Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #332... 22 Panels with Liam Sharp

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With Great Power #332... 22 Panels with Liam Sharp · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. Returning today is… I noticed in your book you're actually an honorary doctor, so I'm gonna call you Dr. Liam Sharp.
• 0:14
  Tad Eggleston: Though, like, not if Stephanie Phillips is around, because she had to get her doctorate the hard way.
• 0:20
  liamsharp: Yeah, I'm a terrible slacker and a cheat. I didn't even go to college, so, you know, do I deserve this?
• 0:29
  liamsharp: It's caution.
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: My answer is actually yes. I don't think colleges give nearly enough… credit for…
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: experience. I think that one of the biggest problems with the collegiate system is that doing things
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't count the way pretending to do things does.
• 0:50
  liamsharp: It's a view.
• 0:52
  Tad Eggleston: And that's my educator view, but this is not one of the education podcasts, except… except when it comes to Arthurian lore, which, Starhenge has seeped in.
• 1:05
  Tad Eggleston: Starhenge is one of my favorite books that has come out since…
• 1:11
  Tad Eggleston: this podcast started. It's on a very short list that stands above So many others.
• 1:21
  liamsharp: It's a Mexicopia.
• 1:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it's not supposed to be diplomatic, because, like, I…
• 1:30
  Tad Eggleston: The only book… the only two books that come to mind… that, like…
• 1:35
  Tad Eggleston: I might like more are Drone by Jesse Lonergan, and… and Meat Eaters by… by Meredith McLaren, and, like.
• 1:47
  Tad Eggleston: It depends on the day of the week. They're all such different books that, like, as with all good art, it starts getting hard to compare. Like, so you… you are… this book is, like.
• 1:59
  Tad Eggleston: this upper stratosphere book for me. That's kind of how I describe things. Like, when I'm talking about the Beatles being the greatest rock band ever, a lot of it has to do with, like.
• 2:11
  Tad Eggleston: all great artists like to get to that upper stratosphere, and most great… you know, the Stones got there for Exile on Main Street, and Sticky Fingers, and Bowie got there for Hunky Dory, and… and Ziggy Stardust, and, you know.
• 2:29
  Tad Eggleston: whatnot, but, like, the Beatles lived there from… like… rubber sole or revolver on.
• 2:43
  Tad Eggleston: I've entered Entered that stratosphere and never came down.
• 2:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 2:50
  liamsharp: This is the first time.
• 2:50
  Tad Eggleston: next strategy.
• 2:51
  liamsharp: Mr.
• 2:51
  Tad Eggleston: book.
• 2:52
  liamsharp: I'm gonna try and stay up there as long as I can, just for you.
• 2:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I don't see Starhenge coming down, so I just, like, that makes it my job to make it… to do as much as I can to allow you to do more Starhenge.
• 3:07
  liamsharp: Well, it's very much appreciated, Peter.
• 3:09
  Tad Eggleston: Because, cause that requires you getting paid to get start… to… to… to… to…
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: to… to do Starhenge. So this is where I'll say to everybody out there who I already convinced to… to…
• 3:21
  Tad Eggleston: to buy the hardcover, the paperback comes out on July 1st, and you need a lending copy. You know, you don't want to lend out your beautiful hardcovers, so you need to buy the paperback now, as… as you also need to buy, issue 1 of Starhenge Book 2.
• 3:40
  Tad Eggleston: A Kiss for Atticus, which I just re-read again.
• 3:46
  Tad Eggleston: This morning, because you were so generous and didn't just send me issue one, but sent me…
• 3:51
  Tad Eggleston: all of Book 2. And…
• 3:53
  Tad Eggleston: Liam, you're still killing it, so give us the front counter pitch for a book for Atticus.
• 4:00
  liamsharp: Well, it's…
• 4:00
  Tad Eggleston: Just for Atticus.
• 4:01
  liamsharp: Because it's a lot more, psychedelic than the first series.
• 4:07
  liamsharp: And I think… I didn't want to… I wanted to drop us into a place that would leave you kind of scratching your head a little bit.
• 4:14
  liamsharp: And I also… there was…
• 4:16
  liamsharp: You know, I'm a… obviously, I'm a massive,
• 4:19
  liamsharp: like Arthur, Arthur Nerd, and Merlin Nerd, and all things kind of Celtic mythology, and all of that kind of stuff. But I didn't want the book to be…
• 4:29
  liamsharp: Completely, defined by that.
• 4:33
  liamsharp: I wanted it to have a little bit more room.
• 4:35
  liamsharp: And I didn't… because, you know, not everybody's into that stuff. Some people yawn when they hear that, you know? Some people are like, oh god, not another.
• 4:44
  Tad Eggleston: That's just because there's something wrong with them, but…
• 4:48
  liamsharp: Well, that's fair. But, I mean.
• 4:50
  Tad Eggleston: There aren't many people that I'll say that about.
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: Hardcore Red Hat wearers and people who don't think Arthurian legend is cool.
• 5:00
  Tad Eggleston: There's just something wired wrong.
• 5:02
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Agreed.
• 5:04
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 5:05
  liamsharp: I would say, I think, you know, it's…
• 5:08
  liamsharp: it's how you get them into it. There has been an awful lot of stuff out there for Arthur over the years, and
• 5:15
  liamsharp: There is a lot of great stuff, and I just didn't…
• 5:19
  liamsharp: I didn't ever want it to be fully defined by that.
• 5:23
  liamsharp: Right. Obviously, Merlin's in it for the long run.
• 5:26
  liamsharp: He… he kinda has to be.
• 5:30
  liamsharp: And, obviously, there's certain things that have been set up in the first book, which are kind of, you know, we know that Amber is the mother of the Earth Queen.
• 5:41
  liamsharp: Which is the big giveaway.
• 5:42
  Tad Eggleston: That was our big… that was our big M. Night Shyamalan moment at the end of…
• 5:47
  Tad Eggleston: of Book 1. Grandma?
• 5:50
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 5:52
  liamsharp: Which was, you know, it was just a… it was like, shall I put this in or not? Because I… obviously, I…
• 5:57
  Tad Eggleston: No, that was… it was perfect.
• 5:58
  liamsharp: Well, it was… it's fun to leave a little cliffhanger, but I also kind of wanted it to feel like a book that you could read and have a satisfying full story, you know, because it does wrap up. There is a… Right. It does.
• 6:12
  liamsharp: and it's… it was always amusing to me, or like, when people, like, reading the first issue and going, is he going to stick the landing? And it's like, I knew that the end was in the first issue, so I just had to get back there.
• 6:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 6:26
  liamsharp: So… and the nature of that book is very circular. So, as we're talking about Kiss for Atticus, that one I wanted to throw us right into a different place, so that it would be a little bit of a different kind of a mystery.
• 6:43
  liamsharp: And something that I could play with, explore more. I mean, there was something that I really loved about
• 6:49
  liamsharp: when I was creating the first book, was…
• 6:53
  liamsharp: Amber is an artist. I was talking to Ugh.
• 6:58
  liamsharp: David Mack about this in Italy, funnily enough. So he created kabuki.
• 7:05
  liamsharp: As a female character, for him to talk about personal things that he loved.
• 7:10
  liamsharp: Interestingly, through not only someone who wasn't his sex, but also somebody who wasn't even, you know, his cultural background.
• 7:18
  liamsharp: But that was corrected enough distance for him to sort of almost be able to stand back a bit and talk about personal things and talk about his feelings about art and all sorts of things, through that… through that lens.
• 7:31
  liamsharp: And Amber is very much that for me. So I can look at her views about storytelling, and different approaches to art, and views about art, as well as, you know, the bigger story there, too. Because…
• 7:47
  liamsharp: I think the thing… the thing is, you know, we do filter our realities through those lenses, through the lenses of the things we love.
• 7:56
  liamsharp: And this is a medium.
• 7:58
  liamsharp: Which is perfect for exploring that.
• 8:01
  liamsharp: So I just thought, okay, I might lean into that a bit more and just see where that goes. Before we came on, you were asking about the, like, the long-term plan, and I do have one, but I also wanted there to be enough room for me to be…
• 8:18
  liamsharp: Spontaneous.
• 8:20
  liamsharp: And to allow a little bit of my inner Mobius out, you know, and to be able to channel some of those.
• 8:25
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely see some Mobius here.
• 8:27
  Tad Eggleston: We actually… the book club we had this as part of was our monthly Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival book club, which normally involves some psychologists, but they were presenting at a comic convention this weekend, so I hijacked the heavy metal book club.
• 8:44
  Tad Eggleston: To, to talk about this.
• 8:45
  SpaceBalls the Phone: It fits so well into, by the way.
• 8:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right, which was on purpose, because, like, And, and…
• 8:54
  Tad Eggleston: I always, I always have to find the right ways to say things sometimes. Like, one of the things that we… we wind up
• 9:02
  Tad Eggleston: talking about a lot in heavy metal, because most of what we've read from Heavy Metal is, like, the first, or what, 30-some-odd issues in. I mean, we read the new stuff as it comes out, but, like, there was a whole 2 or 3 year period where it wasn't coming out after we started the club. That sort of thing.
• 9:21
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the things that, like, there are certain things that we'll see over and over again that bother us, like, an excess of exposition that also repeats what the art says, you know,
• 9:36
  Tad Eggleston: Beautiful, beautiful panels that don't necessarily mean anything. Like, all sorts of things that, like.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: if I were to glance at Starhenge, if I hadn't just…
• 9:49
  Tad Eggleston: if I hadn't read the earlier ones, if I hadn't built an absolute trust in your work, I could have looked through the pages and gone, oh, this is gonna be a train wreck, because, like, everything that, like, I…
• 10:05
  Tad Eggleston: I caution about… In terms of… Making a good storytelling experience.
• 10:13
  Tad Eggleston: You push the bound… you know, there are points where it is much more illuminated prose than it is strict comics.
• 10:22
  Tad Eggleston: You do something that so few people manage to do, which is you have At times, really, like, photorealistic…
• 10:32
  Tad Eggleston: painting that somehow… Doesn't suck.
• 10:38
  Tad Eggleston: the emotion out of it, as so often happens with that quality of art. Like, so…
• 10:45
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about…
• 10:47
  Tad Eggleston: your approach, and how you decide that a page is gonna look like a page, how you… I mean, I remember we talked a little bit last time, because I got to read an early, early version last time, and therefore was upset at a few of the jokes that got caught before the final…
• 11:04
  Tad Eggleston: the final version, and you were just sitting there going, yeah, but there were too many words, and it was not necessary, and I'm like, but it was funny!
• 11:12
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Can I just…
• 11:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's a drop…
• 11:13
  SpaceBalls the Phone: point before you start? Yeah.
• 11:16
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 11:16
  SpaceBalls the Phone: If I had a choice to show a fledgling comic creator
• 11:21
  SpaceBalls the Phone: a comic book, Starhenge would not be what I would show them, because if they thought they could do it, they probably wouldn't be able to. Like, you've mastered breaking the rules, and I'd be like, oh, I don't want to show him that, because he's gonna fuck it up.
• 11:35
  Tad Eggleston: something to aspire to, but, like, if you're making your first comic, next…
• 11:41
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Yes, exactly.
• 11:44
  liamsharp: Well, I'm glad you've sort of touched on all of this, because there is… There is, sort of,
• 11:51
  liamsharp: There's background… there's background reasons for all of this, as much as anything else.
• 11:56
  SpaceBalls the Phone: But they're estimating.
• 11:57
  liamsharp: And… and there is.
• 12:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and I should emphasize that the consensus in this group that regularly, like, we will hit a various, like, because when we do our normal heavy metal book club, we'll go through an issue, and we'll talk story by story, and it's so common for us to hit a story and go.
• 12:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the art is beautiful, and I moved on before I read all of the words.
• 12:21
  Tad Eggleston: Because it gets into, and it doesn't manage to grab us. And, like, across the board, the four of us were like…
• 12:30
  Tad Eggleston: The words matter, the art matters, the art…
• 12:34
  Tad Eggleston: wouldn't tell the story on its own. The words wouldn't tell the story on its own. The synergy between the two is nearly perfect in every way. And I only say nearly because I don't really believe in perfection.
• 12:48
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not qualified to tell you where you were imperfect.
• 12:52
  liamsharp: There is no such thing as perfection, and you're right, art is, art's never finished, it's abandoned. That's absolutely true. So, to answer your… your point, or your question, it's not really a question, it's an observation.
• 13:06
  liamsharp: It's in two parts, really. One is the background, and that's about the things that I love and the things that have inspired me, and the things that I've aspired to be, and to reach and to attain.
• 13:18
  liamsharp: And the second part is about storytelling and stuff that you learn along the way.
• 13:23
  liamsharp: To the first part is that,
• 13:27
  liamsharp: As… as a… as a… as an aspiring…
• 13:31
  liamsharp: young artist before I became professional. I wasn't sure… That comics was my…
• 13:38
  liamsharp: Destiny, and definitely early on, one of the biggest problems with my work was that
• 13:43
  liamsharp: I was leaning into the illustrative side of things, and less into the storytelling side of things. So my storytelling was not great. I hadn't actually studied it. I've learned a lot of that on the hoof, and I've learned a lot of that in the process of doing it, and working with other great creators, and talking to people like Grant, and
• 14:02
  liamsharp: even people like Brian Hitch, when we were in the studio at Marvel UK, he was, he was obsessed with the storytelling, so I learned a lot from him.
• 14:10
  Tad Eggleston: brilliant storyteller.
• 14:12
  liamsharp: Yeah, alright.
• 14:14
  liamsharp: And, you know, right across the board, the people I admire, the people I love, I've learned from looking at their work.
• 14:21
  liamsharp: So, that… a lot of that I've learned on the hoof, but… I… I…
• 14:28
  liamsharp: I did a panel interestingly, with Jock, and and it was about covers.
• 14:36
  liamsharp: We were talking about the design element of things, and I… when I used to look at covers, the things that I used to love were things like Frazetta, Boris Valliejo, science fiction covers, things that were very, basically like a scene from the book, not particularly designed.
• 14:53
  liamsharp: But then I… so, so, so my… my first inspiration, my first thing that I thought I would do would become a book cover artist and be very kind of straightforward.
• 15:04
  liamsharp: Frazetta style, Boris style… but, Jeffrey, Catherine Jones-style,
• 15:11
  liamsharp: illustrative book cover artist. That was kind of where I thought I'd go.
• 15:16
  liamsharp: And I fell into comics instead via my Don Lawrence connection and meeting him. I mean, I always loved comics, so it wasn't like… it wasn't a problem for me, it's just I… I just thought I was probably better suited to be an illustrator.
• 15:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, particularly because you were… you were decades before people could make money just as a comics color… cover artist.
• 15:38
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Yeah, that's right.
• 15:39
  liamsharp: Oh, yeah.
• 15:40
  Tad Eggleston: There are a number of people who just do covers.
• 15:44
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 15:45
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 15:46
  liamsharp: But that wasn't…
• 15:47
  Tad Eggleston: thing.
• 15:49
  liamsharp: Well, it definitely wasn't, I think, then, you know, even though there were obviously great people doing it. But I had always harboured a desire to do, sort of, fully rendered science fiction, fantasy-type artworks.
• 16:03
  liamsharp: And then it becomes a case of, like, okay, how do you put them in a story?
• 16:07
  liamsharp: And make it work, you know, apart from on the covers, which is the obvious thing.
• 16:12
  liamsharp: And that sort of leads to the second part.
• 16:15
  liamsharp: And I was telling this to someone the other day, I don't know if you saw the Spawn the Dark Ages series that I just did, but within that.
• 16:22
  Tad Eggleston: They did.
• 16:23
  Tad Eggleston: Haven't read it.
• 16:25
  liamsharp: Right. But I…
• 16:26
  Tad Eggleston: I need to.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: It's one of very few spawn series that I want to read, but, like, I haven't jumped over the spawn hoop.
• 16:34
  liamsharp: Well, when you, when you, when you get around to it, you'll, you'll appreciate this.
• 16:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I know I will, because I flipped through your art.
• 16:41
  liamsharp: I mean, you'll appreciate the point I'm gonna make.
• 16:43
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay, sorry.
• 16:45
  liamsharp: The, the,
• 16:48
  liamsharp: somebody had got to… the setup of it is very slow, and it's intentionally extremely detailed. The world building there is very, very, you know, if anything, it's Barry Smith-inspired, and Bernie Wrightson-inspired. Highly, highly, highly polished, illustrative approach to the storytelling.
• 17:07
  liamsharp: But as the story progresses.
• 17:10
  liamsharp: I saw one reviewer saying, I don't know what's happened to the art, it's kind of falling apart, it's got all kind of scratchy, and it's…
• 17:17
  liamsharp: It's, it's not the same as it was at the beginning. And it's like, you're totally missing the point. This has been made as a bigger…
• 17:24
  liamsharp: piece of work. You know, when you read this all through, it'll start to make sense, because as the story progresses, it gets more and more intense. It's much darker. There's prolonged fight scenes without any exposition, and those fight scenes…
• 17:40
  liamsharp: You don't want to be super detailed.
• 17:43
  liamsharp: You know, where you're looking at everything else except the fight, so you… you want it to be… to move along much faster, and for you not to be focusing on the details.
• 17:54
  liamsharp: So, what you learn over the years is that, like.
• 17:58
  liamsharp: the finish that you do for a single panel, if I do a page that is fully rendered, I want you to stop and live with it a while, and be in that space with it.
• 18:09
  liamsharp: And, and, and this book is very much that, you know, it's meant to… it's meant to elicit a sense of dreamlike,
• 18:20
  liamsharp: vividness, you know? And that's…
• 18:23
  liamsharp: That's by design, as you know, having read it.
• 18:27
  liamsharp: And it's meant to sort of…
• 18:30
  liamsharp: carry you along on a journey, and that's another thing, too. So, what I didn't mention in the first part of this as well, is one of the things that hugely inspired me, and this is referring to the whole thing about the illustrated prose aspect, is one of the big inspirations for me was,
• 18:49
  liamsharp: Howard Chaikin's adaptation of Alfred Bester's Stars My Destination, which I obviously…
• 18:55
  Tad Eggleston: I did see the shout-out to that in one of the chapter titles.
• 19:00
  liamsharp: Well, yeah, and it's… I've nodded to it a couple of times, and I learned so much about…
• 19:08
  liamsharp: how you can have big amounts of prose, because I have written novels, and I love prose, and you find out…
• 19:15
  Tad Eggleston: I have one of the… I have the audiobook of one of yours, and it's still on my…
• 19:20
  Tad Eggleston: I… I need to… to…
• 19:23
  liamsharp: You should listen to it. I hope you enjoy it, that's the insurer.
• 19:27
  Tad Eggleston: Hold me to that. You'll come on again once I've listened to the audiobook.
• 19:31
  Tad Eggleston: That's how you'll… that's how you'll hold out on.
• 19:33
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 19:34
  liamsharp: So, I mean, basically, it's a big love of, of, of prose, too.
• 19:40
  liamsharp: So, I'm… I'm getting older, you know, I'm 58, I'm not a spring chicken. My time ahead is less time than behind.
• 19:49
  liamsharp: And… what I'm doing now has to be…
• 19:53
  liamsharp: true to what I dream of, you know, things that I've… I've envisaged this… these ideas of finding a mix between
• 20:01
  liamsharp: Proper job,
• 20:05
  liamsharp: what you'd call graphic novellas, I guess, like Howard Chaikin' stuff, which is really… or graphic novel, which is literally an adaptation… an adapted novel.
• 20:16
  liamsharp: with illustrations. That works. That's brilliantly done. And comics, and
• 20:24
  liamsharp: narrative storytelling in terms of the art, and it's where you pick.
• 20:29
  liamsharp: those beats. You know, and it is a balancing act, and I hope, you know, I hope I hit it more often than I don't, but I'm prepared, at least in this, to push the boat out as far as I can, and try things that… that… that I haven't… I haven't tried before.
• 20:47
  liamsharp: And that's, you know, life's too short. You've gotta… you've got to try it. Otherwise, you just get trapped into one zone of what everyone expects from you, and you're just turning the same thing out over and over again, and inevitably, you're gonna become stale doing that. You know, you're gonna lose your heart, you're gonna…
• 21:04
  liamsharp: be unfulfilled, you know? I don't… I always find it sad that…
• 21:08
  liamsharp: Stan Lee had this notion that Stanley Lieberwitch was a… was a great American novelist, and he never got there. It doesn't matter how great he became, it's still sad he never wrote that novel.
• 21:21
  liamsharp: And I don't want to not write that novel.
• 21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 21:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, I can see that, and I will also say that, like, through two books and a novella, you've… you've… you've done the…
• 21:32
  Tad Eggleston: The balancing act really, really well so far.
• 21:36
  liamsharp: Thank you.
• 21:36
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I can't, like… I think the only book…
• 21:42
  Tad Eggleston: that… that… and I have a feeling that you're gonna have… a similar, awe-inspiring, and slash…
• 21:52
  Tad Eggleston: dissatisfying answer to Matt. I think the only…
• 21:55
  Tad Eggleston: book I've ever read that I had more questions about
• 22:00
  Tad Eggleston: how do you keep all of this in your head was Matt Kent's mind management that is just, like, all over the place. And, like, I asked him when I finally had him on, I'm like, did you have that board with all the red string and the…
• 22:14
  Tad Eggleston: Because that was the only way I could imagine it. It's like, no, it's just all in my head.
• 22:19
  Tad Eggleston: And sometimes I'd see something later and throw in a gag.
• 22:24
  Tad Eggleston: that didn't come out the first time around, but, like, since the draft was done, I could… I could put something in the margins, like, and I'm like, you what? So, I have similar questions with this.
• 22:40
  Tad Eggleston: you… Like, the story arc…
• 22:46
  Tad Eggleston: There's no way to put it, it fucks with time. It completely and utterly fucks with time. It's like, one part, the future is the past, is the now, is the whatever, and it's one part, everything, everywhere, all at once.
• 23:03
  Tad Eggleston: How do you keep track?
• 23:07
  Tad Eggleston: of, like…
• 23:09
  Tad Eggleston: what Amber should or shouldn't know, what other characters should or shouldn't know, like, what order to tell the story in, like…
• 23:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I'm all for nonlinear storytelling, and I love Doctor Who timey-wimey shit, as you called it the last time you were on. I've continued using that line ever since.
• 23:35
  Tad Eggleston: But, like… even with the new book, like, I'm like, okay, I kinda know where…
• 23:45
  Tad Eggleston: We are, and how this is…
• 23:47
  Tad Eggleston: And then it's like, oh, wait a minute, but isn't that…
• 23:52
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm enjoying the ride, it doesn't matter for the storytelling.
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: In a lot of ways, it's like the second, third read that you're like, wait a minute, how did this work? Because I'm… it does work, but now that I'm looking at it deeper, it's like…
• 24:10
  Tad Eggleston: and the listeners can't see my hand motions. They're… think jazz hands on LSD.
• 24:19
  liamsharp: Well, it's… it is a… You know, honestly, in this, in this story.
• 24:28
  liamsharp: we've established… I've not… I've not tried to do the Doctor Who thing where the, you know, I think they gave up on that, too. The whole, like, is there one timeline that absolutely is true? There's…
• 24:40
  liamsharp: Time keeps shifting all the time, there's chronatic stubs, you've got…
• 24:44
  liamsharp: you've got the dreadnoughts that are literally trying to end timelines. You know that
• 24:49
  liamsharp: There are versions of the future that go nowhere, and they acknowledge that too.
• 24:55
  liamsharp: So, it's more like a tree with…
• 24:58
  liamsharp: A bunch of dead ends, like, in its branches and its roots, you know?
• 25:02
  liamsharp: And somewhere through the middle of it is a trunk, which is more or less sturdy.
• 25:07
  liamsharp: And I hope to keep them pretty much as much as I can on that path. But they are in a realm where it's already changed. The fifth century they're in now is not the fifth century that we knew.
• 25:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 25:24
  liamsharp: And we already, we've already established that there's a future with no magic and a past.
• 25:29
  liamsharp: That had…
• 25:31
  liamsharp: more magic than we're aware of. So, you know, in a sense, our timeline is not that timeline. Our timeline.
• 25:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 25:39
  liamsharp: doesn't have any magic, as far as we're aware, you know, unless… unless you're, you know, unless you're Alan Moore and has found the secret to unlocking that stuff. I've sadly, I've looked through it all my life and not found it yet. I would love to be convinced of it,
• 25:56
  liamsharp: I think a little bit of me is on that quest, too.
• 25:59
  liamsharp: But,
• 26:01
  liamsharp: But, you know, we can all… we can all love that stuff, and be… and wish for it, and see the wonder of it, and enjoy the metaphors for what it… what it might mean.
• 26:13
  liamsharp: But the thing with this story is it's so big. We've got a… the setup is, like, within the three different realms. You've got the earthbound realm, which, well, as I say earthbound, the universal physical realm, the meta… the meta-velt.
• 26:28
  liamsharp: Which is,
• 26:30
  liamsharp: Where we… we exist, but it's also, you know, the full… the full stretch of time within that.
• 26:38
  liamsharp: And then you've got the, the, the dream, the, the, the hypervilt, and the, and the,
• 26:44
  liamsharp: And the, yeah, the Metavelt. So, it's, like, it's… there's three… there's three different realms. The money… not money, Christ, my brain.
• 26:56
  liamsharp: This is what happens. I've been drawing all day, and when I do that, and then suddenly switch to talking, I'm like a babbling loon half the time.
• 27:05
  Tad Eggleston: just started earlier, you could have drawn and talked at the same time.
• 27:08
  liamsharp: Yeah, it's like… it's like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time, like, two different places.
• 27:18
  Tad Eggleston: I have to start rubbing my tummy first to make it work.
• 27:21
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 27:21
  Tad Eggleston: If I start patting my head first, I'll pat my stomach, but if I start rubbing my tummy, I can then
• 27:27
  Tad Eggleston: my head.
• 27:27
  liamsharp: shut it down.
• 27:29
  liamsharp: So, yeah, now I'm just getting up to speed. It's complicated, basically, but as long as I think it's…
• 27:38
  liamsharp: And there is… there's a lot of…
• 27:41
  liamsharp: I've got a lifetime of stories. I've got 40 years of unexplored…
• 27:49
  liamsharp: Bits and bobs and ideas, and…
• 27:52
  liamsharp: And I want to do them. You know, some of these things are very old. Some of these things are sort of 50 years old, since I first conceived of them.
• 28:01
  liamsharp: some… the, the, the Merlin stuff.
• 28:04
  liamsharp: And the Arthur stuff. I think I… did I talk about the Arthur stuff before, about the whole.
• 28:11
  Tad Eggleston: He might have, but you're allowed to talk about it again. It's been a while. We might have a new listener or two.
• 28:15
  liamsharp: Just the things that people… Don't know, that really fascinate me.
• 28:20
  liamsharp: Like…
• 28:23
  liamsharp: I absolutely love, and I feel like I have to tell the world this, because I didn't know it.
• 28:28
  liamsharp: And I was shocked, because having read and seen all the films and all the… all the, you know, read so much about it, when you go right back and you get to the Jeffrey Monmouth stuff, and you look at the Arthur story.
• 28:40
  liamsharp: You realize that when you tie it.
• 28:42
  liamsharp: into earlier mythology. The link goes way back to ancient Greece, right? So… when you follow the Odyssey.
• 28:51
  liamsharp: which is all very timely, fortunately. The Odyssey gets reinterpreted by Virgil. Virgil does it
• 28:59
  liamsharp: takes it even deeper. He's done it specifically as a piece of propaganda.
• 29:04
  liamsharp: for… Loyola, which, which, which emperor, Augustus?
• 29:10
  liamsharp: So he's writing a piece of propaganda for Augustus, which is basically saying.
• 29:15
  liamsharp: that the emperors of Rome are related to the gods.
• 29:20
  liamsharp: and that Aeneid, who takes the… basically is… is Odysseus, and Aeneid goes through that whole adventure.
• 29:30
  liamsharp: Founds Rome. He's a… he's a demigod.
• 29:34
  liamsharp: And what Jeffrey of Monmouth does is take it to the next step. So he says.
• 29:41
  liamsharp: Aeneas has a son called Brutus. Brutus comes to England, Lands on Totteness.
• 29:47
  liamsharp: And he founds the line of all the kings of Britain.
• 29:50
  liamsharp: So, all the kings of Britain Are related to the…
• 29:54
  liamsharp: to the emperors of Rome, and therefore the gods, the Greek… the Roman gods via, you know, the Greek gods via the Roman gods.
• 30:03
  liamsharp: Which is funny, because, you know, this guy's a Christian monk writing this stuff. Right. And he's basically saying, oh, by the way, all of you rich guys, all of you, you know, kings and princes, you are actually Roman gods.
• 30:18
  liamsharp: Rom…
• 30:19
  liamsharp: And it's another piece of propaganda, which the wealthy of those times would have read and enjoyed and felt good about themselves.
• 30:27
  liamsharp: And his version of Arthur
• 30:31
  liamsharp: basically is on a quest to reclaim that heritage, so he not only conquers Greece.
• 30:38
  liamsharp: not only conquer, sorry, Ireland.
• 30:40
  liamsharp: But he conquers Iceland, which is amazing, and then he conquers all of Europe, gets to the foot of the Alps, he's about to cross the Alps.
• 30:51
  liamsharp: And invade Rome.
• 30:54
  liamsharp: When he gets stopped. But he's literally on the journey to… he's doing a Hannibal, he's on the… he's on that quest, and I find that amazing, because I think that that version of Arthur…
• 31:03
  liamsharp: that's very much… it's almost like a conquering Alexander the Great kind of character that's…
• 31:09
  liamsharp: this kind of destiny that's calling to them, and it's the wrong destiny. He's got… he's got, sort of, corrupted by power as much as anybody else, and we sometimes look at Arthur now as a kind of…
• 31:21
  liamsharp: You know, tragic, almost uncorruptible, character, but actually, that version is pretty…
• 31:28
  liamsharp: you know, pretty power-hungry, and he's looking for dominion over the whole of Christendom and Rome and all of that. It's pretty… he's pretty amazing, really. And I love those stories that you find when you start digging around and joining the dots.
• 31:44
  liamsharp: And I hadn't… I hadn't really heard… come across that before, and I just… I love… I love that sort of aspect to it.
• 31:53
  liamsharp: So there's… I've got other stuff in, in the future, where there's…
• 31:59
  liamsharp: other characters that are like Arthur,
• 32:03
  liamsharp: from other places, and the question then will be, you know, are they, are they connected? Is it… is it, is it, is it like a DNA thing? What is it that… that makes people become like that? This sort of…
• 32:21
  liamsharp: moment of destiny, where they have a potential to do something amazing, and then they get, sort of.
• 32:27
  liamsharp: Lost in a sense of, like…
• 32:30
  liamsharp: Their own, potential to be something
• 32:34
  liamsharp: bigger, but not necessarily better, you know? The destiny is… it's that whole power thing. It's so awful to me that… that people are putting these… are in these extraordinary positions, particularly now, where… where they could do…
• 32:52
  liamsharp: Astonishing things for the world. Astonishing.
• 32:56
  liamsharp: Good things for good… for everybody, and they choose not to.
• 33:01
  liamsharp: And they choose to just…
• 33:03
  Tad Eggleston: In many cases, I think they've completely lost the vision to.
• 33:07
  liamsharp: It lost all the connection to it.
• 33:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, on one level, they choose not to, but on another level, it's they've become so disconnected from the people that they could help that they don't…
• 33:20
  Tad Eggleston: They don't understand that they need help, or.
• 33:23
  liamsharp: But that's what I mean, really. So those stories that I was just describing, all of them are… you know, this is not new, what we're seeing now. This has been going on for a long time, and we… this is what happens, and this is what these stories are trying to tell us.
• 33:37
  liamsharp: And we're incapable, it seems, of learning anything from them, or those of us that can are not in any position to do anything about it. Right.
• 33:49
  Tad Eggleston: Love, at some point.
• 33:51
  Tad Eggleston: because it's also… not quite uniquely, but distinctly European story that tells over and over again. I'd love to, at some point, man, I hope that we have more of…
• 34:09
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… other histories come more for… more to the forefront, because, like, I think…
• 34:16
  Tad Eggleston: They think that every culture, part of their problem moving forward is they think that their culture is the human condition.
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: And there are aspects of it that are, and there are aspects of it that aren't, you know? I mean, one of the things that I think about a lot is, like, I'm autistic.
• 34:35
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, Europeans… European culture has never really been great for… to that people that… those people that were different and weird, even though we're the ones that actually accomplish tons of things.
• 34:48
  Tad Eggleston: like… Whereas, like…
• 34:51
  liamsharp: No, listen.
• 34:52
  liamsharp: I wonder about that, because I think that, you know, we just called them eccentric in the old days, you know?
• 34:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, sometimes, sometimes, if they were rich.
• 35:04
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Yeah. Well, I mean, look what… look what they did to Alan Turing. I mean…
• 35:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 35:08
  liamsharp: Yep.
• 35:09
  SpaceBalls the Phone: It's… We're in his bed.
• 35:12
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Can we talk about.
• 35:13
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas you'll… there's some histories that have, like, North American tribes.
• 35:20
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the weirder you were, the more likely you were to be the shaman, and if you said that they should do it, they'd do it, even though they didn't understand it, because they figured you were working on a higher plane!
• 35:33
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Well, we kinda are.
• 35:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I agree with that, but, like, similarly with the, like, gender differences, like, Native… I mean, again, there were Native American tribes, there were African tribes, that sort of thing, where, like, if a woman didn't want to be married to a man anymore, all she had to do was say so, and it was done.
• 35:51
  liamsharp: Right.
• 35:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know? So, like, each culture has certain things that wind up being hugely different. And I say this without wanting to lionize the other cultures, because I'm certain that they have their own things that… Oh, of course. …that, like, because they were the cultural history, they got stuck in, we do this even though
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: It always leads to this, and then leads to that again, and then leads to that again.
• 36:19
  liamsharp: Yeah, I mean, I suppose what I'm… what I mean is, like.
• 36:24
  liamsharp: I think there's a lot of greatness in the past of all history.
• 36:30
  liamsharp: Where those individuals were…
• 36:34
  liamsharp: not processing the way that… what people call, you know, normative, I don't… I definitely don't process in a typical way, I never have.
• 36:44
  Tad Eggleston: You're not neurodefi- you're not neurodifficult?
• 36:46
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I like you.
• 36:47
  liamsharp: Excuse me.
• 36:49
  liamsharp: You know… Sorry, but if there's something real…
• 36:52
  SpaceBalls the Phone: that needs to be solved. I don't want normal brains working on it, especially if there's a timeline.
• 36:59
  liamsharp: Right.
• 37:00
  liamsharp: Patucky. Well.
• 37:01
  Tad Eggleston: I, I don't, yeah, I don't, I don't think normal brains can, can, can handle,
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: what's the word I'm looking for? Multiple timelines and existences and…
• 37:14
  liamsharp: Well, you know, I think the more you look at history, the more you look… all of… all of… so many great people, so many, particularly artists.
• 37:22
  liamsharp: were troubled, deeply troubled, and sort of cut themselves off in all sorts of strange, as far as neurotypical people are concerned, ways. When you look at it, the way they, you know, even people like Michelangelo, he's consistent, kind of.
• 37:39
  liamsharp: reaching for perfection that he could never achieve, you know? And he would bail on how many sculptures did he bail on, you know, after creating pretty much perfection already.
• 37:51
  liamsharp: I… I see it all over the place, and I think… I don't even know what normal is anymore, you know? I don't know… I don't know if I'd recognize it if I saw it.
• 38:01
  liamsharp: I don't think my world is… I don't want it to be either. It's like, I don't know that many people look,
• 38:09
  liamsharp: That you would just say are just normal. No, I don't know what it is.
• 38:14
  liamsharp: But also, I don't want to, at the same time, I don't want to belittle,
• 38:21
  liamsharp: any, any different, non-typical type people, I think that's part of…
• 38:27
  liamsharp: When… we talk about Spectrum now, and rainbows, and all of that.
• 38:32
  liamsharp: is that's fair. It is, because it's, you know, that's… that's the beauty of it. We want that. We don't want everyone to be all the bloody same. It makes no… who wants a world like that?
• 38:44
  liamsharp: It terrifies me that some people seem to want everyone to conform into one kind of,
• 38:50
  liamsharp: You know, set of rules, and set of beliefs, and set of…
• 38:54
  liamsharp: you know, established by some sort of, you know, group has said, this is how you should be human, and we should all just do that. Makes sense.
• 39:05
  SpaceBalls the Phone: societal norm.
• 39:06
  liamsharp: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, you know, I have… I have, you know, trans people in my family, I've…
• 39:14
  liamsharp: Many, many gay people, friends, and friends, friends, and, definitely, you know.
• 39:21
  liamsharp: All sorts of people are on all sorts of spectrums, and…
• 39:25
  liamsharp: And I love them, and I think they're amazing, and you know, we should be… we should just.
• 39:31
  Tad Eggleston: I agree wholehearted.
• 39:32
  liamsharp: I just think the world is not built to,
• 39:37
  liamsharp: Just… it needs to be built to just accommodate us, and…
• 39:42
  liamsharp: That's just the way it should be, but we, we, we…
• 39:45
  Tad Eggleston: It's so funny how much of this could, could, could,
• 39:54
  Tad Eggleston: be easier if we just valued kindness above other things.
• 40:00
  liamsharp: Yeah, it's funny that… I mean, we're getting way off the topic, which… but that's fine. I mean, I…
• 40:07
  Tad Eggleston: To all topics here.
• 40:08
  liamsharp: around 22%.
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 40:09
  liamsharp: I think it's… I mean, it's all part of it, and I don't mean that in a, like, let's go… I don't mean to be directing us back to that, but I did actually.
• 40:16
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't know, Amber deals with a lot of trying to figure out where she…
• 40:21
  liamsharp: Yeah, totally. Totally. She's very not… she's very, she's all over the place. She doesn't know where she fits into things. She's… she's looking at everything and trying to figure it out in… in all sorts of ways, and .
• 40:35
  Tad Eggleston: In and of itself, I think, should be the first indicator of neurodivergence.
• 40:40
  Tad Eggleston: I think most neurotypicals look at as little as they have to, and really don't care how it works, as long as it works for them.
• 40:48
  SpaceBalls the Phone: -
• 40:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:52
  liamsharp: I think that's…
• 40:52
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like the first question on any test to figure out if you're neurodivergent should be, do you try to figure out how something or things work, even though you don't need to know how to build them?
• 41:04
  liamsharp: If you do…
• 41:06
  Tad Eggleston: You don't even need to ask more questions, you're neurodivergent.
• 41:10
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Not a point.
• 41:12
  liamsharp: No, I… I did put a post up the other day, and it sounds… it sounds maybe quite simple, and a little bit trite, and a bit simplistic, but to me, I've always tried
• 41:25
  liamsharp: to just be… better. Like, every… there's not… there's barely a day or a week
• 41:30
  liamsharp: passes where I don't just try to be a better person, right? Slightly more mindful, slightly more…
• 41:35
  liamsharp: Patient, slightly more aware of other people, and kind towards other people.
• 41:41
  liamsharp: And also, you know, I'm trying to be better at the things I do, but just generally a better citizen of the world, you know? A better person in this world, because I've made lots of mistakes along the way, and…
• 41:54
  liamsharp: And I'm certainly not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, nobody is, but… but I do feel a need to try to be…
• 42:03
  liamsharp: But to be aware that being…
• 42:08
  liamsharp: Kind, you know, is important, and
• 42:12
  liamsharp: It's… it's shocking to me when you sort of realize, as you get older, that actually, especially people
• 42:17
  liamsharp: you could name a bunch of them, but particularly extremely wealthy people, who don't seem to consider that at all. They seem to get up, and actually, their daily goals are nothing to do with, whether they are a better person or not. It's about acquisition, it's about power, it's about…
• 42:35
  liamsharp: And, you know, ring fencing power, and the ring fencing influence.
• 42:41
  liamsharp: And definitely not thinking about, anybody else outside of that, you know, protecting who… I don't even know who they're protecting, because they're not protecting the world, it seems like, you know, they're…
• 42:51
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Protecting themselves and their food.
• 42:53
  liamsharp: Yeah, seems to be. They are literally like… you know, you look at Smaug now, and Smogg suddenly seems much more like a metaphor than I ever imagined. The whole idea of a dragon is much more of a metaphor than… than I think I ever gave it credit for when I was a kid. Sure. This notion of just sitting on a hoard and doing nothing with it.
• 43:11
  liamsharp: You know, flowing flames at anybody who comes anywhere near it.
• 43:15
  liamsharp: And it's serving no purpose at all.
• 43:19
  SpaceBalls the Phone: So, you know…
• 43:20
  liamsharp: Spending on it.
• 43:21
  SpaceBalls the Phone: My wife and I, we raised two girls. They're both young adults now.
• 43:26
  SpaceBalls the Phone: My wife's big thing was, be kind. And I backed that up 100%. But my… the one thing I really wanted to impart on my kids was, money's a tool, it's not the goal. If money's the goal, you're pointed in the wrong direction.
• 43:40
  liamsharp: Yep, I'm with you.
• 43:42
  SpaceBalls the Phone: So…
• 43:43
  liamsharp: I'm with you.
• 43:43
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Those are two things that I really imparted on my kids, and I'm very happy about it.
• 43:50
  liamsharp: No, I think that's true, and… and, you know, hopefully I can…
• 43:57
  liamsharp: explore some of that stuff within the stories too, but I don't want to…
• 44:01
  liamsharp: be always just, you know, I don't want to be preaching to anybody.
• 44:06
  liamsharp: I'd rather it was a story that…
• 44:09
  liamsharp: You know, anyone could find a way in to us, you know, if they chose to.
• 44:17
  liamsharp: But it's all there if you go looking for it.
• 44:22
  liamsharp: there's a lot to unpack, basically, and it is… it is a kind of a psychological workout for me as well. I am exploring myself within this book.
• 44:32
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Oh, absolutely.
• 44:33
  liamsharp: you know, do it, you know, whereas you do… That's true.
• 44:36
  liamsharp: I mean, I'm so…
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: Reading Issue 1 of A Kiss for Atticus today, I felt myself having, like.
• 44:47
  Tad Eggleston: inception moments, because you start out, like, with the process of making the comic, and then there's the old man that looks kind of familiar.
• 44:58
  Tad Eggleston: city.
• 44:59
  Tad Eggleston: And then there's… there's Amber talking about the art, and it's like, so… so are you giving us… this is the reality of you making the comic, and then…
• 45:08
  Tad Eggleston: This is you walking around thinking about stuff, and then this is the voice that you found to… to actually give us the stuff, just in, like, this 3 or 4 page…
• 45:21
  liamsharp: You know.
• 45:22
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 45:22
  liamsharp: That's what I love about Dream Logic, too, you know?
• 45:27
  liamsharp: And I think there's a little bit of a movement there, especially… I haven't seen it yet, but the, the film that's out, what's it called, the, the one with all the rooms,
• 45:36
  liamsharp: Just out of a minute.
• 45:38
  SpaceBalls the Phone: The horror movie? The Back Rooms or something?
• 45:40
  liamsharp: Backrooms, yeah.
• 45:41
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Yes.
• 45:42
  liamsharp: Yeah, but it's all about, you know, liminal spaces that go on forever, and it's like… my son went to see it today, and he said it's like the world dreamed itself.
• 45:51
  liamsharp: And people stumbled into the dream. Jeff was a lovely way of putting it.
• 45:57
  liamsharp: And I always like… it's like Lynch… Lynch dream logic, you know, that kind of thing that you can…
• 46:05
  liamsharp: you're sort of following along, the logic's fine, fine, fine, and then you're suddenly in a whole other environment, you're not entirely sure how you got there, but it was cool, and it makes you think.
• 46:15
  liamsharp: And Mobius does that, Lynch does that, and sometimes I think there's… there's been a… there's been a kind of thing in comics where more and more there's been rules about how you tell the stories. Rules about, what you should and shouldn't do.
• 46:31
  liamsharp: people…
• 46:32
  liamsharp: being very editorial with… with our… with the best will in the world. I get it if you're… if you're running a company like, you know, DC or Marvel or whatever. You've got to keep clarity across multiple books, and you've got to… your canon stuff to contend with, and all of that kind of thing.
• 46:48
  liamsharp: But… outside of that, I don't know that those rules should always apply, because otherwise.
• 46:57
  liamsharp: Nothing moves, it just becomes static again, you know, and all mediums should be able to keep
• 47:03
  liamsharp: keep evolving and keep changing, you know? Otherwise, you know, that again becomes this one rulebook for how you do it, and I always shy away a bit from anything that, like, says, this is how you do this, you know? I don't want to read a book that's
• 47:18
  liamsharp: from a school like that. It should never be like that. It should always be like…
• 47:24
  liamsharp: challenge yourself, open your… open your perception, open your horizons up, and just see what's out there. And some of the most exciting
• 47:33
  liamsharp: discoveries I ever met. I'm a working-class kid from Derby. I didn't expect to be stumbling into avant-garde corners of the world, and avant-garde creators, and, you know, I didn't expect to fall in love with writers like Samuel Beckett.
• 47:52
  liamsharp: plays like Waiting for Goddam, and all of these kinds of things, and…
• 47:57
  liamsharp: you know, I wonder about people like that when you… if you read,
• 48:03
  liamsharp: You know, any of those plays, or,
• 48:07
  liamsharp: I'm thinking, like, Achilles… not Achilles, I'll come back to it if I remember, but some of the avant-garde Irish stuff from the turn of the last century. It really takes you on,
• 48:19
  liamsharp: it really challenges you, and it's sort of really exciting. I love that, and…
• 48:24
  liamsharp: And again, it comes back to that, like, I don't…
• 48:28
  liamsharp: I didn't necessarily pick superheroes as my path.
• 48:33
  liamsharp: my destiny, and I'm glad that I'm slowly being able to pull some of my audience over into areas perhaps they might not have gone down before, and hopefully that they'll enjoy. I know there's a big chunk of my audience that just would rather I just drew
• 48:50
  liamsharp: Conan the Barbarian, or, you know, or Batman, or Wonder Woman. You've done very well.
• 48:55
  Tad Eggleston: nicely on Conan the Barbarian.
• 48:57
  liamsharp: Well, thank you.
• 48:58
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Well, I, for one, am glad you did not, because as I've gotten older, I want to read less superhero stuff, and more books like this.
• 49:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and actually, you know, a couple things you said tickled… tickled something in my autistic brain, and I'm curious as to if Matt will agree with this, too, because,
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like… comics post… Wortham hearings.
• 49:29
  Tad Eggleston: We're, you know, constantly trying to reestablish themselves as a medium that was a full medium, rather than just kid stuff, rather than just, like…
• 49:40
  Tad Eggleston: something else. And in the late 90s, you had Brian Hitch On authority, and, howard Porter.
• 49:55
  Tad Eggleston: on JLA.
• 49:58
  Tad Eggleston: Introduce what got called a lot at the time.
• 50:01
  Tad Eggleston: cinematic comics. And that has become the norm. Comics that feel a lot like movies. And… and…
• 50:13
  Tad Eggleston: I want to make it clear that there's nothing wrong with that. That can be a great comic, that sort of thing. But I feel like, over the last decade or so, you have had a lot of creators
• 50:25
  Tad Eggleston: Both ones that had done the cinematic stuff, had worked before that, and new ones coming in, who are both discovering
• 50:35
  Tad Eggleston: old, old stuff, you know, EC, or going back into, like, Roy Crane, and Windsor McKay, and going, oh, wait a minute, we've been doing some cool-ass shit in comics for way longer than I realized!
• 50:51
  Tad Eggleston: And looking at, okay, you can make comics that are as good as movies, but, like, it's a different medium, so why is the goal to be as good as a movie? Why isn't the goal to be the best thing that you couldn't adapt?
• 51:07
  Tad Eggleston: Or couldn't make a straight adapt… adaptation. Something that you would have to fundamentally change to put into a different medium.
• 51:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and I'm all for doing stories in different mediums. I love looking at telling a story in a different medium, and being able to talk about, like, what works better in this medium, what works better in that medium, what decisions had to be made in terms of changing the story to fit the limitations of a medium.
• 51:34
  Tad Eggleston: But what makes comics… Beautiful!
• 51:38
  Tad Eggleston: Is there are almost no limitations.
• 51:41
  liamsharp: I couldn't agree more. And I think, look, when I looked at Brian's stuff on, you know, that blew my mind, and it did, for a while, make me wish, more than anything, that I could…
• 51:54
  liamsharp: do that as well as he can, you know? I'm not him. Right. But I also never forgot that I also absolutely adore
• 52:03
  liamsharp: Bilson Kevich's Stray Toasters.
• 52:06
  liamsharp: Which…
• 52:07
  liamsharp: Who is… Oh.
• 52:08
  Tad Eggleston: So good.
• 52:09
  liamsharp: is one of my all-time favourites, and I will always go back to that.
• 52:14
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and the fact that he got to do something similar inside… inside of Marvel, with Elektra and Daredevil Love and War.
• 52:22
  liamsharp: Also amazing. Also amazing.
• 52:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's just…
• 52:25
  liamsharp: the, the The Daredevil book he did to stand alone.
• 52:29
  Tad Eggleston: Stray Toasters should have essentially… I mean, in a world that makes sense to neurotypicals, stray toasters would have been like him saying, I am… I did my Moon Knight thing, and I am never doing a… a…
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: superhero comic again, because I don't want to do stuff like that. It shouldn't have led to, hey, I think you could use that art to tell this story.
• 52:56
  Tad Eggleston: But it did, because that's how cool comics are.
• 52:59
  liamsharp: Yeah, exactly. And I, you know, it is good that, you know, I guess I'm beating the drum a little bit for that stuff, too. Dave McKean is a huge influence as well.
• 53:12
  liamsharp: the thing is, I think, naturally, it's a challenge for me, because I think,
• 53:18
  liamsharp: My natural skill when I was young was to have a… to do a kind of Boris Vallier, a Rosetta-type thing, you know, to be a fantasy artist, and a semi-realistic approach to things.
• 53:32
  liamsharp: And it's people like Bill and Dave McKeam.
• 53:37
  liamsharp: that really broke down those walls, because I did… I never got, and I didn't enjoy, Picasso. I just didn't… I just thought, this is…
• 53:47
  liamsharp: this is not good drawing, you know? Okay, I think I…
• 53:50
  Tad Eggleston: And Joy, like, his flower drawings more than a lot of his.
• 53:54
  liamsharp: I mean, you know.
• 53:55
  Tad Eggleston: I sometimes enjoy his abstract, but, like, when he was doing very simple line art is probably my favorite picose.
• 54:04
  liamsharp: I know, it's nice. But that's what I mean. It took somebody like
• 54:09
  liamsharp: Bill Sankaric and Dave McKean to really wake me up to less,
• 54:17
  liamsharp: just realistic art, I guess. Less representational art.
• 54:21
  liamsharp: And I have to really, really push myself to break.
• 54:25
  liamsharp: Break myself out of that.
• 54:28
  SpaceBalls the Phone: I'm gonna be honest, when I was little, I started collecting seriously and reading comics 1987, 1988. I didn't… my little brain did not comprehend Bill Sienkiewicz's work. I didn't get it. And as an adult, I regret that. I wish I had, because I would have…
• 54:48
  Tad Eggleston: There were people that had to bail on New Mutants because of… what's the name of the character that's essentially…
• 54:55
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Oh, Warlock?
• 54:55
  Tad Eggleston: Completely. Yeah, because of Warlock, it just, like, broke their head that there could be.
• 55:00
  liamsharp: That's crazy, because what was great, I loved that car.
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, it is! It is! But that's… it's another one that, like…
• 55:09
  Tad Eggleston: it represents a decision that you gotta give the hat tip to editorial for allowing it. Yes, absolutely. Because it certainly wasn't anywhere near the mainstream when you suddenly had, you know, all of these normal characters, and then this, like.
• 55:30
  liamsharp: Yeah, no, no, no, but it's.
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: I love Warlock.
• 55:33
  liamsharp: That work has had… has really stood the test of time, you know, and it's like…
• 55:39
  liamsharp: It's fed into the cinematic universe, and, you know, it's had its… it's affected the Spider-Verse stuff, and…
• 55:48
  liamsharp: Bill's aesthetic, whether it took, you know, 20, 30 years, it's become fully embraced by the much bigger mainstream.
• 55:57
  liamsharp: And, you know, if you can't tell that Bill's a genius now, I think you're…
• 56:02
  liamsharp: You're really missing something. My, my…
• 56:05
  Tad Eggleston: local county history art museum managed to get the Sienkiewicz exhibit?
• 56:10
  Tad Eggleston: In part, because…
• 56:13
  Tad Eggleston: Alex Ross is local, so after he'd had his exhibit, and it had been well regarded there, they were able to bring in
• 56:22
  Tad Eggleston: I…
• 56:23
  Tad Eggleston: the museum was on my way home from school, and it was only, like, two rooms of various art, but a lot of stray toasters, some of his Jimi Hendrix book that he did at Kitchen Sink.
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. I literally…
• 56:37
  Tad Eggleston: Stopped, like, every day on my way home from school.
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: For a month.
• 56:44
  liamsharp: Well, she doesn't.
• 56:45
  Tad Eggleston: at it again.
• 56:46
  liamsharp: Yeah, I would have probably done the same. It still blows my mind, you know…
• 56:53
  liamsharp: I, you know, if I'm honest, I feel like my stuff is still too, rigid, and still too, sort of, representational, and I would love to get even
• 57:04
  liamsharp: Further away from,
• 57:06
  liamsharp: the kind of old-school fantasy sci-fi tropes that I naturally fall into. But at the same time, there's a reason I love those things, so I don't want to… I don't want to do that a disservice either. It is a… it is a balance, you know, and I think I'll always be swinging backwards and forwards between the two, because
• 57:26
  liamsharp: They both fascinate me for different reasons.
• 57:32
  Tad Eggleston: It feels to me like you're more drawn to…
• 57:41
  Tad Eggleston: Breaking the boundaries of style, and, and mixing…
• 57:48
  Tad Eggleston: Storytelling than breaking the boundaries of form.
• 57:54
  Tad Eggleston: If that makes sense.
• 57:55
  liamsharp: That's interesting, yes. I think that's a really good way of putting it.
• 58:00
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because I…
• 58:01
  liamsharp: Like, years…
• 58:02
  Tad Eggleston: saying that, and I'm sitting there going, I think Starhenge does do…
• 58:06
  Tad Eggleston: what Sienkiewicz did. He just did it more within standard panel structures and where he was using mostly the same
• 58:16
  Tad Eggleston: Form throughout the, like…
• 58:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, the art was very different. Yes, he was doing multimedia things, but… but he was using that storytelling for most of the story, if not all of the story. Like, he established the look, and he stuck with it. Your characters…
• 58:35
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes more for long… you… I mean, we spent a decent amount of time talking about when you fell into, like, the rights in comic story for… for when she meets the Urqueen as a Dryad, as…
• 58:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you've got, like, very modern…
• 58:58
  Tad Eggleston: like, auto-bio journal storytelling for when she's talking about her specific life. And then you have Fresetta-ish…
• 59:10
  Tad Eggleston: painting that… that you somehow tell a story with still. You don't just do that beautiful painting, you, like, so you are…
• 59:21
  Tad Eggleston: very much… like…
• 59:25
  Tad Eggleston: pushing the medium in a million different directions. You're just not doing it by making it so that we can't always tell which character is which.
• 59:34
  liamsharp: Which I kind of like.
• 59:37
  Tad Eggleston: Bill doesn't do a lot.
• 59:39
  Tad Eggleston: It does happen sometimes by people who are… Get in.
• 59:44
  liamsharp: No, I think… I think what you said there about form, versus the medium is bang on. I hadn't been able to articulate it as well, but, I'm going to take, away from this… this… this chat.
• 59:58
  liamsharp: that's going to be something that sits in my head for a while, because that's… I really like that as a framing.
• 1:00:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, what I love about… about… Starhenge so much.
• 1:00:13
  Tad Eggleston: And really, what I love about almost all of my favorite, favorite comics is the willingness to, okay, I know this is what I want to tell, and I…
• 1:00:27
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know how to tell it in a traditional way, so let's throw out the rules.
• 1:00:35
  liamsharp: Yeah, I know it normally…
• 1:00:36
  Tad Eggleston: Figure out how to tell it anyway.
• 1:00:39
  liamsharp: I know. It's like, I like it when a comic is a little bit self-aware, and when it sits back and.
• 1:00:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I love your fourth well breaking, I love that sometimes on the page, you're talking about how to tell the story.
• 1:00:55
  liamsharp: Some people get really pissed off about that, and they're like, you know, yeah.
• 1:00:59
  liamsharp: it does all of those things, and it's really annoying, but to me, it's like, well, you know, that's part of the… I mean, that's…
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we talked earlier…
• 1:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we talked earlier about this not being a great comic to give to that person trying to just make their first comic, but that fourth wall…
• 1:01:19
  Tad Eggleston: breaking on a creative level. You know, not just the fourth wall breaking about, like, personal stuff, but the fourth wall breaking where you're talking about the making of the comic.
• 1:01:30
  Tad Eggleston: is one of the reasons why this is absolutely the book that if I was teaching, like, an advanced or 400-level comic class, I would totally be bringing out as these are ways that you can push the boundaries.
• 1:01:44
  liamsharp: Right.
• 1:01:45
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Look, he even understand…
• 1:01:47
  Tad Eggleston: But he's pushing the boundaries. He even…
• 1:01:49
  Tad Eggleston: thinks out loud, you know? If you were thinking those things, where would you go? Okay, turn the page and found out where he went.
• 1:01:58
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, I mean, that's…
• 1:02:04
  liamsharp: It's nice.
• 1:02:05
  liamsharp: Hearing you, you know, it's nice, having that appreciated.
• 1:02:10
  liamsharp: So thank.
• 1:02:11
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I do. I mean, I told the guys last night, like, I had to… I had to have them all talk first, because I'm like, I am such an evangelist for these books that…
• 1:02:21
  liamsharp: alike.
• 1:02:23
  Tad Eggleston: I don't wanna… I don't wanna, like, push too much my… my thoughts on them on you before you get to at least share your initial thoughts.
• 1:02:34
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like, every time I read them, I see something different.
• 1:02:40
  liamsharp: Good.
• 1:02:40
  Tad Eggleston: And it's not always something where I understand the story more. Hell.
• 1:02:46
  Tad Eggleston: like, what makes it weird is there are times where I read them and I feel like I understand the story less than I thought I did.
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: But I now enjoy it more, because I've noticed what went into it, and now I have to think about that thing, or wonder what's coming 4 books from now that will finally make this fall together for me.
• 1:03:05
  liamsharp: It's funny, so I've seen reviews that have said, oh, this isn't as clever as it thinks it is, and then I've seen other reviews just going, oh, this is way too complicated, you can't even begin to scratch the surface.
• 1:03:18
  liamsharp: And then I've seen, obviously, some… it's funny what some people take offense to, like, there was the bit in it, in the first series, where…
• 1:03:27
  liamsharp: I dealt with the whole Uther rape, scene.
• 1:03:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:03:31
  liamsharp: And said, you know, of course, there's no way Amber would stay with Merlin if that happened that way, you know? So I had to… that was a big… that was an issue for me. I went… I spent a lot of time thinking about that, and then looking at the story and…
• 1:03:46
  Tad Eggleston: She'd have to beat the shit out of her grandson.
• 1:03:49
  liamsharp: Yeah, we're inside.
• 1:03:50
  Tad Eggleston: How dare you?
• 1:03:50
  liamsharp: It's just…
• 1:03:51
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna take you over my knee, dammit.
• 1:03:53
  Tad Eggleston: Where's the… go cut a switch!
• 1:03:57
  liamsharp: Someone was really… one reviewer was extremely pissed off about that, because they thought that I was too revisionist about a very particular part of.
• 1:04:07
  Tad Eggleston: Revisionist of a John Borman movie?
• 1:04:10
  liamsharp: Well, yeah. But, you know.
• 1:04:13
  liamsharp: Also, to be fair, that bit of the story does happen in many different versions of.
• 1:04:18
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I understand, but, but, like…
• 1:04:23
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things that you're honest about and deal with even in the comic, even around that scene, is, like, this story's been told a lot of times, in a lot of different ways. Who the…
• 1:04:34
  Tad Eggleston: Fuck knows which one's real.
• 1:04:38
  liamsharp: Exactly, but the thing is, as well, is, like, when I did get to it, I hardly had to change anything, because then when you look at everything that was leading up to it.
• 1:04:47
  liamsharp: And the guy that was married to her, and all of that, it's like, it's all there, actually. I hardly have to do anything. It's like she's pleading for help. That's the only thing that I changed, was like, she's pleading for help, and he fell for her, and as a result, his potential destiny as the dragon fell apart.
• 1:05:05
  liamsharp: And, you know, he was now… because he'd become… he'd fallen in love, basically. Not that that's a bad thing, but his… his idea of what his destiny is could have been Uther's idea, because I think he would have liked to have been Arthur.
• 1:05:21
  liamsharp: Was… was, at that point ended.
• 1:05:27
  liamsharp: And then it… it was time for his son to come along. But, I mean, completely changing the subject, one of the things I thought you might find fun as well, like, is… is that, and this is beyond the next series too, but I really like the idea of looking at Guan Hamara.
• 1:05:47
  liamsharp: and going, okay, so far, she's just an evil queen, right? From the whole of the first book. I mean, she starts off as Merlin's lover, but she's…
• 1:05:55
  liamsharp: she's got her own issues, she doesn't like people, but she's got… she was on the side of right. Why is she doing this? What's happened there? Because that's not explored at all, and I love the idea of then coming back to it from the point of view of her, and going, okay, what is…
• 1:06:14
  liamsharp: why is she… I mean, I have to, basically. At some point, I've got to do that.
• 1:06:20
  liamsharp: And I… I don't want her to be… Just, an obvious…
• 1:06:27
  liamsharp: just full-out bad… bad guy, you know? There's a reason they're not that, you know?
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: So what I'm gonna throw out to my listeners is we need to buy enough of these and enough of Liam's other works that we can get at least
• 1:06:40
  Tad Eggleston: four issues, or a book a year, or a novella a year, I don't care which, because ore's great as well.
• 1:06:49
  Tad Eggleston: and then Liam, you're just not allowed to die.
• 1:06:53
  liamsharp: I bloody hope not, I've got… I feel like I'm just.
• 1:06:57
  Tad Eggleston: Not loud.
• 1:06:57
  liamsharp: You know, to be honest, you know?
• 1:06:59
  Tad Eggleston: Glad to die.
• 1:07:00
  Tad Eggleston: Just keep going.
• 1:07:01
  liamsharp: Wait, what?
• 1:07:02
  Tad Eggleston: Like, we need to put your house in a bubble.
• 1:07:05
  liamsharp: A little time.
• 1:07:06
  Tad Eggleston: Have you tried to figure out whether you've got that sex criminals thing, where when you orgasm, time stops? Because, like, that could be really useful.
• 1:07:15
  Tad Eggleston: For getting more work done.
• 1:07:18
  liamsharp: I have no idea what you're talking about, but…
• 1:07:21
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:07:24
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Have you read the Fermata by Nicholas Baker?
• 1:07:26
  liamsharp: No. Okay.
• 1:07:28
  SpaceBalls the Phone: It's a similar thing. The character can stop time via some method.
• 1:07:33
  SpaceBalls the Phone: And he can keep moving and doing stuff, and yet, you know, everyone else is just frozen.
• 1:07:40
  liamsharp: Right.
• 1:07:41
  SpaceBalls the Phone: traps are frozen, you walk, he walks through the rain, and he leaves a tunnel of dryness, you know. So, that's what you need to do. Vermont, stop time, and then you.
• 1:07:51
  liamsharp: I need that, or I need a clone.
• 1:07:54
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Yeah, oh boy.
• 1:07:55
  liamsharp: Well.
• 1:07:56
  Tad Eggleston: Be careful with that. Have you ever seen multiplicity?
• 1:07:59
  Tad Eggleston: clone of the Colonel.
• 1:08:00
  liamsharp: Oh, it could be him.
• 1:08:00
  Tad Eggleston: Interesting.
• 1:08:01
  liamsharp: Yeah. Yep.
• 1:08:03
  Tad Eggleston: And the clone will decide that it needs a clone?
• 1:08:06
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 1:08:07
  liamsharp: That's true.
• 1:08:09
  liamsharp: No.
• 1:08:11
  liamsharp: But, you know, I have… I have plans, and there is a bigger arc, I have a long…
• 1:08:17
  liamsharp: form game about this. I know where I want it to go, and we're…
• 1:08:24
  liamsharp: band, I had a little, sort of, trusted group with Daryl and Amber and, Merlin.
• 1:08:30
  liamsharp: Where they need to get to. They have to travel through time.
• 1:08:34
  liamsharp: That much we know.
• 1:08:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, we all.
• 1:08:37
  liamsharp: One way, they've got to go, they've got to get back to the future, basically, you know?
• 1:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: get back. So, will there be a DeLorean?
• 1:08:45
  liamsharp: Well, I think there'll have to be a nod to one. We had the VW.
• 1:08:51
  liamsharp: Right.
• 1:08:52
  liamsharp: I don't want to say anymore, there is, yeah, I'm not saying anymore.
• 1:08:58
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair.
• 1:08:59
  liamsharp: And as parents, that is plotted already, which I think you'll find fun.
• 1:09:06
  liamsharp: And actually, there's a kind of… I'm really hoping that at some point, because…
• 1:09:13
  liamsharp: we have a sort of plan for Matilda to do.
• 1:09:16
  liamsharp: More of their backstory in the style that she's established.
• 1:09:20
  liamsharp: So I really love her to do, given, given time, a, like, a 3-4 issue…
• 1:09:29
  liamsharp: book that ties into Starhenge, which is all about them, and I've already plotted that. It's just, she's in the middle of a second 240-page graphic novel for first, second, so she's a busy girl.
• 1:09:42
  liamsharp: Mmm.
• 1:09:43
  Tad Eggleston: So what you're saying is that I need to talk to Matilda sometime on her own.
• 1:09:48
  liamsharp: Yeah, she… well, she… her book won't be… her first one won't be out until,
• 1:09:53
  liamsharp: end of next year. She's on the second one, two back-to-back, but the first one's been announced, it's called Bubblegum Coven from 1st, 2nd Publishing.
• 1:10:03
  liamsharp: That's a very younger age group, it's sort of the…
• 1:10:06
  Tad Eggleston: I cover everything on 22 panels.
• 1:10:09
  liamsharp: And it's wonderful. It's really wonderful. I'm very proud of her. She just nailed it. She did the… she did everything. She penciled, inked, colored, lettered it. She did the whole thing. So they found a little gem with her, but I need to nap her myself.
• 1:10:29
  liamsharp: For a four-issue series.
• 1:10:31
  liamsharp: Before she goes off and becomes too famous, because I want to continue that. What she did in Starhenge, I love those pages, because they just have a different piece of sensibility, you know?
• 1:10:44
  liamsharp: And I couldn't imagine anybody else drawing
• 1:10:47
  liamsharp: the story about Amber's parents, you know? It's just… it's gotta be her.
• 1:10:52
  liamsharp: So…
• 1:10:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:10:54
  liamsharp: Fingers crossed.
• 1:10:55
  Tad Eggleston: That would be… Yeah.
• 1:10:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, thankfully, you have cards that you can play, I'm certain.
• 1:11:02
  Tad Eggleston: Even if she becomes too famous.
• 1:11:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I just play them carefully.
• 1:11:06
  SpaceBalls the Phone: One thing…
• 1:11:07
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not in favor of playing, like, heavy guilt cards.
• 1:11:13
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Hey, you do what you gotta do.
• 1:11:15
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 1:11:16
  SpaceBalls the Phone: The ends justify the means.
• 1:11:19
  liamsharp: It's more about, I just want to… I wanna make sure she, you know, she's paid fairly, which means I've got to work harder.
• 1:11:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:28
  liamsharp: So, yeah, I just need to get my income.
• 1:11:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right, huh.
• 1:11:32
  Tad Eggleston: We gotta come.
• 1:11:32
  liamsharp: with good.
• 1:11:33
  Tad Eggleston: Kickstarters.
• 1:11:34
  liamsharp: Yeah, right.
• 1:11:35
  SpaceBalls the Phone: I just… Liam, the way you do the timey-wimey shit, quote-unquote.
• 1:11:42
  SpaceBalls the Phone: I've seen it in The Red Wing, I've seen it in Terminator, and it's just so one… one level. I love how it's grandma? You, like, you go all the way back, it's like… I… it's… I love… I just… I really like the way you twisted that even more.
• 1:11:59
  liamsharp: Thank you, man.
• 1:12:01
  SpaceBalls the Phone: No, it's great.
• 1:12:03
  liamsharp: I, you know, I hope I don't tie myself into some sort of granatic stub myself, you know, at some point. But I… to me, it's like, you just… there's an element of feeling my way from it and trusting the process. There's a… there's a really interesting thing, too. One thing I like to leave a little room for, when I…
• 1:12:22
  liamsharp: My first novel, Godkillers, McIveri's Point and Other Stories, there was a point about…
• 1:12:29
  Tad Eggleston: That's the one that I need to listen to.
• 1:12:31
  liamsharp: Yeah, soap?
• 1:12:33
  liamsharp: About a quarter of the way in, I hit this wall.
• 1:12:37
  liamsharp: And I was stuck.
• 1:12:38
  liamsharp: And weirdly, out of nowhere.
• 1:12:41
  liamsharp: A brand new character popped into my head. I didn't know why. I had no sense of why she had.
• 1:12:48
  liamsharp: her whole… I couldn't type fast enough to get her backstory down. It's like she was fully formed, and she just came pouring out, and it was… it was kind of… I felt… people talk about writing, and it feels like…
• 1:13:01
  liamsharp: channeling sometimes, it's like, you're not… you're not writing the story, you're sort of channeling the story through you, and Christ knows where it's coming from. But I just trusted it, and just… it all poured out.
• 1:13:12
  liamsharp: And she just came into the story. I was like, okay, well, okay, she's come out of nowhere. So I went with it, and when I got to the end.
• 1:13:19
  liamsharp: it became really clear that without her, the book couldn't have existed. It didn't work. It would have fallen apart. She had to be there. She was key to it.
• 1:13:30
  liamsharp: And my subconscious had told me that.
• 1:13:33
  liamsharp: And I just trusted it.
• 1:13:36
  liamsharp: That's a really interesting thing that we are capable of humans as doing, and if we spend too much time
• 1:13:44
  liamsharp: Planning everything, and…
• 1:13:46
  liamsharp: you know, making it, like, very, very organized and logical, testing everything. There's no room for those magical things to happen, and that's part of the joy of
• 1:13:56
  liamsharp: creativity. I don't always know when I start a picture what the end result's gonna be, and I love that. I like the… I like the act of discovering. It's almost like sculpting. It's more like in there is a picture, and I'm unearthing it. It's an excavation.
• 1:14:13
  liamsharp: And I do… I really love having enough room for that, you know? It's a… it's just a happy little accident, you know?
• 1:14:21
  liamsharp: That's, so, yeah, there's plenty of that in this.
• 1:14:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you need to start thinking about supper, Matt.
• 1:14:30
  liamsharp: How is that true?
• 1:14:33
  SpaceBalls the Phone: I'm in the middle of my workday, but it's cool.
• 1:14:36
  Tad Eggleston: I think Aaron's sometime soon, so I'm gonna move us into closing questions.
• 1:14:40
  liamsharp: I can actually smell it, which is the… and it does smell really good.
• 1:14:43
  Tad Eggleston: Then we definitely need to move into closing questions, because we don't want to get you in trouble.
• 1:14:49
  Tad Eggleston: Or, or have you eaten cold food?
• 1:14:52
  liamsharp: That was true.
• 1:14:54
  Tad Eggleston: This is…
• 1:14:57
  Tad Eggleston: I'm coming up on 5 years of doing this podcast, and I can't even count the number of ways that my life feels like the Twilight Zone now, where, like.
• 1:15:07
  Tad Eggleston: the people that I call my friends, the experiences that I have, for that matter, I'll even right now, share one of my… my early ex… my early pinch-me experiences again. One day, I…
• 1:15:23
  Tad Eggleston: had a PDF in my DMs on Twitter from this guy named Liam Sharp, who I had barely heard of at the time, because…
• 1:15:33
  Tad Eggleston: your work just didn't really cross over with my stuff that I loved. And it was the first issue of Starhenge, and I read it cover to cover twice, and then I emailed back to you that, like, oh my god, this is amazing.
• 1:15:47
  Tad Eggleston: And I can't even… I can't even describe how important it was, because I'd been… I don't even remember what…
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: why that day was a rough day, but I've been having a bad day, and you made my day.
• 1:15:59
  Tad Eggleston: And I told you that, and your response was to send Issue 2.
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: And that was, like, how our relationship started. So that's… that's one of my many, many, many, like, pinch-me-how-did-this-happen…
• 1:16:16
  Tad Eggleston: stories, but I found that everybody in comics, really anybody who lives in artistic career.
• 1:16:23
  Tad Eggleston: just has a treasure trove of stories that, like, if you either told the 10-year-old self that, oh, this is gonna be something that you do someday, they would go, yeah, fuck you. Or even now, they look back and go.
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: I did that, had this happen, witnessed that, whatever, and they're like, really? Did that happen, or did I dream that?
• 1:16:48
  Tad Eggleston: So I've collected… I've started collecting those stories. Tell me one of those surreal moments.
• 1:16:55
  Tad Eggleston: In your life that never would have happened if it weren't for comics.
• 1:17:00
  liamsharp: Well, I mean, I think just the whole Don Lawrence thing, I mean, the fact that I was, like, every… I feel like that about my whole career sometimes.
• 1:17:10
  liamsharp: The way it comes through.
• 1:17:11
  Tad Eggleston: That is the problem with asking.
• 1:17:13
  liamsharp: You know, like, you know, I pinch myself often.
• 1:17:18
  liamsharp: And I, I am…
• 1:17:19
  liamsharp: I find myself very often saying to myself, oh my god, you know, before we moved to America and moved back again, if I'd have told myself any of that was going to happen, I wouldn't have believed it. If I'd have told myself I was going to be doing my own series for Image, I wouldn't have believed it. If I'd have told my young self that I was going to work with Don Lawrence.
• 1:17:38
  liamsharp: as his assistant, I wouldn't have believed it. If I'd have told myself that I was going to become living down in Brighton and become great mates with Glenn Fabry in his heyday, I never would have believed it, and Simon Bisley, and you know, on and on and on. It's just like, the people I've got to work with,
• 1:17:57
  liamsharp: the adventures I've had getting to know
• 1:17:59
  liamsharp: Bill Sankiewicz is extraordinary to me. Joe Jusco…
• 1:18:05
  liamsharp: I mean, just on and on and on.
• 1:18:08
  liamsharp: One of the moments was in San Diego, and I was…
• 1:18:12
  liamsharp: I was doing The Death Dealer at the time. Again, crazy, a Frazetta-related book.
• 1:18:19
  liamsharp: And this, shadow came over my desk, and I looked up, and it was this giant plaid
• 1:18:24
  liamsharp: plaid, dressed.
• 1:18:26
  liamsharp: Dude.
• 1:18:27
  liamsharp: like, 6'4", 6'5", massive guy, and he just said, dude, I just want to say I love your stuff. I was like, thank you, man. And just as he turned, I saw his badge.
• 1:18:37
  liamsharp: This is, like, 30 years ago, and it was Joe Jusco, who I've been a fan of since I was about 12.
• 1:18:43
  liamsharp: And I was just like, Joe, Joe, Joe, what the hell? You know, he didn't even introduce himself.
• 1:18:49
  liamsharp: I, you know, we've been friends ever since, but, like, the fact that that ever happened to me is still extraordinary. The fact that, you know.
• 1:19:00
  liamsharp: Jim Lee, getting to know Jim, and all of them. There's so many wonderful people in this industry, and I am consistently surprised
• 1:19:08
  liamsharp: By people within the industry that I hugely admire, that follow my stuff and get my stuff, and
• 1:19:16
  liamsharp: and, you know, hold me up there, it's… and are very, you know, supportive about the work I do.
• 1:19:23
  liamsharp: It always, it always humbles me, and it always blows my mind, and
• 1:19:28
  liamsharp: I'm sort of really grateful for that, because I just still feel like…
• 1:19:32
  liamsharp: And time… I do feel like I'm in storage. Time concertina, it doesn't really make sense. It's not linear. I thought time was a linear thing, but you get older and it stops being linear, you know? Stuff that happened 10 years ago feels like yesterday, and stuff that happened last week feels like a month ago, and it's… I can't make sense.
• 1:19:49
  Tad Eggleston: It feels like it never happened.
• 1:19:50
  liamsharp: Oh, it didn't happen at all. Right.
• 1:19:54
  Tad Eggleston: Did I have dinner yesterday? No. But that Comic-Con from 20 years ago is vividly…
• 1:20:02
  liamsharp: Absolutely right, you know, so it's not linear in the way you think it is. All of these things.
• 1:20:08
  Tad Eggleston: Did I eat breakfast this morning? Who knows?
• 1:20:11
  liamsharp: But what I do find is that I… I am as…
• 1:20:15
  liamsharp: enthused, if not more enthused. In some instances, I feel like I'm only just getting to the level of competence.
• 1:20:24
  liamsharp: That I dreamed of.
• 1:20:27
  liamsharp: when I was young.
• 1:20:29
  liamsharp: I, I've never seen…
• 1:20:30
  Tad Eggleston: Wait a minute, for the kids out there, you mean that it takes work?
• 1:20:33
  liamsharp: It can take a lot of work, and a lot… it's not easy.
• 1:20:37
  Tad Eggleston: can't go, I just…
• 1:20:42
  Tad Eggleston: Wanna draw like that, and start?
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: I'm speaking for my wife here, because she's an art teacher, and often has to…
• 1:20:50
  liamsharp: Success.
• 1:20:51
  Tad Eggleston: Explain to her middle school students that, like.
• 1:20:53
  liamsharp: No.
• 1:20:54
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta keep doing it, and do it again.
• 1:20:56
  liamsharp: Do it some more.
• 1:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: and learn about stuff. Right.
• 1:21:00
  liamsharp: Elmwood Gray, you know, who's for a while famous for always drawing people in bars.
• 1:21:06
  liamsharp: he once said to me, he said, it doesn't matter how many times I draw another goth story of someone standing in a bar talking to somebody else, it never gets easy. Why is it not easy for me yet, you know?
• 1:21:20
  liamsharp: I don't know, none of it's easy. It's all hard. Every aspect of it is hard. But that's not to say it's… that's a bad thing. But it is… but the art of this is not the how good you are as an artist at all. It's… it's the… it's the persistence, it's the…
• 1:21:39
  liamsharp: It's extreme art. I do… I don't know of any other art form as extreme as this, if you take it seriously.
• 1:21:47
  liamsharp: And if you really throw your heart into it.
• 1:21:51
  liamsharp: And, you know, we'll pick a different path for ourselves. I'm really happy with this path. I'm not… I was never in it to become, like, mega rich, or…
• 1:22:02
  liamsharp: get a TV show or a film. I mean, obviously, that'd be nice, but that's not what I got into it.
• 1:22:08
  Tad Eggleston: Certainly mean we got more Starhenge.
• 1:22:11
  liamsharp: That's true. I mean…
• 1:22:15
  liamsharp: It would be nice not to have to worry about keeping the roof over my head, and then just do Starhenge.
• 1:22:20
  liamsharp: With occasional, you know, nods to the mainstream.
• 1:22:27
  liamsharp: But I can't complain. People are letting me write more and more of my stuff. I write all my stuff now.
• 1:22:34
  liamsharp: I've got other artists interested in me writing for them, which is… is new.
• 1:22:40
  liamsharp: So I'm hoping I can pursue a bit of more of that.
• 1:22:44
  Tad Eggleston: That's definitely a way to make more money. That's why there are so many…
• 1:22:48
  liamsharp: But I… but I…
• 1:22:49
  Tad Eggleston: Mediocre artists that become writers.
• 1:22:51
  liamsharp: I'm just excited by that.
• 1:22:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a mediocre artist, and I can only do one book a month as an artist, but I can write 6 books in a month.
• 1:23:00
  liamsharp: That's true.
• 1:23:01
  Tad Eggleston: For whatever reason, the comic companies pay us the same.
• 1:23:07
  liamsharp: Yep, I will.
• 1:23:09
  liamsharp: Some people are smarter than others, you know.
• 1:23:12
  liamsharp: In terms of the decisions they make. There's some people.
• 1:23:15
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I don't even mean it that way.
• 1:23:18
  liamsharp: I just…
• 1:23:19
  Tad Eggleston: I think that that's how, like, Jeff Lemire makes it so that he can draw the things that he cares most about drawing.
• 1:23:26
  liamsharp: Oh, no, absolutely.
• 1:23:27
  Tad Eggleston: Always be writing 3 books.
• 1:23:30
  Tad Eggleston: And I'll be working on one that's for me.
• 1:23:34
  liamsharp: Well, that's just what I… I would love, I would love, I would love to get to that point where I'm writing… writing it more for… for more people. It is something I…
• 1:23:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, and…
• 1:23:44
  liamsharp: like…
• 1:23:45
  Tad Eggleston: I've noticed that the people who do well with that often reach a point where they don't do much…
• 1:23:53
  Tad Eggleston: drawing for other people. They're able to keep the work-intensive stuff for themselves while they make their money on the writing.
• 1:24:02
  liamsharp: Yeah, I mean, people…
• 1:24:04
  Tad Eggleston: the exception?
• 1:24:05
  Tad Eggleston: Christian Ward that likes to write for other people, and then likes to draw for other people. He doesn't do a lot where he does both.
• 1:24:12
  liamsharp: He might be smart doing that as well, but .
• 1:24:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 1:24:16
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've heard him make a comment on why he does that, and it, like… I mean, this is the other thing about the fact that there are so many neurodivergent people in comics, and the fact that, like.
• 1:24:28
  Tad Eggleston: Every neurodivergent person is Totally different.
• 1:24:33
  Tad Eggleston: It's that, like, you very rarely find two people that find the pathway that works best for them.
• 1:24:43
  liamsharp: True.
• 1:24:43
  Tad Eggleston: And it's the same as some other person's best pathway.
• 1:24:48
  liamsharp: That's true.
• 1:24:49
  liamsharp: It's true.
• 1:24:51
  liamsharp: Anyway, that's, that's, that's, that's my answer, such that it is.
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: That's a great answer. Alright, final question, my favorite question to ask everybody. Tell me something that you love.
• 1:25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
• 1:25:07
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:25:13
  Tad Eggleston: And not enough people around you have experienced it, and you really want them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:25:21
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Go first, Starhenge. Okay, Liam, now you go.
• 1:25:25
  Tad Eggleston: I do answer this question with Starhench from time to time, yes.
• 1:25:29
  liamsharp: Who knows?
• 1:25:30
  liamsharp: Okay, thank you, mate.
• 1:25:33
  liamsharp: Wow, okay.
• 1:25:36
  liamsharp: That is such a good question, and…
• 1:25:39
  liamsharp: hard to… hard to just come up with… because some of the things I've already said, I mean, for me, straight toasters is just extraordinary.
• 1:25:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but we already talked about it, so…
• 1:25:51
  liamsharp: I need it.
• 1:25:53
  Tad Eggleston: something.
• 1:25:53
  liamsharp: And I've already mentioned Mobius, so, like, one of… one of the things, like, Mobius is.
• 1:25:59
  Tad Eggleston: But you haven't… you haven't mentioned any Mobius titles, so I will… I will leave him inbound.
• 1:26:05
  liamsharp: It's the Azac, Azac stuff.
• 1:26:07
  Tad Eggleston: Our sack?
• 1:26:08
  SpaceBalls the Phone: sex.
• 1:26:09
  liamsharp: It just was, like… This is him just channeling straight.
• 1:26:14
  Tad Eggleston: Other than the fact that Can't decide how he spells Arzak.
• 1:26:18
  liamsharp: No, bro, I like that. Bugs me.
• 1:26:20
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I like it on one level, and on another level, it just bugs me.
• 1:26:26
  SpaceBalls the Phone: Because there's only one right way. Come on!
• 1:26:29
  liamsharp: Yeah, but for me, it's like… okay, so…
• 1:26:33
  liamsharp: to me, this is the dream space. When… when you're in the IRSAC world, you're in the dream space. And it's the same… I have places that I go to in my dreams, and I… they're never quite the same, and it's not the same time zone, and that's some of,
• 1:26:46
  liamsharp: a kiss for Atticus is sort of ex…
• 1:26:51
  liamsharp: Has a bit of that about it.
• 1:26:53
  liamsharp: But there's, like, a shoreline that I know, like, oh, when I'm dreaming it, I'm like, oh, I'm back here again. I know this place. This is a place I come in my dreams.
• 1:27:02
  liamsharp: And I know over there are some shops and a cafe, and I know there's some cliffs over that way, and I know there's sharks in the sea, and for some reason, I still go out in boats and see them, and the boat will often break, and I don't get eaten, but they're there, and they're scary.
• 1:27:19
  liamsharp: And it's… I don't know where it is, but I know the place, and sometimes it's night, and sometimes it's day, and sometimes I'm old, and sometimes I'm young.
• 1:27:27
  liamsharp: But it's not… it's not quite the same, it's nearly the same. I recognize it.
• 1:27:31
  liamsharp: And there's other places with… there's a mountain with a train that goes up it, and there's… there's a… there's a path that used to have concrete mushrooms, but they've gone, and I don't know why.
• 1:27:43
  Tad Eggleston: See, and I'm just…
• 1:27:44
  liamsharp: I was so jealous that you.
• 1:27:45
  Tad Eggleston: Have pictures in your head.
• 1:27:48
  Tad Eggleston: I only hear things in my head.
• 1:27:51
  liamsharp: That's really fascinating.
• 1:27:54
  Tad Eggleston: I can't make a picture in my head to save my life.
• 1:27:57
  Tad Eggleston: Like, maybe once a year, I will have, like, a short black and white dream.
• 1:28:04
  liamsharp: You're not the only person I've heard. I've heard that from it. I would… I would… I would miss my dreams dreadfully.
• 1:28:12
  liamsharp: No, I guess.
• 1:28:14
  Tad Eggleston: Though I have dreams, they're just strictly audible, and I.
• 1:28:18
  liamsharp: They can…
• 1:28:18
  Tad Eggleston: Feel things in my dreams.
• 1:28:20
  liamsharp: Amazing.
• 1:28:21
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I can feel the sensation in my arm, or my shoulder, or my leg, or whatever.
• 1:28:26
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 1:28:28
  liamsharp: But to the point… But that's how my brain works. They're the same, but it's the same place, but it's not the same, and I was like, the changing of the name for me is, like, that just signals that's, like, it's not… like, slight shift, it's like, I'm in a different time and in a different…
• 1:28:42
  liamsharp: Different time zone. It's not quite the same Arzak, it's a different alternate university.
• 1:28:48
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to go.
• 1:28:49
  liamsharp: Read…
• 1:28:51
  Tad Eggleston: You're gonna have to go read Arzak together at some point.
• 1:28:54
  liamsharp: I really hated it, where he wrote, I think it was Dark Horse got him to write a new story. I say new, this is, like, 35 years ago, but he did a new story at the end of it, and suddenly he put some writing in and sort of explained all the different… joined all the stories up, and it's like, don't do that!
• 1:29:14
  liamsharp: I didn't want that. I liked… I liked not knowing where this dream went. I liked the kind of, like, that one was a bit of a gag. It's not even that good a gag, but the art's amazing, and you jaunt off a skull.
• 1:29:27
  liamsharp: What the hell, you know what I'm saying?
• 1:29:29
  liamsharp: But then…
• 1:29:30
  Tad Eggleston: But then also, like, we're like… I think… I think…
• 1:29:34
  Tad Eggleston: half to two-thirds of the way through AirTight Garage in terms of when it was published issue by issue, and because it was published in such
• 1:29:43
  Tad Eggleston: snippets.
• 1:29:45
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 1:29:45
  Tad Eggleston: like, we have no idea, like, I know that I'm deliberately waiting until we get through reading it issue by issue.
• 1:29:54
  Tad Eggleston: before I read it together, but more and more I'm wanting to, because everybody loves it so much, and I love many of the snippets and have so little idea of what's going on in general that it's like…
• 1:30:06
  Tad Eggleston: For this to be so beloved, there's gotta be something that's getting lost
• 1:30:12
  Tad Eggleston: by doing it month by month.
• 1:30:15
  liamsharp: No, because I think that falls into the same territory as Arzak for me. I love that kind of… I just read… I got for Christmas his, the last general book that he did, the one that was published,
• 1:30:27
  liamsharp: He basically just jotted it in his book, and it's very…
• 1:30:32
  liamsharp: It just drifts, you know? There is a kind of overarching story, but it definitely wasn't planned. He just…
• 1:30:40
  liamsharp: did it as.
• 1:30:41
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, famously, with Airtight Garage, it was just a jam.
• 1:30:46
  liamsharp: Yeah.
• 1:30:47
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like…
• 1:30:48
  Tad Eggleston: He called it a jam comic. It was… it was… and it shows, I mean, it's like good jazz.
• 1:30:55
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:30:56
  liamsharp: Well, and Bill Sienkiewicz has talked about that's how he approaches art a lot of the time, that he sees the script as, you know, a guide, but when he's doing the art, he thinks of it as jazz. And I think…
• 1:31:12
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't think… I don't even think Mobius had a script for… for Airtight Garage.
• 1:31:16
  liamsharp: Right.
• 1:31:16
  Tad Eggleston: I think he drew a page, and then he drew another page. And…
• 1:31:23
  liamsharp: And there is… there is bits of that.
• 1:31:26
  liamsharp: in, in,
• 1:31:27
  liamsharp: In Kiss for Atticus, because I wanted it to be, because of the nature of the world they're in, I needed it to be like, okay, we're here, what happens next? I don't know, I'll just start drawing, see what happens. I did let that happen.
• 1:31:41
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, very cool.
• 1:31:42
  liamsharp: And that was really… it works in the context of this story, because I knew where it was going, so I knew it would get resolved into something that fits the previous work.
• 1:31:53
  liamsharp: But it's funny, the things that revealed themselves.
• 1:31:59
  liamsharp: And I don't want to say more than that.
• 1:32:02
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's great. Liam, it is always a pleasure. Like I said, we're gonna need to… to start working on scheduling the next appearance soon, because I do want to be able to get all sorts of spoilery with
• 1:32:18
  Tad Eggleston: Atticus, way, way earlier than we were able to get spoilery with the dragon and the boar.
• 1:32:26
  Tad Eggleston: Since this is the episode where we got to get spoilery with Dragon and the Boar.
• 1:32:31
  liamsharp: There you go.
• 1:32:34
  Tad Eggleston: It's always just a pleasure. I'm so happy that you sought me out, because, like…
• 1:32:42
  Tad Eggleston: without you sliding into the DMs and dropping…
• 1:32:45
  Tad Eggleston: Dropping that PDF. I can't… I can't swear that it would have been a comic that would have caught my attention. I think it would have, because Scott…
• 1:32:52
  Tad Eggleston: great covers, and because I'm always looking for that comic that's different from other things, But…
• 1:33:01
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the way it happened is one of my, my great stories, and you made me feel amazing. So, thank you. Thank you so much. And until next…
• 1:33:15
  Tad Eggleston: This time, this has been Liam Sharp.