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With Great Power #267... 22 Panels with Kieron Gillen · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels, and my brain is only mildly fried as I'm recording for…
• 0:09
  Tad Eggleston: the third time in 5 hours. Phil is back, he's recording for the second time in…
• 0:17
  Tad Eggleston: in 3 hours, so hopefully his brain is less fried, because we are talking with Kieran Gillen, who,
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: We, we teased this interview just a few minutes ago, when, when, when,
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: he begged me to come back to doing 22 panels. We have a Spider-Man theme to, like, all of our naming, Kieran, so when we play Die, it's 22 panels no more. And I'll do a thing up at the beginning of the…
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: episode to say, you know, schedule too much, my head is broken, I can't do it anymore.
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: and I'll end the podcast, and Phil will take over with Di, but then he'll convince me to come back at the end of the podcast, and this time I essentially just,
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: Accused him of guilting me into continuing so he could talk to you.
• 1:06
  Phil: This is my final episode, no kidding, kidding, of course, that would, that would be.
• 1:11
  Tad Eggleston: So, Kieran Gillen is our guest. His upcoming book is, The Return of Die that I've completely forgotten, the subtitle.
• 1:18
  Phil: Die Loaded.
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: die-loaded. Phil, of course, would not forget the subtitle. He's also currently writing The Power Fantasy with Casper Wingard, which is fantastic, and we were gonna talk about it on the episode yesterday, except that we got derailed. We fell off a metaphysical…
• 1:39
  Phil: Got rid of it.
• 1:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we spent an hour talking about what the meaning of a medium is.
• 1:47
  Kieron Gillen: or useful way to spend your time.
• 1:50
  Phil: It was a way to spend time. We got use out of it, I think. So the key… I think the best line that I ended up writing down from that combo was, inherently, mediums have to be social constructs.
• 2:05
  Phil: The idea that, you know, the convention shared between people who enjoy things in a similar way, understand it in a similar way, that was Tad's line, that was Tad's line, and it, it got.
• 2:15
  Tad Eggleston: Every once in a while, I come up with one.
• 2:17
  Tad Eggleston: I barely remember saying it.
• 2:21
  Phil: So I guess the first question is, of those two, what's currently happening, what's coming up, which do you feel more like talking about tonight? The future of Die, or the future of the Power Fantasy?
• 2:31
  Kieron Gillen: I could… I very easily set a grade between the two, in the level of… they're both two children with the desire of attention, and then we'll bounce them… when I feel that one's got too much attention, I'll move to the other one, and then we'll eventually run out of time, and I'm a member, I've got… I'm doing something else. Like, I've got a backlist!
• 2:48
  Kieron Gillen: Where we are right now, Dai is, as we're speaking, a week before FOC, as the orders get cut off a week from, like, Monday, the 13th, so Monday the 20th is.
• 2:58
  Tad Eggleston: Monday the 20th.
• 2:59
  Kieron Gillen: Is the cutoff for that.
• 3:00
  Tad Eggleston: That I did make a big deal of yesterday on the episode.
• 3:04
  Kieron Gillen: Cool. That's the real reason I'm out banging drums. But at the same time, nothing out till November, and Power Fantasy came out this week for the start of the third arc, which was, a banger and went off in that way.
• 3:14
  Tad Eggleston: It was good.
• 3:15
  Phil: It's fun. Obviously, it's quite fun. Both of them are just fun in different ways, and no one really knows what dye is yet. In fact, I should have sent you an early copy. That would have made this interview easier for you. But.
• 3:25
  Tad Eggleston: He'll send us an early copy, just because he, like…
• 3:28
  Tad Eggleston: I will say that, like, I plug the three books that I hope will be spectacular, and I'm very… I'm very,
• 3:36
  Tad Eggleston: very OCD, so I, like, make myself stick to 3 unless I can stretch to 9. But I don't count books that I know are spectacular. So if I read it before it comes out, then it will get a plug.
• 3:52
  Tad Eggleston: Because it doesn't have to fall into the 3, it'll just, like, be a… you know, so the best way to make certain it's getting plugged the week before it comes out is to allow me to read it ahead of time.
• 4:01
  Kieron Gillen: Sneaky. Yeah, I'm proof of it. But.
• 4:05
  Phil: I have no demands.
• 4:06
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, I've got to say, yeah, that's where we are, so basically both are happening, both are kind of… basically, it's all I'm doing, comic-wise. Like, I've got nothing else on my plate. I pause, something else might be ahead, but I basically… the only comic I was having out for a year was the Power Fantasy. Like, except for the What's the Future when it dropped. Not What's a Future,
• 4:24
  Kieron Gillen: we call them giants, the OG Ina did with Stephanie. Right. And then now, you know, come November, I'll be doing a second one. But yeah, it's, it's been a deliberately concentrated period.
• 4:34
  Kieron Gillen: And writing indie RPGs, because I have to kill time somehow.
• 4:38
  Tad Eggleston: So you're doing a, a sequel to Giants?
• 4:43
  Kieron Gillen: No, no, no, we're not, so I was just, that's very much a one-off.
• 4:46
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. When you said it was with Stephanie, and then you said come December, which is when I know Di is coming back, but I just, like, in my head.
• 4:54
  Kieron Gillen: No, no.
• 4:54
  Tad Eggleston: second, I'm like, you got two art… you got, you got a… you're really putting Stephanie to work here, aren't you? You got Dai and another?
• 5:02
  Kieron Gillen: No, no, I meant, like, we've done Giants previously, but we are… we've been worryingly organized in that Stephanie's, like, on issue seven, like, we've generally got six issues in the can, which is probably… I think that's the most I've ever done for a car.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: What I'm saying is you're actually gonna send me the first arc.
• 5:16
  Kieron Gillen: Actually, the last two aren't lettered well enough I would show anybody. But, like, you know what I mean? Like, and also, Stephanie will always be thinking. So, like, next week when they are…
• 5:24
  Kieron Gillen: I'm really working out why, because the thing is, it's obvious what you put out there when. When you're trying to, like.
• 5:31
  Kieron Gillen: Is that what you choose, and you can share, and etc. Especially because, like, the first one is, like, most of the things I write, the first one is the statement of intent. And, okay, this is what we're doing now. And by the end, you'll go, oh no, it's died, but I also understand what the angle is on this beast. And you don't want to give that away too much, because there's so much other stuff to talk about once you've got past that first concept.
• 5:51
  Kieron Gillen: So yeah.
• 5:53
  Kieron Gillen: Comics.
• 5:55
  Phil: It's… it's one of those where, I mean, the sequel to Die was hypothetical for so long that that indication on the side of the hardcover of saying Book 1 was, like, just a little tease.
• 6:07
  Tad Eggleston: I remember him noticing that.
• 6:09
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 6:12
  Phil: Yeah, so I'm glad, I'm so excited for its coming back.
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: It was his Christmas present this last year. He got the Die Hard cover, and, like, the first thing he noticed was it.
• 6:21
  Phil: That's book one.
• 6:21
  Tad Eggleston: one. Yup.
• 6:23
  Kieron Gillen: The real way is, obviously, we… I mean, I went and made up die as a concept,
• 6:28
  Kieron Gillen: well, there's multiple things it was meant to do, but one of them was, like, to be to RPG is what Phonogram was to comics. In other words, an endless device I can use to pick at stuff if I want to write it. You know, and Stephanie wants to draw it. So it's that kind of, like, there's always the possibility of a Book 2, but at the same time, like, the real reason you have Book 1 on the side is if we do a Book 2, it doesn't look stupid.
• 6:47
  Phil: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:48
  Kieron Gillen: You have to have book one. And there's also the meta, you know, there's the meta explanation, because die, all the… every single game in the RPG is in canon. So it's like, we're book one, and then everyone else playing is book two to whatever billion. So, like, if this is all continuity, your games are all die, book, whatever. That's the meta reason.
• 7:07
  Phil: Yeah, but it's also… it's… it's weird because, I remember seeing you post somewhere that… so technically, the game that they play in the comic is different from the game we are playing, in the sense that…
• 7:20
  Phil: I mean, aside from the obvious comparison that that dragged them off to a magical world and.
• 7:25
  Kieron Gillen: Yet.
• 7:25
  Phil: Our magical world, yes, yes. I mean, for all we know, Dai could be, the entity making reality stranger every day, you know.
• 7:35
  Tad Eggleston: I'm telling you, it's all algorithmic, and I can totally hack it.
• 7:39
  Phil: So, yeah, so his, his, he's playing the fool, his, Fool's prep today, he asked for a laptop connected to the interface of the world, and so I said a rock, tilts upward, and is now a screen depicted of cave drawings and, relief sculptures, and you are punching stone keys.
• 7:57
  Kieron Gillen: That's beautiful. Yeah, that's a lot of fun. Pools are just like, what's the word,
• 8:03
  Kieron Gillen: Game's about playing. By definition, you make moves.
• 8:05
  Tad Eggleston: I also have the Carlisle sword.
• 8:07
  Phil: I'm an awesome fool… fool. So the little, I lost myself.
• 8:12
  Kieron Gillen: skateboard.
• 8:13
  Phil: Right, he's been all over it.
• 8:14
  Tad Eggleston: sad.
• 8:15
  Phil: The, eventually, because he got the Sword of Forever Carlyle from the series Lazarus, we are going to go to the world of Lazarus, but the twist is, it's also going to be the world of ludicrats.
• 8:26
  Kieron Gillen: Oh no, I'm sorry.
• 8:27
  Phil: All the Lazari are ludicrats. It's a,
• 8:31
  Phil: Lesutocraticus, something like that, so they'll be having silly fights, over the economic squandered future.
• 8:38
  Kieron Gillen: I'd actually, like, I could just see Rocket could murder me over that. It's like, how dare you corrupt my beautiful piece of worldbuilding with your nonsense?
• 8:45
  Phil: So, okay.
• 8:46
  Kieron Gillen: I guess I…
• 8:47
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I will… Rucka has met Phil, so, like, if he winds up listening, and you just… you just send him to me, and I will… I will clear it, and I will say, Kieran had nothing to do with it, he was worried about being murdered. If you must kill somebody.
• 9:06
  Tad Eggleston: Please don't kill Phil.
• 9:07
  Phil: I like having a co-host, but…
• 9:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'll find you somebody.
• 9:10
  Phil: But at the same time, he's a big enough fan of Douglas Adams to where I think he would be amused by it.
• 9:15
  Kieron Gillen: I hope so. Like, you know.
• 9:16
  Tad Eggleston: No, actually…
• 9:17
  Kieron Gillen: You're a gamer as well, you know.
• 9:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 9:19
  Kieron Gillen: And he's also a huge Pratchett fan. I feel like that fits into the Pratchett.
• 9:25
  Tad Eggleston: the, the, the Pratchett.
• 9:27
  Kieron Gillen: Oh yeah, I mean, it's definitely… it's more Douglas Adams, I mean, it…
• 9:32
  Tad Eggleston: No, I meant…
• 9:33
  Kieron Gillen: Fundamental human… I know what you mean, but like…
• 9:35
  Tad Eggleston: feels very Pratchett.
• 9:37
  Kieron Gillen: It's always like, the way we had to… it was impossible to pitch. Like, Ludacrats was a very difficult book in lots of ways, but the,
• 9:45
  Kieron Gillen: Douglas Adam… oh, actually, the Monty Python guys do June, was one of the useful ones, in that kind of, you know, this is a big… you could write this book as a serious space opera, but unfortunately, idiots are at the wheel, and it's going to be very stupid. That's kind of the vibe. And yeah, and Douglas Adam has a lot in the mix there. I mean, Pratchett's got… imagine if Pratchett… you took Pratchett and removed that kind humanist spirit right at the heart of Pratchett, and you replaced it with a dog, like, humping your leg.
• 10:09
  Kieron Gillen: That's kind of a ludicrous.
• 10:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 10:12
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah. I'm still amazed, it's like, it's… sorry, my stuff really does very well. Ludiscratch did spectacularly badly in a way that makes it even funnier.
• 10:21
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no.
• 10:21
  Kieron Gillen: We are so in the red, we're still in the red on Ludacras every year, and we're further in the red.
• 10:26
  Phil: Here's my pitch, here's my pitch to make Ludacrats more financially successful. You put out Ludacrats 2, reuse the art, and just re-letter it, and then it's, it's money for old rope.
• 10:36
  Kieron Gillen: Yep.
• 10:36
  Phil: There you go.
• 10:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was actually what I was about to say about the Book 1, when you said that you had to put the Book 1 so it matched on the shelf, and I'm like, no, because comics people are OCD. If you put out the second edition of Book 1 that has Book 1 on the side after Book 2 comes out, they will buy it again so that it will look right on their shelf, and give the old copy to a library.
• 10:59
  Kieron Gillen: It's funny, the thing about ludicrous, it's also ludicrous. We could probably get away with that as art, you know what I mean? There's an element of, like, it's just what we do, guys. It's just what we do.
• 11:08
  Phil: Yeah, it's… it was fun. I enjoyed it. You know, it's.
• 11:14
  Tad Eggleston: You reread it now?
• 11:15
  Phil: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah.
• 11:16
  Tad Eggleston: It's one of the things that I read in single issues, and I never actually went back and read it all together, and you guys have both just convinced me that I need to.
• 11:26
  Kieron Gillen: It's really fun. I mean, it's so funny, it's like, we're abstractly talking about other things, but I'm very into talking about ludicrous in that kind of… that book never sells, we're never going to make money at that book. And that's kind of the fun of it. The idea of we just… I want to do something for the art. So me and Jim did the book.
• 11:43
  Kieron Gillen: talked, Jeff into drawing it, and it's 5 really delightful issues we're very proud of it.
• 11:48
  Tad Eggleston: I've got the… the… The… the tag on the issue 4, free penultimate pen, not included.
• 11:57
  Phil: Yep.
• 11:58
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, man.
• 11:59
  Phil: Oh, it's… it's weirdly like a Rosetta Stone to so much of your other work, from… I mean, it, first of all, it features Casanova Quinn, who we talked about briefly before, before air,
• 12:11
  Phil: And then, the way that it ends with lampooning, overly introspective black and white comics in a similar way that, that then ties it to,
• 12:24
  Phil: Peter Kane and Thunderbolt.
• 12:25
  Phil: In that they share… they share that piece between them.
• 12:28
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, I do like… it's also the op… Ludacras makes entirely the opposite argument, which is quite fun in that very different way. I think, we contain multitudes. That's the other thing about Ludacris. Whilst a lot of it was written more recently.
• 12:41
  Kieron Gillen: That first issue was written… actually, no, the second issue was written first.
• 12:46
  Kieron Gillen: But that was dates in 2007, or something like that. But a lot of the plotting for Issue 1 was done, like, then. So, like, Casanova would have been coming out at Image Circa then. You know, this is, like, me…
• 12:57
  Kieron Gillen: Circophonogram, and that's the weird thing of going back to Ludacrats and making it work, in that kind of, like, oh… I mean, like, joking aside, Trump ruined so much about that book, and then it's kind of, like, awful plutocratic monsters became a lot less.
• 13:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 13:10
  Kieron Gillen: You're like…
• 13:11
  Tad Eggleston: To be fair, how many things did Trump ruin, both in terms of humor and, like, we… like…
• 13:19
  Tad Eggleston: We just talked about Rucka. How much… how much was Lazarus, like… I liked it so much better as a caution. I love it now. I'm not trying to bash it now, but it was so much better when it was still a cautionary tale rather than a history.
• 13:34
  Kieron Gillen: Yes, it's, like, outside the windows, but still. And yeah, but of course, we tweaked Ludacrats a bunch to make it, like, operate in a slightly different manner. Yeah, Ludacrous, which is the point. I still smile at the sex scene, in terms of, like, the… just the multi-page sex scene with the sirens going off. That's so dumb, so dumb.
• 13:53
  Phil: Yeah, it's… it's the… I'm remembering the… the woman that was also a locomotive son.
• 13:58
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 13:59
  Kieron Gillen: She's good.
• 14:00
  Phil: Yeah, she had a lot of fun.
• 14:02
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 14:02
  Phil: Pretty much every, every little detail just, just sings in that one.
• 14:06
  Phil: And this is… so this is… I'm trying to… so first of all, so the… the… the preemptive claim to conversational weirdness that I had was… was thinking to myself, okay, I need to go into this interview with full Rorschach energy of the, you know.
• 14:23
  Phil: I'm not stuck in here with you, you're stuck in here with me. But then I'm like, no, no, no, a good interviewer knows that the guest is a star, so my goal is to bring out your Rorschach energy, and to… if I could… if I could regret the level of being trapped here with you that I am, that is… that is the true goal here.
• 14:39
  Phil: So with that.
• 14:40
  Kieron Gillen: Do you want me to break your finger? Is that what you're saying?
• 14:43
  Kieron Gillen: As I question you every…
• 14:45
  Tad Eggleston: If I find a way to do it through the internet, I will send extra money.
• 14:48
  Phil: I would prefer a hot jar of oil to the face, but I'll take what I can get.
• 14:54
  Phil: so The Power Fantasy, which, in a strange way.
• 14:59
  Phil: Feels like you are holding the book hostage, but it's really the world that's holding the book hostage for… for not… for not…
• 15:08
  Phil: the continuation, the, the.
• 15:10
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 15:11
  Phil: It's… it's… sorry, that was a weirdly accusatory way to say that you're… When we're hostage.
• 15:15
  Kieron Gillen: I genuinely feel like I'm gonna… the sec-
• 15:18
  Kieron Gillen: before this is online, I'll be writing something that's online, because I did that essay at the back, and people have… for people who are listening, don't know, I said… we basically talked about the financial realities, and we're not sure we're going past 16. And we're never, you know, we're never sure we're going past 16, and it's like, we're doing okay. But, like, at the same time, it's like, to go past 16, we really want to go to 30, because 16's a good ending, and around 31 is a good ending.
• 15:40
  Kieron Gillen: And, but, like, 26 wouldn't be a good ending. So, like, we've got the math for that is difficult. And the thing… the situation is, the book is much more like, if you're thinking about dropping signals and going into trades.
• 15:50
  Kieron Gillen: Like, maybe don't. Like, you know, if you care, or if you're… or if you're thinking about, you know, all those kind of really basic things, as in, if you're thinking about, I don't know, maybe stopping and waiting for the omnibus, those kind of small things.
• 16:01
  Tad Eggleston: See, this is… this is where…
• 16:02
  Kieron Gillen: That was kind of the message in terms of what you're doing, and also, like, I think all books… we're in desperate need for indie books to be talked about, so that's…
• 16:09
  Tad Eggleston: If necessary, if necessary. If you're totally… if you're space-conscious, etc, and you're… you're thinking that you need to drop the single issues and wait for the trades, then what you need to do is start paying for the substack.
• 16:22
  Kieron Gillen: But you haven't go to me is the problem. AM don't do Substack, button down.
• 16:27
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, there we go. Better. Pay for the button-down.
• 16:30
  Phil: Well…
• 16:31
  Kieron Gillen: That's the problem, is the money won't go to Casper then.
• 16:34
  Tad Eggleston: You can share…
• 16:35
  Kieron Gillen: Well… Oh, I can't. This is in my accounting.
• 16:38
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, does Casper have a Patreon? Can we blog Casper's Patreon, a Ko-Fi, any way for us to give money to Casper? Because that is the alternative. And also, like, if you're loving… if you're loving Power Fantasy, and you think that $5 a month is just way too little…
• 16:55
  Tad Eggleston: There are ways to send more money to these wonderful gentlemen.
• 16:59
  Kieron Gillen: I know we're being slightly playful here, and also those kind of things…
• 17:04
  Kieron Gillen: If we're ever in that situation, we'll talk about it, but in reality, it's like, just making people aware of what books are, and it's worth buying.
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I know, but I'm being slightly playful, and I'm being slightly serious, because you and Casper are relatively
• 17:20
  Tad Eggleston: well-established.
• 17:21
  Kieron Gillen: which.
• 17:21
  Tad Eggleston: Comic book terms means that, like.
• 17:24
  Tad Eggleston: You can't keep doing a book that if you're… if you're leaving… losing money, but, like, you might have a couple of months in between books if you absolutely must.
• 17:34
  Kieron Gillen: It's like, I don't want to talk about specifics of the money. It's one of those situations, like, we're absolutely fine now, but I do the math going forward.
• 17:42
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I'm saying.
• 17:43
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I'm saying. Which is why, which is why I like to tell people, like…
• 17:49
  Tad Eggleston: If you love art, find ways to pay the artists.
• 17:55
  Tad Eggleston: And the other side, actually, because they're almost never doing as well as you think they are.
• 17:59
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, I mean, mostly, I mean, when we were doing Wick Dip, I certainly was, but… No! I say that jokingly.
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: And that's why I separated you and Casper from… Somebody, like, like,
• 18:13
  Tad Eggleston: I don't feel like naming names, but, like, every year, every month, there are 5 comics that are great from people that you've never heard of before. Those people might still have day jobs.
• 18:22
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah. It's really tough. I mean, I've been there, like… That's the,
• 18:28
  Kieron Gillen: I'm trying to balance what to say. Like…
• 18:30
  Kieron Gillen: Specifically, actually, one thing about Power Fantasy, we're still in the kind of… I'm waiting for, like, the details of the second trade to come through. Like, we've had the orders, but I'm not, you know, in terms of the money flow, and all those kind of basic… I can sit and do some math, and I think we might be okay, you know what I mean? But I'm not sure we're okay. Right, right. And that's why I wrote what I did, because that was before…
• 18:47
  Kieron Gillen: all that. And even that is also, like, the emotional strain of doing a fucking… sorry, the emotional strain of doing,
• 18:54
  Kieron Gillen: And I'm getting significant. And part of me is like, do I really… do I want to do this to myself anymore? So, like, there's also that side of it.
• 19:00
  Kieron Gillen: And the answer to that is probably, because I'm a masochist, I must be. But, it'd be a real shame if we end at 16, it's a fucking killer ending, and people be A so angry at us, as in, like, how can you end it there? But also, it's that kind of…
• 19:18
  Kieron Gillen: But it would be absolutely… it'd be an all-time… it's a ballo ending. But, like, and carrying on is, like, I really want to do it because there's so much good stuff ahead. In the same way, you know, we've got to reveal this issue, like, of issue 12, and all that, issue 11, all that kind of stuff. We've got more of that stuff further out, and it's really, like…
• 19:35
  Kieron Gillen: And there's some real character stuff, I don't want to leave the characters where I'm leaving them.
• 19:39
  Tad Eggleston: My, my, my, my, my only mild… Mild request.
• 19:45
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm.
• 19:45
  Tad Eggleston: Is if you decide…
• 19:48
  Tad Eggleston: to end at 16, but you know you might come back for 14 more at another time. Don't do the morning glories, where you… where you end it really nicely, and then do 3 pages to introduce what…
• 20:02
  Tad Eggleston: Would be the next 50 issues, and then not come back.
• 20:06
  Tad Eggleston: Just let it end, and then come back.
• 20:10
  Kieron Gillen: There is the kind of the,
• 20:12
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, I genuinely have forgotten about morning… I've genuinely forgotten how Morning Glories ended, because I read a lot of it, and I forget when I stopped. If I stopped her, it stopped.
• 20:22
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember specifically, except that, like, I didn't realize that it was not a complete series the first time I read it, so I got to what I thought was the end, and I was really satisfied, and I turned the page, and it's like, holy shit.
• 20:36
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 20:37
  Tad Eggleston: And then, holy shit, holy shit, and then… when is this coming back? Oh, wait, they haven't done anything in how many years?
• 20:46
  Kieron Gillen: For me, it's really important that wherever I end a book, to end it. And that's the reason why I'm so… like, if I didn't…
• 20:53
  Kieron Gillen: care about this, I wouldn't be… I wouldn't have written that, as in, I would like to do… because I don't want to leave it in an awkward position. In the same, like, What's the Future? I know… if I was going to do a sequel to Once the Future, I know what it would be.
• 21:03
  Kieron Gillen: And it's all been set up, but it's an ending. Like, when you read the last page of One's the Future, that's the end of the story. You know, like, you may speculate what happens next, but there's no need. And that's kind of how I like ending stuff, as in, yeah, I know what happens, but I'm not… you don't… you aren't gonna walk away wishing it was there.
• 21:21
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, it's like, that's why Uber's such an enormous frustration to me, as in, like, it's four issues away from the end. I've written those four issues, and it's entirely out of my hand. And, like, and even with Uber, I had one issue… if we ever cut… if we're ever told that we're gonna end the comment anymore, I could wrap up all of Uber in one issue. Because the joy of Uber is, of course, it's a historical story.
• 21:39
  Kieron Gillen: So I go into the montage mode, I go into historical, you know, I turn into historical fiction and just do that in an issue. That was my plan, if it was ever gonna be, like, just canceled, and it just didn't… I had no lead time.
• 21:50
  Kieron Gillen: And four issues, so, like, I still talk to William about stuff, and it's one of those things where,
• 21:58
  Kieron Gillen: It's like, it's been years, so I don't want to say it's gonna happen, but, like.
• 22:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 22:03
  Kieron Gillen: It's got every chance of happening, and I've certainly.
• 22:05
  Tad Eggleston: I have plans in my head about what to do with it. Did you… have you been following any of the New York Comic-Con news?
• 22:13
  Kieron Gillen: Bits and pieces? Like, not… I was a… I've been out familying this weekend, I saw.
• 22:17
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 22:17
  Kieron Gillen: What are you asking? I saw the first Coast stuff.
• 22:19
  Tad Eggleston: One of the bigger, like, drops as part of the Vertigo panel was that they're doing…
• 22:25
  Tad Eggleston: the… the full story arc of the end of, Rick Veich's run on… Swamp Thing.
• 22:33
  Tad Eggleston: That, that they hadn't been doing it.
• 22:35
  Kieron Gillen: way back.
• 22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So, I mean…
• 22:40
  Phil: Similarly, they announced that Rucko was gonna be writing Batwoman again, so they're…
• 22:44
  Kieron Gillen: Danny, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Fuck me, sorry, Danny's a great choice, like, talk about, I mean, obviously, Greg being back in Batwoman, amazing, but Danny is an amazing artist, so that's perfect for Batwoman, too.
• 22:54
  Phil: Absolutely. Just joking, if there were any wounds that DC could heal for you, now feels like the time, you know?
• 23:01
  Kieron Gillen: Not hiring me.
• 23:03
  Phil: There we go. That's the gym.
• 23:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, you know, I mean, ask.
• 23:07
  Kieron Gillen: Obviously, I talked to DC, it's just never worked out across the years. Anytime I was interested in work for hire, rather, anytime I was looking for work for hire, it was easy to do Marvel, and any time I was finished at Marvel, I didn't want to do work for hire.
• 23:18
  Kieron Gillen: You know, so it's mostly that, you know. But, like, I speak to them over the years. I think it's more likely I would do a book at DC than a book at Marvel now. And I don't mean that just because I haven't, you know, just because I've done so much at Marvel. If I was going to do Way for Hire, it should be on the other side of the street.
• 23:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right. You know, that makes sense.
• 23:35
  Phil: I, I, you know, this might be a selfish request of me, but I hope you don't have to do that. I hope that you're able to pave your way on Creator Own, just because it's like…
• 23:45
  Phil: Go ahead, because you look like you immediately want to say something.
• 23:47
  Kieron Gillen: I know, like, ideally… it's one of those things that there's many sorts of creator-owned books, and I used to say, like, one of the reasons why I did Want to Future was, why don't I do a work-for-hire book which isn't killing me?
• 23:57
  Kieron Gillen: Like, the idea, let's do something that's fun. You know, smart, hopefully, but just genuinely fun. Write it like I would write AFRA, as opposed to the way I would write Phonogram, or die, or, like, WICDIV, or even Power… Power Fantasy is less difficult… that's not true.
• 24:12
  Kieron Gillen: Like, it's not… it's not die, in terms of the level of research. I mean, it was one of those situations where I conceived Power of Fantasy, it was like, I've got… I don't have a one-year-old at this point, I'm aware my time is going to be pressed in a slightly different way, so the amount of extra… so I've got… I'll do a book about stuff that obsesses me, and be able to, like.
• 24:30
  Kieron Gillen: You know what I mean? So it's… it fits the space I have available.
• 24:34
  Kieron Gillen: But, like.
• 24:37
  Kieron Gillen: if I could get… I've sort of realized the main problem with Creator Own, as opposed to, like, semi-creator Own, like, what's the future, is the level of organisational brain I have to apply to it. So there's an element of, like.
• 24:48
  Kieron Gillen: I can't do 4 creator-owned books at Image, because my brain doesn't handle it, and I'm also too much a control freak to hire people to do it for me. So, the reason why I might do a word for hire is because I have space
• 25:01
  Kieron Gillen: writing space that I cannot fill with an image. Ideally, I should…
• 25:06
  Kieron Gillen: And I'm always… and I've deliberately kept space free over the time, and working out, okay, what… am I going to write the novel about that space? Will I write another silly indie RPG? Or maybe I'll take a work for hire gig on for giggles. Because that's the other thing. We mentioned Fraction before we started talking recorded. I remember, so,
• 25:21
  Kieron Gillen: just, like, it's one of the fun… sorry, I just remembered something he said to me, and I don't want to quote him out of context in that way, but, like, one of the great joys of comics is we can have some fun. The idea of, like, yeah, this seems like a giggle. My weakness, of course, is I can say, yes, that sounds fun for five issues, and then suddenly I've done 40 issues for Marvel again. And that kind of, like… because I'm…
• 25:40
  Kieron Gillen: I said earlier, a control freak, and committed to finishing a story. Like, I think it would probably have been better for my career to quit Krakoa about halfway through, my time there.
• 25:49
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, I had to finish the story, because that's my job, you know, like, that's.
• 25:53
  Kieron Gillen: not my job to marvel, but my job to the readers, as in, I think I can give you an ending that is the best possible one you can get in the circumstances of this book. You know what I mean? Yeah. But yeah.
• 26:03
  Phil: And I say what I… my original thing, just because, you picking up on Krakoa, I was so excited. I was… I was beyond, like, okay, if there's anyone hearing Jonathan was leaving, I'm like, I don't… it's over, you know? And then I hear you come in, and I'm like, damn, I… that's what I want.
• 26:20
  Phil: Unfortunately, then with, Judgment Day being announced, and my comics budget just
• 26:25
  Phil: shrank massively, so it was literally… I looked at the numbers, and I was like, okay, I could either read just all of the crossover that I want to, or all of the indie books by the people making the crossover, you and Sy now. And I said, alright.
• 26:40
  Phil: that's where we're going. Just not looking back, I can… I can pick up… I can pick up superheroes from the library when I need to, but it's… it's, you know, I… I…
• 26:48
  Phil: I am… 10 times more enthused by whatever original ideas people are doing over
• 26:55
  Phil: the work they do for hire, but I understand how necessary that work for hire is to survive at times.
• 27:00
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and sometimes it's just for fun.
• 27:02
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, that's fair.
• 27:03
  Tad Eggleston: That was how I was gonna, jump on Phil at the beginning there, was unless you feel like you want to… I hope that you never have to do work for hire, but, like, I love the existence of Dr. Aphra.
• 27:19
  Tad Eggleston: And I… I imagine that, like.
• 27:23
  Tad Eggleston: I hope, at least, that, like, some of the reason that you wrote Star Wars is you like Star Wars, and somebody said, do you want to play in the Star Wars universe? And you said, hell yes, I want to play in the Star Wars universe.
• 27:34
  Kieron Gillen: It's a giggle, you know, like, look at Fiona, I always look at Fiona Staples writing Saga and then going to write Archie for, you know, draw Archie for a few issues. She didn't have to do that! She evidently, you know, she's like, she clearly wants to draw Archie. And occasionally it's just that, like.
• 27:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm…
• 27:49
  Tad Eggleston: I'm friends with Chris Cantwell, and, like, I love his creator-owned stuff, I hope he does a ton of creator-owned stuff, I love his TV, and he likes making TV, so even though I don't love TV, I love his TV, so I hope he can make as much TV as he wants to make.
• 28:02
  Tad Eggleston: But I've never seen him more excited than when he got the Star Trek gig.
• 28:08
  Tad Eggleston: He's like, I get to write Star Trek!
• 28:12
  Kieron Gillen: That's, like, it's true in that way. The other thing, I mean, hey, Phil, I completely agree with you. If you're gonna buy any book of mine, buy the Create Round stuff. I don't, you know, that's the very.
• 28:21
  Tad Eggleston: I don'.
• 28:22
  Kieron Gillen: And I think…
• 28:22
  Tad Eggleston: I totally agree with that as well.
• 28:26
  Kieron Gillen: Like, and the other, of course, cynical reason to do work for hire is it changes… it's a different audience, and it raises your profile there. And it's always the, like… there's a question mark over actually how many people move over now, and I'm not sure that's.
• 28:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's true as it used to be. There always has been.
• 28:39
  Kieron Gillen: I mean, there's always, like, there's ways to do it. Like, I think Young Avengers to WickDiv was a very good example of, like, using it in a synergistic way. You know what I mean? Like, that's, you know, that is as cynical as it gets, and it was, you know, WickDiv was me and Jamie deciding, let's see if we can make a book sell. Like, let's actually work out a way to eat. And, you know…
• 28:59
  Phil: the funny thing about it is that you put in little signals for the people who would find your work and become obsessed with it. Like, the reason I picked up Young Avengers from the two of you as the first book of yours I read, was because of, Novar.
• 29:12
  Phil: was… I was a huge Morrison fan, and had read Marvel Boy, and was like, oh, he's playing Marvel Boy on the Young Avengers, and he's back to being Marvel Boy? Alright, I'm in. And and fell in love, it was great.
• 29:24
  Kieron Gillen: Thank you. Obviously, that's the very, like… there's two things about Young Avengers, Waltz. It's a whole story we love, there's another thing about… in the Marvel Universe, but also one of the ideas of Young Avengers I really enjoyed, because we never really talked about it, was we were pretending to do classic Marvel stories as if we'd never read them.
• 29:40
  Kieron Gillen: And the idea of, like, Mother was basically us doing Ultron. The idea of, like…
• 29:44
  Phil: Wow, okay.
• 29:45
  Kieron Gillen: You know, and the Cree Skull War, we kind of referenced… we've got this bit where we've got that, you know, those 1950s Cree guys, and the idea of doing a… implying we're doing the Cree Skull War as a Sharks and Jets kind of West Side Story kind of thing. You know what I mean? And that was a lot all the way through, we're doing these kind of… and this…
• 30:01
  Kieron Gillen: slightly warped imagining… you know, people often joke, you know, these people haven't even read the comics, let's make that the thing.
• 30:06
  Kieron Gillen: Let's pretend we haven't read the comics, and we obviously clearly have, and then we do also the deep cuts, like, let's bring back Marvel Boy and try to square that Marvel Boy we loved with where he went since. And the idea of, like, okay, what is the emotion?
• 30:18
  Kieron Gillen: And what I realized, Marvel Boy would have fell in… he must have fell in… he must have fell in love with Earth. That's the only way you get from that guy to this guy. And you can, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm glad it worked for you. Yeah, yeah.
• 30:30
  Phil: And of course, then, digging into the rest of your work after that, you know, phonogram.
• 30:37
  Phil: was… I mean, it continues to be a book that I have the hardest time recommending to other people.
• 30:42
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, yeah.
• 30:42
  Phil: it to my dad to read, and he's… he got… he's kind of stuck on the jump from Volume 2 to Volume 3, and part of that is I'm telling him, like, well, there were, like, five years between that, so it's…
• 30:54
  Phil: You know, but also, he's like, I was never really into Britpop, and I'm like, neither was I, Dad, but, like, the feelings that you evoked of, like, you know, my favorite moment in that is when Cole puts on… is it Koola Shaker? And he's starting to enjoy it, and he's like, what the fuck? I like this now? Yeah. It was Ekbelli, was it?
• 31:14
  Kieron Gillen: I would never, ever, even in the worst fantasy universe, ever make my character like Kula Shaker. You know, there's some things which I'd never, you know, never, never do that. But yes, like, that was the idea, that was hoping.
• 31:26
  Tad Eggleston: Can we have a phonogram geezer crossover? This just popped into my head right now.
• 31:30
  Kieron Gillen: Phonogram, I missed the second name.
• 31:32
  Tad Eggleston: Geezer.
• 31:32
  Phil: browser.
• 31:33
  Kieron Gillen: Keith, oh, that's good. I mean, tell you what, Phil, I would love to work with Phil Bond. Like, you know, like…
• 31:39
  Tad Eggleston: Pass that along.
• 31:40
  Kieron Gillen: Please do. I mean, it's like, you know, I've met Phil quite a few times, and he's obviously a huge influence on me in terms of, Kill Your Boyfriend. Like, if you think about the alternate universe, I often think about the al- I mean, obviously, I like Morrison.
• 31:52
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, I think about the alternate universe of Wollerson, where it's kind of the Saints Women's Day, Kill Your Boyfriend route, rather than going into, being High Priest of the DC Pantheon. You know what I mean? Like, it's a very… and it's always been there, but the idea there's…
• 32:06
  Kieron Gillen: A different kind of cult figure.
• 32:08
  Phil: Yeah.
• 32:08
  Kieron Gillen: You know, I wouldn't get rid of what we got. And, you know, but I mean, I always think about alternatives.
• 32:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, he's, he still, he still does… you know…
• 32:19
  Phil: I mean, but their… their… their careers had more… because I've, I, I know, I know, I know exactly what you mean, and… and especially when… because, again, I, I, I…
• 32:28
  Phil: jumped on Morrison's career at
• 32:31
  Phil: midway through Batman, and… but there was sort of always this back and forth of the tension between the indie work and the superhero work, and the superhero work seemed to mean more to them than some of the indie projects, other than, like, Invisibles and the filth, really, you know?
• 32:46
  Tad Eggleston: So, I do have to say that I'm quite proud slash ashamed.
• 32:52
  Tad Eggleston: both the first… Grant Morrison and the first Philip Bond book I ever read was Kill Your Boyfriends, and…
• 33:01
  Tad Eggleston: But the ashamed part is that it was probably…
• 33:06
  Tad Eggleston: 15 years after… 15 years and 5 readings after I'd read it that, like, I clicked.
• 33:13
  Tad Eggleston: Who they were.
• 33:16
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I'd read it multiple times, loved it, one of my favorite comics, but, like.
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: had never attached… it was… it was when I was reading younger and not attaching as many of the creators automatically to the works.
• 33:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so it was years later that I'm like, oh, wait, that's a Grant Morrison book.
• 33:36
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wait, that's a Philip Bond book!
• 33:41
  Kieron Gillen: It's true. It's like, like, hugely influential on me, in terms of, like, kill your boyfriend, it's,
• 33:47
  Kieron Gillen: It's a hell of a piece, especially, you know, Phil's…
• 33:50
  Kieron Gillen: very breezy, light, energy to it, with all the sociopathy as well. Great stuff. I actually have got a page of it somewhere. I don't own much comic art, but I did get a copy of a page of Kill Your Boyfriend, my first San Diego… I think my second San Diego. Jamie came running back to the table, like, 10 minutes before the end of the show.
• 34:09
  Kieron Gillen: Saying, my God, Phil Bond's selling, pages to kill your boyfriend for, like, $100. Actually, $110, maybe.
• 34:14
  Kieron Gillen: Wow, that's a steal.
• 34:15
  Kieron Gillen: might be 120. But anyway, that amount, and it's like, really, it's going left? And we legged it in the 10 minutes before the close, the horse shut from the image booth down to where Phil was, and Tylee had no chill whatsoever. You know what I mean? It's one of these bits where, like,
• 34:29
  Kieron Gillen: the truth of what me and Jamie are was very clear. But yeah, it's the, the page where you look so sexy in that dress, I'm not wearing a dress.
• 34:39
  Kieron Gillen: That page, which is a, you know, very funny page.
• 34:42
  Phil: Did you… how do you like, Vinnamaramara? Or Vim… Vimanarama?
• 34:47
  Kieron Gillen: I haven't read it in a long time, actually. In fact, I think I've only read it when it came out, so I haven't got strong take on it. It was great to see them working again. I'm genuinely not sure what I'm making it now or then.
• 34:58
  Phil: Yeah. I… I only ask because that was… that was… I found that in college, and so I found that first, and, actually wrote a weird essay on it, for a class on Orientalism.
• 35:10
  Kieron Gillen: was taken.
• 35:11
  Phil: their time. But yeah, it was…
• 35:14
  Phil: just curious. But I, you know, it's… it's definitely… it's definitely one of those ones that I don't remember the suicide aspect when I reread it recently. So, I guess that's a weird recurring theme of Morrison's, though.
• 35:27
  Phil: transitioning while on this, kind of, so I guess…
• 35:32
  Phil: aside from Kill Your Boyfriend, what… how would you describe the rest of your enjoyment of Grant Morrison's work and their influence on you? And I ask that with the looming specter of, I… your newsletter is how I discovered the last born Albion from Al Sandifer. I'm hoping to interview her.
• 35:50
  Phil: maybe soon. I sent her an email, she said, that sounds great, might be coming up, but, you know.
• 35:56
  Phil: yeah.
• 35:58
  Phil: Take it from there.
• 35:59
  Kieron Gillen: Elle, I'm gonna say, everyone read The Last War and Albion. Elle's great.
• 36:05
  Kieron Gillen: Morrison… where'd to start with Morrison?
• 36:08
  Kieron Gillen: So it's… Like, obviously I stole his haircut. Sorry, I stole that haircut. Which,
• 36:17
  Kieron Gillen: Invisibles was big for me, like,
• 36:19
  Kieron Gillen: I was… got into comics in, like, late 90s, so I picked up Watchmen on a trip to America. Then, in America, I met a friend who lent me a load of, like, period Vertigo. So that was… he… big long boxes of the stuff, and including there was Invisibles, amongst… also, like, all of Hellblazer up to that point. Lots of others, including Kill Your Boyfriend, I think, was in there? I'm not sure all about that, though.
• 36:42
  Kieron Gillen: So, Invisible was just one of my, like, real, kind of, entry work into… this is the end… this is the 90s. This is, kind of, comics are kind of born from a similar place where I am, engaged with similar emotions,
• 36:59
  Kieron Gillen: It's really tricky. Like, in that kind of, like… you can go back to Zenith. Like, I read Zenith. I said I would go up to comics later. That's also not true. I read my brother's comics in 2000 AD, so I read Zenith, so that very kind of pop-cultural mode is there. I like…
• 37:16
  Kieron Gillen: God, this is really tricking your pause, because basically, and he's…
• 37:20
  Kieron Gillen: There's so much I want to write essays about, because it's kind of like, I have a complicated history with them, in that kind of,
• 37:27
  Kieron Gillen: There's definitely a point where I lost interest in what they were doing.
• 37:30
  Kieron Gillen: And that was because I was going hard the other way.
• 37:33
  Kieron Gillen: In that kind of, like, I think We Free was the last book I genuinely completely adored of theirs. Interesting. Like, I'm not a… I'm relatively…
• 37:42
  Kieron Gillen: I'm relatively downbeat on All-Star Superman. I'm really kind of out here. I know that now. It's obviously a great book. Like, I'm not joking, but like, but it's kind of the bit where what interests me is not that.
• 37:54
  Kieron Gillen: In the same way, I'll follow it because Grant does. I occasionally think about Alan the same way, as in Al loves all the cosmic stuff at Marvel, and I don't care about it at all, and I'll read it because Al does. And Al clearly loves it, and Al's love will carry me through and take me into this very clearly poetic relationship he has with this fiction.
• 38:11
  Kieron Gillen: you know, Milton's the same. I kind of want to go back and reread all this DC stuff in that, because since I'm in a different place now, I think I'll be able to appreciate it more.
• 38:19
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, Morrison was just very clearly the coolest motherfucker. Like, that's not… that's not over… that's probably the easiest way of saying it. Like, The Invisibles was clearly a load of books thrown at the page. This is a life being lived. I loved the ridiculous, showpersonship of it. You know, the whole, kind of, masturbate to save this book. Like, I kind of, like, we were talking earlier about the power of fantasy, it's like, you'll know if I actually want to save the… if the book's in trouble.
• 38:43
  Kieron Gillen: I'll do something really stupid. Like, I won't just say, maybe order a copy.
• 38:49
  Phil: Tell someone about the book, and then masturbate together about the book. That will be the death knell.
• 38:54
  Kieron Gillen: I'm just encouraging masturbation. It's like, it's not to save the book, you deserve it, you know, give yourself a little treat.
• 39:01
  Phil: Excellent. No, that's, that's really great to hear.
• 39:05
  Kieron Gillen: There's actually a line, I think, actually, I think I'll put it in Last Word of Albion. You can see it in Kill Your Boyfriend, where basically the entire… sorry.
• 39:13
  Kieron Gillen: Saints Riven's Day. There's, like, two panels where basically the boy is dancing to where she goes in the graveyard, you know, in front of Marx's grave.
• 39:25
  Kieron Gillen: You only, you know, and he extolls, the song, what it sounds like, and stops, and you only young once, and that was it. And basically, those three panels are some of my favourite panel transitions ever, and Elle completely nailed me in terms of, oh no, this is where the entirety of Kieran Gillan's persona.
• 39:40
  Phil: on the.
• 39:40
  Kieron Gillen: comic pages come into focus and those free beats. It's that stuff. You know, that kind of, like, really small person.
• 39:45
  Phil: The small human stuff.
• 39:46
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah. Also, but it just posed like, Plex Mentalo. That's the hell of a book. You know what I mean? These kind of… that's… when Morrison really pushes it into that area, no one does what they do. And I…
• 39:59
  Kieron Gillen: I think as a force of nature, an imagination, and a commitment to what comics can do, really, they're in a league of their own. I think of them as somewhat mercurial, in that way, as in, like,
• 40:12
  Kieron Gillen: I think someone like Moore. Moore's a better comics technician than Morrison is by a long way, and I say that…
• 40:16
  Kieron Gillen: obviously, was in a different league to anyone else, full stop, but, like, if you were to compare them, like, for me.
• 40:23
  Kieron Gillen: Let's not go into there. I don't want to put them against each other in that way.
• 40:26
  Phil: Sure.
• 40:27
  Kieron Gillen: He's a mercurial, all-powerful spirit, and it's like, he's…
• 40:33
  Kieron Gillen: The thing I'm also saying, it's very easy for people to try to rip them off, and it never ends well. Yeah.
• 40:37
  Phil: Yeah, that's… that's… that's definitely part of it. So, oddly enough, I think… so… so this is… this is funny. I… my first…
• 40:47
  Phil: like, real comics experience was going to MorrisonCon back in 2012.
• 40:53
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, the ones hurt.
• 40:54
  Phil: I did! I did go to that. That was in my senior year of college. I was 21. I had a blonde mohawk, that I never spiked. It was a ridiculous haircut. I was known as the kid from Normal, because that was the college town, is Normal. And
• 41:11
  Phil: It was… I mean, it was a wild time.
• 41:15
  Phil: it was fascinating, but at their… okay, I just… I lost and then got back. Okay, so what convinced me, because I was already like, oh, Young Avengers is looking interesting, you know, it's kind of a hype for Marvel now. Hickman was talking about the beginning of his Avengers run, so, you know, when they were talking about some of the books coming up, I was like, oh yeah, Young Avengers looks interesting. There was a guy who asked…
• 41:36
  Phil: Other people questions about phonogram.
• 41:38
  Phil: And no one on stage had read Phonogram. And then everyone in the audience cheered, like, what do you mean? Phonogram's great, how could you not have read Phonogram? And I believe when I asked him about it, he… he introduced himself as David Cole. So it was a little… a little strange. After asking if I'd read it, I said no. He said, okay, then my name's David Cole. I'm like, okay, that's weird. In hindsight, weird in hindsight.
• 41:58
  Kieron Gillen: Unless it was David Cole.
• 42:00
  Phil: Unless it was… It's the full-on I met Alan Moore meeting Constantine moment. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And if that's it, then hey, that's great, but, like, that was what convinced me to read…
• 42:11
  Tad Eggleston: Alan's not the only…
• 42:13
  Tad Eggleston: Hellblazer creator. I was talking to Aaron Campbell, and not only did he have stories from a half-dozen other people who'd worked on
• 42:23
  Tad Eggleston: Hellblazer about them meeting Constantine. He told me his own.
• 42:28
  Phil: Nice.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: So Constantine apparently pops up to Hellblazer Creators.
• 42:34
  Tad Eggleston: At a disturbingly…
• 42:37
  Tad Eggleston: common.
• 42:39
  Tad Eggleston: But, like…
• 42:42
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember all of his story right now. Was it a comm? I had, like, lots of sensory stuff going on, but I didn't…
• 42:48
  Tad Eggleston: Like, he acknowledged the non-supernatural element of it, the more doppelganger-if, but, like, doppelganger in that, like, completely weird… I might not have thought of it as Constantine if I hadn't been writing Constantine, but oh my god, it was Constantine.
• 43:08
  Phil: That… that actually happened to me with Alan Moore, too.
• 43:12
  Phil: I, at a con, I ran into a guy that, in hindsight, I was like, was that him?
• 43:15
  Phil: fully knowing, no, that wasn't. He doesn't travel to America, I assume, you know? But it's weird that my brain was in a place where it conjured that up, you know?
• 43:25
  Kieron Gillen: That is interesting, isn't it?
• 43:27
  Phil: Yeah, this is… this is now, I guess, the… have… have you ever met a fictional… well, you've actually been the fictional character that met others with the… the magazine issue of Wick Div.
• 43:36
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, it's like,
• 43:38
  Kieron Gillen: Is that the fiction suit aspect? It's one of those things where I believe in everything, like I say Moore and Morrison believe in, but I've somehow put it into a kind of, like, ironic brackets, by which I mean, this is just science. I'm interested in hacking human consciousness, and I believe we're a bunch of chemical stuff.
• 43:53
  Kieron Gillen: So it's not real real, but… I clearly… I still owe those moments. So there's definitely reasons I do the, kind of, the blurring.
• 44:03
  Kieron Gillen: Have I met any char- it's worth not, have I met any fictional characters? There was definitely a bit where I,
• 44:08
  Kieron Gillen: I put this in the third phonogram, where there was a kind of… there was a Michael Jackson impersonator on the train, which I… I'd just finished the book, and it had to be an impersonator. You know, like, and it's very weird to see a Michael Jackson person, really very credible one, down the train, and I didn't want to look too closely, because it genuinely felt creepy in that way.
• 44:28
  Phil: Yeah.
• 44:31
  Kieron Gillen: I've met people who feel like they've stepped out of my fiction. And this is another thing Morrison wrote about, you know, in terms of they stopped… they started writing Invisibles and trying to use it to alter their lives as an act of magic.
• 44:44
  Kieron Gillen: I think my work is much more of an act of therapy and occasionally a magical ritual to protect the world. Specifically, myself.
• 44:50
  Phil: Mmm, I see. Well, so, so this is where the, the death of Lucifer, death of Bowie, death of…
• 44:57
  Kieron Gillen: Oh yeah, that, like… sorry, Chrissy, obviously, you spoke.
• 45:00
  Phil: Please swear, please swear.
• 45:01
  Kieron Gillen: And the, she,
• 45:04
  Kieron Gillen: she had to say, Kieran, you did not kill Prince. Like, generally, like, when it was just, like, when it was just,
• 45:11
  Kieron Gillen: Bowie, it was weird, it was very weird, because it was the same day. But…
• 45:18
  Kieron Gillen: it was unbearable. When it was followed with Prince, like, shortly afterwards, like, I genuinely was thrown in that kind of… and so Chrissy Hatha's kind of taught me down a bit, in that you're not actually just murdering pop stars. I mean, if Gargon was the third… if Gargon died, we would have been probably, like, someone put away this cursed comic book. Has she… has she put out a significant album since? That's the question.
• 45:36
  Kieron Gillen: I… aye.
• 45:42
  Tad Eggleston: And I know that I'm sometimes in the minority here, but I think her albums with Tony Bennett are gonna go down…
• 45:50
  Phil: as classics.
• 45:53
  Kieron Gillen: I have not given them the fair listen, I think, as they know.
• 45:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I love Tony Bennett, and that's why I have them, but the more I listen to them, the more I realize she brings to them.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: the more I realize that there are as much or more Gaga albums as they are Tony Bennett albums, and in the weird…
• 46:12
  Tad Eggleston: like, it's Gaga channeling… Billie Holiday.
• 46:18
  Kieron Gillen: Or…
• 46:19
  Tad Eggleston: Or, you know, I mean, she's not… she's not…
• 46:23
  Tad Eggleston: She's not Gaga-fying the American songbook.
• 46:27
  Tad Eggleston: she, you know, you can tell that she loves it. It's almost like what you were talking about with Al and the Marvel…
• 46:39
  Phil: Cosmic.
• 46:40
  Tad Eggleston: cosmic universe, you know, like, you can tell that she grew up with these…
• 46:45
  Tad Eggleston: songs and loves them, that when she met Tony, they… they developed a genuine bond.
• 46:53
  Tad Eggleston: And that, like… She loved… you can hear it, she loved making these albums.
• 47:01
  Tad Eggleston: Which is something that I already… that's already why I prefer, like, Tony Bennett to Frank Sinatra. I've never heard Tony Bennett mail a song in. If he's singing it, it's because he means it.
• 47:15
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas Sinatra, half the time I hear him sing, it's like he's singing it because there's a paycheck.
• 47:21
  Kieron Gillen: That's interesting.
• 47:23
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so yeah, that's just my… one of my, my, I don't even want to say unpopular opinions, because I think most people just don't have any opinion.
• 47:35
  Tad Eggleston: albums!
• 47:38
  Tad Eggleston: They're like, oh, Gaga went and did something with an old man.
• 47:45
  Phil: It's a… it's a… quite a semantically loaded sentence there.
• 47:50
  Phil: Yeah, but no, it's, it's funny, cause then, cause then, so then…
• 47:57
  Phil: sorry, with the… with the Prince and the Bowie, so then in Once and Future, with Boris Johnson and the Queen, was that… was that just old hat by then, or…
• 48:05
  Kieron Gillen: I mean, look, maybe I didn't care if those people died?
• 48:08
  Phil: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:13
  Phil: I didn't look up the dates for the Boris Johnson one, but I still remember looking up, like, because I read the end of Once and Future well after it had come out in single issues, and when the Queen appeared, I was like.
• 48:24
  Phil: wait a second, this happened around the time that the queen died. Oh no, maybe they felt… they finally felt comfortable enough to announce it, who knows?
• 48:30
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah…
• 48:31
  Phil: But yeah, so… without… Asking you to resume where you were in some kind of
• 48:38
  Phil: nervous breakdown. How do you continue to square that, you know?
• 48:43
  Phil: does that continue to weigh on your conscience with the power fantasy? Which, I mean, you know, I can draw faint parallels between those.
• 48:51
  Kieron Gillen: Like, that first assassination trap, at Trump… sorry, the first assassination attempt at Trump was the day before FOC. Like, you know…
• 49:00
  Kieron Gillen: everyone is just, like…
• 49:04
  Tad Eggleston: saying…
• 49:05
  Phil: I had a weird instance around that, too, but yeah.
• 49:06
  Tad Eggleston: what I could say, that I would be ashamed of myself for saying.
• 49:11
  Phil: Well, no, because it's weird, I associate the first issue with, you know, the assassination of the American president with that shortly after Joe Biden had the disastrous debate, where he, you know, mentally was not all there.
• 49:23
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 49:25
  Kieron Gillen: It's like, you don't know, like, coincidence exists for a reason, and it's part of the reason about fiction, it does echo and cast
• 49:33
  Kieron Gillen: It's a tarot card.
• 49:35
  Kieron Gillen: You know, fiction's a tarot card, and we interpret it, and it reminds us of different things at different times, I think. Which is, that's a very wishy-washy answer, but I still think it's a worthwhile one.
• 49:44
  Phil: Yeah.
• 49:45
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 49:46
  Phil: On that note, that's one of those where I hope the power fantasy continues on for a very long time. Me too!
• 49:53
  Phil: you know, I am associating the end of it with the end of reality as we know it, you know? That's quite the… quite the unpacking.
• 50:01
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like it's looking for… An option other than that.
• 50:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. That's one of the things that I like about it, is it's like this discussion of…
• 50:16
  Tad Eggleston: And cautionary, again, you know, it feels like a parable for people having too much power, and what happens, and like, is it possible for people to have that much power, and not be corrupted, not be…
• 50:30
  Tad Eggleston: evil. Yeah.
• 50:34
  Kieron Gillen: I mean, it's definitely… the metaphor, I mean, the basic metaphor, and it's like, always be… it's never quite as simple as just one metaphor. Right. But, you know, it's like…
• 50:43
  Kieron Gillen: Etienne says it in the first issue, he's like, no, no one should have the power I have, evidently. And it's like, no one, neither man nor nation, should have the power to destroy the world. So in other words, this is about presidents, and this is about billionaires. You know, this is, is it possible to be an ethical billionaire? And the answer is no.
• 50:57
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, unfortunately, they exist, so what do they do? And what do we do with the power we have? Because I think… the other thing with the power of fantasy, it goes the other way. It's a philosophical comic about what do we do with power.
• 51:10
  Kieron Gillen: And that is something you should carry through with all our lives on a very general level. And this obsesses me, because it's like… I've written a lot of bad people, like, and people who…
• 51:21
  Kieron Gillen: at the very best, the right people who start bad and actually get… grow toward transcendence. That's what Wiktiv is. This is deeply Catholic bullshit. Because, like, one of my things… it's really… being good's easy. Like, I swear, it's like, everyone knows very roughly what it is to be good. Like, in a.
• 51:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it should be.
• 51:37
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, it should be. And the problem is, like, evidently, it's not.
• 51:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean.
• 51:42
  Kieron Gillen: How do we self-justify? That's what interests me, and that's the reason why we.
• 51:45
  Tad Eggleston: That's the thing, the sec- the second life is… Hard, and you see something
• 51:54
  Tad Eggleston: bad that could make it easier. Or the second you see somebody who's being… Bad, and making your life
• 52:02
  Tad Eggleston: harder. You know, there's just… yeah, being good should be easy.
• 52:09
  Kieron Gillen: Perfect, don'.
• 52:09
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why it's so frustrating that not everybody does it, but it's also so easy to decide that it's a luxury.
• 52:20
  Phil: I think it's also rather obfuscated by society, because, you know, one of the things that weighs on my life… weighs on my mind, living in America, is, you know, so…
• 52:35
  Phil: like…
• 52:37
  Phil: we're on a limited budget right now, my wife's in school, and it's hard to stick to it, because one of the things that's difficult is that, you know, we both have various medical issues, so when it comes down to, like, food, something as simple as food, it's like, okay, we want something that's cheap and healthy, and in America, that doesn't exist.
• 52:57
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm.
• 52:57
  Phil: It's just, it, you know, maybe, maybe…
• 53:00
  Phil: Somewhere outside of a city, there's, small vegetable farms where it might be easier, but it's… it's one of those things where it's like, okay, you know, we could eat.
• 53:10
  Phil: You know, cheap, chemical-filled crap.
• 53:12
  Phil: and survive on less money, but we would feel worse in different ways, you know? And in those simple ways, making… and that's even the least consequential, the least…
• 53:23
  Phil: of decisions of what should I eat? You know, that impacts
• 53:26
  Phil: You know, relatively few other people, and yet… Making that decision is still.
• 53:30
  Tad Eggleston: Where should I live?
• 53:31
  Phil: Yeah, those sorts of things. So it's…
• 53:33
  Kieron Gillen: Excellent.
• 53:35
  Kieron Gillen: the good… it's like the… I quite like Power Fantasy regularly gets compared to The Good Place, which I quite like, because it's… not least because it's… it's a…
• 53:42
  Kieron Gillen: it's a genre book about philosophy in a playful way. You know, yeah. And of course, that's where the… that's where A Good Place ends up in terms of people can't be good on Earth.
• 53:53
  Kieron Gillen: You know, the game is stacked, which is, like…
• 53:56
  Kieron Gillen: an interesting way to look about, though, these things. But it's worth thinking about, like, this is…
• 54:00
  Phil: Yeah.
• 54:01
  Kieron Gillen: Picture as a device for us to think about what we're doing and why. And, like, I'm aware of that might be.
• 54:06
  Kieron Gillen: There's a lot of my… I don't like the idea that the stories are just, like, old 1980s He-Man episodes, where you've got the one at the end, as in, of course, kids, what you shouldn't do is, you know, have nuclear bombs as superpowers. Just don't do that. But, you know, at the same time, it's like.
• 54:23
  Kieron Gillen: I'm emotionally engaged with these questions and conversations, and I can't stop thinking about it, which is the reason why I do what I do.
• 54:31
  Kieron Gillen: I think.
• 54:34
  Phil: Yeah.
• 54:36
  Kieron Gillen: Well, I hope. I say all this because it's like, I'm not, like…
• 54:41
  Kieron Gillen: my… kind of the thing that makes me happiest in the world is that the older I get, the more the characters I play in RPGs, if given complete freedom, is basically a paladin. Like, by which I mean, like, a Superman character. Like, I will be a paragon, I will do the good thing, no matter what it costs my character. And the idea that, you know.
• 54:57
  Kieron Gillen: That is basically what I like to do.
• 55:00
  Kieron Gillen: And of course, it's, like, the stuff in the fiction is what I'm afraid about.
• 55:04
  Phil: That's definitely a default. I am accelerating my conversation. My computer might die as my power cord might have gotten pinched somewhere and is no longer charging. So, I am jumping to my endgame. I want to specifically talk about, power fantasy number 10.
• 55:20
  Phil: Which was, my favorite birthday present this year, as it came out on my birthday. Yeah.
• 55:26
  Phil: there… I might have just been staring at it a little too long, but I eventually started reading it. I was staring at that opening page about the diagram for, you know, the basic shapes, the idea of this is… was launched on the Pioneer 10 probe.
• 55:42
  Phil: And with that, I guess…
• 55:45
  Phil: something between that and the signal, the character that
• 55:49
  Phil: is, you know, a drawing of a man and a woman overlapping, and where they overlap, they change color, and there's a third thing that emerges. I started holding up the pages and letting the light shine through, and seeing with the physical object, you know, there's an arrow on that first page that points towards a line that's on the second page.
• 56:07
  Phil: Am I finding something intentional, or did I… did I possibly get a little too inebriated and stare at this book a little too much?
• 56:14
  Kieron Gillen: I would say, like, I would say, like, if… Does the,
• 56:19
  Kieron Gillen: there's the oblique strategy thing, honor your mistake as your hidden intention. I will never tell you if that's true or not.
• 56:26
  Kieron Gillen: But I would never, ever tell you it's true or not. I would say, it's like, if it was… there's definitely times in my career when I've done that.
• 56:34
  Kieron Gillen: Like, in terms of the… done the… you're meant to be able to watch stuff through the page, or, like, the bit in Watchmen when you get stuff like, Dr. Manhattan walking at the same speed across different panels at various repeated poses. But I think if I was going to do something like that, I would have done it like Dennis did at the end.
• 56:53
  Kieron Gillen: end of, Martian Manhunter 1, you know what I mean?
• 56:55
  Phil: Oh, see, I need to…
• 56:58
  Kieron Gillen: Spoilers, sorry about that. I'm so sorry, in fact, it was mentioned earlier.
• 57:01
  Phil: Yeah.
• 57:02
  Kieron Gillen: Venice's, and I forgot the,
• 57:04
  Kieron Gillen: Javier, they're explicitly using the page in interesting ways. Yeah.
• 57:09
  Phil: this… this… I need to get a physical copy of that and read it then, because, part of the inspiration behind this was, assorted crisis events.
• 57:17
  Phil: And I've been reading that series as non-traditionally as possible. So the third issue with Hearth 1 and Hearth 2, I read page 1, panel 1,
• 57:27
  Phil: or when it eventually went page 2 and 3, page 2, panel 1, page 3, panel 1. Page 2, panel 2, page 3, panel 2, and sort of zigzagging with the panels back and forth.
• 57:38
  Phil: As they were typically in the same shape, and I was treating, you know, one page as Earth 1, one page as Earth 2, but the time is happening simultaneously. And that, that got to some really interesting
• 57:48
  Phil: things. And knowing your deep formalist background, and, you know, I was thinking that this is at least a possible thing, and I appreciate the non-committal response.
• 57:58
  Kieron Gillen: No, no, it's definitely a… it is the thing you should consider. It's like, the one thing actually is, actually, about the power of fantasy.
• 58:06
  Kieron Gillen: composing. Some clever shit goes on eventually, but I'm far less engaged with the formalism on Power Fantasy than I am with any other book I've done, with the possible exception of Die, because you can't control Stephanie. And I wouldn't even try. But, like, I've done Weaking Divine with Jamie, so it's an element of, like.
• 58:24
  Kieron Gillen: I wrote the scripts which are dead and playful and giving Casper ideas, but Casper doesn't show me roughs.
• 58:30
  Phil: He doesn't.
• 58:32
  Kieron Gillen: You know, if he goes really off-script, he asks me. Okay. But, you know, normally I don't see stuff till it's finished. And then we just… if there's something really wrong, we'll talk about reworks.
• 58:44
  Phil: Gotcha.
• 58:44
  Kieron Gillen: So in other words, a lot of the formal choices come from Casper, like the… in the latest issue with the big Psyker at the base.
• 58:53
  Kieron Gillen: you've got the… basically, you've got the plan-type view with the characters moving all the way through on the way down. That's Casper, as in, basically, I wrote something much more traditional.
• 59:01
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, to… what's he said, kind of do it like this, because, I did… he did it before on, Homesick Pilots, and he thought he would, like, he really could work well on the base. I said, yeah, sure, definitely, go knock yourself out. And all the way through, it's like, I'm trying to create spaces for Casper to really show off.
• 59:17
  Kieron Gillen: Which is, you know, at least half the battle, really, I think.
• 59:23
  Phil: Yeah.
• 59:24
  Kieron Gillen: the formalism I'm doing is working in a different way, I think.
• 59:29
  Phil: It's freeformalism.
• 59:30
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah. It's more like, I'm less… yeah, I said I'm keeping the same a control freak, which I don't think's really true, compared with many people. I just, like…
• 59:40
  Kieron Gillen: that can make me a control freak. I'm being a control freak, I'm being a control freak now. But, like, it doesn't mean it's… choosing what not to do is also important. This book is about that.
• 59:49
  Phil: Yeah, okay. That is…
• 59:53
  Phil: obliquely insightful, for sure. It's coloring my rereads in multiple ways, because… Yeah. Yeah, that's… I… I'm over.
• 1:00:01
  Kieron Gillen: We talk about everything, though, is the thing. Like, this conversation with me, I talk to Casper every day when we're working, and the other thing is that, like.
• 1:00:09
  Kieron Gillen: You mentioned the substack, actually,
• 1:00:12
  Kieron Gillen: It's not Substack, button down. But Script Club is my new thing, as in basically to pay for the mailing list. And Trust is doing more than that now, by a significant amount, so maybe pay for something else. Is I'm sending out a script, like, once a month is the idea, and when people, like, see them, they'll start to see, Wesley, these dialogue is completely different.
• 1:00:31
  Kieron Gillen: Like, all that kind of, like, I change a lot. Like, I change it after I see the art. I, you know, I quite… there's definitely some scripts I kind of, like, okay, stop drawing this, the dog's not right. And then I come back and rework it. So it's… for me, it's always the conversation. And that kind of also… there's some very clever effects you get.
• 1:00:51
  Kieron Gillen: by… by just the back and forth of it. And also, like, also that so much of the…
• 1:00:57
  Kieron Gillen: the stuff we did deliberately in WikDiv, in terms of, like, cutting up issues and making it from scratch,
• 1:01:03
  Kieron Gillen: we… I got from stuff I had to do at Marvel to get by, in that kind of, like, the story I normally… I've said this in a couple of
• 1:01:11
  Kieron Gillen: when I've teached comics, this is an example I use. Like, Carlos in issue 3 of Uncanny, for the reasons to… he had a lot of stuff going on, so it wasn't his fault or anything, but yeah, we had to split the issue to three artists.
• 1:01:25
  Kieron Gillen: And so the free artists got different segments.
• 1:01:27
  Kieron Gillen: And each one drew their own bit, beautifully, you know, everyone's pages are great. The problem being that one of the person, due to the way the script broke up, didn't do the establishing shot the other person needed. So something that was important for the final, reveal in the story just wasn't set up.
• 1:01:42
  Kieron Gillen: And the problem with this is, is that the thing that hasn't been set up was the thousand-foot-tall Golden Celestial standing in, Golden Gate Park.
• 1:01:52
  Kieron Gillen: And so I had a little cry, because, like, you know, for a while I was thinking, I'm just gonna have to have Magneto here say, oh, we are back in the park, and look, the Celestial is standing there, exactly still, as it stood still for the rest of the time. So if it moves, it's a big deal, right? Everyone remember that, yeah?
• 1:02:09
  Kieron Gillen: But what I actually did was, okay, what we can do is go back to issue 1, take the establishing shot, which we used of the Celestial there,
• 1:02:17
  Kieron Gillen: Remove the people in the foreground, recolor it to be at dusk. Take the panel and magneto.
• 1:02:22
  Kieron Gillen: move it beneath that thing, rearrange the four… there are now four panels on the previous page that center them a bit, to make it look less weird, and we've re-established it. So basically, I magicked up an establishing shop by just telling people to cut and paste.
• 1:02:36
  Kieron Gillen: That. You know, that's, like, as formless as it gets, but at the same time is desperate a hack job.
• 1:02:41
  Kieron Gillen: like that panic editing, we're gonna save it in the editing suite. Right. And that's what Marvel taught me in that way. And I don't think many people do the extremes of what I did, because that's the way my brain works. But I took that stuff and then took it into Wicked, which was one of our major tools. The idea that we could turn 20 pages of comics into 25 pages of comics by cheating and adding black panels and stuff.
• 1:03:03
  Kieron Gillen: So I do less of that. There's some of that actually coming up in Power of Fantasy, now I think about it.
• 1:03:08
  Phil: Okay, okay, that's… that is very exciting.
• 1:03:10
  Kieron Gillen: That's a teas.
• 1:03:12
  Phil: I… that's… we… we love those. That's also… I… I do… I do remember that, anecdote, as I've taken your master class.
• 1:03:19
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, thank you!
• 1:03:20
  Phil: Yeah, it was very… it was… it was enlighten. That was, like, 4 years ago now?
• 1:03:24
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:25
  Phil: about this time four years ago, so yeah. So, it's… I can imagine, because I remember you doing it again, and I thought for a second, oh, I've already taken it, I don't need to take it again, but next time it's up, I might, because it's probably changed from the last time. But, that… that… also, you mentioned the…
• 1:03:42
  Phil: changing in dialogue. The first time I wrote a comic script with dialogue and got art back for that, it was… it was definitely a… a sudden, oh no, I have to change all of this.
• 1:03:55
  Kieron Gillen: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:55
  Phil: From simple, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:57
  Kieron Gillen: Is it working?
• 1:03:58
  Phil: Yeah, and it's… it's… it's something to look forward to now, of like, oh, no, no, no, you know, don't be too precious with the first attempt, because it's not going to be the same.
• 1:04:07
  Tad Eggleston: Just don't fix it on the post… the quote-unquote lettering pass.
• 1:04:14
  Phil: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:04:14
  Tad Eggleston: Leterers have very strict schedules. It's a pain in the neck when they have to go back.
• 1:04:20
  Kieron Gillen: Well, I'll say, I'm gonna play, like, bad cop here, as well, like, I, oh, Casper…
• 1:04:25
  Kieron Gillen: You should give it to the art… you should give it to the R… the letter in the best way possible.
• 1:04:30
  Kieron Gillen: But… lettering is one of the few times you do genuinely get to change the story, like, because no one's read it yet.
• 1:04:36
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:04:37
  Kieron Gillen: Like, and I think letterers should be paid for reworking. Like, basically, because they're.
• 1:04:40
  Tad Eggleston: They, they are.
• 1:04:41
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, yeah, but the number of… there is an element of, like, really…
• 1:04:45
  Kieron Gillen: But you want to create your own book, if something needs to be changed, we'll work out a way around doing it. And it's like, I check with Casper, like, there's people who take the piss, they give completely broken scripts, they demand it bring, but…
• 1:04:56
  Kieron Gillen: there is a kind of, like… the letters I work with, there's an understanding that
• 1:05:02
  Kieron Gillen: we haven't read the story until we've lettered it, and after that, there might be changes. And if it's too many, we'll definitely pay you even more.
• 1:05:07
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and, and, and…
• 1:05:09
  Kieron Gillen: But you're right about schedule, obviously.
• 1:05:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because we've talked to four or five letters, and good ones, and they're not complaining about this, and they even have, like, somewhat different standards when it comes to creator-owned versus, like, their Marvel DC work. But they do appreciate as much of…
• 1:05:30
  Tad Eggleston: The script being… not because of the pay side, but because, like… For that… Netflix.
• 1:05:37
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:05:37
  Tad Eggleston: For them to pay their bills, they need to schedule, essentially, a book a day.
• 1:05:43
  Tad Eggleston: To letters, so if they're having to do a repass, it's having to…
• 1:05:48
  Tad Eggleston: to be added onto their schedule. So even though they're getting paid for it,
• 1:05:55
  Tad Eggleston: They're… they're… they're essentially having to work overtime, because they can't…
• 1:06:00
  Tad Eggleston: There's not a good way for most of them to schedule, okay, these are the days for my repasses.
• 1:06:07
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 1:06:08
  Tad Eggleston: Because particularly if there aren't repasses, then they don't get paid on those days.
• 1:06:12
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 1:06:13
  Tad Eggleston: It was the balancing act.
• 1:06:15
  Kieron Gillen: I think if they're working at Marvel, there's always going to be repasses, because we know…
• 1:06:19
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 1:06:20
  Kieron Gillen: I say that in depression.
• 1:06:22
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I totally get it, but that, like, that's… you know, there's nobody that I talk to that, like.
• 1:06:32
  Tad Eggleston: Are bigger fans of, like, every ounce of comics than letters.
• 1:06:36
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm…
• 1:06:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I love talking to letterers, because A they're the first one that sees the final project, B, they, you know, people who wind up being letterers just have, like, different brains.
• 1:06:49
  Tad Eggleston: That I kind of relate to.
• 1:06:51
  Kieron Gillen: they've got completely different, like… so many of… so many are also line artists, you know, like Clayton is, certainly. Right. There's a very broad skill set there, the designers, you know, yeah, fascinating.
• 1:07:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:07:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so I wasn't saying that you never change it, because there's also nobody that wants the book to be perfect more than the letterer most of the time.
• 1:07:14
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm.
• 1:07:15
  Tad Eggleston: But I've had, like, letters with a group of people, like, because we'll sometimes have the whole team, you know? You'll hear the writer talk about, well, sometimes you just gotta let it go, and the letter will go, no!
• 1:07:27
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, you don't!
• 1:07:31
  Kieron Gillen: That's funny.
• 1:07:33
  Phil: From there, quick, so you've had… you've also had a lot of custom balloons on your books, more Invictive than we've seen so far. Do you have a favorite over the years?
• 1:07:44
  Kieron Gillen: Woden.
• 1:07:45
  Phil: Voted comments, okay.
• 1:07:47
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, like, Clayton loves doing that stuff, and it's like, I never actually ask him.
• 1:07:52
  Phil: Mmm. Like…
• 1:07:53
  Kieron Gillen: It's one of those kind of… oh, that's not true. I say this would be a good place for a custom balloon if you want to do.
• 1:07:58
  Tad Eggleston: is…
• 1:07:58
  Kieron Gillen: Actually, he might… he might re-correct me on that, so Kieran, you're always asking for them. I think it's the case of, like, when he started giving each of the…
• 1:08:04
  Tad Eggleston: He's the letterer that's been on the most, so if you want me to ask the next time he's on.
• 1:08:08
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah. So, I'm aware, like, when he's done it, like.
• 1:08:11
  Kieron Gillen: like, the gods in Dai, for example. Like, we're kind of, like, all the gods in Dai have their own one, so it's kind of now that if… he knows there's 12 gods, so he must have known at the start he's signing himself up for this, I guess.
• 1:08:24
  Tad Eggleston: He… I mean, I know from having talked to him that that's one of the things he likes to do.
• 1:08:31
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm.
• 1:08:31
  Tad Eggleston: likes to design. That's the other thing I've noticed. Every letterer has a different thing that's, like, their passion.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: light, like… Clem… Loved designing a font that That felt…
• 1:08:48
  Tad Eggleston: handwritten, because he saw the writing on the wall, he knew that he was gonna need to go from hand lettering to digital lettering, but he didn't want to have one A. He wanted to have seven A's, so you couldn't tell that it was…
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: digital font, you know? Like, like, when he talked about creating that, he just went nuts. You know, Hassan…
• 1:09:14
  Tad Eggleston: It's, it's, it's like special balloons.
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Clayton, it's more design-type balloons that he really goes nuts over, and otherwise, being invisible. He loves it when it's only that person that, like, is geeky that realizes what he added to the story.
• 1:09:36
  Kieron Gillen: Hmm…
• 1:09:36
  Kieron Gillen: It's like… I think it's broadly something all creators, not just, like, I mean, letterers, but including everyone, you get your best results if you try to lean into what they love doing. Right. This is this kind of, like, that's always… that's why you ideally have a conversation with an artist, like, what do you like drawing? Like, is this… is this going to work? And also, like, where do you want to push your art?
• 1:09:55
  Kieron Gillen: I mean, when I was working with Jamie long-term, we regularly had a kind of, okay, where do you want to go now? Like, I always remember, like, Siege Loki, he wants to do stuff with deep… a deep perspective.
• 1:10:04
  Kieron Gillen: So I kind of, like, the second page of Siege Loki for Marvel, there's this shot from Loki looking out over Asgard, and it's Jaime doing stuff from his perspective, because he wanted to do that. That kind of stuff. So, you know, you get…
• 1:10:17
  Kieron Gillen: doing what you love is… obviously, that's nice for you, but also the work's better. If you kind of make the work miserable for the artist.
• 1:10:24
  Kieron Gillen: You know, it's gonna end up looking shit. So that's one of the, kind of, the reasons why you're trying to do it.
• 1:10:30
  Tad Eggleston: Right. That actually, that segues nicely to one of the two questions that I had in the back of my head for when Phil gave me space again.
• 1:10:40
  Tad Eggleston: Is, is, like, you and Jamie used to be, like, ed and Sean, so, like,
• 1:10:50
  Tad Eggleston: Did he piss you off? What happened, man?
• 1:10:53
  Kieron Gillen: We ain't never getting back together. Like, ever.
• 1:10:57
  Tad Eggleston: Are you now… are you, are you the, are you the… is this a John and Paul thing, or is this a Gallagher Brothers thing, where, like, you'll get back together when you need the money, but you'll, like.
• 1:11:12
  Kieron Gillen: I'm sorry.
• 1:11:12
  Tad Eggleston: other backstage.
• 1:11:14
  Kieron Gillen: The, me and Jamie, all along… I mean, Jamie did a book called, Suburban Glamour between the first two phonograms. I met Jamie, showing him… he showed me the… what an earlier draft of those pages. Jamie's always just wanted to be a writer. Like, it's always been one of his desires, he wants to tell his own stories. So all the time I was aligned with Jamie.
• 1:11:32
  Kieron Gillen: It was like, Jamie, you need to do your own stuff, and then I give him the next script. You know what I mean? Right. So I'm like.
• 1:11:37
  Tad Eggleston: So he's finally just doing his own stuff.
• 1:11:40
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, as an IV aggressive.
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I did notice he's 5 years younger than you, so it's like he spread his wings. You were the older brother, you, like, showed him the ropes, and now it's like, okay, little bird, go fly. He's doing great stuff.
• 1:11:54
  Kieron Gillen: I know, honestly, like, we speak almost every day, you know, mainly about, like, whatever ridiculous, geeky shit we're into. But, like, I could not be a bigger fan of what Jamie's doing. He's, so that sounds like I made, that sounds like I don't mean it. But I actually…
• 1:12:10
  Tad Eggleston: I hope you mean it, because…
• 1:12:12
  Kieron Gillen: No, I definitely, no. I mean, when it sounds like I'm a big fan of his work, it sounds like the most insincere shit. But no, no.
• 1:12:17
  Tad Eggleston: for Sorrow was…
• 1:12:18
  Kieron Gillen: So good. Like, ease of…
• 1:12:20
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 1:12:20
  Kieron Gillen: And that was one of the core ideas that came for me, a role-playing game I was running for him. He kind of took his character and thought… I could do a whole comic on this guy. So, you know, I'm still kind of part of his world in that way. And, you know, he did a Power Fantasy cover, I will always be there in that kind of way. And he,
• 1:12:36
  Kieron Gillen: I'm just really glad he's doing his own stuff, and I can't wait to see more of it.
• 1:12:39
  Kieron Gillen: On the other hand, I'm very aware of the weird inertia that have kept us together. As I said, there's not many, like… I think, like, Sean, you know, Ed and Sean are amazing, but Sean just wanted… Sean wants to just sit and happily draw, and he's clearly very happy doing it. But me and Jamie had this kind of…
• 1:12:53
  Kieron Gillen: and he never had any interest in working in the mainstream comics, in that Sean very much wanted to be where he is. Whilst Jamie,
• 1:13:01
  Kieron Gillen: we managed to be successful enough to do what we did, but also not too successful to tear us apart. Because most… I remember something like Jock and Andy Diggle came in together, you know what I mean? But they got to, you know, they got apart and they broke apart because of what the industry does. Me and Jamie, I got into, kind of, you know.
• 1:13:17
  Kieron Gillen: second rank at Marvel, really, is probably a good way of describing it. Like, I was a poor actor. And Jamie had, you know, never had an ongoing book of his own, he did regular fill-ins. And so, we kind of… then we get Young Avengers together.
• 1:13:31
  Kieron Gillen: killed that, made a sign of, like, oh no, these guys should do a bigger book. And that was us just doing, basically, Phonogram for Marvel. And then we did Wiktiff. And then it's like, we don't have to work for anyone ever again. And I always remember, like, when we announced WICDIF at the Image Expo, and talk about an interesting… you mentioned MorrisonCon.
• 1:13:46
  Kieron Gillen: That period was really interesting, and I,
• 1:13:49
  Kieron Gillen: I'm about to say I miss it, which is nostalgic bullshit, but, like, I think MorrisonCon in some ways makes more sense now, because then it seemed a bit weird, but now it's kind of much more of a normal cultural thing. Anyway, back to ImageCon. Everyone else introducing books had a slide of their own.
• 1:14:02
  Kieron Gillen: And it was that kind of, like, Ed Brubaker, Kelly Sudakonic, everyone had their own slide, and me and Jamie were… the only one there was Kieran Gillan and Jamie McKelvey. We were, like, the one human… we were, like, a Gestalt cartoonist. And that's kind of… it's weird, like, it… and, like, we did, like, one… that one 8-page Batman story for Marvel.
• 1:14:22
  Kieron Gillen: Sorry, for DC. If it did it for Bat and Marvel, it'd be amazing. Yeah.
• 1:14:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:14:27
  Phil: You'll be in the, Spider-Man.
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: They're doing crossover stuff again, so…
• 1:14:31
  Kieron Gillen: I mean, never saying… I mean, I'm sure, like, you know, it would be surprising me and Jamie never do anything else again.
• 1:14:36
  Kieron Gillen: But, like, nothing like what we've done. I'm sure, like, it would take something really huge to get us together.
• 1:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: Him writing, and you doing the art.
• 1:14:45
  Kieron Gillen: We should… honestly, my art is pretty amazing.
• 1:14:48
  Kieron Gillen: If you ever read Immortal X-Men, issue 9, where Sinister's trying to murder everyone, my doodles are Sinister's doodles on the data pages. There's, like, basically, I was doodling over,
• 1:15:00
  Kieron Gillen: the, the Hickmanian data page, which I'm quite proud of in terms of… it was a metaphor for what I did at Marvel, I think.
• 1:15:06
  Kieron Gillen: And this beautiful Hickman design and destroying it.
• 1:15:08
  Phil: I was thinking of the, the cut-up piece that you did of,
• 1:15:14
  Phil: Wasn't it, like, a recruitment poster?
• 1:15:16
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, Orcus, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:17
  Phil: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:18
  Kieron Gillen: That me doing my fanzine. But, you know, I did that in Phonogram, you know, like, I did a load of montage… not a load, but I did, like, a cover for Phonogram 6, the Lloyd issue. You know what I mean? Jamie said, he's never seen me happier than sitting on the floor of his bedroom, cutting out people with little, scissors and prickstick. I'm fundamentally a zine kid.
• 1:15:36
  Phil: But no longer a kid.
• 1:15:40
  Tad Eggleston: So, I also have to ask you.
• 1:15:46
  Tad Eggleston: you… and Phil, if I get this wrong, just slap me upside the head, you're doing the RPG for Criminal?
• 1:15:55
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:55
  Tad Eggleston: that?
• 1:15:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 1:15:59
  Tad Eggleston: I love this. Love this on every level, but it also just… other than the fact that you do RPGs, and they decided they…
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: wanted an RPG with the next volume of Criminal, like, I wouldn't have made that pairing, so, like, how did it come together?
• 1:16:18
  Kieron Gillen: Ed just DM'd me saying, Hey Kieran, do you want to do an RPG for us?
• 1:16:22
  Kieron Gillen: And it was that kind of, just like, it's really crispy
• 1:16:24
  Kieron Gillen: It's their Christmas special, it's like, just like a… like, what do you mean, like a module? It was like, he said, like, like a module kind of thing, like, six pages or so. So it's a small RPG, you know, it's like, it's kind of like an itch.io kind of, like, story game, so it's deliberately quite small in format. But yeah, it's a real game, it's called Flushed.
• 1:16:44
  Kieron Gillen: I had two choices of ways to go, and one was actually going… my mate Grant Howitt, who does the one-page R… a load of one-page RPGs, like Honey Heist, so going that way, and doing a quite silly and throwaway thing, or trying to do something actually a bit more serious, and I went the latter, surprising no one.
• 1:17:00
  Kieron Gillen: It's a kind of…
• 1:17:03
  Kieron Gillen: The story is, all people have just done a heist. You're playing in the undertow, you're playing a game of cards, with a dealer.
• 1:17:09
  Kieron Gillen: And the game juxtaposed between you playing this game of cards and talking about how things went, and the actual events of the heist. So, and the…
• 1:17:16
  Kieron Gillen: the co- the… Cards of… the cards…
• 1:17:20
  Kieron Gillen: The hands of cards. I'm doing quotation marks here.
• 1:17:24
  Kieron Gillen: They determine who has narrative control in the flashbacks.
• 1:17:28
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah? So in other words, like… and each… and each of the cards is kind of the sort of challenge. For example, if they,
• 1:17:35
  Kieron Gillen: Hearts are char… if the dealer plays a heart card, it's like a challenge of romance or personality. If the dealer plays a diamond card, it's a challenge of, like, money, as in diamonds, resources.
• 1:17:47
  Kieron Gillen: If you play a club card, it's a challenge of connections. As in, you know, who do you know? And if you play a spade card, it's a challenge of, like, murder and violence. As in, can you bury them? It's a spade.
• 1:17:56
  Kieron Gillen: And so basically the dealer plays the card, sets up the challenge, then everyone else plays cards, and then you go from there to narrati- you know, and the narrative goes from there. So, at the end of the… so you've done the story, you know it's been successful, because it's all thought in flashback.
• 1:18:10
  Kieron Gillen: If you've won at more hand… if you've managed… if the dealers…
• 1:18:16
  Kieron Gillen: Narrative control at the end of the game, as in do you get to survive or not, is if you get more hands than the dealer, you're fine. If the dealer gets more hands than you, they get narrative control at the end, so they get your epilogue. Oh yeah, but it's… at the same time, when all this is going on, so you've got a whole story, each of the players have a secret objective.
• 1:18:32
  Kieron Gillen: And at the end of the game, the actual cards you have are judged like a poker hand.
• 1:18:39
  Kieron Gillen: And if you bench… if you beat the dealer in that hand, you get your secret objective, it happens, and if you don't, it doesn't happen. So in other words, and this basically all cascades down to…
• 1:18:51
  Kieron Gillen: Winning basically is, oh no, I've completely ripped off everyone for their money, but then got shot for the back of the head by my brother, you know, it's a criminal story, you know what I mean? Yeah. So the secret objectives are things like, I'm here to rip off everybody else's money, I'm gonna get all the… or, I'm a mole for the… I'm a cop mole, I'm gonna get everyone else arrested, or I know there's a mole here, I'm gonna shoot them for the head.
• 1:19:10
  Phil: Wow.
• 1:19:10
  Kieron Gillen: You know what I mean?
• 1:19:11
  Tad Eggleston: All these things play together. I was just asking about how it came together, and now I feel like we need to throw in the episode notes, careful, spoilers for criminal RPG.
• 1:19:24
  Kieron Gillen: It's not a sport, it's… you play it at home, you know, it's a six-foot.
• 1:19:28
  Kieron Gillen: Everyone knows about, you know, it's like.
• 1:19:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but it hasn't come out yet, is what I mean. You just described.
• 1:19:33
  Kieron Gillen: I can pitch it!
• 1:19:35
  Tad Eggleston: We could play the whole game based on listening to this episode now. I love it.
• 1:19:39
  Phil: Ned and Sean.
• 1:19:42
  Tad Eggleston: I just meant so that Sean and Ed will sometime come on the podcast, we haven't had them yet.
• 1:19:48
  Kieron Gillen: It should go live, yeah. It should go live, and it's sort of lovely. You know.
• 1:19:52
  Tad Eggleston: I do, I want them. I've had Jacob multiple times.
• 1:19:55
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 1:19:56
  Kieron Gillen: I'll tell you what, going through and reading all of Criminal, because obviously I did the research, obviously I've read Criminal, but actually reading it in one go, oh my god, what a body of work. Like, seeing it all connect together, and the structure, it's like, mate, I loved it anyway, and now I love it on a completely different level.
• 1:20:10
  Kieron Gillen: Actually, one of the things in the game, you're encouraged to speak in third-person Omniscient Narrator, so when you're doing the flashbacks, you don't say, I'm doing this, you say, you know.
• 1:20:20
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, I love it. You know what I mean? So it feels a little bit more like how, those episodes of,
• 1:20:25
  Phil: Criminal fail? Yeah. Yeah. Because I think…
• 1:20:28
  Tad Eggleston: I love it.
• 1:20:28
  Phil: I think it was, the first one, Coward, I'm pretty sure had first-person narration captions, and then Lawless definitely shifted to third person, and then I don't remember if…
• 1:20:37
  Kieron Gillen: It varies, like, it depends on the type of story. Like, it's a very specifically, close first-person narrator is done in a certain mode, and then the other one isn't. And if you've got multiple characters in it, you're more likely to have the kind of stepping back, as in, this happens.
• 1:20:54
  Kieron Gillen: And that's what, since this is the story with, like, four lead characters, basically, it felt more like that, if that makes sense. That was my feeling, anyway. And of course, if people don't do that, the game doesn't break.
• 1:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:21:05
  Tad Eggleston: I'm looking forward to seeing it, I'm looking forward to playing it. Phil, we're gonna have to… We are. It's quick as well. It's like a couple of, you know, a random, separate, separate criminal…
• 1:21:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if it winds up being part of our die game too, that's cool, but I feel like we're gonna have to have just a criminal episode at some point.
• 1:21:24
  Phil: It'll be interesting. It'll be interesting seeing how… how criminal… because, again, originally, I didn't… I didn't think about working in Lazarus, and then once Lesutocrats came to mind, then it…
• 1:21:33
  Kieron Gillen: bandwid.
• 1:21:33
  Phil: It was all, it was written, it was done. No, I… writing for RPGs is hard. It is? I made an attempt at that earlier this year, with your… the Die Jam. I am the same Phil on the Discord who, attempted to write about multiclassing in Die.
• 1:21:50
  Kieron Gillen: I'm sorry.
• 1:21:52
  Phil: Yeah, no, it's okay, it's okay, I… see, it… it…
• 1:21:55
  Phil: Talk about wholly over-ambition, Batman. I started out…
• 1:21:59
  Phil: overly, overly, overly ambitious, thinking, oh, I should, I should develop what would every possible combination look like. Now I'm down to, I… I know what I'm gonna do for our game, you know, the master has stolen the G12, and they are now a, you know.
• 1:22:14
  Phil: made a pact with the God of Fate, and I know what they're gonna do for that, and I can… I can spoil the heck out of it for Ted, but probably won't. But yeah.
• 1:22:22
  Tad Eggleston: I do love how Phil has… you know, you're a busy guy, so I'm assuming you haven't listened to any of our games, but phil has managed to work in a player on a week's notice.
• 1:22:35
  Tad Eggleston: Phil has managed to… Wind up having two… of the same…
• 1:22:41
  Tad Eggleston: class of player. Phil has managed to not have a complete set of all of the various different players. Phil has managed to…
• 1:22:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: you got sick this week, I have… we have to play a player down, let me roll with that. And we have not had, like.
• 1:23:03
  Tad Eggleston: To me, an uninteresting…
• 1:23:05
  Tad Eggleston: session yet. I would love, at some point, for somebody to actually tell me how they listen, because I worry that, like, the podcast that we put out that's 100% for us, not that that would stop me, but…
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: But I, I am very impressed with Phil as our master.
• 1:23:27
  Phil: Oh, shucks.
• 1:23:28
  Kieron Gillen: Are you enjoying it, Phil? Are you enjoying GMing it?
• 1:23:31
  Phil: Yes
• 1:23:32
  Phil: Yes, it's… it's… it's a lot of fun. This is also actually my first, time running a campaign.
• 1:23:39
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, wow! You've gone in hard.
• 1:23:41
  Phil: Yeah, yeah, I… so, okay, so to… to get a little bit scandalous here, I… this is very typical for me, so my… my drug history is that, you know, I didn't do drugs or drink until I was 20. 21, I tried marijuana,
• 1:23:58
  Phil: 21 and a half, I tried, DMT, and that's… yeah, that was it. So it was like…
• 1:24:05
  Phil: the guy was like, hey, are you gonna be okay? And I'm like, don't worry, I've read Grant Morrison comics, I know what I'm doing.
• 1:24:12
  Phil: And yeah, that was… so, yeah, I jump in the deep end hard. Yeah, so I'm… I'm having fun. I have a vague idea of, you know, where…
• 1:24:21
  Phil: the rest of the world is gonna be, it's… yeah, I, I worry that,
• 1:24:27
  Phil: you know, I always worry about attempting to convey what's in my head to the rest of the group.
• 1:24:33
  Phil: But, I'm also learning to pick up the signs of…
• 1:24:38
  Phil: of what they find are interesting. I have the most fun when someone suggests something I hadn't considered. Like, in today's session, I planned, okay.
• 1:24:46
  Phil: They're gonna meet a group of pirates. The first mate is going to be the Dread Pirate Roberts, he's gonna be Wesley from Princess Pride, he's gonna be trying to romance Tad's girlfriend who came into this world. There's gonna be romantic troubles.
• 1:24:59
  Phil: Tad comes in and says, oh, so is that the last Dread Pirate Roberts? And I was like, oh yeah, yeah, of course he's the last one. He's like, oh, hi, Fezzik.
• 1:25:05
  Phil: And I'm like, you son of a bitch! You son of a bitch! Okay, it's Fezzik now.
• 1:25:10
  Kieron Gillen: You read the book.
• 1:25:10
  Phil: Of course, mate.
• 1:25:12
  Phil: Bezika's the first mate, he's… he's… this totally changed, but he's like, I guess San Diego's there too, and I'm like, yeah, he's there too. I'll have to…
• 1:25:20
  Tad Eggleston: There's not. Wesley's not. He went off and retired.
• 1:25:23
  Phil: He's retired.
• 1:25:24
  Phil: So, I guess maybe Fezzik may or may not be attempting to romance your wife-girlfriend? We'll see.
• 1:25:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I told him not to.
• 1:25:31
  Kieron Gillen: That means that Wesley's out there somewhere.
• 1:25:34
  Phil: Yes.
• 1:25:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:25:35
  Phil: I mean, like, you put it back on the mantelpiece.
• 1:25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, Wesley's out there, he's just not…
• 1:25:40
  Phil: He's not in that side.
• 1:25:42
  Phil: Right, I'm writing that down, Wesley.
• 1:25:43
  Kieron Gillen: That's great. Also, the thing about Die is, like, it's deliberately made to be… I mean, all RPGs are like that. All RPGs you plug shit in. But Die is aggressively saying, really? Just rip off all the stuff you like, and stick it in the world, and see what happens. And it'll hold together by this fiction, because the fiction is so meta anyway.
• 1:26:01
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I love playing The Fool, because I'm the one that loves playing RPGs and not thinking about them in between, and I feel like it's the first time ever that I have, like, a character where it's… it's, like, almost encouraged for me not to be…
• 1:26:22
  Tad Eggleston: fully present.
• 1:26:25
  Kieron Gillen: What we do is now?
• 1:26:26
  Tad Eggleston: What better way… yeah, what better way to be completely and utterly Foolish than to go.
• 1:26:33
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah.
• 1:26:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, so I'm gonna…
• 1:26:40
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why I think the laptop threw him so hard today, because I'm so, so regularly the guy where it's like, okay, I'm gonna ask for the Carlisle sword, and then I'm gonna run, and I'm gonna do a triple jump over the dragon, and slam it down into the neck while swinging around to kick into the ogre.
• 1:27:00
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 1:27:01
  Phil: And I'll say, that sounds like four actions, we'll take it at the first one.
• 1:27:04
  Tad Eggleston: He's like, okay, roll the… But this time, I'm like…
• 1:27:08
  Phil: Yep.
• 1:27:09
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, so… so… we… we've had time shift, and… and… and, like, that feels very computational. I feel like this whole world is a simulation, and I want the laptop that is wired into…
• 1:27:28
  Kieron Gillen: Brilliant. So, all the classes are like, I mean.
• 1:27:32
  Kieron Gillen: What I like about that as a game is the… you know, the archetypes, you know, the Paragons are quite bold, make… they're also always customized by the persona.
• 1:27:41
  Kieron Gillen: And they're also customized by the player, as in, so, this kind of pre-level thing that shakes down. And falls are really an interesting, like, Rorschach test in that way. Because I think about, like, actually, Al Ewing, I ran a game of Die, which, like a campaign for, like.
• 1:27:54
  Kieron Gillen: Jamie, Katie, the editor of Power Fantasy, and, Al. So that was, like, one of the later playtests for Dying. He was the fool.
• 1:28:02
  Kieron Gillen: And he was really it, because he was, like.
• 1:28:04
  Tad Eggleston: He disliked… I could see him being a really.
• 1:28:05
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, he was really good, but he got… on one of it, the character found it really increasingly aggravating. The world was treating him as this kind of, like, no, he wants… the world was treating him much nicer than he wants to be treated, and that was kind of what I was trying to… that was this story. So we went from there, and then there was this other…
• 1:28:23
  Kieron Gillen: the Big Die campaign, Saxie, Alice Saxsei, a writer, they do really, really interesting, like,
• 1:28:31
  Kieron Gillen: gothic, 19th century fiction and dark academia. They're great. But therefore was Bertie Worcester.
• 1:28:38
  Kieron Gillen: They were a fucking sweetheart. Like, you know what I mean? Like, and they're exactly foolish in all the normal foolish ways, but they were very kind.
• 1:28:45
  Kieron Gillen: And looking after people, and they're clearly doomed.
• 1:28:48
  Kieron Gillen: You know, and I always remember the first ever game I ever ran of Die, The Fall was in there, and The Fall was catatonic for the whole adventure, and had to basically carry it all the way through the adventure, and then they made out with the master, and everyone went home. Never made out, they eventually… should we go for a date afterwards, kind of, because it was an emotional thing there. Classic queer coming-of-age story, as Die often is. But you know what I mean?
• 1:29:11
  Kieron Gillen: all of them are fools. You know, and all of them are fools in their own way, because what's more foolish than actually no-going the entire the other way and falling on the ground and refusing to be involved in this bullshit?
• 1:29:19
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, I'm a big fan of games. The thing is, like, what I love about games, and having written them, is that it's the…
• 1:29:27
  Kieron Gillen: It's the call to action. Like, all my, kind of, comics of some degree, have like, hey, not all of them. A lot of my…
• 1:29:33
  Kieron Gillen: comics demand interaction. Like, people who want to be phonomancers, or think about their lives in ways, or think about how magic affects themselves, and all that kind of stuff. Well, RPGs just do that, like, you create a structure, and then people make it their own. You know what I mean? And yeah, it feels fundamentally punk rock in a way that appeals to the zine kid in me, deeply.
• 1:29:54
  Phil: it's one of those things where, I mean, I still remember in our very first… we had, like, a playtest game of Die we did first, when we did the ritual, and I said, you know, open your eyes, you're gonna die. It was a rush, unlike any video game I've ever played.
• 1:30:12
  Kieron Gillen: fun. Yeah. I'm glad it worked.
• 1:30:14
  Phil: Yeah, it really did. It's, you know, for also being someone who, you know, reads a shit ton of Maura Morrison, and believes in that stuff, you know, believes in the weirdness, the magic, like you said, hacking consciousness. I tried to be atheist agnostic, and it didn't take
• 1:30:32
  Phil: And, yeah, there's too much weird stuff out there for me to ignore. And, yeah, I… die…
• 1:30:39
  Phil: tabletop RPGs, the conversation game… It… it gives me something that I don't get from anything else.
• 1:30:46
  Phil: And.
• 1:30:46
  Tad Eggleston: What he's not telling you is he tried to be atheist agnostic, it didn't take, so he created a church around you?
• 1:30:54
  Tad Eggleston: He feels like he's…
• 1:30:56
  Phil: Huh.
• 1:30:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right now, he's talking to God.
• 1:30:59
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, no. Thankfully.
• 1:31:01
  Phil: Yeah, well…
• 1:31:02
  Kieron Gillen: shaved my beard, like, I genuinely had a longer beard two days ago, and I would have been in a much better gold kind of look.
• 1:31:07
  Phil: That's okay, that's okay. yeah, I was… yeah, Christianity was… was… I joke that, other people were homeschooled, I was home-religioned, and not… and thankfully, that… that is a fun way, because other people were home-religioned in unfun ways, but no, my… they just… they never took me to church, and it was nice. I'm glad they didn't.
• 1:31:27
  Phil: But, where I was going with all that, basically, it… So…
• 1:31:33
  Phil: because that was one thing I noticed in thinking about dual-classing and die, is that you can do that without even doing it. You can make the wizardy fool, you can make, we have two Neos, one is a gunslinger, the other is a hacker, you know?
• 1:31:49
  Kieron Gillen: Yes.
• 1:31:49
  Phil: Inherently going in different directions, so then, you know, why bother?
• 1:31:53
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah. Honestly, that was the intent, as in, like, like, Welsh…
• 1:31:57
  Kieron Gillen: The Paragon giving out the dice is in the GM's hands, even though it's always… the players inevitably have an input, which… as is… they should be.
• 1:32:04
  Kieron Gillen: there's got… all the flashes are flexible enough to be able to be, like, what you want it to be. Some maybe lean more one way, but very much like, yeah, you don't need to. In fact, there's much… I mean, I've said this on the Discord, so I'm just repeating what I would have said to…
• 1:32:16
  Kieron Gillen: listening. But, like, the way to hack Dai is just increase the character trees. Give the Nio a different… give the Nio a different gift, you know, give the… you know, all that kind of stuff. And you're sort of, like, this is one of the things about Die Loaded coming back. Look at me segue to Die Loaded. Is that they kind of… we get to highlight different parts of the game. Like, in terms of, like.
• 1:32:36
  Kieron Gillen: different people, you know, different… different emotion nights, or different Neo, we get to say, oh, right, that's a different kind of thing they could be doing, you know, because it's like,
• 1:32:47
  Kieron Gillen: like, we've only got a grief night. Matt's, there's a good one. Like, Matt was the Grief Night. We've only really met a Grief Night in play, and we've met another emotion night, but, you know, we've got a very different kind of Emotion Night at the heart of this one.
• 1:32:59
  Phil: Oh, God.
• 1:32:59
  Kieron Gillen: So, like, and when people kind of look at Die Loaded and Die now, they go, oh, right, I can see the different ways this could play out, which is the intent.
• 1:33:06
  Kieron Gillen: And of course, we also, as well as doing the comic, we're doing extra stuff in the back of the comics as well, for the game. Like, only, like, you know, a couple of pages, like, we're gonna do…
• 1:33:16
  Kieron Gillen: the minimum is the gods. I want to have, like, actual official walls for the 12 gods of Dai in there. Okay. But, like, see what else.
• 1:33:24
  Kieron Gillen: I don't want to… ask me again later, I'll say it on the Discord. Sure. But there's a… there's this campaign frame I kind of want to write, but I need to playtest it.
• 1:33:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:33:34
  Phil: I mean, if you're looking for players.
• 1:33:37
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, that, that, that, that, like…
• 1:33:41
  Tad Eggleston: when I hear… as I hear each of you talk about the Die Discord, which isn't one of the Discords that I'm involved in, and even the discords that I am involved in, I tend to be,
• 1:33:55
  Tad Eggleston: a lurker, except when I'm not, if that makes sense?
• 1:33:59
  Phil: Tim?
• 1:34:02
  Tad Eggleston: but also not, like, a heavy-duty lurker. Like, 90% of what's on the Discord that I'm involved in, like, or any Discord that I'm involved in, I have…
• 1:34:11
  Tad Eggleston: absolutely zero knowledge about, it might as well not exist, right? Yeah. And this, like, plays into my autism, like, like, like, like, if you're not in front of me, you cease to exist.
• 1:34:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I don't really miss people. I will think of them when something makes me think of them, and occasionally one of those thoughts will be, I haven't talked to them in a while, I should send them a text. And I either will do that right then, or forget about it for the next year.
• 1:34:42
  Tad Eggleston: But, so, as I hear you talking about the Discord, I find myself, like, like, what is the Die fandom like? It sounds like there are more people playing Die than I realize.
• 1:34:55
  Phil: There's a lot of Scientists and tech people.
• 1:34:57
  Tad Eggleston: That I also believe, like, but, but, but, but, like…
• 1:35:04
  Tad Eggleston: A, how involved are you with the community versus…
• 1:35:11
  Tad Eggleston: just being the creator, and B, like, talk to me about the differences between, like…
• 1:35:20
  Tad Eggleston: Your comic fan communities, and your role-playing community, and obviously they're gonna cross over quite a…
• 1:35:27
  Kieron Gillen: Bit, just because of the nature of the game, but…
• 1:35:30
  Tad Eggleston: But I… I mean, it sounds like it's robust enough that I would be…
• 1:35:33
  Tad Eggleston: Shocked if everybody playing it started as a reader.
• 1:35:38
  Kieron Gillen: No, no, absolutely. Like, there's a lot of people who…
• 1:35:41
  Kieron Gillen: We're just RPG people, you know, it's a… it's an RPG that did fairly well. It's an interesting concept people jumped on.
• 1:35:48
  Kieron Gillen: Some people have gone one way or the other. Some people just pop in, because it's a Discord, you know? It's, like, self-sustaining. Like, I'm there quite a lot, as in, like, there's moderators. I try to keep slightly distant, because there's,
• 1:36:04
  Kieron Gillen: I think boundaries are important in that way, but, like, I've got to fight to not jump on and answer every single question.
• 1:36:10
  Kieron Gillen: Especially, like, I know there's enough people who know the game very well who will answer most stuff, and I don't need to do it.
• 1:36:16
  Kieron Gillen: But occasionally, especially when I see someone making a really big mistake.
• 1:36:20
  Kieron Gillen: Like, and it's, you know, it's… either they've misread a rule in a very fundamental way, or, like, they're gonna do something which isn't a good idea. I said, don't do that. Like, multi-classing people, why would you do that, dude?
• 1:36:32
  Phil: Because you don't know when enough is enough, and when you have a mouth for, you want another bite.
• 1:36:37
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah? It's like…
• 1:36:40
  Kieron Gillen: It's chatty, it's quotas-friendly, that's the kind of, like, it's, it's not hyper big, but it's like, it's also not small either. It's not like a dead Discord, but it's kind of people, like, there's stuff happening, I check every day, there's normally something chatting about…
• 1:36:52
  Kieron Gillen: I imagine it'll be busier again, like, when the comic comes out, as well. That's the other thing about the thing, that the, we're doing the downloaded,
• 1:37:02
  Kieron Gillen: It's a quick start in the comic book format. So, like, as well, on the same day as the first issue of Die Loaded comes out, we've got this, quick start of how to get started playing Die. It's 56 pages, all the rules, the core rules, the core scenario… not… core rules, the core characteristics, and a complete… a completely normal
• 1:37:20
  Kieron Gillen: scenario for itself, so you just buy this and start playing. So basically, it's another way for people who have been intrigued by DAI, here's a really easy way to start playing, which will probably lead people to go into the Discord, is my thinking.
• 1:37:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:37:32
  Kieron Gillen: Bear.
• 1:37:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's not a question that I wind up asking that much in general, but because of
• 1:37:40
  Tad Eggleston: Because my head is now on it with comics versus roleplaying and whatnot,
• 1:37:46
  Tad Eggleston: like, as a creator, how does it feel the same? How does it feel different? Like, interacting with people who are playing a game that you created versus the people showing up at your table at cons that wanna…
• 1:37:58
  Tad Eggleston: Talk about how meaningful
• 1:38:02
  Tad Eggleston: your writing was to them. I mean, well, and, and similarly, like, talk to me, particularly because you said that, that you've been, you know, writing, writing, RPG modules as well.
• 1:38:16
  Tad Eggleston: talk to me about the differences between writing… writing for a role-playing game, writing for a comic. I mean, I can see the similarities, but…
• 1:38:24
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know, and I talked to Ryan K. Lindsay when he did his… Solo role-playing game.
• 1:38:31
  Tad Eggleston: you know… But that… That's…
• 1:38:35
  Tad Eggleston: that's slightly more contained when it's a solo role-playing game. There's a lot of room for it, I mean, you gotta allow for the player to have lots of control and whatnot, but…
• 1:38:45
  Tad Eggleston: But it's not like, okay, here's… here's…
• 1:38:49
  Tad Eggleston: and particularly with dye, it's… it is one of the reasons I love it so much. It's so non-crunchy. It's so… okay, here's a really loose set of…
• 1:39:02
  Tad Eggleston: Guidelines.
• 1:39:04
  Tad Eggleston: Go play.
• 1:39:05
  Kieron Gillen: It's definitely, like, like, the part… when I was building the natural systemic bit of die, as in the rules,
• 1:39:13
  Kieron Gillen: what's the closest I can get that does what most trad games do that I could bear to run?
• 1:39:18
  Kieron Gillen: That's the kind of, like, it's got to feel a bit like a trad game, in some ways, but, like, oh, you've got dice, you roll dice, things happen. You hit monsters, they lose hit points. You know, there's the real core stuff, but, like, everything else, like, burnt down and got it very, very…
• 1:39:32
  Kieron Gillen: clean, while still having enough bits around the edges that it feels like an RPG. Like, if you pick up Die, it looks like an RPG, it's not this big, but it's got almost a Potempkin Village-type structure to it, in that it looks like an RPG, but if you prod it, you'll realize it's made out of paper.
• 1:39:47
  Kieron Gillen: And deliberately so, as in, it's like, it has all the fetishism of… all the fetishism of an RPG, but without actually the interest of, like, what a… how a TS… how wizards would put together a D&D source book.
• 1:40:00
  Kieron Gillen: What's the difference? Well, there's… God, there's no means of them.
• 1:40:03
  Kieron Gillen: I was gonna say that the fact that RPGs are more the actual creator… more the audience, you don't really get into the level of Star Warship as much, in terms of, like, people often seem to think there's being magical.
• 1:40:14
  Kieron Gillen: about, creators. And of course, you know, all of WickDiv was about, that's nonsense. You know, and, you know, and if you believe that, or if creators start believing that, they really are in trouble.
• 1:40:25
  Kieron Gillen: And I don't think this is true in RPGs, because so much of the magic's about themselves. As in, you know, you have brought the magic together. And I say that, I'm not sure that's true. Like, I think in some degrees, people,
• 1:40:35
  Kieron Gillen: People still have a tendency to put people on pedestals, even if they…
• 1:40:41
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I know a lot of people who… they would have trouble with you saying that about, say, Gary Gygax.
• 1:40:49
  Kieron Gillen: But at the same time… but hold… all of the 1970s stuff was fucking about tearing Gary Gygax down. You know, D&D is too big to be trusted with Gary Gygax. There's a fundamentally iconoclastic nature of RPGs, because RPGs are… you know what I mean? That's what I mean, is even Gary Gygax isn't born down, you know what I mean? That's what I think I'm wrestling with, but I still don't… I think people just idolize, you know what I mean? So I think that's too loose. The difference about writing for RPGs is…
• 1:41:14
  Kieron Gillen: Level of position. Like, RPG… like, I'm writing scripts, I'm doing a story, it's easy.
• 1:41:19
  Kieron Gillen: In that way.
• 1:41:20
  Kieron Gillen: a level of position to every single word you're putting in front of people, if it's going to be any use at all, which I'm bad at.
• 1:41:26
  Kieron Gillen: Rpg writing burns ideas. Burns ideas like nothing else. I remember writing this, story for a game called Apocalypse Keys. Really good game.
• 1:41:36
  Kieron Gillen: basically kind of like a very melodramatic Hellboy kind of setup about these people in an organization with the power to end the world. Power Fantasy fans would love it.
• 1:41:47
  Kieron Gillen: I wrote this scenario for it, and I did the whole thing, and I was aware that this… for this 3,000-word scenario I've written, this is…
• 1:41:54
  Kieron Gillen: as much story, I would probably fit in a Once and Future arc. I could have, for this, whatever I got paid for it, I could have written 5 to 6 comic pages, you know, five to six issues of comics, and got paid that money instead. You know what I mean? So, RPGs burn ideas, especially if you're writing the stuff I like, which is the story game side. Like,
• 1:42:13
  Kieron Gillen: bigger RPGs.
• 1:42:15
  Kieron Gillen: You can pad it a bit, because they're paid more by the word, and story games are more only about the concentration of ideas.
• 1:42:21
  Kieron Gillen: Sorry, I'm being very generalized here. RPG people listening, please don't murder me. But you know what I mean? Like, but you… if you are… if you look at, like, a random table.
• 1:42:30
  Kieron Gillen: So that's what it is.
• 1:42:31
  Tad Eggleston: hi to my brother Adam. My brother Adam's the RPG person listening.
• 1:42:35
  Tad Eggleston: Please don't get mad at Kieran.
• 1:42:38
  Kieron Gillen: Please don't, Adam.
• 1:42:39
  Kieron Gillen: But if you look at, say, any random table, that's 10 novums of ideas put down there.
• 1:42:46
  Kieron Gillen: And, like, if you do that in comics, you either, you know, you're Grant or you're Al, you know what I mean? You're that kind of… that big burst of ideas coming… coming people that hard, that's just normal in comics. Sorry, normal in RVGs. So, I find it really interesting and challenging, and…
• 1:43:04
  Kieron Gillen: it works for me. Honestly, I'm really into it. Like, I'm noodling with, like, I'm writing a few scenarios for various people, because they asked me. But I've got a bigger project I'm working on as well. Yeah, you know, there's at least one reason why I've said about not doing more.
• 1:43:18
  Kieron Gillen: leaving space, what I've filled… what I've ended up filling the space, which I'm not spending right in comics are, is noodling and RPG stuff, you know? And it's like, congratulations, Kieran, you found a field that pays worse than comics.
• 1:43:30
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 1:43:31
  Kieron Gillen: I've got a guess.
• 1:43:32
  Tad Eggleston: here's my, my, my question, though. I mean, you talk about how it burns ideas, but… but does it? Because…
• 1:43:42
  Tad Eggleston: Comics are not only a separate medium, but, like… Couldn't you write the… the…
• 1:43:52
  Tad Eggleston: Like, if you wanted to, couldn't you take those ideas that you just put into a module, and with…
• 1:43:59
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever…
• 1:44:03
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever minor changes you wanted to make to make it a story rather than part of the role-playing universe, still write the comic?
• 1:44:12
  Kieron Gillen: Like, if it was strictly speaking, a piece of work for hire, you know, as in, like, no, I think of you…
• 1:44:17
  Kieron Gillen: I think I've used those ideas, and I think I've probably intellect… I could have probably get away with moving it over.
• 1:44:23
  Kieron Gillen: But I probably feel intellectually iffy about reusing the idea, maybe. And it… that's just on… that's partially on me and partially.
• 1:44:30
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I would argue, and this is, this is, like…
• 1:44:34
  Tad Eggleston: this is both the, I like people to get paid when they can, and the teacher in me that questions every assumption that a student makes that limits themselves in any way. And it is truly a question, it's not a me saying you're wrong.
• 1:44:53
  Tad Eggleston: like… If you're taking your own ideas and fleshing them out more, what's intellectually wrong with that?
• 1:45:02
  Kieron Gillen: True. But to actually really kind of step back to the original point is, you have to generate all those ideas through an RPG. If you do have an idea… if you do an idea… if you do…
• 1:45:10
  Kieron Gillen: something with those ideas later, it doesn't mean the fact… it doesn't change the fact you had to work out more ideas earlier. Right. You know, and the same… in other words, you've had to generate more ideas here, and only some of them you'll be developing. Because that's… because this is the other trick, is you can do this making more idea thing, because you always have more ideas you can use.
• 1:45:28
  Kieron Gillen: You know, that's the real truth of the matter, as in, that's why the form of writing is possible. But it's fucking hard work, RPG, it's dense. You know what I mean? It's really… it's not like a script where there's, like, all the architecture…
• 1:45:39
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than thinking of them as burned ideas, they're your drawer of ideas for that day that, like, you don't know what to write about.
• 1:45:48
  Phil: My experience relating to that, and the one attempt at writing, you know, RPG material that I have, is mostly that,
• 1:45:57
  Phil: Whereas in a story, you can drop an idea and let it percolate and see how it fits in with the whole.
• 1:46:04
  Phil: It's the difference between writing a story about a watch and building a watch.
• 1:46:09
  Phil: Is that you might be able to do…
• 1:46:12
  Phil: do, you know, conceptually know how it works, but when you're building a watch, you have to actually know how it fucking works, and you have to put the gears together.
• 1:46:22
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, you can't cheat. Game mechanics, the clue's there, you know? And even if you're cheating, you're telling people how to do a card trick. And that's the actual… so much of, like, RPG design is a card trick, as in, if you do this, you'll have emotional effects. It's like, you know, you're describing die, the bit where it says, close your eyes and open, you're in die.
• 1:46:41
  Kieron Gillen: that. You know, the whole thing is that's really very carefully playtested. It's a little magical ritual, like, we're using some of the tropes of magic rituals, we're gonna make you pass out the dice, you know what I mean? Like, and it's like, there's a level of buy-in to this kind of thing, you know, and that is exactly it, you know, you can't cheat, and even when you cheat.
• 1:46:59
  Kieron Gillen: You're… you're… you're showing them how to do it, you know, yeah, yeah.
• 1:47:03
  Phil: Yeah, yeah, and I mean, it's even… it's kind of like, as a GM, a question that I've danced around is, you know, asking my players, so how much would you like to be surprised?
• 1:47:12
  Kieron Gillen: And that's not a question you can directly ask someone. Say, well, how much would you like to be surprised?
• 1:47:17
  Phil: Because…
• 1:47:18
  Phil: When you ask someone, well, because then as soon as you ask someone, hey, would you like to be surprised right now? They're expecting a surprise.
• 1:47:25
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:47:25
  Phil: The odds of surprising them goes down.
• 1:47:29
  Kieron Gillen: Is that, like, the, it's one of those really interesting questions about, like, buy-in in RPGs. Like, at the start, okay, at the start, we're going to discuss what we're going to be doing. Like.
• 1:47:38
  Kieron Gillen: That includes that, as in, like, how much is… how much are you gonna…
• 1:47:44
  Kieron Gillen: how much are you gonna trust me? Like, or is this a game where we want to play everything open? Or, like, how much are the boundaries we're gonna have? And all those things push and pull in different directions. I, broadly am speaking, I don't play games with…
• 1:47:55
  Kieron Gillen: too much hidden information anymore. And that's a stage I'm going through. I mean, I was listening to Quinn's, who, like, Quinn's is a very old mate of mine, he's, the biggest RPG reviewer.
• 1:48:05
  Kieron Gillen: He, is talking about, impossible missions. Not a no one, maybe it's the other one.
• 1:48:13
  Kieron Gillen: Delta Green. He's talking about the big Delta Green campaign, and so much about that is about really just messing with the players, and there's like… okay, that's my read on what he said. Please excuse me, Delta Green fans.
• 1:48:25
  Kieron Gillen: that, and that school of play where the scenario is a very deliberate trick for the players, I'm less into, perhaps. And this… the irony being, of course, people have said that about die. You know, the, that, you know, maybe players shouldn't know that they're going to go to an RPG.
• 1:48:39
  Kieron Gillen: I've never said that. I very much tell people up front, the game is about you're gonna be… that's why you want to make interesting people. Or, like, stuff like The Fallen.
• 1:48:48
  Kieron Gillen: You know? And I don't… for me, if you know… it works really well as a surprise, they've got a…
• 1:48:54
  Kieron Gillen: For me, it also works if you know it's going to happen if you die, because then you're ahead on the drama. Because I very much have the idea, if everyone was a collaborator, we know what this… okay, I'm going to become… I've become a foreign, what does that mean? And you're already thinking about how this is going to play out dramatically. You know, you have to have faith in people. That's what RPGs really were about, I think.
• 1:49:11
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:49:12
  Kieron Gillen: Generalisation again.
• 1:49:13
  Phil: No, no, I feel it too, because ours…
• 1:49:16
  Tad Eggleston: I was gonna say, I think we've had enough fun that I'm thinking that Karen's not gonna hate us and say he's never coming back, and we're also starting to run up against my deadline. So I have to get the required final question in. Yep, yep, yep.
• 1:49:31
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:49:33
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
• 1:49:37
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:49:43
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you need them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:49:53
  Kieron Gillen: I hate this question. Like, the idea, like, now I've gone really hard, because it's like, I have pretty high standards, and I talk about everything to everybody. What was the last thing that genuinely blew me away?
• 1:50:10
  Kieron Gillen: Was it… well, I forget which was the first, Ray Fawkes… Ray Fawkes did two.
• 1:50:16
  Phil: one soul, and…
• 1:50:18
  Kieron Gillen: And the people inside. Which one was the second one?
• 1:50:20
  Phil: I think the people inside?
• 1:50:22
  Kieron Gillen: I think The People Inside was the second one. Ray Fawkes of these series of amazing graphic novels for Oni. The people is… both of them have a similar theme, and the idea that, basically, one soul is nine-panel grid, and each one is following a different person through their life.
• 1:50:38
  Kieron Gillen: And so basically turning 9 lives, every page turn takes each carrier further in. People inside is like that, but in spreads, and about relationships.
• 1:50:49
  Kieron Gillen: they're masterful, formless things. Like, they're just really beautiful, elegantly done, like, completely about life and hope. Ray's, like, people…
• 1:50:57
  Kieron Gillen: if people in mainstream comics, they may be knowing him from his work for DC, you know, and he does really good stuff in those kind of space.
• 1:51:04
  Tad Eggleston: issue of, what's the… he just… it's a…
• 1:51:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'll remember it. Keep… keep talking.
• 1:51:15
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah, but he does, like, you know, he's absolutely can do absolutely genre stuff in lots of different ways, but this is really, like, arty, clever, smart, really grounded, human stuff, but you have not seen anything at all like. So yeah, I think that's something I truly love, and more and more people should have read it.
• 1:51:34
  Kieron Gillen: Well, and I will say it's been on my list, but I haven't read it yet, so you did the rare thing of managing to come up with a comic that, like, I need to read.
• 1:51:44
  Tad Eggleston: And what I was looking for is he just started writing, The Phantom at Mad Cave in the first.
• 1:51:51
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, cool. I missed that, I've not talked for Ray in a while, I'll have to drop a line.
• 1:51:54
  Tad Eggleston: The first issue of Phantom came out in it. And actually, for me, it was particularly exciting because, it hasn't reached print yet, but I did… I did my first…
• 1:52:06
  Tad Eggleston: email interview with Jason, the Norwegian cartoonist, who now lives in… France. Yeah.
• 1:52:17
  Tad Eggleston: And he brought up how big the Phantom is in…
• 1:52:22
  Tad Eggleston: Scandinavia, and the fact that long after it was still being made regularly in the U.S,
• 1:52:32
  Tad Eggleston: it continued in Scandinavia, and, like, I fell down a rabbit hole and, like, discovered that, oh, the only English versions of all of these Scandinavian
• 1:52:41
  Tad Eggleston: Phantom comes from the translations out of Australia.
• 1:52:45
  Kieron Gillen: Oh, wow.
• 1:52:46
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, it became… when I then saw that Mad Cave was doing it, and Ray Fox, who's fantastic, was taking on the writing duties, it's like, oh, this could be so much cooler than most people think it could be, because there's actually, like, this whole world of Phantom
• 1:53:05
  Tad Eggleston: That most English speakers don't know about.
• 1:53:07
  Kieron Gillen: T.
• 1:53:10
  Tad Eggleston: And I'll be curious to know…
• 1:53:14
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I've been meaning to reach out to him for a while. I met him briefly at C2E2 a couple of years ago.
• 1:53:20
  Tad Eggleston: And you're like…
• 1:53:24
  Tad Eggleston: Now you're throwing questions into my… I mean, A, you're gonna make me… the biggest reason I haven't reached out to him is I knew I wanted to read these books before I reached out to him. So now, you're gonna kick me into gear to read these, and then reach out to Ray, and also ask him about the Phantom, because…
• 1:53:42
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, it's way cooler than I thought it was.
• 1:53:45
  Kieron Gillen: That's cool.
• 1:53:46
  Tad Eggleston: So, Kieran, it has been a blast.
• 1:53:51
  Tad Eggleston: We'll definitely, definitely be in touch. We'd love to have you back. Obviously, transatlantic is a little bit more difficult, because
• 1:53:58
  Tad Eggleston: Because both Phil and I, like, work during the day most of the time, and… you know…
• 1:54:04
  Tad Eggleston: It makes it hard, and I don't want you to stay up till midnight when you have small children.
• 1:54:11
  Kieron Gillen: Yes. Well, I would love to come back, it's been delightful. I feel I've been quite spacey, so I feel…
• 1:54:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:54:17
  Kieron Gillen: best, but it's been lovely talking.
• 1:54:18
  Tad Eggleston: So have I. Phil's been on his game, because he was the one that prepared, prepared.
• 1:54:25
  Phil: I wrote questions.
• 1:54:26
  Kieron Gillen: Ayy.
• 1:54:28
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't written questions in, like, 2 years now, because, like, I realize that the more questions I write, the less fluid I feel like the interview is, because, like…
• 1:54:40
  Tad Eggleston: I want to get to the next question, rather than exploring where the conversation.
• 1:54:44
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:54:45
  Kieron Gillen: I sometimes think about… obviously, I used to be a journalist, I sometimes… I was never a great interviewer, but I sometimes think about it like,
• 1:54:52
  Kieron Gillen: like GM prep, the idea, you've done the prep, you've thought about stuff that could be talked about, and then you just throw it away. Like, it's just like having done a little bit of thinking beforehand puts you in a place, but you just… you're not married to it.
• 1:55:03
  Tad Eggleston: I bet.
• 1:55:04
  Phil: I would also say…
• 1:55:05
  Kieron Gillen: That's where I try to go.
• 1:55:06
  Phil: Having listened to… almost all of decompressed. You're… you're at least a passable interviewer.
• 1:55:12
  Kieron Gillen: That's what I mean. I'm passive. Like, I was a great critic. I say that with all the ego.
• 1:55:17
  Phil: I see the distinction, yeah.
• 1:55:18
  Kieron Gillen: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:55:18
  Phil: Yeah.
• 1:55:19
  Phil: Did we… did you do the sign-off yet? You haven't done the sign-off yet.
• 1:55:23
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't done the sign-off.
• 1:55:24
  Phil: Okay, I had two questions, and you asked your last one, so we're… No, no, no, no, those are after our questions.
• 1:55:29
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay, after our questions, gotcha. So, for Kieran Gillen, this has been 22 panels, and we will see you after the next page.