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With Great Power #276... 22 Panels with Tom Kaczynski · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is cartoonist and publisher Tom Kaczynski. How's it going, Tom?
• 0:14
  Tom Kaczynski: Going alright.
• 0:16
  Tom Kaczynski: I.
• 0:17
  Tad Eggleston: I finally managed to read Cartoon Dialectics today,
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: I've been sitting on them for forever, and it's one of the reasons I needed to have you on, because unfortunately.
• 0:29
  Tad Eggleston: Too often, if it didn't come out this week, I don't manage to read it until I need to prep for an interview. So, thanks for joining me and causing me to read more of your stuff, because I've always enjoyed it. I didn't finish my reread of beta testing the
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: Apocalypse, but it's also fantastic. And, there I just did some plugs for you.
• 0:51
  Tom Kaczynski: Appreciate that, let's, let's talk about it.
• 0:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, let's… you specifically, and I love that you picked this out, you specifically suggested that we talk about…
• 1:03
  Tad Eggleston: And of course, I should have… should've opened it up to it right off the bat.
• 1:11
  Tom Kaczynski: The name of the essay was… you probably know off the top of your head, I don't know why I'm… Oh, you do, you, it's technology of consciousness.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, from Cartoon Dialectics number 3.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: I… I gotta tell you, I loved this essay, so I'm gonna start by having you…
• 1:33
  Tad Eggleston: Give us the thumbnail version for anybody listening who hasn't bought the comic book yet, so that they can…
• 1:42
  Tom Kaczynski: Know that they need to order it from uncivilized.com.
• 1:46
  Tad Eggleston: BrazilianCivilizedBooks.com.
• 1:50
  Tom Kaczynski: On CivilizedBooks.com, that's right.
• 1:52
  Tad Eggleston: CivilizeBooks.com.
• 1:53
  Tom Kaczynski: Yep. It might be available in some local shops for you too, but not…
• 1:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, hopefully we'll have it at Modern Age Comics in Algonquin soon, but we don't have it yet. We have to make that order.
• 2:07
  Tom Kaczynski: Sounds good.
• 2:09
  Tom Kaczynski: Alright, so comics is technology of consciousness, so,
• 2:13
  Tom Kaczynski: basically, you know, I have this kind of ongoing, long thesis about comics as a kind of,
• 2:22
  Tom Kaczynski: As an interesting medium for the present.
• 2:25
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, this kind of follows the work of, like, you know, maybe the most, familiar to everybody is, Marshall McLuhan. The medium is the message guy, Gutenberg Galaxy, and a few others. But, you know, he has this whole thing of, like, how modernity comes about, essentially as a result of print.
• 2:44
  Tom Kaczynski: Sort of supplanting, you know, the previous culture, the sort of the medieval culture of manuscripts, written manuscripts, oral culture, meaning a lot of, you know, oratory speaking, versus, you know, reading and contemplating, you know, printed words.
• 3:03
  Tom Kaczynski: But, you know, the print not only sort of, you know, makes you read, but it also kind of sharpens your visual senses in a sense that you kind of… a lot of knowledge comes through your visual, faculties.
• 3:17
  Tom Kaczynski: And, it also standardizes a lot of things, so, you know, vocabulary, punctuation, grammar, all these things become
• 3:28
  Tom Kaczynski: very much, standardized when, when, when sort of the world shifts from manuscript to print. And it, and it basically created a new, you know, a whole new, sort of, kind of world and culture.
• 3:40
  Tom Kaczynski: based around this, you know, a kind of print culture, or literary culture, whatever you want to call it. Some people call it modernity. So, you know, but we're in a new transition now, you know, and McLuhan talks about this as well, sort of since the…
• 3:58
  Tom Kaczynski: 19th century, there's been kind of a massive increase in technological prowess in the world, especially the Western world. And, you know, from things as kind of…
• 4:13
  Tom Kaczynski: innocuous as the telegraph way back when, all the way now to computers and, you know, networks and televisions, visual, VR, all kinds of stuff that we've got going on. You know, the cell phone in your pocket.
• 4:29
  Tom Kaczynski: So we're kind of transitioning into a new world. This world was essentially created by people that, you know, from the literary world, that print world. But, you know, the medium is changing. You know, most of us are now getting information not directly from books, although, you know, obviously many people still read, but many of us read in a more kind of stochastic way.
• 4:53
  Tom Kaczynski: So we're reading, we're reading, you know, obviously social media, but also just, like, random articles online, you know, or instead of reading, we're listening to books. You know, a lot of people listen to books they no longer read, like in the, sort of, the classic sense.
• 5:10
  Tad Eggleston: I do a… I do a lot of listening to books.
• 5:13
  Tad Eggleston: a cop to that, but it's because I'm reading so many comics. But yes, it is a different thing. It's a very different thing.
• 5:21
  Tom Kaczynski: So, so, you know, so we're kind of in this new world where, you know, the sort of the… what… what, you know, the kinds of… the kind of mind that succeeded in, sort of, the print world is essentially, you know, no longer,
• 5:37
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of valuable. I mean, it's not necessarily valuable, but maybe more deprecated in the world today. You know, it's still valuable, but it's just not the… it's not the thing that today, sort of brings.
• 5:54
  Tad Eggleston: actually… I'm gonna pause you for a second, because I want to jump in and read the paragraph where you had me hook, line, and sinker as, oh, he's thinking about comics in a lot the same way I've been thinking about comics, and, like.
• 6:08
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna enjoy tonight even more than I thought. It was the paragraph that you had a digital man.
• 6:15
  Tad Eggleston: The much-lamented breakdown of grand narratives is a consequence of the new-slash-old forms of communication, return of the repressed. Typography helped kill religion, feudalism, tribalism, and superstition.
• 6:29
  Tad Eggleston: At the same time, it ushered in industrial technology, nationalism, democracy, and science. Electric media and technology, radio, TV, internet, social media, smartphones, Bitcoin, etc, bring back
• 6:42
  Tad Eggleston: Old social forms.
• 6:44
  Tad Eggleston: We are rapidly retribalizing, de-democratizing, re-religioning, and deindustrializing, but in new forms. The digital man has as much in common with the pre-liberate, primitive man.
• 7:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's a lot to unpack in one paragraph, but it's definitely…
• 7:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I could certainly quibble with specifics and whatnot, but… but…
• 7:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's something that a lot of us struggle with, where on one side, I mean, you hit so many of the things that I think about, you know, you hit on the loss of…
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: grand narratives, or I prefer to think of shared experience, you know, in re-fragmenting, we don't have the same shared experience, and I'd never really thought of the fact that, like, shared experience was really…
• 7:48
  Tad Eggleston: Only a thing… From the printing press until… like… cable TV.
• 7:58
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, you know, in…
• 8:00
  Tad Eggleston: Seth, I'm.
• 8:01
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, the shared experience, yeah, I mean, it begins maybe in the print world, but it really becomes kind of, kind of heightened and, and, and…
• 8:12
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, more mass, massive with newspapers and radio, and then, you know, and then television. You know, as you…
• 8:21
  Tad Eggleston: But as soon as you have too many options, you stop sharing it.
• 8:24
  Tom Kaczynski: Well, that's the thing, that's the thing, you know.
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:25
  Tom Kaczynski: Most, you know, most cities would have, you know, a couple of newspapers, you, you know, you would have a few radio stations, and then, you know, you only had, like, 3 channels to start with, at least in the U.S. Right.
• 8:38
  Tad Eggleston: Poland, we only…
• 8:40
  Tom Kaczynski: So… and that was pretty much standard until, you know, I'd say, like, maybe early 80s, mid-80s?
• 8:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 8:48
  Tom Kaczynski: many people, and then cable really blew up, and started, you know, slowly fragmenting all that, and then, obviously, internet sort of came in on the heels of that, and created a whole new set of channels, you know, that were not even channels, you know? They were just other ways of sort of being on…
• 9:07
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, consuming media, in, in, essentially in private and, and, you know, in many ways directly with other people, instead of having this go-between, this, like, anchor, the TV anchor, the TV person, you know?
• 9:20
  Tom Kaczynski: So there's a lot of, like, sort of one-to-one stuff going on, which is a kind of, you know, tribal kind of way of being, you know, one-to-one.
• 9:28
  Tom Kaczynski: Versus, versus this, you know, the speaker that sort of tells you what's right, you know? Tells you.
• 9:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:35
  Tom Kaczynski: what's the score? which is much more kind of top-down, you know, centralized way of disseminating media. But, you know, so it had, you know, the internet is sort of breaking all this stuff apart,
• 9:49
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, this kind of shared experience that maybe we can date it from, I don't know, maybe roughly from the 20s through the 80s, is sort of falling apart. And that sort of… that centralization also brought with it, you know, sort of…
• 10:05
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, what you call shared experiences, I call grand narratives, you know, there's a kind of general agreed-upon way that the world was or is, and .
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: At least a starting point.
• 10:17
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 10:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there were still experts in fields and whatnot, but like…
• 10:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, one of the things that I think certainly defines American tribalism is we no longer even seem to share facts.
• 10:32
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know, what, what, what…
• 10:35
  Tad Eggleston: what one… what one person thinks is established science, and other people think… or other people think is fake news. You know.
• 10:45
  Tom Kaczynski: Sure, I mean, yeah, I mean, both are… I mean, I think the facts are shared, it's just.
• 10:50
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes.
• 10:51
  Tom Kaczynski: interpretations are mostly, you know, it's like, is this really a fact, or is this… or is this something else, you know what I mean? Everything doesn't… even facts are no longer, sort of, like, they don't have a facticity, you know? Like, they only have facticity for some people, and not for others.
• 11:10
  Tad Eggleston: before we finish up, or finish more on, on, on comics.
• 11:18
  Tad Eggleston: as the technology of consciousness, because I want to get back to that, but something that occurred to me as we were putting dates here.
• 11:27
  Tad Eggleston: It takes us to the mid-80s, or the event horizon.
• 11:34
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, I don't know if those things are related, maybe they are, I mean, that's something.
• 11:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's something to ponder as we go back to talking about… I mean, that just popped into my head, because that's how my brain works. It's like, oh, wait, we just said 1985. Where have I seen 1985 today?
• 11:51
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, that's my other little project, that's the event horizon, that's kind of my position, that 1985 through 1987 were this really kind of special period in comics history.
• 12:02
  Tom Kaczynski: Where, you know, both kind of the mainstream and the weird, indie world sort of, like, clashed together, and created all kinds of hybrids and new formats and new ways of doing comics.
• 12:16
  Tom Kaczynski: That have since, you know, sort of, like, split into multiple different genres, publishing strategies, etc, etc. But there was a kind of moment in that time where a lot was happening, a lot of artists from the indie world would show up in the, sort of, the mainstream world.
• 12:31
  Tom Kaczynski: and vice versa, and I sort of created this firm… this sort of creative ferment,
• 12:37
  Tom Kaczynski: That, you know, has really defined comics, you know, until today, even, so…
• 12:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 12:44
  Tom Kaczynski: Definitely.
• 12:45
  Tom Kaczynski: Definitely. And, so yeah, so I don't know, I mean, that's… it's possible. I mean, obviously, the new media were showing up, and… and, you know, in some ways, that was kind of the height of the comics.
• 12:56
  Tom Kaczynski: you know.
• 12:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, just off the top of my head, I wonder if, with the explosion of…
• 13:04
  Tad Eggleston: Further media there, it, it… spurred…
• 13:11
  Tad Eggleston: Cartoonists to look at their own creations differently, and start thinking about what was inherent about comics, rather than just
• 13:21
  Tad Eggleston: Because you had more to compete with, you had to do… you had to use the medium as the message more. Does that make sense?
• 13:29
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, it does.
• 13:32
  Tad Eggleston: Or at least… or at least there was… there was… there was reason to think of it that way. It's like, okay, why should I do this as a comic rather than a film, now that there are camcorders? You know, what… why…
• 13:46
  Tom Kaczynski: I'm sure that's part of it. You know, part of it is also, it's a sort of a technological shift, you know, that essentially made it easier to, to publish, you know, to, you didn't have to…
• 13:57
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of be beholden to, you know, a large organization that had access to a printing press and could pump these things out. All of a sudden, you had a kind of decentralization of the means of production, if you want to use that term.
• 14:11
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, and sort of, you know, much smaller entities could enter the market. And, obviously you also had this shift in distribution that was happening.
• 14:22
  Tom Kaczynski: Since the 70s, you know, the establishment of the direct market, you know, which also just opened the doors for a lot of experimentation. So there's a lot of different, sort of, factors going on here.
• 14:36
  Tom Kaczynski: But I'm sure the medium played… played, you know, some, some, you know, factor here, you know, and I think later on, maybe even more so. But…
• 14:48
  Tom Kaczynski: But yeah, there was, you know, it was just this…
• 14:52
  Tom Kaczynski: This kind of this ferment that sort of, you know, in a sense, kind of transferred from
• 14:58
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, it flowered maybe in a way in the 60s and 70s with undergrounds, but in this very specific kind of,
• 15:07
  Tom Kaczynski: Subcultural way, and then kind of shifted over into this new world as the distribution methods shifted and kind of opened up a new avenue for these things.
• 15:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:19
  Tad Eggleston: You laid out… Is it 6 specific ways? Reasons?
• 15:28
  Tad Eggleston: They're characteristics of the medium.
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. That… that… make it… So… adept.
• 15:41
  Tad Eggleston: it being a vehicle of conscious. And I love them. They… and I won't… I won't… well, no, I'll read it, it's short.
• 15:50
  Tom Kaczynski: Well, so, before we go there, maybe, let's just kind of…
• 15:54
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, return to the thesis here. So then, you know, if we're on this new world, this digital world,
• 16:02
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, and, and sort of…
• 16:04
  Tom Kaczynski: print, you know, the standard print is sort of deprecated in some ways. It exists, obviously, everybody's still literate, everybody can read, but they're not reading full books. They're reading, you know,
• 16:16
  Tom Kaczynski: either short bits on social media, or maybe they're asking ChatGPT to give them a quick rundown, or they're just listening to a book. It's a very different way of consuming information, and you know.
• 16:32
  Tom Kaczynski: Most likely, you know, maybe we're kind of reverting to some kind of mean again, back to, sort of.
• 16:37
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, I like using older periods as a potential analogy, so, like, if we go back to the sort of medieval world, you know, literacy obviously existed, but it was, you know, it was contained to a very small part of the population. You know, depending on the country, you know, anywhere from.
• 16:56
  Tom Kaczynski: From, you know, 5 to maybe 20% of the population could read, and then everybody else, was, you know, either maybe could just barely read, or maybe you can do the numbers and just do some kind of, like, you know.
• 17:10
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, minimal sort of literacy.
• 17:13
  Tom Kaczynski: But most things were read to people, most things were kind of,
• 17:17
  Tom Kaczynski: Passed on through oratory, or through pronouncements, or through, you know, gossip.
• 17:24
  Tad Eggleston: And .
• 17:26
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, we're kind of in a similar situation, where, like, well, maybe we're reverting to the mean. Maybe there is gonna be… we're going back to, sort of, like, the top, you know, 10, 15% are gonna be the readers, you know, they're gonna keep reading books, because they're the scientists, they're the…
• 17:41
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, historians, they're the philosophers, they're… they have to read books, that's their world. That's never gonna go away.
• 17:49
  Tom Kaczynski: But everybody else is… has this kind of stochastic literacy, where they're just, you know, they're literate enough to read things, you know, in short, short spurts, but not really,
• 18:01
  Tom Kaczynski: Well enough to sort of absorb information in this kind of… in that sort of literary way from that mode of being.
• 18:09
  Tom Kaczynski: So comics, in a weird way, kind of, you know, fit into this world in a…
• 18:16
  Tom Kaczynski: In a maybe underappreciated way, at least right now.
• 18:20
  Tom Kaczynski: They, you know, they sort of can be, you know, a new kind of literacy, for this, for this moment, because, you know, it is, generally speaking, still consumed in print form, and,
• 18:35
  Tom Kaczynski: And it contains the linearity of the novel, of the book, you know, as a… it's still a story that you have to follow page by page, even though on the page you can still kind of play around with the form and…
• 18:47
  Tom Kaczynski: And, and different ways of, laying out the information. But it is,
• 18:53
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, and also combining pictures and words, it, you know, it sort of… it creates a new standard of…
• 19:02
  Tom Kaczynski: Of literacy for today, where, you know, we have to also understand
• 19:07
  Tom Kaczynski: images as much as we have to understand words, you know? And,
• 19:12
  Tom Kaczynski: And comics kind of help you learn how to do that in a way that really nothing else.
• 19:18
  Tom Kaczynski: hand, You know, and then we, you know, and now we can go into those six fields.
• 19:26
  Tom Kaczynski: Six, qualities that comics have, you know, that sort of are…
• 19:32
  Tad Eggleston: You need to…
• 19:32
  Tom Kaczynski: comics.
• 19:33
  Tad Eggleston: Slowness, it must be consumed at human speed.
• 19:36
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, so, you know, a comic, unlike a movie, right, is you just flip the page, you kind of go at your own pace. Like, whenever you're done with the page, you move on.
• 19:47
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, some people are faster, some people are slower, but that's their pace. Whereas a film, you are, you know, you are going 24 images a second, you can't stop it. You can pause it, you can do whatever, but that's not the same as, sort of.
• 20:01
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, kind of consuming it at, you know, in fact, pausing a movie just kind of, like, breaks the whole experience. So, so film, TV, video, any of that stuff.
• 20:12
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, is not slow. It's kind of fast. It's just moving at you, at the speed of whatever, whatever frame rate that you're at.
• 20:24
  Tom Kaczynski: So that's, that's slowness. You know, obviously also, like, you know, social media, you know, that's sort of the doom scroll, like, it's just, you know, you're just kind of consuming things, and it's very kind of…
• 20:34
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, almost, you know, you're just skimming the world, you know? Like, it's kind of a skim.
• 20:42
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, with comics, I think it's a little bit, you know, it's like a book, except, you know.
• 20:50
  Tom Kaczynski: with images.
• 20:52
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I would actually say that it's… it's like a book with images, but it's also… Like, the slowness…
• 21:00
  Tad Eggleston: is also… I mean, what I often say is that the…
• 21:06
  Tad Eggleston: The consumer has way more control over the pacing.
• 21:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So, so, it's, it's, it's like a, a book…
• 21:15
  Tad Eggleston: that requires mental annotating. Because… because…
• 21:23
  Tad Eggleston: there's always something more to grab from the page. So sometimes you might read it quick, and just take the surface story, and then other times you might
• 21:32
  Tad Eggleston: really dive in and start thinking about, okay, why was this positioned this way? Is this telling me something? Was this a natural flow, you know? .
• 21:43
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, and, you know, and books and comics are kind of structured in two different ways. I mean, there's obviously, like, you know, there's a… there's a name for it, the page turner, right?
• 21:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 21:52
  Tom Kaczynski: that's kind of meant to be read fairly quickly, and it's really odd, sort of the pacing and the action, and sort of trying to get to the next page, you know, get to the next mystery, or whatever. And then, you know, there's books that are meant to sort of be savored and…
• 22:06
  Tom Kaczynski: And, slowed down and examined, and obviously comics kind of have both, both styles, as well, so…
• 22:14
  Tad Eggleston: But, I mean, as you said that, I found myself thinking, oh, one of my favorite comics of the year was Jesse Lonergan's drone.
• 22:24
  Tad Eggleston: And… and one of the things that… that…
• 22:27
  Tad Eggleston: that I think Jesse has managed to unlock.
• 22:30
  Tad Eggleston: Is how to make you slow down on a page turner.
• 22:35
  Tad Eggleston: Because he uses so many panels.
• 22:40
  Tad Eggleston: Even though, really, the panels are just breaking up a single picture. He's not necessarily using… but because of the panels, you're stopping at each gutter, or at least…
• 22:49
  Tad Eggleston: Pausing at each gutter, so it, like…
• 22:52
  Tad Eggleston: Forces you to look at an action page longer than you might have otherwise, because of the way he's laid it out.
• 22:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, yeah, no, there's just…
• 23:05
  Tom Kaczynski: That's… I mean, that's exactly… but, you know, you as a reader, you kind of bring your thing, like, you know, you need a reader that's just like, I just want to consume a lot of stuff that's exciting and fast and whatever, and that's how I read. And then there's people who are just, you know, reading at a different pace, but that, again, it's… it's a little… it's human.
• 23:23
  Tad Eggleston: And then there's me, where I'm both. It depends on the day of the week, and the story, and…
• 23:29
  Tom Kaczynski: But it's, you know, but it, you know, I call it human just because, you know, everybody's got a different pace, but…
• 23:33
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 23:33
  Tom Kaczynski: That's the… that's the human pace.
• 23:36
  Tad Eggleston: And that's… that leads to the spatial and temporal integrity, human space-time.
• 23:42
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, so, you know, so what's intra- what I find interesting about comics is that it has to define
• 23:49
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, it has to define the point of view. I mean, that's,
• 23:53
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, that's a little bit like,
• 23:58
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, one of the, sort of, theories is that print, has led to the development of the perspective, you know, of, like,
• 24:08
  Tom Kaczynski: The perspective grid and the sort of the technique of drawing that sort of recreates, you know, the way the world appears to us on a flat piece of paper.
• 24:18
  Tom Kaczynski: So it, you know, sort of mimics three-dimensionality.
• 24:24
  Tom Kaczynski: Obviously, comics don't have to be three-dimensional, there's plenty of comics that do kind of cartoony, flat kind of things, but, you know, the, the, but there is, there is a kind of, you know, there is a kind of…
• 24:37
  Tom Kaczynski: Camera frame that gets created, and it creates a distinction between a moment and another moment, or a place and another place.
• 24:48
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, character and another character, you know, however you're structuring your story. And this… this boundary, I think, is really important. It's, you know, it sort of defines the board, the, sort of the boundaries of meaning. And obviously, obviously comics can also not have any boundaries, and that comes with its own.
• 25:05
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, the lack of something, you know, also, you know.
• 25:10
  Tom Kaczynski: brings, new ideas to the, to the, to the experience. But, but as a, as a, as a rule, with, with the boundary, it's,
• 25:19
  Tom Kaczynski: It's, you know, sort of…
• 25:21
  Tom Kaczynski: it lets you see what the other person is trying to see as well. You know, the sort of… essentially, the panel acts in many ways, you know, like…
• 25:31
  Tom Kaczynski: the point of view of the other person, so that's where the shared sort of space-time I'm talking about here, is the artist, creating, this, this lens that you can, right.
• 25:44
  Tom Kaczynski: So, that's kind of how I see it.
• 25:48
  Tad Eggleston: Multisensory.
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: engages multi-senses. And I love that you put this, because this is probably the thing that I have the most arguments with people about, because I don't think there are any senses that comics can't engage. People will try to talk to me about music, and I'll tell them to go read Palomino, or go read anything by Dave Chisholm.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: you know, they'll say sa- or smell, and I'll say.
• 26:12
  Tad Eggleston: What, you've never read old mad magazines?
• 26:17
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, you know, I… it is multi-sensory, though I will not call it, like, a full spectrum, you know?
• 26:24
  Tad Eggleston: Not necessarily, but it definitely…
• 26:28
  Tom Kaczynski: But it, you know…
• 26:29
  Tad Eggleston: Artists can, can, can evoke.
• 26:32
  Tom Kaczynski: Sure, sure, yeah, absolutely. I mean, that gets into, like, ekphrasis, I don't know if you know that word, but it's a word of translating one kind of medium into another, or one kind of thing into another. So comics certainly can do that, and that's partly what I'm talking about when I'm talking about multi-sensory, is that you can evoke
• 26:49
  Tom Kaczynski: You can invoke sound, you can invoke,
• 26:52
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, sort of a kind of physicality in the characters, et cetera, et cetera. And obviously, it's tactile just as a piece of paper is tactile.
• 27:02
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, in terms of…
• 27:05
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, I do think you can evoke a lot of things, but, you know, but it's a very different way than, say, like, music, you know, kind of, like, runs through you and can, like, literally affect your…
• 27:18
  Tom Kaczynski: your body, you can feel… you can feel music shaking, you know, bass lines or whatever, like, you can feel that in a way that… that you'll never feel a comic book. But,
• 27:29
  Tom Kaczynski: But obviously, you can… you can certainly imagine, certain bits and pieces.
• 27:34
  Tom Kaczynski: But, but, you know, what I like is that, that the character is sort of, also.
• 27:42
  Tom Kaczynski: Tends to be drawn, you see the character,
• 27:46
  Tom Kaczynski: So it kind of gives the character, and the world some kind of physicality that it…
• 27:51
  Tom Kaczynski: that the world kind of lacks in a prose novel. You know, prose, you do have to imagine all these things, but it… but, you know, everybody's gonna imagine these things differently, so the physicality of it is very, very different than when you sort of evoke a very specific world that you create, you know, in comics.
• 28:11
  Tom Kaczynski: Which… which creates a much more of a shared sort of experience between the…
• 28:16
  Tom Kaczynski: Between the creator and the reader, and obviously reader and other readers, because they're seeing kind of the same. They're seeing the same thing versus the book. You know, and all these things are…
• 28:29
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, come in doses, you know? It's… I don't want to, like, over-determine these things, but, but that's just kind of making kind of broad comparisons.
• 28:41
  Tad Eggleston: abstraction, the possibility of abstracting or cooling the engaged senses. I think this is something Scott McCloud hits on a lot, in terms of.
• 28:50
  Tom Kaczynski: Choosing your style.
• 28:54
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah.
• 28:54
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 28:55
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, and you know, obviously comics do different things. There's some very realistic comics out there, and some very abstract ones. So there is a range here, but even with the very realistic comics, you are sort of abstracting
• 29:08
  Tom Kaczynski: From, from reality on some level, and, and creating…
• 29:14
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, sort of like, you know, I do think of it as a kind of cooling, in the sense that,
• 29:23
  Tom Kaczynski: The abstraction does give you a little bit of distance from the object that you're depicting, and, and it gives you…
• 29:32
  Tom Kaczynski: an ability, sort of, to think about it in… in a way that maybe you can't if you're just engaging with the project… with the object directly, you know? So it kind of, like, it's a little bit of… at a remove, which, you know, it…
• 29:46
  Tom Kaczynski: a lot of times, people think of abstraction as this kind of, like, negative thing, you know, it's like, it's too abstract, it's whatever, but I do think we need abstraction to sort of, to function in the world in many ways.
• 30:00
  Tom Kaczynski: Still want to be able to go out there and touch grass, so to speak, but without abstraction, you know, a lot of things are impossible.
• 30:10
  Tad Eggleston: One of the… the… Key points of, what was it?
• 30:19
  Tad Eggleston: Noah Harari's Sapiens was what separates humans, is the ability to share fiction. I think in a way, that's what you're describing is abstraction. It's taking…
• 30:34
  Tad Eggleston: Taking something that is real, but maybe…
• 30:42
  Tad Eggleston: More real in the way that we agree that it's real.
• 30:45
  Tad Eggleston: than… physically real. Like, does that make sense?
• 30:51
  Tom Kaczynski: A little bit. I… you know, I do think that there is… there's two kinds of…
• 30:58
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, and this is… this goes back a little bit to the conversation we had about facts, but, you know, there's two kinds of ways of kind of being in the world, and one is, you know, kind of comes with the Greek word nomos. It's like you're inside of a nomos, so you're inside of a… essentially a society, inside of some kind of social structure.
• 31:16
  Tom Kaczynski: And that social structure has certain facts and certain, you know, ways of looking at the world.
• 31:23
  Tom Kaczynski: And… and religions, and rituals, and…
• 31:26
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, manners and politeness and, you know, whatever. All these things are kind of in there, and they're sort of socially shared, and that's the way things are. But these things aren't always the same as
• 31:39
  Tom Kaczynski: nature, which is outside of Nomos. Outside of Nomos is, like, the sort of semi-known, and many times, much of it is unknown, world of, you know, sort of scientific facts, of…
• 31:54
  Tom Kaczynski: like, you know, experiences that are outside of the, sort of, the shared experience of being inside the city, inside the society. And there's always a tension between these two, you know, because a lot of times.
• 32:08
  Tom Kaczynski: we want to be able to know something about the world, but it can, you know, but sometimes that's forbidden, for whatever reason, you know? Right. There's some kind of taboo about it, or, or, you know, shared…
• 32:21
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, we don't want to know that, kind of thing. And… and then there's this constant push and pull between those two things, and, you know, when…
• 32:31
  Tom Kaczynski: Harari talks about the fiction, I think that's really what he's talking about, is talking about this… this nomos. It's… it's kind of, you know, and I don't think most of us would even think of it as, quote, fiction. It's just kind of…
• 32:44
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, the specific examples that he gets into are the corporation and currency, you know? Corporation isn't really a thing until we agree it's a thing.
• 32:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, a dollar bill isn't… isn't… isn't worth anything until we agree that it's worth anything, and that's… that's the shared fiction.
• 33:06
  Tad Eggleston: And I was thinking partially that, in terms of, like, the representation of a human, no matter how abstract, there's a certain
• 33:17
  Tad Eggleston: certain shape that we're going to associate with human. I suppose…
• 33:24
  Tad Eggleston: you can tell it's the end of the school week, and I participate in lots of different classes, because I also had Magritte pop into my head. This is not a pipe, you know. You know, when we're telling a story with a comic.
• 33:39
  Tad Eggleston: we're… telling a story or explaining things, because, I mean, I love… I love…
• 33:47
  Tad Eggleston: Comics don't get used enough in teaching. They should be used for so many abstract concepts that we try to use some mixture of words and diagrams, where if we just, like, went all in and combined the words with the pictures, it would actually make more sense to people. But that's my own soapbox.
• 34:06
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm…
• 34:08
  Tom Kaczynski: Absolutely, I mean, I, you know, I do think that, like, the skill of drawing could, you know, really should be some kind of, like, fundamental thing, and I don't mean, like, everybody has to draw, like, you know, beautiful drawings or whatever.
• 34:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 34:19
  Tom Kaczynski: way of… Of, kind of, apprehending an object, or a thing.
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: My art teacher wife loves you already.
• 34:29
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, I do mention that in the essay, that there is, you know, every time you draw something, you kind of have to, you know, especially if you're trying to get the likeness right, you kind of have to think about how it's structured, you know? Like, so you have to…
• 34:46
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, understand something about it. Maybe it's just purely in terms of shape, maybe it's, you know, but you can go deeper, obviously, you know, with the human body, you can understand the sort of the skeletal structure and musculature, et cetera, et cetera.
• 35:01
  Tom Kaczynski: to give you, some added understanding. But even beyond that, you, you know, you can apprehend a person's shape, a person's whatever. And, you know, and, actually, you know, Topfer, the, the first, the first cartoonist, as, as he's sometimes known.
• 35:18
  Tom Kaczynski: In his book on physiognomy, which is really kind of like a treatise on picture stories.
• 35:27
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of talks about this a little bit, you know, where, you know, shapes and expressions and all these things, you know, kind of help you apprehend the character of the subject, you know, and
• 35:41
  Tom Kaczynski: So the drawing is just such an important little tool that we, you know, we're sort of…
• 35:47
  Tom Kaczynski: I think it's underappreciated, you know? I mean, it's, you know, for many people, it's just this mysterious skill that some people just are somehow, you know, grow up with. And, you know, obviously, some people have a kind of natural predilection to these things, but, you know, it is something that can be learned.
• 36:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:06
  Tad Eggleston: Materiality.
• 36:12
  Tad Eggleston: Possesses a unique presence.
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: That was the one that I had to read to understand, so…
• 36:20
  Tad Eggleston: What do you mean by that?
• 36:23
  Tom Kaczynski: So… I… You know, it's,
• 36:36
  Tom Kaczynski: it… it's… it's, what's the… how am I gonna… like, the best way to… you know, the way I explain it in the essay is it has a certain…
• 36:48
  Tom Kaczynski: like, in computer terms, it has to be zoomed in to a certain amount, you know what I mean?
• 36:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:54
  Tom Kaczynski: As a certain kind of…
• 36:56
  Tom Kaczynski: physical presence in the world that cannot be, like, made too big or too small, because it just… it doesn't work anymore. So, so it has a certain shape and size that's kind of right for it. You know, that's why so many comics are kind of unreadable on screens, because
• 37:15
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, either you cannot apprehend the whole page on a screen, because everything shrinks too much, or you have to zoom in panel by panel, but then you lose the whole structure, and then you… so you're losing
• 37:28
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, either way, you're kind of losing something from the comic, from the sort of physical presence of the comic.
• 37:35
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, I call this sort of, like, minimum viable legibility. Like, you need… it needs to exist at a certain size. It has a very specific kind of
• 37:44
  Tom Kaczynski: physicality, but there's obviously other ways that you can think about this as well, but, that's maybe, that's maybe one way that, that, that can be described. You know what I mean?
• 37:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. This is… I mean, I… and I'm… I'm more of a digital reader than… than a lot, though I… though I do prefer
• 38:06
  Tad Eggleston: print. I prefer the tactile experience, but I also like being able to carry a library in my pocket, so, you know, it's that balancing act.
• 38:17
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, but even, you know, even the… even the digital reading, you know, like, it's obviously better done on, like, a home computer, or maybe.
• 38:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 38:26
  Tom Kaczynski: Nice big tablet versus.
• 38:27
  Tad Eggleston: Bigger size tablet.
• 38:28
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, versus, you know, your phone, right? So, so even, even, the, sort of the digital reading is already kind of affected by the materiality of the comic.
• 38:38
  Tad Eggleston: Because…
• 38:39
  Tom Kaczynski: You have to have a minimum size device to actually make the reading viable, you know?
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: So I've gotten decent at reading on my phone. I find that the key is you have to start with the full page, then go panel to panel, and end with the full page, and kind of put them together in your head. Still not as good as reading it big, like, my preferred version is the Absolute Edition, where I get it the size that the artist had it, but…
• 39:04
  Tom Kaczynski: I feel like that's, you know.
• 39:05
  Tad Eggleston: But it's hard to take that on a train, Tom.
• 39:07
  Tom Kaczynski: Look, I'm not… That's why, that's why, that's why we call it minimum viable legibility.
• 39:14
  Tom Kaczynski: Not easy, necessarily, to be… it's not supposed to be, you know, the.
• 39:18
  Tad Eggleston: I agree.
• 39:19
  Tom Kaczynski: Fold it, put it in the back pocket, you know.
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 39:21
  Tom Kaczynski: But.
• 39:22
  Tad Eggleston: And this last one, I had to laugh at, because I was reading it on an iPad.
• 39:31
  Tad Eggleston: But in some ways, is, like, one of the strongest…
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: Points that you made in terms of it being…
• 39:41
  Tad Eggleston: so unique? I mean, because I guess in calling it the technology of consciousness, I'm… I'm kind of…
• 39:49
  Tad Eggleston: thinking of other technologies as belonging to something else. And I think, like.
• 39:56
  Tad Eggleston: Digital technology is more of a… Community repository than a… consciousness, or…
• 40:05
  Tad Eggleston: whatever, and so, like, the resistance to digitization, both in production and consumption. And obviously, that's not 100%, because, like I said, I was reading on an iPad, many comics are made on iPads at this point, that sort of thing, but…
• 40:26
  Tad Eggleston: The separation between the text and the pictures, the way that that can't be…
• 40:33
  Tad Eggleston: directly digitized. They can't be directly inventoried, or… or easily
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: easily trained into the newest large language model. That makes us something else.
• 40:48
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, you know, my… so let me just, like, yeah, let me explain it for the listener a little bit. So,
• 40:55
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, one way that I think about that is, you know, text, like a, like a book.
• 41:00
  Tom Kaczynski: Is… essentially, the entire book is its own metadata, because you can very easily…
• 41:05
  Tom Kaczynski: Just, you know, essentially all of computers, as the Matrix, the movie, told us, is made out of a bunch of text, you know? And then, you know, you can go down to zeros and one from there, but
• 41:17
  Tom Kaczynski: But basically, that's how we have, at least for many, many, many, many decades, interacted with computers, is through typing, through typing text in, text in, text out. When the book is in there, it can be easily searched.
• 41:33
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, because that's basically what… how computers and techs have worked for forever, so any book
• 41:40
  Tom Kaczynski: becomes its own metadata, and it's, you know, it's sort of easily digestible. It can be easily regurgitated on any screen at any size, you know, you can kind of, like.
• 41:49
  Tom Kaczynski: change the font size, change the, you know, how many words show up on the screen. It's very easy to sort of adjust that and make it legible, and it really doesn't change the experience too much from
• 42:02
  Tom Kaczynski: From its original. But, you know, it… obviously, reading on a screen is still, like, a different, kind of experience.
• 42:10
  Tad Eggleston: And then comics… They don't have the page termed the same way, at the very least.
• 42:14
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, right, right, right. Which, you know, which sort of… which
• 42:17
  Tom Kaczynski: kind of loses the book's physicality, because, like, when you read it, as you get closer to the end, you know, you really feel that. Right. Whereas when you're reading the book, you know, maybe you have some kind of bar that's telling you you're getting close, but that's not…
• 42:31
  Tad Eggleston: paying attention.
• 42:32
  Tom Kaczynski: You're paying attention, exactly.
• 42:36
  Tom Kaczynski: And also, there's distractions on the, you know, that's the same device could be throwing things at you, so you might be reading, you know, a little bit, but you're not as undistracted.
• 42:46
  Tad Eggleston: an email, and then you respond to the email, and you come back and read another paragraph or two, and then you get the new sports score, and you go look at the highlight.
• 42:58
  Tom Kaczynski: Anyway, so comics, you know, they don't have that. I mean, there's an image, you know, there's a drawing, and then there is, you know, and there's some text. Also, because a lot of this is hand-drawn, you know, it's not always immediately, like.
• 43:15
  Tom Kaczynski: translatable to, like, recognition by, sort of, my… at least by machine, unless it was really being trained on stuff like this. Which, you know, I'm sure it's inevitable on some level, but it… but it is,
• 43:29
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, the comic…
• 43:31
  Tom Kaczynski: It cannot be, sort of, like, directly digested and turned into its own metadata, because the image… you can obviously digitize an image, but what the image says
• 43:41
  Tom Kaczynski: Is not apparent just from
• 43:43
  Tom Kaczynski: the data of the image, you know what I mean? You have, like, you as a viewer, you interpret that image.
• 43:49
  Tom Kaczynski: In whatever way. You can describe the image, you can say there's a man and a woman and a child, and whatever, but even that doesn't really tell you what's going on, because, you know, there's probably some kind of social situation going on. So there's really a lot of deep levels that images can give you
• 44:07
  Tom Kaczynski: that sort of the, you know, even the… even the chat GPTs aren't quite adept at, like, understanding what's going on. They can describe things, but there's always some kind of missing component, you know?
• 44:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I, I, nick Suzanis, has been working a lot on accessibility in comics, and he invited me to, to sit in on,
• 44:34
  Tad Eggleston: Thing he did a couple years ago, for Comics for the Deaf.
• 44:40
  Tad Eggleston: Where they took a scene from his unflattering, And… there was… the…
• 44:51
  Tad Eggleston: an adaptation of it, but there are lots of movies for the deaf, or… I'm sorry, not for the deaf, for the blind. Thomas is Blind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 45:01
  Tom Kaczynski: accent.
• 45:02
  Tad Eggleston: Comics for the Blind.
• 45:03
  Tom Kaczynski: blind.
• 45:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so there are lots of movies for the blind, where they have companies that will, like, describe what's going on and whatnot. So they had one…
• 45:13
  Tad Eggleston: One version where they… they… Had one of those companies adapt.
• 45:19
  Tad Eggleston: The… it was like a 2 or 3 page scene.
• 45:22
  Tom Kaczynski: And then there was another…
• 45:24
  Tad Eggleston: That another cartoonist who's also a poet, and therefore has a language background, worked with the… the scenes.
• 45:36
  Tad Eggleston: To… to try to… to… to… to break it down. And then the third was, he did it himself with kind of a,
• 45:45
  Tad Eggleston: almost a director's commentary going on. He wasn't just saying what was going on the page, he was saying why he'd done it.
• 45:53
  Tad Eggleston: And they had, like, 4 blind…
• 45:58
  Tad Eggleston: people who were also scholars and whatnot go through it, and it was really interesting to me that, like, across the board.
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: It was the poet that they liked the best.
• 46:15
  Tad Eggleston: But they also wanted his commentary track. They're like, the perfect comic would be, like, we could watch it this way, or listen to it this way, but then… but then listen to it that way. But it might be good to have that other track that was very bland and whatnot, but could tell us specifically…
• 46:33
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I mean, I don't know that much about this.
• 46:37
  Tad Eggleston: But that was how much it took to even begin to…
• 46:42
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, right.
• 46:43
  Tad Eggleston: Put the comics experience into… Just words.
• 46:49
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, no, I… I… that's… that's what I'm… that's…
• 46:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was the real point that I was trying to make, is that, like…
• 46:56
  Tom Kaczynski: No, absolutely, it's, it's, it's difficult, and, you know.
• 47:03
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, I would imagine that this is also different, like, there's… there's different kinds of blindness, there's people who
• 47:10
  Tom Kaczynski: Who maybe could see for a time, and then became blind, and there's some people that have always been blind.
• 47:17
  Tad Eggleston: They actually… they had one that was legally blind but could kind of see, one that had lost their sight, and one that had never had sight.
• 47:25
  Tom Kaczynski: Exactly.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: Because they wanted to get the different… different feels, based on whether or not they could even really conjure what might have been there.
• 47:33
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, right, right, right, exactly.
• 47:35
  Tom Kaczynski: So yeah, I mean, it's a difficult question, and, you know, and obviously, as a kind of a visual medium, that's going to be very difficult to translate into something like that.
• 47:47
  Tom Kaczynski: But, you know, that sounds like a really, like, an interesting effort, and I almost imagine that
• 47:56
  Tom Kaczynski: their method could, you know, in a weird way, help AI digest comics.
• 48:03
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately.
• 48:06
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, I can totally.
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: Don't say that too loud, Tom!
• 48:11
  Tom Kaczynski: Hey, I have to see the Doom, you know? It's beta testing the apocalypse.
• 48:15
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 48:16
  Tom Kaczynski: I have to see the doom here. But anyway, but that's, you know, that's kind of what I mean here, in terms of digitization. It's like, there is a kind of resistance to it, and even if the computer can kind of analyze the image.
• 48:30
  Tom Kaczynski: A lot of times, you know, what you see in the image and what the words are can be also kind of at odds with each other, you know? So, like, the words can very specifically undermine the images, or overmine the images, and create a whole new meaning.
• 48:43
  Tom Kaczynski: based on what you see, which may be one thing, but then the words really bring out something else. So it could be, like, a wholesome image, but the image is like, oh, no, actually, there's evil going on here, you know?
• 48:54
  Tad Eggleston: I think…
• 48:54
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, and that's a whole other level of complexity of, like, of seeing these things, combining these things that, you know, as far as I know, no, you know, no, no AI currently, as they stand, can really kind of understand in any meaningful way. They can spit out images, they can do.
• 49:14
  Tom Kaczynski: kind of meme-like things, but… but ultimately, it's really up to the person to say, like, oh, you did… you did something right here, you know? And it's just, like, a shot in the dark, rather than, like, some kind of meaningful, you know, understanding.
• 49:33
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've got a,
• 49:36
  Tad Eggleston: a wrap-up question, but I'm… I'm having… or a wrap-up on this… this particular essay question, but I'm having trouble… trouble quite putting… putting my finger on it. I guess… I guess…
• 49:47
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, go ahead.
• 49:48
  Tad Eggleston: Importance.
• 49:50
  Tad Eggleston: Of having a medium for consciousness, a technology for consciousness, particularly in an age where we're becoming
• 49:58
  Tad Eggleston: More primal, more tribal.
• 50:01
  Tom Kaczynski: Right.
• 50:04
  Tad Eggleston: less democratic.
• 50:08
  Tom Kaczynski: So, I mean… so…
• 50:11
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know how important I think it is, but…
• 50:14
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think.
• 50:15
  Tad Eggleston: But you clearly have thoughts, so you wouldn't have written a wonderful essay on it.
• 50:23
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, there is… I do think that there is a kind of a push and pull between people and the various media that they sort of
• 50:32
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, sort of live with, or interact with, or use to communicate with.
• 50:38
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, and we're in a world where there's many different media, right? And,
• 50:44
  Tom Kaczynski: I don't know, you know, I don't know that comics can ever be, like, kind of a mass medium in the same way that it was before. I don't know if that's really possible. But, you know, I think books also will maybe.
• 50:56
  Tad Eggleston: One can dream. One can dream, one can dream.
• 51:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they're still very prominent in Japan, we could catch on.
• 51:06
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I… I mean, I… again, I'm not saying that that's… that's impossible, I'm just, you know, I'm kind of…
• 51:11
  Tad Eggleston: I know.
• 51:12
  Tom Kaczynski: taking the, maybe the… You're hedging your bets. I'm hedging my bets a little bit here. But, but, you know, in the same way, you know, in the same way that…
• 51:23
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, the, like…
• 51:24
  Tom Kaczynski: the human soul, like, this thing that we, you know, think of, is actually kind of a… it's a… it's actually a little bit of an artifact of literacy, like the soul, like, it really didn't exist pre…
• 51:40
  Tom Kaczynski: pre-literacy.
• 51:42
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, is there a way to sort of, like, carry the human soul
• 51:47
  Tom Kaczynski: into this morass that we're in, in some medium. So, like, let's say the, you know, it is… it does become very difficult for most people to read.
• 51:57
  Tom Kaczynski: Print, and that becomes a very specialized kind of, thing for, you know, the 10% scientists and whoever needs to read.
• 52:06
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, that comics can maybe fill that void of, like, you know, a narrative text, visually focused, you know, widely available, as a kind of, like, soul formation, but in this new way. You know, you've got…
• 52:21
  Tom Kaczynski: you've got visuals, you've got images, you've got this new way of kind of interacting with the world, and the comics become the sort of the slow medium inside of that, in the same way that print was, in a sense, like a slow medium inside of everything else. You know, because, you know, even during Gutenberg era, you know, there were other ways of, you know.
• 52:41
  Tom Kaczynski: communicating, you could send, you know, you can send messengers, you could send, you know, you had semaphores, you had all kinds of weird ways of.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 52:50
  Tom Kaczynski: of doing things, you also had just the world happening, you know, in wars and et cetera, et cetera, and sort of print and literacy were this kind of little bubble that… of, like.
• 53:03
  Tom Kaczynski: Like, focus and understanding, that sort of carried a lot of the, sort of the knowledge and the ideas about the world,
• 53:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Along as… as everything else was sort of rolling along, and…
• 53:18
  Tom Kaczynski: In its usual fashion. So… so maybe… so maybe comics can be that for today, and I don't know if they need to change a lot, I don't need… I don't know, you know, I don't have, like, a very…
• 53:29
  Tom Kaczynski: It's more like a vague, kind of, Intuition, you know?
• 53:36
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 53:36
  Tom Kaczynski: at something… at something like that. And, you know, and I do think that comics bring, you know, there is… there is a kind of,
• 53:47
  Tom Kaczynski: I do think that, sort of, the… the…
• 53:51
  Tom Kaczynski: the power of comics re… has only been explored, like, at a, you know, at a 1% level, you know what I mean? Like, it's, like, we'.
• 53:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:58
  Tom Kaczynski: at telling, like, serialized stories and adventures, and fights with superheroes and blah blah blah. All that stuff is done well, and it works well in comics, but, you know, all the other things, like, you know, kind of like high literature, philosophy, science, all these things don't really.
• 54:16
  Tad Eggleston: We're getting better at them.
• 54:18
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, I'm not saying they aren't, I'm just saying that, you know, comics, you know, it's still…
• 54:23
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, given… even given how much of that has happened in the last, say, maybe 20 years, that's still a blip in terms of all of Comics.
• 54:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. Well, and beyond that, I would say that as much as it's happened, and there are so many wonderful examples of
• 54:43
  Tad Eggleston: Whether it's nonfiction, or philosophy, or metaphysical, or whatever,
• 54:51
  Tad Eggleston: The medium still gets looked on as… the medium of… Spider-Man.
• 55:00
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, maybe. I… I think… I think we're in a bubble where that's the case, but, you know, most… most young readers now read manga, you know what I mean? They have… they don't know who Spider-Man is. Maybe they've seen…
• 55:12
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 55:13
  Tom Kaczynski: in the.
• 55:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 55:14
  Tom Kaczynski: We don't see.
• 55:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's true. And this is, in some ways, is almost more hopeful to me. I remember…
• 55:21
  Tad Eggleston: like, I told you, my wife teaches art. She teaches middle school art, so she starts each class off with, like.
• 55:27
  Tad Eggleston: some sort of general question. And she was telling me a couple years ago that
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: like, on Wednesday, she came home, and she's like, I asked them all who their favorite comic
• 55:37
  Tad Eggleston: Or what their favorite comic was, and they all told me they didn't read comics. But then she came home Thursday laughing. She's like, I asked everybody what their favorite book was, and 80% of them listed a Raina Telgemeyer book. And when I told them that they were comics, they went, what? Those are comics? I just thought they were books!
• 55:55
  Tom Kaczynski: that's… that's where we need to go. It's like, people need to read these and not think it's comics, you know?
• 56:01
  Tad Eggleston: Hi!
• 56:01
  Tom Kaczynski: That's, that's, that's the way to go.
• 56:04
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I was at a Raina Tugelmeyer event on Monday, and, like…
• 56:11
  Tad Eggleston: A packed theater of a thousand.
• 56:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:13
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody waiting outside in 20 degree weather to get in and, you know…
• 56:19
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, that's… honestly, that's actually kind of a, you know, that's a good sign, because that just means this, sort of, the stigma is, like, is just washed off in some ways.
• 56:28
  Tad Eggleston: And some really intelligent questions from really young kids about her work. I mean, you had some of the basic, you know, is this…
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: such and such, but I mean, among other things, she… she… she headed it off at the pass with, if it's got an emoji on the cover, yes, it's true. Next question!
• 56:51
  Tom Kaczynski: It's funny.
• 56:52
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah. Normally, this would be about the place where I would ask you for your…
• 57:00
  Tad Eggleston: comics biography, and I will in a second, but you're…
• 57:05
  Tad Eggleston: one of the more interesting characters I know in the comics industry. You've got, I think, a background that I want to know more about. You're a philosopher.
• 57:15
  Tad Eggleston: cartoonist.
• 57:17
  Tad Eggleston: turned publisher, and… and, like, philosopher cartoonists are rare, cartoonists turned publishers are rare, and… and… and to… to top it all off, you… you…
• 57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Have moved around a little bit in your life.
• 57:32
  Tad Eggleston: live different places and… and… and different cultures. So, so talk to me a little bit about
• 57:39
  Tad Eggleston: Tom Kaczynski and How You Came to be who you are, and then we'll do it through comic books.
• 57:45
  Tom Kaczynski: Convoluted, long story, but, you know, I was born in Poland, behind the Iron Curtain, so it was still…
• 57:53
  Tom Kaczynski: It was still, the communist era in the 70s, that's when I was born. I… and I got into comics there, like, there was a sizable… out of all the, sort of, Eastern European, behind-the-Iron Curtain countries, communist countries, Poland and maybe,
• 58:10
  Tom Kaczynski: Yugoslavia had sort of, like, sizable comics industries.
• 58:15
  Tom Kaczynski: And, so I, I read comics since I was a very young kid, you know, there was this kind of, like, kids magazine.
• 58:24
  Tom Kaczynski: called, like, Youth World, that had comics in it, you know, and I read that religiously you could find, you know, kind of collections of various, strips and things.
• 58:36
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, one of my favorite things was going to, like, you know.
• 58:41
  Tom Kaczynski: what's called Yarmark, which is just kind of like a… it's just like a flea market, and there was always somebody selling, like, some old comics at those, and I would buy those up. There was also, like, an English language library that was not too far from where I was at, and there was some English language comics there, including Peanuts.
• 58:57
  Tom Kaczynski: That I saw, pretty early on.
• 58:59
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, so I got into comics pretty early, and there was a guy, there's a neighbor that, I was friends with, and he had an older brother who was really into comics, and he was starting to draw his own comics. So, so I just, you know.
• 59:16
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of, like, biosmosis, like, was starting to see his… His, you know, sort of…
• 59:23
  Tom Kaczynski: drawings, his projects that he was working on. He never really became a cartoonist or anything, but, like, you know, there was a… there was a time where he was, like, really into it and, you know, learned… sort of taught me a lot, about how to put together, you know, some basics about how to think about, you know, the fact that somebody actually is drawing these things, you know?
• 59:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:41
  Tom Kaczynski: And .
• 59:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they didn't just magically appear on the page.
• 59:47
  Tom Kaczynski: And, I mean, you know, sometimes the lines are so perfect, it's like, how is this even made by a human? But, you know, so… and then at some point, my family, you know, decided to leave. Poland was, especially in their, like, 80s, was under a lot of turmoil. There was… there was the solidarity movement.
• 1:00:05
  Tad Eggleston: Which, which was kind of the,
• 1:00:09
  Tom Kaczynski: Kind of an independent union, that was trying to break from communist politics.
• 1:00:15
  Tom Kaczynski: And sort of, you know, there's many, many years of, like, martial law, turmoil, rioting, and, you know, food shortages, power shortages, etc, etc. And, and my family sort of decided that it was, you know, it's not really a viable place to kind of, like, raise a family.
• 1:00:33
  Tom Kaczynski: And, and, and,
• 1:00:36
  Tom Kaczynski: And and we, you know, we decided to move, and we ended up in West Germany.
• 1:00:43
  Tom Kaczynski: And this was, you know, this was a little bit of an escape, in the sense that, you know, technically, you know, it was illegal for us to leave, but in Germany, you know, you could essentially ask for asylum, and this was kind of a time where, like, essentially anybody that came over from Eastern Europe
• 1:01:02
  Tom Kaczynski: was… tended to be granted asylum in the West, just because this was kind of a struggle between those two power.
• 1:01:09
  Tad Eggleston: Baltimore, right?
• 1:01:11
  Tom Kaczynski: They sort of wanted to sort of show up the other…
• 1:01:13
  Tad Eggleston: That they were helping the people, you know… Back when the United States didn't like Russia.
• 1:01:20
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, there's many, many periods of ups and downs in Russia. And
• 1:01:28
  Tom Kaczynski: the, you know, so we ended up in West Germany, but it was… there was never a destination, there was sort of a waypoint, and we always wanted… my dad really… my parents wanted to go to the United States.
• 1:01:41
  Tom Kaczynski: Although we applied to many other countries, English-speaking countries, because my dad was an engineer, he spoke English, he felt that was sort of the way to go.
• 1:01:54
  Tom Kaczynski: And we, you know, after a year and a half of, kind of.
• 1:01:57
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, going through this process, we got shipped off to the US, we got accepted.
• 1:02:04
  Tom Kaczynski: And ended up in Minneapolis, and, you know, in the process, in Germany, I also, you know, Germany has a comics culture. There were, you know, I learned about American comics there, I read a lot of European comics there, and then by the time I got to the US, you know, going into a comic bookstore was just like, you know, it's like…
• 1:02:23
  Tom Kaczynski: I've never seen a place that had that many comics, you know? So, you know, so it was…
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: So you were in Minneapolis, so I have to ask, did you know the… and I think it's still there, but the College of Comic Book Knowledge?
• 1:02:38
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, that was, that was, you know, that was one of the kind of primary comic book stores. It was not the one I went to the most, because it was a little bit out of my way where I, where I lived. I usually went to Dreamhaven Books and Comics.
• 1:02:52
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:02:52
  Tom Kaczynski: You know that one.
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: I've heard of that one. I only know that, Comic College because one of the co-owners
• 1:02:58
  Tad Eggleston: was living in Wheaton, Illinois, where I grew up. Okay. Or one of the co-founders, I don't remember if he was still an owner. So he went to the shop that I worked at.
• 1:03:10
  Tad Eggleston: So, he told me that if I was ever in Minneapolis, I had to go and tell Ralph hi for him, and Ralph would find me anything I wanted, and sure enough, I was up there on a business trip once, and went in and introduced myself, and…
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: like, my entire list of, I am desperately looking for these books was in my hands in minutes.
• 1:03:31
  Tom Kaczynski: No, they were a great story, they were a great story. There was… it was the College of Comic Knowledge and the Nostalgia Zone. They were kind of like sister…
• 1:03:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:03:38
  Tom Kaczynski: Things in the same, space.
• 1:03:41
  Tom Kaczynski: And they had an insane amount of back issues. But like I said, that wasn't my regular shop. I went there, you know, relatively frequently, but it was, Dreamhaven was really my… not first store, but…
• 1:03:54
  Tom Kaczynski: where I ended up going a lot in college years, because it was on camp… it was close to the campus. Right. I also ended up working there, for a few years, and then
• 1:04:05
  Tom Kaczynski: worked for another store called Big Brain Comics, which, which I was the first employee of that, that store. So, but yeah.
• 1:04:15
  Tad Eggleston: We know lots of people who have been first… first employees of comic shops.
• 1:04:20
  Tad Eggleston: Those of us who love it seem to, like, just manage to pull it off. The comic… comic shop I go to now,
• 1:04:30
  Tad Eggleston: The first employee is actually my boss at the school I work at. The second employee is the current owner.
• 1:04:36
  Tom Kaczynski: Right, right, right, right, right.
• 1:04:38
  Tad Eggleston: And it was both because they were the comics kids that worked walking distance away, and they were just there all the time.
• 1:04:45
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, I was in college, and I, you know, it was easy. Right. And, you know, I was already, like, selling my own mini-comics there, so, like, I knew the staff pretty well. Right. And, you know, at some point, they just were like, dude, you know, we need…
• 1:05:00
  Tom Kaczynski: we need another person, you want a job? You know, it's like, I wasn't… Right. I don't even have to do any applying, they just ask. Right.
• 1:05:08
  Tom Kaczynski: So,
• 1:05:10
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, so, you know, but because of my sort of European experience, I never really had, like, this…
• 1:05:16
  Tom Kaczynski: this, like, like, oh, comics are this, you know? Like, comics are superhero comics, comics are this kind of comic, or that kind of comic. I was always very, like, open to different genres and different…
• 1:05:27
  Tom Kaczynski: different things. So, you know, sort of the… sort of the black and white explosion in America, all the different sort of things going on in comics at that time were really…
• 1:05:37
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, I loved reading my X-Men and Spider-Man and all that, but I also, very much…
• 1:05:44
  Tom Kaczynski: Was interested in what's going on in the, sort of, the indies, you know, the indie comics.
• 1:05:49
  Tom Kaczynski: The various, you know, American flags, Cerebus, you know, Mutant Ninja Turtles, or whatever, you know, like Mr. X, all that stuff.
• 1:06:00
  Tom Kaczynski: So, and then, you know, I just started making my own comics. I, you know, I worked for the school newspaper at the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Daily, and they gave me a comic strip that I did for a few years there.
• 1:06:14
  Tom Kaczynski: And I was publishing my own mini comment.
• 1:06:17
  Tad Eggleston: So when are you gonna collect that?
• 1:06:19
  Tom Kaczynski: Huh?
• 1:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: your comic strip for the Minnesota… I mean…
• 1:06:23
  Tom Kaczynski: We're in the chat.
• 1:06:24
  Tad Eggleston: Smith just collected his.
• 1:06:26
  Tom Kaczynski: Right?
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: It's a nice hardcover.
• 1:06:30
  Tom Kaczynski: It wasn't very good. I mean, maybe someday, I don't know, I have to dig up all my pages from that. They're not all scanned, you know, it's like, it's a… it'd be quite an endeavor.
• 1:06:39
  Tom Kaczynski: But, You know, I did that, also the…
• 1:06:43
  Tad Eggleston: They might be scanned at the school.
• 1:06:46
  Tom Kaczynski: Well, you know, when I started, we were still shooting, we were still shooting film.
• 1:06:51
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:06:52
  Tom Kaczynski: So there were no… they were not being scanned by the computer, we were like, you know…
• 1:06:56
  Tad Eggleston: No, I understand, but lots of schools, because they keep archives…
• 1:07:00
  Tom Kaczynski: That's your own papers.
• 1:07:02
  Tad Eggleston: They might… they may have scanned their archive already.
• 1:07:05
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I have the originals, that's probably… I can, you know, I should just re-scan the originals. That's probably the best way to go, but…
• 1:07:12
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, maybe, maybe, you know, maybe I'll dust them off one of these days.
• 1:07:21
  Tom Kaczynski: But, you know, I started making mini-comics, you know, I got into the whole, like, you know, I realized that there was this whole world of DIY stuff, you know, John Porcellino's catalog kind of opened my eyes to a lot of different things.
• 1:07:33
  Tom Kaczynski: And there were a few creators in Minneapolis that were doing work, you know, like, Anders Nielsen was here. I didn't know him personally, but I knew his comics already. I started buying his mini-comics.
• 1:07:45
  Tom Kaczynski: Zach Sally was here, and, you know, a few other creators. So I just sort of, kind of, like, got into that whole thing.
• 1:07:54
  Tom Kaczynski: At the same time, I was, you know, Minnesota Daily was the second, only the second
• 1:08:01
  Tom Kaczynski: college paper to go online. There was, like, one other paper that went online first, but it was the second ever to go online.
• 1:08:09
  Tom Kaczynski: And, and they needed someone to do, essentially, like, HTML coding for this paper. So I learned HTML very early on, and got into, sort of, the internet world, in the early 90s, you know, through the newspaper.
• 1:08:25
  Tom Kaczynski: And, and my strip was, you know, serialized online pretty early on, and I got, I got an award from, I don't know if you… how much you know about the early web, but there used to be a magazine, a newsstand magazine called The Web, the Web Magazine.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: I vaguely know that.
• 1:08:41
  Tom Kaczynski: And the web magazine, you know, pointed out my little comic strip as one of the… one of the coolest, strips that you haven't heard of, you know?
• 1:08:51
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, and then sort of, I kind of got sucked into the dot-com boom, just because HTML was kind of a magic word back then.
• 1:09:00
  Tom Kaczynski: You can kind of get a… if you knew what you were doing, you could design, you know, in Photoshop.
• 1:09:06
  Tom Kaczynski: Illustrator, and you knew HTML, you could kind of, you know, write your own ticket, and I ended up going to New York and working in advertising a lot.
• 1:09:16
  Tom Kaczynski: And that was sort of why I moved to New York, but I was also… kind of got into the New York comic scene, and, you know, started… I went to the first MOCA, you know, and sort of have been since then.
• 1:09:29
  Tom Kaczynski: Had a group of cartoonists that I hung out with, Gabrielle Bell, Jonathan Bennett, John Lewis.
• 1:09:34
  Tom Kaczynski: And a few others, we were kind of, you know, a little group of cartoonists that met at each other's houses every, every week.
• 1:09:42
  Tom Kaczynski: Kind of, like, see what we were working on, and… Just, you know… Chatting and making comics.
• 1:09:51
  Tad Eggleston: It seems like almost everybody was part of one of those.
• 1:09:54
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, you kinda need that.
• 1:09:55
  Tad Eggleston: enclaves of…
• 1:09:57
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, you need… it's important to have peers that, like, A, you respect, and B, you can kind of compare yourself against, and sort of, you know, they spur you on to kind of get better and better.
• 1:10:09
  Tom Kaczynski: Right.
• 1:10:11
  Tad Eggleston: First readers, friendly competition.
• 1:10:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:10:14
  Tad Eggleston: Cheap editors.
• 1:10:16
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, it's really difficult to do something like that without some kind of peer group, you know?
• 1:10:21
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:10:21
  Tom Kaczynski: And,
• 1:10:24
  Tom Kaczynski: And then, you know, so at some point, I, you know, me and my girlfriend left New York.
• 1:10:29
  Tom Kaczynski: And, went back to Minneapolis, and, I didn't want to work in advertising anymore, and, you know, I still wanted to stay in touch with all my cartooning friends. The Minneapolis scene, you know, vibrant as it is, is nothing like the size of the New York scene.
• 1:10:45
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, I kind of wanted to stay in touch with people and sort of started Uncivilized Books as a mini-comics press.
• 1:10:53
  Tom Kaczynski: I've worked with Gabrielle and a few other cartoonists, kind of early on, and then it sort of morphed into a real press. Gabrielle, like, asked me to do her graphic novel, The Voyeurs, and…
• 1:11:06
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of walked away for a few months saying, I need to see if I can become a publisher, because if I… I don't want to have, like, stacks of these books in my house, I want to have a distributor, I want to have…
• 1:11:17
  Tom Kaczynski: a place to, you know, a way to sell these things. And then, you know, I sort of hooked up with the local distributor, consortium.
• 1:11:25
  Tom Kaczynski: Which was, at that time, had signed, No Brow as their first comics, publisher, and they really wanted to kind of expand. This was kind of, that's sort of the early days of comic… of bookstores embracing comics.
• 1:11:40
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:11:40
  Tom Kaczynski: And I just happened to be in the same town, and they were like, yeah, we need, you know, we need someone around that can help us discern what these things are. And so they signed me on, even though I basically had, you know, I had no books under my belt at that point.
• 1:11:58
  Tom Kaczynski: And yeah, it's been kind of like… that's where I've been ever since then, just kind of…
• 1:12:04
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, Plugging away at uncivilized.
• 1:12:07
  Tad Eggleston: So… So what did you study in college? Because you also seem to be ridiculously well-read.
• 1:12:14
  Tad Eggleston: And I appreciate that, just because…
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: Like, even among studious comics people, you don't get people that drop some of the philosophy stuff that you do.
• 1:12:25
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, I studied architecture, and art. I had a double major in architecture and art. And, and within architecture, you could do a minor, you could do some kind of, like, kind of minor emphasis, so I did that in,
• 1:12:42
  Tom Kaczynski: CSCL, or, you know, Comparative Studies and, Critical Studies and Comparative Literature.
• 1:12:50
  Tom Kaczynski: Okay. So I read a lot of philosophy, a lot of, you know, A lot of.
• 1:12:57
  Tad Eggleston: And you're a cat guy. I love it.
• 1:13:00
  Tom Kaczynski: What's that?
• 1:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: I just saw the cat walk by. Always happy to see cats in the background.
• 1:13:05
  Tom Kaczynski: I've got a couple of cats, yeah.
• 1:13:07
  Tad Eggleston: Mine got shut out because he has a tendency to want to eat my microphone while I'm talking.
• 1:13:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, they're usually pretty good, but I, you know, they sometimes get needy and, you know…
• 1:13:18
  Tad Eggleston: I have 3 that are very good, and one that's a brat.
• 1:13:23
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, we've got 2 of them, and…
• 1:13:26
  Tom Kaczynski: They're usually… this is around the time when they leave me alone, so they're just kind of wondering.
• 1:13:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:13:33
  Tom Kaczynski: But, you know, but I, you know, philosophy is something that I've read since I was young, so it's something that just, you know, it's just a kind of an ongoing interest for me, and literature in general, too. Like, I, you know, I read a lot of novels, and…
• 1:13:45
  Tom Kaczynski: My reading has slowed down in my older age here, but and also in this digital age, you know?
• 1:13:53
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's when I started doing audiobooks, because it's like, okay, I can get the literature in to and from work.
• 1:13:59
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:00
  Tom Kaczynski: I decided, you know, I decided, like, I tried a couple of books, and I just… I couldn't do it.
• 1:14:06
  Tom Kaczynski: And, so I decided, like, okay, I'm gonna read less books, I'm just gonna… I'm just really gonna stick to quality. I'm just gonna… I'm gonna cut out all the fluff, you know? I'm just gonna, like…
• 1:14:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:16
  Tom Kaczynski: Here's my…
• 1:14:17
  Tad Eggleston: But sometimes the fluff is fun.
• 1:14:20
  Tom Kaczynski: What exactly… But, like, I get my phone elsewhere now.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair. I got my fun on the internet, you know? But is that fun, or is that just addiction?
• 1:14:33
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, you know, either way, like, you know, you can certainly… there was, there was a time when people were concerned when people read too many books, you know?
• 1:14:41
  Tad Eggleston: There was. I mean, actually, I think that a lot of the world is still concerned if you read too many books. We complain about lack of literacy, but if you always have your nose in a book, there's something wrong with you.
• 1:14:53
  Tom Kaczynski: Exactly, exactly.
• 1:14:56
  Tad Eggleston: You did, you did,
• 1:15:03
  Tad Eggleston: you did kind of a hybrid e-biography and comics biography, so this will be easier, even. But now I want your comics comics biography, and by that, I mean not your bibliography, but tell me, like, the books that you were reading, as specifically as you can remember.
• 1:15:19
  Tad Eggleston: that formed you, that changed how you looked at comics, that made you want to be a cartoonist. You know, start early, and… and… yeah.
• 1:15:29
  Tad Eggleston: Talk about the… talk about the books that are meaningful.
• 1:15:33
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, most of this stuff you won't know, because it's from Poland.
• 1:15:35
  Tad Eggleston: That's perfect.
• 1:15:36
  Tom Kaczynski: That's.
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay, that just might mean that you have to send me lists to go find it.
• 1:15:41
  Tom Kaczynski: like, a visual version of it, I can show you them.
• 1:15:44
  Tom Kaczynski: But I'm… I'm…
• 1:15:46
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, the stuff in Poland, you know, I mean, really, that's where I first fell in love with comics, and that's the stuff that I really…
• 1:15:54
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, resonated with, you know, and there is, like, there's some kids' comics, you know? There's, like, some very specifically kids comics, there's this kind of, like, asterisk, obelisk-style comic.
• 1:16:05
  Tom Kaczynski: That's called Kaikoi Kokos, and it's basically, you know, like, asterisk Obelisk is, is like the Gauls versus the Romans, right?
• 1:16:12
  Tom Kaczynski: So, Taiko y Kokos is the Slovenians, or the, you know, the Slavs, the Slavs versus the Germanics, you know, and there is a kind of a… there's a competition, they're kind of, you know, the…
• 1:16:26
  Tom Kaczynski: And they're always fighting, and it's… it's a little fantasy, there's a little bit of fantasy world, but the characters are similar in the sense that there's, like, a kind of a skinny, clever character, and then there's a brawny, you know, kind of big guy. They're kind of the best friends, and then there's obviously, like, kind of a…
• 1:16:43
  Tom Kaczynski: the leader of the German tribes, who is, you know, kind of a… his actually… his name is Hegemon.
• 1:16:48
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, when there's just this constant conflict, kind of this…
• 1:16:55
  Tom Kaczynski: Back and forth. So those are some of the earliest comics that I was reading.
• 1:17:00
  Tom Kaczynski: And, there's also, like, this one is really difficult to translate, but,
• 1:17:06
  Tom Kaczynski: There's this really great series of comics,
• 1:17:12
  Tom Kaczynski: that really play with language, and images, and they're just incredibly playful. It's kind of like, a little bit like… maybe, like, maybe the closest thing that I can think of in America, and this is not even comics, it's like Dr. Seuss kind of being really playful with language.
• 1:17:27
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:17:28
  Tom Kaczynski: sort of maybe kind of Dr. Seussian comic book. that, that, that really was fun. It was just, like, all kinds of puns and goofy things happening, and it was really fun for a kid to read and just kind of, like.
• 1:17:44
  Tom Kaczynski: think about.
• 1:17:46
  Tad Eggleston: Whoa, was that one? Was that the…
• 1:17:47
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, there's just… there's many… there's, like, Pusini Pashte, which means… which is a pun on a… on a well-known Polish, like, historical novel. I mean, again, this is gonna make no sense to most of you, because it's… but you've got… even that title is, like, a pun on that title, and there's no easy way to translate that pun, you know, so…
• 1:18:07
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:18:07
  Tom Kaczynski: Fair enough. But then the other, the other comics were maybe a little bit more, kind of, you know, sort of, Euro-comic speed, one of them being Thorgol. I don't know if you ever read Thorgol by.
• 1:18:24
  Tad Eggleston: I've read the first volume. I need to read more.
• 1:18:28
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, there's, like, 20 or 30 volumes.
• 1:18:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:18:31
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:32
  Tom Kaczynski: And, the first, I think, I don't know how many, but Ruschinsky, the Polish artist, is the principal artist on the first bunch of volumes. Eventually, they get a new creative team in there, when Rushinsky kind of ages out of it.
• 1:18:47
  Tom Kaczynski: But, but, you know, they're really great. It's about a Viking that, you know, falls from the sky in a, in a space capsule and gets raised by, you know, it's a spaceman, gets raised by Vikings.
• 1:19:00
  Tom Kaczynski: So he's, like, a little bit advanced, you know, and the Vikings are these barbarians, so he's this kind of, like, fish out of water among the Vikings.
• 1:19:11
  Tom Kaczynski: That's a great comic, great cartooning, great storytelling, just a fun, fun comic. And then another one is Funky Kovol, which is a Pol… like, homegrown Polish thing, and it's,
• 1:19:25
  Tom Kaczynski: it's a sci-fi comic that used to run… there was this Polish magazine called Fantastica, which is, you know, a little bit like, like, if you combined…
• 1:19:34
  Tom Kaczynski: Heavy metal with,
• 1:19:37
  Tom Kaczynski: With, you know, one of the sort of, like, sci-fi magazines that ran actual stories,
• 1:19:42
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:19:43
  Tom Kaczynski: you would kind of have Fantastica. They always had some comics in the back, and then most of it was devoted to serialization of various novels and things. Or, like, or short stories, or whatever.
• 1:19:52
  Tad Eggleston: Short stories.
• 1:19:53
  Tom Kaczynski: And yeah, that comic ran in the back of that, and, you know, it was always really difficult to find specific issues, so I read it out of sequence, but, it was just, like, beautifully drawn, incredible, you know, incredible art, just a wild story about invasion of Earth by these weird little creatures.
• 1:20:13
  Tom Kaczynski: And you know, maybe the closest artist, you know, in the U.S, would be someone like Paul Gulaci, you know, like, kind of, that kind of quality of the art.
• 1:20:23
  Tom Kaczynski: And that same artist also did kind of an adaptation of Erich von Deniken comics, or books for the German market, but it was also really popular in Poland. And there's basically the whole story of, like, you know, Atlantis.
• 1:20:39
  Tom Kaczynski: Gods from space, all this kind of stuff. All these comics were just, like, you know, kind of mind-blowing to me at that time, and just kind of, like, cemented this long love for comics, you know, for me.
• 1:20:54
  Tom Kaczynski: And I… that's when I started making my own comics. My first comics are just kind of these sci-fi, kind of adventure, space battle type things, you know,
• 1:21:04
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, that's basically, you know, those are the really formative experiences.
• 1:21:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, as a publisher now, do you ever think of looking at…
• 1:21:17
  Tad Eggleston: getting U.S. rights for any of these books?
• 1:21:19
  Tom Kaczynski: There's some Polish stuff I'm working on. There's a great book that I would like to do, that's actually adapting Olga Takarczyk.
• 1:21:29
  Tom Kaczynski: who's a Nobel laureate.
• 1:21:32
  Tom Kaczynski: drawn by, Daniel Kumielewski. It's a really cool, book, and I'd like to, put that out.
• 1:21:40
  Tom Kaczynski: And, But there's all kinds of legal wranglings.
• 1:21:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, of course.
• 1:21:46
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, it's sort of in limbo right now, but…
• 1:21:50
  Tom Kaczynski: But I've been trying to get that book here for quite a while.
• 1:21:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's just…
• 1:21:55
  Tom Kaczynski: Funky Cobo book, I really wanted to do the Funky Cobo book, and, you know, it's one of those, like, you know, we had the rights very briefly for a very short period of time, and that's… that was the time when, Uncivilized Books and 11 other people, you know, I don't know if you remember the sort of the Defend Eleven, thing that happened.
• 1:22:15
  Tad Eggleston: I miss this.
• 1:22:15
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, this was, you know, I don't even know if I should be talking about this, because there was a legal, sort of case, but it was, you know, we said some things online about a creator that was…
• 1:22:27
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, accused various improprieties, and this creator sued a whole bunch of other people, including uncivilized Books and a bunch of other creators. So, like.
• 1:22:38
  Tom Kaczynski: That's the moment we got the rights, and we basically just couldn't do the book, because it was the legal… all the legal stuff.
• 1:22:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:22:45
  Tom Kaczynski: in the middle.
• 1:22:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:22:46
  Tom Kaczynski: like… Just, you know, I didn't even know if I was gonna exist, you know, as a…
• 1:22:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:22:52
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, you know, so it just… we just have to, like, give up on it. And, so I… at some point, I'd like to maybe try again, but, but I had this… yeah, it was a weird…
• 1:23:02
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, it's always… I mean, I mean, we're going through…
• 1:23:06
  Tad Eggleston: For different reasons, you know, all of the publishers that are…
• 1:23:13
  Tad Eggleston: number of publishers that are in, like, dire straits because of stock being held by Diamond that… that they're not getting paid for and can't get back, and…
• 1:23:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we, you know… What not?
• 1:23:26
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, they owe us, they… Diamond still owes us a lot of money.
• 1:23:30
  Tom Kaczynski: But they, you know, but they, they don't, you know, we never had stock there. We were never, one of the companies that had stock there, so at least that part of it we're out of, but it still sucks not to get paid, you know.
• 1:23:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. I mean, comics is not a, high-margin industry.
• 1:23:48
  Tom Kaczynski: Yep, yep, yep.
• 1:23:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean…
• 1:23:57
  Tom Kaczynski: But anyway, you know, that's the… that's the kind of, like, the early story of my comics… my comics, career here.
• 1:24:04
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, and, like, that's… It makes…
• 1:24:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna be reading your… you know, as I finish up some of the stuff that I didn't…
• 1:24:16
  Tad Eggleston: finish reading or rereading for today, that sort of thing. It's gonna give me a different lens looking at this as, okay, we've got the sci-fi background from very early on.
• 1:24:29
  Tom Kaczynski: Mixed with a really…
• 1:24:32
  Tad Eggleston: thoughtful.
• 1:24:34
  Tad Eggleston: Interested-in philosophy guy who's lived on…
• 1:24:39
  Tad Eggleston: Both sides of the Iron Curtain.
• 1:24:41
  Tom Kaczynski: Huh.
• 1:24:43
  Tad Eggleston: You know, that suddenly makes beta testing the apocalypse make so much more sense, just from the title sense. You know, because you've seen the extremes of both…
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, you've lived the extremes of both a…
• 1:25:00
  Tad Eggleston: Communist egalitarian society and a capitalist egalitarian society.
• 1:25:06
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:07
  Tad Eggleston: Supposedly, they're both egalitarian, and yet, it doesn't feel that way.
• 1:25:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:13
  Tad Eggleston: But you also got to see things through the lens of…
• 1:25:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm just thinking, between just early interest in sci-fi, any…
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm always fascinated by story… I mean, and now I'm gonna have to, like, really go read Thorgol. I'd forgotten the aspect where it was the spaceman dropped with the Vikings, so that's been how long since I read a volume of Thorgol. Because I'm always fascinated with that particular type of…
• 1:25:48
  Tad Eggleston: Alternate history.
• 1:25:52
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:25:52
  Tad Eggleston: Like, there's a shared novel universe called the Ring of Fire, where Eric Flint took a town from…
• 1:26:03
  Tad Eggleston: West Virginia in, like, 2000.
• 1:26:08
  Tad Eggleston: and dropped it into Thuringia.
• 1:26:11
  Tom Kaczynski: Hmm. In…
• 1:26:12
  Tad Eggleston: during the Thirty Years' War in 1636.
• 1:26:17
  Tad Eggleston: But it's very specific. In creating the universe. He literally… he picked a town that was going to be the fictional
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: Grantville, and he, like, cataloged their library, he found out what resources their schools had, so even as he threw the universe open to other professional writers and other
• 1:26:40
  Tad Eggleston: amateur riders, it was, these are your resources. You can't magically have things. If you can come up with a reason why they should be able to make an airplane.
• 1:26:51
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:26:52
  Tad Eggleston: And they can have an airplane, but it's gotta be…
• 1:26:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure.
• 1:26:57
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, I mean, it reminds me a little bit, I don't know if you read this, The Drifting Classroom by Kazu Omezu.
• 1:27:02
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think I have, but that sounds fascinating.
• 1:27:05
  Tom Kaczynski: It's, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a school, it's a whole school, it's like a, you know, kids from, like.
• 1:27:10
  Tad Eggleston: you know, kindergarten to maybe, like…
• 1:27:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Okay, this looks cool. The teachers, this school somehow just gets projected, like, you know, 10,000 years into the future, and they have to survive in this, like, post-apocalyptic world, with, you know, humanity changed into…
• 1:27:28
  Tom Kaczynski: kind of a crazy, crazy thing, but it's a great, great, great book. I wrote a review of it for the Rain Taxi, review. It's, like, one of my favorite mangas.
• 1:27:38
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm gonna have to read this, this looks fascinating.
• 1:27:43
  Tad Eggleston: And God, dude, I mean, one of the things I always say about manga is, think of 3 things that you don't think have anything in common, and there's a manga about that.
• 1:27:54
  Tom Kaczynski: Oh yeah, oh yeah.
• 1:27:56
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, that's, you know, this is kind of the dream here, right? It's like, why can't we, you know, like, they can have, you know, they can have sports manga, why can't we have sports manga?
• 1:28:05
  Tad Eggleston: I'm actually amazed, and every time anybody goes to Japan, I ask them to look for this, because I'm certain that it exists, and it just hasn't been translated. There was a New York Times story
• 1:28:19
  Tad Eggleston: like, 4 years ago, about the retired Yakuza softball team. Like, an actual retired Yakuza softball team. Like, the softball team between them has spent more than 250 years in prison. Almost none of them have all of their fingers.
• 1:28:38
  Tad Eggleston: And they started wearing pink and black, because initially they wore gold and black, and the other teams were afraid of them. And they're actually the team that takes it least seriously among all the teams in their league. They, like, get their asses kicked on a regular basis, because they're out there drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and just having a good time. And apparently the PTA teams take softball every bit as seriously
• 1:29:03
  Tad Eggleston: as, like, the high school teams do, and high school baseball in Japan is ridiculous, right?
• 1:29:11
  Tad Eggleston: So, I'm like, this is actual real life.
• 1:29:15
  Tad Eggleston: and it feels almost too crazy for a manga. There's gotta be a manga about this, I wanna see it!
• 1:29:23
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, for sure, for sure.
• 1:29:26
  Tom Kaczynski: But yeah, you know, I think we've, you know, sort of like…
• 1:29:29
  Tom Kaczynski: we've only scratched the surface with comics, you know? It's kind of.
• 1:29:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we've definitely only scrapped… in the U.S, we've only… I mean, this is why I was asking about translating, er, you know, getting the rights to some of the stuff you loved as a kid. We've only scratched the surface of really translating and bringing comics from…
• 1:29:47
  Tad Eggleston: around the world to the United States. There are…
• 1:29:51
  Tad Eggleston: So many phenomenal comics in the world.
• 1:29:55
  Tad Eggleston: And you, you actually do do a fair amount of that. How do you…
• 1:30:01
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, I've done a few. I mean, it's a… it's, you know, it's a difficult… it's definitely difficult, you know, if you don't have a lot of resources, it's difficult, you know, to fund that, you know, because…
• 1:30:12
  Tom Kaczynski: Not only do you have to, like, have a resource to, like, you know, translate the thing, you have to re-letter it, you have to… you know, there's all kinds of extra production that comes with it, you know, and it just…
• 1:30:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:30:25
  Tom Kaczynski: It brings all this extra cost to the project.
• 1:30:28
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, that is probably going to be marginal as it is, you know? So, it's difficult to do this for, kind of, the smaller titles, and I've done it a few times, and, you know, it worked out okay, but it was never, like, a very highly profitable thing, unless you can maybe snag a grant or something from,
• 1:30:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:30:47
  Tom Kaczynski: From the other country that, where they support this kind of thing, you know, because there are a lot of countries who do have grants, to sort of, you know.
• 1:30:56
  Tom Kaczynski: Disseminate their various cultural artifacts, including comics.
• 1:31:01
  Tad Eggleston: But, but how do you find and decide upon the material, was actually…
• 1:31:07
  Tad Eggleston: where I… where I was interested in first.
• 1:31:09
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, you know, there… it's, you know, once you're in comics, you kind of just know, you, you know, especially when you're on the publishing side, you just, like, agents find you.
• 1:31:20
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:31:20
  Tom Kaczynski: They're just looking… they're looking for places.
• 1:31:22
  Tad Eggleston: So they're looking for you, and then you're going…
• 1:31:25
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm, this looks interesting, tell me more.
• 1:31:28
  Tom Kaczynski: I'm like, no.
• 1:31:28
  Tad Eggleston: Not for me.
• 1:31:29
  Tom Kaczynski: But then, every now and then, you, you know, all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow, this is, this looks amazing. I would do that, you know? Like, and then, and, you know.
• 1:31:38
  Tad Eggleston: So what you're saying is if I want to be able to read a lot of comics from around the world, I just need to start publishing.
• 1:31:48
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, you know, be the change you want to see in the world.
• 1:31:51
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like… I feel like that was on a bumper sticker somewhere.
• 1:31:55
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, if you want to see more comics from around the world, you can, you know, this… there is a path, you just… you just have to…
• 1:32:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I didn't even mean in translation, I just meant if I wanted people to give me free copies of comics from around the world, I need to be a publisher so that they think I might publish them.
• 1:32:13
  Tom Kaczynski: Sure, but you will also get these things in, you know, in, not in English language. You might get a sample, you might get a sample.
• 1:32:23
  Tom Kaczynski: So, you know, I have the advantage of being able to read Polish and German. So, you know, a lot of times the titles, like a French title, would also have… there might be also a Polish edition or a German edition, so I could read that, even if I can't read French, you know, so that sort of helps me navigate some of this stuff.
• 1:32:43
  Tom Kaczynski: But there's a lot of titles where I'm like, oh, this looks really cool, but I don't really have a way to, like.
• 1:32:49
  Tom Kaczynski: read it, evaluate it, you know, maybe I can… if I have a friend who can read it for me, they can kind of do it. But yeah, it gets very difficult.
• 1:32:57
  Tad Eggleston: So you wouldn't use, like, the Google Translate for evaluation purposes, and then translate.
• 1:33:04
  Tom Kaczynski: For real.
• 1:33:04
  Tad Eggleston: When you decided that it was worth it?
• 1:33:07
  Tom Kaczynski: You could do it, you could do it. it just, you know, just feels like.
• 1:33:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, don't get me wrong, it's clunky, but… but… It's clunky.
• 1:33:16
  Tom Kaczynski: But it's, but it's also…
• 1:33:17
  Tad Eggleston: I've become the double electronic guy sometimes, where I have… where I have the Google Translate with the camera function on my phone, and the French comic on my iPad.
• 1:33:27
  Tom Kaczynski: Listen, I…
• 1:33:28
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 1:33:29
  Tom Kaczynski: I'm fine with that, I'm totally fine with that. You know, I… but I do have a limited amount of time in my life.
• 1:33:36
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:33:37
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, and you know, like, Phenographics, you know, like, you know, their greatest moment of translation was when, you know, when Kim Thompson was still alive, and he could read…
• 1:33:47
  Tom Kaczynski: read and write in multiple languages, so he, you know, he was kind of their Google Translator, he could kind of… Right. He also had a great sensibility.
• 1:33:54
  Tom Kaczynski: And, and could kind of add that resource to, to the company. I don't, you know,
• 1:34:00
  Tom Kaczynski: you know, besides the sort of the everyday things that I have to do, you know, like, to sort of, like, have this translation program on top of it, it's…
• 1:34:07
  Tad Eggleston: So, so now we need… now we need to figure out how to stop time for Tom.
• 1:34:12
  Tom Kaczynski: To read more comics, to figure out what he's gonna publish.
• 1:34:16
  Tom Kaczynski: There you go.
• 1:34:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Chip Zdarsky and Matt Fraction had an interesting theory on it.
• 1:34:21
  Tom Kaczynski: Yep.
• 1:34:22
  Tom Kaczynski: Oh, you mean by stopping time?
• 1:34:28
  Tom Kaczynski: Sure, sure.
• 1:34:29
  Tad Eggleston: That's another book.
• 1:34:31
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:34:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh…
• 1:34:35
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, anyway, that's… that's kind of where we're at. I mean, we're kind of at almost 2 hours.
• 1:34:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, I was about to say, so, Tom, Tom, what is next for you? What's next for Uncivilized?
• 1:34:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we're serializing… Anything you want to plug big.
• 1:34:49
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, we're serializing The Jungle, by Tom Neely and Keenan Marshall Keller, which is, a series about…
• 1:34:58
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, this biker gang of apes, you know, and the biker game…
• 1:35:05
  Tom Kaczynski: gang name is The Humans, so it's kind of like, think of Planet of the Apes, but biker gangs, and they call themselves the Humans.
• 1:35:13
  Tom Kaczynski: A lot of ironies here, but also just an incredibly well-drawn and written series, by those two creators.
• 1:35:20
  Tom Kaczynski: That I… that I really deeply love, and we're doing it in magazine style, so it's a… it's a really, the artwork, like, really screams, off the page. Like, it's really… it looks really great that way.
• 1:35:34
  Tad Eggleston: I have copies of it sitting behind me.
• 1:35:36
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, and And then also about to come out is Fox Bunny Funny by, Andy Hartzell.
• 1:35:45
  Tad Eggleston: I have read it and purchased it, because you may have had it on the road with you.
• 1:35:50
  Tom Kaczynski: I did, I did. Yeah, we had some advanced copies. It's a silent comic, about a world where foxes and bunnies live, and, you know, but they don't really interact. You know, the foxes are the hunters, and the bunnies are the…
• 1:36:03
  Tom Kaczynski: the prey. And, and they kind of exist in their own worlds. However, there appears to be
• 1:36:11
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, this kind of push and pull between those two worlds, where, like, there is a… there's a kind of a mutual fascination.
• 1:36:18
  Tom Kaczynski: It goes beyond just the, sort of, the simple, you know, dynamic of hunter and prey, and and the, you know.
• 1:36:26
  Tom Kaczynski: hybrids appear. Things, you know, there's a fascination of the fox with the bunny, the bunny with the fox.
• 1:36:34
  Tom Kaczynski: And, you know, and these two worlds kind of collide, together. And it's all wordless, without words, and Andy makes kind of a really…
• 1:36:45
  Tom Kaczynski: An amazing job.
• 1:36:47
  Tom Kaczynski: Creating this thing, not only just sort of, like, letting you read it with… just purely with images, but also, sort of creating a lot of,
• 1:36:57
  Tom Kaczynski: room for interpretation, so you can really bring a lot to it, and it gets read in many, many different ways, which I think is a cool, cool thing. I mean, that's one thing that images have that maybe, you know, like a, like a…
• 1:37:11
  Tom Kaczynski: Straight-up text, it's difficult to achieve with.
• 1:37:15
  Tom Kaczynski: And then Andy's other book is also called Monday, which is a book about the Garden of Eden after creation is completed. It's the eighth day.
• 1:37:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:37:26
  Tom Kaczynski: God's created everything, and, you know, this is, you know, this… the sort of the conceit here is that this is an apocryphal story that was taken out of the Bible, but God had some interesting plans on day 8 that we just… And it was…
• 1:37:41
  Tad Eggleston: brilliant and funny, and I loved it. There's one book from the current solicit that I wanted to ask you about, The Exile.
• 1:37:50
  Tom Kaczynski: Oh, yeah, so…
• 1:37:52
  Tad Eggleston: Fascinating to me.
• 1:37:53
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, so this one is actually not published by us, this is Living the Line.
• 1:37:57
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:37:57
  Tom Kaczynski: Because Living the Line has gone through this massive problem with, with Diamond, their inventory is completely, you know, a huge chunk of it is under lock and keyed diamond, and they've lost their only distributor. So we've been helping them sub-distribute the books through.
• 1:38:16
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:38:17
  Tom Kaczynski: So actually, you're seeing it, but it's an older book, it's from a couple years ago.
• 1:38:22
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
• 1:38:22
  Tom Kaczynski: Eric Creek. It's a cool book, don't get me wrong, but it's not one we published.
• 1:38:28
  Tad Eggleston: It's not you, you're just helping out, which is equally cool.
• 1:38:31
  Tom Kaczynski: It's great, it's about a Viking that sort of returns home from, you know, maybe years of raiding and…
• 1:38:38
  Tom Kaczynski: Fighting, and sort of tries to readjust back, into, into sort of… More, you know, everyday society.
• 1:38:47
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Pretty beautiful.
• 1:38:49
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it looks beautiful, which is why it caught my eye, and it caught my eye even more, because it had the little UB code, and I'm like, oh, it's an uncivilized book, but…
• 1:38:59
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, apparently not. My final question is always my final question. Tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:39:15
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:39:25
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, that's a tough one. There's so many comics that I love, and nobody reads them.
• 1:39:32
  Tad Eggleston: That's my favorite kind to hear about, and I will be the guy that reads them.
• 1:39:37
  Tad Eggleston: At least if I can put my hands on them.
• 1:39:39
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, so…
• 1:39:43
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, this actually… this is actually… dives into a little bit… so I'll talk about this other project. This is not a podcast that I'm starting with, with Zach Soto. I don't know if you've ever met Zach Soto.
• 1:39:53
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if I have or not.
• 1:39:55
  Tom Kaczynski: he's from Portland, worked in a lot of kinds of… a lot of different places as also a cartoonist, has worked on the publishing side as well.
• 1:40:07
  Tom Kaczynski: And, Study Group, was a magazine that he worked on with a couple other people. I don't know if you ever read that magazine, Study Group Magazine.
• 1:40:16
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't, no.
• 1:40:17
  Tom Kaczynski: It was one of the kind of, like, cool indie magazines about… about comics, so people should definitely read that magazine, but it's not where I was going to. I was going to… we have this new podcast that's gonna launch soon, so I might as well kind of, like, pre… pre-launch.
• 1:40:34
  Tad Eggleston: lease.
• 1:40:35
  Tom Kaczynski: And it's called Bin Crawler Theory, and so we're gonna talk a lot about old comics, we'll talk about new stuff as well, but, you know, one of the things we're gonna explore is the event, you know, we're gonna talk a lot about comics from around that era, that sort of 80s.
• 1:40:50
  Tom Kaczynski: either pre-event, event, or post-event comics, but we will broaden… go more broadly than that. But, I also, today, just kind of posted about this comic on the social medias.
• 1:41:02
  Tom Kaczynski: It's called Roach Mill, I don't know if you've ever read Roach Mill in the, in the, 80s and 90s.
• 1:41:08
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know.
• 1:41:10
  Tom Kaczynski: about a…
• 1:41:11
  Tom Kaczynski: About a, exterminator, or bounty hunter, or, you know, whatever kind of, guy for hire, you know, that, needs to do dirty jobs.
• 1:41:21
  Tom Kaczynski: And, it ran for just a few issues. There was two series. One was published by Blackthorn Publishing, which was a short-lived company, in the 80s, and then, and then the series got picked up by Dark Horse later. It was one of the early, sort of, Dark Horse comics.
• 1:41:34
  Tom Kaczynski: And it's black and white, really just kind of beautifully done, black and white. Tonally, it's all over the place, can go from, like, kind of hard sci-fi, really moody, beautifully drawn.
• 1:41:46
  Tom Kaczynski: darkly lit corridors and, you know, monsters and goofy aliens and things like that. And then all the way to, like, weird parody and stuff like that, so tonely is really weird. Maybe that's why it was so, you know, so I think it was popular, but not popular enough to kind of… to survive.
• 1:42:06
  Tom Kaczynski: But yeah, it's a really great comic, people should check it out, it's really great.
• 1:42:12
  Tad Eggleston: by Rich Hedden and Tom McQueenie.
• 1:42:14
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, I think they both ended up in animation. If you actually read the comic, you can kind of tell they're really into, like, action-to-action stuff. There's a lot of, kind of, almost animation, keyframes kind of stuff going on in there.
• 1:42:27
  Tom Kaczynski: And then the other comic, I'll mention two, I'll mention two. The other comic that I really love is… is American Flag, and most people, you know, at least in.
• 1:42:36
  Tad Eggleston: And no American flag.
• 1:42:39
  Tom Kaczynski: But most people think of American Flag as the first series. You usually think of the first 26 issues, which are drawn by Howard Chaikin. But I'm talking about Howard… American Flag, the second series, 1 through 12, that sort of…
• 1:42:53
  Tom Kaczynski: ended, and Howard Chaikin came back, but only as a writer. Mike Vosberg was the principal artist there, although a lot of collaborators on that book. But I really… I loved that book. It's,
• 1:43:06
  Tom Kaczynski: It's almost, like, a little bit… little bit more funny kind of version, but what I loved about it is that there was a lot of, kind of, Sovietisms in there, because they… they spend a lot of times, in… in Russia,
• 1:43:21
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't… doesn't the… the first volume…
• 1:43:24
  Tad Eggleston: Isn't the first issue of that volume actually American with a K flag?
• 1:43:29
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, it's still…
• 1:43:30
  Tad Eggleston: the cover, right.
• 1:43:31
  Tom Kaczynski: letters instead of American letters. But I really, I love that series. I think it's really good.
• 1:43:36
  Tad Eggleston: I'll tell Howard the next time I talk to him that you love his work, but better when he just writes it.
• 1:43:42
  Tom Kaczynski: No, no, no, I love them equally. I just think that the second… the series is… is underrated, you know?
• 1:43:47
  Tad Eggleston: I agree, it's fantastic.
• 1:43:50
  Tom Kaczynski: But, but that series, that 12… those 12 issues are totally…
• 1:43:54
  Tad Eggleston: I was just… I was… I was just messing with you and doing the minor flex that Howard Chaikin has been on this podcast twice.
• 1:44:02
  Tom Kaczynski: Oh, that's great, that's great.
• 1:44:03
  Tad Eggleston: I'm kind of proud of the fact that he both came on and didn't hate me so much that he didn't come back.
• 1:44:10
  Tom Kaczynski: That's great, that's great. Yeah, I do, I do think Howard, you know, Chaikin is,
• 1:44:18
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, it's definitely a creator that I've followed since, you know, since the 80s.
• 1:44:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, he's…
• 1:44:22
  Tom Kaczynski: Fascinating. I've got his stuff all the way through to today.
• 1:44:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I, I, I…
• 1:44:29
  Tom Kaczynski: I tend to love his stuff, but I think in general, whether you love or hate his stuff, you can't read his stuff and not think about his stuff.
• 1:44:38
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's why I like it, because it's…
• 1:44:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:44:41
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, it's… it's kind of pulpy and propulsive, but it's also… there is, there is… there's always that kind of element of,
• 1:44:49
  Tom Kaczynski: You know, kind of a…
• 1:44:52
  Tom Kaczynski: kind of a, you know, some kind of, like, intellectual something going on, you know? Right. Which I… which I appreciate, you know? He's like, you never feel like you're being talked down to, it's kind of a…
• 1:45:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, no. Oh, God, no. And you gotta love anybody who loves Steven Sondheim.
• 1:45:10
  Tad Eggleston: At least that's one of my mottos.
• 1:45:15
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 1:45:16
  Tom Kaczynski: I can see that, I guess, you know? I don't know. I don't know.
• 1:45:18
  Tad Eggleston: He does.
• 1:45:20
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, okay.
• 1:45:20
  Tad Eggleston: He's a big musical guy, period.
• 1:45:22
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:24
  Tom Kaczynski: I'm not… I'm not a big musical guy, but .
• 1:45:28
  Tad Eggleston: Now, he actually will make the argument that musicals and comic books are the two great American art forms.
• 1:45:37
  Tom Kaczynski: I mean, I don't disagree, I'm just not that much into the musical, but…
• 1:45:41
  Tad Eggleston: I get it, I get it.
• 1:45:43
  Tom Kaczynski: That's just me, that's a… I'm, you know, I'm also not a man, you know, so…
• 1:45:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, you're not required to be into all cool things. I'm not into all cool things. I'm certain that you're into cool things that I go, really?
• 1:45:58
  Tad Eggleston: Heck, it's football season in Chicago, I get to… I get to go, yeah, I don't care, on a regular basis.
• 1:46:08
  Tad Eggleston: So, Tom, it has been a blast. I always enjoy talking to you, whether it's in person or here. Hopefully you'll be back, hopefully we'll see each other many more times than people.
• 1:46:20
  Tom Kaczynski: Yeah, let's do a beta test seeing the apocalypse next.
• 1:46:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we should do that. I was gonna say, everybody should read Beta Testing the Apocalypse, everybody should read Cartoon Dialectics, and there aren't many…
• 1:46:36
  Tad Eggleston: imprints that I say, Are so curated that, like…
• 1:46:41
  Tad Eggleston: You won't go wrong by reading them, but if you like one uncivilized book, you're gonna like them all.
• 1:46:49
  Tad Eggleston: Because your powers of curation are fantastic. I suppose there are some people who just won't get any of them, but if you like one uncivilized book, you're gonna like them all, even though you like them all for completely different reasons.
• 1:47:04
  Tom Kaczynski: Well, I hope that's the case.
• 1:47:05
  Tad Eggleston: Really appreciate that.
• 1:47:08
  Tom Kaczynski: strive for.
• 1:47:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I… I mean, people think that I give away praise easily, but I really don't.
• 1:47:17
  Tad Eggleston: I just, like, A, like a lot of things, and B, go out of my way to talk to the people who make the things that I like.
• 1:47:26
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Tom Kaczynski, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.