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Transcript

With Great Power #363... 22 Panels with Fred Van Lente · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Fred Van Lente: It'll be work.
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest for the fifth time, not counting baseball panels, is, Fred Van Lente, who, has a couple books coming out monthly right now. We're still doing the, The Future Is, which I got caught up on today, and
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I felt… I felt like…
• 0:24
  Tad Eggleston: Haven't been getting to the comic shop on Wednesdays, and Future is doesn't have same-day digital available, so I sometimes fall behind, because there's so many books that I have to read in any given week.
• 0:36
  Fred Van Lente: That's right, you're driving to the comic stores, that's the whole idea.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: if I don't get it… read in the week that it comes out, it's sometimes, like… piles up.
• 0:47
  Fred Van Lente: I'm sure that's not the only title, and you're not the only person.
• 0:50
  Tad Eggleston: No, but I did, like, I was so happy when you had the availability to book me, because, like, I was hating being behind. And I'm like, oh, I'm talking to Fred! I get to get caught up!
• 1:03
  Fred Van Lente: There you go.
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: So I read the last arc, and then the ARF story over, like, the last week or so. Vampirates I am caught up on. I've been reading those on the days they come out.
• 1:17
  Tad Eggleston: So, so yeah.
• 1:19
  Fred Van Lente: series.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I keep waiting for the vampirates to… to pick some locks or something, but…
• 1:29
  Fred Van Lente: pop out the TRS-80s and…
• 1:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. But,
• 1:34
  Fred Van Lente: blood banks.
• 1:35
  Tad Eggleston: First, though, I, I, I, I…
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't heard as loud reports as I would expect on this, but is David Lapham taking over?
• 1:47
  Tad Eggleston: Full-time art duties?
• 1:49
  Fred Van Lente: He is!
• 1:49
  Tad Eggleston: She is. Oh, wow.
• 1:51
  Fred Van Lente: We're sending his first issue to bed this week.
• 1:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:56
  Fred Van Lente: And it's, weirdly, I didn't write it for him, I didn't know he was gonna be the artist, but it's, like, our first real giant gunfight.
• 2:03
  Fred Van Lente: So I was like, David can handle this.
• 2:05
  Tad Eggleston: That's about as perfect as you can get.
• 2:08
  Fred Van Lente: good at that. So that's sort of like his myth.
• 2:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah. No, David Lapham is one of my favorite artists, so much so that he's the only person that I own
• 2:20
  Tad Eggleston: original pages for… from.
• 2:22
  Fred Van Lente: Oh.
• 2:23
  Tad Eggleston: I actually just… just recently got 3 more, because he had a sale going on. We've got… this one is from…
• 2:31
  Tad Eggleston: One of the hero trade…
• 2:34
  Fred Van Lente: Okay, sure.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: Er, no, I'm sorry, this is from,
• 2:41
  Tad Eggleston: No, it is. Hero Troy Bootleg No. 6.
• 2:45
  Tad Eggleston: This one is… The one that he did for the John LeCare book? Losing Control?
• 2:51
  Fred Van Lente: Okay.
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: And then I just had to get one.
• 2:56
  Tad Eggleston: With a baseball in it.
• 2:58
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, alright.
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: This is, this is from,
• 3:04
  Tad Eggleston: his EC blowback. It's actually got a baseball card up top, too. Yeah. And the first piece of art I ever got was a friend of mine gave me a page from,
• 3:17
  Tad Eggleston: Stray Bullets Killers.
• 3:20
  Tad Eggleston: So… Nice.
• 3:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah, he's…
• 3:23
  Fred Van Lente: He's doing a fantastic job, and he's doing…
• 3:28
  Fred Van Lente: He's an issue away from doing this whole arc.
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 3:32
  Fred Van Lente: Chugging along, chugging along. I, I am…
• 3:35
  Fred Van Lente: Continuing to write to sort of keep up with him.
• 3:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I fi- I finally got to meet him…
• 3:41
  Tad Eggleston: I had the… everybody but… but Dan Hauser from the…
• 3:48
  Tad Eggleston: American caper team. I had Shelly, and I had David, and I had Laszlo.
• 3:56
  Tad Eggleston: And what I hadn't realized about him until Shelly was singing his praises is that, he's fast.
• 4:04
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, his… his… his art is so good that you don't expect to hear that he's…
• 4:12
  Tad Eggleston: Also, one of the fastest in the business.
• 4:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, he's not, like, Kirby fast, but, like… No one is.
• 4:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well…
• 4:22
  Fred Van Lente: Actually, I'm working with somebody who's… who's competent.
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: you've got… you're working with somebody who's comparable to Kirby in terms of fast?
• 4:30
  Fred Van Lente: Well, not in the sense of when Kirby was at his height in the mid-60s, he was doing 9 pages a day.
• 4:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right, I was even, I was even only thinking 6 pages a day.
• 4:39
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah. And, I'm working with somebody who… who turns in inks every other day.
• 4:45
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 4:47
  Fred Van Lente: Which is pretty cool.
• 4:47
  Tad Eggleston: That's, you know… I mean, I, I, I…
• 4:52
  Fred Van Lente: The book we're doing together.
• 4:54
  Tad Eggleston: The Oz book! Who's doing, who's doing the Oz?
• 4:57
  Fred Van Lente: Mike Diodato Jr, baby.
• 4:58
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I like Diodato a lot. He does very good work. Yeah.
• 5:05
  Tad Eggleston: Is he exclusive at AWA, or does he just do so much work there that… that he might as well be?
• 5:11
  Fred Van Lente: Oz is keeping him pretty busy. We're controlling.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 5:14
  Fred Van Lente: books, he's currently halfway through the fourth one, so I've got to start writing the fifth one soon.
• 5:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 5:21
  Fred Van Lente: Third one hasn't even come out, hasn't even been kick-started yet, so…
• 5:25
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I need to read those still, and I'll have to bring you back for the Kickstarter, so, like, keep me in mind.
• 5:30
  Fred Van Lente: Sure, I will.
• 5:32
  Tad Eggleston: For, for listeners, since we kind of jumped straight in, in Media Res, you, you wanna, give the…
• 5:42
  Tad Eggleston: Give the pitch for… for where…
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: the future is, is going, because I hear this next issue is a good jumping-on point. The current issue is a good jumping-on point, because it's a one-shot, so, like, pitch them both.
• 5:56
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's great, and it's about a dog. Everybody loves stories about dogs.
• 5:59
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 6:01
  Fred Van Lente: So, The Futures is about a team of pro bono white hat hackers in the near future, sort of saving people from technological nightmares.
• 6:13
  Fred Van Lente: A retailer described it as.
• 6:17
  Fred Van Lente: Black Mirror with Hope, and I like that. I'm stealing that. That's… that's…
• 6:21
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's a good one.
• 6:23
  Fred Van Lente: book.
• 6:24
  Tad Eggleston: You want to shout out the retailer?
• 6:27
  Fred Van Lente: Don't remember. I know.
• 6:29
  Tad Eggleston: That's not.
• 6:30
  Fred Van Lente: You should never put a… if I didn't say the name, Tad, you should never put a guest on the spotlight.
• 6:34
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair. Well, you know, sometimes people, some peop… like, for whatever reason, I've found that people are, like, hesitant to, like, plug stuff.
• 6:45
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're, like, afraid that… I don't know that I'll think that they're advertising on my show.
• 6:52
  Tad Eggleston: This is the first time somebody hasn't immediately given me a retailer name when I asked for one, but almost nobody starts with, oh, this shop…
• 7:03
  Fred Van Lente: Right.
• 7:05
  Tad Eggleston: did this. You know, it's like they don't want the other shops to be jealous. I don't know what it is. I've never asked why people don't tell me the retailer name right off the bat. But I regularly have to ask, which retailer is it? Let's get them some business.
• 7:21
  Fred Van Lente: Fair enough.
• 7:21
  Tad Eggleston: And almost always, they immediately say, oh, it was…
• 7:25
  Fred Van Lente: Well, he's a pod… he's a fellow podcaster.
• 7:28
  Fred Van Lente: And actually, it's… it's coming to me.
• 7:31
  Fred Van Lente: So, thank you for that, that…
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: There we go. I jogged your memory.
• 7:35
  Fred Van Lente: Diatribe, because it gave me the mental, you know.
• 7:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 7:40
  Fred Van Lente: acuity to grab under. I think it's Mateus who runs the FOC show.
• 7:44
  Fred Van Lente: Okay. Which is every week, on Fridays, as part of the… I think it's the XP… Network.
• 7:53
  Fred Van Lente: I think it's that network of shows that…
• 7:57
  Fred Van Lente: Adam Freeman does his, comic book insiders.
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 8:03
  Fred Van Lente: Industry Insider Show for.
• 8:04
  Tad Eggleston: I should… I should learn comic book podcasts again. I used to know them all really well, and then I started talking to comic creators on my own.
• 8:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, it used to be I'd read a book and say, oh, this person's cool, I want to go hear them talk, and I'd go find an interview with them. And now, I read a book and go, oh, this person's cool, I want to talk to them, and I send them an email.
• 8:28
  Fred Van Lente: Why not? But yeah, no, Matthias is great. He's had me on the show a few times.
• 8:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, very cool.
• 8:35
  Fred Van Lente: Anyway, so you asked why issue 20, which is David Lapin's first issue, which is coming out.
• 8:39
  Tad Eggleston: Is it 20? I thought it was 19.
• 8:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because we've got 18 out now. I thought he was jumping on at 19.
• 8:46
  Fred Van Lente: No, well, okay, he did the… the reason it's conf…
• 8:49
  Fred Van Lente: Using… well, 18's the RF story, right?
• 8:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:53
  Fred Van Lente: numbers of insurers. Okay, so… No, he is coming on 20.
• 8:58
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 8:58
  Fred Van Lente: He did the cover for 19, which is why you might be slightly confused.
• 9:02
  Fred Van Lente: He also…
• 9:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he's been doing… he's been doing bee covers for a while.
• 9:06
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah.
• 9:06
  Tad Eggleston: Isn't he? Yeah.
• 9:07
  Fred Van Lente: So, the reason it's a great jumping-on point is the setup is very simple. The Black Mountain team, which is the codename for our hackers.
• 9:19
  Fred Van Lente: Have pissed off a lot of powerful and rich and influential people, and so they decided they had enough, and so they're going to kill them.
• 9:26
  Fred Van Lente: So, the next arc is… is, is called… well, I can't say what it's called. It's called Asteris, Asteris, Asteris, Asteris, Asterisk.
• 9:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:34
  Fred Van Lente: after the title.
• 9:36
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta be a hacker to go find out.
• 9:38
  Fred Van Lente: Yes, that's true.
• 9:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I keep meaning to learn well enough to learn the titles, and I haven't found the time yet.
• 9:46
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, I'm thrilled, and it's not unusual that people come up to me at a con and be like, I'm XYZ on the leaderboard. I'm like, that's awesome.
• 9:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:55
  Fred Van Lente: I never look at the leaderboard.
• 9:58
  Tad Eggleston: It literally, like, it's in the back of my head that, like.
• 10:04
  Tad Eggleston: I wanna spend part of my summer learning stuff, but it was in the back of my head that I wanted to spend part of last summer
• 10:11
  Tad Eggleston: Doing it, too. I mean, that's kind of the natural teacher thing. Like, we have all of these plans for summer.
• 10:17
  Fred Van Lente: Right. Summer's endless.
• 10:19
  Tad Eggleston: And then the kids go home, and the next month, just like…
• 10:23
  Tad Eggleston: Vanishes, because it's just recharging our batteries.
• 10:30
  Fred Van Lente: And so what's fun is that we started out the series introducing our main hackers, our main characters in individual issues, and then this next arc
• 10:38
  Fred Van Lente: Not quite halfway through the series, sort of reintroduces them, and so there's individual stories of people trying to kill them.
• 10:44
  Fred Van Lente: Well, I mean… Maybe they get out of it, maybe they don't.
• 10:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I hope they mostly get out of it, because I like our characters.
• 10:51
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, read it and find out, you know what I'm saying?
• 10:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I will.
• 10:55
  Fred Van Lente: It's not even a larger audience.
• 10:57
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 10:57
  Fred Van Lente: I thought…
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: It was funny.
• 10:58
  Fred Van Lente: not just you.
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, Fred, I've been reading since day one.
• 11:01
  Fred Van Lente: Personal command.
• 11:02
  Tad Eggleston: I swear.
• 11:05
  Fred Van Lente: I wouldn't do that to you on your.
• 11:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I fell behind, but I caught up!
• 11:08
  Fred Van Lente: I… no one's, you know, no one's criticizing you. I think that's fantastic.
• 11:15
  Fred Van Lente: So yeah, it's very cool. So 20, I think, comes out in November. 19… 19 is technically the first issue of the arc, but you don't really…
• 11:21
  Fred Van Lente: It's fantastic, it's a noir… It's noir animals, because this character, the Stray, comes back.
• 11:29
  Fred Van Lente: Who is a guy. So, in the future, the future is… again, Tad, I know you know this, I'm not telling you, I'm telling the listeners.
• 11:36
  Fred Van Lente: Basically,
• 11:38
  Fred Van Lente: the world is ruled by something called augmented reality. Your phone is no longer necessary to intersect with the internet. You're in the internet all the time through,
• 11:48
  Fred Van Lente: Cerebral implants that project onto your eyeballs.
• 11:51
  Fred Van Lente: For many people, this is wonderful. For many people, it's horrible.
• 11:55
  Fred Van Lente: I'd say for most people, it's horrible.
• 11:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'd like that, no.
• 11:59
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, no, no thank you, but some people like it, and specifically…
• 12:01
  Tad Eggleston: I'm with Wheeler. If I'm gonna use it, I want… I want a visor that I can take off.
• 12:05
  Fred Van Lente: That's right, the main character refuses the implant, so he's got his glasses on. But, his little oculus is…
• 12:13
  Fred Van Lente: purple shades that is, Annie O'Buffy, our original artist, did a brilliant job coming up with…
• 12:19
  Fred Van Lente: But, so there's this… so one of the… one of the advantages of,
• 12:26
  Fred Van Lente: you know, this augmented reality being everywhere, is that you can have an internet skin on you at all times, and one of our…
• 12:32
  Fred Van Lente: a character who's from Wheeler's past, who's sort of this mysterious hacker, who's known as the Stray, he basically…
• 12:38
  Fred Van Lente: It's just a walking, talking cat.
• 12:42
  Fred Van Lente: He comes back.
• 12:44
  Tad Eggleston: met him earlier.
• 12:45
  Fred Van Lente: Yes, yes, he appeared in the first arc. We haven't seen him since the first arc.
• 12:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 12:50
  Tad Eggleston: Now, see, see, this is…
• 12:52
  Tad Eggleston: You only write, like, 4 or 5 comics at a time, but I read, like, 40 a month, so…
• 12:58
  Fred Van Lente: Right, no, no, I hear you.
• 12:59
  Tad Eggleston: Always keep track of what happened 10 issues ago.
• 13:02
  Fred Van Lente: Fair enough. And you, again.
• 13:03
  Tad Eggleston: I wish that my brain worked that way.
• 13:06
  Fred Van Lente: It's a great jumping on point, you don't need to. All you need to know is… is that… is that the cat… is that the stray has adjusted his internet, his internal internet, so everybody looks like talking animals. The whole issue is… the whole…
• 13:17
  Tad Eggleston: Love that.
• 13:18
  Fred Van Lente: From his point of view. So there's rhinos and moles, And…
• 13:22
  Fred Van Lente: what else? There's lizards, and blamingos, and… And Mario, Alan Sendretti.
• 13:29
  Tad Eggleston: Alessandra.
• 13:29
  Fred Van Lente: Alessandra.
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: Ready?
• 13:31
  Fred Van Lente: I, you know…
• 13:34
  Tad Eggleston: I had it, I had it pulled up a second ago. Alessandro.
• 13:37
  Fred Van Lente: Not my strongest.
• 13:37
  Tad Eggleston: Day, I'm sorry, de Alessandro.
• 13:40
  Fred Van Lente: D'Alessandro, thank you.
• 13:41
  Tad Eggleston: de Alessandro.
• 13:42
  Fred Van Lente: It's a kid who lives across the street named Alessandra. It's… you ever get that? We're, like, similar names of other… different.
• 13:47
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 13:48
  Fred Van Lente: It would cause, like, static.
• 13:51
  Tad Eggleston: like, every once in a while, I call people the wrong name because of that, and I have to go, no, see, I was just reading this, and therefore you became that.
• 14:00
  Fred Van Lente: I've had so many cats, like, I… we just got a new cat, like, a week ago. I have to call it every cat name I've ever had until finally I get on her name.
• 14:08
  Tad Eggleston: My grandmother used to go through all of the names.
• 14:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So, she had 4 kids, she had 4 kids, and I was the third grandkid, so sometimes, when I was in trouble, it was Jerry, John, Janet, Julie, David, Tom, Tad.
• 14:25
  Fred Van Lente: That's true, that's a thing, it makes me feel better.
• 14:28
  Fred Van Lente: Thank you for sharing that. So, yeah, so it's a great issue, Mario drew it, and then, next issue, David comes on board.
• 14:36
  Tad Eggleston: David takes over. I mean…
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Dave is one of the few people that I get mildly Star Trek-struck even thinking, so I have to ask…
• 14:47
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, I'm writing… I'm working with both, Mike Diodato Jr. and David Lapham.
• 14:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 14:54
  Fred Van Lente: comics writer had that. It's pretty exciting.
• 14:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, like I said, I have to ask, like, when did you find out, and what was your response when it's like, oh yeah, David Lapin's gonna be writing, or drawing, like.
• 15:07
  Tad Eggleston: The rest of it. What's funny is…
• 15:08
  Fred Van Lente: is we try to get David first.
• 15:12
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 15:13
  Fred Van Lente: But the scheduling didn't work out, because I knew that
• 15:16
  Fred Van Lente: Adam Freeman to him from, you should flash the pages before.
• 15:20
  Fred Van Lente: from the stuff at Bad Idea.
• 15:22
  Fred Van Lente: Right. So, I knew we had an in with him, so he was sort of my first choice. But, it just didn't work out, but 20 issues later.
• 15:29
  Fred Van Lente: No problem.
• 15:31
  Fred Van Lente: He's back, and I… Joe Keating, the editor, called me, I was in the middle of a bike ride in the middle of the park somewhere, I kind of stopped and be like, what?
• 15:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:38
  Fred Van Lente: And like I said, this.
• 15:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, you weren't on the earpiece and just kept riding?
• 15:44
  Fred Van Lente: you know, I lose those things. I… and I don't… I've stopped,
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: You're not that kind of New York guy.
• 15:51
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I stopped…
• 15:52
  Tad Eggleston: You don't have business meetings while you're riding your bike.
• 15:56
  Fred Van Lente: Yo.
• 15:59
  Fred Van Lente: For one thing, too much going on on the streets. Little too dicey, I think.
• 16:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I have seen that.
• 16:05
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, people do it. I actually just stopped listening to my phone, you know, whether it's podcasts or music or phone calls or anything else, just because I play music the whole time when I'm working, so…
• 16:18
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 16:19
  Fred Van Lente: When I leave the office and I'm out and about, I like silence.
• 16:23
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the outdoor noises. Yeah.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 16:28
  Tad Eggleston: That's cool.
• 16:30
  Tad Eggleston: So pitch us on Vampirates.
• 16:34
  Tad Eggleston: Impact.
• 16:35
  Fred Van Lente: Pirates.
• 16:35
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to ask some…
• 16:37
  Tad Eggleston: some weird questions, just because, like, I love it when people mash up stuff.
• 16:42
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, no!
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: Pirates, and then…
• 16:43
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, I've done, you know.
• 16:46
  Fred Van Lente: Cowboys and Aliens, Marvel Zombies, I started out with Silencers, which is a superhero, and…
• 16:50
  Fred Van Lente: and, in Gangster Book, I…
• 16:55
  Fred Van Lente: I don't necessarily, like… like, that's not, like, my…
• 16:58
  Fred Van Lente: Life's dream to mash up genres just happens.
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you also mashed up action and philosophers.
• 17:06
  Fred Van Lente: Sure. Well, that's… yeah, that's sort of its own thing.
• 17:10
  Fred Van Lente: But,
• 17:11
  Fred Van Lente: Vampirates is a high seas adventure and a world of eternal night that's run by vampires, where vampires have taken over.
• 17:20
  Fred Van Lente: Run the human population, even though humans vastly outnumber them.
• 17:24
  Fred Van Lente: And, we follow the adventures and misadventures of a woman named Nera, who until very recently was the empress of these night isles.
• 17:33
  Fred Van Lente: Had a coup thrown against her, and… While escaping the said coup.
• 17:39
  Fred Van Lente: winds up on the pirate ship of a captain named Ikeo, who hates her for her own very personal reasons.
• 17:46
  Fred Van Lente: And so, together, they either have to kill each other.
• 17:50
  Fred Van Lente: Or join forces and take down the… Vampyrean themselves.
• 17:56
  Fred Van Lente: Only 3 issues have come out, so we don't know which one it is yet, but…
• 17:59
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 18:00
  Fred Van Lente: 4th is coming out, 4th just got FOC'd.
• 18:03
  Fred Van Lente: I got page 15 of the fifth issue today, so… chugging along!
• 18:08
  Tad Eggleston: Is it… Limited series?
• 18:11
  Fred Van Lente: At the moment, it's looking like it's gonna be a limited series, but we'll see. We'll see once the last issue goes in, because we could definitely do 100 issues and stuff.
• 18:19
  Tad Eggleston: 5, 6 issues, we're, we're… 5, okay.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so everybody go buy Vampirates, and we can get 5 more.
• 18:27
  Fred Van Lente: do it… Boom.
• 18:29
  Tad Eggleston: And then if we go buy 5 more, then maybe we'll get 10 more, because I've noticed that they sometimes grow exponentially.
• 18:37
  Fred Van Lente: Is that right? Well, let's… let's…
• 18:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, not always, but I mean, it seems like
• 18:43
  Tad Eggleston: you know, hey, you sold 5 issues, so we'll let you sell 5 issues more, and oh, you actually sold 5 issues more, okay, you can have 10 more.
• 18:53
  Fred Van Lente: Comics publishers work in strange and mysterious ways.
• 18:55
  Tad Eggleston: They do. They do. I mean, which has gotta be what's cool about doing The Future Is, because, like…
• 19:03
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like the last… the last…
• 19:06
  Tad Eggleston: Non-image book where you were taking on all of the risk yourself.
• 19:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right. That had… Right.
• 19:13
  Tad Eggleston: Any guarantee beyond, like, 5 issues, 6 issues.
• 19:20
  Tad Eggleston: It's true. Because what? Why the last man?
• 19:24
  Fred Van Lente: I guess, right? I don't know. I mean, they reboot X-Men a lot, too, so…
• 19:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, but, but those, those were…
• 19:31
  Tad Eggleston: Any of the franchise books are kind of… different.
• 19:38
  Fred Van Lente: I think that's probably true.
• 19:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, the X-Men are never gonna go away, I say, remembering that the Fantastic Four managed to go away for, like…
• 19:48
  Tad Eggleston: What, 3 years?
• 19:50
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 19:52
  Fred Van Lente: this or not.
• 19:53
  Tad Eggleston: that's different.
• 19:55
  Fred Van Lente: You mean when Ike shut it down because of the 20th Century Fox thing?
• 19:59
  Fred Van Lente: Heroes Reborn.
• 20:01
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, I, I meant, I meant, I meant what we had a…
• 20:04
  Fred Van Lente: 3 years, I think they came back pretty quickly.
• 20:07
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. It seemed interminable, it seemed like… and I'm not even, like, a huge Fantastic Four fan, I just was working at a comic shop at the time, and it's like, how do we not have new Fantastic Four on the shelf? That just doesn't feel right.
• 20:22
  Fred Van Lente: Who knows.
• 20:23
  Tad Eggleston: So what… brought pirates.
• 20:28
  Tad Eggleston: And vampires together in your head.
• 20:31
  Fred Van Lente: So, my genius artist and co-creator, Luca Pizzari, we had done a book for Marvel called Weapon X.
• 20:39
  Fred Van Lente: And we had a good time working together, we wanted to do something together, we… we met, he used to live here in Brooklyn, so we…
• 20:44
  Fred Van Lente: met and chatted, and nothing was really clicking that we were talking about, but then Luca just looks at me and goes.
• 20:50
  Fred Van Lente: I just have this title, it's Vampirates, what do you think? I'm like, that's it.
• 20:55
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 20:56
  Fred Van Lente: It had, you know, I love…
• 21:00
  Fred Van Lente: you know, the Age of Sail, 18th century stuff, I love…
• 21:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 21:03
  Fred Van Lente: put a lot of stuff from, like, I love,
• 21:06
  Fred Van Lente: Howard Chaikin, and later him and Mike Magnola did this comedy called Iron Wolf that I love.
• 21:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 21:11
  Fred Van Lente: It's space pirates that also have vampires in it, coincidentally.
• 21:16
  Fred Van Lente: video games like Dishonored, like, I just put all this stuff that was already kind of percolating in my brain. It's kind of all went out into the one property at the same time.
• 21:24
  Tad Eggleston: I, I like it. I like it.
• 21:26
  Tad Eggleston: I also love that it just came from the title.
• 21:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know that it's not the first time that something like that has happened, but it's still… it's always cool to me when it's like, oh, I came up with this one word, or this one sentence, and now we're gonna turn it into a whole world.
• 21:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right. It feels so backwards. Except that I have done enough creating that I know that sometimes that's exactly how it works.
• 21:54
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah.
• 21:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you start from this little kernel and just start riffing.
• 22:00
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I mean, you know, to me, a story is just a problem… is a problem you're trying to solve, you know? It's… it just… it can come… oftentimes, it comes just from an image, just a concept, or in this case, a title.
• 22:10
  Fred Van Lente: But the minute he said it, I sort of knew the whole series, and…
• 22:14
  Fred Van Lente: And we all got very excited, like, the color palette that Luca advised Adam Gazowski to do is, like, like, late 60s, early 70s Scooby-Doo.
• 22:23
  Fred Van Lente: Which, now that I've said it out loud, I don't think anyone could look at this book and go like, oh, yeah, okay, yeah.
• 22:28
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I hadn't seen that, but now that you've said it out loud… That's right.
• 22:33
  Fred Van Lente: Not my personal favorite, but definitely Lucas.
• 22:36
  Tad Eggleston: It works!
• 22:37
  Fred Van Lente: When he was growing up in Italy, he just loved… that was, like, American culture to him, Scooby-Doo. I'm like, what?
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: And it works.
• 22:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it does, it works. I, I, I, I…
• 22:51
  Tad Eggleston: I can't… I can't get it… it's in my head now, Fred. It's in my head.
• 22:54
  Fred Van Lente: I know, yeah. No, it's great. And so, yeah, so, like, it's a world set, it's set in a world where there's a thousand-year eclipse, there's no sunlight, so that's why the vampires can run around with impunity.
• 23:06
  Fred Van Lente: But that also means, like, I just like taking little kernels, like, to me, worldbuilding, what's fun in worldbuilding is you take this kind of very tiny kernel of logic, and you just…
• 23:14
  Fred Van Lente: add all those other logical conclusions on top of it, like, there's no greenery, right, in this world, because there's no photosynthesis, because there's no sun… there's not enough sunlight, so all the plant life in this world looks like weird sea anemone things, you know? Like, I'm just… I just get very excited about stuff like that.
• 23:30
  Tad Eggleston: How much of that is your gamer background?
• 23:33
  Fred Van Lente: Most of it, much of it.
• 23:34
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I mean, I've been gaming since I was 12.
• 23:37
  Fred Van Lente: Right. So, I've been gaming longer than I've been riding.
• 23:39
  Fred Van Lente: So… And I've said, you know, soon I'll have some exciting stuff to announce about that.
• 23:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, perfect.
• 23:46
  Fred Van Lente: Into that aspect of it as well.
• 23:49
  Tad Eggleston: by the comics, or…
• 23:51
  Fred Van Lente: Yep. Both, actually.
• 23:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I am… I am…
• 23:56
  Tad Eggleston: more reasons that you have to remember to call me sometimes. I generally see your name and reach out, but, like, you're allowed to make it go the other way, when it's like, I'm allowed to announce this now.
• 24:08
  Fred Van Lente: You're on the list, I swear.
• 24:10
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
• 24:11
  Fred Van Lente: July.
• 24:12
  Tad Eggleston: We, we actually play, intermittently, Kieran Gillens die.
• 24:19
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 24:19
  Fred Van Lente: Is that fun? Oh, cool, yeah, yeah.
• 24:21
  Tad Eggleston: Dang.
• 24:21
  Fred Van Lente: I'm on this… I'm on this writer's group that Kieran's on in one year, he does a Christmas…
• 24:27
  Fred Van Lente: Game every year.
• 24:29
  Fred Van Lente: And I was Niblets the… Gibletz the Zombie Elf. That was exciting.
• 24:34
  Tad Eggleston: Nice.
• 24:35
  Fred Van Lente: It was a Christmas-themed…
• 24:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and…
• 24:37
  Fred Van Lente: for the D&D game.
• 24:38
  Tad Eggleston: And part of the reason I bring this up, though, is that one of the beauties of dye is, like, each side of it is…
• 24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Is… is a different place, so… so…
• 24:49
  Tad Eggleston: our DM, Phil, sometimes gets really creative. So, if you make a game.
• 24:56
  Tad Eggleston: and you want to feed it to Phil, he could make it a side of the die, and we could play, like, a session in your game inside of our die.
• 25:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we haven't done it yet, but I know he's working on having a Lazarus side since they made the Lazarus role-playing game, the Greg Recca book, yeah.
• 25:17
  Fred Van Lente: Kieran just Rakuten is a very good game master.
• 25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I've… that… that shocks me, not at all.
• 25:24
  Fred Van Lente: Not…
• 25:25
  Tad Eggleston: Not one iota. So…
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: I know we're going back and forth, but I… but I have… the future is back in my head, and I know that you got to spend.
• 25:40
  Fred Van Lente: Future is now.
• 25:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's not 6 letters, though, so it'd have to be, like, now, now? The future is now, now.
• 25:48
  Fred Van Lente: President? No.
• 25:51
  Fred Van Lente: We'll figure that out.
• 25:52
  Tad Eggleston: The future is…
• 25:53
  Fred Van Lente: current.
• 25:56
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's too many letters, too, that's 7.
• 25:58
  Tad Eggleston: The future is not now.
• 26:05
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 26:06
  Fred Van Lente: on now.
• 26:07
  Fred Van Lente: It's fine.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: That's 5. Not now is 6.
• 26:11
  Tad Eggleston: Or if you want to be very 90s about it, it could be now not.
• 26:20
  Fred Van Lente: Yes!
• 26:20
  Tad Eggleston: That's the Wayne version.
• 26:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you, you're wearing the Midwest Hacking, or Wild West Hackin' Fest.
• 26:33
  Tad Eggleston: t-shirt from last year. Right. How much have you gotten to…
• 26:40
  Tad Eggleston: work with the various hackers at Black Hills in development, or… I mean, I know you learn stuff from them up front, and I know they feed stuff to be put into the puzzles, but, like.
• 26:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm ju- I'm just curious as to… to… to…
• 26:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's kind of cool to be able to… I'm writing a book, And it's being paid for
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: By people who can be my research team.
• 27:09
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah?
• 27:09
  Fred Van Lente: That's very cool. Bo, who runs, who, runs the band No Bandwidth, who did the soundtrack of the first issue, which, if you can… it's on Spotify, it's on Apple iTunes for free, you should check it out, just type in No Bandworth the Future Is.
• 27:24
  Fred Van Lente: He's the technical advisor, so he basically comes in and is like.
• 27:28
  Fred Van Lente: You know, I've done some research myself on basic hacking, but, you know.
• 27:34
  Fred Van Lente: Part of it is that because the book is set in the future, You don't want it too…
• 27:40
  Fred Van Lente: You know, rooted in modern-day languages and actual modern-day techniques, because then it's… that stuff, number one, may become obsolete, you know, maybe even between the time it takes me to write it and the time it takes for the book to be published.
• 27:52
  Fred Van Lente: So, a lot of it is sort of abstract extrapolations of real-life concepts into this kind of future visual.
• 27:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, honestly, that's more along the lines of what I was imagining and talking about, like, how much do you pick their brains when you're trying to decide what the future's gonna look like?
• 28:11
  Fred Van Lente: It's very much a, I'd rather ask for forgiveness than permission sort of situation, and do it, and where I err, they are not shy about letting me know, which is great. It's perfect.
• 28:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 28:20
  Fred Van Lente: It's the more, sort of, efficient way to do it, since.
• 28:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm certain that's more efficient. I'm just very autistic and prone to rabbit holes, so I'd be the one, like…
• 28:30
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly making…
• 28:32
  Tad Eggleston: really ill-timed phone calls to go. So I was thinking about this. Tell me what you know about this. Right.
• 28:39
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, no, I'm not autistic and very prone to rabbit holes, so I hear what you're saying. I just, you know…
• 28:47
  Fred Van Lente: it's a project that's involved in really interesting ways, because originally it was…
• 28:54
  Fred Van Lente: When it was brought to my attention, they were like, well, we want to do actual case studies we've done
• 29:01
  Fred Van Lente: actual hacking, and then they're like, oh, wait, we've signed a million NDAs.
• 29:05
  Fred Van Lente: And any real stories of what we did would let criminals, you know, repeat the stuff we found, and so that's maybe not a terrible idea.
• 29:14
  Fred Van Lente: And then that… that evolved, then they were like.
• 29:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, as white hat hackers, they don't want to give the playbooks to the black hat hackers.
• 29:22
  Fred Van Lente: Shocking, but true, yes.
• 29:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I'm… That means that they're, like, more insightful than most of the guys on the Manhattan Project.
• 29:32
  Fred Van Lente: It's quite possible.
• 29:34
  Fred Van Lente: But, ultimately, they came with the idea of, of,
• 29:42
  Fred Van Lente: extrapolating the situation into, sort of, the near future, making it science fiction, rather than setting it present day, and I think that really freed us up a lot of stuff, both narratively and…
• 29:53
  Fred Van Lente: conceptually, And most importantly, because it's a comic and not, you know, an actual hack.
• 30:02
  Fred Van Lente: We have to figure out ways to do things visually, so…
• 30:06
  Fred Van Lente: you know, a couple years ago, I came up with this idea of sprites, which I now realize today would be called AI agents.
• 30:11
  Fred Van Lente: So you see already how.
• 30:13
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you for not…
• 30:14
  Fred Van Lente: We're taking this over.
• 30:16
  Tad Eggleston: the spread.
• 30:16
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, no, no, no, I'm not an AI person.
• 30:19
  Fred Van Lente: Neither…
• 30:20
  Tad Eggleston: For that matter, I also thank you guys for the MI, and making AI,
• 30:29
  Fred Van Lente: That's right. The machine intelligence is the future, I think AI is…
• 30:32
  Tad Eggleston: And if you can find a way to make fun of superintelligence even more, I'm all for that.
• 30:40
  Fred Van Lente: That one I would rather forget about altogether, but
• 30:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, obviously.
• 30:46
  Fred Van Lente: But yeah, so everyone has these, like… it's ripped off of the Philip Pullman Golden Compass series, right? Everybody has these little… these little animals, some of the animals, some of the cartoon characters. One of our main characters, Art.
• 30:57
  Fred Van Lente: Is himself an actual sprite in MI?
• 31:00
  Fred Van Lente: who lived.
• 31:01
  Tad Eggleston: So he has a dog.
• 31:02
  Fred Van Lente: Yes, he lives on the node, of his emotional support dog.
• 31:07
  Fred Van Lente: That's just fine.
• 31:08
  Tad Eggleston: I just… I just love that. He's my second favorite character. Yes. My favorite… my favorite being the one that's being, coded more and more.
• 31:17
  Tad Eggleston: overtly autistic, and I can't remember his name right now.
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: Eli, because that's one of my blind spots. I always joke that if my children had behaved themselves, I wouldn't know their names either.
• 31:32
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, no, Eli's great. Eli… Eli is perhaps the most… I'm most excited to see what David does with the Eli issue in this.
• 31:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 31:38
  Fred Van Lente: talking about.
• 31:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: I am now, too. I hadn't even thought that far yet. David Lapham drawing Eli?
• 31:46
  Fred Van Lente: It's like a 60s Hitchcock.
• 31:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 31:49
  Fred Van Lente: Mestiche. Lots of, you know, guys and feces with guns.
• 31:52
  Tad Eggleston: I can't make pictures in my head, and I'm still finding myself, like…
• 31:58
  Tad Eggleston: falling down this… this rabbit hole where I'm hearing words describing what David Lapham pictures might look like of Eli.
• 32:09
  Fred Van Lente: No, it's gonna be fun. It's… I'm excited.
• 32:12
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, I mean, you can slip me issues early all you want, Fred. I'm just throwing that out there.
• 32:20
  Fred Van Lente: I wish. They play it close to the vest over at Rakuten.
• 32:22
  Tad Eggleston: I don't ever, ever put things out to other people.
• 32:27
  Fred Van Lente: That's right.
• 32:28
  Tad Eggleston: Not without permission.
• 32:29
  Fred Van Lente: Rich Johnson does not have your email address, or phone number.
• 32:33
  Tad Eggleston: No. No.
• 32:35
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, I… I, I won't, I won't name books, but he… He managed to find…
• 32:47
  Tad Eggleston: Because one of his things is he'll just do… Amazon searches for people's names.
• 32:54
  Fred Van Lente: Okay.
• 32:55
  Tad Eggleston: So he wound up… Blowing the cover off of a book.
• 33:02
  Tad Eggleston: that I had known about a year earlier than he wrote about it, and that they didn't officially announce for another year after that.
• 33:10
  Fred Van Lente: Okay.
• 33:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because there was briefly an Amazon listing for it.
• 33:15
  Tad Eggleston: The Amazon listing got taken down because he wrote about it, and because the publisher said, get that the hell off the internet!
• 33:24
  Tad Eggleston: But I even know well enough when I read those articles, that before, before I went, we can talk about this, I texted my friend, and I'm like.
• 33:35
  Tad Eggleston: This hasn't actually been announced yet, has it? And he's like, no, please don't re-up that article.
• 33:42
  Fred Van Lente: funny.
• 33:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't hate all of the work he does, so… but I know that he can be a pain in the neck of a lot of people, because…
• 33:56
  Tad Eggleston: He's sometimes really dogged about Weird things.
• 34:02
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't get the scoop thing.
• 34:04
  Fred Van Lente: My… my first job was… in Marvel was at the… Essentially, at the benefit of…
• 34:14
  Fred Van Lente: I'm not phrasing that correctly, but essentially, a good friend of his had the job before me and then got fired.
• 34:20
  Fred Van Lente: Good job.
• 34:21
  Fred Van Lente: This is back when… I was Lying in the Gutters, right, was the name of his comp- CBR.
• 34:28
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I, I think, I think…
• 34:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he still uses that at Bleeding Cool.
• 34:34
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, yeah.
• 34:35
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 34:37
  Fred Van Lente: That's like the, the, the…
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: The morning… that's the morning…
• 34:46
  Tad Eggleston: digest of the biggest stories from yesterday, I think, is what he calls.
• 34:52
  Fred Van Lente: Anyway, I've met Rich a couple times, I don't really have anything against him, I never go to Bleeding Cool, not just because…
• 34:57
  Fred Van Lente: Not out of some, like, nerd rage thing, I just…
• 35:01
  Fred Van Lente: if I don't, you know, if I have to learn about comics news from a website.
• 35:05
  Fred Van Lente: I'm not doing my job correctly. Right. Essentially.
• 35:09
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they have a newsletter, essentially, for the lying in the Gutters, so I get that newsletter, just because it's… it's worth scanning stuff. The number of times I wind up clicking something in it is pretty low, because…
• 35:27
  Tad Eggleston: Either I've heard about it already, because I am now also kind of wired in, and will hear about things ahead of time, or I go, okay, this looks like it could be something. When Heidi confirms it, then I'll start thinking about it.
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I will shout out the beat really quickly, because… They're great.
• 35:51
  Fred Van Lente: The Beat announced to Vampirates.
• 35:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 35:55
  Fred Van Lente: Exclusively, so… good on the…
• 35:57
  Tad Eggleston: They, they, they try very hard to… Get it right, and be…
• 36:07
  Tad Eggleston: Be a mix between journalism and… and…
• 36:12
  Tad Eggleston: Comics promotion. Right. But comics promotion in… in, like…
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: A curated way, not a, you pay us and we'll… Does that make sense?
• 36:25
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah.
• 36:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 36:28
  Tad Eggleston: She does good work, and I'm looking forward to seeing her next week, because… Baseball coming up.
• 36:34
  Fred Van Lente: That's right.
• 36:35
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why I won't… I won't… I won't… I won't, like, get too much into the baseball stuff with you tonight, because we've got baseball next week.
• 36:42
  Fred Van Lente: I know. Unfortunately, I'm gonna have to bail on you, sadly.
• 36:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, well, then I might get into baseball stuff with you, but actually…
• 36:49
  Fred Van Lente: now, that's fine, because… No, no.
• 36:51
  Fred Van Lente: The combo of Election Day and deadlines means I.
• 36:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:54
  Fred Van Lente: Probably, I'm gonna miss that, I apologize.
• 36:57
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't go vote already?
• 36:59
  Fred Van Lente: I did not. Well, here in New York State, we're voting for governor in…
• 37:03
  Fred Van Lente: District or Attorney General, and we have those in the bag. I don't… there's no…
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:08
  Fred Van Lente: I also, I also, like voting on Election Day.
• 37:12
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that's fair.
• 37:13
  Fred Van Lente: a good ritual.
• 37:14
  Fred Van Lente: And it's been a long time since I've had to wait a significant, you know.
• 37:19
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, I, you know This… My district is so blue.
• 37:27
  Fred Van Lente: I don't even know what a good blue joke would be. My district is so blue.
• 37:32
  Fred Van Lente: you know, Donald Duck could have made his outfit out of it, I don't know, but…
• 37:35
  Tad Eggleston: You're a dog from Australia?
• 37:38
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, that went totally over my head. I think I'm too old.
• 37:42
  Fred Van Lente: That's.
• 37:42
  Tad Eggleston: You don't know Bluey?
• 37:43
  Fred Van Lente: Yup.
• 37:44
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's a Bluey joke. You don't know Bluey?
• 37:48
  Tad Eggleston: Bluey is actually one of the things…
• 37:52
  Fred Van Lente: teacher, though, you're more locked.
• 37:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm a high… I'm a high school teacher, so…
• 37:59
  Fred Van Lente: And that counts.
• 38:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but Bluey's not really their thing. No, no, it's my grandkids' thing.
• 38:05
  Fred Van Lente: Huh?
• 38:06
  Fred Van Lente: Okay.
• 38:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bluey is all about learning important life lessons, but doing them really, really well.
• 38:15
  Fred Van Lente: The next one I learn about that will be the first.
• 38:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, you might actually enjoy Bluey, particularly now that they've made it so you don't have to listen to the theme song every time.
• 38:27
  Tad Eggleston: Because that used to be the one reason that I had trouble watching
• 38:31
  Tad Eggleston: Bluey with my grandkids is they're, like, 15-minute episodes, and I don't like the theme song. I don't know that I can say that it's bad, but I don't like it. So having to hear it every.
• 38:44
  Fred Van Lente: episode of the theme song?
• 38:46
  Tad Eggleston: it's probably only a minute, but still, to have to listen to the minute of music that you don't like every 15 minutes is really annoying. But now it skips over it when you're streaming, unless you tell it not to.
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: But that's enough Bluey. If you know, you know. At least some of our listeners do.
• 39:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, actually, what I was gonna ask you about, because if I recall correctly, you're also a basketball guy, aren't you?
• 39:20
  Fred Van Lente: I am. I gave up… I did cable cutting last year, so here in New York City, that means I lost the Yankees network, where the Nets are, and the MSG, where the Knicks are, so my options to watch local basketball have been kneecapped, so…
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 39:36
  Fred Van Lente: Fortunately, I've fallen out quite a bit.
• 39:38
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so, so you didn't enjoy this next round?
• 39:42
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, no, I did, I enjoyed it quite a bit. But that's the playoffs, they're on…
• 39:47
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 39:47
  Fred Van Lente: Those I have. In fact.
• 39:49
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 39:50
  Fred Van Lente: We watched them clinch at HeroesCon in Charlotte in a Buffalo Wild Wings with a bunch of comics creators. It was fun.
• 39:56
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 39:56
  Fred Van Lente: It was really cool.
• 39:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, cause, cause I, I,
• 40:00
  Tad Eggleston: your fellow Brooklynite and comic writer when he's not… not writing.
• 40:06
  Tad Eggleston: Hard news, Spencer Ackerman is a massive, massive Knicks fan.
• 40:11
  Fred Van Lente: We chatted about it. I know Spencer pretty well, we chatted about it.
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. So, so, I, I, I got to, this will actually go out
• 40:21
  Tad Eggleston: after our talk, because we're holding it for… his new book comes out next Wednesday, and he asked me to hold the interview until then.
• 40:28
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 40:31
  Tad Eggleston: I was walking through my school on the day that I was going to be talking to him again.
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: And suddenly remembered that, Chalin Brunson is an alum.
• 40:40
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, is that right? That looks cool.
• 40:42
  Tad Eggleston: So I took a couple of pictures of, like, trophy cases with Jalen's stuff, and I just sent them out to him, and I got, like, the fastest response I've ever gotten from Spencer. It was just, like.
• 40:56
  Tad Eggleston: What the?
• 40:59
  Fred Van Lente: That's cool. I'm more of a Nets guy, really, so…
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: You're more of a Nets guy? Okay.
• 41:03
  Fred Van Lente: I live down the street from the arena, I'm extremely parochial when it comes to sports.
• 41:08
  Fred Van Lente: But, but… but no, it was very cool. It was very cool.
• 41:11
  Fred Van Lente: I am a baseball guy through and through. I find it very.
• 41:15
  Tad Eggleston: That's me.
• 41:17
  Fred Van Lente: I find it very hard to wrap my brain around a sport where they… if they play two day… two days in a row, it's like a big fucking deal, and everyone freaks out.
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: Because I…
• 41:28
  Fred Van Lente: I would be more into basketball if I knew when it was on, because it's not on a set schedule, it's kind of random.
• 41:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 41:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 41:35
  Fred Van Lente: Baseball is, every day, Afternoons on Sundays, usually.
• 41:41
  Fred Van Lente: Sometimes afternoons during the week, but mostly at night.
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: Wednesdays or Fridays?
• 41:48
  Fred Van Lente: Sure.
• 41:49
  Fred Van Lente: Cubs, Fridays.
• 41:51
  Fred Van Lente: Always in the afternoon. That… that's what I love about the Cubs. If I have nothing to do Friday afternoon, their game will be…
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: Cubs came on.
• 41:57
  Fred Van Lente: We'll be on MLB Network. It's very exciting.
• 42:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:00
  Fred Van Lente: Otherwise, you know, not a Cubs guy.
• 42:04
  Fred Van Lente: But, yeah, no, I've been really into the postseason this year. I watched almost every game.
• 42:09
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it was so good.
• 42:10
  Fred Van Lente: And I was thrilled when the… I'm thrilled the Brewers.
• 42:13
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh. I mean…
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: as a Cubs fan, I've had people giving me a hard time, because I've had that Brewers cap on, and I'm just sitting there going… Right.
• 42:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I refuse to accept them as a rival. They were an American League team for the first, like…
• 42:28
  Tad Eggleston: 17 years of my life, I've got the Cardinals, I don't need another rival.
• 42:33
  Tad Eggleston: The Cubs are out, the White Sox are out, and the Brewers are the next closest team to home.
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: Besides, I have friends…
• 42:43
  Fred Van Lente: The Chicago teams were both in the postseason for the first.
• 42:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, oh, oh.
• 42:47
  Tad Eggleston: There were… there were 4 Midwest teams in the postseason this year.
• 42:51
  Fred Van Lente: That's true.
• 42:52
  Tad Eggleston: Because, cause Cleveland made it, too. That's right.
• 42:55
  Fred Van Lente: I'm from Cleveland, so my parents were watching that quite.
• 42:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there was a very legitimate chance of, like, an All-Midwest World Series for the first time in God knows how long.
• 43:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, actually, I think the last All-Midwest World Series was the Brewers and the Cardinals in 82.
• 43:14
  Fred Van Lente: I feel bad for my father-in-law, who has lived in Tampa Bay for a long, many decades, and is an actual Tampa Bay Rays fan.
• 43:22
  Fred Van Lente: I think the problem with, you know.
• 43:26
  Fred Van Lente: It can't be easy being a Tampa Bay Ray and having the Brewers fans completely take over your stadium.
• 43:32
  Fred Van Lente: But…
• 43:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's kind of like being a Marlins fan and the Cubs in 03, except that the Marlins managed to beat us, so they at least got the last laugh.
• 43:44
  Fred Van Lente: Right.
• 43:45
  Fred Van Lente: Well, the, the…
• 43:51
  Fred Van Lente: The problem, I think, is there are a lot of Tampa Bay Rays fans, but they're probably, like, my father-in-law in a wheelchair and can't physically get themselves to the stadium, you know?
• 44:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 44:02
  Fred Van Lente: there is… I think their TV… the ratings, I don't know if you follow this, I am always fascinated by this. The ratings for the World Series were actually quite good.
• 44:09
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah. People were all freaked out because it was Milwaukee, and… the Rays.
• 44:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, how often…
• 44:15
  Fred Van Lente: We're only off a million, a million viewers from last year.
• 44:18
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, how often do you have two teams that haven't won a series ever?
• 44:22
  Fred Van Lente: Sure.
• 44:23
  Fred Van Lente: How often do you have the two best teams in the sport?
• 44:26
  Tad Eggleston: That, too.
• 44:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… The legitimately two best teams in the sport. You know, I mean…
• 44:32
  Fred Van Lente: And last year, you had a team that represents an entire country, you know.
• 44:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean…
• 44:38
  Fred Van Lente: And still the…
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: People always are surprised that, like.
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: I enjoy playoff baseball, but I don't get…
• 44:46
  Tad Eggleston: hyped about it. I'm sitting there going…
• 44:49
  Tad Eggleston: it's not even really the same game. The regular season is baseball to me.
• 44:53
  Fred Van Lente: every year I tell myself, you know, since the… since the Mets are never in it, I'm like, I'm like, I'm gonna watch every game this year, and I never do. I always fall. Usually, frankly, because it's the teams I root for, I'm always rooting for the underdog, so…
• 45:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 45:06
  Fred Van Lente: the Dodgers or the Yankees or whatever make it through, and I'm like, meh.
• 45:09
  Fred Van Lente: I just lose interest, because I'm like, who cares?
• 45:11
  Tad Eggleston: Shohei. I can never root against Shohei. Except this year when he wasn't pitching.
• 45:18
  Tad Eggleston: He wasn't pitching, so I was able to root for the Brewers over the Dodgers this year.
• 45:22
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, that was a great series last year. Nevertheless, the watching the Brewers romp was really cool. That was fun.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I did find myself kind of thinking, though, and I'm glad that it went 5, because it makes it a little less likely that this happens.
• 45:37
  Fred Van Lente: Huh.
• 45:39
  Tad Eggleston: I'm from Chicago, so I remember the 2005 World Series, which…
• 45:43
  Tad Eggleston: doesn't get remembered that much, because it was a four-game sweep by the White Sox, so everybody thinks it was, you know…
• 45:52
  Tad Eggleston: the blowout Nothing World Series, like…
• 45:55
  Fred Van Lente: Was it the Astros?
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: The Astros.
• 45:58
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, back when they were in the.
• 45:59
  Tad Eggleston: And they… and they outscored them by 4 runs.
• 46:02
  Fred Van Lente: That's when… that was the Carlos Belt trend.
• 46:05
  Fred Van Lente: Series, wasn't, postseason, wasn't it?
• 46:07
  Tad Eggleston: I think so, yeah.
• 46:10
  Fred Van Lente: Anyway.
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, they outsource.
• 46:13
  Fred Van Lente: He was at the… he was the Mets at Bio 5.
• 46:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But yes, it was a 4-game sweep, but they outscored them by 4 runs.
• 46:23
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the games went 14 innings, and one of the games was 1-0, and that one run was scored in the eighth. That's a really good series!
• 46:34
  Fred Van Lente: Absolutely true.
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: You don't have to go 7 games to be, like, an epic series, because that's not how baseball works.
• 46:43
  Tad Eggleston: you know, for that matter, there are some 7-game series that get… I don't actually think the Cubs World Series was an epic series. I think the first 5 games…
• 46:55
  Tad Eggleston: were…
• 46:57
  Fred Van Lente: You mean the one against Kleep?
• 46:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we're not that… We're not that great, and not just because we lost Three of them, right?
• 47:04
  Fred Van Lente: I was so angry that the Mets were eliminated in the wildcard round, I did not watch that.
• 47:08
  Fred Van Lente: Postseason add-on.
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, you beat us in the wildcard round the year before, and…
• 47:13
  Fred Van Lente: I don't know, we beat you in the NLCS, we swept.
• 47:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's even worse. That's right, that's right. We managed to beat the Cardinals in the Wildcats.
• 47:21
  Tad Eggleston: Only to run into your fucking buzzsaw.
• 47:24
  Fred Van Lente: But you had less.
• 47:26
  Tad Eggleston: Goddamn Daniel Murphy!
• 47:29
  Fred Van Lente: We've got the rings in the end, so…
• 47:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's all I know. Well, I mean…
• 47:36
  Tad Eggleston: You still have more in my lifetime.
• 47:41
  Fred Van Lente: with the Mets.
• 47:41
  Tad Eggleston: won the World Series twice in the last 45 years.
• 47:45
  Fred Van Lente: No. They only have one in my lifetime. I was born in.
• 47:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 47:49
  Fred Van Lente: I don't know how old you are.
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: No, I… okay, I was born in 80, so okay. You're tied in my lifetime.
• 47:56
  Tad Eggleston: You're tied in my lifetime, but you're up one in my parents' lifetime.
• 48:03
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, you're up one in my grandparents' lifetime.
• 48:07
  Fred Van Lente: I was gonna say, your drought was a tad longer than that.
• 48:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, but my grandparents are actually… I mean, they're not alive anymore, but, like, my… my grandfather was born in 1910, so he didn't miss it by much.
• 48:21
  Fred Van Lente: Right. Still.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was, like… I remember, I lost my hatred of the Mets because of the season that you guys had a couple years ago, and how happy you and Darren and Heidi were. And I feel like your team…
• 48:41
  Tad Eggleston: Shouldn't be any worse, but the last couple of seasons have been brutal.
• 48:47
  Fred Van Lente: Yes, yes. Well, I, you know, I think that, you know, people complain about the stat… the stats guys, you know, adhering to much of their spreadsheets, but…
• 48:59
  Tad Eggleston: See, I'm a stats guy, and that's why I'm saying that your team should be roughly the same.
• 49:04
  Fred Van Lente: Well.
• 49:05
  Tad Eggleston: Like, your numbers are there, they're just not going at the right times. It's like the most annoying team.
• 49:11
  Fred Van Lente: The problem is if you fire your… the problem is, is you… they did a lot of strange things, like they fired the entire coaching staff, but kept the manager, which doesn't make any sense.
• 49:19
  Fred Van Lente: So he's a lame dad, so already he just seems like he has no problem.
• 49:22
  Fred Van Lente: And then they fired the… they got rid of the core, you know, it was…
• 49:29
  Fred Van Lente: I totally get why they could let Pete Alonso go, but…
• 49:33
  Fred Van Lente: But Pete Alonzo is every 10-year-old Mets fan's favorite man.
• 49:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right, no, that…
• 49:38
  Fred Van Lente: People… people went nuts.
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: That's the one and only place that… that I… Like, I get how…
• 49:47
  Tad Eggleston: hard it is to quantify clubhouse presence. I get…
• 49:52
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I don't think… I don't think he was… I don't think he was that much of a clubhouse presence, really. I think that was all.
• 49:58
  Fred Van Lente: I think that… I mean… he's a big…
• 50:00
  Fred Van Lente: goofy white guy. He's, like, the second coming of Babe Ruth for the Mets. You know, without Babe Ruth
• 50:06
  Fred Van Lente: rings.
• 50:07
  Tad Eggleston: But then the second thing I was gonna say is, is, like, what I'm surprised that they don't quantify more.
• 50:14
  Tad Eggleston: is… I mean, particularly in this day and age where it's not clear that any team is really trying to win more than they're trying to make money.
• 50:23
  Tad Eggleston: like, Pete Alonzo is more valuable to the Mets than he is to the Orioles.
• 50:30
  Tad Eggleston: Pete Alonso, I mean, as you said, he's every 10-year-old Mets fan's favorite player. Pete Alonso makes the Mets money.
• 50:38
  Fred Van Lente: The problem is, though, is that Pete knew that, and so was negotiating from that standpoint, and…
• 50:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 50:44
  Fred Van Lente: And that's… that's just the story of sports, is… is if somebody gets a stupid contract, you just can't compete with that. And the Orioles gave them a really stupid contract.
• 50:52
  Fred Van Lente: And they were, you know, checks, notes, also in last place last year. So it's like, what are we complaining about here?
• 51:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But…
• 51:02
  Fred Van Lente: It would have… the problem for David Stearns is that he said, well, we need to get better at defend… you know, defense, and Pete's defense sucks, so he hires a first basin who played one game of first base his entire life. It's insane, like… like, it's like… like, he just treated us like idiot. You know, like…
• 51:18
  Tad Eggleston: He didn't want to… he didn't want to be… I mean, Scott Hattaberg hadn't played first base.
• 51:24
  Tad Eggleston: You should have brought in Ron Washington.
• 51:26
  Fred Van Lente: He didn't wanna… he didn't wanna pay through the nose.
• 51:29
  Tad Eggleston: I know.
• 51:30
  Fred Van Lente: And get crazy years for crazy money.
• 51:33
  Fred Van Lente: for sluggers that statistically usually tempt the client. I get it. The problem is, is then he got rid of everybody else, and he replaced them with people who either were injury-prone and became injured, or…
• 51:44
  Fred Van Lente: The other, you know, the pressure… I don't know how much of this gets play outside of New York City, but it is a real thing. People come to New York, and they just fall flat on their face.
• 51:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 51:54
  Fred Van Lente: Freddie Peralta being a classic example, he was great in Milwaukee, terrible in New York, and fantastic in Tampa Bay. Although the last World Series game, maybe… that's a… maybe not.
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I wonder how much of that is, like… and I even remember talking about this before the game. Who's gonna be at the bigger advantage when Peralta takes the mound against the Brewers? Him, because he played with them and knows them? Or them, because they played with him and know him?
• 52:19
  Fred Van Lente: I mean, he didn't completely flame out like he did in a couple of his starts, but it was definitely his worst start as a… one of his worst starts as a Ray.
• 52:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But I gotta wonder how much of that is that William Contreras has his…
• 52:34
  Fred Van Lente: Sure.
• 52:35
  Fred Van Lente: But that, but that, you know…
• 52:37
  Tad Eggleston: everything.
• 52:37
  Fred Van Lente: Everybody has somebody's number, or somebody should have everybody, you know.
• 52:42
  Tad Eggleston: I know, but when you have… when you have a catcher of that quality.
• 52:46
  Tad Eggleston: who got to work with the pitcher for multiple years?
• 52:50
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, it's not a good combo.
• 52:52
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely. I gotta say, the knowledge edge goes to the team with the catcher. Yeah, no, absolutely.
• 53:00
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know…
• 53:01
  Fred Van Lente: they had… Although, wait a minute, wasn't the…
• 53:04
  Fred Van Lente: Wasn't the game the Rays won was the one Peralta started? Am I remembering that wrong?
• 53:09
  Tad Eggleston: It might have been, but if it was, it wasn't his fault.
• 53:14
  Fred Van Lente: Either way.
• 53:15
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no. No, no, no, no. Because he was on the mound when the Brewers started their 8-run inning.
• 53:21
  Tad Eggleston: Or their sixth run inning, rather.
• 53:23
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, is that right? Okay, fair enough.
• 53:24
  Tad Eggleston: We got the first two outs of that inning.
• 53:26
  Fred Van Lente: That was the third game. Yeah, that was Game 3. Okay, fair enough.
• 53:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 53:29
  Fred Van Lente: Anyway, just, you know, so…
• 53:32
  Tad Eggleston: But he wasn't bad until the wheels fell off and…
• 53:35
  Fred Van Lente: Pete Alonzo of it all is sort of a fascinating subject, because that's… that's Heidi's favorite player.
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I know, when he signed in Baltimore, I knew that Heidi was gonna be… not happy.
• 53:50
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, I mean, I root for laundry, and I make no apologies for it. Like, I don't… if you're not on my tomb anymore, I don't know who you are. Like, I don't give a shit. I didn't… I didn't really, like, get it, like, I can't think there's any player that we lost that I was like, no, not so-and-so.
• 54:04
  Fred Van Lente: Because usually there's a reason they go, you know what I mean? But the problem is, is you can't get rid of everybody and ex… and then suddenly…
• 54:12
  Fred Van Lente: hire a bunch of people who've never been in New York before, and not consider on your spreadsheet somewhere, or in your probability calculations, that all of them will all fall on their face.
• 54:23
  Fred Van Lente: Simultaneously.
• 54:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they probably considered it, they just thought it was at the low end of the curve.
• 54:29
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, so, you know. And…
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes the low end of the curve comes up.
• 54:35
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, it does, yeah. That's, you know, just,
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: You're a gamer, have you… I'm certain you've gone…
• 54:41
  Fred Van Lente: You're doing your baseball show on Tuesday, right? Which is Election Day, and you know, the Nate Silver has the probability of the Democrats winning the Senate at 75%, which is only 2 points higher than he had Hillary Clinton
• 54:55
  Fred Van Lente: winning the presidency in 2016. It's…
• 54:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 54:58
  Fred Van Lente: a probability, it's not, like, and they win, you know. You still have to play the game, you know?
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. Like, I was about to say, you're a gamer, I'm certain you've had runs where it's like, can I ever roll more than a 6 on a D20?
• 55:15
  Tad Eggleston: And then you've had runs where it's like, can I ever roll less than a 14? I just did that.
• 55:20
  Fred Van Lente: And it was in New Dungeon Master, and he was like, do you want my dice? I'm like, it's not the dice, alright? I'm an empiricist. Don't give me that, it's the dice bullshit.
• 55:28
  Fred Van Lente: Alright, I don't believe in ghosts or Santa Claus, either.
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, my…
• 55:32
  Fred Van Lente: sites.
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: My, my favorite little stats, tidbit.
• 55:39
  Tad Eggleston: Is somebody actually did a test.
• 55:43
  Tad Eggleston: Where they had a group of people actually flip a coin a hundred times, And write down the results?
• 55:52
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah.
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: And a group of people pretend to flip a coin a hundred times and write down the results.
• 56:01
  Tad Eggleston: and… In general, The groups were very similar in terms of, you know, almost all of them would have
• 56:11
  Tad Eggleston: Somewhere between 45 and 55 heads, right?
• 56:16
  Tad Eggleston: But… All of the longest streaks…
• 56:20
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, all of the streaks of 7 or more in the entire study Came from the actual coin.
• 56:30
  Fred Van Lente: Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, that makes sense, because…
• 56:33
  Fred Van Lente: Human beings are trying to level it out. It's just… Right. But that's cool.
• 56:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even if they're trying to be random, it's like, okay, we're gonna do 3 heads, and then 2 tails. And then we're gonna do 4 heads, and then 6… er, 3 tails, and 1 head, and 3 more tails. That's great.
• 56:52
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas sometimes, you flip a coin 10 times, and it comes up heads 10 times. Very, very few times.
• 56:59
  Fred Van Lente: Great.
• 57:00
  Fred Van Lente: Have you ever seen the opening of Rosenkratz and Guildestern are dead, where they keep flipping the coin, it keeps coming up the same all the time?
• 57:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 57:08
  Fred Van Lente: Will I need to run?
• 57:09
  Tad Eggleston: You do. Let me ask…
• 57:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know one of them, so you should be able to go really fast. I've got my two closing questions. I'm sorry I forgot.
• 57:18
  Fred Van Lente: Well, we said to slip in the baseball talk, because I… Right.
• 57:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 57:23
  Fred Van Lente: deadline on Tuesday.
• 57:24
  Tad Eggleston: So I'll do the truncated part on my side.
• 57:28
  Fred Van Lente: Good morning.
• 57:29
  Tad Eggleston: closing question is, I've started collecting, like, surreal… comics… experiences, like, like…
• 57:37
  Fred Van Lente: Okay.
• 57:37
  Tad Eggleston: in my time doing this podcast, I feel like I've fallen in the Twilight Zone. Like, I can go, hey, I feel like talking to Fred Van Lente, and…
• 57:45
  Tad Eggleston: then I get to talk to Fred Van Lente, rather than, oh, wow, this is a name on the page. I mean.
• 57:51
  Fred Van Lente: Sure.
• 57:52
  Tad Eggleston: I was texting with somebody that I'm not even gonna name on the air, because I…
• 57:57
  Tad Eggleston: And… and just texting with him today, not trying to set up a show, or…
• 58:03
  Fred Van Lente: Chatting.
• 58:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right, but I've found that that's, like, true of everybody in the business, whether it's.
• 58:09
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, definitely.
• 58:10
  Tad Eggleston: meet, or the experiences that they get to have. So I started… I've started collecting those experiences. Give me, give me one of the 10-year-old Fred Van Lente would go, fuck you, what are you talking about?
• 58:21
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of… You got to have that be part of your life.
• 58:26
  Fred Van Lente: Sure. Well, I mean, you know, I don't know about 10-year-old Fred Vill Lente, but definitely, you know, 20-year-old Fred Vinelenti loves the fact that I'm working with David Lapham on The Future Is, and…
• 58:35
  Fred Van Lente: Mike Diodato on Oz.
• 58:39
  Fred Van Lente: The one thing… I don't get starstruck ever, but so you like this story. So I was in Toronto.
• 58:45
  Fred Van Lente: fan Expo.
• 58:48
  Fred Van Lente: Okay. Which is in a convention center that's next door to the Rogers Center, which is beautiful, by the way, if you get a chance to go.
• 58:53
  Tad Eggleston: It is, I've been there.
• 58:54
  Fred Van Lente: Yeah, it's fantastic.
• 58:55
  Tad Eggleston: But back when it was still the Sky Dome.
• 58:57
  Fred Van Lente: I even staged.
• 58:59
  Tad Eggleston: Idom Hotel.
• 59:01
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, there you go. And, I was tabling next to Bill Sankiewicz, who was away from his.
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 59:05
  Fred Van Lente: time. Oh.
• 59:07
  Fred Van Lente: And then…
• 59:11
  Fred Van Lente: I'm, like, reading or doing some… fucking around my table, and, like, these two fists go on my table, and, like, they've got, like, the tattoo flame sleeves up.
• 59:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:19
  Fred Van Lente: And I look up, and it's Lance Henriksen.
• 59:23
  Fred Van Lente: He's leaning over my table, and he's like, is Bill there? And I'm like, hi.
• 59:28
  Fred Van Lente: No.
• 59:29
  Fred Van Lente: I don't know, you mean, a bathroom, maybe?
• 59:32
  Fred Van Lente: Tell him Lance is looking for him.
• 59:34
  Fred Van Lente: Yes, Mr. Hendricks, sir, I love you. Love you near dark!
• 59:38
  Fred Van Lente: That's, like, one of the few times I got super, super,
• 59:42
  Fred Van Lente: starstruck was when Lance Hammonds wanted to know where Bill Sankiewicz was.
• 59:46
  Tad Eggleston: That's… That's pretty cool.
• 59:48
  Tad Eggleston: And then the final question's always the same, and always has been. Tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love, and not enough people around you have experienced it, and you really want them to, so you have more people to talk about it.
• 1:00:04
  Fred Van Lente: Well, this is the best kind of recommendation for a friend. Ryan Levy, my co-creator of Action Philosophers and Comics for Comics, and…
• 1:00:14
  Fred Van Lente: Action Activist and all that stuff, recommended a nonfiction book called Lucas Wars to me.
• 1:00:19
  Fred Van Lente: Which is an English translation of a French graphic novel about the making of Star Wars. It is a very good book with a sadly dumb title. I don't know if that was the same title in French, I don't know whose decision it was to call it Lucas Words. I assumed it was a people freaking out about the prequels.
• 1:00:35
  Fred Van Lente: So that's why I kind of ignored it, but that is not what it is about. It is literally about the making of Star Wars.
• 1:00:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:00:41
  Fred Van Lente: with a focus on the biographical aspect of George Lucas himself. So, I thought that… I thought it was fantastic. We've already established I am not good with names, so I wish I could tell you the name of the writer.
• 1:00:52
  Tad Eggleston: I don't… I don't remember right now either, but it's been on my pile to read for quite a long time.
• 1:00:56
  Fred Van Lente: But whoever they are, they're great.
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: Far from the first person to say that it's great. Fred, always a pleasure. Remember, you are allowed to pop in and leave on Tuesday if you find yourself with a little bit of time.
• 1:01:09
  Fred Van Lente: Fair enough, fair enough.
• 1:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: I love seeing you. I mean, you often come with the best movie… movie racks.
• 1:01:16
  Fred Van Lente: Alright.
• 1:01:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you're the one that gave us Speedy a couple years ago, aren't you?
• 1:01:20
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, yeah, that was a good one. And another commentator recommended that, his name was Steve Lieber, actually, recommended something.
• 1:01:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. So, so, so…
• 1:01:29
  Fred Van Lente: and Babe Ruth.
• 1:01:30
  Tad Eggleston: But that went back and forth across the country, because… because I remember that, like, half of us read it and emailed in the… in the…
• 1:01:38
  Tad Eggleston: show email, or the roundtable email thread, thanks, Fred, I just watched.
• 1:01:43
  Fred Van Lente: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:43
  Tad Eggleston: The first one was Mark Russell, so if it was Steve Lieber that told you…
• 1:01:47
  Fred Van Lente: I remember that, that's awesome. Cool. Well, thanks, brother. As always, it's great talking to you.
• 1:01:52
  Tad Eggleston: It is, and we'll talk again soon, I hope. And, have a great week. For 22 Panels, this has been Fred Van Lente, and we will see you after the next page.
• 1:02:02
  Fred Van Lente: Thanks, brother.