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With Great Power #360... 22 Panels with Shane Portman · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels.
• 0:06
  Tad Eggleston: My guest tonight is Shane Portman, who apparently has been nominated for an Emmy, but, like, I don't do TV here, I barely know TV. I've got him here because he's got a comic book on Kickstarter that I read the first couple issues of. They're awesome. You can tell us about your Emmys, I'm not making fun of you, Shane, I'm just…
• 0:24
  Shane Portman: It's no offense taken.
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: Notoriously comics first, and then all of those other forms of media.
• 0:34
  Tad Eggleston: I got to read the first couple of issues of Shrub today. I liked them a lot. Can we start out with you giving us kind of the front
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: Front counter pitch, what this book is, how you.
• 0:45
  Shane Portman: the.
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: disability.
• 0:46
  Shane Portman: For sure. It's, it's, Shrub is about a lonely, sentient shrub who befriends two siblings, and they set off on a road trip adventure to Hollywood to find Shrub's only known relative, who's apparently a background actor in Hollywood.
• 1:05
  Shane Portman: And it's, it's… An adventure.
• 1:08
  Tad Eggleston: Total sense.
• 1:08
  Shane Portman: Right, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09
  Tad Eggleston: Total sense.
• 1:10
  Shane Portman: Yeah, why was.
• 1:11
  Tad Eggleston: send.
• 1:11
  Shane Portman: say.
• 1:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if you were sentient shrub.
• 1:14
  Tad Eggleston: How many jobs are there for sentient shrubs?
• 1:17
  Shane Portman: Very true. Very, very true. But the crux of it, the themes in it is basically about letting grief take root and like the various ways that we can we do that.
• 1:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:29
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I'm… I'm a special ed teacher, and we have… we have regular psychologist contributors to 22 Panels, and I'm autistic and bipolar, so… so anytime people are tackling mental health, and particularly when they tackle it well, I'm…
• 1:46
  Tad Eggleston: excited, and, like, based on the first two episodes, or issues. Here, you got the TV thing in my head, I said episodes, issues.
• 1:54
  Shane Portman: It was a hard thing for me to shake, honestly.
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: Ha ha ha!
• 1:57
  Shane Portman: Well.
• 1:58
  Tad Eggleston: That's more excusable.
• 2:03
  Tad Eggleston: Based on the first couple of issues, you not only have a deep understanding of grief, but a lot of empathy for the different ways that people
• 2:15
  Tad Eggleston: experience, grief, etc. I'm gonna try to… I'm actually gonna jump forward, because there was something that I thought you handled amazingly well that kinda…
• 2:25
  Tad Eggleston: It encapsulates in a lot of ways.
• 2:30
  Tad Eggleston: why… why I'm heavily recommending this to anybody and everybody.
• 2:35
  Tad Eggleston: I'm going to try to address it without being too spoilery.
• 2:39
  Tad Eggleston: There is a point in the story where.
• 2:44
  Tad Eggleston: The… Siblings…
• 2:47
  Tad Eggleston: Actually go out of their way on their road trip to visit a location, that there's a picture of them with their father.
• 2:55
  Tad Eggleston: Like, a happy picture.
• 2:57
  Tad Eggleston: Only to get there and discover that, oh, it was a Confederate monument, and not only was it a Confederate monument, it was one that's been torn down and defaced and whatever.
• 3:10
  Tad Eggleston: And understandably, because they're not looking at it that way.
• 3:16
  Tad Eggleston: The initial reaction is, no, this isn't fair, how could this happen, blah blah blah.
• 3:23
  Tad Eggleston: And for a split second, I'm like, okay, we've been so good for so long, because this is near the end of Issue 2. Please tell me that this isn't about to become a train wreck.
• 3:36
  Tad Eggleston: And I should have had faith, because I turned the page, and you've got…
• 3:40
  Tad Eggleston: I think 3 pages, including a double-page spread, essentially showing the roots of that statute, taking… taking the… the…
• 3:51
  Tad Eggleston: the statue all the way back to, like, the parents of the person that the statue was coming over with their slaves and whatnot. So in that sense, you know, you show us that, yes, some people have
• 4:09
  Tad Eggleston: Like, a legitimate Reason to be upset, like, like, this, this affected him.
• 4:17
  Tad Eggleston: Et cetera, but then… but then also show that all of those people who wanted it gone.
• 4:23
  Tad Eggleston: also had legitimate grief. Yeah. There was a lot of pain associated
• 4:31
  Tad Eggleston: down through, and you use the root structure, you know, I mean, the way the two of you hand, the art was, da-da… Andy Alvis does a great job, because, like, to take two pages that are essentially
• 4:48
  Tad Eggleston: art, but kind of weave a root structure around them to really make them fit in. I mean, it was some really brilliant storytelling. Kind of a gutsy move to take that much of your… and go, oh yeah.
• 5:00
  Tad Eggleston: we're gonna make a political statement. I mean, we're not… we're gonna do it as a history lesson, but we know that the people who don't like what we're saying will know that we're saying it.
• 5:10
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, I was… every time I hear about colleges being hijacked by liberals, it's like, no.
• 5:21
  Tad Eggleston: No, they've only been hijacked by people who, like, respect science and history.
• 5:27
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's not, yeah. There doesn't need to be.
• 5:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, if you're now a liberal because you believe that A, slavery is bad, and B, the United States had a lot of slaves.
• 5:41
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Yeah.
• 5:43
  Shane Portman: And then we continued that racism even after Reconstruction.
• 5:48
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, you don't even have to believe that anymore to be considered a liberal.
• 5:52
  Shane Portman: That's yeah, that's so true yeah.
• 5:54
  Tad Eggleston: If you hold to the idea that slave owners weren't just
• 6:00
  Tad Eggleston: a sign of their times, and mostly benevolent, and you know, I mean, who knows? Maybe the black people would have been better if they'd continued being slaves, because they'd be fed and not living in squalor like they are now.
• 6:16
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 6:17
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 6:18
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, I'll get off that soapbox.
• 6:20
  Shane Portman: No, it's totally fine. Yeah, I mean, I… I…
• 6:25
  Shane Portman: I thought it was important to tell because, like you said, this is generational. This is trauma, generational trauma, generational grief that like.
• 6:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 6:33
  Shane Portman: that in a story about grief, in a story that takes place in the United States, it's important to address the deep traumas here. And I think it was a helpful place for Robbie, the older brother, to really, you know.
• 6:46
  Shane Portman: Basically crossed this threshold where he thought, you know, this… they were going to this place to recreate that picture, that beautiful moment they had back when they were kids, and to see that kind of be.
• 7:00
  Shane Portman: You know, that uprooted in front of them, and to kind of take that away was important to kind of reframe his thinking a little bit, and kind of.
• 7:07
  Shane Portman: you know, set him on a place of questioning some stuff, because… Right. Like, I'll… from a… you know, when you're dealing with loss or trauma, especially when you're a kid, like, it's.
• 7:20
  Shane Portman: Robbie's the oldest, and he… he grows up with this kind of, you know, this feeling of… kind of certainty of what he knows, and it… and it…
• 7:29
  Shane Portman: it becomes very concrete about who's good, who's bad, who's this, who's that. And it's really important to kind of shake that up a little bit so you can kind of poke holes and humanize the whole thing.
• 7:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 7:43
  Tad Eggleston: And again, you know, I thought it was… You know, to give you a little more of my background, before I got into special education, I spent a decade in dementia care.
• 7:54
  Shane Portman: Oh, wow.
• 7:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, I, I actually have…
• 7:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like, specific experience and appreciation for the fact that… that you…
• 8:03
  Tad Eggleston: Aren't just dealing with the grief of loss in this book.
• 8:08
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but you're dealing with… the grief of…
• 8:13
  Tad Eggleston: For lack of a better word in English, partial loss.
• 8:16
  Shane Portman: You.
• 8:17
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because one of the things that… what was Dad like before the first heart attack? Yeah. You know, you write at the end of the book about how you lived that part. You had a father who had a heart attack, and.
• 8:29
  Tad Eggleston: continue to be a good father, but a very different person afterwards. Yeah. And then that you lost too soon, so, so, like, you're, you're writing those. And I appreciated a lot of, a lot of what you wrote there, though.
• 8:41
  Tad Eggleston: The one thing that stood out to me, if only because I've used the line so many times that I had to think about, like, what I mean and how to possibly phrase it better.
• 8:52
  Tad Eggleston: It is the… you know, how hard it was sometimes for you when people said, remember the good times.
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: Which, for me, I mean, as I thought about it, I'm like, I never actually meant that to mean be happy.
• 9:07
  Tad Eggleston: I meant it… I meant it to weave this sadness that you're feeling with the happiness that you can remember.
• 9:14
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Yeah.
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm still working on a better way to phrase it, where it's clear that that's what I'm saying, though I think more times than not, it's been taken properly, for me, anyway. I've had the advantage more times than not when I've been in this situation. It's been years of dementia, and then…
• 9:33
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, you know, it's so much.
• 9:35
  Tad Eggleston: different.
• 9:36
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 9:37
  Tad Eggleston: When you're talking to a young person.
• 9:39
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I think that's a whole lot to do with it, because I mean, I, like, I stumble into the tropes, too. It's like, because they're easy to say, and it's almost… there's… it's such a heavy thing that it's, like, there's…
• 9:50
  Shane Portman: Like, what are you supposed to say in those moments? And sometimes, like, like.
• 9:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you hit on it, and I learned a long time ago, the first thing I say before I say anything that's anywhere close to a trope is.
• 10:02
  Tad Eggleston: There's absolutely nothing I can say that's gonna make you feel better. I don't even know what to say. I might try some things, because otherwise I'll feel like I'm not trying. Right. Or something along those lines.
• 10:12
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.
• 10:13
  Tad Eggleston: Please tell me to shut up if I fuck up.
• 10:16
  Shane Portman: Yeah, totally, totally. But I do think you're right with the idea, like, of the.
• 10:21
  Shane Portman: Excuse me, the age difference, like.
• 10:24
  Shane Portman: For me, I was about… I was almost 10 when my dad had his heart attack, and when, you know, when he went into a coma and came out with brain damage. And…
• 10:34
  Shane Portman: I think it had a lot to do with being that age, because it does feel like, you know, it would be like when we were… you know, he was…
• 10:42
  Shane Portman: better, like, than being in a coma, but he wasn't… he definitely was completely different, and we needed to kind of feel that… the loss there, and I think I didn't even realize that until I was much older, and he had died when I was in my 20s. And then I realized, after going to therapy and dealing with all this stuff, like, oh wow, I…
• 11:01
  Tad Eggleston: I'm still grieving.
• 11:03
  Shane Portman: That's.
• 11:03
  Tad Eggleston: First time.
• 11:04
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Yeah.
• 11:05
  Tad Eggleston: That's that's I I you know, obviously at a different life stage, I remember how often.
• 11:11
  Tad Eggleston: I would both tell.
• 11:13
  Tad Eggleston: Residents' families, that it was okay to grieve.
• 11:16
  Tad Eggleston: That, that, no, this wasn't their mother anymore, and that was okay.
• 11:20
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 11:22
  Tad Eggleston: But also, that I'd have to tell my own staff, hey.
• 11:27
  Tad Eggleston: Like, them not showing up could be them health…
• 11:30
  Shane Portman: league.
• 11:31
  Tad Eggleston: Healthily grieving.
• 11:33
  Shane Portman: are.
• 11:33
  Tad Eggleston: Because there'd always be the, this person's got 8 kids, and we never see any of them except when we need supplies. I'm like, yeah, but they get here immediately when we need supplies.
• 11:43
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 11:44
  Tad Eggleston: You know, they never don't show up. So, so here's the question.
• 11:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because how much do we hate it when the kids show up, and the kids break down, and therefore the parent breaks down, only the parent doesn't know why they're breaking down, and they're a nightmare for us for the next two days?
• 12:01
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I…
• 12:03
  Tad Eggleston: Why aren't the kids here?
• 12:05
  Shane Portman: Yeah, right, right, yeah.
• 12:08
  Tad Eggleston: is this their mother anymore? Is this their father anymore? Have they reached a point where they can have a relationship, and so I'm thinking of that as I'm reading this story and going, what must it be like for… you don't have a choice about whether or not you're going to continue to have a relationship with your father. Yeah. You can't go.
• 12:26
  Tad Eggleston: I can't handle going to visit him in the nursing home today, but he's not going to notice that I wasn't there.
• 12:32
  Shane Portman: Right.
• 12:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. You come home from school, and… Hi, Dad!
• 12:38
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 12:40
  Tad Eggleston: And I can only imagine that that would make it that much harder to.
• 12:44
  Tad Eggleston: Acknowledge that something was.
• 12:48
  Tad Eggleston: really different.
• 12:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, and I think, I think those, you know, those phrases and those words, you know, like.
• 12:53
  Shane Portman: it makes sense, you know, think of the good times, but I think they would usually come when we were upset about something, and that, I think, was… it felt very much like a… and they were always… like, I think the tricky thing is, they were all well-meaning people, like, it was never anybody doing anything that was, like.
• 13:10
  Tad Eggleston: right.
• 13:10
  Shane Portman: like, you know, consciously harmful to us, but it's just… nobody wants to see a kid cry, but you need to cry in these moments. So it's this, like, kind of…
• 13:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because I can only imagine in that time, also, like, you were upset about things in real time.
• 13:27
  Tad Eggleston: So to think about the past and the future that you were never going to get to have, how's that supposed to make it better? Yeah, right.
• 13:35
  Shane Portman: Exactly, yeah, totally, totally.
• 13:37
  Tad Eggleston: Hoping that I wouldn't have been… I mean, you and I are the same age, but I'm very much hoping that I wouldn't have been the older person that ever said that to you.
• 13:45
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 13:45
  Tad Eggleston: I break it down in my brain. I'm like.
• 13:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: I was telling a 13, 14, whatever year old.
• 13:55
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 13:55
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 13:57
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 13:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… I mean… I didn't know exactly how I wanted to go about talking.
• 14:05
  Tad Eggleston: to you about this, and thankfully, I don't seem to be crushing you. Tell me if I, like, cross any lines, and you're having to do memory and whatever that you don't want to do.
• 14:14
  Shane Portman: I appreciate that. Yeah. Yeah. Honestly, I really like throughout this process and just in general, I, I feel I'm very comfortable talking about it because I feel like we don't talk about this stuff enough. So, so I will definitely let you know if I.
• 14:28
  Tad Eggleston: And I agree with you, but I don't like to make assumptions for other people.
• 14:32
  Shane Portman: I appreciate that for sure. For sure.
• 14:35
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly not when they're kind enough to be talking to me on my airwaves. I don't want to have that uncomfortable email where you email and you say, you know that part where I was crying like a blubbering idiot?
• 14:48
  Shane Portman: The whole middle, can you just cut that out?
• 14:52
  Shane Portman: Okay.
• 14:53
  Tad Eggleston: But as I talk to you, like, it's sinking in, just, like.
• 14:59
  Tad Eggleston: how different of an experience it is, just because, again, like, we don't even appreciate… I mean, because I was also thinking about, like, we don't appreciate relationship grief. I mean, my best friend moves away. Yeah. You go through a grief process. When you break up.
• 15:13
  Tad Eggleston: with with a partner, even if even like short relationships.
• 15:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, think back to, like, high school, and the 3-week relationship you had, and how… and how it took you 6 weeks to get over it. Yeah. Yeah.
• 15:25
  Shane Portman: Absolutely, yeah, totally.
• 15:26
  Tad Eggleston: And how everybody around you wanted to treat it like nothing, but it did feel like nothing.
• 15:30
  Shane Portman: Yeah, and you have to take, like, the only way to actually grow from that and, like, and to feel… to actually get to that place that everybody wants you to get to, to feel better, is to actually feel the hurt, and then you rebuild.
• 15:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:43
  Tad Eggleston: well, feel the hurt, feel like.
• 15:47
  Tad Eggleston: Feel the everything, because it's not just hurt.
• 15:50
  Shane Portman: Right. True. True. Yeah.
• 15:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, often the hurt almost, I mean, for me anyway, the hurt almost is the thing that has to be worked through.
• 15:58
  Tad Eggleston: to figure out what I'm really feeling.
• 16:00
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because there's probably some anger.
• 16:05
  Tad Eggleston: There's probably… there's probably some… Frustration, or… or sense of unfairness, or…
• 16:14
  Tad Eggleston: heaven forbid, but sometimes, some… some relief or joy that I don't want to acknowledge, because.
• 16:21
  Shane Portman: Sure.
• 16:22
  Tad Eggleston: Feels like the wrong thing to be.
• 16:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was something that I had to really realize from working in dementia care.
• 16:29
  Shane Portman: you.
• 16:29
  Tad Eggleston: that like.
• 16:32
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes, as much as I missed the fact that I was gonna see and laugh with this person every day, I'm sitting there going, life wasn't that fun anymore.
• 16:40
  Shane Portman: Hmm.
• 16:42
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'm allowed to also be happy, because they're like… in fact, I would think that they would be happy, so… so why should I…
• 16:52
  Tad Eggleston: feel like I'm not allowed to be happy, even while I'm also sad.
• 16:56
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:58
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, a lot of… I mean, and for that matter, that's particularly true when it comes to, like.
• 17:05
  Tad Eggleston: the grief that one has over a toxic relationship. If you can't be happy even while you're sad.
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: Or if you don't allow yourself to feel sad even while you're happy, and that's where, like, the hurt to me.
• 17:19
  Tad Eggleston: And it's almost like… It's almost like a buffer to make it easier to pick out.
• 17:26
  Tad Eggleston: Theoretically, to make it easier to pick out what you're ready to feel.
• 17:30
  Shane Portman: Hmm.
• 17:31
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately, too many people take it as the buffer to, oh, all I feel is hurt, I don't want to feel the hurt, let's put more buffer!
• 17:39
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:41
  Tad Eggleston: you.
• 17:41
  Shane Portman: Yeah, That's it's so true. So so true.
• 17:46
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about what… I mean, obviously the obvious, you lived it and worked through it and want to do things to possibly help other people work through it, but what was the instigating factor? Because, like.
• 18:03
  Tad Eggleston: Your dad had a heart attack when you were 10, he died when you were 26, we're 46 now.
• 18:11
  Tad Eggleston: So… so you didn't decide to write this when you were 27, or even 37. What was the… the instigating factor? What… what made you decide that it was… it was time to start telling this story?
• 18:23
  Shane Portman: That's a good question. I…
• 18:27
  Shane Portman: you know, I… it's been in a lot of… like, I've written a lot of, like, short little things about it, like, little more personal essays kinds of things, and it's definitely something that does… obviously very close to me and close to who I am.
• 18:40
  Shane Portman: And.
• 18:41
  Shane Portman: And I do… I do love telling stories that have a strong emotional backbone, and… but I never had anything that really…
• 18:51
  Shane Portman: fit what this material, this, this.
• 18:55
  Shane Portman: You know, this feeling and this emotion and this kind of…
• 18:58
  Shane Portman: kind of story. I didn't have anything, but so… with Shrub, what actually came to me first was.
• 19:05
  Shane Portman: the character. I just thought it was a really interesting character, and a, like, a funny, like.
• 19:10
  Shane Portman: adorable kind of character, that it's just a shrub with eyes, and no mouth, like, just… and how… how will… how that, you know, lives in the world, and what… what… what does that mean? What does that do? And that is literally all I had for a while. Like, I just… and I kind of…
• 19:28
  Shane Portman: you know, put it in the back of my mind and, like, let it sit there for a bit and grow into something. And at first, it was just this idea of the shrub losing a seed pod, and kind of having to uproot to go after this seed pod. And then I just kind of kept
• 19:40
  Shane Portman: following along with what this shrub character is, and if they don't have a mouth, how do they communicate? Then it has to be…
• 19:47
  Shane Portman: through their, you know, they can all the physical stuff and that kind of thing, but I wanted them to understand the world through their roots, like the way that a tree or any kind of plant would. And so going into the ground and connecting to that mycelial network down there that we only know the very minute idea of what is happening in the communication there.
• 20:10
  Shane Portman: And that really started to unlock the idea of, oh, this is… if it's about communication, if it's about, you know, understanding and, like, and this… this under… this underground kind of communication network that's happening there that we don't understand, this invisible, almost, communication that's happening around us, then.
• 20:29
  Shane Portman: There's something about grief and feeling and loss that ties into all that, too, and this… it's kind of like this, you know, invisible thing that's happening around us, and we're participating, and we… and our connection to people and the connection to everything is part of this whole You know.
• 20:48
  Shane Portman: cycle, or whatever you want to call it, but that kind of brought in, like, oh, this is where the grief story goes.
• 20:56
  Tad Eggleston: Like that.
• 20:58
  Tad Eggleston: Again, the autism in me needs to ask, did you already have a…
• 21:03
  Tad Eggleston: a hyperfixation with shrubbery? When did you discover their root system? How long between discovering their root system and thinking that it would be…
• 21:13
  Tad Eggleston: a great metaphor for this, because it is, it's a great metaphor for this, and I didn't know about their root system, and like…
• 21:20
  Tad Eggleston: I've sometimes had to… one of the skills I've had to learn as I get older and have more A, more commitments, and B, more existing hyperfixations.
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: is how not to fall down the rabbit hole, so I have managed not to fall down the root system rabbit hole today. It did take a little bit of effort.
• 21:40
  Tad Eggleston: Where did that come from? Because again, brilliant, and if you tell me you made it up, I'm gonna cry a little. Because it would be even better if it was real science.
• 21:51
  Shane Portman: I did not make it up. I didn't have a… I never had a fascination for shrubs, although I do… when I would go on walks in our community, I would…
• 22:02
  Shane Portman: pass, like, small plants and shrubs and things, and I would always think they were kind of cute. So I did… I had, like, I have a series of little pictures that I would… that I took, especially when I started thinking about more of the story. I was like, oh, that's kind of a cute shrub. That's, like… but shrubs themselves never were, like, a thing that was something I was fixated on. I stumbled into… I don't even remember the first time I learned about the mycelial thing. I worked on a show called… I think it was this…
• 22:25
  Shane Portman: I worked on a show called Tumble Leaf that was a preschool series. It was a stop motion animation, and it took place in this kind of fantastical island, but there's a lot of, like, nature, science based, learning inside of it.
• 22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Looks good, cool, and I have grandchildren.
• 22:40
  Shane Portman: Oh, fantastic, they would love…
• 22:41
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so this… couple of things, because your shape show looks cool, too.
• 22:48
  Shane Portman: Yeah, Shape Island's really great, too, yeah.
• 22:50
  Tad Eggleston: and
• 22:51
  Tad Eggleston: But that's… that's kind of what they… And there's, like, there's… there's been two… already two… and I… I don't have my grandkids a ton, but there's already been too much of… oh, I don't even remember the name of it, which is awesome. It's a really horrible, horrible…
• 23:07
  Tad Eggleston: show that they like, that's essentially only the, okay, put it on Netflix when you desperately need them to stare at the screen so you.
• 23:15
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 23:16
  Tad Eggleston: Sleep Show.
• 23:16
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 23:17
  Tad Eggleston: I understand.
• 23:18
  Shane Portman: I understand, yeah, yeah, thankfully.
• 23:21
  Tad Eggleston: They also like Bluey and a number of other very good shows. Yeah, yeah.
• 23:27
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I love Bluey too, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it… but I think it was on… it was on… for Tumble Leaf, one of the episodes, that we were doing something about
• 23:35
  Shane Portman: trees or something, and I think somehow I stumbled into mycelium there, and really started looking into it, and we never used it, really, inside of there, but that really…
• 23:45
  Shane Portman: I just thought it was always such a fantastic.
• 23:48
  Shane Portman: interesting thing that's happening that we really are only beginning to understand the very basics of. But there's, like, a whole, you know, fungal network underneath us that's constantly, you know, it's breaking things down, but it's also communicating with itself and with trees. Like, it'll divert, resources
• 24:07
  Shane Portman: from other trees to a sick tree, like a tree that's not doing well, like that.
• 24:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:11
  Shane Portman: stuff is like, it's fascinating. So I've always had that as like a…
• 24:15
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 24:16
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 24:17
  Tad Eggleston: Recently learned also from a comic book that there is, like, one plant that's a true chameleon, like, on a genetic level. It can take on.
• 24:26
  Tad Eggleston: other plants.
• 24:28
  Shane Portman: Oh, wow.
• 24:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it also does it through, like.
• 24:32
  Tad Eggleston: fungus… bringing over, and I'm like…
• 24:36
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 24:37
  Tad Eggleston: That is wild.
• 24:39
  Shane Portman: Wow. Is it the change? The appearance changes too, or just.
• 24:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 24:44
  Shane Portman: Wow!
• 24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 24:47
  Shane Portman: That's wild!
• 24:48
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 24:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 24:50
  Tad Eggleston: Shout out to Fred Van Lente and The Future Is at Reka Comics, which is also the only comic out there that has multiple hacker challenges embedded in the comics.
• 25:02
  Shane Portman: Oh, wow.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're published by Black Hills Infosec, which is an actual white hat hacking company.
• 25:10
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 25:11
  Shane Portman: That's rad.
• 25:12
  Tad Eggleston: company. And David Lapham will be taking over art with issue 19 coming up soon.
• 25:18
  Shane Portman: Why?
• 25:18
  Tad Eggleston: A great comic's about to become that much better.
• 25:22
  Shane Portman: Yeah, wow.
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: There's my little plug to you and everybody else out there. Go read the future.
• 25:29
  Shane Portman: Yeah, it sounds phenomenal.
• 25:31
  Tad Eggleston: It's one of my favorite books out there, and… and…
• 25:34
  Tad Eggleston: They've promised 60 issues, which is already cool.
• 25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. To come out of the gate and say… and something that can be done when you've got, like, a billion-dollar InfoSec company that's also run by people who
• 25:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the way it was once described to me by one of the people involved is.
• 25:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know those…
• 25:55
  Tad Eggleston: dumb Marvel comics that you'd sometimes get that were also plugging, like, a car, or a serial, or whatever.
• 26:04
  Shane Portman: Sure.
• 26:06
  Tad Eggleston: Imagine if you did that, but they were actually good.
• 26:09
  Shane Portman: Hmm.
• 26:10
  Tad Eggleston: That's what we're doing.
• 26:12
  Shane Portman: Interesting.
• 26:12
  Tad Eggleston: We love comics.
• 26:14
  Tad Eggleston: We have money. We want to get… have more people be aware of information security.
• 26:23
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 26:24
  Tad Eggleston: By setting up the challenges, they… because they have a leaderboard, even. And, like, the type of leaderboard that's well enough
• 26:30
  Tad Eggleston: Recognize that, like, hackers can put it on their resume leaderboard.
• 26:36
  Tad Eggleston: So it's also, like.
• 26:39
  Tad Eggleston: How they can keep their eyes open for the next talent that they want to hire.
• 26:45
  Shane Portman: the.
• 26:46
  Tad Eggleston: Thanks.
• 26:47
  Shane Portman: the.
• 26:47
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, this is next level thinking, I love it.
• 26:51
  Shane Portman: Yeah, wow.
• 26:52
  Shane Portman: Yeah, that's wild. That's pretty cool.
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: The future is RECA, which is hacker backwards.
• 27:00
  Shane Portman: Oh, cool. Okay, that's easy to remember.
• 27:02
  Tad Eggleston: Black Hills Information Security.
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: Is the name of the parent company. I can't recommend it enough. And you can now buy it digitally if your local shop doesn't have the back issues.
• 27:13
  Shane Portman: Okay.
• 27:13
  Tad Eggleston: I sell them for, I think, 99 cents a piece on my website digitally.
• 27:17
  Shane Portman: That's great, wow.
• 27:18
  Tad Eggleston: They're serious, man!
• 27:19
  Shane Portman: Yeah, wow.
• 27:20
  Tad Eggleston: It's about expanding comics, and I love that too.
• 27:23
  Shane Portman: That's really cool, yeah.
• 27:24
  Tad Eggleston: Back to Shrubbery, which… which… Shrubs is the name of the comic, but Shrubbery is what we're talking about. But it made me… it reminded me, because, like, it's all about the… the…
• 27:34
  Tad Eggleston: The moving of information, like…
• 27:36
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 27:37
  Tad Eggleston: I loved… Like, the idea that, oh wow.
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, these plants are sending information through their root system to go, oh, let's get the water over there, let's get… this plant's getting more sunlight, so let's send the nutrients that way.
• 27:54
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 27:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's just…
• 27:57
  Shane Portman: Yeah, it's incredible.
• 27:58
  Tad Eggleston: Makes my brain happy.
• 28:00
  Shane Portman: Mine too, mine too.
• 28:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 28:02
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, there's… it feels…
• 28:05
  Shane Portman: It feels like there's… I don't know, like, it feels… it feels right, and it feels like… like, it makes… it makes.
• 28:11
  Tad Eggleston: I.
• 28:11
  Shane Portman: I feel like it makes your synapses like calm down and like.
• 28:15
  Tad Eggleston: I am… I am, like… The way my autism
• 28:21
  Tad Eggleston: Manifest motes is A, I'm very much a polyglot.
• 28:25
  Tad Eggleston: I could probably get the ADHD diagnosis, too, if I wanted to, but it's more that I want to go down every thread than…
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: your typical ADHD, I think. Doesn't matter. Once you get enough diagnosis that, like.
• 28:41
  Tad Eggleston: They don't need them for insurance purposes anymore.
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: Which is the biggest reason to get any diet.
• 28:47
  Shane Portman: Right, right, right.
• 28:48
  Tad Eggleston: Get insurance to pay for it.
• 28:50
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 28:52
  Shane Portman: Okay.
• 28:53
  Tad Eggleston: You want to get rid of labels, get rid of insurance companies.
• 28:55
  Shane Portman: Oh my god.
• 28:56
  Tad Eggleston: And doctors will just treat you rather than naming things.
• 28:58
  Shane Portman: Wouldn't that be nice? Wouldn't that be nice?
• 29:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think there are advantages to some labels, but we could also get more specific with the labels and whatnot.
• 29:07
  Tad Eggleston: Because we wouldn't have to convince insurance companies to pay.
• 29:12
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 29:16
  Tad Eggleston: And see, I went down a rabbit hole, and I almost forgot. Oh, yeah, I'm the polyglot fascinated by everything, goes down every rabbit hole, loves to learn, loves to take apart systems, loves to… so the fact that this book is both exploring
• 29:34
  Tad Eggleston: Grief on that level.
• 29:36
  Tad Eggleston: But using the metaphor of plants?
• 29:39
  Shane Portman: the.
• 29:40
  Tad Eggleston: On that level, makes me go.
• 29:44
  Shane Portman: Mike.
• 29:44
  Tad Eggleston: My book, my kind of book. Can't wait to read it to my grandkids.
• 29:50
  Shane Portman: Ha ha ha.
• 29:51
  Tad Eggleston: And to myself, I mean, it's not just for the grandkids.
• 29:54
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: But it's definitely feels all ages, even, not even just YA.
• 30:00
  Shane Portman: It is, yeah, I think that's, like, we were targeting kind of like a, you know, like a middle grade kind of early teen kind of audience, but, like, but it's definitely all ages. I definitely wanted it to kind of…
• 30:11
  Tad Eggleston: We had a…
• 30:12
  Shane Portman: anybody.
• 30:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we had a discussion of what we consider true all ages recently.
• 30:18
  Tad Eggleston: Because there's a difference between… Won't offend anybody?
• 30:25
  Tad Eggleston: And not won't offend anybody, I mean, because we know that particularly once you get to adults, there's nothing that won't offend anybody. But won't be deemed inappropriate for anybody, and will actually have something of interest.
• 30:41
  Tad Eggleston: to everybody.
• 30:45
  Tad Eggleston: And that's where I think…
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: I think that at least what I've read so far, this comic really achieves is… is…
• 30:54
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I think even a 2-year-old would find things that they liked. If nothing else, the punch bug and the shrub eventually joining in on the punch bug. I think every 2-year-old on the planet would see that panel.
• 31:08
  Tad Eggleston: And the second they understood it, just be… Over the moon!
• 31:12
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the more you understand, the more you'll like it.
• 31:18
  Tad Eggleston: So talk to me about, like.
• 31:21
  Tad Eggleston: both using the… How you use the shrub.
• 31:26
  Tad Eggleston: metaphor.
• 31:28
  Tad Eggleston: But then, how you constructed it in such a way… I mean, you're dealing with a really heavy topic, and it would be
• 31:35
  Tad Eggleston: Easy to… to… to lean towards a particular group.
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: And you said that you kind of aimed middle grade, and while I can see that, I think the… it feels more like you aimed middle grade because that was the middle, not because…
• 31:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's not written for everybody.
• 31:56
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, there's no, like, talking down in it, there's no, like, you know, like, there definitely is, like, a,
• 32:04
  Shane Portman: like, I wanted… like, and I… because I feel like that, you know, when you're… when you are a kid and you're dealing with that kind of… with these heavy emotions, I think people have this tendency to talk down, too, because… but… but you're feeling the thing. You're… you're feeling that heavy thing, so you know what it feels like, and I think… I think to have some kind of.
• 32:21
  Shane Portman: something given to you that actually says that it knows what you're feeling, too, is so much more of a relief than somebody trying to, you know, talk down to you, patronize you in some way. Even though that's… that is usually coming from well-intentioned people, it's… I think it's…
• 32:39
  Shane Portman: It's much more helpful. It would have it would have been to me, and I think it it was to me when I was a kid for for somebody to get on my level and actually say, I know what you're feeling. It's kinda like this. And the and be like, oh.
• 32:50
  Shane Portman: That is what I was feeling, and that's nice that somebody else can understand that too.
• 32:56
  Tad Eggleston: What… I mean…
• 33:02
  Tad Eggleston: I will eventually, just because you're a first-time guest, and there's only so far that I can generally find that I can manage to go with one book.
• 33:12
  Tad Eggleston: I'll ask you more about your entire journey with comics in a… In a minute, but…
• 33:20
  Tad Eggleston: Your specific professional history.
• 33:23
  Tad Eggleston: Has been much more… Stage and screen.
• 33:27
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 33:28
  Tad Eggleston: Sure.
• 33:29
  Tad Eggleston: What made you decide that this was something that you wanted to do as a comic?
• 33:37
  Shane Portman: It actually, I had intention, originally my intentions were to make it an animated thing. Like, and I was working at this studio, the studio that produced Tumble Leaf. I had a development there, so I…
• 33:51
  Shane Portman: I had crafted the… a pilot episode of this thing that would be sort of like a short series, or could potentially be a film.
• 33:58
  Shane Portman: And I'd written a pilot, and I'd written a second episode, and sort of, like, an arc of where the series would go. And I pitched it to the head of the studio, and she was really interested in it, and we both were like, this would be really cool to do in stop motion, especially, but the… the industry was in such a terrible place, and still is trying to climb out of that, that there just was… we had no idea where we would pitch it, even though we would love for it to be made. So she was like, you should just…
• 34:22
  Shane Portman: I don't want to, you know, Bob.
• 34:25
  Shane Portman: keep you from doing something with this, so I won't… I won't option it. You do, you know, hold on to it and find a home for it. And so I held on to it, and then I…
• 34:36
  Shane Portman: was fortunate enough to, Barbra and Bryant Dillon at Fanbase Press are a couple of, college friends of mine, and they had mentioned if
• 34:46
  Shane Portman: I ever had an idea for a comic that to pitch it to them. And I was like, this actually could really work as a comic. And I, and I pitched it to them and they, they agreed and, and.
• 34:56
  Shane Portman: That's where we're at, and I'm actually… in the end, I am…
• 35:00
  Shane Portman: So grateful that it actually is a comic, because…
• 35:04
  Shane Portman: I think it's the perfect way for the story to be told. It's so…
• 35:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's because comics are the perfect medium. No offense to your… the rest of your professional career, but comics are clearly the superior medium.
• 35:17
  Shane Portman: Yes.
• 35:17
  Tad Eggleston: There are no limitations to comics whatsoever.
• 35:21
  Shane Portman: I agree. It's very… and I honestly, I'm kind of a… I'm fairly new to comics. I've read comics before, but I've never created one. And I'm not, like, a… I'm not an extensive… I've read every comic kind of a person, but, like.
• 35:36
  Shane Portman: I, I know…
• 35:37
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody is. There are too many of them, even if you're only counting the good ones.
• 35:41
  Shane Portman: True. But this experience is definitely… I… put me way into the category of what you're saying. I do… I do feel like it is such an incredible way to tell a story, because it's… you know, when you… animation is great, like, there's a lot of really cool things that happen in animation, but, like.
• 35:59
  Shane Portman: There is something really cool about crystallizing an image like that and being like, this is the image that was selected for this panel. This is, and this is the, and to refine text to like the crystallize, this is the exact right thing that needs to be said right here. And, and then Yeah.
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: And there's, there's no more interactive medium.
• 36:17
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 36:18
  Tad Eggleston: have to use both sides of your brain. You can't passively read or.
• 36:23
  Shane Portman: Yes.
• 36:24
  Tad Eggleston: of lay watch. You, you.
• 36:27
  Tad Eggleston: The reader is the final collaborator, and they often do some heavy lifting.
• 36:32
  Shane Portman: yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 36:34
  Tad Eggleston: And in fact, the better the comic it is, often the more heavy lifting they do.
• 36:39
  Shane Portman: Mmm.
• 36:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because you have to decide what's going on between the panels.
• 36:44
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 36:44
  Tad Eggleston: to… You know…
• 36:48
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes read into very little things that sometimes we manage to do with a movie, or a cartoon, or whatnot, but they don't demand it of us.
• 36:58
  Shane Portman: Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, it's fed to you, yeah.
• 37:01
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 37:01
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 37:02
  Tad Eggleston: And then the other thing is, like…
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: The reader gets to decide the pacing.
• 37:09
  Shane Portman: safety.
• 37:10
  Tad Eggleston: If you want to make them sit with something, you have to find a way to convince them to.
• 37:15
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: It also, it also gives the advantage of, like, if you need to hit them with something.
• 37:22
  Tad Eggleston: It won't necessarily mean that they have to turn it off and never come back, because they can flip through the hard part.
• 37:28
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 37:28
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I mean, I've said a lot of times that it's the only medium that I can do horror in.
• 37:35
  Shane Portman: is.
• 37:36
  Tad Eggleston: I get to decide how long I spend with the parts that make me uncomfortable.
• 37:40
  Shane Portman: That's really cool. Yeah.
• 37:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, in a novel.
• 37:45
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 37:45
  Tad Eggleston: Stephen King might decide to spend 4 pages describing the stuff that I don't want to read about.
• 37:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. In a movie, the director and editor could spend 10 minutes on the scene that I don't want to watch.
• 37:58
  Shane Portman: Yeah. In a comic.
• 38:00
  Tad Eggleston: I look at the page, go, okay, got all the information I need, flip.
• 38:04
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's really good.
• 38:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know what I mean? Yeah. And in that sense, it's also the one that's most, to me anyway, most respectful of.
• 38:18
  Tad Eggleston: The consumer, because it trusts them.
• 38:24
  Tad Eggleston: To get what they need, where they need it, rather than saying, this is the only way it can be.
• 38:31
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 38:31
  Tad Eggleston: Take it from me.
• 38:33
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 38:35
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 38:36
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I agree, yeah.
• 38:38
  Tad Eggleston: I can evangelize it.
• 38:40
  Shane Portman: A ton.
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: But that's what the… that's what the podcast on a whole is for, not what today's…
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: episode is for. But I will lead to, particularly because I love to ask this question of people who aren't as…
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: Deeply steeped in comics.
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: Give me your comics biography.
• 38:58
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't mean your bibliography, I mean, talk to me about…
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: What comics you remember reading when, how they shaped you, how they made you as a creator.
• 39:11
  Tad Eggleston: If you ran away from comics for a while, when, why, what brought you back? You know, if there was a time where you decided that comics were kid stuff.
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever, but talk to me about your… Your life through comics.
• 39:28
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I… my earliest, comics that I can remember are… I would,
• 39:36
  Shane Portman: I would go to the library constantly to check out like Calvin and Hobbes collections and like.
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: Let's go.
• 39:42
  Shane Portman: Far Side and even Peanuts. They always had Peanuts collectors.
• 39:48
  Tad Eggleston: So I have to ask really quickly, since you grew up outside of Cleveland, did you ever get down to Columbus and the Billy Ireland?
• 39:56
  Shane Portman: No.
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: the Ohio State.
• 40:01
  Tad Eggleston: as the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum.
• 40:03
  Shane Portman: Oh, no way.
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: Which is the largest collection of original comic art in the world.
• 40:09
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 40:10
  Tad Eggleston: Including… Because he famously didn't sell anything.
• 40:15
  Tad Eggleston: And only gave a handful of them away.
• 40:19
  Tad Eggleston: Almost all of Calvin and Hobbes.
• 40:21
  Shane Portman: No way, wow!
• 40:24
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 40:25
  Tad Eggleston: They started with Milk Kniff's collection, so they've got a ton of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon.
• 40:32
  Tad Eggleston: Jeff Smith was an Ohio State alum, so they've got a ton of bone.
• 40:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 40:39
  Shane Portman: I'll have to make a pilgrimage. Yeah.
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: Cartoon Crossroads Columbus?
• 40:45
  Tad Eggleston: A.
• 40:48
  Tad Eggleston: just opened its applications for next year's show in April, so, like, if you decided you wanted to try tabling a comic show, this would be a good one to consider.
• 40:59
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 40:59
  Tad Eggleston: But it's also the one that I tell everybody that they should go to, whether they're tabling or not, because… A, it's free. B, Columbus is a football town, so if the football's… if the football team's not playing, there are lots of cheap rooms. So, it's not just free, it's not hard to stay there.
• 41:19
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 41:20
  Tad Eggleston: I stayed for 3 nights once for, like, $120 in an Airbnb. No way! No way! Where I had a bedroom, a kitchen, and a living room, like.
• 41:31
  Shane Portman: That's.
• 41:32
  Tad Eggleston: Desk area, you know.
• 41:34
  Shane Portman: I go, wow. Wow.
• 41:37
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 41:38
  Shane Portman: Intel, thank you. But.
• 41:40
  Tad Eggleston: A, like, it's just one of the greatest shows, period, because, like.
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: They'll have rock stars.
• 41:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I met Art Spiegelman there.
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, mouse. Yeah.
• 41:52
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 41:53
  Tad Eggleston: Jeff Smith is obviously there most years, because he's one of the founders of the show. He gives out the award for the new talent, where he and his wife give a pretty sizable check to some kid that's…
• 42:05
  Tad Eggleston: just getting started, and make it clear that it's allowed to go to rent, vacation, whatever. It doesn't have to go to their next comic.
• 42:13
  Shane Portman: Yeah, wow.
• 42:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 42:15
  Tad Eggleston: But it's split between the… the…
• 42:19
  Tad Eggleston: the library and the art center next door… well, the Billy Ireland Library and the Art Center next door, the main branch of the Columbus Public Library, and the art museum, and the art school sometimes has
• 42:32
  Tad Eggleston: The last few years, they've had a mangaka come in, and they've done talks at the art school, so, like, they… they really managed to…
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: To bring in the whole. So if you love, appreciate, or even just want to know more about comics, there's no better con for my money, and again, the money's just the room and the transportation.
• 42:54
  Shane Portman: Yeah, wow.
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: Cartoons Crossroads. And I think they're they either just opened their applications or they're opening soon. So, like, if you wanted to pitch this to that, well, pitch going and taking this with you there, now's the time. And then it gets even cheaper because they treat their guests really well.
• 43:10
  Shane Portman: Oh, wow. That's really good to know. Yeah, I will definitely check that out. Yeah.
• 43:14
  Tad Eggleston: But it's worth it even for, like, every hour on the hour on, I think, Friday and Saturday.
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: They have backroom tours of the Billy Ireland. So it's not just the stuff that they have out on display.
• 43:24
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 43:24
  Tad Eggleston: you back into…
• 43:27
  Tad Eggleston: The stacks, and they've got carts out with some of the cooler stuff, and one of the curators
• 43:33
  Tad Eggleston: Talking you through it all.
• 43:35
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 43:37
  Shane Portman: That's pretty rad.
• 43:38
  Tad Eggleston: I like to plug that any opportunity I get.
• 43:41
  Shane Portman: It's worth plugging, man, yeah. And if you.
• 43:44
  Tad Eggleston: still have any friends or family in the area, all the more reason.
• 43:47
  Shane Portman: Yeah, for sure. I do have some cousins that live in Columbus, so that, yeah, yeah.
• 43:52
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Wow.
• 43:53
  Tad Eggleston: I not have to pay for a room at all!
• 43:55
  Shane Portman: That's true, yeah.
• 43:57
  Tad Eggleston: pay the transportation from the West Coast, which is way more than a room, but…
• 44:01
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, unfortunately.
• 44:06
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, but I'll let you go back to libraries and essentially comic strips.
• 44:11
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I mean, that was…
• 44:12
  Tad Eggleston: early on.
• 44:12
  Shane Portman: Yeah, that was… that was my biggest, kind of.
• 44:15
  Shane Portman: connection to comics, honestly. And then I probably, you know, read…
• 44:20
  Shane Portman: you know, a Marvel comic or a DC comic here or there, but I don't have a whole lot of, like, rooted connection in that. And then I went to college, I went to college at a theater school, a conservatory, and a friend of mine there.
• 44:35
  Shane Portman: introduced me to the X -Men series that had just come out before. I think it was a like.
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: So it'd be like that might have been.
• 44:46
  Tad Eggleston: It was either Grant Morrison's run.
• 44:49
  Tad Eggleston: new X-Men would have been around when you were starting college, or it was…
• 44:55
  Tad Eggleston: It was a name that I don't like to say anymore, because he's turned out to be a really bad guy. And his takeover of three of the X-Men lines, which was also really well written, but he turned out to be a not-such-a-good guy.
• 45:06
  Shane Portman: I think it's that guy. I think.
• 45:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and I love his work.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I have this difficulty… well, and I remind myself in comics, like, it's collaborative, so I can call it Derek Robertson's Transmetropolitan.
• 45:23
  Tad Eggleston: But I remember that X-Men run. That was the first X-Men run that I read all of because.
• 45:28
  Shane Portman: Oh.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: Bread, everything by that guy.
• 45:31
  Shane Portman: Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. And that's my friend introduced me and I was like, like, oh, I get it. I get why this like, I understand like this is like, this is rooted this there's a lot of really interesting stuff inside of this. It's not just like pow and bam.
• 45:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 45:45
  Shane Portman: And that's, that's, you know, that's the cliche thing that I had in my.
• 45:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right, oh yeah.
• 45:48
  Shane Portman: That unlocked a lot of, like,
• 45:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, in the United States, I'm blown away at how many people, even in 2026, don't understand that not all comics are superhero. Yeah. I'm sitting there going, but… but they told you that Umbrella Academy was based on a comic. They told you that Sandman was based on a comic by another guy that we don't talk about anymore.
• 46:10
  Shane Portman: I know, yeah.
• 46:12
  Tad Eggleston: They've… I mean, I guess they didn't do a good enough job of telling you that Road to Perdition was based on a comic, that a history of violence was based on a comic.
• 46:20
  Shane Portman: Right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It isn't like an endless list. Yeah. And it's so varied. It's so varied.
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: that, that, that… That, death of Stalin? Have you seen Death of Stalin?
• 46:33
  Shane Portman: I haven't seen it yet, but I…
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: So good. Fucking hilarious. But based on.
• 46:37
  Shane Portman: No, that was a comic.
• 46:38
  Tad Eggleston: It was! It was, it was a European comic before it became a movie.
• 46:42
  Shane Portman: Wow. Okay. Wow. Yeah.
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: Fifth Element wasn't based on a comic, but all of the designs were done by one of the most legendary creators in comics history, Moebius.
• 46:55
  Shane Portman: Wow, yeah. Oh, if that makes sense, it totally… yeah.
• 46:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 46:59
  Shane Portman: Oh, man. Yeah.
• 47:01
  Shane Portman: So, I mean, from there, it was like, you know, I watch men and all like, you know, all those like like that stuff. And then.
• 47:07
  Tad Eggleston: Started with the ones that people… oh, you like that? You gotta read this, and it's gonna be Watchmen, probably, Dark Knight Returns. Yep, yep. You had really cool friends, Mouse, a lot of Vertigo books.
• 47:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. A lot, a lot of Vertigo books.
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: Hat tip to my friend Shelly Bond and her boss, Karen Berger.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: Because I still say that they're two of the biggest influences on what U.S. comics have become.
• 47:34
  Shane Portman: Mmhm.
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly non-superhero division, but I think they even wound up changing the superheroes, because it's like, oh, wait! Feelings are good?
• 47:43
  Shane Portman: Yeah, right, right, yeah.
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: Treating trauma like a thing rather than something to be brushed off is allowed?
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: Hello!
• 47:52
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe we should write some of these differently.
• 47:55
  Shane Portman: Yeah, right, right.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: I think the first time Batman had feelings beyond, I'm… I'm mad, sad, or want revenge, was… was when Tom King started writing him in, like.
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: 2000s… 15 or 16?
• 48:12
  Shane Portman: That's a long run to not have those deep feelings.
• 48:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it worked okay.
• 48:17
  Shane Portman: Sure, sure.
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: Sherlock Holmes never had any feelings at all.
• 48:20
  Shane Portman: Good point, good point, good point. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Fair.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: We never even really figured out why Sherlock did what Sherlock did.
• 48:29
  Shane Portman: laughter.
• 48:31
  Tad Eggleston: Batman, at least we had that. His parents were killed. He was sad and he was never gonna let it happen again.
• 48:39
  Shane Portman: Yeah, there you go. Yeah, that is pretty firmly. But that was.
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: was most of the emotions of Batman for like, 60 years.
• 48:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 48:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even the funny camp Batman that didn't deal with that and whatnot. Do you remember Adam West having a lot of emotions?
• 48:59
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:02
  Shane Portman: Ha ha ha.
• 49:03
  Shane Portman: Okay.
• 49:06
  Tad Eggleston: So what's it like to have that… I mean, I don't get to… because I was someone that's been steeped in comics all my life, I don't get to talk to a ton of people that get to have that realization as an adult. What's it like to, like… start reading comics and go, wait a minute, this is not at all what I thought.
• 49:24
  Shane Portman: it's it's.
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: you.
• 49:26
  Shane Portman: It's pretty cool, honestly, it's really like, it's jarring, but it's very like, it's, it's eye-opening, like, I mean, like you said, like, it is, it's a really
• 49:35
  Shane Portman: It's a really incredible medium. Like, I… like, a pretty perfect medium to, like, really, like, ingest a story. So, like, I mean, I… I remember I read, Blankets.
• 49:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so good.
• 49:46
  Shane Portman: And like, that just blew me away.
• 49:47
  Tad Eggleston: Have you read the follow-up?
• 49:48
  Shane Portman: No, no.
• 49:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he did a book called, Ginseng Roots. It's kind of a follow-up, it's kind of a companion piece, it deals with a lot of the same era, though you get to find out that he does have a sister. She hadn't been included in blankets, because she just didn't, like, fit in. Okay. But, like, he earned his comic book… he and his… they lived in northern Wisconsin, which…
• 50:08
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't know, but apparently is the largest ginseng producer in the world.
• 50:14
  Shane Portman: For real. Wow. I did not know that either.
• 50:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they do. So it's like one of those comics where it's part biography, part nonfiction, learning about the ginseng trade.
• 50:24
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 50:25
  Shane Portman: Yeah, I will definitely check that out. Wow.
• 50:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. It's available in single issues for my friend Tom at Uncivilized Books, and it was published as a… as a… hardcover graphic novel by Pantheon, so it's available both ways.
• 50:39
  Shane Portman: Wow. Do you know when that came out?
• 50:42
  Tad Eggleston: It started coming out in like 2016.
• 50:44
  Shane Portman: Okay, okay.
• 50:45
  Tad Eggleston: And I think that the hardcover came out in like 2022 might have been 2018 that started coming out from from.
• 50:53
  Tad Eggleston: Pantheon. I know it started coming out pre-pandemic from Pantheon, or from Uncivilized.
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I still recommend… Partially because…
• 51:04
  Tad Eggleston: Tom's a friend, and partially because the books themselves are just great artifacts, and I'm going to check to make certain he still has it in stock before I recommend
• 51:15
  Tad Eggleston: Too heavily. But, I love… They did it… There it is.
• 51:27
  Tad Eggleston: They actually did a version… Looks like it is, complete box set, so $70 this way, whereas I think the hardcover's only $30. Let me share my screen.
• 51:39
  Tad Eggleston: They did a box.
• 51:42
  Tad Eggleston: They did a really nice box to put them all in.
• 51:45
  Tad Eggleston: And you can buy them with, with
• 51:47
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if it's 10 or 11ishish.
• 51:52
  Tad Eggleston: So, it looks like they gave you a couple stickers to boot.
• 51:55
  Shane Portman: Hmm.
• 51:58
  Shane Portman: Oh yeah, wow.
• 51:59
  Tad Eggleston: Complete box set.
• 52:02
  Tad Eggleston: But also, it was the first time Craig was working
• 52:05
  Tad Eggleston: With, with, like, a color. So, so, like, he got to learn stuff.
• 52:09
  Shane Portman: Oh, yeah.
• 52:10
  Tad Eggleston: Is this black, white, and red?
• 52:11
  Shane Portman: Right.
• 52:13
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 52:16
  Shane Portman: Yeah, it's really good. I'll definitely check that out. Yeah.
• 52:19
  Tad Eggleston: 12 comic books, a mini-comic, a sticker, and… 406 plus pages of comics.
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: So… The mini comic and sticker, I don't think you get in the, in the, Pantheon version.
• 52:31
  Shane Portman: Mmm.
• 52:36
  Tad Eggleston: Though, it is a nice hardcover.
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I have seen it and… I've seen it and held it.
• 52:42
  Shane Portman: you.
• 52:44
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah.
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: And it costs about half as much.
• 52:47
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, I don't know, animators might get paid like comic people. You might have to choose the.
• 52:55
  Tad Eggleston: Choose to be frugal!
• 52:59
  Shane Portman: There's definitely parallels.
• 53:01
  Tad Eggleston: I bought the single issues as they came out, and then for a while, you could get the empty box.
• 53:06
  Tad Eggleston: for the people who'd been getting the single issue.
• 53:08
  Shane Portman: Oh, okay.
• 53:09
  Tad Eggleston: I did mine. Yeah, that's cool.
• 53:11
  Shane Portman: That's smart.
• 53:14
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, Blankets is such a great book. Craig Thomas.
• 53:17
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 53:17
  Tad Eggleston: Great. Yeah.
• 53:18
  Shane Portman: That one really.
• 53:19
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm sorry, I keep plugging stuff and cutting you off.
• 53:22
  Shane Portman: No, no, it's totally fine. I'm glad to learn this stuff.
• 53:29
  Tad Eggleston: So, so blankets, where else did your journeys lead you?
• 53:34
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Blankets is a good one. I mean, I would imagine Blankets was a…
• 53:40
  Tad Eggleston: a good guiding star for this. I mean, it didn't.
• 53:42
  Shane Portman: Yes.
• 53:43
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… the surrealism of your shrub, but it definitely deals with similarly heavy… Personal issues.
• 53:53
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 53:54
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it was, it was, I would say it's pretty foundational to Shrub.
• 53:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 53:58
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 54:00
  Tad Eggleston: I can even see that as I'm thinking about it now. I didn't make that… it's one of those things where I didn't make the connection in my head until you said it, and as soon as you said it, I couldn't unsee it.
• 54:10
  Shane Portman: Totally.
• 54:12
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of like I was shocked the first time, Damon Goff, also known as Badly Drawn Boy, listed, listed.
• 54:23
  Tad Eggleston: Bruce Springsteen is his favorite artist. I'm like, really?
• 54:26
  Shane Portman: That's very interesting.
• 54:28
  Tad Eggleston: But every, every, every time I've listened to him since then, I'm like, oh, yeah, okay.
• 54:35
  Shane Portman: I'm gonna have to go back and listen to some of this stuff with that in mind.
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: Ideally, after the first time I heard him cover Thunder Road, and then listen to his stuff again, it's like, oh yeah, no, okay, yeah.
• 54:45
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 54:46
  Tad Eggleston: Springsteen guy.
• 54:47
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 54:48
  Tad Eggleston: For that matter, the one time I saw him live, he spent, like, 5 minutes talking about, like, how he'd just managed to find a Springsteen bootleg of something, and he was listening to it out on his back porch and crying, and his son came out and went, Daddy, what's wrong? This music is so beautiful!
• 55:11
  Shane Portman: That's the true hallmark of something moving you. If you can take a…
• 55:16
  Tad Eggleston: Thank.
• 55:17
  Shane Portman: find beautiful and be in tears about it.
• 55:19
  Tad Eggleston: practically.
• 55:19
  Shane Portman: deal.
• 55:20
  Shane Portman: laughs.
• 55:23
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah.
• 55:25
  Tad Eggleston: So, so yeah, Craig Thompson, any other favorites?
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, when did you… actually.
• 55:31
  Tad Eggleston: Were we still in college, or have we moved past college?
• 55:34
  Shane Portman: This is past hours. This is yeah, okay.
• 55:36
  Tad Eggleston: So Tom's is a more recent discovery.
• 55:39
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 55:42
  Tad Eggleston: And anything else stand out that you've… I mean, I feel like if you care, I can start sending you reading lists. More than happy to send you reading lists.
• 55:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 55:49
  Tad Eggleston: Time, you can join book clubs, man, because we read lots of comics on 22 Panels. Yeah, absolutely.
• 55:55
  Shane Portman: Please send me a reading list. I'd be happy to like check out stuff. Yeah.
• 55:59
  Tad Eggleston: So… Alright,
• 56:09
  Tad Eggleston: We're, we're, we're, we're hitting, we're hitting the time that we were shooting for, so I'm gonna roll into…
• 56:15
  Tad Eggleston: my typical closing questions. Okay. One of which, you're new enough to comics that I'm gonna have to…
• 56:25
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to…
• 56:27
  Tad Eggleston: Twist it a little bit for you to make it a little bit easier for you.
• 56:30
  Shane Portman: Okay, I appreciate.
• 56:33
  Tad Eggleston: I've been doing this podcast for, like, 5 years now.
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: And… I feel like I've fallen into the Twilight Zone.
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because the number of people who used to just be names on some of my favorite artifacts.
• 56:49
  Tad Eggleston: the number of experiences that I've gotten to have, the things that I've gotten to see, the amazing conversations I have.
• 56:54
  Tad Eggleston: Like, again, people that used to be just…
• 56:59
  Tad Eggleston: Like, holy names to me that now are people who text me.
• 57:03
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 57:03
  Tad Eggleston: And not just respond to my text, but, like, text me. And, like.
• 57:09
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if everybody feels this way, but I feel like that's the sign that you're really friends, is not… not that they'll text you back, but when they send the text or make the phone call to you.
• 57:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 57:24
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 57:26
  Tad Eggleston: You know, when you get the random message, hey, I was at spring training with my kid today, we got to see boom, boom, boom, and it's like…
• 57:31
  Shane Portman: you.
• 57:33
  Tad Eggleston: Is so-and-so my friend?
• 57:36
  Shane Portman: Totally, totally, yeah.
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: But I've found that that's true of, like, everybody in comics. And to a certain extent, anybody who pursues
• 57:48
  Tad Eggleston: Arts as a major, and particularly storytelling or any sort of collaborative art.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: As a major part of their life.
• 57:57
  Tad Eggleston: So I started collecting those stories. So yours doesn't have to be in the comics world, because that's not where you've spent as much time, but you've spent enough time in television, animation.
• 58:08
  Tad Eggleston: improv comedy at Second City and Improv Olympic here in Chicago.
• 58:14
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me…
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: a story, an experience, something where, like, if you told 10-year-old Shane Portman that this was going to be part of your life.
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: Or even, like, even now, thinking about it, you're kind of pinching yourself. Did this… was that really… was that really me in that room? With… with that thing happening? Tell me one of those stories. Tell me… tell me just some amazing part of your life that never would have happened if you hadn't…
• 58:42
  Tad Eggleston: centered Storytelling and art.
• 58:46
  Tad Eggleston: As part of what you do.
• 58:50
  Shane Portman: You know, I will, I'll say the thing that first comes to mind is, When I…
• 58:58
  Shane Portman: when I moved to Los Angeles, I had wanted to get involved in… I'd wanted to write for something, you know, but I didn't know what, and I was…
• 59:07
  Shane Portman: I was working at a chocolate shop.
• 59:10
  Shane Portman: And, at the chocolate shop, there was a person there who, was an animator. She had just gotten out of school, she was an animator, and her boyfriend at the time was an animator as well, and he was working at this studio, Bix Pix Entertainment, and they were working on Tumble Leaf, and…
• 59:27
  Shane Portman: I had self -published a book of short stories. They were all illustrated by different artists that I knew. And I gave that book out as like a Christmas gift one year or something like that. And they were like these bedtime stories that were supposed to be for adults to read to each other. It was kind of a concept.
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:46
  Shane Portman: And, she and her boyfriend read the book and really liked it. And he casually overheard the, the head of the studio say they're going to be new, needing new writers soon. And he, he was like, Shane's voice would fit this so well. And he, and so he put me in contact with her.
• 1:00:01
  Tad Eggleston: Was this Alistair Cromley's Fairweather Ballad?
• 1:00:04
  Shane Portman: It was yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:05
  Tad Eggleston: Bedtime stories for grown-ups to tell.
• 1:00:07
  Shane Portman: Yep, that's it, yeah.
• 1:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: I like how you rhyme all of that.
• 1:00:10
  Shane Portman: Totally, totally. So that, I, so I, I got, I had an interview there. They,
• 1:00:20
  Shane Portman: they showed me around the studio, and I got hired in the room at the interview, but, I…
• 1:00:26
  Shane Portman: On the tour of the studio.
• 1:00:28
  Shane Portman: They just showed me the stages, and it's stop-motion animation, so these stages are, like, you know, they're table-sized, but they're so detailed, and so incredible, and so… and the way it's lit, it looks like
• 1:00:42
  Shane Portman: I was just floored. I was… I thought it… it looked so real, what was on that table, you know? It was like a green, kind of like a little hilly, like, set with just one character there, and the way it was lit was so pure, and so it felt like…
• 1:00:58
  Shane Portman: you could just picture that thing moving, even if nobody, you know, made that movement as an animator. And I…
• 1:01:05
  Shane Portman: I.
• 1:01:06
  Shane Portman: I, at the time, my wife and I, we were sharing a car, so we had both driven to the studio together, and we were leaving, and we had to get gas, and I…
• 1:01:15
  Shane Portman: I got up, got out to put gas in the car and I just, oh, I was got out to like.
• 1:01:22
  Shane Portman: Put my card into the, you know, the… The gas…
• 1:01:27
  Shane Portman: thing. And I just stood there. I didn't know what to do. And my wife had to come out and be like, are you, do you need some help? Cause I just was like frozen in shock. And I think it had to do a lot with like getting that.
• 1:01:40
  Shane Portman: that job, but also just what I saw, just really, like, kind of blew my mind, like, that it was so…
• 1:01:47
  Shane Portman: alive feeling, and I think that… that's the first thing that comes to mind. The biggest kind of, like, feeling of…
• 1:01:55
  Shane Portman: like, I can't believe I'm here, moment.
• 1:01:59
  Shane Portman: was when, oh, I can't remember…
• 1:02:04
  Shane Portman: Tumbleweave got nominated for the Emmys, and it wasn't the year that I was nominated because I was nominated during COVID. So mine was all a Zoom kind of a thing.
• 1:02:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:02:12
  Shane Portman: It was very odd. My wife was wonderful and she like surprised me by setting up this like red carpet. And we had like a little picture thing that she made on the wall. And it was really cute and wonderful.
• 1:02:21
  Tad Eggleston: We had a hooding ceremony on Free Comic Book Day at our… at the comic shop that I do work for.
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: Modern age in Algonquin, because the owner's wife.
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: Got her doctorate, but the day that it would have happened was Free Comic Book Day, and she wasn't leaving town to…
• 1:02:40
  Tad Eggleston: on his first free comic book day. So, since he's also a doctor, and they have many friends that are doctors, everybody had their robes, and we put the thing up on Zoom, on the big screen TV in the shop, and, like, stopped everybody. It's like, we won't really be selling things for the next
• 1:02:58
  Tad Eggleston: 25 minutes. Oh, that's cool.
• 1:03:00
  Shane Portman: That's cool. Yeah.
• 1:03:04
  Shane Portman: Oh!
• 1:03:04
  Tad Eggleston: So I get the let's make it cool, even though it's not.
• 1:03:09
  Shane Portman: Yeah, totally, totally.
• 1:03:10
  Tad Eggleston: to come up with red carpet is impressive.
• 1:03:12
  Shane Portman: Yeah, she's pretty great. She was really, yeah, it was, but the year, this year, this particular year, it wasn't COVID, it was pre-COVID, and, we were… so, at the ceremony, we wound up meeting, Maria from Sesame Street.
• 1:03:28
  Shane Portman: The woman who, like, who played Maria? What's her name? Sonia.
• 1:03:33
  Shane Portman: I can't remember her last name, but she, we met her and that just kind of like, like, I think.
• 1:03:38
  Tad Eggleston: I got to meet Gordon and Maria.
• 1:03:40
  Shane Portman: Oh my god.
• 1:03:40
  Tad Eggleston: thing at the Stratford Square Mall.
• 1:03:44
  Tad Eggleston: Shout out to,
• 1:03:46
  Tad Eggleston: Zach Quaintance, because we wound up talking Stratford Square when he was on a couple weeks ago.
• 1:03:51
  Shane Portman: Oh, cool.
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: When I was a kid, only I didn't really meet them, because I was… I was so overwhelmed that I was crying the whole time.
• 1:03:59
  Shane Portman: get.
• 1:04:00
  Tad Eggleston: I get it, man. This is actually probably one of the first signs that I was autistic. It took till I was, like, 30-something to get the diagnosis, because, well, when I was a kid, I could talk, which meant I wasn't autistic, and when I was in high school, I was smart, which meant I wasn't autistic, and…
• 1:04:15
  Tad Eggleston: Wasn't until the DSM-5 that I actually got to be autistic, but then I was 30-something, and everybody knows that everybody who's autistic is a kid.
• 1:04:26
  Tad Eggleston: Or at least the insurance companies know that. Right.
• 1:04:30
  Shane Portman: Alright, oh.
• 1:04:32
  Shane Portman: So.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't get my diagnosis until I was like 44.
• 1:04:39
  Tad Eggleston: you.
• 1:04:42
  Shane Portman: But I get the feeling about the overwhelming feeling because it definitely, I was, you know, it just made me feel like a kid again. And she was everything you would want that person to be, you know, like it.
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: I remember when they got married, that was like a big deal. Like we had a watch party.
• 1:04:59
  Shane Portman: They can.
• 1:05:00
  Tad Eggleston: Neighborhood watch party.
• 1:05:03
  Tad Eggleston: That's really great.
• 1:05:08
  Tad Eggleston: On like a 28 inch TV.
• 1:05:11
  Shane Portman: Oh, wow.
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: It was way, way back when a 28-inch TV was one of the…
• 1:05:15
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:05:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:05:17
  Shane Portman: It's all right.
• 1:05:20
  Tad Eggleston: It was our first color TV.
• 1:05:22
  Shane Portman: Yeah, oh man.
• 1:05:23
  Tad Eggleston: Not all the neighbors had them yet.
• 1:05:25
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Right. It's a big deal.
• 1:05:32
  Tad Eggleston: These are the things that, that…
• 1:05:36
  Tad Eggleston: They don't make me old when I'm talking to somebody like you about them, but I can imagine having this conversation in front of some of my students and have them go, the what?
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: Totally, totally, yeah. What are you talking about? Oh yeah, there was a time with… not only without Netflix, but without remote controls. And where TVs were thicker than they were wide.
• 1:06:01
  Shane Portman: And you wanted a really thick and big one. Like that was.
• 1:06:07
  Tad Eggleston: Like, if it was 35 inches wide, it was, like, 40 inches deep.
• 1:06:13
  Shane Portman: Right, totally.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: laughs the
• 1:06:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: Did you get to finish that story or did I wind up cutting you off?
• 1:06:30
  Shane Portman: No, I think I did. Yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. No, no, not at all. I don't think it was cutting off at all. You were playing off. It was. Yeah.
• 1:06:38
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I wanted to make certain that that's what I'd done there.
• 1:06:42
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:06:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because I suddenly blanked out, and I'm like.
• 1:06:44
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember the punchline, so I hope I… oh, that's right, you got to meet Maria.
• 1:06:49
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yep, yep, yep.
• 1:06:53
  Shane Portman: laughs.
• 1:06:54
  Tad Eggleston: All right.
• 1:06:57
  Shane Portman: laughs.
• 1:06:58
  Tad Eggleston: Final question, this one, again, everybody's allowed to cheat, as you… I have a script for it, so you'll know everybody's allowed to cheat.
• 1:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:07:10
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
• 1:07:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's something that you love.
• 1:07:19
  Tad Eggleston: And not enough people around you have experienced it.
• 1:07:22
  Tad Eggleston: And you'd really like them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:07:28
  Shane Portman: that.
• 1:07:29
  Shane Portman: Interesting question. The first, the thing that comes to mind, it's not a comic, but honestly, it's…
• 1:07:36
  Shane Portman: I could see how comics connects to it.
• 1:07:39
  Shane Portman: It's the autobiography of Harpo Marx.
• 1:07:43
  Shane Portman: It's called Harpo Speaks, and it's an incredible story. It's…
• 1:07:49
  Shane Portman: I, like, I've never read, like, I, I've… I've… I had this book.
• 1:07:55
  Shane Portman: And I've given it out to people to read, and I've lost it multiple, multiple times, and I've always had to rebuy it, because I'm like, I have to, I have to own a copy of it. It's, like, too, like.
• 1:08:05
  Tad Eggleston: No, I totally understand. I have a handful of books that I always own at least two copies of, so that I don't have to worry about getting it back when I…
• 1:08:14
  Shane Portman: That's smart.
• 1:08:15
  Tad Eggleston: it, lend it. And for that matter, like the book that I've given away the most in my life, I, I've completely lost track of how many times I've given away is Antoine de Saint Exupery's, the Little Prince.
• 1:08:27
  Shane Portman: Oh, sure.
• 1:08:28
  Tad Eggleston: By the way.
• 1:08:30
  Tad Eggleston: We were talking about loss and grief.
• 1:08:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's a great… book.
• 1:08:36
  Tad Eggleston: Not just about loss and grief, but about why we feel those emotions to begin with. You know, how you have… how you have to live and appreciate things to then…
• 1:08:47
  Tad Eggleston: feel that grief, and that the grief itself isn't always bad, because of the… I mean, I just… it's because of the wheat fields. Every time you see them, you'll hear me laugh.
• 1:08:57
  Shane Portman: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:01
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 1:09:03
  Tad Eggleston: It used to be available for a dollar a copy from Scholastic when my mom was working in a school, so anytime it was in
• 1:09:12
  Tad Eggleston: Like… One of her, her… Book order forms.
• 1:09:17
  Tad Eggleston: I would get between 20 and 40 copies, just so I'd have it around.
• 1:09:21
  Tad Eggleston: I think I'm down to, like, 6, right?
• 1:09:23
  Shane Portman: Wow.
• 1:09:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Well, particularly because the Catherine Woods translation, the original translation, is necessary.
• 1:09:32
  Tad Eggleston: It's been retranslated a few times, and they just suck the whimsy out of it.
• 1:09:36
  Shane Portman: Okay, yeah.
• 1:09:38
  Tad Eggleston: You know, translation isn't… isn't as simple as word for word, you know, they're, oh, this is the more literal translation. It's like, well, I mean, A, is it… because Exupery was alive when Woods did the translation, and he spoke English, he just didn't write in English, so unless he did…
• 1:09:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Bother to read the translation. He probably approved it.
• 1:09:59
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:10:01
  Shane Portman: you.
• 1:10:02
  Tad Eggleston: But second, like, I mean, you have to get, like, 2 pages into it.
• 1:10:07
  Tad Eggleston: for it just to kill you. There's a line in the original that I just love, it's, grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it's tiresome for children to always and forever be explaining things to.
• 1:10:17
  Shane Portman: Yeah, that's brilliant.
• 1:10:20
  Tad Eggleston: And the first new translation I read was.
• 1:10:24
  Tad Eggleston: Grown-ups never understand, and children have to tell them how things are.
• 1:10:30
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:10:31
  Tad Eggleston: And yes, from a literal sense, those mean the same things.
• 1:10:35
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:10:37
  Tad Eggleston: From a poetic, from a… from any other sense, the first one is infinitely better. Yeah.
• 1:10:44
  Shane Portman: Yeah, you can feel it. Yeah.
• 1:10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:10:49
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:10:50
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:51
  Tad Eggleston: We actually… we had a podcast episode where I talked to Matt Madden and Chris Cicada about translating comics, which is a similar thing, because…
• 1:11:02
  Tad Eggleston: Because, as you were talking about, needing to find that economy of words, needing to find the right words, translation is that perhaps even more so, because you need to manage, hopefully, to fit into the same space, not take up more or less space if possible, but not just capture
• 1:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: the meaning, but… But everything that came along with it.
• 1:11:25
  Shane Portman: Yeah, you had to get that subtext inside there too, not just the.
• 1:11:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 1:11:31
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:11:32
  Shane Portman: Wow, yeah, that's cool. That's a really cool topic.
• 1:11:34
  Tad Eggleston: And comics and poetry have got to be the two hardest things to translate.
• 1:11:38
  Shane Portman: I.
• 1:11:39
  Tad Eggleston: know.
• 1:11:39
  Shane Portman: I never thought about that. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm a fan of, Wislawa Zemborska was the Nobel Laureate in, I think, 1997, and I noticed, because Seamus Haney had been the Nobel Laureate the year before, and we'd actually gone to see him read
• 1:11:56
  Tad Eggleston: He did a reading at the Art Institute.
• 1:11:58
  Tad Eggleston: as the reigning Nobel laureate, so it was an unofficial field trip. The English professor's like, I can't get permission for us to go on this field trip. And it's on a school day, but anybody who accidentally puts a $5 bill for the…
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: ticket and their name on it on my desk between now and whenever, I will buy you a ticket, and if you happen to meet me outside the Art Institute at this time, and, like.
• 1:12:32
  Tad Eggleston: It was a senior AP English class, so, like… Literally, we all ditched.
• 1:12:39
  Shane Portman: consumed.
• 1:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: the train downtown.
• 1:12:42
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:12:43
  Tad Eggleston: And met him, and went and listened to Seamus Haney read.
• 1:12:47
  Tad Eggleston: But that had me paying attention to Nobel laureates, and the next year was a Polish poet named Wislawa Zemborska, and the first book I picked up of her stuff was just
• 1:12:57
  Tad Eggleston: Beautiful. And then I picked up another book, and I'm like, this feels…
• 1:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: And I knew initially that, like, her Nobel Prize award specifically
• 1:13:09
  Tad Eggleston: Excluded her war years, almost apologetically.
• 1:13:12
  Shane Portman: Okay.
• 1:13:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because during the war years, you know, they were powerful and angry poems, but they just weren't as good.
• 1:13:19
  Shane Portman: Because they were…
• 1:13:20
  Tad Eggleston: angry, anti-war Poems, you know?
• 1:13:25
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:26
  Tad Eggleston: Weren't as universal, they weren't as… you know, and again, almost apologetically, because, you know.
• 1:13:32
  Tad Eggleston: I think she was Jewish to boot, but if she wasn't, she certainly had… had…
• 1:13:37
  Tad Eggleston: definite sympathies, like, so, so, like, they were coming from the occupied and occupied Poland in… You know, so it's like…
• 1:13:46
  Tad Eggleston: We think that these are important poems, but we're giving her the Nobel for her stuff that's more universal.
• 1:13:53
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:55
  Tad Eggleston: So initially, I'm like, oh, are these war poems? But then I found a couple that were in both volumes that I had, and I'm like, no, the translation's just way better in the other one.
• 1:14:08
  Shane Portman: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:14:12
  Tad Eggleston: And then I remember when Amanda Gorman's book came out and it got immediately.
• 1:14:18
  Tad Eggleston: translated into, like, 3 dozen languages. There was initially a big hoopla Over the fact… The Dutch translator.
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: was… was a white male. And it was Gorman that had to stand up and go, yeah, he's a white male. A, not enough… not a lot of black.
• 1:14:39
  Tad Eggleston: People in… or, you know, in…
• 1:14:43
  Tad Eggleston: the Netherlands. This is… I mean, yes, you could go down… I mean, there are plenty of Black people down in, you know, that speak some Dutch because of Antigua or whatnot, but this is being translated. But most importantly.
• 1:14:56
  Tad Eggleston: He's their most accomplished young poet. I love his work. He understands poetry. Poetry is not easy to translate.
• 1:15:04
  Shane Portman: Mmm.
• 1:15:06
  Tad Eggleston: My publisher didn't pick this guy, I picked him.
• 1:15:08
  Shane Portman: Wow. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:12
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:15:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:15:15
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: And if I got countries wrong or whatnot, I apologize, because it's been years, I didn't go look it up, but I do remember her specifically speaking out that, like, no, she didn't think it was a racial thing, or needed to be a racial thing.
• 1:15:27
  Shane Portman: She.
• 1:15:28
  Tad Eggleston: was happy that a poet was.
• 1:15:30
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:15:30
  Tad Eggleston: her work.
• 1:15:31
  Shane Portman: That makes, oh yeah, I get it. Like that makes a whole lot of sense.
• 1:15:34
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:15:35
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:15:35
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I mean, I'm… I'm cursed to have no linguistic capability.
• 1:15:43
  Tad Eggleston: But… but I know people who do, so I know that sometimes even, like.
• 1:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: Subtitle translations will be off in ways that… They're just, like… tear things…
• 1:15:59
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:15:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, you brought up in your afterword that there's…
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: No word in English for what? What was it?
• 1:16:10
  Tad Eggleston: I remember immediately both thinking.
• 1:16:15
  Tad Eggleston: I love it when people notice things like that.
• 1:16:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because I don't think we as human beings think enough about how…
• 1:16:28
  Tad Eggleston: Language, and sometimes lack of language, affect the way we think about things.
• 1:16:34
  Tad Eggleston: But it also immediately had me thinking about translations and whatnot. Like, every language has… has words that don't translate well.
• 1:16:44
  Tad Eggleston: into other languages.
• 1:16:45
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'm quickly trying to reread through your, your…
• 1:17:01
  Shane Portman: I wish I could remember it, but I don't remember what I said.
• 1:17:10
  Tad Eggleston: It was right up front.
• 1:17:15
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm like halfway through the 1st page I need.
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, well, everybody just needs to read his afterword, because it's worth reading.
• 1:17:27
  Tad Eggleston: And it's worth reading, not just for that part, but like…
• 1:17:32
  Tad Eggleston: Because it gives depth into the story. But it is, it is something I think about a lot. Again, autistic brain, you know? There's so many things that are very, very real that we just don't have words for.
• 1:17:46
  Tad Eggleston: But I think also, sometimes, what makes so many things scary to other people is they're completely aware that whatever… whatever word it is that they don't like, that has just come into the lexicon, doesn't…
• 1:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't actually represent something that wasn't there before.
• 1:18:02
  Tad Eggleston: It represents something that they were able to ignore because there wasn't a word for it before.
• 1:18:07
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:10
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:18:11
  Tad Eggleston: Remember transgender people forever.
• 1:18:13
  Tad Eggleston: We have a good word for it.
• 1:18:15
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:18:16
  Shane Portman: Yep.
• 1:18:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's, it's, like… For that matter, you know.
• 1:18:24
  Tad Eggleston: I cannot emphasize enough.
• 1:18:27
  Tad Eggleston: The autism rate is not going up.
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: It's not going up, it has not been going up.
• 1:18:34
  Tad Eggleston: If it has been going up at all.
• 1:18:38
  Tad Eggleston: It's for one very simple reason.
• 1:18:41
  Tad Eggleston: And that's that…
• 1:18:44
  Tad Eggleston: Autistic people also like sex, and it's a genetic thing, and we're less likely to be sterilized or thrown in institutions than we were
• 1:18:54
  Tad Eggleston: Many years ago.
• 1:18:56
  Shane Portman: Hmm. Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:18:57
  Tad Eggleston: That would be a minimal.
• 1:19:00
  Tad Eggleston: Increase in the overall rate of.
• 1:19:02
  Shane Portman: Sure, yeah.
• 1:19:03
  Tad Eggleston: right?
• 1:19:03
  Shane Portman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:19:04
  Tad Eggleston: What's going up is our understanding and ability to diagnose it. Because as it turns out, autism is also not a thing that's only contracted by affluent white males.
• 1:19:15
  Shane Portman: Right.
• 1:19:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:19:18
  Shane Portman: Surprisingly. Right.
• 1:19:21
  Tad Eggleston: turns.
• 1:19:21
  Shane Portman: Out. Is it too?
• 1:19:22
  Tad Eggleston: Turns out there is more than more to autism than than having affluent white males who behave in in ways that would otherwise get them in trouble not be in trouble.
• 1:19:34
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm not trying to say that, that those, those
• 1:19:38
  Tad Eggleston: diagnosed with autism didn't deserve not to be in trouble because they weren't autistic. I'm saying that… They happen to live… they happen to be part of a group notorious for having parents that will find any reason for them not to be responsible for their actions.
• 1:19:53
  Shane Portman: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.
• 1:19:54
  Tad Eggleston: So they were way more likely to get a diagnosis.
• 1:19:58
  Shane Portman: Mmm.
• 1:19:59
  Tad Eggleston: And now, as it turns out.
• 1:20:02
  Tad Eggleston: Males of color?
• 1:20:04
  Tad Eggleston: Have autism at roughly the same rate.
• 1:20:06
  Tad Eggleston: Poor white males have autism at roughly the same weight. Wait for it, wait for it.
• 1:20:11
  Tad Eggleston: Girls have autism at roughly the same rate!
• 1:20:19
  Shane Portman: It all, yeah, it all makes sense.
• 1:20:26
  Tad Eggleston: This is another thing that I could go down way too many rabbit holes. So we'll let it go there.
• 1:20:31
  Shane Portman: Shit.
• 1:20:32
  Tad Eggleston: It has been a pleasure. I hope I haven't drowned you out. I feel like this is one of the nights where I've dominated conversation. But I think we've also plugged your book, so hopefully it wasn't terrible.
• 1:20:43
  Shane Portman: Not at all.
• 1:20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully you will.
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully you had a fun enough time to come back, because I'd love to talk to you again and I'll talk to you off air about book club opportunities et cetera, because you know it's a good way to get your comic reading in too. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:57
  Shane Portman: Yeah.
• 1:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: For Shane Portman, this has been 22 Panels and we will see you after the next page.