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Transcript

With Great Power #282... 22 Panels with Alex Cormack & Neil Kleid · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels, where Alex Cormac, Killustrator, is returning for… I meant to look it up, like, the sixth, 7th time, something like that, with at least…
• 0:15
  Neil Kleid: Or as my kids would say, 6'7".
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 0:18
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, hey, 6'7", 6'7", yeah. I'm a high school teacher, I get it.
• 0:24
  Neil Kleid: I'm glad one of us does. I'm glad one of us does.
• 0:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think part of it is we're not supposed to get it.
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. That's part of getting it, is that it… you know, they live in the ridiculous generation, so they've made their humor ridiculous as well.
• 0:39
  Alex Cormack: Unlike our generation, where it was all very serious.
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, like, the world made sense at some times in our life.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know, the six, seven kids never had a world that made sense.
• 0:57
  Alex Cormack: True, true.
• 0:59
  Alex Cormack: But yeah, man…
• 0:59
  Tad Eggleston: That's just…
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: the nature of the beast, and this time you brought Neil Clyde with you, which is, yes, sir! The great Neil Clyde. Is it the fifth different artist you've brought with you? Came with John Lees, you came with Rich Dueck, you came with Curtis Martins, you came with…
• 1:19
  Alex Cormack: After a day, cleveland.
• 1:21
  Tad Eggleston: Anthony Cleveland.
• 1:22
  Alex Cormack: Edith Cleveland, yep.
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:25
  Tad Eggleston: Five different writers. It's normally the other way around. The writers bring a bunch of different artists over the time, but Alex is the one that brings all the different writers.
• 1:33
  Neil Kleid: There you go. Well, without Rich, we would never be here, so I'm glad, I'm glad.
• 1:40
  Tad Eggleston: So, the book is medieval, the first issue is out on Comixology already. It's the second time in the past year that a book has come out that just had my name written all over it, like, good art and baseball.
• 1:58
  Tad Eggleston: You said it in medieval times, so I don't get, like, my favorite baseball scenes, unless you find some way to, like, come back.
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, pastime actually showed Greg Maddox on the tarp.
• 2:12
  Tad Eggleston: during the first night game, sliding. So, I mean, give me a moment like that, and I'm gonna love you, Alex.
• 2:20
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so I don't know how packed time got around the licensing issues, but, you will not be seeing anyone that you know.
• 2:27
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 2:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I, I think, I think because it was one panel on a TV screen.
• 2:33
  Neil Kleid: Okay.
• 2:34
  Alex Cormack: Alright.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, like…
• 2:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, in craziness, seeing as that happened in August of 1988, this year, not only was that panel on a TV screen, but there was a bobblehead day at Wrigley that was the Maddox sliding on the.
• 2:53
  Neil Kleid: Oh, that's, that's.
• 2:54
  Tad Eggleston: Bottlehead. I got… I went, so I have two of them, because my wife went with me. And I don't… I can't figure out why, because, like, it's the 27th anniversary… or the… not the 27th, the… the…
• 3:08
  Tad Eggleston: 37th anniversary of… you know? I don't know why it's in the zeitgeist this year.
• 3:16
  Neil Kleid: What I will say is that, is that, though we don't have names or even logos, it's clearly, it's clearly New York.
• 3:25
  Neil Kleid: And, and .
• 3:28
  Alex Cormack: I know what we're talking about, but not…
• 3:29
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, there's a lot of baseball reference, there's a lot, like, there's enough… if you're a baseball fan, even though we don't kind of show real people, or, you know, it's definitely set in 6th century, there's a lot to wipe away from as a baseball fan.
• 3:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, and I do love… we're gonna spoil just a teeny, teeny part of the end, but not the part that you don't want me to spoil.
• 3:52
  Neil Kleid: Well, that's good.
• 3:52
  Tad Eggleston: That… that there's a, that there's a field of dreams.
• 3:56
  Tad Eggleston: At the, at the end, you know, one of the, you know, so give me… give me the front counter pitch, and then this'll make the spoiler part make more sense. So…
• 4:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know it's a web book right now, so the front counter pitch doesn't count yet, but we'll call it a front counter pitch anyhow.
• 4:12
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so for those who don't know, Medieval is an Arthurian baseball book.
• 4:19
  Neil Kleid: It's about a guy named Danny Landau, who's a New York baseball fan, who gets hit on the head at a game.
• 4:26
  Neil Kleid: And ends up back in medieval times, in Camelot. And, it was really inspired by a couple of things. It was inspired by my need to do something a little less emotional. Well, not less emotional, but less dramatic. Something, like, that's from the gut, more from the head.
• 4:43
  Neil Kleid: And it was also inspired by Mark Twain's classic, Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
• 4:50
  Neil Kleid: Which is the granddaddy of dudes getting knocked on the head and ending up back in, in Camelot books. And so…
• 4:58
  Neil Kleid: for me, because I am a baseball guy, and I'm a Tigers fan, for me, when I was reading the book, I kept transposing Connecticut with New York, so I kept…
• 5:08
  Tad Eggleston: And when I saw… when you said that.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: Did you… I forget where I read that, but when I saw that, I'm like, yep, I read that book when I was 10 and did the same thing.
• 5:22
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, if you're a baseball person, you're like, you're like, Yankee means a certain thing to you as a baseball person, right? And so, for me, it was always like, how has no one done this before? And so, the real kicker was, when I did finally read the Twain book, his protagonist, Hank Morgan, is like.
• 5:40
  Neil Kleid: a jack-of-all-trades. He went back to Camelot and did everything he could.
• 5:44
  Neil Kleid: do military tactics, he built a newspaper, he built irrigation, he… he was like this dude from Connecticut who really could do everything, and my response would be, like, if some…
• 5:56
  Neil Kleid: like, Mook from the Bronx ended up back in New York. Like, there are things that person would do. Like, if I went back to Camelot, like, I know how to use an iPhone. I don't know how to build an iPhone, right?
• 6:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 6:10
  Neil Kleid: I mean, come on.
• 6:11
  Neil Kleid: And so… So, that was really what I wanted to show, is this guy who basically, like.
• 6:17
  Neil Kleid: Know some stuff.
• 6:19
  Neil Kleid: but… and can do some stuff, but basically, it's just at sea, right? And it was about a guy who basically has a lot of things he loves in his life. He loves baseball, he loves construction, he loves his girlfriend, he loves…
• 6:33
  Neil Kleid: New York, right? And what happens when he gets knocked on the head and ends up in England and loses it all? Like, who does he become?
• 6:41
  Tad Eggleston: All he's got left is construction and baseball.
• 6:44
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, and…
• 6:45
  Alex Cormack: Yep, and so that's basically what the comic's about.
• 6:48
  Tad Eggleston: Unless he wants to… unless he wants to build a boat, and… go found in New York.
• 6:53
  Neil Kleid: Right, right, go back to New York.
• 6:55
  Neil Kleid: But I don't even think he'd be able to do that, because he doesn't know how to build a boat. Right, I mean, he could go to just…
• 7:01
  Tad Eggleston: work.
• 7:02
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 7:02
  Tad Eggleston: Is he gonna go to York at any point?
• 7:07
  Neil Kleid: New York.
• 7:10
  Neil Kleid: He's gonna go to the bar, that's what he's gonna do.
• 7:12
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like that's where he should build his field, in York.
• 7:15
  Neil Kleid: In York, yeah.
• 7:18
  Neil Kleid: So he's stuck, but he… he makes the best of it, and yes, at one point, he makes a field. And it's my… it's my field of dream moments, our Field of Dream moments. But there's a lot of, like.
• 7:30
  Neil Kleid: influence from things like… that, the natural, like, there's a lot of, like, baseball influence, like, movies, books.
• 7:39
  Neil Kleid: just influence as fans, right? Alex and I are both fans, so you'll see a lot of that, and though I'm not from… I live in New Jersey, in New York, New Jersey, I'm not a New York fan, but the great part about all of this for me is getting Alex, who is a Boston fan, to draw the book.
• 7:55
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. I did…
• 7:57
  Tad Eggleston: Just a quick aside, I did, I did see… Patterson.
• 8:06
  Tad Eggleston: depicted in… in Nice Jewish Boys. Have you been…
• 8:10
  Tad Eggleston: Out to the, what's the name of the field?
• 8:14
  Tad Eggleston: They restored an Eagle League field.
• 8:17
  Tad Eggleston: Recently.
• 8:18
  Neil Kleid: Oh, no, I haven't been, no.
• 8:19
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, no, the last time I was out east, they were still… it's actually right by the falls,
• 8:26
  Tad Eggleston: they were in the process of restoring it, but I know they finished, and I, like, want to go just to…
• 8:32
  Tad Eggleston: Just to go to the…
• 8:34
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, I've been to the falls a couple times with my kids to the… we're talking about the Great Patterson Fall, right? And…
• 8:41
  Tad Eggleston: Hinchcliffe Stadium.
• 8:42
  Neil Kleid: Oh, Hingecliffe Stadium? Okay. No, I have not, I have not actually been… They're keeping up on.
• 8:48
  Tad Eggleston: Playing it again, yeah.
• 8:51
  Tad Eggleston: That just… like, apparently Larry Dobie played there at one time.
• 8:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, cause he was with the…
• 9:02
  Tad Eggleston: Before he signed in the big leagues, he was with the Newark Eagles.
• 9:07
  Tad Eggleston: Which were a really good team at the end of the Negro Leagues. But I digress, because I digress into baseball very easily.
• 9:14
  Neil Kleid: Oh, that's fine.
• 9:15
  Alex Cormack: I'm bad.
• 9:16
  Neil Kleid: We love…
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually how… I mean, I knew that I was going to be reaching out, because it was an Alex comic, but… but… and I always reach out to Alex, I like an excuse to talk to Alex.
• 9:29
  Tad Eggleston: Something about the bearded guy in a sweater that, like…
• 9:34
  Tad Eggleston: Looks like a professor, but then draws horrific…
• 9:39
  Tad Eggleston: Things, and has a different style for every book.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: Just… works for me.
• 9:45
  Alex Cormack: There you go. You're welcome.
• 9:47
  Neil Kleid: That's part of his… that was part of his dating profile at one point, by the way. Yeah, I believe it.
• 9:51
  Alex Cormack: I believe it.
• 9:53
  Tad Eggleston: But, I reached out initially because, you know, we just did our baseball roundtable, and I…
• 10:01
  Tad Eggleston: when I read the press release, I went, oh, Neil's a guy that wants to be at the baseball roundtable. I can feel this.
• 10:08
  Neil Kleid: I do, like, I'm more… I've become more of a football guy lately.
• 10:11
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Head injuries. Head injuries. I worked in senior care. Ugh!
• 10:17
  Alex Cormack: No.
• 10:19
  Neil Kleid: I do like me some baseball, clearly.
• 10:23
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 10:24
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 10:28
  Tad Eggleston: Alex, I guess I kinda knew you were a Red Sox fan. What was it like to… I don't think I've seen you draw baseball before.
• 10:33
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, no!
• 10:34
  Tad Eggleston: the opportunity to…
• 10:36
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, I'll…
• 10:36
  Tad Eggleston: You have to bite your tongue as you drew the pinstripes.
• 10:40
  Alex Cormack: Oh, I, yeah, I wasn't, yeah, so,
• 10:43
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, so, yeah, because I… like you said, I grew up, going to Fenway Park, like, as a kid all the time, you know, I've…
• 10:52
  Alex Cormack: You know, ever since, like, the 80s, you know, I've seen Roger Clemens play, I've seen Wade Boggs play, I've seen, you know, Pedro, Nomar, David Ortiz, like, you know, like, I've been to a zillion games, it's been great. So, the fact that, you know, after I do a Yankees book,
• 11:09
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, first thing I had to do was, get blessings for my family and all that, make sure it was alright. And, once… and… which I was thinking, like, if, you know, they could have easily said.
• 11:20
  Tad Eggleston: Are there… are there any outtakes where… where you just, like, in a warm-up sketch, had, like, David Ortiz in Medieval Times taking a bat to the…
• 11:29
  Alex Cormack: Well, I mean, luckily, most of the Yankee stuff is just, like, right at the beginning of the first issue. And the rest of the time, they're in, like, you know, in, you know, medieval times.
• 11:41
  Alex Cormack: And so, I had to draw a bunch of Yankees fans, and one thing that I actually regret not doing this was, because at the beginning, our guy Danny has to deal with a couple of Red Sox fans.
• 11:55
  Alex Cormack: And I meant to do this, and I don't know why I didn't, but I should have made it myself and my brother.
• 12:00
  Alex Cormack: And I'm… I'm kicking… I've been kicking myself since that I didn't do this.
• 12:05
  Tad Eggleston: But.
• 12:06
  Alex Cormack: And I don't remember.
• 12:08
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think he should have made it a… I mean, I'm a Red Sox fan too, so I think he should have made it a condition of the book.
• 12:14
  Tad Eggleston: That… that the… the offending…
• 12:18
  Tad Eggleston: the offending, head injury come from a home run hit by a Red Sox?
• 12:24
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, well, I, you know, it was in the script, and I try not to delve away from scripts, you know?
• 12:30
  Tad Eggleston: No, you should have told them, we're changing the script just a little bit.
• 12:35
  Alex Cormack: And, well, in my head, it was a foul ball.
• 12:37
  Alex Cormack: I don't think it was a home run.
• 12:39
  Neil Kleid: Yes, it's definitely a foul ball.
• 12:41
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I, I know.
• 12:42
  Alex Cormack: They lost that game.
• 12:43
  Tad Eggleston: But that's how you should have changed it, is that it should have been a Red Sox… I mean, you're at Yankee Stadium, so it can't be a walk-off, but a go-ahead Red Sox home run that also knocks things.
• 12:55
  Alex Cormack: Which would have been right in the night, you know, and it would have been, yeah, it would have been set in 2004, and Game 4… 2004 was a beautiful year.
• 13:06
  Alex Cormack: Excuse me?
• 13:07
  Neil Kleid: My favorite thing that Alex did, though, or should I say didn't do, is that if you go and read the script, and you read those first two to three pages, which are the only pages that are set
• 13:18
  Neil Kleid: Like, in modern times, right?
• 13:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 13:20
  Neil Kleid: And we don't ever say it because of the licensing issues, but it said, obviously, at Yankee Stadium. And so, I actually did, like, a ton of Yankee State… like, Yankee fan research.
• 13:30
  Neil Kleid: Right? Like, it's set in the bleachers, right? It's like, it's… so, I gave Alex, like, you should put this guy in, and you should put this thing happening, and there's a ton of, like, detail in the first, like, two pages of the script, and Alex did none of it. Nice.
• 13:46
  Neil Kleid: He was like, he was like, no, we're good.
• 13:50
  Neil Kleid: Here's what we…
• 13:52
  Alex Cormack: You know, I hate to say it, I remember, now you mention it, I'm like, I remember reading that, thinking, oh yeah, I'll make sure to do that. Then when I got the drawing, I'm like, okay, they're in the stands, I'll just draw a bunch of people in the stands.
• 14:04
  Neil Kleid: Pretty much, and I was like, oh, alright, I get it.
• 14:06
  Alex Cormack: He seemed happy, so I was like, alright, let's keep going.
• 14:08
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, it was fine.
• 14:11
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, but you forgot to put your brother in, too, so I mean.
• 14:14
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, so I probably…
• 14:15
  Tad Eggleston: Cool opportunity for Getter.
• 14:19
  Neil Kleid: Right, and the great thing about Alex, your artist, is so expressive that there are, I think.
• 14:24
  Neil Kleid: Definitely in Issue 1, there… and even beyond, because we're already working on Issue 5 right now.
• 14:29
  Tad Eggleston: I can't wait to see more.
• 14:31
  Neil Kleid: There are definitely moments where you're using real people
• 14:36
  Neil Kleid: like, as background characters, right? Because I think I even pointed out, in issue one, there's this whole scene, the big fight that happens in the tavern, right? Oh, yeah. There's a character, and I'm like, that's totally Jason Matoukas, right?
• 14:49
  Neil Kleid: And you never really told me yes or no, but I'm like, look at the art, it's literally him!
• 14:54
  Alex Cormack: No coming.
• 14:57
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… there's a long history of this in comics. I mean, whether it's Superman versus Muhammad Ali.
• 15:08
  Tad Eggleston: Or… I hate it when I can't remember.
• 15:16
  Neil Kleid: Oh, anywhere.
• 15:17
  Alex Cormack: Oh, yeah, yeah, I mean.
• 15:18
  Neil Kleid: Any comics wedding, right, any…
• 15:20
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, like, Elvis will be in the background, or I'll be.
• 15:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I was just sitting… I was sitting with, Dennis Kitchen and Dan Burr one day, and I had one of Dan's books, and Dennis was going through, because he knew all the places that Dan had hidden.
• 15:35
  Alex Cormack: Heh.
• 15:35
  Tad Eggleston: friends and family. So he's like, yeah, so this is Dan's wife, and this is this cartoonist.
• 15:43
  Neil Kleid: Well, what's funny is that you mentioned Nice Jewish Boys earlier. For those who don't know, it's the book I did right before this, which is… it's very dramatic.
• 15:49
  Tad Eggleston: So this is the palate cleanser that makes a lot of sense.
• 15:52
  Neil Kleid: Yes, medieval was about, but Nice Jewish Boys is a book set in my hometown. It's… it's about…
• 15:59
  Neil Kleid: a guy like me, who kind of gets drawn into a life of crime. It's the Jewish.
• 16:04
  Tad Eggleston: So what you're saying is you just got out of prison, And you're…
• 16:10
  Neil Kleid: comic.
• 16:10
  Tad Eggleston: A guy like you.
• 16:13
  Neil Kleid: But, so the idea, so the point was, is that…
• 16:16
  Tad Eggleston: novels and comics!
• 16:19
  Neil Kleid: But if you, if you… I mean, if you know me, right, if you're from town, like.
• 16:24
  Neil Kleid: people have read it who have come up to me and been like, oh, that's totally this person, or that's this area. And there's moments where I definitely told John Broadley, who wrote it, I was like, I'm gonna send you a picture.
• 16:36
  Neil Kleid: please use this person, or whatever. But then John came here and did a bunch of photo reference. I mean, I live in Teaneck, New Jersey, which is about 20 minutes from the city, not even. And so, we did a ton of research just around the area, you know, photo reference, what have you.
• 16:53
  Neil Kleid: But a lot of it is definitely based on, like, an amalgam of people I know.
• 16:59
  Neil Kleid: And so, you will find, like, we'll find, like, my…
• 17:02
  Neil Kleid: you know, friends and family have looked at it and been like, oh, is that this person? And I'm like, I don't want to say.
• 17:09
  Neil Kleid: With Medieval, I don't… I don't think… Alex, I don't think I gave you a ton of, like, oh, it's… here's, you know, use this person. Right, yeah.
• 17:15
  Tad Eggleston: You didn't… you didn't go into the family genealogy and find the pictures from… From Arthurian Times.
• 17:22
  Neil Kleid: I… well, my…
• 17:23
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, I went way…
• 17:24
  Tad Eggleston: My genealogy doesn't quite branch that way.
• 17:31
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, bye.
• 17:32
  Alex Cormack: I'd like to pretend, yeah, I was up there with the knights, but I'm sure we were probably scrubbing the floor somewhere.
• 17:40
  Neil Kleid: I don't know that there were many Jews in Camelot, so I think.
• 17:45
  Tad Eggleston: Do you know this, or are you just guessing?
• 17:47
  Neil Kleid: I'm guessing, I'm guessing. There may have been, I, like, I don't know.
• 17:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, have they even agreed on when Camelot was?
• 17:56
  Neil Kleid: 6th century, yeah.
• 17:58
  Tad Eggleston: Come on!
• 18:02
  Neil Kleid: I think my people were a little bit further Mediterranean-ish.
• 18:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but if it was 6th century.
• 18:09
  Alex Cormack: And, like, all.
• 18:09
  Tad Eggleston: All of the art is wrong.
• 18:12
  Alex Cormack: How dare you?
• 18:12
  Tad Eggleston: All of that armor is later than 6th century.
• 18:16
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so, so, I, I mean, I'll speak for you on this, Alex. So, we talked about, like, it was a palate cleanser for me, and one of the things that I said when I… because, like, I've done books,
• 18:27
  Neil Kleid: I've spent a long time doing, like, digging into research and sending photo reference, and really, really, really, like, making sure that it is, you know.
• 18:35
  Neil Kleid: it's right. And the one thing I allowed myself from a writing perspective, and I don't think Alex did this, I think you did a little bit of this, was I said to myself, no research.
• 18:48
  Neil Kleid: I am not gonna go into this and research anything. It's going to be, here's what I know, like…
• 18:54
  Neil Kleid: Anecdotally, about…
• 18:56
  Neil Kleid: the Arthurian cycle. Like, from movies, from books I've read, from, like, pop culture, whatever, and that's what's gonna inform the narrative for me. And so I didn't go in saying, like, hey, Alex, like, here's a suit of armor from 6th century that you should… like, I basically… I think there's a note in the front of the first issue that tells Alice.
• 19:16
  Alex Cormack: Do whatever the fuck you want, man.
• 19:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that was actually kind of my point. I mean, I tend to be…
• 19:23
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't been deep, deep into Arthurian stuff for a while, but, like, it…
• 19:32
  Tad Eggleston: I think it was a surprise when people…
• 19:35
  Tad Eggleston: or to many of the people who'd written anything Arthurian, when they finally started doing research, and they went, oh, well, we think there was a King Arthur, but it was, like…
• 19:47
  Tad Eggleston: 600-800 years before most of the stuff that people have written about Arthur.
• 19:53
  Alex Cormack: Well…
• 19:54
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I feel 100%.
• 19:56
  Tad Eggleston: Most of it's hogwash.
• 19:57
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, and I'm sure… and I'm sure there are people who will pick up this book who are, like… and, like, I think there's, by the way, somebody following us on Instagram who's, like, an authorian scholar, who has, like.
• 20:07
  Alex Cormack: it.
• 20:07
  Neil Kleid: Been loving the book.
• 20:09
  Alex Cormack: Oh, great!
• 20:09
  Neil Kleid: And I'm like, please don't read the book.
• 20:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, but that… but that… but… but again, Arthurian scholars tend to be the… the… tend to be…
• 20:19
  Tad Eggleston: More literary scholars and less…
• 20:22
  Tad Eggleston: historical scholars. The historical… I mean, it's kind of like the… Print the legend, you know.
• 20:31
  Alex Cormack: Fair, yeah.
• 20:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 20:34
  Alex Cormack: Between the legend and the truth, print the legend.
• 20:37
  Neil Kleid: So I think if you… and I think if you come into medieval with that, like, print the legend attitude, I think you'll enjoy it, right? You won't get hung up on…
• 20:44
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's what most people think of when they think of medieval. They don't think of…
• 20:49
  Tad Eggleston: dark… I mean, like, there's a reason that, like, the Robin Hood that was most accurate to the Robin Hood time was the one that nobody wanted to watch. It, like, none of the costumes looked cool, it looked dirty and smelly.
• 21:08
  Neil Kleid: By the way, and I think, I think my opinion is with comics in general, like, sometimes you have to have that suspension of disbelief. I remember a couple years ago, total ant, like, tangent here, a couple years ago.
• 21:19
  Tad Eggleston: That's what we do.
• 21:19
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, that's fine.
• 21:21
  Neil Kleid: Okay.
• 21:22
  Neil Kleid: Well, Jake and Zach. When the Flash was on TV, right, when the Arrowverse the whole thing, and…
• 21:29
  Neil Kleid: my family, we were all into it, we really liked it, and my brother, who's a lawyer, one… one week, calls me up, because they had just done an episode, it was like the trial of Barry Allen.
• 21:43
  Neil Kleid: Right? And…
• 21:44
  Neil Kleid: he calls me up, and he's like, I have just got to say, like, in a real court, and he just starts going, and I'm like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.
• 21:52
  Alex Cormack: They're getting caught up in all of this, like.
• 21:55
  Neil Kleid: isn't real. But, like, a guy who can run at the speed of sound, you're okay with that.
• 21:59
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, that's cool, that's cool.
• 22:00
  Neil Kleid: fuck, that's.
• 22:01
  Alex Cormack: No fault!
• 22:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean.
• 22:03
  Neil Kleid: Could it… could it possibly be worse than the…
• 22:06
  Tad Eggleston: than the courtroom scene in the Ben Affleck Daredevil, where it's supposed to be criminal court, and yet Affleck is…
• 22:15
  Tad Eggleston: Acting as, like, prosecutor in favor of the victim… something? That just was…
• 22:24
  Neil Kleid: a good movie, is what it is. At least The Flash was a good show for what it was, but, like, I just love the fact that, like, he got caught up in, like, oh.
• 22:33
  Neil Kleid: this, you know, the lawyer would do XYZ, and I'm like, sure. And then the guy bumps out of court and, like, saves the world. That's okay.
• 22:41
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly when it's what you do, it's hard. Like, I have trouble watching baseball movies if the baseball is wrong.
• 22:49
  Neil Kleid: I get that.
• 22:50
  Alex Cormack: Sure.
• 22:51
  Neil Kleid: And I'll tell you why…
• 22:52
  Tad Eggleston: So he's a lawyer, and like, he's willing to suspend his disbelief for Flash, but he doesn't believe that the lawyers would act differently just because there was a guy that could run at the speed of sound in the world.
• 23:06
  Neil Kleid: Right, so I'm gonna be… I'm a little bit of a hypocrite, because more closer to home, actually recently, is my wife and daughter just did a rewatch of the show, The OC.
• 23:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 23:18
  Neil Kleid: And so in the OC, there's a whole comic book subplot, like, one of the characters writes a comic book, and, like, I happened to watch an episode with them where they did a launch party, and because the launch party went bad, the whole comic, like, didn't… it was like, oh, that's it, we're ruined, and I'm like.
• 23:34
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I don't think that's…
• 23:35
  Alex Cormack: Just like real life.
• 23:36
  Neil Kleid: And then, and then, and then…
• 23:38
  Tad Eggleston: You're sitting there going, wait a minute, launch party?
• 23:40
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, like.
• 23:40
  Tad Eggleston: And then it mattered? I mean, launch party's like a vanity thing in comics, but, like, the public doesn't know about them.
• 23:48
  Neil Kleid: And then, like, two episodes later, I guess he sold… they sold the comic to George Lucas and had dinner with George Lucas to talk about… and I'm like, yeah, this is exactly how, like, a one-person indie comic book… this is exactly how it works.
• 24:03
  Neil Kleid: And so I am a little bit of a hypocrite, I guess.
• 24:06
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I'm just, like, my annoying autistic superpower is I put everything into perspective for people, whether they want it or not.
• 24:18
  Neil Kleid: Fair enough. It's a good outlook.
• 24:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it does get me in trouble sometimes.
• 24:27
  Neil Kleid: Sometimes people don't like to hear that…
• 24:30
  Alex Cormack: No.
• 24:31
  Tad Eggleston: But look at it from their perspective.
• 24:36
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah,
• 24:41
  Tad Eggleston: I hate it when I stop laughing and go, oh, I should have another question, and I don't. So.
• 24:47
  Alex Cormack: All good. I'm certain I'll come up with one.
• 24:50
  Neil Kleid: Alex and I can just sit here talking about the medieval brass knuckles we're gonna make.
• 24:54
  Alex Cormack: That's right.
• 24:54
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me about these brass knuckles, and are they for the comic, or are they for the.
• 24:58
  Neil Kleid: No, they're for me. They're for us.
• 25:00
  Tad Eggleston: So for the side hustle, you have… I mean, because I'm aware…
• 25:05
  Alex Cormack: Side hustle.
• 25:06
  Tad Eggleston: nice Jewish boys that you also…
• 25:10
  Tad Eggleston: walk on the other side of the line sometimes, now that you're out of prison, you gotta go back to, what, shaking down the… the…
• 25:17
  Tad Eggleston: The deli's in town.
• 25:19
  Neil Kleid: I mean, I gotta pay for… Offering protection.
• 25:21
  Tad Eggleston: I have to pay for Bar Mitzvah in two years, so… I'm saying.
• 25:25
  Neil Kleid: won't talk about it much, but, you know, yeah, I'm gonna need it. So, no, I was just, you know…
• 25:32
  Neil Kleid: we don't have, like, I don't have, like, a lot of merch for any of my comics, I don't really, like, print shirts or hats or whatever, and I saw a buddy of mine for his book had done a hat, so I was looking at, like, oh, I should, like, print a custom hat with the Medieval logo on it, and then I'm like, I will never wear it. I literally wear the same, like, Tigers or Lions hat every day.
• 25:49
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 25:49
  Neil Kleid: I'm never gonna switch it up, and so I was like, sure, maybe, whatever, and then I'm like, I really want something that epitomizes the book, and I have…
• 25:57
  Neil Kleid: Alex knows, and, you know, we've talked about it before, but I went to Kentucky in the spring, and I went to the Louisville Slugger Museum and actually made myself, like, a custom medieval bat. Nice. Basically, it just says, The Boss, which is the name of his bat in issue one.
• 26:13
  Neil Kleid: Yep. And, then I was like, I kind of want to put the logo on, like, a pair of brass knuckles.
• 26:19
  Alex Cormack: And I don't… and I don't know why, I just think it, like, totally sums up the book. It fits the book. Well, you know what, they, there's a… I… geez, which issue is it? Like, number 4, number 3, where someone is getting, hit punched in the mouth, and we have the logo right there, it's kind of like the…
• 26:37
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I think we did… I think that's what it was. I think we did put, like, there's, like, a bre… like a…
• 26:41
  Alex Cormack: Right, yeah.
• 26:41
  Neil Kleid: They have the logo on it, not… yeah.
• 26:45
  Tad Eggleston: We'll make some phone calls, we'll figure this out. I mean…
• 26:47
  Neil Kleid: I would love to tell them, I would love to be able to figure out how to, like, actually…
• 26:51
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, I googled custom brass knuckles, and 3 companies come up immediately.
• 26:58
  Neil Kleid: Oh, there you go.
• 26:59
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean… Yeah, a hundred bucks.
• 27:01
  Neil Kleid: we get it done next week.
• 27:03
  Tad Eggleston: Look at this, look at this. Well, that's the…
• 27:06
  Tad Eggleston: There is a Hello Kitty with an AK-47 Brass Knuckles available from the Brass Knuckles Company, so…
• 27:15
  Neil Kleid: I am sure that's 100% official and licensed by the Hello Kitty.
• 27:19
  Alex Cormack: Oh, 100%.
• 27:20
  Tad Eggleston: It's Thanksgiving.
• 27:22
  Alex Cormack: Day Parade float.
• 27:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 27:25
  Alex Cormack: That was call number 2 that day.
• 27:27
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 27:30
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, so, I mean, the options are there.
• 27:35
  Neil Kleid: One day. One day Alex and I will be signing at a convention with…
• 27:38
  Alex Cormack: Yep, after we have dinner with George Lucas, you know.
• 27:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm certain that these are also, licensed. There's a, a Punisher skull, brass knuckles.
• 27:47
  Alex Cormack: Of course, right?
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Of course.
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: They're probably police issue.
• 27:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait, did I say that out loud?
• 27:55
  Alex Cormack: Use an airline!
• 27:57
  Neil Kleid: You don't… It's really funny, because,
• 28:01
  Neil Kleid: like, yeah, I see, like, police in New York all the time, obviously, and maybe I'm sheltered, but I was here in Teaneck, and I… I was at the library the other day, and the library is right next to the police station, and it was the first time I ever saw, like, a police officer with the Punisher logo on their uniform.
• 28:19
  Alex Cormack: Oh, really?
• 28:20
  Neil Kleid: And it, like, totally threw me off. It was, like, a blue Punisher logo.
• 28:24
  Neil Kleid: And it was on the uniform and on the cruiser.
• 28:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 28:29
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I have seen it.
• 28:31
  Tad Eggleston: How to put this?
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: because I don't… I don't want to make it out that… that, like, there aren't hugely bad apples on… on City Forces, because there are absolutely hugely bad apples on City Forces, but I see the Punisher…
• 28:47
  Tad Eggleston: logo and the blue-striped Punisher pop up way more among suburban wannabe, never-have-to-draw-their-gun forces.
• 28:59
  Tad Eggleston: Than… than ones that, like, do things more than… Give speeding tickets.
• 29:05
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, it could be aspirational, maybe.
• 29:08
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 29:08
  Tad Eggleston: Or maybe 4, or maybe they just want to draw the Punisher.
• 29:12
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, he used to be a big question.
• 29:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's possible, but, like…
• 29:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if it's true, you'd think they'd know more about, like, the Punisher's history, and…
• 29:24
  Neil Kleid: I didn't really ask, so…
• 29:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I mean.
• 29:27
  Neil Kleid: It could be, like, you know, go off on, like, the bibliography, the Puniture bibliography.
• 29:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm just saying that, like, Jerry Conway, who created the Punisher, is very much on record as it should not be worn by law enforcement. He's very loudly on record. And then Matthew Rosenberg actually wrote it into a comic?
• 29:49
  Tad Eggleston: Where the Punisher, like, dresses down cops who have a Punisher logo on there. He's like, no, no, no. See, I don't follow the law. You're supposed to follow the law.
• 30:03
  Neil Kleid: Well, that was just… there wasn't that, like, part of the subplot in the… well, I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but in the… It's been long enough that it's… No, no, no spoiler for… for… for…
• 30:13
  Tad Eggleston: for… It was…
• 30:14
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, good.
• 30:15
  Tad Eggleston: 10-year-old punishment.
• 30:16
  Neil Kleid: The Daredevil show that they just did on Disney+, right? That was one of the… it was, like.
• 30:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, was it, wasn'.
• 30:21
  Neil Kleid: There's a scene where, like.
• 30:24
  Neil Kleid: he gets, like, all these cops are like, you know, we're big fans, and he, and he, like, basically, like, dresses them down, or what, and they fight, obviously.
• 30:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 30:33
  Tad Eggleston: there?
• 30:35
  Tad Eggleston: But… man, the country we live in.
• 30:39
  Neil Kleid: Yeah. The world we live in.
• 30:41
  Tad Eggleston: But today…
• 30:41
  Neil Kleid: Why is that the medieval?
• 30:43
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, you go back to Camelot. Is Camelot the same as now?
• 30:48
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, I will say that, like, that's kind of, like, how we look at our nights a little bit, right? Like, I think we sort of set up the nights
• 30:57
  Neil Kleid: in Camelot, like, the Knights of the Round Table as, like, Camelot, the cops of Camelot.
• 31:03
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 31:03
  Neil Kleid: And I think one day, I remember… oh, I quoted it, it's in an essay in one of the… like, one of the back matters. I think I used the term, all nights are bad, or AKAB, or something like that.
• 31:13
  Neil Kleid: And I was like, yeah, that makes sense.
• 31:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, and, like… You have the added…
• 31:26
  Tad Eggleston: they added that the knights are also, like, the oligarchs in that time, so, I mean…
• 31:32
  Tad Eggleston: They've got the double whammy going for them.
• 31:35
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, and so that's… that's kind of like… I mean, like, that's the key conflict of the book, right? I mean, there's more than that. There's a little bit of a relationship stuff going on and what have you, but the key issue is that you've got this guy who's, like, an independent.
• 31:48
  Neil Kleid: And who really doesn't cotton to authority, and is kind of a… an asshole, and drinks a lot, and fights a lot. And then you've got these…
• 31:59
  Neil Kleid: Cops, or knights, or whatever you want to call them, right?
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: Some are also assholes who drink a lot, and fight a lot, and…
• 32:06
  Neil Kleid: But who are, like, using the position of authority to come and basically, like…
• 32:10
  Neil Kleid: do whatever they want, right? So, like, you see that a lot in a lot of these, like, period pieces, right? Like, Braveheart is obviously one of the more famous ones of those, right? Like, where you, you know, you have
• 32:20
  Neil Kleid: feudalist society, or, you know, poor knights, or what have you, who kind of take advantage of their position over peasantry, right? And so…
• 32:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean…
• 32:32
  Alex Cormack: Shit.
• 32:32
  Neil Kleid: I thought that's what really sets things off, right?
• 32:35
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 32:35
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, there's a difference between, you know, being a knucklehead and goofing around and having fun and drinking, and just being a… just kind of a jerk, opposed to people who are abusing people who are… and you should be looking out for them, and just taking advantage of that and, you know, attacking people just because you can. You know, that's,
• 32:52
  Alex Cormack: there's kind of a big turning point, especially in, for Issue 1, seeing these knights, and
• 32:58
  Alex Cormack: just seeing what kind of people that are coming around, and our… our guy Danny, just having a…
• 33:03
  Alex Cormack: Basically, just saying, like, hey, this is not alright, and dealing it with it in his own way.
• 33:10
  Neil Kleid: And I think that's what's… I mean, one of the cool things about the book is that, so, when you think about, like.
• 33:15
  Neil Kleid: Between book, right? Hank Morgan, the protagonist in that book, is bringing in all these, like, modern ideas, right? He's bringing in the newspaper, and he's bringing in soap, and he's bringing in…
• 33:26
  Neil Kleid: elections and, like, you know, everything that you kind of feel like, it's like, oh, okay, Twain is trying to show, like, how, you know, innovation can change, you know, this society.
• 33:38
  Neil Kleid: But with medieval, it was a little bit more subtle, because at the time, the peasantry wouldn't fight that, right? You wouldn't have, like, some random innkeeper pushing back on
• 33:48
  Neil Kleid: Camelot, or to the Knights, or, you know, a monarchy, and basically saying, like, no, you can't take advantage of us. They would just kind of roll over. And so you've got Danny, who's bringing that sensibility, who's saying, like.
• 34:02
  Neil Kleid: Like, yeah, he jokes around at one point about, like, democracy and things like that, but, like, he's basically saying, like, no, like, this is something you need to learn. Like, I'll show you how to do it. I'll show you how to play baseball, I'll show you how to use a toilet, but I'll also show you how to play ball, right?
• 34:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there was a fascinating book that came out 4 years ago called The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity.
• 34:25
  Tad Eggleston: Where an archaeologist and an anthropologist work together And really dug into…
• 34:34
  Tad Eggleston: taking the traditional history, the Eurocentric history of society and whatnot, and questioning whether or not things that were discarded
• 34:49
  Tad Eggleston: from other parts of the world had been more influential than they were, and comparing the anthropological record to the actual archaeological record. Lots of details, but one of the things that they brought up was, as much as we,
• 35:08
  Tad Eggleston: credit the Enlightenment with the whole idea of
• 35:12
  Tad Eggleston: of liberty and equality and whatnot. None of that comes until after first contact has been made with the Native Americans, where they're actually
• 35:22
  Tad Eggleston: Doing that?
• 35:24
  Tad Eggleston: And then there are… quote-unquote, fictitious
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: conversations with those Native Americans that are used to demonstrate this different way of life that you could have, and they're wondering if they're actually fictitious, or if they downplayed the Native Americans, in part because they sit back and go.
• 35:48
  Tad Eggleston: there's no concept anywhere near liberty before this. If you were a serf, you were a serf. It wasn't, oh, I hope that someday I can be a knight. That wasn't an option. That was nowhere near an option!
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right. It was, I don't want to have my head cut off by a knight because I looked at him wrong, because they're allowed to do that.
• 36:12
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 36:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so, so, like, I guess where I'm going is just that the…
• 36:24
  Tad Eggleston: There's so much room to play with… the… the…
• 36:29
  Neil Kleid: But that's, like, a very…
• 36:30
  Tad Eggleston: Different concepts of reality that somebody today would have versus…
• 36:35
  Tad Eggleston: And in some parts of the world, that still rings true, right?
• 36:38
  Neil Kleid: Oh, absolutely.
• 36:40
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, there's, there's, like, go to North Korea, right? Like, you can't fight back against the North Korean government, right? But here in America, we can go out and protest on the streets.
• 36:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right. With the difference between now and then being that there's a decent chance that people in North Korea have heard about America where they protest on the streets.
• 37:01
  Neil Kleid: We… one would hope.
• 37:03
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 37:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, obviously there's repression… I mean, the first sign of an autocratic government is when they start trying to control the information.
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: But…
• 37:17
  Neil Kleid: And there's an aspect to that, I mean, part of Danny's role is to be that mode of communication, to basically come and be like, it's okay for you to.
• 37:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 37:27
  Alex Cormack: And then…
• 37:29
  Neil Kleid: you know, be the guy that basically is like, you know, tell a friend to tell a friend, right? Right. And so, I think that's what…
• 37:37
  Neil Kleid: when you look at, sort of, the comparisons between our book and the Twain book, right, like, there's definitely…
• 37:42
  Neil Kleid: you know, what Morgan is doing in the book, where he's creating that system of communication to try to spread the ideas, because you see at the beginning of the book, his ideas are just contained to Camelot, but by the end of Twain's book.
• 37:54
  Neil Kleid: because they set up a railroad and they set up, you know, a line of, you know, a way to commute the telegraph and what have you, that… those ideas got out. And like, Danny, sorry, Danny, Alex.
• 38:06
  Alex Cormack: That's an iPhone.
• 38:07
  Neil Kleid: We've put out one issue so far, there are five coming, and the hope is to do a whole lot more at some point, but, like.
• 38:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 38:14
  Alex Cormack: That may well happen in Danny's world, right?
• 38:17
  Tad Eggleston: Now, here's my biggest question, just because I want all baseball comics to go on forever.
• 38:24
  Tad Eggleston: Is it set up as a closed five-issue book, or… or…
• 38:30
  Neil Kleid: So… Alex, go ahead, sorry, I don't mean to step off.
• 38:33
  Alex Cormack: No, no, no, go ahead, go ahead, good.
• 38:36
  Alex Cormack: It's,
• 38:39
  Alex Cormack: If it's… I'll say, if it stops right here, it's a satisfying ending. But, if it keeps going, it could be… it could be great, and but no, if, you know, with any luck, we'll make a thousand of these, you know? It'll be.
• 38:56
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, the sad fact of comics these days, or at least for an indie comic, right, is you don't get, like, that.
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 39:04
  Neil Kleid: Right? Well, unless you…
• 39:06
  Tad Eggleston: Unless you're working for RECA.
• 39:08
  Neil Kleid: Check.
• 39:10
  Neil Kleid: So, the idea is basically… it's almost like the Star Wars idea, right? Like, Star Wars could have been done after the end of Star Wars.
• 39:18
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 39:19
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, a new hole, right.
• 39:20
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, if you've read Splinter of the Mind's Eye, that was from the… The screenplay that…
• 39:26
  Tad Eggleston: that Lucas wrote, because Lucas retained sequel rights in case they weren't willing to make another one, and he wrote a screenplay to wrap it up.
• 39:35
  Tad Eggleston: On a super low budget, and then when he got to do something else, he let somebody turn it into a novel.
• 39:41
  Neil Kleid: I don't need foster babies.
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: formal.
• 39:43
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, and so, like, I tend to now, when I pitch something, have to pitch it in a way that it's like, look, if we just get 5 issues, here's what we're gonna do, it's gonna.
• 39:54
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely. I mean, my question more specifically is, like, if you bring him home, it's mostly over. I mean, you can concoct a way to send him back.
• 40:05
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, you can decide… yes, getting more than 5 issues is out of your hands, but you can decide that it's going to be 5 issues and wrap it up in a way that it doesn't make sense to continue.
• 40:19
  Tad Eggleston: So my question is, is your satisfying ending open enough that we might get more?
• 40:26
  Neil Kleid: That's the question.
• 40:28
  Alex Cormack: Do you want us to spoil the comic? Like, no.
• 40:33
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 40:34
  Alex Cormack: Yep, yep, you just gotta read them. That bumps the word.
• 40:38
  Alex Cormack: Read them up till, number 5, and then, then we'll talk then.
• 40:41
  Neil Kleid: I, I think.
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, you're working on 5 already, so I just expect the PDFs in my inbox soon.
• 40:49
  Neil Kleid: I think… I think by the fact that Alex and I are talking, saying we'd like to write more of these, I think you kind of know that there's the opportunity for more, right?
• 40:58
  Alex Cormack: far, is it?
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: So… I know, I was just being my autistic direct self. You guys…
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: your good PR guys, like, obfuscating and…
• 41:10
  Neil Kleid: But what I'll say is this. What I'll say is this. We would like to do more. This is… we love the character, we love the world, we love… I've got stories. We've got stories to tell.
• 41:20
  Neil Kleid: It really depends on all of you out there, everyone who's buying and reading, right? If you tell a friend to tell a friend, and people
• 41:29
  Neil Kleid: embrace medieval, and really.
• 41:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I am telling many friends to tell many friends, and I already brought it up on the baseball roundtable.
• 41:37
  Neil Kleid: That's excellent.
• 41:38
  Alex Cormack: Alright? So, so…
• 41:40
  Neil Kleid: And so, you know, then I…
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: I told multiple publishers about it on the baseball roundtable. I mean, I don't know if it's really a Phantographics type of book, but Eric knows about it.
• 41:53
  Neil Kleid: I like Eric. It is not a Phantom book. We do love you, Eric, but I don't know if it's in the wheelhouse.
• 41:59
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, really, what kind of rules are there to Fanta books?
• 42:04
  Neil Kleid: I just think this is a little bit more commercial for, like, I don't know.
• 42:09
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so now you don't want him to make money.
• 42:14
  Neil Kleid: It's… it's this type… I think it's the story type, I don't know. I know. Like, look, if… if Eric… if Eric emails me tomorrow and is like, screw you, Neil, we would publish this in a heartbeat, then we can have a conversation. But, my opinion is…
• 42:32
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's way more likely to be Mad Cave or Dark Horse, I agree with you.
• 42:38
  Tad Eggleston: And the look on your face tells me that conversations have already occurred.
• 42:42
  Neil Kleid: Well, no. I mean, we're, you know, obviously, whenever… Comixology Originals has the people that they work with, so I think those conversations are happening… happening with us, with, you know, without us. Right now, our focus is getting the five issues out, getting it out into the world, people enjoying it.
• 42:59
  Neil Kleid: promoting it, right? Telling the story.
• 43:02
  Tad Eggleston: See, that's gonna be on you, Neil, because Alex is one of the fastest in the business, and the best in the business, so the only reason books of his don't get finished is when the writers don't get him scripts.
• 43:11
  Alex Cormack: He's got them all. He's, yeah, yeah, I know.
• 43:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's almost done. In fact, we can't see his hands right now. He might be finishing it as we speak.
• 43:20
  Alex Cormack: And done.
• 43:24
  Neil Kleid: Well, you also forget that I'm lettering the damn comic, so I need you.
• 43:31
  Neil Kleid: And so…
• 43:32
  Tad Eggleston: I thought you were lettering the color.
• 43:35
  Neil Kleid: So, I will admit.
• 43:37
  Tad Eggleston: It needs a job.
• 43:38
  Neil Kleid: I will letter it when I get it.
• 43:40
  Tad Eggleston: See, now he's 8. You gotta put him to work.
• 43:44
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, we…
• 43:45
  Tad Eggleston: 8.
• 43:46
  Tad Eggleston: Did I get.
• 43:47
  Alex Cormack: No, he's 9, he's 9.
• 43:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, he's 9, he had a birthday.
• 43:50
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. Eat it on?
• 43:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we met him once. Was it a bear or a bunny that was having a birthday party?
• 43:56
  Alex Cormack: Oh, I was, Monkey.
• 43:59
  Tad Eggleston: Monkey, yeah, yeah. His son came to announce his monkey's birthday was the next day, and he was gonna have a big party, and when he walked away, Alex was like, this is news to me, but I guess I have to plan a party.
• 44:10
  Alex Cormack: There we go. We got a cake, we got a pinata, if I remember correctly, we did the whole thing.
• 44:17
  Neil Kleid: Get a medieval bat to hit the pinata?
• 44:20
  Alex Cormack: Oh, of course. No, this was before that.
• 44:22
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 44:23
  Alex Cormack: There was something in the back of my head saying, this is… this could be good, this could be… this could be…
• 44:30
  Neil Kleid: It's a classic link.
• 44:31
  Tad Eggleston: No more bat.
• 44:33
  Alex Cormack: It's like, yeah, once he took the first swing, like, through the universe, Neil was working on…
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: It will…
• 44:38
  Alex Cormack: Good idea.
• 44:39
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, Neil went… What?
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: You will appreciate this, Alex, as a Red Sox fan. My son's first word?
• 44:46
  Alex Cormack: Yep.
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: No ma.
• 44:49
  Alex Cormack: Oh, no kidding. Yep.
• 44:54
  Tad Eggleston: I hadn't said anything, and we were watch… he liked to watch baseball games with me, and I was watching a Red Sox game.
• 45:00
  Tad Eggleston: And I was introducing all of the players as they came up.
• 45:04
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, like, I, I just, I typically just, even young kids, I… I talk to them like they're adults most of the time. Sure. So I must have told him enough about Naomar, his first…
• 45:15
  Tad Eggleston: at-bat, that when Nomar came up his second at-bat, he went, Nomar!
• 45:20
  Alex Cormack: There you go. Bye.
• 45:22
  Tad Eggleston: And he was young enough that he even had kind of the accent going.
• 45:25
  Alex Cormack: Attaboy, alright.
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: My son has children of his own now, so…
• 45:32
  Tad Eggleston: For Father's Day this year, I came across a Nomar Garcia Para starting lineup figure.
• 45:39
  Alex Cormack: Oh, cool.
• 45:41
  Neil Kleid: That's amazing, because I was at… so my… my kids are… are…
• 45:46
  Neil Kleid: I won't call them Tigers fans, they're more Lions. Like, we're into the Lions now, because the Lions are doing… I mean, I've been following the Lions since I was in high school, but they're really into the Lions.
• 45:54
  Tad Eggleston: Head injuries. Head injuries. Every time there's a hard hit, do you tell them why they can't play football, and that they want to be able to, like, think in their 30s?
• 46:04
  Neil Kleid: I am still getting over…
• 46:06
  Neil Kleid: Thanksgiving, so just give me… let me deal with that. Let me work through that. Anyway, I was at New York Comic-Con this year, and I walked into just a random booth looking for something for my kids, and there was a starting line of Barry Sanders action filters.
• 46:21
  Alex Cormack: I got it from my…
• 46:22
  Neil Kleid: my oldest.
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 46:25
  Tad Eggleston: It's always fun to find the old star… you know, I think I found the Nomar at a comic shop, too. Like, I love that the old starting lineup wind up in…
• 46:33
  Tad Eggleston: Comic shops all over the place.
• 46:35
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, because…
• 46:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because most comics fans aren't walking in and buying… starting…
• 46:41
  Alex Cormack: Harriet.
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: I bought this one at the.
• 46:45
  Alex Cormack: Yup.
• 46:53
  Tad Eggleston: My Pedro.
• 46:54
  Alex Cormack: There you go.
• 46:57
  Alex Cormack: Oh, yeah.
• 46:59
  Tad Eggleston: And actually, a surprising number, because in smaller town America, the comic shops and the sports card shops are the same shops.
• 47:07
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, when I was growing up, that was the situation for me.
• 47:11
  Alex Cormack: The local shop in town, yeah, with, baseball cards and, and comics at the same time.
• 47:16
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 47:16
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, yeah. Our shopping bug's that now, yeah.
• 47:20
  Tad Eggleston: While a lot of those shops, much more of their new stuff is comic-oriented.
• 47:26
  Tad Eggleston: They still have all of those years of back inventory.
• 47:33
  Tad Eggleston: There's a shop in Sioux Falls that every time I'm there, I buy a…
• 47:37
  Tad Eggleston: A box of wax packs for less than it would have cost when… When it was new.
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: I'll buy, like, $19.90 tops for, like, $12 for the wax packs, and I'm sitting there going, there's 36 packs in this. They were 50 cents a piece. It costs… it cost $18.
• 47:57
  Alex Cormack: Bro!
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: 35 years ago, and I just bought it for $12.
• 48:01
  Neil Kleid: It was really fun… it was really funny, because we have… my shop is actually… I mean, we moved, but when, you know, when we moved… when I moved to Teaneck from New York,
• 48:10
  Tad Eggleston: the shop was literally around the corner from my old house. I mean, it's not that much money from now.
• 48:16
  Neil Kleid: It's called ANS Comics.
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: I've heard of it. I didn't manage to hit it when I was… I have a friend who lives in New Jersey, so it wound up being home base on what I called the 22 Panels Ill Advised Comic Shop Tour a couple years ago. My wife and I had different spring breaks, so I took my spring break and went from
• 48:37
  Tad Eggleston: from Chicago to Valpo to Columbus to Charlotte to… Annapolis, DC, stopped…
• 48:47
  Tad Eggleston: in New Jersey, and the 3 days I was in New Jersey, we did a day into Brooklyn and Staten Island. We did a day where we did a loop through…
• 48:58
  Tad Eggleston: It was like a… God, almost a 400-mile loop through New Jersey and Pennsylvania, you know, up to Scranton, down through Philadelphia, and back, and then the last day, I went into Manhattan.
• 49:11
  Tad Eggleston: And then I came back via… Albany… Syracuse, Rochester… Buffalo.
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: Cleveland.
• 49:23
  Alex Cormack: That's a hell of a… hell of a run.
• 49:26
  Tad Eggleston: it was, it was… I think I hit, like, 36 comic shops in 12 states in 10 days.
• 49:31
  Neil Kleid: Well, the one you didn't hit, A&S,
• 49:36
  Neil Kleid: So it's, it's, it's a great little shop, and so, at the time.
• 49:40
  Tad Eggleston: I'll hit it the next time I go.
• 49:42
  Alex Cormack: There you go.
• 49:42
  Neil Kleid: Please, please come, yeah. And so, they were doing some card sales, and this was last… last…
• 49:49
  Neil Kleid: time the Tigers were in…
• 49:53
  Neil Kleid: like, vying for the World Series. They were, like, close and close. My son was a lot younger, and so we… we watched the Tigers, the Tigers-Yankees, and so I wanted to sit with him and, like, watch a game.
• 50:06
  Neil Kleid: He was much younger, and so we all… we both got dressed up in Tigers gear, and I was like, I'm gonna go to the card shop.
• 50:13
  Neil Kleid: and buy some… some old Tops cards that they have. And I wanted to go get, like, the 1985 ones, like, where I kind of grew up, right after those…
• 50:21
  Neil Kleid: Won their last series.
• 50:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And they had all these, like, cellophane packs, like, big ol' cellophane packs for nothing.
• 50:27
  Neil Kleid: And I bought them all up, and it was great, because we went through them together while we were watching the game, and he found, by the way, the old, like, Topps gum.
• 50:35
  Alex Cormack: Oh, no.
• 50:36
  Neil Kleid: Amazing. It was like 30 years ago. He's like, can I eat it? I'm like, I… like, 30 years ago, it was tough, so…
• 50:45
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 50:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that doesn't always stop me.
• 50:48
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. Right, right.
• 50:50
  Neil Kleid: Serving the top spot.
• 50:51
  Tad Eggleston: Gum is like Twinkies. It has, like, a half-life of… A million years.
• 50:57
  Neil Kleid: Well, I didn't… I didn't want to, like, end up.
• 51:00
  Alex Cormack: Good.
• 51:01
  Neil Kleid: Just for some reason.
• 51:02
  Alex Cormack: I haven't broken it.
• 51:03
  Neil Kleid: the key.
• 51:04
  Neil Kleid: But it was really cool to get, like, all those, like, big ol', like, wax packs. And I was, by the way, I was, I think, working for Topps at the time, and I couldn't even get, like, at the office, like, packs for him, so…
• 51:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's… crazy.
• 51:20
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, there was a great series of articles recently.
• 51:26
  Tad Eggleston: trying to remember exactly where they were. I know Tiffany Babb wrote about them at the Fan Files. Tiffany Babb, our resident comic journalist who also has a baseball blog.
• 51:36
  Neil Kleid: We're gonna be on it this week. We're actually.
• 51:39
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, yeah.
• 51:39
  Neil Kleid: See you later this week.
• 51:40
  Tad Eggleston: fantastic.
• 51:41
  Tad Eggleston: So she, she, she linked to the guy that… that did, like, massive amounts of research into who the artists on the comics on the back of…
• 51:51
  Tad Eggleston: Topps cards were.
• 51:53
  Tad Eggleston: So, a guy that's recently gone through and figured out, like.
• 51:57
  Tad Eggleston: You know, like, the 50s through the 60s, there were, like, cartoons on the back.
• 52:02
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, like the little did-y-nosed, and yeah, yeah.
• 52:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. So there's now, like, 4 long articles of the various… Kirby did a couple, and…
• 52:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's a who's who of artists of the 50s.
• 52:16
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, if you look… if you look at the history of Topps, I mean, most of the, like, the greats have worked for Topps. Obviously, Spiegelman, right? Spiegelman is, like, the big one. He worked in, like, at the company for a long time. He invented garbage Pail Kids, and so…
• 52:33
  Neil Kleid: They've been working with, like, everybody for a long, long time.
• 52:37
  Neil Kleid: Mars attacks, dinosaurs' attacks.
• 52:40
  Neil Kleid: the sports cards, the backs of the sports cards, and then all the entertainment work, and it's like a literal, literal comics su-su.
• 52:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 52:48
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: God, I can fall down so many baseball card rabbit holes, too.
• 52:56
  Tad Eggleston: There is something just joyous about opening old packs, though, isn't there?
• 53:01
  Neil Kleid: There is.
• 53:01
  Alex Cormack: Sure.
• 53:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I long ago realized that my greatest joy from baseball cards, particularly in the internet era, where I don't need them for stats anymore, when I was a kid, I needed them for stats.
• 53:15
  Tad Eggleston: I, like, collected, collected, I needed my set, because I needed to know how many triples so-and-so had in 1986. And if I didn't have the card, how would I know that?
• 53:25
  Tad Eggleston: couldn't afford a baseball encyclopedia, because, like, in the 80s, they were, like, 50 bucks, and 50 bucks was a lot, and…
• 53:33
  Alex Cormack: But now you've got fan graphs, and you've got baseball reference, so you don't need them for the stats anymore.
• 53:39
  Tad Eggleston: But I still buy cards, because I like opening packs. I like… I, like, have almost no use for them once they're open. They're… they're in stacks all over the house. I sort them… I sort them based on who I like, and then I put them on a stack.
• 53:54
  Neil Kleid: So, it's the joy of discovery, and I'll tell you, it's… so, number one, I want to point out that, like.
• 53:59
  Neil Kleid: comics, like, now, for some reason, have figured that out with, like, blind bags, right? Blind bags are a big new thing now. And, like, all blind bags are is, like, that joy of, like, opening up a pack of baseball cards and finding the cover that you want, right? Right. But, so, like, I sort of, like, dropped it a second ago, but I worked at Topps for 6 years.
• 54:17
  Neil Kleid: I was one of the founding members of the digital team.
• 54:20
  Neil Kleid: that did all the… the collecting apps, right? And so, I don't know if you're familiar with them, but, like, we did a bunch of apps where it was basically, like, you get…
• 54:29
  Neil Kleid: a bunch of, like, at the time, like, they were JPEGs, but now, like, the predecessor to the NFTs. Right, right, right. And you basically, like, get cars, and you can trade them with people everywhere, and then you can also play them in live, like, contests, right? So, like.
• 54:46
  Neil Kleid: at the time, you got a Derek Jeter card, and Derek Jeter was playing that day, and you played him, and he did well. You had, like, you went up on a leaderboard. If he did poorly, you went down on the leaderboard, right? But… so the contests were, like, a big driver of those apps, but the bigger driver was, I just wanna open packs of cards.
• 55:04
  Neil Kleid: I literally just want to be on my phone.
• 55:07
  Neil Kleid: having this, like, virtual pack show up, animate, open up, gum break, and then I get to see who I got.
• 55:13
  Neil Kleid: And most of the people who
• 55:17
  Neil Kleid: interacted with our apps would tell us, like, I… there's just, like, a… like, a rush. Like, a rush of…
• 55:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's all I ever used it for.
• 55:24
  Neil Kleid: Discovery, right?
• 55:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was all I ever used it for.
• 55:28
  Tad Eggleston: Who'd I get?
• 55:30
  Tad Eggleston: But there's not even the tactile, which is why I eventually talked myself out of using it that much.
• 55:35
  Tad Eggleston: Cause… cause I like it.
• 55:37
  Neil Kleid: I don't care. I don't work there anymore.
• 55:39
  Tad Eggleston: You don't work there anymore.
• 55:41
  Neil Kleid: And by me.
• 55:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 55:44
  Alex Cormack: in drawers, because I normally have baseball cards just randomly in drawers near me, but maybe I don't right now.
• 55:51
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe I actually put them somewhere.
• 55:55
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no.
• 55:56
  Neil Kleid: a month.
• 55:56
  Tad Eggleston: This is why I… when I realized that, and given how expensive cards have gotten, and how much I
• 56:02
  Tad Eggleston: like, I'm not selling my cards, and most of the things that make them expensive, I don't care about. I like cardboard cards. That sort of thing, is when I started going, oh, but I can get old packs where I also know the players.
• 56:18
  Tad Eggleston: dirt cheap, and just keep them around, and when I need that rush, I can go grab one off of the shelf in the basement.
• 56:27
  Tad Eggleston: They go, oh my god, I got an Andre Dawson!
• 56:30
  Neil Kleid: Right, so there's that, there's that tactile element, but there's also, you mentioned before, like.
• 56:35
  Neil Kleid: I know people who just have… like, we'll go over to people's houses, and they know that
• 56:40
  Neil Kleid: I like sports, and I like cards, and whatever, and they'll be like, oh, I have all these cards, you want to take a look? I'm like, I just want to sift through the box of cards. I know.
• 56:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely.
• 56:49
  Neil Kleid: I just want to pick up, like…
• 56:51
  Tad Eggleston: a bunch of cards and just start, like… When I'm on my game…
• 56:56
  Tad Eggleston: I separate out the good ones and keep them in, like, a separate box that can be just that.
• 57:02
  Tad Eggleston: And the good ones isn't always just…
• 57:04
  Tad Eggleston: like, the good players and stuff. Sometimes it's just the cool-looking cards. Like, one of my favorite cards…
• 57:11
  Tad Eggleston: Did you know that Doug DiCenzo was the emergency pitcher for the Cubs for, like, 3 years?
• 57:17
  Neil Kleid: I don't know who that is.
• 57:19
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly, exactly. He was the defensive replacement center fielder, but he was also the emergency pitcher. And the… I think it was 1990 or 91 scorecard of Doug DiCenzo, while it lists him as an outfielder, he is pitching on the front of it.
• 57:36
  Tad Eggleston: Which was just, like, the coolest thing ever.
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: The, the… the… the…
• 57:48
  Tad Eggleston: 89 or 90 upper deck, Greg Maddox.
• 57:52
  Tad Eggleston: Has him hitting on one side and base running on the other.
• 57:57
  Neil Kleid: It's amazing.
• 57:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I just love… I love it when you can identify other players in the card. It's like, oh, you know, this is… this is this giant, but it's also got Ryan Sandberg breaking up a double…
• 58:14
  Neil Kleid: Well, I have a buddy who collects cards, but he only collects error cards, right?
• 58:19
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 58:20
  Neil Kleid: He's got… but it's not even just, like, error cards, it's, like, all, like, the infamous error cards, so it's obviously…
• 58:27
  Tad Eggleston: Chiarello has a lot of those. He was showing them to us on…
• 58:31
  Tad Eggleston: He, he pulled out his, his Billy Ripken.
• 58:35
  Neil Kleid: Right, so he's got… he's got Billy Ripken, he's also got, like, the Star Wars C-3PO that has that, like, costume malfunction, and then,
• 58:46
  Neil Kleid: the one that I saw, and I don't remember who the player was, it's a basketball card, but there's, like, a basketball card with the Menendez brothers in the background.
• 58:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yes!
• 58:53
  Alex Cormack: Soap.
• 58:54
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, that was one of the ones that Mark showed us, too.
• 58:58
  Tad Eggleston: And I forget which one it was, but yeah, the Menendez brothers in the background of, of a…
• 59:04
  Tad Eggleston: And then the one that Derek Gold shared with us on our first baseball roundtable, that since then, three of us have gone and tracked down our own.
• 59:15
  Tad Eggleston: Which is the Kurt Flood Phillies card.
• 59:19
  Neil Kleid: I don't know that error.
• 59:21
  Tad Eggleston: Kurt… Kurt Flood is the one who sued…
• 59:26
  Tad Eggleston: And while he lost, his lawsuit eventually led to free agency, because he didn't want to accept the trade to the Phillies. So he famously never played on the Phillies, but there is a tops.
• 59:39
  Alex Cormack: No.
• 59:41
  Tad Eggleston: Billy's card.
• 59:44
  Alex Cormack: No.
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he, he was, he was the,
• 59:48
  Tad Eggleston: He was the test balloon for free agency.
• 59:51
  Tad Eggleston: The Baseball Project wrote a song about him, called Gratitude.
• 59:57
  Tad Eggleston: And if you don't know the baseball project, you should get to know the baseball project.
• 1:00:01
  Neil Kleid: I won't get to know the baseball, yeah. Baseball project.
• 1:00:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:00:04
  Tad Eggleston: is… is Mike Mills and sometimes Peter Buck from REM, Scott McGahee, and kind of a rotating cast of other…
• 1:00:14
  Tad Eggleston: middling to big rock stars, writing and playing songs about baseball. There's a song about Harvey Haddix, there's a song about Ichiro.
• 1:00:24
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, Alex, did you know that when Ted Williams was…
• 1:00:30
  Tad Eggleston: taking batting practice, with every swing, he'd say, I'm Ted fucking Williams.
• 1:00:36
  Alex Cormack: I didn't know that.
• 1:00:38
  Tad Eggleston: They wrote a song about that. Ted Fucking Williams is a song.
• 1:00:44
  Tad Eggleston: With a great chorus. Ted fucking Williams.
• 1:00:49
  Neil Kleid: song I need to… yeah. Alex, you gotta find that song.
• 1:00:52
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, we gotta, we gotta dig this thing up.
• 1:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right, I wanna… I think it was Pascual Perez…
• 1:00:59
  Tad Eggleston: His first start with the Braves got lost on the way to the ballpark and was driving in circles on the interstate around… they wrote a song about that. They wrote a song about Jack McDowell when he flipped off the Yankee fans.
• 1:01:16
  Alex Cormack: The night after hanging out with Eddie Vedder at Saturday Night Live. Yeah.
• 1:01:23
  Tad Eggleston: The baseball project, I totally, totally… It's just…
• 1:01:28
  Alex Cormack: Sounds good.
• 1:01:29
  Tad Eggleston: Treasure trove of both, like, if you're into… like… Late 80s to mid-90s, alternative Rock?
• 1:01:42
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it's not only that feel, but it's people who literally did that.
• 1:01:49
  Tad Eggleston: But they're telling all sorts of baseball stories.
• 1:01:53
  Alex Cormack: Alright.
• 1:01:55
  Neil Kleid: Nice.
• 1:01:57
  Neil Kleid: Do they have a Steve Bartman song?
• 1:01:59
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think so.
• 1:02:01
  Tad Eggleston: I kinda hope not, or if they do, I hope they don't use his name. I feel so bad for him.
• 1:02:07
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:02:08
  Tad Eggleston: And I do… I mean, I remember reading an article on the 10th
• 1:02:13
  Tad Eggleston: anniversary, where the main thrust of the article was, like, hey, we need to stop
• 1:02:21
  Tad Eggleston: talking about this guy, you know, I mean, it was… it was actually… that was the year the 30 for 30 about him came out, and they're like, you know, the article's like…
• 1:02:30
  Tad Eggleston: This guy's essentially in hiding, and we're gonna pull it out again?
• 1:02:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But… but he talked about actually going, he's like, I knew it was a long shot, but, like, I wanted him to be able to give his side if he wanted to, that sort of thing. So we went to meet with him, and… and he says, like, we had a very nice conversation that was off the record, because he said, no, I'm not willing to… but… and then as we… we left.
• 1:02:55
  Tad Eggleston: he was like, how about that game last night? So after all of these years, Bartman is still…
• 1:03:02
  Neil Kleid: A baseball fan, that's amazing.
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: Not just a baseball fan, but a die-hard Cub fan.
• 1:03:07
  Alex Cormack: Alright.
• 1:03:08
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why the one… the one piece of great justice in the world is the Cubs gave him a World Series ring. And they didn't just give him a World Series ring, they didn't give him, like, the World Series ring that they gave to, like…
• 1:03:19
  Tad Eggleston: beer vendors, I mean, because Cubs gave everybody a World Series ring, but there were different tiers of World Series rings. They gave them the player tier.
• 1:03:29
  Alex Cormack: F.
• 1:03:29
  Neil Kleid: I don't know.
• 1:03:30
  Tad Eggleston: like, the $2.5 million World Series ring.
• 1:03:35
  Neil Kleid: It's kind of like somebody, like, tracking down Ditko.
• 1:03:38
  Neil Kleid: Years later, and him being like, hey, did you read last month's Spider-Man?
• 1:03:42
  Alex Cormack: Awesome.
• 1:03:46
  Neil Kleid: What will Peter do next?
• 1:03:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:03:54
  Tad Eggleston: Ditko was an interesting dude.
• 1:03:56
  Neil Kleid: He was.
• 1:03:57
  Tad Eggleston: We,
• 1:03:59
  Tad Eggleston: We haven't done this again, but Chris Condon and I once did a live read of a comic on… on the
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: The podcast, because we were bored one morning.
• 1:04:08
  Tad Eggleston: And, the one we read…
• 1:04:11
  Tad Eggleston: was… I forget the exact number, but… but Ann Nesenti wrote a Daredevil comic that Ditko illustrated.
• 1:04:20
  Tad Eggleston: involved, like…
• 1:04:21
  Neil Kleid: Yeah. Exciting.
• 1:04:22
  Tad Eggleston: And babies in bags, and it was just…
• 1:04:24
  Alex Cormack: Fucked up trippy, but it was amazing.
• 1:04:28
  Neil Kleid: I think I read that.
• 1:04:30
  Neil Kleid: Oh, I have to look that up.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: And unfortunately, Ann barely remembered writing it.
• 1:04:37
  Tad Eggleston: But, it was great.
• 1:04:43
  Neil Kleid: Yeah. There's some crazy comics out there. I mean, I'm… There are.
• 1:04:46
  Neil Kleid: I am doing a lot of… it's funny, because we talk about trading cards, but also com… like.
• 1:04:53
  Neil Kleid: The thing that I love about trading cards…
• 1:04:56
  Neil Kleid: is that, like, I'm not like a, oh, I want to trade and collect and make money and have the… I want the cards that I remember having when I was a kid, that make me, like, remember a time in my life, right?
• 1:05:09
  Neil Kleid: like, the old school, like, again, like, the Tops 1985 set, where I had, like, or the ones that…
• 1:05:16
  Tad Eggleston: didn't have, but I wanted.
• 1:05:18
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, like, cards that I just remember having at a certain time that remind me of a time in my life, right? Exactly. And so, I'm kind of doing the same thing with comics now, like, I'm actually reading a lot of old 80s and 90s comics, and buying them, right? And getting, like, even if they're in, like, terrible condition, like, I don't care, right?
• 1:05:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, readable.
• 1:05:37
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, exactly. In fact.
• 1:05:39
  Tad Eggleston: Bad but readable is better than great, because it's cheaper.
• 1:05:43
  Neil Kleid: So I was… I was talking to my brother, my brother and I collected together as kids, right? And so we were talking about…
• 1:05:50
  Neil Kleid: 90s comics today, and… because he was… I don't know what we were talking about, maybe G.I. Joe, or some other series, some… oh, it was West Coast Avengers, that's what he was talking about, it was West Coast Avengers, where he's like, you could just see, like, the 90s drop off at some point, where it's like, Engelhart?
• 1:06:10
  Neil Kleid: Burn, and then, like, when Burn left, it just kind of went like… right?
• 1:06:16
  Neil Kleid: So… and so he, you know, we were just saying how, like, in the 90s, like, there were some, like, a lot of Marvel series where you just, like, stopped reading them.
• 1:06:24
  Neil Kleid: Because they were really hard to read. They were just like…
• 1:06:28
  Neil Kleid: okay, I kinda can get through this comic a little bit, but, like.
• 1:06:33
  Neil Kleid: they felt like if I read them out loud, I'd be a little bit embarrassed, like, reading them out loud. And so, I kind of want to go back and read some of those, because I… that's what I… like, I was collecting in the 90s, and…
• 1:06:48
  Neil Kleid: I kinda wanna read them, even if, like, they were…
• 1:06:51
  Tad Eggleston: Just mid to late 90s got good again.
• 1:06:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I wonder how much of it had to do with image?
• 1:07:01
  Tad Eggleston: Because…
• 1:07:02
  Neil Kleid: I think it was a little bit of image, I think it was just a lot of financial issues going on. Look, Marvel… Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
• 1:07:09
  Tad Eggleston: I think when all of their artists left and were able to sell that high, they went, oh, art without story is what sells!
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: And there were a few years where it just didn't feel like they had much good writing at all.
• 1:07:23
  Neil Kleid: Right. Yeah, it was, it was very art-focused.
• 1:07:26
  Tad Eggleston: And most of the artists who were good at storytelling were already at Image.
• 1:07:31
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:07:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know? Or at Dark Horse, I mean, because…
• 1:07:38
  Neil Kleid: And… and so we were saying this, though, but, like, if you look at, like, the DC books, like, a lot of DC 90 books, some of those were really…
• 1:07:45
  Neil Kleid: I don't want to say revolutionary, but, like, there was, like.
• 1:07:48
  Neil Kleid: there were some really good 90s DC books, right? That's when, like.
• 1:07:51
  Neil Kleid: Kyle Raynor became a thing, right? Like, when Conor Hall.
• 1:07:55
  Tad Eggleston: Because they still had… Denny O'Neil and Joe Illage, and they had, they had Karen and…
• 1:08:06
  Tad Eggleston: Elisa and Shelly at, at…
• 1:08:10
  Neil Kleid: Vertigo.
• 1:08:10
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean, and, and, and.
• 1:08:15
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, they were just the editorship thing.
• 1:08:18
  Tad Eggleston: I still had, like, real comics people who understood, like, the entire medium.
• 1:08:25
  Tad Eggleston: In most of their jobs.
• 1:08:27
  Neil Kleid: Virtual?
• 1:08:28
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas Marvel definitely went through a period where, where, like.
• 1:08:33
  Neil Kleid: The business was running.
• 1:08:34
  Tad Eggleston: of their talent had gone, they didn't have a real brain trust, and until they brought in…
• 1:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: Joe Q and Jimmy Palmiati, they just kinda… Twitter.
• 1:08:49
  Neil Kleid: It was Marv… it was Marvolution. It was Marvolution, baby.
• 1:08:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:08:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, now you have me wanting to go back and look more at that era, because it really is…
• 1:09:01
  Tad Eggleston: Like, those Image Comics don't hold up
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: great, because they didn't bring enough writers with them. They figured it out a few years later, when it's like, oh, great art is much better if we have Alan Moore writing for us, or…
• 1:09:17
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, of course.
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:09:19
  Neil Kleid: You had some that were just, like, they were what they, like…
• 1:09:23
  Neil Kleid: I mean, say what you will about the guy, but Savage Dragon has been going strong since Issue 1, right? And, like, it's crazy. It's crazy. Well, but Eric Larson is a legit storyteller. He didn't… Yeah, for sure.
• 1:09:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he didn't drop, I mean… But, like…
• 1:09:40
  Tad Eggleston: I just think of the Wildstorm universe, and, like, Jim Lee is brilliant, and he's a brilliant visual storyteller, but, like.
• 1:09:47
  Tad Eggleston: There was no substance to the first, like, 2 years of those.
• 1:09:53
  Tad Eggleston: comics. It wasn't until he's like, oh, let's go get…
• 1:09:58
  Tad Eggleston: Joe Kelly, and Joe Casey, and… and…
• 1:10:00
  Neil Kleid: No, it was about the art, it was about the colors, about the lettering, it was about, like, the computer… like, the computer… computerization of comics, right? Like, that was really what drove it. It was the novelty. There was a lot about, like, the merchandising and the vibe, and… and that was great.
• 1:10:16
  Neil Kleid: But yeah, then you had, because that was doing so well, you did have, I think, Marvel try to follow in those… I think there's, like, a very famous…
• 1:10:24
  Neil Kleid: story, and I think it's Herb Trimp. Herb Trimp tried to, like, ape Image Comics, like, that style.
• 1:10:31
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:10:33
  Neil Kleid: I don't remember how that went.
• 1:10:35
  Alex Cormack: Amazing.
• 1:10:36
  Tad Eggleston: Probably not will.
• 1:10:37
  Neil Kleid: No.
• 1:10:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, cause I, I, I'm, I, I…
• 1:10:42
  Tad Eggleston: And again, I was… I was a teenager, and I was actually going through one of my not-as-hard-into-comics phages.
• 1:10:49
  Tad Eggleston: during… most of the image revolution, in part because I was always the word guy, so, like…
• 1:10:57
  Tad Eggleston: comics got… I was… and I was also never too much of a DC guy until later, so, like, the comics I was reading suddenly got dumb.
• 1:11:08
  Tad Eggleston: And I assumed that it wasn't the comics, it was me growing up, so I grew out of comics.
• 1:11:15
  Neil Kleid: Right, look, there's definitely…
• 1:11:17
  Neil Kleid: like, I have much love for the comics of that time period. I was an image guy. I liked it, I loved when I was reading an image, and, you know, it was what it was, right? But, there was definitely… because I was also a big Marvel guy, like, a very big shift in Marvel comics, where you were just kind of like… it wasn't even just…
• 1:11:37
  Neil Kleid: the craft, it was… like, West Coast Avengers was the perfect one, because at one point, you had, like, a bunch of fill-in issues.
• 1:11:44
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:11:45
  Neil Kleid: Right? Because it was, like, shift happening. And so, it was just the narrative breaking down, because…
• 1:11:53
  Neil Kleid: that artist was going off to go work at Image, or DC, or whatever, and suddenly you needed to fill.
• 1:11:58
  Neil Kleid: At least that's the way…
• 1:12:01
  Neil Kleid: like, I kind of saw it, or we saw it, and so…
• 1:12:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Neil Kleid: there's just a lot of… there's a lot of series that I dropped at the time that I never got to read, because it was, like, when I was…
• 1:12:12
  Neil Kleid: you know.
• 1:12:13
  Neil Kleid: in high school and college, I was like, I don't want to… but now I'm, like, fascinated, going back and reading some of that old stuff.
• 1:12:20
  Tad Eggleston: Things about having… Marvel Unlimited and DC Universes. I don't have to track down
• 1:12:26
  Tad Eggleston: I can go, oh, wait a minute, somebody just said this is good, let's go find out.
• 1:12:30
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, well, I mean, I have those, but I also have my… my library has been a great… Yeah, that too. I get a bunch of showcases, or a bunch of Marvel epics, and I'll just read, like, volumes of Captain America from the 90s, right? Or…
• 1:12:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well, particularly because they finally got into those eras, like, like…
• 1:12:50
  Tad Eggleston: those… those have been, like, the showcases and epics that have released over, like, the last 4 or 5 years. For a long time, it was like, if you wanted collected old Marvel that wasn't the famous story arcs, you were looking at, like, 60s, 70s, maybe early 80s.
• 1:13:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:13:10
  Tad Eggleston: This is me, this is my retailer brain working, sorry.
• 1:13:13
  Neil Kleid: All good.
• 1:13:16
  Tad Eggleston: We seem to be down all of the rabbit holes now, and I have to teach in the morning. So, I'm going to ask my favorite closing question, the one that Alex has been asked many, many times, and comes with a great answer every time, and the one that Neil gets to answer for the first time.
• 1:13:33
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:13:36
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 1:13:41
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you need more of them too, so you have more people to discuss it with.
• 1:13:58
  Neil Kleid: Alex, can you go first? Because you clearly have an answer for this already that I don't.
• 1:14:04
  Alex Cormack: Something that I love that I feel like more people should get into.
• 1:14:09
  Tad Eggleston: Or at least more people around you, like…
• 1:14:11
  Alex Cormack: Four people around me.
• 1:14:12
  Tad Eggleston: Because, I mean, what I'm saying is, like, Nate Powell cheated and said Hickman's X-Men, because he doesn't really run in a Wednesday com…
• 1:14:21
  Alex Cormack: I will say…
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: And he got into Hickman's X-Men, and he's like, I need more people who know about this.
• 1:14:27
  Neil Kleid: Wait, does it have to be something that's out now, or, like, an old… Yeah. Oh, okay.
• 1:14:31
  Alex Cormack: be any of them, right?
• 1:14:32
  Tad Eggleston: There are, there, I mean,
• 1:14:35
  Tad Eggleston: Paul Pope just, just gave me a Milo Monara book that had been out of print for 30 years, but Fanagraphics happens to be putting out this week, which Paul didn't know until I texted him after the fact.
• 1:14:51
  Alex Cormack: Alright, I'll say,
• 1:14:56
  Alex Cormack: Shaolin Cowboy, I've been reading that lately, and…
• 1:14:59
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:15:00
  Alex Cormack: What am I talking about.
• 1:15:01
  Tad Eggleston: I had that on my stack and haven't… haven't yet. I need to. It's Jeff Darrow, right?
• 1:15:04
  Alex Cormack: Yep. Bye there.
• 1:15:07
  Tad Eggleston: I have that… that exact…
• 1:15:09
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. So, I've been looking at that lately, so… yeah, I'll throw that one out there.
• 1:15:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's a good one.
• 1:15:14
  Alex Cormack: And also all of Neil's books.
• 1:15:16
  Tad Eggleston: Paul O'Neal's books?
• 1:15:17
  Alex Cormack: Yep.
• 1:15:17
  Neil Kleid: Oh my god.
• 1:15:18
  Tad Eggleston: He always plugs his… his… I mean, even when they haven't done other work, he told me to read all of Curtis Martin's books.
• 1:15:24
  Alex Cormack: That's right.
• 1:15:24
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I have. They're the two that you drew.
• 1:15:27
  Tad Eggleston: We don't even know his real name.
• 1:15:29
  Neil Kleid: That's true. I'm glad that somebody is… I still liked it!
• 1:15:33
  Tad Eggleston: And I want more of that story. It was cool. Do we know anything about what's gonna happen with Duel, or is it…
• 1:15:40
  Alex Cormack: No, that's.
• 1:15:41
  Tad Eggleston: not know his name, because he was, like, undercover as a… and, like, he got offed, and now he's just gone?
• 1:15:50
  Alex Cormack: No, as, as… yeah, sure.
• 1:15:56
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, he's out.
• 1:15:58
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, that one is, that one's, that one's,
• 1:16:02
  Alex Cormack: Unless a miracle happens, I think it's, pretty much dead.
• 1:16:05
  Tad Eggleston: Dad. Dad. It's a shame, because you did really great work on that, and he wrote a decent story. I mean, I liked his story, but like…
• 1:16:13
  Tad Eggleston: I loved your work on that.
• 1:16:15
  Alex Cormack: Nothing.
• 1:16:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think I wrote that to you, like, immediately after reading it.
• 1:16:20
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 1:16:21
  Tad Eggleston: Neil, if you haven't seen this, like, it's totally worth reading. Was it 2 or 3 issues that came out?
• 1:16:27
  Alex Cormack: Oh, that was 4.
• 1:16:29
  Alex Cormack: Were there 4? Okay.
• 1:16:30
  Tad Eggleston: four issues of a book called Duel that Alex did, where essentially, like, there's a social media program that you can challenge people.
• 1:16:41
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, for, like, a dual, and people, like.
• 1:16:44
  Tad Eggleston: Both of you has to be dead within 3 days, or both of you will be.
• 1:16:47
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:16:49
  Alex Cormack: The shenanigans ensue.
• 1:16:52
  Tad Eggleston: Alex's art was… How… it…
• 1:16:55
  Neil Kleid: It's the first one that…
• 1:16:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, yeah, but, like, I think what I knew from Alex before that was Sink and Crimson Cage, which already were relatively.
• 1:17:06
  Alex Cormack: Good luck.
• 1:17:07
  Tad Eggleston: Different in terms of their… their style, despite the fact that they were for the same writer.
• 1:17:12
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 1:17:12
  Tad Eggleston: And then there was this, that, like, I read it, and I'm like, oh, this is amazing, who drew it? And I went back, I'm like, Alex Cormac drew this?
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: This is not Alex… this is Alex Cormac 2? Fucked!
• 1:17:25
  Tad Eggleston: Alex… Alex is a chameleon. Alex can do anything he feels like.
• 1:17:30
  Alex Cormack: That's… that's true. I can't, I can't wait.
• 1:17:33
  Tad Eggleston: for him to decide to just do a Charlie Brown strip.
• 1:17:36
  Tad Eggleston: Or, or, or, like, that, that, like, style. Just because it will fuck with people's heads.
• 1:17:42
  Neil Kleid: Alex, have you… have you drawn anything that you've written? Like, a one-man show yet?
• 1:17:47
  Alex Cormack: Have I? Oh, not for a while. Last thing that I wrote…
• 1:17:53
  Alex Cormack: was, oh, I tried out Patreon for about 5 minutes, and I made up a little story for that, about a guy that, like,
• 1:18:03
  Alex Cormack: He basically gets, like, eat by, like, this big, like, underwater
• 1:18:09
  Alex Cormack: monster, basically kind of like a Jonah type of story, but he gets eaten, but he's able to dig himself out of this thing, and he swims out, but then he finds out that he's underneath some…
• 1:18:18
  Alex Cormack: It's a dumb short story, but that was the last time I wrote anything, and maybe that was…
• 1:18:22
  Alex Cormack: Oh, golly, 5 years ago now? Maybe 10 years ago?
• 1:18:25
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's.
• 1:18:26
  Alex Cormack: 10 years ago, maybe, like, 6 years ago, something like that. It was before COVID.
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that sounds fun to me.
• 1:18:31
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. But, no, but I mean, luckily for me, I've been doing, you know, I've been working, so I haven't really had time to cook up anything, so…
• 1:18:42
  Alex Cormack: But.
• 1:18:43
  Tad Eggleston: Alex, you're also, like… I don't think I've said this to you, but I know I've said it. You blow my mind, because you…
• 1:18:52
  Tad Eggleston: Work with more different people, and more consistently than any artist I know.
• 1:19:00
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't work with the big two.
• 1:19:03
  Alex Cormack: Oh, thank you.
• 1:19:04
  Tad Eggleston: And frankly, more consistently and with more people than most people who work for the big two. But the fact that you've networked
• 1:19:12
  Tad Eggleston: this level, and do this many different books at this many different publishers at this level, and haven't done it through meeting some guy that you worked on Spider-Man with, makes you an incredibly unique story in and of yourself.
• 1:19:26
  Alex Cormack: Well, thank you.
• 1:19:30
  Alex Cormack: It's all because I, I'll give credit to Rich.
• 1:19:34
  Alex Cormack: Because that's how… that's how this call got started, that, Neil and Rich were buddies, and
• 1:19:39
  Alex Cormack: Neil was like, alright, yeah, give me his email, or however it worked out.
• 1:19:44
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, well, I mean, look, I saw your work both because of Drive Like Hell, which you did with Rich, and.
• 1:19:51
  Alex Cormack: So, yeah, with, Dave.
• 1:19:53
  Neil Kleid: with the pose, right? And it was definitely, like, yeah, this is definitely the art I want on this book, so…
• 1:20:02
  Neil Kleid: And I will happily work with you on other stuff, just… Beautiful.
• 1:20:06
  Alex Cormack: Alright.
• 1:20:07
  Tad Eggleston: Let's get people to pay us for it. I don't think anybody's ever gone, I'm never working with that Killustrator again.
• 1:20:13
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:20:14
  Alex Cormack: That's, that's true.
• 1:20:15
  Tad Eggleston: I might joke with him, because…
• 1:20:16
  Neil Kleid: He's a little… he's a little too pushy.
• 1:20:18
  Tad Eggleston: Because his, his, his, his,
• 1:20:22
  Tad Eggleston: his Twitter handle was Alex CormacIllustrator, but I'd always read it as Alex Cormac Kill Illustrator, because the K went right.
• 1:20:32
  Alex Cormack: Money.
• 1:20:33
  Tad Eggleston: illustrated.
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: For a while, he even changed his name to say Alex Cormac Kill Iustrator, but…
• 1:20:39
  Alex Cormack: real estate illustrator, doesn't it? I don't know.
• 1:20:41
  Tad Eggleston: on Twitter, but I don't spend time on Twitter. I know you haven't done that on Blue Sky yet.
• 1:20:45
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, well, I… give me 5 minutes, I'll get up. After all this, I'll switch it up.
• 1:20:52
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it should at least be like that in the month of October in any given year.
• 1:20:56
  Alex Cormack: So, Neil, what was your thing?
• 1:20:58
  Alex Cormack: I got, Jeff Darrow over here.
• 1:21:01
  Neil Kleid: So I'm, like, all over the place.
• 1:21:03
  Tad Eggleston: Wait a minute, Jeff Darrow's over there?
• 1:21:05
  Alex Cormack: Oh, no, no, no.
• 1:21:06
  Tad Eggleston: I'm joking!
• 1:21:07
  Alex Cormack: Okay.
• 1:21:08
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I thought she meant it, like…
• 1:21:10
  Tad Eggleston: Zero's just been sitting off-screen this whole time.
• 1:21:12
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, he's over there.
• 1:21:13
  Neil Kleid: down, but I gotta go back.
• 1:21:14
  Alex Cormack: Perfect.
• 1:21:15
  Neil Kleid: Barrow, yeah.
• 1:21:17
  Alex Cormack: We're roommates, you know.
• 1:21:19
  Neil Kleid: So I… I… look, I obviously read a lot of superhero stuff, and I, you know, I read a lot of the stuff that everyone else is reading, right? Like, but I also read a lot of…
• 1:21:30
  Neil Kleid: like…
• 1:21:31
  Neil Kleid: one-person cartoonist books, like series and graphic novels by the person writing it, right? And so, the one… there's four that I really like that I don't… I don't know if people are reading them, because some of them are out of print, and some of them are…
• 1:21:45
  Neil Kleid: I've been around for a while.
• 1:21:46
  Tad Eggleston: But I love.
• 1:21:47
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so, Castle Waiting by Linda Medley is one of my favorites.
• 1:21:51
  Tad Eggleston: I have it downstairs on my list, or my stack of things that hasn't been read, but.
• 1:21:57
  Neil Kleid: It's stupid.
• 1:21:58
  Tad Eggleston: B.
• 1:21:58
  Neil Kleid: It's…
• 1:22:00
  Neil Kleid: not my, like, by the way, if you read Castle Waiting and then read Medieval, you'll be like, wait, this guy likes this, that, like, it's very…
• 1:22:06
  Alex Cormack: No, no, that…
• 1:22:07
  Tad Eggleston: I like that even more. I mean, Alex and I have had long talks
• 1:22:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think the first time we were on, we traded back and forth various stuff that we just liked for the art for, like, half an hour at the end of the episode. That's where the conversation… where the question came from.
• 1:22:23
  Alex Cormack: And so, yeah, so…
• 1:22:25
  Neil Kleid: And that's where… and that's, like, what drew me into some of this stuff, right? Like, Linda's stuff I liked because I liked her art, right? She actually did, like, Justice League for a while, and she was doing a lot of,
• 1:22:37
  Neil Kleid: mainstream stuff, but Council Wheding is on a whole other level, right? Because it's her passion, it's her love, and so it's a really good… there's two volumes, I think Fanna puts it out, and so it's really good. I also like,
• 1:22:52
  Neil Kleid: Finder by Carla… Carla McNeil. Carla's amazing.
• 1:22:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, I have to… I have to show… show you something. And this… this is… and we're gonna have to… I normally… this is… I'm gonna ask a new question that normally comes before the old question, but this is one of my surreal experiences in comics. So, Carla Speed McNeil just put out…
• 1:23:11
  Neil Kleid: Yes.
• 1:23:11
  Tad Eggleston: A.
• 1:23:13
  Tad Eggleston: Carlos was, I think, SPX exclusive, or at least the 300 that she made were for SPX. I wasn't gonna be at SPX, but my friend Dennis was, so I reached out to Dennis Kitchen and said, Carlos, could I have this book at her table? Can you go get it for me?
• 1:23:31
  Neil Kleid: So Carla and I go way back, I've known her since I was at SPX, you know, when I first started, and she's… her work has always been amazing. She was doing Finder at the time.
• 1:23:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, she's on…
• 1:23:40
  Neil Kleid: I don't find her anymore, but Settlers, she's doing…
• 1:23:43
  Tad Eggleston: She says she may come back to it, but she's got, what, 4 books that she's doing, the single issue to kind of figure out where she's going.
• 1:23:51
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, she's using Patreon right now, and Settlers, the one that you've got there, is one of the stories she just did, and so she… I almost worked with her twice. Once on a heavy metal short story, and then once…
• 1:24:03
  Neil Kleid: Oh, yeah.
• 1:24:05
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I would love to… I'm gonna ask her if she just wants to draw it and put it on her Patreon, just because, like, it's sitting around.
• 1:24:11
  Neil Kleid: And.
• 1:24:11
  Tad Eggleston: Well, both Heavy Metal and Metal Erlant are back.
• 1:24:15
  Alex Cormack: Nope.
• 1:24:16
  Neil Kleid: They don't want to do it.
• 1:24:18
  Alex Cormack: Okay.
• 1:24:18
  Neil Kleid: It was an old… it was…
• 1:24:19
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry.
• 1:24:19
  Neil Kleid: Yes. Before the editorial switch.
• 1:24:22
  Neil Kleid: And so, it was that, and then years ago…
• 1:24:25
  Tad Eggleston: Joe had some cool stuff going at Heavy Metal before things.
• 1:24:30
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I did.
• 1:24:30
  Tad Eggleston: I'm upset that we're never gonna see the rest of, the Christos…
• 1:24:35
  Tad Eggleston: or the Montos and Christopher Priest book, er, that we got to see, like, one teaser.
• 1:24:42
  Neil Kleid: Oh.
• 1:24:43
  Neil Kleid: I miss that.
• 1:24:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Joe was on the… Joe Illage was on the show right before that issue came out, and he was just, like, all over it.
• 1:24:53
  Tad Eggleston: And I can't remember the name of it, but I remember reading the story and going, oh my god, this is gonna be amazing. And then heavy metal ended.
• 1:25:01
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I got… I got in, I got a story in before it ended. I did a story, a Houdini story with Mike Oming. That was a lot of fun.
• 1:25:08
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, with Mike Oming?
• 1:25:09
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:25:10
  Tad Eggleston: I love Mike Oming. He's also… he hasn't been on as many times as Alex, but he's chasing you.
• 1:25:16
  Tad Eggleston: He was actually… the last time he was on was with your artist on… Nice Jewish boys.
• 1:25:24
  Neil Kleid: John, yeah, so Mike, John, and I, we're all… we all kind of know each other.
• 1:25:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, because John did the art for Takis.
• 1:25:31
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, for alienated, yeah, yeah. Right, so I had the three of them on for that.
• 1:25:35
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so Mike… Mike and Taki did the story together. We did… it was like a very short Houdini thing, and then we were…
• 1:25:42
  Neil Kleid: Supposed to do some other stuff, it may happen, it may not. Yeah.
• 1:25:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm gonna have to go find that.
• 1:25:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because that sounds fun.
• 1:25:49
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, but yes, Finder is amazing. If you haven't read it, definitely do. And then, the last one, which I don't know.
• 1:25:57
  Tad Eggleston: You said 4, that's only 2.
• 1:25:59
  Neil Kleid: Oh, right, I forgot, right. I have two others, right. So, number three is one that I… I can't tell if people know about these books or not, because, like, I found them through Draw On Quarterly. I think they're on Quarterly.
• 1:26:12
  Neil Kleid: The Paul series by Michelle Rabagliani, who's a Montreal cartoonist.
• 1:26:19
  Tad Eggleston: I think I know this.
• 1:26:21
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, and there's, like, 4 or 5 volumes, they're standalone graphic novels, but it's about his, like, him growing up, and so, like, you can read them both as, like.
• 1:26:32
  Neil Kleid: A person who grew up, or who goes through, like, finding a job, and…
• 1:26:37
  Neil Kleid: going to summer camp, but also, like, he comes at it from the point of view of a father in some cases, so I really, really enjoyed it. And the art's fantastic on it, too.
• 1:26:46
  Neil Kleid: so I definitely recommend, for folks who haven't read that, check that out.
• 1:26:51
  Tad Eggleston: Don't know.
• 1:26:51
  Neil Kleid: And then the fourth one…
• 1:26:52
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like I've heard these, but I don't think I've actually… The…
• 1:26:57
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I think they're drawn apart.
• 1:27:00
  Tad Eggleston: I love drawing cards.
• 1:27:02
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:27:03
  Neil Kleid: And I'm actually looking it up now to make sure that I'm not misquoting the publisher.
• 1:27:09
  Neil Kleid: I'm pretty sure that's who it is. Yep.
• 1:27:11
  Neil Kleid: drawn accordingly.
• 1:27:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, no, I'm looking at it right now. I'm sorry, I could, I could have answered that for you.
• 1:27:18
  Neil Kleid: But those are really good. There's, like, again, 4 or 5 of them, or at least those are the ones I've read. Right. And then the last one is… and I love, by the way, there's a ton more, right? Like, Dean Haspel's work, Josh Neufeld, a bunch of people.
• 1:27:32
  Neil Kleid: But because we're talking baseball, Golem's Might… Golem's Mighty Swing by James Starr.
• 1:27:38
  Tad Eggleston: term is coming… well, A, was at the baseball roundtable, and is coming up on the podcast,
• 1:27:46
  Tad Eggleston: Not this week, but next week.
• 1:27:48
  Tad Eggleston: That's great. Columns on the swing is amazing.
• 1:27:52
  Neil Kleid: His book is fantastic, and I have it on my shelf, and I'm… very inspiring.
• 1:27:57
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a very big fan of… His work…
• 1:28:02
  Tad Eggleston: And end of the golem's mighty swing to begin with.
• 1:28:06
  Tad Eggleston: Which is where I discovered him first.
• 1:28:09
  Tad Eggleston: But he's also… he was involved in founding, what, Cartoon Studies?
• 1:28:14
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, yeah, CCS.
• 1:28:15
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, there's a whole generation of cartoonists that, like, Came up under him.
• 1:28:20
  Neil Kleid: Oh, yeah.
• 1:28:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm really, really looking forward to talking to him.
• 1:28:26
  Neil Kleid: You can tell him that I loved his book.
• 1:28:29
  Tad Eggleston: do that.
• 1:28:33
  Tad Eggleston: I'm pretty certain he'll be back next year for the baseball conversation, so… so this is just more reason for you to show up, and Alex, I'll remember to invite you next year.
• 1:28:42
  Alex Cormack: Sounds good.
• 1:28:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna ask that, just because, like, that Carly Speed McNeil, one of the questions I've been asking recently.
• 1:28:51
  Tad Eggleston: There's another one that I keep meaning to make.
• 1:28:56
  Tad Eggleston: Make more common is,
• 1:29:00
  Tad Eggleston: I've been at this podcast for a little bit more than 4 years now, and I feel like my life has entered the Twilight Zone. The number of experiences I've had, that if you told…
• 1:29:11
  Tad Eggleston: teenage comic reader, Tad, that he was gonna go to a baseball game with Dennis Kitchen, or… or be friends with Christopher Cantwell, or whatever.
• 1:29:23
  Tad Eggleston: I would just say, you're fucking with me. There's… there's no way. There's no way that that will happen in my life.
• 1:29:31
  Tad Eggleston: And yet they have, just because I'm a podcaster, and the more I talk to people in comics, the more I realize that this living in this surreal world
• 1:29:41
  Tad Eggleston: is… is not a unique experience to me. Like, everybody I talk to has some story that never would have happened if they hadn't had the guts to be part of the comics world that just makes them go.
• 1:29:54
  Tad Eggleston: I can't believe that happened.
• 1:29:57
  Tad Eggleston: So, I've been asking for them. Obviously, you know, you don't need to, to, to,
• 1:30:05
  Tad Eggleston: betray trusts or whatnot. We don't need to… to relive weird dreams about Stan Lee that… that other writers that Alex knows may or may not have had.
• 1:30:16
  Alex Cormack: Go, go!
• 1:30:19
  Tad Eggleston: Way back to the first interview, and that one's there.
• 1:30:26
  Alex Cormack: Oh, well, that's an old, long story. I'll leave it at that.
• 1:30:31
  Tad Eggleston: Well, like I said, they can listen to it on 22 panels.
• 1:30:34
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 1:30:35
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's With Great Power Number 1. Maybe number 2? We know, that's right. Christopher Sibella was before you guys, so it's With Great Power Number 2.
• 1:30:47
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 1:30:49
  Tad Eggleston: Any, any surreal experiences where, you know, you're out, out doing something where you, like, almost have to pinch yourself, because it's like…
• 1:30:59
  Neil Kleid: I… so, it's weird, because, look, I've…
• 1:31:03
  Neil Kleid: outside… there's no… like, comic books is… it's not… like, you don't get into comic books for the money or the fame, right? Nope. Like, you don't do this…
• 1:31:10
  Neil Kleid: Right? Because they're like…
• 1:31:12
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I'm gonna be super famous, or make a ton… like, there are people who do, like, who are all comic book famous, or whatever, but like…
• 1:31:21
  Neil Kleid: you do this because you're passionate about it, and so you're all… we're all fans at heart. Like, we're all fans of the medium, we're fans of the industry.
• 1:31:28
  Neil Kleid: And so, like, there are moments of just, like, pure fandom where you're just like.
• 1:31:34
  Neil Kleid: especially as a creator, right? Like, the first time you get a box of comps with your name on it, like, with your name on the front cover of a book, or you walk into a comic book store, and you see, like, your book, right, your comic.
• 1:31:47
  Neil Kleid: Like, that's a surreal moment, right? Being at a convention for the first time and signing for a fan, that's a surreal thing, because I used to be on the other… still am sometimes on the other side.
• 1:31:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:31:57
  Neil Kleid: Hold up.
• 1:31:58
  Neil Kleid: But I've had… I've had a bunch of… and I tell people, like, I'm… I clearly love to talk, right? And so, I tell people all the time that there's, like.
• 1:32:07
  Neil Kleid: four key moments where it, like, hit me, where I was just like…
• 1:32:12
  Neil Kleid: I'm still a fan, but I'm also, like, like, not just a fan anymore, and it's weird that, like, this is my life.
• 1:32:19
  Neil Kleid: And so, the first one I tell people is, I did a book called Brownsville. It was one of my…
• 1:32:27
  Neil Kleid: first graphic novels, it's about the Jewish mafia in the 1930s.
• 1:32:31
  Neil Kleid: And I did it with my friend Jake Allen, and it was my first book, right? It came out in 2006.
• 1:32:39
  Neil Kleid: And I sold it at SPX. I sold it at the very first New York Comic-Con. We were, like, the first booth you saw came… saw when you came in.
• 1:32:47
  Neil Kleid: And, I was promoting it in New York City.
• 1:32:52
  Neil Kleid: at the Jewish Community Center in New York City in… on the Upper West Side. At some, like.
• 1:32:58
  Neil Kleid: Chanukkah Jewish Comic-Con thing that they put together.
• 1:33:02
  Neil Kleid: Where they had Jordan Gordfinkel, who was, like, the editor of Batman at the time, come and speak.
• 1:33:07
  Neil Kleid: And he's the guy who came up with Batman No Man's No Man's Land. And they had all these, like, Jewish creators come in, and the big…
• 1:33:15
  Neil Kleid: keynote speaker.
• 1:33:17
  Neil Kleid: was Joe Cubert.
• 1:33:19
  Neil Kleid: A legendary, legendary Joe Tuber.
• 1:33:22
  Neil Kleid: And so, they had me and one other, like, indie creator in the lobby doing, like, sketches for people, because I can draw a little bit, and, like, doing sketches.
• 1:33:32
  Tad Eggleston: Better than Tom King, I hope.
• 1:33:35
  Tad Eggleston: Canadian Times covers?
• 1:33:36
  Neil Kleid: Love you, Tom!
• 1:33:39
  Neil Kleid: And so…
• 1:33:39
  Tad Eggleston: I love Tom, too, that's why I can give him a hard time.
• 1:33:42
  Neil Kleid: So we're in the lobby.
• 1:33:44
  Tad Eggleston: He's been on… he's been on almost as many times as Alex.
• 1:33:50
  Neil Kleid: And so, we're in the lobby, and we're, we're signing… we're doing sketches, but we're also, like, promoting our, like, indie comics, and I had an ash can that Jake and I had put together for Brownsville before it had to come out.
• 1:34:03
  Neil Kleid: And…
• 1:34:05
  Neil Kleid: I see out of the corner of my eye Joe Kubert walk into the Jewish Community Center, because he's very…
• 1:34:10
  Neil Kleid: Very recognizable.
• 1:34:12
  Neil Kleid: And he came and walked up to the two of us.
• 1:34:15
  Neil Kleid: I mean, I don't even remember who the other guy was that I was with.
• 1:34:18
  Neil Kleid: And he kind of looked at the other guy, and then looked at me, and picked up the ash can, and was like.
• 1:34:25
  Neil Kleid: Oh, this is really interesting.
• 1:34:27
  Neil Kleid: I'm actually doing a book a lot like this right now, too, and the book he was doing was called Jew Gangster.
• 1:34:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:34:34
  Neil Kleid: And it… he kind of, like, mentioned it, and I was, like, talking to him, like, about the book, whatever. He's like, can I take this? I'm like, yep, like, take them all! Like, it's fine.
• 1:34:44
  Neil Kleid: And he's like, listen, can you help me out? I'm speaking today, I don't know if you know who I am, my name is Kubert.
• 1:34:51
  Neil Kleid: And I'm like, yeah, I know who you are.
• 1:34:55
  Neil Kleid: It was just that moment of just, like, it was like a weird, like… he's talking to me as, like, as a peer, but also, like, it was just, like, a weird, surreal moment where I was like, I love you!
• 1:35:06
  Alex Cormack: And also…
• 1:35:07
  Neil Kleid: And also, like, and also, like, hey, we both have books coming out, literally, by the way, the same month, about the same thing.
• 1:35:14
  Neil Kleid: And so, it was just, like, a moment of, like, oh my god, is Joe Hubert my competition right now? But also, like, it's cool that we both have, like, Jewish mafia books coming out at the same time.
• 1:35:26
  Tad Eggleston: That's like, James Stern pointed out, that Golem's Mighty Swing was up for an Eisner, but it lost.
• 1:35:33
  Tad Eggleston: to Will Eisner, so he's not really upset about it.
• 1:35:36
  Neil Kleid: It's true.
• 1:35:39
  Neil Kleid: Fair, fair.
• 1:35:42
  Neil Kleid: Then, the… so the second… so that was the first one. The second one was… I… I did a book called 90 Candles. I won a zero grand for it, so I don't know if everyone knows what the zero grand is, but… one of the Ninja Turtles… What?
• 1:35:57
  Tad Eggleston: Vaguely.
• 1:35:58
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, so Peter Laird of the Ninja Turtles basically
• 1:36:02
  Neil Kleid: put up a bunch of money to fund publishers. People to publish their own books.
• 1:36:07
  Neil Kleid: And you had to apply for it, and so I was just kind of getting into comics, and a bunch of guys in Brooklyn basically said, hey, Neil, you should… you should apply.
• 1:36:15
  Neil Kleid: And I had a book I was doing at the time, and so I put it out, and it's… the concept, it was like…
• 1:36:21
  Neil Kleid: there was no script. I basically drew a panel.
• 1:36:24
  Neil Kleid: Of, like, a baby in the womb.
• 1:36:28
  Neil Kleid: And every neck panel, every panel after that was informed by the one before it, and each panel was another year in this cartoonist's life.
• 1:36:36
  Neil Kleid: Okay. And… and I won this… this grant for it.
• 1:36:39
  Neil Kleid: And… it came out, people seemed to like it, whatever.
• 1:36:44
  Neil Kleid: I went to a convention, and Darwin Cook was signing.
• 1:36:49
  Neil Kleid: Parker, the first Parker book at the convention.
• 1:36:52
  Neil Kleid: And so I love Darwin's work. Beautiful artwork, amazing storyteller, and so I was like.
• 1:36:58
  Neil Kleid: I don't normally stand online at conventions to get things signed, but I'm like, I'm gonna buy this book and get it signed.
• 1:37:04
  Neil Kleid: And I happen to have a copy of 90 Candles with me, and so…
• 1:37:08
  Neil Kleid: waited for about 40 minutes, got up to Darwin, bought the book, told him how much I liked his work.
• 1:37:14
  Neil Kleid: And I was… and he started, like, sketching in this book, and I was like, listen, I want to give you this book.
• 1:37:19
  Neil Kleid: And I gave him, like, the quick, like, balloon pitch for it, like, this is what 90 Candles is, and I told him, and he stopped sketching.
• 1:37:26
  Neil Kleid: took the book, and read the book while I was standing there.
• 1:37:30
  Neil Kleid: And it's a fast read. It's 90 panels, right? And so he literally read the entire book as we were sitting here, and he stops and he looks at me, he goes, I gotta tell you, man.
• 1:37:40
  Neil Kleid: This is probably the best concept for a book I've ever read.
• 1:37:45
  Neil Kleid: And, like, that, like, blew my mind, right? Like, as a creator, as a fan, like, there was just that… it was like, alright, I'm done, I can leave the convention now.
• 1:37:56
  Neil Kleid: So those two moments were really kind of like… Those were surreal moments.
• 1:38:06
  Tad Eggleston: Detective Me is starting to go, but Alex, share a moment.
• 1:38:10
  Alex Cormack: That's the real boat, huh?
• 1:38:13
  Alex Cormack: The fact that I get to do this for a job is surreal.
• 1:38:18
  Alex Cormack: You know, and you know, the… for me, it's, you know, it's…
• 1:38:25
  Alex Cormack: Probably the most real moment was, when I quit my old day job, and decided to do this for full-time.
• 1:38:34
  Alex Cormack: And just the idea that it was, like, the next… the day after that. Like, I… I… it was my last day at my old job.
• 1:38:40
  Alex Cormack: And, you know, and I came home, my wife had, had, like, a couple friends over, and we had, like, a little mini party, it was great and all that. Then it was the next day, and I was like, now…
• 1:38:52
  Alex Cormack: it's… it's not like, you know, you have nowhere to go. You don't have to, like, it's not like,
• 1:38:58
  Alex Cormack: you have to get in the car and go anywhere, you have to… you know, it's not like back at school, like, you had to go to school, or you had to go to, classes, or you had to go to work. Like, it was just like, it's all on you. Like, and that… I remember that being very, like, oh, okay, let's, if we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this. So,
• 1:39:16
  Alex Cormack: And I remember that being very surreal, but…
• 1:39:19
  Alex Cormack: That's not much of a fun story. So.
• 1:39:22
  Tad Eggleston: It is a fun story, but…
• 1:39:23
  Alex Cormack: I… but, to kind of go along with, Neil's story, I remember one time I met, Drew Struzom.
• 1:39:29
  Neil Kleid: He was signing at, 8th grade, yeah.
• 1:39:32
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, I think it was… it was still Boston Comic… Boston Comic-Con at the time, or maybe it was the Family Expo bought it, I can't remember.
• 1:39:40
  Alex Cormack: But he was there, and like, my old… my… Indiana Jones is my favorite movies. Like, that's… I can't get enough of them. And, so I went up just, basically, was just gonna be like, I'm gonna buy a poster, have him sign it.
• 1:39:55
  Alex Cormack: and say hello, and figure that's it. Like, I'm sure there's gonna be a bunch of people, he's not gonna talk to him anymore. I wasn't expecting anything from it, I was just gonna describe this, and…
• 1:40:03
  Alex Cormack: But the… I got there, and I… and we just started, like, chit-chatting. And it was… I was kind of like, why are you talking to me? Like… like, you're doing screws, and I'm sure you're busy, you know?
• 1:40:15
  Alex Cormack: But then I… he was like, so what are you doing? I'm like, oh, I'm an artist, and he's like, oh, I'd love to see your work, do you have… are you… do you have tabling? I'm like, yeah, alright, hold on.
• 1:40:25
  Alex Cormack: So I was like, yeah, give me two seconds, and I ran over, I gave him some, like, showed him some comics, and he was like, oh, this is really good, and I'm like, you're just saying that, sad. But,
• 1:40:34
  Alex Cormack: But yeah, that was, that was, yeah, yeah, it was just, like… like, the fact, that was, like, one of those, like, he's giving me the time of day, that's, that's nuts.
• 1:40:42
  Tad Eggleston: But.
• 1:40:44
  Alex Cormack: But, yeah, no, I'm trying to think of any,
• 1:40:49
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, just… it's… it's a weird business. It's, it's a weird business. It's a weird business, yeah.
• 1:40:56
  Tad Eggleston: It is, and we're all actually human, is what I have to keep reminding myself. You know, I mean, I think… I think it has to do with the fact that
• 1:41:07
  Tad Eggleston: Like, after novelists, comics people are the people who can be famous.
• 1:41:13
  Tad Eggleston: Have a famous name, at least in their crowd, without being at all recognizable in public.
• 1:41:19
  Alex Cormack: Yeah. Probably even more than novelist.
• 1:41:22
  Tad Eggleston: Because it's not as common for there to be, like, an author picture at the back of the…
• 1:41:28
  Tad Eggleston: Comic book as there is at the back of your novel.
• 1:41:30
  Alex Cormack: Right.
• 1:41:33
  Tad Eggleston: like, like, I mean, going back to Tom King, he once said, I'm comics famous. I was at the park once, and.
• 1:41:39
  Alex Cormack: somebody recognized me. I'm like, can you come home with me so my mother-in-law will believe that I'm famous?
• 1:41:48
  Neil Kleid: And then there are those of us who don't even get that, right? Like, there's those of us who put out.
• 1:41:54
  Tad Eggleston: That was after he'd made his appearance on, I forget, was he on Conan for Batman?
• 1:42:05
  Tad Eggleston: But,
• 1:42:07
  Tad Eggleston: But also, like, like, comics is enough of a niche enough world that the people who love it, the people who…
• 1:42:14
  Tad Eggleston: Who get it as a medium, not just superheroes, not just… pop culture… Collecting phenomena, whatever.
• 1:42:23
  Tad Eggleston: I think we're wired a little bit differently, and we attract each other.
• 1:42:29
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, and I think… I think you'll… if you ask that question to a lot of folks in comics, I think the variations on the theme will be…
• 1:42:40
  Neil Kleid: you know, it's surreal when I saw my…
• 1:42:43
  Neil Kleid: name on the shelf, or name on the book, or when I got my first, or when I did my first this, right? Like…
• 1:42:48
  Neil Kleid: That's, like, a big thing, right? Like…
• 1:42:51
  Neil Kleid: number one, there's an aspect of just, like, I made something and it's out in the world for other people to consume, but there's also, like… there's also, like, my kids always… not my kids, necessarily, but more other people. Like, people will hand me a comic book, and I will roll it up sometimes.
• 1:43:07
  Neil Kleid: Right? Or I'll, like, put it in my pocket, and they'll be like, whoa! And I'm like, they're disposable to me at this point, right?
• 1:43:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:43:14
  Neil Kleid: If this idiot can make a comic and put it out on the shelf, then, like.
• 1:43:19
  Neil Kleid: like, what worth do they have, right? And so, there's that aspect of, like, it's a little insecure, whatever. So that's, like, the one theme. The other theme will be, like.
• 1:43:29
  Neil Kleid: it's surreal that I'm in an industry, or in social environments, or talking with people whose work I love, right? Whose work I admire, and they like my work too. Right.
• 1:43:43
  Neil Kleid: Like, when I send out medieval to people in the industry, you know, like, writers who you'll know, right, or artists that you'll know, and we get back, like, dude, this was awesome, or, like, I really enjoyed it. Like, there's that moment of just, like, you did? You liked it? Like…
• 1:43:59
  Neil Kleid: And then the other one is…
• 1:44:01
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, like, when you come face-to-face with somebody who's Maybe… who's a stranger? Who's…
• 1:44:08
  Neil Kleid: Had a reaction to your work.
• 1:44:11
  Neil Kleid: Right? Like, I mentioned that book, 90 Candles, right, that I did, which is, like, it's a little… I mean, a lot of my work is emotional, right? But I had somebody who I had just met at a convention, bought the comic, and then came back to me, like, 24 hours later, and was like, you're an asshole. And I'm like, why? And she's like, you made me cry at a convention.
• 1:44:31
  Neil Kleid: Like, I read this, and I started bawling, and I was like, well, like, I'm done. Like, my job is done. But, like.
• 1:44:39
  Neil Kleid: So, like, that's a huge, surreal thing. Like, Alex and I just signed at Newark Comic Con… with Comixology, and I had people come up to me.
• 1:44:47
  Neil Kleid: like, for the signing, who are, like, either like, I love your work.
• 1:44:51
  Neil Kleid: can you sign this other work I brought? Or, book sounds cool, like… those reactions…
• 1:44:58
  Neil Kleid: Like, I don't get that in my… like, I have a day job, right? I have a day job. I'm a UX designer at a bank. I go to the bank, and people are like, do this, and I do it, and that, you know, and like…
• 1:45:08
  Neil Kleid: Either they're like me…
• 1:45:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'm Neil Clyde. Talk to me nicer.
• 1:45:13
  Neil Kleid: Right, but it's like, you don't get that, like, my wife is, you know, runs a nursing home. Like, she doesn't get like that. Like, she doesn't go to a.
• 1:45:21
  Tad Eggleston: You're in a nursing home for a while, too, that's… that's… I feel for her.
• 1:45:26
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, no, I mean, but, like, but, like.
• 1:45:29
  Tad Eggleston: This is why I can't watch football, by the way, Neil.
• 1:45:32
  Tad Eggleston: I ran dementia units.
• 1:45:35
  Neil Kleid: You're not wrong.
• 1:45:38
  Alex Cormack: By the way, Neil, I also had somebody to…
• 1:45:40
  Tad Eggleston: live Bears fan, and so many of them have dementia now, that it's not even funny. The ones that are still alive?
• 1:45:49
  Tad Eggleston: I am.
• 1:45:50
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… Go lions? No.
• 1:45:55
  Alex Cormack: Neil, I also had somebody at a convention call me an asshole. I sold, one of my books, Sync, to somebody, and the next day he came back and was like, you're an asshole. I was like, what? Like, the book freaked me out, man, it scared the hell out of me, I couldn't sleep, and I was like, all right.
• 1:46:12
  Neil Kleid: Awesome!
• 1:46:13
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, John doesn't count.
• 1:46:15
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 1:46:18
  Neil Kleid: I was gonna say it wasn't me, but…
• 1:46:19
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, it was you, yeah.
• 1:46:22
  Neil Kleid: But that's the thing, it's surreal that we get to create things that make people feel something, right? That make people react a certain way.
• 1:46:30
  Neil Kleid: and hopefully react the way we want them to react, right? Because, like, this is how I felt writing it, this is how I felt drawing. You know, when people… we've been on, you know, a couple of these interviews where people are like, man, that was, like, that was fucked up. Like, that was disgusting. And I'm like, done! Like.
• 1:46:44
  Alex Cormack: Yep.
• 1:46:46
  Neil Kleid: our job is done, right? And so…
• 1:46:49
  Neil Kleid: that's, like, a surreal thing, to be able to put something out into the world that was either in here, or, you know, for Alex here, right? And, like.
• 1:46:56
  Neil Kleid: be able to, like… that's…
• 1:46:58
  Tad Eggleston: You're not a video podcast, it's okay.
• 1:47:01
  Neil Kleid: Oh, we're not, sorry. In my head, or in Alex's hands, and so…
• 1:47:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, see, I thought you were making a difference.
• 1:47:07
  Neil Kleid: No, no, no.
• 1:47:09
  Alex Cormack: It's a family show, it's…
• 1:47:11
  Neil Kleid: I made a gesture there.
• 1:47:15
  Neil Kleid: Not quite canned.
• 1:47:18
  Neil Kleid: But the point is that, like, we, you know, we put something out in the world that comes from us, and when we get something back in return, right? Like, you can get, like, an Amazon review, or a…
• 1:47:30
  Neil Kleid: a review on Goodreads or any of these, you know, reviews or whatever, and that's, you know, that's fun and everything, but, like, when somebody comes up to you at a convention, or on the street, or wherever, who has… who has interacted with your work, and basically is like, I read your work, and it made me feel X.
• 1:47:46
  Neil Kleid: Right? Even if it's… even if it's like, you're an asshole, or I hated it.
• 1:47:51
  Alex Cormack: Yes, yeah.
• 1:47:51
  Neil Kleid: Right.
• 1:47:52
  Alex Cormack: Yeah.
• 1:47:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, I have to share the quick autistic rabbit hole I went down when you told your Darwin Cook story, because I had to make certain that there was no idea stealing.
• 1:48:07
  Tad Eggleston: And… and… and Beto started Julio's day in 2001, so he started before you, and it was… it was… it was…
• 1:48:16
  Tad Eggleston: pages rather than single panels, so it was also a little bit different. And he didn't work with Darwin until, like, 2013, so it's less likely that Darwin would have told him, because I'm pretty certain Beto told me that he and Darwin met for that project.
• 1:48:32
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, as soon as you described 90 campus, I thought of Julius. You know, it's a much different book. Oh, yeah, I'm certain. But… but… but when he said that he was into the concept, I'm just…
• 1:48:44
  Neil Kleid: I immediately threw the two together.
• 1:48:45
  Tad Eggleston: together, like… But, but again, Things don't line up, it's just the synchronicity of, you show Darwin.
• 1:48:55
  Tad Eggleston: Beto wrote a similar concept, Darwin.
• 1:49:02
  Tad Eggleston: One of his last works was drawing for Beto.
• 1:49:06
  Neil Kleid: Fair. I, I…
• 1:49:07
  Tad Eggleston: Just, again, autistic brain connection.
• 1:49:10
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, I think that's just idea space. I think that's.
• 1:49:12
  Tad Eggleston: It absolutely is. It absolutely is. And I would have thought it was idea space, even if the dates lined up in a way that wasn't as clear that it was idea space. I just wasn't going to share it if the dates lined up in a way that wasn't as clear that it was idea space. I don't want to accuse another
• 1:49:32
  Tad Eggleston: semi-regular on 22 panels of having stolen your story, Neil.
• 1:49:37
  Neil Kleid: Well…
• 1:49:37
  Tad Eggleston: She got up.
• 1:49:38
  Neil Kleid: I think his story came out before mine.
• 1:49:41
  Tad Eggleston: It started before yours. It started before yours, it ended after yours, because that's just the way it works in Love & Rockets sometimes. And it was originally published in the main magazine.
• 1:49:50
  Neil Kleid: Right, so I'll tell you why I definitely know I didn't steal his, because… I don't think I knew who he was.
• 1:49:58
  Neil Kleid: Before I did 90 candles.
• 1:49:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:50:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I wasn't accusing you of stealing either.
• 1:50:03
  Neil Kleid: No, no, I'm kidding.
• 1:50:04
  Tad Eggleston: Again, you were talking panels.
• 1:50:05
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:50:06
  Tad Eggleston: I'm always fascinated by craft-type stuff. Ray Fox has done a couple of… Books were, like.
• 1:50:15
  Tad Eggleston: and I haven't finished reading it, but there's one where every page is a 9-panel page, and each panel is a different story.
• 1:50:23
  Neil Kleid: Oh, that's funny. That's funny.
• 1:50:24
  Alex Cormack: Ugh.
• 1:50:24
  Tad Eggleston: panels go… and you go through people's lives, so, like, some of them end earlier than others, that sort of thing.
• 1:50:34
  Neil Kleid: Speaking of… Speaking of things that we love…
• 1:50:37
  Tad Eggleston: craft.
• 1:50:38
  Neil Kleid: Speaking of things that we love in craft, I don't… maybe, maybe because I know we gotta wrap up soon, this was actually a book that, if folks haven't been reading it, is, like, out now, and it's great, is…
• 1:50:49
  Neil Kleid: because I was… I just read the first volume this weekend, and the… the panel work, like, the choreography is just, like, it's amazing. Have you read Assorted Crisis Events?
• 1:50:59
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to guess, Assorted Crisis Events? It's so good.
• 1:51:04
  Neil Kleid: Brilliant!
• 1:51:06
  Neil Kleid: I will say, if you love Assorted Crisis Events, you should also be reading.
• 1:51:11
  Tad Eggleston: Dennis' other major book right now, Absolute Martian Manhunter. He's doing similar, crazy stuff with that book. Both of them are just pushing the boundaries of comics in all sorts of weird and wonderful ways.
• 1:51:25
  Tad Eggleston: I know it's, it's, what, Eric Zawadzky on Assorted Crisis?
• 1:51:32
  Neil Kleid: Yeah.
• 1:51:32
  Tad Eggleston: events. Somehow, there are two of them.
• 1:51:35
  Tad Eggleston: on Blue Sky. I didn't think that that was such a popular name, but I once tagged the wrong one. And they're both artists of, like, some level.
• 1:51:47
  Neil Kleid: It's, it's hearth one, Eric, and Hearth 2, Eric.
• 1:51:51
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, the, Absolute Market.
• 1:51:53
  Neil Kleid: If you read the book, you'd get that joke, Alex.
• 1:51:56
  Alex Cormack: I haven't seen it. I'll pick it up, though.
• 1:52:01
  Tad Eggleston: Absolute Martian Mantunter is… is doing the art on that.
• 1:52:06
  Tad Eggleston: Javier Rodriguez is killing it on the art on that.
• 1:52:10
  Tad Eggleston: But, but yeah, no. Dennis Camp is just… Dennis Camp.
• 1:52:18
  Tad Eggleston: was the answer that Ram V.
• 1:52:21
  Tad Eggleston: gave to this question the first time he was on, before Dennis had done anything that anybody had heard of.
• 1:52:29
  Tad Eggleston: And I went and tracked him down, and went, oh my god, this is good. And I managed to have Dennis on, and I haven't managed to get him to come back on since then, because he's been so busy.
• 1:52:39
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, Dennis Camp kind of blew up on the scene.
• 1:52:43
  Tad Eggleston: in the last 3 years, and went from that guy that, like, RamV and a handful of other people knew of the existence of.
• 1:52:51
  Tad Eggleston: to, like, people are debating what the best comic on the shelves is right now, Assorted Crisis Events or Absolute Martian Manhunter, and he's got another one coming out in the Vertigo line from the same guy that he did 20th…
• 1:53:05
  Tad Eggleston: Century Man With.
• 1:53:07
  Tad Eggleston: That just looks… outstanding.
• 1:53:12
  Neil Kleid: I mean, look, a lot of it… and also, he's doing Ultimates. Ultimates is also very good.
• 1:53:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:53:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:53:18
  Neil Kleid: But yes, craft-wise, I… that's the one thing that I… I just read it, like, 2 days ago. It was really good.
• 1:53:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Alex, if you haven't read this, you will love it. The art…
• 1:53:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they really, really mess around… I mean, both of these books really, really mess around with what you can do with the medium. There's actually a page of Absolute Manhunt… Martian Manhunter, where you're supposed to hold it up to the light to be able to read it properly.
• 1:53:44
  Alex Cormack: Really? Alright.
• 1:53:46
  Tad Eggleston: Takes the stuff on the other side.
• 1:53:50
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, my Yeah, no, just these, these are, are…
• 1:53:57
  Tad Eggleston: Way beyond what you normally see in…
• 1:54:04
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like most of the really experimental craft-type books.
• 1:54:10
  Tad Eggleston: Happen in graphic novels or in indie comics where they come out
• 1:54:16
  Tad Eggleston: quarterly, twice a year, as often as they get done. Like, to see this level of screwing around with the form in a monthly comic.
• 1:54:28
  Tad Eggleston: I don't feel like happens as much.
• 1:54:30
  Neil Kleid: Yeah, but how many of those comics have some dude getting his head in a swirly in a toilet?
• 1:54:35
  Neil Kleid: Well… Just medieval.
• 1:54:38
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't… I wasn't saying that you have to mess with the form to be a great comic.
• 1:54:44
  Tad Eggleston: Those are different things, Neil! There are even some comics that really mess with the form.
• 1:54:52
  Alex Cormack: But don't…
• 1:54:52
  Tad Eggleston: land.
• 1:54:54
  Tad Eggleston: You know, just messing with the form does not make a good comic.
• 1:54:58
  Neil Kleid: I'll cover it.
• 1:54:59
  Neil Kleid: I'm just saying.
• 1:55:01
  Alex Cormack: But yes, the, the…
• 1:55:03
  Tad Eggleston: a swirly, and…
• 1:55:05
  Neil Kleid: There's a lot more… a lot more…
• 1:55:06
  Tad Eggleston: Worley, in medieval times.
• 1:55:09
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely. Because he brought plumbing with him, because that was one of the things that he knew. Spoiler alert!
• 1:55:17
  Neil Kleid: Not only… not only did he invent the swirly, but he had to build… he had to invent.
• 1:55:23
  Tad Eggleston: He invented the toilet, so that.
• 1:55:25
  Neil Kleid: You can invent the swirl, exactly. That's right.
• 1:55:27
  Alex Cormack: That's our, that's our boy.
• 1:55:29
  Tad Eggleston: That, my friend, that is commitment. If you guys haven't read it, Ryan North wrote a book called How to Invent Everything, The Stranded Time Traveler's Guide to…
• 1:55:41
  Tad Eggleston: Something.
• 1:55:43
  Tad Eggleston: That, that was essentially, like…
• 1:55:47
  Tad Eggleston: It, it, it was… it was, it was, set up that…
• 1:55:53
  Tad Eggleston: It was, like, the renter's manual.
• 1:55:56
  Tad Eggleston: In a rental time machine from sometime in the future.
• 1:56:01
  Tad Eggleston: That, Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler.
• 1:56:07
  Tad Eggleston: is what it is. So it, like, takes you through…
• 1:56:11
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, if you get stranded in this time, here's how you can…
• 1:56:17
  Tad Eggleston: Use what's at hand to invent fire, or glass, or whatever will be necessary to immediately take over the world at whatever time.
• 1:56:26
  Neil Kleid: Maybe if I'd had that book, my book… our book would be a little better.
• 1:56:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you know, for Volume 2.
• 1:56:32
  Alex Cormack: Resource book. There you go.
• 1:56:36
  Tad Eggleston: You know, its companion piece is essentially how to become a supervillain.
• 1:56:40
  Alex Cormack: How to take over the world.
• 1:56:43
  Tad Eggleston: There you go. The… the…
• 1:56:46
  Tad Eggleston: Practical schemes and scientific solutions for the aspiring supervillain. This is what Ryan North does when he's not writing hilarious comics.
• 1:56:54
  Neil Kleid: Right.
• 1:56:58
  Neil Kleid: Guys, it has been a blast. Alex, I know you know you're welcome back. Neil, you're also welcome back. The next guaranteed baseball roundtable will be next November, though…
• 1:57:10
  Tad Eggleston: enough people are enjoying it that maybe we'll start doing a spring training one, I don't know. I just… because… because we have baseball people involved, and hopefully one day we'll have more baseball people involved, but I feel like the baseball people are kind of…
• 1:57:25
  Tad Eggleston: Protective of their territory?
• 1:57:31
  Neil Kleid: It's all good.
• 1:57:32
  Alex Cormack: But, yeah.
• 1:57:33
  Tad Eggleston: We gotta find the times that, like… They're not working.
• 1:57:38
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:57:39
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah.
• 1:57:40
  Neil Kleid: I know, this was fun. Thanks for having me.
• 1:57:42
  Alex Cormack: Yeah, thanks so much for that.
• 1:57:43
  Tad Eggleston: You're welcome back anytime. I can't wait to see how this turns out. yeah, just fantastic work.
• 1:57:51
  Tad Eggleston: I love it anytime I get to see a baseball bat. I even… I even loved it when I saw the baseball bat wrapped in…
• 1:57:58
  Tad Eggleston: in… in,
• 1:58:00
  Tad Eggleston: barbed wire, but it wasn't as cool, because there wasn't any, like, scene where he was actually hitting a ball with it, whereas I feel like we'll get to see…
• 1:58:09
  Tad Eggleston: The boss hit a… hit a ball at some point, and…
• 1:58:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's what paths are really for.
• 1:58:15
  Alex Cormack: You'll see, you'll see.
• 1:58:17
  Tad Eggleston: Bonus points if he… if he… if he invents the knuckleball.
• 1:58:22
  Tad Eggleston: Just throwing that out there.
• 1:58:24
  Tad Eggleston: Throwing all that out there.
• 1:58:26
  Tad Eggleston: I'll give you art records.
• 1:58:27
  Neil Kleid: A knuckle something. A knuckle something.
• 1:58:29
  Tad Eggleston: I can give you art reference, Alex. There's a great volume of Ace of the Diamond that, like, almost the entire volume, so, like, 10 chapters, was, like, all one game against knuckleball pitcher, so it's just, like…
• 1:58:44
  Alex Cormack: Oh, nice. All sorts of…
• 1:58:45
  Tad Eggleston: Dancing… dancing baseballs, and…
• 1:58:48
  Alex Cormack: So…
• 1:58:49
  Tad Eggleston: For Neil Clyde and Alex Cormack, this has been 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.