Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / 22 Panels & Psychocomicology: Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club & Support Group #14 - Constitution/Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated

Transcript

22 Panels & Psychocomicology: Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club & Support Group #14 - Constitution/Declaration/Emancipation Illustrated · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to the Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival book club and support group on 22 Panels. We don't have any of our psychologists here to officially run the support group.
• 0:17
  Tad Eggleston: So it's more of an informal support group tonight.
• 0:21
  Tad Eggleston: you know, 4th of July weekend, they want to do family stuff, and I let them.
• 0:26
  Tad Eggleston: I think I, I think I'm required to, they're my boss. But whatever, what we do have is, is we have,
• 0:33
  Tad Eggleston: regular con… contributors Britt Payne and Ryan Carey, joining us, I think, for the first time together. Britt… Britt is the, head of the non-profit The Autism Scene. Ryan is a writer at Four Color Apocalypse on Patreon, and…
• 0:51
  Tad Eggleston: BLA, Matth
• 0:54
  Tad Eggleston: Occasionally the Comics Journal, and we have my mother Julie for the first time since Ramon Perez was on, and just for fun, we have the author of the book, Mr. R. Sakoryak,
• 1:04
  Tad Eggleston: And what we're discussing, because, you know, it's timely, as we record on the day after the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States, we're discussing Constitution Illustrated.
• 1:16
  Tad Eggleston: And the newly released Declaration Illustrated Flipbook with Emancipation Illustrated. So, good evening, everybody. We will start with the typical just check-in. How is everybody doing right now?
• 1:31
  Tad Eggleston: How was your week? How are you feeling? Because this is the support group, even if we're informal support group today.
• 1:40
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody's smiling at me, and nobody.
• 1:42
  Britton Payne: There.
• 1:42
  Tad Eggleston: Nobody'.
• 1:43
  Britton Payne: There is.
• 1:43
  Tad Eggleston: Hearing.
• 1:44
  Britton Payne: So, as we record, it's 4th of July weekend, and it has been an extremely interesting 4th of July for a lot of reasons. It's the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I remember vividly how enchanted I was as a 6-year-old by the bicentennial when I lived near Philadelphia. I was in New Jersey. And,
• 2:02
  Britton Payne: We got this wonderful gift in a challenging time.
• 2:05
  Britton Payne: Politically, which was the World Cup. I don't particularly care about soccer,
• 2:11
  Britton Payne: But,
• 2:13
  Britton Payne: I think it was wonderful to hear all of the reactions of the people who visited the States and found it to be magical, in contrast to the headlines and what they expected to find when they got here, based on the stories. And it felt like this wonderful, hopefully lasting moment.
• 2:31
  Britton Payne: Of… of blasting through the… This sort of fog of unpleasantness, it reminded me a little bit of…
• 2:40
  Britton Payne: Long last have you no decency. You know, a moment that hopefully will break the fever and contribute to maybe turning a corner, because it really was, I think it has been wonderful to, a great way to feel proud about our country and to feel good about ourselves and our lives in a way that can be challenging if we are paying too much attention to the headlines.
• 3:01
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 3:03
  Tad Eggleston: Ryan, Bob, Mom?
• 3:06
  Ryan: Well, I can't top that, so…
• 3:12
  Ryan: I won't even try, I think.
• 3:16
  Ryan: I'm not much into this World Cup stuff. My brother's real big into it.
• 3:21
  Ryan: So I've been checking out a little of it, but
• 3:24
  Ryan: you know.
• 3:26
  Ryan: these soccer fans will drive you a little nuts, won't they? I mean, they act like their game is this pure, great thing, but half of these games are pretty boring.
• 3:36
  Ryan: People talk about being bored by baseball, but Christ,
• 3:42
  Ryan: some of this soccer gets a little dull, and, you know, I mean, FIFA, from what I understand, is arguably the single most corrupt organization in the entire world.
• 3:53
  Ryan: But what the hell, people are having a good time and.
• 3:57
  Ryan: I'm not against anybody having fun.
• 4:00
  Tad Eggleston: You gotta love that the Scots managed to drink Boston out of beer.
• 4:05
  Ryan: You know what? That is kind of that is admirable. You're.
• 4:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Anne took over Fenway Park for a night.
• 4:14
  Julie: Wow.
• 4:17
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, it's been a… you know, it's always a weird week in America today, but I've gotten to have a lot of cool conversations this week. One of the advantages of when I'm on
• 4:28
  Tad Eggleston: On my,
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: Summer break is I have more time to talk to people overseas, or that work during the day, or like Bob, have the most time to talk late at night.
• 4:39
  Tad Eggleston: So, so this has been a cool week for conversations for me. So overall, I'm good, though. I also helped somebody move in the heat and then the rain on Friday night, and I'm still recovering.
• 4:50
  Ryan: Oh yeah, I heard about that one.
• 4:52
  Tad Eggleston: That's right, because Daria helped too.
• 4:55
  Ryan: Yeah, I heard about that one.
• 4:57
  Britton Payne: You are a good friend. Helping somebody move, that's one of the kindest things you can do. You'.
• 5:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. So, that was my week.
• 5:09
  Tad Eggleston: We're looking at Mom and Bob.
• 5:11
  Julie: Homeland.
• 5:12
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 5:12
  Julie: Really?
• 5:14
  Julie: Pretty boring.
• 5:15
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty boring.
• 5:17
  Julie: Pretty same old, same old.
• 5:19
  Tad Eggleston: Saying, well, you're retired now. You're supposed to be reading more and doing fun stuff.
• 5:24
  Julie: I'm reading more.
• 5:26
  Julie: Okay.
• 5:28
  Julie: Doing same old, same old, because I don't have any other same old, same old to do.
• 5:33
  Ryan: One look at your bookshelf there, and we know where your kid got his love for reading.
• 5:37
  Julie: Oh yeah. That that's just the top two shelves.
• 5:41
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 5:43
  Tad Eggleston: We believe in bookshelves in every room in this family.
• 5:48
  Julie: Yeah. Okay.
• 5:49
  Tad Eggleston: All right, Bob, how's your week been? You had a book come out this.
• 5:52
  R. Sikoryak: I did. Came out on June 30th. I wish it came out on June 19th, but we'll get to that. But I was very late. We… I'm glad we squeaked it into, the July 4th weekend, as it was. I went down to Philadelphia.
• 6:08
  R. Sikoryak: to do a book signing at Brave New Worlds, which is a great comic shop.
• 6:12
  R. Sikoryak: In Philadelphia
• 6:14
  R. Sikoryak: And I had a nice… nice turnout in 100-degree heat, and then we stayed the next day to see everybody dressed in costumes and all their…
• 6:23
  R. Sikoryak: red, white, and blue regalia, and it was pretty amusing to be down there. I would not have gone if it were not so close to my book signing, but it was pretty charming to actually see all the buildings that I'd been drawing for a year in person.
• 6:39
  R. Sikoryak: When I went down there, so I… we had a very nice time, and and I'm glad… I'm glad I touched the ground there, this weekend.
• 6:50
  Tad Eggleston: So,
• 6:53
  Tad Eggleston: I'm generally asked by somebody why I pick the books for Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival, and it's always to try to find books that hit on at least a couple of those themes, but when I saw that this one was going to be right around the 4th, I picked these two books, because I think
• 7:12
  Tad Eggleston: Between the facts that
• 7:14
  Tad Eggleston: That I think that our founding documents are among the best parts of our country. We haven't always lived up to them, but like the fact that some of this stuff got put on paper.
• 7:26
  Tad Eggleston: As, as something to aspire to, I actually find quite beautiful, but also the way.
• 7:36
  Tad Eggleston: The way Bob has… has… Given a nice history lesson, a comics history lesson, in terms of.
• 7:44
  Julie: Okay.
• 7:45
  Tad Eggleston: Pages of pastiches and good notes at the end to find out.
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: Like, where everything came from.
• 7:52
  Tad Eggleston: But also, each page kinda…
• 7:56
  Tad Eggleston: kind of encourages you to stop and think about, okay, what is this picture saying about the words? What… how should I…
• 8:04
  Tad Eggleston: look more holistically at these words, because the founding documents are also legal documents, and as I'm certain Britt can attest to, sometimes with legal documents, it…
• 8:15
  Tad Eggleston: They become…
• 8:18
  Tad Eggleston: less interesting reads, because they've gotta word things really carefully, and… and therefore, like, when you're just reading them without splitting them up into chunks, you know, I…
• 8:28
  Tad Eggleston: I know that, like, I told Bob the last time he was on that I've been reading the Constitution, like, minimum once a year since I was, like, 12. But the first time I read it this way was the first time that I'd had to really slow down and read it, and think about it more. And I'd notice things, I'd notice nuances, I'd notice, oh, wait.
• 8:47
  Tad Eggleston: that's a big hole that somebody's gonna drive a Mack truck through someday, and then you learn history, it's like, oh yeah, somebody did drive a Mack truck through that.
• 8:56
  Tad Eggleston: And then it drives you to constitutional history and go, oh, they knew that that was a big hole. They just couldn't agree on how to fill it, which is why they have things like the Fifth, you know, Article 5 and the Ninth Amendment. It's to say, hey.
• 9:12
  Tad Eggleston: This isn't complete. This is what we have.
• 9:17
  Tad Eggleston: Today, Bob and I talked on Tuesday night about Ben Rhodes' new book, and I started listening to it. And the very first speech in it is the one that Benjamin Franklin gave at the Constitutional Convention.
• 9:32
  Tad Eggleston: And while it acknowledges that there were parts of the Constitution that he didn't agree with, what he was arguing to everybody, and this was before there was even a bill of rights amended, or addended to it.
• 9:43
  Tad Eggleston: was that we need to accept this document as is. No, it is not perfect, but if we keep trying to… we will never be able to agree on too many of the things that we disagree on, so we need to just move forward.
• 10:02
  Tad Eggleston: and there's, there's a certain beauty to that.
• 10:07
  Tad Eggleston: And so, yeah, that's why I picked the books is, is like, every time I am really depressed about this country, I remember that.
• 10:21
  Tad Eggleston: We're, if not the only, one of very few countries that have such a wonderful vision of what could be.
• 10:30
  Tad Eggleston: you know, individuals have that vision, but to have it written down, I think, is kind of… kind of special. To have it
• 10:36
  Tad Eggleston: in speeches throughout, I mean, I'm so glad that along with emancipation.
• 10:41
  Tad Eggleston: proclamation, you also included the Gettysburg Address, which…
• 10:45
  Tad Eggleston: Gettysburg Address and Lincoln's second inaugural are essentially, like, the…
• 10:51
  Tad Eggleston: The refounding of this nation, you know.
• 10:54
  Julie: Okay.
• 10:56
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, that was why I picked it. Anybody have opening thoughts on what they thought of the books?
• 11:05
  R. Sikoryak: I work with some great writers.
• 11:08
  Tad Eggleston: Ha ha.
• 11:08
  R. Sikoryak: I don.
• 11:09
  Julie: And I…
• 11:09
  R. Sikoryak: I don't, I don't
• 11:11
  R. Sikoryak: I don't know if they knew or could possibly know what they unleashed and what I liked.
• 11:18
  R. Sikoryak: thinking about while I was doing it was how we have to keep reinterpreting them. I'm so glad I had the time to add the emancipation to the book, because I felt that
• 11:32
  R. Sikoryak: Lincoln starts to, like, reshape what we thought the Declaration meant, and I love having…
• 11:40
  R. Sikoryak: that conversation in history, and you can only imagine what the next part of the book, if I could do a four-sided book, what the next two parts of the book would be that would re-envision what, to take those initial words and see how else you could expand their meaning.
• 11:59
  Ryan: I have fun figuring out.
• 12:02
  Ryan: Which drawings I recognize.
• 12:06
  R. Sikoryak: That's, I mean, that's often my favorite part of these kinds of books.
• 12:10
  Tad Eggleston: That was why I reached out to you, Ryan. I reached out to you at…
• 12:15
  Tad Eggleston: largely because I went, this is… this is the person I know who's gonna recognize the most of these, but also, living in Minneapolis, I imagine you've had to think about
• 12:28
  Tad Eggleston: some of this stuff even more than we have over the last year, so I was curious to get both of those viewpoints.
• 12:37
  Ryan: Well, I mean, the viewpoint of Minneapolis is that,
• 12:43
  Ryan: They're using the Constitution as toilet paper.
• 12:47
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, absolutely.
• 12:50
  Ryan: But what it boils down to, I mean,
• 12:52
  Ryan: I think that's pretty much… that's not even overly cynical.
• 12:57
  Ryan: That's basically day-to-day life here these last…
• 13:01
  Ryan: Certainly earlier this year, but
• 13:04
  Ryan: You know, those guys are still in town a little bit, they're not,
• 13:09
  Ryan: Doing as much, but it's not like they all left.
• 13:13
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 13:16
  Britton Payne: It's also not a new way to treat the Constitution. If you look back through history, you know, the last 250 years, it's fewer than 250 for the Constitution, but still.
• 13:26
  Britton Payne: You'll see that there have been plenty of times when people
• 13:32
  Britton Payne: You might agree with today, and you might not agree with today.
• 13:35
  Britton Payne: Danced around.
• 13:36
  Britton Payne: The Constitution, its original intent, and, and its actual words to advance their political agenda. Again, whether it's something that you
• 13:45
  Britton Payne: some of those, we would say, boy, it's about time they fixed that, and some of them, we would say, ugh, how horrible that was that that happened, where they also ignored the Constitution. So, the value… I'm curious to know, from our… from your… you know, obviously spending a lot of time with the actual text of the original founding document that, as Tad
• 14:01
  Britton Payne: Put, we built this whole thing on.
• 14:05
  Britton Payne: To what extent did you find that the words themselves were moving? And to what extent did you find that the story it told and the example that it set of how to deal with the real world?
• 14:18
  Britton Payne: And how to put that into.
• 14:20
  Britton Payne: Something that we could relate to, which is obviously your point in making cartoons.
• 14:24
  Britton Payne: How did you develop that relationship with what the Constitution was, and what did you kind of come out of it having you feel differently than when you started?
• 14:33
  R. Sikoryak: Well, I mean, certainly speaking for the new book, I don't remember having read all the grievances when I was a kid. Unlike Tad, I didn't memorize the declaration. So…
• 14:45
  Tad Eggleston: I don't memorize the declaration. It was the emancipation that I.
• 14:49
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, all right, fair enough.
• 14:51
  Julie: Okay.
• 14:52
  R. Sikoryak: But I think, I mean, you can't help but see the resonance of a lot of the grievances today. That was really striking to me.
• 15:00
  Julie: Oh.
• 15:00
  R. Sikoryak: I think when you try to write something with a little poetry, the poetry can speak to you beyond time. And
• 15:10
  R. Sikoryak: I… I… I… I…
• 15:15
  R. Sikoryak: you know, I struggle with the… with the racist portions of it. I struggle with the compromises in it.
• 15:24
  R. Sikoryak: But I…
• 15:27
  R. Sikoryak: It's like they knew better, but they weren't going to do anything about it. They couldn't get everyone to agree to do anything about it. And.
• 15:35
  Tad Eggleston: them knew better.
• 15:38
  R. Sikoryak: They all should have known better. But in any case, they didn't. They weren't able to put it into practice for whatever reason.
• 15:46
  R. Sikoryak: you know, it's… what's great about the Constitution is it sort of says, you can keep amending this. So, you know, there was that acknowledgement from the beginning, and I really appreciated
• 15:57
  R. Sikoryak: It was maybe more prominent for me in the Constitution to sense that as I go through history, the parts that are problematic are, some of them are resolved as we go forward. And I liked thinking about them as a chronology of a reading experience because it's not like we threw out the old Constitution. It's still there. It's still part of it. So we're still kind of acknowledging.
• 16:18
  R. Sikoryak: And staring at the flaws from the beginning.
• 16:21
  R. Sikoryak: even as there's amendments later on, if you can stick around long enough, you'll get… you'll get to the better parts. And I think the Declaration has a little bit of that, again, like, juxtaposed with the Civil War era documents, so I…
• 16:37
  R. Sikoryak: I think it helped me recognize that these are still living documents, and to hear politicians talk about the Declaration now, oh, we can't live like they suggest in that document, and sort of trying to rewrite that history is kind of shocking, but people will keep doing that.
• 16:57
  R. Sikoryak: That's one of the reasons using different styles made sense to me, because different characters that I represent would have different viewpoints. Mallard Fillmore is in.
• 17:07
  R. Sikoryak: is in the Declaration, and I know Mallard Fillmore's politics are not mine. Mallard is the duck. And, you know, I might agree more with other artists, or many of the other artists, but… I should say characters. I should say characters. Some characters don't express the views of their creators, but…
• 17:25
  R. Sikoryak: But I really wanted to make sure that the book, Acknowledged those.
• 17:30
  R. Sikoryak: Issues that I'm dealing with but also still trying to bring all these.
• 17:35
  R. Sikoryak: Voices and styles together.
• 17:38
  R. Sikoryak: To suggest… We all have to, we all, we're all here.
• 17:43
  R. Sikoryak: I guess, I guess on some, some level we have to get used to it. Even if we don't want to accept it, we have to deal with each other in the, in the, in the meantime.
• 17:54
  R. Sikoryak: Was that coherent? That was a very good question, and I'm afraid.
• 17:58
  Tad Eggleston: I thought it was cohere.
• 17:59
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, great. Thank you.
• 18:01
  Britton Payne: What artists were you excited to match up with what provisions of either the Declaration of the Constitution or the Proclamation?
• 18:07
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, well, some were really… some came to me right away. I would also say, because I had done the book, the Constitution book, earlier, I vowed not to repeat any of the artists who were in here, which was a bit of a struggle, because there would be characters I wanted to include who
• 18:24
  R. Sikoryak: I didn't want to redraw in the new version, but you know, many of the, many of the.
• 18:29
  R. Sikoryak: comic book characters and so many of the comic strip characters have been reinvented by succeeding artists that I felt I could go back to the well if I was dealing with someone, you know, who had different iterations. So, I mean, one of the obvious ones in the book
• 18:46
  R. Sikoryak: Which occurred to me pretty early on was there's a line about, the king dissolving,
• 18:54
  R. Sikoryak: dissolving the representative houses in America, and I quickly came upon Thanos snapping his fingers as people were dissolving. So that, like, if you can find a visual cue like that, especially one that a lot of people know about, even though it came from the comics, so many people saw the films.
• 19:13
  R. Sikoryak: That, that was like a great visual, a visual, echo to play with.
• 19:20
  R. Sikoryak: As far as, like, just drawing styles, I really like,
• 19:25
  R. Sikoryak: playing with old comic strip styles, so I love working in that era. But it's fun to take on a challenge, like… the Emil Ferris page was very challenging. I had tried to fit in her characters in the previous book, and it was only until I found the right page this time around.
• 19:41
  R. Sikoryak: that I… that I went back to her, but that was a struggle to sort of capture that… that, like, cross-hatching color, development that she does. It's… the way that she builds color out of… builds form out of different colors was… was…
• 19:58
  R. Sikoryak: difficult for me, but I knew it would make a striking page, and I was excited to do that one.
• 20:06
  R. Sikoryak: And I really tried… I really tried to represent a gamut, and the earliest book… the earliest characters in this book are from 1903, and the most recent characters are from 2024, 2025. So I really wanted to…
• 20:22
  R. Sikoryak: Deal with the breadth of comics. And I, I mean, it was fun.
• 20:25
  Ryan: Yeah.
• 20:26
  Ryan: Some of that I, you know, obviously I could pick out all the.
• 20:32
  Ryan: Well, there was no direct Kirby ones in the new book.
• 20:36
  Ryan: But there was plenty of the bastardized Kirby that we got from 70s Marvel, like the… like that John Byrne Terry Austin super villain team-up cover. That's a famous one, that Silver Surfer thing you had going.
• 20:50
  Ryan: So those are always fun for me, but then some of the,
• 20:56
  Ryan: And then I just love that you had Pete Bagg and Mark Beyer in there, because they're two of my all-time favorite cartoonists.
• 21:04
  Ryan: Yeah, the famous Dark Side thing by Keith Giffen.
• 21:08
  Ryan: From Legion of Superheroes, so that was another Kirby clone type of thing.
• 21:13
  R. Sikoryak: For sure.
• 21:13
  Ryan: Oh, wow.
• 21:15
  Ryan: And then, but then some of it, yeah.
• 21:17
  Ryan: Some of it, is more contemporary, like, YA look and stuff.
• 21:23
  Ryan: That I, you know, that's for.
• 21:26
  Ryan: A decidedly younger crowd than me, but
• 21:30
  Ryan: They'll get a kick out of it, I'm.
• 21:32
  R. Sikoryak: Well, that was the hope that that that anyone who saw it would recognize somebody.
• 21:38
  Ryan: Yeah.
• 21:38
  R. Sikoryak: Wanted people to feel like they were in it too.
• 21:41
  R. Sikoryak: And it is really fun for me, because a lot of my fans are older comics fans, but when I see a young kid come up to my table and recognize that I included the Wimpy Kid on the cover, or I included
• 21:57
  R. Sikoryak: the… the… the Babysitter's Club characters from the new book, you know, I'm… I'm really trying to make sure people go, like, this isn't…
• 22:06
  R. Sikoryak: just for one type of fan. Now, I realize by making… including everyone, it probably will confuse some folks that aren't used to the history, but I'm hoping that there's at least something people go like, oh yeah, I remember that. So, whether they're reading it now, or they read it 50 years ago, or somewhere in between.
• 22:24
  Britton Payne: But,
• 22:25
  Tad Eggleston: That was new.
• 22:26
  Britton Payne: Church.
• 22:26
  Ryan: This is covered.
• 22:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, he did give the 10th Amendment to Kirby.
• 22:32
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, yeah. Like I said, I couldn't go back to Kermit.
• 22:35
  Tad Eggleston: Only once per artist.
• 22:37
  R. Sikoryak: And I had to find a Conan not drawn by John Basema, who would have also been a possible choice.
• 22:42
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 22:43
  R. Sikoryak: So, yeah, Ryan, there was a lot of, like, negotiating characters and what iterations to use of them.
• 22:50
  Ryan: Well.
• 22:51
  Ryan: Dark side and Thanos, he can't lose.
• 22:55
  Britton Payne: How much research did you have to do for the newer artists? Like, were you already reading Baby Sitters Club, or relatively aware of it? Or were you like, what's hot now? Let me read that so that I can include it.
• 23:05
  R. Sikoryak: It's a little bit of both, I mean, I read Raina Telgemeier
• 23:09
  R. Sikoryak: familiar with those from when she started that series, but I had done a Raina in the Constitution, so, like, well, I can't do Raina again, but there's other people that took over that series. So some of it is a matter of doing research. I often…
• 23:22
  R. Sikoryak: I often go to bookstores or comic shops and just look around, see what's popular. I look at bestseller lists to see what's popular. I had to have put Dog Man in here, for instance, maybe the top selling comic of all time, at least in America. So there's always research, but then there's research going back.
• 23:40
  R. Sikoryak: I included Skippy, which was a very… a huge comic strip from the 20s, which has not been reprinted that much.
• 23:48
  R. Sikoryak: There are a few volumes that came out recently, but it's almost like a pre-Peanuts kids comic, because it's these very precocious kids having street fights, but also philosophical conversations. I mean, you can totally see where Schultz got inspired by these characters.
• 24:04
  Julie: But…
• 24:04
  R. Sikoryak: there… I can't remember if it was Comics Kingdom or GoComics, but these are two sites that have newspaper comics, and you can go through the archives, and one of those sites, I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember which syndicate his was, but one of those sites has
• 24:22
  R. Sikoryak: years and years of Skippy from the 20s, so I was able to, like, look through every… every episode, and find…
• 24:30
  Ryan: Shut up.
• 24:30
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, it's fantastic. They have Crazy Cat. They have Thimble Theater. It's such a great resource. They don't have every strip, but there's a number of 30 strips they have. Yeah, it's Go Comics and Comics Kingdom. I'm always recommending them. And a lot of the new artists are there too. So a lot of new newspaper comics I will follow there.
• 24:50
  R. Sikoryak: So, I'm always looking at stuff.
• 24:54
  Tad Eggleston: He has totally sold me on subscriptions to both.
• 24:58
  R. Sikoryak: Thank you.
• 24:58
  Tad Eggleston: I have subscriptions to both.
• 25:01
  R. Sikoryak: It's very they're very affordable. And it's a great.
• 25:05
  Tad Eggleston: Expensive.
• 25:06
  R. Sikoryak: It's a great way to get pretty nice.
• 25:09
  R. Sikoryak: Nice copies too. I mean, these are, these are clean, these are clean scans of the old art in most cases. Right. But that's where I found the Julia Jones pages. That's where I found.
• 25:19
  R. Sikoryak: I've probably found alley oop. Where did I find alley o
• 25:22
  R. Sikoryak: I was probably on their site. Maybe it was one of the IDW.
• 25:25
  Tad Eggleston: I know Alley Oop is on one of them.
• 25:27
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, so maybe that.
• 25:29
  Tad Eggleston: I'm, I'm, I'm looking for Skipp.
• 25:31
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah. Excuse me.
• 25:32
  Tad Eggleston: I figure it's my job to answer questions like this.
• 25:35
  R. Sikoryak: Skippy, Skippy is fantastic, so, anyway,
• 25:41
  R. Sikoryak: these books give me an excuse to research, and I'm happy to do that. I try to look at everything, I mean, I look at everything more than I read everything, but I, you know, I try to sort of get a sense of what's happening, and the evolution of comics is always exciting to me, so…
• 25:57
  R. Sikoryak: It's, it's been fun. Now, I would also say for this book,
• 26:03
  R. Sikoryak: I wanted to make sure I had famous characters.
• 26:06
  R. Sikoryak: That I hadn't included in the Constitution that made me research, was there ever a Family Guy comic book? Like, that's a character everyone would know. And it turns out there were three or four issues of a Family Guy comic in the 2000s. I was like, all right, that qualifies.
• 26:20
  Britton Payne: Alright.
• 26:20
  R. Sikoryak: I didn't… yeah, I didn't… I did not want to… I did not want to start drawing from animation stills, because I thought, that just opens up the field so much. Like, that's just a whole other… like, just for my brain to not explode, I had to just kind of limit it to print media, or, you know, web…
• 26:38
  R. Sikoryak: print, you know, web comics. So rather than move into animation, I was like, all right, these exist as comic strips, which is how I got The Lion King in there and Rugrats. These were syndicated strips as well after the animated films or movies, I mean, shows.
• 26:54
  Tad Eggleston: So I will, I will quickly say Skippy from Percy Crosby is on Go Comics.
• 27:00
  R. Sikoryak: Okay, thank you.
• 27:03
  Britton Payne: That was really fun to think about how modern this is. This is going to be a little bit of a long bit, but I've been reading comic books since about 1974, '75, and a lot of them were educational, as you can imagine. The Golden Legacy stuff, the Martin Luther King comic books that inspired John Lewis.
• 27:19
  Britton Payne: In 1976, there were all kinds of — and in 1989, it was the 200th anniversary of the Constitution itself, and George Perez did this insert that went into the Yale Daily News.
• 27:33
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, I found that, I found that.
• 27:35
  Britton Payne: That's wonderful. Yeah, that's a good one. And then it'.
• 27:38
  R. Sikoryak: Superman going back to the writing of the Constitution.
• 27:41
  Britton Payne: Yeah, and then I think Spider-Man and Captain America did something similar over in Spidey Super Stories also during Bicentennial, or no, actually during Bicentennial. And certainly there have been a lot of comic books, and there are children's books even, that try to illustrate the Constitution, make it more understandable. And what they do is they tend to break it down, they modernize the language, they sort of eliminate parts of it and focus on the things that are understandable and stuff like that.
• 28:06
  Britton Payne: And, you know, that's a great way to do it, but what… it's interesting, as I was looking through this, what you've done, you've got very much, like, this hip-hop sensibility of a remix, right? Of taking things that exist and mashing them together to making something
• 28:19
  Britton Payne: You're taking not only the text of the Constitution, but the illustration styles of these various artists, the comic book style of these various artists.
• 28:27
  Tad Eggleston: I have to inter.
• 28:27
  Britton Payne: And then you'.
• 28:28
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I.
• 28:29
  Britton Payne: Yes.
• 28:30
  Tad Eggleston: Bob, has anybody ever called you hip hop before?
• 28:34
  R. Sikoryak: No, but I have a, I have a, I have a deep affinity for.
• 28:40
  R. Sikoryak: that music, and I will talk about that. Please, Britton, finish your lovely…
• 28:43
  Britton Payne: The notion of a remix culture, but even that remix culture is 30 years ago. If you look at what you're specifically doing, you already know this, I apologize for telling you things you know, but you are making single panel
• 28:57
  Britton Payne: pieces of work that are in a vertical format rather than horizontal. These are very much, like, TikTok-y. You know, they're very, very modern in that sense, in a different way of expressing the Constitution. And I know a lot of this is just your personal artistic expression, but it also
• 29:14
  Britton Payne: does fit this modern way of telling stories. This would not have been a sensible way to tell this 40 years ago, or certainly not 60 years ago when people just weren't thinking this way. They weren't ready to change the channel with every panel, but you did. And probably a lot of these could be taken out of context completely and still stand on their own. The amount of text per page is comparable to the note at the bottom of an Instagram feed.
• 29:38
  Britton Payne: It's a similar font style, which there were times when it would have been appropriate to change the font and you chose not to, so that it is consistent.
• 29:48
  Britton Payne: a consistent format that sort of teaches you how to consume it as you consume it, that just feels very, very modern to me. It certainly feels, you know, hip-hop and remix-y, but also the format that you chose to tell this story is very much like a scrolling feed of horizontal-oriented images.
• 30:04
  Britton Payne: that mix things that already exist, mash it up with something that you're interested in, or mash it up with something that's different, and expresses it the way that you were interested in expressing it. It's a… as a format, it's extremely modern to me. It's a very, very modern way of using comic books to tell a very modern
• 30:22
  Britton Payne: Or to create a very modern piece of work.
• 30:25
  R. Sikoryak: That's fantastic. And I appreciate you saying all that. I had not made the connection to TikTok, but I see what you're saying for sure. But when you mentioned hip hop and you mentioned remixing, that is absolutely where I'm coming from. I was in art school in the 80s.
• 30:45
  R. Sikoryak: I was listening to De La Soul, and I was listening to Public Enemy, and I was listening to the Beastie Boys, and I mean, Dale.
• 30:54
  Britton Payne: We were listening to all that music before my people, the lawyers, got a hold of it. There was sort of a break in.
• 30:59
  Tad Eggleston: I'm fine.
• 30:59
  R. Sikoryak: 100%.
• 31:00
  Britton Payne: New York, you were getting those cassette tapes.
• 31:03
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, 100%.
• 31:03
  Britton Payne: Nobody could tell him not to do it because it was so underground.
• 31:07
  R. Sikoryak: I was listening to the De La Soul record that was not available for years because they used samples that were uncleared, and that… that first album, 3 Feet High and Rising.
• 31:19
  R. Sikoryak: Blew my mind. I just felt that that.
• 31:25
  R. Sikoryak: I don't know, it's, it's somehow, it, it's, it somehow remade this work with so much.
• 31:30
  R. Sikoryak: affection and surprise and comedy that I just, I just, I just love that.
• 31:37
  R. Sikoryak: record. And then the density of Public Enemy and also the humor of the Beastie Boys and Paul's Boutique, which came out a couple years later, but was also just like them throwing everything into that mix.
• 31:52
  Ryan: It's still their best one, I think.
• 31:54
  R. Sikoryak: Probably, yeah. I mean, that certainly hit… that one hit me probably the hardest, although…
• 31:58
  R. Sikoryak: I like their later stuff too, but yeah, that was the one that kind of broke things open. I like the first record, but Paul's Boutique is astonishing, and it was more so in 89, I think, when it came out. So, I definitely relate to that. I mean, I…
• 32:12
  R. Sikoryak: went to art school, so I was, you know, I was looking at John Cage and Rauschenberg and, you know, older artists who were, you know, collaging and reinventing the past and all the pop artists to a certain extent.
• 32:28
  R. Sikoryak: So all that makes sense to me. I guess it is modern in a certain sense, but it also…
• 32:35
  R. Sikoryak: Seems maybe pre-modern too, but I do see the, I guess I do see the connection to social media for sure, I guess, I guess.
• 32:42
  R. Sikoryak: the… maybe the… maybe the mixing… well, the availability of the variety of material is part of what made these books possible for me, and that is very much of the 21st century, late 20th century,
• 32:55
  R. Sikoryak: you know, the internet made a lot of this possible and easier for me, even though I was doing work sort of like this in in the late 90s, but more so. It's where we're at now.
• 33:10
  R. Sikoryak: So yeah, that's great. Thank you.
• 33:12
  Britton Payne: Fun. It's really fun. And you also chose to draw in the styles of the artists. Other artists, other, so I don't know if you know Alex Robinson, but, the guy who created Box Office Poison, he… he similarly recreates
• 33:24
  Britton Payne: comic book covers that he cherishes in, but they'll show Teddy Roosevelt or his favorite, you know, historical characters or Trump or whoever. But he tends to recreate those images in his own style rather than, I'm looking at right now, Ty Templeton's style for Superman breaking the chains and stuff like that. And it feels like a really daunting task.
• 33:44
  Britton Payne: To try to imitate the styles of all of these different creators.
• 33:50
  R. Sikoryak: It is. I come from also, I mean, speaking of pre modern, I also come from the tradition of Mad Magazine and the early artists that worked there, like Will Elder and.
• 34:04
  Britton Payne: Do any of your pages serve as a fold-in to reveal a new image, like in a magazine?
• 34:10
  R. Sikoryak: I have not done a fold in yet.
• 34:14
  Julie: as yet.
• 34:15
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah. Well, let's see.
• 34:16
  Tad Eggleston: Have you just done a fold in period or have you just not done.
• 34:19
  R. Sikoryak: I've never done. I've never done a fold in. I've.
• 34:22
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 34:22
  R. Sikoryak: I haven't done a Jaffe in any case. But yeah, when I think. But when I think back to, like, those early mad days, like, they were really trying to replicate the styles. And I think.
• 34:33
  R. Sikoryak: Maybe it's just my obsessiveness. Also, I never really enjoyed my own style, just in terms of
• 34:39
  R. Sikoryak: When I would make finished work that wasn't kind of a parody or homage, I always felt that it felt a little weak to me. And I feel like being able to sort of like stand on the shoulders of giants or something makes my work better. So if I can actually kind of replicate the styles, I think it makes the work richer. And I mean, I hope people recognize.
• 35:01
  R. Sikoryak: when you see all these together, you kind of understand the conceit, which is it's all these voices coming together. One at a time, it might sort of seem like, hey, why did you rip off this one artist? But that's not the point. The point is to have them next to each other. So that goes back to the remix, in a way. It's like having them all bumping up
• 35:18
  R. Sikoryak: next to each other. That's the excitement for me, and I think if they were all my own style, it just wouldn't feel as special, and I might not get that point across that I wanted to get over. But I like bootleggy versions of characters that are off-model, and.
• 35:37
  Britton Payne: Me too.
• 35:37
  R. Sikoryak: The new Nancy strip is really interesting because it's clearly Carolyn Cash's drawing and I really like all her work and to sort of see her sort of do this like kind of very punk version of Nancy is very funny and not, I wouldn't, it wouldn't have occurred to me to do that, but I really enjoy.
• 35:57
  R. Sikoryak: how… Idiosyncratic it is, which is kind of the inverse of Birchmuller's style.
• 36:03
  Julie: Okay.
• 36:03
  R. Sikoryak: In some ways, you know, I think her jokes are… have Bushmiller qualities, but the rendering is very much her own. So, I mean, that's a different kind of remix, I guess. I mean, I enjoy that too, it's just that's not my… that's just not my way.
• 36:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 36:24
  Tad Eggleston: I… wanna call out something that I appreciate.
• 36:29
  Tad Eggleston: In terms of what you do, and then kind of ask if anybody has specific pages that
• 36:34
  Tad Eggleston: That stood out to them kind of in this way, and I'm going to use one of the more obvious examples.
• 36:42
  Tad Eggleston: I like how oftentimes the artwork will…
• 36:50
  Tad Eggleston: We'll really kind of highlight something that that may be… Overlooked.
• 36:57
  Tad Eggleston: In the text, particularly if, like, you sit with the artwork.
• 37:02
  Tad Eggleston: and… and I'm going to use two similar examples. In Emancipation Illustrated, when you get to the… except the 48 counties designated as West Virginia, and also the counties of Berkeley, blah blah blah, the places where there isn't emancipation, you've got this smiling… you know, it's… it's from Kay Chronicles, and you've got this smiling
• 37:20
  Tad Eggleston: Guy, and the, like, rolling eyes… Oh.
• 37:26
  Tad Eggleston: Black guy, I forget the name of the character from the Kay Chronicles off the top of my head. Similarly,
• 37:33
  Tad Eggleston: For the 13th Amendment, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.
• 37:42
  Tad Eggleston: shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction, and while you have chains being broken, it's… it's Luke Cage who, you know.
• 37:52
  Tad Eggleston: Of all the superheroes out there, it's most famously one that has spent time in prison, and therefore would have been allowed to be a slave.
• 38:03
  Tad Eggleston: so, so like, again, these are, these are a couple of more obvious examples of like how.
• 38:11
  Tad Eggleston: the… the… Art can not only go along with
• 38:18
  Tad Eggleston: the text, but sometimes go along with, oh, this…
• 38:23
  Tad Eggleston: there's some subtext here, or there's some text that people tend to gloss over when they think of this, and let's draw that out.
• 38:33
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, A, I encourage any of the rest of the people, if you have pages that that did for you, to think of them and share them, but B, Bob, like, how much thought goes into
• 38:45
  Tad Eggleston: oh, this doesn't quite say what a lot of people think it says, or this section is the very lawyerly, you know, hey, we're doing this, except we're not totally doing that.
• 39:00
  Tad Eggleston: How much thought do you put into, like, oh, I really want to pull that forward, and how much of it is…
• 39:08
  Tad Eggleston: You're doing jazz, you're riffing, and this felt good, and it just kind of shows up there, you know?
• 39:14
  R. Sikoryak: Well… That's… that's a good question.
• 39:18
  R. Sikoryak: Between the 2 books, there's like over 200 artists and 200 pages, so sometimes it's
• 39:25
  R. Sikoryak: it's maybe more conscious, and other times it's more like, well, this kind of fits, I think this will fit, and I talk myself into it as I draw it. But, I mean, it was a long process of sort of finding the different artists, trying to, like, again, make sure I cover the scope of artists and,
• 39:43
  R. Sikoryak: the timeline and the diversity of artists was really important to me. So sometimes it was like, this is pretty good, and this… this illustrates part of it, that you got all that from the Luke Cage.
• 39:53
  R. Sikoryak: Page is great. I think you expressed it more.
• 39:59
  R. Sikoryak: coherently than I would have, but that's all in there, and that's… that's great. I think that a reader's associations to the characters may deepen… hopefully not contradict, hopefully deepen the… the… the… the…
• 40:13
  R. Sikoryak: The echoes that are there.
• 40:16
  R. Sikoryak: So certainly the Keith Knight one and a lot of the more lawyeries talk in the Constitution and emancipation is very funny to me because it is very, there's lots of except this, except that, not except this, don't forget this, like this doesn't count, this counts. And I'm amused by that.
• 40:34
  R. Sikoryak: verbosity, which is antithetical to what many people think about comics, but I actually have come to really like overwritten comics, because I think there's something very funny and counterintuitive about that.
• 40:47
  R. Sikoryak: It's not the way I would write comics, but there's something amusing about that juxtaposition. So the Keith Knight drawing for that was a natural because it is very compromised.
• 41:00
  R. Sikoryak: And, you know, to at least have one character rolling their eyes during some of this is great.
• 41:08
  Britton Payne: I'm curious to Julie and Ryan, what,
• 41:10
  Britton Payne: You know, if you hadn't really
• 41:12
  Britton Payne: I'm currently studying for the bar in California. I'm a New York lawyer, but I'm trying to get my California bar, my California license. And so I'm very familiar with the Constitution right now in a way that is really unpleasant.
• 41:24
  Britton Payne: And Tad, obviously, is reading it all the time, and R has been, you know, drawing it for a while, but you guys maybe only are, you know, revisiting the Constitution for the first time in a while because it was illustrated, or the Declaration, or the Emancipation Proclamation. I'm curious, as you've looked at it, what things, big or small.
• 41:42
  Britton Payne: Kind of stood out to you, that were illuminated, about the Constitution, you know, just because you hadn't read it in a while.
• 41:50
  Britton Payne: or Constitution, Declaration, and Emancipation Proclamation, all.
• 41:56
  Tad Eggleston: And again, his brick address.
• 41:58
  Britton Payne: And Getty's B.
• 42:02
  Ryan: Well, for me, I grew up on Schoolhouse Rock.
• 42:06
  R. Sikoryak: Great.
• 42:06
  Britton Payne: Mmm.
• 42:07
  R. Sikoryak: Me too.
• 42:08
  Ryan: Yeah, we knew kind of a little bit of that stuff, but I don't think I'd read it since…
• 42:14
  Ryan: high school civics class. That being said, none of it really stood out.
• 42:19
  Ryan: You know, in terms of the text.
• 42:22
  Ryan: But, my whole game was really the juxtapositions of the text with picking out
• 42:29
  Ryan: you know, thematically appropriate illustrations, and I thought that certain ones hit the nail right on the head, like the Freak Brothers one. That was just… I thought that was really spot on. I can't remember what,
• 42:45
  Ryan: Wasn't that the part where they're talking about standing armies?
• 42:48
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 42:49
  Ryan: Yeah, so I'm playing from memory here, so unreliable at best, but that one really hit the nail on the head for me. I thought the
• 43:01
  Ryan: I thought the Buddy Bradley one was really good, and I thought Bag would probably appreciate that himself if he sees it. You know, he's a big libertarian.
• 43:11
  R. Sikoryak: I know.
• 43:12
  Ryan: Yeah. So I think that he probably has read he's probably read the whole thing many times over himself. And I think he would get kind of a kick out of that. And I just think, you know, all those times is Buddy raging at the world are always just so perfect, you know?
• 43:30
  Ryan: I mean, nobody draws that kind of thing better than he did. And then, I'm trying to remember what the Mark Beyer one was, but I think it was when they were talking about, you know, despotic overlords type of thing,
• 43:45
  Ryan: the abuses of, and I thought that the,
• 43:49
  Ryan: I thought that the, the exact wording eludes me, you'll have to forgive me, but I thought that, you know, the, nature of his, overlord-ish characters, and how,
• 44:02
  Ryan: Truly alien, they kind of are.
• 44:04
  Ryan: Really hit, really hit the mark on the head with that one.
• 44:09
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, thanks. Yeah, I, yeah, that that page has.
• 44:13
  Ryan: I can't help but sound totally ignorant, and I apologize.
• 44:16
  Tad Eggleston: You are.
• 44:16
  Ryan: You fight.
• 44:17
  Tad Eggleston: No, you're not sounding ignorant.
• 44:19
  Ryan: If I try to pull up the imagery and do the zoom, everything slows down on me.
• 44:24
  R. Sikoryak: No, that's that's totally fine.
• 44:26
  R. Sikoryak: You… you… no, you got all three… you got all three correct, not that you're being graded on this, but you… but you… no, you pin… you pinpointed them very accurately. I was just gonna say the one… the one part of the Mark Buyer page that I chose.
• 44:40
  R. Sikoryak: There's a line that says, a long train of abuses and usurpations. And that seemed to really reflect the series of events that happens to the characters in Mark Byers comics.
• 44:51
  Ryan: Oh, yeah.
• 44:52
  R. Sikoryak: Series, long train of abuses that seemed like spot on for his.
• 44:57
  R. Sikoryak: his character's experiences. Yeah, that's…
• 45:00
  Ryan: Amy and Jordan in a nutshell.
• 45:02
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah. So, so, but thank you for those. I, I, I, that's the, that's the, you're speaking of the, of the era that I would assume you'd be familiar with the, the eighties, the eighties and nineties work. So that was great.
• 45:20
  Tad Eggleston: Mom's back!
• 45:22
  Julie: Yeah, my phone overheated.
• 45:25
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, no.
• 45:26
  R. Sikoryak: Sorry.
• 45:28
  Julie: And.
• 45:28
  Tad Eggleston: You were using your phone rather than your computer?
• 45:32
  Julie: Yeah, I can't get my computer to do what it needed to do.
• 45:36
  Tad Eggleston: Gotcha. That's fair.
• 45:38
  Julie: And my… Tablet doesn't do this anymore, so…
• 45:43
  Tad Eggleston: We'll have to work on that the next time I'm out. Let.
• 45:46
  Julie: Thank you.
• 45:46
  Tad Eggleston: It worked for you.
• 45:49
  Tad Eggleston: Tablet, you can bring this way, but the computer, I'll see what I can do next time I come out.
• 45:54
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, oh.
• 45:56
  Tad Eggleston: but
• 45:57
  Tad Eggleston: So did you have any pages that stood out to you? Is kind of where we were at? Anything that you looked at differently?
• 46:06
  Tad Eggleston: On this read because of the art that went along with it.
• 46:12
  Julie: Well… Yeah.
• 46:15
  Julie: I gotta get up there.
• 46:24
  Tad Eggleston: So we don't have too much dead air. I will also say that one of the pages that I appreciate the most is the arguing snowmen.
• 46:33
  Tad Eggleston: from Calvin and Hobbes for Article 5, because it's like, yes, you can change this, but my God, is it going to be a crazy comedy of errors to do so?
• 46:48
  R. Sikoryak: Well, it's such a pleasure when you have to draw a crowd scene to realize, oh, they could all be snowmen.
• 46:53
  Tad Eggleston: No, man.
• 46:54
  R. Sikoryak: After 100 pages of people arguing, it's like, well, some of them don't have to be drawn in the Milt Gross style, that actually is in another page, but in this case, I can just do… I can just do Snowman and keep it relatively simple, just change their hats.
• 47:09
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 47:12
  R. Sikoryak: I mean, Calvin has a lot of situations that probably would apply to these books.
• 47:17
  R. Sikoryak: But that one, that one, stuck out for me.
• 47:22
  Britton Payne: I thought it was fun putting myself in your shoes, imagining, you know, which artists would I have chosen to put in, and which,
• 47:30
  Britton Payne: Mostly these were what I recognized as comic book covers.
• 47:34
  Britton Payne: which images would I have?
• 47:36
  Britton Payne: chosen as representative of that artist, and then thinking about, okay, I wonder why R made these particular choices. And it really stood out to me in a sequence that wasn't too far apart. You had two different
• 47:51
  Britton Payne: Covers that had, the white original hero.
• 47:56
  Britton Payne: being, fighting with and essentially losing to the Black replacement hero. So you have.
• 48:02
  R. Sikoryak: Mmm.
• 48:03
  Britton Payne: Hal Jordan laying on the ground in the fist of Jon Stewart, and then a couple of pages later, you have Tony Stark and Jim Rhodes, James Rhodes, fighting each other. At least that's what I think was going on in there.
• 48:15
  R. Sikoryak: Right. That's. That's right. I forgot that was Jim Rose, but you're correct. I was just like, oh, two Iron Man fighting. Great.
• 48:21
  Britton Payne: That's hilarious.
• 48:23
  R. Sikoryak: I, but you're right. That must have been, it must have been Rose. I'd have to go back and read that issue. But yeah, that was a case of like seeing the cover going, oh, that will work for, for these purposes.
• 48:32
  Britton Payne: Yeah, but it was because, you know, when I, and when many people look back on the Constitution in our founding documents, and especially the Civil War stuff, era stuff, post-Civil War, you know, race was obviously the nation's original sin and was what sort of created the second iteration of America post-Civil War.
• 48:50
  Britton Payne: So, when I think about these foundational documents, I do think about race a lot, which means then that when I'm looking at
• 48:58
  Britton Payne: you know, a cartoon, your work, I'm conscious of when there are minority characters in the works, because I know that that's not who a lot of the foundational documents were really thinking about, and the women especially, as well.
• 49:12
  R. Sikoryak: Right.
• 49:13
  Britton Payne: And so you seem to very consciously make some of those choices.
• 49:17
  Britton Payne: So I don't know, I was just kind of curious to see about how you considered race as you picked the representative images that you were going to use in your work.
• 49:27
  R. Sikoryak: Well, in the Green Lantern page, you mentioned the, the Jon Stewart and, and Hal Jordan lanterns facing off like that was 100% part of the choice. I, I, I found myself, there's so many he's, there's so many pronoun he in the Constitution that I.
• 49:46
  R. Sikoryak: sometimes got lulled into using male characters. I was like, wait, there should be some women in here. So I do remember in the same section that you're talking about, near the end of the Constitution, I made a point of making sure Fred Flintstone and Wilma are talking about the succession of… of,
• 50:02
  R. Sikoryak: The presidency and Doctor Strange and Clea are talking about the succession of the presidency because I was like, these characters are, I keep, I keep drawing male characters for the president and I have to stop doing that, so I, I was kind of embarrassed when I realized I had done that a couple of times in the book where I didn't have.
• 50:22
  R. Sikoryak: Again, I think it's all the he's, but I can't say it's strictly that we haven't.
• 50:27
  R. Sikoryak: seen the alternate world yet, but you want to put that in the book. You want to… especially in the case of the Constitution, I wanted to make sure, like I said before, I wanted people to see themselves in this document. It is a document that is alive and is changing. It's like, let's make sure
• 50:45
  R. Sikoryak: there's diverse visuals in here, and I… I think I could have done a slightly better job, but I think the new book helps with that, because I made even more efforts to make sure that… that I tried to get different voices in there.
• 51:02
  R. Sikoryak: So hopefully, hopefully that comes across. It was definitely something I was thinking about.
• 51:07
  Britton Payne: Done.
• 51:08
  R. Sikoryak: So, I.
• 51:08
  Britton Payne: Well, it makes you think about it too, because like, you know, we can all read as well and see all the he's and he's and know that we're talking about white men and stuff like that. But then over time, as the law has been interpreted and evolved, we know that those terms now apply to men and women and they apply to people of different races and things like that. And so the…
• 51:25
  Tad Eggleston: Should.
• 51:26
  Britton Payne: No, no, they do. I mean, they do. And so they appropriately are represented by people who may not have been contemplated at that time because the president.
• 51:36
  Britton Payne: of the Constitution and the Declaration of Ind
• 51:39
  Britton Payne: It includes the rights of all of those people, even if that's not who was in the, in the originally.
• 51:46
  Britton Payne: made explicit. It is now, and so a modern document illustrating the Constitution, Declaration, and Emancipation Proclamation, and
• 51:55
  Britton Payne: and Gettysburg Address should show them, because they… because everybody gets those protections, whether or not they were considered at the time.
• 52:03
  R. Sikoryak: Right. Yeah, thank you. I mean, and that's what I, my regret about these books is that.
• 52:10
  R. Sikoryak: I don't have characters from the future. I mean, I really was like, I wish I could have some characters from 2050 in here, because these are going to… these are going to feel dated in 20 years, but someone else should redo this book in 20 years, and do a new version, and…
• 52:25
  Julie: And they don.
• 52:25
  R. Sikoryak: Have to do this, they don't have to do
• 52:28
  R. Sikoryak: Idea of it, but they could, they could do any anything they want, but.
• 52:31
  Ryan: Hey, wait, wasn't Reuben Flagg in there somewhere, though?
• 52:36
  R. Sikoryak: Yes, he was. What was that reference?
• 52:38
  Ryan: That's still the future in my book.
• 52:40
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, that's true. Thank you so much. That's absolutely right. I forget what year. What year did that take place? It might have only been 2030. That sounds.
• 52:50
  Britton Payne: About right.
• 52:51
  R. Sikoryak: Remember, but good.
• 52:52
  Tad Eggleston: Right around the corner.
• 52:54
  R. Sikoryak: Good point. Good point. All right. Yeah, I forgot about that. Thank you.
• 53:00
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, that might be the only few. There might be other sci-fi in there. I have to double check.
• 53:06
  R. Sikoryak: But thank you, Ryan.
• 53:07
  Tad Eggleston: Did you find the page you were looking for, or…
• 53:12
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, okay.
• 53:14
  Tad Eggleston: That, that I'm gonna direct a, a question towards Britt because you're
• 53:20
  Tad Eggleston: because you're deeply immersed in this as you study for the bar again, and because the law… I mean, even before studying for the bar again, like, the law has been a…
• 53:32
  Tad Eggleston: A major part of your entire adult life, you know, it's what you do,
• 53:38
  Tad Eggleston: Was there anything that you looked at at all differently, and or were there pages where you went, damn, that's spot on?
• 53:47
  Britton Payne: You know, there were fewer because I'm really thinking about it in a modern sense. And I'm also, when you study for the bar, they specifically direct you to certain topics and avoid others. So for example, my legal career has largely been about copyright and trademark and copyright and trademark are not tested on the bar.
• 54:07
  Britton Payne: So it's useless to me. When I got to that provision, I think it's section one, paragraph eight, or I forget how they even designate it, where they establish patent and copyright.
• 54:21
  Britton Payne: rights, it says it protects the sciences and useful arts.
• 54:27
  Britton Payne: So if you're thinking about copyright and trademark, you're like, oh, science, that sounds like patent, and arts, that sounds like copyright, and it'
• 54:34
  Britton Payne: Sciences are considered the things that elevate the mind and move the abstraction of liberal thought forward, so that includes treatises and creative things that enrich the mind.
• 54:47
  Britton Payne: Whereas useful arts are things like a plow, you know, and things that you can use, useful arts, and so that's more like an invention. So it's funny that, like, to the modern ear.
• 55:01
  Britton Payne: even if you know that that's where the rights lie, that understanding of the words aren't necessarily the same, that gets made specific when you see choose spelled C-H-U-S-E, when you see commas in weird places, you know, because maybe they were trying to capture the way it was spoken out loud in the room.
• 55:18
  Britton Payne: Rather than what we currently think of as grammatically proper.
• 55:22
  Britton Payne: And so, you know, just kicking around those kinds of things were fun. I was more interested in
• 55:29
  Britton Payne: Who made the cut, you know, who I think was cool. When finally I saw Chris Ware, I was like, good, okay, he's in there. And, you know, but also thinking like, yes, but he did Quimby Mouse instead of, you know, my favorite character or whatever.
• 55:43
  Britton Payne: And I was like, oh, I wonder if he drew it by hand like Chris Ware, or did he use Illustrator? You know, those kinds of things about the art side and about the legal side.
• 55:52
  Britton Payne: There was, like, the Three-Fifths Compromise, you know, where there's this phantom person
• 55:59
  Britton Payne: I know of that from, you know, studying history, but that is not a present thing in the law, and certainly not in my legal practice. You know, that's an artifact.
• 56:09
  Britton Payne: historical thing that's now gone. It is, you know, illustrative of the shenanigans that people try to pull off with electoral politics and counting votes and things like that. But it in itself is not particularly current. It is more historical. It's more about learning about the document rather than using it today.
• 56:28
  Britton Payne: But, but, you know, those were conversations that were going on in my head as I, as I looked, as I looked through it.
• 56:33
  Britton Payne: a little bit more with an eye towards, oh, okay, that's right, maybe this drawing will help me remember that the Fifth Amendment does this and the Sixth Amendment does that, because I know I'm going to get tested on it.
• 56:43
  R. Sikoryak: Well, that's great. I hope it helps.
• 56:46
  Britton Payne: I hope so, too.
• 56:48
  R. Sikoryak: Very exciting to me to hear that you might be using it as a study guide.
• 56:53
  R. Sikoryak: Fun.
• 56:55
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, again, you brought up a lot of interesting stuff there. I would say.
• 57:01
  R. Sikoryak: In terms of who was in it and who wasn't in it, a lot of it came down to what could I possibly shoehorn into this page, or what is a natural connection that I can make between the art and the text.
• 57:16
  R. Sikoryak: There were a lot of artists I didn't get to include.
• 57:22
  R. Sikoryak: Certainly I included a lot of favorites, but I also left out a lot of favorites just because I couldn't figure out how to fit in.
• 57:28
  R. Sikoryak: Name your favorite artist. I have a long list of people I just could not fit in, ran out of pages, ran out of text, or just that the text was like, I might have had a notion for something. I can't think of one off the top of my head, but I might have had a notion for a character, but there wasn't a piece in the text that was appropriate for it. You know, occasionally something would hit me like a lightning bolt, but other times.
• 57:52
  R. Sikoryak: Less so the, the Chris Ware page you mentioned, was one of the, one of the later ones, and it was, it was, it was a.
• 58:01
  R. Sikoryak: It just worked out. And I was like, oh, great, I got Chris in here. It was exciting to me to do it. But, you know, it. I couldn't. I couldn't. I can't get in everyone, unfortunately. Now, the other thing you said about. Oh, you mentioned something else.
• 58:18
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, well, you mentioned the 3/5 compromise, which
• 58:22
  R. Sikoryak: I like that I had to address it and keep it in the book even though it is not.
• 58:26
  R. Sikoryak: relevant anymore, but I thought, no, this is part of the history, and in a way, I'm glad we don't put out a new constitution that just cuts out pieces. I felt like it was important to
• 58:39
  R. Sikoryak: To show that's where we started.
• 58:42
  R. Sikoryak: Yes.
• 58:43
  Britton Payne: In my world, that in particular is useful because, so we're looking at the Constitution and these foundational documents. I'm thinking specifically about the Constitution just because I don't get tested on the Emancipation Proclamation from the bar, you know, or the Declaration.
• 58:58
  Britton Payne: But for the three-fifths compromise in particular, for anybody who's
• 59:03
  Britton Payne: listening who doesn't know, this is where they were trying to figure out how to dole out representative votes in Congress and in the election of the president based on population of a state, but the states that had slavery, that
• 59:19
  Britton Payne: allowed slavery to be legal had more non-citizens. And so they wanted it though.
• 59:25
  Britton Payne: credit, I guess, for, if I'm doing finger quotes, for credit for having those people. And the other states said, that's ridiculous. You know, they're slaves, that's not appropriate at all. So they said, how about three fifths? And they said, all right, fine, it's called the three fifths compromise. And that has now been, the constitution's amendments changed that so that it's, you know, one person, one vote
• 59:45
  Britton Payne: And that those people are able to vote.
• 59:48
  Britton Payne: But…
• 59:48
  Britton Payne: What it does do is it reminds us of who the people were writing those words 250 years ago, because we currently look at other modern statutes and try to test their constitutionality based on the words of those people.
• 1:00:05
  Britton Payne: And if we sort of think of them as men chiseled out of granite.
• 1:00:10
  Britton Payne: That, that we're right all the time and, and infallible, then we are less likely to
• 1:00:16
  Britton Payne: to question their foundational words that we're basing these laws upon. Whereas if we recognize them as humans and flawed, and sometimes even wrong, and sometimes horrifically wrong, then we can look at the foundational documents with a different eye as saying, okay, well, what is useful and illustrative, rather than what is pedantic?
• 1:00:36
  Britton Payne: And there'll be plenty of people who disagree with me, by the way. I'm not saying that I'm right. I'm saying, but this is how I feel, that there's an.
• 1:00:43
  Tad Eggleston: I'll say you're right, and yes.
• 1:00:45
  Britton Payne: Well.
• 1:00:45
  Tad Eggleston: people who disag.
• 1:00:46
  Britton Payne: I'm sure the people on this call, you know, probably, I don't imagine Tad is inviting people who, you know, feel radically different than him. But there are people out there and they're also Americans and they deserve to have their thoughts.
• 1:00:57
  Tad Eggleston: They do.
• 1:00:57
  Britton Payne: Word.
• 1:00:59
  Britton Payne: And respected, especially voters, not necessarily the politicians who are espousing them.
• 1:01:05
  Britton Payne: And so to recognise the value of the elasticity of the document and the thought that went into it and the values as the better, how can we use this document to make our country better rather than pedantically say like, well, these are what the letters of the word say, and this is how I'm telling you what they meant.
• 1:01:24
  Britton Payne: So the door is now closed, and there is no debate. I don't find that to be very useful. I think it's… maybe it's…
• 1:01:31
  Britton Payne: it's.
• 1:01:32
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and.
• 1:01:32
  Britton Payne: You could consider it, but it's not persuasive.
• 1:01:35
  Tad Eggleston: You're touching on one of the things I love about these books is that
• 1:01:40
  Tad Eggleston: There is a huge swath of the country, no matter what they think of the specific words of the Constitution or the Declaration or whatever, have always viewed them as impenetrable, haven't even necessarily tried to read them because they think that they're
• 1:01:57
  Tad Eggleston: they're…
• 1:01:58
  Tad Eggleston: Too long and, and, you know, all sorts of things that is based on just bad assumptions, not like.
• 1:02:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so the fact that, you know.
• 1:02:09
  Tad Eggleston: You have all of this in, in like an inch worth of comic books.
• 1:02:15
  Tad Eggleston: With, like, a paragraph per page.
• 1:02:18
  Tad Eggleston: I think makes it that much more accessible to, to anyone. You know, I, I told Bob on the, on the last.
• 1:02:28
  Tad Eggleston: conversation, and I'll repeat it again. You know, where I fell in love with this book was after watching a clip
• 1:02:36
  Tad Eggleston: of Jordan Klepper from… From January 6th, where he was, he was talking to this 20-something-year-old guy.
• 1:02:45
  Tad Eggleston: Near the Capitol.
• 1:02:47
  Tad Eggleston: And the guy's going, what they did was unconstitutional. It's like, really? Like, where in the Constitution? Well, I don't know. They just said, well, I don't… I've read the Constitution. You've read the Constitution? Yeah, it's a remarkably short document.
• 1:03:04
  Julie: Okay.
• 1:03:04
  Tad Eggleston: You've read the Constitution? Yeah, you should maybe look into it, because I feel like you're about to, like…
• 1:03:11
  Tad Eggleston: Commit… sedition!
• 1:03:15
  Tad Eggleston: at, like, that just stuck in my head so much, because, again, like, yes, I know, I'm an autistic weirdo.
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: I own it.
• 1:03:24
  Tad Eggleston: But, like, I have! I've read the Constitution at least once a year, every year since I was 12, and it's never felt like this big burden.
• 1:03:33
  Tad Eggleston: You know, at 12, it was kind of hard, but, like, at 13, when we actually had to study it for…
• 1:03:39
  Tad Eggleston: for 8th grade and and learn about it. It became easier. And and every year after I mean, it's like there are certain things that I I read every year, you know, around either the 4th of July or or election day or inauguration day is when I'll read the Constitution, and generally the Declaration.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Around President's Day, I'll generally read Lincoln's second inaugural and, and the emancipation or, the, the Gettysburg Address and, and, and around.
• 1:04:11
  Tad Eggleston: Martin Luther King Day, I'll read Letter from Birmingham Jail, and I'll read the I Have a Dream speech. And none of them are that long.
• 1:04:19
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we're talking…
• 1:04:21
  Tad Eggleston: Maybe an hour out of my day on any given one of those days to read that stuff.
• 1:04:28
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, when I hear that people think that it's so impenetrable that they haven't even tried, it's like, I really appreciate that now I have this fun version to hand to somebody and say, well, here, try it.
• 1:04:43
  Tad Eggleston: Try it.
• 1:04:45
  Tad Eggleston: Oh.
• 1:04:45
  Britton Payne: I have a question for you, if I can ask it. Sure. This is gonna get a little bit political, but the Second Amendment, you illustrated the page that has the Second Amendment, you chose the cover of GI Joe number one, I believe.
• 1:04:57
  R. Sikoryak: Yep.
• 1:04:58
  Britton Payne: And it shows… it shows the, it shows a bunch of G.I. Joe-looking guys, but they're dressed in tri-corner hats, and they're jumping off of a giant cannon instead of what I'm assuming is a tank in
• 1:05:09
  Britton Payne: And it's very explosive and dynamic and energetic and stuff, and I don't know if this falls into the, you know, the sort of Kirby clone type stuff. But today, on the front page of the New York Times, it says the current administration rolls back dozens of gun regulations.
• 1:05:21
  Britton Payne: So, this is a hot…
• 1:05:23
  Britton Payne: Currently, for most of our lives, it has been the sort of tension between the Second Amendment, which roughly suggests that it's important that people can arm themselves.
• 1:05:34
  Britton Payne: And the belief by a lot of people in modern times that guns should be better regulated than they are.
• 1:05:43
  Britton Payne: Then they maybe were back in that.
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: Well, this is where I'm going to actually jump in and say, like, the idea that guns should be regulated is in the Second Amendment, and it's only in modern times that we've started to have trouble with it.
• 1:05:59
  Britton Payne: It is, I agree with you that it is a document that, or it's an amendment that has been troubled in its interpretation and that there are good people on both sides.
• 1:06:08
  Tad Eggleston: Well, but, but, but.
• 1:06:09
  Britton Payne: I have found…
• 1:06:10
  Tad Eggleston: Your lawyer, the first…
• 1:06:12
  Britton Payne: Let me step in with lawyer stuff. I disagree, or I disagree with the…
• 1:06:18
  Britton Payne: I believe there should be more and better regulation. I do happen to think that the current Supreme Court analysis of the Second Amendment has been largely correct, based on how it is written, and the way the people who wrote it felt about it.
• 1:06:31
  Britton Payne: I disagree with it, meaning, you know, substantively I disagree with it, but textually.
• 1:06:36
  Britton Payne: I unfortunately think that the, I think that the amendment says what they say it says. You and I may disagree totally fine.
• 1:06:42
  Tad Eggleston: That's that's that's a much longer conversation. The question.
• 1:06:45
  Britton Payne: to R, yeah, the question to R is to what extent was he thinking about that when he chose the GI Joes?
• 1:06:51
  Britton Payne: And sort of celebrating guns on that page.
• 1:06:56
  Britton Payne: rather than celebrating the regulation. I wonder if that one was challenging for you as you approached the Second Amendment for those reasons.
• 1:07:04
  R. Sikoryak: It it was challenging to me.
• 1:07:07
  R. Sikoryak: That was an interesting page. I…
• 1:07:12
  R. Sikoryak: I do try to give each page its due.
• 1:07:16
  R. Sikoryak: As I said before, I wanted to represent everybody. I would say one thing about that page that I recall, and this was… this was, like, 6 years ago that I drew that page, but I seem to recall thinking, oh, I'll use the Punisher. I wanted to have some over-the-top violence. I mean, it's sort of…
• 1:07:34
  R. Sikoryak: comically explosive, the image I was referencing. And I thought I could do something with the Punisher, and then I thought, well, wait a minute, this is about militias.
• 1:07:45
  R. Sikoryak: So I should have a group, I shouldn't have a solo guy with a gun. And I was like, that's about as far as I got. I was like, alright, well, if you all want to look at this, it's like, think about militias versus solo…
• 1:07:58
  R. Sikoryak: You know, standing ground.
• 1:08:01
  R. Sikoryak: Guy in the next Spider man movie, whatever you would call him. Like, like, let's make it about the. Let's, let's, let's at least acknowledge the militia part of it.
• 1:08:10
  R. Sikoryak: But I…
• 1:08:12
  Tad Eggleston: It it is actually.
• 1:08:13
  R. Sikoryak: I hope that the comical, I mean, I'm sure it's not, you can't, any war movie, I think I've heard this said, and I think it's true, I think any war movie is not an anti-war movie. You can't make, someone suggested that you can't make an anti-war movie. Once you make a movie with people shooting guns, it's like it's pro-war. I kind of agree with that. Apocalypse Now is a lot of things, and I don't know, I'm sure people watch that movie go like, yeah, I want to go fight.
• 1:08:38
  R. Sikoryak: And it's not… it's clearly not meant to be pro-war, but it… There's some pretty glorious…
• 1:08:45
  R. Sikoryak: explosions in that movie. And so I'm not… I could have chosen something different. I decided to go with something bombastic and over the top.
• 1:08:55
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I agree with you, Britt, but I, I didn't, but that's what I, that's what I settled on for that page. But it did, it was, there's a, there was a push and pull with that page in particular.
• 1:09:05
  Britton Payne: Did you have a similar push and pull with any pages in the declaration book?
• 1:09:08
  R. Sikoryak: Well, there's that line about the, there's that line about the indigenous folks, which that's not the term they use when they describe them in the declaration, but that page was.
• 1:09:20
  R. Sikoryak: Kind of nauseating, so I ended up using a very restrained style from the 30s. It's this strip called White Boy, ironically, and it is a fairly,
• 1:09:35
  R. Sikoryak: is a very… fairly sympathetic representation of… of American Indians or Indigenous Americans. It's a fairly sympathetic representation of them, told from the viewpoint of a white boy, but,
• 1:09:51
  R. Sikoryak: But I thought I could at least do something pretty, and if you see the characters that are looking at each other in that page, hopefully you'll sort of sense that there's more going on than just, these are savages that we have the right to…
• 1:10:03
  R. Sikoryak: Eliminate. That's not exactly what it says, but it does call them savages, and that made me super queasy.
• 1:10:09
  R. Sikoryak: And I perhaps could have done something that was more overt commentary, but again, I think if you see the dynamic of the characters, you'll appreciate what I'm going for there. But it's maybe more subtle than it needs to be for something that's so, like, explicitly racist and…
• 1:10:25
  R. Sikoryak: You could argue explicitly, colonial… colonialist? Colonialist? What's the word I'm looking for? Empire building? Because it's basically saying, we want this land, and…
• 1:10:39
  R. Sikoryak: The Brits are keeping us from it and these other people. So anyway, that was a. That was a.
• 1:10:45
  R. Sikoryak: troublesome page, but I don't really know what I could do on that page without changing the text. That would make me feel better about it. It's… it's just… it's a really unpleasant part. But it's… again, it's woven in the story, and it's like what you were saying before, Britt. These are not…
• 1:11:00
  R. Sikoryak: These are not larger-than-life gods, these are…
• 1:11:05
  R. Sikoryak: compromising and compromised men writing these documents. So it's part of the story, you know, and I want to acknowledge that if you get past the fun parts about all are created equal and we have these rights, then you get to the harder stuff toward the end.
• 1:11:24
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna jump back to the Second Amendment page just for a minute, because I… it's… no, it's one of my favorite pages, and I told you about this the very first time we talked about it. Because they're… they're dressed as colonial Minutemen, it absolutely
• 1:11:40
  Tad Eggleston: acknowledges the original intent, which which was, there wasn't supposed to be a standing army.
• 1:11:45
  Tad Eggleston: You know, we needed to have the ability to protect communities. They weren't comfortable
• 1:11:52
  Tad Eggleston: Completely yet, with a strong government, so they needed… like, one of the concessions to the states was the idea that you'll have your militias, if you have to rise up against us, we won't prevent your ability to do so.
• 1:12:05
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:12:07
  Tad Eggleston: But then, it was also G.I. Joe. It wasn't… wasn't like Joe Qbert's…
• 1:12:14
  Tad Eggleston: War stories or, or, or whatnot so, so like, you've got the historic.
• 1:12:22
  Tad Eggleston: Minutemen real militia mixed with what makes me just think so much about people out in the woods playing.
• 1:12:30
  Tad Eggleston: Army, you know, that has become so much of what gun rights have.
• 1:12:35
  Tad Eggleston: Become is, is I get to go pretend that I'm.
• 1:12:39
  Tad Eggleston: Whatever.
• 1:12:41
  Tad Eggleston: You know, there isn't any serious…
• 1:12:44
  Tad Eggleston: There isn't that same level of seriousness to what many of the people making the arguments Today, have…
• 1:12:56
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so that's always actually been one of my favorite pages, because I felt like it really well set up the argument surrounding
• 1:13:06
  Tad Eggleston: the, the, the Second Amendment.
• 1:13:09
  Tad Eggleston: Bomb.
• 1:13:11
  Tad Eggleston: and and what its meaning is, and and like it's gone through separate meetings, you know, until 2,008. Pretty much every time it came up in the Supreme Court they leaned heavily on
• 1:13:24
  Tad Eggleston: The well-regulated militia.
• 1:13:27
  R. Sikoryak: Thank you.
• 1:13:29
  Tad Eggleston: Bruin and forward, it's shall not be infringed.
• 1:13:33
  R. Sikoryak: Mmhm.
• 1:13:34
  Tad Eggleston: You know, so like.
• 1:13:38
  Tad Eggleston: On every level there has been debate over that amendment.
• 1:13:42
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, the NRA went from a.
• 1:13:45
  Tad Eggleston: Organizations that helped write gun control legislation, To an organization that…
• 1:13:53
  Tad Eggleston: doesn't believe in any of it. And that happened when there was essentially a takeover of their major conference in, I want to say, 1977 in Cincinnati. Everybody just showed up and voted the other way.
• 1:14:05
  Ryan: They were all for gun control when the Panthers were arming up.
• 1:14:09
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 1:14:10
  Ryan: You know, they didn't.
• 1:14:11
  Tad Eggleston: Ronald Reagan signed off on the strictest piece of gun control legislation ever put forth at the state level in the United States because it had to do with disarming the Black Panther Party.
• 1:14:24
  Ryan: Yeah, and the NRA… the one, gun control thing in recent decades that the NRA sat on the sidelines and did nothing about was when they banned Saturday Night Specials, which legally disarmed the poor.
• 1:14:38
  Ryan: You know, you can't get cheap firearms anymore unless you get them illegally. It's a crime, man.
• 1:14:46
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, I mean, it, it is a fascinating one, but I do, I mean, I
• 1:14:50
  Tad Eggleston: I think you perfectly threaded the needle on that, where you did the hat tip for why it's there, and there are important reasons why it's there. There are unimportant reasons why it's there, too. You know, the southern slave owners were really big on being able to keep their guns. It's a lot easier for a couple of people to keep
• 1:15:10
  Tad Eggleston: 100 people in bondage, if the 100 people in bondage don't have the same firepower. But…
• 1:15:20
  Tad Eggleston: it's also become a completely different world, you know? I don't think that…
• 1:15:25
  Tad Eggleston: That any of the founding fathers could could imagine.
• 1:15:30
  Tad Eggleston: And Uzi.
• 1:15:32
  Tad Eggleston: Let's have this thing that we can put in your coat and pull out and fire 100 bullets a second.
• 1:15:41
  R. Sikoryak: They did tell us we're supposed to amend it. I mean, that was…
• 1:15:44
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly.
• 1:15:45
  R. Sikoryak: And that we could amend it and.
• 1:15:47
  Tad Eggleston: And, and, and my response…
• 1:15:48
  Julie: Good.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: is, like, if this Supreme Court is the right ruling, and
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: I think it's fair to argue that, but if it is, that's what pushes me over the line to.
• 1:16:00
  Tad Eggleston: we need to repeal the Second Amendment and write something that makes more sense.
• 1:16:05
  Tad Eggleston: You know.
• 1:16:08
  Tad Eggleston: be… because it… it's… It's just.
• 1:16:13
  Tad Eggleston: ridiculous how how little
• 1:16:18
  Tad Eggleston: I just I don't know. I and actually, this is a question I've always wanted to ask a lawyer. So particularly because you're you're you're studying the bar right now.
• 1:16:26
  R. Sikoryak: What do you think of Wolverine? Who's stronger.
• 1:16:28
  Tad Eggleston: Well, that too. No, no, no, this is a more general question, Bob. I'm leaving guns. I'm done with my gun.
• 1:16:36
  Britton Payne: But the how…
• 1:16:37
  Tad Eggleston: How are we…
• 1:16:38
  R. Sikoryak: Better have to do with comics, though, Tad. That's.
• 1:16:41
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's supposed to be both tonight.
• 1:16:43
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 1:16:44
  Tad Eggleston: You got your whole episode that was all about comics.
• 1:16:48
  Britton Payne: We just watch our, I'm gonna bring it back to comics no matter.
• 1:16:50
  Tad Eggleston: I know he will, he's good at.
• 1:16:52
  Britton Payne: I always have that on my mind.
• 1:16:55
  Tad Eggleston: How are we supposed to read the preamble?
• 1:16:58
  Tad Eggleston: I've always thought of the preamble as…
• 1:17:01
  Tad Eggleston: like, the lens through which you're supposed to read everything that follows. If you have questions about what this means, we need to go back to the preamble and think of what it means through that lens.
• 1:17:16
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't feel like that's the way it's treated, and I don't know if that's just like a choice thing, or like, is there a way that it's supposed to be treated because it's arguably the most beautiful paragraph in all of our founding documents.
• 1:17:32
  Tad Eggleston: But I don't know that I always feel that it's treated as important.
• 1:17:36
  Tad Eggleston: So… so, I mean, is… is that… is that my hallucination? I mean, yeah, I'm… I'm…
• 1:17:42
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, how, how, how, how, how do you think the preamble is read? How do you think it should be read?
• 1:17:51
  Britton Payne: It's a mixed bag, right? So, you know, I'm a lawyer, so the answer is a little bit of this, a little bit of that, you know, on one hand. What's the saying? I wish I could find a one-handed
• 1:18:01
  Britton Payne: On one hand, on the other hand. There's a specific example.
• 1:18:06
  Tad Eggleston: Limited lawyers than money.
• 1:18:07
  Britton Payne: It can feel like that.
• 1:18:08
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's right.
• 1:18:09
  Britton Payne: So today I was literally studying some of this language, which was provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare.
• 1:18:17
  Britton Payne: Because that defines the powers of Congress. They… is Congress allowed to pass this law? Well, one of the tests they have to do is, does it… does it fit into one of the things that's the purpose of giving them power in the first place? And part of that purpose is to provide for the general welfare.
• 1:18:34
  Britton Payne: Now, that's been interpreted very, very broadly, so that's why Congress can do so many things. The mechanism for doing it, as we learned from, I think it's the 10th Amendment, that we can'
• 1:18:43
  Britton Payne: The federal government can't boss around the states, right? But they can incentivize the states. They can say, well, if you'll do such and such, we'll give you this tax money. So they do have the right to tax and to spend, but they don't have the right to command.
• 1:18:57
  Britton Payne: And so they can command in… or they can tax and spend.
• 1:19:01
  Britton Payne: for the purpose of promoting the general welfare. So that's where, you know, something that becomes important. I tend to think of the Declaration of Independence as something we should be looking at a lot, which is especially for, pursuit of happiness. I think that… I think that that's a really… if you look at…
• 1:19:17
  Britton Payne: where does a nation derive its power? It's from the foundational documents that everybody signed off on, and one of them says that the pursuit of happiness is part of what should be the goal of having a nation. And I just don't think that, especially in modern discourse, we don't really think about
• 1:19:33
  Britton Payne: the importance of happiness as much as we should. So, you know, to answer your question, Ted, there's an element of,
• 1:19:41
  Britton Payne: In contract law, especially, that the titles don't really mean anything.
• 1:19:45
  Britton Payne: You know, like, we can call this section, you know, police power or something like that, but then if the… if the actual text of the designating the power doesn't say anything about police power, well, then the heading doesn't mean anything.
• 1:19:57
  Britton Payne: And I think the preamble in some ways can be ignored and in some ways ends up being an important part of the foundational.
• 1:20:06
  Britton Payne: power of it, kind of in the same way that, like, when you're reading a comic book under Jim Shooter, you know, every comic book is somebody's first, and so there will be that introductory paragraph that says, I'm Wolverine, I'm the best there is at what I do, and you don't… you don't need that
• 1:20:22
  Britton Payne: that doesn't necessarily tell you the story, but it is helpful background information to help you understand the story. So that's largely where I look at the preamble. I agree with you, it's a beautiful piece of prose, it's probably one of the things that,
• 1:20:33
  Britton Payne: it lends power to the more boring stuff and legalese stuff that comes later.
• 1:20:41
  Ryan: Jim Shooter thinking to be in a thought bubble that Steve Rogers is somebody is thinking that recaps the last nine issues in, like, three panels.
• 1:20:51
  Britton Payne: Yes, yeah, but that's the principle. But in theory, you know, if you're following like the Marvel method, you should be able to just look at the images and tell the story, right? And like understand what's going on. And everything else is just kind of color that helps you maybe put it in context.
• 1:21:05
  Britton Payne: And I think that's, in large part, what the preamble is doing, and at some level, what the Declaration of Independence is doing. You know, it's saying we're free from England
• 1:21:13
  Britton Payne: in America, but it is because it's so important, it's the thing that pulled us all together.
• 1:21:18
  Britton Payne: You would look at that to find out what are the principles we're trying to get at in this later document.
• 1:21:24
  Britton Payne: All right, so I will have comic books in there a little bit.
• 1:21:29
  Britton Payne: You know what? Here's the other thing I wanted to say, too. You have that wonderful quote from Ben Franklin on the back of the book.
• 1:21:35
  R. Sikoryak: I love that. I needed to include that. It's, it's basically.
• 1:21:38
  Britton Payne: Really do.
• 1:21:38
  R. Sikoryak: Reaching. Yes. Yeah.
• 1:21:41
  Britton Payne: Yeah, but you know what, it's also him sort of recognizing the imperfection, capturing
• 1:21:46
  Britton Payne: Like you had said, R, that at some point you hate, you don't like having to compromise, but unfortunately that's sometimes what you need to do. And so even if- It was actually from.
• 1:21:55
  Tad Eggleston: the Ben Franklin Right, and that's.
• 1:21:57
  Britton Payne: Then stop.
• 1:21:57
  Tad Eggleston: Think about earlier, right?
• 1:21:59
  Britton Payne: Yeah, and you chose several similar quotes on the back where George Washington seems to really not like it very much.
• 1:22:04
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah, I think.
• 1:22:05
  Britton Payne: You know, a truism also in a lawsuit or in legal stuff is that if both sides are unhappy, you're probably pretty close to right. And so that's a good compromise because there's…
• 1:22:17
  Britton Payne: the idea that if you have an adequate legal system, it delays war. You know, it prevents people from just killing each other in the streets, because that's why our court system is so important, that people feel like they have this fair hearing, you know, that they have this feeling of justice.
• 1:22:35
  Britton Payne: And so, the…
• 1:22:37
  Britton Payne: Those guys were politically savvy. You know, Franklin knew what he was doing. He was talking to the French and he was talking to the British, you know, and he was talking to the local press in Philly and he was talking to the Virginians that he just buttonholed to get them to agree to, you know, this language. So if he went out and celebrated and said, yeah, this is the perfect document, then maybe those Virginians would be upset. But if he says, ugh, I'm upset.
• 1:23:01
  Britton Payne: You know, he's fainting, he's doing a little bit of Mu.
• 1:23:04
  R. Sikoryak: Something is…
• 1:23:05
  Britton Payne: true just to achieve his goal.
• 1:23:08
  R. Sikoryak: Moving.
• 1:23:09
  Britton Payne: that, you know, that's some of what certainly a savvy player like Ben Franklin was able to do. He was doing the same thing all over the world throughout his life, you know, was figuring out what do people need politically in order to advance the goals that he thought were appropriate. So…
• 1:23:23
  Britton Payne: some of that in the language of the Declaration especially, but I think probably also in the preamble of the Constitution,
• 1:23:31
  Britton Payne: Franklin had this notion that we shouldn't lean too heavily on God because maybe there's gonna be division that comes from that. Let's use the same concept, but make it less explicitly religious.
• 1:23:45
  Tad Eggleston: And as a result, recent…
• 1:23:47
  Britton Payne: Roll again with the new public.
• 1:23:48
  Tad Eggleston: One bit.
• 1:23:49
  Tad Eggleston: That changed it to we hold these truths to be self-evident rather than something more. I forget what Jefferson's original.
• 1:23:58
  Britton Payne: These are the truths that God gave us, or.
• 1:24:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 1:24:01
  Britton Payne: Yeah, that's exactly, I think I'.
• 1:24:03
  Tad Eggleston: To lean on to, yeah.
• 1:24:04
  Britton Payne: Yeah, to live.
• 1:24:06
  Tad Eggleston: Leaning on the reason rather than the, yeah.
• 1:24:11
  Britton Payne: Which was a political choice that he made.
• 1:24:13
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:24:15
  Tad Eggleston: No.
• 1:24:16
  Tad Eggleston: They would…
• 1:24:16
  R. Sikoryak: Talented. I know.
• 1:24:18
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I…
• 1:24:19
  R. Sikoryak: Exactly.
• 1:24:20
  Tad Eggleston: I think anybody who wholly discounts
• 1:24:23
  Tad Eggleston: Like the founding fathers for, for, for being intelligent and, and, and.
• 1:24:30
  Tad Eggleston: Forethoughtful and whatnot isn't paying attention, but I also think that, like, anybody who gets into the strictly textual, strictly historical is, is, like, willfully ignoring parts of the text.
• 1:24:44
  R. Sikoryak: he can.
• 1:24:45
  Tad Eggleston: Because, like, again, if you think you're making a perfect document, you don't make it amendable. If you think you've got all of the rights down, you don't need a Ninth Amendment to say, hey.
• 1:24:56
  Tad Eggleston: Just because we didn't enumerate it doesn't mean it's not still a right of yours.
• 1:25:01
  R. Sikoryak: Yeah.
• 1:25:02
  Tad Eggleston: You know, I mean, there are things in the text itself, never mind the writings and the speeches around the text, but there too, that make it clear that it's like…
• 1:25:12
  Tad Eggleston: We're doing something that we understand is new. We think we've gotten a lot of things right.
• 1:25:18
  Tad Eggleston: We're not certain that we'll feel that way 10 years from now, so, like, we'd like, at least if we're not Jefferson, to be able to change it without bloodshed.
• 1:25:28
  Tad Eggleston: Jefferson, actually, like…
• 1:25:30
  Tad Eggleston: Made statements about how we should re-sanctify it in blood and I'm kind of glad that we've only done that once.
• 1:25:37
  Tad Eggleston: I would like to not have to do it again.
• 1:25:39
  Tad Eggleston: Like, when you read about the Civil War times, they, they don't sound pleasant.
• 1:25:45
  Julie: No.
• 1:25:48
  Tad Eggleston: And that's one of the beauty, like, like, we're a relatively young country, but, like.
• 1:25:53
  Tad Eggleston: There aren't a lot of countries out there that have gone 250 years with only 1 major civil conflict.
• 1:25:59
  Tad Eggleston: So, in that sense, we're… Woo woo woo.
• 1:26:03
  Tad Eggleston: Pretty impressive.
• 1:26:05
  Tad Eggleston: Umm.
• 1:26:06
  R. Sikoryak: In other senses?
• 1:26:08
  R. Sikoryak: Less so.
• 1:26:10
  Britton Payne: Well, that's why it's that's why in order to form a more perfect union.
• 1:26:14
  Tad Eggleston: Frick you.
• 1:26:15
  Britton Payne: Recognizing there is no perfect union, but we can get more perfect.
• 1:26:20
  Tad Eggleston: Right. And that's one of the reasons that I ask about the preamble, because, like, that's part of the lens that I feel like it…
• 1:26:28
  Tad Eggleston: I feel like you're supposed to be reading stuff through. I mean, that's part of the lens that I feel like you should be reading the Second Amendment through, is like, okay, like, this text is imperfect. We need to think about why it's this text.
• 1:26:42
  Tad Eggleston: We need to think about that time versus this time. You know, no standing army that time. Standing army this time. Maybe a great compromise is, you want to be able to play guns like this? Fine, you're in the National Guard.
• 1:26:56
  Julie: Oops.
• 1:26:57
  Tad Eggleston: You don't want to play with guns like this, you don't have to be in the National Guard.
• 1:27:03
  Tad Eggleston: you know, I mean… But, but, yeah.
• 1:27:09
  Tad Eggleston: again, I just… I love that the… that what… what you've done, Bob, is create two books that not only encourage us to… to… to look at all this stuff again, but… but…
• 1:27:21
  Tad Eggleston: Give us a way to look at it with some humor.
• 1:27:25
  Tad Eggleston: Look at it.
• 1:27:26
  Tad Eggleston: From possibly a fresh perspective, definitely talk about it on more levels than just wherever our grievance is today.
• 1:27:34
  Tad Eggleston: Which, which isn't something that we get enough of.
• 1:27:39
  Tad Eggleston: in the world right now. So so I really appreciate it. Anybody else with last words before we wrap up.
• 1:27:47
  Ryan: No, I really had fun, with that book.
• 1:27:51
  Ryan: And I hope you find a way to do something else.
• 1:27:54
  R. Sikoryak: Thanks. Me too.
• 1:27:56
  R. Sikoryak: Thank you. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your knowledge of these.
• 1:28:01
  R. Sikoryak: of the of these culture, these subcultures of comics. So thanks.
• 1:28:05
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I will also toss out that Bob has done…
• 1:28:09
  Tad Eggleston: Masterpiece Comics, where he adapts, adapts classic literature into comic book form.
• 1:28:17
  Tad Eggleston: Specifically.
• 1:28:20
  Tad Eggleston: Continuing his pastiche of, of various people. I'm, I'm a particular fan of, Dennis the Menace, Prince of Denmark, and,
• 1:28:29
  Tad Eggleston: And, and.
• 1:28:30
  R. Sikoryak: Venice and Denmark.
• 1:28:32
  Tad Eggleston: I know, I wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't naming it specifically.
• 1:28:37
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, oh.
• 1:28:37
  Tad Eggleston: Trying to let people know what it was.
• 1:28:40
  R. Sikoryak: Oh, I see, I see, sorry, sorry.
• 1:28:43
  R. Sikoryak: I don't mean to step on you, Tad.
• 1:28:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, no, it's your book, so you're, you know, and Charlie Brown, the metamorphized bug.
• 1:28:54
  Tad Eggleston: Waking up in the morning, that's almost as good as when he woke up as a baseball.
• 1:29:01
  Ryan: You're o.
• 1:29:01
  Tad Eggleston: Done.
• 1:29:02
  Ryan: Trump book might be due for a follow-up, I mean, with the verbal diarrhea that guy puts out on a daily basis.
• 1:29:09
  Tad Eggleston: Except that I just don't want Bob to have to do that.
• 1:29:13
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 1:29:13
  Julie: Oh.
• 1:29:14
  R. Sikoryak: Thank you, Ryan. One of the reasons I did the Constitution was because I couldn't bear to draw Trump again for a while. But I wondered if there was more to do with that.
• 1:29:29
  R. Sikoryak: It might seem quaint at this time, I don't know, but I certainly, he's
• 1:29:34
  R. Sikoryak: He continues to infuriate me in new ways every day. He's quite, inventive.
• 1:29:40
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, every once in a while, he'll be quiet for a couple of days, and then he won't infuriate me more, but then.
• 1:29:46
  R. Sikoryak: Okay.
• 1:29:46
  Tad Eggleston: that there are new deaths.
• 1:29:49
  Julie: Yeah.
• 1:29:51
  R. Sikoryak: There was one thing I wanted to mention about the book that I was very happy to have this work out.
• 1:29:59
  R. Sikoryak: I, in the, in the Emancipation, I included, a page based on Hagar the Horrible.
• 1:30:07
  Ryan: Yep.
• 1:30:07
  R. Sikoryak: And I don't know if anyone caught this, but it's a shot of Hagar looking up into the heavens. And it's actually a reference to the comic strip that Joe Biden kept on his desk because he had a, he had a comic strip of Hagar speaking to the skies and saying, why me God? And God says.
• 1:30:24
  Julie: Haha.
• 1:30:25
  R. Sikoryak: Why not? Or something like that? I can't remember. But anyway, if, if Joe Biden was
• 1:30:30
  R. Sikoryak: reading comics, he'd, he'd recognize this page, and then in, in the same document, I got a page from the comic, the Milestone comic, Icon, which, I don't know if, if any of you were familiar, but this was, this was Clarence Thomas. Hmm?
• 1:30:45
  Britton Payne: Defin.
• 1:30:45
  Tad Eggleston: I said very. So it's clear.
• 1:30:48
  R. Sikoryak: It was Clarence Thomas's favorite comic. He would quote this comic, and it caused a lot of anxiety for Dwayne McDuffie, who wrote the comic, because he did not, he did not agree with Clarence Thomas.
• 1:31:01
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, did Clarence Tomics, like, read the comic very well, or did he read, like, the first…
• 1:31:08
  Britton Payne: Fair.
• 1:31:08
  Tad Eggleston: swing.
• 1:31:08
  Britton Payne: McDuffie also didn't agree with Icahn's.
• 1:31:11
  R. Sikoryak: Exactly, yeah.
• 1:31:12
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 1:31:13
  R. Sikoryak: conservative hero. So I was happy to represent comics that are loved by Thomas and Joe Biden in the same book.
• 1:31:21
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right. I mean, I.
• 1:31:23
  R. Sikoryak: Obama's reading these days, but maybe he's in there too. I don'.
• 1:31:27
  Tad Eggleston: I don't think.
• 1:31:28
  R. Sikoryak: Our current president reads comics, which is maybe one of his flaws.
• 1:31:32
  Tad Eggleston: Did you do any of March in either book? Because I know Obama was a big fan of March.
• 1:31:40
  R. Sikoryak: I didn't, that was a possibility, but…
• 1:31:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:31:44
  R. Sikoryak: That might have broken open the space-time continuum or the multiverse, if I put…
• 1:31:50
  Tad Eggleston: Let's.
• 1:31:50
  R. Sikoryak: Lewis in the Constitution. I don't know, maybe that maybe
• 1:31:54
  R. Sikoryak: I don't know. It seems like, seems like I'm, seems like I'm asking for trouble in terms of keeping that.
• 1:31:59
  Tad Eggleston: That's true. It's fair.
• 1:32:01
  R. Sikoryak: The Thomas Jefferson of Earth 2 from showing up.
• 1:32:08
  R. Sikoryak: Anyway.
• 1:32:09
  Tad Eggleston: Bye now.
• 1:32:09
  R. Sikoryak: I know I'm.
• 1:32:11
  R. Sikoryak: Great. It's been a long day. No, no.
• 1:32:14
  Tad Eggleston: That's what we do here.
• 1:32:15
  Britton Payne: So thank you, Paul. He's got gray temples in his red hair. Otherwise, he's the same.
• 1:32:26
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you all for joining us tonight. This has been the Joy, Resistance, Hope, and Survival Book Club on 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.