Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #257... 22 Panels with Carol Tyler

Transcript

With Great Power #257... 22 Panels with Carol Tyler · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is the legendary… I'm gonna say that, legendary, Carol Tyler.
• 0:11
  Tad Eggleston: You've been in this business for so long, I can't even…
• 0:16
  Tad Eggleston: I can't even imagine drawing comics for…
• 0:21
  Carol: For your whole life?
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: She'd been trying, yeah, your whole life.
• 0:24
  Carol: Yes, I've been drawing my whole life.
• 0:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I have been.
• 0:29
  Carol: I mean.
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 0:31
  Carol: We draw as children, and then we find ourselves
• 0:34
  Carol: doing different things, and I've certainly been the lady who…
• 0:43
  Carol: I… I do it because I can't,
• 0:47
  Carol: Yeah, people back in the day would say, I don't understand, maybe you should… let me draw you a picture.
• 0:54
  Carol: So, I was… I'm a person who likes
• 0:57
  Carol: Who likes to read maps, and see it in front of me, and…
• 1:03
  Carol: when I organize things, I have to lay everything out, so,
• 1:10
  Carol: I can't often find the right words, so I will smish my way into what it is I'm trying to say.
• 1:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's…
• 1:19
  Carol: Yeah.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's…
• 1:25
  Tad Eggleston: trying to think of the, like, a non-cliche… I mean, what I want to say is that's beautiful. I mean, because… I mean, I'm a teacher. I… for that matter, I teach special ed, so…
• 1:36
  Carol: Oh, okay.
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: I'm around people who have trouble finding the right words all the time, so anything that helps people find their way in life is immediately something that I'm in favor of.
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: yes. And the way… and the way you've done it, you know.
• 1:55
  Carol: Well, I've done it…
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: It also shares a pathway to other people, because you then share it with the world.
• 2:01
  Carol: Well, I wasn't a person who… I'm not in the category of cartoonist who grew up reading, a certain comic strip, and boy, I wanted to grow up and be like that person.
• 2:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 2:13
  Carol: I had no… I had no aspiration.
• 2:20
  Carol: At all.
• 2:22
  Carol: About anything.
• 2:22
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:24
  Carol: You know, people say, Well, except getting to the Beatles show.
• 2:29
  Carol: Well, I had that aspiration when I was young, but you know what I'm saying? We can talk about the fabs later.
• 2:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, I just, like, you can't tell me…
• 2:40
  Carol: Because I've read that book a couple of times. Yeah, that was the big one. But, you know, like, kids… some kids are, like, they're gymnasts, and they want to be in the Olympics, or they're, studying because they want to be a scientist, or get into some…
• 2:55
  Carol: I had no idea what I wanted to do, and it was in the 50s there,
• 3:01
  Carol: I remember saying to my dad.
• 3:03
  Carol: dad and mom at dinner one night was like, I'd like to go to college. And my dad said, well, why would I spend money on you going to college when you're just gonna get married and have a bunch of kids?
• 3:15
  Carol: That was the vibe.
• 3:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's a very 50s response.
• 3:19
  Carol: Yeah, and so I thought.
• 3:22
  Carol: I didn't react or think anything about it, but I just quietly turned the wheels all the time, like…
• 3:29
  Carol: Well, I don't know if I want to do that. You know, I didn't outrageously say something to my dad, or shut up, or anything like that. I just thought.
• 3:37
  Carol: I just saw a watch, and I'm always… observing everything.
• 3:42
  Carol: I watched, there were some girls in my high school that went…
• 3:49
  Carol: On, what's called the secretarial route.
• 3:53
  Carol: They were typing, and they were gonna do… Office work.
• 3:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 3:58
  Carol: And then there was a nurse's group.
• 4:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:01
  Carol: And then there was College Bound.
• 4:04
  Carol: And I just always thought, oh, going there, college seems more interesting. I don't want to sit in an office.
• 4:11
  Carol: And now, why that choice, or why did I have that hunch that I wanted to do that?
• 4:17
  Carol: When nobody… Growing up, nobody had, like, curls!
• 4:23
  Tad Eggleston: Great, we gotta get her in art school!
• 4:26
  Tad Eggleston: Now, just… just because…
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: one of the things that I discovered when I read Fab Four Mania is that you grew up in my neck of the woods. I'm in Round Lake, right?
• 4:38
  Carol: Oh, my God, you're just over there! So which high school did you go to? Carmel.
• 4:44
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 4:47
  Carol: I mean, definitely with the Catholic vibe. My brother went, my sister went to Holy Child, I don't know if you… that school.
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't know if I know that one.
• 4:54
  Carol: That was over.
• 4:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:55
  Carol: vegan.
• 4:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:57
  Carol: as an all-girls Catholic high school, I didn't want to go there, because I definitely knew I wanted to be around boys.
• 5:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 5:06
  Carol: So, yeah, I went to Carmel, but right before Carmel is when I saw the Beatles.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 5:14
  Carol: And when I got to Carmel, it was just fascinating, the things I learned.
• 5:20
  Carol: And the… the people from Carm… you went to Round Lake High School?
• 5:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, I actually grew up in Wheaton, but I live in Round Lake now.
• 5:29
  Carol: Oh, you live there now?
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I live… I live there now. I grew… I grew up in the west suburbs.
• 5:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. But I've been up in the north suburbs for… God, 15 years now? 16?
• 5:41
  Carol: I'm just gonna say this, Round Lake, Fox Lake, all of the stuff.
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: All the lakes.
• 5:48
  Carol: We were considered kind of a lower class of people, than the North Shore.
• 5:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 5:56
  Carol: So…
• 5:59
  Tad Eggleston: I kind of get that, because I teach in Lincolnshire.
• 6:03
  Carol: Okay,
• 6:09
  Tad Eggleston: Are you from Round Lake?
• 6:10
  Carol: Okay, I mean, I don't know if that still exists, but that was definitely.
• 6:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 6:18
  Carol: you know, it's just an income thing, you know, the Lincolnshire,
• 6:22
  Tad Eggleston: bullet.
• 6:23
  Carol: What else do we have? Highland Park.
• 6:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 6:27
  Carol: He'll, highwood.
• 6:31
  Tad Eggleston: I would.
• 6:32
  Carol: all of those communities, and that was something that came up with me and Justin when we first met, you know, because I was like.
• 6:39
  Carol: oh my god, you're from Highland Park, I'm Fox Lake. And he would say to me, he'd sing that little song to me, Patches from a whole shanty town.
• 6:50
  Carol: Give me a.
• 6:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but you… but, I mean, like…
• 6:54
  Carol: You know…
• 6:55
  Tad Eggleston: I think, though.
• 6:55
  Carol: He was raised really rich kid, and I was raised by a plumber and a secretary.
• 7:02
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know, Tom Waits married a woman from Johnsburg, so…
• 7:06
  Carol: Oh, well, Johnsburg was okay.
• 7:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah!
• 7:09
  Carol: It was something about Fox Lake, Round Lake, Antioch.
• 7:14
  Carol: That kind of area, I think it was because maybe at the turn of the century, early on.
• 7:20
  Carol: It had to do with the trains, it had to do with where…
• 7:25
  Carol: Executives lived, it had to do with, you know, there was no highways out there, and so…
• 7:30
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's actually As late as the 5th… well.
• 7:35
  Tad Eggleston: Like, when I… I… the first place I lived up here was Ingleside.
• 7:40
  Carol: from Ingleside, Illinois!
• 7:41
  Tad Eggleston: Ingleside? Really? Yeah. Oh, it does.
• 7:44
  Carol: Canton point!
• 7:45
  Tad Eggleston: I… I…
• 7:47
  Carol: Where'd you live? Did you live by dogs?
• 7:49
  Tad Eggleston: I'm done.
• 7:49
  Carol: God!
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, because I was… I was… I was tucked in by, like, the, the, there's a lumber yard.
• 8:00
  Carol: Duck Lake?
• 8:01
  Tad Eggleston: I think so.
• 8:04
  Carol: There's a… there's a treasure buried in Duck Lake. I gotta go back there. My great-grandpa buried.
• 8:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:10
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, my landlady, because I lived in an in-law apartment, you know, there was the house, and there was the apartment off the side of it. My landlady told me that, like, it had been…
• 8:24
  Tad Eggleston: The house had been in her family since, like, 1900, but from, like, 1900 to… to the stock market crash, it was their summer home.
• 8:33
  Carol: Yeah, summer homes, definitely.
• 8:34
  Tad Eggleston: And they were… and they were gonna have to get rid of it, except that their… that her aunt lost the
• 8:40
  Tad Eggleston: her home in the city and said, well, I'm just gonna go move into the summer home and find work up there.
• 8:47
  Carol: common story. That, that's…
• 8:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:49
  Carol: It was, so that's who it was peopled by, and…
• 8:52
  Carol: But now what's rung, a lot of, like, old-timers, like my sister and stuff like that, had to leave there because the taxes got too high.
• 9:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 9:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the schools got better, too.
• 9:04
  Carol: Schools got better, but the.
• 9:05
  Tad Eggleston: As a teacher, I like property taxes. That's what pays.
• 9:12
  Carol: Yeah, that part's good. She taught…
• 9:14
  Carol: She taught… I went to Carmel, she taught at Marion Central.
• 9:18
  Carol: And lived just on the line in Wick County, but… heck yeah! I was water skiing on those lakes, and knew those lakes, like, the back of my hand. I mean, I knew… I knew… went to Blarney's, I knew where the Blarney's Island, for people who don't know all of the stuff we're talking about, it was a destination.
• 9:38
  Carol: Basically, it used to just be a,
• 9:41
  Carol: It was all wetlands out there, so it was a hunk of wetlands that they turned into, like, this
• 9:46
  Carol: bar.
• 9:48
  Carol: hamburger joint.
• 9:50
  Carol: That you only could get to by boat.
• 9:53
  Carol: But on the way there, there was a great sandbar for swimming, and we had a boat, and I… yeah, I was all over
• 10:00
  Carol: Ingleside Lake County, shoot. That was my… and my… and I had roots there. Like I said, my dad would go out there, and when he was young, they'd go duck hunting, fishing. They… in fact, they would fish out there.
• 10:15
  Carol: and take all the fish they caught into Chicago and sell it on Monday morning.
• 10:21
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 10:21
  Carol: For a little extra bonus income, so they… they did that.
• 10:25
  Carol: But my great-grandpa, everybody, you know, they were all out there, kind of, working-class people, and then a lot of people
• 10:33
  Carol: that lived out there were…
• 10:38
  Carol: we call them the Czechoslovakian Widows.
• 10:42
  Carol: Because there were a lot of… it was affordable.
• 10:45
  Carol: it was kind of isolated, so, like, people who like to ice fish and stuff like that.
• 10:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's worked out.
• 10:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's worked out well for me, because…
• 10:57
  Carol: It's changed, yeah.
• 11:00
  Tad Eggleston: My wife is from South Dakota, so the rest of the city area kind of scares her. I mean, she's getting used to it. She likes the things you can do, but, like, she's used to having not a lot of people around. You go down into, like, Chicago, and it's a lot of people around, and this is a nice, like, happy medium for.
• 11:20
  Carol: Yeah, around Lakers. It changed a lot, but it was on my bus route.
• 11:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we're actually in Round Lake Heights, so it's that little sliver…
• 11:31
  Tad Eggleston: Literally right between Round Lake and Fox Lake.
• 11:36
  Carol: I know it won't.
• 11:38
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, no, that was one of my joys when I was reading Fab Four.
• 11:44
  Carol: You knew that, dear?
• 11:45
  Tad Eggleston: mania, is I'm like, oh, I… I knew you were from around here, because it was about you going to a… to the Comiskey show, but… but I had no idea that…
• 11:55
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, I think I might have told you this story. My Uncle Andy was given tickets to that show. He was in college at the time.
• 12:03
  Tad Eggleston: And he passed them on because he had a final, and he's like, I'll catch them the next time they come.
• 12:10
  Carol: Oh!
• 12:12
  Carol: Probably didn't…
• 12:14
  Tad Eggleston: They didn't. No.
• 12:16
  Carol: Oh, kick yourself. No, no, no.
• 12:18
  Tad Eggleston: Still does. He still does.
• 12:22
  Carol: No, it was clear to me what the goal was. The goal was to see them in person. I did everything I could possibly do.
• 12:31
  Carol: And got to do that. So, I mean, yes, that's why the book title is, Beatles Obsession and a Concert of a Lifetime, because
• 12:41
  Carol: I knew exactly… people would say, oh, they're a flash in the pan, they're just… it's like… Nope.
• 12:47
  Tad Eggleston: God. No.
• 12:48
  Carol: They're not.
• 12:50
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 12:50
  Carol: Nobody would listen to me or take me seriously, because I was a kid.
• 12:55
  Carol: And, you know, it's like, I was right, that's true, and I knew what I wanted.
• 13:00
  Carol: But then, after I saw the Beatles.
• 13:04
  Carol: I didn't know what I wanted to do with my eyes.
• 13:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 13:08
  Carol: after comics.
• 13:09
  Tad Eggleston: Back to comics.
• 13:11
  Carol: No, I… I… yeah, I mean, I read Nancy in the Chicago American newspaper, my mom got that, she liked to read the American.
• 13:20
  Tad Eggleston: This is so good.
• 13:22
  Carol: But… and I remember being in Chicago, when we lived in Chicago when I was little, I remember,
• 13:29
  Carol: Sunday… the Sunday routine, we'd have the paper, you could lay the newspaper out, it would cover almost the whole living room floor, and you could look at the color comics.
• 13:39
  Carol: So I remember that, and I remember my brother Joe was
• 13:44
  Carol: Into comic books, like all boys.
• 13:49
  Carol: N.
• 13:50
  Carol: he had a box of them he kept under his bed, but I wasn't allowed in his room, and so…
• 13:59
  Carol: fine, I won't look at them. And then my sister got into Archie, and I couldn't relate to Archie, because those were teenagers, and I was a little kid.
• 14:07
  Tad Eggleston: And so, I was foisted off.
• 14:09
  Carol: Little dot, little… you know, the… the… what do you… what is that type of comic? Harvey. All the Harvey titles.
• 14:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Harvey Tails.
• 14:19
  Carol: You're supposed to like this because you're a little kid.
• 14:21
  Tad Eggleston: You didn't even get the Duck comics?
• 14:24
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't really comics with it.
• 14:25
  Carol: band ducks or any of that. I didn't like any of that. I mean, I'd have to read it because it was there, but…
• 14:31
  Carol: The one thing I did like was Nancy and Slugo's Summer Camp, written by John. Oh, so good.
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 14:38
  Carol: And that… Yesterday, when I was at the farm, I thought.
• 14:45
  Carol: I had… I knew I had to come back, and I said, I'll leave Camp Far for Mama.
• 14:49
  Carol: Did you hear that? I don't want to leave Camp Fafa Mama.
• 14:56
  Carol: Because…
• 14:57
  Carol: when we lived in Chicago, and I was reading that, to me, it was like the most magical thing in the world.
• 15:04
  Carol: That you could go to summer camp.
• 15:06
  Carol: And of course, that wasn't going to happen for me, okay? I'm talking about being, like, 8 years old, 7 or 8 years old, and reading that and thinking, because it would be the summer issue.
• 15:17
  Carol: Wow, special.
• 15:20
  Carol: I'll be reading and seeing them go into these little houses, They're little cabins.
• 15:25
  Carol: You know, the place was dotted with these cabins. It didn't matter what kind of hijinks they got into, it was the sense of place.
• 15:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:33
  Carol: And so… Actually, I had to pretend one summer. I wanted to do that so bad. Go to the…
• 15:45
  Carol: building that had screens all around. Oh, I just.
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 15:48
  Carol: I thought that was magnificent.
• 15:51
  Carol: And so I took a towel, From the bathroom.
• 15:57
  Carol: I made, like, a bologna sandwich.
• 16:01
  Carol: And wrapped up the towel, and put the borne sandwich in, wax paper.
• 16:09
  Carol: And I went… In Chicago, the whole city's a grid.
• 16:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 16:14
  Carol: building… Allie… So it'd be building, garage, alley, garage, building. So that would be the unit.
• 16:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 16:25
  Carol: So I went two alleys away.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 16:29
  Carol: was out of my range. We were not supposed to leave this, like.
• 16:33
  Tad Eggleston: He's, like, running away.
• 16:36
  Carol: We live on…
• 16:37
  Tad Eggleston: the street.
• 16:39
  Carol: And Wrigley Field was one way, and Riverview was the other way.
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 16:44
  Carol: So, we were not allowed to leave Addison Street. I could go to Eddy Street, which was behind us.
• 16:52
  Carol: Because my grandma and grandpa lived there. But then across… but then the houses that you could… if you stood on their front porch and looked across the street, those houses, I didn't even look that way, because you weren't supposed to go. But I went behind…
• 17:07
  Carol: Those houses.
• 17:09
  Carol: And I found a garage that was shut.
• 17:13
  Carol: But it had… because the alley is here in the garbage cans. The alley.
• 17:18
  Tad Eggleston: And then there was…
• 17:19
  Carol: The garage doors were set back, maybe.
• 17:23
  Carol: 2 or 3 feet, the actual door. The garage could be as close to the alley as possible.
• 17:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 17:30
  Carol: But then there'd be this little inset, so I found one, and I unrolled my towel, ate my sandwich.
• 17:36
  Carol: That was cute!
• 17:37
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 17:39
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 17:39
  Carol: That's what I did for summer camp, thinking I was just like Nancy in Nancy's summer camp.
• 17:46
  Carol: Yeah, so… At the farm recently.
• 17:52
  Carol: And even, I think… I think I thought this when Justin was still going out there when he was alive.
• 17:59
  Carol: But it wasn't a direct correlation that this was, like, a campfire for Mama, but it is, you know, it's a place I can go to in the summer.
• 18:07
  Carol: It's not a year-round place.
• 18:11
  Carol: And, basically, roll out… unroll a towel and have a sandwich.
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: I love the idea of unrolling a towel and having a sandwich.
• 18:23
  Carol: Rich.
• 18:24
  Carol: Blowing with ketchup on it on white bread.
• 18:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think mine would have been peanut butter and jelly.
• 18:32
  Tad Eggleston: But still.
• 18:33
  Carol: In mute.
• 18:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:36
  Carol: So…
• 18:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 18:40
  Tad Eggleston: You said you didn't have any direction other than you didn't want to be a secretary, you didn't want to be a nurse, so you were looking at the college-bound girls.
• 18:50
  Tad Eggleston: how did comic… I mean, you were drawing all your life, so you were… you were making comics, whether you, like, fully…
• 18:58
  Tad Eggleston: thought about it or not. When did comics become
• 19:01
  Tad Eggleston: Like, oh, this is something I can do.
• 19:04
  Carol: Sequential storytelling is different from doodling in your notebooks in high school.
• 19:09
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 19:11
  Carol: But…
• 19:13
  Carol: my notebooks from high school, for anyone who happens to go to the exhibit at Billy Ireland, I included those in my retrospective show.
• 19:23
  Carol: Because what I… when I looked through them, I thought, I… I really… Became a lettering person.
• 19:31
  Carol: you know, letter forms, because, you know, I would just…
• 19:35
  Carol: I'd say, like, I'd take… okay, it's all technology.
• 19:39
  Carol: brand, we went from… I did Bicpens when I did the original Fab Four Mania Notes. Those were new technology.
• 19:48
  Carol: Ballpoint pens.
• 19:52
  Tad Eggleston: So I did everything with the ballpoint pen back then. All my scratches, all my journals, all my little stuff I did for fab.
• 19:58
  Carol: Then when I got to high school.
• 20:00
  Carol: Cartridge pens were really popular.
• 20:03
  Carol: again, ink. And so I found that, you know, my notebook words, like, Tuesday, September 2nd.
• 20:13
  Carol: assignments do, you know, the assignment notebook, I would just…
• 20:18
  Carol: Listen to the teacher, and draw the letter forms, and make arrange page arrangements. It reminds me so much of what I do with comics. Come up with a way to show this, drop shades, block letters, scripts, different scripts, upper and lower, all caps.
• 20:37
  Carol: I worked all that out in high school.
• 20:41
  Carol: But nobody ever… people like to look at… and with margin decoration, people would say, like.
• 20:47
  Carol: They'd want me to pass around in class, because they were beautiful. I mean, I'd add color.
• 20:53
  Carol: Right. And there was a beauty to the form.
• 20:57
  Carol: That I was adding, but it wasn't, like, random acid doodling. These were well worked out, baseline lettering, one after another.
• 21:08
  Carol: All school year. I did that for 3 years.
• 21:11
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait to see him.
• 21:12
  Carol: Yeah, I thought…
• 21:13
  Tad Eggleston: Can't wait to see them. I repeat, it's The Drop, the Billy Ireland Cartoon Art Museum.
• 21:19
  Tad Eggleston: in Columbus, Ohio, an exhibit of Carol Tyler's work.
• 21:24
  Tad Eggleston: Should absolutely go see it.
• 21:27
  Tad Eggleston: That's the… that's one of the things I'm looking forward to when I go out to CXC this year, is… is to go over to see it.
• 21:36
  Carol: seeing the show. It's, like, epic, it's everything. So, okay, let me go on.
• 21:42
  Tad Eggleston: I thought about and talked myself out of making the crazy one drive to be there for the opening.
• 21:50
  Tad Eggleston: But… but it was just too close to my school year, and I'm like, I'm gonna be there for 6…
• 21:55
  Carol: You know what you missed? You missed, you know, my big orange gown, and…
• 21:59
  Carol: the little lady that goes around and around, but those are online. I mean, it's there, it's still there. The exhibit, we'll talk about that in a second, because I don't want to lose the thread of getting to comics.
• 22:13
  Carol: So…
• 22:17
  Carol: Music.
• 22:19
  Carol: Obviously.
• 22:21
  Carol: was fabulous when I was growing up. You had the Beatles, and then you had all the bands that came after that, you know, Stones, we had Dylan, we had Motown.
• 22:33
  Carol: everything…
• 22:35
  Tad Eggleston: stacked.
• 22:35
  Carol: now is on the oldest channels. Plus, plus, I want to add…
• 22:41
  Carol: My parents… my mom loved to listen to the radio.
• 22:45
  Carol: on her channel.
• 22:48
  Carol: And that would be your Lawrence Welk, Ray Conniff, Singers, Rosemary Clooney, all that stuff.
• 22:56
  Carol: So… I grew up… with the Great American Songbook.
• 23:02
  Carol: And I feel bad for kids today, because… They're not getting that.
• 23:09
  Tad Eggleston: Some of us coming back.
• 23:12
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, you'd be… I mean, Lady Gaga doing a couple… yeah, but Lady Gaga doing a couple of albums with Tony Bennett started getting… started getting kids interested a little bit.
• 23:25
  Carol: Yes, that's true, but you.
• 23:27
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just around high school kids. I'm surprised by how many of them know the old stuff.
• 23:34
  Carol: Yeah, because you know what? It's the real thing.
• 23:38
  Carol: It's authentic.
• 23:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I talk to kids about Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong and whatnot.
• 23:46
  Carol: We didn't have…
• 23:47
  Tad Eggleston: Because the other thing is, everything's available immediately. Right.
• 23:51
  Carol: Well, we didn't have to…
• 23:52
  Tad Eggleston: But they don't either, because it's all on Spotify.
• 23:56
  Carol: I know.
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: So as soon as they know the name…
• 23:58
  Carol: Turn on the radio, or it was in the background, or…
• 24:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's true.
• 24:01
  Carol: It was curated for us, and it was there.
• 24:07
  Tad Eggleston: Correct.
• 24:07
  Carol: I would turn on the radio, and there would be…
• 24:14
  Carol: Just, like, a series of stuff. Okay, and then… .
• 24:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:19
  Carol: The reason why I brought that up is because with, then,
• 24:28
  Carol: Okay, in high school, there was a lot of great music.
• 24:31
  Carol: just great shit all the time. They didn't have to work hard for you, it's there.
• 24:37
  Carol: And then.
• 24:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:41
  Carol: Then there was, around the time I was graduating from high school.
• 24:45
  Carol: the things shifted to album rock, so you had bands, like, I would go, come on, let's go down to Chicago. Why?
• 24:53
  Carol: Because we got a lineup of bands, and there would be…
• 24:57
  Carol: Chicago, the band, of course, but then there'd also be Jethro Tull, and then there'd be, you know, Cream, or, you know.
• 25:05
  Carol: Yeah, on and on.
• 25:08
  Carol: those bands… And then that was… became the album rock and the doors, you know, so it was like…
• 25:17
  Tad Eggleston: I am.
• 25:18
  Carol: with that shift in culture around the Woodstock era that… I didn't go to Woodstock because I was from the Midwest, but…
• 25:27
  Carol: And there was no knowledge… oops, okay.
• 25:33
  Carol: I'm gonna… I'm gonna go get my charger, but keep talking. There was no knowledge…
• 25:38
  Tad Eggleston: Ruh.
• 25:40
  Carol: there was not this hyper-awareness of things going on all over the globe, or even the United States. It was very centric to where you lived.
• 25:49
  Carol: So I'm from Chicago, I didn't hear about Woodstock till a long time later, just by rumor.
• 25:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 25:58
  Carol: It was all driven by… I'm trying to plug in my… it was all driven by race.
• 26:04
  Tad Eggleston: No problem.
• 26:05
  Carol: And then FM channels started coming. The reason why I say this is, Because this… Brought with it
• 26:18
  Carol: Counterculture. Head shops.
• 26:21
  Carol: Our own statements.
• 26:23
  Carol: What we wanted…
• 26:25
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 26:26
  Carol: And that's where the comics came from, the underground comics came from.
• 26:31
  Carol: So, if I went into a record shop, because I wanted to get, like, Zeppelin, a Led Zeppelin record or something.
• 26:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I probably also see…
• 26:42
  Carol: Underground Comics. Yeah.
• 26:46
  Carol: I'm the flight.
• 26:48
  Carol: My…
• 26:49
  Tad Eggleston: That was… that was certain… certainly Dennis Kitchens.
• 26:53
  Carol: You said that?
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: I was the one that figured out where… one of the times when I talked to him, he's like, I figured out that, like, every head shop
• 27:02
  Tad Eggleston: I could talk into buying.
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: 3 or 4 issues of anything, so, like, I knew that I had this… this basis for almost any comic we made.
• 27:14
  Tad Eggleston: As long as I knew where all the head shops were, and could… And we were in there to buy… we were in there to get, like.
• 27:21
  Carol: People went in there to get rolling papers.
• 27:25
  Carol: I think these are called essential supplies.
• 27:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 27:30
  Carol: You'd get your rolling papers, you'd get a rock album, or get some kind of…
• 27:35
  Carol: see if I can… oh, I can do it that way. Accommodates the coordinator.
• 27:40
  Carol: Did I lose you?
• 27:41
  Carol: Oh, there it is, I just…
• 27:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm still here.
• 27:44
  Carol: Shit.
• 27:45
  Carol: I'm just enjoying the time.
• 27:47
  Tad Eggleston: The fact that you're upside down.
• 27:48
  Carol: Okay, so get back to that.
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: failing now.
• 27:52
  Carol: Here we go. So the album rock thing and music,
• 27:58
  Carol: Oh, I can go like that and say, okay. Do I look upside down?
• 28:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's okay, though.
• 28:07
  Carol: No, I don't want this cord. This cord, I have no place to put that.
• 28:12
  Carol: Okay.
• 28:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, it, it, it, like, I don't share… I don't, I don't share the video with anybody else. I'm entertained by you being upside down.
• 28:21
  Carol: Okay, it's not forget.
• 28:25
  Carol: Okay, so,
• 28:29
  Carol: My husband that I met in Tennessee at… when I first went off to a college out there.
• 28:37
  Carol: I couldn't get into… I blew it, and there was no support at home for sending… no money to send me to college.
• 28:46
  Carol: My brother got a football scholarship, my sister went to the convent.
• 28:52
  Carol: what was I gonna do, you know?
• 28:54
  Carol: I was supposed to have babies. So,
• 29:01
  Carol: I went and lived with my aunt in Tennessee, and
• 29:05
  Carol: my grandma had just died, so there was enough money that I was able to get, like, a car so I could commute, so it was like a…
• 29:12
  Carol: It was a college I didn't belong at. It was for engineers. But… but it was…
• 29:18
  Carol: because I had family that lived there, I didn't have to pay out-of-state tuition, I could stay with my aunt.
• 29:25
  Carol: And go to this college.
• 29:28
  Carol: And that's where I met my first husband, and he was a pot dealer, plus he was the second lieutenant in the,
• 29:35
  Carol: Reserves or something.
• 29:37
  Carol: Make a long story short, That's…
• 29:41
  Carol: when I spent 3 or 4 years of my life from after high school.
• 29:47
  Carol: Listening to rock albums, and reading underground comics.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 29:56
  Carol: Nothing.
• 29:56
  Tad Eggleston: Did you have any favorites?
• 29:57
  Carol: particular. It was all, like…
• 30:03
  Carol: It just seemed preposterous, and I couldn't relate to the furry freak brothers. It seemed like a one-note thing.
• 30:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 30:11
  Carol: And I also couldn't relate to,
• 30:15
  Carol: I mean, I looked at it, but I thought, it just… it didn't give me…
• 30:19
  Carol: Inside, or any of this stuff.
• 30:23
  Carol: And yet, I was not a book-oriented person, because I was illiterate.
• 30:30
  Carol: And what do I mean by that?
• 30:32
  Carol: I'm moving.
• 30:37
  Carol: There we go. I was illiterate. What does that mean?
• 30:41
  Carol: I was one of those kids that had trouble learning to read.
• 30:46
  Carol: I went to school when I was 4.
• 30:50
  Carol: 4 years old.
• 30:51
  Carol: That wasn't… my brain wasn't developed yet.
• 30:55
  Carol: And so, when it came time to read, I did not understand
• 30:58
  Carol: the correlation between a letter and a sound, and you blend those. I didn't get that.
• 31:04
  Carol: And at the time, the way they dealt with it was to label you a dummy, and then you just…
• 31:11
  Carol: The kids would laugh at me, because I'd be like… Yes!
• 31:16
  Tad Eggleston: There have certainly been…
• 31:18
  Carol: Everybody else read out loud?
• 31:19
  Tad Eggleston: Not great times in our education system.
• 31:26
  Carol: Yeah, the other thing that got wrong was, because I'm very literate, and I,
• 31:33
  Carol: I had to learn to read out of utility, but not pleasure, that's all I'm gonna say. And the other thing that they got wrong was that I had perfect pitch and they missed it.
• 31:45
  Carol: when I went to take the… in kindergarten, they just… the nuns would decide whether… what the talents were. So they sat me on front of this piano, and they said, find middle C.
• 31:56
  Carol: I was like… There's no letters on these things. Middle C! Find it! Find middle C!
• 32:04
  Carol: I didn't read, how was I gonna read a piano?
• 32:07
  Carol: But, at home, we had a piano, and I could just play stuff all the time.
• 32:12
  Carol: So this is…
• 32:13
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, one of the best piano players I ever met couldn't find middle C, because she…
• 32:19
  Carol: Yeah, what do you need?
• 32:19
  Tad Eggleston: keys were. She just knew which ones to press.
• 32:23
  Carol: I knew in my mind, I had sounds and songs in my head, I knew what the chords were and everything, I didn't know what names they were, but Sister said, don't waste your time giving her any kind of lessons, she doesn't have talent.
• 32:37
  Carol: But I bring this up because music is really the core of Of my becoming a cartoonist.
• 32:45
  Carol: Not only because it was through pop culture and music, But because music Has a structure to it.
• 32:56
  Carol: that I see… when I hear it in music, I… I see it in my work.
• 33:02
  Carol: So when I sit down to work, I don't listen to music while I'm working, but I understand there's things like, syncopated rhythms, and
• 33:12
  Carol: Sometimes the melody will go up, but the bassline will go down, whatever that's called. I don't know what these things are called, but I know there's a lot of shaping that goes on with music.
• 33:21
  Carol: There's a lot of, and it goes… starts, and it goes to here, and there's often a mood presented, and…
• 33:30
  Carol: So then I understood on a level that had no… nothing to do with language, so it was a part of my head, and that's where I make comics from. It's not from the logical, rational part of my brain, but it's from something I can't quite put my finger on.
• 33:46
  Carol: Sequence became popular, or important to me, because when went off to college.
• 33:56
  Carol: I finally did get there. I went to college and had, for the good kind of fun college,
• 34:03
  Carol: after I divorced this guy, this Pahit,
• 34:08
  Carol: People would want me to tell them, you know, I guess I was amusing or something. People would say, tell us about the time your dad's pants came down, or grandmother left her pants at the bus stop.
• 34:20
  Carol: And so everybody's sitting around drinking. This is art school, but it was after we went to somebody's house, after.
• 34:28
  Carol: class. We'd be drinking beers.
• 34:32
  Carol: And I'd stand on the bed and deliver these stories, and people would be laughing their asses up, granted that they were…
• 34:39
  Carol: beer drinking. Also, I would do characters, I was… I would put myself into a costume, I would,
• 34:48
  Carol: I was doing stand-up before it was a thing.
• 34:51
  Carol: And I was doing it for my friends, and I did it because I wanted to tell stories. So I'd stand up there, and I'd tell the story! And I really knew how to animate it and make it great.
• 35:03
  Carol: And I thought about… and I started putting that in my pictures, because the pictures, when I went to school, it was all abstract and…
• 35:12
  Carol: Minimal and stuff. But I had a pair of pants over here, and a guy laughing about it over here.
• 35:18
  Carol: And there was a story about it.
• 35:20
  Carol: And so, my teachers were like.
• 35:26
  Carol: they didn't know how to… what to deal with me, and I thought, I can't… I think… I think you gotta communicate something specific, Tyler. You can't just stand in front of every picture of everybody and say, well, you know what happened in this one? Why don't you just speak it up? And about the time that I was getting ready to…
• 35:44
  Carol: that I was jumping into that area of, like, okay, I'm just gonna…
• 35:51
  Carol: Let's let out tell the story.
• 35:53
  Carol: That's when I saw, Binky.
• 35:59
  Carol: It was around the graduate school time. I saw Binky, and I'd been putting words and shit was going on in my pictures a lot, but he specifically spelled everything out about his circumstance.
• 36:10
  Carol: And that really got to me, because I thought.
• 36:15
  Carol: So he didn't hold back with anything. He just told the story, and that's… that kind of depth
• 36:21
  Carol: I thought, I gotta get… I gotta… I wanna work… Through that…
• 36:29
  Carol: And then when I, so I started doing that, you know, then I met Justin and all that stuff, people know that part, but started doing these stories. So there are a couple of things, I had to learn how to realize that
• 36:41
  Carol: just like the music I was listening to, there'd be an end to the song, there'd be an end to the strip, but with comics.
• 36:47
  Carol: Generally, since I was working in the magazine format, not newspaper, and not singular gags.
• 36:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:55
  Carol: That meant that at the bottom of the page, boom, you're done, whether it be page 1,
• 36:59
  Carol: 2, 3, 10, whatever. But you gotta time your story, and that went back to my com- comedy that I was doing with my friends. You know, how to time it so that when the joke would come, they were ready. I had to prime them for the joke, and then deliver. So it's the same thing with the comics. I'd have to write it up.
• 37:18
  Carol: Right through it, and then boom!
• 37:21
  Carol: deliver.
• 37:25
  Carol: And then when I… so I started getting published in Weirdo, and Aileen would say, you know, 3 pages, have it by Friday, sure can, boom, boom, boom. So I had to learn how to ace stuff like that. One-pagers, three-pagers, five pages, and tell that story, tell it quickly, and do it in such a way that,
• 37:43
  Carol: Didn't drag on or drag people down emotionally.
• 37:46
  Carol: Because it's, you know, I've since become quite a…
• 37:53
  Carol: thoughtful, I guess, literature-based type storyteller, but I gotta be real… gotta be real careful, because you don't want to talk about
• 38:00
  Carol: You don't want people to go.
• 38:03
  Carol: me out of here. You know, people need to enjoy their work.
• 38:09
  Carol: So anyway, that was how I got to sequence.
• 38:15
  Carol: And it was, like I said, a natural extension of… and a confluence of a couple of things that kind of came through.
• 38:22
  Carol: And then the long-form stories.
• 38:25
  Carol: I worked at this history museum, and I did… I… for 5 years, when Julia was little, there was no money, and signed painting was crapping out, so I got this job at a museum, and…
• 38:38
  Carol: I had to interpret community histories and big stories of history, and realized at that time that,
• 38:50
  Carol: Humanity was rocking and rolling.
• 38:55
  Carol: Deeply.
• 38:57
  Carol: Yeah, you're… Doing research on internment camps, and then you're gonna have to make a display about it.
• 39:04
  Carol: How do you turn that story into a visual that has impact?
• 39:08
  Carol: So that, then, after…
• 39:11
  Carol: ended at the History Center. That's when I did the Hannah story. I got laid off and did the Hannah story. So I found a… I figured out something about going into depth about subjects matter that was…
• 39:27
  Carol: head gravity.
• 39:30
  Carol: Fed more wheat.
• 39:32
  Carol: That's kind of the way things have gone.
• 39:34
  Carol: Like, with the soldier's heart and all that, that's a more weighty story of trouble and trauma.
• 39:44
  Carol: And then now I'm doing…
• 39:44
  Tad Eggleston: My introduction to your work.
• 39:47
  Carol: What was that, the soldier's Heart?
• 39:49
  Tad Eggleston: So, Soldier's Heart… Soldier's Heart was my introduction to your work.
• 39:53
  Carol: Did you think of that?
• 39:54
  Tad Eggleston: My, my… I loved it.
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's… Not an easy read, but…
• 40:03
  Carol: I'll tell you.
• 40:04
  Tad Eggleston: But a lot of things worth reading aren't.
• 40:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that'll get you to… I showed a lot of insight.
• 40:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: Early comics were meant to… A lot of insight, and a love, and…
• 40:19
  Tad Eggleston: But also, like, I mean, I haven't reread it in a while, but, like, Was an honest look at.
• 40:29
  Tad Eggleston: what couldn't have been easy? You know, that's… that's actually one of the questions that I have in general for you.
• 40:37
  Tad Eggleston: and this is gonna be a little bit tangential at this point, but, like, with FM Morata, you're…
• 40:43
  Tad Eggleston: You're taking a… Deep dive into grief.
• 40:50
  Tad Eggleston: Like… I mean, at this point, I know a lot of cartoonists.
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: And some of them, like, when they…
• 41:01
  Tad Eggleston: when they read all the autobiographical work, they're just sitting there going, this is beautiful, but I could never do this, because I can't imagine sitting with it long enough for all the page.
• 41:12
  Tad Eggleston: How do you… how do you decide what you're gonna… how? How do you… I mean, cause… Beautiful.
• 41:24
  Carol: Well, you were breaking up. Could you say that again?
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, you bear yourself a lot in this new book. You, you…
• 41:33
  Tad Eggleston: Share a lot of painful moments.
• 41:37
  Tad Eggleston: Difficult times.
• 41:40
  Tad Eggleston: Is there a release to drawing it, or is it just… I, I, I…
• 41:48
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know how to phrase the question, right? And, you know, upsetting while asking the question, because it is, it is intense, yeah.
• 41:57
  Carol: It's hard to do. It's hard to do, but it's…
• 42:00
  Carol: That's why it takes a long time.
• 42:03
  Carol: Because, you know, I can't sit there and go into that every single day, no, but you find the fun things that are fun to draw.
• 42:11
  Carol: And you find workarounds so that you're not, like.
• 42:15
  Carol: Ugh, you know, there's writing aspects of it, there's days when it's like, I can't write about my sister dying today.
• 42:25
  Carol: Or I will say, today is the day… and I generally try to top load. I generally say, what's the hardest thing I have to do in the next segment of this book?
• 42:36
  Carol: That thing, I'm gonna tackle it first.
• 42:40
  Carol: And then that way.
• 42:42
  Carol: I kind of, like, meet the beast, instead of, like, avoiding, I don't want to talk about it. Because y'all know that certain things…
• 42:55
  Carol: Here's the thing about that book.
• 42:58
  Carol: It… what I didn't want to do, Because I can't assume… When you do autobiography.
• 43:09
  Carol: I used to tell my students, nobody cares about your grandmother.
• 43:15
  Carol: They'd say, huh?
• 43:17
  Carol: I'd say, just in general, off the top, I don't care about your grandmother.
• 43:22
  Carol: Your job as a storyteller is to make me interested enough in her that I want to hear her story.
• 43:29
  Carol: What's going on with this lady, or this guy, or whatever it is that you're doing?
• 43:34
  Carol: Because otherwise, you're just writing family history for the sake of family history.
• 43:41
  Carol: And then you really get mired in this personal and inside jokes, and she used to keep a clean Xbox over here.
• 43:48
  Carol: those aren't… those things, that's… nostalgia and that kind of stuff is not important. What's important is…
• 43:55
  Carol: Who is this person? What makes whatever significant, and what was the impact, and… And,
• 44:04
  Carol: That made me wanna make it… concrete.
• 44:09
  Carol: So, in this book.
• 44:11
  Carol: I knew I didn't want to just tell, oh, my mom died, my dad died… assuming that everybody would care.
• 44:24
  Carol: So it's like, I don't really want to document their deaths. What I want to talk about is how sad I feel.
• 44:30
  Carol: Is that selfish? It's like, no, it's not selfish if you… Try to understand that this is now…
• 44:45
  Carol: You're living in a new place.
• 44:48
  Carol: without them.
• 44:51
  Carol: How does that feel?
• 44:52
  Carol: Where are you?
• 44:53
  Carol: And I couldn't figure out where I was.
• 44:56
  Carol: I didn't… could not articulate it for a long time. I… my sister… my mom died in 2012, my sister died in 2013, my dad died in 2015, and all the people in between died in those parts. The neighbor, Kim Thompson, the publisher, and so on.
• 45:14
  Carol: So, it's not like immediately after they died, I got right to it. I had to sit with that stuff for 5 years, sometimes 6, 7 years, because I didn't want to…
• 45:25
  Carol: I didn't feel like I was equipped or ready to tell the story. What story?
• 45:31
  Carol: People die all the time.
• 45:34
  Carol: What story are you trying to tell here?
• 45:36
  Carol: And then I just became… It became clear that there's a…
• 45:42
  Carol: That sadness was a real thing, you know, it was a thing.
• 45:45
  Carol: It was like a uniform I had to put on.
• 45:49
  Carol: Self-directed.
• 45:52
  Carol: It just came upon me, oh, I'll put this… I'm in this thing. And then I had some crucible things happen.
• 45:59
  Carol: you know, problems with my daughter, my brother not talking to me. And then, when those things happened, and I realized life had a futility because everybody was gone, and I was alone, that's when my brain broke.
• 46:13
  Carol: It's in the book.
• 46:16
  Carol: And that, metaphorically, made me understand that I was in a different place.
• 46:23
  Carol: The world I had known was gone, and now it's here.
• 46:28
  Carol: What is this place? And that literally happened where I was in here, trying to sleep, and I was sad about everything, like I describe in the book, brain falls apart, my head literally… I thought I had a stroke, honestly. I went to the bathroom to see my… I was getting ready.
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
• 46:48
  Tad Eggleston: wrote, was this a stroke? I'm looking… I just happened to be flipping to that page as you were talking about it.
• 46:54
  Carol: had a stroke.
• 46:55
  Carol: Because my mom had had a stroke, and I thought, this must be what it feels like, but it wasn't. It was a complete cleaving of
• 47:03
  Carol: life before them, and where I was at now, but yet it came with an army of images!
• 47:12
  Carol: So, it's like that break, that… Breaking.
• 47:16
  Carol: moment.
• 47:17
  Carol: brought forward, this place. Then this man came up and told me…
• 47:24
  Carol: Because it couldn't… just to keep levity. Remember, keep levity in your life. Refill, try and say it, you know, this man was saying this to me.
• 47:36
  Carol: grief, you know, it's so hard to say. But… but that wasn't the point. The point was that this was a place, it was peopled, it was for function, it was a something, and it was a place where I could maybe understand some things.
• 47:50
  Carol: And so… Describing refill became the first part.
• 47:56
  Carol: of this book.
• 47:58
  Carol: Yes, all these people died. Now what?
• 48:01
  Carol: You're in Greenville.
• 48:05
  Carol: And I do talk about some of the things I… thought about.
• 48:10
  Carol: people dead and dying. Not nowhere near comprehensive, but at least I made an acknowledgement to the fact that
• 48:19
  Carol: it was a big thing that I didn't understand, but that everybody goes through. Okay, then the second part was
• 48:26
  Carol: Called The Servant.
• 48:28
  Carol: Because it turned out that the people I served
• 48:33
  Carol: were the ones who I lost, and yet… It was my sister.
• 48:40
  Carol: Who was the ultimate servant?
• 48:46
  Carol: So I wanted to honor her.
• 48:49
  Carol: Because she… her death was unexpected, and…
• 48:53
  Carol: unfair, it seemed. I mean, no death is, but what I was trying to make a point was that old people die. We ex… you know, we hear our grandma die.
• 49:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 49:01
  Carol: Which I… okay, we get that. They're old. They've lived their lives, but my sister was,
• 49:08
  Carol: Not that old, and it just shit a lot on her, and it was just like, oh, fuck.
• 49:19
  Carol: No.
• 49:20
  Carol: And then the third part is about
• 49:24
  Carol: more about the aftermath and living with Justin.
• 49:30
  Carol: Because, around the time I was finishing up the book, he died.
• 49:36
  Carol: And I knew I could not just throw a coda in there about Justin. I knew he deserved another book.
• 49:46
  Tad Eggleston: book.
• 49:46
  Carol: So, the ephemera is actually two parts.
• 49:52
  Carol: This is shaping the exquisite nature of grief.
• 49:55
  Carol: Which is what I felt like I was doing in my head, all these things, so… decorations and all the stuff that came up.
• 50:04
  Carol: Stuff from the pa- you know, shapes, lettering, the lettering, all that stuff came back.
• 50:11
  Carol: as being important, and then to tell Justin's story, What's that?
• 50:18
  Carol: comes from… A big part of that is the farm.
• 50:26
  Carol: And… Memorial we did for him, and it's mostly about stuff, memory, place, and…
• 50:36
  Carol: Coming to terms with…
• 50:43
  Carol: I had… I had to create and invent
• 50:49
  Carol: a… a system.
• 50:53
  Carol: I don't know what to say… I had to create an explanation about how we would be in our afterlife here.
• 51:00
  Carol: Because I know what it's like to live after Justin. He doesn't know what it's like to live after me.
• 51:07
  Carol: where we go… where do we go? And one of the big questions in Book 2 is the essence. Where is the essence of people?
• 51:15
  Carol: Like, where's my sister? I see her purse here, it has no meaning for me, it's just an object, but where is she?
• 51:21
  Carol: Yeah, she says she's in heaven. I don't believe in heaven. So where is she from me? She might be in heaven, but…
• 51:28
  Carol: since I don't believe it, how… where can she exist in a way that I can have access to a sense of connection and peace? And so, all of those questions I ask in the second book. So, the first book, as heavy and intense, or whatever you want to call it.
• 51:43
  Carol: Pretty dancing.
• 51:45
  Carol: It's really a prep for the big questions that come up in the second book that I'm working on now.
• 51:51
  Tad Eggleston: Missing a book.
• 51:54
  Tad Eggleston: And you're doing them back-to-back.
• 51:56
  Tad Eggleston: Which just tells me that you have a ridiculous amount of stamina.
• 52:01
  Carol: Well, you know…
• 52:02
  Tad Eggleston: I would have wanted another Fab Four.
• 52:04
  Carol: I just want to get this shit done. I just, like…
• 52:08
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 52:09
  Carol: my job.
• 52:11
  Carol: Drawing is what I do. I'm a pencil pusher.
• 52:15
  Tad Eggleston: That's what they used to call.
• 52:17
  Carol: group.
• 52:18
  Carol: My dad used to say, oh, he's a pencil pusher, because, you know, he was a worker. He was a laborer.
• 52:24
  Carol: So, my labor is pencils.
• 52:27
  Carol: Thank you.
• 52:28
  Carol: No, I just.
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 52:31
  Carol: I took up the topic because it seemed like something I needed to interpret and try to make sense of, and then the second book is because I could not… I could not smash the whole of the Justin passing experience.
• 52:45
  Carol: And my own, configuration of what… what I… how I feel like it'll be in my life and end.
• 52:53
  Carol: I need to… I'm going to address that. And it's so amazing, because once I… I literally figured something out!
• 53:02
  Carol: And it's like… Peace, bring it on! I just need to get this done, then I can…
• 53:07
  Carol: maybe do some more… I'd like to do… shoot, I'd like to do a book about…
• 53:11
  Carol: I've been think… I've been having so many ideas about
• 53:15
  Carol: Going back to that music of my, the best stuff, the American Songbook.
• 53:21
  Carol: Great American Salongbook.
• 53:24
  Carol: Good comics at all.
• 53:25
  Tad Eggleston: Love that idea. I love that idea.
• 53:27
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of along those lines, because in some ways I'm more curious with Fab Four, though it…
• 53:38
  Tad Eggleston: Plays into the new book as well.
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: You're writing in detail about things that happened a long time ago. How do you access those memories, or have you kept detailed journals, or like…
• 53:53
  Tad Eggleston: I, like.
• 53:54
  Carol: You mean for Fab Four?
• 53:56
  Tad Eggleston: For either of the books, I mean, either of the books is, you know, you're not writing and drawing in real time.
• 54:04
  Tad Eggleston: You know, whether it's 5 years…
• 54:06
  Carol: They're not general comics.
• 54:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 54:10
  Carol: Well, with Feb, you know, I kept…
• 54:13
  Carol: the stuff is on display at Billie Ireland. I kept journals, you know, I made notes, I did all that. For this,
• 54:21
  Carol: For the ephemerada.
• 54:29
  Carol: I can't forget.
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: What happened?
• 54:35
  Carol: I will never forget.
• 54:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 54:38
  Carol: What happened with my sister, how it was with my parents.
• 54:42
  Carol: And even though I kept notes and I wrote stuff, none of that made it into the book. It had to take a different shape. I mean, I wrote these essays and stuff, they're so fun, but that's not the point. This book was not about life in Clinton, Indiana in 2008.
• 55:01
  Carol: 9.
• 55:03
  Carol: It was about… You know, losing your mother and your…
• 55:07
  Carol: I left… I kept it light with my dad.
• 55:11
  Carol: Because I just did that book on him. He makes a little… He already had his whole book. Yeah.
• 55:17
  Carol: So I don't have to go on and on, and I think I covered him pretty… adequately.
• 55:24
  Carol: But he misbehaved.
• 55:27
  Carol: You know, I looked… that was that part. Do you remember those two pages that are all text, and it says the bones of history?
• 55:35
  Tad Eggleston: Vaguely. I'd have to look at it again.
• 55:39
  Carol: It's been a long time.
• 55:43
  Carol: the Ashes story.
• 55:48
  Tad Eggleston: In… The new book, or in the one about.
• 55:51
  Carol: In the ephemerana.
• 55:53
  Tad Eggleston: an ephemerada.
• 55:57
  Carol: Well…
• 55:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it went down. Yeah, okay.
• 56:00
  Carol: Went down.
• 56:02
  Carol: No, it's before… it's the one about, it just says, The Bones of History, it's a two-page spread.
• 56:09
  Carol: And…
• 56:11
  Tad Eggleston: Let me look for.
• 56:11
  Carol: Explain's my mom.
• 56:14
  Tad Eggleston: Here transcribed across the bones of history.
• 56:19
  Carol: Yes.
• 56:23
  Carol: It really goes into…
• 56:25
  Carol: bungling my dad did with my mom's ashes. That's kind of funny, but it's stupid at the same time.
• 56:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 56:36
  Carol: Yeah.
• 56:39
  Carol: So, yeah, I mean, there were things like that. I was like, I am not drawing that out.
• 56:45
  Carol: I'm just gonna write it as text.
• 56:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 56:48
  Carol: And I did have a couple of reference thingies, like, I had some, cards in our family photo archives of
• 56:58
  Carol: Back in the 1800s, somebody died, the printer… printing company would make these really modeling
• 57:07
  Carol: cards. They were, like, this size. It's like…
• 57:11
  Carol: Here we remember, you know, to be written up
• 57:14
  Carol: Our dear departed so-and-so, may he rest in God's
• 57:20
  Carol: Angels of love, and the thing at the door forever until the moment of glory. You know, some terrible poem about death.
• 57:32
  Carol: will grieve not, will cheer not. So, sometimes I would, in this book, I would Pull up.
• 57:39
  Carol: That kind of language.
• 57:42
  Carol: Like, O thee, my garden!
• 57:46
  Carol: what do you have that you can share with me, a cheerful maiden? You know, so I would say that in some places.
• 57:54
  Carol: Instead of really kind of going into the heavy… I did not want to go into heavy Victoriano.
• 58:00
  Carol: Victoriana. Victoria.
• 58:03
  Carol: I did show one page of that, but…
• 58:05
  Carol: I kind of just went into that with language. And to pay homage to Justin.
• 58:12
  Carol: I went back and rewrote the entire comic.
• 58:15
  Carol: In the last year, And upped my lettering game, because I wanted him to be proud of me.
• 58:24
  Carol: So, in honor of him.
• 58:27
  Tad Eggleston: I really tried to knock myself out with good weather.
• 58:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you do fantastic lettering.
• 58:35
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about your layout.
• 58:41
  Carol: Wait, you broke up.
• 58:46
  Tad Eggleston: What's the… This page, and you refer to it as a two-page
• 58:53
  Tad Eggleston: text, but I'm looking at, like.
• 58:56
  Tad Eggleston: You in bed and thinking, all of it.
• 59:00
  Tad Eggleston: cross the top and down the… like, so yes, it's a two-page
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: Two-page text, but, like, also most of it is in the marginalia.
• 59:11
  Carol: What the heck are you talking about?
• 59:13
  Tad Eggleston: Out your work a lot.
• 59:15
  Carol: Wait, you know what, Ted, stop.
• 59:18
  Carol: Excuse me, but you have… you're breaking up, and I didn't really hear your question.
• 59:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm sorry.
• 59:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I… what I said was, in general, talk to me about layouts, but.
• 59:30
  Carol: Bye.
• 59:31
  Tad Eggleston: But it came into my mind specifically because of this page you're describing here.
• 59:39
  Tad Eggleston: transcribed across the bones of history. You're describing it as just two pages of text, and it is, but the marginalia, the way… the way that you draw across both sides and across the top, like, makes it so much more than that.
• 59:56
  Tad Eggleston: And, and…
• 59:56
  Carol: And it looked us.
• 59:59
  Carol: Let me see if I can find that in my files.
• 1:00:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:00:03
  Carol: So I can speak to that.
• 1:00:06
  Carol: Okay, the bones of history.
• 1:00:10
  Carol: See?
• 1:00:11
  Carol: Moving.
• 1:00:16
  Carol: Well, I think because, you know, it doesn't have… Probably.
• 1:00:23
  Carol: Probably what I should say is, it doesn't have… okay, there it is.
• 1:00:28
  Carol: Yeah, I mean, I… It's two columns of text.
• 1:00:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:00:35
  Carol: Yes, around the outside edges.
• 1:00:38
  Carol: there's, like, okay, I'm thinking about…
• 1:00:42
  Carol: Things that… okay, let's start at the bottom, lower left.
• 1:00:47
  Carol: Laying in bed thinking, There's some flowers.
• 1:00:55
  Carol: There's a container. That's my mom's ashes were in the cookie jar.
• 1:01:02
  Carol: Month of May.
• 1:01:05
  Carol: There's the dog she jumped on, before she died.
• 1:01:11
  Carol: Mom laying in bed dead.
• 1:01:15
  Carol: And then it goes over to the holy water.
• 1:01:20
  Carol: The containers with the ashes, the shelves built.
• 1:01:26
  Carol: The sandwiches that my cousins built, and the tree planted.
• 1:01:30
  Carol: Yeah, so I did illustrate on the margins what was said on the.
• 1:01:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:01:36
  Carol: Picking out the key things.
• 1:01:39
  Carol: So that in itself, if you didn't know the story, you would not quite understand. It would just seem like random order, pictures, images.
• 1:01:49
  Carol: But what it does, it just reinforces.
• 1:01:53
  Tad Eggleston: But it also gives the… I mean, looking at the page without even rereading it, I… I was able to get the feeling for what you were saying. And this is… this is something I love about your work, is you have this
• 1:02:07
  Tad Eggleston: It feels effortless to me, but it doesn't feel like it should be, of, like, laying out pages in a way to have maximum impact.
• 1:02:18
  Tad Eggleston: For, for, for, for every picture, every word, Y-you know…
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: You use panels where panels are necessary. You use wide spreads like this.
• 1:02:31
  Tad Eggleston: when that makes most sense. You described it as you didn't want to draw it, and that may be it, but even in deciding
• 1:02:39
  Tad Eggleston: not to draw it. You seem to be able to put it in a way
• 1:02:45
  Tad Eggleston: That… that just makes it… so powerful.
• 1:02:50
  Carol: Well, I think at this point in the story.
• 1:02:54
  Carol: I didn't want to break off… this is 10 pages, that would have been a 10-page story.
• 1:03:01
  Carol: At this point in the story, I took under consideration reader fatigue.
• 1:03:09
  Carol: So, you get it. I got… I got you there. I got you there. Now we can get down to this. Like, you go back to page 111,
• 1:03:18
  Carol: Or, let's say, Bones of History, go back, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… 5 pages.
• 1:03:25
  Carol: And it's black and white, and there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12 panels. Do you see that page?
• 1:03:33
  Carol: It says, at home, Justin convinced himself the guy next door put a hit out on him.
• 1:03:38
  Carol: Okay, so this has to move at a different clip.
• 1:03:44
  Carol: Because the way that the story, this whole chapter, ages, which means, person who's… what is ages.
• 1:03:54
  Carol: What's the matter with me? I'm gonna look that up ages.
• 1:04:05
  Carol: The, support, okay, the support person. So, Aegis…
• 1:04:11
  Carol: This is the panel of me, where I really talk about how I had to step up.
• 1:04:17
  Carol: In… ins… Hump my ass.
• 1:04:21
  Carol: During this time. So, you know, helping my mom, the first… if you go to Aegis.
• 1:04:26
  Carol: Oh my god, what they did to her in the nursing home. Coming home and dealing with my dad,
• 1:04:32
  Carol: Having to do… a flood is coming, you know, so it… all of this had an urgency and a quickness to it, because that's how it felt. Pressure. I gotta do this! I gotta do this! I gotta do this. So, you know, we get… I get to my house, Justin thinks this. Oh, my daughter! So…
• 1:04:49
  Carol: It had to take on a different way that the panels required
• 1:04:55
  Carol: The storytelling and the pacing required that it be that way.
• 1:05:00
  Carol: And then when you get to, like, the point where I'm sick, it's going up.
• 1:05:06
  Tad Eggleston: 120?
• 1:05:06
  Carol: It kind of slows down, and it's a bigger picture. It still runs sequenced.
• 1:05:11
  Carol: And then we come to the bones of history and say…
• 1:05:14
  Tad Eggleston: But also, I mean, it still runs sequence, but the panels are no longer as even… Sweet.
• 1:05:21
  Tad Eggleston: Brid.
• 1:05:23
  Carol: They're not as rigid, no, because I'm falling apart.
• 1:05:28
  Tad Eggleston: Hence, you're falling apart.
• 1:05:31
  Carol: Yeah.
• 1:05:34
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, it's just… it's beautiful, and my question is, like, how…
• 1:05:40
  Tad Eggleston: Did it come naturally to you? Is this how you're seeing money? Or is… like, what's the part in the process? How do you work? Do you script and then draw? Do you work page by page? I mean…
• 1:05:55
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:05:56
  Carol: All of the above.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: All of the above. That's fair!
• 1:06:00
  Carol: I don't know. I just know that, like… okay, let's pretend on this one.
• 1:06:05
  Carol: that got me sick, I hate puking, we all do, but that was like, ugh. And that happened…
• 1:06:12
  Carol: after all of this humping to please… I don't know the… the…
• 1:06:18
  Carol: Better word of it. The intensity of this time when my mom had was dying.
• 1:06:26
  Carol: Right. So, I just had to… and the difficulty of that, isn't it? Then it got to me in the aftermath of that.
• 1:06:34
  Carol: So, if you look at the panel where…
• 1:06:42
  Carol: The page where you go back 3 or 4 pages back from the bones of history, and there's, like.
• 1:06:48
  Carol: My mom's in bed, and I'm having to tell her the terrible news. Right.
• 1:06:54
  Carol: And right in the middle of the page.
• 1:06:57
  Carol: She delivers her most important line.
• 1:07:02
  Carol: She wanted to be buried under a young tree.
• 1:07:05
  Carol: A young tree.
• 1:07:09
  Carol: So, of course I had to have.
• 1:07:12
  Carol: Bigness to it.
• 1:07:14
  Carol: Had to be larger.
• 1:07:16
  Carol: It kind of shows me fading off. It's mostly her, and the way she's looking and delivering that message.
• 1:07:23
  Carol: A young tree.
• 1:07:28
  Carol: So… Those things are… yeah, those are all very conscious ways of
• 1:07:38
  Carol: not only delivering information, but getting to emotional impact, and I guess it's like what filmmakers would do, you know?
• 1:07:46
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 1:07:47
  Carol: close up. When do you…
• 1:07:49
  Carol: When do you back off? When do you simplify? When do you have to get all detailed and everything?
• 1:07:55
  Carol: when do you use symbols, you know?
• 1:07:59
  Carol: So, like, during the time when I'm… there's the throw-up time, and I'm falling apart, but then the page after that.
• 1:08:08
  Carol: It's still… the pages are sparse.
• 1:08:12
  Carol: Because I wanted to… as opposed to other patients… yeah, that's… when you're sick.
• 1:08:19
  Carol: You just have a wave of nausea, and then there's a space where you try to live in.
• 1:08:24
  Carol: Right. And not feel nauseated.
• 1:08:27
  Carol: So that's what I was trying to convey there, just the,
• 1:08:32
  Carol: Oh, this took, you know, just…
• 1:08:34
  Carol: just the… the epic, awfulness of this, and then, you know, step back, back to page 11, it was… you know, meet the demand! And then… Yeah, so I do…
• 1:08:53
  Carol: pick layout, I did that in Soldier's Heart, too. I tried to find ways to make delivering the information
• 1:09:02
  Carol: Based on the pacing required, emotional impact, the…
• 1:09:09
  Carol: Is there something I can do? I could show this, but how can I show this or such?
• 1:09:16
  Carol: In a way that… Is interesting to draw, or that…
• 1:09:23
  Carol: I mean, I could draw myself… there's a lot of being in bad thinking, a lot of being bad… I could have just had the same bed over and over.
• 1:09:33
  Carol: But, you know, how it isn't bad, you flip over, sometimes you flip up because maybe you flipped, and you're…
• 1:09:40
  Carol: It's the other way, or the world has turned around, or…
• 1:09:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well then…
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, the coda to that scene, or to the whole thing, is the scenes from Bones, where…
• 1:09:54
  Tad Eggleston: Where you've got the panels laid over what looks like Is it a… medical textbook?
• 1:10:02
  Carol: Hell yeah.
• 1:10:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 1:10:05
  Carol: The book, as you know, takes on more and more significance. It's the book that I bring up.
• 1:10:13
  Carol: It's actually the hook for second… er, for book two.
• 1:10:18
  Carol: But I don't… Throw it out there right away.
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:10:23
  Carol: So here it comes.
• 1:10:24
  Tad Eggleston: Again, like, like, your, your, your work is…
• 1:10:33
  Tad Eggleston: layered. You're…
• 1:10:36
  Carol: Yeah, it's not a medical textbook, it's that biography book, I found.
• 1:10:39
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:10:41
  Carol: scientists.
• 1:10:42
  Carol: Yeah, and I have to set it up in such a way that It didn't compete
• 1:10:48
  Carol: So, it's like I described earlier with music.
• 1:10:52
  Carol: It's, it… maybe it's a,
• 1:10:56
  Carol: Pollute in the background, or an oboe, or…
• 1:11:00
  Carol: Kettle drop, you know, it's something, another piece of something that can either… augment, or…
• 1:11:10
  Carol: Dissipate, you know?
• 1:11:13
  Carol: It's just a part of the experience of feeling it.
• 1:11:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:11:22
  Carol: These pages, scenes from the bones that you see here, this was the first thing I did.
• 1:11:29
  Carol: In the whole book. I wanted to experiment with
• 1:11:33
  Carol: As opposed to Soldier's Heart, I wanted to try… I knew I wanted to do the book mostly in black and white.
• 1:11:40
  Carol: You know, metaphor for life, death.
• 1:11:44
  Carol: Going back to my roots as a cartoonist, black and white.
• 1:11:49
  Carol: But I used, in this one, I thought, Oh, no.
• 1:11:53
  Carol: Dry washes.
• 1:11:57
  Carol: And see if I want to do…
• 1:11:59
  Carol: I was kind of style hunting, a little bit. Like, what… when you start a book, you gotta come up with a standard thing.
• 1:12:07
  Carol: to keep continuity. So, in the case of this book, I'm in black most of the time.
• 1:12:13
  Carol: I'm wearing… in the first part of grief, I'm always wearing that big, long black coat.
• 1:12:18
  Carol: And throughout most of the book, I'm wearing black.
• 1:12:22
  Carol: Because that was the style standard thing I set up, so you'd always know There I, you know.
• 1:12:30
  Carol: So… I lost it.
• 1:12:33
  Carol: Going back to…
• 1:12:35
  Carol: Okay, so in that one, I was just looking through, well, how did I want to present, and hairstyle, and everything like that. How did I want to be?
• 1:12:47
  Carol: I'm in cargo pants a lot of the times, because as a servant.
• 1:12:53
  Carol: Having to jump in the truck and go help somebody who's sick, or bringing…
• 1:13:00
  Carol: Yeah, that's duty, so I always have the cargo pants going.
• 1:13:05
  Carol: That's not… That doesn't prevail throughout everything.
• 1:13:10
  Carol: So if you go through and you look at all my outfits in the book, that's all thought out.
• 1:13:14
  Carol: Here, and everything's thawed out.
• 1:13:17
  Carol: to evoke where I was, kind of, like, emotional. And boy, does it shift when I get into the second book.
• 1:13:25
  Carol: There's a lot of… lot more,
• 1:13:28
  Carol: There's a real intense part about that, about, the,
• 1:13:35
  Carol: I kind of sold out my physical body.
• 1:13:39
  Carol: To do this work for people.
• 1:13:44
  Carol: Okay, so, now, here I'm being the good daughter, and…
• 1:13:51
  Carol: Now I'm gonna tell the story about my sister, and so on. So, let's see…
• 1:13:56
  Carol: Did you have any other questions about that?
• 1:14:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I think that that…
• 1:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: That was… that was where I was…
• 1:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: where I was headed, I just, again, I appreciate your layout so much, not just in this book, in Fab Four Media, in Soldier's Heart, you…
• 1:14:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know how to tell a story.
• 1:14:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we talked briefly at the beginning about the difference between the doodles in your…
• 1:14:25
  Tad Eggleston: high school notebooks and sequential art, and you have sequential art down in a way that not many people do.
• 1:14:35
  Carol: This is a joy to flip through.
• 1:14:38
  Tad Eggleston: How far along are you in the next volume?
• 1:14:47
  Carol: Hate to say it, but I've had to put it down.
• 1:14:50
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair.
• 1:14:51
  Carol: Oh, because I'm dealing with a sick dog, and… the exhibit.
• 1:14:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 1:15:01
  Carol: It's such a great… I'm not saying that because it's weird.
• 1:15:06
  Tad Eggleston: yourself. I love that.
• 1:15:08
  Carol: I knew about that, but,
• 1:15:10
  Carol: You asked, how far along am I?
• 1:15:13
  Carol: On the other book.
• 1:15:15
  Carol: I haven't about…
• 1:15:19
  Carol: A third down to acceptability, but I know how I am, so I'll say a fourth, because I know I'm gonna… there's some buttons I really want to push. So, at this point.
• 1:15:34
  Carol: That one is called Ephemerada Verdante. Verd is the word for green, Dante, Justin was into Dante.
• 1:15:46
  Carol: Just giving you a hint. Verdante… It's the second book.
• 1:15:55
  Carol: And it's going to be exponentially harder for me emotionally, to do than this.
• 1:16:03
  Carol: So, I've already lined up a therapist.
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: Haha, that's a… that's a good idea, because… cause, like…
• 1:16:11
  Tad Eggleston: as somebody who's had my own experience… I mean, I… I…
• 1:16:15
  Tad Eggleston: I ran dementia units for decades, so, like, you know…
• 1:16:18
  Carol: I'm headed there. I've got prayer.
• 1:16:20
  Tad Eggleston: I hope… no, you're telling stories way too well to be headed to the dementia unit.
• 1:16:26
  Carol: I have had it there, but still, I mean, I have to have a therapist, because we're dealing about… we're dealing with Justin Green here.
• 1:16:32
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 1:16:33
  Carol: And it's not just Justin.
• 1:16:36
  Carol: It's legendary, it's this and that, it's…
• 1:16:40
  Carol: the complexities that I came to find out about him after he passed away, my having to wrestle with that, deal with that,
• 1:16:50
  Carol: While getting older, you know, you know.
• 1:16:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, just based on what's in this book, I can… I can…
• 1:17:01
  Tad Eggleston: you can tell that, like, what's still left to come is gonna be fraught, so I applaud you for finding…
• 1:17:11
  Carol: It's also a completion. It'll be fraught, but good, and you'll feel like.
• 1:17:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:17:17
  Tad Eggleston: But I applaud finding the therapist, because you gotta take care of you, too.
• 1:17:21
  Tad Eggleston: Like, there's a reason why they tell you on the air…
• 1:17:25
  Carol: Yes.
• 1:17:26
  Tad Eggleston: format.
• 1:17:29
  Carol: That's right.
• 1:17:30
  Carol: No, it's… it's… I could do it, but it's because of some stuff I found out about Justin. So,
• 1:17:37
  Carol: That particular thing that I'm going to keep quiet right now is,
• 1:17:44
  Carol: beyond my capacity, so I do need help. That's why I'm gonna get a therapist.
• 1:17:49
  Carol: And yet, it's like, I want to do right and tell it right.
• 1:17:54
  Carol: You know, in my work, I… have you ever…
• 1:17:57
  Carol: You never felt like, God, I'm glad I'm not an ex of her, she wicked me over the poles. You never get that vibe.
• 1:18:03
  Carol: Because I don't… I'm not in it for doing that. Settling scores, or… Making somebody look good.
• 1:18:13
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think generally… It doesn't generally make good art.
• 1:18:18
  Carol: Yeah. So, with the thing now…
• 1:18:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you have to lie for people, but you don't… don't… I mean… There's a difference between…
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: Because it also makes good art to not be honest about people's faults, because you don't want… does that make sense? What I like about your work is that it's honest, it rings true, it rings universal.
• 1:18:43
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we all have people in our lives who are imperfect.
• 1:18:51
  Carol: Yes, and I have to come to terms with that.
• 1:18:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because the.
• 1:18:53
  Carol: not the perfect that Justin was, I think back…
• 1:19:03
  Carol: I want to represent him well, but I don't, at the same time, want to sugarcoat
• 1:19:08
  Carol: what happened between us. Right.
• 1:19:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And so…
• 1:19:11
  Carol: it's not that I have, you know, I'm required to do that, it's just that
• 1:19:16
  Carol: I think that posterity demands, you know, the truth, and…
• 1:19:21
  Carol: I mean, I look back, I was reading my journals
• 1:19:25
  Carol: before they got carted away to the Billy Irelander case, and…
• 1:19:31
  Carol: They're on display, it's really nice.
• 1:19:34
  Carol: But I thought…
• 1:19:35
  Tad Eggleston: We'll talk about that in a second.
• 1:19:37
  Carol: Yeah, years ago, I would go…
• 1:19:39
  Carol: Do I want to share that part?
• 1:19:42
  Carol: About having sex on the side of the road with Sones.
• 1:19:45
  Carol: And it's like, if I don't.
• 1:19:50
  Carol: Future people, how will they know
• 1:19:53
  Carol: What it was like to be a real, full human being.
• 1:19:59
  Carol: if I just pick cherry pick and pick out the things that I… Yeah, Karen Sanitation Company.
• 1:20:07
  Carol: You know, I don't want to do that, so it's like, there's a lot of stuff in there that's like…
• 1:20:12
  Carol: What?
• 1:20:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna let it through. This is why Mark Twain had the version of his autobiography that wasn't allowed to be published until 100 years after his death.
• 1:20:23
  Carol: So, I will say my… our stuff, me and Justin's stuff, has the 100-year gag rule on it.
• 1:20:29
  Carol: That's for sure.
• 1:20:33
  Carol: I'm gonna tell… Touring out, and then…
• 1:20:36
  Carol: people later, but no. Okay, well, we can talk about Billy Ireland, which is a very.
• 1:20:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say.
• 1:20:42
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me about the exhibit.
• 1:20:45
  Carol: So, bless his heart, John Kelly has assigned the job to do.
• 1:20:51
  Carol: Curating.
• 1:20:53
  Carol: But… He had the wonderful happenstance of Falling into dummy.
• 1:21:03
  Carol: magazine.
• 1:21:05
  Carol: And it became, like, a riotous hit.
• 1:21:10
  Carol: So he really had no time to… Curate my exhibits.
• 1:21:17
  Carol: But we didn't figure that out till the stuff was gonna be due in 3 weeks.
• 1:21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:21:24
  Tad Eggleston: So to curate it yourself?
• 1:21:27
  Carol: Well, they needed a checklist and all that stuff.
• 1:21:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:21:31
  Carol: So I call my kid, Julia, me and Justin's kid.
• 1:21:35
  Carol: I said, help me pick stuff for the show. And then I told Billy Ireland, they said, Julie could be, like, curator, whatever, co-curator.
• 1:21:43
  Carol: So, we picked out a bunch of stuff, and then I thought.
• 1:21:48
  Carol: Because when they first said something about… when Caitlin first said something about a show, I thought.
• 1:21:53
  Carol: I don't want to do anything! You guys can pick it up and put it together! I am not gonna put it! Because I put together Justin's retrospective show. I had just… after he passed away, I put together a gigantic… I made this gigantic bonnet that you see in the book.
• 1:22:10
  Carol: my morning bonnet. I actually made a big, giant physical thing and had some of the pages on display with the big bonnet.
• 1:22:18
  Carol: And so it's like, I'm tired of making all this stuff. They can do it.
• 1:22:24
  Carol: Well, no, John couldn't do it. Julie and I picked out some items.
• 1:22:31
  Carol: And then I thought, Hmm.
• 1:22:36
  Carol: How is that gonna be displayed? How do you display this, and that, and this and that?
• 1:22:43
  Carol: And then, like that movie, Close Encounters, I thought, I got it!
• 1:22:51
  Carol: And I found… I went through the house like a maniac, and I had to find the…
• 1:22:55
  Carol: Yeah, first I made a… Inch to a foot map.
• 1:23:00
  Carol: On this tabletop. Okay.
• 1:23:02
  Carol: See, I'm gonna put this here, because my daughter, even though she kind of helped pick out stuff, she's so busy, she's out the door, she's…
• 1:23:09
  Carol: Mapsed out. That kid, - she is, never has any time.
• 1:23:15
  Carol: And I thought, she doesn't realize, because I used to work in a museum for 5 years, I know what's required to put an exhibit together. Even though she runs a gallery, it's mostly graffiti and stuff like that.
• 1:23:27
  Carol: I'm into, like, installation, you know.
• 1:23:30
  Carol: just like my pages here, you know, if we're gonna talk about this, it needs to look this way. If we're gonna do this, it's gonna look this way.
• 1:23:37
  Carol: So I went into this maniac routine, and I spent, like, I was up till 6 in the morning.
• 1:23:42
  Carol: I just went crazy, and I figured out my inch to the foot thing, and then I could start to see it.
• 1:23:49
  Carol: And then I realized that there's… in this house somewhere, there's gotta be a board.
• 1:23:53
  Carol: So, because everything here is still sign shop, and…
• 1:23:57
  Carol: You know, it's still a… our house is not really a home.
• 1:24:01
  Carol: It's just like, pace. We were off a chair and stuff. It's always been that way.
• 1:24:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's a place where artists live.
• 1:24:12
  Carol: Yeah, so, like, I know I got a boardless size, I gotta go find it. I found it, sure, a bunch of stuff was piled on top of it, so I had to schlep all that stuff off.
• 1:24:21
  Carol: Log that big heavy board up here, clean off another table, set it down.
• 1:24:26
  Carol: And then I made… There needs to be… A kennel!
• 1:24:33
  Carol: In the middle, because those people at Billy Ireland complained that there was a giant post in the middle of the gallery space.
• 1:24:42
  Carol: What if you didn't see it because it was disguised by a kettle?
• 1:24:46
  Carol: ink kettle! A black kettle. So I went in the kettle, I found boxes from
• 1:24:53
  Carol: pasta and everything, and I got pictures of, you know, I made a mock, model, a mockette? A model?
• 1:25:03
  Carol: And I made a model of the entire gallery, all the walls, I put these things up on the sides, painted it, made furniture that you see in the Billy Ireland, made the kettle.
• 1:25:15
  Carol: And made the entire exhibit, and then I made a little camera video, like you're going into the show. Because the next day, we were going to have a talk about it.
• 1:25:27
  Carol: And so I said, well, here's your exhibit, we just have to build it. And they were like, what?
• 1:25:36
  Carol: I don't know what he doing to us? I said.
• 1:25:38
  Carol: I could do that. You want me to do it? I'll do it! The thing is, I just really wanted that you walk in, you walk to the right, this giant head that I had from another exhibit. Gonna recycle, I'm gonna put the old display over here.
• 1:25:53
  Carol: We're gonna use this cabinet, put the journal, and then we're gonna have this, and then that whole back wall is California dreaming.
• 1:25:59
  Carol: Now, all the work I did in California in October will be my late bloomerang papers, and then we're gonna come over here, and we're gonna put
• 1:26:07
  Carol: Trouble and trauma, and that's all the Hannah story, and my dad's story, and all of that, and then the cattle is right in the middle, and then… dang if we don't find ourselves looking at some work from tomatoes I did for Cincinnati, and then that whole wall over there is fab!
• 1:26:24
  Carol: Fab! We're gonna have beetles stuff, we're gonna have all of those beetles and all that stuff, and then in this corner, before you leave, is the ephemerata.
• 1:26:33
  Carol: And they were like, whoa, we love it! So then we had to put it together. Oh, God.
• 1:26:41
  Carol: I said, oh, by the way.
• 1:26:42
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait to see it.
• 1:26:43
  Carol: A kettle of inspiration.
• 1:26:46
  Carol: You can walk in there.
• 1:26:48
  Carol: So it's a walkthrough. And when you walk in there, there's a place where you can write down what inspires you. The whole inside of the Kettle Inspiration is a bunch of crap from my house.
• 1:26:58
  Carol: Just random little…
• 1:26:59
  Tad Eggleston: Totuggies, and…
• 1:27:02
  Carol: you know, here's one, should be in their USA Olympic team patch, you know, My brother's room.
• 1:27:08
  Tad Eggleston: I love it. I cannot wait to see this.
• 1:27:11
  Carol: Yeah, people… you know, people see it, and they're like.
• 1:27:15
  Tad Eggleston: weeks.
• 1:27:18
  Carol: It's good.
• 1:27:19
  Tad Eggleston: And you also… you also still tell stories the way that you were talking about earlier from your… from your…
• 1:27:26
  Tad Eggleston: Earlier days, when everybody loved the way you told stories.
• 1:27:30
  Tad Eggleston: And that's what led to your cartooning.
• 1:27:32
  Carol: From Weirdo. Can you talk about Weirdo.
• 1:27:34
  Tad Eggleston: No, I just… earlier in this conversation, you were talking about the fact that You, you used to…
• 1:27:42
  Tad Eggleston: Get up and…
• 1:27:45
  Tad Eggleston: tell stories with your whole body, and different voices, and whatnot. You just… you just did that for me. I almost wish we were a video podcast, because I got the show, and our listeners just get to hear the voices, is wonderful.
• 1:27:58
  Carol: Remember the way I told you that about the exhibit?
• 1:28:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I loved it.
• 1:28:03
  Carol: That's the way I used to… Talked to my, roommates.
• 1:28:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I believe it. I believe it. That's what it felt like.
• 1:28:13
  Carol: get into it, I can animate it, and then I'd pull it out, and then, whoa! I'd be like, what?
• 1:28:21
  Tad Eggleston: Eddie's coming to say hello.
• 1:28:22
  Carol: the dog… I have to take the dog outside, but we're gonna walk and talk, it's fine.
• 1:28:26
  Tad Eggleston: That sounds good.
• 1:28:28
  Tad Eggleston: I've got a cat, you've got a dog. They're fighting for our attention.
• 1:28:33
  Carol: here's what I have to do. She needs to go down, but I have to, just like in the Olympic… I was just talking about gymnastics, I have to spot her, or she'll fall down the stairs, so I have to stand here.
• 1:28:44
  Carol: And push down on her shoulders so that she doesn't go too thin. She's blind and deaf.
• 1:28:52
  Carol: And this is how we do it, right, too? Yeah, oh, she's got it, she's got it. We got it.
• 1:28:58
  Carol: And I'm building… I just built… I don't know if you can see it… just built this ramp
• 1:29:03
  Carol: You see this ramp here? I did. I built a trolley for her, but it's not done yet. Yeah, so she can get up.
• 1:29:10
  Carol: There's a hand cranky thing up there, I bought a… like, for a boat?
• 1:29:16
  Carol: And then.
• 1:29:17
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:17
  Carol: This… let's see, can you… let me see. Can you see this thing, this trolley I'm working on?
• 1:29:24
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 1:29:25
  Carol: Yeah, so that this big stairway
• 1:29:28
  Carol: Which is too steep to believe.
• 1:29:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it looks like it's, it's old building code.
• 1:29:37
  Carol: Okay, we got it, we got it, we're here, and now we're walking across the green archive on our way to…
• 1:29:46
  Carol: Lit her up.
• 1:29:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:29:50
  Carol: You're walking through Justin's… Archive.
• 1:29:56
  Carol: Which is… An impressive array of art and letters.
• 1:30:01
  Carol: and signs.
• 1:30:03
  Carol: And there's my…
• 1:30:07
  Carol: Crown… one of the crowns on the refrigerator. Remember if you saw last year? I put… I got two of them I made, and I put them on my bushes out front for Christmas.
• 1:30:18
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 1:30:19
  Carol: Come on, too, come this way. There you go.
• 1:30:22
  Carol: Then I had to build a ramp here so that the dog You can walk straight across.
• 1:30:31
  Tad Eggleston: There you go.
• 1:30:35
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:30:38
  Tad Eggleston: I think that now is…
• 1:30:41
  Tad Eggleston: about the right time for my, my, my, what I call my final question. It's, it's my most fun question. I ask everybody this.
• 1:30:49
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Tell me something you love.
• 1:30:52
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:31:11
  Carol: That is…
• 1:31:16
  Carol: Say that again, something I love…
• 1:31:20
  Carol: That I wish people knew so we could chat it up.
• 1:31:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:31:28
  Carol: I don't know, because I pretty much put it all out there.
• 1:31:33
  Carol: You know…
• 1:31:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, you can cheat and choose a favorite. I mean, I get all sorts of answers from this. I get obscure things, I get… Nate Powell told me current X-Men comics, because he hasn't read them in years, and he started reading them again, but he's in the indie comic scene, so nobody else reads X-Men.
• 1:31:52
  Tad Eggleston: Andrew Iden said his tomato garden.
• 1:31:56
  Carol: Said what? What was this?
• 1:31:57
  Tad Eggleston: is Tomato Garden.
• 1:31:59
  Tad Eggleston: He said more people need to try his tomatoes, because he's very proud of them.
• 1:32:06
  Tad Eggleston: So, it's an open-ended question. This is your opportunity to make it whatever you want it to be. Well, I could do.
• 1:32:12
  Carol: 10 things. I could say.
• 1:32:15
  Tad Eggleston: do is… I can say.
• 1:32:17
  Carol: tools!
• 1:32:18
  Carol: Look, I'm really good at the chopstop.
• 1:32:22
  Carol: I'm good at… I know what to do with every single tool in this room.
• 1:32:26
  Carol: I'm… I'm a good builder.
• 1:32:29
  Carol: In fact, I think… I'm gonna be… I think… I decided to…
• 1:32:36
  Carol: I'm gonna join the Woodworkers monthly meeting.
• 1:32:41
  Carol: Because I need somebody that can help me with motors. I don't…
• 1:32:45
  Carol: Oh, I'll tell you what I love. Electronics and, not electronics that way, but…
• 1:32:50
  Carol: I need to learn more about, huh, like…
• 1:32:54
  Carol: When I was at the farm yesterday, I said, you know, I should have been an electrician if I wasn't scared to death of getting jolted, but I do understand circuits.
• 1:33:02
  Carol: I'm gonna go to the woodworkers, because I… I can't figure out how to get the belt
• 1:33:10
  Carol: On my dad's table saw in sync with the motive.
• 1:33:14
  Carol: So, most of the time, I'm consumed with tools.
• 1:33:20
  Carol: Building stuff.
• 1:33:22
  Carol: I just built this ramp.
• 1:33:26
  Carol: Yep, for sure, with a trolley.
• 1:33:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I could have used a hand.
• 1:33:30
  Carol: Everywhere around here, I've had to make accommodations.
• 1:33:35
  Carol: In order to get up on the roof, because I had to last year.
• 1:33:41
  Carol: I had to build the scaffolding.
• 1:33:43
  Carol: I built… okay, in Justin's room in here, I built… Shelves for his stuff.
• 1:33:54
  Carol: Out of an old… these are,
• 1:33:58
  Carol: How do I make the camera do that?
• 1:34:00
  Carol: This is old, I found it… I found this on the… I'm always curb… under the curb.
• 1:34:07
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:34:07
  Carol: one of those beds, futon, futon shop was going out of business, so I found a lot of these things.
• 1:34:13
  Carol: And then I made these kind of things, like these shelfie things.
• 1:34:17
  Tad Eggleston: So that, like.
• 1:34:18
  Carol: if I need to pull out… To look at something.
• 1:34:23
  Carol: If you can see this, I can pull it out like a drawer. I designed it in such a way that I could use these logs that belong to my dad
• 1:34:31
  Carol: That I kept.
• 1:34:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:34:40
  Carol: I could talk to people about… about tools and stuff, like, X…
• 1:34:45
  Tad Eggleston: I… I love it. I feel like this is… when you're… when you're done, Drawing about grief.
• 1:34:54
  Tad Eggleston: You should just draw about DIY, what… draw the tool shop that you should have, and like…
• 1:35:03
  Tad Eggleston: there's… there's… I love how-to comics.
• 1:35:08
  Carol: Well, you know what else I did? Okay,
• 1:35:11
  Carol: Once a month, I go to this thing called the, Tinkers? The Tinkerers?
• 1:35:17
  Carol: And I, fixed.
• 1:35:20
  Carol: Discarded fans and stuff.
• 1:35:24
  Tad Eggleston: Love it.
• 1:35:24
  Carol: for the homeless.
• 1:35:26
  Carol: You know, like, to end up in, in these, places.
• 1:35:32
  Carol: So, like.
• 1:35:33
  Carol: a lot of people, they're gonna throw the fan out because it doesn't work right. So I'll take it apart and figure out it needs
• 1:35:42
  Carol: Bing.
• 1:35:43
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:35:44
  Carol: So, I'm an engineer, I figure it out, you know, I think…
• 1:35:48
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, you went to that engineering college. Maybe it was the right college for you.
• 1:35:52
  Carol: No, I majored in geology there.
• 1:35:55
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but it soaked in, it was like osmosis or something.
• 1:36:01
  Carol: Well, I mean, I went there, but I studied in, it was all guys.
• 1:36:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:36:07
  Carol: I'm trying to get the dog back up the stairs, this is why I'm not the ramping machine.
• 1:36:12
  Carol: I mean, hold on, hold on, and I'm going to answer your question correctly, though, get upstairs.
• 1:36:17
  Carol: I'm up here, you know, we saw the movie, Justin Downstairs.
• 1:36:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:36:22
  Carol: It's crazy. I couldn't deal with it. Okay.
• 1:36:25
  Carol: See, here's this… cranky thing.
• 1:36:29
  Carol: Anyway, I just, like, that I would discuss with people.
• 1:36:40
  Carol: I usually end up having to explain to somebody how you do it.
• 1:36:46
  Carol: Like, how do you fix that… this fan right here?
• 1:36:50
  Carol: I got this from the Tinker team.
• 1:36:52
  Carol: Tell you what I did this summer.
• 1:36:55
  Carol: Can you see this? It says BDE on the dial.
• 1:36:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:37:01
  Carol: If you can see that, Phoebe.
• 1:37:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:37:04
  Carol: I'm hearing the air hot.
• 1:37:08
  Carol: heat waves.
• 1:37:11
  Carol: And I thought, that sounds like a note, a musical note.
• 1:37:19
  Carol: So I figured out that low was a B,
• 1:37:22
  Carol: Medium was D, and high was E, and then I went through all the whole house. Every fan I have.
• 1:37:31
  Carol: I've figured out… Whether it was…
• 1:37:37
  Carol: I don't know if you can see that.
• 1:37:41
  Tad Eggleston: G, D-sharp.
• 1:37:42
  Carol: Yeah, if it was high or low.
• 1:37:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:37:45
  Carol: sharp if it was on low. These are the tones.
• 1:37:48
  Carol: So, even the air conditioner. I figured out the musical scale… the musical notes for all the noises in the house, even the refrigerator, and I thought, I'd like to…
• 1:38:01
  Carol: turn that into… because I keep… I've been composing in my head recently. I like to make these into songs. I figured out
• 1:38:09
  Carol: Well, I would want to do lyrics, too.
• 1:38:12
  Carol: So…
• 1:38:13
  Carol: From all of that, you can figure it out, but a lot of that has nothing to do with comics, but at the same time, it has everything to do with comics, and I'll tell you why, one quick thing. I love architecture, and to me, making a comic
• 1:38:29
  Carol: is nothing more than architecture. You're building a house.
• 1:38:34
  Carol: You got your foundation, you got your foundational elements, you have things you gotta do, and so on.
• 1:38:40
  Carol: So, to me, That… that… that, and music, and engineering, and all of that, to me, is…
• 1:38:47
  Carol: what I use when I do comics.
• 1:38:50
  Carol: Make sense?
• 1:38:53
  Tad Eggleston: It does.
• 1:38:54
  Tad Eggleston: It does.
• 1:38:55
  Tad Eggleston: And I love it.
• 1:38:57
  Tad Eggleston: I, you know, just cause… I, I, I appreciate complex brains.
• 1:39:04
  Tad Eggleston: I have one myself, and I often.
• 1:39:06
  Carol: You do.
• 1:39:06
  Tad Eggleston: feel like I'm speaking… speaking Martian to people, so when people talk in a way that I… I go, that makes perfect sense to me, and I bet you that's not true for half the people listening. It makes me feel like I've found my people.
• 1:39:21
  Tad Eggleston: I find a lot of them in comics.
• 1:39:24
  Carol: Yeah, comics people are not just, like, one note, you know, I just do… well, some people are, though. There are some comics nerds, but that's what they do.
• 1:39:32
  Carol: But, you know, if you were to say.
• 1:39:35
  Carol: It's your last day on Earth, honey. What do you want to do? I'd want to go outside, or be with the dog, or make something.
• 1:39:43
  Carol: you know, I wouldn't want to sit at my drawing table.
• 1:39:49
  Carol: Drawing… the drawing table, I love doing it. It feels like home to me. If my… if I'm going out of my mind, and I'm frazzled, I will sit at the drawing table, and I can literally get calm.
• 1:40:01
  Carol: But… I like to…
• 1:40:05
  Carol: make things and do things, and… it's kind of like why I love going out to the farm.
• 1:40:11
  Carol: Because it's like, there's always some kind of fucking project I have to do. This weekend, I was loading up
• 1:40:18
  Carol: Pile of rocks.
• 1:40:21
  Carol: I'm dumping him into an old cistern.
• 1:40:25
  Carol: Golly something.
• 1:40:27
  Tad Eggleston: waste something.
• 1:40:29
  Carol: But, yeah, so now you know some of my hobbies.
• 1:40:33
  Carol: Like… Football, like Joe Burrows, I'm a Joe… I'm in the Joe Burrow, he's Ot fan club.
• 1:40:41
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know who that is.
• 1:40:42
  Carol: Oh, yay!
• 1:40:44
  Tad Eggleston: I have to look that up. Joe Burrow?
• 1:40:47
  Tad Eggleston: Not a fa.
• 1:40:48
  Carol: He's the quarterback for the… he's the quarterback for the Bengals, but he's also the sexiest man on the…
• 1:40:55
  Carol: As far as I'm concerned, he's hot.
• 1:40:57
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay. I mean, now that I'm looking at a picture of him, I see where you're coming from, but I'm a baseball guy. Remember, I worked in dementia units. When I watch football, all I can think of is the head injuries.
• 1:41:09
  Carol: Right, I know, I know.
• 1:41:11
  Carol: And I didn't watch it for years.
• 1:41:14
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently?
• 1:41:14
  Carol: The reason I watch it now is because Joe Burrow is HOT!
• 1:41:21
  Carol: I mean, he's, like, cool, in the sense that…
• 1:41:25
  Carol: He does fashion, you know, he always looks…
• 1:41:29
  Carol: that's what attracted me to him. It's like, he's all.
• 1:41:31
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking at the picture of him that comes up when you Google him, and I see what you're talking about.
• 1:41:39
  Carol: Did you see him shirtless with the A-L-O? Type in Joe Burrow, A-L-O, shirtless.
• 1:41:46
  Tad Eggleston: A-L-O shirt.
• 1:41:49
  Carol: Yeah, that's some brand he's, promoting right now, but if you do that, it'd be like.
• 1:41:56
  Carol: God is a god.
• 1:41:57
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 1:42:00
  Carol: See that?
• 1:42:03
  Carol: I'm gonna say shirtless.
• 1:42:05
  Tad Eggleston: Keep them away from my wife.
• 1:42:09
  Carol: Oh, that very first picture, complex style on… He is hot, yeah. No, he's just good-looking, and he's nice, he's a nice guy, gives money to the poor, he helps… he's from,
• 1:42:21
  Carol: poor part of, like, an Appalachian part of Ohio. So he grew up around people, so he makes sure that people get something to eat. He's,
• 1:42:30
  Carol: He's humble. No, he's a good guy. He's not, like, some arrogant son of a bitch.
• 1:42:36
  Tad Eggleston: That's good.
• 1:42:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's good.
• 1:42:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Carol, it has been an absolute pleasure.
• 1:42:43
  Tad Eggleston: I am looking forward to seeing you again in a few weeks in Columbus. I'm looking forward to seeing the exhibit, it sounds amazing.
• 1:42:53
  Carol: Where are you based at?
• 1:42:54
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I'm in Round Lake Heights.
• 1:42:57
  Carol: That's right, you said that.
• 1:42:58
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:42:58
  Carol: What do you teach?
• 1:43:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a special ed paraprofessional.
• 1:43:06
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm kind of… kind of a.
• 1:43:09
  Carol: What grade?
• 1:43:10
  Tad Eggleston: Jack of Altar at high school.
• 1:43:12
  Carol: High school. Ugh.
• 1:43:13
  Tad Eggleston: High school.
• 1:43:15
  Tad Eggleston: Jack of all trades in special ed.
• 1:43:18
  Carol: I have all the appreciation for you. When I used to teach school.
• 1:43:24
  Carol: As a sub, going into the special ed room was the hardest.
• 1:43:29
  Tad Eggleston: I love the special ed.
• 1:43:30
  Carol: If they didn't have the 8 there, but no, because the teacher wasn't there, sometimes the kids would give…
• 1:43:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, I get it.
• 1:43:36
  Carol: You know, like, where.
• 1:43:37
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 1:43:37
  Carol: Where's Miss Smith? Where's Mrs. Smith? I don't want to be here unless Mrs. Smith is here!
• 1:43:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. No, no, I get it.
• 1:43:44
  Carol: Yeah.
• 1:43:46
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah.
• 1:43:49
  Carol: It's a fun job.
• 1:43:51
  Tad Eggleston: And they like that I like comics.
• 1:43:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know.
• 1:43:55
  Carol: What's your favorite comic?
• 1:43:57
  Carol: What's my favorite comic? Oh, God, it depends on the day of the week.
• 1:44:01
  Tad Eggleston: Genre? Any genre in particular?
• 1:44:04
  Tad Eggleston: All of them.
• 1:44:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if, if, if I'm… if I'm, like…
• 1:44:10
  Tad Eggleston: Off the top of my head, my pat answer is probably loving rockets.
• 1:44:15
  Tad Eggleston: I adore Saga.
• 1:44:19
  Tad Eggleston: But there are just so many, I have, like…
• 1:44:25
  Tad Eggleston: a thousand of them on the wall behind me. I read, like, a thousand pages of comics a week, minimum.
• 1:44:33
  Carol: for you.
• 1:44:34
  Tad Eggleston: I just…
• 1:44:36
  Carol: You like Justin's work?
• 1:44:39
  Carol: Have you seen enough of it? Have you seen, like, Binky… you've read Binky Brown, I'm sure.
• 1:44:48
  Carol: If you haven't, you must.
• 1:44:50
  Tad Eggleston: Soon.
• 1:44:51
  Tad Eggleston: I've read it.
• 1:44:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're breaking up, like.
• 1:44:56
  Carol: I can't hear you. You're breaking up.
• 1:45:00
  Tad Eggleston: Hi, Eric.
• 1:45:03
  Carol: I can't hear you, you're breaking up.
• 1:45:08
  Tad Eggleston: Dave back now?
• 1:45:11
  Tad Eggleston: Let me do that.
• 1:45:13
  Tad Eggleston: Can you hear me now?
• 1:45:14
  Carol: Yes.
• 1:45:15
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I'm in that… I feel like I'm in that… that… that commercial. Can you hear me now? Yeah, yeah, no.
• 1:45:21
  Tad Eggleston: I, if you'd read Binky Brown. I've read Binky Brown, and I appreciate it.
• 1:45:28
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's a step above…
• 1:45:32
  Tad Eggleston: Most of the undergrounds at the time.
• 1:45:35
  Tad Eggleston: But I think it's still of the undergrounds at the time, where it was one part to shock, whereas you connect.
• 1:45:46
  Tad Eggleston: And I appreciate the connection more than the shock factor.
• 1:45:53
  Tad Eggleston: I've always.
• 1:45:55
  Tad Eggleston: They're a cartoonist than your husband.
• 1:45:57
  Carol: What was that?
• 1:45:57
  Tad Eggleston: We argued about that the first time. We argued about that when we met in 2019. I've always thought you were a better cartoonist than your husband.
• 1:46:06
  Carol: And I'll always say no.
• 1:46:07
  Tad Eggleston: I know you will.
• 1:46:12
  Tad Eggleston: But I'll… I'll stand behind that.
• 1:46:16
  Carol: Nope.
• 1:46:17
  Tad Eggleston: Do you have… you have a… a better feel for the medium.
• 1:46:23
  Tad Eggleston: what I was talking about in terms of panel layouts, design, You know, storytelling in general.
• 1:46:31
  Tad Eggleston: You are just… You're in a rarefied group.
• 1:46:39
  Tad Eggleston: with people like the Hernandez brothers, and Fiona Staples, and…
• 1:46:46
  Tad Eggleston: God, you've put me on a spot right now, so I can't…
• 1:46:49
  Carol: No, no, that's alright, that's alright. I just wondered about Justin and…
• 1:46:53
  Carol: I don't like comparisons, because people have different places that they like to do with it. I'm also going to ask, did you see the movie?
• 1:47:01
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't seen the movie. I've heard about the movie, but I haven't seen it yet.
• 1:47:09
  Carol: I love the movie.
• 1:47:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I should. I don't watch as many movies.
• 1:47:13
  Tad Eggleston: I read a lot of comics.
• 1:47:15
  Carol: This is essential. If you like comics, No.
• 1:47:18
  Tad Eggleston: Remind me… remind me the name of the movie, and I'll put it higher.
• 1:47:22
  Carol: Married?
• 1:47:23
  Carol: To comics. Married to comics. Married to comics.
• 1:47:29
  Carol: I will… I will watch it before I get…
• 1:47:32
  Tad Eggleston: to Columbus, and I'll let you know what I think.
• 1:47:35
  Carol: Have a box of tissues handy, and you can watch it with your spouse.
• 1:47:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, if we have to have a box of tissues handy, she might not want to watch it. Though it's a documentary, so a little bit more likely.
• 1:47:49
  Carol: A lot of guys have told me, who are comics guys.
• 1:47:52
  Carol: have said their wife didn't want to watch it because she's not into comics. But then.
• 1:47:57
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, but my wife is into comics.
• 1:48:00
  Carol: Okay.
• 1:48:00
  Carol: Okay, because it turns out that…
• 1:48:03
  Carol: It's more of a story of relation… it's more of a relationship marriage type story.
• 1:48:09
  Carol: than it is a biography of our careers. It's about… tension, and…
• 1:48:16
  Carol: all this in-depth stuff you're talking about, and John, beautifully, John Kinhart, the director.
• 1:48:23
  Carol: He referenced the comics all through the movie.
• 1:48:28
  Carol: Right. So, a lot of the stuff that's in, Soldier's Heart.
• 1:48:33
  Carol: he took panels and, you know, kind of sequentially laid them out for the viewer and stuff, so… I'd like to know, because if you like comics, and you know my work, and we've had a chat.
• 1:48:45
  Carol: It would be interesting to see what you think of Married to Comedy.
• 1:48:49
  Carol: People who have seen it just, like, go… of it.
• 1:48:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I'm looking at the… I got the trailer rolling right now, and it looks fascinating. So, it will get watched sooner rather than later.
• 1:49:03
  Tad Eggleston: And everybody I know who's seen it loves it.
• 1:49:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I, I, I gave, gave, gave my,
• 1:49:15
  Tad Eggleston: gave you regards from Dennis Kitchen before we started talking. He's in it!
• 1:49:20
  Tad Eggleston: And he asked if I'd seen it, so, like, I know I'm supposed to see it, I just haven't gotten to it yet.
• 1:49:27
  Carol: Well, you'll enjoy it, too. It's not just a have-to, it's like, oh, wow. That's a good movie.
• 1:49:32
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the number of movies I haven't managed to see yet is just astounding. I'm too busy reading comics.
• 1:49:39
  Tad Eggleston: Reading comics and teaching.
• 1:49:42
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I do.
• 1:49:43
  Carol: All I do these days is…
• 1:49:45
  Carol: listen to music now. I'm going back to… I'm going back to my music roots, man. Sounds good to me, and I'll listen, and…
• 1:49:51
  Carol: You're in.
• 1:49:51
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I do on my lunch breaks. Today was a kinks lunch break.
• 1:49:58
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 1:49:59
  Carol: Hmm.
• 1:49:59
  Tad Eggleston: Pick a… pick a band and put them on random. That's what I do on my lunch.
• 1:50:03
  Carol: So you're gonna hear a first-generation reaction to it. It was just good shit on the radio, man.
• 1:50:09
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:50:10
  Carol: They're good!
• 1:50:11
  Tad Eggleston: They're good, those kinks, they're good.
• 1:50:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:50:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, again.
• 1:50:19
  Carol: Start my mom's car, her Buick 1965 Buick… Buick?
• 1:50:26
  Carol: Skylar!
• 1:50:27
  Tad Eggleston: convertible, turn on the radio. Oh, there was Dennis on screen.
• 1:50:33
  Carol: Alright, well, we'll see ya. Thank you for.
• 1:50:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we'll see you soon. Absolutely. So, for Carol Tyler, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.