of time if he wasn't getting paid.
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, oh, you don't want to pay me well enough? I'll go make more money for less work than I find less interesting, but I've got a family to feed.
• 1:03:32
  Mark Pracht: Right. But I mean, like, it's… but that's also because he had a skill set… Right. …that a lot of these guys who were working in comics didn't have. He had a skill set that… that… that Jack didn't have. Right. Like, Jack wasn't gonna get a job drawing a…
• 1:03:52
  Mark Pracht: cigarette ad or something for magazines, unless they very specifically wanted Kirby artwork, whereas.
• 1:03:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it's why Eisner was able to have a different career than a lot of these guys do, because he was able to use his comics, not just to tell stories, but to teach, to, you know… Sure. He didn't necessarily have the same commercial art set that Neil had, but he did have the
• 1:04:17
  Tad Eggleston: The ability to market not just his comics, but his studio.
• 1:04:21
  Mark Pracht: Right. And the people who worked into it, to be able to do…
• 1:04:26
  Tad Eggleston: Different sets of things.
• 1:04:29
  Mark Pracht: Right, I mean, but you… I mean, like, you all, like, it's the whole thing of, like, Adams lands like a fucking atomic bomb.
• 1:04:37
  Mark Pracht: And everybody, like, even, you know, Carmine Infantino, who doesn't draw that way at all.
• 1:04:44
  Mark Pracht: And I… you know, like, people hate later Infantino, where it gets even more angular and weird. Like, his Star Wars books are just… they're almost surreal in how…
• 1:04:58
  Mark Pracht: like…
• 1:05:00
  Mark Pracht: just strangely angular everything is, but I love it. I think it's awesome. But I mean, like, you, you know, Infantino would talk… like, Neil Adams was, like, the, you know.
• 1:05:11
  Mark Pracht: Infantino was the THE cover artist for DC, and then suddenly Neil Adams was THE cover artist, you know? Right. And… but I think that…
• 1:05:21
  Mark Pracht: But I think that that…
• 1:05:24
  Mark Pracht: you're right, because there's probably a lot of people in those offices that were like, we need more stuff like Neil Adams, because this is what it's selling.
• 1:05:31
  Mark Pracht: This is what's selling, you know? And it's like,
• 1:05:37
  Mark Pracht: empirically, all I'm saying is that I think that there was a shift
• 1:05:44
  Mark Pracht: there was… there was two shifts happening, you know? There was this… this…
• 1:05:49
  Mark Pracht: explosion of, like, what we would call quote-unquote ultra-realistic artwork led by Neil Adams that his followers
• 1:05:58
  Mark Pracht: grabbed onto, you know, your Frank Miller, your, you know, even Marshall Rogers, who is slightly more cartoony, but does have more of a, you know.
• 1:06:08
  Mark Pracht: he was an architectural student, so, like, all of his buildings are super realistic, and in, right.
• 1:06:14
  Mark Pracht: But, like, all of those… all the Krusty Bunkers guys, you know, like, that was this thing that was happening, and then you have somebody like Kirby.
• 1:06:24
  Mark Pracht: Who all of those guys admired and loved, right?
• 1:06:27
  Mark Pracht: But is still working in this way, that… that… 10-year-old kid walking up to…
• 1:06:37
  Mark Pracht: The newsstand and seeing all the covers, is maybe gonna look at that one and be like, that looks weird.
• 1:06:44
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I…
• 1:06:46
  Mark Pracht: And there's a reason they started putting Neil Adams covers on his books, you know?
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: I would need to go and look at…
• 1:06:55
  Tad Eggleston: like, old Fantastic Four more, but I feel like he also initially got the wrong lesson, because as I think about one of the things that's… that felt…
• 1:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: odd to me in the beginning of our Kirby run here is that he was getting way more detailed with
• 1:07:16
  Tad Eggleston: with things that didn't matter to the storytelling in the background, while getting way more basic with panel structure and whatnot. So, like, he was throwing time into detail. He was seeing that these guys, who did more detail, in part because they were trained in that sort of thing, and therefore could do it quickly. It wasn't…
• 1:07:36
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: a stretch for them to be able to put that, and they were doing it to make up for the fact that they didn't have his storytelling jobs, right? But…
• 1:07:45
  Tad Eggleston: But he saw it and was like, oh, I need to… to handle that detail, but to do that, I gotta drop…
• 1:07:51
  Mark Pracht: dial back, and we're gonna have this many splash pages, and everything else is gonna be 6 panel pages. Yeah. And it's like…
• 1:07:59
  Tad Eggleston: He almost traded some of what he was good at
• 1:08:03
  Tad Eggleston: For this idea that this is the new thing.
• 1:08:08
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, that… but that drawing a two-page spread… Technically, probably was quicker
• 1:08:18
  Mark Pracht: Than drawing 9 panels on a single page.
• 1:08:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:08:23
  Mark Pracht: Even with all that detail, You know, and plus.
• 1:08:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but I was talking about the detail he put into the 6 panels.
• 1:08:30
  Mark Pracht: Oh, sure.
• 1:08:32
  Tad Eggleston: More than the…
• 1:08:32
  Mark Pracht: Then there are also, you know, there's also the panels where, like, when we were talking about the… the…
• 1:08:38
  Mark Pracht: Two panels with the, the, file cabinet.
• 1:08:42
  Mark Pracht: Like, there's some… there… the… there…
• 1:08:46
  Mark Pracht: Most of those are motion lines, especially the one where it hits, hits, the… whatever, the dinosaur.
• 1:08:56
  Sean Harklerode: Ordella.
• 1:08:56
  Mark Pracht: Della, the dinosaur, yeah,
• 1:08:59
  Mark Pracht: that… that that is almost all just motion lines, and wham, and, like, two… three boxes, you know, and, like, half a body, you know? Like, and that's… like, all of that, like, that's not…
• 1:09:14
  Mark Pracht: That's… that's Jack, and I love it, and I think it's awesome, but all I'm saying, I think that we… this… this conversation maybe is… is just getting kind of out of control here, but I mean, like, it… I just think that.
• 1:09:29
  Tad Eggleston: Us? Never.
• 1:09:31
  Mark Pracht: I think, I think you're trying to bring it back.
• 1:09:33
  Sean Harklerode: Is that a play on Devil Dinosaur?
• 1:09:39
  Mark Pracht: Oh.
• 1:09:43
  Mark Pracht: It's,
• 1:09:46
  Mark Pracht: I always thought the Devil Dinosaur was something that came out of his 2001 adaptation. You know, Moon Boy.
• 1:09:53
  Mark Pracht: with the little ape things, yeah, I mean, like.
• 1:09:56
  Sean Harklerode: P-Man came out.
• 1:09:57
  Mark Pracht: Yes. I'm not saying directly out of it, but, like, visually inspired. But,
• 1:10:06
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, I just think it's really interesting to look
• 1:10:10
  Mark Pracht: I think that when he comes back for Even Gods Must Die in the 80s, to wrap this thing up as best he can.
• 1:10:18
  Mark Pracht: like… There is… we're getting… it's sort of like… it's sort of like the Infantino thing.
• 1:10:26
  Mark Pracht: It's… it feels even more Kirby.
• 1:10:29
  Mark Pracht: like… The bodies are a little more boxy. The technology in the background is always hyper…
• 1:10:39
  Mark Pracht: dense, you know? Right. There's that page,
• 1:10:44
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Like, what's that page? Where is it?
• 1:10:48
  Mark Pracht: Like, the page… page 18 of… even gods must die. Like… It's…
• 1:10:55
  Mark Pracht: just a full page of Kirby tech.
• 1:11:00
  Mark Pracht: And it's… Awesome.
• 1:11:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:11:08
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:11:08
  Tad Eggleston: I will say that…
• 1:11:09
  Mark Pracht: I think also, as a storytelling element, we're talking about a society that's being overwhelmed by its technology, right? That's what we're doing here.
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: In Even Gods Must Die, it was page 13, which has its share of tech, too.
• 1:11:23
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the two circular panels, the, the… That was when… well, actually.
• 1:11:31
  Tad Eggleston: Two circular panels, and, if you're paying enough attention, a really odd-shaped panel on the right.
• 1:11:39
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I actually, when I was reading this, I clocked that panel because it also seems like…
• 1:11:46
  Mark Pracht: it should… like, I was like, oh, this must be a double pa… like, there must be another page of this.
• 1:11:53
  Tad Eggleston: And there's not, and… and that…
• 1:11:56
  Tad Eggleston: It works for me. This is the page that I went, oh, this is a whole different ballgame.
• 1:12:01
  Sean Harklerode: Sure. Storytelling-wise.
• 1:12:03
  Tad Eggleston: I hit this page and went, this is the best Kirby page I have seen to date. And I didn't have to turn many more pages before I went, oh, except for this one.
• 1:12:14
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, except for this one.
• 1:12:16
  Tad Eggleston: And, like…
• 1:12:18
  Tad Eggleston: I almost forgot about it. I only, like, just saw it again, flipping through, looking for the tech page you said, because just flipping the first couple of pages into hunger Dogs is like, oh, except for that one, and that one, and that one.
• 1:12:32
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the, the, the, the page where, where, Da-da-da-da-da…
• 1:12:43
  Tad Eggleston: I should remember his name, because isn't it from the Inquisition?
• 1:12:48
  Tad Eggleston: what's his name? Like, appears in his cloak. Page 20 and 21.
• 1:12:53
  Mark Pracht: Tassade? Tassade. DeSade, yeah.
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Like, A, that's your first, like, oh, we've been reading European comics.
• 1:13:06
  Tad Eggleston: But, but B, like, Not just for panel structure, but… but for… you can have action that's not…
• 1:13:15
  Tad Eggleston: Spidey action.
• 1:13:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. You can have… you can have action that it's the… it's the…
• 1:13:21
  Tad Eggleston: The way you draw out time that creates the tension, rather than…
• 1:13:29
  Mark Pracht: Well, I… and I… you know what? I… I will also say this, and this goes… this, this can be about the words, Tad, so, I mean.
• 1:13:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, I need to give it another read, because I read it really fast, but the words were better than anything I've seen.
• 1:13:45
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 1:13:45
  Tad Eggleston: So, that… It's worth mentioning that I think he did have an editor for this one.
• 1:13:50
  Mark Pracht: Shh, yes.
• 1:13:50
  Sean Harklerode: I will say, I read this, and, and, and pretty quickly, I mean.
• 1:13:57
  Sean Harklerode: I saw it was 48 pages, and like, oh, I don't know how long this is gonna take, and I think under half an hour, I read this.
• 1:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:06
  Sean Harklerode: Which… You know, again, It was, I really enjoyed it.
• 1:14:14
  Sean Harklerode: Well, everything you said about the art, it just feels so different.
• 1:14:19
  Sean Harklerode: From what came before.
• 1:14:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. But…
• 1:14:23
  Sean Harklerode: Definitely, as you say.
• 1:14:24
  Tad Eggleston: While still quintessentially… Kirby, like.
• 1:14:28
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: I think… I think what I love the most about this is, like, this is everything that I wanted before, and hadn't even quite been able to put my finger on as, like.
• 1:14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Kirby is this lion, why isn't he doing…
• 1:14:46
  Mark Pracht: Well, I think… I think… I think that… What you just said.
• 1:14:52
  Mark Pracht: He's editing himself.
• 1:14:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:55
  Mark Pracht: he probably wasn't pushing himself either, you know? Like…
• 1:14:58
  Tad Eggleston: And putting out way too many books, and scripting himself. I mean, again, like, I… I would love, love, like, if there was a time machine, and we could go back and do it again, I would love to see what New Gods looks like if you throw…
• 1:15:16
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know who the right editor at the time was, but if we're going back in time, let's give him Karen Berger, or Shelley Bond, or Diana Schutz.
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: Let's give him Denny O'Neill to do the writing.
• 1:15:32
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:32
  Tad Eggleston: He still does the plotting.
• 1:15:34
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:15:35
  Tad Eggleston: But Denny fixes the dialogue.
• 1:15:38
  Mark Pracht: How much would just the… well, and get rid of Coletta on any of the inks, no Coletta inks, period.
• 1:15:44
  Tad Eggleston: How much would that…
• 1:15:46
  Mark Pracht: Only if you have a deadline problem.
• 1:15:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but we've got a time machine now, so we don't have a deadline problem.
• 1:15:56
  Mark Pracht: I mean, yeah, I think, I think that, I think that… Clearly.
• 1:16:02
  Tad Eggleston: And I also think that all of those people would wind up saying that it was the easiest job they ever had. We barely had to do anything.
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: Jack did it all, we just polished.
• 1:16:14
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that, like, just to, like, the… the most, like…
• 1:16:20
  Mark Pracht: I think that it's really interesting how
• 1:16:23
  Mark Pracht: I feel like it's in these last… this… this particular month of reading, like Darkseid has sort of become…
• 1:16:31
  Mark Pracht: The dark side that… I really remember when I was reading.
• 1:16:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Because, like, this moment…
• 1:16:39
  Mark Pracht: On page 42, when they're talking about the reanimated people that he's killed.
• 1:16:46
  Mark Pracht: You know, that he's, like, bringing back all of these people that… that used to be his cadre of…
• 1:16:52
  Mark Pracht: And… And,
• 1:16:55
  Mark Pracht: it's the… at the very bottom, where you see it's just the top of Darkseid's face, and he's like, animated bodies, they're shells without identity, and you realize that it's like…
• 1:17:06
  Mark Pracht: Darkseid's kind of lonely.
• 1:17:12
  Mark Pracht: And… That's fascinating to me.
• 1:17:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and this is another brilliant layout page.
• 1:17:20
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 1:17:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm in, like, brilliant, brilliant layout page.
• 1:17:25
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:17:28
  Mark Pracht: I will say, I loved all the layouts. There were a couple of pages where I wasn't quite sure…
• 1:17:35
  Mark Pracht: how I was supposed to read through the page.
• 1:17:39
  Mark Pracht: There's the one with the circular thing that's got the arrows, and it felt like it was… that was going backwards, but… and that one didn't bother me, because I had the arrows, but…
• 1:17:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, and see, see… You know, go ahead.
• 1:17:52
  Mark Pracht: With so few word balloons, it was hard to… Peg the… the progression.
• 1:18:00
  Mark Pracht: I… and that's a really minor gripe, because, like, at a certain point, like, with this page.
• 1:18:12
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it… it all works, but yeah, it's funny, because it kind of… it goes in, like, a Z formation.
• 1:18:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. What I was… When I was…
• 1:18:22
  Mark Pracht: Your last panel is on the… is on the left-hand side of the page, right?
• 1:18:26
  Sean Harklerode: It's almost like it's cut together. Yeah, it is. Like a collage.
• 1:18:31
  Tad Eggleston: What I was gonna say is, is, is twofold.
• 1:18:35
  Tad Eggleston: The, the first is… that…
• 1:18:41
  Tad Eggleston: I normally am annoyed by arrows. I think that you should find a way to draw the reader through the page, but he actually incorporated the arrows into the art in a way that made them cool.
• 1:18:54
  Tad Eggleston: And I think that all of the pages where I truly had an issue, there were arrows.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: And the other pages, I think two things were true. Either
• 1:19:05
  Tad Eggleston: A, he did a good job of, like, this one really does draw your eye, but the other thing is…
• 1:19:13
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it actually matters which order you read it in.
• 1:19:16
  Tad Eggleston: They're kind of simultaneous, like, the pages where it doesn't tell you
• 1:19:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I would often find myself reading it multiple times over because of the way that I was taking it in, not because I felt like I needed to put it in the proper order, but, like, to get that feeling that, oh, this is all going on at once.
• 1:19:39
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:19:40
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I'll put on my editor hat.
• 1:19:44
  Sean Harklerode: Whose leg is that?
• 1:19:47
  Tad Eggleston: Where?
• 1:19:49
  Sean Harklerode: At the top of 42.
• 1:19:53
  Sean Harklerode: There's just a leg hanging out underneath.
• 1:19:59
  Sean Harklerode: that panel.
• 1:20:01
  Mark Pracht: Oh, you know, it's… okay, so if it's…
• 1:20:05
  Tad Eggleston: Somebody he tossed up in the rafters.
• 1:20:08
  Sean Harklerode: That's what I'm assuming.
• 1:20:09
  Mark Pracht: the Zoc pa… that's actually part of the panel where he's going through the door, right?
• 1:20:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:20:14
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:20:14
  Mark Pracht: But it's… the negative space background does kind of make you go, like, where's that from?
• 1:20:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:20:21
  Mark Pracht: Which actually really, really, that strikes my brain of something I saw just the other day. Some guy was watching the original Star Wars.
• 1:20:31
  Mark Pracht: And he's like, I think I saw something that no one has ever seen before.
• 1:20:36
  Mark Pracht: because I've never seen it mentioned anywhere, is that when Han is sitting at the panel on the Millennium Falcon, when Luke is doing the remote training.
• 1:20:46
  Mark Pracht: Apparently, there is a full ashtray.
• 1:20:51
  Mark Pracht: Sitting on the console.
• 1:20:56
  Tad Eggleston: Guy has to go look for it now.
• 1:20:58
  Mark Pracht: Now I gotta go look for it. Yeah. So…
• 1:21:01
  Tad Eggleston: I also appreciate, on this page.
• 1:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: two things. There are two, like, thicker panel borders.
• 1:21:08
  Tad Eggleston: One of them leads from the hanging
• 1:21:14
  Tad Eggleston: foot panel up around the panel above it, and then stops, but then the other
• 1:21:22
  Tad Eggleston: is open-ended on both sides, and just, like, a pathway between, and, like, that…
• 1:21:28
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the fact that he's messing around stylish… stylistically, not just with the…
• 1:21:35
  Tad Eggleston: the size, shape, and location of panels, but literally with how he splits them up. There have been a couple of places where I noticed,
• 1:21:44
  Tad Eggleston: like… The panel had… Vanishing lines.
• 1:21:51
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know.
• 1:21:52
  Mark Pracht: you know, where.
• 1:21:52
  Tad Eggleston: Where it was boxed on the bottom and open on the top, you know. He's really…
• 1:21:58
  Tad Eggleston: really taking advantage of all of the… actually, 46 is an example of that, where they're closed on the bottom as Orion and Darkseid are shooting each other, duking it out, and open on the top, giving you just this sense of…
• 1:22:19
  Tad Eggleston: action, chaos… Flying around, but, like, not in space.
• 1:22:26
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:22:27
  Tad Eggleston: you know… There are boundaries, they're just much bigger than the box.
• 1:22:36
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, he uses the medium.
• 1:22:42
  Tad Eggleston: To a really impressive degree.
• 1:22:45
  Tad Eggleston: in… Yeah.
• 1:22:45
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that… I really do think that… At this point, jack,
• 1:22:58
  Mark Pracht: Jack is just… unleashed. I mean, like, he doesn't have anything to prove to anybody anymore, right?
• 1:23:06
  Tad Eggleston: Here's another quick question.
• 1:23:09
  Tad Eggleston: Because The Hunger Dogs is DC graphic novel number 4. First, I didn't even realize DC also did a graphic novel series like Marvel did, so I'm now curious to go figure out what the other ones were, because Marvel's graphic novels are…
• 1:23:25
  Tad Eggleston: Some of the unsung… gems of the Marvel Universe.
• 1:23:31
  Mark Pracht: There was a… actually, there was a recent issue of, there was a recent back issue magazine that actually went… that…
• 1:23:40
  Mark Pracht: that explored… the graphic novel, lines of both DC and Marvel.
• 1:23:46
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:23:46
  Mark Pracht: It's a really good read.
• 1:23:48
  Tad Eggleston: But then, the other thing at the bottom, you know, cause,
• 1:23:53
  Tad Eggleston: I originally read this in… in the back of issue 6.
• 1:23:59
  Tad Eggleston: of… New Gods, the reprints, where it had the three-page essay from…
• 1:24:05
  Tad Eggleston: Kirby talking about what was coming next, but… but the only place on… on… DC Universe that… that… that…
• 1:24:21
  Mark Pracht: exists.
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: Something dogs. Why, why did I manage to forget the, the.
• 1:24:25
  Mark Pracht: Underdogs.
• 1:24:26
  Tad Eggleston: Hunger Dogs exists, is…
• 1:24:28
  Sean Harklerode: Diamond Dogs.
• 1:24:31
  Tad Eggleston: Is that the end of… the New Gods Omnibus.
• 1:24:37
  Mark Pracht: Right. And right before you get to that.
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: You've got The King Returns, the ad, you know, 10 years ago, Jack Kirby drew the future, today he ends it. But underneath it, it says, following the publication of Mr. Miracle number 18 in 1973, Kirby said goodbye to the Fourth World characters for over a decade. Then in 1984, a new reprint
• 1:24:57
  Tad Eggleston: miniseries appeared that collected all 11 issues of The New Gods. Its sixth and final issue featured an all-new story entitled Even Gods Must Die that bridged Kirby's previous Fourth World stories with the epic finale to his cosmic saga, The Hunger Dogs, an original graphic novel published in 1985.
• 1:25:20
  Tad Eggleston: The way that's written makes me wonder…
• 1:25:29
  Tad Eggleston: If Hunger Dogs was written first.
• 1:25:33
  Mark Pracht: But, might have been.
• 1:25:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:25:36
  Sean Harklerode: Definitely feels, and I haven't read Hunger Dogs, but…
• 1:25:39
  Sean Harklerode: It feels like he's getting… he's getting the gang back together.
• 1:25:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:25:45
  Sean Harklerode: Right? You know… Darkseid has brought back his minions.
• 1:25:51
  Sean Harklerode: And… you know, I'm disturbed by the ending, but I…
• 1:25:57
  Sean Harklerode: I have a feeling that we've seen that
• 1:26:00
  Sean Harklerode: Darkseid can bring anyone back to life that he wants to, so…
• 1:26:04
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:26:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:26:06
  Sean Harklerode: We're gonna see, spoilers, Orion again.
• 1:26:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:26:12
  Tad Eggleston: But it also, it just makes me…
• 1:26:15
  Tad Eggleston: A, it makes me very excited to actually read Hunger Dogs, and probably reread this slower.
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: but B, it makes me really wonder if these two represent… If not the best.
• 1:26:32
  Tad Eggleston: like, way high on the echelon of Great Kirby.
• 1:26:38
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, look, I think that there is… it is… it is… look, this is…
• 1:26:46
  Mark Pracht: the Fourth World, even with all of its flaws, is Kirby's masterpiece, right? Right. It is… it is mainline Jack Kirby, right?
• 1:26:55
  Mark Pracht: I think that all of those, all of the issues from the 70s
• 1:27:01
  Mark Pracht: He's fighting for the life of the project, right?
• 1:27:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:27:05
  Mark Pracht: He really is.
• 1:27:06
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 1:27:09
  Mark Pracht: for whatever reason, you want to say that he has to fight for the life of the project. That people want to kill it, or because it just wasn't working as well as they had hoped, right? Either way, he's fighting for the life of the project. Now…
• 1:27:22
  Tad Eggleston: Or, honestly, that he bit off more than he could chew. I mean, if he does it as even 2 books a month rather than 4 books a month, what does it change?
• 1:27:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right, no.
• 1:27:34
  Mark Pracht: I… I 100% agree with that.
• 1:27:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's probably all of the above.
• 1:27:39
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:27:40
  Mark Pracht: But… you know… He comes back.
• 1:27:45
  Mark Pracht: He's got an editorial, you know, he's got a management team that wants him there, and wants him to finish it.
• 1:27:54
  Mark Pracht: And… And is not… Is not sitting there and going, like.
• 1:28:03
  Mark Pracht: We need a book every month. We need 4 books every month.
• 1:28:07
  Mark Pracht: We need you to do this now, we need you to change this, we need to do the… you know, like, that there is a… and it is… it is a change in corporate mindset. It is a change in that company's mindset that is trying to facilitate him doing the best work he can.
• 1:28:25
  Mark Pracht: Period. End of story. So, you have…
• 1:28:34
  Mark Pracht: I think there is an argument to be made that this is the best
• 1:28:39
  Mark Pracht: Kirby can do is this… this closing out of this.
• 1:28:44
  Mark Pracht: Personally, I still think there's problems here.
• 1:28:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But… but I think it's also, like.
• 1:28:53
  Mark Pracht: there's… there's things that I really would like…
• 1:28:57
  Mark Pracht: again, I haven't read Hunger Dogs for probably 4 or 5 years, okay? So, my memory is that there's a lot of stuff that still just sort of goes unanswered, or not touched upon, that I'm like, I wish you could have touched on that, or figured out a way to make that.
• 1:29:15
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 1:29:17
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's sort of the same way I feel about the last issue of, of, of,
• 1:29:23
  Mark Pracht: Mr. Miracle making it all about Scott and Barta?
• 1:29:28
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 1:29:29
  Mark Pracht: that these make it all about Orion and Darkseid.
• 1:29:33
  Mark Pracht: And I'm like, The… the pact, right?
• 1:29:39
  Mark Pracht: The exchange of the children.
• 1:29:41
  Mark Pracht: Seems like a big thing that needs to be…
• 1:29:46
  Mark Pracht: Addressed going both ways if you're really wrapping up this story, you know?
• 1:29:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:53
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, I don't think… At no point In my memory, does Highfather
• 1:30:05
  Mark Pracht: explicitly acknowledge that Scott is his son.
• 1:30:13
  Mark Pracht: And Darkseid does explicitly acknowledge that Orion is his son. But I mean, I think that's an interesting thing to…
• 1:30:22
  Mark Pracht: Feel like you don't have to address, or that doesn't need to be…
• 1:30:29
  Mark Pracht: developed. Does that make any sense?
• 1:30:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:30:34
  Mark Pracht: And it's… it, like… because, like, the, you know, the pact was such a big deal, you know, and it… and it was, like, this saved…
• 1:30:43
  Mark Pracht: You know, the new gods for… for a long time.
• 1:30:47
  Mark Pracht: And… and now, it just comes down to… you know, Orion's gonna… make a raid on Apocalypse.
• 1:30:56
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 1:30:57
  Mark Pracht: And, get his mother back.
• 1:31:01
  Mark Pracht: At least in this story, you know? And that certainly should be part of it, but…
• 1:31:07
  Mark Pracht: Like, it feels like there's a grander tapestry that, in the interests of… Wrapping things up.
• 1:31:17
  Mark Pracht: Fairly quickly, even with the extra time and space, that… That we're missing.
• 1:31:23
  Mark Pracht: And, yeah. Anyway, I'm kind of talking about hunger dogs before we ever get there, so… but.
• 1:31:31
  Tad Eggleston: Probably at a good place to wrap for the day.
• 1:31:37
  Tad Eggleston: But I… I'm…
• 1:31:40
  Sean Harklerode: Happy Williams Week, everybody.
• 1:31:43
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:31:43
  Mark Pracht: Will Eisner Week, yes.
• 1:31:45
  Sean Harklerode: Bill Eisner week.
• 1:31:46
  Tad Eggleston: Will Eisner Week, C2E2 around the corner.
• 1:31:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:31:52
  Tad Eggleston: I, I had fun.
• 1:31:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I always enjoy the talks, but I had fun with the reading more this month than I have in a while.
• 1:32:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And I'm…
• 1:32:04
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking forward to… I don't… I've never really dreaded doing the reading, but it's not something that I front-burner with all of my other reading, and… and I… I think it's… it's gonna get front-burnered more.
• 1:32:19
  Mark Pracht: Just in time to be at the end.
• 1:32:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:32:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, I mean, even so…
• 1:32:25
  Mark Pracht: Oh yeah.
• 1:32:26
  Sean Harklerode: want more.
• 1:32:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:32:27
  Mark Pracht: It's true.
• 1:32:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 1:32:28
  Mark Pracht: It's true.
• 1:32:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like…
• 1:32:35
  Tad Eggleston: And you, in a way, doing it for a research project, right? But part of… Part of,
• 1:32:45
  Tad Eggleston: my thing has been, like, I know how much these books mean to Mark.
• 1:32:51
  Tad Eggleston: And, and…
• 1:32:53
  Tad Eggleston: And therefore, like, on top of everything else, I've been trying to go, okay, like, I see some of the basic stuff, but, like, what makes these books something that he had been interested in doing this even before…
• 1:33:11
  Tad Eggleston: we really started talking about seriously doing it. You know, something that you were looking at doing on your own, rather than on the air.
• 1:33:24
  Tad Eggleston: And the way it's wrapping it up makes it make more sense to me.
• 1:33:28
  Mark Pracht: It's like, oh.
• 1:33:29
  Tad Eggleston: You actually get to see some of the…
• 1:33:33
  Tad Eggleston: Some of the… the potential that we've… longed for.
• 1:33:39
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:33:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:33:40
  Mark Pracht: Well, and I'm… I mean, I think that, that, that,
• 1:33:46
  Mark Pracht: This is all stuff that I should talk about next week, next month, so…
• 1:33:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:33:50
  Mark Pracht: I'll leave it alone.
• 1:33:51
  Tad Eggleston: So, anyway, for Mark Pratt, Sean Hoggerwood, this has been the Fourth World Book Club on 22 panels, and we will see you after the next page.