Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #266... 22 Panels with Lucy Knisley

Transcript

With Great Power #266... 22 Panels with Lucy Knisley · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Tad Eggleston: Here we go.
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is one of my favorite authors who I've wanted on the show forever, and finally bumped into and invited, Miss Lucy Knisely. You're the second one of my,
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: Second… second cartoonist that, like, I knew from… They're awkward.
• 0:28
  Lucy Knisley: 20-something comics? Oh, no!
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: who I then also… Read their comics.
• 0:37
  Tad Eggleston: to my grandkids.
• 0:39
  Lucy Knisley: Who was the first?
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: Jeffrey Brown.
• 0:43
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, okay, yep,
• 0:46
  Tad Eggleston: You know, who has even more awkward 20-something comics.
• 0:51
  Lucy Knisley: something.
• 0:52
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are, are, are… Not nearly these.
• 0:56
  Lucy Knisley: Awkward.
• 0:57
  Tad Eggleston: It is his 20-something comments.
• 0:59
  Lucy Knisley: And now we're both, like, nerdy suburban parents. Right.
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. Like, both Chicago area, too. Yep. So, you know, it's one of those crazy things. I mean, you actually mostly come off cool in, like, Age of License, you know, whereas…
• 1:18
  Tad Eggleston: Jeff and Clumsy as… it's almost a painful read sometimes. It's like, wow, wow, you're, you're, you're really honest.
• 1:28
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, there was this, like, really interesting period in autobiographical comics where people were very open about their
• 1:38
  Lucy Knisley: sort of social foibles, and I… I miss that, because now everybody is much more,
• 1:45
  Lucy Knisley: It's much more polished, even if you're awkward, it's much more like… Owned in a way that…
• 1:52
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's still in the indie scene.
• 1:55
  Lucy Knisley: Okay.
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: I think publishers have become a little bit more afraid of it, just because of, oh, they're doing the Jeff Brown, Lucy Knisley, Alison Bechtel thing.
• 2:07
  Lucy Knisley: Sure.
• 2:08
  Tad Eggleston: We want, we want fiction!
• 2:10
  Lucy Knisley: Right, yeah, we want it polished, I get it.
• 2:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know. And actually, you know, that's still…
• 2:17
  Tad Eggleston: I think we're seeing more of those stories also from… non… Cis white males?
• 2:25
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 2:28
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 2:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 2:29
  Lucy Knisley: There's different foibles, all new, all new, exciting foibles.
• 2:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and often a lot of the same stuff, too, which in some senses is their power.
• 2:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because it's like, you read I Was Their American Dream, and it's like… Well, I'm not half…
• 2:47
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's Filipino and half, egyptian, but…
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: I relate to 80% of what's in here anyway. Right? It's awesome.
• 2:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so,
• 3:02
  Tad Eggleston: I… I finally read your Peapod books today, so I'm gonna start with those. Nice. Because I've been meaning to read them, like, since the first one come out, but I, like, read way too many comics.
• 3:12
  Lucy Knisley: I'm sure.
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: And… and not enough YA comics, because… they're like…
• 3:20
  Tad Eggleston: I have a 6- and 4-year-old grandchild, and, like…
• 3:24
  Tad Eggleston: I always have to do the math in my head for my own kids, which is really kind of disturbing. You'll get there one day.
• 3:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, let's see… 2000… so 20… 24 and 27-year-old kids.
• 3:42
  Tad Eggleston: So it's like, your books are actually right between them right now.
• 3:46
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, yeah, you sort of just missed me.
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I've read the baby one to my granddaughter.
• 3:54
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, nice.
• 3:55
  Tad Eggleston: sleep.
• 3:56
  Tad Eggleston: Not long after it came out, it was like, it's like, I had a screaming child on my lap, and I'm like, okay, what comic can I read her? And, oh, Lucy had a kid's book come out yesterday? Bye!
• 4:11
  Lucy Knisley: Perfect. Yeah, that must have been perfectly timed, because my kid is 9, so it would have been, like, just about out when your granddaughter was born.
• 4:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:22
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, you know, actually, maybe it was my grandson. My grandson's the older one. Oh, he's the older one, okay. Yeah, he was a 6-year-old. Got it. So yeah, you know. So, let's… let's start with Peapod Farm, but then I'll probably go back to, like.
• 4:39
  Tad Eggleston: biography.
• 4:41
  Tad Eggleston: Just because I love, I love, I love people talking about how they get to where they are.
• 4:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess the obvious part is Peapod Farm, I assume, started because you suddenly had a younger person to write comics for.
• 4:58
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, I've always wanted to do fiction, and for me, it's always seemed harder, and I think it's about this idea that when you're writing something that happened.
• 5:09
  Lucy Knisley: it's like a provable, verifiable story. Like, it's out there, it exists, you can't deny it. And with fiction, it all happens inside you, so it seems much more vulnerable to me to write a story that you create entirely on your own.
• 5:24
  Lucy Knisley: And so, I was really challenged by this idea of writing fiction, and I wanted to do it, and I…
• 5:29
  Lucy Knisley: you know, when you become a parent, you become more vulnerable, and you become maybe more private, and I didn't want to exploit my kid as much as I'd been exploiting myself for so long. So I was like, alright, it's time to, like, make the push, do the fiction, and so the Peapod Farms books are kind of fiction with training wheels on, because they're based on my own experiences of adolescence.
• 5:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 5:54
  Tad Eggleston: How was it different to write?
• 5:58
  Tad Eggleston: middle grade, YA… Versus writing…
• 6:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess most of your comics aren't quite adult comics, but they're certainly not aimed at the younger audience.
• 6:13
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: something that you consciously did, or did you just start writing the stories and let the agent go, hey, I think we're selling this to a YA market?
• 6:22
  Lucy Knisley: No, I set out to write a middle grade story. I wanted to tell the story of myself at age 12, basically, and so I was like, if I'm talking about this, I want to sort of make the book that I would have wanted at age 12.
• 6:36
  Lucy Knisley: And I don't think that that changes a lot about how you write the story, but it does…
• 6:43
  Lucy Knisley: keep a reader in mind, sort of. So, when I was 12, I was going through my family's divorce, and sort of learning that I didn't have a lot of control in the world, and that there could be adults in my life that were jerks.
• 7:01
  Lucy Knisley: And then I had to deal with this, and so I wanted books that explored these ideas, these ideas of sort of found family, and…
• 7:10
  Lucy Knisley: you know, family dynamics changing, and this also sort of coincided with the pandemic, when a lot of kids were having to move, or having a lot of their control taken away from them, having to deal with a new, scary situation, and so I had those themes in the back of my mind.
• 7:28
  Lucy Knisley: And with fiction, I found that it's a lot more show-don't tell, with a lot of memoir or autobiographical comics. There's a narrator, always, there's sort of the…
• 7:39
  Lucy Knisley: the viewpoint is always present, but with fiction, it really changed that. So that was the biggest change, I think, more than the age range that I was writing for.
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. What was most fun?
• 7:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the books, they deal with all of that difficultness, but they do so with…
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: A sense of joy that… is that…
• 8:07
  Tad Eggleston: delicate balance, like, and what makes… what makes a book like that so powerful? What's the difference between a book with a moral, where it's like, oh, you're supposed to get the moral, and a book that you love to read and relate to, and get various morals out of?
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, you certainly, your joy and love for both the characters and the story shows through.
• 8:33
  Lucy Knisley: Good. I try to keep the joy and the love and the pleasure in all of my work. I think that that's…
• 8:40
  Lucy Knisley: kind of a core tenet in a lot of my comics that I make.
• 8:43
  Lucy Knisley: Sometimes to a fault. I've read reviews of my work that say that, you know, she's too cheerful, she's got too many words.
• 8:51
  Tad Eggleston: Read the reviews.
• 8:52
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, God, I know. I've learned now, never to do that. But.
• 8:57
  Tad Eggleston: I say that to all of my friends, and I have, like…
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: The number of friends of mine that read the, the, the, like.
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: League of Comic Geek review. You know, I'm sitting there going, dude, you're fine. You did fine. It was great.
• 9:15
  Lucy Knisley: Do not venture into Goodreads.
• 9:18
  Tad Eggleston: But ComicsGeek148 said, and I think maybe he had a point. No. No! No, he didn't.
• 9:28
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, I… I just think that…
• 9:31
  Lucy Knisley: in a lot of, sort of, more literary or, kind of critical circles, people want to read a serious story. They want to… they want the trauma and the darkness and the misery, and that that, for them, makes great literature. And for me, I have always thought that
• 9:48
  Lucy Knisley: there should be a celebration of pleasure, that that is just as profound, that pleasure and joy and happiness. And these books do deal with difficult subject matter, but
• 9:58
  Lucy Knisley: I wanted there to be this arc of the main character, Jen, kind of finding the good in a bad situation, and learning to advocate for herself, learning to, to sort of figure out what made her happy, what brought her peace in this kind of changing situation. So…
• 10:13
  Lucy Knisley: for me, that was really the focus of the book, while also, I was trying to do a very sneaky thing, which was…
• 10:21
  Lucy Knisley: talk about…
• 10:23
  Lucy Knisley: food cycles, and food systems, and where the food in the grocery store comes from, because so many kids, especially in America here, aren't aware of where that food is coming from. They don't think about it, it just shows up on their plate.
• 10:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, refrigerator section at… True.
• 10:41
  Lucy Knisley: Exactly, that's where it comes from. It comes from, you know, mom putting it down on your.
• 10:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I thought… I thought there was, like, a factory underneath the refrigerator, and, like, you take a chicken out, and a new one just is created and comes up, right?
• 10:54
  Lucy Knisley: It's 3D printed into the breather.
• 10:56
  Tad Eggleston: The ones you see at the farm, those are just for petting. Those aren't the ones we eat.
• 11:01
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 11:02
  Lucy Knisley: Anna's, like, a very sensitive, animal-loving child who grew up in…
• 11:07
  Lucy Knisley: agricultural country, I was privy to all of this. I had to learn about food systems, and it was very profound to me, because I love to eat. I'm a huge fan of food, and to sort of take part in its growing and its production, and learn about where it comes from, and the effort that goes into it, and meet the stewards of the land that kind of bring it to life, and that was a real revelation for me, how
• 11:32
  Lucy Knisley: Having been a city kid in the past.
• 11:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 11:34
  Lucy Knisley: to be like, oh, there are good things about, like, living on a farm. You can get this incredible fresh food, you can participate in it, it's like, it's so cool to get to.
• 11:44
  Tad Eggleston: But it's… it's still hard when your bacon has a name.
• 11:47
  Lucy Knisley: It is very hard when your bacon has a name. And, you know, as somebody who's getting older and becoming more aware of the way that
• 11:56
  Lucy Knisley: the things that I choose to eat affect the planet around me, and to make more ethical choices. I think kids are aware of that early on, but they don't have necessarily the tools to kind of instruct them and where this stuff is coming from, so it's not my, like, you know, don't eat meat, it's…
• 12:14
  Tad Eggleston: That was actually your really, really insidious slide in there.
• 12:20
  Tad Eggleston: You know, talking about how ecological eating sweet bunny rabbits are.
• 12:27
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, that it is more ecological to, like, buy… and it's, you know, it's more ethical to buy from, like, a small farm
• 12:33
  Lucy Knisley: you know, raises animals that don't make a big impact on the Earth, and, you know, they do adopt a bunny at the end of it. Like, it shows… They do.
• 12:41
  Lucy Knisley: as a pet, also, but, but yeah, but… Right.
• 12:45
  Tad Eggleston: Survive.
• 12:46
  Lucy Knisley: get a little bit of the taste of what it's like to be in 4-H, which is partly animal husbandry.
• 12:52
  Tad Eggleston: And… and I did… I did appreciate that you… you made it, like, the punk girl that explained why killing the… why eating the rabbits was actually possibly good for the world.
• 13:04
  Lucy Knisley: Right? Better than some meat, better than, like, factory farming.
• 13:09
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you know, it's like…
• 13:13
  Tad Eggleston: I wanted to laugh, scream, and cry all at once, because it's like…
• 13:18
  Lucy Knisley: Which is exactly the proper response.
• 13:19
  Tad Eggleston: All makes sense.
• 13:21
  Lucy Knisley: Yep.
• 13:21
  Tad Eggleston: I get this, and I'm laughing because of the way it's being delivered, and the way… the way Jen is totally won over by this cool girl, versus, like.
• 13:33
  Tad Eggleston: Jackass, boy.
• 13:35
  Lucy Knisley: Right. I was just sort of heartless about it.
• 13:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:40
  Tad Eggleston: But at the same time, I'm going, but, but, but, but, but, but, Fred…
• 13:45
  Lucy Knisley: But the bunny, I know. Hold on a second, sorry, I have a visitor.
• 13:49
  Lucy Knisley: Hey, sweetie, I'm doing a podcast right now, can you come back later?
• 13:53
  Lucy Knisley: Okay, alright, sorry about that. Gotta steal the blanket. I get it.
• 13:57
  Tad Eggleston: We have visitors. Visitors are cool.
• 14:00
  Lucy Knisley: Thank you.
• 14:02
  Tad Eggleston: I, I was, I was introduced to, to a, a,
• 14:07
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if it was a stuffed bunny or a stuffed teddy bear.
• 14:11
  Tad Eggleston: one time when I was talking to Alex Cormac, that we were informed had his birthday the next day, which was news to Alex, but, like, we were informed
• 14:21
  Tad Eggleston: Seriously enough that he's like, okay, I gotta go plan a birthday party.
• 14:26
  Lucy Knisley: Right, yeah, I guess so.
• 14:30
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, that's fine. I like that cartoonists are human beings.
• 14:34
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 14:35
  Tad Eggleston: I like to remind our listeners to pay cartoonists so that they can be human to eat.
• 14:41
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, so that I can continue to buy comics for my child and raise the next generation of comics enthusiasts.
• 14:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. So that's actually a good place to take us to.
• 14:55
  Tad Eggleston: Give me your comics biography. And when I say that, I don't mean your bibliography. I mean, we'll certainly do that, but like…
• 15:05
  Tad Eggleston: What comics did you fall in love with as a child? What comics…
• 15:10
  Tad Eggleston: stuck with you? What made you decide, this is what I want to do? Which ones have changed how you think about comics? Like…
• 15:20
  Tad Eggleston: G-give me your, like… meaningful reading history.
• 15:27
  Lucy Knisley: Got it.
• 15:28
  Lucy Knisley: Okay, so I, I came up in, like, the 90s, and like, you know, I was born in 1985, so I really started to get into reading comics in the late 80s, early 90s, and,
• 15:40
  Lucy Knisley: At the time, comic shops were not really set up for little girls, so, you know.
• 15:47
  Tad Eggleston: Almost set up for little girls now. You go to one of the.
• 15:50
  Lucy Knisley: Honestly.
• 15:52
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, I do. We love Challengers, and there's always a panoply of little girls there. The last event I did, a Girl Scout meeting actually attended the event, which was really fun. But anyway…
• 16:04
  Tad Eggleston: going to, but instead we were… there's a… there's a Zine Fest in Minneapolis that…
• 16:09
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 16:10
  Tad Eggleston: We helped get across the line one year.
• 16:13
  Tad Eggleston: And since then, it's like, they're sad when we don't come up.
• 16:17
  Lucy Knisley: You got it.
• 16:17
  Tad Eggleston: go to that. So…
• 16:20
  Lucy Knisley: That's fair. That's totally understandable.
• 16:22
  Tad Eggleston: My wife is like… But Lucy's at… at…
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Challengers. You know what? I am always at challengers. That's what I said. I'm like, there will be other opportunities, and if we ever have her on the podcast, maybe we'll hit it off, and we'll just invite her to dinner, and just…
• 16:39
  Lucy Knisley: Sounds great. I love dinner.
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, see, I knew this about you.
• 16:46
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, it's pretty obvious.
• 16:47
  Tad Eggleston: Just in lunch, and snacks.
• 16:50
  Lucy Knisley: Yep, all of it.
• 16:53
  Tad Eggleston: But, but let's, let's go back to… I'm sorry.
• 16:56
  Lucy Knisley: Got it. Okay, so, so yeah, so Comic Shop's a little hostile. I got…
• 17:01
  Lucy Knisley: I got into reading comics, of course, from Calvin and Hobbes. I was, like, the perfect age for Calvin and Hobbes.
• 17:08
  Tad Eggleston: interrupt again for just a second. Did you manage to look at any of the original Calvin and Hobbes while you were at…
• 17:14
  Lucy Knisley: The Billie Ireland. So I've been to the Billy now 3 times, and the first time I went, I was like, I'm… I'm…
• 17:20
  Lucy Knisley: I'm coming, I'm bringing my kid, who was at the time 6, and I've pulled them out of school.
• 17:27
  Lucy Knisley: And I really want to see Raina's show before it closes, because I didn't make it to the opening.
• 17:32
  Lucy Knisley: And I was like, alright, we're gonna drive 6 hours, we're gonna go to the Billie Ireland, and I wrote them ahead of time, and I was like, hey, I know you guys, like, aren't open on the day that we're gonna come, would it be okay? Do you think you could, like, let me take a peek? And they were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, and we'll take you behind the scenes, we'll show you all kinds of stuff, what are you interested in? And I was like, well, I know that Bill Waterson is an Ohio guy, do you have
• 17:52
  Lucy Knisley: do you happen to have any of his originals? And they were like, oh.
• 17:56
  Lucy Knisley: All of them. We got you. So, it was so wild, because…
• 18:01
  Lucy Knisley: First of all, we got to see the mind-blowing show.
• 18:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no, that was a great exhibit.
• 18:06
  Lucy Knisley: Which was amazing. And then, secondly, they took us behind the scenes, and we got to see all this cool stuff, including, like, a bunch of early foxtrot that we had.
• 18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, who gave you the tour?
• 18:17
  Lucy Knisley: I thought it was Anne who gave me the tour, originally, Anne drove.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I got mine from Caitlin and Jeff Smith, so I know what you're talking about in terms of…
• 18:29
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, and it was, it was just so awesome.
• 18:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And they brought out all the stuff, so my kid, my 6-year-old, has been in the car for 6 hours, and we get there, and I'm like, we're going to a museum!
• 18:40
  Lucy Knisley: So my kid's, like, completely overstimulated in this museum, and just being shown, like, pages of original Bill Watterson art that I'm just, like, you know, crying blood about. Yeah. And my kid's kind of like, yeah, I got that book at home, you know, like, whatever.
• 18:57
  Lucy Knisley: this is cool, I guess, kind of, whatever. But yeah, so I got to see tons of it. I think it's really interesting that, like, in the first Calvin and Hobbes
• 19:06
  Lucy Knisley: strip. Calvin has blonde hair that, like, goes over into his eyes and stuff, which is exactly what my child looks like, so I was like, I birthed… having read so much Calvin and Hobbes, I birthed the original Calvin. But anyway, yeah, so Calvin and Hobbes.
• 19:22
  Tad Eggleston: So, are you gonna spike his hair at some point now, just to…
• 19:26
  Lucy Knisley: Where's
• 19:27
  Lucy Knisley: spikage. It wants to just be in the face at all times. It's sort of a… more of a beaver situation than a Calvin situation at this point.
• 19:37
  Lucy Knisley: It's, like, too long, too. Anyway. But yeah, but Calvin and Hobbs was my, you know, my, my intro.
• 19:44
  Tad Eggleston: gateway drug.
• 19:45
  Lucy Knisley: My gateway drug, and I'm really fortunate. All of my comics career is about timing. Like, I was the perfect age for Calvin and Hobbes when it was being published in newspapers, when the books were coming out, and I got into comics publishing at the time when big publishers were like, oh, what are these graphic novel things? So I just feel really lucky that I kind of timed everything out really perfectly.
• 20:08
  Tad Eggleston: Just right, yeah.
• 20:10
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 20:10
  Tad Eggleston: So, so Calvin and Hobbes to what?
• 20:12
  Lucy Knisley: Calvin and Hobbes, I got into Archie comics after that because, there were, like.
• 20:18
  Lucy Knisley: women in it, there were girls in it, who I was like, okay, that's cool. And a lot of comics that were coming out in the late 80s, early 90s, the only women were sort of, like, wearing the high-waisted bathing suits and, you know, hitting each other and having dramatic
• 20:35
  Lucy Knisley: sort of duels and things, and it just sort of wasn't my scene. I just wanted to…
• 20:40
  Lucy Knisley: read fun stories. So I got into Archie Comics, I was a Archie Club fan club member, and I got them in the mail. I was a subscriber, I got them in the mail, and that was really cool, and I could buy them at the local, like, newsstand. I didn't have to go into the mean… the place where the mean guys were sneering at me over their…
• 21:00
  Lucy Knisley: Long boxes.
• 21:02
  Lucy Knisley: So I was into, Calvin and Hobbes, I was into Archie.
• 21:06
  Lucy Knisley: What else? Oh, I really loved Tin Tin and, Asterix and Obelisk. I had a little bit of, like, the European stuff, but my mother is, like, an artist and a chef, and my father is a literary professor.
• 21:21
  Lucy Knisley: And so, my dad thought that the comics I was reading were not very highbrow, not very literary, and, you know, I was reading other stuff too, but he sort of… he was like, this Archie comic is, like, not, you know…
• 21:34
  Lucy Knisley: It's not Cyrano de Bergerac, like, I don't really know what she's doing with this.
• 21:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, some of the more recent ones have been close.
• 21:40
  Lucy Knisley: I agree.
• 21:42
  Lucy Knisley: And then my mom…
• 21:43
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I got sucked into Archie recently.
• 21:47
  Lucy Knisley: Oh yeah, I mean, they've done some pretty incredible stuff.
• 21:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yay.
• 21:51
  Lucy Knisley: It's dragging us back in.
• 21:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, essentially, it was twofold. Like, Tom King wrote an Archie issue, which, like, I was gonna pick up anyway, but then he and Dan Parent each put their top 10 Archie stories in the back of that issue, and it's like, oh.
• 22:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, now I have a list.
• 22:13
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah. I was really into the really old Archie's that they would, you know, they'd pull out, and it was like, this was not just
• 22:21
  Lucy Knisley: sort of… you know, it wasn't just about this time, it was made at this time, this was topical at the time, and that really fascinated me, that there was this…
• 22:30
  Lucy Knisley: long-running comic that was about teenagers through the ages, and it changed to reflect the popular culture, and that really fascinated me as a kid. So I had all the Archie, like, eras.
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: But you're naturally an artist, and I'm naturally a writer, so, like, the writing in those early Archie really drives me up the wall.
• 22:49
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, it's terrible, and slangy.
• 22:52
  Tad Eggleston: It's so bad. I mean, I thought Stan Lee was normally not a very good writer.
• 22:58
  Lucy Knisley: But, like, he makes the Archie…
• 23:00
  Tad Eggleston: Here, the Archie guys make him look like… Maybe not Shakespeare, but Marlowe?
• 23:06
  Lucy Knisley: Sure, sure, sure. Yeah.
• 23:09
  Lucy Knisley: And, you know, it wasn't highbrow literature that I was reading.
• 23:13
  Tad Eggleston: But the art, like, as I've become more of an art guy, like, I can appreciate what people love about the early Archie. Yeah. But, like, I mean, it's got some serious, serious storytelling drops.
• 23:26
  Lucy Knisley: For sure. And the character design, the character, like, you know, characterization of each of the characters is so good.
• 23:34
  Lucy Knisley: Obviously, Jughead was the best character, and he's like this sort of… weird…
• 23:40
  Tad Eggleston: At least until…
• 23:41
  Lucy Knisley: guy who likes me.
• 23:42
  Tad Eggleston: Hands on Sabrina?
• 23:44
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, it's… I don't… some of the later stuff kind of freaked me out. Everything got too dark and gritty, but I really… Sometimes.
• 23:52
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Afterlife with Archie is a little dark and gritty, but it's also really good.
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, Archie vs. the Punisher meets the Punisher came out at some point when I was… Yeah, no, no, the really great… I mean, that one did come out, but the great one, the one that shouldn't be good, but somehow really, really is, is Archie vs. Predator.
• 24:12
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's fair.
• 24:13
  Tad Eggleston: Alex DeCampi just knocked that out of the ballpark.
• 24:17
  Lucy Knisley: Totally.
• 24:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was wild.
• 24:19
  Tad Eggleston: That had no business being good, and it's amazing.
• 24:23
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 24:25
  Lucy Knisley: And so it was sort of my first introduction to the business of comics, too, because I'd watch them pull these stunts, and I'd be like, okay, they're just trying to sell comics. It's working, like, I'm gonna buy that.
• 24:39
  Lucy Knisley: Right. So, it taught me a little bit about the business, I think, but my dad thought it was not literary. My mom thought it was not feminist, because of the sort of Betty and Veronica fighting over Archie dynamic.
• 24:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 24:51
  Lucy Knisley: And, so in order to get them to continue to subscribe me to the mail order of these books, I had to kind of defend them to my parents, which meant looking at them critically from a pretty early age and being like, okay.
• 25:05
  Lucy Knisley: I am… I have learned this vocabulary from here, and, like, the story structure, and I'd be like, Dad, guess where I learned that word? It was from this Archie comic. And I had to go to my mom and be like, in this story, Betty and Veronica have nothing to do with Archie, and they just, like, go hang out. Isn't that cool, mom? Like, so it got me…
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: Betty and Veronica decide Archie's a jerk, and leave him behind. That actually happens in kind of a lot of them. Right!
• 25:32
  Lucy Knisley: messes up quite a bit. And like, you know, I had to look at the characters and be like, okay, who do I relate to most here? It's obviously Jughead. And, like, what is the deal with Big Ethel? And, like, what are we, from a feminist viewpoint, looking at this character, and…
• 25:49
  Lucy Knisley: So yeah, so I started kind of compiling these. I would make fan comics of them, of Archie comics. I have this one, or my mother, I should say, has this one framed, this Archie comic that I made, and it's drawn in, like, marker. It's so…
• 26:04
  Lucy Knisley: Obviously, drawn by a child, but it's really, it's really bizarre, because… I think Jughead murders Archie.
• 26:15
  Lucy Knisley: And Veronica decides that her true love is chocolate, And…
• 26:22
  Lucy Knisley: Betty and Midge end up together.
• 26:25
  Lucy Knisley: And, yeah, that's, like, that's the crux of it. And my mother has it framed in her house.
• 26:31
  Tad Eggleston: I would too.
• 26:33
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 26:35
  Lucy Knisley: The culmination of many years of Archie fandom.
• 26:39
  Tad Eggleston: Well, beyond that, you're a New York Times bestseller now, so, like…
• 26:44
  Tad Eggleston: when the time comes, and Social Security has gone away, and she needs.
• 26:50
  Lucy Knisley: leads to, to the…
• 26:51
  Tad Eggleston: Like, pay her medical expenses.
• 26:53
  Lucy Knisley: She's got it in her back.
• 26:55
  Tad Eggleston: at Sotheby's.
• 26:56
  Lucy Knisley: I really should use it to apply for the RG people to hire me, really. I should be like, I have literally been drawing this comic since.
• 27:04
  Tad Eggleston: I honestly don't even think you need it. You just show them the Arnie stuff from… from… actually.
• 27:09
  Tad Eggleston: I've seen it. I bet you if you even just sent them an email saying, I'd really like to do Archie, they would immediately start working with you.
• 27:16
  Lucy Knisley: Oh man, I think I would be too intimidated to do Archie. It's… it's, like, too close.
• 27:22
  Lucy Knisley: I ain't…
• 27:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 27:23
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, I'd think about it.
• 27:26
  Tad Eggleston: I think, like, I've talked to more Archie people than I thought.
• 27:32
  Tad Eggleston: just because, like, I didn't come to them through Archie, but, like, Tom's been on a number of times, and, like, the…
• 27:38
  Tad Eggleston: He actually let it slip
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: on our air, like, 3 months before it was announced, he was writing an Archie comic, just because he was so excited, because it was the first time ever that his kids thought he was cool for writing comics, because they're big Archie fans, and Batman…
• 27:55
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, who cares?
• 27:56
  Tad Eggleston: My kid recently found the, the collected Adventure Time, Okay.
• 28:02
  Lucy Knisley: That I'm a part of, and they're just getting into Adventure Time now, and I kind of, you know, sort of filed away, it's at least
• 28:09
  Lucy Knisley: 15 years old at this point, and my kid found it on my shelf and was like, what is this? And I was like, oh, I think I'm in there a few times, like, yeah, check it out. And it… that was the first time that my kid was like, this… you're… what? You drew Adventure Time? And I was like, yes, I made it!
• 28:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no. Alex Zegara's been out a bunch of times, too, and I knew him for his, like.
• 28:31
  Tad Eggleston: crime stuff, and, like, he was an Archie editor.
• 28:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's right, oh my god.
• 28:37
  Lucy Knisley: Cool.
• 28:37
  Tad Eggleston: Matthew Rosenberg wrote, wrote Archie vs. the Ramones.
• 28:42
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: all sorts of people that, like, I never in a million years would have gone, oh, you're an Uchi guy!
• 28:48
  Lucy Knisley: Again, it's this incredibly long-running comic, just gets us all, at some point or another.
• 28:55
  Tad Eggleston: That… well, you know, it took until… until recently to get sucked into it, but now I find myself spending at least some time with Archie on a somewhat regular basis. Again, I read way too many comics, so fitting any one thing in, unless I'm getting ready for an interview or a book club or whatever, can be…
• 29:14
  Tad Eggleston: challenging. But we deliberately…
• 29:18
  Tad Eggleston: devoted, like, a month's worth of episodes to talking about Archie, just to give ourselves an excuse to dive in.
• 29:26
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, perfect.
• 29:28
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know, that might happen again.
• 29:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, from Archie, where do we go?
• 29:35
  Lucy Knisley: So then, you know, I got a little older, I was reading, a lot of Linda Berry, because, all the Marlis stuff was really great for, sort of, this feral child that I was, and, and then when I got into high school, I got into,
• 29:50
  Lucy Knisley: all of the Strangers in Paradise stuff.
• 29:53
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 29:54
  Tad Eggleston: Which I…
• 29:54
  Lucy Knisley: Love.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: paradise.
• 29:56
  Lucy Knisley: It's so cool, and it was so great at a time when, when comics was getting dark and gritty and stuff, and it is dark and gritty in certain ways, but it's really this human story about their interactions, and I loved that. I was all about it. It was so great. And I remember, I had this old…
• 30:13
  Lucy Knisley: Archie-style jalopy that I would drive to school and back, and I would stop at the comic shop on my way home from, from high school, and I would buy the new issue of, Strangers in Paradise, and I'd have it on the seat next to me, and I'd be driving home, and I'd hit lights, and I'd just grab it and, like, read it.
• 30:31
  Lucy Knisley: In the age before cell phones, I would, like, read it.
• 30:34
  Tad Eggleston: I totally get that. Except that I would have been the one that didn't leave the parking lot until I was done reading it.
• 30:39
  Lucy Knisley: Right? Frequently, that would also occur, but I do remember at one point, like, getting mega honked at by… because I was, like, poring over this new issue of Strangers in Paradise.
• 30:48
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, when… when… when I worked at a comic shop.
• 30:53
  Tad Eggleston: I wanted to be the guy that sorted pull list stuff on Tuesday night, because before I left, I would, like, have read
• 31:03
  Tad Eggleston: the two or three comics that I wanted to read most for Wednesday.
• 31:07
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, that's, like, that's why you do it.
• 31:09
  Tad Eggleston: Give yourself a 15-minute break every hour or so to read a comic.
• 31:13
  Lucy Knisley: Exactly.
• 31:14
  Lucy Knisley: You have to know the material to sell it. Like, when I worked at the cheese store, you have to know how to talk about the cheese, so you have to eat it.
• 31:23
  Tad Eggleston: Have you gotten to meet Terry?
• 31:26
  Lucy Knisley: I have, a few times. I'm, like, a complete fangirl around him, and I remember one time he came to the first C2E2 here in Chicago.
• 31:36
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 31:36
  Lucy Knisley: And I was there, I was tabling, and this was the first one, so there were tons of hiccups with the organization of C2E2, and one of the things they hadn't counted on is what a huge, Uniontown, Chicago is.
• 31:51
  Lucy Knisley: And how, when you have a convention, you have to get the union guys to do everything. Everything. Set up the tables, bring the chairs, all the stuff. You can't do it yourself. And so, like, ReedPop, or whatever it was, who was trying to throw C2E2,
• 32:05
  Lucy Knisley: hadn't anticipated this, and, like, there were no chairs. There were tables, but no chairs, and I remember…
• 32:14
  Lucy Knisley: that, I saw Terry Moore, I was like, oh, there he is, and we'd met before, like, he knew what a complete…
• 32:22
  Lucy Knisley: at, like, how much I adored him. But I saw him, and I was like, I'm gonna go say hi, and I went up, and, he was kneeling behind his table so that he could, like, sign prints and stuff, so he was, like, kneeling on the floor of the convention hall, signing prints, and I was like, I'm gonna get you a chair.
• 32:40
  Lucy Knisley: We didn't get you a chair, man. And, like, I had to go and, like, got to talk to the Teamsters and get them to, like, bring a chair over, and I was like.
• 32:47
  Lucy Knisley: This man needs a chair, this is an important person!
• 32:50
  Tad Eggleston: Here's 20 bucks, give me one chair.
• 32:55
  Tad Eggleston: I don't care about everybody else.
• 32:57
  Lucy Knisley: I'm at the top of the list. But yeah, I love Terry, I love his work, I think it's so awesome, and it really was very formative in high school. Obviously, I got, further into, like, the Linda Berry wormhole. I got very into,
• 33:15
  Tad Eggleston: obviously, making comics, understanding comics, Scott McCloud stuff that was, like… Oh, yeah.
• 33:20
  Lucy Knisley: completely mind-blowing at the time, and actually it was just understanding comics when I was in high school.
• 33:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And…
• 33:27
  Lucy Knisley: I went to college because… Because that's what you do, I guess, and
• 33:34
  Lucy Knisley: I'd had a really terrible time in high school. Shockingly, I know cartoonists, they really mostly love, like, higher education. They're super, super comfortable in
• 33:45
  Lucy Knisley: like, high school settings most of the time. But, you know, all of my typical cartoonist, like, undiagnosed ADHD crap aside, I had been to four different high schools in 4 years, and I was miserable, I hated it.
• 33:59
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so you're the cartoonist and the new kid.
• 34:02
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 34:03
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God.
• 34:05
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, and, you know, I was, like, goth for a while, like, all kinds of stuff.
• 34:10
  Tad Eggleston: So you weren't doing yourself any favors, either.
• 34:12
  Lucy Knisley: No. I mean, I think I was…
• 34:15
  Tad Eggleston: And the new.
• 34:15
  Lucy Knisley: Those were the kids I wanted to be friends with, the weirdos, and, like, that was great. Those kids were awesome.
• 34:21
  Tad Eggleston: So it worked. So it was like the hat in Peapod.
• 34:24
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, it was like the hat, exactly. I would, yeah.
• 34:27
  Tad Eggleston: I get that.
• 34:27
  Lucy Knisley: roll in with my, like, my Ankh painted on my face, just like death from the game and series, and be like, yes, yes, I am super-duper cool.
• 34:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 34:38
  Lucy Knisley: And then all the other ridiculous nerds would be friends with me. But, but what I didn't like was the institution. I didn't like the high school stuff. I didn't…
• 34:47
  Lucy Knisley: appreciate that stuff at the time. And, you know, after a period of getting, like, you know, expelled, and finding a new place, and not liking that one, and… Anyway, I was like, okay, who do I…
• 35:01
  Tad Eggleston: get expelled.
• 35:06
  Lucy Knisley: you're… are you implying that I don't seem like the hardened criminal type that would get expelled?
• 35:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yes. Yes, I am.
• 35:16
  Lucy Knisley: I… yeah, I make cartoons about babies.
• 35:18
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I was just, I was just, I realized that the one book of yours that I hadn't read, other than the cat book, which I somehow missed you putting out and need to fix, because I.
• 35:31
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, my God.
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: And we need to grab that one. Oh, yeah.
• 35:34
  Lucy Knisley: For sure.
• 35:34
  Tad Eggleston: But I somehow had not read French Milk. But French Milk starts out with you talking about learning to smoke because you're going to Paris when you're in your 20s. So yes, yes, I don't think we're the hardest.
• 35:46
  Lucy Knisley: cigarettes. I didn't smoke cigarettes, when I was, yeah, going to Paris, but I… I was, like, 20 at the time.
• 35:55
  Lucy Knisley: But, no, in high school, I,
• 35:58
  Lucy Knisley: there was this whole ordeal that'll probably someday make it into a book when, like, the statute of limitations is over, or whatever, but,
• 36:06
  Lucy Knisley: I, I started out at a boarding school for kids with severe learning disabilities, and I was not diagnosed with a learning disability, I was just kind of like a weird artist kid, but my mom thought, I'll send her to this school for kids with learning disabilities, because they'll just know how to teach to the individual kid. But unfortunately, this was like, you know, the,
• 36:28
  Lucy Knisley: late 90s, early 2000 kind of era, and this was when everybody was pretty underwater with learning disabilities, they didn't know how to medicate kids, and they were really struggling, and so it was this boarding school…
• 36:40
  Tad Eggleston: And autism still wasn't a spectrum. Right, exactly. And ADHD was still, like, a problem rather than a trait, and yeah, no, I get it. I'm in special ed now, and I'm autistic, so I, like, totally get what you're talking about here.
• 36:56
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, and I'm, you know, I'm very grateful that she sent me to this school, because it was my people, you know, it was exactly my people, and I, you know, I love all of them.
• 37:04
  Tad Eggleston: Teachers, probably.
• 37:06
  Lucy Knisley: the teachers were really doing their best, but they were totally underwater. I mean, they were just putting out fires left and right, and there were kids that were in high school and they couldn't read, and there were kids that, like, couldn't sit, and there were kids that, like.
• 37:17
  Lucy Knisley: wandered into the woods, and there were, you know, there were kids that were so medicated in such a way that they could barely function, and there were kids that were under-medicated, and they could barely function, and so they were just doing their best, but all the kids were incredibly…
• 37:31
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because the expectation was still to make the kids act normal, rather than to lean into their strengths and use them.
• 37:38
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 37:39
  Lucy Knisley: And, you know, to its credit, the school was very good about, like, okay, this kid needs to just, like, play the guitar half the day. I'm just gonna, like, lean into that. This kid is, like, doing that, and this other kid needs this and that, and so they had these really specialized, like, individual learning programs, but because I didn't have a diagnosis at the time, I didn't qualify for that. So half the day was these individualized learning programs that I was not part of, so I would just kind of
• 38:04
  Lucy Knisley: go do whatever at the sporting school. So I would kind of, like, you know, la la la, and they really just didn't have their act together, so they would take us into, Boston, which is about, like, 4 hours away from the school, on field trips, like day trips on the weekend.
• 38:23
  Lucy Knisley: And they'd load us into a van and take us into Boston and just be like, be free, 14-year-olds! And we were like, great, bye! And it was awesome, and it was great, and we saw lots of really cool stuff, and went to lots of really cool places. But, there was this thing that happened where,
• 38:41
  Lucy Knisley: students that, like, lived in Boston would go home for the weekend, and in order to catch a ride back to school, they would just get on the van that had brought the boarding students down.
• 38:52
  Lucy Knisley: for the day trips, so the teacher in charge would be like, I came with, 12 students, and I have 12 students on the van, so here we go, we're gonna leave. And that's how me and, like, 6 of my friends were left in Boston at age 14 overnight.
• 39:08
  Lucy Knisley: So this was the age before cell phones, and so none of us had cell phones.
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: Another headquarters.
• 39:16
  Lucy Knisley: No, of course not, and we were like, alright.
• 39:19
  Lucy Knisley: Obvious thing that we should do…
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, really quickly, because we've got a handful of younger listeners, I want to point out that the reason I brought that up is there used to be a thing called payphones, where you could put a quarter in and make a phone call.
• 39:36
  Lucy Knisley: Yes. Or, like, you know, you could do the collect call thing, but you had to be like, hold on, I'm talking about…
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: phones.
• 39:44
  Lucy Knisley: Exactly. So, you know, it's a group of 14-year-olds, we're in Boston, we're like, okay, well…
• 39:51
  Lucy Knisley: obviously, we should probably get in touch with one of our parents, who lives near Boston. Nobody did. There was, like, the closest parent was, like, 6 hours away, so we were like, well…
• 40:01
  Lucy Knisley: okay, we'll call our parents and see who's willing to, like, come drive here. And there were too many of us to, like, fit in a car, so we were like, we need multiple parents to, like, come and get us and take us away. So, you know, we did the, like, collect call thing.
• 40:15
  Lucy Knisley: Trying to get somebody to come pick us up, but the nearest parents were hours and hours away, so we were like, well, the obvious thing that we have to do now is go to the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in… in town, here in Boston. So that's… that's where we're gonna go now.
• 40:31
  Tad Eggleston: I assume the Red Sox were out of town.
• 40:33
  Lucy Knisley: Probably, but we were also, like, a bunch of nerdy goth kids. We were not aware of the Red Sox. We were aware of the midnight showing of the Rocky Mountain Picture.
• 40:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just saying that, like, the only sport that nerdy goth kids ever like is baseball, and the Red Sox are great, and Fenway's amazing, so…
• 40:50
  Lucy Knisley: I'm… this was probably not baseball season, because it was cold.
• 40:56
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, his boss.
• 40:57
  Lucy Knisley: for a picture show. It is Boston, it's usually cold.
• 41:00
  Lucy Knisley: But we sought refuge in the midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which was great.
• 41:05
  Tad Eggleston: you in, which is awesome.
• 41:06
  Lucy Knisley: And they let us in, which was awesome, and, you know, it's… it's a whole production, and I'm sure they…
• 41:13
  Lucy Knisley: have carried on this proud tradition, so highly recommend it. But, but we did that, we were kicked out at, like, you know, 3 in the morning, and then we were like, now what? We still have, like, 3 more hours before our parent gets here, so we'll just, like, hang out in the park, I guess? Like, because they wouldn't rent us a hotel room, like, nothing.
• 41:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, well, of course not. I mean, did one of you have a credit card?
• 41:37
  Tad Eggleston: No, certainly not, and…
• 41:41
  Lucy Knisley: Not looking like the right crowd for the hotel room.
• 41:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this, this is, this is the, this is the, the special ed goth…
• 41:49
  Tad Eggleston: Boarding school kids, not the… not the…
• 41:53
  Lucy Knisley: Not the executive with the private part. Right, right.
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, not the… not the… the Ivy League prep school boarding.
• 42:01
  Lucy Knisley: Precisely. So anyway, this was the incident that caused my mom to go, you know what, maybe this school maybe isn't teaching to you individually enough, so let's try something else. So, so then I went to, public school.
• 42:16
  Lucy Knisley: for, about half a year, but because I had come from the school for kids with severe learning disabilities, the obvious thing then was to put me in special ed at this public school. And I was in special ed with kids with pretty severe needs, and kids that really
• 42:32
  Lucy Knisley: Really required a lot of help, and of course, this was, like, an underfunded public school, so the special ed program was in, like, a…
• 42:40
  Lucy Knisley: you know, box container on the, like, football field, too, so it was just… This is where I'm blessed that I work at a high school that's special ed program is, like.
• 42:51
  Tad Eggleston: one of its crown jewels, rather than… Right.
• 42:54
  Lucy Knisley: Right? Like…
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 42:56
  Lucy Knisley: They should all be, but in this case, they kind of…
• 43:00
  Tad Eggleston: We bought it, we bought it.
• 43:01
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 43:01
  Tad Eggleston: We bought a, like, $1.8 million house for our transition kids.
• 43:07
  Tad Eggleston: Teach them to, like, cook and… To… to various…
• 43:11
  Lucy Knisley: After all.
• 43:12
  Tad Eggleston: Living chores and a house.
• 43:14
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, that's real.
• 43:16
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, we got a deal on it, because it was across from the baseball fields, and the owners wanted to sell it, and… and it kept being foul balls, and… and, like…
• 43:25
  Lucy Knisley: Bonus!
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, you know. When the deal only brings it under $2 million, it's still, like.
• 43:33
  Lucy Knisley: That's gonna be a nice house, yeah.
• 43:35
  Tad Eggleston: It's a very nice house. That's awesome! We retrofitted it with, like, an elevator and…
• 43:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, all the stuff you need for a special ed…
• 43:45
  Lucy Knisley: That's amazing.
• 43:45
  Tad Eggleston: high school facility.
• 43:47
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, tripled the size…
• 43:48
  Lucy Knisley: It's like a windowless, airless, Sell.
• 43:53
  Tad Eggleston: You didn't have 3 others.
• 43:56
  Lucy Knisley: We did not. We did not.
• 43:58
  Tad Eggleston: washers.
• 43:59
  Lucy Knisley: panoramic view of the stadium. It was, not that way. But, so I was in this class where I was like, this is… I am not… this is not for me. And I would just kind of leave.
• 44:12
  Lucy Knisley: I was just gonna leave.
• 44:13
  Tad Eggleston: Now I'm starting to see how you managed to get expelled.
• 44:16
  Lucy Knisley: Well, this wasn't even the school I was expelled from.
• 44:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we're not too bad.
• 44:20
  Lucy Knisley: So my mom was like, alright, this is not it either. Let's send you to the preppiest school I can find in the area. And I was like, this is a bad idea. And she's like, no, this is gonna be great. So she sends me to a.
• 44:34
  Tad Eggleston: Still Hudson Valley area.
• 44:37
  Lucy Knisley: It is, yeah.
• 44:39
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 44:39
  Lucy Knisley: preppy schools in that class.
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: it.
• 44:42
  Lucy Knisley: So, so I come to the school, and they, you know, they're like, you have to wear, like, this very restrictive dress code, you have to do after-school sports, you can't have a car here, you have to… even though you're a day student, you have to sleep here 3 nights a week, we don't have a room for you, so you have to make friends and just sleep on their floor, and I was like.
• 45:02
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, I'm not doing any of that stuff. Like, I… I had an after-school job at the local community theater that had, like, rescued me from these horrible situations that I'd been in, and I was like, I'm gonna go to my job after school, I'm not doing sports, I'm going to my job, I need a car to, like, get here and get to my job.
• 45:21
  Lucy Knisley: So I would have to park down the road and, like, walk to school and be like, I just manifested here, there's no car, what are you talking about?
• 45:31
  Tad Eggleston: It's not on school property.
• 45:33
  Lucy Knisley: It's not a school purpose?
• 45:34
  Lucy Knisley: It's in the woods, don't worry about it, like…
• 45:36
  Tad Eggleston: As far as you're concerned, I don't have a car.
• 45:39
  Lucy Knisley: Akari just exist here, don't worry about it. So…
• 45:42
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, and I just, like, I didn't want to play sports, I just wanted to, like, go to my job and hang out, and, you know, I made friends with all the weird kids as usual, and that was great, and I was a day student, and I just refused to, like, sleep on… I think I spent one night in a common room, and I was like, I'm never doing this again, this is gross.
• 46:00
  Lucy Knisley: So, so I just, like, refused to sleep there. So, they kind of put me on, like, super secret probation, because I wasn't playing by the rules. And then, a bunch of…
• 46:09
  Tad Eggleston: else reference there.
• 46:10
  Lucy Knisley: Exactly, thank you.
• 46:12
  Tad Eggleston: Was it, was it double Super?
• 46:14
  Lucy Knisley: It was Double Super Secret Probation, yes. And then, so all of my nerdy, weird, neurodivergent goth friends were like, we should start a GSA, a gay-Straight Alliance, like a student LGBTQ plus club, but, you know, in the time, it was just called a GSA.
• 46:30
  Tad Eggleston: I remember…
• 46:31
  Lucy Knisley: We should start one, that would be great, it would be really cool.
• 46:35
  Lucy Knisley: because there was some issues with, with bullying and, some, like, hate speech and stuff, and we were like, we should form a club so that we can, like, take this to the school and talk about that, and, and the school wouldn't allow it. They wouldn't allow us to start this club. They were like, we don't need that.
• 46:51
  Tad Eggleston: I see where this is going. The school was actually like, you want to exercise hate speech against our poor.
• 47:01
  Lucy Knisley: Right.
• 47:02
  Tad Eggleston: This white boys.
• 47:03
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, but you'll.
• 47:05
  Tad Eggleston: They're so oppressed.
• 47:06
  Lucy Knisley: Feelings, exactly. So we weren't allowed to start this club, so we were like.
• 47:10
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever yard it is.
• 47:12
  Tad Eggleston: To have to go into your backup Ivy League school?
• 47:15
  Lucy Knisley: I know, it's tragic. It's so sad for these poor people.
• 47:19
  Tad Eggleston: You might only become an appellate judge rather than a Supreme Court justice.
• 47:25
  Lucy Knisley: These poor people, it's so sad.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: All because you besmirched them.
• 47:30
  Lucy Knisley: Yes!
• 47:31
  Lucy Knisley: Precisely.
• 47:32
  Lucy Knisley: So we staged a walkout protest during, like, the morning meeting in the chapel of the school, and we staged a walkout. So they were like, okay, now you're on, like, triple, double secret super probation, and we were like, okay, whatever.
• 47:47
  Tad Eggleston: claims probation.
• 47:48
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, I was just really not doing what they wanted me to at the school, and
• 47:54
  Lucy Knisley: So then, because I was a day student, of course, one of the boarding students was like, do you have a hookup for weed? And I was like, I don't, but, like.
• 48:04
  Lucy Knisley: I have some that you can have, like, it's, you know, it's whatever. And we were off campus at the time, and I was like, here you go, don't take it back to school. And of course, he took it back to school, and he got caught with it immediately, and they were like.
• 48:19
  Lucy Knisley: where did you get this? If you turn in the person that gave it to you, you'll be totally off the hook. And I…
• 48:26
  Lucy Knisley: I was turned in as the dealer.
• 48:29
  Lucy Knisley: Because I gave him, like, an ounce of ancient, horrible weed that I…
• 48:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, this is… this is where I have to… to… to ask you if you've read the comic the re-up.
• 48:40
  Lucy Knisley: 3 up? No.
• 48:41
  Tad Eggleston: The re-up, yeah, Cherokee. Oh, the re-up.
• 48:44
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, I did hear about this, yeah.
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was, he was essentially the Georgetown hookup.
• 48:52
  Tad Eggleston: He went… he got to go to Georgetown because he worked there, and anybody who works there can go there.
• 49:00
  Tad Eggleston: So he got a job in their AV department, and then went to Georgetown, has his degree from Georgetown, but while he was there, he was also, like.
• 49:08
  Tad Eggleston: the guy that worked, rather than got it paid for, and, like, light-skinned black guy from Cleveland, so they assumed that he could find him the weed, and he could, so he became the Georgetown dealer.
• 49:23
  Lucy Knisley: Nice! Good for him!
• 49:24
  Tad Eggleston: And now it's been long enough that he's making a comic about it.
• 49:28
  Lucy Knisley: Also, he lives in Amsterdam now, so, you know… Oh, perfect. They can't get him there.
• 49:34
  Lucy Knisley: So, at the time, you know, all these schools had these zero-tolerance policies for this stuff, and even though it was all hearsay and word of mouth, and there was no proof against me.
• 49:44
  Lucy Knisley: They did this really, really shady thing where they, like, brought me into a room alone, and they were like, we know that you're a dealer.
• 49:53
  Lucy Knisley: And if you, if you…
• 49:56
  Tad Eggleston: True, I didn't take any money.
• 49:57
  Lucy Knisley: I was like, I didn't take any money, man. And they were like, if you… if you confess, we won't have to get the police involved.
• 50:05
  Tad Eggleston: I, I…
• 50:06
  Lucy Knisley: Put it on your pet.
• 50:07
  Tad Eggleston: economics class, that it's only dealing if money is exchanged.
• 50:11
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, right? But, like, I was.
• 50:12
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a geek.
• 50:13
  Lucy Knisley: That's true.
• 50:14
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, exactly. I was like, I'm just being nice! So, so they were like, if you confess, we won't call the cops, and we won't put it on your permanent record.
• 50:22
  Lucy Knisley: But if you deny it, we're gonna call the cops, and they're gonna come and interrogate you. And I was 16, so I was like, well, I don't want that. So, okay, I did give it to him, sure. It wasn't on campus, and, like.
• 50:37
  Lucy Knisley: none of this meets your, you know, zero tolerance policy, but they were like, that's correct, it doesn't. We can't kick you out, but we can ask you to leave. And if you don't leave, like, we're gonna make your life miserable, basically, and we were like, we can ask you to leave.
• 50:53
  Tad Eggleston: We can't ruin that poor boy's life.
• 50:56
  Lucy Knisley: Of course not, heaven forbid his, you know, athletic career be tarnished. So I was like, oh, I fucking want to leave this place.
• 51:05
  Tad Eggleston: Cross-player.
• 51:06
  Lucy Knisley: sucks.
• 51:07
  Tad Eggleston: He was a soccer player. Oh, okay, soccer player.
• 51:10
  Lucy Knisley: I played lacrosse, too, they all did.
• 51:12
  Tad Eggleston: almost a real athletic career, I'm convinced that lacrosse is just how white boys get sports scholarships.
• 51:19
  Lucy Knisley: It's galling because lacrosse is a Native American sport. Anyway.
• 51:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's even worse, yes. I understand.
• 51:26
  Lucy Knisley: Ugh. Anyway, so I was, like.
• 51:29
  Tad Eggleston: But the equipment…
• 51:29
  Lucy Knisley: Who crashed.
• 51:30
  Tad Eggleston: Expensive.
• 51:30
  Lucy Knisley: It is various… I can make my own fucking reads. Anyway, but I… but I was like, I… fuck you, I'm out, see ya. And they were like, you can't come back onto campus until after all of your peers have graduated, and I was like, I will never be back here, thank you very much. They have a zoo at this school, and at one point…
• 51:48
  Tad Eggleston: Here's my… here's my question. Once you became an award-winning bestseller, have you ever been hit up for money?
• 51:54
  Lucy Knisley: I get fucking hit up by these people every year, they send me stuff about wanting money from them, and I…
• 52:01
  Lucy Knisley: I, like, take great pleasure in throwing it in the recycling bin. I cannot believe they would have the audacity to ask for money from me. Anyway, they've never asked me to come and speak to their student population because they know it would not end well.
• 52:17
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 52:18
  Lucy Knisley: Anyways…
• 52:20
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, they asked me to leave. I was like, fuck it, I'm out. That was my getting kicked out. It wasn't an official expulsion, but but yes, then it was on my.
• 52:28
  Tad Eggleston: It's a more fun story, and one that you absolutely need to write at some point.
• 52:33
  Lucy Knisley: would be great. I really would like to put it in a graphic novel someday. But it's really about… it's so interesting, because I just experienced this wide swath of different educational modes and philosophies, and I wound up in, like, an art magnet school that was focused on
• 52:49
  Lucy Knisley: weirdo kids who just wanted to make art, and it had this reputation for being, like, weird, and the kids were weird, and they smoked pot and stuff, and I was like, this is my people. This is my home, I'm, like, so happy here.
• 53:02
  Lucy Knisley: And and so I spent the last two years of high school at this great, like, arts-focused program, and it was wonderful, and they were, like, they completely saved my life.
• 53:10
  Lucy Knisley: But I knew that no college wanted to take… no, like.
• 53:17
  Lucy Knisley: College for liberal arts was going to take me with this kind of transcript.
• 53:22
  Lucy Knisley: So I was like, fortunately, I really love art, I've been at this art school, I, like, I have a strong portfolio, I'll be a fine artist, I'll be a painter, this is perfect, this is what I'm gonna do. I love to write, but I'll just be a painter, it's all good. And, so I wound up…
• 53:38
  Tad Eggleston: I'm actually reading at this point, really quickly, because we left off with understanding comics.
• 53:43
  Lucy Knisley: this was, still during the, Terry Moore age, the Scott McCloud age, the, I was reading a lot of what I could get of, sort of, indie zine stuff, but, in, you know, upstate New York, it wasn't as…
• 54:01
  Tad Eggleston: easy to find, but I was fortunate enough. Is anything stand out as something you remember?
• 54:06
  Lucy Knisley: I had this great zine comic, that had a…
• 54:12
  Lucy Knisley: I mean, I read, like, a bunch of Jonan Vasquez then, too, of course.
• 54:17
  Lucy Knisley: But I had this great one called Ain't Nothin' Like Fuckin' Moonshine, and I can't…
• 54:21
  Lucy Knisley: remember who made it, but it was, like, this prize to me, because it was, like, this indie zine, and it was so cool and, like, subversive and great. I'm sure we can find it online.
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: We will be looking for it while you're getting into your college years.
• 54:36
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, okay, alright, so, so I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has this great, like, fine arts program, and they make you do, like, performance art and sculpture and stuff in your first year, and I realized
• 54:49
  Lucy Knisley: like, within moments of arriving at the school, that I didn't just want to make art, I wanted to write and tell stories, so I started making comics for the local school newspaper. Did you find it?
• 54:59
  Tad Eggleston: I think I did.
• 55:04
  Tad Eggleston: They've got one at San Diego State… do they tell me?
• 55:09
  Lucy Knisley: Beautiful.
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 55:11
  Tad Eggleston: Graphic Emporium containing work by numerous contributors.
• 55:16
  Lucy Knisley: That's… that's chitted butt.
• 55:17
  Tad Eggleston: Juana Spoons.
• 55:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, look at that.
• 55:24
  Tad Eggleston: We might have a digital copy.
• 55:27
  Tad Eggleston: at the Rhode Island School of Design Zine Collection.
• 55:31
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, excellent.
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: From there.
• 55:34
  Lucy Knisley: This was a… We'll also say the age of LiveJournal.
• 55:40
  Lucy Knisley: Okay. So, I had kept a blog since I was, like, 15 on LiveJournal, and I was posting comics to it, and making blog… you know, very earnest blog posts, and among my LiveJournal friends are people like Jess Fink, Erika Moen, Raina Talgemeyer.
• 55:57
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's a… that's a good group of friends to have.
• 55:59
  Lucy Knisley: It's, like, all the same colleagues that I have to this day.
• 56:03
  Tad Eggleston: I will assu… oh, it looks like there were multiple issues of it, because there's.
• 56:07
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 56:08
  Tad Eggleston: Volume 13 here.
• 56:09
  Lucy Knisley: That contrast.
• 56:12
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, I had in the back of my head to ask you if you had.
• 56:17
  Lucy Knisley: read Raina and Reyna and Scott's book yet, but now I am just assuming, automatically, you have, of course, read Raina and Scott's book. I have, of course, read Raina and Scott's book. And in fact, the one that's coming out, Raina's book, about facing feelings about the show that was at the Billy Ireland, I'm doing a.
• 56:33
  Tad Eggleston: in the show, and… Very much looking forward.
• 56:37
  Lucy Knisley: Good! The book is awesome, and I'm doing a, like, an in-conversation with Raina next month about that book, so that's gonna be really fun to…
• 56:45
  Tad Eggleston: wear, and… and, like, cause…
• 56:47
  Lucy Knisley: at… it's through, Anderson's Books, so you buy the tickets through Anderson's Books, but it's at a nearby theater in the west suburbs of Chicago.
• 56:57
  Tad Eggleston: I might have to look into that.
• 56:59
  Lucy Knisley: It's… it's so fun to do stuff with Raina, because you just watch, like, the…
• 57:04
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't actually… haven't quite gotten to actually meet.
• 57:08
  Lucy Knisley: Raina yet. Oh, she's the best.
• 57:10
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 57:11
  Tad Eggleston: I… I was there when she was at CXC, and… and she was talking to my friend Chris Schweiser, but I didn't have, like…
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: the courage to go up and say, Chris, you wanna…
• 57:24
  Lucy Knisley: Hold on. Maybe do introduce yourself.
• 57:26
  Tad Eggleston: me?
• 57:28
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes I have that ability, and sometimes I don't.
• 57:36
  Lucy Knisley: Usually, Raina is, like, 12… Adolescent girls deep, so it's hard.
• 57:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the only time ever that I've seen Shelley Bond kind of shoot out of a room was because they needed it for Reyna.
• 57:49
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, God.
• 57:50
  Tad Eggleston: When?
• 57:51
  Tad Eggleston: All the way to…
• 57:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, Shelly had the auditory… did you do any of the panels at CXC? Did…
• 58:00
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 58:01
  Tad Eggleston: So you know the auditorium.
• 58:04
  Tad Eggleston: Which was barely big enough for Shelley Bond, and I have no idea how it was big enough for Reyna's… like, the auditorium at the library, not…
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: Or at, yeah, the public.
• 58:14
  Lucy Knisley: Big one.
• 58:14
  Tad Eggleston: Not the… not the… no, not the Billy. She did one at the Billy, too, and that one also filled up.
• 58:19
  Lucy Knisley: But she had a talk and signing in the auditorium at the public. In the big auditorium, yeah.
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, not the big auditorium.
• 58:26
  Lucy Knisley: I'm sure it was standing room only, like.
• 58:28
  Tad Eggleston: It was beyond standing room only. It was hard to get out because of the people waiting to get in.
• 58:34
  Lucy Knisley: Of course!
• 58:35
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the entire hallway was filled up down to the entrance of the library.
• 58:41
  Lucy Knisley: Awesome.
• 58:42
  Tad Eggleston: That's so great. So yeah, no, I remember when they were… because I was hanging with Shelly, and I remember when they were telling her she needed to leave, and I just thought to myself, how many people in comics
• 58:54
  Tad Eggleston: would they ask Shelly Bonds to hurry up for?
• 58:58
  Tad Eggleston: like, half the names I can think of that they might ask Shelly Bonds to hurry up for, Shelly edited at one point or another, so the person would actually be in there talking with Shelly.
• 59:10
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, exactly.
• 59:11
  Tad Eggleston: Me too, you know what I mean?
• 59:13
  Lucy Knisley: Like, maybe Bill Watterson shows up, and they're like, okay. Right, right.
• 59:18
  Lucy Knisley: But yeah, no, Raina, she's like, you know, the level of…
• 59:23
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you know.
• 59:25
  Tad Eggleston: So if you're having fun with, put a word in. I would kill to talk to her and Scott.
• 59:31
  Tad Eggleston: Because among other things, our next Joy… we have a book club, because… I have lots of book gobs, but we have a book club called the Joy Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club and Support Group.
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: Where my friends from Psychocomicology join us, so we even have psychologists in the room, and we pick
• 59:53
  Tad Eggleston: A book to either make us feel happy, or to make us…
• 59:58
  Tad Eggleston: feel… like, we just did Bitch Planet last night, the Kelly Sudaconic, Valentine de Landro. We've done, Jeff Lemire's Underwater Welder, we did, Squirrel Girl.
• 1:00:12
  Lucy Knisley: Come on.
• 1:00:12
  Tad Eggleston: So we try to do, like, a mixture of, like, inspiring to action, and okay, we just need to be happy. And this next month is the Cartoonist Club, because I just put my foot down, and I said, I've been suggesting this since the beginning, I need a happy book that also inspires to action.
• 1:00:31
  Lucy Knisley: Good, and I think it'll be.
• 1:00:32
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm being the benevolent dictator, it's my podcast, this is what we're reading next week.
• 1:00:37
  Lucy Knisley: and… For people that aren't, like, comics…
• 1:00:40
  Lucy Knisley: critics, or, you know, read comics critically, too, it's really good, it's a really good way to sort of talk about the… the psychology of reading comics, so that's awesome. I'm glad you're doing that.
• 1:00:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, well, I mean, they're a fantastic group, you wouldn't enjoy them. Like, Edgar, Sam, and Lee are…
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: Chicago-area psychologists that use comics in their practice.
• 1:01:04
  Lucy Knisley: Great.
• 1:01:05
  Tad Eggleston: They'll use superheroes to help kids with trauma.
• 1:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: Awesome. But they've been branching out from superheroes now that they've got me going, hey, read these two.
• 1:01:15
  Lucy Knisley: Good.
• 1:01:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so, so, like…
• 1:01:21
  Tad Eggleston: the plan started hatching on, what, November 7th? The day after the election, when it's like,
• 1:01:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we're gonna need…
• 1:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna need a place to… to vent and not feel like the world is ending?
• 1:01:39
  Tad Eggleston: So, you can join. I'll add you to the list. There's a long list. Not a lot of people show up regularly, but everybody wants to know what we're reading, and then I'll bump into them places, and like, I keep meaning to come, but…
• 1:01:54
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a working artist, or…
• 1:01:56
  Lucy Knisley: Right.
• 1:01:57
  Tad Eggleston: I go to sleep early, and I'm on the East Coast?
• 1:02:00
  Lucy Knisley: I'm very heavily involved in my local community independent bookstore here. I'm the artist in residence, basically, and we do a lot of great.
• 1:02:10
  Tad Eggleston: Shout out to your bookstore, then.
• 1:02:12
  Lucy Knisley: It's called Booked, it's here in Evanston, Illinois, and it's awesome. It's little, and it specializes in young readers, but it's got all ages.
• 1:02:20
  Tad Eggleston: I think I know this… I'm pretty certain I know this store. Yeah.
• 1:02:23
  Lucy Knisley: It's a completely radical, amazing store, and they do so many community events, and I'm involved in a small percentage of them, but I still do, like, almost something every month.
• 1:02:34
  Lucy Knisley: So, like, this month we're doing a 20th anniversary Twilight crafting party, which is gonna be completely unhinged. I'm one of the co-hosts for it, and we're doing, like, bedazzling the books, and we're gonna, I'm making,
• 1:02:51
  Lucy Knisley: laminated little figurines of Edward and Bella that you can put in your.
• 1:02:57
  Tad Eggleston: houseplants, or your Christmas tree, or your tree out there. When is this?
• 1:03:01
  Lucy Knisley: It is sold out, unfortunately, because it's a tiny bookstore, but it is, next Friday? This Friday, I think. This Friday.
• 1:03:10
  Tad Eggleston: I was gonna say, like, my wife's a middle school art teacher, she could just come and, like, help with the making certain things.
• 1:03:17
  Lucy Knisley: Everybody can do stuff, yeah.
• 1:03:20
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't.
• 1:03:20
  Lucy Knisley: even thinking.
• 1:03:20
  Tad Eggleston: Thinking about it as, as like, oh…
• 1:03:24
  Tad Eggleston: I, I was, I was immediately thinking the, the, the…
• 1:03:29
  Tad Eggleston: My wife is an art teacher that's so up her alley, it's not even…
• 1:03:33
  Lucy Knisley: Perfect. Well, she should come. We do, in January, we're going to do our third Hot Moms Night, which is just, like, a mom community-building event. It's a after-hours bookstore dance party, and I do live drawing at the Hot Moms events. The last one we did was 90s-themed, and we, like, wore butterfly clips in our hair and listened to 90s music, and I drew moms onto Poke Mom cards.
• 1:03:58
  Lucy Knisley: Which was really fun.
• 1:04:00
  Lucy Knisley: And this time, it's going to be, Golden Girls themed.
• 1:04:04
  Lucy Knisley: So I'm drawing.
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: So, so here is my question.
• 1:04:08
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 1:04:08
  Tad Eggleston: Because my wife is the world's biggest Golden Girls fan.
• 1:04:12
  Lucy Knisley: She's gotta come. But she is not a mother, only a grandmother.
• 1:04:16
  Tad Eggleston: Is that okay?
• 1:04:17
  Lucy Knisley: That is totally acceptable. You do not have to be an official mom, you just have to embody the spirit of Mom's Night Out.
• 1:04:24
  Tad Eggleston: You said hot mom, so, like, I didn't want to steal the spot if, if, like…
• 1:04:28
  Lucy Knisley: It's not relegated to any one gender, or…
• 1:04:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I didn't want this to be one of those, like, 15 items or less, and she shows up with 17.
• 1:04:37
  Lucy Knisley: No, she would be very welcome. So I'm doing a live drawing event where I will draw you with the Golden Girls, so your portrait goes here, with the Golden Girls, and you get to take this home. So it's all a fundraiser for the independent bookstore, and they give a portion of the proceeds to local charities, and it's really cool. So I'm pretty well tied up.
• 1:04:57
  Tad Eggleston: And, like.
• 1:04:57
  Lucy Knisley: All of that. They're doing tons of really cool community events.
• 1:05:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this is, this is, this is definitely something that we will,
• 1:05:05
  Tad Eggleston: We will… we will need to, show up for.
• 1:05:08
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, highly recommend. I'm also… I just did a visit…
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: What day of the week is it? I didn't film it yet.
• 1:05:15
  Lucy Knisley: The Golden Girls thing isn't, isn't out yet, because it's not until January, but, but it will be announced sometime probably in the next month. But the, the Twilight thing is unfortunately sold out. We're thinking about doing a second, because there's been such a huge amount of interest. Yeah.
• 1:05:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I don't know if 10… I mean, it's our anniversary weekend, and I got her
• 1:05:38
  Tad Eggleston: tickets for, do you know, Hillary Campbell?
• 1:05:42
  Lucy Knisley: No, we got…
• 1:05:43
  Tad Eggleston: Henry Campbell is a New Yorker cartoonist who did the graphic novel Murder Book.
• 1:05:49
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah, okay.
• 1:05:49
  Tad Eggleston: a crime junkie.
• 1:05:51
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:51
  Tad Eggleston: And now has her… her new book is, is, The Joy of Snacking.
• 1:05:56
  Lucy Knisley: Cool.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: She's in town for, like, a stand-up event slash shining on our anniversary, and, like…
• 1:06:04
  Lucy Knisley: Perfect.
• 1:06:05
  Tad Eggleston: Murder book is what finally got my wife into comics, so, like, it's like, yeah, we have to go do that.
• 1:06:11
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, for sure. What a perfect anniversary celebration.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, no, I had Hillary on… the one time Kelly's actually been on the podcast was when we had Hillary on.
• 1:06:21
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, fun, that's great.
• 1:06:22
  Tad Eggleston: was, like…
• 1:06:25
  Tad Eggleston: well, first of all, I wasn't gonna let her get away with not being on, but second of all, like, half the reason Hillary was on was I sent the email going, for 10 years, I've been trying to get my wife, who's an artist and loves storytelling, into comics, and she…
• 1:06:39
  Tad Eggleston: We hadn't managed to break that barrier.
• 1:06:42
  Tad Eggleston: And then I brought home a murder book, and I didn't even bring it home for her, it was on a stack of library books, but she picked it up on her own, and the next thing I knew, she's going.
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: Do you have any Rick Geary? And I'm like…
• 1:06:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, but you do! I bought it for you for Christmas last year, and your birthday two years before that.
• 1:07:03
  Tad Eggleston: Turned out I'd been buying all of the right books for my wife, at least in terms of the true crime stuff. She discovered that she loves YA comics on her own.
• 1:07:11
  Tad Eggleston: That's what she found your stuff.
• 1:07:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:07:15
  Lucy Knisley: What did she think of My Friend Drommer? Did she read it?
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: she's a big fan, and that's one of the few other people that she's said hello to. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. But then she felt bad, because, like.
• 1:07:30
  Tad Eggleston: he's got a love-hate relationship with that book, because, like, he lived it.
• 1:07:36
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:07:36
  Tad Eggleston: She's like, oh, I'm so sorry. I'm like, no, Kelly, you're fine. Because she was listening to the episode, and there's a point where I actually had to shut down my co-host. I'm like, Tyler, I think he's ready to talk about literally any other book now.
• 1:07:50
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, no.
• 1:07:54
  Tad Eggleston: But, no, Derf's a good guy.
• 1:07:56
  Lucy Knisley: true crime comic.
• 1:07:58
  Tad Eggleston: It's a great one.
• 1:07:58
  Lucy Knisley: Yes.
• 1:07:59
  Tad Eggleston: It's a great one. I'm a big fan of, the Green River Killer, though.
• 1:08:04
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah!
• 1:08:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Dutton.
• 1:08:06
  Lucy Knisley: Cool, okay.
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:08:08
  Lucy Knisley: Good to know. And again, Kelly's the expert. She knows them all.
• 1:08:13
  Tad Eggleston: Rick Geary's made a career out of it, but it's mostly a historical true crime.
• 1:08:18
  Tad Eggleston: Really well done, historical true crime.
• 1:08:20
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah. You know.
• 1:08:23
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even remember all of the ones. Like…
• 1:08:27
  Tad Eggleston: This podcast makes me abundantly aware of all of the things that I don't know as well as I'd like to in comics, but so does my wife, because, like.
• 1:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: I read more comics than almost anybody, but she gives me a run for my money sometimes, and yet we have…
• 1:08:49
  Tad Eggleston: minimal crossover, except those handful of books that either I go, oh no, you really need to read this, or… or she goes, oh, no, no, no, you really need to read this. It's not like… it's not like I wouldn't like most of the books that she reads, it's just that, like…
• 1:09:04
  Lucy Knisley: There's so much.
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: there's so much, and I'm trying to cover so many different bases at once, you know? I mean, we try…
• 1:09:11
  Tad Eggleston: I say we, but it's a lot me. I keep being told by my co-hosts that it's my show now.
• 1:09:20
  Tad Eggleston: I try so hard to cover so many different realms of comics, you know?
• 1:09:26
  Lucy Knisley: Oh my gosh.
• 1:09:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 1:09:27
  Tad Eggleston: The indie stuff, not to skip the superhero stuff, even though it's not…
• 1:09:32
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to be, like… the reason we came up with the tagline initially, the exploring the… exploring, examining, and elevating the medium
• 1:09:42
  Tad Eggleston: of comics was I am so frustrated with people that, like, oh, I love comic books. Oh, what'd you think of the Spider-Man movie? I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. First of all, superheroes does not equal comics. Superheroes is a genre in comics. Second, it was right there in the question you asked me. Movies.
• 1:10:01
  Lucy Knisley: Right.
• 1:10:02
  Tad Eggleston: Movie is a different medium.
• 1:10:06
  Lucy Knisley: Every time I teach to kids, I have to explain what a genre, a medium…
• 1:10:11
  Lucy Knisley: Like, I'll, like… I mean, I talk about…
• 1:10:14
  Tad Eggleston: wrong. I liked the new Spider-Man movie, but it's completely…
• 1:10:18
  Lucy Knisley: It's a different thing. It's a different thing.
• 1:10:22
  Lucy Knisley: And half the time, when they ask me about the new superhero movie, I'm like, I haven't seen it yet. Right.
• 1:10:27
  Tad Eggleston: But aren't you?
• 1:10:28
  Lucy Knisley: again.
• 1:10:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like, again, I'm into comics.
• 1:10:32
  Lucy Knisley: Right.
• 1:10:34
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are my thing. I have to ask the question, if you're a Golden Girls fan, have you read Golden Rage?
• 1:10:43
  Lucy Knisley: No!
• 1:10:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh… Chrissy Williams and Lauren Knight.
• 1:10:48
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. It's like… it's like Golden Girls… meets Lord of the Flies.
• 1:10:55
  Lucy Knisley: Oh my god, that sounds amazing. Okay, I will get it.
• 1:10:58
  Lucy Knisley: You have to understand, so I have a 9-year-old, and they're.
• 1:11:01
  Tad Eggleston: And you work for a living.
• 1:11:02
  Lucy Knisley: And I work for a living. But I… I have to say, my 9-year-old is the most well-read comics reader I… I have ever known. And I'm a professional, I work in the industry, like, I read a lot of comics. This kid reads comics at a rate that, like, you… you would not believe, and…
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I might.
• 1:11:18
  Lucy Knisley: Like, I'm sure you do, you're in education, like, that you see these kids.
• 1:11:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and also, I, like, managed to read all 3 of your Peapod books while teaching today.
• 1:11:28
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, there you go, yeah, okay, so you know about it, it's…
• 1:11:31
  Lucy Knisley: it's just wild, because when I was growing up, like, we didn't have access to a lot of graphic novels, and now.
• 1:11:37
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually what I love about digital comics.
• 1:11:41
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, it's great. My kid just ran…
• 1:11:44
  Tad Eggleston: carry a library in my backpack, and it doesn't weigh a thousand pounds.
• 1:11:48
  Lucy Knisley: I really, really want the technology to catch up, though, because, like, the e-readers that are black and white don't really do the color comics justice, and then, like, I hate reading them on a screen, so I don't want to read them on, like, an iPad, and so my kid just read…
• 1:12:04
  Tad Eggleston: No, but that's essentially the only good way to do them right now, is an iPad.
• 1:12:09
  Lucy Knisley: I know, but, like, I just feel bad, like, giving my kid an iPad for 6 hours. Like, they'll read an e-reader for 6 hours, and I'll be like, that's…
• 1:12:16
  Tad Eggleston: At least, at least some of them have settings to, to help with the eyes, or get them a nice blue, blue, blue, blue, blue, thing.
• 1:12:25
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:12:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right. There are ways to deal with it.
• 1:12:28
  Lucy Knisley: It's true.
• 1:12:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it's also different when it's static images versus…
• 1:12:33
  Tad Eggleston: Moving images in terms of, like…
• 1:12:35
  Lucy Knisley: But now they've, like, animated the comics, which drives me crazy also, where it, like, zooms in, like, to the panel, and I'm going, what is this?
• 1:12:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, see, that's the other advantage of reading it on the iPad. You don't have to do that. Like, when I read on my phone, I use the zoom in.
• 1:12:53
  Lucy Knisley: But.
• 1:12:55
  Tad Eggleston: I'm insane.
• 1:12:55
  Lucy Knisley: And I want to re…
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Comics in every free second.
• 1:12:58
  Tad Eggleston: Me too, I know, but, like.
• 1:13:00
  Lucy Knisley: I just want to keep up with, like, a fraction of what this kid is reading, just… just so that I can be, like, a part of their interests, and I want to know what they're reading and what they're responding to professionally.
• 1:13:10
  Tad Eggleston: How does he… how does he deal with old ladies and bloodshed?
• 1:13:15
  Lucy Knisley: I'm sure that would really be maybe their thing, but they read a lot of manga these days, and there's some pretty fucked up shit in that, so, like, I'll look over…
• 1:13:26
  Tad Eggleston: It says, here we go!
• 1:13:28
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, what's happening?
• 1:13:28
  Tad Eggleston: Here we go, read it with him.
• 1:13:30
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, exactly. So, so I… I feel like I'm barely keeping up with a fraction of what my kid is reading, and I've basically let almost all adult comic readership fall by the wayside in the meantime, so someday I will get back to it.
• 1:13:45
  Tad Eggleston: What's his favorite thing right now? Or does he read so much that he doesn't even really have a favorite?
• 1:13:50
  Lucy Knisley: Oh my god, it changes so much, but they're really into, they're really into D&D, of course. I know it shocks you to hear that I have kind of a nerd child, but .
• 1:13:59
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I don't know how that happened.
• 1:14:02
  Lucy Knisley: Of course. You did something…
• 1:14:03
  Tad Eggleston: right.
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: For a while, I didn't have a near child, and I thought there was something terribly, terribly wrong with me.
• 1:14:10
  Lucy Knisley: Hmm.
• 1:14:11
  Tad Eggleston: Then he came around.
• 1:14:16
  Lucy Knisley: How could you even survive for a moment about that? Right.
• 1:14:20
  Lucy Knisley: So Scott Kurtz was at,
• 1:14:23
  Lucy Knisley: the Crossroads show in Columbus that I was at, and
• 1:14:28
  Lucy Knisley: I've followed Scott's work for a really long time, and recently he started making a series about kids playing D&D, and I, like.
• 1:14:36
  Lucy Knisley: saw Scott across the room at the, like, special guest cocktail mixer, and sort of, like.
• 1:14:41
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:14:41
  Lucy Knisley: he lined, like, running full speed at him, and was like, Scott… That's who you're running.
• 1:14:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:48
  Tad Eggleston: I was up in the balcony.
• 1:14:50
  Lucy Knisley: Of course.
• 1:14:52
  Tad Eggleston: Hiding out.
• 1:14:52
  Lucy Knisley: when is the next one coming out? Like, my kid needs to know
• 1:14:56
  Lucy Knisley: what happens in the next one? When is the next one coming out? And he was like, oh, it's done. I handed it into the publisher, it's not out yet, but it's done. Would you like me to send you a PDF? And I was like, yes, please! So my kid just read that, and it was awesome, of course, and that was really great. He does this whole, series about kids playing D&D and sort of, like, finding their place among D&D players, which is so great. So, so they're into that.
• 1:15:20
  Lucy Knisley: And then they're reading, they just read, like, all.
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: What's the… Table Titans?
• 1:15:24
  Lucy Knisley: Little Titans, yes.
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:15:28
  Lucy Knisley: The second book's not out yet, but it is very good.
• 1:15:32
  Tad Eggleston: See, that's my favorite… that's my favorite thing about podcasting, is I get…
• 1:15:37
  Lucy Knisley: It's…
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Getting more and more reader copies of things.
• 1:15:41
  Lucy Knisley: It's, like, maybe my favorite thing about being an author is that, like, I meet other authors, and I'm like, I really liked your first book, when's the next one coming out? And they're like, I'll send you a copy.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:15:49
  Lucy Knisley: Right, exactly. I haven't just seduced you into this, like, purposely over the course of many months, but I.
• 1:15:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no, like, like…
• 1:15:58
  Tad Eggleston: I can't tell you how gratifying it was the first time I got sent something that hadn't even been announced yet.
• 1:16:05
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: And then how much it sucked when it never got announced because things went sideways.
• 1:16:11
  Lucy Knisley: I'm like, put that.
• 1:16:12
  Tad Eggleston: Your book is so good!
• 1:16:14
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, no…
• 1:16:15
  Tad Eggleston: I have the PDF…
• 1:16:17
  Lucy Knisley: That's been…
• 1:16:17
  Tad Eggleston: Issue 1 of a series that never came out.
• 1:16:20
  Lucy Knisley: Wow. Oh, that sucks. I've read some work by a friend that got… the whole project got axed, and it's… it's painful.
• 1:16:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah? But, at the same time, I'm so happy that I have this great work by a friend of mine.
• 1:16:35
  Lucy Knisley: Right?
• 1:16:36
  Tad Eggleston: performed other great work. I mean, I can see, like, I can see… how…
• 1:16:43
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, gonna probably give away a little bit to anybody listening. He got to do a run on Star Trek, which was, like, his…
• 1:16:49
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, fun.
• 1:16:50
  Tad Eggleston: dream thing. But this was before that, and it was like…
• 1:16:55
  Tad Eggleston: the closest to Star Trek that he ever thought he was gonna get to do.
• 1:16:58
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, interesting.
• 1:16:59
  Tad Eggleston: crushed him when… it didn't take off, but I could see some of the stuff.
• 1:17:04
  Lucy Knisley: actually go into his Star Trek run, so… Oh, perfect.
• 1:17:08
  Tad Eggleston: No doubt, okay.
• 1:17:09
  Tad Eggleston: for him.
• 1:17:10
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:17:10
  Tad Eggleston: He's doing alright, but it still sucks to have, like, the… like, particularly because my friend is the writer, so, like, essentially what happened is the art was in the can, and the reason they never got to do more is the artist didn't get paid for what he did, much.
• 1:17:26
  Lucy Knisley: Whoa.
• 1:17:26
  Tad Eggleston: next issue, and it's like, well.
• 1:17:28
  Lucy Knisley: Okay, yeah.
• 1:17:29
  Tad Eggleston: Until you start paying people. Kinda how business works. Right.
• 1:17:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, but… but I don't know if you've noticed, there have been a handful of,
• 1:17:42
  Tad Eggleston: Comics creators that have not… not thought that that was the way.
• 1:17:48
  Lucy Knisley: You mean not getting paid? Or…
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, well, I mean, the, like, the comics publishers have thought that, like.
• 1:17:54
  Lucy Knisley: Mmm.
• 1:17:55
  Tad Eggleston: Paying creators was… was secondary to…
• 1:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: to trying to sell their stuff to Hollywood.
• 1:18:02
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:18:03
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:18:05
  Lucy Knisley: There's a lot of that shit going on.
• 1:18:07
  Tad Eggleston: to find your talk with Raina at Anderson's.
• 1:18:10
  Lucy Knisley: Oh. What was the book about it?
• 1:18:13
  Lucy Knisley: November 10th, I think.
• 1:18:16
  Tad Eggleston: That's why.
• 1:18:18
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, were you looking in October?
• 1:18:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right now, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:21
  Lucy Knisley: Next month.
• 1:18:22
  Tad Eggleston: November 10th.
• 1:18:25
  Lucy Knisley: I'm barely mentioned. Don't wear it like it's fine.
• 1:18:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 1:18:29
  Lucy Knisley: I'll be like, alright.
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of.
• 1:18:30
  Lucy Knisley: coming.
• 1:18:30
  Tad Eggleston: expect… well, I mean, no, there's a decent picture of you there.
• 1:18:33
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:18:36
  Tad Eggleston: So… Which one is it, Ed?
• 1:18:41
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Danish Grove.
• 1:18:43
  Tad Eggleston: It's…
• 1:18:47
  Tad Eggleston: Are tickets still available? That's the million dollar question.
• 1:18:51
  Lucy Knisley: Oh yeah, they gotta be. They've barely started.
• 1:18:53
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is Reyna.
• 1:18:55
  Lucy Knisley: It's true.
• 1:18:56
  Lucy Knisley: But it's in a huge auditorium.
• 1:18:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it does look like it's… it does look like it's still available. Okay, good to know.
• 1:19:04
  Tad Eggleston: I'll figure that out later. I just had to… I'd been down that rabbit hole for a while, but you kept entertaining me, so I had to actually found the…
• 1:19:13
  Lucy Knisley: I'm glad you found it, sorry about that.
• 1:19:15
  Tad Eggleston: No! No, I mean, like, this is a podcast, like, our job is to entertain my mom and brother and whoever else is listening, not… not to have me go down a rabbit hole and…
• 1:19:27
  Lucy Knisley: Heh.
• 1:19:27
  Tad Eggleston: Buy, buy tickets.
• 1:19:29
  Tad Eggleston: It does look like there's no option to buy tickets without a book, though.
• 1:19:33
  Lucy Knisley: No, you gotta get a book. That's how Anderson's operates.
• 1:19:36
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, see, I would absolutely get one book, but, like, if I go with my wife, like, we have to get
• 1:19:44
  Tad Eggleston: And you get one as a gift.
• 1:19:45
  Lucy Knisley: I know, it's kind of…
• 1:19:47
  Tad Eggleston: That is something that I… I mean, I was expecting it to… oh, you know what?
• 1:19:52
  Tad Eggleston: at the ticket page. Have you seen this? Let me show you this. You're gonna appreciate this.
• 1:19:58
  Tad Eggleston: On the ticket page, Her name might be bigger?
• 1:20:04
  Tad Eggleston: But, but your picture is bigger.
• 1:20:07
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, alright.
• 1:20:09
  Lucy Knisley: My picture.
• 1:20:13
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, my picture is bigger! Thanks, like, ratio of the picture.
• 1:20:21
  Lucy Knisley: When, Raina and Scott came to town, they did another thing at Anderson's at a big auditorium. Yeah, I so wanted to go to that.
• 1:20:27
  Tad Eggleston: And I had already booked a podcast for the night when it was announced.
• 1:20:32
  Lucy Knisley: I was on book tour. I had, like, an event.
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: can't cancel… I forget who I was talking to, but it was, like, somebody that I also, like, did not at all feel comfortable canceling on.
• 1:20:42
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, of course. At least not until I met them and could, like…
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I think during the thing, or, like, before or after, when I mentioned it, they're like, ISO would have been at that. I'm like, oh, I didn't know that you would have been at that.
• 1:20:58
  Lucy Knisley: So the… we moved into our house a little… like, almost 6 years ago, and our neighborhood is full of
• 1:21:05
  Lucy Knisley: very well-read little girls, which is awesome, because I have this, like, ready readership for my early work, where I'm like, how do you like new chapters in my book? And it's great, and they're wonderful, but they found out that I know Raina pretty early on, because they were like, you're a comic artist, do you know Raina? And I was like.
• 1:21:22
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, I do. And obviously, this is, like, the most interesting thing about me to any young girl. Right. And, and so they… they were all a froth about her coming to town to do this thing, with Andersons.
• 1:21:37
  Lucy Knisley: And, and they were like, are you gonna be there? Are you gonna, like, see your friend? And I was like, I, you know, it really sucks, I have to be out of town, I'm doing this other book event, it's, like, too bad. But my theory is that they think that I am… have been lying about knowing her, so I'm really glad I'm doing this. Like, Raina asked me specifically to do the in-conversation
• 1:21:56
  Lucy Knisley: situation with her, because I'm telling all of the little girls, I'm like, it's true, we know each other, I promise. Proof is coming!
• 1:22:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know, it doesn't get old.
• 1:22:09
  Lucy Knisley: No, of course.
• 1:22:10
  Tad Eggleston: That's the weirdest thing about… you know, I've been doing this podcast for almost 4 years now, and the number of people I count among my friends that I, like, I feel like I have to pinch myself every time I say my friend so-and-so.
• 1:22:23
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, it's awesome. The comics industry is so wonderful that way, it's a great community.
• 1:22:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it's like, but they are. They are my friend so-and-so.
• 1:22:32
  Lucy Knisley: I swear. I swear we know each other.
• 1:22:34
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I have high hopes that, like, a year from now, it's gonna be my friend Lucy. I feel like we're… I might be wrong, but…
• 1:22:42
  Lucy Knisley: For sure. I go to, comics camp every year, do you know it?
• 1:22:47
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:22:48
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, it's in Alaska. A lot of West Coast cartoonists, but it's in Alaska, and it's in Juneau, Alaska. It's incredible. It's a little convention on, like, a Saturday, and then they take all of the
• 1:23:01
  Lucy Knisley: comic people that came to the convention and put us in a bus and take us to a, like, a children's camp.
• 1:23:08
  Lucy Knisley: in the wilderness of Alaska for, like, 4 days, where we just do, like, workshops for each other, and talk about the industry, and hang out, and, like, connect in a way that you don't really get to when you're, like, at a convention and you're working.
• 1:23:22
  Lucy Knisley: And it's really, really cool, and unbelievable people come, and last year, Scott and Raina were both there, and they were just off of the big tour that they had been going on, so they were really like, oh, we needed this to, like, remind ourselves that there's, like, a community here, and it's not just a business, and it was really cool. I… it is one of the most
• 1:23:42
  Lucy Knisley: Incredible things you can do as an artist is to, like, find opportunities for fellowship in this way, and…
• 1:23:48
  Lucy Knisley: Doing that with, like, Raina and Scott is so wonderful, because it's… it's a great reminder that they're not just these, like, famous friends of mine. They're, like, you know, incredible people that you can learn from, and talk to, and who've known me for more than 20 years now, and it's really, really cool to… to have these long-standing.
• 1:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was… that was honestly the other reason that I wasn't… even though Chris and I get along really, really well, the other reason that I didn't, like, interrupt
• 1:24:15
  Tad Eggleston: him and Reyna.
• 1:24:17
  Tad Eggleston: other than just being scared to, was, like, they were having just such a… they were laughing, like, you could tell it was old friends that didn't get to spend much time together, and it's like…
• 1:24:28
  Tad Eggleston: I just can't bring myself to go.
• 1:24:31
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, I get it.
• 1:24:33
  Tad Eggleston: inject myself there. Like, I stood near enough that if Chris had seen me and wanted to, he could have gone, hey, Dad, come over here! But… but I wasn't.
• 1:24:43
  Lucy Knisley: They were locked in.
• 1:24:44
  Tad Eggleston: I couldn't be that guy. Okay, I'm gonna have to move two book clubs to go see you, but it will be worth it.
• 1:24:51
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, sorry.
• 1:24:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's heavy metal and saga, so…
• 1:24:56
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: The people are people that I know and love and will understand, and we will…
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly wind up having them on different days, because the saga has to be on…
• 1:25:13
  Tad Eggleston: certain days, because one of the members has a D&D game on alternate Mondays, so it's gotta be so that it's around her D&D game.
• 1:25:24
  Tad Eggleston: The heavy metal is the one that's been going on longer, but it also has a couple of people that very much want to be in the Saga Club.
• 1:25:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which is how they wind up against each other.
• 1:25:36
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, we'll talk about heavy metal from 7 to, like, 8, 8.15, and then… or no, from 6 to 8, 8.15, and then 8.30, we'll have the new group to talk about Saga.
• 1:25:51
  Lucy Knisley: Nice. Alright.
• 1:25:53
  Tad Eggleston: This is how I… this is how I avoid the, abyss, Lucy. I… I think…
• 1:25:58
  Lucy Knisley: the despair?
• 1:25:59
  Tad Eggleston: I think we have 10 active book clubs right now on 22 panels.
• 1:26:04
  Lucy Knisley: Like, bring it on, whatever it takes, right?
• 1:26:07
  Tad Eggleston: I actually wound up doing the math today, because…
• 1:26:11
  Tad Eggleston: I was joking, like, so many of my friends are like, yeah, you do 3 podcasts a day, and I'm like, I don't do 3… I don't even do one every day. We've been at this for 4 years, and I've only done, like, 714, so that's, like, every other day.
• 1:26:30
  Lucy Knisley: Barely, barely.
• 1:26:33
  Tad Eggleston: And my wife is like, yeah, and besides, sometimes it's 5 on one day, and then you take a whole 2 days off.
• 1:26:43
  Lucy Knisley: Whatever it takes, right?
• 1:26:45
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, y-you know that you're doing something…
• 1:26:49
  Tad Eggleston: Well, something. I'm not gonna say right or wrong. Something when you're… when your Eisner Hall of Fame
• 1:26:58
  Tad Eggleston: Member buddy tells you that you need to fire your scheduler.
• 1:27:03
  Tad Eggleston: And you point out to him that you are the scheduler, and he says, I don't care. Heads must roll.
• 1:27:11
  Lucy Knisley: They're working you too hard, up in corporate.
• 1:27:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, not paying enough, either. Thanks, Mom. Thanks, Adam. My two patrons are also… are also family members. And thanks, Andy. Andy wound up having troubles with Patreon, but he still sends the money anyway, which means we.
• 1:27:30
  Lucy Knisley: I don't even have the cut taken.
• 1:27:31
  Tad Eggleston: way. Works out even better.
• 1:27:35
  Tad Eggleston: The original kind of patronage.
• 1:27:37
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 1:27:38
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, we've gone all over the place, and now I just know that we'll… you'll have to come back.
• 1:27:43
  Lucy Knisley: Okay, well, what were you talking about?
• 1:27:45
  Tad Eggleston: kids.
• 1:27:46
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, college, right?
• 1:27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, but we'll get back to that. I'm gonna ask the last question, because I feel like we're just, like…
• 1:27:54
  Tad Eggleston: We're at that point where it's a good time to wrap and assume that we'll do this again.
• 1:28:00
  Lucy Knisley: Okay.
• 1:28:01
  Tad Eggleston: It's, it's like, it's like I, like, like when…
• 1:28:05
  Tad Eggleston: when my wife and I are visiting a city, and she starts to go, whoa, we're not gonna have time to say this, and I'm like, Kelly.
• 1:28:11
  Tad Eggleston: We can come back.
• 1:28:12
  Lucy Knisley: Perfect.
• 1:28:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, unless you want to be a 4-hour podcast.
• 1:28:18
  Lucy Knisley: No, I do probably have to put my child to bed at some point.
• 1:28:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's kind of what I was thinking, is that, like, you might want to read a comic with him or something before… I mean, he already came and got the blanket, so I'm assuming he's curled up somewhere.
• 1:28:30
  Lucy Knisley: Definitely.
• 1:28:31
  Tad Eggleston: stack of graphic novels. He's read, like, two of them while we were talking.
• 1:28:35
  Lucy Knisley: At least. Yep.
• 1:28:38
  Tad Eggleston: But, I have a favorite quillo's question that I ask every time, so you have to ask answer it the next time you're on, too.
• 1:28:44
  Lucy Knisley: Okay.
• 1:28:45
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:28:47
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic?
• 1:28:48
  Tad Eggleston: But we don't really have rules.
• 1:28:51
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
• 1:28:55
  Tad Eggleston: But something that you love…
• 1:28:57
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:29:06
  Lucy Knisley: Hmm… I'm looking at my bookshelf, hold on.
• 1:29:09
  Tad Eggleston: That's the common response.
• 1:29:11
  Lucy Knisley: Yep.
• 1:29:14
  Lucy Knisley: Okay, let's see… something I love that not enough people know about.
• 1:29:24
  Lucy Knisley: God, I feel like such a basic bitch, because I'm like… Everybody loves all these books!
• 1:29:29
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, I mean, it's totally a lot… I mean, just to give you an idea of, like, the range of things we get, we go from obscure comics to…
• 1:29:41
  Tad Eggleston: to… obscure and not-so-obscure movies, to Nate Powell, the last time I talked to him, said, this is gonna sound really weird, but I started reading X-Men again, and I'm not in a crowd of people who read X-Men movies.
• 1:29:57
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, no kidding. Okay, wait, hold on, I'm gonna get…
• 1:30:00
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 1:30:00
  Lucy Knisley: And then Andrew Iden, the last time I talked to him, said his tomato plants, so, like, there's, like, there's a lot of room.
• 1:30:09
  Tad Eggleston: I accept all answers.
• 1:30:11
  Lucy Knisley: Okay.
• 1:30:12
  Tad Eggleston: But I do like it when somebody manages to come up with a comic that I haven't read.
• 1:30:16
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, a challenge, okay.
• 1:30:18
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 1:30:20
  Lucy Knisley: Particularly…
• 1:30:20
  Tad Eggleston: if you love it, because if you love it, I'm gonna, like, put it on my list of things that I need to go track down.
• 1:30:24
  Lucy Knisley: Well, I mean, but you're a… you know Chicago, so you're gonna know both of these things that I am bringing over. So, two of my best friends.
• 1:30:33
  Tad Eggleston: Probably, but I wasn't enough in the indie scene until recently. So we'll see.
• 1:30:39
  Lucy Knisley: It's borderline indie. So, two of my best
• 1:30:42
  Lucy Knisley: closest long-time Chicago comics people in my life are Sarah Beacon and Corinne Mucha. Sarah Beacon is known for her Let's Make series. She's at Let's Make Ramen, Let's Make Dumplings, she did Let's Make Bread last year, which I think is downstairs because my kid stole it. And she's coming out with a Let's Make Cocktails.
• 1:31:02
  Lucy Knisley: book, and they're amazing. They're so…
• 1:31:06
  Lucy Knisley: incredibly detailed, and, like, she gets really fussy, she gets really into the weeds on the recipes, and, like, it's just really incredible stuff, and I'm always surprised when I meet people who don't know her work, especially if they're a fan of my work, and they're like, I love your food.
• 1:31:21
  Tad Eggleston: Don't know it well enough.
• 1:31:23
  Lucy Knisley: Awesome. Oh, she's the best. So Sarah's a huge…
• 1:31:27
  Tad Eggleston: It's been on my radar.
• 1:31:29
  Lucy Knisley: So…
• 1:31:30
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't know it well enough, so it just went higher, higher on… particularly because I don't think I knew that she was in Chicago, either.
• 1:31:38
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 1:31:38
  Tad Eggleston: I knew that she'd done the Challengers thing, but they have enough people from non-Chicago that I didn't just… particularly because I think she was there for Let's Make Ramen, so, like, I didn't immediately assume…
• 1:31:50
  Tad Eggleston: It has to be… Chicago.
• 1:31:53
  Lucy Knisley: not really a known Chicago food, but she did Let's Make Bread at Challenger's, and I went, and she brought all these breads to eat.
• 1:32:00
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 1:32:01
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, it was really cool. Alright, so Corinne Mucha, she's not making that many comics these days, but she's amazing, and she's… these are two of her comics.
• 1:32:10
  Lucy Knisley: I think she's one of the funniest comic artists that's ever existed, and she has.
• 1:32:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, wait, wait a minute.
• 1:32:16
  Lucy Knisley: From a professional… this is called, Freshman Discipline.
• 1:32:20
  Lucy Knisley: Corinne Mucha, so her name is M-U-C-H-A, Mucha.
• 1:32:25
  Lucy Knisley: And she… she's got, This Is My Alaskan Summer, and, it's…
• 1:32:31
  Lucy Knisley: She wanted Zeric to publish it.
• 1:32:34
  Tad Eggleston: Nice.
• 1:32:34
  Lucy Knisley: It was a great grant for self-publishing back in the day. Yeah. This one's from Zest Books, and it's called Freshman, Tales of a Ninth Grade, Obsession, and Other Revelations. These are really good, but if you can track down any of her mini-comics, which I think you can probably find at, like.
• 1:32:50
  Lucy Knisley: Wendy's, maybe. She has ones about her… her cats, or her mother's cats, and the cat, like…
• 1:32:58
  Lucy Knisley: I'm a professional cat comic artist, like, I have published books about cats, and I consider myself something of an authority on this. Curran's cat comics are so wonderful, and they're so great. They, like, amongst
• 1:33:12
  Lucy Knisley: The top cat comics of all time.
• 1:33:15
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:33:15
  Lucy Knisley: We also have Nicole Hollander at Chicago, and she is amongst the top echelons of good cat comics as well. Do you know her work?
• 1:33:24
  Tad Eggleston: I… Feel like I recognize that name.
• 1:33:30
  Lucy Knisley: She's a grandmother of comics, she's great.
• 1:33:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:33:32
  Lucy Knisley: She has a memoir one that she has that's called We All Ate Wonder Bread, and then she… the one that I had when I was actually a kid, and was very formative, was called Everything Here is Mine, and it's from the perspective of the cats, and it's the Sylvia series she did that was really, like, subversive and cool, and
• 1:33:52
  Lucy Knisley: Very Chicago, she's awesome.
• 1:33:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I remember reading Sylvia in the paper.
• 1:33:58
  Lucy Knisley: These are all Chicago…
• 1:34:00
  Tad Eggleston: just reading.
• 1:34:01
  Lucy Knisley: I know.
• 1:34:01
  Tad Eggleston: Hobbs.
• 1:34:02
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, right?
• 1:34:04
  Lucy Knisley: My last Chicago lady that I just have to plug really quick, because she's my neighbor, is Kyla Roberts. She's awesome, and she, she, like, retired from comics, and then she made a new book that just came out this past year. So she's, you know, she's like…
• 1:34:19
  Lucy Knisley: doing the Miyazaki thing, where she's like, no, no, I'm done. No, actually. So, and she's awesome, too. So these are… these are some of my Chicago ladies who I know and love.
• 1:34:30
  Tad Eggleston: Kyla Roberts when I look them up, so give me, give me a title.
• 1:34:33
  Lucy Knisley: Hold on. Okay.
• 1:34:36
  Lucy Knisley: K, k, k, k.
• 1:34:37
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm assuming she's not the acrobatics and tumbling at Quinnipac. That's not her. Right.
• 1:34:44
  Lucy Knisley: Kyler is spelled…
• 1:34:46
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Kyle.
• 1:34:47
  Lucy Knisley: K-E-I-L-E-R.
• 1:34:52
  Lucy Knisley: This is one of my favorite ones. That changes it. Yeah. She.
• 1:34:57
  Tad Eggleston: Now she's coming up. American comic artist.
• 1:35:01
  Lucy Knisley: Kyla Roberts, and she was doing… she's, like, slightly older than me, and her daughter… her kid is about 17.
• 1:35:09
  Tad Eggleston: She's 2 years older than me, which makes her 7 years older than you.
• 1:35:13
  Lucy Knisley: Yes, and her kid is, like, 17 or 18 now, so the stuff that she did when her kid was really little was really, really, influential on the way that I made comics about my kid when they were little, because it's so good.
• 1:35:28
  Lucy Knisley: And, when I moved to Evanston, I found out she lives, like, 3 houses down from me.
• 1:35:33
  Tad Eggleston: This four-panel at the beginning of her…
• 1:35:41
  Tad Eggleston: Just on the front page of her website is, like, subversively funny.
• 1:35:46
  Lucy Knisley: They're so funny. Her comics are so funny.
• 1:35:49
  Tad Eggleston: It's just… it's just a woman in bed and Robin coming through the door, saying, hey, it's not your fault.
• 1:35:57
  Tad Eggleston: And sitting down on the bed, and saying, you can blame me. And by Robin, I mean, like, Bert ward shorts, Robin!
• 1:36:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I don't even know what to think about that, except that it makes me laugh.
• 1:36:13
  Lucy Knisley: Right? They're all like that. They're just really funny, and they're just, like, these weird conversations that she has with friends and stuff when they're hilarious.
• 1:36:21
  Tad Eggleston: See, you just officially gave me, like, you pulled it off, you gave me…
• 1:36:27
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely, 3 things that I, like, didn't know that I need to go read.
• 1:36:31
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, good, okay. They're all great, they're all Chicago, they're all radical women.
• 1:36:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I like all.
• 1:36:38
  Lucy Knisley: Proud of my selections.
• 1:36:40
  Tad Eggleston: You should be.
• 1:36:42
  Tad Eggleston: You should be. That's… that's a… but then I… you get a special bonus question, because A, you're… in…
• 1:36:51
  Lucy Knisley: Chicago slash North Suburbs, which in some ways is even better, because my wife teaches in Wilmette, and I teach in Lincolnshire, so North Suburbs is our.
• 1:37:00
  Tad Eggleston: our, open ground. Our area, too.
• 1:37:04
  Tad Eggleston: And you're a foodie, so, like, favorite place to go to eat?
• 1:37:08
  Lucy Knisley: Depends on what I'm in the mood for, of course.
• 1:37:12
  Lucy Knisley: The place that we go that's, like.
• 1:37:16
  Lucy Knisley: special occasion kind of thing is Latour, which is, the former chef at Found opened up Latour, and it's in this really weird building in Evanston that used to be, like, a bank, and it's sort of… it's like a round… weird round spaceship-shaped building, but it's really good, like.
• 1:37:34
  Lucy Knisley: Parisian French food, so it's kind of, like, fancy special occasion. I know you're celebrating your anniversary this weekend. We go there for our anniversary.
• 1:37:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, see, see, we, we are, we are,
• 1:37:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm not completely ruling it out forever, but we are, like, diametrically opposed to generally eating anywhere where it starts at $50.
• 1:37:57
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:37:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just looking at the review here, $50. We're in the more that the $10 to $20 per person?
• 1:38:03
  Tad Eggleston: We're teachers, Lou.
• 1:38:05
  Lucy Knisley: you see.
• 1:38:05
  Tad Eggleston: You should…
• 1:38:05
  Lucy Knisley: I understand.
• 1:38:06
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta think back to before you were New York Times best-selling.
• 1:38:10
  Lucy Knisley: I mean, this was, like, our 10-year anniversary special occasion place, but our usual place, our regular, is called Lucky Platter, and it's here in Evanston, and it's, it's just this really cool…
• 1:38:23
  Lucy Knisley: diner kind of place. It's very old Evanston, it's been around for many years.
• 1:38:28
  Tad Eggleston: think I've actually eaten here.
• 1:38:30
  Lucy Knisley: Excellent.
• 1:38:31
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think I've taken… well, no, actually, maybe we took Kidley.
• 1:38:35
  Tad Eggleston: I know that I… I've got a friend who's lived in
• 1:38:38
  Tad Eggleston: who's also a foodie, who's lived in Evanston for, God, probably 20 years now?
• 1:38:45
  Tad Eggleston: I'm pretty certain he's taken ME here.
• 1:38:48
  Lucy Knisley: Attracts.
• 1:38:49
  Lucy Knisley: It's down the street from Booked, the bookshop that I love.
• 1:38:54
  Lucy Knisley: So it's on the same street as Booked, and, so you can hit those both up at the same time, which is great, and then across the street from Booked is, this Belgian chocolatier, Puron, which is really good, and you can get, in the summer, warmer months, you can get chocolate mousse that they make that's
• 1:39:12
  Lucy Knisley: just amazing, and so every first and last day of school, I take my kid for this chocolate mousse, and then in the wintertime, they do hot chocolate at this chocolatier, and you can go and get it, and it's just, like, a melted chocolate cup. It's so good.
• 1:39:26
  Lucy Knisley: So yeah, so that's, like, the trifecta on Main Street. There's also a really cool, very old-school.
• 1:39:33
  Lucy Knisley: newsstand on the, like, the corner across Chicago Avenue there, so if you're doing, like, a whole Main Street run, that's really fun. It's very old-fashioned newsstand. It's, like, where I used to buy my comics kind of place. Right. And then there's, there's, like, a used bookshop down the street, so Main Street Corridor…
• 1:39:51
  Tad Eggleston: I definitely know the used bookshop.
• 1:39:54
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:39:55
  Tad Eggleston: I, I…
• 1:39:55
  Lucy Knisley: Squeeze.
• 1:39:56
  Tad Eggleston: Many a time there.
• 1:39:58
  Lucy Knisley: hurts.
• 1:40:00
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:40:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Lucy, thank you so much, and we absolutely need to do this again when your schedule will allow.
• 1:40:08
  Lucy Knisley: Thank you.
• 1:40:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because, among other things, like, we cut it short, because I went, I remember having children that age, you need to go spend time with them.
• 1:40:17
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah. And I can feel it. We could keep going.
• 1:40:22
  Tad Eggleston: I've had a couple that…
• 1:40:23
  Lucy Knisley: You could get the real comic expert in my house to come and talk to you, who is 9, so…
• 1:40:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I would be all for that, if he… if he ever wants to do it, and you guys come up with, like, a pseudonym for him, because I assume you don't want him… we'll find… we'll find, like, a.
• 1:40:38
  Lucy Knisley: power.
• 1:40:39
  Tad Eggleston: That's right, he's pal.
• 1:40:41
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, like the…
• 1:40:42
  Tad Eggleston: We'll find a voice distorter, so that…
• 1:40:47
  Tad Eggleston: We gotta make it cool for him, otherwise he'll get bored.
• 1:40:50
  Lucy Knisley: True.
• 1:40:51
  Lucy Knisley: No, I think talking about comics would pretty much carry us both, yeah.
• 1:40:55
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:40:55
  Tad Eggleston: I would be totally down with that. Cool.
• 1:40:58
  Lucy Knisley: Like, let me…
• 1:40:59
  Tad Eggleston: I know, we will set that up, because, like, I… I… I'm always looking for different voices. Like, I'm so happy that I have a couple Gen Zers in book clubs now, because.
• 1:41:12
  Lucy Knisley: Oh, yeah.
• 1:41:14
  Tad Eggleston: They've lived such amazingly different lives than we have.
• 1:41:18
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:41:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, among other things, we remember a time that was different.
• 1:41:23
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah.
• 1:41:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's generally how it goes when you realize it. Yeah…
• 1:41:35
  Tad Eggleston: Lucy, it has been an absolute pleasure. Likewise. I so wish that I had, reached out.
• 1:41:42
  Tad Eggleston: years ago, particularly because I could have just left a note with Patrick.
• 1:41:47
  Lucy Knisley: True.
• 1:41:49
  Tad Eggleston: But, we will definitely have to do this again.
• 1:41:53
  Lucy Knisley: Yeah, that'd be great.
• 1:41:54
  Tad Eggleston: For 22 panels, this has been Lucy Knisely, and we will see you after the next page.