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Transcript

With Great Power #265... 22 Panels with Zack Quaintance · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:01
Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. Phil is here to co-host.
0:07
Phil: Hello, hello.
0:07
Tad Eggleston: playing solo on an interview, woohoo! And our guest today is comics journalist and writer Zach Quaintance, who has a Kickstarter
0:18
Tad Eggleston: funding now, so we're gonna start, just so we don't forget. Zach, tell us about your Kickstarter.
0:23
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, my Kickstarter's a comic called Macabre Valley, number one, kicking off a new Texas grindhouse horror miniseries.
0:32
Zack Quaintance: Kind of incorporates, journalism, horror, and
0:39
Zack Quaintance: Monster… Southwestern take on Monster of the Week. In the first issue, we follow a young reporter who investigates the murder of a Border Patrol agent and gets sucked into a dark mystery that involves a beloved local priest and a werewolf.
0:52
Zack Quaintance: And off we go from there.
0:55
Tad Eggleston: I, I, I do like, you're… you're…
1:00
Tad Eggleston: repeated joke, particularly when it's the actual Border Patrol.
1:05
Tad Eggleston: Agents asking, is it… is it…
1:09
Tad Eggleston: Is it fentanyl? Is it immigrants?
1:13
Tad Eggleston: Is it vote tampering?
1:15
Zack Quaintance: Well, yeah, part… that's a…
1:18
Tad Eggleston: Looking into the dark.
1:21
Zack Quaintance: Right, right. Yeah, there's a werewolf is fighting… literally fighting them. There's a little bit of media commentary to it, since it's not a newspaper, and that's a… that's a boiled-down, TV news talking point, and they're just yelling it back at the werewolf as he attacks.
1:37
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. But I did… I did love that the Border Patrol agents adopted it, not just… because you… you'd had it coming from politicians and from news people before that, but when, like, it's the armed agents with a… with a werewolf in it.
1:52
Zack Quaintance: It was a callback, yeah, a few pages later, and what that kind of does, too, I hope, is establishes the tone as something that can be both gory and kind of funny.
2:02
Zack Quaintance: Kind of dark, darkly comedic.
2:05
Tad Eggleston: And maybe socially aware.
2:07
Phil: Yeah, that was, that was.
2:09
Tad Eggleston: I mean, not that that's a good thing. I don't want anybody coming after us. We're not socially aware on this podcast. Totally not!
2:17
Phil: Well, I think… I think we've established that… We're anti-war. You're socially aware, I'm socially unaware, and we try to…
2:25
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're taking the socially unaware position? You want me to be the one arrested and taken away?
2:31
Phil: you read… you follow news, Tad. I… I follow hearsay.
2:37
Phil: But no, that… that… I think that's.
2:38
Tad Eggleston: Sorry, Zach, we just roped you into that.
2:41
Phil: I'll let you guys play that one out.
2:45
Phil: The only… the only anti-woke I want to be is asleep.
2:50
Phil: Anyway, anyway, no, that was… that was probably the bit where I picked up on the humor as well. Like, it was the kind of thing where jumping in from the first couple of pages, I was like, okay, yeah, no, alright, that's… we got, we got intestines on the first page turn.
3:03
Phil: This is gonna be.
3:04
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I have to… I actually have to thank you for that, because, like, at least from my perspective, like, there are that handful of people that try to make comics to elevate truly horrendous things, rather than…
3:19
Tad Eggleston: educate and or make fun of truly horrendous things. So for that split second, where it's like, oh, we've got a Border Patrol agent torn apart, is Zach not who I thought he was? And then we get the joke, and it's like, oh, thank God.
3:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
3:38
Tad Eggleston: Hasn joined Comixgate. Oh, gosh. Ian Kane did not ghostwrite this…
3:45
Zack Quaintance: No, I mean, the disemboweled Border Patrol agent on the second page, which we have left out of our previews, because it's pretty gruesome, that's kind of to establish it as my type of, or our type of sort of pulpy, over-the-top.
4:01
Zack Quaintance: horror cart… and, like.
4:04
Zack Quaintance: it works well with the… with Anna Redman, with the artist, because, like, if we… if I was working with, like, a more photorealistic artist, I don't think we would have done that level of gore, like… No, please no.
4:14
Tad Eggleston: Exactly. But because… The Alex Ross Gore book is not one that I need.
4:19
Zack Quaintance: Looks like a.
4:22
Phil: Well…
4:22
Zack Quaintance: pre-med textbook or something.
4:24
Phil: No, it'.
4:25
Tad Eggleston: Well, except that the pre-med textbooks use cartoons. I know one of the cartoonists.
4:32
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, yeah, we went over the top quickly with the gore, just to kind of, like, set the tone that this is a horror comic, and we're gonna do some pulpy stuff here.
4:41
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, and I don't think it gets as gory as that later, but yeah, that's… that's a throw-you-in-the-deep-end moment early on.
4:47
Phil: Right. It also establishes, hey, if people are gonna get killed, we don't want you to feel bad about it.
4:53
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean… well, part of it, too, is, like, so on page one, we introduce our protagonist, who's, like, a young reporter, one of his first days on the job, and we want to introduce the theme that it's… he's really up against it, right? Like, that these… where he's chosen to work and the stories he's covering are… are gnarly.
5:13
Zack Quaintance: And so that was part of it as well. Like, you're… you're along with him to be like, oh my god, what did I get myself into?
5:19
Phil: Oh, yeah. Well, with him being a journalist, and with you being a journalist, is this a, I mean, I'm reading it as a self-insert, and hoping that you've crossed paths with at least one werewolf in your times.
5:29
Zack Quaintance: Heh.
5:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, wouldn't that be great if… there is stuff drawn from my real life, wouldn't that be great if it was the werewolf? Like, I was like, I've never been a journalist, I've just had a lot of run-ins with werewolves. There you go, there you go.
5:42
Phil: Oh, no, I mention that because I know you're a Grant Morrison fan from… I've followed you on the beat long enough to, to… I'm pretty sure you've interviewed them?
5:52
Zack Quaintance: I have not, but I did do a, rank… what you're probably thinking of is I did a ranking of all their comics.
5:59
Phil: Okay, yeah, yeah.
6:00
Zack Quaintance: Grant Morrison Comics.
6:01
Phil: Huh.
6:02
Zack Quaintance: But… and I also just write about their comics constantly, because, yeah, I am a huge Grant Morrison fan.
6:08
Zack Quaintance: Although this one isn't… it's not supposed to be necessarily metafiction. It's just kind of more, like, based on stuff, because I was a reporter in Texas when I was in
6:18
Zack Quaintance: in my early 20s, little bit older than that these days, but yeah, that was my first job out of college as well, but that's kind of where the similar… I mean, some of the stuff in the book, some of the people are based on, like, actual crimes and people I covered down there, but the character's very different for me.
6:34
Zack Quaintance: Like, he smokes constantly, I don't smoke. That's one… one surface difference.
6:38
Tad Eggleston: Anymore? I mean, when you were a journalist… I know journalists, man.
6:43
Zack Quaintance: Wow.
6:44
Tad Eggleston: They smoke like chimneys until their kids are born, and then they try really hard not to smoke like chimneys, and sometimes succeed.
6:51
Zack Quaintance: Another thing to fictionalize the main character there is, you notice he wears a tie?
6:59
Phil: Oh, there you go.
6:59
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I never once… as a reporter in South Texas wore a tie, not one time, so that's like…
7:05
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, were you from South Texas?
7:08
Zack Quaintance: No, I'm from Chicago.
7:10
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay, my neck of the woods. My neck of the woods.
7:13
Zack Quaintance: Thought you'd appreciate that.
7:14
Tad Eggleston: So that just means that you adapted quickly, because that was actually the one thing that caught my attention, and the only thing that I thought was
7:25
Tad Eggleston: like, unrealistic about the character was that, like, nobody that I know of from South Texas would talk to somebody in a tie, and if you sat down in that bar in a tie, like…
7:40
Tad Eggleston: You… you get the stool kicked out from under you.
7:45
Zack Quaintance: Well, there were, you know, there were… so, like, this paper I worked at in Texas, there was… they would hire people… this used to be a thing, like, when newspapers were healthier, they'd hire… there were papers that would hire people right out of college, they'd work there for a couple years, and they'd go on to a bigger paper, and they called them training papers.
8:01
Zack Quaintance: And so there were a lot of, like, guys I worked with down there who walked around in ties, like, who were, like, they'd gone to school in DC and some of these, like, kind of fancier places, and they were, like, real serious, like.
8:12
Zack Quaintance: reporter guys, and they'd wear a tie to work. Maybe I should have done that, I don't know, but I never did. Maybe it would have worked out better for me. Take the job more seriously, right?
8:22
Phil: You could have been one of the, you know, intrepid, surviving reporters of the dying industry.
8:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, yeah, working and hanging.
8:32
Tad Eggleston: You'd have a substack now. Actually, you probably would have jumped to Beehive or Ghost, but… but yeah. Right, right, yeah.
8:41
Tad Eggleston: - yeah.
8:44
Zack Quaintance: Be an independent reporter.
8:45
Tad Eggleston: It's such a…
8:47
Tad Eggleston: I've had friends who are reporters for forever, and I've developed a couple more since the podcast started, and God, I love reporters and feel for them all at once, because it is…
9:00
Tad Eggleston: A necessary job, and they're… they're…
9:04
Tad Eggleston: They tend to be under attack from both directions.
9:07
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that's… yeah, nobody likes… nobody likes you when you're a reporter. Yeah.
9:11
Tad Eggleston: Including your bosses most of the time.
9:14
Tad Eggleston: You wanna print what?
9:15
Zack Quaintance: It's like…
9:16
Tad Eggleston: I just had to… I just had to dig tooth and nail to get this story, and now you're telling me that I should have just gone with what I had BEFORE I dug.
9:27
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it's a tough job.
9:30
Zack Quaintance: Part of what the comic was is me sort of mourning it, because I wanted to work in newspapers, you know? And they kind of, got destroyed and died right as I got there. So the comic's kind of a, like, make people think a little bit about, what we've lost by not having local… good local newspapers anymore.
9:49
Tad Eggleston: Well, that's, that, that's,
9:54
Tad Eggleston: That's a good segue to… to tell me… tell me about,
9:58
Tad Eggleston: where this comic came from. I mean, it's been my experience that particularly with Kickstarter books, it's not like somebody came and said, Zach, pitched this. It's… it's you had something germinating for a while, and now you're ready to roll with it. So, like…
10:15
Tad Eggleston: Tell me about…
10:16
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
10:17
Zack Quaintance: Absolutely. So yeah, like I said, I was a reporter in McAllen, Texas, which is about three and a half hours south of San Antonio, way down there on the border.
10:27
Zack Quaintance: And I did that for, like, 5 years. And while I was down there, I split time… like, my first job, I started out on the night cops beat, so that… and that's where the gnarly stuff comes from, the, like, covering Border Patrol and cops and all kinds of stuff.
10:39
Zack Quaintance: And then, the other half of the time I was there, I was a features reporter.
10:43
Zack Quaintance: Which… which means you kind of write about culture and, like, entertainment and things, and what we would do every year… I did that for, like, 3 years, I think, and what we would do, around Halloween time is we would talk to people about local legends, like ghost stories, if they've ever seen the paranormal, and kind of do, like, a Halloween…
11:01
Zack Quaintance: local ghost story thing for our entertainment insert. So, like.
11:05
Zack Quaintance: I had a pretty good, mix of, like, seeing actual crimes covered… being at crime scenes and things, and learning about these, like, stories of haunted nuns and stuff, and then asylums that had burned and sat empty, and that kind of thing.
11:23
Zack Quaintance: And like, like I was saying, like, I kind of got into newspapers right as the,
11:29
Zack Quaintance: they were crumbling. Like, I started down there, like, 2008.
11:32
Zack Quaintance: Not to age myself too severely, but but that was… that was a bad time, and so it didn't… it didn't go well. Like, I… like, it was the type of paper you're supposed to work at for, like, a year, year and a half, and move to a bigger paper while I was there for 5 years, like… and not… and while I was there, like, not a lot of people moved on.
11:51
Zack Quaintance: So, like, that to me also kind of felt like…
11:54
Zack Quaintance: that all stuck with me, I thought about it, it obviously, kind of influenced
11:59
Zack Quaintance: how I thought about that time, and then I eventually was like, you know what would be funny? A comic about a werewolf priest, like, just goofing around, goofing around with some friends, and what if the werewolf priest said, howlelujah? Like, that would also be…
12:12
Phil: That was… that was great. He's top notch.
12:14
Zack Quaintance: Once I had that idea, I was like, I have to make a comic about this. And then, so, like, as I was kind of, like, trying to approach it as a goofy comic about a werewolf priest, like, the original idea was it was gonna be… he was gonna kind of be the protagonist. I was like, man.
12:29
Zack Quaintance: I want to take this a little more seriously, and that's where the, like, idea to sort of mesh it together with my own experiences as a reporter down there came from.
12:38
Zack Quaintance: And then, the thing about having, like, a funny comic idea that's, like, too ridiculous not that you have to do it at a certain point, is when you start writing it, you actually do have to take it seriously, and figure out, like, what are the… what are the plot points and, like, sort of, characters that are gonna make people actually care about this, and besides just one joke.
12:57
Phil: It's the… it's the human centipede effect.
12:59
Phil: It's like, you might… you might have that, you might have that phrase, but now you have to… you have to sit down, you have to… you have to figure out, okay, you know, how would this happen? You know, we have to take this, like you said, you have to take it seriously, you have to put it together.
13:12
Phil: On that note, have you ever had any, any, ghost experiences? Any, any supernatural encounters, to… that… that you take seriously?
13:22
Zack Quaintance: You know, I, like…
13:24
Zack Quaintance: Secondhand. Like, I… I've heard some really good ghost stories from other people, and I… to the point where they've given me goosebumps, but personally, no, I've never… I've never really had a, a run-in with the paranormal that, that I thought was legit, you know? Things that really spook me…
13:43
Zack Quaintance: Or are,
13:45
Zack Quaintance: UFOs and run-ins with aliens, like, that's the stuff that really spooks me, but I've never really, like, I don't have an abduction story or something like that, you know?
13:54
Phil: Alright, yeah.
13:55
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, that's the scariest stuff to me, personally.
13:58
Phil: Yeah.
13:59
Phil: It's… oh, so you… you've probably been all over, Blue Book?
14:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, Blue Book's excellent, yeah.
14:05
Tad Eggleston: Red Book coming up.
14:07
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, very excited about it. The thing about that comic is it's convincing.
14:12
Zack Quaintance: You're reading, and you're like, I think this is real.
14:16
Tad Eggleston: I mean, they're taking it from real… real reports.
14:20
Tad Eggleston: and Tynion's doing scripts, and, like, Mike Oming is, like, the world's…
14:27
Tad Eggleston: biggest UFO nod. Like, he went to UFO conventions before he was going to comic conventions, is something that we discovered the last time we talked to him.
14:37
Zack Quaintance: That's awesome. It shows in the book, man, like, yeah, that one creeps me out, in a good way, and I love how the narration's written. It's like a staccato sort of, like, report, you know? It works really well for that.
14:50
Tad Eggleston: Right.
14:51
Tad Eggleston: No, Mike's perfect for that.
14:55
Tad Eggleston: I got another…
14:56
Phil: Question for you.
14:57
Tad Eggleston: Please.
14:58
Phil: So.
14:58
Tad Eggleston: Because I fell down a rabbit hole, I gotta re…
15:00
Phil: All right.
15:03
Tad Eggleston: You may not know this, but I sometimes, like, you'll say something, and I'll fall down a rabbit hole and have to come back.
15:09
Zack Quaintance: Oh, yeah.
15:12
Phil: So in your reporting days, were you into comics then, and if so, what were you reading back then?
15:18
Zack Quaintance: So that would've… yeah, like, I had kind of fallen out of comics a little bit down there, because I was making, like, $12.50 an hour. Yeah, that'll happen. And I was, like, far from home, trying to afford rent and stuff.
15:31
Zack Quaintance: But I would always keep up at the library, like, whatever, whatever they would get,
15:37
Zack Quaintance: You know, comics weren't… they were starting to become prevalent at libraries back then,
15:43
Zack Quaintance: And so… but they… it was mostly superhero stuff at that time. But what really did it, like, after… after the, like, years I was in,
15:52
Zack Quaintance: McAllen, I moved to Austin, Texas, and they had, like, a really good library system, and what really dragged me back into comics and, like, going… and I had a little bit more money, because I was out of newspapers at that point, was I was at the library, and on an end cap, like, magically was the first, trade for Saga, and that's what got me…
16:10
Tad Eggleston: Pulled me right back into comics. Saga got me back into being a Wednesday Warrior.
16:16
Zack Quaintance: Me too, yeah.
16:17
Tad Eggleston: I had been, like, only buying trades and doing digital stuff, and then I couldn't wait for the next Saga issue.
16:26
Zack Quaintance: That's exactly what happened. It was, like, 2013 or so, and I picked up the library, and I was like, I need to read this issue to issue, I'm back.
16:33
Tad Eggleston: Right, perfect.
16:34
Zack Quaintance: up a bunch of other titles, and no looking back from there.
16:37
Tad Eggleston: Right. Austin's a good… Comic Town, too, you got, austin's best… Comics and books?
16:47
Tad Eggleston: Yup. And you've got.
16:49
Zack Quaintance: Dragon's Lair.
16:50
Tad Eggleston: Dragon's Lair, yeah, those are the two that my brother took me to. God, I guess almost a decade ago, but I know that they're both still there. Yeah.
16:58
Zack Quaintance: Those shops are enormous, like, especially Austin… Austin Best Comics is…
17:03
Tad Eggleston: I love that.
17:03
Zack Quaintance: Awesome shop, yeah.
17:05
Tad Eggleston: I was in town for a training, and we were done at, like, 2 o'clock every day for the training, so I was at… and my brother, who lived in town, wasn't done with work until, like, 5 or 6, so, like, I would be at…
17:20
Tad Eggleston: Austin's Best Comics at 2.30 every day.
17:25
Zack Quaintance: You could easily spend 2 hours in that place, man. Yeah, and then you can go next door and look at back issues and stuff, like…
17:30
Tad Eggleston: Right. I don't even think I managed to get to the back issue one.
17:33
Tad Eggleston: We just go through trade paperbacks and spend all of my per diem on a daily basis.
17:38
Zack Quaintance: That was the first shop I ever saw that really took, sort of… like, they had a manga section before, I think most shops did. They had, like… like, they really kind of sectioned out their, trades and graphic novel sections really, really well to make it easy to, like, find new stuff, so, like, you didn't.
17:55
Tad Eggleston: Well, and yeah, and like, once you'd found a book in an area, you knew that you were gonna like the ones around it.
18:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, totally. Like, they did a really good job of sort of, like, laying out their shop like that. Yeah, no, great, great shop.
18:10
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I very much enjoyed that trip.
18:14
Tad Eggleston: Dragon's Marvel.
18:16
Zack Quaintance: Gaming and stuff like that.
18:17
Tad Eggleston: And my brother's more of a gamer than a comic guy. He does comics and loves comics, but, like, Phil knows him. He's the one that actually knows… he and Jonathan are the ones that actually know how to game when we play Doc. Lee and I are just making it up as we go.
18:33
Phil: Peter, I mean, I… I… Lee, for only being around one episode, he felt very experienced, you know?
18:41
Tad Eggleston: Okay, then I'm the one that's just making that mistake.
18:44
Phil: Yeah, but you're supposed to make it up as you go, that's why you're the first one.
18:47
Tad Eggleston: There's a…
18:48
Phil: The reason I chose that character. Indeed. Indeed. You know, it's… it's…
18:53
Tad Eggleston: I don't know if you've read, Kieran Gillen and Stephanie Hahn's Die.
18:57
Zack Quaintance: I have read that, yeah.
18:59
Tad Eggleston: Phil got us playing the game, so we play monthly on the air.
19:03
Zack Quaintance: Oh, nice.
19:05
Tad Eggleston: I play the fool.
19:06
Zack Quaintance: They're doing this.
19:06
Tad Eggleston: Because then I don't have to know what to do.
19:11
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I was in a… I was in a D&D campaign once where I was, like, the plot was kind of over my head, and I… I knew I was really busy at that time, so I came up with, like, a monosyllabic character who only said the words 13. That way, I didn't have to pay too close of attention or navigate any of the interactions, so I didn't need to know the lore.
19:28
Tad Eggleston: I played a barbarian in a campaign that was somewhat like that. Like, he had, like, this strict moral code, but it was, like, it was somewhere between Drax and, like, he took everything literally. So, like, he wound up getting people in trouble, getting the whole crew in trouble, because somebody said, like.
19:49
Phil: Something that he took to… that he interpreted as, shove your spear in me.
19:57
Tad Eggleston: I don't even remember what the idiom was, but it was… it was real idiom, but he decided, oh, make points?
20:06
Tad Eggleston: And it's like… You just killed a cop!
20:11
Zack Quaintance: That's a campaign treasure. Yep.
20:14
Phil: Yep, yep, we've only…
20:15
Tad Eggleston: Bad!
20:17
Phil: I think we've only had, well, I mean, we've had a few crazy moments, but yeah, we definitely had… we had a big one like that when,
20:26
Phil: TAD… Pulled his character's girlfriend from the real world into the… into the fantasy world, and that.
20:34
Tad Eggleston: Did I do that on purpose? I thought you did that.
20:37
Phil: Oh, right, well, you… you… well, you did something where you wanted to save her. Anyway, sorry, we're… we're.
20:41
Tad Eggleston: Oh my god, but it's…
20:44
Tad Eggleston: I wouldn't have thought of that, so maybe I did something that put it in your head.
20:49
Phil: Yeah, there, that's funny.
20:51
Phil: Generally what happens, yeah, where it's like, he's like, I want to do this… I'm the one that thinks of things like skateboards to go after the dragon. Right.
20:58
Zack Quaintance: Well, it's group storytelling, you know, so you're all responsible.
21:03
Phil: Exactly, there we go.
21:04
Phil: You're…
21:04
Tad Eggleston: Remind me of this.
21:05
Phil: That's… you basically did.
21:07
Tad Eggleston: So, like, touching on the comics from Austin, I'm gonna ask one of my favorite questions for first-time guests. Give me your comics biography. And I emphasize that this is not your comics bibliography. This is, like.
21:23
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
21:23
Tad Eggleston: Like, your life through the comics.
21:26
Tad Eggleston: That you were reading, that shaped you, that you remember.
21:31
Tad Eggleston: You know, starting as early as you want, and going to now.
21:35
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this is gonna be… buckle in, this is gonna be heavy with Chicagoland area references. Yay!
21:42
Zack Quaintance: So I got my first comics at Jewel Osco. Nice. Off the rack while my mom was shopping, I started reading, you know, it was around the time the X-Men cartoon was really big.
21:52
Zack Quaintance: started reading Uncanny X-Men, and back then they had it where you could get your parents to send in, like, a $12 check, and you'd get X-Men in the mail after that. Okay. So I did… I was reading, like, X-Men and Amazing Spider-Man as a really pretty young kid, like, I don't know, 9, 10 years old.
22:08
Zack Quaintance: And then when I started to get a little bit of my own money, like, mowing lawns and, like, umpiring Little League Baseball games, I started riding my bike to Graham Crackers Comics in Glendale Heights, Illinois.
22:19
Tad Eggleston: We do know a few graham crackers. Glendale Heights one. The Glendale Heights one has been closed for years. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I do remember it.
22:27
Zack Quaintance: And I think it's.
22:28
Tad Eggleston: one of the few that Patrick Brower… I'd have to ask him, but I don't think he ever worked there. He worked at, like, almost all of them, so most of the time, I'm able to, like, sit back and go, okay, when was Patrick there?
22:40
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so this would have been, like, 1999, 2000… I know the manager's name was Bobby.
22:46
Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay, this is crazy, because I had…
22:49
Tad Eggleston: I had friends who lived in Glendale Heights around then, so I probably…
22:56
Tad Eggleston: Stuck my head in it at that comic shop.
23:01
Tad Eggleston: At least once every 6 months. It wasn't my normal one, because I was in Wheaton.
23:05
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
23:06
Tad Eggleston: But I know that shop.
23:08
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so yeah, I mean, we're from the same… like, I went to high school in Glen Ellen at Glenbard West, so…
23:14
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I have friends at Glenbard West.
23:16
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, we're from the same.
23:18
Tad Eggleston: on the hill.
23:18
Phil: I, I worked at that Trader Joe's.
23:20
Tad Eggleston: Lucas!
23:21
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, Lucas was filming there, yeah. I think the Trader Joe's came well after I was gone. Oh, okay.
23:28
Tad Eggleston: No, it probably opens.
23:29
Phil: Yeah, that was… it opened in 2000.
23:31
Tad Eggleston: The first gl…
23:31
Zack Quaintance: Oh, okay.
23:32
Tad Eggleston: The Glen Allen Trader Joe's, which is one of the first ones in the Chicago market, opened in probably…
23:38
Tad Eggleston: 99 or 2000? Oh, no, they didn'.
23:40
Phil: Yeah, it would have been 2000, because that's… my dad helped open the first 3 stores out there, so that's… that's when we, like.
23:45
Zack Quaintance: Is that on Roosevelt Road, maybe? Everything is on Ellens on Roosevelt Road.
23:50
Phil: It is.
23:52
Phil: And it was that… the wheat and graham crackers that I drove past every day that I eventually popped in on, so…
23:56
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that one was down on Butterfield. That one's still on Butterfield.
24:01
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it is. Yeah, yeah, that hasn't closed. I think they're doing fine.
24:06
Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's still a chain. Yeah. There are two much better comic shops in Chicagoland that exist because Graham Cracker's employees decided that
24:17
Tad Eggleston: They could do better and do.
24:20
Zack Quaintance: Which ones are… I've been to Challenger's down.
24:22
Tad Eggleston: Shout out to Challenger's First Aid, I think, is also former Black Cruppers employees.
24:26
Zack Quaintance: I mean, you know, talk about good comics town, Chicago's got a ton of great shops.
24:31
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
24:32
Tad Eggleston: Chicago Comics, Challengers… Dark Planet, or not Dark Planet, Dark Tower.
24:38
Zack Quaintance: Howling Pages, like…
24:39
Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's amazing.
24:40
Zack Quaintance: Instagram, and I was like, this looks awesome, I'm gonna follow them and go there next time I'm in town, so…
24:45
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Well, you should also drive up to Lion's Tooth in Milwaukee.
24:51
Zack Quaintance: Alright, yeah.
24:51
Tad Eggleston: I mean, if you're into Howling Pages, Lion's Tooth is also a store.
24:56
Zack Quaintance: Similar kind of spirit. Yeah. Yeah.
24:59
Tad Eggleston: Little bit smaller, but that just means that they have to curate even harder in terms of, like, what they bring in.
25:06
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that sounds great. I mean, especially if they have local comics, like, I always love those in those kind of shops.
25:11
Tad Eggleston: At Lion's Tooth, they actually teach classes during the summer.
25:16
Zack Quaintance: Wow, that's awesome.
25:17
Tad Eggleston: And then… and then publish the kid's…
25:20
Tad Eggleston: They have their own zine from the kids that came to learn comics.
25:25
Tad Eggleston: Every summer.
25:27
Zack Quaintance: That's awesome, get the kids, and keep the kids invested in comics.
25:30
Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
25:33
Zack Quaintance: So, yeah, but yeah, I started, riding my bike to Graham Crackers Comics, Glendale Heights, Illinois, Bloomingdale Road. And, at that time… and then I was… I started, I was mostly reading superhero stuff, but at that time, like, late 90s, early 2000s, there was a lot of cool bridges to, like,
25:49
Zack Quaintance: original Super, like, Powers was just coming out then, Astro City, I was really into Rising Stars back then. Yep.
25:56
Tad Eggleston: with Rising Stars.
25:58
Zack Quaintance: I was so into that.
25:59
Tad Eggleston: It's delayed.
25:59
Zack Quaintance: Delays kind of killed the momentum there, but, like, the first, like, first 8 issues or so, I was like.
26:04
Tad Eggleston: And then, like.
26:05
Zack Quaintance: favorite comic ever.
26:07
Tad Eggleston: Did you read the other, Big Joe's comics, the Midnight Nation?
26:10
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I read… yeah, I've got the, like, omnibus back here in one of the.
26:14
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
26:15
Zack Quaintance: Like, oversized, giant artcover that doesn't fit on my shelves.
26:18
Tad Eggleston: No!
26:19
Zack Quaintance: So I was, yeah, I read all that kind of stuff, I got into vertigo,
26:24
Zack Quaintance: And then, like I said, eventually, as I became a newspaper reporter and had no money.
26:28
Zack Quaintance: kind of fell out of being a Wednesday Warrior, and just was doing, like, superhero trades and stuff. And then, as I got into my late 20s, early 30s, and was, like, working in Austin, had a little bit more money, got back into going to shops through Saga.
26:43
Zack Quaintance: And haven't looked back, like, a few years past that, I started, contributing to Comics Beat, and I started my own blog, Comics Bookcase.
26:52
Zack Quaintance: Which is now kind of like my…
26:55
Zack Quaintance: Creator Publishing, Comics Bookcase press, or whatever you want to call it. And have been still kind of balancing comics journalism with making my own comics for the last 4 years or so.
27:05
Zack Quaintance: That, I think, is my comics… full comics biography.
27:09
Tad Eggleston: I like that biography, that's a… that's a… that's a good…
27:12
Zack Quaintance: Well, yeah, we got crazy overlap with the graham crackers in the northwest suburbs.
27:17
Tad Eggleston: County Graham Crackers location. Yep, yep.
27:20
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I was… there was a… and I even worked there on Wednesdays, there was a place in downtown Wheaton called JC Comics that was… that was my primary…
27:30
Tad Eggleston: But when he closed up, I had to find a new shop, and there was one in…
27:36
Tad Eggleston: I think Hanover Park, called Gotham City, that was… that was a regular of mine, because…
27:42
Tad Eggleston: It was never huge, huge on most of the graham crackers. I found graham crackers hit or miss. If you had the right staff, they were great, and if you had the wrong staff, I just felt out of place.
27:52
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
27:53
Zack Quaintance: there was basically just one… the Glendale Heights one was small, so it was, like, the.
27:56
Tad Eggleston: One night.
27:56
Zack Quaintance: The one guy.
27:57
Tad Eggleston: No, I actually think there's still a comic shop there, it's just not… was it on Bloomingdale, just… or no, yeah, Bloomingdale just passed,
28:07
Tad Eggleston: like, essentially, Bloomingdale… trail?
28:10
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so they… that shop…
28:12
Zack Quaintance: the Graham Crackers moved a little bit down the road, and then now there's a comic shop right across the street from, where the other Graham Crackers was, on the other side of Army Trail. And I went… I went in there one time when I was home, and I was like, yeah, like, I grew up here, I used to buy comics at Graham Crackers, and the guy's like, that must have been a million years ago!
28:30
Tad Eggleston: If you are a guest.
28:33
Zack Quaintance: He was older than me, too. I was like, what are you making me feel old for?
28:38
Zack Quaintance: But that was a fine… I don't know what it's called, but that… it's a fine… they had… it was a…
28:42
Zack Quaintance: Decent comic shop, seemed alright, like, if you live in that area.
28:45
Tad Eggleston: What I did like about them is they were good at bundling Like, miniseries or story arcs.
28:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, I didn't have the money for that. Like, what they would do for me, which was really… like, I think they must have, like, used to make, these little inserts that they put with your stack with a paper cutter, you know? And they'd, like, he'd, like, circle stuff he thought I would like, which was really cool.
29:09
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
29:09
Zack Quaintance: I mean, I got into a lot of… like, that's how I found all this… all the, Astro City and, like, that kind of stuff, is, like, through the guy at the comic shop recommending it. I remember I.
29:19
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I was talking about the one that called you old.
29:23
Zack Quaintance: Oh, yeah, yeah.
29:24
Tad Eggleston: That's something I like about that shot.
29:25
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
29:26
Tad Eggleston: Is… is they have lots of, you know, like, where lots of places have, like, their expensive wall books, they instead have bundles of
29:39
Tad Eggleston: like…
29:40
Zack Quaintance: All 5 issues of a miniseries for…
29:43
Tad Eggleston: Whatever price they're selling at, but normally relatively reasonable, because it's really their way of getting rid of back issues by.
29:49
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
29:50
Tad Eggleston: Hey, have the whole storyline!
29:52
Zack Quaintance: You bet.
29:53
Phil: Graham crackers does that, too.
29:55
Tad Eggleston: Right. I've seen them. At least the one, the one that I went to off of 75th Street, did they do it bundle?
30:01
Phil: So, bundle the.
30:02
Tad Eggleston: Graham Crackers definitely does that, particularly for… like, I bought my Electra Assassin set.
30:11
Tad Eggleston: At Graham Crackers. At a ridiculously reasonable price. I think I got the set in, like, $2,000 for less than 20 bucks.
30:20
Tad Eggleston: But…
30:21
Tad Eggleston: But, like, what I like about… what I like about that store in Arlington Heights that I can't remember the name of right now is it's like…
30:31
Tad Eggleston: Everything is… is like that. It's not… it's not…
30:37
Tad Eggleston: It's not just the… I mean, it's literally, like, you can tell that it's like, when he takes it down off the shelf, he goes, do I have a whole run? Yeah, yeah. If I do, it's not going into the dollar boxes, it's getting bundled together.
30:50
Tad Eggleston: So that people can have a whole story, rather than, you know, so I did that.
30:55
Zack Quaintance: They don't raise the, they don't raise the prices on it, from what I could tell.
30:59
Tad Eggleston: Right, no, if anything, they cut the.
31:00
Zack Quaintance: price, yeah, a little bit discounted, because I think he just wants… because I bought… I forget what I bought a bundle of, but I bought a bundle, and he seemed very grateful. He was like, thanks for getting this out of here.
31:11
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, but I think it's a good strategy.
31:13
Zack Quaintance: Oh, it's super… yeah.
31:14
Tad Eggleston: Totally agree. I mean, that is one of the challenges of comic shops, is, like.
31:20
Tad Eggleston: If you didn't… I mean, really, the floppies have about a one-month shelf life.
31:25
Zack Quaintance: Yep.
31:26
Tad Eggleston: And after that, their value goes down hugely, but I think it goes down less if you can bundle it as a story arc.
31:34
Tad Eggleston: than it does… If people are like, oh, do I want issue 13? I don't know.
31:40
Zack Quaintance: Right. Especially any issue past number one.
31:43
Tad Eggleston: Right.
31:44
Tad Eggleston: Mark Russell actually proposed that if he had a comic shop, what he would do is buy the hell out of every issue one.
31:55
Tad Eggleston: But with very few exceptions, Don't buy any other issues other than… The… the… your subscription issues.
32:10
Zack Quaintance: the pre-.
32:10
Tad Eggleston: Until the trade paperback came out, and then just put the trade paperback right up next to Issue 1. So you can buy your issue one, if you like it, you grab the trade paperback.
32:20
Zack Quaintance: I mean, that's good… that seems like good business to me.
32:23
Tad Eggleston: It does, doesn't it?
32:26
Zack Quaintance: Especially as trade prices have come down, and, like, now you have those, like, compact trades and stuff that sell like crazy.
32:35
Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
32:37
Phil: Just because, I mean, it's funny where I'm like, I'm… I… I… my impulse is to go the other way, of, like, I would want a larger
32:46
Phil: You know, because I'm thinking of, like, the compact.
32:47
Zack Quaintance: initiative.
32:48
Phil: Yeah, like, you know, the compact edition of All-Star Superman, it's like, okay, I'm sure that's cool, but like…
32:53
Phil: How… how much detail are you gonna lose in, like.
32:56
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but, I mean, what the Compact Edition is really about…
33:01
Tad Eggleston: is it fits on Barnes & Noble's shelf.
33:03
Phil: Oh, yeah.
33:04
Zack Quaintance: And it looks like manga, for people who are familiar with it. Right, yeah.
33:07
Tad Eggleston: It fits on the shelf at the bookstore at the airport, or at the… I mean, the Compact Edition is way more about bringing more people to comics.
33:19
Tad Eggleston: them.
33:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
33:22
Tad Eggleston: Don't get me wrong, I intend to buy the Saga Compact Editions, just because I buy Saga in all of its forms, and I can see those being the ones that I, like, toss in a…
33:31
Tad Eggleston: book bag with me when I'm going places.
33:34
Zack Quaintance: Loan to a friend or something.
33:35
Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
33:40
Tad Eggleston: But… but that's because I'm insane and buy Saga in all of its forms. I guess I haven't bought my Compendium yet, but I have all of the hardcovers, I have…
33:50
Phil: All of the…
33:51
Tad Eggleston: Well, no, I bought a digital compendium, because I don't have all of the… the… the…
33:56
Tad Eggleston: digital issues before the compendium. I do have all of the digital issues after the Compendium, and I have all of the single issues. I have all of the trade paperbacks.
34:07
Phil: Do you… do you have any series like that, Zach, where you've bought… you've bought in multiple forms?
34:11
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I've got Saga exactly like that, because… because I read the digital as it comes out on Wednesday morning at, like, 7.30am.
34:19
Tad Eggleston: I stay up late and read it at the clock this.
34:23
Zack Quaintance: the night before!
34:24
Tad Eggleston: Wow.
34:25
Zack Quaintance: And then I have the…
34:26
Tad Eggleston: drops at midnight Eastern, Zach.
34:28
Zack Quaintance: Oh, does it really? It does! Oh yeah, I remember that, because I used to live on… when I lived… I was in California for a couple years, and I would get it at, like, 9 o'clock. But, yeah, then I… then I have it pulled at my local shop, and then I buy the trades, because my wife likes to read it, and then on my shelf behind me, I have the hardcovers. I don't have the compendiums.
34:47
Tad Eggleston: I don't have that yet.
34:48
Zack Quaintance: was, you know.
34:48
Tad Eggleston: I feel like I need that just to put next, like, as a coffee table book, or to put next to, like, the guest bedroom bed, or…
34:57
Phil: Compendium Softcover?
34:58
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it sucks.
34:59
Zack Quaintance: Offcover.
34:59
Tad Eggleston: But it's also 54 issues, it's like…
35:01
Phil: Yeah, but, I mean, like…
35:03
Zack Quaintance: Enormous.
35:04
Phil: I mean, I've got the… I've got the… I think I'm like, when I want a big book, I want a hardcover, you know? Like, we've… I've got the… the one-volume edition of Invisibles, so it's like, to me, that's like, alright, that… that book is huge, but you can still read it, you know? That's like, you know…
35:20
Phil: I'm just saying.
35:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, I've got a good mix of hard… if the hardcovers, especially if they have extra material in them, like the Saga hardcovers have extra material in them, I'll… I like to get those.
35:31
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
35:32
Tad Eggleston: But then, I don't know.
35:34
Tad Eggleston: Material in the hardcovers.
35:36
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, but I've got, like, I've got plenty, like, I have Stray Bullets and all the… I don't even know if there's a hardcover of that, and Preacher.
35:43
Phil: No, there isn't yet, and that makes me sad.
35:45
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
35:46
Phil: That is how I read Stray Bullets, too, is in the big… when it resumed, I got the…
35:51
Tad Eggleston: Uber Ales.
35:52
Zack Quaintance: Yep. That thing is… that's a brick.
35:54
Tad Eggleston: I have that, too.
35:56
Zack Quaintance: What a great…
35:56
Tad Eggleston: At this point, I have almost all of the single issues, because they sell for, like, $2 to $5 most of the time, so it's like…
36:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
36:04
Tad Eggleston: One of those things that I just look for at every comic shop I'm at. Are there any stray bullets issues that I don't have?
36:10
Phil: I was gonna say, That sounds criminal, but it's not, it's tray boldness.
36:13
Zack Quaintance: Ehh.
36:15
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah.
36:23
Zack Quaintance: Straight bullets, man. Yeah, I… that's one.
36:25
Tad Eggleston: Still, you need to talk, because I'm… I'm…
36:27
Phil: Okay, you went down the…
36:28
Tad Eggleston: Ramos. There we go.
36:30
Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, that's one of those where, I mean, honestly, David Laffeme, even having read… because that's the thing, is I read most of Stray Bullets, but I eventually trailed off when it returned, because, like.
36:41
Phil: and this might be a controversial opinion that snaps Tad back to us, but I… I was really sad that we never got back to, the real-life Amy race car after.
36:51
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
36:51
Phil: The Killers, holy shit, The Killers are my favorite eight issues of Stray Bullets, period, so far.
36:56
Tad Eggleston: My only page of original art is from Killers.
37:01
Phil: It's so good.
37:01
Zack Quaintance: Really? Oh, you have a page of that? Nice.
37:03
Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
37:04
Phil: I don't have.
37:04
Tad Eggleston: I have a page from Killers.
37:06
Phil: I don't have any original comic art. I have… I have a sketch from Nick Pitara, and a sketch from Chris Burnham.
37:14
Phil: But no, like, original pages or anything like that. But yeah, that would be… that'd be a cool hobby if I ever have disposable income.
37:21
Zack Quaintance: And to that degree. And wall space.
37:24
Phil: Yes!
37:24
Zack Quaintance: Like, I would want… I would want a house where I could have a whole wall of comic art. I've seen a couple people who have that. I'm always very jealous.
37:31
Phil: Yeah, I mean, I…
37:33
Tad Eggleston: Tom King showed us his Archie hallway once.
37:37
Phil: Wow.
37:38
Tad Eggleston: And…
37:39
Phil: I feel like…
37:40
Tad Eggleston: was…
37:41
Phil: an Archie Hallway could be a very, like, idyllic place, but it could turn into a very disturbing place very quickly.
37:47
Tad Eggleston: Well, part of it's the comic art that he's allowed to have outside of his office, because the kids are big.
37:52
Zack Quaintance: Archie fans. Oh, okay, that makes sense.
37:55
Tad Eggleston: He finally became cool to them when he wrote the Archie comic.
38:02
Tad Eggleston: Batman…
38:04
Zack Quaintance: Archie, now we're talking.
38:10
Phil: So here's… okay, that got me a question. So, I mean, I know you're… you so far have done your own stuff, self-publishing. Are there any licensed properties you're interested in writing for that you want to throw out there, you know?
38:23
Zack Quaintance: You don't want to.
38:24
Phil: Try to manifest.
38:26
Zack Quaintance: This one sounds like a weird one. I'd like to do Rick and Morty. I think that would be a fun one. A lot of artists, like, so before Macabre Valley, the last book I did was called That's a Comics Bookcase. It was like a…
38:38
Zack Quaintance: six, six-story sampler, and Ryan Lee drew the, framing sequence, which is like an actual anthropomorphic comics bookcase chasing these kids around a haunted house. Rick and Morty, and it's… you could get kind of meta with that.
38:53
Zack Quaintance: I think that would be a really fun one to do,
38:57
Zack Quaintance: And then, like, superhero stuff, I always like Green Arrow, even though it's a tough one to sell.
39:03
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, my buddy Chris just got his, his run.
39:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
39:10
Tad Eggleston: announced its end. 31 will be the last.
39:14
Phil: fall.
39:14
Tad Eggleston: Conjit, Montos.
39:16
Zack Quaintance: That's…
39:16
Tad Eggleston: He's been killing it.
39:17
Zack Quaintance: I know. Great.
39:18
Tad Eggleston: Like, it really frustrates me the number of times where, like, the best comics still can't sell well enough.
39:26
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it's tough. I mean, Green Arrow's always a tough sell. It never really… it hasn't had a prolonged run for a good while. Right. It just is what it is, so…
39:36
Phil: I think part of that is because… I mean, I think it's… that's a couple different reasons,
39:43
Phil: you know, one, I think that to anyone outside of comics, Green Arrow looks even more like knockoff Batman than he is supposed to be.
39:54
Phil: And, like… and then… and then you get so many diff… like, okay, so, like, here's the thing, because you could… you could call him DC's Daredevil on a certain level, except not every single run has been.
40:06
Tad Eggleston: Except he's more Hawkeye.
40:08
Phil: And, well, yes, he's also, but he hasn't even… he hasn't even been, like, Hawkeye for them. So, like, the thing is, is that you've got a bunch of different iterations of Green Arrow that people are into, like the micro, longbow Hunters, you've got Green Arrow and Green Lantern, you know.
40:23
Phil: van, you've got the super classic, like, Silver Age Green Arrow, you know, and now…
40:29
Zack Quaintance: W Aero fans out there.
40:32
Phil: If you like that particular flavor of buffet food. You know, like.
40:37
Phil: Yeah, so all these different ones, whereas with Daredevil, they homogenize. Like, even when you get a standout like the Wade Samney run that's like, okay, we're bringing back a swashbuckling Silver Age Daredevil, he still fits in with all the other Daredevils. It's not like he breaks out and feels like a different character, whereas with Green Arrow, it kind of starts feeling like different characters.
40:58
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, 100%. I mean, there's, like, the Growl Run doesn't even acknowledge, like, he's not wealthy in the Growl Run.
41:05
Zack Quaintance: Like, you know, like, it kind of does its own thing, and no one has superpowers in the growl run.
41:11
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so it's like, there's… the rules kind of change from run to run at times.
41:17
Phil: Yeah, and.
41:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
41:19
Phil: it's weird how you can have him, again, the same character on one end, that, and then on another end, the friggin' New 52 Green Arrow that was a tech billionaire with too many gadgets that were, quite frankly, ridiculous. You know?
41:31
Zack Quaintance: Yep.
41:33
Tad Eggleston: I mean…
41:34
Phil: Daredevil's version.
41:35
Tad Eggleston: Definitely.
41:35
Phil: the…
41:36
Tad Eggleston: Everybody needs… A boxing glove arrow.
41:41
Phil: Goodbye.
41:41
Zack Quaintance: The single arrow endures, yeah, from era to era.
41:48
Tad Eggleston: I'd be… I mean…
41:49
Phil: Don't say it's ridiculous. No, no, no.
41:52
Tad Eggleston: beyond that, like.
41:54
Phil: It's a good time.
41:54
Tad Eggleston: Batman has… and I don't understand why nobody's ever actually explored this, because clearly, Batman's utility belt is a portal to another dimension.
42:06
Zack Quaintance: Right, like a bag of holding to bring it back to D&D.
42:09
Tad Eggleston: So, so, I mean, I feel like…
42:11
Zack Quaintance: The battlefield.
42:12
Tad Eggleston: I felt like there should be some exploration of that. Like, like, like, like, like, I mean, you, you can have fun with it, like.
42:19
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that is a fun Batman story idea.
42:21
Tad Eggleston: the atom, like, accidentally falls in as he's getting out a Batarang.
42:27
Phil: That's pretty interesting. That's a great story.
42:29
Zack Quaintance: Great pitch, yeah.
42:31
Phil: I was gonna say, ring up Matt Fraction, tell him you need a quantum, utility belt for, storing interdimensional size change and shenanigans.
42:39
Zack Quaintance: And then every…
42:40
Phil: balls.
42:40
Zack Quaintance: mad at Batman for hiding that from them, you know?
42:44
Phil: Right?
42:44
Zack Quaintance: Transparency thing.
42:46
Zack Quaintance: option there.
42:47
Tad Eggleston: So, so let's, let's talk about your comics journalism years. What…
42:52
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, let's do it.
42:54
Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna start with the business side, and then go to the more fun side, because, like, we'll make a sandwich out of… out of, like, good stuff, and…
43:05
Tad Eggleston: Like, you… You've been doing comics journalism for… Honey?
43:14
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, 8 to 10 years. I think I use my blog end of 2017, beginning of 2018, yeah.
43:19
Tad Eggleston: Right.
43:21
Tad Eggleston: So you got to go through… the… Pandemic… Back issue… Bubble.
43:33
Zack Quaintance: Yep,
43:34
Tad Eggleston: Slash… variant cover bubble.
43:42
Tad Eggleston: The subsequent predictable crash is people had money to spend on other things.
43:48
Zack Quaintance: Right, right, and we're leaving their house again.
43:50
Tad Eggleston: Right, and the way that it's also snowballed into…
43:57
Tad Eggleston: like, the most seismic change in the industry since the mid-'80s, when Diamond knocked out all of the other distributors, which is Diamond going bankrupt, and…
44:08
Tad Eggleston: Unlike in the 80s, where it was a bunch of other independent distributors, the only distributors that are stepping in are other
44:16
Tad Eggleston: Massive ones.
44:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, bookmarket kind of distributors. Right.
44:21
Tad Eggleston: So talk, just in a general sense, about what the ride has been like from the business side. What have you seen that's…
44:28
Tad Eggleston: That's worried you? What have you seen that excites you?
44:33
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Well, I'll tell you.
44:34
Tad Eggleston: What cool things do you see that people are doing that you're hoping will work out, that sort of thing.
44:38
Zack Quaintance: I'll start with a funny thing that was happening while this… all this diamond stuff was unfolding, like, as recently as earlier this year, is if you were a comics journalist, and you went into a comic shop, and they found out, the owner would be like, what can you tell me about what's happening with Diamond? Like…
44:54
Tad Eggleston: I'm barely a comics journalist, and my shop…
44:57
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
44:58
Tad Eggleston: Relied on me to… To keep him up to date.
45:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, they had no idea what was happening, they'd heard all these crazy rumors, they just wanted some clarity, and then they… and then after that, they'd be like, what do you think is gonna happen? Like, please tell me, like, give me a prediction, you know?
45:15
Tad Eggleston: Right.
45:16
Zack Quaintance: That was wild, I'd never seen anything like that before, just the sort of,
45:20
Zack Quaintance: Because Diamond had become, like, old carpet, like, it was just… it was there so long, like, it wasn't good, but it was there so long, nobody could imagine comics without it, you know? And then when it started to implode, it was just total chaos.
45:33
Zack Quaintance: But to… yeah, I mean, that was pretty wild. I guess the, like, I didn't even… like, so the… the pandemic, like, boom in comics, I didn't clock it well as it was happening, like, I guess I didn't even… I just kind of kept doing my thing, which is mostly reviews and, like, recommendations.
45:51
Zack Quaintance: Like, I've written a… I've written a column for my website and The Beat for 8 years, top comics to buy. I read 20 to 25 advanced review copies before they come out, and recommend my 5 favorites, and then list, like, 10 others and all the new number ones. It's kind of like.
46:06
Tad Eggleston: You gotta get me more advanced review copies, I don't get that many.
46:10
Zack Quaintance: We can talk, it's not… I mean.
46:12
Tad Eggleston: If you…
46:12
Zack Quaintance: If you added, like, a 10-minute segment to your show, like, here's what I'm reading this week, you could get on all the lists, probably.
46:18
Tad Eggleston: He ordered it, too.
46:20
Phil: Alrighty.
46:22
Zack Quaintance: Well, then you're not lever… you're not leveraging it correctly to get free.
46:26
Tad Eggleston: That's what I'm saying!
46:27
Phil: Even the favorite word of the weekend is leverage.
46:29
Zack Quaintance: Well, we'll talk, we can talk after this, I'll tell you how to do this. It's not… but.
46:35
Tad Eggleston: But then it becomes like… And every week, I talk about the 3 books that were awesome last week, and the 3 books that I think will be spectacular next week. Only the one list that doesn't have to stick to 3 is the books I know are spectacular, because I've read them already, and they are.
46:52
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it becomes like a curse, though, when you get a lot of review comics, because you want to read them, you want to try to read more of them, and then all of a sudden, it's like…
47:01
Phil: there goes your Sunday, you know?
47:03
Tad Eggleston: No, I understand.
47:04
Zack Quaintance: So that's awesome.
47:05
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's how we started.
47:06
Zack Quaintance: Be careful what you wish for.
47:07
Tad Eggleston: Already, I already scheduled myself so much reading.
47:10
Tad Eggleston: That it's not even funny.
47:12
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, so anyway, like, I'm so, like, into, like, what's coming out this week, what's good, that I didn't really notice, that there was some kind of big boom happening with the pandemic stuff, that everybody was buying all these variants and everything, you know?
47:28
Tad Eggleston: I mean, really, there were two different booms going on, because there was the variant boom, but there was also the people discovering comics because it was a storytelling medium available to them in a time where there weren't new movies coming out, TVs, TV shows were on…
47:46
Tad Eggleston: Hiatus, that sort of thing.
47:48
Zack Quaintance: But I think what you've seen now, though, is a contraction, like, a big, big market contraction, especially among creator-owned and original comics, like,
47:58
Zack Quaintance: you know, aftershock kind of went away.
48:03
Tad Eggleston: Don't even get me into Aftershock's business model.
48:06
Zack Quaintance: Vault kind of contracted, published last…
48:09
Tad Eggleston: I have hopes for Vault, but I'm pissed off at them right now, because I finally got Kid Maroon, and it's amazing, and it made me go.
48:18
Tad Eggleston: You had to sit on this for almost a year. Why?
48:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I think there's market reasons behind that. I have also read Kid Maroon, and it is amazing. Kid Maroon's very good.
48:29
Zack Quaintance: Goobers, I thought, kind of got lost, but was also awesome.
48:33
Zack Quaintance: But I'm good. Ryan, like I said, Ryan drew my Death Comics bookcase thing, and I love his work, so I was always gonna like goobers.
48:40
Zack Quaintance: But.
48:41
Tad Eggleston: And Chris is one of my best friends, so I, I should, should, should, should, like…
48:47
Tad Eggleston: cop to… I'm always gonna be partial to Cantwell book, but I still think it's one of… I think it's his best right now. I'm, like, so… It's so good, like…
48:57
Zack Quaintance: I don't even know how to, like, explain… because you think it's one thing when you start, and then it just.
49:02
Tad Eggleston: Huh?
49:02
Zack Quaintance: Is something totally…
49:04
Tad Eggleston: How did I describe it yesterday, Phil?
49:06
Phil: Oh.
49:07
Tad Eggleston: It's social commentary.
49:09
Phil: in a minute.
49:10
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
49:11
Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's, like, so.
49:14
Zack Quaintance: But it's way darker than that.
49:15
Tad Eggleston: Trauma…
49:16
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, Chad, Yeah!
49:19
Tad Eggleston: Growing up too fast, how hard it is to be a human being, a parent, blah blah blah, all told…
49:28
Tad Eggleston: as Dennis the Menace via Dick Tracy.
49:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, well, it's my, you know, it's my favorite type of com- like, I read so many comics, I really like a comic that is just entirely itself and not like anything else.
49:40
Zack Quaintance: And then…
49:41
Zack Quaintance: Kid Maroon fits that bill, like, there's no… you're not gonna read another comic like it, maybe ever. Yeah. And so, yeah.
49:47
Phil: If you do, it's a cheap imitation.
49:49
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, it may be.
49:50
Tad Eggleston: Probably. Every once in a while in comics, we get imitations that are actually, like, refined imitations. Fair. Don't like to assume that it will be a cheap imitation.
50:02
Phil: Now, but…
50:03
Phil: I do, I do stand by the, I… I don't want to read a comic that's less than, like.
50:08
Phil: the creator's whole heart and soul into it, you know? It's like, you hear about movies or TV shows that people were like, that wasn't what I wanted it to be, like, the people who made it, or disagreements come out, and it's like, no, no, I want… I don't want any of that from comics. I want… I want people to, you know, be all in on what they're doing.
50:25
Zack Quaintance: Well, I mean, that's one of the benefits of, like, okay, doing your own thing on Kickstarter is very hard. Like, you have to be your own marketing department, your own business department, all of it, but, like, man, if you take your time and do it right, like, you have total control, and you can make it exactly what you want to make it, like…
50:42
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, that's… that's part of why I've stayed so closely to trying to build a Kickstarter audience, is because it's like.
50:50
Zack Quaintance: you don't have to, I mean, you're not gonna make a lot of money. You throw that out the window, but you get to do whatever you want and make it.
50:57
Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… that's comics in general, Zach, did you not notice?
51:03
Zack Quaintance: I've been doing comics journalism for 8 years, losing money on it. Maintaining my URL and my site records costs money.
51:11
Phil: Yeah, as well.
51:11
Tad Eggleston: back in the business. Like, you brought up, you know, trying to build the Kickstarter audience. There are a handful of people who do have
51:22
Tad Eggleston: really big Kickstarter audiences, I wonder. Was there anybody that, like, you reached out for?
51:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
51:30
Tad Eggleston: advice, or anybody whose model you kind of looked at and went, this is how I think I might be able to do my thing?
51:38
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, Charlie Stickney, who does White Ash, has been an incredible resource of… of advice.
51:43
Zack Quaintance: on Kickstarter for me.
51:47
Zack Quaintance: He's had a lot… he's had a ton of success. He's got, like, 900 backers.
51:51
Zack Quaintance: for each campaign. I don't think my ideas quite translate to Kickstarter. My… the kind of books I want to do necessarily translate to that sort of, enormous Kickstarter audience. Like, I'm… I'm more of a 300 to 400 backer per campaign creator, which I'm… which I'm fine with. Like, that's… that's cool, that works for me, but yeah, I…
52:09
Tad Eggleston: The thing about being on Kickstarter, too, is people are very… I mean, you do have 262 backers already for Macabre Valley, so I'm just tossing that out there. 17 days to go.
52:18
Tad Eggleston: We could get it further up.
52:21
Zack Quaintance: I… I would… yeah, I mean, like, I don't want to jinx myself, but I'm hoping this is the mo… I get the most backers I've ever had on this one. It's my third one, and it's…
52:30
Zack Quaintance: it's ahead of where the past two have been, so, like, every backer, really means a lot to me. Like, I'm chasing this… chasing this record, like, trying to top… because the first one I did was in 2020, which was in the middle of the pandemic. Everyone was at home, everyone had money. Kickstarter was, like, on easy mode at that point.
52:48
Tad Eggleston: Right.
52:48
Zack Quaintance: And, I was working with an artist who's good, but he's a friend of mine, and, like, not sort of… he has a day job, he's not, like, a professional comic book artist, and we were still able to get 327 backers on that, just because of the kind of the time.
53:01
Zack Quaintance: So to top that would mean a lot to me. That's really what I'm focused on with this one. We'll see what happens. I don't want to jinx anything. I'm gonna knock on wood for, like, an hour after this.
53:13
Phil: So, do you… I mean, with that, do you mind if I ask you a, slightly controversial question? Spicy question?
53:19
Zack Quaintance: Let's do it, yeah.
53:20
Phil: Alright, how do you… how do you feel about, established corporations publishers on Kickstarter?
53:27
Zack Quaintance: I, you know, I don't mind it as much, like, I get the impulse to be like, stay off of here, this is for the little guys, but honestly, like, one of the big obstacles you run into over and over again when you're promoting a Kickstarter is people not understanding the platform. Like, you'll get, you'll run it, and you'll have friends, or even comics people be like, oh, I wish I could have got a copy of that, but I didn't know I could only get it
53:47
Zack Quaintance: during the campaign, you know? Right. So, like…
53:51
Zack Quaintance: to some extent, the more people who get familiar with Kickstarter and who have a login and have had a good experience on it, like, paid for a book and gotten it quickly, the better for you, because then they'll be… they'll be more, they'll be more likely to be like, I know this model, I'd had a good… good time with it, I got my book, it was a good book.
54:10
Phil: click, click, click. They back it without having to sign up. That's great for you, you know? You know, I can actually see the benefit of that a little bit better now, because I have mostly, heard the anti-argument on that, but yeah, I mean, as far as lending legitimacy to Kickstarter itself, I… I have to imagine that it goes… it goes leaps and bounds for that.
54:29
Zack Quaintance: I think familiarity and legitimacy is something that helps everybody on there, and it's like, the people backing the Danger Girl Artist Edition aren't gonna back an indie comic anyway.
54:40
Phil: Absolutely.
54:40
Zack Quaintance: You know?
54:41
Tad Eggleston: But I think they're way more likely to, because they saw it, because they're there for their Danger Girl Artist Edition than they were…
54:49
Tad Eggleston: Before that.
54:51
Zack Quaintance: That's how I feel about it. Bring more people into the platform and recognize this as a legitimate way to get good stuff in comics, you know?
54:57
Tad Eggleston: And that actually is a perfect example of why I'm actually in favor of it for literally anybody that's not DC or Marvel. DC and Marvel don't…
55:10
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Actually have money.
55:12
Tad Eggleston: Like, the idea of the other publishers actually being big is kind of shaky.
55:17
Zack Quaintance: I agree with that, like, when…
55:19
Tad Eggleston: Whatever.
55:19
Zack Quaintance: calls Dark Horse a mainstream publisher, I'm like…
55:23
Zack Quaintance: Like, if they sell 8,000 copies of something, that's a victory, and 8,000 is not a ton of people.
55:28
Tad Eggleston: Right.
55:29
Tad Eggleston: Right.
55:30
Tad Eggleston: So, so, so for me, where I go is, and, like, you bringing up the danger girl is perfect, actually, because that's something that if I'm…
55:43
Tad Eggleston: Scott Dunbeer, if I'm… Image, it's like…
55:48
Tad Eggleston: Is there interest in this? Or are we making this big, expensive thing that nobody wants?
55:55
Tad Eggleston: We have these people that say they want it, and they're really excited about it, but we know how fandom works.
56:01
Phil: And it's also… it makes… it makes sense to me that Image would do that, because Image is, you know, it's the collection of, hey, these are all, you know, every series is its own…
56:11
Tad Eggleston: business venture. It's managed by them, primarily, you know? But, I mean, the one that everybody got upset about was the Berserker, and particularly because of Keanu Reeves, and I'm sitting there going, yeah, but, like.
56:25
Tad Eggleston: Two things. First.
56:27
Tad Eggleston: Do you really think that the Keanu fans are gonna automatically come to the comic shop to get his book?
56:34
Tad Eggleston: Second, do you think that… The comic fans are automatically gonna…
56:41
Tad Eggleston: decide that Keanu can write a good comic. Now, I wound up being on board with that because of who he was working with.
56:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, and…
56:49
Tad Eggleston: But I didn't do the Kickstarter, because I'm like, I'm not so on board that I want a hardcover.
56:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
56:55
Tad Eggleston: But it was a way for Boom to kind of go, is this really a thing?
57:00
Zack Quaintance: No, and you see a lot.
57:01
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, from the outside, we can go, of course it was a thing, of course they made all that money, but, like, I could see, you know, when I was trying to decide whether or not I was going to spend that money to begin with.
57:14
Tad Eggleston: Wondering how much of a thing it was.
57:18
Phil: And… Sorry, you go ahead, Zach, I felt like you were trying to…
57:21
Zack Quaintance: It's sort of… it's… it sort of mitigates the risk. Like, there's not big profit margins for some of these mid-tier publishers, so you're like, boom, Oni Press is kind of…
57:31
Tad Eggleston: Now, just constantly running Kickstarters. And so, like.
57:35
Zack Quaintance: like, it's… it's not… the impulse, I think, for a lot of people are, like, they're taking money away from indie guys, but that's just not… I just don't think that's what it… how it works, necessarily, like,
57:49
Zack Quaintance: So, yeah, no, I…
57:50
Tad Eggleston: I mean, the way I look at it is they're making certain that their artists and writers get paid in advance rather than on the back end.
57:57
Phil: Yeah.
57:58
Tad Eggleston: I mean, hopefully they're still giving them back in, but, like, for a lot of artists, the ability to get paid as you turn your pages in is a game changer.
58:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, no, it's tough, I mean,
58:14
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, the way I run my Kickstarters, it takes a little bit longer, like, I pay all the artists at before the Kickstarter in full, like, just so that they know that, like, I don't want anybody to have to agree to, like.
58:24
Zack Quaintance: a situation where they might, like, have to worry if it's gonna fund or not, you know? So, like, I'm lucky to be in a position where, like, I don't have any kids, like, you know, this is kind of my… my childcare expenditures go into making comics, you know?
58:37
Tad Eggleston: That's why the comic shop I used to go to when Wheaton closed, he had kids, and he couldn't have his baby that was the comic shop anymore.
58:46
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, that's kind of, like, my baby is my Kickstarter comics, like… Yeah. But, yeah.
58:53
Phil: I look forward to those days.
58:54
Zack Quaintance: But I wouldn't be doing… I wouldn't be doing that… I wouldn't be taking that risk if I didn't… if I wasn't able to use Kickstarter to recoup the production cost, you know?
59:02
Phil: Yeah.
59:03
Zack Quaintance: So I'm… I'.
59:03
Tad Eggleston: Well, and there are different ways to do that, because I… because I imagine, like.
59:07
Tad Eggleston: you know, like, another one of our contributors, Dylan Gilbertson, has been kick-starting stuff. Yeah.
59:15
Tad Eggleston: you know, I don't think he pays full in advance, but I think he pays for, like, the images that go up in advance. They just don't have… Yeah, yeah. They don't actually start work on the comic until they've got the money.
59:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
59:30
Tad Eggleston: Like, a cover and a page.
59:33
Zack Quaintance: No, totally, like, just basic, like, that's how I did my first one, is we did the marketing material, and then we weren't gonna move forward with it, and then, yeah, there's different ways to do it. You can just do the, like, you need a 5-6 page preview, probably, cover art, maybe a little bit of marketing stuff.
59:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, that works for them, and they, like, the Neighborhood Necromancer is a great book, and they've been.
59:55
Tad Eggleston: It is.
59:56
Zack Quaintance: with that.
59:56
Tad Eggleston: And I love that you knew it.
59:58
Zack Quaintance: I'm a backer of that one, I like… I'm a big fan.
1:00:01
Tad Eggleston: Dylan will love that you knew it, too. He's part of… he's part of the heavy metal book club that we have, and I discovered on air when we were talking to him about the first Nekomancer that he and my brother, Peter, went to college together.
1:00:14
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding.
1:00:15
Tad Eggleston: So we had… so we had Peter crash the… Crash the on-air.
1:00:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, no, I'm… I like… I try to pay attention to Kickstarter and support the ones that I think… like, I think it's… I want Kickstarter to be a place for good comics, you know what I mean? It's tough for people to tell when they look at Kickstarters if this is gonna be good or not, so I try to support the ones that are legitimately good, make sure the good ones hang around.
1:00:40
Tad Eggleston: Well, and Kickstarter can be so weird… To begin with, because, like.
1:00:47
Tad Eggleston: I remember Terry Moore was really worried about his first Kickstarter when he did the SIP Kids. Yeah. And I was much less worried, and literally wound up texting him
1:00:59
Tad Eggleston: within 5 minutes of Kickstarter going, because I'm like, hey, Terry, you paying attention? Like, when I clicked, you only had $100. By the time I got through, you were up to $10,000. Now you're at $37,000 of the $30,000 that you wanted, and it's been a minute and a half. Wow.
1:01:18
Tad Eggleston: Email back going, yeah.
1:01:20
Tad Eggleston: Robin and I are just sitting here watching it roll. We had no idea!
1:01:26
Phil: Good for them, that's incredible.
1:01:28
Tad Eggleston: But then, when Andrew Iden did his last one, and he had Bendis, and he had Fraction, and he had, like, a Murderer's Row, and it was a charity Kickstarter for the Appalachia Comics Project, like, it eked across the line.
1:01:44
Zack Quaintance: Man, it's some… you know, some… I've seen Kickstarters like that, where it's like, it looks like it's just gonna, crush, you know, and then it's been a struggle. I… I really don't know sometimes. Right.
1:01:56
Zack Quaintance: what… Why some of these things don't catch fire on there, like…
1:02:02
Zack Quaintance: I've had good success focusing on the pre-launch and trying to just have, like, make sure you have a large number of pre-launch followers so you can start big on day one. I think that's important, like, if you don't do the pre-launch, maybe that's what it is, but sometimes there's no rhyme or reason to it.
1:02:18
Tad Eggleston: These are all good things to know as I try to learn more and more about the industry, and dreams of either helping people or literally, like, doing it for people.
1:02:28
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, I'm… yeah, any… I'm happy to share the little bit I know.
1:02:33
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I, I,
1:02:35
Tad Eggleston: I've gotten to know Shelly Bond, and I've gotten to know Dennis Kitchen really well, and, like, what I take away from the two of them is that, like, there is a massive need in the comics industry for people who know how to do stuff that's not the…
1:02:50
Tad Eggleston: The drawing and the writing, but more the staying on schedule, and finding a printer.
1:02:57
Zack Quaintance: Oh my god.
1:02:58
Tad Eggleston: And finding the stores to sell it.
1:03:01
Zack Quaintance: There's, like, so much little stuff you don't think about between when the art and the writing is done, and the actual… like, I, like… so I have a postcard. We have a postcard as part of our rewards. Super… the art came back really cool. It's gonna be an amazing postcard. Today, but the art came back big, high quality, so I had to, like.
1:03:19
Zack Quaintance: find out how to do the math. Like, I know that this thing, the way they gave it to me, is 11.69 inches by 8.27 inches.
1:03:26
Phil: You know?
1:03:26
Zack Quaintance: Like, I… but that's not postcard size, so I have to, like, find out what a dimension ratio is, and try to do the math to, like, work it down and see what size that comes out to for normal postcard size. I had to, like, text my brother, who's an actuary, to be like, help me with this. I could have helped you with that.
1:03:43
Tad Eggleston: I also have a brother… I mean, A, I'm a special ed teacher and can do that, so you… if you don't want to, like… wait, is an older or younger brother? He's… he's younger. I mean, we're… Okay, so that actually might make him feel cool. If it was the older brother, it'd be like, Dave…
1:03:59
Zack Quaintance: He was, he was hap… he was happy to help.
1:04:01
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:04:02
Zack Quaintance: He got all the math talent in the family.
1:04:04
Tad Eggleston: I have my share, but my baby brother is a literal, Data scientist.
1:04:15
Zack Quaintance: Aye.
1:04:15
Tad Eggleston: Which, like, not the same as a data analyst, like…
1:04:20
Tad Eggleston: Orders of magnitude, as… as he's often found out to his chagrin, as he, like, gets… like, he's a terrible story, and this is… this is… this is, like, the untold side of, like.
1:04:33
Tad Eggleston: big business going all in on AI slash data science slash whatever. He got a great job, and the first assignment, they kept, you know, he kept helping out in little ways while he was working on it.
1:04:46
Tad Eggleston: And he was given X amount of time, and he presented it.
1:04:49
Tad Eggleston: And it went so far over their heads, it wasn't even funny.
1:04:54
Tad Eggleston: Turned out that, like, the amount of… the amount of work that they'd wanted from him, he'd be done within, like, the first half hour.
1:05:01
Tad Eggleston: And he just, like, went so hard that he blew the, like, blew past it. So he wound up convincing them that they didn't need him, because they didn't understand him.
1:05:11
Zack Quaintance: They're like, you're.
1:05:12
Phil: Oh, that's tough. That's tough.
1:05:14
Tad Eggleston: I mean, they hired somebody else for half a.
1:05:17
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no.
1:05:18
Phil: Goodness, wow, that's rough.
1:05:20
Tad Eggleston: That's, that is true.
1:05:21
Zack Quaintance: rough. I'm sure he was fine.
1:05:22
Tad Eggleston: But this is the… I mean, he's still…
1:05:24
Zack Quaintance: I was…
1:05:25
Phil: I was gonna…
1:05:25
Tad Eggleston: Goodbye!
1:05:26
Phil: I could have helped with the postcard issue specifically, because my day job, I became known as the logo guy, because I'm
1:05:33
Phil: one of two people that understand DPI amongst all the programmers.
1:05:37
Zack Quaintance: Alright, yeah, yeah, no, DPI is very relevant to this. I figured it out, I got it.
1:05:42
Phil: because of.
1:05:42
Zack Quaintance: I'm excited.
1:05:43
Phil: I learned about DPI, because we used to have super shitty standards, and I was like, well, what do they print comics at? Oh, maybe let's use those standards. Hey, now it doesn't look pixelated anymore. What do you know?
1:05:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Well, I would tell you, like, one of the frustrating things about this is these printers, until a couple years ago, used to have people. Like, you would send your print job in, you could talk to a real person who'd explain to you, like, this is why your resolution's off, or whatever, but now they all have these
1:06:09
Zack Quaintance: AI things. They're like, they're like, your DPI is too low, and I'm like, my DPI is not low.
1:06:15
Zack Quaintance: It's… it's like, the problem is when it… you're… you're.
1:06:18
Tad Eggleston: Wait a minute, you mean that AI isn't good at complex problem solving yet?
1:06:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, what, what.
1:06:23
Tad Eggleston: I'm shocked, shocked at something that wasn't even designed to do.
1:06:28
Phil: Right.
1:06:28
Tad Eggleston: complex problem solving, can't do problem solving.
1:06:32
Phil: And then, of course, the one thing that I am the only guy who understands, do you understand the difference between DPI and PPI?
1:06:38
Zack Quaintance: I don't know.
1:06:39
Phil: Oh, well, DPI is the pixels per image, and then… or DPI stands for dots per inch, and then PPI stands for pixels per inch. So once the file actually gets to the printer, what is DPI in the computer becomes PPI.
1:06:55
Zack Quaintance: Sure.
1:06:56
Phil: for the printer, and then the actual DPI are the literal dots of ink that hit. So they… they print the dots at, like, 800 per inch, even though the image is 300 per inch. So it's, yeah.
1:07:07
Zack Quaintance: What I ended up doing to solve this problem is I found a print shop locally.
1:07:12
Zack Quaintance: Now I am… now I'm
1:07:14
Zack Quaintance: I'm going in person to this place on Monday with my files, and face-to-face, working with a human being to do it, which I probably should have done anyway. Yeah. But, like, no, now, and so I'm glad, ultimately, it was frustrating in the moment trying to get this thing to work, because it's supposed to be, like, takes you a really short amount of time, and you have your things shipped out, but now I'm going to do it locally, and I'll save money on the shipping, because I'll go pick up the postcards when they're ready.
1:07:37
Tad Eggleston: So there's another market inefficiency for comics, is, like, somebody should…
1:07:44
Tad Eggleston: print and be, like, full service, where they can print as much of your different comic stuff, including postcards and stickers, all in one place as possible, and have the people to coach you on how to format it properly.
1:07:59
Zack Quaintance: Well, and they used to, like, they… the printer… I won't name them, but the printer I used to use had the people, and, like, now they've… their prices went down, and I was like, oh, great, the prices are much…
1:08:09
Zack Quaintance: much lower. I'm gonna be… I was able to offer kind of a lower price on my Kickstarter, you know? But the… but the downside is, now that there's no people anymore to help you, and I think they were able to lower the price because of the AI, so…
1:08:20
Zack Quaintance: This is something I was talking to someone else on Blue Sky about the other day, like, that they were kind of having the same problems with these printers, that they're all trying to use AI to, like, kind of…
1:08:30
Zack Quaintance: cut… cut customer service corners, so… I don't know. Probably not the only one dealing with it.
1:08:35
Tad Eggleston: No, I know you don't.
1:08:36
Zack Quaintance: people. Don't get rid of the people.
1:08:38
Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, and again, like…
1:08:42
Tad Eggleston: what we normally call AI is large language models. They're literally designed to finish your sentence and or
1:08:54
Tad Eggleston: translated into a different language. They're not designed for complex problem solving. They're remarkably bad at math, because they're not designed.
1:09:04
Phil: Yeah.
1:09:05
Zack Quaintance: for math. Well, because they're not…
1:09:07
Phil: Dealing with integers or dealing with strings.
1:09:09
Zack Quaintance: And, like, I'm only going to need help with this when it becomes complex. Like, for the simple problems that these chatbots can solve, I can do that on… not to inflate myself too much.
1:09:22
Phil: No, no, no, no, no, no, this is…
1:09:23
Zack Quaintance: do that all.
1:09:24
Tad Eggleston: You can turn the computer off and on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:09:28
Phil: Well, not only, not only that, but…
1:09:29
Tad Eggleston: I know what type of file I need, I'm not doing that. I need… it's the…
1:09:34
Zack Quaintance: the…
1:09:36
Phil: problems that I need help with, yeah.
1:09:38
Phil: Someone who can look at what's going on and identify where the issue is.
1:09:41
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:09:42
Phil: something simple, like, you, like, like you said, if your DPI is too low, because it's, of course, like, some.
1:09:47
Zack Quaintance: me.
1:09:48
Phil: Some base-ass check, yeah, no, it's terrible. It's terrible. Yeah, I like to tell people, anyone who thinks that they've done something where AI has been useful is only because they were uninformed in what they were trying to do in the first place. And if you had someone with the actual knowledge.
1:10:05
Phil: They would be able to do it.
1:10:06
Tad Eggleston: Unless it was basic translation.
1:10:09
Phil: Basic trans… I'm offended by basic translation, because if you do literal word-for-word translation in a lot of languages, you lose so much.
1:10:16
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, but, but, but… Google Translate stopped doing literal word-for-word translation almost 10 years ago now.
1:10:24
Phil: Okay.
1:10:25
Tad Eggleston: I mean, cause that.
1:10:26
Phil: Hell yeah!
1:10:27
Tad Eggleston: That's what machine learning is designed for. It's not perfect.
1:10:31
Phil: And that's why I was.
1:10:31
Tad Eggleston: Like, if you're gonna publish, you should still hire a translator. But great translators sometimes start with, and then…
1:10:39
Phil: Mmm. Okay. I see what you're saying. I see what you're saying.
1:10:42
Tad Eggleston: And then smooth the edges now, because it's not having to completely… you don't have to go back to Word 1. You know, it got significantly better, particularly at Chinese, Spanish, German… the languages that there are the most documents in.
1:10:58
Phil: Okay.
1:10:59
Tad Eggleston: it got significantly, significantly better about 6 years ago. People actually, like, managed to figure out when Amazon, or not Amazon, Google flipped the switch to turn the machine learning on.
1:11:11
Phil: Hmm?
1:11:12
Tad Eggleston: And then they confirmed it because somebody asked them the specific question, did you make a major change in your Google Translate service at this time on this day?
1:11:24
Phil: Interesting. Interesting.
1:11:27
Phil: I would be curious, the professional translators and, like, how AI works in the workflow, that's.
1:11:32
Tad Eggleston: Well, and again, I… this is not me saying you should… Right, right.
1:11:35
Phil: AI to do a full-on… Of course, of course.
1:11:40
Tad Eggleston: there are so many nuances, but I'm saying that, like, that's the thing that it's…
1:11:47
Tad Eggleston: best stat. And it's still not good enough that you should be doing it for anything other than personal translation.
1:11:53
Zack Quaintance: I always think of it as, like, is this a job that a human can do? Then they should probably continue doing it. But, like, so there's stuff like, like, like…
1:12:02
Zack Quaintance: San Francisco is using AI to comb through 16,000 pages of city code to find what is, no longer relevant. Like, they had a code that was requiring them to put newspaper boxes every 100 yards, or something like that. So AI went through their city… 16,000 pages of city code, which a human cannot go through that, like, I mean.
1:12:21
Tad Eggleston: And hopefully, it was a well-tailored machine learning program that wasn't just trained on the whole internet. Yeah, yeah. But had been trained on something specific to do that. Yeah, there are lots of great uses.
1:12:34
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, machine learning, like, which we've had for years.
1:12:38
Zack Quaintance: It's not the same thing that they're… that's getting pushed at the corporate level with all these chat GPT products, so, like… Yeah. No.
1:12:45
Phil: Yeah.
1:12:46
Zack Quaintance: And we got it all figured out, they should listen to us.
1:12:48
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. That would be great! I would love that.
1:12:51
Phil: Exactly.
1:12:52
Tad Eggleston: I would love that. But, okay, before I get to my favorite final question, since you do…
1:12:59
Zack Quaintance: Since you do…
1:13:02
Tad Eggleston: Also…
1:13:06
Tad Eggleston: write, you know, the weekly what-to-pick-up column for the beat, which is one of my must-read columns already,
1:13:15
Tad Eggleston: What are your top 3 ongoing series right now?
1:13:20
Tad Eggleston: What are the ones that you must read the next issue the second you can?
1:13:24
Zack Quaintance: Man, I might have to consult my, my release spreadsheet where I track these.
1:13:30
Tad Eggleston: You're totally allowed to.
1:13:33
Tad Eggleston: I imagine you'll be looking at the bookshelf for my final question. Most people do.
1:13:37
Zack Quaintance: Well, I've… I… one of them is the seasons, the,
1:13:41
Tad Eggleston: I need to read that. You're the second person who brought that up recently.
1:13:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:13:45
Zack Quaintance: I mean, that comic, like, it just… it's like one of those I was talking about earlier, where there's not another one quite like it,
1:13:52
Zack Quaintance: And I just don't know where it's going, I don't know what they're trying to do with it, and I love it, and it looks amazing. Like, Paul has a set that I always thought was kind of a dark, dark artist, and has just gone total, like, neon horror, or no, pastel neon horror with this comic. Wow. Yeah, like…
1:14:07
Zack Quaintance: So I am loving that one. Should I do a Cantwell book? I'm a big fan of his as well.
1:14:12
Tad Eggleston: I'll let you do a Cantwell book.
1:14:14
Zack Quaintance: Alright. Star Trek Red Shirts, are you reading it?
1:14:17
Tad Eggleston: So good.
1:14:18
Zack Quaintance: So good!
1:14:18
Tad Eggleston: I… I… okay. I've told this story a few times, but I can't help, like…
1:14:24
Tad Eggleston: Chris and I have been friends pretty much since the first time he was on this podcast, and we just started texting regularly and whatnot.
1:14:30
Tad Eggleston: when he texted me to say he had the Star Trek gig, I mean, A, I was hugely happy for him, because he is.
1:14:35
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I love Star Trek.
1:14:37
Tad Eggleston: Massive Star Trek nod.
1:14:38
Tad Eggleston: But, I immediately turned to my wife and said.
1:14:42
Zack Quaintance: I'm gonna have to learn a lot more about Star Trek now.
1:14:45
Tad Eggleston: It was weird.
1:14:46
Zack Quaintance: maybe this is where you're going with this, but I feel like Star Trek Redshirts is friendly to someone who's only seen a little bit of Star Trek, like…
1:14:53
Tad Eggleston: Oh, it definitely is.
1:14:53
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:14:54
Tad Eggleston: At this point, I haven't seen only a little bit of Star Trek. During the time that he and Jackson and Colin were doing their thing, I watched all of Deep Space Nine, all of Void.
1:15:04
Zack Quaintance: Right.
1:15:04
Tad Eggleston: all of Next Generation. All of Lower Decks.
1:15:08
Zack Quaintance: I mean, that's great, like, Deep Space Nine is so good, yeah.
1:15:12
Tad Eggleston: It is!
1:15:13
Zack Quaintance: Ew.
1:15:13
Tad Eggleston: They suck…
1:15:14
Zack Quaintance: Four decks is also awesome.
1:15:15
Tad Eggleston: And I am still, like, I am still probably among the episodes that I'm most proud of. Like, we've got a handful of episodes that I'm really proud of. We've done some mental health episodes, we've done some educational episodes, I've had Spencer Ackerman on,
1:15:31
Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing, but, like…
1:15:34
Tad Eggleston: to kick off their Star Trek run, we had what we called the… the… the…
1:15:40
Tad Eggleston: I can't even remember what we call it, but it was essentially Star Trek 101, where I was the… I was the complete newbie who knew nothing, and my friend Aaron and Chris Condon were the professors, and the… and the guest lecturers were… were Chris Cantwell, Jackson…
1:15:59
Tad Eggleston: Lansing and Colin Kelly. And, like, they pitched their series, they told us all sorts of stuff about Star Trek in general, and then they took questions from me, which, literally, my first question was, who's Benjamin Sisko?
1:16:15
Tad Eggleston: And Jackson almost fell out of his chair.
1:16:22
Tad Eggleston: That's awesome. But then we did a follow-up with them and Heather Antos at the end of it.
1:16:28
Zack Quaintance: Nice, yeah.
1:16:29
Tad Eggleston: Where we did the wrap-up, and, like, I was able to show
1:16:32
Tad Eggleston: I don't know Star Trek like you guys, but I know my Star Trek now, and it's your fault. Well, that's pretty satisfying, too, to be like, look how far I've come. Right!
1:16:44
Zack Quaintance: Alright, one more. Lazarus Fallen, I'm a huge Lazarus is, like, I think…
1:16:50
Phil: Hell yeah.
1:16:50
Zack Quaintance: Wasaga on hiatus, my favorite, ongoing
1:16:54
Zack Quaintance: long-term, long-form narrative, long-running comic. Lazarus is just an amazing comic book, so…
1:17:00
Phil: My favorite, longest-running book right now, because I've been there since issue 1, hell yeah.
1:17:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, and, like, I thought this would be, like, 6 issues, Lazarus Fallen, like, a 6-issue arc. No!
1:17:11
Phil: 20-something. At least.
1:17:12
Zack Quaintance: Hell yes, I'm hoping they're like, we need a few more. Yeah, no, we…
1:17:16
Tad Eggleston: We, we, we had Greg on for our 200th
1:17:20
Tad Eggleston: weekly episode. He was kind enough to surprise Phil.
1:17:24
Phil: Yep. Would have surprised Tyler, but Tyler was… Driving.
1:17:28
Tad Eggleston: Didn't manage to make it.
1:17:32
Phil: No, that was great, that was so much fun.
1:17:34
Zack Quaintance: You didn't know he was gonna be on? Like, it was a little…
1:17:36
Tad Eggleston: I knew, it was a surprise for me.
1:17:38
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, sure.
1:17:38
Phil: He had a mystery guest, and I was like… in my… it was funny.
1:17:42
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he'd managed to put it on the list of people that he was guessing. Yeah. Though I don't know if he would have managed to if he'd come the first time he was planning to come, but he instead got a writing gig that, like… Yeah.
1:17:54
Phil: As to what that writing gig is, too, but I won't say that guess.
1:17:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no, we promised we would not guess on the air.
1:18:01
Phil: Right.
1:18:02
Phil: But no, if he had come on the first time, I would have guessed a fraction first, and then him second, but… Okay. Because that was right after we talked to Kelly Sue.
1:18:09
Tad Eggleston: Because it was right after we talked. Yeah. Yeah, Kelly Sue's amazing.
1:18:13
Zack Quaintance: Save fraction for 300, right? Surprisingly.
1:18:16
Phil: There we go.
1:18:16
Zack Quaintance: The 300?
1:18:17
Phil: There we go. That'd be exciting.
1:18:18
Tad Eggleston: Come on.
1:18:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so those are my three.
1:18:22
Tad Eggleston: No, those are, those are three.
1:18:23
Phil: I'm gonna have to read the seasons then, because that, that, that, I like Romender, I'm, you know, so that sounds good.
1:18:28
Zack Quaintance: I like Remender, yeah.
1:18:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
1:18:31
Tad Eggleston: See, and the reason I hadn't picked it up yet was twofold. A, I just read so many comics.
1:18:38
Zack Quaintance: I hear ya.
1:18:38
Tad Eggleston: B…
1:18:40
Tad Eggleston: I either love Remender, or I'm indifferent to Remender, so I sometimes wait until people start saying what they like about it to go, oh, okay, this is going to be one that I love.
1:18:50
Zack Quaintance: Did you like Grommets? Did you read Grommets?
1:18:52
Tad Eggleston: I love grommets.
1:18:53
Zack Quaintance: Gromit's is great, yeah, Gromits is so fun.
1:18:56
Phil: So what are your… what are your favorite remember books, then? To, get my last question before Tad's last question.
1:19:01
Zack Quaintance: Deadly Clark.
1:19:03
Tad Eggleston: Well, I still actually have two.
1:19:06
Zack Quaintance: That might be my favorite.
1:19:07
Phil: I need to finish it. I need to… I've stopped after I had.
1:19:11
Zack Quaintance: It's a ride.
1:19:12
Phil: Yeah.
1:19:13
Tad Eggleston: Oh my goodness.
1:19:13
Phil: the last, like, 2 or 3 volumes I need to finish, but yeah. Yeah.
1:19:16
Tad Eggleston: My son got me into that one.
1:19:18
Zack Quaintance: Oh, do you really? Yeah.
1:19:19
Tad Eggleston: That's the first book that it was my son getting me into, rather than me getting him into. Oh, yeah. So that will always have a special, special place.
1:19:32
Zack Quaintance: Well, yeah.
1:19:33
Tad Eggleston: What's…
1:19:34
Zack Quaintance: Greg, too, is just a fantastic artist.
1:19:36
Tad Eggleston: We've had Wes on a couple of times, too.
1:19:38
Zack Quaintance: So good.
1:19:39
Tad Eggleston: I love Kaya. I love Kaya.
1:19:40
Zack Quaintance: Kaya's fantastic. He's one of those artists, it's like, doesn't matter what he's drawing, I'm gonna read it, like, everything, just because I think he's always up to something interesting with
1:19:48
Zack Quaintance: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
1:19:50
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so those… and then I've liked this, like…
1:19:54
Zack Quaintance: remember being kind of funny lately, like, grommits, and I like the Andy Samberg one he did, the Holy Roman one. Oh, yeah.
1:20:00
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:20:01
Tad Eggleston: Holy Roller.
1:20:03
Zack Quaintance: Fair enough.
1:20:04
Phil: Yeah. My old time's probably 7 to Eternity. That one, I've got.
1:20:08
Zack Quaintance: Oh, yeah. Yeah, I've got the oversight on that.
1:20:10
Tad Eggleston: that, because that was one that I was expecting to like a lot, and was indifferent on the first trade.
1:20:15
Phil: It's…
1:20:16
Zack Quaintance: soon.
1:20:16
Phil: It's an odd book. I read it in… With that and Black Science, I never got into nearly as much as some people did.
1:20:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Yeah.
1:20:25
Tad Eggleston: It could be that I just need to…
1:20:28
Zack Quaintance: So, with Seven Eternity, I thought they were gonna do a lot… like, setting up for, like, a long run, and then I thought it just kind of… it, I liked it, but it ended a little abruptly, or kind of… I thought they were positioning themselves for a very long comic.
1:20:40
Phil: Yeah.
1:20:42
Zack Quaintance: But I don't know if maybe that was Opena, because he's… he hasn't been drawing much, like, regular comics lately, so maybe it was his choice. I don't know.
1:20:49
Phil: It might have been. I love just the denseness of the world, like, there's so much in it that is like, yeah, I would have kept reading this for another 20, 30 issues easy, but, like, it's all we get? Alright, time to study it, you know?
1:21:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, that's a kind of thing.
1:21:03
Phil: out what it is. Reread. And Black Science… Black Science is a weird book. It's a weird book, it… because it was basically one where my opinion on it was changing constantly, and the way it ended was like, okay, that works, but I don't know if I liked it, so it's… it's another one that's like…
1:21:24
Phil: it's different. It's a different sort of book. But yeah.
1:21:28
Zack Quaintance: What'd you think of Tokyo Ghost? Where do you fall… where do you guys fall on that?
1:21:31
Tad Eggleston: I love Tokyo Beach.
1:21:32
Phil: I… okay, I love Tokyo Ghost, but that one, that's… I had my… the experience you had with Seven to Eternity, that's the experience that I had with Tokyo Ghost, and I was like, okay, I'm ready for Volume 2, and now Volume 2's never gonna happen, and I'm kind of mad about it.
1:21:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:21:49
Zack Quaintance: That was a good concept.
1:21:50
Phil: That's fair. Yeah. That's fair.
1:21:52
Zack Quaintance: Also, motorcycles and comics are awesome, so…
1:21:54
Tad Eggleston: Yup. Did you read sir?
1:21:57
Tad Eggleston: The Felhelhound book? Yeah. Yeah. Motorcycle jousting that I never knew I needed.
1:22:03
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:22:04
Tad Eggleston: And it's like…
1:22:05
Zack Quaintance: It's like a concept you think would be out there more, right? Motorcycle jousting?
1:22:09
Tad Eggleston: There is a movie that's okay, Not as good as… It's pretty good.
1:22:13
Phil: It's worth it. It's still worth watching. You got a young Ed Harris.
1:22:17
Tad Eggleston: That's true.
1:22:17
Phil: Written and directed by George Romero.
1:22:20
Tad Eggleston: What's the movie again? I always forget.
1:22:21
Phil: It is called Knight Riders.
1:22:23
Tad Eggleston: That's right. It's a long night writer.
1:22:26
Zack Quaintance: the.
1:22:27
Phil: Not Knight Rider, Knight Riders.
1:22:28
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. Motorcycle jousting, not talking karsh. Yep.
1:22:33
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, that's the confusion there.
1:22:35
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I actually still have two more questions, because I had a follow-up to the best ongoing series. You also, like, managed to keep up to date on this year's graphic novels, and I know that you and I have
1:22:48
Tad Eggleston: At least one in common. So, so what are your, your…
1:22:52
Zack Quaintance: Have you read Drome? Is that, is that the one?
1:22:55
Tad Eggleston: That's exactly right.
1:22:56
Zack Quaintance: God.
1:22:57
Tad Eggleston: I read that when it was… when it was… I read that via his Patreon.
1:23:01
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:23:02
Tad Eggleston: I…
1:23:03
Zack Quaintance: I'm on his Patreon as well.
1:23:05
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. That is gonna be the first book that is, like, the top of my best graphic novel in two separate years, because it made the top of my… top… it made one of my top graphic novels of the year in the Patreon year, even though that was the only way you could get it.
1:23:22
Zack Quaintance: And we're, like, we're halfway through the decade, but, like, come on, like, that's.
1:23:27
Tad Eggleston: It's…
1:23:27
Zack Quaintance: Fest of the decade.
1:23:29
Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
1:23:29
Zack Quaintance: It's that.
1:23:30
Tad Eggleston: I love Jesse Lonergan, and this is… this is currently his masterpiece.
1:23:34
Zack Quaintance: That's what I… yeah, that's what I… that was my reaction to it, is, like, Jesse Lonergan has been a master, like, the way he tells stories in comics, and now he has his, like, big statement masterpiece. Yeah, man, that's… that's, like, my favorite graphic novel of the year with a bullet, like…
1:23:50
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:23:50
Zack Quaintance: And it hasn't been… it's been a good year for, like, Tongues. Tongues was very good.
1:23:54
Tad Eggleston: Yep.
1:23:55
Zack Quaintance: The Andrew Nilsen one,
1:23:57
Zack Quaintance: What, did you say 3? Let me.
1:23:59
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I'm a baseball guy, we do threes.
1:24:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I'll have… what else did it? There's, can I count spectators, or does that not… Yeah, absolutely! I'll do spectators for my third one, yeah.
1:24:10
Tad Eggleston: So good.
1:24:11
Phil: That was real good.
1:24:13
Zack Quaintance: Though…
1:24:14
Tad Eggleston: like… The… the Marika Tamaki…
1:24:22
Tad Eggleston: Nicole Goo came out the same week as Strome, and there was one other that week. There were, like, 3 books.
1:24:27
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:24:28
Tad Eggleston: two other books in the week that Drome came out.
1:24:31
Tad Eggleston: that, like, if I was able to just forget about the rest of the year, I would have been completely happy calling them my best three of the year.
1:24:40
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, and there's… I'm gonna look at my shelf… the New York trilogy, the, the one that.
1:24:46
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah! Yeah, that was an incredible book that came out right around when tongues came out in the spring. Yep! So you've had these, like, two… We had Paul Karasek on to talk about that.
1:24:55
Tad Eggleston: Man, it's like… He's gonna die.
1:24:57
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, that book turned out amazing, too, and it's like, because David Mazzicelli was involved in the first part, and so you expect to, like, be like, well, I don't know if the finishing out this trilogy, I don't know how it's gonna stand up to that. It's so good.
1:25:09
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
1:25:09
Zack Quaintance: such a good job with the, again, bits of it. So, yeah.
1:25:13
Zack Quaintance: And then that book, I think it just came out this week, Hello Sunshine? The key to Youngblood.
1:25:17
Tad Eggleston: Yep.
1:25:17
Phil: I want…
1:25:18
Tad Eggleston: Great one. Yep. I don't think either of us have managed to read it yet.
1:25:22
Phil: Not yet.
1:25:22
Tad Eggleston: I have a digital copy, I know he's looking for a physical copy.
1:25:26
Phil: I want, yeah, yeah.
1:25:27
Tad Eggleston: So talk to us next week, and we'll have… Strong, probably very good thoughts.
1:25:33
Zack Quaintance: It's just been a good year for graphic novels, though, like, there's just a lot of interesting things happening.
1:25:39
Tad Eggleston: We are in the platinum age of comics. We are in the age of comics where there are so many good comics coming out in so many different ways that it is impossible
1:25:50
Tad Eggleston: to read and keep up with them all. I know, yeah, I'm giving up my best shot, and I'm still behind, so… Right, right!
1:25:58
Tad Eggleston: And really, if you want to ever read anything that's not new, you've got no chance of keeping up on all of the good news stuff.
1:26:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, like, if you want to go back and read stuff from the 80s or whatever. Like, for me, like, they need to… if they get a new edition, it'll find its way into my stack. Like, when they get, like, a new printing or something, I'll find a way to do it. But yeah, like, just going back and, like, using,
1:26:20
Zack Quaintance: I always forget the name, DC Universe Infinite, or whatever it's called.
1:26:23
Tad Eggleston: Yep.
1:26:23
Zack Quaintance: reading old Legion runs, which I would love to have time to do. I'm never.
1:26:27
Tad Eggleston: That means that you just officially became somebody that we have to, invite to our next Legion Roundtable, which… which has been delayed
1:26:38
Tad Eggleston: First, because my friend Johnny, who I dubbed the world's biggest Legion fan, was chasing after Jim Shooter, and we didn't quite manage to pull it off.
1:26:47
Phil: Hmm…
1:26:50
Tad Eggleston: And I think we're all, like, the last one… the last one was great. We, we had, we had,
1:26:58
Tad Eggleston: So many Pauls, why am I having.
1:27:01
Phil: I'll have it?
1:27:01
Tad Eggleston: Levitz. Yeah. Paul Levitz, and we had…
1:27:04
Phil: biggest interview, I'm pretty sure.
1:27:06
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was… he was an early, really big interview. Yeah, we had Paul Levitz, and we had Tom Bernboign, and we had…
1:27:15
Tad Eggleston: I forget who else. I think either an inker or a colorist that had worked with both of them.
1:27:24
Tad Eggleston: But we'd been supposed to have Keith Giffen that day. Oh, man. My friend Johnny had actually… my friend Johnny had actually worked it out through his son-in-law.
1:27:33
Zack Quaintance: Oh, man.
1:27:35
Tad Eggleston: And he went into the hospital the day before we were…
1:27:39
Tad Eggleston: And while he did come home once, he never really recovered.
1:27:43
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:27:43
Tad Eggleston: So we were, like, literally hours from having Levitz and Giffen talking Legion.
1:27:50
Zack Quaintance: Oh, man, yeah, I've read that stretch of the run, it's some of my favorite superhero comics of all time. The Great Darkness Saga, like, so good, man.
1:28:00
Phil: This… this is where I admit I need… I have… I've read literally one issue of Legion.
1:28:04
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're gonna have to read some more Legion.
1:28:05
Phil: I know, I'm sorry, Zach, I just saw your face.
1:28:08
Phil: Completely just like.
1:28:09
Zack Quaintance: I mean, no, it happens. It's like, cause, like, yeah, I mean, it's a little bit before our times.
1:28:14
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I'll be the first one to say that the reason that I've… and I haven't read a ton of Legion, but the reason I've read the Legion that I've read is one of my good friends was a comic book fan before he discovered the Legion, but fell in love with the Legion
1:28:31
Tad Eggleston: because it was, like, a diverse book, and he was a black kid growing up in Chicago in the 70s.
1:28:37
Tad Eggleston: And then discovered that this hot new rider on the Legion was only a couple months older than he was.
1:28:43
Phil: Wow.
1:28:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, because I think Paul Evans started doing that when he was a teenager.
1:28:47
Tad Eggleston: Jim Shooter the surgery?
1:28:49
Zack Quaintance: Dude, yeah.
1:28:50
Tad Eggleston: Shooter was 13 when he wrote his first… Legion Comic.
1:28:54
Tad Eggleston: And Johnny and I looked it up one of the last times we talked. Johnny is, like, exactly, like, 5 months and 3 days younger than… than Jim Shooter, something like that.
1:29:05
Tad Eggleston: So, like, it was literally, you know, they were the same age, and can you imagine… can you imagine, like, it's already your favorite comic, and you realize that the writer is your age when you're a kid?
1:29:19
Phil: I can't, no.
1:29:20
Tad Eggleston: That'd be kind of weird, 25.
1:29:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
1:29:26
Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I remember Theo Epstein was my hero, because he was 4 years older than me when he took over the Red Sox, and I'm like, oh!
1:29:34
Tad Eggleston: That's what I want! Give me a team when I'm 29!
1:29:38
Phil: It's gonna be weird when I don't think any of the writers I'm a super huge fan of are younger than me, but I have a feeling it's gonna happen at some point.
1:29:47
Tad Eggleston: Oh, at this point, like, all of the baseball players are younger than me, and most of the comic people that I like are either my age or younger. It happens fast.
1:29:59
Tad Eggleston: Happens fast, I actually…
1:30:00
Zack Quaintance: You get over it pretty fast, too, though. You do?
1:30:03
Tad Eggleston: What are you gonna do? I mean, every once in a while, like, I recently had this kid named Moritz Junker on.
1:30:10
Tad Eggleston: who is 19.
1:30:12
Phil: With some of the sharpest lines.
1:30:16
Tad Eggleston: That's pretty cool.
1:30:17
Tad Eggleston: And it's ridiculous that he's 19.
1:30:21
Phil: Yeah, wow.
1:30:22
Tad Eggleston: too. Yeah.
1:30:24
Phil: Yeah.
1:30:25
Tad Eggleston: And he's funny to boot, and I'm like, oh god, we need to… we need more people to know about this guy.
1:30:29
Phil: Well, and here's… there's already someone like that. I remember, Tilly Walden. When I found out that Tilly Walden was… was younger than me, I was like, I thought I… there was no way. There was no way that, you know…
1:30:41
Zack Quaintance: The artist on my… on Macabre Valley is in her 20s. Nice.
1:30:46
Tad Eggleston: I love it.
1:30:46
Zack Quaintance: He's like a comics genius, man.
1:30:48
Phil: Yeah.
1:30:49
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:30:49
Phil: a lot, so much.
1:30:50
Tad Eggleston: Zoe Thorogood is, what, 22?
1:30:54
Phil: thumbs up.
1:30:55
Tad Eggleston: 3, something like that? Yeah.
1:30:58
Tad Eggleston: And I guess part of that is institutional knowledge. They're not having to create as much from scratch, they're taking things that have been used in storytelling and using them in different ways.
1:31:10
Tad Eggleston: And there's a lot more available for them to study, because you've got all of the internet, rather than all of the local drugstore.
1:31:18
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:31:19
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, or, like, whatever random comics they happen to have back issues at at your shop, you know what I mean? Right. That was a lot of what ended up in my house.
1:31:27
Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean, you can tell when comics shift into the group of people that not only are writing comics because they want to write comics, but are writing comics
1:31:39
Tad Eggleston: Because they grew up reading comics.
1:31:42
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Like, every… everything shifts.
1:31:45
Tad Eggleston: Seriously.
1:31:46
Tad Eggleston: At that point, in there.
1:31:48
Tad Eggleston: late 60s, early 70s, it was like, oh, these people care about making comic books. They're not auditioning for… for…
1:31:57
Tad Eggleston: Pulps or… or advertising agencies.
1:32:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:32:02
Tad Eggleston: Or, like.
1:32:03
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, because they used to be embarrassed to be doing this. Right, right. They had to, like, they had to hide it. Right.
1:32:12
Tad Eggleston: Alright, my, my, my… particularly because we've, we've, we've managed to keep you past the 90 minutes now, I will,
1:32:19
Zack Quaintance: Oh, I didn't even notice.
1:32:20
Tad Eggleston: See? See? That means… We're doing good, we're doing good.
1:32:24
Tad Eggleston: We did our job. Tell me something you love.
1:32:26
Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
1:32:33
Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced?
1:32:36
Tad Eggleston: And you want them to, So that you have more people to talk about it with.
1:32:41
Zack Quaintance: Oh, man, well, we talked about straight bullets, that would normally be my answer.
1:32:46
Tad Eggleston: I love stray bullets. Yeah, I'll just go with Stray Bullets, like… I know plenty of comics people who are like, I've always been meaning to read that, but I just haven't… I am shocked by the number of people that don't love Stray Bullets.
1:32:58
Zack Quaintance: But haven't made time to jump in, you know? Right.
1:33:03
Phil: My model of stray bullets.
1:33:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Yeah! Yeah! .
1:33:09
Tad Eggleston: I mean, frankly, if you like crime fiction, you should.
1:33:11
Zack Quaintance: She does, she loves crime fiction.
1:33:13
Tad Eggleston: I always just…
1:33:14
Zack Quaintance: about it is it's funny, too. Like, it's prime fiction with a really good sense of humor, like.
1:33:19
Zack Quaintance: something I admire when you can be, like, serious about genre and also be kind of… not lose the sense of humor to it, you know?
1:33:27
Tad Eggleston: I always used to sell it when I worked at the comic shop as Pulp Fiction on Speed.
1:33:32
Zack Quaintance: Oh, yeah. You have the Amy race car issues, like a hallucination, you know?
1:33:37
Phil: The fact that it's… it's so…
1:33:38
Tad Eggleston: I love that the Amy Reese car issues were, like, just one per story arc.
1:33:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:33:45
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
1:33:46
Zack Quaintance: mound of Amy Racecar.
1:33:47
Tad Eggleston: I loved that… that it wasn't sequential. There's actually a website that… that has got… I mean, because it gives the dates, there's a website that has, okay, if you want to read it chronologically, read, like, issue 17…
1:34:03
Zack Quaintance: hate crime.
1:34:05
Phil: Small crime right there.
1:34:06
Tad Eggleston: No, I, like, I'm somebody who likes to read things different ways, so I could see reading it chronologically.
1:34:11
Zack Quaintance: We're doing a reread.
1:34:12
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've read it… yeah, no, not the first time. Oh, God.
1:34:16
Phil: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm saying.
1:34:17
Zack Quaintance: Because people do that with Hellboy, also, and I'm just like, don't…
1:34:21
Phil: Nope.
1:34:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, to publication order, first time, but I could see… I could see if you want to do a reread to spice it up and give yourself an interest… a different perspective on it than, like, switching it up that way, you know?
1:34:31
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's kind of like… like, we've got a Love & Rockets book club, and we actually decided to, like, go hardcore. We've been going issue by issue. Like, I tracked down scans of early issues so that we could read.
1:34:44
Zack Quaintance: The Jamie and then the Gilbert, or whatever.
1:34:46
Tad Eggleston: Jaime and Beto, Jaime and Beto, like…
1:34:50
Tad Eggleston: rather than having the story arcs together, we get our slices each week, and we talk about that and where we're at. But we're already talking about, like, we're kind of looking forward to, once we get caught up, like.
1:35:05
Tad Eggleston: a year, year and a half from now, we'll catch up. You know, it'll be fun to go back and, like, let's read the story arc.
1:35:13
Tad Eggleston: Rather than… Yeah.
1:35:15
Tad Eggleston: Let's see how it feels different reading…
1:35:18
Tad Eggleston: Death of Speedy together, rather than…
1:35:21
Tad Eggleston: And for me, the first time I read Love and Rockets was in the… the library editions, so they were already connected, or collected by…
1:35:30
Tad Eggleston: by either Jaime or Beto.
1:35:33
Tad Eggleston: So this was my first read of it this way.
1:35:36
Tad Eggleston: Whereas one of the other members read them when they were coming out.
1:35:42
Tad Eggleston: But then kind of fell off.
1:35:44
Tad Eggleston: during Volume 2?
1:35:47
Tad Eggleston: And the third member, this is her first read ever.
1:35:50
Tad Eggleston: So, like…
1:35:51
Zack Quaintance: So, good variety there.
1:35:52
Tad Eggleston: It makes for a fantastic read.
1:35:55
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:35:57
Tad Eggleston: So… Zach, anything else you want to plug? You write regularly in the beat, you've got this Kickstarter that people should throw money at you for.
1:36:05
Zack Quaintance: The Kickstarter, yeah, that's the… I think we're gonna… we're gonna try to move Heaven and Earth to get this comic out to people before Halloween. We're gonna go to print the last week of the… the, the campaign. It's got a lot of top… timely topics around,
1:36:19
Zack Quaintance: immigration and border politics that I think people…
1:36:24
Zack Quaintance: And voters question. Yeah, werewolves. Werewolves, yeah.
1:36:27
Tad Eggleston: Werewolves.
1:36:27
Zack Quaintance: I think it'd be just a really great read for this Halloween.
1:36:30
Tad Eggleston: Actually, don't give anybody ideas. Werewolves would be good for voter suppression.
1:36:34
Phil: Put away.
1:36:36
Tad Eggleston: Werewolf by the polling place? Nobody's voting.
1:36:38
Zack Quaintance: Well, they'd have to move the full moon elections, right?
1:36:42
Phil: I would…
1:36:43
Phil: I would argue that werewolves could be a way around voter suppression if they let you vote once as a human and then once as a wolf.
1:36:49
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, you too.
1:36:53
Phil: We can.
1:36:54
Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
1:36:54
Phil: For society again.
1:36:56
Tad Eggleston: Zach, it was, great to…
1:37:00
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I got it.
1:37:01
Tad Eggleston: to put a face with,
1:37:07
Tad Eggleston: the internet presence that I have enjoyed for…
1:37:11
Tad Eggleston: if not the entire time you've been on the internet, at least the entire time I've been doing…
1:37:16
Tad Eggleston: this podcast, because I didn't do as much with the comic news before I was doing the podcast, but, like, when I started doing the podcast, I started, like, figuring out, who do I give a damn about when they write things?
1:37:31
Tad Eggleston: Well, honored to be part of that group. And who's full of it, and or just has terrible taste?
1:37:37
Zack Quaintance: You do find your guys, you know, like, the.
1:37:39
Tad Eggleston: You do! And I, like, encourage people to do that, like, whether it's pop culture or news, find people that you trust. Like, you should have rules for how you trust, like, I think it's dangerous just to go with the people who make you feel good.
1:37:56
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah. No, you want people who are gonna put you on to new things a lot, I think.
1:38:00
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:38:01
Zack Quaintance: Meh.
1:38:02
Tad Eggleston: But also gonna put you on new things because they like them, and, like, there's nothing to me that's more valuable than understanding how a critic writes. Like, everybody always used to say that
1:38:14
Tad Eggleston: We're gonna go to Chicago Days again. Remember when both Siskel and Michael Wilmington were writing at the Tribune?
1:38:23
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. Cisco, obviously, is the huge name.
1:38:26
Tad Eggleston: But I always preferred Michael Wilmington, only because…
1:38:31
Tad Eggleston: When I read his article, I knew whether I would like the movie.
1:38:35
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it was a bad…
1:38:37
Tad Eggleston: It didn't have anything to do with whether or not he'd like the movie. Often, like, the one I always remember is he absolutely
1:38:45
Tad Eggleston: hated… Indiana Jones and the… The Crystal Skull.
1:38:50
Tad Eggleston: Right? But I read the article, and it's like, one-dimensional bad guy, and I'm like, aren't all of the Indiana Jones bad guys one-dimensional?
1:38:58
Tad Eggleston: But Cate Blanche's talents wasted, and like, aren't all of the female… acting talents in Eden Jones.
1:39:07
Zack Quaintance: Some good.
1:39:08
Tad Eggleston: action scenes. I'm like, okay, no, no, no. And by the time I was reading, I'm like, okay, you say it's a one-star movie, I'm gonna say it might not be my favorite Indiana Jones movie, but I'm gonna wind up liking it, because it's an Indiana Jones movie.
1:39:21
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:39:21
Tad Eggleston: You described an Indiana Jones movie!
1:39:24
Zack Quaintance: It clarified things for you.
1:39:26
Tad Eggleston: Right!
1:39:29
Tad Eggleston: So… Absolutely a pleasure. Your writing is essential at the beat, like.
1:39:37
Tad Eggleston: If you go one place to figure out what comics you should read next week, listen to 22 Panels, but if you go two places, read Zach's column in the beat, because I know I will.
1:39:49
Tad Eggleston: Every Tuesday at 11 o'clock, yeah. Yeah, every Tuesday at 11 o'clock. So, I mean, you can read his column, and then if you're buying your stuff digitally, read the comics that… that…
1:39:59
Tad Eggleston: You want to read from his column, if you're at least in the…
1:40:02
Tad Eggleston: In the Central Time Zone, where 11 o'clock is when they go up.
1:40:07
Tad Eggleston: I like… I like staying up for conversation. I don't pull it off as much anymore. Something about having to get up at 5 every morning.
1:40:13
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that'll do it, yeah.
1:40:15
Tad Eggleston: Saga keeps me up, though.
1:40:18
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:40:18
Tad Eggleston: Saga will either keep me up, or I'll get up at 4.30 the next morning, instead of 5 to read Saga.
1:40:25
Zack Quaintance: I do it first thing in the morning, I read it.
1:40:27
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I almost never get to school before reading Saga.
1:40:32
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Well, yeah, I used to didn't want it spoiled, but now it's just kind of part of my routine.
1:40:36
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah.
1:40:38
Tad Eggleston: But then I'm not even a spoiler guy. It's hard to spoil something for me, because it's like, you tell me the twist, and I'll be like, okay, I'm really curious as to how they got there.
1:40:47
Zack Quaintance: Right, yeah.
1:40:47
Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
1:40:48
Zack Quaintance: How did they pull that off?
1:40:50
Tad Eggleston: It's like, that's crazy! How did he do that?
1:40:56
Tad Eggleston: So, for 22 panels, this has been Zach Quaintance, and we will see you after the next page.