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With Great Power #316... 22 Panels with Jared Sarnie · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:03
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight from, middle of Massachusetts is Jared Sarney.
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: his not-quite-debut book, but, but very, very early book from Birdcage Press is The Machine is Broke… not Birdcage?
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: Stop.
• 0:23
  Jared Sarnie: cage.
• 0:24
  Tad Eggleston: Not Birdcage. No, that's right. That's right. I'm thinking of Field Mouse Press. I was thinking of Birdcage because it's the same publisher that did Bird Comic.
• 0:35
  Jared Sarnie: Yes, Bird Comic, yup.
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 0:38
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, Ruby… Yes. Birds, my…
• 0:42
  Tad Eggleston: mouse.
• 0:42
  Jared Sarnie: They're all little, cute little…
• 0:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, but birdcage… birdcage bottom is a different press, so…
• 0:48
  Jared Sarnie: you should be.
• 0:48
  Tad Eggleston: clear, it's Field Mouse Press.
• 0:52
  Jared Sarnie: Field Mouse Press… Shout out.
• 0:56
  Tad Eggleston: And I wanna say my friend Bob Sikoriak has done… Books at both.
• 1:00
  Tad Eggleston: So that also confuses it in my head. So, like… Forgive me?
• 1:08
  Jared Sarnie: I, I forgive you.
• 1:09
  Tad Eggleston: And hopefully they will, too. Hopefully Field Mouse will, too.
• 1:13
  Jared Sarnie: Field Mouse is very fickle. They're… they're.
• 1:15
  Tad Eggleston: They're very fickle? Yeah, well, then hopefully they just won't listen to the podcast.
• 1:21
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, they love it.
• 1:21
  Tad Eggleston: Send me a cease and desist slash letters. I want no It's just letters.
• 1:27
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 1:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, they can be litigious as they want, there's no money to have.
• 1:34
  Jared Sarnie: Perfect. Perfect. And I don't think there's any money on our end, either.
• 1:38
  Tad Eggleston: And I probably have better lawyers than they do.
• 1:42
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, wow.
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: That's one thing I'm confident in. I have a lot of friends and family who are very good attorneys.
• 1:48
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, okay, I will say that Alex at, Field Mouse Press, Alex Hoffman, is a medical doctor, so… Okay. I don't know if that translates to law, but they're certifiably very smart.
• 2:03
  Jared Sarnie: So…
• 2:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. I mean, that's see what happens. Well, I mean, I've known some dumb doctors.
• 2:08
  Tad Eggleston: I'm assuming Alex isn't one of them.
• 2:11
  Jared Sarnie: You know, they haven't done any medical exams on me, but when it comes to comics, they're very smart, so I assume it's a one-to-one.
• 2:17
  Tad Eggleston: I've known so…
• 2:18
  Jared Sarnie: comment.
• 2:19
  Tad Eggleston: Really, really dumb lawyers.
• 2:22
  Jared Sarnie: Hmm.
• 2:23
  Jared Sarnie: But not yours. You got the top grass guys.
• 2:26
  Tad Eggleston: Most of them.
• 2:28
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want to guarantee that all of the lawyers I know are smart ones.
• 2:33
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, but whoever's listening to this, whatever lawyers are.
• 2:36
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think any of them were listening to this.
• 2:38
  Jared Sarnie: And that's why they're smart.
• 2:39
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe a couple.
• 2:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah. Anyway…
• 2:44
  Tad Eggleston: The book is called The Machine is Broken. We're gonna start with… with where I often start. Give me the front counter pitch.
• 2:53
  Jared Sarnie: Wait, the what pitch is that?
• 2:55
  Tad Eggleston: The front counter pitch. You're at the counter of the comic shop, and you've got a customer that you think would like it, how do you pitch it to them?
• 3:05
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, yeah, usually I imagine myself in an elevator, but this makes a lot more sense.
• 3:09
  Tad Eggleston: No, the elevator is…
• 3:11
  Jared Sarnie: the elevator.
• 3:12
  Tad Eggleston: The elevator's for fuckin' venture capital, fuck that.
• 3:16
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, yeah, that's where… that's where the real… the real scary deals happen.
• 3:19
  Tad Eggleston: And more importantly, like, front counter pitches don't have to be as short, they just have to be… enticing.
• 3:29
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, I'm ready… I'm ready to entice. Let me just enter my… my front counter mind palace. I'm closing my eyes for the listeners at home, and… and the eyes are coming open.
• 3:40
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, so, The Machine is Broken, published by Field Mouse Press, is the debut graphic novel by Jarrett Sarney, that's me, referring to myself in the third person.
• 3:51
  Jared Sarnie: And it follows the story of a young woman named Lux who travels to Zurich with her mom and her sister to use the world's very first fully self-serve, high-tech.
• 4:04
  Jared Sarnie: Completely automated euthanasia device.
• 4:07
  Jared Sarnie: So she gets into the device.
• 4:10
  Jared Sarnie: Starts filling with gas. Slowly, it all starts going black.
• 4:14
  Jared Sarnie: She waves goodbye, and then the machine… Immediately fucking breaks.
• 4:21
  Jared Sarnie: And a guy comes out, and he's got his, like, plumber's ass hanging out. This is a very ass-centric comic, I just want that to be known off the bat, and he lets them know it's gonna be, like, at least 2 weeks to fix this thing.
• 4:32
  Jared Sarnie: And then from there, rest of the book is a lot of emo wandering, a lot of… a lot of surreal adventures, a lot of… lot of deep stuff that… that you're just gonna have to buy the book to… to find out about.
• 4:46
  Jared Sarnie: And that's… that's the front counter pitch. Are you sold? Have… have you handed me your… your pennies?
• 4:53
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe.
• 4:54
  Tad Eggleston: Me?
• 4:55
  Jared Sarnie: Okay.
• 4:55
  Tad Eggleston: But having read it, I'm gonna go… some deep stuff, And some funny stuff.
• 5:03
  Jared Sarnie: to be.
• 5:05
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, it's very… I should have mentioned that off top, that 2B is represented… In the book.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: well represented.
• 5:13
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 5:14
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I don't know how much you have to represent Tubi to actually consider them well represented, but
• 5:20
  Tad Eggleston: Also, you,
• 5:23
  Tad Eggleston: you had to correct yourself on the death of Alex and Bechtel. I mean, you did it quickly, it only took you an inch or two, but…
• 5:32
  Tad Eggleston: still, you should be more aware. I mean, we'd have a national holiday if Allison Bechtel had actually passed.
• 5:39
  Jared Sarnie: And God forbid, I'm knocking on wood.
• 5:41
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody would know.
• 5:44
  Tad Eggleston: And you missed an opportunity for a Mark Twain joke.
• 5:49
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, what would be the Mark Twain joke?
• 5:51
  Tad Eggleston: the…
• 5:51
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, oh.
• 5:52
  Tad Eggleston: A lia trap halfway around the world.
• 5:57
  Tad Eggleston: In the time it takes the truth to tie its shoes, or put its.
• 6:01
  Jared Sarnie: boots up.
• 6:02
  Tad Eggleston: Depending on, on, on which, distribution. So, yeah,
• 6:10
  Tad Eggleston: I have so many thoughts, and they're a jumble.
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: I'll start with… As somebody who's had… Way too much personal experience.
• 6:27
  Tad Eggleston: and, and, and…
• 6:33
  Tad Eggleston: both personal, personal, and, like, personal friend experience, like, with suicide, my initial gut reaction was, oh god, this is gonna be a train wreck. So what I'll tell the listeners is, it's not.
• 6:50
  Tad Eggleston: Gotta stick with it a little bit.
• 6:52
  Jared Sarnie: It's not…
• 6:56
  Tad Eggleston: I, I, I was, I was, I was…
• 7:00
  Tad Eggleston: You know, particularly because you do establish relatively quickly that Lux isn't sick.
• 7:06
  Tad Eggleston: Lux is just… Fed up.
• 7:11
  Tad Eggleston: I guess.
• 7:12
  Jared Sarnie: Well, I will say that's… We don't really know.
• 7:15
  Tad Eggleston: sickness?
• 7:17
  Tad Eggleston: It's, it's…
• 7:17
  Jared Sarnie: It's not… we keep it a little ambiguous in the.
• 7:21
  Tad Eggleston: A little, but not that.
• 7:23
  Jared Sarnie: Teeny bit.
• 7:24
  Jared Sarnie: He better ambiguous.
• 7:26
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 7:28
  Tad Eggleston: I, I guess.
• 7:29
  Jared Sarnie: But I like that you've made this decision, that's good.
• 7:32
  Tad Eggleston: I guess I won't take it away from you, but, like, particularly the way she responds to the… to the guy that clearly is very, very sick.
• 7:44
  Tad Eggleston: Makes me, like, not… And the way her family behaves around her.
• 7:53
  Tad Eggleston: Makes me feel like it's…
• 7:58
  Jared Sarnie: the astute reading.
• 8:00
  Tad Eggleston: Now, again, don't get me wrong, like, given the nature of society and the world we live in, like, it's… I get where she's coming from, but I would have been…
• 8:12
  Tad Eggleston: There are a lot of ways this book could have gone that would piss me off, even though the art
• 8:17
  Tad Eggleston: is… And this is where I'm actually having trouble finding words, because you…
• 8:23
  Tad Eggleston: Float between a number of styles.
• 8:26
  Tad Eggleston: And do it really well.
• 8:29
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, thank you.
• 8:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, like… I guess, like, talk to me…
• 8:40
  Tad Eggleston: No, actually, you know, we're not even gonna… we're gonna go to a question that normally has to go to…
• 8:48
  Tad Eggleston: older, older comic… creators than you, because I'm guessing you're what? We're gonna say 25.
• 8:57
  Jared Sarnie: 27. I'm UNC. 27. I'm certified UNC status.
• 9:01
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 9:03
  Jared Sarnie: But I'm glad my…
• 9:03
  Tad Eggleston: Steph.
• 9:04
  Jared Sarnie: low is keeping me firmly in the mid-20s and not the worst.
• 9:08
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 9:09
  Jared Sarnie: 20s that I currently reside in.
• 9:10
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, you're still… Like, my kid's age.
• 9:17
  Jared Sarnie: Nice.
• 9:18
  Tad Eggleston: So, I mean… Younger than one of them? Older than the other?
• 9:28
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, great. I'm the middle child. Perfect.
• 9:32
  Tad Eggleston: But, like…
• 9:39
  Tad Eggleston: I'm seeing possible influences that are… are sup… Rising.
• 9:47
  Tad Eggleston: For somebody as young as you, particularly given the breadth.
• 9:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, just because there's only so much time that you could have spent reading comics, not… not like, oh, I'm shocked that a 27-year-old has read this and this. It's like, I'm shocked that a 27-year-old went down this rabbit hole, and that rabbit hole, and this rabbit hole, and still had time to learn to draw.
• 10:11
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah. Does that make sense?
• 10:13
  Tad Eggleston: sense?
• 10:13
  Jared Sarnie: Absolutely, yeah.
• 10:15
  Tad Eggleston: So… so talk to me about your comics biography, and… and… and, like, this should be obvious to you, not your bibliography, because this is your debut graphic novel. Your biography. Talk to me about the comics.
• 10:32
  Tad Eggleston: that you remember buying, that you remember reading, that you remember influencing you, and how… which comics have you picked up? Like, I can take you on a path through my comic life, particularly
• 10:48
  Tad Eggleston: my comic life up until the podcast, like, my comic reading, like, hit a whole new level of insanity, where I can, like.
• 11:00
  Tad Eggleston: trace the comics that changed the way I looked at comics.
• 11:05
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah Yeah.
• 11:07
  Tad Eggleston: So… Take me through your life as a reader, and an appreciator of the medium.
• 11:14
  Tad Eggleston: Because I'm curious as to how many of the things that are in my head, as I flip through this, are on your list.
• 11:23
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, I'm very interested to hear what those influences are that come across, and I'll say that Probably…
• 11:32
  Jared Sarnie: speaking broadly before I get into the, the minutiae of my comics journey, I think the biggest visual influence on the book is…
• 11:42
  Jared Sarnie: The internet, and the way that the comics experience is mediated through
• 11:49
  Jared Sarnie: Social media, and just that kind of complete context collapse of seeing, like.
• 11:54
  Jared Sarnie: you know, a scanned page from the 70s, followed by your friend who's working on their first book, and is just posting, like, a half-done sketch, followed by…
• 12:04
  Jared Sarnie: you know, media from completely outside of the world of comics, all compressed onto a feed, and I think that kind of was…
• 12:13
  Tad Eggleston: the Instagram influence, I can see that, I like.
• 12:16
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 12:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm too old to have felt that reading it, but as soon as you say it, I can't unsee it.
• 12:24
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, I think, like, the…
• 12:26
  Jared Sarnie: You know, dominant visual language of our time is…
• 12:32
  Jared Sarnie: Like, this… this complete, like, digital maximalism that just compresses everything together and has this huge…
• 12:41
  Jared Sarnie: You know, visual cacophony of influences that we're assaulted with, and then that…
• 12:46
  Jared Sarnie: is very much reflected in… in the book. But I… I would say for my own, like, comic reading kind of journey.
• 12:56
  Jared Sarnie: The place where I started was, like, I think a really good place to start, where I started probably when I was, like, around…
• 13:04
  Jared Sarnie: 9-ish, reading the very first run of Amazing Spider-Man, and in the Marvel Essentials form, which is, like, those.
• 13:15
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I was about to say.
• 13:16
  Jared Sarnie: prints.
• 13:17
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, I picked up that, and that's, like, right at the start of, like, you know, mainstream Marvel, and it's in black and white, so it gives you kind of a crisp appreciation for the art, and
• 13:31
  Jared Sarnie: that just kind of… from there forward, I was, like, a Stan Lee fanatic, in Ditko, in Romita, in Make Mine Marvel.
• 13:40
  Jared Sarnie: That was definitely my… my jumping-on point. And a lot of that,
• 13:47
  Jared Sarnie: you know, I don't necessarily, like… like… canonize the…
• 13:57
  Jared Sarnie: Storytelling of those books, but the visuals are undeniably influential on… all comics, I think.
• 14:06
  Jared Sarnie: And yeah, and then from there, a lot of my…
• 14:11
  Jared Sarnie: comics reading into my adolescence was, like, reading, like, a lot of…
• 14:18
  Jared Sarnie: like, early 2000s stuff, where I was reading from the library, so it was all, like, a little bit outdated, so I was maybe, like, 10 years behind, what was… was coming out. So in, like, the 2010s, I was reading a lot of, like.
• 14:31
  Jared Sarnie: early Bendis, and I think that's definitely an influence on the, the lettering in this book, and the density, and the rhythm of the dialogue.
• 14:42
  Jared Sarnie: And then the other, I guess, like, jumping forward to, like, kind of what I'm into…
• 14:48
  Tad Eggleston: I only have a couple of what I like to call Bendis pages, too, which is the… the…
• 14:55
  Tad Eggleston: like, what, we've got? 20… I mean…
• 14:59
  Tad Eggleston: It's not quite a straight Bendis page, but… because in a straight Bendis page, or at least what I call the Bendis page, this, you know.
• 15:09
  Tad Eggleston: What.
• 15:10
  Tad Eggleston: 4 by… so 24 panel page would be 24 different heads, and maybe only 3 lines of dialogue, whereas you have more dialogue and less heads in your 24 panels, but it still is very reminiscent of all of the, like.
• 15:30
  Tad Eggleston: investigative pages and powers, where they bring everybody in from… from… savage dragon to… to…
• 15:39
  Jared Sarnie: Yes, yeah.
• 15:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, definitely.
• 15:46
  Jared Sarnie: Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupted, like, really made an impression on me as a kid. No, no, I'm fully vibing with what you're saying. That's…
• 15:53
  Tad Eggleston: Well, because, because…
• 15:54
  Jared Sarnie: And .
• 15:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the reason I wound up interrupting is because I had a finger close to that. Here, I'll show you what I'm looking at. I mean, you probably know, but I had a finger close to that for these two pages, but not quite. And as soon as you said it, I'm like, that's what… that's what I'm feeling.
• 16:15
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, definitely there's that influence there.
• 16:19
  Tad Eggleston: Is the Bendis Roundup, the usual suspects, you know… investigative page in Powers.
• 16:28
  Tad Eggleston: Okay. Back to you.
• 16:31
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, and then, I would say, in terms of, what I'm reading as an adult, it's kind of like…
• 16:37
  Jared Sarnie: I think, in terms of, like, trying to approach something with both,
• 16:42
  Jared Sarnie: A humor, but also not… necessarily flinching at…
• 16:49
  Jared Sarnie: ambiguity. One of my biggest influences and, like, probably, like, the writer in comics who I admire the most is, Adrian Tomina.
• 17:00
  Jared Sarnie: I could, like, read…
• 17:02
  Tad Eggleston: This one's cool.
• 17:03
  Jared Sarnie: Feeling it down over and over again. Yeah, and the design sensibility as well.
• 17:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 17:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you're.
• 17:09
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 17:09
  Tad Eggleston: title page screams, screams to Amina.
• 17:13
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, absolutely, and I'll scream tonight.
• 17:16
  Tad Eggleston: And I've been reading Tomina for longer than you've been alive.
• 17:20
  Jared Sarnie: Fire. Fire.
• 17:23
  Tad Eggleston: Hmm.
• 17:25
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, and I, like.
• 17:27
  Tad Eggleston: I know this, because… I've been reading Tomina for longer than either of my kids have been alive.
• 17:31
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, perfect. So yeah, you've got… you've got the numbers to prove it.
• 17:35
  Jared Sarnie: And then other artists of that ilk, obviously Klaus is, like, completely goaded.
• 17:44
  Jared Sarnie: And I find myself.
• 17:47
  Tad Eggleston: I can see some clouds.
• 17:49
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, very, very inspired by the variety of typography and the, the elements of,
• 17:57
  Jared Sarnie: pastiche, and it's like, you know, specifically with 8Ball, like, thinking of, what's it called? Ice Haven, like, the self-consciously comic book-y page, where, although the subject matter is approached with, like, a real…
• 18:16
  Jared Sarnie: adult literary sensibility. It's not embarrassed by the fact that it's a comic book, it leans in.
• 18:24
  Tad Eggleston: If this page on the left isn't inspired by a friend of mine, I'm gonna be sad.
• 18:30
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, who's your inspo?
• 18:32
  Tad Eggleston: You tell me.
• 18:35
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, so I've gotten a very obvious comparison on this one.
• 18:41
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, there's definitely other stuff going on. The obvious one is the one
• 18:47
  Tad Eggleston: That hits me first, but, like, obviously that there is more going on than that.
• 18:54
  Jared Sarnie: So, I would say that the thing people pull to is, I'm gonna, mispronounce their name, but, my favorite thing is Monsters Emile Ferris. Emil Ferris.
• 19:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 19:06
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, the… which… incredible. But the real source of inspiration for me was the very similar ballpoint drawings of Jim Rugg.
• 19:17
  Jared Sarnie: And gym rug, overall… It's very influential to me in terms of just…
• 19:24
  Tad Eggleston: I can't remember roughly.
• 19:26
  Jared Sarnie: Nihilistic.
• 19:26
  Tad Eggleston: Wait, wait. Ever doing the, the, the spiral notebook page, though.
• 19:32
  Jared Sarnie: They, they have a whole series of.
• 19:35
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 19:37
  Jared Sarnie: of a ballpoint pencil on spiral notebook pages that goes back. Okay.
• 19:41
  Jared Sarnie: Well, and it features…
• 19:42
  Tad Eggleston: Go to that.
• 19:43
  Jared Sarnie: their comics. It's like a little, motif of theirs. They got a great one of, like, a deer… I think it's just a standalone illustration. It's like a deer that is hunting with a rifle. Like, the deer is holding the rifle, anthropomorphized.
• 19:56
  Jared Sarnie: And yeah, in general, like.
• 20:00
  Jared Sarnie: you know, Jim Rugg is not the only artist to do this, but he kind of took the baton from Chip Kidd
• 20:08
  Jared Sarnie: With their obsession of taking the, the texture of the printed comic book page, and blowing up the halftone, and showing the paper texture, and just all that kind of obsession with the comic book as an object, and then reproducing that as a design element.
• 20:24
  Jared Sarnie: And then I think… Jim Rugg does a very similar thing in terms of…
• 20:29
  Jared Sarnie: playing with, having almost, like, kind of, like, behind-the-scenes type pages where they're, like, showing the, like, the faux letterhead, that they're drawing on the Bristol board, or, like, the,
• 20:45
  Jared Sarnie: the Spiral Notebook. In that type of,
• 20:49
  Jared Sarnie: yeah, that stylistic shifting is very, very inspirational to me. Just because, like, the medium of comics is so…
• 20:58
  Jared Sarnie: inherently… Limitless, that as much
• 21:02
  Jared Sarnie: I love someone like Tomino, who is very locked in on this really refined style, and I think that's deeply impressive. I do love that sense of, like.
• 21:13
  Jared Sarnie: exploration and surprise, especially as, like, a young artist where I'm trying to make
• 21:18
  Jared Sarnie: an impact that I want to kind of have this explosive… Stylistic exploration.
• 21:27
  Tad Eggleston: You a David Mack fan?
• 21:30
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, David Mack is definitely on… I don't want to spoil the specific content of this panel, but there's a very clear David Mack influence on the page that you're showing.
• 21:42
  Tad Eggleston: The triangles are what give it most away.
• 21:48
  Jared Sarnie: Absolutely, yeah. The triangles and the mixed media, I find, for the most part, like, part…
• 21:54
  Tad Eggleston: similar.
• 21:57
  Tad Eggleston: And I definitely see some Kayla E. You brought up Kayla E when we were trading.
• 22:01
  Jared Sarnie: A lot of art…
• 22:07
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
• 22:08
  Jared Sarnie: Yup, and Chris Ware, as well, as an influence on… Yeah, definitely some Chris LAE.
• 22:13
  Tad Eggleston: Is… In terms of, is.
• 22:15
  Jared Sarnie: Some of the more graphic design elements.
• 22:18
  Tad Eggleston: Is this blue-pink motif here a nod to Isterio's polyp?
• 22:26
  Jared Sarnie: You know…
• 22:27
  Tad Eggleston: the Chili book?
• 22:28
  Jared Sarnie: Not consciously. I've flipped through that book a number of times in…
• 22:33
  Tad Eggleston: Good.
• 22:33
  Jared Sarnie: Mazzuclei is obviously, like, insane, but I've never actually read it. I just, find myself…
• 22:40
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, very, very drawn to that color palette, and
• 22:47
  Jared Sarnie: And it has some significance within the boat.
• 22:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 22:53
  Jared Sarnie: We want to give away.
• 22:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, that's okay. So tell me, just like, one of the things I'm fascinated… like, I'm fascinated enough with how people craft comics when they have a set style, and they just have to figure out how to set up panels and whatnot. Talk to me about how you…
• 23:17
  Tad Eggleston: talk process with me. Like, like, how, like, like, did we go through…
• 23:25
  Tad Eggleston: You know, do you script first? What level of thumbnailing are you doing? Are you doing really loose pencils? How much of this is planned? How much of this is coming out as you go?
• 23:36
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it feels like there's…
• 23:40
  Tad Eggleston: Too much and all deliberate not to be pretty heavily planned.
• 23:48
  Tad Eggleston: But there have been plenty of books where I thought that of it, and I talked to the artist, and I'm like.
• 23:53
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I was just vibing.
• 23:56
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 23:57
  Jared Sarnie: I always have…
• 23:57
  Tad Eggleston: Ask.
• 24:00
  Jared Sarnie: I'll say that, in general, I do an extraordinary amount of
• 24:07
  Jared Sarnie: pre-writing, is what I'll call it, of writing that doesn't end up being reflected on the page, both in terms of, like.
• 24:15
  Jared Sarnie: you know, almost kind of essayistic writing about the subject matter that I'm touching on to kind of clarify my own thoughts to myself, and
• 24:23
  Jared Sarnie: also, like, in analyzing my own influences of, you know, a collection of work that I know is influencing me.
• 24:32
  Jared Sarnie: finding the connections of what resonates with me about that and honing in on that. So a lot of, like, the kind of more broader idea and thematic work is very much laid out before I start even writing a script.
• 24:50
  Jared Sarnie: For this, it was,
• 24:53
  Jared Sarnie: you know, I kind of see myself as a writer first. This is my very first comic, and prior to this, I've written, like, like, plays, and that's, like, an extremely writer-forward medium, where every single…
• 25:07
  Jared Sarnie: you know Entrance, exit is defined in the writing.
• 25:12
  Jared Sarnie: But with comics being such a visual medium, I, like, couldn't really constrain myself purely to a scripted beat-by-beat.
• 25:22
  Jared Sarnie: Like, full script for myself. It just seemed, like, counterintuitive and… abnormally…
• 25:29
  Jared Sarnie: restrictive. So with this, I kind of spent a long time working out how I felt about these characters, and these ideas, and just, like, the underlying concepts, and then went into an outline where, some small pieces of dialogue, but more so…
• 25:49
  Jared Sarnie: a beat-by-beat, page-by-page breakdown of everything that happens in the book, specifically, making sure certain threads are carried through. There's a lot of,
• 26:03
  Jared Sarnie: deliberate, narrative bookending in this that I try to do of something that's introduced early, comes back later.
• 26:11
  Jared Sarnie: In, like, small threads that might seem like kind of a cast-off detail, or given more significance as it goes on. But yeah, then the actual page-by-page process.
• 26:26
  Jared Sarnie: No, not really… Thumbnails too much, and then…
• 26:35
  Jared Sarnie: dialogue being the… the final, step in that process. I guess more, like, that's kind of the writing process of the book.
• 26:47
  Tad Eggleston: So what's your art background? Because, like…
• 26:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, like, the other thing that just… blows my mind, is… is…
• 26:57
  Tad Eggleston: We have enough different styles that, like…
• 27:03
  Tad Eggleston: you're clearly using different… and I'm… I'm not the artist, so I'm not going to be able to pull out everything, but they're… they're clearly…
• 27:10
  Tad Eggleston: colored pencil pages, or ballpoint pen pages. They're clearly pages that are pen and inked. They're clearly pages that…
• 27:20
  Tad Eggleston: look like they were likely done digitally. There are pages that look like they might have been painted.
• 27:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'm not so naive as to not know that it couldn't have all been done in Photoshop if that's your jam. Like, how did we construct?
• 27:39
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you know…
• 27:41
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 27:44
  Tad Eggleston: Cause again, it's just, like, I love the…
• 27:50
  Tad Eggleston: The superimposition of… of different styles, different feels.
• 27:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know… The ability to have characters
• 28:01
  Tad Eggleston: be in completely different styles, but so recognizable as themselves. Like, I was never confused as to who was talking.
• 28:11
  Jared Sarnie: That's great. That's good to hear.
• 28:15
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 28:16
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, so I would say every single…
• 28:21
  Jared Sarnie: page in this was, at some point, mediated digitally, and I do a lot of going back and forth between digital and physical, of, like.
• 28:32
  Jared Sarnie: Honestly, a lot of it is just influenced by, like, having a,
• 28:38
  Jared Sarnie: a slightly different, like, feel that you can achieve, on an iPad versus with a pencil. Right. And oftentimes, I think,
• 28:52
  Jared Sarnie: it's not necessarily intuitive what's digital and what's not. There's certain things in this book that are,
• 28:58
  Jared Sarnie: like, closer to, like, clean line, and are more drawn a lot more simply, that might imply that it was done digitally, but in reality was done pen and paper, because I feel like I have more control over it. And vice versa, like, that ballpoint pen
• 29:15
  Jared Sarnie: page, like.
• 29:17
  Jared Sarnie: I did use real ballpoint pens on that, but that is a digital collage of a lot of different elements, because…
• 29:24
  Jared Sarnie: I need that sense of control of being able to build
• 29:27
  Jared Sarnie: back and forth, so it was, like, a loose sketch that then I would photograph, and then draw digitally with fake ballpoint pens, and then back and forth, and then print it, and then go back in, and then adjust the colors. Like, that was many, many back-and-forth digital layers, and, like, the, the ultimate,
• 29:46
  Jared Sarnie: texture of, like, the page of, it's, like, the image that we're describing is a ballpoint pen drawing, on a lined piece of paper. Like, that wasn't drawn on a lined piece of paper, it's superimposed onto it.
• 30:00
  Jared Sarnie: So yeah, a lot of moving back and forth, replicating…
• 30:07
  Jared Sarnie: digital textures with… with fake textures, using photography, using stock photography as photo reference, occasionally… just place… Yep.
• 30:25
  Jared Sarnie: book directly…
• 30:32
  Jared Sarnie: Kind of a collage element.
• 30:36
  Jared Sarnie: How much about the story of this, that is, Jizz.
• 30:40
  Jared Sarnie: where, our character enters an elevator and walks into this room where they meet someone else. In, like, that room, I wanted to have a real sense of impact, so I just built a physical dollhouse out of
• 30:55
  Jared Sarnie: cardboard and paper, and… Oh, wow.
• 30:59
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, made a… a glitter… I don't know if you know,
• 31:05
  Jared Sarnie: Cricut, if you've ever used one of those.
• 31:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 31:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I have…
• 31:11
  Jared Sarnie: So there's…
• 31:11
  Tad Eggleston: I use one?
• 31:11
  Jared Sarnie: Let our viewers not home.
• 31:13
  Tad Eggleston: I'm around a lot of artists.
• 31:16
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, so it's like the little automatic paper cutter, so I drew out a pattern of this elaborate kind of,
• 31:23
  Jared Sarnie: again, don't even want to say what it is, but there's an elaborate floor pattern, and then I cut that out.
• 31:28
  Tad Eggleston: We'll call it a.
• 31:29
  Jared Sarnie: It's like…
• 31:29
  Tad Eggleston: Delic Carpet.
• 31:31
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 31:32
  Jared Sarnie: A psychedelic carpet, cut that out with, like, a textured glittery paper, And then…
• 31:40
  Jared Sarnie: ultimately, once I had this physical object that I had photographed a bunch, then,
• 31:46
  Jared Sarnie: actually physically burned it. And that burning of the pa- of the, the dollhouse is, like, probably my favorite page in the comic.
• 31:55
  Jared Sarnie: Where I just went to my dad's house, and he has a little, very poorly assembled fire pit, and we just filmed this thing slowly going off.
• 32:04
  Jared Sarnie: Cardboard. And then, just edited it all together into a kind of compelling image.
• 32:12
  Jared Sarnie: So yeah, a lot of that type of stuff, you know, typical, typical comic arson.
• 32:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, totally hunched over the drawing board for 7.
• 32:21
  Jared Sarnie: dealers.
• 32:21
  Tad Eggleston: A day, like most comic artists.
• 32:24
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, hunched over the fire pit, breathing in smoke.
• 32:29
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, I just have to ask, the letters page you wrote yourself, right?
• 32:38
  Tad Eggleston: Or, or, or, or did you actually…
• 32:41
  Jared Sarnie: Leather speech!
• 32:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 32:44
  Jared Sarnie: That was collected from my Patreon, which is no longer.
• 32:49
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 32:49
  Jared Sarnie: From earlier versions of the,
• 32:53
  Jared Sarnie: Right, and some of it, like, I… I sent to the P.O. box of our aforementioned Adrian Tomina.
• 33:00
  Jared Sarnie: And some of it was pieced together from…
• 33:03
  Jared Sarnie: Some of them were incendiary comments.
• 33:07
  Jared Sarnie: We're pieced together from,
• 33:10
  Jared Sarnie: I don't… I'll just say a social media platform. A lot of this I'm now… now white.
• 33:16
  Tad Eggleston: A dumpster fire, social media platform?
• 33:20
  Jared Sarnie: Sure, I don't think that narrows it down. Well…
• 33:24
  Tad Eggleston: It does a little bit. Yeah.
• 33:26
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 33:28
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, am I wrong about which dumpster fire?
• 33:33
  Jared Sarnie: I… I'm gonna be weirdly secretive to protect my digital friend.
• 33:42
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, that, that, that's actually kinda cool.
• 33:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, though it would have been equally cool if you'd written this set of letters yourself, and had the balls to write as Adrian Tomina.
• 33:57
  Jared Sarnie: I mean, who… yeah. You see, I always had that suspicion about Adrian Tomina's letter pages, where some of the comments were, like, very…
• 34:06
  Jared Sarnie: seemingly self-critical and incisive, and critical in a way that I don't think a comic reader who was physically buying a comic would necessarily
• 34:19
  Jared Sarnie: provide. So I've always wondered that, if those are fake or not.
• 34:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I don't know for his, but I know…
• 34:29
  Tad Eggleston: I know that, the letters pages in My Bad at Ahoy were absolutely written by Bryce Engman, and he had a blast doing it.
• 34:40
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, I think there's a long history that even in, like, you know, old.
• 34:45
  Tad Eggleston: But it was even more obvious. Like, I went back and forth, because, like, there are parts of this just that just…
• 34:52
  Tad Eggleston: Feels so satirical that…
• 34:57
  Tad Eggleston: it would be easy to… but on the flip side, with a Patreon, it's easier to say, hey, I want
• 35:03
  Tad Eggleston: I have no… I have no idea how you… how you ask to get… get comments or letters, you know, I mean…
• 35:11
  Tad Eggleston: No, you're just being secretive.
• 35:16
  Jared Sarnie: I'm making a lot of faces for the viewers at home, I'm making hilarious faces.
• 35:19
  Tad Eggleston: For the listeners at home, he's making crazy faces that nobody but me will ever see.
• 35:29
  Jared Sarnie: Yup.
• 35:31
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna sick McDonald's on you. That's all I'm gonna say.
• 35:35
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, that's… I'm hoping that doesn't, hoping fair use… is.
• 35:44
  Tad Eggleston: You'll be okay. Huh?
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: I do know one of their former VPs pretty well, though, so I mean, if I wanted to sick McDonald's.
• 35:52
  Jared Sarnie: Let me use Slack.
• 35:55
  Jared Sarnie: The inherent obscurity of small press comics protects me from a big F.
• 36:01
  Jared Sarnie: Hope for the rest of this interview.
• 36:04
  Jared Sarnie: goes well.
• 36:07
  Tad Eggleston: Oh… Yeah, I just, like… when does the book come out?
• 36:14
  Tad Eggleston: Or is it… is it… is it out-out?
• 36:17
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I imagine you're… you're taking it to cons and stuff, but is it…
• 36:21
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, so the book will be available in bookstores on… Yeah.
• 36:26
  Jared Sarnie: So it does… it will be out on May 26th, it'll be available in bookstores, but right now, it is available for pre-order.
• 36:35
  Jared Sarnie: on, asterismbooks.com, which is our distributor.
• 36:39
  Jared Sarnie: And if that link is hard to find, you can also go to my website, which will have a link directly, which is, jaredsarney.com, which is J-A-R-E-D-S-A-R-N-I-E dot com, or you can head to themachineIsBroken.com, and all of those will link you to the pre-order. But the actual book will exist, May 26th.
• 37:04
  Tad Eggleston: But not fieldmouse.press?
• 37:09
  Tad Eggleston: that's where I went first, and I'm not seeing…
• 37:11
  Jared Sarnie: Field… it should be on fieldmels.press, I'm just waiting for my publisher to put it up, yeah.
• 37:16
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 37:16
  Jared Sarnie: It… and I've been emailing my buddy Alex about it, all left out, but…
• 37:22
  Jared Sarnie: Right now it's on the asterism site, because he is a doctor, and he is a little busy sometimes.
• 37:31
  Tad Eggleston: Mr. Isn't… Yes.
• 37:33
  Jared Sarnie: It is, FieldMouse is running a crowdfunder campaign that is, like, the word crowdfunder, but without the E before the R, because it's a tech website. It's like, Kickstarter, but a little more artist-centric.
• 37:46
  Jared Sarnie: And it is available with the rest of the Field Mouse season of books, through there as well.
• 37:56
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, now, now, now I'm trying to find… That, cause…
• 38:02
  Tad Eggleston: Because that's the sort of thing that, A, I might plug and… and… and… B, I'll definitely link.
• 38:11
  Jared Sarnie: Nice, yeah, I'm happy to send you, any links, so that they can just click on it instead of hearing my, transcription.
• 38:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that… that is easier.
• 38:22
  Jared Sarnie: Yes.
• 38:23
  Tad Eggleston: and I sometimes… Sometimes actually put them places.
• 38:28
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, we'll see. Okay, so we've got all our bases covered, we've got my…
• 38:32
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, just being honest, you know, this is not my day job.
• 38:39
  Jared Sarnie: That's okay.
• 38:41
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, there's a conundrum press crowdfunder, too.
• 38:46
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, good for them.
• 38:55
  Tad Eggleston: He says as he's looking for the field mouse swan.
• 39:00
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, boo conundrum.
• 39:03
  Tad Eggleston: But it's actually right next to the conundrum, so, like…
• 39:07
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, yay, Conundra!
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: Of course, by the time this goes up, it will be too late for the field mouse, because it has 30 hours left.
• 39:15
  Jared Sarnie: Okay… Goodbye to Field Notch Press.
• 39:19
  Tad Eggleston: And it's…
• 39:20
  Jared Sarnie: Masterismbooks.com.
• 39:21
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it's not… not as close to its… It's… It's,
• 39:33
  Tad Eggleston: Funding is, I'd like it to be. Oh, yeah.
• 39:36
  Jared Sarnie: Well, let's give a lovely piece of clarification. One of the great benefits of Crowdfunder as compared to Kickstarter is that even though you set a goal, it is not all or nothing, so they set an astronomical goal, and then it's basically just a,
• 39:52
  Jared Sarnie: a pre-order mechanism. But all of this is irrelevant to our lovely listeners, because it's not even going to be available by the time.
• 39:58
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it depends. I could turn it around really fast.
• 40:01
  Tad Eggleston: Or, or, like… If not… if there's not a, like…
• 40:06
  Tad Eggleston: And do they allow extensions, too? Because, like, if there's not…
• 40:12
  Tad Eggleston: If you don't have to hit the goal, why end it?
• 40:17
  Jared Sarnie: True.
• 40:18
  Tad Eggleston: critique.
• 40:18
  Jared Sarnie: True.
• 40:19
  Tad Eggleston: clay.
• 40:21
  Jared Sarnie: But yeah, but fortunately…
• 40:22
  Tad Eggleston: have as I look at it.
• 40:24
  Jared Sarnie: That's great. The perpetual link, at astrandbooks.com will be available to all.
• 40:38
  Tad Eggleston: That's where I'm at right now, and I see poetry, fiction, memoirs… Art and visual… let's see…
• 40:49
  Tad Eggleston: Upcoming. Let's see… Is it in the upcoming?
• 40:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I could do, like, crazy shit and use the search bar, but that's no fun.
• 41:02
  Tad Eggleston: When they're… when they're a result.
• 41:05
  Jared Sarnie: Kidding!
• 41:06
  Jared Sarnie: I can send you a nice little direct link, if that would be of help.
• 41:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, sure, you can do that, too.
• 41:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, again, if you want to do, like, sensible things…
• 41:20
  Jared Sarnie: That is… is failing me right at the crucial link-sending time.
• 41:27
  Jared Sarnie: You're breaking up a little teensy bit with you.
• 41:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, see, my hope is always, and it seems.
• 41:35
  Jared Sarnie: There it is.
• 41:36
  Tad Eggleston: that, yeah, I'd beat you to it. $13.95 on the pre-order.
• 41:42
  Tad Eggleston: but my hope is always, and it seems to.
• 41:47
  Jared Sarnie: Okay, great.
• 41:48
  Tad Eggleston: because I record the crop, class.
• 41:51
  Jared Sarnie: There it is!
• 41:52
  Tad Eggleston: Even if we don't make it across to each other, We get recorded properly.
• 42:00
  Tad Eggleston: This is the advantage of crowd… crap.
• 42:02
  Jared Sarnie: Listeners…
• 42:05
  Tad Eggleston: Ehhh.
• 42:07
  Tad Eggleston: So… alright, I'm getting tired, so I'm gonna… I'm gonna take us into…
• 42:16
  Tad Eggleston: closing questions, and apologize for cutting us.
• 42:22
  Tad Eggleston: shorter than I sometimes do, just because…
• 42:25
  Tad Eggleston: End of school year, fatigue, I don't want.
• 42:27
  Jared Sarnie: That is A-okay.
• 42:29
  Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing.
• 42:31
  Tad Eggleston: But I have two closing questions.
• 42:33
  Jared Sarnie: Sleepy time.
• 42:35
  Jared Sarnie: All respects to sleep.
• 42:37
  Tad Eggleston: It is. The first one is always really kind of cool to ask of the younger…
• 42:43
  Tad Eggleston: creators, because it's awesome how quickly we get these.
• 42:50
  Tad Eggleston: I've been doing this podcast for, like, 4 years.
• 42:53
  Tad Eggleston: And… I feel like I've entered the Twilight Zone. The number of things that I get to do in my life now, that if you told me
• 43:01
  Tad Eggleston: 10 years ago, 20 years ago, even 5 years ago, that, oh, you're gonna go to a baseball game with Dennis Kitchen. Oh, you're gonna have dinner with Mark Russell. Oh, you're gonna… this, that, you're gonna talk to just some of the people I've talked to, you know, I would have gone, yeah, fuck you, that's… that's… that's crazy talk. Crazy talk.
• 43:21
  Tad Eggleston: And now it's just, like, part of my life that I get to do all these cool things. And I've discovered that it doesn't matter how…
• 43:30
  Tad Eggleston: how new or old or famous or not in comics you are, you have similar experiences. So, I've started collecting them. Tell me a surreal, pinch yourself, I can't believe that happened to me.
• 43:44
  Tad Eggleston: Experience that you've had because you're involved in comics.
• 43:54
  Jared Sarnie: That… that is a good question.
• 43:57
  Jared Sarnie: So I feel like I'm extraordinarily…
• 44:03
  Jared Sarnie: early in my comics journey. I have not yet put out a book. This is my very first book. This is, like, truly my very first book. There's no mini-comic that precedes this. There's no…
• 44:15
  Jared Sarnie: even really, like, art Instagram page, this is the very first thing. We're on the ground floor here. So for me, the real…
• 44:25
  Jared Sarnie: pinch-me moment is just… The very concept of getting published is still…
• 44:33
  Jared Sarnie: so incredibly thrilling to me. When I found out that this was getting published, I was working in a warehouse. In the warehouse of a publisher.
• 44:44
  Jared Sarnie: So, just like…
• 44:46
  Jared Sarnie: Day in and day out doing the physical labor of moving books around with… with a, you know.
• 44:55
  Jared Sarnie: a heavily degrading back in… in a dream. So…
• 45:02
  Jared Sarnie: I just submitted to Field Mouse with no connection to them, just having known, their work. They didn't know me, I had nothing to speak of in terms of a public profile, still really don't, excluding this podcast.
• 45:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yay!
• 45:21
  Jared Sarnie: of…
• 45:22
  Tad Eggleston: And you picked me out.
• 45:24
  Jared Sarnie: Just so that's.
• 45:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's a surreal experience. You chose me.
• 45:26
  Jared Sarnie: My life. Yeah. Yeah. Having a… Exactly. Exactly.
• 45:34
  Jared Sarnie: But yeah, having somebody take a chance on my work and engage with it, on its own artistic merit, specifically with, Rob Klop, who's the… one of the two guys at Field Mouse and helped me develop this book and was the editor through this process.
• 45:49
  Jared Sarnie: Like, that was very surreal. Because as a young artist, especially, you spend so much of your time
• 45:56
  Jared Sarnie: basically just sharing art among friends. I never went to an art school, but, like, even that, it's… everything is, in some way, buffered through social interaction, where you never really know, does this person actually like my work, or are they just saying it because
• 46:12
  Jared Sarnie: you know, we're in the same room, and it would be awkward to say anything else. So just being able to…
• 46:18
  Jared Sarnie: share my work with somebody who could not give a fuck about me, like, does not know a single thing about me, and still connected with it, was really exciting, and remains exciting. So not…
• 46:31
  Jared Sarnie: Not too interesting, not too cool, no crazy name drops in that.
• 46:35
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, it doesn't require crazy name drops.
• 46:40
  Tad Eggleston: Y-you'll get those, eventually.
• 46:43
  Jared Sarnie: If you stick around.
• 46:45
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 46:45
  Tad Eggleston: We also gotta remember, the crazy name drops in comics, like, the rest of the world is like, who?
• 46:54
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 46:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean.
• 46:55
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah.
• 46:56
  Tad Eggleston: Crazy name drop, crazy name drop. I mean, unless… I guess I've had two guests that have been able to drop Quentin Tarantino, and one guest that worked with Keanu Reeves. But other than them, they're not, like…
• 47:10
  Tad Eggleston: I'm crazy.
• 47:14
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah. Who was, who's your Keanu name drop guest?
• 47:19
  Tad Eggleston: Matt Kent… Matt Kent wrote a comic with Keanu.
• 47:24
  Tad Eggleston: Berserker.
• 47:24
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, yeah! Berserker, of course! That's it.
• 47:28
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 47:29
  Jared Sarnie: Good for them.
• 47:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So Matt was not my last guest, but my guest before that, so I recently had the… Okay. But it wasn't his surreal thing, it just came up.
• 47:42
  Jared Sarnie: Nice, yeah, that was… that was very strictly real, the interactions with Keanu.
• 47:49
  Tad Eggleston: So, my favorite question to ask is, tell me something you love.
• 47:57
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably comic, but we don't really have rules.
• 48:00
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you LOVE.
• 48:07
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you have experienced. And you really want more of them, too, so you've got more people to talk about it with.
• 48:17
  Jared Sarnie: Do you mean, like, a… so a comic or, like, a piece of media that… I want…
• 48:23
  Tad Eggleston: You know, Andrew Iden did his tomato garden.
• 48:27
  Tad Eggleston: Nate Powell went with Jonathan Hickman's X-Men.
• 48:33
  Tad Eggleston: Which, like, everybody else had people to talk about it with, but Nate Powell's in the indie comic scene, so, like, none of his friends were reading it. So, there aren't a lot of rules.
• 48:44
  Tad Eggleston: I do normally wind up getting comics or books or movies or music, but, like, I don't like…
• 48:53
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, I'm trying to think of a good one. Well, fortunately, I don't have any experiences that don't revolve around media, because all I do is… is… is read and watch stuff.
• 49:06
  Tad Eggleston: I guess…
• 49:07
  Jared Sarnie: I'm trying to think of something that is not that viewed that definitely… that… okay, something that, you know, this was well received, and I don't think is the most watched thing in the world, that absolutely blew me away, is the,
• 49:20
  Jared Sarnie: the Canadian film Red Robes.
• 49:24
  Jared Sarnie: Not to be confused with the comic of the same name.
• 49:27
  Jared Sarnie: It is… Kind of like a modern day…
• 49:33
  Jared Sarnie: Videodrome in some senses, although I can't really find a direct comparison for it. It's a psychological thriller that centers around a woman attending the trial.
• 49:48
  Tad Eggleston: There's an auto…
• 49:49
  Jared Sarnie: It becomes…
• 49:50
  Tad Eggleston: Obsessed with a high-profile murder trial.
• 49:56
  Jared Sarnie: Yes, yeah, and that…
• 49:58
  Tad Eggleston: IMDB description.
• 50:01
  Jared Sarnie: I think that… good, good description. That movie captures… The feelings of… alienation, and…
• 50:12
  Jared Sarnie: obsession and voyeurism and violence that are just inherent to the everyday person's usage of the internet. And I think a lot of filmmakers and artists in general
• 50:29
  Jared Sarnie: have a very outdated mode of talking about the internet, or even are afraid to address it. They retreat to period pieces, or they write in, you know.
• 50:43
  Jared Sarnie: Little subplots in their stories that make the phones not work because it's too inconvenient.
• 50:49
  Jared Sarnie: But that movie is completely unflinching, and I think captures something…
• 50:56
  Jared Sarnie: Really nasty, but really real about,
• 51:03
  Jared Sarnie: These little… little black squares in the back of our pocket.
• 51:06
  Jared Sarnie: So shoutout red rooms, trigger warning, everything for that one, though.
• 51:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 51:16
  Tad Eggleston: It does look interesting.
• 51:19
  Tad Eggleston: It is on AMC+, and a friend of mine has a TV show debuting
• 51:25
  Tad Eggleston: Friday on AMC, so I have my AMC+, so if I decide I want to watch it, I can.
• 51:31
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, dope! What's the… what's the AMC? Let's give them a plug. What's the AMC show?
• 51:34
  Tad Eggleston: Technically, it's the third season of the horror, but it's an adaptation of, Victor LaValle's, Devil in Silver.
• 51:46
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, the hard… I've heard great things about that show, I need to watch that.
• 51:50
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't watched the first two seasons, because I don't even know if I care.
• 51:55
  Tad Eggleston: But… but Christopher King…
• 51:57
  Jared Sarnie: Season 3!
• 51:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, Christopher Cantwell's a friend of mine.
• 52:02
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, sick.
• 52:03
  Tad Eggleston: book. The book Silver… er, The Devil in Silver by Victor Lavelle is fantastic.
• 52:09
  Tad Eggleston: Everything I've seen and heard, I mean…
• 52:13
  Tad Eggleston: I was getting updates during production.
• 52:16
  Tad Eggleston: I got a photograph of the outside of the set.
• 52:21
  Tad Eggleston: From the first day of shooting.
• 52:25
  Tad Eggleston: And that was long enough ago that I've been waiting for it for a long time, and it finally comes on Friday.
• 52:33
  Jared Sarnie: Sick. Oh, very exciting. Okay.
• 52:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so it is.
• 52:36
  Jared Sarnie: We can roll right into Red Rooms after that exciting.
• 52:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, or watch Red Rooms before that, because, like, I gotta wait till Friday still. One of the two.
• 52:44
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, perfect!
• 52:45
  Tad Eggleston: What else?
• 52:45
  Jared Sarnie: I have lots of success.
• 52:46
  Tad Eggleston: comics to read, so we'll see.
• 52:49
  Tad Eggleston: -Oh.
• 52:50
  Tad Eggleston: one of the IMDB… Users calls it the definitive satire of the digital age.
• 53:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, so that, that, that popped up.
• 53:02
  Tad Eggleston: As I was glancing at it. For Red Rooms. Definitive satire of the digital age.
• 53:09
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 53:10
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, second only to the machine is broken.
• 53:15
  Tad Eggleston: Is The Machinist Broken a satire?
• 53:19
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, that's higher.
• 53:21
  Tad Eggleston: I guess I could see a satire. I don't know quite how to… how to,
• 53:29
  Tad Eggleston: categorize the… I mean, it's definitely got satirical elements.
• 53:36
  Tad Eggleston: Bye.
• 53:37
  Jared Sarnie: Sorry, we broke up, but we talking about my little book, in terms of.
• 53:42
  Tad Eggleston: I'm talking about your little book. It definitely has satire.
• 53:44
  Jared Sarnie: Oh, cool. Oh, I've heard that.
• 53:45
  Tad Eggleston: I think… I don't know if I think it's full-on a satire.
• 53:50
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, I would not characterize it as a satire. I think, just… Any reflection of…
• 54:00
  Jared Sarnie: Modern life, though, is gonna come off a little bit satirical in parts.
• 54:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… we are… Living in the worst timeline.
• 54:14
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 54:17
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway, since we seem to be having more and more technical difficulties on who knows which end, I think maybe a little bit of each, I see clouds coming in, so, like, maybe we've got weather…
• 54:28
  Tad Eggleston: cracking stuff up here. Hopefully this is all going well to the recording. I don't actually listen, so if they're terrible, I trust, like, my mom or brother to tell me, and they don't generally, so…
• 54:41
  Tad Eggleston: So I just…
• 54:42
  Jared Sarnie: Shout out to the recording.
• 54:43
  Tad Eggleston: come out good. Hi, Mom!
• 54:45
  Jared Sarnie: Another…
• 54:46
  Tad Eggleston: Hi, Brad.
• 54:47
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, hiking.
• 54:47
  Tad Eggleston: John, those are our four.
• 54:48
  Jared Sarnie: Shout out your kids, shout out Britt, shout out John. Shout out Keanu.
• 54:54
  Jared Sarnie: No shout-out to Quentin Tarantino. Fuck Quentin Tarantino.
• 54:58
  Tad Eggleston: What! I like coins.
• 54:59
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah. Boo, go back to Israel, Gwen, you stink.
• 55:04
  Jared Sarnie: I… and on that note.
• 55:08
  Tad Eggleston: The machine is broken. I missed something with Quentin.
• 55:13
  Jared Sarnie: Yeah, he just, like… well, we don't have to get into that.
• 55:18
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, we won't get into that right now.
• 55:23
  Tad Eggleston: For 22 Panels, this has been Jared Sarney. The book is The Machine is Broken. It's available at.
• 55:33
  Jared Sarnie: Asterismbooks.com.
• 55:35
  Tad Eggleston: dot com.
• 55:36
  Tad Eggleston: And we will see you after the next page.