Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / Pulp Blotter #27 - Jon Sable, Freelance

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Pulp Blotter #27 - Jon Sable, Freelance · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Pulp Blotter on 22 Panels. I'm joined by actor Sean Hockergrode, actor and writer Mark Pratt, and fellow podcaster.
• 0:16
  Tad Eggleston: Are you close enough to getting the new show up and going that you want to plug it, Dan?
• 0:22
  Samsung SM-S916U: Yeah, we are at the point of October 7th is the… that Wednesday is the release of the first episode. We've…
• 0:31
  Samsung SM-S916U: Just go.
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: those.
• 0:32
  Samsung SM-S916U: First episode.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: Of.
• 0:34
  Samsung SM-S916U: Comics Over Time, and what we're going to be doing is, yeah, it's the Comics Over Time podcast with me and Dwayne Ekholm. We are at comics.historian.us if you want to check us out, or you can find Comics Over Time on any of your podcast sort of channels, and it is…
• 0:51
  Samsung SM-S916U: Gonna be fun. We're going through the DC universe sort of one year at a time, and just I get to pick out books that I loved from that year, and my buddy Dwayne, who hasn't read a lot of comics, gets to experience them for the first time, and then we talk about them. So are you starting?
• 1:07
  Mark Pracht: Are you starting in 1936?
• 1:10
  Samsung SM-S916U: To save him the pain of a lot of the old stuff, we are starting in 1956-60. We did, basically.
• 1:20
  Samsung SM-S916U: 5 books from the early Silver Age, and then we're gonna do…
• 1:24
  Samsung SM-S916U: 1961 to 63 as a… we're just talking about, sort of, the multiverse elements with some Justice League stuff and the Flash 123, and then 1964 is when we start year by year. Because I figured I would lose him if it was all, like, you know.
• 1:41
  Samsung SM-S916U: Adventures of Bob Hope through the 50s, or whatever, so it,
• 1:46
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah.
• 1:47
  Samsung SM-S916U: No.
• 1:47
  Mark Pracht: You can only talk about the ultra humanite so many times.
• 1:50
  Samsung SM-S916U: I had suggested to him I do like a here's a history of the DC universe up until now, but it would have taken like
• 1:58
  Samsung SM-S916U: 10-15 minutes of me monologuing, so he's like, we're just going to… we're just going to assume people can find that.
• 2:05
  Tad Eggleston: A friend of mine is… I don't know if it's been announced, so I don't know if I should say too much of it, and I don't know if it's the universe or the company, but a friend of mine's writing a history of DC right now.
• 2:15
  Samsung SM-S916U: Oh, fantastic.
• 2:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I know he'll be on to talk about it at some point. And I'll also say that we have
• 2:23
  Tad Eggleston: One more weekend of performances at Shane… of Shane at City Lit theater in Chicago next weekend. Mark has done an absolute
• 2:33
  Tad Eggleston: Positively fantastic job of adapting it. I listened to the book since I saw the play and went, oh, yeah.
• 2:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, you nailed this. Haven't watched the movie yet. That's next on my, agenda.
• 2:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm told that Sean plays the villain quite well, but I got to see an understudy, and haven't managed to get back. I'm kind of hoping that I'll find time next weekend, and we'll see. But, otherwise, Sean breaks a leg every night. Every once in a while, he calls me in to set it, and…
• 3:04
  Tad Eggleston: And that's always a little weird. It's like, Sean, I thought you've been an actor long enough that you knew that this was a euphemism, because, like, it's bad luck to say good luck, so we say break a leg. Not go out there and break your leg!
• 3:19
  Mark Pracht: the.
• 3:19
  Tad Eggleston: They use hammers in the show, and he plays with them backstage, and…
• 3:25
  Mark Pracht: You know.
• 3:26
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 3:27
  Mark Pracht: In this show, we say break an arm.
• 3:29
  Tad Eggleston: Breaking R.
• 3:32
  Mark Pracht: Anyway.
• 3:33
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, so anyway, John Sable Freelance, which had been on my list to read.
• 3:41
  Tad Eggleston: forever.
• 3:42
  Tad Eggleston: And I hadn't, so this is… this is my first experience with it. I know Dan has read it before and loved it. I forget, Sean, Mark, is this… Revisiting, or… So this is new for Sean.
• 3:55
  Mark Pracht: I was… I was big into this book in the 80s, so, I mean, like…
• 4:01
  Mark Pracht: It was also a time when I wasn't getting to a comic shop at a regular basis, so it was spotty. Right. My collecting of it was very spotty, but I always loved this book. It's…
• 4:13
  Mark Pracht: Okay.
• 4:14
  Mark Pracht: I mean, it is really a snapshot of the time, you know? It owes a lot to those, kind of the men's adventure paperback series that
• 4:28
  Mark Pracht: you know, like Mac Bolin, or… Casca, the Eternal Warrior, the Destroyer, things like that, and I was really into that sort of stuff when I was a kid, so…
• 4:38
  Mark Pracht: This was right up my alley.
• 4:42
  Tad Eggleston: Cool, cool.
• 4:44
  Mark Pracht: And I'll see you guys next month.
• 4:46
  Tad Eggleston: No, you told me that you'd read it twice and had much to say, so don't you dare.
• 4:52
  Mark Pracht: I mean, look, you know, like, you know, I'm notorious for not reading the front matter or the editorialization stuff, but, you know, I do know
• 5:06
  Mark Pracht: for the three of us who are in the Chicagoland area, that, you know, this character was born in Evanston, Illinois, which is right outside of Chicago, and that's…
• 5:17
  Mark Pracht: That's pretty cool. I… you know, I don't know, I just… I think this book is fun.
• 5:23
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 5:24
  Mark Pracht: Weird, weird conglomeration of, of Mike Grell's interests, you know?
• 5:32
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, like, the only thing it doesn't have, which is obviously a big interest of his, is the whole sword and sorcery sort of stuff that he got in Warlord.
• 5:40
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 5:40
  Mark Pracht: But,
• 5:42
  Mark Pracht: like the you know, like, whatever you think about it. I mean, the guy loves obviously loves guns. He loves
• 5:51
  Mark Pracht: hunting and and and all of this stuff, and and then throws in this weird reference to Pentathlon, which is when I was a kid.
• 6:01
  Tad Eggleston: Guns and…
• 6:03
  Mark Pracht: That sold me for this book right there. I was like, wait a minute, wait, wait, wait, pentathlon? And then I had to go look that up, and I was like, this is amazing! Why have I never watched this sport?
• 6:15
  Sean Harklerode: Sure.
• 6:17
  Mark Pracht: Anyway.
• 6:19
  Tad Eggleston: John, first impressions.
• 6:22
  Samsung SM-S916U: My first impressions were…
• 6:25
  Tad Eggleston: You're Dan, I said Sean.
• 6:27
  Samsung SM-S916U: Oh, sorry!
• 6:30
  Sean Harklerode: Go ahead, Jim.
• 6:30
  Samsung SM-S916U: He.
• 6:31
  Tad Eggleston: These aren't your first impressions, these are… these are your second, third, fourth, whatever impressions. Okay.
• 6:40
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, so my first impressions, you know, I thought I really
• 6:47
  Sean Harklerode: I thought it really picked up, with Issue 3, when we get into the, origin story.
• 6:53
  Sean Harklerode: I enjoyed the first two, you know, as kind of one-off adventures, and then it was nice to get a little more character development. It reminded me of Ditko's Doctor Strange, how you got, like, 5 issues in, and then you got the origin story.
• 7:13
  Sean Harklerode: My first impressions, you know, I went back from, you know, is this… is he James Bond?
• 7:20
  Sean Harklerode: Particularly, there's a, you know, you can hear, you know.
• 7:25
  Sean Harklerode: We've got all the time in the world playing throughout much of the origin story.
• 7:32
  Sean Harklerode: And, it also reminded me, quite a bit of, Have Gun Will Travel.
• 7:39
  Sean Harklerode: Which, is what I'm kind of hoping the series becomes.
• 7:44
  Sean Harklerode: Kim Williams, which was Richard Boone on television, anyway, as Paladin, who lived in a swank San Francisco hotel, and people would write him letters, and he would go, and he was a gun for hire.
• 8:00
  Sean Harklerode: So I don't know if that's kind of where this goes, but it's a nice juxtaposition between the life as B.B. Flem
• 8:10
  Sean Harklerode: And the adventuring life of John Sable.
• 8:15
  Sean Harklerode: I loved Longbow Hunters and Grell's Run on Green Arrow.
• 8:21
  Sean Harklerode: So this was great for me to see something that came before that, and I think obviously this informs… you read this, and it was like, well, this is… obviously that's the direction he took Ali Queen, you know, because that's what he's more interested in.
• 8:40
  Sean Harklerode: And that always struck me as a very adult.
• 8:42
  Sean Harklerode: comic. You know, it was something that I could lend to older friends, and they were like, oh, this is really good stuff. And of course, the art was amazing.
• 8:51
  Sean Harklerode: Art-wise.
• 8:54
  Sean Harklerode: It reminded me, of Neil Adams for a bit.
• 9:00
  Sean Harklerode: And then I realized that it was Storanko that it was really, just the design, the trippy, you know.
• 9:11
  Sean Harklerode: just collages, almost.
• 9:13
  Sean Harklerode: of photos.
• 9:16
  Sean Harklerode: and the layouts. So I thought about Steranko a lot and his Nick Fury.
• 9:22
  Sean Harklerode: Which was probably another big interest.
• 9:26
  Sean Harklerode: And the beautiful women, you know, obviously he, you know, like you said, it's like those, you know, Mac Bolin.
• 9:35
  Sean Harklerode: paperback, you know, like a Robert McGinnis, you know.
• 9:38
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 9:39
  Sean Harklerode: painting.
• 9:42
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I think… I never really thought about the Sterenko thing before you just said that, but it is true. I mean, like, he's, you know, like, Grell is in that class of artists that came right after Adams that were like, okay, yeah, we can draw things realistically.
• 9:58
  Mark Pracht: But one of the things that I always notice about Grell's work is, I always feel like his figures are a little elongated.
• 10:05
  Mark Pracht: I always feel a little stretched out, and I feel like that's kind of a Storanko thing, too, is it always feels just… just a tad bit distorted, not, like, to the point where you're like, I can't look at this, but I mean, like, just that that… that… that's sort of, like, whenever… whenever Sable is in a… some sort of…
• 10:23
  Mark Pracht: action pose. It feels just a little bit longer than what is realistic, you know, like his legs and stuff, but yeah.
• 10:30
  Sean Harklerode: Also the ladies legs always.
• 10:32
  Mark Pracht: always.
• 10:35
  Mark Pracht: Well, and…
• 10:37
  Sean Harklerode: sales.
• 10:37
  Mark Pracht: Well, you know, it's sort of like, I'll let Dan talk in a minute, but it's sort of like with Perez and his thing with hair.
• 10:49
  Mark Pracht: You know, you can tell that, like, when Mike Blackman shows up, and she's like, well, yeah, I'm over 6… I'm 6 foot tall, and you're like, oh, I think I know what Mike Grell's type is.
• 11:12
  Samsung SM-S916U: Cool.
• 11:12
  Sean Harklerode: All right, Dan.
• 11:14
  Mark Pracht: No, he's…
• 11:15
  Samsung SM-S916U: So yeah, I like the fact, just hearing what everybody else thinks about this, because when I was young.
• 11:24
  Samsung SM-S916U: and I'm realizing probably younger than was the intended age for this, I loved these books. Absolutely loved John's label. And… got to go back and basically read through the entire run up through what I have in my…
• 11:38
  Samsung SM-S916U: in my collection, which is, like, issue 35 or something like that. I also just found the Maggie the Cat books that Image put out in, like, the 90s that, that I'd never read before, but I bought them in a collection, evidently, and while I was sorting some Image stuff, I just saw them last week.
• 11:57
  Sean Harklerode: Done.
• 11:58
  Sean Harklerode: Cat on a hot tin roof?
• 12:00
  Samsung SM-S916U: No, the Maggie the Cat from… you'll find her later as we go along. Oh, okay.
• 12:06
  Samsung SM-S916U: It's one of his femme fatales.
• 12:08
  Sean Harklerode: The earlier adventures of Maggie from Cat.
• 12:11
  Samsung SM-S916U: Yep.
• 12:12
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty much. It's a pretty blatant riff on catwoman. She's a thief, and and has claws and all this stuff. But yeah, she and John get into various.
• 12:26
  Samsung SM-S916U: you know.
• 12:26
  Mark Pracht: misadventures together, shall we say.
• 12:28
  Samsung SM-S916U: Yeah, but I love this because even as I was thinking about it and like, you know, describing John Sable is crazy, but the easiest way.
• 12:38
  Samsung SM-S916U: for me to do it when I'm… when I'm now talking to people. Like, if… if you imagine that Dr. Seuss
• 12:44
  Samsung SM-S916U: had a traumatic event that turned him into the Punisher, and then went around having James Bond-type adventures. That is sort of the box that John Sable exists in. And I just love these. I also love that
• 13:00
  Samsung SM-S916U: In the early 80s, First Comics was just on fire.
• 13:05
  Samsung SM-S916U: Yeah. They had so much stuff. They had chickens, American flag, even some of the crazy stuff they tried. You know, like, I loved Star Slayer, which was another Grill thing that he handed off. I read the Mars
• 13:18
  Samsung SM-S916U: series that they did a little while ago, which was trippy, and I'm not even sure if it was good, but it was trying something that everybody else wasn't trying. So I love the first comics from the early 80s. But these were…
• 13:31
  Samsung SM-S916U: It felt like the sort of, when comics talk about growing up.
• 13:34
  Samsung SM-S916U: This is comics growing up a little bit. Like, he's literally got a guy who is having actual…
• 13:42
  Samsung SM-S916U: realistic adult relationships with women and is.
• 13:46
  Samsung SM-S916U: you know, going through stuff, and we get real origins, and he's got… he's got friends, and he's got hobbies, and he seems like a real person, more than I think most of the characters that you would… you'd get. He's… again, he's fleshed out with all of Grell's obsessions, but he is nonetheless a really well-fleshed-out character.
• 14:06
  Samsung SM-S916U: And continues to be the whole way through the run.
• 14:09
  Samsung SM-S916U: This is just… just fantastic stuff.
• 14:13
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, no, I think I think that I I just think I mean to what Sean was saying. I do think
• 14:20
  Mark Pracht: because Sean was. I was talking to Sean about this like last weekend, and he was like, Yeah, I tried to start reading it like twice or 3 times, or something like that. And I was like, you got to get through those 1st 2 issues. They're a bit. Those 1st 2 issues are a little rote.
• 14:34
  Samsung SM-S916U: you.
• 14:35
  Mark Pracht: And then, you know, because, like, you don't really understand this B.B. Flem thing, or the, you know, it's like, is he a superhero? Does he have a… is this a secret identity thing, or whatever? And it's not until you actually get into the origin story that it all sort of, like, comes into a…
• 14:51
  Mark Pracht: you understand the tapestry that Grell is working with. Now, I think that.
• 14:58
  Mark Pracht: the one thing I can say is that you can… you can see Grell's growing pains as a writer-artist, right? There's a number of times when I'm reading this, and I'm like, oh, okay, that's a bit that he stole from
• 15:11
  Mark Pracht: Mad Max, or whatever. I think about the whole thing where.
• 15:15
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, yeah.
• 15:16
  Mark Pracht: kid with the… with the ants, and it's like, the dialogue is essentially the end of Mad Max, you know, and it's like, okay, you know, you're… you're figuring it out, you know, you're putting the pieces together to… to develop your own voice, and
• 15:32
  Mark Pracht: But yeah, like, John is consistently this…
• 15:37
  Mark Pracht: Super interesting character, you know, like, there's never any point where I'm like.
• 15:44
  Mark Pracht: I don't care, or I don't…
• 15:47
  Mark Pracht: I, you know, and the thing is, it's like, You know, even…
• 15:53
  Mark Pracht: And and the world he operates in is so
• 15:59
  Mark Pracht: morally compromised. Like, I… you know, and… and…
• 16:07
  Mark Pracht: there's no pontificating about the moral compromising of it. It's just sort of like like when he gets involved with the with the the mercenaries, you know.
• 16:17
  Dan Newland: Like.
• 16:18
  Mark Pracht: they don't stop to be like, okay, you know, like, oh, he's… he's a good man who just ended up in this situation. Like, he literally just sort of jumps into it, you know?
• 16:28
  Mark Pracht: Because, and part of it is because he has nothing else to live for, but, I mean.
• 16:33
  Mark Pracht: I like the… the gray area that this whole book sort of lives in. It's… And it's…
• 16:44
  Mark Pracht: Really, I mean, and, like, you can't, you can't even…
• 16:50
  Mark Pracht: You can't undermine, you know, you can't soft… what? You can't undersell the art.
• 16:57
  Mark Pracht: It is.
• 16:59
  Mark Pracht: Right. Like, you can tell that every panel is a labor of love for Grell.
• 17:03
  Mark Pracht: And it is… It's incredible, I, I just, I, I love this book and it.
• 17:09
  Mark Pracht: And to what Dan was saying, yeah, it does… it is… it is comics growing up a little bit.
• 17:16
  Mark Pracht: But… you know, I wouldn't say that it's, like, you know, it's not, like, the equal of, like.
• 17:24
  Mark Pracht: You know, blankets, or one of these… one of these, like, deep
• 17:28
  Mark Pracht: Deep store, or mouse, or anything like that, but it is saying.
• 17:34
  Mark Pracht: you know, we don't have to write for 9 year olds. We can write for like 15 to 17 year olds, you know, and I think that
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 17:45
  Tad Eggleston: As I finish, and I'll jump in, I think that, and there we give away to the audience that I had to finish reading the last issue, that's why I've been quiet.
• 17:53
  Mark Pracht: Tad was Tad. The dog ate his homework.
• 17:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 17:59
  Tad Eggleston: But.
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: I think the way it represents comics… to me, it's genre comics.
• 18:07
  Tad Eggleston: growing up and becoming long-form. Because EC was already grown up, but it was short stories. You know, first, in general, this book
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely. And there were… there were…
• 18:21
  Tad Eggleston: probably some other examples if I thought hard.
• 18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Were, were, were genre… And, and, like, not specifically superhero genre comics.
• 18:35
  Tad Eggleston: kind of hitting the stride of the 20s to 40s Pulp, you know, it's becoming the Dashiell Hammett, the… and comic strips had done some of that as well. Like, if you look at some of the Steve Canyon or… or whatever, it's not that there was none of that.
• 18:53
  Sean Harklerode: Terry Nepomniak.
• 18:54
  Tad Eggleston: In… in the… in the medium, but… but, like, comic…
• 18:59
  Tad Eggleston: books that were more adult-oriented had almost strictly, I think, been
• 19:04
  Tad Eggleston: Or genre comic books, because again, like.
• 19:08
  Tad Eggleston: This is after…
• 19:10
  Tad Eggleston: after the… the underground boom, and those were certainly more adult-oriented, though. Though you could also argue that they weren't really growing up.
• 19:20
  Sean Harklerode: That's it.
• 19:20
  Dan Newland: I think I should… what I'd clarify is exactly that, that I don't think this is blankets, I don't think this is mouths, but it definitely isn't the undergrounds. These are… these are the sort of comics that a, you know, somebody in their late teens, or even an adult, could just sit down and it's got
• 19:39
  Dan Newland: the concerns of adult people in them, but yet it's still comics. It's got action, it's got, you know, the femme fatales, it's got everything.
• 19:50
  Tad Eggleston: And it's still, so it's still Pulp. It's, it's.
• 19:53
  Dan Newland: It's still Pulp, it's still fun, right, you know.
• 19:55
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 19:55
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 19:56
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, it's like, you know, my dad was, obsessed with reading Tom Clancy for years and years and years. I mean, and they… if… if you…
• 20:04
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 20:05
  Mark Pracht: my dad was my dad, or is my dad, but, you know, I don't think he would have read a comic book if I put it in front of him, but if I gave him this, if this… you know, and the thing is, is Grell actually wrote a novel.
• 20:19
  Mark Pracht: A John Sable novel, I don't know if anybody knew that.
• 20:21
  Sean Harklerode: No.
• 20:22
  Tad Eggleston: didn't.
• 20:23
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 20:25
  Mark Pracht: I know. I think it's long out of print, but I mean he did write it. I have a copy someplace.
• 20:31
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, I could have given that to him, and my dad probably would have been like, that's pretty good, that's pretty good, you know?
• 20:40
  Mark Pracht: But I… I really, you know… oh, yeah, here,
• 20:46
  Mark Pracht: page 1, 57 of the collected edition that I'm looking at the the digital one.
• 20:52
  Mark Pracht: is… that is a Starenko page right there. It's the one where it's like, Sable, Sable, Sable, and he's standing there with a gun, and all the girls are inside of the image. That's fantastic. But.
• 21:03
  Mark Pracht: Sorry, that just struck me as I was flipping through it, but that it… it's…
• 21:11
  Mark Pracht: I love the conceit of…
• 21:16
  Mark Pracht: like I said, you know, the first two issues are a little… kind of… kind of just finding the legs.
• 21:22
  Mark Pracht: And then… I think the introduction of Mike Blackman, and using the reading of the book.
• 21:30
  Mark Pracht: to fill out why… John's world is the way it is.
• 21:39
  Mark Pracht: That's… that's… that's a really clever little thing, you know?
• 21:43
  Mark Pracht: It's not, you know…
• 21:45
  Mark Pracht: It's not, like, literary genius or anything like that, but it's a clever way to get all, you know, you get to…
• 21:53
  Mark Pracht: bring in,
• 21:57
  Mark Pracht: you know, Mike Blackman and,
• 22:01
  Mark Pracht: Oh, God, what was the agent's name?
• 22:03
  Mark Pracht: But it… Builds them into the narrative.
• 22:07
  Sean Harklerode: Yes, very interesting.
• 22:08
  Mark Pracht: And it builds their desire to figure John out, and to figure B.B. Flem out as part of the mystery of what we're talking about, and then…
• 22:23
  Mark Pracht: so that as the series goes forward, you have them invested in him, and… and I think that he's invested in them as well, because I love that scene where Mike follows him to his apartment.
• 22:37
  Mark Pracht: And, like, catches him.
• 22:40
  Mark Pracht: And he's like, you know, he was bodyguard or his lover, you know, and I was like,
• 22:46
  Dan Newland: To be clear, by the way, for those who haven't read, Mike is a girl.
• 22:50
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 22:50
  Dan Newland: Mike is a woman, so…
• 22:52
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 22:52
  Dan Newland: unusual, naming.
• 22:55
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 22:56
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there were a couple Mike girls in… in… First comics weren't there.
• 23:02
  Dan Newland: Probably.
• 23:03
  Mark Pracht: Michael Tree, my friend.
• 23:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 23:05
  Dan Newland: Michael.
• 23:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 23:06
  Mark Pracht: Although that wasn't first, but…
• 23:08
  Tad Eggleston: I thought I was at first for a while.
• 23:10
  Mark Pracht: It might have been.
• 23:12
  Mark Pracht: Oh.
• 23:12
  Dan Newland: At least, I think the PIs was done by first, anyways. Yeah. The Moser and Tree one. I'm not sure about all the rest of them.
• 23:20
  Mark Pracht: But yeah, I think, yeah, I just think it's a very…
• 23:27
  Mark Pracht: The origin story is just a really nice little, concise Like, here's the whole world.
• 23:34
  Mark Pracht: And, and I love how, you know, we bring back, what's his name, the, the assassin from Issue 1.
• 23:42
  Mark Pracht: We see the backstory there.
• 23:44
  Mark Pracht: It's like, it's just pretty cool. I like… you know, it was… it's always nice when you can see that somebody has thought about it, you know? It's like, okay.
• 23:55
  Mark Pracht: What… how does this connect?
• 23:57
  Mark Pracht: And what's the backstory? And then I'll get to that backstory, but…
• 24:01
  Mark Pracht: You know, we've already set that up, you know, I dig it. I just, I dig this book. I think it's fun.
• 24:06
  Dan Newland: No.
• 24:07
  Dan Newland: I also find it interesting that you guys are seeing so many parallels with other artists, because to me, Grell is just Grell. I've grown up with the guy to the point where
• 24:19
  Dan Newland: I experienced him and Adam simultaneously, so where the fact that Adam's… I can see the… I can see the…
• 24:26
  Dan Newland: places where Stranko and Adams would have influenced him, but in my mind, they just kind of came together at the same time, so… and, and Grell's still, like, all of these…
• 24:38
  Dan Newland: All of these shots of heads in profile, and heads in little circles in profile, and he does so many panels that cut weird across pages and stuff.
• 24:49
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 24:50
  Dan Newland: It it is almost like an acquired skill to read a Mike Grell story, and it's even more so in his own books because I think sometimes the DC editors maybe just told him.
• 25:01
  Dan Newland: You cannot do all of this shit. We need the book to be readable, right? But when he can do whatever he wants, he's got panels going everywhere, stuff that circles back.
• 25:11
  Dan Newland: I got lost all the time having to figure out which panel I was supposed to be on.
• 25:15
  Mark Pracht: Well, the digital version that we have, like those double-page spreads.
• 25:19
  Mark Pracht: like, I'd just start reading it, and it would seem to make sense, and then I'd turn the page, and I'm like, oh, wait, I missed half of it.
• 25:27
  Tad Eggleston: That was why I wound up just… I… I…
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: Finally wound up reading it in the… The.
• 25:33
  Mark Pracht: panoramic.
• 25:34
  Tad Eggleston: Age spread panoramic, rather than… Single page, because there were enough of those.
• 25:40
  Mark Pracht: And the design is so cool across those that it really is awesome to see it all laid out. Right.
• 25:48
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, I mean, like, to what you're saying, like, it's interesting, because I… Aparo is sort of, like, that with me, because, you know.
• 25:57
  Mark Pracht: Jim Aparo was sort of put in, like.
• 26:00
  Mark Pracht: lumped it. He he was sort of like, oh, he kind of draws like Neil Adams, and I'm like, well, I don't.
• 26:07
  Mark Pracht: like, I can see they're both in that same sort of school, that change that came over comics in the late 60s and in the 80s, where things got more… like I say, more…
• 26:17
  Mark Pracht: Illustratory instead of, you know, cartoony.
• 26:21
  Mark Pracht: but, you know, I don't…
• 26:25
  Mark Pracht: I see them as playing off each other, and, you know, I don't… I don't think.
• 26:30
  Dan Newland: Carlos the man.
• 26:32
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
• 26:32
  Dan Newland: God, I love Jim McCarroll.
• 26:34
  Mark Pracht: this… This book, The Brave and Bold Artist, it's a Tomorrow's book. So good. So good.
• 26:42
  Dan Newland: I have not helped to get that.
• 26:46
  Tad Eggleston: Are there any Tomorrow's books that you don't get, Mark?
• 26:50
  Mark Pracht: There's… I should not get as many as I do, but…
• 26:57
  Mark Pracht: You know, every once in a while, I'm like, there's certain things that just don't appeal to me, but But whenever there's something that does appeal, I do… I love it. I always… I'm always like, it's worth buying, because it's gonna be well-researched.
• 27:10
  Mark Pracht: Sometimes I that's that's a conversation for our other podcast about that. But
• 27:20
  Mark Pracht: But I, you know, I think that…
• 27:22
  Mark Pracht: Grell was just part of that change that was happening.
• 27:26
  Mark Pracht: in the industry. And I think Adams was part of it. I think, you know, technically he came after Adams, and I think Adams opened the door for a lot of people.
• 27:35
  Mark Pracht: Bud.
• 27:37
  Mark Pracht: But, yeah.
• 27:39
  Mark Pracht: Grel is Grel. I mean, that's that's true, like, especially when you when you get down to character design.
• 27:46
  Mark Pracht: Like, that is…
• 27:49
  Mark Pracht: There is something so Mike Grell about every character he designs, and it's not necessarily even anything
• 27:56
  Mark Pracht: Incredibly flashy, like his redesign of Green Arrow is.
• 28:01
  Mark Pracht: just… iconic, right?
• 28:04
  Mark Pracht: But every time I think of a Mike Grell design I always think of Dawnstar in Legion.
• 28:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know? Yeah.
• 28:13
  Mark Pracht: Because, like, again, it's like… Girl obviously likes strong, beautiful women and, you know, the, the
• 28:20
  Mark Pracht: you know, his Native American interests, you know, he puts all that fringe on her, and I was just like, oh, that is, like… if you showed me that character and was like, who do you think designed this character? I'd be like, oh, that's Mike Rell, 100%. I mean, and even Sable, when he's in his…
• 28:40
  Mark Pracht: you know, the battle mask and the… and I love… like, the design of that holster is so cool. I'm like.
• 28:48
  Mark Pracht: That's awesome. It's just like everything about it. Sorry, now I'm just going like, oh, that was just awesome.
• 28:56
  Sean Harklerode: the.
• 28:57
  Mark Pracht: But.
• 28:57
  Tad Eggleston: Welcome to the Chris Farley Show.
• 29:00
  Mark Pracht: But I love…
• 29:02
  Dan Newland: As far as character designs for him, I think that I'm surprised there's not, like, a dark-haired woman in a fur bikini somewhere in John Sable Freelance, because that seems to be…
• 29:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we're only 6 issues in.
• 29:16
  Sean Harklerode: the.
• 29:17
  Dan Newland: Sadly, I can confirm that, the cat is as close as we're going to get in this one. So… but, but yeah, it's… or… what's her…
• 29:27
  Dan Newland: Well… Whatever her name is.
• 29:29
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 29:31
  Mark Pracht: The the other thing. It was funny when when Sean was talking about the bondish, the bondisms of it. because, you know, Grell did a bond.
• 29:39
  Mark Pracht: yeah.
• 29:41
  Dan Newland: You did?
• 29:41
  Mark Pracht: after Green Arrow, and I was like.
• 29:44
  Mark Pracht: Talk about perfect for that material like it's just I don't know.
• 29:50
  Dan Newland: Well, and when you look at, you know, you talked about his influences, there's an entire, like, 2- or 3-page storyline that is basically just him retelling the Maltese Falcon.
• 30:00
  Dan Newland: in his own sort of way. And there's literally… it's… it's even got the Maltese Falcon in it.
• 30:06
  Dan Newland: So he's… he's, like, wearing his influences completely on his sleeve. He's not trying to hide anything at all. But it is… it is just him going through everything he enjoys and putting it on display. So there's a lot of… a lot of Humphrey Bogart and the old Errol Flynn, he talks about, you know, some of those two, that sort of thing in these books as well.
• 30:27
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, and like, you know, other things that I clock going through it. And again, this is not, I'm like, I'm not…
• 30:33
  Mark Pracht: denigrating him for it. It's just like, clearly, it's like you said, it's like, this is stuff that he was inspired by, and that he uses, and, you know.
• 30:43
  Mark Pracht: What's, what's the line, you know.
• 30:47
  Mark Pracht: real artists steal, you know? Like, because, like, when… when they… when he comes back to the… to the house after the family's killed, like, it… that's…
• 30:59
  Mark Pracht: that's outlaw Josie Wales like to the point where the whole thing where he's leaning on the cross, you know. I'm like, all right, great, Mike.
• 31:08
  Mark Pracht: And, I don't know.
• 31:12
  Tad Eggleston: like how much… depth this character was given in a short period of time, without…
• 31:23
  Tad Eggleston: Without going hard into the.
• 31:26
  Tad Eggleston: Details of building it all.
• 31:33
  Tad Eggleston: Like, and I think, I think he represents…
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: like, like, a group of people that, like, I don't even know how much we acknowledge that they exist. You know, they're into guns, they're into…
• 31:50
  Tad Eggleston: to outdoorsy stuff, they're rugged individualists, you know, in all that sense, you'd expect them to be right-wing, but they're also environmentalists and humanists, and… and… have a very solid sense of right and wrong that doesn't necessarily…
• 32:07
  Sean Harklerode: They wrote about it.
• 32:08
  Tad Eggleston: completely aligned with capital… right, right. And again, these… I mean, thank God we're finally seeing some of them run for office in some of these deep red areas that have been dominated by…
• 32:24
  Tad Eggleston: really weird…
• 32:27
  Tad Eggleston: nutso people. But, you know, it's a particular type that, like, often defies expectation, and I think that's even kind of what Mike Gold was writing about in the…
• 32:41
  Tad Eggleston: The introduction is, like, there's nothing that we expect
• 32:44
  Tad Eggleston: you would expect to make them get along, but they do, and I think the reason they get along is they… care about storytelling, they care about there being a moral to those stories. You know, as much as this is Mike… or, John Sable freelance, as much as he's a mercenary or whatnot, he is not at all without…
• 33:04
  Tad Eggleston: a pretty deep moral code. I think we talked about this with Ms. Tree as well, you know, she killed a lot of people, you know, you can argue.
• 33:13
  Mark Pracht: Apple.
• 33:14
  Tad Eggleston: You can argue whether… but… but, like, even more than the Punisher, you know, it wasn't… It wasn't haphazard.
• 33:25
  Mark Pracht: No, yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that, you know, when you talk about Ms. Tree, which, you know, is one of my perennial favorites, like… She is, like, the quintessential… like, even…
• 33:39
  Mark Pracht: with with Sable. You always feel like he's like.
• 33:46
  Mark Pracht: Well, the, the story with the death is a bum deal, you know, where she wants him to murder somebody and he's like, that's not what I do.
• 33:54
  Mark Pracht: Right. That's… that's… I mean, like.
• 33:57
  Mark Pracht: He's not…
• 34:00
  Mark Pracht: adverse to it, if it's necessary, but that he's not a hired killer. Whereas Ms. Tree, like, in her mind, the solution to about every problem is to pull out her gun and blow somebody away. And that's… and that's… Totally fine for that character.
• 34:17
  Tad Eggleston: But she also winds up struggling with that at times.
• 34:19
  Mark Pracht: Sure, sure.
• 34:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, so even there, it's not as simple as…
• 34:26
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, that's one of the things I love about that character, is it's like… That's her solution until she starts going, wait a minute, is this, like, an addiction because I'm still upset that my husband was shot, you know?
• 34:39
  Mark Pracht: I really psychotic? I don't know. But yeah, like, you know, and the thing is, is like, I think the origin story, I think it's pretty clear that John is psychotic, you know?
• 34:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 34:53
  Mark Pracht: And
• 34:54
  Tad Eggleston: Or at least recovering psychotic.
• 34:56
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like, then…
• 34:58
  Tad Eggleston: Because that's one of the things we… I mean, we kind of know, because they give us dates, but do they actually tell us a…
• 35:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think we're supposed to assume that this is happening in real time, which is, what, 1982, 83? So I think we're supposed to assume that it's been about…
• 35:14
  Tad Eggleston: 3 to 5 years since the… the events in…
• 35:18
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 35:19
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't know that that's, like, hard-coded, either.
• 35:23
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
• 35:26
  Sean Harklerode: I'm sorry, and I missed a little bit there, but when you're talking about 1980 or so, it reminds me, like.
• 35:33
  Sean Harklerode: When you talk about the amorality of it.
• 35:37
  Sean Harklerode: You know, they're fighting on… they don't care who wins.
• 35:40
  Sean Harklerode: you know. So oh, here comes Mugabe now.
• 35:44
  Sean Harklerode: And 2026, I know that that's not a good thing.
• 35:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:49
  Sean Harklerode: Right? I don't know.
• 35:51
  Sean Harklerode: How much…
• 35:53
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't work out as well as some may have hoped.
• 35:56
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 35:57
  Mark Pracht: Well.
• 35:57
  Tad Eggleston: So at the same time.
• 35:58
  Sean Harklerode: Probably no great options, right?
• 36:01
  Tad Eggleston: He does make a great point that, like, 200,000 white people having dominion over 7 million black people is not necessarily a good option either. Right, right.
• 36:11
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, and the thing, but the thing is, is like, I think that, you know, when you talk about the rugged individual thing, which
• 36:19
  Mark Pracht: I I have some vested interest in. But,
• 36:24
  Mark Pracht: You know, it's this idea of, like, saying.
• 36:30
  Mark Pracht: You know, look, I don't care how you live your life, and meaning that in the most non-confrontational way possible, right?
• 36:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:39
  Mark Pracht: Like, it's none of my fucking business. And I think that that's John's attitude about almost everything, right? Like, I think… I do think it's very interesting that when he moves back to Africa.
• 36:52
  Mark Pracht: With his wife, you know, who is…
• 36:55
  Mark Pracht: a native, you know, like, white native, but she was born there, she's, you know, she's a citizen.
• 37:03
  Mark Pracht: you know, they keep coming with this… this… the… the revolution that's going on, and the fighting that's going on, and they're… and they always are saying, like, well, John, we know you never cared about politics. We know you never cared… you know, it's like, he came there to run a business, he came there to set up a life for himself and his wife, and… and…
• 37:23
  Mark Pracht: Tried to keep his, you know, narrow white out of it, you know, and, and then it comes home, you know, because it always comes home, right?
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:33
  Mark Pracht: And the thing is, is that,
• 37:38
  Mark Pracht: It also doesn't shy away from the fucking…
• 37:42
  Mark Pracht: complication of this right? Right. Like, when they throw him out of the… when they… they come and arrest him at the end, you know, after…
• 37:51
  Mark Pracht: when they're like, okay, well, you're a mercenary. So you're going to jail. And he's like.
• 37:56
  Mark Pracht: I supported blah blah blah blah, and they're like, yeah, but, you know, now you're a problem.
• 38:02
  Mark Pracht: Doesn't matter, right? And, and the thing is, is that, that there is
• 38:08
  Mark Pracht: Immorality and ambiguity on all sides of pretty much every issue.
• 38:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 38:14
  Mark Pracht: And that.
• 38:16
  Mark Pracht: And then he brings it home at the end when you find out that this guy who was this huge ivory fucking poacher is now like
• 38:28
  Mark Pracht: In charge of… of the… the parks or whatever.
• 38:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, not… not quite. He didn't… he didn't get to assume his job.
• 38:36
  Mark Pracht: But that, but.
• 38:36
  Tad Eggleston: He got to meet some ivory instead.
• 38:39
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Very…
• 38:40
  Tad Eggleston: Close-up.
• 38:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. Yes. But…
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: Turns out that ivory and guts don't go well together.
• 38:51
  Mark Pracht: Man.
• 38:51
  Dan Newland: There's an ambiguity.
• 38:55
  Mark Pracht: Where he takes the tusk and pins that to Jesus Christ.
• 38:58
  Tad Eggleston: I actually loved it when he hung him on the head on the.
• 39:04
  Mark Pracht: well.
• 39:05
  Mark Pracht: But, wait, that wasn't ivory, that was a sable.
• 39:10
  Tad Eggleston: Mmm.
• 39:11
  Tad Eggleston: Fair, fair. Yeah! Anyway.
• 39:17
  Mark Pracht: Dan had something to say, so…
• 39:19
  Dan Newland: We, just off your.
• 39:20
  Tad Eggleston: So, so is ivory only elephant tusks? What do they, what do they call it when they make stuff out of other tusks?
• 39:29
  Mark Pracht: Well.
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: They just call it bone then?
• 39:32
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, because then… because, Rhino Horn is a different thing, because they grind that up to be a,
• 39:39
  Tad Eggleston: And also when when you're a poacher selling things, do you always tell the truth if it looks the same?
• 39:46
  Mark Pracht: Anyway.
• 39:48
  Mark Pracht: What did you have to say, Dan, please?
• 39:52
  Dan Newland: You were talking about, like, ambiguities and everything, and I do think that that is something that… He takes…
• 40:00
  Dan Newland: He takes these sort of semi-nuanced middle groans on a lot of things, even like when they first meet Mike's roommate, who's a gay guy.
• 40:10
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 40:11
  Dan Newland: He's not judgmental about it.
• 40:13
  Mark Pracht: these guys have… I don't.
• 40:14
  Sean Harklerode: enthusiasm.
• 40:15
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think we've gotten there yet.
• 40:16
  Sean Harklerode: You keep going ahead, Dan. What? How far?
• 40:19
  Dan Newland: Where can I go? He's on page 100. Mark's talking about.
• 40:22
  Sean Harklerode: gonna talk about.
• 40:23
  Dan Newland: 6 or whatever. Yeah, 100.
• 40:25
  Tad Eggleston: 56 gets you through, like, we have read through the end of the origin story.
• 40:33
  Mark Pracht: ashes.
• 40:33
  Dan Newland: We haven't met him yet?
• 40:35
  Mark Pracht: No.
• 40:36
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 40:37
  Dan Newland: Really? Okay, nevermind.
• 40:38
  Tad Eggleston: But.
• 40:39
  Mark Pracht: I love that character. I love that character.
• 40:44
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe next month.
• 40:45
  Dan Newland: Later. So the other thing at the end of the origin story.
• 40:48
  Mark Pracht: Heh.
• 40:49
  Dan Newland: What do you think of that guy who stays there?
• 40:54
  Dan Newland: Did you see that? That… because that… he's going back…
• 40:57
  Dan Newland: He's is he going back then? No, that's not yet either. Never mind. We'll talk about this later.
• 41:04
  Dan Newland: Lots of. There's gonna be lots of things.
• 41:07
  Dan Newland: This is what happens when you read all of them in one weekend. I, like, devoured John Sable Freelance. So… I actually went out and found my first comics box.
• 41:18
  Mark Pracht: I could have done that, Dan, except I was like, okay, we're recording, so I'm gonna reread 1 through 6, just so I really can feel like I know it, and then, but, like, I love it. I'm… the other.
• 41:35
  Mark Pracht: Sorry, this just came to me, because I'm flipping through it, and then I got to a page. Mike Grell's obsession with cutting fingers off, or damage to hands, because I always remember in Longbow Hunters, when he shoots the arrow through the dude's hand, too. Like, Grell seems to love mutilating hands.
• 41:59
  Sean Harklerode: Well…
• 42:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he's from the Star Wars era.
• 42:05
  Mark Pracht: It's not a Star Wars until somebody loses a hand.
• 42:08
  Tad Eggleston: Or an arm, I mean, yeah.
• 42:10
  Sean Harklerode: They also, as part of the, the origin story.
• 42:17
  Sean Harklerode: When he first meets Elise.
• 42:21
  Sean Harklerode: I I I knew because my brother and I
• 42:26
  Sean Harklerode: have what we call… we… we term the, the Sonny Crockett Syndrome.
• 42:32
  Sean Harklerode: And that's when your protagonist Meets a woman, and she's perfect.
• 42:40
  Sean Harklerode: She is either evil or doomed.
• 42:47
  Sean Harklerode: We called it the Sonny Crockett syndrome.
• 42:50
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, look, the book is what it is, and it's from the era that it's… it's from the era that it's from. I mean, like, it is guilty, at least gets fridged. I mean, that's… there's no way… there's no other way around it, but it's also, like, you know.
• 43:05
  Mark Pracht: In a way, saying that is…
• 43:12
  Mark Pracht: You know, that would be like saying that
• 43:15
  Mark Pracht: you know, it's the inciting incident, right? That's when it comes right down to it. You know, it would be like saying that, you know, killing the Punisher's family was some sort of…
• 43:25
  Mark Pracht: You know, law.
• 43:27
  Sean Harklerode: I'd say a lot of Tracy Bond, I mean…
• 43:29
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, 100%, yeah.
• 43:32
  Dan Newland: I think it's better, in terms of that, when…
• 43:35
  Dan Newland: Like, we already knew John Sable, and we knew where he's at now, and so there was something bad in the past.
• 43:41
  Mark Pracht: So.
• 43:41
  Dan Newland: So you don't invest too much when you find out he had a wife.
• 43:45
  Dan Newland: 10 years ago, because obviously something happened. But, you know, when you've got a character who's a character like the Green Lantern fridging incident, where there's a character live in the book that people are investing time in, and then suddenly she just gets whacked.
• 44:03
  Dan Newland: So that they can… they can have a plot point for… for the character.
• 44:08
  Mark Pracht: And if you do it well, it really works.
• 44:11
  Dan Newland: But.
• 44:11
  Tad Eggleston: The one… the one huge flaw of my favorite run of, Daredevil, which is the O'Neill Mazzicelli in between the two Frank Miller runs, is when they…
• 44:23
  Tad Eggleston: they take his girlfriend and just have her commit suicide. Not completely out of nowhere, but, like.
• 44:30
  Tad Eggleston: It kind of felt like, oh, we don't want to deal with this character anymore. We need to get rid of her.
• 44:36
  Mark Pracht: You know what, the thing is, if you do something like that, and it really works well, like, look.
• 44:42
  Mark Pracht: Tracy Bond.
• 44:44
  Mark Pracht: It works well and it's essentially exactly what we're talking about but it also, it speaks to, it's not necessarily learning why Bond is the way he is but it's sort of like
• 44:57
  Mark Pracht: is… This.
• 45:00
  Mark Pracht: It becomes a thing about, this is why.
• 45:03
  Mark Pracht: he will never… Be able to have any sort of relationship that works, you know.
• 45:11
  Mark Pracht: And then, you know, they revisited that in No Time to Die.
• 45:15
  Mark Pracht: On the other side, which was interesting enough for me. But,
• 45:20
  Mark Pracht: The other thing I think… I think that it's worth having a conversation about is that… is BB Phlegm.
• 45:28
  Mark Pracht: I fucking love that he hates this thing, just hates it. And I it's just like.
• 45:37
  Mark Pracht: It makes you rich, it makes it possible to do anything you want, anytime you want.
• 45:42
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 45:42
  Mark Pracht: It… and yet, he clearly just is miserable.
• 45:48
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean… It's a constant reminder of his kids.
• 45:54
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 45:56
  Mark Pracht: But it's also, you know, like, I also love that description that they have where it's like, he's too greedy to stop doing that.
• 46:03
  Sean Harklerode: Yes.
• 46:04
  Mark Pracht: And too addicted to the adventure of the other thing.
• 46:07
  Tad Eggleston: So, and without having read more of it, like, even as I saw that, I'm like, is this your excuse, or is this, like…
• 46:17
  Tad Eggleston: You have a love-hate relationship with the constant reminder of your kids.
• 46:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 46:24
  Mark Pracht: it's probably, I think it can probably be in the, in the point of what we were talking about, where everything's complicated. I think it can be.
• 46:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:31
  Mark Pracht: same.
• 46:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:33
  Mark Pracht: Like, it… it… it… At some point or another, he agreed to do these books, right?
• 46:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:41
  Mark Pracht: Agreed to expand these leprechauns.
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:45
  Mark Pracht: and He could have just said no.
• 46:51
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 46:53
  Mark Pracht: you know, and I also, you know, the other thing that I liked is that everything, like, that Grell does spend the time to try to, like, I think the fact that B.B. Flem becomes so popular so quickly and so easily is a little false. But.
• 47:11
  Mark Pracht: I think that… I do think it's interesting how he takes the time to explain that, you know.
• 47:19
  Mark Pracht: John starts putting these ads in the… probably in Soldier of Fortune, or whatever it is, you know, for the time, and… nothing.
• 47:27
  Mark Pracht: So then he decides that he has to do something as, like, a marketing…
• 47:31
  Mark Pracht: It's to catch this child killer, and it's like, okay, like, I love that it's not, like.
• 47:39
  Mark Pracht: there is some… Lip service paid to the… in the real world, just doesn't happen because it's… It.
• 47:51
  Mark Pracht: makes the story move forward, you know? Like, there has to be…
• 47:56
  Mark Pracht: that John is constantly trying to
• 48:02
  Mark Pracht: Make things happen for himself, you know.
• 48:06
  Dan Newland: So the whole, the whole BB Flem thing, the other thing, you know, we talked about how so many of the interests.
• 48:12
  Dan Newland: of… of Grell himself come into this.
• 48:16
  Dan Newland: The fact that it's the story of…
• 48:19
  Dan Newland: a guy who's writing children's books, but really would like to be living this life off as an adventurer, or, you know, he's secretly the guy. Do not…
• 48:30
  Dan Newland: How much is this just Mike Grell psychologically dumping himself into BB Flem, and that is the Mike Grell comic book artist character.
• 48:40
  Dan Newland: Just, you know, dropped onto the page, and then…
• 48:44
  Dan Newland: Him going hunting all the time out in the savannah and the like is the non-drawing comic books version of Mike Rowe.
• 48:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I also thought of a… interesting dichotomy.
• 48:58
  Tad Eggleston: the first guest on David Letterman's My Next Guest Needs No Introduction was… was Barack Obama.
• 49:06
  Tad Eggleston: And at the end of the interview.
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: Obama turned it around and said, Dave, let me ask you a question. You know, and I want to make it clear that I know you're a hard worker, I'm not trying to take anything away from that.
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, like… How much of your success?
• 49:26
  Tad Eggleston: Would you attribute to just luck? To just…
• 49:30
  Tad Eggleston: you know, being the right place at the right time, having it happen, you know, again, not taking away from what you did with that. And Dave just starts laughing, and he's like, all of it.
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: All of it. And Barack starts laughing, too. He's like, me too. So I wonder if there's an element of, like, like you said, the John Sable, like, it doesn't just happen because it happens, you have to go out and make it happen. But at the same time, like, for his successful children's book career.
• 50:03
  Tad Eggleston: It was entirely luck. The right person read the story that he was proud of, that he poured his heart into, that nobody was gonna publish because it was an oversaturated market, and saw something in the middle of it.
• 50:18
  Mark Pracht: I will say, the other thing about it…
• 50:23
  Mark Pracht: is when Mike, is reading Ashes of Eden.
• 50:29
  Mark Pracht: Clearly, she's becoming involved with it.
• 50:34
  Mark Pracht: But I think that her involvement with it.
• 50:36
  Mark Pracht: Is because she knows.
• 50:39
  Mark Pracht: John.
• 50:40
  Mark Pracht: and knows BB Phlegm and understands what she's reading, right?
• 50:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 50:46
  Mark Pracht: I tend to believe that that book is not very good.
• 50:51
  Sean Harklerode: Well, the joke's on us, because…
• 50:52
  Sean Harklerode: Like, we just spent 3 months reading.
• 50:56
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, yeah.
• 50:58
  Mark Pracht: But that doesn't mean… that doesn't mean that the story is bad. What I'm saying is, the book that John wrote may have been.
• 51:06
  Tad Eggleston: Entirely possible.
• 51:08
  Mark Pracht: close to the bone, you know? Right.
• 51:14
  Tad Eggleston: But again, I wonder how much he struggled… I mean, because again, his… his ethos is, I work hard for what I get, etc, like…
• 51:26
  Tad Eggleston: So I wonder… I wonder how… what level of discomfort he also has from the fact that, like, if he really sits back and thinks about it, like, his financial success
• 51:37
  Tad Eggleston: Isn't from hard work.
• 51:40
  Dan Newland: Well, even the leprechaun thing is because He had.
• 51:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 51:44
  Dan Newland: section of it on the book.
• 51:46
  Tad Eggleston: That's the point.
• 51:46
  Dan Newland: Editor is like, look, this is what I can sell, you know? Right. That's my point. If she hadn't said that, he'd have had nothing. Right. Yeah. So, no.
• 51:56
  Tad Eggleston: But it also makes for the overall story to be that much more fascinating, because you're seeing…
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: All of these different sides of the world, how so many things are…
• 52:09
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I was at Milk yesterday, so I had a lot of really interesting comics conversations, but one of the things I brought up is I love the stories that are muddy.
• 52:20
  Tad Eggleston: I love the stories where not everything is clean and laid out for you, where… where…
• 52:26
  Tad Eggleston: you don't entirely know the character's motivations, because the character doesn't entirely know their motivations, because we don't entirely know our motivations. Like, even the most…
• 52:41
  Tad Eggleston: self-reflective person will have trouble figuring out why they do all of the things that they do. Yeah.
• 52:49
  Sean Harklerode: day.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right, so I think it's great to have a story where it's like, oh, well, there's this, but there's also this, and…
• 52:59
  Tad Eggleston: How does this play in? And, and, and that? And…
• 53:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, and I think in some ways, that, that's, that's a way… that…
• 53:11
  Tad Eggleston: Not just in comics, but… but… in… in…
• 53:16
  Tad Eggleston: Pulp and genre fiction in general.
• 53:19
  Tad Eggleston: the 80s, 90s, Current era have grown up.
• 53:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I love Dashiell Hammett. I… I…
• 53:30
  Tad Eggleston: I love Mickey Spillane, you know? They're not exactly subtle very often.
• 53:39
  Sean Harklerode: Perfect.
• 53:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: You don't.
• 53:44
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 53:45
  Tad Eggleston: Never. You don't… right, but also, you don't… but you don't deal… their characters have a very clear code, and you have no idea where it comes from, you just know what it is. And they… I mean, one of the reasons that I love reading Parker.
• 54:03
  Tad Eggleston: Across the entire series.
• 54:07
  Tad Eggleston: Is you start to notice subtle shifts.
• 54:11
  Tad Eggleston: Things that he's not even willing to admit.
• 54:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but Parker, after he…
• 54:19
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think they ever officially get married, but she does wind up taking the name of his most common alias, you know, that sort of… Parker, after he
• 54:31
  Tad Eggleston: Discovers his… his woman.
• 54:33
  Tad Eggleston: And I can't remember her name right now.
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: And particularly after she's like, yeah.
• 54:41
  Tad Eggleston: I was involved in this thing with you, and I want to stay with you, but I don't want to be involved in any more of these with you.
• 54:49
  Tad Eggleston: Parker, when he starts going back to the same place every… between jobs, rather than, like, just going to whatever hot spot he feels like going to, you notice that he starts caring about various things just that little bit more.
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: Even as he claims that he doesn't.
• 55:08
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 55:09
  Tad Eggleston: you know…
• 55:10
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, that's… that's sort of… I think that… excuse me.
• 55:16
  Mark Pracht: That's sort of part parcel of these kind of characters. Right?
• 55:19
  Mark Pracht: They always want to seem like they're, like… Right. You know, it's all about the money, it's all about…
• 55:25
  Mark Pracht: You know. But when it comes right down to it.
• 55:29
  Mark Pracht: Is it about the money? You know, like,
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: Or even the specific moral code.
• 55:34
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, like the death is a bum deal thing when it's revealed that
• 55:40
  Mark Pracht: You know, this is all some sort of plot by… actual living… Nazis from Germany.
• 55:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 55:48
  Mark Pracht: You know, it's like… I, you know, like…
• 55:52
  Mark Pracht: It's that moment where the phone's off the hook and it's like, you know.
• 55:58
  Mark Pracht: He called Simon Wiesenthal.
• 56:01
  Mark Pracht: and just left it off the hook. Like, he didn't tell anybody, but he left it open for somebody to come and deal with it. And… Right.
• 56:09
  Mark Pracht: I think that… I think that all of that is… is so…
• 56:15
  Mark Pracht: You know, I… there is a certain amount of, like.
• 56:20
  Mark Pracht: You know, I haven't… I haven't read these books in a while.
• 56:23
  Mark Pracht: But, like, the memories came flooding back as I was reading them, but, I.
• 56:29
  Mark Pracht: There is this sort of element to John that, like, you know what, he probably is gonna do the right thing, but it's also kind of like, there is an element that's like.
• 56:40
  Mark Pracht: I may not care that day, you know?
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:43
  Mark Pracht: And… and you know, I'm not above saying…
• 56:52
  Mark Pracht: Fuck you, you know, I'm gone, right? And,
• 56:57
  Tad Eggleston: I do also…
• 56:59
  Mark Pracht: Death is Bum Deal, where that woman is trying to hire him to be a murderer, and he's like, that's not what I do. And then he's like, here, here's the number for Alcoholics Anonymous.
• 57:10
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah!
• 57:13
  Mark Pracht: I was just like, good on you, John.
• 57:19
  Tad Eggleston: But I was just thinking.
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: More, how brilliant is it that in those four issues where we're really
• 57:27
  Tad Eggleston: Diving into his psyche, and… and…
• 57:31
  Tad Eggleston: And who he is, and why.
• 57:35
  Tad Eggleston: It's from the perspective of two women who care for him.
• 57:39
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: So… so the perspective is from… from characters that we're supposed to believe are… Are more introspective, are more…
• 57:51
  Tad Eggleston: interested in seeing feelings. So it's not even he's revealing himself to us, it's… it's two women who care for him for…
• 58:01
  Tad Eggleston: Partially financial reasons, and partially they just have gotten to know him and care for him.
• 58:08
  Tad Eggleston: Possibly the, the, the… The sexist, oh, women are more caring, since it was 1982.
• 58:18
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, our perspective is not, oh, we're having John reveal himself, and he's figuring out why he works. It's like, oh, these two people who…
• 58:31
  Tad Eggleston: Help him, in certain ways, maintain his life.
• 58:36
  Tad Eggleston: are deconstructing.
• 58:38
  Tad Eggleston: Who he is and why.
• 58:41
  Tad Eggleston: And that's, like, a cool…
• 58:44
  Tad Eggleston: Perspective, particularly when you have to sit back and go, oh, like, she's reading this book, so it might not entirely be…
• 58:52
  Tad Eggleston: a reliable narrator.
• 58:56
  Mark Pracht: Well, here's another interesting thing.
• 58:58
  Mark Pracht: that… So, the book is called The Ashes of Eden.
• 59:03
  Mark Pracht: And… What's the name of his agent?
• 59:08
  Sean Harklerode: 8…
• 59:09
  Tad Eggleston: Aiden.
• 59:09
  Mark Pracht: Kendall.
• 59:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:11
  Mark Pracht: And I'm like, wow, that's,
• 59:17
  Mark Pracht: That's interesting.
• 59:17
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I think don't don't they say that that's probably why she read it?
• 59:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 59:23
  Mark Pracht: He's like, why is it like, name association or something like that, you know, but I mean, I think.
• 59:28
  Mark Pracht: You know, I don't know, I think that…
• 59:32
  Tad Eggleston: Now you have me wondering if she's a secret agent, and that's not her real name, that's the name that she used to get close to him.
• 59:42
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 59:43
  Tad Eggleston: What.
• 59:44
  Mark Pracht: what's.
• 59:45
  Sean Harklerode: Well, look, if Mike can find him that easily, I mean, come on.
• 59:52
  Mark Pracht: I did love that sequence. Follow that car, and that cabbie is like, are you kidding?
• 59:58
  Sean Harklerode: the.
• 59:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and then at the end, no charge, lady! In all my years as a cabbie, nobody said follow that car!
• 1:00:06
  Tad Eggleston: It's the greatest night of my life!
• 1:00:10
  Mark Pracht: The other thing that I think is really great about B.B. Flem, and I think it does go back to what you're talking about, about, like, does doing this remind him of his children constantly, and his family, is that opening scene, the Hogan's Alley scene in the first issue.
• 1:00:27
  Mark Pracht: when… He shoots.
• 1:00:30
  Sean Harklerode: Correct.
• 1:00:31
  Mark Pracht: A BB phlegm, like, 4 times in the head, and they're like.
• 1:00:34
  Mark Pracht: You know… Maggie's Garters, you shot a good guy, and he's like.
• 1:00:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:00:39
  Mark Pracht: Whatever, you know?
• 1:00:40
  Tad Eggleston: Ha ha ha.
• 1:00:41
  Mark Pracht: And it's like, is he talking about BB Flem? Is he talking about John Sable? You know, it's it's that
• 1:00:50
  Mark Pracht: How… how much does this weigh on him? How much does this life weigh on him? How much does…
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: And that's another interesting thing, like, for somebody who as often voices the idea that, like, if he should die, well, well, if I should be so lucky, you know.
• 1:01:13
  Tad Eggleston: He certainly has lots of opportunities to die that he doesn't allow himself to take. Wow.
• 1:01:19
  Mark Pracht: Sometimes, you know, like,
• 1:01:26
  Mark Pracht: another movie that's very in this genre, and actually, I think, you know, if the, the, Martin Riggs character in Lethal Weapon, you know.
• 1:01:36
  Mark Pracht: He's like, he's got a bullet, he's got the gun, he wants to do it, and when his partner confronts him about it, he's like, you know why I don't do it?
• 1:01:45
  Mark Pracht: Doing the job.
• 1:01:48
  Mark Pracht: That I gotta do the job.
• 1:01:50
  Mark Pracht: And the thing is, is, I think that that's part of that's part of why
• 1:01:55
  Mark Pracht: John does these things, and why he takes these jobs is like it's something to focus on. And it's something to
• 1:02:01
  Mark Pracht: Apply the things that he… that what he can do, and how well he can do it, and apply it to
• 1:02:08
  Mark Pracht: The situation, and it allows that darker thought to go away, right?
• 1:02:16
  Tad Eggleston: And for those of you who read everything, how long until he has a sword fight that he loses? Because that's the part of the pentathlon that he was never good at.
• 1:02:24
  Sean Harklerode: Okay.
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like it has to happen. I, you know.
• 1:02:28
  Mark Pracht: Dan, I flipped forward to the next issue when… His coach comes swinging in.
• 1:02:35
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 1:02:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:02:38
  Dan Newland: You will see some sword fighting.
• 1:02:39
  Mark Pracht: You will see some sort of fight, and you will see another, another fantastic supporting character in this book that I love to death.
• 1:02:49
  Mark Pracht: Again, yeah, every time… Yeah.
• 1:02:53
  Mark Pracht: Go ahead.
• 1:02:53
  Dan Newland: I was just gonna say, so you're talking about, like, you know, the character and how he feels about this, and how he's dealing with it psychologically. One of the things that struck me when I was reading.
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: Or not dealing with it.
• 1:03:05
  Dan Newland: We're not dealing with it.
• 1:03:05
  Tad Eggleston: may be.
• 1:03:08
  Dan Newland: My buddy and I, going back to replug the comics over time thing, spent the better part of half a year reading all of the Moon Knight comics.
• 1:03:16
  Dan Newland: from start to finish in order. And if you think about Moon Knight, who was being published basically at the exact same time.
• 1:03:24
  Dan Newland: mercenary for hire, he's also the Playboy billionaire with the, you know, the other life and everything. He doesn't have the cabbie.
• 1:03:33
  Dan Newland: sort of personality. He doesn't have the actual DID diagnosis that we're gonna find later on, but really, Mark Spector didn't have that in the 80s, either.
• 1:03:43
  Dan Newland: These are very similar characters in a lot of ways.
• 1:03:47
  Sean Harklerode: Right. I was thinking of Moon Knight, actually, so I'm really glad that you said that, because I… wasn't confident enough to say it, but yeah, reminded me of that. And then, of course, Moon Knight is basically the shadow.
• 1:04:00
  Sean Harklerode: You know, so…
• 1:04:02
  Dan Newland: Yep.
• 1:04:04
  Dan Newland: Yeah, I really…
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: You mean good writers borrow from other writers?
• 1:04:09
  Mark Pracht: Good writers steal. No.
• 1:04:10
  Tad Eggleston: Great writers steal things outright.
• 1:04:13
  Mark Pracht: Good writers borrow, great writers steal.
• 1:04:16
  Tad Eggleston: I.
• 1:04:18
  Sean Harklerode: kind of goes back to Dan's comment, you know, when Mark and I were talking about what we saw, what his art reminded us of, and Dan
• 1:04:29
  Sean Harklerode: said, well, I just always thought Mike Rowell was original.
• 1:04:33
  Sean Harklerode: All right.
• 1:04:34
  Sean Harklerode: you know.
• 1:04:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:04:35
  Sean Harklerode: And we're… I think we're all right.
• 1:04:39
  Sean Harklerode: Right? Like.
• 1:04:40
  Tad Eggleston: Now, this raises the question, though, Mark.
• 1:04:43
  Tad Eggleston: Why wasn't.
• 1:04:44
  Sean Harklerode: the.
• 1:04:45
  Tad Eggleston: Your play named Dane.
• 1:04:50
  Tad Eggleston: you
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: I thought about Bane, but, like, there's the Batman thing, and then I thought about Kane, but you've already had a Kane play, so it has to be Dane. You should have made a Dane, and just passed it off as your own.
• 1:05:04
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody would have known.
• 1:05:06
  Mark Pracht: Maybe.
• 1:05:08
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:05:08
  Sean Harklerode: Well, someone already did that. Pale Rider.
• 1:05:12
  Mark Pracht: right.
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: you.
• 1:05:16
  Mark Pracht: But then, yeah.
• 1:05:18
  Mark Pracht: But in that movie he actually has sex with the the Anyway.
• 1:05:25
  Sean Harklerode: We don't know what happens offstage.
• 1:05:30
  Mark Pracht: You're right, we don't.
• 1:05:32
  Mark Pracht: But I do, because I wrote it. No, but…
• 1:05:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Actually, Sean, when you were talking, it was breaking up for me, so I didn't hear half of what you just said, so…
• 1:05:46
  Sean Harklerode: I was saying that, you know, you and I, we were going through, you know.
• 1:05:50
  Sean Harklerode: the Stranco and and everything.
• 1:05:54
  Sean Harklerode: And Dan was saying that I always thought.
• 1:05:57
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:58
  Sean Harklerode: To me, Grell just seemed revolutionary on his own.
• 1:06:02
  Sean Harklerode: And I think it's a synthesis, right?
• 1:06:05
  Sean Harklerode: And I don't know actually if he's influenced by Staranko or Neil Adams at all.
• 1:06:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, if you.
• 1:06:13
  Dan Newland: It's not.
• 1:06:15
  Tad Eggleston: If he's not…
• 1:06:17
  Tad Eggleston: influenced them by direct… them directly. He's influenced by people they influenced, or people they were influenced by.
• 1:06:24
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:06:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, one of the things I always say when people complain about things not being original enough is, like, we're, like.
• 1:06:32
  Tad Eggleston: 40,000 years too late to do anything original?
• 1:06:38
  Dan Newland: Right.
• 1:06:38
  Sean Harklerode: But it's, it's, it's that combination of.
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right, it's how do you synthesize the things that you've experienced.
• 1:06:46
  Sean Harklerode: Because then that's unique.
• 1:06:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:06:49
  Sean Harklerode: And it's always the crazy thing we were talking about the other day. You know, the more personal a story is, the more universal it is. I was talking about this.
• 1:06:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:06:58
  Sean Harklerode: about with Jack Lewis about it. It's
• 1:07:02
  Sean Harklerode: Joseph L'Attorney, it's… it's a… it's a dichotomy, right? Because I'm going to make this very specific to me.
• 1:07:09
  Sean Harklerode: But.
• 1:07:10
  Sean Harklerode: Although the specifics may not seem true, the feelings and the experiences are universal, that we all have these feelings.
• 1:07:21
  Mark Pracht: Well, and I think that that comes down to like, and I've talked about this ad nauseum, but like.
• 1:07:26
  Mark Pracht: that you have to be so specific about your personal story, but then also be willing
• 1:07:33
  Mark Pracht: To let other people.
• 1:07:35
  Mark Pracht: In, and take whatever they want to take from it.
• 1:07:39
  Mark Pracht: Rather than being like, no, you have to take this, because this is my story, and it's like… but that… that…
• 1:07:47
  Mark Pracht: undercuts the idea, you know, because everybody is like, oh, I want people to understand the emotions and the feelings of my life, but…
• 1:07:56
  Mark Pracht: If you're not allowing them to make their own
• 1:08:02
  Mark Pracht: You know, take their… take their own feelings out of it.
• 1:08:08
  Mark Pracht: of what you're saying, then you're not. You're basically still building a wall between you and the audience, and then you wonder why nobody
• 1:08:17
  Mark Pracht: you know, that you don't get the response you want. You have to be willing to sublimate yourself to
• 1:08:23
  Mark Pracht: The audience at a certain point, because they're the final word, right?
• 1:08:28
  Mark Pracht: that everyone is going to take what they want to take. But, yeah, and we bring that to the art thing.
• 1:08:37
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, like…
• 1:08:40
  Mark Pracht: I can sit there, and I can look at Grell's art, and I'm like, okay, I see, I see, Neil Adams' influence, I see a Staranko influence, I see, you know, I see a bit of a Paro there, too. But… It's still Grell.
• 1:08:55
  Mark Pracht: And it still means this to me, right? And, like.
• 1:08:59
  Mark Pracht: That you can look at things in that sort of, like, wow, that's cool.
• 1:09:03
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 1:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: Bye.
• 1:09:05
  Mark Pracht: And not…
• 1:09:06
  Mark Pracht: Like, because that's… that's just the thing, it's like, there are no new stories, really, when you get down to the… the…
• 1:09:16
  Mark Pracht: the elemental parts of it, right? There's a revenge story, there's a romance story, there's a, you know.
• 1:09:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:24
  Mark Pracht: There's a theft story, or whatever, you know, and they all come to… they all come
• 1:09:29
  Mark Pracht: They're all going to have elements that are going to be familiar. It's about how you put your own.
• 1:09:37
  Dan Newland: No.
• 1:09:37
  Mark Pracht: Take on it, right? And then how you open it up and let the audience say, You know.
• 1:09:44
  Tad Eggleston: One of the…
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: things that I sometimes will have happen on the podcast that is always fascinating is I'll be talking to a creator, and I'll bring up something that I see as a possible influence.
• 1:09:59
  Tad Eggleston: And they'll get, like, this funny look on their face and go, I had never thought of that as an influence, but now that you've brought it up, I can't unsee it, because I love this, and now, oh yeah, you know, I wasn't thinking of it at the time, but yes, it was probably lodged in my head.
• 1:10:17
  Mark Pracht: And that's because Tad likes to impose his viewpoint on the other.
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think it's more that, like.
• 1:10:25
  Mark Pracht: It's… it's a joke.
• 1:10:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I know.
• 1:10:27
  Mark Pracht: Oh.
• 1:10:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I always, I, like.
• 1:10:30
  Tad Eggleston: when doing, like, research papers and whatnot, I was always frustrated by the need for, like, specific works cited rather than a much broader bibliography, because I'm sitting there going, like, I know when I'm quoting something. I know when I'm…
• 1:10:45
  Tad Eggleston: paraphrasing something, but, like, there are a ton of things that go into this writing that I might not…
• 1:10:54
  Tad Eggleston: Paraphrase or directly quote.
• 1:10:58
  Tad Eggleston: And there are a ton of parts of this writing that is mostly mine, which doesn't mean that there weren't things that inspired it, but you're gonna get upset that I don't cite something that I don't know what to cite, because there were
• 1:11:10
  Tad Eggleston: 8 different sources that I feel like I synthesized, and probably 10 that I don't feel like I synthesized, but, like, I read them, and they contributed to it.
• 1:11:19
  Sean Harklerode: the.
• 1:11:20
  Mark Pracht: That's when you put a footnote that says Alan Smithy.
• 1:11:23
  Tad Eggleston: laughter Yeah, I don't know how much they like those in college.
• 1:11:28
  Tad Eggleston: I never graduated from college, in part because of things like this, so, I mean… I have…
• 1:11:34
  Dan Newland: I have 18 papers to grade right now, history papers that I will not be accepting that sort of, that sort of shoddy documentation on, just as a note.
• 1:11:43
  Tad Eggleston: This is what I'm saying!
• 1:11:46
  Mark Pracht: You're gonna find out that there's actually a guy named Alan Smithy who wrote this book, and you're gonna be like, that's bullshit, and they're gonna be like, no, it's right here!
• 1:11:55
  Dan Newland: Touche.
• 1:11:55
  Mark Pracht: The History of Everything by Alan Smithee.
• 1:12:01
  Mark Pracht: Anyway.
• 1:12:02
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:12:02
  Dan Newland: You know, Grell, the other thing about Grell that gets me is, I think it's his design.
• 1:12:07
  Dan Newland: Everything from, like, Tyrock onward. You just see a character from Grell, and him and, Who's the guy who did all the X-Men? Cockrum.
• 1:12:18
  Dan Newland: Copper Monroe.
• 1:12:19
  Dan Newland: They… they defined 70s design, basically, for Marvel and DC, and so I think…
• 1:12:25
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's…
• 1:12:26
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's just like I said that, like, when you look at Dawnstar, you immediately know that.
• 1:12:31
  Dan Newland: All of his Legion stuff and the rest. So, yep.
• 1:12:35
  Mark Pracht: Or that book he did for Image, Shaman's Tears.
• 1:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:12:40
  Mark Pracht: You know, like, Gro likes.
• 1:12:42
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't John Sable make an appearance in that?
• 1:12:45
  Mark Pracht: I believe he does, yes.
• 1:12:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:12:47
  Dan Newland: Does he? Oh.
• 1:12:48
  Mark Pracht: I think it…
• 1:12:48
  Tad Eggleston: I think I was reading… well, I think.
• 1:12:50
  Dan Newland: I think it was mentioned in the.
• 1:12:51
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was mentioned in the foreword to this one in the… The graphic novel edition.
• 1:12:57
  Mark Pracht: You know, it was interesting. You were talking about like his work at DC. And maybe the DC. Editors made him like.
• 1:13:04
  Mark Pracht: But it's funny, because I believe I believe Mike Gold was his editor at DC.
• 1:13:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:13:10
  Mark Pracht: So, I mean…
• 1:13:11
  Dan Newland: That could have been.
• 1:13:12
  Mark Pracht: Maybe, I think probably, I think probably that he probably also got a little better at
• 1:13:18
  Mark Pracht: leading people through the page, you know, and obviously, I like the weird, sort of.
• 1:13:23
  Mark Pracht: design of it, but it's… like, sometimes you are like, okay, which one… where am I going now? Right. But,
• 1:13:31
  Mark Pracht: The one other thing that I wanted to bring up
• 1:13:35
  Mark Pracht: Did anybody watch the TV show?
• 1:13:38
  Tad Eggleston: I have not.
• 1:13:39
  Dan Newland: I will admit, I went and found… I was at a convention. I found the TV show on DVD, even, because the rips on YouTube were so terrible, and the rips that I… the DVD that I got was terrible as well, but they were still…
• 1:13:53
  Dan Newland: Ryan Russo.
• 1:13:55
  Sean Harklerode: What was it? What was the,
• 1:13:57
  Mark Pracht: It was on ABC, and it, they actually reshot the pilot because originally Gene Simmons of Kiss fame was playing John Sable.
• 1:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, apparently he was a big… fan of…
• 1:14:12
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, he's…
• 1:14:13
  Dan Newland: He's a big fan of comics.
• 1:14:14
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, and he, he ended up being a producer on the show, but it was also Rene Russo's first acting job.
• 1:14:21
  Sean Harklerode: Wow.
• 1:14:22
  Mark Pracht: She played Eden Kendall.
• 1:14:24
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 1:14:26
  Mark Pracht: And.
• 1:14:26
  Sean Harklerode: event.
• 1:14:29
  Mark Pracht: But yeah, Lewis Smith, I think, played Sable, and I remember because the battle mask, they did the makeup, and they made it kind of more of an actual superhero show, you know, like, he would be like, oh, I'm the author, and then at night, I become the avenging John Sable.
• 1:14:49
  Mark Pracht: But it was more of this, like, it was like… Tiger stripes across his face.
• 1:14:53
  Dan Newland: know.
• 1:14:53
  Mark Pracht: Because then Grell relaunched the series.
• 1:14:57
  Mark Pracht: with a book that was just called Sable, which was the name of the show, and then he changed the battle mask to that makeup style.
• 1:15:05
  Mark Pracht: Which…
• 1:15:07
  Dan Newland: Fascinating.
• 1:15:08
  Mark Pracht: You know, but not, you know, I watched it. I watched it every, it wasn't on very long. It was canceled after, I don't know, three or, you know, like maybe.
• 1:15:17
  Dan Newland: You watched them when they came out.
• 1:15:19
  Mark Pracht: Yep.
• 1:15:20
  Dan Newland: Oh, wow. I did not, I did not remember seeing that.
• 1:15:23
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I got really… I got really excited about it, and then I was like, well, this isn't…
• 1:15:28
  Mark Pracht: This isn't exactly what… this isn't…
• 1:15:30
  Dan Newland: Yeah.
• 1:15:31
  Mark Pracht: This could be cooler.
• 1:15:33
  Tad Eggleston: Looks like there were seven episodes.
• 1:15:36
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it did not last long, and you know.
• 1:15:40
  Mark Pracht: I on Grell's Facebook page that's run by somebody else. But it's his official Facebook page. They keep hinting
• 1:15:49
  Mark Pracht: that… Somebody is interested in the rights to this.
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I will say, when you were talking about the novel, I looked it up, and it's actually available at a relatively inexpensive price for the mass market trade.
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: But it also says on the cover, soon to be a major motion picture.
• 1:16:11
  Tad Eggleston: Which, which has, has not, has not occurred.
• 1:16:18
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, you know, it seems like it seems like a property that'd be easy to do live action, right?
• 1:16:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:16:25
  Mark Pracht: And… but at the same time, it's also…
• 1:16:27
  Mark Pracht: You know, to really do it.
• 1:16:30
  Mark Pracht: You know, you gotta go to Africa, you gotta go… And.
• 1:16:34
  Dan Newland: If you really want to use Sable's character, it's a, it's a product of the 80s because it's so much about Vietnam, it's so much about the Reagan era, it's so much about all of these things.
• 1:16:48
  Dan Newland: That…
• 1:16:49
  Dan Newland: I suspect they'd… it would either have to be very generic to make it modern, or you would end up doing a period piece, and I don't know how well action period pieces like that would really hold up these days.
• 1:17:00
  Sean Harklerode: I don't think we have great white hunters anymore.
• 1:17:03
  Dan Newland: know.
• 1:17:05
  Mark Pracht: Well, and I think that there's the,
• 1:17:08
  Mark Pracht: you know, I do think the Munich Olympics thing is a real keystone piece. I think that.
• 1:17:16
  Dan Newland: Yep.
• 1:17:16
  Mark Pracht: you know, it… you… I think…
• 1:17:21
  Mark Pracht: you could probably modernize it, right? You could probably find allegories to this sort of stuff, whether it's.
• 1:17:27
  Dan Newland: No.
• 1:17:28
  Dan Newland: Change of the wars and everything, and…
• 1:17:30
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:17:31
  Dan Newland: Do an Iron Man thing.
• 1:17:32
  Mark Pracht: you know, you maybe, maybe you tie it into 9 11 somehow. I don't know. But,
• 1:17:38
  Mark Pracht: I think that…
• 1:17:42
  Mark Pracht: Like, it would be cool to do it as a period piece, you know?
• 1:17:46
  Mark Pracht: just… but I mean, it's also, like, that era
• 1:17:52
  Mark Pracht: You know, I think that the fact that Reagan actually is in this book is fascinating.
• 1:17:57
  Dan Newland: the.
• 1:17:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like.
• 1:18:00
  Tad Eggleston: I like that they were worried about what was gonna happen with them, too, because…
• 1:18:04
  Tad Eggleston: Because when Kennedy had been in a book.
• 1:18:08
  Tad Eggleston: It came out right after he died.
• 1:18:14
  Tad Eggleston: So they had their period of, okay, everything's gotta go right.
• 1:18:22
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, I think that this is such a great series, and
• 1:18:28
  Mark Pracht: you know, if everybody else is interested, I think we should go on to.
• 1:18:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I definitely think we should keep going.
• 1:18:33
  Mark Pracht: Yep.
• 1:18:36
  Mark Pracht: And then, you know, eventually we'll get.
• 1:18:37
  Tad Eggleston: going.
• 1:18:38
  Mark Pracht: We'll get to that, you know, we'll get to the Jonah Hex period where we're like, who's just awesome.
• 1:18:46
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, when we did that with Jonah Hex, I went and got Jimmy Palmiotti to, you know, change things, so…
• 1:18:55
  Mark Pracht: There we go.
• 1:18:56
  Mark Pracht: Gotta have… gotta have Jimmy back on, since he and I are gonna be in the same book now.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: We… We might be in talks, just…
• 1:19:06
  Tad Eggleston: It's early stages. We'll circle back after New York.
• 1:19:11
  Tad Eggleston: Cool.
• 1:19:13
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway.
• 1:19:14
  Mark Pracht: Guys, I gotta go. Yeah, I gotta.
• 1:19:16
  Tad Eggleston: I think this is a good place to wrap for, For the Pulp Blotter on 22 Panels, we will see you after the next page.