Latest / Graymalkin Lane the podcast / Sabretooth: the Mary Shelley Overdrive! With Dan Jolley and Matt Parent!

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Sabretooth: the Mary Shelley Overdrive! With Dan Jolley and Matt Parent! · Graymalkin Lane the podcast

• 0:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Graimalkin Lane podcast, where queer friends and allies gather to review and discuss the original X-Men comics in continuity order.
• 0:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: September and Graimalkin Lane is going to be all around the character Sebertooth in theme.
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Over on the Patreon channel we have all kinds of savage, tiger characters we're exploring, it's a ton of fun, and here on the main show we get to celebrate this awful, awful villain of, but boy do we love to see him every time he shows up on the page.
• 0:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll be wrapping up the month with our giant academic panel around Victor Creed, what a joy it's been to research.
• 0:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then I'm going to be at the uncanny experience in September at the end of the month.
• 0:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: So make sure to come talk to me all about your favorite Saber Tooth stories, live and in person.
• 0:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thrilled to be joined by my dear friend Matt Parent and beating for the first time.
• 0:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan Jolly, a writer I've been following for a long time.
• 0:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Matt, let me have you take the reins for just a minute.
• 0:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love coming on Grey Mocking Lane and it's great.
• 0:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You did a whole month for me because they were two because my favorite character and you did even something cooler for me as a huge like 90s kid and a big fan of Sonic the Hedgehog by having Dan Jolly on the writer of the Sonic the Hedgehog presents the chaotic case files, a eight episode podcast that is like, truly so, so good, so well, edited and audio designs great, so funny.
• 1:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not about, so I will say, it's not about Sonic, it's about vector, the, uh, and, and, and Charmy B and all these like side characters to Sonic, but so Dan, I have a question for you as we began your comics writer, what is the unique challenge of sort of writing a character who's been in comics for a long time in audio as opposed to in like the pages of a comic.
• 1:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really, uh, it's just, you have to explain things a little bit more elaborately than you would ordinarily.
• 1:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you're writing a comic or a screenplay or something like that.
• 1:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, you have the stage direction, the action sonic bursts through the door and says vector hi what do you know, whatever.
• 2:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And for audio, you have to explain a little a little further exactly what's going on.
• 2:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: You have.
• 2:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can have the the sound of vector relaxing in his squeaky office chair and propping his feet up, but then you have to you have to hear him or someone else say something that cues the listener in to the fact that that they're in the office and that he's kicking back and relaxing or thinking or whatever and also you really have to have everybody call each other by their names.
• 2:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: all the time and that that was one of the the biggest obstacles for me to overcome in my own like mental preparation for it because I hate it when characters call each other by their names.
• 2:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's all because a little Shakespearean because they're all saying the thing that like to you know well it's just it's unnatural like like we've we've been sort of in year into it a network television does it all the time.
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why Dan?
• 2:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why Dan Jolly?
• 2:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why Dan Jolly?
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Does it feel unnatural
• 3:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me expound on that.
• 3:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, you can watch an episode of supernatural or suits or whatever.
• 3:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it's like they call each other by the name with every single sentence.
• 3:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: And just nobody in the real world ever ever does that.
• 3:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: But in an audio, in a podcast, turns out you have to because you just don't want to have any confusion as to which character is doing what are saying what.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: So like it was the line to walk to try to make that sound natural and not pull you out of the story, but at the same time anchor the listeners to exactly what's happening.
• 3:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: I feel like your answer to it is very funny in that like vector and charming are both good at their job, but they're also both kind of doifices in different ways.
• 3:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it makes a little bit of sense that they sometimes are saying people seems or describing the thing that's happening in the scene for the audience, rather than great.
• 3:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a really you should listen to this podcast.
• 3:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's very great.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is legit the first time I think I have ever examined this as an adult male, but there was for sure a couple of years in junior high school in the mid-90s where I was playing Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis for hours and hours at a time.
• 4:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking of that move where you like push down and he gets like all revved up and then like
• 4:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's out right and I remember never wanting to let like a single villain get by me because every villain had a little animal trapped inside it and when you killed the villain like the little squirrel or bunny or bird or whatever would get to fly away and I was like, oh my little gay heart was I don't have to be helping all these animals.
• 4:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, hey, everybody.
• 4:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan Jolly is here.
• 4:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan, I would love it for you to introduce yourself to our listeners a little bit where might they know you from and we can talk about sonic for the first half hour.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd be happy.
• 4:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hi everyone.
• 4:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm in keeping with the theme of the show.
• 4:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: I am an ally very staunchly so I've been kicking around the professional writing world for better than 30 years now.
• 4:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I started out when I was 19.
• 4:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got my first comic book contract.
• 5:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm still in college.
• 5:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Eventually wound up paying for a couple of quarters worth of tuition with the proceeds from some aliens stories for Dark Wars.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I went from there branched out into licensed property novels and then original novels in about 2007, I got into writing for video games and have done that on and off since then and have had a couple of sort of brushes with Hollywood, I guess, I sold a pilot to Nickelodeon that kind of like Uma Thurman and Pope fiction that never got made, it was just like the script exists out
• 5:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I worked on there's a this weird little interactive TV show on to be called DC Heroes United and I served as lead writer on that for as a senior writer and then lead writer and so my contract ended on that course at the production continued after I left and what made it on screen is basically nothing like what anything that I had contributed to but my name is on there it's a credit.
• 6:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I'm like a writer at large, I guess.
• 6:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: I grew up reading the X-Men.
• 6:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't remember your first comic book, your first X-Men book.
• 6:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, wow.
• 6:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember the first, the specifically the first X-Men issue.
• 6:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: But I've got what era of the books are we talking.
• 6:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: the brood saga.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 6:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was that was my introduction.
• 6:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then I tried to dive into it and you know learn all that I could and I eventually broke up with comic books more or less at least with mainstream comic books.
• 6:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really thought that I had arrived around 2004 2004 2005 because at the time I was writing the ongoing Voltron series for Devil's do and then I got the ongoing Micronaut series.
• 6:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at the same time, a DC came and asked me to reboot firestorm for them and they also bought an original like a creator I say creator owned they more or less under at the time a series called Bloodhound.
• 7:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I was doing four different mainstream comic book series at the same time.
• 7:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that went really well for about a year.
• 7:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then they did it all the way within a month.
• 7:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: I got, I don't remember if the series got canceled, or if I just got booted off of Voltron and Micron, I think Micron got canceled.
• 7:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember exactly.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Bloodhound got canceled.
• 7:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then they decided that they wanted somebody else to take over for Firestorm.
• 7:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I just I would like exited stage left from from mainstream comics and my have been a little bit better about it.
• 7:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, that's when I started focusing on video games and novels, but I still do comics work here in there, there's a I did a kid's graphic novel last year called Mack Moon and the pets, which is about a kid who finds out his dog is cat and his fish or undercover alien cops anyway.
• 8:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: Back to the X-Men X-Men, we're like one of my foundational love of comics series.
• 8:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was the youngest of three siblings.
• 8:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: My older sister and brother were nine and 11 years older.
• 8:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: I had a huge amount of hero worship from my older brother.
• 8:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so he went off to college when I was like in second grade.
• 8:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he would bring home from from college.
• 8:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: These big Xerox paper boxes filled with comic books.
• 8:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: and just give them to me.
• 8:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he was not a collector.
• 8:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: These were not in pristine condition.
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: These were just loose issues thrown into a box.
• 8:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: So my first introduction to the X-Men was around the brood saga and Colossus and Nightcrawler were my two favorites by far couldn't get over how cool they were.
• 8:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've just kind of, I mean, okay, I can't say I've loved them ever since because they eventually the continuity since I had stopped reading around
• 8:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: the continuity got away from me and I don't there's a bunch that I don't know about.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm here to help sort it out any time buddy.
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: I keep it like the P.E.
• 8:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: is a floodmino.
• 9:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I we could talk about a number of the properties here, but I recently read your micronauts work for the first time.
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: I did a huge massive episode on the character a Throyer on my show.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: it was interesting to go look at the different interpretations of the character after Marvel lost the license for these characters.
• 9:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm assuming that kind of old 80s, like time travel space hero, like superhero, you know Saturday morning cartoon theme, that's a really fun genre to get your head into.
• 9:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Versus the horror stuff that we're going to focus on a little bit later today, but you're clearly a very diversified type of writer who puts a lot of heart into things and
• 9:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: That was a really good example of what sometimes what you have to do as a freelance writer, which is you get the opportunity to work on an IP that you don't know that much about.
• 9:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so what that requires then is a deep dive into research.
• 9:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, I didn't have to do as deep a deep dive into research because this has been a little while ago.
• 9:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, forgive me if I have some fuzzy details here and there.
• 9:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: as I recall what Devil's do was doing with Micronauts was based strictly on the toys and not only did not but could not acknowledge anything that Marvel ever did.
• 10:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now that was a huge advantage because the toys on their own had virtually no characterization built in.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and everybody can look these toys up on like YouTube.
• 10:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: But again, that accroyer episode I did.
• 10:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: We talk about the weird history of the toys.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a wild franchise kind of the only thing in Marvel that really compares is like wrong space night, which has become its own thing.
• 10:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, yeah, big fan of ROM as well.
• 10:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 10:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we got to kind of just invent stuff for the for the microphone.
• 10:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's like there wasn't as much history to be beholden to, but you know, I tried to As as much research as I could and as much like reading like fan forums and whatnot, I tried to keep things so that it would honor the spirit that had been established so far as far as anything had been established.
• 10:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh the book we're about to talk about today is uh a favorite to book and it's one of yours, but I so I'm in I'm curious how you feel about that character about like the probably grimist grimyest villain of the the X-Men.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well okay so that uh let's see I pitched that in I think 2000, 2000 and maybe early 2001 and it came out in 2002.
• 11:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is you know it's been a minute I think it was 2002.
• 11:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really wanted to get my hands on something in the X-Men IP.
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So let me ask you for one second, Dan.
• 11:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I want to set this up very briefly.
• 11:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Dan's writing a lot of different things in the late 90s.
• 11:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: He comes to Marvel and does the Doctor Strange Volume 3 series, which is fun, which features a very obscure mutant character named Dr. Jonathan White, who's like a magic power guy who would definitely make a cool villain in our books.
• 11:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then that demon underchild really if I can creepy as well.
• 11:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's early 2000s, it's the reality TV, MTV era of comics.
• 11:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Chuck Austin is on uncanny X-Men right around this time.
• 11:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: As Grant Morrison is writing their epic run on new X-Men, another book that's rounding out this line is the X-Static.
• 12:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: Violence is way up on the page.
• 12:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: We're seeing a lot more villain narratives, kind of take the stand.
• 12:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Sabertooth is wildly popular, not only from the movies, but has like the big bad version of Wolverine.
• 12:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the late 90s, we have that arc where he's like on the team in the collar, then they put him an X factor.
• 12:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a lot happening with the character quite popularly.
• 12:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Jorge Gonzalez also did the saber tooth and mistake series right around this time.
• 12:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Dan's coming in with a new saber tooth volume here that we're going to be talking about.
• 12:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's called saber tooth, the Mary Shelley overdrive.
• 12:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Dan, yeah, tell us how this book came to be if you would.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was, this was back in the stage of my career that was a lot, it was, it was off and on.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And sometimes it was a lot more off than it was on.
• 12:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I had not been handed any ongoing series yet.
• 12:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: The ones that I was talking about, I think spraying directly out of the work that I did on Sabritooth, or at least that they followed it pretty closely after.
• 12:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: But at the time, it was a lot of cold calling.
• 12:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was like, it was, I was calling editors and saying, hey, I would really like to work for you.
• 13:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: That took a lot of persistence
• 13:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because these editors are all busy, I'm some guy that they may or may not have ever heard of.
• 13:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'd had a few things published up to that point, but, you know, nothing, nothing that had set the world on fire.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was calling them and trying to convince them to give me a job.
• 13:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: In fact, I'll share something a little trick of the trade that we had back then.
• 13:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: The caller ID at DC, they didn't have their editor's phone system didn't have caller ID.
• 13:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The way to get an editor on the phone is to call, get a busy signal, hang up, dial back, call, get a busy signal, hang up, dial back.
• 13:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you do that for 20 or 30 minutes.
• 13:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like it's trying to win a like a radio show contest.
• 13:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, because you had to catch them when they weren't talking to somebody that they were already working with and I explained that to Ivan Cohen, my editor on Bloodhound, and he said he put it, wow, what a dirty, underhanded kind of ingenious idea.
• 14:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: is that that means that the the creation of the second fire storm is because you did cult calls.
• 14:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, no, no, that one will get to that after after Sabre II.
• 14:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: But but I don't remember exactly how I got in touch with Mark Powers, but I got on the phone with Mark Powers and I said, I can't because I was thinking I really want to be a part of the X-Men universe.
• 14:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: I said, are you doing anything with Sabre II?
• 14:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he said words
• 14:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: As I recall, maybe tell me more, I had been thinking about the character a lot and the way he was depicted when I was looking into the character when I was trying to research Victor Creed and get to know him as well as I could he was a bloodthirsty killer and that was basically the end of his characterization.
• 14:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: that he was like he was big and scary and he killed everyone and uh and I was like okay all right well that's that's fine but how does he have a place to live?
• 14:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: how is he gonna get his cable hooked up if he kills everyone that he comes in contact with?
• 14:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: because that was that was like the big emphasis of the character he's crazy he's blood thirsty he kills everyone and I'm like that's
• 15:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can't function in society if you kill everyone.
• 15:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Come on and, you know, that may have been reading a little bit too much into things and and trying to Warp the mythology into something that it was never meant to be, you know, I don't know that anybody ever cared about how Victor Creed ordered pizza.
• 15:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: But that was the the germ of the idea that I had was what if you had a guy who was huge and terrifying and enjoy killing people but had to function in modern American society and it seemed to me that that guy would be a hired killer because even if you kill everyone you come in contact with eventually you're going to need money, you know, probably that you don't get from just ripping someone's throat out and rifling through their pockets.
• 15:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I tried to explain the mark powers.
• 15:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: I wanted to establish this guy as the biggest scariest, higher killer in the world.
• 16:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the universal truth of how you make somebody that bad sympathetic is you put them against someone worse.
• 16:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So that's where the, the whole, the bad guys of the story come in, these, these Russian scientists that that that that that that that that engage at all the shenanigans that they engaged in.
• 16:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let's talk about fire.
• 16:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: You said it was not cold calls that allowed you to know fire storm, but no, I had worked with Peter to mossy before I did a it was an else world's project called JSA the Liberty file and that got that led into a sequel called JSA the Unholy 3, which actually got nominated for an Eisner.
• 16:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And those eventually got collected into one volume called the Liberty Files with an S on the end.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: After that, I worked with him on a short-lived and very ill-fated project called Lazarus 5.
• 16:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I still was, I was in the cold calling phase still there.
• 17:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I called Peter before I had a chance to say anything.
• 17:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: He said, what are you a mind reader?
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I said, excuse me, and he said, I had picked up the phone to call you.
• 17:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I wasn't, I don't even remember what I was going to pitch.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't Firestore.
• 17:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: But once he had me on the phone, he was like, hey, we've got this, we've got the situation.
• 17:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Firestore, the original incarnation of Firestore, the original version is basically dead in the water.
• 17:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: the existing fan base for Firestorm.
• 17:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: There aren't enough people to sustain a series.
• 17:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Come up with a new version.
• 17:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I knew that the main, like Firestorm was two characters classically.
• 17:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was high school football, Jock Ronnie Raymond, smart guy, professor Raymond Stein, that that merged.
• 17:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was like the, he used Firestorm, the nuclear man.
• 17:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so it was nuclear fusion.
• 17:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was the two characters fused fusing together.
• 17:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And Ronnie Raymond was the problem like he was like the Ronnie Raymond fan base is there's not big enough to do what we need it to do come up with a fresh approach fresh fresh fresh fresh fresh fresh a approach make sure that the approach that you have is fresh and Ronnie Raymond is a blonde here blue I quite guy and at the time every protagonist in everything was your standard white cis head dude and you know I'm looking around the world and I'm like doesn't all look like that.
• 18:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I said, don't only that, but it's all the sis head dudes telling the queer fans that firestorms not gay.
• 18:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's just two guys mashed up together.
• 18:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: this older teacher and his dear dummy hot friend that is his love assistance late at night in it then there's a big experiment it's come and then there's one totally different I never thought about that in that in that way but there's a way to be what thing to I'm I I will confess that I am a based garden variety bog standard middle-aged system like I myself
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's good that you're thinking, hey, other people exist.
• 19:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, so I'm like on the phone with Pete.
• 19:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I said, are you talking about an approach so fresh that it's like a different person?
• 19:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: And literally he goes, oh, let me call you back.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Click.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And like I imagine him scampering down the hall to Dan to Dio's office.
• 19:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And 10 minutes later, he calls me back and says, OK, yes, it's a different person.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Give us a different person.
• 19:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was waiting for this.
• 19:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, does the new person have to be a white guy.
• 19:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he goes, oh, let me call you back.
• 19:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And 10 minutes later, he calls me back and says, yes, the new firestorm is black.
• 19:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was going to suggest that the new firestorm be Hispanic.
• 19:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I would have had to do a lot.
• 19:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: My, I speak Spanish like a toddler.
• 19:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I would I had to do a whole lot of research to get the the language right.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: But, you know, the new firestorm being black was also fine with me.
• 19:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, I took my marching orders and went off and came up with Jason Rush.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then the internet wanted to flame me and drag me over burning coals because of that.
• 20:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Go see my first interview with Chuck Austin everyone for a reminder about the internet bloodshed of the early 2000s.
• 20:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: DC forums DC forums were completely unmoderated.
• 20:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was just it was trying to try and have a conversation in there.
• 20:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was like trying to have a business meeting and a Chuck E. Cheese sure
• 20:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: the Chuck Austin made night crawlers father like a demonic mutant guy and it was like getting death threats in the mail as a result like we we there's it's crazy times um so this is an amazing time to be an X-Men fan the uh reading this series uh saber tooth the Mary Shelley overdrive the art is beautiful it's very very lovely so we have Greg Scott who
• 20:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm not super familiar with if I'm honest, takes time to enjoy these panel layouts, the savagery, but where I think Greg's real power shines isn't his background.
• 20:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everything is so extraordinarily detailed.
• 20:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He works really hard to create environment.
• 21:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's really, really, beautifully done.
• 21:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: We've got a JD Meteor who is on colors here, also just amazing.
• 21:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: The color is so deeply saber-toothed.
• 21:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's very like mahogany and black and red through the whole book.
• 21:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Randy Gentile is on letters Mark Power, of course, being the editor.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we get these gorgeous like movie poster covers by Tony Harris, that are all giving very vampire movie energy, but also kind of 80's buddy comedy energy to it in a way.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: They also they give like dirty paperback sort of cover like it and then I and I want to it's very like the jackreacher novels.
• 21:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Saber to sort of is in this story a jackreacher type in that he is huge will kill you can kill you anyway and not really interested in being roped into all of this it is it's kind of delightful.
• 21:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: So Dan, what do you talk about Saber Tooth?
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I'd love to hear why you titled this book, The Mary Shelley Overdrive.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's kind of a fancy title for us pedestrian, you know, college age readers in the earth.
• 22:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, real, that really is just because of the bad guys in it.
• 22:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: There's a line in there where Creed remarks that they have turned themselves into their own Frankenstein monsters, because I mean, I guess it's okay that we talk about the details of the story.
• 22:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the villains and this book everybody are a bunch of Russian operatives with some scientists who have kind of created their own super soldier serum in a way.
• 22:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: They've reanimated corpses and turned them into kind of a weapon XE guys that are super strong and kind of indestructible.
• 22:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: So think deadpool, but there's a lot of different kind of versions of this.
• 22:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: We specifically see the Luke Cage origin story reflected in the series where we talk about the experiments they ran in prison and people getting steel hard skin as a result.
• 22:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: But yeah, then go back to the title.
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I have a hard time with titles, sometimes a lot of the time either of the perfect one just presents itself or I agonize over it for days or weeks or whatever.
• 22:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was afraid that Mary Shelley overdrive might be a little highfalutin, you know, a little, oh, look at Dan, he was an English major.
• 23:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And but the only other one that presented itself to me was meat grinder.
• 23:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was at the time I was collaborating with an author, a guy named Scott Sianson.
• 23:13
  [SPEAKER_02]: I co-wrote a couple of novels, licensed property novels with him.
• 23:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I was talking over the project with him and I said, well, I have these two titles in mind here.
• 23:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: One is Mary Shelley overdrive and he said, oh, that's, that's really good.
• 23:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's really evocative.
• 23:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: What's the other one?
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I said, meat grinder and he said, yeah, that can be a lot of house like vibes.
• 23:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I would be expecting a different book.
• 23:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it a play on the Bachman turner overdrive?
• 23:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, yes, okay, I like them.
• 23:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just wanted to like make the rest of them.
• 23:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Just because this is the same number of syllables.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: You kind of rolls off the tongue like that.
• 23:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I was, and I was just kind of thinking like, okay, Mary Shelley, what can I, what can I pair with Mary, Mary Shelley, and that you hit the reference exactly there?
• 23:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you a, are you a, are you a Dracula fan?
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: ask you, oh god, let me delete that line out.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Are you a big friend?
• 24:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I certainly appreciate it.
• 24:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's not like my favorite work of literature.
• 24:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, I don't, I'm not like first in line to see Frankenstein movies, but you know, I definitely appreciate it for what it is.
• 24:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I've been giving a lot of thought to how it's saber-tooth is drawn and this is kind of where I want to open our conversation.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Saber-tooth can often be drawn as like a really menacing, I think X-Men the movie, right?
• 24:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like Tyler, what's, oh, I forgot the actor's name, Tyler Mane.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tyler Mane.
• 24:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Tyler Mane just massive nine foot human, you know, 400 pounds.
• 24:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Giving almost like Bane or strong eye energy with like huge upper body.
• 24:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a few things you characteristically see.
• 24:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the fangs.
• 24:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's often white or yellow eyes, but there's sometimes drawn with pupils.
• 24:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's the the peaked kind of yellow hair that's kind of an odd parallel of Wolverines.
• 24:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get the sharp claws, the massive body.
• 24:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Often there's the first stole around the neck, the stripes that kind of patterned the back of the costume.
• 24:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's named after a Saber II tiger, obviously.
• 25:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Often he's drawn though more sleek and kind of small and tiger-like.
• 25:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: You get kind of a more menacing.
• 25:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's almost more like he's Wolvesmaner wild child size in some of his appearances where he just gets on kind of a more like predator in the shadows kind of energy.
• 25:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one is Victor Creed as he was drawn in the early 2000s through the weapon X series.
• 25:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: becomes like pointed ears, really sharp fangs.
• 25:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's no pupils in his eyes.
• 25:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's giving almost no spheratu a little bit, but we don't ever see him in costume in this series.
• 25:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's always in different versions of plain clothes, almost like he's like mission impossible kind of agent throughout this.
• 25:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan, do you want to talk about working with your art team here?
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This book is beautiful.
• 25:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And where their special directives on how Saber Truth was drawn or portrayed as the lead character.
• 25:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I did want him to look more like someone who could pass for human, who could in theory get a burger at a drive through and not send everyone screaming at the exits.
• 25:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, uh, he's got the thing.
• 25:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: He's not, he's not the thing.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: No.
• 26:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, so yeah, like that's that's why he's in playing clothes.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's why his hair is a little bit less fanciful than it is often drawn.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, just the whole thing, like I was hoping that Marvel would look at this interpretation and think, oh, this is really cool.
• 26:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we should explore this.
• 26:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Maybe we should give Dan his own Saber Tooth series.
• 26:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's what I was hoping for.
• 26:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Instead, Marvel has done an excellent job of pretending this never existed.
• 26:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is like Team X Saber Tooth.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like if you remember Team X back when he was with Logan and Maverick,
• 26:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Were you a familiar with the art team before the book?
• 26:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: No, no, this is Pete Tomocie sent me several different artists to pick from.
• 26:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: And at the time, I was part of Jolly Rogers Studio, which was Tony Harris, JD Mettler, the colorist on this.
• 26:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: race nighter drew Johnson and Jim Royale and Andrew Robinson and Tom Feester and I was like the one writer I was like the token writer which which meant I got to keep up with the bills of the for the studio for the lights and whatnot because I was used to joke that I was the least disorganized member of the creative guy there in the studio full of artists.
• 27:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So like I showed all the rest of the guys the art and it was like I won't all of your input on this the covers are good but the pencils and the colors are top notch the letters are actually really excellent in this book well it it really comes across very very beautifully very action movie forward.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: Matt's going to be joining me for the saber to the academic panel at the end of the month.
• 27:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: We have a lot of conversations.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Matt, there's a lot of types of saber to stories.
• 27:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I know you're a huge fan of this character.
• 27:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: What do you think of him in the role of kind of the leading man, secret agent guy?
• 27:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: The saber to his mind.
• 27:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: favorite X-Men character because he's so important to them functionally to have a bad guy who doesn't change.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really loved this as the, this is just imprivately.
• 27:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like Logan's not here.
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no X-Men here.
• 27:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just, this is what happens when SaberTube is alone.
• 27:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I love that there's this humanness to him that it's still eerie and gross and he's still a monster, but there's, there's this,
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like he has some affection for her and that she has some affection for him.
• 28:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's a really, it's such an interesting thing to see.
• 28:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Kim, I thought I was going to, I've read this one other time as a kid.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: I collected this.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I remember being like so amazed by the art and how gruby gruesome it was, which is what I wanted as a 13 year old anyway, right?
• 28:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as an adult, I was like, oh, is the saber tooth the hero book going to be any fun for me as someone who likes him as like archivalen of the X men this this rules like you are not not to not to like to your horn too much, but like you are right that Marvel needs to unbury this it's it's not available on Marvel and limited and absolutely should be this is a I think foundational text.
• 28:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: One thing that I will Preface this part with I couldn't find issue two like I went back and dug out my copies and I had one three and four and then I went and you're right It's not available digitally and I went on Amazon and available on Amazon were one three and four.
• 29:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think I remember what happened in issue two.
• 29:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have a summary for you, but I am still in the PDF.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 29:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we open on a New York apartment in an building where Saber Tooth lives and the details that go into the backgrounds of every apartment from like panel one is just amazing I'm so impressed with the pencils.
• 29:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll stop saying that but I really love to them in this He's as agreed here's some violence on another
• 29:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: floor and it took me a moment to realize like oh he just woke up and this is happening around him.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: I thought at first he was like on an assignment in this building but like I think this is just where he lives and this was happening.
• 29:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Is that correct in?
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think so.
• 29:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 29:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So there's a woman that lives there and there are some mercenaries who are there to apprehend her and these are these like Russian kind of super-powered zombie guys.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're they're they're sentient.
• 29:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: They're not zombies but they're kind of indestructible and like brought back from the dead.
• 30:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of them's an old man who
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: each other.
• 30:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: I create battles, some guards, there are epic fight scenes, and yet I've been practicing, I'm an aspiring superhero comic book writer myself.
• 30:12
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've been practicing a lot with like fight choreography and the ways to write action scenes in comics versus cartoons versus films, that kind of thing.
• 30:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: The scripted violence in this entire series is quite excellent, a saber tooth again kind of mission impossible style, fighting people with claws and guns, there's a lot of really epic scenes and they fight him pretty hard and these guys are very quickly anti-mute and we very soon see the slurs, you know, filthy mutant being tossed around.
• 30:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a blonde woman up on the roof who's under attack, she doesn't understand why.
• 30:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's both my least and most favorite part of this series.
• 30:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'll talk a little bit about her as we move forward, but she's
• 30:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Let me break in for just a second because I do have issue one here and I had to remind myself That's not where that's not where Creed lives.
• 30:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was in that building too kill someone else Oh, he was there autosignment and then this happened.
• 31:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, what I needed to understand So he just finished the job and then noticed something weird happening
• 31:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you very much for the correction.
• 31:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, so we opened on him.
• 31:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know if he had walked in on that body or if he had killed the person himself.
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I appreciate you clarifying that opening sequence.
• 31:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: A Creed grabs the girl, jumps off the roof.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: They have a tracker on her that they're unaware of.
• 31:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: They get back to his safe house and he demands answers, he threatens to kill her.
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she has so turned on by this man.
• 31:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: She just like rips her shirt off and kisses him on the mouth.
• 31:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: And this character is so rapidly like a virginal and it's just it's a ridiculous early 2000s like the action heroes girl friend she's played by like Jennifer Aniston and has nothing to do in the movie this is like the the wife of the boxer
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So she's, I disagree so much then.
• 31:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's kissing this man.
• 31:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: He shreds her pants off like with his claws.
• 31:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the next morning she's like, oh, I'm a virgin and I was the prom queen and I used to be a babysitter and I'm so innocent and I don't know what happened but I think we're in love.
• 32:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: Our feelings are real, right?
• 32:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh my God, is this what a straight man wants?
• 32:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: You have to let me cut in here.
• 32:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: She is crazier than him, and that's what makes her so compelling.
• 32:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: She sees him and she watches him just slaughter these guys.
• 32:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: She's held in his hands as he jumps across a building.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
• 32:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's hot.
• 32:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something very hot and funny that he is like all business because that's his mode and she is into it and he can't help himself.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love it.
• 32:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a lot.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, so the towel and gets kidnapped in a towel like that's her next
• 32:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: there were a few lapses in communication between Greg and me.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: There were a few things that did not come out in the comic exactly the way I had envisioned them exactly the way I wanted them to.
• 32:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is no shade on Greg.
• 32:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Greg is super talented.
• 32:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'll take it on the chin.
• 33:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: I had not yet learned how to communicate with an artist as well as I should have.
• 33:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm a whole lot more on Matt's side here about Bonnie, because the way I wanted her portrayed was a whole lot closer to Rosanna, our kids character in pulp fiction.
• 33:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
• 33:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, when John Travolta is about to plunge that massive needle into Mathurman's chest and Rosanna, our kid is like watching why I'd practically panting.
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: She's so enthralled and excited about this.
• 33:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's how I wanted Bonnie to be reacting to the presence of Victor Creed.
• 33:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was like this force of nature that she had never encountered before.
• 33:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, she was a little bit unhinged or so.
• 33:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: There were a lot of women being written in comics and movies at this time that just have this kind of characterization.
• 33:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: For those that are following my time travel feature with Kevin over on the Patreon, we just finished watching the film series Transwers.
• 34:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a guy named Jack Death who's like a cable to play.
• 34:05
  [SPEAKER_01]: who comes back to the present from the future and Helen Hunt in one of her movie debuts is like a woman working for Santa as an elf and she's like oh look at this hot action star like just kind of gets wiped like well-ducked up in his world.
• 34:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: This character is coming across very that way in a way that I find charming as well.
• 34:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's funny because he's never been given the opportunity to be a hero like one time and the very first interaction with this woman is you have only heroically saved me like it and Victor goes, okay, maybe I'll do it.
• 34:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Let's just try let's see what happened.
• 34:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Now, Victor also just killed Bertie in this, you'd like to see as a series, this man is also a rapist, like, slubmon horrible, like, just terrible person.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: So the men break into the house that they shoot him with tranquilizers and then like machine guns basically, just a hundred times and leave him dead.
• 34:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is where we close on issue one, but in issue two, he heals a lot faster than they expected.
• 35:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's another glorious battle.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: It is gunfire, destroyed property, slashed throats, and one guy getting tired.
• 35:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: asked out a high story window to his death.
• 35:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: But he is in a towel and creed grabs her, steals a cab, grabs a grenade, throws it as he is exploding, they run for it.
• 35:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we learned that these are super powered Russians working for an evil scientist kind of military general guy named Kalishnikov, like the gun.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's a doctor at an infectious diseases research center working with another doctor named Dr. Philip Krans who has powered himself up as well
• 35:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, dad, I'd love to hear your thoughts on the white choreography here, and the collision-a-cov-serial team-up.
• 35:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, that's an issue too, and that's the one that I remember when I was just...
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so, I'm glad that you appreciate the white choreography, because that's one thing that I really wanted to get better at, to get good at, I thought that I was already kind of okay with it, but I wanted to get better at it.
• 36:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, I wound up enrolling in a bunch of martial arts classes.
• 36:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: to try to learn to write better fight scenes.
• 36:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, over the course of several years, I took classes in Ikido and Hopkido and Taekwondo and Kung Fu and a little bit of Kung Do.
• 36:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: Now, this is not to say that I am any kind of martial artist, because I am not.
• 36:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have zero aptitude,
• 36:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: for any of it, but when you're there taking classes, even if you can't perform all of the techniques, you begin to understand what they're supposed to do.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You see them demonstrated, you talk to the guys who are multiple degree black belts, you know, they tell you stories about stuff, and you can begin to absorb things, which is why when I was writing Bloodhound, I turned it a script at one point in Ivan Cohen called me up and said, why do you hate arms?
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why does 11 sure you're main character why does he break everyone's arm all the time and I said well my instructor told us that it was the the concept it was destroy the weapons if you break someone's arm they can't hit you with it so so I tried to apply that to the fights with saber tooth.
• 37:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was really fortunate that JD Mettler was there in the studio.
• 37:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: And fun fact on the covers Sabretooth here, this guy, that's JD.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, sure.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 37:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's JD Mettler Tony used phono reference for almost everything.
• 37:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think the only project, one of my best best friends is artists Phil Cv who is always taking polar rights of people in positions.
• 37:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, open your mouth, pull your hair back this way.
• 37:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, let me take it from this angle.
• 37:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, it's such a great way to put in realism into your comics.
• 37:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, Tony has like cabinets and cabinets and cabinets filled with reference photos.
• 37:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think the only project he ever did was one that he did with me called Obergeist that he didn't use reference on anyway.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 37:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, so JD is a big good looking guy and had and he was like an illegitimate martial arts.
• 37:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: So the few times that I had like questions about or I wanted to have like a particular pose struck like I could JD and I could mimic that and then Tony could take a picture.
• 38:09
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh yeah, and the the evil Russian guy here on the cover, that's that's Tony.
• 38:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, okay, that's fun.
• 38:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: He uses it for a model for a ton of stuff.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: He was starman.
• 38:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: My favorite part of this series is the work you put into creating kind of an interior world for Victor Creed.
• 38:25
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I'm going to share the rest of my summary for two.
• 38:28
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then Matt, I want to hear you give comment on some of the things we learn about Victor Creed here and how this informs his character.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_01]: We learned that he likes to listen to Joe Cocker.
• 38:37
  [SPEAKER_01]: He drives them to a brothel where he spends a lot of time.
• 38:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: The brothel Matt has comments on Joe Cocker already.
• 38:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Let me pause.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: No, no, I'm sorry.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just, I realized what we're getting into.
• 38:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I apologize.
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, please.
• 38:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was talk that he likes.
• 38:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: He, will you need CNN at the brothel?
• 38:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing.
• 38:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's very fascinating.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: The TV is down at the brothel and Ruth, the owner, let's him know.
• 38:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: We got CNN back up for you.
• 38:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: He has like a space that he's been spending a lot of time in.
• 39:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got money.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is again a very kind of mercenary thing to do.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: When he's greeted like beggar rolls in bikinis, he orders some sirloins in his room.
• 39:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's like, what girls do you want?
• 39:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's like none, because he's got this hot blonde in a towel already with him later when he leaves.
• 39:15
  [SPEAKER_01]: And we presumably, he has had sex with, with body again.
• 39:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ruth tells Bonnie a little bit more about Victor Creed.
• 39:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: He likes money, Python, hates Brad Pitt.
• 39:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: And a couple of times, I've caught him reading John Sandford novels.
• 39:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Over time, he told me he used to think about trying to make a living, building custom furniture, but I couldn't tell if he was serious or not.
• 39:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: I could tell you what he likes in bed, but I'm sure you already know.
• 39:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: The past that girl, I don't know a damn thing about him, except that he can be his mean and heartless as the devil himself.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: And if someone had come in here this afternoon and told me, Creed would show up tonight and ask me to protect someone.
• 39:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd have called that person a liar to his face.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love this rich depth characterization, that it's my favorite thing.
• 39:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's so good.
• 39:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, again, Victor Creep is my very favorite X-Men character.
• 40:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's such a funny thing that Ruth knows Victor Creep we know.
• 40:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, Ruth knows the horrible monster.
• 40:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Still kind of likes him because he's been safe with her in this instance in this space.
• 40:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But, totally knows.
• 40:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we find Victor in this story very chain.
• 40:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think I think we didn't say in the first issue.
• 40:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: When they do fuck the first time, we pan out and we see three, it's very, very amazing.
• 40:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Three panels of the moon just shifting, like about a couple of hours pass.
• 40:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Look, they fucked up.
• 40:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, they fucked up.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They fucked up.
• 40:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: They fucked up for a long period of time.
• 40:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: I really love that.
• 40:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then in that instance, this is a different Victor Creed, at least through this issue.
• 40:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, pun intended,
• 40:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: That, that, that, that, that free panel sequence there.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, we originally had, uh, a little bit.
• 40:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: We, it wasn't like graphic, but you did get to see a little bit more like of the frolicking than, uh, than we, that we ultimately got to Greg turned in the pages and Joe Kasada came back and said, no.
• 41:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: No.
• 41:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: We'll have none of that.
• 41:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: What are you doing?
• 41:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's PG+.
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right?
• 41:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the thing on the cover.
• 41:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: What was that?
• 41:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm actually very sorry.
• 41:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, it wasn't, it wasn't to begin with.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: It wasn't supposed to be.
• 41:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: This was supposed to be no holds barred.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was supposed to be like, what was it Marvel?
• 41:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Max series.
• 41:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: I think this was Spain.
• 41:24
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is the same era where fellow sonic writer Carl Ballers was instructed to write an age at an all age friendly version of Emma Frost as kid and then they released the series that was all ages with like pornographic like playboy covers of Emma on the front also teen plus right like this is the same era right here.
• 41:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, when it was pitched and the series that I agreed to do, it was that Marvel said, let's do no holds barred, our rated just balls to the wall, not not seeing Bonnie actually in her underwear crawling toward Crete on a bed that had to go.
• 42:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: But then then we found out and like this this is one of the foundational scenes in my head This is one of the the defining bits of the whole story.
• 42:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was when one of the bad guys was escaping in a helicopter and Creed froze himself onto the blades and what we saw was supposed to be the wind screen Coded in blood like that was not only were the blood screwed up at the guy inside couldn't see anything because it was cut like
• 42:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: We're solid red with blood.
• 42:28
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember if it was Joe Cassana or it might have been Bill Gemis at the time was involved.
• 42:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: One of the big chirops called us up and said, hey, you know that Saber tooth series that you're writing.
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: You can't show any red blood.
• 42:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's crazy.
• 42:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's none.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: None.
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not a list at the time writing NYX.
• 42:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: So, well, and this is also the era where they were like doing like Aunt May in that trouble book.
• 42:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: If you guys know what I'm talking about, we'll talk about that later.
• 42:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, wild times at Marvel.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Um, Matt, I need your pot take.
• 42:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Why does Victor Creed hate Brad Pitt?
• 42:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's a tall blonde on the talk guy.
• 43:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he's a tall blonde, blonde, hot guy.
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's just like a big dog kind of thing.
• 43:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I do I think it's not the movies that he makes.
• 43:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think in fact, I mean modern day Brad Pitt movies do seem like old like a little like in his wheelhouse right, but no, it's just it's just pure jealousy.
• 43:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we get a heavy metal soundtrack for a little while.
• 43:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Saber Tooth puts on like a black band, like bandana on his head and wears all black.
• 43:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's fighting soldiers, like indestructible soldiers.
• 43:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is amazing.
• 43:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's like long action sequences, where it's like one of those epic fight scenes.
• 43:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm thinking of like Daredevil, the Disney series, like that first episode where it's just that amazing, like long fights scene in the hallway.
• 43:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is epic fight choreography once again.
• 43:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: There's a bunch of fights.
• 43:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets to bite a blade off with his teeth and rip it off in one point.
• 43:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of the soldiers finally confesses to him as Saber Tooth realizes he can start ripping their body parts off.
• 43:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, I'm not going to do a Russian accent, y'all.
• 43:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bonnie Hale is carrying a plague, a bio-engineered stealth weapon, undetectable for 72 hours, but then instant epidemic.
• 44:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: She was infected by mistake.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: One of our own men made a stupid, stupid mistake and infected a civilian.
• 44:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: So we killed him.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: We do not have to draw this out, but it is, I think, amazing to note that this is during the AIDS epidemic and any time we see a story where like, we accidentally infected someone and now shape me in fact someone else.
• 44:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's hard to, I don't think that was your intention dead, but I think we see a lot of stories in this era where that was just kind of in the zeitgeist.
• 44:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: And as we jump to three, Creed calls Bonnie to check on her.
• 44:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's killing, there's a guy guiding on the phone booth wall.
• 44:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, hey, hey, let me in and Creed kills that guy and stuff some in the trash can before he leaves.
• 44:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love these bits where it's kind of horrible murder, but also comedy.
• 44:52
  [SPEAKER_01]: Creed learns the scientists have created these undead soldiers.
• 44:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get the Frankenstein reference.
• 44:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get a scene where Bonnie calls home to her parents, who are a lot.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is also a really adorably written scene where we get a little context about where she comes from.
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_01]: But she's like, oh, I miscreded so much.
• 45:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: We love each other.
• 45:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: I've already met someone that I love.
• 45:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: This one, but there's a codependent relationship.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: What is all I'm going to say?
• 45:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Create ends up captured.
• 45:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: He gets, he ends up on another killing spree.
• 45:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: The scientists are trying to get an antidote because if they don't kill Bonnie, everyone on the East Coast is going to die.
• 45:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think three has like the craziest.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's such a good narrative hook, which is that when he call, we know Victor is a horrible monster who will kill people.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when we call it's like the bad guy calling the heroin stuck at home and we she doesn't know that he might be violent to her but we know that he might be and we don't even know that he might feel some kind of way about it right like it turns out he has been changed by her.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's sort of like the beginning of scream, right?
• 45:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like it's the serial killer calling the, the, the, the, the, the, and I dig it so much.
• 46:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think that the idea, especially I, I will, I'm gonna, we're talking with the fourth one, the second, but the, the, the, the plague is such an interesting thing.
• 46:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Where does that like come from?
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right, we talked about maybe it was the AIDS crisis, but what, where did it come from for you?
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Those directions to me?
• 46:16
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, damn.
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I don't recall exactly.
• 46:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think I just really wanted a reason for Victor and Bonnie to end up in a shoe for the way they do.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mm-hmm.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
• 46:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: So something that gives Victor no choice but to do what he does.
• 46:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's so interesting to me because he's such a selfish character and it's such a, like, cruelly, selfless thing kind of, it's selfish too.
• 46:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're everything he can do as selfish, but it's, it's pretty crazy.
• 46:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm reading way too much into it here because it just just viewing through that like kind of AIDS epidemic allegory for a moment.
• 46:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Someone who was infected, you had a very risk, a big risk to the community if you were having sex with other people.
• 46:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: So they were encouraging finding monogamous partners or even other people who had already been infected so that you could form an agamist relationships and not run the risk of having unsafe sex with other people.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Bonnie does not know she's infected.
• 47:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So it doesn't work here, but we see this character who is infected, who is going to die, latching onto like a person with a healing factor, which is an interesting read on the character, I think.
• 47:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's the thing.
• 47:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Saber Toots would survive the play.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right.
• 47:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He.
• 47:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: He is willing to.
• 47:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: He saves the east coast of America.
• 47:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's this is story about Victor Creed saving the world.
• 47:30
  [SPEAKER_01]: So that tells about issue four.
• 47:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: We get Creed on a cycle very Wolverine style here.
• 47:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: on a motorcycle he's looking on.
• 47:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: He kills some guns and in the same time Bonnie is hiding in the bathroom.
• 47:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we get her first her like her big action sequence where she takes out one of the intruders with a lighter and hairspray.
• 47:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: She like burns them and then she like puts a hairdryer in the bathtub and electrocutes him and then she turns to the camera with the biggest shit eating grin right after she murders this man.
• 47:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's crazy.
• 47:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is where you're.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
• 47:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the, that is the, it, it, it almost works as the reveal that she's been crazy, but her behavior has been crazy up to this point.
• 48:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, create and body have this pretty sweet like truly sincerely sweet moment.
• 48:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he says he'll keep her with him.
• 48:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: He'll keep her safe.
• 48:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then it's really, really elegant.
• 48:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: The next panel, we assume, okay, she's just in the house.
• 48:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's talking to Ruth and it says you'll see to her.
• 48:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we don't see what happens.
• 48:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: He like he's left.
• 48:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he goes to fight the bad guys at the airfield.
• 48:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he chases the main by a guy, he in one of the bad guys, he injects him with acid and he like bubbles up and like dies and then this is that action sequence you're talking about chant down where the doctor is escaping in a helicopter the pan the first panel is drawn the way that you you said where it looks like he is jumping on the blades and I was so in that's so cool that's such a cool way for Victor to get through there.
• 48:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like kind of like dead pulley in that way, right?
• 48:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like that he mutilating himself to get there.
• 48:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Instead in the comic as is he smashes through the windshield and then grabs the doctor.
• 49:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have like a lot of back and forth in the doctor is like, okay, well, did you at least kill her?
• 49:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we cut back to the scene.
• 49:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's all in red.
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's beautiful color and we see that Victor did kill Bonnie and to stop the plague.
• 49:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the last little sequence is Victor and the doctor, and that's servant of Victor is that we don't really get any Like but he has put the doctor in like cement boots and they're over the Atlantic and he has also injected him with a chemical of some kind that's going to react to salt water.
• 49:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: uh as he like throws him into the water and there is this it like create is a very petty person but it's like the one thing that he's ever loves.
• 49:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: You took away from him so he does the the most gruesome killing he can think of.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh by my last note is this is a very good comment.
• 49:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: I enjoyed it very much as well.
• 49:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's daunting on me.
• 49:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: We don't really know how Bonnie got infected in the first place.
• 49:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: We see like the line that a mistake was made, but I almost feel like we're missing just a touch of relevance there for her.
• 50:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'd like there's something I want to know about her to make her sing a little bit more as a character.
• 50:04
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's interesting to write around the same era then just before you put this book out.
• 50:09
  [SPEAKER_01]: They use those like Old Neal Adams pages, Christos Cage, use some old like unpublished pages and worked with Neal on some modern stuff.
• 50:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: And they put out a title called First X Men, which is like a very benevolent sabre-tooth working with like a very benevolent Wolverine in the pre-X men history.
• 50:26
  [SPEAKER_01]: They form like a team of like kids that were getting experimented on by the government.
• 50:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: And Victor created that series falls in love with like an 18-year-old girl named Hollow.
• 50:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, oh, I love you.
• 50:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: I'm going to change for you.
• 50:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: And she dies in the end.
• 50:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: And he's like, oh, never forgive you.
• 50:42
  [SPEAKER_01]: Wolverine, I'll see you on your birthday.
• 50:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: And it's like, it's not effective enough to make it work.
• 50:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: But it's interesting to watch this kind of similar vibe of him losing the one girl he loved.
• 50:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Right after he killed Bertie in the comics, which is crazy.
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Which is crazy.
• 50:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan, let me hear your thoughts on the Bonnie Saber Truth relationship.
• 51:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then what's it like for you revisiting this title after all these years?
• 51:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, first off, I agree.
• 51:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: It would have been nice if we had seen how Bonnie could get and got infected And I don't remember if I just didn't think to put that in or if it If some sort of editorial constraints made it so that it got cut.
• 51:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I don't recall We don't need every end of every story.
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_01]: That's just I just want to know
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, a couple of tangential things that I wanted to tell you guys, just because I think you'll enjoy them.
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I specified in the script.
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is like the one thing that I wanted to take Greg to task on.
• 51:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I specified in the script that, uh, in issue two, Creed is driving this like, uh, late 60s Cadillac.
• 51:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: like some kind of gigantic land barge, you know, classic card, gorgeous thing.
• 51:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he he pulls up in a Toyota Matrix.
• 51:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: And and I was like, so great.
• 51:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, I see that you put Victor Creed six foot seven, whatever, Victor Creed in a Toyota Matrix instead of the car that I specified in the script.
• 52:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, what's that about?
• 52:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, Oh, yeah, I had great reference for it.
• 52:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, uh, another bit in the car, though, that, and this is, this is me having a mental lapse.
• 52:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: Do you, do you ever have the experience where you have something in your head?
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you say, what you're trying to say, different words come out.
• 52:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sure.
• 52:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you're like, wait, I think it's not what I meant.
• 52:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: My day job is a therapist.
• 52:32
  [SPEAKER_01]: I have like 40 active weekly clients.
• 52:35
  [SPEAKER_01]: And I have to remember every person's every detail about every life.
• 52:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: If I say your best friend's name instead of your spouse's name or God forbid, I say my last client, spouse's name instead of your spouse's name, people are upset.
• 52:47
  [SPEAKER_01]: I put my foot in my mouth all the time.
• 52:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Well, I did that to such an extent that I didn't even realize what I had done until the comic came out because in my head He's listening to Bob Seeger and my fingers wrote Joe Cocker in the script and and later I was like what no wait no, that's uh, but by you know, the comic was out
• 53:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: before I realized what I had done.
• 53:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, I wanted Victor Creed to be listening to Bob Seger, but once it came out that now he likes Joe Cocker, I was good with that as well.
• 53:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Hey, no, but I meant to emphasize this earlier because Joe Cocker's most famous song is Aguibba or the help from my friends.
• 53:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: And that being the song that Victor Creed is vibing out to makes me so happy.
• 53:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like it makes me think he goes home and watches the Wonder Years at night.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a different vibe.
• 53:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's kind of come down.
• 53:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: He can't be doing this all the time.
• 53:45
  [SPEAKER_01]: He's got to do this.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: San Francisco likes to murder people.
• 53:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh, this is actually amazing.
• 53:50
  [SPEAKER_01]: Okay, go do this action sequence in this comic, but turn on you.
• 53:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: Ah, so beautiful.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: In the background, well, he's committing his slaughter.
• 54:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Love it.
• 54:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, it turned out to be a very different thing, but I think it works anyway, and I was so let's see this was in I wrote this in 2000 and it wasn't until 2005 I was working for Tokyo pop and I pitched projects to them called Alex unlimited and they said, you know what we like this and we want to do it, but are you okay with changing the main character from a guy to a girl because our demographics use more heavily toward girls.
• 54:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I had never tried, excuse me, I had never tried to write a female protagonist before and didn't know if I could, but I really wanted to get paid because you know, those how I was keeping the lights on.
• 54:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: That said, sure, sure, of course.
• 54:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, because that's what you say as a freelancer when anyone asks you if you can do anything, of course.
• 54:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Or an actor, right, you're auditioning and they're like, you can sort fight in red horses and you're like, yes.
• 54:54
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, like Sasha Ruiz on Graham somebody asked him at one point.
• 55:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Can you can you swim and he goes like a dolphin and then he had to go learn to swim.
• 55:03
  [SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, so I wrote this this this project and it actually they couldn't they couldn't settle on an artist.
• 55:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I knew that they were trying to launch a pros line and I said, would you guys like me to just do this as a novel instead?
• 55:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And they were like, oh yeah, go ahead.
• 55:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: So suddenly I'm a YA author and I'm writing like this.
• 55:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: It was a turn out to be a trilogy that Tokyo Pop did not market in any way, at least in any way that had any effect on anything.
• 55:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: So nobody bought it.
• 55:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I'm still proud of it.
• 55:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: It came out really well.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, that was the that was when I really first began seriously like becoming a student as it turned out of female psychology and how to accurately represent female character.
• 55:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: Um, and since then I've kind of lost the ability to write a male main character because like,
• 55:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: almost all the novels that I've done since then, all the original ones of all featured female name character.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_01]: Well, now my challenge is on a male main character, but make sure that they were both the prom queen and a babysitter and a virgin before they fucked the serial killer.
• 56:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow, autobiographical.
• 56:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I will freely admit that the Bonnie may not be my best female character.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: There may be flaws in her psychology and presentation there, but I did.
• 56:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I did want her to come off as a little crazier and more thrill-seeking.
• 56:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Then I think the comic conveyed.
• 56:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So just as you read it, if you can substitute Rosanna,
• 56:39
  [SPEAKER_01]: This is a character that exists in the MU2, right?
• 56:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, we could see this character who had some sort of weird virus powers come back as some sort of agent of death and come after creed.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: And like, there's some story with this character waiting to happen that I think would be fascinating.
• 56:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I understand to do it.
• 56:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
• 56:56
  [SPEAKER_01]: Matt, do you have any final thoughts on Mary Shelley overdrive?
• 56:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love this, this was so fun.
• 57:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: I was like, yeah, this interview was rad.
• 57:03
  [SPEAKER_01]: Like, I really, I really enjoyed this.
• 57:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I read this book when I was 13 years old and I this is one of my like that is like the kind of book I was looking for when I was that age this is something that's brood saga a little bit right well I mean I was read I mean I was reading comics when I was like sex I was reading the brood saga when I was like sick my dad had comics
• 57:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But my comics that I bought were things like this, or the Marvel Max, or like Frank Teary's Web and X, or I mean NYX, right?
• 57:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like I like to the Grim and Grusom.
• 57:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And you know, you go back to those, and sometimes they don't like, they're not even like fun, there's nothing to it.
• 57:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this has a lot of like life to it.
• 57:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And like, sure, Bonnie is Bonnie problematic, maybe, but being problematic is a neutral statement.
• 57:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the narrative totally works.
• 57:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: The book totally works.
• 57:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Marvel should put out a trade, like, certainly because there's not even a trade.
• 57:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: They're working really hard to pretend it never existed.
• 58:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's so crazy why.
• 58:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't understand why.
• 58:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't, it doesn't change anything bad.
• 58:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't like mess with, like, continuity.
• 58:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't understand why.
• 58:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hope you love it, but it really doesn't.
• 58:13
  [SPEAKER_01]: I haven't developed a deep love for doing the research that this show requires.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: We take a character like Saber II who you know of course as a villain, but not when I really like.
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_01]: I tend to lean more less evil and more like sympathetic, but I've learned to really enjoy this character.
• 58:27
  [SPEAKER_01]: Matt, you've been a big part of that journey.
• 58:29
  [SPEAKER_01]: So I hope I got enjoying the Saber II features on the show this month.
• 58:33
  [SPEAKER_01]: Over on the Patreon, we're going to be hitting kind of tangential characters.
• 58:36
  [SPEAKER_01]: Some you've heard of, some you haven't, we've got like white tiger and saber claw, but the one I know everybody is kind of really pumped for in the worst way is watch for a Romulus episode, we're finally going to robulus in that size with it.
• 58:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a saver tooth on acid.
• 58:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: Will I love that dumb?
• 58:54
  [SPEAKER_01]: I love that dumb guy.
• 58:55
  [SPEAKER_01]: Next week, we'll be back with some surprise guests for a review of the more modern series.
• 59:00
  [SPEAKER_01]: Saber tooth, the dead don't talk.
• 59:02
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then we'll be completing the month with Saber tooth, the trial.
• 59:07
  [SPEAKER_01]: So watch for that.
• 59:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can follow the show at Grimalkin' underscore land on Instagram.
• 59:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Most readily, I keep my own social media private because I've got kiddos.
• 59:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: The two of you, of course, are welcome to add me just ask,
• 59:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can please watch for my book Gameormandat, which came out in graphic novel form this May the Reviews have been stellar.
• 59:23
  [SPEAKER_01]: I will be at Flamcon and the uncanny experience this fall Representing the both the show and the book and I hope to have another book announcement for everyone soon There's some exciting things happening that I'm really pumped about Let me turn it over to Matt and then Dan any final thoughts?
• 59:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: Where can people find you online and anything you'd like to plug for September 2026?
• 59:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, like I said, I, I, I really, really dug this.
• 59:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, I'm that parent.
• 59:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Uh, I am the host, the coast of the escape of the Mojavers, the, uh, a long swing up where, uh, an experiment and other comics podcast.
• 59:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, in September, we are doing our annual, uh, dead pool month.
• 1:00:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: We're doing back to pool to, uh, as the theme.
• 1:00:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, and, uh, so you can, you can listen to some of those.
• 1:00:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This will probably be out.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Um, yeah.
• 1:00:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can find me at escape the Mojavers on Instagram.
• 1:00:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I guess the best way to find me is just to visit my website, Danjolly.com.
• 1:00:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know exactly what I'm going to have out when this day beers, but I would like to plug, if I could, a trilogy, a novel trilogy of mine, given the emphasis of the show.
• 1:00:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is book one of the demon-slute scrolls.
• 1:00:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is the RuneMaster Homicide.
• 1:00:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: And this is a fantasy detective series starring a character who is a member of a species that is entirely pan.
• 1:00:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was trying to come up with trying to come up with a nonhuman species that would improve on humans in every way possible.
• 1:00:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: And that was one of the primary ways.
• 1:00:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: because I was inspired by, I think it was Margaret Meade, who was talking about a culture where nobody had any sexual hangups, and they were all just brilliantly happy all the time.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_01]: So yeah, I am so here for this Margaret Meade reference.
• 1:01:14
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody go look up Margaret Meade.
• 1:01:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: She's amazing.
• 1:01:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: Anthropology class.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: Beminism.
• 1:01:18
  [SPEAKER_01]: A product Margaret Meade.
• 1:01:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, yeah, and so it's a really good blend of sort of sorcery and like procedural detective storytelling starring a six foot three violent skin yellow eyed black war and woman named Niska Stonegate who is sick of all your human bullshit.
• 1:01:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Oh yeah, six feet yellow eyed five of her purple people leader.
• 1:01:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that happens.
• 1:01:48
  [SPEAKER_01]: No, I'm excited.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_01]: Dan, I'm a big fan.
• 1:01:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's been a true joy exploring the series with you.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: You can write a lot of different shit, but this was really fun to go back to this time capsule.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_01]: What a great thing.
• 1:01:59
  [SPEAKER_01]: Everybody go read, say, we're toothed, the Mary Shelley overdrive.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_01]: And then upload all your issue number two's up to eBay so that Dan can get a copy.
• 1:02:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Alright, yeah, please.
• 1:02:08
  [SPEAKER_01]: Alright, everybody, take care of yourselves out there.
• 1:02:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: Stay safe.
• 1:02:11
  [SPEAKER_01]: We will see you back here next week on The Graham Walk and Lane podcast.
• 1:02:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks Matt.
• 1:02:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thanks Dan.
• 1:02:16
  [SPEAKER_01]: Bye everybody.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to Grimalk and Lane.
• 1:02:19
  [SPEAKER_01]: We hope you are enjoying this podcast.
• 1:02:21
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimalk and Lane is produced and recorded in Salt Lake City, Utah, with music and editing done by my husband, Michael Bell, and promo art done by the incredible Seth Martell.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_01]: Look for us on Patreon, where we are releasing weekly episodes about obscure characters and facts.
• 1:02:38
  [SPEAKER_01]: It's a great way to participate with the podcast for only just a couple of dollars a month and it helps support what we are doing here.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_01]: Also, the best way you could help
• 1:02:46
  [SPEAKER_01]: Grimmulkin Lane is by sharing and liking and subscribing, but also please leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts.
• 1:02:53
  [SPEAKER_01]: We'll see you back your next time on Grimmulkin Lane.