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Transcript

With Great Power #311... 22 Panels with Tom Peyer & Stuart Moore · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My hosts today are our, long-time comic guys, writers, editors, general… general everything people, at Ahoy, and many places before that, Tom Pyre and Stuart Moore.
• 0:20
  Tad Eggleston: How's it going, gentlemen?
• 0:22
  Tom Peyer: Hey, great, thanks.
• 0:23
  Stuart Moore: Pretty good, thank you.
• 0:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So,
• 0:29
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God. Like, Tom, I've asked lots of questions to, this is my first time meeting Stuart, and, like, I'm certain I'm gonna come up with all sorts of weird questions to ask about your past as we go.
• 0:41
  Stuart Moore: Fire away.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. But we did come for a purpose, so we should start with.
• 0:49
  Tad Eggleston: Ahoy is… is launching their… their first Kickstarter, next…
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: Week, month, soon. Go save it. Saving Kickstarters is a good thing. It gets it into the algorithm. I have explained this a few times on my podcast, but we'll do it again.
• 1:08
  Tad Eggleston: Going and saying, notify me on launch, that's a good thing for the companies, and it helps all sorts of wonderful things that we don't understand because we don't code.
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: And if you do code, and you know how to make it help more wonderful things, like give Tom and Stuart a call…
• 1:27
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 1:28
  Tad Eggleston: Why not?
• 1:30
  Tad Eggleston: But the Forgotten Divine, talk to me about, like,
• 1:37
  Tad Eggleston: somebody should pitch the book, but then… but then once you've pitched the book, like, why did we decide that we're going the Kickstarter route this time? Like, is it… is it… yeah, no, I'm just gonna leave the question there, I'm not gonna make any conjectures to go into it.
• 1:52
  Tom Peyer: thing. Well, it's a self-contained, complete graphic novel.
• 1:59
  Tom Peyer: It's very excellent, by Mark Russell, who only writes excellently, and Russ Braun.
• 2:04
  Tom Peyer: was the same.
• 2:06
  Tom Peyer: Omnidraw is great.
• 2:08
  Tom Peyer: And, it's a mature theme, It's about,
• 2:15
  Tom Peyer: It's real about what it's like to be in a cult from the inside, how it feels, what the choices you make to be there feel like, how small they feel sometimes.
• 2:24
  Tom Peyer: And it's about,
• 2:26
  Tom Peyer: It's about a guy who's a… he's an actually unhoused veteran, and he starts having dreams.
• 2:33
  Tom Peyer: That take place on this… alien world that… that he's never seen anything like it. And then…
• 2:40
  Tom Peyer: In a short amount of time, he encounters other people who are having the same dream.
• 2:45
  Tom Peyer: And they want to know why, and they… they…
• 2:48
  Tom Peyer: They can only guess why, and they start a support group, which slowly evolves into what we would…
• 2:55
  Tom Peyer: Call a cult.
• 2:57
  Tom Peyer: In fact, it is a cult, and
• 2:59
  Tom Peyer: It's gonna go through all the… Trauma and weirdness and…
• 3:05
  Tom Peyer: even violence of the cult experience. And, before it comes to
• 3:11
  Tom Peyer: A possible revelation of why this is happening to them.
• 3:16
  Tom Peyer: So, it's a terrific story, and it's beautiful to learn.
• 3:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, as I'm hearing you describe it, and as I'm reading the blurb on…
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: on Kickstarter, which hits most of the same things that you hit, and, like, ends with the conceivably dot dot dot revelation, I'm like.
• 3:35
  Tad Eggleston: Only Mark Russell could tell a story about a cult with a…
• 3:42
  Tad Eggleston: at least ambiguous hap… ambiguously happy ending. It feels like such a Mark Russell thing, right there.
• 3:52
  Tom Peyer: I say this a lot, but Mark's great gift to me is he does, like, really deep and original thinking about things, and is able to
• 4:02
  Tom Peyer: Write about them so that it goes down easily.
• 4:07
  Tom Peyer: It's down a lot more easily than it must have for him to formulate.
• 4:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 4:12
  Stuart Moore: Well, he's genuinely funny about it, too. Like, he's a… like, he can take… he can take very serious subjects, as you say, and sort of couch them in,
• 4:21
  Stuart Moore: Like, genuinely, like.
• 4:24
  Stuart Moore: funny, sparkling dialogue, like, and, and one-liners and things like that, at Second Coming, his previous and ongoing book for, for Ahoy.
• 4:36
  Stuart Moore: of that. It's just full of philosophical and theological exploration, that's like a superhero and Jesus Christ, just sort of arguing, arguing about whether it's better to, better to punch someone or, give them a fish to eat, you know, so…
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I… I still love the… what, the first mission they go on? It turns out it's, like.
• 4:59
  Tad Eggleston: counterfeit Pokemon cards, Jesus heals all the broken bones.
• 5:06
  Tom Peyer: Right, right, right. The superhero beats everyone up, and he comes back to find Jesus has healed them. It's like, what did you do?
• 5:15
  Stuart Moore: And, you know, to answer your question about Kickstarter, this is part of Ahoy sort of experimenting and moving out into different markets. The direct market
• 5:25
  Stuart Moore: comic shop market has been in a, it's been in a little bit of chaos for the last 18 months or so, since the, decline and collapse of Diamond. And, we were in a…
• 5:36
  Tad Eggleston: That's a very polite way to put it, Stuart.
• 5:38
  Stuart Moore: I said smile. But, but the, ahoy was in a…
• 5:46
  Stuart Moore: was fairly well situated to ride that out, because we were a very early client of Lunar, the newer distributor. We were their third publisher after DC and Scout.
• 5:58
  Stuart Moore: But… and they've been very good to work with, and they've kept our stuff getting out there. But it has caused chaos, and it has caused, I'm noticing fewer reorders from stores of books, that sort of thing. So, you know, partly as a…
• 6:14
  Stuart Moore: partly as a means of survival, and partly just to experiment and see what we can do. We decided to put… this one seemed… we acquired this book with Kickstarter in mind. It was… it was the plan from the start, and it's been in the works for a while. But we're looking forward to getting that up and running.
• 6:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I… there's sometimes pushback in the Kickstarter creator community when… when…
• 6:39
  Tad Eggleston: some of the bigger publishers jump in. I know when Boom came with a Keanu Reeves book, they're like, really? You're coming into our area with Keanu Reeves?
• 6:49
  Stuart Moore: That book… that book did phenomenally well, though. Of course it did. Which is probably part of the reason it got… it got pushed back, but, well, yeah. But I would have done the same thing. I would have, I mean, I would have put it through as well.
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: where I was gonna go is I honestly don't understand why…
• 7:07
  Tad Eggleston: more publishers, whether it's through Kickstarter, whether it's through Backerkit, whether it's through Zoop, whether it's creating their own platform, because, like.
• 7:17
  Stuart Moore: Yep.
• 7:17
  Tad Eggleston: a Boom or a Marvel or a DC might have the capital to not have to share with Kickstarter. I don't understand why…
• 7:26
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly with, like, a non-single-issue thing, when you know you've got something substantial to sell, there isn't more…
• 7:39
  Tad Eggleston: Crowdfunding, just because it minimizes the risk.
• 7:44
  Stuart Moore: I don't know the details of this, but I am peripherally involved… I'm involved in several Marvel nonfiction projects right now, and I do know that they do have something, I think they call it Marvel Direct Publishing or something like that, where they sort of do stuff like… they do campaigns like that on their own. I'm not really sure the details and how the stuff is sold.
• 8:04
  Stuart Moore: But yeah, a lot of companies are experimenting with that in different ways, one way or another. I think Kickstarter is still probably…
• 8:11
  Stuart Moore: The most central marketplace, you know?
• 8:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's complete.
• 8:15
  Stuart Moore: It's everywhere.
• 8:15
  Tad Eggleston: Certainly for, like, an Ahoy, I mean, I wasn't actually advocating that most companies should go out and make their own.
• 8:22
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like… I try to take the perspective I want to seek
• 8:28
  Tad Eggleston: Creators get paid for their work, and preferably timely, and…
• 8:34
  Tad Eggleston: And preferably not strictly on the back end.
• 8:38
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the ways to do that is to collect the money up front.
• 8:44
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, well, we're in… we're in… as a company, we're in complete agreement with that, and Ahoy has, Ahoy has been well-funded from the start, and we've, we've, we've made a point of paying people fairly and rapidly, and I think that's something… that's something, as a company, I think Tom would agree, we're very proud of.
• 9:01
  Tom Peyer: Absolutely.
• 9:02
  Tad Eggleston: I think that came up last time, and you definitely have the reputation for that, so I certainly didn't want you to think for even a second that I was implying that, oh.
• 9:10
  Stuart Moore: No, no, no.
• 9:11
  Tad Eggleston: Anywhere near some of the companies that will not be named.
• 9:16
  Stuart Moore: I've probably worked for some of them.
• 9:18
  Tom Peyer: I know I have.
• 9:19
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, you, you definitely.
• 9:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I was speaking more of the ones that have actually had bankruptcy papers come out showing how much money they owe to various Hollywood people versus how much money they owe for the stuff that they were trying to get those various Hollywood people to sell, and it's like…
• 9:37
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 9:37
  Tad Eggleston: Did anybody get paid?
• 9:40
  Stuart Moore: Yo. Yeah.
• 9:41
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 9:45
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, so… so that… that… that was… that was my hunch, was that it was like, okay, we've got a… we've got a new weird market, this is a great
• 9:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 9:55
  Tad Eggleston: there are way worse ways to look at crowdfunding than to start with a Mark Russell and Russ Braun book.
• 10:04
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, that was kind of how we approached it, yeah. And we have plans to do more, but yeah, we definitely wanted to put a… put a strong foot forward at the beginning.
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I mean, your trial balloon here, which hopefully isn't a trial balloon, is, like, one that is gonna attract attention immediately. I mean, the…
• 10:26
  Tad Eggleston: the single image available on the website right now is, in and of itself, compelling, and even before I go down and read it, it's like, wait a minute, this comes from a Mark Russell book? I'm in.
• 10:38
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, without describing it in too much detail, people can go look at it, but it's, it's both, beautifully drawn, and it's,
• 10:46
  Stuart Moore: it's, it's otherworldly in a way that's, that's sort of exciting in a science fiction way, but it's also, like, kind of, like, subconsciously symbolic. Like, it feels like it's pulling something out of your head a little bit.
• 10:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and there's just a feeling of… Desolation. Desperation.
• 11:07
  Tad Eggleston: I should come up with another D word. We gotta… we gotta keep the rhythm going.
• 11:13
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, all I can think of is digression, and that's not right.
• 11:15
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 11:19
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, like, like, seeing…
• 11:23
  Tad Eggleston: Seeing this, this, like, clearly unhoused…
• 11:28
  Tad Eggleston: We know veteran, and you can guess veteran, because he's got the camouflage jacket.
• 11:33
  Tad Eggleston: A very military-style backpack.
• 11:38
  Tad Eggleston: You know, seeing this clearly unhoused… unkempt man, just…
• 11:45
  Tad Eggleston: Walking out of this, like, you pointed out, this sci-fi landscape, but, like, it's a sci-fi landscape with kind of muted hues, and, like, even though you're seeing plants, it almost feels like you're on the edge of a desert.
• 12:00
  Tad Eggleston: Like…
• 12:04
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 12:04
  Tom Peyer: That's great.
• 12:06
  Tad Eggleston: And then you see Mark Russell's name, and you're like, okay, okay. And you go further down, and it's like, oh, yeah, no, I'm in.
• 12:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if you're me, the second you saw Russell's name, you were in, but…
• 12:18
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, we both…
• 12:19
  Tad Eggleston: There are some people who are still silly and don't read everything that he does.
• 12:25
  Stuart Moore: We've both known him since, for his, basically his whole career. He was at, he started at DC when Tom and I were both editors there, and did a lot of work with… he did a lot of work with the Vertigo imprint back then.
• 12:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Did one of you, edit…
• 12:41
  Tad Eggleston: Flintstones, because, like, I mean, if you go that far back with them, that would be…
• 12:46
  Stuart Moore: No, that's, that's Mark, that's, that was Marie Javens, actually.
• 12:51
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay. Well, I mean, she's done okay by herself, too.
• 12:54
  Stuart Moore: Yes, she has.
• 12:59
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, she was just the assistant editor of Mad Magazine? Did you see that?
• 13:04
  Stuart Moore: She what? It was… She's credited as assistant editor of Mad Magazine?
• 13:09
  Tad Eggleston: The… I was reading it this morning, and it's actually really good. You know, last year for April Fool's Day, she put out the Harley Quinn Fartacular. This year,
• 13:23
  Tad Eggleston: they put out DC Goes Mad, and Chip Zdarsky was the editor, she's listed as the assistant editor.
• 13:30
  Tom Peyer: That's great.
• 13:31
  Stuart Moore: That's funny.
• 13:32
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, it's all sorts of normal mat, or normal, DC… Writers and artists…
• 13:41
  Tad Eggleston: like, lampooning. It's actually quite brilliant. I was enjoying it immensely until I…
• 13:48
  Tad Eggleston: my body remembered that I was allowed to sleep.
• 13:53
  Stuart Moore: I'll have to check that out. I've been seeing all their PR for it.
• 13:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I think, like, until this week, somehow I thought… That it was just, like…
• 14:06
  Tad Eggleston: Because Matt's done a lot of, like, best-of type issues, so until, like, this week, I thought of it as…
• 14:13
  Tad Eggleston: as… Like, a collection of… various DC spoofs by Madd through the years, and it's not. It's… it's…
• 14:23
  Tad Eggleston: new stuff, and I managed to snag a copy, even though it was going quickly.
• 14:29
  Stuart Moore: Very fast. Wow.
• 14:30
  Tad Eggleston: and… and… Enjoyed it.
• 14:34
  Tad Eggleston: am enjoying it quite a bit. So yeah, no, it fits the Ahoy sensibilities, so, like, if there's no ill feelings towards the old publisher, then yes, you should definitely pick up a copy.
• 14:46
  Tom Peyer: But we're all…
• 14:47
  Stuart Moore: handles.
• 14:48
  Tom Peyer: None at all. They are…
• 14:49
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't think there were, but every once in a while, it's like…
• 14:54
  Stuart Moore: Marie's actually a good friend of mine, and and we coordinated with DC when we took on Second Coming, because they initiated the project, and they were great. They were great to work with.
• 15:04
  Tom Peyer: That was helpful. It was just great, yeah.
• 15:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 15:07
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, like, I'm… like, and I don't know if, like, you hit on one of my…
• 15:17
  Tad Eggleston: how to put it? I like to call them…
• 15:22
  Tad Eggleston: one of the tad brain conspiracy theories, like, I know that it's… it's… it's… it's not true, I don't… I'm not vested in them being true, but, like, they're… when they happen, it's like, oh, I imagine it like this. Because, like, when it was announced that
• 15:41
  Tad Eggleston: that,
• 15:44
  Tad Eggleston: Second Coming was going from DC to Ahoy, I immediately went, of course it is. DC was never going to put out that book? But Mark's done well by them, and so have Tom and Stuart. So by saying they'd put out the book, that got it all the attention it needed to then go to Ahoy.
• 16:06
  Stuart Moore: Right, and we were already working with… we were already working with Mark. He was already writing Billionaire Island for us. Right. With Steve Pugh, which wound up coming out later, because Second Coming was so far along, and we just jumped it on the schedule. But we already had a relationship with him.
• 16:20
  Tom Peyer: Right? And Mark in DC had a real, like, good and positive and peaceful time working this out, that he wasn't going to be doing it for them.
• 16:28
  Stuart Moore: I think, honestly, that was, I don't think I'm telling stories by… out of school here, but I think that was a real higher-up decision to drop the book. I think everyone in DC editorial, up through Marie and Dan DiDio, I think they were all very supportive of it, so they wanted the book…
• 16:46
  Stuart Moore: They wanted the book to land somewhere good. Like, they wanted, you know, they wanted it to succeed.
• 16:53
  Tad Eggleston: And this right here is an example of something that I've been relatively certain of.
• 16:59
  Tad Eggleston: for a long time, with few exceptions, like, the things that we get really frustrated about at Marvel or DC are much higher than the names that we know.
• 17:10
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 17:11
  Stuart Moore: I've seen it work both ways. The names that we know are generally…
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm not saying…
• 17:19
  Tad Eggleston: Never. Not saying never. Right. But the names that we know generally actually care about comics. You know, they're doing stuff… I mean, for that matter, I had Paul Levitz on a long time ago, and one of the questions I asked him
• 17:33
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if this was on or off the air, but I asked him about, Superman's Babysitter, and he just started laughing, and he's like, yeah, I blew it on that one.
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: It's like…
• 17:43
  Tom Peyer: Totally.
• 17:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he's like, I totally blew it on that one.
• 17:47
  Stuart Moore: What was that… what was that incident? I don't remember.
• 17:49
  Tom Peyer: That was the, that was the, the Elseworlds special that had, that had the story about,
• 17:55
  Stuart Moore: Oh, the microwave oven. Yeah, yeah, Cal Baker.
• 17:58
  Tom Peyer: I'll have them all pulped, because he used the phrase, imitatable violence.
• 18:03
  Stuart Moore: Oh, he put that…
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: And it went in Eisner, even though it hadn't been published.
• 18:08
  Tom Peyer: Right? I had a story in there.
• 18:11
  Stuart Moore: You had a story in that volume, yeah.
• 18:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 18:15
  Stuart Moore: Paul said that was a mistake. He said.
• 18:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he's like, I blew it on that one.
• 18:21
  Tom Peyer: So.
• 18:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I didn't have the…
• 18:23
  Tom Peyer: the imitation.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: violence, so, so, so, like…
• 18:26
  Tad Eggleston: I was just asking, you know, when a story that you'd yanked won an Eisner, Well, good post.
• 18:36
  Tom Peyer: Paul say… did Paul Levitt say that, putting it out was worth any number of babies being put in microwaves?
• 18:42
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 18:43
  Stuart Moore: Did they have a number, yeah. Did they have a quantity on it?
• 18:47
  Tad Eggleston: No, we didn't get into that conversation.
• 18:50
  Stuart Moore: how immersive.
• 18:50
  Tad Eggleston: I had forgotten that aspect when I was talking. I forgot that aspect until now.
• 18:56
  Tom Peyer: I just think it's surprising that Paul changed his position on real-life babies being put into microwaves.
• 19:02
  Tad Eggleston: But again, that wasn't the question.
• 19:05
  Tad Eggleston: That wasn't the question!
• 19:09
  Stuart Moore: As I remember, they did publish the story later, you know…
• 19:12
  Tad Eggleston: Eventually.
• 19:12
  Stuart Moore: Hardcover edition, which they thought was somehow less accessible to babies.
• 19:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 19:17
  Stuart Moore: It's been… it's been…
• 19:18
  Tad Eggleston: It's been republished… I mean, it's been republished many times at this point. Like, I mean, again, like…
• 19:26
  Tad Eggleston: when you don't publish a story, and then it wins an Eisner Award anyway… That's so funny.
• 19:34
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 19:35
  Tom Peyer: There'll be stories that I would give an award to if they didn't publish them.
• 19:39
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, yeah.
• 19:43
  Stuart Moore: I think, I think that… I don't think there have been enough Baby in the Microwave stories in recent years. I think that's a genre that needs to be revived. It's like westerns. They go out of fashion for a while, and then you want them, you know?
• 19:54
  Tom Peyer: Stuart, we always said he's a great baby in a microwave, man.
• 19:57
  Stuart Moore: It is.
• 19:58
  Tad Eggleston: As long as we keep a nice…
• 20:02
  Tad Eggleston: Disclaimer at the bottom, I want to make it really clear, 22 Panels is not advocating for any babies in the microwave, unless you are absolutely, positively certain that they are Superman and will do okay. Right. But it's really hard to know that with…
• 20:18
  Tom Peyer: It's hard to know that.
• 20:20
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, we're not into imitative violence. I'm not into imitative…
• 20:24
  Tom Peyer: No, I like original violence.
• 20:25
  Stuart Moore: Original violence, yes. Suggestive violence, perhaps. Just like… like, violence that gives you ideas for new types of violence, rather than imitative. That's not…
• 20:36
  Tad Eggleston: I am digging this back and forth, and I'm already, like, this leads to the easy next question, and Tom's talked about it some.
• 20:46
  Tad Eggleston: the last time that he was on, but I think, as I listen to you guys, listen to you together, talk to me about the ethos of Ahoy. Talk to me about the genesis, and, like…
• 20:57
  Tad Eggleston: Because this humor that I'm hearing between the two of you, like, the last 5 minutes has just been an ad for Ahoy Comics. You know, you have that certain sensibility, that certain sense of humor, that certain sense of, like, comics are supposed to be fun.
• 21:15
  Tad Eggleston: Every time Shelly Bond complains that there aren't fun comics anymore, I remind her of you guys, and she goes, okay, yeah, except for Thomas Stewart.
• 21:24
  Stuart Moore: He's an old friend, obviously.
• 21:26
  Tad Eggleston: I know.
• 21:26
  Stuart Moore: We both worked with her, yeah.
• 21:29
  Tom Peyer: Yep.
• 21:30
  Tom Peyer: Yep.
• 21:31
  Tom Peyer: Well, when we started.
• 21:32
  Tom Peyer: just talking to creators and stuff, the shorthand we used to describe what we wanted to do was Funny Vertigo.
• 21:42
  Tom Peyer: And, I guess we've sort of stuck to that, but every…
• 21:47
  Tom Peyer: Everything we put out has some… Level of humor.
• 21:52
  Tom Peyer: some measure of humor. It doesn't have to be a comedy, but it can't take itself so seriously.
• 21:58
  Tom Peyer: And,
• 22:00
  Tom Peyer: I think that's what… that's one of the things, that and being, you know, larger than life, like a comic book.
• 22:06
  Tom Peyer: Are the two things that bind them all together.
• 22:11
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, I think that's right, and and yeah, I mean, it helps that…
• 22:15
  Stuart Moore: like, the stuff that… certainly the stuff that you write usually has an element of humor in it, of one kind or another, and that was a lot of the… I mean, The Wrong Earth, which we launched the whole company with,
• 22:28
  Stuart Moore: was that. It's, it's taking superheroes, not making fun of them so much as just, like, approaching them with a… with a, with a, with a, you know, askew eye, and
• 22:40
  Stuart Moore: And taking what's… taking what's really fun about them, and playing it up, and occasionally saying, huh, isn't this a little silly? You know, like, while still telling a very human story.
• 22:52
  Stuart Moore: And that's probably true of most of the books, one way or another.
• 22:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that, that feels relatively dead on to me.
• 23:01
  Tad Eggleston: And it's what I appre… I mean, Ahoy…
• 23:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I feel blessed that right now there are, like, 4 publishers that I will… will…
• 23:14
  Tad Eggleston: almost not look at the descriptions before knowing that I'm gonna read the book, and Ahoy is one of them. But Ahoy… Ahoy is the one that I know will always also make me laugh and think.
• 23:28
  Stuart Moore: Well, we've also deliberately tried to keep the line small, and that helps. It's… I think of it as sort of a boutique publisher, in that it's a small… we publish a small number of projects and try to give them all a lot of care, and that can mean very different things. Like, I was just talking with someone else about this, like.
• 23:46
  Stuart Moore: One of the hardest things as a comics editor, I think, which I don't really do anymore.
• 23:50
  Stuart Moore: Is, is knowing when to get your hands in and get them dirty, and really work on a project, and when to just sit back and let the creative team work, because it's very different for very different projects, and, different people require, different… different people respond to different kinds of motivation, and different people require different amounts of care and handling.
• 24:10
  Tom Peyer: Correct.
• 24:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna ask the, the, the softball question. Tell me, tell me your…
• 24:20
  Stuart Moore: Alright.
• 24:20
  Tad Eggleston: Your favorite Ahoy project so far?
• 24:24
  Stuart Moore: No.
• 24:25
  Stuart Moore: You won't do it?
• 24:27
  Stuart Moore: You don't want your…
• 24:27
  Tom Peyer: Because that means That means the ones who aren't my favorite will know that they aren't my favorite.
• 24:34
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I never say least favorite.
• 24:37
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, well, no.
• 24:38
  Stuart Moore: I wouldn't say.
• 24:39
  Tom Peyer: They all have to think they're the very favorite.
• 24:43
  Stuart Moore: I wouldn't say.
• 24:43
  Tad Eggleston: They're all your children, is what you're saying. Yes.
• 24:46
  Stuart Moore: I have an answer, but it's not… it's not my favorite. It's just one that we published that we… I think we all think was a little bit overlooked, and that's Nelson.
• 24:54
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 24:55
  Stuart Moore: Which, is just the story of a, washed-up comic trying to make a, a washed-up insult comic trying to make a comeback. And it's by, Paul Constant and, and Fred Harper, who's currently doing the Toxic Avengers stuff.
• 25:10
  Stuart Moore: And, and it's just hilarious. It's so funny. And it's one of those things that the genre was all wrong for the comic shop market. Like, we didn't sell very many copies of it, but it's just, it's just wonderful. It's just… it's, it's rude. It's also probably the most, extreme
• 25:29
  Stuart Moore: Sexual and violent book we've published, but all in the most ridiculously over-the-top
• 25:35
  Stuart Moore: goofy way. So that's one I would pull out… it's not… like I said, and I have to pull my own books out when I say that, too, like, I don't want to pick one of my books, but but that one, that one I always… that one always… when I think of it, I always smile. Like, I always sort of wish we'd been able to crack the code of how to sell that book a little better.
• 25:54
  Tom Peyer: It is great. That's a great answer, Stuart. It is a great book.
• 25:58
  Tom Peyer: And, yeah.
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, then, then I'm gonna ask the similar question, with, with, with,
• 26:04
  Stuart Moore: Which one do we hate? Which one do we.
• 26:06
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, we're gonna go Priya Hoy. You guys did lots of work, Priya Hoy. What's the book that you brought
• 26:16
  Tad Eggleston: brought through the grinder from pitch to being… I mean, we have a great appreciation for editors, publishers, etc, the people in between at 22Panels. I actually even did a panel at C2E2 last weekend with
• 26:32
  Tad Eggleston: with publishers and store owners, and I was gonna have a distributor, but he had a family issue, because, like.
• 26:41
  Tad Eggleston: it's one thing to make a comic, and it's another thing entirely to get it into people's hands. So, like, I have a great appreciation for all of that work that goes… so…
• 26:50
  Tad Eggleston: when we're not talking about your babies at Ahoy, your babies at previous companies, what's the book that you're most proud of having shepherded through? I say this as I'm looking through Stuart's resume as a…
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: as a, a, a, a,
• 27:10
  Tad Eggleston: And realizing that you were editing essentially every book that I was reading between 1998 and 2002.
• 27:19
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, I guess so, and that's when I stopped editing, pretty much, yeah. The, I mean, the books that come to mind, I mean, there's so many of them. I'm very proud of Preacher. Preacher's probably the most… Preacher's probably the smoothest one from start to finish, like, just in terms of everything working.
• 27:35
  Stuart Moore: Transmetropolitan was closed. There's some stuff at Marvel Nights, too. There's, definitely, some of the…
• 27:43
  Stuart Moore: Some of the Punisher stuff there, I'm very proud of the, Howard the Duck revival that… by Steve Gerber and Phil Winslade, particularly the final issue. And that's another one that underperformed a little bit. It was… the concept, it was a little weird, but,
• 28:00
  Tad Eggleston: literally, all you need to say now is, bend us on Daredevil, and, like, you will have listed all of the books that I was thinking.
• 28:10
  Stuart Moore: Well, Daredevil and also Alias, which became Jessica Jones, those first issues of that are wonderful. Yeah, so, God, yes, that just… I just brain farted, I forgot that one.
• 28:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I'm just, like, it was, it was crazy for me. I pulled up my League of Comic Geeks, and I, and I ordered, ordered, I had it only as you editing, and ordered it, ordered it by a number of issues, and it's, like, Swamp Thing, Hellblazer, Books of Magic, Transmetropolitan, Daredevil, The Invisibles.
• 28:39
  Tad Eggleston: Punisher, Doctor Fate, Alias, Elektra.
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: Judge Dredd, that's worth talking about at some point.
• 28:46
  Stuart Moore: Never worked on Judge. I don't know why people think that. That's weird. Like, you're not the first person to say that.
• 28:52
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe there's another Stuart Moore, and that's why they released you.
• 28:56
  Stuart Moore: I do get mixed up with Steve Moore sometimes, who, is a British writer.
• 29:02
  Tad Eggleston: What I will say is that, that, that,
• 29:06
  Tad Eggleston: League of Comic Geeks is mostly, like, it's similar to Wikipedia, where, like, people put in…
• 29:13
  Tad Eggleston: So somebody typed something in wrong at some point, and nobody corrected it, is what it sounds like.
• 29:19
  Stuart Moore: It's probably Steve Moore, who was a good British writer, and was basically Alan Moore's mentor. They're not related. Right. But he was the guy who kind of brought Alan into… into doing…
• 29:29
  Tad Eggleston: But I can even show you the cover that would make people not question it, because they're…
• 29:36
  Stuart Moore: It says S. Moore, or something, yeah.
• 29:38
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, there's a Steve Dillon cover that's very preacher-ish, and like, if I'm thinking it's Stuart Moore, and I see that cover, I'm like, yeah, he would have edited that.
• 29:51
  Stuart Moore: Actually, if it's, it's not Judge Dredd Magazine, is it? Because they reprinted. They reprinted Preacher for a while.
• 30:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's the answer.
• 30:01
  Stuart Moore: It might be in the back of that, yeah.
• 30:04
  Tad Eggleston: answer.
• 30:05
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 30:06
  Tad Eggleston: then it was because they were reprinting Preacher.
• 30:09
  Stuart Moore: Yet.
• 30:11
  Stuart Moore: Okay, mystery solved.
• 30:13
  Tad Eggleston: resolved.
• 30:13
  Stuart Moore: Another… another great mystery of comics solved.
• 30:16
  Tom Peyer: All the mysteries, that's what.
• 30:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 30:18
  Stuart Moore: That's what we do!
• 30:24
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, you, you, I think you actually wrote?
• 30:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you, you wrote one of my, my,
• 30:35
  Tad Eggleston: one of the Ahoy books that I find underappreciated, because I love my cats.
• 30:40
  Stuart Moore: Oh, Captain Ginger, yes.
• 30:42
  Tad Eggleston: You wrote Captain Ginger.
• 30:44
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, we've brought that back a couple of times, and it's about a spaceship crewed by cats, for anyone who doesn't know, and I actually have plans for that, but not necessarily in comics.
• 30:57
  Stuart Moore: But I, I have to get through a few, I have to get through a few of my Marvel commitments before I can really, concentrate on that. But yeah, I, I love that project. I would… that's… that's…
• 31:08
  Stuart Moore: That's my… I think you have one of these too, Tom. It might be wrong, Earth, but it's my favorite thing to just sit down and write. Like, I could do it anytime. It's just fun.
• 31:16
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, wrong or select that for me.
• 31:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, the last time you were on, Tom, I think was right as you were allowing other people to do Wrong Earth.
• 31:28
  Tom Peyer: That's it.
• 31:29
  Tad Eggleston: I like to have that thing that… that is, like, that thing that you can go to anytime and write it, and to allow others to do it.
• 31:37
  Tad Eggleston: Because I know some people are like, it's my universe, don't touch! And some people are like, I want to see how you play in my sandbox!
• 31:44
  Tom Peyer: It… it was a… it was a catastrophe.
• 31:51
  Tad Eggleston: out west.
• 31:52
  Stuart Moore: Especially my book. Oh, wait.
• 31:54
  Tad Eggleston: felt.
• 31:55
  Tom Peyer: Didn't want to say that, Stuart, but since you did.
• 31:58
  Tom Peyer: It was… it was a funny feeling. It was a really funny feeling, and a good feeling. It was a nice feeling to see other people working on those characters, and…
• 32:08
  Tom Peyer: There was a… there's one there was just… Mark Russell wrote one.
• 32:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 32:15
  Tom Peyer: And he…
• 32:15
  Tad Eggleston: how I met Rob Nyer.
• 32:17
  Tom Peyer: he had, huh.
• 32:20
  Tom Peyer: dragonfly man, you know, the Earth Alpha one, who's like Adam West.
• 32:27
  Tom Peyer: acting as kind of immoral as the Dragonfly character. In their secret identities, they're doing this huge business project, and they're both corrupt.
• 32:39
  Tad Eggleston: Stadium financing.
• 32:40
  Tom Peyer: Stadium Finance.
• 32:41
  Tad Eggleston: This is how I met Rob Nyer, because it was stadium financing.
• 32:46
  Tom Peyer: Oh, that's great.
• 32:47
  Tad Eggleston: And Rob tweeted out, oh my god, my favorite comic writer just did an issue of my favorite book, and it involves stadium financing. I think my head's going to explode.
• 33:00
  Tom Peyer: That's great.
• 33:01
  Tad Eggleston: And I responded to that with, oh my god, my favorite baseball writer's favorite comic writer is one of my favorite comic writers, and was just on my show. I think my head is exploding. I don't suppose you'd like to be on a comics podcast. I think Mark will vouch for me.
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: And 5 seconds after that, Mark is like.
• 33:24
  Tad Eggleston: I will absolutely vouch for him.
• 33:27
  Tad Eggleston: We talked baseball for, like, 15 minutes when I was on last night.
• 33:32
  Tom Peyer: That's great, that's so…
• 33:33
  Tad Eggleston: 10 minutes after that, I was working out scheduling with Rob Neyer.
• 33:37
  Stuart Moore: When that book came out, that was a big day for Alt Reddit Stadium Financing, I remember.
• 33:42
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, when, with,
• 33:47
  Tom Peyer: you know, the Adam West character wouldn't really act as corrupt.
• 33:51
  Stuart Moore: No.
• 33:51
  Tom Peyer: In a story that I was thinking about, and again, well, Mark's trying to make a point here about capitalism.
• 33:57
  Stuart Moore: Yep.
• 33:57
  Tom Peyer: And I think it's like Bob Haney's Brave and Bold, everything doesn't have to link up, you know?
• 34:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 34:03
  Tom Peyer: It's storytelling, so I let it go, and I got a couple angry letters, but just a couple.
• 34:09
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, we got some complaints. I liked it for that, too, and I remember thinking at the time it was one of the bleakest things I'd read by Mark, actually. Like, it was a… there was really no, there's no… there's no moral redemption in that story at all.
• 34:23
  Tom Peyer: wall.
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I have…
• 34:25
  Tom Peyer: I haven't gone back and re-read it, covers, and…
• 34:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I haven't gone back and re-read it lately, but one of the things that Mark is really good at is… is…
• 34:36
  Tad Eggleston: Making the system the bad guy.
• 34:39
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 34:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so when you say the Adam West guy wouldn't be that corrupt, I'm sitting there thinking, like, without rereading it, I bet you the Adam West guy wasn't really corrupt. He was probably working completely inside the law, he was working in ways that he truly believed weren't bad.
• 34:58
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 34:59
  Tad Eggleston: Because he's been conditioned to not believe that they're bad, and they are legal.
• 35:05
  Tad Eggleston: And… Yeah.
• 35:09
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, I mean, that's more the way… I think that's more the way you've handled it, Tom, at various times, where he has… the character has an innate trust of the bankers, who are the, who are the important people of society. Mark took it a little further. Mark made him more of a… Mark made him more of a knowing agent of all of this.
• 35:28
  Tom Peyer: You know, it was a… it was a… the whole project was through it. Stuart's story was great, and it had Fred Harbour art.
• 35:35
  Tom Peyer: And, Gail Simone did one, and it was… Yeah, that was fun.
• 35:39
  Stuart Moore: Achie parity, yeah.
• 35:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just always curious, because, like, even with characters that… I mean, I was just at C2 E2 this weekend, and I overheard a conversation.
• 35:50
  Tad Eggleston: Between a fan and a writer, and I won't call them out, but, like, the writer was talking about how… how…
• 35:59
  Tad Eggleston: They were having trouble reading the new run, even though they, like.
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: loved the new writer's stuff on everything else the new writer had done, but, like, they had other plans, and, you know, some things he was look… they were looking at and going, oh, it would be…
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: we really wanted to do that, and now somebody else got to do it, and some things they were going, oh, we wouldn't have done that, and, you know, it's so common for people that's like, I spent
• 36:28
  Tad Eggleston: Two years with this character, like…
• 36:32
  Tad Eggleston: at least right afterwards, I can't… I can't go back. I can't read the next guy's stuff, because it's not…
• 36:37
  Tom Peyer: It's like going on a date.
• 36:39
  Tom Peyer: With your ex and their new partner.
• 36:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:43
  Tom Peyer: I don't know what books I used to write.
• 36:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 36:47
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, I mean, that's why I was really curious about the emotions of it being…
• 36:54
  Tad Eggleston: Not just the thing that you write, but, like, it was the thing you created, and going.
• 36:59
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, you can play now.
• 37:01
  Tom Peyer: That didn't bother me at all, I loved that. It was flattering.
• 37:03
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 37:04
  Tom Peyer: But if I'm writing a series and someone else takes it over, I'm kind of done with the series.
• 37:09
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 37:11
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. So it's different between when it's somebody else's playground and your own playground.
• 37:17
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, but…
• 37:18
  Stuart Moore: Yeah.
• 37:19
  Tom Peyer: But it was just… like I said, flattering to have people write a story of…
• 37:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 37:24
  Tom Peyer: If somebody was… if I stopped writing Wrong Earth every month, and somebody else was the editor, and somebody else had it, could do what they want with it.
• 37:32
  Tom Peyer: I might fall off reading it.
• 37:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 37:36
  Stuart Moore: I think that's… yeah, that's common. I mean, it's different if you're the editor, then you're at a little more of a distance from it, and sometimes it's almost fun to see what the next team does. But if you're the writer, and you're very much invested in these characters, yeah, it's… you don't want to… you don't want to necessarily stay with it at all.
• 37:57
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 37:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 37:58
  Stuart Moore: Not right away, anyway.
• 37:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's… again, like, I…
• 38:03
  Tad Eggleston: autistic, bipolar… I'm fascinated by psychology.
• 38:07
  Tad Eggleston: So I loved it. You know, I mean, particularly because, like.
• 38:13
  Tad Eggleston: There aren't many creative jobs where you hand off your job to somebody.
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: you know, you write a novel, and it's not like somebody else writes your characters. You know, you don't… is there some movie series, there's some TV, but, like.
• 38:33
  Tad Eggleston: Comics, more than any other creative medium, seem to have, like, it's your baby, until it's somebody else's baby.
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: And… and that's gotta be an interesting experience.
• 38:46
  Tom Peyer: Television can be like that, too.
• 38:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I could see that.
• 38:51
  Tom Peyer: your various Doctor Who showrunners and stuff.
• 38:54
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, but television tends to have more people involved, like, all the time. Like, there's a… you do have showrunners who leave, like, that… that can happen, but
• 39:04
  Stuart Moore: But yeah, it's not… I guess you have had shows where the actual creator has been edged out one way or another, and that, like, the Europe community was done without Dan Harmon, that was… that's controversial among fans, you know, stuff like that, but
• 39:21
  Stuart Moore: But it doesn't happen that often, it's a little bit of a different circumstance. With comics, one of the things I love about comics, and I've probably said this on too many podcasts, but one of the things I love about comics is, if you write a novel…
• 39:31
  Tad Eggleston: We assume that our listeners don't listen to other podcasts?
• 39:34
  Stuart Moore: Great, great. So I'll just…
• 39:36
  Stuart Moore: I'll pull out all the greatest hits. When you write a novel, and I've written several novels, it's, it's all you. Every word you write is exactly what the reader sees.
• 39:50
  Stuart Moore: If you're working on filmed entertainment, television or films, there's dozens of people involved, sometimes hundreds. With comics, it's a close collaboration between a writer
• 40:00
  Stuart Moore: And… usually one to three artists. And that is… that's a… that's a unique and very special
• 40:10
  Stuart Moore: kind of creative work, I find. Like, and when it all works, when the alchemy works, it's… it's almost like… it's like magic. It's great. When it doesn't work, it's a mess. And we… you know, we've all read comics where clearly
• 40:25
  Stuart Moore: the writer and the artist weren't in sync, the artist was rushed, the artist was doing something else. You can tell, like, things… where things did… or the writer just took it on because they had a contract, that used to happen more at the major companies, back in the old days. But
• 40:41
  Stuart Moore: But when it works, it's wonderful, and it's a kind of creative collaboration that you don't really get in any other medium, and I love that. I just love that about it.
• 40:53
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, exactly.
• 40:56
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's…
• 40:57
  Stuart Moore: Also, a conversation stopper, apparently.
• 41:00
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, I… No, no, I…
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: Goodbye.
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: Part of it is I started going… I got caught up in the fact that you wrote Captain America for dummies, and I always think it's cool when whoever writes the For Dummies book is clearly not a dummy, though it's also cool when they clearly are.
• 41:21
  Stuart Moore: Clearly are a dummy.
• 41:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, are you a baseball guy?
• 41:25
  Stuart Moore: I'm not, no.
• 41:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I know Tom is. Baseball for Dummies was written by Joe Morgan.
• 41:32
  Tad Eggleston: One of the spirits.
• 41:33
  Tom Peyer: baseball minds.
• 41:34
  Stuart Moore: Haha, okay. Well, but that's the idea, like, you can't be the dummy and be the one telling the dummies.
• 41:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yes, but… You know, you have…
• 41:42
  Stuart Moore: Didn't know the subject.
• 41:44
  Tad Eggleston: But that's, like, baseball for more… Joe… in, like, the shortest terms, Joe Morgan was considered a very fine baseball player until Bill James
• 41:57
  Tad Eggleston: revolutionized the way we looked at baseball, and then he became known as the greatest second baseman ever. Joe Morgan then, for years on TV, blasted Bill James, blasted Moneyball.
• 42:11
  Tad Eggleston: Said that it needed to get out of baseball, it was ruining all of baseball, so the idea that he wrote.
• 42:17
  Stuart Moore: No.
• 42:18
  Tad Eggleston: the baseball for dummies? Like, one of the stupidest people ever to talk about baseball. He was a great ballplayer, but he didn't even know why he was valuable.
• 42:30
  Tom Peyer: He was the high evolutionary. I… I disagree that he was stupid.
• 42:34
  Stuart Moore: Okay, that part I understood, the High Evolutionary. The rest of it, the rest of what all of you just said, it was like the teachers on Charlie Brown to me.
• 42:45
  Tad Eggleston: Wow!
• 42:45
  Stuart Moore: I didn't… I didn't take in… I didn't take in a syllable of that.
• 42:48
  Tad Eggleston: Excuse me.
• 42:49
  Tom Peyer: I'm a fan of Magno Ball.
• 42:52
  Tom Peyer: play in the 30th century with the Legion.
• 42:55
  Stuart Moore: Oh, yeah, that, that I get, yeah.
• 42:58
  Tom Peyer: as, like, a Magna Ball star.
• 42:59
  Stuart Moore: He was, yeah, yeah, he was good at it, yeah.
• 43:02
  Tad Eggleston: Another Legion fan?
• 43:04
  Stuart Moore: I'm a Legion fan, yeah. Okay.
• 43:06
  Tad Eggleston: I will have to keep that in mind, cause…
• 43:08
  Stuart Moore: Thomas… Tom wrote the Legion for quite a while.
• 43:10
  Tad Eggleston: I know he did.
• 43:11
  Stuart Moore: But, comrade…
• 43:12
  Tad Eggleston: Because we had a couple of Legion of Superhero roundtables, because my friend Johnny is the world's
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: biggest Legion fan, I call him. And I'll stand by it.
• 43:25
  Stuart Moore: I love… here's what I love about The Legion, and I'm probably monopolizing this podcast too much, but what I love about The Legion is it was started under notorious tyrant editor Mort Wisinger, who, among other things, was famous for asking his young kids what they wanted to see happen in a Superman story, and then feeding the writers ideas from his young kids. And I don't know if that's how the Legion came about.
• 43:48
  Stuart Moore: But it feels like it is, because the Legion is an insane idea for a comic book. It's, it's two dozen superheroes, all with different powers and costumes, and
• 44:01
  Stuart Moore: sometimes personalities, and it takes place in the far future. No adult would come up with this idea. Like, it's crazy. You can't even keep them straight. But that's what's wonderful about it. It's a… it's just a great childlike idea.
• 44:17
  Stuart Moore: that, like, some later creative teams, including Paul and Keith Giffen, notably,
• 44:22
  Stuart Moore: brought more of a… brought more of a gloss of hard science fiction to the… to the edges of, and worldbuilding, and made it into a little more, than it had been before. Other people did as well. But,
• 44:35
  Stuart Moore: But that's what… that's, to me what's great about it, is it's a… it's an idea that only, like, a greedy little kid could come up with, like, really, at base. That's what I love about it.
• 44:45
  Tom Peyer: I never saw that.
• 44:46
  Tad Eggleston: friend Johnny was that perfect age when it started. He was, I think.
• 44:53
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if he's 4 months older or 4 months younger than…
• 44:57
  Tad Eggleston: Jim Shooter, so when Shooter took over, it was like, oh, like, literally somebody… So he's been a Legion fan through and through.
• 45:06
  Stuart Moore: Yep.
• 45:07
  Tad Eggleston: and I, I…
• 45:08
  Tad Eggleston: like, doing Legion Roundtables for his birthday, which is coming up, which means we probably won't catch it quite for his birthday. But we haven't had him for a couple years, because he was chasing Shooter, and then we didn't get him, and because we were this close to Giffen. We had Giffen booked.
• 45:24
  Tad Eggleston: And he went into the hospital the morning we were supposed to record.
• 45:27
  Stuart Moore: Oh, dear.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: He did come home and go back again, so it wasn't like…
• 45:34
  Tad Eggleston: wasn't THAT close, but, but, like, we… yeah. It was… it was… it was…
• 45:39
  Tad Eggleston: But… but I'm always sticking in the back of my head, we've got another Legion push, and another Legion person, because…
• 45:47
  Tad Eggleston: I am… I'm kind of starting to become a Legion person slowly over, like…
• 45:54
  Tad Eggleston: years of being friends with Johnny, and I think we've done 3 Legion roundtables now, but what I will say is I'm fascinated by listening to Legion people talk to each other.
• 46:06
  Tom Peyer: Well, I will tell you that, there…
• 46:09
  Tom Peyer: regular series. They've made appearances before, but their regular series started in Adventure Comics, number 300.
• 46:17
  Tom Peyer: Which I, Methuselah, bought off the stands.
• 46:20
  Tom Peyer: In, like, 1962, probably.
• 46:24
  Stuart Moore: Wow.
• 46:25
  Tom Peyer: 61, so I was,
• 46:27
  Tom Peyer: Pissed as hell, because they replaced the Bizarro world in the back of Adventure Comics.
• 46:34
  Tom Peyer: And, but I came to love them, of course.
• 46:38
  Tom Peyer: Right. And they… they both, both series had this amazing John Fort artwork, because he… Yes. His art had two notes.
• 46:48
  Tom Peyer: Mania and stiffness.
• 46:51
  Stuart Moore: Yes, sometimes in the same figure.
• 46:53
  Tom Peyer: Sometimes in the same privilege.
• 46:55
  Stuart Moore: I'm a huge.
• 46:56
  Tom Peyer: huge fan of his work.
• 47:00
  Tom Peyer: And, he,
• 47:03
  Tom Peyer: He passed away in the mid-60s while he was drawing the Legion of Superheroes, and the last panel he ever drew was a picture of a dead superhero.
• 47:13
  Stuart Moore: I have to say, I'll say another thing about the Legion, since we're just digressing all over the place. There's a run of those stories, by Edmund Hamilton, who was an acclaimed science fiction writer at the time, and…
• 47:25
  Stuart Moore: Something no one talks about about Hamilton's DC work at the time is it's obsessed with nuclear annihilation. The, there's a panel, I put it up on social media once, there's a panel where it's just the beginning of a Legion story, and I think this… I think the strip had just gotten more pages, so they were spreading out a little bit. But it's just one of those gather up the Legionnaires things, because there's a mission, or they have to be called back home.
• 47:48
  Stuart Moore: And it's just a panel of two of them in, like.
• 47:52
  Stuart Moore: radiation suits on a planet with just gas everywhere, saying, too bad this planet wiped itself out, like, and it's just the bleakest, most horrible thing in the world. And, and he also wrote the Superman of the Future stories,
• 48:07
  Stuart Moore: Where, Superman's only weakness, the Superman of the future's only weakness, is seawater, because there's fallout in it from a past nuclear war.
• 48:16
  Stuart Moore: And that, to me, is tremendously, like, symbolic, like, of the adopted son of Earth.
• 48:24
  Stuart Moore: is only vulnerable to the thing that humans almost wipe themselves out with. Like, that… I just thought that was… I just think that's great. I just think that's wonderful. But it's all through the Hamilton stuff, it's just… it just pops in at the weirdest times. That Legion panel is great. I'll send it around to you guys later.
• 48:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, please, I, I… I'm… I… again, I…
• 48:45
  Tad Eggleston: Anytime the conversation goes to Legion, I don't know what to say other than Jim Shooter, and Keith Giffen, and Paul Levitz, and Bendis made a go at it.
• 48:59
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, it was weird, that was weird casting. That didn't really fly, yeah, but everybody tried, it was a good show. Nice art, too.
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but, but I find it fascinating, because, I mean, kind of like.
• 49:17
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of like you with the baseball words, wah, wah-wah. I don't quite have that, I pick up more words than that.
• 49:24
  Stuart Moore: But…
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, to see that level of passion about this thing that's in this corner of this medium that I'm so passionate about, that I'm still so confused about…
• 49:36
  Stuart Moore: Well, Magno Ball brings us all together, I think.
• 49:39
  Tad Eggleston: Really fun to me.
• 49:40
  Stuart Moore: Yes.
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: S…
• 49:42
  Stuart Moore: so…
• 49:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I may be back in touch, guys.
• 49:47
  Tom Peyer: The thing about the Legion, if you want to keep hearing about the Legion.
• 49:51
  Tad Eggleston: Sure.
• 49:51
  Stuart Moore: is that…
• 49:52
  Tom Peyer: they did the… they were in the Superman and Superboy comics for years, like, through the 50s.
• 50:01
  Tom Peyer: They would do this thing where they would repeat gags, like.
• 50:05
  Tom Peyer: Superboy would meet another super-powered teenager, or he would, meet an otherworldly club of superheroes.
• 50:15
  Tom Peyer: And what happened was.
• 50:18
  Tom Peyer: Right around 61 or so, they started to think, instead of doing this story all the time with different characters.
• 50:26
  Tom Peyer: Why don't we just keep the same characters and build it into something?
• 50:31
  Tom Peyer: And, so it happened, like, with Monel, and it happened with the Legion, and it was…
• 50:36
  Tom Peyer: It really worked out well.
• 50:39
  Tom Peyer: And.
• 50:40
  Stuart Moore: Right, so it was all about… it was all about introducing other, like, super-powered rivals, sort of, or… or friends, or whatever, to the…
• 50:48
  Tom Peyer: Lens He had to be separated from, because the air was kryptonite or something, or, yeah.
• 50:55
  Tom Peyer: Yep.
• 50:56
  Stuart Moore: I'm sending you all this, this, this bleak, bleak, Legion panel, which, reads, and…
• 51:02
  Tom Peyer: here.
• 51:03
  Stuart Moore: And on a world devastated by atomic warfare, Legionnaire team Starboy and Matter Eater Lad respond to the call. The atom war that wiped out this world must have been ghastly, Starboy. If not for our decontamination suits, this fallout haze would kill us. Yes, it's frightening. I'm glad Saturn Girl called us in. And it looks like there's just buildings toppled and, like, smoke rising from…
• 51:25
  Stuart Moore: Weird colored smoke rising from everything. And this is a complete throwaway. It has nothing to do with the story.
• 51:30
  Stuart Moore: He's terrible.
• 51:34
  Tom Peyer: That's really good.
• 51:35
  Tom Peyer: That's really good. There's… there's a panel I love, I don't know… I forget who… I don't know who wrote it at the moment.
• 51:42
  Tom Peyer: But it's, the Legionnaires are all, like, in this rec room or something, and there's a big computer.
• 51:49
  Tom Peyer: And Starboy comes in, and… and one of the… one of the kids says.
• 51:55
  Tom Peyer: Come on, join us, Starboy, the computer is telling us who it would be the most fun to kiss.
• 52:01
  Tom Peyer: They're always like, no thanks.
• 52:06
  Stuart Moore: Yep.
• 52:10
  Tom Peyer: They were having a computerized kissing party.
• 52:15
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, there's a few… there's a few… there's… there are the War of the Sexes issues, too. There's… there's… there's some of that stuff all through the Legion, you know.
• 52:22
  Tom Peyer: A great one where the girls kill all the boys, and then they have a dance party?
• 52:25
  Stuart Moore: That's right, they put on records, yeah.
• 52:30
  Stuart Moore: Anyway, we've probably talked enough about the Legion for…
• 52:33
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, no, I mean, really, only because I do a Legion of Superheroes Roundtable, and I now need to bring you guys back for it, and I don't want you to say all of the good stuff without Johnny here. I'm starting to feel…
• 52:45
  Tom Peyer: It'll reveal.
• 52:46
  Tad Eggleston: bad for me.
• 52:47
  Stuart Moore: Right.
• 52:48
  Tad Eggleston: Not… not here. But I have… this is about the time to inter… with two of you, it'll take a little bit longer. I, I have two, two closing questions that I'd like to ask.
• 52:57
  Tom Peyer: Are they about the Justice Society?
• 53:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, but do we need to fit in time for the Justice Society?
• 53:10
  Stuart Moore: Actually, though, I will tell you, since we're talking about the Justice Society, the, the first issue of Justice League I read was, I think it was a two-parter that was Gardner Fox's last story, and the first issue takes place entirely on Earth 2, and the Justice League isn't in it at all, and I was pretty confused. I knew, like, I kinda… I'd seen TV, I kinda knew what Superman looked like, and I thought he was involved in this stuff somehow.
• 53:35
  Stuart Moore: Well, you know, but instead it's just Dr. Fate and Our Man and all these characters I'd never heard of. I had no idea what was going on.
• 53:41
  Tom Peyer: You're burned?
• 53:43
  Stuart Moore: No, I was… I was kind of intrigued, you know, but but I was confused. Anyway, sorry.
• 53:50
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I love it. I love it. I mean, I… my…
• 53:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's probably what separates me from some comics podcasts, and what I like is I just like the conversation. If it winds up being tight and whatnot, fabulous. If it winds up being all over the place, and you get to pretend that you're in your living room even while you're driving down the interstate.
• 54:15
  Tad Eggleston: So much the better.
• 54:18
  Tad Eggleston: So… Agreed.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: I… I am in the fifth year of… of hosting this podcast, and I feel like I live in the Twilight Zone now.
• 54:29
  Tad Eggleston: My life has utterly changed for the better, just in terms of having fabulous conversations,
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: Fabulous experiences that if you told me
• 54:42
  Tad Eggleston: 5 years ago, I was gonna sit at a baseball game with this person, or hang out with that person, or most recently, through a connection.
• 54:53
  Tad Eggleston: that I made, only because I have a comics podcast. I had two cars break down in a week.
• 54:59
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, no.
• 55:00
  Tad Eggleston: somebody I knew through comics went, oh, My brother…
• 55:06
  Tad Eggleston: runs a Volkswagen dealership that our uncle owns, so we managed to replace two cars in a few hours inside of our budget, and it wouldn't have happened without comics.
• 55:19
  Tad Eggleston: So, what I've discovered is, is everybody who works in comics has these surreal and or…
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: Just amazing experiences that never would have happened, except
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: that they chose to be part of this, this wonderful community. So I'm kind of collecting the stories. Tell me, tell me a surreal or amazing story.
• 55:42
  Tom Peyer: chosen.
• 55:43
  Tom Peyer: Or everybody's frozen.
• 55:46
  Tad Eggleston: C for…
• 55:48
  Tad Eggleston: For me, it's Tom that's frozen.
• 55:51
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, Tom's present, I can… I can see. Actually, you're freezing up a little now, Ted. Can you say something?
• 55:58
  Stuart Moore: Here you go.
• 56:00
  Tad Eggleston: I can say something.
• 56:01
  Stuart Moore: Okay, yeah, I can hear you.
• 56:03
  Tad Eggleston: Something.
• 56:04
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, I can… I can hear you.
• 56:06
  Tad Eggleston: Stuart should go first, because Stuart's the one coming.
• 56:08
  Tom Peyer: I can hear you now.
• 56:10
  Stuart Moore: Okay. Tom, did you have an answer?
• 56:13
  Tom Peyer: I didn't hear the question.
• 56:15
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, a surreal or amazing story that happened because you chose comics as a major part of your life, something that never would have happened, that you still kind of pinch yourself, that, oh, I got to do that, or this happened to me, or…
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 56:36
  Tad Eggleston: I've had stories from, like, the kid that came up and said this book saved their life to, you know…
• 56:45
  Tad Eggleston: walking down a, I think, Italian street with Sergio Aragon is in the middle of the night, just talking.
• 56:53
  Tom Peyer: That's pretty great. That's pretty great. Yeah.
• 56:58
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 57:00
  Tom Peyer: Going to England, I never would have…
• 57:03
  Tom Peyer: made it to England if I didn't work at Vertigo in the early 90s.
• 57:08
  Tom Peyer: We'd go to UK, walking down…
• 57:11
  Tom Peyer: A London Street with Jamie Delano, that's pretty good.
• 57:16
  Tom Peyer: Boom.
• 57:17
  Tom Peyer: So I'm gonna say that.
• 57:20
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, with me…
• 57:21
  Tad Eggleston: Anything in particular that you loved about England?
• 57:25
  Tom Peyer: just…
• 57:27
  Tom Peyer: Well, I'll tell you what I really loved about Aylin was, after the convention, the hotel kept the bar open until, like, 6 AM.
• 57:36
  Tom Peyer: That was great.
• 57:38
  Tom Peyer: But, just to be… I was walking with Brian Ballant down the street.
• 57:43
  Tom Peyer: And he said, that's the… we passed a bill, and he said, that's the first police station. And I said, worst police station in London? Wow. And he said, no, that's the first police station.
• 57:53
  Stuart Moore: Wow.
• 57:55
  Tom Peyer: So that was great.
• 57:58
  Tom Peyer: And, yeah, just, the people I was able to be with there, Brian Bond, and Peter Milligan.
• 58:06
  Tom Peyer: Jamie, Grant, and just.
• 58:12
  Stuart Moore: I'm having trouble coming up with a specific anecdote, but yeah, definitely the overseas travel. The Glasgow conventions in the early 90s were a lot of fun. Those were just a complete piss-up.
• 58:25
  Stuart Moore: for me, it's probably…
• 58:28
  Stuart Moore: this is gonna sound sort of corny, but, like, it's… it's a lot of the friendships I've kept over the years. Like, there's, and especially the,
• 58:36
  Stuart Moore: this, like, I worked so much at DC and also at Marvel Nights with, with Garth Ennis and, Steve Dillon, and, Steve passed away about 10 years ago, but, on a convention trip to New York, actually. But, before that, like.
• 58:55
  Stuart Moore: a whole lot of us would get together, like, the two of them would come over to New York to visit. Garth now lives in New York about half the time.
• 59:03
  Stuart Moore: But, and Axel Alonzo, who was the other editor of Preacher, like, sometimes the four of us would just go out, hang out, and I loved that. I just loved that, that we were all friends, and
• 59:13
  Stuart Moore: we would all, like, they would come to visit, we'd… or, you know, sometimes I'd go over to there, but, but more often, they'd come over here, and we'd just get together, and there was no fans, there was no comics, there was no anything, really. We just, you know…
• 59:26
  Stuart Moore: They get together and shoot the shit, and we were all still friends. That… that kind of lasting friendship stuff. Grant Morrison's a funny one, because I feel like I talk to… I see him about once every 3 or 4 years, and I edited The Invisibles, and then I was involved in a couple things at Marvel, but I came in on the… kind of the tail end of those.
• 59:43
  Stuart Moore: But, grant, I feel like, like, I…
• 59:47
  Stuart Moore: whenever I talk to him, we just sort of pick up the same conversation, like, 4 years later, whatever, like, it's always very easy, it's always very casual, you know, like, where I'm not as close to him as I am, like, Garth and I are actually friends, and he lives here a lot of the time, so we hang out, but but there are a lot of those people who, and you know.
• 1:00:05
  Stuart Moore: I will say something else. When you, when you leave a position, of authority.
• 1:00:10
  Stuart Moore: at, DC or Marvel, as Tom, you and I both have voluntarily at various times. You kind of learn who your friends are.
• 1:00:19
  Stuart Moore: Because some people really do still want to keep in touch with you. When I left Marvel, and no, it was when I left DC, actually,
• 1:00:28
  Stuart Moore: Axel and Garth just wanted to hang out, and I was like, I appreciated that, because when you don't have a… when you're used to having a day job and you don't have it anymore, a lot of your instant social life kind of goes away. And it, it… you kind of learn who…
• 1:00:43
  Stuart Moore: Who really wants to… wants to be friends, and who was just sort of…
• 1:00:47
  Stuart Moore: Hanging off of the work, you know.
• 1:00:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:00:49
  Stuart Moore: You know, it is different. And I was really encouraged that, like, so many people in comics are just
• 1:00:55
  Stuart Moore: Just, just good people, just straightforward people.
• 1:00:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's… that's similar to the genesis of this question, because, like, the other weird thing for me is I have made…
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: more good friends in my 40s than I did in my teens, and it's all because of this podcast.
• 1:01:12
  Tom Peyer: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:13
  Stuart Moore: Yep, yep. And most people can't… most people can't say that. That's interesting.
• 1:01:17
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I mean, tons of people are still friends with the people that they went to high school or college with.
• 1:01:24
  Tad Eggleston: Because once you don't have that built-in structure for seeing them every day, and you have to, like, maintain the beginning of a friendship, not just the middle and end parts of the friendship, it's hard. It requires work.
• 1:01:44
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, I remember thinking, when I went to college, I thought that was where I'd meet the people I would know for the rest of my life, and it wasn't. It wasn't. Not at all. It wasn't until I moved to New York, got into book publishing first, and then especially comics, that I really sort of found my tribe, found my people.
• 1:02:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. So, I love those answers. Now, now…
• 1:02:06
  Tad Eggleston: my longtime favorite question to ask. Tell me something you love.
• 1:02:10
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 1:02:15
  Tad Eggleston: Not only storytelling, but again, with the rules, but something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you'd really, really like them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:02:29
  Tom Peyer: Oh, that's interesting.
• 1:02:30
  Stuart Moore: That is interesting.
• 1:02:33
  Tad Eggleston: That's what you said last time, Tom.
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: Excuse me.
• 1:02:39
  Tom Peyer: remembered.
• 1:02:41
  Tom Peyer: I have a… I have one friend I talked to about this, and it's Dan Raskler, who was a…
• 1:02:46
  Tom Peyer: long-time DC editor, and I…
• 1:02:50
  Tom Peyer: For the last couple years, we've been getting on the phone every day, and at the same… and watching
• 1:02:57
  Tom Peyer: A chapter of an old movie serial together.
• 1:03:00
  Tom Peyer: And it's really fun, because there's… there's stuff that's so junk that it's no fun to watch alone, and most people won't do it with you.
• 1:03:10
  Tom Peyer: But, Dan and I love these things, and, we've become Probably…
• 1:03:17
  Tom Peyer: Top 10 in the world experts on them, because we watched, like, 49 of them together.
• 1:03:23
  Tom Peyer: But…
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: So, old movie serials watched with friends.
• 1:03:26
  Tad Eggleston: Is how we're gonna call it.
• 1:03:28
  Tom Peyer: materials, yes.
• 1:03:30
  Tad Eggleston: Have a, a, a specific…
• 1:03:34
  Tad Eggleston: Or do you just like any of the old cereals?
• 1:03:37
  Tom Peyer: Well, some of them are bad, and some of them are much better, and you learn to appre… they're all kind of bad, but you learn to appreciate when they're generous, like, when they get… when they hire a guy who has a gorilla suit.
• 1:03:50
  Tom Peyer: Or… and there's, like, a rampaging gorilla running around. That's always really great. Or if there's a…
• 1:03:56
  Tom Peyer: Or if they hire, like, A person for a…
• 1:04:00
  Tom Peyer: A supporting role who's a trick rider, and they ride, you know, they get on a horse and jump it through a window or something.
• 1:04:07
  Tom Peyer: you get… you feel, like, kind of a little spoiled when they go the extra mile. Usually, it's just…
• 1:04:15
  Tom Peyer: It's just, you're in a warehouse, and there might be some dynamite, and people are punching each other, and some of them are just standing there waiting to get punched.
• 1:04:24
  Tom Peyer: And, that's baseline shit, but if they add anything to it, it's wonderful.
• 1:04:30
  Tad Eggleston: Where do you find them?
• 1:04:32
  Tom Peyer: There's, like, a million… And there's some accounts that have a lot of them, but,
• 1:04:40
  Tom Peyer: Captain Marvel's a great one, the Superman and Batman ones are great, but we've branched out into Westerns and things like that.
• 1:04:48
  Tom Peyer: The Dick Tracy ones are great.
• 1:04:52
  Tom Peyer: God, the first stick tracing one,
• 1:04:55
  Tom Peyer: a bad guy brainwashes Dick Tracy's brother to become a master villain, which he does, and then Dick Tracy's brother dies. It's the heaviest thing I've ever seen.
• 1:05:05
  Stuart Moore: Wow.
• 1:05:06
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of like early Dick Tracy comics, or like…
• 1:05:10
  Tad Eggleston: we did a comic strip book club on Dick Tracy, and, like.
• 1:05:15
  Tad Eggleston: early Dick Tracy comics are not…
• 1:05:19
  Tad Eggleston: not comics the way that, like, you think of Sunday comics today, you know? They're… they're…
• 1:05:26
  Stuart Moore: They're very violent, yeah, they're.
• 1:05:28
  Tad Eggleston: There's violent, and there's torture, and there are people who die.
• 1:05:32
  Tom Peyer: Billy, that could have been my answer.
• 1:05:35
  Tom Peyer: I love those.
• 1:05:37
  Tad Eggleston: Chester Gould.
• 1:05:38
  Tom Peyer: Yes, absolutely. I think there… no one in the world could have drawn that strip but him in that way.
• 1:05:45
  Tom Peyer: I've written it in that way.
• 1:05:46
  Tom Peyer: It's like a fingerprint.
• 1:05:51
  Stuart Moore: I guess I have to answer this question, huh?
• 1:05:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:05:54
  Tom Peyer: We do.
• 1:05:55
  Stuart Moore: There, you know, I can give a… I can give a sort of a high culture answer or a low culture answer to this, but the… You can do both.
• 1:06:02
  Tad Eggleston: Oof!
• 1:06:02
  Stuart Moore: There are all the… there are several writers I'm fans of who don't have the following. I think they should. Science fiction writers that come to mind are…
• 1:06:11
  Stuart Moore: Cordwainer Smith, a writer of the 50s and 60s who wrote these, sort of lavish myths of the far future. There's another guy I've only recently gotten into from the same period, actually, a little later, David R. Bunch.
• 1:06:25
  Stuart Moore: who wrote, satirical stories about after nuclear war, and… but he also just wrote all kinds of weird, short shit. Brilliant writer, apparently.
• 1:06:35
  Stuart Moore: All the magazine editors loved his work, and all the readers despised it. Every time they published this guy's work, they'd get negative letters about
• 1:06:43
  Stuart Moore: So, so I kinda like him.
• 1:06:46
  Stuart Moore: the, in comics, I keep coming back to it, and Tom, you've heard me talk about this for a while before, but there's an issue of… you… I think, Tom, you're a fan of the… you grew up with the…
• 1:06:57
  Stuart Moore: Bob Haney, like, stories, you were talking about him in Brave and the Bold, but also Teen Titans from the 1960s, which are, kind of faux hipster and kind of funny, but I… I…
• 1:07:10
  Stuart Moore: came to know his work in the early 70s when he was going through some shit, I can tell you, because the stories are really depressing. There's one where the Teen Titans are, they're after… they're looking for a friend of theirs who's a photographer, and they find out at the end he's been dead all along. Like, there's just…
• 1:07:27
  Stuart Moore: Stuff like that. But there's an issue of Brave and the Bold called Second Chance for a Dead Man.
• 1:07:32
  Stuart Moore: Which I just think is… it's zany and brilliant, and it starts off with a scene that, again, has nothing to do with the story, but Commissioner Gordon and Batman are… they're pinned down behind a police car, and there's just machine gun fire coming out of a warehouse, like, non-stop like this. And Commissioner's saying, yeah, the gang's, like, in there, and they've got all these guns, and Batman says, well, I'm afraid it's come, Commissioner, the hour of the gun. And he opens the trunk of a police
• 1:07:57
  Stuart Moore: car, pulls out a big machine gun, and Batman just leaps over the car, firing this big machine gun. This is in a Batman comic book. And at the end, it turns out, he was shooting blanks, but he confused the criminals enough, and they, you know, they catch him. So that's just the first two pages.
• 1:08:15
  Stuart Moore: Has nothing to do with the story. The rest of it is Batman's infiltrating a crime syndicate, screws everything up, like, gets, like, gets the guys on the run suspicious, and he's like, well, I need some help. Calls in Dead Man to help.
• 1:08:28
  Stuart Moore: And then he's… he proceeds to be a complete shit to Deadman for the entire story. Like, he's just, like, berating him all the time. Deadman gets, deadman goes soft on one of the criminals, the woman who helps run this fake spa that gives criminals new faces.
• 1:08:45
  Stuart Moore: Incidentally, somewhere in this, they, they find out that Batman's Batman, and they give him plastic surgery to look like a criminal, and he's on the run while police helicopters are shooting at him from the sky, and then he just goes back to normal. Like, they just change him back to normal. But at the end.
• 1:09:03
  Stuart Moore: Dead Man has a vision in the middle of it from his god, Ramakushna, who gives him some enigmatic advice, like, to gain your heart's desire, you must lose it.
• 1:09:12
  Stuart Moore: And he comes to read, I gotta let this woman die, then she'll rise as a ghost like me, and we'll be together. So he lets this woman get shot, and she just dies. And it ends with Batman saying, I feel a little bad about Dead Man, I wonder what happened, you know. And Deadman's on his knees, screaming to his god, why did you lie to me? And I just love that. That taught me as a kid, if you put your faith
• 1:09:36
  Stuart Moore: In a deity that you believe in, it will lie to you and leave you alone for the rest of your life in sorrow.
• 1:09:46
  Tom Peyer: I thought that was a great…
• 1:09:47
  Stuart Moore: I thought that was a great lesson to impart to kids, you know? Yeah. I'm sure I just went on far too long about that.
• 1:09:54
  Tom Peyer: No, no. That should be at all the first grade reading.
• 1:09:56
  Tad Eggleston: The chance is that the mascot of 22 Panels, Eddie the Cat, decided to start knocking things over just as you
• 1:10:08
  Tad Eggleston: Just as you were starting, so, I caught Bob Haney, and did you say Brave and the Bold?
• 1:10:13
  Stuart Moore: We're in the boat. Yeah, you can play it back later.
• 1:10:18
  Tom Peyer: Bob Haney Bravenfold story, where Batman is briefly possessed by the ghost of a pirate.
• 1:10:23
  Tom Peyer: And there's this wonderful panel I love, where he's, like, he goes into this place, and he, like, bangs his fist down the counter, and goes, some rum, my thirst, she is great.
• 1:10:36
  Tom Peyer: costume.
• 1:10:39
  Stuart Moore: There's also that great issue where, he recruits, I think it's the 100th issue or something, he recruits a whole bunch of people, including Black Canary, to help him, and… but she doesn't really carry out her assignment, because the rain gets her hair wet, and she has to go into a salon and get it dried out. It's not… not great, but that might have been Jim Aparo's first issue. It looks great, but, it's,
• 1:10:58
  Stuart Moore: It's not… not… not a… not an enlightened story, let's put it that way.
• 1:11:04
  Tom Peyer: The best review I've ever gotten.
• 1:11:06
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:11:07
  Tom Peyer: That really was, it was on a blog, and that person said… was reviewing DC2000.
• 1:11:18
  Tom Peyer: And said, in the spirit of Crazy Bob Kaniger and Crazy Bob Haney, he was gonna name me Crazy Tom Pyre.
• 1:11:27
  Stuart Moore: Great.
• 1:11:27
  Tom Peyer: I'll take that. I want that on my tombstone.
• 1:11:30
  Stuart Moore: Yep.
• 1:11:31
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 1:11:31
  Stuart Moore: I'm very proud to be working with Crazy Tompyre.
• 1:11:35
  Tom Peyer: Thank you.
• 1:11:36
  Tom Peyer: That is mutual.
• 1:11:39
  Stuart Moore: Well, I think somebody… I think… I think a certain feline.
• 1:11:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Eddie is deciding that I should be done.
• 1:11:45
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 1:11:46
  Tad Eggleston: Normally, he is more playful rather than strictly destructive, but he's in a mood today.
• 1:11:53
  Stuart Moore: You can't see my cat, but he's been… she's been passed out, like, right behind me on a couch. She's 18 years old, she sleeps, like, almost all the time.
• 1:12:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's my dog. When I was leaning off-screen, it was because my dog suddenly, like, slipped behind my chair into the closet next to me and was scratching the floor, so I was trying to figure out what he was doing.
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, so the animals are being interesting right now.
• 1:12:18
  Tad Eggleston: But it has been an absolute joy, gentlemen. I will likely be in touch sooner rather than later to see if I can talk you into coming back and talking Legion of Superheroes with somebody who actually knows Legion of Superheroes.
• 1:12:34
  Tad Eggleston: Because those are fun conversations. I love everything that you're doing at Ahoy. The Kickstarter is The Forgotten Divine by Mark Russell and Russ Braun. Do we have a date where that's going live yet, or is that still…
• 1:12:47
  Stuart Moore: Solid… not a solid date. It'll probably be sometime in May, but we're not sure exactly.
• 1:12:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Well, this is where I'll say, keep going and saving the project.
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: you know, the more people click to say, I'm following this, notify me on launch, the sooner it gets launched, I have found.
• 1:13:05
  Tad Eggleston: Because, you know, it's much easier to launch if you're like, oh, we have enough people who might back it immediately that we could fund
• 1:13:13
  Tad Eggleston: Instantaneously, and it's sometimes really fun to watch the numbers Terry Moore's first Kickstarter.
• 1:13:20
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 1:13:23
  Tad Eggleston: I went, you know, I got notified on launch. When I… when I got notified, it was at, like…
• 1:13:28
  Tad Eggleston: er, when I got to the site.
• 1:13:30
  Tad Eggleston: nobody had backed it yet, because I was there in the first seconds. By the time I had picked out my thing, it was up over 3,000. By the time I got through the checkout.
• 1:13:41
  Tad Eggleston: you know, it was up over 20,000. By the time I was done writing the email to Terry, it was up over…
• 1:13:50
  Tad Eggleston: wrote back to me, it was, like, 100,000, and all of this was in the span of, like, two and a half minutes, and he's like, oh, I guess… I guess I can do this Kickstarter thing.
• 1:14:02
  Stuart Moore: Yep. Well, we're… fingers crossed.
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: people interested.
• 1:14:09
  Tad Eggleston: But it's funny to watch the numbers, like, spiraling in real time.
• 1:14:13
  Stuart Moore: Yeah, no, I'm looking forward to that.
• 1:14:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:14:17
  Tad Eggleston: So… and I gotta believe a Mark Russell Ahoy book is gonna have that sort of… I would be shocked if you guys aren't funded.
• 1:14:25
  Tad Eggleston: really fast.
• 1:14:28
  Tom Peyer: Thank you.
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: Unless you have a god-awfully large funding goal, in which case, thank you for paying Mark so well.
• 1:14:36
  Stuart Moore: And.
• 1:14:37
  Tad Eggleston: a little bit longer.
• 1:14:39
  Stuart Moore: I should say, we have a really good team working on this, and both David Hyde and Kit Kalagas, who work with us on this, are veterans of… between them, over 100 Kickstarter campaigns. So we're leaving the nuts and bolts to them. We're letting them sort of fine-tune how all that works with the rewards and the goals.
• 1:14:57
  Tad Eggleston: I need to reach out to David Hyde, because aside from running Superfan Productions, which is… is…
• 1:15:05
  Tad Eggleston: how I've found it even easier to get interview people than it was before, because…
• 1:15:11
  Tad Eggleston: I was… that was… that was the most surprising thing about starting a podcast, is, like, everybody you write to in comics says, sure, I'll come on your podcast.
• 1:15:19
  Tom Peyer: Yep.
• 1:15:21
  Tom Peyer: David would be good for a baseball roundtable, too.
• 1:15:24
  Tad Eggleston: That was exactly what I was gonna say, is Mark Chiarello on the last baseball roundtable is like, have you talked to David Hyde? He's a really big baseball fan.
• 1:15:33
  Tom Peyer: Yeah.
• 1:15:35
  Tom Peyer: He'd be very good.
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, Tom, Stuart, thank you very, very much.
• 1:15:41
  Stuart Moore: Thank you, this is great.
• 1:15:42
  Tad Eggleston: So for Tom Pyre and Stuart Moore.
• 1:15:46
  Tad Eggleston: This has been 22 panels, and we will see you after the.