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With Great Power #353... 22 Panels with Bart Simpson · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest today, and this is… this has been something that I've been, like.
• 0:10
  Tad Eggleston: Every time we've emailed.
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: if I've had anybody in the room, I've had to tell them, just because it's such a weird experience to say.
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: I'm emailing with Bart Simpson.
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: And I get two sets of responses. It's like, wait, isn't that a fictional character? Or, you're gonna have Nancy Cartwright on the show?
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like, no, no, no, I'm emailing with the taller, older, bulk Bart Simpson.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: He makes films!
• 0:43
  Tad Eggleston: And they're like, isn't it a comic show? I'm like, it is! But he makes documentaries about comics people.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: And he just… you just debuted at the Edinburgh Film Festival with Harvey Kurtzman Goes Mad, is that right? Did I get the title right? It's always embarrassing.
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: world of Harvey Kurtzman. See, it's always embarrassing when I don't have it in front of me.
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: The Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman, which I was blessed to get to watch this morning. It's fantastic.
• 1:10
  Tad Eggleston: My wife and I watched Mobius Redux, Another one of your cartoons…
• 1:15
  Bart: Golden Oldie, yes, I produced that one. That was,
• 1:18
  Tad Eggleston: on Friday night, that was good, though I can see that you've developed as a filmmaker.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: And or had a different… touch, and also…
• 1:28
  Bart: just say, yeah, I should just jump in. That was actually… Haskell Bauman was the director of that one.
• 1:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 1:32
  Bart: It was done for German television, and it's, well, you know, it was done also, geez, what was it? It's, like, almost, my god, almost 20 years ago now.
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's been a while.
• 1:42
  Bart: So, yeah, so everybody's moved on since then.
• 1:46
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, and, and like…
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: the only thing that popped into my head as I was watching my… watching the Mad World of Harvey Kurtzman this morning.
• 1:57
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of comparison, is… I wonder how much of the… the… because I felt like…
• 2:04
  Tad Eggleston: The Kurtzman was much more dynamic.
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: And obviously, there's filmmaking changes in the time, and digital technology in your meeting time, but I also then went, oh, wait, though, one of the things I love about European
• 2:21
  Tad Eggleston: cartooning is they don't feel like they have to be all action all the time, so was it a choice, or was it differences?
• 2:30
  Tad Eggleston: So that's my only comparison question, if you have any.
• 2:33
  Bart: Right, yeah, so you're talking about the Mobius… Mobius film?
• 2:37
  Bart: to it.
• 2:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the Moibius film felt… I loved it, though I'll also mention, if any… if you know anybody in production, the subtitles cut out on Amazon, so I had to work… watch the BBC4 version on…
• 2:50
  Bart: Oh yes, that's a shorter one, I think.
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, on YouTube, to be able to have subtitles after the first 15 or 20 minutes.
• 3:00
  Bart: Oh, interesting. Okay, no, it's… yeah, like I say, I was… I was, the Canadian producer on that. It was… my producing partner in Germany was, Ado Baumann von Bruen, and the director was Haskel Baumann, and it was,
• 3:13
  Bart: Sorry, your question was about how comparing.
• 3:15
  Tad Eggleston: The pa- the pacing…
• 3:17
  Bart: The pacing.
• 3:18
  Tad Eggleston: It had a more relaxed pace. It seemed to be more interview. When you showed images, they tended to be more static.
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: Though there were animation images, more of them. Whereas this had a lot of…
• 3:30
  Tad Eggleston: a lot of, like, the cartoon images, you would do 3D rendering, you'd have them pop at you, it seemed like the music drove more of it.
• 3:42
  Bart: Well, yeah, I think I…
• 3:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 3:43
  Bart: I directed the Kurtzmann one, I produced one of the producers on the other one, so I think it's… part of it is directorial style, part of it is where it was actually intended to be shown, because the film was, again, for the, at the time, the ground format on ZDFarte, which is a, you know, German, French, European broadcaster.
• 4:02
  Bart: So, and it was also a…
• 4:04
  Bart: You know, of the time as well. So it had… it had its own format, and I think it was… had different intentions. The… the Kurtzman one.
• 4:11
  Bart: I mean, we can get into it.
• 4:13
  Tad Eggleston: Which is where we're gonna go immediately.
• 4:15
  Bart: Basically, the idea is I'm a music… I'm very much an audio person, which drove a lot of…
• 4:20
  Bart: You know, sometimes it seems counterintuitive when you're doing a visual medium, but.
• 4:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, as I see that, you have lots of sound department credits.
• 4:27
  Bart: Yeah, yeah, I also come from, like, I have a, this sort of,
• 4:33
  Bart: High-concept lo-fi dance band that has been a part of for a while.
• 4:37
  Tad Eggleston: What's the name of the band?
• 4:39
  Bart: We're called Fat Tank, P-H-A-T Tank.
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 4:44
  Bart: It's like, we…
• 4:45
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to look that up, too.
• 4:47
  Bart: Like ABBA, we're never gonna break up, but we all live in different cities right now. I'm in Reykjavik, and then my bandmate is in
• 4:54
  Bart: Bad meets her in Vancouver, where I'm…
• 4:57
  Bart: generally originally from, another one is up island in sort of a rural part of British Columbia. So,
• 5:02
  Bart: But yeah, for me, music is so important, and especially…
• 5:05
  Tad Eggleston: A hasty boy's heart and a Devo-like sensibility.
• 5:09
  Bart: There we go.
• 5:10
  Tad Eggleston: What it says, it sounds.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: I am all over that.
• 5:15
  Bart: And, we're mostly a live band, we're not really… I don't think we even really recorded anything properly, except for a couple of songs, but we had 3…
• 5:23
  Bart: concept concerts. There was Fat Tank, Fat Tank in Space, and Fat Tank Fights the Monster God, and they were all basically
• 5:31
  Bart: They all had a storyline that maybe the audience didn't get, but we certainly did, and that's how we wrote our songs. And, basically the audience would be part of the whole experience, and…
• 5:40
  Bart: I mean, it's a whole other podcast, I'm afraid, but it's,
• 5:43
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay.
• 5:44
  Bart: I don't think our story is over yet. We still joked.
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: I hope not.
• 5:47
  Bart: Back in the old age home. But, we'll see how it all goes.
• 5:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I… in a previous life, I ran dementia units, and like, you know, if there was actually a cool band that lived in the old Hange home together, they'd get to play as often as they wanted.
• 6:03
  Bart: There we go, there we go, exactly.
• 6:05
  Tad Eggleston: You could get your 10,000 hours in, it'd be your cavern club.
• 6:09
  Bart: That's right, that's right. So, basically, when it came to…
• 6:13
  Bart: when it came to, just sort of riffing off this whole sound idea, I mean, it's… I mean…
• 6:19
  Bart: Harvey's,
• 6:21
  Bart: a lot of what was existing for Harvey in Archive was audio, because a lot of his video, the majority of it, was when he was older with Parkinson's, and it was sort of a combination of
• 6:36
  Bart: sometimes hard to watch, but also it didn't maybe give you the full, access to him, or full experience of him. And of course, we used some of that.
• 6:44
  Bart: But…
• 6:45
  Bart: Because I wanted the film to be so driven by Harvey's telling of his own story as much as possible, that meant that we relied on audio. And that allowed us to do a lot of other things that wouldn't have been possible if we were stapled to…
• 6:59
  Bart: you know, constant, video interview with him. Luckily, we found two very good ones. But, but, yeah, the majority… so it just meant that…
• 7:10
  Bart: you know, sound became the key element for me. We wanted to give it a kind of…
• 7:15
  Bart: You know.
• 7:18
  Bart: Beastie Boys-esque, funnily enough, kind of, you know, jazz kind of vibe, because, you know, just to bring up this whole idea of Harvey being a rebel, and Harvey being an awkward rebel, which is kind of what Beastie Boys are to me.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 7:31
  Bart: So, so when we were doing… when we were kind of…
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, I hadn't thought of the connection, but, like, as soon as you said it, it's like, yeah.
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 7:40
  Bart: Yeah, so, so basically.
• 7:41
  Tad Eggleston: New York Reb… awkward Rebels? Harvey Kurtzman and DC Boys have lost… Literally so.
• 7:48
  Bart: Very much so.
• 7:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 7:50
  Bart: Yeah, so…
• 7:51
  Bart: So that was kind of the starting point. Luckily, we found a great composer, and yadda yadda, we can get more into that later, but that's kind of the,
• 7:58
  Bart: That's… I forget how we got here, but that's… that's… that's why sound is so important.
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: That is literally how this podcast works. I showed this to Noah VanSkyver earlier, you get to be the second one to see it. My wife gave me a sticker recently that says, Rabbit Hole Enthusiast.
• 8:15
  Bart: Oh, nice.
• 8:16
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm just looking for the right place to put.
• 8:19
  Bart: There you go.
• 8:19
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic, it shows, I like it.
• 8:26
  Tad Eggleston: Let's…
• 8:32
  Tad Eggleston: Let's start… let's stick with the documentary for now. Why Harvey? What… what attracted you to Harvey?
• 8:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… there are a million good answers to this question. I mean, this is not… this is not the…
• 8:45
  Tad Eggleston: why did you come up with this obscure, weird guy? No, Harvey's amazing. But what was your draw to Harvey?
• 8:52
  Bart: Yeah, well, I mean.
• 8:53
  Tad Eggleston: inspiration here.
• 8:55
  Bart: Sure, well, I was a comic book guy from the moment I came out of the womb, pretty much. My dad used to get me
• 9:01
  Bart: old Green Lantern comics when I was… my parents divorced, and that was his way of, I think, connecting with me, is that we'd go to the old comic book shop in the 70s, and he would, we'd pick some…
• 9:12
  Bart: Green Lanterns up, and we'd kind of read them, and I remember he also.
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: Good era to pick up Green Lantern.
• 9:18
  Bart: Yes, exactly.
• 9:19
  Tad Eggleston: traveling heroes.
• 9:20
  Bart: That's right, that's right.
• 9:22
  Bart: And he, He also had these old Mad Digests, and
• 9:30
  Tad Eggleston: I love those.
• 9:31
  Bart: Yeah, in the 70s, and sort of shortly after that, when I was kind of aware of what MAD was, it was a different thing from when Harvey started it, of course. It was, like, spy versus spy, and, you know, Dave Berg, and all these kinds of things that were maybe, you know, what some people say, and I can see their argument, it was meant for, like, a sort of a younger audience.
• 9:51
  Tad Eggleston: A little bit.
• 9:52
  Bart: So, good for me, I was happy to do… I was happy to read it, but…
• 9:56
  Bart: the mad stuff that came in the Digest, I remember leafing through one of the stories, and it was this kind of really darkly printed,
• 10:05
  Bart: parody of a television show, and each of the panels was like a television set, and they had the lines on the set. And,
• 10:15
  Bart: everybody looked… Semi… like, they look quasi-real.
• 10:20
  Bart: Right. But there was still something overdone about them and pronounced, and it scared the fuck out of me, if I can swear on this… if I could swear on this drug, yes.
• 10:28
  Tad Eggleston: You absolutely can.
• 10:29
  Bart: Okay, so it scared… it scared me, and I just… and I kind of put it away in my, you know, preteen self.
• 10:36
  Bart: But that was my first exposure to Harvey Kurtzman, and of course, Harvey and his collaborators, because he was well known for
• 10:43
  Bart: Right. That's really how he got his message out.
• 10:47
  Bart: So we cut to, I guess it was later, I would… every Boxing Day, which is, like, the day after, for Americans, it's the day after Christmas.
• 10:57
  Bart: In a lot of the Commonwealth countries. So, there's a big sale that happens, in Canada, or used to be. And, I would be lining up at my local comic shop in the rain, and, you know, 6 in the morning or something to get in there first.
• 11:13
  Bart: And there was a guy there who was working there who's a couple years younger than me, but he ended up getting the coolest job in the world at, like, you know.
• 11:20
  Bart: 13, 14, whatever he was, was just working in the comic shop, and I'm like, oh my god, this is amazing. So…
• 11:27
  Tad Eggleston: It is a pretty great job.
• 11:28
  Bart: Yeah, we sort of bonded…
• 11:29
  Tad Eggleston: On and off throughout my life.
• 11:31
  Bart: Definitely.
• 11:31
  Tad Eggleston: Great job.
• 11:34
  Bart: We sort of bonded over that, his name's Gareth Gowden, and he's actually in the film, and he actually, funnily enough, he now owns it.
• 11:40
  Bart: Who owns a comic shop?
• 11:41
  Tad Eggleston: interviewer.
• 11:42
  Bart: In my hometown.
• 11:43
  Bart: And,
• 11:45
  Tad Eggleston: Which, which comic shop?
• 11:47
  Tad Eggleston: Shout out.
• 11:48
  Bart: Legends, Comics, and Books.
• 11:51
  Bart: Or it's Legends Books and Comics, one of the two. Books and comics are comics and books. Sorry, Gareth, if I got the wrong one, but it is, if I can just do a sidebar here, it is one of the…
• 12:00
  Bart: when you go into a comic shop, you… I think, for me, you know if it's a good one.
• 12:03
  Tad Eggleston: comics and books.
• 12:04
  Bart: Smells…
• 12:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's the big…
• 12:05
  Bart: It's always like a comic shop.
• 12:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 12:08
  Bart: There's so many comic shops out there that are, like, toys and all that stuff, but this is none of that. This is, like, if you're a comic fan, this is where you go. And, of course, a lot of his work now, his business now is by eBay and so on and so forth, but he's still got the storefront, and
• 12:22
  Bart: Does cartooning classes and all this kind of thing.
• 12:26
  Bart: And, anyway, one day.
• 12:29
  Bart: he was… he was at some convention, I forget which one it was, but he weaseled his way into an EC reunion.
• 12:37
  Bart: And…
• 12:38
  Bart: And saw,
• 12:41
  Bart: he might have actually been nominated for an award for something, so maybe he didn't weasel his way in. It's been a while. Anyway, the point is, he met Adele, Harvey's wife there, and he went up and shook her hand and said, I became a cartoonist because of your husband, and she said, oh, nobody ever wants to talk about my husband, why don't you come over to my…
• 12:59
  Bart: House and visit. And he was just, like, his jaw dropped.
• 13:02
  Bart: So I posted on Facebook somewhere, it's like, I'm gonna go draw on Harvey Kurtzman's drawing board.
• 13:08
  Bart: And so I saw that, and I'm going, you know, having done the Mobius film and, you know, being a comics fan and things like that, and I said, has anybody done a film on Kurtzman before? And then…
• 13:18
  Bart: I guess, what was that? Probably 12 years later, here we are? But it's, it was not, of course, a direct line from, like, we're working every day for 12 years, but there was some stuff we had to figure out, and talk to the family, get them on board. Of course, they were wonderful to… they just said, go make the film you need to make.
• 13:36
  Tad Eggleston: You mean legalities and funding and all of that funding?
• 13:40
  Bart: Yeah, funding and all that kind of stuff, and also being true to it being Harvey Kurtzman's story. I mean, there was… along the way, there was a real…
• 13:49
  Bart: you know, there were pressure points along the way. It's like, why don't you just make a Mad Magazine film, because nobody knows who Harvey Kurtzman is. And I'm like, well, that's not really the story, because if you…
• 13:59
  Bart: for me, if you… if you know anything about Harvey, his…
• 14:04
  Bart: His work before Mad was interesting, with all the war books.
• 14:08
  Bart: Right. And then, of course, MAD itself was revolutionary.
• 14:11
  Bart: And then he leaves Mad pretty much early on, but then that's when the story gets really, really interesting, because you get all this other shit that we can talk about later here that just surprised the hell out of me when I first heard about it. And with Mad, if it's a
• 14:24
  Bart: documentary I'm Mad, you kind of get the idea, you know? It's like, yes, it's… it's been influential, it's ongoingly been a part of the vocabulary, it's part of the culture, but of course, it all started with Harvey. And I think…
• 14:37
  Bart: That's why Harvey's story interested me. It's because if it was just mad, that'd be one thing, but it's actually everything else that happened
• 14:46
  Bart: Before and after that, that kind of makes it… Shine, to me.
• 14:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he's…
• 14:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you described him as, you know, we brought up the Beastie Boys and the Rebellious, and, like, he… in, like, all of the best and worst ways.
• 15:05
  Tad Eggleston: like… Feels like he embodies that, like, he wants to make his own thing.
• 15:11
  Tad Eggleston: And… he wants to control his own things, so, like, I mean, I'd kind of heard the his leaving mad story, but… but, like.
• 15:22
  Tad Eggleston: the idea that, like, just as it was gaining steam, he would walk away rather than negotiate? Yeah.
• 15:32
  Bart: He's, you know, we're our own worst enemies.
• 15:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:35
  Bart: And I think, you know, for him, it's no exception, but at the same time.
• 15:39
  Bart: I don't know, I mean, if he'd stuck with MAD, I think it would have been maybe, after a while, kind of,
• 15:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, he almost certainly would have left eventually anyway.
• 15:47
  Bart: Yeah, he would have left eventually.
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because he would have gotten bored.
• 15:49
  Bart: You're right.
• 15:50
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 15:51
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but he also seemed like… It feels like…
• 15:59
  Tad Eggleston: He was one of those guys that, like, was kind of aware that he needed to learn
• 16:04
  Tad Eggleston: A little bit more business than he knew.
• 16:07
  Tad Eggleston: But couldn't be bothered.
• 16:09
  Bart: Yeah, yeah, I think you could say that. Or, or maybe sometimes… or you could also say that, I mean.
• 16:18
  Bart: You have to have a lot… you have to have an ego to be in any creative enterprise, and he certainly had his. And,
• 16:25
  Bart: and sometimes… I think especially with the way that he… related to…
• 16:32
  Bart: a couple of his publishers in particular, I think there was maybe a… not a deep understanding of what it was that they were providing in their relationship.
• 16:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know what I mean? Right.
• 16:42
  Bart: And maybe that's a kind way of saying it.
• 16:45
  Bart: But when I interviewed Jim Warren, who was his publisher and help, because I said to him, look, this feels like, you know.
• 16:53
  Bart: what eventually became a toxic director-producer relationship, which is kind of like the, you know… luckily I haven't had… well, I had one of those. Not in this film, but on a previous one.
• 17:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 17:04
  Bart: But, it's, it's not, it's not fun, and it's…
• 17:11
  Bart: I don't know where I'm going with this, other than to say that… that…
• 17:15
  Bart: that Harvey's… yeah, like I say, Harvey's his own worst enemy sometimes, and I think that can hit close to home for a lot of us in the creative field.
• 17:23
  Bart: And, It's just kind of funny that despite all that, he kind of stumbled through and
• 17:31
  Bart: You know, created this whole other language.
• 17:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 17:35
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and that's one of the points in the film that I appreciated was when you highlighted
• 17:43
  Tad Eggleston: the way, particularly, Western Europe.
• 17:49
  Tad Eggleston: views cartoonists as an art form, so… so… so when he was able to…
• 17:55
  Tad Eggleston: to be part of that, and then start doing conventions. He suddenly found the people that, like, got what he was trying to do, and hopefully made a little bit of money to make it easier to live, because that's always the balancing act with artists, is, like, business skills and art skills don't actually
• 18:14
  Tad Eggleston: Occur naturally together, very often.
• 18:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, when they do, it's great, and it's even better when, like Dennis.
• 18:22
  Tad Eggleston: They go, oh, wait, I have some business skills, none of my artist friends do. Let me help you guys!
• 18:27
  Bart: Great, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
• 18:30
  Tad Eggleston: You know?
• 18:31
  Bart: I mean, there's a famous thing that's, like, there's so many stories that you find, you know, found out about Harvey that couldn't make it their way into the film, but…
• 18:39
  Bart: Will Eisner, who's also another example of somebody who had good business skills and a great artist.
• 18:45
  Bart: would always chastise Harvey and say, Harvey, you gotta get this stuff written down, like, you gotta… you know, no more handshake deals, it's like…
• 18:53
  Bart: Right.
• 18:54
  Bart: That was… that was not Harvey's way. He thought he would kind of know.
• 18:57
  Bart: Knew the best way.
• 18:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean…
• 19:02
  Tad Eggleston: you spent more time with it, but, like, to me, it also felt like it was… it was partially deliberate, and it was partially… it just wasn't where his head was. It wasn't… it wasn't that it wasn't his way, as much as it was…
• 19:15
  Tad Eggleston: it was a foreign language. You're telling me I need to what? But they said that we were good.
• 19:23
  Tad Eggleston: Papers for other people! I'm… I'm busy drawing!
• 19:27
  Bart: Yeah.
• 19:30
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you, you featured a,
• 19:32
  Tad Eggleston: a Hugh Hefner quote that I've seen before, you know, I gave him an unlimited budget, and he somehow managed to overspend anyway.
• 19:42
  Bart: Great.
• 19:43
  Tad Eggleston: You know, which again, is… is…
• 19:47
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it's something that we see sometimes in artists. It's the balance of art and capital is, like…
• 19:56
  Tad Eggleston: Art, particularly art for consumers, does actually, like.
• 20:01
  Tad Eggleston: Require the money to come from somewhere.
• 20:04
  Bart: It sure does, and, you know, especially, like, and of course, Harvey wanted to be a filmmaker like so many others of his generation, really, but, you know, whether you're talking about film or magazines or whatever, it's like, it's always the marriage of…
• 20:18
  Bart: arts and commerce, and how much are you willing to compromise? And in some cases, with RV, it wasn't much, but other times, I think later on, I think you began to realize is…
• 20:30
  Bart: You know, I mean, obviously, as the family grew, too, it's like, you… maybe you're gonna realize you can't do everything, and and you've got…
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: I certainly had that feeling myself as I had children.
• 20:39
  Bart: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, me too.
• 20:43
  Tad Eggleston: But, what was…
• 20:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it sounds like you were versed in Kurtzman before you started this, but I assume that you learned a ton in talking to people and researching and whatnot. What was one of the most fun things that you stumbled upon? And if you don't want to do spoilers, we can addend the question and make it the most fun thing that you stumbled upon that you didn't make the film.
• 21:07
  Bart: Oh, interesting. Yeah, I don't know, I think…
• 21:11
  Tad Eggleston: Or both.
• 21:12
  Bart: It's funny, because sometimes… I don't know if your audience is, like, there might be a lot of Kurtzman
• 21:19
  Bart: experts on here, and I think I became one in a way. I would never put myself in the same…
• 21:26
  Bart: realm as, you know, an historian on Kurtzman, because I was more curious about him and wanted to follow where his story went. That's kind of my job as director of the
• 21:37
  Bart: And I think that,
• 21:40
  Bart: you know, facts are important, and they form the basis of everything that we do, but at the same time, you're trying to get the emotional investment from the audience, and frankly, myself in this film, like, for sticking with it for so long. So, I think that… I say that because
• 21:58
  Bart: some, what I say, maybe old hat to some of the Kurtzman experts out there, but I think… That's okay. But I think that,
• 22:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Dennis might wind up listening to this episode Because…
• 22:10
  Bart: renewals.
• 22:10
  Tad Eggleston: Jew and wisdom.
• 22:11
  Bart: Hello, de…
• 22:12
  Tad Eggleston: The one that told me to…
• 22:14
  Tad Eggleston: My mother is not a Kurtzman expert. Hi, Mom. My brother is not a Kurtzman expert. Hi, Adam. I don't think John or Britt, my other two regular listeners, hi John and Britt, are Kurtzman experts.
• 22:28
  Bart: Yeah, I don't want to apologize, I'm just, I've just sort of.
• 22:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 22:30
  Bart: it through myself as to how I…
• 22:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, Karen Green has been on the show, but I don't think she listens.
• 22:37
  Tad Eggleston: That'd be the only person.
• 22:39
  Bart: Oh, she's great, I'm glad that we got her.
• 22:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I love Karen.
• 22:41
  Bart: Mission that she's in.
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was… that was the other person that I'm like… Oh, wait, I can't send her an email. I have an email.
• 22:47
  Bart: Enjoy you.
• 22:47
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 22:48
  Bart: Oh, no, you know, you can send it to her. It's okay. Send… send her a note, just don't send her the project, because she's going to see it in a different context very, I hope, in the near future. But, I don't know, I guess, I guess…
• 23:03
  Bart: there should, in some sense, be no surprises, because Harvey's passed on, and that was, and, you know, his… his… the sort of… the main points of his biography can be found on the internet very, very quickly. So, basically, I think that…
• 23:18
  Bart: That being said, I think we started this early enough that there were still… I think the level of relationship that he had with some of these people that I knew that he intersected with.
• 23:28
  Bart: you know, Crumb, Gilliam, Gloria Steinem.
• 23:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was kinda… kinda weird, particularly watching it in the week that Gloria Steinem passed away, that, like.
• 23:37
  Bart: Yes.
• 23:38
  Tad Eggleston: I had no idea that Gloria Steinem had a history in comics?
• 23:43
  Bart: Yes, you know, it's interesting because there's a clip from Dennis that we really tried to find a way to fit in the film, but it will be in the Blu-ray for the… we're gonna do a…
• 23:54
  Bart: a campaign to get a Blu-ray out, like, when the time comes in the future. And it's going to be stacked with extra stuff, and one of the things is, is,
• 24:04
  Bart: Harvey.
• 24:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm inviting you back now to promote it.
• 24:07
  Bart: There we go, thank you, thank you. Harvey's Memorial, Gloria came up to her and gave a little…
• 24:13
  Bart: speech about women, sort of word people instead of… instead of visual art people, because she felt that there were… there were a lot of… like, Harvey was definitely a man of words in addition to art, and I'll get into that in a second, just how we did that editing-wise. But,
• 24:30
  Bart: She said that she learned
• 24:33
  Bart: more than she ever wanted to know about how to put together a magazine, thanks to Harvey.
• 24:37
  Bart: And,
• 24:39
  Bart: as someone who grew up with a mom in the feminist movement, I was basically, you know, I was…
• 24:46
  Bart: surrounded by Gloria Steinem when I was a kid. Like, I knew who she was when I was, like, 8 years old, or whatever it was. Like, there was free to be you and me, there was, like, this… a lot of…
• 24:55
  Bart: buttons and women's rights camp all over my house. So, so I was very aware of her impact, and of course, the fact that she had Wonder Woman on the first issue of her magazine was pretty cool.
• 25:06
  Bart: To me as a kid. But I think that I would have liked to have included more of Gloria, but because of her health and other reasons, there was no way to do it. So the fact that we included her the way we did in the film was fine, and I think that we
• 25:21
  Bart: you know.
• 25:22
  Bart: if we can't address a little bit more in the Blu-ray, we'll do that. But it's really the level of the relationship that they had. I mean, when we got to Crumb.
• 25:31
  Bart: Who doesn't give many interviews these days, but he…
• 25:37
  Bart: would do it with us, because it was a documentary on Kurtzman.
• 25:42
  Bart: he was wonderful, so amazing. I mean, my only exposure to Crumb had been, of course, consuming his comics from when I was a kid. My dad was a huge fan, so I grew up with them around the house, too.
• 25:53
  Bart: And, And of course, a documentary on him, so I had this particular…
• 26:00
  Bart: Vision of what it was gonna be like to sit down
• 26:04
  Bart: For the amount of time we had, and, and do the interview with, with, with…
• 26:09
  Bart: Was Grum. But he was so gentle and, reflective, and, really,
• 26:21
  Bart: I think he was kind of reconsidering a lot of, in his head, a lot of…
• 26:25
  Bart: how he lived through the 60s, and a lot of what the culture was back then, and everything. And I think… I wasn't expecting that. I wasn't expecting that level of…
• 26:34
  Bart: reflection. And I don't wanna, I don't wanna, you know.
• 26:39
  Bart: diss and say he wasn't capable of it. He certainly was, and I'm very glad… but it surprised me, and it was so wonderful to be a part of that conversation. I think that speaks to two things. One.
• 26:50
  Bart: Harvey's influence and relationship with him was so profound and loving that it's… it affected him deeply. And two, just, you know, just the benefit of time, and wisdom, and life, and and it was a real…
• 27:07
  Bart: lesson to me, in a good way, and I'm just very grateful for that time we had with him, and with Pete Poplosky.
• 27:13
  Bart: We did the interview.
• 27:19
  Tad Eggleston: You definitely… I mean, we talked about… you mentioned the archival footage of interviews with Harvey.
• 27:28
  Tad Eggleston: It felt like at least…
• 27:31
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the Stan Lee was archival, I couldn't tell, with a couple of people, what was…
• 27:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I don't want to give away names. That gets to be you, but
• 27:43
  Tad Eggleston: What was kind of the mix of archival versus being able to interview people? Because…
• 27:47
  Bart: They're…
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: There are a couple of people who aren't around yet, but… or aren't around anymore, but…
• 27:54
  Tad Eggleston: But were possibly when you started? Because I don't know when you started.
• 27:59
  Bart: I'll tell you, I… it's… I won't tell the exact date, because it's a bit embarrassing, but no, well, what the fuck? It's okay, I'll tell you. Basically, we started the, we started the film in, like, officially, 2017.
• 28:13
  Bart: So, almost, like, 9 years ago. And we didn't intend it to take this long, but basically, once we got the, the rights and we started working away…
• 28:24
  Bart: I'd just come off a film that I directed, in Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. It was about the impact of Oscar Niemeyer's
• 28:32
  Bart: work as architect, along with Lucio Costa, the urban planner, and, on… on designing this city that was… that was, intended to birth a new Brazilian citizen, and it couldn't change.
• 28:46
  Bart: So even… it's got UNESCO designation now, so it can't physically change without losing that designation. But people have chosen a different way of living, so you've got this really conflict between a very static city design and people's desires being something else. So…
• 29:03
  Bart: I interviewed Oscar Niemeyer, he was still alive at the time, he's 102.
• 29:08
  Bart: And, I was so nervous before that one. I wanted to get there before he passed on. And, I told myself I would never get in that situation again, but when we got the rights here.
• 29:19
  Bart: I knew going in, like I said, that I wanted the film to be, Harvey telling his own story as much as possible, surrounded by his inner circle.
• 29:29
  Bart: And I did, you know, there's a lot of, like I say, Harvey experts out there, I didn't really want to go down that road. It's all about the
• 29:35
  Bart: Harvey and the people that most immediately he worked with, because I think that's, to me, the juice of the story in so many ways. That gets us as close as we can to be as immersive as we can to Harvey.
• 29:47
  Tad Eggleston: I guess I didn't even completely notice that, but that's true. They were all, like, personal stories.
• 29:52
  Bart: Yes, yeah, very much. Except for… except for Matt Groening, which we'll get… well, even that was… was some, but… but he's maybe the only one that has a bit of a distance to Harvey, but… but,
• 30:02
  Tad Eggleston: But you had to slide them in, because then you can get the whole system.
• 30:05
  Bart: That's a good thing.
• 30:05
  Tad Eggleston: going.
• 30:07
  Bart: Exactly. No, it's a whole other story in itself, but… but basically, the,
• 30:12
  Bart: With… where was I… what was I talking about? I lost my train of thought. Harvey…
• 30:18
  Tad Eggleston: Trival versus…
• 30:19
  Bart: Yes, okay, so that's… so that was the idea. So therefore, I said, okay, when we got the rights, who's in their 90s? Let's interview them. Who's in their 80s? Who's in their 70s? We went down… I hope it's not offending anybody, but that's practically how we had to do it.
• 30:34
  Bart: To make sure that
• 30:35
  Bart: I wanted to make sure that we were able to get those voices, and actually, everybody we interviewed…
• 30:39
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know what… which is more offensive, to go backwards by age, or to, like, make some designation about their health.
• 30:46
  Bart: Right, exactly.
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know? Sometimes you just gotta be as practical as you can be, and…
• 30:52
  Bart: Exactly. And also, we wanted to try and get as much time with a lot of these folks as possible, because we knew that we weren't going to get much of an opportunity, so we deliberately over-interviewed a lot of these folks, and.
• 31:03
  Tad Eggleston: Now this makes me want the Blu-ray even more.
• 31:05
  Bart: Yeah, right, so we've got a whole bunch of stuff. So Al Jaffe and Art Spiegelman were the first two that we interviewed. Okay.
• 31:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Jaffe was the one that I wanted to… to…
• 31:16
  Bart: Yes.
• 31:16
  Tad Eggleston: to ask specifically, because Jaffe's a favorite of mine as well, so… so it was… it was so good to see him.
• 31:24
  Bart: And he was… it was just so lovely being with him. I mean, he,
• 31:28
  Bart: his, his wife had to get sent to the emergency halfway through our interview, and, he did, like, they had a… at the time, there were, like, two apartments right in Manhattan. There was, like, one that was his studio space, and the other, which I assume I didn't go into, but was his home. And,
• 31:44
  Bart: he got a call or something partway through, he said, oh, I gotta check in on something, he walked over, and then he walked back, and he said, okay, let's keep going. And then we found out afterwards, when he said, you know, we finished shooting with him, he said, well, I better check in on my wife. It turns out she was rushed to the hospital for some heart condition.
• 31:58
  Bart: And he said, well, I said, why didn't you tell us? We would have stopped the interview, my God. He goes, well, I didn't want to put you guys out. You spent a lot of time coming here, and…
• 32:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and…
• 32:09
  Bart: Anyway, she was all right, which is the main thing, but it's just… it was a bit of a…
• 32:13
  Tad Eggleston: I will also toss out, just for anybody who's listening and going, oh, that's terrible, like, one of the things that I'll say from my years in senior care is the older you get, the more you get
• 32:25
  Tad Eggleston: To the point of knowing where you're useful and where you're not.
• 32:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so his wife got brushed to the hospital, etc. If she was in surgery, or in the ICU, and he couldn't visit.
• 32:42
  Tad Eggleston: There's not…
• 32:44
  Bart: But there's… but there's still a difference between that and actually just telling us what's going on, because we wouldn't.
• 32:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 32:49
  Bart: It would have been nice to know, but… Anyway… It all works one in.
• 32:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's one of those. I don't want them to start asking different questions, because they're worried about my wife.
• 33:00
  Bart: Yeah, interesting.
• 33:02
  Tad Eggleston: I told my daughter to interrupt us if… if necessary. Yeah. Or whatever.
• 33:08
  Tad Eggleston: I just… I've seen weird stuff like that so much in my life that I have a different perspective on it sometimes, where it's like, oh yeah, sometimes we freak out about things that are just way beyond…
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: Our ability to… Yeah. Do anything.
• 33:26
  Tad Eggleston: And it's kinda nice not to.
• 33:29
  Tad Eggleston: And much easier once, like, the kids are grown up.
• 33:33
  Tad Eggleston: Freaking out about stuff with the kids is… is…
• 33:37
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know about you, but every time my kids got even remotely hurt, or whatever, I would immediately fall into, oh my god, what did I do wrong? What can I do? We must fix this.
• 33:50
  Bart: I don't know.
• 33:51
  Tad Eggleston: who was the most fun to interview?
• 33:55
  Bart: Yeah, so, what's that?
• 33:57
  Tad Eggleston: Who was the most fun to interview?
• 33:59
  Bart: Most fun to interview.
• 34:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is like picking between your kids, so…
• 34:04
  Bart: I, I don't think I want to go there.
• 34:06
  Tad Eggleston: Let's go a different direction.
• 34:08
  Bart: I'm gonna be, diplomatically Canadian, I'm gonna say that everybody had something
• 34:13
  Bart: With them that kind of surprised me, or that made me laugh, or made me… really,
• 34:21
  Bart: Think about the… You know, how a lot of his work relates to today in such a really…
• 34:30
  Bart: you know.
• 34:31
  Bart: chilling way, in a way, you know what I mean? It's like… I think that… that, you know, the danger of doing a film like this when you're… it's like a…
• 34:41
  Bart: it's like about somebody's life and work, is that it can be… well, one of two things. It can be kind of a pom-pom thing, and I think we've all seen enough of those, where it's just like, oh, this guy's amazing, and it doesn't really say anything.
• 34:54
  Bart: Or this woman's amazing, it doesn't say anything. Or it can be, it can be sentiment too, sort of overly sentimental without…
• 35:03
  Bart: Sort of bringing it into what today's…
• 35:06
  Bart: Like, what, what, what's… why are we talking about this right now? And I think… I think for me, the thing that…
• 35:12
  Bart: increasingly I got out of it is that Harvey's whole language of satire that we take for granted right now, that we're kind of… we're all products of.
• 35:23
  Bart: Just underlined how important satire is
• 35:28
  Bart: the way he developed it, especially in the world that we're in right now, because if we did, like, you know, satire has two functions, I think. One is…
• 35:37
  Bart: You get to laugh.
• 35:38
  Bart: Or the uncomfortable shift in your seat, or something.
• 35:42
  Bart: But the second is, and the one that's, I think, the most interesting, is it actually gets you to a point where you can have a conversation about how we're
• 35:50
  Bart: Designing this world that we're living in.
• 35:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:53
  Bart: So, one example is, this is probably not the best example, but I remember that Art Spiegelman was mentioning this in our interview, it didn't make it in the film, but… where… where he said, oh yeah, he said, you know, when he saw the Mickey Mouse parody in Mad Magazine, where it had… it was called Mickey Rodent, and
• 36:14
  Bart: Will Elder worked on it with Kurtzman. And, it's… it's basically a mouse on, you know, with two legs and… what was it, three fingers? Four fingers?
• 36:25
  Bart: And,
• 36:27
  Bart: Fuck that, you know what? Let's scratch that last part, because that's a bad example. If I… I'm only allowed one scratch, and that's it.
• 36:34
  Tad Eggleston: You mean I gotta edit now?
• 36:36
  Bart: Yes, you just gotta edit that one bid.
• 36:38
  Tad Eggleston: Gotta edit that one.
• 36:39
  Bart: That's it?
• 36:40
  Tad Eggleston: Bind that one bit.
• 36:42
  Bart: Don't worry.
• 36:42
  Tad Eggleston: How long?
• 36:43
  Bart: I'll make a big yell, and then you'll find in the waveform.
• 36:46
  Bart: There you go.
• 36:49
  Bart: Okay, so sorry about that. So, I think I'll wheel it back to…
• 36:55
  Bart: everything up to the point where I think I said satire, gets you to the point where you can talk about something that's real.
• 37:02
  Bart: oh, that's fine. It's the Mickey Rodin part that is the kind of useless.
• 37:06
  Tad Eggleston: We'll dump the Mickey Rodent part.
• 37:08
  Bart: Thank you. So, so…
• 37:10
  Tad Eggleston: Making me edit, after I told.
• 37:12
  Bart: so much.
• 37:12
  Tad Eggleston: I hate editing.
• 37:13
  Bart: No, but it says one edit, that's it. That's all I ask.
• 37:18
  Tad Eggleston: It's okay.
• 37:19
  Bart: I'll do it.
• 37:20
  Tad Eggleston: for you.
• 37:21
  Bart: So we can bring it up…
• 37:22
  Tad Eggleston: They watch your film.
• 37:23
  Bart: Yeah, so I can bring it up, I'll just go back in time to when I said.
• 37:26
  Bart: It gets us to a point where we can talk about something that's real, or whatever… Right. Talk about something that's real.
• 37:33
  Bart: So, basically,
• 37:37
  Bart: You know, if you're… if you're doing a satirical look at, like, a television show, or a…
• 37:43
  Bart: A news piece, or something that's in the popular culture.
• 37:47
  Bart: It can, you know, say, like, Real Housewives of whatever, right?
• 37:51
  Bart: It sort of leads to bigger questions about why are we creating this sort of, you know, glorified world where we're…
• 38:00
  Bart: Putting these things up in a pedestal, and, like, why…
• 38:02
  Tad Eggleston: Watching drunken women fight with each other?
• 38:05
  Bart: If they have too much money and too much.
• 38:07
  Tad Eggleston: little time.
• 38:08
  Bart: All that kind of stuff, and you could go down everything, down the line, from, like, you know, political satire and all that kind of stuff, especially. It's like, you know, why are we…
• 38:17
  Bart: why are we doing what we're doing? And I think that's what the sort of benefit of satire really is, and I don't know if.
• 38:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even before the conversation, I think it… it…
• 38:26
  Tad Eggleston: reframes the way we think about things. It unlocks the ability to think about things. Sometimes things that, like.
• 38:34
  Tad Eggleston: There are topics that are just…
• 38:36
  Tad Eggleston: So charged that we don't want to talk about them at all.
• 38:40
  Tad Eggleston: We don't want to think about them at all, other than in, like, the acceptable way.
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: So… so when… when there's satire, when there's something that pierces that bubble.
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: It allows both the thinking and the discussion To expand beyond…
• 38:59
  Tad Eggleston: The status quo into more of, well, but… but is that the best?
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: Like, what parts of this are good, and what parts are bad, and how can we be better?
• 39:12
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 39:13
  Bart: So it's… so it's really… it's a very useful tool, and I think that Harvey's work really, because it came up at a very specific time when mass media and pop culture were just really starting to form, that was…
• 39:26
  Bart: that was his jam, that was his language. That's why it's still so relevant today, is because we're so surrounded by all this shit. We're like, we're swimming in it. And with Harvey's…
• 39:37
  Bart: with Harvey's help, we've actually… it gives us access to something else, so I think that's… what's kind of cool about it.
• 39:43
  Tad Eggleston: One of the points that was made in the film that wound up resonating with me that much more in the weeks after Dolly Parton died was somebody talked about Harvey wasn't
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: Really political, except… That, like, humanity mattered.
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: Human rights mattered.
• 40:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we didn't necessarily…
• 40:08
  Bart: Really poor point.
• 40:09
  Tad Eggleston: point at this country, or this party, or whatever, but, like, war? Bad.
• 40:15
  Bart: Yeah. Well, actually, I think it was… because that was Terry Gilliam who said that, who worked.
• 40:19
  Tad Eggleston: It sounds right.
• 40:20
  Bart: On, on, on help.
• 40:22
  Bart: Before he went on to do Monty Python, etc. And I think that… that for him, Harvey was political, but never in the sort of capital P sense. Right. It's like, it's really about, like you say, about… about…
• 40:37
  Bart: How we relate to each other as humans, and
• 40:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:40
  Bart: And…
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: And I guess I didn't mean to imply that it wasn't political, because, like, that's… those of us who paid attention to the things that Dolly Parton did in her life know damn well that she was political. She just…
• 40:53
  Bart: Right, sure.
• 40:54
  Tad Eggleston: Her emphasis was on… Kindness and human rights, not…
• 41:00
  Tad Eggleston: Not this party, this person, this country.
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yup.
• 41:05
  Bart: And funnily enough, I think with Harvey, like, he got more political as it went on, even his little Annie Fanny stuff, which is…
• 41:12
  Bart: the stuff he did with Playboy Magazine, that started out maybe intriguing, but then sort of even his…
• 41:20
  Bart: Harvey's biggest fans will say that Little Annie Fanny was not his best work, and then, of course, there's the other
• 41:26
  Bart: You know, issue of, of, you know.
• 41:29
  Bart: how some of the portrayals in the strip were done, and all that kind of thing, which is maybe a different conversation now than it was back in the day. And we don't really go into that too much in the film. Maybe we should have, but we didn't.
• 41:41
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no.
• 41:42
  Bart: That was part of… I think people get it, for one. I think people…
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 41:46
  Bart: And, you know, we have some of Harvey's assistants talking about the process and things like that, and I think,
• 41:52
  Bart: I think it's, you know, there are certainly things we try to kind of go into that a little more, but it ultimately didn't make sense. I think it kind of… I think… I trust the audience's intelligence, so I think they're gonna…
• 42:04
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think you hit on it when one of the assistants talked about, do I agree with the message, and certainly the way the women's bodies were drawn? No, but it's working with Harvey Kurtzman!
• 42:18
  Bart: Yep.
• 42:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's…
• 42:21
  Bart: It's, it's… it's interesting, I think there's… There's a whole…
• 42:26
  Tad Eggleston: And even to the extent that you told the story, it was essentially, like, it was the most steady paycheck that he possibly ever had.
• 42:35
  Bart: Mmm.
• 42:36
  Tad Eggleston: And it was the, the, the long.
• 42:40
  Tad Eggleston: Rope of, oh, we might make a film out of this, and you could be involved in it, and that, you know…
• 42:46
  Tad Eggleston: So… It's, it's like… Crossroads between art and capitalism, like… Was it…
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely what he wanted to be doing? Possibly not.
• 43:00
  Tad Eggleston: Did he have children to… Feed and clothe, and who knows, maybe send to college by that point.
• 43:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, he did.
• 43:08
  Bart: He certainly did. Yes, he certainly did.
• 43:10
  Tad Eggleston: Did Hugh Hefner have a lot of money that he was willing to… Dole out in…
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: At least livable, like, doses?
• 43:23
  Bart: Yeah.
• 43:23
  Tad Eggleston: Also, yes!
• 43:26
  Bart: Indeed.
• 43:27
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it's always…
• 43:30
  Tad Eggleston: like, it's something, whether I'm learning and talking about old cartoonists, or whether I'm talking to working cartoonists today, it's always been the challenge, particularly for the artists, because there's only so fast you can make good pages.
• 43:51
  Tad Eggleston: to find the ways to, okay, like, I love my art, I want to tell these stories, I want them to be this way, I also like to eat.
• 44:05
  Bart: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean, talking about pacing, or how long it takes to make a page, that little Annie Fanny was, like, legendary for how…
• 44:14
  Bart: much detail went into it, and how long each page took, and what they had to do to get each page out.
• 44:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 44:19
  Bart: So that's part of what needs to be focused on, actually, the making of that section more than anything else.
• 44:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, when he was describing that, I'm sitting there going… Are you insane?
• 44:30
  Bart: I know, I know. Yeah, so it brings up the question, who's going to notice? But, of course, there is going to be… of course, you do notice at the end.
• 44:36
  Tad Eggleston: You do? You do.
• 44:38
  Bart: Different from anything else.
• 44:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah.
• 44:40
  Tad Eggleston: But, I mean, like, we did a, Jack Kirby Fourth World Club.
• 44:47
  Bart: Oh, yeah.
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: Where we went through his entire Fourth Worth output. Nice. A group of… a group of three of us, you know, reading it all.
• 44:57
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the things that I kept coming back to, particularly because there was a period where they were, like, doing classic Jack Kirby stuff at the back.
• 45:06
  Tad Eggleston: So you get, like, a newsboy legion from the.
• 45:09
  Bart: 50s, all the commandos.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I'd be sitting there going, is it possible that Jack Kirby got worse?
• 45:17
  Tad Eggleston: And then I went, no, he didn't get worse, he just got more time conscious.
• 45:21
  Tad Eggleston: Like, so rather than having the 8-panel page with an inset circle panel and interesting stuff, it became all 4-panel pages, and big splashes when he needed them, because, damn it, he needed to get 6 pages done tonight.
• 45:42
  Bart: Yeah.
• 45:44
  Bart: Well, that was a great series, my god. It's like, it's such a… there's always that…
• 45:49
  Bart: What if it could have been finished in his own terms?
• 45:53
  Tad Eggleston: They also say, what if he had trusted somebody, anybody?
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, not anybody, but… If there'd been somebody he trusted.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: To do a script polish and edit.
• 46:05
  Bart: Oh, sure, sure, yeah.
• 46:06
  Tad Eggleston: VIN.
• 46:07
  Bart: You mean you don't like Kirby's scripting?
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: its moments.
• 46:12
  Bart: It does, it does. Usually it's full of bombast. That is the one thing that I think…
• 46:18
  Bart: Probably even he would suggest, if he were alive today, he would look back.
• 46:22
  Tad Eggleston: But particularly given his stature at the time he was making it.
• 46:29
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like he still could have been in a good producer… like, I've long said.
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: that the single biggest problem with George Lucas' prequel trilogy to Star Wars
• 46:41
  Tad Eggleston: Is he should have had other people writing and directing.
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: It was clear that with Star Wars, what he cared the most about was producing.
• 46:51
  Tad Eggleston: And by taking on the writing and directing, it meant that he wound up with mediocre scripts.
• 46:57
  Tad Eggleston: And… and half-assed directing, because he was already thinking about the special effects.
• 47:03
  Bart: Yes.
• 47:04
  Bart: On the other hand, I guess he made so much money with the other stuff, if he just really wanted to do it, then go for it, man.
• 47:10
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 47:11
  Bart: All I can say is, whatever happened in the prequels still outshines the, two-thirds of the, of the, of the…
• 47:20
  Bart: Of the sequels, in my view.
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: See, I actually like the sequels, but I know I'm in a minority.
• 47:25
  Bart: I'm a fan of Last Jedi.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: Last Jedi is my favorite of the three sequels.
• 47:29
  Bart: the last one.
• 47:30
  Tad Eggleston: to Abrams, too.
• 47:32
  Bart: Oh, you like the last one? Oh, my sweet god.
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 47:37
  Tad Eggleston: I grew up on Return of the Jedi. Return of the Jedi is my earliest movie theater memory.
• 47:44
  Bart: Okay.
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: And if that's true, The Rise of Skywalker just hits a certain sweet spot.
• 47:49
  Bart: Oh my god.
• 47:50
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not willing to say…
• 47:51
  Bart: It's like…
• 47:52
  Tad Eggleston: good movie.
• 47:53
  Bart: Oh, no, it's like…
• 47:55
  Bart: I… ugh, I can't… I can't even think of that film anymore. I mean, especially in relation to what The Last Jedi was trying to do.
• 48:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 48:03
  Bart: something really… with one exception in that film. It was, like, so good, but…
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the irony is that among hardcore Star Wars geeks, I am… I feel like I'm in the minority, because I love The Last Jedi, and everybody's saying.
• 48:20
  Bart: I know.
• 48:21
  Tad Eggleston: A little what?
• 48:21
  Bart: Over time, you know, I'm just of the belief that over time.
• 48:25
  Bart: You know, time is gonna pass, and new people will look at it, and they'll see that it was actually the best one of the,
• 48:32
  Tad Eggleston: I'm certain. I mean, I always bring up, go read contemporaneous reviews of Empire Strikes Back, and then of Return of Jedi.
• 48:39
  Bart: Right.
• 48:39
  Tad Eggleston: Empire Strikes Back got panned, Return of the Jedi was a return to form.
• 48:45
  Bart: Right.
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: If you read contemporary… contemporary, you know, reviews.
• 48:50
  Bart: Yeah, so…
• 48:52
  Bart: And same thing's going on with Honor and Majesty Secret Service, and the James Bond movies. I mean, it's like, it's always been one of my top three, and it's like they… now it's finally starting to get its due, it seems like.
• 49:03
  Tad Eggleston: Now.
• 49:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the one and done turns out to be arguably…
• 49:08
  Bart: Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.
• 49:11
  Bart: Yeah.
• 49:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's actually one of the interesting things with fandom, is, like, you have…
• 49:18
  Tad Eggleston: you wind up having, and this is probably one of the good reasons that Harvey wasn't at MAD for too long.
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: Because… because… I don't… like, I can't imagine how Harvey would have gone through Having his own fans.
• 49:35
  Tad Eggleston: Be upset with his new work.
• 49:39
  Bart: But, boot.
• 49:40
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that fandom does is, like.
• 49:43
  Bart: I hate…
• 49:44
  Tad Eggleston: You start taking ownership of the version that is yours, and then when the creator does something different, it's like, why are you doing that?
• 49:52
  Bart: It's funny, because I think…
• 49:54
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, Jude again.
• 49:55
  Bart: I think there was a taste of that, because even when I talked to Crum, I remember that he talked to
• 50:01
  Bart: when Harvey was still in the throes of little Annie Fanny, he was… he was talking to him about that and dissing him a little bit, if memory serves correctly, and I hope I'm not misrepresenting anybody, but I… but I'm pretty sure that's what happened, because it went on for so long, and Harvey was so…
• 50:14
  Bart: adored by all the underground gang, and, you know.
• 50:18
  Bart: On so many levels, because not only of what he did, but of how…
• 50:23
  Bart: the relationships that he forged with so many of them. Right. That,
• 50:29
  Bart: you know, I guess the curse of some artists sometimes is your earlier stuff is better, unquote, you know? But… but on the other hand, artists have to evolve, and the only time he didn't, I would say, is maybe in the little Annie Fanny, because it wasn't… Right.
• 50:42
  Bart: And that was just funny.
• 50:43
  Bart: Yeah.
• 50:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 50:44
  Bart: Hard to believe 26 years. I mean, that's like…
• 50:47
  Bart: I can't imagine doing anything like that for 26 years, it just would have been…
• 50:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, then you look at Gasoline Alley.
• 50:55
  Bart: Was that 26 years? I'm sorry, I don't… like, I know… Oh, God.
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: gasoline.
• 50:59
  Bart: I didn't realize.
• 51:00
  Tad Eggleston: Gasoline alleys way longer than 26 years.
• 51:03
  Bart: Is it… I mean, are they still doing things like Marmaduke or the Family Circus?
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: No, but Gasoline Alley is still running.
• 51:11
  Bart: Okay.
• 51:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's, it's, it's on…
• 51:13
  Bart: Is it?
• 51:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's on at least its third or fourth cartoon. Well, but Frank King did it from 1918 to 1969.
• 51:27
  Bart: What the hell, are you serious?
• 51:29
  Tad Eggleston: 51 years that Frank King did it.
• 51:32
  Bart: Well, you know.
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter.
• 51:35
  Bart: Food on the table, looking to say…
• 51:37
  Tad Eggleston: Jim Scancarelli, who's doing it now, has been doing it since 1986.
• 51:43
  Bart: Wow.
• 51:44
  Bart: You know, it's funny, because it's sort of like… I mean, if it's going on that long, it has me look at things a little differently, I must admit, only because of the scope of the thing.
• 51:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 51:54
  Bart: But…
• 51:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's one of the ones we did for our… Carl Krumholz recommended it for our comic strip club, so I wound up
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: learning more about it than I'd realized before. And part of the reason he brought it up is, like.
• 52:09
  Tad Eggleston: It's, like, everybody in it ages. So, so, like…
• 52:14
  Bart: Oh, see, well, see, that's kind of interesting. I mean, you could just say the same thing about, for better or for worse, Lynn Johnson.
• 52:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, for better or for worse, it's been going for a long time. For that matter. Well, then rockets is… what?
• 52:25
  Bart: Right. Okay, well, I guess maybe I'm looking…
• 52:27
  Bart: because there's at least… if you're talking about, like, ongoing soap opera, that's kind of one thing, but if you're.
• 52:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 52:32
  Bart: about, like… I don't know, a gag strip that…
• 52:37
  Bart: like I say, pick your poison, I mean,
• 52:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Nancy went for a long time. I mean, Nancy's still going.
• 52:43
  Bart: Does it? Yeah.
• 52:45
  Bart: There's something I like about Nancy, but only because I was a big…
• 52:48
  Bart: Wait, hold on, you're talking Nancy, or you're talking… Because that's…
• 52:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm talking the Ernie Bushmiller Nancy.
• 52:56
  Bart: Listen, I can't say anything bad about that, because… which I would never do anyway, because Dennis is…
• 53:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Dennis is huge into Nancy, so be careful.
• 53:05
  Bart: Exactly, and also, and also, I do respect very much the, the whole Nancy,
• 53:11
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, Bush Miller did it for 44 years.
• 53:15
  Bart: But, okay, let's look at something like Garfield, for example. It's more like that's what I'm talking about. I mean, when I was a kid, sure, it was interesting.
• 53:22
  Bart: But I get more of a kick out of Garfield minus Garfield now. I don't know if you know that strip.
• 53:28
  Bart: Somebody went in and removed the cap.
• 53:30
  Tad Eggleston: That's hilarious.
• 53:30
  Bart: re… terrific.
• 53:31
  Tad Eggleston: cat out.
• 53:32
  Bart: And so it basically just says, John.
• 53:35
  Bart: talking to himself sometimes, and it's so, like, depressing. It said… they say it's about, like, the existential angst of being, like, a middle-aged person.
• 53:43
  Bart: in today's society or something, it is freaking hungry. Garfield minus Garfield. I think it blows Garfield itself out of the water.
• 53:53
  Tad Eggleston: But it is also still running, and he's been at it for 48 years.
• 53:57
  Bart: Well, good for you, Jim Davis. I mean, I'm more of a… I'm more of a beginning, middle, and end guy, so I…
• 54:03
  Tad Eggleston: Me too.
• 54:04
  Bart: Yeah, Bloom County is, like, my go-to for…
• 54:08
  Tad Eggleston: He is fantastic.
• 54:09
  Bart: You know, these trips, it was just my sweet spot of… political…
• 54:14
  Bart: Childlike in some ways, and,
• 54:16
  Tad Eggleston: Mine is… mine is probably,
• 54:19
  Bart: of…
• 54:19
  Tad Eggleston: Alvin and Hobbes, but that probably has to do with the fact that I was born 10 years after you.
• 54:24
  Bart: Right, okay, there we go. Yeah, I know, but I also like Calvin Hobbes a lot, too.
• 54:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 54:29
  Tad Eggleston: But for that matter, Charles Schultz did peanuts for more than 50 years.
• 54:33
  Bart: He did, he did. Okay, maybe it's, you know, Elena.
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: I actually agree with you that I don't understand how people do it. Like, Schultz in particular, because it is mostly a gag strip.
• 54:48
  Tad Eggleston: And it didn't lag.
• 54:51
  Bart: No, no, there's something…
• 54:52
  Tad Eggleston: Peanuts is amazing.
• 54:54
  Bart: As a Canadian, also, there's something about peanuts that I will always admire, because
• 55:00
  Bart: something about Charlie Brown walking in the snow is, like, that… not that it snowed where I was born much, but it still tugs at you. It's like there's this universal… universality to it, and this,
• 55:11
  Bart: This sort of real… Again, existential kind of vibe to…
• 55:17
  Bart: to, to, you know, being the smart kid, in a way, you know? Right.
• 55:22
  Tad Eggleston: And it's another comic that was, not considered political, but definitely had that human rights message and would occasionally… I mean, most famously, there was the one where he did a whole Sunday comic without taking a specific side.
• 55:39
  Tad Eggleston: Where everybody is freaking out because somebody said a prayer at school.
• 55:45
  Tad Eggleston: And it was mostly, like, is this really, really something we're gonna freak out about? Not, not, you know…
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: But then there's also a whole week of strips, I forget which year it is, but long before it was a major, major…
• 56:02
  Tad Eggleston: hot-button issue in the United States, so, like…
• 56:09
  Tad Eggleston: mid-80s, probably? There's, like, a week of strips where Snoopy's trying to get a driver's license and can't get a driver's license. He's trying to get a fishing license and can't get a fishing license. You know.
• 56:21
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the punchline to that week of strips is him walking out with an assault rifle, because anybody can…
• 56:29
  Bart: Wow, man, my God. And when was that? What year was that one done?
• 56:33
  Tad Eggleston: I wanna say it was 1987?
• 56:36
  Bart: Holy crap, that's,
• 56:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I came across it randomly one day, and went, oh my god!
• 56:45
  Tad Eggleston: like, awesome, I ju- I now like you even more.
• 56:50
  Bart: Yeah, yeah, it's like, who doesn't, who doesn't like Charles Schultz? I mean, it's just, like, the guy's a…
• 56:56
  Bart: Yeah.
• 56:57
  Bart: It was beautiful.
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I mean, he's another example of, like.
• 57:02
  Tad Eggleston: there's some… there's some Kurtzman in him, too, where… where, like, he had to do it all his way, he… he just managed to have enough business sense slash…
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: Enough things go his direction that he was able to make it work.
• 57:19
  Tad Eggleston: Even though he sometimes way overworked himself.
• 57:22
  Tad Eggleston: Like, when they got into making movies and stuff, like, he had to oversee all of it.
• 57:30
  Tad Eggleston: I, you know, I, I, I, I…
• 57:33
  Tad Eggleston: I've read and watched a couple of documentaries, and it's like.
• 57:36
  Tad Eggleston: That's just so much work to subject yourself to.
• 57:41
  Bart: Did you see the Charles Schultz talk that's out, they just, they just, it was a couple years ago, right? The Charles Schultz one? I thought it, like, I tried to see every comic documentary I could, but for some reason, that one never
• 57:52
  Bart: I never got it yet, but…
• 57:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, look at that, I just came… I'm looking for the specific,
• 58:01
  Tad Eggleston: comic that I was just talking to, so I'm going through safe comics I have on Go Comics, and I just came across July 5th, 1973, he has,
• 58:09
  Tad Eggleston: Alfred E. Newman.
• 58:11
  Tad Eggleston: It's the end of the Mr. Sack.
• 58:15
  Tad Eggleston: Storyline that starts with him waking up, and his head's a baseball, so he puts the paper sack over it.
• 58:23
  Bart: Ugh.
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: And he wakes up.
• 58:27
  Tad Eggleston: And his head's back, and he looks up, and rather than the sun rising, it's Alfred E. Newman going, what me worry?
• 58:35
  Bart: Oh.
• 58:37
  Bart: Wow.
• 58:40
  Tad Eggleston: So this is the crazy places that this podcast sometimes goes, Bart.
• 58:47
  Bart: I love it. I gotta say, I… no, no, I gotta say, it's like, it's making me… you know, it's so funny, because moving, abroad and,
• 58:57
  Bart: You there?
• 58:58
  Bart: Yeah.
• 58:59
  Tad Eggleston: I'm here, I was just sharing my screen so you.
• 59:01
  Bart: Oh yeah, okay. Yeah, and then having a family and everything else, like, there's certain…
• 59:07
  Bart: And I had kids late, so I guess late by the sort of traditional sense, so basically I've, I have a whole new relationship to time now that I didn't before.
• 59:16
  Tad Eggleston: Man.
• 59:17
  Bart: And again, just a deeper respect for what Kurtzman was able to do, because, you know, you gotta make choices sometimes.
• 59:25
  Tad Eggleston: I don't… I thought I had it saved. I don't see it saved, so I can't give you the specific date right now.
• 59:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I could probably Google it, but that's not as much fun. We'll go back to just talking about…
• 59:38
  Tad Eggleston: Kurtzman or you? Actually, we should start talking a little bit more about you, because we're running up against the time that we were…
• 59:46
  Bart: Oh, yeah.
• 59:47
  Tad Eggleston: Brian is stay within.
• 59:48
  Bart: Yeah, no worries, we can… we can keep moving, it's okay, I didn't get.
• 59:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 59:52
  Bart: my wife, so that means I'm okay.
• 59:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay. So… so I'm gonna ask for an abbreviated version of one of my favorite questions that I don't always get in, and then we'll go into the two… two…
• 1:00:04
  Tad Eggleston: closing questions. You, you talked about getting…
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: Green Lantern comics with your… with your dad when you were young, and that was kind of your starting point in comics. But give me your comics biography. Give me, like, what…
• 1:00:23
  Tad Eggleston: What books do you remember?
• 1:00:26
  Tad Eggleston: Seeking out, reading, buying, that were meaningful to you, that shaped Who you are.
• 1:00:34
  Bart: Wow, okay.
• 1:00:35
  Tad Eggleston: the years.
• 1:00:37
  Bart: Interesting. I'm gonna have to… okay, so I guess I don't want to go…
• 1:00:42
  Bart: purely chronological, so I'm just gonna vomit.
• 1:00:44
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay.
• 1:00:45
  Tad Eggleston: Vomiting out is… I'm all for vomiting.
• 1:00:47
  Bart: That is good, yeah, so… so let's see. Okay, well, I will… I will sort of give my shout out to Gil Kane and, John Broom of Green Lantern. That's really…
• 1:00:56
  Bart: Of course, there's the Denny O'Neill, Neil Adams run that's legendary, but, you know, when I was a kid and bonding with my dad and everything, it's like the Gil Kane…
• 1:01:05
  Bart: I heard on, on this other podcast, I think it's, what is it called?
• 1:01:10
  Bart: Because I love them so much. It's a checkered Past. I don't know if you've noticed it, but they do… they're going through every…
• 1:01:18
  Bart: every issue of the checkered brand, Go-Go comics from DC in the, the 60s.
• 1:01:24
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:01:25
  Bart: It's like they're going through 500 comics, like, reading every one, and it's, like, it's pretty insane. So anyway, somebody said they… that Gil Kane drew the best male asses in comics.
• 1:01:38
  Bart: And when he said that, it reminded me, you know, quite wistfully of me with my dad. For some reason, it's a strange dissociation. But, you know.
• 1:01:46
  Bart: later on in that run, Green Lantern was, like, a lot more fluid, and his butt was up in the air a lot of the time. I have no frickin' idea why.
• 1:01:54
  Bart: But, anyway, there's… there's something about… about that whole…
• 1:01:59
  Bart: run, you know, pre-O'Neill and Adams that I just… I loved. It was like, anything was possible. And that's kind of what I grew up on really adoring, is that kind of vibe.
• 1:02:12
  Bart: I mean, sticking with superheroes, I guess I'll move into… I was, like, you know, the right age when Vertigo came out, and even before that.
• 1:02:20
  Bart: Grant Morrison, I just fell in love with. Like, the moment Animal Man and Doom Patrol came out, I was just incredibly hooked. I would consume anything that he wrote. I, I, I don't know where this is gonna go, Joe, but I can say it anyway. I took Peyote because Grant Morrison wrote about his books.
• 1:02:38
  Bart: And… and,
• 1:02:41
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, they are a wizard.
• 1:02:43
  Bart: They opened… or yeah, sorry, they opened my eyes to a lot of things, and and just really had this right blend of…
• 1:02:52
  Bart: of,
• 1:02:55
  Bart: intelligence and, creativity that just, like, still blows my mind to this day. So, pretty much anything by, by Morrison, I will look at, even now.
• 1:03:10
  Bart: And then, you know, moving into the indie stuff, I mean, Dan Close, 8 Ball, I mean, you know, like, Velvet Glove,
• 1:03:18
  Bart: What is it, a metal glove wrapped in iron? Whatever it was?
• 1:03:21
  Tad Eggleston: cast iron…
• 1:03:22
  Bart: It scared the fuck out of me, oh my god.
• 1:03:25
  Bart: That was, like, everybody was sweating in that… That series… everything was dark.
• 1:03:33
  Tad Eggleston: Like a velvet glove cast.
• 1:03:34
  Bart: David Lynch on acid, but, you know, in black and white pages, it was just like, what the… Damn. So, yeah, it scared the hell out of me, and, and,
• 1:03:43
  Tad Eggleston: I have… Dan Klaus sold his… Boyhood Comic Collection 2… Chicago Comics.
• 1:03:53
  Tad Eggleston: when… when his mom… I forget if it was when his mom passed away or had to move out of their…
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: the house that he'd grown up in, and he didn't feel like moving him all the way back to San Francisco.
• 1:04:03
  Tad Eggleston: So I have one of his issues of Daredevil.
• 1:04:06
  Tad Eggleston: And he, like, put stickers on them that, like, he'd write.
• 1:04:10
  Bart: No.
• 1:04:10
  Tad Eggleston: Really small handwriting, like, who the artist was, basic storyline prod.
• 1:04:17
  Tad Eggleston: So you didn't have to take them out of the bag and board to know about the issue. So yeah, I have, I have one of Dan Klaus's.
• 1:04:24
  Tad Eggleston: Daredevil issues.
• 1:04:26
  Bart: That's great.
• 1:04:27
  Tad Eggleston: And I got it for, like, 10, 15 bucks, something like that.
• 1:04:31
  Bart: Beautiful.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which is cool. I'm way more proud of, like, little artifacts than that, like that, that, oh, I've got the number one, or the first appearance of.
• 1:04:41
  Bart: Yeah, I know, I actually sold all my Green Lanterns when I finished university, because I… I don't know. I mean, A, I needed money, but B,
• 1:04:49
  Bart: I was moving around so much by that point that it's just like…
• 1:04:52
  Tad Eggleston: They get heavy.
• 1:04:53
  Bart: I can't cart all these things all around everywhere.
• 1:04:55
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't reached the point where I can get rid of any yet, but I have tried to slow down on what comes in physically.
• 1:05:02
  Bart: Well, I gotta sell.
• 1:05:03
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not doing a great job of it.
• 1:05:04
  Bart: Listen, I have to…
• 1:05:05
  Tad Eggleston: dry.
• 1:05:06
  Bart: you know, there are times I wish I hung on to those Green Lantern comics a little more, because, of course, the show's out now, and there's probably going to be a spike, and I haven't even bothered to look what my comics would have been worth now, but…
• 1:05:17
  Bart: Anyway, it is what it is, but… but yeah, Morrison… anyway, going back to Morrison, so they got me to, funnily enough.
• 1:05:24
  Bart: to re-engage with a lot of the independent and underground work that I'd kind of sporadically looked at in my, you know, because my dad had all the ZAP comics and all the, you know.
• 1:05:36
  Bart: Everything like that, when I was growing up, and and…
• 1:05:42
  Bart: Yeah, and getting into Morrison, maybe try to re-look at those again, and that's how he got more into…
• 1:05:47
  Bart: indie stuff, like, by Seth and, and all that kind of stuff,
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and… and growing up in Canada, you… you…
• 1:05:56
  Tad Eggleston: Where in Canada did you grow up?
• 1:05:58
  Bart: Vancouver.
• 1:05:59
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you. Okay.
• 1:06:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so not, not, not like…
• 1:06:04
  Tad Eggleston: right in the drawn-in quarterly area, or the Toronto scene, but there's still a lot of… lot of good…
• 1:06:11
  Bart: Yeah, there are, I mean.
• 1:06:12
  Tad Eggleston: Canadian Comics.
• 1:06:14
  Bart: It's… yeah, you can't.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly in that, that… Not quite underground, more what they call alternative comics. Spain.
• 1:06:23
  Bart: I, you know, embarrassingly, because I was born in Victoria, so that's where I spent a good chunk of my time before I moved to Vancouver, but I'd have to really, really dig to think about what
• 1:06:34
  Bart: what sort of indie comics folks are out there, other than, you know, Ken Stacy's out there, and of course, Gareth, and
• 1:06:45
  Bart: I'm sure there's other people, and I'm so embarrassed. I would have… had I known there'd be a test, I would have…
• 1:06:50
  Tad Eggleston: There's no test. Just because I teach is my day job doesn't mean I grade.
• 1:06:55
  Bart: No, it's good. There's… I mean, also, Pia Guerra and, Ian Boothby are there, who are friends of mine, and Pia's, I mean, I love what she's done now. She, like, she did Why the Last Man, but now what she's doing…
• 1:07:07
  Bart: political cartooning, which I think is frickin' amazing. It's so good, and with Ian as well, and it's so…
• 1:07:14
  Bart: So,
• 1:07:17
  Bart: Yeah, I mean, there's a whole host of stuff. I mean, that's kind of my trajectory. It's like, it started out with the Green Lantern, then into the Morrison, and then revisiting the Underground with Dennis' gang and all that kind of stuff, and, you know, and then into…
• 1:07:30
  Tad Eggleston: That's a good trajectory.
• 1:07:32
  Bart: Yeah, I mean, you know, I liked Kate Meaton's last, last work, I think Ducks, I think it was called.
• 1:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: Ducks is so good.
• 1:07:38
  Bart: So honest and raw, and just, like…
• 1:07:41
  Tad Eggleston: I got to meet Kate Beaton at…
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: Comics Crossroads Columbus a couple years ago.
• 1:07:46
  Bart: She's such an incredible person, I really… Yeah.
• 1:07:50
  Bart: Yeah, it's a real privilege. It's one thing about doing this film on, on Kurtzman, is, like, it's…
• 1:07:56
  Bart: like, on one hand, I keep it as a… kept it as a job, but on the other hand, it's like…
• 1:08:02
  Bart: Getting to be… Getting to really be present with,
• 1:08:10
  Bart: all these wonderful creators on so many different levels is just such a gift, and I'm very grateful for the generosity that everybody
• 1:08:19
  Bart: Most of our interviews were, like, a day, you know, if we could, if we could do it…
• 1:08:22
  Bart: It's like, we sort of did…
• 1:08:25
  Bart: Half-day interviews for some of the older folks, but usually we try to do, like.
• 1:08:30
  Tad Eggleston: Spend a day with them.
• 1:08:31
  Bart: Whole bunch of time.
• 1:08:33
  Tad Eggleston: And comics people, I have found, you know, 900-some-odd episodes into this podcast in 5 years. Comics people are actually remarkably generous with their time.
• 1:08:45
  Bart: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:46
  Tad Eggleston: And enjoy talking to people who… who both appreciate their craft and the medium that they're… that they love, you know?
• 1:08:56
  Bart: It's… there's some similarities with documentary, actually, because we work in such small teams.
• 1:09:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:01
  Bart: I was talking with Josh Dysard about this one, he's another great writer, he did, yep. Yeah.
• 1:09:06
  Bart: it's basically, I saw him at…
• 1:09:11
  Bart: No, he was at Comic-Con one year, and I was there too, and he said, why didn't you reach out? Because I was actually working, doing some shooting for something.
• 1:09:19
  Bart: And then I said, well, look, I just remembered that if I go to a film festival.
• 1:09:23
  Bart: It's my one chance to be around my… documentary people.
• 1:09:28
  Bart: And, you know, we work in, like, teams of 3 or 4, or whatever it is, like, you know, at different stages, right? Like, editing is one stage, and then the shooting is the other stage, etc.
• 1:09:37
  Bart: But they're all very small, and if I'm a comic creator, and I get to go to a
• 1:09:42
  Bart: Comic-Con, I want to be with my frickin' comic people, and just really…
• 1:09:46
  Bart: Get to connect and learn things and all that kind of stuff, and, you know, the fans, of course, is sort of a different thing, but with the fellow creators, it's like a real opportunity.
• 1:09:56
  Bart: So… Fuck, where was I going with this? I have another…
• 1:10:00
  Bart: Oh yeah, okay, but anyway, so, so, but we… Dennis actually says in this film that, that Harvey…
• 1:10:06
  Bart: you know, had a similar thing to what you're talking about, which is basically, he never really knew his audience for a long time. Right. He kind of guessed that it existed.
• 1:10:17
  Bart: But until he actually started going out into the world.
• 1:10:20
  Bart: with the help of Dennis and things like that, and the comic convention started popping up, he could see the impact of what he created, and that's quite…
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: I think Dennis specifically talked about having booked a 500-seat room and having Harvey laugh at him, and then it was standing room only.
• 1:10:34
  Bart: That's right, exactly. Yeah, so it's like…
• 1:10:38
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, that leads perfectly into one of my two closing questions. This is my fifth year of doing this podcast, and I feel like I've fallen into the Twilight Zone. The number of people that I count among my friends.
• 1:10:54
  Tad Eggleston: the experiences I've gotten to have, the people I get to talk to, that if you'd told me when I was 15 that this was going to be my life, I would have been like, on what fucking planet? Really? That's funny.
• 1:11:07
  Tad Eggleston: Are you selling me something?
• 1:11:10
  Tad Eggleston: But it is, it's my life. I have… I have friends that used to be these mythical names in books.
• 1:11:18
  Tad Eggleston: I've made more friends in my 40s than I made in my teens, and while I wasn't the popular kid, I never had a ton of trouble making friends. I wasn't, like, an outcast or a loner.
• 1:11:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I found that everybody in the comics industry, certainly, but really kind of in the art community in general.
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: has… stories and… and… Feelings like this as well, where it's like…
• 1:11:51
  Tad Eggleston: you think back at something and go, oh my god, was that… was that Bart Simpson in the room?
• 1:11:57
  Tad Eggleston: How was that Bart Simpson in the room?
• 1:12:01
  Tad Eggleston: So I started collecting those surreal experiences, like, specific or general or whatever, like, those things that, like, you… you…
• 1:12:12
  Tad Eggleston: still kind of sit back and go, wow, this is… this is part of my life, or… or something that I got to do.
• 1:12:20
  Tad Eggleston: So… yeah.
• 1:12:22
  Tad Eggleston: Really open-ended, you can go any direction you want with it.
• 1:12:25
  Bart: Oh, okay, so you're talking about responding to that idea of, like, this.
• 1:12:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, to tell me… tell me a story…
• 1:12:33
  Tad Eggleston: about you that wouldn't be part of your life. In your case, if you weren't a documentary filmmaker, but if you can make it comics-related, that makes it more apropos to the comic… er, to the comics podcast, but I'm not that picky.
• 1:12:47
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, like, it… particularly because, like, creatives don't get…
• 1:12:53
  Tad Eggleston: Paid as well as some other possession.
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Professions, it's nice to know that… that there are parts of our life that are really outstanding.
• 1:13:03
  Bart: Oh, I see. Well, you know, it's funny, I… there's…
• 1:13:06
  Bart: I've got ADHD, so I have this, I've been mulling…
• 1:13:14
  Bart: I've been mulling doing something that's not a film.
• 1:13:20
  Bart: Just to try and make sense of it for myself, because…
• 1:13:25
  Bart: when I look back, especially at the last couple of years.
• 1:13:28
  Bart: Or the last couple, last 20, 30 years.
• 1:13:31
  Bart: It's been, there's been some amazing things that have happened, and I realize that You know,
• 1:13:41
  Bart: I guess talking specifically about this film, meeting all these people is great, and on the other hand, it's part of the job, but…
• 1:13:48
  Bart: I feel that sometimes…
• 1:13:50
  Tad Eggleston: There aren't many jobs that allow you to sit down with Art Spiegelman for a day.
• 1:13:54
  Bart: No, but on the other hand.
• 1:13:56
  Bart: Here's… here's the thing, it's like, I… maybe my sense of wonder and…
• 1:14:02
  Bart: surprise has really been battered around a fuck of a lot over the past number of years, and it's… it's in part because I've…
• 1:14:12
  Bart: you know, just… it's been a… yeah, I mean, it's tough financially, it can be, like, I've still made a go of it, which I'm very happy about. I mean, I know people who've left the industry, I know people who stayed on, and we all look kind of different, right? But…
• 1:14:24
  Bart: But, I guess… Part of why…
• 1:14:31
  Bart: I talked about this ADHD thing, is that sometimes I can forget
• 1:14:37
  Bart: How privileged it is to be in this situation.
• 1:14:41
  Bart: Living, period, for one.
• 1:14:44
  Bart: And I think that,
• 1:14:47
  Tad Eggleston: And in Iceland now, which I would.
• 1:14:49
  Bart: Yeah, I know.
• 1:14:51
  Tad Eggleston: It's very pretty and nice.
• 1:14:52
  Bart: Because in some ways, it all kind of makes sense. And people say to me, it's like, hey, you're in Iceland? It's like, yeah, I'm here. It's like, it doesn't totally register yet, and I think.
• 1:15:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:15:03
  Bart: Need a vacation or something.
• 1:15:05
  Bart: to, to really… Trigger into the beauty.
• 1:15:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the film will go wide in a little while, and then you'll owe yourself a short one.
• 1:15:14
  Bart: Yeah.
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: A week or two.
• 1:15:17
  Bart: I'm answering your question, because I think that… I don't want to see… I think the thing is there can be, and I know that other people must feel this way, but
• 1:15:25
  Bart: that you can kind of lose perspective sometimes, and
• 1:15:30
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's one of the reasons the question came about for me, is it's a way to challenge myself to step back and think about it from time to time.
• 1:15:39
  Bart: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:40
  Tad Eggleston: You can take the challenge or not take the challenge.
• 1:15:42
  Bart: No, I'll take it, I'll take it, I'll take it. I think that…
• 1:15:45
  Bart: I think, you know, I mean, I've lived in Brazil, Scotland, Montreal, Newfoundland, Vancouver, now in Iceland, it's like…
• 1:15:55
  Bart: there's a cost to everything, you know what I mean? It's like there's a…
• 1:15:59
  Bart: I'm a very social person, and sometimes when you're moving around so much, especially now that I've got a kid, it's like my social circle, you know, immediate social.
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: Reset.
• 1:16:09
  Bart: In the same city, it gets set all the time, and that takes a lot of adjustment. The older you get, I think for myself, I'm finding the harder it is to kind of really…
• 1:16:18
  Bart: you know, re-engage, and I think that's something I'm just kind of struggling with right now, and that's part of the reason why maybe
• 1:16:24
  Bart: this whole element of surprise and delight and everything like that gets a bit muted. But on the other hand, I'm remembering something that I said
• 1:16:33
  Bart: at the… in Edinburgh recently, about what's one thing that
• 1:16:39
  Bart: I'm surprised or grateful for something that happened, and I think…
• 1:16:43
  Bart: what I'm grateful for as far as this project goes is not only the people I got to meet, but also…
• 1:16:49
  Bart: And the conversation we were about to have, and the story that we were…
• 1:16:52
  Bart: telling that goes beyond Harvey, of course. It goes into the way that we talk about the world.
• 1:16:58
  Bart: But… is the people I was working with, they all bought in.
• 1:17:02
  Bart: to the idea that this is a film about Harvey, and about what Harvey's…
• 1:17:07
  Bart: Life and work can tell us.
• 1:17:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:17:10
  Bart: And… and everybody, you know, from the camera person, to the editor, to the sound designers, to the composer, we're all aligned. And I think… and looking back, it's like, fuck, that's great, because there was really…
• 1:17:23
  Bart: There is…
• 1:17:24
  Tad Eggleston: Almost like it wasn't just a job, but a mission.
• 1:17:27
  Bart: No, yeah, it was a mission, because there was, like I say, a lot of pressure from some circles in the past version to make this more of a mad film, and I think that would have done it a real disservice, and I'm happy that we got to really stick to our guns, and really, I got to make the film I wanted to make, and I'm super grateful for that.
• 1:17:44
  Bart: And… Moments like that kind of make me,
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that in and of itself is a surreal moment. I mean, I don't…
• 1:17:53
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, I mean…
• 1:17:57
  Tad Eggleston: I bring this book up a lot just because it struck me in a lot of ways beyond just the fiction of it. Tom Hanks wrote a novel a couple years ago called The Making of the Next Motion Picture Masterpiece.
• 1:18:11
  Tad Eggleston: my friend… my friend R. Sikoriak got to do 24 pages of comics for the book, so that… that was what put it on my…
• 1:18:18
  Tad Eggleston: put it on my radar to begin with. But I bring it up because one of the things that it posits,
• 1:18:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, talks about, like, no matter what you think about this movie, or that movie being a good movie, or a bad movie, or a good movie for this director, or a flop for this director, or whatnot, any movie that gets made is a miracle.
• 1:18:40
  Tad Eggleston: The number of places where it can all fall apart and just stop.
• 1:18:46
  Bart: Yeah, it's like this one in particular. It's like, that's why I said it had this weird mirroring of Harvey's life, right? The more I learned about Harvey, it's like, the more I said.
• 1:18:54
  Bart: God damn, this is, like, way too close to what's going on right now. It's like, I can't… and it's… so… but, you know, I remember the trust that… that the Kurtzmans and Dennis put… put, you know, put, what do you call it? What's… how do I say it?
• 1:19:08
  Bart: The, the trust with…
• 1:19:09
  Tad Eggleston: You put in the practice.
• 1:19:10
  Bart: So that's… and that means something to me. And,
• 1:19:15
  Bart: So… and whenever I got too serious about it, I had my wife and kid that I can kind of look at, and… and they're kind of my center of so… so much, so it's like…
• 1:19:24
  Tad Eggleston: Very cool.
• 1:19:25
  Bart: It, yeah, I think, I think that answers your question. It's a pretty.
• 1:19:29
  Tad Eggleston: You know?
• 1:19:29
  Bart: It does actually get me re-engaged about the beauty of, especially documentary making, because it's such a… it's like the… for me, it's the way that you can…
• 1:19:39
  Bart: it unifies so much of the… so many different kinds of arts, but also it's purely based on human relationship. That's, like, more than any other
• 1:19:48
  Bart: form, right? You gotta be true to that.
• 1:19:52
  Tad Eggleston: My closing question forever has been… Tell me something you love.
• 1:19:58
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 1:20:02
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
• 1:20:05
  Tad Eggleston: But something that you love.
• 1:20:08
  Tad Eggleston: And not enough other people around you have experienced it, you really wish they would so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:20:16
  Bart: Oh, man, holy Dinah.
• 1:20:20
  Tad Eggleston: I love this question.
• 1:20:26
  Tad Eggleston: It's also how I build my reading list.
• 1:20:29
  Bart: Yeah, okay, well, I'll give a couple of answers.
• 1:20:31
  Tad Eggleston: Or my film list, or my music.
• 1:20:32
  Bart: Yeah, one is, one is, and this is, I think, a… maybe a…
• 1:20:38
  Bart: maybe it's… maybe it's not that I wish more people would know about it, because I think a lot of people already do, especially in the UK, but…
• 1:20:43
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, well, Nate Powell once gave me Jonathan Hickman's X-Men and made it clear. It's not that tons of people aren't reading it, just not many of my friends are.
• 1:20:51
  Bart: Okay. Stone Rose's first album. Okay. That is the sound of being in love to me. That is the… if there's one album that… that is just… every song on it is perfect start to finish, that's it. It's the,
• 1:21:09
  Bart: Yeah, Stone Roses, the Stone Roses from 1989, I think it is. And I was so happy that I… they reunited
• 1:21:17
  Bart: when I was cutting a previous film in Scotland, and they were playing in Manchester, so if you knew anything about, you know, the Manchester scene in the 90s, and the importance of the Stone Roses as one of the bands that really
• 1:21:32
  Bart: Made that whole scene explode.
• 1:21:35
  Bart: getting to see them right in Manchester was like going to frickin', you know, Mecca. It was like, basically, they had all these… all these, you know.
• 1:21:45
  Bart: beat up 40- and 50-year-olds in pillbox hats with rave whistles on, and they're putting their hands up in the air, you know, singing love songs. I mean, it's just… it's glorious. That's… that's number one. And,
• 1:22:00
  Bart: I mean, for comics, I just, like, I… ugh, I… it's weird, because…
• 1:22:06
  Bart: on the one hand, making a film about Kurtzman makes me want to really…
• 1:22:11
  Bart: Put the spotlight on the independent creators and the,
• 1:22:18
  Bart: The, underground folks, and,
• 1:22:22
  Bart: all that kind of stuff. I mean, I know that it might be less known now, so I just re-read the Contract with God trilogy by Eisner.
• 1:22:30
  Tad Eggleston: So good.
• 1:22:31
  Bart: just… it just, like, it made me cry, again, like, after… even after years, right? And,
• 1:22:37
  Bart: And in particular, for some reason, the second book in that trilogy, A Life Force, was really the one.
• 1:22:43
  Bart: Jumped out at me.
• 1:22:45
  Bart: I mean, there's so many…
• 1:22:48
  Bart: like I, you know, I mentioned ducks and all this stuff that's coming out now, but I think…
• 1:22:54
  Bart: Oh, God, what is it?
• 1:22:57
  Bart: there's gotta be a Morrison book that really is the one that kind of jumps out at me. I don't know why, but…
• 1:23:03
  Bart: Oh, yeah, Seven Soldiers, baby. Seven Soldiers by Grant Morrison.
• 1:23:08
  Bart: That one is,
• 1:23:10
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't actually read that one.
• 1:23:12
  Bart: Criminally underrated.
• 1:23:15
  Bart: what, you know, again, I feel a bit… I don't know why I feel bad, because I love the book, but… but after… after… I feel like, you know, comics…
• 1:23:25
  Bart: can be seen as high art or low art, and sometimes when I… I have to catch myself, because I think about when I talk about superhero stuff, it's like, it's…
• 1:23:34
  Bart: doesn't have the same echelon as the other stuff, but that's such a stupid dichotomy. It's like, you know, everything is valid, everything is… is,
• 1:23:42
  Bart: you know, has its access point. But yeah, Seven Soldiers, for me, was the one that actually made me re-fall in love with comics after some time away, and
• 1:23:52
  Bart: It was… it's basically a, seven intersecting four-issue miniseries of… across all genres, everything from
• 1:24:02
  Bart: Fantasy to, superhero to horror to…
• 1:24:08
  Bart: All that kind of stuff, and sort of story-wise.
• 1:24:12
  Bart: None of the main characters really meet.
• 1:24:15
  Bart: But… they all impact each other's things. So, I mean, just the mathematics of that
• 1:24:20
  Bart: whole thing was just jaw-dropping to me, and I'm just… I'm stunned that it hasn't gotten as more attention than it should, to be honest, because.
• 1:24:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it just went on my list.
• 1:24:30
  Bart: That's great. Well, it's a nice big read of 30 issues, or whatever it is, so…
• 1:24:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:24:34
  Bart: Yeah.
• 1:24:35
  Tad Eggleston: 792 pages if you buy the omnibus, but I.
• 1:24:38
  Bart: There we go.
• 1:24:39
  Tad Eggleston: I have DC Unlimited, so I'll probably just read it digitally, at least for start with.
• 1:24:44
  Bart: Well, the catch is how you read it, because you can read it the way it came out, which is basically, issue one of a miniseries, then issue one of another one for the first four, and then you go to issue two.
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: Well, what's your recommendation?
• 1:24:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'll take your recommendation.
• 1:24:59
  Bart: I mean, I don't know, it's been a while since I read it, but I will say that basically, doing it
• 1:25:05
  Bart: doing it that way, which is, I think… I remember when I was deep into it, this person named Barbalith actually did annotations of the entire series, except for the last issue.
• 1:25:15
  Bart: And and they, I think, show a recommended way of doing it, which is the way it came out, which is basically the first four issues
• 1:25:24
  Bart: The first issues of four of them, and then you finish those, and then it goes on to the last 3.
• 1:25:30
  Bart: Anyway.
• 1:25:32
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like.
• 1:25:32
  Bart: You know, it's funny because there's sometimes… I read something recently which gave me some comfort whenever I get
• 1:25:38
  Bart: discouraged about,
• 1:25:42
  Bart: you know, my analysis of certain things, and I don't want this to seem like I'm a… I've got a stick up my ass, or a, you know, whatever, but… but basically,
• 1:25:53
  Bart: That there's a distinction between intellectual and an artist.
• 1:25:58
  Bart: I think it might have been Lynch who said this, I don't know.
• 1:26:01
  Bart: And basically, I don't have to explain everything when I'm an artist.
• 1:26:05
  Bart: That's true. Except when you're doing funding applications. Right. Especially in Canada. In which case you have to… especially doing a documentary, you have to say exactly what's going to happen for the entire documentary, which makes no sense. But that's what you have to do to get the money. And,
• 1:26:21
  Bart: yeah, but so… and there's a distinction between
• 1:26:26
  Bart: the intellectual and the artist, and they're both two different valid things, but they don't have to cross-pollinate. So… so I… sometimes I feel something in my gut, I don't know why it's there, I just vomited you seven soldiers.
• 1:26:39
  Bart: somebody else is going to have to tell you why that's important that I said that at this particular time, but it's the first thing that popped in my mind.
• 1:26:47
  Tad Eggleston: I like it.
• 1:26:49
  Tad Eggleston: I like it. Well…
• 1:26:51
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you for spending your evening, because you're… you're what, 5 hours in front of me?
• 1:26:57
  Bart: Five hours ahead, yes.
• 1:26:58
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you for spending your evening with me.
• 1:27:02
  Tad Eggleston: I enjoyed myself immensely, I enjoyed the film immensely, I hope we'll find excuses for you to come back, either to pitch this film more, pitch other films, or just come talk comics.
• 1:27:14
  Bart: I'd love to. And I will mention that also that, we're going to be… we premiered in, in,
• 1:27:21
  Bart: A couple weeks ago in Edinburgh, went really well.
• 1:27:24
  Bart: And, we're… we're going to be announcing, are…
• 1:27:31
  Bart: Future screenings closer to where you are.
• 1:27:36
  Bart: In the… in the weeks and months ahead, but it's not gonna be too long. So, so we're… we're excited to get on the road. We have to basically.
• 1:27:43
  Tad Eggleston: As long as Canada doesn't decide that they're not shipping any film to the United States?
• 1:27:49
  Bart: Oh yeah, well, that's another issue.
• 1:27:51
  Tad Eggleston: That would be totally…
• 1:27:52
  Bart: It's a whole other issue.
• 1:27:53
  Tad Eggleston: I would probably support them in that.
• 1:27:56
  Tad Eggleston: But I'd also ask if they would start, accepting U.S. refugees.
• 1:28:02
  Bart: Oh, yes.
• 1:28:03
  Tad Eggleston: At what point do we… do we qualify for refugee status?
• 1:28:09
  Bart: Yeah, well, it's pretty soon.
• 1:28:12
  Bart: But, you know, on the other hand, we need you guys.
• 1:28:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I wish that was more of a satire than it is.
• 1:28:17
  Bart: I know, well, you know, it's somebody… what was it? Tom Lehrer famously said something like,
• 1:28:22
  Bart: satire is dead because Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Prize, and sometimes it sort of feels like, you know, that's what's happening down there, but…
• 1:28:30
  Bart: At the same time, we need you guys down there to fight the fight, you know what I mean? Like, it's…
• 1:28:34
  Tad Eggleston: I'm doing my best.
• 1:28:35
  Bart: All of a sudden, everybody leaves, who… it's like.
• 1:28:38
  Tad Eggleston: Among other things, I refuse to stick to comics on the podcast.
• 1:28:44
  Tad Eggleston: If that costs me mythical listeners, that costs me mythical listeners.
• 1:28:51
  Bart: Hunger.
• 1:28:52
  Tad Eggleston: I get really frustrated when we're not able to just call things out.
• 1:28:57
  Tad Eggleston: As, like, like, it's just… there's certain things that just…
• 1:29:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I get jealous when I look at a Harvey Kurtzman or a Dolly Parton, because they managed to get away with just saying, this is wrong, and not having people go, stop getting political! It's like.
• 1:29:12
  Bart: Great.
• 1:29:14
  Tad Eggleston: This really shouldn't be a political thing.
• 1:29:18
  Bart: Yeah.
• 1:29:19
  Tad Eggleston: Why is the idea that weapons of war being easily available to 18-year-olds is a Bad idea.
• 1:29:27
  Bart: Yep.
• 1:29:29
  Tad Eggleston: a political stance.
• 1:29:31
  Bart: Yeah, very much so, yeah.
• 1:29:34
  Tad Eggleston: Again, Bart, thank you, thank you so much.
• 1:29:38
  Tad Eggleston: I avoided, until now, saying I Karumba.
• 1:29:42
  Tad Eggleston: Educated.
• 1:29:42
  Bart: Okay, no, everybody… listen, everybody's allowed one Bart Simpson joke. It was my dad.
• 1:29:46
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right. I mean, I wanted to be careful, because I figured you've gotten a lot of it in, like, the last…
• 1:29:52
  Bart: Listen, more is gonna come, so… I'm, I'm prepared.
• 1:29:57
  Tad Eggleston: But, it has been a pleasure, and for 22 Panels and Bart Simpson, we will see you after the next page.