Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / 22 Panels Episode #248 - Uncle Scrooge’s Diamond Jubilee

Transcript

22 Panels Episode #248 - Uncle Scrooge’s Diamond Jubilee · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tyler Johnson: Hey everyone, welcome back to 22 Panels. This is the podcast that aims to examine, explore, and elevate the medium of comics. I am Tyler, and across the interwebs.
• 0:14
  Tyler Johnson: from me is Tad, Dan and Phil. Tad, do you want to introduce Dan?
• 0:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll introduce Dan to this audience. Dan has been part of the Heroes of Bronze and,
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: pulp Blotter book clubs for a while, so this is not his first… first rodeo on 22 panels.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: But he also likes some duck books, and since we're gonna be talking some duck… duck stuff.
• 0:46
  Tad Eggleston: in a while, I thought he would be a good addition. Also, every once in a while, you guys get busy, so the deeper bench I have for weekend shows, the better, because…
• 0:59
  Tad Eggleston: You guys don't always know you're busy until you're busy, which I totally understand, because that's, like, human.
• 1:06
  Tyler Johnson: That's my… that's my life, yeah.
• 1:07
  Phil: That's the nature of in-laws in my world.
• 1:09
  Tad Eggleston: But I panic when it's like, oh, it's Friday, and neither of them are busy, and I don't want to skip an episode this weekend. Who can I call?
• 1:21
  Tad Eggleston: Dan is now one more person that theoretically, I can call, unless he hates this experience. In which case, please tell me ahead of time, Dan.
• 1:31
  Phil: Well, welcome to the 22 Panels extended family.
• 1:33
  Dan Newland: It's already been a joy this morning, just hanging out and visiting.
• 1:37
  Phil: Why, why does duck stuff sound wildly inappropriate?
• 1:41
  Tyler Johnson: That's gross. Duck stuff, Tad.
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, I mean.
• 1:45
  Tyler Johnson: We all…
• 1:46
  Phil: I don't want… I want King Shame, I don't want King Shame anybody, but Duck Stuff.
• 1:49
  Tyler Johnson: We all have our things, but duck stuff.
• 1:54
  Tyler Johnson: I mean, how about something normal like feet?
• 1:57
  Phil: Goodness.
• 1:58
  Tyler Johnson: Anyway, let's talk about news this week. What's going on with Diamond?
• 2:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Phil actually did the homework for me, so I'm gonna let him take it.
• 2:08
  Phil: If by homework you mean skimming a lot of, financial jargon and having it go in one ear or out the other, the gist that I got was that the consignment lawsuit where Sparkle Pop was selling off books that, were not
• 2:24
  Phil: fully legally theirs to sell. Has apparently reached a decision, and the side is going to the publishers.
• 2:31
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it's a decision as much as it's a… Settlement.
• 2:35
  Phil: Sure, sure, yeah, a verdict, a verdict was reached.
• 2:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, again, verdict generally, generally involves a judge.
• 2:43
  Phil: Son of a bitch, okay.
• 2:44
  Tad Eggleston: win the parties. That's fair.
• 2:46
  Phil: That's fair. You know.
• 2:47
  Tad Eggleston: Here I am with, like.
• 2:49
  Phil: Shows how up-to-date I am on… shows how up-to-date I am on my,
• 2:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I feel like I should try to be on top of it, being that the one episode I released this week was Comics Law.
• 3:03
  Phil: Okay, yeah, yeah. And,
• 3:05
  Tad Eggleston: Laundry and, and, and Britt Payne sitting second chair.
• 3:08
  Phil: There you go, there you go. But, yeah, the… Heidi described it as a bit of a Pyrrh victory for the publishers, so it sounds like, even… even if, you know, a settlement was reached, now, enforcing that settlement is gonna be the… the next step of things, so…
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it looks like there's some money that's gonna be paid out, but mostly they're gonna have access to…
• 3:33
  Tad Eggleston: Their goods, so they're gonna have to pay to… to, like, retrieve them.
• 3:42
  Phil: Yeah, it doesn't… it's one of those things that…
• 3:44
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, like, it's… It's better than…
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: either them not having them at all, or the market being flooded with them at a low price. Because I think that's also in it, is that, like, anything that they abandon can be sold, but has to be sold at.
• 4:05
  Phil: Interesting.
• 4:05
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's… regular… Right. Price, not deep discounted.
• 4:13
  Phil: the… the also… the overall tone is, is that, you know.
• 4:17
  Phil: still not quite at the point where we can have our full diamond retrospective, as I'm sure there'll be a few more strings to tie up first.
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 4:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, there were actually a couple other legal stories to look at. It looks like Archie Comics is still going through some stuff, but I don't understand that well enough to get into it. So I figured I'd just mention the big, huge one.
• 4:41
  Phil: Mmm.
• 4:42
  Tad Eggleston: Which is that, not only is the Warner-Paramount merger on… on…
• 4:46
  Tad Eggleston: hold for now. The antitrust trial has been set for March 2027. So, as of now, this is actually going to court to see if it can go through, which is a good thing, because it really, really, really, really shouldn't go through.
• 5:03
  Tad Eggleston: What kind of week has it been? Well, turns out we're running out of smart bombs.
• 5:08
  Tad Eggleston: Which,
• 5:09
  Phil: Yay!
• 5:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, yeah…
• 5:11
  Phil: Yeah, yeah, that's hence the sarcastic, facetious yay.
• 5:15
  Tyler Johnson: Oh my god, yay!
• 5:17
  Phil: Superman's been disarming them? Is that it? Is that why they're doing it?
• 5:21
  Tad Eggleston: Has the president all pissy with Hegzith? It's debatable whether he's pissy with Hegzith for using up the bombs, or for allowing the press to know that he'd used up the bombs.
• 5:33
  Phil: So, so this is where, where, unfortunately, under Pete Hedges, they can only make, dumb bombs.
• 5:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense.
• 5:43
  Tad Eggleston: And then, like, how do you know that the Republicans don't want you to know that they did something? They had their Attorney General confirmation vote at 4am on a Saturday morning.
• 5:56
  Phil: Wow!
• 5:58
  Phil: Yeah, that's… that's, that's news for… for only the most dedicated, that's for sure.
• 6:03
  Tad Eggleston: Todd Blanch is officially, officially, officially Attorney General, God help us all.
• 6:11
  Tad Eggleston: as of… 4 AM.
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yesterday morning.
• 6:16
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta say, this Congress has gotten really good at middle-of-the-night votes on things that they don't want people paying attention to.
• 6:28
  Tad Eggleston: This is one of the weeks where I can't rant, I just have to laugh. Dan, you wanna rant? You have any rants?
• 6:35
  Dan Newland: I have a lot of rants, but I don't know that'll get us anywhere either.
• 6:40
  Dan Newland: I'm in agreement with all your rants, and like, to throttle many people.
• 6:46
  Tad Eggleston: All I have the energy to do… I mean, like…
• 6:49
  Tad Eggleston: Who was it? Was it Tom Tillis that was crying over his vote? It's like, dude, if it's that hard, if it hurts you that much.
• 6:59
  Tad Eggleston: Whoa! Yep.
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty much.
• 7:02
  Phil: Pretty much.
• 7:04
  Phil: Lot of, lot of people, a lot of people, you know, struggling to find a spine, I imagine.
• 7:10
  Phil: Toto.
• 7:11
  Tad Eggleston: So, anyway… Let's get into initial order comics for August 27th.
• 7:20
  Tad Eggleston: I can't believe I'm bringing this one up, but I learned with Archie vs. Predator that you can't just ignore books like this. We have Archie vs. Terminator, number 1, from Rory McConville, Steven Butler, and Lily Butler at Dynamite. Final order cut off of September 14th?
• 7:39
  Tad Eggleston: In stores October 7th, the crossover no one saw coming is here! When a teenage John Connor enrolls at Riverdale High, Archie and the gang soon find themselves in the crosshairs of a Terminator. I'm telling you, I can see it now. Archie vs. Terminator vs. Predator.
• 7:57
  Tyler Johnson: Versus.
• 7:58
  Phil: aliens. You gotta get those…
• 7:59
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, I mean, eventually.
• 8:01
  Tyler Johnson: Little Johnny Connor goes to Riverdale. That's awesome.
• 8:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 8:06
  Phil: I'd love to see his, like, war-hardened thousand-yard stare drawn in Archie.
• 8:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I will almost certainly be reading it, just because A I have finally…
• 8:17
  Tyler Johnson: What was the…
• 8:18
  Tad Eggleston: hooked into, oh, there are good things in Archie, and B, again, like, I made fun of, made fun of, made fun of…
• 8:27
  Tad Eggleston: Archie vs. Predator for so long, and then I read it, and I went, fuck.
• 8:32
  Tyler Johnson: Yep.
• 8:33
  Tad Eggleston: This is so… Good.
• 8:37
  Tyler Johnson: Could you imagine John Furlong, right, from Terminator 2, where he's at school at Riverdale with Archie? That's just what I'm picturing in my head.
• 8:47
  Phil: Yup.
• 8:47
  Tyler Johnson: Nope.
• 8:48
  Phil: More or less.
• 8:49
  Tyler Johnson: Okay, guys, let's move on. Coffin girl. Oh, that's you.
• 8:52
  Phil: That is me, sorry. I didn't know if I heard the final word cutoff on that one was,
• 8:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I actually said it before. Oh, you did? Okay.
• 9:00
  Phil: There we go.
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: off of September 14th, which is my son's birthday.
• 9:03
  Tad Eggleston: In stores October.
• 9:05
  Phil: Alright, next up we've got Coffin Girls number one, from Joseph Schmalke at the Midnight Factory Massive, New Orleans, 1732. Three women arrive against their will. The city has no idea what it has brought in.
• 9:21
  Phil: Coffin Girls is a paranormal gothic series set in colonial New Orleans. A world built on stolen labor, on the bodies of women, on the flesh bought and sold. Three women bound by circumstance and a reawakened ancient evil are about to unleash a nightmare the likes of which the city has never seen.
• 9:37
  Phil: Presented as a stunning flipbook in black and white and pink. Side A, written and illustrated by Joseph Schmulke. Side B, written and illustrated by Megan Hutchinson. It's gonna have a final order cut off of August 31st, in stores October 14th.
• 9:51
  Tad Eggleston: I do like me a flipbook. Oh, yeah. That's definitely a selling point.
• 9:55
  Phil: Exactly.
• 9:56
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely a selling point.
• 9:58
  Tyler Johnson: Demon number one from James Heron. The world is infected… infested with a darkness it cannot see. Beasts from hell feast on humanity's soul. Enter Jason Blood.
• 10:11
  Tyler Johnson: A man alive too long, witness to centuries of hell's victories. A wanderer with a shattered mind and a split soul, following the mute face, a lost wizard, tortured by a voice from hell. Can Jason Blood protect our world and save his soul? Will the demon Etrigan rise again?
• 10:29
  Tyler Johnson: I don't need to read that part. This is gonna be, final order cutoff of September 14th, and in shops October 7th. Thank you, Tad, for editing that. Alright.
• 10:41
  Tyler Johnson: Dun, dun…
• 10:43
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, Flux House presents number 1.
• 10:48
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Kent, Brian Hurt, David Lapham. Matt Kent takes the reins to present a tense and turbulent spectacle of mind-bending comics, storytelling from the
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: A prehistoric age through many dimensions beyond our own, and a truly one-of-a-kind quarterly showcase.
• 11:05
  Tad Eggleston: Packed with first appearances, shocking self-contained introductions to major new Flux House releases, and an awe-inspiring surprises. Join one of the medium's most widely acclaimed creative minds alongside longtime collaborators Brian Hurt, David Lapham, and more for 64 pages of wildly unexpected and wholly unpredictable stories that will tattoo themselves
• 11:29
  Tad Eggleston: onto your psyche in brilliant CMYK Inc.
• 11:33
  Tad Eggleston: The final order cutoff is August 31st, in stores on October 7th.
• 11:40
  Phil: Alright, next up there's Godzilla Revenge of the Dead Zone, of the Kaisei Era No. 1, from Ethan Parker and Griffin Sheridan and Pablo, Tunica at IDW.
• 11:52
  Phil: The Wanderer is held captive by G-Force, far, far away from his home in the Dead Zone. The Wanderer is a captive in New York City, and as he's poked and prodded by a team of scientists, he'll fill in the gaps of his mysterious past, and learn of the government's true plans for the future of the Dead Zone.
• 12:08
  Phil: What do any of those words mean? Find out, with a final word cutoff of September 21st, in stores, October 28th.
• 12:15
  Tad Eggleston: I did enjoy the Godzilla of the Dead Zone, so, like, this is the first sequel series to this.
• 12:22
  Phil: Fair enough.
• 12:23
  Tad Eggleston: Godzilla. And Ethan Parker and Griffin Sheridan do good work.
• 12:29
  Tad Eggleston: So, I'm looking forward to it.
• 12:31
  Tyler Johnson: Pop Kill, do you guys like Pop Kill? Have you been reading this?
• 12:34
  Tad Eggleston: I did, I did read the original series.
• 12:36
  Tyler Johnson: Yep, it's really good. Pop Kill Big Candy, number one. The Cola Wars are over. The Sugar Wars are about to begin. John Pyle and Dina Deluxe survived the chaos of Pop Kill, but 8 months later, their relationship is on shaky ground.
• 12:53
  Tyler Johnson: Just as they struggle to move on from each other, Dana unveils… Dina unveils a revolutionary sugar substitute that threatens the fortune of the world's most powerful candy companies.
• 13:06
  Tyler Johnson: Now, a Secret Candy Consortium has marked them for death, and John and Dina are once again running for their lives. Oh, a brand new pop kill saga begins here. And I forgot to mention, this is Jimmy Palmiati, Dave Johnson, Juan Santa Cruz from Mad Cave with a final order cut off of September 14th.
• 13:25
  Tyler Johnson: in shops October 7th.
• 13:29
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, let's talk some graphic novels. You get to lead off, Tyler.
• 13:33
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, I just ordered this one myself for the store, and out comes the wolf from Kevin Mellon. This is from Z2.
• 13:42
  Tyler Johnson: And out comes the wolf, tells the story of Willie Brixton and Ruby, three… Willie, Brixton, and Ruby.
• 13:49
  Tyler Johnson: Free punks looking for a way to escape their dead-end lives in the 1990s East Bay. They've got dreams of how to make that happen, but when those plans collide against a hard and unforgiving reality, the temptations and danger contain within what they will
• 14:04
  Tyler Johnson: Have to do is to make those dreams happen.
• 14:08
  Tyler Johnson: will threaten not only their plans, but also their very lives. Looks like final order cutoff of September 21st, and in shops October 21st.
• 14:19
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, Don Quixote from Miguel…
• 14:23
  Tad Eggleston: De Cervantes and Paul and Gaitan Brizzy. Legendary Disney animator siblings Paul and Gaitan Brizzy present a spectacular new graphic novel adaptation of Don Quixote, sure to embrace
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: be embraced by the many fans of their best-selling version of Dante's Infern.
• 14:42
  Tad Eggleston: Perfect for fans of art history, classic literature, and animation, this Brizzy Brothers adaptation of Don Quixote leaps off the page and brings The Man of La Mancha to life for a new generation of readers. Don Quixote, first published in 1605, is widely considered to be the greatest Spanish-language novel of all time.
• 15:00
  Tad Eggleston: And it's been published in every major language across 700 editions.
• 15:05
  Tad Eggleston: A satire of chivalric romance. It was the first Spanish novel to use everyday language and observations. Final order caught off of August 31st, and in stores October 14th. And a book that I think of every time
• 15:21
  Tad Eggleston: Donald Trump starts ranting about windmills.
• 15:24
  Phil: Hmm. This is…
• 15:26
  Tad Eggleston: My own.
• 15:27
  Phil: My only connection to Anchiotti is one of my writing professors in college, when I asked him, hey, what's a book you'd recommend? He's like, well.
• 15:33
  Phil: basically the two best books ever, Moby Dick and Don Quixote, so pick one of those.
• 15:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they're both outstanding.
• 15:41
  Tad Eggleston: They're both outstanding. I don't know if I'll go best books ever, but I will go among the most important books ever, and ones that are not just important, but, like, genuinely good.
• 15:53
  Phil: Yeah.
• 15:55
  Tad Eggleston: So… and, thankfully, both have fantastic graphic novel adaptations, if you don't want to slog through them.
• 16:05
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway, Gumshoe from Brenna Thumbler, from HarperCollins. In the hot, gossipy town of Stony Lonesome, shy 11-year-old Willa interacts with others the only way that feels right to her. The mail.
• 16:19
  Tad Eggleston: She loves the mail so much that she hopes to become a mail carrier herself one day. But her dreams of delivering birthday cards, thank you notes, and love letters come crashing down when she's mistaken for the notorious Two Gum Tilly, a bandit rumored to be stealing mail for as long as folks can recall.
• 16:37
  Tad Eggleston: Now an outlaw herself, Willa realizes the only way to clear her name is to bring the real Kirk to justice. But when a chance encounter introduces her to the Gumshoe Gang, a group of runaways looking to right the wrongs of the letter-looting thief, she finds that human connection might be her only path to freedom.
• 16:55
  Tad Eggleston: Can Willa clear her name and revive her dreams of postal glory, or has she stamped her last letter forever?
• 17:04
  Tad Eggleston: This is one of those where I'll say that, like, if I didn't know Brenna Thumbler, and I'd read that description, I would have gone, maybe. But Brenna Thumbler brought us Sheetz.
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: and it's sequels, and, like, has earned all sorts of trust from me. She's brilliant in the middle grade YA,
• 17:24
  Tad Eggleston: realm, so I am all over this. Final order cutoff was September 7th, in stores on October 7th.
• 17:32
  Phil: All right. I doubt by… Masasamumi…
• 17:38
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 17:39
  Phil: Masasumi Kakizaki at Abrams. The cave beckons, deep in the rainforest of a southern resort island, where bones of forgotten soldiers abound. Another corpse is nothing special.
• 17:51
  Phil: A young couple grieves the death of their young son, but the husband sets out in search of a waterfall set to bring those who see it newfound happiness. The wife is a skeptic, opposed to the trek, but anything to start afresh, he says. So they try.
• 18:06
  Phil: Anything.
• 18:07
  Phil: That mundane description, if you take a second and look up the cover of this book, it is genuinely disturbing. I was freaked out just looking at it a little bit, so this sounds fantastic. I highly recommend a final order cutoff, August 31st, in stores October 14th, just ahead of Halloween.
• 18:27
  Phil: After that, there is The Moonlit Spiral from Mike Mayhack over at Candlewick. Best friends Ryan and Zyla live in the fantastic world of Helix, where treasure hunting was once a way of life. Nowadays, though, it seems like people are more concerned with researching the past than looking for real treasure in the present. Life has gotten pretty dull, which is how Rhian likes it.
• 18:48
  Phil: He lost his parents to adventure, so playing video games and hanging around his guardian Henry's dusty, failing bookstore are all he wants to do.
• 18:56
  Phil: Then, Ryan discovers hidden pages in a cryptic journal left by his parents. They give clues to the biggest treasure of them all, the last prize of the famed treasure hunter, Orion Flynn. It's gonna have a final order cutoff of September 7th in stores October 6th.
• 19:12
  Tyler Johnson: Okay, Till Death from Michael Schwartz and Rachel Schaefer, as well as Gaia Cardinale.
• 19:19
  Tyler Johnson: From Clover Press, a ghostly romantic horror-comedy road trip that's part the Frighteners and part Harald and Maude. Vivian has spent decades as a restless spirit, waiting for her husband to join her in the afterlife. But when another woman is buried in his plot, her forever after falls apart.
• 19:39
  Tyler Johnson: Enter Mac, a troubled man who survives a skydiving accident and wakes up able to see ghosts. Now, Vimean has convinced him to carry her bones across the country to reunite her with the husband.
• 19:53
  Tyler Johnson: she discovers is on the other side of the country. But breaking the laws of the afterlife puts relentless reporters on their trail.
• 20:02
  Tyler Johnson: Final order cutoff for this will be August…
• 20:04
  Tad Eggleston: It's Relentless Reapers.
• 20:07
  Tyler Johnson: What, what, what, where are we at?
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: You said relentless reporters.
• 20:12
  Tyler Johnson: Did I?
• 20:13
  Tad Eggleston: And you must have been thinking of that Scrooge story.
• 20:16
  Tyler Johnson: Probably. Relentless Reaper's on there. That's funny.
• 20:19
  Tyler Johnson: August… August 31st is the final order cut off and in shops November 4th. Sorry about that. Reapers, not reporters.
• 20:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, sometimes they're one and the same, but…
• 20:31
  Tyler Johnson: Sometimes, I just want to make it my own story, you know, just make it up.
• 20:34
  Tad Eggleston: There we go.
• 20:35
  Phil: They were REAP, reaporters.
• 20:38
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, some collections of note, the complete
• 20:42
  Tad Eggleston: Porto Maltese Volume 1 from Hugo Pratt at Fanographics. A modern Ulysses whose wanderies in the early decades of the 20th century take him to the most fascinating places on Earth. Hugo Pratt's Quarto Maltese is a hard-luck, hard-driving, iconoclastic anti-hero who values freedom and independence more than wealth and status. Treasure hunter, storm-tossed sailor.
• 21:05
  Tad Eggleston: Sailor and itinerant adventurer, the irascible and indefe…
• 21:11
  Tad Eggleston: I never know how to pronounce this word. Independable?
• 21:14
  Phil: I have no idea, honestly.
• 21:15
  Tad Eggleston: I know what it means.
• 21:16
  Phil: Yeah.
• 21:17
  Tad Eggleston: Like, he can't be tired.
• 21:20
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe Indefi-Fatigable? Yeah, whatever. Corda Maltese has earned his status as one of the most popular characters in European comics. Final order cutoff of September 7th, and in stores October 14th, again, from Fanta Graphics.
• 21:38
  Phil: Exploit from Laura, and Tim Leong and, Emiliana Pina over at Mad Cave. Don't bury the lead, bury your enemies. Kirby Kuo might be late to her true purpose in life, but no one would call the 30-something journalist intern out of time. After all, it's Kirby who uncovers a conspiracy surrounding Cole Saxon, a billionaire tech industrialist who, it turns out, is also
• 22:03
  Phil: good at treason. But when a shocking act of violence brings vengeance to Kirby's door, it'll be up to this budding writer, her
• 22:10
  Phil: ignore.
• 22:12
  Tad Eggleston: Horophobic.
• 22:12
  Phil: Agoraphobic room ignite you, Lennox, and the staff of the defunct magazine Riot to bring truth to light, and the powerful to justice. It's gonna have a final order cut off of September 14th in stores October 7th.
• 22:30
  Tyler Johnson: Sorry about that.
• 22:31
  Tyler Johnson: Checking a weird text that I just got. Okay. Remind the complete.
• 22:36
  Tad Eggleston: Was it from a Nigerian prince?
• 22:39
  Tyler Johnson: No, no.
• 22:39
  Tad Eggleston: You should delete it if it was from a Nigerian prince.
• 22:43
  Tyler Johnson: Remind the Complete Saga, Jason Brubaker from Titan.
• 22:47
  Tyler Johnson: Let's see here. This beautifully produced deluxe graphic novel collects the beloved all-ages sci-fi webcomic adventure into one stunning, oversized volume, featuring brand new cover art and exclusive bonus material.
• 23:02
  Tyler Johnson: Sonia is a lighthouse keeper, a gifted mechanic, and an inventor. She lives a quiet life on a remote island with her cat, Vic…
• 23:11
  Tyler Johnson: Victuals?
• 23:12
  Tyler Johnson: When victuals vanish.
• 23:14
  Tad Eggleston: Biddles.
• 23:15
  Tyler Johnson: vote.
• 23:15
  Tad Eggleston: Biddles.
• 23:16
  Tyler Johnson: That is Vittles, with a C?
• 23:19
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 23:19
  Tyler Johnson: Okay.
• 23:21
  Tyler Johnson: Vittles vanishes without explanation, and then unexpectedly returns. Something has changed. The cat now carries the brain of a strange, intelligent lizard creature from a hidden underwater kingdom. I almost said underwear kingdom. That would have been funny.
• 23:37
  Tyler Johnson: What follows is a mystery… what follows is a mystery that spirals from the intimate, a girl trying to understand what happened to her companion into something far larger, a conflict involving brain transplantation, experiments.
• 23:51
  Tyler Johnson: An ancient civilization of lizardmen living beneath the sea, and the dangerous ambitions of those who wield unchecked power. Sonya must navigate a world she didn't know existed, protect the people she loves, and confront questions about faith, loyalty, and what it means to truly know someone.
• 24:10
  Tyler Johnson: This has a final order cutoff of September 21st, and will be in shops October 14th.
• 24:18
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, Phil, you wanna roll the final order cutoffs again?
• 24:21
  Phil: It's true.
• 24:22
  Tad Eggleston: list this time.
• 24:23
  Phil: Alright, finally we're cut off for Monday, August 17th. Dissidium Volume 1 returned from Ram V. Evan Cagle at Image, in store September 23rd. Feeling like an ADHD alien, from Pina Varnall Penguin. Don't have an in-store.
• 24:41
  Tad Eggleston: I neglected the date there, sorry.
• 24:43
  Phil: Oh, mystery order, Ghost of a Ghost number 1 from Mike McNula, Chris Robertson, and Michael Avon Oming, and Tacky Sohm over at Dark Horse in store September 23rd. The Carmen Blade, number 1, from Darcy Vann Polgeist, and Ian Bertram at Image, in-store September 9th. Lancer number one, from Mike Costa, Jake Baker at Bad Idea, in store September 16th.
• 25:06
  Phil: The Mess from Noah VanSkyver at Fanta Graphics in store September 30th. Murder School from Paul B. Rainey, drawn and quarterly in store September 15th. Star Trek 2026 from Christopher Cantwell, Dennis Menhiri at IDW in store September 23rd. The Terrific Teacups from Rick Remender and Feral Darlinpole at Image in store
• 25:29
  Phil: December 30th, and Yuri Tumka and the Devils, another story from Lands Unknown from Mike McGilla, Dave Stewart, and Clem Robbins over at Dark Horse in stores November 17th, and that feeling like an ADHD alien is gonna be in stores September 15th. Not much in the way of crowdfunding, no.
• 25:48
  Tad Eggleston: No, right now, there are actually no…
• 25:52
  Tad Eggleston: No crowdfunding that… that we are… currently backing that are live.
• 26:00
  Phil: We need to refresh our radar, I think.
• 26:03
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I actually did refresh our record. There are a bunch!
• 26:07
  Tad Eggleston: on the horizon, but the only two that I'm going to talk about yet, because they're either friends of the podcast or we've already had them on, Tezuka Gadamanga, Jason Cohn, the documentary on Tezuka, is still launching soon, though I think it's super soon, because I just got another email
• 26:24
  Tad Eggleston: about its imminent launch, and, Death of the Comics Book Case, The Reign of the Comics Book Cases from Zach Quaintance, is also launching soon on Kickstarter.
• 26:36
  Tad Eggleston: Tyler, you want to talk some humble bundles?
• 26:39
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, I'm actually looking… is this one still live for the, Clip Studio?
• 26:44
  Tad Eggleston: It is, it got extended.
• 26:46
  Tyler Johnson: I'm looking for it right now. But anyway, Clip Studio, Creative Collection… I just lost my screen.
• 26:54
  Tyler Johnson: Flip Studio Creative Collection, Paint, Draw, and Animate. You get 10 items for $25? This is a hell of a deal, you guys. This is going to DonorsChoose, and it's been extended to August 19th, so if you've ever had any interest in
• 27:08
  Tyler Johnson: doing comic books, or playing around with the software, or whatever, this is a great deal for this. And I believe you get a year…
• 27:16
  Tyler Johnson: A year? Isn't that right?
• 27:17
  Tad Eggleston: A year subscription to the main program, but then just a massive set of brushes and…
• 27:23
  Phil: over a thousand assets. It's… it's incredible, yeah.
• 27:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 27:27
  Tyler Johnson: Yup.
• 27:28
  Tad Eggleston: 200… 200… Brushes, 200 superhero brushes,
• 27:36
  Phil: Hundreds of…
• 27:36
  Tad Eggleston: 100 comic brushes, 100 3D models, 100 3D poses, 200 speech bubbles,
• 27:44
  Tyler Johnson: Oh, no.
• 27:44
  Tad Eggleston: fuckin' manga panels, and then 40 storyboard assets.
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: As well as the Moho Debut, which is the 2D animation studio.
• 27:55
  Tad Eggleston: that they…
• 27:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 27:58
  Tyler Johnson: After that, the Blade Runner collection from Titan Alcon is, $18, and with that, you get 17 items, which is actually way more than 17 items. I mean…
• 28:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's 17 graphic novels.
• 28:15
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, it's just, awesome. So if you're a Blade fan, get on that. That is going to, the Direct Relief, Emergency Medical Charities.
• 28:29
  Tyler Johnson: And that's been extended till August 13th.
• 28:32
  Tyler Johnson: I mean, by humanoids.
• 28:33
  Dan Newland: those over the last few years. I actually really enjoy the Titan Blade Runner stuff. It's actually been.
• 28:39
  Dan Newland: Been pretty good.
• 28:41
  Tyler Johnson: Oh, I said Blade, didn't I? Blade Runner.
• 28:44
  Tyler Johnson: I, I, I…
• 28:46
  Phil: Where's our Blade Runner crossover? Come on. Vampire replicants.
• 28:51
  Tad Eggleston: blade slash runner, rather than having it be Blade.
• 28:55
  Tyler Johnson: The Humanoids Mega Bundle, this one is awesome, Universes Unbound Part 1, $20, 151 volumes of things.
• 29:05
  Tyler Johnson: That's 35 titles, including The Inkl, Technopriest, Metal Hurlan, Montjourgine, and more. Reading is Fundamental, is what this is, going towards, and it's been extended to August 12th.
• 29:20
  Tyler Johnson: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles return to New York. The IDW collection is, 48 items for $25, going to Make-A-Wish.
• 29:31
  Tyler Johnson: That is going on until August 12th.
• 29:34
  Tyler Johnson: The Dark Horse Bundle, which is really worth it if you want to get into a series you haven't read before, because you get all kinds of, number one trades, for 40, or $20, you get 40 different items, and this goes towards the Hero Initiative, August 13th.
• 29:51
  Tyler Johnson: Is the cutoff for that. Disney Masters and Collections and Originals from Fanographics. $25 gets you 48 items, with proceeds going to first book.
• 30:03
  Tyler Johnson: The cutoff for that is August 19th.
• 30:07
  Tad Eggleston: That's the one that we're gonna explore for the next couple of weeks on… on these episodes!
• 30:12
  Tyler Johnson: Yes. And then the last one I want to mention is One-Shots and Fast Reads from Image. This is a great bundle, because, these happen to be my favorite comics, is the one-shots and really quick reads like that. 59 items, you guys, $25 gets you 59 items.
• 30:31
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't even know where to start, so I figured I'd just list some different ones each time. Like, Ain't No Grave and Altamont are both in there. Yep.
• 30:43
  Tad Eggleston: Hexagon Bridge… I kill giants.
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know, David Lapham's Murder Me Dead.
• 30:53
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it's just… it's a really phenomenal… I mean, essentially, it's got a…
• 31:02
  Tad Eggleston: Tyler Bosses, you'll Do Bad Things. You know, it's a really phenomenal collection of either
• 31:09
  Tad Eggleston: individual graphic novels, or, like, five-issue miniseries… Yep. …type stuff.
• 31:16
  Tyler Johnson: It's great. I'm looking at it right now. I'm probably gonna buy it this afternoon.
• 31:19
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we talked about it recently, it's got step by bloody step.
• 31:23
  Tyler Johnson: Yep. Nice, yep. That will be going to the Book Industry Charitable Foundation, and we've got, about 19 days left, I think? August 25th… oh, there's more left.
• 31:35
  Tad Eggleston: 16 days and 5 hours.
• 31:37
  Tyler Johnson: 16 days. August 25th. Get in there, that's probably one of the best ones, in my opinion.
• 31:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's a very nice one.
• 31:44
  Tyler Johnson: Tad, 3 amazing new books!
• 31:47
  Tad Eggleston: It's finally in stores! I've been talking about it forever, because it's amazing. Islands in the Sky, A People's History of Hurricane Helene, in which actual survivors
• 31:58
  Tad Eggleston: worked with comics legends Brian Michael Bendis, Matt Fraction, Steve Orlando, Gene Lewin Yang, Josh Adams, Valentin Delandro, June Kim, Nate Powell, Jarrett Rutland, all put together by Andrew Iden and Appalachia Comics Project slash Good Trouble, to tell us, you know, kind of the…
• 32:18
  Tad Eggleston: The on-the-ground view of Hurricane Helene. It's just an absolutely outstanding collection.
• 32:26
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it.
• 32:28
  Tad Eggleston: Then, we had, Endeavor, number 3, from Stephanie Lee Phillips and Mark Lehman.
• 32:36
  Tad Eggleston: Wrapping up this, seafaring… Kinda… Lord of the Flies-ish?
• 32:44
  Tad Eggleston: story, at Distillery, I enjoyed that. And, Zach Kaplan and John J. Pearson are back at it with the Smart Division No. 1 at Dark Horse, just kind of an absolutely outstanding
• 32:58
  Tad Eggleston: debut… issue.
• 33:02
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah. Bill, take a walk.
• 33:06
  Phil: Yeah, so, in,
• 33:09
  Phil: personal, professional news, I… I get to… I get to finally, enact my idle mind daydreams. I'm gonna be… I'm gonna be putting in my two weeks notice on Monday, tomorrow.
• 33:19
  Tad Eggleston: That, that you, you, you got the other job.
• 33:21
  Phil: I got the other job, woohoo, yay! Yay! That's been, thrilling, exciting, terrifying, because it's the first time I've… I'm starting with a fully remote company, so there's always this piece in the back of my head of, like, alright, well.
• 33:33
  Phil: The paychecks better show up, the equipment better show up, you know?
• 33:38
  Phil: A little funny, but…
• 33:39
  Tyler Johnson: Well, if it, I mean, yeah. They have a big enough footprint. You're quitting your job to do it.
• 33:43
  Phil: Yes, no, no, that's the other thing. It's a big enough… like, one of my biggest paranoias while applying for jobs was, all of the bullshit AI website scam companies that are out there. So, one of the reasons why I applied to this one was that their website looked actually crafted by human people and had enough information about the business they do to convince me that, hey, this is a real
• 34:03
  Phil: This is a real business, this is not just…
• 34:06
  Phil: some kind of shenanigans. And in reading news, it…
• 34:14
  Phil: comics adjacent, I'd heard the term visual novel, around on the internet for a while, but, this is the first time I am reading slash playing one, called Citizen Sleeper. Oh, okay. Yeah, it's… it's really good. I actually… it's actually a game that I think you would appreciate, Tad, because it's very text-based, where.
• 34:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I know, I know.
• 34:34
  Phil: You know of it?
• 34:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, I don't know of that one, but I know a lot of creators that are into, like, the visual novel games.
• 34:41
  Phil: Yeah.
• 34:41
  Tad Eggleston: So I've got kind of a handful that… I actually kind of watch for bundles on Humble Bundles sometimes.
• 34:46
  Phil: Okay.
• 34:48
  Phil: Well, I did pick up the 1 and 2 on sale, so together it was, like, 20 bucks for both of them.
• 34:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right, see, I play so few video games other than baseball that, like, I try to pay 20 bucks for, like, hundreds of dollars worth of games.
• 35:02
  Phil: They write, yeah. Well, I was gonna say, the thing that's really interesting about this one is you play as,
• 35:08
  Phil: What's known as a sleeper, which is the copy of a human consciousness in a machine body, because, you know.
• 35:16
  Phil: Your human self, sold their physical body to pay off some sort of debt, and their consciousness was copied into this, this worker body.
• 35:26
  Phil: And, now they're on the run and escaping. I've been picking… the reason I say I think you'd be interested in it is that, both mechanics and story, I feel like, use this experience of, hey, you're not quite a human, but you still have to live amongst humans as, like, a metaphor for autism.
• 35:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no, I wasn't saying no.
• 35:46
  Phil: Right, right.
• 35:47
  Tad Eggleston: I was just explaining how I often do it.
• 35:50
  Phil: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:51
  Tad Eggleston: like, I'm glancing right now at the unhinged indie anthology.
• 35:56
  Phil: Oh, nice.
• 35:57
  Tad Eggleston: available at Humble Bundle, where you get 11 games for $12.
• 36:02
  Phil: That's pretty good. That's a good… that's a good… that's a good, that's a good haul for… for that, but,
• 36:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, man.
• 36:07
  Phil: But yeah, so those, those have been, those have been fun. And…
• 36:11
  Dan Newland: The novel, the visual novel, is that, like…
• 36:14
  Dan Newland: A choose-your-own-adventure book, or are you still actually doing.
• 36:18
  Tad Eggleston: I don't.
• 36:19
  Phil: So it's… so it's on the Switch, that's how I'm playing it, so it's a game.
• 36:22
  Dan Newland: Yup.
• 36:23
  Phil: There's… this one has minimal animations, so usually you're just choosing between icons for different actions, or, you know, you have, like… there's, like, an action economy and resource management aspect to it, but the story is told to you through
• 36:38
  Phil: reading prose. So you're reading text descriptions, usually when characters show up, there's just one static image for them, you know, like one drawing.
• 36:48
  Phil: For… for the conversation that's taking place. So, yeah, it's… it… it was one of those things, when I first heard the term, I was like, visual novel, that sounds like a… that sounds like a, you know, a lesser version of the graphic novel. But now, actually playing this one, like, okay, there's a little bit of mechanics to go on,
• 37:06
  Phil: there's… the storytelling is, I think, really evocative. It's… it's one of those things where, yeah, I was definitely a little…
• 37:12
  Phil: A little bit,
• 37:14
  Phil: suspicious, before trying it for myself, but I'm enjoying this one. I think a lot of them tend to be, dating sims, romantic things, like basically an interactive novel where you can choose the romance options, but this one is… is…
• 37:28
  Phil: much less that way, and more just, you know, do you want to gather parts for this mercenary, or do you want to go grow some strange mushrooms and… and figure out what's going on in the biosphere, you know? So yeah, it's really interesting. In the One Piece race, I see you are still becalmed?
• 37:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm still becombed at 700.
• 37:48
  Phil: I, I, you know, in my wait between volumes of Pun Pun, I actually saw a post about this, and then picked up Volume 1,
• 37:56
  Phil: the series called Smoking Behind the Supermarket With You. The gist is that there's an overworked salaryman who, goes to this convenience store and, you know, has, like.
• 38:08
  Phil: a… so far, so far, platonic crush on one of the cashiers there. And then…
• 38:15
  Phil: You know, one day she's not there. He gets invited to smoke a cigarette behind the store with this mysterious and, tough girl.
• 38:23
  Phil: Who… who is actually the same… the same girl that he has the little crush on, but he just can't tell the difference between when she's in customer service mode and not in customer service mode. So there's… that's where the humor is coming from, of she's like, he is so dense that he… he doesn't… he doesn't recognize me.
• 38:38
  Phil: Between the two… the two attitudes. So it's fun. It's fun and it's funny.
• 38:43
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds fun.
• 38:44
  Phil: Yeah.
• 38:45
  Tyler Johnson: That's awesome.
• 38:46
  Phil: It's by Junishi, er, Jinushi.
• 38:48
  Phil: There we go.
• 38:49
  Tyler Johnson: Generation.
• 38:51
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 38:52
  Tad Eggleston: I will ask, too.
• 38:53
  Phil: Now it's duck time.
• 38:56
  Tad Eggleston: I'll have to…
• 38:57
  Tyler Johnson: That's right.
• 38:57
  Tad Eggleston: keep an eye out for that. But now, duck time! So, this is what we invited Dan to join us for, because he… he, like I, has… has been a fan of ducks and coral barks in particular for… for a long, long time, whereas
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: Tyler and Phil have… have…
• 39:17
  Tad Eggleston: more, oh, Tad likes duck books, maybe Disney comics don't suck? And, like, I think Tyler was actually slightly more excited, because he'd already been through the, we finally read some Archie comics, and oh my god, Archie comics are actually good!
• 39:36
  Tad Eggleston: But, but…
• 39:38
  Dan Newland: What archery did you guys read?
• 39:39
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we used Dan Parrott and Tom King's
• 39:45
  Tad Eggleston: advised reading list at the back of Archie the Decision, so…
• 39:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we read, like, Married Life with Archie, and we read Afterlife with Archie, and we read…
• 39:57
  Tad Eggleston: Archie vs. Predator, and…
• 39:59
  Dan Newland: One of the newer stuff.
• 40:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we also read, like, parents picked out more individual stories from the past, but I can't remember individual story names.
• 40:09
  Tad Eggleston: you know…
• 40:10
  Dan Newland: Yeah.
• 40:11
  Phil: Just individual stories from various digests over the years?
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. So, I mean, we actually had to do some digging for some of our stuff, but we used their thing as a roadmap.
• 40:23
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, Tyler, you know, another thing for us to think about, at the back of
• 40:30
  Tad Eggleston: Jughead's Pimageddon this week, Dan Parent had a list, and Tom King's 12-year-old son had a list.
• 40:38
  Phil: Interesting.
• 40:39
  Tyler Johnson: I'll have to look at that, because I have it on my shelf.
• 40:42
  Tad Eggleston: So we might have to go explore some Jugheads sometime soon with their help. I'm also looking forward to one of the first Oni…
• 40:52
  Phil: Oh yeah, the Fabio Moon Archie.
• 40:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, there will be the Fabio Moon Archie, but one of the first Oni collected releases is going to be…
• 41:01
  Tad Eggleston: The decision, plus…
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: a selection of older stuff curated by Tom and Dan. So, like, there's a… I forget if it's hard or softcover, but there's an Archie collection coming out in, I think, October that was curated by Tom King and Dan Perrin. So…
• 41:20
  Dan Newland: The decision, is that the Mark Waid series from back?
• 41:22
  Tad Eggleston: No, the decision was the Tom King one-shot.
• 41:26
  Dan Newland: Okay.
• 41:26
  Tad Eggleston: The first Tom King Archie comic, the second one being Jughead Pimageddon, which came out this week.
• 41:32
  Dan Newland: Okay.
• 41:33
  Dan Newland: And, I read, and then I got for my daughter the, the Mark Waid series back, probably about 8, 10 years ago, and she actually really enjoyed those, so…
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: And, well, he started with Fiona Staples, so… Yeah.
• 41:46
  Dan Newland: That always helps.
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: But… but before we get into favorite stories, I wanted to get first impressions from Tyler and Phil. Like, you grew up on DuckTales and Disney Afternoon and whatnot, so you're not…
• 42:02
  Tad Eggleston: unaware of what kind of Disney storytelling can happen, but what did… how did you feel, like, actually finally reading some Disney comics?
• 42:11
  Tyler Johnson: Well, I mean, obviously, it's pretty cool to see where the Disney, afternoon, and specifically DuckTales, wouldn't have happened without Karl Barks, right? Without his invention of…
• 42:24
  Tyler Johnson: the advent… like, Scrooge kind of, like, influencing George Lucas, in a way, you know, with Indiana Jones and,
• 42:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I loved that you literally had the boulder.
• 42:39
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah.
• 42:40
  Tad Eggleston: The boulder originated in Karl Barks, not… Yes.
• 42:45
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, that's what I'm saying, like, Yeah, not the.
• 42:47
  Tad Eggleston: And Lucas said so.
• 42:51
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, and I, Steven Spielberg, too, like, this, this sense of, adventure that's, like, Scrooge goes on, most of the time, but…
• 43:00
  Tyler Johnson: I just think it's really awesome to see the source material, really. The…
• 43:07
  Tyler Johnson: all those Disney Afternoon cartoons, they all stem from work that Carl Barks did to create this universe, right?
• 43:18
  Tad Eggleston: And there were… there were some others, as we'll be exploring, some new…
• 43:23
  Tyler Johnson: Next week.
• 43:23
  Tad Eggleston: one of the things that I'm learning is that like…
• 43:31
  Tad Eggleston: as… as cool as… as Barks was, the… the US Disney market was kind of what we… kind of what we think of it as, as, like, really kid-type stuff, blah blah blah. But the European Disney market…
• 43:48
  Tad Eggleston: very quickly became, like, just some of the crazy good comics. They were using these characters to do all sorts of storytelling.
• 43:59
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, that's what I'm looking forward to next week, is I think most of the books that we picked for next week are actually…
• 44:06
  Tad Eggleston: originated in Italy, or France, or… whatnot.
• 44:11
  Phil: And that… I'll be… I'll be excited to… I am actually excited to dig into that portion. I, so I'd heard a lot about Carl Barks and Uncle Scrooge, and, you know, kind of knew of it by reputation, but sitting down to read it, it…
• 44:27
  Phil: it didn't quite click for me. It was one of those things where, I feel like I'm missing some perspective or context for it, like.
• 44:36
  Phil: I get that it's… it's absolutely 100%, yes, DuckTales would not have existed without this. That is… that is…
• 44:43
  Phil: abundantly clear.
• 44:45
  Phil: But, like, I… maybe it was… it was even as simple as I just wasn't quite in the mood for it, I don't know. So, that was kind of my first…
• 44:55
  Phil: interaction with it, of like, okay, this is… this is clever, this is… this is, you know, this is interesting, but it… it… it wasn't quite what I was looking for right now.
• 45:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Just a quick question. Did you read… the… Like… Essays on each comic.
• 45:14
  Phil: Not…
• 45:15
  Tad Eggleston: You're smooth.
• 45:16
  Phil: I did read a couple of them, and so it was one of those things where I'm like, okay, I'm getting more perspective on this, and even in, you know, certain stories, like the…
• 45:25
  Phil: the one where he makes the… the 16 gadillion dollar quarter, or whatnot. It's like, okay, I get… I get that this is… this is…
• 45:34
  Phil: you know, very subtle and interesting critique of billionaires and rich people's behavior and market manipulation and all of those things. It just…
• 45:46
  Phil: it wasn't quite coalescing for me, you know? Yes, sir. Yeah, so it's… it was one of those where I would love to hear what you guys have to say about it, honestly.
• 45:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, one of the things that I enjoyed a lot about the… the…
• 46:06
  Tad Eggleston: essays is that they would remind me of when the stories were being written, because a lot of the times, I'd enjoy them, but I'd enjoy them as I'd enjoy a lot of things that are written now.
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: But they weren't written now. They weren't even written in the 70s or the 80s. They were generally written in the 50s.
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And when you put that into perspective, it, like…
• 46:31
  Tad Eggleston: You start thinking about it, sometimes really… really changed…
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: how I looked at the stories.
• 46:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, my thoughts on Barks are relatively well documented. I think he's one of the…
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: the great cartoonist, period. I… I love his…
• 46:51
  Tad Eggleston: like, there are certain traits of Barks that I think of regularly. I love his use of silhouette. I love his action sequences, I love, like, you brought up… I love when he's getting into ridiculous things, particularly with Scrooge, where he makes up the words that indicate that they're ridiculous.
• 47:11
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know, we're, we're, we're…
• 47:15
  Tad Eggleston: I don't feel like opening the book to find them, but, like, 20 fantastic billion dollars. Yeah, yeah.
• 47:22
  Phil: I actually… one thought I had after having read it was a bit of a question of.
• 47:27
  Phil: when… when did the first billionaire come into existence? You know, because early on…
• 47:35
  Dan Newland: Uncle Scrooge would have been the first billionaire. There were no actual billionaires in the world then.
• 47:40
  Phil: That's something I…
• 47:41
  Tad Eggleston: Did… I thought Rockefeller had managed to cross the line.
• 47:45
  Dan Newland: Will he make a billion?
• 47:46
  Phil: Let me see if I can… let me see if this is an easily Googleable…
• 47:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 47:50
  Dan Newland: I was thinking about that, too, that… Yeah, my own money agents.
• 47:54
  Phil: Yeah, cause I…
• 47:54
  Tad Eggleston: Rockefeller and Carnegie are… possible.
• 47:58
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 48:00
  Dan Newland: If anybody would have done it, them or JPM?
• 48:02
  Tad Eggleston: Because I feel like…
• 48:03
  Dan Newland: One of those robber barons was the only one who went…
• 48:05
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like at one point.
• 48:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. At the time of his death in 37, Rockefeller had an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion, which equaled…
• 48:17
  Dan Newland: you're.
• 48:17
  Tad Eggleston: roughly 1.5% of the U.S. GDP.
• 48:21
  Phil: So, so yeah, so John D.
• 48:23
  Dan Newland: I would have been a lock back then.
• 48:24
  Phil: in 1916, was the first billionaire in USD, so… so yeah, yeah. Which is…
• 48:30
  Tad Eggleston: Because I seem to remember that, like, Rockefeller was a guy that, like, his wealth got measured against other nations. I'm sure.
• 48:37
  Phil: Sure, yeah. Well, and it's even… it says something, you know, again, I appreciated the critique of, like, hey, this guy is literally a billionaire, you know, which at the time, it's even more gratuitous and egregious than it is now.
• 48:51
  Phil: And he literally chases down his own nephew for a dime.
• 48:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right. You know? Well, and also, what's he doing with the billions?
• 49:01
  Phil: buying more companies, swimming in them, right, yeah.
• 49:04
  Tad Eggleston: He's not actually creating anything.
• 49:07
  Phil: No, he, he just, he just owns everything.
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: He's paying himself a lot of the time.
• 49:11
  Phil: Sure.
• 49:13
  Phil: But, yeah, it…
• 49:14
  Dan Newland: What is weird, though, is that, you know, a lot of people have done, like, the capitalist critique of it and everything, but the strange thing is that
• 49:22
  Dan Newland: there's no indication, really, that somehow the fact that Duckberg has this one person who's got 99% of the wealth is making things rough for the rest of the society. There isn't really the critique that you would expect.
• 49:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's not a heavy critique. No, definitely not a heavy critique.
• 49:42
  Dan Newland: And it's weird, because, you know, I think, you know, when you talk about it not connecting.
• 49:46
  Dan Newland: One of the reasons this connects for me is I started reading duck comics when I was, like, 7 or 8. Like, I… and I… literally, even before reading a story in Comic Collector when I was, like, 12 or 13 about Carl Barks, I'd already realized there were, like.
• 50:03
  Dan Newland: you know, duck stories I like reading.
• 50:06
  Tad Eggleston: There were good jump comics.
• 50:08
  Dan Newland: I was one of the people who was like, there's a good duck guy out there, right? And it was mostly an Uncle Scrooge that I found those, so he's always been my favorite. Like, I've hardly ever read a Mickey Mouse comic, you know?
• 50:19
  Phil: Gotcha.
• 50:20
  Dan Newland: They're just not the thing. But,
• 50:22
  Dan Newland: But, you know, it's weird, because…
• 50:25
  Dan Newland: there's nostalgia on two aspects, right? I think for Barks, when he was writing them, he had a nostalgia for the Old West, and for the Yukon, and for almost, like, the American… that idea of self-making.
• 50:39
  Tad Eggleston: That rugged…
• 50:40
  Dan Newland: the rugged individualist on the frontier. And for me, it's a nostalgia for, I read these when I was kids. You know, looking at our pen…
• 50:50
  Dan Newland: The fact that we're a bunch of grown-ass, bearded, middle-aged dudes.
• 50:56
  Dan Newland: I don't expect that this would hit as hard if you're reading these stories for the first time, because they are kids' stories.
• 51:03
  Dan Newland: They're kid stories that are well enough done that I think they can still hit for adults if you're in the right mood.
• 51:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 51:11
  Dan Newland: But these definitely are stories that, when he was making them.
• 51:15
  Dan Newland: Barks was astonished to find out he had an adult fandom that was reading these and looking for them later. I mean, the weird thing is that when he did these, Disney didn't even allow him to sign any of his work.
• 51:29
  Dan Newland: Right. And nobody knew who was doing this, like…
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: Who the Good Duck Artist was.
• 51:34
  Dan Newland: Some guy hunted him down when he was in, like, his 60s.
• 51:38
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, it was in the… yeah.
• 51:40
  Dan Newland: way.
• 51:40
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, after.
• 51:40
  Dan Newland: People love yourself, you know?
• 51:42
  Phil: Yeah, and that is fascinating. Like, that story of his life sounds like, okay, yeah, this is a fascinating individual, and like, I love the idea that he was so… he was an uncredited artist that was so talented, people found him and gave him the credit, you know?
• 51:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it was…
• 52:00
  Phil: It's really expensive.
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: Let's see, it was…
• 52:04
  Dan Newland: I went on, like, a European… a European tour, and was, like, you know.
• 52:10
  Dan Newland: Hosted by kings and stuff like this.
• 52:12
  Phil: Right?
• 52:13
  Phil: I briefly looked him up… I looked up his Wikipedia article. It's also interesting that his…
• 52:19
  Phil: He literally lived through almost the entirety of the 20th century. He was born in 1901 and passed away in the year 2000.
• 52:27
  Dan Newland: Interesting.
• 52:28
  Phil: Yeah.
• 52:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 52:30
  Phil: So, yeah, that… some stuff like that is both significant and interesting, and, like, I agree with you that… that, you know, these are…
• 52:38
  Phil: they're clever enough stories that I… I would give them to kids today, you know? And there's…
• 52:48
  Phil: because I also agree that I think some of the best hallmarks of, kids' entertainment, kids' storytelling, is when
• 52:58
  Phil: there is enough going on for parents to look at it and say, oh, okay, that's clever, or oh, I can appreciate what this is doing, you know?
• 53:06
  Tad Eggleston: I like to call it True All Ages.
• 53:08
  Phil: Yes, yes. Exactly. As well as in here.
• 53:11
  Tad Eggleston: It's not just that it's
• 53:13
  Tad Eggleston: not inappropriate for any age. Right. But that any age can find enjoyment in it, and often in very different ways.
• 53:22
  Phil: Oh, yeah, yeah, the different ways especially, because it's… it's one of those where, yeah, this doesn't look like your typical kid's entertainment that's just…
• 53:30
  Phil: sugar and stupidity. There's clear forethought, there's… there's humor as well as comedy. I definitely appreciated
• 53:40
  Phil: in the story I put down, the scene where Donald is trying to push Scrooge up a hill, saying, you gotta go in there, man, and then next panel, Scrooge is pushing Donald, like, no, no, no, you gotta go in there, man. Right. And I remember that bit from cartoons.
• 53:56
  Tad Eggleston: But I also, like… and it's very subtle, but I love how Scrooge is the…
• 54:05
  Tad Eggleston: he's the Indiana Jones-ish adventurer, like, treasure hunter, etc, except it is actually made clear that that's not why he's rich. It might be how he got his stake, but it's not why he's rich. He's rich because…
• 54:25
  Tad Eggleston: he buys out things, and then is… is chintzy. I mean, look how… I mean, like, it's regularly…
• 54:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, he didn't inherit the wealth.
• 54:36
  Tad Eggleston: Cause it actually… there's talk of, like, His clan…
• 54:42
  Dan Newland: It is self-made.
• 54:43
  Phil: Crashed.
• 54:44
  Tad Eggleston: and then… I mean, that's why they keep going back to the Yukon, like…
• 54:48
  Dan Newland: There's actually a story that gets made later, called The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, that actually goes through and does, kind of a… it's done by Don Rosa later, but it gives his life history. And he starts out, yeah, as, like, a poor prospector.
• 55:01
  Tad Eggleston: But, but…
• 55:03
  Tad Eggleston: But again, like, there's something to be said for the way that it emphasizes the way he uses his money to make money, and that part of the way he does that is by paying his labor, even when it's family, very poorly.
• 55:18
  Phil: Right.
• 55:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so… so it's not so heavy-handed that you can't do it in a comic book. Yeah. But… but, like…
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: there is… there is a certain amount of criticism of both the American Dream and our version of capitalism
• 55:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. Going on at least enough to make a 5- or 6-year-old ask some difficult questions.
• 55:42
  Phil: Right, right.
• 55:44
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 55:44
  Dan Newland: It is weird you say that, though, actually, because there was actually a… the first work, I think, that did, like, an analysis of the ducks was actually written when Pinochet was coming to power in,
• 55:57
  Phil: Wow.
• 55:58
  Dan Newland: in Chile, and it was by a couple of academics who were looking at duck comics.
• 56:05
  Phil: Huh.
• 56:05
  Dan Newland: and looked at them as sort of a capitalist imposition on the youth of Chile, trying to, like, mess with their minds. The problem was, these people did not know the whole
• 56:18
  Dan Newland: it's written by a bunch of different people, so they thought they were actually written by or directed by Walt Disney.
• 56:25
  Phil: Massive capital.
• 56:26
  Dan Newland: Trying to sort of mess with the.
• 56:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I also wonder, and I don't have a ton of interest in going into them, but I also wonder, like, if you were looking at non-barks?
• 56:39
  Dan Newland: No.
• 56:40
  Tad Eggleston: Comics, how you would feel.
• 56:43
  Phil: Well, and I…
• 56:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, at this point, like, like, what we think of Scrooge is either Barks or directly descended from Barks.
• 56:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yep. Right.
• 56:54
  Phil: I'd also be curious about the translation aspect, because I have to imagine they would be translated into… I'm not sure if Chile speaks Spanish or Portuguese, but one of the two.
• 57:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 57:04
  Phil: Portuguese.
• 57:05
  Tad Eggleston: This is only Brazil.
• 57:06
  Phil: Only Brazil, really?
• 57:08
  Tad Eggleston: South America, I think.
• 57:09
  Phil: Okay. I thought, I thought there were maybe a couple others, but, but no, okay, yeah.
• 57:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's the only one.
• 57:14
  Phil: Yeah, I know it's the big one, for sure. But, but yeah, because then it's one of those where I'd be curious of, okay, were these faithfully translated, or were they, translated.
• 57:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's, that's always,
• 57:25
  Phil: Or…
• 57:26
  Tad Eggleston: If they were translated by people that wanted to…
• 57:32
  Dan Newland: No.
• 57:33
  Dan Newland: And that makes a difference. There's actually a… they say, in fact, that's one of the reasons why in Germany, the books are so popular, is there's actually a woman who became the translator of all of this material, and she was so good.
• 57:48
  Dan Newland: That she, like, turned them into some of the best stuff that was being produced in Germany.
• 57:53
  Phil: Oh, wow.
• 57:54
  Tad Eggleston: I love it that Europeans actually appreciate their translators, whereas we have to sometimes fight to get their names on the covers of books.
• 58:01
  Phil: Ugh.
• 58:02
  Dan Newland: biographies of her, all talking about… For work translating these comics.
• 58:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 58:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, let… just because, like, we don't want to take forever, let… let's, let's run through everybody's…
• 58:18
  Tad Eggleston: Favorite stories in the book?
• 58:23
  Tad Eggleston: Tyler, Phil, you want to lead off?
• 58:24
  Phil: I just… I put down the first one, the Old Castle Secret, because…
• 58:29
  Tad Eggleston: It was fun.
• 58:30
  Tad Eggleston: It was fun. It lays out… it lays out a lot of groundwork.
• 58:34
  Phil: And that was one I read the essay for, and was like, okay, yeah, so there is more stuff going on here than.
• 58:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's the one that introduces, like, oh, the kids are actually the really clever ones.
• 58:47
  Phil: Yes. Yes. I did love that they picked up a giant axe and were swinging that around.
• 58:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I don't remember, did they… was the Junior Woodchuck guidebook introduced in that story, or was it later?
• 58:59
  Phil: No, that's later on.
• 59:00
  Tad Eggleston: Later stories, yeah.
• 59:01
  Phil: Yeah, it wasn't in that one.
• 59:02
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, I love… I love this whole idea that, like.
• 59:07
  Tad Eggleston: It's almost like adults get in their own way, they get so caught up in what is and what isn't, and kids still have the pliable, creative, problem-solving minds. Yep. Gets put forward, you know? I need to read more Bark's biography-type
• 59:24
  Tad Eggleston: stuff, because I'd be curious to find out how much of this was intentional, and how much of this just kind of came out
• 59:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there seems to be some indication that he did some research
• 59:37
  Tad Eggleston: etc, but, like, I wonder how much of the research was topical research, and how much of it was, like, character research, because, like…
• 59:47
  Tad Eggleston: Huey, Dewey, and Louis really do read like…
• 59:53
  Tad Eggleston: Relatively bright kids with the resources to learn things who haven't been shackled by assumptions.
• 1:00:00
  Phil: Right.
• 1:00:02
  Tad Eggleston: And in that way, it's a little bit of an indictment of the education system as well.
• 1:00:09
  Phil: Although, I have to imagine that that's probably more in hindsight, because I would hope that the education system was still halfway decent.
• 1:00:17
  Phil: But you never know.
• 1:00:18
  Tad Eggleston: The education system has been dealing with kind of the same problems for more than 100 years.
• 1:00:23
  Phil: Okay.
• 1:00:24
  Tad Eggleston: the whole idea… I mean, this is a whole other episode that we could have, but… But…
• 1:00:32
  Tad Eggleston: Building a mass education system is not an easy thing, and on top of that, we haven't been good at going, oh, this works and this doesn't, let's change this. We've much more wanted to go either, everything's good, we just need to do it better, or everything sucks, we need to tear it down and start over.
• 1:00:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Rather than… Ever asking the question of, well, what do we want the education system to do?
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: You, you ask… 100 policy makers, or even 100 educators? What the… Purpose of public education is.
• 1:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: And you're gonna get… At least 50 answers.
• 1:01:11
  Phil: Oh, yeah.
• 1:01:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and if you don't even know what you're trying to attain,
• 1:01:19
  Phil: Putting together.
• 1:01:20
  Tad Eggleston: Good system to do it is… is not…
• 1:01:23
  Phil: Exactly, yeah, you're not gonna get there by accident.
• 1:01:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:01:26
  Phil: Bam.
• 1:01:27
  Phil: Tyler, what was your, what was your favorite story, though?
• 1:01:31
  Tyler Johnson: The, the Homer one, based on, it's fun.
• 1:01:36
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, the… oh, what was it called? Hold on, I'm going… I'm on it right now.
• 1:01:41
  Tyler Johnson: But it's the one that's based on the Odyssey, or the Iliad, I should say, where…
• 1:01:45
  Tad Eggleston: Horsing around with history.
• 1:01:47
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, horsing around with history, right? The… and it's apropos, because we have the Odyssey movie that's out right now, and so I thought.
• 1:01:54
  Tyler Johnson: I started with this one, and I jumped around when I read through this thing on which ones I wanted to read, and yeah, this is the… this was the best one, in my opinion, because… Oh, it was fun. The historical context, you know, of it really interests me.
• 1:02:10
  Tyler Johnson: Because especially when, like, Scrooge is like, come on, boys, we're going to Troy. And they're like, what? You know?
• 1:02:18
  Phil: I'd also be curious how common, you know, referencing classic stories in kids' entertainment was at the time.
• 1:02:26
  Phil: You know, because it's something that happens quite often now.
• 1:02:30
  Dan Newland: When we talk about…
• 1:02:32
  Tyler Johnson: what's great about Karl Barks, though, is that he didn't dumb it down. Like, if you read this, like, if you don't know, if you don't know, the Homer sagas, like, this isn't going to, like.
• 1:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: Nope, you gotta go learn them.
• 1:02:47
  Tyler Johnson: You gotta go know what they're talking about, you know what I mean?
• 1:02:50
  Tad Eggleston: But, the story itself still stands.
• 1:02:54
  Tyler Johnson: Yes, yes.
• 1:02:55
  Tad Eggleston: Which is… which is an even cooler loophole, or, not loophole,
• 1:03:01
  Tyler Johnson: No, I get what you're saying.
• 1:03:02
  Tad Eggleston: needle, I had the needle to threat, you know, it's such a… such a… You know, to…
• 1:03:08
  Tyler Johnson: Probably…
• 1:03:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna drop some words that make you want to go look up stuff, but if you don't, you'll still enjoy the story.
• 1:03:16
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, when I was a kid, if I would have read this, I would have gone to my mom, hey, where's Troy? Or, what is…
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: Who's Cersei?
• 1:03:24
  Tyler Johnson: wooden… Right. What's this wooden horse about? What's, you know…
• 1:03:28
  Tyler Johnson: So I would have, and then that would have led me on to another discovery.
• 1:03:35
  Tyler Johnson: So I really enjoyed it, but I… I really enjoy those works in general, Greek… Greek mythology. So that was a… it was just fun.
• 1:03:46
  Tad Eggleston: Dan, you picked a good one.
• 1:03:49
  Dan Newland: Yeah, this actually is one of my favorite Scrooge stories of all time, though.
• 1:03:53
  Dan Newland: the one north of the Yukon where a chiseler attempts to get Scrooge's fortune by sort of trying to cash in an IOU that Scrooge had already paid back. He has to go all the way up there, loses it, and then ends up on a dog sled with this sort of past-his-prime
• 1:04:11
  Dan Newland: Dog that, that's.
• 1:04:13
  Tad Eggleston: Based off of Baltimore.
• 1:04:14
  Dan Newland: somewhere needs to go, yep.
• 1:04:15
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't realize was a real thing.
• 1:04:17
  Dan Newland: I thought it was just…
• 1:04:18
  Tad Eggleston: That's a future Disney movie.
• 1:04:21
  Phil: It's not even a Disney movie, that's a Dom Bluth move.
• 1:04:23
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow!
• 1:04:24
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah, it's Don Bluth, come on.
• 1:04:26
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:04:27
  Tyler Johnson: Rescuers don't under kind of thing, you know?
• 1:04:29
  Dan Newland: But I love…
• 1:04:30
  Tad Eggleston: Rescuers was Disney.
• 1:04:32
  Tyler Johnson: Oh, what am I thinking? Fern gully? I don't know, something like that.
• 1:04:36
  Phil: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:04:37
  Tad Eggleston: Secret initials.
• 1:04:38
  Tyler Johnson: Anyway, go on. Sorry, Dan.
• 1:04:40
  Dan Newland: No, no worries.
• 1:04:41
  Tyler Johnson: Go on.
• 1:04:42
  Dan Newland: But yeah, I love that one, partly because of the fact that, in the end, he saves the dog instead of his fortune and the like. It's one of those that kind of helps humanize him. But, and it's got the nostalgia thing, you know, when it helps kids, again.
• 1:04:56
  Dan Newland: learn about some of that stuff from, you know, what is… what was the gold rush and all of this. I think it's another one that would encourage somebody to go and hit a history book and find out what's… what's maybe going on around it.
• 1:05:09
  Dan Newland: It's weird, but I think if you haven't read a lot of Bark Stuck's, for comics fans, it seems like you could almost.
• 1:05:17
  Tad Eggleston: And now… No, go ahead, and then I'm gonna jump in for a second.
• 1:05:22
  Dan Newland: I was gonna say, it's weird, because I think you can almost think of it like the difference between EC Comics in the late 40s and early 50s, and everybody else's comics. Right.
• 1:05:33
  Dan Newland: kids' comics in the 50s, and Carl Barks' comics in the 50s. He was just that far ahead of
• 1:05:40
  Dan Newland: of everybody else.
• 1:05:43
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, so I need to make another quick correction on Balto. It is neither Don Bluth nor Disney.
• 1:05:50
  Phil: What?
• 1:05:50
  Dan Newland: -Oh.
• 1:05:51
  Tad Eggleston: bomb.
• 1:05:52
  Tad Eggleston: it was directed by Simon Wells, executive producers included Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, which… which almost makes me wonder how much there was a Barks influence.
• 1:06:12
  Tad Eggleston: Just because, you know, they were both also involved with Indiana Jones, and we already discussed that Barks had direct influences on… on Indiana Jones.
• 1:06:25
  Tad Eggleston: So… Yeah, that's… Fascinating.
• 1:06:33
  Tad Eggleston: Trying to figure out which production company did Don Bluth.
• 1:06:41
  Tyler Johnson: I think it was Don Blue's Production.
• 1:06:43
  Tad Eggleston: Or not…
• 1:06:43
  Dan Newland: Meeting at home.
• 1:06:44
  Tyler Johnson: alone.
• 1:06:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, it was Universal Pictures, Amblin Entertainment.
• 1:06:48
  Dan Newland: distributor?
• 1:06:49
  Tad Eggleston: No, again, Balto's just not Don Bluth.
• 1:06:52
  Phil: Yeah, so, so this one was Amblin Entertainment, so, so it might have been that company, but, yeah.
• 1:06:59
  Tad Eggleston: I don't see Don Bluth involved at all.
• 1:07:02
  Tad Eggleston: It does have his feel. I wonder if Simon Wells did stuff with Don Bluth.
• 1:07:07
  Tyler Johnson: When I said Rescuers Down Under, what I really was thinking of was American Tail.
• 1:07:13
  Phil: Oh, okay, yeah, there you go.
• 1:07:15
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, hey!
• 1:07:16
  Tad Eggleston: Bibles.
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: for our friend Stefan… Stefan… Frank was on American Tale, too.
• 1:07:25
  Tyler Johnson: No, really? Yeah. That's awesome.
• 1:07:27
  Tad Eggleston: That, that, that was his first, first credit.
• 1:07:29
  Tad Eggleston: So, so we've got our, our, our American tail.
• 1:07:35
  Tad Eggleston: connection.
• 1:07:37
  Tyler Johnson: Yup.
• 1:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: It doesn't look like Simon Wells did anything that I know was Don Bluth.
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: He actually started as a storyboard artist on Aladdin.
• 1:07:47
  Phil: Interested.
• 1:07:50
  Phil: I can… I can weirdly feel that connection between.
• 1:07:53
  Tyler Johnson: Yeah.
• 1:07:53
  Phil: on Aladdin.
• 1:07:54
  Tyler Johnson: Yup.
• 1:07:55
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:07:56
  Tyler Johnson: I can, too. That's crazy.
• 1:07:58
  Tyler Johnson: Alright, well…
• 1:08:00
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:08:00
  Tyler Johnson: Let's… let's see here.
• 1:08:02
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, let me, let me roll.
• 1:08:05
  Tyler Johnson: I was gonna say, I was gonna move, I was gonna move on to you.
• 1:08:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, I get to go. I actually picked two, and they came back-to-back, and there's a reason that I picked the two.
• 1:08:13
  Dan Newland: 2?
• 1:08:14
  Tad Eggleston: I decided to. I break my rules.
• 1:08:17
  Tyler Johnson: You can pick two if you want. Tad cheat every…
• 1:08:20
  Phil: Tad picked 2 and not 3!
• 1:08:23
  Tyler Johnson: Usually free, 3 days.
• 1:08:25
  Tad Eggleston: Originally, I had picked one, and it was the Prize of Pizarro, but when Lucas came up, I threw 24K Moon in two, because… like, Prize of Pizarro, why I picked it and why I love it, is, aside from the fact that it's just a great treasure hunting thing.
• 1:08:45
  Tad Eggleston: it's got one of the coolest conceits I've ever seen, which is Scrooge is never actually face-to-face or fully aware that there are people
• 1:08:58
  Tad Eggleston: Working against him.
• 1:09:00
  Phil: Hmm.
• 1:09:01
  Tad Eggleston: And they are never 100% aware of who they're working against.
• 1:09:08
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm. They only ever hear him. He never even hears or sees them.
• 1:09:13
  Tad Eggleston: He assumes that it's all old booby traps or whatnot.
• 1:09:17
  Tad Eggleston: So it's kind of cool to have two groups of people working opposed to each other, but never actually
• 1:09:25
  Tad Eggleston: Outright opposed to each other.
• 1:09:27
  Tad Eggleston: But then the reason I threw in the 24 karat moon
• 1:09:31
  Tad Eggleston: as well, has to do with, like, Lucas talking about, like, Pizarro had…
• 1:09:37
  Tad Eggleston: 3 different booby traps that he used in…
• 1:09:41
  Tad Eggleston: two in Raiders, and one in Temple of Doom.
• 1:09:45
  Tad Eggleston: But I'd actually started thinking about him in 24 Carat Moon when there was dogfighting in space. And it immediately made me think of X-Wing battles. Well, and 24 Carat Moon…
• 1:10:00
  Tad Eggleston: Came out in 1958.
• 1:10:03
  Tad Eggleston: We hadn't even gone to the moon yet, much less started about having dog fights in space. Right.
• 1:10:10
  Tad Eggleston: You know? And I think that's one of the things that is easy to, to, like.
• 1:10:15
  Tad Eggleston: overlook reading Barks now is how many of these things
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: If not being completely originated in barks, or certainly being brought to the masses for the first time in barks.
• 1:10:32
  Phil: Right.
• 1:10:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, he's so clearly both creative and well-read and whatnot, and taking all of this stuff and managing to distill it in these, like.
• 1:10:44
  Tad Eggleston: 8 to 20 page… children's stories that are true all ages is like… just really… spectacular.
• 1:10:55
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, that's why I picked the two.
• 1:11:00
  Tad Eggleston: If I was picking one, it'd be prized at Pizarro, but… but I was picking the… I picked them for essentially the same reason, is, like, two of…
• 1:11:09
  Tad Eggleston: my favorite… action-adventure franchises of all time that started 20-plus years later?
• 1:11:22
  Tad Eggleston: Almost 30 years later?
• 1:11:30
  Tad Eggleston: You can draw a pretty direct line, and in one case, It's even a stated line.
• 1:11:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, it's this, like, obviously, Carl Barks is responsible for the Disney afternoon without much…
• 1:11:46
  Tad Eggleston: work, but, like, the idea that Karl Barks could be As responsible for… Indiana Jones is… is…
• 1:11:56
  Tad Eggleston: as, Robert E. Howard, or HR… Who did the… Who wrote King Solomon's Minds?
• 1:12:07
  Phil: And you're…
• 1:12:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yes or no.
• 1:12:09
  Dan Newland: Richard… I can't remember.
• 1:12:14
  Phil: That's,
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: That's more.
• 1:12:15
  Phil: H. Ryder Haggard?
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, H. Ryder Haggard. You know,
• 1:12:21
  Tad Eggleston: But also that, like, he probably influenced Star Wars.
• 1:12:27
  Tad Eggleston: you know, as much as Buck Rogers or other things, like, just… I mean, it's… it's insane to… to think of…
• 1:12:36
  Tad Eggleston: A kid's cartoonist.
• 1:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: Having that level of… influence.
• 1:12:43
  Tad Eggleston: on… popular culture 50 years later.
• 1:12:49
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:12:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know? So yeah, that's one of the reasons that I'm… I'm… I love…
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Love Carl Parks. Next week, we each picked,
• 1:13:02
  Tad Eggleston: Some… some other titles from… from the…
• 1:13:06
  Tad Eggleston: from the Disney Collection on Humble Bundle, and
• 1:13:09
  Tyler Johnson: I'm already ahead. I'm ahead of the game.
• 1:13:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, Tyler read his other title first.
• 1:13:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:13:17
  Tad Eggleston: So, so we'll be… we'll… I think we'll be exploring some European stuff, we'll be explo… I mean, and that's another thing, I mean…
• 1:13:24
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if any of you have read any Umberto Echo?
• 1:13:30
  Phil: I'm familiar with him, I haven't read his.
• 1:13:32
  Tad Eggleston: He's probably most famous for… The name of the rose?
• 1:13:40
  Tad Eggleston: but… there was a book… I always forget exactly, so let me make certain I get…
• 1:13:52
  Tad Eggleston: Make certain I have my title right.
• 1:13:58
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, I get two of them confused.
• 1:14:02
  Phil: If that's the one I'm thinking of, where the cover is, like, a guy in a diving suit, then…
• 1:14:12
  Dan Newland: The only other one I've read, I think, is Foucault's Pendulum, so I'm not sure about the later ones, so…
• 1:14:21
  Phil: Yeah, I might be thinking of someone else, though.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I just picked the wrong one, so… Oh. It should be… it should be the other one.
• 1:14:29
  Phil: Dangerous clicking going about.
• 1:14:31
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so he wrote a wonderful book called The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, which is described as…
• 1:14:43
  Tad Eggleston: In this fascinating, abundant new novel.
• 1:14:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yambo, a rare book dealer, has suffered a bizarre form of memory loss. He can remember every book he ever read, but nothing about his own life. In an effort to retrieve his past, he withdraws into his old family home and searches through boxes of old newspapers, comics, records, photo albums, and diaries kept in the attic.
• 1:15:03
  Tad Eggleston: And so Yambo relives his youth through mo…
• 1:15:06
  Tad Eggleston: Mussolini, Catholic Education, Josephine Baker, Flash Gordon, Fred Astaire, his memories run wild, and life races before his eyes.
• 1:15:15
  Tad Eggleston: takes the form of a graphic novel. Yambo struggles through the flames to capture one simple innocent image, that of his first love. And it was in there that, that, like.
• 1:15:29
  Tad Eggleston: I discovered how much of a big thing, like, Italian… Disney comics were.
• 1:15:36
  Phil: Hmm.
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because there was a fair amount of time spent with them, and I'm like, oh, this is… this is how, like, barks gets referred to in the United States, but it's not referring to just barks, it's referring to all sorts of people.
• 1:15:51
  Tad Eggleston: and I've always meant to, to, to dive more into, and I'm glad that, that,
• 1:15:58
  Tad Eggleston: Phanographics has been translating.
• 1:16:02
  Dan Newland: Yeah, if you go out and look at, like.
• 1:16:04
  Tad Eggleston: overseas.
• 1:16:04
  Dan Newland: index.org or anything like this. There are more…
• 1:16:08
  Dan Newland: I think there are more Italian duck stories?
• 1:16:11
  Dan Newland: Than any other story, any other country in terms of producing them.
• 1:16:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:16:16
  Dan Newland: By a… by a mile.
• 1:16:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's kind of like, I discovered when I was interviewing Jason that, that, like, Scandinavia loves…
• 1:16:28
  Tad Eggleston: Why can't I remember? Purple suit, da-da-da-da-da-da.
• 1:16:33
  Phil: Darkwing duck?
• 1:16:36
  Tad Eggleston: He's at Mad Cave now, it's not… it's not a…
• 1:16:38
  Phil: The Phantom. The Phantom?
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: Phantom.
• 1:16:40
  Dan Newland: Huh.
• 1:16:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Scandinavia loves the Phantom. They wound up having their own comics. There are massive numbers of Scandinavian Phantom comics. Interesting. That are only translated into English in Australia.
• 1:16:53
  Phil: Wow.
• 1:16:54
  Dan Newland: They're also big fans of the Ducks.
• 1:16:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know what I mean.
• 1:16:57
  Dan Newland: is the second biggest Scandinavia, Germany, and Italy.
• 1:17:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:17:01
  Dan Newland: and duck places.
• 1:17:03
  Tad Eggleston: So… so yeah, no, it's always, always funny to see what… what hits, and then once it hits, you know, I mean, kind of like…
• 1:17:11
  Tad Eggleston: so many of our great creators want to do a Batman story, or want to do a Spider-Man story, their creators
• 1:17:21
  Tad Eggleston: I can write the Phantom? Absolutely!
• 1:17:24
  Phil: Oh, yeah.
• 1:17:24
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know what I mean?
• 1:17:27
  Tad Eggleston: So, anyway, 3 books I hope will be spectacular next week. First, the ones I know are spectacular. We've got Of the Earth, number 4, from Chris Condon, Andrew Eric, Charlie Adlard at Image Comics, Regicide, number 1, from Patrick Kindlin, and Ludovic Laliat at Image Comics, Starhenge Book 2, A Kiss for Atticus, number 2, from Liam Sharp at Image Comics.
• 1:17:49
  Tad Eggleston: And Yumi00X No. 1 from Doug Wagner and Hwaite Silva at Image Comics.
• 1:17:57
  Tad Eggleston: The ones that I haven't read yet that I'm very much looking forward to, are new number one, Miles Morales Spider-Man from Brian Hill, Nico Leone, and Simone DiMaio. I love Brian Hill's work, it's normally a lot darker than I expected Miles Morales, so I'm kinda…
• 1:18:14
  Tyler Johnson: I'm looking forward to that.
• 1:18:16
  Tad Eggleston: Great. I'm definitely looking forward to it, but I'm…
• 1:18:19
  Tad Eggleston: I don't see him deciding to take Miles Morales in a, like, massively dark direction.
• 1:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: I also imagine that it's gonna have some more… because he also often deals very much with racial sensibilities, so I'm really curious to see what he's gonna do with this.
• 1:18:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:18:38
  Tad Eggleston: From a couple of my favorite creators, we have Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theater Presents Roar of the Worlds, from Tom Schuylie and Kyle Baker. Love me some Kyle Baker.
• 1:18:51
  Tad Eggleston: And then, from… Julio Anta and Daniel Irizarre, we have The Beast of Borkan II, a mixing of
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: of, puerto Rican folklore, and… was it Hurricane Irene? Whichever one resulted in… in… in the,
• 1:19:13
  Tad Eggleston: The throwing of paper towels by the president.
• 1:19:17
  Tad Eggleston: Aww.
• 1:19:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:19:20
  Phil: Yeah, I don't remember specifically which one that was, but I do remember.
• 1:19:22
  Tad Eggleston: I don't either.
• 1:19:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's sad when it all starts to, like, blur together.
• 1:19:29
  Tad Eggleston: Phil, what's your all-new giant-sized Trade Waker slash graphic novel pick?
• 1:19:35
  Phil: That's gonna be The Forged, Volume 4 from Greg Rucka, Eric Troutman, Mike Henderson, Nolan Woodard, and Adriana Mayer over at Image Comics. That's gonna be some, battlesuit, in-space-faring adventures.
• 1:19:53
  Phil: I am a little bit behind on the series, I think I've only.
• 1:19:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the first.
• 1:19:57
  Phil: But it's good, it's really good.
• 1:19:59
  Tad Eggleston: It was quite good. I read it in single-issue form after.
• 1:20:03
  Tad Eggleston: re-read the first three volumes, so I am very much up to date, and liked it a lot.
• 1:20:10
  Tad Eggleston: Tyler or Dan, any other closing comments?
• 1:20:15
  Tyler Johnson: No, but I'm really looking forward to next week's read.
• 1:20:19
  Tyler Johnson: like I said, to talk about it. I was ready today.
• 1:20:23
  Tyler Johnson: I know. Nope, that's…
• 1:20:27
  Tad Eggleston: He's looking forward to the fact that he doesn't have to read anything for next week, because he did it already.
• 1:20:32
  Tyler Johnson: I… I am ahead of the game, fellas.
• 1:20:35
  Phil: Gotta keep it in your memory for that long.
• 1:20:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:20:37
  Tyler Johnson: Oh, I will. Alright, well, this has been fun. So all listeners out there, we will catch you guys after the next page.
• 1:20:46
  Tyler Johnson: See ya!