Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #299... 22 Panels with Victor Santos

Transcript

With Great Power #299... 22 Panels with Victor Santos · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody!
• 0:06
  Tad Eggleston: afternoon, evening in Spain, where my guest, Victor Santos, is, is hanging out, living, that sort of thing. Victor, I have been a…
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: You've been on my shortlist for a long time. I love your artwork. I love your artwork. You seem to… you seem to always have a book that…
• 0:29
  Tad Eggleston: That… that is… is on my radar, whether… whether it's…
• 0:37
  Tad Eggleston: your stuff at Pan Out Syndicate has been amazing. Oh, thank you. The book you did with Mike… Mike Oming.
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: What, 2 years ago?
• 0:47
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, the, Project Monarch, project Monarch. And then taking over on, the space book.
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: That I'm drawing a blank on right now.
• 0:58
  Victor Santos: Yeah, We have made a lot of… Books together when.
• 1:03
  Tad Eggleston: when would be…
• 1:04
  Victor Santos: with the Mais Templar, and later the… the Priet Monarch, and now I… Yeah, I was…
• 1:10
  Tad Eggleston: of madness was the word that I was looking for.
• 1:14
  Victor Santos: I was his replacement in the Galaxy of Magnus, which is always an honor, because we began as mutual funds, because I knew the work of Mike when he was, he was publishing
• 1:29
  Victor Santos: powers in image, and I became an instant fan, so it was great to meet him, and… and we are current collaborators, and… Right. I don't know. It's like a one… it's the reflection of the other, you know, he's like my American brother, and I'm his Spanish brother.
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: There you go, I like it. And it's impressive that, that anytime that, anytime…
• 1:58
  Tad Eggleston: creators of the stature of the two of you can, like, pick up where the other one left off and have a book feel seamless.
• 2:08
  Tad Eggleston: which, with Galaxy of Madness, that…
• 2:12
  Tad Eggleston: I love your work, I love his work. When I found out that it was switching, I'm like.
• 2:17
  Tad Eggleston: This is the perfect person to switch to, but, like, generally you don't switch artists in the middle of a miniseries and have it feel…
• 2:24
  Tad Eggleston: Like, it's one thing, and… it… it was a seamless… seamless pass-off, and I just… I… I…
• 2:32
  Tad Eggleston: Appreciated that as a reader, and was impressed with that as somebody who understands everything that goes into creation.
• 2:42
  Victor Santos: Yeah, I always try with Mikey Sissi, because we have very similar influence, we love Mike Mignola, Bruce Steen, Frank Miller, all these artists. But I always… when I began my career in the American market, I…
• 2:57
  Victor Santos: I am a reader, too, I am a comic book nerd, too, so I understand the frustration when you follow an artist in a series, and suddenly they change the artist, and…
• 3:10
  Victor Santos: Everything looks different.
• 3:12
  Victor Santos: And I always try to adapt to… when I had to replace somebody, for example, in the… when I… one of my first jobs in… in the American market was an IDW Godzilla series, and the artist was Phil Hester.
• 3:29
  Tad Eggleston: Oof.
• 3:30
  Victor Santos: Hawaii, Hawaii.
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: Another tough one to follow.
• 3:32
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, I love his art, and he's a huge influence, and we met by internet and talk sometimes, and we have mutual admiration, but I try to…
• 3:45
  Victor Santos: to follow the vibe of, of, of Phil, and and… and move this style to my own style, but I… I… I always…
• 3:56
  Victor Santos: He tried to make a… a soft transition.
• 4:00
  Victor Santos: to the… to one artist, to my… my own art. I… I did the same with… with the Mystampler, too, with… with…
• 4:07
  Victor Santos: with Mike, because.
• 4:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:09
  Victor Santos: he has this very more… more… a more Mike Mignola style in the Mystampla. Right. Because he, in Powers has more, this, Bruce Timm vibe, but in the Maestempla, he was very Mignola.
• 4:24
  Victor Santos: And I tried to… to follow…
• 4:26
  Victor Santos: He's a style and… and step-by-step issue.
• 4:31
  Victor Santos: After the ECU?
• 4:32
  Victor Santos: Be moving all the style of the book to my own style.
• 4:36
  Victor Santos: But always, always soft, always, always trying to, to, make comfortable to the, to the reader.
• 4:47
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me about… Cause, cause I, I, it was, it was enough to, to make me excited.
• 4:55
  Tad Eggleston: When you announced it on…
• 4:58
  Tad Eggleston: your… your substack, but I… I… I am terrible and haven't read the first two chapters yet, so… so tell me about Selenzio, because this… this looks amazing.
• 5:09
  Victor Santos: Thank you.
• 5:10
  Tad Eggleston: And again, like, any other week, I would have, like, spent half this week
• 5:16
  Tad Eggleston: re-reading your stuff, getting up to…
• 5:20
  Tad Eggleston: To speed on… on the things that…
• 5:23
  Tad Eggleston: You know, this was the, what, 87th week of the longest year in American history?
• 5:31
  Victor Santos: So.
• 5:32
  Tad Eggleston: And I had two cars breaking.
• 5:33
  Victor Santos: Oh, okay.
• 5:37
  Victor Santos: So, I would finance theo.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 5:41
  Victor Santos: Yeah, but this is a very beloved project, because, yeah, I have been working for the U.S. market for almost 20 years, I think.
• 5:52
  Victor Santos: But, but my, but I, I have very strange,
• 5:56
  Victor Santos: a strange career for a Spanish artist, because usually Spanish artists, or a lot of European artists, used to try to,
• 6:04
  Victor Santos: to, to get us a place in the, you know, DC, Marvel, and doing superheroes. And… and… but it's not the usual to… to try to do…
• 6:16
  Victor Santos: your career with, Creator Owned.
• 6:19
  Victor Santos: characters. You create your own stories, or working with writers, and do your own stuff. And, after these years, I found every time
• 6:31
  Victor Santos: More difficult to get it to…
• 6:35
  Victor Santos: to get your own stories published, and get more… and get freedom. It's strange, because, I think, maybe 20… maybe 10 years ago, we bought this year, but now.
• 6:48
  Victor Santos: Market is very hard, so, and it's more, it's harder to me.
• 6:54
  Victor Santos: Because I'm… I'm not… I'm not living in the US, so I cannot attend conventions and speak with the editors. So, from internet was a very useful tool.
• 7:05
  Victor Santos: when I tire to… to working with other people, and I want… I want to do something personal, something… doing all the jobs.
• 7:14
  Victor Santos: It's great having internet, and you… you talk about, talk about, the panel syndicate.
• 7:23
  Victor Santos: where I made a couple of comics, Paranoia Killer and Ginger's Revenge. And I decided to do something similar.
• 7:32
  Victor Santos: But in my own soupstack, in my own, in my own, newsletter.
• 7:38
  Victor Santos: And one of the reasons was because, Marcos Martin, who is the artist who… who managed
• 7:44
  Victor Santos: The panels indicate,
• 7:46
  Victor Santos: Paige is very, is… works very hard to maintain this… this… this place, and he makes this, completely free for the artist. He's,
• 7:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 7:57
  Victor Santos: it's a question of love to the medium. So I feel a little… I felt a little guilty to make him work more and more, because he needs to make a living, of course, like every other artist, so he needs time to work.
• 8:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, money is required for things like food?
• 8:15
  Victor Santos: Yeah, things are, you know, eccentric stuff, like food, and a place to live, and these things.
• 8:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:23
  Victor Santos: So I decided… for this project, I decided to use my own Substack, my own newsletter, because it's a place
• 8:30
  Victor Santos: where I have… people following… I have an… I have built an audience with my…
• 8:35
  Victor Santos: with my crazy stories in my newsletter, so make this experiment with these characters I have.
• 8:42
  Victor Santos: And, all this previous… all this previous, chatting is because I wanted to…
• 8:48
  Victor Santos: to give context to the… to the project. And I always wanted to do this as a story, because it's… it's a,
• 8:55
  Victor Santos: It's like, I define, like, a lone wolf and cab, meets, de-equalizer. It's, it's a good definition, but it's basically, like, it's basically a story about, like a mercenary, like, it's, it's this guy, Dion Bomber, who is, ex…
• 9:14
  Victor Santos: ex-soldier who worked for a private contract in Iraq and Afghanistan and all these places, and he was captured, kidnapped by a terrorists, and they tried to be hit.
• 9:30
  Victor Santos: Him, and, you know, cut, cut his head.
• 9:34
  Victor Santos: But he was, very la- for some different circumstances, the place where he was kidnapped was destroyed by a drone attack.
• 9:47
  Victor Santos: And he was, thanks to this miracle, he survives, but he cannot speak anymore. He becomes mute. He has a very, ugly scar in his neck.
• 10:00
  Victor Santos: And he returns.
• 10:02
  Victor Santos: home, and now he's sick of being a soldier, and now he works like a kind of fixer for the criminal world. It's like, you know, it's like a mercenary, but now he works for… for, you know… it's like a kind of,
• 10:20
  Victor Santos: Samurai without lore, without master. It's like a…
• 10:24
  Tad Eggleston: Ronan.
• 10:25
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it's a roaming, it's like, the story is like, I wanted to do, like, a urban samurai story. He works for different lords, for different masters, about… and he always, and he's always,
• 10:38
  Victor Santos: with, his partner is a little girl. He's a 12… 11, 12 years old girl who is a homeless girl, and he has this…
• 10:49
  Tad Eggleston: And looks adorable, I'm sure.
• 10:51
  Victor Santos: Yeah, but instead of, you know.
• 10:53
  Tad Eggleston: that out, just… just… because I… I did just flip through the art on Issue 1, and… and first of all, like, hats off.
• 11:01
  Tad Eggleston: I always love your art. This reminds me a lot of Bad Girls and its tone.
• 11:07
  Victor Santos: Oh, yeah.
• 11:07
  Tad Eggleston: Which is another one of my… my favorite…
• 11:10
  Tad Eggleston: books, period. But also my favorite of your books.
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, this girl is adorable.
• 11:19
  Victor Santos: Yeah, but it's a very nasty girl, because she's a homeless girl, so he's very tough.
• 11:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right. She looks like she could kick your ass, but she's full. Yeah, yeah.
• 11:31
  Victor Santos: And it's very… and it's very funny to…
• 11:35
  Victor Santos: to write, to write her dialogues. Because very clever, he's very smart, and
• 11:41
  Victor Santos: And she's, like, the manager of, of Dion, of Dion Bomar, and she, she arranges his, agreements to, of work, so his, his jobs. So it's a very, funny relationship, it's more, you know, it's like a, like a father-daughter relationship, but
• 11:59
  Victor Santos: sometimes you don't know who is the… who is the grown-up, and who is the… who is… who is the boss, and who is the… who is the… Right. And… and I… I only wanted to use this… this…
• 12:11
  Victor Santos: these… these characters as a vehicle to make different stories of… with different approaches of the storytelling, because you know I love…
• 12:19
  Victor Santos: I love,
• 12:22
  Victor Santos: I love playing with the storytelling, and the point of view, and using these different… because one of my favorite books ever is The Spirit.
• 12:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 12:31
  Victor Santos: by Will Estner, and I love how… Yeah, Will Esner, and I love how Spirit is a vehicle.
• 12:37
  Victor Santos: for the things Will Eisner wanted to do this week, or the other week, maybe he wanted to do a romance story, or maybe one day wanted to do a thriller, or wanted to do an adventure story, or a romantic comedy. And I want to use this character to do this every month, doing a different story, and maybe…
• 12:56
  Victor Santos: The third story will be a tribute to the movie The Raid.
• 13:01
  Victor Santos: with… with Bomar fighting in a building, level by level, against… because he wants to… to…
• 13:09
  Victor Santos: to save a guy who is, who is in the last floor. I have a lot of stories done, because I want two people… want people… I don't want… I don't want people… have delays. If people are going to pay for the… for the stories, they will have a story.
• 13:24
  Victor Santos: At the beginning of every month.
• 13:27
  Victor Santos: without delays. So I have a lot of… I have a lot of stuff ready.
• 13:32
  Victor Santos: So, we have a story… I have very different stories with these characters, and we have a shoot… a story about a shootout, you have a story with different points of view of every character.
• 13:43
  Victor Santos: I don't know.
• 13:44
  Victor Santos: I want to have this feeling of Diesel's TV shows.
• 13:50
  Victor Santos: when the TV shows used to have a lot of episodes, and the creators have the chance to play.
• 13:59
  Victor Santos: I remember, you know, if you have seen Buffy's The Vampire Slayer, for example, or shows like that.
• 14:07
  Victor Santos: They have a space to play, so they have an episode with a musical comedy, they have an episode with,
• 14:14
  Victor Santos: you know, a secondary character is the main character… I miss this kind of story, so… So.
• 14:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, a perfect example of this is your co-creator on…
• 14:28
  Tad Eggleston: Kid Maroon is my dear friend Christopher Cantwill.
• 14:32
  Victor Santos: Oh, yeah.
• 14:33
  Tad Eggleston: who got me sucked into Star Trek, and…
• 14:36
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: the reasons that I got sucked into Star Trek. It's like, oh, oh, wait.
• 14:43
  Tad Eggleston: This is a vehicle for so many different stories, and it's…
• 14:46
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 14:47
  Tad Eggleston: mostly episodic, and I don't have to follow, like, this big, huge arc. I just get to know these people, and… and… okay.
• 14:55
  Tad Eggleston: I resisted for 30 years, and now I'm… now I'm sunk.
• 15:00
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, never is late.
• 15:02
  Tad Eggleston: But it's great, this kind of stories, because as a reader, and as a…
• 15:09
  Victor Santos: a viewer of TV shows or movies. I love the idea of sitting and waiting. Okay, what guy is going to do this week with his characters or with this show? Let's expect the unexpected, no? So…
• 15:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:26
  Victor Santos: I try to do this, and, like, it's not an internet thing, and…
• 15:30
  Victor Santos: And it's something I do in my own channel.
• 15:33
  Victor Santos: So this allows me to do whatever I want.
• 15:37
  Victor Santos: So my idea is doing a lot of episodes, and I don't know if in the future I will have the chance to… to make a huge book with all these stories.
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because, I mean, it looks beautiful.
• 15:51
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 15:51
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't read the words yet, because I'm talking to you, but… but it looks beautiful!
• 15:57
  Victor Santos: Yeah, thank you. But that's not my idea, to have something funny and to share with
• 16:03
  Victor Santos: With the people every month, and .
• 16:06
  Tad Eggleston: Brilliant.
• 16:06
  Victor Santos: And at the same time, having something to… to fill…
• 16:10
  Victor Santos: to feel, good doing it, because I have been working of this story for a long time, along some years, and it was, like, my happy place, my happy place when I was very stressed about the work, or some… or… or I have no… sometimes, you know, in our work.
• 16:30
  Victor Santos: Sometimes you have no work, and you are waiting for the approval of… of… of…
• 16:36
  Victor Santos: of a project, and you feel… and you feel stressed because you don't know if you are going to have a job in the next month. So when I have… when I have… when I don't have nothing to do, I work it in the Silencio book. So this was my… my quiet, happy place while I was waiting for the… for.
• 16:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's cool.
• 16:57
  Victor Santos: Yeah, so… so I can't wait to… you to see what's coming in.
• 17:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's… that's super cool and brilliant,
• 17:06
  Tad Eggleston: To have that, that, like, completely creator-owned
• 17:10
  Tad Eggleston: project for, okay, I don't have anything that I'm getting paid for right now, but let's not waste the hours, and let's have something to keep
• 17:22
  Tad Eggleston: keep ourselves… Focused rather than… Starting to worry about paying bills, etc.
• 17:30
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 17:31
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's, like, that's really good mental health management.
• 17:37
  Tad Eggleston: I'm impressed, I like that. And that actually leads, regulars on this podcast, or a group called Psychocomicology, who…
• 17:47
  Tad Eggleston: Who, use comics for… for…
• 17:50
  Tad Eggleston: in their psychiatric practice, and use them for social-emotional learning, and are just big fans, period, and
• 17:58
  Tad Eggleston: Dr. Ramos, who, heads the group and also is the new owner of Modern Age Comics in Algonquin, Illinois. We'll give a quick plug there.
• 18:09
  Tad Eggleston: Is really kind of passionate about seeing more… bilingual work.
• 18:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, Salenzio is being… being released in both English and Spanish on your… on your website, which is… which is fantastic, because…
• 18:24
  Tad Eggleston: Much to the chagrin of, of… of the, the, the, the…
• 18:34
  Tad Eggleston: manga right in the United States, that there are a lot of people that do appreciate the Spanish language.
• 18:41
  Victor Santos: Honestly, I do it because, Behoff is, is,
• 18:47
  Victor Santos: it was easier… it was very easy to me, make a Spanish version.
• 18:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Because I, I, I, I ride the…
• 18:54
  Victor Santos: I write the scripts in English, but I have a friend of mine, Anthony Ayank, who is a…
• 19:01
  Victor Santos: who is a screenwriter from England, from London, and we are partners in… because we work together developing some,
• 19:12
  Victor Santos: TV shows for… in different… some of them are based in my own comics, but we have been working together in different projects, and he's a very talented writer, so I wanted him to…
• 19:24
  Victor Santos: 2… 2… To help me with the dialogues, because,
• 19:29
  Victor Santos: even I… I improved my English in the last years, it's very difficult. It's difficult to write in English and… and don't make any mistakes, so it's… it's easier having… having the… Anthony helping me with the characters. But at the same time, it's very easy to…
• 19:48
  Victor Santos: make a translation in Spanish of every episode, so… so I basically do… do the… I do the… the book in English, and I'm… and…
• 19:57
  Victor Santos: I make a version in Spanish, you know, I have a folder with the same pages, and the only thing I have to do with the computer is changing the dialogues to Spanish, and… Right, right. So it's easier for me, okay, let's, maybe I will get a couple of…
• 20:13
  Victor Santos: subscribers more if I offer them.
• 20:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean.
• 20:18
  Victor Santos: John?
• 20:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it could also be helpful down the road in terms of publishing collections, to have both ready to go.
• 20:27
  Tad Eggleston: But otherwise, it's just cool, and I like the way, we've… we've had a few episodes where we really dove into…
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: Translation in comics, because… because translation is a… is a complicated thing to begin.
• 20:42
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:43
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because literal translation…
• 20:48
  Tad Eggleston: will lose idiom, it will lose…
• 20:51
  Tad Eggleston: healing, you know, so even with bilingual people, I mean, like, you just…
• 20:55
  Tad Eggleston: brought up. It's often good to have
• 20:58
  Tad Eggleston: Have what's sometimes called a, what do they call it?
• 21:06
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even remember what they call it, but somebody who's local to not… okay, we've got it in English, but now let's make certain the feel is right.
• 21:17
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:19
  Victor Santos: And you write very different when you write in different language, when you write directly in different language. When I write in English, when I wrote the polar graphic novels, I wrote them directly in English, and my mind, the process.
• 21:38
  Victor Santos: is very different when I write in Spanish. If you read… if you read some of Spanish, the translation of some of my Spanish books, you… you will feel the…
• 21:51
  Victor Santos: the technique is different, because they are very different language, so… for example, when I made the comic… when I made the graphic novels of Paula, I have very… I have the editor helping me with the English, but I have very… I was really afraid about… I was writing properly.
• 22:11
  Victor Santos: Because, yes, it was my first book in English, as a complete artist, you know, as a writer. Right. So, so, I have very fun, I am a super fan of the writer,
• 22:24
  Victor Santos: Donald Westlake, the…
• 22:26
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yes.
• 22:27
  Victor Santos: Richard Stark, the… Richard Stark. The Parker novels, and she's…
• 22:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 22:33
  Victor Santos: He's really a stark. He's a stark guy, writing. Yeah, yeah. And I tried to do the polar books really stark.
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. No extra language.
• 22:45
  Victor Santos: Yeah, because it's a way to don't screw up
• 22:49
  Victor Santos: the dialogues. If you have a very few dialogues, it's easier to make them well.
• 22:54
  Victor Santos: So I, I tried to use my… My flows, my disadvantage.
• 23:00
  Victor Santos: as a… as a skill, and try to make a Parker-style writing in the polar…
• 23:09
  Victor Santos: In the Polar Books. And I, I, I, and I… trying to do something similar with, Silencio, because… but this time I have…
• 23:17
  Victor Santos: as an English speaker helping me. But, for example, I have other books made in Spain, Which are.
• 23:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we're gonna talk about one of those in a minute.
• 23:28
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 23:30
  Tad Eggleston: Luckily.
• 23:31
  Victor Santos: some of them will be published this year in the U.S.
• 23:36
  Victor Santos: One of them…
• 23:38
  Tad Eggleston: Published in the U.S?
• 23:39
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it will be… I think I cannot say the publisher.
• 23:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 23:43
  Victor Santos: Because they had not… but I think I can say the books. But one of them is the Moon… the name is Moon Eaters. It was, I make… I made him…
• 23:52
  Victor Santos: in crowdfunding, and I made a crowdfunding, but at the same time, it was published by the Spanish publisher here, and it's like a John Carpenter action-style
• 24:04
  Victor Santos: graphic novel, with, super not… it's, you know, it's like a mix of…
• 24:09
  Victor Santos: of horror carpenter movies and assault of the 13th precinct.
• 24:16
  Victor Santos: I don't remember the title in English of the movie, you know, the police station surrounded by.
• 24:22
  Tad Eggleston: Pelham… 1, 2, 3… Is that it?
• 24:26
  Victor Santos: It's, no, it's, it's, assault to, to 13%, I think.
• 24:32
  Victor Santos: It's a police station surrounded by a lot of gang members, and it's a 70s movie, so it's a…
• 24:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:42
  Victor Santos: It's the first or second John Carpenter movie. And it's like a Carpenter-style story, with all action, and supernatural things, and this is one of the…
• 24:56
  Victor Santos: It's more a B-grade movie style.
• 25:00
  Tad Eggleston: Great.
• 25:00
  Victor Santos: You know, something like, something like you can'.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that's just funny. I just got your… your newsletter while I was talking to you.
• 25:11
  Tad Eggleston: I just got… I just got an alert on my screen.
• 25:14
  Victor Santos: Oh, okay. Victor Santos broke in English!
• 25:20
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know, I mean, in real time, is that the new chapter, or…
• 25:26
  Victor Santos: Oh, okay. Yeah, because I have the… while… meanwhile, I was talking with you, I was,
• 25:32
  Victor Santos: I program, pro- I, you know, you can program the…
• 25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right, you can program the time.
• 25:39
  Victor Santos: So, just you recipe now the newsletter for paid subscribers?
• 25:45
  Victor Santos: It's not magic, it's just the magic… it's the magic.
• 25:48
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's, it's very technical, it's just, it's always.
• 25:50
  Victor Santos: It's funny.
• 25:51
  Tad Eggleston: When it's like… Oh, I'm talking to this person?
• 25:55
  Tad Eggleston: They just got their newsletter.
• 25:56
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 25:57
  Tad Eggleston: They clearly wrote ahead of time.
• 25:59
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah. You know, I don't want delays. I, you know, I am a fan, and I hate delays.
• 26:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, though, I mean, I, I did, like, and this is more for, for my listeners than, than, than you, though I, I sometimes tell, tell.
• 26:13
  Tad Eggleston: I love how creators desperately want to make certain that everything is up to speed on their newsletters or their Patreons, or whatever.
• 26:21
  Tad Eggleston: to the fans out there, remember that creators have lives, too. And, like, we support them because we love their work, and we want them to be able to do more of that in comfort. And to creators, like.
• 26:39
  Tad Eggleston: Most of your fans aren't actually gonna be upset if it's a little late.
• 26:44
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 26:44
  Tad Eggleston: Let me rephrase specifically. The fans that are willing to pay for your newsletter.
• 26:51
  Tad Eggleston: are mostly paying for you. The stuff they get is a bonus.
• 26:57
  Tad Eggleston: It's, I love Victor Santo's work, this money will allow him to do more of that work.
• 27:04
  Victor Santos: But I feel guilty. I want to… I'm really grateful, and but at the same time, I understand,
• 27:15
  Victor Santos: It's a…
• 27:16
  Tad Eggleston: Assault on Precinct 13 was.
• 27:18
  Victor Santos: Yeah, that's what Because in Spanish, sometimes with the movies, it's different, it's a
• 27:24
  Victor Santos: It's hard because in Spain… Spanish people are very creative, changing the titles. Right. So I always remember to… I need to remember the original title of some movies.
• 27:35
  Victor Santos: Anyway, I'm very grateful about what you say, but I understand at the same time, there is a lot of overhead there, and people… it's a… people used to receive, now, a lot of content for free.
• 27:49
  Victor Santos: So… so I didn't want to, you know, offer the same, but know what you are paying. This is what… this is what Disney.
• 27:57
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 27:57
  Victor Santos: do to you every day, you know? Right. They offer things, and they… okay, you cannot share the account now. So they use this bet, no, that they use to offer things.
• 28:09
  Victor Santos: And they… a later day, they,
• 28:14
  Victor Santos: they, erase things and offer less for more. And I wanted to do that as something different, because I understand paying for an artist
• 28:25
  Victor Santos: It's not the same than paying for a streaming, of paying for…
• 28:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 28:29
  Victor Santos: you receive less things, of course, because I only… I'm only a person, I can't do…
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: Great.
• 28:34
  Victor Santos: But as it's.
• 28:35
  Tad Eggleston: You don't have 7 arms?
• 28:37
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course. But I want to offer something more than the things…
• 28:42
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 28:42
  Victor Santos: So I try to make this… of course, I make this book of the Silencio, but I want to make some…
• 28:49
  Victor Santos: Exclusive newsletter, and…
• 28:52
  Victor Santos: And I want to give people, things you can download, like, maybe, maybe PDFs of books.
• 29:00
  Victor Santos: You cannot get now, because they were published a lot of years ago.
• 29:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Or things. Or, for example, I have some stories I made for the Chinese edition of Polar.
• 29:10
  Victor Santos: I made some short stories for the… for the books.
• 29:14
  Victor Santos: So I want to offer these PDFs of these stories, for example, for the paid subscribers, things like that, special things to people.
• 29:23
  Tad Eggleston: Very cool.
• 29:24
  Victor Santos: So people who are so nice to support me.
• 29:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 29:28
  Victor Santos: I want to do this… and, of course, be every month, every beginning of the month, have you… you will have your story, or new story. And, like you said, it's strange, because right now, we, we artists.
• 29:43
  Victor Santos: We have, like, a lot of front lines open.
• 29:46
  Victor Santos: Because years ago, we had, you know, you had to make your book, and send your pages to the publisher, and that's all your job.
• 29:55
  Victor Santos: And right now, you need to have your, maybe your Patreon, or your, or your newsletter, and have your, your,
• 30:03
  Victor Santos: online store, like I have. Right.
• 30:07
  Victor Santos: You know, you have a…
• 30:08
  Tad Eggleston: Original art sales, prints… sticker.
• 30:11
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 30:12
  Victor Santos: Yeah, right now, drawing is, like, I don't know, 40% 40% of my time.
• 30:20
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay.
• 30:21
  Victor Santos: of the time, it's, ranging things, right.
• 30:25
  Victor Santos: On social media, and of course you have to do, you know, paperwork.
• 30:30
  Victor Santos: Make interviews with friends, and
• 30:36
  Victor Santos: But I think a huge part of my daily job is saving time for drawing.
• 30:43
  Victor Santos: Right. Which is… which is, which is strange about,
• 30:47
  Victor Santos: But this is a, is a, it's our…
• 30:49
  Tad Eggleston: hopefully get you as much time for drawing as possible, because I really.
• 30:52
  Victor Santos: I like your drawing, but I thank you for doing one of those interviews for friends. No, yeah, but this… but this… it's something cool, too, because, give you perspective, too, about your own work.
• 31:02
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 31:03
  Victor Santos: And… okay, and maybe internet and the social media can be a pain in the ass, because you have to do more jobs, more jobs, and you have to be your own manager, and your own public relationship guy.
• 31:18
  Victor Santos: But at the same time, give me the chance to talk with you, and talk with people from other countries.
• 31:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And .
• 31:25
  Victor Santos: And, you know, this is a very lonely, lonely job.
• 31:29
  Victor Santos: and you think you are, you know, speaking to the air, and nobody's… even if you are selling some books, you don't… you don't really think people are reading the books. It's a very strange.
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: You're… you are speaking to at least two people. My mom and brother, Adam, listen to every episode. So, hi mom, hi, Adam. We know we've got two.
• 31:50
  Victor Santos: Okay.
• 31:52
  Tad Eggleston: probably listening, John's probably listening, so there's a better than average chance that there are four people listening.
• 31:58
  Victor Santos: But, but even.
• 31:59
  Tad Eggleston: Recently got an email from a guy named Chris, so I think he listens a lot.
• 32:03
  Victor Santos: Okay, but even if I only talking with you, which is important too.
• 32:08
  Victor Santos: It's great having the chains, because it gives me perspective of how you see my work.
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And .
• 32:17
  Victor Santos: I don't know, you really don't believe these things.
• 32:20
  Victor Santos: until you go to some place, I don't know, I, I was in France and Belgium this, past year, making promotion of the…
• 32:30
  Victor Santos: the French edition of the… of, Fahrenheit, adaptation.
• 32:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 32:36
  Tad Eggleston: That was literally the book that I was gonna talk to you about next.
• 32:39
  Victor Santos: Okay, so it's, it's… I, I, you know, I, I'm making the, the presentation. So, so it's great, because I was to the, to the… I was to, to do the signing, you know, and do sketches for the people in the convention, and… and you know, you know.
• 32:56
  Victor Santos: You meet people from other countries, and you talk with them, and they tell how…
• 33:01
  Victor Santos: how important was reading this book for them? And you can't believe it, and wow, this, this…
• 33:08
  Victor Santos: This is beyond me, it's not only me that… and even if it doesn't matter if it's… if it's a hundred of peop… 100,000 people, there are only 5 guys in the, you know, in the signing session.
• 33:22
  Victor Santos: It's, it's important, for the artist.
• 33:26
  Victor Santos: Being conscious
• 33:29
  Victor Santos: about the people is reading your job, so… so… you know, I don't care, really, if you are a, you know, stupid audience, or it's only your family listening to…
• 33:40
  Tad Eggleston: I have a few more.
• 33:43
  Victor Santos: Okay.
• 33:43
  Tad Eggleston: I discover… I discover all the time that I have more listeners than I realize, but I like to keep myself humble, so the people that I know listen are the people we shout out.
• 33:53
  Victor Santos: But it happens, like me, with you. You are not conscious of how many people is listening to you, and sometimes you just discover some guy, you know, you're in a place, and you travel to another city, and you suddenly meet a guy who listens to your podcast, or just read their books, and it's always a nice surprise.
• 34:13
  Tad Eggleston: So, he just brought up Fahrenheit 451. Yeah.
• 34:19
  Tad Eggleston: I unfortunately only speak English. I have no aptitude for languages at all, which means that…
• 34:28
  Tad Eggleston: as much as I love the medium, because I'm also very verbally oriented.
• 34:35
  Tad Eggleston: I don't often buy comics that I can't read the words in.
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: But when I saw that you… had… You were adapting.
• 34:47
  Tad Eggleston: Fahrenheit 451. Even though there's already an English language graphic novel adaptation that is good, I don't want to, like, put it down, I actually immediately pre-ordered it.
• 35:00
  Tad Eggleston: Because Bradbury's one of my favorite authors, you're one of my favorite writers, I knew it was gonna be worth it, even if I couldn't read a word in it. And I can't read a word in it, but I know the story, so that doesn't matter as much.
• 35:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'm also a teacher, and I use your adaptation as much as I use the English language adaptation that we have
• 35:21
  Tad Eggleston: Class sets at school.
• 35:23
  Victor Santos: Oh, that's great.
• 35:23
  Tad Eggleston: Trying to show…
• 35:26
  Tad Eggleston: aspects of the story, because I think it's brilliant. So, so first of all, I hope that one day there's an English language translation of your 450.
• 35:37
  Victor Santos: But that was good news for you, because this is the second book which is going to be translated to English.
• 35:43
  Victor Santos: We finally solved the Fahrenheit adaptation to English language.
• 35:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yay!
• 35:51
  Victor Santos: Yeah, finally, because I can't believe it, because, the work, it was… this adaptation was produced,
• 36:01
  Victor Santos: by a Spanish, publisher.
• 36:04
  Victor Santos: which is… is Planetta, and Planeta is, like, the huge… the huge… the… the biggest publisher in Spain. Right. It's a very… it's a very big media… media…
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: I've actually heard of them, so that's indicative of that, because I don't keep track of many publisher names.
• 36:22
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, but this misses.
• 36:23
  Tad Eggleston: I would like to expand my knowledge, but…
• 36:25
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 36:27
  Tad Eggleston: they're only… So many hours in a day, and so many days.
• 36:31
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 36:32
  Tad Eggleston: And I have to do things like work and sleep.
• 36:36
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course. Every, everybody knows. Everybody needs it.
• 36:40
  Victor Santos: But the point is, They are very huge.
• 36:44
  Victor Santos: And they sold… they produced this adaptation, and they paid for the rights, so it's unofficial, because they have to pay to the Ray Blackberry family, and they approved me.
• 36:55
  Victor Santos: the family approved me as an artist, I had to send some samples for them. Right.
• 37:00
  Victor Santos: And, and the book work… worked really well, and we sold to Germany, France, Italy… Yeah, I've noticed all of those.
• 37:10
  Tad Eggleston: I like the book enough that I, like, every time it sells to another.
• 37:14
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 37:15
  Tad Eggleston: Is English next? Is English next?
• 37:16
  Victor Santos: Yeah, and Russia and Russia, too, was just… which is really…
• 37:21
  Tad Eggleston: No offense, again, there is an English language.
• 37:25
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course.
• 37:26
  Tad Eggleston: comics adaptation, and I imagine that's one of the reasons that it took so long for it to come to English, was because it has a direct market.
• 37:34
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's true.
• 37:36
  Tad Eggleston: And that one's good, too, but I like yours more.
• 37:40
  Victor Santos: Oh, yeah, thank you. I think they are different. I must say, I tried to do something different, like the usual adaptation.
• 37:48
  Victor Santos: Because sometimes I feel when I… when I… You know, I have some…
• 37:53
  Victor Santos: some of my comic books are… favorite comic books are adaptations of other mediums, for example… I don't know if you know the Outland adaptation by Jimmy Seranko, which is a very… In fact, it was published in Europe first.
• 38:09
  Victor Santos: It was the adaptation of the Sun Cornerary movie of the Outlander, and it's…
• 38:15
  Tad Eggleston: And then it was… it was serialized in heavy metal.
• 38:19
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, that's…
• 38:19
  Tad Eggleston: US.
• 38:20
  Victor Santos: And it was compiled in an album in Europe, and this is the edition I had, and it's an adaptation of another… and I love the movie, and I love this book, because it's a huge influence to artists like Fran Miller, because the use of the black and white. But you don't need to read
• 38:38
  Victor Santos: To know the movie, you can read the… do the comic book, and it's a… it's a, it's a fantastic…
• 38:45
  Victor Santos: graphic novel. And, but sometimes I feel some of the adaptation I have read…
• 38:51
  Victor Santos: Of, books, especially.
• 38:53
  Victor Santos: They are more than, they are more, an illustrated book.
• 38:58
  Victor Santos: Right. They basically… Cut. Cut the words.
• 39:03
  Victor Santos: Make a… I'm past the narration.
• 39:08
  Victor Santos: And make draw… and make drawings. And I wanted to do something really different. I have this rule.
• 39:15
  Victor Santos: And I… I… I never used the… I only… I only wanted to use dialogues. I don't want to use the right Bradbury, prose.
• 39:24
  Victor Santos: Because I am a super fan, like you, I am a super fan of Reed Bradbury, I have read,
• 39:30
  Victor Santos: the… how's the name… how is the name in English? The… this story is about a man with tattoos, and every tattoo is a story.
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, the, the, oh, oh, the… The ta- oh, God.
• 39:41
  Victor Santos: Es que experiences something like the… the drowned man, or something, the… the tattooed man.
• 39:49
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know.
• 39:49
  Victor Santos: Oh, we see.
• 39:50
  Tad Eggleston: I know exactly what you're talking about, and it's early in the morning of the longest week ever, remember?
• 39:58
  Victor Santos: Anyway, it doesn't matter.
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: I will know very quickly, because I have the internet, so you keep talking, and I will…
• 40:04
  Victor Santos: Okay, okay.
• 40:05
  Tad Eggleston: fill it in.
• 40:06
  Victor Santos: But anyway, you know, Martian Chronicles, all this stuff. I love how Bradbury writes. He's like a poet. So, I didn't want…
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: The illustrated man.
• 40:15
  Victor Santos: Elephant Man, okay. Yeah.
• 40:18
  Victor Santos: So, I, I, I, I…
• 40:21
  Victor Santos: I didn't want to… to use the words of Ray Bradbury, because if you want to read the book, the words, go and read the book. So, what I'm trying to do is, if I… if I could use only images.
• 40:36
  Victor Santos: to…
• 40:38
  Victor Santos: to make… to make feel the same feeling than the works, I will always use the images. And, you know, like… like the… like the book is a… a partiture, or something like that, and… and I was…
• 40:51
  Victor Santos: Playing the music.
• 40:53
  Victor Santos: Right. So… so if he… if Radbury is speaking and explaining you how the… the books are burned and how the firefighters work, I use all… I… I use… I use these words like my script.
• 41:09
  Victor Santos: And… and I only used the… of course, I used the dialogues of the… I didn't make a mute story, a silent story, I used the dialogues of the story, but I wanted to do something very visual, because my goal was to evoke
• 41:25
  Victor Santos: the feelings that the book creates when you are reading it. And and…
• 41:32
  Tad Eggleston: And my god, do you… do you do it?
• 41:34
  Victor Santos: Yeah, and use the… oh, okay.
• 41:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, I can't even read the words. I mean, but I know the story.
• 41:41
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 41:41
  Tad Eggleston: Just, like, flipping through, just…
• 41:44
  Tad Eggleston: looking at the pictures, it evokes everything and unlocks things. I mean, I'm… I'm autistic, and specifically, one of the major ways that my brain is different is I cannot make any image in my head. People talk about, okay, imagine this in your head, and I'm like.
• 42:03
  Tad Eggleston: Excuse me? Yeah.
• 42:06
  Tad Eggleston: So one of the things that I appreciate about the comics medium is The way that… they will…
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: Guide my imagery… so that…
• 42:21
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not having to do this incomplete thing where, like, I'm reading dialogue and… and… I mean…
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: I have… I have… and I love… I love prose. Love prose, I'm not… not… not, like, bashing the… the medium, but… but, like, the number of times I've had conversations where… where people will talk about, oh, I love this and this, and I'm like, oh, I didn't get that out of that at all. And I'll go back and I'll read it, and I'm like, oh, I see where this is, but…
• 42:48
  Tad Eggleston: it just didn't register in my brain at all, because no matter how descriptive the text is, I don't make
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: a picture, so it's almost like it's just there to get me to the dialogue. I mean, sometimes I'll get more out of it than that, but, like, from the pros, I get much more of their emotions and their thought processes and whatnot, but the imagery doesn't always stand out to me.
• 43:14
  Tad Eggleston: So when a comic can guide me with the imagery, Like, like…
• 43:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a Kurt Vonnegut fan as well.
• 43:24
  Tad Eggleston: But I didn't get why Slaughterhouse-Five was… was… why so many people thought Slaughterhouse-Five was so funny, Until…
• 43:37
  Tad Eggleston: Ryan North and Albert Montes.
• 43:39
  Tad Eggleston: adapted comics. And then it went from a book that I love to, oh my god, this is hilarious!
• 43:45
  Victor Santos: Yeah, this is true.
• 43:46
  Tad Eggleston: suddenly see this stuff that I wasn't…
• 43:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Putting together. We already talked about Donald Westlake, Richard Stark, you know.
• 43:57
  Tad Eggleston: Darwin Cook didn't actually write any new dialogue. I mean, the dialogue Straight from the book.
• 44:03
  Tad Eggleston: But that's most of what he uses from the book.
• 44:06
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 44:07
  Tad Eggleston: You know, everything that's not dialogue, he drew. And it just… I mean, I went through The Hunter once, where I was literally going side by side and marking up my physical copy to try to… to try to reverse engineer how Darwin had done.
• 44:26
  Victor Santos: Oh, that's interesting.
• 44:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it's like…
• 44:30
  Tad Eggleston: If it's a dialogue scene, like, one page can be 3 pages of comics, and if it's…
• 44:37
  Victor Santos: If it's 4 pages of exposition, it's, like, 1 page of comics.
• 44:44
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but he gets everything.
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: And so, this is all my long lineup to talk to me about what it's like to…
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: Adapt a work.
• 45:01
  Tad Eggleston: And since you already touched on it, like, you know, when you're writing primarily first in English versus writing primarily
• 45:11
  Tad Eggleston: first in Spanish, you find that that affects how you work. Like, I don't know if you've done adaptations of.
• 45:19
  Victor Santos: Other than Fahrenheit 451. No,
• 45:25
  Victor Santos: the thing is, in Fahrenheit, I did the adaptation, but using the Spanish version of the…
• 45:32
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so you use the Spanish language of the book.
• 45:34
  Victor Santos: There's… even I rewrite…
• 45:37
  Victor Santos: I rewrite some parts, because I have a couple of… I have my own copy of the book, and the publisher gave me the…
• 45:47
  Victor Santos: their last edition they made, but they, they were different translations, so I,
• 45:57
  Victor Santos: I made my own translation. I took… I took things from the two translations, and at the same time, I have… I bought, a Kindle…
• 46:08
  Victor Santos: an e-book version of the book in English, to be sure. So at the end, I make, like, a little Frankenstein of all the different.
• 46:16
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 46:17
  Victor Santos: So I don't know how the English publisher is going to do with the dialogues, because…
• 46:26
  Victor Santos: It's going to be very difficult to them, because it's not exactly
• 46:31
  Victor Santos: The worst of the… of the…
• 46:36
  Victor Santos: of Bradbury. For example, in France, it seems like the guy who made the translation They tried to make…
• 46:46
  Victor Santos: the dialogues, the most similar possible to the French translation of the book.
• 46:52
  Victor Santos: So he made an extra work to, you know, to make the translation and look for every word in the book.
• 47:02
  Victor Santos: to be sure, look similar to… to my… to my version. So I don't know what the…
• 47:08
  Victor Santos: what does the English translator… because it's like a kind of, like you say, like a reverse engineering to take the translation of Spanish, my own translation, and later try to do it similar to the original
• 47:23
  Victor Santos: dialogue, so it's going to be tricky. I kinda…
• 47:26
  Tad Eggleston: There's a game that some of my students will play where they'll take something and put it into Google Translate and send it through
• 47:38
  Tad Eggleston: like, a dozen different languages, and then translate it back to English to see…
• 47:43
  Tad Eggleston: What has… what it has become through… All of the…
• 47:48
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 47:49
  Tad Eggleston: All of the translations, because, I mean, translation is…
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: a difficult thing, and it's a local thing. Local translator is what I was… what I was looking for earlier in terms of
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even people I know that are bilingual and do mostly their own translation, they like to have a local
• 48:14
  Tad Eggleston: Translator that may or may not even know the language that they're…
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it might be a situation where, like, the Japanese writer translated it.
• 48:26
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 48:26
  Tad Eggleston: But they want somebody in English, who maybe doesn't even know Japanese, to work with them to clean up that English language so that they know that not only do they have the literal meaning, but they have all of the…
• 48:40
  Tad Eggleston: Figurative meaning that they intend to be there You know, because…
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: idiom is different… idiom is sometimes different in different parts of the same country, much less… Yeah, yeah. …across the world.
• 48:56
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, even… and… and, you know, I am, I am, I am Spanish, and most of my English, I learned, by my own, because I studied a little language when I was in high school, but when… when I was studying in the 90s,
• 49:15
  Victor Santos: The… They have not…
• 49:19
  Victor Santos: English professors, they have Spanish professors, so they, they, they, they teach Spanish, they, sorry, they teach English.
• 49:27
  Victor Santos: Not very well.
• 49:29
  Victor Santos: They have a lot of… This is one of the reasons I have this super bad pronunciation, because we have this, because I never learned how
• 49:39
  Victor Santos: how the English is properly
• 49:42
  Victor Santos: you know, pronunciation. It's very difficult to me to… it's easier to me writing, but speaking is hard. Now the… now the people… now the kids in Spain have very good prof… and they have English professors, and so British, Australian, American, and they, they study the different,
• 50:02
  Victor Santos: accent and the different, grammar. Right. But when I… but when I was studying, there was nothing of…
• 50:09
  Victor Santos: Nothing of all. It was very, poor.
• 50:13
  Victor Santos: classes. So, all my English come from the comic books and the movies, so I have a complete mess in my head.
• 50:22
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you're gonna have to come back sometime where I can bring Dr. Ramos on.
• 50:28
  Tad Eggleston: as well, because he loves to tell people, and he means it, it's not… it's not like…
• 50:37
  Tad Eggleston: he tells them for real, he learned English from Captain America.
• 50:42
  Victor Santos: Yeah, and
• 50:44
  Victor Santos: And… but, for example, Spanish guys of my age, of my generation, we learn English from, you know, watching movies with the subtitles, and I… one of the first books I read in English was the Fran Miller
• 50:59
  Victor Santos: The Return of the Dark Knight, and I was reading it with a dictionary in my hand, because I didn't understand.
• 51:04
  Victor Santos: the half of them. But we have this mess in the… in our head with mixing British English with, American English, and sometimes.
• 51:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, this reminds me…
• 51:16
  Victor Santos: This is why I…
• 51:17
  Tad Eggleston: There used to be a great… Eric, go ahead.
• 51:21
  Victor Santos: Oh, sorry, I wanted to say that this is what my newsletter is.
• 51:24
  Tad Eggleston: Name Broken English. Broken English.
• 51:26
  Victor Santos: Because I know sometimes I write with British words and subject with American words, you know, so it's a little mess, but it's a way I can improve my writing.
• 51:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, all of this reminds me of, there was a Saturday Night Live sketch with Alec Baldwin years ago, where he played a…
• 51:46
  Tad Eggleston: a French teacher in the U.S, and he's, he's like.
• 51:50
  Tad Eggleston: correcting Adam Sandler on his pronunciation, Chris Farley on his pronunciation, and then… then he… like, the end of the sketch is he's in
• 52:00
  Tad Eggleston: Paris over the summer, and, and, like, is speaking, like, the perfect…
• 52:08
  Tad Eggleston: book French from what he'd been teaching,
• 52:13
  Tad Eggleston: And some guy on the street, you know, uses…
• 52:18
  Tad Eggleston: you know, speaks, like, actual French, you know? And he immediately starts, like, oh, no, no, no! And gets the crap beaten out of him.
• 52:28
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, it's strange, because like I… like I told you, you have, like, the different structures in your mind when you are writing, and of course, when I write… when I write in Spanish.
• 52:42
  Victor Santos: I feel more confident about what can I do with the… with the… with the dialogues, other, you know, different…
• 52:51
  Victor Santos: I can play with the words and make jokes, more, you know, puns, and these kind of things. In English, I miss to… I must be cautious, because…
• 53:01
  Victor Santos: you know, I can… this is the reason I use an example. Writers like, like.
• 53:10
  Tad Eggleston: like, like, Richard Stark, and… Wesley. James… James Salis, which is a writer, who is the writer of The Drive.
• 53:19
  Victor Santos: Right. Novels, which I, I'm very… oh, Carmack McCarthy, the, the, the, the road. I love this, this, stark, dry style, because
• 53:30
  Victor Santos: Allows me to… Tier 2…
• 53:34
  Victor Santos: to, to, to use the… because English for the… it's funny, because English for the… when I… when I speak with, with, in English with, some, with another artist, with, with an editor, with a writer, sounds very harsh to me.
• 53:50
  Victor Santos: I always feel like I'm very rude. I'm not being polite, because in Spanish, you know, we use a lot of…
• 53:59
  Victor Santos: formulas, to being polite, and maybe we are less direct. You know, you have very…
• 54:06
  Victor Santos: it's like in Italian, we have very… very ways to… to go around of the sensitive matters, and when I talk in English, I feel, like, very direct, and harsh. I'm sure it's a…
• 54:21
  Victor Santos: very subjective feeling, but I cannot avoid feeling that way when…
• 54:27
  Victor Santos: Because, you know, the structure of your mind are different when, depending of the language, you are thinking.
• 54:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I… I mean, I'm…
• 54:39
  Tad Eggleston: I'm an educator, and autistic, and have various rabbit holes that I've gone down, and, like, linguists are…
• 54:47
  Tad Eggleston: Linguistics is definitely one of them, and, like, there's a lot of research into the fact that
• 54:55
  Tad Eggleston: In a lot of ways.
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: the… Like, rules of any language are kind of hardwired by the time we're 5.
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: And, and…
• 55:12
  Tad Eggleston: But in those early years, we can hardwire multiple languages. So, like, some languages are noun first, then verb, then object, some are verb, noun, object. There's all sorts of grammatical differences, there's all sorts of tense differences, you know.
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: And those are actually often the hardest part of learning a new language, is learning the structure of the language, not just the word-to-word part.
• 55:44
  Tad Eggleston: But it turns out that, like, the more of those switches you can have flipped in both directions, because you knew the language young, the easier it becomes to pick up.
• 55:54
  Victor Santos: Yeah, languages.
• 55:56
  Victor Santos: If I…
• 55:58
  Victor Santos: It's funny you say, because for example, I speak a third language, which is Catalan, which is a language from the…
• 56:07
  Victor Santos: the east of the Spain, and it's told in the south of France, too. It's like a… it's a small audience language. They have, like, 9, 10 million of speakers in all the world. But I learned it when I was… because I learned it in school when I was a kid.
• 56:26
  Victor Santos: So, I speak… even if I don't speak this language in gear, it's really fresh in my mind. I don't need to afford to talk it, or reading it, because I learned when I was very, very, very young. English is harder to me because I had to learn older.
• 56:45
  Victor Santos: And, for example, I even studied a couple of years of Japanese when I was in college, which I forgot.
• 56:53
  Victor Santos: Almost everything. But it's very interesting to know how it works, because
• 56:59
  Victor Santos: it tells you a lot about the Japanese culture, and for example, I'm a big fan of the manga books, so knowing how their language is structured, and how their Japanese learn this language, explains a lot
• 57:14
  Victor Santos: about how… For example, the manga and anime… anime… storytelling works.
• 57:22
  Victor Santos: Because it's very… it's completely linked to the way they learn.
• 57:29
  Victor Santos: the language.
• 57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right. No, I mean, I… one…
• 57:34
  Tad Eggleston: One of the other reasons that I fall down linguistic rabbit holes is, like, it turns out that language
• 57:42
  Tad Eggleston: very much…
• 57:44
  Tad Eggleston: affects how we look at the world, and you were alluding to this earlier in terms of, again, writing in English versus writing in Spanish, and how, there was a…
• 57:56
  Tad Eggleston: there's a Radiolab podcast on colors.
• 58:03
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the things I learned from that was that blue Is the last color that…
• 58:11
  Tad Eggleston: has a word for it in every language except I have no idea.
• 58:16
  Tad Eggleston: and for that matter, like, so much so, if you read the Odyssey.
• 58:22
  Tad Eggleston: Homer's Odyssey. There is no… the word blue is not in it.
• 58:27
  Victor Santos: I… I read it somewhere.
• 58:29
  Tad Eggleston: Water is wine-colored.
• 58:31
  Victor Santos: Yes, true.
• 58:32
  Tad Eggleston: When the Odyssey was written, they still didn't have a word for blue.
• 58:38
  Tad Eggleston: The only reason it was earlier in Egyptian is the only naturally occurring blue.
• 58:44
  Tad Eggleston: is a flower in the Nile.
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: Valley.
• 58:49
  Victor Santos: It's very interesting, though.
• 58:51
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because you don't need a color for the sky.
• 58:56
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 58:57
  Tad Eggleston: you don't need to… you know, I mean, everybody's like, oh, but the sky is blue. I'm like, yeah, but you can't turn your clothes blue because of that.
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: you can't…
• 59:07
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it's not a different… different color flower to give somebody, you know, it's just… the sky is the sky, you don't need to…
• 59:15
  Victor Santos: Yeah, you don't need to give a clue.
• 59:17
  Victor Santos: Right.
• 59:18
  Victor Santos: about.
• 59:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:19
  Victor Santos: Yes.
• 59:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:22
  Tad Eggleston: And what's even more interesting is they, in, like, the 70s or 80s, you know, so, like, recently, recently, they actually even found a tribe
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: in the Amazon Region that still didn't have the color blue in their language.
• 59:44
  Tad Eggleston: And they gave them a sheet.
• 59:47
  Tad Eggleston: with 9 color… swatches.
• 59:52
  Tad Eggleston: Going from… from green to blue.
• 59:57
  Tad Eggleston: And not only could they not identify the blue one.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: they thought it was identical to one of the green ones. So because they didn't have the language
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: for it.
• 1:00:11
  Tad Eggleston: their brain… Was adjusting the color
• 1:00:17
  Tad Eggleston: To something that they did know.
• 1:00:21
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, that's interesting.
• 1:00:23
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it's fascinating how minds work.
• 1:00:26
  Victor Santos: And, and comics has a very similar sensibility, because,
• 1:00:33
  Victor Santos: You know, I always love to… to… to read different,
• 1:00:39
  Victor Santos: books, comic books from different countries, and when I travel to a comic convention to other countries, I always try to research what they are doing, because, of course, it's very difficult to learn.
• 1:00:53
  Victor Santos: another language, but but comic books are… the comic books they are doing is a very…
• 1:00:59
  Victor Santos: Useful way to…
• 1:01:02
  Victor Santos: It's like, you know, it's like a speed, express, learning of the language and the culture.
• 1:01:10
  Victor Santos: And, for this reason, I love… even now, we live in a multicultural, globalized culture, and I can collaborate with a writer from the U.S, and…
• 1:01:23
  Victor Santos: We have seen the same anime shows when we were kids, and we read the same books, but at the same time, it's exciting to have the chance to read manga.
• 1:01:36
  Victor Santos: at the same time that you are reading classics of French album books, and reading American comic books, and I think it's great having these multicultural options, and even… and the most important for the artist.
• 1:01:52
  Victor Santos: I think the more… I think it's something you have to, especially if you are an artist, because I know, for example, a lot of people, artists, who work for the American market, for example, and they have never read
• 1:02:07
  Victor Santos: A book, a book outside the superhero… gender.
• 1:02:12
  Victor Santos: Or I… I have no artist,
• 1:02:17
  Victor Santos: who work from the European… European market, they don't like American comic books. And I think the good thing is, I think the progress in every medium
• 1:02:28
  Victor Santos: It happens when you… When you research in other cultures.
• 1:02:34
  Victor Santos: For example, I think, all the things Fran Miller
• 1:02:39
  Victor Santos: I use the example of Ramila every time, but it's a very good example.
• 1:02:44
  Tad Eggleston: I'm reading his… an advanced copy of his autobiography right now. I love Frank.
• 1:02:48
  Victor Santos: Oh, okay, I can't wait to read it. But from all the advances from Miller.
• 1:02:55
  Victor Santos: made for the American market was because he was reading comics nobody was reading in America at the time. He was reading Moi Views, he was reading…
• 1:03:04
  Victor Santos: Gosteki Kojima and Kafugo Koike in Lower Fanca. He was reading Jose Munoz.
• 1:03:11
  Victor Santos: and he used his black and white techniques, you know, Jose Muno, the Argentin, the… all these Argentinian masters, like, Brecia, and Jose Munoz, I think, is not Argentinian, he says, is, Chileeno, I don't know, I don't know.
• 1:03:25
  Victor Santos: he was reading a lot of South America black and white artists when he was making the Sin City books.
• 1:03:32
  Victor Santos: So… I think when you bring something from another field to your field, you're making your own field richer.
• 1:03:40
  Victor Santos: For example, another example I use is David Aja, the artist of the… of, Hokai and the Seeds.
• 1:03:50
  Victor Santos: And the Spanish artist, .
• 1:03:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:03:53
  Victor Santos: I think his Hawkeye is so special, it's because he brings a lot of techniques of the indie comics.
• 1:04:03
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:04:04
  Victor Santos: to the mainstream comic, so…
• 1:04:06
  Tad Eggleston: Also, pizza Dog.
• 1:04:08
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course.
• 1:04:11
  Victor Santos: But I think that's the… that's the point. When you only read the same stuff, you know, if you want to… I love Michael Moorcock novels, you know, Eldrichoffman, LeBonnet, and The Eternal Champion, and Michael Murcock always gave the same…
• 1:04:29
  Victor Santos: The same tip is, if you want to read… if you want to write fantasy.
• 1:04:35
  Victor Santos: read everything except fantasy. You need to read everything from other media, and try… because if you want to… if you only read fantasy, and you want to write fantasy… and you write fantasy.
• 1:04:45
  Victor Santos: You only will… you will write the… a rip-off Of everything you have read.
• 1:04:51
  Victor Santos: And if… I know we're… I know we are going to see…
• 1:04:55
  Victor Santos: a copy of Game of Thrones in the next… we are, we are seeing it.
• 1:05:00
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm certain there are already copies that…
• 1:05:02
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're copies, we don't know about them.
• 1:05:04
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course, but…
• 1:05:06
  Tad Eggleston: Because only the most hardcore, I only read fantasy, and I've run out of other things to read.
• 1:05:11
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, and I was a really big fan of fantasy, but it's difficult to me finding something
• 1:05:20
  Victor Santos: really excited me in fantasy genre. But my first books in Spain were all fantasy, you know, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien stuff. Right. It's my favorite. It's my most famous book in Spain is a fantasy book.
• 1:05:36
  Victor Santos: Right. So… so I love the genre, but it's very difficult to me.
• 1:05:40
  Victor Santos: to find something… I love… right now, I think the only fantasy stuff I read is,
• 1:05:46
  Victor Santos: Terry Pratchett novels.
• 1:05:49
  Tad Eggleston: Terry Prussian.
• 1:05:50
  Victor Santos: Because he, is, he's beyond, he's beyond fantasy. He's, he's, he's satir, it's a political comment, it's a comedy.
• 1:06:02
  Victor Santos: is, he's talking about religion, about belief, about the economy, so it's a…
• 1:06:07
  Tad Eggleston: Erica Henderson has been doing a lot of Terry Pratchett art on her Patreon lately, and it's been really, really fun.
• 1:06:17
  Victor Santos: Yeah. So, yeah, so I try to do something similar when I do books, because I have different influences, and like I said, for example, in Silencio, I… I… I… I… it's a crime action story, but all the info… all the base of the story is because I wanted to do a samurai…
• 1:06:37
  Victor Santos: You know, samurai running stuff.
• 1:06:40
  Victor Santos: Sorry.
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:06:42
  Victor Santos: So I try to make all these, structures of the… of the samurai stories, and make them work in a urban, modern.
• 1:06:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm literally looking at just page 2 of the first one, where you do the 9-panel grid that… that…
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: Alan Gibbon… er, not… Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons lifted from Jaime Hernandez.
• 1:07:12
  Victor Santos: Karma Landez, yeah.
• 1:07:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it had been done before, but… but, like…
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: the most recent example of it before they did Watchmen, and Gibbons specifically talks about having sent
• 1:07:24
  Tad Eggleston: Alan Moore loving rockets and going, this is how we should do this.
• 1:07:28
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it's fine, because… Sorry, sorry.
• 1:07:32
  Tad Eggleston: But, but so, so, so yeah, so we've got the 9-panel grid that already went from, from… from…
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: Hispanic-influenced U.S. underground to… to massive…
• 1:07:50
  Tad Eggleston: World-changing superhero comics, but the pictures in the grid remind me so much more of…
• 1:08:03
  Tad Eggleston: like, the, the koike, the lone wolf and cub.
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: dynamic, in terms of the angles, whatnot. You know, it's got a manga feel and a 9-panel grid, with…
• 1:08:16
  Tad Eggleston: a Mignola… slash oming… feel to…
• 1:08:23
  Tad Eggleston: the character design. So, so, like, just on page 2,
• 1:08:29
  Tad Eggleston: I see inf… and frankly, Mignola and… and… and… Oming, oh, more to…
• 1:08:40
  Tad Eggleston: European comics than probably anybody else
• 1:08:44
  Tad Eggleston: working regularly in the U.S. right now in terms of development of their child. So, so just on page 2 in your 9-panel grid here, I can see, like, the entire world.
• 1:09:03
  Tad Eggleston: Spun around and spit back out in a… way.
• 1:09:07
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it is… like I said, it's great because you have this access to every… to,
• 1:09:13
  Victor Santos: to all the story of humanity, all the story of comics, and in every corner of the world. And this is incredible, having the chance to do a research of influences and inspiration.
• 1:09:28
  Victor Santos: Because for… I remember… it reminds me when I was… when I… when I was a kid, the only… I… I read European albums, and some superhero stuff, but very, very few superhero stuff. And when I was a teenager, it was, in the 90s, it was… it was when manga
• 1:09:48
  Victor Santos: The first manga wave.
• 1:09:50
  Victor Santos: arrived to West… to the Western… to Europe and U.S. with the Dragon Ball and Akira, and all this stuff, all these shorts, especially strong…
• 1:10:00
  Victor Santos: male shounen stuff, you know, violence, violence, and sex, and… and hot girls, and all these things, and science fiction, hard science fiction. And when I was… and when I was at college, in college, I,
• 1:10:14
  Victor Santos: I, I meet a, I, I, I study, art.
• 1:10:18
  Victor Santos: And I meet a lot of people with different influences, so they show me,
• 1:10:23
  Victor Santos: American classic, like, the EC Comics, and Will Eisner, and Frank Miller, and it was like absorbing all the American… the, I don't know, five decades of American comics at the same time.
• 1:10:37
  Victor Santos: Right. And it's something you can do now with, with internet, and you can buy…
• 1:10:44
  Victor Santos: a reprint of, spirit comics, or… or classic comics, or whatever, or you, and I think you and… you and the U.S. have…
• 1:10:54
  Victor Santos: access to the European classic comics, like Moeller.
• 1:10:57
  Tad Eggleston: Most of the time.
• 1:10:58
  Victor Santos: on.
• 1:10:59
  Tad Eggleston: I still don't think enough of them have been translated, but…
• 1:11:02
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:11:03
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 1:11:04
  Victor Santos: But anyway, even if you don't understand the language, even you can go and buy the books to the, you know.
• 1:11:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:11
  Victor Santos: Amazon France, or whatever.
• 1:11:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:13
  Victor Santos: You can do a lot for internet, so… so you have this access. And it's awesome, because you have all this influence at the same time, and you can think, okay, I'm…
• 1:11:24
  Victor Santos: Sometimes it's not something you do because you want, sometimes it's something, like, you know all the influence at the same times, and it's a very…
• 1:11:32
  Tad Eggleston: It's more an instinct, it's more a…
• 1:11:35
  Victor Santos: subliminal thing.
• 1:11:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, the way it always reads with the best artists, yourself included.
• 1:11:43
  Tad Eggleston: But I was, I was talking to Paul Polk recently, too, and, like, you see it in his work, too. All of the stuff he reads…
• 1:11:51
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:11:52
  Tad Eggleston: comes in.
• 1:11:54
  Tad Eggleston: But you're, like, again, just going through this first issue here, you have so many influences that I would be willing to bet that you would have to look at it to say what
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: the influences were, because it had to have come naturally. You couldn't… you couldn't possibly be sitting there going, okay, I'm gonna go from lone wolf and cub to…
• 1:12:14
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: Sin City 2.
• 1:12:17
  Victor Santos: No, it's… yeah, when you, when you…
• 1:12:19
  Tad Eggleston: It's just, you've built that toolbox based on all of these different influences.
• 1:12:25
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:12:25
  Tad Eggleston: Put into the blender of your own brain.
• 1:12:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you brought up Moorcock.
• 1:12:33
  Tad Eggleston: talking about, you know, you want to write fantasy, read anything but fantasy. One of… one of my favorite things is both
• 1:12:43
  Tad Eggleston: I've read both Stephen King and Ray Bradbury's books on writing, and one of King's big things was, like.
• 1:12:53
  Tad Eggleston: If you want to be a writer, read. Read everything. Read all the time. Don't… don't give me this crap about you want to be original.
• 1:13:02
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:13:03
  Tad Eggleston: where you can't be influenced. No. You know, you think you don't have time to read? How much time did you spend in the line at the grocery store? If you'd had a paperback in your back pocket, you could have read 3 pages.
• 1:13:14
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, it's true, it's true.
• 1:13:18
  Tad Eggleston: And Bradbury was, like, just right.
• 1:13:23
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't have to be good. Like, his writing style was he got up in the morning, made a cup of coffee and toast, and wrote a short story.
• 1:13:31
  Tad Eggleston: And he didn't do anything else until he'd finished writing that short story. Many of them were never published, many of them became part of novels, which is why even his novels tend to have
• 1:13:42
  Tad Eggleston: The feel of short stories put together sometimes, but…
• 1:13:48
  Tad Eggleston: It was, wake up, come up with an idea, make a draft.
• 1:13:53
  Tad Eggleston: After that, you can have lunch, you can respond to correspondence, afternoon is for editing, whatever. Put, like.
• 1:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: Just do it.
• 1:14:04
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:14:06
  Victor Santos: So yeah, sometimes if you…
• 1:14:08
  Victor Santos: if you feel like a creator, you all… it's not a question even though to sit down and do it, because you… it's your duty. It's something… it's more than a duty. It's something you need to do to… because you have in your mind the story, and you want to… and you want to, you know, take… take out of your head, and…
• 1:14:26
  Tad Eggleston: Let it out so that there's room for something else.
• 1:14:29
  Victor Santos: Yeah, of course. For example, I have one idea of a graphic novel I had, and it was making in my mind
• 1:14:39
  Victor Santos: for a lot of time. So, in one point, I needed to take out, so I basically made the entire book in pencil. So I have a graphic novel in pencil, completely done.
• 1:14:53
  Victor Santos: And I have no idea when I'm going to ink it and when I'm going to color it.
• 1:14:58
  Victor Santos: But I wrote the story, and I penciled the… I made a sketch of every… of the…
• 1:15:04
  Victor Santos: It's, like, 150 pages. Because I needed to do it, because I need that space of my brain to know a story. Right. So I needed to… I needed to see…
• 1:15:14
  Victor Santos: They ha- they…
• 1:15:16
  Victor Santos: Sometimes the story, you cannot have it in your mind for longer, because you will get tired of the story, and you will hate the characters, and you will never… you will never…
• 1:15:27
  Victor Santos: draw it, and make it real. For example, I… I have a…
• 1:15:32
  Victor Santos: for example, in the times I was making fantasy.
• 1:15:36
  Victor Santos: I remember having conversations with other artists, and these are another writers of fantasy in Spain, so… and they were always very, obsessive
• 1:15:47
  Victor Santos: About, making the perfect world, the perfect, you know, the…
• 1:15:51
  Victor Santos: Tolkien style, having a coherent, perfect of countries with the name of the country, the story of every character, the story of every race, and every power, and every wizard. And I… when I did my fantasy story, I simply began to work on it.
• 1:16:10
  Victor Santos: Without worrying about, the details. I begin to draw, and
• 1:16:17
  Victor Santos: And the background of the characters, and you know, the story of this war, the race, and all this fantasy stuff.
• 1:16:25
  Victor Santos: came… came alone without the needs to look in for, because they appear, but because I need it for making the story.
• 1:16:34
  Victor Santos: So, I think the Ray Bradbury tip is the best, because what you need is to, okay, to begin to…
• 1:16:42
  Victor Santos: To write or begin to draw?
• 1:16:44
  Victor Santos: And the details of the story will appear when you need it, because most of the decisions you take
• 1:16:53
  Victor Santos: When you are making a story, or drawing a story.
• 1:16:56
  Victor Santos: It's a way to solve problems you find making it.
• 1:17:00
  Victor Santos: So you cannot prepare to make in the story and develop a super war, you know, a fantasy, you know, spend one year
• 1:17:10
  Victor Santos: creating the countries, and the reigns, and the story of this war. You need to begin with,
• 1:17:17
  Victor Santos: with the story as soon as possible, and the tale will appear later. I remember, for example, I love the… I'm not a big fan of the Witcher stories, but I read the first,
• 1:17:30
  Victor Santos: the first tales of the… I don't remember the name of the writer. He's a Polish…
• 1:17:36
  Tad Eggleston: Wasn't that, Paul… Tobin?
• 1:17:41
  Victor Santos: Yeah, I don't remember. Okay, anyway, they are the… the first stories are basically crime stories.
• 1:17:48
  Victor Santos: With a guy who arrives to a place, to a town, And solve a crime.
• 1:17:55
  Victor Santos: Instead,
• 1:17:56
  Victor Santos: Instead, the criminal is not a crook or a thief, it's a monster. So, it's the witcher finding out… finding who is the guilty of this story? And that's all. And he had no any history of the wizards or anything. It's a guy who arrives a town.
• 1:18:15
  Victor Santos: and solve a mystery. And I think they are the best stories, because when… when he begins to, you know, introduce this, epic…
• 1:18:26
  Victor Santos: stories with… wars between reigns and all this stuff is when the… I think the story becomes boring.
• 1:18:34
  Victor Santos: But I love the first, the first sample.
• 1:18:38
  Victor Santos: Stories of something you are creating with, you know.
• 1:18:41
  Victor Santos: With joy, and because you wanted to do something, and have fun with it.
• 1:18:47
  Victor Santos: Do you know, it's like,
• 1:18:49
  Victor Santos: I… I'm… I'm not super fan of… I'm not a fan of the Harry Potter books, but I have read all of them, but I remember I love the first Harry Potter books, because they are basically a child's book.
• 1:19:05
  Victor Santos: With a little mystery, okay?
• 1:19:07
  Victor Santos: We have this monster hiding, one of the prof- one of the teachers is the monster. Let's find out who he is.
• 1:19:14
  Victor Santos: And maybe you, later, you know, you wanted to do epic and Larger Than Life.
• 1:19:21
  Victor Santos: And it is when you become… you'll begin to make
• 1:19:24
  Victor Santos: huge, you know, huge brick books, and, right.
• 1:19:28
  Victor Santos: And… and sometimes it's, a question of, Sit down and enjoy.
• 1:19:35
  Victor Santos: Telling a story for your friends, or for your parents, or whatever, or for yourself.
• 1:19:42
  Victor Santos: Because when I began to make the silencia stuff, or when I began to make the…
• 1:19:47
  Victor Santos: the polar graphic novels. The polar graphic novel was, originally was a web… web, webcomic I made.
• 1:19:54
  Tad Eggleston: For my friends.
• 1:19:56
  Victor Santos: Because I have been working a lot on franchise stuff.
• 1:20:00
  Victor Santos: And, I have made Godzilla comic books, and I have made, things for IDW, and boom. And… and it was great, because it's a very good school.
• 1:20:12
  Victor Santos: For… because you need to work fast.
• 1:20:15
  Victor Santos: And but at the same time, I was… I was… I was… feel burned, because I was drawing, like, 40 pages.
• 1:20:24
  Victor Santos: Every month, So I began to make the polar bear.
• 1:20:28
  Tad Eggleston: A lot.
• 1:20:29
  Victor Santos: It's a lot, and I was doing the Mice Templar books at the same time that I was doing the, franchise stuff.
• 1:20:37
  Victor Santos: books, so… I feel I was hating… my fear was hating draw… to hate the act of drawing. So I began to…
• 1:20:47
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 1:20:48
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:20:49
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah, completely. And I began to make the polar books because I needed to recover the joy of drawing something because I feel good.
• 1:20:58
  Victor Santos: drawing and telling things. So, this is a reading of some of the books I have made.
• 1:21:05
  Victor Santos: In Spain, or in internet, in Paris Syndicate, or these places, because they burn, like,
• 1:21:13
  Victor Santos: like, kind of therapy of, recovering the… the joy of drawing, because it's, it's… it's…
• 1:21:23
  Victor Santos: I feel lucky, because I, I made my, my, my… the thing I love most, which is telling stories, is my… is my job.
• 1:21:34
  Victor Santos: But at the same time, you have this,
• 1:21:38
  Victor Santos: It's, at the same time, you… you are in danger, because maybe the job is something you can hate.
• 1:21:44
  Victor Santos: So, I need to make these projects by my… by myself. Even if I don't get a publisher later, I need to do it, because it's the, you know, because, makes me feel, loving the… continue loving the medium.
• 1:22:03
  Victor Santos: You're working so hard, and when you finish your daily job.
• 1:22:08
  Victor Santos: You don't want to take a comic book and read it.
• 1:22:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because you want to forget what a comic book is.
• 1:22:16
  Victor Santos: And I cannot… I want to avoid this with all my heart. I don't want to be all these artists who hate the medium because they are filled, burned…
• 1:22:26
  Tad Eggleston: It becomes too much of a job.
• 1:22:28
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah. But this danger is always present, so for your own mindset safety, you need to do something for you from time to time.
• 1:22:38
  Tad Eggleston: So,
• 1:22:41
  Tad Eggleston: I've been, like, dreading bringing this up, just because I so wanted to reread this and have it fresh in my head and didn't manage to this week.
• 1:22:50
  Tad Eggleston: But you… you drew my… my favorite…
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: well, no, my second favorite, maybe third favorite. There were too many really good graphic novels last year. It would have been my favorite graphic novel in many, many years, but, like, Jesse Lonergan's Drone came out last year.
• 1:23:07
  Victor Santos: Oh, it's just beautiful, I love Jesse Lonervan art.
• 1:23:10
  Tad Eggleston: I do too!
• 1:23:11
  Victor Santos: That's wonderful.
• 1:23:13
  Tad Eggleston: And Meredith McLaren's Meat Eaters came out last year, so I think it was officially my third favorite, but like…
• 1:23:19
  Victor Santos: Oh, yeah.
• 1:23:19
  Tad Eggleston: There are 3 amazing.
• 1:23:21
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: Like, you drew Kid Maroon.
• 1:23:26
  Victor Santos: Oh, thank you.
• 1:23:27
  Tad Eggleston: Which I haven't… I haven't gotten an opportunity to have a deep conversation with Chris about, and I haven't re-read yet, but… but I did… I did go back and look at the… the text that I sent him when I was only 40 pages in, was that…
• 1:23:41
  Tad Eggleston: It was fucking brilliant. The layers of subtext, innuendo, and social commentary have my brain spinning on overdrive. And somehow, it's whimsically funny as well.
• 1:23:54
  Tad Eggleston: So… I mean, Kid Maroon was…
• 1:24:00
  Tad Eggleston: a different kind of book in so many ways. I mean, on one level, it is just a hard-boiled crime story, except that…
• 1:24:08
  Tad Eggleston: It's centered on a 10-year-old, and…
• 1:24:12
  Tad Eggleston: Some of the issues are more 10-year-old-like, except when they're very, very, very not. And, like…
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: the balancing act to take that story and make it that beautiful, talking about it, talk, talk… I mean, how, how…
• 1:24:32
  Tad Eggleston: I literally, because I should have thought about it way earlier, I literally texted Chris and said, hey, you want to drop in? Because I'd love to talk to the two of you about it together.
• 1:24:42
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, you know, he's… on the West Coast, so he might not even be out of bed yet.
• 1:24:50
  Tad Eggleston: But talk to me about that book, because it is such a thin line to take…
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: To take a deep story with a lot of social commentary, and a lot of… psychosocial…
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: Emotional stuff going on.
• 1:25:10
  Victor Santos: Yes.
• 1:25:11
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the old-time cartoon style…
• 1:25:14
  Tad Eggleston: Walk that line where it doesn't feel…
• 1:25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Gratuitous and wrong, but it also… it doesn't feel like you're making light of the subject matter.
• 1:25:26
  Tad Eggleston: And… and you killed it. It was… it was amazing.
• 1:25:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, So yeah, talk… talk to me about… talk to me about that book.
• 1:25:36
  Victor Santos: It's, it's, it's… the point is, it was a very personal book for Chris.
• 1:25:44
  Victor Santos: Because he has write it, at the… I think he got the story first as a novel.
• 1:25:51
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:25:51
  Victor Santos: And, and pros, but… It didn't work for him, and…
• 1:25:56
  Victor Santos: he transformed it into the… into the script, and I won't receive the… the idea, because it,
• 1:26:05
  Victor Santos: The… the people from the pool… the vault, the publisher.
• 1:26:10
  Victor Santos: was the people who contacted me, because they were looking for an artist. But in this kind of stories, I used to be very cautious, because sometimes when the project is very personal for the writer.
• 1:26:27
  Victor Santos: The, you know, the… his presence can be very suffocating.
• 1:26:34
  Victor Santos: I had this bad experience with another writer, I will not say his name. Please do.
• 1:26:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, maybe off-air, but not on air.
• 1:26:43
  Victor Santos: No, but he has a very personal project.
• 1:26:47
  Victor Santos: But, and… it looked fine, because I feel there was not a space for me.
• 1:26:55
  Victor Santos: in the project. He was not looking a partner for doing it, he was looking…
• 1:27:00
  Victor Santos: For a hands… for a couple of hands to do it.
• 1:27:03
  Victor Santos: So, I didn't feel comfortable with it, and I have not a special connection with the reference of this story, so I refused to do it. And he was really upset about it, about my…
• 1:27:16
  Victor Santos: No, I wanted to work with him, but he was really, really upset about it, and he, cut any communication.
• 1:27:23
  Victor Santos: With me.
• 1:27:25
  Victor Santos: So, okay, I cannot do anything. So, my first, reaction of this kind of a story, when you know, when you feel is very special to the writers, is, okay.
• 1:27:36
  Victor Santos: But I am a part of the story, too. I'm a… I'm going to be your partner. We are going to share the rights of this character, so… so I'm going to be part of it. But in this case, with Chris was just the opposite, because he's a very…
• 1:27:50
  Victor Santos: Generous guy. He understands, if you join somebody.
• 1:27:56
  Victor Santos: to make the book with you. He has a… he can…
• 1:28:01
  Victor Santos: He must be part of the process and take the decisions with you.
• 1:28:04
  Victor Santos: So, even I am very respectful, because I saw what Chris was going to do.
• 1:28:11
  Victor Santos: And I put all my effort… my effort to do… to try to get the image he has in mind. But at the same time, I wanted to introduce and share my own influences and, you know, my own feelings about the story of this kid.
• 1:28:30
  Victor Santos: And and the law for the…
• 1:28:33
  Victor Santos: And the first one was a love letter to the old pre-code books.
• 1:28:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:28:38
  Victor Santos: I knew some, some of the stuff. I know the, the AC Comics, for example, because I'm a very fan of, artists like, Johnny Craig, and,
• 1:28:49
  Victor Santos: Karthman… And, Dan de Carlo, a lot of these people, but I have no.
• 1:28:55
  Tad Eggleston: We're on 22 panels, so you gotta mention Wally Wood, too.
• 1:28:58
  Victor Santos: Yeah, I love Wollywood stuff, and Jenny Craig, and Harvey Karsman, I didn't remember Harry Karthman, I…
• 1:29:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Harvey Christmas.
• 1:29:05
  Victor Santos: Super fan of Harvey Carson.
• 1:29:07
  Victor Santos: But, for example, I have no idea about comic strips, for example. I never read Dick Tracy, for example.
• 1:29:14
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there's a lot of Dick Tracy in this.
• 1:29:16
  Victor Santos: Yeah, so, so I made a research, I get… because in Spain, they are publishing the classic Dick Tracy script, so I get my research about this pre-code, the first Superman and Batman…
• 1:29:29
  Victor Santos: Precode stories, which were more violent and more,
• 1:29:33
  Victor Santos: Crude? I think… rough, I think is the word. They're already rough.
• 1:29:38
  Victor Santos: In different levels. They have, like, a lack of sophistication.
• 1:29:43
  Victor Santos: And, it's a very attractive tube.
• 1:29:46
  Victor Santos: So I, but at the same time, you have this story about the family relationship, and lost, and the lust of the innocence of the, you know, grown-up.
• 1:29:57
  Victor Santos: And, I see this guy, this kid, Manuni, every… it reminds me, like, these kids…
• 1:30:04
  Victor Santos: who are, you know, like, Michaelie Culkin, and these kids who are the guy… the kids from Stranger Things, or Harry Potter movies, kids…
• 1:30:13
  Victor Santos: which has a…
• 1:30:15
  Victor Santos: Had grown… have grown up faster, and they have lost their childhood, and when they are older.
• 1:30:25
  Victor Santos: In some… in some way, they are… they have a lack.
• 1:30:30
  Victor Santos: Of, some things. They have lost some things, they have not never been normal kids.
• 1:30:35
  Victor Santos: So I see Kid Maroon, like, one of these stories about a kid who was super, super… he has a supernatural mind with a super clever,
• 1:30:46
  Victor Santos: very gifted, and she's, justice warrior of vigilante, whatever.
• 1:30:53
  Victor Santos: But at the same time, I enjoy it because he's,
• 1:30:56
  Victor Santos: has a friend, it's the first time he has a real friend, or a kid like him, he has this trouble with his parents, and and I think the story works in very, very different levels.
• 1:31:09
  Victor Santos: which I think is one of… sadly, I think is one of the stories… I think the book has not worked really well.
• 1:31:16
  Victor Santos: Because I think, it's a very demanding book, because he works in a very different level. It's…
• 1:31:24
  Victor Santos: I don't know. It's like a kid's… it's like a kid's story, like a children's story, but at the same time it's violent, and… Yeah. And it's very sad at the same time.
• 1:31:35
  Victor Santos: So, right now, when you sell a book.
• 1:31:38
  Victor Santos: you need to do it, like I said, you know, you need to make the catchphrase and say, okay, it's like.
• 1:31:45
  Victor Santos: It's like lone wolf and Cab with equalizer. It's like Harry Potter, but with robots, you know?
• 1:31:51
  Victor Santos: And it's very difficult to sell.
• 1:31:53
  Victor Santos: what…
• 1:31:55
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I… I don't.
• 1:31:56
  Victor Santos: about…
• 1:31:57
  Tad Eggleston: I… this is definitely a hand-sell book. This is one that I hope stays in print, because I think that it…
• 1:32:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if we look at the great works of literature, the great films.
• 1:32:13
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. So many of them weren't…
• 1:32:19
  Tad Eggleston: Weren't immediate commercial successes, because it took time
• 1:32:23
  Tad Eggleston: To digest them, and to talk about them, and for people to go, oh, wait a minute.
• 1:32:30
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:32:31
  Tad Eggleston: And this is definitely one of those books where… where…
• 1:32:37
  Tad Eggleston: I, you know, I… it's been a while since I did a lot of hand selling in a comic shop, but I might be able… I might be doing more of it in the near future, and it's one that I look forward.
• 1:32:50
  Victor Santos: What would they have?
• 1:32:50
  Tad Eggleston: Having copies on hand to, like.
• 1:32:53
  Tad Eggleston: Start showing people and telling them
• 1:32:56
  Tad Eggleston: what to look for, because it's the type of book that…
• 1:33:02
  Tad Eggleston: You're right, there isn't an easy catchphrase.
• 1:33:05
  Victor Santos: No, and it's also a melancholic story.
• 1:33:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:33:09
  Victor Santos: Even it's, has a kind of happy ending, it's a…
• 1:33:14
  Victor Santos: is, there is a constant sense of loss in the story. And, so we said, you know, if we have made
• 1:33:23
  Victor Santos: a parody of the genre, and we have, I don't know, this, over-the-top violence and, self…
• 1:33:30
  Victor Santos: conscious… story. Maybe it will be easier to sell.
• 1:33:36
  Victor Santos: But I think it's not will be…
• 1:33:38
  Victor Santos: It will not be special. My favorite animation movie Ever.
• 1:33:44
  Victor Santos: is the Iron Giant.
• 1:33:46
  Tad Eggleston: Huh?
• 1:33:46
  Victor Santos: I think it's the only time I have really cried, openly cried, watching.
• 1:33:51
  Tad Eggleston: I love the Iron Giant.
• 1:33:53
  Victor Santos: And I love… it's my favorite animation movie in… animation western movie. And, and it's a melancholic, sad story. Even… it's a funny story. At the end is one of the story, which the melancholy and the sadness is,
• 1:34:10
  Victor Santos: It's, it's like the original Lilo and Stitch, movie, which I love too. It's a sad story, because it's a story about loss, and and grow… growing up…
• 1:34:22
  Victor Santos: It's losing things.
• 1:34:24
  Victor Santos: And I think, Keith Maloney's about this, too.
• 1:34:27
  Victor Santos: It's about making friends, but it's about the things you lose when you've grown up, and .
• 1:34:34
  Tad Eggleston: Pressures of the world.
• 1:34:36
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:34:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there… there… again, there is so much… I mean, this is… this is why I said I was afraid to bring it up, because I had really wanted to find the time to re-read it, like, a really deep read, to be able to ask these questions.
• 1:34:52
  Tad Eggleston: And I didn't have the time this week.
• 1:34:55
  Victor Santos: Yeah, I have to read… I love to read, too.
• 1:34:58
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, I'm gonna say right now, hopefully, at some point in the future, even long in the future, because this is a book that I know I'll be revisiting a lot, I can put you and Chris together to talk.
• 1:35:11
  Victor Santos: Something like that.
• 1:35:12
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because I think that would be a fascinating conversation. But you've, you've given me a lot of your time, so I'm gonna get to my, my favorite closing questions. Okay. My first is,
• 1:35:26
  Tad Eggleston: I've been doing this podcast for… for…
• 1:35:29
  Tad Eggleston: I'm entering my fifth year. I'm, like, four and a half years now.
• 1:35:36
  Tad Eggleston: And I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone now. The way in which my life has changed in really positive ways
• 1:35:46
  Tad Eggleston: because of conversations that I get to have, people I get to meet, things I get to do…
• 1:35:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, most recently, I went from… Like, completely freaking out.
• 1:36:03
  Tad Eggleston: Because on top of everything else in the world that was already more weight than I could carry.
• 1:36:10
  Tad Eggleston: I went from having 2 cars to no cars in the span of 3 days, and because of comic book connections, I was able to get set up with 2 new cars in the span of 3 hours on Saturday.
• 1:36:25
  Tad Eggleston: Because somebody I know has a sibling, somebody I know because of comics.
• 1:36:33
  Victor Santos: Yeah.
• 1:36:33
  Tad Eggleston: I would have known them if it hadn't been for comics. Has a sibling who sells cars.
• 1:36:37
  Tad Eggleston: But I find that almost everybody in this industry has
• 1:36:42
  Tad Eggleston: a story like that. Like, whether it's an opportunity to create with somebody, or an opportunity to meet and have a conversation with somebody, or become friends with somebody, or… or a fan that comes.
• 1:36:54
  Tad Eggleston: and tells them how meaningful something was. Everybody has…
• 1:36:59
  Tad Eggleston: At least one of those stories, and generally multiple of those stories, they're just completely surreal, where it's almost they have to pinch themselves to believe that they actually happened.
• 1:37:10
  Tad Eggleston: That never would have happened if they hadn't chosen
• 1:37:14
  Tad Eggleston: To devote a huge portion of their lives to this wonderful medium.
• 1:37:19
  Tad Eggleston: That we call comics. So I like to ask people, share one of your stories, share… share something just completely…
• 1:37:29
  Tad Eggleston: Unbelievable, that never would have happened if you…
• 1:37:33
  Tad Eggleston: Except that you're a cartoonist, and it.
• 1:37:35
  Victor Santos: Well,
• 1:37:36
  Victor Santos: The only thing… the only thing I can say is I met my wife, thanks to comic books. There you go. And we have been together for 20… more than 20 years right now, because I was a friend of…
• 1:37:49
  Victor Santos: of a book, of a comic book store owner.
• 1:37:54
  Victor Santos: And he introduced one of his friends, and she becomes my… I meet him in a coffee convention.
• 1:38:02
  Victor Santos: In the north of Spain. And… and the funny thing is, we met at the same time.
• 1:38:10
  Victor Santos: than the artist's marbacking hat?
• 1:38:12
  Victor Santos: myth… head-on wife.
• 1:38:15
  Victor Santos: So… So, the four of us became friends.
• 1:38:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:38:20
  Victor Santos: Because we met our partners together.
• 1:38:24
  Victor Santos: Right. So I have a special relationship with Mark.
• 1:38:28
  Tad Eggleston: Because we are…
• 1:38:30
  Victor Santos: both of us met our wife in the same place at the same time, and his wife was Spanish.
• 1:38:37
  Victor Santos: And his wife was a Spanish, a Spanish girl, and my wife was Spanish too, but we live separated in very far places. Right. So we were constantly talking about how to manage,
• 1:38:52
  Victor Santos: Relationship, in distance, in distance.
• 1:38:56
  Tad Eggleston: It's a challenge.
• 1:38:58
  Victor Santos: So, because he was living in England, I was living in the east of Spain, my wife was living in… my future wife was living in the north of Spain.
• 1:39:05
  Victor Santos: the Mark Wife was living in Spain, so… so we have, like, this, special relationship, and I have… they… they married, I, my wife and I was to his… to their… to their wedding, so, it's crazy because, you know,
• 1:39:22
  Victor Santos: We have very close friends, because they have this parallel…
• 1:39:27
  Victor Santos: life story together, and and… and if something never happened, if I'm… if I never…
• 1:39:37
  Victor Santos: make comic books, and the other… the other funny things is I never went… I was not… I was not going to… to make comic books, because when I was studying.
• 1:39:46
  Victor Santos: I was, I thought I could never make a living
• 1:39:52
  Victor Santos: drawing, so I was going to study.
• 1:39:56
  Victor Santos: another career in college. I wanted to be… I wanna… I wanna be a journalist.
• 1:40:02
  Victor Santos: So, at the end, I cannot get the place.
• 1:40:08
  Victor Santos: in College of Journalism.
• 1:40:11
  Victor Santos: And I… my second option was to study art.
• 1:40:15
  Victor Santos: So… At the end, I decided to try to make a living drawing things, and it's strange, because he…
• 1:40:24
  Victor Santos: the day I decided to change my career.
• 1:40:27
  Victor Santos: It was completely… my life half…
• 1:40:31
  Victor Santos: will have been completely different. I will be with different people, I will not be with the same
• 1:40:36
  Victor Santos: Person, living together. So, it's strange because,
• 1:40:41
  Victor Santos: The… making the decision of make a living drawing.
• 1:40:45
  Victor Santos: make my life completely different, and I have… I have never… I don't know.
• 1:40:51
  Victor Santos: have the chance to… somebody make a movie of one of my books, or I have traveled to different places of the world, thanks to the comics, so it's strange to think about how my life, how would be different.
• 1:41:05
  Victor Santos: if this day I decided, okay, like, I… like, I have not got the place of…
• 1:41:11
  Victor Santos: in the journalist school, I will try with art.
• 1:41:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So it's a… it's a…
• 1:41:18
  Victor Santos: You know, it…
• 1:41:19
  Victor Santos: if I… if I sometimes have the chance to, you know, use one of these machines of a parallel dimension, you know.
• 1:41:28
  Victor Santos: I'm sure my, you know, my turning point, my… the breakpoint of my life was there.
• 1:41:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:41:36
  Victor Santos: So, it's strange.
• 1:41:38
  Victor Santos: I… at the end, I… I, I, I breathed with relief. Oh, wow.
• 1:41:44
  Tad Eggleston: Good luck.
• 1:41:46
  Victor Santos: I made… I made the… I made the right decision, I think.
• 1:41:51
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, my favorite, favorite closing question. Tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, no rules. But something that you love.
• 1:42:05
  Tad Eggleston: that not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so that you have more people to talk about with it. Or talk about it with. Yeah.
• 1:42:14
  Victor Santos: Something I really love.
• 1:42:16
  Victor Santos: I don't… I don't know. I think it's something very linked to the Spanish culture, but one of the things I love most is simply,
• 1:42:27
  Victor Santos: having a… You know, a lunch with my friends, with the friends.
• 1:42:32
  Victor Santos: It doesn't matter if they are from…
• 1:42:36
  Victor Santos: Friends of the comic book market, of my friends of my… of my school, you know, the guy, the…
• 1:42:43
  Victor Santos: But, it's something that is very… you know, in Spain, especially the Mediterranean culture, we have a very strong feeling about,
• 1:42:53
  Victor Santos: How about, doing all the things, eating something good.
• 1:42:56
  Victor Santos: So, for me, it's like, it's the only thing that makes me feel safe and forget all the stress and the anxiety of every day.
• 1:43:06
  Victor Santos: is having in my… I have, I don't know, this weekend, I have this… this, this dinner with my family, or this dinner with my friends, the act of sharing food.
• 1:43:17
  Victor Santos: with your beloved ones, with the things you love, even though this, we have these dinners, too, with, when I go to conventions, and, I spend time with people I love, but some… but maybe I only can have the chance to see them.
• 1:43:33
  Victor Santos: one time every year, because we attend all the time, all the guys to the same convention. So for me, it's the moments that that
• 1:43:43
  Victor Santos: make a…
• 1:43:45
  Victor Santos: that, that, that you know you… you are… there's the best of life for me, is that the things that change my soul and my mind of peace, to having this moment of sharing food.
• 1:43:59
  Victor Santos: with people. I cannot live in… it was hard for me, for example, the lockdown, and not having the chance to have these meetings, because like a lot of artists, and I've…
• 1:44:15
  Victor Santos: I'm kind of introvert sometimes, and I feel safe in my home, and I feel lazy when I have to go to a convention at the beginning. Later, I have a lot of fun, but at the beginning, so I don't… I don't feel like I don't want to travel.
• 1:44:30
  Tad Eggleston: Leave the house?
• 1:44:31
  Victor Santos: Yeah, yeah. But, but…
• 1:44:34
  Victor Santos: But I have not… I don't need any effort, I don't need any… I have not any anxiety when I have to share food with my friends.
• 1:44:41
  Tad Eggleston: And I think it for me is the best, even if I cannot, you know.
• 1:44:45
  Victor Santos: It's not the fact of drinking, or, you know, or having a party, I don't care about it, but the fact of sharing food with people. Yeah, for me, it's like the highest bond I can have with somebody.
• 1:44:57
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 1:44:59
  Tad Eggleston: Do you have a favorite lunch?
• 1:45:02
  Victor Santos: Yeah, it's, you know, the paella is, very…
• 1:45:06
  Victor Santos: traditional Spanish, dish. It's a… it's basically a rice with chicken and vegetables, and it's making a very… in a very big, round…
• 1:45:17
  Victor Santos: Oh, how's the brain? You know, recipient?
• 1:45:22
  Victor Santos: It's by, by, it's a… I'm from the region.
• 1:45:27
  Victor Santos: where this dish was created, it's very typical of my… the place I born in Valencia. It's my favorite… and it's my favorite dish.
• 1:45:36
  Victor Santos: Ever.
• 1:45:38
  Victor Santos: And it's very hard to do it. It's very difficult to do it properly.
• 1:45:42
  Victor Santos: But when you do it well, it's it's like the dish of the gods.
• 1:45:47
  Victor Santos: For me.
• 1:45:49
  Tad Eggleston: I love it. Thank you so much, Victor, for joining me.
• 1:45:52
  Victor Santos: Pleasure.
• 1:45:53
  Tad Eggleston: Do it again sometime.
• 1:45:55
  Victor Santos: I hope so.
• 1:45:56
  Tad Eggleston: For 22 panelists, this has been Victor Santos, and we will see you after the next page.