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With Great Power #323... 22 Panels with Benjamin Marra · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest today is Ben Mara, who's, it was a, Instagram cartoon first, right? Yep.
• 0:15
  Tad Eggleston: What we mean by yesterday has had two volumes now collected by Fanographics. I've read them both in the last week, and the first part I'll say is they're very different, which makes me very much looking forward to the third volume.
• 0:32
  Tad Eggleston: Because I feel like something's going on that… and I wouldn't let… I thought to myself, oh, you know, I could probably go to his Instagram page and figure it out, but that didn't seem like as much fun. I'll let… I'll let the…
• 0:47
  Tad Eggleston: The listeners do that. Hi, Mom. Hi, John. Hi, Britt. Hi, Adam. Those are the listeners. There might be a couple more.
• 0:55
  Tad Eggleston: I figure we've got few enough, I should, I should…
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: I should say hello by, by, by, by name. Sure.
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: So, welcome, Ben, how are you?
• 1:08
  Ben Marra: Thanks, good to be here. I'm… I'm doing well. Yeah, how are you doing?
• 1:12
  Tad Eggleston: It's the end of my school year, so, like…
• 1:16
  Tad Eggleston: or, well, not the end of my school year. My school year is done, so, like, I am now into that, you know, 3 or 4 days of, oh, wait a minute, I don't have to get up in the morning, that sort of thing. And then I'll start really relaxing soon.
• 1:34
  Ben Marra: Good.
• 1:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, May for teachers, I mean, if you don't know any teachers, May for teachers is… Hair-raising.
• 1:46
  Ben Marra: I can only imagine.
• 1:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, I work in high school, and everybody's like, but I need an A, and it's like, yes, but you have a D, and a week left.
• 1:59
  Ben Marra: Right. What are we gonna do?
• 2:01
  Tad Eggleston: We might be able to get you to a C.
• 2:08
  Ben Marra: So maybe my book is, you know.
• 2:11
  Ben Marra: It's something that you can relate to a little bit.
• 2:13
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, in lots of ways.
• 2:17
  Tad Eggleston: So, I'm gonna, like, normally, I would say, like, give me the front counter pitch for your book, but I'm… I'm gonna have to ask you for front counter pitches for both volumes, because I think…
• 2:31
  Tad Eggleston: I think you have to pitch them differently, at least until we have the third volumes, where we can say it all… all comes together, assuming that the third volume's where that happens. If it's the fourth or fifth volume, that… that could be the thing, too. But yeah, give me the front… front… front counter pitch for… for Volume 1.
• 2:50
  Ben Marra: Alright, so what we mean by yesterday is my daily comic that I started in 2020. It's about a high school teacher.
• 2:59
  Ben Marra: who… Concludes his day, and a lot of…
• 3:07
  Ben Marra: madcap adventure ensues for his evening, and it just sort of charts his,
• 3:14
  Ben Marra: Kind of like a 12 to 16 hour…
• 3:19
  Ben Marra: Period of time in his life.
• 3:21
  Ben Marra: But it's, like, a 400-page book.
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, it was a little jarring to me when I realized that I was on page 300, and we were only, like…
• 3:31
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe 10 hours into his… into his story? I'm like…
• 3:37
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 3:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so we're really doing this in real time. Right.
• 3:41
  Ben Marra: Yeah, so it's, it moves at a… at what I like to call a glacial pace, and,
• 3:48
  Ben Marra: you know, when I was… when I was doing the comic, it was… I was able to kind of do it as a stream of conscious…
• 3:54
  Ben Marra: Story and drawing exercise.
• 3:56
  Ben Marra: I wanted to see, you know, if,
• 3:59
  Ben Marra: I could draw a lot looser and do a daily comic strip as a challenge to myself, and it's kind of morphed into being…
• 4:08
  Ben Marra: how I do comics now. But, the second volume, the pitch would be… It's a,
• 4:17
  Ben Marra: Post, post, post-apocalyptic… A world where,
• 4:23
  Ben Marra: the Earth is about to be exploded by a dying sun. It's sort of, it's directly inspired by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.
• 4:35
  Ben Marra: And, it follows the,
• 4:38
  Ben Marra: adventures of a anti-hero named Ninkujel, who, is a… Dastardly human being.
• 4:50
  Ben Marra: And causes all sorts of mayhem and harm to those he comes across.
• 4:55
  Ben Marra: In trying… to, gain his selfish ends, I guess. So his…
• 5:05
  Ben Marra: It's actually… his full name is Ninkajal the Self.
• 5:09
  Ben Marra: And it's because he's just, like, all about himself.
• 5:13
  Tad Eggleston: I… I like that.
• 5:15
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if I picked up on the fact that it was a post-apocalyptic world. It felt very…
• 5:21
  Tad Eggleston: D&D to me.
• 5:22
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean, well.
• 5:24
  Ben Marra: early D&D is directly inspired by Jack Vance in many ways, including the Bansian Magic system.
• 5:31
  Ben Marra: But, a lot of early D&D had, like, a lot of science fiction elements blended into its fantasy.
• 5:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 5:39
  Ben Marra: But… it wasn't something I was explicit about in the story at all, I'm letting you know.
• 5:47
  Tad Eggleston: Correct.
• 5:47
  Ben Marra: know now that that is sort of the setting.
• 5:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you're just trying to make me go re-read it now.
• 5:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna… gonna have to see if I can find…
• 5:58
  Tad Eggleston: find what I missed, that I was.
• 5:59
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 6:00
  Tad Eggleston: to see to go, oh…
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it makes some sense that, like, post-apocalypse, we'd go back to medieval times, but…
• 6:08
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 6:10
  Ben Marra: Yeah, the, Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun is also a,
• 6:15
  Ben Marra: big influence. I know that Wolf has said that he set Book of the New Sun in Jack Vance's Dying Earth, setting, or was directly inspired by it as well. So yeah, that's my vision for a lot of medieval fantasy.
• 6:31
  Ben Marra: Is that it's, like, actually millions and millions of years in the future when we've…
• 6:36
  Ben Marra: collapsed, and collapsed several times as a species, and have gone back and rebuilt and become medieval again.
• 6:43
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like you're getting into Wheel of Time territory now.
• 6:46
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that Wheel of Time explores that sort of idea as well, although I'm not as versed in that lore.
• 6:53
  Tad Eggleston: I did read all of that, whereas…
• 6:56
  Ben Marra: Did you?
• 6:56
  Tad Eggleston: Vance is… Vance is still on my… my… my to-read list, and as is a lot of the…
• 7:04
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I'm a child of the 80s, so…
• 7:08
  Ben Marra: Like… Me too.
• 7:09
  Tad Eggleston: Most of the sci-fi fantasy That lots of people talk about was, like, the…
• 7:16
  Tad Eggleston: either during my childhood, childhood, or before I was born,
• 7:22
  Tad Eggleston: And I have enough interest beyond sci-fi fantasy that it's like… I just haven't fit it all in yet.
• 7:29
  Ben Marra: It's a lot to consume.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: It is. It is. The people that I know, like, they're only…
• 7:35
  Tad Eggleston: their only hyperfixation… the people that I know that have read all of that stuff, it's like, all they read was sci-fi fantasy when we were growing up, whereas, like, I do my Wheel of Time, and then I do my Salinger, and then I'd do my Kerouac, and then I… and then I'd do some, like, Elmore Leonard, and some John LeCare, then I'd do another…
• 7:57
  Ben Marra: Spread it out. Yeah, a lot of genre, and then some, you know, real literature, or like, you know, literature, literature, and then, you know…
• 8:04
  Tad Eggleston: So, so I, I feel like I have… like, my hyperfixation is good writing, or good comics, and… Same. And therefore, therefore, I, I have…
• 8:16
  Tad Eggleston: Passing knowledge of all of the genres, but not necessarily
• 8:22
  Tad Eggleston: Deep, deep. And I know Jack Vance is one that I need to get into. My dad read a lot of Jack Vance. Oh, did he? But I haven't yet, yeah.
• 8:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow, yeah. In fact, in fact, he would, like… it makes it even more surprising that I haven't actually.
• 8:38
  Tad Eggleston: read them, like, when I had friends that were heavy duty, like, because our house was, like, the lending library for people into sci-fi fantasy in particular, you know, because we had a better selection than the local library.
• 8:55
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 8:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, when I had friends who were serious into
• 9:00
  Tad Eggleston: into sci-fi fantasy, he would sometimes track down, like, the… I think the Leon S trilogy was barely in print at the time, so he'd track it down for them for their birthdays.
• 9:13
  Tad Eggleston: And somehow, I never actually read it, which is something that I need to fix, and I'm on summer break, so maybe that'll go on my summer reading list.
• 9:22
  Ben Marra: If you really like… pros…
• 9:24
  Ben Marra: then you'll like Jack Vance, because he's, like, just this master wordsmith, and, that's why I read him. I mean.
• 9:33
  Ben Marra: I read him because of his prose, because it, like, tickles my brain in a way that very few, if any, other writers do. And, but also his imagination just completely blows my mind. Like, I can't believe
• 9:49
  Ben Marra: what he comes up with in his imagination, it just is like…
• 9:53
  Ben Marra: it just is mind-shattering a lot of the time, and as somebody who has, like, a lot of time to spend in his imagination, I'm often not…
• 10:05
  Ben Marra: impressed by what I come up with, or what other people come up with, and feel like
• 10:12
  Ben Marra: I've seen it all before, but with Vance, it's like, I can't believe that… I'm, like, always surprised and astonished by what he's able to come up with.
• 10:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's about as ringing of an endorsement as one could possibly give, so…
• 10:26
  Tad Eggleston: So, it just went on my shortlist. But yeah. So… hmm.
• 10:34
  Tad Eggleston: Where am I gonna go now? I'm gonna… I keep forgetting to ask this question. It used to be a standard one for people that I was talking to for the first time, but…
• 10:45
  Tad Eggleston: I talk to enough people for the second, third, fourth time now that I sometimes forget for the first-timers. But you're a first-timer, so I'm gonna say, give me your comics biography. And I want to specify specifically, not your bibliography, we might get into that later, we'll probably get into that later, but your biography. Like, tell me about what you remember reading as a kid. Some people remember that first
• 11:10
  Tad Eggleston: book that they bought themselves. Tell me about the books that, like, formed you as a reader, formed you as a creator.
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: you know, made you decide, hey, this is something I want to do, or oh, I can do this, whatever.
• 11:26
  Ben Marra: Right, so… alright.
• 11:29
  Ben Marra: I grew up on, Tintin. I read… I learned how to read, reading Tintin. Those books were really important to me. I remember…
• 11:39
  Ben Marra: Vividly, like, sort of in the back of
• 11:42
  Ben Marra: My parents' car going on a, family trip, like, road trip, and reading, and like, and, like, actually.
• 11:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 11:51
  Ben Marra: learning the.
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I need to ask really quickly, where did you grow up?
• 11:55
  Ben Marra: So I grew up, in the Hudson Valley in New York.
• 11:58
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 11:58
  Ben Marra: Just, north of New York City, right on.
• 12:02
  Tad Eggleston: I only ask because I have a friend who grew up on Tintin, but he also, when he was growing up on Tintin, his…
• 12:13
  Tad Eggleston: Dad was… was stationed in Belgium.
• 12:16
  Ben Marra: Oh, that's like… you're gonna access Tintin very easily there, for sure.
• 12:20
  Tad Eggleston: That's right.
• 12:22
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I'm sure that's, like, blooded everywhere. Yeah, there were, like, these oversized sort of collections, like Van Dessonet kind of style books in the U.S. I don't think that they still are available in that size, in that format anymore, but…
• 12:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, hopefully they'll come back. I feel like…
• 12:40
  Ben Marra: Yeah, maybe.
• 12:41
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like, like, like, Asterix is getting…
• 12:44
  Ben Marra: Oh, yeah.
• 12:45
  Tad Eggleston: right now, I feel like there's something else reprinting, or, you know, actually, Fanographics. Fanagraphics has finally reprinted Cordo Maltese. Cordo Maltese has been out of print for a while.
• 12:58
  Ben Marra: That's…
• 12:58
  Ben Marra: Really great news.
• 13:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, yeah, it would be great to see Tintin back in print in the.
• 13:06
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean, it's the best.
• 13:08
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 13:09
  Ben Marra: So, yeah, I…
• 13:10
  Tad Eggleston: them.
• 13:11
  Tad Eggleston: There's so many tests.
• 13:13
  Tad Eggleston: I want to tell you about the first.
• 13:14
  Ben Marra: the first comic book that I ever bought myself, which was… I was on the way out of town.
• 13:23
  Ben Marra: In my parents' car again, on a family road trip, and my parents stopped in front of, like, double-parked in front of the mom-and-pop comic book store in my downtown, and said, run in and grab, like, a comic to buy to read for the drive.
• 13:38
  Tad Eggleston: The road trip.
• 13:39
  Ben Marra: and gave me, like, $3 or something like that. So I went in there, and I bought…
• 13:43
  Ben Marra: the first issue of a comic called Space Beaver.
• 13:47
  Ben Marra: Which is…
• 13:48
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've heard of this, but I don't think I've read it.
• 13:51
  Ben Marra: So it was during the black and white boom, the TMNT fallout of anthropomorphic…
• 13:56
  Tad Eggleston: It definitely sounds like something that would fall. Right.
• 14:00
  Ben Marra: But this was the self… well, I don't know if it was self-published, but it was a very independent publisher, I think it was a comic book shop publisher.
• 14:08
  Ben Marra: of a young teenage talent named Derek Robertson.
• 14:13
  Ben Marra: Who went on.
• 14:14
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 14:15
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it was his first comic that he did as a 17-year-old, or something like that.
• 14:20
  Ben Marra: And he diligently worked on this comic for…
• 14:24
  Ben Marra: I don't know, 7 or 8 issues, and then he eventually completed it many years later.
• 14:30
  Ben Marra: After he had success in mainstream comics.
• 14:33
  Ben Marra: But, yeah, it was… it was wild, so I picked that up, and that completely transformed me, because it was this hyper-violent
• 14:41
  Ben Marra: comic that… really, like, traumatized and excited me at the same time.
• 14:49
  Ben Marra: So I was super into it, and it made me really inspired to draw, and so I copied, like, a lot of panels from that. But, that was, like, a really big deal. And so I… after I bought that, then I fell into, like, TMNT and, like, the whole black and white boom.
• 15:04
  Ben Marra: And then I graduated and started collecting, like, Marvel comics, like X-Men and stuff like that, when Jim Lee was sort of…
• 15:12
  Ben Marra: On his ascent.
• 15:15
  Ben Marra: During some, like, the crazy, sort of, Wolverine and Psylocke adventures. Right.
• 15:21
  Ben Marra: And, then I was sort of hooked for good.
• 15:25
  Ben Marra: And… I was… yeah, for several years, I…
• 15:30
  Ben Marra: Like, obsessed over comics, and drew comics, and drew it in my sketchbook non-stop, and…
• 15:36
  Ben Marra: just wanted to… I just… I didn't even think about it as, like, really a career. It always sort of seemed like it could be something that I could do.
• 15:43
  Ben Marra: Later, because art was always something that I thought,
• 15:47
  Ben Marra: was something that I would pursue, but,
• 15:50
  Ben Marra: I fell out of it a little bit, and then I came back to it when I was in art school.
• 15:54
  Ben Marra: And… yeah, I just, I just,
• 16:00
  Ben Marra: was, like, totally in the… in the vertigo, golden age, heyday. That was, like, a big time for me. You know, I read… I was obsessed with, like, Frank Miller growing up.
• 16:12
  Ben Marra: And then…
• 16:15
  Tad Eggleston: The thing that…
• 16:16
  Tad Eggleston: what that's like. I didn't go to hundreds of comic stores tracking down my Frank Miller Daredevil run.
• 16:23
  Ben Marra: Right, that's happening.
• 16:24
  Tad Eggleston: definitely not something I did, only to have the collected Frank Miller Daredevil be released, like…
• 16:33
  Tad Eggleston: 4 months after I finally tracked up.
• 16:35
  Ben Marra: Oh man, those original issues are so much better than the.
• 16:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, I'm very happy to have them, but, like, I was tracking them down to read them.
• 16:44
  Ben Marra: Oh, I get it.
• 16:45
  Tad Eggleston: It was the era before there were really, like…
• 16:47
  Tad Eggleston: a handful of Vertigo books got collected, some of them, like… Cerebus was being collected.
• 16:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Like, I mean, you remember that era where, like, the publishers somehow believed that… that collections would cut down on sales?
• 17:08
  Ben Marra: Yeah, they didn't really understand that business model at all. They were really innocent to, like, get into that. It's very strange.
• 17:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, yeah, I just… and, like, and mind you.
• 17:21
  Tad Eggleston: Hundreds of stores over, like, 3 years, despite the fact that the reason I was looking for it is, like, I had half of them from my Uncle Adam's collection.
• 17:32
  Ben Marra: Oh, no.
• 17:32
  Tad Eggleston: And I discovered, oh, all of my favorite Daredevil issues are written by this guy, Frank Miller.
• 17:39
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 17:40
  Ben Marra: Man, I love those comments.
• 17:41
  Tad Eggleston: But it was also roughly pre-inter… like, internet was… like, by the end of the search, I knew what numbers I was looking for, because the internet had… and for that matter, even Man Without Fear, which is still the best Daredevil research on the web, has been around since, like, the late 90s.
• 17:59
  Tad Eggleston: But my search started before it popped up.
• 18:03
  Tad Eggleston: So even when it popped up, he was still filling in the information, because it was… there was no e… you know, there was no easy database for him to go find it. Like, now, you can find all of the Indicia on any Daredevil issue ever. He's got every Daredevil appearance in any other issue. He's got interviews, blah blah blah.
• 18:22
  Ben Marra: Whoa.
• 18:22
  Tad Eggleston: time, it was in its infancy.
• 18:25
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 18:25
  Tad Eggleston: He still had the list of stuff that he needed to know stuff about.
• 18:29
  Ben Marra: Holy smokes.
• 18:30
  Tad Eggleston: But it was because of him that I finally actually was able to bookend. Until then, I was just like.
• 18:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because, you know, lots of shops aren't comfortable with you opening the bags in the shop, that sort of thing. That was also an era that didn't have the names of creators on the front of books.
• 18:49
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 18:49
  Tad Eggleston: Essentially, I was… I was looking for any Daredevil book between, like, $150 and… and, like, $2.50, because…
• 18:59
  Ben Marra: Yep.
• 18:59
  Tad Eggleston: I had Miller as early as, like, 160-something, and I had Miller as late as…
• 19:08
  Tad Eggleston: I think I had the second-to-last issue of Born Again, so, like.
• 19:12
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like that was $2.20-something.
• 19:14
  Ben Marra: I couldn't recall exactly.
• 19:15
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember right now.
• 19:16
  Ben Marra: Sounds right.
• 19:17
  Tad Eggleston: But so, like, for a long time, it's just like… and, like, mild disappointment if I opened it and it wasn't a Miller.
• 19:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 19:26
  Ben Marra: I don't blame you.
• 19:27
  Tad Eggleston: It's also because of that that I have what is now my favorite run of Daredevil.
• 19:32
  Tad Eggleston: Which is the Denny O'Neill, David Mazzicelli stuff in between.
• 19:37
  Tad Eggleston: Miller, and Born Again.
• 19:39
  Ben Marra: Oh, yeah, I love that stuff, too. I mean, yeah, David… I mean, don't get me wrong.
• 19:43
  Tad Eggleston: I love Born Again, but I feel like O'Neill gave Mazzicelli more room to breathe.
• 19:50
  Ben Marra: Yeah, yeah, I think that, I mean…
• 19:53
  Ben Marra: It's… it's funny, David… David Mazzuchelli was my thesis advisor in graduate.
• 19:59
  Ben Marra: for when I was, like, making a comic for my.
• 20:01
  Tad Eggleston: He's one of my white whales, so, like, if you still talk to him, and whatever, like, and he ever wants to talk…
• 20:11
  Tad Eggleston: Comics on a podcast. I hope that I impress you enough.
• 20:14
  Ben Marra: I mean, I don't… I… I haven't talked to him in years, but, he's, yeah, I don't know, he's… he's… I don't know how often he does interviews, so…
• 20:25
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think he does them very often at.
• 20:27
  Ben Marra: No, I don't think he does. I don't think he does.
• 20:29
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't know how much of that is, like, people don't reach out to him, because he's such an artist's artist.
• 20:35
  Ben Marra: He is. I mean, yeah, he's very much… I mean, I don't know if he's still teaching, but I took a class that he taught at the School of Visual Arts, so… Yeah. He's obviously out there playing.
• 20:47
  Tad Eggleston: I know he was…
• 20:48
  Ben Marra: Rhode Island?
• 20:49
  Tad Eggleston: installed design for a while, because I…
• 20:52
  Tad Eggleston: I had an email address, or I found him on faculty there, and therefore had an email address that I was never brave enough to use.
• 21:02
  Ben Marra: I think he was teaching the same class at both RISD and.
• 21:06
  Tad Eggleston: That makes sense.
• 21:08
  Ben Marra: and SVA, but I think the RISD one was, like, if I… this was, like, you know, 15 years ago.
• 21:14
  Ben Marra: He was, he would teach a one-semester comics class at RISD, but at SVA, it was actually a full year class. Oh, nice.
• 21:24
  Ben Marra: So, yeah, I don't know if he still does that or not, but,
• 21:29
  Ben Marra: I mean, he's willing to up, you know… about comics.
• 21:34
  Tad Eggleston: I, I always… I always quote, because, I don't know if you know Joe Illage at all, he was, editor at Milestone, he's done some…
• 21:44
  Tad Eggleston: And he was a bat editor for a while. He's done some writing in the last few years. I mean, he did sporadic writing like most editors do.
• 21:54
  Tad Eggleston: Sure. In previous years, but,
• 21:57
  Tad Eggleston: But I remember the first time I had him on, the way he described Mazzuclei, did you say it was Mazzuclei? You would know.
• 22:04
  Ben Marra: It's Mazzuclei, yeah, that's the Italian. And you have the CH in Italian words.
• 22:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'll start getting it right now.
• 22:11
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 22:12
  Tad Eggleston: That's how few people have talked to him.
• 22:15
  Ben Marra: I mean… It's.
• 22:17
  Tad Eggleston: He comes up on this podcast regularly, and nobody's pronounced it right.
• 22:22
  Ben Marra: I think I saw, like, 85% of people pronounce it, probably, so it's like…
• 22:28
  Tad Eggleston: But what Joe said about him is, like, yeah, he'll pop up every 10 years or so, drop the mic, and then vanish again. Yeah.
• 22:38
  Ben Marra: 100%. Yeah.
• 22:41
  Ben Marra: I wouldn't doubt that he's gonna, like, judge.
• 22:43
  Tad Eggleston: So I keep hoping that we're… I mean, I mean, Asterius Polyp was, like, 15 years ago now, so it's just…
• 22:48
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 22:49
  Tad Eggleston: Hoping that, like, there will suddenly be a David Mazzuclei graphic novel.
• 22:55
  Ben Marra: I mean, we can only hope.
• 22:57
  Ben Marra: You know, That was, like, that book that he did was, like, a…
• 23:02
  Ben Marra: A clinic on how to do combo.
• 23:03
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 23:04
  Ben Marra: Pretty incredible.
• 23:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, everything he does is… I mean…
• 23:09
  Tad Eggleston: This is a podcast about you, so don't let me go too deep into Mazza Kelly, but…
• 23:14
  Ben Marra: But, like.
• 23:15
  Tad Eggleston: Like, his Daredevil, like… He was the first one I saw do… the, like…
• 23:23
  Tad Eggleston: lighter-shaded Daredevil to do the motion.
• 23:26
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 23:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so you got to see the flips and whatnot, but he'd still.
• 23:31
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 23:31
  Tad Eggleston: To do it all in one panel.
• 23:33
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I agree.
• 23:34
  Tad Eggleston: The things he would do with shadows, or with angles.
• 23:38
  Ben Marra: Oh my god.
• 23:38
  Tad Eggleston: It's a breathtaking.
• 23:40
  Ben Marra: It's, like, unbelievable. Our figure work is, like.
• 23:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah!
• 23:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 23:46
  Ben Marra: and real.
• 23:47
  Ben Marra: It's really… it's really… it's just…
• 23:49
  Ben Marra: pure mastery, it's… it's pretty incredible stuff. I mean, I love his Daredevil stuff. I mean, I love his superhero stuff in general, but his… his Daredevil stuff is, the… the…
• 24:00
  Ben Marra: the born-again stuff is remarkable. Even the art that is… that…
• 24:04
  Ben Marra: the style, as it develops over the course of that story, is very interesting to see and watch, and just the story of the artwork is, like, incredible, like, how loose he kind of gets toward the end. It's just really beautiful stuff.
• 24:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 24:22
  Ben Marra: it doesn't… it doesn't get better than that. I mean, I feel like, for me.
• 24:25
  Ben Marra: Like, Steve Ditko is, like, the best superhero comics artist ever lost.
• 24:31
  Tad Eggleston: I liked Echo.
• 24:32
  Ben Marra: it goes, like, it sort of… for me, as I get older.
• 24:36
  Ben Marra: the more comics that I make.
• 24:39
  Ben Marra: DITCO, to me, becomes more and more higher on the pedestal.
• 24:43
  Ben Marra: But Matt Zuckelli's stuff… You can't get better than that. It's like…
• 24:49
  Tad Eggleston: I did.
• 24:50
  Ben Marra: Incredible.
• 24:51
  Tad Eggleston: Something that I hope that I'll do again, Chris Condon and I did a live read of a comic for an episode of 22 Panels, where neither one of us had read it before, and we just, like, literally read it together.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: on air, and it was an Ann Nesenti, Steve Ditko Daredevil issue.
• 25:10
  Ben Marra: Oh, wow, that's so cool.
• 25:12
  Ben Marra: Love that, man.
• 25:13
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, we could tell that, like, it was… Ann couldn't quite remember.
• 25:19
  Tad Eggleston: Because I've talked to Anne.
• 25:22
  Ben Marra: Okay.
• 25:23
  Tad Eggleston: But… but… we could tell that there was a certain amount of it that was Marvel-style, because… like…
• 25:30
  Tad Eggleston: we're just certain that Ann didn't come up with some of the crazy… stuff that…
• 25:36
  Ben Marra: I'm not surprised.
• 25:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, cause, like, it's like there's a robot…
• 25:43
  Tad Eggleston: Kid, but there's also a real kid, and it turns out there's a lot of the robot kids that are bombs, and, like.
• 25:51
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 25:52
  Tad Eggleston: They're all being carried in paper bags.
• 25:56
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 25:58
  Ben Marra: I mean…
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: Ain't the real one?
• 26:01
  Ben Marra: Wow, that's bonkers.
• 26:02
  Tad Eggleston: And I want to say the owl was involved, and some villain that we've never heard of.
• 26:08
  Ben Marra: That's amazing.
• 26:10
  Ben Marra: I wouldn't be surprised.
• 26:11
  Tad Eggleston: But that was… that was part of what we talked about. We're like, this is so batshit crazy, but at the same time, it's so fucking beautiful.
• 26:20
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I love that. I mean… Like… I feel like maybe Ditko…
• 26:27
  Ben Marra: If he doesn't agree with something in the script, maybe it's, like, goes against his, sort of, like, philosophies or something like that, he's just gonna do, like, what he thinks is the right thing to do.
• 26:38
  Ben Marra: So, I'm not… I wouldn't be surprised if he completely went rogue, and just, like.
• 26:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Did whatever you wanted. Well, but, I mean, what I did pick up talking to Anne was that she loved Steve.
• 26:52
  Tad Eggleston: like.
• 26:53
  Ben Marra: Oh, that's great.
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: sweetest… she called him the sweetest man. She loved… she loved being able to… so I… I have a feeling that it was every bit as much, they…
• 27:04
  Tad Eggleston: Because it was clearly a one-off. It wasn't even… I don't even think it was during Nesenti's run.
• 27:10
  Ben Marra: It could have been something that they…
• 27:11
  Tad Eggleston: So I think it was a fill-in fill, like, a pure fill-in.
• 27:15
  Ben Marra: I was just gonna.
• 27:15
  Tad Eggleston: And or, like, it was in the era where they would sometimes pay to have the evergreen issue that they could throw in a file for when they needed a fill-in. Right.
• 27:25
  Ben Marra: Absolutely.
• 27:26
  Ben Marra: Yeah, like…
• 27:28
  Ben Marra: Yeah, like, she might have written that script. They might have been like.
• 27:31
  Tad Eggleston: So I wouldn't be surprised…
• 27:33
  Ben Marra: Just for, like, us to keep in the drawer.
• 27:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was actually Steve needed money and said, let me draw something, and they paired him with Ann, and she said, well, what do you want to draw? And he's like, I've got this idea, and she's like, okay.
• 27:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 27:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 27:46
  Ben Marra: Probably… could very well happen that way.
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know. But yeah, she called him a very sweet man.
• 27:53
  Tad Eggleston: She said she always enjoyed… she's like, he was a little crazy sometimes.
• 27:57
  Tad Eggleston: As we all know.
• 28:00
  Tad Eggleston: But… but she called him a very, very sweet man. And actually, like, I've heard…
• 28:06
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't talked to him, but I was just reading… we just read, and it popped into my head because you were talking about trying to work
• 28:13
  Tad Eggleston: looser with the, the, another guy that did that, like, that was… that was what Michael Fife was doing.
• 28:21
  Tad Eggleston: for…
• 28:23
  Tad Eggleston: Copra was, like, to force himself to work loose, to force himself to work on a tight schedule and just go.
• 28:29
  Ben Marra: Yes.
• 28:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 28:31
  Ben Marra: You gotta, like, really gotta push for… push and move fast.
• 28:35
  Tad Eggleston: In… in… in one of the… One of the, like… Forwards or afterwards to… to…
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: to one of the… the collected volumes, he talked about the…
• 28:48
  Tad Eggleston: the correspondent relationship that he had with Steve Ditko. Apparently, he started writing with Steve Ditko when he was, like.
• 28:55
  Tad Eggleston: a teenager.
• 28:57
  Ben Marra: Yeah, he had it, he had a… I mean, I know, I know a lot of people that… that wrote
• 29:01
  Ben Marra: to Steve and got…
• 29:03
  Ben Marra: like, responses and stuff, but I think that, yeah, Fifei was talking to them regularly. Like, they had a pretty, pretty…
• 29:11
  Ben Marra: long correspondence.
• 29:13
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm pretty certain he's not even the only person I've heard say that. Like, Nico seemed to, to, to, like…
• 29:19
  Tad Eggleston: If you were polite and showed any talent as an artist, and you wanted to send him stuff to look at and whatnot, he'd respond to you.
• 29:27
  Ben Marra: Yeah, actually, one of my favorite artists, Ken Landgraf, wrote him with some sample drawings, and Ditko sent him back
• 29:38
  Ben Marra: A critique and a redraw of the same drawings that Langraph had sent.
• 29:46
  Ben Marra: The Ditko, and Ditko was like.
• 29:49
  Ben Marra: you're drawing too many lines. You gotta simplify it, like, bring it down. Like, the information, you gotta bring it way, way down. Because, like, Landgraph was doing all this cross-hatching, and it was just, like, all this rendering, all this, like, Neil Adams-type stuff.
• 30:02
  Ben Marra: And, Dicko's like, - it's gotta be, like.
• 30:06
  Ben Marra: Boom, boom, because, like, and he was like, for print reasons, it's gotta be this way. Also, for, like, legibility reasons, you know, and then I was just, like… it was, like, such a lesson to me.
• 30:18
  Ben Marra: in… cartooning. I was just like, this is all you ever really need to know about being a cartoonist.
• 30:26
  Tad Eggleston: I love it… I mean, it's teacher in me, I love it when anybody is willing to share… they're…
• 30:35
  Tad Eggleston: Their time and experience.
• 30:38
  Tad Eggleston: To help somebody else that wants to… Yeah.
• 30:43
  Tad Eggleston: Like, one of the…
• 30:44
  Ben Marra: Wants knowledge.
• 30:46
  Ben Marra: One of the.
• 30:46
  Tad Eggleston: guys that does Steve Lieber.
• 30:49
  Tad Eggleston: does, like, a monthly free portfolio review at a comic shop in Portland.
• 30:57
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. You just show up between, like, 1 and 6, and he'll sit there and look through your stuff and talk to you.
• 31:03
  Ben Marra: That's… that's super generous.
• 31:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so yeah, no, I, I… Yeah.
• 31:13
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, but I cut you off there. So, so we got up to, like, vertigo and stuff.
• 31:17
  Ben Marra: Oh, yeah.
• 31:18
  Tad Eggleston: Did you start really deciding that you wanted to do…
• 31:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I haven't actually asked, and, like, I haven't done the deep research on how much other stuff you've done beyond this, but when did you decide that you were gonna do more of the…
• 31:38
  Tad Eggleston: Art as a profession,
• 31:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm now looking at your webpage and going, this is very different from what I've seen so far.
• 31:50
  Tad Eggleston: And very cool.
• 31:51
  Ben Marra: So I, yeah, I went to school for art and, at Syracuse University, and then I went to grad school for art again, both for illustration degrees.
• 32:03
  Ben Marra: And, after I got out of school, I worked at a newspaper doing informational graphics for a while, and it was during that time when I was just, like.
• 32:16
  Ben Marra: really wanting to make comics, but I…
• 32:19
  Ben Marra: And I had done a comic for my thesis, but it wasn't… it was kind of a work in progress.
• 32:24
  Ben Marra: unfinished, you know, Never really… coalesced the way I wanted it to, and…
• 32:31
  Ben Marra: Something was sort of missing, and…
• 32:34
  Ben Marra: I, started watching a lot of Giallo films, 1970s Italian, Sex exploitation crime movies.
• 32:45
  Ben Marra: From the 7… yeah, from the 1970s, and…
• 32:49
  Ben Marra: I knew I wanted to make a Giallo comic, and…
• 32:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 32:54
  Ben Marra: I had been going to Barnes & Noble before my job started, and sort of perusing the graphic novel sections, and
• 33:03
  Ben Marra: I was really unhappy with what I was seeing in, like, the independent comic space at that point, because it was far…
• 33:12
  Ben Marra: different from…
• 33:14
  Ben Marra: you know, the independent comics that I had sort of grown up on and thought had a lot of teeth,
• 33:21
  Ben Marra: so I… I drew a Giallo comic called Night Business.
• 33:26
  Ben Marra: for several issues, and that was the first comic that I ever drew, night business number one, and self-published it. But doing that, getting… it felt like I was climbing Mount Everest, you know, trying to get those 22 to 24 pages done.
• 33:42
  Ben Marra: And when I finally finished it, I…
• 33:46
  Ben Marra: with the knowledge that I could do it, it became… the second issue became easier, and it just became way easier to just crank out these comics.
• 33:55
  Ben Marra: And so I did several…
• 33:58
  Tad Eggleston: at night business, at least the website parts of night business right now.
• 34:02
  Ben Marra: Yeah. It's pretty cool. So it's like a, yeah, it's like a 1980s…
• 34:06
  Ben Marra: Sex and violence thriller in the.
• 34:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 34:09
  Ben Marra: Urban sort of environment.
• 34:12
  Ben Marra: And, so I finished that 10 years after I had done 4 or 5 issues independently, and Phanographics published that.
• 34:22
  Ben Marra: A while ago, and then they collected my… other, sort of… various…
• 34:29
  Ben Marra: single-issue comics into one edition, and then I've been just doing comics ever since then.
• 34:36
  Ben Marra: And, yeah, I've just been, like… Kind of honing my craft.
• 34:43
  Ben Marra: over the past 15 years or so, and now I'm kind of reaching this stage where I'm, yeah, just drawing very quick and loose, and…
• 34:52
  Ben Marra: very inspired by, like, Gary Panther and, like.
• 34:55
  Ben Marra: Japanese, manga style that's, like, that's called Hedauma, which means, like, good but bad.
• 35:03
  Ben Marra: And, there's, yeah, a bunch of… so I'm inspired by, like, a lot of Japanese artists.
• 35:10
  Ben Marra: Or mangaka… And,
• 35:17
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I'm just trying to, like, draw as loose as I can and as much as I can, but I try to do… leverage time in a way that I didn't before, whereas…
• 35:26
  Ben Marra: I'd labor over a graphic novel for…
• 35:28
  Ben Marra: You know, 6 months to 12 months, and then eventually put it out.
• 35:34
  Ben Marra: now I just try to do one kind of daily strip a day, you know, comic strip a day, and
• 35:41
  Ben Marra: Then, at the end of the year, I have a graphic novel.
• 35:44
  Ben Marra: But it's, it's going to be, a 10-volume… Story, it's pretty long.
• 35:53
  Tad Eggleston: You have 10 volumes planned already?
• 35:55
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean, I'm… I've just started the fifth volume right now.
• 36:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, now that I think about it, yeah, because you started in 2020. Yeah. Are you actually doing one a day, or you take weekends off, or…
• 36:09
  Ben Marra: No, I do one a day. I mean, I take some str… like, when I had my second son, I,
• 36:14
  Ben Marra: I took, like, a year off to…
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 36:17
  Ben Marra: Just because having a newborn is a little crazy. But.
• 36:20
  Tad Eggleston: I have… I have been there, not for a while. My newborn has had a pair of his own newborns.
• 36:29
  Ben Marra: Oh, wow.
• 36:30
  Ben Marra: There you go. So yeah, I.
• 36:34
  Tad Eggleston: So I remember that part, too.
• 36:37
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it's a lot. So, so yeah, I've taken breaks, but, and I… and I do sometimes, like, after I conclude a volume, maybe I'll take, like, 6 months off or something like that, and then I'll start the next one. But I have it all mapped out, and it could even go beyond 10…
• 36:52
  Ben Marra: volumes, I have more stories to tell, but, it's just…
• 36:57
  Ben Marra: Right now, going to be a 10-volume sort of tale that is,
• 37:02
  Ben Marra: sort of loosely connected to one another. Some of it not so loosely.
• 37:10
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, you've got me hooked.
• 37:14
  Ben Marra: So… Good.
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 37:17
  Tad Eggleston: it's… it's… now… I mean, now you've got me both hooked, and I'm sitting there going, okay, don't you pull, like, a Robert Jordan on me and die before it's done.
• 37:30
  Ben Marra: I know, hopefully not.
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: Not in life.
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: given, not unless you've given copious notes to somebody.
• 37:36
  Ben Marra: Let me finish it.
• 37:37
  Tad Eggleston: for you.
• 37:38
  Ben Marra: Well, I actually think that it's, like… I mean, going full…
• 37:40
  Tad Eggleston: circle, that's the only reason I was able to get done… I was able to finish the Wheel of Time, is because…
• 37:46
  Ben Marra: man.
• 37:47
  Tad Eggleston: Robert was married to his editor, and when he got sick, she's like, okay…
• 37:52
  Tad Eggleston: You need to write these scenes that are so important that you need to write them, and you need the most detailed notes possible for everything else, because you're not gonna get this done.
• 38:02
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 38:03
  Ben Marra: I mean, I mean, I think that it was,
• 38:08
  Ben Marra: It's, like, an amazing sort of feat and story in and of itself for Brandon Sanderson to step in and…
• 38:14
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 38:15
  Ben Marra: Finish it the way he did. I mean, I haven't read those books, but from what I hear, he did a fantastic job.
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: Honestly, I… I think…
• 38:23
  Tad Eggleston: The 3 by Sanderson, I like as much as anything after the 4th or 5th by Jordan.
• 38:31
  Ben Marra: I mean, that's… that's like a remarkable… that should not have worked, and yet it did.
• 38:35
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 38:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, part of… I mean, Sanderson gives a ton of credit to Jordan, but I think… I think you also have to give credit
• 38:43
  Tad Eggleston: to Sanderson for… for pushing back, because in Jordan's head, it was one volume, and one of the first things he did was say, maybe this would have been one volume for Robert Jordan, but I am not Robert Jordan. I need three.
• 38:57
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 38:58
  Ben Marra: No, I think that was really smart, I mean… I mean, it's, it's like…
• 39:03
  Ben Marra: It's just an astonishing accomplishment, I just don't think that that…
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: And then…
• 39:07
  Ben Marra: Never work again.
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I was, like, following his blog during that time, because I was just fascinated by it. He's like…
• 39:14
  Tad Eggleston: And then he took a whole year, he's like, I know everybody wants them right away, but I'm not even gonna start writing for a year. I'm gonna take a year to do an in-depth reread of everything that's come.
• 39:26
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 39:27
  Tad Eggleston: before.
• 39:28
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 39:29
  Tad Eggleston: So that I can really get into the characters.
• 39:33
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean, that's…
• 39:34
  Tad Eggleston: That's…
• 39:35
  Ben Marra: It's… it's phenomenal. I don't… I don't know how he did it. And even just to have, like, the,
• 39:42
  Ben Marra: Like, kind of egoless…
• 39:46
  Ben Marra: approach to it, you know, being like, this is not mine, but I'm going to do my best to serve.
• 39:52
  Ben Marra: this other person's vision and do the best I can to honor it and help it be what it needs to be. I mean.
• 40:00
  Ben Marra: That's… that's just, like, I… I just don't know.
• 40:02
  Ben Marra: not many other writers could do that. I'm not a huge Sanderson fan, but I think that that is an incredible…
• 40:08
  Ben Marra: accomplished.
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I need to read more Sanderson. There's very little of his stuff that I've read and not liked, but I haven't been such a…
• 40:17
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't been, like, over the moon for it most of the time either, which is why, other than his Wheel of Time stuff.
• 40:24
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't gotten deep, deep.
• 40:27
  Tad Eggleston: But on the flip side, again, like…
• 40:31
  Tad Eggleston: I started reading The Wheel of Time when I was… 13.
• 40:37
  Tad Eggleston: Wow. And I think 3 volumes were out.
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: I… was probably… I think by the time I was out of middle school.
• 40:54
  Tad Eggleston: They were up to, I think, Fires of Heaven, so the fifth volume?
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. And then it started being way more time in between volumes.
• 41:03
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: All of those came out in about 5 years, maybe even 4.
• 41:08
  Ben Marra: Yeah. Seems like that's the typical trajectory.
• 41:12
  Tad Eggleston: And then it was, like, a year and a half, and then it was, like, two, and then it was…
• 41:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and I remember when it was…
• 41:21
  Tad Eggleston: you know, the 9th was, I think.
• 41:26
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember what the 9th was called. I get them confused sometimes at this point. But the 9th is…
• 41:32
  Ben Marra: Bye.
• 41:32
  Tad Eggleston: It had been, like, 2 or 3 years since the 9th.
• 41:35
  Tad Eggleston: and… and I was in college for the second time, so I was an adult with kids, right? I was, like… I was, like, 25? Maybe 26? Yeah. And… and I was actually living in a dorm room,
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: and I discovered that my RA was a Wheel of Time van, so…
• 41:56
  Ben Marra: Oh, whoa.
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: It came up in conversation, and we was like, you know, we haven't heard anything about when the next book's coming out, so we went looking, and Jordan had died 2 hours earlier.
• 42:05
  Ben Marra: What? Oh, no!
• 42:07
  Tad Eggleston: And it's like, holy shit.
• 42:10
  Tad Eggleston: But then, literally the next day, they announced Brandon Sanderson.
• 42:15
  Ben Marra: Oh, wow.
• 42:17
  Tad Eggleston: Because, you know, I think his name was actually Oliver. Oliver and Harriet had… had…
• 42:25
  Tad Eggleston: Planned it out, and even kind of picked their first choice.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So I don't even… I don't even think she'd buried him before Harriet called.
• 42:33
  Tad Eggleston: And left a message on Brandon's machine that Brandon initially thought had to be a joke.
• 42:39
  Ben Marra: Wow, that is… Astonishing. That's incredible.
• 42:44
  Tad Eggleston: But then there was a timeline, you know, because pretty quickly he said, yeah, it's not going to be one book, it's going to be three, and it's gonna be two years before you see the first one, because I need a year just to…
• 42:57
  Ben Marra: Just, like, for research.
• 42:59
  Tad Eggleston: Wrap my head around everything.
• 43:02
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I don't know how you do that either, because… It seems… I mean, I'm glad.
• 43:11
  Ben Marra: It seems like an impossible.
• 43:12
  Tad Eggleston: I'm glad that it happened.
• 43:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm really, really glad that it happened, but, like…
• 43:17
  Tad Eggleston: Nothing like that has happened with any of the other series that…
• 43:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they're finally doing some interesting…
• 43:25
  Tad Eggleston: Dune stuff outside of Herbert in comics?
• 43:30
  Ben Marra: Oh, okay.
• 43:32
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't read a lot of the Dune stuff in prose, but, like, everybody I know who…
• 43:39
  Tad Eggleston: who has, A, said Herbert.
• 43:42
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of petered off quickly, and, you know, the first volume's great, and the other one's not so much, and…
• 43:48
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean…
• 43:49
  Tad Eggleston: And he never got to the end.
• 43:52
  Ben Marra: Alright, I, I, I mean.
• 43:53
  Tad Eggleston: And every other attempt was like…
• 43:56
  Ben Marra: he got pretty weird, which was very, I think…
• 44:00
  Ben Marra: appropriate for the Dune sort of world and universe. But I remember, actually, Robert, not Robert Jordan, George R. Martin saying… he was talking to Frank Herbert about
• 44:15
  Ben Marra: writing Dune, and how…
• 44:18
  Ben Marra: Herbert kind of lost interest in it, and it sort of mirrors Martin's own sort of
• 44:24
  Ben Marra: Relationship with his own series, and how…
• 44:30
  Ben Marra: Herbert would keep on approaching his publisher with, like, new book ideas that weren't Dune, and the publisher would be like.
• 44:36
  Ben Marra: yeah, I can give you, like, X amount of dollars in advance for this, but I'll pay you triple in advance if you give me another Dune book. Dune book, and so… and so Frank Herbert was like, well, okay. And so, even though he wasn't super into it anymore, it was hard to sort of say no to, like, these huge sums of money.
• 44:56
  Ben Marra: That the publisher was willing to give him to write another Dune novel, and
• 45:04
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I think that Martin, it really discourages me about the Song of Ice and Fire ever being finished when I hear that about…
• 45:12
  Tad Eggleston: It does, kind of, doesn't it?
• 45:15
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 45:17
  Tad Eggleston: And while I get it, like…
• 45:20
  Tad Eggleston: I guess what frustrates me is…
• 45:26
  Tad Eggleston: You're the one that chose to write this epic.
• 45:30
  Ben Marra: Right, I know. Also… Like, the professional in me.
• 45:35
  Tad Eggleston: Also, you would have chos.
• 45:37
  Ben Marra: Correct.
• 45:38
  Tad Eggleston: You could have chose… I mean, like, contracts aside, even, you could have chosen to write it in such a way that it could have ended.
• 45:47
  Tad Eggleston: At other points.
• 45:48
  Ben Marra: True.
• 45:51
  Tad Eggleston: Y-y-you know.
• 45:52
  Ben Marra: True. He doesn't work that way, he says, and, like, that's… that's, I think, the problem.
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, like…
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: Star Wars… I still call A New Hope Star Wars, because that's… that's what it should be called.
• 46:09
  Ben Marra: Me too.
• 46:09
  Tad Eggleston: Was very… was very much rich in…
• 46:13
  Tad Eggleston: like, Lucas had 3 item… or 3 movies in his head, right?
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: But… he didn't…
• 46:23
  Tad Eggleston: know if he was gonna be able to make them, so he wanted Star Wars to be able to stand on its own.
• 46:29
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 46:30
  Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, if you've ever read Splinter of a Mind's Eye, have you read that?
• 46:34
  Ben Marra: No, I haven't.
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: It was one of the earliest Star… I mean, it was like a Star Wars novel that came out
• 46:41
  Tad Eggleston: I think in the 80s?
• 46:43
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: That was…
• 46:46
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, a lot of it is… you know, it doesn't completely fit into continuity, because what it was, was it was his script if he could only do one more movie.
• 47:00
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 47:01
  Tad Eggleston: for it himself. So, like, a lot of it is Luke and Vader in, like, this… this foggy planet.
• 47:08
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: So they didn't have to do a lot of set stuff?
• 47:13
  Ben Marra: Oh, interesting. Yeah, you could do it all on the soundstage.
• 47:19
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know, then Star Wars was a hit, and the rest is history.
• 47:24
  Ben Marra: Oh, that's fascinating.
• 47:26
  Tad Eggleston: But, but yeah, no, I always thought that that was… was,
• 47:33
  Tad Eggleston: Was one of those cool things that…
• 47:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because that was the… I mean, in hindsight, it seems brilliant, but, like, Lucas traded a lot of his money up front for merchandising rights and for…
• 47:46
  Tad Eggleston: The right to make sequels. The merchandising rights were almost a throw-in.
• 47:53
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 47:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because nobody'd really merchandised before, and he was giving.
• 47:56
  Ben Marra: Nope.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: He was giving up so much money up front for sequel rights that, like, they felt bad for him. So when he asked for merchandising rights, too, they're like, yeah, sure.
• 48:07
  Ben Marra: Man.
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: That's never happening again.
• 48:09
  Ben Marra: No. No. No. Yeah, in fact, I understand that, like, the direction that Star Wars ultimately took was based on the merchandising.
• 48:20
  Tad Eggleston: Probably some.
• 48:21
  Ben Marra: of the movies, like… the whole… the Ewoks were more for merchandising.
• 48:27
  Tad Eggleston: Don't bash my Ewoks.
• 48:31
  Tad Eggleston: I was 3 in 1983. Return of the Jedi was the first movie I remember seeing. Oh, wow. I love Ewoks.
• 48:40
  Ben Marra: I love the Ewoks, too.
• 48:42
  Ben Marra: Up until a point, and then I…
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: What I actually heard was they couldn't find enough tall people.
• 48:49
  Ben Marra: Oh, interesting.
• 48:50
  Tad Eggleston: Wookiees.
• 48:51
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 48:53
  Tad Eggleston: It was supposed to be Wookiees, and they couldn't find enough.
• 48:56
  Ben Marra: That makes sense, too.
• 48:57
  Tad Eggleston: As they started, like, looking at it and whatnot, they're like, I don't think we can make
• 49:07
  Tad Eggleston: this work.
• 49:09
  Tad Eggleston: And then when they started playing with it, they also decided that it would be…
• 49:13
  Tad Eggleston: funnier in a good way, the types of ways you'd have to do things to have these little people take down the Empire.
• 49:20
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that makes sense.
• 49:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm firmly in the… I think the Ewoks were a good call camp.
• 49:27
  Ben Marra: Okay.
• 49:28
  Ben Marra: I can totally see that.
• 49:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 49:33
  Ben Marra: Yeah, yeah.
• 49:34
  Tad Eggleston: Now, now, writing and directing the prequel trilogy? That, I don't think was a good call.
• 49:40
  Ben Marra: I think you made a lot of bad choices there. It's unfortunate.
• 49:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like, the thing is… He didn't write or direct.
• 49:48
  Tad Eggleston: Empire Strikes Back or Return of the Jedi. So it's like he learned that lesson.
• 49:54
  Tad Eggleston: And then he unlearned that lesson.
• 49:56
  Ben Marra: I mean, he even… I mean, I've done a lot of, like, research into, like, the behind-the-scenes stuff about Star Wars, and listened to tons of podcasts and things like that, and it does sound like he is not interested in directing stuff at all, like, any kind of shows.
• 50:13
  Tad Eggleston: But he's a great producer, particularly if that's a great producer stuff. So I think, I think…
• 50:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think… and think about, like.
• 50:21
  Tad Eggleston: Think about the talent that he could have had. I mean, there's rumor that he sat down with Ron Howard and…
• 50:27
  Tad Eggleston: Steven Spielberg and tried to convince them to do.
• 50:31
  Tad Eggleston: the prequel trilogy, and they're the ones that convinced them to do it themselves. And if that's true.
• 50:36
  Ben Marra: Asden, too, about writing it.
• 50:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right, and if that's true, then your problem is you shouldn't have been going for the veterans. You should have been going for the fans.
• 50:45
  Tad Eggleston: How many up-and-coming, like.
• 50:48
  Tad Eggleston: I just sit there, and for that matter, they gave him bad advice, telling him to do it himself, rather than going, you know, Robert Rodriguez would do it for free.
• 50:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yeah.
• 50:58
  Ben Marra: They should…
• 50:59
  Tad Eggleston: You want a screenwriter? Put Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino on it.
• 51:04
  Ben Marra: Right, yeah.
• 51:04
  Tad Eggleston: Kevin… Kevin will curb Quentin's more… more violent streak. Yeah. Quentin will curb…
• 51:13
  Tad Eggleston: curb Kevin's potty mouth, and you'll have… and they won't want to disappoint you, so all of the things that you're worried about aren't gonna happen anyway, because you're their, like, god.
• 51:25
  Ben Marra: Yeah, and he would have… he could have had the final say, and just executive produced it, and they could have… they could've… the thing is, is like…
• 51:32
  Tad Eggleston: He could have done all of the special effects, he could have done all the parts that he likes.
• 51:37
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 51:38
  Tad Eggleston: And had the.
• 51:39
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 51:39
  Tad Eggleston: the crop.
• 51:41
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it's unfortunate. Yeah, because, like… the Star Wars… The original movie was… was…
• 51:50
  Ben Marra: So many other people had a hand in helping him refine and refine and refine that story over and over and over again.
• 51:58
  Ben Marra: to make it into something that was like a, like a, like a diamond, and…
• 52:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 52:04
  Ben Marra: The problem is…
• 52:05
  Tad Eggleston: Still, objectively, Empire and Jedi are… better.
• 52:09
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I would agree with Empire for sure, but, like, I do think that, like.
• 52:18
  Ben Marra: The point is, like, he had a lot of people, including his ex-wife, as an editor.
• 52:24
  Ben Marra: Who knew how to…
• 52:27
  Ben Marra: guide his vision into something that was, like, really special. But when he didn't have those other people around him to keep the guardrails up, or, like, focus his… help him focus, like, a laser, his vision into something that could be…
• 52:41
  Ben Marra: something really interesting. It just ends up being, you know, Trade blockades and…
• 52:47
  Ben Marra: taxation stuff, which was all stuff that he wanted to explore in the original Star Wars, but they were like, don't do that.
• 52:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… I'm not even saying that you couldn't have done Some of that…
• 53:02
  Tad Eggleston: But you still have to write the script way better to make it work.
• 53:06
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I mean, you still have to have a protagonist, you know? Right. I mean, Phantom Menace doesn't really have a protagonist, so it's a problem from a very fundamental story level.
• 53:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 53:18
  Tad Eggleston: So… but, we gotta get to closing questions, because you're on a clock. Though I will also toss out that I may have,
• 53:28
  Tad Eggleston: just… just ordered a copy of Night Business, so…
• 53:33
  Ben Marra: Oh, nice.
• 53:33
  Tad Eggleston: There's a reason for you to come back sometime.
• 53:38
  Ben Marra: I hope you, I hope you did.
• 53:40
  Tad Eggleston: More to talk about.
• 53:41
  Ben Marra: If you like… if you like…
• 53:44
  Ben Marra: Cobra, and Invasion USA, and, I feel like…
• 53:49
  Ben Marra: Giallo movies and slasher movies and things like that.
• 53:54
  Ben Marra: Like Charles Bronson, you'll be… you'll be… you'll dig up.
• 53:56
  Tad Eggleston: I like… I sometimes like them more in concept than in reality, but there's lots of things that I like more in concept than reality, that when I see them in comics, I like them more than I like them in film.
• 54:08
  Ben Marra: I know what you mean.
• 54:08
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's… that's what I'm… that's what I'm hoping for.
• 54:12
  Ben Marra: I hope you dig that.
• 54:12
  Tad Eggleston: I went through the pages that you have up first, and I went, this looks like something that I would enjoy. So, you made money.
• 54:21
  Tad Eggleston: You made money by sitting down with me for an hour.
• 54:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, maybe, because I got it off of Biblio, so they probably already paid you.
• 54:30
  Ben Marra: Yeah, probably.
• 54:34
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, you know, I mean…
• 54:37
  Ben Marra: numbers.
• 54:40
  Tad Eggleston: So, my closing questions, I've been doing this podcast for a little less than 5 years now, and I feel like I have…
• 54:51
  Tad Eggleston: entered the Twilight Zone.
• 54:54
  Tad Eggleston: the conversations I get to have, the people I get to meet, the people I get to call friends, the things that I get to do that, like, if you told…
• 55:05
  Tad Eggleston: If you told that kid going all over the place looking for Frank Miller Daredevils, that this was gonna be part of his life someday, he would have gone, yeah, on what fucking planet?
• 55:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've talked to Klaus Jansen. Not on air yet, but, like, personally. Yeah.
• 55:26
  Ben Marra: He's… I mean, he's, like, number one.
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: with friends of Klaus's.
• 55:30
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it's unbelievable.
• 55:33
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know? That sort of thing. But I find that, like, everybody who spends time around this industry, or creative industries in general,
• 55:43
  Tad Eggleston: gets that.
• 55:44
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 55:46
  Tad Eggleston: So, I've started collecting stories. Tell me… tell me one of your experiences that you, like.
• 55:54
  Tad Eggleston: when you reflect on it, you still have to pinch yourself a little bit and go, was that really me that got to do that? Or had that happen? Or whatever?
• 56:05
  Ben Marra: I'll tell you a funny story. Sure.
• 56:08
  Ben Marra: So… Paul Gulaci is one of my favorite comic book artists.
• 56:14
  Ben Marra: And, I struck up kind of, like, an email correspondence with him.
• 56:20
  Ben Marra: Back when I was trying…
• 56:25
  Ben Marra: My heart is to… to become a comic book artist and make my own comic.
• 56:31
  Ben Marra: And you can see Google AC's influence on night business in a lot of ways. But…
• 56:39
  Ben Marra: I emailed him, I did a big, illustration for Rolling Stone magazine.
• 56:46
  Ben Marra: And I was really… excited about it, and I emailed it to him, and…
• 56:53
  Ben Marra: He wrote me back, and he was, like, wrote some encouraging words, and at the end of the email, he wrote in all capitals.
• 57:00
  Ben Marra: Keep the fire.
• 57:02
  Ben Marra: So I was like, okay, cool.
• 57:04
  Ben Marra: keep the fire, I'm gonna remember that. And then, for my first tattoo, I got, like, a panther head on my shoulder, and underneath it, it's, like, growling and stuff. And underneath it, it says, keep the fire.
• 57:19
  Ben Marra: And I didn't realize that this was actually the album.
• 57:24
  Ben Marra: Title for, I think a Kenny Loggins album title.
• 57:30
  Ben Marra: It's called Keep the Fire, and so…
• 57:33
  Ben Marra: like, when people would see that tattoo, they would immediately just think that I was, like, a big Kenny Loggins fan, and they didn't know that…
• 57:41
  Tad Eggleston: Many of them started singing Danger Zone.
• 57:44
  Ben Marra: I know. Which I think.
• 57:46
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's the only Kenny Loggins song I know.
• 57:49
  Ben Marra: Oh, man, he's got some good hits from the 80s, for sure. Does he? Okay. Yeah. Danger Zone is one.
• 57:54
  Tad Eggleston: Remember, I was born in 1980, so when I started really listening to music was more… the 90s.
• 58:02
  Ben Marra: No, I got you, I'm with you. I'm, like, right in that pocket, too, like, like, Kenny Loggins, like…
• 58:09
  Tad Eggleston: listening to… Bringsteen.
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: when I was young.
• 58:14
  Ben Marra: Yeah, no, my dad… There's lots of Beatles and…
• 58:16
  Tad Eggleston: Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan are around.
• 58:19
  Ben Marra: Hell yeah.
• 58:20
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, the music that I got into for my… for myself…
• 58:25
  Tad Eggleston: After a very brief country phase.
• 58:28
  Tad Eggleston: was… was, you know, Pearl Jam, and REM, and… Nirvana.
• 58:36
  Ben Marra: Yeah, green. That's the natural.
• 58:37
  Tad Eggleston: Red Hot Chili Peppers.
• 58:39
  Ben Marra: Right on.
• 58:41
  Tad Eggleston: You know, then started to discover some of the better hip-hop, and, you know…
• 58:46
  Ben Marra: Oh, yes.
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: started going backward into jazz and blues, and now I just listen to all the good shit.
• 58:53
  Ben Marra: No, that's like the…
• 58:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's how I describe my… my taste in anything. I like the good shit.
• 58:59
  Ben Marra: That's why… You know, everybody has their entry point onto, like, the tree of music, you know?
• 59:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 59:05
  Ben Marra: Exploring different branches, going down different… yeah, absolutely. No, but you should go back and listen to some Kenny Logan stuff from the A's. He has a really good single from the Footloose soundtrack, too, that's…
• 59:17
  Ben Marra: called I'm Free, or Heaven Knows a Man, or something like… I can't remember the exact title, but it's very good.
• 59:22
  Tad Eggleston: Let's see.
• 59:23
  Tad Eggleston: You sold me on Jack Vance better than Kenny Loggins, but we'll see.
• 59:30
  Ben Marra: Yeah, so, anyway, yeah, that's my Paul Gulaci story, which is,
• 59:35
  Ben Marra: No, that's very cool. Kind of tickles my… me, because I'm just like…
• 59:40
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I've got this Kenny Loggins…
• 59:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it's still…
• 59:43
  Ben Marra: Quote on my arm, but…
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: Cool.
• 59:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, it never gets old.
• 59:49
  Tad Eggleston: That this is a… this is a community where people will get back to you.
• 59:53
  Ben Marra: Oh, yeah, no, it's crazy. Like,
• 59:56
  Ben Marra: It's funny, when I started doing conventions and stuff, and you know, I,
• 1:00:04
  Ben Marra: I would meet, like, Jim Rugg, and, you know, Tom Scioli, and Michel Fife, and…
• 1:00:09
  Ben Marra: All these guys, and
• 1:00:13
  Ben Marra: they… and I'd already known them through their work and through their comics, and so… and they knew… they knew me, too, through my comics, and so…
• 1:00:21
  Ben Marra: we already had, like, this bond. It was strange. It was, like, we had… we had, like, a… we had, like, already formed, like, a club, in a way. The entry was, like, make a comic that we all sort of had read. And so, like, when we started hanging out, it was almost like we were immediately friends, because we all understood each other.
• 1:00:40
  Ben Marra: just based on what we had made, I already knew that we had all read the same comics.
• 1:00:46
  Ben Marra: These are the inspirations that we were drawing from.
• 1:00:49
  Ben Marra: you know, so I already knew who they were, and they weren't, like, very different from who I was from my own experience with comics, and so…
• 1:00:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:00:57
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it was really crazy, and then… and then you, of course, yeah, you meet other people.
• 1:01:03
  Ben Marra: That are also…
• 1:01:05
  Ben Marra: Doing the same thing, and in the same space, and it's… it's… yeah, it's gonna be wild.
• 1:01:08
  Tad Eggleston: It seems it's always really weird for people when they start meeting their influences.
• 1:01:13
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:01:15
  Tad Eggleston: Excuse me.
• 1:01:16
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it's really wild. And yeah, yeah, Fife introduced me to Klaus Jansen.
• 1:01:20
  Ben Marra: And that was… that was a wild experience, because, yeah, he's… he's… his,
• 1:01:27
  Ben Marra: inking on the… on Frank Miller's Daredevil is like…
• 1:01:31
  Ben Marra: some of my favorite stuff ever.
• 1:01:33
  Tad Eggleston: Klaus… Klaus is probably the reason that I understand how important inking is. Yeah. Because there are at least 4 well-known artists that I think are infinitely better when Klaus inks them than when anybody else does.
• 1:01:49
  Ben Marra: Yeah, when I was taking Matt Zuckelli's class, and he was talking about pencilers and inkers, he was like, the inker usually is the better draftsman.
• 1:01:55
  Ben Marra: But the Pencil has to be the better storyteller.
• 1:01:58
  Tad Eggleston: Frank Miller looks so much better when Klaus zinks him.
• 1:02:03
  Ben Marra: Well, that's the best… that's the great thing about comics, is, like, that… that synthesis of, like, creativity, when it starts… when it really…
• 1:02:10
  Ben Marra: like, synergizes… it's like magic. It's like this electric sort of feeling.
• 1:02:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's actually… and I never like to… I don't throw out names when it comes to negative commentary. There's a well-known artist from our
• 1:02:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, really, the Miller-Jansen generation that a lot of the young generation don't like much at all. And the more I've looked at it, the more I realize it's not that his style has changed, it's that
• 1:02:47
  Tad Eggleston: He primarily got inked by Masters.
• 1:02:53
  Ben Marra: Oh, yeah.
• 1:02:55
  Tad Eggleston: early on, and he doesn't have the same quality inkers all the time now, and at least in one case that people really, like, get frustrated with him. Yeah, Klaus is an inker, but the colorist kind of…
• 1:03:10
  Tad Eggleston: didn't do…
• 1:03:11
  Tad Eggleston: justice to, you know. And this is something I think about, you know, because there's always the big argument between who's most important, writers, artists, inkers, blah blah blah, and I think more and more, I think that, like.
• 1:03:26
  Tad Eggleston: The public gives credit, based… On ability to make the book, But… Any level can, like… Kill the book.
• 1:03:37
  Ben Marra: Totally, you're absolutely correct. Yeah.
• 1:03:39
  Tad Eggleston: If you have bad writing, chances are, it's gonna be a bad book. That's why writers get most credit.
• 1:03:47
  Ben Marra: Yes.
• 1:03:48
  Tad Eggleston: If you have bad art, It takes amazing writing.
• 1:03:54
  Tad Eggleston: For it to still be a good book.
• 1:03:57
  Ben Marra: Yep.
• 1:03:57
  Tad Eggleston: And that's why the artists get so much credit.
• 1:04:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right? If you have bad inking, it can still be saved by great writing or great art.
• 1:04:06
  Ben Marra: True.
• 1:04:09
  Tad Eggleston: You know, colorists can kill…
• 1:04:14
  Tad Eggleston: a book, too, but again, like, there are four people that can still save it now. Whereas nobody ever, like, and I've talked to more letters than probably any podcast, and I love letters, but nobody ever said, you know, that book was terrible, except the lettering just saved it.
• 1:04:31
  Tad Eggleston: I really couldn't stand that book, but the color was so amazing.
• 1:04:38
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:04:39
  Tad Eggleston: Which doesn't make them less valuable, it's just how the hierarchy comes about.
• 1:04:44
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that's true.
• 1:04:46
  Tad Eggleston: And really, the only person that it's truly unfair to is the artist, because the artist has to put in way more time
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: than the writer.
• 1:04:54
  Tad Eggleston: And it's why, like, storytelling credit matters for the artist.
• 1:05:00
  Tad Eggleston: But… but also… Why artists need to pick good writers, because, like…
• 1:05:10
  Tad Eggleston: If you… if the story's great, and you let somebody put bad dialogue in.
• 1:05:17
  Ben Marra: your hose.
• 1:05:19
  Tad Eggleston: And so many people don't pay enough attention to go, oh, I love this art and this story, but man, this writing is bad.
• 1:05:27
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:05:27
  Tad Eggleston: what's it been?
• 1:05:29
  Ben Marra: That's true.
• 1:05:31
  Ben Marra: Yeah, everybody's gotta bring it. Everybody's gotta kinda hit a home run.
• 1:05:35
  Ben Marra: For it to be, like, you know, or at least… Hit doubles and triples.
• 1:05:40
  Tad Eggleston: Solid doubles.
• 1:05:42
  Tad Eggleston: doubles across the board, you'll be, like, keep the line moving. Yeah.
• 1:05:46
  Ben Marra: Yep.
• 1:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no shit.
• 1:05:49
  Ben Marra: coming in. No.
• 1:05:51
  Tad Eggleston: Avoid the double play.
• 1:05:53
  Ben Marra: Yeah, exactly. Watch for the shift.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, and it sounds like you're a baseball guy, so I'll have to remember that for the… we do an annual baseball and comics roundtable.
• 1:06:07
  Ben Marra: Oh, nice.
• 1:06:07
  Tad Eggleston: I think I'm the only podcast that does that.
• 1:06:10
  Ben Marra: I think so.
• 1:06:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, to be fair, John Sunders did it once, after I'd done 3. I don't think.
• 1:06:18
  Ben Marra: Oh.
• 1:06:19
  Tad Eggleston: Played out as well as mine did.
• 1:06:21
  Ben Marra: No, I'm sure he… no. Sounds like he's, like…
• 1:06:24
  Ben Marra: Biting off your, idea there.
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: I am not willing to say that about Word Balloon.
• 1:06:29
  Ben Marra: Okay.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: He's been doing it for way too much longer than me. You said it, not me.
• 1:06:36
  Ben Marra: I've been listening… I listened to that podcast a long time ago.
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: This is my point.
• 1:06:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not saying that he… I mean, because I think… well, no, I know, I know that it happened after the first time I told him about mine, so I'm not gonna guarantee that it didn't get into his head, but I won't say he stole it.
• 1:06:57
  Ben Marra: Got it.
• 1:06:58
  Tad Eggleston: Because I don't think it, like…
• 1:07:01
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it meant enough to him to steal it. I think it might have just…
• 1:07:04
  Ben Marra: Right, right, right.
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: dead, and…
• 1:07:06
  Ben Marra: Well, I mean, hey, we can't have… we can't have enough, baseball and comics.
• 1:07:10
  Tad Eggleston: I agree.
• 1:07:10
  Ben Marra: broadcast.
• 1:07:12
  Tad Eggleston: This is one of the reasons I've become a fan… er, er, er, er… Why Phanographic says so… Ew.
• 1:07:25
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:07:25
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, final question, my absolute favorite question to ask. Tell me something you love.
• 1:07:32
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:07:41
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough
• 1:07:43
  Tad Eggleston: People around you have experienced, and you really would like more of them, too, so that you can talk to more people about it.
• 1:07:51
  Ben Marra: Okay, yeah, this is something that directly influenced
• 1:07:55
  Ben Marra: my own, comic, What We Mean by Yesterday, and that's Gary Panther's
• 1:08:02
  Ben Marra: Jimbo Comics that were published by Matt Groening's Zongo imprint, which is different from his Bongo comic publishing company. So, Zongo Comics published a few of his friends
• 1:08:19
  Ben Marra: comics, including Gary Panter.
• 1:08:21
  Ben Marra: And it is one of the most raw, sort of… weird…
• 1:08:28
  Ben Marra: comics that I've ever seen and read, and I actually have. They're kind of hard to find now, you can find them on eBay, but like…
• 1:08:37
  Ben Marra: They're, like, these weird…
• 1:08:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice.
• 1:08:39
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that's an issue, and it's just like…
• 1:08:42
  Ben Marra: I just happen to have this here.
• 1:08:45
  Ben Marra: just gonna show you some pages. I know this is a podcast, so nobody can see it, really, but just, like.
• 1:08:49
  Tad Eggleston: No, I can.
• 1:08:50
  Ben Marra: Yeah, it's just like these…
• 1:08:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:08:52
  Ben Marra: This really beautiful, kind of crazy, six-panel adventure comic of, like, the…
• 1:09:00
  Ben Marra: post-apocalyptic Jimbo world that he lives in.
• 1:09:05
  Ben Marra: Wow.
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, for our listeners, and possibly for you, I have good news.
• 1:09:11
  Ben Marra: What's that?
• 1:09:12
  Tad Eggleston: the New York Reveal Books, printed Jimbo Adventures in Paradise.
• 1:09:20
  Tad Eggleston: as a collection.
• 1:09:23
  Ben Marra: That… he's done some other comics, some other Jimbo comics. I'm not sure if these Zongo issues have ever…
• 1:09:30
  Ben Marra: been collected.
• 1:09:31
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:09:32
  Ben Marra: dumb.
• 1:09:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it just means… it means that there's at least… some way… relatively easily.
• 1:09:38
  Tad Eggleston: for, for, for people to read some Jimbo.
• 1:09:43
  Ben Marra: For sure.
• 1:09:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'll go looking for the other ones, too.
• 1:09:46
  Ben Marra: Yes.
• 1:09:47
  Ben Marra: Yeah, by all means, everybody should seek out as much Gary Panther
• 1:09:53
  Ben Marra: Work and comics of him… of his that they can, because… I mean…
• 1:09:58
  Tad Eggleston: Actually.
• 1:09:59
  Ben Marra: I just…
• 1:09:59
  Tad Eggleston: Jimbo's Inferno from… from… Thana Graphics had at least some of the Zongo.
• 1:10:07
  Ben Marra: Oh, is that right?
• 1:10:07
  Tad Eggleston: contents are from… of the book are from Jimbo7, Zongo Comics 1997.
• 1:10:13
  Ben Marra: Oh, wow, okay.
• 1:10:15
  Ben Marra: I didn't.
• 1:10:15
  Tad Eggleston: formatted to fit the dimensions of its prequel story, Jim.
• 1:10:19
  Tad Eggleston: bow in purgatory.
• 1:10:21
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that sounds…
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: part of the Zongo, but yeah.
• 1:10:24
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that, yeah. I'm not… I'm not sure why the… why the other issues have not…
• 1:10:30
  Ben Marra: popped up in other collections, but I wish that they would, so that more people could
• 1:10:35
  Ben Marra: See them and draw.
• 1:10:36
  Tad Eggleston: It's disturbing.
• 1:10:37
  Ben Marra: I'm in Central.
• 1:10:38
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes, is… is when… When they just can't find good enough copies to scan and clean up.
• 1:10:45
  Tad Eggleston: I know. That happens sometimes.
• 1:10:47
  Ben Marra: It does.
• 1:10:48
  Tad Eggleston: you might need to reach out to him and say, hey, I have the issues.
• 1:10:52
  Ben Marra: No, I have friends that have… who are in publishing who have reached out to him about this exact thing multiple times, and I think that he might not be that interested in it.
• 1:11:04
  Ben Marra: for him, but.
• 1:11:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:07
  Ben Marra: I haven't that high yet.
• 1:11:09
  Tad Eggleston: Might be one of those. You guys can like it all you want, I don't like it enough to reprint it.
• 1:11:15
  Ben Marra: Right. I just don't know…
• 1:11:17
  Tad Eggleston: sometimes.
• 1:11:18
  Ben Marra: I mean, I… I have…
• 1:11:20
  Ben Marra: I revere Gary Panther, and I think that he's, like, a true artist, and I think that…
• 1:11:27
  Ben Marra: for… from… I… like I said, I… I can only sort of speculate, but…
• 1:11:34
  Ben Marra: It does seem like the work itself is the most important thing to him, and
• 1:11:41
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I'm just not sure if he's, like… .
• 1:11:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 1:11:46
  Ben Marra: motivated to… to reprint some of this stuff.
• 1:11:48
  Tad Eggleston: his… his page at Lambiac.
• 1:11:51
  Tad Eggleston: And, and there's a… I didn't… Jimbo in Purgatory involves Jimbo.
• 1:11:57
  Tad Eggleston: talking to John Lennon and Yoko Ono as portrayed on their Two Virgins album cover.
• 1:12:07
  Tad Eggleston: I might be the only one that has that album on vinyl, or at least the only one under the age of, like.
• 1:12:13
  Tad Eggleston: 60.
• 1:12:15
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: The only one that didn't buy it when it came out.
• 1:12:18
  Ben Marra: Right. Yeah, I mean…
• 1:12:21
  Ben Marra: He's a music head, too. But I just… I just love the way that he kind of approaches drawing, and it's just…
• 1:12:28
  Ben Marra: so free, and kind of… it looks just like breathing, it's, like, effortless, and, like, it just…
• 1:12:34
  Ben Marra: I take a lot of,
• 1:12:36
  Ben Marra: A lot of inspiration from that, and just think that's, like…
• 1:12:40
  Ben Marra: there's something… there's something to that approach that really, I think, is really strong and powerful.
• 1:12:46
  Tad Eggleston: And he's also done… album covers for Frank Zappa, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Residence.
• 1:12:54
  Tad Eggleston: And other punk bands?
• 1:12:57
  Ben Marra: Yeah, and he did a lot of, design work for Pee Wee's Playhouse as well.
• 1:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: house. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:13:04
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:13:05
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:13:07
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna have to dig more into… Into Gary Panter.
• 1:13:14
  Tad Eggleston: You're selling me all sorts of stuff here, Ben.
• 1:13:16
  Ben Marra: Oh my god.
• 1:13:17
  Tad Eggleston: It generally works the other way on my podcast.
• 1:13:20
  Tad Eggleston: I'm… I'm pleased. I don't know if my…
• 1:13:22
  Ben Marra: Okay.
• 1:13:22
  Tad Eggleston: book will be. But thankfully, I've only pulled the trigger on buying one thing so far.
• 1:13:27
  Ben Marra: Good.
• 1:13:29
  Tad Eggleston: And that was yours.
• 1:13:31
  Ben Marra: Yes, fantastic. Love it.
• 1:13:34
  Tad Eggleston: So, thank you so much for joining me. Hopefully it becomes at least a, every volume of
• 1:13:43
  Tad Eggleston: Of, this is what we mean by yesterday thing.
• 1:13:47
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:13:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because if there are 10 volumes, I'm gonna wanna be able to talk
• 1:13:52
  Tad Eggleston: more about them, and I figure every third volume or so, we can get into the spoilers of, like, the Volume 3 volumes before it.
• 1:14:01
  Ben Marra: Sure.
• 1:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. You know, I've been out long enough that I can say, hey.
• 1:14:06
  Tad Eggleston: If you haven't read it yet…
• 1:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right. We're talking Volume 1 now.
• 1:14:12
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 1:14:12
  Tad Eggleston: 3 years!
• 1:14:14
  Ben Marra: Not only that, like, it's already been on Instagram for everybody to read for free for who knows how long, so…
• 1:14:19
  Tad Eggleston: You've been able to read it for free for all of this time. I haven't decided yet if I'm gonna go try to read them all on Instagram, or if I'm gonna wait for volumes, because I kind of enjoy reading them in chunks. I know that you even give the directions on…
• 1:14:35
  Tad Eggleston: like… How to read it.
• 1:14:38
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:14:38
  Tad Eggleston: is meant to be read a page a day, and I get that.
• 1:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: And even so, as I was reading it, keeping that in the back of my mind, I'm sitting there going.
• 1:14:47
  Tad Eggleston: No, cause every time I missed a page… I would've had to, like…
• 1:14:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is part of my problem with any webcomic that isn't set up in an easy way to, like, deliver…
• 1:15:02
  Tad Eggleston: to you regularly. It's, like, keeping track of… Where you're at.
• 1:15:08
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:15:08
  Tad Eggleston: finding… it starts becoming a frustration, and then you… then you, like, dread going back to it.
• 1:15:14
  Ben Marra: That's why, that's the reason why you can never really read it back, back on, Instagram, the old, the old, earlier strips, because it's just not conducive to, like, going backward.
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:15:27
  Tad Eggleston: But, but I am looking forward to the next volume, because… Cool.
• 1:15:32
  Tad Eggleston: Because… and I'll admit, and this is something I'll tell our readers too, er, listeners too, like, if you love the first volume.
• 1:15:41
  Tad Eggleston: you gotta stick with it in the second volume, because it, like, took me a minute. The change was jarring.
• 1:15:47
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: And, and like, it was even jarring enough that if I hadn't had this interview coming up.
• 1:15:54
  Tad Eggleston: I probably would have walked away from it and come back at some point. Hopefully come back at some point.
• 1:16:00
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, once you've gotten out of one headspace and into the other headspace.
• 1:16:08
  Tad Eggleston: It's really brilliant and satirical in so many different ways.
• 1:16:14
  Tad Eggleston: Very much like the first one had been, but just in, like, this totally different setting, where you… where you…
• 1:16:24
  Tad Eggleston: You can deal with different things that, like, people would totally go, get your politics out of my comics, except that, like, when it's D&D Fantasy World, it's not politics, because…
• 1:16:34
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's not the real world. That's right.
• 1:16:41
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, there's lots of, lots of, like, digs on consumerism and selfishness and… just…
• 1:16:55
  Tad Eggleston: Kind of the… this weird… Selfish culture that we live in that also doesn't like to acknowledge being selfish?
• 1:17:05
  Ben Marra: Yes, indeed.
• 1:17:08
  Tad Eggleston: the hypocrisy of American culture comes through possibly world culture, but distinctly American culture as well.
• 1:17:16
  Ben Marra: We're all just… we're all just human beings, we're all complex, and are, you know…
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 1:17:21
  Ben Marra: Many different facets.
• 1:17:22
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
• 1:17:23
  Ben Marra: So, the world and life is really crazy. It's just super weird.
• 1:17:26
  Tad Eggleston: But that's… that's also, I think, why sci-fi, fantasy… comic…
• 1:17:32
  Tad Eggleston: superheroes exist. It's why I always laugh when people say, get your… get your politics out of my superhero comics. I'm like.
• 1:17:39
  Tad Eggleston: Have you really been reading superhero comics for very long?
• 1:17:42
  Ben Marra: Yeah, that's what science fiction and superhero comics are designed to do, is explore that stuff.
• 1:17:48
  Tad Eggleston: You do understand that when Captain America punched Hitler, we weren't in the war.
• 1:17:55
  Ben Marra: Right. Right.
• 1:17:57
  Tad Eggleston: Borl Harbor was still in the future.
• 1:18:00
  Ben Marra: Right.
• 1:18:02
  Ben Marra: Yeah.
• 1:18:03
  Ben Marra: It's weird.
• 1:18:05
  Tad Eggleston: We had Nazis gathering at Madison Square Garden, and we were okay with that.
• 1:18:15
  Tad Eggleston: Just sayin'!
• 1:18:17
  Ben Marra: Yeah, I know, people lose… people lose their, perspective on things.
• 1:18:23
  Tad Eggleston: You know,
• 1:18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm a teacher, so I could go down so many different rabbit holes with that, but we're at time, so I'm gonna let you go.
• 1:18:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right on. People can listen to the depth and breadth of 22 panels and get me on that rabbit hole many, many times, so we won't do it again today. Ben, it has been a blast for 22 panels. We will see you after the next page.