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With Great Power #355... 22 Panels with Zack Quaintance · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:02
Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight returning is, Zack Quaintance of The Beat, and of Death of Comics Bookcase, Reign of the Comics Bookcases, with 27 days left to go on Kickstarter, and only…
0:21
Tad Eggleston: A little less than two grand away from your goal.
0:25
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
0:26
Tad Eggleston: my head, because that's what I do. It's, 1640 away from the goal.
0:35
Tad Eggleston: So, you know, hopefully by the weekend.
0:39
Zack Quaintance: That would be nice, I could get a more restful night of sleep, I feel like, knowing it's fun. Thanks for having me back, by the way, I'm super excited.
0:47
Tad Eggleston: Of course!
0:48
Zack Quaintance: accurate, yeah.
0:49
Tad Eggleston: It was fun the last time! You're… you're welcome back anytime.
0:53
Tad Eggleston: Thanks, man, I appreciate it.
0:54
Zack Quaintance: But, yeah.
0:55
Tad Eggleston: You have, like, a life, and jobs, and…
1:00
Tad Eggleston: I think a family, I can't remember. Do you have kids running around?
1:04
Zack Quaintance: No kids, I do have a dog. I have a minute.
1:07
Tad Eggleston: That can almost be the same thing.
1:12
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, he's a lot. So… busy with all.
1:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so give us the, the front counter pitch for Death of the Comics Book Case.
1:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, Death of Comics Bookcase Volume 2 is a sci-fi adventure comic in which a group of kids get a strange invite to a mysterious school event where they rediscover the comics bookcase.
1:35
Zack Quaintance: who's going to give them comics and take them to new worlds, whether they want to go or not. And in those new worlds, they will find oddball superheroes, comic…
1:47
Zack Quaintance: comics creators feuding at Comic-Con, wizards, apes fighting sharks.
1:52
Zack Quaintance: And Los Angeles during the sloppocalypse.
1:55
Zack Quaintance: So yeah, that's what's going on with this one, there's a lot.
1:59
Tad Eggleston: It worked for me. It worked for me.
2:02
Zack Quaintance: Thank you.
2:02
Tad Eggleston: I like how… I like how you kind of hit…
2:07
Tad Eggleston: Hit the primary genres of comics, and kind of took a moment to… to…
2:13
Tad Eggleston: To lampoon the industry as well.
2:18
Tad Eggleston: While at the same time doing it all in good fun, and with the…
2:22
Tad Eggleston: I mean, as, as pointed out by the sloppocalypse, and… and…
2:27
Tad Eggleston: what was it, shark Trump?
2:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, sure.
2:32
Tad Eggleston: That's true.
2:32
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
2:34
Zack Quaintance: We were talking beforehand that I actually… I didn't send you the link to the first one, and I feel like, of all the stories, the Apes and sharks one would have made a lot more sense had you read the first one, where ape and Shark Trump figure more prominently, but yeah.
2:48
Zack Quaintance: There's a shark Trump in this book.
2:51
Tad Eggleston: But, but, but, so yeah, no, I mean, I, I enjoy, I enjoy something that is light-hearted.
2:57
Tad Eggleston: but… has levels, and I feel like… I feel like you did that. You've got… You know…
3:05
Tad Eggleston: Some… some kind of statements about, society and some… Reflections of the industry, and…
3:20
Tad Eggleston: just general fun, and I hope that's what's true.
3:23
Zack Quaintance: You're saying that.
3:23
Tad Eggleston: Because that's what you achieved.
3:26
Zack Quaintance: That's definitely what I was going for, like, my favorite type of comics are the ones that kind of start
3:33
Zack Quaintance: With a ridiculous premise, like a total comic book-y presence that really wouldn't…
3:38
Zack Quaintance: kind of get people to go along with it in any other medium. And then, as you're engaging with it and having fun, they kind of have a little more substance than you initially thought. Like, the kind of Garth Ennis school of doing that, right? Like, I feel like he's…
3:52
Tad Eggleston: It's… it's actually really funny. The comic I read right after finishing Death of the Comics Bookcase, or Death… Death of Comics Bookcase, I keep… I keep inserting a the, even though I'm staring at it, and there's no the.
4:08
Tad Eggleston: Sorry.
4:09
Zack Quaintance: Still sounds the same.
4:11
Tad Eggleston: was… was issue 5 of Babs, which… which absolutely does that. That whole series does that. The… the… the, here's your genre, but… no.
4:22
Tad Eggleston: So…
4:23
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I feel like he starts out wanting to make fun of stuff a lot, and then not being able to do it all the way, like, he has to take his, world and characters a little bit seriously with his stuff.
4:36
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I… I mean…
4:40
Tad Eggleston: as it happens, I have him on the schedule to talk about Babs, so I'm certain that I will be asking stuff like that, but I don't think he ever…
4:50
Tad Eggleston: It never feels like he's not aware that he's gonna be talking about some of the stuff.
4:56
Tad Eggleston: But I think he always… often tries to, like, sugarcoat the pill.
5:01
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, 100%.
5:03
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, that's what I really love about his work, and it's, like, like, I feel like comics has this unique ability to be silly and ridiculous on one page, and then turn the page and just hit you with feelings really hard, that I don't know that other, like, TV and movies
5:22
Zack Quaintance: they need a little more time, usually, to change tones, and one of the things I love about comics is the way you're able to do both relentlessly silly stuff and also find deeper meaning.
5:33
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't even think you have to turn the page all the time. I mean.
5:36
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
5:37
Tad Eggleston: I think sometimes you can…
5:38
Zack Quaintance: Panel, right?
5:39
Tad Eggleston: No, I, I, I, I remember,
5:42
Tad Eggleston: I saw an interview with Abram X. Kendi right after the… the…
5:48
Tad Eggleston: adaptation of Stamped from the Beginning that Jill Christian Gill did with him had come out. He was asked about why he did it in graphic novel format, and he's like, well…
5:58
Tad Eggleston: some really heavy stuff. Like, really heavy stuff, and in comics, like, you can bring levity without taking away the gravity in a way that you can't do in prose.
6:12
Zack Quaintance: 100%, yeah.
6:14
Tad Eggleston: You know, in prose, if you try to bring levity to it, it's like, you suck the gravity out. But in comics, you can do, like, I remember the, like, the running thing in that, because that book…
6:28
Tad Eggleston: It deals with race relations from, like, pre…
6:33
Tad Eggleston: Revolutionary times up until the current time, but one of the running
6:40
Tad Eggleston: running gags, so to speak, is, like, the head of Angela Davis popping up and going, oh, this feels familiar.
6:48
Tad Eggleston: You know, so you've got the person from the end of the book popping up in the 1600s going, hmm…
6:56
Tad Eggleston: And again, if you do that sort of thing in prose, like… It's…
7:02
Zack Quaintance: It's harder to get people to go along with you, with it, that kind of thing, you know.
7:05
Tad Eggleston: Whereas you do… you do that in the comic, and you both get to laugh?
7:09
Tad Eggleston: But also go.
7:11
Tad Eggleston: it, like, both brings the laugh and actually adds to the gravity. Oh, we're not actually just talking about a problem from the 1600s. She's alive now!
7:25
Zack Quaintance: That's such a good example.
7:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
7:32
Tad Eggleston: one of my favorites, just because, I mean.
7:35
Tad Eggleston: I loved the book before it was a comic, I think it's an important read, but I think the comic…
7:40
Tad Eggleston: is…
7:42
Tad Eggleston: So valuable because of the way that it lays all of that out, the way that it bends time, in ways that, as we were just talking about, only comics can.
7:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, bending time is another…
7:57
Zack Quaintance: Thing you can do more… in more interesting ways with comics than you can in prose, or film, even.
8:03
Tad Eggleston: Movies, yeah, I mean, it's just…
8:06
Tad Eggleston: There's something really special about the comics medium, and it's always fun when creators… Lean into that.
8:17
Tad Eggleston: As you leaned into comics tropes. See, I can bring it back.
8:24
Zack Quaintance: there was a lot of that in this book, because it's like, you know, I did… last time I was on here, I was talking about my horror comic, which is one… one story, it was a 30-page issue,
8:34
Zack Quaintance: And, like, I love horror, and I love horror comics. That's kind of the one genre that's not really represented in this book, because I did it in that one. And so part of the goal with this book was to get to play
8:45
Zack Quaintance: With all those other comics tropes and the classic genres.
8:50
Tad Eggleston: Though I will toss out that even though you don't strictly use horror, the bookcase itself is… is… like…
8:59
Tad Eggleston: a nod to the Crypt Keeper.
9:02
Zack Quaintance: Totally, totally, yeah. I mean, like, I'm gonna have you read the first one, so…
9:07
Zack Quaintance: This one, he's much… he's much more Crypt Keeper-y, like, it's…
9:10
Tad Eggleston: See?
9:12
Zack Quaintance: The first one has more of a horror tone to the framing sequence, especially, and the first short in that one is horror, and then it kind of, like, sets the tone through the rest of it, whereas this one's more of, like… the framing sequence is a superhero. It's an homage to Reign of the Supermen, really.
9:29
Tad Eggleston: Right.
9:29
Zack Quaintance: So that kind of sets the tone for… and our first story, the main… the Nick Cagnetti one is a superhero story. And I think we just kind of… there's not another superhero story, but we use some of the, tropes of superheroes in the framing sequence, and…
9:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that just kind of sets the tone for the book throughout, is we're gonna have some fun with, superhero tropes and structure and adventure comics, so that was the goal.
9:59
Tad Eggleston: And I think he's just, without…
10:01
Tad Eggleston: realizing it, and I don't think I'd thought of it this way in a while, you just called out the, like.
10:09
Tad Eggleston: first… Certainly the first DC, because I'm through and through a Marvel boy.
10:14
Tad Eggleston: like… multi-title event.
10:20
Tad Eggleston: that I ever followed religiously was Reign of the Superman.
10:25
Tad Eggleston: I picked all of those up when they were coming at me.
10:28
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, but the…
10:31
Zack Quaintance: We're probably somewhat close in age, if not the same age.
10:34
Tad Eggleston: Whatever.
10:35
Zack Quaintance: The first event I remember existing, or being aware of, was Death of Superman. Like…
10:41
Zack Quaintance: That was the first giant comic book thing.
10:45
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, see, the first event that I remember being aware of…
10:49
Tad Eggleston: And this story's been told a few times. The very first comic I got to buy at the comic shop
10:55
Tad Eggleston: And I had to twist my dad's arm a little bit, because it was 75 cents, and the other ones were, I think, $60 or $40 at the time.
11:03
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. Was…
11:04
Tad Eggleston: was Secret Wars number one.
11:07
Tad Eggleston: Because it had all of the heroes. And when you're 4 years old, all of the heroes means better.
11:16
Zack Quaintance: Oh yeah, you wanna see… you wanna see as many as you can, right?
11:21
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. It's like, we've got… I mean, I remember, like, pretty distinctly, like, what I remember is I was debating between the…
11:33
Tad Eggleston: whichever Spider-Man Marvel team-up I'd picked. And, you know, it was one of those shops where they had, like.
11:42
Tad Eggleston: copies of multiple months back, so, you know, I found the team-ups, and I flipped through until I found the one that I liked, and… and… and I had… and I had, World's Finest with Superman and Batman. I had those two in my hand.
11:56
Tad Eggleston: I was debating between the two when I…
11:59
Tad Eggleston: saw The Secret Wars, and that became the only book I wanted, because it had all of the heroes.
12:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that era, like, you were always an issue away from either Spider-Man or Wolverine coming, like, remember? Like, or maybe those were just the comics I was buying as a little kid, because it had two heroes, you know?
12:21
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it took me a while to get into Wolverine and the X-Men.
12:25
Tad Eggleston: Though I became aware of them from my Secret Wars, because they were in Secret Wars, but Spidey was totally my guy, and I loved that he had
12:35
Tad Eggleston: Team-up, which meant that That there was always a him AND somebody.
12:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Because it's always better with more heroes.
12:45
Zack Quaintance: As we've established.
12:47
Tad Eggleston: Well, it's just… in my head, it's still funny that that's how I was, because my son was such a villain guy.
12:55
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding.
12:56
Tad Eggleston: His favorite in Star Wars was Darth Vader, he got into Venom, he got… like, my son was such a villain guy, and I.
13:03
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
13:04
Tad Eggleston: stood at him, like, dude, but there's… there's Han Solo! Yeah, yeah.
13:11
Zack Quaintance: Guys are kind of polar opposites there.
13:13
Zack Quaintance: At least.
13:14
Tad Eggleston: At least on that. We're alike in a lot of ways, but at least…
13:18
Tad Eggleston: in our childhoods, we went the opposite directions in terms of who was cooler. He would have gotten into Secret Wars with the later covers, all the Doctor Doom ones.
13:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it had its share of villains as well.
13:31
Tad Eggleston: And they do.
13:32
Zack Quaintance: No, not short on villains, that comic, yeah, but they come later.
13:36
Tad Eggleston: Now, I should quickly give the shout-out, we did just start reading Secret Wars and Infinite Crisis on the Heroes of Bronze Book Club.
13:43
Tad Eggleston: The first episode actually posted today, and it'll be monthly. Anybody listening who likes those books, we are… we are going through them with… with the Heroes of Bronze Book Club on 22 Panels. Every once in a while, I give myself cross-promotion. I forget most of the time. This is where I should say that I have a Patreon if people want to give me money, because I always forget to say that.
14:05
Zack Quaintance: Modern life is very challenging. You know, with all these things, you gotta…
14:10
Zack Quaintance: Can't just have fun anymore, you know?
14:13
Tad Eggleston: That's pretty much what I do.
14:16
Tad Eggleston: But, I mean… It'd be helpful to pay for the comics.
14:20
Tad Eggleston: Through the Patreon.
14:22
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't have crazy, crazy thoughts of, like.
14:27
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, let me rephrase. I totally have crazy thoughts of making a living… a living through comics, I just don't believe them.
14:36
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
14:38
Zack Quaintance: You're… so, yeah, you have a good grip on reality.
14:42
Tad Eggleston: If it happens, I won't turn it away, but I'm not quitting my day job.
14:48
Zack Quaintance: No, yeah.
14:50
Zack Quaintance: I mean, yeah, if there's one thing we've learned in the last 10 years, it's day job is key for a lot of success in comics, like, all different.
14:59
Tad Eggleston: Insurance is nice.
15:00
Zack Quaintance: Yes.
15:01
Tad Eggleston: Health insurance is nice.
15:03
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think this is…
15:05
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
15:05
Tad Eggleston: I think this is one of the reasons we're seeing more and more creators either from overseas or emigrating from overseas, because it's, like, easier to choose to take a freelance job when you don't have to worry about health insurance.
15:20
Zack Quaintance: I mean, yeah, it's… it's… yeah, it's like… and there's also a stability thing, too, like…
15:27
Zack Quaintance: for me, doing… I do, like, one big indie comic a year, right? And I need to plan that, like…
15:34
Zack Quaintance: a full year in advance, essentially, like, keep the ball rolling from one to the next. So if I'm, like, putting myself at the mercy of comics, like, in any kind of way, where it's tangled up with my finances, like, suddenly it becomes a lot harder to be able to plan that year in advance, you know what I mean?
15:50
Zack Quaintance: So, like, the day job is really the engine that keeps the comics coming, in a very clear sense. Like, it takes time away. I could write a lot more comics.
16:00
Zack Quaintance: If I wasn't doing it, but…
16:03
Zack Quaintance: To have the stability is key to financing them and keep the production running.
16:08
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
16:09
Tad Eggleston: Yeah And yet, we love it anyway and do it.
16:14
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, yeah, and when I'm not working or writing comics, I'm doing comics journalism as well, so…
16:18
Tad Eggleston: Right! I mean, this is…
16:21
Zack Quaintance: I don't stop.
16:22
Tad Eggleston: It is something… it is something interesting about the world of comics that, like, we're all aware.
16:28
Tad Eggleston: That, like, the money doesn't make sense.
16:31
Zack Quaintance: The people who stick with it, yeah, like, I feel like we don't see this type of person as much anymore, but I, like, when I started doing it, like, I don't know, like, 8…
16:39
Zack Quaintance: 7 or 8 years ago, people would show up every few years and be like, I'm gonna start a podcast or a blog, and it's gonna hit big. I'm gonna be, like, the next,
16:49
Zack Quaintance: CBR that gets bought for a million dollars or whatever, you know? And I think that's kind of stopped, like, you don't really see… I mean, I think maybe those people are influencers now? Like, they're doing, short videos on… TikTok?
17:01
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah.
17:02
Zack Quaintance: There's a ton of that going around.
17:04
Tad Eggleston: But there's a career that I never realized would exist when I was a kid.
17:10
Zack Quaintance: No, how could you? Like, how could you even conceive of that? It would have been impossible.
17:14
Tad Eggleston: I make videos, and people give me money.
17:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I don't… I don't get it, myself. I don't like watching influencer videos, I don't… I don't make my own, like, you know.
17:29
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think even most of the short videos I watch probably aren't the ones that people actually get paid for.
17:36
Tad Eggleston: Though, so…
17:38
Tad Eggleston: though there was, and I haven't watched a ton of them, but I've seen a couple, there is some, like, old guy whose… whose, like, grandkids helped him
17:48
Tad Eggleston: start making videos that's pretty fucking funny, and could be making money at this point, because I know he gets massive
17:58
Tad Eggleston: views to…
18:00
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
18:01
Zack Quaintance: Well, there wasn't…
18:02
Tad Eggleston: Talk about being old making TikToks!
18:05
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. He's like an old guy who does Gen Z stuff.
18:09
Tad Eggleston: Right.
18:13
Zack Quaintance: But actually.
18:15
Tad Eggleston: Ghost of what? With the what?
18:19
Zack Quaintance: Part of my angst with, influencer culture is in the book, funny enough. It is. With that… the Nick Cagnetti story, yeah, the… I guess you'd call them villains, they're, like, influencers as zombies, kind of controlled by the needing to get engagement, and sacrifices.
18:37
Zack Quaintance: dead mall, which you might… you might have even heard… like, a lot of people have been asking me, like, so what mall inspired this? And it's actually my childhood mall in Bloomingdale, Illinois, Stratford Square.
18:48
Tad Eggleston: Isn't it?
18:49
Zack Quaintance: Maybe you've heard of, yeah.
18:51
Tad Eggleston: I have not only heard of that, that was my childhood mall.
18:54
Zack Quaintance: No kidding, was it really?
18:56
Tad Eggleston: I grew up in Wheaton, Illinois.
18:58
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I grew up in Glendale Heights, so…
19:02
Tad Eggleston: Okay, so yeah, it was essentially right between us.
19:05
Zack Quaintance: gone… where you were, you could have gone to St. Charles Mall as well.
19:09
Tad Eggleston: Except that St. Charles didn't even open until I was in high school.
19:13
Zack Quaintance: Oh, did it really? Oh, yeah, I guess I wasn't aware of that.
19:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, like, middle school…
19:18
Zack Quaintance: aerosol, so it had a…
19:20
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it did.
19:20
Zack Quaintance: A thing in it. It did.
19:21
Tad Eggleston: But it was a little bit… it was actually a little bit farther away from me, because I literally lived, like, 3 blocks from Gary Avenue.
19:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, no kidding.
19:30
Tad Eggleston: So, I could just shoot up north.
19:32
Zack Quaintance: Not to get into this too much, what high school did you go to?
19:35
Tad Eggleston: I went to Wheaton North.
19:37
Zack Quaintance: Okay, I went to Glenbard West in Glen Ellen, so…
19:39
Tad Eggleston: Wow.
19:40
Zack Quaintance: Where, yeah.
19:41
Tad Eggleston: I knew a bunch of people at Glombard West.
19:42
Zack Quaintance: I mean, I think they're bordering ta- like, bordering districts.
19:45
Tad Eggleston: they are.
19:46
Zack Quaintance: So, like, Whedon and, Glenbard, yeah.
19:49
Tad Eggleston: They are. Well, Glenbard almost surrounds Wheaton, because Glenbard North is north of Wheaton North. Glenbard West and East are…
19:58
Tad Eggleston: west of… or east of Wheaton North, and Glenbard South is almost in Wheaton.
20:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, we had kids at West who lived in Whedon, like, parts of.
20:08
Tad Eggleston: Right.
20:08
Zack Quaintance: Parts of the district for Glenbard West is in Whedon. Not a lot, but enough, you know.
20:13
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
20:14
Tad Eggleston: And I assume you know Lucas was filmed there.
20:17
Zack Quaintance: Oh, of course, yeah, that's all anyone…
20:19
Tad Eggleston: Everybody at Glenvard West knows that Lucas was filmed there.
20:23
Zack Quaintance: things people talk about at West are Lucas was filmed there, and Sean Hayes went to high school there. Like, those are the two… those are the two things you learn on, like, day one in orientation.
20:33
Tad Eggleston: Right, right. No, I, I, I, you're the Hilltoppers.
20:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I tell people, my high school mascot was the Hilltoppers, and they're like, what? Like, no, the school was on a hill, and they're like, that doesn't explain what a hilltop is.
20:45
Tad Eggleston: No, I, I also, in the, the…
20:51
Tad Eggleston: God, it would have been the late 2000s, I worked at the Glen Ellen Sunrise, so I had a lot of Glenbard West kids that came and volunteered.
21:02
Tad Eggleston: In my dementia department, and we once took… took a bus full of kid… er, a bus full of,
21:08
Tad Eggleston: our residents out to a Glenbard West baseball game.
21:11
Zack Quaintance: Oh, cool. Yeah.
21:13
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
21:15
Zack Quaintance: You know, I went to… did you go to community college by any chance? I went to college at DuPage, also in that area.
21:20
Tad Eggleston: I spent some… I spent some time at COD. My son is currently taking classes at COD.
21:26
Zack Quaintance: Hey, I'm a COD alumni. I got my associate's degree at COD. Oh, wow!
21:31
Tad Eggleston: Wow, see? See, I don't have any degrees, you know, one of these things.
21:36
Zack Quaintance: Nobody… Maybe get…
21:37
Tad Eggleston: associates.
21:39
Zack Quaintance: even most people who go to a community college don't… you don't need to get an associate's when you go to, like, you can just… because I… I transferred to.
21:46
Tad Eggleston: Though they're way more valuable than I realized when…
21:50
Tad Eggleston: I was there, so, like, in hindsight, I wish that I'd done…
21:55
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I spent most of my community college time at Prairie State in Chicago Heights, but in hindsight, like, if I'd done
22:03
Tad Eggleston: a couple of classes differently. I could have gotten an associate's degree.
22:07
Tad Eggleston: And then, when I didn't finish my four-year college, I would still have that, and it would have been…
22:13
Tad Eggleston: Of value, but…
22:15
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that's how I figured.
22:17
Tad Eggleston: But that's my public service announcement to any kids listening right now. There is value to having your associates if you're starting.
22:25
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, they… Illinois, and this is very specific to kids who live in Illinois, but Illinois.
22:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but…
22:30
Zack Quaintance: Their state schools has a rule that you have to… if you get your associates, you go in as a junior status, like…
22:35
Tad Eggleston: That's true, too.
22:36
Zack Quaintance: considered an upperclassman, which gives you some advantage. Like, you don't have to take some of the, core curriculum that way.
22:43
Tad Eggleston: Right.
22:43
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I did that. But the crazy… to get back to the mall, when I was on Instagram one day, scrolling and watching Dead Mall's videos, and Stratford Square popped up, and I was like, that's my mall. Like, this is so weird. And then, you know.
23:00
Tad Eggleston: There's actually a grocery store where one of the, anchor stores used to be.
23:05
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no, I knew they demolished it. Like, it's been… it's no longer fodder for influencers, it has been raised.
23:11
Tad Eggleston: Right.
23:12
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I didn't realize it had been raised entirely. I just… I just knew that… that a corner of it had been turned into a woodman's.
23:19
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, I think that might still be standing, and they want to turn it into some kind of, like, multi-use development, like you see, like, that has, like, a little mix of retail and houses and stuff.
23:30
Tad Eggleston: Right.
23:31
Zack Quaintance: it's a real bummer. I don't know if you experienced this with it. Like, I felt sad for the loss of this mall. Like, I spent a lot.
23:38
Tad Eggleston: No, huh.
23:38
Zack Quaintance: I'm in that mall as a kid, you know?
23:40
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, I guess it's been long enough since I was down there that I hadn't realized that it had gone that far, particularly because, I mean, literally, the mall that I was thinking about when
23:55
Tad Eggleston: I was reading it was Charlestown, because Charlestown became… an absolute… dead mall.
24:06
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
24:07
Tad Eggleston: Way earlier than Stratford did.
24:09
Tad Eggleston: You know, I feel like I've gone to movies at Stratford In the last… 5 years, maybe?
24:18
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I have too, like, I used to go… when my… my parents still lived in.
24:25
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, no, it is recent, 2024.
24:29
Tad Eggleston: Demolition finished in… yeah, so that's, like, new new.
24:33
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
24:34
Zack Quaintance: It was right… that was… yeah, that's right when I wrote this, because I was kind of going through a thing of morning. Like, I'd seen it… I'd seen all these influencers, like, converge on this mall, where I had a lot of good memories. Like, I would go there to see movies and goof off with my friends, and was still going there in the last 5 years… like you said, 5 years, because I'd go home for Christmas and we'd go see a movie at the mall. There wasn't much else going on in the mall.
24:54
Tad Eggleston: Well, now, when you're home for Christmas, you gotta give me a call and we'll go for coffee. I didn't rea…
24:58
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
24:59
Tad Eggleston: came up the last time you were on, I didn't realize.
25:01
Zack Quaintance: I think maybe I mentioned I was from Chicago, but I don't think we talked specific…
25:05
Tad Eggleston: Right.
25:06
Zack Quaintance: Corner of the… the exact same corner of the suburbs, yeah.
25:10
Tad Eggleston: Right!
25:11
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, my family's in Downers now, so it's a.
25:14
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
25:15
Tad Eggleston: My first… my first job was at the Downers Grove South Best Buy.
25:21
Tad Eggleston: the one…
25:22
Zack Quaintance: Oh my, this is crazy! I worked at the Panera that was, like, in the same, it may have opened later than when you worked at that.
25:29
Tad Eggleston: I think so, because that was at that Best Buy. On Butterfield, yeah.
25:33
Zack Quaintance: I worked at a Panera that was right down from that Best Buy.
25:37
Tad Eggleston: 96 and 97, and I then was back again for a little bit in 99.
25:45
Zack Quaintance: So we would have just missed each other. I started working there in, like, 2001.
25:49
Tad Eggleston: Okay, yeah, yeah.
25:50
Zack Quaintance: I just… my story about that Best Buy is one year they were giving out a JC Chavez from NSYNC bobblehead doll. He was huge at the time, in 2001, 2002, for, Black Friday shoppers, which was a huge thing at Best Buy.
26:03
Zack Quaintance: And he got mobbed… he tried to go to the Best Buy, because I guess he had family in the area, so he was there in the… those suburbs for Thanksgiving. So he tried to go to Best Buy to get his own bobblehead and got mobbed.
26:14
Zack Quaintance: And ran and hid in our Panera.
26:17
Tad Eggleston: See, I was at that Best Buy.
26:23
Tad Eggleston: when the Nintendo 64 dropped.
26:28
Tad Eggleston: there were… 800 people in the parking lot for the, like, 60 of them that we had?
26:37
Zack Quaintance: That's crazy.
26:39
Tad Eggleston: The very front of the line, with his mom.
26:42
Tad Eggleston: who agreed to do it with him because he'd been saving the money forever, and not just save the money for the system, but save the… he'd figured out what he needed for the system, and the games that he wanted, and… and… an extra controller, and he knew he needed an adapter to be able to hook it to his TV, and he'd saved all the money, he'd worked out the tax.
27:01
Tad Eggleston: You know, he'd been saving for, like, a year, which is why his mom was willing to…
27:06
Tad Eggleston: They'd literally gotten in line at, like… we… we bumped into them leaving the night before.
27:14
Tad Eggleston: You know, when we closed the store the night before and went to our cars, they were already waiting.
27:21
Tad Eggleston: He came in, he was the first one, he bought it. As he was walking out, he got offered 6 times as much money as he'd paid for it.
27:31
Tad Eggleston: In cash.
27:34
Tad Eggleston: And he did. And his mom was just in awe, she's like.
27:37
Zack Quaintance: Smart kid.
27:39
Tad Eggleston: you've been saving for this forever, and he just looked at her, and like, he's like, they're gonna be easy to get in, like, a month, and she just gave me $4,000. I mean.
27:50
Zack Quaintance: I, like, to be honest, yeah, I don't know if I would have had that kind of self-control as a kid, like, I would have wanted to play Mario 64 so bad, you know?
27:58
Tad Eggleston: And he did! I mean, you saw him waver over it, right?
28:03
Tad Eggleston: Like, it was a decision for him.
28:09
Zack Quaintance: That's funny, man. You know, another interesting thing about that area is… do you remember the magazine, EGM, Electronic Gaming Monthly?
28:16
Tad Eggleston: Vaguely.
28:18
Zack Quaintance: Their offices are over there, so they'd come into Panera all the… yeah, yeah, the…
28:22
Tad Eggleston: Gotcha.
28:23
Zack Quaintance: Ziff Davis Publishing used to be in either Downers or Lombard, right?
28:27
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
28:28
Zack Quaintance: intersects right there. And so they'd come into Panera, and I'd be, like, starstruck over the guys from EGM being there.
28:35
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
28:35
Zack Quaintance: You guys are the review crew, like… That, that, that…
28:38
Tad Eggleston: The first time I met… And I pieced it together long, long later. The first time I met Dal.
28:48
Tad Eggleston: of,
28:53
Tad Eggleston: Challengers Comics and Conversation in Chicago was when he was… he was running the Graham Crackers in Downers Grove.
29:01
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding, yeah. So, was that your childhood comic shop?
29:04
Tad Eggleston: No, I was there… I went there… my girlfriend, who was at Glenbard South, was playing a softball tournament near there, and it was between games, and I needed something to do, so I went to the comic shop.
29:16
Tad Eggleston: I picked up, Grant Morrison and, and Philip Bond's Kill Your Girlfriend.
29:22
Zack Quaintance: Nice.
29:23
Zack Quaintance: But, my childhood comic shop was Graham Crackers in Glendale Heights. It's not there.
29:28
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
29:29
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Graham crackers is still all over.
29:32
Zack Quaintance: Right.
29:32
Tad Eggleston: But…
29:33
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
29:34
Tad Eggleston: I see.
29:35
Zack Quaintance: It was a small location.
29:37
Tad Eggleston: Cause that was the one… was that the one that… Cause I…
29:41
Tad Eggleston: did they have the store that was on… and this is fa… well, this is actually fascinating for at least half of our regular listeners, because my mom and brother are listening, so… so I don't have to worry as much about it at all.
29:54
Zack Quaintance: I think people in comics know about graham crackers, too. You see them at.
29:58
Tad Eggleston: Right.
29:58
Zack Quaintance: in New York and stuff, you know.
29:59
Tad Eggleston: Right, but… but did they have… was the Glendale Heights on… Would have been what?
30:06
Tad Eggleston: Army Trail and Bloomingdale?
30:08
Zack Quaintance: Roughly? Yeah.
30:10
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
30:10
Zack Quaintance: I was on Bloomingdale Road a few blocks.
30:13
Zack Quaintance: off of Army Trail, but Army Trail.
30:14
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
30:16
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. And it moved… it eventually moved…
30:18
Zack Quaintance: moved closer to Army Trail, so it was right at that intersection for a while, in the mid.
30:23
Tad Eggleston: Because that actually continued being a comic shop for longer after Graham Crackers left.
30:30
Zack Quaintance: And there's still a comic shop now at that intersection, I don't know what it's called, I apologize.
30:35
Tad Eggleston: I forget what it's called right now.
30:36
Zack Quaintance: whoever runs it, yeah, it's not.
30:38
Tad Eggleston: No, I like it.
30:38
Zack Quaintance: anymore.
30:39
Tad Eggleston: I'm certain that I can… because what I do… well, I haven't been to it in a while, but the last time I was at it, what I loved was the number of sets they had. I love the stores that are smart enough to go, oh, I have a complete run of this, let me bundle it.
30:56
Zack Quaintance: I was buying sets of, like, old Valiant comics last time I was in there and stuff, like, yeah, they do bundles with their back issues.
31:02
Tad Eggleston: I mean, this is where I'll also give a shout-out to Rainbow in Sioux Falls, which is my wife's hometown.
31:12
Tad Eggleston: Because they have a ridiculous number of bundles, which is actually something that they have… They have done,
31:24
Tad Eggleston: since I started going there,
31:27
Tad Eggleston: So they clearly spent some time at…
31:29
Zack Quaintance: Cool move, yeah. I love, when people do have back issues, and they also kind of, like…
31:35
Zack Quaintance: Not all shops do… some shops will curate. They'll be like, here, this bundle's awesome, and put a little note on it, or whatever, you know?
31:40
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. Well, and the one in Glendale Heights, again, I think it's probably been 5 years since, because I went there the mo… I used to… there's an apartment complex that's on the southeast corner.
31:52
Tad Eggleston: of Army Trail and Bloomingdale that I used to have
31:57
Tad Eggleston: friends that lived in. So when I did, I'd go to that shop.
32:01
Tad Eggleston: semi-regularly. And I've been to it slightly more recently than that, just because it's also close enough to the highway that when I'm going down there.
32:09
Zack Quaintance: It is right off the highway, 355, I think, yeah.
32:12
Tad Eggleston: Right, 355.
32:16
Zack Quaintance: I'm getting homesick, thinking about all these plays, because like I said, my…
32:21
Tad Eggleston: Maybe you should come home for Thanksgiving this year.
32:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, maybe Christmas… yeah, we'll see. I'll let you know if I do, but
32:28
Tad Eggleston: Mom, I'm coming home from Thanksgiving so I can go comic shopping with Tad.
32:32
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
32:33
Tad Eggleston: bad.
32:34
Zack Quaintance: I'm gonna… yeah, I was just like, what are you talking about? But they, yeah, they, like I said, they moved to Downers, so I haven't been to Glendale Heights specifically, or even.
32:42
Tad Eggleston: Alright.
32:43
Zack Quaintance: Stratford area, and, like, since, pre-pandemic, really. Like, right around the pan… like, 2019 was probably the last time I was out in that area.
32:51
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I live way up north, but my son and grandkids are in Wheaton, so…
32:58
Tad Eggleston: I still have good reasons to… to… To go down.
33:03
Zack Quaintance: Whedon's a nice little suburb, like, Whedon and Glen Ellen are both very nice little suburbs.
33:08
Tad Eggleston: Well, they're nicer still that they're not quite as…
33:14
Tad Eggleston: Well, Glen Allen was… was never quite as crazy Christian as Wheaton was when I.
33:19
Zack Quaintance: No, no.
33:19
Tad Eggleston: But, but, but Wheaton's not… as crazy Christian as it was when I grew up, so…
33:26
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, because we'd always have those…
33:28
Tad Eggleston: There's actually a Democrat for their representative now.
33:34
Zack Quaintance: I heard about that, yeah. But we'd always say these things, like, you know, they don't allow dancing in Whedon.
33:39
Tad Eggleston: At Wheaton College. Only at Wheaton College.
33:43
Zack Quaintance: Oops.
33:44
Tad Eggleston: Somehow, somehow counts Wes Craven and… and, Trent Reznor among the people that have gone there.
33:51
Zack Quaintance: I knew that about.
33:52
Tad Eggleston: I'm not certain that either one of them graduated from there, but they both attended at one point.
34:00
Tad Eggleston: In fact, Elm Street is in Wheaton.
34:04
Zack Quaintance: No kidding, I didn't know that! Yeah, that's cool.
34:06
Tad Eggleston: I have friends that grew up on Elm Street. You know, you know who grew up on Elm Street?
34:11
Zack Quaintance: Who's that?
34:12
Tad Eggleston: the Belushis.
34:14
Zack Quaintance: Oh, did they really? Yeah, because I… so I… I went to Southern Illinois University for college, and the Belushis both went… supposedly, that's where John Belushi made the college t-shirt that he has in Animal House. Okay. Was that Southern Illinois, yeah.
34:27
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, one of my best friends went to Southern Illinois and worked at the Saluki.
34:33
Tad Eggleston: For his whole time down there.
34:35
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Journalist.
34:37
Zack Quaintance: So it was called the… the Saluki was the mascot, the paper was the Daily Egyptian, because the Saluki… Oh, that's right, that's right. Yeah.
34:44
Tad Eggleston: That's right, the Daily Egyptian.
34:46
Zack Quaintance: I also worked at the Daily Egyptian. I was like, I worked there 3 years when I was an editor there.
34:50
Tad Eggleston: When were you?
34:52
Zack Quaintance: I was there…
34:53
Tad Eggleston: than me, and he's a little older than me. So he probably missed you.
34:57
Zack Quaintance: I was there from 2004 to 2007. I graduated in 2007 from college.
35:02
Tad Eggleston: Okay. Yeah, so you, I think, graduated almost 10 years after him.
35:07
Zack Quaintance: Okay, yeah, so…
35:08
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Though he won awards down there, so if you heard the name Mark Chase ever, that was one of my…
35:14
Tad Eggleston: My, my…
35:15
Zack Quaintance: When you're in college.
35:17
Tad Eggleston: You're a good friend.
35:18
Zack Quaintance: 10 years is like a different era of people.
35:21
Tad Eggleston: No, that I understand. I just also know that sometimes names wind up on walls, and, like, you don't know who it is, but you saw the thing sitting there.
35:32
Zack Quaintance: I'm sure I walked past his awards, they had a bunch of… it was a good journalism school, like,
35:37
Tad Eggleston: No.
35:37
Zack Quaintance: Bunch of awards, so…
35:39
Tad Eggleston: He was also, he was also in,
35:41
Tad Eggleston: Because Paul Simon taught there after he retired.
35:45
Zack Quaintance: Paul Simon Public Policy Institute is still there.
35:48
Tad Eggleston: He was, he was in Paul Simon's first class.
35:51
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, Paul Simon was well retired by the time,
35:55
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. But we may have had some others.
35:57
Tad Eggleston: Teached there for too long.
35:58
Zack Quaintance: other faculty in common who are still around, because all these guys would have their whole career at the Trib, and then move… retire in Southern Illinois and be adjunct faculty, and that's why it had such a good journalism program, because…
36:11
Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, that, and Halloween gave them… gave you… gave you a great fodder for… for actual…
36:20
Zack Quaintance: Violence and depression.
36:21
Tad Eggleston: Violence reporting.
36:23
Zack Quaintance: When I was there, they had taken a stand, like, Halloween would get so raucous at Southern Illinois University, they had to start closing the school for that week. So, like, when I was there, we would go home for a week around Halloween. Like, you weren't allowed to be there.
36:37
Tad Eggleston: No!
36:38
Tad Eggleston: I think that might have actually started when Mark was there, but I also remember the one year where he talked to me soon after Halloween and told me he was no longer a tear gas virgin.
36:50
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I bet. They burned down the ROTC building one year during Halloween.
36:56
Tad Eggleston: Well, apparently the fraternities invited all of their brothers from all over the country into town for Halloween, so it wasn't even just the…
37:05
Zack Quaintance: Well, that was always the thing, it was people from.
37:07
Tad Eggleston: Right.
37:08
Zack Quaintance: go to the school would, like, converge on this random.
37:11
Tad Eggleston: Nice.
37:11
Zack Quaintance: in the middle of southern Illinois to… Wreck havoc for Halloween, yeah.
37:17
Tad Eggleston: Yeah?
37:19
Tad Eggleston: Now we're completely opted up.
37:21
Zack Quaintance: Because I don't even.
37:22
Tad Eggleston: I think there's been a comic made out of the Halloween.
37:25
Zack Quaintance: I could… I'm getting ideas, though. I'd love to do the…
37:28
Tad Eggleston: I think there could be a great comic made out of the Halloweens itself.
37:33
Zack Quaintance: I mean, yeah, the history of Halloween at Southern Illinois would be a good crime comic, quite honestly. You could do, like, a…
37:39
Tad Eggleston: Or a horror comic, either.
37:41
Zack Quaintance: War, horror, yeah, yeah.
37:43
Zack Quaintance: Crime-horror hybrid would be a fun genre mashup, definitely.
37:49
Zack Quaintance: So…
37:51
Tad Eggleston: It's really funny.
37:52
Zack Quaintance: like, to kind of get us back on track a little bit. Do you know who Mike Gold is? He's like an editor, old editor, retired editor for DC.
38:00
Tad Eggleston: I know I've heard the name.
38:02
Zack Quaintance: Mike Grell's Green Arrow and stuff.
38:05
Zack Quaintance: And he's got a YouTube show that he does now with a friend of mine, Bob Harrison, called The Squadcast, the Pop Culture Squadcast.
38:14
Zack Quaintance: So, he had me on to promote Death of Comics Bookcase Volume 1,
38:19
Zack Quaintance: And we had this exact same thing happen, where we discovered we were both from Chicago, and both went to Southern Illinois University. So, like, this is now two consecutive volumes of Death Comics Bookcase, where I've discovered, with someone, who had… was nice enough to read the book and have me on their show, that we have a ton in common. So it's like, there's a little.
38:37
Tad Eggleston: You know?
38:39
Zack Quaintance: to this comment.
38:39
Tad Eggleston: And that… that still makes it just slightly less than the weirdest thing that's happened on
38:46
Tad Eggleston: 22 Panels, because when I was talking to Dylan Gilbertson for the first time for… for his Kickstarter for My Neighbor Necrodancer, the fourth issue, by the way, is also on Kickstarter now, so once you… Yeah, we're running. Once you've… once you've backed Zack, backed Dylan…
39:01
Zack Quaintance: Zack is both, yeah.
39:03
Tad Eggleston: Yes, because they're both fantastic books. Dylan's actually now a regular on our Heavy Metal Book Club, but the reason for that is, while I was talking to him, is when I figured out that he
39:18
Tad Eggleston: Went to the same college at the same time, in the same dorm, and was very good friends with my youngest brother.
39:25
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding.
39:27
Tad Eggleston: Who I texted and crashed the podcast in the middle.
39:30
Zack Quaintance: So they were actual friends, like, they…
39:33
Tad Eggleston: They were actually already friends, but Dylan didn't know this when he reached out to me to…
39:39
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
39:40
Tad Eggleston: And it wasn't like Peter had told Dylan, hey, my brother's got a comics podcast, you should ask.
39:47
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, your last name's not that common, you know.
39:50
Tad Eggleston: It's not! It's not! But I, you know, I mean…
39:54
Tad Eggleston: I don't… because he had reached out to me, I'm not certain that he…
39:58
Tad Eggleston: He might have known… he would have known my last name from, like, The invitation, but he…
40:04
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
40:04
Tad Eggleston: I went to 22 Panels, so it might not have actually…
40:07
Tad Eggleston: That's a good point. They collect.
40:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, until I'm on the screen with you, I, like, I don't think about your life, like, I just think of you as Tad.
40:14
Tad Eggleston: Right.
40:15
Zack Quaintance: Right!
40:15
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
40:16
Zack Quaintance: I don't… I don't…
40:17
Tad Eggleston: Because I kind of deliberately don't… use my last name?
40:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, you're, like, 22 panels also on a lot of stuff, you know.
40:26
Tad Eggleston: Right, just because I work… In a public school.
40:30
Tad Eggleston: And, yeah, my students know, or a lot of my students know about the podcast, some of them listen, that sort of thing, but because of that, I just…
40:41
Tad Eggleston: I don't want to be, like, anonymous.
40:43
Tad Eggleston: like, I don't… I don't have it set up so it's not easy to draw the strings, but I don't, like, want to broadcast who I am enough.
40:50
Zack Quaintance: You don't want to lead with your last name, like, because there's people out there who call you Mr. Eagle Eggleston, right?
40:57
Tad Eggleston: Generally, Mr. E.
40:58
Zack Quaintance: mystery.
40:59
Tad Eggleston: But… but yeah.
41:01
Tad Eggleston: That's cool.
41:03
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, so, so… But yeah, no, that, that, that's, that, that's the, the, the only, like.
41:11
Tad Eggleston: weirder confluence than this one, where it's like, wait a minute, Stratford Square? Yes, I know Stratford Square.
41:17
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. That same…
41:19
Tad Eggleston: brother, I took to the sneak preview of Men in Black at Stratford Square.
41:25
Zack Quaintance: In the 90s, even.
41:27
Tad Eggleston: Two weeks before it came out.
41:29
Zack Quaintance: We used, like, I sent Nick reference photos from Stratford, but they were all… so Stratford got renovated in the late 90s. Yep. Yeah, and looked totally different, so we used that, the most recent version of it, where it had, like,
41:43
Zack Quaintance: a big fountain, it was like a geyser that shot up in the air. But yeah, he… that whole mall in that book was drawn from Stratford Square.
41:50
Tad Eggleston: I, I, I used…
41:51
Zack Quaintance: I've seen it on those videos.
41:53
Tad Eggleston: I used to,
41:56
Tad Eggleston: Actually, some of my favorite burgers. I'm trying to remember the name of the burger place in the…
42:02
Tad Eggleston: Food Court. There's a burger place in the food court that had particularly thin burgers.
42:08
Tad Eggleston: That were just really good, and I can't remember right now.
42:11
Zack Quaintance: I don't remember.
42:13
Tad Eggleston: But I don't remember it being many other places, yeah.
42:17
Tad Eggleston: And, and that KB Toys was one of my, my Star Wars toy hookups.
42:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, there was a Toys R Us over there back in the day, too, not in the mall, but across the street.
42:28
Tad Eggleston: Not in the mall, across the street, which made it even easier, because, like, when I was going out Star Wars toy hunting, hit the Toys R Us, hit the KB…
42:39
Zack Quaintance: Back in the day, The, remastered movies, probably, when they had the…
42:43
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that…
42:44
Zack Quaintance: It's wrong.
42:44
Tad Eggleston: What was the I'm trying to remember the name of the pizza place that was in the… the… the…
42:52
Tad Eggleston: Not the strip with the Toys R Us, but the strip with the Best Buy and the movie theater. There was a pizza place right there.
42:57
Zack Quaintance: Waldi's, man.
42:58
Tad Eggleston: Garibaldi's.
42:59
Zack Quaintance: I miss that place.
43:01
Tad Eggleston: All these is so good.
43:03
Zack Quaintance: There's still one… there's still one somewhere in the Chicagoland area, I forget, I think.
43:07
Tad Eggleston: There's at least one.
43:08
Zack Quaintance: Or something, yeah.
43:10
Tad Eggleston: I mean, there actually used to be one up closer to me, too.
43:13
Zack Quaintance: There used to be a bunch, but I think they're down to just.
43:15
Tad Eggleston: Alright.
43:16
Zack Quaintance: Original location, yeah.
43:19
Zack Quaintance: Because it's a crazy place, it's, like, decked out, like.
43:21
Tad Eggleston: No, no, there's still an Arlington Heights one, too, so the one close to me is still around. Hoffman Estates and Arlington Heights. So now we know where we're eating when you.
43:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I'm down for that.
43:34
Tad Eggleston: Nicked it.
43:35
Zack Quaintance: Pilgrimage for Garibaldi's, for sure, so…
43:40
Tad Eggleston: I'll introduce you to the comic shop that I do work with out in Algonquin.
43:45
Tad Eggleston: Shout out to Modern Age Comics.
43:48
Zack Quaintance: Cool. Yeah, I'm always up for that. There's some good comic shops in Chicago. I mean, in Chicago.
43:52
Tad Eggleston: There's so many.
43:52
Zack Quaintance: Amazing comic shops.
43:54
Tad Eggleston: There's so many good comic shops in the Chicagoland area.
43:59
Zack Quaintance: I think it's why there's, like, a disproportionate number of creators from the Chicagoland area, like…
44:04
Tad Eggleston: Probably.
44:05
Zack Quaintance: Because the comic shop ecosystem there has been so healthy since we were kids.
44:10
Tad Eggleston: I mean, pro- the- I mean, everywhere I travel, I look for the comic shops, like…
44:16
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
44:16
Tad Eggleston: It's a nice thing.
44:17
Zack Quaintance: A nice thing to do while you're on the road, you know?
44:19
Tad Eggleston: And I think the only place I've been where I think the scene
44:24
Tad Eggleston: even compares to Chicago as New York, and it would be seriously sad if it didn't, because it.
44:30
Zack Quaintance: It's so busy.
44:31
Tad Eggleston: center of comics for so long, and it's so big, and, you know…
44:37
Tad Eggleston: something very depressing if New York's comic scene wasn't really good. Yeah, yeah.
44:44
Tad Eggleston: But then it's Chicago, and I haven't been out to Portland yet, so Portland's probably third, but you know who my sleeper favorite is?
44:52
Zack Quaintance: Who's that?
44:54
Tad Eggleston: Minneapolis.
44:55
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding, I've never gone to comic shops there.
44:58
Tad Eggleston: Oh, my God. Actually, do you know Josh Johnson from The Daily Show?
45:04
Zack Quaintance: I saw that go… yeah, that's kind of gone viral in our comic circles, is like…
45:09
Tad Eggleston: He's been put…
45:09
Zack Quaintance: stores he's doing.
45:11
Tad Eggleston: everywhere he goes. And when he was in Minneapolis, he… I mean, A, there's a lot of good comic shops in Minneapolis. There are a couple of good comics publishers in Minneapolis. Living the Line and Uncivilized are both out of Minneapolis.
45:22
Zack Quaintance: Uncivilized is awesome, yeah.
45:24
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Tom. Tom's amazing.
45:26
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
45:28
Tad Eggleston: I had coffee with him the last time I was in Minneapolis. Tom and I sat down for coffee.
45:34
Zack Quaintance: That's awesome. Yeah, they've… they make… I read everything they put out, basically. Like, they don't put out a lot of comics, but… but when they do, I read it. Like, I make a point and I read it, so…
45:43
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
45:45
Tad Eggleston: But he went to… to…
45:47
Tad Eggleston: Comic College, formerly known as College of Comic Book Knowledge, which is even cooler of a name, but, like.
45:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
45:55
Tad Eggleston: It doesn't come out of the mouth as easily. And probably the sixth or 7th location it's been in since I've known of their existence, and it looks like
46:04
Tad Eggleston: It's bigger again, so I need to make certain I hit it the next time I go into town, but it's where I finally tracked down
46:10
Tad Eggleston: Frank Miller's… Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz's Daredevil Love and War.
46:16
Tad Eggleston: after, like, a year and a half of looking for it, it was the last Daredevil thing that I didn't own in, like, 2000. So, like, pre… so, like, when the internet was in its infancy, and, like, you couldn't just Google things and find them.
46:31
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
46:34
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you couldn't just…
46:35
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, now you can… if you're looking for anything, you can find it online, it's just a matter of, are you okay with the price, you know?
46:41
Tad Eggleston: Well, but, I mean, then it was, I mean, like, because I had found it online once in that era, and it was, like, $100. Whereas I finally found it there, and really, I didn't find it there. The shop I worked in…
46:55
Tad Eggleston: in Wheaton. I don't know if you ever went to JC Comics, or whether they had closed by the time you might have been anywhere.
47:02
Zack Quaintance: No, I think there was a Graham.
47:03
Tad Eggleston: posting…
47:04
Zack Quaintance: meet-in that I had been to.
47:05
Tad Eggleston: That would have been… that would have been down on… on… On, Bloomingdale.
47:11
Tad Eggleston: JC was actually right by the Wheaton Movie theater on…
47:16
Zack Quaintance: In downtown Whedon?
47:18
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
47:20
Zack Quaintance: I remember that theater. They did dollar movies there.
47:23
Tad Eggleston: They did. They did.
47:28
Tad Eggleston: But one of our regulars had been one of the original co-owners, so when he found out I was gonna be up there on a business trip, he's like, oh, you gotta stop in, say hi to Ralph, you're looking for this, ask him if he's got it, he'll know.
47:41
Tad Eggleston: And I asked him, and he's like… he looked at his inventory and it wasn't in there, but he turned to one of his guys, he's like, weren't you going through a Miller phase last year? Do you know if we've got any of these? He's like, yeah, I think there's a stack of, like, 10 of them downstairs. They go downstairs.
47:56
Zack Quaintance: Hell yeah.
47:57
Tad Eggleston: I got one, and they sold it to me for cover price.
48:00
Zack Quaintance: Oh, amazing.
48:01
Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, I haven't found one of these online for less than $100, are you sure you want to sell it to me for $6? He's like, yeah.
48:10
Zack Quaintance: Very kind of them, that's awesome, because they knew you wanted it, like, it was more.
48:14
Tad Eggleston: Exactly! I mean, the only… the only…
48:17
Zack Quaintance: service they're providing.
48:18
Tad Eggleston: remotely similar experience was actually at JHU a few years ago.
48:23
Tad Eggleston: when I was on my ill-advised comic shop tour, And…
48:28
Tad Eggleston: I'd already grabbed most of the Love & Rocket stuff that they had, and I was commenting about how I really like the old original hardcover graphic novels.
48:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
48:38
Tad Eggleston: And… and both of the owners were there, and one of them turned to the other, and he's like, don't we have a box of those in the back?
48:44
Tad Eggleston: And they went back, and they bring the short box, and it had, like, Volumes 2 through 16.
48:52
Zack Quaintance: Amazing.
48:53
Tad Eggleston: original Love & Rock
48:54
Tad Eggleston: covers. Not only did they, they sold them to me at 20% off of cover price.
48:59
Zack Quaintance: It's awesome. Yeah, cause those.
49:00
Tad Eggleston: I'm like, and I'm like, you know some of these you can get… he's like, no, but we've… he's like, no, we've literally been waiting… we've been holding this box for you. I'm like, it's like, for somebody like you, you know, when we… More important. This was here still.
49:15
Zack Quaintance: I'm making a few.
49:16
Tad Eggleston: Go to someone where it was…
49:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, it was meant to have a good home.
49:22
Tad Eggleston: loved.
49:24
Tad Eggleston: But I'm like, that's just awesome. That's the way I'd run a comic shop.
49:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. For, I mean, for the passion, nobody's running a comic shop to get rich rich, you know.
49:36
Tad Eggleston: I mean… Every once in a while, they get lucky.
49:40
Tad Eggleston: I've heard that the reason Ides has their 3-story building in Pittsburgh is they sold an amazing Fantasy XV and bought a building.
49:48
Zack Quaintance: Oh, no kidding. There was a… so I lived in Sacramento, California for a while, and there was a guy there who had a comic book store, he was a former player with the San Francisco 49ers.
49:59
Zack Quaintance: And he had a very valuable back issue business going, like, that when they set up a,
50:07
Zack Quaintance: comics exhibit at the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, like, his stuff went on loan there, like, at the museum, because it was so… it was, like, everything, basically. Like, so he… like, he… the comics he owned were…
50:21
Zack Quaintance: if you had them, you'd be rich. Like, just having the stomach collection, you know. So there's a few of them out there, and, like, so they would set up… they ended up setting up, like, a collector's show in Berkeley. I don't know if they still do it, but it was for, like.
50:33
Zack Quaintance: high rollers, essentially, you know, who are doing these kind of comics that cost, like, a life… a life-changing amount of money to buy.
50:43
Tad Eggleston: Kind of what that… did you see… did you see the announcement for that… that… that artist thing at the… is it the Biltmore in LA?
50:52
Zack Quaintance: I did see that, yeah, yeah.
50:53
Tad Eggleston: I mean, that looks super cool, but it does feel like the High Rollers art show.
50:59
Zack Quaintance: So, yeah, they do some of… they have… they had one… they had that… They do that.
51:03
Tad Eggleston: I got one in…
51:04
Zack Quaintance: As well,
51:05
Tad Eggleston: And I think they've got one in Orlando as well.
51:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. The one in New York here was more European, so they had, like, I think Chris Ware was there, and they had a bunch of,
51:15
Tad Eggleston: Another Chicago guy.
51:18
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
51:19
Zack Quaintance: And they had a bunch of.
51:20
Tad Eggleston: I haven't met him yet, but I hear he's a Chicago guy.
51:23
Zack Quaintance: He's definitely… I think he lives in… I don't know if he still lives there.
51:28
Tad Eggleston: No, I think he does, because I'm pretty certain his wife teaches Still.
51:33
Tad Eggleston: around, like, like, not only pretty certain, like, I am…
51:38
Tad Eggleston: If I recall correctly, I had a guest that was her student teacher.
51:43
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
51:44
Tad Eggleston: In the last 5 years.
51:44
Zack Quaintance: Maybe he grew up in Nebraska or something then, and then now lives in Chicago, because I knew he had a Nebraska connection as well. But yeah, I mean, the Chicago comics community is amazing. Like, Eddie Campbell lives there, for crying out loud.
51:56
Tad Eggleston: I know it!
51:57
Zack Quaintance: Freakin' amazing, you know?
51:58
Tad Eggleston: I won't quite call Eddie a friend, but we're friendly.
52:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I saw…
52:04
Tad Eggleston: my name now, mostly because I share it with his favorite old-time boxing cartoonist.
52:10
Zack Quaintance: Hey, at least he remembers you. One way or another.
52:14
Tad Eggleston: And, yeah, Chris was born in Omaha.
52:17
Zack Quaintance: Okay, yeah, so I knew he had that, some Nebraska connection, so he must have…
52:22
Tad Eggleston: Man.
52:22
Zack Quaintance: grown up in Nebraska and moved to Chicago.
52:26
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we got, we got Landis Blair, we got Tim Seeley, we got Jim Terry, we got John Friesen.
52:32
Tad Eggleston: Daniel Warren Johnson.
52:34
Zack Quaintance: It's nuts, the list is huge.
52:36
Tad Eggleston: If you have an extensive list, you should give it to me, because I don't know enough of the list, and I now try to book
52:44
Tad Eggleston: people for a comic shop in the suburbs, so the more I know, the better.
52:48
Zack Quaintance: I've never said…
52:49
Tad Eggleston: I gotta compare notes one of these days.
52:51
Zack Quaintance: Mike Maurici lives there, for sure.
52:54
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
52:54
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, there's a lot. The list goes on and on.
52:57
Tad Eggleston: Somebody needs to put together…
52:59
Zack Quaintance: C2E2s and see who tabled there, like, 10 years.
53:02
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
53:02
Zack Quaintance: Blowing up, you know, and that's how you figure it all out.
53:05
Tad Eggleston: But somebody should put together the comic creator directory.
53:11
Zack Quaintance: Market, yeah.
53:12
Tad Eggleston: Who lives in what market? Ideally, with a contact info, but even if you don't have that, just the who lives in what market would be such a big deal.
53:22
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, as someone who tries to hire cover artists from time to time, contact info is not always out there.
53:28
Tad Eggleston: No, it's sometimes…
53:29
Tad Eggleston: I mean.
53:30
Zack Quaintance: Well, you know from booking cats with them, I'm sure.
53:32
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
53:33
Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean…
53:34
Zack Quaintance: People have contact forms on their websites, but they don't always respond to those, you know.
53:38
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm surprised at how easy most people are to get ahold of.
53:43
Tad Eggleston: And how hard the others are.
53:46
Zack Quaintance: It does go…
53:47
Tad Eggleston: There's really almost nothing in.
53:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, like, you can Google Brian Bendis' email and send him an email right now, and he'll probably read it or write back. Like, it's not hard to send Brian Bendis an email. But then there's other creators who are, like, fiercely
54:03
Zack Quaintance: guard it, guard it with their privacy, you know? Like, there's no way to contact them.
54:08
Zack Quaintance: You're right.
54:08
Tad Eggleston: But then I wind up being surprised by some, because, like…
54:14
Tad Eggleston: you know, some of my guests, and I'm not… I'm not gonna start naming names, because it just seems weird to do it that way, but there are some of my guests that when I reach
54:21
Tad Eggleston: I actually challenged myself to do, like, the pie in the sky…
54:26
Tad Eggleston: Email every once in a while.
54:28
Zack Quaintance: Sure, yeah.
54:29
Tad Eggleston: you know…
54:30
Zack Quaintance: Were you talking.
54:31
Tad Eggleston: And the number of those…
54:32
Zack Quaintance: That's a… that's a…
54:34
Tad Eggleston: So that, I wound up working through Publicis, so that's a little less surprising, right? I didn't manage to find Garth Ennis, you know, because he's got an Ahoy book, because…
54:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
54:44
Tad Eggleston: does Superfan Promotions does…
54:47
Tad Eggleston: stuff for… for Ahoy when they sent out the last email blast with… I said, hey, I know this is a long shot, but…
54:56
Tad Eggleston: But are Garth and Jason doing the podcast routes?
55:00
Zack Quaintance: I mean, all they can tell you is not right now, and sometimes they'll tell you yes.
55:05
Tad Eggleston: That's what they told me when I made my pitch for Tom Morello.
55:09
Tad Eggleston: And I made a strong pitch for Tom Morello, because he's from Liberty.
55:12
Zack Quaintance: Chicago guy, yeah.
55:14
Tad Eggleston: from Libertyville.
55:19
Zack Quaintance: But those…
55:19
Tad Eggleston: But,
55:20
Zack Quaintance: Non-comics people who dabble in comics are harder to,
55:23
Tad Eggleston: They are.
55:23
Zack Quaintance: Nailed down for publicity, they don't always want to do it.
55:26
Tad Eggleston: I mean, every once in a while, I pull it off, but… and that's my biggest thing, is most of the time, when I go after those people.
55:34
Tad Eggleston: I'm not pitching them for publicity. I say, do you feel like talking comics?
55:39
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
55:41
Tad Eggleston: It'll be…
55:42
Zack Quaintance: Why not?
55:42
Tad Eggleston: I'd love to talk comics.
55:46
Tad Eggleston: If not, that's cool.
55:48
Tad Eggleston: I'm just happy when I get responses from some of them.
55:52
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
55:53
Tad Eggleston: I got a response for…
55:54
Tad Eggleston: I got… I got a resp… and, like, this is one where… where I had to send the email to management, but I got a response from the management of somebody that I fully expected… expected sending out the email, that there was no chance
56:10
Tad Eggleston: that either he was gonna be on the show, or I was gonna grade a response at all. That it was gonna be one of those things that I sent in the ether, and it never came back. And I got a very polite
56:21
Tad Eggleston: No.
56:22
Tad Eggleston: But, like, immediately. Not immediately, but, like, by the next day, and I'm like, that actually feels kind of good. That's validating, the fact that they felt like…
56:31
Tad Eggleston: it was worth… thanking me for having interest.
56:37
Zack Quaintance: Totally.
56:37
Tad Eggleston: You know, as…
56:39
Zack Quaintance: As both a creator and a journalist, to me, a rejection is a million times better than a ghosting.
56:46
Zack Quaintance: I would rather… I would rather you tell me no within the hour, be like, hey, this isn't gonna work, than never respond. Like, it just feels like, total, like, lack of respect to, like, not even get the, rejection emails as a… as someone who does…
56:59
Tad Eggleston: Which is…
56:59
Zack Quaintance: or journalism?
57:01
Tad Eggleston: Right, which is where I do try to remind myself that most of the people that I don't get any response to probably get so many.
57:08
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
57:10
Zack Quaintance: It's a numbers thing, yeah.
57:12
Tad Eggleston: Right. And also why I try to send out enough
57:17
Tad Eggleston: that I just, like, once it's sent out, I don't think about it until I get a response.
57:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
57:22
Tad Eggleston: Like, if I tried really hard, I could probably give you a list of people that I've written emails to, and not… But there's no way you remember all of them.
57:29
Zack Quaintance: But…
57:30
Tad Eggleston: But I don't really think about it. It's more like… it'll only cross my mind if something pops up that makes me think about writing them again, and then I'll go, well, should I? Because I did write them once before, and I never heard back, I don't want to be an annoyance. You know?
57:48
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I get that.
57:49
Tad Eggleston: Awesome.
57:50
Zack Quaintance: You're not sitting around being like, why didn't they write back?
57:55
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think I would have been like that during the first year, which is why I feel.
58:00
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, totally.
58:01
Tad Eggleston: Really blessed with how many people
58:05
Tad Eggleston: like, it's another story that I've told a few times, but like…
58:09
Tad Eggleston: one of the things that I've used this podcast for is that, like, I've long had a difficulty
58:17
Tad Eggleston: Reaching out to people I don't know, and asking them for things. And, like…
58:22
Zack Quaintance: I get that. That might be an effect of where we're from.
58:28
Tad Eggleston: That's possible.
58:29
Zack Quaintance: The two things I don't want to do ever is ask people for anything, anything. Like, I don't want to feel like an imposition, and then I also… I'm also really bad at promoting myself to them, to be like, hey, I'm so great because blah blah blah, you know? And they kind of go hand in hand, because when… a lot of times when you're asking them for something, you kind of need to make a case.
58:48
Zack Quaintance: for why they should work with you, or why they should talk to you, you know? But yeah.
58:52
Tad Eggleston: Or why they should give you a little bit more time on your student loan, or…
58:57
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, whatever.
58:58
Tad Eggleston: Because I can't even do it for the things that I, like, need need.
59:01
Zack Quaintance: But…
59:02
Tad Eggleston: But there's not a great way to, like, practice it. And I suddenly realized that this podcast was a way to practice it. So, like, initially, it's like, okay, I'm gonna send out 5 emails a day just to practice, and I'll try really hard not to care if they get back to me, blah blah blah.
59:15
Zack Quaintance: And it's amazing who says yes, right? Like, that's the…
59:18
Tad Eggleston: Well, and that's… you send out 10 emails and comics, and 9 of them are gonna respond, and 8 of them are gonna say yes, and then you've got way too… That's how comics works. Then you've got way too many podcasts. That's how you get 900-some-odd episodes in less than 5 years.
59:36
Zack Quaintance: You gotta be good at scheduling.
59:39
Tad Eggleston: I embraced Google Calendar.
59:42
Zack Quaintance: There you go. You gotta have some system, you know.
59:50
Tad Eggleston: I feel like we should bring it back to comics, and I feel like I should get you talking more. I'm babbling way too much.
59:55
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I'll tell you, I had to do the email thing to get the cover artist for this book. That's a… that's a good topic, so we have,
1:00:03
Zack Quaintance: covers by Jesse Lonergan, who, won…
1:00:06
Tad Eggleston: Love Jesse.
1:00:07
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, won every Comics Award this summer. He won the Eisner, he won the Ignott's for his book, Drone, probably Win a Ring.
1:00:14
Tad Eggleston: Yep.
1:00:15
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so I know Jen…
1:00:17
Tad Eggleston: You and I… you and I agree on that being the… the…
1:00:21
Tad Eggleston: The best graphic novel of last year.
1:00:25
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I might even call it the best of the 2020s so far for me.
1:00:29
Tad Eggleston: Well, I haven't.
1:00:29
Zack Quaintance: Work that out, but it's.
1:00:31
Tad Eggleston: It probably is for me, too, but I will also say, it was my best graphic novel of 2023, as well, when it only.
1:00:40
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, when he finished it on the…
1:00:42
Tad Eggleston: Patreon. Patreon. I literally named it my best graphic novel, even though it hadn't found a publisher yet.
1:00:49
Zack Quaintance: It's been on a journey, man. Like, he did it piecemeal on his Patreon, slowly, and then… no publisher for a while, and then it got put out by 23rd Street, which was kind of in 2025,
1:01:01
Zack Quaintance: And they're kind of new to the book market graphic novel publishing, so there was a while you could maybe find it in bookstores or online, but not at a lot of comic book stores.
1:01:10
Tad Eggleston: There's still not a lot of comic stores.
1:01:12
Zack Quaintance: It's gotta… Not more now, because of the.
1:01:14
Tad Eggleston: It has.
1:01:15
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:01:16
Tad Eggleston: But it's not available through either Lunar or…
1:01:20
Zack Quaintance: That's the whole problem, is…
1:01:21
Tad Eggleston: You have to order first, second, which is the parent.
1:01:27
Zack Quaintance: Yes.
1:01:27
Tad Eggleston: for… is all through McMillan.
1:01:30
Zack Quaintance: Macmillan, yeah.
1:01:31
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:01:32
Zack Quaintance: And you have… they have, like, different requirements sort of, but… but, yeah, so… I…
1:01:37
Zack Quaintance: I've known Jesse for a while, just seen him at shows and stuff, and I'd always been one of my favorite cartoonists, and so I thought, why not… and he's the nicest guy in the world, so I thought, why not ask him if he'll do a cover for this? Not only did he want to do a cover, but he did the whole cast. Yeah, I have,
1:01:54
Zack Quaintance: One of those guys right here.
1:02:00
Zack Quaintance: We have Jesse Lenergan stickers, yeah.
1:02:02
Tad Eggleston: And that was before he started writing the comic with them.
1:02:05
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:02:06
Tad Eggleston: Pick them up, it's C2E2.
1:02:09
Tad Eggleston: I picked him up at C2E2, I think, when he was promoting was before Jerome.
1:02:17
Tad Eggleston: It was after Ghosts of Science passed.
1:02:21
Tad Eggleston: And I think he'd maybe just done his first thing with Mignola?
1:02:26
Zack Quaintance: Oh yeah, the Miss Truesdale books that he's doing.
1:02:29
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:02:30
Zack Quaintance: We'll know.
1:02:31
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:02:33
Tad Eggleston: And I think he had… was it Speed? Is that the name of his racing book?
1:02:37
Zack Quaintance: I have it over here, it is faster, yeah.
1:02:41
Tad Eggleston: Faster, faster. And that's one of the things I love about Jesse, he's, like, the only person I know who manages to work at every level of all the time.
1:02:51
Zack Quaintance: I mean, yeah, he doesn't… he doesn't… he just does what he thinks is cool, like, he doesn't…
1:02:57
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:02:58
Zack Quaintance: no sense of hierarchy or business, long-term planning. If he thinks something's cool, he's gonna do it. That's why I asked him to do a cover for this, because I knew we'd been kind of friendly. And I was like, oh, maybe he'll say yes. He totally said yes.
1:03:11
Zack Quaintance: Did every character in the book that I wanted on it, he put it on… on there. Right. Including I had to ask him at one point to draw a character named Shark Twain, and he wrote back, sure, Shark Twain is a star.
1:03:27
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, that cover is amazing, that he.
1:03:29
Tad Eggleston: He did the whole.
1:03:30
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, so then he has the bookcase popping out of it, like, the.
1:03:33
Tad Eggleston: Yes, he does.
1:03:34
Zack Quaintance: like, bookcase present.
1:03:35
Tad Eggleston: That's such a cool cover. And you had… you have one of my other favorite artists, Felhound, doing a cover. Yeah. Which I told you that, like, I'm gonna wind up buying… I haven't backed your project yet, because I'm… I'm trying to, like…
1:03:50
Tad Eggleston: decide how much money I'm gonna allow myself to spend, and I know that if I… if I get anything non-digital at all, I'm gonna feel like I need to get both of those covers, so I'll get two covers without even getting the original.
1:04:08
Zack Quaintance: I'll probably send you the all of them if you back it, so don't worry, don't sweat that, man.
1:04:14
Zack Quaintance: We're pals, you know.
1:04:16
Tad Eggleston: And don't get me wrong, the original? Also cool. I don't wanna, like… Yeah.
1:04:21
Zack Quaintance: There's no wrong answer to the covers here.
1:04:24
Tad Eggleston: But… but Felhound and Jesse Lonergan are…
1:04:28
Tad Eggleston: Both on my shortlist of favorite artists right now.
1:04:32
Zack Quaintance: Elhound's awesome. Like, there's kind of.
1:04:35
Tad Eggleston: Did you read Sir? I assume you read Sir.
1:04:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah. And Commander Rao, originally.
1:04:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, oh, yeah.
1:04:42
Zack Quaintance: We actually did our first Kickstarters at the same time, the same month, in August 2020, and we did, like, cross-promo and helped each other get funded and stuff, and since then, I'd always been a huge fan and wanted to see if Felhound would do something for one of my books, and…
1:04:58
Zack Quaintance: it worked out, and we have this awesome cover of our fantasy character, Gold Mask, so…
1:05:03
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, no, it felt like…
1:05:07
Tad Eggleston: Sir, I've said it so many times, is the motorcycle jousting book that you never knew you wanted, and whose art is…
1:05:17
Tad Eggleston: Like, her storytelling ability is just… next level.
1:05:22
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:05:22
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:05:23
Zack Quaintance: Truly, yeah.
1:05:26
Tad Eggleston: And, like.
1:05:27
Zack Quaintance: Motorcycle jousting's not an easy thing to take on visually.
1:05:30
Tad Eggleston: No!
1:05:31
Zack Quaintance: pretty gutsy…
1:05:33
Zack Quaintance: thing to want to draw for 6 issues… 5 or 6 issues, I can't remember how long I ran.
1:05:37
Tad Eggleston: I have issues, but still.
1:05:40
Zack Quaintance: A lot of motorcycles.
1:05:41
Tad Eggleston: All of the covers had the same theme, but you had to actually really be paying attention to realize it, because that's how good she is.
1:05:50
Zack Quaintance: So good, yeah.
1:05:53
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, no. Ugh.
1:05:55
Tad Eggleston: I've gushed over that book.
1:05:58
Tad Eggleston: A lot.
1:05:59
Tad Eggleston: Those were…
1:06:00
Zack Quaintance: Mills, I had to… I had to do the,
1:06:03
Zack Quaintance: reach out and cross your fingers thing, and I was definitely waiting on… anxiously for responses on those.
1:06:09
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:06:10
Zack Quaintance: You know, so… but thankfully it worked out, and I love… I absolutely love all the… all the covers, to the point, like, I'm not a big fan of hand selling at cons, like, just because I'm not a salesman, a very good salesman, of like, hey, let me tell you about why you should buy this, like, for the reasons we were talking about earlier.
1:06:27
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:06:27
Zack Quaintance: weight to table with these covers, because they are going to sell themselves.
1:06:32
Tad Eggleston: And have me come by your table, at least when I'm at the con, because, like, ask Zack Kaplan, anytime I hang out with a friend at a table, I sell their books at the same time.
1:06:46
Zack Quaintance: That's awesome, yeah, no doubt.
1:06:47
Tad Eggleston: He just laughs his ass off as I start handing books to people.
1:06:52
Zack Quaintance: Gotta buy this.
1:06:52
Tad Eggleston: Oh, this looks cool, you should buy this one!
1:06:56
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, you're gonna need to take this, too, you know?
1:07:01
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that's always helpful to have a, like, an actual testimonial going on.
1:07:05
Tad Eggleston: I'm much better at selling other people's books
1:07:08
Tad Eggleston: Than myself in any way, shape, or form.
1:07:11
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. So, yeah, hand-selling your own books, some people are really good at it, but, like, I'm never.
1:07:15
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:07:16
Zack Quaintance: I've never been great at sales, so it's, I'll be like, hey, I'll tell you about it, but if you want to buy it, that's your decision. Like, I'm not gonna.
1:07:25
Tad Eggleston: And I'll actually only tell you about it if you start the conversation, and I'm gonna have my head down until you come and say, did you write this?
1:07:34
Zack Quaintance: The most salesman… the most salesman-y thing I do at these shows is I stand the whole time, so I'm standing there to be approachable.
1:07:41
Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
1:07:42
Zack Quaintance: And then, if someone makes eye contact or slows down, I say, hey, can I tell you about my comic? And sometimes they'll be like, that's alright, I'm just looking. And other times they'll be like, sure, and then you have to do your little pitch, but I always politely ask first, can I tell you about my comic? Because I've tabled next to these guys who have, like.
1:07:59
Zack Quaintance: some, like, really obnoxious kind of carnival bark going on, you know? And, like, I'm
1:08:04
Zack Quaintance: I'd rather not sell any comics than do that.
1:08:07
Zack Quaintance: It's not fun for anybody. It's not fun for the people getting it… well, I don't know. Actually, some people do respond to that positively, like, they laugh at the carnival barking things, and like…
1:08:16
Tad Eggleston: If they're entertaining, It breaks the monotony.
1:08:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:08:21
Tad Eggleston: So I think, really, when it comes…
1:08:23
Zack Quaintance: next to them, you have to hear it a hundred times. Oh, yeah.
1:08:26
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, no, no, tabling next to them, it might be a whole other ballgame.
1:08:30
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:08:31
Zack Quaintance: No, but yeah, some people… they do put a smile on people's face when they're really good at it, and they have a good line, you know.
1:08:38
Tad Eggleston: But, but, but yeah, no, I mean…
1:08:41
Tad Eggleston: Because, go figure, a lot of us in, like, the whole stigma of the anti-social comic book guy came from somewhere.
1:08:50
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it's not totally off-base, but…
1:08:53
Zack Quaintance: It's also, like, a thing where, like, if you're really good at sales, or you're doing something that makes sense.
1:08:58
Zack Quaintance: financially, or whatever, you're not in comics, like, you're doing something else. You're like, you're selling stock, you know? Like, so, like.
1:09:06
Tad Eggleston: Cars! You're selling cars! You're selling…
1:09:09
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, you're doing something a little more rational. Rational and glamorous.
1:09:14
Zack Quaintance: So you're getting these sales pitches from people who are inherently Not well-suited to sales,
1:09:20
Zack Quaintance: I always think the funniest one I ever encountered was, friends of mine were tabling next to this guy who was selling a print.
1:09:27
Zack Quaintance: I think his background was in video games, and he was selling a print. It was a…
1:09:31
Zack Quaintance: like, a pizza… a slice of pizza who he had kind of, like, sexualized a little bit to be, like, a sexy slice of pizza. It looks horrific. It's like… it looks like a nightmare. But he just spent the whole con going, she's a saucy girl, buy my print, and, like, that's the… that is the most…
1:09:50
Tad Eggleston: That was his…
1:09:51
Zack Quaintance: Good.
1:09:51
Tad Eggleston: pitch.
1:09:52
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, she's a saucy girl, by my print, like, all weekend long.
1:09:58
Tad Eggleston: My head hurts.
1:09:59
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:10:00
Tad Eggleston: Thinking about that, my head hurts.
1:10:02
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah. So that's the, like, in my opinion, the floor for worst content.
1:10:07
Tad Eggleston: Did he have a mustache that would have fit in an adult film in the 70s?
1:10:12
Zack Quaintance: you know, he was… it's weird, like, he was a video game guy who, like, made totally legit video games, but was like, I don't… I always tell my friends, I feel like you guys were on a hidden camera show.
1:10:21
Tad Eggleston: This was so funny.
1:10:22
Zack Quaintance: like, setup, that this was not a real person, because it just doesn't make sense, you know? Why he would spend his weekend trying to sell these
1:10:31
Zack Quaintance: Sexy pizza print things, you know.
1:10:34
Zack Quaintance: Very strange. But hey, that's… one of the things you get when you table is no shortage of stories from the weekend, so… Yeah.
1:10:45
Tad Eggleston: Well…
1:10:46
Tad Eggleston: you are one of the handful of people out there who probably reads as many new comics as I do, because that's what you…
1:10:55
Tad Eggleston: Write about every week for the beat.
1:10:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's my thing, I really… Why don't we talk…
1:11:00
Zack Quaintance: 20-plus new comics a week.
1:11:02
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so why don't we talk some about what we've been loving lately.
1:11:07
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, let me get my… I have a spreadsheet, actually, to help me.
1:11:10
Tad Eggleston: You have a spreadsheet. I want you to share this spreadsheet.
1:11:14
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I'll show you. Here, it's color-coded, too, by the way.
1:11:18
Tad Eggleston: That's even better.
1:11:19
Zack Quaintance: I can't really…
1:11:20
Tad Eggleston: start one, but I haven't yet.
1:11:22
Zack Quaintance: Let me find a week where I read… yeah, okay, so here you go. I don't know if you're gonna be able to see it super well.
1:11:28
Tad Eggleston: Okay, okay.
1:11:30
Zack Quaintance: So the yellow ones are the ones I read, the red ones are the ones I'm going to read at some point down the line, and then I rank my top 5 on the side there.
1:11:37
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:11:38
Zack Quaintance: The most purple one is my favorite, and then down, and then the yellow ones are…
1:11:43
Zack Quaintance: like, kind of, like, also receiving votes kind of things. I do that every week. I read 20-some comics, and I pick my 5 favorites from my column on the beat.
1:11:52
Zack Quaintance: What have I been loving?
1:11:54
Zack Quaintance: Minor Arcana? Are you reading Minor Arcana?
1:11:57
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
1:11:58
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:11:58
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
1:11:59
Zack Quaintance: Anything from Ignition Press, I read and I find interesting.
1:12:04
Tad Eggleston: I haven't managed to read it all, but the more I read, the more I find myself going, oh, they're…
1:12:11
Zack Quaintance: It's all good.
1:12:13
Tad Eggleston: damn close to automatic, and I need to find time for more of their…
1:12:19
Zack Quaintance: In baseball parlance, they are batting close to 1,000, my friend. They are!
1:12:25
Tad Eggleston: They are. Ignition has been… Outstanding.
1:12:29
Zack Quaintance: I absolutely love, what they're doing, and I love that there is a… so I think that there's been an issue in the direct market in recent years, like, a new publisher will announce a bunch of flashy stuff, and they'll have, like, one wave, maybe one and a half waves.
1:12:44
Zack Quaintance: And then they just kind of fade when those waves don't make their money back, like, immediately, and that's not how this works. Like, you need… you need to keep throwing stuff out there till you get your Walking Dead or Saga or whatever.
1:12:55
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:12:56
Zack Quaintance: Ignition is on their third wave or whatever now, and they're just continuing, like, they're not slowing down. They seem to have a long runway, and I think it's really good.
1:13:05
Tad Eggleston: Well, and I also haven't heard about them not paying anybody, so that's always a…
1:13:11
Zack Quaintance: Well, they're super… so, like, the principles behind it are, like, Jamie Rich, Philippe Savick, and, Jeremy Hahn, who've all very experienced comics people.
1:13:20
Tad Eggleston: Very.
1:13:21
Zack Quaintance: professional, and you never hear a bad word about any of them, like… Right.
1:13:24
Tad Eggleston: No, I just…
1:13:25
Zack Quaintance: True and creative.
1:13:25
Tad Eggleston: I remember.
1:13:27
Tad Eggleston: I mean, because Mad Cave's on its, it's, you know, has also done really good stuff for a while now, but I remember when it started really doing great stuff.
1:13:36
Tad Eggleston: And… and we had just been through…
1:13:39
Tad Eggleston: waves of great stuff with Scout, and then discovering that they weren't paying, and waves of great stuff with Aftershock, and then discovering that they weren't paying anybody.
1:13:48
Tad Eggleston: So, like…
1:13:50
Tad Eggleston: Tyler and I were, like, reticent to… to start plugging Mad Cave titles, even though we were loving them. So… so, like, the first person I found at C2E2 that year was Kelly Williams, because he had a couple of Mad Cave books, and I'm like.
1:14:05
Tad Eggleston: Kelly, I need to ask you, like, how's it working for Mad Cave? You're getting paid? I want… I don't want this to be another Scout, because he'd also worked for Scout. He and Joe Sorakny had a great book at Scout that they had to claw back to put out the…
1:14:19
Tad Eggleston: you know, the… what was it, the life and death of Captain Suave.
1:14:25
Zack Quaintance: Great title.
1:14:26
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, but, but he's like.
1:14:29
Tad Eggleston: He's like, they pay in direct deposit.
1:14:32
Tad Eggleston: And if you get your pages in by Wednesday, it'll be on your Thursday check. So Wednesdays become my most productive day! And I'm like, yes! I can actually… I can actually plug a company!
1:14:49
Zack Quaintance: You had to give them that, they had to prove themselves, you know.
1:14:53
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, particularly because there was, there was a couple years there where it felt like every company that was making a splash.
1:14:59
Zack Quaintance: Oh, I know. You know.
1:15:00
Tad Eggleston: To turn around and turn that they were doing it at the expense of their creators.
1:15:05
Zack Quaintance: I think a lot of these companies got kneecapped hard by the, what happened in the pandemic with Diamond, and they… but they tried to… they tried to push through it, which is admirable. They all love what they're doing, right? But they just couldn't… after a while, it all crumbled, you know?
1:15:18
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think that might have been part of Scout's issue with Aftershock.
1:15:22
Tad Eggleston: looking through their bankruptcy filings, it was that they were spending a lot of money trying to turn things into Hollywood.
1:15:28
Zack Quaintance: Yes.
1:15:28
Tad Eggleston: And that's not actually how you turn things into Hollywood. If you have to spend money to turn it into Hollywood, it's probably not turning into Hollywood.
1:15:36
Zack Quaintance: 100%, because even if the one thing that's getting it made is your pitch guy who you're paying, it's not bringing any cultural cachet with it. Like, it's…
1:15:46
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:15:47
Zack Quaintance: obscure book that…
1:15:48
Tad Eggleston: But, like, when you looked at their filings, they owed millions of dollars to these… Hollywood PR firms.
1:15:57
Zack Quaintance: Silly way to go about it.
1:15:58
Tad Eggleston: Before the thousands of dollars…
1:16:00
Tad Eggleston: are creators, you know? And it's like, no, you're making a product. If it's good, they will come to you.
1:16:08
Zack Quaintance: There you go, yeah.
1:16:13
Zack Quaintance: Press… Oni Press is another, I like their original stuff they've been putting out this year, like,
1:16:19
Tad Eggleston: The two, dead Teenagers was great.
1:16:22
Zack Quaintance: Dead Teenagers was fantastic. I enjoyed, I'm not gonna say this word correctly… est… estuary?
1:16:29
Tad Eggleston: Didn't actually read that one.
1:16:32
Zack Quaintance: That was,
1:16:33
Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
1:16:33
Zack Quaintance: Dave Angry and Tim Daniel and, Man House. It was like a… yeah, it was a spooky… had nuns, and it was set on the, like, Central California coast, so it was like a aquatic horror book with a bunch of Catholic stuff in it.
1:16:47
Zack Quaintance: Pretty good.
1:16:47
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
1:16:48
Zack Quaintance: Like…
1:16:49
Tad Eggleston: I remember it coming out, and I… they… that team has done a couple stuff, a couple things at Mad Cave that I liked too, so it was, like, on my list, and it just never quite cracked it, because…
1:17:01
Tad Eggleston: There aren't enough hours in the day?
1:17:04
Zack Quaintance: I hear ya, man.
1:17:04
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's my excuse. You see my spreadsheet.
1:17:08
Zack Quaintance: Those red-highlighted comics. Those are the ones I want to read, but haven't, and there's a lot.
1:17:15
Tad Eggleston: No, I think that's actually probably the biggest reason that I haven't actually made the spreadsheet yet, is that, like, I'd have too many red highlighted comics, and…
1:17:25
Zack Quaintance: I have to do it, because I get… I do a lot of these, I get them with the advanced review PDFs, the publishers send them digitally.
1:17:32
Tad Eggleston: Me too.
1:17:33
Zack Quaintance: My tablet, yeah. And if I'm lost…
1:17:35
Tad Eggleston: I get more of them that way? But it makes it easier.
1:17:40
Zack Quaintance: If I'm not organized with them, I forget I have them, I don't download them, like, so the spreadsheet for me is,
1:17:47
Zack Quaintance: Yeah. I gotta do it, yeah.
1:17:49
Tad Eggleston: No, again.
1:17:49
Zack Quaintance: And then also…
1:17:50
Tad Eggleston: I feel like I should, but I…
1:17:53
Tad Eggleston: I… I think I… I'm afraid of the red.
1:17:56
Zack Quaintance: It creeps up on you. My secret is, at the end of the year, I… from my day job, and I assume you're like this too, because you're a teacher, I get two weeks off, two and a half weeks.
1:18:05
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:18:05
Zack Quaintance: right around the holidays, that's… that's when I knock out all the red. Like, that's when I'm like, I become part of the couch, and I just absorb these comics.
1:18:16
Tad Eggleston: When I'm not brain dead.
1:18:18
Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's the problem. Sometimes, by the time I get to those two weeks, it's like…
1:18:23
Zack Quaintance: I know, I just…
1:18:24
Tad Eggleston: Video games.
1:18:25
Zack Quaintance: Video game, yeah. Video games. We're on the same page. We're sleep.
1:18:29
Zack Quaintance: Movies, maybe? Yeah, but video games. Video games are always looming for that holiday break.
1:18:34
Tad Eggleston: I play a lot of baseball on my Switch. That's the only game that I really play, but I play it a lot.
1:18:44
Tad Eggleston: Have good hand-eye coordination.
1:18:46
Tad Eggleston: So all of the other games become frustrating. More so if I like the story and I can't move on because of some Twitch thing that I can't do.
1:18:55
Zack Quaintance: You do the strategy games, like your Fire Emblem and your,
1:19:00
Zack Quaintance: Those kind of things that are turn-based, you know?
1:19:03
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:19:04
Tad Eggleston: Possibly.
1:19:05
Zack Quaintance: Reliance on hand-eye coordination a bit.
1:19:08
Tad Eggleston: But reduces and gets rid of are sometimes different things.
1:19:12
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:19:13
Tad Eggleston: I mean, sometimes it's really dumb things that… You know, I mean, like…
1:19:21
Tad Eggleston: I never played Red Dead Revolver 2, because I loved Red Dead Revolver, but I then had to, like, wait 6 months until my brother came to visit to get me past a level that he thought was easy, but I could never actually
1:19:37
Tad Eggleston: get through. He's like, but you did this, and you did that, and you did that, and I'm like…
1:19:43
Tad Eggleston: Those were different? I don't know why they were different.
1:19:50
Zack Quaintance: I hear you, man, I hear ya. I have one more comic to shout out, though. One more.
1:19:56
Tad Eggleston: Absolutely.
1:19:57
Zack Quaintance: Maybe my favorite.
1:19:58
Tad Eggleston: Shout out as many as you want.
1:19:59
Zack Quaintance: My favorite comic of the year that… certainly that's come out issue by issue.
1:20:04
Zack Quaintance: Paul Chadwick's concrete, so…
1:20:07
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
1:20:08
Zack Quaintance: I've been loving that.
1:20:09
Tad Eggleston: We, we… We did, in our Great Responsibility section of our…
1:20:17
Tad Eggleston: weekly episode, we did all the volumes of concrete, like, sometime last year?
1:20:23
Tad Eggleston: So I've definitely been reading that and enjoying it a lot.
1:20:28
Tad Eggleston: plunging.
1:20:29
Zack Quaintance: comic. It's a… I'm so glad he brought it back 20 years without the main story kind of moving on.
1:20:34
Tad Eggleston: Something like that.
1:20:37
Tad Eggleston: I think my favorite this year
1:20:41
Tad Eggleston: And it's similar, it's… it's, it's the thing that came back after a long time off.
1:20:46
Zack Quaintance: BomThing89, right? Is that where you're going?
1:20:48
Tad Eggleston: No?
1:20:49
Zack Quaintance: No. Is there another one?
1:20:50
Tad Eggleston: Or powers 25.
1:20:53
Zack Quaintance: Oh, Powers 25, yeah. Dude, like, yeah, I wish I could show you my shelf above my desk. It's got all the compendiums that Dark Hars put out recently of powers, like, I love Powers as a.
1:21:06
Tad Eggleston: I lost powers, I love…
1:21:08
Zack Quaintance: arc might be the best Powers arc. Like, it was so good.
1:21:13
Tad Eggleston: Personal. It was so good, and, like.
1:21:20
Tad Eggleston: I didn't know how much I missed Powers until I was reading that first issue of Powers again.
1:21:27
Tad Eggleston: It just felt… yeah, yeah, it felt like just…
1:21:30
Tad Eggleston: Putting on that warm blanket, and getting that cup of hot chocolate, and just…
1:21:37
Tad Eggleston: being safe again. I'm with you.
1:21:39
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, that one's in my,
1:21:43
Zack Quaintance: That one's in my short list of my favorite comics of the year. Power's 25, for sure. Concrete, and then…
1:21:49
Zack Quaintance: My pal Oliver Mertz, his, graphic novel with Oni, Ghost… Oh, so good!
1:21:55
Tad Eggleston: charm of hope.
1:21:55
Zack Quaintance: Ghosts, yeah.
1:21:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I need to… I need to reach out and have him on,
1:22:01
Zack Quaintance: I'll give you an intro if you want,
1:22:03
Tad Eggleston: Dick?
1:22:03
Zack Quaintance: He's one of the nicest dudes ever.
1:22:05
Tad Eggleston: Well, and he's also, I mean… I backed his Kickstarter.
1:22:11
Tad Eggleston: And then realized that it wasn't the whole thing, so I managed to read the whole thing ahead of it coming out, because I reached… he…
1:22:18
Tad Eggleston: Superfan does Oni, so…
1:22:21
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:22:23
Tad Eggleston: So I know I…
1:22:24
Zack Quaintance: If you go through them. David Hyde.
1:22:26
Tad Eggleston: David Hyde, another one of my baseball buddies.
1:22:29
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, he's a big baseball guy.
1:22:31
Tad Eggleston: Also, also Shelley Bond loves Oliver to death.
1:22:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah.
1:22:39
Tad Eggleston: She plugged the hell out of him the last time. Yeah, she plugged the hell out of him the last time she was on the show.
1:22:45
Tad Eggleston: So yeah, no, that's…
1:22:49
Zack Quaintance: He's awesome, though. He's a great guy, and an amazing writer, and a colorist, too. It's, like, unfair how many things this guy's good at.
1:22:56
Tad Eggleston: Well, and like, that's the odd…
1:23:00
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess we've seen some colorists do some writing in recent years, but it still feels like an odd…
1:23:07
Tad Eggleston: pairing, the, the, you know… It's not common. I've known a lot… I've known a lot of writers that taught themselves to letter just so that they could edit
1:23:16
Tad Eggleston: At the last minute, without feeling like they were putting They're letterers out.
1:23:21
Zack Quaintance: And, yeah, I would love that luxury, to be honest with you.
1:23:25
Tad Eggleston: But… but I… I, like… the only… I mean…
1:23:32
Tad Eggleston: I feel like there have been a couple of colorists that have written books in
1:23:36
Tad Eggleston: recent years, but they'd been colorists for a long time, and then written books. I think by the time I knew Oliver, he was writing and color, and I'm just not…
1:23:47
Tad Eggleston: Not used to seeing that pairing.
1:23:49
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I don't think there's anyone who does either in equal measure as, like, you know.
1:23:55
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:23:56
Zack Quaintance: A lot of the colors you've written books are
1:23:57
Zack Quaintance: have colored exponentially more comics than they've written. He's not like that, like, he kind of does it in equal measure, so… Right. That is a bit unusual.
1:24:06
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think he mostly colors his own books, and occasionally somebody else's.
1:24:10
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, like, he's covering that, Forgotten Five that Alex Segura's writing with Cerse,
1:24:16
Tad Eggleston: So good. And Alex is another great guy.
1:24:19
Zack Quaintance: Alex is another one of the nicest guys in comics, yeah.
1:24:22
Tad Eggleston: So, so good.
1:24:24
Tad Eggleston: A hell of… a hell of a prose writer.
1:24:27
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, Secret Identity is his murder mystery.
1:24:31
Tad Eggleston: I love… I love both of those, but I also love all of his, Pete…
1:24:37
Tad Eggleston: Why am I forgetting the name of the…
1:24:39
Zack Quaintance: It's, binging them.
1:24:42
Tad Eggleston: No, Pete Alonzo was the Mets' first baseman, now with the Orioles. Yeah, you would know.
1:24:47
Zack Quaintance: You would know, yeah.
1:24:50
Tad Eggleston: That's too funny. I mean, he did just hit his 300th home run at Shea Stadium as a,
1:25:00
Tad Eggleston: Orioles, so I wouldn't be surprised if it made it into,
1:25:07
Tad Eggleston: made it into your… your beat Slack.
1:25:11
Zack Quaintance: I'm also in New York, so…
1:25:14
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:25:15
Zack Quaintance: There's no.
1:25:15
Tad Eggleston: But Heidi, as the big Mets fan, you know… I think she's mentioned…
1:25:22
Tad Eggleston: I'll actually have to ask her how that felt, because it sounds like the crowd actually cheered him, and I'm really happy about that, because it could have gone the other way. Yeah, yeah.
1:25:33
Zack Quaintance: Well, when your team is as…
1:25:36
Zack Quaintance: You know, they haven't had a lot to cheer about this year.
1:25:39
Tad Eggleston: Well, but, I mean… Pete Fernandez is the name Fernandez.
1:25:45
Zack Quaintance: No, no, that's not that far from Alonzo River.
1:25:47
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Five books with Pete Fernandez, and Pete Fernandez shows up in Alter Ego, which is what made me go back and read
1:25:56
Tad Eggleston: all of the Pete Fernandez books.
1:25:58
Zack Quaintance: Oh, okay. Yeah.
1:26:02
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. But,
1:26:04
Tad Eggleston: No, like, I was at a Cubs-Dodgers game this year, and like, every time Kyle Tucker came up, he got booed, and I'm sitting there going, why are we booing him? He was really good for us last year, and then we didn't make him an offer to come back.
1:26:19
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, there's…
1:26:20
Tad Eggleston: signed somewhere else. He would have maybe even… And also, he's not doing that well this year.
1:26:28
Tad Eggleston: Now, Peter.
1:26:28
Zack Quaintance: He would have maybe been…
1:26:29
Tad Eggleston: a little bit better than Kyle Tucker, but also wasn't really invited back to the Mets.
1:26:35
Zack Quaintance: Right, right. That should make a difference. You know, if it's,
1:26:38
Tad Eggleston: It's not like… it's not like he ran off to the highest bidder.
1:26:42
Zack Quaintance: Right.
1:26:45
Tad Eggleston: You know, it annoys me even more when it's the guy that gets traded away. It's like, you understand that they don't have any say of getting traded, right? Yeah.
1:26:57
Tad Eggleston: It's just something that happens sometimes.
1:27:00
Tad Eggleston: So, I was… I was pleased when I heard that Pete Alonso got… got cheers for his 300th home run.
1:27:06
Tad Eggleston: But you're not the baseball guy, so we should get back to comics.
1:27:09
Zack Quaintance: I mean, yeah, I'm… you know, I was sort of an oddball, not to upset you, but I actually grew up liking both the Cubs and the White Sox, so…
1:27:19
Tad Eggleston: That doesn't upset me.
1:27:20
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, I never, you know.
1:27:22
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I…
1:27:23
Zack Quaintance: Rising there, you know.
1:27:24
Tad Eggleston: I am a die-hard Cubs fan, but I have never particularly disliked the White Sox. I'm happy when they win. The only times that I root against them are when they're playing the Cubs, the Twins, or the Red Sox.
1:27:39
Zack Quaintance: They play the Twins quite a bit, but other than.
1:27:41
Tad Eggleston: They do, they do, but I've got family from Minnesota, I loved Kirby Puckett.
1:27:47
Tad Eggleston: You know, I just happen to be more of a Twins fan. And now, even more so, because my wife's from South Dakota, so her whole family are Twins fans.
1:27:55
Zack Quaintance: Right.
1:27:57
Tad Eggleston: Aww.
1:27:58
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, I'm not… I haven't followed baseball much as an adult, as much as an adult, although I did really get into the Cubs in 2016.
1:28:06
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, didn't we all?
1:28:08
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, everybody, the… yeah, the world, yeah.
1:28:10
Tad Eggleston: To be all. I mean, they got to be on Saturday Night Live. I still watch that episode sometimes, and dream that the week after that somehow didn't happen.
1:28:21
Zack Quaintance: I know, I'm always like, the Cubs winning the World Series broke reality.
1:28:26
Tad Eggleston: It sometimes feels like that.
1:28:29
Zack Quaintance: Things have not been the same… things have not been the same since. It's like…
1:28:33
Tad Eggleston: It sometimes feels like that. We got one week of pure bliss.
1:28:40
Tad Eggleston: Not even, because it was a Wednesday night in Cleveland.
1:28:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah.
1:28:46
Zack Quaintance: It didn't take long to,
1:28:48
Tad Eggleston: And the following Tuesday, The world broke.
1:28:54
Tad Eggleston: and Humpty Dumpty hasn't been put back together again.
1:28:58
Zack Quaintance: But Trump Shark appears in my comic to…
1:29:00
Tad Eggleston: Bring this awful. See, I was about to say that!
1:29:04
Tad Eggleston: I love that you made him a shark, given how much he hates sharks.
1:29:11
Zack Quaintance: I didn't even know that.
1:29:12
Tad Eggleston: with Shark Week. Yeah, no, he's… he's…
1:29:15
Tad Eggleston: he's obsessed with Shark Week and, like, scared of… he, it hasn't been mentioned in a while, but as soon as I saw that, I'm like, oh, that's… that's beautiful synergy.
1:29:26
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, it was more of a… because in the first one, there's Ape Trump as well, like, there's a bunch of Trumps, and this is more of, like, a.
1:29:32
Tad Eggleston: That's too nice. Apes are way smarter than Trump.
1:29:38
Zack Quaintance: How, sort of base and, like, ins… like… Animalistic and…
1:29:45
Zack Quaintance: sort of savage politics of God in, you know? It was kind of that… that idea.
1:29:49
Tad Eggleston: I suppose that's fair.
1:29:51
Zack Quaintance: Made it a different, different thing than it used to be.
1:29:55
Tad Eggleston: But also, it's about you being rude to apes.
1:29:58
Zack Quaintance: Apes fighting in space, so that's what it comes back to.
1:30:03
Tad Eggleston: And that I did like. I liked the Trek troops, which wouldn't have meant as much to me.
1:30:09
Tad Eggleston: Until this recent run of Star Trek comics. Have you read?
1:30:13
Tad Eggleston: the Star Trek comics since… since Heather and… and… Chris, and Jackson and Colin…
1:30:21
Zack Quaintance: I think we talked about this last.
1:30:22
Tad Eggleston: Included the whole line?
1:30:24
Zack Quaintance: big Cantwell fans, so I've read his stuff, and then I've read Red Shirts, but my… one of my terrible secrets is I'm like.
1:30:31
Zack Quaintance: I'm… sort of… like, I've watched some Star Trek, but I don't… I haven't watched it all, and it's just so intimidating to try to get totally into Star Trek,
1:30:41
Tad Eggleston: I still haven't watched anywhere near all of it.
1:30:44
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I mean, how could you? If you didn't watch it as it came out, it's very difficult.
1:30:49
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I have binged a surprising amount of it since that run, just because I went…
1:30:57
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm a huge Cantwell fan, and he's a friend, so, like, I found out.
1:31:02
Zack Quaintance: Another super nice guy.
1:31:04
Tad Eggleston: Before the world. Yeah. Before the world found out he was getting… doing Star Trek. I got the text message that he was doing Star Trek, and he was like.
1:31:12
Tad Eggleston: Doing figurative cartwheels.
1:31:15
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, over the moon, I'm sure.
1:31:17
Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, oh shit, now I need to learn about Star Trek.
1:31:21
Zack Quaintance: Huh?
1:31:23
Zack Quaintance: There's a lot.
1:31:24
Tad Eggleston: Literally, literally, we have a 22 Panels episode that we framed as a classroom, you know, where I had Chris Condon and my friend Aaron, who are Star Trek fans, as the regular professors. The guest professors were Jackson Lansing, Colin Kelly, and Chris Cantwell, and I was the student.
1:31:44
Tad Eggleston: So, so Jackson and… and Colin and… and…
1:31:49
Tad Eggleston: Chris, like, pitched the whole line.
1:31:52
Tad Eggleston: And then they're like, okay, but you don't know anything about Star Trek, so, like, I see you've been taking notes, you've got questions, you know, shoot. And I'm like, okay, first, who's Benjamin Sisko? And Jackson just starts laughing. And he's like, oh, wow!
1:32:10
Tad Eggleston: You said you didn't know anything about Star Trek, and you meant it!
1:32:18
Zack Quaintance: That's too funny.
1:32:20
Tad Eggleston: I now know Benjamin Sisko very well, I loved Deep Space Nine, though I think I'm more of a Voyager guy.
1:32:27
Tad Eggleston: And those were the first two Star Trek series that I watched, because so many of the characters in…
1:32:33
Tad Eggleston: Defiant, and… Jackson and Colin's Star Trek line were from those…
1:32:39
Tad Eggleston: those two series, so even before I…
1:32:41
Zack Quaintance: 9 is on my list. I feel like it's maybe the most, fondly remembered among the hardcore Star Trek fans I know.
1:32:48
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:32:50
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I, I, I, I, I… I have a… I, like…
1:32:58
Tad Eggleston: I know that a lot of the hardcore Star Trek people don't like Voyager a lot, and I almost don't want to know why, because I don't want it to be.
1:33:06
Zack Quaintance: Don't ruin it.
1:33:07
Tad Eggleston: Female captain. Right. I don't want it to be because of female captain. It might be other stuff.
1:33:13
Tad Eggleston: But, like, I don't wanna… cause… cause, like… And, and like…
1:33:17
Tad Eggleston: Obviously, I'm not the only one, because Chris loves it. That's one of the reasons he took so many characters from it.
1:33:22
Zack Quaintance: It's got its… it's got… I don't know, I'm, like, talking out of nowhere, but I feel like it has its fans. I'm not…
1:33:28
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it definitely does, but it almost feels like the Last Jedi of Star Trek series.
1:33:38
Zack Quaintance: Oh, I could see that, yeah. I could see that.
1:33:41
Tad Eggleston: You know, where some of the people who aren't massive Star Trek fans love Voyager, and that actually makes them appreciate more of Star Trek, whereas some of the hardcore Star Trek fans are like, well, how can you like that?
1:33:58
Tad Eggleston: Fandom's weird. I don't know if you've noticed that.
1:34:01
Tad Eggleston: Working in comics?
1:34:03
Zack Quaintance: Well aware of that.
1:34:05
Zack Quaintance: It's hard to miss.
1:34:08
Tad Eggleston: I mean, you hit on that when you had two creators.
1:34:12
Zack Quaintance: That's right, yeah.
1:34:12
Tad Eggleston: Fist fight at, at, at, at a, at a, at a, at a panel in…
1:34:20
Tad Eggleston: That was… that was my new experience of this year. I… I hosted…
1:34:26
Tad Eggleston: 4 panels at C2E2 this year.
1:34:29
Zack Quaintance: Oh, nice! Yeah, that's a lot of fun.
1:34:32
Tad Eggleston: And…
1:34:32
Zack Quaintance: moderated a few in my time.
1:34:35
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:34:35
Zack Quaintance: show ever, but…
1:34:37
Tad Eggleston: Well, I didn't expect to get 4 of the 5 that I proposed
1:34:42
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I went 0 for 3 for New York, New York.
1:34:46
Zack Quaintance: New York's tough, nobody gets their Panels except in New York.
1:34:50
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:34:51
Tad Eggleston: But I got 4 out of 5…
1:34:53
Tad Eggleston: accepted at C2E2, including the one that I thought there was no chance that they were gonna accept.
1:35:02
Tad Eggleston: I literally had a panel called Cool People Talking About Comics.
1:35:06
Tad Eggleston: Where, where we projected comics.
1:35:09
Tad Eggleston: And talked about them.
1:35:10
Zack Quaintance: I mean, it sounds great to me.
1:35:12
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but I, like, it was so amalgamous, and, like, I had a couple of names that were with it, but also was like, I'm literally gonna invite anybody in Artist Alley to come join us.
1:35:24
Zack Quaintance: Nice.
1:35:24
Tad Eggleston: And we've got a handful of them.
1:35:27
Tad Eggleston: It's one of the ones I pitched at New York, too, because I had a bigger turnout for that than I expected, and I kind of want to make it a thing, because it was fun.
1:35:37
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, repeat the… repeat the thing at a different show.
1:35:40
Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like, I actually even figured out how to make it, like.
1:35:47
Tad Eggleston: to vary it, because, like, I just picked out 10… Between, like, 1- and 5-page…
1:35:57
Tad Eggleston: Sequences of comics that were worthy of… Talking about, right?
1:36:03
Tad Eggleston: going all through the years, comic strips, comic books, graphic novels, you know, try… I think I… I forget if I picked out a manga or not, but I know
1:36:14
Tad Eggleston: that I… want to.
1:36:17
Tad Eggleston: But what I've thought would actually be fun is to, like, Just continue expanding the slideshow.
1:36:25
Tad Eggleston: And then have some sort of random way to pick which ones you look at at any given show.
1:36:32
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Like, have an audience member spin a wheel. Okay, number 19, here we go.
1:36:41
Tad Eggleston: So…
1:36:42
Zack Quaintance: Hopefully I'll get to be at a show where you do that. That'd be pretty cool.
1:36:46
Tad Eggleston: I know I'll at least keep pitching it at Chicago every year. The travel expenses are always the issue, and…
1:36:55
Tad Eggleston: Thankfully, I now know enough people that I can stay with around the country, because somehow… I know.
1:37:01
Zack Quaintance: Big time.
1:37:02
Tad Eggleston: Somehow, you actually make friends in comics, not just, like.
1:37:05
Zack Quaintance: Thank you all the time.
1:37:06
Tad Eggleston: to on your podcast, it's weird. I've made more friends in my 40s than I did in my teens, and I wasn't a loner in my teens. You know.
1:37:15
Tad Eggleston: But that's not the way it's supposed to work. I mean, so many people make all of their friends before they leave school.
1:37:21
Zack Quaintance: Right, right.
1:37:22
Tad Eggleston: Whether that's the end of high school or the end of college. You know, because those are the only people that you, like, have to spend time with.
1:37:28
Zack Quaintance: Right. Yeah, you see them every day.
1:37:31
Tad Eggleston: You know, your friend by proximity.
1:37:34
Tad Eggleston: After that, you have to, like, do work.
1:37:37
Tad Eggleston: You have to think.
1:37:38
Zack Quaintance: sacrifice.
1:37:39
Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna send Zack an email to say, hey, how are you?
1:37:43
Zack Quaintance: I know, it's tough, man.
1:37:46
Tad Eggleston: That's stink.
1:37:47
Zack Quaintance: about that.
1:37:48
Tad Eggleston: But I'm realizing this is late, so let's roll into… some closing questions.
1:37:54
Zack Quaintance: Alright.
1:37:55
Tad Eggleston: Well, I don't think my first one for you…
1:37:58
Tad Eggleston: I had the last time you were on.
1:38:01
Tad Eggleston: As we've been in our fifth year of this podcast, I've been marveling about like, how…
1:38:11
Tad Eggleston: Dramatically, my life has changed.
1:38:14
Tad Eggleston: you know, how much I feel like I've fallen into the Twilight Zone.
1:38:18
Tad Eggleston: Like I just said, I've made more friends in my 40s than I did in my teens, and some of them are people that I used to look at as names in my favorite artifacts.
1:38:28
Tad Eggleston: So the idea that they're now people that I share Pictures of my grandkids with.
1:38:34
Tad Eggleston: Or talk trash about baseball with.
1:38:37
Tad Eggleston: It's just, you know, it's sometimes hard to wrap my head around.
1:38:43
Tad Eggleston: But I find that, like, everybody in this industry has surreal experiences that only happened because they were in comics. I think it's true of most arts in general, but I think it's even more so of comics because we're…
1:38:58
Tad Eggleston: really such a small group of people and insular. So I started collecting stories. Tell me one of the…
1:39:05
Tad Eggleston: Crazy stories from your life.
1:39:09
Tad Eggleston: experiences from your life that, that, like, you look back on and you kind of pinch yourself and go, is that really Zack Quaintance in that room?
1:39:18
Tad Eggleston: That just wouldn't have happened if it weren't for your involvement in comics.
1:39:24
Zack Quaintance: Man, I don't have, like, a, celebrity. I feel like, are these stories often, like, celebrity run-ins? Like…
1:39:31
Tad Eggleston: All of the above. They're all of the above.
1:39:33
Zack Quaintance: I do have a good one, and it's… it comes back to Garth Ennis, again. So, I was at… I went to Thought Bubble, last year, last fall to… because the, artists on my last.
1:39:43
Tad Eggleston: Totally on my bucket list.
1:39:45
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, the artist on my last book is from the UK, she was tabling there, so I brought her a bunch of the… instead of shipping the comics, I brought her a bunch so she could sell at the show.
1:39:53
Zack Quaintance: And one of my very good friends in comics, Steve Morris, does PR for, 2000AD, and we were going to get lunch, and the…
1:40:02
Zack Quaintance: fish and chips place, we wanted to go to was closed, so he's like, oh, I hate to do this to you, but there's an American theme bar, it's the closest thing, I need to get back to work, let's go eat lunch there. We went there yesterday with Garth Ennis.
1:40:15
Zack Quaintance: And we go there, and it's a Texas-themed bar in Harrogate, in the UK, which is, like, what you can… it's a pub, essentially, with a bunch of Texas. So we're… we're sitting there, and then Garth Ennis comes in again, the second day in a row.
1:40:28
Tad Eggleston: Oh, to eat.
1:40:29
Zack Quaintance: at the one Texas team pub.
1:40:31
Tad Eggleston: I mean, the fish and chips place was closed.
1:40:33
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, yeah, but it's just funny that, like, like you're talking about, the name I saw associated with the Texas comic preacher, you know, that thought bubble, two days in a row, goes to the Texas theme pub, like, so that was pretty unreal. That's my answer, yeah.
1:40:50
Tad Eggleston: I like that answer. I like that answer.
1:40:52
Zack Quaintance: What's the, okay. Well, yeah, what's the next one? I know you said you had a couple…
1:40:56
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the last question you did have to answer the last time, because I… it's been one of my… it's been my closing question.
1:41:04
Tad Eggleston: Maybe not since the very beginning, but awfully, awfully close.
1:41:08
Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love.
1:41:12
Tad Eggleston: Preferably comics, but we don't have rules.
1:41:17
Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
1:41:21
Tad Eggleston: But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you really want them to, so you have more people to talk about it with.
1:41:31
Zack Quaintance: Oh, hell yeah, I love this question. I don't remember what I said last time either, so apologies. Okay, good. So you won't know, it could be the same thing.
1:41:39
Tad Eggleston: I mean, if I did, I would make you give me another one. So, like, if it immediately rings a bell, I'll go, nope. And if it's something that you've already talked about, I'm gonna say nope. So, like, all those comics we already went through can't be the one.
1:41:50
Zack Quaintance: I got another one, yeah. It's Sync by, John, written by John Leese and drawn by Alex Cormac. I think it's one of the best.
1:41:58
Tad Eggleston: Yes!
1:41:58
Zack Quaintance: made right now, and not enough people know about it, and read it, and talk about it. I have bought it for so many people, and given it to them, and be like, read this.
1:42:08
Tad Eggleston: I am one of the people who knows about it, and talks about it, and has John Lees and Alex Cormac on every time they launch a Kickstarter, so the next time
1:42:19
Tad Eggleston: I do.
1:42:20
Tad Eggleston: The next time they do, I expect you to sit second chair.
1:42:24
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, I'd love to do that. I would… that's… that's one I… I… yeah, I'll make time. Let's do that for sure.
1:42:30
Tad Eggleston: For that matter, they were… I wanna say… let's say… let's look this up so I get it right.
1:42:39
Tad Eggleston: My very first interview was with Christopher Sibella, who has… has finally got a new book coming out. He's… he's doing,
1:42:47
Zack Quaintance: Right? Isn't that what's called?
1:42:48
Tad Eggleston: Rip Kirby.
1:42:50
Zack Quaintance: with Tango.
1:42:51
Tad Eggleston: Right?
1:42:53
Tad Eggleston: Rip Kirby coming from Mad Cave. Yeah, Chris Sibella was our very first guest.
1:43:00
Tad Eggleston: But I want to say Lees and Cormac…
1:43:05
Tad Eggleston: I know they were in the top 5.
1:43:08
Tad Eggleston: But they might have been number 2.
1:43:13
Tad Eggleston: And they… they… I mean, Alex has been back with so many different, like.
1:43:18
Zack Quaintance: Alex.
1:43:18
Tad Eggleston: He manages to bring his right… I love Alex. I love Alex. But he also manages to bring his… his artist with every… yeah, that… with Great Power Number 2, from December 3rd, 2021,
1:43:33
Tad Eggleston: was with John Lees and Alex Cormac.
1:43:36
Tad Eggleston: We actually talked to… did you read Crimson Cage?
1:43:40
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, the wrestling one? Yeah, yeah.
1:43:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, the wrestling adaptation of Macbeth.
1:43:45
Zack Quaintance: Fantastic.
1:43:47
Tad Eggleston: I love.
1:43:48
Zack Quaintance: John's awesome.
1:43:48
Tad Eggleston: so much. John's amazing.
1:43:50
Zack Quaintance: Well, yeah, because I stole his creative team for the framing sequence in Death the Comics bookcase, because that's.
1:43:57
Tad Eggleston: Nice.
1:43:57
Zack Quaintance: I saw Ryan Lee, and Doug Garbar co…
1:44:02
Zack Quaintance: did the first framing sequence for Death of Comics Bookcase, because I liked Mountain Head so much, and then I brought, Ryan… Ryan…
1:44:10
Zack Quaintance: draws the comics bookcase, the big mutant comics bookcase, that's his character design, and I remember when I was starting the second comics bookcase, I thought.
1:44:17
Zack Quaintance: any of the other artists could leave, I'll write a new story for them, the book will still… a different story with a different artist, the book will still work. It's not ideal to not have artists come back, but I could do a different
1:44:28
Zack Quaintance: vignette, but Ryan has to come back and do the bookcase again, and so thank God he was able to. But yeah, because I'm such a big fan of John Lee's, that's how I come across his work in Mountain Head, and he's colored in this one by Michael Woods, because Doug's not doing comics right now, but yeah.
1:44:45
Tad Eggleston: I'm…
1:44:45
Zack Quaintance: So, like, John Lee's… Incredibly nice guy. Sync is an amazing achievement. Amazing. Amazing.
1:44:51
Tad Eggleston: Amazing, and… and this is where I'll also say, sync… Sync has…
1:45:02
Tad Eggleston: It's got a Kickstarter coming up. I don't think we've got an official date on it yet, but I know I have…
1:45:08
Tad Eggleston: one bookmarked.
1:45:14
Tad Eggleston: Projects… sync!
1:45:18
Tad Eggleston: Pineapple.
1:45:19
Zack Quaintance: That's pineapple.
1:45:22
Tad Eggleston: Sex Dungeon Murder Mystery from John Lees and Alex Cormac. You can go sign up to be notified on that one as well.
1:45:33
Tad Eggleston: I actually expect, because they normally launch syncs in… October. Halloween.
1:45:39
Zack Quaintance: Hmm, yeah.
1:45:40
Tad Eggleston: kind of a Halloween-type thing. I expect it to be coming soon, which means I need to… to write out
1:45:45
Tad Eggleston: reach out to John and Alex. Alex, for a while, called himself…
1:45:50
Tad Eggleston: Alex, for a while, called himself, the Killustrator, and that came from me, because I… Nice. His handle is Alex Cormac Illustrator, but because it's Cormac with a K, I read it once as Kill Iustrator, and I told him that, and he's like, that's so amazing.
1:46:08
Zack Quaintance: Oh, he draws so many people getting killed as well. He does!
1:46:14
Tad Eggleston: But, yeah, no, I… Zach, you should go listen to that episode.
1:46:22
Tad Eggleston: If only because Alex gets John to share a story about a dream he once had.
1:46:29
Tad Eggleston: That is so fucking hilarious, and so fucking embarrassing, that John, to this day, can't believe that Alex got him to tell the story to the.
1:46:39
Zack Quaintance: I'll go do that, and then I'll ask him about it.
1:46:44
Zack Quaintance: But yeah, man, let me know when you're doing that episode, I'll come back.
1:46:46
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I'm gonna… It may still be.
1:46:48
Zack Quaintance: during my Kickstarter as well.
1:46:51
Tad Eggleston: They literally send the email as soon as we get off, because… because I've been meaning to send it since the… since the, the…
1:46:59
Tad Eggleston: Since I got the notice to… to… to…
1:47:03
Tad Eggleston: you know, I read his… his… I forget if I got the notice through Kickstarter when they put up the launching, or if I… he also puts out his Friday newsletter that I read every week, or at least skim every.
1:47:15
Zack Quaintance: Yeah, John's newsletter's great. He does, like… I tried to do that once a month, to have a newsletter as, like.
1:47:21
Zack Quaintance: sort of robust as his is, and it's hard. It's so hard, and he does it every week, so…
1:47:26
Tad Eggleston: It does. It does. Grace to him.
1:47:28
Tad Eggleston: Like, there are a handful of people that manage to… like…
1:47:36
Tad Eggleston: It's one thing when you're doing the newsletter that's just, like, a couple of funny things, and then, like, the books you're doing. Lots of people manage to do that.
1:47:44
Zack Quaintance: Mine's all promo right now, I'm doing these Kickstarters, I don't have time.
1:47:47
Tad Eggleston: But the people who match a, like…
1:47:49
Tad Eggleston: do real commentary on, like, the other… you read Patrick Kindland's newsletter at all?
1:47:56
Tad Eggleston: he manages.
1:47:57
Zack Quaintance: No, John's is the one… of any creator, John's is the one I read week in and week out, believe.
1:48:03
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:48:05
Tad Eggleston: I believe it.
1:48:06
Tad Eggleston: I believe it.
1:48:07
Tad Eggleston: I, I…
1:48:10
Tad Eggleston: I am on so many newsletter lists that I can't possibly read them all, I just have to… there's some that it's like, oh, John, must read.
1:48:19
Tad Eggleston: And sometimes I do, and sometimes it's the red spots in my fictional Spreadsheet, so… But anyway…
1:48:27
Zack Quaintance: Thank you for having me on tonight.
1:48:30
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:48:31
Zack Quaintance: weeks for the John Lee's conversation.
1:48:32
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we'll have to arrange that.
1:48:35
Zack Quaintance: Let's talk about DuPage County.
1:48:38
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, no, I mean, if we have Lees and Cormac, it's gonna be the two of them making each other laugh. We won't get to talk much at all. That's just the way.
1:48:47
Zack Quaintance: Fine by me, I'm just down there.
1:48:49
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, exactly.
1:48:49
Zack Quaintance: It is.
1:48:50
Tad Eggleston: Death of Comics Bookcase, Reign of the Comics Bookcases is on Kickstarter through… October 15th?
1:48:59
Tad Eggleston: at 11 a.m. Central Time, noon Eastern,
1:49:03
Tad Eggleston: This has been Zack Quaintance on 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.