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Milestone - Hardware #25, Deathwish #1-4 · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Tad Eggleston: A…
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to the Milestone Book Club on 22 Panels, where today we start year 3 of the original Milestone universe, is what it said on the front cover of hardware number 25.
• 0:18
  Tad Eggleston: Hardware number 25, and then Death Wish 1 through 4. Was it 1 through 4 or 1 through 5? I forget. I just read it, but I don't….
• 0:27
  Marcus Anderson: I went through….
• 0:27
  Tad Eggleston: issues it was. It was 4, 1 through 4?
• 0:30
  Ted: Yeah, it's a four-issue miniseries, and it was…
• 0:34
  Ted: I mean, man, what a hell of a four-issue.
• 0:37
  Ted: Yeah, it was good, and I can….
• 0:38
  Tad Eggleston: I can only imagine how explosive it was at the time, unless it managed to fly under people's radars.
• 0:44
  Tad Eggleston: And the J.H. Williams art was outstanding.
• 0:47
  Marcus Anderson: It's hard, because I was in comics, and I was… we've spoken about this? I was in, college, and so I was away from comics, you know, it was probably the sparsest comics consumption I had since I've…
• 0:59
  Marcus Anderson: elementary school, you know what I mean? So I don't know what the temperature was, if I was just missing it, or, yeah, if it made a splash. But, you know, one thing I would say is that, like.
• 1:10
  Marcus Anderson: I like…
• 1:12
  Marcus Anderson: there's… this is almost gone, the idea of, like, a four-issue miniseries that's not specifically being made for the trade, you know what I mean? Like, we'll get, like, short mini-series, but, like, you got this, … I think I told you guys last time…
• 1:27
  Marcus Anderson: Or maybe I didn't, but I got the Wise Sun… I found the Wise Sun, issues, the four issues mini series, really cheap.
• 1:34
  Ted: eBay.
• 1:36
  Marcus Anderson: The whole chain.
• 1:36
  Ted: The Jose Anderson ones?
• 1:37
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, and that was great, too. Like, I really like what… you know, and you know, Marvel and some of the other publishers, Vertigo, would put out, like, four-issue miniseries, and again, it wasn't just, like.
• 1:48
  Marcus Anderson: here's a trade that we're doing single, in single issues that was, like, just meant to be a cool, tight little mini-series, and I don't know, I like… I like…
• 1:57
  Marcus Anderson: what a lot of creators did with that format, you know, and definitely in this case, too.
• 2:04
  Ted: Yeah, it's… I mean…
• 2:07
  Ted: Oof, yeah, sorry, I'm not even sure where to begin with this thing, because this is, I mean….
• 2:11
  Marcus Anderson: Well, I'm sure we talk about hardware, because we're going to be….
• 2:13
  Ted: I'm sorry, what's actually….
• 2:14
  Marcus Anderson: Death Wish.
• 2:15
  Ted: Let's start with the hardware.
• 2:18
  Ted: But yeah, no, this is a… this is a hell of a miniseries.
• 2:22
  Marcus Anderson: ….
• 2:23
  Ted: Because it's…
• 2:26
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, where do we even… where do we even start with this thing? Like, it's… it's….
• 2:29
  Marcus Anderson: Well, you know what? How about this?
• 2:31
  Marcus Anderson: This was a cool hardware exercise anniversary issue.
• 2:35
  Ted: Yeah, the hardware.
• 2:35
  Marcus Anderson: I feel like we can move on to Death Wish. Because, you know, we love hardware.
• 2:39
  Ted: Yeah, a lot of the hardware here was actually just kind of recapping hardware.
• 2:44
  Marcus Anderson: I will say this. Oh, go ahead, Ted.
• 2:46
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 2:46
  Ted: It's, I mean, it's a recap, but it's a celebration. It's a, it's a… Yeah.
• 2:50
  Ted: It's a fantastic…
• 2:52
  Ted: like, here's what this… here's what hardware is, here's what hardware has done for the past 2 years, here's how things are changing, etc, etc. Like, it's… it is a celebration of everything that hardware is and will be, and etc.
• 3:07
  Marcus Anderson: But it is significant, in the sense that.
• 3:10
  Marcus Anderson: Because, you know what's interesting? When we were on Book 2 of the Milestone Compendium, …
• 3:16
  Marcus Anderson: They dropped a bomb on us, basically, that, …
• 3:21
  Marcus Anderson: that Curtis was, you know, going, seemingly going back to work for Alva, and it got, like, right after that, it got interrupted by all the miniseries, by Crisis, not Crisis, Worlds Collide, and, you know… Yeah, Cris.
• 3:37
  Ted: Yeah.
• 3:37
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, and then even when they came back.
• 3:40
  Marcus Anderson: there was a… I remember there were some issues where they didn't really deal with the questions, because my thing is, like, when you drop that bomb that he's working with Elva, you're like, I…
• 3:49
  Marcus Anderson: I need answers now, you know? And again, that's what frustrates me about, …
• 3:54
  Marcus Anderson: you know, publishers, like, huge events, is that you're following the month-to-month, and you're, like, really looking for answers for something, and then all of a sudden, it just, like, gets shut off, like, you know, because of the event. But what I will say is, with this, anniversary issue.
• 4:10
  Marcus Anderson: The one thing it did that's really significant is, I feel like this one, more than anything.
• 4:15
  Marcus Anderson: kind of reckoned up with what's going on in Curtis' brain with, … and he makes a decision. Now, we don't know what that's gonna look like, but he definitely, like, you know, the issue starts with, …
• 4:27
  Marcus Anderson: to me, this is the most significant thing. The way it ends… begins and ends, is they kind of revisit the bird, the, you know, the… the….
• 4:37
  Ted: The bird story, yes.
• 4:38
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, about the bird that Curtis had as a kid that would crash into the window, trying to get free over and over, and the illusion of freedom, and the illusion of advancement, you know? And then Curtis, like, in the intro, and then definitely in the end, is like…
• 4:53
  Marcus Anderson: I… he basically reclaims his power, and says, like, no, I don't have to smash the window, I don't have to, you know, this, that, and the third. I essentially can make my own way out, you know what I mean? Yes. And you definitely see he's… he's reckoning with Alva, and that he has more… he has more, …
• 5:12
  Marcus Anderson: More agency than he has been giving himself.
• 5:17
  Ted: Yeah, this is a… a restatement of principles, in a way. This is not just, here's what's been happening to hardware, it's also.
• 5:26
  Ted: here's what he's gone through, here's the changes he has gone through as a character, and, like, why it's so significant for him, and here's… here's us restating what hardware is to the Milestone universe, which is kind of its core, like…
• 5:43
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, we.
• 5:43
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I mean, it was the first book.
• 5:45
  Ted: It was the first book, it was the mission statement, like, in a lot of ways. It's the milestone book.
• 5:50
  Ted: And I mean that in the most positive way, obviously, but, like, it's… it is the most milestone of all the books, and it's a fantastic book, and this is it saying, okay, we did the… we did the World's Collide stuff, we did the stuff with Arcana, we did some other nonsense, but, like, we're getting back to… we're getting back to first principles here.
• 6:06
  Ted: he's getting kidnapped by, like, Nick Fury, who, I had to look it up, this is his first appearance.
• 6:11
  Marcus Anderson: I do have to talk about that.
• 6:13
  Ted: Sanctioned. I was… I was confused at first, because I'm like, has this guy been, like, showing up this whole time? Who is he? And it's like.
• 6:18
  Marcus Anderson: No one's.
• 6:19
  Ted: It's the first to know, this is him, like….
• 6:21
  Marcus Anderson: And this is a good, like, 5 years before, you know, we got Sam Jackson, Nick Fury.
• 6:26
  Ted: As actual black entrepreneurs, yeah.
• 6:28
  Marcus Anderson: I… there has to be… even if… even if it's one of those things where, like, I don't know…
• 6:34
  Marcus Anderson: they had seen it at a certain point and forgotten about it. There's no way. That's too big of a coincidence.
• 6:39
  Ted: Eric Miller, noted Milestone fan. No, I'm kidding.
• 6:41
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, well, exactly. But I also noted Creator who I don't believe has a ton of principle, so….
• 6:49
  Ted: Also true! Let's be honest. No, I get you completely. It is a thing where it's… like, I… I am not… I would not be surprised either way. It's… I'll… yeah, Bill, you're right.
• 7:00
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 7:00
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 7:02
  Ted: But yeah, so this is, I mean, this is Sanction coming back, saying, coming to Curtis, kidnapping him, getting the drop on him, saying, hey, what, here's all the stuff you've been up to.
• 7:15
  Ted: And making him seem… I mean, I like the misdirection of it, where we get all these flashbacks of Sanction talking to all the various people in his life, you know, talking to Freaky, and talking to Baraki, and all these other characters, and, like, kind of interviewing them. And along the way, I'm like, how is he, like, getting to talk to these people?
• 7:31
  Marcus Anderson: It's access, right?
• 7:32
  Ted: Yeah, how… he…
• 7:34
  Ted: wait, the character… oh, no, sorry, the character… I was thinking of the character access, I'm like.
• 7:38
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, no, no, no, I just mean, how did he get access to all these people?
• 7:40
  Ted: Exactly. And then, of course, the… the…
• 7:43
  Ted: gimmick, not the gimmick, but, like, the point of it is that, oh, they're the ones who hired this guy to kind of set Curtis straight and figure out what the hell has he been doing? Like, you're working for Alva, what are you… what is this, man?
• 7:56
  Marcus Anderson: And they get that kind of….
• 7:58
  Ted: like, judgment walk where the jury comes in and looks at him and says, like, man, figure yourself out. And that was… God, that was so good. Yeah, no, it's…
• 8:08
  Ted: This was a… this was a restatement of principles for this… for this series, in a really good way. This is a… you know, it's a rebirth thing. He literally gets stripped down to his… to his shorts, and kind of all his flaws, and… and all his story exposed and made bare, and like, yeah, this is who he is.
• 8:23
  Ted: at the most basic level, what does he do next? And….
• 8:26
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 8:27
  Ted: I loved it. I thought it was great. I thought it was… I mean…
• 8:30
  Ted: Okay, for some reason, when I started reading this, I was really confused. I was confusing it with…
• 8:36
  Ted: what was the other… was it an image thing, where, like, issue 25 of all those image series was, like, set in the
• 8:44
  Ted: or, like, they released issue 25 first of, like, issues of Spawn or whatever, and then they, like, worked their way up to it. There was, like, a weird time travel thing with… does anyone know.
• 8:52
  Marcus Anderson: I can't remember that. I actually don't… I don't really remember. Maybe I just didn't read those issues.
• 8:56
  Ted: I might be going crazy. There was some….
• 8:59
  Marcus Anderson: No, I mean, it might have happened, I just didn't read those.
• 9:02
  Ted: I, for some reason, I was expecting issue 25 of Hardware to be kind of a…
• 9:07
  Ted: if not time travel, at least like a… I don't know, I thought there would be some sci-fi aspect to it, but no, it's literally just… Nick Fury comes in, says, hey, here's every single thing you've done wrong.
• 9:17
  Ted: Figure yourself out, man. And, like, that's… that's great, I love that. And then… and then every single one of Curtis' friends came in and said, hey, yeah, you… like, what are you doing here? What's… what's the… what nonsense are you pulling, man?
• 9:29
  Ted: And, yeah, it's…
• 9:31
  Ted: It's a… it's a nice way to do, like, an… a big anniversary… a big milestone, haha, a big milestone issue of, like…
• 9:40
  Ted: Yeah, it's a milestone, milestone, yeah. This is how much you've changed. This is what's, you know, what's happened in your life, and I like that a lot. It was a nice…
• 9:51
  Ted: It was a really nice way to do it, I liked it a lot.
• 9:53
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, me too. And yeah, the only other… the other significant thing for me is that, well, this was 100% Dwayne McDuffie writing, which I think.
• 10:03
  Ted: Yes.
• 10:03
  Marcus Anderson: in previous issues, it was, like, other people, recently, other people, or them and Dwayne McDuffie. Yeah. And also, it was cool that, you know, they jumped back and forth between, Dennis Cowan and Humberto Ramos, which is interesting, because
• 10:18
  Marcus Anderson: their styles are obviously very different, but it works. I didn't feel, like, pulled out of it like I do…
• 10:24
  Marcus Anderson: sometimes when they go back and forth between, artists in the same issue. So, it was cool. Oh, and the other thing that's really significant is the last lines of the issue…
• 10:37
  Marcus Anderson: where hardware says, first was about vengeance, now it's about justice. So that's, like, you know, like a real, real definitive thing, because he's kind of like, you know.
• 10:46
  Marcus Anderson: going back and forth, he was wrestling, before he went back to Alva, with being about more than just revenge, you know, and a vendetta. But now he's…
• 10:57
  Marcus Anderson: Sorry, I'm trusting my dog's doing… now he is, … he's really… yeah, he's making a solid decision that he wants to be about justice.
• 11:06
  Ted: And this also… this… I had come kind of forgotten about this, but I… I mentioned that one of the most recent issues of ICON we did has a sequence that I always remember… wait, was it Icon? Have we done this one yet? Where it's, it's the one… okay.
• 11:21
  Ted: It's kind of the big wrap-up where Icon announces he's leaving Earth, or have I just spoiled things for people?
• 11:27
  Marcus Anderson: I think we….
• 11:28
  Tad Eggleston: No, I think we did that already.
• 11:29
  Marcus Anderson: We did that one, we did do that, I'm pretty sure.
• 11:31
  Ted: Because there's a line that I always remember, because that's another one of these issues that I had when I was a kid. I had this random assortment of issues, and it had that line where Static gives his theory, which is also partly Hardware's theory, about how the Q-Juice worked, where he says it's like.
• 11:44
  Marcus Anderson: Hmm.
• 11:44
  Ted: this is a stuff that doesn't… this is, like, weird plasma that doesn't know what Planck's constant is, so it's constantly looking for, like, human…
• 11:52
  Ted: perception… like, you know, every observer changes it, and, like, people who breathe it in, you ask the universe a question, and it gives you the answer you expect to get. So, bang babies are people who got what they expected to get that night, most of whom expected to die.
• 12:06
  Ted: And then Icon says, well, what do you expect? He's like, I… what do you… what do you expect from the universe? And, Static says, I expect justice. And, like, that's.
• 12:14
  Marcus Anderson: Hmm.
• 12:14
  Ted: Right, I mean, that pairs so well with exactly what hardware is saying, that, yeah, it's not about vengeance, it's about justice. Like, that becomes the rallying cry, the defining moment of…
• 12:26
  Ted: of… hardware… I mean, it's of all the milestone characters, like, it's… it is about…
• 12:32
  Ted: what are they actually fighting for? What is the purpose of their… their superhero-ness.
• 12:40
  Ted: You know what I mean? But yeah.
• 12:43
  Ted: Yeah, no, this is a great, this is a great issue.
• 12:47
  Tad Eggleston: I enjoyed it.
• 12:48
  Ted: It's a lot of fun. It's a lot of fun, and it also, like I said, I mean, it…
• 12:52
  Ted: I don't even know if fun is the right word. It's just really, really solid as telling you
• 12:57
  Ted: It does… it feels like a jumping-on point, you know, like, first… great first issue to jump into, but it doesn't feel.
• 13:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, again, it's, it's, it's a recap, it's… Right. It's… … Like, decision point, and then…
• 13:16
  Tad Eggleston: Future statement of purpose.
• 13:18
  Ted: Yeah, but it doesn't ever feel like, hey kids, here's what I….
• 13:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:22
  Ted: your favorite character, Hardware is up to. Here's what his deal is, like, it's….
• 13:26
  Tad Eggleston: Though it is helpful in giving… giving you issue numbers for… Yes.
• 13:30
  Ted: I do appreciate that, and I was like, oh yeah, what was he doing? Like, when was he fighting….
• 13:34
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, so that's how it's very clearly recapped, when you're getting as seen in issue….
• 13:42
  Ted: Every other page.
• 13:45
  Ted: … Dynamic tween McDuffie!
• 13:49
  Tad Eggleston: But… but that's not a bad thing.
• 13:51
  Ted: No, yeah, I'm not complaining at all.
• 13:53
  Tad Eggleston: Particularly because, as Marcus was saying, … Hardware kinda, like…
• 14:02
  Tad Eggleston: went back to Alva… was forced back to Alva, but then we fell into events, and we just haven't…
• 14:09
  Tad Eggleston: We haven't explored that much.
• 14:11
  Ted: Yeah, we did have that great three-issue arc that just wrapped up with, …
• 14:16
  Ted: the kid, like, the kid to be.
• 14:18
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 14:19
  Ted: new… Student, etc, protege, and then that stuff, which was fun.
• 14:23
  Ted: Although I don't actually think it ever gets followed up on, which sucks, but… but it does tie… but that was very much a story about hardware working with Alva.
• 14:33
  Ted: Which is what I wanted to see from this partnership, is him actually having to figure out what he's going to do now that he's working with the guy who was his, you know, big nemesis. So yeah, this is saying, here's what we're doing from now on.
• 14:46
  Ted: him trying to play Alva at the same time he's gonna be working with Alva, apparently.
• 14:51
  Ted: Yeah, I'm… Yeah, no, this is a great updated mission statement.
• 14:57
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 14:58
  Ted: In a cool way, yeah.
• 14:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, and going back to that, I mean, I don't even know if you were with us when we did the first hardware arc.
• 15:06
  Ted: Starting with the bird and everything.
• 15:08
  Tad Eggleston: But, well, but, but, like, I remember being… struck by…
• 15:17
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't think I'd ever seen… Somebody who was… Supposed to be a superhero.
• 15:29
  Tad Eggleston: Portrayed as so angry and driven towards
• 15:35
  Tad Eggleston: vengeance before. I mean, even your Frank Castles, you know, that was something that you were supposed to know, but it wasn't like…
• 15:44
  Tad Eggleston: Shown in the same way.
• 15:47
  Ted: It also wasn't depicted as toxic in the same way, because I went back and re-read a lot of the early hardware issues, because I also was reading up on Death Wish to remember what happened with that, and I forgot that there's a sequence in, I don't even know, issue 3 or 4, where
• 16:00
  Ted: hardware, like, wakes up in the middle of the night, and he hallucinates talking to the pilot of the helicopter that he explodes in Issue 1. Right. Random nobody, you know, faceless guy just piloting a helicopter, and he has this, like, horrific dream where the guy's got, you know, he's missing an arm, and his face is all burnt up and stuff, and he's realizing, oh, this is the human cost of what I'm doing.
• 16:20
  Ted: And then….
• 16:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 16:21
  Ted: Just… just for the… just not for the hell of it, but, like, just to show you this is the cost of what he is doing.
• 16:28
  Ted: And it's….
• 16:29
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and we get that again here, where he can't sleep.
• 16:32
  Ted: Yeah, no, it's… oh, God. I mean, it makes me think of… the other example that I think of with stuff like that is there's that issue of the invisibles, where it's King Ma… it's like the entire issue is one backstory of one random faceless gas-mashed goon from, like, the first arc that got killed in a nothing fight that never has any further…
• 16:52
  Ted: relevance to the plot. Like, that's… that's one of my all-time favorite issues of comics, and this is doing the same thing, or, I mean, that specific issue is doing the same thing, where it's, yeah, here's the human cost of what you're doing, hardware. And to do that so early on, and then keep following up on that.
• 17:07
  Ted: Yeah, God, it's… oof.
• 17:10
  Ted: Jeez, man, I… milestone. Every now and then I realize, like, oh yeah, they really weren't doing it like nobody… they were… nobody else was doing it like them.
• 17:17
  Ted: Yeah.
• 17:18
  Tad Eggleston: I… yeah.
• 17:20
  Ted: Yeah. I know I'm just kind of restating the mission statement of our little podcast here, but it is, like, every now and then I just have to realize, like, oh yeah, hell, yeah, shit, they were… they were doing it.
• 17:31
  Tad Eggleston: Again, I, you know, in so many ways, these comics would fit in.
• 17:35
  Tad Eggleston: Better at image today.
• 17:39
  Ted: Yeah, they did it anywhere in 1994? Yeah.
• 17:46
  Marcus Anderson: It's… I got… yeah, go ahead, sorry to… I actually don't have anything to say, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just gonna say… I've said this a few times, I won't beat this drum too hard, but I do think that one of the things that I miss… I think that the books of the new…
• 18:00
  Marcus Anderson: Image return… image… milestone returns have been, have been really, really great.
• 18:07
  Marcus Anderson: I think the one advantage that these series had back then is that they just were allowed to run
• 18:14
  Marcus Anderson: You know what I mean? Like, continuously. And, this whole seasons thing… It's…
• 18:21
  Marcus Anderson: It's slightly… it's kind of a slap in the face, in the sense that it's like, you know, just trust, …
• 18:27
  Marcus Anderson: trust Milestone to be what it is. I know they do seasons for some books, But…
• 18:33
  Marcus Anderson: a lot of them just get to cook and, like, you know, kind of, like, keep going and build their momentum, and… yeah, I don't know. I really… that's my biggest criticism of what DC is doing with Milestone now, is that they're just not allowing it to run.
• 18:49
  Marcus Anderson: I do… I get seasons, with, say, Saga, or, like, an indie book, you know, where it's, like, all, like, one phenomenal…
• 18:59
  Marcus Anderson: Fiona Staples-type creator that's just, like, gotta draw it all, and, like, you know what I mean? She needs time to catch up, but…
• 19:06
  Marcus Anderson: there's ways that… man, they keep Batman running, like, every 2 weeks.
• 19:11
  Ted: Oh, yeah.
• 19:11
  Marcus Anderson: Like, come on, like, you could… you could….
• 19:13
  Ted: Chance to sleep.
• 19:14
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, exactly. So, I mean, I don't know. But that's the thing that you're not there.
• 19:19
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, I was agreeing, because also, like, the thing that people also compare this to is, you know, prestige format television versus old-school syndicated stuff.
• 19:28
  Ted: You know? Like, I like new Star Trek as much as I like older Star Trek, but there's a certain charm to stuff like Next Generation, where they had 26 episodes to fill, and they got a whole bunch of bad crap in there that nobody remembers.
• 19:39
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:40
  Ted: Yeah, this is yet another one, like, I'm trying to remember, I don't even remember, someone had a great…
• 19:45
  Ted: tweet once where they're talking about, like, the classic Star Trek episode is 40 minutes of people in a conference room talking about how the engine broke this week. And, like, yeah, that's a classic Star Trek episode right there. I like the slam-bang action stuff, I like the deeper philosophical discussions, but also, like, not every episode gotta be, you know, an Emmy contender, you know?
• 20:01
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 20:02
  Ted: Yeah, so it's a very similar thing, where it's like, you want to have these episodes that are a little bit…
• 20:08
  Ted: You, you….
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I wonder how much of it was also… …
• 20:16
  Tad Eggleston: That they were so different and had so few expectations.
• 20:21
  Ted: That's a fair point. I… I know that….
• 20:24
  Marcus Anderson: Those guys, they fought. Dwayne McDuffie fought. It's why hardware is what it is, because it's not like DC was, like…
• 20:32
  Marcus Anderson: Sure, Duane. Like, we trust… we trust you all implicitly, like, you know, so…
• 20:37
  Marcus Anderson: And when it fell apart, it really came down to them
• 20:42
  Marcus Anderson: it came down to, you know, to McDuffie, like, really standing and being like, no, you told us we were going to have this level of control, and now you're essentially…
• 20:54
  Marcus Anderson: Like, you know, going back on it over a cover, and he held his ground, and they never really recovered after that. It's not like they just, like, killed it right away, then and there, but they stopped supporting. DC the machine, like, pulled its support, and they basically let it wither, you know, or let it end.
• 21:13
  Marcus Anderson: So that's why it's kind of like the same company today that's, like, …
• 21:20
  Marcus Anderson: You know, it would be interesting if they were able to maybe go independent or something, and not have to worry about that. But anyway.
• 21:27
  Ted: Right? Yeah.
• 21:27
  Marcus Anderson: Dear.
• 21:28
  Ted: Yeah, it's, it's, it's…
• 21:31
  Ted: It is… I get what you're saying. It's a little disappointing to see… to not have the… the ability to do these very long-running, built-up over time. I mean, I… you know, I've met in the library… I've met in the library. I love the, you know, DC young adult books that they do.
• 21:48
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 21:49
  Ted: you know, random little volumes of stuff like Galaxy, or the…
• 21:53
  Ted: the various Teen Titan books, and those are great, but also, like, imagine if we had a fucking, you know, ongoing Galaxy series, or an ongoing Teen Titans as done by… I am blanking on her name, and I look like an idiot right now, but, like, imagine if we had that…
• 22:07
  Ted: Call me Garcia, Kami Garcia.
• 22:09
  Tad Eggleston: I met her at C2E2.
• 22:11
  Ted: Nice! Oh, hey, nice. Yeah, no, her stuff is fantastic, and I love those books, but, like, imagine if that was just an ongoing series, like….
• 22:20
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it kinda is, it's just an ongoing series of graphic novels.
• 22:23
  Ted: Yeah, but I mean, like, you know what I mean.
• 22:25
  Marcus Anderson: I know what you mean, though.
• 22:26
  Ted: Small units released regularly, as opposed to relatively far apart releases of big.
• 22:31
  Marcus Anderson: Right. Like, you know what it's like? You know what it's like, it's like, if you think about, to your point, …
• 22:38
  Marcus Anderson: Claremont X-Men. Like, what if, like, Claremont X-Men had, like, a season of Claremont X-Men, and it's like, you would get, like, 6 issues here, then disappear for, like, a year, and then maybe get another 6 issues a year and a half later? You know, there was so much…
• 22:54
  Marcus Anderson: that happened in… in those years, and… and, like, he really… and of course, Claremont is…
• 23:00
  Marcus Anderson: you know, legendary, so of course I'm, you know, I'm pulling out, like, a great example, but my point is he was able to, like, really build and just come up with this subtle nuance of, like, of the characters on their own, their own intersecting, like, you know, relationships with one another, ….
• 23:16
  Ted: Yeah.
• 23:17
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, and it's like, you… he was able to build that because he wasn't just, like, sporadically having 6 issues here and there that are gonna be collected in the trade, you know? So, I think there's something to be said for this type of milestone story being given room to breathe, is what I'm saying.
• 23:34
  Ted: It's… I'm… I only recently heard about… I don't know if this is even an established term or just, like, a thing somebody said once, but the idea of, like, the Levitt' paradigm, the Paul Levitt' paradigm of, like.
• 23:44
  Ted: you always have 3 or 4 plots going at a time. You got your A plot, C plot, A, B, and C plots, and just sort of, like, you kind of swap between whichever one is dominating the story in this particular issue, but it's just sort of like…
• 23:57
  Ted: just juggle them, man. Just try and kind of give equal… more or less equal weight to each one of these, and then…
• 24:02
  Ted: you know, make it work from there. Like, it's… it's…
• 24:05
  Ted: I… I like that as a… as a paradigm, because, yeah, it means you get to kind of shake things up every now and then, and, oh, if we want to do a whole issue about, yeah, the Masquerade and Jean… er, masquerade, …
• 24:20
  Ted: Gene….
• 24:21
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I know what you're talking about.
• 24:22
  Ted: Yeah.
• 24:22
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah. The guy, the Hellfire guy, right?
• 24:26
  Ted: And now I'm switching between, you know, Claremont and Levitt's, but you know what I mean. Yeah, like, if you wanted to do one issue about that thing instead, or if you want to follow up on the Shadowcat and Colossus stuff, or whatever, yeah, swap it around. You got all these issues to do, and nobody's really keeping track of who's got the most issues, so….
• 24:42
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 24:43
  Ted: Yeah, man. Yeah, it's… it's a, it's unfortunately kind of a dying model of comics, but it's, like.
• 24:51
  Ted: God, when it works, it's so on. It's… Man, I….
• 24:55
  Marcus Anderson: Beautiful.
• 24:56
  Ted: I love this era. I mean, I long for this era of comics to come back one of these days.
• 25:01
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 25:02
  Ted: at the event.
• 25:03
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think the key is not to have the error come back, but to realize that there's room for some books to be that way.
• 25:09
  Marcus Anderson: No, that's exactly… that's exactly it. Because it's like, comics are so many things. You know, they can be…
• 25:16
  Marcus Anderson: Things, and….
• 25:16
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, I mean, I think… I think that it's possible that we could see it, …
• 25:22
  Tad Eggleston: there are a couple of things that make me think that that's possible. First, we're seeing anthology books come back. We're seeing anthology books come back both in terms of the anthologies where all of the stories are self-contained, and in terms of anthologies that have
• 25:39
  Tad Eggleston: Running stories.
• 25:41
  Tad Eggleston: But the second thing, and I didn't realize this until recently, Fraction is planning his Batman run to have every issue be
• 25:51
  Tad Eggleston: Self… self-contained.
• 25:53
  Ted: Oh, yeah, and like, that was Paul Dini's thing, too, after Paul Dini took over… that was around the time of the Morrison run, I can't remember exactly when, but yeah.
• 26:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 26:00
  Ted: But yeah, I love that, that's great, I love that model.
• 26:04
  Marcus Anderson: … Yeah.
• 26:04
  Ted: And also, I mean, yeah, like, we, what was the other thing?
• 26:08
  Tad Eggleston: But, but also made it clear that it's not like they won't be a continuous story, it's just… Yeah, like, things matter.
• 26:16
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so very much like the Claremont.
• 26:18
  Tad Eggleston: Run, where you're supposed to be able to pick up any given issue, and enjoy it, and have a beginning, middle, and end.
• 26:27
  Tad Eggleston: but also… If you pick up 10 issues, there's a bigger thing.
• 26:34
  Ted: Yeah.
• 26:35
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I came into Claremont when, the… the X-Men were… people thought they were…
• 26:42
  Marcus Anderson: No, no, it was right before people thought they were dead, but it was, like, they were living in, like, an abandoned Alcatraz, and, like, there's all the crazy stuff with the Marauders, and it was right before the fall of the mutants, and….
• 26:55
  Ted: Australia stuff, I think, right?
• 26:57
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it was right before Australia, yeah.
• 26:58
  Ted: Oh, okay.
• 26:59
  Marcus Anderson: But my point is, it's kind of like…
• 27:01
  Marcus Anderson: there's so much stuff happening that's, like, all over the place and far-reaching, but I didn't feel lost. Like, I wasn't like, man, wait, who's this? What's… what are they about? I was able just to jump right in, even though there was so many things at play. And I jumped in, and I'm like, okay.
• 27:17
  Marcus Anderson: even though I didn't read these past issues, I get that, you know, this was going on with Wolverine, I get that Storm's on her own mission right now, she's lost her powers, and you know what I mean?
• 27:28
  Marcus Anderson: I knew who Forge was, even though I didn't have it all spelled out. So my point is, like, yeah, like, I like… I like that…
• 27:34
  Marcus Anderson: You know, you can do that in comics, and so….
• 27:37
  Ted: paradigm is very much… yeah, I mean, I'm also thinking of, like, the Grunewald run, where you had all these different threads about not just Captain America, but then about, … John Walker, U.S. Agent, and stuff like that. Yeah, no, it's…
• 27:48
  Ted: Oof, I love that particular paradigm. That's classic comics to me, and I kind of wish there were more ways to make that work these days. But yeah, I mean, you mentioned, like, even stuff like Fraction doing single issues, but also, you know, Zdarsky was doing the same thing with Batman 2. It was… it was arcs that had, you know.
• 28:06
  Ted: 5 or 6 issues, and then it all tied up, more or less, into its own thing, like, it's… Yeah, I'm… I'm… it's not as though these are impossible to do, it's just that…
• 28:15
  Ted: Fewer and fewer people seem to make that than… places seem to.
• 28:19
  Marcus Anderson: Well, it just seems like there's, especially with the big posters, there's editorial mandates to, like… you know, and I know we just were talking about DC, about fraction with DC, but, like, it just seems like the overall direction is…
• 28:31
  Marcus Anderson: Not necessarily this, you know?
• 28:34
  Ted: Yeah, the….
• 28:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's… like, it doesn't always work that way, but it's one of the reasons why I like it when one of the…
• 28:43
  Tad Eggleston: The better known, like.
• 28:47
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, when Fraction wants to do something, he normally gets to do it because he's gonna sell. He's as close to A-list as comics come.
• 28:55
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 28:56
  Tad Eggleston: ….
• 28:56
  Ted: Close to. I'm kidding.
• 28:59
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah.
• 28:59
  Tad Eggleston: I just don't know the….
• 29:00
  Ted: Right, no, I know.
• 29:01
  Tad Eggleston: Some comics.
• 29:01
  Ted: That's the way you phrased it, sorry.
• 29:03
  Tad Eggleston: Right. But when they decide to do something like this, if it works, it makes it that… just that little bit easier for somebody who isn't A-list to pitch something like it.
• 29:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, because they've, they've delivered proof of concept.
• 29:21
  Ted: Yeah.
• 29:21
  Ted: Yeah, I would love for that to become more the norm, but it's uphill battle.
• 29:25
  Marcus Anderson: Well, and that's a great point, because it's like, yeah, I love Matt Fraction, but he's…
• 29:30
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, he is, … I think his word goes a little bit farther than maybe some brilliant new Creative.
• 29:37
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it's… I don't think he's doing it as explicitly, but, like, Tom King's Wonder Woman hasn't been as clear-cut, broken into…
• 29:50
  Tad Eggleston: trade paperback.
• 29:51
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, the first arc was a five-issue arc, you know, but after that, it was like, oh, here's a one-shot story, now there's a three-issue story, now there's a….
• 30:01
  Ted: It fits nicely into the trade paperbacks, even if that wasn't, like, the explicit intent, always, yeah.
• 30:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right. So, I mean, the trade paperbacks wind up being slightly different lengths, and or they have two stories in them, or three stories in them, because he's… he's telling stories rather than, oh, all of my stories have to be 6 issues.
• 30:26
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 30:26
  Ted: Back to hardware.
• 30:28
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I was gonna say, yeah, and also, Yeah, time for Death Wish.
• 30:30
  Tad Eggleston: But I was about to say, back to, Death Wish, probably. Yeah.
• 30:35
  Marcus Anderson: We covered hardware. I did too, I mean… I think we all liked the issue, and I think it… I appreciated…
• 30:42
  Marcus Anderson: The look back, and… and also… but also the fact that it… it kind of, shed ground for development in a new direction.
• 30:50
  Ted: And also, I mean, I had forgotten where Deathwish was, like, you had to remind me last time we talked that, like, oh yeah, he'd already appeared, and I'm like, did he?
• 30:58
  Marcus Anderson: He did, yeah, yeah. In hardware, yeah.
• 31:00
  Ted: Yeah, he appeared in Harbor, and then, of course, he also showed up at this anniversary issue, whatever you want to call it.
• 31:04
  Marcus Anderson: Yay.
• 31:04
  Ted: I forgot that that was a thing, that he shows up because he's still in prison at this point, kind of doing his own thing. Well, doing his prison thing, but, like, you know, he's got his… his, …
• 31:16
  Ted: his whole backstory had already been given, I kind of forgot that part until he showed up again. I'm like, oh, yeah, that's what it was. And then, conveniently, they gave issue numbers in this, so I was like, oh yeah, hardware number 5, alright, let's look that up. I got the first few volumes, here we go. Yeah.
• 31:30
  Ted: Death Wish. So, Death Wish, like, the miniseries, is…
• 31:35
  Ted: It's gonna be interesting to talk about. We are probably not the right guys, necessarily. I… so… Yeah.
• 31:44
  Marcus Anderson: I think we have the empathy to discuss it.
• 31:46
  Ted: We do. And also know where we don't have the expertise. Yes, that's the thing of it, because this is a story about… I mean, this is…
• 31:54
  Ted: very prominently, very specifically, this is a trans story, a trans narrative by an author who was transgender, although I kind of tried to look it up. I don't know if she was out at the time, I don't….
• 32:07
  Tad Eggleston: All of them are… are listed… As her male name.
• 32:13
  Marcus Anderson: move.
• 32:14
  Ted: Zoe….
• 32:16
  Marcus Anderson: But that, you know, obviously we don't know where she was at. It has the exact same name, so it's not like, like, she….
• 32:22
  Tad Eggleston: Character, right, you know, I kept expecting the next issue, to be Maddie Blaustein.
• 32:29
  Ted: That's… and there's also a, like, an epilogue letter or something or other from, Maddie's partner, Eve,
• 32:38
  Ted: Who… and the drawing that accompanies them.
• 32:42
  Ted: certainly makes Maddie look like a woman, even though at the time she was, as far as I understand, still presenting as male, et cetera, et cetera. This, yeah, I mean, so, to start off real quick, this is a four-issue miniseries written by Maddie Blaustein, and co-written as.
• 32:57
  Marcus Anderson: For Adam, right?
• 32:58
  Ted: Well, yes, I mean.
• 33:00
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, Maddie, okay, sorry, sorry, sorry.
• 33:01
  Ted: No, no, no.
• 33:02
  Marcus Anderson: Using Martin and… sorry. The character, right. You said an M… you said an M name, so sorry, I was confusing the M name. Not to… not to dead name. Yeah. No, no, I understand.
• 33:11
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I never know how to handle it when, like….
• 33:15
  Marcus Anderson: rights?
• 33:15
  Ted: Former creator.
• 33:16
  Marcus Anderson: Well, I do know this standard, and I know this just from the young people in my life. The standard is even if, … because actually, I have a, …
• 33:25
  Marcus Anderson: a godson, you know, who I initially knew as a little girl. But, like, you know, even when we speak about him in past tense.
• 33:35
  Marcus Anderson: we use his current name, you know what I mean?
• 33:38
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and overall, that makes perfect sense to me, but I…
• 33:44
  Tad Eggleston: what I wonder about, just because, like, like…
• 33:48
  Tad Eggleston: N.D. Stevenson, new copies of… pneumona… Have the credit changed?
• 33:58
  Ted: Yeah. Or also, there's actually a character-based version of this, there's a middle grade novel which was originally titled
• 34:08
  Ted: George, which then was re-released under the name Melissa, because that's the name that the main character takes on at the end. And, like, that's got two different listings in the library. I actually looked this up a while back, because it was a question for me, of if you have
• 34:23
  Ted: an author or creator of any sort who, you know, went by a different identity, how do you reflect that in, like, the computer records? And there is a way to do it, in fact. I was proud of myself for looking this up. But, like, there's a way to do that under library standard cataloging, and I'm so proud that I know that.
• 34:39
  Marcus Anderson: What is it? I'm just curious.
• 34:40
  Ted: It's… it has to do with how they do what they call MARC records, which are machine-readable cataloging, it's how they're entered in the computer.
• 34:46
  Ted: It's… you include a link to, like, another identity that the person may have been listed under, and so forth. It's only come up, like, once or twice in my job, but I'm very proud that I know it.
• 34:59
  Ted: Anyway, but yeah, so this is, this is written by Maddie Blaustein and her partner, Eve Fizzani? Fizani, I assume? …
• 35:09
  Ted: At the time, under Maddie's dead name, and this is… and Maddie Blossier, for people who don't know, is… she was…
• 35:16
  Ted: quite a… multi-talented person. Like, she's famous for a whole bunch of different…
• 35:21
  Ted: interestingly connected things, so she had done some issues of static, I believe, or maybe went on to.
• 35:27
  Tad Eggleston: I think so.
• 35:28
  Ted: Had she gone on to do issues of static? I'm not actually sure.
• 35:33
  Marcus Anderson: I don't know, I don't remember seeing her name in static.
• 35:37
  Ted: I… I'm not sure either, but I looked.
• 35:39
  Marcus Anderson: I mean, like, yet, I mean… She was listening. Because they kind of transitioned from Robert Washington to, to Ivan Velez.
• 35:47
  Ted: Yeah.
• 35:47
  Marcus Anderson: For the most part.
• 35:49
  Ted: Yeah, I just, when I was looking her up on Wikipedia, that was one of the credits that she was listed on.
• 35:52
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 35:53
  Ted: She had written some static issues.
• 35:54
  Marcus Anderson: Maybe… there's probably a good chance she comes in after Ivan leaves, maybe.
• 35:58
  Ted: I wouldn't be surprised. He also specifically, like, created one of the characters who was more notable from the, animated series as well, the Rubberband Man.
• 36:06
  Marcus Anderson: Okay.
• 36:06
  Ted: one of the recurring characters from the TV series, yeah.
• 36:09
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, so Rubberman Batman has… And was a voice actor. Yeah.
• 36:13
  Ted: And yeah, so Mighty Boston was also a prominent voice actress. She is probably most notable as one of the…
• 36:20
  Ted: I don't think she was the first person to voice the character, but she was one of the first and one of the most prominent people to voice Meowth from Pokemon. And in several interviews, credited an episode of Pokemon where it was about Meowth, like.
• 36:36
  Ted: realizing he, you know, wanted to go and travel the world, and, like, wanted to change from just being a Pokemon to, like.
• 36:42
  Ted: to hang out with humans and stuff, that, she said, was part of how she sort of came to terms with her gender identity as well, which I think is extremely cool. …
• 36:51
  Ted: But, ….
• 36:52
  Marcus Anderson: I think that's interesting, because we're…
• 36:55
  Marcus Anderson: And I don't think any of us have the answer of exactly where she was at at this point, but my guess is, …
• 37:02
  Marcus Anderson: I mean, it's all in the writing, right? Like, the reckonings that a person goes through, and that it's not like a switch that specifically, neatly gets flipped one day. Like, maybe, like, obviously, in the story, as we're reading it, just to skip ahead a little bit, but…
• 37:20
  Marcus Anderson: We get a lot…
• 37:21
  Marcus Anderson: In, Marissa, formerly, Martin, like, we kind of have, like, the opening pages of Issue 1. We see Martin, Blaustein, who's a, detective and seemingly, like, the best detective on the force,
• 37:39
  Marcus Anderson: have a run-in with hardware. But then from then on, like, we only see Marissa, and there's a time jump forward, but, like, there's a lot of, scenes here, and there's some, like, really significant ones.
• 37:52
  Marcus Anderson: where, like, Marissa's having a dream, where she's kind of facing off against Martin, and, like, the takeaway of what she expresses is it's not, like, … well, she… there's… sorry, I'm jumping around, but there's also, like, the interaction she has with her, …
• 38:10
  Marcus Anderson: her boss, right? Yeah. Who….
• 38:12
  Ted: boss and her partner, who is a… Right. …as in her cop partner. Right.
• 38:17
  Marcus Anderson: But with her boss, it's interesting, because her boss is like…
• 38:21
  Marcus Anderson: more understanding, and this is the way that I'm sure us cis people can be really frustrating for trans people, because he's more understanding, and he's trying, right? Like, he tells the partner to be like.
• 38:34
  Marcus Anderson: she, you know, say Marissa, like, you know, et cetera, et cetera, but he also, at the same time, like, at a different point, expresses frustration, is like.
• 38:44
  Marcus Anderson: I miss Martin, which is a really messed up thing to say. Like, he doesn't mean it in a messed up way, but it is messed up. But she… she doesn't say it to him, and I think that gets to the complexities of being a marginalized person in the workplace, period. But, like, this specific…
• 39:01
  Marcus Anderson: intersection of marginalization that she's at, where she… is thinking…
• 39:06
  Marcus Anderson: that she, like, likes her boss and is really frustrated with him, and she doesn't correct him. She just says, me too, when he says that, even though it's not what she means. Because in her thoughts that she's having throughout this exchange, she's really expressing, like.
• 39:22
  Marcus Anderson: he doesn't get it. It's not like we were schizophrenic, or we were, like, multiple personalities. Like, Martin was essentially who I pretended to be before I figured it all out. Like, you know what I mean? Or before I… so it's just interesting that, … sorry, just looping back to…
• 39:38
  Marcus Anderson: to Maddie Blaustein, the writer, it really makes me think that
• 39:43
  Marcus Anderson: maybe part of why Maddie is credited under her old name is
• 39:48
  Marcus Anderson: she was somewhere in the… you know what I mean? Like, somewhere in the transition, and it hadn't worked at all.
• 39:54
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, as much as….
• 39:56
  Tad Eggleston: See, I….
• 39:57
  Ted: as much as I don't think it's ever explicitly been… I don't know that there is a timeline, I don't know when she came out, etc. I think it's pretty clear, because also.
• 40:07
  Ted: in the, in the book, in the, in, like, the letters page and stuff, her name is signed as Addie, which is….
• 40:14
  Marcus Anderson: Oh.
• 40:14
  Ted: shortening of her, of her… of her dead name, her birth name.
• 40:17
  Marcus Anderson: At the time, right? The issues that they're coming out, yeah.
• 40:19
  Ted: Yeah, but also then, of course, that's sort of a… a, you know, cutesy version of her….
• 40:25
  Marcus Anderson: eventual chosen name. So, like, there's a….
• 40:28
  Ted: Yeah, there's… there's….
• 40:30
  Marcus Anderson: So she probably knew, but maybe it wasn't, like… Open.
• 40:34
  Ted: Expressing it.
• 40:35
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, or even just, like, or maybe people around her knew, but just, like, in how she's credited, I don't know.
• 40:41
  Ted: Yeah. I mean, I have to assume also, like, her partner, Eve, who I also don't know much about, I haven't been able to find as much information on her, like, it's… it's unclear, kind of, where they both were in their…
• 40:55
  Ted: respective journeys and so forth, and it's… it's… yeah. I mean, the… the unfortunate sideline to all of this is that Maddie unfortunately passed away at, like.
• 41:03
  Marcus Anderson: Very young.
• 41:03
  Ted: age, like, in her early 40s, I think.
• 41:06
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't know that.
• 41:07
  Ted: That's… what was that?
• 41:09
  Ted: Did you say 48? Or….
• 41:11
  Tad Eggleston: 48.
• 41:12
  Ted: Yeah, ….
• 41:13
  Marcus Anderson: Was it, health reasons?
• 41:15
  Ted: It was, it was….
• 41:16
  Tad Eggleston: health.
• 41:16
  Ted: It was, like, an untreated stomach something, or….
• 41:18
  Tad Eggleston: virus, yeah.
• 41:19
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it was, like, really kind of a shitty way to go, but not even in, like, a….
• 41:23
  Ted: Yeah, it sucks. It sucks that she was such an interesting person who was kind of still just getting… I don't want to say just getting started, but, like, she obviously had so much more stuff that she was doing, and had so many interests, and, like.
• 41:35
  Ted: you know, she was not just, you know, doing voice acting and writing comics, but there was other… I believe she was doing some writing as well, I don't know. There's a lot of… there's so many interesting things that she was going to be and do, and it…
• 41:49
  Ted: Really fucking sucks that we don't get to…
• 41:52
  Ted: we're never gonna get to see those, so it's… yeah, I don't know, it's awful.
• 41:56
  Ted: But her experiences… I mean, she did leave us with a pretty fucking phenomenal body of work that exists right now, because, yeah, this comic, first off, fucking rules for a lot of reasons. I didn't really like it. I… I… it's a weird mashup of, you know, dirty, hairy parody, and also, like….
• 42:15
  Marcus Anderson: Which is kind of what Death Wish is, but….
• 42:17
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, yeah, Death Wish is himself a bit of a Dirty Harry parody, who's also sometimes played straight, who's also sometimes not so played straight.
• 42:26
  Ted: He's a… he's a mishmash, he's a real mishmash. But, you know, we've got… like, there's even the joke at some point where she refers to herself as Dirty Mary.
• 42:36
  Marcus Anderson: Right, right.
• 42:37
  Ted: like that. Like, it's very….
• 42:38
  Marcus Anderson: And she has the whole, like, this is a story of a woman who got pushed too far, or something, or something like that.
• 42:43
  Ted: Repeated lines that they keep using from those movies, yeah, no, it's… it's both tongue-in-cheek and also, like, deadly serious.
• 42:50
  Marcus Anderson: It's so smart, though. It's so smart because it's kind of like….
• 42:54
  Ted: It's hard.
• 42:54
  Marcus Anderson: Death Wish… like, when Death Wish was introduced, and I think we talked about this in hardware, but … when he was introduced, his story's so messed up and so…
• 43:05
  Marcus Anderson: just like… … I don't know, just so kind of, like, over the top in, like, the.
• 43:11
  Ted: Yes.
• 43:11
  Marcus Anderson: stuff that happened and how it happened in his backstory, that it's like, yeah, like, what are we gonna get? Get four issues just in his head? Like, that would be crazy. So, but this is so much more interesting. I'm sure that, like, a great writer could
• 43:27
  Marcus Anderson: do a Death Wish-centered story and make it really good, but I just find the… the idea of looking at it through Marissa's eyes, and the way that Death Wish is this kind of, like, specter, almost, that is, like….
• 43:44
  Ted: Yeah.
• 43:44
  Marcus Anderson: You know what I mean? Like, like, like, poking at… …
• 43:49
  Marcus Anderson: her… like, the part of her that's angry, and that just wants to, like, you know, handle things in a lethal manner, you know, and it's… yeah, it's just… it's so much more interesting, because Death Wish is really just on the periphery of the story, but in some ways, that makes Death Wish way…
• 44:08
  Marcus Anderson: cooler and more interesting of a character than when we just had Deathwish at the center, you know what I mean?
• 44:13
  Ted: Yeah.
• 44:14
  Marcus Anderson: Me.
• 44:14
  Ted: Yeah, I don't particularly care about seeing, like, more of Deathwish's story as a dude, but as a foil to Marissa, he's great.
• 44:22
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 44:23
  Ted: It's… so… so, okay, so to start with, we start off with a narrative about Martin Rahm, who is…
• 44:30
  Ted: You know, he's a cop who's been tracking the murders of, largely, prostitutes in…
• 44:38
  Ted: the poorer sections of Dakota, and then also specifically, like.
• 44:42
  Marcus Anderson: trend.
• 44:43
  Ted: Serial murderers of prostitutes, yeah.
• 44:45
  Marcus Anderson: Do that.
• 44:46
  Ted: … and comes across… I'm trying to remember the exact order of things. Does he come across… a woman….
• 44:53
  Marcus Anderson: Boots.
• 44:54
  Ted: What was that?
• 44:55
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, no, sorry, I was saying boots, but you're… no, go ahead, yeah.
• 44:58
  Ted: So, Boots is the person who is the serial killer, who's only known as Boots because he wears these extremely fancy bits of, you know, metal-toe-studded leather boots that are just completely, ludicrously high fashion. I fucking love them.
• 45:12
  Ted: They're so great. Like, I mean, that's the thing, is it's also… it's…
• 45:17
  Ted: Camp isn't the right word, but it's doing very specific types of 80s, over-the-top serial killer
• 45:26
  Ted: nonsense fun. Like, it's….
• 45:28
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 45:29
  Ted: I wouldn't say fun, that's not the right word.
• 45:30
  Marcus Anderson: No, I know what you mean, yeah.
• 45:32
  Ted: It's hitting a very specific vibe, with its tongue both in cheek and out of cheek. Like, it's…
• 45:38
  Ted: It's doing a lot, parentheses positive. It's doing a lot of really interesting, really fun mash-up bits that is…
• 45:48
  Ted: Hard to get across. But yeah, so Martin comes across, murders by this Boots, who's only known because he has these massive steel-toed boots that he kicks people to death with, but also, like, stages the corpses of these, of these trans prostitutes. So he also specifically kills only transgender prostitutes, transgender women prostitutes.
• 46:07
  Ted: And then….
• 46:09
  Marcus Anderson: To your point, real quick, I think, because I think you had started to ask this, the
• 46:14
  Marcus Anderson: women who he comes across, it's specifically, Dina, or Dini, who becomes,
• 46:22
  Marcus Anderson: you know, her partner, eventually, becomes Marissa's partner. Right, that's… Yeah, Dini survived, but, the other woman did not.
• 46:32
  Ted: Right, so Martin comes across this, you know, pair of murdered women, or this pair of women, one of whom is murdered, and the other whom is traumatized, that's Dini, and then we kind of jump 4… 4? 4 years forward. Yeah, four years, yeah. Almost four.
• 46:45
  Tad Eggleston: also, boots… Boots tells her.
• 46:48
  Marcus Anderson: shapes, yeah, oh.
• 46:50
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well… That she's one of them.
• 46:52
  Ted: No, that's later, that's Death Wish, I think. Death Wish does, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 46:56
  Tad Eggleston: I thought it was in that scene.
• 46:59
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, Boots does say something to somebody, but I know what you're talking about, though, but …
• 47:05
  Marcus Anderson: Well, Ted's right, though. In this opening scene, Deathwish is the one that says, you just haven't figured it out yet.
• 47:11
  Ted: Yes.
• 47:12
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, Death Wish was there, too?
• 47:14
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 47:15
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, Death Wish shows up after, ….
• 47:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think of death wishes in prison, but you're right.
• 47:22
  Marcus Anderson: But this is the very beginning, and then Death Wish is in prison.
• 47:25
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 47:26
  Marcus Anderson: Four years later, yeah.
• 47:27
  Ted: Yes, so Death Wish is in prison, Death… Death Wish was also suspected of killing the women, but is in fact innocent, I believe. And then…
• 47:36
  Ted: Yeah, so we get boots, we get now 4 years right. Later, Marissa Rahm is the, you know, detective who's still, you know, obsessed with catching boots, because of course her partner is, you know, the survivor of one of these massacres, and also, yeah, has transitioned, and that's a major part of it, that's a major thing for her.
• 47:54
  Ted: Obviously, that's a dumb thing to say. But it's a major part of her story that she's now, you know, quite literally a different person, and she's still having to deal with these incredibly sexist cops she works with.
• 48:06
  Ted: And is, you know, this sort of jaded, Chain-smoking, you know…
• 48:13
  Ted: burnout cop. It's… I mean, part of the fun is how much it plays into the very classic 80s cop… Yeah, the cop tropes of, like, you know, honey, you gotta let this case go, you're gonna burn out.
• 48:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it even makes spun up Botchco and….
• 48:27
  Ted: Yeah, oh. But it's also, I mean, it's so smart about it, and it's so fun with what it's doing, because then, you know, Boots has come back, Boots is starting to murder all these prostitutes again, and it's…
• 48:38
  Ted: He's not just murdering them, he's, like, arranging them into works of art.
• 48:41
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 48:42
  Ted: And he's like… it's… I mean, it's grotesque, but it's… it's…
• 48:46
  Ted: intelligently grotesque? You know, Maddie very clearly knows what she's doing when she's writing this, where he's… she's playing off of these… these works of serial killer thriller fiction.
• 48:59
  Ted: I mean, there's… one of the issues.
• 49:01
  Marcus Anderson: connect.
• 49:01
  Ted: called Silence of Dakota or something.
• 49:03
  Marcus Anderson: Right, and I just want to say, very briefly, I was struck by that, like, there's… there's one issue where…
• 49:10
  Marcus Anderson: So, Boots, like, also has these… these terrible henchmen who, just are, like, really homophobic and terrible, and… and it becomes increasingly clear that Boots is… a big part of Boots' issue is…
• 49:28
  Marcus Anderson: seeming like self-hatred, right? And, and lack of acceptance of who he is. Now, one running trope throughout film for a long time, especially in the aforementioned, Silence of the Lambs, is just the really…
• 49:44
  Marcus Anderson: dangerous, murderous, trans person. Like, you know what I mean? And, like, that pops up over and over. What is really fascinating here
• 49:53
  Marcus Anderson: I feel like this miniseries subverts that trope, and only in the sense that, like, yeah, sure, could you say Boots is that trope? Yes, you can, and Boots is. Boots is essentially, I don't know, some kind of, like, Buffalo-billed terrible killer guy, right? There's also….
• 50:09
  Ted: There's also that Michael Caine movie, the, ….
• 50:12
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah.
• 50:13
  Ted: I forget the name of it, but you know what I mean.
• 50:15
  Marcus Anderson: I think I know what you mean, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of movies, it's a lot, it pops up in a lot of media.
• 50:19
  Ted: The trans killer trope is such a….
• 50:22
  Marcus Anderson: And queer people have, like, talked about that forever, just, like, you know, psychotic queer characters, or queer-coded sometimes, they're not even queer, but….
• 50:31
  Ted: Yeah, but it goes… I mean, it goes all the way back to… to frickin' Hitchcock and Psycho, you know?
• 50:35
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. Oh, yeah!
• 50:36
  Ted: crossroads.
• 50:36
  Marcus Anderson: That's… that's probably the archetype, really.
• 50:39
  Ted: Yeah, there's a couple really good videos I've seen about, like, the history of the crazed trans killer.
• 50:45
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 50:45
  Ted: as a film archetype, it's… it's… it's got an unfortunately long history, but anyway, yeah.
• 50:51
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, but all I was gonna say is just… is, that, again, this is what I… we always talk about, about representation, is it's not that, like, a character from a certain group has to… has to be, like, perfect or flawless, but it's like, if you have multiple…
• 51:07
  Marcus Anderson: characters of a certain background, you know, then…
• 51:12
  Marcus Anderson: it's like, it takes the onus off of having to represent everybody, like, in this, like, flawless way, because you have multiple trans perspectives. You don't only see a trans perspective through Marissa.
• 51:24
  Marcus Anderson: Or….
• 51:26
  Ted: We see it through Dini as.
• 51:27
  Marcus Anderson: again.
• 51:27
  Ted: the sort of fallen woman prostitute who's forced to do this to make ends meet. No, you have so.
• 51:33
  Marcus Anderson: And….
• 51:33
  Ted: trans characters.
• 51:34
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, and Dini is, like, a realized character in herself. Like, she is a supporting character, but she is… she has agency, she's a, like, you know, like a fully realized character in herself, so… I'm just saying, like, that's the type of, like, storytelling that's going on here.
• 51:50
  Ted: Yeah, which is very much a milestone thing. It's always been that thing of having… yeah, when you have so many black characters, you don't have to worry that, like, each of them needs to be… or, like, one of them needs… the only one you have has to be the… the good representation. Yeah, it's the same…
• 52:05
  Ted: basic idea, I mean, parentheses, again, positive. Like, it's… it…
• 52:10
  Ted: Yeah, I'm also thinking of, like, …
• 52:13
  Ted: There was something else I was gonna say here about, I am completely blanking on what I was about to say. …
• 52:20
  Ted: perspectives, characters.
• 52:22
  Marcus Anderson: ….
• 52:23
  Ted: I don't know.
• 52:24
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, we were talking about maybe having multiple points of view.
• 52:27
  Ted: Multiple points of view, and then also, like, yeah, some of them getting to be, like, the asshole characters.
• 52:31
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 52:32
  Ted: asshole. Marissa is, like, a terrible person in a lot of ways.
• 52:35
  Marcus Anderson: She is, but you kinda… but you get her, too, you know what I mean?
• 52:40
  Ted: character, but she.
• 52:40
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 52:41
  Ted: She's an assh.
• 52:41
  Marcus Anderson: But she is an asshole, yeah.
• 52:43
  Ted: But, like, again, yeah, like you said, sympathetic, you understand her, you get why she's interesting. She has a really cool story, she has a really fascinating and deep story. Oh, I remember what I was gonna say, which is, I do find it, then, I mean, as much as I love Dini, then that makes the fact that she gets killed and….
• 52:59
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 53:00
  Ted: Kind of a not-great… not great in the sense that, like, it's sort of…
• 53:04
  Ted: Hacky? I don't know. I really just like how she gets killed in the story, because it's sort of out of nowhere.
• 53:09
  Marcus Anderson: It is, but I knew something was really wrong, though, when that awful partner lied. Because you know he's lying, because Marissa did not send him.
• 53:19
  Ted: Yeah. You know, like….
• 53:21
  Marcus Anderson: Which I guess, for listeners, we should say what happened.
• 53:24
  Ted: what happens is… I mean, to go through the plot more, so Marissa is tracking down Boots, she also then does the Silence of the Lambs consulting the killer thing, she speaks to Deathwish in prison, he then decides to break out at that point. I do love that it's just like, yeah, he could have broken it out.
• 53:41
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 53:42
  Ted: He just, you know, yeah, cracks the spin.
• 53:44
  Marcus Anderson: He's like, it's time now.
• 53:46
  Ted: Yeah, he just pulls the chains off the wall, and then also just, he does, like, beat the shit out of those cops, but specifically doesn't kill them.
• 53:53
  Marcus Anderson: True.
• 53:53
  Ted: Cause he's, you know, one of the good guys. But he, …
• 53:57
  Ted: So he then starts helping Marissa, more or less, to understand, you know, what Boots wants and all this stuff, and why he's… why Boots has this, you know, messed up obsession with killing trans women, specifically, and arranging them into art, and… yeah, it's… it's this extremely psychological…
• 54:14
  Ted: Silence of the Lambs post-Silence of the Lambs thing, where it's… it's so cleverly commenting on it, and, you know, eventually, of course, Marissa goes too far, and she has to… she has to turn in her badge, but she's gonna do this one last job, where she finally takes it down, gets the revenge she's always wanted, you know, it's… God, it's.
• 54:32
  Marcus Anderson: And, and she shaves her hair. Which is a, which is a classic, cinematic, transition into badassery.
• 54:40
  Ted: Exactly, the whole blast part where then she not only shaves, you see, like, does the full-on, like.
• 54:45
  Marcus Anderson: Liberty.
• 54:46
  Ted: PVC outfit.
• 54:47
  Marcus Anderson: Which I loved, I was here for it. This is where you can… you can put tropes in your story, but if you use it effectively and knowledgeably.
• 54:55
  Marcus Anderson: No.
• 54:56
  Ted: It's so good, because again, like you said, I mean, it's that thing where you have the queer villain who's, you know, the queer fucked up, like, villain, oh my god, it's a man dressed in women's clothing, that's so messed up. But in here, it's, no, this is her taking agency and deciding to beat the shit out of this dude and kill him and finally get revenge, and also she's doing that by going to
• 55:15
  Ted: The biggest, like.
• 55:17
  Ted: gender fuck drag party in this… of this… of Dakota, like, you know, hunting them through the… the rooms. God, it's so good. It's… it's so much fun, and it's…
• 55:29
  Ted: like, the one thing that's funny about it, and which I know then gets…
• 55:33
  Ted: flipped by the follow-up story in hardware is that it has virtually nothing to do with the rest of the Milestone universe, which isn't a bad thing. Like, I don't think it's… I mean, okay. Death Wish shows up, but Death Wish was already, himself, kind of an oddball…
• 55:48
  Ted: bit of… of milestone anyway, because he's just…
• 55:52
  Ted: he's kind of just, you know, the Punisher. … Which, yeah, ….
• 55:58
  Marcus Anderson: Which, in a lot of ways, he's maybe kind of a parody, too, because, like, Punisher comics play it straight, like, of course this guy's…
• 56:06
  Marcus Anderson: this guy makes sense, and what he's doing makes sense. He has to, because it's… you know what I mean? But, like….
• 56:11
  Ted: Yeah.
• 56:11
  Marcus Anderson: Death Wish is so… the story does not shy away from saying Death Wish is really messed up. They're not like… they're not like, his point of view is good, and he's necessary.
• 56:22
  Marcus Anderson: I'm like….
• 56:22
  Ted: Here's that crazy dude, also.
• 56:23
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 56:24
  Ted: Although, also, is it this storyline or the next one, where he literally just, like.
• 56:29
  Ted: Takes the keys and walks out of jail.
• 56:32
  Ted: I think it's the next.
• 56:32
  Marcus Anderson: It might be the next one, yeah, I don't think it happens in this one.
• 56:35
  Ted: Yeah, in the hardware storyline that follows this up, he then literally just, like.
• 56:40
  Marcus Anderson: I mean, I'm kind of spoiling it, but he literally just sees news about.
• 56:44
  Ted: That is, yeah, it is the hardware story, because he sees a news story about something that is, like, oh no, I have to take revenge for this, and he just, like, walks… he's in, like, the exercise yard, wearing the full Death Wish makeup. Right, right. Which is so….
• 56:57
  Marcus Anderson: Which in itself is hilarious to me, because that is a thing, depending on, like, the… sometimes you see it in, like, superhero cartoons, sometimes in comics, but it's like, it's like, why are you locking them up with their stuff?
• 57:09
  Ted: With the full cup.
• 57:10
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 57:11
  Ted: He just… he just gets off the weight bench, goes over to the guard, and is like… and just, I don't even think he asks him for the keys. The guard just, like, looks at him and gives him the keys, and he just walks out of the prison yard.
• 57:22
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, he grabs the gun from the girl, yeah.
• 57:25
  Ted: It's my time to shine, baby. It's so stupid, and I love it. But again, like, this is not a series that has a whole lot to do
• 57:34
  Ted: with the Milestone universe as a whole, yet, because the follow-up hardware store, if I'm remember… sorry, store, if I'm remembering correctly, does do a lot more with the weirder stuff of the Milestone universe in a really fun and wacky way, so I'm… I'm really looking forward to that, too.
• 57:51
  Marcus Anderson: Definitely. But I would say, like, just real quick, like.
• 57:54
  Ted: Oh, sure.
• 57:55
  Marcus Anderson: And I forget, I forget what we were talking about, but, it is the thing where…
• 58:00
  Marcus Anderson: I… I like… to me, this is worldbuilding, even in the way that it feels different and separate from what we've seen in the Milestone universe, because it's the way we're, like, in, like, a real-life city that you might know really well.
• 58:12
  Marcus Anderson: one day you, like, go to a neighborhood, you're like, oh, I never turned down this block before, you know what I mean? And then you're like, oh, there's this whole other side to this town, you know? And I feel like… and of course, like, Dakota would have…
• 58:24
  Marcus Anderson: Like, you know, like, where would the queer people of Dakota hang out, or, you know, stuff like that. So, I think it just, it kind of fleshes out the world.
• 58:32
  Marcus Anderson: It does, it does.
• 58:33
  Ted: It's not that it ever… it's not that it doesn't fit, it is just, like…
• 58:36
  Ted: suddenly, you know, we don't have static, and we don't have hardware.
• 58:39
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 58:40
  Ted: characters around. And it's… it's… That makes it extra fun for when they do show up, the follow-up stuff.
• 58:46
  Marcus Anderson: Dude.
• 58:47
  Ted: But, … let's see, where was I going with any of this? … I…
• 58:52
  Ted: … oh, so, yeah, it ends with Marissa does get revenge on Boots, and she ultimately… I think she just straight up kills him, right? She doesn't, like.
• 59:00
  Marcus Anderson: No, no, she gives him the death wish, choice.
• 59:02
  Ted: Yeah, I forgot.
• 59:04
  Marcus Anderson: He tells him that, like, she hands him the revolver, and says, you can shoot me, or you can shoot yourself, which is interesting in itself, right? Because…
• 59:12
  Marcus Anderson: Boots does have the agency to… I mean, usually when Death Witch tells people that, he's, like, basically saying, like.
• 59:19
  Marcus Anderson: But if you try to shoot me, I'll just take the gun back and kill you myself. Like, you know what I mean? It's like the intimidation, but you feel like she means it too, you know? So, in that way, she goes full Death Wish, you know, and she also loses Marissa in the, not Marissa, Dini in the process.
• 59:36
  Ted: Yeah, which is, I mean….
• 59:39
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, we've.
• 59:39
  Ted: why they kill Dini. I get that it's a narrative trope, I get that there's sort of a…
• 59:44
  Ted: a reason for it. I still… the way they do it….
• 59:48
  Tad Eggleston: Is there… I kind of felt like she was fridged.
• 59:51
  Ted: she was kind of fridged. I didn't… I really didn't….
• 59:55
  Marcus Anderson: How do we….
• 59:56
  Ted: I'm like….
• 59:57
  Marcus Anderson: Dude.
• 59:57
  Ted: I didn't like the way she got killed. I didn't like that it was… I mean, the partner who shows up, I thought was gonna be a completely different character type. I thought he was going to be, you know, the asshole partner who, you know, the most he gets at the end is he, you know, gets kicked in the balls and everybody has a good laugh while Marissa.
• 1:00:13
  Ted: he'd make out on the sunset or whatever. Like, I thought he was gonna be sort of the funny, you know, the guy that the bad shit happens to, because he don't.
• 1:00:20
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 1:00:20
  Ted: bad about it, but no, he's just also secretly always hated Marissa, like.
• 1:00:25
  Marcus Anderson: Well, yeah, can I… can I posit….
• 1:00:28
  Ted: Yes.
• 1:00:29
  Marcus Anderson: This is how I interpreted it. Like both of you, I don't…
• 1:00:33
  Marcus Anderson: like that Dini died. I'm not like, you know, what's the big deal? I agree, like, I wish…
• 1:00:39
  Marcus Anderson: in whatever… you know, like, I… would I rather that she didn't? Yeah. But this is… I can only… I can only make an educated guess as to what, you know, Eve and, Maddie
• 1:00:51
  Marcus Anderson: Were, you know, like, like, what narrative reason, they had behind this.
• 1:00:57
  Marcus Anderson: what I think…
• 1:00:59
  Marcus Anderson: is… alright, like, so you're interested… we talked about, like, the… and, you know, we haven't gotten to all the other cops. Needless to say, it's 1990-something, it's a bunch of, like, testosterone-driven, like, shithead cops, and so… there is… this is not the place for, Marissa to go for understanding and compassion, right? They're… they're… they're horrific to her.
• 1:01:22
  Marcus Anderson: … And they're really bad. Now… This partner guy
• 1:01:29
  Marcus Anderson: I look at it as… and you could still say it's fridging, I suppose, but, like, the part… I look at what happens and, like, the turn he takes as, maybe a thesis statement on the fact that, oh, that shitty guy that's just telling jokes, or, like, you know, like, just messing around, like, it can be the most dangerous one. And you could take that, like, as far as, like.
• 1:01:54
  Marcus Anderson: transphobia, homophobia, racism, all of the above, like, you know what I mean? Like, when frickin', who's the South Carolina asshole, …
• 1:02:06
  Marcus Anderson: Dylann Roof, like, shot up the church.
• 1:02:08
  Ted: Jesus.
• 1:02:08
  Marcus Anderson: You know, like, a big part of his backstory with those other guys that were like, oh, he was just, you know, I don't know, he was saying racist stuff, but he was just joking around, like, you know what I mean? And, like, you see where, like, bigotry is bigotry, you know, like, and it can be very dangerous. So, to me, I almost feel like…
• 1:02:29
  Marcus Anderson: what happened was, like, a sad commentary on a type of shitty dude. Even the, other cops at the force, who seemingly were, like, more aggressive and hostile, you know what I mean? Like, they, …
• 1:02:46
  Marcus Anderson: you didn't necessarily see them take it to this point, but it's this guy who seems, like, kind of like an asshole goofball, you know? So anyway, yeah, I agree, though.
• 1:02:54
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I guess… I guess I… I guess I buy the argument?
• 1:03:01
  Tad Eggleston: But then I think…
• 1:03:03
  Tad Eggleston: that by doing it, like, literally in the final pages, and with the only resolution being that she's in Paris alone.
• 1:03:13
  Tad Eggleston: … He, like, dropped the ball on actually driving that message home.
• 1:03:19
  Marcus Anderson: That's a good point.
• 1:03:19
  Ted: I… it's… it's… Yeah, I….
• 1:03:24
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, because it's like, I agree with that, because it's kind of like, I'm looking at the page.
• 1:03:29
  Marcus Anderson: And it's really just a handful of panels that really address it.
• 1:03:34
  Ted: Oh.
• 1:03:35
  Ted: There's probably some panel count issues there, too, then, if it's that WIC, and it happens that…
• 1:03:39
  Ted: Sort of unspectacular, or not unspectacular.
• 1:03:42
  Marcus Anderson: Like, it's not allowed… it's a powerful page, but it's very quick, and…
• 1:03:50
  Marcus Anderson: And you see that, like, …
• 1:03:53
  Marcus Anderson: similar to when Dini… and I guess in some ways, is it, like, bookending?
• 1:03:59
  Marcus Anderson: how it started, because at the beginning, Dini, like, you know, Marissa states that, like, Dini was a fighter, like, she was a scrapper, and that she survived, whereas, you know, her other friend didn't, and she fought off Boots.
• 1:04:14
  Marcus Anderson: And in this one, it's like Lieutenant Thorne, Kevin Scott Thorne, one of Dakota's finest, …
• 1:04:21
  Marcus Anderson: And, you know, Marissa mentions that Dini, was pretty scrappy and left him with a permanent scar, but then…
• 1:04:29
  Marcus Anderson: you know, Dini's dead, so it's kind of like….
• 1:04:32
  Ted: Giving it, ….
• 1:04:33
  Marcus Anderson: And it sounds… actually, now that… alright, you guys are right.
• 1:04:36
  Ted: Listen.
• 1:04:37
  Marcus Anderson: There's some passive voice going on here, too.
• 1:04:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I can definitely….
• 1:04:41
  Marcus Anderson: They don't actually say what he did. It's all there, it's implied, because you see him being taken away.
• 1:04:48
  Marcus Anderson: And it says when Dakota's finest, blah blah blah, but, like, there…
• 1:04:53
  Marcus Anderson: You know, it doesn't even say, like, he….
• 1:04:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:04:56
  Marcus Anderson: It says, my baby.
• 1:04:57
  Marcus Anderson: lucky. Like, that's kind of….
• 1:04:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I can buy that there is a way that it could have been done that could have been powerful and valuable and meaningful. I just… I don't think…
• 1:05:11
  Tad Eggleston: Don't think they accomplished that.
• 1:05:13
  Ted: it, it did.
• 1:05:13
  Marcus Anderson: Right, or she could have survived, or… because you could have still… you could have still had the same commentary.
• 1:05:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, that was one of the things… Right, that was one of the things I was thinking, is, like, there are two movies.
• 1:05:27
  Tad Eggleston: that I always think of when I think of, like, Oscar movies aren't allowed to have happy endings. One of them didn't even wind up getting nominated, right? And both of them, I think I'd love.
• 1:05:42
  Tad Eggleston: if you just allowed them to have happy endings, and that's Million Dollar Baby and Pay It Forward. And Million Dollar Baby, I've literally never managed to watch again.
• 1:05:53
  Tad Eggleston: Because if it had just been the female Rocky, sure, wouldn't have gotten all the plaudits, but it would have been really awesome.
• 1:06:01
  Tad Eggleston: But no, you gotta have a freak accident and turn it into this discussion of whether or not it's worth living if you've lost all of… whatever.
• 1:06:12
  Marcus Anderson: And then, like, with Pay It Forward, like, the number of times I've been sucked in because it was on TV, and Haley Joel Osment is cute.
• 1:06:22
  Tad Eggleston: And… and it was before Kevin Spacey was… was… was toxic, and… and….
• 1:06:29
  Ted: I forgot who's in that.
• 1:06:31
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I haven't been sucked in in a while. I haven't, you know, but, like, and it's a feel-good movie until they kill him at the end for no apparent reason.
• 1:06:42
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. Well, it's funny you mention that, because you started this by saying Oscar movies, and I meant to ask you, do you mean Oscar TM? As in, like, the movies they make intentionally, like, to… shooting for the Oscar, like… Yeah.
• 1:06:56
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah!
• 1:06:57
  Marcus Anderson: Mmm.
• 1:06:58
  Tad Eggleston: I swear to God, I think that he gets killed at the end of it because they think that that ironic twist is what the award voters want.
• 1:07:06
  Ted: There's a, there's a bit of social media that I've seen, that I saw years ago, a tweet of some sort, that has kind of stuck with me about…
• 1:07:14
  Ted: you know, I believe it was specifically a queer person talking about, like, the urge to self-destruct, the urge to, you know, commit suicide, or whatever, is, you know, has something that's always stuck with me until I realized that's awfully convenient for the people who are trying to destroy me anyway.
• 1:07:29
  Marcus Anderson: And, like, that's something that's kind of applicable here, where it's like… Yeah.
• 1:07:33
  Ted: It's awfully neat to make a little tragic… to have a real, you know, twist of the knife tragedy at the very end, where she loses the one woman she was hoping to keep the whole life, that she, you know, loses her in this sort of freak thing, and like, yeah, from an abstract point of view, yes. But also, like, wouldn't it have been even better if she just, like, fucking shived that dude, and that's how they ended? Like, it's a happy ending?
• 1:07:52
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. Excite's the one person who's.
• 1:07:54
  Ted: And can't, like, you know, Who cares?
• 1:07:57
  Ted: speak anymore about her work, but, like, it… I feel like that would have been a better….
• 1:08:01
  Marcus Anderson: I feel like you guys have convinced me. I feel like that's the one… as much as I love this mid-series, that's, like, the one flaw for me where I would have….
• 1:08:08
  Ted: It's….
• 1:08:08
  Marcus Anderson: Rather, they had done just what you just described.
• 1:08:11
  Ted: Yeah. It's the one fly in the ointment for me, is that it would have been… it's…
• 1:08:16
  Ted: Oof, man. Yeah, it would have been… the moment of survival would have been that much more powerful.
• 1:08:23
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I would love to hear just an author talk from, you know, about…
• 1:08:28
  Marcus Anderson: what… what they were thinking, like, you know what I mean, when they wrote this, like… Yeah.
• 1:08:32
  Ted: I don't think it's collected in the trade paper… I don't think it's… is it collected in the compendium?
• 1:08:36
  Marcus Anderson: Well, there's definitely no letters here, are there?
• 1:08:38
  Ted: Do they have the.
• 1:08:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no letters.
• 1:08:40
  Marcus Anderson: Oh.
• 1:08:41
  Ted: No letters, okay. Because I looked at some actual scans of these issues that included the letters pages, and there's, like, final… there's some author notes from…
• 1:08:49
  Ted: Eve and from Maddie, …
• 1:08:53
  Ted: in the four issues, and also some letters as well, and some of those letters are pretty interesting, too. And they do… I mean, it's….
• 1:09:01
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I'd like to read those, yeah.
• 1:09:03
  Ted: Yeah, it's… no, it's worth reading. I mean, it's… it's… it's…
• 1:09:09
  Ted: It's an interesting work of its time. It is ahead of its time, absolutely. There are stuff I wish it could be… it could have been better at, but, you know, that's…
• 1:09:18
  Ted: You were….
• 1:09:19
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I think….
• 1:09:20
  Ted: We have.
• 1:09:21
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, honestly, the thing that I always like to also say is.
• 1:09:26
  Tad Eggleston: I generally don't spend a lot of time on what I think could be better about bad things.
• 1:09:34
  Ted: Yeah, that's… it's not… it's not worth money.
• 1:09:36
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta have a really solid foundation for me to care about what might make it better. So, like…
• 1:09:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, look.
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: I had to write a letter to the class that says, if I tear your story apart, it's because I like it. There's no more damning criticism from me than, nice story and nothing else.
• 1:10:00
  Ted: That's… yeah, that's a good way to put it. Like, this is a… this is a story absolutely worth talking about.
• 1:10:05
  Ted: Which is the highest possible compliment I can get.
• 1:10:06
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:10:08
  Ted: so….
• 1:10:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right. Oh, man.
• 1:10:10
  Ted: It is… I am so glad that it exists and I got to read it.
• 1:10:14
  Marcus Anderson: You know what I put this up there with? With what we just described?
• 1:10:18
  Marcus Anderson: There's, like, …
• 1:10:20
  Marcus Anderson: My only beef… I feel like Logan, the film, is pretty much perfect for me. My one beef…
• 1:10:27
  Marcus Anderson: is dead.
• 1:10:29
  Marcus Anderson: They saw in their infinite wisdom to, for no real reason that impacts the story at all, resurrect, …
• 1:10:38
  Marcus Anderson: Black… Black acting, greats, and I say Black acting greats in the sense that Black people know who they are, but everybody else doesn't necessarily. Eric LaSalle and, … who's the wife?
• 1:10:49
  Marcus Anderson: It'll come back to me, but they, they, they, they, they throw a black family in the middle of the movie that helps…
• 1:10:56
  Marcus Anderson: Logan and X23. And, yeah.
• 1:10:59
  Marcus Anderson: just to… and I was like, oh my god, they're gonna kill them. And, like, you know what I mean? And, like, it does nothing for the story other than, like, yeah, like, like, fridging. Like, it's classic fridging, like….
• 1:11:10
  Ted: It's the little definition, it's tomatoes.
• 1:11:12
  Marcus Anderson: Except… Yeah, except…
• 1:11:14
  Marcus Anderson: Not even, because I feel like it wasn't even the… in the top 5 things that Logan was sad about in the movie. Like, he was sad, but… but he wasn't, like, sad, sad. So my point is, like, that… and there's a… there's a few movies like that, where I'm like.
• 1:11:30
  Marcus Anderson: wow, this is incredible! And, like, why did you have to just, like, kill this marginalized person? Usually bi person, but, like, in Dini's case, you know, a trans person. But, like, yeah, just to…
• 1:11:43
  Marcus Anderson: I don't know, it's weird. It's like, when you do this, like, thing, it's pretty much perfect, and you… you have to… they just… they just… they just can't, you know… although this is different, right? Because this is somebody of the same… two writers of the same community that Demi's from. You know, which is maybe why I was giving them a little bit more grace than just if it was, like, …
• 1:12:02
  Marcus Anderson: A cis dude writing this story.
• 1:12:05
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:12:05
  Marcus Anderson: But it's….
• 1:12:06
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I absolutely give the grace….
• 1:12:09
  Marcus Anderson: Hit.
• 1:12:10
  Tad Eggleston: I absolutely give the grace, but, like, if there's ever, ever a book that I've read that deserves a CODA issue, this is it.
• 1:12:21
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I can see that.
• 1:12:22
  Ted: Yeah, shit. It would be nice. And I mean, so, Maddie, Maddie… Marissa does show up in that hardware series, and boy howdy, does she have some fun changes.
• 1:12:32
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, okay, I didn't read ahead yet, so I didn't… okay, I'm gonna have to go back.
• 1:12:36
  Marcus Anderson: Like, I remember some of those hardware issues better than a lot of other stuff.
• 1:12:39
  Ted: What happens to Matty?
• 1:12:42
  Tad Eggleston: Well, then maybe I will wind up having a different opinion.
• 1:12:46
  Ted: It's… I mean, it doesn't….
• 1:12:48
  Tad Eggleston: Because I don't even necessarily think that it would take 8.
• 1:12:52
  Tad Eggleston: Hun!
• 1:12:54
  Tad Eggleston: I don't even think it would require a full issue coda for me to wind up getting
• 1:13:04
  Tad Eggleston: the message… and tragedy.
• 1:13:10
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I just… I don't feel like it spends enough time with the tragedy. I don't think it spends enough time with the… the… the…
• 1:13:20
  Tad Eggleston: The danger of hate.
• 1:13:22
  Ted: It does… I mean, it does feel also a little bit like it's… like it's checking off the checklist of what happens in the Dirty Harry-style vigilante, you know.
• 1:13:31
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:13:32
  Ted: Push too far… storyline, which…
• 1:13:35
  Ted: is unfortunate. Like, it does feel a little too much of, it's just trying to hit the point that it needs to hit.
• 1:13:42
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:13:44
  Tad Eggleston: Which, I mean, this also is the downside of monthly comics.
• 1:13:51
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I don't know what kind of… I don't know what kind of deadline Maddie was working on. I don't know if there was an ability to rewrite and go, this doesn't feel right, this…
• 1:14:02
  Tad Eggleston: You know, a lot of monthly comics, a lot of the reasons why writers don't like doing them as much.
• 1:14:09
  Tad Eggleston: is it's a lot easier to craft a six-issue story and have it be the way you want it… want it to be, than to be able to go issue in, issue out, and not make… not do things that you wind up looking back on months or years later and going, oh my god, why did I do that?
• 1:14:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh yeah, too much coffee, and a, and a….
• 1:14:31
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 1:14:32
  Tad Eggleston: At a deadline that was 3 hours passed.
• 1:14:35
  Ted: Yeah, it's… it's… I do feel bad for focusing on this one flaw in what is otherwise an absolutely fantastic miniseries. I do…
• 1:14:45
  Ted: Yeah, I feel a little bit guilty.
• 1:14:47
  Marcus Anderson: No, I think it's valid, it's valid. Even I was initially like, oh, I don't know, guys, but I… the more I read it and, you know, listen to what you guys are saying, I can definitely see that critique, …
• 1:15:01
  Marcus Anderson: One interesting thing, just looking ahead, is that Adam and Eve, … or, sorry, I'm only saying Adam and Eve because it's written that way, but Maddie and Eve….
• 1:15:09
  Ted: And also, it's such a great, like.
• 1:15:10
  Marcus Anderson: It is, like, yeah, yeah.
• 1:15:12
  Ted: It's perfect.
• 1:15:13
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah, but Maddie and Eve write the, the hardware arc that's coming up, so I think that's cool, too, that they get to, like, really…
• 1:15:21
  Marcus Anderson: Essentially, revisit these characters in their own voice, you know?
• 1:15:25
  Ted: Yes, it's… I am so excited for this upcoming story, because it is… it is such a… it's such a amazingly… it's wild, like, this is, again, sort of doing a very specific… I don't want to say parody, I don't even want to say satire, it's doing a specific thing.
• 1:15:42
  Marcus Anderson: I know what you mean, because they play it, like, straight. Like, they don't….
• 1:15:45
  Ted: Yes.
• 1:15:46
  Marcus Anderson: There is all types of, references, and like you say, like, kind of like… kind of like satire or parody of the tropes of this genre.
• 1:15:55
  Marcus Anderson: of, you know what I mean? But, like, it's…
• 1:15:58
  Marcus Anderson: usually with a parody, there's a certain silliness, like, you know what I mean? And there's no… there's no, … this isn't like the naked gun, like, you know what I mean? Like, they're playing it as a series. And because of what, Maddie's story is… or, sorry, Marissa, sorry, too many blouse scenes.
• 1:16:16
  Ted: No, I….
• 1:16:17
  Marcus Anderson: But, like, because of what my.
• 1:16:18
  Tad Eggleston: Well, well, but….
• 1:16:19
  Marcus Anderson: Marissa does get called Maddie, so, you know, I mean… Yeah, yeah, no Mort, right? I think Mort is the.
• 1:16:24
  Ted: weren't, and….
• 1:16:25
  Marcus Anderson: this week.
• 1:16:26
  Ted: Hort, or something? Yeah, yeah, and Hort, I think, yeah.
• 1:16:29
  Tad Eggleston: Somebody was calling her Maddie, too.
• 1:16:31
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, maybe, maybe. You might be right. Maybe it's the….
• 1:16:34
  Tad Eggleston: More is for when she's pissed at her, and Maddie is for when she's being sweet.
• 1:16:39
  Marcus Anderson: Okay.
• 1:16:40
  Marcus Anderson: That's interesting.
• 1:16:41
  Tad Eggleston: In fact, they even talk about, she calls me Mort when I'm being a geek. Hort when I'm being a real geek.
• 1:16:47
  Marcus Anderson: Bro!
• 1:16:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, right, right, right.
• 1:16:50
  Ted: relationship tidbits are so fun.
• 1:16:52
  Marcus Anderson: No, I feel like that… that almost has to be pulled from their real story, right? Like, their real….
• 1:16:57
  Ted: interrupt.
• 1:16:57
  Marcus Anderson: It feels… it feels too natural to just be….
• 1:17:00
  Ted: And it makes it even more… it makes it suck even more that Marissa… that… Marissa… that Dini then dies, because it's like…
• 1:17:07
  Ted: you know, with a lot of those movies, the fact that the guy has a wife and a kid or whatever, or, you know, is two days away from retirement, is just kind of incidental to the whole thing, and in this case, no, like, they genuinely love each other, you get to see it! Like, they're genuinely in love, they're… they've got their own little pet names and everything.
• 1:17:26
  Ted: And here, no, it's just… it's… and so that makes it all the more poignant and awful that she dies in kind of a shitty way, anyway.
• 1:17:36
  Marcus Anderson: You know what's interesting? Oh, sorry, we… No, no, I don't really have anything else to say. I was gonna say, like, one thing that I find interesting, and this isn't a critique, specifically, it's more of, like, a… this question, like, I found it interesting that in issue…
• 1:17:50
  Marcus Anderson: Issue 3, like, the opening page of Issue 3, it's his dream sequence, Where, …
• 1:17:57
  Marcus Anderson: you know, you kind of see Death Wish and a dead version of Boots, it seems like, in the…
• 1:18:06
  Marcus Anderson: and Maddie, and it's this whole interaction, and then you also see
• 1:18:10
  Marcus Anderson: like, both Maddie and Martin represented, … sorry, Marissa and Martin represented, and … but they do this thing visually, because of course, as an artist, I'm gonna pick up on this, where, they jump back and forth with, like, kind of like a…
• 1:18:26
  Marcus Anderson: cartoony, for lack of a better term, version of Maddie to, like, the…
• 1:18:33
  Marcus Anderson: quote-unquote regular version of Maddie that we see. And that's obviously, like, a technique that… that I like, that we employed in Big Gym, where it's kind of, like, for different…
• 1:18:42
  Marcus Anderson: sides of the narrative, or to evoke different feelings, you kind of jump back and forth between styles. I just… it almost stood out to me more because it's… it only really happens for, like, 4 panels. Like, you know what I mean? And I almost… part of me almost wishes, like, maybe we saw more of that.
• 1:19:00
  Marcus Anderson: Because I think it's effective where we see it, and I actually…
• 1:19:04
  Marcus Anderson: I think that could… but then again, it's like, this story really… In its main world, ha- has, …
• 1:19:11
  Marcus Anderson: a very established tone, and I guess that could have really taken us out of it if…
• 1:19:16
  Marcus Anderson: The rest of the story went back and forth artistically.
• 1:19:20
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, I do… we haven't actually said anything about the artist, who is J.H. fucking Williams on this, by the way. Pretty early.
• 1:19:27
  Tad Eggleston: I mentioned it early on.
• 1:19:29
  Ted: Okay, good. I just… because that… this dude obviously kills it on the
• 1:19:33
  Ted: absolutely fantastic job. I do, I mean, it's… I like that he, you know, Marissa has an…
• 1:19:42
  Ted: God, this is gonna sound like a backhanded compliment. I love Marissa's… Marissa has a really interesting face. I like her face a lot.
• 1:19:48
  Ted: Which… that sounds like a really backhanded compliment. I… She's also got huge 80s, 90s glasses, too. Oh my god, which adds to the interesting nature. I appreciate that she's wearing flats. Like, I love that she's wearing actual flats, and she's not trying to have….
• 1:20:01
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, that's true.
• 1:20:02
  Ted: thing.
• 1:20:03
  Marcus Anderson: It doesn't have, like, 8-inch stilettos like most, comic….
• 1:20:08
  Ted: Oh, it's so good. No, I… I… I mean, obviously, guess what? J.H. Williams, talented artist, I hope that guy goes far, you know? I hope he keeps doing stuff. He…
• 1:20:19
  Ted: Like….
• 1:20:20
  Tad Eggleston: Did I ever tell you what, …
• 1:20:22
  Tad Eggleston: Shelly Bond said about when she… …
• 1:20:28
  Tad Eggleston: She… she… he did a run on Sandman. Yes, yeah. When she was editing.
• 1:20:36
  Tad Eggleston: And when… when she… when she inked him to do it, people are like, oh, you're never gonna manage to stay on schedule, blah blah blah. She's like, no, we'll be fine. And she called… she called him, and she said, okay, tell me, how long does it take you to do an issue? I can get it done in the moment. No, no, no.
• 1:20:55
  Tad Eggleston: Don't tell me what you think you want me to hear. Tell me how long it takes you to get an issue done the way you like to do it.
• 1:21:03
  Tad Eggleston: And he's like, 6 weeks. And she's like, okay. And she called the nameless author and said, I need 3 fill-in issues. We need to give him some runtime, and we need to have a thing in the middle so that we can keep the….
• 1:21:21
  Ted: Run some coffee.
• 1:21:23
  Tad Eggleston: That's good editing. You know, that's… that's….
• 1:21:26
  Ted: seal way to have….
• 1:21:27
  Tad Eggleston: You know, rather than taking a great artist and trying to make them be something they're not.
• 1:21:35
  Tad Eggleston: …
• 1:21:36
  Tad Eggleston: look at… I mean, and this is also a place where having an ongoing series allows you to do it, because, you know, Tom… Tom King told a similar story about letting his artists…
• 1:21:48
  Tad Eggleston: on his Batman run get caught up. The entire reason the Nightmarish story arc
• 1:21:53
  Tad Eggleston: exists, as he was able to do the 6… …
• 1:21:58
  Tad Eggleston: One-shot issues with different artists, and give the two artists that were doing the next long run
• 1:22:05
  Tad Eggleston: time to get ahead. Chip Zdarsky at, at, CXC last year talked about how, really, the only reason the whole,
• 1:22:16
  Tad Eggleston: Joker Year One that everybody loved happened, because he wanted to give his regular artist lead time, but then DC got so excited that they released it weekly rather than bi-weekly, so he only stole his artist half the time that he wanted to.
• 1:22:33
  Marcus Anderson: Hmm.
• 1:22:35
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, anytime… oh, go ahead, sorry, dude.
• 1:22:39
  Ted: No, I'm just, I'm just trying to think, like, other examples I can think of off the top of my head of, like, artists who need that lead time to make it work, and it's also just thinking about J.H. Williams, and like, oh yeah, you know, the guy who did that amazing run on both Batman and then also Batwoman.
• 1:22:53
  Ted: Like, yeah, you want to give him as much time as you possibly can to make this happen. And this… these four issues really show him…
• 1:22:59
  Ted: I don't actually know where he was in his career at this point. He'd obviously been doing some other stuff, but, like, I'm curious what.
• 1:23:04
  Tad Eggleston: Relatively early.
• 1:23:05
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I think this is pretty new. Yeah. Maybe not the first, but yeah.
• 1:23:08
  Ted: Yeah, but he's already pretty developed as an artist, like, you can see him… you can see his signature style in this, so….
• 1:23:14
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it's definitely….
• 1:23:15
  Ted: Man, it's a lot. It's… Yeah, overall, this is a really stellar bit of… of…
• 1:23:23
  Ted: of comic storytelling, and also an incredible addition to the Milestone universe in a way that's just…
• 1:23:30
  Ted: it's so… it's so good, and it's so… it wouldn't have fit anywhere else. I mean, for as much as DC had Vertigo and stuff like that, this isn't really something you could do in the DC Universe, but you can do in the Milestone universe, and they did, and it ruled, like, guess what?
• 1:23:48
  Ted: Yeah, God, it's… it's such a fun…
• 1:23:51
  Ted: I don't even want to say artifact, but it's such a fun part of what Milestone is and could do.
• 1:23:56
  Ted: And I'm so happy that it's here.
• 1:24:00
  Marcus Anderson: Definitely.
• 1:24:01
  Ted: Yeah. I'm just noticing the time, also, I'm thinking, like, oh crap, I gotta wrap this up, I gotta work in the.
• 1:24:05
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, keep talking for a second, because I'm trying to figure out where in his career J.H. Williams was when he did this, and we forgot Promethea.
• 1:24:12
  Ted: No, I can't.
• 1:24:13
  Tad Eggleston: He also did Promethea.
• 1:24:16
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, God!
• 1:24:17
  Ted: Well, that was… well, that was later, though. You're not.
• 1:24:20
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that was after this.
• 1:24:21
  Ted: Yeah, yeah, Promethea, that was early 2000s, right? I think? I'm trying to remember.
• 1:24:25
  Tad Eggleston: Late 90s, early 2000s, yeah.
• 1:24:28
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, so that was after, yeah.
• 1:24:29
  Ted: Oh, yeah. But, but yeah, this, I mean, I'm trying to… I don't know what else he did, if he did anything at Milestone. Off the top of my head, I have no…
• 1:24:38
  Ted: I don't know. …
• 1:24:41
  Ted: Anybody you know off the top of their head if Jay Angelians did any other milestone stuff?
• 1:24:45
  Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to figure it out right now. He had done some stuff at Innovation Publishing and Eternity Comics.
• 1:24:55
  Tad Eggleston: And then… Blood Syndicate.
• 1:24:58
  Ted: Number 9 was….
• 1:25:01
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I remember that. That was a, … it focused on… what's his name? A boogeyman.
• 1:25:06
  Tad Eggleston: 7th grade. What do you mean?
• 1:25:08
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it was a.
• 1:25:09
  Tad Eggleston: And then he's at Showcase93.
• 1:25:12
  Ted: Okay.
• 1:25:12
  Tad Eggleston: And then he was at Blood Syndicate 15.
• 1:25:17
  Tad Eggleston: Judge Dredd, number 5.
• 1:25:20
  Tad Eggleston: Guy Gardner Warrior, number 26, and then Death Wish. So this is actually really early.
• 1:25:29
  Ted: Damn, okay. And he's already drawing like this, good God, okay.
• 1:25:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:25:34
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and it also looks like he's doing this and Judge Dredd at the same time.
• 1:25:39
  Ted: Moses.
• 1:25:41
  Tad Eggleston: Which probably means one of them was done earlier.
• 1:25:44
  Ted: Heh, yeah.
• 1:25:47
  Ted: Anyway, yeah, no, this is… I mean, and this… I don't have Maddie Blaustein's credits up in front of me. I don't know how much else she did after this. She did… I know she did, like we talked about, she did some issues of static. She may have even done one or two issues of Blood Syndicate. I forget if I looked that up, and that's what the other thing she was on. …
• 1:26:05
  Ted: I don't know if she did much that was a… well, I don't want to say…
• 1:26:09
  Ted: original as in not part of any existing universes. I kinda don't think so, but she was also.
• 1:26:15
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, some Peter Parker Spider-Man.
• 1:26:18
  Ted: Oh, that's good, cool, alright, I dig it.
• 1:26:20
  Tad Eggleston: Web of Spider-Man.
• 1:26:22
  Ted: Okay, here.
• 1:26:23
  Tad Eggleston: wait a minute, I haven't….
• 1:26:24
  Marcus Anderson: That was the 80s, though.
• 1:26:26
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I gotta… I gotta change the roles, because right now I've got it as all roles, and she was an editor, too.
• 1:26:34
  Marcus Anderson: Right, yeah.
• 1:26:35
  Tad Eggleston: So let me take it to just writer roles.
• 1:26:38
  Marcus Anderson: If I'm only going by Wikipedia, which is the end-all of knowledge.
• 1:26:44
  Marcus Anderson: It looks like the milestone stuff was maybe some of the latest, comics work, and then maybe there was a transition to,
• 1:26:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:26:56
  Marcus Anderson: to TV, like, after that, animated.
• 1:26:58
  Tad Eggleston: And we had, we had Hardware 20, Icon 18, Hardware 21, the Death Wish books, Hardware 23,
• 1:27:07
  Tad Eggleston: And 24, and then 26th through 8.
• 1:27:13
  Ted: She was doing the last few issues of Hardware?
• 1:27:15
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, that's interesting.
• 1:27:17
  Tad Eggleston: I thought we'd commented on it. Wait, what you definitely did.
• 1:27:19
  Marcus Anderson: do… I mean, this one we….
• 1:27:21
  Tad Eggleston: She didn't do 25.
• 1:27:22
  Marcus Anderson: Wayne McDuffie, yeah.
• 1:27:23
  Ted: Right. That was, yeah, that was Jane McDuffie again.
• 1:27:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Maddie, Maddie had the Arcana.
• 1:27:29
  Ted: Oh, the Arcana stuff, okay.
• 1:27:31
  Tad Eggleston: I was thinking.
• 1:27:32
  Marcus Anderson: the, … Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't….
• 1:27:34
  Ted: stuff. The, the, the, the, the protege, what's his name?
• 1:27:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:27:38
  Marcus Anderson: No, not that. That was Otis, Wesley, Clay, yeah. But I do remember at the time….
• 1:27:44
  Tad Eggleston: At the time when we read Arcana, we did remark on the fact that it was Maddie Ballstein. 30 to 35?
• 1:27:51
  Ted: Okay. Oh, so later on, but a substantial run, 6 issues, alright, okay.
• 1:27:55
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:27:56
  Ted: But that actually does look like the… it looks like….
• 1:28:00
  Tad Eggleston: That's the end of the comic writing.
• 1:28:03
  Ted: Because everything after that that's coming up is collections of earlier stuff.
• 1:28:09
  Ted: Okay.
• 1:28:10
  Tad Eggleston: Static 35 might be the last.
• 1:28:13
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. This is the theme I come back to so much with other… comic creators is just how…
• 1:28:20
  Marcus Anderson: how tough it is to indefinitely, like, make a living in comics? Because you just have so many, like, awesome people like Maddie Blastein, who…
• 1:28:29
  Marcus Anderson: You know, they end up pursuing other work.
• 1:28:33
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and one of the things I always wonder about, I mean, particularly when it's like Maddie Blaustein, where
• 1:28:40
  Tad Eggleston: it's… tangential. She became a voice actor.
• 1:28:46
  Tad Eggleston: starting with… comic-type stuff.
• 1:28:50
  Tad Eggleston: And it looks like she might have done some writing on some of that stuff. You know, was it initially she was doing both, and then one was more lucrative? I mean, here, there are lots of artists…
• 1:29:04
  Tad Eggleston: There are lots of artists that are, right? Like, Jeff Lemire, for a long time, could… just couldn't afford to write. Or couldn't afford to draw, rather.
• 1:29:13
  Tad Eggleston: Because….
• 1:29:15
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, no.
• 1:29:15
  Tad Eggleston: as indeed.
• 1:29:16
  Marcus Anderson: us to move.
• 1:29:16
  Tad Eggleston: Too much more money as a writer.
• 1:29:19
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. What? No, I… in my 5-year plan, I'm thinking about some writing moves myself, for the same reason, because it's just….
• 1:29:27
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:29:29
  Ted: Yeah, man, it's….
• 1:29:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh….
• 1:29:30
  Ted: Let's got Alex Vape… tapes.
• 1:29:34
  Tad Eggleston: So… so yeah, I mean, yes, it's sad, but it's… to me, it's most sad if they wind up having to, like, go become an accountant or… or McDonald's manager versus moving into some other creative career.
• 1:29:49
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, that is the thing.
• 1:29:51
  Tad Eggleston: We have.
• 1:29:51
  Ted: some amazing stuff. Like, I… obviously, I would have loved to see what she'd… what she'd…
• 1:29:56
  Ted: come up with later in her career, too, but, like, the stuff that she did leave us is really phenomenal stuff, and I'm so glad that we got it as it is, and…
• 1:30:05
  Ted: Yeah, I don't know. It's… it's…
• 1:30:08
  Ted: Damn. This is… this is such a good thing. I wish there was its own, like, special little collection of the Death Wish stuff, of, like, just Maddie Blaustein's contributions to the Milestone universe, but I get that it's, you know, part of the big compendium, because there's a lot of… there's a lot of individual writers who only had one or two.
• 1:30:26
  Tad Eggleston: Hey, I'm just happy that they made the compendiums. For years, most of it wasn't reprinted at all.
• 1:30:34
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I know, I was….
• 1:30:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, and you….
• 1:30:37
  Marcus Anderson: I can tell you what was reprinted.
• 1:30:38
  Tad Eggleston: when it prints.
• 1:30:40
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, there was a handful… A handful of icons. I think there was….
• 1:30:44
  Tad Eggleston: Not a lot. I think there were two volumes of Icon that took you through, like.
• 1:30:47
  Marcus Anderson: Dude.
• 1:30:48
  Tad Eggleston: Issue 10.
• 1:30:49
  Marcus Anderson: Yup.
• 1:30:50
  Tad Eggleston: One volume was static that took you through, like, 5 or 6.
• 1:30:55
  Marcus Anderson: No, that was it. And I… I was… I would… I would check.
• 1:30:57
  Tad Eggleston: Hardware, I think there were two volumes, and it took you.
• 1:31:01
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I had those, I had those two volumes, and that's it.
• 1:31:04
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah….
• 1:31:07
  Marcus Anderson: There was never a blessing to get in the….
• 1:31:10
  Tad Eggleston: And none of the other stuff. For that matter, like…
• 1:31:13
  Tad Eggleston: I had to come home to race to read today, because Death Wish still isn't on DC… Infinite.
• 1:31:23
  Marcus Anderson: Hmm.
• 1:31:24
  Ted: You can't get it digitally. You can only get it….
• 1:31:26
  Tad Eggleston: Get it in the compendium. In the compendium?
• 1:31:30
  Marcus Anderson: Hmm.
• 1:31:32
  Tad Eggleston: You know… … and that's actually true of… Everything but those main… like… hardware icon
• 1:31:44
  Tad Eggleston: and static. All of the issues are available digitally, and I don't think any of the rest of the milestone is.
• 1:31:53
  Ted: And it's… and like we were talking about… were we recording at that point or not? But we were talking about, like, the Wise Sun miniseries?
• 1:32:00
  Marcus Anderson: Like, I don't know if that is… I think we were.
• 1:32:02
  Ted: Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that's in the compendium, but I don't know if that's up on DC Infinite or any of the….
• 1:32:07
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think it is.
• 1:32:07
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, jeez.
• 1:32:09
  Ted: Alright, well….
• 1:32:10
  Marcus Anderson: It's too real. Too real for DC.
• 1:32:12
  Ted: Wheel!
• 1:32:13
  Ted: I mean….
• 1:32:15
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully, it's not that….
• 1:32:18
  Marcus Anderson: But, one….
• 1:32:21
  Ted: Mmm….
• 1:32:22
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I just, I just know that DC has been behind the game on digitizing some of their stuff. So, like, every time I turn around, there are things that weren't there.
• 1:32:35
  Tad Eggleston: Like, like, like, the first time somebody recommended that I read Joshua Dysart's run on… ….
• 1:32:46
  Marcus Anderson: Unknown soldier.
• 1:32:47
  Tad Eggleston: What's the soldier with… yeah, Unknown Soldier. Yeah, Unknown Soldier. It wasn't… yeah, it wasn't on DC Infinite at all, and now I think they're up to, like, the first 6 issues. It's 24 issues, so there's still a way to go, but in a few months, it's gone from none to 6 issues.
• 1:33:05
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, well, look, and then, like, not to beat the….
• 1:33:07
  Tad Eggleston: better.
• 1:33:09
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead.
• 1:33:11
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, I was just gonna say… I was gonna say very briefly that, I hear all of that, and I'm sure there's a lot that they are… where they are catching up.
• 1:33:19
  Marcus Anderson: with digitizing. But my thing is…
• 1:33:23
  Marcus Anderson: our society is what it is. Oh, absolutely. Some of us see it more than other… clearly than others by… based on experience, and one thing I believe in, and I put my money where my mouth is, right? Like, …
• 1:33:36
  Marcus Anderson: as… I've had situations where, you know, I…
• 1:33:42
  Marcus Anderson: was sure to make sure that I…
• 1:33:45
  Marcus Anderson: you know, where, say, like, you know, you had, like, female creators, right, and creative people, and I needed some… I was like, I do not need to be centered in this discussion, you know what I mean? And I think there is something to be said for, recognizing
• 1:34:03
  Marcus Anderson: when there's a lack of representation in a certain area, and maybe prioritizing certain things. And there's a lot of our… the worst people in America who are… happen to be in power right now, in creating an authoritarian government, who… who basically believe that any prioritization or any…
• 1:34:21
  Marcus Anderson: And I'm not, I'm not critiquing you, but I'm saying, like, any, any, like, concept….
• 1:34:25
  Tad Eggleston: But I'm just gonna agree with you, I'm gonna say that I am willing to bet that, like, mid-November of last year.
• 1:34:33
  Tad Eggleston: digitizing Milestone for the website got put on the back burner.
• 1:34:40
  Tad Eggleston: All but guarantee it.
• 1:34:43
  Tad Eggleston: Wow.
• 1:34:43
  Ted: I wouldn't be surprised.
• 1:34:44
  Marcus Anderson: And I guess that's what I'm saying, like, it's….
• 1:34:46
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, particularly because you know that they've remastered it. Like, the other argument that I'll give for some stuff is, like, when I was talking to Scott Bryan Wilson.
• 1:34:54
  Tad Eggleston: …
• 1:34:56
  Tad Eggleston: his job at DC, before he was a writer, for a while, he wasn't… he couldn't write comics for DC, because if you have a non-creative job.
• 1:35:05
  Tad Eggleston: You're not allowed to have a creative job.
• 1:35:08
  Tad Eggleston: Like, so he had an office job at DC, but one of his jobs at DC was maintaining their library, so when he got there, they were, like, 20,000 different issues short of actually having their entire collection.
• 1:35:23
  Tad Eggleston: Like, a major part of his decade at the company was chasing down issues that they didn't have in their archive.
• 1:35:32
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah.
• 1:35:33
  Tad Eggleston: And he said some of them were way more recent than they should have been. It wasn't all going back and looking for, like, Atlas stuff, or Superman number one.
• 1:35:44
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, I just feel like it's, like, whether, whether it's… You know, whatever.
• 1:35:48
  Tad Eggleston: But clearly they have them now, because they put out the compendiums.
• 1:35:52
  Marcus Anderson: Right, but whether it's, whether it's, like, what we were talking about before, about, …
• 1:35:57
  Marcus Anderson: the, you know, the seasons, as opposed to, like, just giving Milestone room to breathe.
• 1:36:02
  Marcus Anderson: DC is leaving money on the table, because.
• 1:36:06
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
• 1:36:06
  Marcus Anderson: There's a… there's a very hungry audience, … Particularly….
• 1:36:10
  Tad Eggleston: Because let's face it, once the writing and the art has been done, particularly to go digital, you're not talking about a lot of money.
• 1:36:21
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 1:36:22
  Ted: Yeah.
• 1:36:22
  Marcus Anderson: So….
• 1:36:23
  Ted: Everything is relatively cheap.
• 1:36:25
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah. I really think it's a microcosm of the meritocracy myth, right? When it's kind of like, well, you know, it didn't move, like, you know, X amount of books, or whatever, or Batman's our biggest seller, or… and for the record, for the millionth time, I do like Batman. I only go back to Batman because, you know.
• 1:36:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, no, I know!
• 1:36:45
  Marcus Anderson: And I love Spider-Man, but Marvel's like, Spider-Man's the money, Batman's the money, in DC's case, so they're like, not only are we gonna give you, like, you know, three….
• 1:36:55
  Tad Eggleston: No, and I….
• 1:36:56
  Marcus Anderson: But we'll also give you, like, every possible remix of every ancillary character that you didn't ask for, you know what I mean?
• 1:37:05
  Tad Eggleston: I told you guys earlier, and I've been flipping through the catalog as we've been talking, so I got to see some stuff from it. They are doing, and this is, like, a Batman book, but still, the Batman Beyond Static Crossover series.
• 1:37:22
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, it looks cool.
• 1:37:22
  Tad Eggleston: Starting in, I think, September.
• 1:37:26
  Tad Eggleston: Not starting in September, starting in November, it's in the September catalog.
• 1:37:32
  Marcus Anderson: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:37:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, like… They… they… They do….
• 1:37:43
  Marcus Anderson: Sure.
• 1:37:43
  Ted: enough to say, hey, some of my best friends are black. Okay.
• 1:37:49
  Marcus Anderson: I will, I will, but not to be too negative, but I will say this, you had to get Dwayne McDuffie, who is, by all accounts from everybody across the industry, was brilliant, a great guy.
• 1:38:00
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:38:00
  Marcus Anderson: He had, obviously, the level of frustration and interference.
• 1:38:04
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah. No, no.
• 1:38:05
  Marcus Anderson: birth to hardware, so my point is, like, despite all that, he managed to bring static to TV and make a hit, where I'm sure a lot of people were telling him it wouldn't be one.
• 1:38:16
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean….
• 1:38:17
  Marcus Anderson: And that's why, like, Static is the one character that they'll cross over a little bit. They did put Icon and Rocket a little bit into Young Jones.
• 1:38:24
  Tad Eggleston: What's the most profitable Marvel movie?
• 1:38:30
  Marcus Anderson: Oh, probably Black Panther, right? A solo, or…?
• 1:38:33
  Tad Eggleston: Black Panther. No, Black Panther!
• 1:38:34
  Marcus Anderson: solo, you know
• 1:38:38
  Marcus Anderson: No, definitely, but even that.
• 1:38:40
  Tad Eggleston: Which was never gonna make any money.
• 1:38:43
  Marcus Anderson: Right.
• 1:38:44
  Marcus Anderson: Look at this… look, we're going… sorry, I know we kind of went over, but, like… Yeah, and also, I'm fading fast. Yeah, I feel you, I feel you.
• 1:38:54
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that was fun. Next week, we're… or next month, we're gonna, go track down Death Wish.
• 1:39:00
  Tad Eggleston: In the pages of hardware.
• 1:39:03
  Tad Eggleston: With some more Maddie Blaumsteins, so, …
• 1:39:06
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you guys, as always, and Ted, sorry that we went completely off the rails, and let you hit the wall all at once.
• 1:39:14
  Ted: Hey, no.
• 1:39:14
  Tad Eggleston: Like, what….
• 1:39:16
  Ted: what is this… what is this… what are we even doing here if we're not going off the rails?
• 1:39:20
  Tad Eggleston: true. That's how I look at it.
• 1:39:22
  Tad Eggleston: But, you know, particularly when I know we're, like, when I suddenly realize that Ted is feeling like I should feel, but I get this weird rush from talking about comics.
• 1:39:36
  Ted: It's me.
• 1:39:37
  Tad Eggleston: I get you. It is… And I see on your face, I'm like, I, too, have to be up at 5 o'clock tomorrow morning.
• 1:39:46
  Ted: Oh, my God.
• 1:39:47
  Marcus Anderson: I'll get some wrists.
• 1:39:49
  Tad Eggleston: So, for the Brothers Anderson, no relation. This has been the Milestone Book Club on 22 Panels. We will see you after the next page.