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With Great Power #285... 22 Panels with Jimmy Palmiotti · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is… is, partially responsible for getting me back into monthly comics, Jimmy Palmiati.
• 0:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Sorry.
• 0:13
  Tad Eggleston: years? No, no, no, no, because it was, it was with Marvel Knights. I, I had, I had drifted away…
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: During, like, the early and mid-90s, and then…
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: between Kevin Smith, you, and Joe on Daredevil, and then the line that you put together, I got sucked back in, and…
• 0:36
  Tad Eggleston: Haven't fully left since.
• 0:39
  Tad Eggleston: My buddies Sean Hargow wrote and Mark Pratt, Chicago-area actors and playwright, in Mark's case, have joined us. Maybe Marvel Knights is your next play, Mark.
• 0:50
  Mark Pracht: Or is that too recent?
• 0:52
  Mark Pracht: That's probably too recent.
• 0:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Is there enough murders? Is there enough murders?
• 0:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Make it interesting.
• 0:58
  Tad Eggleston: See, Mark did what's called the Four Color Trilogy. He did a play about,
• 1:07
  Tad Eggleston: Bob Kane and Bill Finger, a play about… Wortham, and…
• 1:14
  Mark Pracht: Codains.
• 1:15
  Tad Eggleston: Bill Gaines, and then.
• 1:17
  Mark Pracht: Sean played Bill Gaines.
• 1:19
  Tad Eggleston: played Bill Gaines, and then a play about Stan and Jack.
• 1:23
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, that, yeah, that sounds like fun. I mean…
• 1:26
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 1:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Especially the Stan and Jack one, probably a lot of fun stuff said there, you know?
• 1:32
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah.
• 1:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I… Stan used to tell me a ton of stories, so…
• 1:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I don't know how many of them are actually 100% true.
• 1:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: how many of them people know, you know? Obviously, I've known them for years, and…
• 1:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I used to host his panels a lot, you know, so we used to…
• 1:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: pull me aside and go, hey, Jimmy, did I ever tell you about the time I met this guy? You know, he would, like, go on and on, and I'd be like, I don't know if it's true, but it sure is fun to hear, you know?
• 2:02
  Tad Eggleston: 100%.
• 2:03
  Tad Eggleston: true from Stan's point of view.
• 2:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, I mean, he used to tell me, he told me, you know, we were talking about Silver Surfer one day, and he just said, you know.
• 2:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: he said, Jack came in with all these surfing magazines and said, you know, look, the kids love surfing, I got an idea for a character, and he, you know, and he says, and he brought in a drawing, and Stan's like, that sounds great, you know? Like, I mean, that's the way he explains how they came up with stuff, is like, Jack would find these…
• 2:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Things that he… look what the kids were looking at and say, hey, this is something in the…
• 2:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I don't know, it sounds pretty… it sounds right on, in a way, right? Because, I mean, Jack's thinking visually, and Stan is thinking story, and
• 2:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, even later on with Jack, when he did his stories, they were all kind of based on other things.
• 2:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Where, kind of, Stan pulled stuff out of nowhere a little bit, you know? .
• 2:59
  Mark Pracht: I mean, the tack I take in that show is basically that… that…
• 3:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: it… none of that exists without both of them, so… Absolutely. I agree with that 100%. I always say that this,
• 3:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I run into writers, and I run into artists more than writers, right? I run into artists…
• 3:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: that I always say, why don't you do a creator-owned story or a book, and they say to me, and I'm always shocked by this.
• 3:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I have no ideas.
• 3:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Or, and and it's really funny, because some of them are, like, huge name creators.
• 3:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I'm just like, you don't have any ideas? I mean, you've been doing this for how many… long? And they're like…
• 3:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: No, you know, I just don't… I don't have it, you know, I've been the person, I'm the opposite, like, way too many ideas, right? So, I do get, like, that every… and it's coming up soon, the new year, where I start looking at, like, alright, I got another year, I better get these books out, otherwise they die in my brain.
• 3:59
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 4:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, and I'm always looking for collaborators and stuff like that. I do love to collaborate, so I do love…
• 4:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: to work with other people. I'm not one… I'm not a guy that's hoarding credits, you know? It just has no appeal to me. As a matter of fact, I used to always say, you know, if I'm writing with somebody else, then just every other issue, just switch the names around.
• 4:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: switch to places, you know? It's a really easy thing to do, and if we're splitting 50-50, I don't care, I don't have to worry about anything, you know?
• 4:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I… well, I'm sure that that was a fun play, though, to write. I mean, a lot of, you know…
• 4:34
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 4:35
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, I mean, that's one thing, you know, one of the things, you know, Tad just said, you know, you were one of the people who got him back into comics. I could almost say the same thing. I had been out…
• 4:47
  Mark Pracht: about the mid-90s, I got kind of fed up with everything, and it wasn't until I moved to Chicago in 2001, and it wasn't until,
• 4:56
  Mark Pracht: I started picking up, very, very specifically, and very much, I remember, it was the Jonah Hex book, which, to this day, is still my favorite ongoing series of the 21st century.
• 5:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Thank you.
• 5:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, I mean, I loved it too. As a kid, I,
• 5:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I grew up in Brooklyn, and they had these, there was a bookstore in Flappish Avenue in Brooklyn called My Friend's Bookstore.
• 5:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he had boxes of comics on the floor in the bookstore, right? So they were, like, shoved under the regular, where the books were.
• 5:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And you'd pull them out, and they were 10-for-a-dollar comics, right?
• 5:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And…
• 5:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: when I go in, he… I was such a good customer, he'd always say, Jimmy, today they're 12 for a dollar, pick out two extra. But in the box was not… you know, it was…
• 5:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If it was a superhero comic, it was either in bad shape or one that nobody cared about, right? But… but this is now… we're talking about early 70s, and
• 5:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And for me, I shoveled snow to make money, and then I would go to the bookstore, and I'd have $4, and I'd be like, okay.
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: I get 48 comics, how cool is this, right? And I go there, but the boxes were filled mostly.
• 6:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with the stuff that nobody was really paying good money for. So, it doesn't mean they were bad, but they were horror comics. I had, you know, everything Frankenstein, you know, all the Mar… that Marvel line in the 70s with Frankenstein, the mummy.
• 6:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: All that kind of stuff. Horror comics, tons of DC horror comics, and of course, sci-fi and westerns, and there were Jonah Hex books, and
• 6:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I remember going in and buying, like… I picked up a couple of Jonah Hexes, because I liked the covers. I just liked… there was, like, a coffin going over a cliff, some crazy thing, and I said, well, Jonah Hex looks cool, you know? And I started reading a couple of them, then I realized I had number 33, and I was like, let me go back in the boxes next week, and eventually.
• 6:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I got them all. You know, I had to go behind the counter to get the, the first appearance at number one.
• 7:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But it was only a couple dollars back then. And, and I remember reading them, and… so the Westin was the furthest thing in the world
• 7:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: from an Italian kid growing up in Brooklyn, you understand? The furthest thing. I mean, it might as well have been outer space tales about Jupiter, you know, and
• 7:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I remember I fell in love with Westerns reading Jonah Hex, and I remember…
• 7:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Not too long after that, the Outlaw Josie Wales movie came out, and I went to see it in the theater, because I thought, he kind of looks like Jonah Hex in this movie.
• 7:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And the movie was fantastic, you know? One of Clint's best in my eyes, and
• 7:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, and I just… so, after that, it was years and years and years and years and years. Later, you know, they never did much with the character.
• 7:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I pitched… Justin and I pitched Jonah Hex around 19…
• 7:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: 90… I was gonna say late 90s…
• 8:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I had no interest in it, and then one day I got a call, later, years later,
• 8:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: From Dan DiDio, because I bugged him, when Dan DiDio started at DC,
• 8:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I asked him, I said, can, can, you guys, like, I want to do Jonah Hex, like, can you guys…
• 8:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, you guys aren't doing anything with the character, and he's like…
• 8:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: no, but Brian Azzarello wants to do Jonah Hex, and I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry, but you, you know, it's Brian Azzarello, you can't sell a book, you know? And I'm like, okay.
• 8:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, Brian never did it. So, Brian came out with his own western, and then Dan DiDio called me up and said, okay.
• 8:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Brian decided to create, I think it was Loveless, I think, was it? I think it was. And, he said, Brian's doing that…
• 8:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: send me a pitch for Jonah Hex, and I said… literally on the phone, I said to him, I said, check your mail, it's in your mail now.
• 8:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I had it all ready. And I actually had it with, with,
• 9:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Mark Teixero was gonna draw the book, okay? Because that was my high school buddy, I went to high school with Mark.
• 9:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We got the gig, and then Justin and I started writing a book, and we pitched it to Dan, we said, look, can we do done-in-one stories? Because, number one, nobody does them anymore. Number two.
• 9:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: we can actually pick out the artists in advance, and we can write a bunch of these in advance, and then have, like, 15 artists doing them at the same time. So the book will never come out late.
• 9:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he said, yeah, that sounds great. As long as you can wrap up a story in each issue, and and then Mark Texera, I called him up, I said, you got the job, and he goes.
• 9:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Mark takes Sarah literally on a phone call. I swear to God this happened. He goes to me,
• 9:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Is there any way you can write the book, but not have horses in it?
• 9:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I go, what? And he goes, I really suck at drawing horses,
• 9:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, if there's any way you can do the book without horses in it, and I said.
• 10:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I absolutely cannot write this book without horses. I said, are you insane? I'm like, you know, like, it's like, but I gotta have, like, a bunch… Jonah Hex and a bunch of guys, you know, walk through the desert all the time. So Tex was out.
• 10:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then,
• 10:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, after that, we kind of… we kept going with different artists as we went along, and it actually…
• 10:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: What we promised Dan was exactly what we did. We wrote… we found artists that wanted to do a story, we wrote them in advance, and we… some artists sat on the book for, like, a year, you know? Some of those issues…
• 10:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And at one point, we were in, I was in Spain, and I met with Jordy Brene, and that was that. You know, Jordy did… I think Jordy did 17 issues altogether.
• 10:46
  Tad Eggleston: Something like that. Yeah.
• 10:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And, but anyway, it was, it was, it was, for me, it was super important
• 10:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because everyone knew me as an anchor, everyone knew me as the guy, Marvel Knights guy, right? The guy that… the guy that's kind of, like, editing.
• 11:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I said, if I'm gonna write, I have to really kill it on this book. Like, I can't fake this, I can't…
• 11:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, I can't rip off Frank Miller like, like everybody else was doing, and do Daredevil and Batman like Frank Miller. I'm sorry, but that has not left Batman at all.
• 11:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: those characters ever since. And I said, I have to write this thing. So, I… I did crazy things. I, I went and, I went horse… took horseback riding lessons. I.
• 11:30
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 11:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I went and stayed at a ranch out in California. Justin had experience working on a ranch, and and then I did a lot of history research and a drive out west, and…
• 11:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: we kind of researched a ton of stuff, which is on the page, but it's not beating you over the head, you know? It's there.
• 11:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But it's not supposed to be, like, me telling you, hey, look what, look what… look, there weren't kazoos back in 1874, you know, who gives a crap, right?
• 12:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But… but there was a lot of stuff that was real in the books, and…
• 12:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: even the… even when we had, like, Darwin Cook said he wanted to draw an issue, and I said, well, I'm gonna…
• 12:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We're gonna research Canadian Mounties for you, since you're from Canada. I'm gonna give you a little nod.
• 12:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: to that, and then how to track wolves, you know? And I read this whole thing about wolves, and then…
• 12:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I read this horrific story about a guy that got mauled by wolves, and I was like, great, I'm gonna put that in the story. And you know, so that's how that series came down, and that's also, I think, why those books stayed with people.
• 12:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But… well, it stayed with everyone but DC Comics, because all the books are out of print.
• 12:46
  Jimmy Palmiotti: All the… our first 70 issues are out of print.
• 12:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And that happened because while we were doing the run, it got attention.
• 12:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They decided to make a movie, but not involve us at all.
• 12:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: As a matter of fact, tell us to our face how proud they were that we weren't involved with it.
• 13:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But it was based on our books.
• 13:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And… and then, when the movie bombed…
• 13:09
  Mark Pracht: Jimmy. What's that? But was it?
• 13:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: No, it was… you know what? We went on a set… Justin and I flew to New Orleans.
• 13:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because one of the producers was a friend, like, somebody I knew from before.
• 13:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he invited us. Now, DC Comics did not invite us.
• 13:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: To the set. No invite. As a matter of fact, nothing from them. They literally just told me one day we're making a movie on Jonah Hex.
• 13:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We're basing it on your comics, which of course it wasn't, and
• 13:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So he flew me out there, and when I got… when Justin and I got to the set, the crew had comics for us to sign.
• 13:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, and they said, we love the comics, and the art director said, you know, we're doing some art direction based on the covers.
• 13:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I said, yeah, but what happened to the story? I read the script, and I said, what happened… he doesn't have superpowers, he's a tracker, he doesn't need to dig up a dead guy to find out where somebody went, he literally is… what he does for a living is track people, like…
• 14:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: there was so much in the script that my head was exploding, you know, and I… and… but it was great to have lunch with Josh Brolin, and John Malkovich, and meet everybody. It was a… it was a blast.
• 14:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I knew the movie was doomed, and then, you know, we didn't want our names on the movie, obviously, if you looked at it, not on there. Because they just completely ignored the material, and they got what they deserved in a weird way, because, you know… But the problem with that is, who got screwed the most out of that movie?
• 14:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Justin and I, because
• 14:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The movie bombed, and all the Barnes and Nobles and bookstores in the United States returned all the trades, and they were destroyed.
• 14:49
  Mark Pracht: So, they were recycled, I'm sorry, they were recycled.
• 14:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: to make another Batman… 85 Batman covers, probably. Right.
• 14:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But anyway, they were recycled, and, and trashed, and never put back in print again. Now, you know, you know the All-Star Western
• 15:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Omnibus came out, and
• 15:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They're still looking at that, saying, if it does sell well, we'll do one with your other books, but still, everything's out of print, and .
• 15:16
  Tad Eggleston: Alright.
• 15:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I know this isn't what we were gonna talk about, guys, today, so I'm sorry about that.
• 15:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, it is part of what we were gonna talk about. I mean, literally, like, these guys are in two book clubs that we have, and you've managed to hit them both, because we have our Kirby Fourth World Book Club.
• 15:32
  Tad Eggleston: And we have what we call the pulp Blotter, where we do pulp-type comics. In the last 3 months, we've been reading your Jonah Hex run. And that's why, you know, as Mark was going, if I ever got to talk to Jimmy Palmiati, I'd have to ask him about this. I started emailing you. Right, right.
• 15:50
  Mark Pracht: No, no.
• 15:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, go ahead.
• 15:51
  Mark Pracht: I mean, like, I don't… I just, like, I…
• 15:54
  Mark Pracht: you know, I don't… I don't wanna…
• 15:56
  Mark Pracht: fill up all the time with talking about Jonah Hex, but I mean, I just… there were so many things that we've been talking about during the course, and you've touched on some of them, like, I… Yeah. Like, to me, to me, like, it's so tied into Josie Wales. It feels very much of a piece with that.
• 16:14
  Mark Pracht: But it's also, like, and talking about how you love collaboration and things like that, it's a conversation we had about
• 16:21
  Mark Pracht: wondering how those issues came about with… because when we just read the Darwin Cook issue with the wolves. Okay, yeah, right.
• 16:32
  Mark Pracht: we immediately were like, did Darwin come and say, I really want to do something with wolves and Canadian wilderness, or did you say, we're going to do that because it's Darwin?
• 16:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So Darwin used to… so, 6 months out of the year, Darwin lived… well, he lived up in Canada, right? Up in Halifax, up that way. And then 6 months of the year, he bought a house near me in Florida, because he used to… he used to come to my house and stay here in our guest room.
• 17:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then we started noticing the clothes piling up in the closet, and we're like, okay, he's moving in, right? Then he got married, and he bought a little place near us.
• 17:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And in the mornings, Darwin would come with some Starbucks for Amanda, because Amanda and Darwin were like brother and sister, okay? And he would come over, and we'd talk, and we'd talk about stories, and he'd ask me what I'm working on, and we'd talk about Jonah Hex.
• 17:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he just said, you know, I read this issue, oh my god, that was great, he loved Jordy Brene, you know, he says, that guy's brilliant, people don't understand how good he is, DC has no idea that they have a treasure like that, and, you know…
• 17:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he goes, I want you to write an issue for me, I want to do an issue, and I said, I said, okay, I said, let me think about that, you know, because we're writing it for you.
• 17:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, right away, I thought Canada, like, Canadian Mounties. And then I said, okay, if it's gonna go up north, there's problems around that time with wolves that were a big problem. I started reading some of the headlines and… about cities and wolf problems, and then… and then I started reading real… real stories about wolves, the idea, you know, that,
• 18:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, to kill them, you have to kill all of them. The whole pack, you have to… you know, there's a thing where he's sliding the candle in, and he's going into the cave, and then they start panicking and clawing their way out. You know, this is, like, all real, stuff.
• 18:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So I started putting this story together, and I gave him the outline, and I said, here's what I want to do, do you want to draw this? And he's like, hell yeah, man, you know? He's like, absolutely. Now, we had it two more times with Darwin, because
• 18:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: when we were doing the 50th issue, he was over here, and he goes, what are you gonna do for 50? And I said, Jonah Hex is gonna kill 50 men in that comic.
• 18:46
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he's like, what do you mean? I said, if anybody wants to take the time and count, he kills 50 guys in that comic, and he's like, for the 50th issue. And he's like, but how you gonna pull that off? And I'm like, no, no, no, that's not the story. The story is about Tallulah and him.
• 18:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That's just in my brain.
• 19:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: a side note, that if you read it, it kills 50 people. And I… and Justin and I were talking, and we're, like, saying, look, you know, in the old Jota Hexes, he would bang a lot of prostitutes and stuff like that, you know.
• 19:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I said, but Tallulah is, like, you know, our creation for the series, like, he has something in common, and something invested in this woman, and…
• 19:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They kind of make a really interesting, out-of-control couple.
• 19:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, and the 50th issue, we definitely explored that, the idea that, you know, people cut… they run into a bar and start screwing, and everybody runs out, you know, that kind of thing. And the 50th issue, I said, listen, no, it's gonna… it's gonna be heavy. I said, because…
• 19:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: this stuff's gonna go down, and he's like, I wanna do it. And…
• 19:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: he… he drew the hell out of that book, and it's a great comic, like, I honestly… I forget I wrote it, and Justin wrote it, because I just read it for his art, and it's so beautiful. But he was really pissed off, because he won, like, 6 Isers or something that year, but nobody…
• 20:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: mentioned Jonah Hex, and he said, that was my best work that year. And he goes, but because it was Jonah Hex, nobody gave a crap about it, you know?
• 20:16
  Mark Pracht: I will tell you that one of my prized possessions is I have the original art for page 1 of Jonah Hex number 50.
• 20:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: No kidding!
• 20:26
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. And I got an instant…
• 20:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: too, because I inked the version before he fired me. I inked, like, four pages, four or five pages.
• 20:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then he, and then he fired me. He's like…
• 20:37
  Mark Pracht: He's like, if I wanted it to look like me, buddy, I would have done it myself, because I was being very loyal to his pencils.
• 20:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he wound up making it himself, and I gave those away to friends of mine.
• 20:48
  Mark Pracht: Well, all I know is I have a… I got the… I got it at San Diego, I don't remember what dealer I bought it from, but he signed it, and it's… it's the whole sequence where they're riding through Monument Valley.
• 21:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah.
• 21:01
  Mark Pracht: I just… you know.
• 21:04
  Mark Pracht: I don't have all the money in the world, and it was, like, one of the cheaper pages, because it was just all…
• 21:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, it's the four panels that are on horseback.
• 21:12
  Mark Pracht: And I was…
• 21:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: to the double-paid splash.
• 21:15
  Mark Pracht: But I was like, this is brilliant, I love it, it's everything I love about Westerns, and I was just like… and I… it's on my living room wall, cleaned up.
• 21:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, Matt. I'm glad it's got a great home, I mean… and it's funny, because in the last story we did with Darwin,
• 21:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: is in the All-Star Western, the last issue, and it's actually in the hardcover.
• 21:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If you didn't get the omnibus, have you gotten it, or no?
• 21:43
  Tad Eggleston: No, I…
• 21:43
  Mark Pracht: Not yet.
• 21:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, so in the omnibus, it's actually different.
• 21:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's the original… it's the original… let me get… I'm gonna get… oh, we're on radio, I can't… they can't see it. I could show you… I mean, you could show us. Yeah, I could show you guys, just… just so you know, I'm not so… I'm not… I was told not to make a point about it.
• 22:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But…
• 22:04
  Mark Pracht: Did we all know.
• 22:05
  Tad Eggleston: This is us anyway, Jimmy, so we're fine.
• 22:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It was sort of… it was… it was them…
• 22:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: it was actually DC, which was really sweet of them to do. They're actually like, you know,
• 22:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: For that last issue, we're gonna put it, like, the way it was…
• 22:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Anna, let's see if you guys can.
• 22:22
  Mark Pracht: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I totally remember that.
• 22:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You see, but you remember there was a big branch.
• 22:27
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 22:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: In front of her.
• 22:29
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 22:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So they, they, they said, well, in tribute to Darwin in this book, we're gonna put it like the original art, and I said, thank you so much, that was very cool of them.
• 22:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, and on that last one, he insisted he'd do the last issue. We knew we were getting canceled. The end of the year told us, he said, look, that's gonna be your last issue, and I said, can we do a double issue? He's like, sure.
• 22:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: By the way, Dan DiDio.
• 22:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If it wasn't for him, there would have been zero Jonah Hex comics. Anyway, he's a huge…
• 23:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: a fan of all the odd characters at DC, so he was the guy that kept going back and saying, hey, why don't we do a series on this, and why don't we try that? So he's the one that okayed all the Jonah Hex stuff, but that last issue of Jonah Hex, I wanted to…
• 23:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: retro, rewrite the Jonah Hex annual where they killed him in the past.
• 23:22
  Mark Pracht: And.
• 23:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because I felt like we needed to have some more stories for him one day, so I did that, and
• 23:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But anyway, I'm very proud of this gigantic omnibus that came out, but I'm really hoping they do one or two of the first 70, because…
• 23:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: There's so many artists, there's some artists that are no longer with us, there's some artists that are,
• 23:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Big-time artists.
• 23:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, you have early appearances from some really… and I wanted to ask you about how you went about finding people, because you've got…
• 23:56
  Tad Eggleston: a Fiona Staples issue, you've got a Jeff Lemire issue, and this… these are, like… it's like Staples' eighth credit, and Lemire's…
• 24:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We have a… we have a… I'll tell you a quick story about the Dick Giordano issue.
• 24:10
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 24:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Giordano's wife, I guess, at the time. She,
• 24:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: She called me, because I knew Dick, I would see him at shows, and said, look, Dick is, very sick.
• 24:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: A, he's not gonna live much longer.
• 24:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: had cancer, and she goes, but he always wanted to draw an issue with Jonah Hex, and I said, say no more. Justin and I wrote that issue in 2 days, and we got it to,
• 24:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We got it to Dick, and it's ironic, but it starts with a funeral, but that was on purpose in a weird way, because if you read the story, you'll get it. We got it to Dick right away, Dick drew it, handed it in.
• 24:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It came out?
• 24:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Dick got to do a signing with it, the book, the printed book, and then he passed away not too long after that.
• 25:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But we were so thrilled that we got to get that for him. He just wanted to do that. It was, like, one of those things, and of course, I would never say no. I mean, he's a guy, you know, he's Dick Giordano.
• 25:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 25:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I honestly, I can… like I said, one day they do the omnibus, I can literally… between Justin and I, we can write a story to each and every issue.
• 25:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Has a story behind it. Like, there's… there's an issue that never was done by Jeff Darrow, which is a funny story.
• 25:29
  Tad Eggleston: Ugh.
• 25:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because Jeff Darrow.
• 25:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, you know, I talked to Jeff there, I said, would you like to do an issue with Joan Hex? He goes, oh, you know, I love what you're doing with the book, I want to draw… yes, I'll draw an issue. I'm like, okay.
• 25:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We wrote up a story about, where Jonah Hex
• 25:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Had to, and I made it very Jeff Darrow, I gotta admit, because I'm a big fan of his, where Jonah Hex is hired to help transfer an octopus out of San Francisco to a circus, right?
• 25:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he gets the script, and he goes, I love it. He goes, but it's like you wrote it for me. I just wanted to do two guys on the street with guns.
• 26:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He goes, so I'm gonna pass on this one. So we… who did we get? We get Eduardo Riso, and he drew…
• 26:12
  Tad Eggleston: Right. I was about to say.
• 26:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And that's a fun issue. That's like a… Yeah, yeah. But originally, that was… that was written for Jeff, okay? And you can see it if you look at that with the circuit. Jeff would have went crazy on the octopus, the whole thing, right?
• 26:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then there was another issue we wrote for Jeff, And…
• 26:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We said, okay, let's try it again, and we wrote another issue for him, finally got it to him, he goes.
• 26:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: this is great! I'm like, terrific! And he goes.
• 26:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, but I got bad news. I'm like, what is it? He goes, my DC rate kind of sucks, I can't really do this for the money they're offering. And I was like, yeah.
• 26:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, guess what? That didn't get done. So we never got Jeff Darrow because DC wouldn't pay him more for it.
• 26:58
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 26:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Which was a shame, because the other story, I think it went to… we just… we tweaked it because it went to Jordy.
• 27:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And when I met Jordy in Spain, I met him in Barcelona.
• 27:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He asked me a favor, he said, on the stories, can you have humor in my stories? Give me a little bit of humor.
• 27:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he said, and I like to draw the ladies.
• 27:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So if you can make sure they have these elements in my stories.
• 27:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And so that's why we have, like.
• 27:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: There's one where he has these, like, three girls, it's always… in Jordy's story, there's always,
• 27:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, some girls, or some craziness. We had one where a bunch of nuns are beating them with sticks, and he was like, that's fantastic, that's funny. He goes, I leave… and we had a bullfighter one because, of course, Jordy lives in Barcelona, and they're bullfighters.
• 27:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right. So we did a bullfighting one. So they each have, like, they're very aimed at artists, and, like, even J.H. Like, J.H. Williams did an issue that's beautiful.
• 27:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's probably one of the most screwed up stories in the whole run, okay? But it took JH, like, a year. He had a year to do that. And I think at some point he felt bad he was,
• 28:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He's, you know, it took so long, so he started doing some black and white paintings on the rear… on the edges, like, it's such a beautiful book.
• 28:17
  Mark Pracht: But we had a lot of that. In 70 issues, we definitely had a lot of.
• 28:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: interesting people that would either come to me and Justin, or we would go to a convention and walk up to them. I… Brian Selfries is one I walk up to, and I said, you know, do you want… can you do a Jonah Heck story? He goes, what's the deadline? I said, a year.
• 28:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he goes, yeah. I'm like, okay. They, by the way, they all do them, like, 2 weeks before it's due. It's not like anybody's sitting there for a year.
• 28:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I will say, Dan the Dio said that when we finished our 70-issue run, it's… it won an award for…
• 28:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The book that came out 70 weeks in a row in the first week of the month for 70 weeks in a row.
• 28:59
  Mark Pracht: He says, you guys never miss shipping, it always came out the first week, and I said.
• 29:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, because we had them being worked on 6 or 7 at a time, you know?
• 29:07
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 29:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But… But anyway, yeah, I mean, one day.
• 29:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Or if we're gonna ever do a show, we can go through each issue, and I can tell you a little story about each, like… but that's the fanatic. We're gonna only have, like, two people listening to it before they put a gun in their own mouth.
• 29:20
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I feel like that's our show half the time anyway, which doesn't mean… but, you know, what I have found is I have 300 downloads somewhere, like, once a week, so, like, you do it once, and 5 years later, somebody finds it, and they listen to it all.
• 29:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, look, when I kicked the bucket, you could play the show, and people go, oh, yeah. You know, I remember he was alive. He was quite alive.
• 29:45
  Mark Pracht: I mean, all I can really say about it is, and I know we want to talk about other projects, but, you know, I have… I have a lot of stuff in my room, and I finally had to sort of cull
• 30:02
  Mark Pracht: A whole bunch of my monthlies.
• 30:04
  Mark Pracht: Donated them to libraries and stuff like that.
• 30:07
  Mark Pracht: And, the one thing I was, like, adamant… I was like, I am never giving up.
• 30:13
  Mark Pracht: those 70 issues of Jonah Hex. I… I… I just… it… it really… I don't… I don't want to end up sounding like Chris Farley, you know, but…
• 30:24
  Tad Eggleston: Did do a Chris Farley imitation in our last Jonah Hex issue.
• 30:30
  Mark Pracht: It's…
• 30:31
  Tad Eggleston: the Darwin.
• 30:33
  Mark Pracht: Oh yeah, well…
• 30:34
  Tad Eggleston: Bill Darwin, and…
• 30:36
  Mark Pracht: And… but that series means a lot to me.
• 30:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, thank you. I appreciate… I really appreciate that. I feel it's, you know, I feel…
• 30:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think if you wait long enough, or you're alive long enough, I feel…
• 30:51
  Tad Eggleston: somewhere, somebody's gonna get those 70 issues out, and then people are gonna discover it. You know what I mean? Right. Like, I don't…
• 30:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't know, they don't… because they don't tell you anything, I don't know how the All-Star Western one did, and you know, All-Star Western…
• 31:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: had…
• 31:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: editorial talking to us, right? They were, like, saying, this is gonna get canceled unless you do something crazy, and we… we kept going crazy. But in the backups, we kind of did our own thing anyway.
• 31:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And don't get me wrong, I had fun writing All-Star Western, it was insane, but it was one big story, right? It was this gigantic story that, literally, they would call me up, say, you have to put Brewster Gold in next issue. I'm like, how? And they're like, well, you gotta figure that out.
• 31:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But we need Boosted Gold, and if you can do this and that… and they're like, alright, we need Superman in it, can you put Superman? I'm like, yeah, and I said, you know, I think that was the funny thing, I said, you know.
• 31:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If Superman picked up Jonah Hex, he'd probably throw up from, flying, you know? He's not used to… and he does in the comic, he throws up. But it's like… that was editorially driven, and it kind of makes sense why they collected that first, and not my… not the books we originally did.
• 32:01
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 32:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I think I'd like to… I'd like it to be collected, and I'd like people to see it before I die, you know what I mean? After I'm dead, I have no idea, right? Nobody knows what the hell, you know.
• 32:13
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, I just think that collection of artists, it's like, we talk about it all the time when we're doing the show.
• 32:18
  Tad Eggleston: Who's who?
• 32:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, I mean, Jordan…
• 32:21
  Mark Pracht: wrong.
• 32:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I thought for sure…
• 32:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: As a matter of fact, I pitched a collection of just Geordie, and I said, can we do them in black and white, you know?
• 32:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And they're like, nobody will buy it. And I'm just like, okay. I mean, that's what I get all the time. I mean, look…
• 32:35
  Tad Eggleston: I would have bought that.
• 32:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Look, I…
• 32:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Amanda, my wife, and I hit DC up every year and say, can we do another Power Girl series? And every year, they tell us no.
• 32:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And every year they tell us, nobody will buy it, they say something like that, right? Right. But the collected trade for Power Girl keeps selling out.
• 32:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay? And I keep telling them, I'm like, what printing of this book is it?
• 33:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And you guys still don't get it, so, like, it's like I'm talking to, like, a wall, you know? Like, they just…
• 33:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't think… and I personally think that… I don't think a lot of them go to comic stores. I don't think a lot… I don't think a lot of the people that work in comics actually…
• 33:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Buy comics and read them?
• 33:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think they did when they were younger?
• 33:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I don't think they actually currently read stuff. I don't think a lot of them… of course, there are a couple that do. But, man, I… I always, like, I'm always… always blows my mind, you know? I'm like…
• 33:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I sit there at signings, and people go, when are you guys gonna do Power Girl again? And I'm just like, yeah, they have no interest in that, you know? And they're like, how would that… I mean, we literally pitched something, and they told us it probably wouldn't sell. And I was like.
• 33:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, but it will sell better than your bottom 30 books.
• 33:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: in a heartbeat, you know? And,
• 33:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, you know, so I just move on, I move to other things, you know, that's…
• 33:59
  Mark Pracht: sweat…
• 34:00
  Mark Pracht: I can… I can pivot to that, because I am also a massive fan of that Power Girl series. I… you guys, like, you… you and Amanda are…
• 34:10
  Mark Pracht: that Power Girl, Terra, the Starfire series, like, all of it. I was… I… every time you guys put out a book, I was like, I'm air, I'm there.
• 34:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That was, Dan DiDio called that the Jamanda universe. Jimmy and Amanda.
• 34:23
  Mark Pracht: He's like… Yeah.
• 34:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He's like, you don't have to… I said, can we not worry about continuity and keep it in its own con… and he's like, if for some reason it works for you guys, he goes.
• 34:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So do it. And, you know, mine and Amanda's attitude on it was comics… we always used to say, is it fun?
• 34:41
  Mark Pracht: Like, we go, is it fun? Like, it's flirty, it's sexy, it's cute, it's weird, it's goofy.
• 34:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's grounded in a weird way, and
• 34:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, for Power Girl, and for, like, Terra, and for, like, even Starfire, when I first got Starfire, people hated it. They were like, what did you do to Starfire? And I said, I put Starfire in a blender. I put all the different ones I read, I threw them in a blender.
• 35:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And, including the cartoon, which I like, the Tea Titans Go, and I said, and I said, here's the version that popped out, you know, bing, you know, and I was like.
• 35:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And a lot of these series do better after they come out.
• 35:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And they're collected, and then all of a sudden, people start discovering, like, Power Girl was like that.
• 35:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Tara was like that, and we wanted to always call her Atlee, but they had to… they had a,
• 35:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: the copyright was running out on Terra, and they made us call her Terra, but we always call her Atlee. And, and then when they gave us Starfire, they were just like, you know, just do what Jimmy and Amanda would do on Starfire, and we were like, well…
• 35:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I said, you know, after I read… because I didn't really know Starfire that well, so after I read them all, I said, well, she's a… she's a bit of a hedonistic person. And Amanda's like, she's a totally hedonist, she doesn't have any of the hangups, and I said.
• 36:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, I said, I think we should move her to Key West. I think she should live in Key West.
• 36:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It kind of like, you can be that person down there without having… making a stink, and
• 36:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, that was our stupid thinking on that, but
• 36:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We had so much fun doing those 12 issues, and again.
• 36:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: like, later on, the trades did very well. Like, the trades always sell.
• 36:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So it doesn't… I mean, look, we're doing Harley and Elvira, and…
• 36:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That… I think the number 3 comes out tomorrow. That sounds right. It's the most insane comic. It's insane, okay? I mean, we're also dealing with Cassandra Peterson, right? Because she's…
• 36:40
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 36:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: she's looking at her dialogue and rewriting it in places, she's like, no, no, it's gotta be dirtier, and I'm like, okay, and
• 36:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But it has our tone. When Amanda and I work together, it has that tone.
• 36:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Which is, we're just kind of trying to have fun and…
• 36:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: There was a point… look, I know, I always say, I know how to do dark comics. I mean, I wrote Jonah Hex with Justin. I said, I could do really dark, you know?
• 37:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I like to flip the switch and say, okay, I can do really fun, too. You know, I think fun is… but I also think humor is the toughest thing for comic writers to do.
• 37:19
  Mark Pracht: I, I think…
• 37:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I… because I also… I also think a lot of it… Amanda and I have a sense of humor in our everyday lives. We laugh at the stupidest things, and that comes through in what we do.
• 37:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I… when I see other people trying to copy what we do, it always comes out weird to me. Like, it's always, like, trying too hard.
• 37:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And that could just be me protecting myself and my workload.
• 37:45
  Sean Harklerode: What?
• 37:46
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But but I do see it. Sometimes I look at… when other people did Power Girl after us, I always felt like, fake Power Girl.
• 37:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, I just, I would just say, right away, I'd just go, that's not really Power Girl, that's, like.
• 37:57
  Mark Pracht: Hold on.
• 37:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: name, you change the look. I'm like, there was nothing wrong with our Power Girl. You just do the same thing, you know? Even the writer after us kind of right away
• 38:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: killed the mom… killed, you know, not killed the mom, but she killed people, like, where she worked, and I was like, why are you touching that? Like, the fans love that continuity.
• 38:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I think that's what comics got away from continuity, so much so that the entire DC line is being replaced
• 38:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: by an entirely new DC line.
• 38:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I always used to say, if you have to do what-if stories for characters, you're probably just not writing the character right.
• 38:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know? I get it if you say Superman is the size of Godzilla, that's kind of fun. Okay. But if you're doing a what-if, where it's just, like, really something, or Elseworlds, they called it, or any of that, I always say, why are you running out of stories with this character? Character's great. There's a million stories you could tell.
• 38:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, again, I'm ranting, so let's pull it back to power.
• 38:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, the Power Girl is an issue 3 of… Harley Quinn Elvira.
• 39:06
  Sean Harklerode: Oh. Okay, so that comes out tomorrow.
• 39:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Power Girl is in it, Amanda even drew two pages of it. It is our Power Girl. Like, nothing ever happened, she's still in Brooklyn, she still has
• 39:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Same cat.
• 39:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And Harley's still trying to stick her face between her boobs all the time. So, nothing really has changed there.
• 39:25
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I appreciate all, I appreciate it so, so much, because actually, when I read your books with Amanda.
• 39:33
  Mark Pracht: Right. It makes me think of my own marriage, you know? It's our own way of communicating with each other, and I think you're absolutely right. I think, like, it is… it is sexy, and it's flirty, but it doesn't feel…
• 39:47
  Mark Pracht: like, exploitative or, God forbid, misogynistic or anything like that. Right. It's… it's… it… it feels like a fully rounded female character that… that…
• 40:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: owns their own sexuality, and… Yeah, I think it's a… you know, Amanda has a… you know, so Amanda's my secret weapon. I can write…
• 40:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The craziest stuff, and she'll somehow make it not seem as dirty.
• 40:13
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 40:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I will give you an example, because Garth Innes also understands this.
• 40:20
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say…
• 40:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: When we… when we did the pro, we were like.
• 40:24
  Mark Pracht: Like, if anyone.
• 40:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Anybody else draws this, we're the most misogynistic pieces of crap on Earth.
• 40:29
  Tad Eggleston: But you hand it to Amanda.
• 40:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And Amanda's actually got a filthier mind in both of us.
• 40:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And,
• 40:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then she makes it, like… I remember when the pro came out, people were like, you know, I know she's a prostitute, and I know this happened, but I really feel for her, you know, with the baby. And I was just like, well, I said, that is a superpower, because…
• 40:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The way we grew up is we're supposed to have empathy and understanding for everyone.
• 40:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So the idea that it became socially cool to be a bully to people, or to be shitty to…
• 41:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: People that aren't like you.
• 41:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That's a… that's something that goes against comic book readers, right? Right, right. We learned when we grew up is everyone deserves a chance, everybody wants the same things. No matter what color, no matter where they come from, everyone wants to just have a normal life, be able to eat, have white kids, husband, kids, wants the kids to do well.
• 41:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And…
• 41:28
  Tad Eggleston: Spider webs.
• 41:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right, and, right, and this is, like, yeah, but it's, like, such a… it's such a simple thing.
• 41:35
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 41:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, anyway, Amanda is always our secret weapon. If I have… we have a book Amanda and I are working on. It probably won't come out for another year and a half, two years.
• 41:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That is so crazy.
• 41:46
  Tad Eggleston: But if she wasn't drawing it, I'd probably be thrown in jail for it, so… I can't wait!
• 41:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But she's doing it together. She's doing it so they'll… and by the way, when Amanda and I work together, where we're writing together, like Starfire or, like, Harley Quinn.
• 42:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If people… fans don't like it, they say, I wrote it.
• 42:07
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 42:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And if they really like it, they say, you know, Amanda Connor really knocked it out of the park, this issue. They always do that, and we always get a giggle out of it, because I'm like, I'm like, boy, oh boy, man, you know? They're just afraid to say anything.
• 42:21
  Mark Pracht: Saying negative about her.
• 42:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's like a superpower she has, man.
• 42:27
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean…
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: Clearly shot.
• 42:30
  Mark Pracht: He's the better half, right?
• 42:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Absolutely, 100%. I tell her, I tell her, nobody's gonna miss me when I'm gone. When you're gone, then we're gonna be crying and weeping and…
• 42:40
  Mark Pracht: Doing all that stuff.
• 42:41
  Tad Eggleston: With Amanda, I have to ask about your Wednesday comics, because A, that's just one of my favorite projects, period, that DC has done in forever.
• 42:52
  Tad Eggleston: But… but your story with Supergirl and Crypto, and I can't remember the cat's name right now, but…
• 43:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Stinky, and
• 43:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Speedy. Speedy. Yeah, we call it… that's Power Girls is stinky, that's Speedy is the other one.
• 43:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. Was just, like, it was the comic relief, every, every issue, but then when I was talking to Mark Chiarello about it, and he said that, like.
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: You guys were actually doing stories week by week. What was it like to work at that pace, to do the.
• 43:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So we, we actually, we actually, two things happened, right? Because…
• 43:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: When he said they're like Sunday comic strips, we realized we have to have a beginning and an end on each page.
• 43:34
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Right?
• 43:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: a lot of people didn't pay attention to that, right? But we did, we were like, well, it's Sunday Pages, so… Okay, the other thing was, the first call I got about it was.
• 43:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: do you know how to write, like, for all ages? Because they call me up, do you know how to write for all ages? And I'm like, what do you mean? They're like…
• 43:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: we want you and Amanda to do a Supergirl, but we don't want it dark, and I said, yeah, I could write for… I can write anything, I mean, that's easy. And they're like, no, no, no, really, I mean, you need to write her, she's a young girl, and I'm just like, guys…
• 44:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm like, it's storytelling. I said, I'm… you know, and of course, it was my idea that, you know, I wanted to put Aquaman in there, because I thought he's, like, a goofy character. I mean, he has a shell phone, that's so ridiculous.
• 44:17
  Sean Harklerode: But I…
• 44:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I… when we handed them in, and Amanda did them giant size, they're, like, 3 times the size of a regular comic page. They're gigantic. Right.
• 44:28
  Tad Eggleston: No, I've… yeah.
• 44:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: when we handed him in, and with the story and everything, I… I was just like, oh man, I hope this works, like, people are just gonna either hate me for this, or whatever. Because I kind of made Supergirl, like, a little emotional.
• 44:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And… and crazy, Luke pulling her hair out a little bit, and not being able to control the super pets, which would be realistic. And then even Aquaman giving her a little crap in it, you know.
• 44:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I was like, but Amanda and I always talked about Supergirl, always like, it's a young girl, so she should be a little crazed, you know, a little emotional.
• 45:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, and I was… we were really… I was really happy that, people liked it, because I…
• 45:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I was like, look at the heavy hitters in this book, like, we're like the goofy…
• 45:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, light part of the book, everything's so… But you're still heavy hitters. Yeah, they're all heavy.
• 45:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yep. And Paul Pope, yeah.
• 45:25
  Tad Eggleston: Paul Pope.
• 45:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, like, all of a sudden, the Mandarin and I…
• 45:27
  Tad Eggleston: Azzarello and Rizzo.
• 45:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know what, we just gotta do what we do best, we gotta make it fun.
• 45:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And, and make it easy to read. Like, just, you can easy to follow, you know? And,
• 45:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And, it worked out. I mean, you know,
• 45:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think… I think that helped get us some other jobs, because people saw I was able to… you know, they knew me for doing Jonah Hex, because the Jonah Hex guy write this young girl with… dealing with pets, and I was…
• 45:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: For me, it's all the same, it's just you have to, you know, change the background music while I'm writing, you know?
• 46:03
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 46:07
  Mark Pracht: Not… yeah, that's… I… yeah, it's like, I just…
• 46:11
  Mark Pracht: Yeah. I… I absolutely… this is kind of off-subject, but, like, I… I'm… I'm a… I'm a very…
• 46:20
  Mark Pracht: kind of limited, original art collector, so I try to get one piece by.
• 46:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I see a page behind you, I see a page.
• 46:27
  Mark Pracht: He's throwing you on the floor.
• 46:28
  Mark Pracht: That's, that's, Ramad, Ramita Jr.
• 46:33
  Mark Pracht: And I have a… I have a, Kevin McGuire up there.
• 46:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Awesome.
• 46:38
  Mark Pracht: But, like, and every year, Sean and I go to San Diego every year, and I always have, like, a get list, like, who I'm looking for. Right. And Amanda's been on that list for…
• 46:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, so the easy way to get Amanda is you just tell me what you're looking for.
• 46:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Here's the thing… here's the thing that's gonna… so I have to explain this once in a while. We do have some Amanda's work on PaperFilms.com, right? But not a lot.
• 47:04
  Mark Pracht: Yeah.
• 47:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Not a lot.
• 47:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We sell stuff when people ask for it, right? But we both… Amanda and I both decided we… because we watch a lot of our artist friends sell all their art, and then they get older, and they have nothing.
• 47:17
  Mark Pracht: Right.
• 47:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It happens all the time. So people have to ask us about something, like, hey, do you have any pages from this? And I'll always say, yeah, let me see what I… what are you looking for, let me see what I got. The other thing is we both decided that we're in work mode now, right? So we should be working and not spending time selling artwork.
• 47:37
  Mark Pracht: And we don't want to give it to a dealer, because dealers look at it like…
• 47:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: hey, you know, I'll give them, like, I'll give them the whole, you know, maybe, 112 pages of…
• 47:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey, which Amanda did on oversized page, and they'll be like, well, since it's $112, how about you give it to me a little cheaper? And I'm just like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you know. And she also has things like, you know, if somebody's gonna buy the Supergirl page, which are giant.
• 48:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: She wants them to buy the whole story, not the one page, right?
• 48:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, I tell you, and you have my email, just hit me up and tell me what you're looking for, and let me see what I got.
• 48:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, we put things up on the site once in a while. We go to OAX, which is… this year it's February, in Orlando, and Amanda puts together a portfolio of stuff to bring.
• 48:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then people flip through it, and we usually sell a bunch of stuff. Some pages… people love covers, even though they, you know, they're expensive, but people want covers. We get it.
• 48:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But she's not super expensive. She also brings, like, she did, like, these books, Soul Searches, and a couple of older books.
• 48:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They're, like, a couple hundred bucks a page, $150, $200 a page, 250. People buy those like crazy. Gargoyles, I think we sold most of the gargoyle pages, you just put them out for a couple hundred bucks each, and .
• 48:56
  Mark Pracht: Yeah, most of…
• 48:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with selling. We're not Jim Lee, and we're not these guys that keep dumping it with the dealer.
• 49:01
  Mark Pracht: Right. We're… we just…
• 49:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We're busy making comics, so…
• 49:06
  Mark Pracht: Absolutely, yeah, I mean, and that's… that… that's awesome. I like it. I love it.
• 49:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, Darwin cooked, Darwin hardly ever sold anything. When Darwin passed away, he had a stack.
• 49:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Wow. It's, like, at least maybe 4 feet high of his pages, you know? And his widow, Marsha, gives Albert Moy, like, a big stack every year or so, right? Twice a year.
• 49:31
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I know a bunch of artists that are, like, when I was talking to Paul Pope, like, a month ago, the guy I had co-hosting with me that night brought up a page from…
• 49:43
  Tad Eggleston: That meant something to him from, like, a comic…
• 49:46
  Tad Eggleston: That came out almost 20 years ago, and Paul's like, hold on! He walks across the room, and he comes back. This one?
• 49:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, you know, Paul, he's such a lovable guy, I love Paul. His, his… I think his sister lives down here, so I see him every once in a while, he comes over.
• 50:01
  Tad Eggleston: The one that makes the toys?
• 50:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: What's that?
• 50:04
  Tad Eggleston: He's got a sister that makes, They're, they're, they're like…
• 50:11
  Tad Eggleston: Build your own kid fort type.
• 50:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, no, no, you know, most of my guy friends don't talk about their sisters around me.
• 50:18
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 50:19
  Tad Eggleston: No, he just… I have grandkids, so it came up the first time we talked.
• 50:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right, right. No, Paul is… Paul is one of those guys, I mean, he's just working all the time. Yeah. You know, a lot of people say, you know, you guys disappear for a while, and I always go, yeah, we're working, man. I did the opposite, like, I disappeared last year, and then I noticed this year I have 4 books coming out a month for the next 6 months.
• 50:43
  Tad Eggleston: And I'm just like, okay, well, that's accumulation of a lot of work.
• 50:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I hate when it does that. I want just one book a month, you know, I want it to last a while, but I literally tell everybody, after March, I don't have anything except for my, Deadly Tales of the Gunslinger, and that's…
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well…
• 50:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know.
• 50:59
  Tad Eggleston: I was just reading that for the first time today, and noticing kind of the similarities and differences.
• 51:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: from Jonah Hex. So first, give us the front counter pitch. If you were selling it at the comic shop, who do you sell that to?
• 51:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, if you like Spawn, you should buy it. Okay. His best-selling book is the Gunslinger book. But Todd writes the Gunslinger book, it's the character I'm writing in present day, okay? Okay.
• 51:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I am writing The Gunslinger in the 1800s.
• 51:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he has no idea what is going on with him, but he became this character.
• 51:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And he's, he's just… at this point, the base… the back-back story is he's looking for his sister, but the day-to-day stuff is he's just trying to figure out what the hell's going on with him, and
• 51:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because he does, he gets, he gets kind of butchered pretty well, and then instead of dying, he becomes this, like, really disgusting-looking, Western character that,
• 52:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: is got a lot of history, and when Todd McFarlane hired me for the book, he asked me to do a couple of things. The first thing he says.
• 52:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't have a lot of story, backstory on his character, build the Bible. So, I have a, like, a 22-page Bible on his character, where his grandparents came from, where his parents lived, how he became the gunslinger. I need that to write this, because he wants me to do some worldbuilding.
• 52:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And the other thing for me is, like, okay, we… I don't want to get to where Todd is in my book, right? Because that's later.
• 52:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I also don't want to do stories that are all about demons and monsters and everything, so I tried to write The Gunslinger as a straight Western.
• 52:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with… with crazy stuff going on. Sometimes, you know, and look, by the third issue, I think I had a… a whorehouse full of women
• 52:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: break through the wall. Did you guys do that… see that movie,
• 53:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Excuse me, weapons? Yeah. Did you guys see that?
• 53:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay.
• 53:07
  Sean Harklerode: Great.
• 53:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Before the movie came out, I had the scene where these prostitutes, there's, like, 30 of them.
• 53:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And they start becoming these demon-like women.
• 53:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And they start running like crazy, and they run through the walls.
• 53:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then they grab the gunslinger and push him out the second floor of the building. Like, they just keep going through the walls. And when I saw weapons, I started laughing out loud. I'm like.
• 53:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm like, that's how it's gonna look if somebody ever makes this into a movie. It's gonna look just like those kids running through the walls. I was laughing out loud. But Gunslinger, it's very… if you like Jonah Hanks, you'll like the Gunslinger because, man, the artwork that Patrick Reynolds does on it is just stunning.
• 53:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And it's gonna… it gets meaner per issue. Like, I'm really digging in.
• 53:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think issue, 13, 14, and 15 are my best.
• 54:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And it's… and it's like… and they have to deal with, it's Gunslinger dealing with, this Captain Lane, this guy that screwed him.
• 54:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Just, it's a long story, but he screwed him really bad, and he's getting back to get the guy, but the guy becomes possessed by a demon, so he's now a little bit bigger than life.
• 54:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And it's brutal. I mean, it's brutal. I've done a ton of research with American Indians on this, because he has, like, a sidekick, this girl that's with him, and
• 54:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's a crazy book, as, and the third thing, getting to the third thing Todd asked me to do, he said.
• 54:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Can you stay on this for a long time?
• 54:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He said.
• 54:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I says, I need you to launch this, and I need you to stay on it for a while. Not for 10 issues, not for 12, but, like, for 20 or 30, and he said, could you do that? He goes, because I… I want to give this to you, but I need a commitment, because I want you to really build up this world.
• 55:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I said, dude, I said, I prefer to do that. I said, I can't stand four issues of a series. I want to do 30 or 40. I mean, Harley Quinn, I did 105 out of the gate. Jonah Hex was probably, like, over 100 issues.
• 55:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, maybe 108 or something like that. I said, I prefer that because the readers want to do that consistency in the team. They want… they want the same writer on a book. I want the same writer on a book. I don't… I hate when it changes 30 times, and right.
• 55:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, yeah, so Gunslinger is a western with supernatural backgrounds. It is, it doesn't say it on the comic, but it's a mature audience's book, because there is nudity, and there is ultra-violence on it. I think that's just…
• 55:45
  Tad Eggleston: Assumed for spawn?
• 55:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I guess, I mean, I didn't know… I know the violence part.
• 55:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, I remember when, I think issue 2 or 3 drew some of the prostitutes topless.
• 55:58
  Sean Harklerode: And I was like, are we allowed to do that? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, oh, okay, great, man.
• 56:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, that's fantastic. I… well, that's how I like… I… look, I'm a heavy metal kid. I grew up…
• 56:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with heavy metal, I mean, I like…
• 56:10
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, that's another one of our book clubs.
• 56:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, man, I like, I like my TNA in a comic. I'm like, you know, I eat, I eat meat and pizza, and I drink beer. You know.
• 56:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, and I just figure… I figure, you know, I…
• 56:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: normally with a job, I try to see where the limits, like, how far I can push things.
• 56:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: With Todd, it's like, do whatever you want, man. Like, great. He's a great… what a great boss, what a great place to work for, and, you know, maybe they'll fire me tomorrow, who knows, but…
• 56:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm writing… I'm writing, 16 and 17 and 18 right now.
• 56:45
  Tad Eggleston: 11 was in stores this past week.
• 56:50
  Tad Eggleston: This coming week.
• 56:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, okay.
• 56:51
  Tad Eggleston: have.
• 56:52
  Tad Eggleston: We have Harley Quinn X Elvira, and Daredevil Punisher, Devil's Trigger number 2.
• 56:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Number 2.
• 57:00
  Tad Eggleston: We're also doing the, the, the, the Punisher… .
• 57:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: world to come, the Marvel 9.
• 57:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, world to come in the Marvel Knights.
• 57:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah.
• 57:09
  Tad Eggleston: And Blue Falcon and Dynamite. That's the one that I didn't manage to read any of yet. So Blue Falcon and Dynamite is… Blue Falcon Dynamite was the toughest job out of all of them. Okay.
• 57:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: you know, when you write something that people… it's… when I watch the cartoons, and I realized I'm in trouble, because…
• 57:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: There's… there's not a lot there. There's not a lot there, you know. Like, the dog was like, okay, you know, Captain Polk, you know, whatever. It was… it was goofy. Okay, blue folk, here I come, boy, you know.
• 57:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, all that stuff going on, so I said, well, I need to John Wick this up a little bit, you know, because otherwise I'm gonna get bored. The worst thing is me getting bored. So it kind of made them go after his dog, and, you know, we get to see the origin of Dino Mutt.
• 57:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then it gets a little crazy after that, but it's… it's…
• 58:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's in tone with the character and the story.
• 58:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And if they gave me a second series, like, if I did another mini-series.
• 58:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I… now I know where to go completely insane with it. Like, now I understand it. But I had to get… to me, I had to get to the point where, who is this guy?
• 58:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, who is he, and why is this dog, you know, what's going on here, you know? And it's not easy to do, because it's not very defined. Everybody has their version of it, which is kind of funny, because they're all based on a cartoon that really has no story.
• 58:36
  Mark Pracht: Right, right.
• 58:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, I… I don't know if they're gonna offer me another one, but if they do.
• 58:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I absolutely know where to take it. I actually need to take it into more of a Power Girl-type tone.
• 58:50
  Tad Eggleston: You know?
• 58:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And make… and make Blue Falcon a little bit more of a dog. I have him… I have… of course, I have his two girlfriends, an ex-girlfriend and another one in this book, but given another series, I'd probably go a little more crazy. That said, you know, it's a fun book.
• 59:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It'll make a nice trade.
• 59:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: These books I have coming out could not be any more different from each other.
• 59:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The world to come, I mean…
• 59:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I did that with Dan Pinojian, it's beautiful, I… I talked them into, letting me put obituaries in the back of the comics.
• 59:25
  Tad Eggleston: I like the obituaries.
• 59:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah.
• 59:26
  Tad Eggleston: Stories are cool.
• 59:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I wanted to… I wanted 3 things, because there's a mission statement.
• 59:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: when you read the first one, it's Punisher talking to you?
• 59:34
  Tad Eggleston: It's in the third one, too.
• 59:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's in the third one, too. Okay, I didn't even see it.
• 59:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I felt like it's very important to say that out loud.
• 59:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: to anybody that wants to know, because this is a character, this is Frank Castle, a little older, right? And the obits… and the third thing I had was I wanted to do a,
• 59:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, old man brain. You know, where you scan the phone and it takes you to a website.
• 1:00:00
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, QR code.
• 1:00:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, so I wanted to do a QR code
• 1:00:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with me and… me and, Dan.
• 1:00:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: talking about the series every issue. So, like, when you were done reading it, we would walk you through what we were thinking in it.
• 1:00:16
  Tad Eggleston: Awww.
• 1:00:17
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They… they didn't go for that.
• 1:00:18
  Tad Eggleston: They didn't go for that. I was about to say, did I miss something?
• 1:00:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But I did… I did get the mission statement, and I do get… and I did get to write obituaries, so that… obituaries I always wanted to do in a Punish comic, and that's the first time somebody said yes to me.
• 1:00:32
  Tad Eggleston: Damn.
• 1:00:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And,
• 1:00:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: and the mission statement was another yes, so I thought 2 out of 3 ain't bad, you know?
• 1:00:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, no.
• 1:00:41
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, I mean, you and Dan can come talk about it here, you know, I'll let you… Yeah, I just… You have an outlet on 22 panels, anytime you want.
• 1:00:49
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, thank you so much, and we will. We should get Dan and I together on that one. My thing is, if you're paying $5 for a comic, I feel…
• 1:01:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Like, there should be more stuff in it.
• 1:01:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I feel like it's… I feel like we should take advantage of technology.
• 1:01:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: How great would it be if every comic you did, you could scan this thing.
• 1:01:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And it goes to a YouTube video…
• 1:01:12
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you're working a ton, so I don't know how much you manage to read new comics. Have you read Chris Condon and Jeffrey Allen Love's News from the Fallout?
• 1:01:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: No. Do they do that?
• 1:01:23
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta look for the stuff, they don't do it as, like, just a QR code.
• 1:01:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: In the background or something.
• 1:01:30
  Tad Eggleston: They set up a website, they set up a phone number.
• 1:01:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't like that.
• 1:01:34
  Tad Eggleston: All sorts of stuff that they, that, that they did around the comic that, that, yeah.
• 1:01:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, that's fanta- I gotta check that out.
• 1:01:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:01:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I mean, not a phone number that you call and you get to talk to them, a phone number where they've got, like, a message set up that fits in with the comic.
• 1:01:50
  Tad Eggleston: I put somebody I can't stand's phone number, you know? Like, you look at, like, the White House's phone number. Yeah, call them.
• 1:01:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, my God.
• 1:01:58
  Mark Pracht: But, I was gonna say, and who is that, Jimmy?
• 1:02:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, you know.
• 1:02:05
  Tad Eggleston: I know we're running up against your time, Loon. I wanna, I wanna quickly…
• 1:02:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If we go a little bit more, I'm okay with it, so, you know.
• 1:02:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I want to quickly ask you about Pop Kill.
• 1:02:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay.
• 1:02:14
  Tad Eggleston: Just because I loved that, and the hardcover comes out in February.
• 1:02:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yes.
• 1:02:19
  Tad Eggleston: And I gotta wonder, just because, like, you've got the twin…
• 1:02:24
  Tad Eggleston: rival business partners, like, did this… did this come out of Adidas Puma, or… or…
• 1:02:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It actually came out of… it came out of Dave Johnson's brain.
• 1:02:34
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:02:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, we thought, you know, Coke, Pepsi, right? We thought Coke Pepsi.
• 1:02:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, right.
• 1:02:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And what makes that even worse is if they're twin brothers, you know…
• 1:02:43
  Tad Eggleston: I just… I don't know if you know, but Adidas Puma is the same family, but they split, like, years ago, and, like, they literally split a town. Like, like, like, they're in the same town in Italy, and, like…
• 1:02:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I did not… I did not know that.
• 1:03:01
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:03:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Kind of makes sense.
• 1:03:02
  Tad Eggleston: Serious rivals.
• 1:03:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It kind of makes sense. I mean, we did stupid things, like their buildings are near each other.
• 1:03:08
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:03:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: post-its on the window. Yeah. You know, look, we wrote this… we did Pop Kill…
• 1:03:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Dave, you know, Dave wanted to write more comics, and he says, you're a good collaborator, would you want to write something, you know, help me out, and, you know, and I said, what's the idea? And he pitched it to me, and I said, okay.
• 1:03:26
  Tad Eggleston: you know, let's take the robots out of it, because he had some other crazy stuff. I said, I said, but let's see if we can ground this, like, in a real world a little bit, you know? And then we can get crazy and colorful with the characters.
• 1:03:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And we did it as 3 Kickstarters, you know, and and they did very well, and we were like, okay, we know why it's doing well, because we put hot girls on the cover.
• 1:03:46
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But something happened where people were like, well, actually, we're reading it, and the story is a lot of fun, and I'm like.
• 1:03:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, I said it's my version of James Bond, like, but 10 times more misogynistic.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Like…
• 1:03:59
  Sean Harklerode: It comes…
• 1:03:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Completely, completely…
• 1:04:01
  Tad Eggleston: She's also the really smart girl in the middle of it.
• 1:04:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, no, no, there's always a small…
• 1:04:05
  Tad Eggleston: Was that Amanda?
• 1:04:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Look, my books of women are always smarter than the men.
• 1:04:12
  Sean Harklerode: I just want to…
• 1:04:13
  Tad Eggleston: That's the opposite.
• 1:04:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: on reality.
• 1:04:14
  Tad Eggleston: Mystic, though?
• 1:04:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Me, no, but…
• 1:04:17
  Tad Eggleston: At least for the book. For the book.
• 1:04:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I can write that character like that. Well, it's funny to write him because he steps on his own feet when he's walking. Oh, yeah. You know, all the time. And deep down, he's lovable, but he's also an a-hole. But, you know, my thing is, you know, we know, we've learned this with modern TV, is like.
• 1:04:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You can love-hate people.
• 1:04:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 1:04:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And, you know, Game of Thrones taught us that, right? The people in Episode 1 we hated. By second season, we loved them. So…
• 1:04:48
  Tad Eggleston: A cat is not be interested in them.
• 1:04:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right, no, no, they have to, they have to be…
• 1:04:53
  Tad Eggleston: If you don't like them and you don't care, that's a bad thing.
• 1:04:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: In my writing, I tend to base characters on people, so they do different things than I normally would, right? It's very important that everybody doesn't act like you, because then your comics become, you know,
• 1:05:11
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, yeah, that was, that, that, you know…
• 1:05:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I forgot what we're talking about for a second here.
• 1:05:18
  Tad Eggleston: Popkill. Popkill.
• 1:05:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So with Pop Kill, we… I was… we were talking to… actually, Mark Irwin at Pop… at Mad Cave was talking to Dave, and…
• 1:05:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They said they'd be interested in doing a deal with us on it, you know, and we're like.
• 1:05:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, I said, but, you know, I did a Kickstarter, and…
• 1:05:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm very loyal to my Kickstarter people, so I said, they can have the books.
• 1:05:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But they can have none of the covers from my Kickstarters, you know? Oh.
• 1:05:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So they had to get… we had to get new people to do that stuff and everything. We never thought it would sell… it's one of their best sellers that last year, you know, this year.
• 1:05:57
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:05:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We never thought it would sell, but the joke was, you know, people read it and were like, oh, that was a lot of fun. And I'm like.
• 1:06:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Man, fun always wins, you know? Fun always wins.
• 1:06:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean…
• 1:06:09
  Mark Pracht: I'll… I'll tell you, I… somehow…
• 1:06:12
  Mark Pracht: it slipped under my radar completely. Right. And Tad was… I think it was on the last Jonah Hex thing we were talking about. He described this plot to me, and I'm like, that sounds like the most amazingly fun thing in the world.
• 1:06:27
  Mark Pracht: And I've got it… I've actually got it all set… I've got it in my shopping cart. I'm actually working on a… I've got a writing project going on right now, so I'm a little neck-deep in that.
• 1:06:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: All good.
• 1:06:37
  Mark Pracht: But it's like, as soon as I get a moment, I… I'm gonna read that whole thing. I can't.
• 1:06:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Mark, it's ridiculous. It is.
• 1:06:46
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds ridiculous.
• 1:06:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's ridiculous. But it's charming, and it literally, and I guess because, tad, you read it? I don't know, Sean disappeared. I did. Sean exploded.
• 1:06:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But Tad wrote it. It is, like, at its core, it's a very traditional.
• 1:07:05
  Mark Pracht: boy-girl story. Right, yeah. At its core.
• 1:07:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But it gets wacky, and the villains are colorful, and, you know…
• 1:07:13
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, the villains are insane.
• 1:07:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, they're insane. And basically, it is a story just about espionage of the soda companies, you know? Right. We honestly thought nobody would buy this, and we, we, we,
• 1:07:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We got a buddy of mine, Juan Santa Cruz, who does my Panket Little Jane books, to do the series, and Juan killed it on it, man. It's just beautiful. There is not a lazy panel in that comic, you know?
• 1:07:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: the backgrounds, the action, he really just… Juan is just, man, it's just… I fight people, because they try to steal them for their books, and I fight them. I'm like, you can't have them. I've been working for him since 2001. I've been working with him. We did a book called The Resistance years ago together.
• 1:08:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And in, like, 2000, in the year 2000, I've been working with him ever since. And,
• 1:08:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But yeah, Pop Kill is just, you know, man, I mean, and you know, Mad Cave is putting out seasonal reprints of the one-shots, so there's, like, these…
• 1:08:17
  Tad Eggleston: There's, yeah, there's a, there's a Valentine's Day one.
• 1:08:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, they have Valentine's Day one, and then there's, probably a July, so, I don't know, whatever holiday they find.
• 1:08:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They're doing… you know, we call that milking it, but hey, you know.
• 1:08:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: like I said, I'd rather Mad Cave do it, you know, when the big guys do it, I get a little… meh, because I'm like, you guys got all the money already, you know?
• 1:08:40
  Mark Pracht: Right, right.
• 1:08:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I always say the smaller companies need to hustle harder.
• 1:08:43
  Mark Pracht: Right. Like Dynamite. Dynamite needs to hustle all the time. Mad Cave has to hustle.
• 1:08:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because they're competing with…
• 1:08:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: they put out Batman, and it has 47 covers, and it's like… it's not the covers, it's the idea that…
• 1:08:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Regular guy goes in there with $60, and that's all the money he has.
• 1:09:02
  Tad Eggleston: Right. You know, and I hate that. I'd rather him come out with 15 different books.
• 1:09:07
  Jimmy Palmiotti: than 60 copies of the same book, you know?
• 1:09:10
  Tad Eggleston: Which is also why I love that…
• 1:09:13
  Tad Eggleston: Mad Cave and Dynamite and… and…
• 1:09:18
  Tad Eggleston: Vault and Oni have been really, like, focusing on… they might do some superhero stuff, but they're…
• 1:09:25
  Tad Eggleston: they're doing really interesting stories that are not necessarily… so, like, they understand, maybe we're not gonna be able to take the superhero money, but maybe we get somebody else to come into the comic shop for pop kill that wasn't coming in for…
• 1:09:38
  Tad Eggleston: for Batman at all.
• 1:09:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, no, I look at… I look comics… I look at comics like I look at music when I buy music. There's the big movie… music company, and you know, they have the… the albums they already know are gonna do really well.
• 1:09:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:09:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But they're gonna milk you, they're gonna put out 16 versions of the vinyl, and they're gonna… but… but I've always been a little more New Wave punk rock kind of underground stuff, so I look at comics like that, I look at, like, the smaller companies, a little more punk rock to me, and a little more underground. They… they don't have the same rules, and again.
• 1:10:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I understand, everybody loves Batman and the X-Men, I get it.
• 1:10:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But as I get older, it's harder to really… feel passionate.
• 1:10:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: about, oh, he let the Joker go away again. Yeah, like, all that stuff, it's kind of… it's a little repetitious, and I'm happy people love it, but I definitely… I definitely need some, some punk rock music once in a while, and I need some… I need some shit that's just off-the-hook crazy.
• 1:10:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I do off-the-hook crazy. I do like… I do like, writing things that… as…
• 1:10:46
  Jimmy Palmiotti: a friend of mine reminds me all the time, that shit never sells. And I'm like, yeah, whatever.
• 1:10:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm like.
• 1:10:52
  Tad Eggleston: You're like, I got a roof over my head, it sells well enough.
• 1:10:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, my whole attitude with it is, it's in my head, so I need to get it.
• 1:11:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I am convinced all our brains are like a one-level parking lot.
• 1:11:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And they have, like, it fits 100 cars, and we have 100 cars. And unless you move one of those cars out, you can't put a new one in.
• 1:11:13
  Tad Eggleston: So, for me, it's like, all those cars are stories.
• 1:11:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I am like, you gotta… I am so excited when I'm done with something that I've had in my head for 10 years, and it's out.
• 1:11:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Because now I got room to do something else. And I really feel that way, that visual is exactly how my brain feels. And then you get thrown odd things, like when they say, hey, would you want to do Elvira and Elvira and Harley? And I'm just like, I would have never thought of that.
• 1:11:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But what can we do with that, you know?
• 1:11:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yep, no, I gotta say that, like, that sort of… that sort of pairing used to be the thing that I'd go, really? And then I read Alex DeCampi's…
• 1:11:54
  Tad Eggleston: Archie vs. Predator, and I went, holy shit. And it's like, okay, if you could do this with Archie vs. Predator, never again am I gonna look at a comic and go, what the hell are they thinking? I'm gonna go find out what the hell they're thinking.
• 1:12:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, not all crossovers work, obviously.
• 1:12:11
  Tad Eggleston: Don't always work, but I now no longer think that just… The concept couldn't possibly work.
• 1:12:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right. It's funny, because I… you got… your readers can't see this, but the second issue has,
• 1:12:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Carly holding ice cream cone, and it looks like, Elvira's boobs, right? Well, Amanda originally had cherries on the.
• 1:12:32
  Tad Eggleston: Of course.
• 1:12:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They were like, No way. So, when Amanda signs the comic now, she draws little charges.
• 1:12:40
  Tad Eggleston: He draws the chair. Nice.
• 1:12:44
  Mark Pracht: Well, I mean, actually, you know, to me, like, those two characters, kind of, like, in my head. I haven't read it yet, I tend to read… I tend to let…
• 1:12:54
  Mark Pracht: miniseries finish, and then read the whole thing, so…
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:57
  Mark Pracht: And but I mean, like, those two characters, to me, seemed like they would bounce off each other really well.
• 1:13:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, it's really… I mean, it's the only, you know, the exciting part and the tough part is that she's involved, so I have to… I have to wait until…
• 1:13:13
  Jimmy Palmiotti: She okays everything, and… and it's like, she usually makes things…
• 1:13:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: a little crazier. And then once in a while, she'll have, like, a moment where she'll be like, well, that's a little too far, and I'm like, oh, okay, you know?
• 1:13:28
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, you know, we have a lot of people who have to okay it, because everyone in DC has to okay it, and then there's the licensors, and it's one of those comics that, you know,
• 1:13:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: When it's done, I think the editor will be going on vacation.
• 1:13:40
  Tad Eggleston: I think…
• 1:13:43
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think Joe will be taking a little time off there after that, but .
• 1:13:47
  Tad Eggleston: But that's the nature of the beast. You take on a monster, you have to wrangle it, you know?
• 1:13:52
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, I gotta… I gotta ask my favorite closing question.
• 1:13:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay.
• 1:13:56
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me.
• 1:13:57
  Jimmy Palmiotti: He was dead when I got there. That's my favorite.
• 1:14:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Good.
• 1:14:04
  Tad Eggleston: Tell me something you love, preferably a comic.
• 1:14:08
  Tad Eggleston: But we don't have rules.
• 1:14:10
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules, but something that you love.
• 1:14:14
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, you need them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
• 1:14:24
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh. So, it's funny because,
• 1:14:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't… when I'm with my comic book friends, we don't talk about the comics.
• 1:14:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: We talk about the editors, we talk about how shitty we're paid, we talk about… we talk about a lot of things, but we don't talk about the actual…
• 1:14:46
  Tad Eggleston: content of the books. As a matter of fact, I'm not convinced any of my friends read anything I write.
• 1:14:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay? I'm not convinced, okay? I know Dan Pinojian's reading Punisher because he has to.
• 1:14:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I don't think it's normal for him to actually read a comic of mine. What I like to read… I got… I gotta… let's see. I mean, my brain went right to this, right over here behind me.
• 1:15:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Is they're putting out these,
• 1:15:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They're not cheap, they're, they're, they're,
• 1:15:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: $29.99, $30 each, but they re-released these giant metal her lamp.
• 1:15:24
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah!
• 1:15:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, it's a big book.
• 1:15:27
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no, that actually, that one right there is Friday night's Book Club on 22 panels.
• 1:15:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, okay.
• 1:15:35
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 1:15:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It has a… it has a mix of new and old in it.
• 1:15:39
  Tad Eggleston: New and old, yeah.
• 1:15:40
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's got editorial in it, there's some Mobius in here, there's some stuff. This, to me, is like my adult happy land.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: I just finished reading that yesterday, it's…
• 1:15:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Is this humanoids? Is it humanoids?
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, it's humanoids.
• 1:15:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, I read at one point Humanoids was having issues, and I don't know what's going on.
• 1:16:00
  Tad Eggleston: Apparently, and I have this… I have this both from… from…
• 1:16:06
  Tad Eggleston: a couple of artists that work with them, and The Beat recently… reworked their story. They did file Chapter 7, but they filed Chapter 7 right after they transferred all of their assets to a different humanoids company.
• 1:16:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, okay, okay, so…
• 1:16:24
  Tad Eggleston: So they're gonna keep coming out with this. Right.
• 1:16:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That was my favorite thing. It's by far.
• 1:16:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:16:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: is the book, Meadow Hurlan. I can't recommend it enough. I don't know if… it comes out maybe, what, $600?
• 1:16:36
  Tad Eggleston: Quarterly. Quarterly.
• 1:16:37
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, it's worth it. I mean.
• 1:16:39
  Tad Eggleston: Four issues a year.
• 1:16:41
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, it's just…
• 1:16:42
  Tad Eggleston: I initially kick-started it, and… Yeah, yeah, no, I…
• 1:16:47
  Tad Eggleston: Heavy Metal came back too, and I've been… I've been picking up those as well, but the metal Erlant has just been…
• 1:16:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They also do a hardcover version, too.
• 1:16:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, they do. They do.
• 1:16:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I, you know what, they were really nice. I was cheap, and I bought the… I bought the soft cover. Yeah, no, no, I like the softcover. I mean, I… I… I… look, in the perfect world for me.
• 1:17:10
  Jimmy Palmiotti: like, let's say, let's pick Batman, because it's an easy one. If Batman came out once a year, and it was 300 pages, I'd be happy.
• 1:17:19
  Sean Harklerode: Yup.
• 1:17:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You understand? I… I… the single comics, I get it, and I get the appeal and the collectability, but I do like my big fat monster books, and yeah. Meadow Hurlance, so four times a year.
• 1:17:32
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Actually, my…
• 1:17:33
  Tad Eggleston: I like a good anthology, too, and…
• 1:17:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah.
• 1:17:37
  Tad Eggleston: And these have been really good anthologies.
• 1:17:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The thing with anthologies is interesting, because they never sell.
• 1:17:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Right? The hardest thing is get… getting anthology and stuff, but if you put metal… heavy metal or metal hurl on, then you have an extra… you have some kind of where to go, right? Right.
• 1:17:57
  Tad Eggleston: out the new EC anthology books, too, that have been.
• 1:18:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, they're hot… I'm hot and cold with those, because, I, I, you know…
• 1:18:06
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They're very hot and cold. Have you been reading them?
• 1:18:09
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, I have. I'm not saying that they've been as… as…
• 1:18:13
  Tad Eggleston: consistent as Metal Erlant in terms of being good, but I know that they've been selling okay.
• 1:18:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: No, no, they do, they do…
• 1:18:20
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, man.
• 1:18:21
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And the editor, she's terrific on them and everything. I just… I wish… it's like the quality.
• 1:18:28
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm happy with anybody who makes David Lapham do work.
• 1:18:31
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Well, David should be doing more. I mean, I, you know, I'm a straight bullets guy, so…
• 1:18:36
  Tad Eggleston: I love straight balls. Have you seen… have you seen his new book, American Caper.
• 1:18:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I think I… I think it's in my poll… in my poll box.
• 1:18:48
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Shelley Bond is editing, and it's the writers from, Red Dead Revolver, and…
• 1:18:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, the video game?
• 1:18:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Grand Theft Auto are doing their first comic.
• 1:18:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: They don't have much story space, do we know that, right? You know that, doesn't it?
• 1:19:02
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, I know, but, but they, they…
• 1:19:06
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've gotten to read the first few issues, and Shelly didn't get involved until they sold her on the fact that they wanted to make a comic.
• 1:19:14
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, okay, no, I'm sure they're great. I mean, I think I put that game on zombie mode to make it interesting for me.
• 1:19:19
  Sean Harklerode: You know?
• 1:19:20
  Tad Eggleston: I never played it. I just… So, I used to write a lot of video games, so, you know.
• 1:19:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: When I play games, I like it to be more story involved, but, you know, once in a while, you just want to get on a building with a sniper rifle, though, and take out a bunch of people, but…
• 1:19:35
  Mark Pracht: layout.
• 1:19:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: In a video game, folks.
• 1:19:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, I feel like that's what you had,
• 1:19:41
  Tad Eggleston: Frank Castle do with Daredevil in this last book?
• 1:19:44
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, the Daredevil Punisher book…
• 1:19:48
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That whole middle part of Issue 1 is a callback to Welcome Back Frank.
• 1:19:53
  Tad Eggleston: So, it's told from Punisher's point of view, but by issue 2.
• 1:19:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: we see Frank Castle leaving Central Park Zoo after, you know, all the bears and all the craziness. Right.
• 1:20:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And then he meets up with Daredevil on a subway, and it's… I literally took apart what we did in Welcome Back Frank, and I told a story that we didn't know was happening right after that. So, that's why we… I got to put the World Trade Center in the last page. Like, you go to the last page, and there's the World Trade Center.
• 1:20:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I'm trying to reinstate that, hey, it's not today, you know, it's the year 2000.
• 1:20:29
  Tad Eggleston: I said the last question was gonna be the last question, but it's not anymore, because I gotta ask you, as an editor.
• 1:20:35
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yes.
• 1:20:35
  Tad Eggleston: When Garth Ennis turned in the script to Welcome Back Frank, and then when you got the Dylan Pages, like… Yes. Because I wasn't a Punisher fan before that.
• 1:20:46
  Tad Eggleston: But, but, like, but the, the, the, the polar bear?
• 1:20:53
  Tad Eggleston: I have… why?
• 1:20:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I have the original art for that page, where it swipes his head.
• 1:20:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh.
• 1:20:59
  Tad Eggleston: That's one of my.
• 1:21:00
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know, I inked all those, I inked all those books, so I did.
• 1:21:03
  Mark Pracht: That's kept right.
• 1:21:03
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I loved, you know? You know, we were waiting for Garth and Steve to get on it. They had to finish a preacher. Garth pitched us it.
• 1:21:15
  Jimmy Palmiotti: If you read Welcome Back Frank, they're very simple stories. They're very… They are. It literally is, like, 3-word balloons on a page. It's very simple, and we gave, you know, we literally told them, do whatever you want. I got to Ink Steve.
• 1:21:30
  Jimmy Palmiotti: One day we'll do another show, we can just talk about that book, because I have a lot of stories with that one.
• 1:21:36
  Tad Eggleston: Dude, anytime, man.
• 1:21:37
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:21:38
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But, but it's… It keeps getting reprinted, that story.
• 1:21:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yes, it does. In fact, it's coming out again in the new Digest size.
• 1:21:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Alright, another 24 cents for me. It's fantastic.
• 1:21:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Dude, I still haven't checked, I think I haven't checked up there for how much is that?
• 1:21:59
  Jimmy Palmiotti: 5 cents.
• 1:22:01
  Tad Eggleston: 5 cents. Yeah, 5 cents. I hadn't… I didn't cash it.
• 1:22:04
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so the stamp to send it to you was significantly… Don't you love it when you get checks in the mail that cost for less than the stamp?
• 1:22:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know.
• 1:22:17
  Mark Pracht: I…
• 1:22:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Nick…
• 1:22:19
  Mark Pracht: Yes.
• 1:22:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: one day we'll… I'll give you a breakdown of a royalty. A book has to sell 60,000 copies until you… then you've got a royalty.
• 1:22:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: For every copy sold, You get to split with the whole team, 5 cents.
• 1:22:33
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The company makes 95 cents.
• 1:22:35
  Mark Pracht: -
• 1:22:36
  Jimmy Palmiotti: on every dollar the profit made. So we split it 3 or 4 ways. So, getting a 5-cent check makes sense, in some weird way. Sometimes you get 50 bucks.
• 1:22:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But… very rare.
• 1:22:50
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Mostly it's, like, 7 and 11.
• 1:22:51
  Tad Eggleston: Which is why creator-owned are great.
• 1:22:54
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's also why, when you go to a convention.
• 1:22:58
  Jimmy Palmiotti: It's okay to bring the… your favorite creator's donuts, because they probably haven't eaten much.
• 1:23:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, I do that too.
• 1:23:05
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So you'll make best friends with… if you bring food to conventions.
• 1:23:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Those people will be your best friend for the whole show. I always tell people that, they don't believe me, and then they go, you know, I brought these cookies to David Finch, and oh my god, he was so… and I'm like, you… don't you understand? They're like.
• 1:23:22
  Tad Eggleston: Coffee, too.
• 1:23:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yes, of course. They run out of… we run out of the hotel, we get to work, and then we're like, oh, we didn't get time… they didn't give us time to eat breakfast, so.
• 1:23:30
  Mark Pracht: We're all making note of that, if you ever come to C2E2.
• 1:23:33
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I… I… San Diego. Not enough of them take me up on it, but I might… I might not stop… I might stop waiting for them to take me up on it, basically. Yeah, donuts are in donuts, nobody says no to donuts, right? Because, like, every time I stop at a friend's table, I'll say, do you need me to run and get you anything? Do you want me to go grab some… Well, see, they feel guilty.
• 1:23:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: about that, because they know how long.
• 1:23:54
  Tad Eggleston: That's why I'm thinking that rather than doing it that way, I should just… I should just show up, and I go, I've got these 6 sandwiches, which one do you want?
• 1:24:02
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay, so this will be our ending story here. So, I'm in… I'm in Philly, okay, known for their Philly cheesesteaks, right? I'm doing the Philly show.
• 1:24:12
  Jimmy Palmiotti: comic convention. And I put online, I said, listen.
• 1:24:16
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Anybody who brings me a Philly cheesesteak, I will do a free sketch for.
• 1:24:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Okay.
• 1:24:22
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Saturday, I got 36.
• 1:24:25
  Tad Eggleston: I don't taste that.
• 1:24:29
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So, what I did, I ate the one… I ate one, because of course, I can't eat.
• 1:24:34
  Jimmy Palmiotti: And I walked up and down Artist Alley, and I gave everybody a.
• 1:24:38
  Sean Harklerode: At Philly cheesesteak. And I had to draw 36 drawings, big deal.
• 1:24:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: So that worked out pretty well, you know? Yeah. Everyone kept going, oh, I see you have 18 cheesesteaks over there. I said, no, no, just wait on line.
• 1:24:51
  Jimmy Palmiotti: bring it up to me, and I'll do your… what do you want? A sketch of? And I would do it, and then they'd give me the cheesesteak, and I would say, who's still hungry? And of course, they're all hungry, you know?
• 1:25:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:25:01
  Jimmy Palmiotti: The green room, for comics, it's usually, like, some radioactive cold cuts and a bottle of… and a, and a pointy, narrow, pointed cup of water, so you can't put it there.
• 1:25:14
  Tad Eggleston: This is where I'm gonna give a plug for my favorite con that not enough superhero people go to.
• 1:25:20
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Go for it.
• 1:25:21
  Tad Eggleston: Comics Crossroads Columbus. Jeff Smith's Con.
• 1:25:27
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Ohio.
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: Ohio, yeah. The… the… A, I know the people who fill the green rooms, they get good snacks. B, the, the opening night,
• 1:25:39
  Tad Eggleston: Why are you shaking your head at me, Mark?
• 1:25:41
  Mark Pracht: I'm not… I'm not shaking my head, I was just thinking about a story that I have, but that's a different topic.
• 1:25:45
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha. The opening night reception is catered by the Ohio State Culinary.
• 1:25:52
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Oh, that's beautiful, huh?
• 1:25:54
  Tad Eggleston: with good food.
• 1:25:56
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Amanda said she's going. I just heard.
• 1:25:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:25:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, they give you,
• 1:26:03
  Tad Eggleston: They actually give out lift passes, so you can get around town, and there's plenty of good food in town.
• 1:26:08
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yes, that's…
• 1:26:08
  Tad Eggleston: And, and…
• 1:26:10
  Tad Eggleston: I know that there are people like myself there every year that will happily, like, hey, I'll get you dinner.
• 1:26:16
  Tad Eggleston: I took a bunch of people out.
• 1:26:19
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Kansas City Comic Con, that's another one, they feed you like crazy.
• 1:26:21
  Tad Eggleston: They feed you well.
• 1:26:23
  Jimmy Palmiotti: with you.
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: So there are a couple of them.
• 1:26:25
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, there are a couple. They, you know, it's weird when we go and they're… they have the cosplay people over us, like, they're… like, they're… they take better care of the cosplay before they do the comic guests.
• 1:26:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, Cartoon's Crossroads is very much comics.
• 1:26:42
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Nice, and I notice you have a Loving Rockets poster on your wall.
• 1:26:45
  Tad Eggleston: I do.
• 1:26:45
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That is… that is… if I didn't say Metal Hurlon, it was gonna be Lovin' Rockets, because I love.
• 1:26:50
  Tad Eggleston: I… we have a Lovin' Rockets book club, too. Jimmy, you could join book clubs on 2020.
• 1:26:55
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know what I have a lot of? I have, like, I have, like, 40 pages of, you know, Beto, the, the.
• 1:27:02
  Tad Eggleston: Beto's been a guest 3 times now.
• 1:27:04
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Has he… I have, like, 40 pages of his… of his art.
• 1:27:08
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm jealous.
• 1:27:09
  Jimmy Palmiotti: I used to buy it directly from him. He had a website he'd put up on, and I would buy, like, 3 or 4 pages every month.
• 1:27:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Beto's amazing.
• 1:27:18
  Jimmy Palmiotti: Yeah, he's, jamie's stuff is harder to get, it's more expensive, and Jamie, you know, that's Jamie. Jamie's a little different than… the two of them are different.
• 1:27:26
  Jimmy Palmiotti: But they're both… That was a blast. They're both… I've been a fan of theirs since I was a kid. They're a big fan of Amanda, so, that's nice. So, once in a while, I get a free drawing.
• 1:27:36
  Tad Eggleston: Because of that. They trade. They trade.
• 1:27:39
  Jimmy Palmiotti: guys, well, listen, I gotta go, but…
• 1:27:42
  Tad Eggleston: Let's do this again, our best to Amanda.
• 1:27:45
  Mark Pracht: Absolutely.
• 1:27:46
  Tad Eggleston: She's welcome to come anytime.
• 1:27:47
  Jimmy Palmiotti: You know what, maybe next year we do me and Amanda together.
• 1:27:50
  Tad Eggleston: I like that idea. That would be fantastic. I'll hit you up.
• 1:27:53
  Jimmy Palmiotti: That'll be fun.
• 1:27:54
  Tad Eggleston: So, for Jimmy Palmiati, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.