Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #288... 22 Panels with Eric Reynolds

Transcript

With Great Power #288... 22 Panels with Eric Reynolds · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:02
Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. I guess morning for Eric. It's still morning for Eric in Seattle. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest this morning is a co-publisher and president? I forget the title. I should have looked that up before we started.
0:16
Eric Reynolds: Vice… vice president.
0:17
Tad Eggleston: Vice President of…
0:19
Eric Reynolds: Mary is still the president.
0:21
Tad Eggleston: Still, still the president, okay. Well, you know, I didn't know if he'd come up with a higher title, you know? I mean, we're baseball guys, you know.
0:28
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right.
0:29
Tad Eggleston: The general manager is now the president of baseball operations.
0:33
Eric Reynolds: That's right, exactly.
0:35
Tad Eggleston: We now don't have bench coaches, we have assistant managers, and bench coaches.
0:40
Eric Reynolds: That's right.
0:43
Tad Eggleston: So, Eric Reynolds, to celebrate the 50th year of Fanographics, which…
0:51
Tad Eggleston: is crazy. I mean, I guess on one level, it's not crazy, because, like, Marvel and DC are older than me, too, but, like.
1:00
Tad Eggleston: everybody knows Marvel and DC, and they've got, like, a whole different remit. So, for me to think, oh, wow, fan of graphics that I love all these comics from…
1:09
Tad Eggleston: And I think of the comics that I love as primarily things that came out of Vertigo and going forward.
1:16
Tad Eggleston: is older than me. It's just like,
1:21
Tad Eggleston: It's always a weird thing to wrap my head around.
1:25
Eric Reynolds: Well, yeah.
1:27
Eric Reynolds: I suppose it is myself as well.
1:31
Tad Eggleston: And, amazingly, older than… than loving rockets, though not by that much.
1:38
Tad Eggleston: Because that's the other thing that I have always associated
1:43
Tad Eggleston: Always associate… I mean, now I associate all sorts of things with fan of graphics. I'm not… not trying to limit you to…
1:50
Tad Eggleston: the one thing. So, let me start with,
1:56
Tad Eggleston: A, how long have you been there? I know that you've been there a long time, but not since the beginning, or have you been there since the beginning, and just in different roles?
2:05
Eric Reynolds: No, no, I started in 1993, so… Okay. What is that? Going on 33 years?
2:11
Tad Eggleston: Yeah Yeah.
2:14
Tad Eggleston: So not quite as long as I've been alive. I was reading comics by then.
2:19
Tad Eggleston: And then the, the, the other question that, that I would ask, just because it's a,
2:26
Tad Eggleston: I'd love to hear it from somebody on the inside. How would you describe Fanographics to somebody?
2:32
Eric Reynolds: Well, I guess it depends on who I'm…
2:34
Eric Reynolds: Describing it, too, a little bit.
2:36
Tad Eggleston: Right?
2:37
Eric Reynolds: You know…
2:40
Eric Reynolds: if I'm talking to somebody who really doesn't know anything about comics, I just say we're a publisher of
2:46
Eric Reynolds: Comics and graphic novels and cartoon-related
2:51
Eric Reynolds: Works, that we tend to…
2:55
Eric Reynolds: Stay away from most of the traditional genres that most people associate with comics, you know, superheroes and sci-fi and…
3:03
Eric Reynolds: fantasy and stuff like that. Though not, not, you know, not rigidly.
3:08
Eric Reynolds: Boom.
3:09
Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, I think you've had examples of all of those in the last year.
3:13
Eric Reynolds: Absolutely.
3:14
Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
3:15
Eric Reynolds: Absolutely.
3:16
Tad Eggleston: Certainly all of them in the next year.
3:18
Eric Reynolds: Probably, yeah.
3:20
Tad Eggleston: Didn't you just announce a Barry Windsor-Smith.
3:25
Eric Reynolds: We did. Marvel thing. Marvel collection of all of his Marvel work. I was just.
3:29
Tad Eggleston: Right.
3:30
Eric Reynolds: Some of the proofs, Day before yesterday.
3:35
Eric Reynolds: Looks great.
3:36
Eric Reynolds: So yeah, so I, I, you know, and then,
3:41
Eric Reynolds: you know, I try not to get too highfalutin with it, in terms of,
3:47
Eric Reynolds: Trying to make us, you know, sound good, or… or, try to…
3:54
Eric Reynolds: Kind of over-legitimize, ourselves,
3:58
Eric Reynolds: But I think that if I'm… Digging a little deeper.
4:03
Eric Reynolds: The company has just always reflected the tastes
4:08
Eric Reynolds: of the publishers, whether it be Gary Groth, or the late Kid Thompson, or myself, and that,
4:15
Eric Reynolds: I think, you know, we've proven to be
4:18
Eric Reynolds: pretty good at that, following our own. Right.
4:22
Eric Reynolds: Following our own instincts versus chasing trends.
4:26
Eric Reynolds: I think that's… I think that's been…
4:29
Eric Reynolds: kind of historically our strength. And our strength in opposition to the way Much of the industry operates.
4:40
Eric Reynolds: Right. Over the last several decades.
4:43
Tad Eggleston: I'll take… I'll add one thing and say that, certainly all through the years, you have appreciated both
4:53
Tad Eggleston: Craftsmanship, and people who…
4:59
Tad Eggleston: Utilize the… the inherent assets of comics.
5:04
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, I do… I mean, I… myself, personally, I'm a… I'm a huge craft nerd, I'm a cartoonist myself,
5:14
Eric Reynolds: So, before… so, yeah, so when… when you and I just started talking, you know, we talked… you brought up Wally Wood and 22 panels, and…
5:23
Eric Reynolds: You know, I… I… absolutely revere Wood's work from a craft perspective. Oh, yeah. But then… I also…
5:36
Eric Reynolds: really value, personal expression.
5:40
Eric Reynolds: Utilizing the tools of the medium and having an idiosyncratic point of view.
5:47
Eric Reynolds: Something unique to say.
5:49
Eric Reynolds: And then… You know, utilizing the craft of comics, in the service of that.
5:56
Eric Reynolds: Whether you're a slick illustrator like Wood, or a much more highly stylized You know, unique cartoonist.
6:10
Eric Reynolds: whether it be a, you know, a Richard Sala,
6:15
Eric Reynolds: you know, I think of a cartoonist like Mark Beyer, who…
6:20
Eric Reynolds: is hardly a great… and we don't even publish Mike Beyer, he's just a cartoonist that I admire a lot.
6:26
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I'm seeing it.
6:29
Eric Reynolds: Hayes from Raw Magazine, and you know, Rory Hayes would be another good example, underground cartoonist, who.
6:37
Tad Eggleston: See, this is… there's a handful of people that I get to talk to.
6:43
Tad Eggleston: that I immediately have to be… all over…
6:49
Tad Eggleston: Google, because they toss out names that I don't know. There have been lots of different Roy Hayes. What's a Roy Hayes work?
6:58
Eric Reynolds: Rory. Rory. Rory.
7:00
Tad Eggleston: that would probably make a… Yes, that makes a very different… big difference in terms of Googling.
7:07
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't know who Roy Hayes is, but…
7:10
Tad Eggleston: There were, like, 4 different ones, from politicians to storytellers to…
7:15
Tad Eggleston: Sounds like somebody who drew, like, a Western comic.
7:19
Eric Reynolds: In the 40s.
7:23
Tad Eggleston: No, I hadn't gotten to looking up the comic side of…
7:28
Tad Eggleston: Roy Hayes, so… so… I don't know if there's ever been a Roy Hayes comics guy.
7:35
Tad Eggleston: But Rory Hayes looks cool.
7:38
Tad Eggleston: I like…
7:39
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, a real primitive, but singular voice in the underground comic scene. He died rather young.
7:48
Eric Reynolds: So he has a relatively small body of work, but really, really great, wild.
7:54
Eric Reynolds: Stuff.
7:57
Tad Eggleston: I'm looking… this is… my wife is an art teacher.
8:00
Tad Eggleston: And one of the… one of the,
8:05
Tad Eggleston: one of the assignments she has every semester is you have to do an artist biography, and she lets them do cartoonists, and even encourages it sometimes. She does frustrate them, because she has a list of acceptable sources. They can't just chat GPT
8:22
Tad Eggleston: Or even just Google, you know, she's like, you can try… she's like, I will allow you to Google, but then you will also list every website you use in detail.
8:34
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
8:34
Tad Eggleston: Or, you can go to my acceptable sources.
8:38
Tad Eggleston: But she was actually, surprised and delighted when I… when I told her that Lambiic is actually a…
8:48
Tad Eggleston: a comic shop in Belgium, not.
8:50
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yeah.
8:51
Tad Eggleston: Not just an encyclopedia of…
8:54
Eric Reynolds: That's right. It's actually in Amsterdam.
8:57
Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right. Amsterdam. I, I…
9:00
Tad Eggleston: I knew that, and I talked to,
9:06
Tad Eggleston: And I don't know if she's in Belgium right now or not, she's…
9:10
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I talked, I talked to,
9:13
Tad Eggleston: one of your… your… Leonie Bischoff, recently.
9:18
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yeah.
9:18
Tad Eggleston: So that had… that in my head.
9:22
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah. So, talk to me about the process of…
9:28
Tad Eggleston: finding things, because the other thing that I love about Fanagraphics, and maybe it's you guys split it up, and you each have areas, or… I don't know, but you have this mix of
9:42
Tad Eggleston: New works, both… original US and translated.
9:49
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
9:50
Tad Eggleston: And… re-printed, or… or… Collected.
9:59
Eric Reynolds: Or Kylo.
9:59
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, archival, that, that, like, is one part undergrounds, one part comic strips, one part…
10:10
Eric Reynolds: American.
10:11
Tad Eggleston: Golden Early Silver Age.
10:13
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I think that's fair.
10:15
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
10:16
Eric Reynolds: There's always… there's other… there's outliers, but I think that… I think those.
10:19
Tad Eggleston: And there's stuff that crosses the… but if I was gonna list what Vanna Graphics does, it's the archival that's got those three categories, and it's new stuff split between translations generally European, but more South American than any other country I know.
10:37
Tad Eggleston: And the occasional… East Asian.
10:42
Tad Eggleston: Though it looks like you're about to do more with that, because you just started… this year starts a new imprint, right?
10:48
Eric Reynolds: Yep, that's right.
10:50
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we gotta get into all the 50th year stuff in a minute.
10:54
Tad Eggleston: Hopefully, we can remember them all between us.
10:59
Tad Eggleston: But then, like, also… English language… current underground stuff, and or… less arc…
11:11
Tad Eggleston: I don't want to say less archival, but, like, more direct reprint than…
11:17
Tad Eggleston: than collected archival of underground, you know, the Phantographics Underground is kind of its own thing sometimes.
11:25
Tad Eggleston: And then, of course, you've also brought back, and I love you for this, and whoever… you have to tell me who's responsible for this. Who, A, brought all the Disney comics to begin with, but B, now has the Monthly Duck and Mickey books.
11:42
Tad Eggleston: Coming out again, because whoever… whoever decided to do that, thank you, thank you, and thank you.
11:50
Eric Reynolds: It was mostly Gary Groff who started
11:53
Eric Reynolds: who got us connected with Disney, and it was the Carl Barks Library that kick-started it all.
11:59
Eric Reynolds: We didn't really set out to become…
12:04
Eric Reynolds: you know, such a prolific publisher of Disney comics. It really started with just Carl Barks being the, kind of.
12:11
Eric Reynolds: One of the great white whales of… of…
12:15
Eric Reynolds: Cartoonists that, at the time, you know, still hadn't really been properly archived like that.
12:21
Eric Reynolds: Right. And then it just kind of grew organically from there, but we couldn't… we literally, I don't think we could do…
12:27
Eric Reynolds: most of the Disney stuff that we do without a fellow named David Gerstein.
12:31
Eric Reynolds: Who is an animated… an animation, kind of.
12:37
Eric Reynolds: Scholar, historian, and he's also just happens to be, like, the… most…
12:45
Eric Reynolds: well-informed, well-educated guy on Disney comics history that, that I know exists, at least in terms of North America.
12:54
Eric Reynolds: you know, you get into European Disney comics, that's kind of a…
12:58
Eric Reynolds: a whole nother beast, but, but yeah, David is just, a… a kind of,
13:06
Eric Reynolds: obsessive Disney fan who has really just knows…
13:13
Eric Reynolds: you know, there's so much Disney stuff out there.
13:16
Eric Reynolds: Like I said, like, there's been so much original work published in Europe.
13:21
Eric Reynolds: Yeah. Stuff that, like, I just, you know, I couldn't even be fully aware of if I wanted to be.
13:28
Eric Reynolds: But he is, so he can help us prioritize, like, what's the… what's the good shit that, you know, needs to be collected.
13:36
Tad Eggleston: I mean, you guys have done a fantastic job so far.
13:39
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
13:39
Tad Eggleston: at all, because, like.
13:41
Eric Reynolds: Oh my god.
13:41
Tad Eggleston: How could you?
13:42
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, my pocketbook won't allow it.
13:45
Tad Eggleston: So, you know, keep sending the free stuff.
13:49
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
13:50
Tad Eggleston: Well, that's.
13:50
Eric Reynolds: Started with barks, and then…
13:52
Eric Reynolds: And then the natural extension from there was the Don Rosa Library, which was also
13:58
Eric Reynolds: That was also very much,
14:01
Eric Reynolds: spearheaded by Gary. Gary and Don are peers and had known each other for decades. Don was actually one of the earliest Phantographics creators.
14:13
Eric Reynolds: Before he started working with Disney.
14:16
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
14:17
Eric Reynolds: so, you know, there's… and you've got Gary, who is… I guess about… 15 years older than me.
14:27
Eric Reynolds: And then you've got myself, and we've got different, you know, generational kind of, tastes and…
14:34
Eric Reynolds: Relationships, and I think it all helps each other.
14:38
Tad Eggleston: That leads perfectly to one of my favorite questions to ask. Give me your comics biography. Not your bibliography, but your biography.
14:47
Eric Reynolds: a story.
14:48
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, talk to me about, like, that.
14:50
Tad Eggleston: That first comic you remember reading and rereading, the first comic that you were proud to buy, you know, the comics that shaped who you are.
14:59
Eric Reynolds: I really don't remember a time when comics weren't in my life.
15:05
Eric Reynolds: I would wager it started with the newspapers, probably Peanuts, and even Garfield, and, you know, the popular stuff from the
15:16
Eric Reynolds: 70s and 80s, and then I also became a… just a comic book fan.
15:24
Eric Reynolds: From a very early age.
15:26
Eric Reynolds: I don't remember the first comic book I ever had, per se.
15:31
Eric Reynolds: I… I do have a vague memory of going to,
15:37
Eric Reynolds: the farmer's market in LA with my mom.
15:42
Eric Reynolds: And getting a… issue of Action Comics that was drawn by Kurt Swan.
15:50
Eric Reynolds: And I think at that point, I'd already had a couple of other issues, whether of action, or Superman, or World's Finest, or something.
15:59
Eric Reynolds: I do remember, like, a light bulb going off that,
16:03
Eric Reynolds: That this style that was drawn
16:07
Eric Reynolds: you know, that Superman was drawn in was, like.
16:10
Eric Reynolds: recognizable, that it was like, like, this looks like the other comics that I have, and…
16:17
Eric Reynolds: And it was the moment when, like, I realized there were credits, and that,
16:23
Eric Reynolds: This thing was drawn by Kurt Swan.
16:25
Eric Reynolds: Who was not the greatest.
16:28
Eric Reynolds: comic book artist, or anything, but he was… but he was really good, and he was really solid, and he was the first guy who's…
16:35
Eric Reynolds: name, I remember, like.
16:37
Tad Eggleston: Well, and he's also…
16:38
Eric Reynolds: I…
16:40
Tad Eggleston: absolutely indelibly tied to Superman.
16:42
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, he was, like, you know, he was arguably the quintessential.
16:46
Tad Eggleston: Right.
16:47
Eric Reynolds: But he was the first guy that I basically remember pairing up,
16:50
Eric Reynolds: The visual style with the name.
16:53
Eric Reynolds: And then, from there, it was just kind of like…
16:56
Eric Reynolds: I always approached comics as… from…
16:59
Eric Reynolds: a visual standpoint, I was always attracted to the drawing. So when I realized that, you know, that I could pin the drawing to the… to the specific artist, that kind of opened the floodgates, I think. And I was really young, I think, at that time, like, I don't even know, maybe 7?
17:17
Eric Reynolds: and…
17:21
Eric Reynolds: So, from there, it was just, like, I was just kind of obsessed. I grew up buying comics at 7-Eleven, then when I was about, probably…
17:30
Eric Reynolds: old enough to ride my bike, like, a mile or two. There was a little…
17:36
Eric Reynolds: kind of punk rock record store, newsstand in downtown Huntington Beach in the early 80s, where I grew up.
17:43
Eric Reynolds: that had comics, and I would ride my bike.
17:45
Eric Reynolds: There, just to go get comics.
17:48
Eric Reynolds: And then from there, I found out that there was, like, an actual comic book store about maybe 4 miles from my house, and…
17:57
Eric Reynolds: I had to beg my mom to drive me there. That would have been around, like, 5th grade, 6th grade, I think.
18:03
Tad Eggleston: You remember the name of the shop?
18:05
Eric Reynolds: Well, I do. It was, because I ended up working there for 5 years.
18:09
Tad Eggleston: That's such a common… such a common theme.
18:13
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, it was, the land of oohs and aahs, in Fountain Valley, California.
18:19
Eric Reynolds: And I started working there when I was 15. I worked for comics under the table.
18:26
Eric Reynolds: Of course. And then, you know…
18:28
Tad Eggleston: That's how most of us do it.
18:30
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, then eventually became a more, like, you know, permanent employee, and… And the… the original owner…
18:38
Eric Reynolds: whom I wasn't super crazy about. He sold the store to the manager, and he was a good friend.
18:45
Eric Reynolds: And, I ended up working for him for…
18:48
Tad Eggleston: Then your rate of comic pay got… got increased?
18:52
Eric Reynolds: A little bit.
18:53
Tad Eggleston: one comic an hour, it became two comics an hour. That's right, exactly.
18:58
Eric Reynolds: And when you worked at a store in those days, this was in the mid to late 80s, you know, there were few enough comics out… coming out that, you could read, like, almost literally everything coming out.
19:10
Tad Eggleston: Right.
19:11
Tad Eggleston: Right.
19:12
Eric Reynolds: And you'd have slow days, you know.
19:15
Tad Eggleston: That's much harder to do. Which is nothing to do.
19:18
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, yeah.
19:18
Tad Eggleston: much, much harder to do today. There's so many… it's hard to keep up, even… and I'll be the first to admit.
19:29
Tad Eggleston: some people would call me non-discerning, I call myself eclectic. I think that they're… you know, my version of what's good is much broader than a lot of people's versions of what's good, but I… I can't keep up
19:45
Tad Eggleston: With new good books coming out.
19:48
Tad Eggleston: Particularly if I want to catch up on any of the old good stuff that I either wasn't alive for or was too busy for.
19:57
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
19:58
Tad Eggleston: You know what I mean?
20:00
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and the great… and that's why working at that store, for me, personally, was so great, because
20:06
Eric Reynolds: I would… I basically just started reading stuff that I otherwise wouldn't have been purchasing.
20:12
Eric Reynolds: buying.
20:14
Eric Reynolds: And got a great education. You know, I've started particularly reading, like, Lovin' Rockets, and… and then the really big one was the Comics Journal.
20:25
Eric Reynolds: Reading the Comics Journal month-to-month in the 80s was…
20:31
Eric Reynolds: A big-time crash course in the business, the art form, the industry, the craft,
20:40
Eric Reynolds: And from there, I just, like, I, you know, it was just…
20:45
Eric Reynolds: I didn't set out to work in comics, but I also, like, in hindsight, like, it almost seemed sort of inevitable, because I was just, like.
20:51
Tad Eggleston: Right?
20:52
Eric Reynolds: completely obsessed.
20:53
Tad Eggleston: So,
20:57
Tad Eggleston: Tell me a couple of books that you don't think you would have picked up, except that, like, it was a slow day at the comic shop, and you decided to read that are among your favorites now.
21:08
Eric Reynolds: Well, when I first started working at the shop, I would have been, like.
21:13
Eric Reynolds: it was 1985, so I would have been, like, 14 or 15, and I was still mostly reading stuff like,
21:22
Eric Reynolds: John Burns Fantastic Four, and…
21:24
Tad Eggleston: It's just really good.
21:26
Eric Reynolds: And then, you know, from there…
21:30
Eric Reynolds: the next… like, it was a pretty traditional trajectory for people my age. From there, it went to, like, Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, I got really into that.
21:38
Eric Reynolds: And then, of course, you had 86, which was Watchmen and Dark Knight, and… Right.
21:45
Eric Reynolds: And, you know, so I, I was…
21:48
Eric Reynolds: My tastes were sort of, you know, refining at that time, and then…
21:54
Eric Reynolds: I don't know what the specific, like.
21:58
Eric Reynolds: you know, Rosebud Comics was, that… comic was that, that really helped me define
22:08
Eric Reynolds: the types of comics that I really gravitated towards, but again, just working in the shop, I was surrounded by, like, there were so many anthologies coming out at the time.
22:19
Tad Eggleston: I didn't even realize…
22:19
Eric Reynolds: Alternative anthologies. Yeah, yeah, there's huge proliferation of alternative anthologies in the…
22:26
Eric Reynolds: Late 80s into the early 90s.
22:29
Eric Reynolds: where, you know, you just see so many great cartoonists, and .
22:36
Tad Eggleston: More things to look for at used bookshops.
22:38
Eric Reynolds: Hmm… Yeah, I mean, just…
22:42
Tad Eggleston: Your wife will thank you.
22:43
Eric Reynolds: I mean, obviously the big ones were, like, Raw and Weirdo.
22:47
Tad Eggleston: Right.
22:48
Eric Reynolds: But there were so many others. There was, like, bad news, which was a great,
22:55
Eric Reynolds: anthology edited by Mark Newgarden, who went on to write How to Read Nancy.
23:02
Eric Reynolds: street music, honk, I mean, there were all these… all these wild… Drawn a Quarterly started… the publisher, Drawn a Quarterly, started as a…
23:12
Tad Eggleston: As an anthology.
23:15
Tad Eggleston: Now I realize… I guess I was thinking more, like, anthologies like Heartbound, or even.
23:21
Eric Reynolds: No, no, no, like, purely.
23:22
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're talking the periodical anthologies. That I knew more of, but it's still… I'm always happy to hear more names, because I know the obvious ones, the Drawn and Quarterly, the…
23:35
Tad Eggleston: raw is…
23:37
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
23:38
Tad Eggleston: Original issues of Raw are on my holy grail list.
23:42
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right. Yeah, good luck. I don't have those either. I have a cutting of one or two.
23:49
Tad Eggleston: I am blessed that I have, they're…
23:54
Tad Eggleston: it was… I think it was one of the last things they published, their,
24:02
Tad Eggleston: Exquisite corpse.
24:04
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yeah. Okay.
24:06
Tad Eggleston: The, the three panels from each…
24:08
Tad Eggleston: I have a copy of that.
24:10
Eric Reynolds: Because.
24:12
Tad Eggleston: Bob Sikoriak's become a friend, so I discovered it the first time he was on, and I'm like, oh my god, that looks amazing. And I was so, like, all over it that my co-host, Tyler, tracked one down and gave it to me for Christmas. So I have…
24:26
Eric Reynolds: And Bob was a… was a regular presence in that scene.
24:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
24:32
Eric Reynolds: And then, really, for me, it was, like, the… I think the two guys that I really just kind of fell in love with, like, almost from the moment I first saw their work was, Dan Klaus and Chester Brown.
24:47
Eric Reynolds: Yummy firmer.
24:50
Eric Reynolds: They've come up.
24:51
Tad Eggleston: On this show from time to time.
24:53
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and then… and then from there, like, it was just like, okay, oh, oh, okay, this is the stuff. This is the shit that I like, and then it was like.
25:01
Eric Reynolds: By that point, Lemon rockets had already been going a little while.
25:05
Eric Reynolds: I don't remember.
25:07
Tad Eggleston: They started before you were working in the store, they started in 82… That's right.
25:10
Eric Reynolds: That's right, but then, you know, you start to go.
25:11
Tad Eggleston: We have a Loving Rockets book club. We're 70-some-odd episodes into it, because we go issue by issue. Really? Is that right? We do. We do, yeah.
25:21
Eric Reynolds: Holy shit.
25:22
Tad Eggleston: And actually, it's one of the coolest things ever.
25:24
Tad Eggleston: Because… In Issue 17,
25:28
Tad Eggleston: there was a letter from a woman named Maria Pena who described herself as a budding cartoonist, and it was a wonderful letter.
25:36
Tad Eggleston: And she talked a little bit about how she had a comic coming out, and she used both her first and last name and put herself in Australia, so I'm like, I'm gonna see if I can find her comic. I didn't find her comic, but I found Maria. So Maria…
25:49
Tad Eggleston: Burst guested on the show.
25:52
Tad Eggleston: just like you are right now, but we hit it off so much that she joined the book club. So, because of the letters page and Love & Rockets, I regularly talk to an El Salvadoran refugee in Australia or Malta, depending on which of her…
26:09
Tad Eggleston: Though right now, she's actually in El Salvador for Christmas. I could be talking to her tomorrow. I have to check in later today to see if we're on.
26:17
Eric Reynolds: That's awesome. You know, the single greatest thing about working in comics, I think, over 30 plus years is how much
26:24
Eric Reynolds: Smaller, it's made the world.
26:27
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
26:27
Eric Reynolds: In terms of making friends, in terms of discovering art.
26:33
Eric Reynolds: That's… that really has been one of the most gratifying, you know, aspects of working in comics as long, getting to meet people from around the world who kind of share a common interest.
26:45
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think… I think it's, like, just small of enough of a common interest that people, when they find their tribe, they really want to, like, hold on to them, because they don't necessarily have them locally, while just big enough of a common interest to really wind up
27:01
Tad Eggleston: with a… I mean, I laugh. Everybody talks about how it gets older and… and it… and with good reason. Harder and harder to make friends the older you get.
27:10
Eric Reynolds: Right? But for me, I've made more friends in my 40s than I did.
27:15
Tad Eggleston: at any other time in my life, just because I started this podcast.
27:20
Tad Eggleston: And, like, become more wired into the comics community. Right.
27:26
Tad Eggleston: You know, because comics, people like to cock comics, and then we discover we like baseball, too, and…
27:34
Eric Reynolds: That's right.
27:35
Tad Eggleston: You know, there's all sorts of stuff like that.
27:39
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so Dan Klaus and Chester Brown, Caitlin, McGurk is a big Chester Brown fan, too.
27:46
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I can believe that. Caitlin's a good friend, and she's got great taste.
27:52
Eric Reynolds: So I would… even though she's a little younger, I would expect the…
27:55
Eric Reynolds: She's also a scholar, and she knows her shit, so I'm not surprised.
27:59
Tad Eggleston: Well, but, but she actually listed as,
28:05
Tad Eggleston: what's… what's the… oh, why am I drawing a blank on the book? I hadn't read it when she talked about it.
28:12
Eric Reynolds: FSP clone?
28:14
Tad Eggleston: No, no, no.
28:16
Eric Reynolds: I never liked you.
28:17
Tad Eggleston: I Never Liked You. Okay. Was literally one of the first books that really got her into… Oh.
28:26
Tad Eggleston: I like comics.
28:30
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I feel like those comics, like, kept me from…
28:33
Eric Reynolds: You know, there's so many of us who read comics, you know, into high school, and then just kind of fall by the wayside.
28:41
Eric Reynolds: And those are the comics that kept me from falling by the wayside and maintaining an interest when I could have easily lost it. Because, like, I…
28:51
Eric Reynolds: I have to admit, I…
28:53
Eric Reynolds: you know, I can't even read, like, most mainstream comics anymore. I mean, I try to. I'll be attracted, like, visually by something, and…
29:01
Eric Reynolds: They just… They just don't do much of anything for me anymore. And… It's become…
29:10
Tad Eggleston: Pickier and pickier.
29:12
Eric Reynolds: I just read a comment called the… I just read the Absolute Martian Manhunter.
29:18
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love that book.
29:19
Eric Reynolds: the… the artwork's phenomenal. Javier Rodriguez is really, I think, one of the great… You know, mainstream artists,
29:29
Eric Reynolds: working today. It's just so… his…
29:32
Eric Reynolds: His sense of page composition and also color, his visual imagination is incredibly rich, and sophisticated.
29:44
Eric Reynolds: You know, and I kind of liked it, but I also just, like, I really just find myself lingering on the artwork, and I'll go, like, 5 pages and realize, like, I almost didn't even really read it. I was just kind of looking at it, and then have to go back and…
30:00
Tad Eggleston: Though, I do have to give some major props to Dennis Camp.
30:05
Tad Eggleston: The writer, if only because the other most visually stunning non…
30:17
Tad Eggleston: doesn't feel like a mainstream comic on the stands right now is Assorted Crisis Events, which is also his writing.
30:27
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't know that at all.
30:28
Tad Eggleston: Our artist is Eric Zowitzki.
30:33
Tad Eggleston: But, like, it too just plays with the medium.
30:38
Tad Eggleston: Right and left.
30:39
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, they're, they're…
30:41
Eric Reynolds: almost kind of… to an almost kind of meta, right. …degree, I guess that's, like.
30:47
Eric Reynolds: descending from, you know, Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, mostly.
30:52
Tad Eggleston: Right.
30:54
Eric Reynolds: But yeah, I mean, but I see, like, guys like him, who I think is really, really talented, or Trad Moore is another one. Like, I'll pick up anything he does, because I just think he's such an interesting artist, but…
31:08
Eric Reynolds: But I have to say, like, I… most of the time, I just sort of wish they were just…
31:12
Eric Reynolds: doing their own thing, something that wasn't tethered to an intellectual property. And that, you know, that's just up for.
31:19
Tad Eggleston: Well, and that I get. I mean, assorted… this is why, between the two, I prefer Assorted Crisis events, because that's… that's the creator-owned one.
31:29
Tad Eggleston: But… but I get that.
31:33
Tad Eggleston: Cause, I mean… A, it always feels like there's a little bit more… Oh, he did.
31:46
Tad Eggleston: cover homesick pilots? I'm sorry, I just started looking at Trad more art.
31:53
Eric Reynolds: He's a really interesting cartoonist.
31:55
Tad Eggleston: It is. I'm digging it.
31:57
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, it's a mixture of more tied to…
32:07
Tad Eggleston: Because you're more tied to a property, you often have certain restrictions on you.
32:15
Tad Eggleston: And…
32:17
Tad Eggleston: I mean, even if you're given a wide berth, you know, you didn't design the characters, so there's that restriction, I guess.
32:26
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't know, I mean, I don't… I don't… I didn't…
32:29
Eric Reynolds: I didn't come here to talk shit about mainstream comics.
32:32
Tad Eggleston: No, I'm not trying to talk shit about them. I'm trying to talk philosophically about them, Eric.
32:38
Eric Reynolds: Well, my, well, my, yeah, they, like… Yeah.
32:42
Tad Eggleston: I mean, because it is also one of the things that makes Martian Manhunter really special, is that…
32:47
Tad Eggleston: I don't think I've ever, even in the absolute line, which is reimagining Heroes.
32:56
Tad Eggleston: you know, it stands out as, like, a completely different character design than I've ever, like… It's still green.
33:08
Tad Eggleston: It's got that in common.
33:10
Eric Reynolds: Well, I would actually… actually, I… it is inspired by…
33:15
Eric Reynolds: I think it's Mark Badger's interpretation of the character. Okay. And I don't even remember… what…
33:24
Eric Reynolds: the series was, but I think it would have been in the 80s. But, there was a kind of reboot of that character
33:32
Eric Reynolds: drawn by Mark Badger, and he brought in this, like.
33:36
Eric Reynolds: Really abstract, almost kind of psychedelic look.
33:40
Tad Eggleston: I'm seeing it. I'm seeing it.
33:42
Eric Reynolds: And that's where that…
33:43
Tad Eggleston: It still has two eyes.
33:46
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right, but that's where that, that… that abstracted…
33:53
Eric Reynolds: version of the… of the… of the green guy comes from.
33:58
Tad Eggleston: No, I totally see that.
34:00
Eric Reynolds: But yeah, anyway, I mean, like… I feel like…
34:03
Tad Eggleston: They did actually do the Martian Manhunter series.
34:07
Tad Eggleston: in.
34:08
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, like I said, I can't remember where…
34:10
Eric Reynolds: what… what… was it a Martian Manhunter series?
34:12
Tad Eggleston: It was technically, it was technically Martian Manhunter Vol. 2.
34:19
Eric Reynolds: I remember being… Kind of drawn to that when it came out, because it was just so different looking.
34:26
Eric Reynolds: But, anyway, like… Yeah, I can't really, like, like…
34:30
Eric Reynolds: I can't really imagine, like, if you were a writer, that any… Great.
34:38
Eric Reynolds: Kind of concept or idea?
34:40
Eric Reynolds: that you might have that could be applied to, say, Batman.
34:45
Eric Reynolds: At this point, wouldn't be better served just being its own thing, and not… you know, like…
34:53
Eric Reynolds: Why does the world need another Batman story? I have no idea.
34:57
Tad Eggleston: I don't know why the world needs another Batman story, but it's the fact that the world needs another Batman story that they wind up getting made.
35:05
Tad Eggleston: Cause I've heard two… 2…
35:10
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I talk to tons of creators, and a lot of them in the mainstream, and the two things that I'll hear, even from people
35:18
Tad Eggleston: who…
35:21
Tad Eggleston: aren't in love and love with superheroes about why they'll tell stories there are… are twofold. First, sometimes coming up with the character is the hardest part.
35:32
Tad Eggleston: So if they've got a character to play with, it's easier for them to tell a story than…
35:40
Tad Eggleston: You know. And second, and tied to that, it's a business, and they have rent to pay, and insurance to pay for, and like, it's a quick, steady paycheck, rather than…
35:53
Eric Reynolds: That's 100% true, and that's why I don't begrudge anybody who.
35:56
Tad Eggleston: Right. No, no. No, no. And I think it's also why you get brilliance, because, like, they're honing those skills. I mean, I don't know if I buy as strongly into the idea that they build their name, and it actually crosses over. Unfortunately, I think that
36:15
Tad Eggleston: Too many superhero comics readers don't really know who's making their comics.
36:22
Tad Eggleston: Aww.
36:22
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
36:23
Tad Eggleston: But, it does give them a,
36:30
Tad Eggleston: A trial by fire, in terms of…
36:34
Tad Eggleston: Honing their skills in terms of getting used to deadlines, and in terms of deciding between good storytelling and beautiful pages, and, like, there's so much that goes into comics that you can only really learn by doing comics.
36:53
Tad Eggleston: That…
36:56
Tad Eggleston: Like, if you're lucky enough to be in a situation where you can learn to do it and get paid for it, rather than learn to do it and hope to sell it at a table at a teeny tiny con in a shopping mall on a…
37:09
Tad Eggleston: Sunday afternoon in… in December.
37:14
Tad Eggleston: Y-you know what I mean?
37:15
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
37:17
Tad Eggleston: I like that it exists for that. But yeah, no, I mean, I've noticed…
37:23
Tad Eggleston: Perhaps even more since I started the podcast and try to read
37:28
Tad Eggleston: tons of stuff. I find myself…
37:32
Tad Eggleston: Even more commonly issuing any license title
37:36
Tad Eggleston: Until I've already heard good things about it, unless it's by a very…
37:41
Tad Eggleston: select group of people that it's like, oh, no, they're gonna knock this out of the park. The fact that they're doing this means that they had a story to tell, not…
37:52
Tad Eggleston: That they just needed the paycheck.
37:55
Tad Eggleston: They're happy to get the paycheck, but… but, like… That sort of thing. Damn.
38:03
Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, just being weirdly philosophical. Let's get back to Fanographics books. Talk to me about…
38:11
Tad Eggleston: You said that, that, like, Each of the editorial…
38:16
Tad Eggleston: people have brought in their own sensibilities and whatnot. Talk to me about what are the Eric Reynolds' sensibilities? What books at Fanographics are there, because…
38:26
Tad Eggleston: Because you saw them and went, Let's do this.
38:31
Eric Reynolds: Well, I don't wanna…
38:34
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, without… let me… let me rephrase, because I've talked to… to… to…
38:41
Tad Eggleston: Paul Levitz a couple of times, and he's… he's pointed out that when you're in a certain position, like, saying, this is cool, makes it suddenly, like, make people…
38:52
Eric Reynolds: Well, no, I just…
38:53
Tad Eggleston: Currently.
38:55
Eric Reynolds: I more just, like, want to say, I don't want to, you know, like, take, you know, claim credit for discovering anything. A lot of the stuff that we publish is stuff
39:05
Eric Reynolds: You know, a lot of the artists that we publish are artists who were
39:09
Eric Reynolds: already working before we published them, and already doing good work, and, you know, and we sort of recognized it as such, and took a chance.
39:18
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I finally have a stronger connection with Fanographics because you guys put out the hardcover Santos Sisters.
39:26
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and that was, you know, that's a… that's sort of a great example. They were already doing the comics with Floating World. Floating World, if you don't know, is an incredible
39:37
Eric Reynolds: retail shop in Portland, Oregon, and also.
39:41
Tad Eggleston: Well, and they'd actually started doing the books all by themselves, but then Floating World said, hey… That's right.
39:48
Eric Reynolds: That's right, they did, I think, at least the first issue or two by themselves before they connected with Floating World, and…
39:55
Tad Eggleston: I remember there being a little bit of a snafu when, like, the second printing popped up on Lunar, and everybody's like, well, what about the first printing? And they're like, the first printing was 400 copies. They're gone!
40:09
Eric Reynolds: That's funny.
40:11
Eric Reynolds: But so I was already aware of the series because, I just, you know, I pay attention to everything that Floating Rogue does.
40:19
Eric Reynolds: And so I was already a fan before we started publishing it.
40:25
Eric Reynolds: And I suppose that's true of, you know, a lot of the stuff that I acquire for the company.
40:32
Eric Reynolds: But I think, you know, to answer your question, like, I…
40:35
Eric Reynolds: I tend to gravitate towards more… The more contemporary stuff.
40:41
Eric Reynolds: The more… the… the new work that just kind of excites me, and you know, that I…
40:49
Eric Reynolds: that I just…
40:50
Eric Reynolds: respond to for whatever reason, and it can be for a variety of reasons. It could be for the art, it could be for the subject matter,
40:59
Eric Reynolds: But, you know, like I said, everything that… pretty much everything that we publish is…
41:06
Eric Reynolds: acquired either by myself or Gary,
41:10
Eric Reynolds: And then also these days, Conrad Groth, Gary's son, also acquires a number of books that we publish, and each of us have our own
41:19
Eric Reynolds: Our own taste and instincts, and…
41:25
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and I… you know, I think we're… I think we're pretty good at it.
41:31
Eric Reynolds: That's, like, his… that's, like, the closest I think I'd like to get to, like, hubris, is, like…
41:36
Eric Reynolds: I think… I think I've been doing it long enough that I know that,
41:41
Eric Reynolds: that I have confidence in our taste, you know, and our instincts on… on that front.
41:50
Tad Eggleston: So… 50 years… of Phanographics. I know that…
41:58
Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to see if there's… there's any official
42:02
Tad Eggleston: press release. I know that you're doing facsimile editions.
42:06
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't think so.
42:06
Tad Eggleston: time?
42:07
Eric Reynolds: I don't think we've put out any kind of official press release. We've done some… Okay.
42:12
Eric Reynolds: Some logo branding stuff, and we've got some things cooking in terms of these facsimile editions.
42:18
Tad Eggleston: Well, is there anything cool that you can tell me beyond the facsimile editions, which are definitely…
42:24
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm… I go back and forth on how much I like the Fast Emily editions. I love them for those books that are actually worth reading, that are too expensive for people to buy.
42:34
Eric Reynolds: Right.
42:34
Tad Eggleston: love… so, like, you guys doing Fast Simile Editions are… is, like, kind of amazing. I would love Fast Simile Editions of, say, Raw Magazine.
42:43
Eric Reynolds: Right, right.
42:44
Tad Eggleston: There are certain things that I wish were never out of print.
42:48
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, well, that's sort of where I was coming from, when…
42:53
Eric Reynolds: I wanted to start doing these,
42:56
Eric Reynolds: you know, I go to the comic shop, and I see, like, you know, a random issue of Marvel Team Up from 1978 that they've done a facsimile edition of, and… and I don't really understand it. Like, I'm like, who's buying this, you know? Like, what's… and… and…
43:11
Eric Reynolds: But then I also thought about,
43:14
Eric Reynolds: how, when I first started getting into comics, there were certain comics, and R. Chrome's a great example,
43:23
Eric Reynolds: there were certain comics of his that were, like, in print for, you know… by the time I discovered them, they'd been in print for 20 years, or at least 15 years. And, you know, you could always… there are still, to this day, I went up to… I was in Victoria
43:39
Eric Reynolds: British Columbia this weekend, and went to a great comic shop, Legends, owned by Gareth Gowden.
43:45
Eric Reynolds: And, he had a bunch of undergrounds. I'm a big fan of underground comics, and…
43:52
Eric Reynolds: he had, multiple copies of, R. Crumb's People's Comics, which was just a single-issue comic that Crumb did in the early 70s, I think, early to mid-70s, and…
44:05
Eric Reynolds: it's one of those comics you can just sort of still find, because it probably went through multiple printings, you know, issues of Zap that,
44:15
Eric Reynolds: That… that there… the comic book format is the perfect delivery device for that work.
44:23
Eric Reynolds: And so I just thought, like, huh, I wonder if… if this would fly, like, if we did, you know, an 8-ball number 1 and a Leather Rockets number 1, like, would there be…
44:32
Eric Reynolds: an audience in 2026 for them. And I really don't know, I mean, time will tell, but
44:39
Eric Reynolds: But I just loved the idea of actually doing single issues that I felt, like, sort of.
44:46
Eric Reynolds: Warranted, you know, being in that
44:49
Eric Reynolds: You know, being re-released in that original…
44:53
Eric Reynolds: format, because I saw so many of them at the comic shop that I just kind of didn't quite understand, like, why'd they choose this one, you know?
45:00
Eric Reynolds: And I don't even mean that critically, I mean it, I mean.
45:03
Tad Eggleston: No, no, I think there are… there are a lot of us who look at them.
45:07
Eric Reynolds: You know, like, why a random issue of…
45:10
Eric Reynolds: Secret Wars or something, I don't know.
45:12
Tad Eggleston: Well, they actually did all of Secret Wars.
45:15
Tad Eggleston: Fair. Fair enough.
45:17
Eric Reynolds: I didn't know that.
45:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they did do all of Secret Wars. I didn't buy them, because I actually have 3 sets of the original.
45:23
Tad Eggleston: The first comic I ever remember buying, I was 4 years old, was Secret Wars number 1.
45:30
Tad Eggleston: And it happened.
45:31
Tad Eggleston: Because I'd been… I'd been… I'd been going back and forth. I had both, World's Finest, because it had Batman and Superman.
45:40
Tad Eggleston: and a Marvel team-up, because it had Spider-Man and whoever in my hands, and I couldn't decide between the two of them, and then up by the register was Secret Wars, and it had ALL the heroes. Sure. And it cost, like, 25 cents more, so I had to beg and plead
45:58
Tad Eggleston: But… but more heroes meant better to me at that age, and… and I… and I won. I think I had to give up a little bit of candy at the… because… because they're in… in Wheaton, Illinois.
46:09
Tad Eggleston: There is still… a store called The Popcorn Shop that is literally… Maybe…
46:18
Tad Eggleston: 2 feet wider than its door?
46:21
Tad Eggleston: So it's just like this hallway between stores. In fact, there's bricks on either side, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's one of those, like, they connected the buildings on the street by making
46:34
Tad Eggleston: And… now, I guess, the cheapest candy is, like.
46:40
Tad Eggleston: At least a nickel, but at the time, like, half the candy…
46:44
Tad Eggleston: In the jars was, like, a penny apiece, and the expensive candy was a nickel.
46:49
Tad Eggleston: So, you could go in with, like, 25 cents, 50 cents, and FILL.
46:54
Tad Eggleston: a bag, so my dad and I used to walk downtown to go to the comic shop and the popcorn shop, and I think I'd had 50 cents to spend at the popcorn shop that I turned into 25 cents in order to get Secret Wars number 1.
47:13
Eric Reynolds: It's funny, I always… I always gravitated toward the teen books, too, as a little kid, because
47:19
Eric Reynolds: I think, and it speaks to, like, why…
47:22
Eric Reynolds: what I do love about the genre of superhero comics, which is just the colorful costumes, and, I was always
47:34
Eric Reynolds: I… looking back, I realized, like, I really was, like, just responding…
47:40
Eric Reynolds: Visually, in a very, like, visceral way.
47:45
Eric Reynolds: To the… to the designs and the colors,
47:49
Eric Reynolds: as much as I was the stories, you know, I just kind of got a charge from the way they looked, and I still do, that's, like, the thing, you know, I still love Jack Kirby.
48:00
Eric Reynolds: I could care less about reading a Jack Kirby comic, but I've got…
48:04
Tad Eggleston: You know, like… We have a…
48:06
Eric Reynolds: bookshelves of Jack Kirby comics here on my shelves.
48:09
Tad Eggleston: We have a…
48:10
Eric Reynolds: look at.
48:10
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we have a Jack Kirby Fourth World Book Club that we're nearing the end of his Fourth World. We've been going
48:18
Tad Eggleston: month by month, we've been reading them as they came out, and I can attest,
48:24
Tad Eggleston: that you're not wrong to care less about reading a Jack Kirby comic.
48:31
Tad Eggleston: There are things that could be amazing.
48:34
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right, right.
48:37
Eric Reynolds: No, there's concepts in there.
48:39
Tad Eggleston: Right.
48:41
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, but the… the… but the just… the… the punch that they…
48:46
Eric Reynolds: that they pack, you know, is… visually is just, you know, still something that I get a…
48:53
Eric Reynolds: a real charge from. And it's why I still have so many
48:58
Eric Reynolds: Jack Kirby books on my shelf.
49:01
Eric Reynolds: And it's why… and it's why I can enjoy
49:05
Eric Reynolds: you know, Jack Kirby and Robert Crum.
49:08
Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
49:13
Tad Eggleston: he brought up Robert Crum, and, and, like, I'm gonna preview this weekend's recording, one of my favorite single issues of the year.
49:24
Tad Eggleston: was… what is it, paranoia…
49:27
Eric Reynolds: Tales of paranoia.
49:29
Tad Eggleston: Toys of Paranoia by Robert Crum.
49:32
Tad Eggleston: But what I couldn't figure out, and I don't know if I even want you to answer this question.
49:38
Tad Eggleston: One of the reasons it was my favorite single issues of the year is I couldn't figure out if Crumb Has Gone Crazy, or if it was brilliant satire.
49:50
Tad Eggleston: And if he's gone crazy, I don't know if I want to know.
49:54
Eric Reynolds: Well, I've…
49:55
Tad Eggleston: And if it was brilliant satire, it was really brilliant and subtle satire.
50:01
Eric Reynolds: I mean, I guess…
50:02
Tad Eggleston: he has gone crazy, I think… I think there's, like, something inkling in the back of his head that, like, knows it.
50:10
Eric Reynolds: there's a self-awareness to Crum that, that you can't deny. And that shows in that comic, because he…
50:20
Eric Reynolds: espouses, you know, some points of view that I think
50:25
Eric Reynolds: It's… it's pretty easy to say that most, you know, most of us
50:30
Eric Reynolds: Most of my like-minded peers don't agree with at all.
50:34
Tad Eggleston: But the fact that…
50:35
Eric Reynolds: It can make you read it, and…
50:37
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Since I'm an educator, and a lot of it is about vaccines, I will say, people who understand science at all don't agree with
50:47
Tad Eggleston: Sure!
50:48
Eric Reynolds: I am, I'm…
50:49
Tad Eggleston: And are hugely dangerous. I just… you don't have to, because, you know, he's worked for you, but I need to make clear
50:56
Tad Eggleston: Vaccines, safe. I'm autistic, they didn't cause my autism. My autism isn't a bad thing.
51:03
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right. No, I'm with you 100%, and… but it is… it does… you know, but I love that comic in its own way.
51:11
Tad Eggleston: I did too.
51:13
Tad Eggleston: I was sometimes… Comfortable loving that comic.
51:16
Eric Reynolds: For sure, for sure, but he is such a natural woman. But that was part of his brilliance.
51:20
Eric Reynolds: He's a natural entertainer, which is kind of funny to say about someone who's such a…
51:26
Eric Reynolds: A lifelong iconoclast, but he has such
51:30
Eric Reynolds: great instincts as a storyteller that,
51:36
Eric Reynolds: You know, he somehow pulls it off, and it's been…
51:41
Eric Reynolds: you know, I've had this conversation with a few people, and it's kind of funny, because, like, almost to… you know, you… I don't think I've heard anybody tell me that they dislike that comic.
51:52
Eric Reynolds: and I talk to a lot of cartoonists, and we're all just kind of, like.
51:56
Eric Reynolds: oh my god, he's still got.
51:58
Tad Eggleston: No, I've even read a handful of reviews that were very upset about the position of the comic, but if you actually read the review, you could see that they had a grudging
52:11
Tad Eggleston: respect for the way it was done. It's like… it's like, I don't want to like this comic more than I don't like this comic.
52:21
Eric Reynolds: I keep telling myself, imagine how boring it would be if he had, like, totally sensible, agreeable opinions on everything.
52:28
Eric Reynolds: And I think you could draw that line through all of his work, you know? Oh, absolutely.
52:32
Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
52:33
Eric Reynolds: He's made a career of, you know, Making people uncomfortable by confronting
52:39
Eric Reynolds: You know, very uncomfortable truths about… about… people.
52:45
Eric Reynolds: And about society, and…
52:48
Eric Reynolds: I don't think this is all that different, and I don't think he's gone crazy. I think he can harbor
52:54
Eric Reynolds: You know, views different from my own without necessarily
52:59
Eric Reynolds: Having to label him as crazy.
53:03
Tad Eggleston: And that wasn't necessarily the best terminology.
53:07
Eric Reynolds: No, no, but I know what you mean, yeah. And, well, I think it's fair, because…
53:13
Eric Reynolds: he brings it up himself. I mean, I think it even says, like, on the cover, something like is, you know… I'm paraphrasing, but it's something to the effect of, like, you know, is he a… is he a truth teller or a crazy person?
53:26
Eric Reynolds: Right. He knows, he knows that, the jury is out.
53:34
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I think where it… Where it wound up… Both.
53:42
Tad Eggleston: attracting me, because it humanizes… I mean, because one of the great values of it is it humanizes a lot of people that we…
53:51
Tad Eggleston: People of our political and, and, and, academic bent tend to…
54:04
Tad Eggleston: Diminish in ways that if you were doing it because…
54:08
Tad Eggleston: of their gender, or their color, or anything like that. We'd be absolutely appalled, but… but yet we're able to allow it because of
54:19
Tad Eggleston: A dumb position that they hold, or… whatever.
54:25
Tad Eggleston: So, like… To be able to… to…
54:31
Tad Eggleston: Well, to be forced to be put into the position of, oh, This isn't a bad person.
54:37
Tad Eggleston: I mean, not just from…
54:40
Tad Eggleston: my thoughts on crumb to begin with, but, like, the way the book is portrayed, okay, no, this isn't a person who's inherently reprehensible.
54:49
Tad Eggleston: I just really, really disagree with them on…
54:52
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, yeah.
54:55
Tad Eggleston: Had, had its own really…
55:04
Tad Eggleston: strong value.
55:08
Tad Eggleston: But… but for me, one of the things that made it even more comf… uncomfortable than most crumb is, like, most crumb, I feel like…
55:17
Tad Eggleston: the… Most crumb, I feel like the… The things he's pushing against?
55:27
Tad Eggleston: Are… are things that have… Have to do with societal mores regarding what's essentially personal beliefs or decisions.
55:41
Tad Eggleston: You know, whereas in this one, it's like, no, if too many people, like.
55:47
Tad Eggleston: Like, South Carolina has a measles epidemic right now. You know, this is not a societal moray that affects individuals. This is a societal moray
56:00
Tad Eggleston: for society.
56:02
Tad Eggleston: And that just, you know, it's always that weird… I mean…
56:08
Tad Eggleston: Just in general, that's the balance of freedom, you know? You know, freedom is the ability to do the things that you want to do and whatnot, but nobody argues that that crosses to murder.
56:24
Eric Reynolds: Right.
56:24
Tad Eggleston: oh, I want to be free to… to kill you, and… and we're the land of the free, so unless you can kill me first, I should be allowed to? I mean, I guess there are some Second Amendment people who are very close to that at this point, but…
56:41
Eric Reynolds: Right.
56:43
Tad Eggleston: So yeah, no, I thought it was a brilliant book.
56:50
Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, without… without asking you to… to…
56:54
Tad Eggleston: to dish any dirt or anything, like, was there any…
56:58
Tad Eggleston: fear at Fanographics? Putting… I mean, you knew what was in it ahead of time, you knew the possibility…
57:06
Eric Reynolds: No, no fear, partly because… you know.
57:12
Eric Reynolds: I was just… I was so excited to just read it, and when I did, I was so… I was so…
57:19
Eric Reynolds: I was just so excited that he did a new book for the first time in, like, 15 years or more.
57:25
Tad Eggleston: Right.
57:26
Eric Reynolds: And that he still had it, you know? I mean…
57:30
Eric Reynolds: I would almost argue that I think his drawing has gotten better. I mean, there are.
57:34
Tad Eggleston: I think it has.
57:35
Eric Reynolds: There are panels in that book that I can't believe, you know, he drew in 2025.
57:41
Eric Reynolds: Because they're equal to anything he's ever done, and…
57:47
Eric Reynolds: So, if I could get back…
57:48
Tad Eggleston: Actually, I mean, from my perspective, it felt like he slowed down.
57:55
Eric Reynolds: I don't know. I don't know, but I… but I…
57:57
Tad Eggleston: I don't know either, but it felt like he took all of those tools and gifts that he's had forever, and…
58:06
Tad Eggleston: Allowed himself to breathe while making the comic.
58:11
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I mean…
58:12
Tad Eggleston: Maybe that's just because it had been 15 years that I assumed that sum, but…
58:17
Tad Eggleston: But that, to me was the biggest difference, is the type of stuff that I'm used to seeing because somebody's working on a tight deadline or whatnot, and I just gotta get through this.
58:26
Tad Eggleston: That didn't feel like, you know, felt like each page was crafted.
58:31
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, crumbs always.
58:32
Tad Eggleston: Who's been.
58:32
Eric Reynolds: kind of a… He's been both a fast artist, but a patient artist at the same time.
58:40
Tad Eggleston: Right.
58:40
Eric Reynolds: He's obsessive, so he gets to work in…
58:44
Eric Reynolds: But I've never… I don't think I've ever read anything he's ever done that I felt like he rushed. I feel like he knows… he knows the pace he needs to work at for the work to be what he wants it to be.
58:55
Eric Reynolds: And I don't think there's anybody who's really ever been any better at it. And so to go back to your question about whether there was any fear about putting it out, any repercussions,
59:05
Eric Reynolds: Surprisingly, there really wasn't, because I understand the question. It's not a totally unfair question, but
59:13
Eric Reynolds: But I know for myself and for Gary and other people in the office,
59:17
Eric Reynolds: We just had the confidence to know that if…
59:21
Eric Reynolds: if we were as excited about this, even though, you know, I'm a fully vaccinated educated adult.
59:29
Tad Eggleston: Alright.
59:29
Eric Reynolds: I, you know, I don't… I don't listen to Joe Rogan, or,
59:35
Eric Reynolds: you know, or ascribed to some of the… some of the conspiracies that Crum Puts in there, but,
59:45
Eric Reynolds: But that's okay. I don't… I don't see the… I mean, I guess… I guess on one level, he must have meant it as a kind of polemic,
59:54
Eric Reynolds: Or he wouldn't have done it.
59:56
Eric Reynolds: You know, like, he had opinions that he wanted to get across, but like I said, I also feel like he's also an entertainer, and he found a way
1:00:06
Eric Reynolds: Or his obsessions on that front.
1:00:10
Eric Reynolds: To… to work for an audience, regardless of, you know, who the audience was, in the same way that, you know, his… his…
1:00:20
Eric Reynolds: You know, other… other… You know, kind of transgressive impulses in his younger days, and… You know, other…
1:00:30
Eric Reynolds: other less-than-popular points of view that he's held his entire career. He's, you know, he's been able to get across. And you have to bear in mind that this is a guy who has been so…
1:00:45
Eric Reynolds: you know, so… He's been an iconoclast and an anti-authoritarian
1:00:54
Eric Reynolds: For his whole life, and he came by it extremely honestly, if you've, you know, if you've read
1:01:00
Eric Reynolds: like Dan Adele's recent bio of the man, you, you know, it comes across very clearly.
1:01:07
Eric Reynolds: You know, he sort of earned his… his,
1:01:14
Eric Reynolds: His inherent, you know, suspicion of the world.
1:01:19
Eric Reynolds: He's earned it very… he's come by it very honestly. And whether, you know, it's…
1:01:29
Eric Reynolds: you know, the Vietnam War, or…
1:01:33
Eric Reynolds: You know, the war on drugs, up through today, and, vaccines, like, it's…
1:01:40
Eric Reynolds: I don't feel like he's crazy in Tales of Paranoia, because I feel like it completely re… enforces everything
1:01:51
Eric Reynolds: that you already knew about him, even if, in this particular case, I don't agree with him as much as I might have on, you know, other… Right.
1:02:00
Eric Reynolds: It's really quite masterful.
1:02:04
Eric Reynolds: Because, you know, can you imagine if,
1:02:08
Eric Reynolds: if Steve Ditko, you know, did a…
1:02:12
Eric Reynolds: Comic, it would be completely unreadable.
1:02:14
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I wasn't quite gonna go there, but I was gonna ask kind of a similar itch question.
1:02:27
Tad Eggleston: And this might touch on the hubris that you don't want to show any of, but how much do you think
1:02:36
Tad Eggleston: Fanographics publishing it.
1:02:38
Tad Eggleston: Versus…
1:02:40
Tad Eggleston: some fly-by-night, or what… I mean, there are a handful of other publishers who I could see publishing it that would have the same gravitas. How much do you think your publishing it contributes to…
1:02:52
Tad Eggleston: The fact that… It's given a great…
1:02:57
Tad Eggleston: deal of thought, rather than just the knee-jerk, oh, it's anti-vax!
1:03:03
Tad Eggleston: Get it away from me.
1:03:05
Eric Reynolds: I think I can answer that in a way that,
1:03:08
Eric Reynolds: is sincere. I think the greatest…
1:03:11
Eric Reynolds: Thing that we were able to do for that comic was put a $6 price tag on it and publish, you know, a
1:03:18
Eric Reynolds: you know, 15,000 copies.
1:03:21
Eric Reynolds: and just get it out there as a comic book. I think if… if anybody else had done it.
1:03:27
Eric Reynolds: You know, it would have been a $15 book, with a much smaller run, a little more collector-oriented, and that's… that's really…
1:03:37
Eric Reynolds: I think one of the great things about that book is that, it's just like a…
1:03:42
Eric Reynolds: A mass market comic book.
1:03:47
Tad Eggleston: You're doing a… Studio edition of Carl Barks.
1:03:52
Eric Reynolds: We're doing two, actually.
1:03:54
Tad Eggleston: Are you?
1:03:58
Tad Eggleston: I have the Diamond Edition just because I wanted the bigger pages, but the Studio Edition also looks…
1:04:07
Tad Eggleston: I'm flipping through some of the stuff that's already been announced for this year right now. One of the things I noticed, and I don't know who gets to be involved in this, but I'm looking…
1:04:19
Tad Eggleston: a lot of the Peanuts library is being… re…
1:04:24
Tad Eggleston: reprinted, going back to print, becoming available again. Yeah. And I'm just going through… Some of the… the…
1:04:35
Tad Eggleston: I mean, aside from Seth being involved in almost all of them.
1:04:39
Tad Eggleston: You've got… All of the hardcovers.
1:04:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Al Roker, Robert Smigel, Billie Jean King.
1:04:46
Eric Reynolds: Barack Obama.
1:04:46
Tad Eggleston: shadow with.
1:04:48
Tad Eggleston: John Waters.
1:04:51
Eric Reynolds: You're bearing the lead. Barack Obama.
1:04:53
Tad Eggleston: Well, I just hadn't gotten that far. I'm going up.
1:04:58
Tad Eggleston: Whoopi Goldberg.
1:05:01
Tad Eggleston: Jonathan Franzen, Matt Groening, Garrison Keeler, and see, see, the Barack Obama one must not be among the ones being reprinted there.
1:05:10
Eric Reynolds: It was the… it was the second-to-last volume.
1:05:13
Tad Eggleston: Okay, but, like, who… who gets to… to reach out to those people? What… what experience? I mean…
1:05:24
Eric Reynolds: Most of those were Gary, okay.
1:05:26
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:05:26
Eric Reynolds: you know, or an assistant in our office just trying to navigate, you know, publicists and whatnot. But it was a lot of fun. We started publishing the Complete Peanuts around
1:05:39
Eric Reynolds: 2004, almost?
1:05:41
Tad Eggleston: Another thing that I would love to have all of, but there are too many.
1:05:46
Tad Eggleston: One day. I mean, the problem…
1:05:48
Eric Reynolds: 6. It's…
1:05:49
Tad Eggleston: The problem is one, yeah, but for me, with the peanuts, with the EC, with that sort, it's one part money, but it's like three parts my wife going, where are you gonna put them?
1:06:01
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:06:03
Tad Eggleston: I get it, I get it.
1:06:05
Tad Eggleston: It was…
1:06:06
Eric Reynolds: It was really fun when we started the Complete Peanuts.
1:06:10
Eric Reynolds: to just brainstorm who would be good introduction writers. And I do think that's one of the things that we brought to the table,
1:06:18
Eric Reynolds: in that list of names you just read. We cast a wider net than just, you know.
1:06:24
Eric Reynolds: I don't know.
1:06:25
Eric Reynolds: another cartoonist, or what have you. Right.
1:06:30
Eric Reynolds: We tried to think of people who had, you know, a cultural
1:06:36
Eric Reynolds: Either, either, you know, insight or… or a cultural currency that, was worthy of Charles Schultz.
1:06:45
Eric Reynolds: you know, his work. I mean, Schultz is, like.
1:06:49
Eric Reynolds: I… he's… to my mind, he's the Beatles of comics. He's…
1:06:54
Eric Reynolds: He's the… he's the guy that everybody knows, and for the most part, everybody
1:07:01
Eric Reynolds: gives credit to and likes. It's not…
1:07:03
Tad Eggleston: If they don't…
1:07:04
Eric Reynolds: Oh, amazing.
1:07:06
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they don't love them, they respect them. Right. And if you… and if you don't like it, you know, it's… it almost comes off as a little bit of a contrarian.
1:07:14
Eric Reynolds: You know, knee-jerk position.
1:07:15
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, just with the Beatles thing, I know a handful of people that will say, I don't like the Beatles, but none of them will say that the Beatles are bad, or that they don't understand. In fact, they'll often say, I know this is an unpopular opinion, and I respect their talent, but I don't like the Beatles. They're just not my cup of tea. It's like… it's like they're aware that
1:07:39
Tad Eggleston: That not only is it so unpopular of opinion that they need to prep you for it, but that, like, it's earned that status, not just…
1:07:48
Tad Eggleston: Flavor of the week.
1:07:50
Eric Reynolds: But it's so unimpeachably great, to my mind, his work.
1:07:55
Eric Reynolds: that it is like the Beatles, and it's the kind of thing, like, you ever watch, like, a, you know, like a Beatles documentary or something, and…
1:08:03
Eric Reynolds: you know, all the talking heads talking about how great the Beatles are, none of them
1:08:08
Eric Reynolds: are as great as the Beatles, you know what I mean? Like, you can't… you can't… it's almost impossible to find someone who can speak with an authority on the subject
1:08:20
Eric Reynolds: That, you know, that… that is…
1:08:22
Eric Reynolds: that is up to the task of living up to that reputation that's already there, and I think Schultz is kind of like that.
1:08:32
Eric Reynolds: He's just, you know, what…
1:08:34
Eric Reynolds: what could another cartoonist say, you know, say about… I mean, I shouldn't say that, because I think, you know, there are… there's a generation of cartoonists like Seth.
1:08:43
Eric Reynolds: and Chris Ware and Ivan Brunetti.
1:08:45
Eric Reynolds: and Dan Klaus, and Art Spiegelman,
1:08:50
Eric Reynolds: Who have done a tremendous job of
1:08:54
Eric Reynolds: rehabilitating Schultz's reputation. There was a time where… where Schultz was, like.
1:09:02
Eric Reynolds: sort of the way people perceived Paul McCartney in the 80s as being, you know, sort of lacking a certain amount of,
1:09:10
Eric Reynolds: depth, or gravitas, or… or whatever. I'm sort of… sort of stop…
1:09:16
Eric Reynolds: started being taken for granted a little bit. And I think…
1:09:21
Eric Reynolds: if there's anything I hope the Complete Peanuts accomplished, it was to really just…
1:09:30
Eric Reynolds: Just poo-poo that, you know, that train of thought, because it really is,
1:09:35
Eric Reynolds: You know, one of the unimpeachably great bodies of work in the history of the.
1:09:38
Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
1:09:40
Eric Reynolds: Like, I don't even think you could argue.
1:09:43
Eric Reynolds: Otherwise, whether you personally really respond to it or not.
1:09:47
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:09:51
Tad Eggleston: as I'm going through, through upcoming books, there, there, there are a couple I want to talk about first. I think this is the first… yep.
1:10:00
Tad Eggleston: complete collection, I think the first time, of Joe Matt's Peep… Peep Show?
1:10:05
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yeah, I've been working on that, just this week. It's a project very near and dear to my heart.
1:10:14
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I know… I know that you guys did the… the final Peep show.
1:10:20
Eric Reynolds: We did, yeah.
1:10:21
Tad Eggleston: Earlier ones as well, or…
1:10:23
Eric Reynolds: No, we… the only one we published was the posthumous, 15th issue, but, right.
1:10:29
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, that came out after he passed away.
1:10:33
Eric Reynolds: But it was something that I talked to Joe about doing before he died, about doing the complete peep show, and we just kind of never got around to it.
1:10:44
Eric Reynolds: And… I'm super excited to do it. I've kind of made it my mission a little bit to…
1:10:50
Eric Reynolds: collect, you know, and maybe, you know, canonize some of the great works of the 90s and 80s that I
1:11:00
Eric Reynolds: you know, that I feel like really defined my aesthetic points of view.
1:11:06
Eric Reynolds: And a lot of that is, you know, stuff that Phantographics publish, but, but also, you know, extends to… to someone like Joe, who…
1:11:14
Eric Reynolds: even though Phanographics didn't publish Pete's show, he was, you know, he was… An artist who was just…
1:11:24
Eric Reynolds: working in a mode of comics and cartooning that, you know, he could have easily been a fan of graphics artists, he just happened to land at Drawing Quarterly.
1:11:35
Eric Reynolds: So I've been working on that collection,
1:11:39
Eric Reynolds: with my friend Sammy Harcombe, a cartoonist. Sammy… was, was…
1:11:46
Eric Reynolds: basically tasked, with kind of sorting through Joe's archives.
1:11:52
Eric Reynolds: From the Matt family, particularly Joe's sister, Monica.
1:11:57
Eric Reynolds: And so, we've been kind of slowly chipping away at it for over a year now, and it's, just about to go to press and come out this summer.
1:12:06
Eric Reynolds: And I'm… I'm super excited about it. It's a complete…
1:12:11
Eric Reynolds: collection of all 15 issues. It's got a fantastic
1:12:15
Eric Reynolds: afterward by, Diana Schutz, the longtime comics editor, and who is a close personal friend of Joe's.
1:12:25
Tad Eggleston: Anna Schutz was one of the first editorial names that caught my eye.
1:12:30
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:12:30
Tad Eggleston: paying, really.
1:12:31
Eric Reynolds: Diane?
1:12:31
Tad Eggleston: to.
1:12:32
Eric Reynolds: Diana's one of the great Great prose.
1:12:36
Eric Reynolds: Great.
1:12:38
Eric Reynolds: Non, you know, non-cartoonist figures, and…
1:12:42
Eric Reynolds: the history of American comics over the last 50 years or so.
1:12:46
Eric Reynolds: She's wonderful, and so she wrote a great piece for it,
1:12:52
Eric Reynolds: We kind of painstakingly restored the single issues, because…
1:12:59
Eric Reynolds: None of the digital… there were no digital files for most of the single issues. They predated digital files.
1:13:05
Eric Reynolds: Right. Drawing Quarterly was very accommodating in terms of letting us have access to their files, but they only had the graphic novel collections, The Poor Bastard and,
1:13:18
Eric Reynolds: Bare weather… And the other one that, that Joe…
1:13:26
Eric Reynolds: Joe's sort of an obsessive futzer, is how I would put it. He routinely would tweak things for the collections, whether it was, like, re-inking something that he didn't like, or changing a reference to a band that he thought was, like, too…
1:13:44
Eric Reynolds: Two in the moment, one is something that would, like, maybe, you know, resonate a little bit more 10 years from now, or whatever, 10 years from then.
1:13:52
Eric Reynolds: changing color, the duotone color palette, so we went… we basically took all of John Quarterly's book files.
1:14:00
Eric Reynolds: And then, physical copies of the single issues, and… and…
1:14:06
Eric Reynolds: restored everything. There was something on virtually every single page that needed to be
1:14:12
Eric Reynolds: sort of reverted back to its original. And, and we did this mostly because, Joe…
1:14:21
Eric Reynolds: Job more or less regretted most of the changes that he made for the book collections.
1:14:28
Eric Reynolds: He expressed that, to… To a lot of friends over the years that he would…
1:14:37
Eric Reynolds: you know, I think he felt like he was, almost,
1:14:43
Eric Reynolds: In a desire to be taken more seriously, you know, would kind of tweak things and not follow his original instinct, and…
1:14:52
Eric Reynolds: So we're restoring them all.
1:14:54
Eric Reynolds: And it's gonna be a big bat.
1:14:58
Tad Eggleston: I am…
1:14:58
Eric Reynolds: 400.
1:14:59
Tad Eggleston: Very much.
1:14:59
Eric Reynolds: age brick.
1:15:01
Tad Eggleston: Very much looking forward to it. Currently listed as on sale July 14th.
1:15:06
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, that sounds about right. It's gonna be going… we just got a dummy of the book in the printer.
1:15:10
Tad Eggleston: Meow.
1:15:11
Eric Reynolds: That I looked at on, Wednesday.
1:15:15
Tad Eggleston: Alright, this one just caught my attention today, even though it's coming.
1:15:22
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay, this one's a reprint.
1:15:25
Tad Eggleston: But just, just caught my attention today, I didn't, didn't know,
1:15:32
Tad Eggleston: didn't know of this book, but my friend Dennis Kitchen has been sending me various 3D stuff.
1:15:40
Tad Eggleston: Recently, so when I saw Frank in the third dimension, like… A, cool, but B, like… Is there some…
1:15:54
Tad Eggleston: hidden history of, like, underground people and doing really cool 3D stuff that I just somehow… Miss?
1:16:05
Eric Reynolds: Yes, yes, there is. Okay. Talk to me.
1:16:08
Tad Eggleston: about it.
1:16:09
Eric Reynolds: And I'm not sure I'm the expert to really detail it for you, but, you know, there's a long tradition of 3D comics that goes back to the mid-20th century.
1:16:19
Eric Reynolds: you know, in the heyday of the original, kind of, 3D
1:16:23
Eric Reynolds: In terms of movies and,
1:16:25
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:16:26
Eric Reynolds: you know, kind of being kind of a pop phenomenon, I'd say in the 50s?
1:16:30
Eric Reynolds: And so, as you had, you know, 3D movies coming out, publishers also got on the bandwagon and published a lot of 3D comics. And then there was this dude named Ray Zone, who…
1:16:44
Eric Reynolds: I'm not familiar enough with the process, but he… he kind of dialed in on a… on a… on a…
1:16:51
Eric Reynolds: a process for… for doing 3D printing.
1:16:56
Eric Reynolds: With the traditional red and blue layers.
1:17:00
Eric Reynolds: And he was an underground guy. He was, like, an underground comics guy.
1:17:05
Eric Reynolds: And so, you know, Dennis Kitchen actually published a few 3D comics in the, probably, 80s.
1:17:14
Tad Eggleston: This I know. Yeah.
1:17:16
Eric Reynolds: And they're, you know, and they're…
1:17:17
Tad Eggleston: Has recently made posters.
1:17:19
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and so there was a little bit of a, like, 3D renaissance in the 80s that I think was probably… I mean, it was definitely…
1:17:26
Eric Reynolds: the result of Ray Zone's work. But… and he was doing 3D packaging for a number of different publishers, including Dennis.
1:17:34
Eric Reynolds: There was a Bob Burden, Art Adams Gumby comic, I think, in 3D in the 80s. There were some more, like.
1:17:43
Eric Reynolds: Bottom-of-the-barrel, kind of, just crass, attempts to…
1:17:48
Eric Reynolds: grab old public domain comics and put them in 3D and repackaged them, and so it had a little bit of a… a little bit of a bubble that burst,
1:17:57
Eric Reynolds: And then…
1:17:59
Eric Reynolds: So I think there's a certain nostalgia value to guys like Dennis' age and Jim Woodering's age, who are both a little bit older than me, but it also extends down to people as young as me who, who kind of went through the… that… that… that little wave of them in the 80s.
1:18:15
Eric Reynolds: Right. And then, you've got… Ray Zone passed away, unfortunately.
1:18:21
Eric Reynolds: Probably, quite a while ago, at least a decade ago, and…
1:18:24
Eric Reynolds: But there are a couple of other people, like, I don't know if they're proteges of his, or just, you know, kind of students from afar.
1:18:31
Eric Reynolds: But there's a fellow named Charles Barnard, and a couple of others who have,
1:18:37
Eric Reynolds: Kind of perfected the technique.
1:18:39
Eric Reynolds: and…
1:18:41
Eric Reynolds: So, the work that Dennis has been doing, which hasn't been published, but it sounds like you've seen some, and I've seen some as well, he's shared some of it with me, and then also this Jim Woodring Frank in the 3D book.
1:18:54
Eric Reynolds: it's traditional red-blue glasses 3D, but it's… it's the best I've ever seen. Like, it's just… it's just so fucking good.
1:19:05
Tad Eggleston: I, I mean, mostly, what he sent me is… is… initially, actually, it started with,
1:19:12
Tad Eggleston: One of my coworkers, after seeing my copy, way back in the day,
1:19:20
Tad Eggleston: Kitchen Sync had done, like…
1:19:25
Tad Eggleston: It was literally for, for… it was, it was,
1:19:30
Tad Eggleston: I guess I don't have it nearby, but it was… it was commissioned by the… the…
1:19:37
Tad Eggleston: Wisconsin Board of Education.
1:19:39
Tad Eggleston: And it was a comic on, essentially, money management.
1:19:44
Eric Reynolds: Okay.
1:19:44
Tad Eggleston: was given to, like, every senior in all of the state, that sort of thing. But he still has some available, so I'd ordered one, and, like, we were looking at it, and we're like, for our, you know, because I work special ed, for our kids going through
1:19:59
Tad Eggleston: personal finance, this actually teaches it better than half of the textbooks we have. So we were showing it, and one of my coworkers ordered it, and when I
1:20:09
Tad Eggleston: sent him a message, say, hey, so-and-so's, you know, be nice to her. One of the things that he sent out was this 3D print of, I forget what, but she's going nuts with it, and I'm like, oh, wow, and the next thing I know, I get this big tube of posters in the mail with, like, 50 pairs of…
1:20:26
Tad Eggleston: 3D classes. It's like, yeah, if any of your kids want them, whatever.
1:20:31
Eric Reynolds: That's awesome, and kids.
1:20:32
Tad Eggleston: But…
1:20:33
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. But what I appreciated so much is I'm used to a certain 3D where it's like, oh, okay, it comes off the page, woohoo!
1:20:43
Tad Eggleston: But, like, so much of this, like, the art was built around being 3D. It was… Yeah, right.
1:20:48
Tad Eggleston: stuff that looked kinda interesting before you put the glasses on, but when the glasses were put on, it's like, oh my god, this is cool. And not just cool because it comes off the page, but because it, like, changes what I'm looking at.
1:21:03
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and it wasn't… it wasn't retroactively applied to work that was, you know.
1:21:07
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. I wound up giving one to my brother, and I just realized I have a perfect spot on my wall that I should put it, because I have one for me, too. There was, like, a…
1:21:22
Tad Eggleston: a little Nemo pastiche that he did.
1:21:25
Tad Eggleston: that, like… It's like a full-page Nemo, but with…
1:21:31
Eric Reynolds: You should get this, this Jim Woodring book, it sounds.
1:21:34
Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, it's very… very much immediately got added to the list of things that I will…
1:21:42
Tad Eggleston: definitely be picking up this year, unless you want to have Tucker send me a copy. You know, I mean, whatever works. I made the mistake of telling him that I'm more than happy with PDFs, and I don't get as many physical copies anymore.
1:21:57
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:21:58
Tad Eggleston: And it's like, is there a way to say, this one I'd like physically?
1:22:03
Eric Reynolds: Never hurts to ask, right?
1:22:04
Tad Eggleston: That's true.
1:22:08
Tad Eggleston: Just because one of our… our connections is… is baseball, I noticed that the Atlas Comics Library number 10 is Sports Action.
1:22:21
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:22:22
Tad Eggleston: Jackie Robinson is… is immediately…
1:22:27
Tad Eggleston: put out, though it also… Koematsai, 106 home runs in one.
1:22:31
Eric Reynolds: This is one that I didn't know already. I didn't work on that book at all, but I was looking through a PDF of it, probably.
1:22:39
Tad Eggleston: Oh, Hack Wilson, I know.
1:22:41
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and it's like a… it's basically, like, you know, short, well, biographical strips about…
1:22:48
Eric Reynolds: About sports legends at the time, you know, some of… some of whom are still legends, and some of whom…
1:22:54
Eric Reynolds: Guys like you and me don't remember.
1:22:57
Eric Reynolds: Even fairly well-formed baseball fans like us.
1:22:59
Tad Eggleston: Most of the baseball ones will… will know, but Koi… Koimatsai, I don't.
1:23:07
Tad Eggleston: I must…
1:23:09
Eric Reynolds: I presume there's also some fictional stuff in there.
1:23:14
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's always a possibility.
1:23:16
Eric Reynolds: But my sense was that a lot of it were just sort of, like,
1:23:20
Eric Reynolds: You know, short, biographical, almost like, like the old, kind of.
1:23:25
Eric Reynolds: Ripley's, Believe It or Not, kind of strips about…
1:23:28
Eric Reynolds: Some amazing accomplishment or feat that these athletes accomplished.
1:23:36
Tad Eggleston: It looks like that could actually be… be fiction, and that would make me feel better.
1:23:42
Tad Eggleston: Because, like… doing a search for Koimatsai gets me things about sports action number 5, but nothing else.
1:23:56
Tad Eggleston: Because I'm just sitting there going,
1:24:01
Tad Eggleston: No, oh, it, it, it, it, in the, the…
1:24:06
Tad Eggleston: Marvel fandom, it even has Koimatsai in… in parenthesis… er, in quotes, rather than…
1:24:18
Tad Eggleston: So, so yeah, it could be… could be a fictional character.
1:24:22
Eric Reynolds: Inspired by Babe Ruth.
1:24:25
Eric Reynolds: I'd have to ask Michael Dean, who's the editor of those books.
1:24:29
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, just… just because, like…
1:24:32
Tad Eggleston: I'm sitting there going, I thought I knew the Japanese baseball home run record, and it's, like, 50-something, finally set by…
1:24:43
Tad Eggleston: Well, I think it's been broken since Tuffy Rhodes said it, but, like…
1:24:47
Tad Eggleston: four different American players came close, only to get walked in, like, every at-bat from the time they tied their record until the end of the season.
1:24:58
Tad Eggleston: Before there was finally one that had enough games left, and somebody pitched to it.
1:25:05
Eric Reynolds: That's funny.
1:25:09
Tad Eggleston: And the only reason that I think it was Tuffy Rhodes is because that would have caught my attention, because Tuffy Rhodes' best Major League game…
1:25:17
Tad Eggleston: was opening day of 1994 for the Cubs, where he hit 3 home runs that I think were…
1:25:24
Eric Reynolds: I don't even remember Tuffy Rhodes.
1:25:27
Tad Eggleston: This is my point. I mean, his, his, his major league… 590 Major League at-bats.
1:25:39
Tad Eggleston: A total of 13 home runs, even though he hit 3 on opening day 1994.
1:25:48
Eric Reynolds: And then went to Japan and tore it up.
1:25:51
Tad Eggleston: But his time in Japan…
1:26:00
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and 13 seasons in Japan, He hit…
1:26:09
Tad Eggleston: 286, 381, 559 slash line.
1:26:15
Eric Reynolds: What? With 464 home runs.
1:26:18
Eric Reynolds: Holy crap, wow.
1:26:20
Tad Eggleston: Including 51 in 2003… 55-2001, I think, is the year that he…
1:26:28
Tad Eggleston: Ironically, the single-season hit record in Japan was also
1:26:34
Tad Eggleston: broken by a former Cub. Matt Merton…
1:26:38
Tad Eggleston: Broke each hero's single-season hit record.
1:26:43
Tad Eggleston: He was a guy that I really wish the Cubs had held onto.
1:26:47
Eric Reynolds: I don't remember him either.
1:26:49
Tad Eggleston: He… actually, he had some good seasons, and… and looked like he was gonna be something.
1:26:56
Tad Eggleston: But then they made their… their biggest…
1:27:03
Tad Eggleston: free agents, I mean, after his first… Kind of breakout year.
1:27:09
Tad Eggleston: In 2006, he had a 297, 365, 444 slash line.
1:27:17
Tad Eggleston: After having… a… a… better slash line in more limited time in 2005, but 2007…
1:27:30
Tad Eggleston: was the year that they sang Alfonso Soriano to play his position.
1:27:35
Tad Eggleston: And still, he was 281, 352, 438, and limited
1:27:42
Tad Eggleston: playing time in 2007, but then they traded him to the Rockies.
1:27:47
Tad Eggleston: Or no, he was traded to Oakland in the Dan Herron trade, and then eventually to the Rockies. He just kept getting traded places where he was the fourth outfielder.
1:27:56
Tad Eggleston: Which drove me up the wall, because I'm sitting there going, this guy consistently has…
1:28:02
Tad Eggleston: 350 or higher on base percentage, decent power, above average left… Fielder, average right fielder.
1:28:11
Tad Eggleston: Not stolen base speed, but good base running speed. Like, how is this guy not a regular somewhere?
1:28:19
Tad Eggleston: And then, like, he wound up in Japan, and… what year was it that he hit?
1:28:26
Tad Eggleston: Where's my hits? I love, I love baseball reference and fan graphs, yeah. 214 hits in 2010 to set the Japan League record.
1:28:37
Tad Eggleston: Breaking East Churro's record.
1:28:40
Eric Reynolds: Right.
1:28:42
Tad Eggleston: So, yeah. But, but, you know, to…
1:28:46
Tad Eggleston: with Tuffy Rhodes, him not sticking with the Cubs is less surprising, because he was more of the…
1:28:52
Tad Eggleston: It didn't stick anywhere, but… Matt, I never understood how that happened.
1:28:59
Tad Eggleston: The next book that really,
1:29:05
Tad Eggleston: Caught my attention on your upcoming slate.
1:29:09
Tad Eggleston: This one's due out in April. I think final order cutoff just passed. I plugged the hell out of the final order cutoff, don't worry, I didn't wait to talk about it until now. Teodora's letters.
1:29:22
Tad Eggleston: An enslaved Women's Fight for Family and Freedom. This… this strikes me as the… quintessential.
1:29:31
Tad Eggleston: Phantographics book. It's… it's…
1:29:37
Tad Eggleston: deals with… like, progressive history. It deals… it's, it's, it's a translation of, of, oh, weird.
1:29:48
Eric Reynolds: Brazilian work.
1:29:50
Tad Eggleston: Well, Brazilian work, yes, but I was just gonna say, in general, of a…
1:29:58
Tad Eggleston: renowned artist that's not renowned here. Yes. So, so, so, like, like…
1:30:05
Tad Eggleston: you're bringing something that, you know, I mean.
1:30:10
Tad Eggleston: The biggest thing that I dislike about the fact that I grew up in an English-speaking country is I feel like we get the least…
1:30:23
Tad Eggleston: foreign literature.
1:30:26
Eric Reynolds: I think that.
1:30:26
Tad Eggleston: English is the last… English feels like the last language anything gets translated into. Like, if you live in a Spanish-speaking country, if you live in a Portuguese-speaking country, even China and Japan.
1:30:40
Tad Eggleston: probably a lesser extent Russia, there's a really good chance that anything great in English has been translated into your language.
1:30:48
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. The reverse is so rarely true.
1:30:51
Eric Reynolds: I think that's true, and the history of comics is sort of a testament to that. The history of international comics, you know, you've got,
1:31:00
Eric Reynolds: They're…
1:31:03
Eric Reynolds: take a market like Brazil. Brazil has an incredibly rich tradition of comics, and it's got an incredibly vibrant scene right now.
1:31:16
Eric Reynolds: And… One of mine.
1:31:17
Tad Eggleston: My favorite comic shop owners is a Brazilian expat.
1:31:22
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yeah?
1:31:23
Tad Eggleston: Chris… Chris Cicada.
1:31:25
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely.
1:31:26
Eric Reynolds: Absolutely, she's fantastic, and and… You know, there's probably been… 3 or 4?
1:31:40
Eric Reynolds: Brazilian cartoonists that have been translated into English over the past, you know, decade or more.
1:31:45
Eric Reynolds: I went to Brazil just a year ago,
1:31:49
Eric Reynolds: And just kind of got immersed in the scene, and there's, I mean, there's so much good work.
1:31:54
Eric Reynolds: But I think the reason for what you were describing is that
1:31:59
Eric Reynolds: I think Americans are the most myopic of all.
1:32:03
Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
1:32:04
Eric Reynolds: And.
1:32:05
Tad Eggleston: Followed closely by British.
1:32:07
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, probably, and… and so…
1:32:10
Tad Eggleston: I mean, we came by it honestly.
1:32:13
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, and even what… and even what has come over here… I mean, let's… let's leave manga out of it for now, because that's really its own special thing, but…
1:32:22
Tad Eggleston: Well, but, I mean, even there, like, it's such a small slice of what's available, and it's.
1:32:29
Eric Reynolds: Right.
1:32:30
Tad Eggleston: slice.
1:32:31
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, that's… that's definitely true, but I was gonna say.
1:32:33
Eric Reynolds: you know, historically, in America, the stuff that we have gotten is… just the…
1:32:39
Eric Reynolds: cherry-picked works from the Franco-Belgian tradition of comics, and I think that's mostly just due to the…
1:32:47
Eric Reynolds: the international popularity of things like Tintin and Asterisk, and and, and…
1:32:54
Eric Reynolds: So even, you know, the… and it's a… there's a lot of great masters in that, you know, tradition that,
1:33:02
Eric Reynolds: that have been translated into English.
1:33:05
Eric Reynolds: For a very good reason, because they are masters.
1:33:09
Eric Reynolds: But it's also very much related to the commerce of things, and the fact, like, heavy metal's probably a big reason why, you know, a lot of that stuff ever got translated. Because when I first started in comics, the conventional wisdom
1:33:24
Eric Reynolds: was basically that Americans didn't want to read anything but American comics, and I think that was mostly true, and we kind of made it part of our mission to try to, you know, try to change that narrative a little bit. But even Phanographics, you know, for the first
1:33:39
Eric Reynolds: 10, 20 years, really only dipped its toes into Franco-Belgian comics.
1:33:45
Eric Reynolds: And, you know, you can only know what you know, you know, you can't know what you don't know. And it's taken an evolution of decades to get to the point where
1:33:55
Eric Reynolds: You know, and the world's gotten smaller enough in terms of the internet and…
1:34:00
Eric Reynolds: other things that we've been able to discover that there is, you know, these… these… these rich scenes in South America, in, you know, the Philippines, or wherever, you know, Australia, where you don't even have to translate it, you know?
1:34:18
Tad Eggleston: No.
1:34:19
Tad Eggleston: Well, well, and also where sometimes you can find the English translations of things
1:34:27
Tad Eggleston: that hadn't, like, I recently discovered. Made it over here. I recently discovered, I did my first…
1:34:36
Tad Eggleston: email interview, Tucker set this up for me, with Jason.
1:34:41
Tad Eggleston: Okay. And this'll be published in American Nature Presents number 4. Okay, cool. At least, it'll start there.
1:34:48
Tad Eggleston: But I had no idea that the Phantom was huge in Scandinavia.
1:34:56
Eric Reynolds: Okay.
1:34:57
Tad Eggleston: So much so that they had
1:35:00
Tad Eggleston: a long history of original Phantom comics in Scandinavia, long after it was a big deal here, that when I started looking into it, right, when I started looking into it to try to figure out the only English translations you can find are in Australia.
1:35:15
Eric Reynolds: That's funny. Yeah, yeah.
1:35:17
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, so anyway, you know, there's just, yeah, Americans are not… haven't… haven't traditionally been the most, you know, progressive,
1:35:25
Eric Reynolds: embracers of, of international scenes, but, but yeah, like, back to your point, Marcelo
1:35:32
Eric Reynolds: De Solete, who did Teodora's Letters, he's a, you know, phenomenal contemporary Brazilian cartoonist, who's, you know… he has won an Eisner Award, so he's not, like, completely unknown over here, but…
1:35:45
Tad Eggleston: That's how I knew that he was known, because it says Eisner Award winner.
1:35:51
Eric Reynolds: But, you know, but it's.
1:35:57
Tad Eggleston: Eisner does have a couple of international categories that you can still be relatively unknown in the United States and win in.
1:36:04
Eric Reynolds: Oh, yes, yeah, that's absolutely true. A great cartoonist from, Sweden, Moa Romanova, won.
1:36:11
Eric Reynolds: Eisner for her first English-translated work, Goblin Girl, that we published a few years ago.
1:36:19
Tad Eggleston: Yes, so good.
1:36:20
Eric Reynolds: it was one of the… that Eisner Award was, like, one of the best surprises I've had, like, awards-wise in a while, because I didn't really…
1:36:28
Eric Reynolds: I didn't really expect it to win. It wasn't, you know, a huge, popular, proud pleaser of a book, even though I absolutely love it.
1:36:36
Tad Eggleston: I, I am, I am a big fan, as the, the, the new one.
1:36:42
Eric Reynolds: sold.
1:36:44
Tad Eggleston: Buff Soul was… was fantastic.
1:36:46
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, she's great.
1:36:47
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:36:48
Eric Reynolds: so anyway, yeah, I don't…
1:36:52
Eric Reynolds: Forget quite how we got on that tangent, but…
1:36:55
Tad Eggleston: Well, Teodorus letters.
1:36:56
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:36:57
Tad Eggleston: Which also, like, just the ins… I mean, the fact that it's this…
1:37:06
Tad Eggleston: under… I mean, again, like, the translation, particularly the Brazilian translation, makes it feel like a Phantographics book, but then it's also, like, an enslaved woman's
1:37:18
Tad Eggleston: Fight for family and freedom.
1:37:20
Tad Eggleston: And when you dig into it, we're looking at…
1:37:27
Tad Eggleston: a different history of slavery than the U.S. history of slavery.
1:37:31
Eric Reynolds: Sure.
1:37:31
Tad Eggleston: You know, the, the, the…
1:37:36
Tad Eggleston: And I can't come up with…
1:37:38
Tad Eggleston: other examples immediately off the top of my head, but, like, the telling of history that's underappreciated, that is not strictly US or Eurocentric also feels like a fan of graphics thing.
1:37:55
Eric Reynolds: Yes, maybe.
1:37:56
Tad Eggleston: It's just… maybe it's just the way… the way Beto uses… Kind of…
1:38:04
Tad Eggleston: fictionalized Central American history so often in…
1:38:08
Tad Eggleston: Palomar that makes me think that, but… but it does. It feels like it's part of a Phanographics thing to go, hey, there's this history out there that you didn't know.
1:38:19
Eric Reynolds: Well, I think… I think Phantographics has always been pretty…
1:38:23
Eric Reynolds: Willfully political in its own… in its own way, whether it's the way we approach the industry, or the… or the medium.
1:38:31
Eric Reynolds: There's been a… a consistent Focus on, you know, giving
1:38:40
Eric Reynolds: Giving voice to voices that, you know, aren't…
1:38:44
Eric Reynolds: Or… or haven't been well represented in… American comic books.
1:38:51
Eric Reynolds: You know, our… one of our…
1:38:54
Eric Reynolds: you know, Gary Grok founded the company, but soon after.
1:38:59
Eric Reynolds: you know, he partnered up with Kim Thompson, who passed away, Gosh.
1:39:06
Eric Reynolds: 13 years… almost 12 and a half years ago now.
1:39:09
Eric Reynolds: Yeah. But Kim was, a, a…
1:39:12
Eric Reynolds: a military brat, basically, who grew up all over Europe and even a little bit in East Asia.
1:39:20
Eric Reynolds: And…
1:39:22
Eric Reynolds: So he… he grew up with this kind of much broader view of comics than… than the average American.
1:39:31
Eric Reynolds: he was… he was, I think, really the… the first…
1:39:36
Eric Reynolds: person to really dial in on it as part of Phantographics' mission.
1:39:42
Eric Reynolds: Whoa…
1:39:42
Tad Eggleston: The added bonus that he could translate a lot of it himself, right?
1:39:47
Eric Reynolds: Well, that… yes, 100%. And that's the, you know, that's the…
1:39:52
Eric Reynolds: That's the hardest part about international comics, is the overhead to do them is a lot more than a native language book, because you have to pay a translator, and you have to pay a production artists to
1:40:04
Eric Reynolds: you know, to redo the lettering, and you have to buy… often buy files from the foreign publisher to work with, and so they're much trickier to, you know, to make a profit on. So when you…
1:40:17
Eric Reynolds: when you can translate it all… when you're the editor and publisher and translator all yourself, and you're not paying yourself to do those things, it makes it a lot easier. And that's what Kim did. He did it as a… it was a pure labor of love for him.
1:40:33
Eric Reynolds: He was, you know, he would, he would have…
1:40:37
Eric Reynolds: done all of that translation work that he did, and often did do it for free. You know, he didn't… didn't pay himself
1:40:45
Eric Reynolds: to do it. He would, you know, he would…
1:40:48
Eric Reynolds: Save on that to help make it viable.
1:40:54
Eric Reynolds: But anyway, like, yeah, you know, the…
1:40:57
Eric Reynolds: what you're saying about the alternative, you know, kind of histories, whether it's, you know, of slavery, as seen in Marcelo's work, including his first book, Run For It… Right.
1:41:08
Tad Eggleston: Right?
1:41:10
Eric Reynolds: But also, you know, other…
1:41:13
Tad Eggleston: Other histories… Kingdom of Runaway slaves.
1:41:17
Eric Reynolds: But I think there is a… an interest in our part to,
1:41:24
Eric Reynolds: To tell… to have those stories told. There's a value in it.
1:41:27
Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm just… one of your sections… one of your genres is historical, I just noticed. I love that among your genres are both historical and funny animals.
1:41:42
Tad Eggleston: And that one book is in both, because you were the original publisher, and this might have been before… actually, I'm pretty certain it was before your time, of, Usagi Yojimbo.
1:41:53
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:41:54
Eric Reynolds: Yep.
1:41:55
Tad Eggleston: So, before we get into, like, some of my favorite closing questions, two more books on the…
1:42:05
Tad Eggleston: The horizon that really caught my eye,
1:42:10
Tad Eggleston: for similar reasons. The first is, cordo Maltese.
1:42:17
Tad Eggleston: you're bringing back into print, which I appreciate a great deal, because it's long been kind of on that holy grail of stuff that I hadn't read enough of, that everybody says, this is amazing, and it's like, great! I hear that it's amazing! Where do I get one?
1:42:36
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, it's been… had a kind of bits and starts.
1:42:40
Eric Reynolds: Probably.
1:42:41
Tad Eggleston: So, when… when this was… was put into… Print.
1:42:50
Tad Eggleston: I… I was… I was quite…
1:42:53
Tad Eggleston: Or, well, it's coming, March 17th.
1:42:55
Eric Reynolds: I mean, yeah.
1:42:55
Tad Eggleston: I'm… I'm reading it because… because Tucker was kind enough to send me an advance
1:43:02
Tad Eggleston: PDF, and for that matter, we'll be talking about it on our Pulp Blotter Book Club.
1:43:08
Tad Eggleston: Because…
1:43:10
Tad Eggleston: when my other plotter guys, who were also my Kirby guys, found out that I had one, they're like, oh, we want to read Cordo Maltese!
1:43:19
Tad Eggleston: So you're gonna get some advanced press for that, soon. Excellent. But then the other one that you got advanced press for without even me knowing that you were getting advanced press for it, and we're gonna wanna give you a lot more,
1:43:36
Tad Eggleston: You've already released
1:43:40
Tad Eggleston: The Magnificent adventure, The Perils of Giuseppe Bergman, but upcoming, and the one that really caught my eye and made me really… because I go back and forth on Minara. I love his art, I don't always love his…
1:43:54
Tad Eggleston: material.
1:43:55
Eric Reynolds: That's fair.
1:43:57
Tad Eggleston: when I love his material, I love it, love it, so I, like, always want to try to figure out if…
1:44:02
Tad Eggleston: if I'm gonna love it, but…
1:44:06
Tad Eggleston: and preview for a question I'm going to be asking you in a few minutes. My… my… my…
1:44:15
Tad Eggleston: Traditional closing question is, tell me something you love, preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
1:44:23
Tad Eggleston: Preferably, Storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love…
1:44:30
Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so you can talk to them about it.
1:44:35
Tad Eggleston: And when Paul Pope was on recently, he said, to Sarai.
1:44:40
Tad Eggleston: by Milo Manara, which he also lamented was long out of print. And the next day, I was able to send him a message going, yes, it's been long out of print, but it won't be for long, because it looks like it's part of this, the magnificent African Adventure.
1:45:00
Tad Eggleston: Due out April 28th.
1:45:03
Tad Eggleston: So talk to me… To what level you can, about… about bringing the… both of these, like, fantastic…
1:45:12
Tad Eggleston: and tied together, I mean, even in the description of the Cordo Maltese, it finishes up with,
1:45:23
Tad Eggleston: As a side note, readers who enjoyed The Magnificent Adventure by Milo Minera and its book-length search for HP will be quick to note that HP is, in fact, Hugo Pratt.
1:45:34
Eric Reynolds: Right.
1:45:35
Tad Eggleston: beloved mentor of.
1:45:36
Eric Reynolds: Banara.
1:45:37
Tad Eggleston: I don't know if these are ones that you were involved in or not, but, like, these are definitely a couple of examples of…
1:45:48
Tad Eggleston: Another thing that… that… that…
1:45:53
Tad Eggleston: You talked about how Phanographics doesn't do a lot of the genres that you typically see in comics, and while that's true on one level, it's not true on another, which is, like, these are…
1:46:07
Tad Eggleston: quintessential adventure comics. For that matter, one of… another thing that Paul Pope turned… turned me on to, that… that he actually wrote the…
1:46:17
Tad Eggleston: Introduction to…
1:46:19
Tad Eggleston: for a fan of Graphics Edition is old Roy Crane work.
1:46:25
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, but those are… those aren't traditional adventure comics.
1:46:30
Eric Reynolds: but, yeah, we're doing them because they're master… masters of color.
1:46:36
Tad Eggleston: That's… that's… that's my point, is that…
1:46:39
Eric Reynolds: This happens to be…
1:46:40
Tad Eggleston: What you do do is, when there's the masterpieces of a genre.
1:46:45
Tad Eggleston: You're the most likely to go out and get them.
1:46:48
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
1:46:49
Eric Reynolds: Well…
1:46:50
Tad Eggleston: Try to, anyway, but.
1:46:53
Eric Reynolds: But yeah, I mean, actually, I actually…
1:46:55
Tad Eggleston: some competition, more now than you used to. There are a number of publishers going after Translated stuff.
1:47:02
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, that's true. That's definitely true. That's great, and that's good.
1:47:05
Tad Eggleston: Apologies.
1:47:06
Eric Reynolds: there's more than enough to go around, you know? Right. In fact, like, the… one of the hardest parts of the job is… is…
1:47:14
Eric Reynolds: passing on work that you really like, because we just can't do everything, and…
1:47:20
Eric Reynolds: And that… and that's…
1:47:22
Eric Reynolds: never more true than on the… on the translation front. You know, you have to kind of choose your battles. We can only do so many a year.
1:47:30
Eric Reynolds: And there's…
1:47:33
Eric Reynolds: there's so much more out there that, in a perfect world, I would love to do, but I just can't, and so…
1:47:38
Eric Reynolds: The more the merrier, you know, in terms of the competition on that front.
1:47:42
Eric Reynolds: But yeah, I actually didn't work on the Monara books or the Pratt books,
1:47:48
Eric Reynolds: much probably like yourself, I'm very aware of their work, and have come across it, you know, over the years. I actually have a very similar, you know, take
1:48:00
Eric Reynolds: on Monara as you, which is that, you know, I was always sort of attracted to the drawing.
1:48:05
Eric Reynolds: Rarely was able to really find the proper entry point to actually read it.
1:48:12
Eric Reynolds: Pratt, I had a little more… a little more,
1:48:20
Eric Reynolds: background in, you know, there were some NBM collections that were published in the 80s, and I think Dark Horse maybe in more recent years, and…
1:48:28
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:48:28
Eric Reynolds: So I come across it and, you know, always…
1:48:32
Eric Reynolds: marveled at his skill, but I'm eager to really kind of sit down and take it all in as a larger body of work, rather than just one particular, you know, excerpted storyline.
1:48:46
Eric Reynolds: Okay.
1:48:46
Tad Eggleston: And I'm assuming with The Magnificent Adventure that there will be the third volume to have all of the Giuseppe Bergmen.
1:48:56
Eric Reynolds: That seems like a safe assumption. I actually don't… I actually don't know myself.
1:49:00
Tad Eggleston: Well, that might mean that you don't have an answer to my next question, which is, do you know if there's plans to do more of the Cordo Maltese?
1:49:09
Eric Reynolds: Yes, yes.
1:49:11
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:49:11
Eric Reynolds: There, there is plans.
1:49:14
Eric Reynolds: To do, basically all of it if the market can bear it.
1:49:20
Eric Reynolds: And we can…
1:49:20
Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll do my best.
1:49:22
Eric Reynolds: much money. I'll do my.
1:49:23
Tad Eggleston: Best! Yeah.
1:49:27
Tad Eggleston: dinky little podcast, though I do.
1:49:31
Tad Eggleston: I'm making my panel moderator debut at C2E2, so maybe…
1:49:38
Eric Reynolds: Maybe.
1:49:38
Tad Eggleston: That will make us a bigger podcast. We'll see.
1:49:43
Tad Eggleston: I do too. Okay, so… so a couple of…
1:49:49
Tad Eggleston: they've become my… I now have two, two required closing questions. The first, and I'm really interested to hear yours, because you… you… you've had comics experiences all around the world.
1:50:02
Tad Eggleston: This is my… entering my fifth year of doing this podcast, and I…
1:50:11
Tad Eggleston: pinch myself on a regular basis at what my life has become. The people that I talk to regularly, not just on the air, but off the air. The number… the number of
1:50:23
Tad Eggleston: like, conversational experiences that I have had, that if you had told even 35-year-old me, but certainly 15-year-old me, hey, you're gonna do this in your life, I would have gone, yeah, no.
1:50:39
Tad Eggleston: But I've also discovered, like, everybody in comics has those surreal experiences, those things that they're like, oh my god, I just did…
1:50:47
Tad Eggleston: blank.
1:50:49
Tad Eggleston: So, tell me… tell me one of your surreal experiences that never would have happened if you… weren't…
1:50:57
Tad Eggleston: Immersed in the world of comics.
1:51:01
Eric Reynolds: Oh, man.
1:51:02
Eric Reynolds: I can think of… a couple of things come to mind.
1:51:06
Eric Reynolds: You know, some more… More kind of comical than… you know.
1:51:14
Eric Reynolds: It's sort of walking, you know, amongst the genre.
1:51:18
Tad Eggleston: There aren't rules. There aren't rules.
1:51:22
Eric Reynolds: when, I mean, I've got… I've had the…
1:51:25
Eric Reynolds: pleasure meeting, you know, so many cartoonists that I really revere that,
1:51:31
Eric Reynolds: But I kind of won't even go there.
1:51:34
Eric Reynolds: But one of my… one of the… a couple amazing memories…
1:51:38
Eric Reynolds: It was probably 2000 and… 2…
1:51:44
Eric Reynolds: I went to a comic convention in Granada, Spain. Peter Bagg, who's a… A very good friend.
1:51:54
Eric Reynolds: And they had a big awards ceremony.
1:51:58
Eric Reynolds: It was… If you don't know Granada, it's near Malaga, in the south of.
1:52:04
Tad Eggleston: This is where I have to say, I have been all the way to Toronto, and that's the extent of my international travel.
1:52:11
Eric Reynolds: Okay, well, it's one of the, you know.
1:52:12
Tad Eggleston: Old, older…
1:52:14
Eric Reynolds: It's one of the older regions of Spain. It's a rich Moorish tradition. It's close to Gibraltar in the
1:52:22
Eric Reynolds: and Africa, you know, Northern Africa.
1:52:24
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:52:25
Eric Reynolds: It's a beautiful, small city that's kind of built into the mountains, and
1:52:32
Eric Reynolds: We went to this very small convention.
1:52:35
Eric Reynolds: Pete has enjoyed a lot of success in Spain over the years as one of the more popular countries for his work.
1:52:43
Eric Reynolds: And they had an awards ceremony that we went to… were invited to and went to, and it was in this beautiful, old.
1:52:50
Eric Reynolds: Well, it wasn't it? It was a very modern amphitheater on this very old
1:52:55
Eric Reynolds: Campus, built into the mountains, and…
1:52:59
Eric Reynolds: Very prestigious-looking auditorium, with this gorgeous view looking out over, over… over all of Granada.
1:53:08
Eric Reynolds: and…
1:53:11
Eric Reynolds: like I said, it was 2002, and we sit in our seats, and it's like… it's one of those things, like, where it's so different from America. You've got, like.
1:53:22
Eric Reynolds: the mayor of Granada is there, and dignitaries from, you know, Spanish cultural groups, and… Yeah, the…
1:53:32
Eric Reynolds: You know, kind of…
1:53:32
Tad Eggleston: me of the weirdest part of the whole Anglem series, or… er…
1:53:37
Tad Eggleston: debacle this year was that, like, it was a major political event for the upcoming mayoral election. I'm sitting there right. This… this is… this is weird and cool.
1:53:50
Eric Reynolds: So anyway, the, you know, we're just… we're just going to this award ceremony, it's all in Spanish. We know we're not going to really understand anything, but what the hell, you know, we're guests.
1:54:00
Eric Reynolds: We're gonna go take it in, and…
1:54:03
Eric Reynolds: we sit down, and the host, the MC, kind of starts, beautiful stage,
1:54:10
Eric Reynolds: And all of a sudden, all chaos breaks loose from behind us. The doors to the… to the auditorium burst open, and all of a sudden, there's screaming and yelling and gunfire.
1:54:25
Eric Reynolds: And…
1:54:26
Eric Reynolds: we don't know what the fuck is going on. It's like, you know, a year… within a year of 9-11.
1:54:32
Eric Reynolds: And, people just start freaking out, and…
1:54:36
Eric Reynolds: Basically, these, these, these armed… Rebels, like, storm the stage, And…
1:54:47
Eric Reynolds: literally proceed to tie up the MC on stage, like, put his arms, tie up his wrists.
1:54:54
Eric Reynolds: And they start to… they start to corral other people from the crowd, including Peter Bagg, who's a special guest of the convention.
1:55:03
Eric Reynolds: And at this point, I think that one of our hosts.
1:55:07
Eric Reynolds: Like, leaned in and told us, like.
1:55:11
Eric Reynolds: Don't worry, you're gonna be okay.
1:55:13
Eric Reynolds: But, in the moment, it really was terrifying, and you had no idea what.
1:55:19
Tad Eggleston: I'm not a fan of gunfire.
1:55:21
Eric Reynolds: No, it was… it was crazy. And so anyways, they… they hogtie all these guests up on stage together, like, you know.
1:55:30
Tad Eggleston: Right?
1:55:31
Eric Reynolds: chattel. And,
1:55:34
Eric Reynolds: who walks out on stage but Osama bin Laden, or, of course, a dead ringer for Osama bin Laden.
1:55:42
Eric Reynolds: And he proceeds to… I… I could speak a little bit of Spanish, just enough to kind of have an idea of what's going on, so he's… he's…
1:55:52
Eric Reynolds: he starts going on a… on a rant against, you know, Western evil.
1:55:58
Eric Reynolds: The evils of capitalism, and the lack of morals, of Western…
1:56:06
Eric Reynolds: Democracy, and blah blah blah blah blah.
1:56:09
Tad Eggleston: And you're sitting there going, you know that we work in comic books, wait… Yeah, and we're just… we're just… we're just sitting there going, like, what in the fuck is going on?
1:56:18
Tad Eggleston: I mean, except for the gun part, we pretty much agree with you, and…
1:56:22
Eric Reynolds: But we wouldn't know.
1:56:23
Tad Eggleston: money if…
1:56:24
Eric Reynolds: But it gets better. He,
1:56:27
Eric Reynolds: So he goes on this little spiel, and as he's doing this, he takes, like, the program of the vent, and he folds it into a paper airplane.
1:56:37
Eric Reynolds: And there's a little,
1:56:39
Eric Reynolds: a little lectern, like a dais that, you know, is where the people are going to be reading the awards from, and it's these two… two columns with a little glass table and microphone on top of it. And he's standing, like, maybe 5 feet away from it, you know.
1:56:54
Eric Reynolds: Preaching to the audience.
1:56:57
Eric Reynolds: And he folds this paper airplane up.
1:56:59
Eric Reynolds: And tosses it at this little
1:57:02
Eric Reynolds: two-column dais, which suddenly looks like the World Trade Center.
1:57:08
Eric Reynolds: And as the paper airplane hits it, It bursts into flames.
1:57:14
Eric Reynolds: I mean, this is, like, a high production fare.
1:57:18
Eric Reynolds: And from there, it only gets weirder. I should have prefaced this by saying that when he comes up on the stage, he's followed by
1:57:26
Eric Reynolds: I see two women in burqas who are, you know, look like traditional,
1:57:32
Eric Reynolds: Muslim, like, his, you know, like his concubine, or whatever.
1:57:36
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:57:37
Eric Reynolds: And anyways, for the next half hour.
1:57:40
Eric Reynolds: They proceed to put on a full-on Hardcore sex show.
1:57:47
Eric Reynolds: They… he disrobes, the women disrobe.
1:57:51
Eric Reynolds: And they proceed to, with Peter Bagg and the other guests, right behind them on stage, all just looking, you know, like.
1:57:59
Tad Eggleston: Hi, Doc.
1:58:00
Eric Reynolds: tied up. They proceed to… to put on a full-on hardcore sex show. And anyways.
1:58:10
Eric Reynolds: Meanwhile, people are vacating in droves, like, nobody has any idea what's going on. Very few people were aware of any of this was gonna happen.
1:58:19
Eric Reynolds: It turned out that the organizer of the show
1:58:24
Eric Reynolds: Basically had some axe to grind with the city.
1:58:29
Eric Reynolds: And, this was… he sort of saw the writing on the wall that, you know, that he maybe wasn't long for doing these conventions, and he put on, like, the greatest fuck you in the history of comics.
1:58:47
Eric Reynolds: it was un… and it… this was, like, a five-star, you know, venue. It was a class, you know, a classy affair all the way around. Anyways, to this day, it's like, you know, Peter and myself and my friend Hernan Magoya, who's a Spanish comics writer who was there with us,
1:59:05
Eric Reynolds: it was, for better and for worse, the most mind-blowing thing I've ever seen in my life.
1:59:12
Eric Reynolds: And, yeah.
1:59:14
Eric Reynolds: So there's that, and then the other thing I think of is, in… around…
1:59:18
Tad Eggleston: I also feel like if nobody's made that into a, like, 8-page comic yet, somebody needs to.
1:59:25
Eric Reynolds: I wrote a story about it. I also took a lot of photos throughout it. I had a camera on me, and I also wrote a story about it for the Comics Journal. This thing was such a scandal that it made national news in Spain.
1:59:38
Eric Reynolds: There were, like, elected officials who were not re-elected because they were seen as being, you know, a party to this. I was interviewed as one of, like, 3 or 4 Americans in the audience.
1:59:53
Eric Reynolds: I was interviewed on, national news.
1:59:58
Eric Reynolds: And… and by El Pais, the big… the biggest newspaper in Spain.
2:00:05
Eric Reynolds: Because, just to give the American perspective on this crazy 9-11 sex show, basically,
2:00:14
Eric Reynolds: It was… it was wild. And… and,
2:00:19
Eric Reynolds: yeah, just to this day, like, you know, Peter and I bring it up pretty often, like, oh my god.
2:00:24
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
2:00:25
Eric Reynolds: Can't believe we saw that. And then the other, the other really wild thing that comes up a lot in the conversation with peers is, around 2000,
2:00:33
Eric Reynolds: I got to go on this comic book cruise. There was a CBELDF cruise that, happened.
2:00:39
Eric Reynolds: Down from LA down to 3 ports of call in Mexico for a week, and…
2:00:45
Eric Reynolds: on this cruise was everyone from Will Eisner to Chris Ware to the Hernandez brothers.
2:00:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I knew I'd heard about the curse, so it was probably Beto that brought it up.
2:01:00
Eric Reynolds: had Neil Adams,
2:01:02
Eric Reynolds: You know, it was just, like… and we were all just, you know, trapped on this boat together for a week with a couple… few dozen comic book fans as well, just living and breathing.
2:01:14
Eric Reynolds: Comics, and it was… a very memorable, kind of singular experience. It was fantastic.
2:01:24
Eric Reynolds: It's so weird and… and just fun,
2:01:29
Eric Reynolds: And then… and then it was gonna be, like, an annual fundraiser thing, and then…
2:01:33
Eric Reynolds: And then… they never did it again.
2:01:36
Eric Reynolds: So we got to go on the… only one.
2:01:39
Tad Eggleston: The one.
2:01:40
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:01:42
Eric Reynolds: but yeah, those are probably the two weird… two of them.
2:01:46
Eric Reynolds: more unique experiences I can think of.
2:01:50
Tad Eggleston: The… the very cool experiences.
2:01:54
Eric Reynolds: Though…
2:01:55
Tad Eggleston: One of them would have been absolutely terrifying.
2:01:58
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I mean, there was… I will say, like, the Granada thing, I was also there with a friend, a British cartoonist, Scottish cartoonist, named Lorna Miller, really great.
2:02:09
Eric Reynolds: Independent artist, and she just happened to be there as well, and… I don't know.
2:02:16
Eric Reynolds: she found it all very upsetting, and very, very triggering, you know, she… and in a way that was…
2:02:23
Eric Reynolds: totally understandable. I was lucky enough to be, like, 20…
2:02:29
Eric Reynolds: I was in my 20s, and I was just…
2:02:33
Eric Reynolds: pretty dumb and, didn't, you know, wasn't suffering from any kind of PTSD of any sort, so I was able to kind of take it in stride. But other people, you know, it was… it really was, like, a scandalous thing. People thought they were gonna die.
2:02:49
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
2:02:51
Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, it took me a while to figure out that you were talking performance art, and…
2:02:57
Eric Reynolds: It was, it was total performance art.
2:03:00
Tad Eggleston: And, like, until I figured that out, I'm like, oh my god, this is horrible!
2:03:06
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
2:03:08
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, ugh.
2:03:13
Eric Reynolds: I think the cruise is much more fun.
2:03:15
Tad Eggleston: I bet you you're able to laugh more each year that passes between the performance art and…
2:03:28
Eric Reynolds: Like I said, I was… I was… for, you know, for better or for worse, I…
2:03:32
Eric Reynolds: I was not traumatized by it. I was really, like.
2:03:38
Eric Reynolds: I was… I was kind of awestruck, and like, oh my god, this is the… this is the most amazing thing I've ever seen in my life.
2:03:45
Eric Reynolds: Just the sheer audacity of all of it, and the production values. It was, like, an incredibly well-produced affair.
2:03:54
Tad Eggleston: At what point did you figure it out that it was production, though?
2:03:58
Eric Reynolds: Well, that's what I don't actually quite remember, because my recollection is that they kept it very tight-lipped. They didn't want people to know that they were going to be a part of this, you know, performance art. They wanted the shock value.
2:04:10
Eric Reynolds: But at some point.
2:04:14
Eric Reynolds: At some point between these commando guys bursting in the room, which was genuinely terrifying for… for a few moments.
2:04:23
Eric Reynolds: to the point where Osama
2:04:26
Eric Reynolds: you know, obviously it's not really Osama, even though it looks just like a famous stage. It was sometime in between there, like, some, you know, somebody…
2:04:34
Eric Reynolds: in our… probably when they grabbed Peter to take him up on stage and tie him up, I think someone leaned into us and said, you know, play along, please. But I… actually, I don't completely remember.
2:04:47
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because I know the point for me in your telling the story, where it finally became clear, was when the paper airplane burst into fire, because…
2:04:58
Tad Eggleston: That that requires… planning.
2:05:01
Eric Reynolds: Yeah.
2:05:01
Tad Eggleston: And not the type of planning that, like, somebody who actually intended to start killing people
2:05:07
Tad Eggleston: Would likely give a damn about.
2:05:09
Eric Reynolds: No, no. They… there was some…
2:05:12
Eric Reynolds: Some, very skilled technicians employed to put this thing around.
2:05:18
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:05:19
Eric Reynolds: I mean, they had, like, pre-wired this… this lectern to… to burst into flames.
2:05:27
Eric Reynolds: It's pretty crazy. Yeah.
2:05:29
Tad Eggleston: No, no, I mean, I…
2:05:30
Eric Reynolds: One battle after another, when, when, beginning of one battle after another, when, but when Leo.
2:05:37
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
2:05:37
Eric Reynolds: Mario's character wires the.
2:05:40
Tad Eggleston: You probably just made $30 for Fanographics, because I feel like I'm gonna need to, to get my digital subscription to the Comics Journal archive just to go find your story.
2:05:54
Eric Reynolds: I hope you can. If you do, let me know, because, it was… it was…
2:05:59
Eric Reynolds: It was something else, let me tell ya.
2:06:01
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know, if you did it soon after, there's nothing on any of the covers from 2002 that indicates that it's in there, but…
2:06:10
Eric Reynolds: It was just a news story, you know, it was only, like.
2:06:13
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:06:13
Eric Reynolds: 2 or 3 pages long, with some…
2:06:16
Tad Eggleston: And that's my point, it wouldn't necessarily be on the cover. I would have to, like, just start flipping through the issues until I find it.
2:06:23
Eric Reynolds: Yeah. Do you remember roughly what time of year it was?
2:06:26
Eric Reynolds: Well, this would have been, like, 2000…
2:06:29
Eric Reynolds: probably, like, spring of 2002, so it would… it would have been in… I… I presume it was in…
2:06:37
Eric Reynolds: You know, one of the 2002 issues, summer of 2002 or so.
2:06:41
Tad Eggleston: it probably means I'm looking at, like, May, June, August.
2:06:44
Eric Reynolds: That'd be my guess, yeah.
2:06:46
Tad Eggleston: Maybe April.
2:06:49
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Okay.
2:06:51
Tad Eggleston: So, those are things to know. Now, and I already previewed it, final question, I might come up with a baseball question to throw in afterwards. We'll see. But, final traditional comics question. Tell me something you love.
2:07:08
Tad Eggleston: Preferably comics, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but we don't have rules. Something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you really, really would like them to, so that you have more people to discuss it with.
2:07:24
Eric Reynolds: I can never go wrong with, Rick Altergott's Duthus.
2:07:28
Eric Reynolds: I don't know if you're familiar with Doofus.
2:07:31
Eric Reynolds: If you aren't, it's, you know, through no fault of your own. There's a very small body of work.
2:07:37
Eric Reynolds: A few comic books, and then,
2:07:40
Eric Reynolds: one collection from the late 90s, and then a new graphic novel that came out early last year called Blessed Be.
2:07:49
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
2:07:49
Eric Reynolds: That's where I recognize it.
2:07:52
Tad Eggleston: Cause you guys put that out.
2:07:54
Eric Reynolds: He draws in a kind of… Wallywood-esque style.
2:07:59
Tad Eggleston: Yup.
2:07:59
Eric Reynolds: But it's in the service of some extremely… kind of lowbrow… Humor, okay.
2:08:09
Eric Reynolds: it's, I love his work. I think it's just endlessly hilarious, and kind of even beautiful when it's, like.
2:08:17
Eric Reynolds: scatological or whatever. He's just one of the more singular
2:08:22
Eric Reynolds: Voices in comics that just kind of…
2:08:27
Eric Reynolds: kind of marries all of my disparate kind of interests, whether it's, like, high craft versus lowbrow comedy versus, transgressive kind of tendencies, and,
2:08:41
Eric Reynolds: Just… --
2:08:43
Eric Reynolds: Mixes it all up into a really weird, and… always hilarious.
2:08:52
Eric Reynolds: kind of episodic comedy about these kind of losers in a small town, flower town, USA.
2:09:00
Eric Reynolds: Great stuff. I have, one of his covers on my… all here.
2:09:06
Eric Reynolds: So yeah, he comes to mind. He's one of my favorites.
2:09:10
Tad Eggleston: That's a… that's a… that's a very good one.
2:09:13
Eric Reynolds: One of the cartoonists that I work with is a great cartoon, Italian cartoonist named Manuel Fior.
2:09:22
Tad Eggleston: I am a fan of his, too.
2:09:25
Eric Reynolds: I adore his work, I think he's one of the most beautiful and sophisticated makers of comics in the world, and we've published, like, 6 books by him or so, and I don't understand why he isn't one of the best-selling contemporary cartoonists working today, because
2:09:44
Eric Reynolds: His work is romantic and beautiful, and just…
2:09:48
Tad Eggleston: Huh?
2:09:48
Eric Reynolds: So visually rich, and just so… such a high level of craft. It's incredible.
2:09:54
Tad Eggleston: I just realized that you've done 3 of… three of the ones that you've done, I haven't read, so they just went on my list, because somehow I missed them. But I love Hypericum, I love the interview, and I love 3,000 kilometers per second.
2:10:08
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, all… everything he's done is… is just wonderful. Such a sophisticated…
2:10:15
Eric Reynolds: world-class talent, and for whatever reason, you know, English readers haven't completely embraced them the way that I have.
2:10:24
Tad Eggleston: Which is just silly.
2:10:27
Tad Eggleston: Though, I think it was Matt Baker.
2:10:34
Tad Eggleston: David.
2:10:35
Eric Reynolds: Baker, yeah.
2:10:37
Tad Eggleston: that, that said Hypericum, or used Hypericum as his… his thing that he loved that not enough people knew about.
2:10:44
Eric Reynolds: Oh, cool.
2:10:45
Tad Eggleston: Don't be wrong, but I know that Hypericum has been an answer to this question.
2:10:50
Tad Eggleston: I just, I, you know, 200-some-odd interviews, I don't… I don't… you know, and I haven't, unfortunately, talked to Matt Baker, because that would require a medium. Yeah, when you said Matt Baker, I was like, where are you going with this?
2:11:07
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, both Altergott and Fior, even though they're incredibly different artists, I would put them both in the
2:11:14
Eric Reynolds: Cartoonist, cartoonist category?
2:11:16
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
2:11:19
Eric Reynolds: Along with, like, Olivier Schraulin, or Kim Deich, or just those, you know, those cartoonists that…
2:11:25
Eric Reynolds: Aren't bestsellers, but, like, every cartoonist loves.
2:11:28
Tad Eggleston: Olivia Schwarn was,
2:11:32
Tad Eggleston: was, in one of the very first times I asked the question was, Bob Sikoriak's answer.
2:11:43
Tad Eggleston: So, yeah. Yeah. You guys publish a surprising number of the answers to that question.
2:11:52
Tad Eggleston: Which is why I was so happy when,
2:11:58
Tad Eggleston: Mark from… from Santos Sisters fame got me in touch with Tucker, and I started having my… my pipeline to, hey, this looks good, can I talk to somebody?
2:12:11
Eric Reynolds: Good deal.
2:12:11
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, it's weird,
2:12:17
Tad Eggleston: Despite the fact that we started out
2:12:20
Tad Eggleston: With the very strong intention of… We want…
2:12:29
Tad Eggleston: To elevate the medium of comics.
2:12:33
Tad Eggleston: You know, to make it beyond superheroes, etc. Just because of who's easiest to get ahold of, and who responds fastest, that sort of thing, we had way more superhero creators for a really long time, because it's just harder to line up
2:12:51
Tad Eggleston: the indie people, either because… They're not on social media, or because…
2:12:58
Tad Eggleston: Frankly, a lot of them, I think, are working or traveling a lot more.
2:13:03
Eric Reynolds: Hmm.
2:13:03
Tad Eggleston: You know, so getting the… or, you know, them even… I mean, the number… number of people that, that, like, I'll see at another con, and they're like, shit, I still haven't responded to your email, I'm sorry, I've got the 3-day jobs, plus I make the con.
2:13:17
Tad Eggleston: I'm like, I totally get it!
2:13:19
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, of course.
2:13:21
Tad Eggleston: So, so it's been really nice to now have… this specific
2:13:27
Tad Eggleston: pipeline into Fanographics to say, hey, Tucker, the new catalog came out, I'm really interested in this stuff, you know, what can we set up?
2:13:36
Eric Reynolds: Good. I mean, I can tell you, like.
2:13:38
Tad Eggleston: It's created some great interviews.
2:13:40
Eric Reynolds: That's great. I love it. I mean, my… ever since the pandemic,
2:13:46
Eric Reynolds: And it really started with the pandemic.
2:13:49
Eric Reynolds: I've just become a voracious,
2:13:55
Eric Reynolds: viewer of cartoonist interviews on YouTube.
2:13:58
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:14:00
Tad Eggleston: Which… which we're going to start doing sooner… sooner… sooner rather than later. I've started playing with…
2:14:06
Tad Eggleston: We finally have the… all of our audio, I think, is up on YouTube now, and I'm looking at…
2:14:13
Tad Eggleston: Doing some video.
2:14:15
Eric Reynolds: Indeed.
2:14:15
Tad Eggleston: But I haven't gotten there yet.
2:14:17
Tad Eggleston: Because it just feels like it's time. Fifth year in.
2:14:21
Tad Eggleston: Feels like it's time to start.
2:14:24
Eric Reynolds: I say watching, whether I'm watching or just listening to audio.
2:14:26
Tad Eggleston: No, I know. That's why we got the audio up, because I realized that I do 80% of my podcast listening through…
2:14:35
Tad Eggleston: YouTube, so I'm sitting there going…
2:14:38
Tad Eggleston: Whether you're watching or not. This is a place… Yeah, this is a place where podcasts go, where people listen to podcasts. I need to…
2:14:47
Tad Eggleston: We need to be there, too, if we're gonna…
2:14:50
Tad Eggleston: You know, but… Yeah, that's certainly true.
2:14:52
Eric Reynolds: True for me.
2:14:53
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there are a few more hoops to jump through to get yourself…
2:14:58
Tad Eggleston: listed, so I had to… had to figure that out. But literally this week, because I'm still off of school, I've been playing with some video editing and… and whatnot.
2:15:09
Tad Eggleston: And ideas for even live streaming in a way that's more than just two faces.
2:15:19
Tad Eggleston: You know, because… the challenge is, I don't want to be that guy that puts the whole comic up.
2:15:25
Tad Eggleston: And the easiest way to do it is just flip through the comic while you're talking, but then you can accidentally put the whole comic up.
2:15:32
Eric Reynolds: In my mind, to my mind, two faces is fine if the conversation's good.
2:15:36
Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, and two faces is fine. And, and, like, I'm not, I'm not saying that I, like, I have no interest in doing two faces either.
2:15:45
Eric Reynolds: Do I know what you mean.
2:15:46
Tad Eggleston: But because it's a visual medium, it's like, if we're gonna do visuals, it… like, one of the challenges sometimes, like, we run into this all the time, particularly with, like, the book clubs, is like, okay, how do we best describe this amazing thing that you need to go buy to look at?
2:16:04
Eric Reynolds: Right.
2:16:06
Tad Eggleston: You know, whereas sometimes it would be nice to be able to just throw the panel up.
2:16:10
Eric Reynolds: Yeah. You know. For sure, yeah.
2:16:13
Tad Eggleston: So… but it's a matter of, figuring out how to prep where it's not a ton of extra work, and or…
2:16:21
Tad Eggleston: How to be able to do it on the fly where I don't feel like I'm showing too much.
2:16:28
Tad Eggleston: You know?
2:16:29
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah.
2:16:31
Tad Eggleston: So, my final question… Because I told you I'd come up with a baseball one.
2:16:37
Tad Eggleston: and, you know, you're enough of a baseball historian that, like.
2:16:43
Tad Eggleston: And you shared a tidbit of information in one of our recent emails that just made me salivate.
2:16:52
Tad Eggleston: So you, you said that, that Phantographics used to, to share a… a warehouse space with… with Ebbets Flannels. Yeah. When Ebbets… when Ebbets moved out, they left a… a…
2:17:05
Tad Eggleston: trove of, of… Alternates.
2:17:10
Eric Reynolds: They left.
2:17:11
Tad Eggleston: go through.
2:17:12
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, we shared an… we shared a warehouse space with them in downtown Seattle.
2:17:17
Eric Reynolds: And for them, it was a smaller… it wasn't their full space. It was our.
2:17:23
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:17:23
Eric Reynolds: warehouse, and then they had a part of it that was just their irregulars, as I guess they call it?
2:17:29
Tad Eggleston: Irregulars, I guess, is the word I'm looking for, yeah.
2:17:32
Tad Eggleston: Meaning the A stitch is off.
2:17:35
Eric Reynolds: Right, right, right, exactly.
2:17:36
Tad Eggleston: But…
2:17:37
Eric Reynolds: But to, you know, the untrained eye.
2:17:39
Tad Eggleston: Absolutely. Most of it looks absolutely perfect.
2:17:42
Eric Reynolds: And so, anyway, we had to…
2:17:44
Eric Reynolds: We both had to vacate this space, and…
2:17:49
Eric Reynolds: they just abandoned most of it. Like, they were fully out, but they left, quite literally, a small mountain of stuff. It was a big room.
2:18:00
Eric Reynolds: where they had just… it wasn't even, like, carts, it was literally just loose. I mean, there were boxes in there, too. Oh, yeah, no, no, no. But it was… but it was literally, like, a… probably a 10… I got a whole…
2:18:11
Eric Reynolds: I have several caps here that I got.
2:18:13
Tad Eggleston: No, no, I'm wearing one, I've got… I've got a,
2:18:19
Tad Eggleston: a graze one right by… right by my feet, because I was wearing it yesterday. So that… that's where the question comes.
2:18:27
Tad Eggleston: tell me, because I assume you took many, many things, so give me your top 3 fines from that pile.
2:18:35
Eric Reynolds: Haha, that's great. Yeah, I had a… had a fucking blast. It was like a… it was like a shopping spree, you know? It was like.
2:18:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
2:18:42
Eric Reynolds: supermarket. Yeah, no, I would have killed to be involved in that. There's one right there.
2:18:48
Tad Eggleston: Nice. I have, I, I have both that and… and the, the cap.
2:18:53
Eric Reynolds: The red and blue one.
2:18:55
Tad Eggleston: With the soft bill, I love the soft bill caps.
2:18:58
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, well, I guess I would be…
2:19:02
Eric Reynolds: I mean, this actually isn't one of those, but I would be remiss, not to mention the… the Fanta…
2:19:08
Tad Eggleston: Yes.
2:19:09
Eric Reynolds: That's collab.
2:19:10
Tad Eggleston: And if you find another one of those, I, like…
2:19:15
Tad Eggleston: would be eternally grateful, because I didn't know it existed until you guys were sold out.
2:19:20
Eric Reynolds: There were very few made. It was, like, under 100.
2:19:23
Tad Eggleston: I know, but it's still up on their website to taunt me.
2:19:26
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right, right. This was a… I don't… this was a fun one. I have a good friend, Matt… Matt Johnson, who, does a magazine in Seattle called PMA.
2:19:38
Eric Reynolds: So is that one?
2:19:39
Tad Eggleston: it is, or is it…
2:19:40
Eric Reynolds: No.
2:19:40
Tad Eggleston: for something else. What… what's.
2:19:42
Eric Reynolds: So it stands for something else, and I'll be honest, I don't know what.
2:19:47
Eric Reynolds: But I found a few of these in there, and I was able to give them to my friend Matt.
2:19:53
Eric Reynolds: to just kind of help promote his magazine. He gave him out to some VIP friends. So that was super cool.
2:20:01
Eric Reynolds: I have, A couple of killer jackets, for…
2:20:09
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, those are the ones that I haven't been able to afford yet.
2:20:12
Eric Reynolds: Ancient…
2:20:12
Tad Eggleston: A couple of jerseys, but no jackets yet.
2:20:15
Eric Reynolds: for a Seattle ice rink that,
2:20:18
Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice.
2:20:19
Eric Reynolds: 18 played for 100 years ago.
2:20:22
Tad Eggleston: Nice.
2:20:23
Eric Reynolds: so much fun stuff. It was… it really was just, like, me and my coworker Kit Brash went down there one day, and
2:20:31
Eric Reynolds: Literally just climbing, and…
2:20:34
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
2:20:34
Eric Reynolds: digging, and what's this? And, you know, you had to not only find something
2:20:39
Eric Reynolds: That was cool, but also was your size, you know?
2:20:42
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, cool.
2:20:43
Eric Reynolds: A lot of it was, like, you know, like, XXXLs that I wouldn't wear, couldn't fit into.
2:20:48
Tad Eggleston: Well, see, I would have taken all of those.
2:20:53
Tad Eggleston: For that matter, they recently had a survey, and I said, you know, I really like my sweatshirts big, and you don't even make 4XLs.
2:21:02
Eric Reynolds: But yeah, so anyway, that was super fun. And it was great to just…
2:21:07
Eric Reynolds: Not how… like, it was just there for the taking.
2:21:11
Tad Eggleston: The other thing, the other thing I found, which I wish I had in here.
2:21:14
Eric Reynolds: I could show you is.
2:21:17
Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm certain you'll be back.
2:21:18
Eric Reynolds: I found a, football poster, a screen print, from the… 19…
2:21:27
Eric Reynolds: I think it's from around 1930.
2:21:30
Eric Reynolds: From an Ohio company that, that made posters.
2:21:36
Eric Reynolds: And, it burned to the ground, like, a year or two after this poster was made. I just did a little Google research.
2:21:45
Eric Reynolds: But it's a fantastic old,
2:21:49
Eric Reynolds: old screen poster, and the neat thing about it is it's got someone On the middle of it.
2:21:57
Eric Reynolds: hand-drew X's and O's like a play, like, drew up a play.
2:22:02
Eric Reynolds: And, and,
2:22:04
Eric Reynolds: So I have no idea who it was, but I'd love to think that, you know, it was…
2:22:08
Eric Reynolds: some… some famous coach of that era, who's, like, jotting something down at the time. I've got it hanging up.
2:22:14
Eric Reynolds: Basement.
2:22:15
Tad Eggleston: I mean, in general, I'm only a baseball guy, and football in particular. I spent a decade in senior care.
2:22:21
Tad Eggleston: and dementia care in particular, so all I see is head injuries, but that still sounds cool.
2:22:26
Eric Reynolds: Well, I'm actually the same. I'm, like, way more of a baseball fan than anything else, but this was a cool…
2:22:35
Eric Reynolds: it's just a cool piece of graphic design and illustration. It's in, like, 2 or 3 colors, and, hand… hand screen.
2:22:44
Eric Reynolds: And close to 100 years old.
2:22:48
Eric Reynolds: And it was tucked behind,
2:22:50
Eric Reynolds: It was just tucked behind a bunch of crap, and that… and that…
2:22:56
Eric Reynolds: And it clearly, like, it belonged to somebody at some point, but… Right. And who just decided to stash it there for a while, but .
2:23:04
Tad Eggleston: Right.
2:23:04
Eric Reynolds: But I grabbed it and given it a good home.
2:23:09
Tad Eggleston: Alright, that, that, that made me think of one… one more baseball-type question.
2:23:14
Tad Eggleston: Because you're enough, I think, of a baseball history geek that this question will work.
2:23:23
Tad Eggleston: What?
2:23:24
Tad Eggleston: Team or barnstorming tour do you wish you could have seen?
2:23:29
Tad Eggleston: I'm taking it a step further than what player do you wish you could have seen? What team or barnstorming tour
2:23:36
Tad Eggleston: Do you wish you could have seen?
2:23:40
Eric Reynolds: Oh man, that's a really great question.
2:23:42
Eric Reynolds: you know, if you ask, like, that about a band or something, you know, you could… it'd be a bunch of stuff that comes right to mind. Baseball-wise.
2:23:50
Eric Reynolds: I mean, you'd be… you'd… you would never go wrong picking one of those Yankees teams.
2:23:59
Eric Reynolds: of the, what, late 20s and 30s?
2:24:03
Eric Reynolds: During that big run.
2:24:05
Tad Eggleston: Except that I'm more of a pitching guy.
2:24:07
Eric Reynolds: Oh, I was gonna say, except for the fact that I kind of hate the Yankees, so…
2:24:13
Tad Eggleston: I mean, Garrett…
2:24:14
Eric Reynolds: You know what I would say?
2:24:16
Tad Eggleston: Bill Dickey was cool.
2:24:19
Eric Reynolds: I would say those very early… one of the LA Dodgers teams with Jackie Robinson.
2:24:26
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
2:24:28
Eric Reynolds: You know, sitting here…
2:24:29
Tad Eggleston: Brooklyn.
2:24:30
Eric Reynolds: LA, I think. I mean.
2:24:31
Tad Eggleston: in L.A.
2:24:31
Eric Reynolds: Brooklyn would probably be the more historically, kind of, you know, relevant, but being a Southern Californian myself.
2:24:39
Tad Eggleston: Well, and so was Jackie. He was probably as happy as anybody when they moved.
2:24:44
Eric Reynolds: My dad was a Dodgers fan, and he went to the very first Dodger game in LA when they moved.
2:24:52
Tad Eggleston: Alright.
2:24:53
Eric Reynolds: And, he was a problem.
2:24:57
Eric Reynolds: Oh.
2:24:58
Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
2:24:59
Eric Reynolds: No, I was just gonna say, like, he was brought… what year did they move? Like…
2:25:03
Tad Eggleston: 57?
2:25:05
Eric Reynolds: I was gonna say 58, 60, something like that, so he would have.
2:25:08
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was 50s.
2:25:10
Eric Reynolds: He would have been in his 20s, and he became a Dodgers fan, you know, for his whole life. He's passed away.
2:25:17
Eric Reynolds: But, So I think I would have picked that.
2:25:21
Tad Eggleston: 58 season.
2:25:22
Eric Reynolds: I would've… I would've…
2:25:23
Tad Eggleston: Season was the first.
2:25:25
Eric Reynolds: love to go be a Dodgers fan from day one. I think that would have been pretty cool.
2:25:30
Tad Eggleston: I have historically been on the Giants' side of that rivalry, but Shohei… Shohei!
2:25:41
Eric Reynolds: You couldn't go wrong seeing, you know, Willie Mays in his heyday, too. Oh, God.
2:25:46
Tad Eggleston: No. But I think the answer to my own question for me… would be…
2:25:53
Tad Eggleston: one of two more obscure things. I would have… Satchel Page did barnstorming
2:26:01
Tad Eggleston: tours with the Dizzy Dean All-Stars. So it was the Satchel Page All-Stars against the Dizzy Dean All-Stars, and I think that those would have been… and you would have gotten to, you know, I think…
2:26:15
Tad Eggleston: I don't think Ruth was ever part of the Dean All-Stars, but I think Gehrig was for at least part of a season.
2:26:21
Eric Reynolds: That sort of, you know…
2:26:23
Tad Eggleston: Or… and I didn't even know about this until Bob Kendrick talked about it in… in…
2:26:31
Tad Eggleston: He's got a podcast called Black Diamonds.
2:26:35
Tad Eggleston: out, out of the… for the Negro League Baseball Museum. The,
2:26:40
Tad Eggleston: the first barnstorming tour of Japan.
2:26:43
Tad Eggleston: was actually an Eagle League team, almost a decade before the white teams got there.
2:26:49
Tad Eggleston: fat.
2:26:50
Eric Reynolds: That would have been pretty cool. Yeah, seeing any of those…
2:26:53
Tad Eggleston: That would've been cool.
2:26:53
Eric Reynolds: any of the Negro League greats would, of course, have been…
2:26:57
Eric Reynolds: be pretty amazing, especially given how little…
2:27:01
Eric Reynolds: you know, little record there is of some of those guys, like, just how good were they, you know? How great.
2:27:07
Tad Eggleston: I mean, we have… thanks to a handful of people who've done, like, some serious scouring of newspapers to dig up box stores, etc, we have a much better idea of their
2:27:21
Tad Eggleston: A statistical record than we once did? But, like…
2:27:26
Tad Eggleston: There's so little video, or even action photography.
2:27:31
Tad Eggleston: I mean… We think that there's not a ton of video pre-50s for…
2:27:39
Tad Eggleston: For the major leagues, but you can find, like.
2:27:41
Tad Eggleston: 10 times as much video of Babe Ruth playing baseball as you can find of, like, all of the Negro League players combined.
2:27:51
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right.
2:27:52
Tad Eggleston: I think… I think I've found, like, 3 clips of Satchel Paige before he was in the big leagues. Find a little bit more of his time with the Indians.
2:28:01
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right.
2:28:03
Tad Eggleston: You know, I found, like, one Josh Gibson swing.
2:28:08
Tad Eggleston: I don't know what an Oscar Charleston swing would look like.
2:28:12
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, right, right.
2:28:14
Tad Eggleston: L.
2:28:15
Eric Reynolds: I don't mind being at the Doc LSSD no-hitter game, too.
2:28:19
Tad Eggleston: That would be pretty cool, too.
2:28:20
Eric Reynolds: Damn.
2:28:21
Tad Eggleston: Have you seen that… have you seen that documentary?
2:28:23
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, it's great.
2:28:24
Tad Eggleston: That's so cool.
2:28:27
Tad Eggleston: That's another one that I think… Just to see if there's actually a comic on it.
2:28:31
Eric Reynolds: I… yeah, you might be right.
2:28:33
Tad Eggleston: Somebody did a Doc comic. I would love to just, like, you know, scrutinize his body language throughout that whole thing.
2:28:39
Eric Reynolds: Yeah. It'd be pretty fun.
2:28:40
Tad Eggleston: Oh, there's so many great bait stores… So many great baseball stories.
2:28:47
Tad Eggleston: We need more baseball comics, Eric. You're one of the people that could make this happen. We need more baseball comics.
2:28:54
Eric Reynolds: I don't disagree with you.
2:28:57
Tad Eggleston: And I feel like… I feel like it's one of the most under-translated manga, too, because you know that there's way more baseball manga than
2:29:06
Tad Eggleston: translated.
2:29:07
Eric Reynolds: Sure, yeah.
2:29:09
Tad Eggleston: I mean, even if you didn't literally know, you would know, because baseball's way bigger in Japan, and comics are way bigger in Japan, and sports comics are way bigger in Japan.
2:29:21
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, no, I'm sure you're completely correct.
2:29:25
Tad Eggleston: In fact, every… I don't know if you ever… I mean, maybe with the, with the… the…
2:29:33
Tad Eggleston: new phanographics, manga imprint, you'll be seeing more. They're…
2:29:40
Tad Eggleston: there's a concept that I feel like has to be a manga.
2:29:44
Tad Eggleston: I don't… I can't confirm it, but everybody I know who's in Japan or whatnot, I'm like, look for this. This is one that I would read untranslated, because there was a New York Times article
2:29:56
Tad Eggleston: And I want to say 2022 or 3?
2:30:00
Tad Eggleston: about the retired Yakuza softball team.
2:30:05
Eric Reynolds: Oh, wow.
2:30:08
Tad Eggleston: The team literally wore pink and black uniforms, because they originally had pink and gold uniforms, but they felt like the other teams,
2:30:17
Tad Eggleston: We're scared of them.
2:30:19
Tad Eggleston: and see, they're, like, the opposite of their league. Like, their softball league has, like, PTA teams that are, like, cutthroat, and they're just out there drinking, smoking, and having a good time.
2:30:31
Tad Eggleston: Right? And they want to be allowed.
2:30:33
Eric Reynolds: Every softball league should.
2:30:36
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. And they don't care that they get their asses kicked, but they would prefer to get their asses kicked than win because the other team isn't
2:30:45
Tad Eggleston: Is too afraid to play.
2:30:48
Tad Eggleston: Which is why they switched to Blink…
2:30:50
Eric Reynolds: So you're saying… you're saying you know this exists, or you just…
2:30:54
Tad Eggleston: No, this real thing exists. There was a New York Times story about it. What I'm saying is, manga is defined by, take two crazy things that shouldn't be a story, and we're gonna tell it. So I feel like there has to be a manga version of something like this.
2:31:11
Eric Reynolds: Yeah, I mean.
2:31:12
Tad Eggleston: You have Way of the House Husband, which is essentially this for cooking.
2:31:18
Tad Eggleston: I would desperately like to see a manga about this. I don't know that it exists. I know that the actual team exists. The actual team has, like, between them, I want to say, almost 200 years of prison time, and is missing 22 knuckles? Something like that?
2:31:35
Eric Reynolds: Wow.
2:31:37
Eric Reynolds: Alright.
2:31:39
Eric Reynolds: I'll keep that in mind.
2:31:41
Tad Eggleston: But… but it feels like there has to be a manga.
2:31:45
Tad Eggleston: Can't you just see that comedy baseball manga?
2:31:48
Eric Reynolds: Oh yeah, yeah, 100%.
2:31:52
Tad Eggleston: Good stuff. Eric, it has been a blast. We'll have to do this again sometime.
2:32:00
Tad Eggleston: And, for 22 panels, this has been Eric Reynolds, and we will see you after the next page.
2:32:07
Eric Reynolds: Thank you, Tad.