Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #294... 22 Panels with Ezra Claytan Daniels

Transcript

With Great Power #294... 22 Panels with Ezra Claytan Daniels · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is Ezra Clayton Daniels, who's… you know, you probably won't remember any of this, but you were one of the first people I reached out to way, way back.
• 0:16
  Tad Eggleston: after Karen Green told me or hipped me to, are you at risk for empathy myopia?
• 0:23
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, wow, that's a deep cut.
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: that, yeah, it was one of the things that she… she was, I think…
• 0:29
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just gonna look it up. We're gonna actually find out where Karen Green fell on the… on the guest list. This is… this is where it's advantageous that I, I, I…
• 0:40
  Tad Eggleston: name episodes… Differently, if they're interviews versus other stuff.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: You're gonna be, I think, the 290th… 4th? 93rd? 94th interview episode.
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: Which is still weird to me.
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because we're only at, like, 220 weekly episodes, so it's like, wait a minute, how did this show that initially we didn't know if we were going to be doing interviews…
• 1:12
  Tad Eggleston: Wind up having more interviews than weekly episodes.
• 1:17
  Ezra Daniels: Those interviews are fun!
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: They are, but I didn't know that so many people would say yes.
• 1:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, initially, because I…
• 1:29
  Tad Eggleston: People don't believe it when they only meet me… Karen was the 9th with Great Power episode.
• 1:35
  Ezra Daniels: Wow, that's early!
• 1:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, it would have been… that was in February of 2022, so that was around the first time that I reached out to you. And we went back and forth, and then you were the one that said, I'm busy, circle back at this time, and I forgot to circle back. And I circled back, like, 8 months later, and you were busy again.
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: And then I forgot to circle back.
• 2:00
  Ezra Daniels: Man, well, we made it work.
• 2:02
  Tad Eggleston: But this time, I happened to circle back the week before you have a book coming out, so that's where we'll start here, is introduce, give us the front power…
• 2:12
  Tad Eggleston: The front counter pitch… for…
• 2:17
  Ezra Daniels: Mama came calling.
• 2:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah.
• 2:19
  Ezra Daniels: I'm so bad at giving the pitch, but Mama Came Fallen is a story about a young woman
• 2:24
  Ezra Daniels: Who, survived an attempted murder when she was a little kid by a man who wore the hide of a dead alligator as a mask, and she survived the attack, and her dad was,
• 2:40
  Ezra Daniels: arrested for the attempted murder, and spent the last 20 years of his life in jail, and he is released from jail and beelines it back to her with a message telling her that, I'm not the one who tried to kill you, the people who did it are still after you, and you're in danger. And then, the next morning, he's found dead.
• 2:59
  Ezra Daniels: And that's where the mystery kicks off, where Kira has to… the main character's name is Kira, and she has to figure out
• 3:05
  Ezra Daniels: What her dad was trying to tell her, if he was lying, if he was just trying to cover his ass, or if there's other people that are actually out there trying to do something shady.
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: And this is where I have to really quickly, for people who read monthly comics, say, no, Ezra didn't…
• 3:20
  Tad Eggleston: Ruin anything, even if you read the first 40 pages of this book and go, why did you tell me all of this?
• 3:26
  Ezra Daniels: Stop.
• 3:26
  Tad Eggleston: There's still more twists… That's just the beginning. All that sort of thing.
• 3:32
  Tad Eggleston: That's the hook in the beginning.
• 3:33
  Ezra Daniels: But it's… it's…
• 3:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because you've got a layered beginning, because you start with her and her mom.
• 3:41
  Tad Eggleston: And then you go into the present day, so… so, like, I really… I loved your beginning, which is why I was shocked when you told us right away that Dad said he hadn't done it, and I'm like, I guess that is still the beginning, it's just…
• 3:55
  Ezra Daniels: I think it's on the back of the book, I think it's written on the back of the book.
• 3:58
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't read the back of the book, I just read the pages, man.
• 4:02
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know if the back of the book is on the PDF I got sent.
• 4:07
  Ezra Daniels: Well, he can edit that part out of the interview.
• 4:10
  Tad Eggleston: No!
• 4:11
  Ezra Daniels: It's not on the back of the book.
• 4:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, because I… I mean, unless you decide that you want me to edit it out, I kind of like to have all of this stuff raw, because… because that's part of…
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: Comics more than almost any other medium.
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: I think people, should…
• 4:36
  Tad Eggleston: temper their expectations, and I don't mean that in, like, the… the… let's keep our expectations low, I mean that in the… in the…
• 4:49
  Tad Eggleston: I talked to Chris Ryle on Friday, and Chris Ryle adapted Megalopolis.
• 4:54
  Tad Eggleston: and one of the things that he and I both agree regarding the moon…
• 5:00
  Tad Eggleston: has been panned across the board, is that, really, the problem is, everybody went in going, oh, it's Francis Ford Coppola's masterpiece! So when it wasn't Apocalypse Now, and it wasn't The Godfather, they're like.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: what's going on here? I don't know what I'm watching, and they decided that it was bad because of that.
• 5:20
  Tad Eggleston: comics, as a medium, like, you can't go, oh, don't ruin anything, because, well, I mean…
• 5:26
  Tad Eggleston: There are so many different ways to tell a story, there's so many.
• 5:29
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 5:32
  Tad Eggleston: No matter what you think you know about a writer, no matter what you think you know about storytelling, like, you're gonna enjoy it best if you just open it up and enjoy it, rather than sitting there going.
• 5:44
  Tad Eggleston: can't know anything, or I must know things, or it's gonna be like this. I don't know, do you read a lot of weekly comics still?
• 5:53
  Ezra Daniels: I don't read a lot of weekly comics. I usually wait for the graphic novel collections or just self-contained stories.
• 5:59
  Tad Eggleston: Have you gotten to see any of, Dennis Camp's Assorted Crisis events?
• 6:04
  Ezra Daniels: No.
• 6:05
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that's my big recommendation to everybody right now, because, like, Nobody… well, and…
• 6:13
  Tad Eggleston: the second big recommendation for anybody is also Dennis Camp. It's Absolute Martian Manhunter, because with both books.
• 6:21
  Tad Eggleston: He is using the medium itself to tell the story.
• 6:25
  Tad Eggleston: Like, every freaking issue.
• 6:29
  Tad Eggleston: you know, one of the recurring gimmicks in Martian Manhunter is, like, you have to put the page up to the light to get the whole thing.
• 6:39
  Ezra Daniels: Stuff like that.
• 6:40
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like… each issue of Assorted Crisis Events is a one-shot.
• 6:49
  Tad Eggleston: One and done.
• 6:50
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the world itself is kind of defined, but beyond that, the stories… and they're just human stories, but they also, like…
• 6:59
  Tad Eggleston: completely… Break all of the… formula barriers.
• 7:07
  Ezra Daniels: That's cool.
• 7:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'll have to check that out. I like the, I like the…
• 7:12
  Ezra Daniels: I like them being one-and-done stories. I think that's the big reason why I, and probably a lot of people who feel daunted by getting into weeklies, don't get in.
• 7:19
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 7:20
  Ezra Daniels: so much to get into. And I even have written a couple of things for… I did a couple things… I wrote a couple things for Marvel. I did a Wolverine story, and it was part of a… it was part of the, Infinity…
• 7:34
  Ezra Daniels: Crisis? Infinity Crisis, that came out last year, a couple years ago?
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I, I, I, I don't know, but I'll figure it out.
• 7:45
  Ezra Daniels: But anyways, it was such a crazy experience, because I hadn't been following the weekly stories, and there was so much leading up to this particular event that I just wasn't aware of.
• 7:55
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly if you're in an event.
• 7:57
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, so I had so much homework to do. Infinity Watch. Yeah, Infinity Watch.
• 8:01
  Tad Eggleston: remember that.
• 8:02
  Tad Eggleston: So you were in the annual?
• 8:04
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. Okay. I did a Wolverine, one-shot. Yeah, the Wolverine…
• 8:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'll have to go read that now.
• 8:12
  Ezra Daniels: But it was really fun, I mean, it was obviously a dream come true, and I did one of the stories for,
• 8:19
  Ezra Daniels: I don't know why I'm forgetting the title of these books, but I mean, in my defense, the titles for some of these Marvel event books can be a little repetitive, and… Well, I mean…
• 8:31
  Tad Eggleston: said Infinity, I'm like, which infinity?
• 8:33
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, exactly.
• 8:34
  Tad Eggleston: For half a second, I thought of Final Crisis. I'm like, no, that's.
• 8:38
  Ezra Daniels: No, yeah!
• 8:40
  Ezra Daniels: So, that's… that's in my defense, but the one I did…
• 8:43
  Tad Eggleston: Watch Gauntlet?
• 8:45
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, how many are there? But I did a Marvel… Marvel Voices…
• 8:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… I have… I have Marvel Unlimited, and I have DC Universe, because I… I try to get as few…
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: physical Marvel and DC as possible at this point. I wait until I hear, oh, it's great, and then I go read it, because I just pay for the subscriptions.
• 9:09
  Ezra Daniels: That's smart, that's the way to do it.
• 9:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, I mean, sometimes it's smart. Sometimes I go…
• 9:14
  Tad Eggleston: God, I've been paying 8 bucks a month for both of these, and I don't think I've read anything on either of them for, like, 3 months.
• 9:22
  Ezra Daniels: Well, you have the option. It's nice to have the option.
• 9:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 9:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and then I'll binge some… then I'll spend… read, like, 300 comics in a month, and I'll go, okay, now it was worth.
• 9:31
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, now I paid for it.
• 9:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm sorry, this is another place where we're bantering too much before we start.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: can make it hard, because I, like, I'm so in media res that I'm trying to sit there going, okay, what do we need to say for listeners? Hi, Mom, hi Britt, hi Adam, hi, John. That might be all of the… oh, wait a minute, there's a guy named Chris that emailed recently, so hi, Chris.
• 10:01
  Tad Eggleston: There might be more listeners, I don't know yet.
• 10:06
  Tad Eggleston: So if you don't get the bump that you were hoping for, my apologies, I will continue to sell your book every opportunity I get.
• 10:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's what we should go back to. We should go back to…
• 10:18
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a teacher, it's the end of the week. I'm remembering…
• 10:22
  Tad Eggleston: See, I remember the mama part. Mama Came Calling. We'll go back to Mama Came Calling. I, I, I, I loved it, because…
• 10:30
  Ezra Daniels: Thank you.
• 10:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I expected to. You two could fork, but… layered… mental health stories…
• 10:43
  Tad Eggleston: That aren't exclusively mental health stories.
• 10:47
  Tad Eggleston: R… both delicate, to do… Because they're… it's important to… to… to, like.
• 10:59
  Tad Eggleston: Do it right, and not make… Any of the struggles into…
• 11:07
  Tad Eggleston: MacGuffin-type things, rather than, like, actual character things.
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: If you wanna, like, like this story, where, yes, the mental health stuff is really important.
• 11:23
  Tad Eggleston: But it's not actually the story, it's the…
• 11:31
  Tad Eggleston: characters.
• 11:32
  Tad Eggleston: And that's… it's just a really… like, like, this level of… of… Deep character…
• 11:41
  Tad Eggleston: characters, it's anxiety, sense of loss, trauma, etc, is normally the stuff that you see in memoirs, or books that are just about that. So, like, balancing that, it was just… I found myself really, really impressed, and, like, diving…
• 11:58
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I… I initially, like, when you said, how about the 30th or the 31st, I went.
• 12:05
  Tad Eggleston: will I have time to get this done by then? And then the next thing I knew, I hadn't put it down.
• 12:11
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, great, that's so great to hear.
• 12:15
  Tad Eggleston: Even though it's a high enough quality PDF that I had to, like, go through 4 different readers before I could find one that was not having trouble with it.
• 12:25
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it's a really… it's a really high-resolution PDF to send to people. I downloaded it the other day, I'm like, why is this two gigs?
• 12:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, well, and particularly, again, it becomes hard because not all of the readers can handle it without going…
• 12:41
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think there's anything on this page.
• 12:43
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, no, there's something on this page that… You know, and, like…
• 12:50
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, I need to… I need to make certain. Is it… is the only primary color yellow?
• 12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Because… Yeah. Okay. Every once in a while, I've had a PDF experience where I wound up getting one color and finding out later that there were supposed to be more.
• 13:08
  Tad Eggleston: So for, like, the first 30 pages, I was wondering, you know…
• 13:13
  Tad Eggleston: is the… is this the PDF is… is not reading properly? It looks good, so I don't think it is.
• 13:22
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 13:22
  Tad Eggleston: I forget the point where I decided, no, this was important, this was what they did.
• 13:28
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah, I hope it came through, but yeah, we were trying to go for a… it's actually a duotone, it's a really dark blue,
• 13:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 13:36
  Ezra Daniels: yellow, and so the idea was that when the colors overlap and play with each other, it would create this kind of nauseous green that would kind of, like.
• 13:44
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. That was probably where I… where I figured it out, was…
• 13:48
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 13:49
  Tad Eggleston: one of the places where there was the green. And I kind of picked up that it wasn't really a grayscale, but I'm not as good at color as my wife. If I'd shown it to my wife, she would have immediately gone, what are you talking about, black and white? That's blue.
• 14:00
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it's subtle, because it's a super dark, it's like a really slaty blue, but we spent a lot of time working on the colors and choosing a pair of colors that would look, passable on their own, but also work together to create this… we really wanted to feel like this kind of, like I said, a nauseous or claustrophobic, color, color story.
• 14:19
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, and I… I didn't even have those words, but yes, I felt both of those things at various…
• 14:27
  Tad Eggleston: Points.
• 14:30
  Ezra Daniels: Great.
• 14:30
  Tad Eggleston: Which is one of those…
• 14:31
  Ezra Daniels: Easy idea.
• 14:32
  Tad Eggleston: about comics is that they can make you feel things that you can't
• 14:35
  Tad Eggleston: Keep your finger on why you feel them.
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, so talk to me about…
• 14:43
  Tad Eggleston: Because you have, at this point, three… well, I'm just gonna assume that this one's gonna get nominated for everything like the other two did. Three incredibly well-regarded graphic novels. Bottom Feeders.
• 14:57
  Tad Eggleston: Upgrade Soul, which I… which I did, like, a quarter of a reread today, and enough to go, oh yeah, this is amazing. And… and… and… now,
• 15:08
  Tad Eggleston: Mama came calling.
• 15:10
  Ezra Daniels: There you go.
• 15:10
  Tad Eggleston: Remember, one of these times.
• 15:13
  Tad Eggleston: I always remember the mama, but for whatever reason.
• 15:15
  Ezra Daniels: I'm thinking…
• 15:16
  Tad Eggleston: the mom is the second word, so I'm, like, I'm digging for that first word.
• 15:23
  Tad Eggleston: I need to just put it up on screen in front of me. That's what I should have done at the beginning. You know, it's… it's… did I mention I teach high school?
• 15:31
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, we're all learning. We're all… we're just getting by. We've got bigger problems than the…
• 15:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:36
  Ezra Daniels: book.
• 15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right, k- yeah, no, I, I, I had a therapy appointment earlier today, and, and… I found myself going…
• 15:49
  Tad Eggleston: Was the second shooting in Minnesota really only?
• 15:53
  Tad Eggleston: Last Saturday.
• 15:54
  Ezra Daniels: God.
• 15:55
  Tad Eggleston: It was, wasn't it?
• 15:56
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 15:59
  Tad Eggleston: It's still January?
• 16:01
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, yeah.
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: How many days in January were there? I thought February was the month with a… with a variable number of days, and I thought it only got to have one extra day every four years. It feels like this January has been, like.
• 16:17
  Tad Eggleston: A thousand days.
• 16:18
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 16:22
  Tad Eggleston: And now I lost… I lost my other train of thought. I had a better train of thought going.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right. So, I mean, you are…
• 16:38
  Tad Eggleston: a… a… Established cartoonist in your own right.
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: you know, there was no drop-off between Bottom Feeders and Upgrade Soul. I mean, because I'm a big Ben Passmore fan, so when your second graphic novel came out and I only saw your name on it, I'm like.
• 16:58
  Tad Eggleston: I'll give this a shot.
• 16:59
  Tad Eggleston: And I loved it, so I'm glad I did, but initially it was like…
• 17:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he did really good writing, but I really love Ben's art.
• 17:10
  Ezra Daniels: That's great.
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: Then!
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: Ben, who's a very good karaoke singer, too.
• 17:21
  Tad Eggleston: I've seen him a couple times out at CXC on karaoke night. He always… he always drops the mic. That's funny.
• 17:28
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 17:28
  Tad Eggleston: Upset the karaoke dudes.
• 17:32
  Tad Eggleston: But he could.
• 17:32
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, totally.
• 17:33
  Tad Eggleston: Get away with it. But yeah, but yeah, what are they gonna do?
• 17:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he's kind of a big guy, isn't he?
• 17:39
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah, he's been doing special arts lately.
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he… I didn't even know that part.
• 17:44
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 17:47
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, how do you decide… like…
• 17:52
  Tad Eggleston: this is one I'm doing, and… or… or this is… this is one that I need to find an artist, and then, I mean, just from your three graphic novels.
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: Er, the two that you've done with other people.
• 18:04
  Tad Eggleston: ben was a little bit better known?
• 18:09
  Tad Eggleston: At the time, though, he's certainly become much better known since then.
• 18:13
  Tad Eggleston: I think I was at least reading in the press for this that this is really Camilla's…
• 18:19
  Tad Eggleston: First major work?
• 18:21
  Ezra Daniels: That's her first graphic novel, yeah, she's illustrated.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: a couple of.
• 18:23
  Ezra Daniels: picture books, but this is her first graphic novel. We started working on this book together when she was still in school. She hadn't even graduated. He went, she went to,
• 18:33
  Ezra Daniels: MICA in, Maryland.
• 18:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 18:36
  Ezra Daniels: art school, so she hadn't even graduated yet. And I found her just, trolling Instagram for up-and-coming artists that had interesting styles.
• 18:44
  Tad Eggleston: You mean just like every good editor out there?
• 18:47
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 18:48
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, and I have, like, a folder of people that I was tracking and seeing how they're developing their style, and with Mama Came Calling, I really, committed to trying to find an up-and-coming artist who hadn't had a big break yet, because I felt really grateful that I'd been given the opportunities that I'd been given, and just lucky to, you know, have
• 19:08
  Ezra Daniels: had the doors open for me, and I was in the publishing world, and I could pitch a book, and people would publish it, and I was just looking back on the early days of my career, and just thinking about how
• 19:18
  Ezra Daniels: much it would have changed my life if I got a gig like this when I was in my early 20s, because as you probably know, my first… my first public… my first published graphic novel, Upgrade Soul, I couldn't find a publisher for that. For 15 years, I was trying to find a publisher for that book, and it finally…
• 19:35
  Tad Eggleston: didn't actually know.
• 19:37
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, and finally…
• 19:37
  Tad Eggleston: Upgrade Soul was done before Bottom Feeders?
• 19:42
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 19:43
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, I've been working on that book for years.
• 19:46
  Tad Eggleston: I… no, no, see, I'm not always good at, like, digging into the backstory, because I'm so, so… I have so many books to read!
• 19:55
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, well, that's why you do the interviews, because you can hear it, you can hear it different from the horses.
• 19:59
  Tad Eggleston: Great stuff. So, so you were, you were sitting on… Upgrade soul.
• 20:04
  Tad Eggleston: When you were selling bottom feeders.
• 20:07
  Ezra Daniels: I can't remember what the exact order was. They came out back-to-back, because Ben was working.
• 20:12
  Tad Eggleston: They did.
• 20:12
  Ezra Daniels: Peters as I was finishing up Upgrade Soul, so we were kind of, like, neck and neck a little bit with finishing.
• 20:18
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 20:18
  Ezra Daniels: those two books. And I ended up self-publishing Up Bixel as an interactive app, Serialized, starting in 2012.
• 20:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 20:29
  Ezra Daniels: we were releasing chapters in the app, and then when I finished the whole thing,
• 20:34
  Ezra Daniels: I did a short, self-published run of the book, and then I found a publisher with, what used to be LionForge has now, been folded into Oni.
• 20:42
  Tad Eggleston: Only.
• 20:44
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha. See, see, this is… this is how… I didn't wind up… Having it hit my radar.
• 20:53
  Tad Eggleston: Until… that version.
• 20:58
  Ezra Daniels: felony version.
• 20:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:01
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 21:02
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, it was like… So, in my mind, it came, like, a year or two…
• 21:07
  Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to remember… I'm trying to look up my release dates, so… so that I can know… I mean, because also, time has no meaning anymore.
• 21:22
  Tad Eggleston: So it's entirely possible that it's… it's… It's, like…
• 21:28
  Tad Eggleston: They could have come out the same week, and because time has no meaning anymore…
• 21:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I can tell you when they came out, I remember.
• 21:36
  Ezra Daniels: Upgrade Soul came out in 2018, and then, Bono.
• 21:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it did. How did that happen then? How do I have them completely reversed in my head?
• 21:46
  Ezra Daniels: I don't know.
• 21:50
  Ezra Daniels: Well, the… maybe because you're thinking about the hardcover. The hardcover of Upgrade Soul came out
• 21:55
  Ezra Daniels: Probably, like, 2023, or… 2022?
• 22:01
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe, but I… Fine.
• 22:05
  Tad Eggleston: The hardcover has a slightly different cover, isn't… isn't the hardcover the… the…
• 22:10
  Tad Eggleston: Or did they put out a hardcover before they put out the… the anniversary Edition, or whatever?
• 22:17
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, no, that's the hardcover.
• 22:19
  Tad Eggleston: That is an argument.
• 22:19
  Ezra Daniels: cover, yeah?
• 22:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I read it before that came out.
• 22:23
  Tad Eggleston: So, so somehow…
• 22:27
  Tad Eggleston: it had just completely missed my radar, and probably somebody else's, because I read it after I had read somebody else do a write-up of it, and went, oh, he's got another book!
• 22:38
  Ezra Daniels: That's funny.
• 22:39
  Tad Eggleston: They must… they must have… hopefully, they did it as, oh, if you like bottom feeders, you should look at the last book from Ezra Clanton Daniels, but in my head, it was the next book from…
• 22:53
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, I mean, to be fair, like, A, both of these books are pre-pandemic, and for me, they're also both pre-grandkids,
• 23:02
  Tad Eggleston: Time has taken on a whole different meaning for me since these two books came out, but I completely apologize. Ezra, I.
• 23:11
  Ezra Daniels: Oh my god. I had also, like, which book came out first?
• 23:14
  Tad Eggleston: man.
• 23:15
  Ezra Daniels: Upgrade solar body heaters?
• 23:17
  Ezra Daniels: Who cares?
• 23:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah.
• 23:20
  Ezra Daniels: in the grand sche things.
• 23:21
  Tad Eggleston: But it's, like, it's part of what led to my question, because to me, it seemed like you'd done a book with Ben, and then you'd done a book on your own, and now you were doing a book with Camilla, when in fact, you'd done a book on your own.
• 23:37
  Tad Eggleston: And now you're doing books with other people. Yeah. And doing occasional cartoons yourself.
• 23:43
  Ezra Daniels: And it's because, like I said, Upgrade Soul took me 15 years to finish, and it was just such a huge time suck that…
• 23:49
  Tad Eggleston: That makes me…
• 23:50
  Ezra Daniels: I see.
• 23:50
  Tad Eggleston: Sense in my head.
• 23:52
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 23:53
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there are some people who go back and forth, like, like, both Matt Kent and Jeff Lemire have, like, the projects that…
• 24:00
  Tad Eggleston: These are the ones I draw, and they take whatever time that they need to take, and these are the ones I write so that I can pay myself until I'm done drawing.
• 24:10
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, and I think, like, them…
• 24:12
  Tad Eggleston: Jesus.
• 24:13
  Ezra Daniels: similar to Jeff Lemire, I feel like I have a lot of ideas that I want to get out in the world, and I'm pushing 50 now. I literally don't have time to write and draw all the stories that I want to tell, so just as a matter of pure…
• 24:27
  Ezra Daniels: economics of the time that I have, it makes sense to work with other people.
• 24:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, I have to sometimes remind myself that I'm 45 myself.
• 24:37
  Tad Eggleston: Because every time I, like, Chris Schweiser…
• 24:41
  Tad Eggleston: In a recent blog post, was talking about, like, in decisions regarding
• 24:49
  Tad Eggleston: The series of books he's working on.
• 24:52
  Tad Eggleston: like… He had to make some big decisions, because he's like.
• 24:56
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not getting any younger, and this could be a significant portion of the rest of my output in my life, and I'm like, you're not that old, man!
• 25:05
  Tad Eggleston: No, you're talking about, like, a thousand pages of comics, and you're pushing 50… Yeah! Okay, maybe you are that old!
• 25:12
  Ezra Daniels: And drawing is really physically taxing, it's hard on your…
• 25:15
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly, exactly.
• 25:16
  Ezra Daniels: It's hard on your limbs, but it's also, like, it's hard on your body because it forces you to sit, and, like, that sedentariness of drawing comics is just really…
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I have to ask you, do you have Coreta Wilburg's book?
• 25:28
  Ezra Daniels: No.
• 25:29
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, create a Wilburg.
• 25:31
  Tad Eggleston: who is, our Sikoriak's wife.
• 25:35
  Tad Eggleston: Wrote a book called Draw Stronger.
• 25:40
  Tad Eggleston: Creator Wilburg actually created the, the… The role of…
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: artist in residence at the NYU Med School.
• 25:53
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, cool. And was that for, for, for a long time. She does lots of, of, of… like, actual…
• 26:01
  Tad Eggleston: Medicine comics?
• 26:04
  Tad Eggleston: But the one that I tell everybody that I know who draws to go pick up
• 26:10
  Tad Eggleston: is this one, from Uncivilized Press.
• 26:15
  Tad Eggleston: Draw stronger.
• 26:16
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, cool, yeah, I've seen this.
• 26:17
  Tad Eggleston: Self-care for cartoonists and visual artists. Yeah.
• 26:21
  Ezra Daniels: That's so important, and it's so easy.
• 26:23
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 26:23
  Ezra Daniels: yet.
• 26:25
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 26:26
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, like, I mean, the, the, the…
• 26:31
  Tad Eggleston: The first essential books that I tell people who are getting into comics that they have to read are things like…
• 26:37
  Tad Eggleston: Understanding comics, and… Drawing words and writing pictures, and some of the old Eisner…
• 26:48
  Tad Eggleston: Storytelling books and whatnot. But, like, for artists, not long after that, it's like, oh, and you want this, because otherwise you'll break yourself.
• 26:57
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that's so crucial, yeah. And I mean literally break yourself, not… Yeah.
• 27:01
  Tad Eggleston: figuratively, not comics will break your heart, kid, break yourself. I mean, like… My arm won't lift.
• 27:08
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 27:09
  Ezra Daniels: And also, just, like, to maintain the stamina to… to work long hours is… it's hard to…
• 27:15
  Ezra Daniels: To force yourself to… to work and not get tired, so just, like, cardiovascular fitness is really big.
• 27:22
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I think the only artists I know that…
• 27:29
  Tad Eggleston: know of, because I don't know as many of them personally, who…
• 27:35
  Tad Eggleston: are as much gym rats as some of the artists that I know in comics are drummers.
• 27:42
  Ezra Daniels: Hmm.
• 27:44
  Tad Eggleston: And I think it's the same reason, it's like…
• 27:47
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it's the endurance.
• 27:49
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, we are the ones who have to do these crazy beats of endurance that nobody realizes.
• 27:59
  Tad Eggleston: So we have to be prepared for that.
• 28:01
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah, when me and Ben were on tour for… we toured, I toured with Ben for, Upgrade Sold, just to, like, prep people for Bottom Feeders, because we knew Bottom Feeders was going to be coming out imminently, but then when Bottom Feeders came out, we went on another tour. We did, like.
• 28:16
  Ezra Daniels: We had month-long book tours.
• 28:18
  Ezra Daniels: Where we… both times, we bought a month pass on Amtrak and just rode the Amtrak for a month, just, like, back and forth across the country, basically. But we were so… like, we… it was… it was so much fun for lots of reasons, but, like, one of the big things we did was, like, we would, like, go run together, like, do, like, exercises together at every stop that we had, because we were, like, stuck on a train, like, basically stuck on, like, an airplane seat for…
• 28:42
  Ezra Daniels: Days at a time sometimes, so when we got out, we had to be…
• 28:46
  Ezra Daniels: I'm just really good about getting exercise.
• 28:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 28:51
  Tad Eggleston: I need to be better at getting exercise. One day.
• 28:55
  Ezra Daniels: It's always tomorrow.
• 28:56
  Tad Eggleston: I do have to run around a really big school.
• 29:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, that's kinda exercise.
• 29:03
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, for sure.
• 29:04
  Ezra Daniels: And just, it's a mental exercise to just be, like, mentally dexterous enough to interact with people as you do all day, every day.
• 29:13
  Tad Eggleston: I might put noise-canceling headphones on the second I hit the hallway to, like, reset during passing period.
• 29:23
  Tad Eggleston: It's a necessary part of my life.
• 29:26
  Ezra Daniels: You gotta do what you gotta do. Self-care.
• 29:29
  Tad Eggleston: So, tell me where…
• 29:34
  Tad Eggleston: And I pulled it up, and then I moved it. Mama came calling. Tell me where the ideas came from.
• 29:42
  Ezra Daniels: I used to spend a lot of time in Florida. My brother lived in Gainesville for 10 years, and I used to date a woman who lived… her family lived in Jupiter, in West Palm Beach, so I'd go down there, too. I spent many Christmases down there, and I just really became…
• 29:59
  Ezra Daniels: Kind of smitten with the… With the… with the tone of the area, just like the… the really…
• 30:06
  Ezra Daniels: stark juxtaposition between kind of the snowbird Northerners who own property down there, and often, like, really ostentatious property, and the locals, and specifically the lower-income locals who, like, lived in or adjacent to swamps, and
• 30:23
  Ezra Daniels: You know, people who did manual labor for work, and it was just this really…
• 30:27
  Ezra Daniels: a really striking, juxtaposition that I just hadn't really experienced like that before, and it's such a specific culture down there that I really… I thought it was really interesting, and I really wanted to write a story that was set there. And I started writing a, Mama Came Calling as an attempt to write… just… I just wanted to write a really gonzo, fun.
• 30:46
  Ezra Daniels: prime pulp thriller. I was reading a lot of Rebecca and Phillips books, and I had this book,
• 30:52
  Ezra Daniels: a graphic novel adaptation of Donald Goyne's Daddy Cool that was published in the 80s by… can't remember the publisher's name.
• 31:01
  Ezra Daniels: But it's this really awesome, kind of like a…
• 31:05
  Ezra Daniels: blaxploitation, hard-boiled detective graphic novel that's illustrated in kind of an EC comic style, and I wanted to do something that felt like that book. I loved that book so much. So I just started writing this story, and it is a really gonzo crime thriller, and it still has some of those elements, but over the course of working on it for… I mean, beginning to end, I wasn't… I wasn't working by chipping away on it, like, here and there, I wasn't working on it consistently, but beginning
• 31:30
  Ezra Daniels: In the end, it was another thing that…
• 31:32
  Ezra Daniels: I wrote the first draft of that story probably 13 years ago, so it's been…
• 31:36
  Ezra Daniels: in my mind for a long time, and as I would go back to it and dust it off and write new drafts of it, it just became more and more personal, and the main character's story became more and more…
• 31:48
  Ezra Daniels: Directly, mirrored to my own story and my own…
• 31:53
  Ezra Daniels: Issues with identity, and insecurity, and
• 31:58
  Ezra Daniels: and things like that, so it became probably the hardest thing I've ever written, even though it's…
• 32:04
  Ezra Daniels: And, like, ambition-wise, it doesn't come close to Upgrade Soul, which is, like, such a sprawling…
• 32:09
  Ezra Daniels: emotional epic. This one's a much tighter and more grounded story, like, it takes place in the real world. There's no… there's genre elements, but there's no science fiction or fantasy stuff. It's a very character-driven thing. But it was just really hard for me to dig deep enough to find
• 32:25
  Ezra Daniels: the emotionality and… That's sometimes tightening things.
• 32:29
  Tad Eggleston: things up.
• 32:30
  Tad Eggleston: Makes it harder, too, you know?
• 32:33
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 32:33
  Tad Eggleston: rather than being sprawling and whatnot, to go, okay, I need all of this to come out, but it's got to be at this breakneck pace.
• 32:42
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah. Because… Yeah, of course, yeah, so it had needed to be so economical.
• 32:47
  Tad Eggleston: It hadn't popped immediately into my head reading last night.
• 32:53
  Tad Eggleston: But as soon as you started talking about Florida, I'm like, oh…
• 32:57
  Tad Eggleston: It reads like a Hyacin novel.
• 33:01
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know how much… have you read any Carl Hyacin?
• 33:05
  Ezra Daniels: No, I haven't read any.
• 33:07
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Carl Hyacin, he was a…
• 33:10
  Tad Eggleston: beat reporter for… I want to say the Miami Herald for a long time. So he writes just batshit, crazy…
• 33:19
  Tad Eggleston: Mysteries.
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: Crime stories, all set in Florida.
• 33:24
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man, that would have been a great research. I wish you had told me that 10 years ago.
• 33:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 33:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, he's been doing it for that long.
• 33:32
  Tad Eggleston: He's been doing it for much longer than that, even. Yeah, no, I… like, one of his more recent books,
• 33:42
  Tad Eggleston: May have dealt with a, a,
• 33:48
  Tad Eggleston: He doesn't ever name it Mar-a-Lago, and I don't remember if he actually ever says that the…
• 33:56
  Tad Eggleston: Resident is the former president, it did come out in between. But he does have a snake eat…
• 34:03
  Tad Eggleston: An old rich lady, And hilarity ensue.
• 34:08
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man. That sounds great. That sounds right up my alley.
• 34:11
  Tad Eggleston: I think that one was called Squeeze Me.
• 34:14
  Tad Eggleston: Bad Monkey was another of my favorites.
• 34:20
  Tad Eggleston: He had one called Basket Case, where Warren Zevon actually wrote a song for it.
• 34:26
  Ezra Daniels: Wow.
• 34:29
  Ezra Daniels: No, I'm not familiar. That sounds great, though.
• 34:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Carl Hyasson, I'll make certain I drop an email with his name.
• 34:36
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, send me a link.
• 34:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm… I'm… I'm… both amazed that it just means that Florida really is like that.
• 34:49
  Tad Eggleston: You both managed to capture the same…
• 34:55
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I… I didn't… I didn't… I never thought of him as… I mean, at this point, I thought of him as one of the,
• 35:05
  Tad Eggleston: Anybody who wrote… read crime books knew… knew who he was type of guy.
• 35:10
  Tad Eggleston: Even… actually, what I really loved was about the time that my kids were the perfect age to be reading them, he branched out and started doing some, like, middle grade YA novels.
• 35:21
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, cool.
• 35:22
  Tad Eggleston: Almost as batshit crazy, they're just not as gory and don't have the sex or language or drugs.
• 35:28
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's fun.
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I think Hoot was his first YA book, and it involves, like, a middle school kid taking on a major…
• 35:40
  Tad Eggleston: Like, corporation that, that, that's, that's, that's, messing up an owl habitat.
• 35:54
  Tad Eggleston: He, he, he, he may be really good at writing characters that
• 35:58
  Tad Eggleston: don't stick strictly to legal things, but they… they… they… they break the law.
• 36:06
  Tad Eggleston: For good reasons against even worse.
• 36:10
  Ezra Daniels: That's, I mean…
• 36:11
  Tad Eggleston: I… I dropped the link in the… the chat.
• 36:16
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, cool.
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: But I'll try to remember to email you, too, because I'll just… I'll give you a list of some of my favorites. I'll go through.
• 36:23
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that.
• 36:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's.
• 36:23
  Ezra Daniels: I also remember I was reading a lot of, the Vertigo Crime.
• 36:28
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 36:28
  Ezra Daniels: Do you remember those? I do. I think it was…
• 36:32
  Ezra Daniels: maybe it was… was Karen Berger the editor of those? But there was, like, a whole line of, like, 15 selfies.
• 36:38
  Tad Eggleston: No, I… I mean, Karen Berger was the editor of the overall Vertigo. I don't remember if she was the sub-editor of the Vertigo crime.
• 36:48
  Tad Eggleston: Or whether that might have been,
• 36:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I can think of so many people that might have gotten that gig.
• 36:56
  Ezra Daniels: But those were great as well.
• 36:57
  Tad Eggleston: Where all good things happened.
• 36:59
  Ezra Daniels: It was, and they had… I mean, it was such a fun series, because they, as you know, they pair these really great prime writers with really great illustrators, and there's some real gems in that line.
• 37:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:11
  Tad Eggleston: Bronx Kill.
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: As I pull up the Vertigo Crime Series.
• 37:23
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, those are great. I tracked down all of them on Abe Books when I started working on this.
• 37:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. No, I have also read all of them. They are…
• 37:30
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely favorites of mine, and… and…
• 37:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's a shame how many of them are out of print right now.
• 37:41
  Ezra Daniels: I know, it's such a bummer, because I really… one of the other things I was trying to do with Mama Came Column is I had this fantasy of this book being sold in airport bookstores, because I felt like that would be the perfect place to pick up a cheap graphic novel before you get on a flight, and you can read it during the course of the flight, and when you're done with the flight, you'll probably be done with the book, and then you can hand it off to somebody at your destination. So I was imagining, like, what kind of a book would be a great
• 38:05
  Ezra Daniels: thing to sell at an airport, and it's like, a crime thriller would be… a crime thriller is a really, like.
• 38:10
  Ezra Daniels: a really sticky, funky-looking cover would be such a great thing to have in an airport. So that… I mean, that's not why I came up with the story, but as we were getting deep into it, and I was thinking about what this book is going to look like in the world, that became my fantasy. So I really wanted to do something exactly like those Vertigo crime books. I wanted to do a smaller-scale book that, like, felt like a novel, and it would look in… like, it would look like it's,
• 38:34
  Ezra Daniels: In the right place on a shelf full of other
• 38:37
  Ezra Daniels: Well, and that's a question that I have for you, because I've only seen the PDF.
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I ordered… I mean, before I even emailed you, I had ordered
• 38:46
  Tad Eggleston: a copy on Bookshop.org, so hopefully I'll get it next week.
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: But what, what size did you make it?
• 38:55
  Ezra Daniels: Well, it ended up being 6x9, so it's just standard trade paperback, whatever size, like, a Colleen Hoover or James Patterson book was.
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 39:04
  Tad Eggleston: So it will fit in the… nicely in the… In the airport bookstores.
• 39:11
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, I hope so, but I mean, I really wanted it to be, like, 4x7, like, the classic pulp…
• 39:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 39:18
  Ezra Daniels: Size, but they were like, there's no way we're gonna do this.
• 39:22
  Tad Eggleston: the bullet.
• 39:22
  Ezra Daniels: It looks like.
• 39:23
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, yeah, I don't… I mean, I'm all with you.
• 39:27
  Tad Eggleston: I wish that a lot of the old sizes were still around, and I wish that
• 39:33
  Tad Eggleston: More publishers were willing to say, you know, kind of, screw the decorum, this book will look great this way, let's do it.
• 39:44
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 39:45
  Tad Eggleston: But, among the sizes that get used right now, having… having the… the…
• 39:54
  Tad Eggleston: The trade paperback size… like, the book trade paperback size versus the…
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: comic trade paperback size is… is probably more appropriate, is what I was…
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: trying to say was that it was the James Patterson seism.
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: Fair enough, yeah.
• 40:09
  Ezra Daniels: I think it still looks cool.
• 40:11
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, but I really… I also wanted it to be printed on, like, the cheapest, stockiest paper that they could get. I really had this vision, like, I wanted this book to be, like, $10, I wanted it to be super cheap, I wanted to, like, decompose in people's hands as they're finishing it, and they could just.
• 40:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, now you're just making me think of other things, starting with,
• 40:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you brought up Brubaker and Phillips, but have you read Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' That Texas Blood?
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: No. Or Enfield Gang Massacre. First of all, they're phenomenal. They're…
• 40:47
  Tad Eggleston: one of my unpopular comic opinions that I stick to anyway, because I think 20 years from now, nobody's gonna argue with me.
• 40:55
  Tad Eggleston: is that Jacob Phillips is already better than his dad.
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: He can do everything Sean can do, and more.
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow. In his, in his, like, late 20s.
• 41:05
  Ezra Daniels: Wow, okay, cool, I'm excited!
• 41:07
  Tad Eggleston: But when they did Enfield Gang Massacre, which is in the same universe as their That Dex's Blood series, but, like, 100 years earlier, it's like an actual western.
• 41:20
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas they've been doing, like, West Texas crime stories in that Texas blood.
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: They did it all on newsprint.
• 41:31
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, cool, that's… that's so cool.
• 41:33
  Tad Eggleston: And then they did the graphic novel on newsprint, too.
• 41:36
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man, I'm so jealous. I just love that. I just love that tactile quality.
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: This is where… this is where sometimes… cause… cause image…
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: To a certain… because they were all image books, and image is kind of like, well, you know…
• 41:51
  Tad Eggleston: It's your skin, not ours.
• 41:53
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, totally, yeah, Image doesn't care.
• 41:59
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, they may have done that, but brubaker and Phillips just did the giant-sized criminal.
• 42:05
  Tad Eggleston: on… on, on…
• 42:12
  Tad Eggleston: newsprint as well, and I may be on a text thread with Chris Condon, where somebody immediately went, just picked up giant-sized criminals, is Brubaker stealing from you?
• 42:25
  Ezra Daniels: Condon was very, very…
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: good to say, you said it, I did not.
• 42:34
  Ezra Daniels: That's cool, though. That's… I mean, yeah, we're all thinking about the same thing, but I feel like we're all probably coming from the same inspirations, even just aesthetic inspirations.
• 42:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like…
• 42:45
  Tad Eggleston: one of the things is, you have higher quality newsprint now, too. I mean, it feels like newsprint, but it's not gonna fall apart the way some of those…
• 42:56
  Tad Eggleston: even 80s, and certainly 70s comics. We're not talking, like, full-on pulp newsprint.
• 43:04
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 43:05
  Tad Eggleston: We're talking paper with bleed.
• 43:08
  Tad Eggleston: That has a certain texture to it.
• 43:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I actually love how much…
• 43:16
  Tad Eggleston: In the comics industry, it seems like more and more people are… playing around…
• 43:24
  Tad Eggleston: not just with the format, but with the physical pro… I mean, for God's sake, DC put out a scratch-and-sniff comic last year.
• 43:31
  Ezra Daniels: I don't forgotten about that.
• 43:33
  Tad Eggleston: year.
• 43:36
  Ezra Daniels: That's crazy. That's funny.
• 43:37
  Tad Eggleston: Had you seen anything Scratch and Sniff since, like, the 80s?
• 43:41
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 43:42
  Tad Eggleston: They put out a Harley Quinnat scratch and sniff issue, and what's more, the scratch and sniff smelled like farts.
• 43:51
  Ezra Daniels: Well, what else are they gonna smell like?
• 43:56
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, but I got to talk to Joanne Starer and Ted Brandon Rose Stein about making it, and man, did they have fun.
• 44:04
  Ezra Daniels: That's fun, I bet. I just picked up the new Phantographics, they just did a new reprint of the Eternaut, which, I was so bummed to miss it on the first print, but the new print is so big. I think it might be newsprint. I was thumbing through it when I brought it home the other day, and it has this, like, a really nice tactile quality to the paper.
• 44:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, the phantographics really, really…
• 44:25
  Tad Eggleston: I love that Phantographics doesn't have a strict house style. They put out each book in the way
• 44:36
  Tad Eggleston: That it's gonna present best.
• 44:38
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. Yeah, they do really good work.
• 44:40
  Tad Eggleston: They put a lot of thought into what's the best way to make this book.
• 44:45
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, Evie… like…
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: like, if you look at a series… like, a series of their books are gonna be made the same, but even if you go from, like, oh, this is a comic strip book and that's a comic strip book, it's like, yeah, no, the Peanuts books aren't necessarily gonna be like the Pogo books.
• 45:04
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're different strips.
• 45:06
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 45:07
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna do it the way it… Makes sense.
• 45:10
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah.
• 45:11
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it was really fun working with them on Bottom Feeders. When I did the… I mentioned that I did Upgrade Soul as an interactive iOS app before it was a book, and part of the…
• 45:21
  Ezra Daniels: structural strategy with that was that we originally designed Upgrade Soul to be seen on iPad screens, so every page was, like, a 4x3 ratio
• 45:32
  Ezra Daniels: It's like a tablet screen, but they were designed to then be stacked two up for a standard comic book size. So if you look at the actual Upgrade Soul book, every page of Upgrade Soul is actually two iPad screens stacked on top of each other. So every single page of Upgrade Soul is bisected… it's dissected down the middle.
• 45:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 45:51
  Ezra Daniels: And we… and because I didn't know what was going to happen with bottom feeders when we were working on it, I thought we might do bottom feeders as an interactive app, the same way I did Upgrade Soul. So I had Ben do the art in the same ratio, and so when we brought it to Phantom Graphics.
• 46:06
  Ezra Daniels: I told Eric that we could do the book as a horizontal landscape format book, or we could stack it, let's the same way… same way I did with Upgrade Soul, and have it be a more standard-sized book. And when me and Ben, like I said, we did a… I said earlier, I think before we started recording.
• 46:22
  Ezra Daniels: But me and Ben did a really short-run, self-published version of Bottom Feeders,
• 46:28
  Ezra Daniels: when we were on one of our book tours, just to get the book out there. We hadn't signed with Banner Graphics yet, we didn't know what we were going to do, but we had this book that was done, and that self-published version is actually stacked, vertical, so if.
• 46:39
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, then I definitely… I definitely don't have that one. I have…
• 46:42
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 46:42
  Tad Eggleston: I've only seen it as the… Is… is the, the widescreen.
• 46:47
  Ezra Daniels: the brick… yeah, the brick-sized one. But when we… we sold a, Spanish translation of Bottom Feeders, and that one, they ended up stacking it, so that one's, like, a actual comic book size.
• 46:58
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
• 47:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, I mean, like…
• 47:02
  Tad Eggleston: through the podcast, I've become so much more a student of, like, All elements of comics.
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, it had never occurred to me until I started really learning about comic strips that one of the reasons comic strips are set up the way they are is so newspapers
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: Could choose how to run them.
• 47:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. I know.
• 47:25
  Tad Eggleston: Do they do them as four panels across, or do they do them as…
• 47:30
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 47:30
  Tad Eggleston: square with two panels and two panels, you know.
• 47:32
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, they could test them out where they need to.
• 47:34
  Tad Eggleston: For them to, you know…
• 47:37
  Tad Eggleston: And it also made me laugh so much as I learned things like, oh, all this stuff that we attribute
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: to Will Eisner, or even to Frank Miller and later artists like Windsor McKay and Roy Crane were doing when they had full pages to work with, rather than being shrunk down to half pages, and then quarter pages.
• 48:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you look at some of the comic strips from, like, the teens and 20s, it's like, oh!
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: All this stuff that people called new in the 90s, wasn't new.
• 48:16
  Ezra Daniels: There's so much like that.
• 48:21
  Tad Eggleston: We just hadn't looked at it, like, and…
• 48:24
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, we forget.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: I, I learned some of this, cause I, I,
• 48:30
  Tad Eggleston: talked to Paul Pope a couple of times, and I was talking to him about his Wednesday comics, and, like, he totally…
• 48:36
  Tad Eggleston: based his style of, of, like, the Adam Strange stories on… Roy Crane's Captain Easy.
• 48:45
  Ezra Daniels: That's cool. I mean, all the students, that doesn't surprise me that. So you didn't know God. Yeah. Talking to Paul Pope is so much…
• 48:51
  Tad Eggleston: So much fun. In fact, I have something in the pipeline that I'm still afraid to talk about on the air, on the air, but Paul and I, I think, are gonna be talking about an upcoming Phantographics release together, just because he loves it, and I'll take any excuse to…
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: Talk Comics with Paul Pope.
• 49:11
  Ezra Daniels: That's awesome.
• 49:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's my other favorite thing to do on this show, is when I can start talking to…
• 49:21
  Tad Eggleston: To… to cool people about comics that aren't even theirs.
• 49:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, oh yes, I will come talk about blank.
• 49:28
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, I mean, I feel like the best artists and writers are, like, true nerds, and they, like, really nerd out about really specific things, and especially people like Paul, like, you know he's got some deep-cut all-time favorites.
• 49:39
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 49:39
  Ezra Daniels: that nobody else knows about, things that people have forgotten about. And, you know, like, I honestly feel like the best comics ever made are books that people don't remember, like, books that are completely lost to time because they're not kept in circulation. I feel like…
• 49:55
  Tad Eggleston: Half the time, the best comics from this year aren't the ones that people Jumped up and down about.
• 50:03
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, for sure.
• 50:04
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 50:05
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, so much of that has to do with the marketing behind the books, and the publicity, and who's keeping the books in circulation, like I said, but…
• 50:14
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, I, like, when people ask me what my all-time favorite books are, one of the first ones that comes to mind is an old kitchen sink press book called, Kings in Disguise that I don't think has been in circulation for decades. I have a copy of that downstairs!
• 50:29
  Tad Eggleston: And you know why I have a copy of that downstairs?
• 50:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh!
• 50:33
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, this is… I'm gonna… I'm gonna… I'm gonna… I'm gonna…
• 50:41
  Tad Eggleston: There are two questions that I closed the show with, so I'm going to go ahead and preview them for you and allow you to think about them, because one of them is talk about a surreal experience that you had just because of…
• 50:57
  Tad Eggleston: The fact that you work in comics and share it. And another one is, like, share something that
• 51:07
  Tad Eggleston: You love that not enough people around you have… have… red…
• 51:14
  Tad Eggleston: And you need them to, so you can talk about it. So… so… you're not going to be able to use Kings in Disguise, because you just used it now, and we're not.
• 51:21
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man, well, that would have been the one!
• 51:23
  Tad Eggleston: I know, I know, but I might have to bring you back, because I was just thinking today that another person
• 51:31
  Tad Eggleston: that… I didn't… like, I've talked to…
• 51:37
  Tad Eggleston: And worked on having come on the show, and we, like…
• 51:42
  Tad Eggleston: Scheduled something, and then had to cancel it, and then we've circled around, and then we both got busy, and we haven't…
• 51:49
  Tad Eggleston: traded emails in a while, is Dan Burr.
• 51:52
  Tad Eggleston: And… and the… and this is… this is why I brought up both of the questions. I discovered Kings in disguise.
• 52:01
  Tad Eggleston: Dennis Kitchen has become a friend of mine. Enough so… that…
• 52:06
  Tad Eggleston: when he comes into town, because his family lives up in Milwaukee.
• 52:11
  Tad Eggleston: he tries to make certain that we get together. And this last time.
• 52:16
  Tad Eggleston: he's like, is it okay if we have lunch with my friend Dan? And then we'll go to the, you know, the comic shop or something. And I'm like, sure! And at the time, I knew that he had done… he was the artist on, on, like, as a teacher, as a… as a…
• 52:33
  Tad Eggleston: as a policy nerd, etc. He did the art on a book called Economics.
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: Which is, like… A comics journalism history of economics?
• 52:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And it's amazing, it's one of my favorites. It's like, before you talk to me about anything economics, if you don't know this book.
• 52:55
  Tad Eggleston: like… Or, or, or can show that you know the shit in this book.
• 53:01
  Tad Eggleston: Then, like, go read this comic, and then we can have a talk about economics.
• 53:07
  Ezra Daniels: That's great, I gotta read that one.
• 53:09
  Tad Eggleston: It's.
• 53:09
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, I love that book. It's such a… I mean, that was, like, one of the first books I read that was just like, oh, this is what you.
• 53:14
  Tad Eggleston: Dennis brought up Kings of Disguise, so I immediately ordered a copy that I didn't get in time.
• 53:20
  Tad Eggleston: to… go get… er, to get signed by him, but I did get the sequel.
• 53:29
  Tad Eggleston: I came across at a… at a…
• 53:31
  Tad Eggleston: at a comic shop, literally the day before I met with them.
• 53:35
  Tad Eggleston: What was the sequel? The sequel's On the Ropes.
• 53:37
  Ezra Daniels: Yep.
• 53:38
  Tad Eggleston: So I have my On the Ropes signed by Dan.
• 53:40
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's awesome.
• 53:41
  Tad Eggleston: Because I literally sat and, like.
• 53:46
  Tad Eggleston: the cafe area of a co-op in Milwaukee.
• 53:51
  Tad Eggleston: Eating breakfast sandwiches and drinking coffee with…
• 53:57
  Tad Eggleston: Dennis Kitchen and Dan Burr for, like, That's pretty cool.
• 54:02
  Ezra Daniels: Pretty surreal comics experience.
• 54:04
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 54:07
  Tad Eggleston: So it's crazy that you mentioned that book, that's… and I still need to read it, it's on the pile.
• 54:13
  Ezra Daniels: It's so good.
• 54:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it just went higher on the pile, and then I'll bring you back, and I'll say, I'm talking to Dan Burr, you gotta come and be the co-host today.
• 54:22
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man, that would be amazing. But yeah, like, I feel like that, like, books like that that just get lost, because, like, you know, Watchmen and Dark Knight.
• 54:30
  Tad Eggleston: It is still in print.
• 54:32
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, is it? Great.
• 54:33
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 54:35
  Ezra Daniels: Great.
• 54:36
  Ezra Daniels: But it doesn't have the marketing engine behind it that something like Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen do. That's why I feel like that's one of the reasons those books are always, like, at the top of, like, the top 10 greatest graphic novels of all time.
• 54:48
  Ezra Daniels: So it's unfortunate that a lot of these.
• 54:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 54:51
  Ezra Daniels: Books just get lost.
• 54:52
  Tad Eggleston: Somewhere where that becomes interesting is, is…
• 54:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't think you were on all of the emails I shared with your… or traded with your publisher today, but, like.
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: even beef… I mean, the downside of the diamond monopoly
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: Was… a lot of the book publishers never
• 55:13
  Tad Eggleston: felt like dealing with Diamond, because they don't need to.
• 55:18
  Tad Eggleston: So there were a certain class of book that never made it into comic shops.
• 55:24
  Tad Eggleston: because they weren't coming through Diamond, but now part.
• 55:26
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 55:27
  Tad Eggleston: Diamond.
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: tons of publishers just haven't landed anywhere. Even the ones that do
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: Want to make certain that they… and the stores are having to figure out how to go from having
• 55:39
  Tad Eggleston: One catch-all distributor to…
• 55:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, will I be okay with 2? How about 3? 6? 8? How many distributors do I need to deal with? I'm not used to having to look at different catalogs!
• 55:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, comics are just…
• 56:03
  Tad Eggleston: A weird business from a distribution standpoint.
• 56:06
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 56:07
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because I'm… I want to say, like…
• 56:11
  Tad Eggleston: there are 3 comic shop chains in the nation. There's one down in Florida, there's Graham Crackers in Illinois, and there's the one out in Massachusetts.
• 56:24
  Tad Eggleston: And I think that, like, the most stores in any of those chains is 8?
• 56:31
  Tad Eggleston: So, it's not like you have…
• 56:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even independent bookstores sometimes have… I mean, generally, most independent bookstores will have
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: a couple of categories that they're really good at. And the rest will be… They'll know something, and then…
• 56:50
  Tad Eggleston: They'll do special orders for you, right?
• 56:53
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 56:53
  Tad Eggleston: With comics, it's like…
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: to a certain extent, if you're not good at superheroes, you're not in business, with a handful of exceptions. You know, Desert Island in Brooklyn has managed to, like, be…
• 57:08
  Tad Eggleston: you know, a couple of really small stores, like Lion's Tooth up in…
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: Lion's Tooth doesn't even have a Lunar account, you know, and didn't have a Diamond account before that, but…
• 57:19
  Ezra Daniels: Hmm.
• 57:19
  Tad Eggleston: They do resistance books, they do indie comics, they…
• 57:24
  Tad Eggleston: into book clubs, they… they, teach art, they, you know…
• 57:31
  Tad Eggleston: They scrape by in a million different ways to not.
• 57:34
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:35
  Tad Eggleston: not have the superheroes. And they're a really small place. Like, my bedroom is about the size of
• 57:43
  Tad Eggleston: their store.
• 57:45
  Tad Eggleston: It's wonderfully laid out, I'm not… that's not supposed to bash it, and there's Dennis Kitchen original art on the wall.
• 57:52
  Ezra Daniels: Wow.
• 57:53
  Tad Eggleston: He drew it in front of me a couple years ago.
• 57:56
  Tad Eggleston: And that was fun.
• 57:59
  Ezra Daniels: That's cool.
• 58:01
  Tad Eggleston: It is, it is, it is fun when you're at a store and they figure out that you're with somebody cool.
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah.
• 58:15
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: I lost… no, I didn't completely… yeah, so I spent, like, half the day today trying to figure out, like, what's the best way to get your book
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: Into the comic shop that I consult for.
• 58:27
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that's…
• 58:28
  Tad Eggleston: We're probably…
• 58:29
  Ezra Daniels: Frustrating.
• 58:30
  Tad Eggleston: Start an account directly through… I have it up.
• 58:38
  Tad Eggleston: No excuse for forgetting again.
• 58:42
  Tad Eggleston: HarperCollins. HarperCollins does direct distribution and has enough other comics that…
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: that I think will probably just start an account. And thankfully.
• 58:52
  Tad Eggleston: you know, pretty quickly, you know, I got hooked up with
• 58:56
  Tad Eggleston: the comic shop person from HarperCollins to… okay. Oh, great. By the way, also loves your book. He separated us out separately with, I'm gonna separate this out, just two of us, so I can say, yeah, wasn't it an amazing book?
• 59:10
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's awesome!
• 59:12
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody else?
• 59:13
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that makes me feel so good.
• 59:15
  Tad Eggleston: doubted him.
• 59:17
  Ezra Daniels: That's awesome.
• 59:20
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, I'm not alone in thinking mama came calling is amazing.
• 59:25
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, great.
• 59:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, that's… that's always a comics issue, is how…
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: How do you get it from…
• 59:37
  Tad Eggleston: You being done with it to the person who wants to read it having it in their hands.
• 59:43
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: I might have a panel about that at C2E2 this year.
• 59:49
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that'd be great.
• 59:50
  Tad Eggleston: And by might, I mean I do. It's on the schedule already.
• 59:54
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, great, that'll be very useful.
• 59:56
  Tad Eggleston: Bye.
• 59:57
  Ezra Daniels: on the Upper Collins people to that panel.
• 59:59
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I, I, I have…
• 1:00:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't know if it would be completely informative, but I have a publisher, a distributor, and a comic shop to say, okay, let's talk about the challenges.
• 1:00:13
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:00:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's one thing to make a great book, and it's another thing…
• 1:00:18
  Tad Eggleston: To love a great book, but how do we get said great book?
• 1:00:21
  Tad Eggleston: In between.
• 1:00:23
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:00:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's a lot of steps.
• 1:00:26
  Tad Eggleston: So… Tell me your comics… Biography.
• 1:00:34
  Tad Eggleston: And by that, I don't mean your bibliography. We've hit… we've hit most of your bibliography. I mean, I'd love to hit more, but I mean, like, your biography. Talk to me about the comics you remember reading earliest, the comics that made you fall in love with comics, the comics that made you want to write comics, you know?
• 1:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about the formative comics. Give me names, give me writers, give me artists
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: Like, take me on a journey.
• 1:01:01
  Ezra Daniels: Okay, let me think about this. Well, I always… I always made comics ever since I was a kid. I discovered a box of old 70s Marvel comics that my uncle had left behind when he went to, war. He went to Operation Desert Storm.
• 1:01:15
  Tad Eggleston: See, I got my box of comics that my uncle left behind when he went to college, but same 70s Marvel.
• 1:01:25
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, probably a lot of the same issues. And they were just, like, a bunch of disconnected issues, it wasn't any runs or anything, it was just, like, a bunch of random stuff, but I just felt good with the art.
• 1:01:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, mine had a lot of spectacular Spider-Man.
• 1:01:39
  Tad Eggleston: And I remember specifically there's more spectacular than amazing, which is why I've always been more into spectacular than amazing.
• 1:01:46
  Ezra Daniels: That's funny. You get your allegiances early on.
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, lots of Daredevil.
• 1:01:52
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, like, a hodgepodge after that.
• 1:01:57
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. Yeah, probably a lot of the same stuff.
• 1:01:59
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, so I… I got into comics that way, and I really liked the art more than the stories. I don't remember reading the stories, because like I said, they're all disconnected issues, so I couldn't follow the stories beyond that issue anyways.
• 1:02:13
  Ezra Daniels: And then, like, a lot of people, when the Marvel trading cards came out in the 90s, that was a huge thing for me, and I collected all of those, and that's how I was introduced to artists like Mark Taxiera, and…
• 1:02:23
  Ezra Daniels: Dennis Cowan was a big one. I don't know if Dennis Cowan did any of those cards, but I remember he was a really big.
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: I love Dennis.
• 1:02:30
  Ezra Daniels: This style is so, like…
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: I love Dennis Cowell.
• 1:02:34
  Ezra Daniels: It's so singular, and I really got, like…
• 1:02:36
  Ezra Daniels: I did freelance illustration and graphic design for a long time, was my day job, and so I was a really big fan of just illustration in general, and I got really into collecting old pulp sci-fi magazines from the 50s, like, like the little digest-sized one, Galaxy Magazine was my favorite one.
• 1:02:53
  Ezra Daniels: And Galaxy Magazine just had the coolest
• 1:02:56
  Ezra Daniels: most interesting black and white interior art. The cover art was always cool, like the big, fully painted stuff, but the interior art was so stylish and so beautiful. Actually, one of the… I only have a few pieces of original art in my collection. One of them is a piece by William Ashman, who was a Galaxy Magazine illustrator from the 50s.
• 1:03:16
  Ezra Daniels: And I have this, like, great yellowed piece of art with, like, old, crumbling Scotch tape on the back holding it together, and it's from 1956, I think, so that's one of my most prized possessions.
• 1:03:29
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, it was really started by just being into the art, and I also was just, like, really into telling stories and writing stories. I got really into movies really early.
• 1:03:39
  Ezra Daniels: And I dreamed of being a filmmaker, but I always had pretty bad social anxiety, and the idea of managing a film set and a crew and actors was really terrifying, but because I was able to.
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: It can be done. I know somebody who's got… that…
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Stuff going on that's still a showrunner and makes really good shows.
• 1:04:04
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, sure it can be.
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sometimes blown away that he does, because it feels like every time he finishes, he's like, why did I do that?
• 1:04:13
  Ezra Daniels: I know.
• 1:04:14
  Ezra Daniels: I mean, I've definitely been in situations like that before, where I… I mean, I think that's one of the things I trained myself to do, is just to learn to say… to never say no to something, because I was afraid of the…
• 1:04:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:04:26
  Ezra Daniels: of the anxiety, and so a lot of interesting places have… doors have opened up for me because I learned to say yes to everything, but…
• 1:04:35
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, so I turned to drawing comics instead of filmmaking, because I had this ability to draw, and it was just the way that I could tell the stories that I wanted to tell without relying on anybody else, and so that's how it began.
• 1:04:47
  Tad Eggleston: Like that.
• 1:04:49
  Tad Eggleston: Any other guiding forces? I mean…
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: We've got the old boxes of comics, but, like, eventually you were…
• 1:04:58
  Tad Eggleston: Older than 10, and maybe started
• 1:05:03
  Tad Eggleston: Paying attention to who was drawing or who was writing the stuff.
• 1:05:06
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah. Like, I think I kind of… I grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, so I didn't have access.
• 1:05:11
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my gosh.
• 1:05:11
  Ezra Daniels: Anything?
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: where Sioux City is.
• 1:05:13
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, really? Yeah.
• 1:05:14
  Tad Eggleston: My wife grew up outside of Sioux Falls. Oh, that's crazy! Yeah.
• 1:05:19
  Ezra Daniels: So yeah, I grew up there, and Sioux City is a great place to grow up, but I didn't have access to a lot of, like, outside-the-box comics. It was pretty strictly Marvel.
• 1:05:28
  Tad Eggleston: Shocking.
• 1:05:29
  Ezra Daniels: and image stuff, so… I might have some…
• 1:05:32
  Tad Eggleston: You even had image stuff.
• 1:05:34
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, I think I might have seen some Sin City stuff, but I don't think I really knew what Sin City was until I left, my hometown.
• 1:05:41
  Tad Eggleston: any city that wasn't in Iowa.
• 1:05:44
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah, pretty much.
• 1:05:46
  Ezra Daniels: But I moved to Portland, Oregon to go to art school, and then.
• 1:05:49
  Tad Eggleston: That was Sin City.
• 1:05:51
  Ezra Daniels: That was a real Sin City, but I think I…
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: And then Chicago was definitely Sin City.
• 1:05:56
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that was… I'm just…
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just speaking based on, like.
• 1:06:00
  Tad Eggleston: extended family of my wife and or, like, family friends back home in Sioux Falls that are like, she lives where?
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: Mind you, we're, like, 45 miles outside of Chicago.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: I hope she's got a gun!
• 1:06:17
  Ezra Daniels: It's not that bad. Yeah.
• 1:06:24
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, Chicago is not that bad.
• 1:06:26
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah…
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: But the people in… many of the people in South Dakota do think it is.
• 1:06:32
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:06:34
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:06:35
  Tad Eggleston: That was my commentary.
• 1:06:38
  Ezra Daniels: Chicago is wonderful, and not really that dangerous at all.
• 1:06:44
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. But yeah, so I, got back into comics when I moved to Portland to go to art school, and that's when I discovered… I really got into Sin City, I discovered, like, Dan Klaus, and Chris Ware, and…
• 1:06:57
  Ezra Daniels: Probably, I think, Charles Bulls?
• 1:07:00
  Tad Eggleston: Some of whom have Chicago ties. Yeah. I swears is still in the area. Dan Klaus moved out to San Francisco, but…
• 1:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: But, I have one of Dan Klaus's childhood Daredevil issues.
• 1:07:16
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, crazy.
• 1:07:16
  Tad Eggleston: Because when his…
• 1:07:19
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if it was when his mom passed away, or if it was some other relative, but eventually, the last, like, Chicago-area relative…
• 1:07:27
  Tad Eggleston: passed away, and, like, his childhood comic collection was still here, and he… Didn't want to take it
• 1:07:36
  Tad Eggleston: across the country. So instead, he sold it all to Chicago comics. Now, what makes it cool is Dan Klaus was that kid that not only bagged and boarded everything, they had stickers on the outside that would say things like.
• 1:07:51
  Tad Eggleston: Ordway, or, you know, they give, like, little tiny stickers and really small handwriting that would, like.
• 1:08:00
  Tad Eggleston: List the writer and artist, and sometimes have a synopsis of the story, or who the bad guy was, or…
• 1:08:07
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's so cool.
• 1:08:08
  Tad Eggleston: So I, I have, I think it's a Jerry Ordway-era Daredevil…
• 1:08:16
  Tad Eggleston: that has the Dan Klaus sticker and, like.
• 1:08:19
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's cool. Have you ever had him on the show?
• 1:08:22
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't.
• 1:08:23
  Ezra Daniels: Haven't had Dan Klaus yet. Oh, man, that'd be great.
• 1:08:25
  Tad Eggleston: briefly at, CXC a couple years ago.
• 1:08:29
  Ezra Daniels: I wonder if he would… I wonder what he would say if you told him you had that comic.
• 1:08:32
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I would dig it out, so I could go, see? Look!
• 1:08:36
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that'd be so cool.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: I just thought, like, of all the cool things to wind up… I mean, they had his entire collection, and, like.
• 1:08:47
  Tad Eggleston: they didn't treat it like they did, and I don't know if that's something that he worked out with them. I mean, I think there were a few signs that said, like, look for… but they just put it in their bins where it would go normally, and you.
• 1:08:59
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:08:59
  Tad Eggleston: flipping through, flipping through, and go, oh, wait a minute, this is a Klaus one.
• 1:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: And it was still, like, 10 bucks.
• 1:09:06
  Ezra Daniels: Wow.
• 1:09:07
  Tad Eggleston: For a, like, 1973 Daredevil in… When was that?
• 1:09:11
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:09:12
  Ezra Daniels: When was that?
• 1:09:13
  Tad Eggleston: This was post-pandemic, so it was like… Probably 2022? 20…
• 1:09:18
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, wow.
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: They still have some.
• 1:09:20
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, crazy, that was way after I left.
• 1:09:22
  Tad Eggleston: they were going nuts. I mean, they'd had them for a year when I was in and came across the Daredevil.
• 1:09:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I just… I happened to…
• 1:09:31
  Tad Eggleston: see an article on it once, I'm like, oh, the next time I'm down at Chicago Comics, I'll have to, like, flip through stuff, and…
• 1:09:37
  Ezra Daniels: That's so cool. Yeah, Chicago Comics, that was my spot when I lived in Chicago. I mean, Chicago Comics and Quimbies, obviously, but yeah, those… Eric Kersimer and one of my roommates was working at Chicago Comics when I first moved to Chicago, so we were there all the time.
• 1:09:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was,
• 1:09:52
  Tad Eggleston: When I was at Loyola in 98 and 99, I was at Chicago Comics probably twice a week.
• 1:10:00
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:10:01
  Ezra Daniels: Second home.
• 1:10:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:10:05
  Tad Eggleston: Such a good story. Chicago's got a lot of good comic shops. I mean, I will always shout out Challengers Comics in Conversation.
• 1:10:12
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:10:13
  Tad Eggleston: Because they're amazing. First Aid Comics is amazing.
• 1:10:16
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, yeah. What was the one in Evanston?
• 1:10:19
  Tad Eggleston: And a couple of them.
• 1:10:20
  Ezra Daniels: kamikaze.
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe?
• 1:10:24
  Ezra Daniels: That was a great shop, too.
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: Howling Pages might be… after you moved, but it's great.
• 1:10:32
  Tad Eggleston: And they had… they… they had an art show for Godzilla vs. Chicago.
• 1:10:38
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, cool, oh, oh, I think I knew about that, yeah. That's cool. Yeah.
• 1:10:42
  Tad Eggleston: Man.
• 1:10:43
  Ezra Daniels: That was a fun book to work on.
• 1:10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Well, talk to me about it, then. How did that come… I mean, because Godzilla… I was… I was… I'm not a Godzilla guy.
• 1:10:53
  Tad Eggleston: There's so many things in comics lately that, like, enough people that I love who…
• 1:10:59
  Tad Eggleston: did happen to be that fandom or whatnot, have wound up doing things that…
• 1:11:05
  Tad Eggleston: I had never been a fan of, and it's like, well…
• 1:11:08
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not a Godzilla fan, but I'm an Ezra Clayton Daniels fan, I'm a Carolyn Cash fan, and I'm a Chicago fan, so if Godzilla is coming to Chicago, and Ezra Clayton Daniels, and Carolyn Cash… oh, and…
• 1:11:23
  Tad Eggleston: That Tim Seeley guy's pretty cool, too.
• 1:11:27
  Tad Eggleston: are all gonna be involved in the comic, then… I think I'm buying it.
• 1:11:33
  Tad Eggleston: And then it was amazing, and I'm like, God damn it, am I a Godzilla fan now?
• 1:11:38
  Ezra Daniels: That's awesome. Yeah, I don't…
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: So how did that come about, and were you a Godzilla fan, or just a Chicago fan?
• 1:11:45
  Ezra Daniels: Well, I'm more of a Chicago fan. I was a little bit of a Godzilla fan, but not like a Godzilla… like, I mean, I'd seen a lot of Godzilla movies, but I wouldn't consider myself a Godzilla fan, but…
• 1:11:55
  Ezra Daniels: The editors just reached out to me because I think it… maybe it was shortly after the MCA, Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, did a big, like, Chicago comics retrospective. It was, like, Chicago comics from the 60s until now, and so they featured
• 1:12:09
  Ezra Daniels: a bunch of my work, and they featured a bunch of work from people that I was running around with when I was in Chicago at that time, so…
• 1:12:16
  Ezra Daniels: that had, like, kind of reinvigorated my association with the Chicago comic scene, so I think one of the editors might have seen that show, or heard about that show.
• 1:12:25
  Ezra Daniels: So they reached out to me, and I told them I had been living in LA for the past 8 years, but they were just like.
• 1:12:31
  Ezra Daniels: It's a Chicago vibe, and also Bottom Feeders is such a Chicago-centric book that I feel like
• 1:12:37
  Ezra Daniels: And I'm honored to be considered a Chicago, like, one of the cartoonists from Chicago, because like I said earlier, I still consider Chicago home. Like, when I meet people here, even though I grew up in Sioux City, and I've been in LA for 10 years, and people say, where are you from? I say, I'm from Chicago, and I still have my 773 phone number.
• 1:12:55
  Tad Eggleston: Well, nobody wants.
• 1:12:55
  Ezra Daniels: I'm still…
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: from Sioux City.
• 1:12:58
  Ezra Daniels: I mean… Nobody wants to sing the film.
• 1:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: two cities, so it was either… it was either Chicago or Portland.
• 1:13:03
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, right.
• 1:13:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, among other things, you say you're from Sioux City, and you're gonna have to follow with Iowa, because they won't know.
• 1:13:13
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah, I'll have to…
• 1:13:14
  Tad Eggleston: it.
• 1:13:14
  Ezra Daniels: There'll have to be some explanations.
• 1:13:17
  Tad Eggleston: And then they'll be like, is that actually a city? Because I've never heard of it.
• 1:13:25
  Tad Eggleston: I thought it was just a root beer brand.
• 1:13:32
  Tad Eggleston: I used to get Sioux City Sarsaparilla at a mobile station in Mount Morris, Illinois, every time we drove out to Galena. That, for the longest.
• 1:13:40
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, yeah.
• 1:13:41
  Tad Eggleston: what Sioux City meant to me.
• 1:13:43
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, there's some great, there's some great sweets from Sioux City. There's, Sioux City Sarsaparillo, but also Sue B. Honey is a big one. And, what's the other one? Palmer Candy Company is in Sioux City. They make the Twin Ding, the cherry, the chocolate-covered cherry mounds.
• 1:14:00
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:14:01
  Ezra Daniels: I don't know if you've had those, but that was, like.
• 1:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: I think I have.
• 1:14:05
  Ezra Daniels: Come on the red package.
• 1:14:06
  Tad Eggleston: I don't mean to sound like I'm making too much fun of it, because I'm not. I, I, I…
• 1:14:11
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, leave Sioux City alone.
• 1:14:13
  Ezra Daniels: What does Susan ever do you?
• 1:14:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 1:14:17
  Ezra Daniels: Some things. I'm certain I could come up with something.
• 1:14:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know how much I like Iowa these days. They're pretty red. They used to be purplish, and they've changed their mind.
• 1:14:37
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, we have a pretty… pretty bad leadership in NIOR right now.
• 1:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, wasn't it an Iowa senator that was, like…
• 1:14:48
  Tad Eggleston: When somebody yelled at her that people would die if she cut back on
• 1:14:55
  Tad Eggleston: Medicaid funding? She's like, well, we're all gonna die.
• 1:15:00
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:15:00
  Tad Eggleston: decided that the way to apologize for it was essentially to double down from a… Cemetery?
• 1:15:10
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that sounds right. Joni Ernst? That sounds like her.
• 1:15:13
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:15:14
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, I just emailed her yesterday.
• 1:15:18
  Ezra Daniels: Not personally, but just like, come on, man, what's going on?
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right!
• 1:15:24
  Tad Eggleston: No. Like, I've gotten to know Andrew Iden because of this, and… and… and…
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Talking to him is really great, because, like, he's from rural North Carolina, and spent time in Georgia with John Lewis and whatnot.
• 1:15:46
  Tad Eggleston: And, like… Is really good at grounding me and reminding me that, like.
• 1:15:51
  Tad Eggleston: People are people everywhere, these are some hard-working people.
• 1:15:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so… so I will say that I can find ways to make fun of my own city, and.
• 1:16:03
  Tad Eggleston: Perhaps not today as much. It's just sometimes fun.
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: to think about, because, you know, I mean, I'll also say, I never tell people I'm from Wheaton.
• 1:16:16
  Tad Eggleston: I tell people, I'm from Chicago.
• 1:16:19
  Ezra Daniels: But yeah…
• 1:16:20
  Tad Eggleston: And if I don't tell him…
• 1:16:21
  Ezra Daniels: easier.
• 1:16:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and if I don't tell them I'm from Chicago, I tell them I'm from Galena, even though I left there when I was 3. But it's a cooler-sounding town.
• 1:16:31
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:16:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know? It's like, it's like, I'm either gonna be from the city or the small town. I'm not gonna tell you I'm from the suburb.
• 1:16:41
  Tad Eggleston: At least not if we're outside of Chicagoland. If I'm talking to somebody in Chicagoland, you tell… you tell them the real place, because they'll call you out if, like…
• 1:16:49
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, totally.
• 1:16:50
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm from Chicago, huh, really? Which neighborhood? .
• 1:16:52
  Ezra Daniels: the.
• 1:16:53
  Tad Eggleston: preaching.
• 1:16:55
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, my wife was really good at calling people out on that. Like, let's be clear. Oak Park? Maybe you get a pass. Berwyn? Naperville? Mmm…
• 1:17:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, you know, I mean, Wheaton is the home of the Billy Graham Center, and Wheaton is where the, ironically titled Chicago Golf Course is apparently…
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: where… Dick Cheney and… Karl Rove, and a lot of those,
• 1:17:31
  Tad Eggleston: Neocons hatched all of their plans going into 2000.
• 1:17:37
  Ezra Daniels: No.
• 1:17:40
  Tad Eggleston: Dennis Hastert?
• 1:17:41
  Tad Eggleston: He was from our district.
• 1:17:44
  Tad Eggleston: Or no, he might have been DeKalb.
• 1:17:46
  Tad Eggleston: But, the…
• 1:17:49
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, and by the way, Sioux City represent, the former,
• 1:17:54
  Ezra Daniels: captain of the Chicago Bulls, Kirk Heinrich, is from my hometown, and he was… I went to high school with him. I don't know if you follow the Bulls, but he was.
• 1:18:01
  Tad Eggleston: A little bit, I'm much more of a baseball guy.
• 1:18:04
  Ezra Daniels: Well, he was a captain of the Bulls for a long time.
• 1:18:08
  Tad Eggleston: Cool.
• 1:18:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I remember Michael Jordan.
• 1:18:16
  Ezra Daniels: I don't follow basketball either, but…
• 1:18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Scottie Pippen?
• 1:18:19
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:18:22
  Tad Eggleston: John Paxson?
• 1:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I…
• 1:18:26
  Ezra Daniels: I remember this.
• 1:18:27
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I remember some of the guys that were on the championship teams, how about that?
• 1:18:31
  Ezra Daniels: I don't know, are we just naming basketball players?
• 1:18:34
  Tad Eggleston: Randomly, yes.
• 1:18:35
  Ezra Daniels: That's the.
• 1:18:36
  Tad Eggleston: Best I can do.
• 1:18:38
  Tad Eggleston: I think all of the ones I named were once on the bowls, though.
• 1:18:44
  Ezra Daniels: I don't even know. Somebody will call you out in the comments.
• 1:18:48
  Ezra Daniels: Probably not.
• 1:18:50
  Tad Eggleston: I don't get enough comments.
• 1:18:52
  Tad Eggleston: But please, I want more commenters, so if I got anything wrong, please call me out in.
• 1:18:57
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, just rage bait… you need to start rage baiting Chicago Bulls fans by naming random names and saying that they're on the championship team.
• 1:19:05
  Tad Eggleston: Let's see, ezra Clayton Daniels, he was the forward…
• 1:19:11
  Ezra Daniels: Right.
• 1:19:12
  Tad Eggleston: that got injured and Michael Jordan took over. That's what I… that's right.
• 1:19:17
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, leave a comment.
• 1:19:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Ben Passmore was the center.
• 1:19:24
  Tad Eggleston: He's tall enough to be.
• 1:19:26
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:19:32
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, we're both getting goofy silly at this point. So A, we just need to agree to do this again, but B, now we'll get into those final questions.
• 1:19:41
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. Oh, and by the way, my headphones are dying soon, so yeah, we should start with that.
• 1:19:46
  Tad Eggleston: I started noticing.
• 1:19:46
  Ezra Daniels: I'm gonna disappear.
• 1:19:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So give me one of those surreal stories, one of those things that happened to you because you work in comics that, like, if you had told 10-year-old Ezra, or even 20-year-old Ezra.
• 1:20:01
  Tad Eggleston: or in my case, like, I started doing comics podcasting at 41, so, like, I…
• 1:20:10
  Tad Eggleston: If you told 40-year-old myself.
• 1:20:13
  Tad Eggleston: frankly, that I was gonna be talking to Ezra Klington Daniels and laughing with you for… for an hour and a half, but certainly that I was gonna have, like, lunch with Dennis Kitchen, or…
• 1:20:23
  Tad Eggleston: any number of things that I've done, and I've found that everybody in comics has stories like that, where they're just like.
• 1:20:29
  Tad Eggleston: How did I start living this life?
• 1:20:31
  Ezra Daniels: Thanks, buddy.
• 1:20:33
  Tad Eggleston: Give me one of those stories.
• 1:20:35
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, man.
• 1:20:37
  Ezra Daniels: I…
• 1:20:39
  Ezra Daniels: Well, the first thing that comes to mind was when I got to write a Deathlock story for Marvel, and that wasn't, like, a celebrity, like, a comic celebrity interaction, but that was definitely.
• 1:20:50
  Tad Eggleston: It doesn't have to be.
• 1:20:51
  Ezra Daniels: times.
• 1:20:52
  Ezra Daniels: But that was definitely one of those times where I was just like, I can't believe that I get to come up with, like, a canon
• 1:20:57
  Ezra Daniels: Deathlock story. Deathlock was my favorite character when I was… and mostly just from collecting the cards, because the art on the Deathlock card was so cool, and like, as a kid, he's a cyborg zombie, like, how could any character be cooler than that? And then to find out later that, like,
• 1:21:15
  Ezra Daniels: Dwayne McDuffie wrote some of the, like, the all-time great Deathlock storylines, and then… and Dwayne McDuffie's take on the story being, like, that Death Rock is a Black man trapped in the body of a dead white man, I found so… connected with me as a biracial person in a way that I couldn't even really argue.
• 1:21:32
  Tad Eggleston: Now I have to go read more Deathlock. I barely knew Deathlock, and you've just sold me on Deathlock.
• 1:21:39
  Ezra Daniels: it's such a fun… it's just, like, such a fun world, and Dennis Cowan drew, a lot of the… I think he did almost all of the Dwayne McDuffie, storylines for Deathlocke, but they're just awesome comics, so that was a big inspiration when I started making comics, so it was really a dream in a lot of ways to be able to write something.
• 1:21:57
  Ezra Daniels: And it turned out really fun. I was really proud of that story.
• 1:22:03
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds… amazing to me.
• 1:22:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you just gave me so much new information.
• 1:22:10
  Tad Eggleston: And I hope that didn't come off in even one iota facetious. It's more like…
• 1:22:17
  Tad Eggleston: I'm also autistic, so sometimes my, like.
• 1:22:20
  Tad Eggleston: when my brain is blown, like, I stop having control over how my voice sounds. When I've got the headphones on, I'm like, oh, did that sound like I was being sarcastic? I'm not being sarcastic.
• 1:22:32
  Ezra Daniels: The rain is blowing.
• 1:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: up. McDuffie and Cowan did this character that I didn't even realize was cool. Now I need to go look, and Ezra did, so, like, I have at least two Deathlock stories that I have to go find.
• 1:22:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:22:54
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, they're great.
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: Even another thing to throw into… we have a milestone book club.
• 1:23:01
  Ezra Daniels: Cool, yeah, that'd be perfect.
• 1:23:03
  Tad Eggleston: And we're, like, halfway through milestone, but every once in a while, we'll take a… I mean, so far, we've taken breaks to do…
• 1:23:10
  Tad Eggleston: Like, new milestone.
• 1:23:12
  Tad Eggleston: But this would be another thing, you know, as we wrap up the third compendium, it might be something to toss out and go, hey.
• 1:23:19
  Ezra Daniels: Totally relevant, yeah.
• 1:23:20
  Tad Eggleston: Do we wanna… did you guys know that…
• 1:23:24
  Tad Eggleston: Dwayne McDuffie and Dennis Cowan got together on Deathlock?
• 1:23:29
  Tad Eggleston: I did not know this, and…
• 1:23:33
  Tad Eggleston: Gregory Wright. Here I am, I just, I pulled it up. Deathlock number 1 from…
• 1:23:39
  Tad Eggleston: Prod… no, that's the digital release date.
• 1:23:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Dwayne McDuffie, Gregory Wright, and Dennis Cowan.
• 1:23:52
  Tad Eggleston: From 1991. So they actually were doing Deathlock BEFORE they did Milestone.
• 1:24:00
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:24:01
  Tad Eggleston: Now, I really need to go… Yeah. See, this is…
• 1:24:04
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it's great. Yeah. And, like, the early Death Lock stuff is really cool, too, so the stuff from the 70s is really psychedelic and super stylish. I really like, like, all the Death Lock stuff is really fun.
• 1:24:14
  Tad Eggleston: No, okay, you've convinced me. I'm gonna have to add it to my…
• 1:24:18
  Tad Eggleston: Do you have… do you have any idea how… how… how big my to-read pile is?
• 1:24:23
  Ezra Daniels: I probably have some idea.
• 1:24:25
  Tad Eggleston: stuff. He gave me Marvel stuff?
• 1:24:27
  Ezra Daniels: I've got a big-to-read pile. I can't imagine how big somebody who actually works in a store has.
• 1:24:35
  Tad Eggleston: I know, but Marvel doesn't need my money!
• 1:24:38
  Tad Eggleston: And they don't need me to promote their stuff, man!
• 1:24:46
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, well, that does actually take away one more thing for the last question, though, which is, tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules, preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules, but something that you love.
• 1:25:00
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you need them to, so you have more people to talk about. And it can't be Deathlock, and it can't be.
• 1:25:10
  Ezra Daniels: Kings in disguise.
• 1:25:12
  Tad Eggleston: Kings in disguise, because we already talked about them, and I'm gonna read them both and make you come talk to me about them.
• 1:25:18
  Ezra Daniels: I got a good one,
• 1:25:20
  Ezra Daniels: Karen Chapp's book, Future Perf.
• 1:25:25
  Ezra Daniels: is…
• 1:25:26
  Ezra Daniels: a book that, I read probably… I think it probably came out, like, maybe 8 or 9 years ago. It's a pretty small little,
• 1:25:34
  Ezra Daniels: book published by Chatbooks. And that book, especially in times like these, where it feels really hard to find hope against these insurmountable odds, I found that book to be this really stunningly hopeful.
• 1:25:50
  Tad Eggleston: What is it again?
• 1:25:51
  Ezra Daniels: It's called Future Perf.
• 1:25:54
  Tad Eggleston: Gucci Perf?
• 1:25:56
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:26:00
  Ezra Daniels: by KCHAP, C-Z-A-P.
• 1:26:08
  Ezra Daniels: I think about that book a lot, and I found it to be really helpful and inspiring, and it's just stunningly beautifully illustrated.
• 1:26:22
  Tad Eggleston: This is… First, I think it's, it's, it's Kevin now.
• 1:26:29
  Tad Eggleston: It appears.
• 1:26:31
  Tad Eggleston: F-U-T-C-H-I-P-R-F?
• 1:26:35
  Ezra Daniels: Yep, that's it.
• 1:26:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:26:38
  Tad Eggleston: And it's now being, published by Uncivilized.
• 1:26:48
  Tad Eggleston: So… So I know the publisher.
• 1:26:52
  Tad Eggleston: He's a good guy.
• 1:26:57
  Tad Eggleston: Make certain, I'm gonna share, and you can tell me that this is the one.
• 1:27:05
  Tad Eggleston: As soon as I find the right button, I can't always find the right button.
• 1:27:10
  Tad Eggleston: This one?
• 1:27:12
  Tad Eggleston: Does that look right?
• 1:27:13
  Ezra Daniels: Yep, yep, that's the one.
• 1:27:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:27:18
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, it's so good. But yeah, it's Karen now.
• 1:27:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it's Karen now, and it was? Yeah. Okay.
• 1:27:26
  Ezra Daniels: I think they've made it go by KCHAP now.
• 1:27:29
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I… I just… I'm… I'm used to Tom being on top of having that stuff right, so I just assumed that…
• 1:27:39
  Tad Eggleston: that it had changed, and you had read it before, but… but… No, this is an old…
• 1:27:44
  Ezra Daniels: Probably an old, but the book, like I said, the book came out a while ago.
• 1:27:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it looks like the book originally came out in 2016, but this is the…
• 1:28:02
  Tad Eggleston: Got it.
• 1:28:04
  Ezra Daniels: But anyways, it's an awesome book.
• 1:28:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:28:06
  Ezra Daniels: I highly recommend it.
• 1:28:07
  Tad Eggleston: Looks good.
• 1:28:11
  Tad Eggleston: I will have to.
• 1:28:13
  Ezra Daniels: That's the one I bet.
• 1:28:13
  Tad Eggleston: Check that out, and check out chatbooks as well.
• 1:28:18
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, they do really great stuff.
• 1:28:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because micropresses are good things to know.
• 1:28:26
  Tad Eggleston: Cerebro character file?
• 1:28:30
  Tad Eggleston: Counting down the X-Men?
• 1:28:34
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:28:37
  Tad Eggleston: That also looks cool.
• 1:28:41
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly… like, I'm weird. I don't have favorite X-Men, I haven't read a ton of X-Men, but I often like reading books about the X-Men.
• 1:28:53
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
• 1:28:55
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:28:57
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's one of those things where they have so much history that it's like, I'd rather read what other people love about them, and then go…
• 1:29:06
  Tad Eggleston: Go on my curated journeys.
• 1:29:10
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, oh, you love this stuff, now I'll go read it because you're writing about it.
• 1:29:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there's so much to get through otherwise.
• 1:29:18
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, totally.
• 1:29:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So, Ezra, it has been a blast. We will have to do it again.
• 1:29:27
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, this is fun.
• 1:29:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I… I know that I'm…
• 1:29:32
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes I feel like I'm the weird podcaster because, like, I just want it to feel like we're in the living room.
• 1:29:38
  Tad Eggleston: And we turned on a microphone.
• 1:29:40
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. Well, next time I come through Chicago, I'll have to hit you up, and we'll have to do an in-person podcast.
• 1:29:45
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely, and I… I am hoping to get to the West Coast sometime in the next couple of years, so… and only the next couple of years, because I'm on a, like, two teacher salaries, so, like, travel…
• 1:29:58
  Ezra Daniels: Understandable.
• 1:29:59
  Tad Eggleston: happen a ton.
• 1:30:00
  Tad Eggleston: But I have more and more people who will put me up in the LA area, so I only have to pay to get there, and LA is one of the few places…
• 1:30:10
  Tad Eggleston: That you can generally find a, like, not ridiculously expensive flight into.
• 1:30:15
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah. So…
• 1:30:17
  Tad Eggleston: So, it could happen this summer. I could wind up… Oh, let me know! …say, I'm staying with whoever.
• 1:30:24
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:30:25
  Ezra Daniels: Let's do a podcast episode!
• 1:30:27
  Tad Eggleston: Or just have coffee. Or just have coffee.
• 1:30:29
  Ezra Daniels: Coffee!
• 1:30:31
  Tad Eggleston: Or go to a comic shop!
• 1:30:33
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:30:34
  Tad Eggleston: So far, I've only actually recorded one podcast live.
• 1:30:39
  Ezra Daniels: out.
• 1:30:40
  Tad Eggleston: I was with Emil Farris at Lion's Booth in Milwaukee.
• 1:30:44
  Ezra Daniels: That's a good one.
• 1:30:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Emil's great.
• 1:30:47
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:30:48
  Tad Eggleston: Another Chicago transplant, though. She moved out to Milwaukee.
• 1:30:51
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, did she?
• 1:30:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:30:54
  Ezra Daniels: Crazy. I never met Emil when I lived in Chicago the whole time. I only met Emil when we were both at a comic festival in Switzerland, and we hung out a bunch in Switzerland. That's a pretty good, surreal comics experience.
• 1:31:06
  Tad Eggleston: You could have met Emil the same day I met Emil, which was the same day I met you.
• 1:31:14
  Ezra Daniels: Was she tabling a cake that year?
• 1:31:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, she was at the Phantographics table at Cake that year.
• 1:31:20
  Ezra Daniels: Oh… well, actually, now that you say that, I might have, like, briefly just said hi, but I didn't actually have a conversation with her until we were in Switzerland.
• 1:31:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:31:30
  Tad Eggleston: I actually managed, and I didn't even realize it for years afterwards, I had enough of a conversation with her that day that she actually remembered me all of the times that I emailed her afterwards.
• 1:31:42
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's amazing.
• 1:31:43
  Tad Eggleston: We've been, like… Because she's a Cubs fan.
• 1:31:47
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, like, I mean, I'd sometimes just drop her, you know, she made me promise to follow her on Facebook, so I did that, and then I occasionally just dropped, like, a note if there was a Cubs thing, and then during the… the pandemic, she complained that there was no baseball.
• 1:32:05
  Tad Eggleston: For her to draw to, because she just put the game on.
• 1:32:08
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, yeah.
• 1:32:09
  Tad Eggleston: And, and so I sent her links to, like.
• 1:32:13
  Tad Eggleston: a dozen really good YouTube full games for mysteries, like, well, here's this one and this one.
• 1:32:22
  Ezra Daniels: Oh, that's cool.
• 1:32:22
  Tad Eggleston: this one.
• 1:32:26
  Tad Eggleston: So… That's cool. And she remembered it all.
• 1:32:29
  Ezra Daniels: That's awesome.
• 1:32:29
  Tad Eggleston: She's still busy as hell and always traveling the world, because, you know…
• 1:32:34
  Tad Eggleston: She wrote that book that everybody loves.
• 1:32:37
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah, that's that Rockstar comics life.
• 1:32:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:32:40
  Tad Eggleston: There aren't many people who wind up living the Rockstar comics life, but she's come…
• 1:32:46
  Tad Eggleston: I think as close as… anybody I know, it's…
• 1:32:49
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:32:51
  Tad Eggleston: It's weird. You know? You know, she's another person that I'll get together with when I'm in Milwaukee, and… and…
• 1:32:58
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, half the time when I reach out to her, she's like, I'd love to, but I'm in blank.
• 1:33:05
  Ezra Daniels: Yeah.
• 1:33:06
  Tad Eggleston: I will be in blank.
• 1:33:10
  Tad Eggleston: He's like, well, yeah, no, I can't sail across the ocean to have alcohol.
• 1:33:19
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Ezra, Clayton, Daniel, this has been 22 Panels. Pick up…
• 1:33:26
  Tad Eggleston: Mama Came Calling in bookstores everywhere on Wednesday?
• 1:33:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I'm probably… I'm gonna emphasize bookstores everywhere, because this is one that's probably gonna be easier to find at your local Barnes & Noble than at your local comic shop. If you can get it at your local comic shop, please, please do, and…
• 1:33:44
  Tad Eggleston: Any local comic shop people listening, get a HarperCollins account set up, though Harper is working on setting up with
• 1:33:54
  Tad Eggleston: with Lunar, so keep your eyes open for it to pop up on Lunar, I just know it's not in this catalog.
• 1:34:01
  Tad Eggleston: Mama Came Calling, I read it last night, it's so good, Ezra.
• 1:34:06
  Ezra Daniels: Thank you.
• 1:34:07
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait to have the physical copy in my hand and really pore over it again, hopefully sometime this week. Yeah, so for Ezra Clayton, Daniel, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.
• 1:34:19
  Ezra Daniels: Thanks for having me.
• 1:34:21
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.