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With Great Power #258... 22 Panels with Andy Hartzell · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:02
Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest today is the cartoonist behind
0:09
Tad Eggleston: Last year's Apocryphal Comic Book Monday.
0:14
Tad Eggleston: And the upcoming 20th Anniversary Edition, or nearly 20th Anniversary Edition, of
0:21
Tad Eggleston: Fox Bunny Funny, both out from Uncivilized Books. Hello, Andy Hartzell, how are you today?
0:28
Andy Hartzell: Hello, Tad Eggleston, I'm doing well.
0:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, isn't this weekend SPX weekend? Is this, like, the one con that you're skipping?
0:37
Andy Hartzell: No, next weekend is at.
0:39
Tad Eggleston: Oh, next weekend is SPX. Okay, so you'll have back-to-back weekends. You'll be at SPX next weekend, and then…
0:46
Tad Eggleston: Columbus the weekend after that.
0:48
Andy Hartzell: That's right. I will see Vox Funny and Funny for the first time at SPX, as I saw…
0:54
Andy Hartzell: Monday for the first time at SPX.
0:56
Tad Eggleston: Right.
0:57
Andy Hartzell: in…
0:57
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I bought Monday at Columbus, so I'll buy, I'll buy,
1:02
Tad Eggleston: I'll buy a Fox Bunny funny from you at a… Columbus again. So…
1:10
Tad Eggleston: Actually, I can't remember if I bought it or Tom just made me take it. One of the two.
1:15
Tad Eggleston: I would have paid for it, it was good enough to pay for, but I don't think I ever walk away from the uncivilized booth without at least one thing that Tom just decided that I needed to read.
1:26
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I'm trying to remember, were you the one where we had the conversation afterwards? Did he pay for it? I don't remember. No, I don't know, I think he paid for it.
1:33
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know I paid for a lot of things while I was at the table.
1:40
Tad Eggleston: because there were a number… I mean, I think I spent 90 bucks at the uncivilized table, because I was behind on things. I needed Matt's book, and I needed…
1:51
Tad Eggleston: I forget what else.
1:54
Andy Hartzell: Graphic novels are not cheap.
1:55
Tad Eggleston: No, but they're worth it.
1:58
Tad Eggleston: They're worth it, I, you know, and, and you scribbled in mine. I have a, a nice, a nice,
2:09
Andy Hartzell: Oh yeah, you got God.
2:10
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
2:13
Tad Eggleston: God said this book was for me.
2:17
Tad Eggleston: So, I actually… let's go with the new work first.
2:22
Tad Eggleston: In terms of the, like, the new work, because you said in one of our emails that you'd gotten away from comics for a while, and then we'll.
2:29
Andy Hartzell: When you say the new work, what are you calling?
2:31
Tad Eggleston: I like… I meant the one that you'd created more recently, so Monday. Let's start with Monday.
2:37
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
2:38
Tad Eggleston: And then we'll go back to your beginnings, and why you've revisited that, and what it's like to be back on the con scene, etc. We'll make it up as we go. That's my rough rundown in my head. So tell me about Monday.
2:53
Andy Hartzell: Well…
2:55
Andy Hartzell: So Monday is not the newest one, if you… if you actually go back to the beginnings, because Monday was a book that I started over 20 years ago.
3:05
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
3:05
Andy Hartzell: And and worked on for a while, and then put away, actually did Fox Money Funny afterwards.
3:14
Andy Hartzell: And then,
3:17
Andy Hartzell: you know, this is… this is probably a not uncommon story. You know, life intruded, I didn't do a whole lot of cartooning for a long time.
3:25
Andy Hartzell: Then, the pandemic happened, and magically a bunch of time opened up. Always got me back to cartooning. And I, you know, I pulled it out. You know, I had been wanting to finish it for years, and I pulled it out and actually finished it.
3:44
Tad Eggleston: kept your Zoom up over your hands so you could be part of the meeting while drawing the comic, or…
3:51
Tad Eggleston: Cause I know, I know people who did that.
3:54
Tad Eggleston: Yes, yes, I'm totally part of this business meeting.
3:58
Andy Hartzell: I don't think I ever quite did that.
4:01
Tad Eggleston: But.
4:04
Andy Hartzell: But there was definitely some multitasking that was happening at that time.
4:07
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. So, okay, so, so it's the oldest and the youngest, but… but… but tell me about the book. Tell me about the, what, what…
4:18
Andy Hartzell: What was the… Well, what am I called the back of the, that, metaphysical slapstick suspense comic, something like that.
4:26
Tad Eggleston: Right.
4:27
Tad Eggleston: Fable for our unstable age.
4:29
Andy Hartzell: There we go.
4:31
Andy Hartzell: Well, the setup is… this is a… this is a new story featuring the oldest comic characters, you know, Adam and Eve, Snake and God, and it's set in the Garden of Eden, on…
4:43
Andy Hartzell: The eighth day of creation, the first Monday, the first day of the second work week of creation.
4:49
Andy Hartzell: Adam and Eve wake up to discover that, God is back in the garden.
4:55
Tad Eggleston: They did the time clock?
4:59
Andy Hartzell: He's back at work, he's making something,
5:02
Andy Hartzell: New, and, it seems like that's something maybe, threatening to, to,
5:10
Andy Hartzell: to disrupt the entire creation and knock Adam and Eve off the… the pedestal as the pinnacle of creation. And so that… what are they going to do about it is the… is the kind of major dramatic question of the piece. And
5:28
Andy Hartzell: That's… that's the setup.
5:32
Tad Eggleston: what… I mean… I love the setup.
5:37
Tad Eggleston: And… and I love where it goes, it made me laugh.
5:42
Tad Eggleston: and made me think. But I guess what I was really trying to ask is, like.
5:49
Tad Eggleston: Where'd the germ come from? Particularly if it's one that's stuck with you for 20 years. What was the seed? What was the… I want to write about the eighth day.
5:59
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, there's a… there's… there's… I can answer that in different ways, but, you know, I…
6:04
Andy Hartzell: I am… I grew up in the Midwest.
6:08
Andy Hartzell: Moved to the Bay Area and was part of the tech scene.
6:12
Andy Hartzell: For… 25 years.
6:15
Andy Hartzell: and… now I'm back in the Midwest. But,
6:22
Andy Hartzell: The story, I think, really came out of working at a startup, And, as a creative, and…
6:34
Andy Hartzell: you know, the, going through the usual tensions of kind of the creatives versus producers, right, and all of the, all of the, the sometimes productive, sometimes unproductive tension of that. So…
6:51
Andy Hartzell: in a way, and maybe I didn't realize this right away, I'm imagining the… World as a startup.
7:00
Andy Hartzell: And, and in my, you know, little cosmos.
7:05
Andy Hartzell: God is kind of the ultimate, creative, right, who just refuses to be managed. And, the snake is the ultimate, manager, who just wants things to, you know, who wants
7:23
Andy Hartzell: The enterprise to run smoothly.
7:27
Andy Hartzell: So, you know, this is kind of… it's a fable about the, you know, the…
7:33
Andy Hartzell: The age-old conflict of creatives versus management.
7:39
Tad Eggleston: I like that.
7:41
Tad Eggleston: And I'm gonna come down on the side of, there has to be a good balance. I've never met a writer that's not better with a good editor. I've never met a musician that's not better with a good producer.
7:57
Andy Hartzell: Absolutely, yeah. You know, and some of my best working experiences were working with just really good producers who
8:05
Andy Hartzell: Who wanted to see, you know, us succeed, and
8:10
Andy Hartzell: I understood the trade-offs that had to happen, and were able to negotiate to, you know, to make sure that we could actually deliver under time constraints, you know.
8:23
Tad Eggleston: Right.
8:23
Andy Hartzell: Then, you know, and then there's the opposite.
8:27
Tad Eggleston: Right. Which is just… we're just gonna do this, and… I mean, I always use the analogy, and I feel like they're big enough that they certainly don't have egos that I'm gonna, like, crush, but I always use the Metallica analogy, because, like, early in their career.
8:47
Tad Eggleston: They had solid 5 or 6 minute songs, and by about their 4th or 5th album, they were all 8 or 9 minute songs, and all of those 8 or 9 minute songs, if they'd been tightened into 5-minute songs.
9:00
Tad Eggleston: It wouldn't even require, like, taking parts out, it just would have required tightening each one a little bit.
9:07
Tad Eggleston: Right. They would have been brilliant, but instead, they all have, like, 30-second segments where it's like, okay, are you done with this? Are you ready to move on yet?
9:18
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, that is kind of…
9:20
Tad Eggleston: I can only imagine it was because they got big enough that there was nobody there to say, hey,
9:25
Tad Eggleston: Great drum solo?
9:28
Tad Eggleston: But it would be better if it was shorter.
9:32
Andy Hartzell: And how many, you know, substacks and things can you say that about, right? I mean, you know, we live in an age when it's really, you know, the barrier to entry for many of our forms is very low, but the whole, you know, the whole profession of the editor is kind of slowly being,
9:53
Andy Hartzell: eliminate it, right? I mean, I heard recently that I think the New York Times is kind of eliminating its critics. It's like theater critics and, you know, dance critics and music critics in favor of kind of a more, you know, social media kind of, you know, approach.
10:11
Andy Hartzell: And that's just kind of a sign of the times, right? That, you know, editors and critics, you know, are also…
10:21
Andy Hartzell: Are very important. And, you know, the role of the critic in really helping people to
10:30
Andy Hartzell: understand an art form, to understand people who are trying to do something new, who can't really, you know, who need that critical apparatus to try to explain it to the audience, right? And that's kind of…
10:43
Andy Hartzell: You know, that's… that's kind of gone away, and that's… that's a, you know, it's about.
10:48
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait a minute, you mean that a critic's job is to actually
10:52
Tad Eggleston: Dive deep, rather than just say, this sucks.
10:56
Andy Hartzell: Exactly, exactly.
10:58
Tad Eggleston: Oh!
10:59
Andy Hartzell: we're doing.
11:01
Andy Hartzell: Boy, we need.
11:01
Tad Eggleston: Whoa!
11:02
Andy Hartzell: Thank you.
11:04
Tad Eggleston: I mean, cause I… I… I sometimes say that I'm not…
11:08
Tad Eggleston: big on criticism. What I'm really meaning when I dig into it is that, like.
11:17
Tad Eggleston: I don't need to bash things. If I don't like it, let somebody else talk about it, you know? I talk about the things I like and why I like them.
11:27
Tad Eggleston: You know, I feel like there's… to me, there's sometimes too much oxygen given to
11:36
Tad Eggleston: Things that people don't like, and why you shouldn't like them either.
11:40
Tad Eggleston: And that just seems like why.
11:44
Andy Hartzell: easier to write about things you don't like, right?
11:46
Tad Eggleston: I would think.
11:47
Andy Hartzell: Because you're putting yourself in a… You know, I'm playing above.
11:50
Tad Eggleston: Elevated. Right.
11:51
Andy Hartzell: So you can kind of look down and deacon, and there is a pleasure in saying, look, you know, this is why this sucks. I can take it apart. But if… if you're talking about something you really like, you don't want to take it apart, right? You kind of don't want to…
12:06
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I sometimes take it… take it apart entirely, but it's.
12:09
Andy Hartzell: But you don't like it anymore, because all you have is Right?
12:15
Tad Eggleston: I just like to see how the pieces work. I'm the guy that metaphorically would take apart the radio and put it back together. I was never actually that good with electronics, so I'm not actually that guy, but, like…
12:28
Tad Eggleston: I like to look at things and go, oh my god, I just realized that you did this with your panel work, and that's why it works.
12:38
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, yeah.
12:39
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
12:40
Tad Eggleston: So, so he came back with the pandemic. Talk about Fox.
12:48
Tad Eggleston: Okay, because I, like, I, I, I, I love Monday for, essentially, the, the, the…
12:55
Tad Eggleston: the reasons that we just talked about, and… and I'm certain I'll come up with more ways, or might come up with more ways to talk about it that aren't spoilery, but I feel like, to a certain extent, we're at the… we've given you the…
13:07
Tad Eggleston: the… the intro, Andy's art is at times Escher-esque, at times… Are always funny and slapstick.
13:17
Tad Eggleston: just… go read it. Uncivilized books.
13:25
Tad Eggleston: $30 is… is a, is a steal for… for… for…
13:32
Tad Eggleston: The snake as the garden manager who continually pisses off the debutante artist.
13:43
Tad Eggleston: But it's also a very… There's similarities.
13:50
Tad Eggleston: But to me, there was a very different feel from… from…
13:53
Tad Eggleston: Fox Bunny Funnies, in part because Fox Bunny Funnies is completely silent, which I loved.
14:00
Tad Eggleston: And in part because…
14:07
Tad Eggleston: Do you like Fox Bunny Funnies…
14:12
Tad Eggleston: Ed…
14:15
Tad Eggleston: And this is where I want you to talk about it first, just because. But I feel like it's… its messaging was… was…
14:22
Tad Eggleston: Was deeper and more subversive.
14:26
Tad Eggleston: And… The ability to look at it as just pure slapstick was… Like, just ratcheted to 11.
14:35
Tad Eggleston: You know, there's, there's, there's fun.
14:38
Tad Eggleston: On almost every page, particularly when you get to funny, and aptly titled.
14:45
Tad Eggleston: So talk to me about how…
14:48
Tad Eggleston: Well, first, give us our front counter pitch for Fox Bunny Funny. How are you going to be selling it at SPX? And then,
14:58
Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about where that one comes from.
15:00
Andy Hartzell: Okay, this is going to be unpracticed, because, you know, the sales pitches only emerge in the moment, right?
15:07
Tad Eggleston: Right, right, right.
15:08
Andy Hartzell: But, box Bunny Funny is, set in a… an anthropomorphic kind of society.
15:18
Andy Hartzell: Two societies, like a city of foxes and a city of bunnies that are…
15:26
Andy Hartzell: right next to each other, but… but run on completely different principles. The Fox, city is run on predation. That's how they… that's, like, their main value, is being predated.
15:37
Tad Eggleston: Of the bunnies.
15:38
Andy Hartzell: of the bunnies, right? And the bunny society is run on victimization, I guess. Being the victims is their,
15:50
Andy Hartzell: is what the Society is all about.
15:53
Andy Hartzell: And, and it has to do with a, I guess, you can say an illicit desire of our kind of protagonist character, or a, a, a desire that does not fit into the structures of his society.
16:10
Andy Hartzell: And… and how this both,
16:14
Andy Hartzell: Kind of throws both his own life and the whole society's, kind of structure kind of ends up being
16:24
Andy Hartzell: Remixed, in a way.
16:28
Andy Hartzell: See, that's not very good, but it'll get better, because I'll be giving the…
16:33
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I'll toss out, like, the one minor spoiler, because, you know, it only spoils the first part. There is a fox that, like, is at least bunny curious.
16:46
Tad Eggleston: He's interested in what it would be like to spend time as a bunny, and… Yeah.
16:52
Tad Eggleston: I mean, it seems like the bunnies have more fun.
16:56
Andy Hartzell: Do you think so?
16:57
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, when they're not being hunted.
17:01
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
17:03
Tad Eggleston: you know…
17:05
Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's relative. I mean, how much fun can you have when you're being hunted? I mean, there are many different
17:17
Tad Eggleston: real-world
17:19
Tad Eggleston: things that you could apply this to in a heartbeat. That's one of the reasons that I talked about the messaging being a little bit more subversive, because there is that element of…
17:33
Tad Eggleston: like… But easy to skip, because, you know, bunnies are…
17:39
Tad Eggleston: herbivores, and foxes are carnivores, and they can't actually help that when they're not anthropomorphic.
17:46
Tad Eggleston: But, there's the element of, like, Why can't we get along?
17:53
Tad Eggleston: Why do you… why are you defined by being bigger? And I don't know if the bunnies… at least I didn't get the feeling that the bunnies defined themselves by their victimhood as much as…
18:05
Tad Eggleston: the…
18:07
Andy Hartzell: Well, that was the central, kind of, maybe the central facet.
18:09
Tad Eggleston: They… they were defined by their victimhood.
18:13
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
18:13
Tad Eggleston: By… by their… by their oppressors.
18:19
Tad Eggleston: I mean, to, to, to… how many times have you heard the… the…
18:27
Tad Eggleston: the MAGA-ish Republicans say, I don't have anything about Black people, or against Black people, I just wish they wouldn't… wouldn't, like, play up their victimhood, blah, once, and they're going…
18:38
Tad Eggleston: I've never known a Black person who played up their victory. Most of them are just trying to get by. I mean, I have a sticker right… right here on… on my…
18:52
Tad Eggleston: my laptop that says, Trans Agenda.
18:55
Tad Eggleston: Live long, happy lives.
18:59
Tad Eggleston: So it's not trans agenda. Convince everybody that we're victims. Check. And then they go, it's… you know, I feel like, oftentimes.
19:09
Tad Eggleston: In this world.
19:12
Tad Eggleston: The people who are actually the victims don't…
19:15
Tad Eggleston: Don't play the victims as much as they are the victims, and… and…
19:22
Tad Eggleston: Your predators not only are predators, but, like, the second anything
19:28
Tad Eggleston: As with the foxes, that are really, really, really…
19:34
Tad Eggleston: not understanding how to handle this fox that would like to try out being a bunny, you know? The second… the second any part of the order of the…
19:46
Tad Eggleston: Oppressors is…
19:51
Tad Eggleston: nibbled at, like, they start…
19:58
Tad Eggleston: Feeling like they're victimized.
20:02
Andy Hartzell: Fair enough.
20:03
Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, and I did a quick reading, because I had all sorts of other stuff to read, so I read it this morning, but that was kind of the vibe that I got, and that's why I wanted you to speak first, because I didn't… didn't want to, like, put… put…
20:17
Tad Eggleston: put ideas in that weren't yours as much as let you know what I got.
20:23
Andy Hartzell: Well, you know, the beauty of a wordless… any wordless story that, you know, that has kind of a self-consistency to it, I feel like, is that it does
20:37
Andy Hartzell: It… because… because… Because it doesn't have words, it's not…
20:43
Andy Hartzell: It's not explained, it's not, you know, it's not framed, it's not… you don't… aren't told in the story what it means.
20:51
Andy Hartzell: So you have… you're… you… The reader has more leeway to interpret it for themselves.
21:00
Tad Eggleston: Right. And Fox Money Funny actually has been interpreted in lots of different ways. Right.
21:05
Andy Hartzell: you know, obviously there's been a lot of, you know, queer and trans and, you know, LGBTQ readings of the book, but there's also been, you know.
21:16
Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, I could put it Israel-Palestine, I could put it.
21:19
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
21:20
Tad Eggleston: Ukraine, I could put in.
21:21
Andy Hartzell: came out, it was, Rwanda, you know. Right, right.
21:26
Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
21:27
Andy Hartzell: and
21:31
Andy Hartzell: And I think the ending is ambiguous enough, too, and the whole… that whole funny section that you're talking about is ambiguous enough that it doesn't,
21:43
Andy Hartzell: you know, it's not making, I think, like, just a…
21:49
Andy Hartzell: trite, plea for tolerance kind of thing. I think… I feel.
21:52
Tad Eggleston: No.
21:53
Andy Hartzell: It's, there's, it's more ambiguous and more,
22:00
Andy Hartzell: Like, open to a different kind of interpretations.
22:03
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think it's also more observant than prescriptive.
22:06
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
22:07
Tad Eggleston: I actually feel that about Monday as well, because… even with words, you know.
22:13
Tad Eggleston: It's not clear-cut that, like.
22:17
Tad Eggleston: God is wrong and the snake is right. The snake is right, and God is wrong. It's…
22:24
Tad Eggleston: it's laying out, like, the different perspectives, and then throwing Adam and Eve in the middle, and, like, that's the whole, like, worker slash middle management, like, I have to somehow make both of you happy. Right.
22:44
Tad Eggleston: And I don't know if I agree with either of you, but nobody's asked me.
22:49
Andy Hartzell: Exactly. Well, you know, it takes a long time.
22:53
Andy Hartzell: to draw a graphic novel, especially for me. And one of the ways that
23:02
Andy Hartzell: I mean, if I knew… like, neither, neither book…
23:06
Andy Hartzell: did I know how it was going to end when I started?
23:10
Tad Eggleston: That… that… that'll lead in the next round of questions.
23:13
Andy Hartzell: But, but both of them, I think, you know, as…
23:19
Andy Hartzell: I worked on them, the ending kind of… the obvious ending kind of ultimately revealed itself.
23:26
Andy Hartzell: And that, you know, that's… then that becomes something that carries you through. You're like, oh, I gotta see how this turns out, you know?
23:34
Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I am fascinated about in comics, and it's true in most art, but I feel like, as so many things are in comics, it's ratcheted to 11, is that, like, everybody works
23:50
Tad Eggleston: differently.
23:52
Tad Eggleston: Some people, like, even when they're a solo cartoonist, will have, you know, a tight script done, and then do, like, thumbnails, pencils, inks, blah blah blah, and others are, like…
24:05
Tad Eggleston: I kinda know I want this, and now I'm gonna sketch the first page. You know, now I've got 4 pages sketched, and they look good, I'm gonna ink them, and now what happens next?
24:16
Tad Eggleston: So, so… and everything in between.
24:20
Tad Eggleston: for that matter, he exhausted himself, but Nate Powell, for a while, liked having
24:26
Tad Eggleston: A nonfiction and a fiction book going at the same time, because it meant that
24:32
Tad Eggleston: there were that many different jobs that he could choose from. Do I want to be researching right now, or writing right now, or penciling right now, or inking right now, or coloring right now, whatever I want to be doing, I probably have something in the room that needs that done.
24:49
Tad Eggleston: So, like, you said, when you started, you didn't know how they ended. Like, what's your process? Where… where… where do you start with a graphic novel? Where…
25:00
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, step me through from…
25:03
Andy Hartzell: Well, it's been doing it.
25:03
Tad Eggleston: idea to, I have a thing.
25:08
Andy Hartzell: Each one… each one's been different. So, Monday, I… I… would,
25:14
Andy Hartzell: I'd script… I did script before I… so I'd script out a scene in longhand, revise it until I liked it.
25:22
Andy Hartzell: then thumbnail, and that would work in chunks, you know, in basically a scene at a time.
25:30
Andy Hartzell: With Fox Bunny Funny, it was a… and… well, with Fox Bunny Funny, it was a…
25:37
Andy Hartzell: a very different process. I, I…
25:42
Andy Hartzell: actually just drew it in… for the most… so most of the book is a strict six-panel grid. Square, you know, square panels, 6 to a bridge, and then at a critical junction, it kind of breaks that format. But, so I just cut myself,
26:00
Andy Hartzell: you know, a bunch of little, kind of, note-card-sized Bristol boards, and just worked an image at a time without even thinking about, page design.
26:09
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
26:10
Andy Hartzell: not how I would have done any other project that I've worked on, and maybe not the… but for that particular… it just worked for that project, and so I would just go out to a coffee shop or whatever in the morning with a stack of
26:25
Andy Hartzell: cards, and… and work straight ahead. And I ended up then, you know, discarding some, because they didn't kind of work for the flow of the page, and, you know, reconfiguring, you know, stuff at the end, after I, you know, have this
26:41
Andy Hartzell: giant stack of… of single images.
26:45
Tad Eggleston: Did you mess around at all with, like, completely changing the format of how you… I mean, because if you work from single images, you could go vertical scroll, you could go huge pages, you could go little pages, I mean…
26:59
Andy Hartzell: You know, I… this is detailed a little bit in the deluxe, almost 20th anniversary edition, as the 18th anniversary Edition, because I do include some pages, some discarded pages,
27:13
Andy Hartzell: And a whole ending that…
27:16
Andy Hartzell: That I ended up discarding. But…
27:19
Andy Hartzell: I… for… at first, I thought I was gonna do a square format, a square, four panels to a page.
27:27
Andy Hartzell: Okay. And and so I drew the final sequence, which does not adhere to the grid structure, right, in, assuming a square format.
27:38
Andy Hartzell: And then I showed it to, you know, some friends, some people whose, whose judgment I trusted, and one in particular, Jesse Recklaw, was very,
27:54
Andy Hartzell: had very definite ideas about comics and what works and what doesn't work, and he had, you know, he was… he was very… the six, you know, the human eye was designed to take in six panels per page. That's what it's, you know, that is the actual number. So, so I did end up…
28:13
Tad Eggleston: Okay, this… I just have to laugh, because I… I pulled up Jesse Recklaw, and the first comic
28:21
Tad Eggleston: On his website is a four-panel comment.
28:24
Andy Hartzell: See, do as I do, not as I stand.
28:27
Tad Eggleston: And the second comic is a four-panel comic, and the third comic is a four-panel comic.
28:34
Andy Hartzell: I won the competition, that's why he told me this.
28:36
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:37
Andy Hartzell: Oh.
28:38
Tad Eggleston: Everything I've seen so far… And that's…
28:42
Andy Hartzell: probably… I mean, I'm just kidding, because he… I… in his defense, I would say, I think what you're probably looking at are, like.
28:50
Tad Eggleston: Your diaries.
28:51
Andy Hartzell: They'll do your diary.
28:52
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they're comic strips. Yeah, they're comic strips.
28:55
Andy Hartzell: Maybe different laws apply to the comic structure.
28:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I'm just laughing. That's what came up immediately, was… was a bunch of four panel cars.
29:09
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
29:12
Andy Hartzell: So, yeah, so I ended up reconfiguring as a 6-padel, and I think it looked good as 6 paddle.
29:17
Tad Eggleston: No, it looks great. It looks great. I just… I… I,
29:21
Tad Eggleston: I'm fascinated when… when… when people… mess around.
29:26
Tad Eggleston: With comics, like, one of my…
29:30
Tad Eggleston: One of my favorite comics in the la- or, like, favorite mainstream comics in the last few years is,
29:38
Tad Eggleston: Tom Taylor and Bruno Redondo, I think his last name, did an issue of Nightwing.
29:46
Andy Hartzell: Where…
29:48
Tad Eggleston: It… it could be turned into a scroll.
29:51
Tad Eggleston: It's a whole thing.
29:53
Tad Eggleston: I literally bought a digital copy so I could do screenshots to have my wife color print.
30:01
Andy Hartzell: Oh.
30:02
Tad Eggleston: put together as a scroll, so I could just read it across. I know comic shops that took apart, like, two copies, because, you know, you got the pages, so that they could put it across, like.
30:15
Tad Eggleston: Part of their wall to show off that, like,
30:20
Tad Eggleston: there's an issue of Ice Cream Man coming up that's, like, a card set.
30:25
Tad Eggleston: where each card is a page or panel, and you have to, like, put them together, and I'm not even certain if there's a specific order, or if it's designed to be a choose-your-own-adventure type thing. You know, I just… I like it when people screw with the medium, so I had to ask, yeah.
30:41
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I like that stuff, too.
30:43
Tad Eggleston: When you've got that stack of cards, there's just so many different things that you could do.
30:50
Andy Hartzell: It's true.
30:53
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, I did, I did turn one sequence into, like, 3D, slides, which I'm gonna bring to… with me to the cons. Okay, cool. You know, you can, you can view them as individual slides with a 3D viewer.
31:08
Tad Eggleston: Oh, awesome.
31:09
Andy Hartzell: And yeah, I remember doing… back in the, kind of, mini-comics days of the early aughts, I… like, there was…
31:19
Andy Hartzell: one, again, I think Jesse Recklaw's idea called Bizarre Love Triangle, which was a pyramidal-shaped comic.
31:29
Tad Eggleston: Okay, yeah, I've seen a couple of those. Where, yeah, that opens up, and each chapter is a different kind of triangle of the pyramid, and I did one, and…
31:38
Tad Eggleston: scenes.
31:38
Andy Hartzell: want Jesse B.
31:39
Tad Eggleston: I've seen some, you know, you know, and I was never able to fold them, but, like, when I was in middle school, like, the girls all had those paper-folded things that they would open and close X number of times. I've seen people do comics on those, where it's like… you know…
31:56
Andy Hartzell: I know that, I'm forgetting the name of the cartoonist, but, Tom of Uncivilized Books sells a, an endless comic. Yep.
32:04
Tad Eggleston: I have that. I was about to bring that up.
32:08
Tad Eggleston: You know, so yeah, I mean, that's one of the things I, I, I…
32:14
Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's so many things I love about comics, but… but, like, one of the biggest things that I love is, like, there are no boundaries.
32:25
Andy Hartzell: No.
32:25
Tad Eggleston: You know, if you… if you can imagine it, you can find a way… To express it in comics.
32:33
Tad Eggleston: It might mean… Completely blowing the doors off of what people consider comics.
32:39
Tad Eggleston: But, like, that's just more fun.
32:44
Tad Eggleston: I mean…
32:45
Andy Hartzell: Or, you know, it makes you stand out at conventions, too.
32:48
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that too.
32:52
Tad Eggleston: So, after, you know, your decades in Silicon Valley, what's it like to be out on the convention circuit now? And did you do convention circuit before that? Is this a return to the convention circuit? Yeah.
33:06
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, it is, I mean, I… so I…
33:09
Andy Hartzell: started in the 90s, and I lived in Las Vegas in the 90s, that's when I really started,
33:15
Andy Hartzell: cartooning. And I had a, I had a strip in a… some free weeklies at the time,
33:24
Andy Hartzell: which I would… most of what I would… you know, I would then go to Kinko's when they had their, you know, midnight half-price specials and make, you know, zines out of it. Right, right. And I would go to the San Diego Comic-Con at the time when,
33:40
Andy Hartzell: You just wait till the guard's back is turned and sneak in and set up at an empty table while you're stuck.
33:46
Andy Hartzell: It was much… it was a very different kind of place back then.
33:51
Tad Eggleston: Right.
33:52
Andy Hartzell: So,
33:54
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, and then… and then when I moved to the Bay Area in the… in 2000, that's when I kind of got a little more serious about cartooning, and
34:04
Andy Hartzell: And I, I did the convention circuits, I, you know, I did the West Coast, you know, Ape, and, and, and, San Diego, and, and, and things like that through, and I guess I, I hit a couple East Coast cons in the, in the aughts, and then
34:21
Andy Hartzell: the teens is when, you know, I kind of trailed off.
34:25
Andy Hartzell: I, and, and, and got involved in other stuff, and, and, and, so…
34:33
Andy Hartzell: You asked what it's like to go back to the Midwest and doing the… I only returned to the Midwest, like, 2 months ago.
34:40
Tad Eggleston: Well, I meant… I didn't… I didn't say Midwest, I just said back to the concert. I mean, if you want to tell me what it's back in the Midwest, that's fine, too.
34:48
Andy Hartzell: That's a different subject.
34:49
Tad Eggleston: But that's a whole different subject.
34:52
Andy Hartzell: It's fun, it's cool to be back in the convention circuit. It's, it's gratifying when people remember. I'm almost surprised when people
35:02
Andy Hartzell: remember me.
35:05
Andy Hartzell: and… and even, you know, remember picking up some of my… those kind of obscure books in the 90s that… that I, you know, that there's some people that are still going to the cons and can…
35:16
Andy Hartzell: can remember some of the stuff I was doing back then. Obviously there's a whole new generation, you know, there's a lot more,
35:26
Andy Hartzell: people in masks than there used to be in the 90s.
35:33
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, we'd had that whole thing.
35:35
Andy Hartzell: I don't know if you noticed it, maybe you're too busy working, but… oh, wait a minute, no, you said that's when you started drawing again, so you should know about the maths. Yeah, I do know about the pandemic.
35:49
Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, with cartoonists and tech people, you never… I never like to assume that they know about the outside world. Most of them do, most of them are way too wired in, and, like, convinced that the world is ending, and probably right, but…
36:07
Tad Eggleston: But, some of them just, like, haven't looked up from their desk in… 15 years.
36:15
Tad Eggleston: And that's cool, too, if that's what makes them happy.
36:19
Andy Hartzell: Particularly because, like, I often like the results of that.
36:23
Tad Eggleston: I mean, we had Terry Moore on, and he said the funniest thing he ever hears at cons is people are like, oh, I love this, I love this, so you travel a lot? He's like…
36:33
Andy Hartzell: It's like, I've been sitting at a drawing table for 16 hours a day for 30 years now.
36:42
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, some cartoonists have more of a work-life balance than that, but I'm always… I'm always,
36:51
Tad Eggleston: It's always interesting to see.
36:57
Tad Eggleston: Give me your…
37:00
Tad Eggleston: comics biography, and by that, I don't mean your bibliography. We've hit a lot of your bibliography, and you can certainly hit other books that you've done if you want, but what I really mean is, like.
37:15
Tad Eggleston: Talk about your experience with comics through… through life. Like, when did you start? What did you start on?
37:22
Tad Eggleston: What made you decide that you wanted to do this? You know, what inspired you? That sort of thing.
37:31
Andy Hartzell: Well, I think unlike most of the other cartoonists I know, especially people, you know, kind of my generation.
37:38
Andy Hartzell: I did not grow up with, with the superhero comic books, really. I mean, I grew up in the country.
37:46
Andy Hartzell: there weren't any, you know, it was before the internet, there were not really comic book stores around, so the comics that I… so it was really newspaper comics.
37:58
Andy Hartzell: Okay. Which was still.
38:00
Tad Eggleston: We love our newspaper comics here.
38:01
Andy Hartzell: Wait.
38:03
Tad Eggleston: We have a quarterly newspaper comic book club.
38:06
Tad Eggleston: Well, good!
38:07
Andy Hartzell: But yeah, I mean.
38:08
Tad Eggleston: Comics are comics, man.
38:11
Andy Hartzell: It was definitely a more vital art form. Obviously, when I was
38:14
Andy Hartzell: when I was a kid, and, you know, I was really into… I was into peanuts, I was, you know, really into Calvin and Hobbes, of course, and I was into Bloom County, and all these sorts of things, and, you know, and, like, Broomhilde, and Hagar the Horrible, and The Wizard of Id, and I would…
38:31
Andy Hartzell: you know, I would cut them out of the… make little books out of them. I would, like, cut them out of the newspaper and make little books out of them.
38:39
Andy Hartzell: And and, you know, the comic books were, you know, it was the Dell Archie Digest, or the Dell comics, and the Archie Digest, and Mad Magazine, and and then I did have, my dad had The Great Comic Book Heroes, which is, you know.
38:59
Andy Hartzell: the Jules Pfeiffer introduction, and it was…
39:01
Andy Hartzell: It's basically all the origin stories of the DC and Marvel, you know.
39:05
Tad Eggleston: Right?
39:05
Andy Hartzell: characters, so the Golden Age and early Silver Age kind of stories, and so I, you know, I would pour through that. And there was a short time where…
39:14
Andy Hartzell: The very early Batman and Superman comics were being republished in, like, extra-large editions with kind of a gold, cover, and those were for sale in, you know, just dime stores and stuff like that, so I picked up those.
39:28
Andy Hartzell: So, you know, my experience of Batman and Superman were, like, the 30s and early 40s Batman and Superman. I really was not even…
39:40
Andy Hartzell: aware of what was going on in, in, kind of contemporary mainstream comics. you know, I was into animation, I was into Disney, I was into the Warner Bros. cartoons, I was really into, like.
39:52
Andy Hartzell: you know, if I could… old Fleischer cartoons and things like that, when I could… could find them, I would collect, you know, Super 8 movies, and… and, you know, I was really interested in the early days, you know, the silent, silent,
40:10
Andy Hartzell: cartoons and, and, and really early, comic strips, you know, when I could find them. And when I went to college is when… was it…
40:20
Andy Hartzell: It's the name, Turtle Clip. The Crazy Cat reprint started coming out.
40:25
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
40:25
Andy Hartzell: And that really, I mean, that was a really big deal to discover.
40:31
Andy Hartzell: the early Crazy Cats, and the Crumb Comics compilations that I started acquiring when I was in, in, in college, and that was… that kind of coincided with the big.
40:43
Andy Hartzell: The black and white boom of the, you know, early-mid 80s, and the,
40:52
Andy Hartzell: the comic book store as a phenomenon, so, you know, I went to the University of Michigan, and I can't remember the name of the comic book store there that I would hang out in, but, you know, buy these,
41:07
Andy Hartzell: You know, neat stuff, an early 8-ball, and
41:13
Andy Hartzell: you know, Reed Fleming, the world, the milkman, and all of these now kind of obscure black and white, indie comics of the, of the 80s. And that's what really got me
41:29
Andy Hartzell: you know, I drew comics as a kid, I drew a comic in my high school newspaper, and things like that.
41:38
Andy Hartzell: I went to college thinking I wanted to be a playwright, and then I discovered comics, and…
41:45
Andy Hartzell: Thought, well, this… This would… this could be more fun. There's… there's kind of…
41:51
Tad Eggleston: I don't have to deal with acting.
41:52
Andy Hartzell: It's more, you know, I can just put out my own books. And… and so I, so…
42:01
Andy Hartzell: I started drawing comics at, you know, right after I got out of college, I guess, and
42:12
Andy Hartzell: Sorry, my dog is…
42:14
Tad Eggleston: That's completely okay. He's cute. She's cute. They're cute.
42:22
Tad Eggleston: I don't want to misgender the dog.
42:24
Andy Hartzell: Happy.
42:25
Andy Hartzell: So that's, I mean, that's kind of the early, I guess, comics…
42:32
Andy Hartzell: biography. You know, later I, I, you know, I discovered Tatuka, and, and, you know, got, got really into his stuff, and some of the other
42:44
Andy Hartzell: manga, and I discovered the French, the La Sociation.
42:49
Andy Hartzell: cartoonists, the Johann Svar and Louis Frondheim and those guys, and I was really into them for a while.
43:00
Tad Eggleston: It's awesome, good stuff.
43:02
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
43:04
Andy Hartzell: But, you know, but the… but I always… when the talk turns to…
43:10
Andy Hartzell: Marvel and DC, I often find that I, you know, it's still lots of kind of blank spots in my education when it comes to that stuff.
43:19
Tad Eggleston: Which is, I mean…
43:23
Tad Eggleston: To a certain extent, you know, I probably read more comic books than 90% of the people I know, because the people who are even close in terms of the number of comics that they read also make comics, which, like, takes up more of their time than
43:39
Tad Eggleston: than teaching high school does, believe it or not.
43:44
Tad Eggleston: I can squeeze comic reading in between things at school. They can work or read and not do both, and sometimes, when they've been working all day, the last thing they want to do is look at a comic.
43:56
Andy Hartzell: Right.
43:59
Tad Eggleston: But I have massive holes in my… my…
44:02
Tad Eggleston: Marvel and DC knowledge, because, like, I could not have massive holes in my Marvel and DC knowledge, or I could know about other things.
44:12
Andy Hartzell: Right.
44:14
Tad Eggleston: I gotta decide…
44:17
Tad Eggleston: You know, I tend to, and don't get me wrong, I read my share of superhero comics.
44:24
Tad Eggleston: But it tends to be more… I wind up reading superhero comics because somebody that I like their writing somewhere else is doing a superhero comic, and it's like, oh, I need to see this then. Or someone whose art I like somewhere else is suddenly on a superhero title, or… or…
44:43
Tad Eggleston: enough of the right people have been raving about something for long enough that it's like, okay, I'm gonna go get caught up on it now. Yeah. You know?
44:56
Tad Eggleston: you know, I can't… I… I don't want to say I can't imagine actually keeping up on all the superior stuff, because I know a handful of people who do, but, like…
45:07
Tad Eggleston: My biggest thing is I just… I don't care about continuity enough.
45:12
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
45:13
Tad Eggleston: I like a good story, I like good character development,
45:18
Tad Eggleston: When your continuity is that big, most of the character development actually happens in spurts and arcs, and maybe erased in a different arc by a different creator, so, like, trying to keep track of the character development over 60 years…
45:36
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
45:38
Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
45:38
Andy Hartzell: No, I mean, I had a friend in the 90s, I was a caricature artist in Las Vegas, and I had a lot of friends who were into comics, and one in particular really trying to get me into the X-Men, and I just…
45:49
Andy Hartzell: you know, just all of those little, you know, C, issue, you know, X, Y, U.
45:56
Tad Eggleston: And I even have the greatest… I mean, I remember when I was a little kid.
46:00
Tad Eggleston: And, like, because I started on comics because I inherited my dad and uncle's…
46:06
Tad Eggleston: collections, so it was all of these 70s and 80s Marvel comics. You know, I was that kid that when it said, see whatever, I'd be flipping through my comics, do I have that one? Let me go see that.
46:18
Andy Hartzell: Right, right.
46:19
Tad Eggleston: I had… I had… I had notebooks with lists of, I need to find this comic, and why I needed to find the comics. Like, this is referenced in this comic.
46:30
Andy Hartzell: That just kind of makes me tired.
46:32
Tad Eggleston: Well, you know, by the time I was, like, 10…
46:36
Tad Eggleston: I spent that energy on baseball stats rather than which comic to go find.
46:42
Tad Eggleston: But I get where it comes from in terms of, like, the itch that it scratches for a certain type of…
46:50
Tad Eggleston: of mind.
46:51
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
46:51
Tad Eggleston: And, like, I mean, to be honest, I'm like that with Daredevil.
46:57
Tad Eggleston: I've read almost every issue of Daredevil, and at one point, I'm certain I will have read almost… or will have read every issue of Daredevil. I have read every issue of Daredevil since, like, 1980.
47:10
Tad Eggleston: So I'm just still catching up on some of the old ones, but I don't…
47:15
Tad Eggleston: I don't have the encyclopedic memory of that. I'm happy that there's a guy that started a website, like…
47:20
Tad Eggleston: When the internet was young, that he still has going, and I can go there when I need to know.
47:26
Andy Hartzell: Now, would it bother you if continuity was completely broken and dared.
47:31
Tad Eggleston: No, it's happened. It's happened.
47:35
Tad Eggleston: I just try to look at it separately.
47:39
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
47:41
Tad Eggleston: You know? I get the people who do get upset.
47:45
Tad Eggleston: But at the same time, you know, I've spent enough time in my life writing, and certainly enough time in my life
47:52
Tad Eggleston: reading.
47:53
Tad Eggleston: that it's like, I get why they have the big, like, universe continuity
48:01
Tad Eggleston: Reset Events, because that allows the next generation of writers to have
48:08
Tad Eggleston: Kinda clean slate to work in, rather than having to go back and…
48:13
Tad Eggleston: Not contradict 50 years' worth of… Whatever? Right.
48:20
Tad Eggleston: You know, have to try to… I mean, particularly because, like.
48:26
Tad Eggleston: I don't think Stan and Jack knew that they were creating continuity.
48:31
Tad Eggleston: I mean, they started having stuff cross over a little bit relatively early, but, like…
48:40
Tad Eggleston: I think it was probably… 10 years into Marvel and, like, 50 years into DC before…
48:48
Tad Eggleston: you had people who were really trying to make certain that they… I mean, Superman didn't originally fly, you know? You know, Batman used guns.
49:02
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
49:05
Tad Eggleston: Y-you know.
49:07
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I was actually having this conversation with…
49:10
Andy Hartzell: Tom, yesterday, and you should, when you finally do get him on.
49:15
Andy Hartzell: your podcast, you should have the conversation, because he has a lot more worked-out ideas about,
49:24
Andy Hartzell: How, you know, how the shift happened, where the shift of, of kind of not really caring about continuity, you know, where, you know, every episode could be kind of self-contained, to, to all of a sudden, no, we, you know, things have to, you know.
49:41
Andy Hartzell: all of the superheroes have to live in the same universe, you know, they have to be able to… there has to be that sort of inter, you know, operability between them. And, you know, and that's paralleled in…
49:56
Andy Hartzell: You know, in… in the world of, you know, TV and sitcoms and stuff like that, where, you know, there was a time when, you know, maybe the family in the sitcom had a dog in this episode, because the plot has to do with, you know, because the dog runs away.
50:10
Tad Eggleston: And they don't see the dog ever again.
50:12
Andy Hartzell: There is no dog, because there's no need for a dog.
50:15
Tad Eggleston: No writer remembers that there was a dog for 10 more years, and then somebody's like, whatever happened to…
50:22
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, yeah.
50:23
Andy Hartzell: And, you know, there's something that, kind of, there's something that changed in the sensibility of,
50:31
Andy Hartzell: Of all these media, where suddenly continuity becomes
50:35
Andy Hartzell: much more important. And, you know, you go into folklore and things like… mythology, things like that, you know, you could…
50:42
Andy Hartzell: Or early cartoons, you know? Obviously, you know,
50:47
Andy Hartzell: Wile E. Coyote comes back at the beginning of every new cartoon, even if he was blown up at the end of the old cartoon. I mean,
50:55
Andy Hartzell: Y-you, there is… there's just not a need to…
51:02
Andy Hartzell: You have these elements that remain consistent, and you can keep remixing the elements and have new stories with those elements, but the need for some kind of, you know, comprehensible continuity is not there.
51:16
Tad Eggleston: I would imagine that the shift… came first.
51:21
Tad Eggleston: with…
51:26
Tad Eggleston: Well, holding on to their old issues.
51:29
Tad Eggleston: And then reprints.
51:32
Tad Eggleston: And then really hit overdrive when there started being repositories of information.
51:43
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
51:44
Tad Eggleston: You know, so, like, the book that you brought up was the Jules Pfeiffer, the… the…
51:50
Andy Hartzell: The Great Comic Book Heroes?
51:52
Tad Eggleston: the great comic book heroes, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that was one of the early
51:59
Tad Eggleston: early points of things starting to come together, just because, okay, now… now this exists outside of the pages of the converse.
52:07
Andy Hartzell: I've heard lots of people reference that particular book. And then when you… then when you start having, like, the… the…
52:15
Tad Eggleston: the… the history of the Marvel Universe, or the Marvel Heroes A to Z, or…
52:22
Tad Eggleston: But then when you, when you finally have, like.
52:27
Tad Eggleston: everything's collected, and it's in your public library, and then everything's digital, and you can reference back everyth, you know. It's different…
52:37
Tad Eggleston: I mean, if I really wanted to get all philosophical, it probably also has to do with…
52:43
Tad Eggleston: As the real world becomes less and less tethered to, like, continuity and fact.
52:51
Tad Eggleston: The people who are escaping into comics become that much more… like… Attached to the idea.
53:03
Tad Eggleston: That things are supposed to be a certain way.
53:07
Andy Hartzell: Because you're trying to make it more real. You're trying to kind of… Right. This is a… this…
53:12
Andy Hartzell: This is a universe, and if it's a universe.
53:14
Tad Eggleston: Right.
53:14
Andy Hartzell: Needs to have, kind of.
53:16
Tad Eggleston: In our real universe, an insurrection became a family cookout at the Capitol Rotunda, but… but in the Marvel universe, Peter Parker is Spider-Man.
53:31
Andy Hartzell: Right.
53:33
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, that's… that's interesting. I hadn't… I hadn't thought of it that way.
53:37
Tad Eggleston: This is how my brain works.
53:41
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, it is because, you know, the emergence of the fan, and the superfan, and writing for, you know, and, and,
53:51
Andy Hartzell: The ability of the fans to make their voices heard, and.
53:55
Tad Eggleston: Hmm?
53:55
Andy Hartzell: You know, to talk back to the writers, and.
53:58
Tad Eggleston: Starting with cons, and then social media, and yeah.
54:02
Andy Hartzell: For sure, yeah. I mean, I have,
54:06
Andy Hartzell: I'm, you know, I haven't done any comics with licensed characters, and I don't have any kind of knowledge of that, although I did work
54:15
Andy Hartzell: for about 4 years for, Telltale Games, and got to work on, you know, licensed properties, from Sam and Max, Back to the Future.
54:28
Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, I see Back to the Future here.
54:31
Andy Hartzell: Oh, you saw that, like, on my… some…
54:34
Tad Eggleston: On your webpage. I may have that up on the other half of my screen.
54:40
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, Law & Order, some others. And walsh and Gromit, and
54:51
Andy Hartzell: And it was especially… I mean, it was… it was… it was interesting writing, you know, doing… writing…
54:58
Andy Hartzell: and having those forums, and having the fans weigh in. And the way those games were created, we were doing one a month, you know, we'd do, like, a run of 6 to 8,
55:10
Andy Hartzell: games, and release them monthly so that you would be getting the real-time feedback as you're writing, and that real-time feedback could kind of… ultimately could affect the storyline. So I got…
55:25
Andy Hartzell: I kind of got some of that, and there is… There is a… A certain joy to writing
55:32
Andy Hartzell: for fans. We're like, no, okay, I know that this… they're really gonna eat this up if I put in this for this. Yeah.
55:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely, and, like, this is, this is…
55:47
Tad Eggleston: One of the things that's always baffled me about the comics world is it seems to be split.
55:53
Tad Eggleston: into, like…
55:56
Tad Eggleston: three groups, at least in the con scene. You've got your… your super indie, where if there are any publishers at all, they're uncivilized and silver sprocket. But for the most part, it's guys who… who… who…
56:11
Tad Eggleston: stapled their own comics together, or paid for their own… whatever. And you've got those…
56:17
Tad Eggleston: festivals slash cons, and then you've got stuff like… like, SPX or Cake, or whatnot, where, you know, maybe phantographics are drawn in Quarterly are there, but you're not gonna see…
56:30
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess this year there was one guy, one guy at Cake that's got a decent rev… I'm trying to remember who it was, even, but has done a decent amount of mainstream art.
56:40
Andy Hartzell: Hmm.
56:42
Tad Eggleston: But one. One in the entire room.
56:44
Andy Hartzell: Bye.
56:45
Tad Eggleston: Had done anything at any, like, the big five.
56:50
Tad Eggleston: Wednesday Warrior-type companies. Except that there's now this split, because in some ways, like, some of the publishers that are cake are bigger than your Wednesday Warrior-type companies, because, you know.
57:04
Tad Eggleston: there were people there who had stuff from Scholastic, there were people there who had stuff from, Abrams.
57:12
Tad Eggleston: Right? And those actually often outsell. I mean, I was talking to Greg Rucka yesterday, and, you know, he just got a TV gig, and one of the things he said that he'd been talking about the people in the writer's room with is how different the scale is between
57:32
Tad Eggleston: floppy comic writing and TV, it's like… You're a massive hit.
57:39
Tad Eggleston: with your Batman comic, if there's a pre-order of $500,000.
57:43
Andy Hartzell: If you have 500,000 people watch your streaming show.
57:48
Tad Eggleston: you're done.
57:49
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
57:52
Tad Eggleston: You failed.
57:54
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
57:57
Tad Eggleston: I don't know where I was going with that, except that, like.
58:01
Tad Eggleston: A, I think that, like, the people, as I get to know them, are so similar.
58:08
Tad Eggleston: And like so many of the same things, so it's weird that they put these guardrails up.
58:14
Tad Eggleston: Between them, that there are so few people that seem…
58:17
Tad Eggleston: One of the reasons I like CXC so much is it's the one con that I go to where I see people from all of the worlds.
58:25
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
58:26
Tad Eggleston: Both, both, both among the exhibitors and among the… the… the… the guests.
58:32
Tad Eggleston: They're the visitors, you know.
58:35
Andy Hartzell: a little more… there used to be a little more kind of flow between the kind of… at least that kind of mainstream sensibility, and the more indie sensibility, and I think, you know.
58:50
Andy Hartzell: You know, I think as Marvel and DC have become these, you know, multi-platform franchises and all the movies and all that, it's separated more, because.
59:02
Tad Eggleston: Right.
59:02
Andy Hartzell: Because… The, you know, main… the…
59:07
Andy Hartzell: mainstream has become so dominant. Right. And so indie has kind of separated away from mainstream.
59:15
Tad Eggleston: Right? But I was even just thinking about some of the smaller license stuff, you know? I mean, I've been really, really happy to see how many…
59:24
Tad Eggleston: of the people that I know from the indie comic scene have been taking part in IDW's Godzilla vs. Whatever City. You know, Carolyn Cash did one for Chicago, and Jesse Lonergan did one for Boston, and…
59:41
Tad Eggleston: Dave Baker did one for LA, and… and that sort of thing, but… but, like…
59:50
Tad Eggleston: even when it comes to, like, doing an Adventure Time, or a My Little Pony, or all of these smaller-ish…
1:00:01
Tad Eggleston: licensed stuff.
1:00:03
Tad Eggleston: you… you know, the number of times I've seen people who… I'm sitting there going.
1:00:11
Tad Eggleston: I don't want to, like… and I won't name any names, because I try to forget them, because they're all good people. But where I'm sitting there going, like.
1:00:21
Tad Eggleston: You're turning your nose up on what would have been a life-changing gig if you got it.
1:00:28
Tad Eggleston: And talking about how you would never do that, because I don't want to sell out and do license stuff, and it's like, you don't want to sell out and do licensed stuff? Wouldn't you love to be able to do your stuff and not work at Target?
1:00:41
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:00:44
Tad Eggleston: And, as you were just saying.
1:00:47
Tad Eggleston: I mean, the people I know who have done My Little Pony…
1:00:51
Tad Eggleston: say, BronyCon… you know, PonyCons are the best. They're the nicest people in the world. I've never been to one, but I actually, like, I kinda wanna go to one, just because of the handful of…
1:01:02
Tad Eggleston: writers and artists that I've ever had on that have done any My Little Pony work and gone to PonyCons, because they're like.
1:01:11
Tad Eggleston: They are the nicest people in the world. You know, they make certain that we're fed, and hydrated, and get breaks, and all of the people coming through are nice.
1:01:25
Tad Eggleston: And actually know your stuff, and don't just, you know, bring you that stack of things that they want to take to that grater.
1:01:35
Andy Hartzell: Oh yeah, for sure. I mean, yeah, there's something…
1:01:40
Andy Hartzell: There's… there is something to… to going to a con where everyone just, you know, is just there for the… for the love of it.
1:01:47
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:01:48
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:01:49
Tad Eggleston: You know?
1:01:51
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's just what I thought about when you… when you said that you actually kind of enjoy doing the licensed stuff sometimes, because it is…
1:01:58
Tad Eggleston: I mean, and for that matter, I remember I had a great… we had a great conversation with Box Brown, who wrote a book
1:02:06
Tad Eggleston: last year or the year before, called the He-Man Effect.
1:02:09
Andy Hartzell: Oh. That is essentially all about the monetization of, of…
1:02:13
Tad Eggleston: nostalgia, but he was also, like, completely honest. He's like, that being said, I have a room full of action figures.
1:02:21
Tad Eggleston: No!
1:02:25
Andy Hartzell: But you can't write about something like that unless you…
1:02:28
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:02:29
Andy Hartzell: Right.
1:02:30
Tad Eggleston: But that's, that's also the thing, is like… I mean…
1:02:35
Tad Eggleston: one of the most talented writers I know, who's written his own stuff for TV, his own stuff in comics.
1:02:43
Tad Eggleston: I've never seen him more excited in his life, except… except maybe when his third son was born.
1:02:49
Tad Eggleston: than when he got a Star Trek writing gig.
1:02:51
Andy Hartzell: In comics.
1:02:53
Tad Eggleston: Like, like, he was like, I'm writing Star Trek now.
1:02:56
Andy Hartzell: I'm like, I guess, I guess I need to go learn about Star Trek now.
1:03:02
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:03:02
Andy Hartzell: No, I mean, it was intimidating to,
1:03:06
Andy Hartzell: you know, to be given, like, the Back to the Future…
1:03:10
Andy Hartzell: franchise. And then to work with Bob Gale, you know, the original writer.
1:03:14
Tad Eggleston: Right?
1:03:16
Andy Hartzell: And, you know, and… because you know that there are… I mean, I saw the movies, I love the movies, but there are people who just know it so much…
1:03:25
Andy Hartzell: More.
1:03:27
Andy Hartzell: And, you know, there's always a… it was always a part of me that was like, I'm not… I can't do this, because I'm not, you know, I'm not steeped in it the way other people are, and I'm gonna make a mistake.
1:03:40
Tad Eggleston: I've heard a lot of people argue that that's an advantage, because if you're too steeped in it, you only want to feed them, rather than doing something.
1:03:49
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:03:50
Andy Hartzell: And, but it, I mean, that one in particular was…
1:03:57
Andy Hartzell: was great, because we did have Bob Gale there, so he, you know, we could kind of… We could…
1:04:03
Tad Eggleston: Hey, hey, Bob, what did you write about this?
1:04:06
Andy Hartzell: I mean, we could come to him with all kinds of, you know, crazy ideas, and then he could…
1:04:10
Tad Eggleston: Did Doc Brown ever say this?
1:04:12
Andy Hartzell: And yeah, and he would kind of bring us… bring us back in. So it was a… it was… it was kind of a…
1:04:18
Tad Eggleston: And you did remember that Doc has a dog? Or did the dog get forgotten?
1:04:22
Andy Hartzell: Well, most of the series was set in the 19… like, early 1930s, when Dr.
1:04:31
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
1:04:32
Andy Hartzell: the age of Marty, you know, when they're the.
1:04:35
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
1:04:35
Andy Hartzell: Young.
1:04:36
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:04:37
Andy Hartzell: So, yeah, I don't think the dog ever appeared in… in our… our version.
1:04:45
Tad Eggleston: You just forgot about the dog! Yeah.
1:04:48
Andy Hartzell: Well, he was not…
1:04:49
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
1:04:50
Andy Hartzell: Well, if I recall correctly…
1:04:52
Tad Eggleston: he had almost the same dog in the 50s named Copernicus, so…
1:04:57
Andy Hartzell: Oh, yeah!
1:04:57
Tad Eggleston: Like, in the 20s, he would have had…
1:05:02
Andy Hartzell: That's right, he would have had, you know, I don't know, Aristotle.
1:05:07
Tad Eggleston: Galileo.
1:05:11
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, no, I don't think… I don't think we got the dog, but that's… but, you know, we weren't able…
1:05:16
Tad Eggleston: Sorry, the only reason it popped into my head was your comment about sitcoms having the episode about the lost dog, and finding the dog, and then never seeing the dog again.
1:05:26
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, well, I think, yeah, maybe we were a little bit into that trap.
1:05:32
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, to be fair, that's about how much the dog was in the movies. It was the joke between, okay, it's the same dog, but in the 50s it's Copernicus, and in the…
1:05:43
Tad Eggleston: In the 90s, it's Einstein.
1:05:45
Andy Hartzell: design.
1:05:47
Tad Eggleston: And then I think he took it with him to the 1800s, but I don't remember.
1:05:51
Andy Hartzell: Well, what about the… the one set in the future? What… who did… was there a dog in…
1:05:58
Andy Hartzell: No, it's not.
1:05:59
Tad Eggleston: Oh, because he was dead, yeah.
1:06:00
Andy Hartzell: Right.
1:06:06
Tad Eggleston: Ugh, haven't watched those in a while, I might need to.
1:06:08
Andy Hartzell: No, I haven't either.
1:06:09
Tad Eggleston: Time travel is… is…
1:06:13
Andy Hartzell: Time travel is…
1:06:15
Tad Eggleston: difficult to write. It is. No, I imagine it is.
1:06:18
Tad Eggleston: We got into these.
1:06:20
Andy Hartzell: Crazy looping conversations about how What about causality in the course of…
1:06:25
Tad Eggleston: Right, among other things, like… You have to decide what rules you're abiding by.
1:06:32
Tad Eggleston: Because… Even if you play things mostly fast and loose, if there's If there aren't
1:06:40
Tad Eggleston: Some inherent dangers to the time travel that you're doing?
1:06:45
Andy Hartzell: Right.
1:06:45
Tad Eggleston: It becomes less interesting.
1:06:49
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:06:51
Tad Eggleston: But there are so many, so many options for rules. Are you in a universe where you can have 7 of yourself at the same place at the same time?
1:07:01
Tad Eggleston: Were you in a universe where if you see yourself.
1:07:04
Tad Eggleston: All of… all of creation winks out of existence.
1:07:07
Andy Hartzell: Well, my main writing partner for that series, Mike Stoneley, was the… was the kind of pedantic stickler for making sure that the time travel rules were
1:07:20
Andy Hartzell: followed, and then I was the one who was always trying to suggest things that would… that broke that continuity, and we
1:07:29
Andy Hartzell: He'd usually win the arguments, and we'd, you know…
1:07:32
Tad Eggleston: I bet you it would turn into something better than either one of you would have done, though, because of that. I think so. I think so. You know. I mean, that's… that's the… I mean…
1:07:45
Tad Eggleston: We've only talked to a handful of writing teams, and all of, you know, even more than, like, writer-artist teams or whatnot, like, how they split up writing duties, how they work as a team.
1:07:58
Tad Eggleston: differs wildly. But… but the one thing that generally they seem to have in common is that
1:08:09
Tad Eggleston: they each bring something very different to the table.
1:08:16
Tad Eggleston: You know, so they complement each other in some way.
1:08:21
Tad Eggleston: like, an example that I love to use is that, like, one of the comics that I've enjoyed over the last few years is called, Undiscovered Country, and it's like this…
1:08:34
Tad Eggleston: dystopian future where the U.S. is…
1:08:39
Tad Eggleston: Completely walled itself off from the rest of the world, and then, like.
1:08:44
Tad Eggleston: a disease starts breaking out in the world, and rumor has it the U.S. has the cure, and they invite X number of people in to come
1:08:54
Tad Eggleston: And everything goes from there. But.
1:08:57
Andy Hartzell: Sounds interesting.
1:08:58
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, initially I was so-so, but then I looked at it, and I'm like, wait a minute.
1:09:02
Tad Eggleston: It's Charles Sewell and Scott Snyder working together, and I adore Scott Snyder's worldbuilding.
1:09:09
Andy Hartzell: Hmm.
1:09:10
Tad Eggleston: But don't always… like, I don't always like his work as much as everybody else does, because I think that sometimes he does so much worldbuilding that he forgets the character building.
1:09:22
Andy Hartzell: And…
1:09:23
Tad Eggleston: And vice versa is true for Charles Sewell. I adore his character building, and sometimes I think he's got these great characters in a world that he didn't quite figure out, and it kind of unravels. So you know what? You put the two of them together…
1:09:41
Tad Eggleston: And sure enough, I've loved it, you know, so… Yeah.
1:09:46
Andy Hartzell: It takes a while to hit. You said you were kind of so-so on it at first, but it…
1:09:50
Tad Eggleston: No, no, I jumped in pretty quickly, I was so-so when I heard about it.
1:09:54
Andy Hartzell: Oh.
1:09:55
Tad Eggleston: And I was so-so when I heard about it, in part because it's like, okay, this is an interesting comic… er, concept, but I'm only so-so on…
1:10:05
Tad Eggleston: Scott Snyder, I mean, these are… in… in…
1:10:08
Tad Eggleston: among Wednesday comics people, these are both A-list writers, but they're both… A-list writers that I have
1:10:16
Tad Eggleston: Generally not liked quite as much as other people.
1:10:19
Tad Eggleston: have liked them. So I wasn't initially sold, because neither one of them are, oh, they have a new book, I have to buy it for me. But then I sat back and thought about.
1:10:30
Tad Eggleston: oh, why is Scott Snyder not somebody that I automatically buy books from? And why is Charles Sewell not somebody that I automatically buy books from? And, oh, they could be perfectly complimentary. Yes, I'm buying Issue 1, and we're gonna hop on this train and see where it goes. Yeah.
1:10:49
Tad Eggleston: You know…
1:10:52
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, that is… that was, you know, all my cartooning, you know, I'm a solo cartoonist. I mean, I've done little kind of, you know, experimental, just kind of zine kind of collaborations with people, but,
1:11:07
Andy Hartzell: again, working at Telltale, that was kind of a revelation for me.
1:11:14
Andy Hartzell: How you could create something in a group, And it could be…
1:11:21
Andy Hartzell: greater than the sum of its parts. And, you know, to write something and then have the animators take it up to the next level, or, you know, or to come up with an idea, and then have other writers that can bring their own
1:11:35
Andy Hartzell: strengths to… to burnish that idea. I mean, it was a really kind of joyful kind of experience working there.
1:11:42
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:11:43
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:11:44
Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm gonna move us into my favorite closing question, just because I don't want to take up your whole afternoon, as much as I'm enjoying myself. We'll get to see each other in a couple weeks.
1:11:56
Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
1:11:59
Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic.
1:12:00
Tad Eggleston: But we don't really have rules.
1:12:03
Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
1:12:06
Tad Eggleston: But something that you love.
1:12:08
Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you'd like them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
1:12:20
Andy Hartzell: Okay.
1:12:22
Andy Hartzell: And no limits, if you're, if you're, if you're somebody that sits there going.
1:12:26
Tad Eggleston: I can't give you just one thing, then give me 10. Whatever.
1:12:30
Andy Hartzell: Again…
1:12:32
Tad Eggleston: we're a comics podcast, so I love it when it can be a comic, but, like, Andrew Iden said his tomato garden. So, so, like…
1:12:42
Andy Hartzell: Well, okay, so… and maybe I'm… maybe I won't say a com… I mean, there's… because most of the comics that I love are gonna be…
1:12:49
Andy Hartzell: things that lots of people love. Although, you know, I could sit here.
1:12:53
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, Nate Powell went with new X-Men books, because, like, he hadn't read X-Men in 20 years, and he'd gotten back into it, and he's in the indie comic scene, so nobody around him was reading it.
1:13:07
Tad Eggleston: So it doesn't have to be…
1:13:11
Tad Eggleston: You know, it could be more… more personal.
1:13:17
Andy Hartzell: Let me think… well, what… I, I will say, and this is…
1:13:25
Tad Eggleston: And I do love that you're doing the reverse of most people. You're looking up in the air and thinking, most people with a shelf behind them would be spinning around and scanning their titles. That's what we get 90% of the time. It's like, where's the book… unless there's a bookshelf in front of you, too, I don't know.
1:13:44
Tad Eggleston: But you seem to be searching your memory.
1:13:47
Andy Hartzell: Well, like, there's several… there's several possible directions that I could go. You know, I've already.
1:13:53
Tad Eggleston: Take them all.
1:14:00
Andy Hartzell: Well, so I'm a… I'm also… so my… my other half, my husband, is a musical theater writer, and I am one of those…
1:14:11
Andy Hartzell: I'm a… so I'm also kind of a musical theater queen.
1:14:16
Tad Eggleston: musical theater.
1:14:17
Andy Hartzell: And I see a lot of commonality and inter… like, there is something very similar between comics and musicals that
1:14:28
Andy Hartzell: I find it really interesting that I'm surprised that there are not more people who are not into both, because both of them are…
1:14:36
Andy Hartzell: essentially these impure art forms. Like, the reason both forms are dismissed is because they're… is because they're… they're, you know.
1:14:47
Andy Hartzell: Comics is both writing and art, and, you know, and there are a lot of people who object to putting writing and art together and turning it into something, you know, it's like that's neither one nor the other, that's neither fish nor fowl, and this is why a lot of people consider it
1:15:04
Andy Hartzell: So…
1:15:05
Tad Eggleston: I mean, because, I mean, that's why everybody eats plain hamburgers, too, because, I mean, clearly, you should never, ever mix…
1:15:13
Andy Hartzell: right.
1:15:16
Andy Hartzell: When it's working well, when it's this dance between writing and art, and neither one dominates, then it's… then it becomes this purely.
1:15:25
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:15:26
Andy Hartzell: kind of thing.
1:15:27
Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
1:15:28
Andy Hartzell: cannot be…
1:15:30
Andy Hartzell: dis… it cannot be turned into as component parts. And I think that the same is true with… with musicals, you know? Absolutely. They're both drama and music, and for that reason, a lot of people find them to be, you know, a lesser art form, because they're.
1:15:46
Tad Eggleston: No.
1:15:47
Andy Hartzell: Not as.
1:15:47
Tad Eggleston: No.
1:15:48
Andy Hartzell: But when that dance, when the music and the words and the story just lead in and out of one another perfectly, then it's raised to this great new level. So I wish there were more people who could, like, do that code switching and talk about.
1:16:05
Tad Eggleston: You are in really good company with… Howard Chaikin.
1:16:11
Andy Hartzell: Oh, okay.
1:16:12
Tad Eggleston: Howard Chaikin is a massive musical… music theater.
1:16:16
Andy Hartzell: fan. I didn't know that.
1:16:18
Tad Eggleston: He goes to both New York and London every year just to take in shows.
1:16:23
Andy Hartzell: Hmm.
1:16:24
Tad Eggleston: really big Sondheim fan, really big old school.
1:16:29
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:16:31
Tad Eggleston: Like… Yeah.
1:16:32
Tad Eggleston: old Damon Runyon-type… Guys and dolls type stuff.
1:16:37
Tad Eggleston: Damn.
1:16:38
Andy Hartzell: Professor.
1:16:40
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, and there's something, you know, I like comics that have that kind of theatrical sensibility to them, too, that have that kind of artifice to them. I like… I like artifice.
1:16:50
Tad Eggleston: Do you have any favorite musicals?
1:16:52
Andy Hartzell: I mean, I'm… I am a big Sondheim fan, I love, you know, I guess, follies, and .
1:16:59
Tad Eggleston: That is also Howard's favorite.
1:17:02
Andy Hartzell: Oh, yeah. you know, I'm a Frank Lesser fan, too. I love Most Happy Fella, which is, his magnum opus, and
1:17:16
Andy Hartzell: And I, you know, I'm… I like chess, which is going back to Broadway this year, and
1:17:27
Andy Hartzell: I could go on and off, but .
1:17:29
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's a good list. Alright. It's a good list, and I will have to go track down Most Happy Fella and Chess, because I don't know if I know those two personally.
1:17:40
Tad Eggleston: Because I'm just the wrong generation to have been around a lot of musical theater people. Just young enough. But I was… I was blessed that, like.
1:17:50
Tad Eggleston: My best friend in high school, she's still one of my best friends, Was the music theater geek.
1:17:56
Tad Eggleston: Got her master's at Boston Conservatory, that sort of thing. So, like, I'm not… unversed, I just, like, between…
1:18:06
Tad Eggleston: not having…
1:18:07
Tad Eggleston: The time or money to go to it, and not having a community of people around me that were all over it.
1:18:14
Andy Hartzell: Right.
1:18:14
Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
1:18:16
Tad Eggleston: And again, like…
1:18:20
Andy Hartzell: I feel like…
1:18:26
Tad Eggleston: I feel like the Andrew Lloyd Webber era of musicals has kind of become a different era of musicals.
1:18:35
Tad Eggleston: And this is not to, like, slam him, I know a lot of people who love lots of this stuff, and I don't dislike all of it.
1:18:44
Tad Eggleston: But… but…
1:18:48
Tad Eggleston: Like, what you were talking about in terms of the words and the music and the guts, and the, like…
1:18:55
Tad Eggleston: storytelling, I think.
1:18:58
Tad Eggleston: For a while, in the late 80s into the 90s, there were a lot more that were just… Pretty.
1:19:06
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, and I think you've got that sort of paparrettta, you know.
1:19:10
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:19:10
Andy Hartzell: Weber School, you know, really started… it was… it developed more from concept albums. Like, musical theater developed out of…
1:19:20
Andy Hartzell: you know, vaudeville and Musical Review, and there was a certain way of putting the show together where, you know, you gotta have the chorus number, and then you gotta have the ballad, and you gotta have… and it was a more theatrical way of putting a show together, whereas,
1:19:37
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, the Andrew Lloyd Webber School started as the album, and then it's… you transfer the album to the…
1:19:44
Andy Hartzell: Right. But it still kind of feels like an album.
1:19:48
Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
1:19:49
Tad Eggleston: And I feel like we're starting… I mean, like, I feel like Rent and then Hamilton, I mean, to an Avenue Q in between, to name the really obvious ones that even the guy who can't go digging up all of this stuff managed to notice, started to kind of shift us back
1:20:09
Tad Eggleston: or at least morph us. I think you might still have a little bit of the album Dominating, but…
1:20:19
Tad Eggleston: But it went back to…
1:20:23
Andy Hartzell: To the… yeah, I mean, I, I love.
1:20:25
Tad Eggleston: To being meteor.
1:20:27
Andy Hartzell: It may be, yeah, yeah. You know, I'm… I like comedy, I like musical comedy, and I think it was, you know, right around the turn of the century, Mel Brooks, you know, came up with the producers.
1:20:38
Tad Eggleston: producers.
1:20:39
Andy Hartzell: Avenue Q, Drowsy Chaperone, Hairspray, all of these sort of com… musical comedy kind of came back.
1:20:47
Tad Eggleston: After having been gone for a couple of decades.
1:20:50
Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and particularly because, like.
1:20:57
Tad Eggleston: I mean, comedy goes in and out of favor in film and in comics, but it gets replaced by, like, action, or… or drama, or, you know, some other…
1:21:09
Tad Eggleston: specific…
1:21:12
Tad Eggleston: genre of things, whereas I feel like as the comedy musical went out, it was kind of replaced by the sing-along musical, not the…
1:21:23
Tad Eggleston: oh, we're in a more serious period. It wasn't any more serious, it was just…
1:21:30
Tad Eggleston: Easier to sing along to.
1:21:32
Andy Hartzell: Maybe?
1:21:34
Tad Eggleston: Or the Disney musical, almost.
1:21:36
Tad Eggleston: And, and this is… this is without, like, bashing
1:21:40
Tad Eggleston: too many of the Disney, because in some ways, like, during that period, Disney might have been making the best musicals, you know? I mean, you know, Beauty and the Beast, .
1:21:53
Andy Hartzell: Aladdin, all those…
1:21:54
Tad Eggleston: Aladdin, Little Mermaid, those were fantastic. You know, I am… I am far from the Disney adult, and… and… and there… there is a stretch of movies…
1:22:08
Tad Eggleston: from, like… really from…
1:22:12
Tad Eggleston: from beauty to, like, the Lion King, and The Lion King I wasn't as big on, but that kind of slipped hard after that, I thought.
1:22:22
Tad Eggleston: That it was like, oh my god, these are…
1:22:25
Tad Eggleston: These are really good. They're not just… It's…
1:22:30
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, I'm older than you, so I do kind of remember the, I mean, like, I was way into Disney as a kid, but…
1:22:40
Andy Hartzell: you know, and I was a kid in the 70s, when Disney had, like, two movies, and The Rescuers is the only Disney movie that came out.
1:22:49
Tad Eggleston: Rescuers was great.
1:22:50
Andy Hartzell: At a prime age, you know, prime.
1:22:52
Tad Eggleston: I love the rescuers. Right. Right.
1:22:54
Andy Hartzell: And, you know, and then…
1:22:59
Andy Hartzell: And so when they kind of hit that stride in the late 80s, it was this, oh my god, Disney can actually, you know, they can actually make commercial hits. They can actually, reach a crossover audience. So that, yeah, it was a big deal.
1:23:17
Tad Eggleston: For the first time since… Like, the 30s and 40s.
1:23:22
Andy Hartzell: Oh, yeah, or… yeah.
1:23:25
Tad Eggleston: You know, I actually, I mean, this is a whole different conversation. Sometimes I think.
1:23:30
Tad Eggleston: and I say this as somebody whose favorite Disney movie might be Fantasia, that the Fantasia experiment.
1:23:40
Tad Eggleston: Set Disney back.
1:23:43
Tad Eggleston: For a couple of decades. They made this thing that the world wasn't ready for.
1:23:47
Tad Eggleston: And…
1:23:49
Tad Eggleston: they decided, because of that, to, like, stop making music movies at all, and do a lot more dumb live action. And that's where you got your Harvey the Love Bug, and all of the early Kurt Russell…
1:24:02
Tad Eggleston: Disney, you know, boy in the…
1:24:06
Tad Eggleston: what, gray flannel suit? I don't even remember all of them. I just… I just remember seeing them on the wall of… a handful of them were okay. I like Blackbeard's ghosts.
1:24:16
Andy Hartzell: The love bug is a pretty good.
1:24:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I like the love bug, I like the shaggy dog, but… but, you know, it was this, like, utter shift.
1:24:25
Tad Eggleston: And they didn't really come back to… Cartoons as more than… Kids stuff.
1:24:36
Tad Eggleston: For a while.
1:24:39
Andy Hartzell: I mean, I think maybe you got your continuity a little bit.
1:24:43
Tad Eggleston: It's entirely possible.
1:24:43
Andy Hartzell: No, that's entirely possible. Like, 1942 or something like that, and, you know, they, they,
1:24:52
Andy Hartzell: The love bug wasn't for another 20 years after that. Well, yeah.
1:24:57
Tad Eggleston: But I'm just trying to think what… what good animated movies…
1:25:03
Andy Hartzell: After that, Bambi came after that, Dumbo came after that.
1:25:06
Tad Eggleston: Did they come after Fantasia?
1:25:08
Andy Hartzell: Yeah!
1:25:09
Tad Eggleston: Okay, then my continuity's blown.
1:25:11
Andy Hartzell: It was more, you know, World War II.
1:25:14
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no, I'm sorry, Fantasia was third.
1:25:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, okay, screw that entirely. Dumbo was the next year, Bambi was the year after that.
1:25:23
Tad Eggleston: Then he had Saludos Amigos, 3 Cavalleros…
1:25:26
Andy Hartzell: Absolutely.
1:25:26
Tad Eggleston: My music, fun and fancy free, Melody Time.
1:25:30
Tad Eggleston: Ichabod and Mr. Toad, Cinderella after that, Alice in Wonderland after that, Peter Pan, yeah, okay, just hit me over there. Sleeping Beauty was after that. Why did I think Fantasia was.
1:25:40
Andy Hartzell: I saw why, you know, why Disney kind of lost a step or two, in the 40s, but I don't think…
1:25:47
Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, now I'm looking at it, and I don't think they lost a step.
1:25:51
Andy Hartzell: What they did is they stopped putting out as many of them. Yeah.
1:25:58
Tad Eggleston: I mean, they only put out 3 in all of the 60s, and it was 101 Dalmatian, Sword in the Stone, and Jungle Book. Very good movies, but only 3 of them, whereas they'd been doing…
1:26:08
Tad Eggleston: They did 5 in the 50s, they did…
1:26:13
Tad Eggleston: One a year in the 40s.
1:26:17
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, because Walt Disney turned his attention more to the parks. Right. Interested in movies at the end of his life.
1:26:25
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:26:27
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, okay.
1:26:29
Tad Eggleston: Overall, that makes me feel better.
1:26:32
Tad Eggleston: Makes me feel better that they didn't, like, Make this, this… terrible decision.
1:26:42
Andy Hartzell: But it's interesting that you… that Fantasia is your favorite Disney movie. I… I… I… I always get a little bit sleepy in Fantasia in certain parts.
1:26:50
Tad Eggleston: But I'm okay with that. I'm okay with that.
1:26:53
Tad Eggleston: And the other thing is… like…
1:26:59
Tad Eggleston: what… what I would really love is if… if the real Fantasia experiment had happened, because originally they had intended to, like, keep it in theaters
1:27:12
Tad Eggleston: continuously, and just swap out segments. Yeah. I mean, there was supposed to be a Sal… I mean, I've seen some of the sketches from a Salvador Dali baseball.
1:27:21
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:27:21
Tad Eggleston: You know, my favorite Fantasia segment is actually from
1:27:27
Tad Eggleston: Fantasia 2000. I love their Rhapsody in blue.
1:27:32
Andy Hartzell: I knew you were gonna say Rhapsody in Blue. I love it too.
1:27:35
Tad Eggleston: I mean.
1:27:36
Andy Hartzell: inspired.
1:27:38
Tad Eggleston: What?
1:27:39
Andy Hartzell: It was, it was Hirschfeld, like, they were going after the Hirschfeld.
1:27:44
Tad Eggleston: And I just, I, I… I love music, I love… comics…
1:27:55
Tad Eggleston: I don't love cartoons as much as I love comics, but… but…
1:28:02
Tad Eggleston: But, like, silent cartoons feel more like comics to me?
1:28:06
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, they're a lot closer to towns.
1:28:09
Tad Eggleston: you know… I mean, I guess part of it is, like…
1:28:14
Tad Eggleston: For a cartoon that's not silent to work for me, they… they… it better have really good voice acting.
1:28:21
Tad Eggleston: And I don't mean really famous voice acting. I mean…
1:28:25
Tad Eggleston: People who know how to sync with Who sync well with… with the image.
1:28:34
Tad Eggleston: Who, who managed to get the emotion right.
1:28:38
Tad Eggleston: et cetera, because… Nothing can take me out of a cartoon more.
1:28:46
Tad Eggleston: than… if I feel like the audio track is off.
1:28:54
Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
1:28:56
Andy Hartzell: And not…
1:28:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, not often, like, they, they threaded it wrong. Often, like.
1:29:04
Tad Eggleston: You weren't paying attention to when the lips were moving.
1:29:10
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, I think too many.
1:29:12
Tad Eggleston: Or that sounds really happy, but that character looks really sad.
1:29:17
Andy Hartzell: But when you say silent, though, I mean, there's not a whole lot of completely silent cartoons out there. Are you talking about cartoons from the silent era, or are you talking about.
1:29:26
Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, I, I mean wordless.
1:29:29
Andy Hartzell: Yeah.
1:29:30
Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, Fantasia. I mean, like, a lot of the… the Looney Tunes, where there's little to no…
1:29:39
Tad Eggleston: Actual dialogue as much as running around the music.
1:29:44
Andy Hartzell: Did you see the… there's a wordless… I can't remember the… the wordless cartoon that came out this year about the… the animals that survived the kind of post-apocalyptic flood? What is it called? It's a…
1:30:06
Andy Hartzell: It's… it's an incredible movie.
1:30:13
Tad Eggleston: Zip.
1:30:14
Tad Eggleston: Low?
1:30:16
Andy Hartzell: Flow. Flow is the movie, yes.
1:30:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah…
1:30:19
Andy Hartzell: It's.
1:30:21
Tad Eggleston: I know, that's the…
1:30:23
Andy Hartzell: is it Bulgarian or Latvian, I think? But it kind of had a… it was kind of an arthouse hit in the States, and yeah, it's about a cat who survives this sort of apocalyptic flood and makes
1:30:43
Andy Hartzell: common cause with other animal survivors. And it's very mysterious. It's very.
1:30:51
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think I've only seen the trailer so far, but it's been very much on my list.
1:30:57
Andy Hartzell: You should see it if you like.
1:30:58
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
1:31:01
Andy Hartzell: Storytelling.
1:31:04
Tad Eggleston: I do. I mean, I like words too, but, like…
1:31:09
Tad Eggleston: I've become more and more appreciative of the ability to tell stories With an economy of words.
1:31:18
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I mean, and because comics is a visual art form, and people kind of, you know, sometimes forget that, and if you can convey something with
1:31:29
Andy Hartzell: With a drawing, it's better not to underscore and underline it with words, usually.
1:31:36
Andy Hartzell: And, you know, and Flow does a beautiful job of individuating, like, it's got you know,
1:31:44
Andy Hartzell: It's got a, you know, a bunch of these, you know, only slightly anthropomorphized animals, but.
1:31:51
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:31:52
Andy Hartzell: Gives people, like, a very distinct personality.
1:31:55
Andy Hartzell: and you… You, you, you…
1:31:58
Andy Hartzell: you know, just, you know, like what I was saying with Fox Plenty of Funny, I mean, you can interpret it in lots of different ways, but it's…
1:32:07
Andy Hartzell: You know, it's got… the characters are real enough that you can invest yourself in them, and, you know, it's very satisfying.
1:32:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I might literally go down and…
1:32:21
Tad Eggleston: Ask my wife if she wants to watch a movie.
1:32:25
Tad Eggleston: I think we're both exhausted, so it might be a after… after a nap and dinner, but… but she… she…
1:32:32
Tad Eggleston: She watches, like, 80% animation, so, like, convincing her to watch a cartoon is never very…
1:32:41
Tad Eggleston: Andy, thank you so much. It has been a blast. You're welcome back anytime. I, look forward to seeing you in…
1:32:49
Tad Eggleston: Columbus, and yeah. Be well.
1:32:52
Andy Hartzell: Pretty good Zine Fest in Chicago, will you be there?
1:32:58
Tad Eggleston: I… hadn't even talked about that yet. I don't know if I actually knew that one, so the answer is… I am…
1:33:08
Tad Eggleston: 75% more likely to be there than I was too many.
1:33:11
Andy Hartzell: Okay.
1:33:17
Tad Eggleston: Cause, cause I, I, I do, I, I do love to, to…
1:33:21
Tad Eggleston: to try to… is it just Chicago Zine Fest online?
1:33:25
Tad Eggleston: I thought it was… Harold Washington?
1:33:28
Andy Hartzell: The Pretty Good Zine Fest is what I know it as, but maybe it's Chicago Zine Fest also.
1:33:35
Andy Hartzell: But I think it should be pretty good.
1:33:37
Tad Eggleston: That says… that says… that says July 19th, but when I googled pretty good…
1:33:41
Andy Hartzell: This… this is October, I think.
1:33:44
Tad Eggleston: when I googled Pretty Good SceneFest, it came up on top.
1:33:49
Andy Hartzell: Not really.
1:33:50
Tad Eggleston: Well, so, maybe no one will show up, because they're all waiting for July.
1:33:54
Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll have to figure it out. I'll have to figure it out, because I do try very hard to catch.
1:34:02
Tad Eggleston: Chicago area, and Milwaukee area, because I'm, like.
1:34:10
Tad Eggleston: Smack dab in… smack dab in between.
1:34:13
Andy Hartzell: Hmm.
1:34:14
Tad Eggleston: So, are you going to Milk?
1:34:18
Andy Hartzell: What is milk?
1:34:19
Tad Eggleston: That's the Milwaukee… is essentially Milwaukee's version of cake. In fact, they…
1:34:25
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, they…
1:34:26
Tad Eggleston: I called it milked.
1:34:28
Andy Hartzell: When is it?
1:34:30
Andy Hartzell: I know there's something in Madison in early December that I think I might be going to.
1:34:39
Tad Eggleston: Milk Comic Fest, one-day festival.
1:34:46
Tad Eggleston: September 27th.
1:34:48
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, this year.
1:34:50
Tad Eggleston: 10 to 4.
1:34:52
Andy Hartzell: Hmm.
1:34:54
Andy Hartzell: Yeah, I don't think I'm gonna make it to that one.
1:34:56
Tad Eggleston: None.
1:34:57
Andy Hartzell: I gotta…
1:34:57
Tad Eggleston: If you're… if you're ever in Milwaukee, you definitely need to hit, Lion's Tooth Bookstore.
1:35:03
Tad Eggleston: Is… is, like, one of my favorite independent Comic shops, slash bookshops, slash… Yeah, lion's tooth.
1:35:13
Andy Hartzell: Alright.
1:35:13
Tad Eggleston: on… on connect… Knick and neck.
1:35:17
Tad Eggleston: It's on the…
1:35:18
Andy Hartzell: very, Wisconsin… Wisconsinian. Yeah.
1:35:22
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, it's this shop that's, that's comics and books and, and…
1:35:29
Tad Eggleston: And they have book clubs, and they have a wine group, and they have…
1:35:37
Tad Eggleston: Live music sometimes, and during the summer, they do… Cartooning summer camps for… for kids.
1:35:45
Tad Eggleston: it's just a cool, cool little spot with… with a couple of wonderful owners.
1:35:51
Tad Eggleston: I recommend it to anybody, and they would absolutely carry your book.
1:35:57
Andy Hartzell: Okay.
1:35:57
Tad Eggleston: If they don't already, it would be one that would be totally up their alley.
1:36:01
Andy Hartzell: Nice.
1:36:02
Tad Eggleston: So, again, thank you so much, for Andy Hartzell. This has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.