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Pulp Blotter Book Club #20 - Zorro · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:01
Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Pulp Blotter Book Club on 22 panels, I'm joined by playwright Mark Prod, and
0:11
Tad Eggleston: actor Sean Harker Road. Mark has been known to do some acting as well. I almost said playwright Mark Harker Road, because, you know, you guys are… you guys are just becoming one entity for me, so do you want to be Parker Road, or… or… Harkocked?
0:29
Sean Harklerode: Cool Road.
0:30
Tad Eggleston: What's, what's your, what's your, what's your relationship name?
0:34
Mark Pracht: You should just call us Quatto.
0:36
Tad Eggleston: Quatto?
0:37
Mark Pracht: Yeah, Quade!
0:39
Mark Pracht: You know, from,
0:45
Mark Pracht: Total Recall, the little guy that grows out of the other dude's stomach.
0:49
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'll grow…
0:51
Mark Pracht: I'll grow out of Sean stuff.
0:53
Sean Harklerode: There's a great, great character like that in a McCammon novel, Gone South.
0:59
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:00
Sean Harklerode: He holds… he's a private eye, and the little guy has a gun.
1:05
Sean Harklerode: Here's my shout-out to Robert McCammon, if anyone out there has never discovered great genre horror…
1:14
Tad Eggleston: I… I… I have not, so I'm literally looking up… up right now.
1:19
Sean Harklerode: Literary, literary fiction.
1:22
Sean Harklerode: Great stuff.
1:24
Mark Pracht: Haste.
1:25
Tad Eggleston: Robert McCammon.
1:26
Mark Pracht: Excuse me.
1:27
Tad Eggleston: One of the pictures of him has a eye patch.
1:31
Sean Harklerode: Yes, that's for his latest novel. He just, wound up his Matthew Corbett series.
1:39
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:40
Tad Eggleston: Cool, cool.
1:42
Mark Pracht: Not to be confused with John Corbett.
1:44
Sean Harklerode: Right.
1:45
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, maybe John is going to play Matthew in the…
1:53
Tad Eggleston: I mean, the USA Network has called the early American James Bond, and if the USA Network is bothering to talk about a book, they might be… might be planning to adapt it. Not that much actually gets adapted direct to TV anymore, because TV's, like…
2:12
Tad Eggleston: dead. Speaking of TV, these are adaptations of the Walt Disney stuff today. What are the Walt Disney's TV?
2:21
Tad Eggleston: T.
2:22
Mark Pracht: That was a rollercoaster ride.
2:23
Tad Eggleston: Zorro series.
2:28
Mark Pracht: I think I can… Sean and I had a conversation the other night, and I think we can both agree, these are actually better than the TV show.
2:38
Tad Eggleston: I can only assume so, because the only things I don't like about these are so clearly…
2:48
Tad Eggleston: for the TV show.
2:51
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, look, you know, it's a pretty… it's a pretty straight-ahead Zorro adaptation,
2:59
Mark Pracht: It's been a long time since I read, The Curse of Capistrano, but…
3:06
Mark Pracht: it's… it's pretty straight ahead. The one thing about it is, you know, and I think that this is definitely from the TV show, is that there isn't really a lot of
3:15
Mark Pracht: action.
3:17
Tad Eggleston: No.
3:18
Mark Pracht: There isn't a lot of sword play, there's just a lot of horse chases, and…
3:22
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there's not a ton of action, and there's probably a little bit more slapstick than is…
3:32
Tad Eggleston: Truly necessary or always works.
3:37
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, you know…
3:40
Tad Eggleston: the making the sergeant the utter buffoon, I think, is taken to…
3:46
Mark Pracht: If I remember correctly, the sergeant was kind of a buffoon in the novel, if I remember.
3:51
Sean Harklerode: He was… he was venal and a drunkard.
3:55
Mark Pracht: Right.
3:56
Tad Eggleston: Right.
3:56
Sean Harklerode: But…
3:57
Tad Eggleston: Right. I mean, there's a difference between, like.
4:00
Tad Eggleston: A professional buffoon, and the guy that tries to…
4:04
Tad Eggleston: Climb the flagpole that he has no chance of climbing because he's a fat buffoon.
4:11
Sean Harklerode: Well, I mean, if anything, that's dialed down here in the…
4:15
Tad Eggleston: I'm certain of that, too. From the TV show. Anyone who is interested.
4:22
Sean Harklerode: The only place I know you can watch the TV show now is on the Grit TV, network.
4:28
Tad Eggleston: It's not… it's not even on… on Disney Plus? That's sad.
4:31
Sean Harklerode: not on Disney+, but it.
4:33
Mark Pracht: One,
4:34
Sean Harklerode: It's on Central Time.
4:37
Sean Harklerode: From 6 a.m. to 8am every Saturday morning.
4:41
Tad Eggleston: Haha!
4:42
Sean Harklerode: So, 7 to 9, Eastern.
4:45
Sean Harklerode: so they show 4 episodes.
4:48
Sean Harklerode: Every, every Saturday morning.
4:51
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, and I think that probably the reason it's not on Disney is because…
4:55
Mark Pracht: for once, I don't think Disney got the full rights to the character, you know?
5:00
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, probably.
5:01
Sean Harklerode: Well, they had… they have run it.
5:05
Sean Harklerode: I believe they, they might have, like, a movie, like a…
5:09
Mark Pracht: Yes.
5:09
Sean Harklerode: put 3 episodes together into a movie. I do know that for a while, they were showing on the Disney Channel, was showing it late night.
5:20
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I remember.
5:21
Mark Pracht: when Disney Plus first started, the movie was on there, if I remember correctly.
5:27
Mark Pracht: Because I got really excited, because I hadn't seen him in a long time, and then I watched it and went kind of, ugh, okay.
5:34
Sean Harklerode: It's uneven, some of the episodes are really good. Yeah, yeah.
5:38
Sean Harklerode: My friend Richard Anderson is in a really good episode.
5:42
Tad Eggleston: And, and that's, that's also something…
5:44
Mark Pracht: friend, Richard Anderson.
5:45
Tad Eggleston: That is something that I… that… that I noticed, because I pulled up the episode guide, and was comparing it to…
5:54
Tad Eggleston: The… the… the story list, and he… he clearly had the ability to skip over huge chunks of material.
6:02
Mark Pracht: Oh, sure.
6:03
Tad Eggleston: Because it's like, he'll do one episode, skip four episodes, do another episode, skip six episodes, do two episodes.
6:13
Sean Harklerode: I, you know, I mean, I think, and I say this as I have, as I usually do when we tape on Sunday mornings, sound down, but I have the Adventures of Superman, screening behind me, behind the computer.
6:30
Sean Harklerode: I think if you think it's 1958, 1959,
6:36
Sean Harklerode: this is a children's… it's an adventure show. You've got Adventures of Superman, you've got the Lone Ranger and Zorro. You know, it's right there with those other two, I think. And probably Ash Gordon,
6:54
Sean Harklerode: you know.
6:55
Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, a lot of the, a lot of the Saturday morning serials are shown on TV at that point. Right.
7:01
Sean Harklerode: So I think it really…
7:02
Mark Pracht: And actually, again, that conversation that Sean and I were having the other night, you know, probably Hopalong Cassidy is showing on a regular basis, you know, it… that was the time period
7:14
Mark Pracht: I'm just saying that for myself, as a…
7:19
Mark Pracht: fan of Zora. I had not read these books.
7:23
Mark Pracht: Right. But as a fan of Zorro, I was… and I should have been… I should have been more aware of the fact, you know, that it was adapting to TV show. I was kind of shocked at how little swordplay there was, how…
7:37
Mark Pracht: Rarely the bullwhip came into play. It was just sort of surprising.
7:45
Sean Harklerode: But I will say, when it does, it's really cool.
7:48
Tad Eggleston: Yes.
7:49
Mark Pracht: He really has been really iconic.
7:51
Sean Harklerode: When that whip comes out, or the stance he takes as he's… as he's finished.
7:58
Mark Pracht: Yeah, no, I think that… You know, I think… they're…
8:07
Mark Pracht: It couldn't… it couldn't help but make me think of the… the Banderas, film.
8:13
Mark Pracht: Which, to me, was sort of like, well, this is kind of perfect, you know?
8:18
Mark Pracht: It was just like…
8:19
Tad Eggleston: I do need to correct something.
8:22
Tad Eggleston: Three seasons of Zorro are currently on Disney+.
8:28
Sean Harklerode: Really?
8:29
Tad Eggleston: Er, no, I'm sorry, maybe only 2 seasons.
8:32
Sean Harklerode: Well, that's… .
8:34
Mark Pracht: I had not noticed it.
8:35
Sean Harklerode: I, I have…
8:36
Tad Eggleston: I literally just looked it up.
8:39
Mark Pracht: My damn algorithm wasn't listening to me.
8:42
Sean Harklerode: I will say that grit Until a few months ago, showed it every day.
8:47
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, sep…
8:48
Sean Harklerode: Kevin? So maybe that was.
8:50
Tad Eggleston: 78 episodes over 2 seasons.
8:54
Tad Eggleston: are, are on Disney Plus right now.
8:57
Sean Harklerode: Great!
8:59
Mark Pracht: Well, I'm gonna go look for that.
9:01
Sean Harklerode: I have to check out the… well, I've seen it, but the,
9:03
Tad Eggleston: As well as the sign of Zorro, which is, I think, the aforementioned movie.
9:10
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
9:11
Mark Pracht: with the great, great Guy Williams.
9:13
Tad Eggleston: Right.
9:16
Mark Pracht: Before he got lost in space.
9:18
Sean Harklerode: Right.
9:18
Tad Eggleston: That's right.
9:20
Sean Harklerode: So, there's an episode, I think it's a two-parter, with Annette Funicello, and the reason she's in it is Walt noticed
9:30
Sean Harklerode: how smitten she was with Guy Williams.
9:33
Sean Harklerode: You know, she just had, like, a little schoolgirl crush on Guy Williams, and Walt was like, we need to put her in Zorro.
9:41
Tad Eggleston: There we go.
9:42
Sean Harklerode: It's a, it's a cute episode.
9:46
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I, I talked to… Chris Ryle.
9:55
Tad Eggleston: on Friday afternoon, an episode that will probably go up before this, but isn't up yet.
10:00
Tad Eggleston: And we talked a lot about his Megalopolis adaptation, but we talked about adaptations in general, and one of the things that was great for him with the adaptation of Megalopolis is, like, every time he was…
10:13
Tad Eggleston: talking to Coppola, Coppola would say, no, no, no, this isn't my Megalopolis, this is your megalopolis. How do you think it will work best? Do that. Right. Which is not at all the direction that you normally get.
10:28
Mark Pracht: Right.
10:28
Tad Eggleston: with… licensed properties. So, I will say that even back.
10:34
Mark Pracht: Back in the 50s, what I see here.
10:37
Tad Eggleston: is… a book that Alex Toth drew the hell out of.
10:43
Sean Harklerode: Yes.
10:44
Mark Pracht: But probably had…
10:46
Tad Eggleston: More interference than…
10:49
Tad Eggleston: then I certainly would have liked him to have in terms of making a book that was…
10:54
Tad Eggleston: You know, because I don't think I've… and I haven't read a ton, ton of Toth, but I don't think I've ever seen him sick as steadily to the six-panel grid as he did here.
11:05
Tad Eggleston: And I, like, I figured that that's gotta either be an editorial decision, or, okay, if you're not letting me do my thing, I'm doing this for a paycheck.
11:15
Tad Eggleston: We're gonna make this easy on Monday.
11:16
Mark Pracht: Wow.
11:17
Tad Eggleston: What?
11:17
Sean Harklerode: I, I, I would say… I feel like the first…
11:22
Sean Harklerode: The first, I don't know, 4 issues or so that's in here, are fantastic.
11:30
Sean Harklerode: I mean, they're really a straightforward adaptation of Curse of Capistrano, really. Some adaptations, you know, for the show. Right. And then, it sort of veers from that.
11:45
Sean Harklerode: And you get more in the slapstick stuff. So I don't know if that was a directive that came after that more serious start. But there are some… some serious,
11:56
Sean Harklerode: issues, you know, later, still. Like, I mean, there's a… Yeah.
12:00
Tad Eggleston: Well, and…
12:00
Sean Harklerode: I mean, murder, and… I mean…
12:04
Tad Eggleston: Like, I don't want any of this to sound like I'm… I mean, this is still, to me, a 5-star comic. Anybody who loves comics, anybody who loves Toth, anybody who loves 50s comics.
12:17
Tad Eggleston: should be looking at this. Like, there's… So much brilliance.
12:26
Sean Harklerode: And we should say that, you know, this is a Kickstarter that is coming out, and so it'll soon be available.
12:32
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it will be in stores sooner rather than later.
12:34
Sean Harklerode: With both Tad's and my names in the back.
12:37
Tad Eggleston: Yes, yes. Though with Zoop, they just take the name from your credit card. Normally, on, on, on, on…
12:46
Tad Eggleston: on Kickstarter, I always put 22 panels in the book, rather.
12:49
Sean Harklerode: Oh.
12:49
Tad Eggleston: than my name. And I certainly never use my… Somehow, my, my… my…
12:58
Tad Eggleston: Bank credit cards wound up with my nickname.
13:04
Tad Eggleston: My middle initial and my last name.
13:08
Tad Eggleston: Which always looks weird to me, to see Tad and Eggleston, but I know that they took it from my card, rather than…
13:16
Sean Harklerode: Well, I guess that's how I'm Gregory Sean Harkle Road.
13:19
Tad Eggleston: Right, exactly.
13:22
Mark Pracht: Well, that's because both of you seem more, you know.
13:25
Mark Pracht: Uncle… Uncle Scroogey in the…
13:30
Mark Pracht: Gregory S. Harker Road. But I mean, you know, look, I think that… I think that the one thing that you really have to say is, I mean, these were Disney comics, right?
13:41
Tad Eggleston: Yes.
13:42
Mark Pracht: So, I mean, like, this was the… it's the same thing with the Barks, books, and everything like that. I think that there was an ability to put your own artistry into it, but I mean, there was a style. Oh, absolutely. It's exactly the same when you look at EC Comics, or you look at the Atlas stuff during that time… Oh, absolutely.
13:58
Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
13:59
Mark Pracht: like… there's a house style, and that you do have to adhere to that.
14:06
Mark Pracht: But, you know, I thought… I thought the art was pretty spectacular. I mean, it's a really great, you know, and like, on an adaptation level, and doing… like, it looks like Guy Williams. I mean, it's…
14:20
Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is also where, like, I have to say that I started enjoying it better when I started consciously reversing my normal reading style, because I tend to be drawn first to words.
14:35
Tad Eggleston: And like an EC comic, like a Jack Kirby comic, I enjoy this so much better when I take in the action.
14:44
Tad Eggleston: and then skim as much of the words as I feel like I need. Not because they don't work, but because it's sometimes really wordy.
14:55
Tad Eggleston: And because they… they sometimes add stuff and sometimes don't, and really, really sound like a 50s Disney TV show. I mean, if you love the dialogue in…
15:07
Tad Eggleston: 50s TV… shows.
15:10
Tad Eggleston: then go for it. But, like, even when I was a kid, the only thing I didn't like about Lost in Space was the dialogue.
15:19
Tad Eggleston: And that was the 60s. I understand, I understand, but, but, but, like, it was definitely an era where…
15:28
Mark Pracht: It's a lot like… I've been rewatching Space 1999, because I got a Blu-ray set a couple years ago, and I never got through the whole series, but, you know, and it looks…
15:41
Mark Pracht: gorgeous, for a myriad of reasons. One, that there's hardly any process shots in it, because it's, you know, it's Gerry Anderson in the… the…
15:50
Mark Pracht: marination stuff, so it's actual, like, they're flying models over the sets and stuff like that. And… that…
15:58
Mark Pracht: That they were one of the,
16:01
Mark Pracht: pioneers of video sync. So, like, when you see somebody on a screen in that show, it's just the screen. So suddenly, everything has this real tactile quality. But my god, you go through that thing, and it's like…
16:15
Mark Pracht: I think it was… this is what I was thinking when I… when Sean was talking about, the… the varying quality of the Zorro episodes. Like, there's stuff that's really pretty good, and then there's stuff that's just, like.
16:28
Mark Pracht: who approved this, you know? Right.
16:30
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I…
16:31
Mark Pracht: I mean, but I think that… I think that,
16:36
Mark Pracht: And maybe it's because we've been reading Kirby.
16:39
Mark Pracht: This didn't feel wordy to me at all.
16:43
Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, it's not as wordy as Kirby.
16:45
Mark Pracht: Yeah, okay.
16:46
Tad Eggleston: I felt like this.
16:47
Mark Pracht: this was…
16:48
Mark Pracht: you know, I felt like I had a sense of who these people were. That was a long way to get to that point, and I apologize for that, but but I thought, you know, I thought that there was a good handle on who all the characters were, and maybe it was taken directly from, you know, I don't remember the show well enough to be able to say, oh, that was an adaptation of that episode, or that was an adaptation of that.
17:10
Tad Eggleston: Well, I literally compared the titles.
17:13
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
17:14
Sean Harklerode: Hmm.
17:14
Mark Pracht: For the most part.
17:15
Tad Eggleston: For the most part, they kept the titles.
17:18
Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, and that may be Toth going… that may be Toth going, like, well, this one is just more visually compelling, it'll work as a comic book better, or it might be editorial saying, these are the popular episodes, let's just do those.
17:29
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, could be either one.
17:30
Mark Pracht: And, But I will say that…
17:39
Mark Pracht: for me, where the things started to run out of steam was when they brought in, what was it, the Eagle?
17:46
Tad Eggleston: The eagle? And all this, like…
17:47
Mark Pracht: this… crime syndicate thing going on, and I was just like.
17:53
Tad Eggleston: Well, because, I mean, you gotta be careful about being anti-government for too long.
17:57
Mark Pracht: Well, but that, I mean, that gets the same…
18:00
Sean Harklerode: That really gave it a punch, reading it right now.
18:05
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, it's also, like.
18:07
Mark Pracht: I… there are worse things that surprised me, like where the captain is removed from the story, Like, completely.
18:15
Mark Pracht: I mean, and that was, like, I think that that made, Sergeant is Garcia,
18:23
Mark Pracht: seem even more incompetent and buffoonish, because he wasn't an underling, suddenly he was in charge. And you're like, who left this guy in charge?
18:34
Mark Pracht: You know? So, I don't know, I think that… I mean, I can… I can…
18:41
Mark Pracht: Like, there's a lot of well-duh stuff in this. Like, it's Alex Toth. The art's awesome. Yeah.
18:46
Tad Eggleston: The art's amazing.
18:47
Mark Pracht: Remember when you drew Zoro? Yeah, that was awesome. Anyway, but, I mean, like, I think that there's all sorts of other stuff that, like, I think that when you talk about
19:00
Mark Pracht: 1950s comics.
19:02
Mark Pracht: That there… there's this weird… Not even weird, but there's, like, this… this schism.
19:11
Mark Pracht: between, like, EC…
19:15
Mark Pracht: And the crime comics and stuff that are starting to aim for an older audience, and then there's, like, this stuff, which is clearly pointed right to kids.
19:27
Tad Eggleston: But here's the thing that I feel. I think the art is more EC.
19:33
Sean Harklerode: Yes.
19:34
Mark Pracht: Sure.
19:34
Tad Eggleston: But the words are more… yeah.
19:37
Tad Eggleston: So there's almost a dichotomy between the way the words
19:45
Tad Eggleston: The way the dialogue is structured, where it feels very much for kids, and the art that feels…
19:52
Tad Eggleston: Very much for everyone, and in particular, adults.
19:57
Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense?
19:58
Sean Harklerode: Like this is a lot better than most 50s comics I've read.
20:02
Mark Pracht: Sure, 100%. I mean, maybe it's not EC.
20:06
Sean Harklerode: level, but, I mean, this is… I mean, reading, like, Silver Age…
20:11
Mark Pracht: Batman, Superman, Green Lantern.
20:13
Tad Eggleston: Definitely.
20:14
Sean Harklerode: You know.
20:14
Tad Eggleston: And it's hard to… it's hard to compare to Barks, because Barks IS actually kids' comics.
20:20
Sean Harklerode: Right. Sure.
20:22
Mark Pracht: But, I mean, it's the same thing, I mean, like.
20:24
Tad Eggleston: But I would actually… I mean, a lot of what Barks does really well with ducks, which is, like, use the shadows, use the silhouettes, you know, let the setting tell a story, that sort of thing, you see Toth doing here.
20:39
Mark Pracht: Sure. But I mean, I also think that that's… you're also talking about people who've been in the industry for quite a long time, right? Yeah. And who had, in Toth's case, had worked for EC, had, you know, and now, you know, there's a certain level of artistry
20:56
Mark Pracht: that's just gonna bleed through, right? No matter what you're drawing.
21:00
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, it doesn't… to me, it… the… the… illustrations
21:07
Sean Harklerode: They… they feel more like book illustrations than comic art in…
21:13
Tad Eggleston: Sometimes.
21:14
Sean Harklerode: places, right?
21:16
Sean Harklerode: Which is not a criticism, it's a, wow, that's… that's really nice. Especially, I like the night scenes.
21:25
Mark Pracht: Yeah. They're really well rendered.
21:27
Sean Harklerode: And I don't know if that just reminds me of the opening of the show, which always scared me a little bit as a kid, when he's riding out in the lightning and…
21:38
Sean Harklerode: But I… I… I do love…
21:42
Tad Eggleston: scenes that take place at night in this look… look amazing to me. And oh man, when he gets to do an action scene, I'm looking at… it's… it's page 165, where there's a… there's a gunfight, there's swinging down from a balcony.
21:58
Tad Eggleston: There's whisking a woman out of the room as they're being shot at.
22:04
Tad Eggleston: It's just… ugh.
22:08
Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's just, like.
22:11
Mark Pracht: Like, and it's not to say that there's no action.
22:14
Tad Eggleston: No.
22:14
Mark Pracht: It seems like there's an awful, like, you know, for.
22:18
Tad Eggleston: I mean, like…
22:19
Mark Pracht: Zorro, there's an awful lot of, like, come Tornado, let's chase them, you know, or they're chasing us, and… or I'm gonna send Tornado off…
22:31
Tad Eggleston: Right.
22:31
Mark Pracht: By himself. I was gonna…
22:32
Tad Eggleston: gonna say this a little bit earlier, and then I got distracted. Like, I think one of the big differences
22:41
Tad Eggleston: Between… Comics today, and comics in the 50s, and it's been a gradual thing in between.
22:50
Tad Eggleston: And also, TV today versus TV in the 50s, that has been a gradual thing in between, is…
23:00
Tad Eggleston: who took them seriously from a creative standpoint? Like, in the 50s, if you were a writer, you didn't want to be writing comics or TV. You wanted to be…
23:13
Tad Eggleston: you know, for that matter, if you were a director or an… I mean, in the 50s, when it came to TV, like, almost nobody in it wanted to be in it. They were… they wanted to be in film.
23:27
Tad Eggleston: But, but, like, if this was what paid the bills until they could get there, alright.
23:35
Tad Eggleston: Which doesn't mean that that meant all of them, because there are always people who see the power of a medium early, and there's enough in Zora…
23:44
Tad Eggleston: say, That some people working on it probably saw that, but…
23:50
Tad Eggleston: you know, the basic reason why the TV show didn't have enough action, and therefore why the comic didn't have enough action to adapt, is action's way more expensive to shoot.
24:02
Mark Pracht: Well, 100%, also, and also, there was a much more… there was much more sensitivity to…
24:08
Mark Pracht: to what you could show or what you… I mean, like, if you go back and watch
24:13
Mark Pracht: the Lone Ranger show.
24:16
Mark Pracht: I mean, like, he's not… shooting people.
24:19
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, though, I mean, this is another one.
24:21
Sean Harklerode: their hands.
24:23
Tad Eggleston: That's another, you know, and I don't necessarily want to go a deep dive on this, but it's funny how much…
24:32
Tad Eggleston: mores that involve Corporation's behavior often also
24:39
Tad Eggleston: Align with what's going to be most profitable for them.
24:43
Mark Pracht: Sure, but I mean, I also think that the… what?
24:46
Mark Pracht: I don't think…
24:47
Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, I guess I'm saying that I don't know that it wasn't that the public in general wouldn't have been more than happy to see more action and even a harder edge, but it was more expensive, so it wasn't worth it.
25:02
Mark Pracht: I don't… I think… I think that that's part of it.
25:05
Mark Pracht: I mean, it's certainly… I mean, like, certainly, we know… we know for a fact that… that…
25:13
Mark Pracht: that Disney… Up into the 1950s, was actually a very small company with.
25:20
Mark Pracht: Constant money problems, you know?
25:22
Tad Eggleston: Right?
25:23
Mark Pracht: I just watched the,
25:27
Mark Pracht: the Disneyland Handcrafted documentary, which is amazing, and they have that… they have a great point in there where they were like, no one… everyone in Hollywood thought that this thing was insane.
25:38
Mark Pracht: That it would never make money.
25:40
Mark Pracht: And Roy Disney, Walt's older brother, said.
25:46
Mark Pracht: What do you mean, everybody in Hollywood? I think it's insane and it'll never make money. You know?
25:52
Mark Pracht: I, like, you know, like, so, I'm sure there was always a sense of…
25:59
Mark Pracht: How… how little can we spend to get the most bang from our buck?
26:03
Mark Pracht: And that's… Right. That's also…
26:06
Mark Pracht: I, you know, I'll speak as an artist. That's also a responsible artistry as a… Oh, no, it's…
26:14
Tad Eggleston: That wasn't strictly a slam on it, either. It was more a… it's important to look at both this comic and the TV show…
26:26
Tad Eggleston: That it was made from, from the context of when it was made.
26:30
Mark Pracht: 100%.
26:31
Tad Eggleston: 100%, but I'm also gonna say, like.
26:34
Mark Pracht: that… as…
26:37
Mark Pracht: you know, I would say the second half of the 20th century is entirely, in terms of
26:46
Mark Pracht: Fantasy storytelling, let's put it that way, is a story of…
26:52
Mark Pracht: Rapidly accelerating mainstreaming of that type of storytelling.
26:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. You know?
26:59
Mark Pracht: like… I've said this a lot about Kirby, like.
27:06
Mark Pracht: there was comic book fandom as far back as the 1950s and the 1960s, but this idea of, like, an organized fandom and conventions on a regular basis and all of this stuff, that doesn't happen until the 1970s. So…
27:21
Mark Pracht: and then you can see that change in publishing. Like, especially at Marvel.
27:29
Mark Pracht: where, you know, in the 70s, and I've been doing a lot of research on this era for one reason or another.
27:37
Mark Pracht: Became this, like… Kind of madhouse of people just running off and doing…
27:46
Mark Pracht: You know, whatever they felt like they wanted to do, because they had so many writer-editors who were in charge of their own shit.
27:54
Mark Pracht: And… We're not operating under any sort of, like.
28:01
Mark Pracht: editorial mandate to maintain some sort of consistency, right? And I think that that all comes about because the audience started to shift older. Now.
28:11
Mark Pracht: To your point.
28:13
Mark Pracht: That means when we read a 1950s Zorro comic book, or watch an episode of Zorro from the 1950s, or watch Lone Ranger, or we watch
28:24
Mark Pracht: the Adventures of Superman, or, you know, there's… there's all these factors. There's technology.
28:30
Mark Pracht: You know? George Reeves is never gonna look as…
28:36
Mark Pracht: George Reeves flying is never gonna look as realistic as even Christopher Reeve flying, just because there was no technical way to do it, right?
28:48
Mark Pracht: And… But also, that the sensibilities were… much.
28:55
Mark Pracht: different, you know? And I do, I do believe that that is a cultural thing. Absolutely. And I think that that shift, you know, like.
29:04
Mark Pracht: even… even when we think back to within our lifetime, you know, there's this huge shift that happens in television when The Sopranos opens, you know?
29:15
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess the point I was making is that art has a huge influence on culture, and I didn't know that we were at a time where the culture wouldn't have been willing to shift.
29:30
Tad Eggleston: But there certainly wasn't enough profit to make them willing to spend the money to find out.
29:39
Mark Pracht: Well, and the other thing is, is like, let's not forget that we are not that far off from
29:46
Mark Pracht: kids…
29:48
Tad Eggleston: Bright.
29:48
Mark Pracht: Burning their comics.
29:50
Tad Eggleston: Right.
29:51
Mark Pracht: You know?
29:52
Tad Eggleston: Over… Which I'm still… That there's so many…
29:57
Tad Eggleston: questions about that era that I still… still have, but that's a whole other conversation.
30:03
Mark Pracht: I mean, it…
30:04
Tad Eggleston: Just in comparison, comparing it to other arrows.
30:07
Tad Eggleston: But…
30:09
Sean Harklerode: Mass psychosis.
30:10
Sean Harklerode: Is a hell of a drug.
30:13
Tad Eggleston: It is, but it often turns out that it's not completely out of nowhere, either.
30:19
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, there's always somebody you can blame for all your problems.
30:23
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. Well, but I don't, I don't like…
30:24
Tad Eggleston: the individual, either. I like to look at… the systems.
30:29
Sean Harklerode: No, no, no.
30:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
30:31
Sean Harklerode: I don't think people are blaming individuals or groups of people.
30:35
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, exactly. I mean, there's always some group that you can say, this is… this is what's causing.
30:41
Mark Pracht: all of my problems. And… and 9 times out of 10,
30:47
Mark Pracht: Yeah, that group has a factor, but then there's also all of this other stuff, you know? Oh, yeah.
30:53
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
30:54
Mark Pracht: And… but it's just so much easier to point your finger and say that.
30:59
Mark Pracht: Because I can fix that, and I don't have to change myself, right?
31:04
Tad Eggleston: That, that…
31:04
Sean Harklerode: I guess what?
31:05
Tad Eggleston: like the most.
31:09
Mark Pracht: I'm asking him to change his ways.
31:12
Sean Harklerode: What did you say, Ted? I'm sorry.
31:14
Tad Eggleston: I said that is the solution that everybody likes the most. The one that involves them not changing.
31:21
Mark Pracht: Sure.
31:21
Sean Harklerode: Right.
31:23
Mark Pracht: Right.
31:24
Tad Eggleston: That is the most popular solution to every problem.
31:29
Tad Eggleston: It's not me, it's that guy!
31:34
Mark Pracht: All I gotta do, all I can say is, you know, I'll quote Plato, Moderation in all things.
31:41
Tad Eggleston: Yes.
31:42
Sean Harklerode: Mickey Mouse's dog said that?
31:46
Mark Pracht: I did, I said Plato, not.
31:48
Sean Harklerode: Oh!
31:51
Sean Harklerode: No joke.
31:55
Sean Harklerode: But has anyone… Robert?
31:58
Tad Eggleston: Kamen uses the same typewriter I use.
32:01
Sean Harklerode: You use a physical typewriter?
32:05
Tad Eggleston: Not as much as I'd like, but it's one of my most prized possessions.
32:09
Sean Harklerode: I have an old one I'm needing to restore.
32:11
Tad Eggleston: Underwood Standard Portable came off the line in 1928.
32:16
Sean Harklerode: Awesome!
32:18
Mark Pracht: You know what, Ted? There's your opening to get Tom Hanks on this podcast.
32:23
Tad Eggleston: Is it?
32:24
Mark Pracht: He collects typewriters.
32:25
Sean Harklerode: Right?
32:26
Tad Eggleston: So does Eddie Vedder.
32:28
Sean Harklerode: And, you know, I mean, and, you know, Bob.
32:30
Tad Eggleston: I would like to, but I don't have enough space. I do have… More than one typewriter.
32:36
Sean Harklerode: You're bomb.
32:36
Mark Pracht: I'm talking about you collecting more typewriters.
32:39
Mark Pracht: I…
32:40
Tad Eggleston: No, I know Bob illustrated his book.
32:42
Mark Pracht: I'm gonna dial back just for a second. You had Chris Ryle on your show, and you didn't ask me to join in?
32:50
Tad Eggleston: It was.
32:51
Mark Pracht: Talking about Megalopolis, one of my… Most…
32:57
Tad Eggleston: Mark.
32:58
Mark Pracht: Interesting movies of the last 2 years?
33:00
Tad Eggleston: Are you at workit?
33:02
Tad Eggleston: 3 o'clock in the afternoon?
33:04
Mark Pracht: I could make time for lots of things.
33:06
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I'm sorry.
33:08
Sean Harklerode: I didn't even know.
33:09
Tad Eggleston: Chris…
33:09
Sean Harklerode: Chris will definitely be back. We had a good time. Is the Megalopolis adaptation out?
33:16
Mark Pracht: Yes.
33:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it came out at the same time the movie did.
33:19
Mark Pracht: I have not read it yet. I've wanted to, I haven't.
33:22
Tad Eggleston: I read it before I saw the movie, which I think helped me like the movie more than a lot of people, because I already understood that I was A gonna need to be looking beneath the surface, and B, that if I was looking for a Godfather or Apocalypse Now-type movie, I was gonna be disappointed.
33:44
Mark Pracht: Well…
33:45
Sean Harklerode: I'm really interested. I watched Megadoc recently.
33:48
Tad Eggleston: Yes. I haven't seen that yet.
33:50
Mark Pracht: Well, and what's funny, what you just said about Ryle saying that Coppola was like, you have to do your Megalopolis, that's, like, totally reflected in Megadoc. Like, that that's, you know…
34:03
Tad Eggleston: Well, here is what I'll say right now, like, I wound up… I mean, I already loved the comic. I finally saw the movie because I had Ryle coming up.
34:14
Tad Eggleston: I loved the movie. So, like, I'm telling you right now that we can get another, like, deep dive Megalopolis something going.
34:26
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, and the thing was, is I also told you that I wouldn't… I wanted to talk to him about, Origins of Marvel, the reissues, and I… Yeah, we didn't even get to that story.
34:35
Tad Eggleston: stuff. We didn't.
34:36
Mark Pracht: Sean's Origin is coming out.
34:38
Tad Eggleston: There will be more… there will be more royal conversations. This one actually came together really, really fast, because Shelley Bond thanked him in her most recent book, because he…
34:54
Tad Eggleston: he reached out to her so fast after DC had let her go that, like…
35:00
Tad Eggleston: She didn't know anybody knew that she was employable.
35:05
Tad Eggleston: And she didn't know him at the time!
35:08
Mark Pracht: I actually went to a, sorry, we are way off topic right now, I'm thinking about this role. He was one of the first pre… when I first was at San Diego, and I went to, like, a Creators Roundtable thing, you know, it was, like, speed dating for creators or whatever, he was one of the, the.
35:27
Tad Eggleston: That's actually how a comic that we recently, featured came together, a speed dating session at C2E2.
35:34
Mark Pracht: But I, I,
35:36
Mark Pracht: I… was, like… I had copies, and I was trying to give him one, and he was like, I don't know, you know, I've got a… I'm working on a TV show that's sort of like Mad Men, based on a comic book play… a comic book publisher. This sounds like it's right up your alley, and I'm like, yeah, yeah!
35:54
Mark Pracht: And he never got.
35:55
Tad Eggleston: I did actually plug your trilogy to him.
35:58
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
35:59
Mark Pracht: Well, you could, you know. Next time you talk to him, you could remind him.
36:03
Tad Eggleston: We'll make it happen. We'll make it happen.
36:04
Sean Harklerode: It could happen.
36:06
Tad Eggleston: We'll make it happen!
36:07
Mark Pracht: I'm ready to send books out to anybody.
36:10
Mark Pracht: Anybody. Anyway.
36:12
Tad Eggleston: Well, okay, I will start… you guys go back to talking about Zorro, and I will start writing an email to get his address for you.
36:19
Sean Harklerode: Have, have…
36:21
Sean Harklerode: Any of you, I looked at them at San Diego, and just packing space is always at a premium. The IDW books, on top, the Genius books, there's Genius Animated, Genius Illustrated, and I think there's a third one.
36:39
Tad Eggleston: There is, and I have skimmed them.
36:42
Tad Eggleston: They at least used to be available on Hoopla? Let me see if they're still available on Hoopla.
36:47
Mark Pracht: If I remember correctly, like, there was a lot… I remember reading a lot about Toph, and that he was sort of a miserable bastard to work with.
36:58
Tad Eggleston: Except when he wasn't.
37:00
Mark Pracht: Well, that, like, he was one of those people who was very, very much, like.
37:05
Mark Pracht: I know the best way to do everything.
37:08
Tad Eggleston: Right, but, like, one of the things… I mean, Chaikin talked about them in the introduction here, that you never read the introductions.
37:16
Mark Pracht: I don't.
37:17
Tad Eggleston: And that's okay.
37:18
Mark Pracht: Among other things… Sorry, Howard.
37:20
Tad Eggleston: As soon as there was a woman in the room, he was the consummate gentleman.
37:24
Mark Pracht: Sure.
37:25
Tad Eggleston: Until there wasn't.
37:29
Mark Pracht: I just remember I was reading something about his days at Hanna-Barbera and designing the Super Friends, and that it became some sort of…
37:38
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, Super Friends came up… with, with, with, Chris, too.
37:45
Sean Harklerode: So, I mean, that's what I was…
37:48
Sean Harklerode: Trying to get at with, with, with that question,
37:52
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
37:52
Sean Harklerode: Because looking at the art, I do see his animation style. So…
37:58
Mark Pracht: out.
37:58
Tad Eggleston: prevalent, right? Yeah. I can see…
38:01
Sean Harklerode: But, well, particularly, and this is probably not the best thing, but, you know, obviously, Adult Swim
38:09
Sean Harklerode: uses a lot of TOF, or toast.
38:11
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
38:12
Sean Harklerode: You know, for inspiration, or just, you know, copying, and
38:16
Sean Harklerode: I do… sometimes, when I'm reading these Zorro books, Don Diego, of course, looks just like father on, The Brax show, and so…
38:27
Mark Pracht: Sure, yeah, yeah.
38:28
Sean Harklerode: I would be reading, I'd be reading, and Don Diego would have, Father.
38:34
Sean Harklerode: he would have, you know, Mother, he would have that voice in my head.
38:40
Sean Harklerode: But it is… it's an iconic style, you know, Johnny Quest, Hercules…
38:46
Mark Pracht: Space Ghost. Space Ghost.
38:48
Mark Pracht: that… that…
38:49
Sean Harklerode: Where space goes.
38:50
Mark Pracht: Space Ghost, possibly the most perfect design
38:56
Mark Pracht: Of a superhero suit thing… ever.
39:00
Mark Pracht: Just taking the name and putting it with an image, it's perfect.
39:06
Sean Harklerode: Like, I, you know…
39:08
Mark Pracht: I'm not saying it's the greatest superhero costume ever, I'm just saying that if you say.
39:12
Mark Pracht: character called Space Ghost. I immediately see that image, and I'm like, it's perfect.
39:17
Sean Harklerode: So…
39:20
Mark Pracht: But.
39:21
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I just…
39:23
Mark Pracht: Go on.
39:24
Sean Harklerode: the… I just was really struck by the art, and how self-assured it was, and…
39:33
Sean Harklerode: just as I said earlier, it doesn't really feel sometimes like I'm reading a comic book. I feel like I'm reading a children's book, that's illustrated. And… and I love that.
39:44
Sean Harklerode: Right? And particularly, I like the night scenes, as I said. I just… I just love this, and I can't wait to get the physical copy.
39:54
Mark Pracht: Well, you know, and the other…
39:55
Sean Harklerode: Fantastic.
39:56
Mark Pracht: I…
39:56
Sean Harklerode: PDFs already to the backers.
39:59
Mark Pracht: the, I think that, you know, if I remember correctly, and I may be… I may be misremembering this, so if I say something that's really wrong, is that there was, like, that…
40:14
Mark Pracht: Disney Comics was kind of a gold standard at this point, in terms of just, like, they hired really good artists.
40:22
Mark Pracht: And they… and they did… well-executed books.
40:27
Mark Pracht: you know.
40:29
Mark Pracht: EC, at this point, had collapsed, and, you know, there was… it only makes sense that, you know, I can see Walt taking a look at
40:39
Mark Pracht: Tote's work, and being like, oh yeah, this is the guy.
40:42
Sean Harklerode: Were these under the… were these Dell comics?
40:48
Sean Harklerode: Well, they're not published by Dell.
40:51
Mark Pracht: I thought Disney had their own line. It may have been under Dell, but it was, like.
40:59
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I don't know.
41:00
Mark Pracht: I… I… again, I am saying this completely, I… when I was doing my research for…
41:06
Mark Pracht: the shows, I was not looking at Disney, but I remember reading a lot of things. They were certainly, like, one of the dominant companies.
41:14
Mark Pracht: In that period, you know?
41:18
Mark Pracht: After… after the code, and after the,
41:26
Mark Pracht: And they also had enough cultural cachet that they sort of avoided all of the… Hoopla, you know?
41:35
Mark Pracht: Anyway…
41:39
Sean Harklerode: Hoopla, hoopla.
41:40
Mark Pracht: Aye.
41:41
Mark Pracht: Knee-deep in the hoopla.
41:45
Mark Pracht: But no, I think…
41:48
Mark Pracht: you know, it's funny, because I really, I really enjoyed this… these stories, and then I got to the shaken one at the end, and I was like, well, it's kind of just, whatever.
42:01
Sean Harklerode: Well, I mean… Go ahead.
42:05
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, it's just… it seemed like…
42:11
Mark Pracht: it seemed like… it sort of felt like the Howard Shaken playbook of, you know, throw some sex into it, throw some…
42:19
Mark Pracht: political intrigue, and… Okay, great.
42:24
Mark Pracht: I just didn't… it didn't feel all that, inspired to me.
42:30
Sean Harklerode: I liked it. I felt like it was, you know, it was more of a tribute to, you know.
42:36
Sean Harklerode: kind of the origins of Zorro in the Scarlet Pimpernel, so to have Don Alejandro, to have, you know, been… well, actually Bernardo, I guess, in contact with, Percy.
42:51
Mark Pracht: Yes.
42:52
Sean Harklerode: in France, and I always… you know, I remember I was in…
42:58
Sean Harklerode: junior high school, when that Scarlett Pembernail movie came out on TV, and we were all quoting the, you know, they seek him here, they seek him there, the next day at school. Which I know sounds very strange, but we were really into the Scarlett Pembernail.
43:18
Sean Harklerode: Somehow.
43:18
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, you know, it's so… like, the, the… the,
43:26
Mark Pracht: DNA of all of these characters, you know.
43:30
Mark Pracht: Bob Kane liked to talk about Zorro a lot.
43:34
Mark Pracht: in relation to Batman, And, I mean.
43:37
Mark Pracht: you can't deny it. I mean, you got the cave, you got the butler, you got the horse, you got the equipment, you got the black suit, you got, you know, like, and you… you can't talk about Zaro without talking about the Scarlet Pimpernel, and…
43:57
Mark Pracht: You know, it's just this lineage of this idea of someone who, you know, puts on…
44:04
Mark Pracht: a costume, and… and is a… is a FOP.
44:08
Sean Harklerode: Right.
44:09
Mark Pracht: who is…
44:10
Mark Pracht: not a FOP. I mean, I do think… the one thing I do love about Don Diego is that, you know, and it really does come from Guy Williams' portrayal of it, like, he's not really a FOP, you know? It's just like, he's just kind of… .
44:28
Sean Harklerode: I liked…
44:29
Mark Pracht: your feet, yes. I like playing guitar, I like reading poetry, I like… but I mean, like, you know, Guy Williams never came off as,
44:38
Mark Pracht: Foppish.
44:39
Mark Pracht: At least in my mind.
44:41
Sean Harklerode: Right.
44:42
Mark Pracht: I, I, you know, it's funny, I don't want to keep invoking it, but…
44:45
Mark Pracht: I won't even… I don't want to keep invoking it, but I mean, actually,
44:52
Mark Pracht: The, the modern film, the, the.
44:57
Tad Eggleston: Banderas.
44:58
Mark Pracht: The Banderas film… man, Banderas goes for the fop thing when he's playing Don Diego.
45:04
Mark Pracht: It's like, ugh, what's up, blah, blah, blah, blah.
45:09
Sean Harklerode: I really want to see this, Jean de Jardin series.
45:14
Tad Eggleston: I've heard good things.
45:15
Sean Harklerode: Yeah. I mean, I love him.
45:18
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
45:19
Sean Harklerode: So fantastic.
45:20
Sean Harklerode: Deerskin, everyone.
45:23
Sean Harklerode: Craziest movie you'll ever see.
45:25
Sean Harklerode: Well… Maybe one of the craziest movies you've ever seen.
45:31
Mark Pracht: Apparently, you've never seen Brotherhood of the Wolf.
45:34
Sean Harklerode: I have not seen Brotherhood of the Wolf.
45:36
Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's a… it's like a… it's like a… a French Revolution kung fu movie.
45:42
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… I also recently won.
45:46
Sean Harklerode: I mean, yeah.
45:46
Tad Eggleston: El Topo.
45:48
Tad Eggleston: Oh! Jotovsky.
45:52
Tad Eggleston: Who else?
45:52
Mark Pracht: Topo is, like, that's not… like, that… That… I…
46:00
Tad Eggleston: Different kind of crazy, is that what you're saying?
46:02
Mark Pracht: Different kind of crazy.
46:04
Mark Pracht: you know, like, all you gotta do, all you have to do is watch Jodorosky's Dune, that documentary, and you realize.
46:11
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Jonorowski's tune.
46:12
Mark Pracht: is… out of his mind. And… and, like, he's…
46:18
Tad Eggleston: Mostly…
46:18
Mark Pracht: through Water.
46:19
Tad Eggleston: Always?
46:20
Mark Pracht: he's a true artist, but, like, and he doesn't give a fuck. He doesn't give a fuck about the modern mores. That whole thing where he's talking about the, you know, if you really… if you really love a book when you adapt it, you have to it. You know, and I'm like.
46:37
Mark Pracht: Did you just say that? Because…
46:41
Mark Pracht: dude, you know, and I'm like,
46:47
Mark Pracht: It wasn't even that, he was like… How do you even spell that?
46:50
Mark Pracht: It starts with an R and ends with an E.
46:54
Mark Pracht: I think he actually even said that first you have to love it enough to marry it, and then…
46:59
Sean Harklerode: Oh, see, I didn't understand.
47:01
Mark Pracht: And then… and then…
47:04
Sean Harklerode: Okay. Alright.
47:05
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
47:06
Sean Harklerode: That's, that's… that's a word choice. That's a word choice.
47:10
Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, like, and you're just like, oh, okay, you are from a whole different world, in a whole different time, and I, you know, and the thing is, is like…
47:22
Tad Eggleston: I would still have them on 22 panels in a heartbeat.
47:26
Mark Pracht: To talk about those humanoids books? Yes.
47:28
Tad Eggleston: S.
47:29
Mark Pracht: Yes?
47:30
Mark Pracht: I mean.
47:31
Tad Eggleston: I may have reached out, I may not have heard back.
47:34
Mark Pracht: I… I will 100% tell you, you will get nothing useful out of it.
47:38
Mark Pracht: like, like, he will talk about stuff for hours, it'll be fascinating, but you will… I will… I will guarantee you, nothing will be illuminated about those books, because I think that he doesn't want to illuminate his work. And I… and I…
47:52
Tad Eggleston: Anyway, ever since…
47:52
Sean Harklerode: Totally respectfully.
47:53
Tad Eggleston: I want illumination, I just want good conversations.
48:00
Tad Eggleston: It doesn't have to be direct illumination. Sometimes you get illumination just from getting to know the person better.
48:06
Mark Pracht: Just get Copel on here, and before you start it, do the Pawaba thing.
48:11
Mark Pracht: And he'll be…
48:16
Tad Eggleston: You guys don't seem to know what the Pawaba thing is.
48:19
Sean Harklerode: Aye.
48:20
Mark Pracht: I feel like it's the apocalypse now.
48:24
Mark Pracht: Francis Fort Coppola, ever since he was a theater student.
48:28
Mark Pracht: When they would begin a production, he would get the entire team in a circle.
48:32
Sean Harklerode: Oh, okay.
48:33
Mark Pracht: And they would go, Pawaba, Pawaba, Pawaba, and it was supposed to bring good fortune to the production. So they does that on the first day of shooting of every show, of every movie.
48:45
Mark Pracht: I… I love me some Coppola.
48:47
Mark Pracht: And I love his craziness.
48:49
Sean Harklerode: He is a fascinating…
48:51
Mark Pracht: Yes. Dying.
48:52
Mark Pracht: But, anyway, that's a whole nother thing there.
48:55
Tad Eggleston: Is it really, really weird that as much as I love The Godfather, until Megalopolis, my favorite Coppola movie, might have been Jack?
49:07
Mark Pracht: I have never seen Jack.
49:09
Sean Harklerode: action.
49:09
Mark Pracht: That's… Weird.
49:13
Mark Pracht: I mean, look, if.
49:15
Sean Harklerode: That was a journeyman effort from him, like, he just directed me.
49:18
Mark Pracht: He needed money.
49:20
Sean Harklerode: Like, when he.
49:20
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, I mean, almost everything between Apocalypse Now and Megalopolis was because he was paying off debt.
49:28
Mark Pracht: Well, no, because Apocalypse Now made a shit ton of money. It was, one from the park.
49:34
Sean Harklerode: Got it.
49:35
Mark Pracht: Well, one from the Heart is where he tried to build Zoetrope into an actual movie studio.
49:41
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
49:41
Mark Pracht: And… Man, read… read about the making of that movie. It's crazy. Like, he had understudies for the cast.
49:51
Tad Eggleston: No.
49:52
Sean Harklerode: And I'm like…
49:54
Mark Pracht: But, .
49:57
Sean Harklerode: I think that'd make a great stage play.
50:00
Mark Pracht: the heart.
50:01
Sean Harklerode: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
50:02
Mark Pracht: Yeah. The.
50:05
Tad Eggleston: I also honestly think that Jack is one of Robin Williams' better performances.
50:09
Tad Eggleston: And I love Robin Williams.
50:11
Sean Harklerode: Check that out.
50:12
Tad Eggleston: I mean, honestly, like, I think that.
50:14
Mark Pracht: I don't.
50:17
Tad Eggleston: We don't give enough credit to things that are…
50:23
Tad Eggleston: Not over the top. Sometimes doing something subtle and quirky is harder.
50:28
Sean Harklerode: 100%, Tad.
50:30
Mark Pracht: 100%.
50:31
Tad Eggleston: And that's what…
50:32
Mark Pracht: How do I feel about Jack? 100% true.
50:33
Tad Eggleston: Jack has this weird story where you've got this, like, it has one point, which is, you know, Robin Williams' character grows at, what, 4 times speed?
50:43
Mark Pracht: Sure.
50:44
Tad Eggleston: So by the time he graduates high school, he's almost 80.
50:52
Mark Pracht: And I just…
50:53
Tad Eggleston: And other than that, it tries to treat it… I mean, in a lot of ways, it's just a series of vignettes of what would it be like…
51:02
Tad Eggleston: To be the 16-year-old in… Preschool.
51:07
Tad Eggleston: Or the 16-year-old body, With the 4-year-old mind in preschool.
51:14
Tad Eggleston: You know, how did the parents cope with that? I mean, I just… I haven't watched it in a while, but I've always.
51:19
Mark Pracht: I think…
51:20
Tad Eggleston: shocked when I discovered that it was Coppola, but when I discovered it was Coppola, I also went, you know what, that makes sense, because he would pay attention to the details of doing this right.
51:29
Sean Harklerode: There are movies out there, man, that are so much better than anyone remembers or thinks.
51:35
Mark Pracht: Yeah.
51:35
Sean Harklerode: so many forgotten gems, so I'll check that out. I don't know if it's streaming anywhere, or…
51:40
Tad Eggleston: I'll check right.
51:40
Mark Pracht: I…
51:41
Tad Eggleston: While we go back to Zorro. Or other copies.
51:44
Sean Harklerode: Go back to River.
51:46
Mark Pracht: Francis Ford Coppola Zorro. I'm in.
51:49
Tad Eggleston: Oh, God.
51:51
Sean Harklerode: So, I mean, the Chaikin'… I mean, the artwork I liked.
51:57
Sean Harklerode: And,
52:00
Sean Harklerode: You know, I mean, it was… it was definitely a tribute to Toth. I mean, you can see he's using those models, I think.
52:07
Mark Pracht: Sure, yeah, 100%.
52:10
Sean Harklerode: But again, a darker, I mean, you know, the throat, the slit throat there.
52:17
Mark Pracht: Right.
52:19
Tad Eggleston: Oh, look at that! It is on Disney+. So you… you can… you can watch Zorro and Jack on the same streaming service.
52:30
Tad Eggleston: Wow.
52:31
Tad Eggleston: As we plug the mouse more than we normally do. Right.
52:37
Sean Harklerode: Well, I don't know if any of you have read… Tad, you've read the Matt Wagner, Zorro.
52:43
Tad Eggleston: Oh, God, yes. Yeah, fantastic. Well, and… and what's more is, I… I…
52:51
Tad Eggleston: one of the reasons I read the Matt Wagner Zorro is the first volume gives… gives credit to Isabelle Allende, because it's very much based on
53:01
Tad Eggleston: Her re… her novel reinterpretation of…
53:08
Tad Eggleston: Why do I forget the name? Capistrano?
53:11
Mark Pracht: Curse of Capistrano.
53:13
Tad Eggleston: Capistrano. Which… which…
53:16
Tad Eggleston: until Wagner's adaptation of it was probably my favorite Zorro, and now it's a toss-up between the book and the comic for my favorite Zorro. But then he continued on from there. He also got to tell me a great story about
53:32
Tad Eggleston: When he got to spend…
53:34
Tad Eggleston: 3 days watching movies with Quentin Tarantino while they wrote the script for Django Zorro.
53:41
Sean Harklerode: Oh!
53:46
Sean Harklerode: Wow.
53:48
Tad Eggleston: Go listen to the Matt Wagner and, Kelly… Kelly Jones episode of 22 Panels.
53:54
Sean Harklerode: Oh, wow, Matt Wagner and Kelly Jones?
53:57
Tad Eggleston: Dracula together, that's why they were on.
53:59
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, okay.
54:01
Tad Eggleston: The third Dracula Kickstarter was recently.
54:04
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a fun conversation.
54:08
Sean Harklerode: I'll bet.
54:08
Tad Eggleston: Kelly's a good guy. Kelly's a good guy. I look forward to talking to them again.
54:14
Tad Eggleston: Actually, though, my favorite of the stories he told, I'll tell most of this story.
54:19
Tad Eggleston: He was a presenter at the first Eisner Awards.
54:23
Tad Eggleston: He was also up for an Eisner, but he didn't win.
54:27
Tad Eggleston: And then he was in the elevator with his wife, and just before the door closed, Will Eisner and his wife got in the elevator as well.
54:37
Tad Eggleston: And Will looked at him and said, I just saw you at the awards, didn't I? Congratulations! And he said sheepishly, but I didn't win anything. And apparently, Will leaned over and whispered in his ear, yes, you did.
54:57
Mark Pracht: Kind of reminds me of the, the Paul Levitt's,
55:02
Mark Pracht: Bob Kane Widow Story. You guys have heard that, right?
55:06
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
55:08
Tad Eggleston: My, my, my other fun…
55:12
Mark Pracht: No one really likes your husband.
55:15
Tad Eggleston: Well, I've told you, I… I took…
55:17
Sean Harklerode: That I had not heard.
55:18
Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah, so, so…
55:20
Mark Pracht: I… I… I gotta, I'm gonna… I'm gonna relate this story just for Sean, because I heard this, was that, after Bob died.
55:28
Mark Pracht: his widow, who I can't remember her name now, she came into the DC offices and went to Paul Levitt's and was like, I hear that Will Eisner has an award named after him. Don't you think that Bob should have an award?
55:43
Mark Pracht: You know, in his name?
55:45
Mark Pracht: And… Poor Paul had to be, like, Mrs. Kane.
55:51
Mark Pracht: Your husband's reputation in this industry is not… stellar.
55:57
Tad Eggleston: See, C, I…
56:00
Tad Eggleston: in dementia care, so I can't give names, because I'm controlled by HIPAA, but I took care of
56:08
Tad Eggleston: An individual that was good friends with.
56:12
Tad Eggleston: Bob Kane's wife, and therefore was at many.
56:15
Mark Pracht: Many dinner parties, and apparently, even at the dinner parties.
56:18
Tad Eggleston: nobody liked Bob Kane. They were all there for the wife, and thought Bob was a self-aggrandizing… I mean, the number of things she would say about… sometimes she'd go on rants about Bob Kane, and then suddenly look up and, oh, wait, you're a comic book guy, I'm sorry, and I'd be like, no!
56:37
Sean Harklerode: Jesus!
56:40
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, yeah, you know.
56:42
Mark Pracht: Not one good Bob Kane story. Not one.
56:47
Mark Pracht: Anyway.
56:48
Mark Pracht: I'll be right back. I gotta jump off for a second.
56:51
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
56:52
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, there really aren't…
56:56
Tad Eggleston: I can't think of any good Bob Kane stories. I mean, I can think of Bob Kane stories that are good because he gets, like, punched?
57:04
Sean Harklerode: Right, there's…
57:05
Tad Eggleston: I mean, when the good story about you involves somebody punching you in the face, I think that says something.
57:11
Sean Harklerode: Right.
57:12
Sean Harklerode: or Bill Moumi, how he would lord it over Bill Moumi, that…
57:18
Sean Harklerode: They were canceled before him, before Batman was?
57:26
Sean Harklerode: Lost in space. So you're loading it over an 8-year-old, right?
57:30
Tad Eggleston: Right.
57:31
Tad Eggleston: Right.
57:31
Sean Harklerode: Well, I mean, the… he was in his 20s, or maybe early 30s.
57:35
Tad Eggleston: doesn't matter.
57:36
Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
57:37
Tad Eggleston: Doesn't matter.
57:39
Sean Harklerode: Right.
57:40
Sean Harklerode: No, I… I have really… I really enjoyed these books. It reminds me of…
57:47
Sean Harklerode: When I was a kid, if I stayed at my grandparents' house, I could watch Mr. Ed and Zorro in the morning.
57:56
Sean Harklerode: They had different TV channels than we had.
58:00
Sean Harklerode: Out in the country.
58:02
Sean Harklerode: We couldn't get… have all of the reception that they did.
58:06
Sean Harklerode: So… I just love that.
58:10
Sean Harklerode: That opening sequence with the lightning strike, and riding Tornado.
58:19
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
58:20
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I thought the opening sequel… I mean, again, I can't emphasize enough how good
58:28
Tad Eggleston: the art is on this. I think that's… that's one of the reasons I talked about it before, and I think I'm gonna push hard. I think… I think our next two months need to be Toth on Torpedo, and then Bernay on Torpedo.
58:41
Tad Eggleston: Because I think the fact that that was primarily for a European audience.
58:48
Tad Eggleston: at… actually, I can't remember if it was a European or South American audience, but… but certainly not… maybe even both. Certainly, the US was, like, the third place that the book got sold.
59:02
Tad Eggleston: Between the fact that it's… it was aimed at a different audience, and the fact that,
59:11
Tad Eggleston: That audience has different… Comic Sensibilities allowed for… Different parts of what makes…
59:22
Tad Eggleston: Toth Gray to… to come out. I mean, that was really… that was really the first thing I… I mean, I… I mean, I grew up on Super Friends, so, like, I had…
59:33
Tad Eggleston: I had experienced Toth without knowing that I'd experienced Toth, and I'm certain there are other places,
59:41
Tad Eggleston: that I had done that as well, but Torpedo was the first place that I was reading it because, oh, this is an Alex Toth book, I have heard so many good things about Alex Toth, I should read this.
59:56
Tad Eggleston: Y-you know what I mean?
59:57
Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I'm not familiar with it, so…
1:00:00
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Sounds great.
1:00:01
Sean Harklerode: me.
1:00:02
Sean Harklerode: I do like how expressive a lot of this is, and I don't know, you know, You, you think?
1:00:08
Tad Eggleston: Oh, right.
1:00:09
Sean Harklerode: Kurt Swann's, Superman, The Winking.
1:00:12
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:00:13
Sean Harklerode: Which, you know.
1:00:14
Sean Harklerode: you know, George Reeves did a lot at the end of episodes, and I don't remember, but I'm just assuming that Guy Williams did a few. I mean, there are a few here where, like, Zorro's winking at you, like, at the end.
1:00:30
Tad Eggleston: I actually loved so many of the facial close-ups. Right. I mean, as much as I talked about earlier, about the six-panel grid and, like, the lack of action, showing the fact that he maybe didn't put
1:00:45
Tad Eggleston: The same level of…
1:00:49
Tad Eggleston: storytelling into this that he might have put into some of his other work. His craftsmanship, the acting of his characters, the shot angle, the lighting, whatnot, like, every panel is a work of art.
1:01:08
Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it reminds me of, like, reading Love and Rockets that way, where it's like, if you're, like, zooming in on a panel, you go, oh, I could frame this. And then you move to the next panel, and you're like, oh, I could frame this.
1:01:22
Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
1:01:23
Sean Harklerode: I'm interested, speaking of that, you know, the book comes in two versions. There's a black and white and a color.
1:01:33
Sean Harklerode: version.
1:01:34
Tad Eggleston: Did you look at the color at all?
1:01:36
Sean Harklerode: I did not…
1:01:37
Tad Eggleston: Did I not share that?
1:01:38
Sean Harklerode: white. I only looked at the color.
1:01:39
Tad Eggleston: Oh, you only looked at the color.
1:01:42
Sean Harklerode: color.
1:01:43
Tad Eggleston: See, I mostly read the black and white because I wanted to focus on Toth, but I did one issue in color.
1:01:49
Tad Eggleston: At the end of the… end of the book, they've got a couple of pages…
1:01:54
Tad Eggleston: The way they actually looked, so you can see… Yes. …how the recoloring
1:01:59
Tad Eggleston: And it's where I'll say, A, like…
1:02:04
Tad Eggleston: He drew this so it could have been a black and white book.
1:02:07
Tad Eggleston: Which isn't always the case when it's being colored.
1:02:12
Tad Eggleston: B… The color doesn't make it worse, but I don't think it makes it better.
1:02:18
Tad Eggleston: With the new coloring, And C, the old coloring made it worse.
1:02:26
Sean Harklerode: Really? Okay. You know, the coloring on those two pages that we're seeing, the original coloring at the very back of the book, I'm like… They clash with the Senor Gomez hunts a fox?
1:02:37
Tad Eggleston: Right. It's like, this is bad coloring.
1:02:41
Tad Eggleston: You're taking amazing art and… and… and adding…
1:02:49
Tad Eggleston: Not mediocre color coloring, not blah coloring, bad coloring.
1:02:57
Tad Eggleston: like, so, I mean, like, I'll bring up,
1:03:04
Tad Eggleston: EC, because there are a lot of people that don't like the Dark Horse remastered color editions. Like, they think the only good color editions are whatever company had it before Dark Horse.
1:03:16
Sean Harklerode: Or the Russ Cochran…
1:03:18
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:03:19
Sean Harklerode: Reprint? .
1:03:22
Tad Eggleston: And I think…
1:03:23
Tad Eggleston: primarily Marie Severin did a good enough job on coloring that, like, that is a legit argument. Based on what I've seen of the original colors on the Zorro books, I would be very sad if anybody tried to make that argument.
1:03:40
Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, there is an argument between the black and white and the color.
1:03:45
Tad Eggleston: Because… like…
1:03:53
Tad Eggleston: And I wonder if Toth inked himself, because I know he didn't always. I actually discovered very recently
1:03:59
Tad Eggleston: that, the guy who drew…
1:04:05
Tad Eggleston: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, who I… his name was discovered recently, too, so give me a second and I'll find it again. But anyway, as well as…
1:04:18
Tad Eggleston: being the artist on Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story, which is one of the…
1:04:24
Tad Eggleston: A, still in print 70 years later, and B…
1:04:30
Tad Eggleston: One of the best-selling comics of all time, and essential to the non-violent…
1:04:40
Tad Eggleston: Protest movement of the… of the 60s.
1:04:43
Tad Eggleston: Was Alex Toth's favorite anchor.
1:04:51
Tad Eggleston: That's one of his other claims to fame, and I'm going…
1:04:57
Sean Harklerode: Well, I don't know if…
1:04:59
Tad Eggleston: Beat had an article on… on Martin Luther King Day. Go figure.
1:05:03
Sean Harklerode: Wow.
1:05:05
Tad Eggleston: They actually run the same article about the comic every year.
1:05:10
Tad Eggleston: Because it's still available.
1:05:13
Tad Eggleston: But now that the name of the artist is known, they can add that.
1:05:22
Sean Harklerode: I don't… I don't know, it was… going back to the… the coloring, I don't know if you follow, Jose Villarubia?
1:05:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:05:31
Sean Harklerode: You know, he… I haven't seen him do it in a while. If he… if he remasters color, I know it's gonna be amazing. Right, and he will post sometimes, you know, comparisons, and what he likes and doesn't like about 3 prints, and showing the originals.
1:05:46
Tad Eggleston: It's really very interesting to read on those things. Really quick, Cyberry is the name that I was looking for.
1:05:54
Tad Eggleston: Cy Berry both drew the comic Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, and was… among Toth's favorite inkers.
1:06:02
Sean Harklerode: Was that… was that contemporaneous? Was that…
1:06:06
Tad Eggleston: I mean, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story came out in…
1:06:11
Tad Eggleston: I wanna say the late 50s?
1:06:13
Sean Harklerode: Oh, okay.
1:06:15
Tad Eggleston: 57.
1:06:18
Sean Harklerode: Wow.
1:06:20
Tad Eggleston: I mean, it was literally… it was, like, the reason March exists…
1:06:27
Tad Eggleston: is because Andrew sold it to the congressman as a way to work in the history of Martin Luther King and the Montgomery story, which in a very real way was the handbook
1:06:41
Tad Eggleston: of the Civil Rights Movement.
1:06:44
Tad Eggleston: Because it starts out with the story, and it finishes up with, like, 8 pages on how to do nonviolent resistance.
1:06:52
Tad Eggleston: So it literally is a handbook to… to nonviolent resistance.
1:07:02
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:07:04
Tad Eggleston: and it was Eddie Campbell that… that… the… the… Because Eddie knows it.
1:07:10
Tad Eggleston: Eddie can identify anybody's art, so Eddie was able to say, I think it's gonna be this guy, or this guy, or maybe this guy, and that got us so that they only had 3 guys left to ask, and they wound up asking one of them, he's like.
1:07:25
Tad Eggleston: I did!
1:07:33
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, he did Tarzan and Flash Gordon, er, Barry did Tarzan and Flash Gordon for King Features.
1:07:40
Tad Eggleston: And, was Alex Toth's most accomplished and favored anchor?
1:07:47
Tad Eggleston: So I'd have to dig deeper to figure out what he inked for Toth.
1:07:56
Sean Harklerode: Cool.
1:07:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:07:58
Tad Eggleston: That was a little thing that I discovered this week, that I threw in the…
1:08:02
Tad Eggleston: Looks like he… he inked, World… World's Finest 68?
1:08:08
Tad Eggleston: And 6… er, 66, rather.
1:08:19
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait a minute here. We were talking about Genius Isolated earlier, and the life… the three-volume…
1:08:26
Tad Eggleston: set, looks like Cyberry comes up somewhere in the…
1:08:38
Tad Eggleston: somewhere in the interview, because the page comes up, so…
1:08:45
Tad Eggleston: we'll table that. I can go down… way down… way too far down that rabbit hole, and…
1:08:51
Tad Eggleston: And me, going down rabbit holes in real time is only interesting for so long.
1:08:58
Sean Harklerode: Right.
1:09:01
Tad Eggleston: I think we might officially be past the point where it's truly interesting. Mark, you're back! Do you have any, parting shots? We should probably start wrapping up.
1:09:12
Mark Pracht: Not really. I mean, I think that,
1:09:16
Mark Pracht: I also read the color version, even though you were kind enough to send both.
1:09:21
Mark Pracht: And really, that only happened because
1:09:27
Mark Pracht: I sort of, like, picked one and transferred it to my reader.
1:09:30
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:09:31
Mark Pracht: And, I… cause it wasn't…
1:09:35
Mark Pracht: I guess it wasn't clear to me from the files which one was the color and which one was black and white.
1:09:41
Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
1:09:41
Mark Pracht: So.
1:09:43
Tad Eggleston: Whereas I picked two and transferred them to my reader, cause…
1:09:46
Mark Pracht: Right.
1:09:47
Tad Eggleston: I'm… A-a-a nerd like that?
1:09:51
Mark Pracht: But, I don't know, I think that it was… it was…
1:09:56
Mark Pracht: Like, I was kind of shocked at how much I really enjoyed it. I… I… it really… I… I expected something a little more antiquated than it was, and it was just fun, and I think that…
1:10:13
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I think that's all.
1:10:15
Tad Eggleston: All the, the, the tooth.
1:10:17
Tad Eggleston: Like, I think if you take…
1:10:20
Tad Eggleston: If you take the exact dialogue and then put the comic in almost anybody else's hands, it would have felt like the antiquated thing that you…
1:10:29
Tad Eggleston: Expected it to be.
1:10:30
Mark Pracht: That's certainly true, but I also think that it's just so… there's something… elemental about…
1:10:42
Mark Pracht: I think there's something elemental about a character like Zoro.
1:10:45
Mark Pracht: You know?
1:10:46
Mark Pracht: even…
1:10:47
Tad Eggleston: I can just… I'm just trying to imagine… I mean, because, like.
1:10:53
Tad Eggleston: action was so big in comics. I mean, I think one of the reasons why…
1:11:01
Tad Eggleston: there is an action in this is because there wasn't action in the TV shows, and while you could have inserted it and or lengthened the action scenes significantly, it would have…
1:11:16
Tad Eggleston: meant either cramming character development, or… or cutting it out. So instead, Toth… made the, the, the decision…
1:11:30
Tad Eggleston: to make the other parts interesting enough, cause again, like, I don't believe for a second that his… his…
1:11:39
Tad Eggleston: Disney editorial Cared as much about
1:11:43
Tad Eggleston: Keeping the story coherent, as they did about…
1:11:49
Tad Eggleston: not crossing certain lines, and making it fun, and having the kids pick it up. I mean, they didn't even let them… they didn't even let them…
1:11:58
Tad Eggleston: draw covers, they used photo covers, you know?
1:12:01
Tad Eggleston: Which that just blows my mind. You've got Alex Toth on your book, and you're using photo covers?
1:12:07
Mark Pracht: Yeah, but you also had, you also had an incredibly popular television show.
1:12:13
Tad Eggleston: No, absolutely, absolutely.
1:12:15
Mark Pracht: I mean…
1:12:15
Tad Eggleston: that that's It's what it is, it makes sense.
1:12:19
Sean Harklerode: Mario Cello is not buying that book.
1:12:21
Sean Harklerode: That government.
1:12:22
Tad Eggleston: But, but that makes…
1:12:24
Mark Pracht: I will tell you.
1:12:26
Mark Pracht: part of me… there's a part of me that wonders why at some… during the 50s, DC didn't switch over to George Reeves covers, with that being as popular as it was.
1:12:37
Tad Eggleston: It's quite possible.
1:12:38
Tad Eggleston: Because they couldn't.
1:12:40
Mark Pracht: Possibly because they couldn't, yeah.
1:12:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:12:42
Tad Eggleston: But…
1:12:42
Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
1:12:43
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I think a lot of what makes this are the way he makes quiet scenes work.
1:12:49
Tad Eggleston: And I think… my… my feeling is that's… that's all him.
1:12:57
Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that, you know, what I was saying is that there's not… there's not as much action as I anticipated, and what I mean by that is, you know, bullwhip, swordplay, blah blah blah blah, but I mean, everything is propulsive.
1:13:11
Mark Pracht: Like, and I think that they're all fairly short stories, you know?
1:13:15
Mark Pracht: Especially my, I mean, those, those…
1:13:17
Tad Eggleston: I mean, a lot of these are essentially 3 episodes in an issue.
1:13:21
Mark Pracht: Sure. But, like, it… like, there's no… there's no room to just sort of meander.
1:13:29
Tad Eggleston: Right. And…
1:13:31
Mark Pracht: Like, I do… I would have to say, like, I would assume that that was an editorial mandate.
1:13:37
Mark Pracht: You know?
1:13:37
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, maybe, but I could see these stories being set up with one exposition page, five pages of action, and one concluding exposition page. I've seen stories from this era that feel like that.
1:13:53
Mark Pracht: Yeah. You know.
1:13:54
Tad Eggleston: Aww.
1:13:55
Mark Pracht: But you… but…
1:13:57
Mark Pracht: again, I mean, I think… I think that this all goes… this is all… it's a cyclic thing, and it feeds itself, is that you have a popular TV show with a popular actor, and a popular character, and then you… so, like.
1:14:11
Mark Pracht: don't break what works, you know? And that's all I'm saying, is that at no point does it slow down to say.
1:14:22
Mark Pracht: Okay.
1:14:24
Mark Pracht: we're gonna, like, there's no… there's actually very little setup to any of these stories, except for the bare bones, but that's also how the TV show worked, you know? Right.
1:14:35
Mark Pracht: You know, it's like, okay, here's the situation, how's Zorro gonna deal with it? And then, you know.
1:14:40
Mark Pracht: And how long before we see Zorro, you know?
1:14:44
Mark Pracht: It's sort of like when you watched the Hulk TV show, and you knew that, okay, he's gonna change twice.
1:14:50
Mark Pracht: Once at about the half-hour point.
1:14:53
Mark Pracht: Or once at about the 20-minute point, and then once at the 50-minute point, you know? And… and…
1:14:59
Mark Pracht: You know, everything's formula, man, and
1:15:03
Mark Pracht: And it works! It works, and that is a testament to Toth's storytelling, his art.
1:15:11
Mark Pracht: you know, but I also would assume that somebody was like, okay, this is what we want, we want 3 stories per issue, blah blah blah blah, so you've got…
1:15:22
Mark Pracht: 8 pages.
1:15:23
Mark Pracht: Or whatever, you know? So…
1:15:26
Mark Pracht: then it becomes, like, how do you do the… how do you do that in 8 pages? So, and I think that he does a remarkable job of keeping
1:15:34
Mark Pracht: It kept me turning the page.
1:15:37
Mark Pracht: there's a lot of… there's a lot of books from this period where… including a lot of EC books, I mean, I… you know, like, EC was the king, but there's a lot of those stories where I'm just like, okay, whatever.
1:15:50
Mark Pracht: Whatever. Whatever. Like, and these, and of course this, if I'm understanding correctly, this is a selection of them.
1:15:59
Mark Pracht: So they probably wore…
1:16:02
Tad Eggleston: I mean… It's all the toast?
1:16:06
Tad Eggleston: Now, what I don'.
1:16:07
Mark Pracht: But I mean, like…
1:16:07
Tad Eggleston: Certain is whether other artists were…
1:16:11
Mark Pracht: I would assume they probably had other artists working on it as well.
1:16:14
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, that would be a very.
1:16:15
Mark Pracht: Really interesting.
1:16:16
Tad Eggleston: Disney way to do it would be to have multiple artists working at once.
1:16:20
Mark Pracht: You know, and, and…
1:16:22
Mark Pracht: It would be interesting to see if the artwork is… I mean, I 100% believe it was probably on model.
1:16:29
Mark Pracht: Right.
1:16:29
Tad Eggleston: Right. Though I also would not be shocked to discover that there wound up being the good Zorro artist, just like there was the good duck artist.
1:16:41
Mark Pracht: There's always…
1:16:41
Sean Harklerode: There's always the good artist, man, you know? It's like…
1:16:46
Tad Eggleston: Well, but with D… er, with… I mean, and this is the other thing, like, it doesn't say anywhere that Alex wrote this, it doesn't give a writing credit.
1:16:55
Mark Pracht: No.
1:16:55
Tad Eggleston: And for that matter, there are no credits inside the pages we get. So, I mean, I'm really curious as to, like.
1:17:05
Tad Eggleston: Based on, on, like, how… what I know about comics.
1:17:12
Tad Eggleston: And how they were made at the time. Who else was involved?
1:17:16
Tad Eggleston: Because… They're… they're…
1:17:22
Mark Pracht: those… it was all those words don't matter artists, right? Or, writers.
1:17:26
Tad Eggleston: Always.
1:17:30
Tad Eggleston: I only said Kirby's words didn't matter.
1:17:34
Sean Harklerode: Ho ho!
1:17:36
Mark Pracht: Whoa, whoa, I did not say that. Kirbyites, when you come with your pitchforks and torches, don't, I did not say that.
1:17:47
Mark Pracht: Anyway, alright guys, I need to go.
1:17:50
Tad Eggleston: You think the Kirbyites are listening to this podcast, too?
1:17:55
Mark Pracht: They probably listened to the first episode of our, Fourth World series, and were like, nope.
1:18:00
Tad Eggleston: Yep, that's true.
1:18:03
Tad Eggleston: Anyway, for 22 panels, this has been the Pulp Lotter Book Club with Sean Hockerwood and Mark Pratt, and we will see you next time
1:18:11
Tad Eggleston: After the next page.