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With Great Power #344... 22 Panels with Emil Wilson · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good! I guess it's barely afternoon. Good afternoon, everybody! Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest today is Emil Wilson.
• 0:10
  Tad Eggleston: Author of the upcoming Nightingales, and by upcoming, I mean, like, next Tuesday? Right? Yep.
• 0:18
  Emil WILSON: Yep.
• 0:19
  Tad Eggleston: Tuesday. I'm most of the way through it. I'm loving it,
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know how to begin to describe it, so I'm gonna start by asking you for the front counter pitch, which is a common starting point for me anyway.
• 0:32
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, sure. The Nightingales is based on a true story from my family's history.
• 0:38
  Emil WILSON: It, takes place in 1985, when my father had a co-worker who was dying, and he had invited this man and his two dogs to move into our home after they'd been evicted from their apartment. And…
• 0:54
  Emil WILSON: You know, it… it kind of turned the family upside down a little bit. I think that my father wanted to make sure that this…
• 1:00
  Emil WILSON: man had a place to live. I think that my mother was understandably…
• 1:04
  Emil WILSON: a little, uncomfortable with having a stranger and a sick stranger in our home. And the other thing that happens in the book is this friendship that blossoms between this man and the teenage daughter, who is based on my sister.
• 1:17
  Emil WILSON: I was away at college, it's semi-autobiographical, but I basically took people I knew and…
• 1:22
  Emil WILSON: a basic situation and kind of ran with it.
• 1:26
  Emil WILSON: Added my own experience to it at the end, but it's a book about…
• 1:29
  Emil WILSON: kindness, and how kindness can be complicated, and how it can be transformative for people, not just the person who gets it, but the person who's giving kindness, and I think that that's maybe the type of book we could be reading right now in this world that we're in.
• 1:44
  Tad Eggleston: I think this is a book… I think it's the kind of book we should always be reading.
• 1:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, don't get me wrong.
• 1:49
  Emil WILSON: Agreed.
• 1:50
  Tad Eggleston: I think, yes, it's that much more valuable right now, when kind seems to become a four-letter word in some areas, which…
• 1:58
  Emil WILSON: That's when it becomes a theme in literature, like, that's when you're like, wait a second, we need this as a theme? But we do, so it's all good.
• 2:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I suppose kind is technically a four-letter word, but come on, do we gotta…
• 2:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, the, the, the autistic in me needs to, A,
• 2:18
  Tad Eggleston: point out that, that, that, like, you're talking about the disease, you,
• 2:24
  Tad Eggleston: what we also get is a history lesson of what it was like to be on the periphery of the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, when nobody knew what was going on, when the White House was gaslighting everything, when…
• 2:40
  Tad Eggleston: there wasn't good, easy information available. So in that sense, it was a profound piece of kindness
• 2:48
  Tad Eggleston: On your father's part, on your mother's part, it was… understandable if… if… if not…
• 2:58
  Tad Eggleston: defensible fears and whatnot, that makes sense. I mean, defensible in the time, but, like, not defensible
• 3:06
  Tad Eggleston: From a scientific standpoint. I think it was interesting.
• 3:10
  Emil WILSON: I mean, when I first started the book, I said it…
• 3:13
  Emil WILSON: I'd gotten the year mixed up, and I thought they had come in 1986, and my sister said, you know, I think that this happened a year earlier because…
• 3:21
  Emil WILSON: In terms of the AIDS timeline,
• 3:25
  Emil WILSON: In October of 1985, Rock Hudson dies, and that completely changed how people talked about AIDS in the national conversation.
• 3:34
  Emil WILSON: And I think, as my sister said, in 1986, I don't know that our mother would have let this man in the house if there was some sort of suspicion about it. In 1985, there was still, especially in a small town in Oregon.
• 3:47
  Emil WILSON: AIDS was something that happened in New York, or it happened in San Francisco, but it didn't happen where we lived, and I think that there was a lack of information.
• 3:55
  Emil WILSON: So, when my father said, here's this friend of mine who has cancer, I think that we all believed him, and then it became very clear that that wasn't the case. And… Okay. Again, I think that…
• 4:07
  Emil WILSON: you know, we know so much more about AIDS. AIDS changed in the next 10 years. I know that there were people on TV that had AIDS, and there were discussions about it, but I think in 1985, we were all still a little bit like, what? What is this? And again, like you said, the White House didn't even speak… speak its… speak the name.
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 4:26
  Emil WILSON: engineer.
• 4:26
  Tad Eggleston: I was… I was just… I just listened… I don't know if you know the, Hysteria podcast at Crooked Media. They just did a… this fucking guy on Ronald Reagan, and… and I already thought he was this fucking guy, but… but, like…
• 4:43
  Tad Eggleston: Now I think even more that he's this fucking guy.
• 4:49
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that it was, you know, there's this really fantastic, famous, sound…
• 4:55
  Emil WILSON: oral history of AIDS, where they're in a White House press conference, and, you know, someone's like, well, do you have AIDS? They're like, well, I don't have AIDS, because of course I don't have AIDS. Do you have AIDS? And it's this… Right. It almost feels like, at this moment, it feels almost like comedy writing, because they're completely passing the potato back and forth, but…
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: They played some of those clips in this fucking guy, where they were essentially making fun of it, making fun of gay people.
• 5:23
  Emil WILSON: Great.
• 5:24
  Tad Eggleston: in the White House press room.
• 5:26
  Emil WILSON: Which is exactly where people should be made fun of, is in the White House press room. So, yeah.
• 5:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that… that's certainly part of the playbook that got picked up by his… his spiritual… I mean, like…
• 5:38
  Emil WILSON: Sure.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: I always… I have known for a long time how much worse Reagan was than the history books have mostly treated him, where…
• 5:51
  Tad Eggleston: you know, he's been lionized enough by the Republican Party that he's, like, the most divisive president in terms of presidential rankings. You know, some have him right after, like.
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: Some, some it's like Washington, Lincoln, Reagan, and some, it's like, he's waaaay down.
• 6:08
  Emil WILSON: Way down. Yeah.
• 6:10
  Tad Eggleston: And like…
• 6:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… over the last decade, as I've learned more about Reagan, and more about… like, I knew about the economic stuff, I knew about the foreign policy stuff.
• 6:27
  Tad Eggleston: as I start getting to know more about the social policy stuff on top of that, and how he really was the frontrunner for
• 6:35
  Tad Eggleston: all things horrible from the Republican Party for the last…
• 6:39
  Tad Eggleston: Well, my lifetime. My lifetime. My entire lifetime.
• 6:45
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, exactly.
• 6:46
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, okay, well, I mean, aren't you lucky that
• 6:52
  Tad Eggleston: that Buchanan moved weapons to the South, even though he knew that the Civil War was coming.
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: Hoover laughed at the possibility of… of global economic collapse. Right. And two of your three Republican successors are just, like, arguably both the dumbest and most…
• 7:20
  Tad Eggleston: Dangerous men to ever hold office, so you are only the fifth worst president.
• 7:30
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, exactly.
• 7:32
  Emil WILSON: Please!
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: But you… you directly led to two of the people behind you, so I don't know, maybe you should get bonus points?
• 7:40
  Emil WILSON: I don't know. I don't want to give any bonus points at this point. I just, like, nobody deserves.
• 7:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I meant bonus negative point.
• 7:49
  Emil WILSON: Right, right, right, right.
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than the 50,
• 7:51
  Tad Eggleston: maybe… maybe we put W in front of you, because W at least seemed to understand the gravity of the job?
• 8:00
  Emil WILSON: Great.
• 8:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's, like, the only thing I'll give him. Sure.
• 8:05
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go off.
• 8:07
  Emil WILSON: Oh, no, no, no, it's all good. I think that… I think that in terms of… like I said, I think that we didn't know… my father didn't tell us that coming.
• 8:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:16
  Emil WILSON: headaches, and…
• 8:18
  Emil WILSON: I think, you know, as… I was away at college, and when I came home, and I met… I met Jim, and the dogs, I… I recognized what was going on, and…
• 8:30
  Emil WILSON: I was coming out in college, and so I suddenly put it all together, and, you know, my sister already knew it. And it's exactly like it is in the book. The scene is… the scene is exactly as it is in the book. So,
• 8:44
  Tad Eggleston: And, ironically, that's pretty much the last thing that I read.
• 8:47
  Emil WILSON: Well, there you go.
• 8:49
  Tad Eggleston: So that scene I have seen, and it's amazing.
• 8:52
  Emil WILSON: Oh, thank you! Thank you!
• 8:53
  Tad Eggleston: So, I hope that you were able to repair
• 8:58
  Tad Eggleston: the… I, I do, I do like the, the, the, the…
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: Here I'm getting into your personal history and putting it on the book, which I know is at least somewhat fictionalized, but… but, like.
• 9:11
  Tad Eggleston: the…
• 9:13
  Tad Eggleston: wall of ice between you and your mother in that scene is… and just as a human being, I hope that some of it melted at some point over the last 40 years.
• 9:24
  Emil WILSON: It has, I mean, it has, it has. I have to say that the… one of the great things about…
• 9:29
  Emil WILSON: one of the happy accidents of writing this book has been I have completely reassessed who my parents were, both to me and to each other and as people. And there were plenty of times when…
• 9:41
  Emil WILSON: You know, I remember I was in this workshop with this cartoonist named, Elizabeth Trembley, and she was reading the book, and she…
• 9:49
  Emil WILSON: She said, you know, I think the father is the asshole. I think the mother has every right to not want a stranger in her home. And…
• 9:58
  Emil WILSON: It was one of those moments, and I know it's a… I mean, it's an obvious…
• 10:03
  Emil WILSON: Comment about the book, and…
• 10:05
  Emil WILSON: it was one of those moments that I just rethought the character, and I rethought my mom, and I rethought… like, you know, she's right. She… she should have had a spouse who listened to her opinions, and…
• 10:17
  Emil WILSON: you know, I think that my parents were both caught in a time period where…
• 10:21
  Emil WILSON: you know, they were from the 50s, and then my mother was like, I'm gonna be a housewife, and then the 70s came, she's like, I don't like any of these feminism choices, and I don't like the fact that I don't get choices, and I think she was really frustrated. And it's made me really rethink who she is, and it's given me…
• 10:39
  Emil WILSON: some time to be a little gracious, and give her credit where maybe I hadn't done that before, so…
• 10:45
  Tad Eggleston: And I also loved the,
• 10:49
  Tad Eggleston: Real self-reflection, where you acknowledge the ways in which you and your mother were…
• 10:55
  Tad Eggleston: alike, and that was… Very much. …what was… causing…
• 11:01
  Tad Eggleston: Because it happens a lot in all sorts of families with… without… with and without, like, massive, dramatic stories going around them. Like, the more two people are alike, the…
• 11:14
  Tad Eggleston: The less it takes to completely separate them.
• 11:18
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that… I think that my mother and I always, and I think these characters do too, that I think that they…
• 11:24
  Emil WILSON: they understand more about one another than they let on, and I… Right.
• 11:29
  Emil WILSON: It's interesting, it'll be interesting to see what you think about
• 11:32
  Emil WILSON: as the book goes on, because I think that there is… A lot that happens.
• 11:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll email her.
• 11:38
  Emil WILSON: Yo, there you go.
• 11:41
  Tad Eggleston: Brilliant.
• 11:42
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, it's interesting, like, I took a lot of our family's history, and then I kind of combined it with my own, so… Right. The end of the book, which you… which is coming.
• 11:52
  Emil WILSON: Right. Is a lot of what I experienced separately. What happened is, is that this experience happened with this man moving into our home, and then a couple years later, I moved to New York and started working as a buddy for gay men's health crisis as a buddy for people with AIDS.
• 12:08
  Emil WILSON: And I was assigned somebody who I got very close to.
• 12:11
  Emil WILSON: And a lot of the conversations that happened in the last third of the book are all based on that friendship.
• 12:17
  Emil WILSON: So, it's,
• 12:20
  Emil WILSON: you know, I sort of say that everything in the book happened, it's just who it happened to, and the order that it happened, that's all been chained. That's been moved around, but…
• 12:29
  Emil WILSON: Most of the stuff is true on some level.
• 12:32
  Emil WILSON: So… Yeah.
• 12:35
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow, I just read the email from Laura. Thank you! I feel honored.
• 12:43
  Tad Eggleston: You wanted to reach out to me. See, see, I was, I was still assuming that you, you had listened to interviews,
• 12:52
  Tad Eggleston: AFTER you had booked the interview, but it.
• 12:54
  Emil WILSON: Oh, no, no, no, no.
• 12:55
  Tad Eggleston: other way around.
• 12:56
  Emil WILSON: I've listened to this podcast for… I've listened to this podcast for a while.
• 12:59
  Tad Eggleston: You're actually a listener!
• 13:01
  Emil WILSON: I'm a listener, so…
• 13:03
  Tad Eggleston: So, so now I'll say, hi mom, hi Adam, hi Britt, hi John, hi Emil!
• 13:12
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, exactly. So it's, yeah, it's, it's,
• 13:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no,
• 13:19
  Tad Eggleston: I want to pick a little bit at the mom-dad thing there, because it was a little of something that I thought, and also, like, one of the things that I…
• 13:31
  Tad Eggleston: I guess wasn't clear on.
• 13:33
  Tad Eggleston: Because the way you're describing it is different from how I had it in my head. In my head.
• 13:40
  Tad Eggleston: Mom knew it wasn't cancer from the get-go. He'd been honest with her.
• 13:45
  Tad Eggleston: But they decided not to be honest with Lou.
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: And also, she hadn't been given a choice. So there was still that element of, I'm going to be kind to this friend of mine, whether you're ready to be kind to him or not. And that, again, there's a real delicacy there, and is that kindness, or is that… I mean, that's kindness to…
• 14:09
  Tad Eggleston: Jim, but it's kinda asshole to Anne Marie.
• 14:13
  Emil WILSON: to each… to each other. Oh, absolutely.
• 14:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 14:16
  Emil WILSON: My… my father…
• 14:18
  Emil WILSON: I think that my father was relying on the fact that my mother's father had died of cancer, my mother worked at a church, I think that he appealed… was trying to appeal to something that…
• 14:29
  Emil WILSON: you know, I think that he knew that what he was asking was a big ask, and I think that he had to set it up very carefully in terms of what would she…
• 14:38
  Emil WILSON: what would she warm to? What would she agree to, and I think that…
• 14:44
  Emil WILSON: I, I, I do think… I… again… As most parents.
• 14:49
  Emil WILSON: what my mother actually knew, and what she claims to have known, there might be some blur there. Right. But I think that she…
• 14:58
  Emil WILSON: I don't think that she was told he had AIDS. I don't think that my father would have been that…
• 15:02
  Emil WILSON: flat-footed about it, and I think that he would have been a lot more…
• 15:06
  Emil WILSON: he would have made the situation sound very, you know, look at this thing that we're doing, and this is really important, and I think that he also was trying to appeal, as Donald does.
• 15:16
  Emil WILSON: In the book, of, like, you know, you work at a church, what do you think…
• 15:20
  Emil WILSON: What do you think we should be doing here if you work at.
• 15:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 15:22
  Emil WILSON: should be helping others, and I think that my mother was like, well, I'm happy to help others, I don't necessarily want them in the next room.
• 15:28
  Emil WILSON: Right. So, again, that's fair.
• 15:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, I mean, Donald, to me, and I'm gonna, like, say clearly never diagnosed, because he never would have been diagnosed, but he reads very autistic.
• 15:43
  Emil WILSON: I wouldn't take it.
• 15:45
  Emil WILSON: Maybe.
• 15:46
  Tad Eggleston: Like, autistic under DSM-5 standards, not under the DSM-3 standards of the time, which I'm acutely aware of, because when I was 3, I wasn't autistic, because I could speak. And when I was 14, I wasn't autistic, because I was smart. And finally…
• 16:05
  Tad Eggleston: Finally, at 44, I'm autistic, and I can, like…
• 16:10
  Tad Eggleston: get some of the things that I need and explain things to doctors when they're like, oh, well, this shouldn't be happening. I'm like, yes, because you're assuming that my body works the way it's supposed to.
• 16:20
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 16:23
  Tad Eggleston: he, like, the spending time with the manuals, I mean, just so much of him reads very much spectrum to me.
• 16:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why the thing that, like, I resonate with him is…
• 16:40
  Tad Eggleston: And this is… this is sometimes really, like, it's sometimes a struggle that I have with my wife, particularly sometimes when it pertains to my children that aren't her children, right?
• 16:52
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes?
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Things are just right.
• 16:59
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 16:59
  Tad Eggleston: Nothing else matters.
• 17:01
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: And that's what I feel from Donald in this book, is it's like, there's some awareness…
• 17:09
  Tad Eggleston: That this is a hardship on his family?
• 17:12
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 17:12
  Tad Eggleston: But it's also just right, so his family needs to get over it, learn whatever.
• 17:19
  Tad Eggleston: Because anything else is wrong.
• 17:23
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think there's some of that. It was interesting. One of the things, and this comes up a little bit at the end of the book, before he died, I spent some… I spent a year with my dad, and I was starting to work on this book, and there's lots of funny stories which we can get to, but one of the things that I… I really…
• 17:41
  Emil WILSON: I asked him about was, well, why did you have this man come and move into our home? And he…
• 17:46
  Emil WILSON: he got really quiet, and I wasn't really sure why, and then he was like, well, why wouldn't I? And I just said, well, there's lots of reasons why you wouldn't, like…
• 17:54
  Emil WILSON: he was sick with something that we didn't know a lot about, your wife wasn't behind it, like, you didn't know the impact it would have on your family, and he was like, what do you think friendship is? He's like, here's this person who I work with, who I'm friends with, why wouldn't I…
• 18:08
  Emil WILSON: he had no place to go, I had a place that he could stay, why wouldn't I offer him that? Right. And I remember thinking, you know, sometimes you do this with children, where you quiz them on something, and the answer that they have is so much more thoughtful and considered than you possibly could have imagined.
• 18:25
  Emil WILSON: And he said, you know, I think that you're the asshole for questioning why I would do something that was basically kind, like there's some other reason, or that I shouldn't have done it.
• 18:35
  Emil WILSON: And I just thought, you're right, I shouldn't have.
• 18:39
  Emil WILSON: I shouldn't have questioned that, but I guess on the surface, I guess I didn't realize that you had thought through all that. And he was like, at some point, I don't know that I had to… he's like, I don't know that I thought through it. He's like, I should have listened to your mother better, I should have gauged the situation better, but all I cared about was that I had somebody in my life
• 18:58
  Emil WILSON: who was in desperate need of something, I had that to give him. Why wouldn't I offer that? And I just thought.
• 19:05
  Emil WILSON: you're right. I… I have no… I have no further questions, like, that's… Right. That's exactly the right answer, and I am the asshole for questioning it, so… Right.
• 19:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Where… I mean, just to say, like, where I was going through and how this is resonating even more is when you said that he said, why would I?
• 19:23
  Tad Eggleston: I was expecting your answer to be.
• 19:26
  Tad Eggleston: or why wouldn't I? I was expecting your answer to be, oh, I hadn't thought about it that way. You're right. And no, you immediately had, well, there's this reason, and this reason, and this reason.
• 19:36
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 19:36
  Tad Eggleston: None of those had popped into my head. It's like.
• 19:39
  Tad Eggleston: A person who is close to me, who has no other option.
• 19:45
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 19:46
  Tad Eggleston: and is in need, and I have a way to help, done.
• 19:50
  Tad Eggleston: Done!
• 19:52
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, and I think that my father also was gauging, like, nothing… no hardship that you're going to feel equals the hardship that he feels. Exactly. So, that… that has to be taken into consideration, and I think…
• 20:04
  Emil WILSON: I think that that's true. I think that to not acknowledge that a hardship.
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: And this is also where I go back to, I suspect that your father was somewhere on the spectrum.
• 20:15
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, maybe.
• 20:16
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, that's where I felt, like, like, particularly reading about your father in the, in the manual form.
• 20:23
  Tad Eggleston: That was just… that was a brilliant choice to make the manual of Donald.
• 20:29
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it. I'm sitting there going, oh, like, because that's actually…
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: one of the biggest challenges I've had throughout my entire life, and one of the places where having the diagnosis is helpful just to me.
• 20:47
  Tad Eggleston: As a reminder to me.
• 20:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right? Is that, like, I was always kind of aware that people didn't think the way I thought.
• 20:54
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 20:55
  Tad Eggleston: But now, I, like…
• 20:58
  Tad Eggleston: people don't think the way I thought… think. I can't just assume that something that's obvious to me.
• 21:06
  Emil WILSON: Okay.
• 21:07
  Tad Eggleston: will be obvious to everybody else. And just because it's obvious to me, doesn't mean that whatever they're…
• 21:15
  Tad Eggleston: Insecurities, feelings, thoughts, whatever.
• 21:20
  Tad Eggleston: don't matter. For that matter, doesn't even actually mean that it's obvious. Every once in a while, I'll get a piece of new information and dramatically change my opinion on something. Right, right.
• 21:29
  Emil WILSON: Great.
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's one of the things I always laugh about. You know, people are like, one of the things about being autistic is your own ability to change your mind. It's like, I don't think it's that simple.
• 21:39
  Emil WILSON: I think.
• 21:39
  Tad Eggleston: for a lot of us, like, we will absolutely change our mind. We will change our mind in way more dramatic ways than people
• 21:47
  Tad Eggleston: Most people are capable of doing.
• 21:50
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, we need the proof. And once we've got the proof, now reality has changed.
• 21:57
  Emil WILSON: Yes.
• 21:58
  Tad Eggleston: And the old way is unimaginable.
• 22:02
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 22:04
  Emil WILSON: It's interesting, I've never thought of it that way, and I think that you're right. I think that he…
• 22:08
  Emil WILSON: you know, I mean, to… like it says in the manual, I mean, like, the reason for that manual is that… I mean, that's true, my… I never saw my father read a book, but…
• 22:17
  Emil WILSON: he would always sit and read manuals, and I… you know, when you're writing a book about it, you think, like, well, why would he always read manuals? And it was because he just wanted to understand how things worked. He wanted to understand how to fix them when they went bad, or when they started to break. He wanted to understand all of that.
• 22:35
  Emil WILSON: And that was the… that was the writing that kept him interested, and, you know, things like novels and nonfiction, he had no time for it. He just wasn't interested in that at all, but…
• 22:46
  Emil WILSON: you know, like, give him a Scandinavian yogurt maker, and he would spend a week Looking at that manual.
• 22:53
  Tad Eggleston: Learning Norwegian so that he could read the…
• 22:56
  Emil WILSON: Sure, like, it was all, like… I mean, but if that thing started to break, he'd be like, don't touch it, stand over there, let me take care of it. And it was like, yeah, okay.
• 23:05
  Tad Eggleston: I get that, because I'm the same way, though it was first with fiction, because, like, I unlocked early in life.
• 23:15
  Tad Eggleston: That fiction was as close as we got
• 23:19
  Tad Eggleston: To a manual for other people.
• 23:21
  Emil WILSON: Hmm, interesting. Yeah.
• 23:24
  Tad Eggleston: And then later, I started getting into nonfiction, like…
• 23:30
  Tad Eggleston: along with fiction, because I realized, oh, nonfiction gives you the outside world impacts on what makes them
• 23:40
  Tad Eggleston: feel and believe… and, like, I'm a big…
• 23:43
  Tad Eggleston: you know, if I was able to do…
• 23:46
  Tad Eggleston: One massive thing with the education system, it would be we'd do a lot less siloing and a lot more…
• 23:54
  Tad Eggleston: How does this history, this science, and this… Fiction all interplated.
• 24:00
  Emil WILSON: brother.
• 24:01
  Emil WILSON: I mean…
• 24:01
  Tad Eggleston: one of my… one of the things that I'll bring up.
• 24:06
  Tad Eggleston: I've brought up a few times on the podcast, because it still never… never ceases to… to blow my mind, in part because…
• 24:15
  Tad Eggleston: Like, it makes so much sense.
• 24:19
  Tad Eggleston: from a weird autistic perspective, is that, like, Benjamin Franklin watched Beethoven play.
• 24:28
  Emil WILSON: Is that right? They, they, they…
• 24:30
  Tad Eggleston: They were… they were…
• 24:32
  Tad Eggleston: contemporaries. Beethoven was doing symphonies. I mean, we don't know for certain that Benjamin Franklin watched Beethoven play, but, like…
• 24:39
  Emil WILSON: They could have.
• 24:39
  Tad Eggleston: playing in places in Europe where Franklin was in Europe as a diplomat.
• 24:46
  Tad Eggleston: it seems highly unlikely that Franklin wouldn't have watched Beethoven play, but really, the more important thing is that, like, the Revolution and Beethoven are at the same time.
• 24:58
  Emil WILSON: Huh.
• 24:59
  Emil WILSON: That's fascinating.
• 25:01
  Emil WILSON: I had no idea.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: There was a fan ta- exactly, people don't even understand the timelines enough to go, oh, wait, Beethoven was in the 1770s and 80s? The American Revolution!
• 25:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there was a graphic novel recently, like, one of my favorite graphic novels of last year was called Einstein in Kafka Land.
• 25:22
  Tad Eggleston: Because…
• 25:23
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:24
  Tad Eggleston: Einstein… Einstein and Kafka were in, I think, Vienna at the same time?
• 25:29
  Emil WILSON: Yep.
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: You know? And, like, it's not a guarantee that their paths crossed.
• 25:36
  Emil WILSON: But it's not…
• 25:37
  Tad Eggleston: It was enough of a salon culture that, like.
• 25:41
  Tad Eggleston: there's very good reason to believe that, like, they could have been at some of the same talks, or Kafka could have been at… at…
• 25:51
  Tad Eggleston: Einstein talks, or vice versa, right? And then when you start looking at it through that lens, it's like, oh…
• 25:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, this, this, like, the way this all swirls together…
• 26:03
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 26:03
  Tad Eggleston: Makes this weird sense.
• 26:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's not like neither one of them would have done any of their stuff without each other, but, like, to…
• 26:14
  Tad Eggleston: you know, the idea that Einstein was starting to defend relativity. He'd come up with relativity before he got there, that's why he was there. But he wasn't, like, the big man on the totem pole there yet, you know, so he was defending relativity. At the same time, Kafka was trying to figure out how he wanted to tell his stories.
• 26:34
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and like, in a lot of ways, they both completely changed their fields.
• 26:39
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, completely.
• 26:41
  Tad Eggleston: at the same time.
• 26:43
  Emil WILSON: Huh. That's… I mean, that's… that's… that sounds fascinating.
• 26:48
  Tad Eggleston: And again, like, the cause and effect, I don't know. But I think to teach them separately, loses something.
• 26:56
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 26:57
  Tad Eggleston: To think.
• 26:58
  Emil WILSON: dope.
• 26:58
  Tad Eggleston: completely separately loses something. Just like, you know, I was really happy. I mean, to bring this full circle back to this, I was really happy that I just listened to this fucking guy on Ronald Reagan, because I had a much…
• 27:12
  Tad Eggleston: better grasp.
• 27:15
  Tad Eggleston: on the world… That this story was set in.
• 27:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Than I would have had if I was just coming into it raw.
• 27:27
  Tad Eggleston: And then it takes on this whole other nuance, because, like, your dad was a court reporter, and you didn't see him read anything but manuals, but, like, as a court reporter, I… I gotta imagine he was somewhat aware of…
• 27:40
  Tad Eggleston: Like, a courthouse is a place where, where, where news gets talked about, news is happening.
• 27:45
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, for sure.
• 27:46
  Tad Eggleston: people are aware. So, like…
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta believe that it wasn't just, my friend is sick. It's like, my friend is sick, and most of the world are assholes that are so afraid of his sickness that, like, not just that he doesn't have other family, he doesn't have other people who are willing to sit back and go.
• 28:07
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody has said this is contagious in ways that make it so you can't live in my house.
• 28:14
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, and I think that it was also the type of a town where everybody… I mean, it was a small town, so everybody kind of knew each other's business, and I certainly believe that the people at the courthouse
• 28:26
  Emil WILSON: knew to some extent that Jim was living with our family, and I think that…
• 28:32
  Emil WILSON: You know, I'm sure that there was…
• 28:34
  Emil WILSON: a lawyer or two, who kind of, like, looks sideways, is like, what's that? What's happening there, in terms of, why would you let that person into your home? And…
• 28:46
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, after having met Jim, I mean, it certainly… he certainly was somebody that… I mean, I was… I was coming out, I met him, I immediately recognized him as another gay man, and I…
• 28:58
  Emil WILSON: can't imagine that other people didn't as well. So, yeah, it was…
• 29:04
  Tad Eggleston: So you're lucky enough to actually have the gaydar. One of my best friends growing up was a lesbian, and she always complained that, like.
• 29:15
  Tad Eggleston: She didn't like only meeting girlfriends at lesbian bars, but, like, she had absolutely no gaydars, so that was the safest way to…
• 29:25
  Emil WILSON: No, it was true, and I didn't have a very strong gator at that point in my life. I think I was, like, 18, 19 years old.
• 29:31
  Emil WILSON: certainly recognized, like, why… and I remember saying to my sister, why is there a gay man living in our home? And she was like, well, he's nice, I mean, he's a nice guy. And, you know, I mean, you recognized that, but nobody else did, and it was like, yeah, okay, but I recognized it, and I sort of have questions, and…
• 29:52
  Emil WILSON: you know, I didn't necessarily feel… I think that my parents were supportive, but I think it was the 80s, and I think that there was… Right.
• 29:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, her response, even, was so 80s. Yeah, but he's a nice guy.
• 30:05
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 30:07
  Tad Eggleston: As if the two have anything to…
• 30:09
  Emil WILSON: Right, right.
• 30:11
  Emil WILSON: That was… you know, and I think that at that point in the book, Lou is defending
• 30:16
  Emil WILSON: Jim, but I think that she… I think that the brother kind of sits over the… the… the book, and I… because of, you know, one of the reasons of having an odd name is you can kind of enter your story with your name, and people are like, oh, I know, like, I see what's happening here, and that was…
• 30:32
  Emil WILSON: you know, I use that to my own benefit, but yeah,
• 30:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and the book, you had yourself already out, but you've referred to it as coming out now. Was that… was that a decision you made for the writing to…
• 30:47
  Emil WILSON: I think… I think that I was… I think that I was out at school. I think that when I… and again, this is a subtlety that I think people in the 80s would understand, is that…
• 30:57
  Tad Eggleston: We're certain. I overall understand it, but…
• 31:00
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, yeah, I mean, when you're out at college, and then you come home to your small town, you're still, like, you're not gonna announce that you're gay in the same way that you would at college, so I think that it's all sort of part of the process of coming out, and…
• 31:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess I meant, were you out to your family in real life, or was that a dramatic change you made for the book?
• 31:19
  Emil WILSON: No, this was all around the same time. Like, I came out to my family around the same time as Jim coming to live with us, and I think that…
• 31:29
  Tad Eggleston: Because the implication in the book is that you'd come out before leaving to college, and that that was part of the…
• 31:36
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 31:37
  Emil WILSON: And I think that some of that…
• 31:39
  Tad Eggleston: And if I'm… if I'm asking weird…
• 31:41
  Tad Eggleston: nitpicky questions, I'm sorry, this is the…
• 31:43
  Emil WILSON: Interesting.
• 31:44
  Tad Eggleston: Just putting the timelines together.
• 31:47
  Emil WILSON: I think… I think it was one of those things that I think, for me, there was always a sense of kind of, like, testing the waters to come out, and I know there were conversations that my father had where I would never have said, like, Dad, I'm gay, as one… as one thinks about when you're coming out. I think that I was like, you know, I'm being this girl, but then I kind of like this boy over here, and I think that…
• 32:08
  Emil WILSON: You don't name it, but the person you're talking to kind of starts…
• 32:12
  Emil WILSON: I just think it's, like, this weird, sort of, slow…
• 32:17
  Emil WILSON: role of information that you give to people that you love, so that when you say, I'm gay, it's not a complete shock. And I'm sure.
• 32:23
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
• 32:24
  Emil WILSON: Anyway, but… Right. I don't know that…
• 32:27
  Emil WILSON: It's interesting that you would think that the character was out, because I think that he…
• 32:32
  Emil WILSON: Or… or that I was out, but I think it was just… I think the 80s was just a time when coming out was not something that you often did, like, over dinner, and that.
• 32:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 32:41
  Emil WILSON: said and done. So…
• 32:43
  Tad Eggleston: It just, it felt like a dimension to me that, like, from the get-go, Lou's going, okay, she's gay, but so is a male, so what the hell is the problem?
• 32:54
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, and I think that she, she knew…
• 32:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Emil's not allowed to come home? Right, right.
• 32:59
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I don't know…
• 33:04
  Emil WILSON: I think that she… and I think that Lou probably did that for effect. Like, I think that it wasn't so much about the information, but about sort of framing it to the mother to say, look, you have this concern about this man, but that concern is living under your roof and is your kid, and how do you balance that out? And I think that that was…
• 33:24
  Emil WILSON: certainly something that was probably done in my family, and I think that was done to sort of get…
• 33:31
  Emil WILSON: One of my parents to kind of…
• 33:33
  Emil WILSON: understand, like, look, you're having this feeling, but this feeling, you need to think about it in a broader sense, in terms of both your family and the person living here. So, it's… I mean, I think that now… I mean, it's funny having this book in 2026, because the amount of people that I have
• 33:51
  Emil WILSON: workshopped this way, or have read this book, who are 35 and under, have no sense about… I mean, I've even had people raise their hand and be like, I don't know anything about AIDS, can you kind of give us some background?
• 34:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that was something that was popping into my head, is like, do you remember how big of a deal it was when Magic Johnson tested positive?
• 34:10
  Emil WILSON: Oh, it was huge, but I mean, it was…
• 34:13
  Tad Eggleston: And he's still alive.
• 34:15
  Emil WILSON: He's still alive.
• 34:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's how much it's changed in our lifetimes.
• 34:19
  Emil WILSON: But that was in the early to mid… I think that was around 93, 94? Like, you think about, like…
• 34:24
  Emil WILSON: You think about somebody who's 25 right now.
• 34:29
  Emil WILSON: they've never… I mean, AIDS was…
• 34:31
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly, that's my point. If you're 25 right now, like, it's… it's not something you want.
• 34:39
  Tad Eggleston: But it's something that people live with.
• 34:42
  Emil WILSON: Or it's something you've never heard of. Or it's something that, if you've heard of, you have no background about what it is, and that's… that's been a bit surprising.
• 34:50
  Tad Eggleston: You certainly haven't… you've heard about it more the way you've heard of chlamydia and herpes. Probably not as much as herpes. A little bit more than gonorrhea. Right. You know?
• 35:00
  Emil WILSON: But it's interesting, when you are of an age where it was so impactful to who you were growing up, and then suddenly somebody raises their hand, and I mean, it's… I'm of two minds with it. Like, when someone asks me that… to explain AIDS, I'm like, how great that we've come so far that…
• 35:16
  Emil WILSON: We now have to explain what it is, and then there's also part of me that's like, you know, you should probably.
• 35:21
  Tad Eggleston: How horrible is it that we're, like, whitewashing recent history this way?
• 35:25
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, or, like, you should learn your history, like, this is something that you should know about, just knowing about, but,
• 35:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 35:34
  Emil WILSON: interest days.
• 35:35
  Tad Eggleston: Similarly, one of the things I always, always think about
• 35:40
  Tad Eggleston: when it comes to gay marriage, and I think about even more as people
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: As we're backsliding right now, in very real ways.
• 35:51
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 35:51
  Tad Eggleston: I remember, David Kaplan, who's a major sports guy in the Chicago area, WGN Radio, some on TV, I think more on TV now.
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: But at one point, I don't remember exactly why they were talking about it on their sports show, but they were talking about,
• 36:13
  Tad Eggleston: like, when the Supreme Court hearing came down that made gay marriage legal and whatnot, and like, she's like… and I brought my daughter over, and I'm like, you gotta watch this, this is history happening, and she looked at me, and she's like.
• 36:27
  Tad Eggleston: Even they couldn't get married already?
• 36:31
  Emil WILSON: Yeah. Meanwhile, I remember being… I mean, I'm.
• 36:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, Steve.
• 36:33
  Emil WILSON: I remember being in my late 30s and saying to somebody, I won't live to see gay marriage legalized. Like, I just won't see that.
• 36:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:42
  Emil WILSON: 10 years later, I'm, like, standing in the middle of the street thinking, this is bonkers how far we've come. Right.
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: Like, his 16-year-old daughter at the time.
• 36:52
  Emil WILSON: I know.
• 36:52
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 36:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it is kind of like, you know, I mean, the Republicans love to call it, like, social contagion or whatnot, but I don't think we have more trans kids because we have more trans kids. I think we have more trans kids because kids that are awkward, and don't know why, and don't know what they're feeling, and whatever, finally have a word for it that isn't something…
• 37:19
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 37:20
  Tad Eggleston: That will get the shit beaten out of them.
• 37:22
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, and they understand that there are other people like them, and that.
• 37:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:27
  Emil WILSON: You know, and again, it's hard to…
• 37:29
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than having to either be hermits, or the kid that's regularly shoved into a locker, Right.
• 37:37
  Tad Eggleston: they can find their community.
• 37:39
  Emil WILSON: Interesting how things evolve like that. Like, I remember… I remember a couple of years ago, somebody asked me to join a…
• 37:45
  Emil WILSON: a queer cartoonist collective, and I just thought, I'm fine joining it, I just struggle with that word personally. I mean, again, I'm of an age where I remember being in high school, having my head shoved into a toilet, and called a queer, and I… I have a hard time, personally, embracing that word.
• 38:05
  Tad Eggleston: The people have… Come on.
• 38:07
  Emil WILSON: I mean, now it's this big umbrella word that everybody lives under, and they're like, we're all queer, and I'm like, I just… that word just hurts. It's just…
• 38:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because you have a personal history.
• 38:17
  Emil WILSON: Right. And again, how great that language changes, but at the.
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: the same.
• 38:20
  Emil WILSON: weight.
• 38:22
  Emil WILSON: You can't…
• 38:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's also…
• 38:23
  Emil WILSON: remember that.
• 38:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's also where I remind myself that, like, as long as we don't fuck up royally, which, by the way, to, to, to, to, like, your generation, and a little bit less my generation, and certainly the generation older than both of us, we're fucking up royally right now! Get our acts together!
• 38:44
  Emil WILSON: Exactly.
• 38:47
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the things that are still hard for the older generation to…
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: To, like, wrap their heads around.
• 38:56
  Tad Eggleston: the kids are like, yeah, that's just the way it is. So, so, so, like, in general, like, I, I don't…
• 39:02
  Tad Eggleston: When I think about Martin Luther King and the arc of justice.
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: I think one of the things that doesn't get talked about enough is it's just, like…
• 39:15
  Tad Eggleston: It's really just, like, most people don't like it when their lives suck.
• 39:24
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so the things that make their lives better?
• 39:28
  Tad Eggleston: they embrace.
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 39:32
  Tad Eggleston: And the old people who didn't like the change die.
• 39:37
  Tad Eggleston: And therefore, the change becomes the normal.
• 39:41
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: And you just continue that way. So I… like, I'm not saying that the activism or whatnot isn't important. I think it incredibly is. I think it affects it. I'm not saying that we don't have backsliding. We absolutely have backsliding, but I think one of the reasons that the over…
• 39:57
  Tad Eggleston: arcing… sense of the universe is towards justice is because, like, not justice sucks.
• 40:06
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, anytime… anytime you have a better understanding of what justice is, sure, you have people who will either be hurt with… hurt by it, or… or don't like change, and they will push back against it, but they will die. And the kids who were… grew up with, oh, this makes sense, will be the ones that are in power.
• 40:29
  Tad Eggleston: And you're.
• 40:29
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, which is, at least in this day and age, exciting to think about, that at least it's not.
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:36
  Emil WILSON: Well, whatever you think in terms of conservativism, that's gonna change in the next 20 years, and it's probably not gonna swing your way, although it might. Who knows? I mean, I think that, if anything, about…
• 40:47
  Tad Eggleston: No, I, I worry about Yanni.
• 40:48
  Emil WILSON: You met right.
• 40:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean, the manosphere scares the bejesus out of me. Though the fact that they've all… that, like, certain things have already been lost on them. The fact that so much of the manosphere has already gone, oh, no, that's not what we signed up for.
• 41:03
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 41:03
  Tad Eggleston: We just want to be able to do these horrible things. We don't want to do those horrible things. I mean, that's… something?
• 41:11
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 41:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's not a lot, but it's something.
• 41:15
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 41:18
  Tad Eggleston: But I was also reading this morning about, like, they're putting signs up on the Smithsonian about, oh, this isn't really our.
• 41:26
  Emil WILSON: This is a… fuck you.
• 41:28
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 41:29
  Emil WILSON: Right, right.
• 41:30
  Emil WILSON: Right. And then what do you… it's just like, you watch all that.
• 41:35
  Emil WILSON: History changing, and you're like, wait a minute, something's gotta…
• 41:38
  Emil WILSON: like, you can't do this, but… it's happening.
• 41:41
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because, like…
• 41:45
  Tad Eggleston: Why do I love my country less? Because I love the fact that it learns from imperfections and challenges, rather than that it was just always perfect from the get-go.
• 42:00
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 42:02
  Emil WILSON: Interesting.
• 42:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, isn't my con… isn't the… isn't the country I love a stronger one?
• 42:11
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I mean, it… yes, but what do you do when… when the same thing is being said by somebody who disagrees with you, so…
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 42:20
  Emil WILSON: hose.
• 42:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, I… I'm decent at listening to the people who disagree with me.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: I'll argue them till the cows come home.
• 42:32
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 42:33
  Tad Eggleston: But I'll try to listen.
• 42:35
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 42:36
  Tad Eggleston: Unless they're just being mean. I don't have much… I don't have much tolerance for meanness.
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: I don't get what the upside is.
• 42:46
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 42:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's just… I mean, when you were talking about the high school kids and putting your head in the toilet, I'm like, why? What's entertaining about that?
• 43:01
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, yeah, what was entertaining about that? That's a great question. I never thought of it as entertainment until just now, and it's like, wait, what?
• 43:09
  Tad Eggleston: And if it's not entertainment, then what the hell is it? I mean, what…
• 43:12
  Emil WILSON: Certainly wasn't entertaining for everybody in that bathroom.
• 43:14
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, no, definitely, but I'm even trying to think from their perspective, like, what… What did they…
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even setting aside the, like, what did they get that was worth what you went through, because they certainly didn't get anything that was worth what you went through. I don't even want to pretend to say that… but what did they get out of it, period? What part of putting your head in the toilet was better than going out and smoking a cigarette?
• 43:48
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I wish I'd…
• 43:50
  Emil WILSON: I wish I'd know, I would have carried cigarettes with me and just handed it to them and been like, go outside.
• 43:55
  Emil WILSON: So, I mean…
• 43:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's actually the one part of humanity that I've just never been able to crack at it. It's why I get really, really…
• 44:05
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes lost when I see, like… because I… we see that right now. There's a lot of humanity, frankly, on both sides of the aisle. We're starting to see it way more on the left, where it's like.
• 44:16
  Tad Eggleston: They voted for Trump, fuck them all.
• 44:19
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 44:20
  Tad Eggleston: And it's like, no, they're still people. I don't want anybody to be punished. Why can't… why can't we all have nice things?
• 44:30
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think, not to… not to bring it back to… not to bring it back to comics, necessarily.
• 44:35
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we should bring it back to comics.
• 44:38
  Emil WILSON: I think there was a lot of thinking I did. I mean, I think that one of the things that I'm really pleased about with this book is that
• 44:45
  Emil WILSON: I think that I made some choices that I kept thinking, you know, I read comics, other people are… I mean, I didn't grow up with comics at all. I mean, I didn't start reading graphic novels until about 10 years ago, and…
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: You're teasing a later question.
• 44:59
  Emil WILSON: Oh, okay.
• 45:01
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta get your comics biography at some point.
• 45:05
  Emil WILSON: Well, my comic biography is…
• 45:06
  Tad Eggleston: Not yet, because I want to finish on this, this, what you were saying, I'm sorry.
• 45:10
  Emil WILSON: But I think that it was about thinking about, you know, what do other people…
• 45:17
  Emil WILSON: I think it's an idea of… you're creating a book that…
• 45:22
  Emil WILSON: you know, there are people who read comics, and they like this kind of comics, and comics look like this, and this is what it is, and I think that when you sort of say, well, I'm gonna do something different that you're not gonna like, but I… I have to kind of follow this direction for myself.
• 45:36
  Emil WILSON: That was something that I considered. I mean, I was…
• 45:40
  Emil WILSON: not to… not to hint at my comic's biography, but I…
• 45:45
  Tad Eggleston: You're about to hit.
• 45:46
  Emil WILSON: I quit… I quit my advertising job a few years ago and went and…
• 45:50
  Emil WILSON: went into a program at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, and I…
• 45:56
  Emil WILSON: I think that when you go back to.
• 45:58
  Tad Eggleston: I've had James Sturm on the air a couple of times. You have.
• 46:01
  Emil WILSON: And you know, I went to school, and I… I…
• 46:07
  Emil WILSON: I think when you go to school in your 50s, you…
• 46:11
  Emil WILSON: you have a very different perspective on… on… on… on that, especially art school, and I think that, you know, I was the…
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: You mean it's almost like college is wasted on the young?
• 46:21
  Emil WILSON: Maybe. Or you learn different things in college. I think that when you go when you're older, you have a very different agenda.
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. I think, by the way, that we should make college for people over 40 free, just because they will bring so much to classrooms.
• 46:36
  Emil WILSON: That would be great.
• 46:37
  Tad Eggleston: I literally just came up with this right now, so, like, I haven't worked out the finances of it.
• 46:42
  Emil WILSON: We'll implement it after this call.
• 46:45
  Emil WILSON: The, the thing that was interesting is, is that I… I remember there was this presentation that I gave, and somebody… it was an instructor who basically said, you know, I don't know what you think you're doing here, but this isn't comics. Like, this is something different. And I just thought.
• 47:01
  Emil WILSON: Okay?
• 47:03
  Emil WILSON: I mean, unfortunately.
• 47:03
  Tad Eggleston: And my favorite thing is monsters taking over the world yet?
• 47:08
  Emil WILSON: It had, it had, for sure.
• 47:11
  Tad Eggleston: Did the instructor also not think that that was a comic?
• 47:15
  Emil WILSON: No, I didn't ask them. I think that for me, what the.
• 47:18
  Tad Eggleston: Because I did notice that, that Emil and a male
• 47:22
  Tad Eggleston: Have some similarities in their style.
• 47:24
  Emil WILSON: They do. I think that Emil Ferris and I should at some point do a workshop or a conversation where it's like, Emil and Emil, or Emil and Emil. And,
• 47:38
  Emil WILSON: And just, I think that would be hilarious. I've already designed the poster, if she's interested, she should call. But I…
• 47:47
  Emil WILSON: You know, I think that what this instructor didn't know is that my background is in advertising. And if an advertiser… if you're with a creative director, you're showing them work, and the creative director says, I don't know what this is, but it's not advertising, that is the highest compliment you get. Because what that means is that nobody else is gonna…
• 48:07
  Emil WILSON: categorize it as advertising. People are gonna see it, they're gonna be like, I don't know what that is, but I love it, because it's different.
• 48:14
  Emil WILSON: And… I think in comic school, that was a very different…
• 48:19
  Emil WILSON: I don't know that it was meant as a compliment. I think it was meant as, you're doing something that's very different here, and you should think about the people who are gonna read this and what they're used to, and I was like, I don't care what they're used to. Like, they… like, I think that I look at my book in how, like, dialogue is dealt with, how…
• 48:39
  Emil WILSON: you know, there's no panels, it's all done like a sketchbook, there are, like, pictures on top of pictures, and, you know, there's a section that looks like a manual, and I think that for a lot of people at school, that was like, this is… this is too many words, this is too weird, we don't want this.
• 48:57
  Emil WILSON: And I… I'm really proud of it. And…
• 49:00
  Tad Eggleston: You should be.
• 49:00
  Emil WILSON: I'm really excited about it, and I think that that's…
• 49:04
  Emil WILSON: You know, I think that that's something…
• 49:06
  Emil WILSON: that I really thought about in terms of, like, what is everybody else doing, and what's right and what's wrong? I'm just gonna follow my own vision, and I'll make the world that I want to live in, and I'll start here. So…
• 49:19
  Emil WILSON: That was sort of the impetus for the way the book looks, and yeah.
• 49:25
  Emil WILSON: So…
• 49:28
  Tad Eggleston: I… I love that. I love the… I do, I love the, like, comics…
• 49:38
  Tad Eggleston: I love that comics can be anything. Comics are just words and pictures put together to tell a story, and preferably, you know, where neither the words or pictures tell the story
• 49:51
  Tad Eggleston: individually.
• 49:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 49:54
  Tad Eggleston: But I, what I think…
• 49:56
  Emil WILSON: Not to interrupt, but one of the things that I think is interesting that I felt like I learned at school is, is that I think that there's this psychology that, you know, the pictures have to tell the story, and that's, like, they tell part of the story, and the words tell part of the story. And I think that what is lost on that conversation is that…
• 50:12
  Emil WILSON: There are some cartoonists, without even knowing that they're doing it.
• 50:16
  Emil WILSON: create mood and tone with their drawings, and they write the rest of it. And I think that that is absolutely… you know, there's a big discussion, and I know you've had this on your show, that in terms of, like, what's illustration versus comics, and I think that the difference is that, you know.
• 50:35
  Emil WILSON: Sometimes comics can use pictures to give a feeling of something that the words then contribute to, and vice versa, but…
• 50:44
  Emil WILSON: it's not so much that the pictures take care of the action, they show you the action that you don't have to write, it basically gives you a tone or a mood that you don't need to describe. And I think that that's…
• 50:58
  Emil WILSON: something that, you know, I really like. I think that there's a lot of sections in this book that are a lot of words, and I know that, and I know that…
• 51:09
  Emil WILSON: But I think that at the end of the day, for me.
• 51:12
  Emil WILSON: I sort of come down and choose, like, I don't need to draw all these things out. I can put 3 paragraphs down that describe this person's backstory, and then find some other visual way to kind of get you to understand it a little differently. And that's all it needs to be. I think that words can be really great
• 51:31
  Emil WILSON: To talk about some very abstract, difficult.
• 51:35
  Emil WILSON: concepts that I think pictures would just take pages and pages to do. So… Yeah.
• 51:42
  Emil WILSON: That's kind of… that's my soapbox for the morning.
• 51:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and it's a good soapbox. I think also, to me, the… the… the major…
• 51:53
  Tad Eggleston: Difference between comics and illustration is…
• 52:00
  Tad Eggleston: If you take the pictures away.
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: How much of the story is lost.
• 52:06
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 52:06
  Emil WILSON: That's a… that's… to be honest, that is an advertising… that is a beginning class advertising 101,
• 52:14
  Emil WILSON: trick that every advertising class I've been in is where they have an ad with a headline and a picture, you cover up one, it means one thing, you cover up the other, it means something else, and then when you see both together, it means a third thing. And I think that…
• 52:29
  Emil WILSON: Advertising seems like it's very different from comics, but they do almost the same thing, in terms of…
• 52:36
  Tad Eggleston: Visual storytelling.
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, really, really, the difference between advertising and comics is, like.
• 52:44
  Tad Eggleston: Advertising is designed to be manipulative rather than strictly storytelling.
• 52:54
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, or it…
• 52:55
  Tad Eggleston: So you're.
• 52:56
  Emil WILSON: Informative. Informative, sometimes it's not always manipulative.
• 52:59
  Tad Eggleston: Not always, but…
• 53:01
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 53:02
  Tad Eggleston: there's more of a history of working on and manipulating the audience, you know? The famously, you know, wedding rings didn't have to cost a bajillion dollars until the beers came up with two-month salary.
• 53:19
  Emil WILSON: Yeah. I guess it's interesting, because I remember at school, I got into a conversation with somebody that they were like, you know, advertising is brainwashing, and I was like, no one's brainwashing you. You decide what purse you're gonna buy. I'm just giving you the information, you decide what you want to do. That's not manipulation. You're the one who makes that choice, so…
• 53:38
  Emil WILSON: I don't know, I guess I just…
• 53:39
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, I could toss some comics your way that would talk… that, like, have the details of how advertising firms, like.
• 53:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Hired psychiatrists to work on…
• 53:52
  Tad Eggleston: Not just… not just put it… I mean, like, like, putting 3 items on a shelf…
• 54:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's a choice.
• 54:03
  Tad Eggleston: Putting 3 items on a shelf with a very, very…
• 54:07
  Tad Eggleston: stayed, like, this has these things, this has these things, this has these things. That's a choice.
• 54:14
  Tad Eggleston: taking… taking 3 purses, and one of them has no advertising budget whatsoever, so you haven't seen it on… on TV, magazines, anywhere. The other one is… is… is, like, a super small budget, so you've only seen it in magazines, and it's just a picture of the person, says, you know,
• 54:33
  Tad Eggleston: has 7 pockets, or whatever. And the other is a massive advertising campaign on Super Bowl ads with, like, Christy Brinkley carrying the purse.
• 54:46
  Tad Eggleston: There's manipulation there.
• 54:48
  Emil WILSON: Sure, but then you go into the store, and you're like, well, I've never seen this purse before, and why would I spend all this money on this purse when I buy this purse? And, again.
• 54:57
  Emil WILSON: None of that is my… I mean, I'm not the one designing that.
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no.
• 55:02
  Emil WILSON: And they just come to me and say, can you do the idea that sells the… Right.
• 55:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right, no, no, I didn't say the artist was doing… Right.
• 55:10
  Emil WILSON: No, no, no, and I know.
• 55:12
  Tad Eggleston: But sometimes the information you're being given to use is very carefully picked out.
• 55:18
  Emil WILSON: Oh, it is! I mean, there's.
• 55:20
  Tad Eggleston: To be very manipulative. Right.
• 55:24
  Emil WILSON: So… but it's interesting.
• 55:26
  Tad Eggleston: And I say this as somebody who doesn't actually, like… I don't disdain advertising.
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, among other things, there are a lot of things that… that… that…
• 55:37
  Tad Eggleston: we get and should get for free or little money that we're only ever gonna be able to get for that amount because of advertising. I kinda hate the way…
• 55:49
  Tad Eggleston: Google Analytics has taken over advertising to make it all but impossible for things like, say, a newspaper or a magazine to exist, because why pay?
• 56:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right. To have… have your ad in a magazine when you can just pay Google to put it in front of only the eyeballs that it will…
• 56:08
  Tad Eggleston: actually sway.
• 56:11
  Emil WILSON: I think it's interesting, coming from the art side of advertising, to design a graphic novel, because one of the things that I kept thinking about was, I think that there's a very… you know, when you study, you know, a gridded, paneled page.
• 56:24
  Emil WILSON: And you think about how that…
• 56:26
  Emil WILSON: How that… you read that as a reader.
• 56:30
  Emil WILSON: I think that in advertising… I mean, for me, we're looking at comics, there are plenty of pages I open up, and I'm like, I don't know where to go here. Like, I don't know where my eye's supposed to go. I mean, I know.
• 56:39
  Tad Eggleston: No, there's.
• 56:39
  Emil WILSON: to write and down, and I get that, but…
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: Unless it's manga.
• 56:44
  Emil WILSON: Unless it's manga, and even then, I'm like, there's too much going on here, like, I don't know where to look. And…
• 56:49
  Emil WILSON: I think what's interesting is, for me, there are parts of comics that feel…
• 56:56
  Emil WILSON: for me, I, like, especially, like, say, dialogue, I'm always like, okay, so I look at this panel, I start the conversation, I then go to the next panel, look at the panel, what are they doing in this panel, and then continue the conversation.
• 57:08
  Emil WILSON: And conversation always feels like it's a stop-and-start thing, because you're constantly going from box to box to box to box. Box to balloon to box to balloon to box to balloon.
• 57:16
  Emil WILSON: And what was interesting is that I kept thinking about, when I was making this book.
• 57:21
  Emil WILSON: the first scene in the social network, which comes up before anything…
• 57:26
  Tad Eggleston: Sorkin!
• 57:28
  Emil WILSON: Right, and before any…
• 57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Aaron Sorkin.
• 57:30
  Emil WILSON: any kind of logo or anything, you're in this bar, and you're… you think it's a bar, it could be any place, it's just two people sitting at a table, you don't know who they are, you don't know who they are to each other, there's no establishing shot, and yet everything is about that dialogue. That dialogue introduces you to the entire concept of the movie in terms of…
• 57:50
  Emil WILSON: who they are and what spurns him to do Facebook, etc, etc. And I kept thinking, trying to find a way…
• 57:57
  Emil WILSON: to have the dialogue be seamless, and not to have somebody stop and start and stop and start. And the reason that the book looks like it does, where the dialogue is all put into a block.
• 58:07
  Emil WILSON: is that I really wanted that dialogue to flow, and I really wanted you to sort of start reading the dialogue and not take your eyes away from it. Like, read this in its entirety, and understand what they're saying to each other.
• 58:18
  Emil WILSON: And I thought that was…
• 58:20
  Emil WILSON: there was definitely a moment, to get back to what we were talking about a minute ago, where I was like, I've never seen anybody do this, and I don't know that I can do this, but I… this is the only way that I feel like I can do this. And I… I'm really happy with it, because I do think conversations
• 58:37
  Emil WILSON: are integral to this book. Like, how they speak to each other, how they're communicating to one another, how they're not communicating to one another is really important here.
• 58:47
  Emil WILSON: And so…
• 58:48
  Tad Eggleston: But I think also grounding the reader in the fact that it's Lou's perspective matters.
• 58:54
  Emil WILSON: I don't know… I think when it comes to dialogue, not so much. I think that you… since the narrative is all her perspective, I think that you have entered the world through her. But there are certainly conversations that she doesn't participate in.
• 59:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right, but what I'm… what I mean is, because it's, designed as a journal, Right?
• 59:17
  Tad Eggleston: I, at least, always take the conversations as…
• 59:27
  Tad Eggleston: Unreliable narrator isn't the appropriate way to put it, but, like, I take them as symbolic conversations, as much as…
• 59:37
  Tad Eggleston: verbatim conversations, and that both… that's both because they're not in the word balloons, etc, and because I… I'm… I'm reading the whole thing from Lou's perspective. I… I feel like, on one level, it's Lou's…
• 59:53
  Tad Eggleston: Coming-of-age story.
• 59:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right? So what I feel like I'm seeing is a distillery of…
• 1:00:07
  Tad Eggleston: Or a distilled version of, of, like, conversations that she either sees or imagines or cobbles together
• 1:00:14
  Tad Eggleston: In a way that…
• 1:00:18
  Tad Eggleston: is meaningful to her. I mean, when… most time when people journal, it's not just recording events, it's… it's trying to work their…
• 1:00:28
  Tad Eggleston: thoughts out to a greater understanding for themselves, and… and, like, I feel that in this. Like, whether that was directly intended to be one of the things that I feel, like, that's one of the reasons this works for me, is that it feels like
• 1:00:47
  Tad Eggleston: You're supposed to be looking at everybody's perspective, even if you're glomming on to one or another, because…
• 1:00:56
  Tad Eggleston: Lou is aware that…
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: As much as she has her own perspective, her perspective is… is still young, and still changing, and still…
• 1:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: moving.
• 1:01:09
  Tad Eggleston: And I love that.
• 1:01:13
  Emil WILSON: I think that's true. I think you may come up with some stuff at the end where you realize that the sketchbook is…
• 1:01:20
  Emil WILSON: sort of in real time, but it's also sort of a memory, and she's basically writing it from a point later on in life. We sort of see… we've moved forward in time significantly towards the end of the book. And I think…
• 1:01:33
  Emil WILSON: It's… it's interesting, because what you just said made me think of something that I… somebody asked me, why didn't you write this as a memoir? And I… my immediate reaction was, well, I wasn't there for the beginning of it, and then…
• 1:01:46
  Emil WILSON: I couldn't make it a memoir because I… I was basically telling the story through these people, and one of the reasons that I was happy not to write it as a memoir is having written memoir before, and having…
• 1:01:58
  Emil WILSON: shown it to people, and they're like, yeah, you're just not… you're not going deep enough, like, you gotta go deeper, and…
• 1:02:03
  Tad Eggleston: It's horrible.
• 1:02:03
  Emil WILSON: to tell.
• 1:02:05
  Emil WILSON: It is, to me, it's one of the stumbling points with memoir, but to choose your family as characters where you're not part of it.
• 1:02:13
  Emil WILSON: you know those people intimately as people and as characters, and you can… you know what they're gonna do in any given situation. It's funny that you would say, like, the conversations are things that Luke creates, which is true, has to be true.
• 1:02:27
  Emil WILSON: But as the person who created them, I'm absolutely convinced that that's what would have been said in that given moment.
• 1:02:34
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:02:34
  Emil WILSON: by these people, because I knew them so well, and…
• 1:02:37
  Tad Eggleston: You also weren't there, so… so you…
• 1:02:39
  Emil WILSON: I wasn't there, but I… Right, but I knew… I think that that's one of the things that I like about… I wanted to do this book and not have me be the main character, was that I didn't…
• 1:02:50
  Emil WILSON: I wanted to sort of…
• 1:02:52
  Emil WILSON: again, and I use this word oddly, but I was sort of using my… the knowledge I have of my family to create the story, and…
• 1:03:02
  Emil WILSON: you know, it's interesting when you write characters based on real people who are in your family. I think that with memoirists that write prose.
• 1:03:11
  Emil WILSON: it's always interesting to see what people say about how they appear on the page. When you do it as a graphic novel, the stuff that comes out of people's mouths are nuts. Like, when I showed my father's sketches, he was like, why am I bald? Like, why did you make me bald? And I was like, well, the other guy kind of had your hair cut, and I mean…
• 1:03:30
  Emil WILSON: Does it matter? He was like, I'm really proud of my hair, why am I bald?
• 1:03:37
  Emil WILSON: And I just thought.
• 1:03:38
  Emil WILSON: you're worried about your hair? Like, you're… like, the behavior is questionable, and you're worried that you're balding as a character, and it's… again, I think that it's this.
• 1:03:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's actually probably a sign that you got the behavior dead on for him.
• 1:03:52
  Emil WILSON: Maybe…
• 1:03:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because he doesn't think of it as questionable, he's like, yep, this is right.
• 1:03:56
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, this is the one.
• 1:03:57
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm not bald.
• 1:03:58
  Emil WILSON: But I'm not bald. And I think that that's true. I think that that is exactly how he reacted, and it was… it's just this interesting part that I hadn't expected with a graphic novel as opposed to a memoir, is that…
• 1:04:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:04:11
  Emil WILSON: is that you have to put people that you know and love on the page in physical form, and how they… you know that I know that when my mother saw, there was a… there's a drawing of her in the middle of the book, and she's like, I really like this outfit, I don't remember ever having this, but I would have accessorized it differently, and I was like.
• 1:04:30
  Emil WILSON: I need you to focus on what you're saying in this… I mean, like.
• 1:04:34
  Tad Eggleston: Like, you're…
• 1:04:35
  Emil WILSON: I'm worried about the brooch as opposed to the necklace, and I'm like…
• 1:04:40
  Emil WILSON: you know, you're doing… you're saying some awful things. And it's…
• 1:04:45
  Emil WILSON: It's just an interesting part of… it's a byproduct of…
• 1:04:49
  Emil WILSON: Right. Of being a graphic novelist that I hadn't really thought about, and…
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:04:53
  Emil WILSON: it's something that I'm learning in how… I'm working on… the next thing I'm working on is,
• 1:04:58
  Emil WILSON: is something that talks… is about the siblings, is about me and my sister, and sort of things that happened later on, and it's just interesting, I'm much more conscious of how I'm presenting her, myself, the other people who are not in this book, who will be in the new book.
• 1:05:16
  Emil WILSON: How they're gonna look at… look at themselves on the page, and what will they see, and that's been interesting, so…
• 1:05:23
  Tad Eggleston: Did your sister respond to this book?
• 1:05:27
  Emil WILSON: good. I think that she… the first reaction, she… she called me after she read the first draft of it, and she's like, this is really close to the bone, and she's like, nobody would get that except for you, me, mom, and dad. Like, no one's gonna understand thing… they're gonna read things and be like, oh, that's interesting, and she's like, we see it completely different.
• 1:05:47
  Emil WILSON: I think she has since come to the point where
• 1:05:51
  Emil WILSON: I mean, she knows the things that have been changed and the things that are made up, and…
• 1:05:56
  Emil WILSON: I think that…
• 1:05:58
  Emil WILSON: again, I think that nobody else would get that, so I think that she's… I think she likes it. I think she likes it a lot. I hope… I hope she likes it.
• 1:06:06
  Tad Eggleston: I think that…
• 1:06:07
  Emil WILSON: my… I think that my mom likes it, I think that she… I think there's enough of a lie that the stuff that's the truth, kind of what you were saying, the stuff that's the truth, she can kind of be like, well, that's not… I don't need to think about that, because this stuff's a lie, so maybe this is a lie.
• 1:06:23
  Tad Eggleston: The brooch is in the wrong place, so it's not…
• 1:06:25
  Emil WILSON: approaches the wrong place, so…
• 1:06:28
  Emil WILSON: You know, I would never… I would never wear heels with that, so it's all…
• 1:06:32
  Tad Eggleston: armchair psychiatrist, like, in a scene where you've got her saying terrible things, that's a… that's a reasonable response. She doesn't want to address the terrible… she really doesn't want to address the terrible things if she can't say, no, I wouldn't say that.
• 1:06:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So, let's look at the fact that I would accessorize this dress strip in.
• 1:06:54
  Emil WILSON: Right, and hopefully, I mean, like I said, one of the things that I was really happy about is that I think I spent a lot of time trying to really understand where all of that was coming from, and that…
• 1:07:03
  Emil WILSON: You know, I think that one of the things when you write memoir is to give grace to the people, because they're characters, you can't just have a bad guy. Like, you have to have somebody that's dimensional, and why would.
• 1:07:14
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 1:07:15
  Emil WILSON: doing.
• 1:07:15
  Tad Eggleston: You could. I mean, they've got.
• 1:07:17
  Emil WILSON: Sure.
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: fucking guy on hysteria.
• 1:07:22
  Emil WILSON: But, you shouldn't. You should make the character dimensional, and you should make the character understood, and…
• 1:07:27
  Tad Eggleston: And are you saying that you can't be a bad guy and have dimensions of your despiteful evilness? I mean, I feel like our current president does have multiple dimensions, but he's a bad guy.
• 1:07:40
  Emil WILSON: I think that's true, but I remember the… but I think we've all seen… we've read stuff or seen stuff where we're like, oh, that's where he got that.
• 1:07:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, his…
• 1:07:50
  Emil WILSON: It doesn't make it any better. It doesn't make it better, but it does…
• 1:07:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'll give you that.
• 1:07:54
  Emil WILSON: It's gonna be like, okay, at least I know where the source of that is, and that you're not just…
• 1:07:59
  Emil WILSON: A horrible person, that there's actually a reason this happened.
• 1:08:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, on the off chance, though, that we have any, ANY,
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: MAGA listeners, I doubt it. 900-some-odd episodes in, I think they would have figured out, but I want to say once again that I was a dementia care professional. I have administered the Montreal mini mental test many, many times. He's bragging about passing
• 1:08:26
  Tad Eggleston: A dementia exam that a kindergartner should be able to pass.
• 1:08:34
  Emil WILSON: Oh… it just… if you start talking about it, it just becomes worse.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: It does sometimes, but every once in a while, I just need to put that on the record. For people who don't… I mean, seriously, I don't understand why a Democrat hasn't said, let's take them together and record it.
• 1:08:55
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I don't know that that would.
• 1:08:58
  Tad Eggleston: You're so certain I can't pass it? Let's take them together and record it.
• 1:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:09:06
  Emil WILSON: I wouldn't… I wouldn't… I wouldn't hold your breath for that, ever.
• 1:09:09
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's not gonna happen, but I don't understand why it hasn't.
• 1:09:13
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:09:14
  Emil WILSON: So…
• 1:09:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I do. The… the Democrats…
• 1:09:18
  Tad Eggleston: Have their hearts in the right place, but… but misplace their spines.
• 1:09:22
  Emil WILSON: That's a different podcast. That's a different… that's a.
• 1:09:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it is sometimes this podcast, but I was gonna move on.
• 1:09:32
  Emil WILSON: Yes, sure, okay, let's move on.
• 1:09:35
  Tad Eggleston: Let's hear your comic's biography. Now, I'm gonna… I'm gonna be specific. Yeah. When I ask for a comic's biography.
• 1:09:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not asking for your bibliography. I'm not asking for your CV.
• 1:09:48
  Tad Eggleston: I am… I am asking, like… What comics have shaped you?
• 1:09:55
  Tad Eggleston: What comics do you remember reading, remember buying, remember looking at and going, oh, I didn't know comics could do this? Remember go… looking at and going, oh, maybe I should make comics.
• 1:10:09
  Emil WILSON: I think there was one book in particular that… that stood out to me, and again, I think it just… it was, like so many of that… like, that question is about timing, I think, in terms of not necessarily the comic scrape, but you read it at the moment that something was germinating and it hit the right thing.
• 1:10:27
  Emil WILSON: I think that, for me, one of the frustrations I had, which I've spoken to, is that I just didn't… I didn't think in comics, I didn't grow up with them, I didn't have a background.
• 1:10:37
  Emil WILSON: And I kept thinking, why do they all look the same? Like, they all look the same to me. And I know they don't. I know when you see a bunch of comics after a while, they all… you know, you see the nuances, they're different, but if you're just coming into the form, it all feels similar.
• 1:10:53
  Emil WILSON: And there was this book… that Nora Krug wrote called Becoming.
• 1:10:59
  Emil WILSON: Which is all about her investigating her family's involvement in the Nazi Party. She's a German national, and she's now living in the US. And, it was the first book I saw where it felt like I didn't have a reference for it. I didn't have…
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: Belonging?
• 1:11:19
  Emil WILSON: Belonging, yeah. And…
• 1:11:23
  Emil WILSON: And I think what was interesting for me was that it didn't… it didn't look like a comic, what I thought of as a comic. It did different things, it sort of brought in journals, it brought in documents, it brought in photographs, it brought in collage.
• 1:11:38
  Emil WILSON: And I just thought…
• 1:11:40
  Emil WILSON: this isn't what I want to do, but this allows me to do what I wanted. Like, now that I've seen someone else do something different, I can do something different and feel confident about it. And it was the first thing that I read that eventually got me to the school, because I was like, I'm not going to go to a school.
• 1:11:55
  Emil WILSON: and learn how to make paneled comics with word balloons. I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that. I want to do something… I want to see what somebody's doing.
• 1:12:03
  Emil WILSON: that feels really different. And I mean, once you sort of push on that, you find a bunch of other stuff, like, Richard Maguire's here.
• 1:12:12
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, my God.
• 1:12:12
  Emil WILSON: Pretty transformative for me, because it was… again, it was conceptual, it was different.
• 1:12:18
  Emil WILSON: You had to really think about what you were looking at, you had to sort of understand the story behind what… the pictures.
• 1:12:25
  Emil WILSON: That was really transformative for me,
• 1:12:30
  Emil WILSON: You know, it's funny, and again, I don't want it to sound like I hate… I hated comics, I didn't. Like, somebody asked me a couple of weeks ago, if you could read something again for the first time, what would it be? And the first thing I thought of just…
• 1:12:43
  Emil WILSON: off the cuff was mouse, because I just thought, That is so…
• 1:12:50
  Emil WILSON: You know, it's one thing to be different, it's another thing to do something traditional that is so masterful, and that is so masterful.
• 1:12:58
  Emil WILSON: I…
• 1:13:00
  Emil WILSON: I do go back to that, and I look at that, and I think, you know, I don't want to do this, but I…
• 1:13:04
  Tad Eggleston: Amazing.
• 1:13:05
  Emil WILSON: I'm so…
• 1:13:07
  Emil WILSON: I'm so moved by the fact that this exists. Those were sort of the things that really stood out for me.
• 1:13:16
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that,
• 1:13:20
  Emil WILSON: Frank Santoro's Pittsburgh was also really.
• 1:13:22
  Tad Eggleston: Another great book.
• 1:13:23
  Emil WILSON: Was also really transformative for me, in terms of the fact that It just felt like…
• 1:13:29
  Emil WILSON: he was doing something just very, very different. And it's interesting when you talk to him, he is such an amazing…
• 1:13:36
  Emil WILSON: comics historian and knows his stuff, so… I mean, he can…
• 1:13:41
  Emil WILSON: You know, he has a mind that is just, like, full of reference, and he knows where he's coming from, and the fact that he created that…
• 1:13:48
  Emil WILSON: out of all of that traditional stuff was pretty fantastic. I'm a huge fan of his.
• 1:13:55
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, those are the books that sort of come to mind, so…
• 1:13:59
  Tad Eggleston: I love Pittsburgh, but I need to get to know more Santoro, particularly because
• 1:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: The way you just described him.
• 1:14:07
  Tad Eggleston: feels like that there are a handful of people that I love talking to just because of…
• 1:14:14
  Tad Eggleston: How much so many of the things they love don't…
• 1:14:18
  Tad Eggleston: don't necessarily… aren't immediately visible in their own art. Yeah.
• 1:14:22
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that some of his early work is like that, and I think that he's…
• 1:14:27
  Emil WILSON: I don't know. I… I… I'm… like I said, I'm a huge fan of his, and I…
• 1:14:31
  Emil WILSON: He's incredibly kind, and he's incredibly…
• 1:14:34
  Emil WILSON: He's just very smart, and I just… I… I'm a big fan.
• 1:14:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I love talking to smart people, too.
• 1:14:44
  Tad Eggleston: It's just fun. Like, I don't understand the idea of wanting to be the smartest guy in the room, and I say this as somebody who, like, I'm not being too big-headed when I say that I'm often the smartest guy in the room.
• 1:15:01
  Tad Eggleston: But I find it annoying half the time.
• 1:15:04
  Tad Eggleston: and even the times that it's great, you know, I'd love for there to be
• 1:15:08
  Tad Eggleston: people that I get to learn from.
• 1:15:10
  Tad Eggleston: And I… you learn from the people who aren't as smarter, like, that sounds more…
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: It's hard… it's hard to talk about things like that without sounding way too big-headed.
• 1:15:20
  Emil WILSON: Great.
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: But… but, like…
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there are a handful of people that I've known in my life who it's like, you're absolutely as smart or smarter than I am, and I love talking to those people.
• 1:15:35
  Emil WILSON: I think that's true. I think that one of the things that I… I feel like I've learned in comics, specifically, has been that people are… I've met people who are smarter, not necessarily smart, but heartfelt smart. Like, I remember being at school…
• 1:15:50
  Emil WILSON: You know, Jason Lutz is an instructor at Cartoon Studies, and Jason is the most gracious, wonderful teacher that you can encounter, and he…
• 1:16:02
  Emil WILSON: I remember there was somebody who was…
• 1:16:06
  Emil WILSON: I don't know that it was my work, it might have been my work, that somebody was kind of like…
• 1:16:10
  Emil WILSON: kind of stabbing at it a little bit, and I remember him saying, look, he's like, this is…
• 1:16:15
  Emil WILSON: visual, it's artful, it's moving. That's what we do here, that's what we make, is we make things that are pictures and words, but our intent is to move somebody, or to make them understand something. And he's like, and by that… by that…
• 1:16:33
  Emil WILSON: you know, metric, this does that. So, he's like, whether or not you think this is a comic or a successful comic, it does that. And it was…
• 1:16:41
  Emil WILSON: I found myself being like…
• 1:16:44
  Emil WILSON: I don't know, there's something about Jason that is just so warm and wonderful, and I just am like, yeah, that's what we do here, and I think that if I… at the end of the day, I look at my page, and I'm like, is this artful? Is there art? Does it move me? I've done my job.
• 1:17:00
  Emil WILSON: And that's…
• 1:17:02
  Emil WILSON: that's what's great about making comics, and I don't know that it has to have all the other trappings of it. It can just be that, and I think that that was a bit of a North Star for me with this book, was just like, does this move me? Am I at the end, and I was moved, and I remember the first time I showed it to a group of people, and people were moved, and I was…
• 1:17:22
  Emil WILSON: I remember going into the kitchen with…
• 1:17:25
  Emil WILSON: a cartoonist, and saying to her, like, was that a weird workshop that people were crying? And she was like, oh, yeah, that was weird. And she's like, but it… but it's also great, you know that, right? Like, if you've done something that has moved somebody, that is what we all strive for.
• 1:17:42
  Emil WILSON: And I thought that was… that's been something I've been really pleased with with this book, is the response has been pretty emotional for a lot of people, so…
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: So, what…
• 1:17:53
  Tad Eggleston: This is gonna seem like a non-secondary, but it's just how my brain works. What… what took you from what I assume was a not unsuccessful career in advertising to… to…
• 1:18:05
  Tad Eggleston: Storytelling, and specifically to graphic storytelling.
• 1:18:10
  Emil WILSON: I'll make this really quick, because it's an interesting story. A friend of mine died, and a bunch of her friends got together one weekend, and got drunk on a lot of wine, and sat around the room and pointed fingers at each other and said, this is what you need to do before you die.
• 1:18:24
  Emil WILSON: Because it was our first sort of brush with mortality, we had all just turned 50, and there was a sense, like, if you have something on your bucket list.
• 1:18:32
  Emil WILSON: Now is the time to start doing it, because you never know.
• 1:18:35
  Emil WILSON: And…
• 1:18:36
  Emil WILSON: everybody got something different. Mine was, you should go to art school. Not because I didn't… I needed art school, I was an art director, I had been an illustrator, I had ceramics, I did a side hustle with printmaking.
• 1:18:49
  Emil WILSON: But I had never taken my work and moved it to the center and made it my priority.
• 1:18:55
  Emil WILSON: And they thought that's what art school would do for me, and I was like, yeah, but the problem with art school is I have to choose a discipline, and I don't want to do that.
• 1:19:02
  Emil WILSON: And they said, well, what about, like, something like graphic novels? You get to write, you get to draw, you get to design…
• 1:19:08
  Emil WILSON: And I just thought, yeah, but comic books are for, like, superheroes or for teenage girls that are, like, first crushes, and I don't want to do that. And they were like, no, it's a perfectly good, viable way to tell a story, and that's what got me on the path, is I just…
• 1:19:23
  Emil WILSON: I had enough… I had enough background in advertising and design to be dangerous in terms of doing what I wanted to do, but I…
• 1:19:32
  Emil WILSON: I just wanted to… I just needed the… I needed the Nora Crugg book to sort of make the connection of, like, oh, I can do whatever I want. Like, I don't have to follow this metric. I don't have to follow this map. I can do…
• 1:19:43
  Tad Eggleston: If I'd been in that room, I would have given you a stack. No, they don't. Here!
• 1:19:49
  Emil WILSON: No, and I think that it's… I think that that was sort of what got me into it, was I just wanted to…
• 1:19:55
  Emil WILSON: tell…
• 1:19:56
  Emil WILSON: stories, but I needed it to feel like, oh, this is something that I would've… I just need to follow my vision a little bit. And I think that that's the piece of art school that can be a little harder to get in touch with, is that you're… you know, it's not about creating art, it's about creating art that you… that is really meaningful to you, that is really representative of you.
• 1:20:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:20:16
  Emil WILSON: And…
• 1:20:17
  Emil WILSON: that was something that I think being older really helped me with. And again, going to art school was great. Going to cartoon school was amazing. I thought that the age was going to other me. I mean, I was the second oldest person to ever go to the school. I was older than the instructors. I was older than everybody.
• 1:20:32
  Emil WILSON: And the thing that othered me was not that. The cohort was amazing. They were welcoming and supportive.
• 1:20:38
  Emil WILSON: But… it was the fact that I'd had another career.
• 1:20:42
  Emil WILSON: and then sort of walked into the school, and I was like, you also sort of have a sense of, like.
• 1:20:48
  Emil WILSON: I think that a lot of people in art school don't understand how to monetize it to sort of have a life doing it, and I felt like I was the one…
• 1:20:56
  Tad Eggleston: Sage brother…
• 1:20:58
  Emil WILSON: There was somebody in my class who made these amazing 3D sculptures, and I felt like I was always the Hollywood producer, stage mother, that I was like, look, let me tell you how we're gonna make a living here. You take this, you do this with it. You take this, you do this with it. You sell both, you basically make income here, and then you do this in the middle, and she was like, hey, grandpa, calm down, like, what?
• 1:21:16
  Tad Eggleston: That's the problem.
• 1:21:18
  Emil WILSON: And I…
• 1:21:19
  Tad Eggleston: The problem is, you're a good artist, and I want you to eat.
• 1:21:22
  Emil WILSON: You're an amazing artist, and you should focus your… everything so that you can pay your electric bill and still do your art.
• 1:21:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And…
• 1:21:32
  Emil WILSON: And I think that that was…
• 1:21:35
  Emil WILSON: that was part of what made school so odd, is that I had production experience, and I had…
• 1:21:41
  Emil WILSON: I had paid an electric bill, and I hadn't…
• 1:21:45
  Emil WILSON: you know, like, it was about, look, if we're gonna do this and make a living at it, we gotta make the living part of it. And…
• 1:21:51
  Emil WILSON: I think that comics is incredibly hard to make a living at. I don't think that that's news to anybody.
• 1:21:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's a recurring theme on this podcast.
• 1:22:00
  Emil WILSON: Oh, I'm sure, and again, at Cartoon Studies, every week they have a visiting lecture come in, and I looked at somebody at one point, halfway through the year, and I said, if one more person says, marry somebody with an insurance policy… marry somebody with an insurance coverage, I'm gonna lose it, because it's like… it's like, you know, in the…
• 1:22:19
  Tad Eggleston: There's truth to it!
• 1:22:20
  Emil WILSON: It's true to it, but it's like, you know, when people went to school, like, when women went to school in the 60s to get, like, a husband, it's like, that's what this feels like. Like, I don't want to marry rich to do comics.
• 1:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, hey, I got a sugar mama. She's a public school art teacher.
• 1:22:39
  Tad Eggleston: I keep being told that that means that I don't understand what Sugar Mama means.
• 1:22:43
  Emil WILSON: I, I love, I love the term sugar mama.
• 1:22:49
  Tad Eggleston: She's a public school art teacher!
• 1:22:51
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:22:52
  Tad Eggleston: She makes twice as much money as I am.
• 1:22:54
  Emil WILSON: Exactly, exactly. So… I think that that's…
• 1:22:59
  Emil WILSON: you know, again, when you're older, going to art school, it's like, I know why I'm here, but I also know the realities of being in the world, and.
• 1:23:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:23:06
  Emil WILSON: I gotta make those two things work together, and I don't know that I've necessarily done a good job yet, but…
• 1:23:13
  Emil WILSON: You know, I think that there's also a lot.
• 1:23:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there is something…
• 1:23:15
  Emil WILSON: the book, so…
• 1:23:16
  Tad Eggleston: There is something to be said for living and working in the lamp factory in Montreal, like Paul Pope did.
• 1:23:23
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:23:24
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:23:25
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if even he actually thinks that there's a lot to be said for that.
• 1:23:31
  Emil WILSON: Well, but I think that it's… it's…
• 1:23:33
  Tad Eggleston: Cool.
• 1:23:34
  Emil WILSON: I just… it's… it's frustrating, because I know that a lot of people, myself included.
• 1:23:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:23:39
  Emil WILSON: have to do other jobs to be able to do this job, and I think that that can be…
• 1:23:45
  Emil WILSON: not just demoralizing, but it can also be exhausting. Like, there…
• 1:23:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:23:48
  Emil WILSON: days you come home and you're like, I don't want to draw anything, I just want to watch TV in, like, the most mindless TV that exists, and…
• 1:23:58
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:23:58
  Tad Eggleston: Please don't tell me you're into reality TV.
• 1:24:00
  Emil WILSON: No. I mean, look, I don't even know.
• 1:24:03
  Tad Eggleston: It would ruin my whole image.
• 1:24:05
  Emil WILSON: No, no, no.
• 1:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: housewives. Oh, God.
• 1:24:08
  Emil WILSON: No, no, no, no, that's not my schtick. But, I do think… I do think that it's…
• 1:24:16
  Emil WILSON: you know, it's hard to do this, so I think that you have…
• 1:24:19
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 1:24:19
  Emil WILSON: understand your sacrifices, and… Yeah. But also know that you have to follow what you want to do, and not think about
• 1:24:27
  Emil WILSON: you know, what the market is, you just have to follow your stuff. I mean, I pitched this…
• 1:24:31
  Emil WILSON: first chapter of this book, and someone's like, hmm, AIDS is over, what about COVID? And I was like, I don't want to write a book about COVID. Like, I want to… that's not my experience. And… so who knows? Who knows what the marketplace… you just have to kind of do your own thing.
• 1:24:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like… It's something that…
• 1:24:52
  Tad Eggleston: It's a weird place that the comics marketplace is in, because, like, half the comics marketplace is… is…
• 1:25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Locked into the weekly comics, monthly formula.
• 1:25:09
  Tad Eggleston: specialty store distribution. So, like, if it doesn't… if they can't see how it fits into that, they don't understand how it exists at all. And the other half of comics
• 1:25:22
  Tad Eggleston: Is… is more of the long-term publishing world, but…
• 1:25:26
  Tad Eggleston: But two things. First, as more and more… VC and… and…
• 1:25:36
  Tad Eggleston: private equity has gotten an end to long-term publishing, it's become less and less long-term, less and less about, oh, we want to have the catalog so that we can make money for the next 50 years. It's, what have you done for me this week?
• 1:25:52
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:25:54
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, like… All art.
• 1:26:00
  Tad Eggleston: But particularly… long-form storytelling.
• 1:26:08
  Tad Eggleston: Takes time to find its audience.
• 1:26:11
  Emil WILSON: Oh, yeah, it takes time to make it. It takes time to make it, and then find the audience, and then the… you know, to make it an object takes time as well. Right, right.
• 1:26:21
  Tad Eggleston: But so, like, making it to what you think that people will like is, like, the dumbest possible way to do it.
• 1:26:28
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:26:29
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:26:30
  Tad Eggleston: Unless you're somebody who's paying for it, but doesn't understand what it is. Right.
• 1:26:36
  Tad Eggleston: Which, unfortunately, exists too much.
• 1:26:39
  Emil WILSON: Right. So when you see something like, you know, Richard McGuire's here, and you're like.
• 1:26:46
  Emil WILSON: He just… he just did… he didn't…
• 1:26:48
  Emil WILSON: I can't imagine that anybody was like, oh yeah, this is gonna do well, this is gonna be a…
• 1:26:53
  Tad Eggleston: That started out as, like, a 16-pager.
• 1:26:56
  Emil WILSON: Right. I mean, it's just one of those things, like, thank God.
• 1:26:58
  Tad Eggleston: So somebody saw it, because it started out much smaller, and I want to say Pantheon came to him and said.
• 1:27:06
  Tad Eggleston: We think this could be more. Do you think it could be more?
• 1:27:10
  Emil WILSON: That's great.
• 1:27:11
  Tad Eggleston: Huh.
• 1:27:11
  Emil WILSON: I love that. I love knowing that someone's like, let's see the potential in this, and let's go with it. Like, that's…
• 1:27:17
  Tad Eggleston: I believe. I haven't talked to Richard, but I know it started much smaller.
• 1:27:24
  Tad Eggleston: And then became a bigger thing.
• 1:27:26
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that that's an interesting piece to it. I remember when I was invited to go to the comic art workshop in Australia, and there was a lot of discussion about this book.
• 1:27:37
  Emil WILSON: about… think about what you want it to be. Do you want it to be a real object? Do you want the journal… the sketchbook to be the book? Do you want this book… like, think about what you want it to be, and that was a really wonderful piece of advice in terms of…
• 1:27:53
  Emil WILSON: who do you want to read this? How do you want them to see it? What do you want it to look like on a shelf? Don't… every question but what's the story? That was not… I mean, we talked about that too, but…
• 1:28:03
  Emil WILSON: You know, and it was… that conversation really galvanized something for me in terms of, like, look, I…
• 1:28:09
  Emil WILSON: you know, when I gave it to my… the man who would become my agent, he said, look, I don't read graphic novels, I don't really like them, but I like this one, and I like it because it moved me…
• 1:28:19
  Tad Eggleston: Which means I have another stack that I can give him, too.
• 1:28:22
  Emil WILSON: He's like, it doesn't look like what I think a graphic novel should be, and that was what attracted me to it. And I thought, that's the person… I want that to be my reader. I want the person who doesn't read the advertising slogan, the graphic novel for the person who doesn't read graphic novels.
• 1:28:39
  Tad Eggleston: I'm down with that, but also, like, it frustrates me so much. Nobody says, I don't do moving pictures, or I don't do probes.
• 1:28:51
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are a medium. There's no such thing as a person who just does not like… you don't like examples of the medium. I guarantee you.
• 1:29:02
  Emil WILSON: And for you don't know enough about…
• 1:29:04
  Tad Eggleston: has some, you know… and half the time, it turns out that they already know it, they just somehow have divorced it from the medium. Right, you know. I don't do comics. Oh, I've read every Peanuts cartoon ever.
• 1:29:21
  Tad Eggleston: Comics!
• 1:29:22
  Emil WILSON: And it is interesting, I mean, getting back to advertising, it is a little bit of a… there is a little bit of a PR problem in terms.
• 1:29:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:29:30
  Emil WILSON: in terms of…
• 1:29:31
  Emil WILSON: why… why was I turned off when I… when someone brought it up for me? And it was because I just… I assume it's this thing.
• 1:29:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:39
  Emil WILSON: It can be anything, but I assume it's this.
• 1:29:41
  Tad Eggleston: You're totally hitting on, like, my moral compass for this podcast here.
• 1:29:46
  Emil WILSON: Which is… which is a huge conversation to be having in terms of, like, well, then what do you… then which way do you go as an artist? Do you do the thing that feels like a really wonderful example of…
• 1:29:59
  Emil WILSON: a great comic, whatever that is to you, or do you do something that just feels completely bonkers and different? It's like, well, you can define it however you want. Like, this could be… Right.
• 1:30:09
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, both can be true. Right. Both can be true. I mean, like, all of… like, almost all of my favorite comics are my favorite comics because they did something that made me look at the medium differently.
• 1:30:23
  Tad Eggleston: whether it was Frank Miller's Daredevil way back when, that, like, very much falls into that panel and whatnot, but, like, dealt with much more serious personal issues, and I'm like, oh…
• 1:30:36
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, you mean it doesn't have to be all superficial superhero stuff? We can… we can deal with relationships, and we can deal with crisis of faith, and we can deal with…
• 1:30:47
  Emil WILSON: I mean, on some level, that's a wonderful perspective, that you think that… I mean, that that's true, that that's something that you think about in terms of, like, that they do some… they present some way for you to look at it differently. I think that that.
• 1:31:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:31:01
  Emil WILSON: That's incredibly inspiring to someone like me, that's incredibly encouraging to somebody like me, because…
• 1:31:06
  Emil WILSON: I feel like there are times when you create something where you're like, oh, well, this worked, I'm gonna do it this way, the way this person did it, instead of thinking, like, well, what's a different way to do it?
• 1:31:17
  Emil WILSON: And I think that that's where, for me, advertising came in, because it was like, you never do the thing that everyone else is doing, because then it's gonna be forgettable, or people aren't gonna spend time looking at it.
• 1:31:27
  Emil WILSON: But it's a wonderful thing to hear, like, keep doing the thing that feels different, because that's the thing that will make the reader be, you know.
• 1:31:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:31:36
  Emil WILSON: When I worked at… worked… did some freelance for Apple, there was this phrase that they kept throwing at you that was like, we need to surprise and delight our consumer.
• 1:31:46
  Emil WILSON: And I think about that line a lot, like, am I delighting and surprising, or am I just delighting? Or is this surprising enough? And I think about that a lot, like…
• 1:31:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:31:57
  Emil WILSON: I think it's the combination of those things that make something worth Reading.
• 1:32:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like, all of that said, like, you dropped the social network, I'm gonna drop some more Sorkin wisdom, you know? There's a great line in the West Wing that has been attributed everywhere to, like.
• 1:32:19
  Tad Eggleston: it's been attributed everywhere under the sun, going back, I think, even to Shakespeare, but, like, where I first came across it was in the West Wing, so I give…
• 1:32:30
  Emil WILSON: Tap the…
• 1:32:32
  Tad Eggleston: Good writers borrow liberally from other writers. Great writers steal things outright.
• 1:32:39
  Tad Eggleston: So… so sometimes changing…
• 1:32:42
  Tad Eggleston: my… the way I look at the medium doesn't actually mean doing something completely differently. Sometimes it's doing something
• 1:32:52
  Tad Eggleston: That feels like it's not different at all, except that it is.
• 1:32:57
  Emil WILSON: Or that it's in a different context. Right. You know, how much of advertising… like, I remember…
• 1:33:02
  Emil WILSON: When you're given an assignment in advertising, you look at everything but advertising, but you look at, like, Busby Berkeley musicals, and you're like, I'm gonna use that. I'm completely stealing from it, but in the context of a 30-second commercial for an airline, no one's seen that before, so that's different. And it's just the way.
• 1:33:20
  Tad Eggleston: You mean you can do an airline commercial that isn't…
• 1:33:24
  Emil WILSON: Sure.
• 1:33:24
  Tad Eggleston: just a different part of Rhapsody in Blue?
• 1:33:29
  Emil WILSON: It's shocking when you get that, when someone in a meeting is like, do anything but that.
• 1:33:34
  Emil WILSON: And you're like, okay, I'll be careful what you ask for, because I will.
• 1:33:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, well, no, I was just blown up, I mean, and don't get me wrong, I love Rhapsody and Blue, which is why I always laughed, and I'm like.
• 1:33:48
  Tad Eggleston: do people realize? Because they use different… they've used different enough parts through the years, and I'm like, do people realize that United has been using the same song?
• 1:34:00
  Emil WILSON: It's all the same song.
• 1:34:01
  Tad Eggleston: Oops.
• 1:34:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:34:03
  Emil WILSON: It's… it's crazy, and it's, it's probably, you know…
• 1:34:07
  Emil WILSON: I mean, half the choices you're… I mean, from an advertising point of view, you're like, oh, it's because it was free, it just came into the
• 1:34:13
  Emil WILSON: like, last month, so… Right. Yeah, that makes sense.
• 1:34:17
  Emil WILSON: But, you know, it all comes down to…
• 1:34:20
  Emil WILSON: It all comes down to… it doesn't come down to money, but it definitely comes down to, like, how can you use… be practical about what you're using, so…
• 1:34:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah, no, I just… I'm always fascinated, like, you've got me just thinking of recent comics that, like, one of my favorite…
• 1:34:36
  Tad Eggleston: Comics last year, like, at first glance…
• 1:34:39
  Tad Eggleston: it was, it was, Chris, Chris Cantwell and Victor Santos did a book called Kid Maroon, and at first glance, you know.
• 1:34:49
  Tad Eggleston: It's very much set up
• 1:34:52
  Tad Eggleston: at a traditional comic, you know, mostly panels, mostly word balloons, you know, there's a little bit of an edge to it that makes it feel like somewhere between, like, 50s comic strips and…
• 1:35:04
  Tad Eggleston: current comics.
• 1:35:06
  Tad Eggleston: But… but it was also, like…
• 1:35:09
  Tad Eggleston: it was doing this Dick Tracy-like character, As a 9-year-old.
• 1:35:17
  Emil WILSON: That's great.
• 1:35:19
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, the more you read it, the more you realize that it's this entire commentary on the world we live in, on growing up, on being told that you're supposed to grow up before you really should grow up, like, there's so many layers.
• 1:35:36
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 1:35:39
  Tad Eggleston: that just… or, you know, similarly, you know, Kayla E. with her book.
• 1:35:44
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:35:44
  Tad Eggleston: Last year.
• 1:35:45
  Emil WILSON: You did a great interview with her, that's one of my favorites.
• 1:35:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Kayla's great.
• 1:35:51
  Tad Eggleston: And big hat tip to Dr. Ramos on that one. He did some heavy lifting for us. Yeah.
• 1:35:59
  Tad Eggleston: If I'd been smart, I would have asked him to come for this one. Or his wife, Sam. Either one of them would have had great insights.
• 1:36:06
  Tad Eggleston: But… but yeah, you know, to take… to take these things that don't… I mean, that's sometimes it. It's like, oh, I know the… oh, no, I don't know this.
• 1:36:15
  Tad Eggleston: Those words balloon don't have the words that I thought they would have in them.
• 1:36:19
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:36:20
  Emil WILSON: Or used to an effect that it was like, you know, that was…
• 1:36:24
  Emil WILSON: You're, like, 20 pages in, you're like, oh, this is a… this is a terrible read, like, this is so hard to read, and then everything around it is so effervescent and beautiful, and… and fresh and bright, and you're like…
• 1:36:38
  Emil WILSON: I don't know the feelings I'm feeling. I was so blown away by that book, and just in terms of, like, how…
• 1:36:44
  Emil WILSON: you're constantly trying to negotiate your feelings, and what you're looking at, and what you're… you know to be true, and what you're looking at, and it's… it's just fantastic. So…
• 1:36:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:36:56
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I'm, I'm a… Great.
• 1:36:59
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, no, I mean, I actually love it when I find people who haven't gone deep into comics, because they go into the back of my head as people that get involved in book clubs, because, like, I love it when people who clearly know how to make comics, and clearly know how to do storytelling.
• 1:37:17
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:37:18
  Tad Eggleston: but don't have… I mean, I love talking to people with a huge historic background, too, don't… but it's always fun to talk with the people, it's like.
• 1:37:26
  Tad Eggleston: I never would have thought to do it this way, but…
• 1:37:32
  Emil WILSON: Oh, yeah.
• 1:37:33
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know, you know what I mean?
• 1:37:35
  Emil WILSON: Oh, yeah, and sometimes… I mean, look, sometimes it doesn't work, but in some situations when it does, those things that just…
• 1:37:42
  Emil WILSON: fight against each other, and they suddenly work, and they're… one sort of is in conversation with the other, and it's a conversation you never thought you'd see, that.
• 1:37:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:37:50
  Emil WILSON: It's so surprising and delightful.
• 1:37:53
  Tad Eggleston: But then I'll also say that, like, I mean, as you were talking about, like, watching the… needing to sometimes watch the most mindless TV ever, or whatnot, I mean, that's why not all of it has to be high art. Sometimes it can just be…
• 1:38:06
  Emil WILSON: No.
• 1:38:07
  Tad Eggleston: unstore… I mean, like, it's okay.
• 1:38:10
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was… Nick Hornby wrote a book called 31 Songs.
• 1:38:15
  Tad Eggleston: Where he wrote essays about all sorts of songs he loved, and he put…
• 1:38:21
  Tad Eggleston: he put Marvin Gaye and the Beatles into one song, or one essay, and the reason he did it is, like, okay, when we're talking about the best music, sure, it's all Marvin Gaye and the Beatles, but… but, like, if that was all you listened to…
• 1:38:37
  Tad Eggleston: even that would get… that's what makes the other things stand out, you know? They've given you this template of perfection, and sometimes, it doesn't even matter that it's not perfect, because, like, it speaks to you, or it's good for the moment, or…
• 1:38:55
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, or it's… it's meaningful, but it… I mean, you're right, it's the stuff that's mainstream and wonderful that gives all the sort of unique stuff, like, wow, that's… that's really cool, and… Right. Those things can exist in the same world.
• 1:39:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, sometimes it's even just a warm blanket, like, like,
• 1:39:14
  Tad Eggleston: our next, you know, and I gotta reach out to people and hopefully have actual people to talk to me about it, but our next Joy Resistance Hope and Survival Book Club, I decided to go on the joy side, and I'm doing Chip Zdarsky's run on the Spectacular Spider-Man. And the reason I'm doing that is that, like.
• 1:39:34
  Tad Eggleston: I've loved Spider-Man all my life, and I don't actually read a ton of it.
• 1:39:40
  Tad Eggleston: anymore.
• 1:39:41
  Tad Eggleston: In large part, because…
• 1:39:45
  Tad Eggleston: None of it, like, and very rarely do I read a Spider-Man comic and go, oh, well, that was a waste of time.
• 1:39:51
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:39:52
  Tad Eggleston: But very rarely do I go, oh my god, I've never seen Spider-Man do that before. That's amazing!
• 1:40:00
  Tad Eggleston: So it's reached the point where the ones that I like the most often have the least truly original.
• 1:40:07
  Tad Eggleston: but managed to capture the essence of what I love about Spider-Man.
• 1:40:11
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, the teaser, on the off chance that I don't manage to put together the group for the conversation, about why Zdarsky's run is so wonderful to me, is it's like, oh.
• 1:40:25
  Tad Eggleston: Funny and awkward.
• 1:40:28
  Tad Eggleston: with great intention, that doesn't always work out the way he wants it to. That is the essence of Spider-Man to me.
• 1:40:35
  Tad Eggleston: So, when I read this…
• 1:40:37
  Emil WILSON: I see that, I see that.
• 1:40:39
  Tad Eggleston: This is just like that warm blanket to wrap myself in and remember
• 1:40:43
  Tad Eggleston: That… that this is… this was something that's comforted me all of my life.
• 1:40:48
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 1:40:49
  Emil WILSON: That's interesting. I think that that's great. I think that, you know, I always sort of say to my, you know, my friends, I'd rather go to a movie and see, like, a hot mess that's… that isn't totally successful, but it's really interesting, than seeing something that's so slick and kind of boring. But it's…
• 1:41:05
  Emil WILSON: But I love the idea.
• 1:41:06
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, 99% of the time, I agree with you.
• 1:41:09
  Tad Eggleston: But I will watch Return of the Jedi over and over and over and over and over and over again. I will watch Ferris Beatles over and over and over and over and over again.
• 1:41:18
  Emil WILSON: There's always exceptions, but I love the fact that Spider-Man, what you were talking about was that it's not always successful, but it's… the intention is always there, and that's what you have to… at those moments where you're like, wait a minute, what? What? That the intention kind of carries you through, so…
• 1:41:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but also… but also, like, again, the… when I get excited about a new Spider-Man, it's when…
• 1:41:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'd love it if somebody captures something new and makes me look at Spider-Man from a different angle, but it hasn't.
• 1:41:47
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:41:47
  Tad Eggleston: happened for me in a long time, and when you've got a character that's 60 years old… I mean, I'm not saying it couldn't happen. Tom King made me look at Batman from a different angle.
• 1:41:55
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:41:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, that was, like, 80 years into Batman.
• 1:41:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:42:00
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:42:01
  Tad Eggleston: And it's like, wait, he can feel something that's not, I'm mad.
• 1:42:06
  Tad Eggleston: And stand!
• 1:42:10
  Emil WILSON: Love that. That's great, that's great.
• 1:42:12
  Tad Eggleston: question whether or not he's allowed to be happy? Wow, sign me up!
• 1:42:20
  Emil WILSON: Wow. Let's grow.
• 1:42:22
  Tad Eggleston: always been a much more rounded character. So in some ways, that makes it even harder to, like, really do something new and different with Peter, because from, like, the get-go.
• 1:42:33
  Tad Eggleston: there was always that balance between, oh, like, I want to be a scientist.
• 1:42:38
  Tad Eggleston: But… but that lady's getting mugged, and I should be going to class, but that lady's getting mugged.
• 1:42:45
  Tad Eggleston: Kinda like your dad.
• 1:42:47
  Emil WILSON: Yeah. Bye.
• 1:42:48
  Tad Eggleston: My family may not like this, but I'm not letting Jim live on the street.
• 1:42:55
  Emil WILSON: Right. Right. And it doesn't matter, like, what I'm giving up or what I'm sacrificing in my wake, that it's all… you know, the end justifies the means, but sometimes it's like, unless you're… unless you're the person, you know, benefiting from the situation, the end doesn't always justify the means. Right!
• 1:43:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right! So, yeah, that was just my, my weird side… tangent, as I… as I think… well, because, like, I mean, I… I… you made, you, you made me think about comics in a different way, that's, that, that's…
• 1:43:24
  Emil WILSON: Oh, that's great.
• 1:43:25
  Tad Eggleston: because I think about comics a lot, because you put me on a side where I'm sitting there going,
• 1:43:35
  Tad Eggleston: Like, how, how do we…
• 1:43:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because I do. I love comics that do completely new things. I'm more likely to like a comic that took a big swing and missed.
• 1:43:51
  Tad Eggleston: than one that was completely safe, but didn't do anything. But at the same time, there are lots of comics that I love.
• 1:43:59
  Tad Eggleston: That, from a form standpoint, don't…
• 1:44:03
  Tad Eggleston: do anything particularly amazing. They just use…
• 1:44:09
  Emil WILSON: They just do it really well. And that's okay.
• 1:44:11
  Tad Eggleston: They excellently use an established form to tell a great story.
• 1:44:16
  Emil WILSON: And that's all it needs to be sometimes.
• 1:44:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:44:19
  Emil WILSON: And it doesn't need to be… I think that to that point about the Nick Hornby book.
• 1:44:24
  Emil WILSON: It's those things that are great, and also make you appreciate the people who are doing something like, oh, that's different, and that's interesting, but I don't think that anybody should ever lose sight of the fact that if something's done really well, and it's familiar, that's great too.
• 1:44:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:44:43
  Emil WILSON: just sometimes… I mean, that's sometimes better, because you're like…
• 1:44:46
  Emil WILSON: You know, this just shows you how it's… how it really can work.
• 1:44:51
  Emil WILSON: And the other stuff… Well, and it also, I mean…
• 1:44:53
  Tad Eggleston: as an educator, it makes me hopeful for society that it's like, oh good, we haven't lost the lessons of the previous generations of Daredevil writers.
• 1:45:02
  Emil WILSON: Absolutely. Absolutely.
• 1:45:05
  Emil WILSON: And I think that is important.
• 1:45:07
  Tad Eggleston: particularly… particularly from veteran comic people and or people who love
• 1:45:12
  Tad Eggleston: Old comics, you know, because one of my big theories is, like, the best of the best comics are the best of the best comics, no matter what era.
• 1:45:20
  Emil WILSON: Right, I would agree with that.
• 1:45:22
  Tad Eggleston: But, like… The bar for getting published, particularly for the big two.
• 1:45:32
  Tad Eggleston: Gets higher and higher.
• 1:45:34
  Emil WILSON: the worst Marvel.
• 1:45:36
  Tad Eggleston: comics right now are 10 times as good as the worst Marvel comics in the 90s.
• 1:45:42
  Emil WILSON: Which is great, like, that's its own.
• 1:45:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:45:44
  Emil WILSON: And that's what we should.
• 1:45:45
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I mean, is that people have mastered the craft enough.
• 1:45:51
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:45:52
  Tad Eggleston: Now, there are people who argue that that means we get less greatness, and that might be true.
• 1:45:57
  Emil WILSON: Brilliant.
• 1:45:58
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know. I don't know that I completely agree with that.
• 1:46:01
  Tad Eggleston: But… But there's something to be said for great craftsmanship.
• 1:46:07
  Emil WILSON: Oh, there's a lot to be said for it. It's… it's great. And it's… and it's… yeah, as somebody who's, you know, done one book, I'm always like, I don't know…
• 1:46:16
  Emil WILSON: You have a great appreciation for what people do when you start doing it, and you realize how difficult it is. And it's…
• 1:46:24
  Emil WILSON: It's… that's been a big lesson, is just in terms of, like, you know…
• 1:46:30
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I mean, I'm… I mean, one of the reasons I chose to do this book as a sketchbook is because I am terrible at character design, and the sketchbook totally covered up my sins in terms of… Oh!
• 1:46:42
  Emil WILSON: You know, I mean, in a sketchbook, if you do 5 portraits of the same person, they're all gonna be different, and that's part of being in a sketchbook. If you do that in comics, that's… that's… that's not… that's not good. Like, you need to make these.
• 1:46:54
  Tad Eggleston: Not most of the time, no.
• 1:46:56
  Emil WILSON: And… and I think that it's… it's…
• 1:46:59
  Emil WILSON: I definitely came to appreciate… I mean, look, I appreciate the fact that I figured out a visual language that could
• 1:47:05
  Emil WILSON: cover up the things I don't do well, but at the same point, it made me admire the people
• 1:47:11
  Emil WILSON: who do really amazing character design, and can do it from page to page, from angle to angle, that I… I… I don't… I can't do.
• 1:47:19
  Tad Eggleston: I think that… I think that's something that's so unappreciated about art in general.
• 1:47:25
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I remember… do you remember the band The Presidents of the United States of America?
• 1:47:29
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:47:30
  Tad Eggleston: Who famously played 3-string guitars and two-string basses, because they were having trouble, like, mastering.
• 1:47:38
  Emil WILSON: Guitar and bass. They didn't know how to… They didn't know how to play guitar, but we want to be a band, so let's just…
• 1:47:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they had ideas and whatnot, and, like, I remember them doing interviews, and they're like, so what would you recommend for somebody just starting out with a band? He's like, well, get rid of half of your strings.
• 1:47:55
  Emil WILSON: Or learn to play the guitar better. So, you know…
• 1:47:59
  Tad Eggleston: I don't disagree. I don't disagree that learning to play guitar better is also good, but, like, they did a lot of fun, and interesting, and even good songs.
• 1:48:09
  Tad Eggleston: Because they recognized their weaknesses.
• 1:48:13
  Emil WILSON: Yep.
• 1:48:14
  Tad Eggleston: and worked around them. I mean, sometimes you can get better, and sometimes it's worth getting better, or waiting, you know, waiting to get better, but, like, there's a lot to be said for going.
• 1:48:24
  Tad Eggleston: I am not good at this, I don't particularly like this part, so rather than torturing myself to go through that, wait a minute, I could do this, and I could still get the job done.
• 1:48:38
  Emil WILSON: I'm a 55-year-old man in a cartoon school of 20-year-olds. I'm gonna die before you do, let's get going, I gotta get this going.
• 1:48:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, it's.
• 1:48:47
  Emil WILSON: You do… there is a time deadline, like, it's like, let's go. I gotta… I got no time. You… you're gonna, like, have a life. My life's half over. I gotta go.
• 1:48:58
  Emil WILSON: So…
• 1:48:58
  Tad Eggleston: Daniel Adams did, I think, 5 hours on Batman's…
• 1:49:02
  Tad Eggleston: or, Kevin Smith's Batman podcast, between, like, two sittings. And I remember at one point, he was talking about, of course you fucking trace! Why on earth would you not trace?
• 1:49:12
  Emil WILSON: You're gonna waste your.
• 1:49:15
  Tad Eggleston: time figuring out proportion?
• 1:49:17
  Emil WILSON: Right. Someone's already done that, just do this.
• 1:49:20
  Tad Eggleston: and Rockwell traced!
• 1:49:21
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 1:49:24
  Emil WILSON: Right, so…
• 1:49:25
  Tad Eggleston: Dumb shit, it's still art!
• 1:49:27
  Emil WILSON: Right, it's still your art, you can change enough, it's fine.
• 1:49:32
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:49:34
  Tad Eggleston: Incredible I mean, like, the, the, the…
• 1:49:39
  Tad Eggleston: Do you know the origin of our, our, our, our title?
• 1:49:45
  Emil WILSON: I don't, I was actually trying to look that up. I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole trying to find that, and I couldn't, so…
• 1:49:50
  Tad Eggleston: Wally Woods, Wally?
• 1:49:52
  Emil WILSON: Oh, yes, I do know, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:49:53
  Tad Eggleston: 22 panels that always work.
• 1:49:56
  Emil WILSON: I have… I have it hanging over there.
• 1:49:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah.
• 1:49:59
  Emil WILSON: We got that at school, and I'm always… it's one of those things that it's like…
• 1:50:04
  Emil WILSON: okay, this is great to kind of think about… I think we actually had an assignment where you had to use as many as you could. Right.
• 1:50:10
  Emil WILSON: I…
• 1:50:11
  Emil WILSON: I thought it was great. Like, you know, there are some things that people have done that you're like, that's… that's… that's fantastic. Like, let's incorporate that, that there's no reason to change that. That's great.
• 1:50:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but also, like, the… the… I always forget exactly.
• 1:50:25
  Emil WILSON: I would…
• 1:50:25
  Tad Eggleston: I always forget exactly what it says underneath it, but it's essentially like… it's, like, things that you can use when the writer uses too damn many words.
• 1:50:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Interesting, like, because I've heard, you know, I've had guests that make fun of it, oh, you mean 22 panels that are always boring? It's like, no, the point is not…
• 1:50:47
  Tad Eggleston: you should only use these 22 panels. The point is, when you're laying out a page.
• 1:50:53
  Emil WILSON: Crape.
• 1:50:53
  Tad Eggleston: If you have trouble, Look at the damn wall, pick one, and move on.
• 1:50:57
  Emil WILSON: Right, it's tools in the toolbox. Yeah.
• 1:51:00
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna…
• 1:51:01
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:51:02
  Tad Eggleston: You know, Wood was also the one that said, never draw something you can trace, never trace something you can paste up, never paste up something you can copy.
• 1:51:12
  Emil WILSON: Wow, you've suddenly made me feel really good about doing comics now, because I feel like, oh my god, there are all these hacks that I told myself I couldn't do, and now I get to do them all. That's great.
• 1:51:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, because… I mean…
• 1:51:24
  Tad Eggleston: Again, you shouldn't be stealing… like, we need to make clear, you're not stealing other people's art, you shouldn't be, like, swiping things, etc, but, like, if it's your own art, and you did it well on this page, and you didn't do it well on that page, then cut it off of the page you did it well on.
• 1:51:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right. You know, don't do it again!
• 1:51:45
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, that's true. That's, yeah, that's true.
• 1:51:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, essentially, Wood came from the era where you got… I mean, you still get paid by the page in a lot of comics, but, like, we're… we're, like…
• 1:51:57
  Emil WILSON: Oh, yeah, you gotta, you gotta find workarounds, and you gotta move quicker.
• 1:52:01
  Tad Eggleston: moving at a certain speed matters to get paid, and it's like, dude, you need to keep a roof over your head. Don't…
• 1:52:11
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:52:11
  Tad Eggleston: How are you doing?
• 1:52:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. You know, I mean, it's why I honestly think that Jack Kirby's work got less interesting during the 60s. If you look at a lot of 50s Kirby, he had much more interesting page designs and layouts and whatnot, and…
• 1:52:29
  Tad Eggleston: During the 60s, when the page rate had dropped, because there wasn't as much competition, etc, he did a lot of four-panel pages. A lot of full-page panels.
• 1:52:39
  Tad Eggleston: A lot of two… he essentially invented the two-page spread, and great, like, wonderful, there are great two-page spreads out there, and he made a lot of them, but it's also sometimes clear that it's like.
• 1:52:51
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm behind! How can I get this page done faster?
• 1:52:56
  Emil WILSON: You at 5, I gotta go.
• 1:52:58
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than 8!
• 1:52:59
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:53:02
  Emil WILSON: Wow, that's fascinating. That's great.
• 1:53:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and that's the thing, like, and some creators are better at allowing themselves to do things like that than others, but, like, I think with storytelling, even more so than
• 1:53:19
  Tad Eggleston: I hate using the word fine art even more than I hate using the word low art, because who the hell decides what art is what?
• 1:53:27
  Emil WILSON: Sure.
• 1:53:28
  Tad Eggleston: But I will differentiate storytelling art.
• 1:53:32
  Tad Eggleston: because…
• 1:53:33
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 1:53:35
  Tad Eggleston: Storytelling art…
• 1:53:40
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to say it's inherently commercial, because, like, it doesn't have to be for money, but it is inherently…
• 1:53:49
  Tad Eggleston: To be seen and understood in some way by an audience.
• 1:53:54
  Tad Eggleston: Like, you can make other art that is truly just for you, and you don't give a damn if it's seen, and I suppose, like, you can write for yourself, that sort of thing, but…
• 1:54:03
  Tad Eggleston: But even if you're writing for yourself, you're somehow writing for an audience.
• 1:54:08
  Tad Eggleston: Otherwise, it'd just go on in your head. Does that make sense?
• 1:54:12
  Emil WILSON: It does. It does make sense.
• 1:54:14
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 1:54:19
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever… whatever hacks you have to use to…
• 1:54:23
  Tad Eggleston: go where you want to go, to tell the story, to get it done on time, whatever constraints you have. I mean, some, like, Matt Madden.
• 1:54:33
  Tad Eggleston: Picks out a constraint before he starts.
• 1:54:36
  Emil WILSON: Yes, right, exactly.
• 1:54:37
  Tad Eggleston: You know? I'm going.
• 1:54:40
  Emil WILSON: And that stuff is… and that stuff is great to sort of inspire something really different, and I love that stuff. Right.
• 1:54:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:54:46
  Emil WILSON: I always listen to the stuff that he's doing, and I'm always like, why are you.
• 1:54:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Matt's such a cool guy.
• 1:54:52
  Emil WILSON: And then… and then all of a sudden, you're… you're doing it, and you're like, oh, I'm thinking of things I've never thought before, like, this is great, like, I'm…
• 1:54:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:54:59
  Emil WILSON: You know, I love that kind of stuff. I feel like that…
• 1:55:02
  Emil WILSON: Especially what I've had to do my entire career, is like, okay, you gotta do this, but you can't do these three things. And it's like, okay, I gotta figure out a way around it.
• 1:55:10
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:55:11
  Emil WILSON: That's great, so…
• 1:55:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Matt's… Matt's… Matt's incredible, and an incredible guy, too. I'm… I'm happy to…
• 1:55:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think he falls into my friendly acquaintance category. Maybe friend category. Like, I have more and more trouble, like, figuring out
• 1:55:27
  Tad Eggleston: what people are to me as I get older, because you're not supposed to make friends in your 40s, they tell you that you make all of your friends when you're young. I've made way more friends in my 40s than I made in my teens.
• 1:55:38
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I did too.
• 1:55:39
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you, 22 Panels. Thank you, comics in general.
• 1:55:43
  Tad Eggleston: 8.
• 1:55:44
  Emil WILSON: Well, that's encouraging! Like, that's really encouraging, yeah.
• 1:55:47
  Tad Eggleston: The comic… the comics community is really, really great that way.
• 1:55:50
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, it is great that way.
• 1:55:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but yeah. So, let… just because you've been so, so generous with your time, we're already over 2 hours, right.
• 1:56:03
  Tad Eggleston: Let me, let me, move into my, my closing questions. Okay. You listen to the podcast, so you know what to expect.
• 1:56:12
  Emil WILSON: I… I think I do.
• 1:56:13
  Tad Eggleston: At least kind of, okay. Well, we'll start with the new closing question. It's really only been this year, and it segues nicely with what we're just saying.
• 1:56:25
  Tad Eggleston: I've been doing this podcast for a little less than 5 years now, and I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone. I mean, like I said, I've made more friends… made more friends in my 40s than I made in my teens.
• 1:56:37
  Tad Eggleston: Which isn't, I'm told, how it's supposed to work.
• 1:56:40
  Tad Eggleston: Very odd.
• 1:56:42
  Tad Eggleston: you know, making friends in the era where, like, I have to, like, work to make friends, like, send emails, or make phone calls, rather than just bump into them in class.
• 1:56:53
  Emil WILSON: raped.
• 1:56:54
  Tad Eggleston: I think we really, I think we really neglect how, how, how, how much of, of, like.
• 1:57:00
  Tad Eggleston: Our social skills are.
• 1:57:01
  Emil WILSON: Oh, you have to work at it. You have to work at it.
• 1:57:04
  Tad Eggleston: Until we're out of school. Right.
• 1:57:10
  Tad Eggleston: But beyond that, like…
• 1:57:12
  Tad Eggleston: They're with… they're with people that used to just be names on pages of my favorite things.
• 1:57:20
  Tad Eggleston: I've gotten to see things come to life in front of my eyes. I've gotten to have conversations with amazing and wonderful people.
• 1:57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Like, again, like, so much of my life right now.
• 1:57:34
  Emil WILSON: It's true.
• 1:57:34
  Tad Eggleston: told me…
• 1:57:37
  Tad Eggleston: even 6 years ago, the year before this podcast started, that this is gonna be your life. I said, what the fuck are you talking about? How? How? How is that gonna be my life?
• 1:57:49
  Emil WILSON: Right, right.
• 1:57:50
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a lowly, special ed paraprofessional. How am I gonna hang out with blank?
• 1:57:59
  Emil WILSON: Exactly.
• 1:58:00
  Tad Eggleston: What do you mean, so-and-so is gonna send me an advance copy of this so that they can get my thoughts on it?
• 1:58:07
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:58:08
  Tad Eggleston: You're out of.
• 1:58:08
  Emil WILSON: That sounds crazy, that sounds crazy and great.
• 1:58:11
  Tad Eggleston: It is. It is. It's… it's insane.
• 1:58:15
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 1:58:17
  Tad Eggleston: And I love it. But I also have found that, like, everybody in comics, probably everybody in the arts, because I've had a handful of people that, like.
• 1:58:26
  Tad Eggleston: like, recently I had, oh, why can't I remember his name right now?
• 1:58:33
  Tad Eggleston: We'll come up with it before long.
• 1:58:36
  Tad Eggleston: But, but I recently had, had, had on a, a, a…
• 1:58:42
  Tad Eggleston: And how cool is this? Like, Nick Thorburn.
• 1:58:46
  Tad Eggleston: was recently on. And in the same week, he, he released a graphic novel with with…
• 1:58:57
  Tad Eggleston: Fanta Graphics and his new rock and roll album with his new band, The Cream.
• 1:59:04
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, how you get to be a cartoonist…
• 1:59:09
  Tad Eggleston: And a mid-level rock star at the same time.
• 1:59:12
  Emil WILSON: In the same week, no less.
• 1:59:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I talked to him, like, 2 weeks before that.
• 1:59:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right, so, so, like, but, but I made him give me stories from both the comics and the music world.
• 1:59:28
  Tad Eggleston: Because… so… so I've started collecting these… tell me a surreal experience. Some… something that you've experienced that, like.
• 1:59:40
  Tad Eggleston: Teenage male, or even 40-year-old male would have gone, yeah, what the fuck are you talking about?
• 1:59:48
  Emil WILSON: Oh.
• 1:59:49
  Tad Eggleston: But that you're like, oh, wow, that was me in that room, or that was me that had that person come up to me and say, blank, or whatever.
• 1:59:59
  Emil WILSON: Oh, this, this, this is a lot easier than… I… where you were going, I was like, oh, no, I don't know if I'm gonna be able to answer that, but this one's… but that's easy. One of the things that surprised me, and it's a very small thing, although it's… I think it just shows.
• 2:00:13
  Tad Eggleston: Except that it's not, like…
• 2:00:15
  Emil WILSON: It's not, and I think.
• 2:00:15
  Tad Eggleston: Can't be if it makes you feel like that.
• 2:00:18
  Emil WILSON: I think that some of it is age, sort of what you were saying. So one of the things that I am…
• 2:00:24
  Emil WILSON: I did not realize about the publishing world
• 2:00:27
  Emil WILSON: was that you… you need blurbs for your book. Like, you need to have people blurb your book so that they can have a comment on the book, so that someone in a bookstore will pick it up and be like.
• 2:00:36
  Tad Eggleston: My first blurb coming up.
• 2:00:39
  Emil WILSON: Your what?
• 2:00:39
  Tad Eggleston: on the back of nerd Emergencies, I have my first blurb coming.
• 2:00:43
  Tad Eggleston: I will be a published blurber.
• 2:00:45
  Emil WILSON: It's… it's so…
• 2:00:48
  Emil WILSON: It's a weird thing, and the publisher had… the editor had written to me and said, hey, look, it goes a long way if you could write, like, a note to a variety of people.
• 2:00:57
  Emil WILSON: here's a list of people, you could write to them, the note will help us get the blurbs in. And I was like, yeah, I have no problem writing that. We wrote… I think I wrote, like, about 40 letters to… emails to people.
• 2:01:09
  Emil WILSON: So that they would read the book, so that they would comment on it, and every time a comment would come in.
• 2:01:15
  Emil WILSON: The editor sends it to you, like, she's like, hey, we got this great…
• 2:01:18
  Emil WILSON: We got this great blurb from so-and-so, here it is, we wanted to pass it on. And the thing that I did not know…
• 2:01:25
  Emil WILSON: about myself is that I'm still at the age where, like, being able to be published feels like a gift.
• 2:01:32
  Emil WILSON: Getting this book out there feels like a surprise, and then to have people read it, and then like it, and then comment on it, just felt like…
• 2:01:41
  Emil WILSON: you know, the ice cream with the sauce on top of the ice cream on top of the cherry, like, it all just keeps piling up. So, they would send me these blurbs, and I would sit at my computer weeping for, like, 20 minutes uncontrollably, with no sense of, like, why am I doing this? Like, why do I feel so touched by this? And…
• 2:02:00
  Emil WILSON: No matter what it was.
• 2:02:02
  Emil WILSON: I mean, some of the blurbs were beautiful, and some of them are very long, and they cut them for the…
• 2:02:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right, the U.
• 2:02:07
  Emil WILSON: Simple Publishing.
• 2:02:09
  Emil WILSON: But the fact that somebody would write something so beautiful about something that you had written, and that they had liked it so much that they had… would write something about that.
• 2:02:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 2:02:19
  Emil WILSON: Easy to me.
• 2:02:20
  Tad Eggleston: This is where, like, unless you tell me not to, you, you, I don't know if we'll wind up using it as a blurb, but, like, I got to have that feeling earlier in the podcast, when I actually checked my email.
• 2:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: And I read, one of the reasons I wanted to reach out to Tad about helping promote The Nightingales is that I knew the conversation, like so many of his interviews with cartoonists, wouldn't go to the usual places. I really enjoy his interview.
• 2:02:46
  Emil WILSON: Which has been true. This is great.
• 2:02:47
  Tad Eggleston: She keeps things loose and conversational, isn't afraid to bring in his own experiences, and always seems genuinely curious about how car… how other cartoonists think.
• 2:02:58
  Tad Eggleston: That… that made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
• 2:03:02
  Emil WILSON: Oh, thank you for…
• 2:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: much.
• 2:03:04
  Emil WILSON: And it's funny, I think that because… and that just sort of underscores something, which is, you know, that to me is very true. Like, I didn't have to overthink that, I just kind of wrote that, and I sent it to…
• 2:03:15
  Emil WILSON: you know, the publicist, Laura, who said it to you, and I suspect that somebody writing a blurb for my book probably was like, I like this book a lot, I'm gonna write, like, 3 or 4 sentences, and that's it. And it was so meaningful to me, in a way that they probably had no idea about, that I…
• 2:03:33
  Emil WILSON: I just… it did feel a little surreal in terms of, like.
• 2:03:36
  Emil WILSON: How wonderful to have somebody write something for you about something that you've created.
• 2:03:42
  Emil WILSON: I'm just… I mean, I hope that this is something that doesn't go away. Like, in the course of the last few months, there have been reviews, I suspect there'll be more reviews, more blurbs, people will see it, people will text me on Instagram, whatever it may be.
• 2:03:57
  Emil WILSON: But I'm just still just so… grateful for that experience. So.
• 2:04:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know in my ex… I know in my experience, it never gets old.
• 2:04:10
  Tad Eggleston: I have less experience than some people, but I've talked to some people who have a lot… a lot more experience, and most of them, also, never gets old. Never gets old. The idea that somebody could actually…
• 2:04:23
  Tad Eggleston: Look at and be moved by something that you did.
• 2:04:27
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 2:04:28
  Tad Eggleston: you know.
• 2:04:30
  Tad Eggleston: Which is, I think, another thing that makes… comics…
• 2:04:36
  Tad Eggleston: kind of publishing in general, but I think comics, because of that crossover with fandom.
• 2:04:44
  Tad Eggleston: Engenders even more of it, so…
• 2:04:47
  Tad Eggleston: So important culturally is that, like… it.
• 2:04:54
  Tad Eggleston: it, encourages interaction. It… it plants seeds for discussion, for… You know…
• 2:05:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there aren't as many book conventions where you just go and talk to the authors of things. Right, right, right.
• 2:05:13
  Tad Eggleston: you know, there are book signings, some of them are, like… I brought up Nick Hornby. I feel blessed. I got to talk with Nick Hornby for about 20 minutes one night, but the way I did it was…
• 2:05:26
  Tad Eggleston: I let everybody else go in front of me in line.
• 2:05:30
  Emil WILSON: Oof.
• 2:05:30
  Tad Eggleston: I took the risk.
• 2:05:32
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:05:33
  Tad Eggleston: that he would be done before I got there.
• 2:05:39
  Tad Eggleston: Or the… the… the… the pot.
• 2:05:41
  Emil WILSON: Right, you traded that in for the hope that he would sit and talk to you, and that would be great.
• 2:05:46
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I also…
• 2:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: came knowing that I had an ace up my sleeve, which he's… which was, like, he'd just written in the Believer.
• 2:05:55
  Tad Eggleston: about…
• 2:05:56
  Emil WILSON: Okay.
• 2:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: he had a column in The Believer for a long time called Stuff I've Been Reading, and his most recent Believer column had been about
• 2:06:09
  Tad Eggleston: included Moneyball, Michael Lewis's book, which we can go back to Aaron Sorkin now, too, because, like, Sorkin wrote the Moneyball movie.
• 2:06:18
  Tad Eggleston: with both Social Network and Moneyball, managed to make really good movies out of things that you shouldn't have been able to make good movies out of.
• 2:06:24
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:06:24
  Tad Eggleston: But his comment on Moneyball was that He knew nothing about baseball.
• 2:06:33
  Emil WILSON: Hmm.
• 2:06:35
  Tad Eggleston: And, and therefore only understood one word in four.
• 2:06:38
  Tad Eggleston: And it was the best sports book he'd read in a decade.
• 2:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: But he also, like, he'd started by pointing out that the reason that he'd read it is he'd been in LA selling the fever pitch rights
• 2:06:52
  Tad Eggleston: for the Ferrelli Brothers movie.
• 2:06:54
  Tad Eggleston: And he'd fallen in love with the Red Sox and the Cubs, because this is 2003,
• 2:06:59
  Tad Eggleston: And they felt very much like his arsenal, which at the time had been, like, lovable losers for most of his lifetime.
• 2:07:08
  Tad Eggleston: And I had… That year, also read…
• 2:07:15
  Tad Eggleston: Fever Pitch. It was the last, at the time, the last Nick Hornby book that I hadn't read, and I'd been scared of it, because I know nothing about soccer, and therefore only understood one word in four.
• 2:07:27
  Tad Eggleston: But it was one of the best.
• 2:07:29
  Tad Eggleston: sportsbooks I've never read. So I was able to, like, literally mirror back to him, but also then go, but I am a massive Cubs and Red Sox fan. Cubs, because I grew up in Chicagoland and Red Sox, because by the time I was 9, I realized that they were the American League equivalent of the Cubs.
• 2:07:48
  Tad Eggleston: So we actually wound up talking baseball for 20 minutes.
• 2:07:52
  Emil WILSON: How great! To, like…
• 2:07:54
  Tad Eggleston: Because he was back in the States, it was 04, he was back in the States, both the Cubs… I mean, the Red Sox would go on to win the World Series that year.
• 2:08:02
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:08:04
  Tad Eggleston: But both the Red Sox and the Cubs were in the playoff hunt. You know, we wound up talking about the game that Josh Beckett had pitched the night before.
• 2:08:14
  Emil WILSON: But how…
• 2:08:15
  Tad Eggleston: But it only happened because I decided that, like, I've had comic experiences like that, because you just have to wait for there not to be anybody else at their table.
• 2:08:24
  Emil WILSON: Right, right.
• 2:08:26
  Emil WILSON: And it's the only way that you're gonna get what… and again, you took a chance.
• 2:08:29
  Tad Eggleston: Which happens way more at a Comic-Con.
• 2:08:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, with the exception of, like, the big, big names, way more times at a Comic-Con will you see an artist that you'd like to talk to just sitting at their table.
• 2:08:41
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 2:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because there are so many more of them.
• 2:08:44
  Tad Eggleston: etc. Whereas for a book signing, you either have to manage to like somebody who has no audience whatsoever, in which case their publisher may have… may or may not have sent them on a signing tour.
• 2:08:59
  Emil WILSON: Right, right.
• 2:09:00
  Tad Eggleston: Or you have to do crazy stuff like that.
• 2:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 2:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: Alright. Final question. Final question. Okay.
• 2:09:08
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 2:09:12
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 2:09:15
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 2:09:22
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you really, really wish they would, so that you had more people to talk about it with.
• 2:09:33
  Emil WILSON: Okay, like any question like that, I'm gonna go with my first… my gut, that comes first to mind, and it's… I think it's comics-related.
• 2:09:41
  Emil WILSON: So, like I said, I didn't read comics as a kid.
• 2:09:48
  Emil WILSON: But I was fascinated with the Sunday comics because of the registration.
• 2:09:54
  Emil WILSON: And…
• 2:09:56
  Emil WILSON: when I went… when I became a printmaker, I was faced with how things don't exactly line up, and how the beauty of them not lining up can be. And if you… I mean, again, we both grew up in small towns. The Sunday paper was never.
• 2:10:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's not THAT small, but yeah, okay.
• 2:10:15
  Emil WILSON: But it was… the color paper, the comics were never printed so pristinely that everything lined up, and there was some.
• 2:10:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I was on the Chicago Tribune, so most of mine were lined up.
• 2:10:25
  Emil WILSON: Okay. Well, there was always this time… I remember talking to…
• 2:10:30
  Emil WILSON: People in comics, and even just… friends that…
• 2:10:34
  Emil WILSON: the beauty of misregistration, and nobody got it. And I just thought…
• 2:10:42
  Emil WILSON: There's something really beautiful about when something is slightly off-register, and… I'm still…
• 2:10:49
  Emil WILSON: I'm still a big fan of… you know, like…
• 2:10:54
  Emil WILSON: posters from India, from, like, the 50s, where the print We're really off.
• 2:11:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know what you're talking about, and I'm like, I'm feeling like there's a great book in this somewhere.
• 2:11:06
  Emil WILSON: I… and I… I know that it's a weird thing, and I know that it's a weird, like, that's a thing you focus on, but I love that stuff. I love…
• 2:11:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, imperfections are so amazing.
• 2:11:17
  Emil WILSON: Imperfections are so amazing, and…
• 2:11:20
  Emil WILSON: You know, when the imperfection… you know that there was an imperfection, and they couldn't fix it, or they didn't have enough money, or they didn't have time, or whatever, and so they just let it go through. And you're like, this is so beautiful. I remember I worked at this printing press.
• 2:11:37
  Emil WILSON: where they would discard all the stuff that wasn't perfect, that makes sense. And I remember I used to have a scrapbook that I used to always keep.
• 2:11:44
  Emil WILSON: the stuff that was really off-register, because I found it to be… so…
• 2:11:50
  Emil WILSON: I don't know, there's something about it evocative that was just…
• 2:11:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:11:53
  Emil WILSON: You just… you could see how it… it came close, but it didn't work, and yet it worked in its own way. I love that stuff. And that's…
• 2:12:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I, I just, like…
• 2:12:03
  Tad Eggleston: Imperfections can teach you so much about process, imperfections can teach you about life, imperfections can teach you about…
• 2:12:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So many things.
• 2:12:14
  Emil WILSON: I also think that there's such beauty in them, and I know.
• 2:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah.
• 2:12:18
  Emil WILSON: I mean, it's an… it's absolutely not what you're supposed to see, and it's certainly… from a printing press point of view, it's absolutely not the stuff that you… you know, that.
• 2:12:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, the…
• 2:12:27
  Emil WILSON: at 6.
• 2:12:28
  Tad Eggleston: But, I mean… I'm just thinking, like.
• 2:12:31
  Tad Eggleston: with four-color printing, because I'm thinking, like, there actually used to be this problem in Marvel comic books sometimes, you know, with, like, four-color printing, when it's like…
• 2:12:42
  Tad Eggleston: You can see that things weren't lined up, and you've got, like, this thin band of yellow here, and this thin band of blue there, and it's like…
• 2:12:52
  Tad Eggleston: one of the beauties to me, aside from just the aesthetic beauty, is, like, that's when I learned
• 2:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: before I'd ever read it anywhere, that, oh, the printing process isn't that they have all of these colors, they mix them on the page.
• 2:13:10
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:13:13
  Emil WILSON: And you don't really know that. I mean, that's something that you…
• 2:13:17
  Emil WILSON: forgive until it's misregistered, and then you understand that it's like… it's like the curtain's been pulled aside, and you realize, oh, that's just… the yellow plate is off. Right. And it's made… set everything off into this land of, like.
• 2:13:32
  Emil WILSON: Why are all these colors wrong? And…
• 2:13:35
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I think that it's fascinating now that they have… like, I was just looking on, like, some Procreate site, and there were, like, all these filters that you can buy that actually lets you… that it basically creates misregistration, and I just thought, I don't want to… I don't want you to help me create it, I just want it to be natural, and…
• 2:13:53
  Tad Eggleston: Natural, right.
• 2:13:54
  Emil WILSON: And that's.
• 2:13:54
  Tad Eggleston: Though, though, I mean, that's… that… that, like…
• 2:13:59
  Tad Eggleston: I've talked to Clem Robbins a few times.
• 2:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: Probably should again. Clem Robbins is, is, like…
• 2:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: Clem Robbins has been lettering comics since, like, the 70s.
• 2:14:10
  Tad Eggleston: And he talked about…
• 2:14:14
  Tad Eggleston: That point where he realized that he was gonna have to start lettering digital, because that was where the industry was coming, going, and he wouldn't be able to make a living if he didn't.
• 2:14:27
  Tad Eggleston: But that what he loved the most about hand lettering Was that it wasn't uniform.
• 2:14:35
  Emil WILSON: And that the imper… and again, I think that we found a way to sort of include imperfections in a lot of
• 2:14:40
  Emil WILSON: what we create… Right.
• 2:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 2:14:43
  Emil WILSON: Totally.
• 2:14:44
  Tad Eggleston: What he talked about doing is he actually created his own font set.
• 2:14:47
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:14:48
  Tad Eggleston: with something like… 200-some-odd characters.
• 2:14:53
  Emil WILSON: Yep.
• 2:14:53
  Tad Eggleston: And some sort of random setup.
• 2:14:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, he has it, so, like…
• 2:15:00
  Tad Eggleston: Every character has multiple variations, and, you know, the idea being to as closely as possible, still have that feel of…
• 2:15:14
  Tad Eggleston: imperfection.
• 2:15:16
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I mean, that's… and that's what's…
• 2:15:18
  Emil WILSON: So, yeah, to answer your question, it's a weird… it's a weird thing to be in love with, and again, it was my first gut reaction, is just that feeling comics-adjacent related.
• 2:15:31
  Emil WILSON: in terms of why I got… I was interested as a kid, that I was just… I was so fascinated by the look of that, and that…
• 2:15:39
  Emil WILSON: And again, some of it was Marvel Comics, and some of it was just… I mean, it was.
• 2:15:43
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:15:43
  Emil WILSON: comics, because…
• 2:15:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:15:45
  Emil WILSON: Then, the red plate shifts, the magenta plate shifts, and suddenly.
• 2:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, no, no, I mean, you brought up smaller newspapers. I've certainly seen lots of comic pages.
• 2:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: you know, again, I grew up on the Chicago Tribune, and after they'd had years, so I didn't often get that in my own paper.
• 2:16:02
  Tad Eggleston: But I've seen it further back.
• 2:16:07
  Tad Eggleston: And also, like, this is my weird mind, I don't know how much of a fiction reader you are, but I, like, I feel like either Salman Rushdie or Umberto Echo could… could create an entire, like.
• 2:16:20
  Emil WILSON: Probably.
• 2:16:21
  Tad Eggleston: 900-page novel around somebody obsessed with misregistration.
• 2:16:26
  Emil WILSON: Right, right. I think what's interesting is, is that when you, when you do the printing, the black plate's always the last one to go on, and it always is the one, it seems like, that kind of, like, herds all the cats in at one place.
• 2:16:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:16:40
  Emil WILSON: kind of like… Comes in when the black plate comes in, and… I, I, I, I love…
• 2:16:48
  Emil WILSON: You know, every once in a while, if you're at a printing press, you can see stuff that doesn't have a black plate yet, and you realize how…
• 2:16:55
  Emil WILSON: control… how much control that black plate, enacts on on a page. And…
• 2:17:01
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I just… I find all that stuff… the fact that you have a rainbow of colors in four colors is just…
• 2:17:08
  Emil WILSON: Crazy.
• 2:17:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Well, and, like… One of… one of the things that… Have you looked at much…
• 2:17:22
  Tad Eggleston: 60s to early 80s band-aid disnee.
• 2:17:27
  Emil WILSON: I… I… I believe I have. I…
• 2:17:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 2:17:31
  Emil WILSON: I, I, I love…
• 2:17:33
  Emil WILSON: that time period, I don't know that I know exactly what you're talking about, but I…
• 2:17:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, like, French comics, mostly, like, like, your Metal Arlent, and, like, one of the things that really struck me as I started, like.
• 2:17:47
  Tad Eggleston: you see it in Mobius. It's just like, were they using better print processes? And, like, a friend of mine is like, no, they were still using four-color printing, they just were willing to be…
• 2:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: Precise with it.
• 2:18:00
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:18:01
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas in the United States, they kept it as simple as possible.
• 2:18:06
  Emil WILSON: Well, or they were in a rush, or it wasn't, like, everything was under this money deadline, so everything was, like, rushed through, and…
• 2:18:13
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't…
• 2:18:14
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, I don't know.
• 2:18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right. You know, they had reasons for keeping it simple, but like, in the U.S, they took the four colors, and they wanted
• 2:18:25
  Tad Eggleston: like… bigger swatches of them, and they wanted to split those colors only into, like, 16, or…
• 2:18:34
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:18:35
  Tad Eggleston: 32 additional colors, and in France, they were like, oh, we're okay with going practically pixel by pixel, not that pixel was the word at the time, and we're gonna take… we're gonna take these 4 colors and turn them into 256 different colors. Right.
• 2:18:55
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:18:56
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, it's, I think that that's my weird… I mean, I do love it, and I think that, to answer your question, I think that it's…
• 2:19:05
  Emil WILSON: something that I… I think about a lot, and I…
• 2:19:09
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 2:19:09
  Emil WILSON: worry about it with the book that I wrote, because there wasn't four-color…
• 2:19:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 2:19:14
  Emil WILSON: We'll get different problems.
• 2:19:15
  Tad Eggleston: Printing now, right.
• 2:19:16
  Emil WILSON: different printing, but it… but I do…
• 2:19:19
  Tad Eggleston: But now I'm imagining, like, the more intricate four-color print done slightly off-register, and how psychedelic that could wind up.
• 2:19:28
  Emil WILSON: Oh, it… some of it can be amazing, and the thing is, if it's far enough… if it's miserchered far enough, you actually have to look at it to understand how it would… how it would sit on top of itself, and…
• 2:19:40
  Emil WILSON: What it would do, and the fact that it's so far away, is the sort of weird puzzle thing that your brain does, and it's.
• 2:19:47
  Tad Eggleston: Emil, I'm telling you, I think that when you're done writing memoirs, you may have your first
• 2:19:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess it could still… it could… no, no, I'm actually thinking, use it as something fiction.
• 2:20:03
  Emil WILSON: Hmm. Maybe. Maybe.
• 2:20:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you can have non-fictional elements in fiction.
• 2:20:08
  Emil WILSON: Rape.
• 2:20:09
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm thinking, like, the story of the person fascinating by this, and, like, how they see the world differently because of that, could be powerful.
• 2:20:21
  Emil WILSON: That's a… I may write that down, steal it from you, and not pay you.
• 2:20:24
  Tad Eggleston: You're more than welcome to. You're more than welcome to. I give it freely.
• 2:20:28
  Emil WILSON: There it is, it's mine.
• 2:20:31
  Tad Eggleston: You now have record. Yeah.
• 2:20:33
  Emil WILSON: paper.
• 2:20:35
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like, but, like, yeah, no, I, like, you, you're, you're, my, my, my, my, my, unfortunately, only…
• 2:20:43
  Tad Eggleston: And it's really weird for me when something visual gets my brain firing on all cylinders, because I can't make pictures in my head. So the words are bouncing around like mad, thinking of what
• 2:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: what, comic that… that decided to lean into and… And…
• 2:21:09
  Tad Eggleston: Use off-register…
• 2:21:13
  Tad Eggleston: As part of the storytelling could… could look and feel like, and… Yeah.
• 2:21:20
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, the possibilities are endless, like, it's…
• 2:21:22
  Tad Eggleston: They really are. This is why… comics, the possibilities are endless. This is why I love comics. For that matter, I haven't managed to bring it up
• 2:21:31
  Tad Eggleston: before, but I'll bring it up really quickly now, like, a book that may or may not have even been available the night that everybody was pointing their fingers and saying, you should do this, is the recently Eisner Award-winning Cartoonist Club by Raina Telgemeyer and Scott McCloud, who are
• 2:21:49
  Tad Eggleston: Giants of the industry, and, like, both often work very much within forms or whatnot, but, like, the biggest rule of the Cartoonist Club?
• 2:21:59
  Tad Eggleston: Is there are no rules to making commerce. Right.
• 2:22:02
  Emil WILSON: Great.
• 2:22:04
  Tad Eggleston: They're in a position.
• 2:22:04
  Emil WILSON: That's so great.
• 2:22:05
  Tad Eggleston: names.
• 2:22:05
  Emil WILSON: Which is so great.
• 2:22:07
  Tad Eggleston: You want to use glitter and… and… and tape?
• 2:22:11
  Tad Eggleston: construction paper onto the page? Go for it. Great, do it. You want to draw super realistic? Go for it. You wanna… you wanna go all XKCD and do everything using
• 2:22:25
  Tad Eggleston: Stick figures, go for it. Ryan North has one of the longest-running webcomics of all time, using the exact same digital dinosaur
• 2:22:36
  Tad Eggleston: And, like…
• 2:22:38
  Tad Eggleston: I think there's a house and a car, let me pull it up, I'll show it to you. He only changes the words, like, 3 to 5 times a week. There are thousands of them now, but… but the…
• 2:22:52
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… the visual… Has been the same.
• 2:23:00
  Emil WILSON: Wow.
• 2:23:01
  Tad Eggleston: For God knows how long now.
• 2:23:05
  Tad Eggleston: And it's still comics.
• 2:23:07
  Tad Eggleston: It's even pretty good comics.
• 2:23:09
  Tad Eggleston: Some days better than others, cause, like.
• 2:23:12
  Tad Eggleston: He's… but yeah, the visual is always this.
• 2:23:16
  Emil WILSON: Oh, wow.
• 2:23:18
  Emil WILSON: This is great!
• 2:23:19
  Tad Eggleston: This is the visual. Every time.
• 2:23:22
  Emil WILSON: Oh, really? Nothing changes, it's just new words? No.
• 2:23:26
  Emil WILSON: Oh, that's great!
• 2:23:28
  Tad Eggleston: And he's been doing it for, I think, 20-plus years now?
• 2:23:37
  Emil WILSON: Wow, it's almost like a stationary that you just fill in.
• 2:23:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:23:41
  Emil WILSON: Tad.
• 2:23:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right!
• 2:23:43
  Emil WILSON: Oh my god.
• 2:23:44
  Tad Eggleston: He does comics. And it's not even like… I mean, Ryan North does other comics, right? Ryan North was involved in…
• 2:23:52
  Tad Eggleston: a fantastic adaptation of, of, Kurt Vonnekut's Slaughterhouse-Five.
• 2:23:59
  Emil WILSON: Okay, this is…
• 2:24:01
  Tad Eggleston: It's what made Slaughterhouse Spy finally click to me.
• 2:24:05
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm not the visual thinker.
• 2:24:09
  Emil WILSON: It's funny, I've been playing around with something similar, where the visual doesn't change, it focuses you on
• 2:24:14
  Emil WILSON: just the words.
• 2:24:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:24:16
  Emil WILSON: Constantly interested in…
• 2:24:19
  Emil WILSON: what you can do visually, and where your eye goes, and the emphasis that it has, and I… I feel like repetition is… is hugely…
• 2:24:29
  Emil WILSON: under… I mean, I feel like it's something that, in comics, you're constantly told, like, you have to change up this panel and change up the next panel, and it's like, well, what if they're all the same? What happens then? And…
• 2:24:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, sometimes, like, if you ever read,
• 2:24:43
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Rosenberg and Tyler Boss did a book called Four Kids Walking Into a Bank.
• 2:24:48
  Emil WILSON: No, I love that. I was just thinking about Mira Jacobs' Good Talk, where she used.
• 2:24:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Mira Jacob. I love Mira Jacob's guitar. Yeah. Four Kids Walk into a Bank uses all sorts of different styles and whatnot, but there are a few pages, like, I mean, there… there's one page that I love, where it's like a 16-panel page.
• 2:25:07
  Tad Eggleston: Like, 15 panels are exactly the same, and one is the guy in the middle throwing up in the back of the car.
• 2:25:15
  Tad Eggleston: And it, and it, like…
• 2:25:17
  Emil WILSON: Fantastic.
• 2:25:18
  Tad Eggleston: So much more powerful for the fact that you had the exact same image over and over and over again, and then…
• 2:25:25
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:25:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, 4 kids walking the bank, aside from just being a wonderful like… quirky… It's not exact…
• 2:25:37
  Tad Eggleston: I think some of the early blurbs were, like.
• 2:25:40
  Tad Eggleston: If Wes Anderson made a Quentin Tarantino movie.
• 2:25:47
  Tad Eggleston: or if Wes Anderson made a resume.
• 2:25:48
  Emil WILSON: I'm already there, like, that's… that's enough. I'm… you got…
• 2:25:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right, if… I think it was… if Wes Anderson made Reservoir Dogs, I think was.
• 2:25:55
  Emil WILSON: Right.
• 2:25:55
  Tad Eggleston: early blurbs. But it's also… I mean, we did a whole episode on it way back in the beginning. It's one of the ones that I actually did
• 2:26:05
  Tad Eggleston: like, really deep show notes. So if you go find my blog spot, one of the early…
• 2:26:11
  Tad Eggleston: episodes. Like, I broke down all of the different weird things that they did in Four Kids Walking to a Bank that I really, really loved.
• 2:26:20
  Emil WILSON: I'm totally gonna find it. That sounds great.
• 2:26:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's… you know, but it came out of… they both worked at… at…
• 2:26:31
  Tad Eggleston: Down the street from The Strand, why do I always forget the name of this comic shop in New York?
• 2:26:36
  Tad Eggleston: Bob Skoriak took me there,
• 2:26:39
  Emil WILSON: Oh.
• 2:26:41
  Emil WILSON: I don't know.
• 2:26:44
  Tad Eggleston: It's one of the famous ones, but it's not Midtown, and it's not… Forbidden Planet.
• 2:26:51
  Emil WILSON: I love it.
• 2:26:51
  Tad Eggleston: worked at Forbidden Planet.
• 2:26:53
  Emil WILSON: Yeah.
• 2:26:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's where they met, and they read tons and tons of comics together, all sorts of… I mean, they're the ones that turned me on to a book called Teen Boat.
• 2:27:04
  Emil WILSON: Okay!
• 2:27:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's a TH…
• 2:27:06
  Emil WILSON: too.
• 2:27:07
  Tad Eggleston: Who's sometimes a boat.
• 2:27:10
  Emil WILSON: Oh my god.
• 2:27:12
  Emil WILSON: That's great. I love it.
• 2:27:14
  Tad Eggleston: And from an artistic standpoint, it's not hugely special-special, but, like, from just a conceptual and funny standpoint, it's…
• 2:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, they were the guys that worked at the comic shops so they could read everything. I mean, you could tell that they worked at the comic shops so they could read everything.
• 2:27:30
  Tad Eggleston: And they've both become very successful as comic creators since then, but, like, Four Kids Walk into a Bank is just a masterclass on storytelling, and often in ways that don't feel…
• 2:27:42
  Tad Eggleston: That different or special until you really sit back and go, oh, wait… Oh, wow.
• 2:27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh. Oh!
• 2:27:50
  Emil WILSON: I'm totally gonna find it, that's great.
• 2:27:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but this is… this is… this is what I… like, if you like it, let me know.
• 2:28:00
  Emil WILSON: I will, I will let you know.
• 2:28:02
  Tad Eggleston: talk about it. Like, I would love to talk comics with you anytime you like. I've really, really enjoyed.
• 2:28:07
  Emil WILSON: That would be great. This has been great. This has been…
• 2:28:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'll talk on or off air. Let's wrap up, and then we'll talk a little bit off-air, so I'm not, like, putting you on the spot to become my best friend on the air. That's not a nice thing to do. I might… I might stop recording, and you'll go, never talk to me again.
• 2:28:27
  Emil WILSON: No, no, no, that's…
• 2:28:29
  Tad Eggleston: You have to say that, I'm still recording.
• 2:28:31
  Emil WILSON: Right. That's true, that's true. We will be best friends forever.
• 2:28:36
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway, for Emil WILSON, the new book is called The Nightingales. It's in stores, Tuesday, August 4th, in bookstores. Comic shops should have it on the 5th, though who's it coming out through?
• 2:28:53
  Emil WILSON: It's coming out through Avid Reader and Simon & Schuster.
• 2:28:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, so you're gonna wanna look at more bookstores than comic shops, but ask your comic shop. I'm trying to remember if Simon & Schuster…
• 2:29:04
  Tad Eggleston: I think they might actually… for most comic shops, they might have to get them through Ingram. I don't know if they're available through either Lunar or…
• 2:29:11
  Tad Eggleston: But don't
• 2:29:14
  Tad Eggleston: Penguin Random House, which are the two big comics distributors. It's a weird time for comics distribution right now.
• 2:29:21
  Emil WILSON: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that. So, but yeah, it's…
• 2:29:25
  Tad Eggleston: It's available everywhere. But yes, definitely, definitely bookstores everywhere. I'm certain Bookshop.org, if you're in the Milwaukee area, go to Lion's Tooth, ask them. You know, I'm certain partners and sons will consider it in the Philadelphia area. Wouldn't be surprised if, if,
• 2:29:41
  Tad Eggleston: If, Desert Island has it in Brooklyn, I'm certain that I can come up with more, and if they don't have it, I'm certain that they can get it for you.
• 2:29:49
  Emil WILSON: And it's in the UK on August 6th.
• 2:29:52
  Tad Eggleston: August 6th in the UK. Wow, so you got back-to-back-to-back release dates.
• 2:29:57
  Emil WILSON: Damn.
• 2:29:58
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Emil WILSON, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.