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With Great Power #337... 22 Panels with R. Sikoryak · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, thank you.
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody! Welcome to 22 Panels Late Night. I think you're the… only the second creator that's… that's wanted to get together this late. Arsa Koryak, whose new book, Declaration, Illustrated, Flipbook with Emancipation, Illustrated.
• 0:20
  Tad Eggleston: We'll actually be in stores…
• 0:22
  Tad Eggleston: Probably by the time you're listening to this, it's released… I guess bookstores, it was released today, wasn't it? And comic shops tomorrow?
• 0:31
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, wonderful to have you back. We gotta do another comic strip club, like, just because I miss them, but it's become so… you guys are all working too much!
• 0:44
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, we're trying… we're trying to be cartoonists, as well as talk about cartoons.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so tell me about, Declaration Illustrated.
• 0:53
  Tad Eggleston: And how it became Declaration and Emancipation Illustrated, because that part I didn't know until…
• 1:00
  Tad Eggleston: Much more recently, and it was a pleasant surprise.
• 1:02
  R. Sikoryak: I was… I was kind of springing that part on, folks. I, as you know, Tad, I'll explain to your listeners, in case they didn't catch it, I did a book
• 1:12
  R. Sikoryak: 6 years ago now, called Constitution Illustrated.
• 1:16
  R. Sikoryak: And it came out during the pandemic, and it… it got some notice, but I felt like there was a little bit more…
• 1:23
  R. Sikoryak: Juice in the, in the.
• 1:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I have given away, like, 10 copies.
• 1:30
  R. Sikoryak: Well, it's not…
• 1:31
  Tad Eggleston: I had to… I had to have you mark one up for me so I wouldn't give it away.
• 1:37
  R. Sikoryak: I appreciate that, Ted, although it's not your responsibility to get my books out, I do appreciate that. But anyway, I had done that book.
• 1:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, really, it was just because it's one that I always carry in my bag with me, so, like…
• 1:52
  Tad Eggleston: when people are really fascinated with it, it's like, well, why don't you keep that one, and I'll get another.
• 1:58
  R. Sikoryak: That's… that's great. That's great.
• 2:01
  R. Sikoryak: So…
• 2:02
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a nerd like that sometimes.
• 2:04
  R. Sikoryak: I appreciate it. I appreciate it, Tad. It's very helpful to me.
• 2:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I teach. They have to take their constitution tests. It unlocks things.
• 2:15
  R. Sikoryak: So… so yeah, so that book was…
• 2:18
  R. Sikoryak: the entire text of the Constitution
• 2:22
  R. Sikoryak: Broke into small pieces, and then each page had a full page
• 2:28
  R. Sikoryak: Comic drawing, drawn in the style of… comics… American comics, since…
• 2:36
  R. Sikoryak: 1889, I think, was the earliest one I used.
• 2:40
  R. Sikoryak: And I… so I'd made that book, and they weren't adding any more amendments, so I decided to go back and make a sequel, which was Declaration Illustrated, which was the…
• 2:50
  R. Sikoryak: the Declaration of Independence in its entirety, and as I was working on that, I had had it in the back of my mind.
• 2:57
  R. Sikoryak: that maybe I should do something with Lincoln, maybe I should do something with the Gettysburg Address.
• 3:02
  R. Sikoryak: And the declaration was taking me so long, and I was running so late on my deadlines, I actually asked for more time from Drawing Quarterly, and with a little more time, I thought, well, why don't I just put these two ideas together into one book?
• 3:15
  R. Sikoryak: So, one side became the Declaration, and the other side became the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Gettysburg Address. And the reason I thought that was so appropriate was
• 3:27
  R. Sikoryak: Lincoln is constantly referencing the Declaration of Independence fourscore and seven years ago, is referring back to the Declaration, not to the Constitution, not to the end of the Revolutionary War. So clearly, the Declaration was the document that
• 3:42
  R. Sikoryak: meant the most to Lincoln, and I thought he offers kind of a corrective.
• 3:47
  R. Sikoryak: For it, at least to a certain extent.
• 3:50
  R. Sikoryak: So, I liked having them as two sides of one book.
• 3:54
  R. Sikoryak: And, like the Constitution, it is… every page is a portion of the unabridged
• 4:01
  R. Sikoryak: unaltered text combined with a cartoon style, again, from over 100 years of comics. American comics. I have to keep saying that, it's all American. Yeah.
• 4:12
  Tad Eggleston: I think a little bit more animation than… than the, constitution Illustrated had.
• 4:19
  R. Sikoryak: Well, what I did was, I did not… I have so many rules, and we can talk about rules for an hour, but…
• 4:25
  Tad Eggleston: I'd love to talk about rule. At least a little about Rule.
• 4:27
  R. Sikoryak: I thought you would.
• 4:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic. I love rules.
• 4:31
  R. Sikoryak: I picked that up from our conversations, Tad, that you like rules. In any case.
• 4:36
  Tad Eggleston: I don't always follow them, but I like to know them.
• 4:39
  R. Sikoryak: Sure, of course, that's, like, that's how our president… well, he doesn't even really want to know what they are, he just…
• 4:45
  Tad Eggleston: Are you kidding me? I think we should send him a copy of Constitution Illustrated, because it might be the first time he reads it.
• 4:51
  R. Sikoryak: Well, Tad, all you gotta do is walk down to the reflecting pool, put your hand in, you'll get arrested, and you can hand everybody copies.
• 4:56
  Tad Eggleston: That's true. That's true.
• 4:58
  R. Sikoryak: So, let's…
• 5:00
  Tad Eggleston: Honestly, my dream is to buy a set for Congress.
• 5:06
  R. Sikoryak: Well, bless you.
• 5:07
  Tad Eggleston: Send them to every member?
• 5:10
  R. Sikoryak: Some of them might like comics.
• 5:13
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, there is the Comics Caucus.
• 5:17
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, I didn't know about this.
• 5:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, there is a comics caucus. It's, it's, what's his name? In California, actually took the oath of office on a Bible band in Action 1. But now, yeah, we'll shut up… let me mute myself.
• 5:30
  R. Sikoryak: Let me… Had has muted himself. I did not have to go that far, but I did want to say.
• 5:38
  R. Sikoryak: I had very specific rules about how I did this, and one of them was I wasn't
• 5:44
  R. Sikoryak: going to do anything that wasn't… that didn't exist in comic strip or comic book form. Even the… even the…
• 5:52
  R. Sikoryak: Even the characters that were… Created for animation are characters that existed in some form in comic strips.
• 6:03
  R. Sikoryak: Which is why I was able to get The Lion King in there, The Proud Family. Family Guy had a comic book very briefly in the aughts, and I was like, great, I can put the Family Guy in.
• 6:13
  R. Sikoryak: I did not want to start, like, taking stills from shows. I thought, I have to keep this as a book, it has to have a purity. If I open it up too wide, if I open it up to movies or video games, like, where does it end? It just… it just expands outward, and I thought.
• 6:28
  R. Sikoryak: comics are my bailiwick. I have to keep it to that. So, I scoured…
• 6:34
  R. Sikoryak: places… the Rugrats had a… had a comic strip for many years, a daily comic strip for many years. All of the… all of the comics… all of the characters represented in… in the book are from their comic
• 6:47
  R. Sikoryak: strip print iterations. So, I felt I needed to do that just for my own sanity. What I tried to do for this book was not use any of the artists I used in the Constitution.
• 7:00
  R. Sikoryak: So, there are no repeats of artists. There are, in some cases, different iterations of a character over time.
• 7:08
  R. Sikoryak: But Charles Schultz appears only once, which made me very sad, because I could not draw Franklin in the Emancipation Proclamation. But I thought, no, I must keep to my rule, and I, and I did. So…
• 7:23
  R. Sikoryak: I create many parameters for myself, but… and in some ways, I think it makes the book stronger, because I'm keeping to my rules, but on the other hand, it is much more difficult than me just saying, well, Franklin should be in here anyway.
• 7:37
  Tad Eggleston: That does explain some of the even deeper dives, though. I mean, I thought you went on some deep dives in Constitution Illustrated, but, like…
• 7:48
  Tad Eggleston: Wally Wood's Dynamo?
• 7:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know? Well, the…
• 7:54
  R. Sikoryak: The other thing that I tried to do was…
• 7:56
  R. Sikoryak: I not only wanted to include artists.
• 7:59
  R. Sikoryak: who I hadn't used before, but… In almost every page.
• 8:04
  R. Sikoryak: I've tried… a couple times I cheated a bit, but I tried to find a character that appeared in more than one comic.
• 8:13
  R. Sikoryak: So, Dynamo had a whole series of comics in the 60s. Nobody remembers Dynamo, but everybody remembers Wally Wood, so doing a Wally Wood comic
• 8:23
  R. Sikoryak: But using one of his own characters seemed like the right way to go.
• 8:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 8:28
  R. Sikoryak: So… I mean, you could… the thing that… the thing that is…
• 8:32
  R. Sikoryak: beautiful and exhausting when I think about the book is that someone else could come to this project and have chosen entirely different characters to do every page. I try… I think I chose… I chose some very iconic
• 8:46
  R. Sikoryak: and in my opinion, super appropriate moments for many of the pages, but I have no doubt another comics fan could go in and say, why didn't you use Peppermint Patty for the 19th Amendment, or what have you. So, not that there are other characters out there than peanuts, that was my first thought in my head.
• 9:03
  Tad Eggleston: Hell yeah.
• 9:04
  R. Sikoryak: The… the conceit was…
• 9:06
  R. Sikoryak: And this was the whole idea of the book. I wanted anyone who picked it up to recognize somebody in it. So even if you don't read comics, you will be aware of Family Guy, you will be aware of Mickey Mouse, who did exist in comic strips, but.
• 9:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 9:19
  R. Sikoryak: You may know them from their TV shows or what have you. And I really… I wanted to make it very inclusive, but I also wanted to keep within my rules of
• 9:29
  R. Sikoryak: these are drawings… these are based on drawings from comics. And if I didn't make it clear, not only am I drawing
• 9:36
  R. Sikoryak: the images based on characters, but I am…
• 9:40
  R. Sikoryak: drawing from specific eras or specific iterations of a character or an artist. So, Wally Wood's Dynamo, which
• 9:49
  R. Sikoryak: many of your listeners may not know, Dynamo is a superhero comic from the mid-60s that Wallywood, I believe, created, and didn't last very long, but you'll recognize the style, or you'll recognize the vibe, even if you don't recognize the character. But if you do recognize the characters, it's an extra kick, I hope.
• 10:07
  Tad Eggleston: Well, what I will say in terms of the quality of your work is, like, I immediately pegged your Daredevil as Mazza Kelly, so…
• 10:18
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, well, that's fantastic.
• 10:20
  Tad Eggleston: Now…
• 10:21
  R. Sikoryak: I'm so happy to hear that.
• 10:22
  Tad Eggleston: I am… I am both a Daredevil nut and a Mazza Kelly nut, but part of that is you are really good at
• 10:30
  Tad Eggleston: Getting the specific style, like, you…
• 10:33
  R. Sikoryak: Well, that's…
• 10:33
  Tad Eggleston: That's great. You are… you are the cartoonist superhero. You're like… you're like Clayface, only… only on the page.
• 10:42
  R. Sikoryak: And I'm not a murderous maniac, but…
• 10:44
  Tad Eggleston: Well, we hope.
• 10:46
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you wouldn't say that on the air if you were.
• 10:49
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, no, of course not.
• 10:51
  Tad Eggleston: Anyways.
• 10:52
  R. Sikoryak: Clayface might, though. In any case, thank you for picking up the… the Mazz at Kelly. I agonized over that, but… and down to, like, I will collect what they used to call morgue…
• 11:05
  R. Sikoryak: files, which would be… morgues would be collections of images based on a specific artist or a specific element that you might want to use for reference. So for every page.
• 11:14
  R. Sikoryak: I either found, like, an existing cover, which was super helpful, like I did Teen Titans number one as a cover, and that was great, because it resolved the composition for me, but in the case of the Daredevil page, I found a very iconic kingpin pose, I found a semi-iconic Daredevil pose, had to create the background. How does he ink bricks on buildings? Like, I was very specific, finding reference for all the elements that I could.
• 11:38
  R. Sikoryak: And I did.
• 11:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 11:39
  R. Sikoryak: because I felt like I set a very high bar for the Constitution, I did not want to phone this one in. So, I worked really hard to keep the quality up, and because it took…
• 11:49
  Tad Eggleston: like.
• 11:50
  R. Sikoryak: There's…
• 11:51
  Tad Eggleston: As you say that, I realize…
• 11:54
  Tad Eggleston: that the giveaway wasn't in anything in the Daredevil or Kingpin, it was the window.
• 12:00
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, great. I can show you my morgue file of Windows from Azacat.
• 12:06
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's totally a Mazza Kelly window, is what I'm saying.
• 12:09
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, I just didn't want to…
• 12:11
  Tad Eggleston: The giveaway for the.
• 12:11
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 12:12
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I hadn't even put it in my head yet.
• 12:14
  R. Sikoryak: That's crazy.
• 12:15
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, when I was reading, I, like, specifically put in the back of my head, because I knew that there was going to be a list when we got there.
• 12:22
  R. Sikoryak: I know.
• 12:22
  Tad Eggleston: I'm like, I gotta see who did the Daredevil. I bet you it's… I bet you it's Amaza Kelly. And it was, and I was happy that I called it, and like, as we talk here, and you talk about all that other stuff, I realized that I didn't call it based on the Kingpin or Daredevil. I… I… like, what…
• 12:40
  Tad Eggleston: What stuck out to me in my head was the window.
• 12:44
  R. Sikoryak: That's great.
• 12:45
  R. Sikoryak: I love that. Well, great, then my job here is done.
• 12:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, like… That actually takes me, though, to…
• 12:57
  Tad Eggleston: both something that I love so much about comics, and what makes
• 13:02
  Tad Eggleston: These books so special is that… Atomics?
• 13:10
  Tad Eggleston: There are so many layers of… of meaning and… and things that shape meaning.
• 13:20
  Tad Eggleston: And, and affect your mood, thought processes, etc. Like, you know, it's… it's easy…
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: to not think of a… of a window, but the way Mazza Kelly
• 13:35
  Tad Eggleston: draws windows always actually, to me, makes them feel more like… They're keeping you
• 13:44
  Tad Eggleston: From what's on the other side, rather than, like…
• 13:50
  Tad Eggleston: opening the other side to you, you know? And this one… this one is, like, a little bit different from a lot of Miles Kelly windows you see, because, like, it's an outdoor thing, and it's Daredevil can't get into what I assume is the courthouse, because it's establishing judiciary powers.
• 14:09
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like, often in the comics, it's like, oh, like…
• 14:15
  Tad Eggleston: it would be great to get out of this situation. No, the window isn't an option, is what it feels like, even when sometimes it becomes an option. Like, it feels much more like a barrier.
• 14:27
  Tad Eggleston: than a window. And that always, like, and it does in this situat… like, the Kingpin Daredevil is a brilliant decision here, but…
• 14:37
  Tad Eggleston: Because of that window, Where it makes the entire wall… And the big hulking guy.
• 14:44
  Tad Eggleston: feel like a barrier. It really drives home
• 14:48
  Tad Eggleston: The idea that part of why they're…
• 14:52
  Tad Eggleston: They're starting a revolution is because
• 14:56
  Tad Eggleston: They haven't had access to the laws or judiciary powers that they have to live by.
• 15:04
  Tad Eggleston: Which leads me to the other thing, and why I love these books so much, and we talked about it with Constitution Illustrated some years ago, way back in, like.
• 15:14
  Tad Eggleston: with great power number 4 or 5. Like, this is with great power number 300 and… 30-something. Wow.
• 15:24
  Tad Eggleston: That's how long I've been doing this, Bob. Actually, that's how crazy I am, because I haven't been doing it for 5 years yet.
• 15:32
  Tad Eggleston: But… like, what I love is not just that here we get
• 15:38
  Tad Eggleston: we get the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Gettysburg Address, or the Emancipation Proclamation in… digestible.
• 15:50
  Tad Eggleston: pieces, because particularly with things that need to be taken apart, sometimes it's better to kind of read them a sentence or a paragraph at a time, rather than trying to read with a flow. It's good to sit with the text for a second. So by breaking it up, you force the reader to sit with the text, but also.
• 16:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because it's a comic, and the juxtaposition of words and pictures is what makes it a comic, but also because, in a way, it's an abstract comic.
• 16:20
  Tad Eggleston: you're not telling the story of the Constitution. There are a couple great comics that tell the story of the Constitution. I don't know if there's a great comic that does the story of the Declaration of Independence, but they're great comics that tell the stories. What you're doing is you're taking each of these paragraphs.
• 16:39
  Tad Eggleston: And you're giving a vibe slash…
• 16:42
  Tad Eggleston: something to think about. Like, you're, you're tickling the brain.
• 16:49
  Tad Eggleston: to influence… Or, at the very least, compel.
• 16:57
  Tad Eggleston: More thought about what You know, it doesn't always influence the reading.
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: like, the meaning taken. Sometimes it does, but it's not strictly, this is how you should read the Constitution. It's, hey, let me do this to your head so that you really think about this
• 17:15
  Tad Eggleston: section, and I just… that's one of the… I mean, aside from, like, the fact that I think there are many members of Congress that… that need to read these documents
• 17:25
  Tad Eggleston: Period. That's why I dream of sending it to Congress, is not just that they should read the documents, but I would love to know that they'd read it in a way that forced them
• 17:36
  Tad Eggleston: To sit back and ponder it.
• 17:39
  Tad Eggleston: That forced them to step out of…
• 17:43
  Tad Eggleston: All of the stuff that they were taught was in there without really experiencing it themselves.
• 17:50
  R. Sikoryak: Hmm.
• 17:52
  Tad Eggleston: You know, cause a lot of… a lot of the way we…
• 17:55
  Tad Eggleston: experience the founding documents is, like, through the people that said, oh, well, it's in the Constitution that this, and paraphrases something that may or may not be in the Constitution.
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: Right? So to sit with the text, but also sit with the text in a way that, like.
• 18:10
  Tad Eggleston: Lights little fires.
• 18:12
  Tad Eggleston: it's just beautiful, and you did it again.
• 18:16
  R. Sikoryak: Well, thanks.
• 18:17
  Tad Eggleston: I told you there was supposed to be a question, so what I'm gonna ask is, like.
• 18:23
  Tad Eggleston: how much time do you spend deciding? I mean, we talked a little bit about you've got the rules, and you have to decide
• 18:30
  Tad Eggleston: you know, oh, I can only use one image for… but how much time do you decide
• 18:34
  Tad Eggleston: Spend deciding what's gonna go with This passage, and why.
• 18:40
  R. Sikoryak: Well,
• 18:43
  R. Sikoryak: I make lists of comics I want to include, and I break the text down to little pieces and start doing little doodles. But just to go back to something you said, which I think is.
• 18:52
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 18:53
  R. Sikoryak: I think was appropriate, and I'm glad that you felt this.
• 18:58
  R. Sikoryak: You talked about…
• 19:00
  R. Sikoryak: seeing yourself in the document, I think that's the phrase you used, because that's something that I think about in terms of these books. The reason I have all these different characters is because
• 19:11
  R. Sikoryak: all of these different creators, and even the characters themselves, have very different political viewpoints. And I tried not to just put in
• 19:20
  R. Sikoryak: work by artists who I politically align with.
• 19:24
  R. Sikoryak: But I tried to put in everybody, so you will find some… I hope you will find some compatriot in terms of morality or… or empathy in the book, however you define those terms. So that was important to me, that you could see
• 19:43
  R. Sikoryak: We all have to live in this country, and I wanted these books to sort of represent, like, as many kinds of voices as I could get, by doing it myself.
• 19:52
  R. Sikoryak: Right. So to go back to your other question, which is how did I determine which ones to include, I…
• 19:58
  R. Sikoryak: from when I made the Constitution, I had a long list of artists I thought would be fun to include. Many of those I didn't get to. I didn't get to Will Eisner in the first book. I didn't get to Jules Pfeiffer. I didn't get to…
• 20:11
  R. Sikoryak: my brother was… my brother Steve was very disappointed I didn't include Alley-oop, because he loved… he loved an Alley-oop comic strip.
• 20:20
  R. Sikoryak: So, people would come to me and say, oh, what about this artist? You know, this artist and this artist?
• 20:26
  R. Sikoryak: you know, I didn't put in We Pals, which I would have liked to have put in the Constitution. So, anyway, I had a lot of people to carry over from the first book that I didn't get to, and then for this book, I sort of had to kind of rethink it, like, well, who would be appropriate for these new…
• 20:41
  R. Sikoryak: sections, but I made a long list. I made a list of decades. You'd probably really like these, Tad. Speaking of lists, I made a… I made a spreadsheet, essentially, of, like, cartoons from the 1920s, from the 30s, from the 40s that I had included. Who else didn't I include? Oh, this decade looks a little light. Is there another 1950s artist I can put in here?
• 21:01
  R. Sikoryak: So I was trying to make sure that I kept moving it around and keeping it… keeping it flowing. I tried to include a lot of artists from the 2020s, partially because I did do
• 21:11
  R. Sikoryak: so many… I did over 100 for the Constitution, so I thought, well, this is my chance to move up… move the goalposts up a little bit, get more recent artists. But,
• 21:22
  R. Sikoryak: But it was a constant balance of different styles, different aesthetics, different genres of comics, and sort of matching all those together, and then
• 21:34
  R. Sikoryak: I…
• 21:35
  R. Sikoryak: I have these three-ring binders that I keep. I draw digitally, but I also print out stuff as I draw, so I can sort of see what the pages look like next to each other, and see how they feel next to each other. And early on in doing the declaration, the first thing I did was I broke down the text into little bits and started doing, like, stick figures, like, what could be on this page?
• 21:55
  R. Sikoryak: You know, what does… what is… how do you…
• 21:58
  R. Sikoryak: illustrate life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Well, it's probably 3 characters, but I'll figure that out later. I'll just do… I'll do a doodle of three characters next to each other, and I'll leave that for later. And then every page is like that, like, oh, what does this mean? Oh, something about standing armies are… should be illegal, or something like that. And it's like, alright, it's gonna be a big, big army on this page, so I'll do, like, stick figure drawings of all these.
• 22:20
  R. Sikoryak: I put these in my binder, I see what they look like together. What I often found as I was working on it was…
• 22:27
  R. Sikoryak: I had chosen too large a section of text. So, I think this was originally going to be 60 pages, it ended up being 70 pages, because I kept kind of slicing the sentences down, because
• 22:39
  R. Sikoryak: They did, like, long sentences back in the day, so part of it is, like, just sort of slicing the phrases and sub…
• 22:47
  R. Sikoryak: sub-sentences apart and spreading that out over pages.
• 22:52
  R. Sikoryak: but it's a long process of just, like, letting it percolate. I put up… put up the pages on the wall as I finish them next to each… like, little postage stamp versions of all the pages on the wall, so I could see what they look like next to each other, and also sort of see how much more I have to do. So it's great to sort of have these visual
• 23:10
  R. Sikoryak: these visual, physical objects of the book in progress that I can kind of build off of.
• 23:16
  Tad Eggleston: See, see, you're making me, like, drool over, like…
• 23:21
  Tad Eggleston: The possibility of, like, the… the…
• 23:25
  Tad Eggleston: Director's Cut slash… slash Master Edition with all the annotations and whatnot version of the three books. I… I might be the only person that…
• 23:37
  Tad Eggleston: desperately wanted to pay for it, but God would I pay for it.
• 23:42
  R. Sikoryak: Great. That's one.
• 23:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah! I mean, you had me at spreadsheets?
• 23:49
  R. Sikoryak: I mean, I make… I make them very… I make them very casually, but they are… they are very long. You can imagine how many artists…
• 23:56
  Tad Eggleston: I can.
• 23:57
  R. Sikoryak: that I… that I wanted to include, and certainly, the other great thing about doing the two books together was
• 24:05
  R. Sikoryak: like I said, I always try to get a diverse group of artists together, but with the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg, I…
• 24:14
  R. Sikoryak: I tried to dig a little deeper in terms of Black artists who I hadn't included before. A lot of… a lot of that text refers to the Senate and the President, and that was gonna be… that didn't… that could be white, but I wanted to make sure that I brought in artists I hadn't had before. You mentioned, I think before we started recording, you mentioned that you…
• 24:33
  R. Sikoryak: Had, done… just done a…
• 24:36
  R. Sikoryak: podcast about Milestone. Yep. A lot of those artists, I wonder, would include. Yep. And this was actually… this was…
• 24:43
  Tad Eggleston: You even took from the cover of one of the compendiums.
• 24:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 24:48
  R. Sikoryak: I'm glad that came out.
• 24:49
  Tad Eggleston: I love that.
• 24:49
  R. Sikoryak: They use it. Yeah.
• 24:51
  Tad Eggleston: I love that page. In fact, I feel like when I was reading this initially, I wound up screencapping that and sending it to the Milestone Book Club.
• 25:00
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, great.
• 25:01
  Tad Eggleston: I was so…
• 25:02
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, great.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Hey! It's such a…
• 25:05
  R. Sikoryak: It's such a… it's a very iconic image. I wanted… I wanted to get Dennis Cowan, and somehow I was excited to find that. So I'm just… I mean, the joy and the curse of doing a book like this now is…
• 25:20
  R. Sikoryak: while I still go to comic shops, and I still ask friends, and I still look at bestseller lists, a lot of what I'm doing is just, like, skimming online. Like, let me look at all of the milestone covers, see which ones I could use.
• 25:35
  R. Sikoryak: So, you know, sometimes I would use a cover. Actually, in two cases, I used a static cover, and I used the compendium cover, but I found a paved.
• 25:43
  Tad Eggleston: I think you had an icon page, too.
• 25:44
  R. Sikoryak: But that was an interior page, and that's me flipping through the comics. So much stuff is available now. It made it so much easier to do this book.
• 25:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I also have to give you massive props and… and…
• 25:58
  Tad Eggleston: Both for picking and for pulling off.
• 26:02
  Tad Eggleston: You did an, my favorite thing is Monsters page.
• 26:06
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I knew I wanted to get her in, and I was very.
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: Oh my god.
• 26:10
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, thanks. So you recognized it before you?
• 26:13
  Tad Eggleston: Emil's a friend. Of course I did! As soon as I… I mean, I… I… like, what I appreciate the most about this is not only did you capture her style with all of the crosshatching and whatnot, that I could imagine this page taking you almost as long as, like.
• 26:30
  Tad Eggleston: 3 other pages. I don't know how she does it.
• 26:35
  R. Sikoryak: It scared me to do, honestly. I was like, I'm not sure.
• 26:39
  Tad Eggleston: The fact that…
• 26:42
  Tad Eggleston: you took a classic painting, did it in her style, with Karen on the outside looking at it, was such the perfect homage.
• 26:53
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, thanks.
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: that I just…
• 26:55
  Tad Eggleston: I got goosebumps… I still… I'm looking at the page right now, and getting goosebumps all over again, because you also nailed the wonder of Karen…
• 27:04
  Tad Eggleston: the… And I also caught that you put her more in…
• 27:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, no, not… not caught, because this is the beginning of the Gettysburg Address. But, like, we're looking back at
• 27:22
  Tad Eggleston: the revolution, which is particularly great, because that's the other side of the flipbook,
• 27:32
  Tad Eggleston: But you've got her in the Civil War uniform that just makes it…
• 27:39
  R. Sikoryak: Thanks, thank you.
• 27:40
  Tad Eggleston: Including the notebook paper, It's just… Thanks! Thank you so much.
• 27:48
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I… Well, that's…
• 27:50
  R. Sikoryak: That's great. I mean, you weren't…
• 27:52
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 27:52
  R. Sikoryak: I don't know if you're the only person this book is for, but you are a person this book is for, because you… you got that, and you got the reference that I was evoking.
• 28:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, these…
• 28:04
  Tad Eggleston: I wish that these books were for more people. I think they should be for more people. I would… I would love, and, like, I ponder the idea of… of, like.
• 28:14
  Tad Eggleston: throwing together, like, the curriculum, even though I'm only mildly qualified officially to write a curriculum to, like, teach the Constitution through this, because I think that, like…
• 28:31
  Tad Eggleston: Civics is sometimes lost right now.
• 28:34
  Tad Eggleston: And part of it is that we don't engage, and part of the reason that we don't engage is we're afraid to deal with the hard stuff.
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: Boom.
• 28:45
  Tad Eggleston: But one of the things that these books do is…
• 28:50
  Tad Eggleston: while they force you to confront the hard stuff, they don't ne… oh, and the Kyle Baker?
• 28:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, they force you… that's where I forgave you for not doing Baker's, plastic Man.
• 29:07
  Tad Eggleston: Because you had the Plastic Man in Declaration, I'm like, oh, why didn't he do Kyle Baker's Plastic Man? And then I got to the Baker page, I'm like, oh, that's why he didn't do Kyle.
• 29:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I mean, that's… like, you know, we're using these for our Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club.
• 29:32
  Tad Eggleston: on Sunday night, and part of the reason is, like.
• 29:38
  Tad Eggleston: I think, as much as these books are great to read on your own, the discussion that…
• 29:46
  Tad Eggleston: They can have, to just be able to take a page and go, okay, so let's look at this, that
• 29:52
  Tad Eggleston: On the first day of January, in the year of our Lord, 1863, all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then…
• 30:08
  Tad Eggleston: Thenceforth and forever free.
• 30:10
  Tad Eggleston: And we've got… This is, oh, God.
• 30:14
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to go… go look at… at the… the…
• 30:19
  Tad Eggleston: Because I know it and don't know it all at once.
• 30:25
  R. Sikoryak: So the character is… is Nubia.
• 30:27
  Tad Eggleston: Nubia.
• 30:28
  R. Sikoryak: I don't want to mispronounce the artist's name, so I'm actually gonna look it up, so…
• 30:32
  Tad Eggleston: Right, where is…
• 30:38
  R. Sikoryak: Aletha Martinez.
• 30:40
  Tad Eggleston: The Martinez. Yes.
• 30:43
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, from there, you have to go, okay, folks.
• 30:46
  R. Sikoryak: What's that?
• 30:47
  Tad Eggleston: What does… well, but… but after…
• 30:50
  Tad Eggleston: After reading that and looking at this, what one has to do is go, okay, why do we have this picture?
• 30:58
  Tad Eggleston: We just freed all of these people, but we have one person on the page. It's a woman, not a man. Does that tell us something? You know, we've got this wonderful landscape. What does that tell us?
• 31:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know, at some point, you're gonna start thinking about, wait a minute, we freed all the people in states of rebellion, what does that mean?
• 31:20
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 31:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, again, like, like…
• 31:25
  Tad Eggleston: And I literally just chose that page at random. I was flipping through the pages, and that was the page that I was on, and that's why I read that page.
• 31:36
  Tad Eggleston: So… so I… I'm making up the lesson plan as I go, Bob.
• 31:40
  R. Sikoryak: Well, the Gettysburg Address is more verbose, and the sentences are much longer. I felt more confident doing the Gettysburg Address, where it is more poetic and…
• 31:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 31:54
  R. Sikoryak: more… more to the point. So I was able to sort of pull that apart more. As you read that page, I was like, gee, should that have been two images? But…
• 32:02
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 32:02
  R. Sikoryak: I had to stop the book somewhere.
• 32:04
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I, I, I actually do…
• 32:09
  Tad Eggleston: I like it as one image, because among other things… I mean, here's the thing.
• 32:13
  Tad Eggleston: that, like, as I keep staring at it, and I keep thinking of the… of the text, and the fact that it's a,
• 32:20
  Tad Eggleston: an individual looking out over this beautiful, beautiful landscape, here's my question.
• 32:25
  Tad Eggleston: Is she one of the ones that just got freed? Or one of the ones that isn't?
• 32:31
  Tad Eggleston: Is she in Kentucky?
• 32:34
  Tad Eggleston: Is she still a slave?
• 32:38
  Tad Eggleston: How does that make her feel?
• 32:39
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, these are good questions. You do need to write the study guide, yes.
• 32:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but, but that's, that's, that, that's, that's…
• 32:47
  Tad Eggleston: That… that's my point. And then… but then the next one is, and the executive government of the United States, including the military and naval, authority thereof will recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons, and you've got a party going on with… with the one…
• 33:02
  Tad Eggleston: the one, the one Union soldier who's kind of like, okay,
• 33:08
  Tad Eggleston: This is gonna be some work.
• 33:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so again, like…
• 33:21
  Tad Eggleston: Teaching always involves finding a way to get… students…
• 33:29
  Tad Eggleston: involved. And the best conversation is always going to be one that they start on their own.
• 33:36
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, in using Constitution Illustrated to help people prepare for their Constitution test, whatnot, like.
• 33:43
  Tad Eggleston: I have, at times, like, rather than asking them about the text, I will ask them about the picture, and let them come back to the text.
• 33:52
  Tad Eggleston: Nice. You know, and that…
• 33:55
  Tad Eggleston: has it sink in better? And that's… that's one of… I mean, again, that's what is so…
• 34:01
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean, obviously, as the person who's also, like.
• 34:05
  Tad Eggleston: crazy about comics, but I love that you also give us comics history, and I get to go through and go, oh!
• 34:12
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna have to go find Tom Sutton's The Comic Book Guide for Artist, Writer, Letterer, because that wasn't a thing I knew existed, but…
• 34:20
  R. Sikoryak: I love that cover, and he's not an artist I've seen a ton of, but his stuff is so much fun. It's… you can tell he's just really enjoying drawing it. It just… it's very loose, and it's kind of sloppy, but it just seems… and maybe some of it is him just meeting a deadline, but there's something very…
• 34:38
  R. Sikoryak: free about it that I really enjoyed, just looking at his work. You know, it's…
• 34:44
  R. Sikoryak: Well, you said a lot of interesting things, I'm not sure which to respond to.
• 34:49
  Tad Eggleston: I'm sorry.
• 34:50
  R. Sikoryak: No, no, that's okay. I like hearing all your compliments, so that's not a problem at all. I'm just, I'm just trying to remember, there was… there was one thing that you mentioned that I thought was… was kind of important about
• 35:05
  R. Sikoryak: Maybe seeing the visuals rather than the…
• 35:08
  R. Sikoryak: Rather than the text. Oh, well, you had also mentioned comics history, and this was… this was one of the pleasures of this book for me, was to have the excuse to go look at old comics. And new comics. I mean, there's a lot of new artists. There's a lot of contemporary artists. There's a lot of artists younger than me, which obviously has been happening as my career has progressed.
• 35:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know what? You're 14, you're a wonderkind.
• 35:34
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, sometimes I feel 14.
• 35:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of the beauties of comics.
• 35:40
  R. Sikoryak: We try.
• 35:41
  Tad Eggleston: continue to feel younger. Yes.
• 35:46
  R. Sikoryak: Going to the gym helps.
• 35:48
  Tad Eggleston: I might need to do more of that.
• 35:50
  R. Sikoryak: state.
• 35:50
  R. Sikoryak: My back is… So, I'm lucky.
• 35:53
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 35:54
  R. Sikoryak: That's good. I think of all those hours hunched over a drawing.
• 35:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, thankfully, your wife also wrote a book on… on how to…
• 36:04
  Tad Eggleston: How to maintain your drawing health.
• 36:08
  R. Sikoryak: 100%, 100%.
• 36:10
  Tad Eggleston: I have a copy downstairs that's waiting to be sent to a cartoonist friend of mine, along with Shelly's book on editing.
• 36:20
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, great.
• 36:20
  Tad Eggleston: I told her I was going to send the two of them out a long time ago, and I ordered Creotas, and I kept forgetting to order Shelly's, but I was talking to Shelly today, so I put in an order
• 36:31
  Tad Eggleston: verbally.
• 36:34
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 36:34
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah,
• 36:37
  Tad Eggleston: Because, I mean, that's… that's… I mean, as a tangent, that's… aside from the fact that I maintain that we are in the platinum age of comics, there are more great comics out there right now than anybody could hope to keep up on, particularly if they want to get into
• 36:55
  Tad Eggleston: The things that came before.
• 37:00
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly if they're the type of people who's like, oh, I love this, I want to know what it came from.
• 37:06
  Tad Eggleston: You know, if you're just getting into Nancy because of Carolyn Cash, you're gonna wanna go read Ernie Bushmiller. You know?
• 37:14
  Tad Eggleston: You start reading Ernie Bushmiller, you're gonna start going, oh my god, comic strips are way better than I've given them any…
• 37:22
  Tad Eggleston: I need to go
• 37:23
  Tad Eggleston: read… this is where you'd have to help me out, because I don't know as many of the funny comics from that era.
• 37:29
  R. Sikoryak: Fritzy Ritz?
• 37:31
  Tad Eggleston: There you go.
• 37:31
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, shoot, what is the name of the guy who created Fritzy Ritz?
• 37:35
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, how embarrassing. It'll come to me. Don't… please, Ted, don't… let's not stop to look it up. Okay. The audience, the viewers will tell us.
• 37:44
  Tad Eggleston: Larry Whittington.
• 37:46
  R. Sikoryak: I knew it started with a W. Anyway… Well, the…
• 37:53
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, there's just… I remember many years ago speaking to an editor
• 38:00
  R. Sikoryak: and I'm… I'm gonna say it was Gina Gagliano, but I'm not sure, but I remember talking to her 20 years ago and saying.
• 38:08
  R. Sikoryak: oh my god, I can't keep up with what's happening in comics anymore. And she's like, that's just how it should be. There should be more out there than you can…
• 38:15
  R. Sikoryak: Then you can, you know.
• 38:18
  R. Sikoryak: that one person could enjoy. I think she… I think she was… she saw it as it's better that there's more variety, but… and also more volume, but as someone who
• 38:30
  R. Sikoryak: felt like I could have a handle of what comics were when I was a kid. It is…
• 38:36
  R. Sikoryak: Mind-boggling to consider how much is out there now.
• 38:40
  R. Sikoryak: And I don't think I'm gonna do another book that has a hundred different artists in it next time, but I'm glad I made the effort to do this one, or these two, I should say. So…
• 38:52
  R. Sikoryak: Just to sort of, like, touch…
• 38:55
  R. Sikoryak: the… touch these styles, at least briefly, and ponder these comics for a day or two as I was working on the pages. Or sometimes 3 or 4 days, depending on how deep I went. But…
• 39:08
  R. Sikoryak: There is something…
• 39:11
  R. Sikoryak: there is something amazing at the… at the variety, and I… I am so excited to see someone come along and…
• 39:17
  R. Sikoryak: break all the rules and do something I don't understand, because they… they didn't grow up with what I grew up with, and they don't think about comics the same way. That's the most exciting thing to me, is to see someone who is like, I don't… I don't like balloons. I'm like, okay, that's fine. Do something else, show me what you got.
• 39:35
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, what I love about this era is that
• 39:42
  Tad Eggleston: The threshold for, like, making a living in comics is as high or higher than it's ever been, but the threshold for…
• 39:52
  Tad Eggleston: Presenting your comics to the world is lower than it's ever been.
• 39:57
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 39:59
  R. Sikoryak: That's true.
• 39:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I wish that we could also get people better paid. I wish that there were more people who could just make living as… as artists, and, like, not… not a subsistence-level living, but, like…
• 40:13
  Tad Eggleston: At least a mildly, like, like.
• 40:16
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like if you are consistently producing art, it would be great if you made the living that a manager at McDonald's or Walmart makes.
• 40:26
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not talking, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars, I'm talking… Can pay your rent.
• 40:34
  Tad Eggleston: Not run up debt, and maybe go on a vacation every 4 or 5 years.
• 40:39
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 40:41
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know?
• 40:42
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 40:43
  Tad Eggleston: Mom.
• 40:44
  Tad Eggleston: like, if we lived in a world, and this is where I'll plug a bush, in between, because Shelly gave me a reading assignment.
• 40:52
  Tad Eggleston: in between talking to Shelly and Milestone, I read a book called…
• 40:58
  Tad Eggleston: Gigs that came out last week.
• 41:01
  Tad Eggleston: Mark Mostile and Cy Smith.
• 41:04
  Tad Eggleston: And aside from the fact that the cartooning itself is really impressive, and the way they… they…
• 41:13
  Tad Eggleston: Adapt pacing to the different The different chapters and the different things going on, it's really amazing,
• 41:23
  Tad Eggleston: It also…
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: It imagines a future where we've been given a universal basic income, but we were given it by the same people who are super rich now, so it's, like, dependent on doing gigs when they…
• 41:39
  Tad Eggleston: Tell you to do gigs, and…
• 41:41
  Tad Eggleston: And it's just barely enough to get by, and oh yeah, there are almost no other jobs.
• 41:48
  R. Sikoryak: Hmm.
• 41:49
  Tad Eggleston: But also, like, about…
• 41:54
  Tad Eggleston: still finding hope, and trying to make a better world, and making things, and art, and all of that in this… in this book is separated into, I think, 5, maybe 6 chap… 6 segments. They're not really chapters, they're kind of chapters, I don't know, maybe they're chapters.
• 42:10
  Tad Eggleston: There's not a table of contents.
• 42:12
  Tad Eggleston: There's hashtags with a new word.
• 42:15
  R. Sikoryak: Huh.
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: But… But yeah, no, I mean, so much…
• 42:23
  Tad Eggleston: It's so hard for so many people to get to move forward.
• 42:28
  Tad Eggleston: Or even just…
• 42:30
  Tad Eggleston: subsist. And it makes me that much more frustrated that when we live in that environment, that the people who want to actually make things, rather than just
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: Exist and pay for cable?
• 42:44
  Tad Eggleston: Are often taken care of that much less.
• 42:50
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know where I was going, except that we do have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in that Declaration of Independence thing.
• 42:58
  Tad Eggleston: And I loved your image for that.
• 43:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, particularly because, like.
• 43:04
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just riffing here, but, but, but, you know, what was that? That was, what was the dog? I don't remember the name of that dog right now. Droopy. But, but yeah, so, so, so, so, so life is bosoms.
• 43:20
  Tad Eggleston: Liberty is droopy with his flag, and the pursuit of happiness is a very happy, not quite drooling, but you can feel it coming, Wolf looking in the window.
• 43:32
  R. Sikoryak: Right, well, I remembered the…
• 43:34
  R. Sikoryak: the… I don't… I'm not sure how I got to those characters for that page, but I grew up loving the Tex Avery cartoons of the 1950s that came out, that I saw as a kid on TV.
• 43:49
  R. Sikoryak: Not in the 50s, I'm not that old. But I did… I did remember those characters very well, very manic cartoons, and then I had found this Dark Horse series from the 90s that used those characters, and it was beautifully drawn. It's… sometimes it's hard to…
• 44:08
  R. Sikoryak: To translate animation into comics, but the.
• 44:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 44:12
  R. Sikoryak: who did that book.
• 44:15
  R. Sikoryak: I thought did a great job of capturing, kind of, the liveliness of those characters.
• 44:21
  R. Sikoryak: But it's funny, now that you mention it, it's like, I don't remember why I thought of Droopy for that page. There is one cartoon where he waves a little flag and says, hoo, but I… I don't remember how… how I got to that, but…
• 44:35
  R. Sikoryak: But I was happy to stumble upon that comic and see that… see that… be able to put those pieces together. I should mention.
• 44:45
  R. Sikoryak: I saw someone on Facebook who saw one of my pages out of context and thought, these are just rip-offs of, you know, specific artists. I do credit all of the artists that.
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: You too.
• 44:57
  R. Sikoryak: I… that I reference, I credit all of them in the index, so…
• 45:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 45:02
  R. Sikoryak: I… I…
• 45:03
  Tad Eggleston: Credit them in detail.
• 45:04
  R. Sikoryak: I do not… I don't want anyone to think that I'm just riffing on this stuff, and trusting you might figure it out. I recognize that the readers of a book on the Constitution is probably much bigger than the readers who will know who inked
• 45:19
  R. Sikoryak: Justice League 101, is also parodied in here. So, in any case, I… I do try to make… I make things… I wanted things to be specific.
• 45:30
  R. Sikoryak: I find if I just did, like, a general drawing of Droopy, I think the style would get a little soft, and I really wanted to sort of capture the energy and the vibe of, like, particular artists. So that was really important to me to reference in the book.
• 45:44
  R. Sikoryak: I can't really speak to the gig economy, but maybe that's for another book.
• 45:50
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, you know, I wasn't… I wasn't…
• 45:53
  Tad Eggleston: Brian LeMay and Greg Hyland, the pencil and inker on the Tex Avery Druby book.
• 45:59
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, no, those are the people I used.
• 46:01
  Tad Eggleston: They're not the people you need.
• 46:02
  R. Sikoryak: No, multiple…
• 46:04
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of the Dark Horse ones. That's issue… Issue 1 and Droopy, but there were… there were actually a lot of…
• 46:10
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: do a whole series of Tex Avery stuff.
• 46:14
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, and I have to tell you, this is one of the struggles of the book, because Bill Morrison also drew some of those comics, and his were quite good, but I couldn't find all the characters, so I actually… I'm gonna… I'm gonna make sure I get their names right.
• 46:27
  R. Sikoryak: oh, shoot, I'm in the wrong book. These indexes are so long!
• 46:33
  R. Sikoryak: Maybe you have it in front of you, but I can find it.
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: I can probably have it in front of me pretty quickly, too.
• 46:38
  R. Sikoryak: Okay. I just, I do think it's important,
• 46:40
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 46:42
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, so…
• 46:42
  Tad Eggleston: You too.
• 46:43
  R. Sikoryak: Stephanie Wagner.
• 46:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 46:45
  R. Sikoryak: and Jim Massarra.
• 46:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 46:49
  R. Sikoryak: Stephanie, go ahead and Jim…
• 46:50
  R. Sikoryak: Masara, and I found one of the Drouby comics, and I thought, oh, this is really nice, can I find images of their… of the other characters also drawn by them? Because I really wanted to keep it in the family. If you… if you…
• 47:04
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 47:04
  R. Sikoryak: You know, this is me… this is just me micromanaging everything I do.
• 47:07
  Tad Eggleston: No, I mean, it is… it is… it is overall way, way better to… if… if you're gonna be doing…
• 47:14
  Tad Eggleston: various,
• 47:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, what do you consider them? Do you consider them pastiches, homages? I mean, I think…
• 47:23
  R. Sikoryak: I… I say parody a lot, but maybe homage is better, or pastiche is better.
• 47:31
  R. Sikoryak: But I… I think I defer to parody because…
• 47:34
  R. Sikoryak: I felt like that's what Mad Magazine did. Right. So that's what I think of.
• 47:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… I get… I guess the different… the only difference that I would… I would bring up
• 47:44
  Tad Eggleston: in terms of why I'm looking for the right word, even, is that, like, parity, I think, implies a certain level of…
• 47:53
  Tad Eggleston: making fun of it, and that's the other thing that I love about These books is…
• 48:03
  Tad Eggleston: while there are things that make me smile and make me chuckle, I never think that you're…
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: Making fun of either the text or… or the art.
• 48:13
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I feel like you're being very true and reverent to both.
• 48:18
  Tad Eggleston: Which is something that's also really special about these, like, like, it takes…
• 48:26
  Tad Eggleston: Takes a delicate hand to pull that off.
• 48:30
  R. Sikoryak: I hope that the absurdity of combining Droopy with the Declaration will provide enough humor, and then I don't have to do anything else other than that. And I do.
• 48:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 48:41
  R. Sikoryak: I do…
• 48:42
  R. Sikoryak: I have a… I have an earnest streak that I sometimes worry is way too long, but I also have an irony streak, which I think keeps it in check, at least to a certain extent, and that's what I try.
• 48:52
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 48:52
  R. Sikoryak: by putting them together. It's like, each one has its own integrity.
• 48:56
  R. Sikoryak: They have to exist together, but they each have their own… they each bring their own… Right. Stance.
• 49:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I feel like the irony is just bringing them together to begin with.
• 49:07
  Tad Eggleston: And the earnestness is how you treat both subjects.
• 49:11
  R. Sikoryak: I hope so, yes. Yes.
• 49:14
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and, and… Like, again, like, this is…
• 49:20
  Tad Eggleston: This… this is… this is the dream project of people like me who think too much.
• 49:26
  Tad Eggleston: but I think not necessarily in a bad way, because it… it…
• 49:35
  Tad Eggleston: Forces me to think differently about a lot of things.
• 49:38
  Tad Eggleston: Like, it forces me to look at the art differently, it forces me to look at the words differently.
• 49:46
  Tad Eggleston: it forces me to slow down with things that I don't always go slowly with. You know, I've read the Constitution a lot of times. I've read… I've read… I practically have the Gettysburg Address memorized at one point.
• 49:59
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so, so, like… I'm not used to things forcing me to slow down as I go…
• 50:06
  Tad Eggleston: through them.
• 50:10
  Tad Eggleston: similarly, with a lot of comics, you know, I have a tendency to read fast and then read slow if something makes me want to read slow, whereas
• 50:19
  Tad Eggleston: what this is doing for me in terms of comics history is I wind up looking at some things that I had
• 50:27
  Tad Eggleston: Previously kind of overlooked.
• 50:30
  Tad Eggleston: because of the way you pair them, because the words slow me down. I have to read those words and spend more time with that page, and both is for, you know… and again, as the autistic person that doesn't know how to not think about three things at once, I love that you give me this book where I'm supposed to think about a couple of things at once.
• 50:50
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's crazy.
• 50:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I, I, yeah.
• 50:57
  Tad Eggleston: Do I have any other good questions, or am I just riffing at this point?
• 51:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's what I do sometimes. Sometimes I just riff.
• 51:07
  Tad Eggleston: I know that you covered this a little bit way…
• 51:13
  Tad Eggleston: way back when we talked the first time, but… but I'm gonna… I'm gonna ask about it again, just because I think it's… it's worth it for…
• 51:21
  Tad Eggleston: For people who haven't listened to episode 5 or 6 or whatever it was, I could look it up if I felt like it, but I look up other stuff.
• 51:32
  Tad Eggleston: before… Terms and conditions.
• 51:37
  Tad Eggleston: You were already kind of doing the pastiche thing, but… but there was more writing involved, because you did a lot of taking…
• 51:47
  Tad Eggleston: literature and adapting it Into a different character.
• 51:56
  Tad Eggleston: What inspired…
• 52:01
  Tad Eggleston: briefly, terms and conditions, but I think that's what we talked more about in terms of what gave you the idea to start, oh, I'm just gonna take this
• 52:08
  Tad Eggleston: Ridiculously long document and make it more interesting.
• 52:12
  Tad Eggleston: But what made you then pivot and go, I'm gonna take these documents that are
• 52:19
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not saying that the terms and conditions aren't important, because, like, the fact that they're allowed to write
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: Such ridiculous terms and conditions that nobody in their right mind is…
• 52:30
  Tad Eggleston: Gonna spend the time reading them, and even if they do, they're unlikely to understand them all.
• 52:34
  Tad Eggleston: Is a problem in of itself, but…
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: But the Constitution, the Declaration, the Emancipation Proclamation, the Gettysburg Address are infinitely more important documents than the Apple
• 52:48
  Tad Eggleston: terms and conditions. So first, briefly, what inspired you to… I'm gonna take these things that people don't read enough.
• 52:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. And have them… I mean, because with the terms and conditions, probably anybody who actually bothered to read all of the terms and conditions while they were reading your comic was probably reading them for the first time, and probably has never read them in any other form.
• 53:12
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, I… one of the… I may have told you this before, but I had been doing literary adaptations, retelling classic stories with
• 53:23
  R. Sikoryak: With existing comic strip characters.
• 53:26
  Tad Eggleston: Masterpiece Illustrated is one of my favorite books.
• 53:30
  R. Sikoryak: Masterpiece Comics.
• 53:31
  Tad Eggleston: Comics. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
• 53:33
  R. Sikoryak: It's okay.
• 53:33
  Tad Eggleston: illustrating.
• 53:35
  R. Sikoryak: I try to use… I try to use different… I try to use different explanations of what I make each time.
• 53:41
  Tad Eggleston: Another piece of comics.
• 53:42
  R. Sikoryak: I used that?
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: at school a lot, too.
• 53:44
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's great! Well, I'm working on a sequel to that, but it's taking forever.
• 53:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yay! Are we ever gonna see Moby Dick? I know you've been working on.
• 53:51
  R. Sikoryak: That's… I have a… I have a draft of it that is readable, but I'd rather finish it if I die tomorrow. I'll… I'll make sure Criota gets you a copy of the draft.
• 54:01
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 54:02
  R. Sikoryak: But I do want to… I do want to finish that. I am working on that book. I took a sidetrack into doing Terms and Conditions because I wanted to try making comics a different way. I thought, well, if I… and I had been doing some comics where I was literally adapting poetry in different styles, so that led me to Terms and Conditions.
• 54:20
  R. Sikoryak: then with the 20…
• 54:20
  Tad Eggleston: more of those.
• 54:22
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, okay.
• 54:22
  Tad Eggleston: Poetry Comics.
• 54:23
  R. Sikoryak: Thanks. There's a lot, that's a whole other conversation we should probably have sometime. Not for me.
• 54:28
  Tad Eggleston: Definitely.
• 54:29
  R. Sikoryak: Generally, but just generally.
• 54:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 54:32
  R. Sikoryak: when 2016 happened, and, Trump was elected, I made a book about him, and then…
• 54:40
  Tad Eggleston: Trump.
• 54:41
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, I didn't want it… and I was… those that was also using direct quotes from him, and…
• 54:47
  R. Sikoryak: people kept saying, oh, you'll never run out of material, which is true, but I probably would have run out of sanity.
• 54:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was actually gonna say, please, please don't make the sequel.
• 54:57
  R. Sikoryak: yeah, I… and… and the country made one in anyway. But in any case, once I… once that happened.
• 55:04
  Tad Eggleston: No, I just meant that I didn't need any of those words associated anymore. That's, like, the one book of yours that I can't… I read it once, and I can't read it again, because I don't want to associate those words with my friend Bob.
• 55:16
  R. Sikoryak: Well, that's nice of you to say.
• 55:17
  Tad Eggleston: I can't do it. I just can't do it.
• 55:19
  R. Sikoryak: It was a… it was… it was a very difficult hope to make.
• 55:22
  Tad Eggleston: It was brilliant, but yeah, you don't need to do that again.
• 55:25
  R. Sikoryak: I think that's a…
• 55:26
  Tad Eggleston: I think.
• 55:27
  R. Sikoryak: I think that's a… I think that's a valuable thing to feel, and I'm kind of grateful that I made a book that is radioactive. In any case, I didn't want to go back to that, but I still wanted to talk about politics.
• 55:42
  R. Sikoryak: And everyone, everyone always says, whoever the president is, half the country says he's wrecking the Constitution. And I thought, well.
• 55:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 55:52
  R. Sikoryak: then we need to talk about the Constitution, and what does the Constitution say? So since I'd done the terms and conditions, and the whole point of that was.
• 56:00
  R. Sikoryak: There's no reason you would read this.
• 56:03
  R. Sikoryak: this is absurd, I'm gonna make that book. The Constitution was like, well, it's a similar idea, but it actually is… has a purpose. So, I like that. So that's what… that's what shifted me from the terms to the Constitution.
• 56:17
  R. Sikoryak: And then, like I said, the declaration just felt like…
• 56:20
  R. Sikoryak: more of the story that wasn't really covered. The thing that's wonderful about the Constitution is it can be amended, and even as you read… if you read it all the way through, they're amending it as you go. So you might hit some pretty bad passages, and then it's like, oh, they actually, like, turned that around.
• 56:39
  R. Sikoryak: And that's kind of a beautiful thing. Now, the Declaration and the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation don't change, but…
• 56:46
  R. Sikoryak: you see the… you see the evolution from one to the other, and you sort of see the story of the country change from the first one… first document, which has some good stuff and has some, like, not great stuff in it, and then the Emancipation Proclamation, which is totally,
• 57:05
  R. Sikoryak: half-baked, but also is a first step towards something better. So, I liked…
• 57:11
  R. Sikoryak: I mean, obviously, I'm more passionate about these than the terms and conditions as terms of a document to read. I'm more inspired by them. I think they're dynamic, they do still speak to the country, even though they're old documents, so it just felt like a new…
• 57:26
  R. Sikoryak: Now, well, new for me, new way of, kind of, wrapping my brain around the country. And, yeah, like I said, I think I'm done. I'm not doing the,
• 57:38
  R. Sikoryak: I forget.
• 57:40
  Tad Eggleston: You're… you're not gonna do the… the… the NATO,
• 57:45
  Tad Eggleston: I know I tossed that out for you.
• 57:47
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah.
• 57:48
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly. It also is not as long as people think it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, as you tell this story, I remember how we actually hooked up to begin with, is that…
• 58:02
  Tad Eggleston: And I forget if you wound up liking the episode, or if I wound up doing the episode and going.
• 58:10
  Tad Eggleston: Oh!
• 58:12
  Tad Eggleston: I… I,
• 58:15
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna start reaching out to these people. But… but we did an episode, I think it might have been as early as episode 4 of our weekly episodes, where we did Constitution Illustrated fault lines in our Constitution, and…
• 58:30
  Tad Eggleston: Good talk.
• 58:33
  R. Sikoryak: Mmm, great, great.
• 58:35
  Tad Eggleston: T-together.
• 58:37
  Tad Eggleston: And where… where we really dug deep, and that was literally inspired by, you know, was making the rounds again, even though it was… it was…
• 58:47
  Tad Eggleston: This was probably November of 21, so at this… at that point, the video was, like, a year old, but it was making the rounds again for whatever reason.
• 58:59
  Tad Eggleston: you know, Jordan Klepper had been at January 6th.
• 59:03
  Tad Eggleston: And there's a point in it where he is talking to… A young man.
• 59:11
  Tad Eggleston: Probably not 30 yet.
• 59:14
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe 25, somewhere in there.
• 59:18
  Tad Eggleston: And the guy's saying that he's there because this and that was unconstitutional, blah blah blah, and Jordan's going…
• 59:26
  Tad Eggleston: Really? I mean…
• 59:28
  Tad Eggleston: I don't remember that part of the Constitution. Where was that in the… and the kid's like.
• 59:33
  Tad Eggleston: You've read the Constitution! And he's sitting there going.
• 59:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's… it's… it's a remarkably short… you've read the Constitution, yeah, right, whatever, you've read the Constitution, yeah, like, and maybe you should too, because it kind of feels like you could be committing sedition in the next few minutes.
• 59:54
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the way that became prophetic, and also the idea that, like.
• 1:00:02
  Tad Eggleston: Here you have somebody who's getting re-
• 1:00:04
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I don't know for certain if the kid actually went in the Capitol, but he was definitely in the crowd, at the Capitol.
• 1:00:10
  Tad Eggleston: And on the side of the people who were going to be storming it.
• 1:00:13
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 1:00:14
  Tad Eggleston: Who?
• 1:00:15
  Tad Eggleston: Strongly believed that he was defending this document that he hadn't read.
• 1:00:23
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm sitting there going.
• 1:00:25
  Tad Eggleston: I think I've read the Constitution at least once a year, every year since I was, like, 12.
• 1:00:33
  Tad Eggleston: And… And the most time I spent with it was the first time I read Constitution Illustrated.
• 1:00:40
  Tad Eggleston: You know, where I think I spent a whole 3 hours with it.
• 1:00:44
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 1:00:45
  Tad Eggleston: It's not that long of a document!
• 1:00:47
  R. Sikoryak: No, it is not.
• 1:00:49
  Tad Eggleston: You know? Reading the Constitution shouldn't be this, like, sign of ridiculous scholarship.
• 1:00:58
  Tad Eggleston: And in fact, wasn't supposed to be.
• 1:01:03
  Tad Eggleston: It was supposed to be accessible.
• 1:01:06
  R. Sikoryak: Right, right.
• 1:01:07
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was something that was fought over.
• 1:01:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, just like the priests that posed the printing press because, people can't understand the Bible, they need to get it through us.
• 1:01:23
  R. Sikoryak: Right, right, right.
• 1:01:26
  Tad Eggleston: There are… there were definitely people in the convention that would have liked it to be longer and more tedious and harder to…
• 1:01:34
  Tad Eggleston: Parse.
• 1:01:35
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:01:38
  Tad Eggleston: But… The idea that we're a nation of people that
• 1:01:45
  Tad Eggleston: is a representative democracy, where even if some of the people thought that it only meant white property-holding men at the time, you know, that more people than the people in this room should be able to truly understand what is going on and be involved in it, has been something
• 1:02:05
  Tad Eggleston: That was there from the start.
• 1:02:08
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, like, I mean, that was what inspired the episode, was watching this kid going, and I'm like.
• 1:02:15
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I think I'd read it when it came out, because it got a lot of critical acclaim when it came out, so I bought a copy
• 1:02:21
  Tad Eggleston: when it came out, and I spent some time with it, the time that I really spent, like, the 3 hours took notes. In fact, it's like the one… like, if you go back to the blog spot that I don't even plug anymore, because I'm so behind on show notes, like, the two where I did hardcore show notes.
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: were for four kids walk into a bank, and for Constitution, illustrated fault lines, and then good talk.
• 1:02:45
  Tad Eggleston: Because… like… again, I'm just like…
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: not only… not only is it not that long of a read, there's a comic book, dude! In the comic book version, it's only 100 pages, and… and, like.
• 1:03:02
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, well, I guess he could have read it. I guess he could have read it. Yeah, it had come out by then. Wait, no, no, he didn't.
• 1:03:10
  Tad Eggleston: I thought I had.
• 1:03:11
  R. Sikoryak: 2020. Yeah, it must have.
• 1:03:12
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because it was January 6th, 2021.
• 1:03:15
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, 21, yeah, so it had come out.
• 1:03:17
  Tad Eggleston: Did it come out?
• 1:03:17
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:03:19
  R. Sikoryak: It came out before the election, I'm pretty sure.
• 1:03:21
  Tad Eggleston: Bright! Bright!
• 1:03:23
  R. Sikoryak: Well, you weren't my publicist then, so that's why… that's why this random person in Washington didn't see it.
• 1:03:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, but, like, but again, I wasn't just thinking of that kid, I was thinking of the fact that he's emblematic of a lot of the nation. Like, I have people quote things to me all the time that then I go look at…
• 1:03:45
  Tad Eggleston: you know, oh, it says this, and I go, and I look at it, and I'm like, well, yeah, but let me read the entire sentence to you.
• 1:03:51
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, well…
• 1:03:52
  Tad Eggleston: I get it.
• 1:03:53
  R. Sikoryak: I get stuff wrong all the time. I mean, I wouldn't… I…
• 1:03:58
  R. Sikoryak: I can only speak about this material
• 1:04:02
  R. Sikoryak: As a civilian who made a book about it.
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: No, I understand.
• 1:04:05
  R. Sikoryak: You know, I didn't read the Constitution when I was 12, so you're way ahead of me.
• 1:04:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'm autistic, and I'm a nerd, and I'm…
• 1:04:14
  R. Sikoryak: You're a great, you're a great comics reader, so that's good for me.
• 1:04:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I didn't get to read it in comics form until 2000.
• 1:04:23
  R. Sikoryak: No, but I meant your, your, I meant your… your… your impulses to read.
• 1:04:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Are good.
• 1:04:30
  R. Sikoryak: when…
• 1:04:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:04:32
  R. Sikoryak: deep.
• 1:04:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I, like, the old…
• 1:04:34
  R. Sikoryak: It's kind.
• 1:04:34
  Tad Eggleston: the only times where I'm not reading.
• 1:04:39
  Tad Eggleston: Really? There are 3 times where I'm not reading.
• 1:04:42
  Tad Eggleston: When I'm… when I'm… decompressing by playing my baseball video game, and half the time, I'm like…
• 1:04:52
  Tad Eggleston: play an inning, read a comic, play an inning, read a comic. So it's not even always, like, completely not reading then.
• 1:04:59
  Tad Eggleston: when I'm driving and listening to music, rather than… an audiobook.
• 1:05:07
  R. Sikoryak: And then…
• 1:05:07
  Tad Eggleston: It's, like, 70% audiobook and 30% music.
• 1:05:12
  Tad Eggleston: And I count… it is reading, if I'm listening to it being read to me.
• 1:05:17
  R. Sikoryak: Sure, I would do too.
• 1:05:18
  Tad Eggleston: Or, like, when I'm actively podcasting, teaching, or walking in the hallways at school.
• 1:05:25
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty much all other times, I am reading something, whether it's an email, or a newsletter, or a comic book, or, like, I don't know how to stop reading.
• 1:05:37
  R. Sikoryak: Well, we… those of us who keep making books appreciate it.
• 1:05:41
  R. Sikoryak: I have a question. This is… speaking of a tangent, we do not need to go down, but I'm very curious about this. As someone who listens to audiobooks, as you do, and who likes comics, have you listened to many of the audiobook adaptations of graphic novels?
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't done a ton of them yet.
• 1:06:00
  Tad Eggleston: Though… though the handful that I've done, I have actually been relatively impressed by.
• 1:06:05
  Tad Eggleston: I need to do a few more.
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: there's one that I'm not gonna talk about because I don't feel like falling down a whole different comics rabbit hole, but there's a… there's a full cast version of a very famous comic by a guy we don't talk about anymore, that… that for a while, my favorite way to read it
• 1:06:27
  Tad Eggleston: was… I've got the big Absolute Editions.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: And I would look at the pictures while listening to it.
• 1:06:34
  Tad Eggleston: So that I could really focus on the pictures without… without… because I sometimes have the problem when I'm reading comics that I don't… I wind up zeroing in too much on the words, and don't take in the art as well as I'd like. Sure. So it really allows me sometimes
• 1:06:51
  Tad Eggleston: The guy that, that, like, there's a Halo Jones.
• 1:06:56
  R. Sikoryak: initiative.
• 1:06:56
  Tad Eggleston: Which works beautifully on its own, but also works really well that way, where you listen to Halo Jones while flipping through…
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: the pages. So, so, like, the… the ones that I have done, I have appreciated. I need to do a few more. Like, the more that come out, the more I wonder about whether or not they're gonna work.
• 1:07:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's great that they're doing them.
• 1:07:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know Nick Susanis, don't you?
• 1:07:26
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, sure.
• 1:07:26
  Tad Eggleston: you know of him. Oh, I know.
• 1:07:28
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, yeah, I knew Nick when he was in New York. I didn't…
• 1:07:30
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I… that's what I figured.
• 1:07:32
  Tad Eggleston: He invited me to an online symposium once about comics for the blind.
• 1:07:38
  R. Sikoryak: I think I listened in on that one, too.
• 1:07:41
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. And, like, that made me really think, oh, there's so many ways that you could mine this.
• 1:07:49
  Tad Eggleston: to take this and enhance it. You know, you can't replace a comic.
• 1:07:55
  R. Sikoryak: No.
• 1:07:56
  Tad Eggleston: with all.
• 1:07:56
  R. Sikoryak: That's the… I find this all very fascinating, and you said something that I think is really important. One of the reasons I started adapting literature into comics was
• 1:08:08
  R. Sikoryak: There's no such thing as a good adaptate… there's no such thing as a faithful adaptation, or there's no such…
• 1:08:14
  R. Sikoryak: thing as a replacement adaptation. Whenever you… you have to remake it in another… you have to remake it in another medium, and… Right. And similarly, when you make a graphic novel into an audio play, that's a cool thing, and I'm… I'm obviously interested in someone who
• 1:08:31
  R. Sikoryak: takes something in one form and moves it into another, but it's its own thing. And I'm fascinated by…
• 1:08:38
  R. Sikoryak: The attempt to do these things, even though
• 1:08:41
  R. Sikoryak: The whole point… not the whole point… one of the… one of the beauties… one of the beauties of comics is you can absorb it at your own pace, you can imagine the voices in your head. Once you make it an audiobook, it's something else. Now, I do cartoon slideshows of my comics, and I do shows where cartoonists present their work in reading form. That also breaks all the rules of comics. I think it's very interesting, but it's a whole different medium.
• 1:09:05
  R. Sikoryak: And I… I'm fascinated by… we are very…
• 1:09:10
  R. Sikoryak: maybe as a species, maybe as consumers, I'm not sure, but we seem… we… people, as an… as… as themselves, seem very…
• 1:09:20
  R. Sikoryak: interested in seeing different iterations of the same story. So it's interesting. There's an Odyssey movie coming out. Do we need an Odyssey movie? I want to see it, but I don't know if we need it. We've got lots of Odyssey adaptations. I have an Odyssey… I have a 12-page Odyssey comic that's going to be in Masterpiece Comics, too. Will it be better than Christopher Nolan?
• 1:09:39
  Tad Eggleston: I think, I think.
• 1:09:40
  R. Sikoryak: There's a blast.
• 1:09:41
  Tad Eggleston: Odyssey graphic novel coming out, too.
• 1:09:43
  R. Sikoryak: Well, there's… the Gareth Hines one, I think, has been.
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that's the older one, yeah, but I think.
• 1:09:48
  R. Sikoryak: There's a new one.
• 1:09:48
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, a new, new one.
• 1:09:49
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, okay. Yeah. That's the other beauty… that's the other thing that I think is so fascinating and kind of beautiful about what the kind of work I do. There's always going to be another version. Right. No one's gonna make the definitive one.
• 1:10:02
  R. Sikoryak: And even though that makes me feel a little less important, it also…
• 1:10:07
  R. Sikoryak: Makes me kind of happy that there's always another thing to explore.
• 1:10:12
  R. Sikoryak: That I might not do, but someone else will do. I look forward to seeing the next version of the Constitution in comics that someone does. I would really like to see what, you know, the next person does with it, so…
• 1:10:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they're… I mean, not done like you, but I mean, there is already another… another Constitution comic that I think actually predates yours.
• 1:10:32
  R. Sikoryak: She's in.
• 1:10:33
  Tad Eggleston: One part text and one part history.
• 1:10:38
  R. Sikoryak: I think I might have seen that…
• 1:10:41
  R. Sikoryak: I… the one that I remembered seeing was more of a historical description of how it worked, rather than a line-for-line illustration. It's fine. I mean, I'm not saying that's… I just… it felt…
• 1:10:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, it's… it's…
• 1:10:54
  R. Sikoryak: It's a different approach.
• 1:10:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's certainly not line-for-line illustrated, but I think it does have all of the lines in it. I haven't read it in a while. But yeah, Jonathan Hennessy and Aaron McConnell did the United States Constitution Graphic Adaptation.
• 1:11:08
  R. Sikoryak: I'm sure… I'm sure that's on my list somewhere.
• 1:11:13
  R. Sikoryak: So, John.
• 1:11:13
  Tad Eggleston: I just…
• 1:11:14
  R. Sikoryak: Jonathan Hennessy did some books on Gettysburg, I believe.
• 1:11:20
  Tad Eggleston: Gettysburg and…
• 1:11:21
  R. Sikoryak: I have one of his Gettinberg's books right here, so, like, I am aware of you, Jonathan. I just lost track of your Constitution book. But there are a number of adaptations in…
• 1:11:30
  Tad Eggleston: It came out in 2008, and I think it was actually out of print for a while. I think it might have come back into print after your book, I'm not 100% certain on that or causation, but I remember that I discovered it after I discovered your book.
• 1:11:44
  R. Sikoryak: I usually…
• 1:11:45
  Tad Eggleston: them both in teaching, because it's… it's good for, like.
• 1:11:49
  Tad Eggleston: really, I mean, with your book, I have them unlock…
• 1:11:54
  Tad Eggleston: their own understanding of the words, and with his book, and with the first, second fault lines in the Constitution, it helps you unlock
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: The whys, and the history, and the things that… that seems vague, there's a reason why it seems vague.
• 1:12:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know, one of the things that I… drives me nuts about the current textualism and originalism of the Supreme Court is I am not at all convinced that any
• 1:12:26
  Tad Eggleston: of the Founding Fathers were in favor of that interpretation of the Constitution.
• 1:12:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know, both the arguments that were had, the things that got kicked to Congress, and, you know, the Ninth Amendment.
• 1:12:42
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 1:12:43
  Tad Eggleston: Indicate to me!
• 1:12:45
  Tad Eggleston: That they didn't view it as a perfect document.
• 1:12:49
  R. Sikoryak: Right. That's why, on my edition of the book, I actually wrote… I actually included quotes from the Founding Fathers, many of which are like, this is the best we could do, essentially.
• 1:12:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right!
• 1:13:00
  R. Sikoryak: Right!
• 1:13:01
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, cause the history is that… We had 13 colonies that…
• 1:13:11
  Tad Eggleston: That had at least 5 major groupings of different needs.
• 1:13:17
  Tad Eggleston: You know, you had… you know, and that's… that's even, like, when you ignore the first one, which is, like, slaveholding versus non-slaveholding.
• 1:13:27
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but there were other major differences in how they viewed what they wanted this nation to be. The idea that there's ever been a unified version
• 1:13:39
  Tad Eggleston: of, of, of, like, what America…
• 1:13:43
  Tad Eggleston: Is and should be, it's just… Ridiculous. Right.
• 1:13:47
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 1:13:48
  Tad Eggleston: It's never happened. The book that… that I… I've downloaded the audiobook, but I… but I… I haven't,
• 1:13:55
  Tad Eggleston: gotten a chance to listen to it yet, but it's on my list for this week, even, because it feels appropriate, is
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: Ben Rhodes, who was…
• 1:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: both a speechwriter for Obama and a national security advisor. His newest book is called All We Say.
• 1:14:15
  Tad Eggleston: And it's a selection of 15 speeches.
• 1:14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Not 15 speeches he agrees with.
• 1:14:27
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 1:14:27
  Tad Eggleston: like, 15 speeches throughout the history… I mean, for that matter, I think he wound up leading with Trump, because as much as, like, ugh!
• 1:14:37
  Tad Eggleston: Like, it felt like he had to.
• 1:14:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:14:40
  R. Sikoryak: Right, I did hear about this book, yeah, that sounds.
• 1:14:42
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, it's like 15 speeches, like, like Alexander Stevens' case for white supremacy as the cornerstone of the Confederacy. Benjamin Franklin's call for compromise at the Constitutional Convention.
• 1:15:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, where, where, like, he's using it to, to, to really look at…
• 1:15:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know, this is different ways that people have called for us
• 1:15:11
  Tad Eggleston: to look at, you know, so it's not as simple as, this is a real American, and that's a real American, because they're all real Americans.
• 1:15:20
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 1:15:22
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:15:24
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:15:25
  R. Sikoryak: that's what we have to figure out how to work it out. And I hate to say that, because I have a lot of friends who are like, no, we can't work it out with these people! It's like, I know why you feel that way, but…
• 1:15:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and you know what?
• 1:15:38
  R. Sikoryak: Clearly have another Civil War and think that's gonna go great for.
• 1:15:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and so often, when people are saying that, they're like, oh, so you'll compromise on this and that? I'm like, no, I won't.
• 1:15:48
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't think… I don't actually think that it's compromising on those things.
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: I think that it's continuing to battle it out, and helping people realize that those aren't the things that they care about.
• 1:16:01
  Tad Eggleston: I think that many, many more people would rather have A little bit less trouble
• 1:16:09
  Tad Eggleston: Paying the rent and putting their kids through college and whatnot than actually give a damn about trans kids playing sports.
• 1:16:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But, when they have people convincing them that neither party can make their life better.
• 1:16:25
  Tad Eggleston: Then trans kids playing sports feels like the only thing that they have control of.
• 1:16:29
  R. Sikoryak: Damn.
• 1:16:31
  Tad Eggleston: you know.
• 1:16:33
  Tad Eggleston: No, I have no interest in compromising on, on, like, human rights.
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's not what it means to work with people.
• 1:16:43
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 1:16:44
  Tad Eggleston: But you know what? They don't really have interest in compromising on human rights either, and most of them are for it, they just don't always see when…
• 1:16:54
  Tad Eggleston: When they're pushing for things that ignore it.
• 1:16:57
  Tad Eggleston: Some of them do, but, I mean, like, I live in a purple area. I have…
• 1:17:03
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, thank God it's not up anymore, in part because I'm pretty certain it was the husband that drove it, and he passed away a couple years ago, but for half… for most of the time that I've lived in the house that I live in, I had to drive down the street and see a Trump flag.
• 1:17:20
  Tad Eggleston: Flying two doors down.
• 1:17:23
  R. Sikoryak: Ugh.
• 1:17:24
  Tad Eggleston: And this was despite the fact that I have black neighbors, I have Hispanic neighbors, I have…
• 1:17:29
  Tad Eggleston: Filipino neighbors, I, like… I live in a melting pot
• 1:17:35
  Tad Eggleston: Block in a melting pot neighborhood.
• 1:17:40
  R. Sikoryak: Damn.
• 1:17:42
  Tad Eggleston: But they're also nice people. I've seen them, like, help out the… Like, like, you know…
• 1:17:52
  Tad Eggleston: there are MAGA people that are still great to their neighbors. There are MAGA people that… that are still great to their families. Yeah.
• 1:18:01
  Tad Eggleston: And that's where it gets interesting. When you start… when you start thinking that, oh, I can't possibly have common ground with these people, it's like, well, then you're not…
• 1:18:10
  Tad Eggleston: You're not actually being that… imaginative?
• 1:18:14
  R. Sikoryak: I… I might have told you this story.
• 1:18:16
  R. Sikoryak: And it doesn't say a lot.
• 1:18:18
  R. Sikoryak: about character, but it does say something that has stuck with me really deeply. And one of the reasons I did the Trump book
• 1:18:28
  R. Sikoryak: where I…
• 1:18:29
  R. Sikoryak: took quotes of his and inserted him and quotes into classic comic book covers. But I was inspired
• 1:18:37
  R. Sikoryak: from that book, by a zine put out anonymously called Tea Party Comics. Have I mentioned this to you?
• 1:18:44
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think so.
• 1:18:46
  R. Sikoryak: So Tea Party Comics was a parody of comic book covers featuring Obama.
• 1:18:53
  R. Sikoryak: drawn in a really demeaning way. Like, I just… it was just kind of grotesque parodies of Obama. They weren't quotes from Obama, they were just kind of, like, scenarios with Obama in them.
• 1:19:05
  R. Sikoryak: But it was really… it was rather… rather rough drawing, and the parodies of Obama were really unpleasant.
• 1:19:14
  R. Sikoryak: But…
• 1:19:15
  R. Sikoryak: I looked at this thing. This guy had done parodies of Classics Illustrated, and Tales of Suspense, and all of these old comics, and Zap comics, and he parodied all of these different comics in history, and put these, like, grotesque Obama
• 1:19:31
  R. Sikoryak: parodies in them. And I looked at this comic, and I thought, I could not talk about this… I could not talk to this guy about politics. We are not going to agree about anything.
• 1:19:39
  R. Sikoryak: But if I was stuck in a comic shop with him, we could talk about comics all day. Like, this guy loved something that I had great affection for, and I was like, I… this isn't common ground, because he's not gonna vote for anybody I voted for. But I'm also like, I could be civil with this guy.
• 1:19:59
  R. Sikoryak: If push came to shove, He had this…
• 1:20:06
  R. Sikoryak: real deep knowledge and clear love of old comic books. And just looking at this thing, it was like, this guy…
• 1:20:13
  R. Sikoryak: this guy is, you know, is someone I could relate to on some level, and, like, can't… Okay.
• 1:20:21
  R. Sikoryak: you know, can we get along somehow? Anyway, I don't know. I mean, it seems…
• 1:20:27
  R. Sikoryak: when the book came out, when I saw that Obama comic, I think Obama was still president.
• 1:20:34
  R. Sikoryak: The country didn't seem as divided as it is now.
• 1:20:38
  R. Sikoryak: But man, just, like, there's some grotesque…
• 1:20:41
  R. Sikoryak: grotesque Obama drawings in there, and it's like… I mean, I don't recommend anybody look at it. It just… it was really interesting.
• 1:20:48
  Tad Eggleston: See, I actually kind of want to, just be… and I don't know if what I'm looking.
• 1:20:53
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, Kat, I knew you were gonna look.
• 1:20:55
  Tad Eggleston: it.
• 1:20:55
  R. Sikoryak: I knew you were gonna look for it.
• 1:20:58
  Tad Eggleston: Because what I'm looking at right now actually looks more like somebody taking
• 1:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: Actual stuff and rewriting the script.
• 1:21:09
  R. Sikoryak: Well, these were black and white. I mean, these were, like.
• 1:21:13
  R. Sikoryak: black and white zines. I think I found them through Ethan Persoff's site. Ethan Persoff
• 1:21:20
  R. Sikoryak: collects a lot of obscure political and historical and educational comics, and I think I found them through him, through his site. Really interesting. He's got a really interesting library of stuff on his website, and I think that's where I first saw them.
• 1:21:34
  R. Sikoryak: I didn't see them in person, I only saw them online, but there's, like, 3 issues.
• 1:21:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I wouldn't want to… I wouldn't want to pay for them.
• 1:21:42
  R. Sikoryak: No, but I mean, I didn't even see them.
• 1:21:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, most… most of the reason that I want to look at them, and as I'm seeing them, it is actually…
• 1:21:52
  Tad Eggleston: confirming it's actually significantly harder… to do…
• 1:22:05
  Tad Eggleston: non-fact-based propaganda through comics. It's not that you can't do
• 1:22:11
  Tad Eggleston: some propaganda through comics, but it's hard to lie, like, outright, and do… you can frame things. Does that make sense?
• 1:22:20
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, I was merely… I was merely thinking about…
• 1:22:25
  R. Sikoryak: I could relate to this guy's love of comics. Right!
• 1:22:30
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I…
• 1:22:30
  R. Sikoryak: Force that from quality of drawing, or quality of message, or, like.
• 1:22:35
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, I just…
• 1:22:36
  R. Sikoryak: That's.
• 1:22:36
  Tad Eggleston: I, I just, I, like… I'm… I'm…
• 1:22:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm… because I was thinking about it, like, how could you possibly… make…
• 1:22:49
  Tad Eggleston: the unquotable Obama. He just didn't give you…
• 1:22:54
  Tad Eggleston: It'd be really hard to find the material to make it work.
• 1:22:59
  Tad Eggleston: And I think… I think that's… I mean, honestly, I think that, like.
• 1:23:04
  Tad Eggleston: without naming Comics Gate People, and they've gone off and tried to make their right-wing comics, and I think half the reason that they either don't finish them, or even if they do finish them, they don't sell, isn't just because comics tends to be a more liberal group, it's because it's really hard to make them good.
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: Comics aren't inherently liberal… But… but they are semi-inherently… Truthful.
• 1:23:39
  Tad Eggleston: If that makes sense?
• 1:23:42
  Tad Eggleston: Because of that juxtaposition between words and pictures, because you have to think about what the pictures were, because you have to think about how the words…
• 1:23:52
  Tad Eggleston: Connect to the pictures.
• 1:23:54
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 1:23:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's something that I've been pondering for a long time, so this made me… this is definitely, so far,
• 1:24:06
  Tad Eggleston: a… a… a… An argument in favor of, of,
• 1:24:17
  Tad Eggleston: My theory that it's really hard to make
• 1:24:22
  Tad Eggleston: To make the right-wing propaganda comic.
• 1:24:25
  R. Sikoryak: I would… but I… well, I would also… I mean, I don't want to defend the artists, because I… I didn't… I didn't think… I didn't think they worked politically, let's put it that way.
• 1:24:33
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:24:34
  R. Sikoryak: I would also say, I… when I was doing my Trump book, I didn't want to put words in his mouth. I was like, I'm not interested in making things up. Like, that just…
• 1:24:42
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 1:24:42
  R. Sikoryak: Seemed like… I can't think like that, and I didn't… I didn't…
• 1:24:48
  R. Sikoryak: you know, I'm… I may be… I may be more literal. I'm… I like doing research, which is different, and I don't… I'm not even… I'm not trying to say that that makes me better or anything, I'm just saying, like, the way my brain works is I tend to, like, bounce off of…
• 1:25:03
  R. Sikoryak: stories that exist, or legal agreements that exist. So…
• 1:25:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, and, like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take this to a way more interesting,
• 1:25:14
  Tad Eggleston: direction. Have you gotten, an opportunity to see any of DERF?
• 1:25:21
  Tad Eggleston: Bector's upcoming book?
• 1:25:24
  R. Sikoryak: No, I didn't.
• 1:25:25
  Tad Eggleston: That's…
• 1:25:25
  R. Sikoryak: Is this the book about the masses?
• 1:25:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:25:28
  R. Sikoryak: Or did that come out already?
• 1:25:29
  Tad Eggleston: No, it hasn't come out.
• 1:25:30
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, I did see… I saw a page, or a promotion… promotional page from it, but I didn't read any of it yet.
• 1:25:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it comes out September 15th, but I got to read a copy, and
• 1:25:43
  Tad Eggleston: It also had me thinking, because, like, there were absolutely propaganda cartoons going on in that era, but what made them work is they had kernels of truth.
• 1:25:56
  Tad Eggleston: And they still didn't, like, automatically work. I mean, it's kind of… I have a friend who's a young political cartoonist, and it frustrates them, because political cartooning is a harder and harder business to be a part of.
• 1:26:10
  Tad Eggleston: And one of the things that they've been told by veterans is, oh, you need to make cartoons that, like…
• 1:26:16
  Tad Eggleston: Appeal to both sides, and they're like, but… I wanna have a point.
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: I'm curious…
• 1:26:24
  R. Sikoryak: I'm curious who he's talking to, because I would assume, like, There's plenty of…
• 1:26:30
  R. Sikoryak: political cartoonist I know who would be like, no, you have to have… you have to have a point of view. So that's an interesting bit of advice. I… I can see why some people
• 1:26:39
  R. Sikoryak: Want to be able to… both sides.
• 1:26:41
  Tad Eggleston: who's somebody who's still syndicated. The advice that they get from people who have had to go out on their own.
• 1:26:49
  Tad Eggleston: Doesn't tend to be that way. They actually got really upset when they got that comment, and enough so that I went… I went digging into the guy's cartoons, and I'm like, yeah, here's the thing. He's not as good as you. I don't care how long he's been doing that.
• 1:27:04
  Tad Eggleston: And they're like, oh, no, I love some of his work, and I… so I dug deeper, and I'm like, okay, he was once good.
• 1:27:11
  Tad Eggleston: Now he mails in 9 cartoons out of 10.
• 1:27:16
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:27:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's hard to.
• 1:27:18
  R. Sikoryak: keep a career going. I also, I mean.
• 1:27:20
  Tad Eggleston: rider.
• 1:27:20
  R. Sikoryak: of this guy's work. I'm not trying to let someone else.
• 1:27:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I… that's why I'm not naming any names.
• 1:27:26
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, no, because…
• 1:27:27
  Tad Eggleston: I also, I also don't, like, and one of the things that I said to my friend was, like.
• 1:27:34
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not even blaming him for mailing it. I don't know what his situation is.
• 1:27:38
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:39
  Tad Eggleston: have kids that are in college, you know? I mean, and… but also, take his advice from that perspective. Don't take it as a stylistic thing.
• 1:27:48
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:49
  Tad Eggleston: He's talking about…
• 1:27:51
  Tad Eggleston: And he, you know, I mean, as I dug through the stuff, I'm like, I can tell you where he started getting really angry and frustrated with his work. It's, like, it's right here!
• 1:28:01
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:03
  Tad Eggleston: You know, and I've been lucky enough now to talk to a handful of political cartoonists on the show. I got to talk to,
• 1:28:17
  R. Sikoryak: Antillinius?
• 1:28:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I haven't… I haven't gotten to talk to Ann Telnes. That would be…
• 1:28:23
  Tad Eggleston: But no, I talked to Ruben Bolling, and I talked to Jen Sorensen, and I've talked to… I've talked to Matt Boers a couple of times.
• 1:28:30
  R. Sikoryak: They're all great. I mean, it's unfortunate the nib isn't going. I think Crucial Comics is doing interesting work in this area, but the nib was really special, and I…
• 1:28:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yep.
• 1:28:40
  R. Sikoryak: know all those folks were involved and still work with Matt in some capacity, so…
• 1:28:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and Matt's still… Matt's still, like…
• 1:28:46
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:28:47
  Tad Eggleston: It's involved in stuff, but I think…
• 1:28:49
  R. Sikoryak: Terrific.
• 1:28:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I think he…
• 1:28:51
  R. Sikoryak: I think he wanted to be a cartoonist again.
• 1:28:53
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly. He decided that he didn't want to be an editor anymore.
• 1:28:57
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, and I… I could appreciate that, for sure.
• 1:29:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:29:01
  Tad Eggleston: Like, that I even brought up with him, like, it wasn't strictly a money decision. Yeah, he was having trouble making it all work the way that he wanted to, to be able to pay people the way he wanted to, but he could have found a way. What it really came down to is it wasn't what he wanted to do anymore.
• 1:29:21
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:29:21
  Tad Eggleston: I respect that. He's been doing good work with his Toxic Avenger.
• 1:29:28
  Tad Eggleston: And justice warriors.
• 1:29:30
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:29:32
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, it's…
• 1:29:33
  Tad Eggleston: And… and I actually just had him on, because there was a Kickstarter, Called That One Map Board.
• 1:29:38
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's right, yes, yes.
• 1:29:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah!
• 1:29:41
  R. Sikoryak: I'm looking forward.
• 1:29:41
  Tad Eggleston: in the back.
• 1:29:42
  R. Sikoryak: That's the kind of book I like.
• 1:29:44
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love that.
• 1:29:44
  R. Sikoryak: Dive into…
• 1:29:45
  Tad Eggleston: Right. No, I reached out to them immediately. I'm like, this reminds me of how to read Nancy in all of the best ways. Please let me talk to you.
• 1:29:57
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, seeing how something iterates is exactly what I'm interested in.
• 1:30:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and that's why I would totally buy the deluxe edition of the founding documents by R. Sikoriak that had all of the back matter, and the spreadsheets, and the pictures of the thumbnails on the wall.
• 1:30:17
  Tad Eggleston: and the detailed commentary, and some essays by friends of yours. I'd contribute one if you'd like.
• 1:30:25
  R. Sikoryak: Thanks.
• 1:30:28
  Tad Eggleston: I think I did okay when I wrote about you for American Nature Presents. Did I send that to you?
• 1:30:34
  Tad Eggleston: I forget if I did or not.
• 1:30:35
  R. Sikoryak: I don't… I don't remember… I don't think.
• 1:30:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:30:38
  R. Sikoryak: I… I think I would have remembered that. I'm sorry.
• 1:30:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no, I don't think I… I don't think I've sent you a physical copy, I just couldn't remember if I'd sent you the text. I'll have to try to send you a physical copy.
• 1:30:51
  R. Sikoryak: If you… yes, if you sent it to me.
• 1:30:53
  R. Sikoryak: on a deadline, I might have missed it, sorry.
• 1:30:56
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's good. I mean, I do… I do remember that you helped me figure out which…
• 1:31:03
  Tad Eggleston: pictures to use to submit. Okay.
• 1:31:06
  R. Sikoryak: So maybe I did… what year was this?
• 1:31:08
  Tad Eggleston: This was recently, it was, like, last year.
• 1:31:10
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 1:31:12
  R. Sikoryak: this, I really thought… I have to say, the Constitution took me a year and a half. I pitched it to Drawing Quarterly in April of…
• 1:31:23
  R. Sikoryak: 2019, I guess, and it came out in… July of 2020?
• 1:31:31
  R. Sikoryak: I was thinking about this book for a long time. Took me 3 years, I think, total. So it took me twice as long to do a book that's exactly the same length, but I think it was between digging deeper, wanting to keep the quality up, and just life getting in the way.
• 1:31:45
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's also…
• 1:31:47
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it lends itself as easily to splitting things up, so, I mean, your first thing is you had to decide
• 1:31:56
  Tad Eggleston: you had to make, I think, probably more decisions on what… what is gonna be a page.
• 1:32:01
  R. Sikoryak: Perhaps.
• 1:32:02
  Tad Eggleston: How am I gonna split this up to pages?
• 1:32:04
  R. Sikoryak: I did atomize stuff a lot as I went along.
• 1:32:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:32:10
  Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, and again, I… out in stores, by the time anybody's listening to this, I can't… I cannot speak highly enough of it. I…
• 1:32:19
  Tad Eggleston: I adore your work in general, but these two are amazing. As you held up Constitution Illustrated, I will remind everybody that they're also
• 1:32:28
  Tad Eggleston: Pocket size.
• 1:32:29
  R. Sikoryak: Yes. I mean, there's a big…
• 1:32:31
  Tad Eggleston: size, but.
• 1:32:32
  R. Sikoryak: This was…
• 1:32:32
  Tad Eggleston: Nope.
• 1:32:33
  R. Sikoryak: Absolutely.
• 1:32:33
  Tad Eggleston: You can get your illustrated pocket constitution.
• 1:32:37
  Tad Eggleston: I tested it. Senators, keep it in your… in your suit… suit pocket.
• 1:32:42
  R. Sikoryak: It… it fit in… it fit in my jean pockets. I haven't… it won't fit in a… it's not a pocket protector size, but it's definitely.
• 1:32:50
  Tad Eggleston: No, but it'll fit in a back pocket, it'll fit in pretty much any cargo pocket.
• 1:32:56
  Tad Eggleston: It'll fit in most inside suit pockets.
• 1:33:00
  Tad Eggleston: These are just the places that I've tried it.
• 1:33:05
  Tad Eggleston: It'll fit in most winter coat inside pockets. Fantastic. Trench coat inside pockets.
• 1:33:12
  Tad Eggleston: And it certainly is easy to just throw in, like, the pencil pocket. I mean, I don't even keep it in the main part of my backpack.
• 1:33:19
  Tad Eggleston: It's in, like, the area that's mostly pencils and, like, fidgets and stuff. I also generally have my copy of the Constitution.
• 1:33:28
  Tad Eggleston: Illustrated, because that's the one that's worth carrying.
• 1:33:33
  Tad Eggleston: We've been enjoying our time for quite a while, so I'm gonna get us into closing questions, just because it's almost midnight my time, which means it's almost 1AM your time.
• 1:33:42
  Tad Eggleston: But you picked the time, so I can't…
• 1:33:46
  R. Sikoryak: No, this is…
• 1:33:47
  Tad Eggleston: It's great.
• 1:33:47
  R. Sikoryak: I tend to draw or just do emails late at night. I've gotten back to my college habits, and now I do this.
• 1:33:58
  Tad Eggleston: I fall into that over the summer sometimes, too, and then I have to go back to being at school it.
• 1:34:04
  Tad Eggleston: 7 AM.
• 1:34:05
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I teach in the afternoon, so for the most part, I'm not…
• 1:34:09
  Tad Eggleston: That makes sense to me, I get that.
• 1:34:11
  Tad Eggleston: I don't have that choice.
• 1:34:13
  R. Sikoryak: Er, no, not at all, I know.
• 1:34:15
  Tad Eggleston: I wish that high schools could start at noon.
• 1:34:18
  R. Sikoryak: I'm sure, like…
• 1:34:19
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, most of the students do, too.
• 1:34:22
  Tad Eggleston: So, I don't even know if I had…
• 1:34:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think… I think when you were on the first time, I was still drifting away from the original questionnaire that I put together that wound up just being too unwieldy.
• 1:34:37
  Tad Eggleston: Into closing questions, and so… so I don't even know if you've answered
• 1:34:43
  Tad Eggleston: the older of my two closing questions, but I'm going to start with, I developed a new one this year.
• 1:34:50
  Tad Eggleston: Because it's my fifth year doing this podcast, and I… and I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone, like…
• 1:34:58
  Tad Eggleston: number of things that I've gotten to do, people I've gotten to talk to, things I've gotten to see.
• 1:35:05
  Tad Eggleston: just experiences that I've had, that if you told me when I was 15 that this was gonna be in my life, hell, if you told me when I was 35 that this was gonna be my life, I would have been
• 1:35:18
  Tad Eggleston: What the fuck are you on?
• 1:35:20
  Tad Eggleston: You're insane. Just, I mean, one of them, I sat down and had coffee with you, in person, just to have coffee, as two friends.
• 1:35:28
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:35:29
  Tad Eggleston: You know, like, that was one of those first experiences of the whole, oh, wait, this person that I admired as a name on a page enjoys spending time with me.
• 1:35:42
  Tad Eggleston: weird.
• 1:35:46
  R. Sikoryak: I had fun.
• 1:35:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you keep coming back, so I assumed that I brought something to the table.
• 1:35:55
  Tad Eggleston: But I find that everybody in comics, really everybody in the arts, but certainly everybody in comics has their…
• 1:36:04
  Tad Eggleston: pinch-me moments. They're… they're things that they look back on, smile, and go, was that really me? In that…
• 1:36:13
  Tad Eggleston: Place in that conversation…
• 1:36:16
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean, whether it's meeting people, or… or people coming up to… I mean, like…
• 1:36:23
  Tad Eggleston: Just all sorts of things that people wind up getting to do that they just…
• 1:36:28
  Tad Eggleston: Again, it doesn't feel like the type of life that… that people get to have.
• 1:36:34
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense? So I started collecting those stories. You know, tell me one of your pinch-me-surreal moments in comics, one of those things that was… that happened in your life that wouldn't have happened
• 1:36:47
  Tad Eggleston: If you hadn't chosen a life where comics
• 1:36:52
  Tad Eggleston: We're as central as they are.
• 1:36:55
  R. Sikoryak: Hmm. Well, this is more about, like, experiences as a cartoonist, which I think came to me…
• 1:37:01
  R. Sikoryak: I think this came to me just because I'd been making a lot of comics, by the time this happened, but…
• 1:37:08
  R. Sikoryak: we mentioned terms and conditions before, and I made that book kind of as a midlife crisis book, because it was around the time I was turning 50,
• 1:37:19
  R. Sikoryak: And I was just like.
• 1:37:20
  Tad Eggleston: Wait, you turned 50?
• 1:37:23
  R. Sikoryak: I did. And this was a while ago. So I was around the time, like, the year… the year… I think it was 2014 or 2015 that I started making the book.
• 1:37:33
  R. Sikoryak: And I started making, because I was like, I can't keep spending 2 years on 15-page adaptations of literature that will be collected after I get enough pages to make a book in, you know, 20 years. Like, I have to find a way to make something faster, and, you know, I sort of… so I… Terms and Conditions was kind of like…
• 1:37:54
  R. Sikoryak: like, a move just to try something different, to sort of break some of my habits. Take this text, don't alter it, just illustrate it, like, using…
• 1:38:04
  R. Sikoryak: altered existing comics pages. Anyway, it was just kind of an experiment that I thought was funny and bizarre and amused me, but…
• 1:38:14
  R. Sikoryak: when I…
• 1:38:16
  R. Sikoryak: I had been putting it out in the world in different ways, and like, I was selling mini-comics at comic shows, and I had started putting them up on Tumblr, and then
• 1:38:27
  R. Sikoryak: once I started to get the word out, just through email connections, I got… I had this deluge of…
• 1:38:33
  R. Sikoryak: of attention, like, one week, like, two days after I sent out a big email, I got all this deluge of attention. One of my friends sent it to someone at Boing Boing, and someone else sent it to somewhere else, and within a week, I was on NPR's Morning Edition, and
• 1:38:49
  R. Sikoryak: Fresh Air was talking about having me on for a discussion they were having on legal documents, which I'm completely unqualified for, and that fell through.
• 1:38:57
  R. Sikoryak: I would have liked to have seen what would have happened with that interview, but they ended up not using me. But for a moment, I had gone completely viral.
• 1:39:05
  R. Sikoryak: for this thing that I made really just out of, like, I have to try something different.
• 1:39:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:39:11
  R. Sikoryak: So, having that experience, and then… and then, like, doing events with lawyers, and speaking at conventions of lawyers who do illustrated legal documents, this is just, like, this sidetrack of my career that I never would have gotten to if I
• 1:39:30
  R. Sikoryak: maybe wisely stopped making comics and went into animation or something more lucrative. But I always was driven to do this work and to find new ways to tell stories, and that… I guess I hit a sweet spot of this…
• 1:39:43
  R. Sikoryak: Absurd, meaningless thing, plus this topicality of… of… the internet.
• 1:39:49
  R. Sikoryak: made… made my work accessible to a lot more people than… than I would have had any other way. And this all happened… a lot of this happened before the book even came out. It was just from having it on Tumblr. So, to sort of be discovered in that arena, where I was so much older than most of the people who were on Tumblr, even at that point, was just very funny, and it…
• 1:40:10
  R. Sikoryak: It just made me kind of realize that
• 1:40:13
  R. Sikoryak: you have to keep trying different things. You have to kind of keep reinventing yourself. If you're going to have a career, and I talk to my students about this a lot, if you're going to have a career making… making art, you have to keep open to new experiences, and new ways of working, and kind of
• 1:40:29
  R. Sikoryak: breaking your old habits and trying new things. Even though the core of what I was doing in terms of conditions, you could trace back to everything else I'd done commercially and
• 1:40:41
  R. Sikoryak: And everything else I'd done publicly, that I'd put out in the world,
• 1:40:47
  R. Sikoryak: But even so, like, having that… making that thing…
• 1:40:52
  R. Sikoryak: drew attention to my work in lots of new ways, and it didn't… it didn't lead to
• 1:40:58
  R. Sikoryak: A movie deal, or any other, like, life-changing, like.
• 1:41:03
  R. Sikoryak: windfall of cash, but it did kind of reinvigorate me, and… and I still… I still… that book is still in print, and I still show it to people, and some people are like, what is this? How does this exist? And I really started it as a personal project just to try it out, so…
• 1:41:22
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:41:23
  R. Sikoryak: You know, again, it's not… it's not something that… Led to a life…
• 1:41:32
  R. Sikoryak: altering moment in a macro sense, but in a micro sense, I just sort of saw the potential to make things that are.
• 1:41:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and… I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's… I mean, I mean, again, it wasn't… wasn't asking…
• 1:41:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that fits perfectly what I was asking about, which is, like, that surreal, like, oh my god, how did this happen? I mean, like, the way you talked about it, where, like, I suddenly went viral, and I didn't even quite understand why. And then I was on NPR.
• 1:42:02
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah. And this was months after I made it. This was just sort of me, like, putting out in the world, I guess I'll try this.
• 1:42:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and like, as you're saying it and talking about those things, I'm like, you know, I, like, vaguely remember that. Not because I… it was just on the periphery of where I was in comics at the time. I just started reading comics again. I mean, I never completely stopped reading comics, but I just started, like, picking up
• 1:42:27
  Tad Eggleston: monthly comics again in, like.
• 1:42:29
  R. Sikoryak: dignity.
• 1:42:29
  Tad Eggleston: year or two before that, after, you know, my kids were old enough that they didn't cost as much money, and… and, like, I could, and, like, I could even justify it, because I would
• 1:42:39
  Tad Eggleston: Because my son was kind of into comics too, so it was something we did together. But, like, we were very much in the superhero image dark horse world.
• 1:42:51
  Tad Eggleston: And it only touched the edge of that, but, like.
• 1:42:55
  Tad Eggleston: before, you know, I mean, the book that I noticed you with was Constitution Illustrated, but as soon as… as soon as it said from the writer of Terms and Conditions, I… I was able to go, oh, I remember when that was a thing. Haven't read it yet, but, like, it made me know who you were.
• 1:43:11
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:43:12
  Tad Eggleston: So hearing you describe it from your side was…
• 1:43:16
  Tad Eggleston: was fun for me, and I was… Great. I liked that.
• 1:43:19
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:43:19
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I asked this question now.
• 1:43:22
  R. Sikoryak: And you don't… yeah, you just really don't… and I wouldn't have done the con… I don't think I would have thought to do the Constitution if I hadn't done terms and conditions.
• 1:43:29
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:43:29
  R. Sikoryak: So it was kind of like, in some ways it's the same idea, but definitely a little bit more focused and directed. Right. Anyway.
• 1:43:38
  Tad Eggleston: But now…
• 1:43:39
  R. Sikoryak: what people… the thing is, you don't know what… you don't know what's gonna hit with people, and I mean, I always knew that was true, but I also didn't think anything I did would hit. So, that was really interesting to have that experience, and very exciting, and a little scary at the time. I was like, what do I do with this… this momentary power I have?
• 1:43:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:43:59
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:44:01
  Tad Eggleston: So, the final question, and again, I don't remember if this was a question the first time you were on.
• 1:44:07
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
• 1:44:10
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably comics, but we don't have rules.
• 1:44:14
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love.
• 1:44:20
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough other people around you have experienced? And you wish that more of them would, so you had more people to talk about it with.
• 1:44:30
  R. Sikoryak: Hmm, that's… interesting.
• 1:44:33
  R. Sikoryak: Wow, you're asking someone who looks at so many different colleagues!
• 1:44:39
  Tad Eggleston: You don't have to… you can give me more than one, for sure.
• 1:44:42
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:44:43
  Tad Eggleston: of all, like, I ask it the way I ask, you know, initially, like, where the question came from, I'm filling air, giving you time to think, but where the question came from was, like, tell me an underrated comic or whatnot, but I don't like that, because
• 1:44:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I don't… I don't like the… Some…
• 1:45:03
  Tad Eggleston: Every comic is somebody's favorite. Probably even that Tea Party comic, but I hope not.
• 1:45:12
  Tad Eggleston: But… but also, like, I don't like it because, like, what's underrated to one person might be…
• 1:45:20
  Tad Eggleston: overrated to another, or whatnot, and that's not, like, how I like to judge comics, but…
• 1:45:25
  Tad Eggleston: But what is true is almost everybody has that book that they love, that just…
• 1:45:33
  Tad Eggleston: They don't know enough other people who have read it, and they're like, please read this so we can talk about it.
• 1:45:39
  Tad Eggleston: And it's led to so many different recommend… I mean, to give you an idea of the breadth that we get, I like to just use one creative team in separate interviews, so it wasn't when they came on to talk about the book they did together, but… but…
• 1:45:58
  Tad Eggleston: Nate Powell gave me Jonathan Hickman's X-Men. He's like, I know everybody's reading it, but the crowd that I'm in doesn't read weekly superhero comics anymore. But I went… I went to the comic shop recently, and I picked up
• 1:46:11
  Tad Eggleston: an issue, and I'm hooked. I've been going back every Wednesday since.
• 1:46:15
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, wow.
• 1:46:16
  Tad Eggleston: Whereas Andrew Iden, the last time he was on, said my tomato garden. I know it's not a book or whatnot, but I'm really proud of my tomatoes, and I wish that more people could come and taste them and talk to me about them.
• 1:46:32
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, well, so… I have… I have a book that I haven't…
• 1:46:36
  R. Sikoryak: finished reading, but got me excited when I saw it. So I'm gonna walk over to my.
• 1:46:40
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds good. Sounds good. No, I can't do that, because that's copyrighted. If I… if I start into the Jeopardy music, we could get sued or something.
• 1:46:50
  R. Sikoryak: It won't take you that long. So…
• 1:46:52
  R. Sikoryak: this was an anthology that I read about,
• 1:46:58
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, I forget the name of the author. His name is Ryan, and he does something, I think it's called Four Color Reviews or something?
• 1:47:06
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, Ryan, Ryan, Carey. Ryan Carey.
• 1:47:10
  Tad Eggleston: on this show a number of times.
• 1:47:11
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, great. Well, then he may have recommended this. Okay, great.
• 1:47:14
  Tad Eggleston: of mine.
• 1:47:14
  R. Sikoryak: Ryan. I don't think I've met Ryan, but he.
• 1:47:18
  Tad Eggleston: He lives in Minneapolis.
• 1:47:20
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, great. Well, he wrote… he wrote about this anthology. He's not in the anthology, he wrote about it.
• 1:47:26
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 1:47:27
  R. Sikoryak: Or call her epoxy?
• 1:47:28
  Tad Eggleston: apocalypse is totally a Patreon that people should…
• 1:47:31
  Tad Eggleston: should… I mean, A, it's just worth giving Ryan a buck for his thoughts on comics, and B,
• 1:47:38
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody, like… He is the most known person, I swear to God, in, like, the…
• 1:47:45
  Tad Eggleston: underground indie scene. Like, if you want the reviewer that got sent the book that you've never heard of, Ryan's the guy.
• 1:47:56
  R. Sikoryak: this was a book I never heard of, and I'm not… so, Ryan has… has… has introduced me to a lot of stuff I had not seen. Yeah. But I… so… so yes, definitely follow him, but… but this book in particular.
• 1:48:09
  Tad Eggleston: What is it called?
• 1:48:10
  R. Sikoryak: It's called A Live Outside, and it feels to me a little bit like, Kramer's Ergot, if you remember that anthology. I do. Like, very…
• 1:48:20
  R. Sikoryak: dynamic, rather abstract, comics that really come from the artier end of the indie scene, and I just love this kind of work. It always excites me. It's so…
• 1:48:34
  R. Sikoryak: different in its approach to what I grew up with. It's like what I said earlier, it's like, I love seeing people make comics in ways that I'm not familiar with. Who's in here? Trenton Doyle Hancock, Roman Muradov, Ronrigi Jr, Angela Fanch.
• 1:48:50
  R. Sikoryak: I know some of these folks…
• 1:48:51
  Tad Eggleston: Roman Murdoch did a great book at Phanographics recently.
• 1:48:55
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 1:48:55
  Tad Eggleston: Boom.
• 1:48:56
  R. Sikoryak: Yes. So, tons of people in here. I won't, I won't read all.
• 1:48:59
  Tad Eggleston: You sat? I won't really…
• 1:49:00
  R. Sikoryak: off everyone's names, but, but I really love this kind of work, and it's… it's just… it's, like, visually exciting to me, and I… I…
• 1:49:11
  R. Sikoryak: I have always tried in my commercial work to sort of reference things that civilians might know, but this is the kind of work that gets me excited when I see people making comics that don't seem to be thinking about what's happening in comics, even though there is definitely a scene that revolves.
• 1:49:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:49:28
  R. Sikoryak: this kind of work, but it's its own thing. People are making their own work, and just…
• 1:49:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:49:33
  R. Sikoryak: out there.
• 1:49:34
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, and as you show me pages, and as you describe it that way, you also… that's Brian's jam.
• 1:49:41
  Tad Eggleston: comics that are… Different.
• 1:49:46
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, and I would say the other thing about this, it's got inset booklets, it's got rhizograph inserts, it's very…
• 1:49:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, it looks beautiful.
• 1:49:54
  R. Sikoryak: It's very… it evokes, in terms of the format and the insert… inserted…
• 1:50:00
  R. Sikoryak: booklets reminds me a little bit of Raw Magazine, even though it's an aesthetic, definitely, of today, rather than the 80s and 90s. But the other thing is.
• 1:50:10
  R. Sikoryak: all of my books are anthologies. Like, I… I'm not in… I'm not interested in having… making a book that is one style. So when I see an anthology that is so dynamic as this, it gets me very excited, and this is the kind of stuff that I just… that always… that always gets me. So, just having this…
• 1:50:28
  R. Sikoryak: having this around, just makes me happy to see it on my shelf. I do have to finish reading it. But I've liked what I've read of it, and it's… it's… I mean, it's more about the experience of just being in the book, you know, like, seeing the book.
• 1:50:44
  R. Sikoryak: And, you know, looking through it page by page that I find really, really great. And some of it is non-narrative, or not non-narrative, but wordless.
• 1:50:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right.
• 1:50:53
  R. Sikoryak: this is the kind of stuff that just gets me excited. When I saw Ryan wrote about this, I was like, that is something I need to have. So, this is alive outside.
• 1:51:02
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I buy quite a few books, because Ryan… recommends them.
• 1:51:08
  R. Sikoryak: the publisher is, I believe this is… is this Neil?
• 1:51:13
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's Neoglyphic.
• 1:51:15
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, thank you.
• 1:51:16
  Tad Eggleston: It's, it's…
• 1:51:18
  Tad Eggleston: It is still… I'm not actually gonna, like, say the places that it's available yet, just because… I think I bought it from.
• 1:51:26
  R. Sikoryak: the publisher, so…
• 1:51:27
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it is out of stock at the publisher.
• 1:51:30
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, okay.
• 1:51:30
  Tad Eggleston: The reason I'm not saying on air the places that it's available is purely
• 1:51:36
  Tad Eggleston: purely a, a, a, a selfish one, where, where…
• 1:51:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm finding it out of stock so many different places, and it's expensive enough that I can't buy it immediately, that I don't… I don't want them all to go away before I buy my car.
• 1:51:53
  R. Sikoryak: That's funny. That's funny. It's, I mean, it's a… it's a… it's a real…
• 1:52:00
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because, I mean, I will say, it's a $50 book, and you will be able to find it if you go googling a live outside comic anthology. I don't want to make it impossible for people to go be.
• 1:52:10
  R. Sikoryak: Me too.
• 1:52:11
  Tad Eggleston: Retail price is $55, I'm seeing it for $50 in a few places. Bob's holding it up. It's a thick, big book, it's worth every penny. This is not… I did a math lesson in one of my… one of my,
• 1:52:25
  Tad Eggleston: American Nature Presents, too, where I laid out cost per page of My Favorite Thing Is Monsters versus the two best-selling
• 1:52:37
  Tad Eggleston: Single-issue comics that came out that week.
• 1:52:41
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, well, yes, $50 was…
• 1:52:45
  Tad Eggleston: a lot for My Favorite Thing is Monsters. It was, like, less than a third of the per-page story cost.
• 1:52:52
  R. Sikoryak: Nice. That's great.
• 1:52:55
  Tad Eggleston: That's great. Of, like, the Batman and the Spider-Man that came out that week. That's great.
• 1:53:00
  R. Sikoryak: That's great.
• 1:53:02
  Tad Eggleston: So yeah, I will totally plug. Four Color Apocalypse is Ryan Carey. We're gonna have to arrange for you to meet him, you get along with him really well.
• 1:53:12
  R. Sikoryak: If I'm not mistaken, he reviewed my brother's book, so he's, like, in my circuit, but I don't…
• 1:53:17
  Tad Eggleston: That would not shock me at all.
• 1:53:21
  Tad Eggleston: I keep forgetting to reach out to your brother. I keep forgetting to read any of your brother's books. I think I was even at a con your brother was at, and somehow failed to go to his table.
• 1:53:31
  R. Sikoryak: It's hard to get to people at shows, but I know a guy that knows my brother, so I can put you in touch.
• 1:53:36
  Tad Eggleston: No, I figured, I figured.
• 1:53:39
  Tad Eggleston: for R. Sikoriak, the new book is, is,
• 1:53:43
  Tad Eggleston: Declaration and Emancipation Illustrated. It should be in shops by the time you're listening to this, and .
• 1:53:49
  R. Sikoryak: I'm also on tour.
• 1:53:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but not coming to Chicago, you bum.
• 1:53:54
  R. Sikoryak: No, no, sorry. I wish I were, I'd like to go to Chicago, but I'll be in Philadelphia.
• 1:53:58
  Tad Eggleston: I got a comic shop that'd love to have ya.
• 1:54:02
  R. Sikoryak: We'll, we'll talk about… we'll talk…
• 1:54:04
  R. Sikoryak: Talk about transportation. In any case, I'm gonna be in Philadelphia July 3rd, I'm gonna be at New York… New York City, where I live, July 11th, I'm gonna be in Baltimore on August 18th, and I'm gonna be at San Diego Comic-Con for all four days, doing as much as I can to promote this book, so…
• 1:54:24
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:54:24
  R. Sikoryak: I'm making the rounds if you are in any of those four states.
• 1:54:29
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know if I'll be in any of them in the times that you are, but I am hoping to get out to New York.
• 1:54:35
  Tad Eggleston: for New York Comic-Con, and if I do, then we'll see each other.
• 1:54:39
  Tad Eggleston: You know, cross your fingers for me. It all depends on whether or not they,
• 1:54:44
  Tad Eggleston: They approve panels.
• 1:54:46
  Tad Eggleston: Cuz, cuz, like…
• 1:54:49
  Tad Eggleston: I can't afford the tickets. It's really that simple. I mean, I guess I can get a pro ticket now, and that makes it cheaper, but… but I don't know if I can justify the…
• 1:55:01
  Tad Eggleston: The other costs without the panels?
• 1:55:04
  Tad Eggleston: And with the panels, I have a… I have a… I might have a…
• 1:55:09
  Tad Eggleston: what's the word I'm looking? Benefactor! Yeah, I have a benefactor that will… that will happily make certain that I can come out from my panels.
• 1:55:17
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:55:19
  R. Sikoryak: Is it Abel Magwitch?
• 1:55:22
  Tad Eggleston: What?
• 1:55:23
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, he's… Abel Magwitch is the character from Great Expectations. Sorry if I spoiled Great Expectations.
• 1:55:28
  R. Sikoryak: for people.
• 1:55:29
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:55:31
  R. Sikoryak: So.
• 1:55:32
  Tad Eggleston: Again, for R. Sikoriak, this has been 22 Panelists, and we will see you after the next page.