Latest / Issues: Comics & Mental Health / Issues EP 3 | Paul Jenkins Dives Headfirst Into Comic Fandom, The Sentry's Mental Health, & Bob

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Issues EP 3 | Paul Jenkins Dives Headfirst Into Comic Fandom, The Sentry's Mental Health, & Bob · Issues: Comics & Mental Health

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What is cracking, Hope Nation? It is your friendly neighborhood,
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Kevin Hines, and I couldn't be more excited today. Welcome, everyone,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: to another powerful and inspiring episode of the Hindsight's Podcast.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, Kevin Hines, joined today by a guest host,
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: suicide prevention expert, comic book film lover, and executive director
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: of Recovery Innovations International, David Covington. guest host and mental
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: health and recovery expert of Helios Recovery, Jesse Heffernan. And
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: a huge thanks to the amazing Andy of Kapow Comics
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: for having us here live in his incredible shop, as
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: well as a nod to Powerhouse Comics, which is hosting
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: Jesse over there, where he is on this glorious day.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: We are joined by our guest interviewee. He is a
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: true legend in the world of comic books, filmmaking, and
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: video game making. Our incredible guest's contributions to storytelling in
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: all mediums have not only shaped the very fabric of modern, deep,
• 0:55
  Speaker 1: critically envisioned comics, but also have inspired countless readers to
• 0:59
  Speaker 1: look beyond the page and reflect on their own journeys.
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: Our guest today is none other than award-winning Paul Jenkins,
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: a name synonymous with some of the most groundbreaking and
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: emotionally resonant characters ever to appear in comic books. From
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: his groundbreaking work on The Sentry, a hero with an
• 1:15
  Speaker 1: inner darkness and struggle so real, it resonates with anyone
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: who's ever faced their own mental health battles or addictions.
• 1:22
  Speaker 1: To his work on The Incredible Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: Fantastic Four, Paul has left an indelible mark on the
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: comic book landscape. Paul's work doesn't just stop with the
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: written page. His narrative style has pushed boundaries, challenging the
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: very way we think about superheroes and human struggles. With
• 1:41
  Speaker 1: his insightful approaches to character development, particularly with mental themes,
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  Speaker 1: Paul has sparked important conversations and broadened the scope of
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: what comic books can be. A voice for those facing adversity.
• 1:54
  Speaker 1: A reflection of our own trials and a beacon of
• 1:57
  Speaker 1: hope to some of our darkest moments. Paul's career spans decades.
• 2:01
  Speaker 1: earning him recognition from fans and critics alike. He's won
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: multiple awards, including the prestigious Eisner Award, and has contributed
• 2:08
  Speaker 1: to some of the most iconic storylines in modern comics.
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: His work on The Origin of Wolverine is legendary in
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: and of itself. I have those comics. His storyline expertise
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: goes beyond comics. He's written novels, worked on animated series, films,
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  Speaker 1: created stories, that piqued the heart and soul of humanity.
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  Speaker 1: On top of all of this, Paul's influence extends far
• 2:29
  Speaker 1: beyond just his professional work. His commitment to authenticity and
• 2:34
  Speaker 1: vulnerability in storytelling has led him to connect with fans
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  Speaker 1: and readers on a deeply personal level. Whether through the
• 2:41
  Speaker 1: century where he portrayed characters battling with deep mental struggles
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: or his work that continues to challenge the conventions of
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: the superhero genre, Paul has proven time and time again
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: that comics are much more than entertainment. They are a
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: mirror into your own experiences and a guide to overcoming
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  Speaker 1: your darkest days. It is with great honor and excitement
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  Speaker 1: that I introduce you today to the extraordinary Paul Jenkins. Paul,
• 3:06
  Speaker 1: thank you so much for being here on the Hindsight
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: Podcast Heroes Edition.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, it's great. I don't know how to live up
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  Speaker 2: to that entire billing you just gave me, but fantastic.
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: Well, we are glad you're here. Welcome to Jesse Heffernan
• 3:18
  Speaker 1: and to David Covington. Glad you guys are here. How
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: are you all today?
• 3:24
  Speaker 2: Doing great.
• 3:25
  Speaker 3: It's early Kevin, but great to be here. Glad you're here.
• 3:28
  Speaker 4: Glad you're here.
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  Speaker 1: So the first question I have, which is not on
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  Speaker 1: my list, I'm going to ask this to all three
• 3:33
  Speaker 1: of you because I think it's by far possibly the
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: most important question of the day. We'll start with you, Paul.
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  Speaker 1: How is your mental health today?
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: Uh, yeah, I think it's somewhat intact. I'm always busy.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: So I think there's a small part of, uh, being
• 3:49
  Speaker 2: so busy and thinking of stories where you're giving a
• 3:51
  Speaker 2: little piece of yourself to your audience all the time. And, uh, Yeah,
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  Speaker 2: that can be pretty challenging for anyone. Like if you're
• 3:57
  Speaker 2: a creative person, if you're a writer, you're often like
• 4:01
  Speaker 2: finding a little piece of yourself that you're trying to
• 4:04
  Speaker 2: understand and giving and putting it out there. So I
• 4:07
  Speaker 2: would say that my mental health is jumbled, but fine.
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  Speaker 2: Thanks very much.
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  Speaker 4: Jumbled, but fine.
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: We need to put that on a bumper sticker. Okay, David,
• 4:15
  Speaker 1: how is your mental health today?
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  Speaker 5: You know, Kevin, my outlet, as you know, is the
• 4:20
  Speaker 5: Spartan obstacle course races. And I did a mountain in Ogden,
• 4:23
  Speaker 5: Utah yesterday. And I'm sore, but my mind is clear.
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  Speaker 5: And I got my outlet.
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  Speaker 4: Beautiful. Jesse, to you now.
• 4:33
  Speaker 6: How do you follow up someone that just did a
• 4:35
  Speaker 6: Spartan race yesterday?
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  Speaker 4: Like, but.
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  Speaker 6: I would say with all things going on, like I agree,
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  Speaker 6: it's a jumbled thing. There's a lot of stuff that's
• 4:44
  Speaker 6: really stressful. There's a lot of stuff that's really great.
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  Speaker 6: But I did manage to participate in some basketball this morning. Gratefully,
• 4:50
  Speaker 6: I was able to help out my teammates a little bit.
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  Speaker 6: But mostly it was just to be able to get
• 4:54
  Speaker 6: out and do something and get some of that out
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  Speaker 6: of there. So grateful to be here. This was a
• 4:58
  Speaker 6: little nerve wracking, but I think we'll get through. Paul
• 5:01
  Speaker 6: seems like he's doing fine, so I'm fine.
• 5:04
  Speaker 4: There we go. There it is. Easy peasy.
• 5:06
  Speaker 1: All right, Paul, you have created some of the most
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: iconic and emotionally complex characters in comic book history. What
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: inspired you to begin your journey in the world of comics?
• 5:16
  Speaker 2: Well, I didn't exactly intend to be a comic writer, actually.
• 5:20
  Speaker 2: I studied to be a filmmaker. And I came over
• 5:24
  Speaker 2: to the United States. I was teaching music and drama
• 5:26
  Speaker 2: to learning disabled children. And I happened to meet a
• 5:30
  Speaker 2: couple of guys that had a black and white comic
• 5:31
  Speaker 2: book and they had sold the rights to do it
• 5:33
  Speaker 2: as a TV show and a toy. And that was
• 5:35
  Speaker 2: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So I became the third
• 5:44
  Speaker 2: employee of the Ninja Turtles in this tiny little office
• 5:47
  Speaker 2: in Northampton, Massachusetts. So there am I. I was also
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: a musician. And so I played in a band. And
• 5:55
  Speaker 2: those guys had done an album cover for us. So
• 5:57
  Speaker 2: I didn't really have any expectations when you're a musician,
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: you're really a waiter, you know, you're really like working
• 6:04
  Speaker 2: in like different places, trying to get, make your way.
• 6:06
  Speaker 2: And we were, we were generally working in Northeast of the,
• 6:09
  Speaker 2: of the States. Um, but I started working with them
• 6:12
  Speaker 2: and next thing you know, it exploded, right? This thing
• 6:15
  Speaker 2: blew up and I'm 22 years old. By the time
• 6:18
  Speaker 2: I was 24, I was a director of a publishing company.
• 6:21
  Speaker 2: I was the editor in chief, you know, so I'm
• 6:23
  Speaker 2: a kid. And I have all the staff or the people,
• 6:26
  Speaker 2: all of whom were older than me. Um, so I
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: think I was just thrown into the deep end. And
• 6:32
  Speaker 2: from that, I was, I was connected to comics because
• 6:35
  Speaker 2: we had a publishing company called Tundra. And that was
• 6:38
  Speaker 2: something that I worked really hard on. I was the
• 6:39
  Speaker 2: editor in chief there. And then I broke into comics
• 6:43
  Speaker 2: really in the only way that you can't. So there's
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: a bit of a name drop in this story. Um,
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  Speaker 2: I was over talking to Alan Moore. I was the
• 6:50
  Speaker 2: editor in chief of a company called Majestic in Cincinnati, Ohio.
• 6:54
  Speaker 2: And I was talking to Alan and we were talking
• 6:58
  Speaker 2: about his book, Big Numbers, where he made this incredible
• 7:00
  Speaker 2: chart that charted out like 12 issues of the character
• 7:03
  Speaker 2: arc for everybody in it. And I said, Alan, I'm
• 7:08
  Speaker 2: always thinking that the state of comics is sort of mediocre, really.
• 7:13
  Speaker 2: This is, you're talking 1993, maybe. Um, I don't get it,
• 7:19
  Speaker 2: you know, like I, I think like you do, there
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  Speaker 2: should be some real depth and some understanding. What do
• 7:24
  Speaker 2: you think? And he said, well, you know, give it
• 7:25
  Speaker 2: a shot. Why not? And so I went to San
• 7:27
  Speaker 2: Diego and I broke into comics. The only way that
• 7:29
  Speaker 2: you cannot break in. Um, I met the editor in chief, sorry,
• 7:33
  Speaker 2: the editor in chief of, um, vertigo, uh, Karen burger.
• 7:37
  Speaker 2: I'd kind of known her peripherally. And then I met
• 7:39
  Speaker 2: the editor of hellblazer and they were looking for a
• 7:41
  Speaker 2: new writer. So I asked him, could I try out
• 7:44
  Speaker 2: and I'd never written anything And he said, yeah, okay.
• 7:47
  Speaker 2: And six weeks later, they called me up and said, okay, congratulations.
• 7:50
  Speaker 2: You're the new writer of Hellblazer.
• 7:52
  Speaker 4: How long was the run of Hellblazer?
• 7:54
  Speaker 2: I think I wrote more issues of Hellblazer than anyone,
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  Speaker 2: probably between five and six years.
• 7:58
  Speaker 4: Incredible.
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: We'll have to backtrack and get those issues and catch up.
• 8:04
  Speaker 4: Your character.
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: The Sentry, which we want to talk about a lot today,
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  Speaker 1: is one of the most fascinating and very flawed heroes
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  Speaker 1: in modern comics. You created The Sentry quite some time ago.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: And you had times where you brought it to Marvel,
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: you brought it to DC, they turned you down a
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: couple of times each, and then it came to be.
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: What drew you to explore themes like mental health in
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: comics and even borderline personality disorder through this character?
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  Speaker 2: Well, you know, The Sentry, you know, BPD possibly, But
• 8:36
  Speaker 2: I think, you know, when I created the century, one
• 8:38
  Speaker 2: of the things that I wrote to Marvel about was saying,
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: I think he should have a diagnosis. And I think
• 8:43
  Speaker 2: you should give this to all of the writers that
• 8:44
  Speaker 2: end up working with him if you could. So I
• 8:48
  Speaker 2: built out a diagnosis because if you're a writer, you're
• 8:51
  Speaker 2: an amateur psychologist, you spend your entire life doing it.
• 8:55
  Speaker 2: So I did create a diagnosis and I was very
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: careful in the way that I did it. I actually
• 9:00
  Speaker 2: consulted with a couple of psychologists and people that would
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: understand it. Um, and then, you know, I think the
• 9:09
  Speaker 2: reason that I wanted to write about that is because
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  Speaker 2: every single human being you've ever met yourself, myself, we're
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: dealing with issues of mental health. We're have family members
• 9:19
  Speaker 2: who deal with issues of mental health. We are connected
• 9:22
  Speaker 2: directly to issues of mental health. And so this thing
• 9:25
  Speaker 2: was intriguing to me. My family, you know, I grew
• 9:29
  Speaker 2: up in the West country of England and in South London.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: But I come from a family that's very fractured. My
• 9:35
  Speaker 2: father left when I was five years old. My mom
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: has some challenges in that regard and trying to raise
• 9:43
  Speaker 2: two little children with no money. Sometimes we would live
• 9:49
  Speaker 2: in like a farmer's cottage with no electricity. Sometimes we
• 9:52
  Speaker 2: would live, I mean, I've lived in a caravan. I've
• 9:54
  Speaker 2: been homeless twice. You know, I come from a place
• 9:57
  Speaker 2: that's just not as simple as people would imagine. that
• 10:00
  Speaker 2: I came from. So when people meet me, generally they think, oh,
• 10:04
  Speaker 2: that guy does okay. He's a comic book writer and
• 10:07
  Speaker 2: he's pretty well known and he makes video games and film.
• 10:10
  Speaker 2: But they don't understand that almost everything that you find
• 10:12
  Speaker 2: in my writing is informed by years of deprivation and
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: living in that circumstance. Working then in comics, I want
• 10:22
  Speaker 2: to write about mental health and the psychology of things
• 10:24
  Speaker 2: all the time because I sat there and I was
• 10:26
  Speaker 2: an observer for the first part of my life.
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: You write about, in a sense, your own lived experience
• 10:32
  Speaker 1: and lived expertise and you infuse that into your comics,
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: which I think is incredible.
• 10:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but I think also you're looking at other people, right?
• 10:40
  Speaker 2: I'm not just writing about my own experience. I'm writing
• 10:42
  Speaker 2: about things that I observe. If you're a writer, you
• 10:44
  Speaker 2: better be able to observe things and then describe them
• 10:46
  Speaker 2: the best you can and maybe interpret them. So I'm
• 10:49
  Speaker 2: also writing about other people's issues with mental health and addiction.
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  Speaker 4: Beautiful.
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: Paul, in your experience, how does comic book storytelling allow
• 10:59
  Speaker 1: for a deeper exploration of mental health and personal struggles
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: compared to other mediums?
• 11:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a great question. It does and it doesn't, right?
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: I think if you look at the market and if
• 11:12
  Speaker 2: you look at the publishers, I think that you can
• 11:15
  Speaker 2: probably explore more in film and television than you can
• 11:18
  Speaker 2: in comics at times because of the way that that
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: american publishers are specifically especially the mainstream right i think
• 11:26
  Speaker 2: you can do them in independent comics you can do
• 11:29
  Speaker 2: lots and lots of stuff uh i just happened to
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: come into marvel when they it was perfect storm right
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: i walked in when they were in chapter 11 bankruptcy
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: and i think they weren't far away from chapter 7
• 11:41
  Speaker 2: i think they were really struggling in those days and
• 11:44
  Speaker 2: so they they they fell into the last resort of
• 11:46
  Speaker 2: the creative corporation they said um you know, we're going
• 11:51
  Speaker 2: to let you do that wizardy stuff that you're really
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: good at with Hellblazer. We'd love you to just bring
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: it to our books because they didn't know what else
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: to do. And I've got to give credit to Jimmy
• 12:02
  Speaker 2: Palmiotti and Joe Quesada, who were the editors at Event
• 12:05
  Speaker 2: Comics that went over to create Marvel Knights. And they
• 12:09
  Speaker 2: allowed me to walk in. I'd never written for Marvel.
• 12:12
  Speaker 2: I think I had actually. I think I'd written Werewolf
• 12:14
  Speaker 2: by Night, but that's because they pegged me as a
• 12:16
  Speaker 2: horror writer because of Hellblazer and I was anything but
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: a horror writer. And so I came across, and I
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: remember pitching a 12-issue maxiseries to them, and they just went, okay.
• 12:32
  Speaker 2: And most of the time that I worked for Marvel,
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: they didn't edit a single word. Not a single word
• 12:37
  Speaker 2: was changed. They just let me do it. And that
• 12:40
  Speaker 2: seems really unusual now because there's no way that they
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: would do it, but that's because the stakes were raised
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: on their end. They certainly weren't raised on my end.
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: And so they just permitted me to think of whatever
• 12:49
  Speaker 2: I wanted to do. The only friction was that I
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: love single issue stories because I think someone should walk
• 12:54
  Speaker 2: in a comic store and be able to pick it
• 12:56
  Speaker 2: up and walk away, read it and have a judgment
• 12:59
  Speaker 2: based on one issue. And they hated it. They always
• 13:02
  Speaker 2: wanted you to collect for trades. But I would just
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: simply say, why don't you put five of them in
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: one collected edition? I don't know how hard that is.
• 13:11
  Speaker 2: So I think it's fascinating in some ways looking back
• 13:15
  Speaker 2: at my own career and looking back at what Marvel did.
• 13:18
  Speaker 2: realizing that 25 to almost 30 years ago now, they
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: just handed the keys to the castle to me and said,
• 13:24
  Speaker 2: go for it. Wow.
• 13:26
  Speaker 1: This is something I didn't know. I don't think you
• 13:28
  Speaker 1: guys knew this. And the folks watching and listening at
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: home didn't know this either. It's quite incredible. Paul, what
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: was the initial concept for the Sentry and how did
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: it evolve through your creative process?
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, that was actually a pitch for the DC character,
• 13:46
  Speaker 2: Our Man, because if you think about it, I was
• 13:49
  Speaker 2: about to work on Hellblazer. And the moment I started
• 13:53
  Speaker 2: working on Hellblazer, I was immediately not satisfied because I
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: wanted to write other things, right? I just had so
• 13:58
  Speaker 2: much to say. And I knew that I could say
• 13:59
  Speaker 2: it in Hellblazer, but I thought it would be rude.
• 14:01
  Speaker 2: And frankly, you can't get by writing one comic book
• 14:04
  Speaker 2: a month. You need to do maybe two to really
• 14:08
  Speaker 2: be okay. So I knew Karen Berger. obviously the editor-in-chief
• 14:14
  Speaker 2: at Vertigo. And I asked Karen if I could take
• 14:19
  Speaker 2: a character that they had called the Hour Man. I
• 14:22
  Speaker 2: think naively I thought she wouldn't mind if it was
• 14:24
  Speaker 2: a superhero coming into Vertigo. But she told me something
• 14:28
  Speaker 2: that was pretty fascinating. She said that if Alan Moore
• 14:33
  Speaker 2: had pitched Watchmen to her in those days, she would
• 14:36
  Speaker 2: probably turn it down. Because it wasn't a Vertigo book. Um,
• 14:41
  Speaker 2: and I understand that, right? She didn't want to do superheroes,
• 14:44
  Speaker 2: but our man was interesting character. I think I was
• 14:47
  Speaker 2: just casting around. And the thing about me, especially in
• 14:50
  Speaker 2: those days, I don't know anything about comics. I'm not
• 14:52
  Speaker 2: a big fan of comics because I didn't grow up
• 14:54
  Speaker 2: with them. We didn't have any comics. And so I, I.
• 15:01
  Speaker 2: I asked her, can I write this character Our Man
• 15:04
  Speaker 2: as a guy struggling with addiction because he takes a
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: pill called Miracolo and it lasts for an hour. And
• 15:09
  Speaker 2: at that point, I thought if you had an hour
• 15:12
  Speaker 2: of addiction, you'd be addicted to this power. And maybe
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: if you couldn't take another one for an entire day,
• 15:18
  Speaker 2: that your next 23 hours would be spent obsessing over
• 15:21
  Speaker 2: taking the next pill because you want to go back
• 15:24
  Speaker 2: and be a superhero. And she loved the idea, but
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: she said, there's no way that Vertigo would publish something
• 15:29
  Speaker 2: like that. And she didn't think I tried that idea
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: with the DC universe. And they said, you cannot do
• 15:35
  Speaker 2: that to one of our characters, which is a shame
• 15:37
  Speaker 2: because I think they would have done it later once
• 15:38
  Speaker 2: we proved that it worked. So Karen had a great
• 15:42
  Speaker 2: idea and she said, why don't you take that and
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: make it a new character? Um, so this is probably 1995.
• 15:48
  Speaker 2: I think it was March of 1995. I went to
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: Karen back with The Sentry and I said, here, this
• 15:56
  Speaker 2: is a new character and she turned it down. And
• 15:58
  Speaker 2: so then I went to an editor at DC called
• 16:00
  Speaker 2: Kerry Kowalski, who loved it. She championed this project and
• 16:03
  Speaker 2: they turned it down. And then, you know, a few
• 16:06
  Speaker 2: years later, I went to Marvel and I asked them,
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: you know, would you do it? And they said, no,
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: we're not interested. So I think it was such a
• 16:15
  Speaker 2: difficult thing to get going because it was very challenging
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: to the status quo of, superheroes it didn't fit with
• 16:23
  Speaker 2: superheroes and it didn't fit with vertigo so it was
• 16:25
  Speaker 2: like twilight you know.
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: I want to tell you to go back to our
• 16:31
  Speaker 1: man just for a moment um and pardon me for
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: not knowing the answer to this question but uh there's
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: a there's a very similar theme in the film power
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: are you familiar with that film.
• 16:42
  Speaker 2: I am not unfortunately i'm not Well, I.
• 16:45
  Speaker 1: Feel like they stole it right from your code book,
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: my friend. Because in the film, mostly villains, mostly thieves
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: and criminals take these one-hour pills. No, they lasted 24 hours.
• 16:59
  Speaker 1: 24-hour pills, they give you this massive amount of power,
• 17:02
  Speaker 1: and they become addicted to the pill. So I think
• 17:06
  Speaker 1: they owe you some residuals.
• 17:08
  Speaker 2: I can tell you that I happen to know that
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: I'm probably one of the most stolen from creators that
• 17:14
  Speaker 2: you will meet. If you actually take a look at
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: the film Unbreakable. Yeah. So that is the sentry. It's
• 17:21
  Speaker 2: a guy who doesn't know he was a superhero. When
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: you walk into the comic store, when you literally go
• 17:28
  Speaker 2: into the comic store with Mr. Glass, the character, and
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: you follow him there, you can actually freeze frame on
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: a rack of comics. And those comics are myself and
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Brian Bendis. And if you think about his big character
• 17:41
  Speaker 2: who's in the frame, he's called Sentry Man. Like M.
• 17:45
  Speaker 2: Night Shyamalan just literally read the Sentry and went, I'll
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: have that story and went off and made it.
• 17:51
  Speaker 4: Yeah, he made it up.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: Well, you know.
• 17:53
  Speaker 4: You need to call that guy.
• 17:55
  Speaker 2: This type of thing happens all the time to me.
• 17:57
  Speaker 4: It does. That's too bad.
• 17:58
  Speaker 1: You're still creating great things that people around the world
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: are finding interesting.
• 18:02
  Speaker 4: A great love and an admiration for.
• 18:05
  Speaker 1: Paul, I'd like to know, you know, you've worked on
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: iconic Marvel and DC characters, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Fantastic Four. How
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: do you approach each character differently considering the individual's history
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: within comics and the mythologies?
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Well, I think there's a few things that I do,
• 18:26
  Speaker 2: but I'm not quite sure if it's a similar method
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: that other writers use. So, you know, I am of
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: an age right now where I can consider myself a
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: gray beard. You know, I, I, I'm the wizard that
• 18:37
  Speaker 2: gets to tell our other people how I've done it. Right. Um,
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: and I think the first thing is, uh, you know,
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: I learn every day, right. If I don't learn and I'm,
• 18:46
  Speaker 2: I think when people say, well, I've arrived creatively, they're correct.
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: That's as far as they'll ever go. Right. They can't
• 18:51
  Speaker 2: go any further. And as I'm looking at these characters.
• 18:57
  Speaker 2: The first thing that I would sort of add into
• 19:00
  Speaker 2: what I lovingly call my college lecture, which is, you know,
• 19:03
  Speaker 2: the way that I think we should approach these. You
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: have to have a why. Tell me why this story
• 19:10
  Speaker 2: deserves to exist. And if you can't tell me why
• 19:12
  Speaker 2: it deserves to exist, don't do it. Because I was
• 19:15
  Speaker 2: fascinated when I started working in comics. I don't know anything.
• 19:18
  Speaker 2: You know, I just didn't know anything about comic book characters.
• 19:21
  Speaker 2: So I would be given a character. The Inhumans, I
• 19:25
  Speaker 2: was given two five page stories. stories by jack kirby
• 19:28
  Speaker 2: and i literally told them don't send me anymore i'm
• 19:30
  Speaker 2: not interested i don't want to see anything because i
• 19:32
  Speaker 2: get it right had they sent me 12 issues to
• 19:37
  Speaker 2: read i would have been reading through continuity and things
• 19:40
  Speaker 2: that other people had done so you have to find
• 19:43
  Speaker 2: the why of the character and i think you can
• 19:45
  Speaker 2: look at any character we'll pick one The Hulk is
• 19:49
  Speaker 2: a really easy one, for example, right? It's how do
• 19:51
  Speaker 2: we manage the part of us, ourselves that's like dark
• 19:55
  Speaker 2: and angry? What do we do? What's that duality of
• 19:58
  Speaker 2: a person where you're combating the sort of inner desires
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: and most violent kind of impulses that you have? And
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: how do you overcome that, right? Like we all deal
• 20:07
  Speaker 2: with that. But let's take Spider-Man. I always thought Spider-Man
• 20:12
  Speaker 2: was kind of the, the guy, if he wasn't Spider-Man,
• 20:16
  Speaker 2: he still would have been a teacher. That's, that's who
• 20:19
  Speaker 2: he is. That's the kind of person he wants to be.
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: And he's an orphan. He goes over to be raised
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: by kind of grandparents, his aunt and uncle. And he's
• 20:31
  Speaker 2: very much like the guy that wakes up. This is
• 20:33
  Speaker 2: how I explain it. He's the guy that wakes up
• 20:37
  Speaker 2: and he has the flu. And he coughs and splutters
• 20:40
  Speaker 2: in the shower and he gets in the car and
• 20:42
  Speaker 2: he drives two hours to work. He's five minutes late.
• 20:44
  Speaker 2: His boss yells at him. He has a terrible day.
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: Still got the flu. Drives home two more hours. Gets home.
• 20:50
  Speaker 2: His wife's gone out. Dinner's in the cat. Kids are
• 20:52
  Speaker 2: in bed. And he goes to bed and he does
• 20:55
  Speaker 2: it all over again every single day. Because that's a modern,
• 20:58
  Speaker 2: that's a daily form of heroic behavior that a dad
• 21:02
  Speaker 2: might do or a mom might do or something like that.
• 21:04
  Speaker 2: That we just, we all understand that. And if you
• 21:07
  Speaker 2: see that character that way, then you can easily write
• 21:10
  Speaker 2: him because you understand why he's the character who's different
• 21:14
  Speaker 2: from the others. If he has the trolley problem, you know,
• 21:18
  Speaker 2: do you run over one person or three? Or do
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: you save the people in the cable car or on
• 21:24
  Speaker 2: the bridge? He will only be able to save both.
• 21:26
  Speaker 2: He can't do it any other way. And so once
• 21:29
  Speaker 2: you can imagine these characters and make up your own
• 21:32
  Speaker 2: definition of them, that means something. And I think what
• 21:36
  Speaker 2: What fascinated me when I broke into comics was that
• 21:39
  Speaker 2: so many people working in comics had no concept of that.
• 21:42
  Speaker 2: They just really like comics. And so they've read thousands
• 21:45
  Speaker 2: of them and they want to do that. Yeah.
• 21:48
  Speaker 4: I see that.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: You see the exuberance in the fandom, but without the
• 21:54
  Speaker 1: understanding of the depth of the story. And that's what certainly,
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: to go off script here for a moment, that's what
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: certainly drew me to Origins of Wolverine. you know, your,
• 22:05
  Speaker 1: your writing in that is impeccable. I'm going to go
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: back and read it again. I haven't read it in
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: some time since, you know, since it came out, when
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: it came out and I read it, it wasn't like
• 22:15
  Speaker 1: the other comics I'd read.
• 22:16
  Speaker 4: I was moved.
• 22:18
  Speaker 1: I think that's something you touch upon in everything you
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: do is with what your work, with your writing, you
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: move people.
• 22:26
  Speaker 4: And that's really important.
• 22:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I mean, ask yourself in the origin of Wolverine, like,
• 22:32
  Speaker 2: How is there a kid sitting at the bottom of
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: the hill looking at a farm with the lights blazing, right?
• 22:38
  Speaker 2: And he can play with the farmer's children, but he's
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: not allowed to go to their birthday party. So where
• 22:45
  Speaker 2: do you think that comes from? It comes from my
• 22:47
  Speaker 2: brother and I living that experience.
• 22:49
  Speaker 4: Yeah. Yeah. And you felt that.
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Even if you didn't know that anecdote about your life,
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: you felt the pain. You felt the trauma and the struggle.
• 22:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 22:58
  Speaker 4: Incredible.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: You bring a sense of realism that is larger than
• 23:05
  Speaker 1: life to characters like the Sentry. Why do you think readers,
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: I mean, we briefly touched upon this, but I want
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: to hear it from you, resonate so deeply with what
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: your creations that are battling these inner demons?
• 23:20
  Speaker 2: You know, one of the things you can do is
• 23:21
  Speaker 2: you can take a look at the way, I'm going
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: to look at Marvel just specifically for a bit. Take
• 23:27
  Speaker 2: a look at the way Stan Lee, Dicko Kirby, John
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: Romita would build and create these characters. In some ways
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: they are, they often had a flaw, a problem, right?
• 23:39
  Speaker 2: Daredevil is blind. Spider-Man's a teenager trying to work out
• 23:42
  Speaker 2: how to, you know, live with a secret identity, right? Uh,
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: the Hulk is really angry. And so you've got all
• 23:49
  Speaker 2: these characters where their power is their problem. And I
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: have written about that. So, so often I, I think
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: that you can look at someone. And, and never know
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: what their challenges are, but you have to be honest.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: I think if you're a writer, you have to be honest.
• 24:05
  Speaker 2: You're just describing things that you see or that, you know,
• 24:08
  Speaker 2: you're being honest about being vulnerable. You're being honest about
• 24:12
  Speaker 2: being tired or sad or frustrated or, or whatever. And
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: so it resonates for one particular reason. I think I,
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: I worked out a method of creating when I started
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: doing this and I was lucky enough to be an
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: editor at Tundra to people like Alan Moore, right. And
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: you know, uh, Dave McKean, uh, George Pratt, these are
• 24:40
  Speaker 2: people that were really contributing like character driven stories in comics.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: So I think that all I simply did was, was
• 24:53
  Speaker 2: create a path for myself to say, I don't care
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: about the superhero powers. A lot of times my editors
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: at Marvel and DC would get frustrated with me because
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: I would say, let's assume that there's going to be
• 25:03
  Speaker 2: a fight in this comic book and the eye candy
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: that you need. That's fine, right? Like we know that's
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: going to happen. So that's going to be in the story.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: I don't want to write about that in my pitch
• 25:11
  Speaker 2: or in my outline. Instead, I'm going to tell you
• 25:15
  Speaker 2: what this story is about. And I would sort of
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: talk about the various things. And I really did get
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: to a place where I was enjoying that, right? We
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: had a character. We could go to the Spider-Man rogues gallery.
• 25:26
  Speaker 2: And really look at the why of why people were broken.
• 25:31
  Speaker 2: For example, there's a character called Mind Worm, and he
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: can use his powers of the mind to mess people up.
• 25:37
  Speaker 2: But in our issue, we made him a homeless guy.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: And he had fallen victim to the constant pressure of
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: this psychic power he had. So he was sitting on
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: a street out by himself. And simply affecting the entire street.
• 25:54
  Speaker 2: Nobody knew like that for an entire two or three
• 25:56
  Speaker 2: blocks around this psychic emanation of his sadness and misery was,
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: was pushing everybody to a really difficult place and they
• 26:05
  Speaker 2: didn't know why. And so Spider-Man comes upon him and realizes,
• 26:09
  Speaker 2: oh my God, that's mind worm. That's someone that I fought,
• 26:11
  Speaker 2: you know, and that story was nothing to do with
• 26:15
  Speaker 2: fighting or punching. There is a story, probably the most
• 26:20
  Speaker 2: signed issue that I ever do of Spider-Man is a
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: story of Peter Parker's Spider-Man. It's number 33. I can
• 26:27
  Speaker 2: always tell you when a fan is coming to have
• 26:31
  Speaker 2: me sign it because they're holding it in two hands
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: and they're probably crying. And it's a story about baseball.
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: And it has a real, I think, piece of heart
• 26:41
  Speaker 2: in it because I only ever wrote things that I
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: felt and things that I only ever do that, right? Um,
• 26:48
  Speaker 2: I had been to great Britain. Um, and I think
• 26:52
  Speaker 2: one of the challenges living in the States and being
• 26:54
  Speaker 2: from great Britain is that when my family members pass away,
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: I have to kind of go see them and say
• 26:59
  Speaker 2: goodbye to them before they're gone. If you imagine that's
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: a pretty challenging kind of situation. Um, you know, I've
• 27:05
  Speaker 2: done it with my grandparents. Uh, I did it with
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: my dad a few years ago. Um, so I went
• 27:11
  Speaker 2: over to see my grandfather and I knew it was
• 27:12
  Speaker 2: the last time I'd ever see him. And I was
• 27:14
  Speaker 2: kind of his favorite. It was a bit of a curmudgeon.
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: He was like, you know, He had had his ship
• 27:19
  Speaker 2: sunk in the war. He's in the Merchant Navy. He
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: lost a lot of friends. He didn't want to talk
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: about it ever. You know, he'd had a really difficult life.
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: He never knew his father because my great-grandfather was killed
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: in the first war. So I go over to see Grandad,
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: chat with him. It's in an old people's home in
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: Ryadda in Mid Wales. And I couldn't talk to him.
• 27:40
  Speaker 2: He didn't want to talk about football, the FA Cup final.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: His team with Chelsea was playing in the FA Cup
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: final that day. He didn't want to watch it. He
• 27:47
  Speaker 2: wasn't interested. And he said, listen, boy, I'm fine. I'm just,
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: I've had enough, right? So everything was fine. But at
• 27:54
  Speaker 2: one point I said, hey, granddad, do you remember the
• 27:58
  Speaker 2: old wartime songs that you used to sing to me?
• 28:00
  Speaker 2: And I started singing a song with him and he
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: started singing with me. And there was a really strange moment.
• 28:06
  Speaker 2: So we start singing this old song. And then I
• 28:08
  Speaker 2: realized we look around and all of the old people
• 28:11
  Speaker 2: are singing it. There's an old lady with dementia that's
• 28:13
  Speaker 2: sitting by the window waiting for someone to pick her up.
• 28:15
  Speaker 2: And she was mouth in the words because she knew
• 28:17
  Speaker 2: that this was a shared experience. And it was a,
• 28:22
  Speaker 2: so I got on the plane. I knew I'd never
• 28:24
  Speaker 2: see him again. And I guess my uncle went to
• 28:27
  Speaker 2: go take him for a walk the next morning as
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: I'm on the plane. And when he did, he went
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: out for a walk that morning. My grandfather passed away.
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: And so I'm on the plane and I wrote this
• 28:39
  Speaker 2: script and it was about, it was about Peter Parker
• 28:41
  Speaker 2: going to baseball game every year with his uncle. And.
• 28:46
  Speaker 2: as he goes to the baseball game, um, they always lose, right?
• 28:50
  Speaker 2: They lose every single time. He goes to see the
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: Mets and they suck. And so he's five years old
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: and he's seen him for the first time and he
• 28:56
  Speaker 2: loves it. But he, he, he, he, you know, he can't, um,
• 29:03
  Speaker 2: he can't handle the fact they lose. And so they
• 29:05
  Speaker 2: go every year and every year they lose and they
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: lose in these incredible ways. So one year he finally
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: goes and he's so upset. He's like 14, 15 years old.
• 29:14
  Speaker 2: He goes with uncle Ben. And for the first time,
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: the Mets begin to win and they win at the
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: very end of the game. And you're focused on uncle
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: Ben in the stands. He doesn't, the camera's just looking
• 29:25
  Speaker 2: at him in the comic and it said, you know,
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: I'm finally, we want any, and uncle Ben looks at
• 29:30
  Speaker 2: me to tell me the whole story. And three days
• 29:33
  Speaker 2: later he's dead because we don't, we get these moments
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: of joy, we get these moments of sadness. So they
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: had shared this thing. So people come up to me
• 29:44
  Speaker 2: with that comic all the time and they're like, this
• 29:47
  Speaker 2: was everything. This, this, this made me think of my family.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: This made me think of my dad's made me think
• 29:52
  Speaker 2: of my mom and it's because What people don't realize
• 29:58
  Speaker 2: is that there's only one picture of Spider-Man in the
• 30:02
  Speaker 2: entire book because they made me put it in. It's
• 30:05
  Speaker 2: a story about a little boy and his father figure
• 30:08
  Speaker 2: going to a baseball game. None of us have punched
• 30:11
  Speaker 2: a guy dressed in spandex, but we have all been
• 30:14
  Speaker 2: to and done things like that with our family.
• 30:17
  Speaker 4: We've all been to the funerals of our lives.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: We've all been to the funerals of our lives. We've
• 30:20
  Speaker 2: all been to these things. We deal with it all
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: the time. And so I don't want to write about
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: punches and kicks and they're in there i want to
• 30:29
  Speaker 2: write about how we connect to people that we love
• 30:32
  Speaker 2: uh what happens when we miss them um how they
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: affect us that has meaning and that's that's the way
• 30:38
  Speaker 2: i made my career was to write the things that
• 30:41
  Speaker 2: we actually know not the things that we don't know
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: and to dress them with the things that we don't know.
• 30:46
  Speaker 1: Wow uh mind blown right now thank you paul for
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: that that was a really beautiful story a really important
• 30:51
  Speaker 1: one to.
• 30:52
  Speaker 4: Have on this podcast uh.
• 30:56
  Speaker 1: On that note, as I'm sitting here crying and so
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: is David, I can't tell Jesse is, but what roles
• 31:02
  Speaker 1: does vulnerability play in your storytelling and why is it
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: such an important part of every character you either create
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: or you continue on working?
• 31:11
  Speaker 2: Yeah. I love that question because, because I want to,
• 31:17
  Speaker 2: you know, I can point that back to you in
• 31:19
  Speaker 2: some ways, right? I can, because, because the story I
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: just told you made you cry. Yeah.
• 31:24
  Speaker 5: And.
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: And the thing is, it takes a lot of courage
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: and honesty to talk about as a guy, for example,
• 31:33
  Speaker 2: talking about crying. Yeah. Right. I don't care. You know, why,
• 31:39
  Speaker 2: why do we put stigma on, on being vulnerable? Why
• 31:43
  Speaker 2: do we put stigma on crying or whether it's crying
• 31:47
  Speaker 2: with sadness or emotion or joy? Right. Like who we
• 31:52
  Speaker 2: are as people, we, we have to, Be those people.
• 31:57
  Speaker 2: We can't be somebody else. And as we're being somebody else,
• 32:01
  Speaker 2: we're made to be somebody else. It's probably doing damage. Now,
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: I think that there are various parts of that. I
• 32:12
  Speaker 2: think if you're a parent, you have to take that
• 32:16
  Speaker 2: blow for your kids. You know, I know that my
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: wife and I take it for our kids all the
• 32:21
  Speaker 2: time because they're mental. You know, but... Like you do,
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: you have to take those hard pieces, right? And I
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: realized it's very hard to self-assess as well. You know,
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: it's hard to assess your own career. It's hard to
• 32:38
  Speaker 2: assess how and why you do it. But I've spent
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: years trying to think about it because I do teach
• 32:43
  Speaker 2: in college and I do do speeches and stuff like that,
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: you know, and seminars. I think that I decided early
• 32:53
  Speaker 2: on as a writer to be honest, right? To tell
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: the truth. And the one thing that's very strange for
• 33:02
  Speaker 2: people to understand is that my brother and I went
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: through quite some really difficult things, not an easy thing.
• 33:09
  Speaker 2: Now ask me if my childhood was happy and my
• 33:11
  Speaker 2: answer is, yeah, it was fine, right? Despite all the
• 33:14
  Speaker 2: challenges and difficulty and really awful things that we might
• 33:18
  Speaker 2: have had to deal with, I didn't even notice it.
• 33:21
  Speaker 2: I was of a type of kid who would just,
• 33:27
  Speaker 2: watch it and observe it. And, and then I threw
• 33:30
  Speaker 2: myself at a very early age into, into being creative
• 33:34
  Speaker 2: and to sports. Um, I did sports constantly. Um, I
• 33:38
  Speaker 2: ended up throwing the javelin and then doing the decathlon
• 33:40
  Speaker 2: for my county. So I traveled everywhere doing sports. I
• 33:43
  Speaker 2: played soccer, I played rugby and I did athletics all
• 33:46
  Speaker 2: the way through the year. I studied really hard. Um,
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: we did have a very, very challenging home life. So
• 33:54
  Speaker 2: when I was 11, um, Uh, it was decided for
• 33:59
  Speaker 2: me by my mom and by some teachers that this
• 34:02
  Speaker 2: kid's too smart to get in trouble with the police
• 34:06
  Speaker 2: all the time. I think I had been in trouble
• 34:10
  Speaker 2: cause me and my mate Ian Fox were breaking into
• 34:12
  Speaker 2: cars and we were just from that place, you know,
• 34:14
  Speaker 2: and we were just, and so they, I tried out
• 34:18
  Speaker 2: for a scholarship for a school called Christ hospital and
• 34:20
  Speaker 2: it had four scholarships dating from 1552. Um, Edward VI
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: founded the school, but now it was all full fee
• 34:29
  Speaker 2: paying rich kids. And then there were four of us
• 34:31
  Speaker 2: that had nothing and I won a scholarship. So I
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: moved away from home when I was 11 and I
• 34:37
  Speaker 2: never went back. Um, and, and, you know, when there
• 34:41
  Speaker 2: were holidays and stuff, I would sometimes see my mom.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: I would sometimes now see my dad again. Um, I
• 34:47
  Speaker 2: would stay with my grandparents. So when you live through
• 34:52
  Speaker 2: all of that, um, And I was not affected. I
• 34:56
  Speaker 2: did a TED talk a few years ago, asked a
• 34:59
  Speaker 2: psychologist who was there, why didn't it affect me? And
• 35:01
  Speaker 2: he said, you know, sometimes we just run into what
• 35:03
  Speaker 2: we call unicorn kids, kids that just have, they're in
• 35:07
  Speaker 2: the system, foster care, whatever, and they don't notice it.
• 35:10
  Speaker 2: And I think I was just one of those kids.
• 35:12
  Speaker 2: But instead of feeling pain, I thought, I want to
• 35:18
  Speaker 2: explain this to people. And that's why I became a writer.
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: That fascinates me to no end because, I'm adopted, I
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: was in foster care, and I have an opposite.
• 35:33
  Speaker 4: Feeling from you.
• 35:34
  Speaker 1: I felt, and I mean this from the depths of
• 35:38
  Speaker 1: my soul, a void in my chest from not seeing
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: or being with my birth parents or my birth brother.
• 35:45
  Speaker 1: They all died tragically when I was very young before
• 35:49
  Speaker 1: I got to know them. I've always felt that void.
• 35:53
  Speaker 1: And I can tell you that the moment I met
• 35:56
  Speaker 1: my birth sister at 25, I felt that void close.
• 36:04
  Speaker 1: And it was, it was a, it was a magical
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: feeling of seeing her face, the uncanny resemblance of our mom,
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: you know, with the scarf and the red dress, you know,
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: sundress that you can only get away with in San Francisco. And,
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: And all I wanted growing up my whole life was
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: to tell my birth mother I loved her. It was
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: my one goal my whole life until I found out
• 36:27
  Speaker 1: that she had passed away very tragically to drugs and
• 36:30
  Speaker 1: alcohol and potentially suicide. And she enveloped me in her arms.
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: And without knowing that story, she just simply said, I
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: love you. And because she looked just like our mom,
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: something moved in me that has never been the same.
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's funny you use the word void
• 36:49
  Speaker 2: right now. You know where the void comes from, right?
• 36:51
  Speaker 2: Because I will say, you know, as unaffected as I'd
• 36:54
  Speaker 2: probably say that I was, yeah, okay, there were really,
• 36:58
  Speaker 2: really hard days. And, you know, the void is that
• 37:02
  Speaker 2: feeling of helplessness and difficulty that you experience in that regard.
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: You know, my youngest is adopted, right? Yeah. and and
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: i think depending on the circumstance you know in his
• 37:19
  Speaker 2: case he only sees one dad and one mom it
• 37:23
  Speaker 2: doesn't matter because i think parenting doesn't isn't necessarily just
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: something of blood it can be something of of like
• 37:30
  Speaker 2: i know that i was destined to meet him i
• 37:32
  Speaker 2: knew that our souls have known each other many times
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: before if that you believe in that kind of thing
• 37:35
  Speaker 2: you know and and i just he and i are
• 37:38
  Speaker 2: just incredibly connected so he's a real daddy's boy right
• 37:41
  Speaker 2: he loves football and He loves Crystal Palace Football Club.
• 37:44
  Speaker 2: Well done, young man. But I look at a lot
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: of those challenges. I look at all of that vulnerability
• 37:50
  Speaker 2: and I say, well, you know, I'm not that afraid
• 37:52
  Speaker 2: of it. Why would I be afraid of telling people
• 37:55
  Speaker 2: about how that feels? Like I said, you look at
• 37:58
  Speaker 2: the origin of Wolverine, you can see the little boy
• 38:00
  Speaker 2: sitting at the bottom of the hill. But you can
• 38:03
  Speaker 2: see it in so much of my work. And I
• 38:05
  Speaker 2: think it's not the only thing I write about. I
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: want to write about all kinds of things. And some
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: of my stuff is pure comedy, right? I love writing comedy.
• 38:13
  Speaker 2: But I think that when you choose to be a
• 38:16
  Speaker 2: writer and you begin to understand yourself as a writer,
• 38:21
  Speaker 2: I said earlier on, you can't be satisfied. You have
• 38:23
  Speaker 2: to say, I need to do what's next and I
• 38:26
  Speaker 2: need to keep learning. I realized that I had written
• 38:30
  Speaker 2: so much about those challenging times, but it didn't shape me.
• 38:34
  Speaker 2: It's not the only thing that shapes you. Tomorrow shapes you.
• 38:38
  Speaker 2: And so that's the way that I live.
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: You don't let your past define you.
• 38:42
  Speaker 2: No.
• 38:43
  Speaker 4: You keep moving forward one day at a time.
• 38:44
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:45
  Speaker 4: Okay, Jesse, you've been waiting patiently.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: There and looking forward to your questions.
• 38:54
  Speaker 4: All things. You can speak it. All things.
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 38:59
  Speaker 6: No, it's all good. First, I want to say thanks
• 39:01
  Speaker 6: to Zach who's sitting here. Yeah, he didn't know I
• 39:03
  Speaker 6: was going to do that.
• 39:04
  Speaker 2: No.
• 39:06
  Speaker 6: So he's the owner of Powerhouse Comics where I am.
• 39:08
  Speaker 6: And this is the comic book shop where I bought
• 39:10
  Speaker 6: my very first comic back in 1992. And is this
• 39:14
  Speaker 6: the same carpeting?
• 39:15
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 39:16
  Speaker 6: It's the same carpeting. So that's awesome. I love that.
• 39:18
  Speaker 6: It still smells the same. You can feel that. And
• 39:21
  Speaker 6: then while you were talking, because he's listening in, he
• 39:24
  Speaker 6: went and pulled the Golden Age About the Hour Man
• 39:28
  Speaker 6: addiction piece.
• 39:29
  Speaker 2: He went and pulled it.
• 39:30
  Speaker 6: Oh I've got those so I mean how cool is
• 39:31
  Speaker 6: it to be in a comic shop to do that
• 39:35
  Speaker 6: so as a person myself who's struggled with mental health
• 39:38
  Speaker 6: and substance use recovery things like that like your work
• 39:41
  Speaker 6: and your stories have been fascinating and I'm kind of
• 39:44
  Speaker 6: on two different things like which one's going to be
• 39:46
  Speaker 6: the better question but I think this one about like
• 39:48
  Speaker 6: Marvel has had this series and And even as far
• 39:50
  Speaker 6: back as like Speedy, right? With like Green Lantern and
• 39:53
  Speaker 6: Green Arrow and like the portrayal of substance use and
• 39:55
  Speaker 6: mental health. Jessica Jones, Tony Stark, Moon Knight. So when
• 40:00
  Speaker 6: you finally got to that point you were talking about,
• 40:02
  Speaker 6: you went to Marvel for the Marvel Knight series. Like,
• 40:05
  Speaker 6: how did you pitch? Because a lot of those characters,
• 40:07
  Speaker 6: it seemed like that stuff came later. Like Tony Stark
• 40:09
  Speaker 6: happens to be an alcoholic. Whereas the Sentry is this
• 40:12
  Speaker 6: flawed character out the gate. So how is like, asking
• 40:17
  Speaker 6: them to do that and say right out the gate
• 40:20
  Speaker 6: at this time period and and what was kind of
• 40:22
  Speaker 6: the thing that got them to that point to green
• 40:24
  Speaker 6: light it to say like yeah we're going to take
• 40:26
  Speaker 6: the risk on this.
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: I had gone to marvel and we were the first
• 40:34
  Speaker 2: thing i did for them was the inhumans yeah um
• 40:36
  Speaker 2: i think i mentioned that i really only had a
• 40:39
  Speaker 2: couple of um A couple of two five page stories
• 40:45
  Speaker 2: by Jack Kirby. And then they let me write it. Okay.
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: We did really well. We won an Eisner award, which
• 40:51
  Speaker 2: I think really surprised them because they hadn't won one
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: in a really long time. And it made Marvel look
• 40:56
  Speaker 2: at themselves and realize, wow, we can do this. We
• 40:59
  Speaker 2: actually probably are different than we think. And maybe this
• 41:02
  Speaker 2: crazy idea of bringing in a guy like Paul Jenkins
• 41:05
  Speaker 2: and some of the other people they brought in isn't
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: a bad idea. So they handed Joe Quesada the job
• 41:09
  Speaker 2: as editor-in-chief, Jimmy Palmiotti, and instead they went from Marvel
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: Knights to like a big imprint. When that happened, Jay
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: Lee and I had some leverage. In some ways, they
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: were lining us up to do, they said, you know,
• 41:24
  Speaker 2: you can kind of do whatever you want that's available.
• 41:26
  Speaker 2: And I think there was talk about doing a Namor
• 41:29
  Speaker 2: series and there was talk about doing, I think maybe
• 41:33
  Speaker 2: the Avengers or something. I can't remember what it was. Um,
• 41:36
  Speaker 2: and I said, Jay, I'd really, really like to do
• 41:38
  Speaker 2: this book that I've been pitching for five years. Uh,
• 41:41
  Speaker 2: the century and Jay to his credit immediately said, that
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: sounds great. Like I really liked this. Um, so it
• 41:50
  Speaker 2: should be added here. The, I don't think the century
• 41:53
  Speaker 2: would be the century of Jay. Hadn't also brought into
• 41:55
  Speaker 2: doing it. You know, it had been something I've been
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: trying to do for about five years. Um, but we
• 42:00
  Speaker 2: did have this leverage. So we went back and we
• 42:04
  Speaker 2: said to Joe Quesada and Jimmy, we'd really like to
• 42:08
  Speaker 2: do this instead of Namor or anything else you're lining
• 42:10
  Speaker 2: us up for. And Joe argued for a minute. He
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: wasn't quite sure about doing a new character because Marvel
• 42:19
  Speaker 2: keep claiming that they don't do new characters. And so
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: they finally said yes. We went back and started the Sentry.
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: The first issue came out I had written that first issue,
• 42:33
  Speaker 2: the outline for it and the specific dialogue and stuff
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: like that in 1995. And this was now 2002. So
• 42:41
  Speaker 2: it was like seven years after I'd created it. It
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: came out. People said, wow, they followed up The Inhumans
• 42:49
  Speaker 2: with this book and it's great. They really liked it.
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: So I think that we had now solidified ourselves as
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: a creative team and that I had solidified my position
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: at Marvel. of being a guy that would take superheroes
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: and use them in a way that other people weren't
• 43:04
  Speaker 2: doing them.
• 43:07
  Speaker 6: Yeah, I really appreciate all the backstory of like your
• 43:09
  Speaker 6: personal experience and how you've just woven in so much
• 43:13
  Speaker 6: of that. And I'm going to just jump to the
• 43:15
  Speaker 6: movie real quick. So, you know, your influence in that
• 43:20
  Speaker 6: and being able to help shape, you know, where Bob went,
• 43:24
  Speaker 6: you know, and I thought it was so great. They're
• 43:25
  Speaker 6: just like, here's Bob and how they kind of played
• 43:27
  Speaker 6: that off. But the part that like, At the end,
• 43:31
  Speaker 6: and I'm curious about your thoughts on this, how unlike
• 43:35
  Speaker 6: any other superhero movie, the way that they kind of
• 43:39
  Speaker 6: took care of it at the end was not we
• 43:41
  Speaker 6: beat him up, we killed him, whatever it was. We
• 43:43
  Speaker 6: held him, right? We saw him for the vulnerable character
• 43:47
  Speaker 6: that he is. And I'm getting goosebumps now, and I
• 43:50
  Speaker 6: cried all the times I walked out of that, right?
• 43:52
  Speaker 6: So did they talk to you about that kind of
• 43:55
  Speaker 6: like ending piece? And how did that land for you
• 43:58
  Speaker 6: and your influence on it?
• 44:01
  Speaker 2: We didn't talk about the specific scenes because they have
• 44:05
  Speaker 2: to be very careful in the film world. I understand this.
• 44:08
  Speaker 2: And because I understand it, it wasn't something that I cared.
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: I was worried about.
• 44:13
  Speaker 5: Right.
• 44:14
  Speaker 2: Um, I will tell you that when I walked into
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: the after party, after the, the premiere, I just walked
• 44:23
  Speaker 2: in and all of a sudden this guy's yelling at
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: me from across the room. And it's Jake Schreier, the
• 44:27
  Speaker 2: director who I had worked with on consulting and Jake,
• 44:30
  Speaker 2: wanted to talk to me, asked me, how did I
• 44:32
  Speaker 2: like the film? Because it's the first time I'd seen
• 44:34
  Speaker 2: the thing. And did he do a good job? And
• 44:39
  Speaker 2: he's asking me and I'm like, dude, aren't you busy?
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: You should be where you have a million people around you,
• 44:44
  Speaker 2: but you want to know how I felt. And that's
• 44:47
  Speaker 2: because I think the DNA of my consulting and the
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: work that I did was all the way through that film.
• 44:55
  Speaker 2: And Jake was really kind and gracious and very humble
• 44:58
  Speaker 2: about that. saying to me look you know do you
• 45:01
  Speaker 2: think that we did land any any i've read about
• 45:04
  Speaker 2: it i've watched a couple of interviews with him i've
• 45:07
  Speaker 2: watched him with lewis pullman who's a lovely guy um
• 45:10
  Speaker 2: and and they all really cared about how to do
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: it i'll give you kind of anecdotally something um that
• 45:17
  Speaker 2: the black widow florence pew she said that when she
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: arrived at the first scene they had some costume for
• 45:24
  Speaker 2: her and she's like why am i not just wearing
• 45:25
  Speaker 2: t-shirt and sweats i'm miserable I should be wearing that.
• 45:29
  Speaker 2: And so they really bought into the idea of this
• 45:32
  Speaker 2: being about mental health challenges. And in talking with Jake,
• 45:39
  Speaker 2: I think it's not, you know, that I wrote or
• 45:44
  Speaker 2: had any input on that last scene and its resolution.
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: I did not. That's something that they did. But what
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: I can say is that the approach that I took
• 45:52
  Speaker 2: with the sentry is interestingly, especially the second series that
• 45:56
  Speaker 2: I wrote, not even as much as the first. The
• 45:59
  Speaker 2: second series they really went for. They understood what I
• 46:01
  Speaker 2: had done with that series. I really liked that series
• 46:04
  Speaker 2: and most people don't know it as well as the
• 46:05
  Speaker 2: first one. They understood what I had written and we
• 46:10
  Speaker 2: had really great interactions with the producers and with Jake
• 46:14
  Speaker 2: about how and why that story meant something and from
• 46:19
  Speaker 2: that they understood that he had the power of a
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: million or in their case a thousand Exploding Suns. It
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: was probably pretty big no matter what Um, and, and
• 46:29
  Speaker 2: yet he couldn't use it. I would tell them about it.
• 46:33
  Speaker 2: Part of my college lecture that really you want the
• 46:37
  Speaker 2: incredible superpower. It's like an, a massive hyper advantage. And
• 46:43
  Speaker 2: under here, you got a disadvantage, his mental health issues.
• 46:46
  Speaker 2: And all of that is meaningless in some ways because
• 46:48
  Speaker 2: it's the collision in the middle. That's the person. And
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: so the only thing I ever wrote about was the person.
• 46:52
  Speaker 2: And what do you think was, what came out of
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: that film? He's the breakout character of that film, although
• 46:57
  Speaker 2: Florence Pugh is fantastic and beautiful and amazing and vulnerable
• 47:01
  Speaker 2: and brilliant, right? But that character's the breakout. Why? He's
• 47:04
  Speaker 2: not even the sentry for more than like three minutes.
• 47:07
  Speaker 2: He's actually, it's all about the person. It's Bob. That
• 47:11
  Speaker 2: whole story is about Bob and we can see ourselves
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: as Bob, but we can't see ourselves as the sentry.
• 47:15
  Speaker 2: We can see ourselves in the void, but not as
• 47:18
  Speaker 2: the void, if you know what I mean. So that's
• 47:20
  Speaker 2: all I ever wrote about was the people. I only
• 47:22
  Speaker 2: ever wrote about the people. And that's what Marvel have
• 47:25
  Speaker 2: suddenly realized is the value proposition for some of their characters.
• 47:31
  Speaker 2: That's great.
• 47:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 47:31
  Speaker 6: Again, like I thought the whole movie and even the
• 47:33
  Speaker 6: work that did come from your series just like speaks to,
• 47:37
  Speaker 6: I guess like in the, in the mental health substance
• 47:39
  Speaker 6: use field, like we call it peer services, like peer
• 47:42
  Speaker 6: to peer services and just how that portrayed that so well.
• 47:45
  Speaker 6: My last question that I'm going to ask is, Is
• 47:48
  Speaker 6: there a character, a title, if you could pick anything,
• 47:52
  Speaker 6: is there one that you've ever wanted to work on,
• 47:54
  Speaker 6: or have you already found that and been able to
• 47:56
  Speaker 6: do it?
• 48:01
  Speaker 2: I think I have a good answer and a bad answer.
• 48:03
  Speaker 2: It depends on how you look at it. I don't
• 48:06
  Speaker 2: care what character. It doesn't make any difference to me.
• 48:10
  Speaker 2: Because I think you should be able to find something
• 48:12
  Speaker 2: in any character and I have been able to do so.
• 48:14
  Speaker 2: Give me a character. I'll probably be able to tell
• 48:16
  Speaker 2: you the why of that character after I've thought about
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: it for a little while. There actually is something that
• 48:23
  Speaker 2: I've wanted to do and I might get to do.
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: We'll see how it plays out. I like villains. I
• 48:31
  Speaker 2: like to tell the story of villains because I think
• 48:33
  Speaker 2: that you can understand. If you can understand why they
• 48:37
  Speaker 2: do what they do, If you can agree with them almost,
• 48:40
  Speaker 2: but you can't agree with their methods, then you're writing
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: a villain properly. They do believe in themselves. They're usually
• 48:46
  Speaker 2: the hero of their own story, right? And so I have,
• 48:50
  Speaker 2: I hope, some really interesting and challenging and powerful and
• 48:53
  Speaker 2: poignant stories about villains that get you to understand, like,
• 48:57
  Speaker 2: why did you end up in this place? Why did
• 48:58
  Speaker 2: you become this person? And if you can actually understand
• 49:02
  Speaker 2: why someone becomes this person that they eventually become, It's
• 49:06
  Speaker 2: probably going to mean something to you as well, just
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: as much as any of the other work I've done.
• 49:11
  Speaker 2: So I wouldn't necessarily pick a particular character. I've had
• 49:14
  Speaker 2: a chance to probably write most of them anyway. And
• 49:17
  Speaker 2: if someone would say, well, you didn't really do much
• 49:18
  Speaker 2: with Superman. I'm like, yeah, I did. i did this
• 49:20
  Speaker 2: entry that's a great answer i like that.
• 49:25
  Speaker 6: Good So it's a pleasure to meet you. Thank you
• 49:34
  Speaker 6: so much. I got to jump to something else, but
• 49:38
  Speaker 6: this was great. Thanks so much, Kevin. Great to see you, David.
• 49:42
  Speaker 6: Looking forward to seeing this when it comes out on
• 49:43
  Speaker 6: the other side.
• 49:45
  Speaker 4: Thank you, Jesse.
• 49:46
  Speaker 2: You're a part of it. All right.
• 49:49
  Speaker 4: Talk to you later.
• 49:49
  Speaker 6: Thanks.
• 49:52
  Speaker 1: David Covington is a dear friend of mine, one of
• 49:54
  Speaker 1: my personal heroes. in suicide prevention and mental health. He
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: is one of the best or the greatest suicide prevention
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: champions I've ever met in my life. And one of
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: my dearest friends.
• 50:09
  Speaker 2: Boy, do I have a story for you.
• 50:10
  Speaker 4: Yeah, please.
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: I really do. I'll tell this story as an anecdote. Oh, really? Oh, yeah.
• 50:14
  Speaker 4: Okay. Well, let's hear that story.
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: And then, David, after we hear that story, David, you're
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: up for your questions.
• 50:20
  Speaker 4: Let's go for it.
• 50:21
  Speaker 2: Sure. I mean, David, I think this would be of
• 50:23
  Speaker 2: real interest to you. And I'll, I'll, I'll preface this
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: in advance. You know, it is a story about like
• 50:29
  Speaker 2: attempted suicide. Um, I had this experience. I think when
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: you look back at your career, I often don't, I've
• 50:42
  Speaker 2: been to red carpet events. I'm going to one this week,
• 50:44
  Speaker 2: you know, I don't care about any of that stuff.
• 50:46
  Speaker 2: I used to describe it as an equation. there are
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: three parts of the equation why you create. You create
• 50:52
  Speaker 2: because you love the creativity. You create because you like
• 50:55
  Speaker 2: the money. You create because you love the attention, right?
• 50:59
  Speaker 2: And unfortunately for me, attention was 0% of my equation.
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: I'm just sort of really straightforward, ordinary guy that really
• 51:06
  Speaker 2: doesn't care about that stuff. But that actually helps me
• 51:09
  Speaker 2: in dealing with fans, right? I can deal with them
• 51:12
  Speaker 2: and be super happy and not really worry about... And
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: I want to see them eye level, right? I just
• 51:17
  Speaker 2: want to... meet people and say hi to them right
• 51:22
  Speaker 2: so often times you get fans that are like really
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: nervous to meet you they see you as someone that
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: you're not and whether it's a good thing or sometimes
• 51:30
  Speaker 2: it's really good they really want your signature and it
• 51:32
  Speaker 2: means something so I'll sign a book right but for
• 51:36
  Speaker 2: me it's probably 20% money because I have a family
• 51:38
  Speaker 2: and 80% creativity so fan interactions things like that at
• 51:44
  Speaker 2: conventions are quite special to me that means something I
• 51:47
  Speaker 2: love that kind of thing So one year I was
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: signing up Marvel and the way that those signings can
• 51:53
  Speaker 2: work at San Diego Comic-Con, they're really crazy hectic. And
• 51:56
  Speaker 2: so you sit there for an hour and what they
• 51:58
  Speaker 2: do immediately is the line is forming to get a signature.
• 52:01
  Speaker 2: And so they put a guy at the back and
• 52:02
  Speaker 2: he has a sign that says, I'm the last in line.
• 52:05
  Speaker 2: And he carries the sign the whole way so that
• 52:07
  Speaker 2: no one tries to get in behind him. And, you know,
• 52:11
  Speaker 2: you go through the line, you sign, you say hi
• 52:12
  Speaker 2: to everyone. I usually last in the line way longer
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: because I chat with everybody and I spent time with them.
• 52:19
  Speaker 2: And the guy comes, he's last in line. And the
• 52:24
  Speaker 2: whole signing, I have been looking, there's a guy standing
• 52:26
  Speaker 2: on the other side of a red rope where they
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: keep them apart. And he's been watching me and he
• 52:32
  Speaker 2: is holding a comic book in two hands. And it's
• 52:35
  Speaker 2: kind of like a little signal that I get like
• 52:37
  Speaker 2: that comic means something to that guy. So I said,
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: Hey buddy, do you want a signature? And he looks
• 52:42
  Speaker 2: around and he says, me? And I was like, yeah, man, yeah,
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: come on over. Just jump over the rope. And he
• 52:48
  Speaker 2: was a bit nervous, but he came over. And he
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: puts down in front of me a copy of Hellblazer.
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: And the copy of Hellblazer was a specific issue. It
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: was about what happens when people die. In the story,
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: John Constantine, who's quite of a dark character, there's an
• 53:09
  Speaker 2: old lady who's dying and there's two people that are
• 53:13
  Speaker 2: having a baby. And he goes downstairs to where the
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: old lady's dying and hangs out with his mate Straff
• 53:18
  Speaker 2: and kind of experiences the death. But upstairs, a new
• 53:22
  Speaker 2: baby is being born. And so it's a story of
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: how people go in and out of these life experiences,
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: sometimes in the same week, in the same day. So
• 53:32
  Speaker 2: this guy comes over. I said, do you want me
• 53:34
  Speaker 2: to sign it to you? And he just said, no.
• 53:37
  Speaker 2: And I said, okay. And I give it to him.
• 53:39
  Speaker 2: And he didn't even thank me. He just walked away.
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: And I thought, well, it's okay because it takes all kinds.
• 53:45
  Speaker 4: But.
• 53:46
  Speaker 2: A couple of weeks later, I got an email. That
• 53:48
  Speaker 2: guy had found out my email address, and he said, Mr. Jenkins,
• 53:51
  Speaker 2: I want you to know who I was. And then
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: he told me, and I couldn't believe it. So many
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: years before, when I wrote that issue, I got an
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: envelope from Axel Alonso, who ended up becoming the editor-in-chief
• 54:03
  Speaker 2: of Marvel, but he was the assistant editor on Hellblazer,
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: then the editor. And all it said on the envelope was, wow.
• 54:11
  Speaker 2: And I opened it, and it was from that guy,
• 54:13
  Speaker 2: that same guy who came to see me years later.
• 54:17
  Speaker 2: And he suffered from depression and his father had died.
• 54:21
  Speaker 2: And in the same week that his father had died,
• 54:25
  Speaker 2: his brother and sister-in-law had a baby. And he had
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: a momentary pang of happiness to see the baby come
• 54:32
  Speaker 2: into the world. And he couldn't reconcile his feelings. He
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: didn't know what to do about it. So he decided
• 54:36
  Speaker 2: to take his own life. He walked into, this is
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: in the 90s, right? He walks into his garage and
• 54:44
  Speaker 2: he sets up his car based on what he can
• 54:46
  Speaker 2: find out how to do it. And because it was
• 54:49
  Speaker 2: a Wednesday, coincidentally, it was New Comics Day. And he thought,
• 54:55
  Speaker 2: I know what I'll do. So he went and he
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: got a bunch of new comics to read. And then
• 55:00
  Speaker 2: he sat in his car and he closed the garage
• 55:02
  Speaker 2: door and did, you know, turn the engine on. And
• 55:05
  Speaker 2: the first book he wrote was Hellblazer because he really
• 55:07
  Speaker 2: liked Hellblazer. And it was that issue. And he turned
• 55:11
  Speaker 2: his engine off. Now that is... Something that was luck.
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: It was, I didn't save the guy's life. It was luck.
• 55:22
  Speaker 2: It was coincidence. But look at that, right? This guy was,
• 55:29
  Speaker 2: was saved because of the existence of a comic. It
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: reminded me of the obligation that I have when I
• 55:38
  Speaker 2: meet people and I'm going to interact with them because,
• 55:41
  Speaker 2: because you'd never know you can meet someone who's wealthy. Right.
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: But they can still have money problems because maybe they've
• 55:47
  Speaker 2: gathered wealth and they've been trying to keep their lifestyle. But,
• 55:49
  Speaker 2: you know, but now it's all going away. Right. You
• 55:51
  Speaker 2: never know what someone's going through. And so it reminded
• 55:55
  Speaker 2: me of something. Maybe I was doing it right. Right.
• 55:57
  Speaker 2: That every fan gets a high and the chat and
• 56:00
  Speaker 2: I never avoid looking them in the eye and chatting
• 56:02
  Speaker 2: to them. You do not know. And I think that
• 56:06
  Speaker 2: that guy writing to me was really courageous. But you
• 56:09
  Speaker 2: have to understand, you know, the final thing I'll say
• 56:11
  Speaker 2: on it is I'm meeting a fan. and it's wednesday
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: and i'm signing that was my maybe one of the
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: most important moments of his life because of what had
• 56:21
  Speaker 2: happened to him right and so it reminded me and
• 56:25
  Speaker 2: taught me again that interacting with fans is like a
• 56:30
  Speaker 2: privilege and an obligation in some ways and we're not
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: trained for it right i'm actually pretty good at it
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: but some other creators are not they're they're perhaps they're
• 56:39
  Speaker 2: a bit nervous or they're socially awkward or whatever, you know,
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: you have to forgive the creators if they're not as
• 56:43
  Speaker 2: forward as I am. I'm pretty friendly.
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, wow.
• 56:51
  Speaker 5: That, you know, that Kevin talked about being moved by
• 56:55
  Speaker 5: your Wolverine origin story that look just a human to
• 56:59
  Speaker 5: human sharing stories that connect and move and, and you know,
• 57:07
  Speaker 5: this whole, podcast has been such a blessing to me.
• 57:11
  Speaker 5: It feels to me, hearing you talk about your lived
• 57:15
  Speaker 5: experience and your background and everything that you've brought into
• 57:18
  Speaker 5: your story, it feels just like that moment in the
• 57:21
  Speaker 5: film where Yelena determines she's going to walk into the void.
• 57:26
  Speaker 5: And the only reason, I mean, that brought tears to
• 57:29
  Speaker 5: my eyes because you can see all of her life
• 57:32
  Speaker 5: that comes right into that moment.
• 57:34
  Speaker 3: And she just, and that's what you've done. So, Thank
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: you so much.
• 57:40
  Speaker 5: I wasn't aware of Peter Parker 33, but hearing you
• 57:45
  Speaker 5: tell that story, the last text I ever got from
• 57:48
  Speaker 5: my father, I still have it, says long live the Giants.
• 57:52
  Speaker 5: And it was sarcasm, but it was the year Eli
• 57:55
  Speaker 5: had won the Super Bowl. We weren't fans, but it
• 58:00
  Speaker 5: feels just like that Uncle Ben moment that you were
• 58:03
  Speaker 5: describing earlier.
• 58:04
  Speaker 2: Wow, what a Is that the one with the David
• 58:07
  Speaker 2: Tyree head catch?
• 58:08
  Speaker 4: Yeah, he caught it with his helmet, you know.
• 58:14
  Speaker 2: Unbelievable.
• 58:15
  Speaker 5: So, hey, I've got a few questions. And, Kevin, I'm
• 58:19
  Speaker 5: going to play off of one of Jesse's questions and
• 58:22
  Speaker 5: move into the ones you had for me. But, Paul,
• 58:26
  Speaker 5: your writing in The Incredible Hulk is often cited as
• 58:30
  Speaker 5: one of the most introspective takes on the character. How
• 58:33
  Speaker 5: did you approach writing for Bruce Banner and the Hulk,
• 58:36
  Speaker 5: given their duality and the emotional turmoil they experienced? Sounds
• 58:40
  Speaker 5: a little bit similar, but probably way different than the
• 58:42
  Speaker 5: Sentry too.
• 58:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's very different from the Sentry, David,
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: because the Sentry, in some ways, I think perhaps the
• 58:56
  Speaker 2: Sentry is aware and unaware of his issues, right? He's in...
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: full denial that those issues exist and that's creating another
• 59:06
  Speaker 2: problem for him at times, right? Whereas Bruce Banner I think,
• 59:10
  Speaker 2: is well aware that this is a problem because it's
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: literally painted on his skin every time he gets upset,
• 59:16
  Speaker 2: you know? When he becomes the Hulk, you know... Now,
• 59:22
  Speaker 2: you know, the Hulk... It's just like many other characters, right?
• 59:25
  Speaker 2: The Sentry could be used to smash up the universe
• 59:27
  Speaker 2: and cut a planet in half and do really powerful things.
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: And I find that to be unbelievably boring and pointless.
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: I find the Hulk smashing somebody to be interesting in
• 59:39
  Speaker 2: the sense that visually it can look good. But I'll
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: point to the way that I wrote the Hulk. I
• 59:50
  Speaker 2: really felt that this was about Bruce Banner. You know,
• 59:54
  Speaker 2: I'll always go back to the alter ego. And so
• 59:59
  Speaker 2: I also felt that when I took over the Hulk,
• 1:00:01
  Speaker 2: they had kind of lost their way. That was one
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 2: of the things they kept doing to me at Marvel
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 2: was saying, you're the Mr. Fixer. We need you to
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 2: fix the book. And if you look at the way
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: the Hulk had been when he was successful, he was
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 2: a ticking time bomb. Things were going to go badly
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 2: and we needed to set that bomb again so that
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 2: it would tick. So we gave him Lou Gehrig's disease.
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 2: And when that happened, There's nothing that he could do.
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 2: He knew that he would get, he would finish at
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 2: some point and the Hulk would take over. And he
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 2: was terrified of this. Obviously we had ways in which
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: he overcomes Lou Gehrig's disease because of the super powery
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 2: kind of stuff. And that's, you know, that's not what
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 2: most people can do, obviously. But all of that was about,
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 2: I'm going to end. Like it was about facing immortality.
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: It was about losing control. because he would have to
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: lose control. There was no choice. If the Lou Gehrig's
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 2: disease ravaged his body to a point, the Hulk would
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 2: take over and he would be trapped and there was
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 2: nothing he could do about it and the Hulk would
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: go off. So I think, you know, perhaps to be
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 2: fair to myself, maybe some of it is like the
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 2: psychology and the things that mean something. Some of it
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 2: might just be craft in writing. You know, we decided
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 2: to change the situation of the Hulk. Why not give
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: him back a time bomb? because that's what works for
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 2: the whole is more of a like writing craft decision
• 1:01:23
  Speaker 2: than it is an emotional decision, you know? So I
• 1:01:28
  Speaker 2: always approach my work both ways, right? What is engaging?
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 2: What's interesting? Maybe we need to do that as well.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 2: I can look at Spider-Man as a good example. When
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 2: I came on board that, one of the first things
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: I said to Mark Buckingham, my partner in crime, was, wow,
• 1:01:43
  Speaker 2: Spider-Man used to win his battles not because he punched hardest,
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 2: who cares? but because he used to piss off the
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: supervillains with wisecracks. He won against Dr. Octopus because Dr.
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 2: Octopus had no sense of humor and Spider-Man had a
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 2: great sense of humor. So even if Dr. Octopus punched
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: him on the ground, he would say something that was
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 2: so infuriating that Dr. Octopus would get annoyed, right? And
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 2: so we made so many of our issues a comedy.
• 1:02:12
  Speaker 2: We even had one entire issue where he's moping around
• 1:02:15
  Speaker 2: cause he's lost his wife that don't blame me. They,
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 2: they made Mary Jane die for a minute. And, um,
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 2: he's all upset and he's trying to work out and he's,
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 2: I've made this promise to you, Mary Jane, I'm going
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: to do it. I'm going to do it. You go
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 2: through the whole issue, trying to work out what the
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: promise is and the promise is that he's going to
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 2: try out a comedy club and he goes, and he
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 2: goes through a comedy club and he's absolutely terrible. He bombs. So,
• 1:02:40
  Speaker 2: you know, I mean, it's, I think you just have
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 2: to sometimes work out that maybe you need to look
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 2: at the characters and actually put some effort and guile
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 2: into the way that you write them. It's not just,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: can you do psychology? It's, can you actually think of
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 2: things that mean something to the reader?
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 3: I love this so much, Paul.
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 5: You talked about the why of the characters earlier, and
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 5: now you're nailing the who of the characters, who Peter
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 5: Parker is. Hey, one quick aside. You talked about being
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 5: brought in to fix things. Does Smart Hulk need to
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 5: be fixed or not? What's your take there?
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 2: Well, I don't know that Smart Hulk is as interesting.
• 1:03:17
  Speaker 2: I called him the Professor Hulk, right? I made loads
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 2: of Hulks because he had disassociative identity disorder. And so
• 1:03:28
  Speaker 2: one of the big Hulks we gave him was the
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 2: Devil Hulk. He wanted to destroy the world, you know?
• 1:03:35
  Speaker 2: We had him, but when you actually see all the
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: hulks come flying out of his psyche, right, all the bodies,
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 2: they all come flying out. There's a clown hulk. There's
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 2: all kinds of hulks, and they're all just rushing out.
• 1:03:45
  Speaker 2: It's this flood that opens. So there's potential to do
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 2: that story. I think that it's fetishized a little bit,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 2: multiple personality disorder. I think it's a challenge and an
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: illness that people have to kind of identify with. and
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 2: I didn't want to fetishize it, but I wanted to
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: maybe say, Hey, look, you know, maybe someone has a
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 2: lot of different aspects of their personality that are helping
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 2: them deal with. And what was it helping them deal
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: with in his case, according to the law? Um, it
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 2: was child abuse. He had been abused as a child.
• 1:04:15
  Speaker 2: And so he was trying to like put the pieces together.
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 2: And the only way that he could, he had developed
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 2: because of his, whatever you might call his diagnosis, a
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: secondary access to diagnosis of, of, a personality disorder.
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 5: So this challenge for comic book writers, how do you
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 5: break new ground while staying true to the reader's expectations
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 5: at the same time? What strategies did you use or
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 5: do you use to push boundaries while maintaining that integrity
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 5: we've been talking about in both the characters and their universes?
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: I love that question because it's got a simple, actually
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 2: a more simple answer than you would think. How do
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: you push any boundaries right well you stay honest and
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: you don't have any fear of taking a risk as
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 2: a writer so what's risky in comics is it risky
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 2: to have someone throw a big punch and you know
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: planets explode and spaceship flying it's not risky that's just
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 2: window dressing you know what's risky is taking six pages
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 2: of a 20 page comic book and having two people
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 2: sit in a coffee shop, because that's what the story dictates.
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 2: And they sit and they talk. We had, I did a,
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: I think it's one of the stories that I did
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 2: with Umberto Ramos in Spider-Man that probably takes what you
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: might call a risk, but I don't think it was
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 2: a risk at all. And it, and it essentially was,
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 2: It was called The Revenge of the Green Goblin, and
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: it's pretty widely recognized being a very definitive kind of
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: goblin story. Norman Osborn essentially puts Peter Parker in a place,
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: in a warehouse, and says, okay, the two of us
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 2: are in here, and here's the deal. If you get
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: out of here, right, well, if I win this fight, right,
• 1:06:16
  Speaker 2: then I will kill all of your family. They've all
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 2: got sniper rifles aimed at them right now. So you
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 2: have to defeat me in order to save their lives.
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 2: If you win, you have to kill me. And that
• 1:06:27
  Speaker 2: means you'll become me because you're a killer now. So
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: he puts him in an impossible situation. They have this
• 1:06:32
  Speaker 2: incredibly big fight. Peter Parker's actually genuinely angry for a change.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 2: And they beat each other to a standstill. There's nothing
• 1:06:41
  Speaker 2: they can do. They're finished. And they sit down next
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 2: to each other. And they don't know what to do, right?
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 2: As they're sitting there in the quiet and they're breathing
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 2: heavily and they just don't know what to say to
• 1:06:54
  Speaker 2: each other, don't know what to do, the Green Goblin says,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 2: you know, I wasn't going to call myself the Green Goblin.
• 1:06:58
  Speaker 2: I was going to call myself Mr. Coffee. And they
• 1:07:02
  Speaker 2: start laughing because they just don't know what else to do.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 2: And they're cracking up laughing at this moment. And then
• 1:07:09
  Speaker 2: as the laughter dies down, Peter says, I've realized what's
• 1:07:13
  Speaker 2: happening here and I'm not going to kill you. So
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 2: go ahead, kill my family. If I kill you, I
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: become you. And it's not about me. It's not about
• 1:07:21
  Speaker 2: anybody else. You know who this is about? It's about
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 2: Gwen Stacy. His first love, I think. If I killed you,
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 2: she would hate that. So I'm not going to do that.
• 1:07:31
  Speaker 2: And when that happens, there's nothing that Norman Osborn could do.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: He has lost. He cannot win. And to me, understanding...
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 2: that felt like some people would say it's a risk
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 2: to have the two of them sit there. And it
• 1:07:52
  Speaker 2: is a risk, right? That's the real risk is having
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 2: them resolve things and having them get to a point.
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 2: But that had all the meaning in the story, right?
• 1:08:00
  Speaker 2: So whatever the story tells you to do, go do that.
• 1:08:04
  Speaker 2: That's taking a risk. That's actually writing the things in
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: the way that I feel that we're supposed to write
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 2: them in, say, a comic book, you know? Yeah. Wow.
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 5: Paul, in your opinion, how have the comic book industry
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 5: and its treatment of mental health themes evolved since you
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 5: started your career?
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 2: Well, there's positives and negatives, right? I feel that there
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 2: is positive because I think it's addressed more. I think
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 2: that people are ready to talk about it more. I
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 2: think that's just a societal thing. I think that we
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: landed in a place where, I mean, you know, it
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 2: comes and goes, doesn't it, right? It's changing again now.
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 2: But I think for some time, People weren't ready to
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 2: talk about this and then they were. The downside to it,
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 2: to me, is that, like I said, I mentioned earlier
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 2: on that I created a diagnosis for century and i
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 2: wish they had actually stuck to that diagnosis because i
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 2: i do find that there's this like naive and childish
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: approach to things like mental health issues right like centuries
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 2: mental because he's mental and so he does crazy things
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 2: right that's not anybody's diagnosis that's not really what happens
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 2: ever You remember I said a little bit earlier that
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 2: I really like writing about villains. If I had a choice,
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 2: I'd want to write about them.
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 3: Why?
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: Because people write villains as if they're Laurel and Hardy
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: villains from 1920 where they stand on the edge and
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 2: they twirl their moustache and say, ha ha, I'm the
• 1:09:30
  Speaker 2: bad guy and I've got you now. I'm the landlord.
• 1:09:34
  Speaker 2: I find in some ways American comics to be lazy,
• 1:09:42
  Speaker 2: to be childish, to be unmotivated by passion and honesty
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: and integrity I think they can often just be window
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 2: dressing and I think that that's the downside is that
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 2: we can write some incredible things with superheroes and with
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: other books right war comics and crime comics we can
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: do any of that stuff but somehow we have this
• 1:10:09
  Speaker 2: fear of doing it because we don't want to be
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 2: honest or we don't want to explain things I don't
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: know so there's there's positives and some real downturns as
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 2: well that people just won't actually stick to it you know.
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 5: Yeah wow so you're talking about these themes of courage
• 1:10:27
  Speaker 5: and authenticity you're also talking about an industry that at
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 5: times can be uh not embrace all that so what
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 5: advice would you give to young writers and creators looking
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 5: to make their mark in the world of comics well.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: Um, I've got one part of what I call my
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 2: mythical college lecture, which is, you know, that you hear
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 2: this maxim that writers write. That's not true. Writers finish, right?
• 1:10:50
  Speaker 2: So the first thing you need to do is finish
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 2: a script. Don't, you know, you've only got, you can
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: only work with something that you actually hand in. If
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: you made the most beautiful painting in the world that
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 2: people would cry to see, and then you walked it
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: in the middle of a forest and left it there
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 2: has no value, right? So finish. But, I mean, I
• 1:11:09
  Speaker 2: think it's just this. If you know the truth of
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: your story, of any story that you're writing, you know
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 2: the truth and then you lie to yourself and everyone
• 1:11:18
  Speaker 2: else by not writing that, then you're never going to
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: get anywhere, are you, right? You're not going to actually
• 1:11:26
  Speaker 2: deliver anything except you're either going to pander to the
• 1:11:28
  Speaker 2: audience or you're not going to be truthful, right? So
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 2: you've got to do that.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 5: Looking back on your career, Paul, is there a specific
• 1:11:36
  Speaker 5: moment or character arc you're the most proud of?
• 1:11:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah. I think if I looked in my work
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: in mainstream comics, I probably would look at Captain America
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: books I did called Captain America Theater of War and
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 2: the mythos story that I wrote about Captain America. So
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 2: here's this weird thing. I'm a Brit living in the
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 2: States and those books are like a love letter to
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 2: the American military. It's a strange thing. But you have
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 2: to understand, That I grew up, my mom was a
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: little girl in the Second World War. She lived through
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: the Blitz. She cries even now if she hears the siren.
• 1:12:13
  Speaker 2: She was evacuated. She made friends with all the Yanks.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 2: And one day they were gone. And that morning she
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 2: walked out of her house and she watched the gliders
• 1:12:22
  Speaker 2: go over. Now those gliders that went over to Normandy,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 2: they had, I think, a 40% survival rate just from landing.
• 1:12:29
  Speaker 2: Just from landing, right? Oh my God. You're talking about
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: the hell that the American soldiers went through on Omaha,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: but any of the soldiers went through as they landed
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 2: on Normandy, right? Now, I've had a massive reverence for
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 2: the military because my family's a military family. My great-grandfathers,
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 2: three of them were killed in the first war. That
• 1:12:52
  Speaker 2: means that three of my grandparents didn't know their father.
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 2: My great-grandfather, Freddie Groves, is buried in Ramla, right? And
• 1:13:03
  Speaker 2: he was, the war ended on November the 11th and
• 1:13:06
  Speaker 2: he died on the 13th of November, two days after
• 1:13:09
  Speaker 2: the end of the war and they couldn't get him home.
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 2: So he's buried in the Middle East. My great grandfather,
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: Bill Eldridge, I just went to go see his grave
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 2: with my brother. He died in the clearing house. He
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 2: was shot at the Battle of Arras and he just
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 2: lost blood. Nowadays it would be a scratch. They would just,
• 1:13:29
  Speaker 2: fix him up and he'd be fine right but in
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 2: those days in the middle of that battle they couldn't
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 2: save his life so you think about all of that
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 2: uh what it means to be from a family who's
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 2: lost a lot my family are pretty much known as
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 2: pikeys because and and where that comes from is the
• 1:13:44
  Speaker 2: english civil war they're the people who are given pikes
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 2: and made to stand up front because they die first
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 2: right that's why they're called pikeys and so you know
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 2: writing captain america theater of war I wrote about the real,
• 1:14:01
  Speaker 2: they asked me to take, the first one was Mythos.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: They asked me to take the origin of Captain America,
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 2: the comic origin, then mix it with what they thought
• 1:14:10
  Speaker 2: the film was going to be. So there was a
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 2: modern day kind of retelling of the origin that relayed
• 1:14:15
  Speaker 2: to the film and to the origin, but also give
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 2: it a unique voice. Those Mythos books were really hard
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: to write. But the premise I put forward is that
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 2: there's a reason why Captain America joins the army. He's
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 2: born in 1920. He grows up in the depression. His
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 2: dad dies when he's really young. And so he joins
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: the army, not because of Adolf Hitler, but because he
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 2: wants to be in his father's regiment because he didn't
• 1:14:40
  Speaker 2: know his father. Now you take it from my point
• 1:14:42
  Speaker 2: of view, my father left when I was five years old.
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 2: My father's a military guy. He was in the Duke
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 2: of Cornwall's infantry. And so you understand that like a
• 1:14:50
  Speaker 2: lot of what was written about in that book was,
• 1:14:54
  Speaker 2: was about me and my dad. And, um, Uh, you know, um,
• 1:15:03
  Speaker 2: in that book, we get this guy, this kid, if
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 2: you think about Captain America, he's got, um, in the origin,
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 2: there's a kid out on the streets trying to read
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: a comic book. And there's a kid with one of
• 1:15:15
  Speaker 2: those old style catapults, like bullying him and, you know,
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: firing a missile at Captain America. And what I wrote
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 2: about was that kid was called Doug Huggins. And he,
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: Was the neighborhood bully. He lived in the thing. And
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 2: then one day when Captain America goes to enlist, he
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 2: goes with Doug. He goes because he wants to be
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: in his father's regiment. Doug goes because he's bored. Doug
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 2: gets accepted. He gets rejected. But then he becomes Captain America.
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 2: Now he ends up in Doug's regiment. And so they
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: both go to, they're in the Blue Spaders. That's what
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: he wants to be in, the 17th Infantry, right? And
• 1:15:48
  Speaker 2: they go to Palermo and Sicily. They're part of the
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: first American forces to land somewhere else. They go all
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 2: the way through Europe. He goes through D-Day. In the end,
• 1:15:56
  Speaker 2: he ends up pinning the Medal of Valor, Medal of Honor, whatever,
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 2: Purple Heart or something to Doug Huggins. And at the
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 2: very end of the book, it's just him and the
• 1:16:07
  Speaker 2: old boys. They're all old now. And he talks about it.
• 1:16:09
  Speaker 2: He says, I've been in a company of heroes, right?
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 2: Because those were the heroes that he grew up with.
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 2: And they all were left on some foreign field forever 22, right?
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 2: And in the company of heroes, I remained because now
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 2: he's with all these superheroes, right? And so he's at
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: the regimental dinner and he's eating carrots because his, because
• 1:16:28
  Speaker 2: his mom always told him, you got to eat carrots
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 2: a good few. And he's, and he's feeding Doug and
• 1:16:32
  Speaker 2: Doug's a really old man. And now he's just, he's
• 1:16:35
  Speaker 2: so old that cat. And he says, I'll miss those boys.
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 2: And then everyone, everyone fades out and it's just him
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: and Doug. And so that book is one. That I loved,
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 2: but what you need to know is that Doug Huggins
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 2: was my next door neighbor. Yeah. He, he was on
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: the USS, um, St. Louis when Pearl Harbor was bombed
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 2: and his best friend, Bobby Shaw was killed on the Arizona.
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 2: He was a Trump at a third class. There's another
• 1:17:11
  Speaker 2: issue of captain America. That's all about Bobby Shaw, the
• 1:17:14
  Speaker 2: worst soldier and the bravest man that captain America Avenue,
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: because he was, he was terrified. Because true heroism is
• 1:17:21
  Speaker 2: not going into battle with gun blazing. It's going, being
• 1:17:24
  Speaker 2: terrified and thinking of home. And so those books will
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 2: make you cry. They will make you cry.
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 6: That's a cry, right? I don't know why I've cried
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 6: this episode.
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 5: Well, Paul, you know, we started out talking about the
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 5: shared experiences of Mets games between Peter and his uncle.
• 1:17:46
  Speaker 5: Thank you so much for pouring so much heart and
• 1:17:48
  Speaker 5: soul into this work.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 4: In your career.
• 1:17:51
  Speaker 5: You've created these shared experiences for so many millions of us.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 4: Kevin and I have.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 3: Done this again and again.
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 4: I remember he flew.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 5: I don't remember where he was going, but he stops
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 5: in Phoenix and we go see Black Panther at midnight
• 1:18:04
  Speaker 5: in Phoenix so we can share that together. And then
• 1:18:06
  Speaker 5: he flies out immediately afterward because that's just what you've crafted.
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 3: Hey, Paul, tell us about Meta Studios.
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 2: So Meta Studios is my company. We're small. There's six
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 2: or seven of us. It actually has been in existence
• 1:18:27
  Speaker 2: since 2014. So we predate Zuckerberg's Meta by six years.
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 2: You just kind of procreated the name. But we do
• 1:18:35
  Speaker 2: have the trademark for Meta Studios. So if he tries
• 1:18:36
  Speaker 2: to make film and television animation, then we can shut
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 2: him down, which I'm sure a lot of people are
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: excited about. Meta is an acronym. It stands for media,
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 2: which is what I do. I work across different media.
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 2: One thing that's really weird that people don't understand is
• 1:18:51
  Speaker 2: that I make film, animation, comics, television, new media. We
• 1:18:55
  Speaker 2: do work in Web3. I had said this earlier. People
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 2: see NFT and they think of it as a four-letter word,
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: but an NFT is a fundamentally useful technology. It has
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: nothing to do with whether or not you got ripped off.
• 1:19:09
  Speaker 2: You got ripped off by people doing pump and dump
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 2: and pyramid schemes. That's what you should be upset about,
• 1:19:14
  Speaker 2: not NFTs. Same with AI, right? AI, if it's used
• 1:19:17
  Speaker 2: to scrub other people's work and steal it, is terrible.
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: But AI is a fundamentally useful tool like a glorified hammer, right?
• 1:19:23
  Speaker 2: So we work with those types of technology all the time.
• 1:19:27
  Speaker 2: We do it in an ethical way. The E in
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: meta is for education because it's something I care dearly about.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: We're on a big educational project right now. The T
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 2: stands for technology because I think that's what sets us apart,
• 1:19:39
  Speaker 2: understanding how to work across different technologies. And the A,
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: this goes all the way back to my days with
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 2: Ninja Turtle and Tundra, the A is the advancement of creators.
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 2: So media, education, technology, and advancement is what the company's about.
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 2: When I founded it, the day that I did, I
• 1:19:55
  Speaker 2: wrote what you might call a vision statement or a
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: mission statement. And it said, you know, our goal is
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 2: to make projects like this that make money for our
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 2: investors that blah, blah, blah, do the things that they do.
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 2: Our core values are transparency, integrity, accountability, and proactive communication.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 2: We added that one afterwards because we got so frustrated
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 2: trying to deal with people that couldn't communicate. So we
• 1:20:17
  Speaker 2: just said, okay, that's one of our core values. You know,
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 2: why would you waste so much time and money not communicating?
• 1:20:23
  Speaker 2: It just seems so silly, right? And so we, you know, we...
• 1:20:27
  Speaker 2: We are in the business of moving across all media. Sometimes,
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: you know, we have like an independent film slate that
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 2: we would like to get funded right now. We're working
• 1:20:37
  Speaker 2: on that. There's such an opportunity. I had chaired an
• 1:20:40
  Speaker 2: advisory committee for the governor of Georgia on digital, interactive
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: and independent filmmaking. So Georgia hasn't done it. No one
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: has really done it. We want there to be an
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 2: independent filmmaking play here because there can be. We've got
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 2: a good tax credit and we can build out. We've
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 2: got so many people that have worked here for like
• 1:20:58
  Speaker 2: 20 years in film. So let's go make that into something.
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: So I suppose in many ways, Metastudios is a company,
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: but it's also represents something which is to try and
• 1:21:08
  Speaker 2: build creators forward and to make them compensated for the
• 1:21:16
  Speaker 2: work that they provide.
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 4: Oh, David, terrific.
• 1:21:21
  Speaker 5: Paul, I have a 16- and 17-year-old, and I've seen
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 5: every version, iteration of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So when
• 1:21:30
  Speaker 5: you mentioned that's where you got your start, I just gasped. Kevin,
• 1:21:33
  Speaker 5: what a privilege to join you and Paul. And Kevin's
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 5: a storyteller of the highest level, and so privileged to
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 5: meet you, Paul.
• 1:21:44
  Speaker 4: And hear about all the work you've done and continue
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 4: to do.
• 1:21:47
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it, David. I like the fact that you
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 2: guys are asking questions that have some meaning. Where do
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: you get your ideas from? The answer is, as Harlan
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 2: Ellison used to say, I get a mail order catalog
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 2: from Cleveland and I was so like them.
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you, David, for joining this episode of the
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: Hindsight's podcast. We love you, buddy. And I'm glad to
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 1: have you on board. Thank you for your time today.
• 1:22:13
  Speaker 1: Feel free to log off. We're going to continue to
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 1: wrap this podcast up. And David, I'll see you very
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 1: soon at the city nearest to, let's go see Fantastic
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 1: Four together. Oh man, I am so looking forward to this.
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 4: I'll come to Phoenix. Let's make it happen.
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 2: All right, brother.
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 4: All right, brother. Take care.
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: So my final question for the podcast, Paul, as a
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 1: creator who's been through so much in your own life,
• 1:22:40
  Speaker 1: What is the ultimate message you hope to impart through
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 1: your work? And after that, tell us about three things
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 1: you're working on right now that you want people to
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: know about.
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 4: I know there's a million, but tell us about at least.
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 7: Two or three. Message is a challenging one, right? Because
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 7: I think if you're trying to preach.
• 1:23:09
  Speaker 2: That's transparent. You can see that. And I don't. Someone
• 1:23:13
  Speaker 2: once said to me, I find this to be a
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: curious comment. I'm not sure if it was, it is
• 1:23:18
  Speaker 2: a compliment, but I'm not sure if it's a good
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 2: compliment or kind of a weird compliment. Someone said, you're
• 1:23:23
  Speaker 2: really good at writing women. And I said, they're 50%
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 2: or 51% of the world's population. I should hope so.
• 1:23:29
  Speaker 2: In other words, that seems like an odd compliment, although
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it. It seems obvious. It seems obvious, right?
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 2: But then shouldn't I be good as a writer at
• 1:23:40
  Speaker 2: writing anybody? So, you know, if I became a crusader
• 1:23:47
  Speaker 2: for women, well, there are plenty of those people, right?
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 2: What does that even mean, right? However, I think that
• 1:24:00
  Speaker 2: my whole point, and I remember being told that, and
• 1:24:03
  Speaker 2: I said, well, let me give you the answer to
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 2: that question. or to that statement, I'm not really good
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 2: at writing women and I'm not a crusader for women.
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 2: I want to write good stories. And so the, the,
• 1:24:17
  Speaker 2: the big thing that used to be real challenge for me,
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 2: this has nothing to do with being woke or, or
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 2: whatever someone's, you know, criticism of it is had nothing
• 1:24:25
  Speaker 2: to do with anything. It was, I, I got really
• 1:24:29
  Speaker 2: bored of writing stories where I, the women were just
• 1:24:33
  Speaker 2: like half naked and you know, there's nothing there. Right.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 2: So I was asked to write Witchblade years ago and
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 2: she flies around in a silver cap suit, you know,
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 2: with her boobs hanging out.
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 2: And I said, I'll, I won't do it. Not unless
• 1:24:48
  Speaker 2: I can write her. Look, the story's fascinating. Anyway, it
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 2: could be really interesting. She's a young, attractive woman working
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 2: as a detective in the New York police department. That's,
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 2: that's got a million stories in it. Like how hard
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 2: would that be? So I wrote her in T-shirt and jeans.
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: And I said, she's just as sexy. Right? So why
• 1:25:07
  Speaker 2: can't we do that? And guess what they made into
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 2: the TV show? The T-shirt and jeans one. The one
• 1:25:11
  Speaker 2: that actually meant something. That's what became the TV show.
• 1:25:14
  Speaker 4: I remember that.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: So why do the silver catsuit? That just like, like
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 2: too many fights, like all this stuff. That's just boring
• 1:25:22
  Speaker 2: as there's nothing there.
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 6: Right?
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 4: You tell real stories.
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: Right. But, but she was still sexy. That's the point.
• 1:25:27
  Speaker 2: I'm in no problem with her being sexy, but why
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: have her, in a silver catsuit that barely covers a body.
• 1:25:32
  Speaker 2: That's stupid. So I wasn't a crusader for women or
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: women's rights in that decision. I wanted to write a
• 1:25:40
  Speaker 2: better story. And by doing so, some of that comes out, right?
• 1:25:45
  Speaker 2: Some of the spotlight shone on mental health issues. Some
• 1:25:49
  Speaker 2: of the spotlight shone on disabilities. I have a project
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: called Alters. And Alters, it's the same thing, right? This,
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: I think, is a good story. Alters is, was about
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 2: it was actually something i pitched to the x-men and
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 2: the x-men officers wouldn't do it and i wanted to
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: take people with mental and physical disabilities and or disadvantages
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: i suppose you could say so somebody who is homeless
• 1:26:13
  Speaker 2: somebody who has a mental health issue somebody who's physically
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: disabled all kinds of people give them the x-men power
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 2: and then you've got the collision of the hyper ability
• 1:26:24
  Speaker 2: the disability and the collision is the person in the
• 1:26:26
  Speaker 2: middle right this is this They wouldn't do it. I
• 1:26:29
  Speaker 2: did it anyway through Aftershock in this book called Alters. Now,
• 1:26:32
  Speaker 2: the main character was a transgender woman, right? She was
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 2: living as a middle brother of three. She hadn't told
• 1:26:41
  Speaker 2: her parents what was going on, just about to go
• 1:26:45
  Speaker 2: through this transition of her own, taking hormones and stuff
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: like that. And she gets this superpower because they all
• 1:26:51
  Speaker 2: get these superpower called an alteration. She becomes an alter
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: and she can't, it's so complicated. She can't do what
• 1:26:57
  Speaker 2: she wants to do with her real life. She can
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 2: only be who she is when she's in costume. So
• 1:27:01
  Speaker 2: she appears as this character called Chalice. And now she's,
• 1:27:05
  Speaker 2: she can only be who she is when she's not
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: who she is. Right. That is an interesting story. It's
• 1:27:10
  Speaker 2: not about transgender issues, nothing about any of that stuff. However,
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 2: you know, I did consult with trans people and one
• 1:27:16
  Speaker 2: of the things I learned immediately, right, Kevin, was one
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: of the first things I learned was that someone, one
• 1:27:24
  Speaker 2: of the trans people I interviewed, cause I wanted to
• 1:27:26
  Speaker 2: know like, what's it all about? Tell me. Said, um,
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: you know, when I am in front of the mirror,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 2: when I was young, I was so repelled by puberty.
• 1:27:36
  Speaker 2: I hated it. I was so unhappy. And, uh, I
• 1:27:40
  Speaker 2: would stand in front of the mirror and I would,
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: you know, dress myself and put makeup on. And that's
• 1:27:45
  Speaker 2: where I said goodbye to my real face. I thought
• 1:27:48
  Speaker 2: I was really sad. And I wrote that line in
• 1:27:51
  Speaker 2: the book. And one of the other trans people who, uh,
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 2: who were consulting with me said, that's the dumbest line
• 1:27:56
  Speaker 2: I've ever heard. And I said, it's interesting because in fact,
• 1:27:59
  Speaker 2: you're saying no trans person would say that. A trans
• 1:28:01
  Speaker 2: person literally told me that line. It proves to us
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 2: that we cannot win. There's no one thing that we
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 2: can write that is the truth. We're trying to just
• 1:28:12
  Speaker 2: say the things that we find that are our truth,
• 1:28:15
  Speaker 2: the truth that we see, the things that we do, right?
• 1:28:18
  Speaker 2: That's the best thing that we can try to do
• 1:28:19
  Speaker 2: is create it.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 4: There's no one truth for everybody. Everybody's different.
• 1:28:25
  Speaker 1: So Paul, you've talked about your comics, the heroes you've created,
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: the villains you are going to write, and some of
• 1:28:36
  Speaker 1: your personal experiences, your living experience growing up in Great
• 1:28:39
  Speaker 1: Britain and all these great things. These stories are empowering.
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 4: They're powerful. Some of them are heartfelt and moving and difficult.
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: But I want to know right now, and the audience
• 1:28:50
  Speaker 1: wants to know, what are you working on?
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 2: Uh, I'm, I'm, there's one little exclusive that you get.
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 2: I'm not kidding. I'm actually, I haven't worked in mainstream
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 2: comics for a really long time.
• 1:29:01
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:29:02
  Speaker 2: I'm just about to go back and do the first
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 2: one I've done maybe 12 years. Uh, so I can't
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 2: say which one it is because I'm, I know the
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 2: publisher usually doesn't want to have me say it. I'm
• 1:29:12
  Speaker 2: about to go write a story in mainstream. So that's
• 1:29:15
  Speaker 2: kind of interesting to me. Um, because it's been a
• 1:29:17
  Speaker 2: really long time since I did it. Most of the time,
• 1:29:20
  Speaker 2: you know, I'm working on a big, big educational project.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 2: Hopefully we can work this out. If that becomes a thing,
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 2: then I think it has a chance of making a
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 2: real difference in the entire field of education. And we're
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 2: working in new technology. So a little part of what
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 2: we're doing right now is actually in some groundbreaking technologies
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 2: that are going to change things as well, right? You know, yeah.
• 1:29:46
  Speaker 2: So those are really weird things to explain because people say, well,
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: didn't you write the Hulk? And I go, yeah, I know,
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 2: but that's not what I do.
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 4: I can be more than that.
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: Well, it's not what I do, right? I've only ever,
• 1:29:56
  Speaker 2: I studied to be a filmmaker. I can't study to
• 1:29:58
  Speaker 2: do comics. So, you know, working in film is something
• 1:30:01
  Speaker 2: that I do. Working in animation is something that I do.
• 1:30:05
  Speaker 2: People don't realize that I've been a narrative director or
• 1:30:08
  Speaker 2: writer for six platinum selling video games and a lot
• 1:30:11
  Speaker 2: of the work I did was in innovation and storytelling
• 1:30:14
  Speaker 2: in video games. And I do that even to this day.
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 4: The Darkness.
• 1:30:17
  Speaker 2: The Darkness is one of them. You know, there are
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 2: plenty of them, right? The Darkness literally was, they believed
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 2: it would sell about 350,000 copies. And it sold 1.6 million.
• 1:30:28
  Speaker 2: But the gameplay was rated at 10 out of 100.
• 1:30:31
  Speaker 2: That's a disaster. That was when 2K Games and the
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 2: game industry itself realized that what I was pushing for,
• 1:30:38
  Speaker 2: innovation and storytelling and moving people's emotions, was the most
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 2: powerful and frankly valuable tool that they had. And that's
• 1:30:45
  Speaker 2: why we've got so many games.
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 4: Which is now what everyone's doing.
• 1:30:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah. You want to see, you take a look at
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: Assassin's Creed, right? Take a look at a picture of
• 1:30:51
  Speaker 2: Ezio Auditore, the Assassin's Creed 2, and look at the
• 1:30:55
  Speaker 2: way that the stories are pieced together. Now go find
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: a video game called Prototype and you will see Assassin's
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 2: Creed before Assassin's Creed. A lot of the work that
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 2: I did innovated in the way and so is used
• 1:31:05
  Speaker 2: across the entire industry, I'm sure.
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 4: Incredible.
• 1:31:08
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: Ladies and gentlemen, family and friends of all ages, people
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: of all backgrounds, sitting here with Paul Jenkins. This has
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: been an eye-opening and wonderful experience for the Hindsight's podcast. Paul,
• 1:31:21
  Speaker 1: thank you from the bottom of my heart for coming
• 1:31:23
  Speaker 1: on the show. This is one of my favorite episodes
• 1:31:25
  Speaker 1: by far. Heroes edition of the Hindsight's podcast. Wherever you are,
• 1:31:29
  Speaker 1: whatever you're doing, whatever pain, trauma, struggle, issue, challenge you.
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 4: Face, Keep going.
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: You are meant to be here until your natural end.
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 1: Suicide is never the solution to your problem.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 4: It is the problem.
• 1:31:41
  Speaker 3: Trust me.
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: I know as someone who's left off the Golden Gate
• 1:31:45
  Speaker 1: Bridge and survived, you have a purpose on this planet
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: and it's not to die by your hands. You're beautiful
• 1:31:51
  Speaker 1: just as you are. You're not perfect. Nobody is, but
• 1:31:54
  Speaker 1: you're meant to be here. So keep going. Move forward
• 1:31:56
  Speaker 1: one day at a time, one step at a time.
• 1:31:59
  Speaker 1: And they're all baby steps. Whatever you do, my friends,
• 1:32:01
  Speaker 1: be here tomorrow. This is the Hindsight Podcast, sponsored by
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: Kapow Comics.
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 3: Andy, we love you.
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: And a shout out to Powerhouse Comics as well.
• 1:32:11
  Speaker 4: Take care, be well, and be here tomorrow. See ya.