Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #314... 22 Panels with Matt Kindt
Transcript
- 0:01Tad Eggleston: We're starting almost in media res here. We kept having good parts of our conversation, so I'm gonna… Challengers is where I see your artwork on the wall on a regular basis.
- 0:10Matt Kindt: Oh, yeah, okay.
- 0:11Tad Eggleston: Henry Lime is, like, dead center behind the counter.
- 0:14Matt Kindt: No, that's great. I… I miss that shop. I need to come back up. I haven't been to Chicago in a few years, so.
- 0:20Tad Eggleston: Well, welcome to 22Panels, Mr. Matt Kint. You've been on my shortlist for a really long time, so when I saw that you were being publicized by Superfan, and they're really good for setting stuff up for me, I was so excited!
- 0:37Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I'm so excited. As soon as I realized this was the baseball meets comics podcast.
- 0:43Tad Eggleston: It is.
- 0:43Matt Kindt: I was like, I have… I have to be on here.
- 0:46Tad Eggleston: It is. Like, I love… I… I have…
- 0:51Tad Eggleston: four reoccurring lifelong hyperfixations, and they're baseball, music, comics, and, I'm gonna be really specific, policy. I have zero interest in politics.
- 1:05Tad Eggleston: Though it bleeds into policy. I have lots of interest in how government works.
- 1:11Tad Eggleston: How to do better.
- 1:13Matt Kindt: Yeah, okay, alright.
- 1:14Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
- 1:15Matt Kindt: That doesn't make sense. It seems like the most useful of all those things.
- 1:20Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I think they all play together.
- 1:25Matt Kindt: They all play together.
- 1:27Matt Kindt: No, it's interesting, like, I… I was thinking about that the other day, because I was like, I think I have, like, too much stuff, I want to get rid of.
- 1:34Matt Kindt: extraneous things in my life, you know, and I look around, and I'm like, well, I have books. I love books, I can't get rid of them. That includes comics.
- 1:43Matt Kindt: And then I love, movies. Can't get rid of those. Love movies.
- 1:48Matt Kindt: And then, Board game.
- 1:51Tad Eggleston: I'll have all my CDs.
- 1:52Matt Kindt: Yeah, I'm a board game fan, so I have a bunch of…
- 1:54Tad Eggleston: Board games, I have your board game.
- 1:56Matt Kindt: Yes, thank you.
- 1:57Tad Eggleston: I haven't found anybody to play it with me yet, so I don't know how. I've read through the rules.
- 2:03Tad Eggleston: figured out.
- 2:04Matt Kindt: Alright, well, if we meet up in Chicago, I can… I, I'll reluctantly, teach you and then get beat by you.
- 2:11Matt Kindt: I love it.
- 2:11Tad Eggleston: I will toss out that, like.
- 2:13Tad Eggleston: I, I… and talk to me off-air, but I might be able to also arrange lodging, so you only need to be able to get up here.
- 2:21Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, that's cool, I'll figure it out. I definitely… it's been too long since I've been to Chicago. Yeah. I love the guys at Challengers, and…
- 2:28Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, they're great, though I have to shill for Modern Age Comics and Algonquin now, because…
- 2:35Tad Eggleston: Psychocomicology, Edgar Ramos and Lee Woods and Samantha Ramos, psychologists that use, use their, use comics in their practice, bought a store.
- 2:49Matt Kindt: Yeah, okay. So there…
- 2:51Tad Eggleston: They're on my podcast regularly, they own a store, I book their events, I go out there regularly, they get me my comics cheaper, so, like, I have to plug them too, but I still have a pull list at Challengers as well, even though it's an hour away.
- 3:04Matt Kindt: I can't, visit both. Yeah. Is it… where is it? Is it west? North of… Oh, okay.
- 3:11Matt Kindt: Yeah, alright, we'll hit them both.
- 3:14Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we'll make it work.
- 3:16Tad Eggleston: We'll make it work.
- 3:18Matt Kindt: I love… I love a good comic shop.
- 3:22Tad Eggleston: great comic shops are… like, every city I go to, I look for a comic shop and a music store, and if I… like, I'm really happy if I can do a comic shop, a music store, and a baseball game.
- 3:33Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, I would always do, every convention.
- 3:37Tad Eggleston: Major League, minor league, I don't care.
- 3:39Matt Kindt: Yeah, I would do… every convention, I would… I would always go to whatever the stadium was, I'd go there if they were in town, you know.
- 3:44Tad Eggleston: Okay.
- 3:45Matt Kindt: A lot of times they book, like, San Diego, I've been to maybe 20 times, they're always gone, you know, they don't…
- 3:50Tad Eggleston: Did you know that they used to have…
- 3:54Tad Eggleston: a… it depended on the year, how they split up the teams, but most of the time, it was publishers versus distributors, or editors versus publishers. Yeah. Softball game at San Diego every year.
- 4:06Matt Kindt: That sounds so fun, dude, I would… I would…
- 4:10Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 4:11Matt Kindt: kitchen.
- 4:11Tad Eggleston: told me about it.
- 4:13Matt Kindt: Well, that's… they should, they should just have, like, Marvel versus DC versus Image versus, whatever, every publisher have a team, you know, and we'll have some playoffs.
- 4:22Tad Eggleston: Kitchen Sink used to have their own team. He hasn't gotten to me yet, but he came across a,
- 4:28Tad Eggleston: A set of the baseball cards they made for themselves.
- 4:31Tad Eggleston: So at some point, I'll get my kitchen sink… Softball league baseball cards.
- 4:36Matt Kindt: Yeah, dude, that's so great. Here's what I'll say, I love softball. I haven't played in a long time, and I was… I was never very… I was good at fielding. I'm good at catching, throwing, and but I'm not… I don't hit very hard or anything, but,
- 4:52Matt Kindt: I was on… I used to work at the Sporting News, and they had a team, so I'd be on that team.
- 4:56Tad Eggleston: Huh.
- 4:56Matt Kindt: Really good.
- 4:57Tad Eggleston: You worked at the sporting news?
- 4:58Matt Kindt: at sports. Yeah, I designed coffee table books.
- 5:01Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
- 5:02Matt Kindt: This was, like, the McGuire home run era. I actually designed a book that was, like, all about the home run record.
- 5:09Tad Eggleston: I got to see… McGuire's, I think 60… 4th, and Sammy 62nd.
- 5:21Tad Eggleston: For the change in my pocket.
- 5:24Tad Eggleston: Because they happened in the second game of a doubleheader at Wrigley.
- 5:29Tad Eggleston: And I got off the train.
- 5:31Tad Eggleston: when I saw that there was still baseball going, I was taking a class at the Lakeshore campus of Loyola, and living… or, no, I was taking a class at the downtown campus, and living on the Lakeshore campus, so I was heading back to…
- 5:46Tad Eggleston: To my dorm, and saw the game was still…
- 5:49Tad Eggleston: going, and a friend of mine and I jumped off.
- 5:52Tad Eggleston: And we found a scalper, because they were sold out.
- 5:56Tad Eggleston: But he was so desperate to get rid of his tickets, because it was already, like, the second inning of the second game.
- 6:02Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 6:03Tad Eggleston: We wound up giving them up.
- 6:05Tad Eggleston: For the change in his pockets, they were the third row behind home plate.
- 6:10Matt Kindt: Oh my god, dude, those are good seats, too.
- 6:12Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's cool. That's cool.
- 6:15Tad Eggleston: He had… he had held on too long.
- 6:17Matt Kindt: Yeah, right place at right time, man, that's what you… that's what you gotta do, is just, wait it out.
- 6:24Matt Kindt: No, I… so, here's my softball, sir. I hit,
- 6:28Matt Kindt: I, don't hit for power, I'm medium speed, but we, I can hit… I can hit it where… I can hit it wherever. So it always hits the right fielder there. Worst fielders over there, so I'll just hit the right field every time, so I can get on… I can get a single, you know. Right.
- 6:49Matt Kindt: But the one time… this is my only home run I've ever hit in my entire life. It's, like, the greatest moment in my softball slash baseball, career.
- 6:59Tad Eggleston: I've only got a couple myself, and they feel really good, don't they?
- 7:02Matt Kindt: No, well, it comes with a caveat, because I hit it over the head of the right fielder, and I'm rounding first, and as I'm rounding first, my
- 7:10Matt Kindt: shoe comes off, because I'm just running so hard, you know, I can feel it. My shoe comes off, and by the time I'm around second to third, my sock is starting to slide down, and my sock is just long, and flapping, and then flapping, and then I… around third, and I… and then slide into home, and I'm… and
- 7:27Matt Kindt: I'm safe, but I slide under the legs of the guy who's at the home plate, like, into his crotch.
- 7:36Matt Kindt: And then I was safe, and it was a home run, but everybody was laughing so hard. I was like, this is my… my triumphal… triumphant moment, and I had one sock almost all the way off, and I slid into this guy's crotch at the end. It was… it was,
- 7:51Matt Kindt: It was exactly what I wanted out of a home run.
- 7:54Tad Eggleston: There you go.
- 7:56Tad Eggleston: There you go.
- 7:58Tad Eggleston: No, I had two in my life, one literally bounced off the fence and over, so it, like, just barely hit that top… you know, they've got the yellow things on the top of the chain.
- 8:09Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 8:10Tad Eggleston: That, but it went the right direction.
- 8:13Matt Kindt: That's good, that counts, man, that counts.
- 8:15Tad Eggleston: No, it was a much better picture.
- 8:19Tad Eggleston: Much better picture.
- 8:21Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I was good at outfield. I love running for balls, catching.
- 8:25Tad Eggleston: I was good at throwing from the outfield, but not great at judging fly balls.
- 8:30Matt Kindt: Yeah, I love… that's my favorite part.
- 8:32Tad Eggleston: as many as I'd like, but, but, but, like…
- 8:36Tad Eggleston: I was the guy that would throw you out.
- 8:39Tad Eggleston: You try to stretch that single into a double, or double into a triple, whatever. I once accidentally knocked a kid out because I hit him in the… you know, it was… it was just the wrong angle, and the ball hit him in the back of the helmet, rather than going…
- 8:55Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 8:56Tad Eggleston: I felt terrible.
- 8:57Matt Kindt: But he was out.
- 8:59Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's not, you know, that's not your fault.
- 9:04Tad Eggleston: No.
- 9:05Tad Eggleston: I mean, we will certainly talk more baseball, but we should probably talk some comics, because my…
- 9:13Tad Eggleston: You are returning to your magnum opus.
- 9:16Tad Eggleston: At least that's how I've always described it.
- 9:19Matt Kindt: And…
- 9:19Tad Eggleston: And I… first, I wanted to show you, and I only grabbed one of them, I bookmarked… or I,
- 9:25Tad Eggleston: Book clubbed Mind Management with a friend.
- 9:28Matt Kindt: Nice.
- 9:28Tad Eggleston: Probably 4 or 5 years ago.
- 9:30Matt Kindt: Okay, cool.
- 9:32Matt Kindt: Yeah, look at that, oh my god.
- 9:34Tad Eggleston: Every volume has that many posts.
- 9:36Matt Kindt: It's got, like, 100 post-its stuck in there.
- 9:38Tad Eggleston: Right, and it's, it's, it's all, like, questions.
- 9:42Matt Kindt: Doesn't Question on every one. Right.
- 9:45Tad Eggleston: So, I have had my first question for you.
- 9:50Tad Eggleston: planned out since before I had a podcast.
- 9:53Matt Kindt: Yeah, okay.
- 9:54Tad Eggleston: how do you keep track of it all? Do you have, like, that red string bulletin board set up to tie everything? Because that's what I imagine, is Matt and his typewriter with, like, the murder board up, with all the red string crossing each other, and…
- 10:13Matt Kindt: No, you know what's funny is, is, like, the trick for me is, like, I don't do that, I'm not organized. The trick for me is, like, I work on it, I binge work, so I'll work on… I'll get a whole thing done all at once, or within…
- 10:26Matt Kindt: You know what I mean? I don't work on anything else until that's done. So, especially with that book, it was all I was doing.
- 10:33Matt Kindt: I think that was all I was doing, but I just was, like… I just sit down, do… write it all at once, then go draw it all at once, and then… So it's all in my head at the same time, so there's nothing to keep track of. I did keep notes. It was too big after a while.
- 10:47Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, like, you have to stop and eat or spend time with family at some point, so, like… Yeah, yeah. I mean, I get that you're not doing…
- 10:58Matt Kindt: Nevermite.
- 10:59Tad Eggleston: Other books, but these are complicated books, man!
- 11:03Matt Kindt: Yeah, because it's… I guess,
- 11:06Matt Kindt: That's what my editor today, she texted me and was like, how… she's like, how are you doing this? And I was like, well, I was like, that's all I'm doing, I don't… you know what I mean? I sleep, I eat, I'm doing this, I'm not… I haven't played video games, haven't watched any movies, haven't watched TV, haven't done anything else, so I just do it.
- 11:23Tad Eggleston: Okay.
- 11:23Matt Kindt: But I do… I do it all in a few big sittings where I just get most of it out, like, either, like, the detailed outline, or the whole… all the notes, so it's all together. And then, and then when I'm doing that, the whole book… the whole thing is just in my head is like a…
- 11:39Matt Kindt: almost like a movie, like, I could see it playing out. So everything after that is just, like, typing it down, and then drawing what I… what it's already done, you know, so it's… it's a…
- 11:49Matt Kindt: I don't know, there's no… I don't think there's any trick to it, but I definitely, here's… here's the other thing, though. It takes up all of my brain. As soon as I'm done, I flush it out, so I don't remember anything. Like, once I'm onto the next book, I've forgotten. I've forgotten it all.
- 12:05Matt Kindt: which is… it's great when you go back then and re-read if I'm reading or proofing lettering or something. Right. Because I'll… I'll read something, I was like, oh, that's…
- 12:13Matt Kindt: That's pretty funny.
- 12:16Matt Kindt: It's like somebody else wrote it, you know? And
- 12:20Matt Kindt: And then my wife, the day, I was like, oh, that ending, that's a pretty good ending. My wife's like, are you reading your own thing and talking about how your ending is good? I was like, yeah, but it's like somebody else wrote it. It's like, it feels like somebody else wrote it, and now I'm being entertained by it, so…
- 12:36Tad Eggleston: I, this is… and I gave you a taste of this in the email today. My brain goes all over the place, and you're reminding me of an interview
- 12:45Tad Eggleston: David Bowie gave, I think, around the Earthling album.
- 12:50Tad Eggleston: Where, where, where somebody asked him.
- 12:52Tad Eggleston: like, so… like, talk about your influences in this album, and he just started laughing, he's like, okay, this is… this is gonna sound so pretentious, but I swear to God, it's not supposed to be. See, my son is 6, and he wanted…
- 13:07Tad Eggleston: to hear my old stuff, and so we've been listening to, like, Ziggy Stardust, and Hunky Dory, and… and I haven't listened to any of these in, like, 30 years.
- 13:19Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 13:20Tad Eggleston: So, so they're actually, like, my biggest influence on this album is.
- 13:25Matt Kindt: It's me!
- 13:28Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I… but here's the thing, I think that's the creative impulse, right? For, at least for me, is like, I want to make a thing that I would want to read, the thing that I don't see anywhere, that, so you're creating a book that you would like.
- 13:42Matt Kindt: You know, so I think if you're able to do that, and then if years go by, and you forget about it, and you look at it, hopefully you would like it, because you kind of made it for yourself.
- 13:50Tad Eggleston: I mean, one would hope.
- 13:52Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 13:52Matt Kindt: Yeah, it would definitely…
- 13:54Tad Eggleston: Nope.
- 13:54Matt Kindt: And but the thing is, I don't go back and reread anything. I did… I did read,
- 14:00Matt Kindt: mind management again, before I started again, because I wanted to…
- 14:04Tad Eggleston: I was about to say.
- 14:05Matt Kindt: Yeah, but not to tie in with it, I purposely… I wanted to make this thing so standalone, separate, that you could never read that old series and still be satisfied by this new one.
- 14:18Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, so far, you're not gonna… I mean, I've just read the Free Comic Book Day book and Issue 1, and because I said those words, I officially can't publish this until after noon Eastern tomorrow, because it's still embargoed.
- 14:33Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 14:34Tad Eggleston: when we set this up for this time, there was a little thrill to go, oh, wait a minute, I get to talk to him while it's still embargoed? That's so cool!
- 14:43Matt Kindt: Yeah, alright, cool. I, yeah, we could talk about everything then.
- 14:48Matt Kindt: Hold on.
- 14:50Tad Eggleston: But having read those, those two, like…
- 14:55Tad Eggleston: I can already feel, like, people who know what they're getting into are gonna get that much more special of a…
- 15:02Tad Eggleston: experience. You know, they're little Easter eggs, callbacks… I don't even know what to call them, because they're…
- 15:09Tad Eggleston: It's mine management, so it's not quite…
- 15:14Tad Eggleston: It's never quite what it would be in another book.
- 15:18Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's… it's a little… it's a little off. If you've read the old stuff, it's a little off, on purpose. And to me, it's just like a… I don't know.
- 15:28Matt Kindt: trying to think of an analogy. Like, high school. Like, if you're a freshman coming in, that's what new readers are, right? If you're a senior, you're like, yeah, I've been here before, I get what's going on, and then,
- 15:38Matt Kindt: Perfect. Know what to expect.
- 15:39Tad Eggleston: Perfect analogy.
- 15:40Matt Kindt: It's really what it is, but it's… but it's its own… everybody's experiencing that same year, you know, at the same time, and
- 15:47Matt Kindt: So yeah, so maybe that's it. But yeah, I didn't… the other part of it was, I looked at it, I… I reread it all, because I didn't want to repeat anything. I didn't want to do, like, all the…
- 15:57Matt Kindt: the weird stuff I did, and, like, there's a lot of format things and different ways of.
- 16:02Tad Eggleston: I love it.
- 16:03Matt Kindt: You're telling us, I didn't want you to…
- 16:04Tad Eggleston: Doing other format things already.
- 16:06Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, that's the idea, it's like, okay, I did that, I don't want to do that again, like…
- 16:11Tad Eggleston: format things. Yeah, yeah.
- 16:13Matt Kindt: so different. I'm trying something different, which is making it harder, but also, like,
- 16:18Matt Kindt: I have a… I have a bigger picture playing this time. I think the first time around, I had an idea for this sprawling series with all these characters that would sort of weave…
- 16:29Matt Kindt: Through all these different, times and places, and
- 16:35Matt Kindt: But I didn't know… like, I knew… I knew the ending. I knew the ending, and was like, how we get there, we'll figure it out. We'll go along the way. But this time, I have the whole thing figured out, and I'm trying to… I'm trying to mess around with not just, like, the… what's on the page, but also, like, how it makes you feel.
- 16:51Matt Kindt: From arc to arc. So, like, the… at the beginning, it's like detectives and this duo who's… who's trying to solve these murders, you know, and it's hopefully kind of comfortable as far as, genre and what they're doing, like a procedural mystery where they're looking for clues and finding, and almost kind of
- 17:10Matt Kindt: Not basic, but like a… like a…
- 17:13Matt Kindt: all these tropes that you're used to, like detective duo, girl and a guy, maybe they're gonna… are they gonna have a romance? Are they… what are these murders? They're really weird, who did it?
- 17:24Matt Kindt: all these kind of, like, just generic tropes. And as a way to sort of be like, oh, this is… what a fun, relaxing comic, you know? And then, I just finished writing the next, like, 5 through 8, and it's the craziest… it's the craziest shit I've ever put on paper in my life.
- 17:44Matt Kindt: But, hopefully I've tricked you into getting that far.
- 17:47Tad Eggleston: That's… that's saying something.
- 17:50Matt Kindt: Like.
- 17:52Tad Eggleston: I, I, I had, I, like, there's…
- 17:56Tad Eggleston: you've done so much work, and really so much amazing work that, like, I had to…
- 18:01Tad Eggleston: Pull up and refresh myself.
- 18:05Tad Eggleston: before we got started, to make certain that I, like…
- 18:09Tad Eggleston: add in my head… I didn't want to forget that, like, Oh, you know…
- 18:16Tad Eggleston: You did a book with your mom.
- 18:18Tad Eggleston: That, that turned better.
- 18:20Tad Eggleston: detective trope on its head in a beautiful… and…
- 18:24Tad Eggleston: Okay, really quick, we gotta do… because I mentioned earlier, my mom is one of the people that does listen to all of the episodes. So, mom, spoiler alert, if you haven't read Guilt Frame yet, pause the podcast and finally go read it. It's sitting in your living room.
- 18:44Matt Kindt: Oh, that's good. That book's for her.
- 18:46Tad Eggleston: It is, it's totally for her.
- 18:48Matt Kindt: Go get it.
- 18:49Tad Eggleston: She's that kind of mystery nut, too. But, like… This is what, like.
- 18:56Tad Eggleston: And again, spoiler alert, everybody, I am spoiling it, it came out 2 years ago, deal with it, because I don't know how to give you this piece of praise without spoiling it.
- 19:09Matt Kindt: Yeah, do it. You've hit the warnings.
- 19:11Tad Eggleston: Right. So… At the end of Issue 1, I was like, oh…
- 19:20Tad Eggleston: They're the thieves and the killers. And by the end of Issue 2, I was certain that they weren't.
- 19:26Matt Kindt: Fun…
- 19:27Tad Eggleston: they were at the end of the season.
- 19:30Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 19:32Tad Eggleston: So to manage to pull that bait and switch, like, like.
- 19:38Tad Eggleston: To have… have me, like, okay, I got this, no, no, I don't think so. And then, boop, yep, you were right 3 months ago.
- 19:48Tad Eggleston: That's like a special kind of talent.
- 19:51Matt Kindt: No, it's… it's, it was fun working with my mom. My mom's got that mind for that, too, like, all the… the mystery, and the… and the… all… all the details of the… the mystery, and the detectives, and… and the…
- 20:05Matt Kindt: She's got a good brain for that, and she's been writing all her life, so we had a lot of fun. The… the beauty of those books is we had an idea for the first one. While we're doing the first one, we had an idea to do a trilogy, so there's two more books.
- 20:17Tad Eggleston: Oh, we just…
- 20:17Matt Kindt: We just finished writing the second one, so the script's done, we're just gonna write them all, so they're all written, and then I can draw them at my leisure, because I'm just… it's too busy right now for me to draw them, but…
- 20:26Tad Eggleston: I mean, because you got that whole mine management thing going.
- 20:29Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, so I have to kind of weigh, I can't draw two books at the same time, but.
- 20:34Tad Eggleston: I'll tell you a little bit.
- 20:34Matt Kindt: The comic show.
- 20:35Tad Eggleston: You want Issue 1.
- 20:36Tad Eggleston: Final order cutoff is.
- 20:41Matt Kindt: I haven't given.
- 20:41Tad Eggleston: by somewhere.
- 20:42Tad Eggleston: Final order cutoff is… April 27th, so soon, and it'll be in storage June 24th. Anyway…
- 20:52Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, so we wrote, we came up with the idea for the trilogy, so the first book is, like, who did it, right? The second book is, oh, now we know who did it, but how are they going to get away with it? And the third book is, how do they get caught? So we… Oh, wow. It's a way of sort of doing every kind of
- 21:08Matt Kindt: Mystery, murder mystery, you know, the all-in-one thing where the… it's the same, sort of,
- 21:15Matt Kindt: Main characters every time.
- 21:17Matt Kindt: But that's fine. I think the second book's even better than the first one, and the third one's gonna be,
- 21:22Matt Kindt: nuts. They're gonna…
- 21:25Tad Eggleston: I mean, I believe it. I mean, everything you do is nuts. I mean, I'm…
- 21:30Tad Eggleston: again, I'm just floating through, and like…
- 21:34Tad Eggleston: as you were talking about mind management, I found myself thinking about
- 21:39Tad Eggleston: subgenre and bang, and going, are they really in the universe? Because they already felt like they were kind of in the universe, but now the way you're talking about the new mindbag management, are they?
- 21:53Matt Kindt: Yeah, boy, here's what I would say, read those carefully. Also, you don't need to, but if you do, you'll be like… you'll,
- 22:04Matt Kindt: You'll start to glom onto some things maybe a little earlier.
- 22:07Tad Eggleston: Well, I might have to go dig them out again.
- 22:13Tad Eggleston: It's one of the problems with the fact that I buy all your stuff in single issue. I have to, like…
- 22:18Tad Eggleston: Work harder to read it again, or go buy it again.
- 22:21Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, man, I appreciate it.
- 22:23Tad Eggleston: the ladder. Just go by the…
- 22:26Matt Kindt: Doing the monthly, though, is, that's great, that's what keeps us, it keeps the industry going, you know, is the people that go in.
- 22:34Matt Kindt: Buy those monthly books.
- 22:36Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like, again…
- 22:43Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to think of all of the different ways I have described your work through the years, because it depends on which one, and I haven't even…
- 22:50Tad Eggleston: I haven't even tackled your Valiant stuff yet, because…
- 22:54Tad Eggleston: like, I know that I need to tackle that whole era of Valiant.
- 23:00Tad Eggleston: because it was, what, you and Lemire? I think Van Lenti took over for…
- 23:06Tad Eggleston: as it went into… like, there's, like, two waves of valiant stuff that just…
- 23:12Tad Eggleston: Seems to have redefined a pretty cool universe?
- 23:16Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 23:16Matt Kindt: No, that's fun, that's probably the most…
- 23:19Matt Kindt: It's definitely the most fun, create… or, work-for-hire stuff I've ever done, you know, because we were sort of taking these legacy characters and relaunching them, and then working with
- 23:28Matt Kindt: friends, like, I'm still friends with everybody that we worked with. I worked.
- 23:31Tad Eggleston: Well, and here we're gonna go full circle, too, like, cause you worked in the Valiant universe, and then more recently, you've worked…
- 23:40Tad Eggleston: with one of the originators of the Valley Universe, David Lapham.
- 23:44Tad Eggleston: So…
- 23:45Matt Kindt: Like, can you believe that?
- 23:47Tad Eggleston: Dude, what was…
- 23:48Matt Kindt: I remember being in college and reading Stray Bullets, and it was, like, my favorite comic.
- 23:52Tad Eggleston: Oh, it's so good.
- 23:53Matt Kindt: Like, this guy is so good at writing and drawing, so good. And then… and then to find myself…
- 23:59Matt Kindt: paired up with him, writing scripts for him. I'll tell you, I've been nervous only a few times in my comic book career, but sending him the first script was one of those times.
- 24:10Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, he's a master. I'm blessed to have gotten to talk to him once so far.
- 24:18Tad Eggleston: We'll drag him on again, I'm certain.
- 24:21Tad Eggleston: He's another baseball guy, Orioles fan.
- 24:23Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, he, which is totally fine, you know?
- 24:27Matt Kindt: That's… I allow it, but .
- 24:31Tad Eggleston: The wife does screen printing.
- 24:33Tad Eggleston: So I have all sorts of t-shirts, and this is a THB Paul Pope sweatshirt, but she made me a t-shirt. He… in stray bullets, they went to an Orioles game.
- 24:45Tad Eggleston: And there's a panel that's just a beautiful Eddie Murray-hitting panel, so I have a David Lapham, Eddie Murray t-shirt.
- 24:55Matt Kindt: That's cool, does he know that?
- 24:57Tad Eggleston: It does.
- 24:58Matt Kindt: Man, that's.
- 24:59Tad Eggleston: It does.
- 24:59Matt Kindt: You should have us both back. We'll talk mainly.
- 25:02Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, I… you know what? I will work on that, because Hero Trade… Hero Trade and, Night City was just… I just finished…
- 25:11Tad Eggleston: Actually, I sent… sent him an email this last Wednesday, because I think he had 3 books come out this Wednesday? He had Night City, he had…
- 25:25Tad Eggleston: or maybe it was only two. It was, it was, it was the last Night City and the first, HAB.
- 25:32Tad Eggleston: But, like, it's still weird any time an artist has…
- 25:37Tad Eggleston: Two books come out on the same day, particularly because he's also got… Da-da-da-da-da… American…
- 25:48Tad Eggleston: Oh, what's it called? The, the, the, the Dark Horse book.
- 25:53Tad Eggleston: that he's doing with the… the… I know Shelly Bond is… I had the whole team on, and I can't remember them right now.
- 25:59Matt Kindt: What is that?
- 26:00Tad Eggleston: Jelly Bond is editing, and… and…
- 26:04Tad Eggleston: the guys from Grand Theft Auto are writing.
- 26:07Matt Kindt: Oh, yeah, oh my gosh, yeah, he was telling me about that, I can't remember the title.
- 26:10Tad Eggleston: It's ridiculously good. I mean, like…
- 26:14Tad Eggleston: And I'm drawing a blank on the name right now.
- 26:16Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 26:17Tad Eggleston: Which is just terrible, because again, I got to talk to that whole team. That's how I finally got to meet David Lapham.
- 26:25Matt Kindt: American Caper.
- 26:27Matt Kindt: There we go.
- 26:29Tad Eggleston: Because I know Shelly, and when she announced it, I'm like, Shelly!
- 26:33Tad Eggleston: I want to meet David Lapham, can I talk to all of you?
- 26:37Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, he's great. Yeah, have us both back. That'd be great. He… he, I was so nervous to work with him at the beginning, and then we… because I'd been on a panel with him, like, years ago, and I was like, hey, I just want to… to the side, I was like, I'm just… I'm a huge fan of whatever, I can't believe we're both up here, whatever, he's a nice guy. Then years later, we ended up working together, and then… and now we talk on the phone.
- 26:57Tad Eggleston: See, you talking about you being on a panel reminded me of something. You could have been on 22 panels a long time ago, and via one of my baseball people, because you were on a panel at San Diego with Christopher Cantwell.
- 27:10Matt Kindt: Yeah, okay.
- 27:11Tad Eggleston: And… and I desperately wanted you, so… so my wife literally… Designed an invitation.
- 27:20Tad Eggleston: that Chris printed up and took with him.
- 27:23Tad Eggleston: To give to you, to invite you on 22 panels, but you darted too fast for him to get it to you.
- 27:30Matt Kindt: I was like, I don't remember getting it. So, yeah, yeah, maybe I did.
- 27:34Tad Eggleston: No, you didn't get it, because as soon as the panel was over, you were off.
- 27:38Tad Eggleston: And I got a text from him saying, I'm so sorry, he ran away before I could…
- 27:43Matt Kindt: I probably had another signing or something I had to go run to or whatever, or I was just trying to get out of there.
- 27:51Matt Kindt: Good, bud.
- 27:52Tad Eggleston: But yeah.
- 27:52Matt Kindt: It wasn't my fault.
- 27:53Tad Eggleston: No, I don't blame anybody, I just… I just remembered it when you said panel. I went, oh yeah, that's right, I know somebody you paneled with.
- 28:04Matt Kindt: No, that's great. Yeah, LabM's great. We… we, and now we talk on the phone.
- 28:10Matt Kindt: And we'll talk about whatever stories, just whatever, and then I get off the phone, and I'm like.
- 28:14Matt Kindt: Guess who I just talked to?
- 28:18Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about Night City, because that's gotta be totally crazy. You write, he draws, you color, so, like…
- 28:25Tad Eggleston: You get to see…
- 28:29Matt Kindt: Yeah, you know what was interesting is,
- 28:32Matt Kindt: I don't know, we didn't… didn't have a colorist yet, and I was like, you know what? I was like, what if I painted Lapham? Because I remember, loving his work back in the 90s, Valiant, and it was all… that was not digital color, it was all hand-painted or hand-colored stuff, you know.
- 28:47Matt Kindt: And I was like, maybe he'd be up for it. So I… I asked him, I was like, hey, can I just do… I'll just do a couple test pages, because I don't know if it'll work either, you know? So let me just paint a couple, I'll send them to you, and if it's good, then we'll just… we'll just…
- 29:01Matt Kindt: well, I'll just keep doing it. And so, I don't know what happened, but the deadline came up, Issue 1,
- 29:08Matt Kindt: it was due, and I was like, oh my god, alright. So I just painted the whole issue, scanned it in, turned it in, and I was like, oh my god.
- 29:15Matt Kindt: I forgot to send them the sample pages to approve, so I was like, I was like, oh, no.
- 29:21Matt Kindt: And so I called him right away, I was like, look, dude, I… I forgot to send you those, the deadline was due, so I just cranked it, I finished it all, turned it in. And he was like, no, no, it's alright, it looked great. He was happy with it, and he had… it was interesting, because he hadn't been colored.
- 29:40Tad Eggleston: No, he hasn't been… I mean, until…
- 29:41Matt Kindt: The 90s.
- 29:42Tad Eggleston: Recently, not much of his stuff has been…
- 29:45Matt Kindt: Or, or, and if it hasn't been, it's been digital, and right. And so, so he's actually, he really liked it, and I was so…
- 29:52Tad Eggleston: That was one of the things that we talked about with American Caper. It was weird.
- 29:57Tad Eggleston: seeing his stuff colored. Not as weird, because he also,
- 30:01Tad Eggleston: I mean, first of all, I think a couple of the… the…
- 30:05Tad Eggleston: The Bad Idea books have gotten colored.
- 30:08Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 30:09Matt Kindt: And…
- 30:10Matt Kindt: There's another one that he did.
- 30:12Tad Eggleston: image that got colored.
- 30:16Matt Kindt: Yeah, color's always okay, but for his art, I prefer black and white. You know, there's some people… I like Jeff Smith, I prefer black and white. Lapham, black and white. Paul Pope, black and white.
- 30:25Tad Eggleston: Jeff's a good guy.
- 30:26Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I…
- 30:28Tad Eggleston: took me on a backroom tour of the Billy Ireland.
- 30:33Matt Kindt: That's cool. Now, he… he's always been super friendly. He gave me a blurb for my very first book, I never forgot it, so I always thank him every time I see him.
- 30:40Tad Eggleston: He's… he's such a good guy.
- 30:42Tad Eggleston: Such a good guy. And this is where I'll quickly plug, Cartoon's Crossroads comes back April of 2027.
- 30:50Tad Eggleston: So, like, mark your calendars right now, everybody should be in Columbus.
- 30:55Tad Eggleston: in April… I'll get the exact weekend here, because…
- 31:02Tad Eggleston: They had to move it from the fall to… the…
- 31:07Tad Eggleston: spring, because they don't get the Ohio State football schedule.
- 31:12Tad Eggleston: Early enough anymore.
- 31:14Tad Eggleston: So, April 15th to 18th, 2027.
- 31:18Tad Eggleston: I'm skipping this year, but back…
- 31:22Tad Eggleston: Full-on in 2027. Have you been to that one?
- 31:25Matt Kindt: No, I'd love to do it. I'd love to do it. I hear about it, but it's…
- 31:29Tad Eggleston: Well, this is where I'm gonna say, Matt, like.
- 31:31Tad Eggleston: This is the one that I tell people, if you're not doing it, you should just go.
- 31:37Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 31:37Tad Eggleston: Give yourself a weekend and just go.
- 31:40Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Because… It's just a special con.
- 31:46Matt Kindt: Mmm.
- 31:46Tad Eggleston: You know, like, it's the only con I know where, like.
- 31:51Tad Eggleston: You always want to be at all the panels, and that makes it difficult, because…
- 31:58Tad Eggleston: Like, then how do you get to the floor to talk to people and buy stuff?
- 32:03Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, I get it, I get it. No, the older I get, the more I'm… I want to do these… I want to do, like, small little one-day shows and everything, and
- 32:13Matt Kindt: And I do… some of the most fun I had last year was just doing some mini-comics.
- 32:18Matt Kindt: I did, I did too many comics, I think. I did, like, a…
- 32:23Tad Eggleston: Oh.
- 32:23Matt Kindt: I did nerdy well. I do a webcomic for my Patreon, and so I put, like, a bunch of those together and just…
- 32:29Tad Eggleston: Is that to pay for your Patreon now?
- 32:31Matt Kindt: Mini comic, you don't have to pay for it. But, I bet that…
- 32:34Tad Eggleston: I want your webcomic.
- 32:36Matt Kindt: And then I did, it'll be out eventually, and Owen's gonna put it… put it out, just wait for it.
- 32:42Matt Kindt: But, yeah, I have, like, a year and a half's worth of… it's, like, basically 3 graphic novels worth of stuff on there.
- 32:48Tad Eggleston: This is… this is what I'm saying.
- 32:51Matt Kindt: But it's funny, I do it, like, weekly or every other week, so I just forget after a while that it starts to build up. Yeah. What did I do? I did a… I'm a fan of the Viagra Boys, this band, and so I illustrated one of their songs as a mini-comic.
- 33:05Tad Eggleston: Viagra Boy?
- 33:06Matt Kindt: And then I… that one, I gave… I gave that mini-comic out at the… they came into St. Louis, and I just went to the show, and I just gave it out to everybody.
- 33:14Tad Eggleston: nice.
- 33:15Matt Kindt: I had, like, 100 copies printed, I think, and then… But that's some of the most fun I had. I'm doing a…
- 33:20Matt Kindt: Minneapolis. My daughter lives in Minneapolis now, she graduated from school, and so we go up there every time we can, and there's… there's a little one-day spring con that's gonna be there in, I guess I'll plug that. When is that? That's in, June.
- 33:35Matt Kindt: It's the weekend before Heroes.
- 33:37Matt Kindt: But that's just, like, a one-day show, I got a table for that. I think I'm just gonna make mini-comics to sell there, like, old.
- 33:43Tad Eggleston: Well, I will, I will say that, insert name…
- 33:51Tad Eggleston: Comic Cuisine Fest in Minneapolis is one that, 22 Panels has been supporting
- 33:59Tad Eggleston: For as long as we've been around.
- 34:02Tad Eggleston: So, so, like, I will totally plug that one for you to either go visit your daughter and go to the con, or, like, I know the… I know the people, I could probably get you a table.
- 34:13Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, I… I just want to go… yeah, I… we'll see what the dates are. I know I was looking all… scouring the dates to see what I could do this year, and and I have… there's a lot of… there's so many good cartoonists up there, like Xander Cannon's one of.
- 34:25Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
- 34:26Matt Kindt: He's amazing, he's up there. He's gonna be at this one, too. That's what I…
- 34:30Matt Kindt: I just love these little one-day shows, and then Heroes is still just, like, a straight-up comic show, I love that.
- 34:36Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I still need to get out to Heroes. That's… that's…
- 34:40Matt Kindt: That's a good one, man.
- 34:41Tad Eggleston: Of the… of the… the cons that I… I… Haven't been 2.
- 34:50Tad Eggleston: in the United States, that's probably top of my list.
- 34:53Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 34:54Tad Eggleston: go worldwide, I think only Thought Bubble and Anglem.
- 34:59Tad Eggleston: Alright.
- 35:00Matt Kindt: is awesome, Uncle Lim's great. You know what one I liked is, lucca Festival in Italy.
- 35:09Tad Eggleston: I've heard of that one.
- 35:10Matt Kindt: That one's amazing, too, that was really…
- 35:12Tad Eggleston: Supposedly, Lake Como is really good, too?
- 35:14Matt Kindt: I haven't been to that one, but I would like to be invited.
- 35:16Tad Eggleston: Elsa Chardier was just writing about.
- 35:19Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 35:20Tad Eggleston: Just looking forward to heading out for that one.
- 35:23Matt Kindt: No, that's good. I think I need to draw better to get invited to that one.
- 35:28Tad Eggleston: I mean, they appreciate comics, though.
- 35:31Matt Kindt: No, no, they, they do, they do.
- 35:35Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I like the cons that I… like, I go to C2E2 every year because it's the Chicago con.
- 35:43Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 35:43Tad Eggleston: And because I've learned how to just hide an artist's alley and or…
- 35:50Tad Eggleston: go to panels, and this year I actually hosted 4 panels, which was kind of cool. It was the first time I've…
- 35:55Tad Eggleston: hosted panels, and…
- 35:57Matt Kindt: Okay, that's cool. Do you like it?
- 35:58Tad Eggleston: experience. I enjoyed myself, yeah.
- 36:02Matt Kindt: Oh, that's good. You know what? Newark Comic-Con's pretty great, too. The artist alley there is just a gigantic.
- 36:06Tad Eggleston: I've heard, and I have enough people that live out in New York, or near New York, that I could…
- 36:12Tad Eggleston: I might put in panel submissions this year, because if I can get a panel, I'll just go… I'll drive out and stay with a friend.
- 36:20Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 36:21Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
- 36:22Matt Kindt: Shit, it's worth it. It's great.
- 36:24Tad Eggleston: I might go back to San Diego someday. I… I went, like…
- 36:30Tad Eggleston: The last year before it became crazy.
- 36:34Matt Kindt: Which year was that?
- 36:36Tad Eggleston: I think it was 98?
- 36:38Tad Eggleston: maybe 99? I was literally… I was on vacation in Southern California with family, and we heard an ad for it on the radio in the LA area, and shot down to San Diego for the weekend, and were able to buy tickets at the door, and Kevin Smith was the biggest name there.
- 36:56Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Outside of comics.
- 36:58Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, I… I, my first year there was 2000.
- 37:03Matt Kindt: And I remember waiting, standing in line at the…
- 37:06Matt Kindt: at the… whatever, I got a table there, and I was staying in line to get my badge.
- 37:12Matt Kindt: And then, I backed up because I heard something, and I stepped on the foot of the guy behind me, and the guy behind me was Stan Lee, waiting in line for that… his badge, too.
- 37:21Matt Kindt: So, it wasn't too bad in 2000, but every graph for that.
- 37:25Tad Eggleston: Broke Stanley's foot, is what you're saying.
- 37:27Matt Kindt: I didn't take it, but I was like, oh man, I'm sorry.
- 37:31Tad Eggleston: Knocked over an old man, and somehow they still let you write Spider-Man?
- 37:35Matt Kindt: He wasn't that old back then, that was a while ago.
- 37:40Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I, no, my biggest regret, though, and one of the few reasons that I would kind of like to go back.
- 37:51Tad Eggleston: I wasn't nearly as steeped in… I mean, I was a steeped reader, but I wasn't into comics culture.
- 37:57Tad Eggleston: So when I saw it said Artist Alley, I thought that meant only artists were allowed.
- 38:04Matt Kindt: Oh. Yeah.
- 38:08Tad Eggleston: You know, and it wasn't even that packed. And every once in a while, I've, like, seen lists of people who were there in 98 and gone, oh my god, the number of people that I could have talked to.
- 38:17Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Except that I didn't know it was allowed.
- 38:21Tad Eggleston: I thought you needed to have a special badge.
- 38:24Matt Kindt: No, that's good. No, there's probably better places to talk to people now.
- 38:29Matt Kindt: New York's still pretty good for that.
- 38:32Tad Eggleston: But, but yeah.
- 38:33Tad Eggleston: But, you know, I've got this podcast now, and the crazy thing about comics is, like, everybody says yes.
- 38:41Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's a… I'm too…
- 38:43Tad Eggleston: small for anybody. That's weird to me. It's totally weird to me, Matt.
- 38:49Matt Kindt: I've heard about you for years. I've been trying to get on this podcast for at least 3 years.
- 38:56Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm easy to get a hold of, Matt.
- 39:01Matt Kindt: No, I don't… but I also don't want to be presumptuous, you know? It's weird to be like… I was like, hey, let me be on your.
- 39:05Tad Eggleston: I can't remember if I've sent you an email through your site or not, because I kind of try to forget who I send emails to, and just wait for things to come back, but you might be on the list of people that I was too afraid to.
- 39:20Matt Kindt: Also, you might have done it in my emails, is basically a dumpster fire, so…
- 39:24Tad Eggleston: No, I get that too.
- 39:27Tad Eggleston: No, actually, in the, in the early going, like… I… I long have had…
- 39:39Tad Eggleston: great difficulty reaching out to people I don't know and asking for things, which isn't an easy thing to practice, because for the most part, you don't need to do that unless you really need to do that. So it sucks if you can't do that.
- 39:54Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 39:55Tad Eggleston: But there's no good way to practice it. So when I started the podcast, I went, oh, I have a way to practice this.
- 40:01Tad Eggleston: And I started… You know, it's like, okay, you gotta send…
- 40:05Tad Eggleston: 5 emails a day, only, like, everybody responds, so I had to, like, dial it way back, because…
- 40:11Tad Eggleston: We were scheduling too many podcasts.
- 40:14Tad Eggleston: But then the other thing I did was, like.
- 40:17Tad Eggleston: back when Twitter wasn't a dumpster fire, what I liked about it was you couldn't send a message until they
- 40:26Tad Eggleston: followed you.
- 40:27Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, so it's really.
- 40:29Tad Eggleston: That was kind of a nice feature. So it's like, oh, they've given you the thumbs up to send a message.
- 40:35Matt Kindt: Hmm.
- 40:36Tad Eggleston: So I kinda… I promised myself, oh, if I know this person, I'll… I'll send a message.
- 40:42Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, it never hurts. Here's what I'll say, is that, one year, I was at Baltimore, Darwin Cook came up to my table and was like, hey, Matt, I'm just a big fan of mind management, blah blah blah, really love your stuff. I was like, oh my god, dude, I didn't…
- 40:57Matt Kindt: I was like… I love your work and everything, and then,
- 41:01Matt Kindt: a few years later, I emailed him something, and then he emailed back, he was mad at me because I hadn't come up to him, like, the next year at Baltimore, I hadn't come up to say hi to him or anything. He's like, you didn't… I was there, you were there, you didn't say anything. I was like, what the heck, what's wrong with you? And I was like.
- 41:17Matt Kindt: I felt so bad, but I was like, I'm not…
- 41:20Matt Kindt: I'm too shy to do that, dude. I was like, I don't…
- 41:22Tad Eggleston: Right?
- 41:23Matt Kindt: I mean… No, I get it.
- 41:24Matt Kindt: And then just…
- 41:25Tad Eggleston: Me too?
- 41:25Matt Kindt: You know? And so… and then, and then he passed away, like, the year after that, and I just… it haunted me. Like, that haunted me, and I was like…
- 41:34Matt Kindt: So I just remember being…
- 41:35Tad Eggleston: So, was he mad, or was that email mad? Because that's the other thing that I can never tell, is somebody messing with me in an email?
- 41:46Matt Kindt: He was that.
- 41:47Tad Eggleston: Excuse me.
- 41:48Matt Kindt: mad, but I forgive him.
- 41:50Matt Kindt: But but no, but here's why. Here's what was great about that, is then the next year, I was at Kansas City, and I'm stand… I'm sitting at my table, staring at Bill Sienkiewicz at his table, doing drawing sketches and everything, and I was like.
- 42:02Matt Kindt: I love Bill's work so much, I was like, I'm gonna go. And all weekend, I was like, I'm too shy, I can't go… wait, he's not gonna… like, does he know me? And then I can't presume he does, you know, because I don't… not everybody knows everybody.
- 42:15Tad Eggleston: Right.
- 42:15Matt Kindt: And then, so I'm just like, I'm just gonna go up there and just… and then by Sunday afternoon, I finally did. I was just like, this is ridiculous. I'm a grown adult. And,
- 42:26Matt Kindt: And I went up and I was like, hey, blah blah blah, and I think he knew who I was, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. He acted like he did, so either way, it doesn't matter. I like that he acted like it, you know?
- 42:36Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's so funny, because…
- 42:39Matt Kindt: He's done covers for me since then, so I think he does know me.
- 42:43Tad Eggleston: At least now.
- 42:44Matt Kindt: But yeah, now he does. And what I realized is, like, oh, I… I… I like it when people do that to me, you know? And so, I was like, they… I think everybody does, like, you just…
- 42:56Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think overall, people don't go to cons if they don't like some people to come up and say, hey, I like your stuff.
- 43:04Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, and that's…
- 43:05Tad Eggleston: And it's even cooler if it's a pier rather than…
- 43:09Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 43:10Matt Kindt: No, it's… it's all on me, and I still have… whatever that anxiety is, I still have it for, like… like, if we have to order pizza over the phone, I can't be the one that does it.
- 43:20Tad Eggleston: No, I love that you can order pizza online now.
- 43:23Matt Kindt: I know, I don't have to talk to a person. It's so bad for me, because I'm even more out of practice, you know?
- 43:30Tad Eggleston: Get it.
- 43:32Tad Eggleston: See, we're finding more, more reasons that we should be friends, Matt.
- 43:36Matt Kindt: I know. What's funny is, like, I could sit and do this, this is different. Somehow this is different, you know, than, like, calling up and ordering a pizza, or talking to somebody…
- 43:45Tad Eggleston: Because you know that I like comics already. So you know that we have at least one thing to talk about.
- 43:51Matt Kindt: That's true, and that pizza guy, I don't know what he likes.
- 43:55Tad Eggleston: You don't know what he likes, you don't know if he's had a good or a bad day.
- 43:59Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 44:00Tad Eggleston: you know… I mean, like… 800 episodes of a podcast,
- 44:09Tad Eggleston: aside, I'm actually pretty much an introvert, but there are certain places where I'm not.
- 44:16Tad Eggleston: You know, if I'm in a comic shop, and there's a good chance that you're into comics, I'm less introverted.
- 44:23Tad Eggleston: At a baseball game, I'm less introverted. I still don't start the conversations, but I don't have trouble
- 44:32Tad Eggleston: joining in one, particularly if I think I've… like, if I hear you talking about something, and you get something wrong, or you can't remember a player, or…
- 44:42Tad Eggleston: whatnot, you know, I'll turn and say, oh yeah, that was Jody Davis.
- 44:46Tad Eggleston: You know…
- 44:49Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, that's funny. Yeah, it's weird, man. I don't… and I don't get… I haven't been nervous.
- 44:55Matt Kindt: public speaking, or… I haven't been nervous in, like, a long time.
- 45:00Matt Kindt: But.
- 45:01Tad Eggleston: Public speaking's easier, too, because, like.
- 45:03Matt Kindt: bother me, yeah, it's like you… it's because you know what you're talking about. You're… whatever the thing is, you're the one… you know more about that than anything else. Right. It's not hard.
- 45:11Tad Eggleston: Well, and you know that they care about hearing it.
- 45:15Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 45:16Tad Eggleston: is the two things that I worry about
- 45:18Tad Eggleston: Are a little bit sounding dumb, but really about talking too much.
- 45:24Tad Eggleston: at somebody who really doesn't want to listen to what I'm talking about.
- 45:29Matt Kindt: Oh, that's what… yeah, and I think that's what it is. I just assume people don't want to hear what I… you know, I was like, oh, they're not… this is…
- 45:35Tad Eggleston: With… with public speaking, they wouldn't be there if you didn't… if they didn't want to hear what you were talking about, with…
- 45:41Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, I think, like, speech class is harder than real public speaking.
- 45:46Tad Eggleston: Because it's like, pretend public speaking, and the students are required.
- 45:51Matt Kindt: Nobody be there.
- 45:53Tad Eggleston: I'm a teacher, I can handle that. Not all my students want to hear my stuff, but there's a reason that they should hear my stuff.
- 45:58Matt Kindt: Yeah, exactly.
- 46:02Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, put me at a party?
- 46:07Tad Eggleston: And I'll try to be invisible.
- 46:10Matt Kindt: Probably won't go to the party.
- 46:12Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I often have that.
- 46:13Matt Kindt: I mean…
- 46:15Tad Eggleston: I don't go to many parties. I meant, like, if I didn't have a choice.
- 46:19Matt Kindt: Yeah. Like that.
- 46:20Tad Eggleston: wedding that you can't get out of, or… I am the king of leaving weddings early.
- 46:26Matt Kindt: Yep, no, that's the way to do it. Now, the older I get, the less… the more I'm like, you know, I don't even think… I don't have to go there. I don't have to do that. Right.
- 46:35Tad Eggleston: Right.
- 46:36Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean, the only crowds I have any interest in… our concerts, Baseball games, And occasionally.
- 46:47Tad Eggleston: comic conventions, but there, I'm even pickier about my crowds than concerts or baseball games.
- 46:52Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 46:54Matt Kindt: No, I will, mike said, I love board games, so I'll go to a big board game… I go to Gen Con every year.
- 46:59Tad Eggleston: Do you?
- 47:00Matt Kindt: Giant crowd in a…
- 47:02Tad Eggleston: Lake Geneva is… like…
- 47:05Matt Kindt: It's not there anymore, it's in Indianapolis. It's named…
- 47:08Tad Eggleston: I know that, but they still have something in Lake Geneva, too, don't they?
- 47:12Matt Kindt: I don't know. That I don't know.
- 47:13Tad Eggleston: I think they do.
- 47:15Matt Kindt: But, that's one.
- 47:16Tad Eggleston: But yeah, Lake Geneva is, like, 20 minutes from my house.
- 47:20Tad Eggleston: 25.
- 47:22Matt Kindt: I wish it was still there. It's so big now that this last year, I was like, maybe this is too big for me, I don't like…
- 47:27Matt Kindt: Bumping into people all the time, trying to get a board game, you know?
- 47:32Tad Eggleston: I know there's still something in Lake Geneva, because Jim Zub was there.
- 47:38Matt Kindt: But it might…
- 47:39Tad Eggleston: be more…
- 47:40Matt Kindt: He does a lot of game stuff.
- 47:42Tad Eggleston: RPG than… than board game.
- 47:45Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 47:46Matt Kindt: No, I don't… I don't do RPGs so much, because I don't wanna… Too social.
- 47:52Tad Eggleston: Pretty much like work.
- 47:53Matt Kindt: It really is, it's like, oh, if I'm gonna make something up, I'm gonna, put it in a book and get paid for it.
- 48:00Matt Kindt: I've got… I wanna break… I wanna…
- 48:03Matt Kindt: I want something with structure and rules, and there's a winner and a loser.
- 48:10Tad Eggleston: What's your favorite board game right now?
- 48:12Matt Kindt: Right now, I just learned this new one called On Mars, which, I don't know if it's my favorite, it's just the one I just… I spent, like, a day and a half learning it, because it's so complicated. It's by this game designer named, his last name's Lucerda, and he's known for designing these, like, big, complicated games.
- 48:31Matt Kindt: And and it's really good. It's part of the fun for the games for me is, like, figuring out how it works. You know, what are the… so the more complicated, the better. This is one of those.
- 48:41Matt Kindt: I was joking with my wife, I was like, look, she got from me for Christmas. I was like, it's… it was so expensive because it's so complicated. Look how complicated it is, that's why it costs so much.
- 48:52Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't get to… like, I… I like that sort of stuff.
- 48:58Tad Eggleston: I don't have enough people in my life that do to be able to do…
- 49:03Matt Kindt: You gotta have, yeah.
- 49:04Tad Eggleston: My wife has about, like, a 30-40 minute time limit for… so we'll play Ticket to Ride, we'll play Settlers of Catan.
- 49:13Tad Eggleston: Y-you know, I mean, I can get her past, like, The simple, simple games, but…
- 49:20Matt Kindt: Yo.
- 49:21Matt Kindt: But, like…
- 49:21Tad Eggleston: like…
- 49:23Matt Kindt: My wife, she likes card games, you know, like, 20-minute long ones, you know. Right. But you definitely, you have to have a friend or somebody who's… who's willing to spend, like, a whole day learning and then playing a game, you know, that's… Right.
- 49:36Tad Eggleston: And I don't have that group right now.
- 49:38Matt Kindt: I have a… luckily, Brian, my studio mate, Brian Hurt, who's also the.
- 49:42Tad Eggleston: Oh, Brian Hurts in your studio.
- 49:44Matt Kindt: my other new book, Fort Psycho, which we could plug here, too.
- 49:47Tad Eggleston: We'll definitely… Fort Psycho is coming out a month after Mind Management, so I think it's just officially been solicited, so give me a second, and I'll have, like, the final order cutoff dates and whatnot.
- 49:59Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 50:00Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
- 50:01Matt Kindt: Yeah, I do that while I… I, but Brian, who… we've been studio mates for, like, 10 years, we've shared two different studios, and
- 50:10Matt Kindt: He's… we sort of fell into board games at the same time, got into him, so he's the guy. We spent…
- 50:16Matt Kindt: We spent a whole day,
- 50:19Matt Kindt: what was the game? It was some Lord of the Rings game, where it literally took… we woke up, started playing at 10, and we were done at, like, 9pm.
- 50:26Matt Kindt: That night, it took all day to do in a…
- 50:30Matt Kindt: So you gotta have somebody like that who's willing to just…
- 50:33Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely. That's… that's the… that's the key. I will… I will toss out that the Fort Psycho has not been solicited yet, so I don't have an official final order cutoff or release date. However, I will remind people that
- 50:47Tad Eggleston: There is a Fort Psycho Mind Management double feature on Free Comic Book Day. I have read it, both halves are…
- 50:55Tad Eggleston: Excellent.
- 50:56Tad Eggleston: And, just show up on May 2nd and get your comics. If you're at Modern Age Comics in Algonquin, we have, Tim Seeley and Greg Petrie in store to sign your books.
- 51:11Matt Kindt: Yeah, that sounds good. We will be at Betty's Books in St. Louis.
- 51:15Tad Eggleston: Benny's books?
- 51:15Matt Kindt: Yeah, buy these books.
- 51:17Tad Eggleston: Let me add that to my list of comic shops that I need to go to.
- 51:21Matt Kindt: Those…
- 51:22Tad Eggleston: I, E, or Y?
- 51:24Matt Kindt: Why?
- 51:26Matt Kindt: No, it's great, and it's,
- 51:28Matt Kindt: walkable from my house, I'm really going off.
- 51:31Tad Eggleston: That's always a… that's always a bonus.
- 51:38Tad Eggleston: Wait a minute.
- 51:42Tad Eggleston: Is it…
- 51:43Matt Kindt: B-E-T.
- 51:44Tad Eggleston: I'm seeing a Benny's Books…
- 51:46Matt Kindt: B-E-T.
- 51:47Tad Eggleston: 5013C.
- 51:49Matt Kindt: No.
- 51:52Tad Eggleston: That, that, that, that, that's a charity.
- 51:55Tad Eggleston: Let me put St. Louis.
- 51:57Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 52:00Tad Eggleston: It might… is it the charity?
- 52:02Matt Kindt: No, it's a… zip code is 63119.
- 52:09Matt Kindt: It's on Big Ben.
- 52:11Matt Kindt: Rips and groves.
- 52:14Matt Kindt: we're gonna be doing a… I'm bringing my typewriter, and I'm gonna make little, ID cards for everybody that shows up, with a little sketch of them as a character, and then their specialty, and then their backstory, you know, and their,
- 52:30Matt Kindt: whatever their abilities, either mind management or forward psychology.
- 52:33Tad Eggleston: Wait a minute, did you say… Betty? Not Benny?
- 52:37Matt Kindt: Yeah, Betty, B-E-P-E-L.
- 52:41Tad Eggleston: the T's rather than the N's makes all the difference. Betty's book, Graphic Books for All.
- 52:49Matt Kindt: That's it.
- 52:53Tad Eggleston: Just… just made my list of comic shops I have to go to.
- 52:57Matt Kindt: No, it's really great. It's really… they…
- 52:59Matt Kindt: There's sort of good coffee there, too, which is…
- 53:01Tad Eggleston: Oh, even better.
- 53:03Tad Eggleston: There aren't enough comic shops to have coffee.
- 53:06Matt Kindt: Yeah, I know, man, it's like, why.
- 53:08Tad Eggleston: My favorite one closed, too. Did you ever get to, amalgam Comics in Philadelphia?
- 53:16Matt Kindt: -
- 53:17Tad Eggleston: Oh, it was fantastic.
- 53:19Tad Eggleston: Black woman run… own shop.
- 53:23Tad Eggleston: Great music, great coffee, great curated selection of Like, graphic novels, Just… wonderful shop.
- 53:34Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 53:34Tad Eggleston: That, that unfortunately closed in, I think, 22 or 23?
- 53:40Tad Eggleston: Managed to get there twice, and I have the mug.
- 53:43Matt Kindt: No, that's great, dude. That's… that's a… that's a hard… it's a hard business to be in. And to do it well, or whatever, is even harder.
- 53:58Tad Eggleston: Did they have you listed as… Oh, there's also face painting with Kenya and painted tattoos with Jess from 9 to 10.30 at Betty's Book.
- 54:09Matt Kindt: She asked what time we were going to do it, so we think we just sent it to her so that we might not be out.
- 54:13Tad Eggleston: It says 11 to 2.
- 54:14Matt Kindt: 11 to 2, yeah, that's when we're doing it. That's what we said. We didn't want to wake up late, we didn't want to work too, or we didn't want to wake up early or work too late.
- 54:23Matt Kindt: yeah, spend by $25.
- 54:27Tad Eggleston: and roll a D20 for a discount.
- 54:30Matt Kindt: What the heck?
- 54:32Matt Kindt: No, it should be fun. They have a great… they have a great, like, selection of graphic novels and everything, and .
- 54:40Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this looks like a cool store.
- 54:42Matt Kindt: That's… that's… that's my local shop.
- 54:49Tad Eggleston: Staff picks are testament and dreaming in color.
- 54:53Matt Kindt: They have a book club, too, when I… I try to drop in on their book club when I can.
- 54:59Tad Eggleston: I love it when their books
- 55:01Tad Eggleston: I'm hoping to get one going.
- 55:04Tad Eggleston: Sooner rather than later out at, modern age, but, like… Teaching.
- 55:11Tad Eggleston: And in a different direction from the shop.
- 55:14Tad Eggleston: Like, my house, the shop, and the school are like a 40-minute triangle. Like, the house to school is 40 minutes, the house to the shop is 40 minutes, and the shop to school is 40 minutes.
- 55:29Matt Kindt: That's a lose-lose-lose triangle there.
- 55:34Tad Eggleston: So, like… Right now, it limits a lot of my stuff to behind-the-scenes scheduling and whatnot.
- 55:45Tad Eggleston: Making the connections. Telling them, hey, order this book.
- 55:50Matt Kindt: Yeah, you know, I was talking to Brian the other day about this, is what I miss. I miss drives. Like, our… the studio's, like, a 5-minute drive from here, and then if you're not commuting into work, like, a 20-minute or so drive, you… I miss…
- 56:05Matt Kindt: That, there's, like, a thinking time in there, where.
- 56:08Tad Eggleston: It's also when I get to listen to my books.
- 56:10Matt Kindt: Yeah, you listen to the books, but I… I was driving in the studio the other day, and it was… it's literally, like, 5 or 6 minutes from the house to the studio, and in that time, I did have an idea. I was like, oh, I got this great idea. I got in, and I was like, Brian, I had this great idea while I was driving, and I was like… but I was like, if I had had a 20-minute drive, I probably could have had even more ideas.
- 56:30Matt Kindt: And I just don't… don't have that anymore, and we…
- 56:33Tad Eggleston: Oh, I do some crazy thinking in the car.
- 56:35Matt Kindt: Yes.
- 56:35Tad Eggleston: sometimes have to take notes at stoplights, or as soon as I pull into the parking lot.
- 56:40Matt Kindt: No, there's some… there's something about the rhythm, and the sound of the road, and the…
- 56:44Matt Kindt: It sort of puts you in, like, a weird flow state that I think is conducive to being creative.
- 56:50Matt Kindt: we… one of my favorite trips was Heroes. Brian and I would usually drive there, it's like a 13-hour drive. Yeah. So we'll wake up early, and we'll drive, and then all day, all we'll do is, like, talk… have a checklist of
- 57:03Matt Kindt: ideas he's working on, ideas I'm working on, we'll just, like, talk about them, and for, like, 13 hours, it was some of the most productive driving we've ever done, you know, I think…
- 57:11Tad Eggleston: Well, if you need an assistant, and you wanna… and you can get me in, I'll drive down to St. Louis and share the driving.
- 57:18Matt Kindt: Yeah, alright, alright, yeah, I'll, I can bounce some ideas off you.
- 57:23Tad Eggleston: Yeah, cause, cuz… is on my… and actually.
- 57:29Tad Eggleston: This year, my wife and I had different spring breaks, and I… and I did panels at C2E2, because C2E2 wound up being at the end of my spring break. I think it was 2022,
- 57:39Tad Eggleston: was the last time we had different spring breaks, and I went on what we called the 22 Panels Ill-Advised Comic Shop Tour.
- 57:49Matt Kindt: Where did you go? Where was the tour?
- 57:51Tad Eggleston: I… I hit Challengers on my way out of town.
- 57:54Matt Kindt: Yeah, okay.
- 57:55Tad Eggleston: I went to a store in Valparaiso that I can't remember the name of.
- 58:00Tad Eggleston: I got to meet, and we're gonna give a quick rest in peace, because I saw today that he passed away. I met Gibb at,
- 58:09Tad Eggleston: Laughing Ogre in Columbus.
- 58:12Tad Eggleston: Great, great guy, we talked for, like, 2 or 3 hours.
- 58:15Tad Eggleston: and then I cut down to…
- 58:21Tad Eggleston: Charlotte, so that I could go to here's…
- 58:25Tad Eggleston: So I've been to the shop, but I haven't been to the con.
- 58:29Matt Kindt: No, that's alright. That doesn't… that doesn't sound ill-advised. It sounds great.
- 58:33Tad Eggleston: Well, but then from there, I went up to…
- 58:37Tad Eggleston: I cut through and hit Big Planet in DC.
- 58:41Tad Eggleston: and Third Eye in Annapolis on my way to stay with a friend in New Jersey.
- 58:47Tad Eggleston: I stayed with him for, like, 3 days, and during that day, we spent 1 day where we shot into Brooklyn and did…
- 58:54Tad Eggleston: Bulletproof, anyone… And then JHU in Staten Island on our way out.
- 59:02Tad Eggleston: And then… We did a full loop through… Pennsylvania and… and…
- 59:13Tad Eggleston: New Jersey the next day, where we went up to Comics on the Green in Scranton.
- 59:18Tad Eggleston: We hit Amalgam in Philadelphia, and we hit, like, 4 other shops that I can't remember.
- 59:26Tad Eggleston: And then I met my friend Bob Scranton.
- 59:32Tad Eggleston: Manhattan to go to the Strand, and…
- 59:38Tad Eggleston: God, Matt Rosenberg used to work there. Matt Rosenberg and Tyler Boss worked there, and I can't remember the name of the story. Forbidden Planet? Does that sound right?
- 59:46Matt Kindt: That sounds good.
- 59:48Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 59:48Matt Kindt: That, or Midtown, but I don't know.
- 59:51Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 59:51Matt Kindt: I don't know where they are.
- 59:52Tad Eggleston: A town I didn't actually make it to.
- 59:54Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 59:54Tad Eggleston: didn't actually make it to Midtown. All of the stores I hit in New York that trip, I didn't hit Midtown.
- 1:00:00Matt Kindt: That's crazy, dude.
- 1:00:01Tad Eggleston: I met with Marcus Kwame Anderson at Aquilonia, outside of… Albany.
- 1:00:11Tad Eggleston: I hit a couple of stores in Rochester. I hit a store that had a coffee shop in Buffalo.
- 1:00:18Tad Eggleston: I hit… Is it John and Nancy's?
- 1:00:23Tad Eggleston: John and something in Cleveland on the way home that, Durf Bechdurff had told me to go to.
- 1:00:29Matt Kindt: Nice.
- 1:00:31Tad Eggleston: And, I hit 2 different… Vault of Midnights in…
- 1:00:39Tad Eggleston: It hit the, the East Lansing and the…
- 1:00:42Tad Eggleston: Grand Rapids Fall to Midnights in Michigan.
- 1:00:47Tad Eggleston: Before getting back home.
- 1:00:48Tad Eggleston: So it was like.
- 1:00:51Matt Kindt: That might be more…
- 1:00:52Tad Eggleston: 20-some-odd stores in 9 states.
- 1:00:55Matt Kindt: That might be more comic shops than I've ever visited in my lifetime.
- 1:00:58Tad Eggleston: 10 days.
- 1:00:59Matt Kindt: of them.
- 1:01:00Matt Kindt: Now, I did… I remember one year before I was…
- 1:01:03Matt Kindt: comics full-time. I was working at the Sporting News, and they… they sent me and another guy out to LA for a graphic design conference.
- 1:01:12Matt Kindt: And one afternoon, I dipped out of the conference, and I just took a cab. This is before Uber. This is, like, 19…
- 1:01:19Matt Kindt: No, this is, like, 2000. 1999, maybe.
- 1:01:22Matt Kindt: And I just took a cab to every… every comic shop.
- 1:01:26Matt Kindt: It was in the phone book, you know, it was a full apple and all that, whatever.
- 1:01:30Tad Eggleston: I mean, it was 98 or 99 that I was out there, and…
- 1:01:35Tad Eggleston: it was all… I mean, the reason we wound up at Comic-Con is it was… it was the year that I was obsessively tracking down every Frank Miller Daredevil.
- 1:01:46Tad Eggleston: And mind you, this is, like, before the internet was even really a thing. So, really, I was just looking for, like, the earliest Daredevil I had.
- 1:01:57Tad Eggleston: that had Frank Miller was, like.
- 1:01:59Tad Eggleston: 159, and the latest one I had was somewhere in…
- 1:02:05Tad Eggleston: Born again, so, like, 2…
- 1:02:08Tad Eggleston: 14 to 15, so I figured I was looking for at least 10 issues on either side.
- 1:02:15Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:02:17Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, those are the days, right, where you had to get the Overstreet price card, and, like, who's the rider? Who's the,
- 1:02:24Matt Kindt: Where you, mail order Mile High Comics, man, I used to order a bunch of stuff from there. Yeah.
- 1:02:29Matt Kindt: Yeah. I've been to.
- 1:02:30Tad Eggleston: One mile high.
- 1:02:32Matt Kindt: I know, I've heard all about it, and I have yet to go.
- 1:02:36Tad Eggleston: I have been to Mile High.
- 1:02:37Matt Kindt: It's been in life.
- 1:02:38Tad Eggleston: It's huge.
- 1:02:40Matt Kindt: That's cool. I would love to get there. We almost went there one year, and then something fell through. I couldn't… whatever, we couldn't make it happen, but…
- 1:02:46Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:02:49Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I have a Google Map with, like.
- 1:02:56Tad Eggleston: Hundreds of comic shops pegged on it.
- 1:02:59Tad Eggleston: That I either have been to or want to go to.
- 1:03:02Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's cool.
- 1:03:03Tad Eggleston: Cuz…
- 1:03:04Tad Eggleston: I just… I love a good comic shop. I love a bad comic shop. I mean, like, comic shops, to me, are kind of like ballparks, and I remember
- 1:03:13Tad Eggleston: I think it was Will Leach did all 30 ballparks in one year, and wrote an article on each one of them.
- 1:03:19Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:03:20Tad Eggleston: And the one about… Tropicana Field in Tampa.
- 1:03:26Tad Eggleston: like… was all about how terrible it is, but then finished with, but, all told.
- 1:03:34Tad Eggleston: Spending an afternoon at a ballpark beats pretty much anything else I could have done.
- 1:03:40Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, that's great. That's great.
- 1:03:42Matt Kindt: No, every comic shop. I remember when I was a kid, we would do driving vacations, and me and my brother… I have an older brother, he was really into comics.
- 1:03:51Matt Kindt: he got me into comics, and we would drive to wherever it was. You know, when we lived in Kansas City, we'd drive to St. Louis. When we lived here, we would drive… we went down to Texas for the Gulf Coast one year for vacation. Whatever hotel we stay in, we would grab the Yellow Pages, and we would look up comic books.
- 1:04:10Matt Kindt: stores, and see where the local shop was, because we didn't have one near our house. Right. So every time we were out, it was like, where is it? We're probably close to one. And then you call, find out what the hours are, and it's like, they're not open till noon. No shop was open till noon on…
- 1:04:24Tad Eggleston: Of course not.
- 1:04:24Matt Kindt: Back in the… whatever, this was, 80s.
- 1:04:26Tad Eggleston: They weren't open on Mondays.
- 1:04:28Matt Kindt: So it's like, oh my god, they're not… and then we have to get an early start for our vacation to do whatever family thing we were doing and everything, and now we're gone, so the place we were, we never… we would never get to go to a comic shop, but we always tried, you know?
- 1:04:43Matt Kindt: But, that's how desperate back then it was. Like, just… now everything seems so easy, you know what I mean? You can…
- 1:04:49Tad Eggleston: easy.
- 1:04:50Matt Kindt: Download it, or order it, or shop to it.
- 1:04:54Tad Eggleston: And digital is definitely a game changer in terms of being able to read stuff.
- 1:04:58Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:04:59Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I was, what did I… I was…
- 1:05:03Matt Kindt: I was re… I… Jeff Lemire's, Minor Arcana, he sent it to me as a PDF, the first issue as a PDF, and I was like, that was great, I'll get it when it comes out. Well, I missed it, and then I couldn't find the book anywhere, and then I go online and can't order it. It's like, I don't know if it's out of… temporarily out of print, book one.
- 1:05:21Matt Kindt: So then I decided to buy the digital. I was like, well, at least I… at least I can read it. Right.
- 1:05:27Tad Eggleston: Alright.
- 1:05:28Matt Kindt: I mean, but you should have said it.
- 1:05:30Tad Eggleston: Hey, I drew your fill-in issues a sweet tooth, can't you just send me a PDF of those.
- 1:05:34Matt Kindt: I want to support it. And also, I hate reading digital. I didn't want to read it that way. I just did it begrudgingly.
- 1:05:40Tad Eggleston: Well, that's what I mean, is rather than paying for the digital, save the money to.
- 1:05:45Matt Kindt: for it when it.
- 1:05:45Tad Eggleston: comes back in physically.
- 1:05:47Matt Kindt: I still support it. I'll still buy the books. But, no, I was…
- 1:05:51Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna laugh if you can buy it straight from his website. I'm checking right now, by the way.
- 1:05:56Matt Kindt: Don't do that. He's not gonna ship from Canada. I… I guarantee you he's not selling it.
- 1:06:02Matt Kindt: but
- 1:06:04Matt Kindt: we're doing an unofficial crossover. So there's a crossover with a character from that book that's crossing over with Mind Management, and then likewise, we're doing a secret
- 1:06:15Matt Kindt: No one knows about this. You're the first person I've told about this.
- 1:06:18Tad Eggleston: I am so excited.
- 1:06:19Matt Kindt: Both teams.
- 1:06:20Tad Eggleston: hear about it, and hopefully to see it. And yeah, it doesn't look like he has a web store right now, so you win.
- 1:06:27Matt Kindt: We're doing a secret crossover, so I had to… I had to make sure I got the names right. I was like, I can't remember the name of that… of somebody. I won't spoil it.
- 1:06:38Tad Eggleston: Oh, he's… he's another… I've got… I got to meet him at Challengers, and I gave him a card.
- 1:06:44Tad Eggleston: But I've never managed to get him on the podcast. He seems very shy.
- 1:06:49Matt Kindt: He, I took him to his first baseball game.
- 1:06:52Tad Eggleston: Did you?
- 1:06:53Matt Kindt: Yeah, I was up in Toronto, just hanging out with him.
- 1:06:56Matt Kindt: And I was like, let's go to Toronto Blue Jays game. I was trying… I'm trying to go to… every time I go to the city, I try to go to that stadium, you know? So, I hadn't been to see Toronto, and he's like, okay, so we got…
- 1:07:09Tad Eggleston: That's one of the stadiums I've been to. I even stayed in the Sky Dome Hotel.
- 1:07:13Matt Kindt: That's pretty cool, that's pretty cool. I liked it, it was neat, it was neat. He,
- 1:07:18Matt Kindt: this is a… I can't remember what year it was. It was a year, Verlander was pitching for Detroit, and he was.
- 1:07:23Tad Eggleston: So, I've been… early…
- 1:07:25Matt Kindt: children.
- 1:07:25Tad Eggleston: mid-2000s.
- 1:07:27Matt Kindt: Yeah, Jeff was like, he's like, I'll order tickets online. I was like, okay. And then he's like, I got…
- 1:07:32Matt Kindt: like, right behind home plate, like, 4 rows back behind home plate. It was, like, 50 bucks. It was so cheap.
- 1:07:38Matt Kindt: And I was like, oh my god, these seasons are so great. I was like, how much were these? He's like, 50 bucks. I was like, oh, it's weird. So we went to the game, and then, he'd never been, and it was great. But Verlander, it was… he was pitching a no-hitter, like, through the sixth inning. Oh, nice. It was, like, the most super exciting.
- 1:07:55Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:07:56Matt Kindt: If you've never been to a baseball game, super boring.
- 1:08:01Matt Kindt: I don't think he was… it didn't really sell him on baseball, you know, but .
- 1:08:05Tad Eggleston: That reminds me, I had a friend…
- 1:08:09Tad Eggleston: And that I went to school with.
- 1:08:12Tad Eggleston: that she went to a White Sox game one night, and she came home, and I was going nuts. I'm like, oh my god, I can't believe you got to go tonight's game! It was amazing! She's like, it was?
- 1:08:24Matt Kindt: It's a little boring.
- 1:08:26Tad Eggleston: She was at Mark Burley's perfect game.
- 1:08:31Matt Kindt: And bore the tears.
- 1:08:33Tad Eggleston: It's like.
- 1:08:33Matt Kindt: Where's the shit?
- 1:08:34Tad Eggleston: Like, I didn't think much happened. I'm like, that's the point!
- 1:08:37Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:08:39Matt Kindt: No, it's so funny. Yeah, it's a…
- 1:08:42Matt Kindt: Anyway, it was… it was a good time.
- 1:08:46Tad Eggleston: Baseball? But that's what I love about baseball. It's got… pastoral cadence.
- 1:08:56Tad Eggleston: It ebbs and flows.
- 1:08:58Matt Kindt: No, it's… it's relaxing. I like listening to it while I'm working, because it's… it just has a…
- 1:09:03Matt Kindt: It's, like, a good background.
- 1:09:05Matt Kindt: Vibe to it, you know?
- 1:09:07Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:09:08Tad Eggleston: I mean, I grew up on Harry Carey and Steve Stone. There's…
- 1:09:13Tad Eggleston: Never been a better hometown call.
- 1:09:17Tad Eggleston: than the pair of those. I mean, there's a difference between the impartial call and…
- 1:09:23Tad Eggleston: And I hear St. Louis got the best of Harry's impartial years, but we got the best of his hometown years.
- 1:09:29Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, we fired him, man, that's unbelievable. We got Jack Bucks pretty great, but yeah. You know who Vin Scully, Dodgers, the best, the absolute best.
- 1:09:39Tad Eggleston: I told you, I was reading through the Superfan…
- 1:09:44Tad Eggleston: Baseball Movie Roundtable, and a number of people brought up For Love of the Game, which I'm glad that they did, because I think that that is an unheralded baseball masterpiece. It may not be a movie masterpiece, but it's a baseball masterpiece.
- 1:09:57Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:09:59Matt Kindt: What did I pick? What did I pick for that?
- 1:10:02Tad Eggleston: I'll go find out.
- 1:10:03Matt Kindt: I'm gonna look at that.
- 1:10:04Tad Eggleston: But what disturbed me… was nobody…
- 1:10:10Tad Eggleston: mentioned… you picked Moneyball, which is another good pick.
- 1:10:14Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, I stand by that, only because.
- 1:10:17Tad Eggleston: I don't blame you.
- 1:10:18Matt Kindt: I love… I love the,
- 1:10:21Matt Kindt: The strategy and the science and the board gaminess of it.
- 1:10:25Tad Eggleston: Actually, have you ever played Stratomatic?
- 1:10:28Matt Kindt: I haven't… my dad did, and then my… and Derek talks about it. We… we, I bought, Derek Gould, we haven't talked about him on the record yet, but my friend Derek, who's writer for the Cardinals.
- 1:10:41Matt Kindt: For the post-dispatch, I guess.
- 1:10:44Tad Eggleston: And a, a, a annual 22 panels guest.
- 1:10:47Matt Kindt: Yeah, he's been here before. Anyway, I, he talks about that, and then I bought him a board… this great baseball game, board game, I can't remember the name of it, he has it, but it's so fun, too, but I, when you have him on, he'll remember the name of the game. I bought him this great baseball board game. It's not that, the strategy.
- 1:11:05Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I've got a couple of them. I've got, like, a pizza box baseball that's okay.
- 1:11:12Matt Kindt: Gosh.
- 1:11:12Tad Eggleston: I can't remember. I'm a sucker for a baseball game.
- 1:11:15Matt Kindt: I… I remember when I was a kid, this is, like, 19…
- 1:11:19Matt Kindt: 80s, like, mid-80s, late 80s, there was a PC game that was just all
- 1:11:27Matt Kindt: It was all names and numbers, all stats and everything, and you do… you would do the lineups, and then put.
- 1:11:32Tad Eggleston: There's still some of those, and I still play them.
- 1:11:35Matt Kindt: through it, right? And I was like, that kind of made me love baseball. Yeah. Like, I like watching it, you know, I like the baseball part.
- 1:11:43Tad Eggleston: People are shocked at how few baseball games I watch on TV.
- 1:11:47Tad Eggleston: Because I don't actually watch a ton of games on TV.
- 1:11:51Tad Eggleston: Particularly because, again, I was spoiled by Arne Harris and Joe Corneo, who…
- 1:11:58Tad Eggleston: produced and directed every Cubs game from the very first broadcast in, like, 1950,
- 1:12:04Tad Eggleston: Until they died in the 2000s, and therefore nobody
- 1:12:11Tad Eggleston: Like, every… every baseball camera thing that you've imagined, they came up with. And the problem is, now everybody's got their football or their basketball crews going on, or shooting the games, and they don't…
- 1:12:26Tad Eggleston: Or at least producing the games. They don't know where… where to be.
- 1:12:32Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:12:33Matt Kindt: No, I…
- 1:12:34Tad Eggleston: too much time showing you the guys in the booth, which is about as boring as you can possibly get.
- 1:12:41Matt Kindt: No, I don't… I usually listen to it, I don't really watch it, you know?
- 1:12:44Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love listening to baseball. Listening on the radio, or even listening to a good… TV crew.
- 1:12:53Tad Eggleston: is beautiful.
- 1:12:55Tad Eggleston: But I listen to baseball, and I read about baseball, and…
- 1:13:00Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:13:01Matt Kindt: Yeah, I read… I read my… I read Derek's, because he's such a comic fan, too. He reads my comics, and I was like, I gotta… I gotta read what your… your work also, you know, we have…
- 1:13:11Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, he's the car…
- 1:13:12Tad Eggleston: beat writer, so I can't bring myself to read them on a regular basis, but I do read baseball every day.
- 1:13:17Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, he's a good writer, he's a good writer.
- 1:13:20Tad Eggleston: He is. He's a very good writer.
- 1:13:22Matt Kindt: Our, our hobbies overlap each other's, work.
- 1:13:28Tad Eggleston: I mean, but, but, I mean, I, I like… The,
- 1:13:33Tad Eggleston: The first year that we did it.
- 1:13:36Tad Eggleston: like, thank God Rob Nyer's a Kansas City slash…
- 1:13:40Tad Eggleston: Seattle fan, because everybody else was either a Mets, Yankees, or Cardinal fan, and I'm sitting there going, here I am, hosting my first baseball and comics podcast, and almost everybody roots for or works
- 1:13:58Tad Eggleston: writing about… teams that I despise.
- 1:14:04Tad Eggleston: But that also made them grow on me, because, like, now I have friends that like them.
- 1:14:09Matt Kindt: Now you're putting real people's faces to the teams, you know?
- 1:14:13Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:14:14Matt Kindt: You can't hate the person.
- 1:14:16Tad Eggleston: No, you're not even the only Cardinals fan that I can count among friends now.
- 1:14:21Matt Kindt: I know, right? We're here…
- 1:14:22Tad Eggleston: Call you a friend now. Is that okay?
- 1:14:24Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, let's do it. I mean… I think we've hit it.
- 1:14:27Tad Eggleston: off well.
- 1:14:28Matt Kindt: Only one Cubs fan as a friend, I guess that's you.
- 1:14:33Tad Eggleston: I mean, Derek grew up in Chicago. He's never quite completely answered the question of his fandom.
- 1:14:41Matt Kindt: Yeah, he's not… it's definitely not Cubs. I think it's…
- 1:14:45Matt Kindt: I don't want to answer for him. I think it's, like…
- 1:14:48Matt Kindt: I don't know if it's Colorado? I don't know who… I think it's Colorado, weirdly.
- 1:14:53Matt Kindt: That'd be cool. We'll let him answer that. I should know that, actually. That'd be cool.
- 1:14:59Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
- 1:15:00Tad Eggleston: And actually, you know, I mean, the south side has the two most famous fans at this point.
- 1:15:07Matt Kindt: Who's that?
- 1:15:08Tad Eggleston: Barack Obama and the Pope?
- 1:15:10Matt Kindt: Oh, yeah, yeah. Is the Pope a fan of the White Sox?
- 1:15:14Tad Eggleston: He's a White Sox fan.
- 1:15:16Tad Eggleston: He was at a World Series game in 2005.
- 1:15:20Matt Kindt: I had no idea. Yeah.
- 1:15:22Matt Kindt: Alright, alright.
- 1:15:24Tad Eggleston: And in fact, the one game that they… They're doing a… Pope Hat Night in August.
- 1:15:35Matt Kindt: That's crazy, dude. That's crazy.
- 1:15:36Tad Eggleston: They started out with, like, $1,500.
- 1:15:39Tad Eggleston: And sold them so fast that they decided to expand it to everybody gets one.
- 1:15:45Tad Eggleston: And they were selling, like, 12,000 tickets a day.
- 1:15:50Tad Eggleston: After they made the announcement, for that game only.
- 1:15:53Matt Kindt: Who would've thought? Who would've thought?
- 1:15:55Tad Eggleston: Like, the night before Popat Night is when they're retiring Ozzie Guillen's number. It hasn't sold nearly as many tickets.
- 1:16:04Matt Kindt: That's… well, he shouldn't… you know what I mean? He shouldn't… what does he expect?
- 1:16:10Tad Eggleston: They have a Pope mural.
- 1:16:12Matt Kindt: Yeah, nice.
- 1:16:13Tad Eggleston: at Comiskey now.
- 1:16:14Matt Kindt: Alright.
- 1:16:15Tad Eggleston: I didn't… I didn't know that until recently, when I was reading about Poe Pat Night.
- 1:16:21Tad Eggleston: I try to go to a White Sox game from time to time. Among other things, it's…
- 1:16:25Tad Eggleston: Generally, it's cheaper to get in.
- 1:16:27Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's so weird, because it didn't used to be.
- 1:16:34Tad Eggleston: It used to drive me up the wall. I'm like, wait a minute, the White Sox are the worst team.
- 1:16:39Tad Eggleston: In the harder-to-get-to neighborhood, that… Isn't as nice of a neighborhood.
- 1:16:47Tad Eggleston: And… Their ballpark's not as good.
- 1:16:51Tad Eggleston: And their tickets are more expensive, and they only sell out on half-price Mondays?
- 1:17:00Tad Eggleston: And then I discovered that part of their deal with the state of Illinois is they don't pay certain taxes if their attendance is below a certain threshold.
- 1:17:10Matt Kindt: Oh, alright, well.
- 1:17:11Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, fucking Jerry Reinsdorf.
- 1:17:16Matt Kindt: No, you know, my favorite,
- 1:17:19Matt Kindt: Let's see, favorite ballparks? I… Dodger Stadium is probably my favorite.
- 1:17:24Tad Eggleston: are saying.
- 1:17:24Matt Kindt: We went to…
- 1:17:26Matt Kindt: we were in San Francisco for something to see the Giants, and the best I had… it was me and our daughter was, like, maybe 7 or 8.
- 1:17:33Matt Kindt: And it was… it was a chilly night, and
- 1:17:36Matt Kindt: At the stadium, and it was… the best part was they had Ghirardelli's hot chocolate in big backpack canisters that the guys were… Oh, wow. They were walking up and down, and then they would pump… pump out hot chocolate into cups, and I was like, this is the best… that might have been the best baseball game.
- 1:17:54Tad Eggleston: Was that in the new park, or Candlestick?
- 1:17:58Matt Kindt: New park, new park, new park.
- 1:18:00Tad Eggleston: I haven't been to the new park yet.
- 1:18:01Matt Kindt: It's like, yeah.
- 1:18:02Tad Eggleston: I haven't been to the new park yet, but I've been to Candlestick.
- 1:18:05Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's… it's beautiful. I, I, it was neat, and it was cool.
- 1:18:09Tad Eggleston: I think I've been to… I think I've been to, like, 5 or 6 stadiums that aren't there anymore.
- 1:18:15Matt Kindt: That's a bummer. I miss… Old Bush Stadium is the one I grew up on.
- 1:18:20Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and I never made it down to that, but I've been to the old Comiskey Park, I've been to Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, I've been to Tiger Stadium in Detroit, I've been to Candlestick Park in San Francisco, Jack Murphy Stadium in San Diego.
- 1:18:34Matt Kindt: It's almost like those don't count now. It's like you haven't been to the ballpark.
- 1:18:37Tad Eggleston: Oh, I have to, I have to go to the ballparks again, yeah.
- 1:18:40Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 1:18:41Tad Eggleston: But then, I've been to Fenway, I love Fenway, I love Wrigley.
- 1:18:45Tad Eggleston: I like the park up in Minnesota.
- 1:18:50Matt Kindt: Oh, yeah, I've been there, that's great, because my daughter's up there now.
- 1:18:53Tad Eggleston: The Minnesota Park's nice.
- 1:18:55Matt Kindt: It doesn't he? It's real steep, so you're, like, feel like you're right.
- 1:18:58Tad Eggleston: That's the part I don't like.
- 1:18:59Matt Kindt: Oh.
- 1:19:00Tad Eggleston: Because I don't like that at Comiskey, or the new… I can't call it whatever it's called now.
- 1:19:05Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:19:05Tad Eggleston: But, but the new Sox park, That steep wasn't cool either.
- 1:19:11Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:19:12Tad Eggleston: I actually like the one in Milwaukee way more than I expected to.
- 1:19:17Matt Kindt: I haven't been there.
- 1:19:18Tad Eggleston: Pretty nice stadium.
- 1:19:20Tad Eggleston: Well, we'll try to hit 2 if you come to Chicago. They're not that far away, if they happen to be in town.
- 1:19:26Matt Kindt: This is a… this is the gear, I think. I think I'm up for it.
- 1:19:30Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:19:31Matt Kindt: I'll talk to.
- 1:19:32Tad Eggleston: I took Dennis Kitchen to a Milwaukee Milkman game.
- 1:19:36Tad Eggleston: The Brewers were out of town when he was in town, and we felt like going to a baseball game together.
- 1:19:41Tad Eggleston: The Milwaukee Milkmen were in town, so we went to an independent minor league game.
- 1:19:45Matt Kindt: Dude, that's really great. It reminds me, I've been to, Buffalo Bison, so I have…
- 1:19:51Tad Eggleston: I wanna see that.
- 1:19:52Matt Kindt: So we went to a Buffalo Bisons game years ago, that's high school, probably.
- 1:19:57Tad Eggleston: Going to a South Bend Cubs game later this summer.
- 1:20:00Tad Eggleston: My wife already picked up the tickets. I've been out to see the Iowa Cubs a few times.
- 1:20:05Tad Eggleston: Used to go down and see the Peoria Chiefs a lot. I've seen them both as a Cubs farm club and as a St. Louis Farm Club.
- 1:20:12Matt Kindt: who is it that, every year at Gen Con in Indianapolis, there's a… there's a…
- 1:20:17Tad Eggleston: Indianapolis Indians.
- 1:20:19Matt Kindt: They're right next to the stadium. Are they? And then there's always… they're always playing, too, during that week, and I was like.
- 1:20:27Matt Kindt: I was, like, tempted to go, but I'm like, I'm playing board games, I'm not here for baseball, so I've never gone. I've seen it, and I'm like, I want to play board games, that's what we're here for.
- 1:20:36Tad Eggleston: That's definitely on my list. Among other things, they'll sometimes wear Indianapolis ABCs.
- 1:20:42Tad Eggleston: uniforms.
- 1:20:45Tad Eggleston: the Negro League team that Oscar Charleston was on.
- 1:20:48Matt Kindt: That's cool, that's cool. I, yeah, no…
- 1:20:53Tad Eggleston: We need more baseball comics, Matt. I'm telling you this.
- 1:20:55Matt Kindt: We are… I'm working on a baseball graphic novel with… with my friend.
- 1:21:01Tad Eggleston: this.
- 1:21:01Matt Kindt: And it's.
- 1:21:02Tad Eggleston: I like this.
- 1:21:03Matt Kindt: he's, he's dictating the schedule here, because I'm going to do.
- 1:21:06Tad Eggleston: I mean…
- 1:21:07Matt Kindt: All the drawing and, like, the, whatever, layout.
- 1:21:09Tad Eggleston: So, in other words, it gets written during the off-season, because, like…
- 1:21:12Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, so during the season's tough, but he's… he's… I think he's almost there, he said it's almost ready.
- 1:21:18Tad Eggleston: I mean, we've been talking about going comic shopping when he's in town for a Cubs series. Since the first time he was on, we haven't managed to make it happen yet.
- 1:21:26Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:21:27Matt Kindt: No, well, maybe we'll… maybe we'll road trip up there. I don't know when the Cardinals are going up there, but I wonder if he's traveling with them, maybe I'll… maybe I'll tag along. He'd bring his friend to work day, and I'll go to the… go to the game.
- 1:21:40Tad Eggleston: Let's see, we can find out. It's not hard to find out when…
- 1:21:44Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's true.
- 1:21:45Tad Eggleston: They're coming to town.
- 1:21:46Matt Kindt: No, I had… I… talking to him, I had an idea for a baseball graphic novel, because I…
- 1:21:53Matt Kindt: I feel like sports comics don't really… aren't really a thing here in the U.S, you know what I mean.
- 1:21:58Tad Eggleston: No, not in the US. Japan?
- 1:22:00Matt Kindt: Right, there's tons of manga. I was like, why… we should be able to do one here. I think we could do a really good.
- 1:22:04Tad Eggleston: There's some great baseball manga.
- 1:22:07Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I…
- 1:22:07Tad Eggleston: I imagine there's a lot of great baseball manga that hasn't been translated, too.
- 1:22:12Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:22:13Matt Kindt: That's what I… I was reading, I was reading Blue Lock, which is just, like, a soccer… soccer… I've heard about it.
- 1:22:19Tad Eggleston: about that.
- 1:22:20Matt Kindt: And and it's neat the way it breaks things down, but I was like, we could do… let's do this, not like that, but I want to do something that's… that's, kind of non-fiction.
- 1:22:31Matt Kindt: But that basically shows, like, all the things I love about… or, I mean, just in and about baseball.
- 1:22:37Matt Kindt: basically all the questions I have for Derek, I was like, what about this? How does this work? What does this do? How do we,
- 1:22:44Matt Kindt: And so we're doing a book like that, I think, which is gonna be…
- 1:22:48Matt Kindt: Neat, I don't think there's anything like it.
- 1:22:52Tad Eggleston: Cubs are coming to St. Louis at the end of May, so if you're hosting, I can come down.
- 1:22:58Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:22:58Tad Eggleston: I haven't been to the ballpark in St. Louis yet.
- 1:23:01Matt Kindt: End of May.
- 1:23:04Matt Kindt: Let's see…
- 1:23:08Matt Kindt: Yeah, we can figure that out.
- 1:23:10Matt Kindt: I guess people are listening, so maybe we should schedule this off.
- 1:23:13Tad Eggleston: It looks like the first time the Cardinals are in…
- 1:23:18Tad Eggleston: Chicago is 4th of July weekend.
- 1:23:23Matt Kindt: That seems like a hassle.
- 1:23:25Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:23:26Matt Kindt: Hmm.
- 1:23:27Tad Eggleston: Oh, that seems like a hassle, period.
- 1:23:29Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 1:23:31Tad Eggleston: And then we're back down in St. Louis at the end of July.
- 1:23:36Tad Eggleston: Which means that, like, wow, we're seeing the August…
- 1:23:41Tad Eggleston: You just have to come up and stay in Chicago for multiple weeks.
- 1:23:45Matt Kindt: I could do that, I miss Chicago, it's been a while.
- 1:23:50Matt Kindt: I didn't do C2E2 this year, which I liked doing, but I just didn't have time.
- 1:23:54Tad Eggleston: So you brought up… yeah, you haven't done C2E2 since I've been doing it.
- 1:23:58Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I,
- 1:24:01Matt Kindt: It's just hard. It's hard with the schedule I have. It's, like, taking a weekend off, then there's, like, a week to recover from it and everything, it's just a…
- 1:24:09Matt Kindt: I gotta make comics. I'm too busy making.
- 1:24:12Tad Eggleston: Totally get it.
- 1:24:13Tad Eggleston: I mean, actually, like, one of… like, I'm the type of guy that, like, I dream of what I would do if I had a billion dollars dropped in my lap, and one of the things I do is, like, buy and renovate, like.
- 1:24:27Tad Eggleston: an old motel, anywhere near places that I wanted
- 1:24:33Tad Eggleston: people to come to the Comic Cons, so I could say, hey, no, come out for the week, there's a drawing table in your room. Yeah.
- 1:24:40Matt Kindt: No, that's true, yeah.
- 1:24:41Matt Kindt: I thought about that, I was…
- 1:24:44Matt Kindt: well, this… the older I get, what am I? I'm, like, 53 now? I was like, what does my retirement look like? You know? And I think about, I was like, well, what will I do when I don't have to work?
- 1:24:52Tad Eggleston: Comics? Retirement?
- 1:24:54Matt Kindt: Well, that's what… I was like.
- 1:24:55Tad Eggleston: Your retirement is you'll die at your drawing table, just…
- 1:24:58Matt Kindt: Just a book for…
- 1:24:59Tad Eggleston: just accept it.
- 1:25:00Matt Kindt: But here's the… here's the realization I had, is I was like, what… this… I'm doing what I like to do, like, why would I do something else, even if it wasn't…
- 1:25:09Matt Kindt: you know what I mean, for Mind Your Living, I was like, I enjoy doing it. Like, I had so much fun. I was riding all day in the last two days, just solid 12-hour riding days, and I was like, it's the most fun I have. I was like, wow.
- 1:25:21Tad Eggleston: I have to circle back, though, because you mentioned, with Free Comic Book Day, you're going to be typing out nameplates and whatnot, and you mentioned the con, and I know you often take your typewriter to conventions, and, you know, other people sketch stuff, and you'll type pages. So, my question for you is, what kind of typewriter?
- 1:25:39Matt Kindt: I have a, oh my god, what's the name of it? It's a, hermes, or Hermes,
- 1:25:47Matt Kindt: portable. It's, like, the smallest one I could find.
- 1:25:51Matt Kindt: Let's see if I can find it, it's a Jeremy H-A… H-E-R-M-E-S.
- 1:25:56Matt Kindt: And I have 3 of them.
- 1:25:58Matt Kindt: Different colors, different fonts.
- 1:26:01Matt Kindt: One is…
- 1:26:02Tad Eggleston: Okay.
- 1:26:02Matt Kindt: One is from South America, so it's got more Spanish characters on it, but it's got a neat font, like, more of, like, a computer-y-looking font.
- 1:26:11Matt Kindt: Alright, bonus.
- 1:26:11Tad Eggleston: See if I can…
- 1:26:12Matt Kindt: By the exact model.
- 1:26:14Tad Eggleston: I gotta look at these.
- 1:26:15Matt Kindt: It's a… it's a Hermes Baby typewriter, they call it the Baby. 1963.
- 1:26:22Matt Kindt: It's like a…
- 1:26:23Tad Eggleston: Some of them cost even more than the Shohei action figure that we were looking at.
- 1:26:27Matt Kindt: That is true, but I can make money with a typewriter.
- 1:26:31Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I'm pretty certain that if I get the right influencer account, I could do, like, stop-motion videos with my Shohei action figure.
- 1:26:41Matt Kindt: just shoot an unboxing video, you know, or do some ASMR as you open it up and play with it.
- 1:26:48Tad Eggleston: No, I asked because I have a, I have an Underwood standard portable.
- 1:26:53Matt Kindt: Yes, that's probably a little bigger.
- 1:26:56Tad Eggleston: a little bit bigger. It's not… it's not that big, because it's the first, like, portable, and it was designed to be portable. It's probably heavier.
- 1:27:05Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's probably… the one… that baby's heavy, too, and but I got it because it is portable, the color is fun, so it looks cool. Yeah. You know, I have an orange one, I have, like, a green one, and then a white one.
- 1:27:18Matt Kindt: And they're… and, what's cool about it is, is, at the convention, it's loud, and people talk… the sound of the thing typing cuts through everything. Like, people stop and look, you know, and it's like, what is that sound? And people sort of have, like, a sense memory of what that sound is, because they've heard it somewhere in their life.
- 1:27:36Matt Kindt: You know, and then… but you haven't heard it in that context, so that's kind of cool. And it's also, like, I've come to so many conventions over my lifetime.
- 1:27:46Matt Kindt: that I'm kind of bored of sitting at the table, so anything I can do… yeah, is that your underwood? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 1:27:54Tad Eggleston: Well, it's not mine, I just pulled up an email.
- 1:27:55Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's when you get.
- 1:27:56Tad Eggleston: bay.
- 1:27:57Tad Eggleston: Mine… I looked up the serial number once, because mine's been in the family since it was given to my grandmother.
- 1:28:05Tad Eggleston: As, like, a graduation present, or maybe just sometime when she was in high school.
- 1:28:09Tad Eggleston: She was born in 1913.
- 1:28:12Tad Eggleston: The one I have came off the line in 1929.
- 1:28:17Matt Kindt: That's crazy.
- 1:28:19Tad Eggleston: The H stinks.
- 1:28:22Tad Eggleston: Which, I know when I've been using the typewriter a lot, and unfortunately I haven't been lately, though I saw that you have a physical
- 1:28:31Tad Eggleston: Mailing address for… for… for mind management, so I was thinking about it again today.
- 1:28:40Tad Eggleston: Because I also need to write a physical letter to Brian K. Vaughan one of these days, because I think that's the only way I'll get him and Fiona to come on, is if I send him a physical letter.
- 1:28:50Matt Kindt: No, you should do it. It's so great, you sent me a letter… I got a… I just designed…
- 1:28:55Matt Kindt: a custom letter… letterhead and envelope for myself that I've been wanting.
- 1:29:00Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice.
- 1:29:01Matt Kindt: I'm just dying to write letters to anybody that writes me a letter.
- 1:29:05Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, I miss having pen pals, so maybe I'll… I'll come up with, like, some baseball geeky thing, and we can just start going back and forth.
- 1:29:14Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, dude, have you ever talked to Derek about the postcards he mails out?
- 1:29:19Tad Eggleston: No.
- 1:29:20Matt Kindt: He mails everywhere, because he travels with baseball all the time. He sends postcards to all his friends, like, from everywhere he's going, you know, constantly, so…
- 1:29:29Tad Eggleston: I am gonna have to talk to him about this.
- 1:29:31Matt Kindt: Yeah, I have a…
- 1:29:32Tad Eggleston: Never gone.
- 1:29:32Tad Eggleston: Baseball.
- 1:29:33Tad Eggleston: Postcard from him.
- 1:29:35Matt Kindt: Yeah, get a… get in your address, you might get one. It's so great when they come in the mail, but it's nothing like… especially now, like, the mail… I don't even check the mail anymore, because I'm like, there's nothing good in it. It's all just, like…
- 1:29:45Matt Kindt: Junk, you know?
- 1:29:47Tad Eggleston: Well, I get stickers from Kyle Starks, and.
- 1:29:50Matt Kindt: Yeah, print those few.
- 1:29:52Tad Eggleston: Brent's from Elsa Chardier, and from Jacob Phillips. So, like… And the onion.
- 1:30:01Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's it. Brian subscribes to the Onion newspaper, so he brings that in. I get Derek's postcards, and then my Patreon, if you go to my Patreon, I stole Derek's idea, but monetized it to my Patreon, so there's a postcard club.
- 1:30:16Matt Kindt: It's basically Kyle's Sticker Club of postcards, so I mail a postcard every month.
- 1:30:21Tad Eggleston: So… Do you design the postcard, or do you…
- 1:30:25Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's all… it's original art for the postcard, and then…
- 1:30:28Tad Eggleston: Yeah, see, that's like what Elsa Chardier does.
- 1:30:30Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:30:31Tad Eggleston: Only hers come all the way from France.
- 1:30:34Matt Kindt: Well, mine couldn't go to France. If you move there.
- 1:30:36Tad Eggleston: And then… So, so you might appreciate this.
- 1:30:40Tad Eggleston: The onion was at C2E2.
- 1:30:42Matt Kindt: That's great.
- 1:30:44Tad Eggleston: So I have an onion, 20-sided die.
- 1:30:47Matt Kindt: Nice.
- 1:30:49Matt Kindt: No, that's great. There's something about…
- 1:30:51Tad Eggleston: one of their guys gave me when I invited him on 22 Panels.
- 1:30:55Tad Eggleston: I wrote to him, he hasn't gotten back to me yet, but I want him. Because among other things, like, I need them to take over InfoWars. It's not over yet, and that would just be amazing.
- 1:31:07Matt Kindt: No, that would be great, dude. I forgot that I put my, I put that address in the Free Comic Day comic. We're gonna get all kinds of crazy, crazy.
- 1:31:17Tad Eggleston: You did!
- 1:31:20Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:31:21Matt Kindt: Not sure, I probably should have run that by the… Brian before I did it.
- 1:31:26Tad Eggleston: Oh, is that the studio address?
- 1:31:28Matt Kindt: Might be the studio… might be the studio address, or it could be a P.O. Box. Don't go there and find out.
- 1:31:35Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's not listed as a P.O. Box.
- 1:31:37Matt Kindt: No, it may or may not be, we'll see.
- 1:31:41Tad Eggleston: I didn't have time to check today, is the phone number working?
- 1:31:44Matt Kindt: The phone number works, yep. Please call the number, the number's so funny.
- 1:31:49Tad Eggleston: You know, do you… did you get a chance to see, news from the Fallout, Chris Condon and Jeffrey Allen Love's book?
- 1:31:57Matt Kindt: -
- 1:31:58Tad Eggleston: First of all, it's just fantastic, and it's available as a graphic novel now. But second, they did so much meta stuff. They set up a website.
- 1:32:09Tad Eggleston: with, like, secret links in the website that you had to search for. They set up a phone number.
- 1:32:17Matt Kindt: No, dude, I love that stuff. Condon's great, too. He.
- 1:32:20Tad Eggleston: I love Chriscon.
- 1:32:21Matt Kindt: signings together, he's really great, and .
- 1:32:23Tad Eggleston: Actually, yeah, he was talking about being right next to you.
- 1:32:27Tad Eggleston: At a con, with you and your typewriter.
- 1:32:29Matt Kindt: Yeah, we did… we did a signing in Phoenix, and I… and I've never met him before. I was like, hey, if I bring two typewriters.
- 1:32:36Tad Eggleston: That's right, that's what he was telling me.
- 1:32:39Matt Kindt: And, I was like, I'll bring two, and like, you start a… you start a little micro-fiction story, and then I'll write the ending, you know?
- 1:32:46Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
- 1:32:46Matt Kindt: And then, or we.
- 1:32:47Tad Eggleston: Told me about that.
- 1:32:48Matt Kindt: And he was totally game for it. I was like, oh my god, this is so great, and .
- 1:32:53Tad Eggleston: This is a good chord.
- 1:32:54Matt Kindt: And it was so… that was maybe the most fun signing I've ever done, because we just were crazy. I believe it. Funny little story.
- 1:33:01Tad Eggleston: like, Talk about… Writers that have just exploded.
- 1:33:07Tad Eggleston: He is so good.
- 1:33:09Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, he's a good dude, too, that's what I…
- 1:33:12Tad Eggleston: Oh, he is. He's an amazing dude. I am very happy to call him my friend. I've treated him to dinner. I've been his cabbie in Chicagoland.
- 1:33:22Tad Eggleston: We text and email regularly. He's such an amazing guy.
- 1:33:29Tad Eggleston: But also just so talented.
- 1:33:33Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, 20 years from now, people who picked up that Texas blood at the beginning are gonna go.
- 1:33:40Tad Eggleston: How was this not huge? Because the amount of talent between those two guys is just…
- 1:33:47Matt Kindt: Yeah. That's it. What was the… Enfield… Enfield Massacre?
- 1:33:51Tad Eggleston: Bill Gang Massacre.
- 1:33:52Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, that was good, I liked that a lot.
- 1:33:54Tad Eggleston: Oh, I loved it. And I loved their decision… their decision to put it on New Sprint, and not tell anybody in advance.
- 1:34:01Matt Kindt: The paper's great. Surprise. The paper's great.
- 1:34:03Tad Eggleston: Wednesday, when you picked it up.
- 1:34:05Matt Kindt: No, we… you know what we did,
- 1:34:08Matt Kindt: for the new mind management, we matched the paper of the original series, which is, like, this kind of, like.
- 1:34:15Matt Kindt: Similar, it's sort of like a pulpy, sort of gritty.
- 1:34:18Tad Eggleston: Right?
- 1:34:18Matt Kindt: Paper, and we found a printer that… that had that… that paper.
- 1:34:23Tad Eggleston: Awesome.
- 1:34:24Matt Kindt: And I haven't… we haven't used… I haven't…
- 1:34:27Matt Kindt: Had anything on paper like that since then, so…
- 1:34:32Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna use a different example to ask you how the crazy stuff comes to you, because I spent…
- 1:34:42Tad Eggleston: like, 45 minutes one day, and didn't… didn't finish, because, like, I had students get in the way, and I never got back to it, but you clearly wrote a code into the receipt on the back of the issues of Spice Purb.
- 1:34:58Tad Eggleston: Yes.
- 1:34:59Matt Kindt: I did.
- 1:35:01Tad Eggleston: Which one day, I will take the time to actually crack.
- 1:35:06Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:35:07Matt Kindt: I'm pretty sure… I'm trying to think of the solution. It's probably just a symbol substitution code where the number and the.
- 1:35:12Tad Eggleston: No, I was… I was pretty certain it was a substitution code, I just hadn't figured out exactly how it lined up yet, because I don't… it's not.
- 1:35:20Matt Kindt: It's not…
- 1:35:21Tad Eggleston: And A is 1, B is 2.
- 1:35:24Matt Kindt: I… whatever I did, it just shifted, so if you.
- 1:35:26Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay. So that'll make it easier.
- 1:35:28Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:35:29Tad Eggleston: I was actually doing detailed number analysis. I was going, okay, which number shows up the most? That's probably E, let's…
- 1:35:36Matt Kindt: I try not to make them too hard, because I do get… people send me weird little codes and things all the time, and I'm like.
- 1:35:45Matt Kindt: I was like, man, I don't have time to… I don't have time to… to code it.
- 1:35:49Tad Eggleston: So you're telling.
- 1:35:50Matt Kindt: I like doing that.
- 1:35:51Tad Eggleston: I shouldn't send you a letter using the baseball encyclopedia as…
- 1:35:55Matt Kindt: If you want me to read it, don't make me work. Don't make me work. I've already worked.
- 1:35:59Tad Eggleston: Because I was thinking about that as I was driving home.
- 1:36:03Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:36:04Tad Eggleston: seeing the opportunity, I'm like, I should type up a letter where I use the baseball encyclopedia as the cipher.
- 1:36:10Matt Kindt: I get the… I get the funniest emails, or funniest, like, mail, whatever, fan mail, whatever you want to call it. I get the funniest, weirdest things, and I'm like, I don't know… I don't know what this is, and I have deadlines, so please put the solution on the back, or upside down and everything, so I can just…
- 1:36:27Tad Eggleston: Okay.
- 1:36:28Matt Kindt: Drip to it.
- 1:36:28Tad Eggleston: Okay, if I do anything crazy, I'll also give you the.
- 1:36:31Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, I do appreciate it, but
- 1:36:35Matt Kindt: But I… yeah, just because I make stuff like that doesn't mean I enjoy stuff like that.
- 1:36:43Matt Kindt: I was like.
- 1:36:44Tad Eggleston: You only like…
- 1:36:44Matt Kindt: Don't torture me.
- 1:36:48Tad Eggleston: just because you have so many books out, I gotta do a couple quick hits on other recent books you have out. Give us the front counter pitch of Space Scouts, which…
- 1:36:58Tad Eggleston: The, trade will be available before we know it.
- 1:37:02Matt Kindt: Yeah, Space Scouts.
- 1:37:04Matt Kindt: Spitzkop?
- 1:37:04Tad Eggleston: unexpectedly cool.
- 1:37:06Matt Kindt: It, I love Dave Rubine. I've worked with him on a few other books. We did, Aether…
- 1:37:12Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I did your… your pandemic Kickstarter.
- 1:37:15Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, and yeah, Cosmic Detective.
- 1:37:17Tad Eggleston: I'm a detective, yeah.
- 1:37:19Matt Kindt: And then,
- 1:37:20Matt Kindt: And so I love working with him, and I had this idea, which is basically, like, it starts out as a Legion of Superheroes story with a bunch of crazy alien characters that come to… to, a planet to compete in this sort of reality show to be the next… be the new heroes of the universe.
- 1:37:36Tad Eggleston: Right.
- 1:37:36Matt Kindt: So that's, like, the starting point, and then…
- 1:37:39Matt Kindt: And then I love… it has all the stuff I love about… I love, like, battle royale-type things, where there's eliminations, and… and then,
- 1:37:48Matt Kindt: Sort of some of the social stuff.
- 1:37:50Matt Kindt: And then I also like, twist, so there's that plus, like, a horrible twist.
- 1:37:56Tad Eggleston: Yes.
- 1:37:56Matt Kindt: And and I won't spoil it, but…
- 1:37:59Tad Eggleston: The little socio-political commentary going on there.
- 1:38:02Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, and it's kind of whatever commentary. I don't… we don't have to label everything.
- 1:38:07Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:38:08Matt Kindt: We won't.
- 1:38:10Matt Kindt: But yeah, I just,
- 1:38:13Matt Kindt: Yeah, I love… I grew up loving Legion of Superheroes, and I… I don't think I… there was any particular run I loved.
- 1:38:19Tad Eggleston: Oh, you're another Legion fan?
- 1:38:20Matt Kindt: I'm a big Lisa fan.
- 1:38:22Tad Eggleston: Okay, cause we have… It's semi-annual, we haven't had it in a couple of years because my friend Johnny.
- 1:38:30Tad Eggleston: Who is old enough that… that…
- 1:38:34Tad Eggleston: one of the reasons he's a massive Legion of Superheroes fan is because he realized, or he discovered, that Jim Shooter, when Jim Shooter was writing it, was only, like, 3 months older than him.
- 1:38:46Matt Kindt: No, he's really young, he's a kid.
- 1:38:49Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:38:49Tad Eggleston: Right. Jim Shooter started writing it when he was 13.
- 1:38:52Tad Eggleston: And, like, again, Johnny, I think, is 3 months older than Jim Shooter would be. So the reason we haven't had it the last couple of years is he was desperately trying to get Jim Shooter.
- 1:39:04Tad Eggleston: And then Jim died, and, like, but we will have another one sometime soon, so I'll keep you on the list of people who might be interested in coming and talking Legion of Superheroes.
- 1:39:15Matt Kindt: No, that's great, I love it. I… my first exposure to it was, like, the 90s, Keith Giffen's The Great Darkness, where it was just all the nine-panel grid and everything in a…
- 1:39:25Tad Eggleston: our last Legion Roundtable. Yeah. We did have Paul Levitz and Tom Berenboyne.
- 1:39:33Tad Eggleston: And we got the message from Keith's…
- 1:39:37Tad Eggleston: Son-in-law, literally the morning that we were recording, that he'd gone into the hospital.
- 1:39:42Matt Kindt: Oh, jeez.
- 1:39:43Tad Eggleston: make it.
- 1:39:44Matt Kindt: That's a… that's a bummer. No, he…
- 1:39:46Tad Eggleston: This close.
- 1:39:48Matt Kindt: Yeah, I love,
- 1:39:52Matt Kindt: I love that. That era was my first… what was cool about that, that era.
- 1:39:57Matt Kindt: of it was never knowing any of it before. It's like, all the characters, they're using their first names, they're not in costume, like, who is who here? I don't even… I don't even know, but that was part of the fun, was sort of…
- 1:40:07Matt Kindt: having these characters with all this history that you sort of had to discover or uncover, and I think that was… that was maybe one of my favorite parts of it. So, I don't claim to be an expert in it, I just claim to be a fan of it.
- 1:40:21Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm becoming more of a fan.
- 1:40:23Matt Kindt: Yeah, I… it's, one of my dream projects, and I started it, it was to… I wanted to draw…
- 1:40:30Matt Kindt: every single Legion member, and just have, like, a book, an art book that's, like, every character, you know, in it. But,
- 1:40:38Matt Kindt: I don't have the time to do that. Well…
- 1:40:42Tad Eggleston: Now I know that if you're in Chicago, I need to, like, take you out to breakfast with Johnny, just so he can get a picture of you wearing a Legion ring.
- 1:40:48Matt Kindt: Yeah, it's one of those things.
- 1:40:50Tad Eggleston: that.
- 1:40:50Matt Kindt: What?
- 1:40:52Tad Eggleston: Oh, you have one, so you can just send me the picture without him having to provide it.
- 1:40:56Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, I don't… I've got a ring.
- 1:40:58Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, he's got, like, they, they did, when Bendis did Legion of Superheroes, they, they did a thing where they, they, they did the… you could buy 25…
- 1:41:09Tad Eggleston: packs of the plastic ring for your… so I bought a package of them just for him.
- 1:41:17Matt Kindt: Yeah, is that what the… I can't remember where I got it from, I just have it in… I have all my Legion books custom bound, like, the issues, I just have them bound in the hardcovers, so I have that ring sitting on top of it. I can't remember where I got it from, but I guess that's where…
- 1:41:30Tad Eggleston: If it was the plastic one, that was when it was.
- 1:41:32Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, it's.
- 1:41:32Tad Eggleston: There is actually, like, re… like, one time when he was offering it to somebody, the guy said, or I could just… and he pulled one out from under his desk, we were at a comic shop, and put on, like, a high-end…
- 1:41:45Matt Kindt: A real one. It actually… he actually started floating.
- 1:41:50Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, Johnny, Johnny moderates,
- 1:41:55Tad Eggleston: private Legion of Superheroes group on Facebook.
- 1:41:59Tad Eggleston: Like, invite only.
- 1:42:01Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:42:01Tad Eggleston: Tons of the creators…
- 1:42:03Tad Eggleston: through the years, are part of the group, that sort of thing. So one of the things he'll do is he'll get pictures of people, or have me get pictures of people, wearing the Legion ring, and he'll post it up to that group.
- 1:42:13Matt Kindt: Yeah, well, I'll send you one.
- 1:42:14Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we'll make that work.
- 1:42:15Matt Kindt: Studio, alright.
- 1:42:17Tad Eggleston: But, but I also have to ask you about SafeNow, because…
- 1:42:22Tad Eggleston: Not named Mind Management or Red Handed, this is probably my favorite Matt Kent book.
- 1:42:29Matt Kindt: Oh, I appreciate it. It's…
- 1:42:32Tad Eggleston: heartbreaking, it's… Beautiful.
- 1:42:36Tad Eggleston: It's… Creative and crazy.
- 1:42:43Matt Kindt: How would you pay?
- 1:42:44Tad Eggleston: catch it.
- 1:42:44Matt Kindt: I, here's… I won't pitch it, but I'll tell you how the idea for this story came to me. Well, I, there's two parts to it. The first part of the idea was… I was playing Red Dead Redemption, this video game where you're a cowboy.
- 1:42:59Matt Kindt: And, you play, it's a big open world, you can do whatever you want.
- 1:43:02Tad Eggleston: Written by the same guys who wrote American Caper for…
- 1:43:06Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
- 1:43:08Matt Kindt: circle it right around to lap him again. I love it. He, but I was playing that, and he… I was playing, and then I saved my game, and I play… I play that game, like,
- 1:43:18Matt Kindt: I'd roleplay, like, this is what I would do in real life. I'd try not to kill people, or do whatever, unless they deserve it, then you put them down, you know, but…
- 1:43:25Tad Eggleston: Right?
- 1:43:26Matt Kindt: But, try to be good. But then I saved the game, and then… and then after a while playing like that, I'm like, what happens if you just go nuts, you know, and start killing everybody? So… so one night, I was… I saved my game, I was done for the night, but I was like, I'm just gonna kill this whole town.
- 1:43:41Matt Kindt: horses and everything, just be a complete monster to see how long you survive, or what happens. I don't know what happens. So I'm doing that. In the middle of doing that, my wife walks downstairs where the TV is and the game machine, and she's like, oh my god, what do you do? She's like, did you just shoot a horse? And I was like.
- 1:43:59Matt Kindt: Like, yeah, but I… it's… I just saved my game, this isn't real, you know what I mean? I didn't… I'm not really doing this. And she's like, but you're really doing it. I was like, no, no, no, it's… look, I saved my game, and I come back.
- 1:44:10Matt Kindt: And then, but it struck me, I was like, oh my god, it… because you… I was really doing it, you know, in the game.
- 1:44:17Tad Eggleston: Right.
- 1:44:18Matt Kindt: And so then I was like, oh, what if you were… what if your power was… you could save your game, your life, and go back and do…
- 1:44:26Matt Kindt: And then does it make you… does it change you as a person if you do some horrible thing, but you can just go back and not do it?
- 1:44:33Matt Kindt: you just… part of you did that thing, you know, so it does… I was like, oh, that'll be an interesting character thing, to have this power.
- 1:44:40Tad Eggleston: You got to witness all sorts of things. Yeah. I mean, this was actually… I can't remember the name of the character, but one of the characters in,
- 1:44:52Tad Eggleston: Milestone Universe. Blood Syndicate.
- 1:44:55Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Had the ability to go, like, everything back.
- 1:44:59Tad Eggleston: X number of seconds.
- 1:45:01Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, I don't remember that one, but I remember buying those issues. That was on good paper. That was printed on good paper. Yep.
- 1:45:09Matt Kindt: Yeah, so that was where the idea came from, and then the part… the… later on, when I was writing it, the idea for the ending, which I won't spoil here, had to do with being
- 1:45:19Matt Kindt: I don't think I've gotten there yet.
- 1:45:22Tad Eggleston: The end hasn't happened yet.
- 1:45:24Matt Kindt: Yeah, maybe… well, then I won't spoil it. It's not out yet. I wrote it so long ago, I don't know what… I don't know where it's at, but I won't spoil it, but the.
- 1:45:31Tad Eggleston: Currently, Issue 4 is to be determined.
- 1:45:35Matt Kindt: Yeah, don't… well, then I won't tell you the second half of how the ending came about, because.
- 1:45:39Tad Eggleston: I mean, feel free to send me a PDF, and then you can tell me all you want.
- 1:45:44Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, no, I won't spoil it, but that's for the.
- 1:45:47Tad Eggleston: And I normally don't care about spoilers, but I do on this one, Matt.
- 1:45:52Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah, I won't… I'll shut up right there, except that the ending is heartbreaking, but also optimistic.
- 1:45:58Tad Eggleston: I believe… you're good at that. That seems to be in the Matt Kent niche.
- 1:46:05Matt Kindt: That's a… I mean, that's how… that's how I… that's me.
- 1:46:10Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
- 1:46:11Matt Kindt: It's like we're, we all ended up in the same spot.
- 1:46:14Tad Eggleston: Real.
- 1:46:14Matt Kindt: Let's, let's have a good time while we're here.
- 1:46:18Tad Eggleston: So… so I do have…
- 1:46:20Tad Eggleston: One, one question, and this is probably more of a bad idea question, but you… you might know.
- 1:46:27Tad Eggleston: So the… and I was very excited for it, and… and I bought it, and I… and I would have bought it
- 1:46:35Tad Eggleston: I mean, obviously I bought it without knowing, but, like…
- 1:46:39Tad Eggleston: the zero issue. Matt Kent, Jose, Rip, Cano, issue zero, that's what it says on the first… on the front cover, and I'm like, and you buried the lead, because also Jesse Lonergan!
- 1:46:58Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:46:59Matt Kindt: Yeah, he… he's so great. We're working on another book together. I'm writing, like, a graphic novel, and and I hadn't… wasn't quite done with it yet, you know? So he's like, hey, should I do this, 8-pager? I was like, well, only if you're… I was like, only if it doesn't mess up our other schedule. He's like… he's like, no, I read the…
- 1:47:18Matt Kindt: he's like, I read the script, I really liked it, so I want to do it. And I was like, what? I was like, what was it? I couldn't remember. I'd written… I had written two 8-page stories for a bad idea that, while I was,
- 1:47:30Matt Kindt: I was sick, I think I had COVID, or whatever it was, I was out of my mind, and I was, like, at the tail end of it, but I was still, like.
- 1:47:36Matt Kindt: not quite right. And then, but the scripts were due, and I was like, I forced myself to write two 8-page stories during this weird time, and I was like, I couldn't remember what I'd written, and when I was writing it, I was like, this is terrible, but I have to get…
- 1:47:52Matt Kindt: pages done. And so I turned him in, I couldn't even remember until he sent it to me. I was like, what did I… I don't even remember what I wrote, dude. I was like, I hope it's good. But yeah, it was… it ended up being really neat. What he did was really cool.
- 1:48:05Matt Kindt: But, yeah.
- 1:48:06Tad Eggleston: Ridiculous.
- 1:48:06Matt Kindt: Stephanie's awesome. Jerome is a… of all the… the favorite book I read last year, you know?
- 1:48:12Tad Eggleston: Chrome is… is…
- 1:48:14Tad Eggleston: not only is the… I'm on record as it's my favorite book of the year. It was, like, literally my pick for top book of the year.
- 1:48:23Matt Kindt: No, dude, it's so good, and here, let's talk about it for a minute, because I… I don't have a lot of people to talk to about it, because Brian hasn't read it yet, and I'm just bugging everybody.
- 1:48:31Tad Eggleston: Really quick before that, though.
- 1:48:34Tad Eggleston: I follow him, I'm one of his patrons, so I'd actually read it in the unedited
- 1:48:40Tad Eggleston: form before he sold it. So, it was also my top graphic novel of 2023 in its unpublished form.
- 1:48:50Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I subscribe to his Patreon, but I can't log in. Since I run one, I'm on a…
- 1:48:56Matt Kindt: certain account, and I've… and then, I can't see the other account, so I don't… I subscribe to a few people I like, and then I don't see any of it.
- 1:49:05Tad Eggleston: We got, we gotta help you be able to…
- 1:49:08Matt Kindt: That's alright. I'll just wait for the book. I'll just wait for the book. I don't mind supporting him.
- 1:49:13Matt Kindt: But, no, here's what I liked about Drone, is the way I felt when I was reading that was like, it felt like he channels some kind of
- 1:49:21Matt Kindt: Kirby sort of crazy Kirby energy to it, but he wasn't doing a pastiche of Kirby, or doing, like, a take on Kirby, or, like, even, like, a throwback. Like, I've seen people do that all the time, where they're like, it kind of looks like Kirby, and it's like they're trying to channel… and I was like, I don't like that, because I feel like, well, you're just…
- 1:49:39Matt Kindt: you're just doing your Kirby because you like Kirby. But he did something with that book that felt like Kirby, but not… but completely new, completely different.
- 1:49:47Tad Eggleston: Well, but that was part of how it felt like Kirby.
- 1:49:50Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's what… I know, and that's what the beauty of it is.
- 1:49:53Tad Eggleston: relevant… I mean, like, I hadn't thought of it that way, but as soon as you said it, it made sense to me. We've got a Kirby book club, we just… we just read… we just finished reading his whole
- 1:50:04Tad Eggleston: New Gods run, original run. So I've been talking Kirby once a month. I've become more, more a student of Kirby than I'd ever been before.
- 1:50:15Matt Kindt: Doesn't write very well.
- 1:50:16Tad Eggleston: But draws like a motherfucker.
- 1:50:18Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's… that's the thing, is like… but it's just the sheer creativity and the ideas and everything, but it didn't… after I read Jerome, it…
- 1:50:24Matt Kindt: it wasn't until a couple days later where it hit me, where I was like, oh… I was like, this is why I like it, because it's… there's something there that's… that's deep-seated, that curvy seed in there somewhere that I love.
- 1:50:34Tad Eggleston: Well, and the other thing that I just adore… is…
- 1:50:41Tad Eggleston: And it took me so long to figure out exactly why I loved it so much.
- 1:50:46Tad Eggleston: I love his panel usage.
- 1:50:49Matt Kindt: Oh my gosh, that's… he's the best. There's nobody doing it like that, you know what I mean?
- 1:50:54Tad Eggleston: I realized what it is, is… is he… He controls, like…
- 1:51:02Tad Eggleston: for me to fully, fully, like, make this make sense, like, I have to…
- 1:51:07Tad Eggleston: The only medium that I can read horror in is comics.
- 1:51:12Tad Eggleston: I can't read horror prose, I can't watch horror movies, because the parts that I don't like, the director, the writer, they decide how much time I spend with them. I can't just go, woo!
- 1:51:25Matt Kindt: We have.
- 1:51:26Tad Eggleston: Those panels do.
- 1:51:31Tad Eggleston: Is they manipulate your time.
- 1:51:34Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Even though there's one picture, so you can crack out of it. If you ever drew something that I really didn't want to look at, I'm certain that I could manage to turn the page.
- 1:51:43Tad Eggleston: But even when it's one picture for the whole page, because it's separated into 30 panels.
- 1:51:52Tad Eggleston: It forces you to linger on it.
- 1:51:55Tad Eggleston: You spend a little bit of time with each panel, just in case one is different.
- 1:52:00Tad Eggleston: work.
- 1:52:00Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 1:52:01Tad Eggleston: It's not even really just in case one is different, because you know that they won't be, but…
- 1:52:07Tad Eggleston: But it's this way of manipulating the… the time.
- 1:52:13Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, you're right. In the… this is why I'm look… like, for me, like, the older I get, the harder it is for me to find comics that are interesting to me, because I've seen it all. You can kind of catch up with comics and read all the greatest things, I think. And I feel like I… now it's harder for me
- 1:52:31Matt Kindt: to find something like that that's like, oh my god, I hadn't thought of that. Or… or, like, here's a new way of doing a thing, because that's what… I'm always trying to figure it out, like, how do I… how can I do something new and different? Only you can do in comics?
- 1:52:43Matt Kindt: And then he's… he's cracked the code on something there with, like, what you said, plus, like, the way that… it's not just a lot of panels, or, like, the layouts are crazy, it's, like, the panels are part of the storytelling in a way that nobody else is doing it.
- 1:52:56Matt Kindt: like, the actual panel, the arrangement, and the… it's part of the storytelling, and sometimes they go like this, where the panels are in the story, and then sometimes they're out, pushing you to the next thing. Nobody's doing anything quite like it.
- 1:53:10Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and, like, every read-through, I, I, like, notice… like…
- 1:53:19Tad Eggleston: and great artists, like, one of the reasons I can read Mind Management over and over again, one of the reasons that I can read Saga over and over again, one of the reasons I can read Jesse Lonergan, anything, over and over again, is each read
- 1:53:34Tad Eggleston: I will discover something new.
- 1:53:38Tad Eggleston: but not something… I mean, sometimes something that'll make me look at it differently, but more something where I have picked apart just a little bit more
- 1:53:49Tad Eggleston: why I was so odd to begin with.
- 1:53:53Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 1:53:54Matt Kindt: I felt…
- 1:53:55Tad Eggleston: it the first time, even though I…
- 1:53:57Tad Eggleston: Didn't notice it the first time.
- 1:54:01Matt Kindt: Yup.
- 1:54:02Tad Eggleston: You know… .
- 1:54:06Matt Kindt: No, that's what… that's what I love about that, and that's why I… I sort of love, and that's why I kind of reject comics that… where you can just read and flip, read and flip, and it's like…
- 1:54:16Matt Kindt: Artisem's incidental, you know, it's not doing anything to add to it, and .
- 1:54:20Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't reject them, because sometimes they're still fun stories. I mean, like, reject them.
- 1:54:25Tad Eggleston: Every medium has different types of stories.
- 1:54:27Matt Kindt: No, no, you're right about that, but I reject him, because I was like, I want to read comics that use comics to make.
- 1:54:31Tad Eggleston: But, like, like, I mean, it all comes down to how much reading time. You make more comics. Like, I don't reject them because comics are my favorite medium for…
- 1:54:39Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:54:40Tad Eggleston: All storytelling.
- 1:54:41Matt Kindt: That's true. That's true. I have… here's what I…
- 1:54:43Tad Eggleston: I'm much more of a reader than a maker.
- 1:54:45Matt Kindt: I am… that… that's true. I also… I didn't used to be… I think, the older I get, the more I realize how much I have finite time on this earth, so I'm gonna make sure that I… I can't read everything, so I'm gonna make sure that, I try to read… I get that.
- 1:54:59Tad Eggleston: I mean, trust me, I'm getting pickier.
- 1:55:02Matt Kindt: Hmm, yeah.
- 1:55:03Tad Eggleston: I'm just not as… and you've got, it sounds like, about 10 years on me, so, like…
- 1:55:09Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah.
- 1:55:10Tad Eggleston: Maybe only 8, did you say 53?
- 1:55:12Matt Kindt: 53, and I didn't start…
- 1:55:14Tad Eggleston: 7 years, you got 7 years on.
- 1:55:16Matt Kindt: I've never quit a book… a prose book. I've never… I never quit a prose book partway through until, like, 10 years ago, and then I was like, you know what? I don't need to. I don't need to finish everything. It's okay.
- 1:55:28Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's a hard thing to accept, though.
- 1:55:30Matt Kindt: Yeah, but I still haven't.
- 1:55:31Tad Eggleston: Not all the way there.
- 1:55:33Matt Kindt: I've not walked out of a movie yet, but… but books, I've stopped.
- 1:55:37Tad Eggleston: I've never walked out of a movie, I have stopped watching one that I was streaming, or whatever.
- 1:55:43Matt Kindt: That's true. I have done that too. I have done that too, but…
- 1:55:47Tad Eggleston: But you brought up books, and there's one other comic that I absolutely have to bring up. I've already had you for, like, 2-plus hours, so…
- 1:55:57Matt Kindt: minutes, Leah?
- 1:55:58Tad Eggleston: What?
- 1:55:59Matt Kindt: Chop this… edit this down to 20 minutes so people will hear it all.
- 1:56:04Tad Eggleston: Actually, ironically, some of the longer ones are the ones that get listened to more.
- 1:56:08Matt Kindt: No, that's good. Get to work and then get back. I think people go, oh, wait!
- 1:56:13Tad Eggleston: X number of hours with so-and-so?
- 1:56:16Matt Kindt: God.
- 1:56:16Tad Eggleston: I'm in.
- 1:56:17Tad Eggleston: You… And I've all… like, every issue, I send Ibrahim a glowing email.
- 1:56:28Tad Eggleston: You and Ibrahim Mustafa have taken on…
- 1:56:35Matt Kindt: John Lecrae?
- 1:56:37Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, I was gonna go there, but what I was really gonna say is, like, the near impossible project.
- 1:56:42Tad Eggleston: Because John LeCare is… Not only the master spy novelist, but he's the master spy novelist because… Cuz…
- 1:56:54Tad Eggleston: He's a spy novelist.
- 1:56:56Tad Eggleston: Because he's not James Bond. Because he's not…
- 1:57:00Tad Eggleston: action all the time, blah blah blah, because… but…
- 1:57:04Tad Eggleston: he's still always compelling. And somehow, always compelling, even though he doesn't, like… I mean, like…
- 1:57:14Tad Eggleston: In Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy, the climax is George Smiley
- 1:57:20Tad Eggleston: Sitting in a room, going through papers, that you don't hear about what's in the papers, and still, it's a…
- 1:57:30Tad Eggleston: like… compelling climax.
- 1:57:34Tad Eggleston: Even though he didn't tell you what was going on, and it's not action-packed.
- 1:57:39Tad Eggleston: So, when I saw that this book was coming, because I'm a huge Le Carre fan. Huge LeCare fan.
- 1:57:46Matt Kindt: Same.
- 1:57:47Tad Eggleston: And…
- 1:57:47Tad Eggleston: And overall, I'm a huge believer that the comics are the perfect medium, that there's no story that can't be told as well or better in a comic book.
- 1:57:58Tad Eggleston: I'm all for comic adaptations of anything.
- 1:58:03Tad Eggleston: Right?
- 1:58:06Tad Eggleston: And when I saw this announced, I was scared, because I'm sitting there going, Please, dear God.
- 1:58:15Tad Eggleston: Have this feel like a lecery?
- 1:58:17Matt Kindt: Me too.
- 1:58:19Tad Eggleston: And like, the only reason I was 100% on board is I'm like, oh, Matt Kent and Ibrahim Mustafa, I know that they CAN do it. So the question is.
- 1:58:31Matt Kindt: How…
- 1:58:32Tad Eggleston: Much editorial interference will they run into
- 1:58:38Tad Eggleston: You know, oh, where's the car chase? Why don't we have gadgets? I mean, I could just… I could hear the horrible conversations in my head, and Dark Horse isn't always like that, but you know what I mean.
- 1:58:50Matt Kindt: Yeah. No, here… here's a true story of that. Everything you said that was… would make you nervous, me too. I didn't want to do it. Honestly, I didn't want to do it. I turned it down, I was like, I don't… I don't… and then,
- 1:59:03Matt Kindt: But I talked to the estate, and the people running the estate are his kids. It's his daughter and his son.
- 1:59:11Matt Kindt: And then,
- 1:59:13Matt Kindt: So I was talking to them, and then there was such reverence for the original books, and then for their dad, and for the work, and they were telling me stories about them and everything, and then… and then,
- 1:59:24Matt Kindt: And I felt good about it, because I was like, oh, let's turn in an outline, here's… here's some ideas, here's… and then I felt like they were…
- 1:59:32Matt Kindt: protecting me, but also, like, making sure that it… it was right, you know? And I wasn't gonna do something that was…
- 1:59:39Matt Kindt: disrespectful to him or the property and everything, because I'm such a huge fan of it. The last thing I want to do is
- 1:59:46Matt Kindt: honestly, the last thing I want to do is, like, kind of work on… on it, or be a part of that. You know what I mean? I… I just want to be a fan of it sometimes, and so this is one of those cases, but… but also, I was like, I was like, maybe if it's said… because it's said in modern day, we don't see Smiley, you know, you sort of… there's…
- 2:00:03Matt Kindt: his fingerprints around it a little bit, hints of him and everything, but it's… it's all new, set in this universe with all this stuff he set… he…
- 2:00:11Matt Kindt: created, so, like, all the toys and the cool stuff is there, but I can… you can sort of tell a new story, and it's in comics. Anyway, I, yeah, I… I was happy with how it turned out, and they were happy with how it turned out, and that's all that really matters, like, are the kids happy?
- 2:00:25Tad Eggleston: I mean, I can't wait for the third issue. I'm happy with how the first two have turned out, and like…
- 2:00:31Tad Eggleston: The next issue is, I think, a week from Wednesday, and, like, I'm salivating already.
- 2:00:37Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, I'm glad, I'm glad you're liking it, and that one I have to sort of block out. I was like, I hope to God people love it. I know that the kids liked it, and that, at the end of the day, is all they'.
- 2:00:47Tad Eggleston: I mean, frankly, I mean, particularly because I imagine, at least on some level, it was work for hire. That's your audience. If they liked it, you're good.
- 2:00:58Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, it was work for hire, but I was like, I don't need work for hire, I don't do it anymore, you know? I was like, I don't need the hassle or the… and that was… I don't really need it. I don't want notes, you know? But this one is too…
- 2:01:11Matt Kindt: Too fun not to try.
- 2:01:14Tad Eggleston: You know, I haven't… I haven't had Ibrahim on the air since… since…
- 2:01:18Tad Eggleston: this? Like, how did you pair with him? Because he is, like, the perfect…
- 2:01:24Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, Darkworth set it all up, it was all through them, you know, it was just,
- 2:01:28Matt Kindt: All right.
- 2:01:28Tad Eggleston: Right, so who was editing and was smart enough to go, Matt Kent and Abraham Mustang?
- 2:01:33Matt Kindt: That's a good question, that's a good… I have no idea where the name… I think they sent… I think they sent the estate a few different options, and then they chose… and he was picked from all of them, you know.
- 2:01:45Matt Kindt: I think that's how it worked, but I can't… I don't know… I don't know all the details.
- 2:01:49Tad Eggleston: He's definitely one of those… completely underrated storytellers out there. His… his solo work is…
- 2:01:59Tad Eggleston: I don't know if you've read it all, if you haven't…
- 2:02:01Matt Kindt: He did a Cano Monte Cristo thing, or whatever, I thought was really cool.
- 2:02:05Tad Eggleston: Count and sin.
- 2:02:06Matt Kindt: I'd never worked with them before, so…
- 2:02:08Matt Kindt: Yeah. He's such a good guy.
- 2:02:11Tad Eggleston: Such a good…
- 2:02:11Matt Kindt: Cool, he did a great cutaway view, I was like, what? And when I was writing it, I was actually writing for me to draw, forgetting that I wasn't drawing it. And then, so a lot of the script was like… I was like, oh boy, I hope you don't mind cutaway views and cool…
- 2:02:25Matt Kindt: But, no, he has a real good sport about it, so… Yeah.
- 2:02:29Tad Eggleston: So, what's your favorite LeCary novel?
- 2:02:33Matt Kindt: Boy, it's a good question. Tinker Tailor's probably my favorite, just because.
- 2:02:38Tad Eggleston: It's so good.
- 2:02:38Matt Kindt: There's so much… and I can keep… I can re-read it, because I forget. I was like, what hap… how does all this tie together? I forget.
- 2:02:46Tad Eggleston: The whole Karma trilogy.
- 2:02:48Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 2:02:49Tad Eggleston: I mean, I like all the Smiley books, even the new one, but the Carla trilogy.
- 2:02:53Matt Kindt: Yeah, those are my favorite. I read them all in chronological order.
- 2:02:57Matt Kindt: all of his books, you know, just to sort of… I wanted to make sure I tried to capture the voice through osmosis, you know, so I tried to not write as me, necessarily. And so I reread everything, took a ton of notes. I've never done that much
- 2:03:12Matt Kindt: work.
- 2:03:13Matt Kindt: for a comic before in my life. It's usually just making stuff up, it's easy.
- 2:03:19Tad Eggleston: Do you read, McCarron?
- 2:03:22Tad Eggleston: the Slough House books.
- 2:03:24Matt Kindt: No, I've been…
- 2:03:25Tad Eggleston: Slow Horse.
- 2:03:26Matt Kindt: I've been watching the TV show, and then Brian, reads all the books, he tells me they're great, and that I like them and everything, and then I just haven't yet, because…
- 2:03:33Tad Eggleston: I'm listening to the books… er, well, I was re-listening to the first one, and now listening to the later ones, because,
- 2:03:41Tad Eggleston: I watched the series after, Dennis Hopeless told me I needed to. Yeah.
- 2:03:48Tad Eggleston: No, it's good.
- 2:03:49Tad Eggleston: One of the things I like that they did in the series… Like, the novels, like…
- 2:03:57Tad Eggleston: you can… you can tell that they're, like, using different names, but kind of referring to Smiley-type stuff.
- 2:04:05Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 2:04:06Tad Eggleston: And in the TV show, they just use Smiley.
- 2:04:10Tad Eggleston: You know, he gets referenced on a regular basis, and I love it.
- 2:04:15Tad Eggleston: They… they do feel like both the novels and they feel like they belong in the same universe. The MI5 and MI6 are the same universe.
- 2:04:24Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah. No, it's great, and I will… I think I'm waiting for this show to be done.
- 2:04:30Matt Kindt: And then I'll go read the books, because then there'll be no more show, and then I'll still have.
- 2:04:34Tad Eggleston: That's fair.
- 2:04:34Matt Kindt: He'll get my fix, you know.
- 2:04:35Tad Eggleston: I mean, he's still reading… writing the books, so, I mean…
- 2:04:38Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 2:04:38Tad Eggleston: B.
- 2:04:39Matt Kindt: Yeah, that's… yeah, that's true.
- 2:04:40Tad Eggleston: It'll be a while on either one.
- 2:04:42Tad Eggleston: We'll see.
- 2:04:43Matt Kindt: But.
- 2:04:44Tad Eggleston: Alright, we're gonna get to the two closing questions, just because if I want you to be my friend Matt Kint, I can't keep you forever and ever.
- 2:04:53Matt Kindt: Yes, that would be great. I have… I have to go back and work some more tonight.
- 2:04:57Tad Eggleston: And I have to proctor the ACT tomorrow.
- 2:05:00Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 2:05:00Tad Eggleston: Also.
- 2:05:01Matt Kindt: Yeah.
- 2:05:02Matt Kindt: Yeah, alright, I won't trade you.
- 2:05:06Tad Eggleston: Well, that's good, because nobody would want to see my drawing.
- 2:05:09Matt Kindt: That's good, and I wouldn't know what to do.
- 2:05:12Tad Eggleston: king draws better than I do.
- 2:05:16Tad Eggleston: I've been doing this podcast for… for…
- 2:05:23Tad Eggleston: like, not even five years now, and I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone. The number of experiences I have, like, hanging out with Matt Kint for two and a half hours.
- 2:05:34Tad Eggleston: Two days after I knew it was possible that I could hang out with Matt Kent at all… .
- 2:05:41Matt Kindt: Cool, dude, I, it's been great.
- 2:05:44Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. Like, my life is just filled with all of these surreal…
- 2:05:50Tad Eggleston: talked to me 10 years ago and tell me it's gonna happen, unbelievable experiences. But I've also discovered that, like, everybody in comics…
- 2:06:01Tad Eggleston: has those experiences, or feels that Twilight Zone. So I've started collecting
- 2:06:06Tad Eggleston: experiences. Tell me one surreal. You have to pinch yourself to believe that it actually happened.
- 2:06:13Tad Eggleston: Experience that you've had.
- 2:06:17Matt Kindt: Oh boy, let's see…
- 2:06:19Matt Kindt: So, you're… it's true, here's what I'll say about comics, is if you told me going into comics that it would provide the opportunities I've had over the course of my life, just, like, travel opportunities, you know, going to…
- 2:06:33Matt Kindt: to France, and all over Europe, and everything, and Anglem, I would say one of the… my favorite,
- 2:06:43Matt Kindt: one of my favorite memories… I have two memories. One is… I'll do… I'll make them real quick. One is, going to Paris, landing in Paris, getting in the car, the publisher picked me up, and then we're driving through town to the hotel, and then the radio's on. He's like.
- 2:06:58Matt Kindt: He's like, oh, they're talking about you right now on the radio. This is, like, my second book, Two Sisters, one of my earlier books. And I was like, what? He's like…
- 2:07:06Tad Eggleston: Which is so good.
- 2:07:07Matt Kindt: They're talking about,
- 2:07:08Tad Eggleston: I didn't even bring up Red Hannah tonight. We could do a whole episode on Red H.
- 2:07:12Matt Kindt: We'll do another one, we can actually talk about the books sometime, but that's… that's less interesting to me. But but yeah, they were talking about me and the books on the radio, in the car, right after we landed. I was like, what the heck's going on here? Second one is Luca, Italy. We were at this… they were like, oh, come to the theater tonight, there's gonna be…
- 2:07:31Matt Kindt: whatever, it was this big… it looked like an opera house, and it was the opening night of the convention, and I didn't… couldn't understand anything, and they're like, oh, go backstage, I don't know what's going on, you know, and
- 2:07:44Matt Kindt: They're, like,
- 2:07:46Matt Kindt: They're like, just go backstage and get in line. I was in line, I was with… I can't remember who was there, it was, like, Paul Pope, a bunch of other, like, big names.
- 2:07:52Tad Eggleston: He's a great guy.
- 2:07:53Matt Kindt: comic book people.
- 2:07:55Tad Eggleston: Positive.
- 2:07:55Matt Kindt: Yeah, we're totally…
- 2:07:56Tad Eggleston: That's another one of those weird things.
- 2:07:59Matt Kindt: They're, like, way behind the stage till they call you your name, so I was like, okay, I don't know what's going on, it's a crowd out there. And then, so everybody, they call the names, you walk out, and so they call my name, I walk out, and they hand me some kind of…
- 2:08:10Matt Kindt: award, some kind of plaque or something in a velvet box and everything. I was like, what's happening here? What is going on? I don't know what it was, you know? And then, literally, like,
- 2:08:20Matt Kindt: And then there was the convention, you do all the… all that stuff. But literally, like, a month later, I'm reading an old interview with Jack Kirby in the Comics Journal, and they're talking about, whatever, this is, like, from the 80s, this interview.
- 2:08:32Matt Kindt: And Jack Kirby's talking about, yeah, I… they invited me to Luca, and then I came, and I was on stage at this place, and… and then they… they're like, go, and then they call me out, and then they give me this award,
- 2:08:45Matt Kindt: after they called my name, I had no idea what… what it was for, what they were doing, because of all the… I don't speak Italian. It literally was the same… he was describing the same experience I just had, like, a month earlier. Interesting. And I was like, that… that was the best. I was like, oh my god, I don't… I don't deserve it, but I was like, it's cool to be at least walking in the… whatever.
- 2:09:04Matt Kindt: You do.
- 2:09:05Tad Eggleston: You deserve it.
- 2:09:06Matt Kindt: And that's an amazing…
- 2:09:07Tad Eggleston: story.
- 2:09:07Matt Kindt: Of these greats, you know, but that's probably one of my favorites.
- 2:09:11Tad Eggleston: Love it.
- 2:09:12Tad Eggleston: Alright, last question. Tell me something you love.
- 2:09:16Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
- 2:09:22Tad Eggleston: But something that you love.
- 2:09:24Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you need them to, so you can talk more about it. And you can't say drone, because we just talked about it.
- 2:09:32Matt Kindt: Yeah, we would say don't drum… okay, oh, boy. Let's…
- 2:09:38Tad Eggleston: I mean, it would have been a good choice, but we just talked about it.
- 2:09:41Matt Kindt: Yeah, yeah. No, here's what… you know what I'm gonna say? I'll plug another friend of mine, Kyle Starks, I think is a talent.
- 2:09:49Tad Eggleston: Kyle's another regular on this podcast.
- 2:09:51Matt Kindt: Yeah, is he on the.
- 2:09:52Tad Eggleston: Big fan of Kyle Starks.
- 2:09:53Matt Kindt: So, so mad that he got on here before me. I was like, how dare.
- 2:09:57Tad Eggleston: Multiple times.
- 2:09:58Matt Kindt: But no, he… I just read his… he's doing…
- 2:10:01Tad Eggleston: He's another guy that had two of my favorite books that came out this week.
- 2:10:05Matt Kindt: Yeah, what came out? What was it? Plug on the…
- 2:10:08Tad Eggleston: Let me pull up the show notes from… from… I had to go 9 rather than 3. Normally, I do my top 3 books, and if I don't do 3, I have to go to 9, because…
- 2:10:18Tad Eggleston: like, I'm a baseball guy. He had both Where Monsters Lie, Dead End, I got my PDF from him, and End of Life Number 3.
- 2:10:28Matt Kindt: Nice. Yeah, those are both good. I read all these…
- 2:10:30Tad Eggleston: Fantastic.
- 2:10:30Matt Kindt: the PDFs, I'm reading them in the worst possible way. But, no, I would say get… Sex Castle is the first book… Oh, I love.
- 2:10:39Tad Eggleston: Sex Castle.
- 2:10:40Matt Kindt: That was the one that got me onto his work, and then we became friends, and then,
- 2:10:46Matt Kindt: he's got a new one, he's gonna launch a Kickstarter this summer, and he sent me a PDF of it, and I can't remember the name of it, it's like something… it's a…
- 2:10:53Matt Kindt: Girl's name…
- 2:10:54Matt Kindt: stole my heart, and I have, like, 2 days to get it back or something. You'll see it this summer, but he's.
- 2:10:59Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to remember if he mentioned it, I mean, he literally sent out a Patreon today.
- 2:11:07Matt Kindt: Yeah, I wonder if he's.
- 2:11:08Tad Eggleston: We're talking about not having anything, like, on the slate right now.
- 2:11:12Tad Eggleston: Which is frustrating for him.
- 2:11:13Matt Kindt: Hmm.
- 2:11:14Matt Kindt: I'm doing a, well, I'm doing a variant cover for it, for him, but it's like a 40- or 50-page graphic novel, but I read it, and I was like, his art, he's drawing it too, so my favorite stuff is that he writes and draws.
- 2:11:26Tad Eggleston: Me too.
- 2:11:26Matt Kindt: something about the goofiness of his art, and I mean goofiness in the best possible way.
- 2:11:32Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
- 2:11:33Matt Kindt: That goes with the writing, which seems ridiculous, and it's…
- 2:11:36Matt Kindt: It's violent and funny, but there's… he's… there's a secret…
- 2:11:41Matt Kindt: ingredient… there's real heart and real feeling in it that, like, sort of catches you off guard because it's funny and it's weird-looking, and then he sucker punches you with, like, these feelings that, are so shocking to me. I haven't read… I don't really read any comics like that.
- 2:11:57Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I… I adore Kyle Starks. I will say that the only time I like… Kyle Starks.
- 2:12:06Tad Eggleston: writing with a different artist, as much as I like Kyle Starks all by himself, is when Chris Schweiser is drawing him. Sidekick's Trigger Keaton is…
- 2:12:15Matt Kindt: It was so good, and yeah, he's…
- 2:12:17Tad Eggleston: Not just because it's the only other Tad Thaddeus I have ever met.
- 2:12:22Matt Kindt: Apparently.
- 2:12:23Tad Eggleston: And they have a friend named Thaddeus who's a tad, but, like, I have no Thaddeuses in my life, I have known Tad's in my life, I have never met a Thaddeus that was a Tad other than me until the character in Six Sidekicks is Trigger Keaton. So, my wife also made me a sweatshirt.
- 2:12:40Tad Eggleston: that has… there's a… there's a panel where… where… where Tad's at the…
- 2:12:46Tad Eggleston: at the wheel of his car, going, hi, my name is Tad.
- 2:12:50Matt Kindt: No, that's great.
- 2:12:53Tad Eggleston: They debuted that at C2E2 last year, and went to both of their booths to show off.
- 2:12:57Matt Kindt: Your t-shirt game is strong, dude.
- 2:13:01Tad Eggleston: This is the advantage of marrying a printmaker.
- 2:13:03Matt Kindt: Yeah, no, that's great.
- 2:13:05Tad Eggleston: My sugar mama is a… is a… is a… is a public school art teacher who's also a printmaker, so I'm in good shape.
- 2:13:13Matt Kindt: That's great, it's a dangerous combination, I love it.
- 2:13:15Tad Eggleston: I do too.
- 2:13:19Tad Eggleston: Stick around for a second after we're off air, but for 22 panels, this has been Matt Kent, and so much fun. I was so nervous earlier today, and we just fell into it, and it's been fantastic, and we will see you after the next page.