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With Great Power #272... 22 Panels with Alisa Kwitney · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. My guest today is Elisa Quitney, the… the…
• 0:10
  Tad Eggleston: Author of the recent Ahoy book, Howl?
• 0:14
  Tad Eggleston: Which is a wonderful,
• 0:16
  Tad Eggleston: sci-fi period piece, I guess is the way I'd put it, with a little bit of body horror.
• 0:20
  Tad Eggleston: And a lot of humor, and a lot of heart.
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: Welcome! How's it going?
• 0:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Thank you. Well, I'm really glad to be here. I feel like I've come bringing my brain on this, just post-Halloween Day of the Dead podcast.
• 0:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. And this is… this is where… this is where I'll… I'll be honest, and like, I read Howl, and I am now looking… looking up the rest of your bibliography right now. I… I know that you've done other work, but I… I read Howl and re-read Howell, and that's what…
• 0:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, I'm so glad.
• 0:59
  Alisa Kwitney: This is the second larger collaboration between Maurice and myself, the artist.
• 1:06
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:06
  Alisa Kwitney: Whose real name is… first name is Alain. Morsei is his… Nomme de Art.
• 1:14
  Tad Eggleston: Now, that's actually really common in European comics, for the artist to go by…
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: One name, generally their last name, occasionally their first name, sometimes just a different name entirely, but they don't… they don't mess around with the two-name things, the…
• 1:29
  Tad Eggleston: the… the European band-aid disnee.
• 1:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, yeah, so, so… Marci and I, we were matched up for a DC project that ended up
• 1:45
  Alisa Kwitney: getting all derailed and then came out in a different way with a different, and great artist, Mike Norton.
• 1:52
  Alisa Kwitney: That was Mystic U.
• 1:54
  Alisa Kwitney: But Joanne and I, just really hit it off, and we kept… it was during a period when DC, DC Comics was moving from the East Coast to the West Coast.
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: West Coast?
• 2:07
  Alisa Kwitney: From, from, you know, the sign of civilization.
• 2:10
  Tad Eggleston: Now, as I'm flipping…
• 2:12
  Alisa Kwitney: Death, you know?
• 2:13
  Tad Eggleston: flipping through your timeline right now, I know why I…
• 2:18
  Tad Eggleston: recognized your name, even though I couldn't pin it, you were a co-worker of a friend of mine, Shelley Bond's been on a bunch of times, and…
• 2:26
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 2:26
  Tad Eggleston: two were at Vertigo together. Oh my gosh, yes. Okay, so I'll, I'll…
• 2:32
  Alisa Kwitney: finish the…
• 2:34
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry.
• 2:34
  Alisa Kwitney: of, of, comics recent, and then I'll go further back.
• 2:38
  Tad Eggleston: So, so we began to talk about all the possible things that we could do, Alain and I, and… because we've been talking a lot.
• 2:46
  Alisa Kwitney: And because…
• 2:48
  Alisa Kwitney: so the editor on that Mystic U project was busy with moving his life and his work from the East Coast to the West Coast, and I… you see, you jump the gun, the shark, the toilet,
• 3:04
  Alisa Kwitney: I was going to say, I had been an editor at DC.
• 3:07
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic, I sometimes get ahead of my… I think about everything, everywhere, all at once.
• 3:13
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, they say the test for being on the spectrum is membership in SIFWA, or being a friend of mine, and that's
• 3:22
  Alisa Kwitney: I…
• 3:24
  Alisa Kwitney: So anyway, we… I had been an editor at DC Comics, at the Vertigo imprint, actually before it was Vertigo. I am pre-Vertigo, Vertigo.
• 3:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And, and during vertigo. And,
• 3:38
  Alisa Kwitney: So I knew how to care and feed for an artist. We did that, and we started to do a lot of projects together. I think Elaine and I did our first project in Femme Magnifique for Shelley.
• 3:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 3:51
  Alisa Kwitney: And then we did a really foul and disgusting, story for, the Edgar Allan Poe Snifter of Terror.
• 3:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 4:00
  Alisa Kwitney: inordinately proud of.
• 4:02
  Alisa Kwitney: And, then we did Guilt. Guilt.
• 4:05
  Tad Eggleston: Which I did also read. That's the other reason I recognized it. Good! I mean, I had to. I mean, A, ahoy. B, old ladies, and I spent a decade working dementia care. I have an affinity for my old ladies.
• 4:20
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, I'm all about dementia and old ladies, and Lam says, what's happened in my life?
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: Some of my favorite stories are from demented old ladies.
• 4:32
  Alisa Kwitney: I've got a Creepshow story with him, too, that's, it's a little nursing home story.
• 4:37
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I'll have to go track that down.
• 4:39
  Alisa Kwitney: So, okay, so guilt, of course, is my… 90s Sex and the City meets the 1960s Twilight Zone.
• 4:47
  Alisa Kwitney: And…
• 4:49
  Alisa Kwitney: how I kind of call Mrs. Maisel meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978, I should say. Right. Even though 1958 Body Snatcher's also very good, and this is set around 58, but I…
• 5:03
  Alisa Kwitney: 1978 is My Body Snatchers. But anyway, just
• 5:07
  Alisa Kwitney: I know Shelly, because I helped tell Karen, you should hire this person.
• 5:11
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice!
• 5:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, thank you, because… because Shelly has great taste, and I enjoy talking to her, so anybody involved in getting her started makes me happy.
• 5:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, no, we shared an office, we've collaborated on a bunch of things, and she…
• 5:32
  Tad Eggleston: No, as I'm looking through your stuff at League of Comic Geeks, I'm like, yeah, no, I'm guessing… I know lots of these books she did some of, so it's either you worked on them together, or you worked…
• 5:46
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, we've collaborated on a.
• 5:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 5:48
  Alisa Kwitney: of things, and also, I'm trying to find the Facebook page. I don't need to… so, Shelly just posted pictures of her Halloween costumes throughout the years.
• 6:01
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 6:02
  Alisa Kwitney: And I think she posted one from either the late 80s or the early 90s, where she's Nula, the fairy from Sandman.
• 6:11
  Tad Eggleston: And, and I am Mazakin.
• 6:15
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 6:17
  Tad Eggleston: I'm actually… Shelly… Shelly's coming up again soon, because she's editing, American Caper.
• 6:24
  Tad Eggleston: With David Lapham and some guys from Rockstar Games.
• 6:28
  Tad Eggleston: At Dark Horse, so I immediately… I'm like, David Lapham, maybe Shelly can get me in!
• 6:36
  Alisa Kwitney: Sounds fantastic, gosh.
• 6:38
  Tad Eggleston: So… yeah, but this is the… this is the Elisa Quitney show, not the Shelley Bond shows.
• 6:46
  Tad Eggleston: Let's… let's talk more Howl. It's…
• 6:51
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, like, I read it in single-issue form when it came out.
• 6:55
  Tad Eggleston: was actually…
• 6:56
  Tad Eggleston: I had it on my pull list before… before Hannah started sending me PDFs, so, like, I often read it twice in single issue form when it came out, because I'd read the PDF ahead of time, and then it'd come, and I'm like, oh, this was good, I'm going to revisit it.
• 7:13
  Tad Eggleston: But, I think… I think I didn't… Click.
• 7:20
  Tad Eggleston: Until I was reading here afterwards in the… the collected edition.
• 7:26
  Tad Eggleston: That part of it was collecting
• 7:29
  Tad Eggleston: mom's memories as mom was losing them. If it's not too painful, can we… can we talk about that? Because…
• 7:37
  Alisa Kwitney: Absolutely, we can.
• 7:38
  Tad Eggleston: Because there's so few people that like to talk dementia with me. I mean, I know that's a weird thing to say.
• 7:44
  Tad Eggleston: No, I get it. But particularly people who've gone through it often don't want… I mean, there's a reason why they call it the silent killer, because…
• 7:53
  Tad Eggleston: You know, in a lot of ways, you have to mourn your loved one long before they're actually gone.
• 7:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you know.
• 8:00
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, so, first of all, I am so fine with talking about this. I think one of the biggest… when my first novel came out,
• 8:09
  Alisa Kwitney: it was… I remember, you know, that was my literary book that was reviewed in the Sunday New York Times, and it was all about college and bulimia and body issues.
• 8:19
  Alisa Kwitney: And at the time, in the 90s, you didn't admit. People would say, so what made you write this book? And I'd say, well, I have an intellectual interest in, you know, women's body issues. And it felt like this shameful secret.
• 8:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And I was talking, actually, I went in to talk to a class that Paul Levitz is teaching for,
• 8:41
  Tad Eggleston: Another guy that's been on the show a couple of times.
• 8:45
  Alisa Kwitney: Wonderful. So, so we were.
• 8:47
  Tad Eggleston: See, I love that I've got, like, 30-some-odd listeners. Hi, Mom, hi Adam, hi Britt, hi John, but I still have so many guests that, like, I'll talk to guests and go, oh!
• 8:57
  Tad Eggleston: I don't just know that person, I know that person!
• 9:00
  Alisa Kwitney: Nice, nice.
• 9:03
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, you got me in a weird mood.
• 9:05
  Alisa Kwitney: No, no, I love it! So, I was talking to his class about the bulimia, and
• 9:11
  Alisa Kwitney: And someone said, you know, what made you write about it? And I said, well, first of all, I was bulimic, you know? And I… and I could see Paul was sort of like… but I thought, you know, oh, if there's anything great about getting older, it's you have, I wouldn't say no shits left to give, but fewer, fewer shits!
• 9:30
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. I'll say, like, as, as, as… I mean, I was diagnosed…
• 9:37
  Tad Eggleston: actually really recently, and I self-diagnosed relatively late in life as well, because, like, when I was a kid, like, if you could speak, you weren't autistic. And then, if you were smart, you weren't autistic. So, like, from a clinical standpoint, I've only actually been autistic since I was, like, 32, when the DSM-5 came out.
• 9:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, yeah, I…
• 9:57
  Tad Eggleston: But
• 9:59
  Tad Eggleston: one of the things that I've realized that my autism has always manifested itself is, I don't have a filter. I was never, you know… I was diagnosed bipolar. There was no… I never had it in my head, oh, I shouldn't tell people that I'm bipolar.
• 10:14
  Tad Eggleston: But what I like about getting older is it's less likely that they give a shit either.
• 10:20
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than going, oh my god!
• 10:24
  Alisa Kwitney: Absolutely. So, let me first… I'll introduce you to my mother, you know, as best I can. So my mother's even.
• 10:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, beyond the introduction that I already got in the book.
• 10:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Beyond… yes, so… My mom was, a rebel.
• 10:40
  Alisa Kwitney: She was, you know, a beatnik. She lived with my dad outside of marriage. She was very intellectual.
• 10:47
  Tad Eggleston: Scandalous.
• 10:49
  Tad Eggleston: The intellectual part, not the living with your dad outside of marriage.
• 10:52
  Alisa Kwitney: all of it. She was, she was…
• 10:57
  Alisa Kwitney: Someone who first got into writing and journalism, and then became much more interested in… well, in addition, interested in psychology and the understanding of self, became a therapist, ran groups.
• 11:10
  Alisa Kwitney: Part of that, I should mention, was the influence of the celebrity therapist Mildred Newman, co-authored How to Be Your Own Best Friend, the first big, or the second big celebrity self-help book.
• 11:23
  Alisa Kwitney: And Mildred is also in the DNA of Hal, so… Yeah. There's so much fun.
• 11:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I was… I mean, when you said that.
• 11:33
  Tad Eggleston: obviously, but before you talked about Mildred, I went, so is your mom actually very much in the DNA of
• 11:40
  Tad Eggleston: Both the protagonist and antagonist female characters.
• 11:45
  Alisa Kwitney: She's not. No, no, so, so, I… I'll tell you, there's so many things to tell, so I'm trying to keep on a track.
• 11:53
  Tad Eggleston: That's okay. We're known for being all over the place.
• 11:57
  Alisa Kwitney: So my mom.
• 11:57
  Tad Eggleston: As much as we're known.
• 11:58
  Alisa Kwitney: this is good, this is good. So, my mom was the sort of mother who said.
• 12:04
  Alisa Kwitney: at a certain point, I'd had trouble in public school, I'd had trouble in a private school, so my grandparents said, send her to a Hebrew school, a half-a-day Hebrew school. And I thought, this is… this is a swell idea, there were gonna be 7 people in my class, I was thrilled.
• 12:19
  Alisa Kwitney: And my mother said, I'll send you in one condition. The day you come home and tell me you want to keep kosher, and I can't eat bacon in the morning, that's the day I pull you right out of there.
• 12:32
  Alisa Kwitney: So, I think that story definitely encapsulates something about my mom.
• 12:37
  Alisa Kwitney: was, a… a proud…
• 12:41
  Alisa Kwitney: you know, we spoke Hebrew at home, but, you know, she was definitely not going to relinquish bacon.
• 12:48
  Tad Eggleston: that, that reminds me of a… have you ever read Christopher Moore's Lamb?
• 12:53
  Alisa Kwitney: No, no, I haven't.
• 12:54
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, Christopher Moore wrote a book called Lamb, The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.
• 13:02
  Tad Eggleston: Christopher Moore's a very humorous writer to begin with, but… but.
• 13:08
  Alisa Kwitney: I don't know.
• 13:08
  Tad Eggleston: He decided to tackle, like… like, the Bible really doesn't talk about Jesus between, like.
• 13:15
  Tad Eggleston: His birth and his 30s.
• 13:18
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 13:18
  Tad Eggleston: So he decided to, like, tackle that, including, like, sending him off to learn from, like.
• 13:24
  Tad Eggleston: at a Buddhist monastery, and… and, you know, because, like…
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: correctly, he's like, oh, wow, Christianity is actually… like, a lot of the morals are built off of these older religions. What if you had him go… what if the wise men…
• 13:40
  Tad Eggleston: This is what it literally was. Well, the wise men were… were… you know.
• 13:46
  Tad Eggleston: holy figures from…
• 13:49
  Tad Eggleston: But Jesus discovers bacon, and it tastes so good that he figures that that law
• 13:58
  Tad Eggleston: Wasn't one of the good ones.
• 14:00
  Tad Eggleston: And it's something… it's something that Biff will then remind him of on a semi-regular basis when he's trying to balance whether or not
• 14:10
  Tad Eggleston: this is really a law of God, or a law of man. Biff will just be like, bacon! Josh, remember bacon!
• 14:20
  Alisa Kwitney: I have to tell you that I am struggling myself. Not… I don't keep kosher, but I try not to eat anything too intelligent.
• 14:27
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. That is an issue, because pigs are pretty smart.
• 14:31
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, so I've been trying to stay away from pigs and octopi, and, you know, I know this is not perfect, I mean.
• 14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely stay away from the Dolphins.
• 14:44
  Alisa Kwitney: Whale meat, definitely a no-no.
• 14:46
  Tad Eggleston: And if Douglas Adams is to be believed, you should probably avoid the, mice?
• 14:52
  Tad Eggleston: Because they've been experimenting on us.
• 14:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, I… I try to eat stupid, I try and eat, stuff that was stupid and died relatively happy, but that's… that's another…
• 15:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, here is… here is the thing. At this point, the pigs that we're actually eating
• 15:09
  Tad Eggleston: Are so inbred, and so just fed to be happy, that they probably are stupid and happy if they weren't hunted in the wild.
• 15:17
  Alisa Kwitney: You have a great point. I will say, so.
• 15:20
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just trying to justify my bacon here. No, I…
• 15:23
  Alisa Kwitney: Completely understand, and there was a great… was it Rick and…
• 15:28
  Alisa Kwitney: Morty, or Futurama, where they go to a place where the delicious spaghetti and meatballs is… has a very, morally compromising origin, let's just say that. And my son just.
• 15:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that could be either of them, yeah.
• 15:44
  Alisa Kwitney: I, I, I was not sure, but okay, let me, let me go back to.
• 15:48
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry.
• 15:49
  Alisa Kwitney: Back beyond… Yes, I keep taking…
• 15:51
  Tad Eggleston: you on crazy tangents.
• 15:53
  Alisa Kwitney: I love this, this crazy… I… I… it is only my.
• 15:56
  Tad Eggleston: That's how I roll.
• 15:57
  Alisa Kwitney: as a teacher, it helps me kind of guide it back, because I have… I, too, have taught the school.
• 16:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and you're an editor. I mean, your whole role is to take those creatives and keep them on track and on schedule, and…
• 16:11
  Tad Eggleston: Get the book in on time.
• 16:12
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, that… that… there are different kinds of editors. I think my… my favorite part of editing is helping people to make connections. Right.
• 16:21
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't say that was your favorite part of animation.
• 16:25
  Alisa Kwitney: My second favorite part was talking people down from emotional ledges, where they're like, there's no way I can finish it!
• 16:31
  Tad Eggleston: Those are also required parts of editing.
• 16:36
  Alisa Kwitney: Your friend Shelly wrote a whole trilogy of books.
• 16:39
  Alisa Kwitney: That she did. Although we had a very different way of working as editors, and it was very funny, because I think I drove her nuts. I spent a lot of time.
• 16:47
  Tad Eggleston: talking to people on the phone. She was more, you know, efficient. No, I've had a bunch of editors on it, and, like.
• 16:55
  Tad Eggleston: they all have different styles, which is one of the reasons why I've started to, like… any creator that ever suggests that they don't really need an editor, or they don't like editors, or whatnot, aside from the fact that I'll just bring up rock star names, and they'll go, well, I mean, obviously.
• 17:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'll also point out, like, finding the right editor for you is kind of like finding the right therapist. Not every editor fits, which doesn't mean you don't need one.
• 17:22
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, oh, so much, and Tom Pyre is just… I mean, he was my friend and my.
• 17:28
  Tad Eggleston: Tom's also been on.
• 17:29
  Alisa Kwitney: before he was my editor, he is.
• 17:32
  Tad Eggleston: He sent me some baseball coats, it was really nice of him.
• 17:36
  Alisa Kwitney: he's amazing, and I still… I think I did one cartooning class just to sort of experience what it's like on the other side of the desk.
• 17:46
  Alisa Kwitney: And I was trying to draw something, and I ended up drawing Tom Pye, or circa 1990-whatever with his… then he wore a lot of Hawaiian shirts, and he had this wonderful…
• 17:56
  Tad Eggleston: Crazy hair.
• 17:57
  Alisa Kwitney: icy hair, curly hair, and this sort of,
• 18:02
  Alisa Kwitney: kind of a combination of laid-backness and chain-smoking and philosophical… he was, like, a cross between, I don't know, the big Lebowski, the Buddha… so many things went into the making of…
• 18:17
  Tad Eggleston: with some Bill Gaines and Jimmy Buffett mixed in?
• 18:21
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes! Very much that, that intersection of tropical Saint-Frois and, and, and Mad Magazine,
• 18:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 18:32
  Alisa Kwitney: humor.
• 18:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've only talked to Tom the once, but, like, I would expect that just from Ahoy Comics.
• 18:41
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, well, a horse…
• 18:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, just, just from looking at the line and the way it's been curated.
• 18:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know, it's brilliant and it's intelligent, but it never fails to be funny, even when it's not a book that's necessarily supposed to… I mean, like, your book isn't, like, marketed as a… as a funny book.
• 19:03
  Tad Eggleston: But it's got humor. And…
• 19:06
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, sweet.
• 19:07
  Tad Eggleston: Toxic Adventures isn't… isn't marketed as a serious book, but…
• 19:13
  Tad Eggleston: it's got messages. I mean, it's written by a freakin' political cartoonist, you know? I mean…
• 19:18
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, getting hooked up with Mark Russell right out of the bat, like, showed that, like, he knew where to go.
• 19:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Absolutely, and I remember, like, talking to Mark Russell back at… he actually…
• 19:32
  Alisa Kwitney: So he was just starting out, and he's so smart. I actually asked his advice about how can I show a vagina dentata without showing a vagina dentata? And…
• 19:43
  Alisa Kwitney: his… his… that's in the Edgar Allan Poe story, but… Right. All right, so the thing I was going to say about my mom and about dementia… so my mom was my mentor, my best friend, and when I began to see the first signs that something was shifting.
• 19:59
  Alisa Kwitney: None of her doc… you know, I would take her into doctors, we did neuropsychological testing, and everyone kept saying to me, oh no, she's fine, you know, this is… she just needs to eat more healthily and get more exercise.
• 20:13
  Alisa Kwitney: And then came the pandemic.
• 20:16
  Alisa Kwitney: And so my mom was with me, and kind of, I had to move her out of her Upper West Side apartment.
• 20:23
  Alisa Kwitney: She fell off a cognitive cliff.
• 20:27
  Alisa Kwitney: And… what happened is it changed everything about the way I was working, because it's the biggest thing.
• 20:35
  Alisa Kwitney: I've ever had to deal with. And I… I found that humor and horror were the two things that really helped me to understand
• 20:46
  Alisa Kwitney: a way to talk about this, a way to work through what I was feeling.
• 20:50
  Tad Eggleston: So you also, actually, you were… you were the primary caregiver as well.
• 20:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, I mean, yes and no, yeah, so there was a period where she was at home with me, and then I was case managing and going to see her all the time, but with, you know, home healthcare aides. We had a few different chapters to all of.
• 21:09
  Tad Eggleston: I only bring that up because it's been…
• 21:13
  Tad Eggleston: Something that I've noticed is the people who…
• 21:19
  Tad Eggleston: experience it day in, day out. First, notice the issues faster.
• 21:26
  Tad Eggleston: And second, come to peace with
• 21:30
  Tad Eggleston: This isn't a horror. I mean, it is a horror, but it's not just a horror.
• 21:35
  Tad Eggleston: This is just… something.
• 21:37
  Tad Eggleston: And it's not something that never needs to be talked about, and it's not something that will always make me sad, because there are funny times, too. I mean, oh my god, some of my funniest stories are from old ladies with dementia.
• 21:49
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, you know, and the thing is, my mom was… So…
• 21:56
  Alisa Kwitney: So intellectual, and we were so close.
• 21:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And so it felt… it felt really shocking, but what I… I mean, guilt was one kind of way of dealing with it. And guilt is the story about a woman who has one big regret, and her… her Upper West Side co-op, you know, has a door where you can go back 40 years in your own life.
• 22:17
  Alisa Kwitney: And you're not supposed to change anything major.
• 22:20
  Alisa Kwitney: And so that was one way of… for me, of exploring this whole idea of…
• 22:25
  Alisa Kwitney: you know, how do you deal with the fact that you've made decisions in the past that, looking back, you might really wish you'd gone a different way? And also dealing with the horror that is a co-op board on the Upper West Side.
• 22:41
  Alisa Kwitney: But, so with that story, I… I also wanted to bring in, you know, kind of, like, the weirdness
• 22:51
  Alisa Kwitney: of buildings. You know, I grew up in a building that was a village. It was a vertical village, and you know so much about your neighbors, but then there are things you don't know, and you can discover that somebody, you know, from your own past has moved into the building, but they were on the other side, so you didn't know, and…
• 23:07
  Alisa Kwitney: And then there's this communal laundry room. It's… there's so much strangeness to buildings that's beyond…
• 23:14
  Alisa Kwitney: Rosemary's Baby. So, that was my inspiration for that. For this.
• 23:19
  Alisa Kwitney: As my mom began to change, and seemed for the first time in my life not like the person I knew so well.
• 23:26
  Alisa Kwitney: I thought about pod people a lot.
• 23:29
  Alisa Kwitney: And, you know, the whole… I mean, the whole…
• 23:34
  Alisa Kwitney: truth of pod people is that we expect people that we've been very intimate with, our parents, our siblings, our spouses, our kids, to remain known quantities to us. And there are these weird moments where you think.
• 23:51
  Alisa Kwitney: Who are you? Do I know you at all?
• 23:53
  Alisa Kwitney: Right. And there's this…
• 23:55
  Alisa Kwitney: So I feel like that's the true horror, and the scary part. And the body horror stuff, which is fun.
• 24:04
  Alisa Kwitney: And, you know, something to play with, and the humor, which is the only way I can take, you know, I don't like vodka or tequila without a mixer, and I don't
• 24:14
  Alisa Kwitney: Horror without, you know, humor.
• 24:18
  Tad Eggleston: I'll take the mixer without the vodka and tequila. That's probably why I take so much more humor than horror.
• 24:29
  Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, it…
• 24:30
  Alisa Kwitney: I've seen that, too. I've been… there's this new, like, non-alcoholic tequila substitute, so I've been…
• 24:37
  Alisa Kwitney: I've been doing so much…
• 24:38
  Tad Eggleston: She's never been much of a drinker.
• 24:40
  Tad Eggleston: I, I think, I think, I think…
• 24:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, even during the eras of my life were the, like, you're supposed to be, like, the 20s, when, like, it seemed like everybody just…
• 24:53
  Tad Eggleston: The only thing that was fun was getting drunk, and I'm sitting there going, but it's… but it's not fun.
• 24:59
  Tad Eggleston: Why do you think this is fun?
• 25:03
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, true.
• 25:04
  Tad Eggleston: Can't we play a board game? That's more fun!
• 25:08
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, it took me many, many years. I think a lot of us were strangers kids. I have to say that all through my childhood, people wanted to do things that were not reading books, or reading comics, or drawing, or writing, and I didn't… I mean, okay, climb a tree, play with a dog, but that was just about it.
• 25:25
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right?
• 25:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no. I think… It's one of those weird things, that, like…
• 25:36
  Tad Eggleston: There's so many things that we enjoy that we somehow convince ourselves that we're not supposed to enjoy, and therefore we deprive ourselves.
• 25:44
  Tad Eggleston: And it's really, really funny when those things are, like, the things that aren't even harmful to ourselves or others.
• 25:50
  Tad Eggleston: It's like…
• 25:53
  Tad Eggleston: doesn't hurt you to read a comic book, but I know people that are, like, afraid to read comic books around people.
• 25:58
  Alisa Kwitney: Because…
• 25:59
  Tad Eggleston: Because adults aren't supposed to be reading comic books.
• 26:03
  Alisa Kwitney: As a kid, I was… I hated summer camp, and I still remember one time I was reading a comic while everyone was getting ready.
• 26:11
  Alisa Kwitney: And at one point, I look up, and my two counselors are staring at me. The whole camp had left, the cabin had left, and they were waiting to see how long it would take me to notice.
• 26:24
  Alisa Kwitney: And I was drugged. You know, I was reading, like, if I had a good horror comic, every time I reread it, I was in a drugged state.
• 26:33
  Tad Eggleston: Nice. Are we talking, like, EC stuff? Charleston? Or Charlton?
• 26:38
  Alisa Kwitney: Charlton definitely… I mean, first of all, I loved House of Mystery and House of Secrets and The Witching Hour. I loved Charlton, Midnight Tales.
• 26:49
  Alisa Kwitney: So, you know, and I found some of them
• 26:53
  Alisa Kwitney: recently, from old, you know, and I've recreated Some of my old.
• 26:57
  Alisa Kwitney: Old stuff. At 11, I discovered vampirella, and I.
• 27:03
  Alisa Kwitney: mixed feelings, because I did notice that it was,
• 27:09
  Alisa Kwitney: kind of, you know, I was raised in a feminist household, and it was a little uncomfortably objectifying.
• 27:16
  Alisa Kwitney: But the stories in it were gripping, and some of the art, like Jose Gonzalez and Esteban Moroto, just…
• 27:24
  Alisa Kwitney: floored me, so I, I spent, yeah, so from age 11, I suppose I read Vampirella, too.
• 27:29
  Tad Eggleston: Have you read any of Christopher Priest's current run on Vampirella?
• 27:36
  Alisa Kwitney: I have not. Should I?
• 27:37
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god, yes. Among other things, he's got her going to a therapist.
• 27:45
  Alisa Kwitney: Right.
• 27:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, cause I actually…
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: despite the fact that so many of my favorite writers have written Vampirella through the ages, I… I had avoided Vampirella for the same reason, you just… it just…
• 28:02
  Tad Eggleston: it felt too objectifying to me, and I'm like…
• 28:06
  Tad Eggleston: And it was, it was totally, like…
• 28:09
  Tad Eggleston: Without investigation, it was, it was, it was…
• 28:13
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I, I was, I was, what's the term?
• 28:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I can't remember the right word, but I was, I was knocking it down without actually exploring it.
• 28:25
  Tad Eggleston: Contempt prior to investigation. It was totally contempt prior to investigation.
• 28:31
  Tad Eggleston: But then, between the fact that I just love Christopher Priest, but another friend of mine is like.
• 28:38
  Tad Eggleston: yeah, I'm reading this, you have to read this, and I'm like…
• 28:41
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know, blah blah blah, and he's like, no, I've never read one either, but my comic shop guy convinced me to get the first issue, and it's fucking good.
• 28:51
  Alisa Kwitney: Alright, I will…
• 28:52
  Tad Eggleston: look at this. I mean, one of the things that I discovered later, because I liked the backstories more.
• 28:59
  Alisa Kwitney: I…
• 29:00
  Alisa Kwitney: I discovered that what I really love in terms of comics art is a certain amount of what we call acting, which is the…
• 29:07
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 29:08
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, the little emotional reactions, body posture, micro-expression…
• 29:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 29:14
  Alisa Kwitney: And it's… it's one of the ways that Alana and I really bonded, because I thought.
• 29:20
  Alisa Kwitney: I mean, everyone's mileage may differ, but I… it's really hard…
• 29:25
  Tad Eggleston: The acting in this book is amazing.
• 29:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, it's the key to humor.
• 29:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 29:30
  Alisa Kwitney: to dramedy, which I think, if I… if I…
• 29:33
  Alisa Kwitney: if I think, you know, what I'm writing here is a real hybrid of… there's some horror, there's some rom-com, and it goes between… and then there's, you know, hopefully there's emotional drama before you go into the funny. So, you need somebody who's got those
• 29:51
  Alisa Kwitney: you know, focus and love of figuring out the pacing and the emotional reactions. And if you're drawing beautiful women, you know, thrusting their sexy, sexy elbows at the reader.
• 30:05
  Alisa Kwitney: then, you know, it all becomes about those sharp little elbows, and, you know, God, look at those kneecaps, and then you don't really… it's not a posture that conveys any emotional.
• 30:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I love that you think that the average male clientele is looking at the kneecaps, but…
• 30:22
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, I… I realize they're not, but I… I thought I would, you know… Breasts, it's so predictable.
• 30:34
  Tad Eggleston: This actually leads really well, though, into one of my favorite questions to ask, and I'm even more interested in asking it to you now, seeing as your history clearly goes so deep. Tell me your comics biography, and by that, I don't mean…
• 30:51
  Tad Eggleston: Like, your bibliography, I mean, like…
• 30:55
  Alisa Kwitney: What formed me?
• 30:57
  Tad Eggleston: what informed… yeah, what informed you? Start with those House of Secrets, House of Mystery, like, and take me through…
• 31:03
  Tad Eggleston: through your life, what has formed you, what has formed your thoughts on comics? Give me titles, give me artists, give me anything that pops into your head. Interesting anecdotes, like the counselors just watching you to figure out if you noticed the kid.
• 31:18
  Alisa Kwitney: Okay, so, so I'm thinking,
• 31:21
  Alisa Kwitney: I should have prepared better for this, because my brain is a sieve these days.
• 31:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Okay, I started out reading everything, so everything in the 70s meant
• 31:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Betty and Veronica, and Archie comics, anything that, you know, you'd go down to your little candy store, and they'd have a rack with comics, and sometimes it'd be Charlton, and sometimes it'd be DC, and sometimes it'd be superhero, and… So first I read everything.
• 31:54
  Alisa Kwitney: And then I read romance comics, which were very strange.
• 32:00
  Alisa Kwitney: what I noticed is my first
• 32:03
  Alisa Kwitney: Deepest love was the soap opera of Archie Comics.
• 32:10
  Alisa Kwitney: and the… the anthology horror. Those were my first loves. And I later discovered Nicola Cuddy, I think, C-U-T-I.
• 32:19
  Alisa Kwitney: did a lot of the stories from Charlton that I had loved. Never got to meet him.
• 32:25
  Alisa Kwitney: I've left out here Mad Magazine, which was a huge influence. I…
• 32:32
  Alisa Kwitney: God, I absolutely loved Mad Magazine, and
• 32:38
  Alisa Kwitney: I even read Cracked magazine. I was into all of that humor and satire.
• 32:43
  Alisa Kwitney: and… I'm sorry, I'm just trying to think where, you know…
• 32:49
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's funny.
• 32:49
  Alisa Kwitney: things change, but I would go over to my friend's, house. My mom had a really good friend in the Berkshires, and their sons, Dan and Josh Braun, who now, are part of, sorry, Submarine… was it entertainment? The… they… they did…
• 33:06
  Alisa Kwitney: Blackfish, and they do a lot of documentary films. But anyway, they were big comics readers, and they read a lot of Legion, a lot of the superhero stuff.
• 33:16
  Alisa Kwitney: I also loved the feminist…
• 33:20
  Alisa Kwitney: superheroes that were having a moment. I… I took Wonder Woman through her Maude, Diana Rigg kind of day with Dick Giertano, I think was… was… I think he was penciling as well as inking then. Rose and Thorne, the kind of bipolar superhero.
• 33:37
  Alisa Kwitney: My favorite, too, for a long, long time, Shanna the She-Devil, before she hooked up with Khazar, she had briefly had her own book. She was She-Devil with a PhD, she was kind of like a kick-ass Jane Goodall-type character.
• 33:53
  Alisa Kwitney: And unlike Wonder Woman, she thwacked people with her feet and fists, and did a lot of gymnastics stuff off of, like, Cape Buffalo horns. I was just very into it.
• 34:04
  Alisa Kwitney: So that was… That was that. The cat…
• 34:11
  Alisa Kwitney: before she became Tigra, she was a college student who also had a feminist teacher, and she… there was some male guy who was trying to manipulate… it was all weird, and there was some seamy, almost pimp-like energy going on around the edges of this, but I…
• 34:30
  Alisa Kwitney: they were overtly feminist, and these women kicked ass, and I… I liked that.
• 34:36
  Alisa Kwitney: So yes. So that was… that was what formed me… oh, for… I went through…
• 34:42
  Alisa Kwitney: In my late teens, I went through a big Conan, the barbarian, Red Sonja phase.
• 34:48
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, so then I stopped reading for a little while, and I…
• 34:54
  Alisa Kwitney: I applied to Columbia's MFA program.
• 34:57
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. And.
• 34:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And I think, just…
• 35:01
  Alisa Kwitney: to screw with people, I said, I really like comics, horror, and romance novels, which was just the thing you did not say in Columbia's MFA program in the 90s.
• 35:13
  Tad Eggleston: You can get away with the comics now.
• 35:16
  Alisa Kwitney: Say that again?
• 35:17
  Tad Eggleston: I said, you could definitely get away with the comics now.
• 35:20
  Tad Eggleston: Columbia was the…
• 35:21
  Alisa Kwitney: Everything has become…
• 35:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just, I'm just thinking, Columbia was the first, first school where a comic got turned in as a PhD thesis.
• 35:30
  Alisa Kwitney: Wow, yeah, but… but back in the day, so then, Krista, I'm just… God, I'm having a moment. Sorry, I'm… I'm… I'm older now.
• 35:38
  Tad Eggleston: It's okay.
• 35:39
  Alisa Kwitney: The secret lives of older boys, the secret lives of… I'm just trying to… So, the author who died way too young of The Secret Lives of Altar Boys was also in the program with me, and he said.
• 35:50
  Alisa Kwitney: You love, comics, well, you know, have you read The Killing Joke?
• 35:56
  Alisa Kwitney: And I had not.
• 35:58
  Alisa Kwitney: And, so I discovered that, you know, DC was doing all this really… Strong, strange, wonderful stuff.
• 36:09
  Tad Eggleston: Dangerous Life of Altar Boy?
• 36:10
  Alisa Kwitney: Dangerous lives. Dangerous lives of older boys.
• 36:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that would be…
• 36:16
  Alisa Kwitney: Chris.
• 36:16
  Tad Eggleston: Chris Fuhrman.
• 36:18
  Alisa Kwitney: Chris Fuhrman.
• 36:19
  Alisa Kwitney: And I'm sorry, Chris, it's been… I'm old now.
• 36:23
  Tad Eggleston: Come on.
• 36:23
  Alisa Kwitney: And, he died way too young.
• 36:26
  Tad Eggleston: Also, I put you on the spot.
• 36:28
  Alisa Kwitney: So, anyway, I will say that around this time, when I started reading comics again.
• 36:34
  Alisa Kwitney: I decided I needed a job, and I applied at the literary publishing places, but I also decided to apply at Silhouette, which was in New York City at the time, Marvel, and DC.
• 36:46
  Alisa Kwitney: And DC… answered. They're the only ones who initially answered. Later… Silhouette later offered me a job. But…
• 36:54
  Alisa Kwitney: So, I went in in a blizzard, and,
• 37:00
  Alisa Kwitney: And no one was there except for Kevin Dooley, I think. And then I came back later, and I got my interview, and they said, well, what are your favorite comics?
• 37:08
  Alisa Kwitney: And I…
• 37:09
  Alisa Kwitney: I didn't lie the way you're supposed to in an interview. I didn't say one of the comics they were publishing now. I said, really? My first love is horror comics, but you're not publishing House of Mystery and House of Secrets anymore. And they said, well.
• 37:22
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, actually, you might be really good. We've got this editor, Karen Berger, and she does a lot of weird stuff with those old characters. So this was before Vertigo was Vertigo.
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: And at the time… This probably would have been about the time that Swamp Thing was…
• 37:37
  Alisa Kwitney: swamped.
• 37:38
  Tad Eggleston: Hitting a setup.
• 37:38
  Alisa Kwitney: over the Swamp Thing then, and they also gave me a bunch of Sandmans.
• 37:44
  Alisa Kwitney: And I fell so in love with the Sandman comics that before I was called back for my next interview, I went out and bought, you know, all the ones I'd missed.
• 37:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 37:57
  Alisa Kwitney: And I think those were the days when still I would go into a comic book store in New York City, and someone would look at me and say.
• 38:04
  Alisa Kwitney: Girl!
• 38:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that still happens in some comic shops. Actually, generally, it's not, there's a girl, it's… There's…
• 38:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's a girl!
• 38:16
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, I think I would… I'm loud and brassy.
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: Did you have a favorite New York comic shop?
• 38:23
  Alisa Kwitney: I don't… I don't remember. It took me a while to figure out how to find them. I think I was just glad to find them.
• 38:31
  Alisa Kwitney: And I don't remember, you know, because very quickly after that, I was getting my comics for free!
• 38:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's right.
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's crazy how, if you don't have to pay for them, you don't go looking for them as much.
• 38:46
  Alisa Kwitney: I was getting… in those days, we got all the comics that DC published.
• 38:52
  Alisa Kwitney: And all the comics that Marvel published.
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 38:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 38:57
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't even realize that. I know that DC even now, gives out a crazy number of comps.
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the…
• 39:05
  Alisa Kwitney: I had comics up the gazook.
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the number, the number of, of people who…
• 39:13
  Tad Eggleston: either are doing or have done work with DC who, like, will have garage sales or hand them out as Halloween
• 39:23
  Tad Eggleston: things, or give them to the local comic shop, or Chip Zdarsky and some of the Toronto crowd actually had a special con last year that was their comp con, where, like, 20 of them just came with all their comp books, and you could show up and get one for free that they'd sign.
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because they needed to get them out of their basements.
• 39:46
  Alisa Kwitney: I, I definitely got rid of way too many comics, but…
• 39:50
  Alisa Kwitney: My mother never threw out all my comics.
• 39:54
  Alisa Kwitney: And so… I still have some…
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 40:00
  Alisa Kwitney: I've, I've replaced some that… these were my originals.
• 40:05
  Tad Eggleston: Nice.
• 40:07
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, this is my phantom stranger.
• 40:10
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 40:10
  Alisa Kwitney: That was the first one I did with Guy Davis. Yeah, this is all Shanna. I think I have the cat in here as well. I should say, for your listeners, that I was holding up an original Shanna the She-Devil.
• 40:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. And there's, there's, Outsiders.
• 40:25
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, so I just kept, like, a few of my favorites from.
• 40:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, like, based on some of the specific… Nice.
• 40:34
  Tad Eggleston: the specific…
• 40:35
  Alisa Kwitney: Get you arrested now, because it's the mummy protecting an Israeli soldier, during the Yom Kippur War.
• 40:46
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 40:50
  Alisa Kwitney: My… my treasure trove!
• 40:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, as I was listening to a lot of your story, it made me think…
• 40:57
  Tad Eggleston: Of… have you read Alex Segura's novels? The two comics ones?
• 41:03
  Alisa Kwitney: I haven't, but I know I need to. I mean, he's a great writer, and I.
• 41:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 41:08
  Alisa Kwitney: he's… he's…
• 41:09
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, there's an element that, like, I was half expecting when I asked the question for you to go, well, truly, I was the one that he consulted with.
• 41:21
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm thinking, you know, as you're telling the story, I'm like, you…
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: You're telling a story that would fit in so well with
• 41:34
  Tad Eggleston: The protagonist in… in the first one.
• 41:37
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, funny.
• 41:38
  Tad Eggleston: Where, where, where it's, it's, it's the woman…
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: Massively into comics, both finding the ones that were more feminist than the other ones, and liking the horror comics, and…
• 41:50
  Tad Eggleston: And… and… You know, where it would have differed is, like, her character…
• 41:59
  Tad Eggleston: because of the setting and whatnot, is… is, like, only allowed to be the executive assistant, only it's not called an executive assistant yet.
• 42:11
  Alisa Kwitney: No.
• 42:11
  Tad Eggleston: And she's not allowed to be an editor. And she certainly couldn't be a writer or a creator.
• 42:18
  Alisa Kwitney: But that was not my experience.
• 42:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right, no, you were a decade later. But, like, there was just similarities in the characters, and I'm sitting there going, oh…
• 42:30
  Tad Eggleston: I wish I… the book was near me, rather than downstairs. I'd be flipping through to see if you were in the thank you notes.
• 42:38
  Alisa Kwitney: Maybe he stole some of my thoughts, but no, I was…
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean.
• 42:42
  Alisa Kwitney: I was lucky.
• 42:43
  Tad Eggleston: I think, yeah, I think, I think parts of it are, are, not an abnormal story.
• 42:51
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately.
• 42:52
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 42:53
  Tad Eggleston: Unfortunately.
• 42:54
  Alisa Kwitney: But I mean, I was really lucky, so when I went to work for Karen.
• 42:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And Tom… Tom Pyre was, you know, my… my…
• 43:03
  Alisa Kwitney: I think we sh… we shared an office initially,
• 43:08
  Alisa Kwitney: I was really lucky in terms of how Karen treated me, and Tom, and everyone there. I remember one time, Denny O'Neill.
• 43:16
  Alisa Kwitney: early on in my tenure asked me if I wanted to go out to lunch, and I was a little suspicious. I was in my, you know, early 20s, mid-20s, and I said, you know, Karen, is this okay? Why is this editor who's not you, you know, asking me out to lunch? And she said, oh, definitely go.
• 43:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And I, you know, I had a great time. He introduced me to Robert McKee's books on story structure.
• 43:42
  Alisa Kwitney: he and Paul taught me a lot about ensemble plotting, multi, you know, multi-plotline A, B, and C plotting over time. They were great lectures, and.
• 43:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 43:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 43:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Danny…
• 43:59
  Tad Eggleston: I love Denny's work, and I wish I'd started, like, going out of my way to meet comics. I wish that I'd, like, broken down that barrier between being a fan and…
• 44:09
  Tad Eggleston: talking to people in the industry that isn't nearly as big of a barrier as I…
• 44:14
  Tad Eggleston: thought it was until I started this podcast.
• 44:19
  Tad Eggleston: Because Denny would have been a great one to talk to, and there's just so many great…
• 44:25
  Tad Eggleston: Danny O'Neill, I mean, another one of my favorite writers is,
• 44:29
  Tad Eggleston: Devin Grayson, who essentially got her start by cold calling him. I haven't talked to her, but I've heard her talk about it on a couple other podcasts. She's like, yeah, I cold-called the DC office to talk to Denny O'Neill, and he talked to me!
• 44:46
  Alisa Kwitney: He was incredibly kind. I remember that he… so I did one of the No Man's Land stories.
• 44:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 44:53
  Alisa Kwitney: And I was given the story that was pure filler.
• 44:58
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, so you worked with, Joe Illich, too, then? Yeah. Would have been in the office.
• 45:04
  Alisa Kwitney: I think so. I'm trying to… this is now a moment or so. Zuly drew my… my issue, but…
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I just mean that Joe Illich did a lot of the editorial work on No Man's Land.
• 45:14
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 45:14
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 45:16
  Alisa Kwitney: All I remember is that I was very excited to be doing a Batman story.
• 45:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, of course.
• 45:21
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, oh, and Denny said, you can't do Batman…
• 45:27
  Alisa Kwitney: Or… and I said, okay, can I do Catwoman? No.
• 45:31
  Alisa Kwitney: Can I do…
• 45:33
  Alisa Kwitney: the Penguin, or the Riddler, or the Joker. No, no, you can't do any villains or Batman. I said, can I do, I think, was it Oracle at the time?
• 45:47
  Alisa Kwitney: And… and he said, no, you can't do that.
• 45:51
  Alisa Kwitney: And I said, what can I do? And he said, that's the challenge. So it was an issue that was filling in when everyone else was busy elsewhere. And I am really, really proud of that issue, because I got in everybody. I put in.
• 46:10
  Alisa Kwitney: Batman, and Oracle, and the Penguin, and Joker, and Catwoman.
• 46:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that sounds…
• 46:18
  Alisa Kwitney: I was proving myself to Denny, and he let me get away with it.
• 46:22
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 46:26
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, that, that, like, this is a newer question. I came up with it when I was talking to,
• 46:33
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Wagner and Kelly Jones recently, that I can't believe I didn't start asking a long time ago,
• 46:42
  Tad Eggleston: In my four short years podcasting, huge, huge amounts of my world have just started feeling surreal, because there's this line from… this completely blurred line between
• 46:55
  Tad Eggleston: These people that I love, their artistic work and whatnot, and these people who are also my friends.
• 47:03
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 47:04
  Tad Eggleston: It's like… it's like when you're watching a World Series game and… and texting with…
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: an Eisner Hall of Famer, it's like…
• 47:13
  Tad Eggleston: What world did I fall into? And it's made me realize more and more that no longer… no matter how long one has been in this business.
• 47:28
  Tad Eggleston: That kind of surreal…
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: spec doesn't get old or go away. So obviously without, like, without,
• 47:45
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I'm not looking for you to dish dirt or anything like that, but tell me some of your favorite stories. Some of the things that if you hadn't been…
• 47:56
  Tad Eggleston: A comics editor, if you hadn't been a novelist, if you hadn't been… a comics writer.
• 48:04
  Tad Eggleston: Never ever would have happened, that you still kind of pinch yourself that they do happen.
• 48:13
  Alisa Kwitney: I'm trying to think,
• 48:17
  Alisa Kwitney: There's… there's so… I almost don't know where to begin in terms of, you know.
• 48:25
  Alisa Kwitney: older or, or new things.
• 48:29
  Alisa Kwitney: Can you narrow down the question?
• 48:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, let's start with a new one, because that's almost more fascinating, because, like, that's… that's one of the things, and again, I've only been doing it for 4 years, but, like, it blows my mind that it never gets old.
• 48:45
  Tad Eggleston: when somebody that I was afraid to send an email to, to ask them to be on the show.
• 48:52
  Tad Eggleston: Like, 6 months later is like…
• 48:55
  Tad Eggleston: my friend, rather than just the person that I'm scared to send an email to, right?
• 49:02
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't lost that feeling at all, and from talking to people who've been in the industry much longer, it doesn't seem like most people do. There's this sense of wonder from being able… so, like, you've been in the industry for
• 49:16
  Tad Eggleston: More years than we're gonna do the math on, because you're clearly only, like, 26, 27, and therefore couldn't possibly have been working in the industry.
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: 35 years ago.
• 49:28
  Alisa Kwitney: So, one of the stories that Wha… You know, I think it's…
• 49:39
  Alisa Kwitney: because I was working at DC Comics, I look back now, and I wish I'd gone and spent more time with the Mad Magazine guys.
• 49:48
  Alisa Kwitney: But, because I was there, this is probably not your expected… wait, can I find something? I'm going to find something.
• 49:56
  Alisa Kwitney: that I just unearthed in a box.
• 50:00
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, where are you?
• 50:04
  Alisa Kwitney: No, no, no. Where did I put it? Okay.
• 50:08
  Alisa Kwitney: Wait.
• 50:09
  Alisa Kwitney: It's the Brides of Shekenstein.
• 50:12
  Alisa Kwitney: Here it is.
• 50:14
  Alisa Kwitney: So, because I was working at DC Comics, My father had,
• 50:22
  Alisa Kwitney: Harlan Ellison had started out as a fan of my father's, as a very young, I think, teenager, and then it obviously rose to great success. I think there's some letter that…
• 50:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he wrote a Daredevil comic. Everybody knows that that's the height of success, to get to write a Daredevil comic.
• 50:38
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's those other short stories in that movie that they stole from one of them, but writing a Daredevil comic, that's…
• 50:46
  Alisa Kwitney: The height, the height. So, the, the, the thing that,
• 50:51
  Alisa Kwitney: I remember is during that time, you know, suddenly I got to talk to more people. I ended up talking to, and I can't remember how this happened, that I was in touch with Harlan around this introduction he wrote to my father's book of short stories.
• 51:09
  Alisa Kwitney: But here's… here's this little note, can you see, from Harlan directly, and it says, Lisa, Pulp House sent me extras of the intro. I have need for only one or two copies, the books are now out, and I thought you might… could use these. Affectionately, Uncle Harlan.
• 51:28
  Alisa Kwitney: And so he wrote this.
• 51:30
  Alisa Kwitney: I don't know, maybe Harlan would have done this anyway. I think the fact that I was an editor, you know, so I get this…
• 51:38
  Alisa Kwitney: you know, this is my father asking Harlan to do this, and instead, he… he talks about meeting my father, and then goes on to kind of…
• 51:48
  Alisa Kwitney: Attack him for everything he ever did wrong, and talk about how crazy all of his ex-wives were, with the exception of…
• 51:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Ziva Whitney.
• 51:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And, oh, gosh, yeah, so there's… there's Z and Fruma and the whole story,
• 52:09
  Alisa Kwitney: Let's see… Hey, Sheckley, when you gonna pay me back the hundred you borrowed when you were editing at Omni?
• 52:16
  Alisa Kwitney: And, so finally Sheckley blows it with Z, which I have always taken to be a major stupid move, but maybe it was just the end of the natural life of the relationship, who knows? And who's the hell to say, none of our business, really, not that any of us has been so goddamn smart ourselves.
• 52:33
  Alisa Kwitney: So he, yeah, so this is back when I was an assistant editor.
• 52:39
  Alisa Kwitney: And anyway, it goes on and on about, about, all of, of…
• 52:46
  Alisa Kwitney: The Brides of Shecheckenstein, in which only my mother comes out Sort of beautifully.
• 52:53
  Alisa Kwitney: And, yeah, so that was… that was a pretty…
• 52:58
  Alisa Kwitney: cool moment, and I think at one point I got to talk with Douglas Adams as well.
• 53:03
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 53:04
  Alisa Kwitney: there were kind of amazing moments for me. And on the other hand, I will say that
• 53:11
  Alisa Kwitney: I think the stuff that I enjoyed the most was talking about story, talking with story about… with story… with Paul Levitz, with Denny O'Neill, and with Neil Gaiman.
• 53:23
  Alisa Kwitney: And I know that right now, you know, that, you know, it has been, you know, that…
• 53:32
  Tad Eggleston: Tough. Yes. No, I understand.
• 53:35
  Alisa Kwitney: But, I…
• 53:37
  Alisa Kwitney: have rarely met anyone, besides my father, too, who talks about story and writing in… in such,
• 53:48
  Alisa Kwitney: In ways that crack it open and invite you in.
• 53:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 53:53
  Alisa Kwitney: As opposed to people, you know, using their intellect to… Beat you like a cudgel.
• 54:00
  Tad Eggleston: You mean that, like… Among writing teachers, there are some that are…
• 54:08
  Tad Eggleston: Surly, old, failed writers that wanna beat you up rather than invite you in? I'm shocked!
• 54:15
  Alisa Kwitney: Those ones never even let me into their courses, because I was always writing genre.
• 54:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Yes.
• 54:23
  Tad Eggleston: That, that actually… and this is, this is another, another question that, like, answer to the extent that you feel like, because it's a little personal.
• 54:32
  Tad Eggleston: Like, again, reading the afterword type stuff, I was…
• 54:40
  Tad Eggleston: I was struck with how you managed to form Some sort of positive relationship.
• 54:48
  Tad Eggleston: With a man that you also talk about essentially abandoning you for a decade.
• 54:53
  Alisa Kwitney: My fault.
• 54:54
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, I mean, I…
• 54:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, your father, right? Let's see. That the autism mind forgets the salient points, because I know that we both know who I'm talking about. I assume that the listener…
• 55:08
  Alisa Kwitney: I want to make it clear that wasn't Neil, who was the last.
• 55:10
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 55:10
  Alisa Kwitney: I guess it.
• 55:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 55:12
  Alisa Kwitney: So let me say,
• 55:15
  Alisa Kwitney: So the thing about my father is, I was raised in part by his bookcase.
• 55:20
  Alisa Kwitney: So, I, you know, he and my mom split, Fairly amicably.
• 55:27
  Alisa Kwitney: When I was about 4 or 5.
• 55:30
  Alisa Kwitney: And then…
• 55:32
  Alisa Kwitney: there was a little bit of contact, and then he just took off for Europe, stopped paying child support, and there was pretty much no contact.
• 55:41
  Alisa Kwitney: But I continued to have his bookcase, so I had the books that formed him.
• 55:47
  Alisa Kwitney: And I had his books, and I had the books of his compatriots. And I honestly felt that there was this…
• 55:58
  Alisa Kwitney: feeling of recognition I got reading his short stories. My kids have felt it, too. They are weird, they are terse, they are funny, they have teeth.
• 56:08
  Alisa Kwitney: They are very accessible, but they stay with you. There are, in particular, I think, two stories about dating, which seemed, you know, very…
• 56:18
  Alisa Kwitney: germane when I was dating in the 90s, but now seem utterly prescient to the online dating situation. I think one ends at a firing range, and the other ends with, being fixed up by your aunt.
• 56:32
  Alisa Kwitney: So, I… I kill nothing by giving you the ending first. I heartily recommend you go back and read them.
• 56:41
  Alisa Kwitney: You've convinced me.
• 56:43
  Alisa Kwitney: So I… his work was satire that was more popular in Russia and Ukraine, because it was read as an indirect attack on authoritarianism.
• 56:57
  Alisa Kwitney: I loved it. So when I… by the time he came back to New York, I was 14,
• 57:02
  Alisa Kwitney: And I already knew that I wanted to write.
• 57:06
  Alisa Kwitney: And so it gave us… I wanted to write, and I love to read. It gave us a way to connect that wasn't about emotion, and wasn't about him being a father, which he, you know, it was too late for that.
• 57:20
  Alisa Kwitney: And so, I ended up, you know, I'd sit in on interviews, and he couldn't remember what he'd written or why, and I would say, having read it more recently, oh, well, that's the story in which this and this happens. And he would say, oh, thank you, and…
• 57:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And…
• 57:38
  Alisa Kwitney: And yet, he was also the kind of person where I could say to him, you know, you just left. You left, you didn't…
• 57:46
  Alisa Kwitney: pay support, you didn't, you know, how do you justify that? And he could say, well, you know, and he would be able to talk about it and apologize. It didn't ever mean anything different, but you could talk to him about anything.
• 58:01
  Tad Eggleston: And.
• 58:03
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, so the other thing I'll say, I had two big shocks around my parents, because they were never together in my…
• 58:10
  Tad Eggleston: I have very few memories of them together.
• 58:14
  Alisa Kwitney: But when he came back in, there were a few times when I would see them sitting together, talking.
• 58:19
  Alisa Kwitney: Or I'd see him playing flamenco guitar and my mother singing.
• 58:23
  Alisa Kwitney: Anyway, I'd look at them and I'd think.
• 58:31
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, you, too, I can see you, I can see you young and passionate, beatniks singing songs of the Spanish Civil War, you know, it was…
• 58:42
  Alisa Kwitney: And… And then when my mom started to suffer from dementia,
• 58:49
  Alisa Kwitney: I started to really read through her letters.
• 58:51
  Alisa Kwitney: And I was in shock, because I found these letters, and I saw how much they were in love, and for how long. We don't write letters anymore. We have emails, we have phone calls, we don't have the same kind of record left.
• 59:06
  Alisa Kwitney: But I have the record in their
• 59:09
  Alisa Kwitney: oh, so clever, writing that… that showed, you know, who they were, and I… some of the letters got printed in the back of the graphic.
• 59:19
  Tad Eggleston: You included some in the graphic novel, and like, initially, when you talked about
• 59:24
  Tad Eggleston: introducing the letters how much they showed the love, and I started reading them, I'm like, oh, I don't see this. But then, as I read them again, I'm like, oh, the love is in the shorthand.
• 59:33
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: The love is in the things that they don't have to say to each other.
• 59:39
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, the love is that this quirky letter that doesn't seem like a love letter at all.
• 59:46
  Tad Eggleston: Like, absolutely can be, in part because it was written down, rather than… Yeah, I miss letter writing.
• 59:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah. I used to do a lot of letter writing when I was a kid, and now I don't have anybody to write to, so…
• 1:00:01
  Tad Eggleston: like, I need to find, like, somebody who wants to be a pen pal again, because…
• 1:00:05
  Tad Eggleston: There's just… I mean, and, like, I sometimes treat emails, like.
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: real letter writing, and for that matter, I'm more common… I'm more likely to treat texts like real conversations or even letter writing.
• 1:00:19
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 1:00:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I, I, I…
• 1:00:23
  Tad Eggleston: I kind of abhor short, short communication.
• 1:00:26
  Alisa Kwitney: Except, except for planning.
• 1:00:29
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes, I mean, we're not built for that.
• 1:00:32
  Tad Eggleston: But I…
• 1:00:33
  Alisa Kwitney: So, when I was writing, I think what I was trying to do is get
• 1:00:41
  Alisa Kwitney: I wanted to visit a time I could never have known.
• 1:00:46
  Alisa Kwitney: One of the fascinating things that happened with all of this is that in the book.
• 1:00:52
  Alisa Kwitney: I write about my mother and a friend, and the friend has a name Frida, which was not the real name of the friend, because I was inventing her. Because my mom, from the time…
• 1:01:03
  Tad Eggleston: Even if she's real, because, like, you're not very nice to Frida, so you wouldn't want to…
• 1:01:08
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, the thing is, all I knew is that my mom had had this really close friend, and that this friend had married a science fiction writer, and so had my
• 1:01:19
  Alisa Kwitney: my mother, and they were couples friends, and then something happened, and the friend did what we now call ghosting. My mom never called it ghosting, we didn't have that term.
• 1:01:29
  Alisa Kwitney: And it was an utter mystery.
• 1:01:31
  Alisa Kwitney: And only after my mom died, and after the comic was finished.
• 1:01:36
  Alisa Kwitney: did I actually manage to get in touch with this friend? Still alive, still Compass Mentis, and found out, you know, the secret of the dissolution of their friendship. So it's… it's not the story that's in Howl, because I didn't know it, and I think it is, like so many things.
• 1:01:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Less satisfying than the fictional story.
• 1:01:59
  Alisa Kwitney: But…
• 1:02:00
  Tad Eggleston: over a casserole recipe? Because that would just be…
• 1:02:04
  Alisa Kwitney: No!
• 1:02:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, no, because you're in New York, so it can't be over casserole recipe, maybe a cocktail recipe.
• 1:02:11
  Alisa Kwitney: No, you know, I think, I think there is…
• 1:02:17
  Alisa Kwitney: having the facts of what, you know, irked Fruma, which was her name, she was married to William Ten, they had a good marriage, Philip Klass.
• 1:02:27
  Alisa Kwitney: I think…
• 1:02:30
  Alisa Kwitney: Philip Klass was his real name. You know, she… I think there is something underneath the details of whatever, you know, it was, I think…
• 1:02:40
  Tad Eggleston: There always is.
• 1:02:41
  Alisa Kwitney: had a weekly bridge game, and at some point my mom claimed that she and Bob had colds.
• 1:02:47
  Alisa Kwitney: And had instead gone to a publishing party, and this was sort of the straw that broke the camel's back.
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And, and I… I'm telling you rather casually, because I don't think… I imagine this was more my father saying, I've got to go to this party, and, you know… Right.
• 1:03:03
  Alisa Kwitney: He would… he would have been the one not wanting to…
• 1:03:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but I mean, one of the things that you had in the story that would actually play along with that is that element of jealousy, both.
• 1:03:14
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 1:03:15
  Tad Eggleston: Both between her torture mother and…
• 1:03:19
  Tad Eggleston: And him towards your father, at least in the book.
• 1:03:22
  Tad Eggleston: Or in your book.
• 1:03:24
  Tad Eggleston: if there was… if there was truth to that and reality, I could see how, like, both lying not to go to,
• 1:03:33
  Tad Eggleston: Previously scheduled engagement, but specifically lying because you got invited to this thing that they would have liked to have been invited to.
• 1:03:43
  Alisa Kwitney: I imagine that it's… people think jealousy is what
• 1:03:47
  Alisa Kwitney: destroys friendships. I often think it's the perception of unfairness.
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:03:52
  Alisa Kwitney: I think that unfairness is one of the main…
• 1:03:57
  Alisa Kwitney: propulsions of reading, too. We read and we get very empathically connected to characters when we experience ourselves with them being treated unfairly. So I always think that there's…
• 1:04:11
  Alisa Kwitney: unfairness that propels you a bit. There's curiosity, which propels you, then there's…
• 1:04:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think… I think… I think jealousy is more what the people who…
• 1:04:27
  Tad Eggleston: The people who are envied, call it.
• 1:04:29
  Alisa Kwitney: Hmm…
• 1:04:31
  Tad Eggleston: I think the people who are…
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: jealous, and I agree with you, I don't really like calling them jealous. I don't think they're actually upset about the success
• 1:04:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think most quote-unquote jealous people, they don't want to tear you down.
• 1:04:47
  Tad Eggleston: They're frustrated that they don't understand
• 1:04:52
  Tad Eggleston: Why they haven't been successful in the ways that they've wanted to be, and you are.
• 1:04:58
  Tad Eggleston: And therefore, you know, you're… Your success becomes a reminder of…
• 1:05:05
  Tad Eggleston: What they feel are unfairnesses in their life.
• 1:05:08
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 1:05:09
  Tad Eggleston: That sometimes are actual unfairnesses, and sometimes are…
• 1:05:12
  Alisa Kwitney: And,
• 1:05:13
  Tad Eggleston: Not.
• 1:05:13
  Alisa Kwitney: I also think there was some money element in there, which had more to do with my father, because I think he was,
• 1:05:23
  Alisa Kwitney: And again, you know, I… I think my father was both charming and difficult. I think one of…
• 1:05:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I honestly think… Once again, a writer who's charming and difficult, I'm shocked. Shocked!
• 1:05:39
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, yeah, I mean, he, he was,
• 1:05:44
  Alisa Kwitney: so incredibly self-involved, but I… and I feel sad, you know, I… I actually… I really enjoyed, and I want to reach out to her again. I…
• 1:05:55
  Alisa Kwitney: I mean, I feel sad that, my mother and Fruma couldn't ever have
• 1:06:00
  Alisa Kwitney: solve that mystery. I don't… not that my mother was burning up with, questions about that, And, and…
• 1:06:08
  Alisa Kwitney: I wanted to circle back to dementia for a moment and to say, you know, one of the things about dementia that I think is really fascinating
• 1:06:16
  Alisa Kwitney: Is that it's not…
• 1:06:19
  Alisa Kwitney: one thing, and one thing only. Just as, you know, you get me in the morning, or, you know, usually before 4 o'clock in the afternoon, my intelligence is up here.
• 1:06:30
  Alisa Kwitney: And then I just trickle down until finally around 9 o'clock, when a lot of podcasts want to speak to me, I'm good for only watching Dancing with the Stars.
• 1:06:39
  Alisa Kwitney: And I, you know, so the same with dementia, and my mom not only had dementia.
• 1:06:46
  Alisa Kwitney: And initially, I got her to the wrong place, and they gave her too many drugs, and then I had to, wean her off the too many drugs, and I don't know what additional damage that did. Then she had aphasia, and she could not speak a lot.
• 1:07:02
  Tad Eggleston: Amber.
• 1:07:03
  Alisa Kwitney: But…
• 1:07:04
  Alisa Kwitney: the great thing is, I knew her really well, and I always felt like I could have the conversation for two of us, you know, based on almost nothing, because, you know, I know more about my mother than most daughters, I would say, know about their
• 1:07:21
  Alisa Kwitney: mothers or daughters, I know things that a person probably shouldn't know about their mother, but I know everything. I know that when her therapist said to her, you know, oh, you're wearing slacks because you're scared of your own femininity, that the real reason was that my 20-something-year-old mother was embarrassed about her skinny legs, which she'd inherited from her father.
• 1:07:42
  Alisa Kwitney: So I know so much.
• 1:07:45
  Alisa Kwitney: And anyway, and it helped us have a conversation, and towards the end, When she was…
• 1:07:51
  Alisa Kwitney: Less energetic, and, and, and, you know.
• 1:07:54
  Alisa Kwitney: as I say, she could barely speak.
• 1:07:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Suddenly, she turned to me, and she… she said in Hebrew… she… Hebrew, I thought, was her second language, but it turned out it was her first language, which I discovered with the official… and she said, you're writing?
• 1:08:09
  Alisa Kwitney: And I said, Oh, yes.
• 1:08:12
  Alisa Kwitney: I'm writing about you.
• 1:08:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:08:17
  Alisa Kwitney: Which was, close to the… close to the end. The… one of the finer things… final things she said to me was on Election Day, when,
• 1:08:27
  Alisa Kwitney: I was watching the new… we had a little deathsgiving downstairs, everyone was gathered around with the TV, and…
• 1:08:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And, my mom had been pretty nonverbal. You know, she was one of those…
• 1:08:39
  Alisa Kwitney: things where you could sink more into yourself. You become your self.
• 1:08:43
  Alisa Kwitney: And suddenly, I sat down on her bed, she said, Hiya Bubbula!
• 1:08:47
  Alisa Kwitney: And it was just this wonderful, wonderful moment, and I…
• 1:08:53
  Alisa Kwitney: In a way… oh, my second dog coming in.
• 1:08:55
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:08:56
  Alisa Kwitney: I, I hope in a way that
• 1:08:58
  Alisa Kwitney: all of that… oh, I… I… I… we're getting closer to the end. I wanted to tell you about body horror.
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: Huh? Sure.
• 1:09:07
  Alisa Kwitney: So, one of the inspirations in terms of the book was the, john Carpenter's…
• 1:09:15
  Alisa Kwitney: two different approaches to protein and shape-shifting aliens. One, of course, was Star Man, the sexy young Jeff Bridges with Karen Allen, you know what I mean? And the other…
• 1:09:28
  Tad Eggleston: That's the one that I've seen.
• 1:09:29
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, and the other is the thing.
• 1:09:31
  Tad Eggleston: Which I might watch this week, because it was the one picked for my family's movie club.
• 1:09:39
  Tad Eggleston: But I haven't decided if I'm going to, because I haven't decided if I'm in the mood for a horror movie this week.
• 1:09:45
  Alisa Kwitney: I… I understand. Well, so…
• 1:09:49
  Alisa Kwitney: Rob Botin was this very young, very capable, inventing things as he went,
• 1:09:57
  Alisa Kwitney: Practical effects designer on that movie.
• 1:10:01
  Alisa Kwitney: And he does a lot of the stuff that
• 1:10:04
  Alisa Kwitney: you know, it's fun and amazing, and, you know, I mean, if I were in a movie theater in 1982, I'd probably, you know.
• 1:10:13
  Alisa Kwitney: pee myself, but now on a TV or a computer, I can handle it.
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I was in a movie theater in 1982, and I guarantee I peed myself.
• 1:10:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, I am.
• 1:10:23
  Alisa Kwitney: I.
• 1:10:24
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I…
• 1:10:26
  Alisa Kwitney: highest compliment.
• 1:10:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the first movie that I ever went to was Empire Strikes Back, but I missed the big reveal because I needed to be fed, so Mom took me to the bathroom.
• 1:10:40
  Tad Eggleston: I don't.
• 1:10:41
  Alisa Kwitney: I love it.
• 1:10:43
  Alisa Kwitney: Okay, so… so raw teen was one of the inspirations for the body horror, and I wanted to do lots of different things, and Alan and I have this deep collaboration, and I would look up, you know, how mushrooms do, and I watched and rewatched the thing to be inspired for, you know, my big fight scene.
• 1:11:03
  Tad Eggleston: And now I have to watch it. You've made it so I'm participating in my family's movie club this week, because…
• 1:11:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because now, it's not just the movie they're all watching, it's like, it's the one that's related to.
• 1:11:17
  Alisa Kwitney: the podcast that I do.
• 1:11:19
  Tad Eggleston: I think you should watch it, and then re-watch…
• 1:11:22
  Alisa Kwitney: Starman, because they were…
• 1:11:24
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:11:25
  Alisa Kwitney: they were done so close in time together, and I always feel like if… it's like Cesar Milan showing you a dog that's really out of control, and then showing you how well-behaved it can be.
• 1:11:36
  Alisa Kwitney: And, you know, I just keep thinking, if you'd only taken the alien from the thing and treated him a little better, he would have turned into young Jeff Bridges. Who doesn't want that?
• 1:11:46
  Alisa Kwitney: So… So the thing is, I wanted to play with body horror.
• 1:11:52
  Alisa Kwitney: And…
• 1:11:55
  Alisa Kwitney: And I wanted it to be funny, and as I say, I love, you know, the… I was just rewatching Troll from 1980, is it? 1981 or 2?
• 1:12:06
  Alisa Kwitney: the little horror puppets, also in an apartment building in New York City. Sounds right.
• 1:12:13
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, the little…
• 1:12:15
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:12:16
  Alisa Kwitney: Okay, I'll stop that now.
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no, no!
• 1:12:18
  Alisa Kwitney: So, I… I thought I was sort of prepared. My mom had a skin cancer.
• 1:12:26
  Alisa Kwitney: That we had removed, and you couldn't really do.
• 1:12:30
  Alisa Kwitney: Chemo or radiation, because she, you know, it's just not the thing you do to someone with pretty advanced
• 1:12:36
  Alisa Kwitney: Alzheimer's. They wouldn't understand she had no…
• 1:12:38
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:12:39
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, and she wasn't verbal enough to even report on
• 1:12:43
  Alisa Kwitney: things accurately. Right. Except for these weird flashes of cognition you'd get. But, so…
• 1:12:50
  Alisa Kwitney: When the tumor came back, it came back quick, in a very unexpected place on her neck, and started to grow, and I wanted to see if we could remove it just to make her comfortable.
• 1:13:02
  Alisa Kwitney: And because of its location, it couldn't be removed. And then, you know, she was on hospice. So this… this tumor started to look
• 1:13:13
  Alisa Kwitney: so disgusting. I mean, it was… it was…
• 1:13:16
  Alisa Kwitney: growing, and it started to ooze, and it had all this smell, and I started to call it squiggy.
• 1:13:23
  Alisa Kwitney: And I just felt like it was squamous cell. And I felt that there was only one way that I could handle this, was with humor, because we were going to have to live with this cancer, and it wasn't going to get better.
• 1:13:38
  Alisa Kwitney: And there was no way to heal it. And our lives don't give us a lot of preparation.
• 1:13:43
  Tad Eggleston: What's happening to the…
• 1:13:46
  Alisa Kwitney: person that's been the most important person to you in the world. And so, all I could do is say, is there anything we can do about Squiggy? Squiggy's really smelling, and I think it's a little uncomfortable right now.
• 1:13:56
  Alisa Kwitney: Squiggy broke through the bandage.
• 1:13:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And…
• 1:14:01
  Alisa Kwitney: toward the end of life, actually, there was a real fear, and I don't think I fully let it in that Squiggy was going to, hemorrhage, and it was going to be this big, kind of, John Carpenter ending. I mean, it wouldn't have been so bad…
• 1:14:17
  Alisa Kwitney: For my mom, because she would just experience, rapid blood loss, which isn't the worst thing in the world, when you're.
• 1:14:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there are worse ways to go.
• 1:14:26
  Alisa Kwitney: But, you know, might have been very dramatic, and I remember at one point, the nurse who came in was also called Elisa.
• 1:14:34
  Alisa Kwitney: And then the other nurse came in, and I could see that people were like.
• 1:14:39
  Alisa Kwitney: Squiggy's bleeding, and we're having a little trouble stopping the bleeding, and… And it felt…
• 1:14:47
  Alisa Kwitney: that in their… I mean…
• 1:14:49
  Alisa Kwitney: Obviously, none of this was going to end well, but there was this sort of crazy…
• 1:14:56
  Alisa Kwitney: fun humor to it, like, well, let's try this! How about we do this? How about we… and it… it felt… I don't know how to describe this, but there are so many things that…
• 1:15:06
  Alisa Kwitney: ache.
• 1:15:07
  Alisa Kwitney: in me, with the loss of my mom, but I felt that writing pod people and body horror
• 1:15:14
  Alisa Kwitney: actually protected me, and helped me make it through, so that I… You know, could be there.
• 1:15:21
  Alisa Kwitney: You know, dealing with all of this with… with…
• 1:15:24
  Alisa Kwitney: calm, strange humor. So, yeah, that was…
• 1:15:28
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 1:15:30
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 1:15:31
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, I'm gonna ask, my, my, favorite closing question?
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:15:40
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
• 1:15:43
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
• 1:15:47
  Alisa Kwitney: But something that you love.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: That, not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, because you want more people to talk about it with.
• 1:15:57
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, gosh, okay, so I don't know if all the comics people I know know about Roz Chasts. Can we talk about something more pleasant?
• 1:16:07
  Alisa Kwitney: But…
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: Such a good…
• 1:16:10
  Alisa Kwitney: It's… Such a wonderful book, and she is just a fabulous writer-artist.
• 1:16:20
  Alisa Kwitney: And then there's another one here. Let me see if I can… Lay my hands on it.
• 1:16:25
  Alisa Kwitney: See, I'll remember.
• 1:16:28
  Alisa Kwitney: Wait, is it this? Yes! I did!
• 1:16:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Probably nothing. Probably Nothing A Diary of Not Your Average Nine Months by Matilda Tristram.
• 1:16:41
  Alisa Kwitney: Wonderful, very deceptively simple cartoony drawings about a woman who finds out she has cancer and is pregnant.
• 1:16:52
  Tad Eggleston: Probably Nothing by Matilda. What's the last name?
• 1:16:54
  Alisa Kwitney: Tristram, T-R-Istrom S-T-R-A. Okay.
• 1:16:58
  Alisa Kwitney: So those are two, given this… I mean, if you'd asked me in another moment, I would have said something else entirely.
• 1:17:05
  Tad Eggleston: This is why it's my last question, no matter how many times you've been on the show.
• 1:17:11
  Alisa Kwitney: Hmm…
• 1:17:13
  Tad Eggleston: Cause…
• 1:17:14
  Tad Eggleston: There's always a new answer, and it's one of the few places that I have people, like, recommend comics that I haven't read.
• 1:17:23
  Tad Eggleston: Because I read way too many comics.
• 1:17:25
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't actually think that people can read way too many comics, but…
• 1:17:30
  Tad Eggleston: would I read a lot of comics! It's always cool to actually have one like the… probably nothing I had never heard of.
• 1:17:39
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:17:40
  Alisa Kwitney: Well, so the… actually, when I'm teaching comic book writing, I often point to the lovely, charming illustrations in here, and I say.
• 1:17:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice.
• 1:17:49
  Alisa Kwitney: art background do you think this, artist has? Because it looks… her drawings look a little like Madeline, the, you know, from, Madeline in Paris.
• 1:17:59
  Alisa Kwitney: And often people's first reaction is to say, oh, you know, no background. And then they look again, and they see that this is, you know, it's a deceptively,
• 1:18:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:18:11
  Alisa Kwitney: It's almost harder to tell a story.
• 1:18:14
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, my dogs are… That simply.
• 1:18:16
  Alisa Kwitney: The devil.
• 1:18:21
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the number, I mean, the last time Shelly was on, she brought Liz Prince with her, because Liz did the art for her.
• 1:18:28
  Tad Eggleston: Camp Book.
• 1:18:30
  Alisa Kwitney: Mmm…
• 1:18:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I've actually been a fan of Liz's for even longer than I've been a fan of Shelly's.
• 1:18:38
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow. And part of that is because Liz has this deceptively simple style that makes you feel like you can do it too.
• 1:18:48
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 1:18:49
  Tad Eggleston: But when you start deconstructing it, you go, oh my god, this is so…
• 1:18:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:18:56
  Tad Eggleston: just right.
• 1:19:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and that's, I mean, that's… that's one of the beauties of comics, you know, I just re-read, for a book club tonight. Have you had an opportunity to read Raina Tuggemeyer and Scott McCloud's The Cartoonist Club?
• 1:19:13
  Alisa Kwitney: I have not. I've read other books by both of them with great.
• 1:19:17
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:19:18
  Tad Eggleston: They got to, you know, because Raina apparently had been telling Scott for years that she wished that there was an Understanding Comics more for the middle grade set.
• 1:19:29
  Tad Eggleston: And finally she went, wait a minute.
• 1:19:31
  Tad Eggleston: Why don't I just call them and say, hey, let's do a book together that's understanding comics for the middle grade set.
• 1:19:38
  Alisa Kwitney: I love that, and I, by the way, remember him giving a lecture at Vassar College, and I took my then 11-year-old daughter.
• 1:19:46
  Alisa Kwitney: And she loved it and understood it. He's such a great communicator and great teacher.
• 1:19:52
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but yeah, so I… I was… I had a point there. I was re-reading it today, and, and like…
• 1:19:59
  Tad Eggleston: Just marveling at… Because it's the understanding comics for, like, how much of comics is knowing
• 1:20:08
  Tad Eggleston: The acting like you were talking about earlier, or… Or…
• 1:20:14
  Tad Eggleston: getting the right symbolism, you know? I mean, it's why, in some ways, it's harder for…
• 1:20:21
  Tad Eggleston: The polished art to tell a good story, because like… You can't be too subtle.
• 1:20:32
  Tad Eggleston: Sometimes.
• 1:20:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Oh, gosh, this could be a whole other podcast. And by the way.
• 1:20:38
  Tad Eggleston: It will be later tonight.
• 1:20:39
  Alisa Kwitney: Will you, will you… oh! Will you write me, a list of all of the, you know, comics I should be reading, so…
• 1:20:47
  Tad Eggleston: My best.
• 1:20:48
  Alisa Kwitney: gotten…
• 1:20:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, what I'll say right now is, like, we do book clubs out the wazoo, so if you ever want to just talk comics, I can invite you to… I mean, tonight's… tonight's book club is part of our monthly, Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival book club and support group.
• 1:21:07
  Tad Eggleston: Because after that election last November, I realized that it was going to be a really, really hard…
• 1:21:15
  Tad Eggleston: Four years for a lot of us.
• 1:21:18
  Tad Eggleston: And we needed… we needed a place to… to gather our strength, and… and to laugh, and to whatever. And I also happen to know a… a group called Psychocomicology, where they use comics in their psychology practice.
• 1:21:34
  Alisa Kwitney: Love it.
• 1:21:36
  Tad Eggleston: So they co-host this with me?
• 1:21:39
  Tad Eggleston: I would.
• 1:21:40
  Alisa Kwitney: Absolutely love. Absolutely. Yeah. No, because…
• 1:21:43
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah.
• 1:21:44
  Alisa Kwitney: Comics are my favorite drug.
• 1:21:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so I will definitely send you emails with ideas, and letting you know the crazy stuff that we do, because…
• 1:21:53
  Tad Eggleston: I record way too many episodes, because they're my drug, too. And talking about them is even more my drug, because…
• 1:22:00
  Tad Eggleston: then I feel like I'm doing something with it. I'm frustrated with the number of people who don't think of…
• 1:22:09
  Tad Eggleston: comics as a medium, or even if they think of comics as a medium, they don't think of them as, like… they think of them as a lesser medium, and I'm like, how can you have a lesser medium?
• 1:22:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, yeah, there are books that aren't as good as other books, there are movies that aren't as good as other movies, but to look at a medium and say, there's nothing worthwhile in that medium.
• 1:22:31
  Tad Eggleston: Let's just… Nonsense.
• 1:22:35
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah, I mean, my grandmother told me that, comics would make me go blind, but…
• 1:22:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, well, but here's where it becomes even more nonsense, and, like, it's where me being a geek and whatnot, like, they're the only medium that requires you use both sides of your brain.
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: requires.
• 1:22:55
  Alisa Kwitney: Yes.
• 1:22:58
  Tad Eggleston: They're far and away the most interactive media.
• 1:23:00
  Alisa Kwitney: Dog is complaining that we have excluded her from this party, sorry.
• 1:23:06
  Tad Eggleston: You have to… you… you have to fill in the gutters. I mean, that was one of the things, like…
• 1:23:13
  Tad Eggleston: there's, like, in Understanding Comics, there's a chapter on the gutters. In Cartoonist Club, there's a chapter where they're talking about the timing and whatnot, and they're, you know, they're talking about, okay, you've got these four…
• 1:23:27
  Tad Eggleston: panels, what's the story? And they're like, well, it's this. It's like, well, but how do you know it's that? Because you don't actually see that happen.
• 1:23:34
  Tad Eggleston: What if you threw this in?
• 1:23:38
  Alisa Kwitney: Yeah.
• 1:23:39
  Tad Eggleston: What if you switched the order?
• 1:23:42
  Alisa Kwitney: And it creates inferential thinking, and in my experience, I worked at a school for kids with dyslexia.
• 1:23:50
  Alisa Kwitney: And the hard part wasn't teaching them the mechanics of reading.
• 1:23:54
  Alisa Kwitney: It was that because they'd missed
• 1:23:57
  Alisa Kwitney: Some stages of reading, they didn't do inferential thinking.
• 1:24:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:24:01
  Alisa Kwitney: And so that was the thing, and I absolutely used comics.
• 1:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:24:07
  Alisa Kwitney: to explain.
• 1:24:08
  Tad Eggleston: you're not just reading the text, you're reading this image. I'm friendly with a teacher out of Philadelphia named Tim Smyth, who literally wrote the textbook, Teaching with Comics and Graphic Novels.
• 1:24:21
  Tad Eggleston: And part of the reason he wrote that textbook, you know, he's a history teacher and reading specialist at the high school level, but…
• 1:24:30
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are how they Unlocked reading for one of his… dyslexic children.
• 1:24:37
  Alisa Kwitney: And that made him… I mean, he'd always been a comics fan, but, like, seeing the… and with his history classes, like, he'll just throw old comics on the table to have them use them as artifacts, you know, look at them.
• 1:24:48
  Tad Eggleston: tell me what you see. You know, they'll have to talk about the fashion, or the cars, or what they can learn without even reading the comics about when the comic was made. You know, there's so many things
• 1:24:59
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, particularly in an era where, with teaching, we understand
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: that there are visual learners and verbal learners and whatnot. We're… we're incorporating more and more graphics into textbooks, but, like, the idea that you would just have graphics and text interspersed is something that…
• 1:25:18
  Tad Eggleston: Collegiate programs are all over.
• 1:25:21
  Alisa Kwitney: But it's still somehow passe for K-12?
• 1:25:27
  Alisa Kwitney: No, and I think.
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, John Lewis wrote his biography as a comic. Thank you, Andrew Item, for convincing him to.
• 1:25:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, and by the way, the next thing I think that Maurice, that Alain and I are going to do, is going to be middle grade horror.
• 1:25:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, nice.
• 1:25:45
  Tad Eggleston: Nice. I look forward to it. Did you see the work he just did with Mark Russell?
• 1:25:50
  Alisa Kwitney: I've seen just a little, I can't wait to…
• 1:25:53
  Tad Eggleston: Thanksgiving? Yeah. The Thanksgiving one-shot was… Wonderful horror.
• 1:26:01
  Tad Eggleston: So, Elisa, stick around for a minute, but let me take us out. For Elisa Quitney, the book is Howl. The book before that was Guilt. You'll see her in the editorial.
• 1:26:11
  Tad Eggleston: line all over Vertigo Comics through the years, and she's got some novels, too, if you do that sort of thing. Do you want to plug any of the novels, or should I… oh, here we go. Rogue, Untouched, Cadaver and Queen, Corpse and Crown.
• 1:26:25
  Tad Eggleston: Flirting in cars, that sounds fun.
• 1:26:27
  Tad Eggleston: Sex as a second language also sounds fun.
• 1:26:30
  Tad Eggleston: on the couch, I mean, keep that away from JD.
• 1:26:34
  Tad Eggleston: Does she or doesn't she? Dominant blonde, and Till the Fat Lady Sings.
• 1:26:41
  Alisa Kwitney: and .
• 1:26:41
  Tad Eggleston: Awesome.
• 1:26:41
  Alisa Kwitney: Moonburn and The Better to Hold You, my two Elisa Sheckley werewolf books.
• 1:26:47
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. I like werewolves.
• 1:26:50
  Tad Eggleston: I'll have to, I'll have to,
• 1:26:53
  Tad Eggleston: Have to… have to check those out at some point.
• 1:26:55
  Alisa Kwitney: STI. In my world, it's an STI.
• 1:26:59
  Tad Eggleston: It's an S.
• 1:27:02
  Tad Eggleston: That's making me think of Charles Burns and, and, and, Black Hole now, see? In comics?
• 1:27:11
  Tad Eggleston: So for Elisa Quitney, this has been 22 panels. We will see you after the next page.