Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #268... 22 Panels with Team Golden Rage

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With Great Power #268... 22 Panels with Team Golden Rage · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good, I guess… I guess it's afternoon to all of my guests. I was about to say good morning, everybody, because that's what it is for me.
• 0:10
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guests today are… is the Golden Rage creative team, Chrissy Williams and Lauren Knight returning, and Sophie Dodgson.
• 0:24
  Sofie Dodgson: jumping in with us this time around, with her red hat and everything. Oh yeah, I can cosplaying.
• 0:32
  Tad Eggleston: I was rereading it this morning in my dazed fugue state as I was eating breakfast, and loving it again. So… I think I'm gonna start, and, like, Chrissy, give the Golden Rage pitch, because, like, it's time for…
• 0:50
  Tad Eggleston: And we might be past final order cutoff, but that doesn't matter as much for the trade paperbacks. The trade paperback of, of, of…
• 0:57
  Tad Eggleston: of the second volume is right around the corner, so give the pitch for people that need to go out and buy it. And thank you, Mom, I'm pretty certain you already have, based on the last episode.
• 1:11
  Chrissy Williams: Okay, so the standard Golden Rage pitch is, the elevator pitch would be, older women… older women have been deemed useless to society, they've been abandoned on an island where they must fight to the death.
• 1:29
  Chrissy Williams: And make friends and dessert. And this is Volume 2 of the series, so we've added another line onto that, which is also, and remember, how the hell to take care of a screaming baby.
• 1:41
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, so what we have is our kind of battle royale meets the Golden Girls setup, plus Child. And we… yeah, that's the basic… that's the basic.
• 1:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and… and, like, this… this volume deals with so many family dynamics, because you've got… you've got the mother-daughter that you had in the first volume, but then, like, we slowly find out that the child is a granddaughter of… of our… of our…
• 2:13
  Tad Eggleston: our big character, whose name is escaping me at the moment, because it's early in the morning.
• 2:21
  Tad Eggleston: It's right.
• 2:22
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, I think what we've done here is… it's very much the case of come for the elevator pitch, but stay for all the chats about friendship and family.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: I'm even gonna, like, we're gonna jump straight into, like, deep spoiler, because there's such a great speech at the end, or near the end, that I just, I, like…
• 2:50
  Tad Eggleston: it hit me again, so I'm sharing it again, because thankfully, I think it applies to at least good fathers, too.
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: It made me feel like I was a good father because it… it applied to me. There is no mother, or there is no good mother. There is just a person who tries and succeeds and fails. Is never any ending. Good enough is amazing.
• 3:15
  Tad Eggleston: Good enough is all you can do. Mothers are just people. We are people.
• 3:23
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I thought, aside from just being a great line in and of itself, that wound up,
• 3:32
  Tad Eggleston: kind of encapsulating so much of the series. You know, you start from this premise that, like, oh, we're getting rid of all of the old ladies, because they don't make babies anymore, so they're useless. Except that, like…
• 3:46
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody's useless or useful beyond…
• 3:51
  Tad Eggleston: what they can manage to do, and everybody has multi… I mean, I think it's telling when the daughter shows up, and she's just like, please, let me stay here, because it's gotten so horrible!
• 4:04
  Tad Eggleston: Which is predictable, because any society that decides that it should just cast off any group of people is likely to be horrible, but…
• 4:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know, even though she's going to this mother, that she has this… deeply…
• 4:23
  Tad Eggleston: flawed relationship, I guess, is the easiest way to put it. Like, it's like, I still feel safer there. I feel safer with you.
• 4:32
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 4:34
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me a little bit, and then we're gonna start kicking towards the art team, about,
• 4:41
  Tad Eggleston: Like, what it meant to really kind of look at… family dynamics.
• 4:48
  Tad Eggleston: In such a holistic and… and…
• 4:52
  Tad Eggleston: human way, I mean, you use the word human way. They're just people. Like…
• 4:59
  Tad Eggleston: Because that's… it's such a hard thing as a child, to look at your parent and go, oh, yeah, you fucked me up, but it's not because you were…
• 5:06
  Tad Eggleston: trying to fuck me up. It's because… you are also fucked up.
• 5:15
  Chrissy Williams: Yes, I think it took me quite a long time to get to that, as an adult, to look back on.
• 5:19
  Tad Eggleston: I think it takes a long time for most of us.
• 5:22
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, I think, there's a whole… there's a whole combination of stuff that has fed into this book, and some of it is definitely born of my experience, having a child when the first Golden Rage volume came out, and doing that very literal, kind of.
• 5:41
  Chrissy Williams: write what you know thing, and wanting to bring that in, and seeing how that changed everything. But…
• 5:47
  Chrissy Williams: One of the key things about my… I would say my personal experience was… I know the phrase, chosen family is obviously,
• 5:57
  Chrissy Williams: Used much more prominently,
• 6:00
  Chrissy Williams: in… I, like, with queer friends, queer family, like, much more, but I found, as a new mom living in the middle of London with no family nearby, that I had no family other than what became the people that we found we could lean on then. And…
• 6:19
  Chrissy Williams: applying that to Golden Rage, for me, is really important, because
• 6:25
  Chrissy Williams: I don't think family are always the best people to help with family. I think.
• 6:30
  Tad Eggleston: Not always.
• 6:31
  Chrissy Williams: I think as,
• 6:34
  Chrissy Williams: I think we've taken for granted, or I… no, I'm saying we, like the royal we. I, I think, took for granted very much that as a capable.
• 6:45
  Chrissy Williams: woman, I would be able to cope with the stresses of motherhood and the early… you know, and it would all be a learning challenge I could roll with. And I think, you know, what we're seeing loads of now is much more interesting stories about motherhood and parenthood. I don't mean just motherhood.
• 7:06
  Chrissy Williams: And how much more realistic and, terrifying it can be. I think there's a… there's a play on in London at the moment that is explicitly about the… the sort of…
• 7:18
  Chrissy Williams: it's almost like going behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, and just like, what do you mean? You don't… no one knows what they're doing? No? Wait, and so… but I can… what? You don't know… nobody? Nobody knows?
• 7:29
  Tad Eggleston: And we have this perception that women… They didn't give you the manual at the hospital, Christy? Yeah. I got a manual.
• 7:36
  Chrissy Williams: I didn't care.
• 7:36
  Tad Eggleston: a manual. I did… I did… I didn't get a manual.
• 7:40
  Chrissy Williams: But no, it's that… it's that idea that women especially, the burden is still always on women to have maternal instincts and, you know, be able to just vibe their way into parenthood or something, which is… which is, on the one hand, madness, but on the one… but on the other hand…
• 7:58
  Chrissy Williams: Well, I think what we're doing in Golden Rage is trying to
• 8:02
  Chrissy Williams: present, like, a spectrum of different women's experiences and relationships to… like, one of my favorite lines in it is when the character Lottie is asked.
• 8:12
  Chrissy Williams: oh, how do you not know… how do you get to your age and not know anything about babies? And Lottie's reply is, oh, I'm just lucky, I guess. Like, that is good and solid and valid and great. I hate the feeling that somehow we're all supposed to just naturally know what to do.
• 8:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I also actually loved that it was Lottie who takes care of everybody else, that's like, yeah, no, I can make you tea, but babies?
• 8:41
  Chrissy Williams: Absolutely, give me a chicken, give me a cat, but a human. Thank you.
• 8:46
  Tad Eggleston: I can take care of them when they're 10.
• 8:50
  Tad Eggleston: Which, I often feel that way, it's like, my wife and I were just talking about it last night, you know, because when we got married.
• 8:59
  Tad Eggleston: She still thought that she wanted it.
• 9:01
  Tad Eggleston: kids, and I already had kids, so it was like, either way, right? I love you, so if you want to have a child, I don't want to deprive you of that, but… but I got kids, so if you don't, we're fine.
• 9:15
  Tad Eggleston: And when she made the decision not to have the kids, you know, it was this whole, like…
• 9:20
  Tad Eggleston: oh, but, like, this is expected of me, blah blah, and she was suddenly worried that I'd be disappointed, and…
• 9:26
  Tad Eggleston: I was like, no!
• 9:29
  Tad Eggleston: you're allowed to… and one of the specific things that she talked about, she's like, I don't get the people that are like, oh, I have a baby in my arms, and I just want to have another baby. She's like, babies are gross. They're smelly, they're boring.
• 9:45
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 9:48
  Chrissy Williams: No, definitely this pet, I think there's a… When they're 5 or 6, and I can do art projects with them, they're kinda cool!
• 9:53
  Tad Eggleston: But until…
• 9:56
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like, hey, I don't even want them until they're, like, 10, and we can have philosophical discussions.
• 10:03
  Chrissy Williams: It's all very different. I think everyone… everyone has…
• 10:08
  Chrissy Williams: Their own, sort of, experience and…
• 10:13
  Chrissy Williams: needs and desires in this whole area, and there's just so much societal expectation. In… well, I mean, specifically, I'm obviously talking about someone who… I live in the UK. There's so much societal expectation still,
• 10:26
  Chrissy Williams: for women to somehow be perfect mothers, and… and over in the UK as well, I think,
• 10:32
  Chrissy Williams: I feel like… I feel like the UK doesn't really like children very much. There's some kind of… it's starting to change… Did mommy blogs become a thing in the UK?
• 10:42
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, it's… I mean, it… it is definitely changing, but you…
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I just… I just meant that at least in the United States, the mommy blogs are the worst, because it's like, oh, these are the things that you must do, and it's based on all this history, and blah blah blah. It's like, no, it's not. This is not what your parents did. This is not what their parents did.
• 11:03
  Tad Eggleston: Some of it is better, and some of it is, like, worse.
• 11:09
  Tad Eggleston: But you're just saying, and you're putting so much responsibility on first-time… I mean…
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: Again, we were just talking about the kids thing, it was our anniversary, so we wound up, like, talking about all sorts of stuff, and you know, it's like,
• 11:28
  Tad Eggleston: One of the things she realized is, like, oh, like…
• 11:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, this is why they allow screen time, and this is why before screen time.
• 11:38
  Tad Eggleston: there was always a playroom in the house, where you could just tell the kids to go. Or, if it was nice outside, it was…
• 11:46
  Tad Eggleston: Go outside and don't come back until dinner.
• 11:49
  Tad Eggleston: You know? And, like, mom probably wasn't making us lunch…
• 11:55
  Tad Eggleston: Because she was all nice and wanted to make us lunch, it was because if she had the peanut butter and jelly sandwich ready when we got to the door, we interrupted her day even less.
• 12:06
  Tad Eggleston: It's like, here, have a sandwich, bye!
• 12:10
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah.
• 12:12
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think there's ever been a generation that wants to spend 24 hours a day with their…
• 12:20
  Tad Eggleston: Children.
• 12:22
  Chrissy Williams: No, of course, and it's not just generational, it's, I mean, contemporary now. It's a cultural thing, you see different…
• 12:28
  Chrissy Williams: people, families in different countries, just the different ways that people are brought up, what is more or less normal for family coming to help, not coming to help, you taking the baby around? Like, I think what… in Golden Rage, what I definitely wanted to have in my head is.
• 12:45
  Chrissy Williams: This is the village, this is the… okay, so maybe chosen family is actually the wrong phrase when they've all been dumped on the island in one go.
• 12:54
  Chrissy Williams: stuck with it. Well, I guess that's, like, more like real time.
• 12:58
  Tad Eggleston: They'd kinda… they'd go into groups, so there was some choosing, and then they realized that there weren't enough of them to choose.
• 13:05
  Chrissy Williams: Hmm…
• 13:06
  Tad Eggleston: They need to be a little wider in their choosing.
• 13:10
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, I guess… I guess we just wanted… we… again, I'm using the royal we, sorry, we just wanted to try and…
• 13:19
  Chrissy Williams: show an array of different experiences. Yeah. I mean, there's in which… is it, is it issue 4? Where they… no, it's actually in the last issue, of course it's in the last issue.
• 13:31
  Chrissy Williams: well, like, a load of the first half, the issue is just women standing on a beach screaming. That's the kind of, hey, do you wanna, do you wanna try and process some of this emotion? Do you want to try… would you like to stand on this beach and scream with me now, please? That's really where we are at this point.
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: And it's kind of why… it's a shame that we don't have Becca with us, because she did some great word balloon work there.
• 13:57
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that whole… the spread with the most intense screams is just such a joy… but it's, I mean, it's two individual pages, but they're sitting on each other. It's such a joy to… to look at. Yeah, yeah.
• 14:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, that's a great place to transition, to bring the artists in, and Lauren, don't feel left out, but we've talked, so I'm going to actually start with color.
• 14:19
  Lauren Knight: Particularly…
• 14:22
  Tad Eggleston: It does.
• 14:24
  Tad Eggleston: Because, you were given an interesting assignment, in that there's a lot of snow.
• 14:33
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm.
• 14:34
  Sofie Dodgson: But I'm really nerdy about snow. I'm half Norwegian, so I grew up.
• 14:38
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 14:38
  Sofie Dodgson: With a lot of snow. There's not so much snow… I'm only 3 eighths Norwegian, but I get it. Oh, cool. And you know, there were a few people who knew what I was working on, and I said it was set in the winter, and it was going to be snowy. We're like, oh, well, that'll be easy for you, ha ha ha. But it's much more nuanced than that.
• 14:56
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, I… that's why…
• 14:58
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I mean, I love, I love the way, like, shadows form on snow, and there's sort of really, like, neon cyan blues that kind of emerge on snow. You know, it was great, I loved it.
• 15:09
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah.
• 15:11
  Tad Eggleston: And how about, just, like…
• 15:16
  Tad Eggleston: And I never, you know, I wish I could get my wife to join for more podcasts, because she's the actual art teacher that knows the proper terms, but…
• 15:26
  Sofie Dodgson: I'm not very trained, so maybe I don'.
• 15:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, okay, then maybe it'll work out that I'm just bumbling my way along.
• 15:32
  Sofie Dodgson: we can Together, that's fine.
• 15:34
  Tad Eggleston: You seem to have… Restricted your palate a little bit.
• 15:41
  Tad Eggleston: to set… a tone, and I think a lot of that's around the snow.
• 15:49
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, talk to me about how you…
• 15:53
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, if it wound up that you got detailed instructions from Chrissy or Lauren, give credit where credit is due, but I… I feel like…
• 16:01
  Sofie Dodgson: This is the team that you…
• 16:02
  Tad Eggleston: You were given black and whites and said, Go to town!
• 16:07
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I mean.
• 16:08
  Tad Eggleston: Like, how did you decide… how to…
• 16:13
  Tad Eggleston: like, color fashion for given… I mean, were the red hats red hats in the story, or…
• 16:19
  Sofie Dodgson: The red hat.
• 16:20
  Tad Eggleston: Did your Red Hat inspire that?
• 16:23
  Sofie Dodgson: Perfect.
• 16:24
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
• 16:25
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, Chrissy will have to tell you what the Red Hats mean, but they're an actual, sort of, organization, I believe. Okay. So that was very much in the script already.
• 16:36
  Sofie Dodgson: But otherwise, for color,
• 16:42
  Sofie Dodgson: I think my approach for Golden Rage was… my first… I tend to do several passes through the collar, and my first pass tends to be quite literal, like, naturalistic. I can see a little cattail.
• 16:57
  Tad Eggleston: That cat has been on two consecutive podcasts now.
• 17:00
  Sofie Dodgson: No, my dog made a little canyon.
• 17:03
  Sofie Dodgson: I see you do need the rest of Chrissy's family.
• 17:08
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, and then… and then I kind of go through… and I guess that's where the expressiveness comes from, like, I try and
• 17:14
  Sofie Dodgson: exaggerate the color, or push the color, like, there's some lovely romantic scenes in this, volume that I really wanted to, kind of.
• 17:24
  Sofie Dodgson: Heighten, or, you know, kind of…
• 17:27
  Sofie Dodgson: Using color as a tool to just push the emotion of the scene.
• 17:31
  Sofie Dodgson: So…
• 17:33
  Sofie Dodgson: Do I have… I'm trying to sound like I have a method. I think I kind of do what feels right to me at the time. You know what I mean?
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: That, that's… That's a method.
• 17:45
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, and then there's, you know, then there's some very literal, like, a colorist's job is to make sure, you know, scene changes are obvious, so.
• 17:52
  Tad Eggleston: I see art supplies behind you, so I know that you can't possibly work entirely digital, but But…
• 17:59
  Sofie Dodgson: I wonder…
• 18:00
  Tad Eggleston: Talk to me about, like… tools.
• 18:04
  Sofie Dodgson: I do… I work entirely digitally in comics.
• 18:07
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 18:09
  Sofie Dodgson: I mean, I'd love to be able to do some kind of non… I was going to say traditional, but that's a sort of strange word, a non-digital, comics word, but there's never really time. Time. Time, unfortunately, but that would be lovely. But,
• 18:23
  Sofie Dodgson: I love to paint and draw, and I work as a costume designer, so I tend to do, sort of, more traditional.
• 18:30
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 18:32
  Sofie Dodgson: kind of tools there. But yeah, unfortunately, costume, comics is all… is all digital.
• 18:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, do you ever play with it when you're trying to decide?
• 18:40
  Tad Eggleston: A color, or… or…
• 18:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm just trying to dig into the creative process, like, I mean, I understand that you'd be coloring the page on…
• 18:51
  Tad Eggleston: on…
• 18:53
  Tad Eggleston: screen, but, like, when you're coloring digitally, are you also doing all of your creative, finding the right tone?
• 19:03
  Sofie Dodgson: I mean, it just…
• 19:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, when my wife paints, she'll have, like, a piece of paper that has a ton of different shades.
• 19:09
  Sofie Dodgson: of various colors. So that's the kind of… Until she gets the right one to go… Different. It's much…
• 19:15
  Sofie Dodgson: easier to find a color digitally than it is to mix paint. Okay. So, obviously, mixing digital color
• 19:22
  Sofie Dodgson: you know, is instant, and it's predictable, whereas mixing pigment in paint is very unpredictable. So the kind of theory between color mixing between digital and traditional is very different, but
• 19:36
  Sofie Dodgson: I think my background… in, like…
• 19:40
  Sofie Dodgson: painting, you know, there are still rules that inform both. Like, I use a lot of,
• 19:45
  Sofie Dodgson: complementary colors, so, you know, colors that are opposite each other on the color wheel. Especially in scene transitions, like, you know, we have a very obvious kind of blue outdoor into orange kind of indoor.
• 19:59
  Sofie Dodgson: And, you know, I mean, that's kind of one of the main…
• 20:01
  Sofie Dodgson: roles of a colorist, I think, is to make those transitions kind of make sense.
• 20:06
  Sofie Dodgson: But yeah, I think my approach with Golden Rage was…
• 20:14
  Sofie Dodgson: Other than the really psychedelic scene in issue…
• 20:18
  Sofie Dodgson: 4, I think it is? It is… it is reasonably naturalistic colors, but then in the kind of heightened emotions, I like to… heightened emotional scenes, I like to kind of push it a bit more. You know, if,
• 20:31
  Sofie Dodgson: It's like a stabbing scene, I like to flood it with kind of red in the background.
• 20:35
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I was just noticing as you showed the spread that was between an outside and indoor scene, even… I mean, I'm just looking at the last issue now, like.
• 20:46
  Tad Eggleston: When there's heightened energy, you're more likely to have a red sky versus a blue sky.
• 20:53
  Tad Eggleston: orangish sky. My wife will always jump down my throat. That's not red, that's…
• 21:00
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah. No, that, yeah, exactly, and that… that's very intentional. I think in the first…
• 21:05
  Sofie Dodgson: in the first volume, there was a scene… there was a fight scene where I went very, kind of, like, kung fu movie with the colors, like.
• 21:13
  Sofie Dodgson: you know, very kind of quick flashes of color. But that's the fun thing about working with Chrissy and Lauren, is that, you know, there can be lots of quite natural scenes with trees and… or candlelight or interiors, but then
• 21:27
  Sofie Dodgson: you know, suddenly there's a psychedelic neon scene with dogs and tennis balls, or… or a kung fu battle kind of thing.
• 21:36
  Sofie Dodgson: And that's… yeah, that's a lot of fun for me.
• 21:39
  Tad Eggleston: like, literally, as I'm looking at this, I'm noticing that
• 21:44
  Tad Eggleston: That a lot of those panels lauren has also… added…
• 21:55
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know what to call it, because it's not quite motion lines, and it's not quite an extra shadow, but like…
• 22:02
  Sofie Dodgson: you can see… what would you call it, Lauren? Like, like…
• 22:07
  Tad Eggleston: When you have your…
• 22:09
  Lauren Knight: I call those the squigglies. Those are the squigglies.
• 22:13
  Tad Eggleston: It's not squiggly, they're actually really straight, which is part.
• 22:19
  Lauren Knight: I don't know, I just, add some stuff occasionally.
• 22:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but, but so, like, it can have, like, this really profound effect where both the linework and the color are just emphasizing
• 22:32
  Tad Eggleston: the emotion…
• 22:34
  Tad Eggleston: on… now is… like, I don't think I even talked a ton to Chrissy and Lauren about this last time. What level of communication do you guys have with each other while you're working, or is it a lot of…
• 22:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know, one person does their thing, says it on another person, there's maybe some talking, but at the top, you know…
• 22:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, how do you…
• 22:58
  Tad Eggleston: How do you complement each other? Because you complement each other really well, and I love to… I love to hear how teams work, because…
• 23:06
  Tad Eggleston: Every great team works differently.
• 23:10
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, I come in after Chrissy and Lauren, so I feel like they need to…
• 23:14
  Lauren Knight: I work quite closely with Chrissy when I'm doing the inks.
• 23:19
  Lauren Knight: But then, I don't really work directly with Sophie when it comes to colours.
• 23:25
  Sofie Dodgson: I know, I'm all alone at the end.
• 23:27
  Lauren Knight: Yeah, I just… I send them off.
• 23:28
  Tad Eggleston: It's just.
• 23:28
  Lauren Knight: Because they trust you the most, Sophie.
• 23:30
  Sofie Dodgson: Don't they.
• 23:32
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's because they're tired of the book and don't want to think about it anymore. It's they trust you the most.
• 23:36
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, no, that…
• 23:39
  Tad Eggleston: They haven't moved on to the next thing. They just know.
• 23:42
  Sofie Dodgson: You've got it covered.
• 23:45
  Chrissy Williams: But I think, I mean, we're laughing, but I think that is true. Lauren, I certainly find that with Sophie. We've talked before on other podcasts, behind your back when you haven't been there.
• 23:56
  Chrissy Williams: Just enough.
• 23:58
  Tad Eggleston: She talked about how great of a job she did, so…
• 24:00
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh, wait, I need to listen back and, like, bathe in that.
• 24:04
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, what you do is… there's absolute trust on our… on our part, because I don't think we've… we've…
• 24:11
  Chrissy Williams: So, Sophie just so… is just so good at reading the ink work, I think. You know, there's… there's never been any sense of, like.
• 24:19
  Chrissy Williams: inappropriately matching mood or tone or whatever.
• 24:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, except that purple sky you were telling me about, where you just got it, and you're like, what the hell did you do? And it turned out it was your April Fool's joke.
• 24:31
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh, right.
• 24:31
  Tad Eggleston: Or was that a different prompt?
• 24:33
  Sofie Dodgson: I think that was a different podcast.
• 24:36
  Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to give Sophie ideas.
• 24:40
  Chrissy Williams: But no, it's… and you… I mean, you can see, especially by… that this is Volume 2, like, already from the first one, you could see how much…
• 24:49
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 24:50
  Chrissy Williams: how much Sophie's color added and what it brought, so I think by this time, we're like, Sophie knows exactly what to do, all of it is… all of it is good.
• 25:01
  Chrissy Williams: And yeah, the issue… I just want to say that the issue 4 that you mentioned, Sophie, so that's a whole issue taught with these sort of flashes of surreality, that Sophie put this kind of neon… neon type of colouring in, and it just looks so good, it works so well.
• 25:20
  Chrissy Williams: Everyone's heads turn into dog heads for a moment, it's.
• 25:24
  Sofie Dodgson: That was great. That, for that issue, I saw the artwork before I read the script, and I was like, okay, Lauren's gone mad, cool.
• 25:33
  Lauren Knight: I love drawing Kung Fu Emma.
• 25:38
  Chrissy Williams: Hang it, guys.
• 25:39
  Sofie Dodgson: So good.
• 25:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that… You've got me flipping through that issue now. Sending me down rabbit holes.
• 25:54
  Tad Eggleston: This is one where I'm gonna go Lauren first, but it'll probably go into Sophie,
• 26:01
  Tad Eggleston: Was there any character that… that… Chrissy… gave you… That you, like.
• 26:12
  Tad Eggleston: really gravitated towards, and, like, you look forward to the pages where you got to… to… to draw…
• 26:22
  Lauren Knight: I think it's, I think it's a pretty open secret that we all love red.
• 26:29
  Lauren Knight: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 26:31
  Lauren Knight: Cause she feels her emotions very openly, so she was always great to draw.
• 26:37
  Sofie Dodgson: You know, I do feel bad picking, like, one of the younger women, though, because I also really love Rosie.
• 26:42
  Lauren Knight: Oh, I don't… I do know.
• 26:44
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah.
• 26:47
  Lauren Knight: Rosie's also my favorite, but…
• 26:50
  Tad Eggleston: Chrissy, was there any character that when you got the artwork back, you went.
• 26:56
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's so much more than I'd put into it.
• 27:01
  Chrissy Williams: I honestly, I think the core cast, when Lauren even did the initial sketches, like, you can look at the initial sketches, they were in the back of the Volume 1, I think.
• 27:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 27:11
  Chrissy Williams: there's not, like, a huge difference at all between what those characters were, is it? They would just… they just felt like they arrived instantly, like, yes, great, amazing. Like, Lauren just…
• 27:22
  Chrissy Williams: Nailed the physicality of them, the differences of them.
• 27:30
  Tad Eggleston: But did she flesh them out more in your head? Were there any characters where, like, you thought of them this way, and then Lauren drew them, and you're like, oh, I didn't even know this about them, but now I know this about them because of this picture in front of me?
• 27:45
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I… I wasn't writing it with, kind of, central casting in my head. I didn't have, like, a… like a…
• 27:53
  Chrissy Williams: The only character I ever had a, sort of, slight model for in my head was, the witch I thought could be a, a bus stop Judi Dench. That was my… that was my, no, Julie Walters! Julie Walters! Judy bus stop Judi Dench would be a completely different… would be a bus stop Julie Walters.
• 28:12
  Chrissy Williams: no one else, I didn't have, like, a specific actor or something in mind.
• 28:17
  Chrissy Williams: you know, I'm… and the character descriptions I sent to Lauren were like, well, but they were like a paragraph, a short paragraph each, with adjectives, you know, tall.
• 28:27
  Lauren Knight: strong, italian. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 28:31
  Chrissy Williams: nervous, like, trying to go, yeah. So, no, Lauren, absolutely.
• 28:39
  Chrissy Williams: created and, like, incarnated a string of generic adjectives on a page into this really vivid, alive…
• 28:50
  Tad Eggleston: Did any of their stories wind up changing?
• 28:53
  Chrissy Williams: Any of the stories wind up changing.
• 28:55
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 28:56
  Tad Eggleston: And any of them go, oh, I need this person to do this now.
• 29:01
  Chrissy Williams: I don't think… I don't think any of their stories wound up changing, though I think probably, what started off as the friendship between Lottie and Caroline, where
• 29:12
  Chrissy Williams: Caroline is much taller, and Lottie is much more petite.
• 29:16
  Chrissy Williams: I think the friendship between them, I've enjoyed writing, to be able to see them together on the page more. I think that's been fun, but I wouldn't… but not as a… not as a plot point, but just thinking visually. It's so nice to see the two of them together helping each other.
• 29:33
  Chrissy Williams: Stand up, or what, you know, whatever they're… whatever they're doing.
• 29:37
  Tad Eggleston: We've got two volumes now, we're… Were they both…
• 29:43
  Tad Eggleston: conceived of when you started, or did you write the series and then it did well enough that it's like, okay, what do I write next?
• 29:52
  Chrissy Williams: It was,
• 29:55
  Chrissy Williams: left deliberately… Volume 1 was written deliberately so it could be self-contained and self-sufficient and just be, one and done in parenting themes. But then we… we, no, we wanted to make more, and when I was thinking about… I have a few different ideas for, like, oh, and if we did another one, this would be the key thing, this would be the key thing.
• 30:19
  Chrissy Williams: to be perfectly honest, even before I had a baby, I've always loved that episode of the Golden Girls, where,
• 30:26
  Chrissy Williams: one of them… where Blanche thinks that she might be pregnant for a minute, and they're running through remembering and thinking about. And they, you know, for a show that was…
• 30:37
  Chrissy Williams: So long ago now, it has not aged badly, really, in terms of how they all tackle those issues and the different ways different people think about these things.
• 30:48
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 30:49
  Tad Eggleston: there are a number of things that are surprisingly progressive about the Golden Girls. When you sit back and go, wait a minute, this came out in the 80s?
• 30:57
  Chrissy Williams: Bye, yeah.
• 30:59
  Tad Eggleston: And they were okay with this, and they were okay with that, and it was on network TV in prime time.
• 31:07
  Chrissy Williams: Anywhere.
• 31:10
  Chrissy Williams: Stephanie.
• 31:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know, with the, this is the second volume now, so you have a year's worth of…
• 31:23
  Tad Eggleston: fan response, either in person at cons, I don't know how many cons any of you get to, or through correspondence, etc.
• 31:33
  Tad Eggleston: How have you enjoyed the reception?
• 31:38
  Tad Eggleston: enjoyed the reception, but I assume enjoyed the reception.
• 31:42
  Tad Eggleston: I like to think that if I like it, there are other people who like it, and I pretend that there aren't people who, like, hate things just for the sake of hating things.
• 31:52
  Chrissy Williams: Well, apart from people trying to gather us up and cast us onto a desert island where we have to, fight to the death and make friends in the desert, no, it's been…
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: Is that really about the comic? I mean, I thought that was just the world now.
• 32:07
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, I mean, the whole world is…
• 32:10
  Chrissy Williams: It's very difficult to do anything other than crawl under your bed and…
• 32:15
  Chrissy Williams: cry at the moment. Sorry for being flippant about it, but I mean, it's a real.
• 32:19
  Tad Eggleston: How else are we supposed to handle it? If we're not at least a little bit flippant, we will cry under our beds and…
• 32:27
  Tad Eggleston: Cry.
• 32:28
  Chrissy Williams: Which sounds really, really nice, and my bed's not that far away, but I'm gonna keep talking to you anyway.
• 32:35
  Chrissy Williams: Well, let's… to answer your question, Lauren, do you want to say a little bit about Thought Bubble? Like, that's… that's sort of the big UK con that we've done together. Sophie goes as well, but on a separate table. And that's, I think, where we've done the most.
• 32:49
  Lauren Knight: Yeah.
• 32:51
  Lauren Knight: Loads of people coming up and saying how much they loved it, and…
• 32:56
  Lauren Knight: there was one lady who wanted to get a tattoo of the, Rage Before Beauty skull thing, so I'd sent her a high-res version of it. I don't know if she did get it in the end, but…
• 33:09
  Lauren Knight: Hopefully she did.
• 33:10
  Sofie Dodgson: She comes.
• 33:11
  Lauren Knight: But no, it's really cool. You get to, like, speak to…
• 33:15
  Lauren Knight: All sorts of people who come up, and they're so excited about it, and… Glad that we're there.
• 33:21
  Lauren Knight: want more, especially, which is really nice to see, because we work in a little vacuum, so we don't really get to see. We're just throwing out
• 33:31
  Lauren Knight: Stuff into the void, or what?
• 33:34
  Lauren Knight: Sounds cool.
• 33:36
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah. I've definitely had a few people come up who've told me it's the first comic they've ever read, that someone got it for them. I think that's…
• 33:45
  Tad Eggleston: That was definitely where I was gonna go next, is it's definitely one of those that, like, strikes me as a great entry point
• 33:54
  Tad Eggleston: For a whole class of people who don't think they like comics?
• 33:59
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think… well, I mean, I… I hope so, but we've… we've… we've definitely had people who've…
• 34:07
  Chrissy Williams: You know, I've had people tell me it was the first time they went into a comic shop.
• 34:12
  Chrissy Williams: And they went to get it, and that's…
• 34:14
  Tad Eggleston: And I hope they had good experiences, because that can be dangerous.
• 34:19
  Tad Eggleston: Many good comic shops, so, like, if you know any, plug them.
• 34:23
  Tad Eggleston: And my reminder to everybody else, you know, be nice to the customers who don't know all of their comic history. You will need them eventually, as all of the people who know all of the comic's history get old and die.
• 34:39
  Chrissy Williams: I've actually had… I don't know, maybe it's a difference in the UK. I've actually had really, really positive experiences in comic shops. I love… I think… I think…
• 34:49
  Chrissy Williams: it doesn't feel to me like it felt when I was, like, a teenager, that it was superheroes and done. That's not… even just in terms of what gets given shelf space and stuff, there's…
• 35:01
  Tad Eggleston: Excellent, and… about our shops. They're getting more female-friendly.
• 35:08
  Chrissy Williams: Oh, yeah.
• 35:09
  Tad Eggleston: in urban areas, but there are still those shops that…
• 35:14
  Tad Eggleston: the women I know go in and they're like, at best.
• 35:17
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like they don't see me, and at worst, they're really horrible.
• 35:23
  Chrissy Williams: Aww, I'm sorry.
• 35:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 35:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's a shift, you know, it's one of those things where, like, some of it is actual toxic masculinity, and some of it is more, you know, comics tend to be geeky nerds and not good at talking to begin with, so, like…
• 35:45
  Tad Eggleston: They're not that great at talking to other guys, but they at least have experience with that.
• 35:50
  Chrissy Williams: Do you think they might be interested in screaming on a beach?
• 35:54
  Tad Eggleston: I do! I do, actually. That was one of my favorite scenes.
• 36:01
  Chrissy Williams: That is… rage… rage is for everyone. Rage is for everyone.
• 36:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that is one of the appealing things about the comic, is that, like, I mean, yes, it pulls in…
• 36:13
  Tad Eggleston: another audience, and I know I'm not…
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the typical male reader.
• 36:21
  Tad Eggleston: Among other things, I don't even always know if I identify as male, I just… almost everything that goes along with male is like, no, icky, go away.
• 36:30
  Tad Eggleston: But then I like girls, so I'm like… So, how does this work?
• 36:35
  Tad Eggleston: Mom.
• 36:36
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, too much information.
• 36:39
  Sofie Dodgson: This is a safe space.
• 36:41
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, good.
• 36:42
  Sofie Dodgson: You're all good.
• 36:43
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, the comics community has always kind of been interesting in that way, because… it, like…
• 36:51
  Tad Eggleston: By and large, it really is a place where… where, like, the vast majority of…
• 36:59
  Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to remember who said it to me, but we were at a con once, and somebody's like, yeah, so Comic Cons are essentially where shy, no, or divergent people go out and pretend they're not.
• 37:15
  Sofie Dodgson: Yep.
• 37:18
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, as someone who literally created a promotional fanzine that I could just, like, hold up and give to people so I didn't have to talk to them as they went past the table, I have no idea what you're talking about.
• 37:32
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly, exactly. Like, I, you know, 700-some-odd recordings in, people don't believe that I'm shy, but it's like, no. I can talk here, and I can talk in a classroom. Everywhere else?
• 37:47
  Tad Eggleston: If you start the conversation with me, and it's on a topic that I actually feel, like, confident that I know something about, then we can talk.
• 37:57
  Tad Eggleston: Otherwise, I'm the quiet one in the corner, and that's the way I like it.
• 38:02
  Chrissy Williams: There is something wonderful about cons, that you… you just go and you… you see what sometimes feels…
• 38:10
  Chrissy Williams: Well, I mean, as Lauren said, we're working away in vacuums in our own, kind of, personal silos, and it's… there's more of people together in London, but even then, everyone's all dotted around, all over the place. It's not that regular that people see each other. It's so amazing as creators, also, to go to a…
• 38:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 38:29
  Chrissy Williams: mention and just see all the other people, and remind yourself that they're real, and not just… we're not just the promotional posts on social media, or whatever. It's… it's so nice…
• 38:41
  Chrissy Williams: To just remind yourself that everyone is real, and we're all actually doing things, and… It's one that…
• 38:49
  Tad Eggleston: Then that you actually have a community.
• 38:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I know some creators are way more well-rounded than some of us fans, and for that matter, some fans are way more well-rounded than others, but a lot of us don't…
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: Don't feel a lot of community outside of our comic shop.
• 39:07
  Tad Eggleston: Or a con, or whatever, just because, again, right now, anyway, comics seem to… primarily attract…
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: kind of a neurodiverse, awkward crowd, I think.
• 39:24
  Tad Eggleston: I think there's probably real research should be done into the whys of that,
• 39:30
  Tad Eggleston: Because the medium is actually one that…
• 39:34
  Tad Eggleston: you can't read comics passively. You have to use both sides of your brain. You have to connect the words and the pictures. They're a fabulous educational tool that doesn't get used often enough, as I'm on my education soapbox for a second.
• 39:50
  Tad Eggleston: So it's, I guess, not surprising that they attract some really interesting people, but…
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: I wonder what it says about the world, that those really interesting people feel… So…
• 40:08
  Tad Eggleston: Separated from so much of the rest of the world.
• 40:12
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, no.
• 40:14
  Tad Eggleston: But it's why I like the safe spaces.
• 40:17
  Tad Eggleston: You got morning tad right now, I'm, I'm, I'm sorry.
• 40:23
  Chrissy Williams: It's alright, I like, I like it, it's more philosophical, I like it.
• 40:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:28
  Chrissy Williams: I mean, it… I… You know, this is probably more than my… Ability to… To… to…
• 40:38
  Chrissy Williams: To talk in terms of research or anything like that, but…
• 40:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 40:43
  Chrissy Williams: certainly seems that our government, and from what I can see, America as well, is sort of going out of their way to try and…
• 40:53
  Chrissy Williams: make things even harder for neurodiverse people.
• 40:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 40:58
  Chrissy Williams: It's just what seems to be progress… progression seems…
• 41:03
  Tad Eggleston: The, the, the, the, the, the right, and, and certainly the,
• 41:07
  Tad Eggleston: the Secretary of Health and Human Services seem to be really obsessed with autism right now, and specifically making it out to be the worst thing in the world, and completely the fault of mothers and Tylenol.
• 41:24
  Chrissy Williams: Oh, yes, yes.
• 41:24
  Tad Eggleston: Or maybe circumcision.
• 41:26
  Chrissy Williams: The latest, yeah.
• 41:29
  Tad Eggleston: Other than one of my favorite, you know, I'm autistic, so, like, I…
• 41:35
  Tad Eggleston: I definitely have people who I read just because they're autistic and write well about, like… one of my favorite responses was from a newsletter where she's like, no, there are more autistic people in the world now because there are more autistic people fucking.
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: That's it.
• 41:53
  Sofie Dodgson: I saw that. That's it? Yeah, I enjoyed that.
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: If there are more people… if there are more… it wasn't even… there are. It's, like, if there are more autistic people in the world right now, because, like, if you actually know anything about statistics.
• 42:08
  Tad Eggleston: That's not actually a clear-cut statement. There's a lot of reasons to believe that it's all about we're better at identifying, not.
• 42:18
  Tad Eggleston: there are more. But if there are more autistic people in the world now, it's because there are more autistic people fucking.
• 42:26
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, It's genetic. It's not, like… it's not Tylenol, it's not vaccines, it's…
• 42:36
  Tad Eggleston: It's like left-handed.
• 42:39
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's crazy to me how much still is getting thrown onto, oh, if you did this when you were pregnant, it's…
• 42:48
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, it's just… it's just how can we blame parents? Blame mothers? Well, no, no, not parents, not parents.
• 42:55
  Tad Eggleston: Mothers.
• 42:56
  Tad Eggleston: key distinction here, and it's clearly just because… I mean, I hate to be the one to have to break this to you, but I'm from America, so I feel like it's my responsibility. Women need to be kept at a certain place. They're very good at making food and babies.
• 43:14
  Tad Eggleston: But we gotta keep them away from, like, government or jobs, and I can't even keep a straight face, as I'm saying this.
• 43:21
  Sofie Dodgson: This would be an awful soundbite to just link this bit.
• 43:28
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm.
• 43:29
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, but that's, that's, that's how…
• 43:33
  Tad Eggleston: too much of the, the United States, and, and…
• 43:37
  Tad Eggleston: Britain seems to be doing a little bit better right now, but their Brexit period, they had a lot of trouble with it, too.
• 43:45
  Chrissy Williams: It's… it's… we're not out of those.
• 43:47
  Tad Eggleston: No, you're not out of the woods, I just feel like you're…
• 43:51
  Tad Eggleston: You're, like, this much farther than we are right now?
• 43:55
  Chrissy Williams: I don't know, I think we're learning from your playbook, I think is what's.
• 43:58
  Tad Eggleston: I hope not.
• 43:59
  Chrissy Williams: politicians, things feel like they're getting more and more…
• 44:03
  Chrissy Williams: estranged? That's not the word I'm looking for. Opposing…
• 44:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 44:09
  Chrissy Williams: My god, I'm coming.
• 44:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because most of Europe seems to be learning what not to do from our playbook.
• 44:15
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm…
• 44:16
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, oh, that's what I mean, explicitly, is I feel like people are…
• 44:20
  Chrissy Williams: Learning new rules that are, fundamentally about,
• 44:27
  Chrissy Williams: Dismantling respect for other human beings.
• 44:32
  Chrissy Williams: It's…
• 44:32
  Tad Eggleston: It's…
• 44:33
  Chrissy Williams: horrible. There's a much bigger right… there's a bigger left as well, the Green Party that was traditionally.
• 44:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, there is a left. I mean, one of the things that I hate when people talk about the extreme left in the United States is I'm like.
• 44:47
  Tad Eggleston: drop AOC in… in France, and she's like…
• 44:52
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe 10 degrees left of center.
• 44:57
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm.
• 44:58
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah.
• 44:59
  Tad Eggleston: And don't get me wrong, I love her, and I do think she's progressive and whatnot, but, like, in most of the world, she would just barely be left, rather than the huge boogeyman…
• 45:12
  Tad Eggleston: Leftists!
• 45:14
  Sofie Dodgson: But we have the same here. I mean, Labour are very centralist, if not the other side now.
• 45:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, don't know, yeah.
• 45:24
  Chrissy Williams: The way they've been dismantling our welfare and…
• 45:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 45:29
  Chrissy Williams: what they're trying… yeah, sophia's…
• 45:32
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, that's definitely… Definitely the US playbook.
• 45:37
  Sofie Dodgson: Thatcher and Reagan kicked it all off.
• 45:40
  Tad Eggleston: Let's… let's get away from depressing and talking.
• 45:42
  Sofie Dodgson: More about throwing axes at babies.
• 45:45
  Chrissy Williams: Well, I think, I mean, one of the things in Golden Rage that we do get asked a lot is, oh, what about the mainland? What about the backstory? What about that stuff? And I'm like, no, no! We… we are, like, a whisker away from actually living in that place. I'm not interested in that. I'm interested to see what happens when…
• 46:05
  Chrissy Williams: this community…
• 46:08
  Chrissy Williams: sorts itself out, and how it has different… it employs different strategies in solving problems and caring for each other, and that's what's interesting to me. Yeah.
• 46:21
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 46:25
  Chrissy Williams: I've made it about the comic again!
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, comics… comics have always been progressive, and, like, they're two sets of progressive comics. They're…
• 46:34
  Tad Eggleston: There are… are the ones that are… are cautionary, and there are the ones that are…
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: this is how it could be better. And, like.
• 46:48
  Tad Eggleston: shades in between. But this, this definitely has, like, the premise is cautionary, but… but the… the stories itself are… are, like…
• 46:57
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 46:59
  Tad Eggleston: How can we just make a community that works?
• 47:05
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah.
• 47:06
  Tad Eggleston: And part of his understanding that…
• 47:08
  Tad Eggleston: will fail, sometimes. And you get up… And you try again.
• 47:15
  Tad Eggleston: I know in the United States, one of…
• 47:20
  Tad Eggleston: one of the points that I just became absolutely infuriated with our political landscape was when
• 47:27
  Tad Eggleston: flip-flopping became this horrible thing, and I'm like, wait a minute. These are the people making massive decisions, and they're people. They'll make mistakes, and they'll learn new things. Because they had this opinion.
• 47:41
  Tad Eggleston: 6 months ago, 6 years ago, whatever.
• 47:46
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't mean they need to hold it.
• 47:48
  Tad Eggleston: if they look at it and go, oh, I was wrong.
• 47:53
  Tad Eggleston: they should be able to do that without us thinking that it's a bad thing. In fact, shouldn't it be a good thing to say, oh, I believe this, we did this, it didn't work out well?
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: We're gonna try this new thing!
• 48:12
  Tad Eggleston: it made me actually blown away when I was… I was reading a book on Roosevelt and discovered that, like, not that long ago, I mean, that was literally part of his…
• 48:24
  Tad Eggleston: when he was running with the New Deal, and people asked about doing too much too fast, he's like, no, no, we have to do everything we can right now, and if it doesn't work.
• 48:34
  Tad Eggleston: We'll try something else. But what we know is where we are right now is bad.
• 48:42
  Tad Eggleston: 25% unemployment, you know, blah blah blah, like… We can change course later.
• 48:51
  Tad Eggleston: First, we need to feed everybody.
• 48:53
  Tad Eggleston: And it's been a while since we've seen leaders like that.
• 48:58
  Tad Eggleston: Except in comic books, which is why it's so beautiful to see them in comic books.
• 49:04
  Tad Eggleston: And why I cried a little bit when it was like, oh, you solved part of our problem, because now we've got one less mouth to feed, because you're going off, and I was a very happy when…
• 49:13
  Tad Eggleston: Rosie came back, because it's like, yeah, but… But… Damn.
• 49:25
  Tad Eggleston: Like, how attached…
• 49:28
  Tad Eggleston: This is actually going to be for the artists first, because they… they… they… they… they get it when the decisions have kind of been made already. How hard is it when you get a character
• 49:41
  Tad Eggleston: Or… or scene, where it's like…
• 49:45
  Tad Eggleston: okay, I trust Chrissy that this will be fine, or whatever, but, like, no! I don't want to do this to this person.
• 49:55
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want them to go through this. I mean, is that a thing, or are you able to detach yourself from the characters that you're drawing or coloring?
• 50:06
  Tad Eggleston: How does that work?
• 50:07
  Lauren Knight: I think I… I just go along with it, because I trust Chris's storytelling, so…
• 50:14
  Lauren Knight: And a lot of it is… she's very good at giving people their comeuppance, so if you're kind of behind her, you're like, yeah, this is good. I've drawn that death scene very happily.
• 50:26
  Sofie Dodgson: No, absolutely. I mean, I think I…
• 50:29
  Sofie Dodgson: I work sort of 50% in comics and 50% in another, kind of job, so it's always really important to me to use my time wisely, and I only want to work with people where I trust
• 50:41
  Sofie Dodgson: their decisions and what they're gonna do, you know, and that is people like Chrissy, so…
• 50:47
  Sofie Dodgson: I don't think I've… obviously, some things are upsetting when they happen, like, you know, death scenes and stuff, but…
• 50:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, my theory on the long, long saga hiatus has always been that, like.
• 51:02
  Tad Eggleston: Fiona prefers to get one script at a time. She doesn't want to know what's coming next. And the last three issues before…
• 51:12
  Tad Eggleston: before hiatus, it was they killed Dolph, they killed Prince Robot, they killed Marco. And I just imagine Fiona finishing up that last issue, and picking up the phone, and calling Brian, and going, fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you! I'm taking a break, and hanging up!
• 51:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and clearly, it's not that she doesn't trust the storytelling, but… and I don't know that that's actually what happened either, I don't wanna… but… but I know how it was to read it.
• 51:46
  Tad Eggleston: I know how it was, like, I trust… I trust Brian and Fiona. For that matter, I even trust Fiona as a check on Brian, she saved Lyingcat.
• 51:59
  Tad Eggleston: But it's just, like, sometimes it's so hard to read this stuff that I… then I sit back and I go, like, what mindset
• 52:07
  Tad Eggleston: must you get in to create it? You know?
• 52:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, and, like, I have my own mental health issues, so, so, like, everybody, you know, for some people, it's like, didn't even think about it, I just thought about the scene.
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I mean, I talk to people, and, like, I know fantastic
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: cartoonists that pour all sorts of themselves into their work, that, like, the idea of ever doing auto-bio is just absolutely, positively, no way, because it's like, no, I can't spend a
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: day or a week drawing horrible things from my own life. It's not even that they don't want it out there, it's the idea of sitting there with it is just…
• 53:02
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, not just with this book, is that… is that… is that a thing, or is that just a thing in my head?
• 53:10
  Lauren Knight: I think, if something really bad other than
• 53:14
  Lauren Knight: a sprained ankle had happened to Lottie, I wouldn't have been that happy about it.
• 53:20
  Lauren Knight: It may have had words that would have just been, why?
• 53:25
  Tad Eggleston: You would have turned in two pages, one page doing whatever to Lottie, and one page with Rosie…
• 53:31
  Lauren Knight: taking…
• 53:32
  Tad Eggleston: Chrissy's head off.
• 53:34
  Sofie Dodgson: Next page, she's breakdancing, she's totally okay.
• 53:38
  Lauren Knight: But no, I get what you're saying.
• 53:41
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I get what you're saying, but I think…
• 53:43
  Sofie Dodgson: I think with me, it's always about…
• 53:46
  Sofie Dodgson: working with people that I trust and care about. Right. Obviously, this… book tackles…
• 53:51
  Sofie Dodgson: Motherhood, and found family, and friendship, and, you know, lots of…
• 53:57
  Sofie Dodgson: issues, like, I'm a mom and, you know, had a difficult birth, and my lovely son is disabled, there's a lot of challenges, you know, there's a lot of things that can be triggering exploring motherhood, but
• 54:07
  Sofie Dodgson: But I trust Chrissy to, like.
• 54:11
  Sofie Dodgson: and Lauren with the artwork subsequently, to, like, navigate that, and I, you know… That's…
• 54:17
  Sofie Dodgson: such an important part of working in comics for me, is working with people that I trust. Like, I… I mean, I…
• 54:23
  Sofie Dodgson: Turn down comics.
• 54:25
  Sofie Dodgson: often because I just think this isn't going to align with the things I care about, or, you know.
• 54:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, so that leads into the question that's in my head, is, like, particularly as a colorist that has to work
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: more jobs at once to make it worth it. It sounds like because you've got two jobs, you can balance in more ways than you might…
• 54:46
  Tad Eggleston: Otherwise, like, how do you… How do you build the trust?
• 54:53
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, luckily, now I can be a little bit choosy about who I work with. Right, right.
• 55:02
  Tad Eggleston: You've been at it for a while now.
• 55:03
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah.
• 55:04
  Tad Eggleston: Seeing your name on comics and going, I recognize that name.
• 55:08
  Sofie Dodgson: That's kind of… I mean, I'm not, you know, there's some extremely prolific, comic colorists, and I'm not one of them at all. Right.
• 55:17
  Sofie Dodgson: And I don't… I don't really have the capacity
• 55:21
  Sofie Dodgson: for that, because I work other jobs, and I,
• 55:25
  Sofie Dodgson: have a… my son to raise. Have a child. Yeah, so… How do I… I think…
• 55:31
  Tad Eggleston: This is my reminder to people that comic creators are people who have lives and bills.
• 55:37
  Sofie Dodgson: and families, find ways to support them. Yeah, exactly, that's very kind.
• 55:46
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, maybe it… oh, god, it's awful to say vibes-based, doesn't it? But I… now I tend to pretty exclusively work with people that I've worked with.
• 55:54
  Sofie Dodgson: before, so I know…
• 55:56
  Sofie Dodgson: I know, as a parent, if my son is poorly, I can send them an email and it not be a big deal, you know? Right.
• 56:04
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah.
• 56:07
  Sofie Dodgson: Dunno.
• 56:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and I guess, I guess trusting…
• 56:11
  Sofie Dodgson: Like, I… I think if I'm…
• 56:13
  Sofie Dodgson: if I'm gonna read a story about motherhood, I think it's important to me that maybe a mother's written it, and I think…
• 56:23
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I don't know.
• 56:24
  Tad Eggleston: I think experience is useful.
• 56:26
  Tad Eggleston: that.
• 56:27
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I don't… I'm just trying to think of…
• 56:29
  Tad Eggleston: You're not from… School where white men clearly know everything.
• 56:34
  Sofie Dodgson: Anything?
• 56:34
  Tad Eggleston: Just by being born?
• 56:36
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I mean, it's more nuanced than that, I suppose, me saying, you know, I need people to be exactly who they're writing about, but…
• 56:42
  Tad Eggleston: No, it shouldn't be more nuanced.
• 56:45
  Sofie Dodgson: I'm the one that was…
• 56:46
  Tad Eggleston: Like, being sarcastic.
• 56:49
  Sofie Dodgson: No, I know.
• 56:51
  Sofie Dodgson: It's completely reasonable to…
• 56:53
  Tad Eggleston: If motherhood is central to the story, not being the child of a mother, but being a mother is central.
• 57:01
  Sofie Dodgson: At least you should get written by somebody who has the experience.
• 57:05
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe a stay-at-home dad.
• 57:09
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe a stay-at-home dad.
• 57:10
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I mean, I think I turned down working on a comic recently,
• 57:15
  Sofie Dodgson: Based on, a historical character that had a lot of, kind of.
• 57:19
  Sofie Dodgson: sexual violence in the story, and it was about women, and I just sort of was kind of wondering about the intention of the writer, I suppose, and… Right.
• 57:29
  Sofie Dodgson: So I guess, yeah.
• 57:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and even if you trust the intentions, I can't imagine that it's always worth…
• 57:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that there are thro…
• 57:38
  Tad Eggleston: Three major questions for a project like that.
• 57:41
  Tad Eggleston: A story worth telling at all.
• 57:43
  Tad Eggleston: Second is the story… Going to be told in a…
• 57:53
  Tad Eggleston: societally positive way.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: I had to choose my words, because I didn't want to say positive way, because that sounded like, oh, you know, the sexual assault is positive. No, no, no, no, no. It's going to be treated in a way where it's the cautionary, or the whatever. But then the third is, even if it's being done well, even if it is that important work.
• 58:15
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly for collaborative work, Can I do it?
• 58:21
  Tad Eggleston: While maintaining my own mental health.
• 58:23
  Sofie Dodgson: No, exactly, exactly. And I mean, I've done some pretty horrific, violent, sexual assault-y comics, for sure. Right. It's about trusting the people that I'm working with.
• 58:35
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 58:35
  Sofie Dodgson: sexual assault-y, using that as an adjective, that was terrible.
• 58:40
  Tad Eggleston: Welcome to the world we live in.
• 58:42
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah.
• 58:44
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you, Brett Kavanaugh.
• 58:47
  Sofie Dodgson: No, exactly.
• 58:51
  Sofie Dodgson: complicated.
• 58:56
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, actually, I think it was Kieran yesterday that said, like, being good isn't that hard.
• 59:04
  Tad Eggleston: And it's amazing how many… how many excuses we… we come up with to… to not be good.
• 59:13
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, on one side, yes, it's very complicated, and on the other side, it's like, should it be, though?
• 59:20
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, but basically…
• 59:22
  Tad Eggleston: Does it need to be?
• 59:23
  Chrissy Williams: basic respect for other human beings is really easy. Really, really, really easy. And yet, somehow.
• 59:34
  Chrissy Williams: The higher up, and the more labels are attached, and the more… they… everything gets convoluted and removed from the really core principle of just respect.
• 59:44
  Chrissy Williams: Respecting.
• 59:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and then the other thing is, like, as soon as one person has broken that… that…
• 59:51
  Tad Eggleston: communal trust of respect, it becomes easier for the next people, either because they justify it because, oh, it worked out well for them, or because they justified by it with, well, if he's not gonna respect me, I'm not gonna respect him, blah blah blah, it's like…
• 1:00:09
  Tad Eggleston: It's just such a… I remember having a conversation with my son when he was, like.
• 1:00:17
  Tad Eggleston: 12 or 13, probably, where he was explaining that, like, he was only gonna show his teachers exactly the… the respect that they'd earned. He wasn't gonna show them any more respect than… than they showed him, and I'm sitting there going.
• 1:00:32
  Tad Eggleston: So it's more important to you not to show them too much respect than too little respect? He's like, that's right. I'm like, well, if that's true for them, doesn't that mean that everybody's trying to actually show just a little bit less respect than the other person is showing? And at what point do we just get to the bottom, where nobody's showing any respect?
• 1:00:54
  Tad Eggleston: Isn't it better just to show them the maximum amount of respect unless they have forced you not to?
• 1:01:02
  Chrissy Williams: And even then, the maximum amount that you can.
• 1:01:06
  Tad Eggleston: muster to give them. I mean, I like to think that if you put me in a room with Donald freaking Trump, I would treat him respectfully.
• 1:01:15
  Tad Eggleston: I wanna bitch slap him, but I treat him respectfully.
• 1:01:20
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah.
• 1:01:22
  Tad Eggleston: But it gets hard when…
• 1:01:27
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody's showing you respect, or if you're part of a community that…
• 1:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: Is regularly not shown respect, or systemically not shown respect, or…
• 1:01:40
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:01:42
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah.
• 1:01:45
  Chrissy Williams: It is. It's almost like there are negative consequences towards
• 1:01:50
  Chrissy Williams: generations of people not showing basic respect for human rights. It's almost as if there are negative consequences.
• 1:01:58
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah.
• 1:01:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean… Generational trauma's a thing?
• 1:02:05
  Tad Eggleston: Systemic… systemic… Trauma?
• 1:02:11
  Tad Eggleston: disrespect?
• 1:02:14
  Tad Eggleston: Any number of things? Also a thing?
• 1:02:19
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, we, we gotta end, like, happier, so I'm gonna give you… I'm gonna give you a brand new question before I even get to my… my… my…
• 1:02:35
  Tad Eggleston: my standard closing question, which is also, I think, a less… less downer question. I'm sorry that we got so downer. I love this book. This book overall is a fun read, so anybody listening, like.
• 1:02:49
  Tad Eggleston: If we've depressed you, please don't take that as a reflection of the book.
• 1:02:57
  Tad Eggleston: And the problem… I mean, you guys are being all polite and muting yourself, but the problem with you meeting yourself is I'm watching Lauren and Sophie laughing, and it's great.
• 1:03:07
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh, no, I'm sorry.
• 1:03:10
  Sofie Dodgson: I'll send you some soundbites that you can edit in.
• 1:03:13
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's true.
• 1:03:13
  Sofie Dodgson: It's because my dog keeps barking. Yeah, that's fair.
• 1:03:16
  Tad Eggleston: That's fair. So my brand new question that I am asking, just because, like…
• 1:03:22
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like we, we need a just major… let's, let's swing up right now. Tell me something from the last week that has just made you laugh.
• 1:03:36
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh my gosh.
• 1:03:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you thought you were only talking about comics today.
• 1:03:42
  Chrissy Williams: Wait, I do have one. Well, the others are thinking. I actually do have something. I watched… we've been watching the new series of Only Murders in the Building.
• 1:03:51
  Chrissy Williams: And… and we just hit the one where… where Steve Martin's character has started taking testosterone, and… and he's… I can't remember what the first line is, he's like, oh, but I think the testosterone is starting to have an effect on my pheromones.
• 1:04:06
  Chrissy Williams: Because something, something, something, and then… I'm being followed by cats!
• 1:04:12
  Chrissy Williams: And then, like, you pan over to the cats at the window, and that… that… I genuinely had just such a laugh, that delightful, like, the hard juxtaposition between testosterone and I'm being followed around by cats.
• 1:04:27
  Chrissy Williams: I just thought it was… it was delightful. I had a look… a good laugh out loud at that.
• 1:04:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yay.
• 1:04:37
  Sofie Dodgson: I sent Chrissy a poem that I read online a few days ago, and now I feel insane for reading a poem out loud. But it was written by a 5-year-old called Peter, and he said.
• 1:04:49
  Sofie Dodgson: I have for breakfast Weetabix, I have for lunch some meat, I have for tea two sausages, and that's enough to eat. And that was my…
• 1:04:58
  Sofie Dodgson: poem of the month. I really enjoy it. I like it. And the spelling is… is hilarious, like, it's written by five-year-old, so it's very cute.
• 1:05:06
  Sofie Dodgson: Otherwise, my child would be…
• 1:05:09
  Tad Eggleston: stuck it in an email to me so I could see it, because that's.
• 1:05:11
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh, I will. Fantastic. Yeah, otherwise, I've had a very sleep-deprived week, so don't.
• 1:05:16
  Tad Eggleston: Huh?
• 1:05:16
  Sofie Dodgson: There's not been a lot of humor in my week.
• 1:05:19
  Lauren Knight: I have, my one-year-old niece who, for some reason, has grown almost human-sized two front teeth.
• 1:05:29
  Sofie Dodgson: She looks like a.
• 1:05:30
  Lauren Knight: She's an actual squirrel, and every time she smiles, I just crack up.
• 1:05:35
  Sofie Dodgson: I love that you said human instead of adult as well. Well, right.
• 1:05:41
  Lauren Knight: I've also had a very sleep-deprived week, okay? I don't even feel human right now.
• 1:05:47
  Chrissy Williams: Can I… if Sophie read that little poem, can I… can I read the one that I replied to you with? Sure.
• 1:05:54
  Sofie Dodgson: But…
• 1:05:54
  Chrissy Williams: A tiger, also written, so written by a 6-year-old. The tiger.
• 1:05:58
  Lauren Knight: He destroyed his cage.
• 1:06:01
  Chrissy Williams: Yes!
• 1:06:03
  Chrissy Williams: And then in all caps, YES!
• 1:06:05
  Chrissy Williams: The tiger is out!
• 1:06:09
  Chrissy Williams: Great poem.
• 1:06:10
  Sofie Dodgson: I don't know how many, like, comic creative teams are just sharing mini poems written by children.
• 1:06:17
  Lauren Knight: No credit given.
• 1:06:20
  Tad Eggleston: I think that there needs to be more crossover between poetry and comics. Not enough people are doing it. So, like, if you need to start by doing a one-pager of the tiger poem, or the…
• 1:06:36
  Chrissy Williams: I actually love the idea of being able to break that into.
• 1:06:40
  Lauren Knight: Hello!
• 1:06:40
  Chrissy Williams: Like, real, real, like, gritty art style, you know what I mean?
• 1:06:44
  Tad Eggleston: I seriously think that there… I mean, unfortunately, from a commercial standpoint, that there might only be me among the first buyers, maybe Matt and Adden, but I feel like, you know.
• 1:07:00
  Tad Eggleston: There is…
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: A lot of brilliant work that could come out of adapting Poetry or song lyrics.
• 1:07:12
  Tad Eggleston: But not using the words.
• 1:07:15
  Chrissy Williams: Hmm.
• 1:07:15
  Sofie Dodgson: -
• 1:07:17
  Sofie Dodgson: I don't even tell a poet to take the words out of poems, though.
• 1:07:20
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no, I mean, like, if you were, if you were doing… if you were doing it as, like, a comic, like, like, adapting it as the comic, and maybe put the poem on the other side of the page, like, like…
• 1:07:31
  Tad Eggleston: So it's like, here's what came out of it. There's the poem, here's the comic that came from it.
• 1:07:37
  Tad Eggleston: Some of them could have the words, too. I'm not saying that the words…
• 1:07:41
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, one of the beautiful things about good poetry is it… Paints pictures, so it's always…
• 1:07:48
  Tad Eggleston: those rare times where you see comics that are adapting poems, it's really interesting to see how they…
• 1:07:55
  Tad Eggleston: how they see the pictures.
• 1:07:57
  Chrissy Williams: There's actually… there's a load of different practitioners working in poetry comics in different ways, like, some of them working very much towards more, I would say, student or early years, kind of, breaking poems down into panel by panel by panel, trying to make them more accessible, and try and help
• 1:08:16
  Chrissy Williams: past that, sort of, that perceived difficulty in reading them. And other people who are…
• 1:08:21
  Chrissy Williams: Being much more abstract and, poetic in their
• 1:08:27
  Chrissy Williams: panel transitions, and in the composition of the page. And I've definitely have seen poetry comics that don't involve any words at all, that are just about… that they're calling it poetry comics much more in a, this is a type of comics that is more akin to poetry than, you know…
• 1:08:44
  Tad Eggleston: I know… I know Matt Madden did… it's called Walker, and I forget which…
• 1:08:50
  Tad Eggleston: poetry format whiz, but there's a poetry form where you only use 6 words, and you use them in a different order in each stanza. So, he took that.
• 1:09:00
  Tad Eggleston: and true… 6 panels.
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: And then rearranged them, and, like, it was 6 stick figure action panels.
• 1:09:10
  Tad Eggleston: So, so what he would then change in each page was, like, the…
• 1:09:15
  Tad Eggleston: the backgrounds or… or the things that the… but… but the main character was in the exact same position on that panel in a different place on each page, you know, so he did… wound up doing a pretty cool comic with it.
• 1:09:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I know a few people who do haiku.
• 1:09:34
  Tad Eggleston: comics a lot.
• 1:09:36
  Chrissy Williams: That generally have both the words and pictures.
• 1:09:40
  Sofie Dodgson: Like a proud mom, I want to talk about Chrissy's amazing poetry comments.
• 1:09:44
  Sofie Dodgson: Okay.
• 1:09:45
  Tad Eggleston: You're…
• 1:09:46
  Chrissy Williams: We have got… well, the thing that Tom and I have been working on is coming out next month, actually, hopefully in time for Thought Bubble. It's called…
• 1:09:58
  Chrissy Williams: I know the way out.
• 1:10:01
  Chrissy Williams: And, spoilers, I don't know if we
• 1:10:06
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, it has a collection of 3 poetry comics that we've done.
• 1:10:10
  Chrissy Williams: That all speak somewhat towards, kind of, grief and,
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: You said Tom, but Tom…
• 1:10:19
  Chrissy Williams: Sorry, Tom Humberstone.
• 1:10:21
  Chrissy Williams: So Tom Humberstone and I edited, 10 years ago, edited an anthology called Over the Line, An Introduction to Poetry Comics.
• 1:10:31
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right!
• 1:10:32
  Chrissy Williams: Loaded.
• 1:10:33
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, I… and this is…
• 1:10:35
  Tad Eggleston: I've read at least one book of your poetry since last time, but it's morning, so, like, I, like, completely forgot. Oh, that's right! I am actually talking to another one of the people that is obsessed with both poetry and comics.
• 1:10:51
  Chrissy Williams: No, we talked about it last time. I know you know, it's all good.
• 1:10:55
  Sofie Dodgson: I was, like, digitally kicking.
• 1:10:56
  Tad Eggleston: I just… I'm so frustrated that that, like, clicked right now.
• 1:11:03
  Chrissy Williams: But yeah, I… it's… I definitely… I mean, if you were… if you wanted to… if… if I'd wanted to get into a genre of, you know, commercially viable comics, I also wouldn't have written something with postmenopausal women as the protagonists.
• 1:11:18
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think… I think, I think with that, you could actually be…
• 1:11:28
  Tad Eggleston: Just ahead of the curve?
• 1:11:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, two things. First, like.
• 1:11:35
  Tad Eggleston: I want to say Heidi McDonald was reporting just last week that… that the… based on…
• 1:11:46
  Tad Eggleston: Facebook releases algorithm data that can then be
• 1:11:50
  Tad Eggleston: Cold by all sorts of people, and there are some comics people that will look through it every year, and based on the algorithmic data…
• 1:11:59
  Tad Eggleston: released by Facebook this year. The comics readership is actually 52% women now.
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know,
• 1:12:08
  Tad Eggleston: So, A, you've got a bigger audience, period, but B, like, the… the… those ones that started with the Reina Telgemeyer as their gateway are gonna need this book in, like, 50 years or so. So, I mean, it might not…
• 1:12:26
  Tad Eggleston: It might not benefit you the way you want it to, but it could still… it could still send your grandkids to college.
• 1:12:32
  Chrissy Williams: Amazing. No, I mean, I think that… I mean, as… as I think you will have got from what Lauren and Sophie were saying before, like, I also feel we… we…
• 1:12:45
  Chrissy Williams: We've worked so well together on this, and we have so much, sort of, trust in what each other's all doing. It… it has felt really important
• 1:12:56
  Chrissy Williams: to make it. And even… even the normal things that kind of interrupt the actual process, it hasn't felt that it's been a difficult process. Even where we've had to, you know, we've had to delay things and we've done that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's just… that kind of practical stuff is there. The actual…
• 1:13:12
  Chrissy Williams: you know, Lauren drawing it.
• 1:13:17
  Chrissy Williams: self-coloring it, like, knowing what the story is and nailing just the heart of the story has felt like it just happens really easily. It's felt… it feels to me like it's…
• 1:13:28
  Chrissy Williams: it's meant… this sounds a bit… this is God, now I was showing off my poet side, but it's like, it's really… it's meant to exist, it's meant to be, this felt… feels like a really…
• 1:13:38
  Chrissy Williams: These characters needed more story. They needed to tell more, and they're still, you know…
• 1:13:46
  Tad Eggleston: Honestly, I hope that they still get more.
• 1:13:48
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like, I feel like… Feel like there's…
• 1:13:55
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like there could be more.
• 1:13:58
  Chrissy Williams: There is, just as we did with the first one.
• 1:14:01
  Chrissy Williams: It is… it ends in such a way that.
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:04
  Chrissy Williams: It could… we could go whichever way you want! Just holding my hands and rubbing… no, not rubbing my chin, stroking my chin? Is that what I…
• 1:14:17
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah.
• 1:14:18
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry, I fell down a rabbit hole, I am…
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I, I just purchased a copy of Over the Line, digitally.
• 1:14:29
  Chrissy Williams: Oh, cool.
• 1:14:30
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't do last time.
• 1:14:32
  Tad Eggleston: But… but I've, I've… I've corrected that now.
• 1:14:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like… I'm disappointed that I haven't read it already.
• 1:14:43
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, thank you.
• 1:14:44
  Chrissy Williams: Thank you. The last… actually, the one that's out at the moment, that came out last year, I should say that it won… it won a Scottish… there's a new independent comics awards in Scotland called the Selkies, and it won a Selkie Prize
• 1:15:00
  Chrissy Williams: for Best Narration, which I feel incredibly proud of what Tom was able to do on the page, because
• 1:15:06
  Chrissy Williams: To give best narration to something that is unconventionally told and narrated feels like something…
• 1:15:14
  Tad Eggleston: Is the one that came out last year, is that the I Know the Way Out, or is that…
• 1:15:18
  Chrissy Williams: No, I Know The Way Out is going to be out next month.
• 1:15:21
  Tad Eggleston: Upcoming.
• 1:15:23
  Chrissy Williams: The one… the one that won the prize was, oh good god, my brain! Come back to me in a second. Yeah.
• 1:15:32
  Chrissy Williams: Charts!
• 1:15:33
  Sofie Dodgson: Sorry, I'm like, Chrissy, your book is called Charts.
• 1:15:37
  Chrissy Williams: What would I do?
• 1:15:39
  Chrissy Williams: Yes, sorry, Introduction to Charts.
• 1:15:41
  Sofie Dodgson: I'm a very big fan. I'm a very big fan. Oh, thank you. I love it.
• 1:15:46
  Chrissy Williams: I love working with Tom because what… so what the three of us have is something that's very specific to plot and character. What happens when I work with Tom is that
• 1:15:56
  Chrissy Williams: the script, such as it is, is super, super sparse. It might just be the poem, or it might be the poem with me vaguely suggesting page breaks, or possibly panel breaks, I think, but very little. And then Tom absolutely goes off and just…
• 1:16:13
  Chrissy Williams: starts penciling and planning out all of that stuff. It's a much looser…
• 1:16:19
  Tad Eggleston: This one doesn't look like it's available digitally, but there's a bunch of pages at his website, and I'm looking at them right now, and my god, it's gorgeous.
• 1:16:27
  Chrissy Williams: I'm hoping…
• 1:16:28
  Sofie Dodgson: At some point… At some point.
• 1:16:31
  Chrissy Williams: At some point next year, we're hoping to actually put out, like, something that's a longer format that collects together all the stuff that we've done. At the moment, we've just been putting out, sort of, 20 to 30 page pamphlet-type things, and Tom also works with an amazing printer. And the last one was rhizoprinted with,
• 1:16:50
  Chrissy Williams: The way that method of printing works is that, you know, each page is printed individually, so they all come out with slightly different colors, slightly different textures, slightly different things, so each single physical copy is also a unique object.
• 1:17:07
  Sofie Dodgson: It's such a gorgeous, tactile book. I love, like, the paper and the color, and Rizo.
• 1:17:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's become… It's so beautiful.
• 1:17:13
  Tad Eggleston: Really, really big in the… the…
• 1:17:18
  Tad Eggleston: indie comic community to Rhizo Print.
• 1:17:21
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm.
• 1:17:23
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like every… every… Small con…
• 1:17:28
  Tad Eggleston: I've been to in the last year or so has either an official panel or an unofficial group discussion somewhere about rhizo printing.
• 1:17:37
  Sofie Dodgson: Mmm.
• 1:17:38
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, that's funny.
• 1:17:39
  Tad Eggleston: Gorgeous.
• 1:17:40
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah. Like, if you're ever looking for U.S.
• 1:17:45
  Tad Eggleston: publisher… I mean, I know you know the industry, but, like, I know…
• 1:17:50
  Tad Eggleston: At least a couple of smaller presses that might be interested in…
• 1:17:56
  Tad Eggleston: And not having to make you pay shipping and whatnot.
• 1:18:00
  Chrissy Williams: Meh.
• 1:18:04
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, that's the only reason that I'm not ordering a copy of this right now. I think it would cost me twice as much to ship it as it would cost to get the book.
• 1:18:13
  Chrissy Williams: Yes, we have the same thing, trying to get stuff from you guys. It is, it's…
• 1:18:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:18:18
  Chrissy Williams: It's really hard to…
• 1:18:20
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, but tariffs are good.
• 1:18:27
  Sofie Dodgson: Great.
• 1:18:29
  Chrissy Williams: and public.
• 1:18:29
  Tad Eggleston: Postal services should be businesses rather than services.
• 1:18:36
  Chrissy Williams: Oh, I would just like to apologize, my cat is coughing up a hairball right next to me.
• 1:18:42
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh, I can hear it, baby.
• 1:18:44
  Tad Eggleston: I thought that was me.
• 1:18:45
  Chrissy Williams: I'm gonna unmute for a moment.
• 1:18:48
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, that means everybody.
• 1:18:50
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody else gets to answer the final question, first.
• 1:18:56
  Sofie Dodgson: Tell me something you love.
• 1:18:59
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 1:19:01
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:19:06
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced.
• 1:19:10
  Tad Eggleston: And you want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:19:18
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh my gosh.
• 1:19:20
  Lauren Knight: You asked this last time, I should have known.
• 1:19:23
  Tad Eggleston: I ask it every time.
• 1:19:24
  Lauren Knight: in preparing.
• 1:19:25
  Sofie Dodgson: You could've… yeah, you could have given me a… I forgot!
• 1:19:28
  Lauren Knight: Well…
• 1:19:28
  Sofie Dodgson: I…
• 1:19:30
  Tad Eggleston: Hey!
• 1:19:30
  Sofie Dodgson: Hmm…
• 1:19:31
  Tad Eggleston: Almost everybody forgets, that's why it's that much better of a question.
• 1:19:36
  Lauren Knight: Does this count that I just drew the tiger coming out of the cage.
• 1:19:40
  Sofie Dodgson: It depends. Supposed! It's not gonna…
• 1:19:43
  Sofie Dodgson: Can't you draw the sausages, though?
• 1:19:45
  Lauren Knight: I forgot that one! I should have, because I can't draw a tiger from memory.
• 1:19:51
  Tad Eggleston: It counts if you're allowed… if you're willing to send it to me, and I can.
• 1:19:58
  Lauren Knight: Put it up.
• 1:19:58
  Tad Eggleston: Put the show notes, and then people can actually look at it to talk about it.
• 1:20:02
  Lauren Knight: Okay, it also comes with a human baby.
• 1:20:05
  Lauren Knight: With human teeth, human baby would…
• 1:20:08
  Sofie Dodgson: With the human teeth.
• 1:20:09
  Sofie Dodgson: This is great. Have you been live?
• 1:20:10
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Lauren, it's gonna be… I'm just gonna call it, Your… Show doodles.
• 1:20:20
  Lauren Knight: Yes.
• 1:20:21
  Tad Eggleston: Show Doodles slash Tiger Poem.
• 1:20:24
  Lauren Knight: Love the tiger boom.
• 1:20:27
  Sofie Dodgson: Oh gosh, I'm bad at this kind of question. I feel like I'm… I feel like I'm constantly trying to get my friends to play the comics that I love, play the… play the… read the comics I love, and play the games I love, and
• 1:20:40
  Sofie Dodgson: to not much success. Maybe I need to be more forceful.
• 1:20:43
  Lauren Knight: Hmm.
• 1:20:43
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that should mean that you have a long list, because if you're trying to get them to read, and trying to get them to play, and they're not, all of those that they have said no to qualify for this question.
• 1:20:56
  Sofie Dodgson: It's very… I don't think they're saying no. Gosh. Okay.
• 1:21:01
  Sofie Dodgson: Well, the first thing that's popped into my head that I'm obsessed with is…
• 1:21:08
  Sofie Dodgson: Because I'm… so I love Meg and Mogg, which is this English kid's book, with really insane bright colors, and it's about a witch, and it's completely…
• 1:21:20
  Sofie Dodgson: batshit crazy. There's an adult version called Meg and Mogg with a double G, so M-E-G-G and M-O-G-G, which is…
• 1:21:30
  Sofie Dodgson: very far away from Megan Moore's children's book.
• 1:21:35
  Sofie Dodgson: In that it's very adult and explicit, and…
• 1:21:40
  Sofie Dodgson: There she is. I had no stand, and I'm a fan.
• 1:21:44
  Sofie Dodgson: So that… that would be the one that I would… Recommend to all of my…
• 1:21:49
  Tad Eggleston: Simon Hanselman.
• 1:21:50
  Sofie Dodgson: Exactly. You know, enough people have…
• 1:21:54
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I read just a little bit of this way back when, and didn't wind up
• 1:22:00
  Tad Eggleston: jumping all over it, but it keeps coming up, and I know I need to read it more, and I don't think I knew that it came
• 1:22:09
  Tad Eggleston: from… a children's book, and I wonder if that would wind up making me look at it differently. So…
• 1:22:16
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, I mean, there's no obvious connection, other than it's about a witch and a cat.
• 1:22:21
  Sofie Dodgson: Right. But I'm obsessed with the children's book, and I'm obsessed with the very explicit, adult, druggy, pornographic, not children's book version of it as well. So, that is…
• 1:22:34
  Sofie Dodgson: The first thing that's come into my mind.
• 1:22:37
  Sofie Dodgson: Yeah, tag, someone else. No, that was good.
• 1:22:42
  Chrissy Williams: The thing I have been, fairly majorly obsessed with over the summer is the real life of Maria von Trapp from The Sound of Music.
• 1:22:52
  Chrissy Williams: I had not realized
• 1:22:54
  Chrissy Williams: I had not realized that The Sound of Music is not a work of fiction, but, is based on her autobiography, and so I've read her actual autobiography over the summer, which,
• 1:23:06
  Chrissy Williams: albeit does, have some words which are, I think, which would not be deemed acceptable today, just in terms of
• 1:23:15
  Chrissy Williams: naming things, but the attitudes and the actual experiences and everything are kind of crazy. If you imagine Sounding Music ends halfway through the book, or even, like, a third into the book, and now, hard cut to the family arriving in Brooklyn.
• 1:23:30
  Chrissy Williams: all of them still wearing, basically, like, the Austrian lederhosen and the… all of that stuff, having to, find a way to rent a house, they have no money, just the whole experience of…
• 1:23:42
  Chrissy Williams: I'm… I'm having, like, a whole thing, like, my, my sort of childhood, oh, Austria, the singing, in brackets, Nazis, it suddenly dropped into, like, urban, post-war, New York.
• 1:23:57
  Chrissy Williams: And it's all about how they kind of… the struggles and how they actually made it as a sort of singing family, and what they did, and what happened to them, and it's a really bizarre rewriting of something in my childhood. And also,
• 1:24:14
  Chrissy Williams: a really… a really interesting voice. She is…
• 1:24:19
  Chrissy Williams: sassy AF for a nun, like, that's something that the Rogers and Hammerstein absolutely nailed. She is definitely the nun who talks back and should never have been a nun, etc. There's… there's just a lot about,
• 1:24:34
  Chrissy Williams: Given that, in some ways, she is a very traditional and, and…
• 1:24:42
  Chrissy Williams: a lot of traditional religious, ideas that sort of guide her. There is so much in that story about transgression, and about striking new pathways, and about…
• 1:24:55
  Chrissy Williams: You know, doing things that technically put your family in danger.
• 1:25:00
  Chrissy Williams: But are done for the good of wanting to create a different life and a different way of being, and it was crazily, interesting to read.
• 1:25:11
  Chrissy Williams: Yep, so the Von Trapp…
• 1:25:15
  Chrissy Williams: family, real-life story, that's my… that's my thing that I want to talk about.
• 1:25:19
  Tad Eggleston: I'm seeing multiple different… Memoirs?
• 1:25:24
  Sofie Dodgson: You are more prepared to answer that question, Chrissy.
• 1:25:29
  Chrissy Williams: by the side of my bed. I was actually thinking I would answer a question about comics, and then I thought, no, it's Maria von Trapp.
• 1:25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Is it… well, I mean, I'm seeing Maria, I'm seeing Maria My Own Story, the Trap Family Law… well, that's Trap Family Lodge Gift Shop, and the story of the Trap Family Singers.
• 1:25:47
  Chrissy Williams: I think it was the story of the Trap Family Singers.
• 1:25:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, yeah, it looks like the My Own Story…
• 1:25:54
  Tad Eggleston: It's more about becoming a nun.
• 1:25:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't know.
• 1:26:00
  Chrissy Williams: She's a really interesting voice to read, and given when she was writing, it's… it's really interesting. And also, in the course of it, she talks about how she learned English, just, like, on the fly from bellhops in New York, and it's just… it's a really interesting…
• 1:26:17
  Chrissy Williams: Look at people who have just changed their entire brain, changed the entire language that they communicate in primarily as adults, as full, you know, it's… there's loads going on.
• 1:26:27
  Chrissy Williams: As well as some,
• 1:26:31
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, never… it's the trouble with reading things from the past, isn't it? They use different words to describe things, and some of those words can be very shocking, out of con… Yeah, now.
• 1:26:46
  Chrissy Williams: But I would say that the intent behind the words was not negative. There's a real warmth and a kindness,
• 1:26:53
  Chrissy Williams: Well, I'll also toss out that, like, you now have your next graphic novel pitch.
• 1:27:00
  Chrissy Williams: Well, I actually have got a script about nuns that I've been thinking about, honestly. Well, I'm in that too.
• 1:27:06
  Tad Eggleston: I was just thinking, like, the New York Van Trapp family.
• 1:27:10
  Chrissy Williams: It's just a…
• 1:27:12
  Tad Eggleston: After the sound of the music.
• 1:27:14
  Chrissy Williams: It just… but you think about the visuals in your head from that family, and now put it next to, like, the Godfather, right?
• 1:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it actually shocks me that nobody has…
• 1:27:29
  Chrissy Williams: Made that film.
• 1:27:31
  Tad Eggleston: Or comic, one of the two, yeah.
• 1:27:33
  Chrissy Williams: Okay.
• 1:27:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:27:36
  Tad Eggleston: it's always… I mean, particularly in… I mean, to a certain extent, yes, film, because we're in this era where, like, everything is, like, let's regurgitate properties, let's take the stuff that we already own. How did nobody go, oh, wait, the von Trapps are real, and there's more to the story! Get me Jay-Z!
• 1:27:56
  Chrissy Williams: It is, it's the reboot to end all reboots, right.
• 1:28:01
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, oh god, there's an awful… you know, I'm not gonna make that pun, never mind. Let's move on.
• 1:28:08
  Chrissy Williams: Nope. Nope, nope.
• 1:28:11
  Chrissy Williams: Thank you for asking such an interesting question.
• 1:28:15
  Tad Eggleston: When we reach the point where we have to censor ourselves, it's clearly time to be…
• 1:28:23
  Tad Eggleston: be at a finish, but it was such a joy. I hope to talk to you all again, either because you
• 1:28:30
  Tad Eggleston: work together again, or because we come back individually, or with other projects, or whatever, it has been an absolute pleasure. I hope I haven't been too annoying. Mourning me is weird.
• 1:28:43
  Tad Eggleston: So, for… for Chrissy Williams, Lauren Knight, and Sophie Dodgson, the three-quarters of the primary
• 1:28:53
  Tad Eggleston: Golden Rage team.
• 1:28:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, because I feel like I should list editors, too, but I don't have them off the top of my head, or how many of them are…
• 1:29:01
  Chrissy Williams: Jomet Gill was an editor, also.
• 1:29:03
  Tad Eggleston: edit.
• 1:29:04
  Chrissy Williams: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:29:05
  Tad Eggleston: Becca Carey, with the letters. She won't give everybody credit right now, but Chrissy, Lauren, and Sophie have been talking to us for the last…
• 1:29:12
  Tad Eggleston: Hour and a half, it has been a joy. Enjoy the rest of your days, which… which is significantly less than the rest of my day. I'm just starting my day, and I have to go get a physical, and then do two more podcasts, because I need to… I need to fire my scheduler.
• 1:29:30
  Chrissy Williams: Ask them about the Sound of Music.
• 1:29:33
  Tad Eggleston: Ask them about the Sound of Music? I mean, it's a heavy metal book club and a saga book club, but I'll try to… I'll try to remember.
• 1:29:39
  Sofie Dodgson: I'm sure you.
• 1:29:39
  Chrissy Williams: heavy rain.
• 1:29:39
  Sofie Dodgson: Where that in.
• 1:29:40
  Sofie Dodgson: Yep, yep, yep.
• 1:29:41
  Chrissy Williams: Definitely, definitely. Slip it over.
• 1:29:44
  Tad Eggleston: Heavy metal, the magazine, not the music.
• 1:29:51
  Tad Eggleston: This is a comics podcast, and we differ from that when we're playing Die.
• 1:29:58
  Chrissy Williams: But that came out of a comic, so, you know… Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:30:04
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you so much, it's been a wonderful way to spend my morning.
• 1:30:09
  Sofie Dodgson: Amazing.
• 1:30:09
  Tad Eggleston: for.
• 1:30:10
  Sofie Dodgson: Thank you so much.
• 1:30:11
  Lauren Knight: Thank you.
• 1:30:11
  Tad Eggleston: For the Golden Rage team, this has been 22Panels, and we will see you after the next page.