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With Great Power #281... 22 Panels with Eran Aviram & Aviv Or · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Aviv Or: Audio, right?
• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Only audio, yes.
• 0:03
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. I guess it's afternoon for Aviv and Iran? Or is it even evening now? One of the two. You guys are… you get UK-based?
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. My guests today on 22 Panels are Aviv Orr and Iran Avirom?
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, hey!
• 0:24
  Aviv Or: Hello.
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: And they, they just released… their book.
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: It'd be great if I actually had it in my head, rather than, like, had to… to go open it and look at it. When do you want to introduce your book while I'm struggling?
• 0:39
  Aviv Or: So, book is Crystal Heart.
• 0:43
  Tad Eggleston: That's the… that's the word I was looking for.
• 0:45
  Aviv Or: S.
• 0:49
  Tad Eggleston: Crystal Hart from Dark Horse Comics, who wants to give me the front counter pitch?
• 0:55
  Aviv Or: So…
• 0:57
  Aviv Or: Crystal Heart is, so, the front counter page is if I'm selling it at a comic book store, right?
• 1:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:04
  Aviv Or: So I guess the first thing I would ask is, are you familiar with, role-playing games?
• 1:10
  Tad Eggleston: I am.
• 1:11
  Tad Eggleston: Buy up and sell.
• 1:13
  Aviv Or: So, crystal Heart is about four friends who are role-playing a game in an original setting.
• 1:21
  Aviv Or: Where everyone's heart is made of stone, and special agents, you know, player characters, remove their own hearts and replace them with crystals that they find lying around in the world.
• 1:33
  Aviv Or: And those crystals give them special abilities, kind of like superpowers, but they also change their personality in all kinds of weird and unexpected ways. And the story follows both what happens in the story that they're telling together.
• 1:49
  Aviv Or: But also what happens around the table, because as we know, role-playing games are…
• 1:57
  Aviv Or: just the fact that we're letting a bunch of dice decide some of the things that happen, and there are rules to form the story, it creates a lot of fun and funny things around the table itself. So, in the comics, you can see both, you know.
• 2:15
  Aviv Or: The story itself, with all the heroics and the adventure and the magic and mystery, and the fun stuff that happens around the table.
• 2:24
  Tad Eggleston: That's a very well, succinctly put, and you accomplish it well. I, I noticed… I've seen…
• 2:34
  Tad Eggleston: Comics along these lines… Before, or at least parts of comics,
• 2:41
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Rosenberg and Tyler Boss started out each chapter of four kids walking to a bank with some sort of play, whether it was a role-playing game or kids playing video games together. But, like, what you did that I don't think I've seen before
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: Is really mix the table, and…
• 3:05
  Tad Eggleston: The gameplay, both in terms of having both on the page, but occasionally by…
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: trying to… trying to come up with the… the… the correct word, having…
• 3:19
  Eran Aviram: Overlapping. Overimposing, yeah, yeah.
• 3:21
  Tad Eggleston: Superimposing, there we go, superimposing the, the, the…
• 3:26
  Tad Eggleston: The game character on… on the real-world character,
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: To, to emphasize what's going on.
• 3:36
  Aviv Or: That's… that's one of the… that's one of the tools, or features, I don't know how to call it, that, we…
• 3:44
  Aviv Or: kind of found very early on, before we even started Crystal Heart. We did a comic, previous to it that we'll maybe discuss a bit later.
• 3:53
  Aviv Or: But we found this, tool to… so, just for people listening at home, occasionally you would see the characters sitting around the table, mid-game.
• 4:08
  Aviv Or: And, if you've ever played a role-playing game, you know that sometimes you talk as the player, I'm going to roll a die, oh, I got a 20, that's fun. And sometimes you speak as your character, as the character that you play. And some people, when they do that, their voice changes, their accent changes, their demeanor change, like…
• 4:28
  Aviv Or: it shows that you are not speaking as yourself, you're speaking as a character. So we have a way to show that in the comic.
• 4:36
  Aviv Or: Where, when one of the
• 4:38
  Aviv Or: people around the table speak as their in-game character. We kind of draw the story character around them, give them some of the features of that character in a specific color.
• 4:52
  Aviv Or: that relates to that character, and then you know, oh, it's not Rotam, the player, speaking, it's the character that she plays, Muna, that is currently speaking. It's very difficult to talk about characters playing characters where they're all characters, they're all made up.
• 5:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, again, we play… we've done 12 sessions of Die on this podcast after having
• 5:17
  Tad Eggleston: gone through the book by Kieran Gillen and Stephanie Hans. So, at least our long-time listeners… hi Mom, hi Adam.
• 5:28
  Tad Eggleston: Have some experience, like, figuring out how…
• 5:33
  Tad Eggleston: How to understand what we're saying.
• 5:37
  Tad Eggleston: So… My first, and it's probably the…
• 5:43
  Tad Eggleston: Obvious question, particularly because you, you…
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: you call it a real play, but, you know, you're showing the dice rolls. Did you make your decisions based on dice rolls? Did you play the game and write it as you go, or did you have an idea and fudge the dice because you wanted to write a story?
• 6:02
  Eran Aviram: This is, like, the classic question.
• 6:05
  Eran Aviram: Which we get a lot, because it sort of makes sense that it would be… I mean, it's a game, we shouldn't play. Wasn't it just a game that we played, and then recorded? No.
• 6:16
  Eran Aviram: It started out as actually a game that we actually sat down to create. It took 10 years from the moment we created the game, and we only played, like, 5 sessions.
• 6:27
  Eran Aviram: Something like 10 years, even more, until the day we decided to make long-form comics, and then we said, let's use this one. Let's use this idea, this concept that we already know works as an interesting role-playing game world.
• 6:44
  Eran Aviram: And then we sat down and created the story.
• 6:48
  Eran Aviram: Because it's… it's a story, it's a comics, first and foremost. It's a comics about the game, it's not a game that created the comics.
• 6:57
  Tad Eggleston: That's reasonable, but it would have been equally reasonable the other way, just harder.
• 7:05
  Eran Aviram: I mean, I don't want the dice to actually dictate to me what is going to happen in my story. I get that. It's… it's tricky. I do want them to surprise the reader, and sometimes they surprise me as well. Sometimes when I'm not sure what would happen, I didn't literally roll a dice, right, as a writer.
• 7:22
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 7:23
  Eran Aviram: But I said, what would happen now that would have surprised me around the table if it would have happened? If it would have happened. Because of rules, because of dice, because of whatever. And that's where the story went, because we do want to tell a story about people actually playing a game, and this is the sort of thing that happens in a game.
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, absolutely. So tell me about this system, because I don't… I don't know… I don't know this system.
• 7:47
  Eran Aviram: Very quickly, it's called Savage Worlds. We really like it. It's way more popular in the US than it is in the UK, actually. So, most of our audience, I think, is from the US as well.
• 8:01
  Tad Eggleston: And…
• 8:03
  Eran Aviram: it's… it's very simple as a system… as the system goes. You have dice, it's… it's all playing games, obviously, you have dice, and your character has attributes and skills.
• 8:14
  Eran Aviram: Any of them is a die. So, for example, if you have agility, it can be D4, which is not a lot. It can be D12, which is, like, Olympic level.
• 8:25
  Eran Aviram: And whenever you try to do something, you roll the die. If you got a 4 or above, you did it.
• 8:31
  Eran Aviram: basically speaking. Obviously, it goes way beyond that. Right, right. But that's the basics. And it's really simple, and it's really straightforward, and it works…
• 8:41
  Eran Aviram: Well, for our purposes, because we don't actually want to get into super-duper extra-long tactical fights with hit points and the like.
• 8:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right, no, I,
• 8:55
  Tad Eggleston: I tend towards the less crunchy games myself. That's one of the reasons why when… when Phil, who will be joining us shortly, asked about, like, playing die, I went, oh, this seems incredibly non-crunchy, and just.
• 9:10
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 9:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, please.
• 9:12
  Eran Aviram: die sort of cheats by giving each player a die. Right, right. That's…
• 9:19
  Tad Eggleston: And, and others excited die, but yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:24
  Tad Eggleston: But I think the last session we played, I didn't have to roll my dice at all.
• 9:29
  Tad Eggleston: Which… I think somebody did.
• 9:33
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but, like, we just wound up bouncing around and, and…
• 9:38
  Tad Eggleston: Didn't do specific dice rolls, which…
• 9:40
  Tad Eggleston: it's just as much fun for me, like, like, I know that as a role player.
• 9:46
  Tad Eggleston: And I have limited experience, one of the frustrations is…
• 9:51
  Tad Eggleston: When you can't do the thing you want to. Or…
• 9:55
  Eran Aviram: I… I would… I would say that the issue would be with playing the wrong system then. Yeah. Because there are systems… I should give,
• 10:04
  Eran Aviram: A disclaimer first, I walk in the field, I am editor of foreplaying games in my day-to-day life, and I'm going to bring an example from a game that I've worked on called Legend in the Mist.
• 10:16
  Eran Aviram: And in that game, for example… Plug the hell out of your games, too. You're welcome to. So, Legend in the Mist is the latest one in a series that began with City of Mist, and the main concept of them, they are all built on, like, an engine called…
• 10:31
  Eran Aviram: These days, less so, but originally an engine called Apocalypse Engine, which is, like, a whole line of
• 10:40
  Eran Aviram: I would say, completely different…
• 10:45
  Eran Aviram: philosophy, gaming philosophy, compared to, for example, D&D. In D&D, and in Savit World, you roll, and as we said, you press a number, you succeeded, great, you didn't succeed.
• 10:58
  Eran Aviram: you failed, and if you failed, nothing happens. And that's…
• 11:02
  Eran Aviram: annoying a lot of the time. It's… it can be incredibly annoying if it happens several times in a row. And why am I here? The dice are just not in my favor, I'm… I… nothing is happening.
• 11:15
  Eran Aviram: the story is not… not only is it not going my way, it just isn't going anywhere. I'm just cruising along. So, in Legend in the Mist, for example, that cannot happen.
• 11:27
  Eran Aviram: Because if you did not succeed.
• 11:29
  Eran Aviram: First of all, you do not necessarily fail, which is interesting, and also, you get consequences. Something happens. It can happen to you.
• 11:37
  Eran Aviram: But you are still in the story. Something still happened to you. And that's really interesting, and I would highly recommend that sort of philosophy as a playstyle.
• 11:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 11:48
  Eran Aviram: It absolutely did not work for our comics, because we want the very simple, straightforward idea that everyone gets, you pass the number, you make it, you didn't pass the number, you didn't make it.
• 12:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 12:01
  Eran Aviram: We don't… we didn't want the system
• 12:04
  Eran Aviram: the rules to tell the story for us, which is what… the whole point of Legend in the Mace is, like.
• 12:10
  Eran Aviram: the system really helps us being a storyteller. We don't want it. We want to tell the story. So we had to use something simple and straightforward, and potentially, potentially, annoying, which I think
• 12:24
  Eran Aviram: Probably somewhere in the book.
• 12:26
  Aviv Or: And also, the fact that Savage Worlds,
• 12:30
  Aviv Or: Does have all these different, dice, and cards, and bennies, which are these, like, poker chips that you can use to roll again, or to get all kinds of other bonuses to the game.
• 12:43
  Aviv Or: They're all visual elements, which are great when you do a comics, which is a visual, medium. So that definitely worked in our favor.
• 12:52
  Eran Aviram: it gave something for the players around the table to do. We could show them doing stuff, or caring about stuff, or holding stuff, or, you know, actually doing interesting stuff, not just sitting and talking, which is…
• 13:04
  Eran Aviram: Multiple.
• 13:05
  Tad Eggleston: So, we're…
• 13:11
  Tad Eggleston: You… you clearly picked this game, but… but is it also licensed? Is it one of… is it from your company, Iran, or… or…
• 13:20
  Eran Aviram: No, okay, so I'm…
• 13:22
  Tad Eggleston: But it…
• 13:23
  Eran Aviram: It's definitely licensed, it's licensed Pinnacle Entertainment Group, who are not my company.
• 13:29
  Eran Aviram: We started…
• 13:31
  Eran Aviram: by… Aviv, you'll remind me, but I think we've just chosen Savage Walls because we liked it, and we decided that it fits us for all the reasons we explained.
• 13:41
  Eran Aviram: And also, it had a FEN, license that allowed anyone to do stuff for Savage World under specific conditions, and it started, and, like.
• 13:51
  Eran Aviram: 15 minutes after we started, after we published, or something like that. Very, very quickly, like, in a few weeks, probably, they contacted us and offered us to become an ACE, which is what they call a specific class of companies that
• 14:07
  Eran Aviram: are allowed more, they have a bigger license. We can do way more.
• 14:12
  Eran Aviram: And they said, just to be sure, just to be clear, and because we really like what you're doing, let's not go with the fan, let's make you an ace, then everything is covered, legalese-wise, you can just continue on explaining the rules in your book, that's fine, best of luck.
• 14:31
  Eran Aviram: We love it that you, you know, tell other people about our game and teach them how to play it, so, yeah.
• 14:36
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's a fortuitous, way for things to work out.
• 14:41
  Aviv Or: Very much so.
• 14:42
  Tad Eggleston: you know, hey, we feel like doing this too. Oh, you can do it, and you're cool with it, and that means that you can eventually go to Dark Horse, rather than just having it up for…
• 14:53
  Tad Eggleston: Free on the internet, or whatever.
• 14:55
  Aviv Or: Yeah, exactly.
• 14:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 14:57
  Eran Aviram: That's Aviv. Go to Dow course, that's an Aviv thing.
• 14:59
  Aviv Or: Sensitive evening. Yes.
• 15:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, since he just said that, how did we take it to Dark Horse?
• 15:09
  Aviv Or: So I started working with Dark Horse, like, 3 years ago,
• 15:15
  Aviv Or: Up until then, I've been doing… I'm a freelance illustrator.
• 15:19
  Aviv Or: Right. I've been doing…
• 15:21
  Aviv Or: illustration work and character design for games and for streams and for things around the tabletop space. And I was a big fan of Critical Role, and Dark Horse are doing a lot of the Critical Role, things.
• 15:39
  Aviv Or: So I started working on a, coloring book that they put out, and then they said, hey, would you like to also draw comics about Critical Role? And I said, yes, this is my dream job.
• 15:51
  Aviv Or: So I started working with Dark Horse, and it's been great. So when we finished the webcomic and decided that we wanted to find a publisher to work with, that was kind of like our first
• 16:04
  Aviv Or: port of call, basically, because I knew some people, I could say, hey, are you maybe interested in a graphic novel that is complete, and you can just have a look at it before you decide, and you, like, you're really not risking anything?
• 16:18
  Aviv Or: And they said yes, and it's been a real pleasure to work with them. The editor that we worked with, Misha Guerre, has just been lovely from the start to the end. Just a wonderful person to work with on this project.
• 16:32
  Tad Eggleston: Very nice. Yeah, I've heard good things about them.
• 16:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, how did you two get together? Are you long-time pals, gamers together, or just randomly?
• 16:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because clear… I mean, again, I'm very used to… to… to…
• 16:54
  Tad Eggleston: I can't… I'm trying to think if I've talked to somebody who'd done the webcomic on their own, and taken it to a publisher, rather than…
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: Either just the webcomic, where it's generally just a writer-artist, not… a team.
• 17:09
  Tad Eggleston: Or… Talking to somebody who's already been published, so, like.
• 17:13
  Tad Eggleston: they, they, they either were put together by an editor, or, or, you know, I mean, they're…
• 17:18
  Tad Eggleston: this feels like there's a different story than I'm used to, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
• 17:24
  Aviv Or: Cisco.
• 17:24
  Tad Eggleston: as Phil enters in the room, so we'll say hi to him really quick.
• 17:27
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 17:31
  Aviv Or: Is he in the room with us?
• 17:37
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, Phil, this is…
• 17:39
  Aviv Or: So…
• 17:39
  Tad Eggleston: and Iran?
• 17:40
  Phil: Hello!
• 17:41
  Aviv Or: Hi!
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: And they were about to tell us how they met.
• 17:45
  Phil: I would love to hear that story.
• 17:46
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna hear the meet-cute.
• 17:48
  Phil: We're gonna start from.
• 17:50
  Aviv Or: So, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, oh, a cat!
• 17:57
  Phil: Okay, sorry. That's Eddie.
• 17:59
  Tad Eggleston: That's Eddie.
• 18:01
  Aviv Or: C. Nice.
• 18:02
  Aviv Or: About… 20-something years ago, I want to say.
• 18:07
  Aviv Or: We met…
• 18:10
  Aviv Or: in the role-playing, geeky, creator scene in Israel, basically. And, Iran actually introduced… Iran ran the first tabletop role-playing game I've ever played. It was,
• 18:27
  Aviv Or: a D&D World of Warcraft game, I think?
• 18:32
  Aviv Or: I played a night elf.
• 18:34
  Aviv Or: I was a badass, it was a great experience, and since then, he's GM'd about 99% of the games I've played, I would say. So that's when we met.
• 18:46
  Aviv Or: And shortly after, Iran was working as a writer and editor in a…
• 18:55
  Aviv Or: An Israeli online magazine for video games.
• 18:59
  Aviv Or: called V Games.
• 19:01
  Aviv Or: And they hired us to, draw a webcomic for them.
• 19:07
  Aviv Or: which was wild. I got paid to do a webcomic 20 years ago in Israel.
• 19:13
  Aviv Or: So we started working together, and it's been a pleasure. And since then, we've kind of been finding… we've been friends all this time, of course, and we've also tried to find opportunities to, work on projects together, specifically comics, because that's what we do well.
• 19:35
  Tad Eggleston: Fantastic.
• 19:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, to get Phil up to speed quickly,
• 19:43
  Tad Eggleston: They picked the system that they thought would make a good
• 19:49
  Tad Eggleston: comic, and started making a webcomic, which, relatively quickly, the… the…
• 19:55
  Tad Eggleston: The publishers of the system came across and said, we like this, we're giving you special class, rather than being amateur fan writers.
• 20:06
  Phil: Nice.
• 20:06
  Tad Eggleston: So when they finished it, they had the ability to go get it published. Iran also works as a game designer, game editor, or just…
• 20:19
  Eran Aviram: Both.
• 20:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, both.
• 20:21
  Tad Eggleston: But at a different company from… from the…
• 20:26
  Tad Eggleston: And see, I'm terrible, I've already forgotten the name of the system.
• 20:31
  Eran Aviram: Dude, yeah.
• 20:31
  Eran Aviram: Personal hearts.
• 20:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Crystal Hearts is the…
• 20:35
  Aviv Or: Crystal Heart is the story, the comic. Right, okay. Gotcha. Savage Worlds is the name of the system.
• 20:41
  Phil: Right.
• 20:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 20:42
  Aviv Or: it in, and that is created by Pinnacle Entertainment. A lot of words that mean nothing on their own.
• 20:48
  Tad Eggleston: So, you know.
• 20:50
  Aviv Or: That's funny.
• 20:51
  Eran Aviram: And somewhere in the middle, I should note, because it hasn't been so far mentioned, we also actually created a game.
• 20:58
  Phil: Yes. Excellent.
• 20:59
  Phil: Very cool.
• 21:00
  Tad Eggleston: The Crystal Hearts game.
• 21:02
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 21:02
  Phil: For, Savage Worlds.
• 21:04
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 21:04
  Eran Aviram: Yep.
• 21:05
  Phil: Oh, wow.
• 21:06
  Eran Aviram: Again, because we have an ACE and we were allowed to do so.
• 21:11
  Eran Aviram: We didn't have to pay anything for Pinnacle, for example, to do this. They just… we can just do it. So we did it, and it was a Kickstarter, and it was very nice.
• 21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Phil's gonna be the one that winds up getting us into this, and then bringing you back to say, hey, we need to play around with this. Fantastic. That's how Phil rules.
• 21:33
  Phil: A little bit, yeah. I was already, curious the, you know, the differences of, you know, if D20 is, is a… or, D&D is more of a D20 system versus we're playing Die now, which is, my first time playing a game with a dice pool system, so I didn't know if there were any,
• 21:52
  Phil: Any crunchy features you would like to… to, promote, you know, system-wise, or if, you know, focusing on the comic either way.
• 22:01
  Eran Aviram: I think maybe there are, like, 3 things that I very quickly can say about Savage Worlds, and why it's fun, and why it was fun in the comic, as well.
• 22:09
  Eran Aviram: So, like, the basic… the most basic thing is,
• 22:16
  Eran Aviram: I know the basics, the first one that comes to mind. Clouds for initiative.
• 22:20
  Eran Aviram: You deal cards from regular.
• 22:22
  Phil: Oh, cool.
• 22:23
  Phil: Fine. And you just go through initiative, you know, starting at…
• 22:26
  Eran Aviram: lowest and going to the highest. Oh, the other way around? Otherwise, starting at the highest? Okay, that makes more sense.
• 22:33
  Eran Aviram: And that sounds completely random, because everyone just gets a card. Every round, everyone gets a new card, right? And it just works for several draws, it completely works.
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: I actually really liked that, too, that the initiative changes round by round, rather than if you're last, you're always last.
• 22:53
  Eran Aviram: Exactly, it's always interesting, you always… you never know if the enemy gets somewhere between you guys, and it looks great in comics, because you can literally show the cards, and you can do stuff, and you can hold the card, and it's fun, and whatever. So that's a thing that is very much also in the spirit of Savage Walls.
• 23:12
  Eran Aviram: Fast Furious fun. Just get a card, that's when you act.
• 23:16
  Phil: You do the thing on your turn, the end.
• 23:19
  Eran Aviram: That's basically how it is. The other thing that's really great is, health, or, you know,
• 23:26
  Eran Aviram: There's a name for it, but I don't remember what exactly they call it. It's not health, because we don't have heat points in Savage Water.
• 23:32
  Eran Aviram: It's not about attrition, it's not about, how… when will I get to zero hit points, and until that point, I'm fine, right? In D&D, one point or a thousand points are the same. In Savage Worlds, generally speaking, you're up.
• 23:48
  Eran Aviram: You're, down, or you're off the table?
• 23:52
  Eran Aviram: These are the options. When you're up, you're fine. When you're down, you're shaken, you need, you can't act on your turn unless you can roll a die, and you get some bonuses or whatever, and good for you, and you… whatever.
• 24:07
  Eran Aviram: And the other… and you're off the table is you get 3 wounds, each of them more terrible than the last, because they are cumulative minus 1 to everything you do, which is absolutely terrible in a system where 4 is the number you are trying to get to, even minus 1 is, like, the end of the world.
• 24:24
  Phil: Oh, yeah.
• 24:24
  Eran Aviram: And that's… that's great. That's great. That's a lot of fun. That's really, anxious-inducing. I mean…
• 24:30
  Phil: Oh, yeah!
• 24:32
  Tad Eggleston: I… so, the Crystal Heart is your variation, so… so… is this something that… I mean, you said you'd been working on it for 10 years, but…
• 24:43
  Tad Eggleston: only played maybe 5 games in it before turning it into a… so where did the Crystal Heart come from? Because I kind of like this conceit.
• 24:50
  Tad Eggleston: We do. We like it as well. Yeah, well, I hope so.
• 24:56
  Eran Aviram: It's… so…
• 24:57
  Tad Eggleston: I do.
• 24:58
  Eran Aviram: I don't think.
• 24:58
  Tad Eggleston: that you didn't just go, which one do we like the least? Let's write about that.
• 25:04
  Eran Aviram: I mean, okay, we, I wouldn't say we even walked about it for 10 years. I think it would be more correct to say that once we decided we wanted to do something, we sort of…
• 25:16
  Eran Aviram: recalled Crystal Heart, and thought about some other options, but this one was the one that most stood out, because it's an interesting premise, and it's all about, also, it begins very…
• 25:30
  Eran Aviram: It started out as a very, oh, interesting, people have stones for hearts, oh, you can replace crystals, but that's not actually what the game is about, that's not what the story is about. I mean, I don't want to spoil anything, right? But it's 7 chapters, and not all of them are about, let's get another crystal.
• 25:46
  Eran Aviram: And…
• 25:51
  Eran Aviram: I think that… also, I want to mention, the actual Crystal Heart setting that we've come up with for the comics is not exactly the one that we did, but it's not because we sat down to work on it over all 10 years. We probably sat down for, like, 2 weeks before we started and reworked everything to match.
• 26:11
  Eran Aviram: What we need from an actual comic.
• 26:14
  Eran Aviram: It… the idea started with, very vaguely.
• 26:20
  Eran Aviram: Combining, like, 3 tropes, one of them is Indiana Jones.
• 26:23
  Eran Aviram: going into all our koft, whatever, going into, you know, ancient tombs, and being a colonizer who plums them for everything and taking everything, and that's actually a thing. I mean, you are a colonizer. You are coming to take stuff from… and it's a point that should be addressed.
• 26:43
  Eran Aviram: But it begins if this is, like, the most natural thing, and that should be done, and whatever, and it feels correct, and the players, not the characters, the players think that this is a correct thing to do.
• 26:54
  Eran Aviram: The other thing is about the hearts and the stones, right? Where did that come from? It comes from a line of a song in Hebrew.
• 27:02
  Eran Aviram: About how some stones have the heart of humans, and some humans have heart of stone.
• 27:08
  Phil: Mmm.
• 27:08
  Eran Aviram: And it's an old song in Hebrew, and I really liked it, and I brought it to the table when we sat down to speak about… to talk about what sort of
• 27:17
  Eran Aviram: What is the next campaign we want to play? Well, we want Indiana Jones. Also, how about everyone have Hearts of Stone?
• 27:23
  Eran Aviram: Why?
• 27:25
  Eran Aviram: Oh, okay, because we can replace them with supernatural crystals that give you superpowers, and that's…
• 27:34
  Eran Aviram: thoughtful…
• 27:35
  Eran Aviram: it's great for two reasons. First, it's very anime, which is, like, the third thing we went for. We wanted it to… we were watching Naruto all the time at the time. So we wanted anime, which is interesting superpowers, and in most shonen anime.
• 27:50
  Eran Aviram: every person have a single superpower, have everything that they do, and they do it in very… and they use it in interesting ways, so we thought, that's what we want. We want something like that. But we also need it to be a role-playing game, and in role-playing games.
• 28:05
  Eran Aviram: The players need a reason to go around and do stuff, the players need some sort of motivation, so they go around and get more.
• 28:13
  Eran Aviram: Crystals, and they can replace them.
• 28:16
  Eran Aviram: And let's make this more interesting, the crystal affects your mind, your brain.
• 28:21
  Phil: The way you think.
• 28:23
  Eran Aviram: So it's not all just great things, it's also some… there's a price to pay, which is interesting, role-playing game-wise. And all of that got combined together, we sat down, it's not just me and Aviv, we had 3 other friends.
• 28:38
  Eran Aviram: Sitting down and thinking about all this, and sort of… Coming up with these basics.
• 28:44
  Eran Aviram: For… from which everything has developed.
• 28:49
  Phil: So then those… those are the… the friends of yours would be characters in the… in the comic? Or no, they're… they didn't… No. Interesting, okay.
• 28:58
  Aviv Or: Yeah, they were… they were collaborators on the very, very early game that we played of Crystal Heart before it was ever… we ever imagined it would be anything more than just us around the table playing.
• 29:10
  Aviv Or: Yeah, they got a little mention, in the start of the book, but they do not appear in it, as far as I remember. I don't think we gave them any NPCs, no.
• 29:20
  Eran Aviram: Not at all, not even, no, no.
• 29:23
  Eran Aviram: I did send them in the WhatsApp group, so they know that it's… I'm still playing with it.
• 29:28
  Tad Eggleston: So… Tell me how you decided…
• 29:37
  Tad Eggleston: on… or… tell me about creating your out-of-game characters. One of the things I like is, from a drawing standpoint, is you drew them so that I could see them being teenagers, I could see them being college kids.
• 29:54
  Tad Eggleston: I could see somebody as young as, like, 14 or as old as 30 looking at them and feeling like they're reading their friends. Was that something that you did
• 30:06
  Tad Eggleston: Intentionally, or was there an audience that you were… looking for…
• 30:11
  Tad Eggleston: And again, just tell me about creating the out of the world.
• 30:15
  Tad Eggleston: characters.
• 30:16
  Aviv Or: That's interesting. I think that's the power of cartoons, really. So these characters originated
• 30:24
  Aviv Or: I mentioned it before.
• 30:26
  Aviv Or: before we started Crystal Heart, we had a run on our website, called Up to 4 Players, which was,
• 30:35
  Aviv Or: A weekly comic strip.
• 30:38
  Aviv Or: doing jokes about tabletop games, not even role-playing games, just board games, card games, things like that. And it was…
• 30:46
  Aviv Or: There's a backstory to that as well.
• 30:50
  Aviv Or: But very, very shortly, it was a reward for a crowdfunding campaign that Iran did with a friend of his, because they have a podcast about role-playing games. And one of the things they promised their listeners is that we too will do
• 31:10
  Aviv Or: A comic strip about board games.
• 31:13
  Aviv Or: So we did. And
• 31:17
  Aviv Or: So the concept is, we're doing jokes about board games, but we also wanted to make it a bit more personal, or a bit…
• 31:26
  Aviv Or: Like, made it more character-driven than just pure jokes.
• 31:30
  Aviv Or: So, we framed it around, there's these two…
• 31:34
  Aviv Or: there's this couple of people who live in London, UK, and there's another couple of friends who move from Israel to London, UK, and now they can all play games that are up to 4 players. And this is…
• 31:50
  Aviv Or: vaguely and loosely based on, Iran and his wife, who've been living here for many years, and myself and my husband, who've moved here about 12 years ago.
• 32:01
  Aviv Or: So these four characters are, again, very vaguely, very loosely, kind of sort of based on us.
• 32:10
  Aviv Or: So I suppose, originally, they were meant to be, sort of.
• 32:14
  Aviv Or: 30, 40-year-old people, but having said that, they're also just universally people. They're meant to be Geeks.
• 32:25
  Aviv Or: who like games, and who live in a different city, a different country than the one they were born in. So it's kind of… they were meant to sort of portray just a universal
• 32:37
  Aviv Or: this is a person, and it doesn't really matter their age, I suppose. Probably not 14, I think, if you read the earlier strips.
• 32:49
  Aviv Or: It becomes clear that these people have their own…
• 32:52
  Aviv Or: flat, and they pay taxes and things like that. But again, that's… that's, I think, the beauty of,
• 32:59
  Aviv Or: A very stylized style of cartoons, where you…
• 33:04
  Aviv Or: You designer characters based… based on their, like,
• 33:10
  Aviv Or: like, features, stand… standout features, and it doesn't… like, I don't have to do exactly every wrinkle and every white hair, to really
• 33:23
  Aviv Or: Express how old… how old these people are.
• 33:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 33:28
  Eran Aviram: And once we started Crystal Heart, it was supernatural… not supernatural, it was supremely natural for us to just go with these four as the characters, because Aviv already knew how to draw them.
• 33:42
  Eran Aviram: could do it by heart and in the middle of sleep, and I knew how to write them. I knew what each of them would do as a player in the game, and how they would speak, and what they would want.
• 33:58
  Tad Eggleston: Phil, any role-playing-ish questions before I kind of.
• 34:03
  Phil: shifters.
• 34:04
  Tad Eggleston: even more towards comics, not that we.
• 34:06
  Phil: No, that's okay.
• 34:07
  Tad Eggleston: playing.
• 34:07
  Phil: No, no, no, it's a… I'm now intrigued, because I was putting together that… so the comic is about the four people that play a game.
• 34:14
  Phil: And…
• 34:16
  Phil: So you have… you have that layer of real-world people, and then they're… they're playing the… the game of Savage Worlds of Crystal Heart?
• 34:23
  Aviv Or: Yep.
• 34:23
  Phil: Okay, gotcha, yeah, so that's…
• 34:26
  Phil: I, I was… it was, it was piecing it together, coming in late, you know?
• 34:32
  Phil: One of those sorts of things. No, I think, so, and those, those four characters were based on you two and your partners. Okay, so that's, like, that's very… that's definitely very interesting. So then how, I guess.
• 34:47
  Phil: And this is definitely tying into the mechanics of the story, so these are real-world people who then interact in a fantasy world? Is it like a portal fantasy of some form, or…
• 34:58
  Eran Aviram: Not at all. We did everything.
• 34:59
  Tad Eggleston: Playing the game around a table.
• 35:00
  Phil: Okay, so then the game is just a game in the context you're.
• 35:04
  Eran Aviram: We make it… we made it… we walked very hard, actually, at times, to make sure that this is just a story about regular people playing a game.
• 35:13
  Phil: It's time.
• 35:14
  Eran Aviram: I don't know if… I don't remember which issue it is, but there's… there's an issue in which they need to
• 35:21
  Eran Aviram: To finish quickly, because there are only, like, 15 minutes until the end time for today.
• 35:25
  Tad Eggleston: That's issue two.
• 35:26
  Aviv Or: to go home. Okay, great.
• 35:28
  Tad Eggleston: I got to that.
• 35:32
  Eran Aviram: We had…
• 35:35
  Eran Aviram: we introduced, somewhere in the middle, adventure cards, which are special cards that you can use in Savage Worlds, you don't have to, and they're really fun, because they, again, introduce some randomness and more power to the players. And the problem is that we decided to introduce specifically the adventure cards that we actually created for
• 35:55
  Eran Aviram: Crystal Heart. And the reason that's a problem is, the art on them is taken from the comics.
• 36:01
  Eran Aviram: Which would mean that they are using cards on which there is an art of their specific characters, despite never mentioning… we never mentioned that they created the game based on what they're doing. They're just playing a game. So it would be really weird!
• 36:19
  Eran Aviram: if someone sit down to think about it for a moment, there'll be some four-fold breaking. So we avoided that. We never showed a card with an out of them on it. Never. There was decisions made just to avoid that thing from happening.
• 36:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, comics and role-playing, live very much in, in…
• 36:43
  Tad Eggleston: The same spaces, but they don't always cross, and there are lots of people who are
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: role players who do a little bit of comics, and lots of people who are comics people who dabble in role-playing. So… so, I mean, you guys are clearly role players, and you clearly make comics.
• 37:02
  Tad Eggleston: But first, like, how would you describe yourself between the two? And then kind of give me your comics journey.
• 37:10
  Tad Eggleston: You know, when did you start reading? When did you…
• 37:14
  Tad Eggleston: What did you fall in love with? What shaped How you think about comics.
• 37:19
  Tad Eggleston: What made you want to make comics? That sort of thing.
• 37:22
  Phil: Who are your members?
• 37:22
  Eran Aviram: Would you mind… would you mind if I start with? Because mine's probably way shorter.
• 37:28
  Eran Aviram: I'm… I'm not the one… as you'll see from Aviv's story later, I'm not the one who's always wanted to be a comics skater.
• 37:37
  Eran Aviram: I sort of stumbled into it. I… I love comics, I absolutely admire understanding comics to this day, the… the classic of…
• 37:47
  Eran Aviram: That I think anyone should do it. Yes.
• 37:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 37:50
  Eran Aviram: But the thing.
• 37:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 37:51
  Eran Aviram: any writer should read. Any role player, GM that wants to create, they should read it as well. I think it's a very important…
• 38:01
  Eran Aviram: a cornerstone text about how to establish narrative in general, and how to show a person… how to convey to a person what you want to deliver through
• 38:12
  Eran Aviram: text and art, but I'm obviously the text person.
• 38:16
  Eran Aviram: And that was incredible, and I really liked it, but even before that, I probably read,
• 38:22
  Eran Aviram: Sandman and Transmetropolitan, which I, to this day, sort of admire, and I sort of fell off…
• 38:33
  Tad Eggleston: Both incredible comics that it's, it's, it's, it's very, very…
• 38:37
  Tad Eggleston: Annoying to me that we can't talk as much about them anymore because of their writers.
• 38:43
  Eran Aviram: Yes, yes, yes.
• 38:44
  Tad Eggleston: We talk about their artists.
• 38:47
  Eran Aviram: There's always an issue, of course, of separating the artist from.
• 38:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 38:52
  Eran Aviram: I think it's really interesting to talk about
• 38:55
  Eran Aviram: the creation and reflection of the artist, so there are places in… I don't want to get into it, but there are places in Sand, in Sandman where it would be interesting to talk about reflecting on one we know about Garmin these days, and that, in my mind, also keeps the text relevant, and it still allows me.
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. To address it.
• 39:17
  Tad Eggleston: There's truth with Transmetropolitan and Ellis as well. Yes. I haven't… I haven't managed to get myself to reread it since everything came out, because Ellis was too much my favorite writer, and I just, like…
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: the, the s…
• 39:31
  Tad Eggleston: that the wounds haven't healed enough yet, but even as I was reading some of the stuff, and particularly the women who talked about finding
• 39:40
  Tad Eggleston: The stories that they told him that they thought that they were just telling him being.
• 39:45
  Eran Aviram: I didn't know that.
• 39:47
  Tad Eggleston: I immediately started going, oh my god, this issue. That issue.
• 39:55
  Eran Aviram: Oh my gosh.
• 39:56
  Phil: Yeah, it's astounding that, I mean, it… not to derail us too hard, but, no, I had just become a fan of his, like, maybe 2 years before. It was one with, Moon Knight and Injection, was… was how I…
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 40:09
  Phil: kind of got into his work, so… Yeah, no, it was a… I didn't know that level of, of things too, but,
• 40:18
  Phil: But yeah, no, that's… I mean, it's… that's just a reason to keep reading more comics, you know? It is. Keep finding new favorites.
• 40:25
  Phil: That's a… that's a good way.
• 40:28
  Phil: Good way to go.
• 40:28
  Tad Eggleston: And I will say that, Brian Michael Bendis recently called Kelly Thompson the, the,
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… this era's Warren Ellis, in terms of being able to… to write this snappy dialogue that also always
• 40:43
  Tad Eggleston: moves the story forward, that sort of thing, so this is my plug for my friend Kelly. Go read Black Cloak, go read Birds of Prey.
• 40:54
  Eran Aviram: Interesting. I, I look forward to it.
• 40:57
  Eran Aviram: Woo!
• 40:58
  Eran Aviram: That's basically it, I think. I… I always wanted to do interesting things in comics. Generally, what interests me is interesting walls and interesting,
• 41:11
  Eran Aviram: situations, I think, and I never… I could never draw for the life of me. Then I met Aviv, and my life changed!
• 41:24
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, so, my comment…
• 41:26
  Aviv Or: Longer story, I'm told. Yeah, well, it's not that long. My comics journey started before I knew that comics was really a thing.
• 41:35
  Aviv Or: There was the… 90s animated X-Men show, that I was…
• 41:43
  Aviv Or: extremely in love with, to the point where, I guess all kids
• 41:48
  Aviv Or: you know, in those days, wanted to be an X-Man. And I found myself… like,
• 41:56
  Aviv Or: accepting the next best thing, which was I could at least draw myself as an X-Men, or I could at least draw these cool people, so I have more of them once the episode is over.
• 42:11
  Aviv Or: And after many, many, many weird…
• 42:15
  Aviv Or: wonky attempts, I found a book called How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way.
• 42:21
  Tad Eggleston: Which I'm sure many comic artists can relate to.
• 42:25
  Aviv Or: It was life-changing, and it started years of just…
• 42:32
  Aviv Or: Drawing constantly, because, hey, young artists, that's the only way you can get good good.
• 42:39
  Phil: Unfortunately.
• 42:40
  Aviv Or: But also not unfortunately, because… because that'.
• 42:43
  Tad Eggleston: What? You mean you can't just put pencil to paper and suddenly be a genius artist? That's what all my students want.
• 42:52
  Phil: That's what everyone thinks is the trick, but it's not.
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: Why can't I make brilliant websites on day one of web design?
• 43:00
  Aviv Or: I know, it's hard, it's hard. But the journey is part of the process. The process is part of the journey, or whatever. That's the only way you find what you love to do, and how you love to do it.
• 43:14
  Aviv Or: So…
• 43:15
  Tad Eggleston: your style.
• 43:17
  Aviv Or: Yeah, exactly.
• 43:17
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's the other thing, is that…
• 43:20
  Tad Eggleston: it, you know, and I've got another kid that's doing a music production class right now, and, like, they're doing a sampling project.
• 43:29
  Tad Eggleston: And I keep trying to get them to take smaller and smaller samples, and it's like, but this is the part, I'm like, yes!
• 43:36
  Tad Eggleston: But right now, it's still a Beatles song and a Rolling Stones song, and it needs to be a You song.
• 43:43
  Aviv Or: This is exactly… okay, so at the start of my… when I was a budding comic artist, I was mad about Joe Madd, Joe Madre.
• 43:55
  Phil: familiar with this stuff.
• 43:56
  Aviv Or: rank in his work on X-Men, because, also, for some reason, some…
• 44:01
  Aviv Or: weird publisher in Israel decided to translate a run of Spider-Man and X-Men comics, which was unheard of, and I have no idea why they decided to do this. I'm sure it did not… they were not successful, they must have…
• 44:16
  Aviv Or: like, closed shop, shortly after, but thankfully, it was right at the right time, and I got all my Joe Mad fix from that run.
• 44:26
  Aviv Or: And that's… that's who I wanted to be. So I started basically cop… copying, Joe Matt, and I was working with a group of people who were trying to create a comics together, and I remember, I did one character design.
• 44:43
  Aviv Or: And one of them with the most experience in the group said, yes, finally, this is…
• 44:50
  Aviv Or: this is an Aviv drawing, and not a Joe Madd drawing. And at the time, I was like, yeah, but that's not what I'm trying to do, man! But obviously, after some time, I realized that this…
• 45:02
  Aviv Or: This is the next step, like, this is what…
• 45:07
  Aviv Or: this is how you get… you find your style, like you said, this is how you get better. You, take in all your inspirations and all the…
• 45:14
  Aviv Or: The things that spark This immense joy in you, and you…
• 45:20
  Aviv Or: consume them and let them live in your brain rent-free for years, and along with all the other inspirations and experiences and everything else you do in your life, at some point, your mind…
• 45:33
  Tad Eggleston: You're an artist.
• 45:35
  Tad Eggleston: The way I understand it, artists don't have experiences or other things that they do in life.
• 45:40
  Tad Eggleston: sit at their table for 16 hours a day. This is what Terry Moore told me.
• 45:44
  Phil: Oh, sure.
• 45:45
  Aviv Or: Oh, okay.
• 45:46
  Phil: Yeah, no, this worked. Terry Morse probably sowed enough wild oats to last him a lifetime, you know? Like,
• 45:52
  Phil: It's one of those.
• 45:52
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 45:53
  Phil: No? No, yep. I mean, that's, that's not…
• 45:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it was specifically something that he said on air, he's like.
• 46:01
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I played in bar bands, but when I became a cartoonist.
• 46:05
  Tad Eggleston: full-time. I've… you know, people are like, oh, do you draw what you experience? I'm like, experience? I've sat at my drawing table for 16 hours a day for the last 30 years. What do you mean, experience?
• 46:18
  Aviv Or: Okay.
• 46:20
  Tad Eggleston: Not…
• 46:20
  Phil: Unrelatable, I suppose. At some point.
• 46:23
  Phil: the experience seems to happen. No, while you were talking, while I was listening to you talk about your artistic influence of Cho Maderia, I looked at some of your art on Blue Sky, and I really love how dynamic, like, the range of your character designs running from, like, darker, more realistic, to upbeat and cartoonish, so I thought that was really great, and.
• 46:45
  Eran Aviram: That's… that's a thing. That's a thing.
• 46:48
  Phil: Yeah, yeah, it's… it was lovely. I would love to, you know, get my hands on this book and tear into it, because, I… it's… I would not have guessed, having looked at your art style, that he was an early influence for you.
• 46:59
  Tad Eggleston: I gave you the PDF.
• 47:02
  Phil: I haven't had time to re- After that…
• 47:04
  Tad Eggleston: No, but you weren't supposed to admit that you, you, you, you hadn't got, you got your hands on it, you just didn't…
• 47:13
  Phil: It's, it's, it's in, it's in my digital brain, deep.
• 47:16
  Tad Eggleston: It may be, it may be that, that, like, I read Chapter 1 yesterday, and went, oh, Phil's gonna love this, and texted him then to make certain that he got involved, and, you know, as you think.
• 47:28
  Aviv Or: So yes.
• 47:28
  Tad Eggleston: As you mentioned earlier, it's Thanksgiving.
• 47:30
  Phil: It is. I'm running around with in-laws, so I darted away to the… we're in a, like, 120-year-old house, and the children's bedroom is clearly haunted, so…
• 47:42
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 47:42
  Phil: Of course, that's the best place to record from. That's so quaint. I live in a house that's, like, 130 years old. Nice. Oh, nice.
• 47:50
  Aviv Or: UK brag.
• 47:50
  Eran Aviram: London. Locate, yeah.
• 47:52
  Phil: Sure, sure.
• 47:54
  Tad Eggleston: I wish I lived in a house that was that old.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: Or a house that I designed myself, one or the other. That's what I want.
• 48:01
  Tad Eggleston: And if I design it myself, it would be all of the wonderful things about a house that old, but with better pipes and…
• 48:10
  Aviv Or: Congratulations.
• 48:11
  Tad Eggleston: We just… Right.
• 48:12
  Phil: We'll get you a time machine so that you can design your own house a hundred years ago, and you can have both.
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: That'd be awesome.
• 48:22
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 48:25
  Phil: So when did… when did you take drawing from a hobby to a career?
• 48:31
  Aviv Or: Hmm.
• 48:32
  Phil: Sorry to cut you off, Ted.
• 48:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, that… I was looking for a question, so you're… you're in good shape.
• 48:37
  Aviv Or: So… I actually… I don't know if I should… well, yeah, I guess…
• 48:43
  Aviv Or: guess a career is what you make of it. I actually started… I sold my first…
• 48:48
  Aviv Or: comic books, when I was around, 17 or 18, I think. I worked with a friend of mine that I met on, like, a comics forum, back when that's how the internet worked.
• 49:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And, we worked together on…
• 49:08
  Aviv Or: a mini-series, like, a fantasy mini-series that we published, in Hebrew in Israel, and then two more books that were…
• 49:16
  Aviv Or: kind of a…
• 49:18
  Aviv Or: fantastical autobiography of us as comic creators in Israel, but we were, like, I was a panther and he was a raccoon, sort of a.
• 49:28
  Phil: Mmm.
• 49:28
  Aviv Or: furry, that's fun. …personas, yeah.
• 49:33
  Aviv Or: So that was quite early on, just meeting someone I had a good time working with, who was also called Iran, but it's a different Iran, and it's
• 49:42
  Aviv Or: a weird trend, I guess? I don't know.
• 49:45
  Aviv Or: And then… A few years later, I've worked in graphic design for some time, just because it's…
• 49:56
  Aviv Or: it's better money than trying to find, work in art, but then… I know, it's crazy. But at some point, I decided…
• 50:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's no money in comics, I'm shocked. I know. I'm shocked!
• 50:09
  Aviv Or: Who would have thought, with all the comic book millionaires out there,
• 50:15
  Aviv Or: a few years later, I just decided to make a step into freelance, illustration, and I just offered services to whoever
• 50:24
  Aviv Or: Character design for various things. And then…
• 50:30
  Aviv Or: I think it was about 3 years ago when I was approached, by Dark Horse to do my first comic book in the industry popper. And that was very exciting, and that's, kind of what I'm doing now.
• 50:47
  Phil: Excellent. What was, what was that book?
• 50:49
  Aviv Or: So it was Ortegan, I've been working with Dark Horse on, critical role coloring books.
• 50:57
  Aviv Or: And, they obviously handle all of…
• 51:01
  Aviv Or: Critical Role's comics, which… of which there are many. So one of them was, a deep dive into
• 51:09
  Aviv Or: Artagon, which is one of my favorite NPCs from Critical Role. It's this, chaotic, Faye,
• 51:17
  Aviv Or: demigod, kind of, but not really, depends on whose word you're taking. And, it was, truly, like I told Tad earlier, a dream project.
• 51:29
  Phil: combining…
• 51:30
  Aviv Or: Here, here's your first foray into, the comic industry with
• 51:37
  Aviv Or: A really cool character, with a very cool story, and also…
• 51:42
  Aviv Or: not drawing anything you're not comfortable with. So no cars, no bicycles, no horses, no cityscapes, just lovely forest and fae stuff. It was really lovely.
• 51:54
  Phil: That's awesome.
• 51:54
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 51:56
  Eran Aviram: that affected a lot of Crystal Heart as well, obviously.
• 52:01
  Phil: Oh, so there's no cars, still no cars, still no horses.
• 52:04
  Eran Aviram: There is one cost.
• 52:06
  Phil: There's one car?
• 52:07
  Aviv Or: Yeah, in Crystal Heart, we have, the tank, which is… which is kind of an old terrain… most terrain vehicle, that the team of agents use as they roam about the world of the Five Lands.
• 52:20
  Aviv Or: Probably the most challenging thing about designing stuff for Crystal Heart was this tank that I did from various angles. We call it a tank, it's a…
• 52:31
  Aviv Or: It's a van.
• 52:33
  Eran Aviram: True.
• 52:34
  Aviv Or: Yeah. But other than that, I think, no, nothing.
• 52:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well… Did you also… I'm just… I'm flying through the internet and learning stuff. Did you also do Ghostbusters?
• 52:49
  Aviv Or: I did, yes.
• 52:51
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, ho ho ho.
• 52:53
  Tad Eggleston: That was on my list of things to read anyway.
• 52:56
  Aviv Or: Nice.
• 52:57
  Tad Eggleston: But, but I'm… yeah, because Dave Bohr does…
• 53:02
  Tad Eggleston: good work and plays in other people's universe as well, which aren't always the same thing.
• 53:08
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there are plenty of people that are good at playing in other people's universes and not particularly great on their own, and there are lots of people who are great on their own and not as good at playing in other people's universes.
• 53:21
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 53:25
  Tad Eggleston: I actually… the one that I want to ask the specific question about, just because I just discovered it, and it looks really cool, Singularity1885? Looks like the first time…
• 53:37
  Tad Eggleston: You guys did a comic together?
• 53:39
  Aviv Or: So… The first long-form comic that we did together, yes.
• 53:45
  Aviv Or: I don't even remember how it started. Why… what made us… Do this.
• 53:52
  Eran Aviram: We wanted to do a project. We wanted, VGames was over, we sat down, we said we want to do something together.
• 53:59
  Eran Aviram: I came up with the idea, you liked it, we wanted it to be in color, then we said, nope, not going to be in color, too much work.
• 54:07
  Eran Aviram: It's going to be black and white. And then we sort of just created the first one.
• 54:15
  Eran Aviram: Printed it, various copies, not a lot, I come and go.
• 54:22
  Eran Aviram: So, we only made it, the first issue, we sort of started working on the second issue, we have some ideas for it, etc. But…
• 54:34
  Eran Aviram: It never corporately do anything with it.
• 54:37
  Eran Aviram: And I'm coming and going with SavaViv will take it from…
• 54:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it looks cool. Thank you. I'm gonna have to read it, and if it does, you've got this wonderful pay-what-you-want link.
• 54:53
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and, you know… I'll pass it around, and maybe.
• 54:57
  Aviv Or: Lovely.
• 54:57
  Tad Eggleston: more people pay you, and you'll go, okay, I'm gonna write a chapter, too. Or maybe not. Maybe you've moved on completely, and you're much better writers and artists now. You know, it's always weird.
• 55:09
  Tad Eggleston: When you're looking at, like, the old comics, some people don't even like to… like… I know people that, like, don't even like to name their earliest comics, because they're afraid that you'll go find them.
• 55:24
  Tad Eggleston: And some of them are quite good and quite famous now. And it's like, no, no, no.
• 55:28
  Phil: We don't talk about that.
• 55:30
  Aviv Or: I get that kind. There is one book in my past that I don't think people need to find, but other than that, I'm quite happy with most things. And I think Singularity turned out.
• 55:42
  Tad Eggleston: No, it looks very nice.
• 55:44
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 55:44
  Tad Eggleston: Very nice, so I doubt that it falls into that.
• 55:48
  Aviv Or: Yeah, I go back to look at the pages, and I'm like.
• 55:50
  Aviv Or: how did I do this? How did I have the patience to draw all of Westminster Abbey, with full detail several times? I'm not doing that again.
• 56:02
  Aviv Or: So that might be an obstacle in getting back to Singularity 1885.
• 56:08
  Tad Eggleston: work.
• 56:09
  Tad Eggleston: Old school, or do you do digital?
• 56:11
  Aviv Or: Digital.
• 56:12
  Tad Eggleston: These days over digital. You don't have to draw Western…
• 56:16
  Phil: I can't…
• 56:17
  Tad Eggleston: Master Atomy over and over and over again, you can…
• 56:20
  Phil: But how many… you can't just use the same angle of Westminster Abbey over and over and over again. It's true, but you… Hence why… There are things that you can do.
• 56:29
  Aviv Or: I'm definitely using tools, like, there are 3D models of things that I've been using in my work, in an ethical and legal way, is a big thing. 3D models.
• 56:41
  Phil: Yeah. Should be normalized.
• 56:44
  Aviv Or: It's very, very helpful, but I don't just, you know, magically make the model into line art, I still have to actually draw the line art over it. If you look at Ghostbusters, there's a lot of…
• 56:56
  Aviv Or: I use a lot of, a lot of models of things, because once again, cars, my, my biggest enemy.
• 57:04
  Tad Eggleston: And I assume you also didn't fly to New York to be able to just look at buildings.
• 57:09
  Aviv Or: I flew in Google Earth, which was really.
• 57:13
  Phil: Now, my, my wife does graphic design. She's in school for, her degree right now, and so I've seen her… she did a piece that was, like an old medieval cathedral, and I think she spent a good 8 or 12 hours drawing all the tiny columns and lines and skeletons onto every… every spire. So, so yeah.
• 57:33
  Aviv Or: Isn't there… isn't there a brush to that?
• 57:37
  Aviv Or: There are brushes for many things, and I'm very thankful for people who create them, but there's a limit.
• 57:42
  Phil: Yeah, we need a skeleton cathedral brush, right?
• 57:46
  Phil: up little ones, you know, like bushes.
• 57:49
  Tad Eggleston: and I'm gonna, I'm gonna describe
• 57:53
  Tad Eggleston: the process that… that a friend of mine works in, just… just because it's the one that I know, and I'm always curious as to… we have a friend who…
• 58:04
  Tad Eggleston: First thing he does on a book, particularly because he's from an animation background, so he's got the animation tools, that sort of thing, is he makes
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: 3D models of all of his rooms.
• 58:14
  Phil: Relatively detailed ones, so that when it's time to draw the rooms, he can just take the model and…
• 58:22
  Tad Eggleston: adapt it.
• 58:23
  Tad Eggleston: Very smart. And he actually will then, like, draw the action on top of that, and, like, the last thing he'll do is he'll go back and actually…
• 58:32
  Tad Eggleston: Sketch in the lines from the model, drop the… The original thing in color.
• 58:38
  Phil: computing.
• 58:38
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, how do you…
• 58:41
  Tad Eggleston: I'm learning more about layers. I'm constantly learning more about how things are done. Talk to me about how… how you work.
• 58:49
  Tad Eggleston: Just cause…
• 58:50
  Aviv Or: So that's a very smart way to work.
• 58:55
  Aviv Or: What I would do is I would draw the same room, from scratch, For about 200 pages.
• 59:03
  Aviv Or: and then remember to make it in 3D, so I'll have something to work with for the last 20 pages. That's usually my technique. It's not great, and I don't recommend it.
• 59:13
  Aviv Or: But there have definitely… There's definitely been some stuff, like autom… not automation, but creating my own brushes and things like that, which in Clip Studio is really easy and very handy to do. All of them
• 59:29
  Aviv Or: I think I only started to do in Chapter 7 of the book, but certainly since then, I've been learning, so I'm…
• 59:37
  Aviv Or: now, when I'm approaching a book from, from, like.
• 59:42
  Aviv Or: from the first page, or from reading this script, I'm trying to find the places where maybe this would be a good thing to plan ahead, to make a,
• 59:52
  Aviv Or: a little floor plan of it. Even if it's not built in 3D completely, at least I have something to refer to, and I don't have to flip back to earlier thumbnails or earlier pages to see where exactly did I place the sofa, or the wall, or whatever it is.
• 1:00:09
  Aviv Or: And… And so there was one project,
• 1:00:13
  Aviv Or: I worked on Midst, The Valorous Farmer. It's another book from, Dark Horse. It's kind of… it's a Critical Role book, but it's from a third-person,
• 1:00:26
  Aviv Or: they have a podcast, that's not, like, the core Critical Role team, but it's a different group who does it.
• 1:00:33
  Aviv Or: And they had, 3… Separate stories that they, like, merged into one book, exploring their universe.
• 1:00:44
  Aviv Or: And their universe exists in kind of a… not exactly space, but kind of space, and I was tasked with designing a thing that is a mix between a tractor and a spaceship, that can travel this
• 1:01:01
  Aviv Or: Sort of space, and also harvest moss.
• 1:01:05
  Phil: from.
• 1:01:07
  Aviv Or: sheets that are hanging in, low-gravity surroundings. Wow. And… yeah, so my process, for this, if you ask, was panic.
• 1:01:19
  Aviv Or: For, I think, about a month and a half, just pure panic. It's a good amount of panic, yeah.
• 1:01:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, thank you. See, this is… this is where I gotta jump in. You hooked up with us through… through Ted Brandt and Rose Stein.
• 1:01:33
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 1:01:33
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I totally just heard them.
• 1:01:37
  Tad Eggleston: I totally understand how you guys…
• 1:01:41
  Aviv Or: Yep, yep. The kinship is real. But then I basically, I went and I learned how to use Blender, just so I can specifically model
• 1:01:53
  Aviv Or: a very, very basic version of that tractor-turned-spaceship.
• 1:01:59
  Aviv Or: so I could play with it, and rotate it, and…
• 1:02:01
  Aviv Or: see how it looks like from various angles, which my brain just can't imagine on its own. So that… so now I'm definitely trying to…
• 1:02:12
  Aviv Or: make planning, and smart planning,
• 1:02:16
  Aviv Or: More of my process from the start, rather than wait for the end and then figure out a better way to do things.
• 1:02:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to, like…
• 1:02:26
  Aviv Or: No, no.
• 1:02:27
  Tad Eggleston: That's a sore spot.
• 1:02:28
  Aviv Or: What can you learn?
• 1:02:31
  Tad Eggleston: Ron, like, particularly with comic writing not being your day job, how do you write your scripts? Are you giving, giving Aviv detailed panel breakdowns? Are you writing words and leaving the rest?
• 1:02:49
  Eran Aviram: It's… it's… well, I… it's true that I write the scripts, but it's really a collaborative effort, because Aviv edits them, and also tells me what can and cannot be done, and also says stuff like.
• 1:03:03
  Eran Aviram: what is on this wall? Or, this is the first time we see this wall, what is on this wall? Or, this sounds like an insane established shot. Let's not do that established shot. Let's do something else.
• 1:03:14
  Eran Aviram: and also gave me a list of… we sat down, between every issue, sort of. We sat down, and Aviv… Aviv sat me down and told me, look.
• 1:03:26
  Eran Aviram: I need this and this from you. I need to know this and this, and it would be much better if we
• 1:03:33
  Eran Aviram: For example, you gave me a page that had enough action in it for, like, 3 pages. We need to breathe out more room, etc. She gave me the comics stock.
• 1:03:44
  Eran Aviram: And the artist stock. And that was probably the best education. Walking with an artist so close, and just getting from her everything that she needs.
• 1:03:56
  Eran Aviram: That's how I got better.
• 1:03:59
  Eran Aviram: I will say that.
• 1:04:00
  Aviv Or: I've worked with several,
• 1:04:03
  Aviv Or: comics writers since, and like, your work, your scripts are on par with professional comics writers that I've worked with. Like, I enjoy, I understand your scripts, and obviously there's a lot of it,
• 1:04:18
  Aviv Or: We've been working together for years, so we… there's a lot of things we don't need to say to each other, because we just…
• 1:04:25
  Aviv Or: Right.
• 1:04:25
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:04:26
  Aviv Or: Yes, telepathy is big.
• 1:04:29
  Aviv Or: But yes, like, your way of writing and communicating what you need in a page, or what you would like to see in a page, is great, stop-notch. I think you could be professionally… a professional comic writer if you wanted to.
• 1:04:43
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't think there's good money in it, so I don't know if you should want to do that.
• 1:04:47
  Eran Aviram: No, no, thank you. It's…
• 1:04:50
  Tad Eggleston: There's sometimes better writing in… or better money in the writing, because you can do it faster.
• 1:04:57
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 1:04:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, come on.
• 1:05:00
  Eran Aviram: It's always felt so weird how little I walk compared to how much Aviv works, and throughout all the 7 years, we didn't get paid for
• 1:05:12
  Eran Aviram: Crystal Heart. We had, a Patreon.
• 1:05:16
  Eran Aviram: And we solved some issues, but it's not like any of this ever bought anything close to enough money.
• 1:05:23
  Eran Aviram: For my time to say nothing about a thief's time, which is easily, like, 12 times how long it took me to do anything.
• 1:05:31
  Eran Aviram: It was always weird that she agreed to continue to do this. Page after page, weekly, weekly, an entire A4 page.
• 1:05:42
  Eran Aviram: Every week, in Color.
• 1:05:46
  Aviv Or: How do you?
• 1:05:47
  Eran Aviram: I don't know.
• 1:05:48
  Eran Aviram: We talked about doing another project after this one, and I don't… I don't know how it can… I don't know how. I don't think it can happen.
• 1:05:54
  Tad Eggleston: That sounds like what they call a labor of love.
• 1:05:57
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:05:58
  Aviv Or: Yes, 100%.
• 1:06:00
  Eran Aviram: 100%, yes.
• 1:06:02
  Tad Eggleston: And that makes me that much happier that you guys managed to sell it to Dark Horse, and…
• 1:06:09
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe we'll recoup.
• 1:06:11
  Tad Eggleston: a little bit of that time and energy. I mean, I don't wanna…
• 1:06:16
  Tad Eggleston: Get your hopes too high, just because comics are still comics.
• 1:06:19
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 1:06:21
  Eran Aviram: We'll say.
• 1:06:21
  Aviv Or: I mean… There's something… because we've worked on it for 7 years.
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:06:27
  Aviv Or: And it's… This is in the past, and now we just got a nice little sum of money.
• 1:06:34
  Eran Aviram: Exactly.
• 1:06:34
  Aviv Or: or just doing a bit more work to get it ready for print, so it felt like, woo, incredible! As long as you don't really think about the stuff.
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: That's absolutely the way to think of it.
• 1:06:43
  Eran Aviram: Yeah.
• 1:06:44
  Eran Aviram: I mean, it wasn't… it was still great for both of us, I think, because it allowed us to practice our craft.
• 1:06:52
  Eran Aviram: It allowed us to get in with Savage World guys, it allowed us to show what we can do to other people,
• 1:07:01
  Eran Aviram: It was a good thing.
• 1:07:04
  Aviv Or: 100%, yeah. I mean… I am… So proud of this comic.
• 1:07:10
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:07:11
  Aviv Or: Say, you shouldn' Yeah.
• 1:07:13
  Eran Aviram: It's a very good comic, by the way. It's a very good comic. Also, it's a very good comic.
• 1:07:17
  Aviv Or: Yes!
• 1:07:17
  Tad Eggleston: S.
• 1:07:18
  Aviv Or: And the fact that it was a webcomic meant that we got to show it to people week by week.
• 1:07:24
  Aviv Or: And we got to hear what they think, and we got to…
• 1:07:27
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:07:28
  Aviv Or: make… an audience, and see it grow little by little, and…
• 1:07:33
  Aviv Or: people were excited about this thing that we were creating. So I'm not saying…
• 1:07:39
  Aviv Or: You know, don't pay your artist.
• 1:07:41
  Aviv Or: If… if you give.
• 1:07:44
  Tad Eggleston: Good words, I will very loudly say, pay your artists.
• 1:07:48
  Aviv Or: But certainly, if you're doing something as a project of love, as your own baby project, and you get that encouragement from other people reading it and enjoying it, it's a very big thing.
• 1:08:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:08:03
  Eran Aviram: I want to add something on another thing that I just recalled that goes back to what you said about, the script writing. Again, Aviv.
• 1:08:12
  Aviv Or: Insisted that every page, because it's one per week.
• 1:08:17
  Eran Aviram: Not that it stands on its own, but that it's… but she had the comic sensibility to say, it should be fine.
• 1:08:27
  Eran Aviram: money on its own, and in a satisfying manner, every page should be its own thing.
• 1:08:32
  Eran Aviram: And that's how we wrote 330 pages. Each of them
• 1:08:38
  Eran Aviram: has to end on something satisfying, either funny or tense, or whatever.
• 1:08:43
  Tad Eggleston: It's just making it harder for yourself.
• 1:08:45
  Eran Aviram: I think that's a really hardly be good.
• 1:08:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we live in an age where, like, the comic creators that have made it decide, okay, we're just going straight to graphic novel, because I don't want to have to work in 22-page chunks, and here you are talking about working in.
• 1:09:04
  Phil: One page.
• 1:09:04
  Tad Eggleston: page chunks.
• 1:09:06
  Phil: Oh, yeah.
• 1:09:07
  Aviv Or: I think we would have survived, making it.
• 1:09:11
  Aviv Or: a full graphic novel with no input from anyone else. Never.
• 1:09:17
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, obviously, going about it in this way is unlikely what happens next, but are you thinking about doing another project together, or…
• 1:09:33
  Tad Eggleston: Are you shopping ideas to… to publishers? I mean…
• 1:09:39
  Tad Eggleston: Or are you waiting to see how sales go, and keeping your day… I mean, I assume you're keeping your day jobs. If you're not, then they gave you a bigger chunk of change than I would have expected, and hallelujah!
• 1:09:51
  Aviv Or: Yeah, no, definitely keeping our day jobs, and speaking of these day jobs.
• 1:09:57
  Aviv Or: since I've been… I'm now doing comics, as pretty much my full-time job.
• 1:10:04
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:10:05
  Aviv Or: It's harder to see myself
• 1:10:09
  Aviv Or: putting aside two days a week to work on a comic that I'm not getting paid for. But then again, I am a little hungry to maybe work on something
• 1:10:23
  Aviv Or: That is my own creation, that is our own creation, so…
• 1:10:28
  Aviv Or: So, to answer shortly, we haven't started discussing anything new.
• 1:10:34
  Aviv Or: There are definitely challenges in starting something like this from scratch.
• 1:10:39
  Aviv Or: But we'll see!
• 1:10:43
  Tad Eggleston: And always best when you can manage to sell it ahead of time.
• 1:10:47
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 1:10:48
  Tad Eggleston: And that's one of the advantages of having this out, is now you have proof of concept, you have…
• 1:10:54
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully sooner rather than later, proof of sales, etc.
• 1:10:59
  Tad Eggleston: This type of book is… more…
• 1:11:07
  Tad Eggleston: prevalent than I would have expected when Critical Role rolled out What, 6, 7 years ago?
• 1:11:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there are role-playing games for all ages, there are… Yes.
• 1:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: Built around real systems, built around systems that only exist in the book themselves, you know.
• 1:11:28
  Tad Eggleston: So, it's, it's definitely…
• 1:11:36
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely a market that has… has a real base.
• 1:11:40
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:11:40
  Aviv Or: Absolutely.
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: Don't count yourself out.
• 1:11:43
  Aviv Or: Look into agents.
• 1:11:47
  Tad Eggleston: But, aye.
• 1:11:52
  Tad Eggleston: Think…
• 1:11:53
  Tad Eggleston: Is there anything else that you wanted to plug specifically? Anything that you feel like I missed that you want to say about the book?
• 1:12:06
  Aviv Or: No, I think we mentioned the game.
• 1:12:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right. The game is also available. I will toss out, and I'll toss it out again at the end, up to 4players.com is where you can find Crystal Heart the game, it's where you can find the download of the first issue of Singularity, all sorts of fun stuff.
• 1:12:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, so I recommend, going there.
• 1:12:34
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, then we're gonna go to my favorite final question.
• 1:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: Unless Phil has anything else. I forgot to ask. Phil doesn't have anything else. My favorite final question. Tell me something you love.
• 1:12:47
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
• 1:12:51
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:12:57
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to.
• 1:13:02
  Tad Eggleston: So that you have more people to discuss it with.
• 1:13:12
  Tad Eggleston: I can always tell where people's bookshelves are.
• 1:13:19
  Aviv Or: Oh…
• 1:13:26
  Aviv Or: It's really hard, those questions, but I see Iran has an answer, yes.
• 1:13:30
  Eran Aviram: I'll give a short one, not necessarily the best thing that ever comes to mind, just the…
• 1:13:35
  Eran Aviram: The one nearest in time.
• 1:13:38
  Eran Aviram: It's called His Majesty the Warm.
• 1:13:42
  Phil: Oh, I've heard of that.
• 1:13:43
  Eran Aviram: Oh, good, it's a role-playing game, an indie role-playing game, just one…
• 1:13:48
  Eran Aviram: I think Silver on Silver Any, and it's… which is an award in the whole banking world, which we were nominated to twice. It's…
• 1:14:00
  Eran Aviram: Very interesting system.
• 1:14:03
  Eran Aviram: He does a lot of fun things.
• 1:14:05
  Eran Aviram: And I think that more people should check it out.
• 1:14:11
  Eran Aviram: I have started playing in it. It…
• 1:14:14
  Eran Aviram: plays a bit more clunky than it looks, but it would, I assume that we will ease into it.
• 1:14:22
  Eran Aviram: And it might be the best dungeon crawler of all time.
• 1:14:27
  Eran Aviram: Yet.
• 1:14:29
  Eran Aviram: I mean, you know, next version would be better, but… Right.
• 1:14:33
  Eran Aviram: Interesting. Very interesting.
• 1:14:36
  Eran Aviram: His Majesty de Warm. It sounds weird, it's great.
• 1:14:43
  Phil: Yeah, weird is my favorite flavor, so…
• 1:14:45
  Tad Eggleston: I do love here that it says, often ignored subsystems like food, hunger, light, and inventory management are central to play, and actually fun.
• 1:14:54
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:14:55
  Phil: It's a bold claim.
• 1:14:57
  Eran Aviram: It's completely true.
• 1:14:58
  Phil: It sounds great to me.
• 1:15:00
  Tad Eggleston: So… Alright.
• 1:15:04
  Tad Eggleston: Aviv, you're on the spot now.
• 1:15:06
  Aviv Or: So the first thing that popped in my head was something that I don't know if people can get their hands on these days, but…
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: There are libraries.
• 1:15:17
  Aviv Or: True.
• 1:15:18
  Aviv Or: One of the big influences on me when I, started doing comics, when I started reading comics, was…
• 1:15:27
  Aviv Or: a publisher called CrossGen.
• 1:15:29
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:15:30
  Aviv Or: They were big for, like, I don't know, 5 years, maybe? And they…
• 1:15:35
  Tad Eggleston: Something like that.
• 1:15:36
  Aviv Or: They crashed and burned, and… Disappeared.
• 1:15:39
  Tad Eggleston: I actually feel like somebody got their…
• 1:15:42
  Phil: Did they work.
• 1:15:43
  Tad Eggleston: It's a Michael.
• 1:15:44
  Phil: Turner?
• 1:15:47
  Aviv Or: Maybe? I'm not sure. They had.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: water.
• 1:15:49
  Aviv Or: Vast range of genres.
• 1:15:51
  Tad Eggleston: Their assets have been acquired by Disney and rebranded.
• 1:15:57
  Tad Eggleston: as a label for Marvel?
• 1:15:59
  Tad Eggleston: So I think that some of their stuff has actually been…
• 1:16:04
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. Getting put out in collected editions? Interesting. I'll look again, I have… so my favorite one…
• 1:16:11
  Aviv Or: The one that left, like, a mark on my heart was, a series called Meridian.
• 1:16:17
  Aviv Or: Which was about a young girl…
• 1:16:19
  Aviv Or: All of their, books had…
• 1:16:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Barbara Kessel and Joshua Middleton.
• 1:16:27
  Aviv Or: Yes.
• 1:16:27
  Tad Eggleston: That's a good…
• 1:16:29
  Aviv Or: It was beautiful. As an artist, the thing I notice first in comics is the art, rather than the story, and
• 1:16:37
  Aviv Or: It had beautiful artwork, beautiful colors, and I really like the story as well. All the cross-gen titles had a kind of a connecting theme to them.
• 1:16:50
  Aviv Or: that there is one character that has, like, a sigil that gives them powers or something, and they're all connected in this universe. And in Meridian, it was this young girl who gets
• 1:17:02
  Aviv Or: Powers, but then also her evil uncle gets, like, a mirrored kind of powers, so they kind of, face off against each other.
• 1:17:13
  Aviv Or: But there's…
• 1:17:15
  Aviv Or: sky pirates, and beautiful environments, and magic, and adventure, and it's just wonderful and exciting and beautiful, and I've been trying to hand down… I had the copies of the whole series, and I think I gave them away when I moved to a different country, because there's only so many books you can take with you.
• 1:17:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So I'm trying to hunt down…
• 1:17:36
  Aviv Or: any… any… anyone selling their old copies, see if I can get my hands on them. So, Meridian by Crossgen.
• 1:17:43
  Tad Eggleston: Radian by CrossGen.
• 1:17:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I hadn't heard cross-gen in a while. I didn't get…
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: deep in when they were coming out, and kind of regret it, because I heard… Good things… later?
• 1:17:58
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 1:17:59
  Tad Eggleston: So… Yeah, I'm trying… trying to figure out if they, they are, because I found…
• 1:18:11
  Tad Eggleston: Confirmation that they were acquired by Disney Marvel.
• 1:18:15
  Phil: Yeah, but.
• 1:18:15
  Aviv Or: That means very little, really.
• 1:18:17
  Tad Eggleston: But I can't find confirmation that they've done anything.
• 1:18:21
  Aviv Or: Yeah.
• 1:18:22
  Tad Eggleston: then, yeah, it.
• 1:18:23
  Aviv Or: Yeah, but they were so cool. They just had…
• 1:18:26
  Aviv Or: when you look around and you see mostly superhero stuff, Marvel and DC and stuff, and then there's a company that says, we're not really doing that, we're only doing other genres,
• 1:18:39
  Aviv Or: sci-fi and detective and old-school fantasy and YA fantasy, and it's just… everything was just good.
• 1:18:50
  Aviv Or: And wonderful, and then they closed. So, capitalism, I guess.
• 1:18:55
  Phil: No.
• 1:18:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah…
• 1:18:58
  Aviv Or: Well…
• 1:18:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah… I was already thinking about capitalism, because I was thinking about your book, and the fact that, like.
• 1:19:09
  Tad Eggleston: We live in societies that want us to have less and less and less and less free time, because… because you must be producing, or you are… you are wasting oxygen.
• 1:19:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 1:19:22
  Eran Aviram: Just so you know, in Ireland.
• 1:19:25
  Eran Aviram: They tested, successfully and are going to,
• 1:19:29
  Eran Aviram: going to the next stage with, universal basic income to artists.
• 1:19:33
  Phil: Woohoo!
• 1:19:34
  Eran Aviram: What's that?
• 1:19:34
  Phil: 12 Ireland for that.
• 1:19:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, I was… I was going to say they're slightly better about it in various places in Europe than they are here.
• 1:19:42
  Aviv Or: Mmm.
• 1:19:43
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, you can even look at U.S. history, the fact, you know, one of the reasons that there was… there was so much…
• 1:19:51
  Tad Eggleston: Fascinating art that came out of…
• 1:19:54
  Tad Eggleston: the 30s and the 40s was… was that part of the WPA was paying artists.
• 1:20:01
  Tad Eggleston: You know, artists need to eat.
• 1:20:07
  Tad Eggleston: It's really what it comes down to. Artists need to eat, they need to have…
• 1:20:12
  Phil: Unfortunately, artists cannot photosynthesize yet.
• 1:20:15
  Aviv Or: I'm gonna…
• 1:20:15
  Phil: They are working on it.
• 1:20:17
  Tad Eggleston: don't… And, and, like… Yeah.
• 1:20:23
  Tad Eggleston: I dream of the world where either A there was a lot more universal basic income, and therefore people who wanted to be artists could
• 1:20:36
  Tad Eggleston: maybe not live the high life without being able to sell anything or whatnot, but not worry about having a roof over their head, or eating, or going to the doctor. Yep. Like, those… you have those 3 things.
• 1:20:50
  Tad Eggleston: And God knows we have the resources for everybody to have those 3 things.
• 1:20:55
  Phil: Yep.
• 1:20:56
  Tad Eggleston: Then art will start happening at a much greater scale.
• 1:20:59
  Aviv Or: Yep.
• 1:21:01
  Tad Eggleston: That's a decent point to end on. Aviv, Iran, thank you so much for having dedicated so much of your time to this really incredible work that I will be finishing. My apologies for not getting it done ahead of time.
• 1:21:18
  Aviv Or: Oh.
• 1:21:18
  Tad Eggleston: I, my dear friend Dennis Kitchen told me I'm supposed to fire my scheduler. I tried to explain to him that I'm the scheduler, and he told me that heads must roll.
• 1:21:34
  Tad Eggleston: But this is how it,
• 1:21:36
  Tad Eggleston: It sometimes gets hard to manage to get all the reading in, because, like…
• 1:21:41
  Aviv Or: It's a big book!
• 1:21:43
  Tad Eggleston: And you're, like, my third interview since… Sunday… And Thanksgiving, and…
• 1:21:54
  Aviv Or: Capitalism again.
• 1:21:55
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. Work. Yep.
• 1:21:59
  Phil: Sleep, that thing.
• 1:22:01
  Tad Eggleston: only so many hours in the day, and it, like, I should have started earlier. It was denser than I was expecting it to be. Not in a bad way, but…
• 1:22:11
  Phil: Sounds like that's what you get from focusing every page as a unit, you know?
• 1:22:15
  Aviv Or: Exactly. Right. Yes.
• 1:22:16
  Tad Eggleston: But… but I was… I was expecting… I was expecting it to be a breezier read, and… and…
• 1:22:22
  Tad Eggleston: It wasn't, which…
• 1:22:26
  Tad Eggleston: is often a bad thing, but wasn't. Like, like, I don't… once I got used to, oh, wait, this is…
• 1:22:34
  Tad Eggleston: I wouldn't have it any other way, but that's also where I had to decide, okay, just enjoy what it is as deep as you can get, rather than desperately trying to get through it tonight. Yeah. Because…
• 1:22:47
  Tad Eggleston: And I told you at the beginning, I woke up way too early, but sometimes when I wake up way too early, my brain's not capable of taking in things.
• 1:22:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, of course.
• 1:22:57
  Phil: It's not enough coffee to get him up to, you know, 5 AM. That's too rough a time to think for anyone.
• 1:23:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was actually 4 AM.
• 1:23:04
  Phil: Ugh, yeah, no, that's… I don't even want to be mobile, of course.
• 1:23:07
  Aviv Or: No.
• 1:23:09
  Tad Eggleston: Spreadsheets. I made myself spreadsheets today.
• 1:23:12
  Aviv Or: 4 a.m?
• 1:23:14
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. I'm autistic.
• 1:23:17
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic, this is… this is like… I manipulate numbers sometimes to relax.
• 1:23:23
  Aviv Or: I, I, I appreciate that.
• 1:23:24
  Tad Eggleston: I took baseball stats, and just manipulated them.
• 1:23:28
  Phil: Nice.
• 1:23:30
  Tad Eggleston: And then pumped them into a video game so that I can play with old players that aren't in the video game.
• 1:23:37
  Phil: Also, video games or this, we're just manipulating numbers here, guys.
• 1:23:41
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And I can see that Iran has that too, because he gave me the big thumbs up when I said I just manipulate numbness to relax.
• 1:23:50
  Tad Eggleston: I guess that would be it.
• 1:23:52
  Eran Aviram: Devil, not to me, but I appreciate that you know what.
• 1:23:55
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:23:56
  Eran Aviram: for you.
• 1:23:56
  Tad Eggleston: Because I was about to say, that would actually probably be a good trait for somebody designing games.
• 1:24:03
  Eran Aviram: Yes, it is.
• 1:24:05
  Eran Aviram: Yes.
• 1:24:06
  Phil: Absolutely.
• 1:24:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, like, on the crazy side note, but it's gaming, and I just talked about manipulating baseball stats, like, there is a baseball dice game called Stratomatic that I didn't discover until my 30s, and when I discovered it, I went.
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, this is a lot like the games I wrote myself when I was 10.
• 1:24:26
  Eran Aviram: True.
• 1:24:27
  Phil: Wow.
• 1:24:29
  Tad Eggleston: But they've got a 20-sided die, and I didn't know those existed. I was working with mold.
• 1:24:33
  Eran Aviram: This is what I'm saying.
• 1:24:34
  Aviv Or: X.
• 1:24:34
  Phil: Wow.
• 1:24:35
  Eran Aviram: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kept you closer?
• 1:24:37
  Tad Eggleston: Baseball cards, rather than actually having…
• 1:24:41
  Phil: Fascinating.
• 1:24:42
  Tad Eggleston: So, for 22 panels, this has been Aviv Orr and Iran Avaram. Their book is Crystal Heart.
• 1:24:51
  Tad Eggleston: out from Dark Horse, there is a game of the same title that you can find at upto4players.com, and I encourage you to do so, because it looks
• 1:25:03
  Tad Eggleston: super cool. I already texted it to my brother, and he's told me to remind him,
• 1:25:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because he's been itching to DM again. Nice. So maybe… maybe this will be the next one.
• 1:25:17
  Phil: Not if I get my hands on them first.
• 1:25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, because you're DMing the die game.
• 1:25:23
  Phil: He's… he's… there might be, an evil alliance with… there might be…
• 1:25:27
  Tad Eggleston: And if there wind up being two play-live games on 22 panels, then I'm blaming you guys, and, like, you'll have to come back as random characters sometime.
• 1:25:40
  Aviv Or: love to.
• 1:25:41
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Avivor and Aran Avaram, this has been 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.