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Pulp Blotter Book Club #24 - Palomino v. 3-4 · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to the Pulp Blotter Book Club on…
• 0:07
  Tad Eggleston: 22 panels. I'm joined by Chicago-area actors Sean Hargelrode and Mark Pratt, and Dan's joining us from St. Paul, Minnesota, with a very religious picture behind him, because he's staying in a hotel that used to be a monastery.
• 0:25
  Dan: Good times, good times. Kinda cool. Hanging in the convent.
• 0:28
  Tad Eggleston: Hanging in the convent.
• 0:31
  Tad Eggleston: So… how's everybody doing this morning?
• 0:36
  Sean Harklerode: Great.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, Mark, you know that my mom and brother can't see your facial expressions through their radios.
• 0:50
  Mark Pracht: I… I… all I have are facial expressions this morning.
• 0:54
  Tad Eggleston: All you have is facial expressions this morning.
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, Palomino Volumes 3 and 4, with the, the…
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: I think 15-year gap in between them.
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: Opening thoughts.
• 1:16
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:18
  Sean Harklerode: I…
• 1:18
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:19
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I was, I was surprised by the gap.
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: I was too, initially.
• 1:27
  Dan: Did not see that coming.
• 1:28
  Dan: I will admit.
• 1:29
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 1:32
  Dan: Probably traditional spoiler warning here before we go too far, that if somebody has not read Volume 3 of Palomino yet, they should probably do that before.
• 1:40
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I…
• 1:42
  Dan: I think so.
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: I somewhat say that for all of our book clubs. If you're listening to a book club, you should expect for people to talk about the books.
• 1:53
  Dan: massively spoil this thing, so, be warned.
• 1:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I thought…
• 1:57
  Mark Pracht: When the UFO landed, I was completely blown away.
• 2:00
  Tad Eggleston: I was like…
• 2:02
  Mark Pracht: Now, this thing has taken a turn, and now I'm in…
• 2:06
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's a different book of his.
• 2:10
  Mark Pracht: Oh, really? Oh, I think I might have written the wrong thing then.
• 2:14
  Tad Eggleston: You read Romance in the Era of the… I always forget.
• 2:20
  Mark Pracht: No, I think I… I think I read… it's, you know, the Marvel special, super special that Sean gave me.
• 2:26
  Dan: for my birthday?
• 2:27
  Mark Pracht: one year, and it's an adaptation of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
• 2:35
  Mark Pracht: Anyway.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: Romance in the Era of the Space God.
• 2:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's clearly what you read.
• 2:42
  Dan: Nice.
• 2:44
  Sean Harklerode: Well.
• 2:48
  Sean Harklerode: I, I mean, it, it kind of… it reminded me a little bit, just the device.
• 2:53
  Sean Harklerode: of it reminded me, I think, where it's going, of,
• 2:58
  Sean Harklerode: Where I think Southern Bastards intended to go.
• 3:02
  Sean Harklerode: With the daughter, picking up where the father left off.
• 3:11
  Sean Harklerode: In the investigation.
• 3:13
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I will say, I very much had that thought as well.
• 3:18
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 3:22
  Mark Pracht: I just have to be… like, I thought that the world that the first three volumes worked in, the world of…
• 3:29
  Mark Pracht: Country western clubs and stuff like that.
• 3:33
  Mark Pracht: That was more intriguing to me than…
• 3:37
  Mark Pracht: I work for a newspaper, or a failing newspaper in Los Angeles, you know, I sort of, like…
• 3:44
  Mark Pracht: like, not to… like, because I think Southern bastards, no matter what… One of the creators…
• 3:53
  Mark Pracht: what kind of a jerk he was. I think that what was lovely about that is that when that change happened, it deepened
• 4:01
  Mark Pracht: the conflicts within that story, you know? It made it even more…
• 4:06
  Mark Pracht: Like, the world it was in suddenly exploded, and you were like, oh god, this is gonna change everything, and… and…
• 4:13
  Mark Pracht: this… this time jump, it changes everything, but I was sort of like, okay, so…
• 4:21
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I mean, this is the valley.
• 4:23
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah. You know, 1995.
• 4:27
  Sean Harklerode: sean was.
• 4:29
  Mark Pracht: there.
• 4:30
  Sean Harklerode: I was there in 2000, or 19.
• 4:32
  Mark Pracht: Oh, okay. Yeah. Close enough.
• 4:34
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 4:36
  Dan: Yeah, I thought there were a lot of story elements that could have continued on. You know, some of the stuff with the old… the old singer… the guy that… the guy that, in my mind, is basically the… the Johnny Cash preacher from that Columbo episode, is what I kept kind of coming back to in my head.
• 4:52
  Sean Harklerode: So…
• 4:53
  Dan: So…
• 4:53
  Mark Pracht: 100%, yeah.
• 4:55
  Dan: But I liked that guy, I think it would have been interesting to follow some of them stories, and they mostly just sort of got left, because…
• 5:01
  Dan: You know, guy blows up and dies, and then we pick it up.
• 5:04
  Dan: Decade or so later.
• 5:07
  Mark Pracht: I mean, yeah, and it's clear that they're going to pick up some of those threads, I mean, like, but… I don't know, it was just that, like.
• 5:14
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, she does run into Sherry Jo, so…
• 5:17
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 5:18
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, I just… I like that I… like, just the concept of this detective that also, you know, goes into the club every night and plays pedal steel guitar, I was sort of like, that's kind of, you know, that's a… it's a hook, that's an interesting hook, that's something I haven't seen before.
• 5:36
  Mark Pracht: And… yeah. I don't know.
• 5:39
  Tad Eggleston: You mean you never watched the Jason Lee Memphis Blues?
• 5:46
  Tad Eggleston: I forget which station that was on.
• 5:49
  Tad Eggleston: Blues singer by night, detective by Day.
• 5:54
  Sean Harklerode: And he had a list of people that he'd done wrong.
• 5:57
  Tad Eggleston: No, that…
• 5:58
  Mark Pracht: I'm just trying to be a better printer.
• 6:00
  Dan: Make up for it.
• 6:04
  Tad Eggleston: No, this was after Earth.
• 6:05
  Mark Pracht: Farm us.
• 6:06
  Dan: Is that an actual thing? You're not even kidding?
• 6:09
  Tad Eggleston: Blues, yeah, it's an actual thing.
• 6:10
  Dan: Really? I have not… I've not watched any of that.
• 6:13
  Mark Pracht: So that was first by…
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it's ever been… streaming.
• 6:19
  Mark Pracht: Was that a Church of Scientology project?
• 6:21
  Tad Eggleston: I don't… I mean, I… I… like, how… they didn't… they didn't say that on the episodes.
• 6:27
  Mark Pracht: Well, they never do!
• 6:30
  Tad Eggleston: So, so I guess I can't… I can't completely answer that.
• 6:39
  Mark Pracht: No, I… it's funny, we're all just sort of sitting here going, yeah.
• 6:47
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, like, I was waiting to hear some. I think it's, interesting and… bold choice…
• 6:59
  Tad Eggleston: that takes time… To pay off to… essentially have… Dad's death and aftermath off-screen.
• 7:11
  Tad Eggleston: You know, because your cliffhanger at the end of Volume 3 is, like, did he make it out of the building?
• 7:18
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 7:20
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I… I… when… when the friend came to the door, I immediately was like, well, he's dead.
• 7:26
  Mark Pracht: You know.
• 7:30
  Tad Eggleston: Was that…
• 7:31
  Mark Pracht: That was mine.
• 7:31
  Tad Eggleston: or that… or was that…
• 7:33
  Mark Pracht: It's at the… that's at the end, Volume 3.
• 7:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 7:38
  Mark Pracht: The daughter has the vision of her mother in the living room, and then…
• 7:42
  Mark Pracht: There's the knock on the door, and it's the… The partner, who's clearly dirty.
• 7:48
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 7:49
  Mark Pracht: Who, comes and says, you know, basically comes to tell her that her dad's gone.
• 7:55
  Mark Pracht: In that map.
• 7:56
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, I need… I need to correct myself. It wasn't Memphis Blues, it was Memphis It ran.
• 8:03
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, Memphis beat!
• 8:05
  Tad Eggleston: In 2010 and 11.
• 8:07
  Dan: Yeah, I looked it up. Basically, anything after about 2004 to 2006, I was in mid-small child territory, and it's all a blur, and I have no media context for about a decade there. It's just completely gone. So, I missed that entirely.
• 8:23
  Dan: I probably would like this show, actually. I should give it.
• 8:26
  Tad Eggleston: It was on TNT for, it looks like, one season.
• 8:30
  Dan: There you go.
• 8:33
  Dan: Actually, the opening theme is by Kevmo. Love Kebmo.
• 8:35
  Sean Harklerode: Oh!
• 8:38
  Dan: worth listening.
• 8:39
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I…
• 8:39
  Dan: True, anyway.
• 8:40
  Tad Eggleston: I absolutely won't call it, like, high, high… Cinema, but it was entertaining.
• 8:49
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, but I have to ask, at some point during that show, does the rest of the band pull away in the bus, and he comes out of the bathroom of the gas station saying, oh, what, just forget about me, I'm only the lead singer!
• 9:04
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't remember, but that would have been an awesome, an awesome throwback.
• 9:10
  Mark Pracht: almost famous joke that I think only Dan got.
• 9:15
  Tad Eggleston: I got it!
• 9:16
  Sean Harklerode: I got it.
• 9:18
  Mark Pracht: It just wasn't.
• 9:19
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know that I thought it was funny, but I got it.
• 9:24
  Sean Harklerode: with Mighty Thor.
• 9:26
  Tad Eggleston: And I will actually…
• 9:27
  Tad Eggleston: I will totally recommend, Cameron Crowe's, recent autobiography that, that, like, is framed by the…
• 9:36
  Tad Eggleston: the musical adaptation of Almost Famous.
• 9:40
  Sean Harklerode: I actually got that for my birthday this year.
• 9:44
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 9:45
  Sean Harklerode: Very fun.
• 9:47
  Mark Pracht: That's one of Colleen's favorite, filmmakers, so she read it. I haven't read it yet, but…
• 9:53
  Mark Pracht: Why? Why? Why do we need a musical, stage musical of Almost Famous? Why do we need that?
• 10:00
  Tad Eggleston: Essentially, because his mom thought musicals were a higher art form than… than film.
• 10:11
  Tad Eggleston: And she just barely made it… well, you've seen the movie, you know his mom.
• 10:16
  Mark Pracht: I know.
• 10:19
  Mark Pracht: All I'm saying, and the thing is, is, like, it shouldn't be a musical, it should be a play with music.
• 10:28
  Tad Eggleston: Which it might have been, I haven't actually seen it. I mean…
• 10:31
  Tad Eggleston: A lot of what's called musicals these days are plays with music rather than true musicals.
• 10:42
  Mark Pracht: Sorry.
• 10:42
  Tad Eggleston: Mark's making great, great faces.
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Share your real thoughts, Mark.
• 10:49
  Mark Pracht: I don't have any thoughts.
• 10:51
  Mark Pracht: I have learned over the last several months to not share my thoughts.
• 10:55
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not sure. But, but, like…
• 10:57
  Mark Pracht: it that way.
• 10:58
  Tad Eggleston: This is difficult, because, like… I thought that was the point of this puppet test.
• 11:06
  Mark Pracht: Hey, look, man.
• 11:08
  Mark Pracht: I told you, I… I… I was looking forward to… okay.
• 11:13
  Mark Pracht: Here's… the one thing you said about the… this… this… this, this…
• 11:19
  Mark Pracht: twist, this change in the plot, is you called it a slow burn, and I'm still saying, this… this series
• 11:27
  Mark Pracht: is so slow that I'm like.
• 11:31
  Mark Pracht: I feel like everything, you know, like…
• 11:35
  Mark Pracht: I feel like almost the first three… like, the first three volumes could have been 2 volumes.
• 11:41
  Mark Pracht: I still feel that way. And I think that… I think that there is… Is a lot of,
• 11:48
  Mark Pracht: And it's clear it's an atmospheric desire, you know?
• 11:53
  Tad Eggleston: Damn.
• 11:53
  Mark Pracht: But then I'll also say this, the atmosphere of him going into the, what would the hell was the name of the bar? The Palomino?
• 12:04
  Mark Pracht: And playing gigs.
• 12:05
  Sean Harklerode: How did you forget that?
• 12:13
  Mark Pracht: Sean, my life right now, I have forgotten so much, anyway,
• 12:21
  Mark Pracht: As I said, as I said…
• 12:22
  Tad Eggleston: Does that mean I could call you Bill and you wouldn't remember that it was wrong?
• 12:26
  Mark Pracht: Probably not. I've been answering to a lot of different names lately. But,
• 12:37
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I didn't, like, quite honestly, yeah, like, I… I… I… by the time I got through the third volume, I was like, you know what, like, I was starting to really kind of dig the artwork.
• 12:47
  Mark Pracht: Like, I wasn't… I wasn't totally on board with it in the first couple, and then I was like, okay, this is cool. And then when we make this 15-year shift, like.
• 12:56
  Mark Pracht: It felt like, okay, now we're just running around, you know.
• 13:01
  Mark Pracht: sunny LA in the late 90s, and… you know… I was there.
• 13:07
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I wasn't there a lot, but I was there occasionally, and I was like, okay.
• 13:13
  Mark Pracht: Alright.
• 13:16
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess, I guess I have the advantage of I wasn't.
• 13:21
  Tad Eggleston: But… and also… and I'm becoming aware that, like, this is… this is one of the places that I differ from a lot of people.
• 13:30
  Tad Eggleston: I… like meandering.
• 13:39
  Mark Pracht: That's fair.
• 13:40
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, I think coming from the dense storytelling that we've been doing in other.
• 13:47
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 13:47
  Sean Harklerode: places. This feels like… What are we gonna talk about? Nothing really happened.
• 13:53
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 13:54
  Sean Harklerode: You know?
• 13:54
  Dan: That's the weird thing is, I mean, I don't even know this meanders so much as it just…
• 13:59
  Dan: elongates. Like, I went in… I went in and… I forgot my card, but I was obsessed enough after reading a few of these that I went in and, like, counted the panels in a… in, like, an issue of 100 bullets, and counted the panels in an issue of one of the criminal books, and the like.
• 14:19
  Dan: And if you took the same panel count that they do versus the panel counts that are in here, one of these entire volumes would be, like, an issue and a half.
• 14:30
  Dan: You know, because a normal comic book's 5… 5 panels or something like this. Right. This average is probably, like, 1.2, 1.4 panels.
• 14:38
  Dan: per page.
• 14:38
  Tad Eggleston: patient.
• 14:40
  Dan: And so…
• 14:41
  Dan: I think that's one of the things that got me, is just when you really look at it, how little
• 14:46
  Dan: How little is happening, and how much of what you're seeing is…
• 14:51
  Dan: more of… more of just flipping through pages to see… see what is going on. You've got all these beautiful full-page art.
• 14:59
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 14:59
  Dan: But there is actually… And in terms of… it's not even so much that there's not
• 15:04
  Dan: That the story doesn't move fast, it's that the panels are so big that by the time you get done, even though there is a lot of fast movement, you don't really progress as far as you might have.
• 15:13
  Dan: You know.
• 15:14
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 15:15
  Dan: One of the things that I almost wanted to ask you guys is, at what point does a comic book become a picture book?
• 15:23
  Dan: You know?
• 15:24
  Mark Pracht: I think that.
• 15:25
  Dan: Excellent.
• 15:25
  Mark Pracht: I think that's a fair thing to ask, yeah.
• 15:29
  Dan: Because even in Volume 3.
• 15:32
  Mark Pracht: Exactly.
• 15:34
  Mark Pracht: No, I mean, like, but I do think, like, okay, I think to Dan's point, yeah, like…
• 15:44
  Mark Pracht: I'm thinking back, because I read these about a week ago. You know, I'm thinking about… I'm thinking back to reading Volume 4, and, okay, so what…
• 15:54
  Mark Pracht: what… What illumination of this overall… mystery…
• 16:03
  Mark Pracht: Is… is… how… what… what parts of the mystery move forward, right?
• 16:09
  Mark Pracht: And… So, she goes and she has an interview with, the TV star whose wife got killed.
• 16:16
  Mark Pracht: And pisses off his new wife.
• 16:20
  Mark Pracht: But doesn't really get any more information, right? It's just other than…
• 16:26
  Mark Pracht: The wife is super defensive about it, right?
• 16:30
  Mark Pracht: And then, she goes to the Palomino and meets Sherry Jo.
• 16:35
  Mark Pracht: And then they turn out the… then they close down the Palomino, right? And I'm like, okay, so…
• 16:41
  Tad Eggleston: She gets the locker key.
• 16:44
  Mark Pracht: She gets the locker key. But… like…
• 16:54
  Mark Pracht: How vagious was that?
• 16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Like, and I, I get…
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: I get the argument in terms of the number of pages. For me, what Volume 4 is, is without showing
• 17:13
  Tad Eggleston: the…
• 17:18
  Tad Eggleston: 15 years of sadness.
• 17:21
  Tad Eggleston: You're establishing that… She's been… a train wreck.
• 17:29
  Tad Eggleston: 4.
• 17:32
  Tad Eggleston: The last decade and a half.
• 17:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, she's now working for and dating the guy that she kicked in the balls for being a bully, right?
• 17:44
  Tad Eggleston: Dating might be too strong of a term.
• 17:50
  Tad Eggleston: She's on, like, the puff beat of a third-rate Probably online-only newspaper.
• 18:03
  Sean Harklerode: Not at that time.
• 18:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, not quite.
• 18:05
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 18:07
  Tad Eggleston: Not yet. Puff beat of a third-rate newspaper, probably the type that you get free in your mailbox because of the ads.
• 18:14
  Sean Harklerode: the LA Weekly.
• 18:15
  Dan: Right.
• 18:17
  Sean Harklerode: Or the LA Express, if you're real.
• 18:20
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 18:20
  Sean Harklerode: Bottom.
• 18:21
  Mark Pracht: Alright, but.
• 18:24
  Tad Eggleston: But… She happens to be put into a situation where she asks a question that doesn't feel as…
• 18:34
  Tad Eggleston: Pointed to her as the reaction that sheet.
• 18:40
  Tad Eggleston: gets from it.
• 18:42
  Tad Eggleston: And that starts to provide a kick in the head, and then this mysterious woman says, meet me at this place that she's avoided her entire life because of the ties to her dad.
• 18:54
  Tad Eggleston: She bumps into his ex-lover. So, so, like, yes, the whole thing is a transition.
• 19:00
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, the argument that taking… I think this is one of the shorter ones, because they're not all the same length.
• 19:09
  Sean Harklerode: I read this in under half an ac… number 4.
• 19:13
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 19:14
  Dan: I was gonna note that I actually timed the same thing, because I'm like, how long does it even take me to read this? And it… yeah, it just goes in no time, but…
• 19:21
  Mark Pracht: I mean, and you know, and like, that's something that Sean and I have talked about in our personal lives, like, you know, like, I've been really enjoying going back and sort of going into, like, 70s Bronze Age comics.
• 19:33
  Mark Pracht: Because… I get a 22-page story, or a 25-page story, whatever it was at the time, and…
• 19:41
  Mark Pracht: It takes me a good… Half hour to read it, you know?
• 19:47
  Mark Pracht: And I think, you know, it is one of those things, Ted, you know, when we were doing the Kirby thing, and you were… you were… you had the thing about words, right?
• 19:57
  Mark Pracht: And the thing is, is that I think that… and, you know, I'm not… I'm just saying this is an observation, it's not an.
• 20:03
  Tad Eggleston: Dammit?
• 20:03
  Mark Pracht: or anything like that. I think there's the same amount of words.
• 20:06
  Mark Pracht: It's just they're all spread out over…
• 20:09
  Mark Pracht: 6 pages instead of being on one, you know?
• 20:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 20:13
  Mark Pracht: Ed, and I think that… like…
• 20:17
  Mark Pracht: There's a lot of times, like, I, I think that…
• 20:22
  Mark Pracht: and I think we talked about this the last time we talked about this book, you know, like, there's that great book, the,
• 20:28
  Mark Pracht: Eisner Miller.
• 20:30
  Mark Pracht: where they have a really long conversation about how… what the power of comics is, is that you can distort or extend time, right? Right. That you can take a half a second and turn it into 3 pages, or you can take…
• 20:43
  Mark Pracht: 6 months and turn it into two panels, you know? And… and the thing is, is, like.
• 20:48
  Mark Pracht: But they also… the gist of that conversation is that when you do those things, you need to have a… there needs to be a compelling reason to do
• 20:57
  Mark Pracht: that. And I think that…
• 21:01
  Mark Pracht: part, and I think, you know, we know that the writer, the artist here, comes from TV,
• 21:09
  Mark Pracht: And I think the animation, it all feels like storyboards, right? And… and I think that… For me.
• 21:21
  Mark Pracht: while I love storyboards, and I love the art of storyboards, and I love the art of storyboarding, and I can, you know, I like when… I love opening up a book of, like, here's all the storyboards for Raiders of the Lost Ark, or whatever, but…
• 21:34
  Mark Pracht: That's… that's not the end of the storytelling, right? There's an interpretation of that, and I think that
• 21:44
  Mark Pracht: In a way, This feels like a book.
• 21:50
  Mark Pracht: that somebody… is writing to try to sell us a TV show.
• 21:56
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 21:59
  Dan: I even think it's probably got to do with the fact that as an animator.
• 22:04
  Dan: He's used to controlling the flow of time. He's used to controlling what we as an audience see. Right. And so, I mean, when I talk about… it's almost not even a picture book, but a flipbook at a certain point, where he's used to just that idea that he's gonna present things to us one at a time, and then they're gonna cycle away in something else. And…
• 22:23
  Dan: one of the things as a comic fan that I love and that I've cultivated is that ability to understand
• 22:29
  Dan: how panels work, and how important the gutter is. You know, there's a reason why you have gutters, and why you have smaller panels and bigger panels, and I think that, in actual fact, these… if it had been reduced from
• 22:43
  Dan: You know, like, cut the volumes in half, or something like that.
• 22:48
  Dan: it may have been stronger storytelling, because you'd have been able to use more of the mechanisms of comics. Panel transitions, and the gutters, and just that… those juxtapositions between. You know, right now, basically, the page flip is, in many cases, the only control I have, and as a comics fan, I'm used to
• 23:06
  Dan: Just mentally being able to…
• 23:09
  Dan: to read the comic the way I want to, and some of that, I feel, is being taken away from me. Now, that's it.
• 23:14
  Dan: I actually do love this story. I think it's really cool stuff, and I enjoyed it as something that was different from a lot of the others I've read. But I do think that as a storyteller.
• 23:25
  Dan: if he'd embraced more of the comics format and gotten away… because there are times he does, like in Book 3, where we have a number of places where there's 4 or 5 panels.
• 23:35
  Dan: to the page for a while, and I really enjoyed those. But then by the end of, like, Book 3 here, I think Book 3 again finished with, like, 7 pages that were mostly one panel, or 1 to 2 panels. And he uses that because he likes that idea of being able to build suspense through having the full page and making you flip it.
• 23:54
  Dan: But I think there's ways to do that without… and again, if I bought this as a print book, I think I'd have been… I'd have had a different opinion, because I'm like.
• 24:02
  Dan: This could have been a lot cheaper and used a lot less paper, and been a better story.
• 24:06
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I think that… I think that when you do, like, a big splash page or a double-page spread.
• 24:13
  Mark Pracht: you know, I feel like that should be something…
• 24:18
  Mark Pracht: And this… this is my… this is my Kirby fan thing, you know, where you…
• 24:23
  Mark Pracht: and then BAM! You know, double-page spread that would be like, oh, wow. And then we'd go back to the panels, you know? And the thing is, is like… like, the turning off of the Palomino sign.
• 24:38
  Mark Pracht: like, I agree that that was probably worth a huge…
• 24:43
  Dan: Absolutely. That's cool.
• 24:44
  Mark Pracht: But… it was, like, I think it was 3 double-page spreads? You know, and I was just like, okay.
• 24:53
  Mark Pracht: And I think that… yeah, I don't know, I mean, like…
• 24:57
  Mark Pracht: I'm getting… I'm getting into the weeds of the technical aspects of it, and I do… I mean, like, I think the story is… is definitely interesting.
• 25:06
  Mark Pracht: But I…
• 25:08
  Mark Pracht: I don't know. I… I was… I was a little sad that we lost, you know, like, if we want to talk storytelling and we want to talk character, I was a little sad that we lost, the father, you know, because I thought that that was this thing that I hadn't seen before, you know? And the,
• 25:27
  Mark Pracht: And the, you know, the,
• 25:31
  Mark Pracht: the girl reporter detective, you know, I've seen that a few times. And I… but I, you know, I… and especially because he wasn't a singer, he wasn't a… you know, he wasn't like a star, he was just this guy who played steel guitar, you know?
• 25:45
  Mark Pracht: for whoever played that night, you know? And the jobbing musician element of it was really kind of fascinating to me. I was like, okay, because, you know, I've had some experience in that world, but…
• 25:57
  Mark Pracht: Not like that, but… you know.
• 26:00
  Mark Pracht: I thought that… I thought that was really interesting, and then… But…
• 26:08
  Mark Pracht: It… it just feels like everything is at a low simmer.
• 26:11
  Mark Pracht: all the time, right? And I just…
• 26:16
  Mark Pracht: And that's fine to a point, but, like, every time, like, if I'm writing a monthly comic, it's like, okay, you could write a comic that's a low simmer, but then on that last page, you better have something that makes me go like, okay, I gotta read the next one.
• 26:31
  Mark Pracht: You know?
• 26:32
  Mark Pracht: And… Sometimes I get that with this, and sometimes I don't.
• 26:38
  Dan: You know, I think that it would be cool
• 26:41
  Dan: If the dad had at least gotten a win before he died, too. Maybe… maybe you have what the girl's gonna have solve as a B-plot that's running through it, but at least let the dad solve a case before, because really, his story's just basically wandering around being confused until he gets blown up.
• 26:57
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 26:57
  Dan: You know, and then the daughter's gotta pick it up. So, at least to what I remember.
• 27:02
  Sean Harklerode: Assuming he's dead.
• 27:06
  Dan: Yeah.
• 27:08
  Mark Pracht: That's true.
• 27:09
  Dan: I guess we'll find out.
• 27:10
  Sean Harklerode: I mean.
• 27:10
  Mark Pracht: My dad's smiling.
• 27:16
  Mark Pracht: Tad's got kind of a shit-eating grin on his face, so I'm thinking that probably…
• 27:20
  Tad Eggleston: He's dead.
• 27:21
  Mark Pracht: Okay.
• 27:23
  Sean Harklerode: Now…
• 27:24
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I…
• 27:28
  Dan: So…
• 27:29
  Sean Harklerode: I mean, to me, this feels… and I don't know, Stefan,
• 27:35
  Sean Harklerode: But it feels to me like this is…
• 27:40
  Sean Harklerode: He's got… he just wants to play in these various worlds that he either heard about or enjoyed living in.
• 27:51
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I, I can…
• 27:53
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, yeah.
• 27:53
  Tad Eggleston: enjoyed living in.
• 27:55
  Dan: Nope.
• 27:56
  Tad Eggleston: And I don't know that that's inaccurate.
• 28:01
  Sean Harklerode: And, so, you know, he tells the story of the Palomino in the late 70s, and then he flashes forward, probably when he was a young professional. He knows the Valley in the 90s, and so now that's another familiar milieu.
• 28:18
  Sean Harklerode: For him. I don't know if you read the stuff at the end, where he… the backgrounds are CG, he builds the backgrounds totally, so you've got a world, to live in there. So it really feels like a passion project for him.
• 28:38
  Sean Harklerode: Telling, you know, the story he wants to tell, and…
• 28:44
  Sean Harklerode: You know, I think that is one of the good things about the format.
• 28:48
  Sean Harklerode: that…
• 28:51
  Sean Harklerode: I agree. Were this being published by Image, or Marvel, or, you know, someone on a monthly basis, there'd be an editor.
• 29:01
  Sean Harklerode: Saying, something's gotta happen.
• 29:05
  Sean Harklerode: But, I mean, this definitely feels like it is creator-controlled, and this is…
• 29:10
  Sean Harklerode: The way he wants to tell it, and the pace,
• 29:15
  Sean Harklerode: it would probably, you know, if I were buying it, I don't know what the,
• 29:23
  Sean Harklerode: frequency of this was, has been over and over… It's been about a fall.
• 29:29
  Tad Eggleston: Volume a year, a little more.
• 29:31
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, I would… it's like… I was one of the lucky ones who never watched Lost.
• 29:37
  Sean Harklerode: Until it was all done.
• 29:39
  Sean Harklerode: Because I can tell you, if I had the wash lost, Episode by episode, I'd have lost my mind.
• 29:46
  Sean Harklerode: And, I don't know that I would have been able to stick with this on a yearly…
• 29:52
  Sean Harklerode: release schedule.
• 29:54
  Sean Harklerode: But I…
• 29:55
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 29:56
  Sean Harklerode: Drawing it on this scale.
• 29:58
  Mark Pracht: And, you know, and I think that there is that idea that it's a passion project, and it's something that clearly means a lot to him, and that is great. And I think that he should have every right to do that, and I think that he should have every right to find the audience for that, and apparently he has, so great.
• 30:13
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, like, it is…
• 30:18
  Mark Pracht: It also comes down to, you know.
• 30:22
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it… like, I think that the way we're writing… the way we're reading it is probably the only way that I would ever get through this.
• 30:31
  Mark Pracht: If I had to wait… I will say, if I had to wait a year from 3 to 4, and then I.
• 30:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 30:38
  Mark Pracht: Y and 4?
• 30:39
  Tad Eggleston: That's where I was actually…
• 30:40
  Mark Pracht: Probably be, I might have thrown it across the room.
• 30:44
  Tad Eggleston: because…
• 30:50
  Tad Eggleston: if I recall correctly, it was actually, at least in terms of Kickstarters, and I think, I think that he might have had some stuff.
• 31:00
  Tad Eggleston: available through his store before the Kickstarter, but, like.
• 31:04
  Tad Eggleston: When I was introduced to it, the first two were available.
• 31:09
  Tad Eggleston: And then the next Kickstarter had 3, 4, and 5.
• 31:16
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 31:18
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, you didn't have to… you didn't have a hu… I mean, if you kick-started it, rather than…
• 31:30
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than buying volumes individually, Through his web store.
• 31:36
  Tad Eggleston: There wasn't necessarily any time at all.
• 31:40
  Tad Eggleston: between volumes 3 and 4, and for that matter, you had Volume 5 as well, and I'm actually kind of wondering if… if that…
• 31:50
  Tad Eggleston: because I did, when I finished Volume 4 this morning.
• 31:55
  Tad Eggleston: I did have the… oh, that was fast. And I wonder if I didn't notice it as much the last time, because I rolled straight into Volume 5.
• 32:08
  Dan: As we do this, by the way, just as a note, I would have…
• 32:12
  Dan: bought these once a year, coming out if they needed to, or whatever. I actually do… as much as I do wish that he would compress the storytelling, and maybe have expanded some of the side things, had another mystery in there or whatever for this, or just published it in a more compact number of pages.
• 32:30
  Dan: This is… it is different. The way he presents, it's different than almost any other comic out there, the way that, you know, kind of he structured things, and the fact that it comes from kind of that animation sort of mentality. I think these are pretty gorgeous, and… and as long as I can just…
• 32:49
  Dan: go through them, and like you say, and especially since I basically had all 6 at once and didn't have to worry about
• 32:55
  Dan: you know, about how slow they were, but even when I just had the first, I think I only got 1 and 2 from you initially. And I read those, and I was pretty happy. And then, you know, like, a couple days ago, I realized that there were other ones out there that were just under a different naming convention, or whatever.
• 33:12
  Dan: I really… I really do think this is a… a pretty cool vision that he's produced.
• 33:18
  Dan: It's just so… it is very different from what I'm used to in comic books.
• 33:22
  Dan: It is more manga in terms of that expan… that expansiveness and the like.
• 33:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well.
• 33:29
  Dan: Yep.
• 33:30
  Tad Eggleston: I think, I think it's… I mean, Stefan…
• 33:36
  Tad Eggleston: I think was born in Germany.
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: Came to the U.S.
• 33:39
  Tad Eggleston: I think is his child.
• 33:41
  Tad Eggleston: Like, his entire professional career's been in the US. But… but, yeah, it definitely has a manga influence, it definitely has a Band-Aid to Snae influence.
• 33:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, honestly, I think one of the things that makes me like it is…
• 34:03
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like Band-Aid to Snay often has… more unique pacing.
• 34:13
  Tad Eggleston: Not as… Action-packed, more, more, more time spent in the… the… The spaces in between action.
• 34:27
  Tad Eggleston: Though they tend to do it by having more panels on a page. I feel like he took that sensibility and did it more in the manga…
• 34:37
  Tad Eggleston: Less panels per page, less set panels… style,
• 34:44
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, it's come up here before, I know it's come up in conversations I've had with a lot of people lately, particularly having gone and seen a movie from a cartoonist.
• 34:57
  Tad Eggleston: Last night. Like, cartoonists are… the… the director…
• 35:05
  Tad Eggleston: The actors, the set designers, the lighting director, the… the…
• 35:12
  Tad Eggleston: the, costume designers and whatnot, and I think that…
• 35:24
  Tad Eggleston: I will call Stefan an absolute master of… the acting…
• 35:30
  Tad Eggleston: The set design, the costume design, the lighting.
• 35:35
  Tad Eggleston: the cinematography.
• 35:37
  Tad Eggleston: But his… editing and… directing our… An acquired taste.
• 35:54
  Tad Eggleston: Does that make sense? That they're atypical.
• 35:57
  Tad Eggleston: I love them.
• 35:59
  Tad Eggleston: clearly they don't work as well for everybody, and I understand
• 36:03
  Tad Eggleston: the reasons why, like, I can't argue any of the things you're saying, I just… I feel differently about the things that you're saying. Does that make sense?
• 36:13
  Dan: I'm also, this morning, by the way, just noticing, because I ended up having to bring a different reader with me.
• 36:21
  Dan: This could work really well as a scrolling comic. I don't know if… are you guys reading it in traditional left-to-right on your readers, or are you scrolling it?
• 36:31
  Mark Pracht: I'm doing left-right, yeah.
• 36:33
  Tad Eggleston: Left or right.
• 36:34
  Dan: Because all of his panels are… I mean, it… there's a lot of time scrolling through where I literally can't tell where the pages end and the panels, because it's just a lot of…
• 36:44
  Dan: Horizontal panels, one stacked on top of another, and full pages and the like. Horizontal scrolls?
• 36:50
  Dan: You could read this as a vertical scroll comic really easily, like one of the… I can't remember what Marvel calls it in the Marvel app, but, any of those that are, like, the newer style bits.
• 37:00
  Tad Eggleston: DC go.
• 37:01
  Dan: Let's read.
• 37:02
  Dan: Yeah. So… But, yeah.
• 37:06
  Dan: That's interesting.
• 37:07
  Tad Eggleston: That's… that's an interesting… Observation as well.
• 37:10
  Dan: So…
• 37:11
  Tad Eggleston: And more questions to ask him the next time I talk to him, because, like…
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: It makes me, you know, because of the differences, I've talked to him a lot about, like.
• 37:22
  Tad Eggleston: I've probably talked more process with Stefan than I have with most
• 37:26
  Tad Eggleston: artist, just because of the things that I've noticed that are so different, you know? So even before he wrote about it, I knew that he was making, like, 3D models of all of his backgrounds.
• 37:39
  Tad Eggleston: And then… and then drawing the stuff into that, and then redrawing the background
• 37:44
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, so, I mean, what you actually get is the drawing. I mean, it's all drawn, hand-drawn, but, like, when he's drawing the action, he…
• 37:53
  Tad Eggleston: has the 3D model of the exact place in the room, so that, like.
• 38:00
  Tad Eggleston: the posters stay in the same place, you know, I mean…
• 38:03
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 38:05
  Tad Eggleston: He's one of a couple of people that I know that does that, where it's just, like, that's how their minds work, they need the very specific.
• 38:13
  Tad Eggleston: But now I wonder, like, when he's…
• 38:20
  Tad Eggleston: Looking at things, how he scrolls through… Looking page to page.
• 38:28
  Tad Eggleston: You know… Yeah.
• 38:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'm totally on record multiple times, and, like, this is definitely…
• 38:43
  Tad Eggleston: one of my favorite recent comics, but a lot of that is because it's different. I don't feel like it throws out all of the conventions of comics and paneling. I think that it…
• 39:01
  Tad Eggleston: Picks and chooses what and when.
• 39:04
  Tad Eggleston: Like…
• 39:07
  Dan: So, so as a name, I don't know if you guys were McFarlane Spider-Man fans.
• 39:13
  Dan: But some of the same frustrations that I had with McFarlane back in the day, kind of that… he also played along along a lot, and liked having the big panel things and stuff like that.
• 39:24
  Dan: And I think this has a lot of…
• 39:26
  Dan: You know, it's interesting because if you…
• 39:30
  Dan: I'd love to see what would happen if this book had been submitted to Stan and Jack at Marvel in the early days, right? You know, it has no action in it for, like, the first however many pages, and all these full-page spreads. They'd have… they'd have just been completely lost trying to figure out what to do with this.
• 39:49
  Dan: Well, it does seem like water.
• 39:52
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, it definitely feels modern, and it definitely feels like somebody with a coherent voice, and a coherent style of their own. I mean, like, part…
• 40:02
  Mark Pracht: Part of… part of… part of Stan's…
• 40:07
  Mark Pracht: thing, you know, was that his style was, like, make sure, you know, grab him and hold them, you know.
• 40:14
  Mark Pracht: it was a… it was a sell, sell, sell kind of thing, right? And… and that's fine, and that… also, that was the time he was working in, and I think that by the time we get to now, you know, the idea of what… what constitutes… because, I mean, in a way.
• 40:34
  Mark Pracht: I mean, we can't really call these comic books. They're graphic novels, right? Right. I mean, like, and that's… and that's a totally… that can be a totally different kind of storytelling, you know, just because so many graphic novels that we have are just collections of comic books.
• 40:51
  Mark Pracht: It kind of tends to… to warp the idea of what that is, you know?
• 40:56
  Mark Pracht: like, everybody calls Watchmen a graphic novel, and I don't… I don't think that's accurate. I think that they…
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: No, that's, that's.
• 41:04
  Mark Pracht: It's a comic book.
• 41:05
  Dan: Yeah.
• 41:08
  Mark Pracht: Now, you can say that, you know, most people read it as a graphic novel, and that's fine, but I mean, like.
• 41:13
  Mark Pracht: It would be interesting to see Stefan… Work in a monthly… format.
• 41:23
  Mark Pracht: And see what that would be, you know?
• 41:26
  Mark Pracht: Cause…
• 41:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think he makes too much money in animation to do that.
• 41:30
  Dan: Yeah.
• 41:31
  Tad Eggleston: Probably. Probably. I mean, I don't think he's getting rich in animation, but, like, when you're directing Marvel shows.
• 41:42
  Dan: Nope.
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: you're getting paid more than you'd ever get paid for a monthly comic. Like, one of the reasons these do come out is, like, they are his passion project. He does them…
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: After hours, or between projects, or… That sort of thing.
• 41:59
  Mark Pracht: This, this scene. This scene, this scene is hard for me in a number of reasons. The one that you've just put up on the screen share.
• 42:08
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 42:09
  Mark Pracht: For, like, obviously personal reasons, but, also…
• 42:14
  Mark Pracht: Here's… here's my problem with this scene.
• 42:17
  Mark Pracht: I don't think we learn anything new about any of these characters. We introduced the wife, who…
• 42:24
  Mark Pracht: I immediately was like, well, that's why he's dirty.
• 42:28
  Mark Pracht: Because he needed the money for her care.
• 42:31
  Mark Pracht: And… but it's just sort of… it's sort of a reiteration of the conversation that her dad had with this guy.
• 42:39
  Mark Pracht: In the previous volume.
• 42:42
  Mark Pracht: Which… Intellectually, I'm like, okay, I understand that she didn't have this conversation with this guy.
• 42:50
  Mark Pracht: But I, as an audience, am now…
• 42:54
  Mark Pracht: revisiting what I think is… it feels like I'm learning the same things.
• 42:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, you're learning one more thing, which is that 15 years later, they still have to have that conversation.
• 43:09
  Tad Eggleston: But I pulled it up for a different reason, because this is one of the places where he uses panels, and I kind of love the way he does.
• 43:18
  Tad Eggleston: It's fantastic.
• 43:19
  Dan: Fantastic, you know?
• 43:20
  Tad Eggleston: Because on this first page, like… most…
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: Well, actually, the two-page spread works really well, too, but, but, like.
• 43:30
  Tad Eggleston: So you've got a little bit of happiness, she cracks a joke, and then the laughter is…
• 43:37
  Tad Eggleston: It's in the background panel.
• 43:40
  Tad Eggleston: And then the sickness is on top of it.
• 43:43
  Tad Eggleston: And then as it slows down, it zooms out.
• 43:47
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so I think you feel…
• 43:50
  Tad Eggleston: Both the joy and the… the…
• 44:02
  Tad Eggleston: background… Sorrow's not… sorrow, stress… whatever.
• 44:09
  Dan: Which type of thing, yeah?
• 44:10
  Tad Eggleston: palatably.
• 44:12
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 44:17
  Tad Eggleston: You know, similarly on this next page, again, I just love the acting. He says so much with this eye here. So much with these eyes here.
• 44:26
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 44:27
  Dan: No, these are great. One question, by the way. Looking at these, I have not been able to not think that Tim Sale is drawing this for most of the things, since somebody mentioned it last time, right?
• 44:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Tim Sale was a good friend of his, and, like…
• 44:44
  Tad Eggleston: Part of how he became that much more interested in making comics.
• 44:48
  Tad Eggleston: I think Tim Save…
• 44:49
  Dan: It's still around.
• 44:50
  Tad Eggleston: For the beginning of this.
• 44:52
  Dan: If you go back, though, to that one you first showed.
• 44:56
  Tad Eggleston: This one?
• 44:57
  Dan: When he turns up the lights.
• 45:00
  Dan: it almost feels like John Byrne instead to me.
• 45:03
  Dan: Which is kind of.
• 45:03
  Sean Harklerode: Oh, wow.
• 45:05
  Dan: Like… He… he changes… he changed not just…
• 45:10
  Dan: you know, like, the lighting, but when all those shadows come off, his drawing style changes because of that, too, because normally he's got so much, almost like ink wash going on and everything, and I'm like, this looks like a completely different artist when you turn up the lights.
• 45:25
  Sean Harklerode: This page you have here, which is in, Volume 4, they're on the, patio, the lighting here in the next page are just.
• 45:36
  Dan: Nope.
• 45:36
  Sean Harklerode: Wizard, I think it's the next page that… yes.
• 45:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 45:40
  Sean Harklerode: When he says, don't ever freaking say that.
• 45:44
  Tad Eggleston: We're allowed to swear on this podcast.
• 45:49
  Mark Pracht: Sean meant to say fucking.
• 45:53
  Sean Harklerode: So, but I mean, just the light on her there.
• 45:58
  Tad Eggleston: Either that, or he meant to say Falcon.
• 46:03
  Tad Eggleston: Gippy Kaye…
• 46:05
  Dan: Does he light his scenes, too? Does he put, like, the actual light scenes into his 3D?
• 46:09
  Tad Eggleston: I think he might.
• 46:11
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not entirely certain.
• 46:15
  Mark Pracht: Well, you know, it is interesting, when you mentioned burn.
• 46:20
  Mark Pracht: Because I totally saw that on that other page. Like, once you said it, I totally saw it. I was also struck by… I don't know if you've followed Bern in recent years, but he started 3D modeling
• 46:33
  Mark Pracht: A whole bunch of stuff in his work.
• 46:36
  Mark Pracht: Especially, like, vehicles and stuff.
• 46:39
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 46:39
  Mark Pracht: And, I don't know, it's just interesting.
• 46:45
  Sean Harklerode: I only read his Star Trek, photo plays now.
• 46:51
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, I just applied for a advanced reader copy of,
• 46:58
  Tad Eggleston: X-Men Elsewen. I'm hoping that… that I get to…
• 47:01
  Mark Pracht: You want to talk about a book I can't believe exists.
• 47:05
  Mark Pracht: That's… I, I…
• 47:09
  Mark Pracht: I don't know what that says about the future of Marvel Comics, but the fact that they licensed that is…
• 47:16
  Mark Pracht: Shocking to me.
• 47:17
  Dan: I read those earlier.
• 47:20
  Tad Eggleston: But they're also putting it out through Abrams rather than Marble.
• 47:24
  Dan: Yup.
• 47:25
  Mark Pracht: Oh, you're rabbit.
• 47:28
  Tad Eggleston: And I wonder how much of it has to do with things like, you know, in recent years, DC published what would have happened if you guys hadn't killed Jason Todd?
• 47:43
  Tad Eggleston: And, and now is finally publishing the, the, the sequence of Swamp Thing that they axed.
• 47:50
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 47:50
  Dan: Nope.
• 47:51
  Tad Eggleston: So, so…
• 47:52
  Dan: that.
• 47:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it started already.
• 47:55
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 47:56
  Dan: Not for me, because I get my once-a-month shipments, and I have not.
• 47:59
  Tad Eggleston: Ow, that's right.
• 48:00
  Dan: to queue yet, so…
• 48:02
  Tad Eggleston: But.
• 48:05
  Mark Pracht: Stop crowing about your privilege, Tad.
• 48:09
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't actually read it either, I just know that it's… on the shelves.
• 48:14
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't read enough of Veitch's run on Swamp Thing that, like, before I read that, I'd want to read Veitch's run on Swamp Thing.
• 48:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yup.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I was a little young for it when it was coming out, and…
• 48:30
  Tad Eggleston: And haven't gotten to it since.
• 48:33
  Mark Pracht: I, you know, the most recent, not the most recent, but I think it was the last issue of Back Issue.
• 48:39
  Mark Pracht: had a long interview with… with Veich about, Brat Pack.
• 48:46
  Tad Eggleston: Huh?
• 48:49
  Mark Pracht: And, man, that dude seems…
• 48:52
  Mark Pracht: He's… he… I… I… you know, I've never… I never read an interview with him before, but his… his… he's salty.
• 49:01
  Dan: Didn't he do, like, Void Indigo and a lot of those graphic novel things back in the day? And some crazy stuff back in the day?
• 49:07
  Mark Pracht: Well, yeah, it's really funny, because, like, the interviewer, you know, it's a back issue, which I love back issue, and I love the Tomorrow's books, but, you know, they're like, well, what about this character and this character? And he's like, I don't give a shit.
• 49:26
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think… I think that there are… two types…
• 49:32
  Tad Eggleston: well, there's a spectrum of superhero creators. There's the people who, okay, this is a more steady paycheck, so how can I tell the stories that I care about?
• 49:44
  Tad Eggleston: using these characters, and they're the ones that are, like, steeped in all of the mythos and lore. Like, and I think Rick Weich…
• 49:55
  Tad Eggleston: represents the, like, okay, I'll take the paycheck, but if I could do it on my own, that would be better. And Mark Waid is the… I've read every superhero comic since 1958.
• 50:09
  Mark Pracht: Well, but I also… I mean, like, you can have that, like, I think that Mark Waid
• 50:17
  Mark Pracht: I think Mark Waid is telling personal stories within.
• 50:21
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely, but I mean, I was speaking much more about how they wind up doing interviews. Like, if you ask Mark Waid about a character, he's gonna care, because he's cared forever. And Rick Veitz is like, I didn't use that character, so I don't know who he is.
• 50:37
  Mark Pracht: Well, no, but when we talk about Brad Pack, I mean, those are his characters. That's a career of our own series. I think… I just think…
• 50:46
  Mark Pracht: Vikes seems to have a very punk rock kind of attitude about everything, where it's like, I'm gonna burn it all down, and I don't really care. And that's great. That's great, and I love that. Like, this whole thing just started, I just think it's really interesting that a project that…
• 51:05
  Mark Pracht: famously cantankerous John Byrne, Right.
• 51:08
  Mark Pracht: I don't know if anybody was…
• 51:11
  Mark Pracht: any of you guys ever spent any time on the Burn Robotics message boards?
• 51:16
  Tad Eggleston: I, I'm Peru.
• 51:16
  Dan: I regretted it, but I was there.
• 51:21
  Mark Pracht: I… I… there was a point where I was like, you know what? I love the fact that every time he does a commission, he puts it up on the board.
• 51:28
  Mark Pracht: Because I like John Byrne's artwork, I've got a page right up here. But,
• 51:34
  Mark Pracht: And so I, like, every time he would do a commission and he would put it up, you know, so that everybody could see that… and I was always like, that's cool.
• 51:41
  Mark Pracht: Then, every time I floated out of that thread, I was like, why am I here? I don't know why I'm, you know…
• 51:48
  Dan: But… Nope.
• 51:49
  Mark Pracht: a project that… Seems completely rooted.
• 51:57
  Mark Pracht: in John being pissed that he left that book, and Chris Claremont
• 52:06
  Mark Pracht: Managed to still go on and do… 25 years.
• 52:13
  Mark Pracht: And… and and Marvel, and I think Abrams is licensing it from Marvel.
• 52:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, they…
• 52:23
  Mark Pracht: They're licensing. They have to. So, yeah, right. But I mean, what I'm saying is that…
• 52:29
  Mark Pracht: I am fascinated by the mindset that is going on at Disney Corporate, we have to… that they would think, oh, you know what, we should just license… we should just let this…
• 52:42
  Mark Pracht: Essentially, long-form fanfiction just get published by a professional publishing company. And… I, I am…
• 52:52
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's funny.
• 52:53
  Mark Pracht: It's fascinating why that happened.
• 52:56
  Mark Pracht: Sorry, this is way off topic, but…
• 52:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like, I don't even know what…
• 53:00
  Sean Harklerode: Project we're talking about, so…
• 53:02
  Mark Pracht: So, okay, so let me, let me try to do this succinctly for Sean. So, John Byrne, at some point or another, I think it started on the Byrne Robotics Board, decided he was going to start
• 53:14
  Mark Pracht: doing… X-Men from the point where he left the way he thought it should have been done.
• 53:22
  Mark Pracht: Right?
• 53:23
  Mark Pracht: And he did, I don't know, it's like 20…
• 53:26
  Tad Eggleston: It's gonna be 3 volumes.
• 53:27
  Dan: So, like, Gene… Gene… Gene doesn't die is the main… is the main… Right.
• 53:32
  Mark Pracht: Right. So, now, Abrams…
• 53:36
  Mark Pracht: has licensed from Marvel the rights to do a full professional publication, color publication, I think they're hardcover books.
• 53:45
  Dan: of…
• 53:46
  Mark Pracht: all of this stuff that Burn did on his own, basically as fanfiction.
• 53:51
  Dan: Yeah, and not only did them, but, like, for years, he would just post them up on his site, and you could download them and read them. I don't think he inked them back in the day, I think they were just pencils.
• 54:01
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, yeah.
• 54:01
  Dan: He had pencils, and then he lettered his stuff in. And so, probably they've either hired him or somebody else to ink him.
• 54:09
  Dan: Is Terry Austin still around?
• 54:11
  Tad Eggleston: It says, Byrne has written and penciled every page and inked multiple chapters, it doesn't say…
• 54:16
  Mark Pracht: There we go.
• 54:18
  Dan: So… But yeah, that's a…
• 54:21
  Mark Pracht: Because, you know, like, all of those other, you know, like, those other Abrams books are all lovely. Yeah. But they're also, you know, like, the, the Veracity Trap, you know, those felt like, basically like children's books.
• 54:37
  Mark Pracht: that featured those characters. And…
• 54:41
  Mark Pracht: you know, that made sense to me. I was like, okay, yeah, like, reach a slightly larger audience, blah blah blah blah, use the characters. But, yeah, the… this is mind-blowing to me. Like, the mindset that would… that… the corporate mindset that would allow this to happen is.
• 54:59
  Dan: It is free money for them.
• 55:01
  Dan: It's true, yeah.
• 55:02
  Dan: You know.
• 55:02
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, yeah, I mean, Mark, I mean, we live in an era… I read a thing recently about how fanfiction is literally being…
• 55:11
  Tad Eggleston: Purchased, and they'll go through and change the names.
• 55:16
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
• 55:18
  Mark Pracht: Well, look, look, guys.
• 55:20
  Sean Harklerode: That's Twilight. I mean, Mandalorian and Grogu.
• 55:25
  Sean Harklerode: There's no.
• 55:25
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 55:26
  Sean Harklerode: That movie do exist. It's money.
• 55:27
  Mark Pracht: all… I would say all of our major…
• 55:30
  Tad Eggleston: I've seen it.
• 55:30
  Mark Pracht: Is it bad?
• 55:32
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't seen it yet.
• 55:33
  Sean Harklerode: It's there.
• 55:35
  Mark Pracht: Colleen and I are going this afternoon, so…
• 55:38
  Tad Eggleston: And I have not…
• 55:39
  Sean Harklerode: Don't deliver.
• 55:40
  Tad Eggleston: They told me I need to see I Love Boosters, so there are two movies in the theater that I want to go see.
• 55:45
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, like, we live, we live in a fanfiction media environment right now. Like, everything is fanfiction, really. Like, the way I look at it. Like, every time there's a new Star Wars product, it feels like fanfiction.
• 55:59
  Tad Eggleston: for Palomino.
• 56:02
  Mark Pracht: That's a…
• 56:08
  Dan: Ted, bringing this to death, Mark?
• 56:10
  Tad Eggleston: Fallen out of…
• 56:11
  Sean Harklerode: Were you able to get back on topic?
• 56:15
  Mark Pracht: You know, every time I say, okay, this is way off topic, you're like, it's fine, we need to.
• 56:19
  Tad Eggleston: No, that wasn't actually to bring us back on topic, that was to say, hey, the thing that's not…
• 56:24
  Mark Pracht: Palomino… Palomino, look, look, even, like, print media now isn't mass media anymore, really. That's true. Like, let's be honest about it. That's true. So, like, I'm, like, I'm talking about, like, I watched, I watched Spider Noir the other night, first two episodes of that.
• 56:40
  Sean Harklerode: Black and white?
• 56:41
  Mark Pracht: enjoyed it.
• 56:42
  Mark Pracht: What?
• 56:43
  Sean Harklerode: Black and white, or color?
• 56:45
  Mark Pracht: I watch the black and white.
• 56:49
  Mark Pracht: I was trying to… I was trying to suss out how that was done, and somebody who worked on the show said that they actually came back and did reshoots to do the color version, and I'm like, so this isn't the same…
• 57:02
  Mark Pracht: Shot?
• 57:03
  Dan: Wow.
• 57:04
  Mark Pracht: this… and I'm like, that's insane, that can't be true, like, you… Anyway, but, you know, like…
• 57:14
  Mark Pracht: Everything is a variation, like…
• 57:17
  Mark Pracht: I think, famously, I was on my Facebook or whatever, and I said, look, man, I understand that people really love Absolute Batman. I think everybody's in love with it. That's great. It's not for me. I look at that, I look at the artwork, and I just think, that's not what I want to read.
• 57:34
  Tad Eggleston: I have enjoyed what I've read, and it's at best the third best absolute book.
• 57:42
  Sean Harklerode: I… I enjoyed it.
• 57:45
  Sean Harklerode: and now I'm a little… It's fizzling a little bit for me.
• 57:50
  Dan: The first volume I liked, the second one got really dark and really brutal in that.
• 57:55
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't even read the second one yet. I'm not even certain I finished the first one.
• 58:00
  Mark Pracht: like, for myself, like, look, I'm a Batman fan. Anything they put out, I'll at least give it a cursory look.
• 58:08
  Mark Pracht: But when I saw that the bat symbol turned into a giant axe, I was like, okay, not for me.
• 58:13
  Mark Pracht: you know, I was just like, that's not… Excellent.
• 58:17
  Tad Eggleston: man.
• 58:18
  Mark Pracht: Look, it doesn't… like, I'm not even gonna make a joke about it. It's just, it wasn't for me. I was like, that's not… and so I didn't… I didn't even bother, because I was like, I don't want to be… Because if I… if I read it, I'm gonna feel compelled to tell people what I think about it, and then people are gonna get mad at me, because that's what happens.
• 58:38
  Mark Pracht: So…
• 58:40
  Mark Pracht: why not just let it go, and just be like, hey man, it's not for me. And not for me, in the most, shield, not sword kind of way, you know? Like, hey, man, it's not for me, so I didn't read it.
• 58:52
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 58:53
  Mark Pracht: Do you have any opinion on it other than that?
• 58:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, here is my question, just because I have, like, other book club ideas running through my head. Is Else one for you?
• 59:10
  Mark Pracht: Which one? Else… Like the Bronx.
• 59:13
  Dan: violence?
• 59:13
  Tad Eggleston: That is, is, as excellent.
• 59:15
  Mark Pracht: And elsewhere.
• 59:15
  Dan: I really enjoyed DL Swins.
• 59:18
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I… I… curious, right? I, I'm…
• 59:24
  Mark Pracht: I'm curious enough that I would read the first one, but the thing is, is that I would look at it as…
• 59:32
  Mark Pracht: no matter what I read, I would have to look at it as…
• 59:37
  Mark Pracht: like Star Trek The New Voyages, where I'm like, it looks great.
• 59:42
  Mark Pracht: blah blah blah blah, but that's… it's…
• 59:47
  Tad Eggleston: I'm just thinking that it would be interesting to do…
• 59:52
  Tad Eggleston: Like, the three-part discussion where you read Dark Phoenix.
• 59:58
  Tad Eggleston: maybe even four-part discussion, where you read Dark Phoenix, you read…
• 1:00:04
  Tad Eggleston: where it went originally, you read Elswin, and then you kind of do a wrap-up about
• 1:00:11
  Tad Eggleston: Like, how the two made you feel.
• 1:00:14
  Tad Eggleston: How you feel about.
• 1:00:15
  Dan: I will note, I mean, I read a lot of X-Men, I have basically every X-Men comic for, you know, 200 issues or whatever during that time, but…
• 1:00:23
  Dan: X-Men, for me, after about issue…
• 1:00:27
  Dan: one… well, really after the days of future passed.
• 1:00:31
  Dan: turns into a very different book that I… I didn't enjoy the X-Men after that, other than the Paul Smith issues, which were just so gorgeous, I couldn't help myself.
• 1:00:40
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:00:41
  Dan: I like a lot of the X-Men Elsewind stuff better than most of the stuff that came after X-Men after that.
• 1:00:50
  Dan: Strangely enough.
• 1:00:51
  Mark Pracht: I… yeah, look, look, I… It also has to do with my weird relationship with John Byrne, right? Where…
• 1:01:00
  Dan: Absolutely.
• 1:01:01
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, like, you know, it's like, I'm like, great artist.
• 1:01:06
  Mark Pracht: I don't care that he draws with a Sharpie.
• 1:01:08
  Dan: Whatever.
• 1:01:09
  Mark Pracht: But…
• 1:01:12
  Mark Pracht: dude, do you have to be such a cranky old bastard all the time, you know? And,
• 1:01:22
  Mark Pracht: That… that… I think that would invariably…
• 1:01:26
  Mark Pracht: float in my head, those two warring sides of my thing, because, like, I… look…
• 1:01:32
  Mark Pracht: Burn's Fantastic Four run is one of my favorite things ever, right?
• 1:01:36
  Tad Eggleston: I concur.
• 1:01:38
  Mark Pracht: And.
• 1:01:41
  Dan: First 12 issues of Alpha Flight, absolutely adored.
• 1:01:44
  Mark Pracht: 100%.
• 1:01:45
  Dan: 1?
• 1:01:45
  Mark Pracht: But… and the thing is, is like…
• 1:01:48
  Mark Pracht: it's something he did for fun, so hey, whatever. But, like, to me.
• 1:01:55
  Mark Pracht: I… I would… I would be willing to do that little experiment. I would be willing to read those, and… and…
• 1:02:03
  Mark Pracht: have that conversation. It… it's… I… I am just curious about…
• 1:02:09
  Mark Pracht: like, like I said, in my mind, what, like, especially with all the layoffs that just happened and everything, what the hell is going on at Disney with Marvel, you know? Like, it feels very bad for…
• 1:02:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Marvel Publishing. I'm waiting for Heidi McDonald to do a deeper piece on it, because she was…
• 1:02:34
  Tad Eggleston: Cautiously optimistic, out of the gate.
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: Because what she saw…
• 1:02:42
  Tad Eggleston: And without getting into, like, huge specifics, and without specific knowledge that it was exactly what was happening, but what she saw was it felt like…
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: Feige was finally taking over…
• 1:02:57
  Tad Eggleston: The publishing side, and really pushing out
• 1:03:01
  Tad Eggleston: all vestiges of the Perlmutter era.
• 1:03:07
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty good.
• 1:03:08
  Tad Eggleston: N.
• 1:03:09
  Mark Pracht: I mean…
• 1:03:09
  Tad Eggleston: She said that on a general sense, and said, I'm gonna need to do a deeper dive, but I need to find some things out. And I haven't seen the deeper dive yet, so I'm curious. Because, like, Marvel… I mean, honestly, like, Marvel has…
• 1:03:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm a Marvel boy through and through, and I read more DC comics right now than I read Marvel.
• 1:03:35
  Mark Pracht: Well, with the sales numbers, it seems like everybody is. Right!
• 1:03:39
  Mark Pracht: Good.
• 1:03:40
  Dan: season run… I mean, but if you think it's, you know.
• 1:03:43
  Dan: no matter how much of a trouble he is in real life, Burn has got to be one of the top 10
• 1:03:50
  Dan: like, all-time Marvel creators.
• 1:03:52
  Dan: And on spec, he went out and did a… a passion slash.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Not even really on spec, just because he felt like it.
• 1:04:01
  Dan: Yeah, without getting any contract, and he couldn't get paid for it, because he knew the characters were licensed, so he couldn't publish it. But he just did it, and gave it away. I think that there were a lot of people out there who, for a long time, had wanted to see this actually get published.
• 1:04:20
  Dan: And so it's cool that… that he is actually going to get it published. I know that it is weird that they're doing it to an extent, but it's been… I mean, when did he start this? It was the 90s or early 2000s. It's been ages these pages have been out there, just sort of accumulating.
• 1:04:37
  Mark Pracht: It's been pretty wild. I mean, like, I just…
• 1:04:41
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, no, I, like, I agree with everything he just said. I, like, I think it's great that Byrne did it, I think it's great. I think the way he did it was actually really interesting and cool.
• 1:04:52
  Mark Pracht: you know, I… I actually think that this is more interesting than, frankly, his photo books.
• 1:05:00
  Mark Pracht: his Star Trek photo books, which… Alright, I mean, like, But, you know, that was…
• 1:05:06
  Sean Harklerode: They remind me of.
• 1:05:09
  Tad Eggleston: I'm all for experimentation.
• 1:05:11
  Dan: Sure, yup.
• 1:05:13
  Sean Harklerode: I enjoyed that.
• 1:05:15
  Mark Pracht: I mean, they're cute, But it's also…
• 1:05:17
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I haven't even finished reading one of them.
• 1:05:20
  Tad Eggleston: like…
• 1:05:21
  Dan: I don't even know what these are, I have not seen these, so I'm gonna.
• 1:05:23
  Mark Pracht: Well, there was this whole series, I can't remember, it's… I don't think they're continuing on, but Burns…
• 1:05:30
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah, they're not…
• 1:05:31
  Mark Pracht: And it was like I was saying, when he would do… he was doing, CG,
• 1:05:38
  Mark Pracht: 3D models of all the
• 1:05:41
  Mark Pracht: vehicles and stuff. He started using Photoshop to take frames from Star Trek.
• 1:05:49
  Mark Pracht: And then he would reorder them.
• 1:05:52
  Tad Eggleston: Write his own stories.
• 1:05:54
  Mark Pracht: write his own stories. So, it was all…
• 1:05:57
  Sean Harklerode: New visions, right?
• 1:05:59
  Mark Pracht: New visions, that's exactly.
• 1:06:01
  Dan: And is this actually published, or is this more of him doing his own crap?
• 1:06:05
  Sean Harklerode: This was a while ago. I think it was IDW.
• 1:06:07
  Mark Pracht: IDW.
• 1:06:09
  Mark Pracht: Oh. And it's… it's…
• 1:06:11
  Dan: Check this out.
• 1:06:12
  Tad Eggleston: I think I have PDFs, because it was part of a humble bundle, so I can probably pull some up and send them to you, Dan, if you want.
• 1:06:18
  Mark Pracht: It's one of those things where I'm like, you know, like, the most interesting thing to me, like, because at one point, he, like, Byrne was doing Star Trek comics, like, he did,
• 1:06:31
  Mark Pracht: he did a, Assignment Earth comic with Gary 7, and… and he drew it.
• 1:06:38
  Mark Pracht: And I was like, that's awesome! I… like, I love John Byrne artwork, I, you know, and… and then it was this weird thing, and I was just like, this feels like…
• 1:06:52
  Mark Pracht: How can I… how… how can I…
• 1:06:54
  Mark Pracht: Make less effort, and make more money.
• 1:06:58
  Mark Pracht: You know? But it had to take time and effort.
• 1:07:02
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, do you really think it was less effort?
• 1:07:05
  Mark Pracht: I… I don't know, I… like…
• 1:07:08
  Mark Pracht: But the mindset of it is strange to me. I don't, I don't know.
• 1:07:12
  Dan: Guy could draw almost as fast as Kirby sometimes, it seems, so I don't know.
• 1:07:16
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:07:17
  Dan: He was doing a lot of books at one point.
• 1:07:20
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, like…
• 1:07:22
  Mark Pracht: Well, but that's all those guys from the 70s, you know? Like, even Frank Miller, when he started, was fast as hell. I mean, you know, because they had to be, you know?
• 1:07:33
  Mark Pracht: I don't know. I could talk… God, I can talk about John Burns.
• 1:07:36
  Sean Harklerode: I'm not interested in, in, you know, Photoshop.
• 1:07:40
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, it's probably true. Like, I'm probably trying to put… I'm probably trying to put too much of a thought process behind it, you know? Like, every time I do something, I'm like, oh, what does this mean to me, and what does this mean, you know? And it's like, maybe I just want to do it.
• 1:07:57
  Mark Pracht: But, and I think… I think it's the exact same thing with this else… else win.
• 1:08:01
  Mark Pracht: thing. I think you just wanted to do it. And that's great.
• 1:08:05
  Mark Pracht: And it's… and it's great that they're getting published. Like, this is… none of this is me going, like, poo-poo this project or anything like that. I'm just fascinated that… that…
• 1:08:14
  Mark Pracht: you know, I would love to hear what… I would love to hear what Chris Claremont thinks of it.
• 1:08:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm certain you only have to wait till the next panel he's on.
• 1:08:24
  Dan: I can see.
• 1:08:25
  Mark Pracht: Probably true.
• 1:08:28
  Tad Eggleston: It might be that Marvel tries to keep them away from panels for a while?
• 1:08:32
  Dan: Let's see.
• 1:08:32
  Dan: Yeah, I was outlining to a couple years ago, and I'm like, man, this guy…
• 1:08:36
  Tad Eggleston: Were you at that one?
• 1:08:37
  Dan: Yes, I think.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: I started getting texts from a handful of friends.
• 1:08:42
  Dan: Whoa…
• 1:08:42
  Tad Eggleston: I was actually on a train headed home when that panel was going on.
• 1:08:46
  Sean Harklerode: What happens?
• 1:08:47
  Mark Pracht: It's gonna be true.
• 1:08:47
  Dan: off a bridge at that point. I can't even remember what, but I remember sitting there going, oh my god, Chris Claremont has just lost his mind in this panel. He was going off on everybody, going off on Marvel and everything, and it was… it was not good. I also think it was slightly…
• 1:09:05
  Dan: misogynistic or racist or something. I can't remember what it was, but there were things where I'm like, hmm…
• 1:09:11
  Dan: No, this is not great. This is not great, Chris. Not a good look for you. He was…
• 1:09:16
  Dan: I think… Being an angry old white dude.
• 1:09:22
  Mark Pracht: Well, that's, that's, you know… Hey, we got 4 of those here.
• 1:09:26
  Dan: There you go.
• 1:09:27
  Dan: It happens, but yeah.
• 1:09:29
  Mark Pracht: You… Well, you know, and the thing about it, like, I…
• 1:09:33
  Mark Pracht: I often… whenever I think about Chris Claremont, I always think about those last couple of years, when they were like, okay.
• 1:09:41
  Mark Pracht: Here, you have to work with Rob Liefeld.
• 1:09:43
  Mark Pracht: And it's like…
• 1:09:47
  Mark Pracht: And he's not gonna draw what you want him to, you know, and it's like, then you have to adjust to that. And I… I was reading an interview with him where he was talking about that.
• 1:09:59
  Mark Pracht: I just saw something today where LIFA…
• 1:10:02
  Mark Pracht: Liefeld went off about the, the… the DC boycott.
• 1:10:09
  Mark Pracht: The blackout, or whatever it is, where…
• 1:10:11
  Mark Pracht: they're boycotting DC Comics until they publish a ongoing series.
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: a ridiculous amount of time since the last…
• 1:10:24
  Mark Pracht: I Am Batman, that was what it was, which…
• 1:10:29
  Mark Pracht: I have to admit, I read 10 issues of, and then I was like, yep, not for me. I'm done.
• 1:10:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, we don't necessarily need more I Am Batman, but, you know… static?
• 1:10:42
  Tad Eggleston: Icon.
• 1:10:44
  Mark Pracht: They have all of those Dakota… Dakotaverse…
• 1:10:47
  Tad Eggleston: That's what I'm sayin'!
• 1:10:48
  Mark Pracht: Mike, I mean, there's plenty of things, and, you know.
• 1:10:52
  Tad Eggleston: They could be ongoing.
• 1:10:55
  Mark Pracht: But, you know, the other thing is, is like, is anybody coming in and pitching that?
• 1:11:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yes. I mean, I can't honest… this is a place where I have inside knowledge. Yes.
• 1:11:06
  Mark Pracht: Okay, good.
• 1:11:07
  Tad Eggleston: Good. In fact, some of the people involved in the boycott have been among the people pitching.
• 1:11:14
  Tad Eggleston: And, like… They're also experienced enough that, like, the boycott isn't, oh, we're upset that they.
• 1:11:24
  Dan: Yep.
• 1:11:26
  Tad Eggleston: You know…
• 1:11:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Joe Willey and I talked about that on 22 Panels a while ago, before the boycott became a big, big thing, when it was still in the DC So White phase, you know, pay attention to…
• 1:11:41
  Tad Eggleston: How long it's been.
• 1:11:43
  Tad Eggleston: Cause they had to fight to get the,
• 1:11:49
  Tad Eggleston: The… the… the milestone chapter of the…
• 1:11:54
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:11:54
  Tad Eggleston: the new history of the DC Universe. And then they managed to mount a campaign to sell it out. Twice.
• 1:12:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, right.
• 1:12:03
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, they reject the idea, and there's good reason to, that, like, It's a sales thing.
• 1:12:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:12:14
  Mark Pracht: I don't… I don't have any inside information, so, I mean, like, I was just fascinated when I was reading it. I, you know, I will say…
• 1:12:22
  Mark Pracht: I mean, I can only speak about my experience with I Am Batman, and that, you know, that was supposed to be the new status quo, and I was like.
• 1:12:33
  Mark Pracht: I don't know. Yeah. I always… I always think that, like, replacing… yeah.
• 1:12:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and, like, that I don't disagree with, but again, they have a stable of…
• 1:12:45
  Mark Pracht: They do have. You've got.
• 1:12:46
  Tad Eggleston: characters already.
• 1:12:47
  Mark Pracht: Vixen, you've got all.
• 1:12:49
  Mark Pracht: those…
• 1:12:50
  Tad Eggleston: And when you look at where Marvel has been most…
• 1:12:55
  Tad Eggleston: Successful in introducing characters of color.
• 1:13:00
  Tad Eggleston: Even if they've shared names, they haven't been… Replacements.
• 1:13:07
  Tad Eggleston: you know, Miles Morales is a Spider-Man, but he was never supposed to replace Peter Parker, except…
• 1:13:12
  Tad Eggleston: when Peter Parker died in the Ultimate Universe, but that was a different universe.
• 1:13:17
  Mark Pracht: Well…
• 1:13:18
  Tad Eggleston: bomb.
• 1:13:19
  Mark Pracht: I would also say that that was the strongest version of Miles Morales, and I… Miles Morales…
• 1:13:24
  Tad Eggleston: I don't disagree with you.
• 1:13:25
  Mark Pracht: favorite new… comic book character of the 21st century. Hands down, flat out.
• 1:13:32
  Tad Eggleston: And… Yeah.
• 1:13:33
  Mark Pracht: I think that bringing him into the mainstream universe kind of.
• 1:13:39
  Tad Eggleston: I think getting rid of the Ultimate Universe was a mistake in general, because it gave them a place to…
• 1:13:45
  Tad Eggleston: You know, but also, like, when they made Ms. Marvel, it, it, like…
• 1:13:53
  Tad Eggleston: Carol Danvers is still around, she's just a captain now.
• 1:13:57
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know.
• 1:13:58
  Tad Eggleston: So, like…
• 1:14:01
  Dan: I just think comics have had a problem with this forever, you know?
• 1:14:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:14:05
  Dan: I love the idea that on Earth 2,
• 1:14:09
  Dan: Batman had gotten old, had gotten married, had gotten a daughter.
• 1:14:13
  Dan: And essentially, Dick and her had taken over after he had retired, you know?
• 1:14:18
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 1:14:19
  Dan: And that idea that then you… each generation should have their own heroes, you know?
• 1:14:24
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, and that they kept those characters around, but it was, like, one book, right? Like, it was, like…
• 1:14:31
  Mark Pracht: there was, JSA or whatever, that was their one book where those characters sort of, like.
• 1:14:38
  Mark Pracht: It was the Roy Thomas universe, you know? Right.
• 1:14:42
  Dan: All-Star Squadron, and that sort of stuff.
• 1:14:45
  Mark Pracht: But, I mean, I think, you know, I'm with Tad. I think they should have left the Marvel… the Ultimate Universe alive, even if it was just for Miles' book. Yeah. And if you wanted to do… if you wanted to do…
• 1:14:57
  Mark Pracht: crossovers, you… they did it. They did those Spider-Man crossovers that I enjoyed quite a bit.
• 1:15:04
  Tad Eggleston: My favorite Spider-Man crossover, and I guess it was after he was in the universe, there was a free comic book day where they had a Who's Got the Better Pizza contest.
• 1:15:18
  Mark Pracht: Nice.
• 1:15:19
  Dan: I think the problem with the Ultimates universe, though, wasn't it that it looked so much like the movie universe that it had become, probably for most people, the real universe. And what they could have done is folded up the original Marvel universe and just used the Ultimate one.
• 1:15:34
  Mark Pracht: Well, and I think, I think that this, like, this kind of goes back to what we were just talking about. Like, if Kevin Feige is now in charge of publishing.
• 1:15:42
  Tad Eggleston: One of his guys is.
• 1:15:44
  Mark Pracht: that… I… I… Hi!
• 1:15:49
  Mark Pracht: Corporate Synergy Comics is not my favorite thing in the world, you know? No. And, I, I…
• 1:16:00
  Tad Eggleston: But I also, like… I mean, the comment in terms of them being…
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: the Ultimate Universe being the universe, like…
• 1:16:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of the reasons why it's good to not have
• 1:16:18
  Tad Eggleston: corporate synergy in comics as much as to continue to…
• 1:16:22
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if there's… if there's anything that's been a problem at Marvel.
• 1:16:28
  Tad Eggleston: Over the last decade or so, it's been that, like, they do more titles from whoever's in…
• 1:16:36
  Tad Eggleston: The movies right now, but don't necessarily
• 1:16:40
  Tad Eggleston: Have them tie in, and they don't make certain the best of their past stuff is in print, and…
• 1:16:49
  Mark Pracht: Look, there's…
• 1:16:50
  Sean Harklerode: They did try… I mean, they did do some tie-in stuff with the Fantastic Four last year.
• 1:16:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. Yeah.
• 1:16:57
  Sean Harklerode: First steps.
• 1:16:59
  Sean Harklerode: But, but yeah, you're right.
• 1:17:02
  Dan: Marvel's all.
• 1:17:03
  Mark Pracht: What, I mean…
• 1:17:03
  Dan: In that way, though, I mean…
• 1:17:05
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:17:05
  Dan: Since the toy biz era, comics basically were made to sell toys, and so they didn't… and that's one of the reasons you didn't have any titles that starred female characters, because the toy biz execs were convinced that girl… girl toys, action figures didn't sell.
• 1:17:21
  Mark Pracht: Hey, don't speak that way about Avi, Aaron. No.
• 1:17:27
  Dan: Oh, man.
• 1:17:28
  Mark Pracht: AV… my…
• 1:17:31
  Mark Pracht: If there's one person in the entirety of this entire corporate structure that I'm always like, I don't want to ever hear from him again, it's A.V. Arid.
• 1:17:45
  Mark Pracht: Anyway, but no, I think, you know, I think that Marvel missed… like, I think what you're saying is, like, they should have started a…
• 1:17:54
  Mark Pracht: MCU comic line.
• 1:17:57
  Mark Pracht: That just existed outside the other one. Because, like, I think it's funny, because, like, I've had this conversation on, like, Reddit and things about…
• 1:18:04
  Mark Pracht: Miles Morales, and how I thought that the most successful version of Miles Morales was the one who was the… the… the,
• 1:18:12
  Mark Pracht: heir apparent to the now-deceased Peter Parker, right?
• 1:18:16
  Mark Pracht: that I thought that that was the most successful and the most interesting version of that character, and their people kept pushing back, they're like, there would be no Miles Morales book if… if they hadn't folded him into the mainstream universe, and I'm like, that's just… that's ludicrous.
• 1:18:33
  Mark Pracht: If… if… there would be no Miles Morales book if it wasn't selling.
• 1:18:37
  Mark Pracht: it obviously was selling enough that that was the one character that made it out of the Ultimate Universe, you know? You could have easily just continued that. I think that that's… it's an interesting… it's this… but that's the fanboy mentality of, like, everything has to matter, you know?
• 1:18:56
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:18:56
  Mark Pracht: Which kind of goes.
• 1:18:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and everything has to matter to each other. I mean, and that's… that's…
• 1:19:03
  Tad Eggleston: I don't know that I mind there being a central continuity, but, like, I've always loved Elseworlds, I've always loved…
• 1:19:12
  Tad Eggleston: what if, like…
• 1:19:14
  Sean Harklerode: Imagine your story.
• 1:19:16
  Tad Eggleston: What… like, like…
• 1:19:22
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly with characters that are this old, like…
• 1:19:26
  Tad Eggleston: Deciding that it all has to fit together is just a… Weird overall decision.
• 1:19:32
  Mark Pracht: Listen, continuity… is… is hell.
• 1:19:36
  Mark Pracht: That's… that's my opinion. I think that, like, canon… I shouldn't say continuity.
• 1:19:42
  Mark Pracht: canon. This idea that I… when I take over writing
• 1:19:48
  Mark Pracht: Spider-Man, or Batman, or whatever. I have to make sure that all of this makes sense all the way back
• 1:19:53
  Mark Pracht: to… to win.
• 1:19:58
  Mark Pracht: Bob Kane and Bill Finger sat in a… sat in an apartment and figured out what Batman was. And that… that's so ridiculous, like, and that it's gotta… it's gotta sync up with, like.
• 1:20:10
  Mark Pracht: I, I, you might actually argue that the only time that ever really, really worked
• 1:20:16
  Mark Pracht: was probably when Stan was writing everything.
• 1:20:20
  Mark Pracht: Or was editing everything.
• 1:20:24
  Mark Pracht: Because Larry Lieber was writing.
• 1:20:27
  Mark Pracht: And probably when Jim Shooter was running Marvel in the early 80s.
• 1:20:32
  Tad Eggleston: I would say, like, the first 4 or 5 years of the Ultimate Marvel Universe.
• 1:20:37
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, but that was, like, 5 books, right?
• 1:20:40
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:20:40
  Mark Pracht: So, yeah, I mean, like, that's easy enough, right?
• 1:20:43
  Mark Pracht: That's, like… but I mean, like, shooter…
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: That, to my mind, is how big the absolute canon universes should be.
• 1:20:53
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, I mean, one of the things… one of my favorite things about Killing Joke
• 1:21:00
  Tad Eggleston: is when it came out, it wasn't Canon.
• 1:21:02
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, well, yeah.
• 1:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: And then people went, this is something that we can do something with.
• 1:21:08
  Tad Eggleston: And they started writing stories, and it kinda unofficially became canon.
• 1:21:13
  Mark Pracht: Sure.
• 1:21:14
  Tad Eggleston: And so, if I had…
• 1:21:17
  Tad Eggleston: if… if I were the publisher, like, each…
• 1:21:23
  Tad Eggleston: Company would have, like, 5 or 6 ongoing titles.
• 1:21:28
  Tad Eggleston: that were the main universe. They would have mini-series that were written
• 1:21:34
  Tad Eggleston: that we just wouldn't say whether they were in-universe or not, and let, kind of, the fans and the next writers decide, unless they were clearly out of universe, and then they become an Elseworlds or whatever.
• 1:21:44
  Tad Eggleston: And, like… Stop sweating it so much.
• 1:21:48
  Mark Pracht: Well, look, I mean, in a way, isn't that what's, like,
• 1:21:52
  Mark Pracht: In a way, that's sort of what's happened, right?
• 1:21:55
  Tad Eggleston: It's getting there.
• 1:21:56
  Mark Pracht: Batman, right, is… they restarted even though, Loeb and Lee weren't finished with Hush 2.
• 1:22:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:22:07
  Mark Pracht: And now… We're finally getting the next issue of Hush 2.
• 1:22:12
  Mark Pracht: The final issue of Hush 2? I don't know. With Hush 3 on the horizon.
• 1:22:16
  Mark Pracht: And…
• 1:22:17
  Tad Eggleston: Is there a Hush 3 on the horizon?
• 1:22:19
  Mark Pracht: They're already talking about it. But…
• 1:22:21
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God.
• 1:22:22
  Mark Pracht: I'm like, why are you gonna do that? Jim Lee can't keep up.
• 1:22:27
  Mark Pracht: Makes you wonder about that.
• 1:22:29
  Mark Pracht: All-Star Batman and Robin.
• 1:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, it's always been that he couldn't keep… I mean, like, the story and.
• 1:22:38
  Mark Pracht: I just… I…
• 1:22:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we thought it was true.
• 1:22:40
  Mark Pracht: when that book was… and we are way off the reservation now, but when that book was coming out, and everybody was like, oh, Frank Miller can't.
• 1:22:47
  Sean Harklerode: Beautiful.
• 1:22:47
  Mark Pracht: I can't write it. I'm like, you sure it's Frank?
• 1:22:50
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:22:50
  Mark Pracht: Cause…
• 1:22:51
  Tad Eggleston: I think even at the time, they said it was Miller, er, not Miller, it was, lee.
• 1:22:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. But I mean, like, and it's like, it was funny, because people would complain about stuff, and I would be like, I feel like Frank is writing this like he thinks it's coming out every month, and…
• 1:23:07
  Mark Pracht: It's coming out, like, once every two years, you know?
• 1:23:11
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:23:11
  Mark Pracht: And that's not to say that I'm defending that book, because there's a lot.
• 1:23:15
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, I've been reading in advance of Frank's book, and I'm loving it, and I wonder if he'll get into that.
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: Later, and I just got through Roe.
• 1:23:24
  Dan: So, speaking of… of Miller, has anyone else seen the documentary that supposedly was created, like, 2 years ago about Frank Miller? And I thought it got, like, a limited release, and then has never been seen anywhere else?
• 1:23:40
  Dan: I've been waiting for that to come out.
• 1:23:43
  Mark Pracht: No.
• 1:23:44
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even know about this.
• 1:23:47
  Mark Pracht: Alright.
• 1:23:48
  Mark Pracht: I have an utter fascination.
• 1:23:49
  Dan: It's called Frank Miller, American Genius.
• 1:23:52
  Dan: If you just go to frankmillermovie.com, I will post the link here.
• 1:23:57
  Tad Eggleston: I assume.
• 1:23:57
  Dan: It supposedly has been made forever.
• 1:24:01
  Dan: And… it just never… I think they're looking for a distributor or something, but it's been forever waiting for the stupid thing to actually come out, and I would really like to see it.
• 1:24:13
  Mark Pracht: Frank is… Frank is such a…
• 1:24:17
  Tad Eggleston: Frank is gonna be at, at,
• 1:24:24
  Tad Eggleston: Fan Expo Chicago this year.
• 1:24:26
  Dan: Hmm.
• 1:24:28
  Mark Pracht: True.
• 1:24:29
  Sean Harklerode: Nick Cage is at the Indiana Comic-Con next week.
• 1:24:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 1:24:34
  Mark Pracht: My friend.
• 1:24:35
  Sean Harklerode: his first U.S. con.
• 1:24:38
  Sean Harklerode: Maybe his first con ever.
• 1:24:42
  Mark Pracht: Nick Cage.
• 1:24:43
  Sean Harklerode: a tangent.
• 1:24:48
  Mark Pracht: Anyway,
• 1:24:50
  Mark Pracht: But that's, you know, this whole conversation about continuity and stuff, it comes back to what we were talking about, like the, else win. I, I love… I want to read it. I think it… I think it's probably…
• 1:25:00
  Mark Pracht: Gonna be good.
• 1:25:04
  Mark Pracht: But you know that immediately what's gonna happen is somebody in some fan group is gonna start saying, this should become the actual continuity.
• 1:25:12
  Tad Eggleston: Of course.
• 1:25:12
  Mark Pracht: somebody has to… like, they have to square everything in their brain, because everything… and I'm like.
• 1:25:21
  Mark Pracht: It's sort of like… it was sort of like in the 80s, if you remember, after Dark Knight Returns come out, and it seemed like all of the Batman books were trying to point towards
• 1:25:30
  Mark Pracht: That being… the future?
• 1:25:33
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. You know?
• 1:25:35
  Mark Pracht: Oh, Robin died. Robin died? Okay, we killed Robin. Oh, and then…
• 1:25:39
  Mark Pracht: you know, we need to have Batman have a big Batmobile that looks like a tank, so then they put it in the cult, and then, you know, it was just like, okay, alright, alright, alright.
• 1:25:49
  Mark Pracht: Like, the joy of the story was that it wasn't.
• 1:25:53
  Mark Pracht: Tied into…
• 1:25:56
  Mark Pracht: My favorite thing, I think I… and I don't remember where he said this, but Frank Miller… somebody asked Frank Miller about it, and he was like, well, actually, the Batman in Dark Knight Returns is based on Adam West.
• 1:26:09
  Mark Pracht: And I say.
• 1:26:10
  Tad Eggleston: I can see that.
• 1:26:10
  Mark Pracht: it's… That is the best answer ever.
• 1:26:16
  Mark Pracht: Anyway… Guys, I gotta go.
• 1:26:19
  Mark Pracht: I know we got way off Palomino, but…
• 1:26:22
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we went all over those. I think we had a good Palabino conversation as well.
• 1:26:27
  Sean Harklerode: Hey, I…
• 1:26:28
  Tad Eggleston: You got to hang.
• 1:26:29
  Sean Harklerode: I know we talked about, I think since the last time we talked.
• 1:26:35
  Sean Harklerode: we talked about a possible future installment of the Further Adventures of Indiana Jones, and guess what?
• 1:26:43
  Sean Harklerode: Announced.
• 1:26:43
  Tad Eggleston: I saw that.
• 1:26:45
  Sean Harklerode: So…
• 1:26:46
  Tad Eggleston: They're finally, they're finally…
• 1:26:47
  Sean Harklerode: Originals.
• 1:26:49
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. So, alrighty. For the Pope Lauder Book Cup, we will see you after the next page.