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With Great Power #324... 22 Panels with Glenn Fleishman & Matt Bors · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guests today are Glenn Fleischman and Matt Boers. Matt is returning to the podcast, joined us
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: not long after the sad shuddering of the nib, and to boost the new gig with the, Toxic Avenger comics.
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: Glenn, I am just meeting, but Glenn is the mastermind behind one of the…
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: cooler comics projects I've seen since maybe reading Nancy, or How to Read Nancy.
• 0:37
  Tad Eggleston: And it's called That One Matt Bohr's Comic.
• 0:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna let you guys describe it, because I don't even know how to start, because I managed to actually miss this when apparently it was an internet thing.
• 0:53
  Glenn Fleishman: It's, it's like a…
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: I just saw Matt Boers and went, oh, I'm in. And then as I looked at it, I'm like, oh, this is even cooler than I thought.
• 1:00
  matthewbors: Well, why don't I explain the actual comic, and Glenn, you can explain the project. So I did a comic…
• 1:04
  Glenn Fleishman: dear.
• 1:05
  matthewbors: Yeah, I did a comic in 2016,
• 1:08
  matthewbors: that's called Mr. Gotcha, and someone criticizes,
• 1:13
  matthewbors: Apple… Apple and their factory… their Foxconn situation, if you're familiar with that, the terrible factory they had. And someone says, oh, you know, you're criticizing it at an iPhone. And then it goes back in time to seatbelts, someone… someone's saying cars need seatbelts, and saying, yeah, yeah, you have a car.
• 1:29
  matthewbors: And then it goes to the last panel, which became a meme, I guess we call them. Although I kind of resent that term as a cartoonist, you know, because it's not a meme, it's a comic, but whatever.
• 1:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:40
  matthewbors: It's a peasant saying we should improve society somewhat, and Mr. Gotcha pops out of the well, and he says, yet you participate in society. Curious.
• 1:49
  matthewbors: And that seems to…
• 1:51
  Tad Eggleston: Left out the best.
• 1:53
  matthewbors: Oh, yeah. You liked the last one.
• 1:55
  Tad Eggleston: intelligent.
• 1:56
  matthewbors: You like that last line? Everybody's got a favorite. So it was popular, and then it got more popular, and then it kind of kept getting popular and recirculating for years and years, and…
• 2:09
  matthewbors: I think more people know about it than know about me. Like, it's weirdly referred to as that Matt Boers comic by a lot of people, so that's where Glenn comes in.
• 2:19
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, I, I've known Matt for, for more than 10 years, probably around 15 years, something like that, and, met him in person at his Her Block Prize ceremony, which is ironic. I went out there and covered it for Boing Boing back in the days when blogs were king, and you could actually,
• 2:36
  Glenn Fleishman: cover things for blogs, but, I,
• 2:41
  Glenn Fleishman: Matt and I have worked on a couple things here and there, and I did a piece for one of the last issues of The Nib, and always wanted to do some project with Matt, but, you know, never… nothing's ever kind of…
• 2:51
  Glenn Fleishman: been the right fit. We have very different career paths that we do, and so forth. But one day, I think it was January, I was about to go to sleep, and I was reading some article, and it said, blah blah blah, that one Matt Boers comic, and I'm like, oh my god, how many times have I seen this phrase? And I knew the…
• 3:05
  Glenn Fleishman: the panel, I remember when it came out and thought it was funny and appropriate at the time, and I start…
• 3:11
  Glenn Fleishman: searching on Google, and I think, oh, oh, this is more of a meme than I realize. It's on, Know That Meme, that site, and so forth. So I cobble an idea together an email mess. I said, I think we could do a whole book about this if we hired in people to write essays and do comics. So it's not just
• 3:29
  Glenn Fleishman: your comics, another collection, because Matt did a collection six years ago, called We Should Improve Society Somewhat. But this would be, like, a fun, critical anthology, like a look at things that become memes, the whole nature of why people
• 3:44
  Glenn Fleishman: will shortcut critical thinking and discussion by dropping in a cartoon, but also, I think, remix culture, to some extent, that Matt's comic lends itself so well to pasting on two different faces, or pasting in some different dialogue, or what's hilarious to me is taking the dialogue out and sticking it on, like, a screenshot from The Matrix, but it always kind of works. It's like,
• 4:08
  Glenn Fleishman: There's that beautiful, weird four-panel.
• 4:11
  Glenn Fleishman: meme where, I don't know what it's from, is it from, like, some kind of trucking or,
• 4:16
  Glenn Fleishman: repair shop show, and there's a man with mutton shops and long hair getting angry at somebody else, and he throws a chair. It's like a four-beat structure of photos, that gets used. It's weird that it's four beats, and I feel like Matt has that same thing of, like, there's a universality of, you can just drop stuff in, and people know what… most people know what you're talking about, or sometimes there's enough context, people can understand it.
• 4:38
  Glenn Fleishman: without more information. So, Matt amazingly said, yeah, that sounds like we could do that. That might be an idea we could do.
• 4:45
  Glenn Fleishman: As a very, very tiny publisher, I said, great, let me put it together and…
• 4:49
  Glenn Fleishman: And, start talking to people, and
• 4:52
  Glenn Fleishman: Then we've launched it on Kickstarter.
• 4:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. It… I'm flipping through it, and… and… Yeah.
• 4:59
  Tad Eggleston: That sums it up well. I guess… I guess my one, like, the teacher in me, like, has the one… the one question, because the one thing I don't…
• 5:10
  Tad Eggleston: I see, I see, a fantastic set of… cartoonists, and…
• 5:20
  Tad Eggleston: comic scholars. I wonder if you'll include
• 5:27
  Tad Eggleston: Any sociologists, or psychologists, or…
• 5:29
  Glenn Fleishman: We've reached out to some academics.
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: Outside of the…
• 5:32
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, and strangely, people have written, in fact, about meme culture, and written, you know, in, like, academic journals or published books about it, and oddly, I haven't heard back from them. I have a feeling that…
• 5:44
  Tad Eggleston: root of them.
• 5:44
  Glenn Fleishman: Well, there's an interesting dynamic with Kickstarters, is there's a stage at which some people don't feel like it's real, because you haven't raised the money. And as we speak, we're about 65% funded and halfway through. I'm confident we're gonna reach the goal, because that's how it usually happens. You hit more than half, and you're halfway through, it's good.
• 6:02
  Glenn Fleishman: you know, we'll hit our goal, but once we've hit the goal, and people can go to the campaign and go, oh, this is funded, they have the money, now they're gonna do it, I think I'll go back and do another wave. So we got some great response from people.
• 6:14
  Glenn Fleishman: with, I would say, a sketchy… I made even, like, a little one-sheet PDF to explain it, like, here's the prospectus for you as a paid contributor, because I thought this is a heavy lift to ask people. So we have a few people, a couple people with some bigger names that we're hoping to, you know, national publication folks.
• 6:29
  Glenn Fleishman: we're hoping to bring in as well, who… and some academics, but I think when it feels real.
• 6:36
  Glenn Fleishman: It'll be like, we have funded this project, we have money in the bank, we can pay you, here's a schedule. So, we'll see what happens then.
• 6:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 6:44
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, I mean, we tried to find people who had something meaningful to say about culture and memes and whatever. I was really excited to get Casey Green, because he's kind of the one person in the project so far who's been truly memed himself with his Everything is Fine dog. Oh, yeah. And we may get some other meme artists if we can.
• 7:02
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 7:03
  Tad Eggleston: No, and it wasn't supposed to be… I mean, you've got a really impressive list here.
• 7:10
  Tad Eggleston: I just, like, again, like, one of the things that this appeals to me for is, like.
• 7:20
  Tad Eggleston: I love looking at things from a million different angles. I like… I like it when we can have discussions that involve
• 7:29
  Tad Eggleston: Takes.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: that aren't…
• 7:32
  Tad Eggleston: from the same backgrounds. I think that that… I think that's what's missing in any DEI discussion right now. I think it's what's missing in the way we silo education in general. I mean, just the example that I use off the top of my head, like.
• 7:49
  Tad Eggleston: Beethoven was writing symphonies.
• 7:52
  Tad Eggleston: during the American Revolution.
• 7:54
  Tad Eggleston: And the number of people who don't know that… is insane.
• 7:58
  Tad Eggleston: And on one hand, is it relevant? Maybe, maybe not. But could it be? Sure, because they were living in a time… I mean, how much of our culture
• 8:11
  Tad Eggleston: cross-pollinates. How much… how much does meme culture lead to our… Political culture.
• 8:18
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so I think understand… Matt's…
• 8:21
  matthewbors: These are all questions will be answered in the book.
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: This is what I'm about.
• 8:25
  matthewbors: No, no, I know, I am too. I kind of… I have a complicated relationship with it, because it's… it's…
• 8:32
  matthewbors: It's not that it's mine, and I'm mad that people use it, because I don't care that much. It's not, like… It should get paid, though. Well, you know, people say that…
• 8:42
  Tad Eggleston: that clear.
• 8:43
  matthewbors: Well, but I think, you know, people posting a reaction meme
• 8:48
  matthewbors: is not taking money out of my pockets. It's not like a new case in which I would get paid.
• 8:53
  Tad Eggleston: or Facebook, or Twitter, or whatever, they've got the money to give you a penny every time it gets liked.
• 8:59
  matthewbors: Yeah, well, a penny for every like would… would go a long way, but they're not gonna do that. But I think it's… so there's, like, a penny reasons…
• 9:09
  Tad Eggleston: most.
• 9:09
  Glenn Fleishman: Haha.
• 9:10
  matthewbors: two… two reasons why I'm a part of this campaign is, like, because it was Glenn's idea. I mean, at first, I was kind of unsure, and I was like, I don't know, is there interest in that? And I thought, you know, I'm interested. If I… if I…
• 9:22
  matthewbors: step outside of, like, being annoyed, kind of sometimes seeing it constantly, like, when I log into my social media accounts, people tagging me about it. Because as a creator, you don't want…
• 9:32
  matthewbors: to be known for only one thing, or, you know, I'm doing other stuff, and the… I mean, realistically, I will probably never do something that has this amount of… that travels this far, because I'm not making memes anymore, but, like.
• 9:45
  matthewbors: I was never making memes, I was making political cartoons, but whatever. See, I just sort of succumbed to this idea. So I'm genuinely interested in it from, like, cultural criticism perspective, like, having the people we have write about it. We have, who do we have? We have Laura Hudson, we have…
• 10:04
  Tad Eggleston: I had Laura Hudson on recently, she's amazing.
• 10:07
  Glenn Fleishman: You know, Anna Merlin, who I love.
• 10:09
  Tad Eggleston: And we should plug her comic exploit issue.
• 10:11
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, yeah.
• 10:12
  Tad Eggleston: Street is in the stores tomorrow.
• 10:15
  Glenn Fleishman: That's amazing.
• 10:15
  matthewbors: Cool.
• 10:15
  Glenn Fleishman: our friend,
• 10:18
  Glenn Fleishman: Parker Molloy, who I really… I love her take on… I mean, she is fighting such a strong, independent battle for, sort of, truth and sanity, but she's also, like, she likes cartoons, and so we're like, great, come and bring… because, you know, here's the thing that gets me about your panel, Matt, and it's kind of… this is kind of why it makes me…
• 10:37
  Glenn Fleishman: angry, not that you made it, but, like, how people use it sometimes, is that, I mentioned in the campaign, I think, somewhere, about, like, The Good Place, which came after Matt's cartoon, they did not steal the idea from Matt.
• 10:49
  Glenn Fleishman: The Good Places, the whole TV show, and Matt's panel is kind of about, can we affect change, or is the world so corrupted that there's nothing we can do because we're so complicit in it? And I would say, of course we can affect change, and that was kind.
• 11:03
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, I'm a teacher, so if the second half of that is correct, then my whole life is meaningless.
• 11:10
  Glenn Fleishman: We, we are…
• 11:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because between the teaching and this podcast, it's all about trying to, in small, trickle-down, ripple fashion, affect change.
• 11:24
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, it's… well, I learned an amazing word, I feel like, during the first Trump presidency, which was revanchism. I don't think I knew what it meant.
• 11:30
  matthewbors: Hmm.
• 11:30
  Glenn Fleishman: And it's kind of like when one side has lost, and the other keeps fighting, but they fight more fiercely because they've already lost, right? It's a fight in the face of…
• 11:42
  Glenn Fleishman: Failure, and often more power is gained in that point, because they have nothing to lose.
• 11:47
  Glenn Fleishman: And the Mr. Gotcha panel came just…
• 11:50
  Glenn Fleishman: before Trump was elected, right? September 2016. And so we hadn't yet felt exactly that. We thought we were about to crest over that, and instead, we went into this period in which, and now we're in the second period of it, that's even more extreme, and has worldwide components that are even more extreme, and some backlash, where…
• 12:07
  Glenn Fleishman: battle seems to be lost, but it has not been lost. In fact, they're fighting so hard because this is their last chance to win. And, I sound strident, but it's true.
• 12:18
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 12:19
  Glenn Fleishman: Is, like, the, we should have…
• 12:21
  matthewbors: That's a good outlook.
• 12:22
  Glenn Fleishman: change society somewhat. Well, you know, we can do it. Mr. Gotcha says, you know, but, you're part of society, so you can't do anything. Like, no, I… oh, I can! So, there's some of, like, anger and frustration with the… with the dialectic, let's even say that, inside that one panel that makes me… that made me feel we have a lot to talk about, not just…
• 12:41
  Glenn Fleishman: it's a meme, and Matt did it, and the nib, or whatever. We have a lot of interesting things to talk about around cartooning, but just the state of the world we're in is represented in that little microcosm.
• 12:51
  matthewbors: And I guess to, like, build on that, you know, I didn't make it out of nowhere, right? I made it from observing the culture, mainly online, which at that point was how many of us were engaging with the world, certainly where my cartoons were published and getting the most traction and all that. And…
• 13:10
  matthewbors: you know, in the 2010s, in the lead-up to Trump, and then it got worse, like, political… politics for many people became arguing online and posting online, particularly, you know, during the Twitter era.
• 13:24
  matthewbors: And I wouldn't say that was a great era, but it was also, like, my cartoons did well and stuff like that online. And… yeah, so I was responding to the argument that I would see over and over online, which essentially I reduced to…
• 13:40
  matthewbors: someone saying, we should improve society somewhat, we should do something, we should maybe have better healthcare. And, you know, that being invalidated by the
• 13:51
  matthewbors: you know, participating in it, being hypocritical, and I think… I even, you know, I've gone through waves of sort of how I feel about this comic, and where I agree or disagree with it, because…
• 14:01
  matthewbors: I think it was roasting a certain type of Mr. Gotcha guy that is very real.
• 14:06
  matthewbors: But then, as people use it, people use it to actually shut down arguments now. Like, they're like, oh, you're being like the Matt Boers guy, you're saying you participate in society, which is a little bit like being Mr. Gotcha 2, even if you're kind of correct. So, it's weird to have it, you know, it's, like, used as a rhetorical device.
• 14:25
  matthewbors: Online.
• 14:27
  matthewbors: I don't know.
• 14:29
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I have two, two, like.
• 14:32
  Tad Eggleston: autistic, must-get-them-out things right now, one of them related and one of them completely unrelated. Going back to Glenn and Revenge.
• 14:43
  Tad Eggleston: One of the ironies that I see is that these people who are dug in and fighting so much harder because they've got nothing to lose anymore don't realize when their opponents are in the same place.
• 14:56
  Glenn Fleishman: Ending.
• 14:57
  Tad Eggleston: and somehow always assume that they will behave differently. Look at Iran. Look at…
• 15:04
  Tad Eggleston: If we're harder, they'll do what we want. If we're meaner to them, they'll do what we want.
• 15:11
  Glenn Fleishman: Iran is…
• 15:11
  Tad Eggleston: Excellent one.
• 15:13
  Glenn Fleishman: example, because, right, it was like, we're gonna go in there, we're gonna knock them over, leadership will fall, the people will embrace us as… as… what was the Bush phrase? The people will embrace us as rescuers?
• 15:22
  matthewbors: Liberators.
• 15:23
  Glenn Fleishman: Liver rings. Liver rings. I swear to God, they almost said that.
• 15:26
  matthewbors: bet.
• 15:26
  Glenn Fleishman: And then they're like, nope, we just brought in a different guy, and we have all these weapons you haven't done, and you were totally wrong.
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: Not even really a different guy. The guy's son.
• 15:35
  Glenn Fleishman: A slightly different.
• 15:36
  Tad Eggleston: And you killed his entire family.
• 15:39
  Glenn Fleishman: It's so horrible. I don't mean to laugh. I don't mean to laugh. It's like, it is, it's like, it's ironic, and…
• 15:44
  Tad Eggleston: Supposed to make him want a deal on your terms?
• 15:48
  Glenn Fleishman: Exactly.
• 15:49
  matthewbors: And, you know, This happens.
• 15:52
  matthewbors: Famously, over and over through U.S. history, especially, like.
• 15:56
  matthewbors: And Trump, you know, Trump was… not that I ever believed him, but I mean, one of the things that was supposedly different about Trump was that he wasn't going to actually do that, and he…
• 16:06
  matthewbors: I don't want to say he stuck with it for a while, but I guess his first term wasn't as erratic as this, with, like, overthrowing Maduro and launching a war.
• 16:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, all…
• 16:15
  Glenn Fleishman: Starving Cuba.
• 16:17
  Tad Eggleston: all the guardrails are gone. But also, I feel like Trump is more of a student of history than we give him credit for, but also way less of a student history than he thinks he is.
• 16:28
  matthewbors: Well…
• 16:29
  Glenn Fleishman: I agree with you, because I agree.
• 16:31
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like…
• 16:32
  matthewbors: Second part.
• 16:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I feel like, I feel like, like, he's read about this somewhere, and thinks it turned out well, so he's good.
• 16:41
  Glenn Fleishman: Do it.
• 16:42
  Tad Eggleston: Chew.
• 16:42
  matthewbors: Well, I think Trump has many problems, but I would say, I would… I don't think he's a very well-read man. The guy does not…
• 16:51
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, you're right, he saw on the History Channel…
• 16:54
  matthewbors: Yeah, he saw on foot.
• 16:54
  Tad Eggleston: channels during the… during the… the…
• 16:58
  Glenn Fleishman: Bear attacks and shark attacks.
• 17:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the Fox News commercial break.
• 17:03
  Glenn Fleishman: That's right, slipping.
• 17:04
  matthewbors: He really is a… I mean, Trump, in a very real way, is a product of television. I mean, he is a… he's a big fan of television, his career was made through television. He thinks… he thinks in television.
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: I have a new question that really needs to be asked about how much he's proud of his dementia tests. And I know that they're dementia tests, because I've administered it.
• 17:30
  Glenn Fleishman: many, many.
• 17:30
  Tad Eggleston: Many, many, many times, I ran a dementia unit.
• 17:35
  matthewbors: Oh, yeah.
• 17:35
  Tad Eggleston: And frankly, those of us who understand dementia knew when he came down the elevator that he had it. Or the escalator, that he had it. Like, everybody having this discussion about, well, he's clearly worse, yeah, but, like, look at him in 2015, he was clearly worse than when he was on The Apprentice.
• 17:54
  Glenn Fleishman: When he was younger, he used to be, funny, and he used to listen to people, and he was.
• 17:58
  Tad Eggleston: And he had a legit vocabulary.
• 18:02
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, that's right.
• 18:02
  Tad Eggleston: He didn't often misuse words.
• 18:05
  matthewbors: Is it dementia, though, or is it just… No, it is. Because I feel like… I'll just tell you what I think. Hold on, I'll tell you what I think, and then you ran a dementia unit, so you tell me. But I think…
• 18:15
  matthewbors: I feel like people oversell this idea that he's, like, near death, totally out of it, in dementia. He's out of it, he's erratic, he's not as sharp as he was, I'm not making any excuses for him. I just am a little skeptical that this guy has, like, full-blown dementia and all that.
• 18:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, first of all, dementia is a symptom, not a disease.
• 18:35
  matthewbors: Hmm.
• 18:36
  Tad Eggleston: It's the primary symptom of Alzheimer's, it's a primary symptom of Lewy body, you can have it with Parkinson's, like, there are lots of things that can cause dementia, and they have differing… I mean, what I see is consistent with Alzheimer's, but this is where I'm not a doctor, I just ran
• 18:55
  Tad Eggleston: a dementia unit. That dementia can work at differing speeds. The reason that I say it's dementia is…
• 19:07
  Tad Eggleston: What dementia is, is most… defined by is, like, we're not talking little forgetfulness, we're talking…
• 19:19
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of a, almost predictable pattern of forgetfulness, where it's…
• 19:25
  Tad Eggleston: The mixture of last in, first out, and the things that…
• 19:30
  Tad Eggleston: have the most emotional ties stick the longest. And you can see that, like, he gets angrier. For that matter, he has definite sundowning. He's way, way, way better
• 19:44
  Tad Eggleston: before 3 or 4 o'clock in the afternoon. Yeah.
• 19:47
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, and at… and at 2 AM, when he wakes… when he's still awake, right? Because he's…
• 19:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 19:51
  Glenn Fleishman: But also, ostensibly popping them full of, uppers, although.
• 19:55
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 19:55
  Glenn Fleishman: He's got some kind of medicinal regime to keep him…
• 19:59
  Tad Eggleston: There was actually a… I don't know if you guys know, J. Kuo, Status Quo Newsletter. He also does some work at the big picture, which is George Takei's newsletter. He actually, you'd have to dig for it, because it's a few years old now, but he had…
• 20:19
  Tad Eggleston: Like,
• 20:21
  Tad Eggleston: a specialist in dementia break down the specific reasons why, A, you can absolutely diagnose somebody with dementia without having seen them, because it's actually harder to diagnose them in person than if you have a longitudinal
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: Record.
• 20:38
  matthewbors: Sure.
• 20:39
  Tad Eggleston: And B, breaking down the specifics of, no, this isn't… this isn't, like, quirkiness, this isn't…
• 20:46
  Tad Eggleston: you know, these are telltale.
• 20:49
  matthewbors: Going, you know, maybe, the synthesis here.
• 20:52
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, don't get me wrong, all of the other stuff is also true.
• 20:55
  matthewbors: Going back to my…
• 20:56
  Tad Eggleston: makes it worse.
• 20:57
  matthewbors: my television theory, that he is sort of, like, television manifest. He's like a guy, you know, he's a guy who has probably ingested more television than most living human beings, like, seriously.
• 21:10
  matthewbors: That he… he… it's just warped his… like, yeah, like, you're talking about, memories and…
• 21:16
  matthewbors: like, he's pulling on, like, these old memories from television of the America that he, like, idealizes that is being made great again, of all his narratives. They don't come from deep reading of history, they come from, like.
• 21:30
  matthewbors: Television programs and movies and shit. And he hired…
• 21:34
  Glenn Fleishman: Reply… he hired reply guys. He hired Mr. Gotcha. His name. Pete Hegseth, at some level, besides all the reports of
• 21:40
  Glenn Fleishman: alcoholism, is just a guy who has great rejoinders to anything that's said. I mean, Fox News, what is Fox News, mostly, and all the people he hired from there and other stations, but a way that they can diffuse any news that comes up.
• 21:55
  Tad Eggleston: Just asking questions, or what about?
• 21:57
  Glenn Fleishman: Greta Thunberg can't be believed because she took an airplane somewhere, so obviously she doesn't really believe in global warming.
• 22:05
  matthewbors: Yeah. Yes, there… you know, I did a sequel to… I did a few sequels to the Mr. Gotcha cartoon, because I felt like it still had a few legs, and I did one that was about Greta, people… people saying Greta's a hypocrite.
• 22:20
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, right, yeah.
• 22:20
  matthewbors: I don't know, what do you guys… I mean, I think this is… we could get in deep about it, but it's just like, you know, hypocrisy as a political cartoonist, I feel like
• 22:29
  matthewbors: was what I was sort of trained to point out in people… in politicians, mainly, people with power, but then also in people. Like, people profess to believe all sorts of things, and then you find out they're a hypocrite. It deflates the weight of their argument, and I just wonder…
• 22:44
  Tad Eggleston: does it anymore?
• 22:45
  matthewbors: Well, less… less and less so.
• 22:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I feel like that's one of the ways that the billionaire class using the Republican Party has just broken the world, is shame and hypocrisy are no longer, like.
• 23:02
  Tad Eggleston: considered…
• 23:03
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 23:04
  Tad Eggleston: negative traits.
• 23:08
  matthewbors: And then… but then another aspect of it, you know, Glenn and I have talked about is… so we were saying earlier, you were saying that change is still possible, change starts small, you're a teacher.
• 23:17
  matthewbors: And then often, like, how change starts small, we can't affect these huge systems, so how does change start small? Well, people can't change things systemically, so they start talking about, you know, boycotts, or…
• 23:29
  matthewbors: don't support this person who's bad, or don't support these companies who are bad, and sometimes I feel like that is… and that becomes, then.
• 23:37
  matthewbors: when, you know, this is something… I'm just talking out loud, because I've had to think about.
• 23:41
  Tad Eggleston: I understand it.
• 23:41
  matthewbors: a lot with this comic, is when is that valid, and when does it not matter at all? Because, I mean, I…
• 23:48
  matthewbors: you know, don't use Apple products because of all their terrible mining and Foxconn and everything. I mean, it's a legit argument, it's obvious… it's a human rights atrocity.
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas I've just always avoided Apple products because they're overpriced.
• 24:02
  matthewbors: Yeah, that too.
• 24:03
  matthewbors: You know, you can… you can… I think you can come…
• 24:07
  Tad Eggleston: to the conclusion, avoid Apple.
• 24:09
  matthewbors: You know, like, I'm not…
• 24:12
  matthewbors: one, I'm not someone who… I don't have a New York Times subscription, but I… you know, there's a lot of, like, cancel your New York Times subscription, because they have bad take on this, and cancel your Spotify, because they had Joe Rogan, and you can cancel everything, almost, because of a moral or political reason, but I'm not sure that it does anything.
• 24:30
  matthewbors: And that that is really all we have to do in a lot of ways, because we can't affect change at a higher level, so it becomes arguing about where the line is for, you know, ethical… basically ethical consumption under capitalism.
• 24:46
  Tad Eggleston: Just, just, just using that example, for a long time.
• 24:50
  Tad Eggleston: I would defend Amazon because of the Washington Post.
• 24:54
  Glenn Fleishman: Bob. Of course, right, and now.
• 24:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, well, because… well, for two reasons. First, there was… there was something good that he was doing, and second, because that…
• 25:07
  Tad Eggleston: Often shined light
• 25:10
  Tad Eggleston: in negative ways upon his competitors, that made Amazon that much bigger of a target. I wasn't convinced that Amazon was doing anything
• 25:20
  Tad Eggleston: strictly above and beyond other warehouses. I mean, obviously, I never like the huge, huge conglomerate. That's a different question.
• 25:29
  Tad Eggleston: But in terms of getting into their policies, but…
• 25:34
  Tad Eggleston: But then he made it hard to defend him there, and, you know, where I finally wound up canceling both my post and time subscriptions wasn't like the uproar and whatnot, is when I started…
• 25:47
  Tad Eggleston: to reach the point where I'd read what were supposed to be news articles and immediately see the way…
• 25:55
  Tad Eggleston: In… in bending over backwards to appear balanced.
• 26:03
  Tad Eggleston: They.
• 26:05
  Tad Eggleston: Instead, at best, buried the leads, and at worst, muddied… Like, verifiable facts.
• 26:16
  Glenn Fleishman: Well, I'll tell you, related to that, I did an event with Greg Pock, one of the contributors to our book, who's a wonderful.
• 26:23
  Tad Eggleston: Another guy that hopefully I'll talk to one day.
• 26:25
  Glenn Fleishman: oh my gosh, he's great.
• 26:27
  Tad Eggleston: He seems great.
• 26:28
  Glenn Fleishman: writer, just lovely guy, and college classmate, it turned out, although we didn't really know each other in college, but there you go. Oh, cool. Anyway, so Greg did this event with, Indivisible, Brooklyn and Comics Action, which was a cancel day the night before,
• 26:42
  Glenn Fleishman: May Day, and a bunch of us with various relationships, mind a little tangential to comics we got on, and we had, I don't know, 70 or 80 people. It wasn't recorded, it was like, how can we
• 26:52
  Glenn Fleishman: Basically, and nobody said it, I was waiting, Matt, I was like, is someone gonna say… I actually said, I have a $25 gift certificate if someone says the magic word during this event, and no one did. No one said, we should improve society somewhat, or…
• 27:05
  matthewbors: Mmm.
• 27:06
  Glenn Fleishman: Society. So, but it was really, could we collectively,
• 27:10
  Glenn Fleishman: Not like we were trying to reach a target money goal for this group of people, but it was kind of like a little outreach, like, what do you do? What could you substitute? People had questions about, how do I replace X? People wanted some moral reassurance, like, I'm disabled, and I use Amazon because they will come to my door, and everything else, no one else will.
• 27:30
  Glenn Fleishman: And I need these supplies, and I can't get them, and everyone's like, you know, doing snap, snap. Like, that is fine, because this is a, you know, there are different needs that must get balanced. And other people, you know, my family, we just canceled our… we had Amazon Prime for many, many years, kind of stopped thinking about it. We canceled it in February. It's not a big political action. I don't think $140 a year affects them, but we just don't want to contribute to it. And so we still do buy some stuff from Amazon, but it's…
• 27:55
  Glenn Fleishman: it's… I've investigated all the other options, and it takes me back, there was a New Yorker profile of Pete Seeger when he was in his 80s, and it ended with…
• 28:04
  Glenn Fleishman: him going out, and just… he was standing on the highway near his house, or road, holding up a sign which was like, end the Iraq War… sign, rather, and people were just honking, and they were like, that's the level, this man could get 100,000 people out to a concert, but he felt
• 28:18
  Glenn Fleishman: individually is important enough to register his own moral
• 28:22
  Glenn Fleishman: agency by standing on a road near his house and doing that from time to time. Jane Fonda going to get arrested. She got arrested so many times over climate stuff in the late 2010s that people stopped covering it, but she felt it was a moral…
• 28:34
  Glenn Fleishman: act, so…
• 28:35
  matthewbors: Yeah, I like…
• 28:37
  Tad Eggleston: She was in a position where she could arrest… could get arrested, and it wasn't gonna lose her job, or a roof over her head, or…
• 28:45
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because that's the other thing that I like to bring up, and I'm sorry, Matt, for…
• 28:50
  matthewbors: I'm cutting it.
• 28:51
  Tad Eggleston: you're off there, hold on to your thought, because I want to hear it, is that, that, like.
• 28:56
  Tad Eggleston: it's different levels of sac… I mean, I remember even with, like.
• 29:02
  Tad Eggleston: When everybody was canceling Disney Plus because Jimmy Kimmel was briefly canceled.
• 29:07
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 29:09
  Tad Eggleston: my wife was really, like, on the fence, and I'm like… I'm like, honey, The Simpsons, Bob's Burgers, like, ALL of the things that keep you sane, you get through Disney+.
• 29:22
  Glenn Fleishman: Damn it. I won't.
• 29:23
  Tad Eggleston: stop you from canceling it, but no, I'm not gonna ask you to cancel it.
• 29:28
  matthewbors: Yeah, well, you know, I think… I guess I was… I was gonna talk about this, this thing, like, the canceling subscriptions is a big thing now, right? Like, that's…
• 29:36
  matthewbors: That seems to be the only thing we… we can… we can do sometimes. I mean, and I'm of… you know, I'm… I guess I'm deeply conflicted over it, because I don't think, on the one hand, canceling Disney Plus does anything.
• 29:50
  matthewbors: Right. But, I'm gonna raise my hand.
• 29:52
  Glenn Fleishman: on that. You go ahead, but I'm gonna raise my hand and come back to that.
• 29:55
  matthewbors: But, you know, or maybe, you know, like Glenn, you were saying, like.
• 29:59
  matthewbors: You reach a line where you need to register your sort of, you know, your moral autonomy or something, and you need to express yourself, and you need to do something, and it…
• 30:10
  matthewbors: But I think we maybe just put too much weight on it. But I guess what I wanted to say that is,
• 30:16
  matthewbors: in opposition to that point is to get any of the systemic change that I would, you know, like to see, that most of us would like to see,
• 30:24
  matthewbors: you do have… you have to get so many people on board, you kind of have to build momentum for something. Like, a good,
• 30:30
  matthewbors: one thing I use is, like, let's say, like, factory farm reform or something, right? I'm not a vegetarian or a vegan.
• 30:37
  matthewbors: But I have been at different periods of time, but most people, even people who just eat meat constantly without guilt, would say, pretty ugly system, oh yeah, I'd love to do something about it. So what do you… I mean, well, I need meat, we need protein, what am I gonna do? It's already in the store, me not buying it doesn't matter. So, like, what we need to do ultimately is, like, you have to move things so much where you have, like, wherever we're at now.
• 31:00
  matthewbors: you have to get to the point where, you know, half the country is going to always eat meat, but they're like, I would love to have reforms, you know, 20% are, like, vegetarian and pescatarian, and
• 31:13
  matthewbors: 15% are hardcore vegans, and then, like, 3% are, like, bombing shit. And then, when you get, like.
• 31:21
  matthewbors: I mean, that's what happened during, say, the Civil Rights Movement, right? Like, you had the movement to where, like, what was in the middle and what was… and then you had a radical expression of, like, you had radical groups that were actually bombing and shooting stuff.
• 31:34
  matthewbors: then you kind of get to a point where reform can happen, not revolutionary change, but you can actually get to systemic change. So…
• 31:43
  matthewbors: You know, how does that… how does that happen in the context of our current political environment? I don't know, but I guess that's…
• 31:50
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably with minimal bombing.
• 31:52
  matthewbors: Yeah, but, you know, people are, I mean…
• 31:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, I get it. The U.S. is an armed…
• 31:57
  matthewbors: That's why we see… I actually think we're in an era of very weird…
• 32:01
  matthewbors: Weird expressions of violence that are really,
• 32:06
  matthewbors: removed from political organizing. Like, you used to have groups like the Weathermen and the Black Panthers and groups in the 60s and 70s, and even weirder radical groups like the Symboines Liberation Army, and you could certainly say.
• 32:20
  matthewbors: that, you know, revolutionary violence is counterproductive, or not gonna result in what they want, or whatever. But we don't… it's kind of weird that we don't have that today. Sometimes I'm… I'm amazed that we don't, like, particularly around the environment. But what we have are sort of…
• 32:38
  matthewbors: Individual shooters that are sort of…
• 32:42
  matthewbors: all seemingly mentally ill, and just driven by, sort of, different things they've latched onto.
• 32:47
  Glenn Fleishman: Let's radicalized by communities, though.
• 32:49
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 32:50
  Glenn Fleishman: not… but not a whole… you don't have, like, 50 people rush the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
• 32:55
  matthewbors: Yes.
• 32:56
  Glenn Fleishman: Or you have people shooting the president, allegedly. No, I guess they are actually shooting the president. The person is alleged, right? Anyway, but they… but they got their ideology from
• 33:06
  Glenn Fleishman: from groups, but we don't have… often right-wing groups, weirdly, but we don't have,
• 33:13
  Glenn Fleishman: We don't have people roaming… you don't have a… you don't have… yeah, somebody's Liberation Army or whatever, you don't have a… several people doing an.
• 33:20
  matthewbors: organized around a radical idea. You have sort of, even, you know, with the different Trump shooters, some of them are anti-Trump people. The guy, young guy in Pennsylvania, I think he was kind of like a school shooter type. He didn't have a deep ideology.
• 33:34
  Tad Eggleston: He wanted more of the…
• 33:36
  matthewbors: Yeah, and, you know, you could run through the…
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: And the guy down at Mar-a-Lago was, like, more of a supporter who…
• 33:44
  Tad Eggleston: Was upset that he hadn't gone far enough.
• 33:47
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, it's all…
• 33:48
  matthewbors: Yeah, it depends on how you, you know, because I think he was a little politically incoherent.
• 33:54
  Glenn Fleishman: all the fears we had of… we had all those fears of right-wing militias, like, actually kind of roaming the country and doing things, and they broke… and the FBI broke up a lot of those, and there were all kinds of incidents, but I don't…
• 34:04
  Tad Eggleston: We shouldn't completely give up those fears.
• 34:07
  Glenn Fleishman: No…
• 34:08
  Tad Eggleston: Very interesting job on January 6th.
• 34:11
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, although, that was… They've all been…
• 34:13
  Tad Eggleston: Pardons, we're looking at giving them money.
• 34:16
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah.
• 34:16
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, although all those people… well, this is a sidebar, but it's like, they thought they could affect society somewhat, just not in the way that we wanted. But it's also, they suffered a… you know, they fucked around and they found out, right? They… they all suffered consequences, so even though they've been pardoned, even though it looks less likely they're gonna get money based on
• 34:34
  Glenn Fleishman: Weirdly, a GOP Senate revolt on the issue. They had their lives upheld, their families ripped apart, their organizations destroyed, so…
• 34:45
  Glenn Fleishman: even… even they couldn't… even they couldn't affect change, so I don't know… that's the wrong kind of change, I don't want that kind of change, but…
• 34:54
  matthewbors: I think where they got was, you know, it ultimately led to Trump being re-elected in the…
• 35:02
  Tad Eggleston: I would also say, like, look at the spate of Republican-led states and voting laws that were enacted in the six months after that. I think they got a lot of change.
• 35:12
  Glenn Fleishman: I guess so. It's… it's a… it's a sad thing. So, we guess we kind of…
• 35:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean.
• 35:16
  Glenn Fleishman: Change, just…
• 35:17
  matthewbors: Well…
• 35:18
  Glenn Fleishman: Not positive change.
• 35:19
  matthewbors: I mean, I don't know if it's been, confirmed, but I think the general feeling, the general speculation is that a lot of the ice guys are, you know, coming from.
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 35:31
  matthewbors: groups, like the, the Boogaloo Boys and all that crap, because those are the types of people who were just frothing at the mouth to go kind of, be…
• 35:41
  Tad Eggleston: To a certain extent, border patrols had that problem.
• 35:44
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 35:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Since its inception. I mean, this is… this is a place that I could go down tons of rabbit holes, and I would love to have you guys come back for those rabbit holes, but…
• 35:54
  Glenn Fleishman: I was gonna ask if we… there's a whole other… there's a whole other rabbit hole, actually, you brought up early on that I was wondering if we could explore.
• 36:01
  Tad Eggleston: Which one's that? But I'm watching the clock for it.
• 36:03
  Glenn Fleishman: It's awesome. It's, memes don't pay the bills, right? Like, that's one of the other parts, like, we're gonna do a dive in the book about the NIB history, because I don't… I mean, the NIB got a send-off
• 36:13
  Glenn Fleishman: got, you know, a lot of very positive, comments. And in fact, my book, How Comics Are Made, came out in part because the end of the nib meant that Mark Kaufman, the designer in that, who's gonna be our design consultant, he was freed up to do this huge book, and then he did another book. He's a… Mark, by the way, called on a comics podcast.
• 36:33
  Glenn Fleishman: design-nominated, person this year, because two of the books he designed are in the, Best Comics, related book category for the Eisners, 2026 Eisner. So, yay to Mark. Very cool. But, so we try to carry… I try to carry on some NIB traditions in how comics,
• 36:50
  Glenn Fleishman: are made. But that was the thing, is, like, the NIB did so much great work. I was a very…
• 36:56
  Glenn Fleishman: delighted reader, and across… I mean, Matt, you kept it going across three dot-coms.
• 37:02
  Glenn Fleishman: and as an independent, and had, you know, meme moments, I want to say meme moments all the time, some of them for your own cartoons, some of them people…
• 37:10
  Glenn Fleishman: talked about, or there were Eisner Awards for the publication, there were industry awards. It was a talked-about thing that people loved, and I… if you mention the nib to people who are in comics, they speak about it so fondly, and yet, the money to keep it going without you
• 37:24
  Glenn Fleishman: You know, essentially.
• 37:26
  Glenn Fleishman: working 700 hours a day, which I believe is not possible, weren't there. So we're gonna talk about that in the book, too. Like, memes don't pay the bills, and the nib is… I want to say a… it's not a casualty of it, but it's related to, like.
• 37:39
  Glenn Fleishman: You know, if you could figure out a way to monetize some of the… or get people to pay for stuff in some way associated with the things they love so much that they become part of culture, then you could have things like the nib without living in France and running Le Nibe in France.
• 37:54
  matthewbors: Yeah. Oh, yeah, Le Plume, it would be called.
• 37:58
  matthewbors: sink, maybe. That would be the pen. I don't know if there's a specific…
• 38:00
  Glenn Fleishman: That's probably right.
• 38:03
  matthewbors: But,
• 38:05
  matthewbors: I am… I guess… I wanted to just say that we're doing signed prints for the campaign, which is… I haven't done before, despite how popular this is. I've been kind of hesitant to, like, monetize it, maybe too hesitant, because signed prints is a pretty easy thing.
• 38:21
  matthewbors: So we're doing signed prints for the first time, including, like, a real high-end Gicle print, to use another fancy.
• 38:28
  Glenn Fleishman: French. French.
• 38:30
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is where I say, Matt, you work cons. How have you not had signed prints available at your table forever?
• 38:39
  matthewbors: Well, you know, I don't do that many cons, I only really started doing them… I did… started doing them with the Nib, when we launched the Nib magazine, which was the last few years of the Nib, but that was, like, 2018, 19, and then we had the pandemic, and then…
• 38:54
  matthewbors: On the cons on the other side of it, the nib was… shutting down.
• 38:59
  Tad Eggleston: And I guess the one time I saw you at a con, we also… we also had Caitlin sing My Way as a farewell to the.
• 39:07
  matthewbors: Oh, that was, that was such a great, like, that was a great, moment to have that karaoke.
• 39:12
  matthewbors: Is this a 2020?
• 39:14
  Glenn Fleishman: SPX2024 or something, maybe?
• 39:17
  matthewbors: some the CXC…
• 39:19
  Tad Eggleston: CXC.
• 39:20
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, okay.
• 39:21
  matthewbors: I think. Yeah, that was great.
• 39:26
  matthewbors: what I was gonna say, oh, you know, I think the short answer to why I didn't monetize it was, I was working at the nib full-time, I didn't have time, and I was… I was… like, when I was working at First Look Media in particular.
• 39:38
  matthewbors: I was getting paid good, and like, it was a full-time job with benefits type thing, I had little kids, like, I didn't have time to mess around with signed prints, it wasn't worth it for me. And I used the Mr. Gotcha stuff for nib merch, we did a tote bag, so I kind of redirected, like, I didn't make money
• 39:53
  matthewbors: for that specifically myself, but I made money for the nib, which was my job, so it seemed like it worked out for me for a while, it was fine. So, like, I was just… I was so focused on the nib, I didn't… I mean, I didn't have time to do anything else, and eventually got to the point where, you know, I didn't even…
• 40:09
  matthewbors: Well, I did quit my own cartoons in 2021, two years before the nib ceased, but the truth is, is that for a long time, like, many, many, many years, I was still doing my cartoons late at night, because the nib was full-time. So it's like I could barely do my comics, I didn't have time to think about merch.
• 40:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:28
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually why, like, we need people. I mean, going way back to the discussion that was…
• 40:34
  Tad Eggleston: I think off-air, about, like, doing video with this podcast. When I'll start doing video is if and when I have enough money coming in that I can hire somebody to do the editing.
• 40:48
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 40:49
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, this is the inverse. I went to Matt and said…
• 40:51
  Tad Eggleston: art that I don't want to do.
• 40:53
  Glenn Fleishman: I said to Matt, hey, I'd like to make you some money, and Matt said, essentially, eventually, okay, because I've been, I've published, mostly my own books, and I've been a consultant on other people's books, but I've done some pretty… the last 3 years, I've gotten big back into print. I mean, I've done some art projects before that.
• 41:11
  Glenn Fleishman: You can see behind… behind me, this is the Tiny Type Museum. It was a very… it was like a $1,000 collection of printing artifacts we made as a whole.
• 41:18
  Glenn Fleishman: That was a whole deal, but I… I wanted to do books that actually
• 41:22
  Glenn Fleishman: fit my weird little printing history interest.
• 41:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm seeing your… how comics are made, and thinking that we need to… we need to have another discussion sometime.
• 41:31
  Glenn Fleishman: That would be fine. It's a great… it's a fun book, and it was…
• 41:34
  Tad Eggleston: For that matter, 6 centuries of type and printing feels like it might be up my alley, too.
• 41:39
  Glenn Fleishman: it's all… it's… so I… the how comics are made comes out of that same exploration of, like, how did this stuff work? And I found nobody had ever written in a comprehensive manner about how newspaper comics were… went from the artist's hand to a printed page.
• 41:53
  Glenn Fleishman: And that's… that's that whole book across the whole era. But, in that whole process, I learned a lot more about, boy, about budgeting and printing. I've got good North America printers I work with who I can figure out, based on what they need to charge in North America, how to structure a campaign
• 42:08
  Glenn Fleishman: that has the right price. So, when I went to Matt, I had a spreadsheet, or, you know, we talked about it, then I made a spreadsheet and said, I'm licensing this from Matt. Like, this isn't… this is not his book, I'm publishing it, but it's his work, and he needs to make his money first, because it's got his name in the title, among other things.
• 42:23
  Tad Eggleston: And this is where I'll also toss out, that according to your website, you are also a crowdfunding consultant, which I know lots of people.
• 42:30
  Glenn Fleishman: overall.
• 42:31
  Tad Eggleston: Always looking for.
• 42:32
  Glenn Fleishman: do that. I, I've had some great projects, like, Shift Happens, which was a, 1300-page, 3-volume, slip-cased, hardcover
• 42:42
  Glenn Fleishman: work that… back in 2023, where I was on… literally on press for 100 hours with it, with the author, and
• 42:48
  Glenn Fleishman: learned some things. So that's kind of… I mean, people really want, instantiations of stuff. Like, this is one of the things I found, is people want something real right now. They're kind of… there's, like, there's only so much digital work. I mean, when the NFT thing happened, let's talk about that for… very briefly, is the NFT thing, I feel like it was…
• 43:08
  Glenn Fleishman: a reaction for artists who'd… well, I shouldn't say artists, it was… there's a lot of scam behind it, but some artists were very interested in it, because there's no way to instantiate a unique digital object, right? And it was like, could this be it? And the answer is no, it was not. But…
• 43:23
  Glenn Fleishman: But artists need something, because so many artists I know have switched over to drawing entirely, you know, digitally on tablets or other means.
• 43:31
  Glenn Fleishman: And, the fun part right now is that the rediscovery of print, and also the ability to do print-on-demand in short numbers, or, you know, I just did a project with, with Dan Perkins, slash Tom Tamaro. He wanted to get his last 5 years of comics in print.
• 43:47
  Tad Eggleston: Have it over here.
• 43:48
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, great. Awesome, you're a…
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: You're a blinker.
• 43:50
  matthewbors: Fleischman, Kickstarter backer in a, you know…
• 43:54
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't even realize that until I was looking through here.
• 43:58
  Glenn Fleishman: great printer which could do inserted, tipped-in signature pages, and Dan was able to, like, we were hoping, like, I think the target for the campaign was 35 grand. We were hoping to ship, I don't know, 1,500 books or something? We shipped over 3,000. I mean, this isn't secrets, it's on the campaign. Right.
• 44:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's also on your webpage.
• 44:17
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, exactly. The campaign raised over $130,000, and that was such a…
• 44:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 44:23
  Glenn Fleishman: boost for Dan, where, you know, Dan's working away, alt weeklies are dying, I mean, Matt, people like Matt have left the whole industry because there's.
• 44:31
  matthewbors: I know, he… Tom Tamaro's really, like.
• 44:34
  matthewbors: I don't want to say the last, because there's other people doing it, like Keith Knight and Ruben Balling and stuff, but I mean, he's…
• 44:40
  Glenn Fleishman: tool it long, and Ruben.
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Jen Sorensen.
• 44:43
  matthewbors: Yeah, yeah, and I…
• 44:45
  matthewbors: And I edit comics at In These Times still, so I do a little bit of dabbling in editing and political cartoons, so we run Jen and Tom Tomorrow, and…
• 44:53
  matthewbors: Keith sometimes, and Brian McFadden, and Matty Libchansky, all, like, a lot of people from the nib. But…
• 45:01
  matthewbors: Yeah, I mean, you know, In These Times is doing two comics pages with me, but, like, not any other magazines you can point to, I don't think.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 45:10
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, it's so… so it's like there's this re… so, this is all… I'm sorry, I'm a very, what am I, I'm a loop.
• 45:17
  Tad Eggleston: Glenn, you're gonna have to come back.
• 45:19
  Glenn Fleishman: Alright, I'll be happy.
• 45:20
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just telling you that.
• 45:21
  Glenn Fleishman: Good schedule.
• 45:21
  Tad Eggleston: Now, Matt's always invited back, but I have a million other things to talk to you about.
• 45:26
  Glenn Fleishman: Awesome.
• 45:27
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 45:28
  Glenn Fleishman: books. I'm…
• 45:28
  matthewbors: I'll come back, because we got… we'll have… much more Toxic Avenger will be announced later this year. I can't say anything about it. We're still gonna do more Toxic Avenger.
• 45:37
  Glenn Fleishman: But my loop closing actually fits Toxic Adventure, too, is that people really want stuff. I mean, they don't want to fill their houses with stuff, and we all have too much stuff, but people want a book, they want an experience, they want to have somebody… I mean, Dan signed so many copies of his book, you know, because people are like, oh my god, I can get Tom tomorrow to sign my book.
• 45:56
  Glenn Fleishman: And I feel that way. I have a shelf of books where I, you know, met the author, or I did some work with the author, and they send me a signed copy, and I've got several… I mean, I could turn my camera around, but listeners can't see it. I've got two original Matt Bohrs.
• 46:10
  Glenn Fleishman: right there on the wall that I bought from Matt. I've got the, two… a Steve Jobs reincarnation comic, and the…
• 46:16
  Glenn Fleishman: Roger Ebert, reviews the note… when he died, reviews the notion of,
• 46:24
  Glenn Fleishman: the idea of comics showing people going to heaven. That's your… that's one of your meta-comics, but…
• 46:30
  matthewbors: Oh, right, that was a big one.
• 46:32
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, so it's… so, I should say Matt still owns the original of the Mr. Gotcha comic, also.
• 46:40
  matthewbors: Yes.
• 46:40
  Glenn Fleishman: It's still in his possession. But, so, but people want stuff. People want stuff, and they want a connection with somebody, and so this is the great thing, is that it's possible as an artist, as a cartoonist, as a writer, to do a short run of something, or sometimes a big one if you're surprised, and make it affordable, and actually make
• 46:57
  Glenn Fleishman: profit from it, so you're paying yourself for your time. That's amazing.
• 47:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 47:02
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 47:04
  Tad Eggleston: Two closing questions now. There used to be one, but I've started a second one in Season 5, because…
• 47:11
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone in my 5 years with this podcast. The number of just surreal experiences that I get to have, the conversations I get to have, the people who have become friends that used to be just names on pages.
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: And I find that everybody that works in comics, or around comics, or really any creative industry, but it seems even more so in comics, because it's kind of a close-knit.
• 47:39
  Tad Eggleston: Really welcoming field.
• 47:41
  Tad Eggleston: as those…
• 47:43
  Tad Eggleston: pinch-me stories, those, those… if you told 10-year-old Glenn that he was gonna get to do this, he would have been, OH MY GOD!
• 47:54
  Tad Eggleston: So I've started collecting the stories. Tell me one of those… tell me one of the… and, you know, as broad as you want, you know, it doesn't have… it doesn't have to be name-dropping if you don't want, it can be name-dropping. Oh, I love that name-d.
• 48:07
  Glenn Fleishman: I love to name drop. Right. I love to name drop.
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but one of those where you sometimes just, like, you think about it, and you're like, was that really me?
• 48:17
  Glenn Fleishman: Well, I'll tell you, the big one for me is, when I was researching how comics are made, you know, I was calling
• 48:23
  Glenn Fleishman: and emailing all kinds of cartoonists and people involved in cartoon… newspaper comic production and history, and had great conversations with so many people, and I mean, I'll say this is funny, but, like, this isn't my big one, but, like, the guy does Funky Winkerbean and, Crankshaft, why am I blanking on his name?
• 48:40
  Glenn Fleishman: Was a wonderful fellow, had so many great, interesting things to talk about over 50 years of doing daily com- for the part of that, two daily comics with partners and colorists and whatever. That was great. I read Funko Winkerbean, which is one of the weirdest and kind of greatest, weird strips that…
• 48:56
  Tad Eggleston: Tom Baddiak.
• 48:57
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, lovely guy! But, and I got an exchange email with, Gary, Trudeau and, Bill Watterson for the book, Bill through his editor, and Gary could not be more…
• 49:08
  Glenn Fleishman: generous with his time, and the rights to use stuff, and everything else, but the one that got me was…
• 49:14
  Glenn Fleishman: I got in touch with Bill Griffith, I met him at an SPX when I was playing the book, and said, hey, I'm working on this book, can I get in touch? Like, here's my card. You know, he's a cranky guy, and he has a lot of privacy stuff, his wife died a couple years ago now, and it's very sad, all the stuff going on. And, over time, he's like, he's like, you know, I got all this stuff in my studio, I'm like, can I…
• 49:33
  Glenn Fleishman: come to your studio? And he's like, yeah, sure. So, I was in Connecticut, I did this whole trip of, University Archives, I was researching and meeting with a few people, including, George Corsolo, another lovely guy who's the colorist for Gary Trudeau, has been for 25 years, and George designed every album and…
• 49:52
  Glenn Fleishman: a novel cover you liked in the 70s and 80s, like Lonesome Dove, so he's totally modest, but his studio is lined with amazing, iconic designs.
• 50:01
  Glenn Fleishman: But, so I drove to rural Connecticut, where Bill Griffith and his wife had settled.
• 50:06
  Glenn Fleishman: And I think she had died the year before at this point, and he let me into his studio, and I spent a few hours with him, and he let me dig through all his files, and photograph stuff, and talk about his career, and I was like, I've been reading Zippy since I was…
• 50:20
  Glenn Fleishman: I don't know if I read Mr. Frog when I was little, I probably read that when I was a teenager, but that was pretty amazing to, you know, actually be in his studio, looking through his files, looking at all the…
• 50:29
  Glenn Fleishman: the fun crap he's collected, at least his walls of the studio are lined with, like, old packaging objects, right? Like, you know, old,
• 50:38
  Glenn Fleishman: tins of things and toys and whatever that he uses for reference or inspiration. So that was… that was pretty cool. And, you know, it's not like we became friends or buddies, this is a professional thing, he's got his own life, but he is… could not be of, again, not have been more generous, or welcoming, or helpful
• 50:56
  Glenn Fleishman: with everything that I could possibly have asked for, including letting us use Zippy in an illustration that he didn't create in the book to show the process of doing acetate overlays for color separation. He's like, sure!
• 51:08
  Glenn Fleishman: You got it, buddy. I'm like, oh my god. So, that was pretty great.
• 51:13
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds amazing. Matt?
• 51:15
  matthewbors: God, I don't know, I mean, I don't know if I have… I'd have to think on any kind of, like, I don't know, name-droppy, crazy experience that I had. I mean, you know, I don't… honestly, I've been…
• 51:26
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because I already took away Caitlin McGurk in singing my… my way.
• 51:32
  matthewbors: That was a great…
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: cookie.
• 51:33
  matthewbors: No, no.
• 51:33
  Glenn Fleishman: I literally just got email in my inbox from Caitlin, just arrived, like, 2 minutes ago. I see Caitlin in my notification.
• 51:40
  Tad Eggleston: from Tad.
• 51:41
  Glenn Fleishman: I shop.
• 51:42
  matthewbors: I mean, I always wanted to do comics since I was… you know.
• 51:46
  matthewbors: whatever, 4 years old, like, it's been a singular obsession, and I've got to do…
• 51:51
  matthewbors: almost everything that I want to do. I still want to do more, but I mean, honestly, if I was looking at everything I've done so far, you know, I've… I've done comics journalism trips to Afghanistan and Haiti, I was on the Eisner stage, I've… I've…
• 52:06
  matthewbors: you know, that whole generation of, like, Gen X alt-weekly cartoonists, like Ruben Bowling and Keith Knight and Tom Tomorrow, I came up really admiring them, and they all became my good friends, and then I became the guy that gave them money, and I got to publish a magazine, and got to do an animated series. Like, I got to do a lot of stuff, that's really cool. I mean, I'm…
• 52:25
  matthewbors: grateful for my career. I think that… all that stuff is stuff that if you, went… if I, you know, told my younger self that I would do, I would be super psyched, and also I'd be like, yeah, like…
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: And live in a house rather than a one-bedroom studio apartment with…
• 52:43
  matthewbors: Yeah, now I do, now I do.
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: wait, and…
• 52:46
  matthewbors: Now I… now I have a house.
• 52:47
  Glenn Fleishman: I was… God, nobody told me this.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: That's the surreal part, is, like, because if you've wanted to be a cartoonist from age 4, by age 15, you'd probably decided that you were okay living on ramen noodles.
• 53:01
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh my god.
• 53:01
  matthewbors: Well, yeah, I mean, I was… I was for a long time, like, you know, living kind of pretty close to the ground in my 20s and some of my 30s, and then, really, it was the… it was the new media money that funded the NIB that, you know, helped me have, like, a decent job. I wouldn't say it was…
• 53:17
  matthewbors: I don't know if it was comics in particular, because comics doesn't, comics still doesn't pay all that well.
• 53:23
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 53:24
  matthewbors: I'll do it.
• 53:24
  Tad Eggleston: comics adjacent.
• 53:26
  matthewbors: No, no, it totally was. I just… I'm saying that I've done… I've accomplished a lot in comics, and I've done what I wanted to do, but then there's also, like, you don't get to really, like, rest on your laurels or your.
• 53:37
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, no.
• 53:38
  matthewbors: You know what I mean? Like, I don't have a… I don't have that going for me.
• 53:41
  Glenn Fleishman: I'll tell you, there's one funny thing, there's a statistic I saw the other day that I've been repeating, which is, when Bill Watterson, talking about making money in comics, it's… there's this very weird thing going on right now, which is, Matt, you should have pivoted to YA.
• 53:52
  Glenn Fleishman: That's what everyone's doing. Because I saw that… no, I mean, not really, but you know what I mean, like, that's… I didn't know that… I don't think anyone quite understood the money was there, so I saw a figure, Andres McMil Publishing, when they put out the Watterson book that he illustrated but didn't write, that really dark, weird…
• 54:08
  Tad Eggleston: Great book.
• 54:09
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, so, they, in the press release, they said, Bill Watterson has sold 65 million copies of his Calvin and Hobbes collections, and I did the math, and 65 million is a big number.
• 54:19
  Glenn Fleishman: And then, not that long after that, Dana Simpson retired from her daily Phoebe and Her Unicorn strip, and is only doing weekends, and I thought, there's, you know, I think she's in 300 papers, so there's money there, but it's… and she's in some bigger papers. But, you know, I'm like, I get that. And I didn't realize the popularity of her young adult books, and in the press release announcing her retirement, it said, Dana Simpson has sold 4 million copies of Phoebe and Her Unicorn.
• 54:43
  matthewbors: Jesus.
• 54:44
  Glenn Fleishman: books, and I was like, oh, why the hell are you doing daily strips if you're selling four? So, she built up, over a decade, a real
• 54:52
  Glenn Fleishman: Loving readership, and did collections, and then does original…
• 54:56
  Glenn Fleishman: titles, and no, so now she's got the best of both worlds, I think, because she gets to do a lovely Sunday strip on a much more leisurely schedule, and has this incredibly rich bookmark, and again, I do the math. I mean, did she make a dollar a book? I don't know, but she made something a book that was pretty good, and
• 55:11
  Glenn Fleishman: So there is money out there, but it's not the part that we chose. Like, comics history and editorial cartooning, sadly, is not where the interest is.
• 55:19
  matthewbors: Well, and trust me, I'm well aware of all this, because I have peers, colleagues who have gone into YA. I think, you know, there's more people that go into it than hit it big, but I also… Absolutely.
• 55:30
  matthewbors: like…
• 55:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there's some great YA stories out there, too.
• 55:34
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 55:34
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want… I don't wanna make.
• 55:36
  Glenn Fleishman: Well, I'm not criticizing.
• 55:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's just a cash grab.
• 55:39
  Glenn Fleishman: No, no, no, it's the popularity that's great, as kids love this, and so do a lot of adults. I mean, I read Laura Olympus, I read from the library, I think, the first 3 or 4 volumes, and it's not perfect, but it's amazing, and it's gorgeous.
• 55:52
  Tad Eggleston: It actually works way better as a web scroll.
• 55:55
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, is that right?
• 55:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that was what it's designed as.
• 55:58
  Glenn Fleishman: She sold, or they've sold, I forget the pronouns, a bazillion copies.
• 56:02
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 56:03
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, yeah. So, I'm not critical of success. I think it's great that some cartoonists have found something where people go gaga, and they love it, they love it so much. You know, we don't have Harry Potter anymore, rest in peace, or something, and so now we need something that's wonderful for kids, and there's a lot of stuff out there for them now.
• 56:21
  Tad Eggleston: There is.
• 56:23
  matthewbors: Yeah. Unfortunately for me, I've pivoted to my main interest, which is just, like, violent mutant satires, so I'm doing Toxic Avenger and Justice Warriors, which I love.
• 56:33
  Tad Eggleston: Almost… that's almost YA.
• 56:36
  matthewbors: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I think it's… it's definitely not for kids, and if you… hey, if you look at the sales, I'm sure it's not even for adults either.
• 56:47
  matthewbors: No, I'm kidding. We've had some success. We're doing more of all of them. I can't officially announce anything, but we're doing more of them. I'm in my mutant fiction era. I have other ideas eventually, but this is kind of the era of my career I'm in.
• 57:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Picasso had his blue period, which has his mutant fiction period.
• 57:08
  matthewbors: Yeah. If, you know, if there was anything that was coming, it was that. Like, this is the thing that actually tracks the most from, like, my childhood.
• 57:17
  Tad Eggleston: There we go. Alright, we gotta get the final question in before Glenn has to run for his other call. Tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules, preferably storytelling, but again with the rules, but something that you love.
• 57:32
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you wish that they would, so you had more people to talk about it with.
• 57:41
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, I've got one.
• 57:42
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 57:43
  Glenn Fleishman: there's a series called Counterpart that ran two series, and friends of mine kept telling me about it before the pandemic.
• 57:49
  Glenn Fleishman: I ran two seasons, rather, and I, watched it during the pandemic, and it's, J.K. Rowling, it's got Stephen Ray in it, it's amazing, and it actually, unfortunately, predicted the pandemic. It's kind of an alternate world thing, there's, like, sort of two…
• 58:02
  Glenn Fleishman: worlds, but I don't want to spoil it for anybody, but it's really quite amazing, and I think it's kind of a sleeper.
• 58:07
  Tad Eggleston: J. Case.
• 58:08
  Glenn Fleishman: Simmons. What did I say? Did I say Rowling?
• 58:10
  Tad Eggleston: growling.
• 58:12
  matthewbors: I was supposed to.
• 58:13
  Tad Eggleston: Is that supposed.
• 58:14
  matthewbors: I think… I think Glenn said he'd love…
• 58:16
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sick!
• 58:17
  matthewbors: K. Ralph.
• 58:17
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, no, it's just lived through. J.K. Simmons, who is actually a relative of family friends of mine, weirdly enough, because the world is small, but never met him. But it's a great, it's a great show. It's on, I don't know, it's on some streaming service.
• 58:32
  Glenn Fleishman: I think it has,
• 58:34
  Glenn Fleishman: a great sense… I mean, watching For All Mankind on Apple TV, which I've kind of petered out on in Season 3, I think it got… I don't know, it got a little whatever for me, which is also kind of like, what if
• 58:45
  Glenn Fleishman: this small thing, so it's alt history as opposed to science fiction, per se. So counterpart, I think it's, pretty great, really complicated ideas about identity and,
• 58:55
  Glenn Fleishman: Self and, fairness, and all kinds of things.
• 59:01
  matthewbors: Okay, I know what I'm gonna say.
• 59:04
  matthewbors: I'm gonna… because I was gonna write about it, and I didn't have the time. There's… this is something that I don't think many people know about, at least not enough, is a jazz album that came out last year called Weirdo by Emma Jean Thackrae, which I think is great. It's one of the, my favorite new albums I've come across in a long time.
• 59:22
  matthewbors: She, has… her longtime partner died, like, I think unexpectedly, and she wrote this album
• 59:32
  matthewbors: As a response to it, and it's not a somber or, it can be depressive in parts, but it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a really interesting reaction to grief, and it's, like, there's a song called Black Hole about,
• 59:47
  matthewbors: being in a black hole of despair, as she says in the song, and I… I… I defy you to put it on and tell me you're in a bad mood after you hear that song.
• 59:55
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, wow.
• 59:56
  matthewbors: It's a really great jazz album, vocal jazz. I wouldn't even call it, like… you know, I love a lot of jazz, but I have trouble defining the genres. It has a lot of mix of…
• 1:00:08
  matthewbors: funk, R&B, soul, like, you know, it's accessible, as they say. And it's weird, Hence the title.
• 1:00:18
  matthewbors: And, I think, extremely great. And also, one last thing is that in a real flex, she…
• 1:00:25
  matthewbors: Plays every single instrument on the album.
• 1:00:31
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, great. Wow, alright, I've just bookmarked it to go get a copy.
• 1:00:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I, I just, I just pulled it up on, on Bandcamp as well, all over it. Counterpart appears, actually, to be very difficult to watch right now.
• 1:00:48
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, well, now it's… then it's a… it's a…
• 1:00:51
  Glenn Fleishman: wonderful TV show that you have.
• 1:00:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:00:53
  Glenn Fleishman: dig out, you have to hunt for it.
• 1:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: It is not currently streaming…
• 1:00:57
  Glenn Fleishman: Oh, it's nowhere, you can't watch it.
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: anywhere.
• 1:01:00
  Glenn Fleishman: You can buy…
• 1:01:01
  Tad Eggleston: buy the first season Blu-ray from Amazon.
• 1:01:06
  Glenn Fleishman: Well, there… I did find a really good sleeper. It is eerie the first time that they show people doing pandemic measures that are so similar to ours, and it was shot in 2017, or 2016. You're like, oh no, people really did know what was gonna happen, because they must have talked to experts, because they're showing exactly…
• 1:01:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it looks like… it looks like you can… you can buy the DVD, but…
• 1:01:29
  Glenn Fleishman: TV, see, you like physical things.
• 1:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:01:32
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah, Matt, why aren't we doing a DVD of the book? I don't…
• 1:01:36
  matthewbors: Dvd commentary, let's do it.
• 1:01:39
  Glenn Fleishman: That's right, or a USB memory stick, we'll send you.
• 1:01:41
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 1:01:41
  Glenn Fleishman: Fantastic.
• 1:01:43
  Tad Eggleston: We're sorry.
• 1:01:44
  Glenn Fleishman: Very small.
• 1:01:45
  Tad Eggleston: You, you know, I, I per… like, I was working at…
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: Best Buy running music departments when MP3s started becoming a thing.
• 1:01:56
  Tad Eggleston: And the whole company was like, oh, we gotta downsize this, music's going away, blah blah blah. I'm like, no, it's not. Watch. Vinyl will come back.
• 1:02:06
  Tad Eggleston: And nobody believed me.
• 1:02:09
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, no, people like the tactile experience.
• 1:02:15
  Tad Eggleston: People like to be able to flip through liner notes. The only reason vinyl went away to begin with is because it's not portable.
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: The only reason cassettes went away is that CDs are more durable.
• 1:02:31
  Tad Eggleston: MP3s will become our portable music, and that will just mean that people want vinyl for home.
• 1:02:37
  Glenn Fleishman: I like it. I, I have a letterpress printer friend in London, was just talking to him, in fact. He's one of the last commercial letterpress printers, probably, in the world, I think? And one of the ways he's survived is there's a company there that does, like, 300-pound…
• 1:02:50
  Glenn Fleishman: LPs, they go back to the original tapes, they, with permission, they remaster them, they cut them in a very special way, they've got some kind of great vinyl master cutting thing, so these are as good as any version of it ever made on vinyl, and they sell them for a huge amount, and they sell them out, and they hire him to do letterpress printed
• 1:03:10
  Glenn Fleishman: albums, so that it's all in the same mode, and he's like, this is fantastic, it's a market. Right. You know, what's your job in 2026? I'm a letter for entrepreneur printing vinyl album covers.
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right. No, I mean, I, I, like…
• 1:03:28
  Tad Eggleston: I think the beauty of the digital age is there shouldn't be anything that you can't…
• 1:03:35
  Tad Eggleston: consume. We should reach a point where things aren't unreadable because they're out of print.
• 1:03:42
  matthewbors: Yeah.
• 1:03:43
  Tad Eggleston: The other thing is that I think that overall, that will lead to higher and higher quality
• 1:03:51
  Tad Eggleston: physical objects. Because if you can consume it.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Without buying it, then the one that you buy has gotta be special.
• 1:04:04
  Tad Eggleston: And so the biggest challenge is figuring out the way to make certain that artists get paid to work.
• 1:04:12
  Tad Eggleston: Dig it. And, like, some of that is things like Patreon, some of that is live music, or… I mean, but, like, we're seeing a resurgence
• 1:04:24
  Tad Eggleston: A small resurgence so far, but a resurgence in, like, newsprint comics.
• 1:04:29
  Tad Eggleston: Like, Santos Sisters is printed on newsprint. You know, when Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips did…
• 1:04:39
  Tad Eggleston: the Enfield Gang Massacre, they surprised everybody by doing it on newsprint. You know, Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips liked it so much that they did their next graphic novel on… or they did… they did their next comic.
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: On, like, a newsprint.
• 1:04:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know? And it's higher quality than the newsprint that was coming out in the 70s, but it has that feel to it.
• 1:05:04
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so, yeah, I think…
• 1:05:10
  Tad Eggleston: And it's still, like, as you guys are too aware, it is a discussion for another day, complicated by the fact that when there's such a disparity between the haves and have-nots, it's really hard for the have-nots to do cool things, because there's just no oxygen for them to…
• 1:05:29
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I'd love to talk to you about your North American printing connections, because that's one of the things that goes through my head, is, like, there is an opening there for somebody to set up sustainable printing somewhere
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: In the vast amount of the Midwest, where there's lots of land…
• 1:05:52
  Tad Eggleston: You know, to be able to… to do…
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: the projects that are meaningful to us without having to worry about going through the Strait of Hormuz, or being sunk in a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, or… These are just things that have actually happened to comics that I know of.
• 1:06:10
  Glenn Fleishman: I do know a story about a book that was held up because, of, the Evergreen, or the Ever, whatever it was called, the one that blocked the Suez Canal, because the paper was on a, yep. Yeah, it was on a, boat that.
• 1:06:22
  matthewbors: Oh, yeah.
• 1:06:22
  Glenn Fleishman: through there, and they couldn't get it to the United States to finish the printing.
• 1:06:25
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't understand why we don't have sustainable paper mills. There are ways to make them.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, between using bamboo, or using recycled paper, or working your tree farm.
• 1:06:38
  Tad Eggleston: Really properly, so that you're… you're growing…
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: Roughly at the speed that you're using it, which apparently is something that people do. This is stuff that I've only done minimal research in. But I've done enough to know that there are possibilities.
• 1:06:52
  Glenn Fleishman: in British Columbia, they, I believe they source all of their paper from sustainable Canadian
• 1:06:59
  Glenn Fleishman: operations, and they have, like, multiple levels of certification, so it's not like we're buying it from China, and they claim it's sustainable, or from Italy. It's like, no, they're actually being milled and grown and…
• 1:07:10
  Glenn Fleishman: there's a special seal you can get on your copyright page that the printer approves if they've made sure they've closed the loop, they have a compliance officer, so you can do it, but as we was talking about at the outset of it, this is me as a very, very tiny publisher of one for both my own projects, and this book with Matt is kind of my first
• 1:07:27
  Glenn Fleishman: publisher hat book, where I'm like, I went to an author and said, let's… cartoonist, let's do this, is,
• 1:07:32
  Glenn Fleishman: I scale the projects around the cost of using those methods, and not everybody has that.
• 1:07:37
  Glenn Fleishman: Right. Anyway, if I was going into bookstores, this would be impossible, right? We're only doing direct sales, because I need to bring the book, the cost of the book is going to be, I don't know, it's gonna be like $12 a unit or something before…
• 1:07:47
  Glenn Fleishman: everything else, and it's… I need it to be, like, $2 to get it to bookstores. So, there are places elsewhere in the world, you know, it's a growing thing. A lot of paper is made from bamboo, anyway, I could go on. I have, like, 7 books on paper.
• 1:07:59
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 1:08:00
  Glenn Fleishman: that I've been reading.
• 1:08:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, no, understood.
• 1:08:01
  Glenn Fleishman: more about paperwork.
• 1:08:02
  Tad Eggleston: These are conversations that I'd love to have with you, Glenn. I might be too small fish for you to want to have in-depth ones with me, but it sounds like you're somebody who thinks about this stuff in some of the ways that my autistic brain thinks about this stuff.
• 1:08:15
  matthewbors: I used to… you know, I used to, because I… when I ran the nib, and… but now I'm happy… I have a publisher, Ahoy publishes most of the comics that I work with, and I'm happy to leave a lot of that stuff to them, because actually doing it all is a little bit overwhelming, and that's why Glenn doing this Kickstarter is great, because I will say, before we go, that I was…
• 1:08:34
  matthewbors: It's the 10th anniversary of the comic in this coming September.
• 1:08:38
  matthewbors: And I was thinking about doing merch stuff, like, definitely sign prints, and maybe some merch, or whatever.
• 1:08:44
  matthewbors: And I was like, you know, I should get some money for it, basically, was what I was thinking. And then Glenn came to me with this idea, and I thought, well, this is actually more interesting, because it produces a new…
• 1:08:55
  matthewbors: product, I guess, for lack of a better word. You know, it produces something that's, has interesting writing that hopefully… and I get to sit around and, I guess, read what people have to say about my comic in a book that's named after me, which sounds insane and self-indulgent, but
• 1:09:11
  matthewbors: It's interesting.
• 1:09:13
  Glenn Fleishman: It's, it's fun. I like, I like this role of it. I ran a publication called The Magazine for,
• 1:09:19
  Glenn Fleishman: A couple years, it was an Apple…
• 1:09:21
  Glenn Fleishman: app store thing that I actually bought from its founder, who wasn't exactly ready to run a publication, but he did incredible programming work to get it started.
• 1:09:29
  Glenn Fleishman: And my favorite thing was writing checks to illustrators and writers and cartoonists. It was like, this is so great to do, and it was nice to try to make a living from it, but it wasn't sustainable.
• 1:09:41
  Glenn Fleishman: Either. So, anyway, Matt will be happy to write you a check when the time comes.
• 1:09:46
  Glenn Fleishman: Yeah. Well, an electronic transfer through, international, money sources or something, but…
• 1:09:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:53
  Tad Eggleston: Just so long as it's not Bitcoin.
• 1:09:56
  Glenn Fleishman: We have one… wait, well, I was gonna be… we have… we're not gonna put any AI in this book, except…
• 1:10:02
  Glenn Fleishman: I'll just bring this up briefly. There's one cartoon that was made, a remix that uses AI, and I'm like, if we put that in the book, do we have to mark the book as having AI content? So it's like, maybe we won't include it, because then people will get mad at us because it has any AI content, even if it's for the purpose of critique, so that's a whole other conversation.
• 1:10:21
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I understand.
• 1:10:22
  Glenn Fleishman: That's another 2 hours there.
• 1:10:24
  Tad Eggleston: For Glenn Fleischman and Matt Bors, this has been 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.