Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / 22 Panels & Psychocomicology: Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club & Support Group 11 - More Crowded

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22 Panels & Psychocomicology: Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club & Support Group 11 - More Crowded · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to the Joy…
• 0:06
  Tad Eggleston: Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club and Support Group on 22 panels.
• 0:11
  Tad Eggleston: This time to… this week… this month, we are… we are recording in two parts, because while Lee and I talked some crowded last month, and like, nobody else managed to show up, which made us sad, because we liked it a lot, but since we decided to… to… to record over two months, I went, wait!
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: I'm friends with all the people who made Crowded, so I reached out to them, and since there's a huge time zone difference.
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: you know, Chris is probably just getting out of bed in Portland right now. He doesn't strike me as a morning person.
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: And Ted and Ro are probably staying up just a little bit for us, because they don't strike me as night owls.
• 0:55
  Tad Eggleston: In Gloucester.
• 0:59
  Tad Eggleston: We're recording this month in two parts. Welcome to part one of the JRHS Book Club and Support Group, Lee!
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: we forgot last month, and possibly even the month before, because that's how frazzled we've all been, but I like the check-in period, and I like… I like the way you lead it. So, so will you… will you lead us in our support group?
• 1:20
  Lee Woods: Absolutely. Check you.
• 1:21
  Tad Eggleston: Before we dive into the book.
• 1:24
  Lee Woods: And for those of you that are not familiar with group therapy and sort of group dynamics, it typically is just doing a check-in, coming in with just a quick introduction by way of name, and a feeling word. How you feeling today? What word best describes how you're feeling?
• 1:40
  Lee Woods: And I'll start, just to kind of lead by example here. I'm excited! I'm excited,
• 1:46
  Lee Woods: got through Crowded, all three volumes.
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: Hi, excited.
• 1:50
  Lee Woods: High excited, a scale of 10 of excitement.
• 1:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no. You said you start with a name and then give a feeling word, so I thought your name was excited.
• 1:58
  Lee Woods: Oh, there's a smartass of the group, there's always one. So, Lee changed my name on the Zoom call, and I'm going with Excited, got through Crowded, and I'm excited to hear more from the creators.
• 2:14
  Lee Woods: And whoever would like to go next?
• 2:17
  Britton Payne: Oh, I'm Brit, Britain Payne, and my feeling word is gonna be swirly.
• 2:22
  Britton Payne: I've had a lot of things going on that sort of have thrown my schedule off. I'm a father of two kids, 10 and 11, and they obviously need to be taken everywhere, and I've had ups and downs that are real and imagined, and kind of like I've been reading in Martian Manhunter, absolute Martian Manhunter recently.
• 2:40
  Britton Payne: Even if… even things that are in your mind are real, on that exact quote, but…
• 2:46
  Tad Eggleston: That's… so swirly, I'm going with swirly. I like it.
• 2:50
  Lee Woods: That's good.
• 2:52
  Ted Brandt: Alright, I'll go next. I'm Ted, and I guess my word would be… weak. It is feeling it.
• 3:02
  Ted Brandt: Still emotionally rung out at the moment.
• 3:05
  Lee Woods: Gotcha.
• 3:08
  Lee Woods: Highs and lows, it happens to the best of us.
• 3:11
  Matt: Alright, so I'm back.
• 3:12
  Ted Brandt: Hanging in.
• 3:13
  Matt: And I am slightly overwhelmed.
• 3:17
  Matt: Both my kids came home for the weekend to celebrate my birthday, which is in the middle of next week.
• 3:22
  Matt: So I've just been… Doing this, that, and every other thing, so… just a lot.
• 3:27
  Lee Woods: Happy belated!
• 3:28
  Matt: Oh, thank you.
• 3:29
  Tad Eggleston: Now, early, you said the middle.
• 3:31
  Matt: Yeah, it's early, but that's fine, I get it.
• 3:32
  Lee Woods: Happy early birthday! I can look.
• 3:34
  Ted Brandt: Isn't it?
• 3:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's a great therapist tool to be able to listen.
• 3:40
  Lee Woods: Probably a little important.
• 3:43
  Tad Eggleston: Amro, and I'm gonna go with Stimmy, because it's the only thing that's keeping my brain working at the moment. My hands cannot stop moving.
• 3:53
  Tad Eggleston: Boom.
• 3:55
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm Tad, and I actually like both Ted and Rose, because… I'm… I'm…
• 4:03
  Tad Eggleston: I'm very overwhelmed with, like, the world and everything going on, and feeling weak, but I'm also very stimmy, both because I have… have the things to do with my hands, and because this is the fourth recording of the day, and, like, so I'm kind of replacing
• 4:20
  Tad Eggleston: Like, my psychic energy is going up, while my physical energy is going down.
• 4:28
  Tad Eggleston: Which…
• 4:29
  Ted Brandt: I don't know how you manage to talk to that many people in a day. I would die.
• 4:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, if it's any…
• 4:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, first of all, because I'm a teacher, I sometimes have to do it anyway.
• 4:40
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm a paraprofessional, I can sometimes get away with not, but… but…
• 4:46
  Tad Eggleston: But also, they've been really good conversations.
• 4:50
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm… I'm energized by good conversations. It's small talk that I can't do.
• 4:57
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, intellectual, thoughtful.
• 5:00
  Tad Eggleston: conversations where… where you're trying to figure out what the other person thinks and is saying, and you're sharing what you think and you're saying, and… and everybody's open to the possibility of changing their opinions, not even necessarily to, oh, I'm gonna adopt your opinion, but,
• 5:17
  Tad Eggleston: I hadn't thought about that. Now that I've thought about that, I think this third thing…
• 5:24
  Tad Eggleston: I find those really… Stimulating, though sometimes physically exhausting.
• 5:31
  Tad Eggleston: So, that's where I'm at, is like…
• 5:35
  Tad Eggleston: Today's been an energizing day, and I'm also really glad that tomorrow is Kasmer Pulaski Day, and my school
• 5:42
  Tad Eggleston: celebrates, and, and therefore, I will be able to Sleep in.
• 5:49
  Tad Eggleston: Because I will need it by the time we're done talking to Chris.
• 5:53
  Tad Eggleston: So… Yeah, the book is crowded.
• 5:58
  Tad Eggleston: This is a few books back for you guys, and I'm gonna quickly plug it, it's Worst Man you've got coming out this year, right?
• 6:04
  Ted Brandt: Yes.
• 6:05
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait to see a copy. Hint, hint, nod, nod, wink, wink.
• 6:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm excited to… I mean, you guys have written some short stories.
• 6:17
  Tad Eggleston: but mostly I'm used to seeing your amazing art with other people's writings, so to see a huge graphic novel with just your sense of humor and whatnot, I am…
• 6:27
  Tad Eggleston: super excited about.
• 6:30
  Tad Eggleston: Famously, last year, you also got to write the first Scratch and Sniff comic in many, many decades.
• 6:36
  Ted Brandt: You're not right.
• 6:37
  Tad Eggleston: Draw, draw, draw, that's right. I had you with Joanne on, I had all three of you. Go back and listen, so I just think of it as a creative team.
• 6:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because she's also on the continent now, and therefore, like, the time zones to have the three of you were much more conducive than the time zones to have
• 6:57
  Tad Eggleston: Chris and you two.
• 6:59
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 6:59
  Tad Eggleston: So… I'm gonna actually start, before we get to Matt's, art question, and I know…
• 7:08
  Tad Eggleston: I know I probably asked this in… during our… our first…
• 7:12
  Tad Eggleston: Conversation, but that was almost, like, 4 years ago now.
• 7:16
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 7:17
  Tad Eggleston: the book itself finished up, like, three and a half years ago, because I think we talked right before…
• 7:24
  Tad Eggleston: the graphic novel third volume came out, I feel like, was the first time we talked.
• 7:30
  Ted Brandt: Time is a lie, so I'll take your word.
• 7:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's exactly my point. So, when you look back and think of Crowded,
• 7:42
  Tad Eggleston: dual question. First, what do you think about personally, in terms of doing it and the experience and whatnot? But then, if any part of the story sticks with you that you were particularly pleased with it, or you got the script and went, this is amazing.
• 7:58
  Tad Eggleston: whatever. Like, talk to me a little bit about your crowded memories, because it's been a few years.
• 8:03
  Ted Brandt: It has.
• 8:04
  Ted Brandt: Yeah. Well, it doesn't feel like it's been a few years. It feels like it's been… it feels like it was yesterday and 20 years ago, and I'm not that old, so I don't know how I'd know what 20 years ago feels like. Yeah, yeah, it's like…
• 8:17
  Ted Brandt: That's when I was a child. It doesn't really feel in the past in that way. No. Like, I don't know whether it's just because we're both very neurodivergent and don't really have a great sense of time or what, but… but it's true,
• 8:31
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, it is both a billion years ago, and we just finished doing it. It's really odd.
• 8:37
  Ted Brandt: M… I mean, I think, really, like.
• 8:41
  Ted Brandt: One of the defining memories for me was just…
• 8:44
  Ted Brandt: getting that first script, because although we'd had a discussion with Chris, we… before, like, agreeing to do it, we still didn't really know what we were in for.
• 8:54
  Ted Brandt: And so, like, getting it and going, oh, okay, this is what we're looking at. And starting to, like.
• 9:02
  Ted Brandt: actually… Digest it and work out what it was going to need.
• 9:08
  Ted Brandt: was a really… It was the first time we'd had that much freedom doing something, and so… it was…
• 9:18
  Ted Brandt: A lot to try and work out how to do it.
• 9:22
  Ted Brandt: How much…
• 9:22
  Britton Payne: How big was the script that you got? Like, and to what level of detail?
• 9:27
  Ted Brandt: Moderate, but we often ignored it.
• 9:30
  Matt: Was it… was it just Issue 1, or how much…
• 9:33
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, oh yeah, no, we only ever got an issue at a time. Yeah.
• 9:38
  Ted Brandt: We only ever got an issue at Diamond, but yeah, like…
• 9:41
  Ted Brandt: Our defining thing was, well, this needs more panels. Yeah.
• 9:45
  Ted Brandt: But, yeah, a reasonable proportion of the panel count in the book is stuff we added in.
• 9:52
  Ted Brandt: At least for the first one. Yeah.
• 9:55
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, slightly less as it went on, and we just lost stamina. Yeah. Did you finish a single issue? I started putting more in.
• 10:04
  Britton Payne: Finish a single issue, and then get feedback from the writer, and then, you know, how much did you have to change that first issue to sort of establish the equivalent of the pilot?
• 10:12
  Ted Brandt: Oh, we never changed anything.
• 10:16
  Ted Brandt: And that wasn't because we were unwilling, it's just, like…
• 10:19
  Ted Brandt: it was only ever, like, only ever tiny tweaks, and they only ever came in at pencil stage, like, by the time…
• 10:25
  Tad Eggleston: Good writers don't tweak much after, like, thumbnails. They know how much work it is for the.
• 10:32
  Ted Brandt: And also, like.
• 10:33
  Tad Eggleston: Thanks.
• 10:34
  Ted Brandt: you know.
• 10:35
  Ted Brandt: our tweaks tended to actually just take what Chris had put, and I've made, like, split it up so it was more for clarity. I was like, oh, this moment could do by being itself, rather than full-on changes.
• 10:48
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, yeah, we never, like, outright said, this isn't the right thing, like, as a vibe, but sometimes we'd just go.
• 10:56
  Ted Brandt: We get what you're going for, but…
• 10:58
  Ted Brandt: There's better ways of doing this.
• 11:02
  Ted Brandt: But yeah, I mean, Chris was a very good collaborator from that point of view. He always was willing to trust us to know our job.
• 11:11
  Britton Payne: And how long was the whole process from, you know, when you first got that first script to when you turned in
• 11:17
  Britton Payne: The finals for the last issue.
• 11:21
  Ted Brandt: couple of months? Well, I… the first.
• 11:23
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that gets weird. Let me jump in really quick, just because I did put a timeframe on it, because we couldn't… because it felt like a lifetime ago, and one of the reasons it feels like a lifetime ago is issue 12 of Crowded, which was the last single issue that came out. The last six were released as a graphic novel.
• 11:42
  Tad Eggleston: Issue 12 came out on the last Wednesday before Pencils Down.
• 11:49
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: It came out on my birthday, and… and… 2020.
• 11:57
  Tad Eggleston: So, March 25th, 2020, There were no Wednesday comics in April of 2020.
• 12:06
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, we had a fun…
• 12:07
  Tad Eggleston: It was May when D.C.
• 12:09
  Ted Brandt: Drawing a book that no one was going to see for a year. That was…
• 12:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 12:14
  Ted Brandt: We agree.
• 12:15
  Ted Brandt: We really did lose our minds a bit that year.
• 12:19
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 12:21
  Ted Brandt: But yeah, it was, I think, probably a couple of months, because, like… Well, the thing is, with the first issue, because we did the first few pages… Yeah, we did the first five pages. Because we had to do it for the pitch, wasn't it? Yeah. So, that kind of… because it's got that gap in the middle between doing the…
• 12:38
  Ted Brandt: Because I don't think we had script past the first pages to begin with, because we didn't know if it was going to get picked up. So it was then after that, so I can't quite figure out what the full timescale was on that. Yeah, no.
• 12:52
  Ted Brandt: So it took a little bit of figuring out to begin with for the first 5 pages. Yeah, because we added a lot of extra stuff into that to make for timing beats.
• 13:03
  Tad Eggleston: Those first 5 pages are ridiculous.
• 13:06
  Ted Brandt: Page 1, I think, only had 5 panels on in the script?
• 13:10
  Ted Brandt: And it's things like that, like… just…
• 13:15
  Ted Brandt: it worked much better like this, with timing, like, the panel of Vita's eyes was not in there, and… We like adding beats. Yeah.
• 13:25
  Ted Brandt: Like.
• 13:25
  Britton Payne: How did you… how did you come up with… I mean, I'm curious to know about the process of building that world. It's a really deep world, and also how you did the sort of Steranko sound effects. Like, how much of that was… or visual effects, even? How much… how did you guys work that out? I imagine some of it was as you did those first five pages, and some of it was over time.
• 13:46
  Ted Brandt: Well, some… some of the places are real places, and were, like…
• 13:53
  Matt: a lot of looking at Google Earth and Street View, and trying to figure out how to draw that.
• 13:58
  Ted Brandt: Although, the bit from the observatory in LA, we actually, I went into my copy of Grand Theft Auto at the time, and drove up to the observatory in there, because it's basically a model of LA.
• 14:11
  Ted Brandt: That's amazing.
• 14:11
  Britton Payne: Incredible.
• 14:12
  Ted Brandt: Game Photography.
• 14:14
  Ted Brandt: To get the angling right to that.
• 14:16
  Lee Woods: Okay.
• 14:17
  Ted Brandt: Which is a really underrated trick. We've also used, these Marvel Spider-Man games for New York.
• 14:23
  Ted Brandt: We also used a Marvel LEGO game for the interior of the helicarrier. Yep.
• 14:29
  Matt: Nice!
• 14:30
  Ted Brandt: Sometimes, you just want… There are no references! Exactly, sometimes you need a certain shot of a certain type of corridor, the comics just isn't obliging, and the game has one. So you just have to play through a level of that in order to, get what you need.
• 14:46
  Lee Woods: Oh, that's interesting, because I'm… I just… because I'm a video gamer as well, I know that Watch Dogs did that for Chicago, because it's heavily based in Chicago, so some of the streets and buildings are legit, like, they took a picture of it and put it in-game, so… that makes total sense.
• 15:02
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, I mean, like…
• 15:03
  Ted Brandt: Lots of very talented 3D modelers have already done a lot of work. There's no point reinventing the wheel.
• 15:10
  Britton Payne: That's amazing. In those first 5 pages, maybe it's towards 6 or 7, I think is the first time we see you do a Steranko effect. It's when you throw the… she throws the coffee on the little old lady.
• 15:22
  Britton Payne: And it's… and the splash of the coffee spells the word splash.
• 15:27
  Britton Payne: And that's something you do a lot in the book, that it took me a couple times… at the first time I saw one of those, I was like, oh, that's an unusual shape for a splash of coffee. It's very dynamic, just like the rest of the art. And then I started to notice, you know, on the very first page, you have Blam Blam, blam, which is a more typical way of having a visual representation of a sound effect.
• 15:47
  Britton Payne: But by the time you get to even that coffee splash, you've sort of established a style.
• 15:53
  Britton Payne: How did you guys come to that? Did you come to it on your own? Are you Staranko fans? Did you find seats somewhere else? Is that a manga thing I'm not familiar with?
• 15:59
  Matt: If you're not Star Ankle fans, explain this.
• 16:02
  Ted Brandt: Actually, it was, it was Batman and Robin, Frank Whiteley issues.
• 16:08
  Matt: Really.
• 16:08
  Ted Brandt: They all had, diegetic sound effects in.
• 16:11
  Britton Payne: Oh my gosh, I'll have to reread that. I'm actually currently rereading Morrison Batman.
• 16:16
  Ted Brandt: You haven't read it, but I showed you, like, enough of them to kind of… It must have percolated in. Well, I, yeah, I showed you a bunch of them, specifically because we had a conversation. Yeah.
• 16:26
  Ted Brandt: because I remember, when we were coming to do this page, I was just like, well, but what if we, you know, what if we drew the sound effects for this? And…
• 16:36
  Ted Brandt: I think one of my favorite sound effects that we did was also the flamethrower. Yeah. But I mean, even on the page with the splash, one you… the ones you may not have noticed, on the bottom panel… Is it FOC? It's Flok, oh, FOCK.
• 16:49
  Britton Payne: Oh, wow.
• 16:50
  Ted Brandt: hit the, thing. And, you've got fork on the, the glass crack on the glass… on the window of the car as well.
• 16:59
  Britton Payne: That's so cool.
• 17:01
  Britton Payne: I'll have to check out that Frank Whiteley artwork on… for Batman. It's a wonderful series, and I'm currently, like I said, I'm currently rereading Batman, by Jim Morris, Batman by, Grant Morris.
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: Marcel.
• 17:12
  Britton Payne: I'll have to get to that. How did you decide what technology to evolve and what to leave as is? As we look at the same page, you've got a pretty standard-looking meter, you know, put the dime in, or put the… I don't know what you guys put in over there, to park your car, but on the… maybe two pages before, there's an alarm clock that goes off that has sort of a projected, like, Star Trek-y hologram.
• 17:32
  Britton Payne: How did you make those decisions about what things you wanted to… what technologies you wanted to evolve, and what you wanted to leave where they were?
• 17:38
  Ted Brandt: I think sometimes it's just we remembered that we could do that. Yeah, but also, like, a lot of it was, at the time, we were discussing Parks and Rec Season 7. For the alarm clocks. Yeah, but in general, the philosophy of, like, the future isn't evenly distributed, some bits will be…
• 17:56
  Ted Brandt: Boring and cheap, because…
• 17:58
  Ted Brandt: boring and cheap works, and some things will be gimmicky and, like, flashy because you can sell that, like… so, like… It's like they're not gonna make a profit off a fancy parking meter. No, exactly. And so, like, Parks and Rec Season 7 was kind of, like, a lot of the jumping-off point for that, of, like.
• 18:15
  Ted Brandt: They actually did a really good look at what it'll look like to have futuristic technology
• 18:21
  Ted Brandt: In some areas, and… but just, you know, you're still driving a crappy, ordinary car.
• 18:27
  Britton Payne: And so in Parks and Rec Season 7, that's when they sort of imagine forward Leslie Knope's career, and who, you know, it goes probably 50 years into the future, maybe more?
• 18:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's only in the last… that's only the last episode, but the entire season is, like.
• 18:42
  Ted Brandt: 5 years later, yeah.
• 18:44
  Tad Eggleston: Weird. Yeah.
• 18:46
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, which was exactly the kind of vibe.
• 18:48
  Tad Eggleston: I love the synchronicity, because so often when Ted and Ro and I talk, it turns out that, like, we listen, or we watch the same shows
• 18:59
  Tad Eggleston: Because my wife and I just finished our rewatch of Parks and Rec. Literally yesterday, we watched the final episode. So the last week and a half has been…
• 19:08
  Tad Eggleston: Like, Season 7.
• 19:12
  Tad Eggleston: Matt had an art question I wanted to make certain we got in before he forgot it.
• 19:16
  Matt: Thank you. Are you guys, by chance, Metallica fans?
• 19:20
  Ted Brandt: Not really, because…
• 19:23
  Matt: This guy here on the front cover, He looks like Lars.
• 19:29
  Matt: Or is it just me?
• 19:30
  Ted Brandt: That's fair!
• 19:32
  Ted Brandt: I was like, is that intentional? No, even slightly.
• 19:36
  Matt: Huh.
• 19:37
  Ted Brandt: I mean, this is one of those times of, like, you know,
• 19:40
  Ted Brandt: proper disclaimer of any resemblance to anyone real or fictional living on there.
• 19:45
  Matt: Incidental.
• 19:45
  Ted Brandt: Purely coincidental.
• 19:47
  Matt: Fair enough.
• 19:49
  Ted Brandt: There's only so many faces!
• 19:51
  Matt: I just…
• 19:51
  Tad Eggleston: I just actually remembered a random question that it's been long enough that I gotta ask it again.
• 19:59
  Tad Eggleston: I know that I asked… that there were… there were images that made me think of Erica Henderson's work on Squirrel Girl, and other images that made me think of Saga the first time we talked about this book, and you hadn't read either of those at the time you read them yet.
• 20:17
  Ted Brandt: I think I have tried to read a little bit of Squirrel Girl, but I don't think I got very far. I think things happened, and then it's like, I've forgotten to read. There are just… there are only so many hours in the day, and we spend so many of them working.
• 20:31
  Tad Eggleston: See, this is where I go back to artists need good contracts, Britt, because…
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: They have to spend so many hours…
• 20:40
  Ted Brandt: It's not the contract's fault, it's our fault. We take on your account.
• 20:43
  Britton Payne: I was just gonna say the very same thing. This is… this is not a lawyer problem, this is a crazy artist problem.
• 20:48
  Tad Eggleston: It goes both ways.
• 20:50
  Britton Payne: It's the lawyer's job to try and protect them from themselves sometimes.
• 20:53
  Tad Eggleston: That's true, too.
• 20:55
  Ted Brandt: I don't think anyone's gonna be capable of that with us.
• 21:01
  Britton Payne: Speaking of art, there was… there were a couple panels and places where there were… there were artistic objects in the background. There's a flashback scene, I just happened to be looking at it in the first issue, where there's somebody sitting on a couch… oh, it's actually our protagonist, Charlie, sitting on the couch, and behind her are three… it's maybe on page 5 or 6, it's one of the flashback scenes, where she's babysitting, and behind her is just three… three canvases, one's blue, one's…
• 21:24
  Britton Payne: red and one's yellow. And, you know, throughout, you have to make those kinds of choices about how am I going… what kind of art is popular in this world? Was that a conscious decision, or was that more like, I don't want it to be noisy in the background when the real story of this panel is in the foreground?
• 21:39
  Ted Brandt: We didn't color it. No, that, that was the… that was the one.
• 21:42
  Britton Payne: But you did choose to leave blank panels that were clearly art. Somebody chose that art, put it on the wall behind them, you thought about it, you've obviously thought about the design of the sofa, and what were you saying with that, and, you know, part of that.
• 21:53
  Tad Eggleston: I think, actually, you're bringing up a source part. They put very detailed art on those panels, and their colorist decided, I don't feel like doing that, and just… blue, red, yellow.
• 22:06
  Ted Brandt: It's funny you should talk about art on the walls, because in Worst Man, I actually have a folder full of hotel art I have made to put in specific spots, so I can just keep putting it in, because we are coloring that one as a… there's specific pieces of art in specific all the four ways, it's just…
• 22:25
  Ted Brandt: Hotel art, and… yeah.
• 22:27
  Britton Payne: Imagine, as an artist, you have to make those kinds of choices about what level of detail do I want to put in the background, how is this telling the story, how's this, you know, how is this building my world?
• 22:37
  Britton Payne: You know, and so I'm… you clearly have a lot more patience than I do as an artist, where I'll draw the character, if I got the facial expression right, I'm done. You know, so that's why it's a doodle and not art, you know?
• 22:47
  Tad Eggleston: I actually…
• 22:48
  Britton Payne: Even in that panel, you've got a… you could have had a wall behind them, and you chose to have a sliding glass door, or a floor-to-ceiling window, and you can see a fence out in the background, and a tree out in the background, and you sort of gave yourself a harder job.
• 23:03
  Ted Brandt: Oh, we will always take the harder route, because…
• 23:07
  Ted Brandt: It doesn't occur to us not to! And also, because, like, it's… part of the thing is, what it comes down to is, like, years later, you won't really remember how disgusting you felt
• 23:20
  Ted Brandt: when you were overworked. But you'll look at the work and go, yeah, that turned out well.
• 23:26
  Ted Brandt: like…
• 23:27
  Tad Eggleston: That's a great perspective.
• 23:28
  Ted Brandt: The suffering is temporary. The pages last forever.
• 23:32
  Britton Payne: I love that.
• 23:32
  Matt: Dr. Wants.
• 23:34
  Britton Payne: Over the course of… I'm dominating this conversation. By the way, Matt and Lee and Tad, please…
• 23:38
  Matt: You're asking.
• 23:39
  Britton Payne: Let's dive in.
• 23:39
  Matt: I was like.
• 23:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're doing good stuff.
• 23:42
  Britton Payne: Alright, alright.
• 23:43
  Tad Eggleston: I have a handful, but…
• 23:46
  Britton Payne: One of the topics that I'm most interested in are related. It's about the evolution of the art style over the course of the time you do the book. So if you're working on a book, it's 18 issues, I don't know, does that take a year and a half? Like, I don't know how long that would take.
• 23:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, this one in particular started in…
• 24:01
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, do you guys remember how much lead time before the first issue came out? Because the first issue came out August 15th of 2018, and the last volume came out
• 24:13
  Tad Eggleston: on February 16th, 2022.
• 24:18
  Tad Eggleston: But again, there was a pandemic.
• 24:20
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, it's the previous year, because we had to have 3 issues in the can before the first one came out. Yeah, it took us about 4 years in total, I think.
• 24:29
  Britton Payne: Well, so over that time, as artists, your interests evolved, you set things aside, you get…
• 24:34
  Ted Brandt: I mean.
• 24:34
  Britton Payne: use different tools, even. I mean, that you might have switched from…
• 24:37
  Ted Brandt: The rules didn't really change that much.
• 24:40
  Ted Brandt: Acknowledge this. Yeah, and we, like, we… part of the reason it took so long was because Crowded wasn't really making any money, and so we had to keep doing side work.
• 24:49
  Ted Brandt: Which… you know, did slow things down. But,
• 24:53
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, tools didn't really change. Like, after the first 5 pages, because the first 5 pages, I inked with brush, and then moved to Gnibs, and stayed there.
• 25:04
  Britton Payne: What's a G-Nib?
• 25:05
  Ted Brandt: It's the most common, manga inking, like, a dip pen tool.
• 25:12
  Britton Payne: So that you did all… you didn't use a Cintiq or a tablet or whatever?
• 25:16
  Ted Brandt: For inking? Oh, God, no. I've, I don't…
• 25:20
  Ted Brandt: I prefer to do it all on paper, so…
• 25:23
  Ted Brandt: Ro will pencil digitally, and we'll print them on 11x17 boards.
• 25:29
  Ted Brandt: I'll be…
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I…
• 25:31
  Ted Brandt: I'll get one and show you.
• 25:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I loved that, and I don't know if I remembered that, because that is…
• 25:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, A, so neurodivergent with Ted's response for inking? What are you talking about? But B, so different from…
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: what I'm so used to hearing. There's so many people that, like, insist on still doing their pencils.
• 25:56
  Britton Payne: Cool!
• 25:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 25:59
  Britton Payne: So if you're just listening, we just got to see Ted bring out
• 26:03
  Britton Payne: Old book, a book, a big giant portfolio full.
• 26:07
  Ted Brandt: Black and white, ink, art pages.
• 26:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right. But yeah, no, I'm so… I'm much more used to hearing… I do rough pencils, scan them, and then ink it digitally. Hearing the reverse is… I don't know if I've ever heard that before. And yet, Ted… and… and, like…
• 26:30
  Tad Eggleston: I get it, actually, because it's the final piece, and, like, there's something more real about it. It makes sense to me that this was… this was inked by hand, that… that… that makes…
• 26:42
  Tad Eggleston: makes that, that hard to pin down what makes this pop in a way that other books don't, suddenly click in my head.
• 26:53
  Tad Eggleston: But again, it's so the opposite of what I've heard from so many artists in the last 5 years, that it just… it makes me smile that Ted's like, for inking? What are you talking about?
• 27:05
  Matt: Yeah, do you… what software do you use to pencil it?
• 27:09
  Ted Brandt: For Crowded, I was using Clip Studio Pro.
• 27:13
  Ted Brandt: Yeah. But I've moved over to Procreate, For, current stuff, cause…
• 27:20
  Ted Brandt: I'm not even certain why, but I like the pencil tools. Yeah, I mean, that was it. You just… you liked the brush responsiveness. Yeah.
• 27:29
  Ted Brandt: More. It is… not good for if you want to have multiple perspective grids, because that just doesn't work.
• 27:39
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, but, like, yeah, it works out really well, though, as a thing, like, you know, get a batch of pages over.
• 27:47
  Ted Brandt: Print them off in… like, turn them into,
• 27:52
  Ted Brandt: Turn them into blue line, so all the black… all the black lines of the pencils go to blue, fade them down to about 20% opacity, print them out on 11x17 boards, and then…
• 28:03
  Ted Brandt: Get to work.
• 28:04
  Britton Payne: And over the course of four years, Ted, how did you… when you look back at this work, when you look at the first 5 pages versus the last 5 pages, how do you feel like your inking style evolved in a way that you can see in the book, or do you feel like you were relatively consistent?
• 28:18
  Ted Brandt: That's a question.
• 28:21
  Britton Payne: And Ro, get ready, I'm gonna ask you a similar question, specifically about how you drew the characters.
• 28:26
  Ted Brandt: I don't really feel like… I can be judged solo on that, because my entire purpose… is to be…
• 28:36
  Ted Brandt: the adjunct here, like… So, I'm not sure that… That's… because, I mean.
• 28:47
  Ted Brandt: It definitely changed in Volume 3, because I did that all digitally for just trying to find reasons.
• 28:56
  Ted Brandt: We're just… we were so exhausted, and just pushing through as fast as we could at that point, so…
• 29:03
  Ted Brandt: Because we were doing it in one volume.
• 29:06
  Ted Brandt: But, like, while it was on paper, I mean, I don't know, I went where seeing your lines told me to go. Yeah.
• 29:15
  Ted Brandt: So any changes were started, like, started out with you, really.
• 29:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think they described themselves as one artist the first time I talked to them.
• 29:26
  Ted Brandt: Yeah… Yeah. One brain cell. Yeah.
• 29:30
  Britton Payne: Well, Ro, how do you feel like… did you feel like your style on this book evolved, or do you feel like you stayed pretty close to what you had envisioned in the beginning and stuck with it till the end?
• 29:41
  Ted Brandt: I got better at structuring things, definitely.
• 29:44
  Britton Payne: What do you mean by that?
• 29:45
  Ted Brandt: I learned how… how to better draw arms, as you can tell with Vita's arms development.
• 29:52
  Ted Brandt: But, yeah, there's definitely some heads earlier on that…
• 30:00
  Ted Brandt: I had an idea for what I wanted, and I didn't quite have the skills of how to structure it at certain angles that didn't quite turn out how I wanted it to, but it's… it's fine. But it's just that thing, like, I can see how I've improved since then.
• 30:16
  Ted Brandt: And that's the main thing with…
• 30:20
  Ted Brandt: the style stuff, because I don't know how much we make idea of consciously for style stuff.
• 30:27
  Ted Brandt: We have, like, a firm idea at the start of a project of, like, well, this is the kind of vibe we're going for. Everything else is winging it. And then it becomes less of a conscious thing, doesn't it? Yeah. It's like, well, this is what the vibe is, so this is how the style comes out.
• 30:42
  Ted Brandt: It's not like I'm going to draw it specifically this way, because while we tried doing that earlier on in the career, it became out quite stiff, I think. When we were trying to get specific influence from a specific artist or anything, and trying to emulate in any way of that, it just came out a bit more dead.
• 30:59
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, whereas if we just, like, basically, you know, kind of finalize a vibe list going into something, then it's much easier…
• 31:09
  Ted Brandt: to stick to that without killing anything. I think it's more about tapping into a certain aspect of our personalities when we're drawing, rather than looking at certain visual styles… Yeah. …for how to make the thing look a certain way.
• 31:24
  Tad Eggleston: Now, for, like, positioning or whatnot, do you use any sort of photo reference or model or whatnot, or are you doing that…
• 31:33
  Ted Brandt: I can't remember for crowded how much we used. Mixed, like… Sometimes we would have photo references, but yeah, there's… if you want to… what we like to do is the acting of stuff, so…
• 31:45
  Ted Brandt: if… even if at certain points we weren't doing it, for photo reference in there, we probably were actually doing some of the poses when… we're just, like, figuring out how.
• 31:54
  Tad Eggleston: And that's kind of what I meant, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 31:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's the advantage of the fact that you work together. You can say, Ted, do this. Oh, yeah. It happens a lot.
• 32:05
  Britton Payne: Everything in this book was so fun, now that you brought it.
• 32:07
  Tad Eggleston: Look at it, bro.
• 32:08
  Britton Payne: So it was really a treat. Like, I'm not… I'm not much of a manga reader, so maybe it's, you know, this is a translation to me of something that everybody else already knows.
• 32:16
  Britton Payne: I loved the body language and the… how deep into the facial expressions. Basically, everybody was, but Charlie was… seemed like the inspiration for all that. She was so…
• 32:26
  Britton Payne: fun and over-the-top and horrible, you know, to have in your life, but also invigorating and fun, and the kind of, like, mayhem that makes trying to keep that under control is part of what makes life a lot of fun. So she's such a fun, great character, and it ends up, to me, the art sort of expressed that character just as well as any of the dialogue did, or at least even supplemented it. It's like, oh.
• 32:48
  Britton Payne: she… she… even just in the way she throws her hip around, or the way she leans in too close, or the way she has this big expression, you know, fits that character and helps propel the whole story and make it essentially believable. I don't know, it was such a treat. And Vida, over time, I thought, got more…
• 33:05
  Britton Payne: She was… I thought she looked more feminine in the beginning, not by a lot, but, like, a little, and then by the end was much more masculine. And at first, I was wondering, first of all, am I seeing things? And I kind of checked on it, and I was like, yeah, I guess a little, and, you know, she might have just changed her clothes or something.
• 33:18
  Britton Payne: But I do wonder if that's something… it sounds like that's not something that you guys did consciously, it's maybe just something I noticed, but it also fits the story.
• 33:27
  Ted Brandt: That one was conscious.
• 33:30
  Britton Payne: Yeah.
• 33:31
  Britton Payne: Can you… can you talk about that? Because it was very interesting, and it fit very well into a story, a particular scene at the end that I know you guys didn't write, where they had the sort of triangle of women at the end who were, you know, trying to get to their goal. I don't want to spoil too much, but they have a conversation about what it's like
• 33:48
  Britton Payne: To, be attracted to someone, and sometimes it's not… you're not sure, because everybody's the same gender, you're not sure if it's because you like who they are for you, or that you kind of want to be…
• 34:02
  Britton Payne: what they are, because everybody's the same gender, both of those things can happen. And I'm curious to hear, now that you've sort of said that it was conscious.
• 34:12
  Britton Payne: Is that… is that the kind of thing that it built to? And how did you discover that if you're only getting it a script at a time?
• 34:19
  Ted Brandt: I mean, like, it became more and more obvious that Vita, like, you know, was just… one of her defining characteristics is tough.
• 34:28
  Ted Brandt: like, you know, mentally, physically. It's… she's a woman who's… Gone through a lot.
• 34:36
  Ted Brandt: And, you know.
• 34:38
  Ted Brandt: You've described, basically, Vita's character design speedruns Bruce Willis through the Die Hard films. Yeah, that was the…
• 34:48
  Matt: That's amazing. I see it. I love that.
• 34:50
  Britton Payne: I see it.
• 34:51
  Matt: That's great. Like, so did you guys get to pick the graffiti on the walls, and the…
• 34:56
  Ted Brandt: Oh, yeah.
• 34:57
  Ted Brandt: Everything in the background was us.
• 34:59
  Matt: I love that. King Starter was great.
• 35:03
  Matt: I'm like, oh, that's really funny.
• 35:06
  Ted Brandt: Simone?
• 35:07
  Tad Eggleston: Eat like a czar in Crispy Kremlin?
• 35:10
  Ted Brandt: Yep. Yep, I liked that one.
• 35:13
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, well, let's think, like, we're trying to just…
• 35:17
  Ted Brandt: you know… Make ourselves giggle. And it's a satire book, we're trying to just, like, you know… this was, you know, right around the time when there was still fuss being made about Russian interference in American elections, and we were like, well, let's just, you know, let's just go further.
• 35:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, to be fair, some of us aren't done with that fuss. It feels unresolved.
• 35:40
  Matt: I'm maybe a little mad.
• 35:44
  Ted Brandt: Given all of that, it just seemed really fun to take one of the biggest American icons, like…
• 35:49
  Tad Eggleston: And, like.
• 35:49
  Ted Brandt: As you say…
• 35:51
  Tad Eggleston: this, I… as you say this, I happen to be on the panel that has both Eat Like a Czar and Fuck Nazis in the same panel, and in that sense, it's very prescient.
• 36:03
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, and… or, like, we had a lot of fun. We ate the predictions. Oh, yeah. How many predictions?
• 36:10
  Ted Brandt: So many of them have come true. Like, so many
• 36:12
  Ted Brandt: Little bits in there have come true, and it's horrible.
• 36:16
  Ted Brandt: But yeah, the penis.
• 36:18
  Britton Payne: Your influences… your influences have been really interesting to me here, when you talk about Parks and Rec, when what I saw was something else. So, I'm looking at the cutaway, page, and I don't know, 10 or 15 pages in, I think the first issue, that to me, is like Chris Ware and Windsor McKay, but I'm curious, you know, what put that in your head?
• 36:37
  Ted Brandt: Well, basically, we got told we wanted to have a cut… the script said it wanted to cut away showing Vita's house, and we were like, from the description of this house, it's too wide. Yeah, because it's… To fit on a page that… Because this page is vertical, not wide. Because we made the house in SketchUp.
• 36:53
  Ted Brandt: And I will say, we made the housing sketchup two period-appropriate American standards.
• 37:00
  Lee Woods: Like, so the gaps between, floor and ceiling are standard,
• 37:05
  Ted Brandt: like, the thickness of floorboards was standard. We… it, like, I mean, we didn't put plumbing in, but, like.
• 37:12
  Tad Eggleston: This is another way that I know how many artists… I mean, you guys are showing it, but you're so far from alone among neurodivergent artists. The number of times I hear things like, we made it to period standards, even in a book that was in the future, but this house, we know when it was built, and we had to get it right. None of your readers know!
• 37:34
  Ted Brandt: Nope.
• 37:35
  Tad Eggleston: But I gotta tell you, I…
• 37:39
  Ted Brandt: I didn't go look it up to check it, but when I saw the house, I'm like.
• 37:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they researched this.
• 37:46
  Matt: I noticed, for sure.
• 37:48
  Ted Brandt: And then, yeah, we, like, built it all fully in SketchUp, like, based on… made floor plans then based, you know… Because we had to read…
• 37:57
  Ted Brandt: Chris's script, and figure out what the floor plan would be, and how to… because… How to move through it. Because we had what the dialogue was going to be, so we had to figure out what the layout of the house was.
• 38:09
  Ted Brandt: So that we could have a nice flow of dialogue.
• 38:14
  Ted Brandt: So…
• 38:15
  Tad Eggleston: This actually… it was a question that's popped in my head a couple of times, so I'm gonna make certain that I ask it before I forget again. My friend Stefan Frank, who does a fantastic book called Palomino.
• 38:28
  Tad Eggleston: came to comics… well, didn't come to comics through animation, he's been a comics guy too, but he's done a lot of animation work, so one of the things that he did at the beginning of Palomino, and, you know, would stop and do in between if he introduced a new location or whatnot, is he will put together
• 38:47
  Tad Eggleston: The digital mock-up of the location.
• 38:51
  Tad Eggleston: with the, you know, the 3D modeled
• 38:54
  Tad Eggleston: On the computer, you know, because he's got those computer skills, so that he can throw the art up on the wall, he can put the stuff, and then before penciling, he'll, like, get his angle with that stuff in, pencil on that page, including going over and putting more detail into
• 39:13
  Tad Eggleston: All of the… but rather than…
• 39:16
  Tad Eggleston: having to remember how the room is, or go, you know, he's just like, okay, this is what… you know, so it starts with making a bunch of 3D models, and then it's… and then it's, what's the angle on each of these pages? We're printing up pages that have, essentially, my background already.
• 39:31
  Tad Eggleston: that I will then work in and go from there. Do you guys… I mean, I know that you guys pay a ton of attention to your backgrounds and whatnot. How do you keep it all
• 39:41
  Ted Brandt: Do that. Yeah.
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: You do do that!
• 39:44
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, for Worst Man, we made an entire island hotel.
• 39:49
  Ted Brandt: like… That is… large.
• 39:53
  Ted Brandt: And again, like, it was the same thing. We went through, like, design process of going, right, well, this clearly wouldn't have been started as a hotel, because it's a bit of a bit more of a classic building, so it would have started as a house, and then this is how they would have adapted it to make it into a hotel, and… But one thing's been…
• 40:11
  Ted Brandt: We really want to learn Blender.
• 40:14
  Ted Brandt: Because with Crowded, all of the,
• 40:18
  Ted Brandt: Sets were, like… they weren't that big.
• 40:22
  Ted Brandt: Because it was, like, one location at a time. But if you're doing an entire hotel.
• 40:27
  Ted Brandt: SketchUp doesn't like that! And SketchUp is badly enough made that its processing issues scale with your
• 40:36
  Ted Brandt: Computer's processing power, so it doesn't actually get any better if you put it on a larger machine.
• 40:42
  Ted Brandt: So, yeah, having one big building that you basically have to split into four different things of, like, well, this is what the upstairs looks like, this is what the downstairs, and this, and this half is like…
• 40:54
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 40:56
  Ted Brandt: I want to learn Blender, because that seems to have that problem.
• 40:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I'm now thinking that, like…
• 41:03
  Tad Eggleston: And this is just how, you know, my neurodivergence, and I'm always thinking of the next episode or the next cool thing to do, I'm now going, I so want to put you guys and Stefan in a conversation together, and possibly even make it, like, the first
• 41:18
  Tad Eggleston: Or, I mean…
• 41:19
  Tad Eggleston: Could be the first… I've been considering finally doing some video 22 panels. You know, we finally… we finally started posting the audio to YouTube, and it's like, oh, if I've got a YouTube channel, maybe I should do a video from time to time, but I want to make it, like, worth it. But I'm imagining, like, having you guys and Stefan with your 3D models, sharing screens, showing us how we set up rooms.
• 41:43
  Tad Eggleston: Because it's just so fascinating to me, and such…
• 41:46
  Tad Eggleston: Such the inside baseball of comics that, that, like…
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: as soon as you hear it, it's like, oh my god, that's brilliant and whatnot, but, like, as a reader, until somebody says, oh yeah, I do this, it's like…
• 41:58
  Tad Eggleston: How do they make that magic work?
• 42:02
  Ted Brandt: I don't know whether that would work, because we no longer have a subscription for,
• 42:08
  Ted Brandt: SketchUp, because it's so expensive.
• 42:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 42:12
  Ted Brandt: I realized our year subscription was going to run out with… was it 70 pages left of Worst Man to Do? Yeah. So I dropped doing pencils and did 3 solid weeks to get the remainder of the shots we needed from the island before the subscription died.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that makes sense, that makes sense.
• 42:31
  Ted Brandt: No…
• 42:33
  Lee Woods: So, I have a question about some of the, the character development, because you… Brim brought up a great question about the, sort of, progression and development of, say, Vita.
• 42:43
  Lee Woods: I'm wondering, is there a particular, like, character or relationship dynamic, or even just environment? Because we talked about how awesome this, sort of.
• 42:53
  Lee Woods: universe is. Is there something about the comic… now, if I could try to narrow all your experience down to, like, a single question, I guess, is do you have
• 43:02
  Lee Woods: One of those things that sort of pops out to you that you feel connected with, and why?
• 43:09
  Ted Brandt: I think for me, it's the worldbuilding of, like, all the stuff, because that was just us… goofing. Constantly.
• 43:17
  Ted Brandt: And, like… and I'm proud of every single one of those gags. You should be.
• 43:22
  Ted Brandt: They all still make me laugh every time I look at them.
• 43:27
  Ted Brandt: My… although my single favourite one is…
• 43:30
  Ted Brandt: the one where… in the splash page when they get to Vegas.
• 43:34
  Ted Brandt: Marie's Condos.
• 43:37
  Britton Payne: Yes, I saw that one.
• 43:40
  Ted Brandt: just…
• 43:40
  Britton Payne: There's a super deep cut that came from the writers, a really deep… so I don't know that you guys would know about it, even, but it's… it's a, there was a couple, two men, and they were getting beat up, I think it was in Vegas.
• 43:56
  Britton Payne: by Vita, and one of them said to the other one when they got hit, they said, Sugar Bear! And the other one said, Butterfly. And that's a reference to a very specific song.
• 44:07
  Ted Brandt: Yes. Mass.
• 44:08
  Britton Payne: But I was very excited that I got the reference.
• 44:13
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, yeah, no, I think… I think for me, it's just, like, all the background gags, because they were keeping us sane throughout a lot of this.
• 44:22
  Britton Payne: You put in, Scott McCloud, I think? Does that ring a bell?
• 44:25
  Ted Brandt: Probably. We probably did.
• 44:28
  Britton Payne: They interviewed her old friends, you know, who, you know, submitted money to the… we haven't, I guess in the podcast, we haven't described the plot of the…
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we did kinda last month.
• 44:40
  Britton Payne: Okay, fair enough. But we can do it.
• 44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Again, go for it.
• 44:43
  Britton Payne: Well, there's a young woman named Charlie. It's a sort of alternate future kind of story about a young woman named Charlie who.
• 44:50
  Tad Eggleston: Like, 10 minutes in the future, not deep into the future.
• 44:53
  Britton Payne: But it feels… it feels futuristic. You know, I remember that it was 5 minutes in the future, but it still has, you know, feels futuristic.
• 45:00
  Tad Eggleston: How are you?
• 45:01
  Britton Payne: There's an app in this world where the world had evolved a little bit so that people wanted to get out their frustrations. There's an app that lets them get out their frustrations. You can put out a hit on somebody, and if you put money in the pot, and somebody else murders that person, then they get the money. And so it's a sort of a matching app like that.
• 45:20
  Lee Woods: Reaper.
• 45:21
  Britton Payne: And this.
• 45:22
  Tad Eggleston: Reapons.
• 45:22
  Britton Payne: So one of our… the star of our show has become famous for being on this app, and so everybody wants to target her. She gets to be known as the Million Dollar Girl, and then, and again, it goes from there. So early on in the.
• 45:34
  Tad Eggleston: Eventually, the $3 million girl.
• 45:36
  Britton Payne: Well, spoiler alert, huh?
• 45:38
  Lee Woods: Mmm.
• 45:39
  Britton Payne: And and so in this particular scene that I'm talking about, the woman that she has hired to protect her through a different app.
• 45:48
  Britton Payne: and is allowed to do this legally, is trying to find out, why are all these people interested in seeing you dead? And they interviewed people who knew her in her previous life, who had, I believe, contributed money into this thing. And one of them is Timmy Fisher, motion graphics designer, ex-boyfriend.
• 46:06
  Britton Payne: And he, looks… he's wearing a shirt and an outfit that looks like Scott McCloud wore it in Understanding Comics.
• 46:14
  Ted Brandt: That is… A complete coincidence.
• 46:17
  Britton Payne: That is so funny, I just… I just happened to have read a different… I'm reading Zott, and so I'm thinking about Scott McCloud a little bit, and that was funny to see.
• 46:27
  Lee Woods: Whoa.
• 46:28
  Britton Payne: Those are the fun decisions you guys get to make as artists, when you get a script, and you're like, okay, well, you know, what am I gonna entertain myself with sneaking in, you know, as references, or giggles, or people that I really know, or…
• 46:39
  Ted Brandt: That might have been… I think it might have been in a flash t-shirt. Yeah.
• 46:43
  Britton Payne: It has… it's a red t-shirt with a yellow sort of lightning bolt, and a green,
• 46:50
  Britton Payne: dress shirt over it, basically. Yes. Which at least reminded me, and then he's got, like, that kind of career, he's a motion graphics tenant.
• 46:56
  Ted Brandt: That wasn't on purpose.
• 46:57
  Britton Payne: Yes.
• 46:58
  Ted Brandt: No, I think he was just wearing the Flash t-shirt that I owned at the time, and then the colors would have come from Tree. Yeah.
• 47:04
  Britton Payne: Oh my god, that's so great.
• 47:06
  Britton Payne: And then there's a restaurant you called The Food Place, and I wonder if you were watching the TV show The Good Place?
• 47:11
  Ted Brandt: It's the same font as their, as their title.
• 47:14
  Britton Payne: Oh, that's so great.
• 47:17
  Lee Woods: I still stand by. The last podcast that we did, one of my favorite pages was the one where Charlie and Vita, as, Charlie's doing Charlie things, and Vita's trying to protect her, going to this, strip club called Buy Furious.
• 47:31
  Matt: Yup.
• 47:32
  Lee Woods: Still my favorite page of, like…
• 47:35
  Ted Brandt: Between the script, that was not us. No, I think that might be the only business that was named by Chris. Yeah.
• 47:41
  Lee Woods: Really?
• 47:42
  Ted Brandt: Are you… you guys would click, click, boom?
• 47:45
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, I think we might…
• 47:47
  Britton Payne: Boom is the name of the place, it's in a mall, I think.
• 47:49
  Ted Brandt: That might have been… Maybe that was crucial. I don't remember that one. No.
• 47:53
  Britton Payne: One of our characters goes and buys guns.
• 47:55
  Ted Brandt: Yes.
• 47:56
  Britton Payne: on Tick Tick Boom, which is a musical written by Jonathan Larson, who wrote Rent.
• 48:01
  Britton Payne: It's a pretty deep…
• 48:02
  Ted Brandt: Kristen, because I didn'.
• 48:03
  Britton Payne: It's a pretty deep cut.
• 48:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and ironically, it's also a comic now by Doug Wagner.
• 48:11
  Ted Brandt: Click, click. Yeah, so, certainly.
• 48:13
  Tad Eggleston: And that came after, so he was stealing from you guys.
• 48:17
  Ted Brandt: Any business that they don't interact with was probably us, and anything they do interact with was probably Chris.
• 48:24
  Ted Brandt: That's usually a good rule of thumb.
• 48:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 48:27
  Ted Brandt: like.
• 48:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking at another…
• 48:29
  Ted Brandt: Let's go to the comic store, Hepcat Comics, Chris named that. Yep. I think that's actually…
• 48:34
  Tad Eggleston: Probably even a real shop.
• 48:35
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, he was doing it specifically after a shop that was, like, staffed by friends of his.
• 48:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:42
  Tad Eggleston: For that matter, I think Buy Furious might be a real… Place, too.
• 48:47
  Britton Payne: That was so funny.
• 48:47
  Tad Eggleston: Burger.
• 48:48
  Ted Brandt: I don't know. We did name… we also named Obnoxious the club as well. I think so, yeah. Oh, no, we definitely did.
• 48:56
  Ted Brandt: Just because that seemed like a fitting name for that kind of place.
• 49:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking at another fun page, and I am wondering…
• 49:07
  Tad Eggleston: whether it was scripted or your decision, with the Vita Slatter's superhero list,
• 49:17
  Tad Eggleston: The Polaroids are such a nice touch.
• 49:21
  Ted Brandt: Was that, was that scripted?
• 49:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's… it's in the third book.
• 49:25
  Ted Brandt: I can't remember what's actually on the page.
• 49:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, it's in the… it's in the second book.
• 49:30
  Ted Brandt: Haha, I'm in the wrong book.
• 49:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, sorry.
• 49:33
  Ted Brandt: It's been so long, we can't remember what we did.
• 49:35
  Tad Eggleston: I think… I think it's… I think it's page 44, roughly, or at least that's what it is in the digital.
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: But, but yeah, there's the… the… four… four different Polaroids!
• 49:48
  Tad Eggleston: To go along with… That's…
• 49:50
  Ted Brandt: I think that might have been requested. I'm not certain… I can't remember!
• 49:56
  Ted Brandt: I can't…
• 49:59
  Ted Brandt: I… I suspect… I don't remember whether… how much of that was in the script. No, I mean, it was definitely… it was definitely… I can definitely remember it being said as, like, like a page from an old, like, you know, an old, kind of ring-bound book that Vita had.
• 50:15
  Ted Brandt: I'm not sure… I can't remember. …how much of it was scripted to look exactly like that. I mean, young Vito punching a kid in the balls could have come from us or Chris.
• 50:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's true.
• 50:26
  Matt: Right, fight it dirty.
• 50:27
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't.
• 50:28
  Matt: Waiting dirty, yes.
• 50:32
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, I don't know.
• 50:34
  Britton Payne: Bro, how much of yourself do you find that you put in your work when you're penciling? Whether it's the lead character reminds you of yourself, or an idealized version of yourself, or a character type you've always wanted to draw… how much of yourself ends up on the page, do you think?
• 50:48
  Ted Brandt: All of the stupid expressions of me…
• 50:53
  Ted Brandt: Do you look at yourself in the mirror or something?
• 50:56
  Ted Brandt: I have taken videos of myself doing stuff to see what my face does, and how my body reacts, because sometimes I need you, and that… because I will have done the pose, but it doesn't look right when I'm doing it, so I have to pose Ted into what I just did, so that it looks more right.
• 51:16
  Ted Brandt: Because I also have a bit of hypermobility.
• 51:19
  Ted Brandt: So, sometimes it goes too far and it looks weird, particularly my hands. Yeah.
• 51:24
  Ted Brandt: They don't move right. My hands do not move right, they shouldn't bend like that by themselves.
• 51:30
  Ted Brandt: But… so it makes… it does make some of the hands look awkward, because you've… you've had a look at some things, like, that hand doesn't look right. It's like.
• 51:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're moving your wrists more than she was.
• 51:40
  Britton Payne: I'm really trying as hard as I can, and it's not…
• 51:43
  Britton Payne: Interesting. Wow! Oh, yeah, you put them together, oh, look at that! Yes, you definitely…
• 51:49
  Britton Payne: So what we're doing, for those of you just listening, we are putting our palms together, and then trying to move our fingers as far away from each other as we can, and Lee and I are doing it, and we're getting, I don't know, 2 inches away, 3 inches away, and then Ro is doing it, and it's like a… it's like a…
• 52:04
  Tad Eggleston: She's not quite touching the backs of her hands with her… with her fingernails, but, you know, it feels.
• 52:11
  Britton Payne: She's really bending quite a bit. Now she's bending her pointer finger back, and it's going almost to a right angle. Be careful, bro, those are your tools.
• 52:17
  Lee Woods: I realized this was weird until I met you.
• 52:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… I mean, one of the reasons I invited Britt, and I should have told you guys earlier, Britt,
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: is the founder of the autism scene, which is a… a… a…
• 52:34
  Tad Eggleston: Britt, you describe it, you do it better.
• 52:36
  Britton Payne: It's a nonprofit that advocates for the inclusion of more autistic… explicitly autistic characters in kids' pop culture. And I speak a lot about comic books. I'm currently writing… excuse me, currently running a screenwriting competition where you pick an existing kid's animated show, you write a spec script that has an explicitly autistic character, and then if you win, you get money, or you get to meetings with, you know, movers and shakers in kids' animation in Hollywood.
• 52:59
  Britton Payne: And so I spent a lot of time thinking about Autistic and neurodivergent characters in
• 53:04
  Britton Payne: And, you know, as facing
• 53:07
  Britton Payne: neurotypical kids, so they can get exposed to, you know, different kinds of people and their inner stories and lives, in the hopes that it will engender more empathy for the autistic people who they encounter in their real lives, and also, you know.
• 53:18
  Britton Payne: as part of that, generate work for autistic people who are in Hollywood, and pop culture creation, so they get more opportunities as well.
• 53:27
  Tad Eggleston: So I bring this up just because when Roe said that she didn't realize that everybody couldn't do that, I just…
• 53:34
  Tad Eggleston: I've been dealing with a lot of various things with my autism lately, and some of the trauma from not being diagnosed for a long time. And so much of that is driven by things like, oh, that was uniquely me? That's not an everybody thing? And how long it took me to know that?
• 53:55
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 53:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because, I mean, it's natural for people to think that… I mean, at least a psychologist, how old are you when you start realizing that your brain isn't the same as other people's brains?
• 54:09
  Tad Eggleston: When you go from concrete to abstract thinking.
• 54:12
  Lee Woods: Yeah, even as a counselor.
• 54:15
  Lee Woods: Very young. 4 to 6 is when you start making that sort of development there.
• 54:20
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. So, so younger than… than I thought, but… but there's still… Well, I meant the person knowing
• 54:30
  Tad Eggleston: That they were different.
• 54:32
  Lee Woods: Oh.
• 54:34
  Lee Woods: Yeah.
• 54:34
  Tad Eggleston: Not that they are different, but being aware that…
• 54:41
  Tad Eggleston: my brain works this way, their brain works that way, just because I think it doesn't mean EVERYBODY thinks it.
• 54:51
  Tad Eggleston: I know it's sometime before you get rid of your imaginary audience, but… but not…
• 54:59
  Ted Brandt: That goes away?
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, no. Imaginary audience, I think, is the first of the things that, like, some people never manage to shed.
• 55:13
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah… So… Yeah…
• 55:20
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna, just because I know it's getting late for Ted and Ro, and because the rest of us are coming back in a few hours, I'm gonna move towards wrapping up.
• 55:29
  Tad Eggleston: But, but I'm gonna first ask, any final thoughts on Crowded from Tenant Row?
• 55:36
  Ted Brandt: Well, just getting the volumes out again for this, I'm still very happy with the 3 trade covers, like, because…
• 55:46
  Ted Brandt: They end up, like, in the correct sequence, actually telling the entire story of the book pretty well.
• 55:53
  Matt: Yeah, I noticed that, I liked that.
• 55:56
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, like, it worked out well, because, like.
• 56:00
  Ted Brandt: It wasn't… it wasn't… it wasn't planned out from the start,
• 56:04
  Ted Brandt: The Issue 1 cover was just like, oh, well, that's gonna be the trade.
• 56:08
  Ted Brandt: And then the other two trade covers were like, well, okay, so we need to replicate that, but keeping, you know, in touch with the themes, and so it just ended up being, like.
• 56:20
  Ted Brandt: a way of distilling the entire book into three images, which worked out.
• 56:28
  Ted Brandt: I would totally own Vita's jacket. Yeah.
• 56:32
  Matt: The yellow one?
• 56:33
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 56:33
  Matt: Yeah, okay, I get it, yup.
• 56:35
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 56:36
  Britton Payne: Feel Bill-inspired?
• 56:39
  Ted Brandt: Yes.
• 56:41
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, you got one right, Britt.
• 56:43
  Britton Payne: It's fun, it's kind of fun to be wrong, though, because I.
• 56:46
  Tad Eggleston: I know!
• 56:47
  Britton Payne: you know, one thing, and it's really interesting to hear, you know, what are the influences. Overall, you know, Tad, you're saying, you know, overall thoughts, I think that if you're trying to encourage people to give the book a shot, the thing that I latched onto, and the thing that I think it is, is a really fun, propulsive.
• 57:05
  Britton Payne: A story about a very charismatic
• 57:09
  Britton Payne: but challenging young woman to be around, and the people who are trying to sort of… who kind of fall in love with her in a certain way, and I think that it's a… it's an immersive book that you can get into. It's three volumes, it feels longer than just three volumes. When you told me it was 18 issues.
• 57:23
  Britton Payne: I was pretty surprised, so that you really get a lot of story and a lot of life out of these people. It's a very rich world that they're in, and it's a fun world that, you know, you can spend… you can spend more time in, which I just think is terrific.
• 57:37
  Tad Eggleston: It definitely falls in the category of books that
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: Every time you read it, you will see more.
• 57:44
  Tad Eggleston: And more, and more,
• 57:47
  Tad Eggleston: whether it's the stuff hidden, or… I mean, and this is on both… both you guys and Chris. There's just so many layers of commentary.
• 57:56
  Tad Eggleston: in the writing, in the art, you know, you've got… you've got Vida and Charlie's story, and I'm drawing a blank on…
• 58:05
  Tad Eggleston: the all-but-nameless woman's name.
• 58:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, Cersei's story. But it's also a story of a world that's… all too possible?
• 58:20
  Tad Eggleston: In both good and bad ways. I mean, like…
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: what happens with Oklahoma, and I'm not gonna… like, if we do any real spoiling, we'll do it when Chris is on later tonight, so, like, anybody who's listening to the episode now, this is your… your spoiler alert, like, pause when we're done talking to Ted and Ro, go…
• 58:43
  Tad Eggleston: go read the books if you haven't already, and come back when we talk to Chris, because I don't know how careful we'll be with spoilers there, and I am releasing it as one episode.
• 58:55
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like… that was, like, heartwarming. It's like, oh…
• 59:01
  Tad Eggleston: Here is something good that happened in this nightmare landscape of a world.
• 59:08
  Ted Brandt: We're…
• 59:09
  Tad Eggleston: Where a group of people managed to go, hey.
• 59:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's not good that that's how they had to do it, but that, like.
• 59:18
  Tad Eggleston: A group of people were able to go, hey, we know how to…
• 59:22
  Tad Eggleston: to put ourselves in a position to take care of our rights. This is what we're gonna do.
• 59:30
  Ted Brandt: Just going back to… the book feels long. Part of that is because, like, an average image trade is 100 pages, because it'd be 5 issues at 20 pages. Ours were 150, because…
• 59:40
  Tad Eggleston: I am.
• 59:41
  Ted Brandt: It was 6 issues at 24.
• 59:43
  Ted Brandt: Average.
• 59:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 59:44
  Ted Brandt: And so, like, up to 28.
• 59:47
  Matt: I know this isn't your guys' fault, but it's also very wordy.
• 59:51
  Ted Brandt: Oh, yeah.
• 59:51
  Matt: There's a lot to actually No, it's a good thing. It's not a bad thing.
• 59:56
  Britton Payne: No, I agree, you have this rich conversation…
• 59:58
  Tad Eggleston: at Ted's re… reaction.
• 1:00:02
  Ted Brandt: Yeah, it's.
• 1:00:02
  Britton Payne: It's a really interesting comparison to Die Hard, because they do, you know, to follow up on Matt, or to interrupt him, I apologize, Matt.
• 1:00:09
  Matt: No.
• 1:00:09
  Britton Payne: Now I'm excited to say what you started talking about, which is that, you know, you have this die-hard element to it where you're both
• 1:00:16
  Britton Payne: really racing along with plot, and there are always, you know, danger is right around the corner all the time. You really never get an opportunity to rest as a reader, and but then you also get to know so much about these people, because they are so wordy, they talk so much.
• 1:00:30
  Matt: And it's fun because so much happens in the first book, you're like, what the heck are they gonna do in the next book? Like, how are they gonna top this, or make it better, or make it continue? It's like when a TV show, the first episode is so good, you're like, where are they going with this?
• 1:00:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, this is… this is a masterpiece of a series. I know it's one that I will come back to.
• 1:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: Over and over again. It's one that I almost wish we could get, like, that completely…
• 1:01:01
  Tad Eggleston: boring, we live on a farm, and now we're gonna go on vacation in Costa Rica, and you're expecting something crazy to happen because we're moving at breakneck paces, but that's not our world anymore, so it never actually happens. Sequel? That would be amazing.
• 1:01:17
  Matt: I mean…
• 1:01:19
  Ted Brandt: you know, not to be too self-serving here, but just keep your eyes out for Worst Man, because it will be at least as fast-moving. It's got…
• 1:01:28
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, every…
• 1:01:29
  Ted Brandt: I think I see a forecast.
• 1:01:31
  Tad Eggleston: Everything I've seen of it so far.
• 1:01:33
  Tad Eggleston: And again, wink, wink, nod, nod, you know, read your own book, you're allowed to toss PDFs out in the world.
• 1:01:44
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, I'm so looking forward to it. I mean, when you guys first told me the premise of that, I went, oh my god, that sounds…
• 1:01:53
  Tad Eggleston: Amazing.
• 1:01:55
  Tad Eggleston: And you guys are perfect for… I mean, cause…
• 1:01:59
  Tad Eggleston: What you do as well or better than anybody else in the business right now is the acting that we've already talked about, but also blending
• 1:02:12
  Tad Eggleston: Emotionally weighty topics?
• 1:02:16
  Tad Eggleston: With humor in a way that doesn't take away from the weight.
• 1:02:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it takes away from the weight, but not the gravity, if that makes sense.
• 1:02:26
  Matt: I know exactly what you're saying. And I don't think I can word it any better.
• 1:02:30
  Ted Brandt: I… what I'd say is, we describe ourselves as clowns for a reason.
• 1:02:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:02:36
  Tad Eggleston: I like that.
• 1:02:38
  Ted Brandt: It's that, you know, that's what clowning is.
• 1:02:42
  Ted Brandt: Everyone feels like shit, so you make them laugh.
• 1:02:46
  Ted Brandt: Not to take… not to stop them from feeling like shit, but just to give them a moment of levity within it, like…
• 1:02:52
  Ted Brandt: That is the essence of clowning.
• 1:02:54
  Ted Brandt: It's support, it's relief, it's… finding joy in disaster.
• 1:03:01
  Ted Brandt: And that's where we like to live.
• 1:03:03
  Ted Brandt: Yeah.
• 1:03:05
  Tad Eggleston: I think that that is the perfect spot to end part one, so I'm gonna kill the recording here, and when people listen again, Ted and Ro will be gone, and we might have some more people, including Christopher Sibela, so…
• 1:03:20
  Tad Eggleston: Hang out for a second, Ted in a row, because I just love talking to you. But
• 1:03:26
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 1:03:30
  Tad Eggleston: Please, dear God, know.
• 1:03:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, good.
• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: And, everybody had a nice break, we breathed, and we're back 3 seconds later, and somehow Britt has disappeared, Ted and Ro have gone to sleep, but Christopher Sabella popped into the room, so…
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: That's just awesome. I love how my world works. How's it going, Chris? It's been a while.
• 0:18
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, thanks for having me back.
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: I miss you. I'm always looking for my friends to pop up so that I have an excuse to… to say, hey, come on the show, and…
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: And you've been quiet for a while, and…
• 0:34
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah, I've just been, yeah, working in secret on stuff, so…
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, at least it's working in secret. I think we should have another check-in, Lee, since, well, for our listeners, it's… it's seconds later. It is three and a half hours later.
• 0:50
  Tad Eggleston: For us, and part of… if I didn't explain it well enough in the emails, Chris, the Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club and Support Group is something that we started after a certain person was
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: re-elected, and we decided we need an excuse to get together and read things that either fit our moods, or take us in a different mood, or… or whatever, but… but things that make us feel like…
• 1:22
  Tad Eggleston: There's hope, or give us joy, or give us a road map for resistance and survival.
• 1:30
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes all of those things at once, I think… I think this is one of those books, crowded, that hits all of those things at once, but at least one of those things for every book we read. And, because Lee's from Psychocomicology, he's a practicing psychologist, he leaves our quick group therapy check-in at the beginning.
• 1:50
  Lee Woods: I see Chris just, like, grab his head, like, oh, no, what did I jump into? No worries, man.
• 1:58
  Lee Woods: So…
• 1:59
  Tad Eggleston: He's a writer, he'll come up with a good lie if he needs to.
• 2:02
  Lee Woods: There you go, just a good spin.
• 2:03
  Lee Woods: No, part of group therapy, and a large part of what I do, is whenever we have groups, we have certain members pop in and out, and whenever that happens, we just do a quick intro. Hey, my name's Lee, and I typically go for, what's a good feeling word that you're feeling in this moment?
• 2:21
  Lee Woods: And just to let you know, my name's Lee, I changed it on the… I figured out how to do it on Zoom.
• 2:26
  Tad Eggleston: He's been Larry for a long time.
• 2:28
  Lee Woods: That is my first name, that is my government name. And…
• 2:33
  Lee Woods: intrigued would be the word that I'm using.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 2:36
  Lee Woods: For now. I went from excited to intrigued, because
• 2:39
  Lee Woods: Specifically with you, Chris, I'm intrigued about some of the,
• 2:44
  Lee Woods: dynamics at play, so I wanted to pick your brain on that, but we'll… I'm sure we'll get there.
• 2:49
  Christopher Sebela: Okay.
• 2:51
  Tad Eggleston: I'm Tad. I went from,
• 2:54
  Tad Eggleston: fidgety and weak exhausted to, like, this and my fifth podcast recording of the day, but this time with a three and a half hour break in between. I've had four great conversations. I have
• 3:11
  Tad Eggleston: for the first time in a while, our very first guest back. Chris was the first 22 panels guest.
• 3:17
  Tad Eggleston: So that's… that's how long Chris has been coming on the show. So I'm actually feeling energized, which is weird, because I shouldn't be, but, you know, I like a good conversation. I've gotten to have four of them today, and… and… and now I'm gonna get to have another. So, yeah.
• 3:39
  Matt: Does that make it my turn?
• 3:41
  Tad Eggleston: Orcuses. I mean, you guys can duke it out, you can rock, paper.
• 3:44
  Matt: Chris, do you want to go, or do you want me to go? I'll go last.
• 3:46
  Lee Woods: Okay, cool.
• 3:48
  Matt: My name's Matt, and I was feeling overwhelmed before, not in a bad way, actually in a good way. My kids came home to celebrate my birthday for the weekend. It's, you know, on Tuesday, but, you know, so I had a lot.
• 4:01
  Tad Eggleston: They're in college, they can't come on Tuesday.
• 4:03
  Matt: Exactly.
• 4:04
  Tad Eggleston: Just live with it.
• 4:05
  Matt: And now I'm feeling happy content, because they're home safe, I had a great weekend, and now I'm talking to my buddy Tad, and Chris, and Lee, and
• 4:16
  Matt: This is great stuff, I'm really excited.
• 4:18
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, though, I think you and I should text Belle every 5 minutes or so to give her a hard time for the life choices where she decided not to be part of this book club tonight, but instead study?
• 4:29
  Matt: Buddy, how y'all.
• 4:32
  Lee Woods: What a weird…
• 4:34
  Matt: sharpened the stick, and that's what she chose to do. I was like, damn.
• 4:40
  Matt: But, no, seriously, like, this is really…
• 4:42
  Tad Eggleston: Belle does love the book. She's the one that you're sending… er, you sent… copies to.
• 4:47
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, nice.
• 4:48
  Tad Eggleston: She's just… she was… this is her dad. Yes.
• 4:52
  Christopher Sebela: I'm sorry. Okay.
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: She loved the book. She's the reason that we chose this for the book club, because she loved what she'd seen so much that we wanted to give her an excuse to read it, but she's, like, a good student, and even though she got into her doctoral program, apparently there's no senioritis in college.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: I never got to senior year in college, so I didn't know this, but…
• 5:17
  Matt: Well, yeah, she's… she's got a lot on her plate, so…
• 5:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 5:23
  Tad Eggleston: I say it all lovingly, she's allowed to not be here.
• 5:27
  Tad Eggleston: As long as she's at Saga tomorrow night.
• 5:29
  Matt: Oh, shoot that book.
• 5:30
  Tad Eggleston: The book club was, like, literally made for her.
• 5:32
  Matt: We literally talked about it before she left.
• 5:35
  Tad Eggleston: So don't worry.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Aw.
• 5:41
  Christopher Sebela: I guess it's me. I'm, Christopher Sibela, I'm a writer, written a bunch of comics and other stuff,
• 5:52
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, word, I'm feeling, slothful.
• 5:56
  Christopher Sebela: this is the most productive I will be all day today, is having this conversation, because otherwise…
• 6:03
  Christopher Sebela: I would just be watching Taskmaster with my dog,
• 6:07
  Tad Eggleston: Your dog did look up when you said slothful.
• 6:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 6:11
  Matt: gave you a dirty look. She's like, no, I'm slothful. You're… you're doing something.
• 6:17
  Christopher Sebela: I'm doing something, she doesn't understand what, but, yeah.
• 6:21
  Christopher Sebela: You understand something that's happening.
• 6:23
  Tad Eggleston: And Zola is just adorably in the background. She's one of the few animals that appears on the podcast that makes me sometimes wish that we were,
• 6:35
  Tad Eggleston: a video podcast, because I feel like we could just zoom in on Zola and stop talking, and we'd go viral.
• 6:42
  Lee Woods: There you go.
• 6:43
  Tad Eggleston: 100%.
• 6:44
  Christopher Sebela: It's… I tend to give her center stage on Zooms, that's why I'm, like, over in the corner. Right. She's much more interesting to look at than I am, so…
• 6:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, I know Lee has questions, so I'm gonna let Lee lead tonight.
• 6:58
  Lee Woods: Boom.
• 6:59
  Lee Woods: Chris, I…
• 7:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you should butter him up first, because, I mean, you and I.
• 7:02
  Christopher Sebela: No, no, you don't have to, like, you can just dive right in.
• 7:06
  Tad Eggleston: It's a book club, man, we're supposed to also talk about how much we love the book. Okay, that's fair. Yeah, yeah.
• 7:12
  Lee Woods: Don't get me wrong, this is not a criticism question.
• 7:15
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know what's… No, no.
• 7:19
  Lee Woods: So, let me preface this by saying,
• 7:23
  Lee Woods: One of the things that I have read, and I've…
• 7:27
  Lee Woods: By the way, I'm a relatively new comic reader. I've been reading May for the past, like, 8, 10 years.
• 7:35
  Tad Eggleston: Which isn't new anymore.
• 7:37
  Matt: Yeah.
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, just because you hang out with, like.
• 7:40
  Tad Eggleston: total comic nerds that have been doing it for, like…
• 7:44
  Matt: You're in the closet.
• 7:44
  Tad Eggleston: years in a row. Like, when you say new, I'm like…
• 7:49
  Matt: 6 months.
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, okay. I'm like, I've known you for too long to call it new, and I met you through comics.
• 7:57
  Lee Woods: That is true. So, new-ish, I suppose.
• 8:01
  Lee Woods: I know one of the things that I've noticed is that some writers.
• 8:07
  Lee Woods: struggle to write other characters. So let's just say, like, I know one of the main criticisms, Punisher fan, that
• 8:16
  Lee Woods: there was a female writer writing Punisher, or a…
• 8:22
  Tad Eggleston: sucked, because Becky Clunan did a really great job.
• 8:26
  Lee Woods: And then we have, like, a white writer writing about Black characters. My question for you is,
• 8:35
  Lee Woods: When it came to writing these characters, Evita, Charlie, and later on, Cersei, where did you draw… get that inspiration from, to draw or write about these characters?
• 8:46
  Matt: Do you mean female lesbian characters as a man?
• 8:50
  Lee Woods: Yeah.
• 8:51
  Matt: Awesome, because that's… that's a question I had.
• 8:56
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, like, I mean, I'm queer, so I tend to, like, center, queer narratives,
• 9:06
  Christopher Sebela: I guess it's part and parcel,
• 9:09
  Christopher Sebela: like, as a, you know, like a white, dude, like, I feel like there's been…
• 9:16
  Christopher Sebela: more than enough stories about white dudes. Like, I've certainly spent the majority of my life being fed stories about white dudes, and I just did…
• 9:26
  Christopher Sebela: I wasn't interested in, in contributing, to, like, it just wasn't very interesting to me. Like, end…
• 9:35
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, to a certain degree,
• 9:39
  Christopher Sebela: for a while there, I think my answer was that, like.
• 9:43
  Christopher Sebela: and I think it still holds true, is that, like, there's a certain…
• 9:48
  Christopher Sebela: I think there's a certain autopilot you can get into when you're writing characters who are not too dissimilar from yourself. Like, you're just like, well, I know what it's like to be that kind of person,
• 10:02
  Christopher Sebela: And, like…
• 10:04
  Christopher Sebela: It's… it's… it's harder when you're writing about people who you don't, you know, share a lot of major characteristics with.
• 10:14
  Christopher Sebela: and I don't know, it just keeps me on my toes a little bit. That's more of a secondary characteristic at this point, like.
• 10:21
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I don't know, and I just…
• 10:25
  Christopher Sebela: you know, I always approach it, and, like, I want to write,
• 10:30
  Christopher Sebela: characters that I enjoy writing, and you know, be as…
• 10:37
  Christopher Sebela: good at it as I can.
• 10:41
  Christopher Sebela: So, I don't know, I don't worry about getting blowback. One is that, like, you know, you don't get a ton of blowback on creator-owned stuff.
• 10:49
  Christopher Sebela: As compared to, like, yeah, if, if, you know, like, if I was writing a Blade comic or something, like, I would…
• 10:57
  Christopher Sebela: Totally accept,
• 10:59
  Christopher Sebela: that, just because there's a lot more voices, there's a lot, like, but, I don't know, with, like, creator-owned, indie comics, for lack of a better word, like…
• 11:09
  Christopher Sebela: There's not as much,
• 11:14
  Christopher Sebela: not as much expectation, I don't know, and I just feel like, you know, I just treat all my characters as, like.
• 11:21
  Christopher Sebela: people, like, and I try not to, you know, fall into tropes or,
• 11:29
  Christopher Sebela: cliches, like, yeah, I'm just, you know, I'm generating people, and a lot of the… it's also easy… easier, I guess, a little bit, because I… I don't write, like.
• 11:41
  Christopher Sebela: super upstanding people. Like, I'm much, much more interested in characters who are… who are broken, or a little, screwed up.
• 11:50
  Christopher Sebela: or a lot screwed up, who are not, you know, 100% pleasant all the time. Not, like, full-on hateable characters, but I certainly, like to enjoy
• 12:01
  Christopher Sebela: Characters where it's a little tough to,
• 12:05
  Christopher Sebela: You know, a little tough to, like, fall in love with them, like…
• 12:10
  Christopher Sebela: But I also treat that as, like, a success, like, if I can make you care about this character who's kind of a selfish asshole, I feel like I'm… I'm doing my job correctly.
• 12:21
  Matt: Yup.
• 12:22
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it's a lot of stuff, but yeah, it's just… I don't know, when I… when I came up with Crowded, like.
• 12:30
  Christopher Sebela: When I started thinking about, you know, who the main characters were gonna be, like, Charlie and Vita just sort of, you know, pretty quickly popped into my head. Not fully formed, but, pretty, pretty well formed. So, I didn't, I didn't question the process too much.
• 12:48
  Matt: Okay, so following on that, What, what?
• 12:54
  Matt: made you think
• 12:56
  Matt: crowdfunding a murder, because it's brilliant, and I feel like we really need that right now, in today's society. And see, I'm the complete… I mean, it's brilliant, but no, we do not need that right now. No, I feel like…
• 13:12
  Tad Eggleston: Have you seen what's being done with poly markets already?
• 13:16
  Lee Woods: And this is the part where I say I'm a mandated reporter, legally, you know?
• 13:23
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I don't know…
• 13:26
  Christopher Sebela: couldn't tell you… I mean, I could tell you, I mean, I remember exactly where I was, like, when I…
• 13:34
  Christopher Sebela: Add the idea, kind of… I mean, I had the first idea about it in, like, 20…
• 13:43
  Christopher Sebela: 13, I think? 2012? I think, things were…
• 13:52
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, politically, things weren't as screwed up as they are now, but there were certainly a lot of screwed up stuff, and…
• 14:00
  Christopher Sebela: It was just the notion of, like, you know, the fact that we have all these elected representatives who
• 14:07
  Christopher Sebela: don't… don't serve the people who elect… yeah. And that, you know, the only way to really
• 14:15
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, the easiest way to get these people to do what the people want them to do would be to threaten them.
• 14:22
  Matt: In a way…
• 14:23
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, in a way where, like, they couldn't just brush it off, so, like, if you…
• 14:27
  Christopher Sebela: If you go online and see that, you know,
• 14:30
  Christopher Sebela: 4,000 people are donating money,
• 14:35
  Christopher Sebela: you know, have raised, $2 million to have you assassinated, like, that would certainly, like, straighten out your behavior a bit, and make you think, like…
• 14:44
  Tad Eggleston: Though I thought you were depressingly accurate in the book, too, with the fact that it stopped being used on politicians and starting to be used on normal people remarkably fast.
• 14:55
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, yeah, no, that seems like, yeah, the easiest prediction of all is, like, if they came up with something like that, like…
• 15:01
  Christopher Sebela: And like… I think one of the… one of the people in,
• 15:09
  Christopher Sebela: and the company that started Reaper says it, that, like, you know, the, the chemicals in your brain don't know the difference, like.
• 15:18
  Christopher Sebela: Like, if you put out a hit on a politician, or if you put out a hit on the dude down the hall who
• 15:25
  Christopher Sebela: annoys the shit out of you.
• 15:27
  Matt: Right.
• 15:28
  Christopher Sebela: like, the same chemicals are getting tripped in your brain, so yeah, and it would be a lot easier to get that sort of satisfaction that your money actually did something. So, it seemed, yeah.
• 15:40
  Christopher Sebela: It's with most of these things, like, starts out with something of a noble vision, and then just becomes…
• 15:46
  Christopher Sebela: Bastardized.
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: As much as crowdfunded murder can be noble.
• 15:52
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a very low bar of ability there. I dig it, and I dig it.
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the executives at the end really hit that note, too, in terms of
• 16:11
  Tad Eggleston: We just wanted to figure out if we could do it. We thought it was… We were just playing…
• 16:18
  Matt: Can I just tell you…
• 16:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it's really profitable!
• 16:20
  Matt: I just… I just want to say thank you for the way you explained how it all came to be, using the teen…
• 16:30
  Matt: hackers to mansplain it, because I'm like, how does this work? The whole time?
• 16:36
  Christopher Sebela: No, I agree that.
• 16:37
  Matt: And you explain it, I'm like, oh my god, this is awesome writing.
• 16:41
  Tad Eggleston: Also note that it was teams that were able to reverse engineer it, not…
• 16:45
  Christopher Sebela: Earth.
• 16:46
  Christopher Sebela: Well, yeah, that, like, I knew we had to have an info dump somewhere.
• 16:51
  Matt: Yes, yes. Just to, like, you did it brilliantly. Thank you.
• 16:54
  Christopher Sebela: But, yeah, yeah, no, thank you. Like, I was pretty excited when I…
• 16:59
  Christopher Sebela: stumbled onto, like, yeah, having the kids, yeah. It all just… a lot of this book just, like, sort of just plucked it out of thin air, like, some of my favorite stuff. Yeah, it just sort of… like, I never had the kids…
• 17:16
  Christopher Sebela: set up as anything approaching, like, characters that we'd ever see again, and, like, then when they manifested, then they become
• 17:24
  Christopher Sebela: Part of the fabric of the book, and become wrapped up in the whole ending of the book, so…
• 17:29
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, whoever serves that to me, I'm grateful to them.
• 17:35
  Lee Woods: Well, one thing.
• 17:36
  Christopher Sebela: Or whatever.
• 17:37
  Lee Woods: I'd like to sort of highlight as well is something that you said about these characters, because I'll be upfront with you.
• 17:44
  Lee Woods: the first two and a half volumes, Charlie annoyed the ever-loving.
• 17:49
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, yeah.
• 17:51
  Matt: I think so.
• 17:52
  Matt: to.
• 17:53
  Lee Woods: I…
• 17:54
  Lee Woods: But… and I'm gonna go with this two ways. I'll go with it as a consumer, as a reader, and also as a clinician.
• 18:01
  Lee Woods: is… it annoyed the shit out of me. I was like, really? Like, I don't know how…
• 18:07
  Lee Woods: oblivious, naive, willfully ignorant you need to be. It's like, if I have a $2 million hit on me, I want to comply with a defender and tell them everything.
• 18:19
  Matt: Walmart!
• 18:19
  Lee Woods: I want everything. You're gonna know everything.
• 18:22
  Matt: Or I'm gonna kill myself and collect.
• 18:25
  Lee Woods: And the people after me are gonna be okay. Now, it's… it's like, why? Like… Fucking why, right?
• 18:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but the…
• 18:36
  Tad Eggleston: That also makes one of the twists, like, how on earth did I not see this? How on earth did I manage to not see this coming?
• 18:46
  Lee Woods: Yeah, and this is where the sort of analytical part of me comes in, is that
• 18:53
  Lee Woods: I felt for her. Like, I did…
• 18:56
  Lee Woods: Feel for her after she's like, I don't like myself.
• 19:02
  Lee Woods: Right? Despite that being a part of, like, a drunken experience, it was like…
• 19:07
  Lee Woods: it's like, I just wanted someone else to care, and going back to that sort of salad, and the comment called a salad, it's… who wants to sort of take part in that salad?
• 19:17
  Lee Woods: and contribute to my hit, right? Just if… do people care about me? Because even negative attention is still attention.
• 19:25
  Matt: That's right.
• 19:27
  Lee Woods: So…
• 19:29
  Lee Woods: that aspect is… and that's what triggered for me the resistance side. Yeah, there was a resistance that Charlie didn't want to talk about anything.
• 19:39
  Lee Woods: But also, for her, it was…
• 19:42
  Lee Woods: Her owning up to that effect of herself, of how much she didn't like herself.
• 19:47
  Lee Woods: how much she hated herself, even. So, the way you did that, and you're very… Yeah, humorous way.
• 19:55
  Lee Woods: Because how else do we deal with dark shit? Like, a murder hit?
• 19:59
  Christopher Sebela: Right.
• 20:00
  Lee Woods: with humor, right? It was…
• 20:04
  Lee Woods: in my experience, very well executed, and even to some degree, there was a little bit of catharsis there for me. It was like, holy shit, yeah, I can understand that.
• 20:14
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, like, ultimately… like…
• 20:20
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, I needed Charlie to be this agent of chaos, and
• 20:26
  Christopher Sebela: You know, I mean, like,
• 20:28
  Christopher Sebela: You know, a lot of this book… shares DNA with… like,
• 20:34
  Christopher Sebela: you know, like, 80s buddy comedies, most specifically the movie Midnight Run. So, like, you have to have, like, the… I don't know, like, that dynamic is, like, you have the…
• 20:47
  Christopher Sebela: the professional, the no-nonsense person, and then you have the person who's constantly throwing a monkey wrench. So, I wanted to have that, but then I also wanted, like, yeah, to have, have it not just be, like.
• 21:00
  Christopher Sebela: I didn't want her to, like, suddenly, like…
• 21:03
  Christopher Sebela: Like, oh, now I'm a better person. It's like, probably doesn't…
• 21:07
  Christopher Sebela: necessarily become a better person, she just becomes, like.
• 21:11
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, a less terrible person? .
• 21:14
  Matt: Slightly more self-aware.
• 21:17
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, like, you know, yeah, I always have a problem where, like, yeah, like, within the archivist story, like, like, oh, I'm completely different at the end, like…
• 21:29
  Christopher Sebela: You know, I… not to say that people don't change, but I think people don't change that dramatically. You know, it's a very… it's a very slow process.
• 21:38
  Christopher Sebela: So… Yeah, it was more about just sort of digging up why Charlie is such a shithead.
• 21:48
  Christopher Sebela: And… but… yeah, I got tons of feedback throughout it, like… like, when I had Charlie and Vita hook up, I remember getting an email from a reader saying, like, yeah, I'm not gonna read the book anymore if you're gonna have them together, because Charlie is awful.
• 22:02
  Christopher Sebela: And I was like, okay, like, I was like, okay, fair enough, like, you know, I can tell you that, like, it's not gonna turn into
• 22:10
  Christopher Sebela: you know, a love story from here, like, Charlie is still Charlie, she's still gonna fuck it up,
• 22:17
  Christopher Sebela: So, but yeah, like…
• 22:21
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, I always loved Charlie the whole way through, of course, because I was, you know, directing her to do
• 22:28
  Christopher Sebela: these terrible things. But… but yeah, like, and I think I didn't even really know a lot of, like, the…
• 22:37
  Christopher Sebela: you know, like, I knew that… we're getting into spoilers here, right? Like…
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we actually warned at the end of the first part that there would likely be spoilers, so I'll remind people again that if for whatever reason you haven't read Crowded, please pause the recording, go to your local library, bookstore, or go to Chris's website and order them, and he'll sign them.
• 22:59
  Christopher Sebela: Yes.
• 22:59
  Tad Eggleston: And read Crowded.
• 23:01
  Tad Eggleston: You can get all 3 of them for 40 bucks, which is a good deal.
• 23:05
  Christopher Sebela: like, her… you know, I always knew…
• 23:09
  Christopher Sebela: I'll be muddy. I mean, I always knew who was behind the campaign, from the beginning, but I never was quite sure why, so, I mean…
• 23:19
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I don't map out books, like, fully to the… like, I leave a lot of wiggle room where it's like, well, I don't know what's going… so, you know, I sort of figured out Charlie as I went along,
• 23:32
  Christopher Sebela: Which makes the whole process more enjoyable for me. Like, if I knew every…
• 23:38
  Christopher Sebela: detail walking into Issue 1, like, it would…
• 23:41
  Christopher Sebela: would start to feel a little, I don't know, mechanical to me, so, so yeah, figuring that out was, like, a big…
• 23:48
  Christopher Sebela: a big moment for me, and figuring out how to, I don't know, have Charlie vocalize it without it being, you know, a sort of, like, a very special episode of Crowded-type vibe.
• 24:03
  Christopher Sebela: So, yeah, it was tough to, like, still be crowded, but get into that stuff.
• 24:10
  Christopher Sebela: So yeah, I'm glad it… I'm glad it hit for you like that, because I was, I was pretty happy with…
• 24:16
  Christopher Sebela: How that all came together.
• 24:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think I'm probably in the minority, but it's because it reminds me of such a good friend of mine. I was always…
• 24:28
  Tad Eggleston: Enamored of Charlie. I always viewed her… Outgoingness, over-the-topness, seeming…
• 24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Unawareness more as a shield than…
• 24:49
  Christopher Sebela: Unique.
• 24:50
  Tad Eggleston: as a sign of her character, so, like, even when you said, I don't want people to think that Charlie suddenly became a good person, and I'm sitting there going, I never thought Charlie wasn't a good person. I thought Charlie just had this big wall that she put up.
• 25:08
  Tad Eggleston: Against, like, everybody.
• 25:10
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and that was actually something that I always liked about her.
• 25:21
  Tad Eggleston: Even… even as it… it made it really hard at times to go.
• 25:26
  Tad Eggleston: Charlie. Charlie, please! Can't you see that Vita isn't running away? She does actually want to keep you alive.
• 25:35
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah.
• 25:36
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, I mean, I like the fact that, like.
• 25:40
  Christopher Sebela: The… how people feel about these characters is not universal, like…
• 25:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 25:45
  Christopher Sebela: I love having a contingent of people who are like, I cannot stand Charlie.
• 25:51
  Christopher Sebela: You know, it's a reaction, so as long as I'm getting a reaction at my most base level, that satisfies.
• 26:01
  Lee Woods: the…
• 26:02
  Tad Eggleston: Excellent.
• 26:03
  Lee Woods: Sorry, the, that… when you mentioned, like, them hooking up to it, it reminded me…
• 26:08
  Lee Woods: of, the movie The Bodyguard, right, with Whitney Houston and, Kevin Foster. Versus, like, oh, okay.
• 26:15
  Lee Woods: Well, it was…
• 26:18
  Lee Woods: I can't sing, we're not doing that. But it was like, okay, because there was that moment, it was like, come on, man, we're doing this? Okay. Of course you would, you idiot. Think about Charlie, specifically. And even then, man, it was like, the way that you wrote it.
• 26:35
  Lee Woods: in the next volume, I was like, no, that was part of her plan to keep her around.
• 26:38
  Lee Woods: To make a cake. Right. Like, oh… Oh.
• 26:43
  Lee Woods: Okay, she's not as… naive as she seems, right? I…
• 26:50
  Lee Woods: Yeah, it's just… it was very well executed, man. Like, that's very much a kudos, tip of the hat to you.
• 26:57
  Christopher Sebela: Thanks. Thank you.
• 27:00
  Lee Woods: Now, here's what I hated… no, I'm just kidding.
• 27:02
  Christopher Sebela: I'm gonna ask a variation on a pair of questions that I asked to Ted and Ro.
• 27:10
  Tad Eggleston: the variation is, like, I wanted them to talk about when they got scripts in, and for you, I want you to switch that to, like, when you saw the way that they realized it.
• 27:24
  Tad Eggleston: But talk to me about… I mean, because the other thing, like, we kind of realized together is… and, you know, it was a… it was a big enough and enjoyable enough deal to them that, like, they… they're like… it feels like it was yesterday, and then we realized it was actually a really long time ago.
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: You guys started this journey almost 10 years ago. It was… it was split up by a pandemic.
• 27:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right. It went from single issues to… to a trade for the end, you know, this was… this was a long, interesting journey, so…
• 27:59
  Tad Eggleston: I want to know both in terms of the story itself and in terms of the experience.
• 28:09
  Tad Eggleston: What do you look back and feel best about. You look back on and go, oh, that was…
• 28:18
  Tad Eggleston: Something really cool.
• 28:21
  Christopher Sebela: The, you know, just landing… Ro and Ted.
• 28:30
  Christopher Sebela: like… The fact that, like, these two amazing artists were just, like.
• 28:36
  Christopher Sebela: looking around for something, you know, something of their own to work on, and I had something, and, like, our,
• 28:44
  Christopher Sebela: our friend and the editor of the book, Juliet, managed to put us together. It's one of those, like, I've had a couple moments of, like, weird,
• 28:55
  Christopher Sebela: Good timing in comics.
• 28:58
  Christopher Sebela: Like, my very first book,
• 29:01
  Christopher Sebela: high crimes, like, I met Ibrahim just on a… There's a whole series of.
• 29:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I thank you for that, too, because he's… he's another guy that's become a friend that I met because of… between Ted Rowe and Ibrahim, we're talking, like, 3 of my 10 or 12 favorite people in comics.
• 29:20
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, me too.
• 29:21
  Christopher Sebela: But yeah, like, meeting Ibrahim was, like, if I had done one thing differently, then, our mutual friend would not have introduced us, like, you know, so same with Rowan's head. Like, the fact that I, you know, got to work with these amazing artists who…
• 29:38
  Christopher Sebela: seemingly had flown under people's radars until then.
• 29:44
  Tad Eggleston: There's still not enough on people's radars.
• 29:47
  Tad Eggleston: But, they did get… Catch and Sniff book last year.
• 29:51
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, well, I feel like when the Worth fan comes out, like, that'll be, like.
• 29:55
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 29:57
  Christopher Sebela: Anybody who's sleeping on them is gonna wake up, so…
• 30:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 30:01
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, the whole journey of Crowded was just, like, you know, like, it was the…
• 30:07
  Christopher Sebela: You know,
• 30:09
  Christopher Sebela: it was the fastest yes I've ever gotten pitching it to a publisher. Like, you know, I sent it to Eric Stevenson at Image, and I think, like.
• 30:20
  Christopher Sebela: Two hours later, I got a yes.
• 30:22
  Christopher Sebela: Which is… crazy, like, I was, like.
• 30:25
  Christopher Sebela: I was like, okay, well, I'll… I'm gonna bunker… maybe it wasn't that quick, maybe it was the next day, but still, like, you know, you send it a pitch, and you're not…
• 30:33
  Christopher Sebela: expecting, like, okay, I'm gonna get an answer right away, like, you…
• 30:36
  Christopher Sebela: just like, okay, well, I'm gonna, be waiting a couple weeks. But the, yeah, the quickness with which he said yes,
• 30:46
  Christopher Sebela: just, I don't know, everything just came together so easily, and… yeah, like… I don't know,
• 30:57
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, just everything about it was… it's very hard for me to pick out a best moment,
• 31:04
  Christopher Sebela: Because it was just responsible for so many,
• 31:07
  Christopher Sebela: different highlights, for the, you know, like, 6 years that we worked on it. You know, I got to go to the Eisner's,
• 31:16
  Christopher Sebela: Again, which, after… getting nominated For the first…
• 31:22
  Christopher Sebela: time, or maybe it was the second time, or no, yeah, like, I didn't think I'd ever be nominated for an Eisner again, so the fact that we got two nominations in a row,
• 31:37
  Christopher Sebela: that was super cool. I don't… yeah, I don't know. It's, yeah, I can't chip out any, like.
• 31:44
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair.
• 31:46
  Tad Eggleston: How about returning artwork?
• 31:48
  Tad Eggleston: that there are pages that stand out to you as, oh my god, I didn't know that that was what I wrote.
• 31:56
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, again, a majority of it because, you know, pretty early on in the process,
• 32:05
  Christopher Sebela: you know, Row and Ted asked, like, would you mind if we added panels? And I was like, no. And so, every page
• 32:14
  Christopher Sebela: That came back was, like…
• 32:17
  Christopher Sebela: what I had written was there, but it was just enhanced and improved. You know, and they had free license to add all
• 32:26
  Christopher Sebela: the different jokes they wanted to in there. Like, I was very… you know, I was not…
• 32:33
  Christopher Sebela: Like, any background jokes you see in there, like, art…
• 32:36
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, we talked about those. We talked about a lot of those. I think the way Ted put it was, if…
• 32:45
  Tad Eggleston: If the restaurant or place is interacted with, then Chris probably named it. If it was just in the background, that was all us.
• 32:53
  Christopher Sebela: Right.
• 32:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 32:56
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, they, you know… Kremlin cream.
• 32:59
  Christopher Sebela: The only background gag I can truly take credit for is,
• 33:06
  Christopher Sebela: I think… I think is in issue one, and it's when Charlie's looking at her DVR, and one of the shows listed is a limb adoption.
• 33:16
  Christopher Sebela: Like, that's mine. Which is a… a stupid…
• 33:21
  Christopher Sebela: there used to be this show on TV called Elimidate.
• 33:24
  Christopher Sebela: Where it'd be, like, a bachelor, and then 3 bachelorettes, and they all went on a date together, and as it progressed.
• 33:32
  Christopher Sebela: He kicked one of the… until he, you know, so he was eliminating dates until he had the one, and…
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: A limit option feels like the…
• 33:40
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I immediately…
• 33:42
  Tad Eggleston: Natural.
• 33:42
  Christopher Sebela: then had the thought, and it's been a running joke, only to me, in the year since, and I was like, finally, I'm writing a book where a limit option makes sense, in the world building.
• 33:56
  Christopher Sebela: But yeah, no, I mean, like, again, in issue one, and I own this page, it's the, the, the cutaway scene of Vita's house.
• 34:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 34:06
  Matt: It's a good pitch.
• 34:07
  Christopher Sebela: Like… Yeah, like, blew me away the first time I saw it.
• 34:12
  Matt: They did a great deal of research.
• 34:19
  Christopher Sebela: Exhibit?
• 34:19
  Tad Eggleston: about that. They did! They looked into, like.
• 34:25
  Tad Eggleston: average, average, like, floor size, and average, you know, for the, the, the late 19th century Victorian, like, they…
• 34:37
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, it makes sense.
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: All sorts of research. I mean, I got to laugh about that, you know, again, listeners, this was… this was an hour ago. For me, it was earlier this afternoon,
• 34:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I laughed so hard, I'm like, that is… that is a such… such a you guys thing to do, and, like, I kinda saw it, and I'm, like, probably the only person who even thought about whether or not you'd done that, and I wouldn't have if I didn't know you.
• 35:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:04
  Christopher Sebela: Josh.
• 35:05
  Christopher Sebela: So yeah, like, I don't know, like… Yeah, like, you know, they…
• 35:13
  Christopher Sebela: They sent over initial drawings of Charlie and Vida.
• 35:19
  Christopher Sebela: which were very different from Charlie, but, like, then the next pass they sent over, it was Charlie and Vita, like, so it's… there wasn't…
• 35:29
  Christopher Sebela: But, like, Yeah, it's just that everybody felt super, like, on their game and assured in that whole process.
• 35:37
  Christopher Sebela: I was probably, you know, the least self-assured of anybody, because I… I don't know, because I'm just a panicky dude.
• 35:45
  Christopher Sebela: So,
• 35:49
  Christopher Sebela: yeah, I can't say… like, probably the one thing that I specifically remember being really blown away by was the, there's a two-page spread of them on the train.
• 36:01
  Christopher Sebela: In Volume 2, when they're taking the… the… the Hyperloop to Vegas, and the,
• 36:09
  Christopher Sebela: It's when everybody starts attacking them, and the… literally the whole two… Like, it goes around,
• 36:16
  Christopher Sebela: Like, and they made it work. Like, there's no way I could script something like that.
• 36:21
  Christopher Sebela: And if I did, nobody would ever want to draw it.
• 36:25
  Christopher Sebela: So, yeah, no, there's just…
• 36:30
  Christopher Sebela: Like, you could just throw anything at Ro and Ted, and they would knock it out, like…
• 36:35
  Christopher Sebela: I was… I was never worried about giving them anything, because I knew
• 36:40
  Christopher Sebela: I knew they would… they would kill it, and they'd make it better than anything that I had written, so…
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: Is there any part of this that, that, that, like, 8 years later… cause, cause, like.
• 36:56
  Tad Eggleston: I know that, like, there's a part of me reading it, and it came up with Ro and Ted as well, that it's like, goddammit, we weren't supposed to be right about this. This was supposed to be a joke. Is there any part of this that you're like.
• 37:11
  Tad Eggleston: Man, I really wish that either I hadn't seen this coming, or…
• 37:18
  Tad Eggleston: Or the world had taken my warning and run with it, rather than run toward it.
• 37:28
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 37:30
  Christopher Sebela: No, I mean, like, yeah, I don't, like…
• 37:33
  Christopher Sebela: You know, we still haven't nailed, like, the really big… you know, there's still not a,
• 37:38
  Christopher Sebela: a crowdfunding platform for assassination. I feel like if that ever happens, like, then I would really feel something. But, like, there has been… an Uber for Bodyguard has been introduced.
• 37:50
  Christopher Sebela: I think a couple times since… Crowd had started,
• 37:57
  Christopher Sebela: I know at least one started while we were working on it, and then, but, like, even in the run-up to us, like, working on the book.
• 38:06
  Christopher Sebela: I remember getting anxious because, like, there was,
• 38:13
  Christopher Sebela: there were a bunch of, like, different new, sort of platforms popping up for, like, really right-wing people, the… and the only one I remember by name is,
• 38:24
  Christopher Sebela: There was one that was… it was Patreon, except you replaced the P with an H. It was Hatreon.
• 38:31
  Christopher Sebela: I was like, oh…
• 38:35
  Tad Eggleston: that they actually owned that part? That's…
• 38:38
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it was a thing, like…
• 38:40
  Tad Eggleston: Amazing.
• 38:41
  Christopher Sebela: He was up.
• 38:42
  Tad Eggleston: Really distinct.
• 38:42
  Christopher Sebela: Maybe…
• 38:44
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know if it ever actually came out, I just remember, like, reading about it and thinking, like.
• 38:49
  Christopher Sebela: Man, we really gotta, like… we gotta… this book has to start coming out, because the real world is already, like, starting.
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: Catching up.
• 38:56
  Christopher Sebela: ACES.
• 38:58
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 39:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm trying to think if, if.
• 39:04
  Christopher Sebela: you know, if there's anything I wish…
• 39:11
  Christopher Sebela: Like, I do wish, like, our book really delves into fantasy when they go to Oklahoma City.
• 39:18
  Tad Eggleston: I was literally gonna go there.
• 39:21
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, and it's a… it's a haven for queer people, like.
• 39:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 39:24
  Christopher Sebela: That was more, like, me putting a wish out into the world, but also was sort of based on a…
• 39:31
  Christopher Sebela: a real idea of, like, more of a political movement, but, like, I can't remember…
• 39:38
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, it was libertari… I read this book about these libertarians who all, like, move to
• 39:45
  Christopher Sebela: A town and kind of take it over and become, like, the voting bloc. And then, of course, everything starts going horribly wrong, including, like, bear attacks.
• 39:55
  Christopher Sebela: Can't remember the name of it, but
• 39:59
  Christopher Sebela: So, yeah, that's, like, as close to, like… I'm trying to think if there's anything else that, like…
• 40:05
  Christopher Sebela: I'm really hopeful would, come to fruition, but,
• 40:10
  Christopher Sebela: Well, there is an app at the end.
• 40:13
  Christopher Sebela: That, that once Vida has quit being, working for defense.
• 40:18
  Christopher Sebela: That's, like, it's called Karma, and it's, basically, like, people in need.
• 40:25
  Christopher Sebela: Sort of looking for someone to come help them.
• 40:29
  Christopher Sebela: Like… Yeah, that was sort of like a fiver, except for, Justice.
• 40:39
  Lee Woods: But…
• 40:39
  Christopher Sebela: Of course, any of that, if it actually came to exist, would be horribly warped and mutated from my utopian vision of it, so… I'm totally okay with everything we wrote staying in the book, but yeah, some stuff has escaped into the real world.
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: So… going back to Oklahoma City, I have to ask the…
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: To me, the first obvious question,
• 41:09
  Tad Eggleston: Why Oklahoma, and did it have anything to do with the musical?
• 41:14
  Christopher Sebela: Not… nothing to do with the musical, I just, like.
• 41:20
  Christopher Sebela: I never lived in Oklahoma. I lived in Kansas City, Missouri, so I lived near Oklahoma, and always knew it as a place where, like.
• 41:30
  Christopher Sebela: That was not very, friendly to, queer people.
• 41:36
  Christopher Sebela: So it just seemed like…
• 41:39
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, the… the least expected,
• 41:44
  Christopher Sebela: But also, I needed a place, like, because they were moving geographically from west to east, like, it had to be somewhere, between, you know, Vegas and Washington, DC.
• 41:58
  Christopher Sebela: So, it's the… and Oklahoma is right there, so,
• 42:06
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it was a number of different factors that I was just like, yeah, okay, this'll be,
• 42:12
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, this will be a good, I don't know, wish to put into the world, and it is not… very much not come true, but .
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Live in hope.
• 42:22
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah.
• 42:25
  Tad Eggleston: one day, one of the wishes in comic books has to come true, rather than just the warnings from comic books. Right. That's all I have to say.
• 42:33
  Tad Eggleston: Just once. One of the wishes.
• 42:36
  Matt: That way.
• 42:38
  Lee Woods: And, as someone that's lived in Oklahoma for about 3 years, I can definitely say your version of Oklahoma.
• 42:45
  Christopher Sebela: is way more fun. I would rather… Thank you.
• 42:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean…
• 42:53
  Tad Eggleston: But as I say that, though, with the wish casting, like, with our luck, it'll be something cool, but dumb, like web shooters.
• 43:03
  Tad Eggleston: Sure. Rather than actually getting one of the… one of the…
• 43:08
  Christopher Sebela: That'd be a pretty…
• 43:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you would…
• 43:09
  Christopher Sebela: shooters, like, I think that'd be here.
• 43:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I would love to have web shooters, but, like, so many of the substantial warnings of comics have come true.
• 43:18
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah.
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: It would be… it would be just… just like the world to finally give us something cool out of comics.
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: And it's just fun, rather than…
• 43:29
  Tad Eggleston: And then immediately gets used for evil, because you know that we'd have web shooters for, like…
• 43:34
  Tad Eggleston: 10 minutes before somebody decided to…
• 43:37
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, yeah, no.
• 43:38
  Tad Eggleston: It was something hated.
• 43:39
  Christopher Sebela: People would totally wreck it, yeah.
• 43:40
  Matt: No.
• 43:41
  Christopher Sebela: But I would just like to enjoy 10 minutes with a pair of web shooters.
• 43:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yup.
• 43:46
  Christopher Sebela: Before… before they were banned.
• 43:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 43:59
  Tad Eggleston: what I love… the most about crowded,
• 44:04
  Tad Eggleston: what I love the most about Ted and Ro's work, what I love the most about a lot of your work, though every once in a while you just go dark, dark, and while I love it, I'm sitting there going, come on, let me laugh a little.
• 44:16
  Christopher Sebela: Sure, sure.
• 44:19
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, Ted used a great word that's going to take me on a brief tangent, because Ted and Ro decided that, like, what they are is they're clowns. They don't take you away from reality, they give you a little bit of levity to go with your…
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: Which is where my tangent is. Have you returned to the Clown Hotel, or is it still a place?
• 44:44
  Tad Eggleston: I never want to come anywhere near again.
• 44:47
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, I thought about actually going back, last year, because it was the 10th anniversary.
• 44:54
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 44:55
  Christopher Sebela: But… The Clown Motel is under new ownership.
• 44:59
  Christopher Sebela: And it's… it's currently owned by people who… Who don't, like… Who get the joke?
• 45:08
  Christopher Sebela: It was much more fun when it… to me, at least, it was more fun when it was owned by people who did not understand
• 45:15
  Christopher Sebela: Why people thought it was creepy.
• 45:20
  Christopher Sebela: But the current owners definitely understand why people think it's creepy, and they've leaned way too hard into it.
• 45:26
  Christopher Sebela: So…
• 45:28
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
• 45:28
  Christopher Sebela: Unfortunately, now it looks like Like, it looks like a cheap haunted house.
• 45:33
  Christopher Sebela: And also, like.
• 45:37
  Christopher Sebela: I think they charge 3 times the room rate as when I stayed there. I think it's, like, 100 bucks a night to stay there, which it's not, like…
• 45:46
  Christopher Sebela: There's no world where paying $100 a night to stay in a clown motel makes any sense.
• 45:54
  Christopher Sebela: like, when I was there, it was, you know, it was like 30 bucks a night, which, like, still not great, but you could justify.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if Matt knows this, but Lee's looking at me really weird, that there's a… there's a clown motel in… is it… is it in Nevada, or…
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, in Nevada, that's really creepy, and do you spend a week or a month there?
• 46:16
  Matt: You told me this free time.
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: A month there, and wrote a book about it, and, and, yeah.
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: I recommend reading the book. The way I always refer to the book is Chris spent a month in this hotel, so none of us need to come within 50 miles of it.
• 46:34
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, that was… I mean, the whole reason I put the zine together
• 46:38
  Christopher Sebela: you know, there's, like, a prose book, that I wrote, but that was part of the Kickstarter
• 46:44
  Christopher Sebela: That I put up.
• 46:46
  Christopher Sebela: Chef.
• 46:48
  Christopher Sebela: Basically to pull the trigger on whether I would go or not.
• 46:53
  Christopher Sebela: But, but people, like, wouldn't stop asking me about it, so I finally just put together a zine all about it. And yeah, it encapsulates my 30 days living in central Nevada.
• 47:06
  Christopher Sebela: you know, like, 50 miles from a hospital in either direction.
• 47:12
  Christopher Sebela: A town where there was nothing to do except drink and do meth.
• 47:17
  Christopher Sebela: And just, yeah, living… Definitely.
• 47:20
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely the type of place that you want a clown motel and no hospital.
• 47:26
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it was just such a weird, messed-up town, that I had already gone to visit, and…
• 47:33
  Christopher Sebela: it was just a joke that got out of hand. I was like, what if I spent a month at the Klein Motel? And then I put up a Kickstarter.
• 47:42
  Christopher Sebela: And actively discourage people from contributing money, and it…
• 47:47
  Christopher Sebela: We hit goal in, like, 4 hours. It was terrible.
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, this is… this is… as I'm talking about… as I'm listening to you talk about actively discouraging people from putting up money, I have to ask, was that the genesis of Reaper?
• 48:03
  Christopher Sebela: I guess, to some degree, yeah. Because certainly, I think a majority of people, gave money because they wanted to watch a dude die in the desert. So,
• 48:16
  Christopher Sebela: So yeah, honestly, yeah, but I had already… actually, I had already had, the… the idea for
• 48:24
  Christopher Sebela: for Reaper by then, so…
• 48:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so it wasn't the Genesis.
• 48:28
  Christopher Sebela: worsted it.
• 48:32
  Tad Eggleston: It was the… it was the beta test.
• 48:36
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it was, it was me exploring the world of crowdfunding, so I would know what I was talking about.
• 48:43
  Christopher Sebela: That's a good explanation of why I did that, because I have no… I have no honest explanation of why I did that.
• 48:51
  Christopher Sebela: I think it was just to see if I could.
• 48:53
  Christopher Sebela: And then it turns out I could, so…
• 48:56
  Tad Eggleston: So now that I'm done with my tangent, what I really meant to ask, and the much more interesting question,
• 49:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, what makes this book… so powerful, so…
• 49:10
  Tad Eggleston: Wonderful, and such a good fit for this book club, is that even while… displaying…
• 49:22
  Tad Eggleston: Acts of resistance, acts of survival.
• 49:26
  Tad Eggleston: horrible circumstances.
• 49:29
  Tad Eggleston: you manage to bring joy to it. You manage to bring hope to it. You manage to bring love to it, you paint a very full
• 49:38
  Tad Eggleston: life tapestry.
• 49:40
  Tad Eggleston: I assume that that was your intent, but talk to me about the… the…
• 49:47
  Tad Eggleston: The process of managing to breathe that into something.
• 49:52
  Tad Eggleston: Managing to take something that could have just been a Chasebook.
• 49:56
  Tad Eggleston: or a John Wick shooter, and make it something
• 50:01
  Tad Eggleston: So much more, because the characters…
• 50:04
  Tad Eggleston: are fully fleshed out and driving the story.
• 50:09
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it was a, you know, I think when I initially conceived of it, it was a much more, like.
• 50:15
  Christopher Sebela: Serious, grim, dark story.
• 50:18
  Christopher Sebela: But I knew… personally.
• 50:21
  Christopher Sebela: Like, I knew it was a book I wanted to go longer than, say, like, 5 or 6 issues.
• 50:27
  Christopher Sebela: And I did not wanna…
• 50:30
  Christopher Sebela: One, I didn't want to, you know, live in that mind space for, you know, what turned out to be, you know, like, the 6 years that we worked on it.
• 50:42
  Christopher Sebela: But also, like, or maybe it was 4 years.
• 50:45
  Christopher Sebela: Regardless, I didn't want to, like… but also, I'm just…
• 50:49
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, I can't help but crack jokes.
• 50:52
  Christopher Sebela: So,
• 50:54
  Christopher Sebela: And I think having… I mean, I think a big part of it was Ro and Ted coming on board, sort of gave me permission to make it a bit…
• 51:04
  Christopher Sebela: more fun.
• 51:08
  Christopher Sebela: So that even though we're dealing with, like, dark and ugly stuff at its surface, there's no…
• 51:14
  Christopher Sebela: Like, we approach it comedically, sort of wilder than life, yeah, I mean,
• 51:25
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know, yeah, it was just like…
• 51:28
  Christopher Sebela: You know, when you initially think of an idea, you don't really know what it's going to be.
• 51:34
  Christopher Sebela: And for the longest time, all I had was the concept
• 51:40
  Christopher Sebela: I didn't have Charlie and Vita at all. I'd say for, like.
• 51:43
  Christopher Sebela: two years or so after I came up with it, I just had the idea, and I remember…
• 51:49
  Christopher Sebela: Pitching it to an editor.
• 51:51
  Christopher Sebela: That I was pretty friendly with, and he sent it back, with notes of, like, I think the concept is cool, but why should I care?
• 52:01
  Christopher Sebela: Which was a very big moment for me, creatively, because I was like, oh, that's the, like, that's the key to everything.
• 52:11
  Christopher Sebela: is, like, if I don't have characters.
• 52:14
  Christopher Sebela: Sort of front and center, then…
• 52:17
  Christopher Sebela: then all I have is just, like, a cool idea, and, like…
• 52:22
  Christopher Sebela: You know, anybody can come up with a cool idea, but that… Okay.
• 52:28
  Christopher Sebela: Unless there's some flesh and blood in front of it, behind it, then why should anybody care?
• 52:36
  Christopher Sebela: So I think, yeah, like, crystallizing it into Charlie and Vita, like, these two characters who were both fucked up in their own ways, and…
• 52:46
  Christopher Sebela: Still managing the, like, struggle to get by, like…
• 52:53
  Christopher Sebela: Just made it a little more human, and…
• 53:00
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, you know, there's screw-ups, so, there's… I don't know, there's… there's always something funny, about people, trying really hard and goofing it.
• 53:12
  Christopher Sebela: Not all the time, but, you know, if you can't laugh at your own goof-ups.
• 53:18
  Christopher Sebela: what can you laugh at? So, yeah, it was just, like, After a while, I…
• 53:26
  Christopher Sebela: I don't know what I would have done if somebody wanted me to do that book seriously. Like, it would have been…
• 53:33
  Christopher Sebela: No fun to write, less fun to read, and we certainly wouldn't be here talking about it now.
• 53:42
  Lee Woods: Yeah.
• 53:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that hits on why I get frustrated that, like, the Academy pays so little attention to comedies. Life…
• 53:51
  Tad Eggleston: very rarely is all serious, or all funny. Right, right.
• 53:57
  Tad Eggleston: like… We're having this conversation.
• 54:01
  Tad Eggleston: Because the world is really rough right now, so, like, Lee and I, and the Rice of Psychocomicology, and a long list of people who don't always manage to show up, but want to know what books we're reading, and have the option to, like, decided a year-plus ago that we need a monthly outlet.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: I decided that on top of the God knows how many other podcasts I record in a given month.
• 54:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
• 54:33
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, this book was an outlet for me, too. Like, you know, you know, we were working on it through…
• 54:40
  Christopher Sebela: majority of, of Trump's first term… Yeah, first term in office, and, like, yeah, it's very hard to, like.
• 54:48
  Christopher Sebela: It's… it's good to have something you can sort of pour all your, sort of anxiety and, worst-case scenarios into, and, like.
• 54:57
  Christopher Sebela: Turn it into a little bit of a joke. Makes it easier to kind of deal with
• 55:02
  Christopher Sebela: A lot of fear and uncertainty.
• 55:07
  Lee Woods: One of the things I definitely enjoyed, and you talked about the sort of humor aspect of it, was…
• 55:12
  Lee Woods: I know Rowan and Ted, like, I love the… how expression… full…
• 55:19
  Lee Woods: how much expression that Charlie had.
• 55:23
  Lee Woods: But then also, the running joke that I loved in the writing, and it was so funny to me, especially as an older sibling, I sometimes do this with my younger siblings, is like.
• 55:35
  Lee Woods: Talking as if Charlie wasn't there.
• 55:37
  Tad Eggleston: My favorite running gag.
• 55:39
  Lee Woods: About the entire thing.
• 55:41
  Lee Woods: Which is, like, it happens so often, it's just like, I… she would say it, like, I'm right here!
• 55:46
  Christopher Sebela: Right, right.
• 55:47
  Lee Woods: And I'm just like, No, no, you're not. You're the child. Go away.
• 55:52
  Lee Woods: But yeah, and again, I think you…
• 55:56
  Lee Woods: highlight the excellent point here, and I'm sitting here with, again, a Deadpole shirt, talking about a guy that has a tragic, is a fuck-up, and…
• 56:04
  Lee Woods: How he deals with it through humor, right?
• 56:07
  Lee Woods: Is that… it was that… balance that you had, and even with Vita being as serious as she was.
• 56:15
  Lee Woods: It's like… having those humorous moments, even for herself. And I think some of my favorite writing was when
• 56:25
  Lee Woods: she was… following Charlie to find her again, after she fired her.
• 56:30
  Lee Woods: Charlie fired Vita, and she's just talking to Dog, who she happens to name Doug.
• 56:37
  Lee Woods: And it's just like… Yeah.
• 56:39
  Lee Woods: It's like, I'm going through this, I'm still working through it, and I'm…
• 56:44
  Lee Woods: And in my head, I'm like, yeah, you're talking to a dog.
• 56:47
  Lee Woods: It's like, man, it's that humor, that balance, with the seriousness.
• 56:54
  Lee Woods: Of the moment was, again, high praise for me, so…
• 56:59
  Christopher Sebela: Ouch.
• 57:03
  Lee Woods: I gotta say, though, the dog… was…
• 57:08
  Lee Woods: For you, was there a particular reason for the dog? Was it just because you have your own dog as well, to include a dog in the story? Because…
• 57:16
  Lee Woods: It's like, even though the dog had, like, maybe 3 lines of bark, bark, it…
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: Bork, bork.
• 57:22
  Lee Woods: or… Excuse me.
• 57:24
  Lee Woods: Is that… I don't know, it seemed like to have a sense of,
• 57:31
  Lee Woods: The dog was a character of their own, if that makes any sense at all for me.
• 57:34
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:35
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I didn't have a dog at the time, so…
• 57:40
  Christopher Sebela: I was putting dogs in whatever book I could, and, like, I didn't have a plan.
• 57:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait, so that was the wish casting that came true?
• 57:52
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I guess so.
• 57:55
  Christopher Sebela: like, yeah, I didn't even… like, I had no plans for there to be a dog in this book. It was literally when I was writing
• 58:04
  Christopher Sebela: you know, that Charlie's initial recap of her first… you know, when she's sitting with Vita.
• 58:11
  Christopher Sebela: In the, in the restaurant, and explaining what happened to her over the last 24 hours, like.
• 58:18
  Christopher Sebela: when…
• 58:19
  Christopher Sebela: I had her being confronted by that old woman, I just… I put a dog in there, and then I had Charlie steal her dog, because I thought it was funny, to steal a dog from somebody who's trying to kill you.
• 58:33
  Christopher Sebela: And then… And then…
• 58:36
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, then suddenly dog was just a part of things, and I figured out a way to
• 58:41
  Christopher Sebela: incorporate dog, like, plot-wise. So dog kind of helps save the day.
• 58:48
  Christopher Sebela: when, he carries a gun, in his little harness while they're being, attacked by Trotter. And then…
• 58:59
  Christopher Sebela: Then it just felt like, oh, well, dog is now, like, this sort of weird child between the two of them.
• 59:06
  Christopher Sebela: Like… Yeah, I don't know. I just think,
• 59:12
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I just really wanted a dog.
• 59:14
  Christopher Sebela: In my own life, so, putting a dog… and it's…
• 59:20
  Christopher Sebela: the kind of dog that I would never want to own.
• 59:24
  Tad Eggleston: Like, a small, yappy dog.
• 59:28
  Christopher Sebela: But, but I think even… even working on Crowded, like, changed my mind about that, and now, like, I would totally get, like, a small little handbag dog.
• 59:38
  Christopher Sebela: But yeah, just another, like, you know, you know, if there… if there can…
• 59:46
  Christopher Sebela: if you could say there's one innocent in all of Crowded, it's dog. So I think just having that, that pure innocent sort of stuck in the middle of all this, sordidness.
• 59:57
  Christopher Sebela: Is fun. Like, dogs are just fun, so.
• 1:00:05
  Lee Woods: No, you're right. I didn't think about the innocent aspect of it, but I thought it was interesting, too, because, especially in several of the scenes, especially volumes 2 and 3, how
• 1:00:16
  Lee Woods: obviously in Volume 1 as well, because you mentioned the Trotter, incident, but it's also, like, how Vita had to go back and get Dog.
• 1:00:25
  Lee Woods: And then…
• 1:00:26
  Lee Woods: that brief, moment where Vita almost forgot the dog in this sort of break-in, so it was like…
• 1:00:34
  Lee Woods: It's… and even in some of the dialogue, they reference each other's mom and dad to the dog, so it's, like, very…
• 1:00:40
  Lee Woods: cool to see that sort of relationship, and I just wonder if that process was,
• 1:00:45
  Lee Woods: I don't want to say, like, intentional, sorry, poor word there, but how that sort of developed in that way, so… that was really cool.
• 1:00:54
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, just another one of those things I didn't plan for, and I just went with it when it showed up, and
• 1:01:00
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, that's sort of my favorite thing about writing, is leaving myself a lot of these blank spaces, and seeing what happens, and…
• 1:01:08
  Christopher Sebela: Usually, whatever worms its way into that blank space winds up being, like, one of my favorite things about it, so…
• 1:01:17
  Christopher Sebela: I got lucky with Crowded, yeah.
• 1:01:22
  Lee Woods: Well, Ryan Reynolds has the greatest book ever, so it's gotta mean something, right?
• 1:01:27
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah, no, I,
• 1:01:30
  Christopher Sebela: Like, and that's a legitimate…
• 1:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: about. Yeah.
• 1:01:34
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, the whole… the whole Ryan Reynolds thing is a whole story unto itself, but basically, like, we… we were…
• 1:01:41
  Christopher Sebela: We… we started following each other on Twitter and DMing with each other,
• 1:01:49
  Christopher Sebela: And I just decided to shoot my shot, and I was like.
• 1:01:53
  Christopher Sebela: But he told me he liked… he really liked my writing, so I was like, hey, like.
• 1:01:59
  Christopher Sebela: I'm looking for the ultimate pull quote, and I feel like you would be it.
• 1:02:04
  Christopher Sebela: So, I guess I'll reveal a secret of the Ryan Reynolds pull quote, which is that, like, so I asked him, I was like, could you, like, could I get a pull quote from you? And he's like.
• 1:02:16
  Christopher Sebela: Sure, he's like, I'm super busy right now, but if you write something and send it to me, I will edit it as I see fit and, send it back to you, with my approval.
• 1:02:27
  Christopher Sebela: So… so then I shot my second shot, which I was like, I'm gonna have him say that this is the greatest book ever.
• 1:02:34
  Christopher Sebela: And so I wrote that and sent it to him, and he was like.
• 1:02:40
  Christopher Sebela: like, sent it back with a couple edits. He's like, yep, looks good to me. So I was like, okay. Like.
• 1:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: brick.
• 1:02:47
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, like, I figure why, why make Ryan… like, if you're gonna put words in Ryan Reynolds' mouth, like, make him say the, the nicest possible thing he can about you.
• 1:02:57
  Matt: Absolutely.
• 1:03:00
  Christopher Sebela: So yeah, I tricked him into it somehow, I don't know how.
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: I love it. I love it.
• 1:03:05
  Lee Woods: That's amazing.
• 1:03:06
  Matt: I just love that it's legit. That's awesome.
• 1:03:09
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah, no, it's, like, I also got him to buy…
• 1:03:14
  Christopher Sebela: A full-page newspaper ad with a picture of my dog.
• 1:03:18
  Christopher Sebela: For… So, that's part of the… the… the Ryan Reynolds tale, which…
• 1:03:25
  Christopher Sebela: is way too long to go into. It would be, like, its own episode.
• 1:03:30
  Christopher Sebela: At this point.
• 1:03:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, one day, he's gotta option crowded and make it happen.
• 1:03:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he'd have to be the bad guy, because there's really no other role for him in the movie.
• 1:03:42
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, I mean, we all said amongst ourselves on the team that, like, he would make a very good trotter.
• 1:03:50
  Christopher Sebela: But, yeah, I don't know, yeah, like, honestly, I think, like.
• 1:03:57
  Christopher Sebela: There's that movie that came out two years ago called Jackpot, which really, like, kind of, I think really took a lot of the wind out of crowded sales, Hollywood-wise, because it was…
• 1:04:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I haven't seen it.
• 1:04:09
  Christopher Sebela: But what… I remember getting a lot of, social media posts directed at me.
• 1:04:17
  Christopher Sebela: Asking if we had gotten paid, for the movie Jackpot, so, but, you know, Hollywood.
• 1:04:26
  Tad Eggleston: Let me look it up. Oh my god, Ryan Reynolds wrote it. No, I'm kidding.
• 1:04:31
  Christopher Sebela: That would be the ultimate. Gotcha.
• 1:04:33
  Matt: That's horrible.
• 1:04:36
  Matt: Too funny.
• 1:04:37
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I think, I think, I think John Cena in it? .
• 1:04:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:04:42
  Tad Eggleston: It'd be funnier if it was, like, some ex of his that we didn't even know he'd dated.
• 1:04:49
  Tad Eggleston: It did only… it is only 5.8 stars on, on,
• 1:04:56
  Tad Eggleston: IMDB, but it does have John Cena and Awkwafina in it.
• 1:05:00
  Christopher Sebela: Right, right. And yeah, again, like, I couldn't tell you… like, I remember watching the trailer.
• 1:05:07
  Christopher Sebela: And being, like.
• 1:05:10
  Christopher Sebela: well, I don't know why people are bringing this up to me, like, this doesn't seem very similar.
• 1:05:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's not really. It feels more Shirley Jackson than…
• 1:05:22
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it's close enough for perception, I guess, so, you know, but never say never, like, you know, something could happen with it, but we got to make the book that we wanted,
• 1:05:34
  Christopher Sebela: with no interference, so I'm… yeah, like, if all we have is the book, then…
• 1:05:43
  Christopher Sebela: It well exceeds my expectations of what we're gonna do.
• 1:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: That's a… that's a…
• 1:05:50
  Tad Eggleston: a good place to be, both in terms of what you got to do and how you feel about it.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: Matt, you've been nodding your head at a lot. Is it just because we're asking all the good questions, or… No, I just…
• 1:06:03
  Matt: Everything you're saying, I'm agreeing with. I'm like, yes, yes, yes!
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: My last, and this is a relatively minor question, but, like, again, what I love so much
• 1:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: about this book has to do a lot with the depth of the world, how everything has some level of significance. So,
• 1:06:33
  Tad Eggleston: What was your favorite of the…
• 1:06:37
  Tad Eggleston: Supporting and or bit part characters.
• 1:06:42
  Christopher Sebela: Hmm, but, like, I really… obviously, I really like Cersei.
• 1:06:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't count her as supporting her bit part. I count the 3 as, well, the 4 if we include dogs.
• 1:06:56
  Christopher Sebela: became much more of a major… but again, that was another character that, like, I didn't… I didn't know where we were going with… with her.
• 1:07:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:07:05
  Christopher Sebela: And, like, I certainly…
• 1:07:09
  Christopher Sebela: I didn't have anything about her past figured out. I mean, I think one of my favorite parts of the whole run is, Cersei's…
• 1:07:16
  Christopher Sebela: A flashback to her past.
• 1:07:19
  Christopher Sebela: Which is all told through, like, Instagram and YouTube screenshots.
• 1:07:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's, like, in the frames.
• 1:07:28
  Christopher Sebela: like, and I feel like… That could have been a book.
• 1:07:32
  Christopher Sebela: unto itself, like, the…
• 1:07:34
  Christopher Sebela: like, I was… I was sort of mildly obsessed at that point with the idea of, like, family YouTubers, like, people exploiting their children to make shitloads of money,
• 1:07:45
  Christopher Sebela: Regardless of, like, how much of…
• 1:07:49
  Christopher Sebela: Their privacy, they were violating, to get… to get clicks.
• 1:07:55
  Christopher Sebela: Keep your eyes peeled. This summer, my friend Jenny Wood has a graphic novel coming out.
• 1:08:02
  Tad Eggleston: from Mad Cave, well, from Maverick, so you might even be able to arrange to get yourself in advance on it, called I Didn't Ask For This, which is all about the…
• 1:08:13
  Tad Eggleston: the kids… That, that were the kids in the… the… the… the influencer families.
• 1:08:23
  Christopher Sebela: Nice.
• 1:08:23
  Tad Eggleston: And as they hit, like, the teenage years and are really, really tired of…
• 1:08:29
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, no, I feel like that's gonna, like…
• 1:08:32
  Christopher Sebela: All those kids are going to come back in some way or another, probably not in good ways.
• 1:08:37
  Tad Eggleston: This one stayed to realism and hopefulness. It didn't go off and turn them into horrible people. Right. It had them as, like…
• 1:08:50
  Tad Eggleston: it's a wholesome book, but it's also very funny and poignant, if that makes sense. Nice.
• 1:08:57
  Christopher Sebela: I will definitely check that out. Yeah. I'm trying to think, like, I really liked,
• 1:09:06
  Christopher Sebela: Vita's, friend from the, Secret Service.
• 1:09:11
  Tad Eggleston: We.
• 1:09:12
  Lee Woods: Whose, name I can't remember now. Jaren.
• 1:09:16
  Christopher Sebela: hmm?
• 1:09:17
  Lee Woods: TRM.
• 1:09:19
  Christopher Sebela: Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, again, a character I didn't think was,
• 1:09:26
  Christopher Sebela: Like, I like them so much that I've brought them back for the ending.
• 1:09:29
  Christopher Sebela: And figured out a way to make it make sense, so I was really happy about that.
• 1:09:35
  Christopher Sebela: The kids, like, I really liked…
• 1:09:40
  Christopher Sebela: I loved writing the kids, like…
• 1:09:44
  Christopher Sebela: Just exploiting the shit out of all these systems, and, like, coming up with the idea that, like, they were…
• 1:09:52
  Christopher Sebela: like, the way they profited off of Reaper becoming a thing was just, like, faking that people had campaigns open on them so they could extort them for money,
• 1:10:05
  Christopher Sebela: And, like, but they all, you know, are, like, none of them are old enough to drive, and, like, you know, have to be, like, picked up by their moms, work out of the back of a comic book store, like,
• 1:10:20
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, like,
• 1:10:24
  Christopher Sebela: I like them all. I'm trying to think of if there's, if there's anyone I… I don't, but yeah, no, like, I guess maybe the… the execs…
• 1:10:34
  Christopher Sebela: In the, you know, the last, issue.
• 1:10:38
  Christopher Sebela: are not cool.
• 1:10:41
  Christopher Sebela: But yeah, like, you know, really, all I had was, like, Charlie and Vita.
• 1:10:46
  Christopher Sebela: And I knew Vita had an X.
• 1:10:48
  Christopher Sebela: And that was it as far… and I knew, you know, Trotter was gonna be a villain, and I knew that Cersei was gonna be a villain.
• 1:10:57
  Christopher Sebela: But I certainly didn't know where anybody was going from there, so…
• 1:11:02
  Christopher Sebela: I'm still gonna say Circe, because I did not.
• 1:11:04
  Tad Eggleston: And then Cersei didn't wind up being a villain.
• 1:11:07
  Christopher Sebela: Right, yeah. It all, yeah.
• 1:11:11
  Tad Eggleston: Which leads me to a follow-up.
• 1:11:15
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a big Aaron Sorkin fan.
• 1:11:18
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the things that I've always appreciated about
• 1:11:23
  Tad Eggleston: how he talks about his writing, but particularly when he talks about, like, the West Wing. Like, Donna and Charlie weren't supposed to be characters, but the actors came in and so blew him away that he found out… found himself writing more and more for them to the point that they wound up being…
• 1:11:43
  Tad Eggleston: like, opening credit characters. The way you keep describing your characters as, I didn't think that they were gonna be this, and then they just pulled themselves forward.
• 1:11:54
  Tad Eggleston: How much of Ted and Ro's art, and the way it came back to you, and, like, seeing the realized characters, seeing the way Roe made them act, and Ted…
• 1:12:07
  Tad Eggleston: Wound up influencing Or did you not think about it that carefully? No, I mean, I…
• 1:12:16
  Christopher Sebela: I'd say, you know, probably,
• 1:12:20
  Christopher Sebela: 75% is probably a low number, like, you know, like, when you're writing scripts, like, all these things are, like.
• 1:12:26
  Christopher Sebela: You see stuff in your head, of course, but, like, you don't…
• 1:12:31
  Christopher Sebela: you know, you're just writing… you're putting words in people's mouths, and like… and also, like, with the majority of… I'd say the… most of the cast in, in crowded, like.
• 1:12:43
  Christopher Sebela: And in most of my books, I don't… I don't give the artist, like, here's what they should look like.
• 1:12:50
  Christopher Sebela: what I tend to do is I will send artists, like, here's who this person is.
• 1:12:55
  Christopher Sebela: You figure out, because you're the one who's going to have to draw them, you know,
• 1:12:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:13:00
  Christopher Sebela: you know, 20 up to a thousand times, so you should figure out what works instead of me dictating, like, oh yeah, they have a small scar on the corner of their eye, and, like, you'll have.
• 1:13:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, that one's too… that one's too big. You need to make it smaller. Erase something.
• 1:13:20
  Christopher Sebela: So yeah, like, when I…
• 1:13:21
  Tad Eggleston: Any that guy, writers out there.
• 1:13:23
  Christopher Sebela: I would get Roe and Ted's pages, like, suddenly all these
• 1:13:28
  Christopher Sebela: fictional people became a little more real to me, and I became, attached to them.
• 1:13:34
  Christopher Sebela: And, you know, selfishly, I wanted more of them, so I just tried to figure out how… how could I get them back.
• 1:13:43
  Christopher Sebela: So I was fortunate that, like, again, I didn't know…
• 1:13:49
  Christopher Sebela: Didn't really know how the book was gonna end,
• 1:13:53
  Christopher Sebela: I mean, I knew it was gonna be them sort of confronting…
• 1:13:57
  Christopher Sebela: the company that started all this, but I didn't know
• 1:14:00
  Christopher Sebela: You know, what the end result of that was going to be, I didn't…
• 1:14:07
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, it's… it all just kind of, like, Thank you.
• 1:14:13
  Christopher Sebela: What works really good for me is sometimes when writing feels like it's happening at you.
• 1:14:19
  Christopher Sebela: Like, you were just, not to get too,
• 1:14:23
  Christopher Sebela: about it, but, like, you know, like, you're… you're transcribing
• 1:14:29
  Christopher Sebela: Stuff that is just, sort of, popping into your head. And they're kind of…
• 1:14:38
  Christopher Sebela: they're calling the shots, and you're, you're, like, you're taking dictation. So…
• 1:14:45
  Christopher Sebela: So, yeah, like, Ro and Ted were…
• 1:14:48
  Christopher Sebela: you know, the most important part of the process, because once I saw them, then suddenly I could develop an affection for them, and then, you know, seeing ways to bring them back into the narrative.
• 1:15:09
  Tad Eggleston: Great.
• 1:15:09
  Lee Woods: I'm gonna say Doug. Doug was my favorite side character.
• 1:15:14
  Tad Eggleston: I counted him among the key four. Absolutely.
• 1:15:17
  Lee Woods: I thought we were at 3!
• 1:15:19
  Tad Eggleston: I corrected myself immediately.
• 1:15:23
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, I mean, Doug is basically the third main character.
• 1:15:28
  Lee Woods: 100%.
• 1:15:30
  Christopher Sebela: But again, like, you know, did not plan on that, and then suddenly, once I saw Rowan said, like…
• 1:15:39
  Christopher Sebela: Well, that, I think, the moment I wrote, Charlie Stealing the dog, I was like, okay, well, I guess… I guess we have a dog in this book now, and I have to figure out what to do with them.
• 1:15:49
  Christopher Sebela: But… but, like, seeing the way Rowan's head rendered dog…
• 1:15:54
  Christopher Sebela: We only made that conviction stronger with each issue, so… Yeah, without them, like…
• 1:16:03
  Christopher Sebela: yeah, the book would just be… would just be a comic book script, which I cannot think of a worse thing for people to read.
• 1:16:11
  Christopher Sebela: Unless you.
• 1:16:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, sometimes it's…
• 1:16:13
  Christopher Sebela: Right.
• 1:16:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, sometimes it's fun to see how the sausage is made. I'm one of those weird people that, like, I want to know how it was made, but you're right.
• 1:16:21
  Christopher Sebela: Sure, if…
• 1:16:22
  Tad Eggleston: Script is way more fun when you can compare it to the final product.
• 1:16:26
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, exactly. If you're just eating, you know, rat lips and assholes, then it's not as good, but, like, if you've had a… if you've had a hot dog.
• 1:16:35
  Christopher Sebela: Then it's a little more interesting, I guess.
• 1:16:39
  Christopher Sebela: That's a terrible word.
• 1:16:40
  Lee Woods: Do the same thing.
• 1:16:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah.
• 1:16:43
  Matt: Like, if somebody was just like, here you go, here's a pile of rat lips and assholes, you'd be like, no thank you, but… I want my nitrates, motherfucker!
• 1:16:52
  Christopher Sebela: But if someone was like, here's what a hot… where do they get hot dogs from? You'd be a little more interested.
• 1:16:56
  Matt: Because, yeah.
• 1:16:57
  Christopher Sebela: I've had hot dogs, I like hot dogs.
• 1:17:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm allergic to hot dogs.
• 1:17:04
  Matt: Really?
• 1:17:05
  Tad Eggleston: I get sick.
• 1:17:06
  Matt: I'm sorry.
• 1:17:08
  Tad Eggleston: Hot dogs and fish.
• 1:17:10
  Christopher Sebela: Well, I feel bad about the fish. Hot dogs, you're not really, like…
• 1:17:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't feel…
• 1:17:14
  Christopher Sebela: I enjoy hot dogs.
• 1:17:16
  Tad Eggleston: But also, I…
• 1:17:17
  Christopher Sebela: realize.
• 1:17:17
  Tad Eggleston: about the fish.
• 1:17:19
  Christopher Sebela: like, hot dogs and donuts, I think, are, like, two things that taste great, but also I know while I'm eating them, it's like, I might as well just be, like, eating poison.
• 1:17:29
  Christopher Sebela: This is just, it's like, the worst thing you can put in your mouth.
• 1:17:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I think they both beat Twinkies.
• 1:17:37
  Lee Woods: Don't you dare talk bad about Twinkies.
• 1:17:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, seriously, one of the coolest things I ever read, when I was a kid, there was, like, a kid's financial magazine called Zillions.
• 1:17:48
  Tad Eggleston: And… and there was an article that they broke down
• 1:17:53
  Tad Eggleston: a comparison of the… they used the framing of a goat will eat anything, and you know, you've got cartoons of, like, goats eating tin cans or whatnot. So they did a… a…
• 1:18:06
  Tad Eggleston: a detailed… Nutritional analysis of a tin can versus a Twinkie.
• 1:18:17
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 1:18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no. And the Twinkie won on edibility and taste, and the Tin Can won on literally everything else.
• 1:18:27
  Tad Eggleston: They're like, if you can figure out how to eat a tin can without ripping up your guts…
• 1:18:35
  Tad Eggleston: It is WAY more healthy than a Twinkie.
• 1:18:40
  Lee Woods: Alright, well… Yes, I can.
• 1:18:43
  Tad Eggleston: But it doesn't take.
• 1:18:44
  Christopher Sebela: How often are you eating Twinkies these days, though?
• 1:18:47
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know if they make them anymore.
• 1:18:49
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty sure at least had some problems.
• 1:18:51
  Matt: They still make them.
• 1:18:53
  Tad Eggleston: They did manage to get somebody to buy them, because I know that they…
• 1:18:59
  Tad Eggleston: They, they were a, a,
• 1:19:03
  Tad Eggleston: Private equity. Hostess was a private equity death.
• 1:19:07
  Tad Eggleston: I think…
• 1:19:08
  Christopher Sebela: Twinkies survived these, yeah, the death of Hostess, like…
• 1:19:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:19:15
  Tad Eggleston: Chris, thank you so much for joining us.
• 1:19:19
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, of course, thanks for asking.
• 1:19:21
  Tad Eggleston: It's such a great book. I loved having the excuse to read it again.
• 1:19:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know, the only… the only downside of this…
• 1:19:31
  Tad Eggleston: podcast, particularly as I've gotten to the point that I re…
• 1:19:35
  Tad Eggleston: cord way too much, is that…
• 1:19:39
  Tad Eggleston: is that I don't have as much time to go revisit things as… as I sometimes wish I did, unless I… unless I assign them for a book club.
• 1:19:53
  Tad Eggleston: So, it was, it was such…
• 1:19:59
  Tad Eggleston: to reread it. It's such a pleasure to talk to you again. I hope he's able to announce, upcoming… upcoming secret works that we'll… we'll talk some more, and .
• 1:20:09
  Christopher Sebela: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Matt, you're here.
• 1:20:12
  Tad Eggleston: Matt, you're here, and you came up with the, the, the, the exit line, so you get to say it.
• 1:20:18
  Matt: We'll continue after the next page.