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Fourth World Book Club #15 - Hunger Dogs · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Mark Pracht: Good!
• 0:03
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels and the Fourth World Book Club. Sean's doing some exercise. He pulled out the omnibus, and, you know, that's as good as doing just deadlifts. Mark is here, and we're joined this month with Jimmy Gasparo of Comic Book Yeti, and the writer of,
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: Still upcoming, right? Penny and the Yeti?
• 0:27
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah, bro.
• 0:28
  Tad Eggleston: come out while I wasn't looking.
• 0:29
  Jimmy Gaspero: No, it'll be out April, 21st, and, bookstores, and the 22nd, and comic book shops.
• 0:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so, like… not next week, but the week after? Yeah. Yeah. Week after next.
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: So, I highly recommend that book, even for Mark and Sean, even though they're not exactly the age group that it's… that it's, geared towards.
• 0:56
  Mark Pracht: What are you saying.
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's not even young adult, it's middle grade, and middle grade really means, like, 4th through 8th?
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean…
• 1:09
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's, it's geared towards, like, 10-year-olds. Do you want to be that young? Because I'll call you that young!
• 1:16
  Tad Eggleston: We'll get you some Blue's Clues.
• 1:20
  Sean Harklerode: I mean…
• 1:21
  Mark Pracht: Love me some loose clues.
• 1:22
  Sean Harklerode: I did just download Condor Man.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 1:28
  Tad Eggleston: I actually may have also just bought Condor Man on your recommendation.
• 1:36
  Mark Pracht: Why isn't the hardware man on Disney Plus? That's the question.
• 1:41
  Tad Eggleston: We are wrapping up our… Journey through…
• 1:49
  Tad Eggleston: Kirby's Fourth World, with hunger Dogs here.
• 1:54
  Tad Eggleston: before I… before I throw it to the expert experts, I'm gonna give… like, I've taken to giving my, my off-the-cuff opinion right off the bat, and… and like last month.
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: I so wish that he'd, like…
• 2:10
  Tad Eggleston: Given this level of care and thought to…
• 2:14
  Tad Eggleston: all of it. I understand that he was more rushed when he was doing this stuff in the 70s versus…
• 2:19
  Tad Eggleston: The two wrap-ups in the 80s, but, like.
• 2:22
  Tad Eggleston: these last two, that second story last month that I can't remember the title of it right now, and then Hunger Dogs, like…
• 2:30
  Mark Pracht: I think it's Even Gods Must Die.
• 2:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, even Gods Must Die and Hunger Dogs, you know.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I still wish that he had a scripter slash co-plotter just to tighten things up a little bit, but overall, the storytelling is just so much better.
• 2:47
  Tad Eggleston: And that's not even really to knock
• 2:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's always been good storytelling, but this is, like, next-level storytelling.
• 2:56
  Tad Eggleston: it shows you why Kirby is the king in a way that… that I feel like…
• 3:04
  Tad Eggleston: So much of what we read up until this point hinted that he could be, except that he was moving so fast and taking no help that, like, you'd see…
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: a page of it here, and 3 pages of it there, and… whereas these… these two volumes have just been…
• 3:23
  Tad Eggleston: Outstanding. I really enjoyed them.
• 3:27
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 3:29
  Mark Pracht: I defer to our guest first. You get the first word.
• 3:33
  Jimmy Gaspero: Oh, I do? Okay.
• 3:34
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Jimmy has to go. We're putting you on the hot seat, Jimmy.
• 3:37
  Jimmy Gaspero: Is this just, like, my overall thoughts?
• 3:41
  Mark Pracht: I mean…
• 3:41
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever.
• 3:42
  Jimmy Gaspero: Okay, so I went…
• 3:44
  Tad Eggleston: You could fill your wine glass and tell us about your kids.
• 3:48
  Jimmy Gaspero: So, so I…
• 3:51
  Jimmy Gaspero: I've read the Fourth World Saga a while ago, and I went back, and for this, re-read even Gods Must Die and Hunger Dogs to refresh my recollection. And I hadn't delved too much into
• 4:04
  Jimmy Gaspero: like, the history of what was going on when these were being made, other than recognizing that there was a pretty big gap in time of maybe a dozen years between when the Fourth World wrapped up and when Kirby did both of these. And… I really like even Gods Must Die.
• 4:19
  Jimmy Gaspero: I… it's probably one of my favorites out of the old… out of the entire Fourth World.
• 4:25
  Jimmy Gaspero: Hunger Dogs is a little bit more, like, hit or miss for me. I think there are some sequences of it that really work, and I wish there were more of, because, like.
• 4:37
  Jimmy Gaspero: The scenes with Isaac, I think, really work, like, well, but I feel like there aren't… there isn't enough of it. It feels a lot of the Hunger Dogs feels like…
• 4:50
  Jimmy Gaspero: you know, Kirby is jumping around to try and wrap up as much stuff as he can. And then also, when I went and did research some of the history and realized that, like, he had a bigger plan, you know, it's hinted at in the afterword by Mark,
• 5:04
  Jimmy Gaspero: But he had a bigger plan, but then there were certain things he couldn't do because of the Superpowers toy deal with Kenner. And it made a little bit more sense as to why the story felt a little disjointed to me.
• 5:17
  Jimmy Gaspero: But yeah, there are some sequences in it I really, really love. I just wish there was more of, like.
• 5:23
  Jimmy Gaspero: that stuff.
• 5:26
  Jimmy Gaspero: But, it's very interesting to think about this as, like, a wrap-up to it, and, you know, Kirby, what he tried to do, or what he really did accomplish with the Fourth World, and now, I think he's, like, in his mid to late 60s, when he's wrapping up with the Hunger Dogs, and,
• 5:46
  Jimmy Gaspero: you know, I think of, like, the Forever People, and what kind of a great group of, like, hippie superheroes they were, and now the only, like.
• 5:55
  Jimmy Gaspero: the only bit of, like, the young generation is Isak, and he's… he's… he was, like, you know, Metron's, like, assistant and apprentice, and now he is disfigured, and warped, and building things, like, machines of destruction for Apocalypse, and I'm like, God, that is such, like, a…
• 6:13
  Jimmy Gaspero: it seems to be such a much more, like, cynical view of the younger generation than we see in Forever People.
• 6:23
  Jimmy Gaspero: You know, so those were the things that stood out to me going back now and reading even Gods Must Die and then Hunger Dogs.
• 6:32
  Sean Harklerode: I agree with you, I think… It's… it's a little disjointed.
• 6:37
  Sean Harklerode: I enjoy it.
• 6:39
  Sean Harklerode: But… reading that, basically, I think he wanted to end everything.
• 6:47
  Sean Harklerode: And DC was like, whoa, no, no, no, don't end everything. We might want to use these people again. And so, I think that was a push-pull about him wanting just to end it all. I mean, I feel like…
• 7:02
  Sean Harklerode: If he could, this would have been the end of the new gods, and we'd spin out some…
• 7:08
  Sean Harklerode: other gods…
• 7:10
  Sean Harklerode: you know, you know, just as the old gods died, now the new gods died, and then there'll be even newer gods. I don't know, but that's what I got…
• 7:21
  Mark Pracht: as the next generation?
• 7:24
  Sean Harklerode: But, it does skip around a bit, like, particularly… the thing that got me most, was…
• 7:34
  Sean Harklerode: All of a sudden, Orion has rescued Tigra, I'm like.
• 7:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 7:40
  Sean Harklerode: What?
• 7:42
  Mark Pracht: That happened, yeah.
• 7:43
  Sean Harklerode: And that's in, like, 3 panels? I'm like, come on, that's a major storyline here.
• 7:50
  Sean Harklerode: Or it should have been, could have been.
• 7:53
  Sean Harklerode: So that was a little disappointing, but I love, you know, The art…
• 8:01
  Sean Harklerode: Kinda goes back and forth, the coloring is…
• 8:07
  Sean Harklerode: Kinda throws me off a little bit.
• 8:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think in…
• 8:13
  Sean Harklerode: It's that.
• 8:14
  Tad Eggleston: That version that I read, it's clearly a modern recolor that some of those are better than others, and this one, I think.
• 8:20
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't qualify as one of the great ones.
• 8:24
  Sean Harklerode: Right, well, it's definitely that 80s, you know, prestige, you know, palette.
• 8:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:31
  Sean Harklerode: You know, it's not quite the four color of the… of the 70s.
• 8:37
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 8:40
  Sean Harklerode: But, sometimes it serves it, and sometimes it makes it look very flat, I think.
• 8:47
  Sean Harklerode: But, I don't know, the art is… is… He's getting curbier and curbier?
• 8:58
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 8:58
  Sean Harklerode: I…
• 8:59
  Mark Pracht: I missed… I missed Mike Royer on the inking.
• 9:04
  Mark Pracht: deeply, you know? I think that… I think that… that when…
• 9:09
  Mark Pracht: when he found Royer to work on those New Gods books, you know.
• 9:15
  Mark Pracht: He found the perfect anchor for him, and
• 9:18
  Mark Pracht: And I think that there's a number of things, like, I'm looking at page, 48 right here, there's a…
• 9:25
  Mark Pracht: Like, Darkseid doesn't quite look like Darkseid to me.
• 9:29
  Mark Pracht: in… just in the art, and it's mainly because I think that that lack of Royer
• 9:36
  Mark Pracht: Royer just sort of took that angularity and made it
• 9:39
  Mark Pracht: Part of it, and it feels like sometimes this is trying to smooth out some of that angularity.
• 9:46
  Mark Pracht: The curviness of it, you know?
• 9:49
  Mark Pracht: I guess… sorry, I had to jump off for half a second there, but and maybe I'm covering something that somebody's already said, if I do.
• 9:57
  Tad Eggleston: You're… you're good.
• 9:58
  Mark Pracht: I… I think even God's Must Die was a much cleaner ending to things.
• 10:07
  Mark Pracht: I do think, as Jimmy said, I know that this whole thing was happening, we gotta, we gotta look to,
• 10:16
  Mark Pracht: to, jeanette Kahn.
• 10:21
  Mark Pracht: who brought Kirby back to do this graphic novel, and she was the one that made the deal with Kenner to do the Super Bowers figures, and got Jack royalties from that. So, while Jack maybe couldn't truly finish it.
• 10:37
  Mark Pracht: he was getting something out of that, and I actually… I was just thinking about reading the Superpowers book, which Jack wrote, but didn't draw.
• 10:47
  Mark Pracht: So, anyway.
• 10:50
  Sean Harklerode: I've got that on my camera.
• 10:51
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 10:53
  Mark Pracht: But I do think… I'm just gonna echo everybody else. I feel like this jumps around so much, and that…
• 11:02
  Mark Pracht: like, a lot of times I'm like, oh, this is cool, and then we're off to something else. I think that it feels to me like New Genesis and… and Highfather all kind of become sort of like a…
• 11:17
  Mark Pracht: footnote, you know? I… in a way, I kind of wanted Hyman to… I wanted… I would have liked to have seen Highfather take more of the stuff that Hyman was doing.
• 11:26
  Sean Harklerode: Exactly.
• 11:27
  Mark Pracht: I felt like… I felt like…
• 11:29
  Mark Pracht: And I know it feels to me like Hyman is, kirby's stand-in.
• 11:37
  Mark Pracht: But… at the same time, I'm like.
• 11:42
  Mark Pracht: Highfather is supposedly the guy who raised
• 11:45
  Mark Pracht: Orion. I feel like there… there… and it is something that happens all through this Fourth World thing, is that you… you kind of want to know what this relationship between Orion and Highfather is, and they never quite get there, you know? And it always…
• 12:03
  Mark Pracht: that always bugged me a little bit, but I do think it jumps around a lot, and there's a lot of, like, trying to get… trying to click a lot of boxes. And, like, I think… I would say, I did think, even God's Must Die was a much cleaner, more direct ending. I also liked…
• 12:20
  Mark Pracht: one of the things about even God's Must Die, there was that lovely thing about, you know, Darkseid bringing his underlings back to life, and then they weren't quite the same, and there was a sort of loneliness to Darkseid that…
• 12:33
  Mark Pracht: that…
• 12:34
  Mark Pracht: has kind of evolved, but then kind of is gone. You know, it feels like somebody trying to connect dots
• 12:44
  Mark Pracht: and I've said this all along, I never really felt like Jack knew exactly where this whole thing was gonna go.
• 12:50
  Mark Pracht: And… I think… Much like,
• 12:57
  Mark Pracht: much like, you know, any number of things we can talk about, like, say, the Star Wars sequel trilogy, if you know where you're going, it'll give you a lot of freedom to get there, to take side roads, and to go and do other things to get there. And I just feel like, at a certain point, Jack.
• 13:15
  Mark Pracht: has so many ideas coming, and so many things that he wants to talk about, that he never really quite settles on what does this whole thing's supposed to mean, you know? And, like, the anti-life equation is just sort of gone, you know?
• 13:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I noticed that there was, like, hints in this that there were other equations.
• 13:36
  Sean Harklerode: With the ice equation, right?
• 13:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right. There's a… well, but not just the life equation. Like, like, there was a… there was a point where, you know, you must know all the equations of the… and it's like…
• 13:47
  Tad Eggleston: I had thought that the anti-life equation was strictly a MacGuffin-type thing, and now we're acting like there's some sort of mathematical magic in the universe that
• 14:00
  Tad Eggleston: That you've ignored up until this point.
• 14:04
  Tad Eggleston: What are the rules? How's that supposed to work?
• 14:07
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 14:08
  Sean Harklerode: How have we gotten this far into this conversation without mentioning the micro mark?
• 14:15
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah. Yeah. Which… at first.
• 14:19
  Sean Harklerode: My name for, for, you know, now going on for Mark.
• 14:24
  Jimmy Gaspero: micro-mark. It's weird, because at first I was like, what…
• 14:29
  Jimmy Gaspero: like, what… are they describing, like, a weapon? And it seems like at times, they are definitely talking about a weapon, but then they…
• 14:38
  Jimmy Gaspero: They describe it… oddly, at a certain point in time, because I think…
• 14:44
  Jimmy Gaspero: I don't know if it's Highfather, or somebody else mentions the MicroMark, and it sounds like they're talking about the current moment, rather than a specific weapon. So I wasn't sure exactly what that was a stand-in for.
• 14:57
  Sean Harklerode: And then…
• 14:58
  Tad Eggleston: I read the…
• 14:59
  Sean Harklerode: perspective, where I thought it might be, like, one of the figures in the foreground.
• 15:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I read the micro mark as, like, a layman's attempt at, like.
• 15:14
  Tad Eggleston: High-level nanotechnology, where, like, we're putting together these little, little things that, because they can do anything at a molecular level.
• 15:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, even though it's little and whatnot, it can cause huge amounts of damage, because it takes its… and it can replicate itself, blah blah blah. But,
• 15:35
  Tad Eggleston: Both because he was imagining a thing that either didn't have a word, or he wasn't using the word.
• 15:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and it's hard to know right there, because nanotechnology really was something that became a bigger part of the zeitgeist in the mid-90s.
• 15:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I remember a friend of mine doing a paper on it in high school, because, like, if they get it down, it could be…
• 16:01
  Tad Eggleston: it could be a game changer. If you can go in and reformulate a cell, you could use a nanobot to cure cancer, just because it could go in and take the cancer
• 16:13
  Tad Eggleston: cell and turned it into a regular cell, you know? .
• 16:20
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, like, but that's… that's always been… I mean, like, this is… what we're talking about has sort of always been the…
• 16:28
  Mark Pracht: the genius of Kirby, and sort of the Achilles heel of Kirby, is this idea that he's gonna throw out all these ideas.
• 16:35
  Mark Pracht: and that… When he's working with somebody who is a good…
• 16:42
  Mark Pracht: even editor, let alone writer, they can smooth that stuff out and make sure that we
• 16:49
  Mark Pracht: hit the beats that are necessary. Like, I was…
• 16:55
  Mark Pracht: during the course of this, I reread, OMAC.
• 17:01
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that's right.
• 17:02
  Mark Pracht: probably the worst example of it. Like, every book in that is like, oh, here's this incredible idea, here's this incredible idea, here's this incredible idea, and it never really…
• 17:11
  Mark Pracht: Amounts to anything, nor does it really add to the…
• 17:16
  Mark Pracht: the drama, you know? It's just idea, idea, idea, idea, and… and I think that… you know.
• 17:25
  Mark Pracht: as much as I love Jack, that is the one thing, it's sometimes, you know, you really wish he had a strong editor who was just like.
• 17:34
  Mark Pracht: I get it, I get it. I know you want to have your… you want to do what you want to do.
• 17:40
  Mark Pracht: But we have to clean this thing up and make sure that we understand what it is, you know?
• 17:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I… I… more than once, I've found myself reading these, and all the more in… in the…
• 17:54
  Tad Eggleston: These two volumes, where again, he gets away from his 4 and 6 panel pages that use so much…
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: For so much of the rest of the series, where, you know, he uses…
• 18:07
  Tad Eggleston: he's got more acting in these, you know, a little less bombastic imagery, a little bit more acting. It makes me wish that, like, he'd taken…
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Denny O'Neil under his wing, and felt like he was just showing Denny O'Neill the path, but in reality had, you know, this writer-editor guy who could say, hey, Jack, what if we did it this way?
• 18:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 18:33
  Sean Harklerode: Okay.
• 18:34
  Sean Harklerode: I also think there's a very strong… speaking of editing, he definitely has an anti-computer, anti-technology, computerization,
• 18:48
  Sean Harklerode: What do you call it?
• 18:49
  Sean Harklerode: mechanization, bank… You would…
• 18:52
  Tad Eggleston: He was way ahead of the curve on the anti-AI thing.
• 18:56
  Sean Harklerode: Right, and I think that's very important in… a very important theme in here, and it kind of goes back and forth.
• 19:03
  Sean Harklerode: That, again, had there been an editor, someone say, hey, you know, elucidate this a little bit more, you know.
• 19:12
  Sean Harklerode: bring that out. But it's very important to him, obviously, in this, and you can see that it's probably, hey, I'm the older guy, these newer guys, it's all computers, you know, let's just do it the way I like to do it.
• 19:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah. I mean, like, if you take all of the Fourth World as a whole, you can see…
• 19:36
  Tad Eggleston: a lot of what's important to Jack, you know? He seems to be…
• 19:42
  Tad Eggleston: trying to find the humanity in both, like, this epic good and epic bad, you know, to kind of break them both down as, no, there are good things from bad, and there are bad things from good, and, like.
• 20:00
  Tad Eggleston: No matter what your gods are, they're not…
• 20:05
  Tad Eggleston: they're not infallible, you know?
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: He… he… he… it definitely shows an awareness of a… of a technological future, but he's also shows an awareness that, like, that won't make the world…
• 20:26
  Tad Eggleston: world perfect, because you will still have humans, you know, and how the technology is used is… is…
• 20:35
  Tad Eggleston: important. He certainly shows a lot, I mean, whether it's the…
• 20:40
  Tad Eggleston: Is it the Flim Flam man? What did Stan get?
• 20:44
  Tad Eggleston: The Funky JS… Funky Flash Man?
• 20:46
  Sean Harklerode: Funky flash on you. Yeah, funky.
• 20:48
  Tad Eggleston: Flashman. Whether it's Funky Flashman or any number of things, you know, he shows… like… His struggles between, like.
• 21:00
  Tad Eggleston: okay, I understand that, like, some level of commercialism is required to, you know.
• 21:08
  Tad Eggleston: pay my mortgage, but… but I… I'm an artist, and I want to be an artist, and, like, I… I… like… So, I feel like Jack…
• 21:20
  Tad Eggleston: if you look at the entire thing on a whole, there's a lot of Jack struggling with his own humanity and place in the world.
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: But again, like…
• 21:32
  Tad Eggleston: He's a great artist, and an okay writer, a great storyteller, but not a very good scripter, and as a result, without having…
• 21:43
  Tad Eggleston: somebody to kind of bounce things off of, it becomes…
• 21:49
  Tad Eggleston: And I get this really well, you guys get to watch me do it on a regular basis. He's thinking out loud, but he's doing it on the pages of…
• 21:57
  Tad Eggleston: Four different comics over a year and a half.
• 21:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 22:01
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 22:04
  Jimmy Gaspero: talk more about the anti-technology, or maybe anti-modernization of it. One of the things I found really interesting about the Hunger Dogs is the characterization of Darkseid in this, who also seems like if you're… if you're…
• 22:22
  Jimmy Gaspero: if what you're espousing is kind of like an anti-modernization, let's say, in the art form, or the work that you've been doing, you have your main bad guy, Darkseid, who really seems to be chiding all of his new…
• 22:36
  Jimmy Gaspero: Underlinks for… for all of their…
• 22:41
  Jimmy Gaspero: all of their new weapons and all their new designs. He really seems, like, not thrilled with that aspect of it, like, to the point where…
• 22:50
  Tad Eggleston: My slingshot, dammit.
• 22:51
  Jimmy Gaspero: Keep that going.
• 22:52
  Tad Eggleston: Get away from it.
• 22:53
  Jimmy Gaspero: And he even tells the one, if you can take this crowd control measure on a cosmic scale, you've ripped off the anti-life equation. And he seems… Darkseid seems annoyed by it, like…
• 23:04
  Jimmy Gaspero: like, these new weapons of mass destruction is not… is still not as good as, like, fear. It's just a very odd characterization for Darkseid, how down he is on all these new weapons, like, that keep popping up.
• 23:21
  Mark Pracht: I've always found Darkseid to be really interesting. I mean, it's like I was talking about in the Even Gods Must Die, you know, there was that whole thing where he, you know.
• 23:30
  Mark Pracht: you know, resurrects DeSaud, and it's not quite DeSaud, and he seems somehow…
• 23:38
  Mark Pracht: really sad about that, you know? That, like, he's really lost all of these people who understood what he… or at least
• 23:47
  Mark Pracht: were his… team, you know? And now, we have a dark side that seems sort of… floating…
• 23:58
  Mark Pracht: he almost seems like he's floating in a sort of meaningless void now. Like, that… that if he doesn't have… like, if it's all, like, we're going to unleash this bomb.
• 24:09
  Mark Pracht: Or, or, or…
• 24:12
  Mark Pracht: You know, like, and maybe it is, that, like, control by fear is what he understands, and what…
• 24:20
  Mark Pracht: means something to him.
• 24:22
  Mark Pracht: And that… Wanton destruction doesn't seem to…
• 24:30
  Mark Pracht: Maybe that's what I'm… maybe that's what I'm chewing on right now, is, like, he seems turned off by the idea of just wanton destruction.
• 24:37
  Mark Pracht: You know? He would rather control something that actually exists rather than just destroy it. You know what I'm saying?
• 24:43
  Mark Pracht: Does that make sense?
• 24:44
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, that makes sense. I think there's.
• 24:46
  Tad Eggleston: There's also an element of old people, no, like, change.
• 24:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so he imagined doing it this way, so this young whippersnapper's like, well, you haven't been able to figure out the anti-life equation, but I created this thing that'll do the same thing, and he's like, no, it won't, because it's not the same.
• 25:06
  Tad Eggleston: But it'll do the same. No, it's not the same.
• 25:11
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, yeah.
• 25:13
  Mark Pracht: It's sort of… well, that's sort of the… well, that's the AI thing, too, you know? It's like, I can.
• 25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, I mean…
• 25:21
  Mark Pracht: prompts and shoots out a piece of artwork or whatever, but that's not the same as me drawing it.
• 25:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and to another level, an anti-life equation might be cleaner, it might be… it might be almost the Infinity Gauntlet snap and half the people are gone, whereas what's being described here, it's like, oh, we're gonna raise the cities, there's nothing left, there's…
• 25:44
  Tad Eggleston: And that's… You know, any aesthetic is then gone.
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, he doesn't… he doesn't want… destruction he wants.
• 25:56
  Tad Eggleston: anti-life.
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, and those can be different.
• 26:02
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 26:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm thinking out loud here. I do that a lot, Jimmy. These guys know that already.
• 26:07
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I… yeah, I… I do think…
• 26:12
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I think that all of these books really do make this case for Darkseid to be…
• 26:19
  Mark Pracht: One of the most fascinating villains.
• 26:22
  Mark Pracht: Ever. Dare I say it, I think, actually, Darkseid deep down, is actually more interesting than, say, you're Thanos or whatever. Like, there's something about that character, there seems to be, like.
• 26:35
  Mark Pracht: there is this element of, like, he is… he is locked in battle with his own son, right? And that it doesn't… it doesn't go to say that
• 26:46
  Mark Pracht: Star Wars Revolution, where the son redeems the father, Nor does it…
• 26:51
  Mark Pracht: Like, it just perpetuates that battle, you know?
• 26:55
  Mark Pracht: That it's this unending thing.
• 26:58
  Mark Pracht: But the one thing, and I… just to jump back a little bit, the one thing that I really missed in this, that I think was…
• 27:07
  Mark Pracht: to me, very inherent to what we were talking about over the course of the whole Fourth World.
• 27:13
  Mark Pracht: Where the hell is Scott Free?
• 27:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 27:16
  Mark Pracht: Like, this is, like, this pact that was supposedly this… you know, I remember when we got to that issue of, you know, the pact.
• 27:23
  Mark Pracht: that was supposed to bring peace, and yet didn't really work, but it was still this idea that they had changed the suns, you know?
• 27:32
  Mark Pracht: There are, like, Jimmy brought up the Forever People, and, you know, we always talked about, when we were reading it, how it felt like it was sort of meandering and never really found out what it was trying to say.
• 27:45
  Mark Pracht: But… you know, we bring back Isaac.
• 27:51
  Mark Pracht: But, like, wouldn't it… like, which always felt like sort of a peripheral character to me, and then…
• 28:00
  Mark Pracht: you know, but the Forever people are still wandering out there, the Infinity Man's still wandering out there, like, this had been, like…
• 28:08
  Mark Pracht: You almost wish that he'd done, like, a trilogy of graphic novels to… to really give himself the space to wrap all this up.
• 28:17
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I…
• 28:18
  Mark Pracht: you know.
• 28:18
  Sean Harklerode: Oh.
• 28:19
  Mark Pracht: Go ahead.
• 28:20
  Sean Harklerode: I kinda get the sense that this…
• 28:22
  Sean Harklerode: several times, because there's several splash pages in here that it made me think, like, okay, this was the break. This was going to be four different issues, or something.
• 28:34
  Sean Harklerode: But I think… the decision to set it entirely on Apocalypse?
• 28:41
  Sean Harklerode: probably is why, you know, A, probably why scot-free and the others aren't on there, but it's also why it feels so different
• 28:53
  Sean Harklerode: Than what went before, because it was… because we always had humans interacting and in peril.
• 29:02
  Sean Harklerode: And the people he was trying to dominate.
• 29:06
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 29:07
  Sean Harklerode: And in this, it's just apocalypse.
• 29:11
  Sean Harklerode: Where we see… You know, look, the hunger dogs, right?
• 29:17
  Sean Harklerode: The… the rabble.
• 29:20
  Sean Harklerode: the, the…
• 29:22
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know, they're not humans, but they're the denizens of apocalypse, right? And they start to rise up, but it's not quite the same as when it's on Earth. Does that make sense?
• 29:35
  Sean Harklerode: Just, which I understand why, hey, we've had the battle on Earth, now we're going to apocalypse to end it all.
• 29:44
  Sean Harklerode: Right? But it can just make it tonal shit.
• 29:48
  Mark Pracht: I want to correct myself. I had said that Mike Royer didn't work on this, it looks like he did.
• 29:53
  Mark Pracht: But there's also inking by D. Bruce Berry, and…
• 29:57
  Mark Pracht: I'm… as I'm flipping through it, I'm… like, there's definitely pages that I'm like, oh yeah, that's Royer, but then there's also pages where I'm like, that feels strange, and I'm assuming those are the Barry pages.
• 30:08
  Sean Harklerode: It's a dis… there's a dissonance, because some of it feels very familiar, and some of it doesn't, and I think what I said earlier about the coloring, I figured it out. To me, the coloring reminds me of a picture book.
• 30:22
  Sean Harklerode: Remember, we used to get the picture books in middle school or elementary?
• 30:29
  Sean Harklerode: It seems more like that. Even you'd get a Spider-Man picture book, and it wasn't colored like a Spider-Man comic book.
• 30:38
  Sean Harklerode: That's what this reminds me of.
• 30:42
  Mark Pracht: I will… I do want to talk about… there is one transition in this book that I was… I puzzled over
• 30:48
  Mark Pracht: For… ever. And it… and it's just because…
• 30:53
  Mark Pracht: I think it's incredibly dissonant. And, I don't know what pages this is, there's no page number. It's, when Hyman has the bomb.
• 31:03
  Mark Pracht: And it disintegrates in his hands, and then we suddenly switch over to… New Genesis and these monsters… And…
• 31:15
  Mark Pracht: that transition still makes no sense to me, and I still am lost narratively of, like, I… it… I was like, wait a minute, did I miss a page? Was there a page missing here? Or…
• 31:28
  Mark Pracht: What's also funny is that at least in my… in my… because I'm reading this on Kindle.
• 31:35
  Mark Pracht: The… the aspect ratio of the pages changes.
• 31:39
  Sean Harklerode: Yes, it does in the, it does in the omnibus as well.
• 31:43
  Tad Eggleston: I think that's because this was released as a DC graphic novel.
• 31:50
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, yeah!
• 31:52
  Tad Eggleston: Different aspect ratio.
• 31:55
  Tad Eggleston: From a regular comic.
• 32:00
  Mark Pracht: And why were… why, like, that… Totally makes sense.
• 32:04
  Mark Pracht: Except there's this series of pages
• 32:09
  Mark Pracht: That are not in that ratio.
• 32:12
  Mark Pracht: It's.
• 32:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I…
• 32:14
  Mark Pracht: There's the.
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: I wonder if it has to do with whether you're seeing one page or two pages.
• 32:21
  Mark Pracht: Mmm…
• 32:22
  Sean Harklerode: Well, here, I'll hold this up. See, I mean, you can look at the difference in the margins.
• 32:27
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 32:28
  Sean Harklerode: Fascinating for our podcast listeners.
• 32:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yep, yep, yep.
• 32:32
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah, all of this. I…
• 32:35
  Sean Harklerode: Gutter at the bottom, and then the next page, there's no gutter at all, really.
• 32:42
  Jimmy Gaspero: I thought I read somewhere that there were, like, 25 pages of this that they added back in for the omnibus, and I'm trying to see where I read that.
• 32:53
  Jimmy Gaspero: But I thought somewhere I had read that there were, yeah, that there were some other pages that I don't think were ever in the original, that when they did the omnibus, they added them back in, which could explain…
• 33:06
  Mark Pracht: That would explain a lot.
• 33:07
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 33:12
  Jimmy Gaspero: you know, I'm just trying to see… figure out where I… where I saw that.
• 33:15
  Mark Pracht: I remember when this book came out, and I was… I don't know, early teens.
• 33:23
  Mark Pracht: And I didn't know what the hell it was, you know?
• 33:28
  Mark Pracht: So I never picked it up or anything, so I… I wish, I wish I had, you know?
• 33:34
  Mark Pracht: Just to be able to answer that question, if there was… but I mean, even if I think… even thinking about that, what you just pointed out, Jimmy, like, if I take all of these pages that are in the larger aspect ratio, and just remove them.
• 33:50
  Mark Pracht: It seems an even more sort of, like, weirdly disjointed Transition, you know?
• 33:57
  Jimmy Gaspero: It's in the afterword, in the omnibus by Mark Vanier, I can never remember how to say Mark's last name.
• 34:05
  Mark Pracht: near.
• 34:06
  Jimmy Gaspero: Vinier? Yeah, he says that,
• 34:09
  Jimmy Gaspero: Talking about the construction of this, there were technical difficulties. The first version had been inked and lettered by Mike Royer. It had been done to conventional comic book format to be printed on pages the size of those in the book you're holding.
• 34:20
  Jimmy Gaspero: A graphic novel, which is what the expanded version would be, has larger pages, different proportions to make the pages Jack had already done fit into the graphic novel format.
• 34:30
  Jimmy Gaspero: Kirby did additional art to add into the margins. He also did the new pages, which were drawn to graphic novel proportions. Royer was unavailable at the time, so these were inked and lettered by D. Bruce Berry, and then in parentheses it says, you should be able to tell which is which.
• 34:46
  Jimmy Gaspero: By the lettering, if not the inking techniques.
• 34:51
  Jimmy Gaspero: And then the restructured story was colored by Greg Theekston, and then to tie the two batches of pages more closely together, because there was some problem with the photo stats of the Royer-inced pages, Theekston wound up re-inking and retouching a lot of the art on those pages.
• 35:07
  Jimmy Gaspero: But I was going to mention the same thing, because if you… we talk a lot about… we've already mentioned a lot about the story being…
• 35:14
  Jimmy Gaspero: like, disjointed at times, and there being a lot of ideas. You would think that, alright, like, on my podcast with creators, we talk a lot about the economy of comic book storytelling, and that transition does seem totally bizarre, because you don't need it to get into
• 35:31
  Jimmy Gaspero: like, if you want to bring Lonar in, and what's going on on New Genesis, you don't need that at all. It's just about some, I don't know, plague-infested monsters, like, gobbling up New Genesis, and, like, it's… Right.
• 35:44
  Jimmy Gaspero: one page, three panels, and even the narrative captions. Like, you don't really need it to get into the other aspects of it. It does seem very…
• 35:53
  Jimmy Gaspero: Very strange.
• 35:54
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, when we start talking narrative captions in Kirby, there are a lot of them that you don't need.
• 36:00
  Jimmy Gaspero: Hey!
• 36:00
  Mark Pracht: My favorite Kirbyism. My favorite Kirbyism is the… the strange… quotation marks.
• 36:09
  Mark Pracht: Around words that are… like, you're like, why is this inqu…
• 36:14
  Mark Pracht: Like, and I don't have a good example in front of me, but it's been all through his work. I see it in his 70s Marvel book.
• 36:21
  Tad Eggleston: The first day after the gods were born.
• 36:28
  Mark Pracht: this is a rip-off, quote-unquote, you know, and I'm like… Do you…
• 36:36
  Mark Pracht: It kind of strikes me… it kind of strikes me… sometimes it strikes me as the old guy trying to use the hip lingo and thinking that he needs to, like.
• 36:45
  Mark Pracht: And it's like… but at the same time, like, sometimes it's just bizarre stuff, and you're just like, I don't know why you did that, Jack. And I don't know why the letterer didn't just say, I don't need this.
• 37:00
  Jimmy Gaspero: If anyone ever hosts a Jack Kirby, like, pub trivia night, that would be a great one. Just read a sentence, and the team has to figure out which word or two words is in, in quotation marks. In quotation marks.
• 37:15
  Mark Pracht: That'd be incredible.
• 37:17
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I'm great.
• 37:19
  Sean Harklerode: the biggest miss in all of this is the last page with Metron.
• 37:25
  Sean Harklerode: that that doesn't have a header that says Prologue?
• 37:31
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 37:32
  Sean Harklerode: So, you know, we, you know, we began with the epilogue.
• 37:36
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:37
  Sean Harklerode: to end.
• 37:38
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 37:38
  Sean Harklerode: Because this is a prologue to what's coming next, right?
• 37:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 37:43
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah.
• 37:44
  Sean Harklerode: That just hit me when you were talking about Something when you're…
• 37:48
  Sean Harklerode: I wasn't sure where you were going, and I was like, oh, yes.
• 37:52
  Sean Harklerode: Reminded me of the epilogue.
• 37:56
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, because in my play, I think it's… it's,
• 38:00
  Mark Pracht: Carmine, when Jack's pitching it, it's like, it starts with the epilogue, and Carmine's like, wait, the epilogue's at the end.
• 38:08
  Sean Harklerode: That's the end.
• 38:08
  Jimmy Gaspero: But then…
• 38:10
  Sean Harklerode: That's the first issue with New Gods.
• 38:11
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah. But yeah, that… that is… that is actually a really, a really astute thing that…
• 38:19
  Mark Pracht: Again, a really… a really… clued-in and talented editor or writer would have been like, you know Jack.
• 38:27
  Mark Pracht: This is what we should do.
• 38:29
  Mark Pracht: And Jack, I… I could imagine Jack being like, that's a great idea, kid.
• 38:34
  Jimmy Gaspero: Heh.
• 38:37
  Sean Harklerode: Have… have we ever seen,
• 38:41
  Sean Harklerode: Has there ever been a prologue? You know, we talked about, when we were doing the series, and we had that flashback to when the pact was made, how much we really wish we'd seen more of young Highfather and…
• 38:58
  Sean Harklerode: And Darkseid back then. Had they ever done a series back then? I mean, I think that would…
• 39:04
  Sean Harklerode: If anyone's listening, DC. I would buy that in a heartbeat.
• 39:11
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 39:13
  Mark Pracht: Well, I've always thought… I've always thought that
• 39:16
  Mark Pracht: you know, the only… the only series that keeps… seemingly keeps… like, I know they've attempted a new gods revival.
• 39:25
  Mark Pracht: I think…
• 39:26
  Tad Eggleston: Even recently.
• 39:27
  Mark Pracht: Definitely.
• 39:28
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah, there was just one right there.
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: something.
• 39:30
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 39:30
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 39:32
  Tad Eggleston: Read it still.
• 39:33
  Mark Pracht: I think in the early 80s, actually, before this came out, I think that,
• 39:42
  Mark Pracht: Danny O'Neill wrote a…
• 39:44
  Mark Pracht: an attempt to revive the new gods, and we know that Mr. Miracle's come back several times. Yeah. You know, and it's like, we were talking about, like, man, you know, somebody out there has to have a good pitch for the forever people, like…
• 40:01
  Mark Pracht: But that doesn't seem to come back. There may have been one revival of that.
• 40:05
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, for me…
• 40:07
  Sean Harklerode: do that.
• 40:09
  Mark Pracht: Giffen, maybe? I don't know. I wish I had an encyclopedic memory of that, but…
• 40:17
  Mark Pracht: We need to get Mark Waid on this.
• 40:21
  Mark Pracht: He'd be like, oh yeah, that cover looked like this, and
• 40:24
  Mark Pracht: But I, you know, I don't know, like, I think about, I think about all the people who have taken these ideas and expanded them.
• 40:33
  Mark Pracht: I know, Tad, you told me that your introduction to Darkseid and the New Gods was the Great Darkness War, and, like, how successful that story is. And, I mean, like, I have always thought, you know, in the 80s, when they did Cosmic Odyssey.
• 40:50
  Mark Pracht: I love that series, and I thought, you know, I didn't quite think that Mignola was the right artist for it, but at the same time, you know, it's Mike Mignola, that's great. You know, it's great art, but it's also… it just…
• 41:04
  Mark Pracht: It was a little strange to me, but,
• 41:07
  Mark Pracht: you know, I… I keep thinking about that,
• 41:12
  Mark Pracht: even the, even the, the, X-Men, Teen Titans crossover book.
• 41:21
  Mark Pracht: has a really interesting story. You guys read… you guys read that, right?
• 41:27
  Sean Harklerode: I read Odyssey, but I don't…
• 41:30
  Mark Pracht: Now, yeah, that one of the villains of the X-Men Teen Titans crossover that they did in the 80s.
• 41:40
  Mark Pracht: is Darkseid and Dark Phoenix.
• 41:44
  Mark Pracht: And at the end, Darkseid tries to cross the source wall.
• 41:50
  Mark Pracht: and ends up becoming one of the Titans that's…
• 41:53
  Mark Pracht: embedded in the wall, and I always thought that that was just this awesome idea, you know, like, that the arrogance of him trying to cross the source wall
• 42:03
  Mark Pracht: But that's, that's, that, you know, and that's another thing, that's another bit of, of, of,
• 42:09
  Mark Pracht: you know, he…
• 42:10
  Mark Pracht: canon that is not in these books. Like, Jack never addresses it, like, Jack didn't create the Source Wall, or any of those things. I think it's fascinating, and it… when you go back and you read how Jack wanted to create all these books, and then hand them over to other people.
• 42:29
  Mark Pracht: Like, how much we could have gotten out of it if that had actually happened, you know?
• 42:37
  Tad Eggleston: I was gonna ask a question, because Mark has done the Kirby… Research the most, like…
• 42:47
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like all of the Kirby I know, either he felt like he didn't have enough autonomy, or he insisted on near-complete autonomy. So he was either with Stan…
• 43:04
  Tad Eggleston: Writing words that he didn't want.
• 43:07
  Tad Eggleston: or whatever, or… or he was, I don't want an editor, I don't want a writer. Is there anything where he did have that team?
• 43:17
  Tad Eggleston: That… that… We talk about wishing he had here, where he had a writing partner that was…
• 43:27
  Mark Pracht: Oh, there was…
• 43:28
  Tad Eggleston: valued him as a storyteller, but…
• 43:31
  Mark Pracht: There's certain.
• 43:32
  Sean Harklerode: Him and Joe?
• 43:33
  Mark Pracht: Joe Simon, of course, you know, through the 50s, they did all the… they did the romance books.
• 43:40
  Mark Pracht: they did crime books, they did some of those horror books. I mean, and look, I think… I think that, you know.
• 43:49
  Mark Pracht: Okay.
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: Let's go dig up more of those.
• 43:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, Jack's perception, I think that, that… I think…
• 43:59
  Mark Pracht: the Lee and Kirby dynamic is always going to be interesting to try to parse out.
• 44:04
  Mark Pracht: Because I think that Jack, obviously.
• 44:08
  Mark Pracht: at some point felt that it was an unfair situation. And I… there… there's definitely elements of it that are unfair. There's no… but at the same time.
• 44:19
  Mark Pracht: I don't think you can deny that… I don't think… I don't think that anybody can say that Stan Lee did not value Kirby's contributions.
• 44:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I wasn't… I wasn't trying to… I… I was…
• 44:31
  Mark Pracht: No, I'm…
• 44:31
  Tad Eggleston: only of Jack's state of mind. Right. You know, was there ever a time where he was with a collaborator that he was…
• 44:39
  Tad Eggleston: Like, really willing to take the…
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Let's word it this way, or even just hand over the… this is…
• 44:49
  Tad Eggleston: This is the story we're telling.
• 44:51
  Tad Eggleston: you script it, and I approve it, whatever.
• 44:55
  Mark Pracht: I don't, you know…
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: I lost you for a second. Okay.
• 44:58
  Mark Pracht: seems it's seen.
• 44:59
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, that's… It seems to me that Jack…
• 45:08
  Mark Pracht: There always seems to be a problem.
• 45:11
  Mark Pracht: At some point or another.
• 45:13
  Mark Pracht: there was, you know, there was the Joe Simon situation where Joe Simon sued to try to get the rights to…
• 45:19
  Mark Pracht: Captain America.
• 45:22
  Mark Pracht: And… Jack… Signed an affidavit.
• 45:29
  Mark Pracht: saying that they had created it as a work for hire for Timely slash Marvel.
• 45:35
  Mark Pracht: And… you know, some of the things that have been said was that Joe Simon tried to undercut Jack.
• 45:43
  Mark Pracht: like, he tried to get the rights all to himself, rather, you know, he wasn't suing for Jack, Simon, and Kirby, he was suing for just Joe Simon, right? And that, in a way, that's why Jack sided with Marvel.
• 45:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 45:57
  Mark Pracht: Or Martin Goodman.
• 45:59
  Mark Pracht: Like, so it seems like…
• 46:05
  Mark Pracht: as time goes on, everything… you begin to realize, this isn't fair, or somebody does something that's a slight, or… or… you know, I don't know. I mean, like, it… it seems that…
• 46:21
  Mark Pracht: Because I want to be real careful what I'm saying here, because I love Jack, and I think Jack is a stone genius, and I think Jack is…
• 46:30
  Mark Pracht: always gonna be on the Mount Rush floor of comic creators.
• 46:33
  Tad Eggleston: He's also human, and that's part of what this is all about.
• 46:37
  Mark Pracht: He's also human.
• 46:39
  Mark Pracht: Right. And I think that… I do think that there is a,
• 46:48
  Mark Pracht: You sign a deal, and then…
• 46:52
  Mark Pracht: You know, the deal goes away, you know, like.
• 46:57
  Mark Pracht: When you sign a deal that's the same deal that everybody else gets, and then suddenly the thing becomes super mega popular or successful, then suddenly the deal that everybody gets feels…
• 47:09
  Mark Pracht: Wrong?
• 47:11
  Mark Pracht: And then… And, and… Certainly, it probably is, but at the same time, it's like…
• 47:21
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but that's what everybody else got, you know? I think about… like, the one thing we can say about Kirby that is continual across his history is this return of the original art.
• 47:32
  Mark Pracht: And certainly, that is something where I'm 100% on Jack's side, and I think that it should have been, like, it should always be returned.
• 47:40
  Mark Pracht: But then again, you see these interviews with all of these
• 47:44
  Mark Pracht: Golden 8 artists who were talk… are asked about that, and they're like, did you ever get your art back? And he's like, no, I didn't want it.
• 47:50
  Mark Pracht: Not Jack specifically, but other artists, because they were like, what was I gonna do with it?
• 47:56
  Mark Pracht: that this value of the art, and we've talked about this before, the value of the art did not really arise until there was this organized fandom, and conventions, and sales, and those kind of things, and that then suddenly this stuff had value, and now, well, I do deserve it back. Well, yes, you do.
• 48:14
  Mark Pracht: But nobody was really asking for it back until now, you know?
• 48:18
  Mark Pracht: And that does not change
• 48:21
  Mark Pracht: my feelings about the unfairness of taking it. That doesn't change my feelings about the unfairness of what absolutely happened with his Marvel art, where they put it in their warehouse, and that there were people who were taking it out of there, or… or being asked to destroy it, or, you know, any number of other things. But at the same time, like.
• 48:42
  Mark Pracht: That was… that was the standard operating procedure of the industry, and…
• 48:48
  Mark Pracht: Until somebody tries to change it.
• 48:50
  Mark Pracht: Or makes the case to change it.
• 48:53
  Mark Pracht: That's the way it is, you know?
• 48:55
  Mark Pracht: I don't know, maybe I'm being…
• 49:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think that's…
• 49:01
  Mark Pracht: Somebody else have a point.
• 49:03
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I mean, you put me in mind of Dave Chappelle's take on the Incredible Hulk.
• 49:11
  Sean Harklerode: You know, seems like everywhere you go, you get into a fight. I'm starting to think maybe it's you.
• 49:20
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 49:22
  Mark Pracht: Well, and the thing is, is like, I… I think…
• 49:24
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and I'd love to hear Jimmy's point of view on this, too. It's like, it…
• 49:30
  Mark Pracht: It does seem like…
• 49:36
  Mark Pracht: Last, last summer, I got… I went out to LA, and I went to the… the Kirby exhibit at the,
• 49:46
  Mark Pracht: you know, what the hell was the name of that museum that out there? But they had a huge Kirby exhibit, lots of original art, you know, lots of designs, things like that, and it's… you know, they talk about these thousands and thousands of characters that Jack created.
• 50:00
  Mark Pracht: And… absolutely true.
• 50:03
  Mark Pracht: But I think many of those thousands are just a sketch.
• 50:07
  Mark Pracht: And I do think that a sketch of a character is in the same way that
• 50:14
  Mark Pracht: Stan Lee talks about, if you've got the idea, then you've created it, and that's not necessarily true. You have to have the artist put it into a… some sort of image.
• 50:24
  Mark Pracht: And take your idea and make it
• 50:28
  Mark Pracht: I don't want to say real, but make it…
• 50:31
  Mark Pracht: Flesh it out, right? Into something that is a visual thing.
• 50:38
  Mark Pracht: And the same thing is, like, a design of a character that's on a piece of paper that has no context isn't really a character, it's just a design, right?
• 50:47
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, just think about all the… how many different people claim to have a hand in creating the Wolverine, right?
• 50:53
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 50:56
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah.
• 50:59
  Jimmy Gaspero: Who's gone.
• 51:00
  Tad Eggleston: Clearly Kirby.
• 51:02
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I…
• 51:03
  Tad Eggleston: Just ask, what's his name, the guy that Mark always gets in fights about.
• 51:07
  Mark Pracht: Ugh.
• 51:08
  Mark Pracht: No, no, no. No, I… no.
• 51:11
  Sean Harklerode: No.
• 51:11
  Mark Pracht: We're not gonna bring… we're not gonna bring that guy up.
• 51:14
  Sean Harklerode: I will say, I don't wanna…
• 51:18
  Sean Harklerode: not mention this, because I think it's very important. One of the greatest things about this book, I was so thrilled when I turned the page, we get a two-page spread collage. Full-on Kirby collage towards the end, with the destruction of New Gener.
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, I… that's my favorite page in this book. I love it. It's one of my favorite pages, period.
• 51:40
  Jimmy Gaspero: That's one of the things I wanted to bring up and talk about, like, what everyone thought of it, because, like, going back from my memory of the Fourth World and, you know, not having read it in a little while, and then getting to that collage, I'm like, what is going on here?
• 51:57
  Mark Pracht: I… I am such a huge fan of Kirby's collages. I mean, we did talk about it, how,
• 52:03
  Mark Pracht: one of my… when he used to do them in the Marvel books, they were almost always, like, black and white, which…
• 52:09
  Sean Harklerode: tight.
• 52:10
  Mark Pracht: a color drawing of it. And the thing is, is that it's probably the advances in coloring and things like that into the 70s, is that once he got to the Fourth World, he could do these collages and that they could be colored. And that makes this pop. It is incredible. It is… I… I cannot…
• 52:29
  Mark Pracht: I cannot gush more. I will say that when I went to that exhibit.
• 52:35
  Mark Pracht: This was one of the pages hanging on the wall.
• 52:38
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, wow.
• 52:39
  Mark Pracht: And it would.
• 52:39
  Jimmy Gaspero: Oh, that's awesome.
• 52:41
  Sean Harklerode: Hey, is that a Star Destroyer? The rear of a Star Destroyer from Star Wars?
• 52:48
  Mark Pracht: Where…
• 52:49
  Sean Harklerode: Just a… I'm looking.
• 52:52
  Mark Pracht: Thank you, Ed.
• 52:53
  Sean Harklerode: All Apocalypse Reels.
• 52:55
  Sean Harklerode: as its sister planet, New Genesis, blown apart.
• 52:59
  Jimmy Gaspero: It looks like it. Yeah, it's on the… on mine, it's, like, on the left side of the page, almost…
• 53:06
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 53:07
  Jimmy Gaspero: Halfway down, does…
• 53:09
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I do see it.
• 53:10
  Jimmy Gaspero: Does look… does look like a Star Destroyer. And actually, right.
• 53:13
  Mark Pracht: Right, to the right of that?
• 53:15
  Mark Pracht: Is that the cockpit of a B-wing?
• 53:20
  Sean Harklerode: It could be.
• 53:21
  Mark Pracht: That's just to the right.
• 53:24
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah.
• 53:25
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 53:27
  Jimmy Gaspero: It def- yeah, it definitely could be. It's…
• 53:29
  Mark Pracht: That… it totally is a Star Destroyer. I totally missed that! That's incredible.
• 53:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you know, I mean, that was his, his,
• 53:41
  Tad Eggleston: his… his model for blowing up a planet was… was Star Wars. This has the feel of an Alderaan…
• 53:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so he was… he was given the hat tip.
• 53:53
  Sean Harklerode: Well, I, I, I also do love…
• 53:56
  Sean Harklerode: also, coming out of this page, as, you know, New Genesis, you know, the city there is flying off.
• 54:09
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know for certain, but this feels to me like… Things coming full circle.
• 54:23
  Sean Harklerode: Because, to me, as soon as I saw that, and that Highfather is looking for a place to land.
• 54:30
  Sean Harklerode: It made me think of Jason Aaron's Thor run.
• 54:35
  Sean Harklerode: And, I thought, hey, it's coming back.
• 54:40
  Sean Harklerode: Like, Kirby's ideas from new gods have now gone back to Thor.
• 54:47
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 54:47
  Sean Harklerode: Right?
• 54:48
  Sean Harklerode: Which.
• 54:49
  Mark Pracht: Right? I mean…
• 54:50
  Mark Pracht: Because, yeah, that… that was, you know, that was always the strong rumor, was that, you know, this all was supposed to be
• 54:57
  Mark Pracht: Kirby's continuation of Thor, that he wanted to wipe out all of the Thor characters in Ragnarok, and then replace them all.
• 55:04
  Sean Harklerode: Right, and with that, and I… I don't know if, Ted, you've ever talked to Jason Aaron.
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: I have not yet.
• 55:12
  Tad Eggleston: He's on the list.
• 55:13
  Sean Harklerode: We've communicated a couple times, but he's.
• 55:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right, and a lot of.
• 55:16
  Sean Harklerode: Series is going.
• 55:18
  Sean Harklerode: with Kevin Bacon.
• 55:23
  Mark Pracht: We're not…
• 55:23
  Jimmy Gaspero: I just saw the other.
• 55:24
  Mark Pracht: guy.
• 55:27
  Mark Pracht: like, the one series that I have always been like, why? I know, I know he was a bastard, but…
• 55:36
  Mark Pracht: Could we not have finished this? Please!
• 55:42
  Mark Pracht: I love that series.
• 55:45
  Tad Eggleston: It is great.
• 55:46
  Tad Eggleston: It is great.
• 55:47
  Jimmy Gaspero: I have to finish it still. I haven't finished it.
• 55:51
  Tad Eggleston: I just…
• 55:51
  Sean Harklerode: Eric.
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: I just quickly shared my screen, because I think I have a book that we may either want to throw in after,
• 56:02
  Tad Eggleston: after-cree Skull Roar, or throw into our pulp blotter at some point.
• 56:07
  Tad Eggleston: there is a Best of Simon and Kirby that actually kicked off
• 56:12
  Tad Eggleston: a series of Simon and Kirby Books done by…
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: There's a horror book, a sci-fi book, a crime book.
• 56:22
  Tad Eggleston: Done… done with the… and it looks like a superhero book.
• 56:28
  Tad Eggleston: Done with the, approval of both of their estates.
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: And with a lot of hand-picked Joe Simon stories.
• 56:37
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I have the, the best of Mainline, which was their… That was the… the,
• 56:44
  Mark Pracht: the publishing company that Joe and Jack started.
• 56:48
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 56:48
  Mark Pracht: 50s.
• 56:50
  Mark Pracht: It did not last long.
• 56:52
  Mark Pracht: But, you know.
• 56:57
  Mark Pracht: From my understanding, for all Jack's complaints about publishers.
• 57:02
  Mark Pracht: They had pretty much the same policies that all the publishers they worked with when they became popular.
• 57:11
  Jimmy Gaspero: Ugh.
• 57:13
  Jimmy Gaspero: One of the things I also had wanted to bring up in terms of the hunger dogs is,
• 57:20
  Jimmy Gaspero: the last time, and it's only… it's 3 pages before the end, but the last time we see Darkseid in this, you know, I… I understand that Jack had wanted to kind of at least kill…
• 57:32
  Jimmy Gaspero: Darkseid and Orion at some point.
• 57:36
  Jimmy Gaspero: But not being able to do that, I thought it was very interesting in terms of we see…
• 57:42
  Jimmy Gaspero: Orion with his mother and Becca, like, speed away, and we just… the last two panels are… we see, like, this encroaching white space, and Darkseid is, like, a little tiny, like, speck in that last panel. I thought that was very…
• 57:58
  Jimmy Gaspero: interesting for, like, a character that has occupied so much real estate throughout the Fourth World, that that's how we… we see him at the very…
• 58:06
  Jimmy Gaspero: end of it, just moving away from him, the white space starting to, like, envelop him. I thought it created a very interesting picture, for the last of Darkseid.
• 58:19
  Mark Pracht: Well, I think it…
• 58:19
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 58:20
  Mark Pracht: thematically, it's super, super interesting, because I think, like… and this, of course, is my own interpretation of what maybe Jack was trying to say, and God knows if it's right, but, like… like I said, when even God's Must Die, that idea of him bringing back all of these people who were gone…
• 58:38
  Mark Pracht: And then feeling like they're not the real… You know?
• 58:42
  Mark Pracht: And that's more and more isolated.
• 58:45
  Mark Pracht: more and more with less people that he could turn to, you know? Granny's gone.
• 58:52
  Mark Pracht: Verman Vunderbar's gone, Kalabak's gone, DeSaad's gone, you know, and all he has left is… His command of this…
• 59:04
  Mark Pracht: And that, I think, probably, like, to me, it's like…
• 59:08
  Mark Pracht: sometimes, you know, absolute power, it just leaves you alone. You know, it just leaves you isolated from everyone else.
• 59:16
  Mark Pracht: And that… that's where we leave Darkseid, you know?
• 59:21
  Sean Harklerode: Jack Darkseid?
• 59:26
  Mark Pracht: I think we… I think we know Jack as Hyman.
• 59:30
  Mark Pracht: Hyman looks like Jay.
• 59:31
  Sean Harklerode: But it looks like him.
• 59:33
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 59:34
  Sean Harklerode: But…
• 59:35
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 59:35
  Sean Harklerode: We talked about having absolute control, being left alone.
• 59:39
  Sean Harklerode: All of his patriots have gone.
• 59:45
  Mark Pracht: Well… He always said that there was something of himself in all of his characters, so…
• 59:51
  Sean Harklerode: I also love, when you talk about the whiteout,
• 59:56
  Sean Harklerode: There's a few pages before that,
• 1:00:02
  Sean Harklerode: Where all the characters in the foreground of this big explosion, it's the top of…
• 1:00:10
  Sean Harklerode: I don't know. I don't have page numbers. Oh, it's the page… it's the page before the collage.
• 1:00:18
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:00:19
  Sean Harklerode: all the characters in the foreground are whited out instead of blacked out, which I thought was a…
• 1:00:25
  Sean Harklerode: Is a fabulous visual.
• 1:00:28
  Sean Harklerode: That when you mentioned that about Darkseid, it reminded me.
• 1:00:32
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:00:34
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah.
• 1:00:35
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah, there are… like I said, there are some really interesting concepts in this, like, I was looking at Darkseid in terms of how we last see him, as if he… if Darkseid with the anti-life equation, is standing in as, you know.
• 1:00:47
  Jimmy Gaspero: totalitarian or authoritarian governments.
• 1:00:52
  Jimmy Gaspero: And, you know, we now have gone from the early 70s to 1984, 1985, kind of, like, the height of the Cold War. I was just, like, really trying to think of what Jack was, like, grappling with and what he was trying to say, just that these types of governments
• 1:01:09
  Jimmy Gaspero: No matter how long they're around, like, can't survive, like, there's al- the hunger dogs are always gonna turn on you at some point in time, and…
• 1:01:17
  Jimmy Gaspero: You know,
• 1:01:19
  Jimmy Gaspero: it was just… just kind of, you know, interesting in terms of the, like, the political ramifications, I thought, of what he was trying to say about
• 1:01:28
  Jimmy Gaspero: about Darkseid, and kind of reflecting the current moment, and how things had changed from the early 70s to 1985, too. I was wondering how much of that was wrapped in with what he…
• 1:01:38
  Jimmy Gaspero: how he ended… That panel on Darkseid.
• 1:01:44
  Mark Pracht: Well, I think… I think that that has a lot to do with it. I think also, you know, like, I think…
• 1:01:51
  Mark Pracht: What you're saying about the change in the political situation from being, like.
• 1:01:58
  Mark Pracht: because I will never forget that my father
• 1:02:03
  Mark Pracht: My father was actually… we were having a discussion after we saw Red Dawn, of all things, right?
• 1:02:09
  Jimmy Gaspero: The historical documentary, Red Dawn?
• 1:02:16
  Mark Pracht: Right! But,
• 1:02:19
  Mark Pracht: But he was actually… we were actually talking about it, and I, you know, I was… I think I was… actually, I was… it was the day I was 13. I turned 13, and we went and saw Red Dawn, because it was the first PG-13 movie that got released, and I thought that it was… it came out of my birthday, my 13th birthday, so we went. But,
• 1:02:38
  Mark Pracht: And I remember he was talking to me about it, and he was like, you know, like, the big flaw in that is that right now.
• 1:02:44
  Mark Pracht: The idea of amassing more… territory
• 1:02:49
  Mark Pracht: Doesn't make sense to anybody anymore.
• 1:02:52
  Mark Pracht: And we went through that period in the 80s. It was more about having
• 1:02:56
  Mark Pracht: it was consolidating your power into technology and into, more powerful weapons, rather than trying to take over more and more space, right? That… that people wanted to control what they had, rather than trying, you know, and I think that
• 1:03:13
  Mark Pracht: dark side… in a way.
• 1:03:19
  Mark Pracht: maybe, and maybe this is it, because I do think that there is a shift in…
• 1:03:25
  Mark Pracht: what we're talking about, like, I think that the political shift in this book, that now I'm thinking about it, is where now we're only on… on Apocalypse, right? He isn't trying to take over Earth anymore. He isn't trying to, you know…
• 1:03:38
  Mark Pracht: expand his power base. He's trying to hold on to what he already has with more powerful weapons and more powerful, you know, violence, and, you know, and that in the end of the day, he is a,
• 1:03:55
  Mark Pracht: a relic.
• 1:03:56
  Mark Pracht: You know, that he doesn't function well in this world that we're in now.
• 1:04:01
  Mark Pracht: And that… he… maybe what Jack is trying to say, that eventually he's just gonna be erased from…
• 1:04:10
  Mark Pracht: From what's left anyway.
• 1:04:14
  Mark Pracht: I… maybe. Well, that's… that's… That's… yeah.
• 1:04:18
  Jimmy Gaspero: No, I think that's an interesting… I think that's an interesting point,
• 1:04:22
  Jimmy Gaspero: You know, it does seem to… to…
• 1:04:25
  Jimmy Gaspero: allude to that, in terms of how he's left things with him.
• 1:04:30
  Mark Pracht: I would tell you one other thing that I thought about when I was reading this.
• 1:04:39
  Mark Pracht: So, one of the things that I thought about… sorry, I thought I heard my wife calling.
• 1:04:45
  Mark Pracht: Is that, I always think about… the bugs.
• 1:04:52
  Mark Pracht: who lived… Underground on New Genesis.
• 1:04:56
  Mark Pracht: Right? Because that was also sort of the replest underclass of New Genesis, and they are not mentioned at all in this, you know? The, you know, the planet blows up, they decide they can blow up the planet and they'll fly away in Supertown, you know?
• 1:05:13
  Mark Pracht: And… we never talk about the bugs, you know?
• 1:05:18
  Sean Harklerode: There are some skulls flying out in that collage.
• 1:05:20
  Mark Pracht: There are.
• 1:05:21
  Mark Pracht: There are, and I think… I think that's… that's an… I mean, like, I think that that probably was just a… I don't have time to deal with this.
• 1:05:29
  Mark Pracht: Element of it, but it did cross my mind, you know?
• 1:05:34
  Jimmy Gaspero: Huh.
• 1:05:35
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah, they're not mentioned at all. It is so odd, the characters that he doesn't bring back for this.
• 1:05:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:05:41
  Jimmy Gaspero: You know.
• 1:05:42
  Mark Pracht: And yet, you know, we get this extent… this little scene with,
• 1:05:49
  Mark Pracht: Oh, what's his name? The horse guy.
• 1:05:53
  Jimmy Gaspero: Lonar.
• 1:05:54
  Mark Pracht: Lonar, who…
• 1:05:56
  Sean Harklerode: people.
• 1:05:56
  Mark Pracht: Which… Lonar, of the Hill people. But, yeah, because they, like, that… quite honestly, one of the more…
• 1:06:04
  Mark Pracht: forgettable of the young new gods that we were introduced to, you know? I mean…
• 1:06:11
  Mark Pracht: at least in my mind, I mean, the horse is cool, yeah, but, it's just interesting.
• 1:06:18
  Mark Pracht: Like… It's just really interesting, the characters he does bring back, and the characters he doesn't.
• 1:06:25
  Mark Pracht: part of me… Part of me?
• 1:06:28
  Mark Pracht: thought that he brought back Lonar just because he wears Thor's helmet.
• 1:06:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 1:06:39
  Sean Harklerode: We talked about odd,
• 1:06:42
  Sean Harklerode: transitions and who he brings back. There is that moment where Highfather and Lona are talking, and you turn the page, and all of a… all of a sudden, light rays just been standing there.
• 1:06:54
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:06:56
  Sean Harklerode: I had to turn back, and I was like, when did Light Ray get there?
• 1:07:01
  Jimmy Gaspero: I… I do like Light Ray's appearances in both… in both… even… even God's Must Die and this. Like, even God's Must Die, Light Ray just shows up and he's like, hey, you're Ryan, watch… watch me reprogram this… this…
• 1:07:14
  Jimmy Gaspero: you know, mechanized soldier into a bomb. And then this one, he just shows up, and he's like, I'm just gonna break through the barrier of apocalypse, and then…
• 1:07:24
  Jimmy Gaspero: We last see light ray, and Orion's just watching him go off into the distance, and Orion's just like, that guy!
• 1:07:33
  Sean Harklerode: Oh…
• 1:07:34
  Mark Pracht: Oh, that Orion.
• 1:07:37
  Jimmy Gaspero: I do think, you know, Kirby's melodrama, you know, how… I think he has always been very good at kind of playing up the melodrama of a scene, you know, I think of bringing, like, he re… you know, bringing romance comics.
• 1:07:52
  Jimmy Gaspero: In the, I guess, 50s or into the 60s, but I did like, I really did like the couple of pages we get between Orion and Becca.
• 1:08:02
  Jimmy Gaspero: when he shows Becca his true face, I thought that was, like, really well done.
• 1:08:07
  Jimmy Gaspero: did not seem like it was the same comic as the rest of Hunger Dogs, but really well put together scene, well constructed, yeah, I thought that was, like, a really great bright spot in this between the two of them.
• 1:08:24
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:08:25
  Jimmy Gaspero: But… On any map.
• 1:08:27
  Mark Pracht: Now, I think that's… I think I 100% agree with that.
• 1:08:31
  Mark Pracht: the only… the only caveat would be there's that one splash page with the extreme close-up of Orion that is clearly not inked by Mike Royer, that…
• 1:08:43
  Mark Pracht: You're sort of like.
• 1:08:48
  Jimmy Gaspero: Yeah.
• 1:08:48
  Mark Pracht: Sir.
• 1:08:49
  Mark Pracht: And… and Becca's, you know, it… it…
• 1:08:52
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, like, it is, you know, it is interesting that even Year says that, because it really is clear as you flip through it, it's like, oh, yeah, that's not…
• 1:09:02
  Mark Pracht: That page was… You know.
• 1:09:08
  Mark Pracht: Anyway… Unfortunately, guys, I'm gonna have to get off, so,
• 1:09:15
  Mark Pracht: If… if y'all want to continue.
• 1:09:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, then we're at a good point, I think. I think we'll almost certainly wind up returning to Kirby at some point, but for the next 3 months, I think, 3 issues apiece of…
• 1:09:29
  Tad Eggleston: of the, the Kree-Skrull War, Roy Thomas and a series of artists,
• 1:09:37
  Tad Eggleston: From roughly the same time, and somehow none of us have ever actually read it.
• 1:09:42
  Sean Harklerode: Well, this has been great. You know, I finally…
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:09:47
  Sean Harklerode: Managed to get through the omnibus?
• 1:09:50
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the doorstop? I mean, I have a number of doorstops, so I say that lovingly.
• 1:09:55
  Sean Harklerode: I do have the complete DC Ditco omnibus to go through now, so…
• 1:10:01
  Tad Eggleston: Pardon me.
• 1:10:02
  Tad Eggleston: What did Ditko do at DC?
• 1:10:05
  Sean Harklerode: Creeper…
• 1:10:07
  Mark Pracht: Creeper.
• 1:10:07
  Sean Harklerode: Shade the Changing Man?
• 1:10:11
  Sean Harklerode: Which is what I've been reading in it.
• 1:10:13
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:10:14
  Sean Harklerode: Hawking Dove?
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:10:18
  Sean Harklerode: Huh.
• 1:10:19
  Sean Harklerode: And, and a lot of, like, a lot of horror, you know, like, mystery stories.
• 1:10:25
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:10:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:10:26
  Mark Pracht: I was, I…
• 1:10:29
  Mark Pracht: Last, last story, then I gotta go. But, on, on, on the DITCO Facebook page, somebody had put up a, a letter, you know, the letters to DITCO thing.
• 1:10:40
  Mark Pracht: And Sean's already laughing, because he saw it. It's like some guy had sent Steve a letter, and he's like, I would really love an autograph, or maybe a piece of original art, just a… just a stick figure or something. And he sends him back, like, a page of just…
• 1:10:57
  Mark Pracht: Like, why? Why should you deserve this? Why should I give this to you? You know, it's like, you know, it's the full-on objectivist ditco, like, I don't owe you anything. And then it gets to the end.
• 1:11:10
  Mark Pracht: Eddie just put SD.
• 1:11:12
  Mark Pracht: Because it's like, no, you don't get a signature.
• 1:11:21
  Jimmy Gaspero: Bush!
• 1:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I mean, in many collector circles, that might be worth more than if he had given him a…
• 1:11:26
  Mark Pracht: We were talking about that, I was like, do you know how excited I would be to own that?
• 1:11:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:34
  Sean Harklerode: I re…
• 1:11:34
  Mark Pracht: over the moon.
• 1:11:36
  Sean Harklerode: Have you guys seen the kid who wrote to Steve Martin? No, no, John Cleese. Someone wrote to John Cleese asking for an autograph.
• 1:11:45
  Sean Harklerode: And John Cleese wrote back this whole thing about how he's too important to respond to those sorts of things, and then signs of…
• 1:11:59
  Mark Pracht: Oh, I have a dream.
• 1:12:01
  Tad Eggleston: For Mark Pratt, Sean Harklrode, and Jimmy Gasparo, this has been the Fourth World Book Club. We're gonna have to come up with a new name.
• 1:12:08
  Tad Eggleston: Soon, on 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.