Latest / Graymalkin Lane the podcast / Iron Man 109-112: Moonrise! With Ho Che Anderson and Shawn Porett!

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Iron Man 109-112: Moonrise! With Ho Che Anderson and Shawn Porett! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Green Walken Lane podcast where queer friends and allies gather to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now in a few minutes, my dear friend Sean Peretz is going to be joining us to be my co-host for this episode, but it is just me and my featured guest for the first few minutes.
• 0:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be debuting this episode in August, 2027, which is Dark Star Month on the Green Walken Lane Show.
• 0:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be talking all about the Dark Force and Dark Sides and all kinds of things on both this and the Patreon channel.
• 0:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So stay tuned for the trial of Laney of Petrovna at the end of the month on the show.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be an amazing academic panel.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: I am thrilled to be featuring the incredible talents of Hoche Anderson on the show today.
• 0:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I got to meet Hoche on a panel that I was in in Toronto, which was a crazy time.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And what a joy to have been able to connect with you.
• 0:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hoche, welcome to Gramel Can Lane.
• 0:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: My initial question for you is, what is your dark side look like?
• 1:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh.
• 1:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't think we want to go down that road.
• 1:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: My dark side, you know what, read one of my comics, sand and fury, the screen queen adventure, and that's got a lot of darkness in it.
• 1:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a good idea to do a plug and sidestep the question at the same time.
• 1:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think that was the smartest approach.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But if you want to tell everybody a little, let's begin if you don't mind, do we tell everybody the origin of your name?
• 1:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, my father was died in the wool, lefty before that was fashionable, you know, and I came into the world in 1969.
• 1:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: My dad was, uh,
• 1:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, had communist leanings and, and, well, let's, yeah, he had, he had very, he had, he had, he had, he had more socialist leanings.
• 1:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's actually more of a accurate depiction of dad.
• 1:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was an utter leftist and really admired Che Guevara and, uh, and, uh, and Ho Chi Minh and, uh, decided without workshopping it with my mother to put that on the kid.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: He was, I think they had a plan where if it was a girl,
• 2:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mom was going to name her.
• 2:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: If it was a boy dad was going to name her.
• 2:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that was a little bit of a flawed approach personally.
• 2:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dad won the lottery on that one and threw that on me.
• 2:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so that's where it comes from.
• 2:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Ho Chi H O space C H E everybody.
• 2:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: So not Ho Chi min and not Che Guevara, but a combination of the two.
• 2:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think you're trying to find a really academic lovely way to say that your parents were hippies.
• 2:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, that's not accurate, but they were definite.
• 2:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were definite lefties for sure.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Excellent.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where did you girl up?
• 2:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I came into the world and a place called Middlesex in the UK, grew up in Canada though.
• 2:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We came here when I was five years old, moved to Toronto and been here ever since.
• 2:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm from the suburbs.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm from the suburbs of Toronto called Scarborough.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, Scarborough's lovely.
• 2:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I almost moved to Toronto last year.
• 3:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We can talk about that sometime.
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It didn't quite work out the way I hoped, but I still would love to land there.
• 3:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: What a beautiful city.
• 3:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was just there for a T-caf, recently, where you got to host a controversial panel.
• 3:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I people talked to me about the panel, the whole the whole couple of days.
• 3:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to share your experiences, the moderator of this particular panel at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival?
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: with love too.
• 3:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I'm not an event planner.
• 3:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm a cartoonist and you know, storyteller.
• 3:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this kind of exercises a different side of my brain.
• 3:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of work putting these panels together and it's a fascinating experience when you actually like you done all this work.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing is now live and the people who are there, the panelists, the guests and the guests and the audience take it over and it becomes their thing and takes
• 3:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's kind of funny because I am that was like the first panel that I had moderated for a while and done like that muscle was sort of kind of atrophied a little bit and that day I joined that panel I just felt like I was not on my game and I I didn't wasn't comfortable it wasn't until like the next day that I've funded like kind of got my mojo back so one of the things I was remember about that panel is kind of wishing I've done a better job on it.
• 4:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was thrilling and it was like to have like the entire room be packed that everybody so engaged and I got to tell you that moment when you and Nick kind of had a little bit of kind of a back and forth with some it was one of those moments where I was like oh fuck and also oh fuck yeah like you know it's like I found a little bit bad for for Nick to be honest because you know you got a little bit of a
• 4:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: a little bit of pushback from the up from that from the audience.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I also thought like this is a great moment just to be a part of.
• 4:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I loved that.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Except some things that I didn't necessarily agree with.
• 4:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I like that you, you know, I didn't want the people to to attack him.
• 4:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I like that you very gently, but very firmly offered a counter argument to his points.
• 5:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought you had a good, so you want to do you want to share with the topic of the panel was
• 5:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, we participate in a panel called Dangerous Cartooning.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I think one of the guys, one of the creators of the South Park said that one of the reasons that they're tackling politics so much in their show now is because politics would become pop culture.
• 5:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've always been engaged politically, but I find like just more people in general are kind of plugged into what's going on in the world now than I've noticed in a long time.
• 5:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I wanted to reflect that a little bit
• 5:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, kind of lean into the into the political a little bit.
• 5:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And uh, so I invited some fine cartoonists who's work, um, uh, challenge societal norms shall we say?
• 5:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I, I was really honored to be part.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was, I was at four separate panels in T-Coff.
• 5:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I was thrilled to be invited to all of them.
• 5:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: You didn't know me beforehand.
• 5:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm the guy that wrote Game Warman Dad, you know, right?
• 5:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which is a, a newer book.
• 5:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I, I'm known for other things, but that's what I was there representing.
• 5:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there were a lot of really heavy topics.
• 6:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: The room was in a classroom.
• 6:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was packed, people standing only sitting on the floor.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had a mix of kind of conservative liberal, queer, American, Canadian voices.
• 6:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We were talking about pretty heavy topics, like, you know, genocides and the removal of rights.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had one particular panel as two was sharing some pretty conservative views.
• 6:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And using language that I don't think he realized the crowd was responding to in a certain kind of way.
• 6:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: For example, he said the quote at one point, and this isn't a calling out.
• 6:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: We ended our conversation very respectfully, but he said at one point, I wish we could go back to the 90s whenever one knew their place, which is a really wild thing to say.
• 6:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I think what he meant is, it from his experience as a white cis guy, everybody was comfortable and like we all got along, but what it sounded like was he wanted people to go to a place of reduced rights.
• 6:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And so I very respectfully, I hope, address that.
• 6:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we had a nice back and forth.
• 6:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: I actually thought your moderating was excellent.
• 6:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought that skill set of letting the crowd kind of take over for that moment was really actually beautiful.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it sounds like you hold yourself to a very high standard of professionalism.
• 7:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the moderation I thought was was extremely well done.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that's a paneled people are going to remember.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: They walked away with a lot of thoughts and feelings.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Either of like feeling represented.
• 7:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Because these are intense times where politicized views
• 7:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, we talked about your parents and kind of the introduction to all of this.
• 7:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: You as a creator have always taken some very divisive approaches, writing about very bold things from very bold places.
• 7:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to tell everyone a little about your history with comics?
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.
• 7:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, I was in love with and obsessed with comics from a young age.
• 7:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thought words was kind of the Rosetta Stone for me.
• 7:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: My mother took me to see that movie.
• 7:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wanted, I just think it was on its first run, but I think it was during the 78 rerelease.
• 7:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: the movie blew my mind, opened a window into another way of thinking and open the door to a fascination, just the storytelling with science fiction, with ideas, with art.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there was never like a grand career plan, but you know, I found myself just always gravitating towards storytelling.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was always writing stuff, I was always drawing stuff.
• 8:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was sort of like,
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it was I already knew what I was going to be doing from a little from a young age, without even having a conscious thought of it, sort of like the profession chose me to some extent.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I, you know, drew, drew my entire life.
• 8:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Went to, there was a comics publisher in Toronto called War Text Comics in the early 80s.
• 8:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Toronto is a very kind of funky new wave town back in the early.
• 8:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: A lot of like creative energy going on and there was a comic book published in Toronto called Mr. X by Paul Ravash originally and Dean Mauder and then by but when it actually hit the stand it was published by it was sorry it was created by the Hernandez brothers and it was like just going to galvanize and comic book for me.
• 8:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I took my stuff there when I was 14, got rejected, went back when I was 16, and they kind of entered me into like a kind of an apprenticeship there.
• 9:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Eventually, I got my first work published at Phantom graphics early in my, like, one of my first meetings with them.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: They said, we want to do this King book.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you interested in being a part of it?
• 9:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: King has in Martin Luther King.
• 9:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Martin Luther King.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this is this is about 1993.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is my first contact with him was 1990, 89 90.
• 9:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I can't get from that.
• 9:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Keep going, but I want you to work in, uh, I want to be your dog into this.
• 9:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh,
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was my first, that was my first, my first comic book with him was, I want to be your dog.
• 9:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Fennec graphics had an imprint they were like running out of cash.
• 9:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Howard Shaken's black hissed, hit the comic book scene hard and was making a shit ton of money.
• 9:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And suddenly there was like this market for a rather comics.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, so, uh, they took advantage of that and created, uh, aeros comics and offered me.
• 9:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think a lot, I think it was also, it was a chance to like make some money with like having some like muddy stuff.
• 10:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was also like kind of an opportunity for a new car, new cartoonist to get their start.
• 10:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I took full advantage of that.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd already published a little bit with a company called Camico.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've done some stuff for a Matt Wagner, some grandal stuff.
• 10:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I jumped over to fan graphics and did a book called I Want to Be Your Dog, which was like a fine part kind of neighborhood
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, a group of like kind of crazed characters and, you know, kind of navigating love and crime and it was kind of weird and, you know, very me and very it was, it was an attempt to like what I, you know, I was thrilled to be doing like a sex comic, what I really want to do is just tell a story so it was kind of me kind of threading the needle between being a storyteller but also having some like legitimate like sexy stuff in there.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And through doing a dog, I got the opportunity to do king.
• 10:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, and that's where I kind of took my first four into, you know, more overtly political material.
• 10:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Go early 90s and speaking as a queer white American for just a moment.
• 11:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: 1991 was the Clarence Thomas appointment with the Anita Hill in San Diego.
• 11:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had Rodney King's beating and that awful verdict that resulted in what they call riots, but I call kind of protests or stand out moments from the culture.
• 11:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot happening.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Nelson Mandela was released from jail in 1990.
• 11:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Martin Luther King in that story coming out in 1993 was pretty divisive and I love comic history where we go like Star Wars, smut, and then what was it like putting this book out at that time?
• 11:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ah,
• 11:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: thrilling to be honest with you.
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And let's not forget, um, this was also not too far off from OJ, which uh, you know, that was like the intersection of class race, uh, you know, celebrity, you know, it was, there was a lot going on.
• 11:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Police brutality means a shit ton happening in that era.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was reading a lot of the village voice at that point.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: My father kind of massive collection of village voices that he collected over like 10 years.
• 12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I had this great access to this real lefty material which talked a lot about Kings Legacy in relation to Martin Luther King, us two Malcolm X's legacy.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I remember the loose barricone was big in the news at that point.
• 12:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a lot going on in racial politics in that era.
• 12:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, I was a giant fan of Oliver Stone through JFK, you know, Salvador, and all the films he had out in that era, the door is even.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he just like such an overtly political storyteller.
• 12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was really happy to kind of be playing in those waters, you know.
• 12:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really like the idea of taking a great figure from history, a controversial figure from history.
• 12:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Shining a light on them through the comics medium.
• 12:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was really an exciting thing to be a part of.
• 12:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't shared a lot of this part of my history on the show, but I was a young teen.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I grew up in Missouri, but as a young teen, we moved to rural like potato country Idaho, which is where I spent my adolescence.
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And there was a lot of shitty shots, stuff happening in my house, but I think I knew one black kid in my entire town, like that kind of space.
• 13:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: In my mind, like racism didn't exist growing up.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just a couple years later, though, in 1997, I went as a Mormon missionary to Philadelphia and lived in inner city, Philly, and other areas where I became extremely aware of racial history and politics in a way that I had never been exposed to previously, and that's what launched my path toward being a social worker, which is the field that I still work in these days.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it's it's an interesting time in my mind to analyze how all of that history was impacting me as a little closet and white kid, you know, back in those days you reference screen queen a moment ago jumping forward you got to write a series for Marvel addressing concepts related to police violence toward African Americans in the United States in a series called Luke Cage City on fire that was from what I can tell fully produced but never actually published.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I've heard this story for more than one African-American creator, but do you want to talk a little bit about working on Luke Cage?
• 14:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, um, absolutely.
• 14:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, um, it was City of Fire just, uh, just a quick correction.
• 14:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Did I say it on the night, but I apologize.
• 14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's the name of some, uh, that's the name of some like Japanese crime film or something like that.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, whatever.
• 14:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so what happened was I'd been interested in doing some work from Marvel.
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I threw the great Ed Pisco or got, uh, got a contact, uh, over there.
• 14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, thank you.
• 14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Justin piece Ed.
• 14:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Justin piece Ed.
• 14:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: What happened?
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.
• 14:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they offered me.
• 14:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh, the opportunity to write like a five page story for Marvel's voices.
• 14:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they said, pick any character, you know, do what you want.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I said great.
• 14:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wrote a thing, uh, with Luke Cage.
• 14:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and there was a lot of back and forth with them on the story because, um, what would happen if, you know, I'm sure your listeners are aware of, uh, the, you know,
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: George Floyd case, where there's murdered by the cop Derek Shelvin, and I kind of postulated the theory or the notion of George Floyd's mother being put in a position to protect Derek Shelvin from, you know, an angry mob to, in order to get him to justice to face the crime of killing her son and going to Lucas for that protection.
• 15:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there was a, there was a, that script, even though it was five pages, then it reduced to four pages, went through a lot of
• 15:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: revisions because they kept asking for changes.
• 15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I kept saying, no problem.
• 15:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is your character.
• 15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes we're not violating the core of the story.
• 15:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's keep going.
• 15:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember they got to one point and they wanted the final change and I said to them, guys, I'll make this change.
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if I do this, it will violate the entire point of the story.
• 15:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There will be no point for the story existing.
• 15:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they came to their senses and they said, cool.
• 15:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then so after I finished that last draft, you know, I don't know, a few weeks went by.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: They contacted me and they said, hey, look, um, there's like a lot going on in the story.
• 15:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we think we could expand this into something more.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Are you interested in doing like a one shot or many series or whatever I said?
• 16:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, absolutely.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, uh, and I had always been kind of fascinated by Luke Cage.
• 16:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've done a
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: series for a milestone.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was the D.C. D.C.
• 16:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Distributed comments company from the mid-90s.
• 16:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I done a thing for them called Wysun, which was really kind of like a Luke Cage analog.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I was exciting to get to play with the actual character himself.
• 16:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wrote this when I thought was pretty good.
• 16:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I still think that's a pretty good script.
• 16:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wrote this three part, you know, action adventure, you know, politically-themed, but, you know, character-based, but still action-packed story about Luke Cage.
• 16:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, get this, you know, this murdering cop to justice before, you know, for he's killed.
• 16:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it involved, like, you know, city politics and corrupt cops.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: fun little yarn.
• 16:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so I wrote the whole thing.
• 16:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We got one issue totally finished, lettered, colored the whole thing.
• 16:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was amazing to see.
• 16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought, you know, I already liked the story.
• 17:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Seeing what the artist did with it was just next level.
• 17:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was so good.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I felt like.
• 17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: God, I feel like did I have anything to do with this?
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is crazy.
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And great work from all the, all the creators involved.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there were pencils I think on mostly finished on the second issue and then about 10 pages of pencils done on the third issue.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it was a significant amount of work done on this book.
• 17:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then about, you know, they'd asked me because of the nature of the material.
• 17:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: They'd asked me to write about two weeks before publication.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: They ask me to write, you know, like a paragraph as a trigger warning, you know, some, you know, heavy material in here for those impacted by police brutality, you know, just before warned what you're getting yourself into.
• 17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm super stoked and then I don't know where I get this call and this is right around the time.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: of the, what is that kid, the Kyle Rittenhouse incident.
• 17:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you remember that, but Kyle Rittenhouse was this kid who took a nail or 15 to, I think, a black lives matter.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 17:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was, right, right, yeah, that was, that was a tough one.
• 17:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And right around the then, I think he had just gotten acquitted, I want to say.
• 18:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, the things were politically charged as they always are these days.
• 18:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think, I mean, this is just a supposition, but, you know, they said, they came to me and they said, look, it's not a good time to release this story.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's, we don't want you or the other creators to like be targeted.
• 18:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, guys, someone, you know, big man.
• 18:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, you know, I'm a grown man.
• 18:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can take care of myself.
• 18:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they used that as a reason to shit, can't become like so.
• 18:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: What are you going to do?
• 18:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: You were fully paid for that work, correct?
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah.
• 18:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marvel standards and practices when it comes to the way we are handling politically charged situations in Trump, era America with queer politics, is certainly not changed very much.
• 18:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: What are you working on these days?
• 18:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am just finished writing a piece for DC Comics, which has been another dream come true.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't think this one is gonna fall into the same quack wire that the Marvel worked in, which is like fingers crossed.
• 18:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't say what it is, but I'm super, super excited about it.
• 18:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The artist is, I've just seen like the first like 10 pages of layouts by the artist and I am thrilled beyond words.
• 19:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's one thing, the other thing is actually,
• 19:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: say right now, but I'm working on a project for the University of Toronto and MIT, they've got like a public publishing wing and I'm doing a bit of story that is based on New York City history from let's say the 1850s to like the early 1910s and I'm like just scripting the piece now.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've
• 19:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, really having a lot of fun with this one.
• 19:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's like you connect a king in a way and that it's like research based in a historical sort of, yeah.
• 19:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: As a fan of yours and meeting you and you've got a tremendous amount of charisma and presence.
• 19:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like I'm a big fan, but I'm tremendously compelled by the work that you're doing in the history that you have.
• 19:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love your ability to just kind of channel that energy and that like extremely deep academic, but also very storytelling forward, love in the different works that you're doing.
• 20:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi for Marvel listeners, I got to write a shuri story in one of the Wakanda titles a little while back.
• 20:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there anything else you want to plug before we go to a little bit lighter fair at our interview?
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I'm not some of my Marvel stuff.
• 20:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Even though things ultimately didn't work up between them, I had a tremendous time working with my editor Will Moss over there.
• 20:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a terrific guy.
• 20:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I had a lot of fun, I got to write Killmogger for them.
• 20:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I got to write it from the end.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I got to do some stuff.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, I did play.
• 20:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I brought into a play story.
• 20:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I had some fun.
• 20:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I would love to continue.
• 20:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they've got their way of doing things.
• 20:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it didn't work out.
• 20:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there you go.
• 20:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm proud of that work.
• 20:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm like somebody's here.
• 20:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's this amazing pod of talent in Toronto between my friends Jason Lowe and Anthony Olavera and Ryan North and like there's so many amazing people who are doing such cool fucking work up there it's it's a it's a joy to have you on let me welcome the lovely and talented Prince of power himself Sean Perret to the show as well hi Sean how are you buddy hello Chad I'm always happy to be here.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, so lovely to have you.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 21:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've been talking on the show in the 1970s era about all of the different types of things that were happening in the world and how they were impacting our comics.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, we're going to delve into a dark star story in a little while.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is not super ex-mendants, but I want to focus our conversation for a few minutes.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to get light.
• 21:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I promise.
• 21:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: like we have academic and silly mixed here.
• 21:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But in the 1970s some of the topics we've been talking that we're influencing all of our books including X-Men have been Soviet and American politics which we see certainly in the issue we're going to read in a few minutes.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have the black exploitation era of film really impacting things.
• 21:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of things happening in horror and storytelling, second wave feminism, queer and disability rights.
• 21:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But one of the areas we haven't talked about very much, I want to spend a few minutes on, which is very simply the category of Star Wars.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're coming up in the X-Men on the first epic kind of Shia Empire, like Star Jammers, Imperial Guard, like this whole era of kind of space opera where we're fighting against fascism in a very real way.
• 22:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: with like lots of Superman energy beings and you know people toss in planets and suns at each other and like the mcr on crystal which if you grab it can rewrite reality Star Wars had such a tremendous impact on everything.
• 22:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had Star Wars and all of these other things going on before.
• 22:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But let's talk about I said Star Wars.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had Star Wars.
• 22:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: We had Star
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've flopped my words.
• 22:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Star Wars had such a tremendous impact on everything.
• 22:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We previously had star trek and other series just before that God, I'm going to be revoked for like getting those to my listeners.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're going to come for me.
• 22:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let's talk a little bit about what we love about Star Wars.
• 22:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, as we lead into this, were you an X-Men fan growing up?
• 22:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh my god, absolutely, I was.
• 22:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I was, I came in at the tail end of the Claremont burn era.
• 22:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: John Grant blew my mind in that era.
• 22:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Looking back as work still does.
• 22:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I was along, you know, when I think it switched over to a, it was, who was the artist after that?
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was Dave Cochrome after that.
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then, Cochrome before, Cochrome before burn.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yes, that's right, Cochrome.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, Cochrome came back, right?
• 23:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then after that it was Paul Smith.
• 23:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then I kind of stopped around the time that John remade a junior came in not that I didn't like his work.
• 23:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just I was starting to lose interest mark marks the best tree just like like a some really amazing pencil or something the way with built in coverage and like these are our houses working in in the industry across the board.
• 23:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: That whole era where they're like fighting the Sleesoids and out in space.
• 23:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like that was that was incredible stuff that was Sleesoid.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: What were they called?
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you just said the brood.
• 23:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Majestic triar and all that business.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Great stuff.
• 23:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: spending a lot of time on the Shiar in the Imperial Guard in 2027 on my show.
• 23:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Star Jamers, there's some really cool coming up.
• 23:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I always am researching what we're approaching on the show and I've been watching already in preparation a lot of old Star Wars and Twilight Zone and... Oh, man.
• 24:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've never seen it before, but I'm almost through it now.
• 24:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the first time I got I could.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: I feel like you could take every single solo episode of that show and it's been expanded into its own like franchise of media since then, which is amazing focusing on Star Wars for a minute.
• 24:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll say when you were a kid who was that kid that who was the character that you like nerded out for that was just your favorite.
• 24:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's a good question.
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Everybody has to be console-offend.
• 24:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was a big console-offend, of course.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I loved Princess Leia.
• 24:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Princess Leia was awesome.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: She was the she reminded my mom, kind of like my mom was definitely a take-nose shit type of person.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, those are the two.
• 24:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Luke, I have a love and appreciation for all those characters.
• 24:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: All right, it's a little kind of like like their foibles for like a better word.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that Luke was such a whiny, little shit.
• 24:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know when he was in that first movie.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I love Star Wars.
• 24:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was shown it on a beta disk at the age of five and never looked back.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Definitely Luke Skywalker fan.
• 24:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was very confused growing up because I started hearing people say he's whining.
• 24:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, wait, really?
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's whining.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I went back and watched, I was like, oh, he's whining.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe I'm whining.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe that's why I didn't notice how whining he is.
• 25:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've always had like a as a kid especially like a crush on like the wholesome like pretty boy that was like a little bit boy scout in whatever franchise, you know, which is Luke Skywalker.
• 25:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I fell in love with like cannonball in the in the X men world was like always my first love like I love that like kind of wholesome cornfed character.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Luke always always had my heart.
• 25:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, I'm going to ask you just a couple of pairing questions.
• 25:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you just give me an answer and why a Han Solo or Luke Skywalker.
• 25:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ah, Han Solo.
• 25:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And why, um, just, you know, people like a, like a bad boy, man.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they, they had a certain, uh, certain charisma to them, a certain fuck you attitude of like T-shirt first, you know, Harrison Ford's very handsome guy.
• 25:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I don't know.
• 25:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just said, there was, uh, there was a kind of a danger and a draw to that kind of mystery to that character that I think is unique to that series.
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's something, only Harrison Ford could
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's extremely charming, Sean, outside of Corsair, who is the obvious, who is the X-Men equivalent of Han Solo.
• 26:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, John's good at these like pairing questions, it's amazing.
• 26:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Am I okay?
• 26:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'd probably say Wolverine, he gives me a very Han Solo vibe.
• 26:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, Hoccae, job at the hut, or Emperor Palpatine.
• 26:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, Palpatine, man.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jabba is fascinating, but grotesque.
• 26:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like Palpatine's evil genius.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love he's obvious to get subtle at the same time.
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: He used his wits and his, his, gosh, I'm blanking on the word, but his is aggression for lack of a better one to his malevolence to gain power very Trump in in a way, a smart Trump.
• 26:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's good.
• 26:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know, if you're a smart person, they might be a little bit like Palpatine, but very much like the Wizard of Oz he projects his power, but really he's just a little guy behind the curtain.
• 26:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, who is the Xman equivalent of Palpatine?
• 27:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Job of the Hutton, Mojo are clearly the equivalent of each other.
• 27:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and I will say, Ho Chi, I do have a friend who would be very offended that you call Java grotesque.
• 27:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: She thinks he's like cute, but not like she wants to sleep with him cute, but she thinks he's like adorable.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, have you seen that?
• 27:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, man, I'm not here to Kingshame.
• 27:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You do, you do, and drink it up.
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Baby Yoda, why not baby job us?
• 27:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can just take him home.
• 27:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, thank you.
• 27:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Equivalent of Palpatine.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I probably say, I probably say apocalypse.
• 27:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I feel like he's made stuff happen behind the scenes.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: He turns people evil into his horseman all the time.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like he's very calculated and very scary.
• 27:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, Jar Jar Binks or the Ewoks?
• 27:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my god.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's like a reverse Sophie's choice.
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're both more.
• 27:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a method to my madness.
• 27:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks a lot, brother Chad.
• 27:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to have to go.
• 27:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to have got that.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're just so bad.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to have to go with the Ewoks just because I can't stand the kind of, I hate to be this kind of pro-culture, but I can't stand the kind of obvious somewhat offensive racial stereotype they threw at the actor there.
• 28:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't abide by Georgia.
• 28:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: I show a lot of terrible films at my house, and I've been getting ready to show the garbage pale kids movie, which just look at the preview.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: They hired a bunch of little people to dress in these horrible suits that they couldn't breathe in to play the garbage pale kids, and nearly every person who played a garbage pale kid also played an Ewok.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know what you're trying to stare.
• 28:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been a really interesting thing.
• 28:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, what is the X-Men equivalent of the Ewoks?
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: X-Men equivalent of the Ewoks.
• 28:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a hard one.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: I kind of felt the BAMP.
• 28:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: The BAMP, yeah, that's what I was just thinking.
• 28:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ho Chi C3PO or R2D2.
• 28:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, man, R2.
• 28:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love R2.
• 28:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love R2 to death.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: I, uh, he's just so, so I, I don't have to words.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just love our two.
• 28:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: Although I have a real saucepot for C3PO 2, he weirdly reminds me of my mother.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I can't, I can't, I can't really put it into words.
• 28:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's because mum would sometimes go wonderful the way that C3PO would.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And your mum will is your mama's British, right?
• 29:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: My mother's guy needs, but she had when she was in England.
• 29:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, yeah.
• 29:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's a certain fussy quality that my mother has that C3PO has.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I've got to, I've got a real fondness for both of them, but I have to go to R2.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: These two R2D2C3PO, one of the great body colonies of all time, which they're amazing.
• 29:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: A Sean, who are the X-Men equivalent?
• 29:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Who's the X-Men equivalent for R2D2?
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, wow.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, our teenage, I'd say, I'd say, do because we don't know what do you say, but we know he's like Fitchie and saying a lot of bad words.
• 29:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to go almost Lockheed, like Kitty's dragon.
• 29:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's like, yeah, no, no, no, no, no.
• 29:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: It doesn't not quite not verbal, but like super effective.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, okay, I got two more for you.
• 29:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, Ho Chi is it Princess Leia or Chewbacca?
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love Chewbacca, but Princess Leia's a goat, man.
• 29:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, yeah, I gotta go.
• 29:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I gotta go with Team Leia.
• 29:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Sean, the equivalent of Princess Leia in the X-Men.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm gonna go Kitty Pride just because I feel like we saw her really coming to her own become leader just like Princess Leia did.
• 30:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hmm.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, last one.
• 30:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I feel like this is the most challenging.
• 30:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: They be not a Ho Chi Darth Vader or Yoda definitely Darth Vader.
• 30:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love Yoda.
• 30:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yoda's great real disawesome Darth Vader is so fascinating.
• 30:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is one of the greatest villains of all time evil and yet still you know has a certain code a slight one, but a code that you know got love of his family at the very least or at least of his son
• 30:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Or at least he's willing to like not totally exploit his kid at the end looks amazing is just totally unknowable force of evil in the first film.
• 30:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'll not Darth Vader is one of the greatest creations of all time.
• 30:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love Darth Vader.
• 30:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Sean, uh, the aquaing name too.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sorry to call you.
• 30:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, Darth Vader.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: The equivalent, I think would be Magneto, right?
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it's the arch nemesis, right?
• 30:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Would like he can go both ways.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: He can be cruel or heroic.
• 30:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, actually keeping apocalypse is the puppeteen.
• 30:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to say Mr. Sinister because the puppeteen made Sinister just like Darth Vader was made.
• 30:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he's fascinating to me.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's my favorite villain of all time.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hmm.
• 30:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Interesting.
• 31:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, Ho Chi, did you collect Marvel Star Wars comics growing up?
• 31:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ah, yeah, sure.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ah, you know, I actually let me revise that.
• 31:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of my favorite comics of all time is the chicken adaptation.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I forget to wrote that one.
• 31:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Was it Roy Thomas?
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's like one of also one of the gateways for me from, you know, into comics.
• 31:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't really, I collected some of them, but I, they never really felt like Star Wars to me.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I, I couldn't really kind of connect with them.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: They felt like they were just going, even as a kid, I thought these adventures just feel fake.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, uh, I was something to fan of them, but I was a massive, massive fan of the toys.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: I had all of that shit and playing like really small and fragile.
• 31:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They were like just a couple inches tall, right?
• 31:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're like normal action figures are like, what four to six inches?
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Star Wars toys were like like three inches, I think?
• 31:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they were like two and a half something like that.
• 31:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: They were tiny little things, but they, I mean, you know, that's all I knew.
• 31:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd love those things.
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I, you know, the chefs and yeah, it was a big fan of the toys.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting to consider for my expense super nerds out there.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know what it's like to follow like the cartoon continuity versus the movie continuity versus the comics continuity.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We know what alternate realities are.
• 32:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you were a person who can explain the summer's family to somebody,
• 32:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: You're an X-Men super fan in your own way, but there's always other directions you can go.
• 32:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Star Wars has that level of fandom out there, and we may have some Star Wars super fans out there.
• 32:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love Star Wars, I'm not a super fan, I don't know the language as well as most people, but there's the cartoon in the toy in the comics.
• 32:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Marvel has been for the last several years publishing a modern line of books, and some of my friends, my friend Alex Segura, for example,
• 32:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have this recent, they're telling all of these stories that are consecutive and considered canon in the Marvel chronology, but they have to take place between one movie and the next movie.
• 32:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And the comics just keep going on.
• 32:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you're writing like six comics in between two films, that's one thing.
• 32:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when you have to read 50 comics and also write 10 more, but also it has to end in that place where the other movie is, they're introducing all these new characters and new pieces of the chronology, and some of the industry grades have been working on these books.
• 32:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Kieran Gillin has an epic run.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's some really interesting continuity in all of that, and we may have some Marvel super fans that are joining these.
• 33:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've never been to a Star Wars convention, but I'm getting ready to dress as a ruckus from the nasty boys at a con, and everyone who's not an X-Men fan goes, who?
• 33:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know it people who at the Star Wars conventions are going is like the most tiny person from that like back of the room in one episode of like whatever and they know every person who ever played everything.
• 33:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you guys consider yourself Star Wars super fans?
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if so, what's one can in fact that you know that you think most fans would not know about the Star Wars universe?
• 33:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not a super fan.
• 33:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know like the deep, deep lore.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know like you know the obscure names.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I don't really care too.
• 33:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just, you know, I like the films.
• 33:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have not, I'm sure the books are phenomenal.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've heard amazing things.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't really have a lot of interest for me.
• 33:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Star Wars is an audio-visual phenomena.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's specifically a film phenomena.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, um,
• 33:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, all I know is what I've seen from like, you know, the nine films and maybe I and a little bit of the man Lauren actually I watched and or which was great, but you know, I, um, I don't care to go that deep into the minutia of it.
• 34:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just like to put the films on and and you know, enjoy what they offer me.
• 34:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, all the Disney shows in the middle now too.
• 34:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: All right, like all that established continuity.
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Star Trek, of course, has the same thing.
• 34:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been watching Star Trek, the original series for the first time.
• 34:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I can't even tell you the name, but William Schatter's not in the first episode.
• 34:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's like a different origin, something.
• 34:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know his name, but like a modern Star Wars series went back in as like telling the story of that original captain from the first episode.
• 34:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm like, OK, like that's fun.
• 34:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's fun to see people doing into these like super nerd fandom spaces.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, do you have a Star Wars fact?
• 34:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know if I'd say I'm a super fan, but I guess I do like Star Wars more than the average person, because I do read the comics, I do like watch all the shows, the series, but I don't know if I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan, but I'm a fan,
• 34:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: from that level that I know something the other people winning.
• 34:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I guess fun fact to be pigeonholed Poe Damont's parents into like the after return of the Jedi comics and now there's the actual history with them and Leia which we learned about in the sequel but yeah Star Wars has been like a life thing for me but I think Marvel has always been more of my go to just because I see myself in Marvel more than
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I nerd out over the little historical facts like Carrie Fisher is the daughter of Debbie Reynolds, which is fascinating or like Mark Ham will become the voice of the Joker in Batman, like that kind of stuff I think is amazing.
• 35:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, we're getting ready to delve into a late 1970s set of books in Iron Man.
• 35:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ironman was a 1960s kind of industrial weapons designer fighting, you know, the red threat Russia has always been one of the will Russia and China basically have always been like the two groups he's fighting against most when it's not like American corporate greed.
• 35:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Two of his largest foes are the crimson dynamo, which is like the Russian version of Iron Man, which is like a state controlled suit of armor, and the titanium man, which is a different Russian one, and then the mandarin, which is like the very problematic, you know, Chinese character, like in that Fumanchu kind of mantra.
• 36:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the late 1970s, a lot is happening in Russian politics.
• 36:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: For those that have been listening to the show, we covered some of this very deeply in the month I had dedicated to Colossus last year.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: So you can go back and listen to a lot of that content.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: But we're in an era of like late Cold War, kind of red scare, nuclear threat, the era of books where we're calling in the comics, we're calling the Russian government corrupt, but we're also talking about how a lot of people in Russia are really good people.
• 36:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: For those that have been following the champions reads that Sean and I do every quarter with a group of just lovely individuals, we've seen Black Widow become the team leader, she's a defector, but she started out as like the secret Russian spy who was, you know, going to tempt men and turn them against the United States government, but at this point she's like now a feminist icon, dark star is a newer character added to the book in the champions who is a Russian defector by the end of the story and she joins up with the champions.
• 37:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: This month on the show we're covering some of Darkstar's early history outside of the champions and we're going to be talking more about kind of the Russian politics and like this character who manipulates some pretty powerful forces.
• 37:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think she has the potential to be like a storm level character in the X-Men world if someone used her appropriately.
• 37:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's a fucking powerhouse.
• 37:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot going on in the books, and we initially see the fantastic four number one back in the early 1960s.
• 37:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: The origin story of the FF is they are in the space race to get to the moon before Russia.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Russia got to space first.
• 37:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Americans made it to the moon first in real world politics, right?
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that wasn't until the mid and late 1960s.
• 37:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: But now we're jumping to the late 1970s and we have a
• 37:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, a Soviet group with dark star in it headed to the moon for a conflict with Iron Man and then we go crazy space opera.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: This gets very Star Wars at a certain point with a lot of crazy like characters being mixed in.
• 38:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to get too lost in the continuity.
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, what's your relationship with like this deep kind of Marvel lore that where you jump in and there's just like all these characters being tossed at you.
• 38:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: One last thing I'm gonna say about Star Wars.
• 38:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, please think of Star Wars and the making of the Emperor Strikes Back by, I think it's our W Rinsler, amazing books.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: The coffee table books covering every, like all the menu show you good, you could want about the production of those films.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's my plug for that book.
• 38:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this reading this felt so much like when I was a little kid, and I, you know, I traded comic with a friend or I picked one up randomly from the rack and not know what the fuck was going on.
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, kind of like you're a swept away in the action so it kind of doesn't matter, but wishing that you could kind of go back and see read all the issues kind of leading up to it and that's that same kind of feel as that.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it was sort of disorienting and and it's also I was going to be honest.
• 38:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was weird.
• 38:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I hadn't read this error of comics for a while.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So even though in my mind, I remembered how a lot of it was like sometimes they would have an image and then a caption describing exactly what was going on in that image that I just looked at or they had a lot of it was dialogue where it was, oh, there's the robot who's actually the, you know, robot version of my lover Tony and then editors note, see last issue, whatever.
• 39:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: over the decade.
• 39:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it was a real throwback as an adult kind of reading it critically.
• 39:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was like, okay, this is a little bit of a slog.
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was it was nice to kind of reconnect to my childhood self.
• 39:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: It would have just been so thrilled and you know, slept away by the story, especially because of the store wars aspects.
• 39:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, you're fun to talk to about anything, and I'm your frequent guest on my show, but one of the things that we've talked about most, weirdly, is Russian politics in 70s books.
• 39:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: We did, uh, we did the super rapes together with our friend Molly Laser, we've been doing the Darkstar stuff, Sean's part of the Darkstar, triality, and at the month.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be tilting into Iron Man 109 through 112.
• 40:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the earliest dark star appearances outside of the champions, she had defected to America at the end of those books, but at this point in her history, she seems to have gone back to Russia.
• 40:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't need to get lost in the character because she's not a huge part of this story, but it is one of her earliest appearances.
• 40:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was born in late 1978.
• 40:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: This book was published in early 1978 by the incredible Bill Mantlow.
• 40:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the most amazing Marvel-pensler's of all time, Carmen Infantino is here.
• 40:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Fred Kita on Inks.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Frenchwa Mooli is on Colors.
• 40:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: John Costanza on Letters and Archie Goodwin on Edits.
• 40:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'm getting ready to talk about Frenchwa Mooli for a moment, but this is a huge name in, like, Pochaie, do you want to talk about Frenchwa?
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I was, I was like, as soon as I saw F Mooli.
• 40:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was like, it's definitely,
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Friends, well, I'm really, I was like, there's no way.
• 40:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's so Congress, because I know her work from, you know, from working with our Spiegelman and her relationship with our Spiegelman and from raw magazine back in like the 80s, I want to say, you know, she's always been such a kind of cutting edge, you know, experimental creator to see her involved in such a mainstream, um, bit of storytelling was was amazing and shocking to be honest.
• 41:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: French one, Mouli, and I'm going to spend just a minute on this, just talking about a few of the things that make her amazing, because we could do a whole tribute episode.
• 41:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: But French one, FRANCO IS-E, Mouli MOU-L-Y, is married to Artspeak Woman, who's the infamous creator of mouse, M-A-U-S, if you've never read it, you should definitely look it up.
• 41:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also the mother of Nadia Spiegelman, who is an amazing person all in her own right.
• 41:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Frenchwa has been knighted in France for her working comics.
• 41:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Her father was one of the scientists who helped specialize the surgery related to breast reduction.
• 41:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: She witnessed civil
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: uprisings in her youth moved to New York and colored more than 50 Marvel comics during the late 1970s, which is also when she founded Raw Books and Graphics, which is also amazing and has its own history, and she began recruiting American artists to come to American comics and has a hand in a ton of people's careers.
• 42:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: She later became an editor at the New Yorker, just an incredible person, remains an incredible person, definitely look her up.
• 42:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was mind-blowing.
• 42:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So on an issue 109, we on the cover see the invincible Ironman, his logo covered in rivets and red and gold.
• 42:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The book is only 35 cents.
• 42:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's battling Darkstar, Laniya Piccerovna, who has joined the champion's super team in the foreground previously at least.
• 42:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the foreground, we meet her twin brother for the first time.
• 42:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is another set of mutant twins, much like Quicksilver in the Scarlet Witch, although they are not played up as often.
• 42:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Her brother is Vanguard.
• 42:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: His name is Mikhail.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Vanguard carries the hammer and the sickle in his hands and also has them in blazing on his chest.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we talked about this during Colossus month, but the hammer in the sickle in this era was kind of a propaganda image of like the working class and the industrial class working together for the better good of communist causes.
• 42:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: So to put this honest superhero and then launch him into kind of
• 43:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's the, he's a state operative.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learned later that these characters were kidnapped from their parents and raised as so the assets.
• 43:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Their father is the character, the presence who goes on to be kind of a Chernobyl level radioactive threat in 70s comics in weird gold armor.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have an episode on the presence out there as well.
• 43:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: John Bern is drawing Iron Man often in this era.
• 43:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's on the cover here.
• 43:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Iron Man is the symbol of American capitalism.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Facing these two twins from the Soviet Union on the moon, it is another red hero for our hero to triumph against.
• 43:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, are you an Iron Man fan?
• 43:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not really.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've started reading his like more modern era stuff, but I had no idea about a lot of this past craziness.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I just recently learned about his long history with Whitney Frost.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I had no idea they were things.
• 43:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that of mask I love her is iconic like 70s era bond villain like she's amazing.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would love to do a whole month dedicated to her one month.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now Vanguard and Darkstar are both mutants.
• 43:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've never had much to do with the X-Men.
• 44:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: Darkstar has had a little bit Vanguard almost nothing.
• 44:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: A van guard is defined as a leading position for a military formation, so like a person ready to strike.
• 44:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: We open on the remnants of Iron Man's last adventure alongside Battle Mask, Jasper Sitwell, Jeanne DuWolf, Yellow Jacket, Hank Pym, and the Jack of Hearts.
• 44:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they've been facing the threat of Midas International.
• 44:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're not going to get lost in any of this, but there's an LMD, a life-model decoy, of Tony Stark running around.
• 44:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a defunct growing man and a jack of hearts is staying on to be Iron Man's apprentice in the story.
• 44:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Lots of crazy 70 stuff.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: They track the growing man's origin to the moon and go to investigate.
• 44:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And for those of you that are following the time you why me feature with my friend Kevin and I over on the Patreon, we've talked a lot about the growing man over there because he's an operative Kang the conqueror from the future.
• 44:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you're head of spending with all these names, we're not gonna get lost in any of them, don't worry about it.
• 44:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I love Jack of Hearts.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's one of the most complicated, weird little characters and Marvel's history.
• 44:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: An American poet, student who gets exposed to something called the Zero Fluid, and gets half of his body turned Evan Black, and he wields the Zero Energy and has to withdraw radiation from things in order to live.
• 45:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's currently the lover of She-Hulk in Marvel Comics, modern comics, which is amazing.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do love Jack of Farts.
• 45:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: I didn't know a lot about him until she Hulk actually, but yeah, he's a little crazy.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like literally, like he doesn't remember things that was past, like he's bad.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: Memories going all over the place.
• 45:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really like him with she Hulk though, just because it's so ridiculously complicated with his power structure in hers.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: His costume is kind of known as one of the most complex costumes to draw in comics history.
• 45:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's so much detail in all of the little patterns on his tunic, et cetera.
• 45:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, that's our setup.
• 45:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: They go to the moon to investigate the growing man.
• 45:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's all you need.
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Quinn Jedi ends up crashing on the moon.
• 45:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: They land in the blue area, which was set up by the Cree, which has a breathable atmosphere for humans.
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: The inhumans live there.
• 45:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: The watchers sit a little as there.
• 45:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: Don't worry about it.
• 45:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: But when they get out of their ship, they find the crimson dynamo, dark star, and the brand new hero van guard waiting.
• 46:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to do a tiny bit more set up.
• 46:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: The original crimson dynamo was a military asset in a weaponized suit, who ended up defecting to the United States in an old 1960s story.
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the Champions League we've been doing, we just introduced the character Yorri Petrovich, which Shana is going to know, because we did the script reads, who's the son of Iván Petrovich, who's like the father figure to the black widow.
• 46:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Yorri was also taken from his parents and raised to the anti-American blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 46:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is the story where the dark star was introduced.
• 46:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a brand new character, however.
• 46:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a different crimson dynamo who goes on to have about 80 appearances in Marvel Comics over the years and is still being used.
• 46:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: But there I think have been nine or 10 different crimson dynamos over the years in the comics.
• 46:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, despite her best attempts, Dark Star fails to stop all of the boy heroes from fighting because that's what superheroes do any time they meet.
• 46:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we get this delicious speech from Dark Star.
• 46:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not doing a Russian accent today, my apologies.
• 47:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I Lenin's Ghost!
• 47:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Man, always pretending they know what is right, what is best.
• 47:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: You let rage blind you to the truth.
• 47:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will not allow that the Dark Force will not allow it, and by Lenin you will hear me out.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, she's the most powerful character on the page.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's the only woman in the battle.
• 47:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: She keeps channeling Lenin of all people.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she's exasperated by all of these horrible men.
• 47:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, do you have any thoughts on the visuals of these early fight sequences?
• 47:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very of its era.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's, you know, I'm very kind of,
• 47:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's fine.
• 47:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nothing spectacular.
• 47:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm very kind of like my I realize now looking at this fight choreography.
• 47:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: How when I wedded I am to kind of Miller style fight choreography, which was so kind of which was so derivative of of the cinema that he was looking at so when I when I look at this kind of fight choreography, it's very efficient and very clear, but it's somewhat not exactly dynamic.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: I kind of
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: feel like him.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know the comics of this server were very much, you know, based on having a fight every few minutes.
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I always find the stuff that's the most interesting is the conversation, not the fighting so much.
• 48:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the stuff I was finding the least memorable.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that haven't been said.
• 48:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Carmen Infantino is one of the greatest comics artists of all time, and there was nothing that he couldn't do with the medium.
• 48:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he was a incredible artist.
• 48:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, he's one of the people that I studied a lot when I was a little kid before, you know, way before it turned professional.
• 48:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was an artist that I continued to study into, you know, 20s and early 30s.
• 48:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a lot of people that love did co and Kirby and burn and talk from two of my favorite favorites from early Marvel are Jean Colon and Carmen Inventino.
• 48:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I love Jean Colon too.
• 48:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Carmen's work on Spider Woman in this era just is legendary in my brain.
• 48:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, Darkster is using her powers in some interesting ways.
• 48:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It almost comes across like a green lantern ring, a little bit, where she's like wielding energy to grab things, but she also uses it to repel Iron Man's magnetic field in his armor and gets overloaded.
• 49:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, do you want to talk about Vanguard's powerset?
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is kind of a unique, mutant power.
• 49:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of those weird ones that's a little tricky to use on the page.
• 49:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, so he can channel energy through objects.
• 49:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's chosen to channel through a hammer and sickle, which like you said is a symbol of just so he is at the time.
• 49:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: So this is a fun little power, it's almost like if you, you know, like if you hit bishop with kinetic energy he absorbs and then repels it.
• 49:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost like Vanguard can do that with different types of energy sources.
• 49:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: So if you direct a certain amount of force, if Hercules punches him, he's going to give that energy and then drive it back at you.
• 49:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right Sebastian Shaw almost has this kind of power or strong guy where they absorb kinetic blows and then channel it into strength.
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: But Vanguard does it in an energetic way.
• 49:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He takes the energy and then uses it to repel.
• 49:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's times when it's used against him almost comically in the books, but he's not a super frequently used character.
• 49:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Do you have to know who designed, uh, so it was like the red characters name again, the original version or is this, uh, is just designed specific to uh, in Fentino this is the third I think crimson dynamo armor used in the comics the original crimson dynamo had a little bit bulkier design here I'll send you a link really quickly.
• 50:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, so this is kind of a streamlined version of that one, but let me send up with this in the chat here so you can see They mean to do rail the conversation.
• 50:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, it was great.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I told you at the beginning.
• 50:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: All all tangents are very welcome.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the original one of shows up in iron entails of suspense number 46 in 1963 and it's a Dawn Hack design.
• 50:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: On Hack, the Great Dawn Hack.
• 50:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Very cool.
• 50:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: I like the design very much, and it's one of the things I would love to take a crack at redesigning.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they find a weird egg shipped on the moon.
• 50:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: In issue 110, Keith Pollard comes aboard as Penciler with Mary Titus on Colors, Bruce Patterson on Letters.
• 50:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: The title of this issue is The Sojourners From Space.
• 50:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, what do we find inside the egg shipped?
• 50:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the egg shipped is the Levergellian season.
• 50:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Levergellian is a little green gem.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yep.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are previously established characters.
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're very deep intellectual characters.
• 51:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: If we, again, if we're talking Star Trek or twilight zone, there's all these weird little aliens that get introduced in those series and some of them are taken very seriously.
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: These are little tiny green guys who are like very cerebral and they have acquired the Punisher robot.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Not Frank Castle of the Punisher, but Punisher, the robot that once served is the Harold of the Galactus.
• 51:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a weird little robot that gets used in comics from time to time.
• 51:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Turns out they are at war with planet 1-Dagore 2.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now here's where things just get insane.
• 51:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have Mount 1-Dagore on Earth, which is where Wanda Maximoff has her origins with Chitan and all of those crazy things, which is also the home of the high evolutionary who's a guy that has turned a bunch of animals into men, and in his like first story amplifies himself up to Godhood.
• 51:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: He ends up creating a planet that exists on the opposite side of our sun that is in rotation.
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called counter earth.
• 51:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's often called one to gore two.
• 52:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a number of complicated histories, but this planet one to gore two is specifically connected with another 70s character.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We haven't touched on it all in our conversations, which is Adam Warlock, which is a fascinating story all on its own.
• 52:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so we have one to go to a race of evolved animal men, hybrids, and they are at war with the regalians on the moon.
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, you texted me in the middle of your read, and was like, what the fuck am I reading?
• 52:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is it for you lost it just a little bit?
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, like I had no idea there was a one to go to planet.
• 52:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like the many you think you know where the stores go, the store is going.
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like oh, it's going to be wrong with the Soviets, but then they ended up like babysitting the egg doing nothing.
• 52:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you get the rebellion, so no being at war with the one to goreens.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was just like, what is going on?
• 52:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is Chad making me reap this time?
• 52:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Iron Man and Jack of Hearts get pulled into all of the madness.
• 52:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Darkstar Vanguard and Crimson Dynamo are ordered to just kind of wait outside on the moon.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: So for the rest of this series, we kind of get Darkstar being like, oh my god, man, will you please settle the fuck down?
• 53:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've been ordered to wait just
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: hang on, we don't need to worry about them, but also maybe the Americans aren't so bad.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get a lot of like statements of her being exasperated with her brother and the crimson dynamo, and that's kind of the whole purpose she serves after that initial fight, so it's kind of like, why are they here at all, except why not, right?
• 53:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: of his new characters.
• 53:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: So a lot of this story is Iron Man and Jack of Hearts, working with the Regalians and the Punisher Robot against the Knights of Wonder Goar, but then realizing the Knights of Wonder Goar are actually the good guys.
• 53:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we get a team up with some alternate aliens, which kind of gives us Iron Man goes to Camelot Energy a little bit.
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets to ride on an electric steed in space and the Regalians turns out they're trying to colonize
• 53:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: The cover tells us that we're entering Motown, Mayhem, but the real book is called Moon Wars.
• 54:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know why we even talk about Motown on the cover.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not going to read that comment, Chad.
• 54:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Keith Pollard and A. Al-Kala are here.
• 54:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Irvine Tonobius here.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ironman leads the Knights of Wondergore against the colonizing regalians.
• 54:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: You truly don't need to worry about it.
• 54:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Darkstar is lounging outside the ship board.
• 54:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: The Punisher robot comes bursting out.
• 54:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Then Ironman, they find themselves in a big giant alien war.
• 54:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Iron Man gets to fight on roller skates in one panel, and in the end a brand new robot shows up.
• 54:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the recorder robots who is abruptly ending all of the conflict, and it continues in further Iron Man adventures.
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: What shade of do you have any thoughts on Iron Man's roller skates?
• 54:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you didn't know we were in the disco era, now you do.
• 54:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dorn the roller skates the roller skates made me very happy.
• 54:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was trying to figure out where the fuck he's roller skating to in space Whatever it's Iron Man 112 which is where he has his roller skates is fighting the Punisher and on the bottom it says Motown mayhem Oh, town mayhem I was like wait, where did I get that?
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he's got to speed too.
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Al-Kala also and keep probably amazing.
• 55:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 55:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: White checks here as well.
• 55:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, can I get your comments on the first page of 112, which shows Iron Man on a sword on the atomic steed?
• 55:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is somehow like the cover of a porn show.
• 55:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't know if there's something very weird about this.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, especially like okay the front of the horse is like a dildo like I feel like he drives his horse into somebody This is definitely a porn waiting to happen like it looks cool for the most part of the because it's this art style in the 70s That's where the porn comes in I think
• 55:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: You're two devils on that motherfucker.
• 55:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, there is.
• 55:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's one devil.
• 55:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a double bill though.
• 55:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Double penetration atomic sun.
• 55:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, okay real quick.
• 55:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got to tell this quick story.
• 55:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I used to work in a cost center.
• 55:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And one of my friends was being varated by a customer and he told her why don't you get off your dildo chair.
• 55:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so we just thought that was the funniest thing.
• 55:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Years later, I went to an art little thing in Louisiana, New Orleans.
• 56:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: And there was a chair with a lying Pinocchio's face
• 56:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cherice, did Victoria found your Dildo chicken?
• 56:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do you guys remember that episode of South Park where they're like writing around in those balls that have like the Dildos that are penetrating them as they're like bounce down and it's making them go all around the house.
• 56:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, this is this is a 20 stark on this on this machine.
• 56:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not even talking about all the crazy shit happening on earth with pepper pots and the Tony Stark LMD and Madam Mask and Jasper sit well and just true true insanity.
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have a special connection to the character Jasper Sitwell.
• 56:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: When I got my job at Marvel on the handbooks, it's because I was writing Marvel's Survivor fan fiction online and I got noticed from doing that.
• 56:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: And instead of Jeff Probst in my Survivor series, I use Jasper Sitwell as the host of all.
• 56:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love my survivor stuff.
• 56:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is there like one character that just was too much for you guys was it Jack of Hearts was it the Punisher robot was it like was there just like Oh my god, there's so much here that it just kind of pushed you one thing too far.
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually I really like the Punisher robot.
• 57:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was pretty cool.
• 57:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, it was kind of confusing with it being called the Punisher I was like every time they read that I was like you couldn't come up with another character, but another name This is this is before Frank Castle.
• 57:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is the OG Punisher
• 57:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was wondering about that, but so I guess that applies to the castle character then.
• 57:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, but I, yeah, Jack of Hearts was a lot.
• 57:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: Jack of Hearts was hard to kind of read my mind around.
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought that that costume was just so confused and the power set was so strange and the origin was just what is going on.
• 57:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to be honest, at this point, I had kind of like, was just sort of like letting the words sort of wash over me as I was reading them.
• 57:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It only kind of got interesting to me again was when they started talking about genocide, you know, colonization and genocide.
• 57:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I was like, okay, something I can wrap my, you know, I can stick my teeth into.
• 57:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, uh, door wars, but we missed the first 30 minutes.
• 57:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, 100%.
• 57:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also, I really enjoyed those like over the top space battles where there's like 1,000 ships approaching earth.
• 58:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was like,
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: not wanted to be the artist on that bad boy, but as a as a visual spectacle, it was pretty impressive.
• 58:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, we're getting we're getting pod racing.
• 58:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're getting clone wars.
• 58:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're getting ewalks.
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're getting like all kinds of energy with these random characters floating around from animal men to colonizing greening space aliens to ancient robots.
• 58:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the most famous Marvel runs of all time is the introduction of Galactus in Fantastic Four in like 49.50.51.
• 58:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're like the silver surfer shows up.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm confident you guys have read that.
• 58:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm also confident you don't remember that that's where the the Punisher robot first shows up.
• 58:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: I would like to put them in the the earth side or like the skies on fire, the FF go up to approach the ship and they fight the Punisher robot.
• 58:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's the the first time we meet that character.
• 58:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Jack Kirby designed the
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's kind of it, unless we have any moments we want to highlight from all of this.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're just getting lost in the Marvel insanity a little bit as we kind of track Darkstar's journey a little, but this is a crazy space epic that gives a lot of Star Wars energy in that we go too space.
• 58:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Come for Matt and Mask and stay for the Knights of One Degore.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: You know what I'm saying?
• 59:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I just don't read it at all.
• 59:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I mean, it was fun for what it was.
• 59:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was always my story back to these crazy 70s comics.
• 59:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: For me, Vanguard was a lot, I don't know, I was just like Vanguard.
• 59:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: Maint Vendor, do we get a Patreon on my show one day?
• 59:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm baffled by the Motown Mayhem thing, is like the roller skates the only connection to Motown.
• 59:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that's a bit at all.
• 59:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, a lot of wild stuff going on in our comics at this time.
• 59:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's always interesting to map out the place of mutants in all of this, right?
• 59:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We look at X-Men and mutants as kind of symbols of oppression, dark star and vanguard, or the only mutants in this story, but they're the representatives of the state at the same time, just wild continuity.
• 59:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Follow the adventures of Iron Man as we he fights the the unicorn and his power horn in the next issue and we go on from there But we won't be talking about Iron Man for a moment show again despite my comments actually Enjoy the shit out of reading this it was a real kind of throwback to when I was like just it Reignited some of the feelings I had about reading comics when I was a little kid that just the endless possibility of them crazy as fuck Like as an adult.
• 1:00:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what's going on with this comic, but it was I'm glad I got the chance to
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, to dive back into these waters.
• 1:00:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a lot of fun.
• 1:00:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Sean, you and I've been doing a lot of 70 stuff on my show with the champions reads this is very akin to what's been going on a champions lots of chaos lots of like different types of concepts in the late 70s era kind of mixing together in our superhero comics that last champions read we did.
• 1:00:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're so fucking much going on and you're just like, wait, I can't even keep track of the plot anymore.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is that time's to this was fun.
• 1:00:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad that we're reading champions.
• 1:00:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm glad that was like the opener to this because yeah, this is times two of anything we've read champions.
• 1:00:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I was already in that 70s mindset.
• 1:00:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you didn't get me to off-kill to your chat.
• 1:00:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: The beast is in the Avengers during this time.
• 1:00:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: He shows up in Iron Man in a few issues.
• 1:00:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got Angel and Ice Man over with the champions.
• 1:00:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Claremont getting ready to take us to the Star Jammer's and everything going on in Cosmic Space.
• 1:01:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're in late 1970s on Cray Mulk and Lane.
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: and I'm gonna do have had the two of you with me for this episode today.
• 1:01:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: As we are wrapping up, I'm an enormous fan of yours, Ho Chi.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's such a joy to feature you on the show.
• 1:01:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for sharing your voice.
• 1:01:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to have you back again.
• 1:01:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Talk, nerdy shit, anytime.
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Sean, just always a delight, of course.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Do we have anything you would like to plug?
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Any final thoughts?
• 1:01:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're gonna put this out in the third Monday in August if you have anything you would like to talk about.
• 1:01:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can follow the show at Gremelken underscore lane on Instagram most easily.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: I keep my own social media private because I've got kids of the two of you are welcome to add me just ask.
• 1:01:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: But the show is putting out regular content.
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to wind up August with the trial of Laney of Petrovna.
• 1:01:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have an amazing academic panel assembled that Sean and I are going to be recording this weekend with some of our favorite champions friends.
• 1:01:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: This crew.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, I'm excited about it.
• 1:01:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: September on the show is going to be featured all around the character saber to it.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we get to have lots of stories about savagery and complicated evil villains in a different era happening in the 70s over on the Patreon.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're going to be closing out the month here with the character I believe it's dormant from the Great Lakes Avengers.
• 1:02:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're talking all about the dark force over on that channel some amazing conversations with some incredible friends over there as well.
• 1:02:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if you haven't checked out my book Game Ormondad, it's been out since May.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: The review's have been amazing.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been such a joy, and I have to wait to give you guys some further announcements about writing projects coming up, but I can't wait to do all of that.
• 1:02:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Watch for me at the uncanny experience in September and at Flamcon, actually Flamcon will just be ending when we release this.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: But hopefully I saw you in New York at Flamcon in Mid August.
• 1:02:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: It was a joy to be there.
• 1:02:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm sure.
• 1:02:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, congrats on a game on my dad, by the way.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
• 1:02:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it a very enjoyable read and just super stoked to have you get to meet you and to have you on our panel.
• 1:02:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Just enjoy an honor.
• 1:02:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ho Chi, thank you.
• 1:02:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks, man.
• 1:02:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, I'm going to say, uh, September 15, my next book, I want to be your dog on the bus, uh,
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: hitting the stands available for pre-other and now for fan-of-graphy's books.
• 1:02:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a reprint of like my very first comic book as a writer and artist from 1990.
• 1:03:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: We talked about it earlier.
• 1:03:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've got some new stuff in it, some new stories, some process material.
• 1:03:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so fun, fun little book.
• 1:03:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ho Chi Anderson 69 Instagram and Ho Chi Anderson at the, and yes,
• 1:03:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, 69.
• 1:03:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 1:03:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Anderson, 16.
• 1:03:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: No.
• 1:03:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's see here.
• 1:03:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: I was born.
• 1:03:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's my cover.
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you can unhoche on a double dildo to talk to me.
• 1:03:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hey, man, my mom is listening to this, what are we doing?
• 1:03:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I'm also on my name at Facebook as well.
• 1:03:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Sean, Pleasure to get to meet you, sir.
• 1:03:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: You too, thank you.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sean?
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:03:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I was going to say the same thing.
• 1:03:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's been really great to get to put a face to your work, Coach A. I've read the Lecona series and a lot of the Luke Cage, so that was really cool.
• 1:03:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But right now, on solving for X-Men, we are, we just finished covering X-Men 97.
• 1:03:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: and our chat helped us on episode four because we needed your therapy to help us through my needle.
• 1:04:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: And right now we're getting back to Wolverine and the X-Men until a vision question is out so you could find us on topicrex.com.
• 1:04:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could find me on Seany TV.
• 1:04:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay everybody, thanks for listening.
• 1:04:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I hope you're enjoying the content.
• 1:04:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: This month as we do 90s or excuse me, 70s craziness.
• 1:04:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: Uh, and no one sent me death threats if I said star trek instead of course.
• 1:04:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've got a very busy brain.
• 1:04:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everyone I'm doing my best.
• 1:04:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Sean.
• 1:04:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Hocay.
• 1:04:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you all back here next week on Rev.
• 1:04:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to Grimalk and Lane.
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hope you are enjoying this podcast.
• 1:04:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimalk and Lane is produced and recorded in Salt Lake City, Utah, with music and editing done by my husband, Michael Bell, and promo art done by the incredible Seth Martell.
• 1:04:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look for us on Patreon, where we are releasing weekly episodes about obscure characters and facts.
• 1:04:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great way to participate with the podcast for only just a couple of dollars a month and it helps support what we are doing here.
• 1:04:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also, the best way you could help
• 1:04:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimmulkin Lane is by sharing and liking and subscribing, but also please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• 1:05:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you back your next time on Grimmulkin Lane.