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Fourth World Book Club #12 · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:03
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Fourth World Book Club on 22 Panels. I'm joined by…
• 0:10
  Tad Eggleston: Actor Sean Harker wrote, actor and playwright Mark Pratt.
• 0:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we wrapped up,
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: Forever People and New Gods. One of them…
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't particularly satisfied with the ending, and the other one, I was slightly more satisfied with the ending.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: And Mr. Miracle continues, and .
• 0:39
  Mark Pracht: Alright.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty good… issue? Yeah, that's where I'll go. That's my… that's my hot take off the top. Now I'll hand it over to the people who actually, like, know Kirby.
• 0:50
  Mark Pracht: Well, which one were you satisfied with? That's my curiosity.
• 0:55
  Tad Eggleston: I was slightly more satisfied with the New Gods ending.
• 0:59
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, really?
• 1:00
  Mark Pracht: Interesting.
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: Slightly more satisfied with New God's Ending.
• 1:06
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean.
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't know that I was satisfied with either ending.
• 1:12
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 1:13
  Tad Eggleston: Thankfully. But…
• 1:15
  Mark Pracht: you get two more Kirby New God stories when we're done with this thing.
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right. At the very end. And that's kind of what it felt like, is the New Gods ending felt like an ending.
• 1:26
  Mark Pracht: For now.
• 1:27
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, this series is ending, but these characters aren't ending, blah blah blah. Whereas the… the…
• 1:35
  Tad Eggleston: Forever People ending felt like an ending. Like, they're done, we're done,
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: And no, not in a satisfying way, just…
• 1:46
  Tad Eggleston: Here! Here have this planet to go live on!
• 1:50
  Sean Harklerode: Right, you know, it would be interesting to come back in 25 years to…
• 1:57
  Sean Harklerode: D, what had sprouted from this seed we'd planted. According to Evanier, jack found out midway through
• 2:09
  Sean Harklerode: doing these pages.
• 2:14
  Sean Harklerode: That this would be the last issue.
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that would… that would explain a lot.
• 2:19
  Sean Harklerode: So… Yeah.
• 2:21
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, to me, that… it definitely explains forever people. Yeah. Bringing back Infinity Man, whom we haven't seen.
• 2:30
  Sean Harklerode: In forever.
• 2:33
  Sean Harklerode: and who had been banished?
• 2:38
  Sean Harklerode: Kind of like the Silver Surfer? .
• 2:42
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:45
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Yeah, go ahead, I'm sorry.
• 2:48
  Sean Harklerode: Right, but, I mean… he…
• 2:54
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I think it was the best thing he could come up with.
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Sean Harklerode: I think, you know, in the beginning of it, he's… the first several pages, he's not intending it to be the end, and that's why I think all of the Infinity Man stuff is, like, single page.
• 3:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 3:12
  Sean Harklerode: Because he probably…
• 3:13
  Tad Eggleston: color.
• 3:13
  Sean Harklerode: asserted that back.
• 3:15
  Tad Eggleston: That was definitely one of the thoughts that I had on both issues, like, when did he find out
• 3:22
  Tad Eggleston: that…
• 3:23
  Tad Eggleston: You know, how long did he have to figure out an ending to these series? You know, did he know two issues back? Did he know… you know, and if he didn't even know when he started this issue, that explains
• 3:35
  Tad Eggleston: So much.
• 3:37
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that was part of par for the course when you're talking about, like, deep in the Bronze Age. I think that it was sort of like…
• 3:44
  Mark Pracht: Alright guys, this ain't working, wrap it up.
• 3:47
  Mark Pracht: Now, you know.
• 3:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 3:49
  Mark Pracht: I do think… here's… here's my feeling. I feel like…
• 3:58
  Mark Pracht: I, I absolutely agree with everything you guys said. The whole Infinity Man thing does feel, like, warmed over,
• 4:06
  Mark Pracht: Kirby… Kirby Silver Surfer stuff.
• 4:12
  Mark Pracht: And, but, you know.
• 4:16
  Mark Pracht: Again, I love Jack. I think Jack is really brilliant. I think he's a genius. I also think that he tends to revisit some of the same stuff over and over again.
• 4:28
  Mark Pracht: But… for me, And it…
• 4:35
  Mark Pracht: goes along with whatever you got… there is a palpable sense of sadness over all of this.
• 4:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 4:42
  Mark Pracht: Like, I think that there's just, like… But, you know…
• 4:49
  Mark Pracht: What's also interesting about that is that, you know, the last couple of months that we've done this, we've all talked about how meandering and sort of unfocused everything felt.
• 5:00
  Mark Pracht: Right. You know.
• 5:01
  Mark Pracht: and… And then when they say, you're done, then it's like, okay, now I feel awful about everything.
• 5:10
  Mark Pracht: And I feel… and there's this deep sadness, and it's like, well, you know, if…
• 5:17
  Mark Pracht: If there was a little more coherent plot momentum, Through all of these books.
• 5:25
  Tad Eggleston: It might not be done.
• 5:26
  Mark Pracht: you might not be done, right?
• 5:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 5:31
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, again, that's not me slagging on Jack, it's just… That's the way it feels.
• 5:44
  Mark Pracht: Alright, we'll see you guys next month.
• 5:48
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but we haven't talked about, Mr. Miracle.
• 5:55
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I… I mean…
• 5:58
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that… I mean, I think that, I mean, I do think there's interesting things that happen. I think that, you know.
• 6:08
  Mark Pracht: I'm looking at…
• 6:12
  Mark Pracht: I'm looking at Forever People right now, and, you know, once again, we have sort of these random powers that…
• 6:20
  Mark Pracht: Come out of nowhere, and are attributed to some weird…
• 6:26
  Mark Pracht: I can't remember what they say.
• 6:30
  Mark Pracht: like, atomic energy or something like that, and… and then, you know, sort of the deus ex machina of, Infinity Man, who was always sort of a deus ex machina, but it's just…
• 6:41
  Mark Pracht: like… In a way, that's the best idea in this book.
• 6:49
  Mark Pracht: And it's been gone for most of the run.
• 6:52
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 6:54
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 7:02
  Mark Pracht: And maybe he would have gotten around to it, but it seems like something that I would have jumped right to, is like, where does… like, even before this banishment, where does Infinity Man go when they're not…
• 7:14
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 7:16
  Mark Pracht: Where… where is… it's very clear here that it's… he's a different… Different, entity. Entity.
• 7:26
  Mark Pracht: I mean, it's not just like… it's not like, it's not like, Captain Planet, where, you know.
• 7:32
  Mark Pracht: We all become one, you know?
• 7:35
  Mark Pracht: it's… it… But maybe it is. I don't know, but…
• 7:41
  Mark Pracht: I would have liked to, like…
• 7:43
  Mark Pracht: how much… like, I really think that the series would have been a lot more interesting if we'd… if Jack had thought, oh, maybe I should show Infinity Man on this other planet having adventures.
• 7:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 7:54
  Mark Pracht: Wrapped into the rest of this, you know, and there…
• 7:58
  Mark Pracht: You could have put, like, a ticking time bomb on it, like, you know.
• 8:03
  Mark Pracht: both the… both the Forever People and Infinity Man, if they can't reconnect, would…
• 8:09
  Mark Pracht: you know, cease to exist, or whatever, you know? I… I don't know, but I mean, there's all sorts of ways you could have gone with it, and yet it just ended up in this, like, sort of, like…
• 8:19
  Tad Eggleston: more.
• 8:20
  Mark Pracht: vague… vaguely Scooby-Doo sort of series.
• 8:23
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, I mean…
• 8:25
  Mark Pracht: I do feel like we can have this conversation, because this is the end of the forever people. Right. They're not coming back, right?
• 8:31
  Tad Eggleston: I think somebody did a miniseries.
• 8:34
  Mark Pracht: Somebody.
• 8:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:37
  Mark Pracht: But that's not…
• 8:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's not Kirby, that's not… Right.
• 8:41
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 8:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. In vain kind of stuff. Right.
• 8:43
  Sean Harklerode: kind of the big chill, you know, they aged on the planet.
• 8:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:47
  Sean Harklerode: And, then de-aged by the end of it.
• 8:51
  Mark Pracht: I'm sleeping the race car.
• 8:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think, you know, and I kind of hate that we almost always come back to
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: having an editor would have made a huge difference, but, I think what I see a lot in…
• 9:08
  Tad Eggleston: Both Forever People and New Gods is that I think Jack
• 9:15
  Tad Eggleston: thought that he'd built more of the world and the characters in his head than he really had. And if he'd bothered to put together, like, the Bible before he started, you know, that had the character sheets, that had…
• 9:31
  Tad Eggleston: The world-building sheets, so that there was a cohesion from the get-go, it might have made a huge difference.
• 9:41
  Mark Pracht: Well, I also think that… I also think that, if… if…
• 9:46
  Mark Pracht: if it'd been envisioned, I… I believe that Jack knew what… He was aiming for, right?
• 9:55
  Mark Pracht: like, when I talk about the Star Wars sequels, like, that's the big problem with that trilogy. Like, nobody knew what the target was. Nobody knew what the point of that story was. And I think Jack knows
• 10:07
  Mark Pracht: how these characters are supposed to resolve. So, in a way.
• 10:12
  Mark Pracht: And I know that it was the early 70s, and this stuff never… like, the idea of a miniseries never… didn't even exist then, right?
• 10:20
  Mark Pracht: But if… if… it would have been, like, Jack Kirby is gonna do 12 issues of each one of these books.
• 10:26
  Mark Pracht: And then they're gonna resolve.
• 10:28
  Mark Pracht: how much more… how much tighter would that have forced him to make that storytelling? And…
• 10:37
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, all of this mythology.
• 10:41
  Mark Pracht: And clearly, he had all sorts of ideas about mythology.
• 10:46
  Mark Pracht: it's, like, it's kind of jammed into, like, what was it, two issues of New Gods?
• 10:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Like, where we got some background on Highfather and Darkseid and all of these things, and it's like, man, that's the stuff that… that's the… that's the meat of the matter, right?
• 11:04
  Mark Pracht: like… Because both of these books turned into,
• 11:10
  Mark Pracht: just sort of repeating the same thing, right? The forever people will go into a situation, and then they're like the Scooby-Doo gang, right? It's like, hey kids, let's figure out this mystery, or whatever, or somebody will show up and attack them, or, you know, or whatever, and then…
• 11:29
  Mark Pracht: new Gods was like, okay, there's a new threat from New Genesis, er, from Apocalypse.
• 11:36
  Mark Pracht: Orion gets enraged and attacks, And…
• 11:40
  Tad Eggleston: Can I… can I just say that I did love in New Gods that moment where… where the, the…
• 11:47
  Tad Eggleston: police detective is like, I don't know what it is with you and your… your routines or whatnot, but around here, we'd all attack at once!
• 11:59
  Sean Harklerode: Correct.
• 12:00
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah!
• 12:01
  Sean Harklerode: No.
• 12:02
  Sean Harklerode: The heroic code.
• 12:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's…
• 12:05
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 12:06
  Mark Pracht: So, I don't… I don't quite…
• 12:13
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and obviously he's dealing with a sort of Joseph Campbell hero myth kind of thing here, right? Right. Obviously, right? So, Orion is the… the…
• 12:23
  Mark Pracht: well, I mean, like, not to… not to blow, you know, possible spoilers, but I mean, like, and we already know that… that there was the baby swap, right? So, you have Orion, and you have Scott Free, and they're your two…
• 12:39
  Mark Pracht: You know, heroes who have the call, Although…
• 12:45
  Mark Pracht: Scott still doesn't seem to have gotten a call, you know, to action.
• 12:50
  Mark Pracht: He's just sorta hanging out.
• 12:52
  Mark Pracht: And… and that's fine.
• 12:55
  Mark Pracht: because… wherever they were planning to go. But,
• 13:03
  Mark Pracht: I did think… like, I… I thought, I thought… yeah, I mean, I don't know. I mean, it was just, like, it was another fight between, you know,
• 13:12
  Mark Pracht: Orion and Kalabak.
• 13:14
  Mark Pracht: And… the… the supporting cast all seemed
• 13:23
  Mark Pracht: As kind of cipher-ish as usual.
• 13:27
  Mark Pracht: Yep. There was a point where somebody seemed to act like, Terrible Turpin was still alive.
• 13:35
  Mark Pracht: And I'm like, okay… what… what? Like, what's going on? I don't understand.
• 13:42
  Mark Pracht: But I mean, I don't… yeah.
• 13:44
  Mark Pracht: But I also think… I also think that knowing that the book was over.
• 13:48
  Mark Pracht: sort of put a pall on everything, and it… I think there was probably a kind of a sense of, well, what does this… any of this matter? You know?
• 13:56
  Sean Harklerode: Right. Well, before leaving, so it feels like we've left forever, people.
• 14:01
  Sean Harklerode: But I… I wanted to… the thing that… that got me That…
• 14:06
  Sean Harklerode: drove me about Forever People. It was very small, it was the credit for research.
• 14:12
  Sean Harklerode: by Mark Evanier and Steve Sherman.
• 14:16
  Sean Harklerode: On the splash page.
• 14:18
  Sean Harklerode: So I… I looked into that, and apparently.
• 14:22
  Sean Harklerode: That was credit for work done on the previous two issues with Dead Man.
• 14:27
  Sean Harklerode: So… Apparently, they had informed Jack of stuff about Deadman, and how…
• 14:38
  Mark Pracht: The hook hand and all of that.
• 14:39
  Sean Harklerode: And stuff, right?
• 14:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 14:41
  Sean Harklerode: anyway, I wanted to… Share that.
• 14:47
  Sean Harklerode: But, I, I think… to me.
• 14:51
  Sean Harklerode: The problem with these two issues, obviously, he seems to have found out midway through that this is the end.
• 14:59
  Sean Harklerode: And forever, people, He, he found a way to… to end it.
• 15:04
  Sean Harklerode: Or at least to end it for now, to give it a new beginning, if you want to think about what's happening on this other planet, etc.
• 15:12
  Sean Harklerode: But I don't think that he would have been able, and nor should he have, found…
• 15:19
  Sean Harklerode: a complete end to Orion and the dark side threat and apocalypse and everything.
• 15:26
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 15:27
  Sean Harklerode: So, I do feel like this is, you know.
• 15:31
  Sean Harklerode: Kind of the best he could do.
• 15:34
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know, you know, look, the title of the story, Dark Side and Sons, right?
• 15:40
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 15:41
  Sean Harklerode: And, you know, so we get the revelation about, you know, Kalabak. I don't know if that was going to be revealed
• 15:49
  Sean Harklerode: When this story started, Right?
• 15:54
  Sean Harklerode: Because it seems to have all been about Kalabak.
• 15:57
  Sean Harklerode: But, you know, I think it's hard to judge these two so harshly.
• 16:05
  Sean Harklerode: given… the heartbreak that… that Jack… Had to be working through.
• 16:12
  Sean Harklerode: And the pressure to find Something he could live with.
• 16:19
  Sean Harklerode: To, to, to finish them up.
• 16:22
  Sean Harklerode: you got the sod, and we see the Black Racer again.
• 16:29
  Sean Harklerode: Who, you know, had not been seen.
• 16:34
  Sean Harklerode: In quite a while.
• 16:36
  Sean Harklerode: Except for his appearance in Lois Lane 115.
• 16:42
  Sean Harklerode: Which had come out in the interim.
• 16:47
  Mark Pracht: You know, it is interesting, I'm looking at New Gods right now, and…
• 16:52
  Mark Pracht: you know, what you were saying about the title, Darkseid and Sons.
• 16:55
  Mark Pracht: I think it's really interesting that there are two splash pages.
• 17:01
  Mark Pracht: I wonder if these first three pages with DeSaad escaping
• 17:10
  Mark Pracht: Were added in once he knew it was over.
• 17:18
  Sean Harklerode: Could be, but he's done that before.
• 17:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I know.
• 17:21
  Sean Harklerode: I haven't done that with, you know, it's like the preview.
• 17:26
  Sean Harklerode: Sure. For the cold open of a…
• 17:29
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 17:30
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I mean, it definitely could be.
• 17:34
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 17:35
  Mark Pracht: I mean, because it… yeah, it's like a double splash page with a double title, you know, one of them is just The New Gods, but, I mean… Right.
• 17:43
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, yeah, I mean, absolutely, I mean, if you look at it like that…
• 17:47
  Sean Harklerode: He could have totally been on page…
• 17:50
  Sean Harklerode: You know, 7 or 8 here, or 1… 2, 3, 4, 5…
• 17:58
  Sean Harklerode: And then found out, and was like, oh, well, I'm gonna need to put Calibac into this.
• 18:04
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 18:04
  Sean Harklerode: And I, you know, went back and did those 3 pages.
• 18:08
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 18:09
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 18:12
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, because Kalabak doesn't even show up until…
• 18:17
  Mark Pracht: There's no one… for the first 7 pages, nobody knows about Calabag.
• 18:22
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 18:22
  Sean Harklerode: Well, except for…
• 18:25
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 18:25
  Sean Harklerode: It… it… the teaser.
• 18:28
  Mark Pracht: Right, right, right, right.
• 18:30
  Sean Harklerode: Great.
• 18:31
  Mark Pracht: So really, that's only the… that would have been 1, 2, 3… Or…
• 18:37
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 18:39
  Mark Pracht: That would have only been 4 pages in.
• 18:41
  Mark Pracht: Anyway, I don't know. I mean, we're trying to… we're trying to suss out something that is…
• 18:46
  Mark Pracht: impossible to suss out. Even if Jack was still with us, he probably wouldn't remember. Okay.
• 18:52
  Mark Pracht: And, but, I mean, I don't… you know, I don't know. I think that…
• 18:58
  Sean Harklerode: But the art on this one is great.
• 19:00
  Mark Pracht: The art… the art is…
• 19:02
  Tad Eggleston: Always.
• 19:03
  Mark Pracht: Always great art. I will say, I think that… I think that the ending… I think…
• 19:11
  Mark Pracht: like I said, there's a palpable sadness here, but I also think that I think
• 19:20
  Mark Pracht: knowing what's gonna hap… and again, I… I know what's gonna happen.
• 19:25
  Mark Pracht: going forward in, in, Mr. Miracle, which is a sort of a,
• 19:32
  Mark Pracht: not to… I don't want to get spoilery, but the book starts to feel a little schizophrenic.
• 19:38
  Mark Pracht: In that it kind of just wants to be a regular superhero title, and continue this story.
• 19:44
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 19:45
  Mark Pracht: it's very clear that at some point, Jack must have realized that the Forever People, even that they were canceling it, but it must… he must have known that it was not…
• 19:56
  Mark Pracht: Like, there wasn't much where… there wasn't much place to go with it, right?
• 20:01
  Mark Pracht: And that any sort of long-term plan he might have had, and maybe he did, and maybe he didn't, to reintegrate the Forever People with the rest of the story.
• 20:12
  Mark Pracht: was… either… not possible.
• 20:19
  Mark Pracht: or… Not really relevant. Relevant, you know?
• 20:25
  Mark Pracht: Whereas, when we end… when we finish with Orion here at the end of New Gods.
• 20:31
  Mark Pracht: I think he knows that he still has Mr. Miracle to bring some of this stuff back, right?
• 20:39
  Mark Pracht: We know… we know about, you know, the… the… shared…
• 20:46
  Mark Pracht: heritage that both Orion and Scott Free have.
• 20:51
  Mark Pracht: So that's… that's a link to be able to bring all these characters back, if he wants to.
• 20:56
  Mark Pracht: And, and… I don't know, but…
• 21:08
  Mark Pracht: Well, and yeah, destiny shall end it. It is written that the father of Apocalypse shall meet his banished son in the red light of the fire pits, and there they shall decide this war.
• 21:20
  Mark Pracht: And so it shall be. I can deny it no longer to other than myself. I am Darkseid's son, armed and ready with the heritage bequeath me, the ultimate ferocity, and when I clash with Darkseid, the war will end.
• 21:35
  Mark Pracht: So…
• 21:40
  Sean Harklerode: Anthony Burton.
• 21:43
  Mark Pracht: Anthony Bourdain?
• 21:44
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I'm sorry.
• 21:47
  Sean Harklerode: popped up.
• 21:47
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean, there's a… like, he's sort of… again.
• 21:54
  Mark Pracht: Pointing towards what, ultimately, that story he does for the reprints.
• 22:00
  Mark Pracht: and then the hunger Dogs.
• 22:03
  Mark Pracht: His two attempts to sort of wrap up the story, you know?
• 22:08
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 22:12
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, I think… I think it's all… I think it's all very sad. Like, I… I was very sad reading these.
• 22:18
  Mark Pracht: Because… No matter what sort of What sort of, limitations Jack ran into.
• 22:32
  Mark Pracht: in himself, And his process?
• 22:37
  Mark Pracht: He clearly had something he wanted to say, and…
• 22:42
  Mark Pracht: It was, you know, cut off at the knees.
• 22:46
  Mark Pracht: And… And I think… You see a man trying to…
• 22:54
  Mark Pracht: Wrap up the series and still keep that idea… viable.
• 23:01
  Mark Pracht: And it's… It makes it messy, and it makes it kind of a… Painful.
• 23:11
  Mark Pracht: And now I'm going to shut up.
• 23:14
  Mark Pracht: As I talk too much.
• 23:17
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, I think you've got,
• 23:22
  Tad Eggleston: One of the reasons I sit back and let you talk sometimes is, like, because you're not going through this the first time.
• 23:30
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like sometimes you have…
• 23:34
  Tad Eggleston: The per… perspective on it that… that…
• 23:41
  Tad Eggleston: there are times where, as much as I appreciate Kirby, as much as I appreciate what I'm looking at in these comics, I'm just so disappointed in the whole that, like.
• 23:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like, how can I talk about this in a way that makes people want to read comics? And read these comics? And…
• 24:02
  Tad Eggleston: that's an important thing for me. So… so sometimes I let you talk, because… because you've got that…
• 24:09
  Tad Eggleston: wider angle lens on it than I do sometimes.
• 24:13
  Mark Pracht: Well, look, I mean, and… and…
• 24:17
  Mark Pracht: Sean, you've read these before, right?
• 24:20
  Sean Harklerode: I've read Mr. Miracle, I haven't read…
• 24:22
  Mark Pracht: Oh, okay.
• 24:23
  Sean Harklerode: God's.
• 24:24
  Mark Pracht: Well, look…
• 24:25
  Mark Pracht: to answer your question, this is what I would say. And you guys can feel free to riff on this, but I mean, like, look.
• 24:32
  Mark Pracht: Jack Kirby is the king of comics.
• 24:36
  Mark Pracht: There are so many things about how comic book storytelling works, and how a good comic book story is put together visually.
• 24:46
  Mark Pracht: that he… developed, championed and… and made work, right? So…
• 24:55
  Mark Pracht: No matter what faults there may have had, you know, no matter how much his…
• 25:03
  Mark Pracht: Reach may have exceeded his grasp.
• 25:08
  Mark Pracht: There are also… especially if you're… if you're a creator, if you are somebody who wants to be a comic book artist, you should be devouring these things, right?
• 25:19
  Mark Pracht: And if you just wanna know, like, what…
• 25:26
  Mark Pracht: like, an even… I think an even better idea of what the imagination that co-created Marvel was really thinking about.
• 25:35
  Mark Pracht: Before it was… put through the framework of the Stan Lee editorial style.
• 25:41
  Mark Pracht: these are great things. All the, you know, although I would also say that in terms of
• 25:51
  Mark Pracht: in terms of Kirby's…
• 25:55
  Mark Pracht: post-Stan Lee partnership output, and his work at DC. I mean, like, I'm always gonna say, my favorite is always gonna be, Commandi.
• 26:06
  Mark Pracht: And part of that is just because it doesn't have this…
• 26:11
  Mark Pracht: This weight of some sort of deeper meaning.
• 26:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think it also had a more specific structure.
• 26:20
  Mark Pracht: Sure. Well, I mean, it also, I mean, like, and it was… you know, and it was something like, whether anybody wants to admit it or not was based on trying to, you know, losing… losing the bid to get the rights to Planet of the Apes, right?
• 26:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 26:35
  Mark Pracht: And that was, but, like, it also is just, like, a lot… it's a lighter adventure book. It's like, you know, Commandi's moving around the post-apocalyptic world, and things happen. And that…
• 26:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and.
• 26:50
  Mark Pracht: That… that's okay in that framework. In this framework, you're like, why does it just seem like things are happening, right?
• 26:57
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, again, I'm in some ways beating the dead drum, but I think it's worth exploring.
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: The purpose of an editor in comics is to…
• 27:11
  Tad Eggleston: be that wide-angle lens. The purpose of an editor in comics is to…
• 27:18
  Tad Eggleston: make you better, not constrain you. And… like…
• 27:25
  Tad Eggleston: Are there great ideas here? Obviously, because we have the Great Darkness Saga down the road.
• 27:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there's so much that comes out of this in terms of the overall DC universe.
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: That… It can't be denied.
• 27:45
  Tad Eggleston: But at the same time, even as much as Kirby is king,
• 27:53
  Tad Eggleston: working in a wider continuity, having interplay between books, having things that happened in Issue 1 matter in Issue 12, is really fucking hard.
• 28:09
  Mark Pracht: Look.
• 28:11
  Tad Eggleston: So in that sense, this is actually… it's…
• 28:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's a cautionary and aspirational tale for comics creators as well, that, like, here we have the master of comics, and even in a thing that he did so many amazing things in, he shows how hard it is to make great comics.
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: how much team effort can make a difference. How much… Go ahead. I…
• 28:41
  Mark Pracht: I, I will, I will caveat that. I think how hard it is to make comics that…
• 28:50
  Mark Pracht: Are trying to sell you A narrative that carries over
• 28:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean…
• 28:59
  Tad Eggleston: Frankly, making comics, period, is not easy, but yeah, no, a shared universe is…
• 29:06
  Mark Pracht: If you're… if… If you're the guy brought in to do an issue of Batman or whatever,
• 29:13
  Mark Pracht: it's pretty… I think that in a lot of ways, there's sort of like, these are the givens of what a Batman story is, and you can just sort of… it's sort of like what I'm saying about Commandi. It's like, okay, this is what… this is what the tenets of the series are, and therefore, I can just…
• 29:31
  Mark Pracht: Come up with a story that fits into that, and that it doesn't really matter.
• 29:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and this is…
• 29:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Kirby's doing it here, but you see it in other… you know, there have been many attempts over my lifetime to make
• 29:46
  Tad Eggleston: New shared universes, and some of them have had some great stuff in them, but none of them have managed to stick.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the closest is the Valiant universe, but…
• 29:59
  Tad Eggleston: It just gets rebooted every 10 years.
• 30:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it hasn't stuck stuck. It's… it's stuck enough
• 30:08
  Tad Eggleston: With deep enough roots to play with, that they can always find creators willing to give it another round, and they can always find enough buyers to make it worth it for a while, but it has never become…
• 30:24
  Tad Eggleston: a player with Marvel or DC.
• 30:27
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, but that's also, like, win, when Valiant.
• 30:32
  Mark Pracht: I feel like this is getting kind of off the subject, but, you got Jim's shooter.
• 30:39
  Mark Pracht: Building that thing, right?
• 30:41
  Mark Pracht: And he had… like… we can say whatever we want to say about Jim Shooter, but the man…
• 30:49
  Mark Pracht: Understood, clarity of storytelling, clarity of artwork, clarity of narrative, right?
• 30:56
  Tad Eggleston: And he was perhaps a better editor than a writer.
• 31:00
  Mark Pracht: 100%. And that's…
• 31:02
  Tad Eggleston: what his primary role in Valiant was, was the editor.
• 31:05
  Mark Pracht: Right. But I mean, it also, you know, it also was, like.
• 31:11
  Mark Pracht: he also had a very specific… I love reading Shooters. I re-read Shooter's blog every once in a while, because I.
• 31:18
  Tad Eggleston: I do.
• 31:18
  Mark Pracht: Fascinating.
• 31:20
  Mark Pracht: Just that he had such a specific idea about how Editorial should work.
• 31:28
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, for all of his problems working with, Mort Weisinger.
• 31:35
  Mark Pracht: Who sounds like a miserable bastard.
• 31:38
  Mark Pracht: he learned how to be an editor from Wort Weisinger, who was like, no, you will do it my way, right? And,
• 31:48
  Mark Pracht: It's a fasc… he's a fascinating figure, and I'm actually… yes, I'm gonna leave it at that. I find Jim Shooter a very fascinating figure.
• 31:59
  Mark Pracht: I do too.
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sad that, like, we made a real push to have Jim Shooter.
• 32:08
  Tad Eggleston: on the show before he passed, and it never came to fruition. Right. And that's… that's something that I'm definitely,
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: sad about it.
• 32:16
  Mark Pracht: So, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, but there are, you know, he did…
• 32:21
  Mark Pracht: it's sad for you and your show that you didn't get him, but, I mean, like, he did some really great…
• 32:26
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's…
• 32:28
  Mark Pracht: I can't… I think it might have been.
• 32:29
  Tad Eggleston: There is plenty to… yeah, there are… Good luck out.
• 32:33
  Mark Pracht: 5-hour interview with him? Yeah.
• 32:35
  Tad Eggleston: I may or may not have been able to add anything to the conversation.
• 32:41
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, yeah, I feel like…
• 32:43
  Tad Eggleston: Between his own writing and the conversations that he did have with other people.
• 32:48
  Tad Eggleston: There's a lot out there.
• 32:50
  Mark Pracht: the real question, you know, the real interesting thing would be to be able to speak to… I mean, and you're never gonna get John Byrne, right? But to have, like, John Byrne talk about his relationship with Shooter, or… or,
• 33:05
  Mark Pracht: All of those guys who got, you know, who got there, you know, cause…
• 33:12
  Mark Pracht: Sorry, this gets into a whole other thing. You know, Marvel was swamped in writer-editors.
• 33:19
  Mark Pracht: when Shooter took over, right? And sometimes that's good, and sometimes that's bad, but, I mean, like…
• 33:27
  Mark Pracht: And right or wrong, Shooter thought that was… that was the wrong… and this does tie back into what we're talking about here, because here we're dealing with a writer-editor, right?
• 33:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right. That Shooter had this idea that no writer.
• 33:40
  Mark Pracht: like, there had to be somebody in charge of saying, no, your script has to be in here, and your art has to be in here, and it has to look this way, and it has to make sense, right? And…
• 33:52
  Mark Pracht: you know, The thing is, is like…
• 33:59
  Mark Pracht: how would Kirby have functioned under that kind of a situation would have been really interesting. Like, if Kirby was still working for Marvel when Shooter came in and took over.
• 34:14
  Mark Pracht: you know, doing… Captain America and things. It might have been really interesting, you know? But…
• 34:25
  Mark Pracht: You know, which does make me think, to bring this back to Kirby, I was actually thinking about this this morning before we got on, is…
• 34:32
  Mark Pracht: I was thinking about Kirby's, you know, late, late 70s Marvel work when he came back.
• 34:41
  Mark Pracht: Especially Captain America, like, That was probably my first exposure
• 34:50
  Mark Pracht: to Kirby artwork, and it disturbed the shit out of me.
• 34:55
  Mark Pracht: I… I… well, I mean, the thing that I specifically remembered was in that Captain America story, you know, Cap is blinded.
• 35:04
  Mark Pracht: And the way he drew… His eyes, when he was blinded, freaked me the fuck out.
• 35:10
  Mark Pracht: I was just like…
• 35:12
  Mark Pracht: what is going on here? Why does it, you know… because he actually drew it like his eyeballs had been removed, you know?
• 35:20
  Mark Pracht: And I was like, that's fucking insane, you know? I don't know.
• 35:24
  Mark Pracht: Somebody else talk.
• 35:25
  Tad Eggleston: I'm now thinking that we may need to… discuss…
• 35:32
  Tad Eggleston: Before moving on to some other series where we do the…
• 35:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we've talked about ABC Comics, but I'm kind of curious, and I would want, Mark, you to curate it, because you're definitely among us, the Kirbyite.
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: Doing an episode or two of…
• 35:50
  Tad Eggleston: like, some very directed post-New Gods Kirby.
• 35:55
  Tad Eggleston: To kinda… to kinda get a feel… I mean, some… some Commandee, some… some Back to Marvel.
• 36:04
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 36:05
  Tad Eggleston: maybe some demon, you know, to get a feel for what he learned, what he… I mean, obviously this isn't, like, a guarantee of what he learned, because we can't talk to him, but to be able to go.
• 36:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know, based on what we saw in… in the whole… Fourth World, you know…
• 36:24
  Tad Eggleston: This is how Kirby seems to have changed as an artist.
• 36:27
  Mark Pracht: We can…
• 36:28
  Sean Harklerode: What he learned was comics will break your heart.
• 36:30
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 36:31
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 36:32
  Mark Pracht: I mean, although I think that…
• 36:35
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I always think… I think that…
• 36:43
  Mark Pracht: you know, and this… this is all… like, this feels like something that should be in the wrap-up of the whole series, but I mean, like, I think that, you know, that comics will break your heart thing…
• 36:52
  Mark Pracht: I often feel like…
• 36:57
  Mark Pracht: I always… I often feel like Jack had a very selective memory about a lot of things. I mean, he'd been in comics for… since the 30s, right? He'd been an editor, he'd been a publisher, you know? He and Joe Simon ran…
• 37:13
  Mark Pracht: you know, mainline comics. They hired writers and artists, and, you know, maybe Joe was taking care of most of the business stuff, but certainly, like.
• 37:24
  Mark Pracht: Like, there's a whole load of things, you know, the idea of, like.
• 37:29
  Mark Pracht: you know, work for hire, and all of those things, and look, we can… we can talk about the ramifications of work for hire.
• 37:39
  Mark Pracht: like, that's a… that's a hour, hours and hours conversation, but, like, it was the nature of the beast, right? Right. It was the nature of how the industry worked. Nobody, you know, like, we talked, you know, like, and I made this point in my play, like, artwork things, like.
• 37:59
  Mark Pracht: Before, like, 1970, Nobody got their artwork back.
• 38:05
  Mark Pracht: And, like, a lot of those artists didn't care, and they didn't want it. They didn't know what to do with it, right? So…
• 38:14
  Mark Pracht: And it's really… it's that rise of, you know, I think that…
• 38:21
  Mark Pracht: Okay, so here we are.
• 38:23
  Mark Pracht: And now I'm… I'm going. So, if you guys want to stop me, you better do it now.
• 38:29
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I like it.
• 38:30
  Mark Pracht: Sean's just shaking his head and like, oh my god, whatever. But I mean, like, here we are, like, this series is happening right in… as the Bronze Age is erupting, right? And I think the Bronze Age is when, like.
• 38:44
  Mark Pracht: fandom really starts happening, right? We have the, you know, the first… the first big comic convention is in, the late 60s, I can't remember, like, it's 66, I think.
• 38:56
  Mark Pracht: Off the top of my head. You know, San Diego Comic-Con, or at least the proto-San Diego Comic-Con, starts in 71. Kirby starts going down there, right? And he starts… starts going to the convention and interacting with the fans, right? And I think that…
• 39:12
  Mark Pracht: Suddenly, Things like the value of original artwork, become apparent.
• 39:19
  Mark Pracht: And that… For a comp… for an industry that worked in one way, for decades.
• 39:27
  Mark Pracht: suddenly there's… there's a push to shift. And as we all know, big businesses and, like.
• 39:35
  Mark Pracht: We're gonna call comics big business, even though they really…
• 39:38
  Mark Pracht: In the grand scheme of things, weren't big business, right?
• 39:42
  Mark Pracht: change… It's always hard, and always incremental, right?
• 39:52
  Mark Pracht: And… and it wasn't until, you know, yeah, but it… but it all… it feeds into all of this stuff.
• 39:59
  Mark Pracht: The fan stuff, it feeds into the new writers coming in. It feeds into the writers becoming writers' editors, because they feel like they have more of niche audiences they're playing to.
• 40:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think it's also important to note that this is the era where
• 40:18
  Tad Eggleston: Certainly among the writers, and more… starting among the artists, you really kind of have that first…
• 40:27
  Tad Eggleston: generation of comics creators that grew up as comics fans, and are doing comics because they want
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: to do comics, not because they'd like to write a novel and can't get that deal. Not because they'd like to be an illustrator in some highbrow magazine and can't get that deal.
• 40:49
  Mark Pracht: Not because they were writing pulp novels for the pulp magazines, and
• 40:55
  Mark Pracht: That it was just another revenue stream, you know?
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that all of those things… all of those things are happening together, and it cha… I mean, it just changes the industry in a whole lot… a whole lot of ways, and the industry, in a lot of ways, is still sitting there going, like, okay, well, we sell… we sell comic books on newsstands to…
• 41:14
  Mark Pracht: To 10-year-old kids, right?
• 41:17
  Mark Pracht: And really, the only person who seemed to really get that there was this other thing out there
• 41:23
  Mark Pracht: we have to be honest, to Stan Lee, you know? He was the one going to colleges and interacting with people.
• 41:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and for that matter, this is one of the places where Kirby is really important, where Will Eisner is really important, where Wally Wood is really important. They wanted to make
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: comics.
• 41:43
  Mark Pracht: Absolutely.
• 41:44
  Tad Eggleston: they cared about making comics. It wasn't,
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Hubert. It wasn't a… a… I mean, most of the EC guys, and it really… it really shows you how much those hearings wound up damaging the industry, because, like, comic strips, for a long time had been people who wanted to make comics. This… this is what they wanted to do, right?
• 42:08
  Mark Pracht: Well, and people who made comic strips were also… you know,
• 42:15
  Mark Pracht: celebrities. Right. And they were… they were incredibly well paid, so…
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: and comic books, particularly at EC, were just starting to have a hint of that.
• 42:30
  Tad Eggleston: And then the whole thing blew up for a decade.
• 42:34
  Mark Pracht: I mean…
• 42:35
  Mark Pracht: Yes. You know, I remember when, we did the talkback with Jeff Trexler after Innocence of Seduction, I sort of postulated that if the hearings hadn't happened, would the industry have shifted away from superheroes even stronger? And,
• 42:55
  Mark Pracht: I don't know.
• 42:56
  Tad Eggleston: You still might have had the Marvel era?
• 42:59
  Mark Pracht: You might have. You know? Yeah, but I mean…
• 43:01
  Tad Eggleston: because I, I think, you know…
• 43:05
  Tad Eggleston: I think the biggest thing is the industry never would have become kids' stuff.
• 43:11
  Tad Eggleston: or Strictly Kids stuff.
• 43:13
  Tad Eggleston: again.
• 43:13
  Mark Pracht: Maybe, maybe not. I mean, I think things go… I mean, it was 30 years… it was 30 years before you had vertigo.
• 43:20
  Tad Eggleston: 40 years before you had vertigo. Whereas if EC continues the way they are, vertigo is…
• 43:28
  Tad Eggleston: Exists, but it's, it's part of a wider…
• 43:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I really think without the hearings, we have French comics.
• 43:39
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I mean, the whole dichotomy between how Kniff
• 43:46
  Sean Harklerode: And, you know, Chester Gould and all those guys were treated
• 43:51
  Sean Harklerode: Walt Kelly… it is fascinating, right?
• 43:56
  Sean Harklerode: And I think it's because they were read by adults.
• 44:00
  Sean Harklerode: And, you know.
• 44:03
  Sean Harklerode: They talked about how Gould got away with so much violence in Dick Tracy in the 50s.
• 44:10
  Sean Harklerode: Like, ghoulish, terrible things, like the end of the brow.
• 44:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 44:16
  Sean Harklerode: Which was censored when they republished it in the 60s.
• 44:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. But they were also… I mean, they were read by adults who'd started reading them as kids, and that's what you never got with EC Comics, is the kids who had read the comics becoming adults with the comics still available.
• 44:36
  Mark Pracht: Well… I don't know. I mean, look, I think… I think that it's really hard to… to,
• 44:50
  Mark Pracht: it's really hard to, like, estimate genre changes. I think that…
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: I think that…
• 44:57
  Mark Pracht: And it also is really… what's that? I always loved,
• 45:04
  Mark Pracht: the public taste changes so rapidly. There's a great line in Working Girl, that movie from the late 80s. Right. You know, no one ever got rich underestimating what the American public was willing to taste.
• 45:18
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 45:18
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 45:19
  Mark Pracht: And, It, it,
• 45:26
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think… I think that there would have been…
• 45:34
  Mark Pracht: I think there would have been some… I think there would be more crime and horror comics going forward if there wasn't the hearings, you know?
• 45:44
  Mark Pracht: Or if… if…
• 45:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, mostly, I was just thinking about the number of great artists that would have continued doing comics. I mean, how much do we see consistently from the EC artists in the decades after that?
• 46:04
  Tad Eggleston: the hero.
• 46:04
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, they were around.
• 46:06
  Tad Eggleston: They were around, but they weren't.
• 46:07
  Sean Harklerode: Moved on.
• 46:08
  Tad Eggleston: guys anymore.
• 46:09
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 46:10
  Sean Harklerode: Jack Davis, you know, got into commercial illustration.
• 46:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:15
  Mark Pracht: But I always felt… I always felt like that was where Jack Davis was headed anyway. I think that…
• 46:20
  Mark Pracht: You know… He expressed some real reservations about those books.
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:25
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, I don't, you know, it…
• 46:28
  Tad Eggleston: But I still, I still feel like that you never got the group of kids who grew up on EC Comics becoming comics creators.
• 46:38
  Tad Eggleston: the same way.
• 46:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, they all wrote books about EC Comics. Right.
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: You, you, you don't, you don't have the… the…
• 46:49
  Sean Harklerode: So they became filmmakers.
• 46:51
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 46:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:53
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah, I mean, like, you know, John Carpenter and, and, you know, all those guys. I, I don't know, I mean, I think that, I think that…
• 47:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I can't predict exactly how it would have gone, but I think… I think not only did it make the…
• 47:08
  Tad Eggleston: the, the industry… Way more superhero-centric, but… but it… it… like…
• 47:18
  Mark Pracht: Well, you know, I think it also spawned the Underground comics, too.
• 47:21
  Tad Eggleston: It did, it did.
• 47:22
  Mark Pracht: Because a lot of those, a lot, you know, like you would talk.
• 47:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 47:25
  Mark Pracht: You talk about people being inspired by East.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no.
• 47:28
  Mark Pracht: To me, you got, like, our chrome.
• 47:29
  Tad Eggleston: Raw, and Weirdo, and yeah, oh, yeah, absolutely, it inspired the underground comics.
• 47:35
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, in terms of where EC Artists went, that's one of the places.
• 47:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. No, I think that…
• 47:43
  Tad Eggleston: You know, Dennis Kitchen would go find them, and… Get them to work again.
• 47:47
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, I think that, you know, like, we were talking about,
• 47:53
  Mark Pracht: There was the… the one issue of,
• 48:00
  Mark Pracht: Oh, God, what was it? Was it…
• 48:02
  Mark Pracht: Mr. Miracle, where there was the planet of the van… with the vampires and the horror movie stuff, and how… how I… I felt like Kirby's artwork didn't really lend itself to that kind of atmospheric thing. Kirby has atmosphere, let's not… let's not…
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:18
  Mark Pracht: let's not… I'm not trying, like…
• 48:21
  Mark Pracht: the Kirby atmosphere didn't necessarily make me think, vampires and ghoulies. And the thing is, is like,
• 48:29
  Mark Pracht: I think that's why like…
• 48:35
  Mark Pracht: you didn't see Kirby drawing for EC, you know?
• 48:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:40
  Mark Pracht: you didn't see, like… like, he's bouncing around, but he's still, like… I think Kirby knew what his thing was. His thing was, like, sci-fi, like, Sky, Sky Master, Sky, Sky Master's that… the newspaper strip that he tried to do.
• 48:56
  Mark Pracht: And, then going back to DC and doing, like, you know, the, the,
• 49:05
  Mark Pracht: And not the Suicide Squad, the,
• 49:13
  Mark Pracht: Oh, my God, I think my brain is going, anyway…
• 49:18
  Sean Harklerode: for the unknown.
• 49:19
  Mark Pracht: Challenger's the Unknown. There we go. Thank God. Thank you.
• 49:26
  Mark Pracht: But guys, I mean, again, that's… that… that was his bailiwick. That was his place. I mean, I think he could have done… he could have done those EC science fiction books.
• 49:36
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 49:38
  Mark Pracht: I don't know. I don't know that… I don't know that he would have wanted to work under that… the constraints that those books had.
• 49:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 49:47
  Mark Pracht: I don't think he would have wanted.
• 49:49
  Tad Eggleston: But, but I also…
• 49:50
  Mark Pracht: He handed a page that already had all the word balloons on it.
• 49:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, but, but, like…
• 49:56
  Tad Eggleston: very few of them were doing it as well, but when EC succeeded at something, other companies followed. I don't know that you would have ever seen Jack Kirby work at EC, but.
• 50:11
  Mark Pracht: Whatever.
• 50:12
  Tad Eggleston: would have…
• 50:16
  Tad Eggleston: It would have gotten him to see… gotten to see him do more of the work that he wanted to do.
• 50:24
  Tad Eggleston: That he clearly wanted to do.
• 50:27
  Mark Pracht: what… I mean, what do you… like, I know Joe Simon and… he and Joe Simon did, like, Black Magic, and they did some horror…
• 50:36
  Mark Pracht: books. Well, I'm just looking at, like.
• 50:38
  Tad Eggleston: the sci-fi stuff that he puts into this, that he puts into the Fantastic Four, that he puts into… Sure. And I think in Kirby's perfect world, he'd be doing the sci-fi without the superheroes.
• 50:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, like, look, I think…
• 50:55
  Tad Eggleston: Or with way less of… the superhero element.
• 51:00
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but at the same time, it, like, everything turns into superheroes with Jack, you know? That's true. Like, Orion…
• 51:07
  Mark Pracht: isn't technically a superhero, but he's… he's a superhero, right? I mean, and I think that… I think that…
• 51:14
  Mark Pracht: you know, I… I mean, we haven't even talked about Mr. Miracle yet, but
• 51:22
  Mark Pracht: Which I think Sean wants to talk about.
• 51:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we should definitely get to it, because it was interesting, and I was thinking about it when you talked about how Mr. Mariko gets kind of schizophrenic going forward, because I think, to me, that started with this issue.
• 51:37
  Mark Pracht: And I would… I would say that's probably true is very true. But I think that…
• 51:41
  Sean Harklerode: No, no, I'm not in any hurry, I mean…
• 51:44
  Sean Harklerode: It was not my favorite issue of Mr. Miracle.
• 51:48
  Mark Pracht: Well, it wasn't mine either, but, I mean, I think there's…
• 51:53
  Sean Harklerode: all the tropes that make the worst Mr. Miracle story.
• 51:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. And, you know.
• 51:59
  Mark Pracht: as Tad will see as we move forward, and you've read Mr. Miracle, you know, it starts to be like, oh, you want… how about this thing, and how about this thing, and how about this thing, you know, and it's like, okay.
• 52:12
  Mark Pracht: But.
• 52:13
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I just remind myself that eventually, Mr. Miracle was put in Tom King's hands. And so… so there was something there.
• 52:22
  Mark Pracht: You know, I… I think, I think Anyway, I…
• 52:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's the type of thing…
• 52:28
  Sean Harklerode: Great fun in the 80s.
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right, it's the type of thing that I like, that I know I say a lot about Stan Lee, is like, look, I have trouble listing him among the great writers, which doesn't mean that I don't think he's one of the most important ones.
• 52:41
  Sean Harklerode: I think the most important thing about Mr. Miracle, for me, who had a couple of the originals as a kid, you know, hand-me-downs.
• 52:50
  Mark Pracht: Sure. And…
• 52:52
  Sean Harklerode: it was… Looking at them.
• 52:56
  Sean Harklerode: Reading them, kind of, but mainly looking at them, and then playing, you know, imagining you're an escape artist.
• 53:06
  Mark Pracht: Beautiful.
• 53:07
  Sean Harklerode: That's… You know, that was my, you know, 6- or 7-year-old self, you know.
• 53:14
  Sean Harklerode: Reading those.
• 53:16
  Sean Harklerode: Again, handed me down.
• 53:19
  Sean Harklerode: And so I think that's… and maybe, you know, that's what Jack wanted, you know, some kids playing Mr. Miracle.
• 53:26
  Mark Pracht: Sure, I mean, I 100% think that's what it was, but, you know, and we… I think we talked about this last month. Boy, it wouldn't have been… like, I sort of yearn for some actual sense of.
• 53:40
  Mark Pracht: how… The escapes work, other than hand-wavy them, you know?
• 53:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 53:47
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 53:47
  Mark Pracht: And, I think that…
• 53:56
  Mark Pracht: When we talk about this particular issue.
• 53:59
  Mark Pracht: like, that last Dr. Bedlam story was so awesome, where he was in the building, you know, and had to get down, you know, had to get to the ba- you know, had to get to the main floor. Like, that was awesome. And this just feels like, okay, well, I'll bring back Dr. Bedlam.
• 54:17
  Mark Pracht: Ed… And he's got a UFO. Okay, he's got a.
• 54:22
  Sean Harklerode: Thanks, Oscar.
• 54:22
  Mark Pracht: Okay, alright.
• 54:25
  Mark Pracht: I did want to say…
• 54:28
  Sean Harklerode: By all the rules, right?
• 54:29
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:30
  Sean Harklerode: They all play by the rules.
• 54:32
  Mark Pracht: I did want to… like, this is just a… this is one of my favorite moments of whacked-out Kirby anatomy, is in the final panel of page 11.
• 54:44
  Mark Pracht: when Scott… It's like walking out the door and turns around.
• 54:49
  Mark Pracht: And… His face is… his right eye is… there you go, Sean!
• 55:02
  Mark Pracht: Sean's doing, military presses with his,
• 55:06
  Sean Harklerode: with my office.
• 55:07
  Mark Pracht: World Omnibus.
• 55:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 55:13
  Sean Harklerode: Page 11.
• 55:15
  Mark Pracht: Page 11.
• 55:20
  Mark Pracht: It's… it… It's…
• 55:23
  Sean Harklerode: The last time?
• 55:24
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, the last panel, where he has two eyes that are, like, one is, like.
• 55:29
  Mark Pracht: Three times the size of the other one?
• 55:31
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 55:33
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and the thing is, is, like, that's Jack, right? Jack…
• 55:38
  Sean Harklerode: perspective.
• 55:39
  Mark Pracht: It… That's not perspective.
• 55:44
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, like, Jack's about energy isn't about…
• 55:47
  Mark Pracht: anatomy, or… or… you know, it's Kirby anatomy, and that's not real… it's not reality, and he wasn't concerned with reality.
• 55:56
  Mark Pracht: You know, that's… if you want reality, you go to… you go to Neil Adams.
• 56:01
  Mark Pracht: And I mean… and I… I've said this before, it's… I'm like a broken record. I also, like, I also spend a lot of time thinking about that…
• 56:12
  Mark Pracht: you know, Danny O'Neill and Neil Adams' Hard Traveling Heroes run, Came out before these.
• 56:21
  Mark Pracht: So, there is a… there is a dynamic shift in… Storytelling and artwork that happens that… Jack… just doesn't…
• 56:38
  Mark Pracht: that's not Jack's thing, right?
• 56:40
  Mark Pracht: like… Jack can't do Hard Travelin' Heroes, right?
• 56:45
  Mark Pracht: He can't do that. That's not his thing. He's… he's very much in that sort of…
• 56:52
  Mark Pracht: it's all very golden age, as far as I'm concerned. Like, that's where he… he learned storytelling, that's where he learned character creation, and… and that's where he lives, and that's where his joy is. But…
• 57:07
  Mark Pracht: again, talking about this shift in the Bronze Age, and these new, maybe more… More adult, more,
• 57:18
  Mark Pracht: older, a little more…
• 57:23
  Mark Pracht: critical fan base that's coming out. Like, obviously, there's the Kirby Disciples.
• 57:31
  Mark Pracht: who apparently were all at San Diego during the first 3 years of…
• 57:36
  Sean Harklerode: That's the worst gang on the streets of San Diego. The Kirby Disciples.
• 57:41
  Mark Pracht: Yep.
• 57:41
  Tad Eggleston: They're, yeah, they're always there.
• 57:43
  Sean Harklerode: It's dangerous.
• 57:44
  Mark Pracht: They come around, and they start hitting you with their mother boxes. Yeah.
• 57:49
  Tad Eggleston: Which version?
• 57:50
  Tad Eggleston: The little one like Scott Free, or the big one like the Forever People?
• 57:57
  Mark Pracht: Hey, man.
• 57:58
  Mark Pracht: They're all the mother box.
• 58:00
  Mark Pracht: I mean, to me… Don't, don't be, don't be… don't be box-shaming the mother boxes.
• 58:06
  Sean Harklerode: So, what… what was your term, the make it up, M, or what was your…
• 58:12
  Mark Pracht: I hand-wavium.
• 58:13
  Sean Harklerode: Hand-wavy them.
• 58:15
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 58:15
  Sean Harklerode: So… To me, this… Really stuck in my craw.
• 58:23
  Sean Harklerode: Because, you know, the mother box is basically like, you know, Doctor Who's sonic screwdriver with Cynthia, you know, it…
• 58:31
  Sean Harklerode: Can do anything.
• 58:32
  Sean Harklerode: And… When, in the beginning of the issue, you tell me, oh no, the mother box is broken.
• 58:42
  Sean Harklerode: I'm expecting to see some actual…
• 58:46
  Tad Eggleston: Escapism?
• 58:47
  Sean Harklerode: artist.
• 58:48
  Sean Harklerode: varied.
• 58:48
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 58:50
  Sean Harklerode: I'm not… I'm not satisfied that, oh, I didn't tell you, I… I put another…
• 58:57
  Tad Eggleston: new one!
• 58:59
  Mark Pracht: into my mask. Right.
• 59:02
  Mark Pracht: So now I don't actually have to have the mother box, like…
• 59:05
  Mark Pracht: And I'm… look, I'm okay that mother box technology can be adapted to all sorts of different things. That's fine. Like, you know, there were those things where they would always show him having a thing on his arm, right, that was under his costume, that, you know, alright, so it's skin… it's like…
• 59:23
  Mark Pracht: so small, it just is… you can't see it under the costume. Great. Fine. Superhero, hand-wavian. That's great. But, I mean, it's…
• 59:32
  Mark Pracht: But… and it's… it's part of…
• 59:35
  Mark Pracht: I think it's part of that Golden Age mentality that I was talking about with Kirby. Like, that…
• 59:42
  Mark Pracht: It… it…
• 59:45
  Mark Pracht: I… like, whatever we need to finish the story, and not… and sometimes it undercuts the drama of it, you know?
• 59:54
  Mark Pracht: Go ahead, Sean's laughing.
• 59:55
  Sean Harklerode: Quite honestly.
• 59:57
  Sean Harklerode: This reminds me, when I talked about how, as a kid, you know, you would play these things, you would just get ideas.
• 1:00:05
  Sean Harklerode: And it's totally something a kid would do
• 1:00:10
  Sean Harklerode: When, like, you shoot, you know.
• 1:00:13
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know if you guys played, you know, cops and robbers, and…
• 1:00:16
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 1:00:17
  Sean Harklerode: But, you know, he got shot. He's like, oh no! I had on…
• 1:00:24
  Sean Harklerode: impermanently, you know, steel underneath my…
• 1:00:28
  Tad Eggleston: my, Serape, you know. Or, like, one of the…
• 1:00:35
  Sean Harklerode: So it does follow that logic.
• 1:00:37
  Tad Eggleston: 100%. As a parent, one of the coolest scenes in a mediocre movie ever is in Big Daddy when they're playing cards.
• 1:00:46
  Tad Eggleston: And it always finishes with, I win. What is this game? What are the rules? What is the name of this game?
• 1:00:53
  Tad Eggleston: win!
• 1:00:56
  Tad Eggleston: So you all… That's right, I win!
• 1:01:00
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, you know, and like, when you're a kid, you know, you, like, you're playing some game, and you're like, okay, I'm gonna say we can do this, because then I can win, and then somebody else does it, and you're like, wait, wait, no, no, no, wait a minute.
• 1:01:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's like… it's like… it's like Calvin Ball.
• 1:01:14
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Right.
• 1:01:15
  Tad Eggleston: The mother… the mother, the mother box in the… in the… this… this would be a great question to ask Bill Watterson. Did the mother box influence Calvin Ball?
• 1:01:26
  Mark Pracht: Well, and the thing is, is this is… this is sort of part of the truth of, like, the… the Kirbyites have this, this narrative that if the direct market had existed.
• 1:01:39
  Mark Pracht: win… These books came out.
• 1:01:44
  Mark Pracht: They would have been huge hits.
• 1:01:46
  Mark Pracht: I don't necessarily agree with that.
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if they would have made it as far as they made it.
• 1:01:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 1:01:55
  Mark Pracht: But here's the deal, is Kirby is imagining just like…
• 1:02:01
  Mark Pracht: the, you know, Kirby is imagining 10-year-old kids Going up to a newsstand.
• 1:02:08
  Mark Pracht: And wanting to give them something that's spectacular.
• 1:02:13
  Mark Pracht: And at the same time, trying to tell this story that…
• 1:02:19
  Mark Pracht: Has some sort of mythic relevance, right?
• 1:02:22
  Mark Pracht: And… It takes some real storytelling skill.
• 1:02:29
  Mark Pracht: And I don't… I don't even mean, like, visual storytelling. I'm talking about, like, what you're talking about, Tad. Editorial skills.
• 1:02:38
  Mark Pracht: To put those two things together and make them work.
• 1:02:41
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 1:02:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think… I think that the biggest argument against the idea that, things would be… crate.
• 1:02:50
  Tad Eggleston: if…
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: or have been great for Kirby, if the direct market existed, is list the people who have succeeded going from Marvel or DC to independent books, and how many of them are writers versus how many of them are artists.
• 1:03:07
  Tad Eggleston: with the exception of the image revolution, which, frankly, was short-lived, and, like, revitalized itself with J. Michael Straczynski, and then Robert Kirkman, and then Saka.
• 1:03:22
  Mark Pracht: It's funny, just this morning while I was doing laundry, I watched a video that some guy had made about Eric Larson, and how…
• 1:03:30
  Mark Pracht: Savage Dragon had sort of evolved from this, this sort of, like, slam-bam action thing into kind of a sex book.
• 1:03:38
  Mark Pracht: Right? And, and he was talking about, like, he… he invoked Kirby.
• 1:03:48
  Mark Pracht: And… and I think, in a way.
• 1:03:55
  Mark Pracht: Eric Larson kind of represents, like, a much, a much more differently,
• 1:04:03
  Mark Pracht: in… you know, like, he's a kind of a Kirby that, A, is more adult, obviously, but also, like, at some point.
• 1:04:12
  Mark Pracht: identified the fact that… I'm not looking for kids to pick up this book.
• 1:04:21
  Mark Pracht: But I'm still gonna work in this milieu that I loved as a kid, you know, with superhero shit, right? And,
• 1:04:30
  Mark Pracht: And maybe, maybe, like, I've now just somehow backed into, kind of.
• 1:04:37
  Mark Pracht: Identifying my problem with these books.
• 1:04:41
  Mark Pracht: My struggles with these books. I don't really have a problem with these books.
• 1:04:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't either, but I do struggle with them, yeah. That's a good way of putting it.
• 1:04:49
  Mark Pracht: they are… trapped.
• 1:04:52
  Mark Pracht: Between trying to tell something more adult and appeasing a kid, right? Right.
• 1:05:00
  Sean Harklerode: And…
• 1:05:03
  Mark Pracht: there are… I mean, you… I know… I know how you feel about Stan Lee's writing, but Stan Lee somehow was able to do both.
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: Often.
• 1:05:13
  Mark Pracht: with applaud.
• 1:05:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Well, and, like, going along with that, like, I like that you said appeasing a kid rather than appeasing the comics code, because I do think that there are elements where he's appeasing the comic code, but I think what's evident a lot, what the mother box represents, is Jack underestimating the ability of
• 1:05:34
  Tad Eggleston: Kids to understand and Be… excited by complex things.
• 1:05:43
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean…
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: I think he writes down to kids.
• 1:05:47
  Mark Pracht: I think that… I think that…
• 1:05:50
  Mark Pracht: I don't think that the mother box is necessarily that… the problem. I think the mother.
• 1:05:54
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it's…
• 1:05:55
  Mark Pracht: I think… I think it's a… it's a… it's a… it's a complex sort of idea, what the mother box is. I think that it's just, like.
• 1:06:05
  Mark Pracht: Jack gets into… A corner story time… story-wise, and then just comes up with a…
• 1:06:15
  Mark Pracht: an easy way out that often involves the mother box, but that, like…
• 1:06:21
  Mark Pracht: the fact that Scott has a mother box that he can use to do all sorts of interesting things, it's like… Sean's absolutely right. With Doctor Who, the sonic screwdriver isn't necessarily the problem, it's that the sonic screwdriver always is the solution, right?
• 1:06:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right. No, no, and, and I, I…
• 1:06:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's emblematic of the bigger problem.
• 1:06:42
  Mark Pracht: Which is that he doesn't think kids will care.
• 1:06:47
  Tad Eggleston: He doesn't think that kids will care that he's hand-waving all of this stuff.
• 1:06:52
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:06:54
  Tad Eggleston: He doesn't… he doesn't think highly enough of their intellect to think that… He needs to…
• 1:07:03
  Mark Pracht: I, I don't…
• 1:07:04
  Sean Harklerode: I'm just imagining young Annie Wilkes.
• 1:07:07
  Sean Harklerode: Picking up a Jack Kirby comic.
• 1:07:11
  Sean Harklerode: And saying, that's not what happened last month.
• 1:07:15
  Mark Pracht: Right. Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:16
  Sean Harklerode: Annual…
• 1:07:17
  Mark Pracht: That's very true.
• 1:07:18
  Sean Harklerode: Stephen King's misery, 100%.
• 1:07:21
  Mark Pracht: That's a very good thing. I mean, like, look, I don't think…
• 1:07:27
  Mark Pracht: I don't think that he thinks… I think I take some task with you saying that he doesn't think enough of their…
• 1:07:33
  Mark Pracht: intellect, or whatever. Because, I think that… I think…
• 1:07:41
  Mark Pracht: I think that Jack thinks… I think Jack thinks he thinks like a kid.
• 1:07:47
  Mark Pracht: And immediately does.
• 1:07:49
  Mark Pracht: And I think that it's just… there's one new… there's a new exciting thing, new exciting thing, new exciting thing. And it's… I think it's part of the… it's part of the problem with mythology with all of this, too, is that I think he kept reading stuff and being like, oh, I can filter that into it, you know? He rides… he reads…
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: I do… I do want to emphasize that Jack… Jack, I think, neglects… the…
• 1:08:17
  Tad Eggleston: intellect and wonder of children more than he
• 1:08:21
  Tad Eggleston: thinks less of it. There are… there are way more examples, particularly of this era, where people are very much writing down to kids.
• 1:08:29
  Mark Pracht: Bomb.
• 1:08:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't… I don't think… I don't think Jack as deliberately writes down to kids as much as…
• 1:08:41
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't consider how… Much they may be paying attention, how much they may be thinking along with the characters.
• 1:08:50
  Tad Eggleston: Allows himself to hand-wave without thinking about whether or not his audience will be okay with that.
• 1:08:59
  Tad Eggleston: Because he assumes that if he's okay with that, his audience will be okay with that.
• 1:09:05
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:09:06
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think, yeah, I mean…
• 1:09:08
  Mark Pracht: I just, like, the whole thing is so complicated to me, right?
• 1:09:13
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:09:14
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, I think that it's so…
• 1:09:17
  Mark Pracht: And it is one of those things where you just wanna… you wish you could talk to him, right? You wish you could just have that conversation and be like.
• 1:09:27
  Mark Pracht: Look, Jack, I don't need you to remember every single panel of every page, but I mean, like, what…
• 1:09:34
  Mark Pracht: what did you… what… what were you trying to accomplish? What was the… Right. You know, were you… were you trying to create this mythological story that might appeal to an older audience, or were you trying to make,
• 1:09:50
  Mark Pracht: flashy, simple, One and, you know, like.
• 1:09:55
  Mark Pracht: one-and-done stories that an 8-year-old that walked up to the newsstand would get. Because, like, and it's… I don't believe… I don't believe that DC was hiding sales numbers to get rid of Jack, because A, they canceled these books, but they didn't, like.
• 1:10:14
  Mark Pracht: fire him. They gave him other books to write on… work on. Right. They… they… and, like, who the hell doesn't want to sell books? Like, if the books are selling.
• 1:10:24
  Mark Pracht: why would you say, okay, well, you know, the books are selling, but let's just stop? No. But…
• 1:10:31
  Mark Pracht: Go ahead.
• 1:10:31
  Sean Harklerode: I think, you know, Jack wanted to be an editor.
• 1:10:36
  Sean Harklerode: Right? The other part, when I read about, you know, how he found out halfway through, those first two we talked about this week.
• 1:10:46
  Sean Harklerode: it was a two-part conversation. The other part of the conversation was, we love Demon and Commandee.
• 1:10:55
  Sean Harklerode: And we don't want you to leave the books.
• 1:10:59
  Sean Harklerode: So… He was taken off the books that he wanted to write, And…
• 1:11:06
  Sean Harklerode: Given the two books that he had planned to hand off to someone else.
• 1:11:12
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 1:11:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's an interesting question on the side.
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: though, that we'll come back to, because Mark has a point, but… but…
• 1:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: Why was Jack never really an editor?
• 1:11:26
  Mark Pracht: I think maybe we can see why.
• 1:11:29
  Mark Pracht: I mean, look, one of the things that I read about, and I… look, and I know Mark Ivanier was there.
• 1:11:38
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:11:43
  Mark Pracht: Every time… every once in a while, I think I'm gonna… I'm gonna say something really kind of… vague…
• 1:11:48
  Mark Pracht: vaguely… this, you know, like, it's gonna piss somebody off, and I don't really like to piss people off.
• 1:11:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna remind you, my mom and brother don't piss off easily.
• 1:11:59
  Tad Eggleston: They're all pretty…
• 1:12:01
  Mark Pracht: He's loyal. The other thing is, like…
• 1:12:04
  Mark Pracht: Someday, somebody's gonna revisit all of these. You know that, right? That's true.
• 1:12:08
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, boy.
• 1:12:10
  Sean Harklerode: Went out of off Lilo.
• 1:12:13
  Mark Pracht: that… Kirby wanted to start these books, and then hand them off.
• 1:12:23
  Tad Eggleston: And then go start something else.
• 1:12:25
  Mark Pracht: That, like, he did want to be, like, in charge of a line of books.
• 1:12:30
  Mark Pracht: Probably. I'm sure that part of that was… to… prove… to… Stan and Joe Simon.
• 1:12:42
  Mark Pracht: That he could do that, too.
• 1:12:46
  Mark Pracht: But… I, you know, I don't know. I mean, I think that…
• 1:12:52
  Mark Pracht: I, I, I don't know, I, I don't know.
• 1:12:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's just such a… and I… I…
• 1:12:58
  Mark Pracht: It's like…
• 1:12:59
  Tad Eggleston: I have the advantage of having lived through
• 1:13:03
  Tad Eggleston: Vertigo and some of the other lines that were started more by editors than by… it just feels like such a weird way to… I want to start a line of books, so the way I'm gonna do it is I'm gonna start out by doing EVERYTHING myself.
• 1:13:20
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:13:20
  Tad Eggleston: and then find a point to pass it off. You would think that if that's what he really wanted to do, he'd want to have writers
• 1:13:27
  Tad Eggleston: co-scripting with him from day one. He'd want to have the inker that could take over penciling. He'd want to have…
• 1:13:36
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think…
• 1:13:37
  Tad Eggleston: The best talent that he could pull to him, and work as a team.
• 1:13:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I wonder how different this could have been if… if… If that had been.
• 1:13:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because again, Jack clearly has amazing ideas that… I mean, I'm gonna say it again, I think are hurt as much by lack of sleep as anything else.
• 1:14:01
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, and the thing is, is, like, he does have… he has, even Aaron Steve… Steve Sherman, right?
• 1:14:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:08
  Mark Pracht: they're there. Like, they're ready. I mean, I think…
• 1:14:13
  Mark Pracht: It's pretty clear that he was grooming them to be… Creatives.
• 1:14:21
  Mark Pracht: Right. Right? And I think that both, certainly Mark Evenir would say that… that his… whatever talent he has was… was fostered and, encouraged by Jack.
• 1:14:33
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, but the real question is, like.
• 1:14:35
  Mark Pracht: I… I don't know, I mean, like, I'm… I'm utterly fascinated, like, and I guess since we're… we've reached the point where most of this
• 1:14:45
  Mark Pracht: line of books, this Fourth World Books, have now been canceled. We've gotten the last issue.
• 1:14:51
  Mark Pracht: Now, like, why… We're in a period where almost all sales our newsstand sales.
• 1:15:00
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 1:15:02
  Mark Pracht: Why are they not selling?
• 1:15:07
  Mark Pracht: like… Jack Kirby artwork, just a few years before, on Marvel Books, is selling books.
• 1:15:15
  Mark Pracht: These drawn covers that sell, that people go and they buy them off the thing. You know, they buy them off the newsstand.
• 1:15:23
  Mark Pracht: And… I ask myself, Did even the kids back then Look at these covers, and think.
• 1:15:36
  Mark Pracht: Oh, they're just trying to be Marvel.
• 1:15:40
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 1:15:41
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 1:15:47
  Mark Pracht: Because… The imagery still works, 100%.
• 1:15:52
  Mark Pracht: But the, the cover blurbs and stuff, you know, they do lack that sort of, like.
• 1:16:01
  Mark Pracht: You know, Kirby says, buy it. Kirby says, buy it, right? You know, and it's like…
• 1:16:07
  Mark Pracht: I also wonder about things like this, right? I don't think Stan Lee would ever say, Stan Lee says buy it.
• 1:16:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:16:16
  Mark Pracht: he'd be… he'd say, Marvel says, buy it.
• 1:16:20
  Mark Pracht: Marvel says, you know? And I think that…
• 1:16:24
  Mark Pracht: I… and… and I don't think that… I don't think we can… I don't think we can remove the… the ego thing.
• 1:16:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:16:34
  Mark Pracht: Why did Jack do all of this? Because Jack had things to prove.
• 1:16:38
  Mark Pracht: He had, like, never…
• 1:16:43
  Mark Pracht: I don't want to say this and be wrong about it, but I think I'm right.
• 1:16:48
  Mark Pracht: I don't think that he'd ever had a huge hit
• 1:16:52
  Mark Pracht: Where he didn't work with someone else.
• 1:16:57
  Mark Pracht: He had, had, Joe Simon, had Stan Lee, like, the Sky Masters, he was working with Wally Wood. I mean, like… like, everything was Jack and somebody else. Jack and somebody, and I think that he needed to have something that was his.
• 1:17:14
  Mark Pracht: And that was only him, and then he could say, that was a huge hit because of me, because I did it. And…
• 1:17:22
  Mark Pracht: Boy, I, like… Anybody who's a creative can understand that.
• 1:17:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Anybody.
• 1:17:29
  Mark Pracht: And.
• 1:17:32
  Mark Pracht: But,
• 1:17:37
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, I mean, like…
• 1:17:39
  Mark Pracht: And… and I think that part of my… my sadness about these… these three books in particular, and knowing that that's what he… when he found out that it was sort of done, right? And the thing is, is, like, we have… we have a bunch more to read, but…
• 1:17:55
  Mark Pracht: in a way, this is… this month is the end of this Fourth World experiment, really. Right. At this point, we're… we're… it's the dregs, and then it's trying to… trying to find an ending.
• 1:18:08
  Mark Pracht: And, right.
• 1:18:11
  Mark Pracht: It's… it's… it's… like, it's just sad, because I know… how much…
• 1:18:23
  Mark Pracht: Doing it all himself meant to him.
• 1:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:18:27
  Mark Pracht: I mean… I would hazard to guess.
• 1:18:33
  Mark Pracht: That if he thought he could do it fast enough, he probably wanted to ink them, too.
• 1:18:37
  Mark Pracht: You know? Right.
• 1:18:39
  Mark Pracht: And… But, like… You can't do 4 books a month, or 5 books a month.
• 1:18:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:18:48
  Mark Pracht: If you're penciling and inking.
• 1:18:52
  Tad Eggleston: And trying to write them well.
• 1:18:54
  Mark Pracht: and try one.
• 1:18:56
  Mark Pracht: you know, but I also think…
• 1:19:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that doesn't take no time.
• 1:19:02
  Mark Pracht: I've probably invoked this as well at some point during this series. But, I mean, it's like there's this quote from Eddie Van Halen.
• 1:19:09
  Mark Pracht: Where, you know, he was like, look, I write…
• 1:19:12
  Mark Pracht: when I write music, I just write what I like, and I'm egotistical enough to think that other people will like it. And…
• 1:19:19
  Mark Pracht: I don't care what's sung over it.
• 1:19:23
  Mark Pracht: Right? Like, he didn't care what David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar came up with as lyrics. He didn't care. To me, it was just… to him, it was just gilding the lily of his music, right? And I think that Jack truly believed that about his art.
• 1:19:42
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and in a way.
• 1:19:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that… What makes me wish you'd done… Less words. More silence.
• 1:19:47
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:19:48
  Tad Eggleston: Let the… let the art speak for itself.
• 1:19:50
  Mark Pracht: Well, you're gonna… you're gonna enjoy, Hunger Dogs a lot, then.
• 1:19:56
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:19:56
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:19:58
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I don't know if you're gonna enjoy it a lot, but it definitely has less dialogue.
• 1:20:04
  Mark Pracht: And I think that that is… that is also a shift towards the 80s, where…
• 1:20:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:20:09
  Mark Pracht: There was a different style of writing that was… that was… had developed.
• 1:20:12
  Tad Eggleston: I, I mean…
• 1:20:13
  Mark Pracht: But.
• 1:20:16
  Tad Eggleston: If the art's supposed to speak for itself, you should let it.
• 1:20:20
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, you know, and it's just.
• 1:20:22
  Tad Eggleston: And that's another place where a good editor and time makes a difference, because you're right. This is in an era of…
• 1:20:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, my biggest problem anytime that I go back and reread Secret Wars is I'm like, Jim, just shut up!
• 1:20:35
  Tad Eggleston: Every one of these balloons could be cut in a quarter, and you could still get all of the information out.
• 1:20:46
  Mark Pracht: It has to be clear. I mean, yeah, I think, yeah. But I mean, and it, you know, we've also, we've invoked Lucas at various times during this, like, but it's also Lucas, you know, like, he said that, you know, like, the dialogue's terrible, I know that, but it's also not important.
• 1:21:02
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:21:02
  Mark Pracht: It's the… it's the… it's the imagery, it's the movement, it's the music, it's all of that.
• 1:21:08
  Tad Eggleston: And I think…
• 1:21:08
  Mark Pracht: That makes the story exciting.
• 1:21:09
  Tad Eggleston: I think where he proved himself wrong on that was… was, Venom Menace and Attack of the Clones, that I think could have been…
• 1:21:18
  Tad Eggleston: Improved immensely with… with just some… basic… Dialogue rewrites.
• 1:21:28
  Sean Harklerode: Oh.
• 1:21:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:21:31
  Sean Harklerode: I don't… well, I don't have so much a problem with Phantom Menace, but…
• 1:21:35
  Sean Harklerode: the… the love scenes with… with Anakin and Padme in…
• 1:21:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that… that's… that's where… that's where he proved that having a different director would have been worthwhile.
• 1:21:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, what frustrates me the most about the prequels is, like, He didn't direct or write
• 1:21:54
  Tad Eggleston: Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It's like he learned that lesson, and they were… they are better than Star Wars. Star Wars is necessary for… for Empire and Jedi, but, like, I think those movies are better.
• 1:22:08
  Tad Eggleston: And Mark's shaking his head.
• 1:22:09
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, so we've got an argument there.
• 1:22:13
  Sean Harklerode: Jedi.
• 1:22:13
  Tad Eggleston: See, I was 3, so I love… So…
• 1:22:17
  Mark Pracht: I don't…
• 1:22:18
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know that Jedi's better than Phantom Menace, honestly.
• 1:22:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I think, I think that…
• 1:22:24
  Tad Eggleston: You guys…
• 1:22:25
  Sean Harklerode: I'm having my childhood right now.
• 1:22:27
  Mark Pracht: The best parts… the best parts of Return of the Jedi are possibly some of the best parts of that first…
• 1:22:33
  Mark Pracht: trilogy. Right. But that's the confrontation between Luke and Vader.
• 1:22:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. And the Emperor.
• 1:22:40
  Mark Pracht: That stuff is great. But, look, I…
• 1:22:43
  Tad Eggleston: You slam the Ewoks.
• 1:22:45
  Sean Harklerode: But the, the urban…
• 1:22:47
  Mark Pracht: remember.
• 1:22:47
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, it is kind of undeniable that Empire Strikes Back just has… It.
• 1:22:56
  Mark Pracht: Right. Yeah. Well, there's a narrative… there's a narrative thing there. But I will tell you this.
• 1:23:02
  Mark Pracht: Empire Strikes Back.
• 1:23:04
  Mark Pracht: doesn't work without Star Wars. Right, no. And when I…
• 1:23:08
  Mark Pracht: I… I feel this so often.
• 1:23:12
  Mark Pracht: I wish… I wish there was nothing but the original Star Wars. I will give up Empire Strikes Back, I will give up Return of the Jedi, I will give up…
• 1:23:24
  Mark Pracht: and or any of that stuff that everybody loves, Mandalorian, which I enjoy a lot, I would give it all up.
• 1:23:32
  Mark Pracht: If we could go back in time, and have Star Wars be a thing that stood on its own.
• 1:23:37
  Mark Pracht: And that was the end of it.
• 1:23:39
  Mark Pracht: I think that it… it would actually have a greater… artistic impact?
• 1:23:49
  Mark Pracht: I think it would… I think,
• 1:23:52
  Mark Pracht: the… it might have changed Lucas's career, In measurable ways.
• 1:23:58
  Mark Pracht: I think that it…
• 1:24:01
  Mark Pracht: I would just rather have had that. I would rather have just had one Star Wars movie. Period. End of story, full stop.
• 1:24:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'd have to ponder that. Do I still get my toys?
• 1:24:14
  Mark Pracht: You would have probably had… I mean, like, they would have probably had toys for a year or two.
• 1:24:18
  Mark Pracht: I think… I think we would have been better off if there had only been toys for a year or two, you know?
• 1:24:23
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but then the toys would have been done before I was born.
• 1:24:28
  Mark Pracht: Sorry.
• 1:24:28
  Mark Pracht: I would have had mine.
• 1:24:32
  Sean Harklerode: My Death Star, my Millennium Falcon…
• 1:24:34
  Mark Pracht: Well, who knows what you would have had then? I mean, like, you know… I mean, like.
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, I…
• 1:24:41
  Mark Pracht: It's loaded.
• 1:24:42
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's…
• 1:24:43
  Mark Pracht: Holders… Yeah, go.
• 1:24:45
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's a better thing to ponder than any of the people that, like, would like to excise one movie, or one series, or blah blah blah. I think an all-or-nothing is a much better question.
• 1:25:01
  Mark Pracht: I've… I've never… I've never hated anything with Star Wars on it.
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: Neither have I.
• 1:25:07
  Mark Pracht: And even the holiday special.
• 1:25:10
  Tad Eggleston: I like the Holiday Special.
• 1:25:13
  Mark Pracht: I… I can't say I like it, but I don't hate it. I chuckle through it. I cringe through it, but but… but there…
• 1:25:23
  Tad Eggleston: The music was done by a, like, legit… I always forget his name.
• 1:25:30
  Mark Pracht: But I mean… I think that… Marauder.
• 1:25:37
  Mark Pracht: Miko. Miko, Miko, what was his name?
• 1:25:42
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, that was just for… I meant for the overall special.
• 1:25:48
  Mark Pracht: Oh, I know. I know what you mean. I don't remember who did it, but… I will say,
• 1:25:55
  Mark Pracht: I just think, culturally, it would put us in a better spot, too, because it might have, you know, it still probably would have spawned a bunch of imitators, but this idea of everything having to be a long line of… of…
• 1:26:09
  Mark Pracht: sequels?
• 1:26:10
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:26:11
  Mark Pracht: Might have been in… you know, might have been in… avoided.
• 1:26:16
  Mark Pracht: you know, and the thing is, is, like, even… even if, like, what…
• 1:26:24
  Mark Pracht: My second thing would be to take that Episode 4 off of it.
• 1:26:30
  Mark Pracht: And just have it be Star Wars, A New Hope.
• 1:26:35
  Mark Pracht: Empire Strikes Back, or, you know, Star Wars The Empire Strikes Back, Star Wars The Return of the Jedi, and then…
• 1:26:40
  Mark Pracht: End it. You know?
• 1:26:43
  Mark Pracht: And, and…
• 1:26:45
  Mark Pracht: you know, I know both Sean and I have things about the prequels that we do really love.
• 1:26:51
  Mark Pracht: And I think as a trilogy, it tells a very interesting story, and it does it pretty damn well.
• 1:26:59
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, that doesn't blind me to weaknesses of it, but I do think… I mean, like, but I think this is the big thing, is, like, I think that the fact that
• 1:27:12
  Mark Pracht: this long, recurring storyline Damaged pop culture in a lot of ways.
• 1:27:21
  Mark Pracht: that I think…
• 1:27:25
  Mark Pracht: You know, because, like, certain things had happened before. We had the… you had the Universal Monsters and things like that that kept coming back, but it never felt like…
• 1:27:36
  Mark Pracht: oh, this is episode 5 of the, you know, the Universal Monsters story. It was just like, okay, it's the vampire meets the wolfman, you know, Dracula meets the Wolfman. Hey, whatever, you know, and it's like… it was like, it was a point that I made recently when I saw that that new Avatar movie had passed
• 1:27:56
  Mark Pracht: you know, a billion dollars, which I…
• 1:27:59
  Mark Pracht: like, I never thought I'd saw that again, and I realized there were several others that did, but I just haven't been paying attention.
• 1:28:05
  Mark Pracht: You know, it's like… There is a certain amount of, like.
• 1:28:11
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I went and saw that movie yesterday, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
• 1:28:16
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, it's not my favorite franchise or anything like that, but it's also, like, it almost inherently is just, like.
• 1:28:23
  Mark Pracht: Alright, here we are again, we're on Pandora, this is the next thing that happens, okay.
• 1:28:29
  Mark Pracht: it feels… there's a very breeziness to it, and I think that's part of why people think it doesn't have any cultural impact.
• 1:28:36
  Mark Pracht: Like, it's not like… you don't feel like somebody's going, like, this is important, you know?
• 1:28:42
  Mark Pracht: And,
• 1:28:45
  Mark Pracht: This… I'm being very long-winded here, but that's… part of my wish is that Star Wars was a contained thing that just was…
• 1:28:54
  Mark Pracht: And I think that part of our real big problem in.
• 1:28:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and…
• 1:28:58
  Mark Pracht: is that we… everything has to be a franchise, and I don't.
• 1:29:01
  Tad Eggleston: Where I think we could pull this around and back is…
• 1:29:10
  Tad Eggleston: I think there could have been a really great Fourth World graphic novel.
• 1:29:15
  Mark Pracht: Sure. 100%.
• 1:29:17
  Mark Pracht: Or, like I said earlier, Like, a 12-issue miniseries.
• 1:29:22
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:29:24
  Mark Pracht: New Gods miniseries that covered all of this.
• 1:29:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:27
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 1:29:29
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:29:30
  Mark Pracht: But that's… in 1971, Neither of those things actually exist, you know?
• 1:29:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:39
  Mark Pracht: I mean, graphic novels exist, but not…
• 1:29:42
  Mark Pracht: not to Marvel or DC, you know.
• 1:29:45
  Mark Pracht: but… Here we are.
• 1:29:51
  Mark Pracht: And I guess next month we have…
• 1:29:54
  Mark Pracht: I guess we're probably… I think we're winding down, don't you?
• 1:29:58
  Tad Eggleston: We are, we We've got it… we've got it lined up for 3 more months.
• 1:30:03
  Tad Eggleston: With next month being, like 3, 12 12 to 15 of…
• 1:30:10
  Tad Eggleston: Mr. Miracle, and then 16 to 18 of Mr. Miracle, along with…
• 1:30:15
  Tad Eggleston: the New Gods number 6, second story.
• 1:30:20
  Tad Eggleston: From the reprint series, and then The Hunger Dogs in April.
• 1:30:25
  Tad Eggleston: to wrap up.
• 1:30:28
  Mark Pracht: And we can all know that we have conquered the Fourth World!
• 1:30:34
  Sean Harklerode: The Armageddo.
• 1:30:35
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:30:40
  Tad Eggleston: They're…
• 1:30:41
  Mark Pracht: I would just say this… this actually turned into a really great conversation in my mind. I don't…
• 1:30:48
  Tad Eggleston: I agree. They always do.
• 1:30:51
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:30:52
  Tad Eggleston: Wasn't… don't… I feel like… I mean… Dematists did forever people.
• 1:31:00
  Tad Eggleston: It was a cosmic odyssey.
• 1:31:06
  Tad Eggleston: didn't… I feel like… Yeah.
• 1:31:10
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't… yeah, John Byrne?
• 1:31:13
  Tad Eggleston: did a fourth World Series?
• 1:31:15
  Mark Pracht: I think he did, yes.
• 1:31:17
  Tad Eggleston: Have either of you read it?
• 1:31:20
  Sean Harklerode: for college.
• 1:31:21
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:31:22
  Mark Pracht: I don't think it lasted very long.
• 1:31:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but I don't… I don't think it was designed to. I think it was more the decision to do the miniseries. That's one of the reasons I'm curious.
• 1:31:34
  Mark Pracht: Well, you know, like, look, there's a lot of people who took these ideas and did really interesting things with them, and that speaks to, you know.
• 1:31:44
  Mark Pracht: would it have been better to hand it… to have Jack say, okay, here's my idea, it's…
• 1:31:51
  Mark Pracht: What do you think, you know?
• 1:31:56
  Mark Pracht: you know, in my play, I have, Carmine Infantino suggest Denny O'Neill. I don't know that that happened, but I know that Denny O'Neill wrote them later, right? So, that's why I invoked that.
• 1:32:10
  Mark Pracht: But just there… there were other… there were people writing at that time who…
• 1:32:17
  Mark Pracht: somehow, like, Jesus Christ, like, we were talking about Jim Shooter earlier, like, look at… look at Legion of Superheroes.
• 1:32:25
  Mark Pracht: he, like… somehow made those characters feel real to young people. Granted, he was, like, 13, right?
• 1:32:34
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:32:35
  Mark Pracht: 13-year-old writing a book, but he also, like, understood the value of having
• 1:32:41
  Mark Pracht: narratives that carried through the whole series, you know? And… Would that have helped?
• 1:32:49
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, at this point, I think Shooter is out of the industry. I think he's managing a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Pittsburgh right now. But,
• 1:32:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, that kind of mindset… Some youthful energy, right?
• 1:33:08
  Mark Pracht: I wonder, I… it does make me think about that. What if… what if he just said to, to, Mark Ivanier, hey, why don't you write the dialogue?
• 1:33:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:33:19
  Mark Pracht: You know, what would have happened, you know?
• 1:33:25
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that goes to how beholden evenir feels to Jack.
• 1:33:32
  Mark Pracht: and would… even here have been…
• 1:33:35
  Mark Pracht: willing or able to be like, I think it would be better this way, you know?
• 1:33:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the only reason I even… the burn thing popped into my head is, like, I think of the way I look at
• 1:33:48
  Tad Eggleston: Bendis and… and… Is it Buckingham? Who… or… who did the original art on Ultimate Spider-Man?
• 1:33:59
  Mark Pracht: Oh, Begley. Mark Begley.
• 1:34:01
  Tad Eggleston: Bagley, yeah. Bendis and Bagley on Ultimate Spider-Man, and for that matter, I think of Burn on Man of Steel, you know? There have been times in history where, where…
• 1:34:18
  Tad Eggleston: a… A muddy thing that had a lot of greatness in it was… was taken and…
• 1:34:28
  Mark Pracht: And refined, yeah.
• 1:34:29
  Tad Eggleston: refined. So I almost wonder if that's… that's what Byrne did with his… His new gods.
• 1:34:38
  Mark Pracht: It's hard to know.
• 1:34:39
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think.
• 1:34:40
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, I haven't looked at it. I haven't…
• 1:34:43
  Mark Pracht: It's sort of like, burns FF run.
• 1:34:49
  Mark Pracht: Which, I… you know, that's my childhood in a lot of ways.
• 1:34:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, I love Burned Sapphire Furnit.
• 1:34:53
  Mark Pracht: And, and it's… it's, I think it's really good, but I also think it doesn't…
• 1:35:04
  Mark Pracht: It's sort of a lot of just…
• 1:35:08
  Mark Pracht: keeping the formula right, you know? Right.
• 1:35:13
  Mark Pracht: Rather than… like, and obviously there are things that happen editorially, you know.
• 1:35:20
  Mark Pracht: keeping Ben on the battle world.
• 1:35:22
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:35:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:35:23
  Mark Pracht: and bringing the She-Hulk into that team, which… Right.
• 1:35:29
  Mark Pracht: let's be honest, that's the best thing that ever happened to the character of She-Hulk.
• 1:35:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I think that…
• 1:35:35
  Mark Pracht: Changed that character Immeasurably, and for the better.
• 1:35:41
  Mark Pracht: going forward.
• 1:35:42
  Tad Eggleston: Was Burns sensational She-Hulk before or after that? It was after that, wasn't it?
• 1:35:47
  Mark Pracht: Who's after it.
• 1:35:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:35:49
  Mark Pracht: he became the caretaker of that character for a long time, because there was… there was the savage She-Hulk.
• 1:35:55
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:35:56
  Mark Pracht: And then that ended.
• 1:35:57
  Mark Pracht: And then she…
• 1:35:58
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was a four-issue miniseries to begin with.
• 1:36:01
  Sean Harklerode: No, no, that was, like, a 21-issue series.
• 1:36:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:36:04
  Tad Eggleston: Is it?
• 1:36:05
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, it was… it was pretty meandering, if I remember correctly.
• 1:36:10
  Mark Pracht: and, then she became an Avenger.
• 1:36:15
  Mark Pracht: to keep.
• 1:36:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:36:16
  Mark Pracht: around.
• 1:36:17
  Mark Pracht: Right? I know, Sean's the Hulk guy, so I…
• 1:36:21
  Sean Harklerode: No, I mean, she was started… I mean, she and Spider-Woman both were created to keep CBS from, creating female…
• 1:36:31
  Sean Harklerode: Hulks and Spider-Man.
• 1:36:33
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:36:33
  Mark Pracht: That's… that's a given, right? in my mind.
• 1:36:39
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, Savage She-Hulk ran for a little over 2 years or so.
• 1:36:45
  Sean Harklerode: And then, you know, she went to the Avengers, and then Secret Wars, FF.
• 1:36:52
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and I know that when she went to the Avengers, there was a pretty… pretty… that there was a change in personality.
• 1:37:00
  Mark Pracht: that… I think Burn expanded on, but I mean, like.
• 1:37:06
  Sean Harklerode: You know, it's a very interesting, you know.
• 1:37:10
  Sean Harklerode: She's so different from Bruce in that
• 1:37:13
  Sean Harklerode: she revels in the power. Right.
• 1:37:16
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:37:17
  Sean Harklerode: Of course, she has more control.
• 1:37:19
  Sean Harklerode: Although a few years ago, they did a…
• 1:37:22
  Sean Harklerode: A series where she was savage, where she was… Raging as well.
• 1:37:28
  Sean Harklerode: And I have a friend of mine, Jerome.
• 1:37:31
  Sean Harklerode: Who probably isn't listening, but, jerome loves She-Hulk.
• 1:37:37
  Sean Harklerode: And he hated that series.
• 1:37:40
  Sean Harklerode: Cause, like, that's not who she is.
• 1:37:45
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, no, I mean, but yeah, I… sorry, now we're talking about John Byrne.
• 1:37:50
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah. Alright.
• 1:37:52
  Mark Pracht: Don't, don't…
• 1:37:53
  Mark Pracht: don't go to Burn Robotics. I don't even think that that message board is active anymore, I don't think, but…
• 1:38:01
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, but did you see, and this is… this is the last thing I'll say about John Byrne, because I'm kind of fascinated anytime something like this happens, he had been…
• 1:38:10
  Tad Eggleston: Continuing his X-Men stuff after leaving the book.
• 1:38:16
  Tad Eggleston: It's getting… Elsewen, X-Men Elsewen, is being published by Abrams Books.
• 1:38:25
  Tad Eggleston: Starting in June of this year.
• 1:38:28
  Mark Pracht: Bye.
• 1:38:30
  Mark Pracht: You know, yeah.
• 1:38:32
  Mark Pracht: Well, you know, Mr. Byrne has a lot of strong opinions about a lot of things.
• 1:38:40
  Mark Pracht: Although, Byrne apparently, like, when he was at DC, I think he hit a lot of those Kirby things, because he did a… he did a demon book, too.
• 1:38:48
  Mark Pracht: I know that because I have a piece of original artwork right up here on my, on my right.
• 1:38:56
  Mark Pracht: So…
• 1:38:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I just… I… I…
• 1:39:00
  Mark Pracht: I know he's a huge Kirby fan, that's all I know, so…
• 1:39:03
  Tad Eggleston: I am always a little bit fascinated, kinda, kinda like, DC last year… I think it was last year,
• 1:39:13
  Tad Eggleston: did the four-issue series that would have been the four issues if Jason Todd had lived.
• 1:39:19
  Tad Eggleston: I am kind of fascinated sometimes when…
• 1:39:23
  Tad Eggleston: when they, you know, rather… rather than the full-on Elseworlds or What If book, you have… we're… we're…
• 1:39:32
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna take from this point…
• 1:39:36
  Tad Eggleston: And show you a different vision.
• 1:39:39
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, I mean, and they had those pages, obviously.
• 1:39:43
  Mark Pracht: Because, I mean, I've seen the… I've seen the, Jim Aparo page where he's, you know, he's alive! Right.
• 1:39:50
  Mark Pracht: I don't… I don't know. I think… I think that it's interesting…
• 1:40:01
  Mark Pracht: But… for myself, I am so tired of multiple timelines, and multiple universes, and…
• 1:40:11
  Mark Pracht: You know, when it works, it's great.
• 1:40:14
  Mark Pracht: But a lot of times, it's just… it's just flooding the market with more…
• 1:40:18
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely, and that's why I'm honestly way more interested in something like this, where it's not a story-driven multiple universe, multiple timeline, it's a…
• 1:40:33
  Tad Eggleston: there was a creative decision made, completely outside of Universe, But…
• 1:40:40
  Tad Eggleston: This is what somebody else did.
• 1:40:43
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:40:44
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 1:40:44
  Tad Eggleston: It was very much, you know, it's fanfiction, only from one of the creators.
• 1:40:50
  Tad Eggleston: rather than…
• 1:40:50
  Mark Pracht: Although… You know, there is… there is one element that's very much missing from that.
• 1:40:56
  Tad Eggleston: Claremont.
• 1:40:57
  Mark Pracht: Claremont, yeah. Right. And… And I don't… I don't know… I mean, like.
• 1:41:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't know enough of my X-Men history to know how much of a split there was between Claremont and Byrne at that time, but it seems that if Byrne felt the need to carry on, that, like, there was some sort of creative differences breakup.
• 1:41:25
  Mark Pracht: I don't really know the truth either, but…
• 1:41:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:41:29
  Mark Pracht: like… when I think of… when I think of the creator that made the X-Men the X-Men.
• 1:41:37
  Tad Eggleston: You think of Claremont?
• 1:41:39
  Mark Pracht: I think of Claremont.
• 1:41:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. Just like the first people… I mean, and this is… this is… this is, again, where we'll bring it back to Kirby, and the greater question of,
• 1:41:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, artists deserve way more credit than they get.
• 1:41:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Is the answer, but… but the question is, like, how much credit do artists.
• 1:42:04
  Mark Pracht: wind up getting, etc, because, like…
• 1:42:07
  Tad Eggleston: When you talk about…
• 1:42:10
  Tad Eggleston: the early X-Men years, that was Claremont Byrne for a long time, you know? People think of Stan Lee when they think of Spider-Man, when they think of Fantastic Four. They don't think Ditko and Kirby the same way they think of Stan Lee.
• 1:42:26
  Tad Eggleston: And that's not entirely fair, but in both cases, like, it's fascinating
• 1:42:33
  Tad Eggleston: To look at, okay, they want to go prove that it's just them, or that they did, you know, what happens then?
• 1:42:40
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:42:40
  Mark Pracht: I will say this. I picked up…
• 1:42:47
  Mark Pracht: the first epic collection? Because I hadn't read it in years, right? So it was the… the… the first collected…
• 1:42:56
  Mark Pracht: New X-Men.
• 1:42:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right?
• 1:43:00
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 1:43:01
  Tad Eggleston: Was that, Grant Morrison?
• 1:43:03
  Mark Pracht: No, this is the ones from this… this is the…
• 1:43:07
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, Len Wayne, and…
• 1:43:08
  Mark Pracht: Len Ween, doing, giant, giant sizes.
• 1:43:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, right, right, right, right.
• 1:43:14
  Mark Pracht: And then, if I'm remembering correctly, Claremont takes over.
• 1:43:20
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty quickly. Like, right away. Right.
• 1:43:23
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 1:43:24
  Mark Pracht: And I was sort of shocked.
• 1:43:28
  Mark Pracht: how long Dave Cockrum.
• 1:43:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:43:32
  Mark Pracht: was there. Was on the book. Before Burn came in.
• 1:43:35
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 1:43:36
  Mark Pracht: And,
• 1:43:38
  Mark Pracht: just… it sort of surprised me, because I always thought, oh, it's… it's Claremont Byrne, but man, Cochran was there quite a while. I mean, it was like…
• 1:43:48
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and wasn't it Cockrum with wine?
• 1:43:51
  Tad Eggleston: as well.
• 1:43:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah, Cochrane. Cochrane?
• 1:43:53
  Tad Eggleston: actually predates.
• 1:43:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:43:57
  Mark Pracht: Cockrum designed all those characters for Giant Size X-Men number 1, so… But yeah, it…
• 1:44:06
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, I… yeah.
• 1:44:09
  Mark Pracht: I don't know.
• 1:44:11
  Mark Pracht: I don't really want to get…
• 1:44:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's true.
• 1:44:13
  Mark Pracht: John Burn Byrne thing.
• 1:44:14
  Tad Eggleston: No, absolutely not, though that is, like, like, like…
• 1:44:19
  Tad Eggleston: like Kirby and Fourth World, like, the Claremont X-Men years is one of the bigger holes in my comics knowledge. At some point, I need to give them a more serious read.
• 1:44:30
  Mark Pracht: Well, and… and, you know, in a lot of ways, it has some of the same frustrations, but…
• 1:44:37
  Mark Pracht: because, like, there's a lot of, like, subplots that, like, disappear for, like, 2 years, and then… but then, they do reappear, and you're like, oh, whoa, well… Sometimes…
• 1:44:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've heard… I've heard both Byrne and Claremont talk about things that they would throw in and think that they were gonna do something with, and then never actually managed to do anything with.
• 1:44:58
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, and that happened… I mean, that happens with storytelling all the time, you know, where you're like, oh, this'll… this'll lead to something, and then you're like, oh, well, maybe it doesn't.
• 1:45:09
  Mark Pracht: But if you're not publishing on a monthly schedule, you'll probably edit it out. Sure.
• 1:45:14
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah.
• 1:45:15
  Tad Eggleston: That's true enough.
• 1:45:15
  Mark Pracht: But I mean, like, but that's also… that's the joy… that's part of the joy of being on a monthly schedule, is that you're… you're sort of sowing seeds to…
• 1:45:27
  Mark Pracht: to, spark something later.
• 1:45:31
  Mark Pracht: And if it doesn't spark, alright, whatever. Got something else. We got the brood over here, we got the Shire R, we got the, you know…
• 1:45:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:45:40
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, I don't…
• 1:45:44
  Tad Eggleston: Are they the Shire? I've always thought of them as the Shi'ar.
• 1:45:49
  Mark Pracht: I… I always read it as Shire R, but…
• 1:45:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just trying to figure out if anybody's heard it pronounced by somebody who's an authority, because it's one of those funny things about comics, too, is that, like… I mean, I…
• 1:46:04
  Mark Pracht: I'll tell you one of my big blind spots that apparently is huge for everybody but me is that, the 97 X-Men cartoon.
• 1:46:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I haven't…
• 1:46:14
  Mark Pracht: They not either.
• 1:46:20
  Sean Harklerode: Don't…
• 1:46:21
  Mark Pracht: They had to have.
• 1:46:22
  Sean Harklerode: That's.
• 1:46:22
  Mark Pracht: At some point during that show, right?
• 1:46:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:46:25
  Sean Harklerode: I don't remember if they, if they did. I, I believe it's Shire, but .
• 1:46:31
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:46:31
  Tad Eggleston: That works for me.
• 1:46:33
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:46:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's one of the reasons I like audiobooks, particularly from, from reputable…
• 1:46:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there are certain people who you know put more effort into putting together the audiobooks than others, and, like, because you know that they asked the author, so how do we pronounce this? How do we pronounce that? So you get kind of a definitive pronunciation of certain things.
• 1:46:57
  Mark Pracht: And then the author goes, I don't fucking know.
• 1:46:59
  Tad Eggleston: That happens sometimes, too.
• 1:47:03
  Mark Pracht: Look, there's no… there's no… there's no vowels in this word. What do you…
• 1:47:07
  Sean Harklerode: I was like.
• 1:47:08
  Mark Pracht: Well, I don't think I know.
• 1:47:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, how do you pronounce Mr. Mixplititics?
• 1:47:18
  Mark Pracht: You know, I… Paul Dini was on the commentary track for the first Mr. Mixus Spitlick.
• 1:47:28
  Tad Eggleston: Mr. Spicklett.
• 1:47:30
  Mark Pracht: Mix 6… Mix 6 Spit Lick.
• 1:47:33
  Mark Pracht: Mix, sick, spit lick.
• 1:47:35
  Mark Pracht: Paul Dini is very…
• 1:47:40
  Mark Pracht: definitive on what he is talking about. He's like, it is Mix, yes… Mix, yes, Spitlick. Mix, yes, Spitlick.
• 1:47:49
  Tad Eggleston: mixes.
• 1:47:49
  Mark Pracht: And I'm like… I always thought it was Mix… MixelPlick.
• 1:47:54
  Tad Eggleston: For years, and when I was a kid, it was…
• 1:47:58
  Mark Pracht: When I was a kid, I was… it's Mr. Mixelpick.
• 1:48:03
  Mark Pracht: But, I… actually, when he… he… he actually kind of sounded it out, and it mixed Yes Spitlick, and I'm like, okay, so that makes sense.
• 1:48:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Yeah.
• 1:48:16
  Tad Eggleston: But now we are so far off.
• 1:48:18
  Sean Harklerode: That's the road.
• 1:48:19
  Tad Eggleston: and down the rabbit hole, and at, like, the two-hour mark, so it might take…
• 1:48:23
  Mark Pracht: Talk about a character that I really wish Kirby had taken care of.
• 1:48:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god, that would have been fun.
• 1:48:29
  Mark Pracht: Oh my god.
• 1:48:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, that would have been fun.
• 1:48:36
  Mark Pracht: Anyway… For the 22 Panels podcast!
• 1:48:42
  Tad Eggleston: Fourth World Book Club on 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.