Latest / 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast / With Great Power #349... 22 Panels with Stephan Franck

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With Great Power #349... 22 Panels with Stephan Franck · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:00
  Tad Eggleston: Right into it.
• 0:02
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. We're starting almost in media res. Stephan has returned.
• 0:09
  Tad Eggleston: Dan Newland and Sean Harklerode are here to grill him about Palomino, because we did it in the book club, but we were actually just talking the spirit, and I decided that we had to hit record before we talked anymore.
• 0:23
  Tad Eggleston: Wonderful stuff about Will Eisner's The Spirit without, like, saving it for her posterity, so… Hi, guys!
• 0:30
  Tad Eggleston: Go ahead, Dan, with your… with whatever you were gonna say.
• 0:34
  Dan Newland: putting me on the spot. I was just… you were talking about how you discovered heavy metal, and that's sort of where you got interested in animation, or the idea that you could do it.
• 0:44
  Dan Newland: Had you seen, like, the metal Holland and some of the things that were the French edition of that? Or did you get into heavy metal from the American side first, essentially?
• 0:52
  stephanfranck: No, so, so, like, until that movie… so first, I was into… because I was…
• 0:58
  stephanfranck: before we were recording, we're talking about, like, my parents' store, right? So they had…
• 1:04
  stephanfranck: the comics, but they also had, because my dad had a photo studio in the basement, so everything that was related to, to photo, film, whatever, was also happening there. And so.
• 1:18
  stephanfranck: he was selling…
• 1:20
  Tad Eggleston: Parents' store just sounds cool as fuck.
• 1:23
  stephanfranck: Coolest.
• 1:24
  Tad Eggleston: Comics, books…
• 1:25
  stephanfranck: Anyway, good.
• 1:26
  Tad Eggleston: Photography.
• 1:28
  stephanfranck: Yeah, I would come back from school, and you know how, like, in libraries, you have, like, those ladders to go to the higher, like, shelves and stuff like that?
• 1:38
  stephanfranck: I was a little kid, I would climb on there, find an empty, like, cubbyhole in a, you know, and I would, like, sit there at the top corner of the store with my stash of comics, and I would read from there while I'd be monitoring the store, like, in a fucking, like, security camera.
• 1:55
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I love that you got into comics and animation, but I think that if I'd had your parents and their store, I, like, never would have left the family business, because after a certain age, you just wouldn't have been able to get me out the door.
• 2:09
  stephanfranck: Well, the family business left me, that's a surprise.
• 2:14
  stephanfranck: So, but… Anyways, right, so,
• 2:18
  stephanfranck: So, you know, he was selling Super 8
• 2:21
  stephanfranck: millimeter reels of the Disney animated movies, right? So I would bring them home and project them, like… I had something with climbing on top of stuff, so I would, you know, I would climb up my, like, bookshelf and from there, project, like, the film against the wall, and I'd be completely entranced by the, like, Jungle Book, all that stuff, like, all the milk call animation, I mean, it's just
• 2:46
  stephanfranck: I didn't know Mill Call back then, but it was just.
• 2:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 2:49
  stephanfranck: magic to me. So, I was always in love with the art form of animation.
• 2:56
  stephanfranck: But I was also in… but not so much with the stories. I was more interested with the stories we were telling in comics, and also in love with the art form. But see what I'm saying? Like, my… just the term… in terms of sensibility, I was more pulled in this direction. But then, the magic of animation was also… so I did both, growing up, and I completely forgot your question, I'm sorry.
• 3:20
  Dan Newland: No, just… I was… I was interested…
• 3:22
  Tad Eggleston: I think that answered whatever.
• 3:24
  stephanfranck: Whatever question.
• 3:24
  Tad Eggleston: We might have had to do.
• 3:25
  Dan Newland: But yeah, I mean, a lot of the… there was a lot of great French stuff going on at that point as well. Were you influenced as much by that then, or was you really more entranced by the American comics? And that was what…
• 3:37
  stephanfranck: Did you…
• 3:37
  Tad Eggleston: Discover Mobius BEFORE watching the movie.
• 3:41
  stephanfranck: Yes, so… Okay. Until… so…
• 3:45
  stephanfranck: Yes, as in, yes, I remember your question, and… but the answer is no. What I mean is that,
• 3:55
  stephanfranck: until I found that crate of books at the distributor's, you know, warehouse when I was with my mom, right?
• 4:02
  stephanfranck: I was…
• 4:04
  stephanfranck: solely into just the regular comics, like the American comics, and the French kids' comics. You know, you're…
• 4:13
  Tad Eggleston: Luke, 10-10.
• 4:15
  stephanfranck: you know, Tintin.
• 4:17
  stephanfranck: you name it, asterisk also, although I was less of an asterisk. Like, the whole,
• 4:24
  stephanfranck: got, you know, the Smurfs, you know, all this stuff. Anyways, so… but then what I found…
• 4:29
  Tad Eggleston: That's where your love for the Smurfs started.
• 4:32
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 4:33
  Tad Eggleston: directed a Smurfs movie.
• 4:36
  stephanfranck: I did. But then, when we,
• 4:42
  stephanfranck: when I found those books of the Spirit.
• 4:45
  stephanfranck: They are published by humanoids.
• 4:49
  stephanfranck: Ubenoid Associates, as they were called back then, right? Which is the, you know, the publishing company that used to do Metallurland. So, because of the spirit, I was like, hey, who's publishing this stuff? And that brought me to more of their books, and then I really became aware… because, like.
• 5:11
  stephanfranck: It was a family store, right? So, the material had to be arranged around the store by my dad.
• 5:20
  stephanfranck: By, by dangerousness.
• 5:23
  Dan Newland: Right?
• 5:24
  stephanfranck: So, all the… all the… The comics that were, like.
• 5:30
  stephanfranck: okay for kids, where, like, at kids' level, they were, like, you know, by the door and stuff, like, you're Spider-Man, you're Superman, all that stuff. But then there were the comics that were considered dangerous, and they were, like, printed in black and white, smaller, and I'm talking stuff like the original,
• 5:46
  stephanfranck: Death Pool, or… no, this…
• 5:50
  stephanfranck: wait, why am I breaking on his name? The Rich Butler, you know what I mean, Deathstroke? Deathpool? No, not Deathstroke.
• 5:59
  stephanfranck: Fuck, why is it… I'm so stuck on the French name, because they had French crazy names, but…
• 6:06
  stephanfranck: you know, he's a cyborg, you know, RoboCops inspired by it, deathlock.
• 6:11
  Dan Newland: Oh, yeah.
• 6:12
  Tad Eggleston: block.
• 6:13
  stephanfranck: That's true.
• 6:14
  stephanfranck: Deathlock. So, so all that stuff was higher, so kids couldn't reach, so it was on a completely other shelf. It was next to, like, the pop novels and the, you know, semi-porn stuff people read on the train and whatnot, right? And then you had magazines, you know, you had the news mags, and then you had
• 6:34
  stephanfranck: the dangerous magazines. So yeah, the porn, the blah blah blah blah, and Meta Lerlot was right next to the porn.
• 6:44
  Dan Newland: Nope, I mean…
• 6:45
  stephanfranck: Don't go there.
• 6:47
  stephanfranck: Right?
• 6:48
  Dan Newland: So you had the advantage of having the family store, but the disadvantage of having parents who knew exactly what was in all of those comics, because when I could bring home an Epic Illustrated, or a Heavy Metal, or whatever.
• 7:01
  Dan Newland: it was just a comic book, pretty much, to my parents, unless there was something crazy on the cover. So they never questioned any of this, you know? I mean, I was… when did… when did American Flag came out? Like, I would have been.
• 7:13
  Tad Eggleston: Over 30?
• 7:14
  Dan Newland: 13.
• 7:14
  Tad Eggleston: One or two, yeah.
• 7:16
  Dan Newland: I should not have been reading that, but I had all of them, because…
• 7:19
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, there you go, there you go, didn't know any better. So… but so… so that's when I discovered,
• 7:27
  stephanfranck: With the movie, then the movie, right? It's just like, okay, you know, and so…
• 7:32
  stephanfranck: And I had this huge collection of Metallurlan, and guess what? When I moved all my books, you can see a lot of them in the back here, but some of them I've had for decades, which I'm not gonna say on air. How many decades? But the point is.
• 7:49
  stephanfranck: every.
• 7:50
  Tad Eggleston: One decade.
• 7:51
  Tad Eggleston: There are You're very precocious.
• 7:56
  stephanfranck: Yeah, so… one box, didn't make it.
• 8:01
  stephanfranck: And that's the box I had all my material on.
• 8:05
  stephanfranck: and that had all the… the Dupri… you know, there was, like, two… I mean, there was a few historical… they're still… they're still around… publishers in France, like Dargo, Dupri, whatever, and Dupri had those amazing
• 8:23
  stephanfranck: softcover books that are considered, like, the holy grail of that era, and all of my softcover Dupree books also didn't make it. They got lost somewhere.
• 8:36
  stephanfranck: So, I'm very sad for those.
• 8:39
  Tad Eggleston: Hopefully, there was some very, very happy baggage claim handler somewhere that discovered them years later, rather than just getting destroyed or anything like that. I want to at least believe that they found a good home.
• 8:54
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, sometimes they do. I have a… from Chicago, I had a fun baggage claim story from Chicago.
• 9:02
  stephanfranck: one year I was doing C2E2, And,
• 9:08
  stephanfranck: you know, and so… because I was also doing this show in Montreal at the time, I was traveling sometimes to Montreal, and from LA, and so…
• 9:24
  stephanfranck: I had to take…
• 9:26
  stephanfranck: whatever. So, like, the thing happened that I… instead of going straight from home to C2E2, I flew through Montreal, and then we changed the tickets. Long story short.
• 9:37
  stephanfranck: at the end of C2E2, I have only a few books left, you know, with me and whatever, you know, and I go to the airport, turns out
• 9:46
  stephanfranck: my plane, you know, ticket had been canceled because of all the shenanigans of changing planes or whatever. Long story short,
• 9:55
  stephanfranck: I'm, like, desperate, because I have to be in LA, like, the next morning, I don't want to buy another ticket either, and stuff like that, and the lady saves my ass.
• 10:03
  stephanfranck: she goes, hey, I can put you in the seat that, you know, like, those jumper seats that, like, when the host, you know, the flight attendants, you know, just fly, you know, you can… but here's the trick.
• 10:15
  stephanfranck: you can't have… you can only have only one bag. Just one bag. And, you know, so I had to…
• 10:22
  stephanfranck: you know, and I had two bags, because I had a few books I was bringing back, so I'm cramming everything into the one bag, and then there's some books of silver, the types of trays of silver that I just didn't know what to do with, and I… I said, well, I'm giving them to you, because,
• 10:37
  stephanfranck: you know, and she's like, oh, you know, my husband loves comics, maybe I'll just give them. She's like, yeah, do, please, here, here's a bunch of books. So…
• 10:47
  stephanfranck: Fast forward the following year, I'm back at C2E2, this guy makes a beeline to the booth.
• 10:54
  stephanfranck: And goes, like, hey, you're probably not gonna remember her, but you met my wife at the airport last year, because you give her… dude, she saved my ass, I will remember her forever.
• 11:06
  Dan Newland: But he was like.
• 11:07
  stephanfranck: like, I love the boat, give me the yellow button!
• 11:11
  stephanfranck: Sometimes there's, like, little messages in bottles, and it finds, you know.
• 11:17
  Tad Eggleston: Well, your books are addictive, too.
• 11:20
  stephanfranck: Thanks.
• 11:21
  Tad Eggleston: At least, I find them addictive.
• 11:24
  Tad Eggleston: Dan finds them addictive. Sean finds them mildly addictive.
• 11:28
  stephanfranck: Well, you know…
• 11:33
  Dan Newland: We should probably talk about them a little bit.
• 11:34
  Tad Eggleston: I was about… I was about to segue into that, so why don't we talk a little bit of Palomino, because it's all done, it's all been shipped out.
• 11:45
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 11:45
  Tad Eggleston: So, so, so, I can say, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler alert, they're all available, if you haven't read them…
• 11:53
  stephanfranck: 621. That's right.
• 11:58
  Tad Eggleston: So…
• 11:59
  stephanfranck: A lot of pages.
• 12:01
  Tad Eggleston: So many good pages.
• 12:04
  Tad Eggleston: It's… it, like… Whoa, is…
• 12:07
  stephanfranck: Here's the thing, right, like, so, so, I…
• 12:14
  stephanfranck: I, as I was saying earlier, you know, I did comics and animation growing up, that was my, you know, thing, but,
• 12:22
  stephanfranck: you know, animation took over for me, like, just when I started animation school was when Who Framed Roger Rabbit came out, and that changed the industry completely, and now there was, you know, the opportunity to work on a lot of really cool stuff. So, I kind of embarked in comics, but the thing that had really, like.
• 12:43
  stephanfranck: because comics were, you know, like, the sort of Superman, Batman, Spider-Man, Iron Man, where everything, to me, Daredevil, you know, when I was, you know, all the way to 13, 14, once I found heavy metal, metal, right? And then at that point, I got more into Corbin, Mobius, all that stuff.
• 13:02
  stephanfranck: And so… but then, between animation and also music and stuff like that, I had kind of… by the time I was in college, I had, like.
• 13:11
  stephanfranck: not lost interest, but lost touch a little bit with comics, and that's when Dark Knight Returns, the Watchmen, the Sienkiewicz stuff, the Howard stuff, you know, all the… those… and I was reading that stuff, and I was like, holy fuck.
• 13:25
  stephanfranck: The great American novel with the stuff I used to love when I was 10. I'm obsessed now. And so,
• 13:35
  stephanfranck: my… so… and so then I started… I embarked on this career in animation, but 15 years ago, I was like, hey, don't forget, you also want to do the comics, and so I… I started, you know, doing comics, and… but immediately.
• 13:51
  stephanfranck: maybe unwisely, but I was like, hey, I want to try to tackle the big graphic novels. I want to try to do the immersive tone that you can sit for 5 hours on your… it's just like, you know… and… and so that's why Silver is, like, 500 pages, and…
• 14:08
  stephanfranck: Palomino is 600-something pages, and this… but there's something about… that form.
• 14:16
  stephanfranck: of storytelling that I think I find really fascinating, and of course, I like short things, too. Like, I have short things. The next thing I'll do in comics will be a very short thing, because I don't have it in me to commit to another 6 years or something, you know? But…
• 14:34
  Tad Eggleston: Your interim short thing was awfully good, too, for the love story.
• 14:39
  Tad Eggleston: Loving the time of the space god.
• 14:42
  stephanfranck: So, thank you. Sometimes it's like a, you know, it's just a primal scream that just comes out.
• 14:47
  stephanfranck: And I just remember growing up, you know, reading, like, you know, Stephen King, and sometimes you read his, like, 700-page, you know, novels, and sometimes you read his short stories, and there's a form and an art to all of them that is lovely, you know.
• 15:09
  Tad Eggleston: Everybody's tongue tied. Somebody say something.
• 15:13
  Sean Harklerode: So, what was,
• 15:15
  Sean Harklerode: So, did… did you spend 6 years on… on Palomino? Like, one a year, basically? Or…
• 15:22
  stephanfranck: Yes, something like this, although, it's because it's a,
• 15:30
  stephanfranck: it's a complex story, right? I mean, you know, there's all those threads that need to tie together and stuff like that, and so it's not something you can really improvise one book at a time, right? So, I knew,
• 15:44
  stephanfranck: roughly where I want it to go.
• 15:47
  stephanfranck: I had the ending in mind, you know, a version ended up changing, as you know, but I, you know, the ending in my… so I had my destination, I knew where North was, but I, you know, I wrote
• 16:01
  stephanfranck: And drew the first book.
• 16:03
  stephanfranck: And then I was like, alright, now I need to make… I'm really getting into, like, Act 2, if you will, right? So I really need to get my shit together, right? So I wrote…
• 16:13
  stephanfranck: And drew, in one stretch, 2 and 3.
• 16:17
  stephanfranck: And then, when I was done with three, I was like, alright, now we're on the B side, so everything… so I wrote it out all the way to the end, and I laid it out all the way to the end, the three books, and then I… and I started, like, you know, you know.
• 16:32
  stephanfranck: tying them down and stuff, so that's why I did 4 and 5. So, one came out, then 2 and 3 together, that was the biggest gap.
• 16:40
  stephanfranck: Because it took me a long time to write 2 and 3, and also because I was at my busiest, on some other projects, you know, and so, but I, I still…
• 16:56
  stephanfranck: get through it, you know, so it took almost 3 years to get 2 and 3 out, and then 456…
• 17:02
  stephanfranck: 4 and 5 took a couple of years, and then less than a year later, I had 6, because at that point, it was already written, it was already laid out, all I had to do was finalize the drawings.
• 17:10
  stephanfranck: So, it's a little, irregular in its, in its, release.
• 17:18
  stephanfranck: But,
• 17:22
  stephanfranck: So, it's pretty interesting, like, I find that if I'm in the middle of a show, like, for instance, when I was working on What If.
• 17:31
  stephanfranck: I was on there for almost 4 years, but I was still averaging
• 17:37
  stephanfranck: once the book is written and laid out, I was still averaging 5 pages a week, you know, at the same time as I was doing the show, so I was pretty good. And then,
• 17:47
  stephanfranck: like, last year, I was like, alright, I'm just gonna… I need to finish this series, so I put animation a little bit to the side, I just took some freelance gigs, but focused really on the book, and then I can see how fast I can go when I can just… if I'm just doing just that, and then it took me…
• 18:07
  stephanfranck: just a few months, you know, just, like, maybe 4 months to draw and color the… the book. But again, I had the layouts done already.
• 18:19
  Tad Eggleston: How long do the layouts take? Because I know for some artists, the layouts are the…
• 18:25
  stephanfranck: we're…
• 18:26
  Tad Eggleston: Almost the most time consuming.
• 18:27
  stephanfranck: No, for me, it's faster.
• 18:30
  stephanfranck: Because, you know, because of the other stuff, you know, I've done, Tons of…
• 18:39
  stephanfranck: Storyboarding in my time, you know.
• 18:43
  stephanfranck: And so, the ability to tell the story…
• 18:47
  stephanfranck: You know, to see… to create the continuity.
• 18:51
  stephanfranck: That to me, and especially since it's layout, the drawings aren't…
• 18:56
  stephanfranck: super formulated, necessarily, so they're enough so I get the vibe, and I get the emotion, and I get the point and the energy, but they are not final drawings, you know? So… so that doesn't stop me, and so I can go pretty fast. I can, you know, do real layout, maybe, like,
• 19:15
  stephanfranck: Maybe 8 pages a day, you know, something like that, that includes, you know.
• 19:20
  stephanfranck: blocking in the CGI that I use for the sets, or whatever, you know? So I go pretty…
• 19:26
  stephanfranck: pretty… once I…
• 19:28
  stephanfranck: Writing takes… takes a lot of time, and not… not writing… like, it's just finding the take.
• 19:37
  stephanfranck: Right? Like, I wrote spell, you know, like, 3 different… 3 different ways before I…
• 19:45
  stephanfranck: figure, like, okay, this is the… this is the version I'm telling, right? So, sometimes you have the high concept, you know, but the theater of it is kind of escaping you, exactly, you know? Right. And then you're like, okay, you know, so they were, you know, so…
• 20:01
  stephanfranck: I think if I've learned something in the…
• 20:05
  stephanfranck: You know, the storytelling, sort of, business is not to be precious about
• 20:11
  stephanfranck: the stuff, you know? It's not about, is it a good idea or a bad idea? It's just, is it the right idea? Is this what this is about, right? And so, I had a couple of takes on Palomino that I thought were cool, but they were not really getting to the…
• 20:27
  stephanfranck: The core of what this was about.
• 20:29
  stephanfranck: And then, so… so I, you know, apparently it was a high concept that I, you know, just a high concept of…
• 20:36
  stephanfranck: hey, you know, it's a neo-noir that takes place in LA in the late 70s or early 80s, you know, around the Palomino Club, and it's, you know, a window on that way of life, on that time period, on the end of the American century and the beginning of this, all that stuff, right?
• 20:57
  stephanfranck: I had that high concept for a long time, but for 20 years.
• 21:02
  stephanfranck: But then I didn't know what it was, until,
• 21:08
  stephanfranck: you know, I decided to move forward with it, and
• 21:16
  stephanfranck: and then at that point, it still took me a year, year and a half to crack the take, you know? Then, once I have the take, when I can hear the voices of the characters in my head, and I can see what it is, then it becomes improv in slow motion, you know? But, you know what I'm saying?
• 21:36
  Dan Newland: So… so… this might explain why it sometimes seemed like
• 21:41
  Dan Newland: Especially when I was reading the stuff that's in the first time period, like the 70s.
• 21:45
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 21:46
  Dan Newland: I felt like there were so many untold stories. Like, like, somewhere you've got a Silmarillion hidden away, that's just going to be all of these other stories finally to come out. Like, characters like Stu. Stu does not seem to me like a guy who should only be in two scenes.
• 22:03
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah.
• 22:04
  Dan Newland: But he's… he's so well developed as a character.
• 22:07
  Dan Newland: Was he in more of this in some of these different things, or…
• 22:11
  stephanfranck: No, but there's… I'm gonna say something I've never said publicly before. There's two other arcs of Palomino.
• 22:21
  stephanfranck: That I exist in my head.
• 22:23
  stephanfranck: And some of the things that are unresolved in the first act arc.
• 22:28
  stephanfranck: Will our seed plant it for these two other arcs?
• 22:33
  stephanfranck: so, so, so, so there you go, thank you. Fantastic.
• 22:38
  Dan Newland: Fantastic.
• 22:38
  stephanfranck: The thing that I will say, though, you know, is,
• 22:44
  stephanfranck: You know, it's pretty hard, right? Because, like.
• 22:48
  stephanfranck: you know, when you discover something when you're 10 years old, or like, you know, like me discovering the spirit, or like movies, like when I saw Blade Runner when I was 14, like, stuff hits you.
• 23:01
  stephanfranck: that age?
• 23:03
  stephanfranck: Let alone, back in a time where there was a lot less
• 23:10
  stephanfranck: content, to use that word out there, you know, than it does now. So sometimes… so this is my caveat to say that something
• 23:18
  stephanfranck: you know, many times, you know, we're like, oh, you know, this didn't hit me, like, when I was Star… when I first saw the first Star Wars, when I was 5 years old, right? Nothing's ever gonna hit you like that, right?
• 23:30
  stephanfranck: But, so, that is true, right? But that being said, I do feel like movies felt bigger when I was a kid.
• 23:40
  stephanfranck: You know, I think, like, a lot of movies now, even big movies, it's like, this one thing happened, second thing happened, three things happened, and, like, you feel like the whole thing happened in two days, and it's gone, and it's just like, whereas you went to see, like, those movies of the, you know, 70s, 80s, whatever, you felt like you were entering an entire world, right? There was an art to making the world feel very, very big.
• 24:02
  stephanfranck: And I… Thought long and hard about why
• 24:06
  stephanfranck: what my personal theory is to, you know, why that is, and I think it's because
• 24:13
  stephanfranck: The old movies understood that…
• 24:20
  stephanfranck: You know, when you live in the world, right, there's stuff… your window, your interface, your window in the world is narrow, and you hear stuff
• 24:29
  stephanfranck: That you overhear, that you see, you know about.
• 24:33
  stephanfranck: But you… it's not in your field of vision. It's like, you'll never… oh, you heard,
• 24:38
  stephanfranck: terms that you don't know what they mean, or somebody mentions something in the conversation, and you understand it in passing, and… but you, you know, you'll never know what that really was, and you just let it go, it's fine. You just accept that the world is bigger than you. And so, in other words, the story, to me.
• 24:59
  stephanfranck: To feel lived in, to feel real, to feel like it has scale.
• 25:04
  stephanfranck: needs to exist outside the confines of the borders of the frames, of the panels, of the borders of the story, and even outside of the sphere of awareness of the characters, or their field of understanding, right? And so, that's why
• 25:22
  stephanfranck: You know, and sometimes the none resolve, because
• 25:29
  stephanfranck: You know, it's funny, like, when I was a kid.
• 25:32
  stephanfranck: Or, like, when I was a young person, you know.
• 25:35
  stephanfranck: I had this kind of fantasy that one day at the end of my life.
• 25:40
  stephanfranck: all roads will have led to Rome, that everything will be tied together, and as you, you know, get older, you realize that, oh, no, a lot of shit is going sideways, and this will never connect with that, and I'm never getting good again with this person, you know what I mean? Like, you know… so… and…
• 26:01
  stephanfranck: So… I like that in story. Like, for instance,
• 26:08
  stephanfranck: You know, there's this, this subplot.
• 26:12
  stephanfranck: with Sherry Jo and her father.
• 26:17
  stephanfranck: I'm not gonna spoil it for people who haven't want to read it, but the point… but we know what it is, right? And so, he's looking for somebody. He's looking for a person, and we set it up in the story almost like, this is gonna be a thread, a thread, right? And then that thread gets interrupted.
• 26:34
  stephanfranck: And they'll never get their answers, and then we… when they meet again by chance, you know, 20 years later, it's just like, hey, have you ever found that person? And she's like, never found that person, maybe someday somebody will. And that, to me.
• 26:49
  stephanfranck: Is what makes story lifelike.
• 26:55
  Dan Newland: That is fascinating, because we… we talked about that, and it's… it's intriguing, because thinking about it.
• 27:00
  Dan Newland: there are a number of times where, I think, when you're watching modern movies, reading modern stuff, the protagonist is so much the center.
• 27:09
  Dan Newland: That you don't even imagine that the camera might follow somebody else out of the room.
• 27:13
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 27:14
  Dan Newland: And I think there are times in here
• 27:16
  Dan Newland: where you've got characters who are magnetic enough, even as secondary, tertiary characters, I wouldn't mind following them out of the room instead of the people I'm supposed to.
• 27:26
  Dan Newland: You know? Yeah. And that really… I mean, it bothered me that we didn't find out. We talked about it on the podcast, that we didn't find out what was going on with some of those cases, that he's just a detective. Yeah. The whole conceit of a detective is they solve stuff. Yeah.
• 27:41
  Dan Newland: then he dies, unexpectedly, and stuff doesn't get solved. And that's a brave storytelling decision. Yeah. You know?
• 27:49
  stephanfranck: Yeah, I'll get to that one, because it really kind of imposed itself on me when I least expected it. But, to your point, I think, you know.
• 28:00
  stephanfranck: the way… we're talking about short story, long stories, right? The short stories, what I like about that is that it's, like, a small window in a big world.
• 28:12
  stephanfranck: Right? Like, you know, a good short story is not a short window on a short… on a small world. It's a very tiny little bit window
• 28:22
  stephanfranck: So, so you can have a short story that ends up on an open ending, on an open… they can…
• 28:27
  stephanfranck: you know, finish open-ended. But, like, the idea is that you want to feel like it's a small window on the bigger world. But the thing is that as you get
• 28:40
  stephanfranck: into bigger stories.
• 28:42
  stephanfranck: The window can never be big enough to see the whole world. Because if you do that, then your world now is gonna feel very, very small and very, very fake.
• 28:54
  Sean Harklerode: Wow.
• 28:56
  Dan Newland: Pretty cool.
• 28:56
  Sean Harklerode: I've never… Heard it expressed in that… in that way, but that's a… it's a great,
• 29:04
  Sean Harklerode: Great way of looking at it.
• 29:07
  stephanfranck: And, to go to the, you know, like, the idea of… so, spoiler alert, right?
• 29:15
  stephanfranck: when I first, conceived Palomino in its actual form.
• 29:22
  stephanfranck: Not the previous takes. The idea was that…
• 29:27
  stephanfranck: It all takes place in 1981, and when there's the big thing that happens at the end of…
• 29:33
  stephanfranck: Volume 3, you know, the idea was he wakes up the next morning at the hospital.
• 29:39
  stephanfranck: You know, or, like, two weeks later, whatever, he's in a coma for two weeks, whatever, you know? And then you do that super tropey scene where she's like, Dad, you scared the fuck out of me, and he's like, you know, she's like, if you do this again, I'll kill you myself, you know? And… and it was always going to be an idea that at the end she retraces
• 29:59
  stephanfranck: her mom's steps, you know, through, like, the Malibu experience and stuff like that. But at this… but he was going to be around, and then, like, actually, the original idea was that she's… she was going to save him.
• 30:11
  stephanfranck: Right? At the end.
• 30:13
  stephanfranck: But then I…
• 30:16
  stephanfranck: I do 1, 2, 3, I write 1, 2, 3, I draw 1, 2, 3, I release 1, 2, 3, and then I'm like, okay, now I need to write 4. And no matter
• 30:29
  stephanfranck: how I started to write that hospital scene where he wakes up, Well, yeah, that's bullshit.
• 30:35
  stephanfranck: That's bullshit. There's no way he survived this, there's bullshit. And it started to occur to me that, oh my god, no, he did die. And then, all of a sudden, it became also…
• 30:47
  stephanfranck: Obvious to me that
• 30:50
  stephanfranck: she was the main character, and I didn't know it when I did it, but we start with her as a child, as a very, very strong person.
• 31:02
  stephanfranck: was a very strong want in the story, which is to find out what happened to her mom, and then her dad, and then everything else. But it's set up from the get-go, and first I thought it was, like, a quirky, cool way to lead to him, but guess what? It was always going to lead to her. And that also,
• 31:21
  stephanfranck: So… On the meta level.
• 31:26
  stephanfranck: the… let's not forget that, you know, so this is based around the Palomino Club, right? Like, 1981, the, you know.
• 31:34
  stephanfranck: Reagan just gets, you know, walks into the White House. It's the beginning of, like, a thing. But it's the end, like, you know, the 80s are the place where the 50s came to die, right? So it's like this end of this American century. And the palm, you know, was…
• 31:52
  stephanfranck: not gonna go too deep into the panel, because I could talk about just the panel for hours, but,
• 31:59
  stephanfranck: the benchmark, the high point of it, was around that time, 1981, from late 70s to early, you know, 1980, 1981, and then it started to go down, and then it closed in 1995. So the idea that we had these two sides of the story with this 15-year gap of
• 32:18
  stephanfranck: and since we're using Palomino as our motif for the world, as the American century, the, you know, American culture, if you will.
• 32:28
  stephanfranck: And that… so we have the high points, and then we have when it closed for business, you know? And… and then transformed into a… so, and it became this thing where,
• 32:41
  stephanfranck: You know, he dies with his world.
• 32:45
  stephanfranck: And she, when we find her again now, she's 29, so she… it's 1995, so she has the agency of being that age.
• 32:54
  stephanfranck: And… and she's a journalist, but she works for one of those, if you guys remember those, like, those free weeklies that you had everywhere that are basically paid for the…
• 33:03
  stephanfranck: by the porn ads in the… or the prostitution ads in the back. But meanwhile, in the front, it's like gonzo, journalism, hard-hitting, you know, stuff. And so she wears for one of those places.
• 33:14
  stephanfranck: And it feels like, well, she's part of that new world, because 1995, right, is the dawn of the digital age. Well, I mean, those places didn't know
• 33:26
  stephanfranck: Right? That in a few short years, they were gonna be put out of business by a Craigslist.
• 33:32
  Sean Harklerode: Right.
• 33:33
  stephanfranck: Right? So, like, it became this thing about time passing, right? About the fact that if in 1979 you've gone to the Palomino, and American culture, and blah blah blah, and go, like.
• 33:46
  stephanfranck: this is going to change at some point, or end, or whatever. People are like, you're insane, this is going to be a thousand years of this, right?
• 33:55
  stephanfranck: Guess what?
• 33:56
  stephanfranck: And then, you know, you go to, 1995, oh, look, you know, we have the, you know, Web 1.0, this is crazy, blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
• 34:09
  stephanfranck: This is gonna last forever, yeah, 10 years later, not even. 5 years later, it's over, right? And then start over, something new. So, it became a thing about change.
• 34:19
  stephanfranck: And it became… became a thing about the fact that everything… everything goes, everything must go.
• 34:26
  stephanfranck: And so, in a world where, like, cultures?
• 34:31
  stephanfranck: political systems, I mean… Right?
• 34:35
  stephanfranck: Nothing that you can… no, you can take a people.
• 34:39
  stephanfranck: you can't take anything, anyone, for granted. Everything must leave, right? But so, in that current movement.
• 34:49
  stephanfranck: what's the true north? What's the points that's unmovable? What is the… or the… not maybe unmovable, but what is the through line? What is the thread? And I think it's the moral…
• 35:03
  stephanfranck: choices that some people make, right? Like, this idea of…
• 35:08
  stephanfranck: you know, fighting for justice, and whatever, and just, you know, not… not going along to get along, whatever. Like, that sort of spirit of resistance against what you know is wrong, even when that's a problem for you, at the end of the day, that's all that remains.
• 35:29
  stephanfranck: And so that's what this is, in a way, about.
• 35:40
  Tad Eggleston: We've gotten too good at describing this. Also, I've fallen down the…
• 35:46
  Tad Eggleston: rabbit hole, because Dolly Parton passed away today, so I'm trying to figure out if she ever played the Palomino.
• 35:54
  stephanfranck: Oh, yes, he did. I know she did, because I've seen some posters.
• 35:59
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm seeing conflicting reports. But in my Google search, I did come across Comic Watch, Dark Planet Comics Debut's Palomino cover.
• 36:10
  Tad Eggleston: And all new preview by Stephan Franck from May 11th, 2020.
• 36:17
  stephanfranck: Yeah, it, yeah, you know, it's pretty funny, like, as all good stories.
• 36:23
  stephanfranck: You know what the plot is going to be.
• 36:27
  stephanfranck: But the meaning of it sort of reveals itself in the… in the… You know, and also…
• 36:36
  stephanfranck: I mean, there's a lot of different layers we can get into, right? Like, but, just on the, like, the personal…
• 36:44
  stephanfranck: Character layer, is that…
• 36:50
  stephanfranck: I mean, it's a story that's about… because it's about that transmission of the passing of the torch. You know, I always said.
• 36:59
  stephanfranck: that… You know, you grow up, you're born…
• 37:07
  stephanfranck: And you become sentient, and you feel like the main character in the story of your life.
• 37:13
  stephanfranck: And then one day you have kids, if you do, and the, the feel…
• 37:20
  stephanfranck: like, secondary characters in the movie of February. And then one day, they're, like, around the age, they're 14, 15, you know, you're just the driver, and you realize you're not part of the conversation that's happening in the back, and you realize, holy shit, now I'm a secondary character.
• 37:37
  stephanfranck: in the story of their life. That's… that's who I've, you know… and that's a very, very, very hard transition to make for anyone in real life, right? That's what Snow White is about, right? Like, you know, I just remember…
• 37:54
  stephanfranck: Like, when my… all my kids are adults now, but,
• 37:58
  stephanfranck: I just remember my oldest, When he was in the…
• 38:05
  stephanfranck: high school, and I just remember, you know, just driving him to high school one morning, and, you know, he's like, hey, just, I'll get off here, right? So, like, okay, whatever. And first, you know, no conversation in the car, whatever, right?
• 38:18
  stephanfranck: And so, he gets out of the car, you know, out of the car, and then I watch him go talk to his friends, and I'm just… I'm at the red light, waiting, you know, to go to work, you know? And I…
• 38:31
  stephanfranck: I'm watching him, and I see, oh man, you know, they're all looking at him and his friends, they're all young and beautiful, but I was overwhelmed by this feeling that… and they have their entire life ahead of them, their life is an open book.
• 38:46
  stephanfranck: And the next feeling that I had was, Fuck that guy.
• 38:52
  Sean Harklerode: Because there's…
• 38:53
  stephanfranck: It's an intense feeling of jealousy that even in the most loving parent will, you know, like, becoming a secondary, second banana in the story of somebody else's life.
• 39:07
  stephanfranck: when you used to be the main guy, is hard for everyone. That's, again, that's the witch in Snow White, right? So, I…
• 39:17
  stephanfranck: I thought it was go… so I think it was something interesting in terms of…
• 39:23
  stephanfranck: You know, him being the hero, then…
• 39:26
  stephanfranck: But she's already a teenager, so she's already giving him a run for his money and stuff like that, and I thought that was the story. But then I realized that's not what the story is.
• 39:34
  stephanfranck: the story… well, that's only half of the story. So we have that story from his point of view.
• 39:40
  stephanfranck: But then there's a little bit of my own, because I'm… as a parent, I've had that story. But as a child, my dad passed away when I was very young.
• 39:49
  stephanfranck: And so, what happens… when, like, when I was 8.
• 39:55
  stephanfranck: So, what that means is that you're still seeing, especially if they're a big personality, and you see all these artifacts, all those… you hear those stories and stuff like that, and the person you've lost becomes this mythical person.
• 40:12
  stephanfranck: This is not a medical… this medical figure
• 40:16
  stephanfranck: but not quite a person, because you are too young to know them as a person. And guess what? They're half your DNA, and probably 80% of your, you know, nurture, right? So… which means that part of yourself
• 40:33
  stephanfranck: Part of you is a mystery to yourself.
• 40:37
  stephanfranck: And so, I think for her, she lost her mom, then she loses her dad.
• 40:43
  stephanfranck: There's this part of her, like.
• 40:45
  stephanfranck: who am I? What is the… like, you know, so she knows she has a certain legacy as, like, daughter of a detective. She's clearly… is that type of a person, even her friend tells her when she's a kid, but she…
• 41:01
  stephanfranck: you know, but who is she, really? She doesn't know, right? And then you have the other thing, also, that…
• 41:08
  stephanfranck: When you… when you do lose a parent.
• 41:11
  stephanfranck: Then you become suddenly aware that it is a possibility.
• 41:17
  stephanfranck: And also, you're running out of spare, right? So, you go, like, anytime the car doesn't come to the driveway, you know, on time, you go.
• 41:27
  stephanfranck: Oh, here's the car, okay. So, I was really…
• 41:32
  stephanfranck: And, like, for instance, that scene at the end of Book 3, when she, you know, falls asleep, like, reading the files she shouldn't be reading, right? And then she… she's, like, it's… she falls asleep, it's dark, and then there's lights in the driveway, and she's like, oh, shit, is he… right? So, to me, that's a moment that was played from my own memory.
• 41:51
  stephanfranck: of… after my dad was gone, and I was, you know, again, it was with my mom, and we're like, well, you know, it happened once, could happen twice, you never know. And, like, this always look, like, around the time when, you know, the car's supposed to pull into the driveway, you can't help but check the window and see if a car's coming, you know? So, that became her story, and her, kind of.
• 42:14
  stephanfranck: breaking through to the other side of that, of becoming an adult, of letting go of the past, letting go of backstories. Because that's something else that I think we're talking about big theories about story. Like, one of the
• 42:29
  stephanfranck: biggest thing that makes a movie feel small and bullshit is backstories, right? Where you have to feel like.
• 42:36
  stephanfranck: But, you know, good movies don't have backstories, right? Like, do you know why Dirty Harry is the way he is, right? Like, did he… was his dad mean? Was his dad super nice? Did he… was his… you know, was his dad killed by a… who gives a fuck, right? Doesn't matter.
• 42:56
  stephanfranck: What's happening?
• 42:58
  stephanfranck: What do you say?
• 42:58
  Tad Eggleston: One of those names is not like the others.
• 43:01
  Dan Newland: I think he's… he's sharing.
• 43:03
  stephanfranck: Oh, there you go. I'm sharing a picture.
• 43:06
  Tad Eggleston: One of those names is not like the others.
• 43:09
  stephanfranck: Yes.
• 43:11
  stephanfranck: Like, which names? Wait, where…
• 43:13
  Dan Newland: Chili peppers, probably?
• 43:14
  Sean Harklerode: hot chips.
• 43:18
  stephanfranck: Oh, there you go.
• 43:19
  Tad Eggleston: Red Hot Chili peppers…
• 43:21
  stephanfranck: And they played the cow.
• 43:22
  Tad Eggleston: Amino!
• 43:23
  stephanfranck: Yes, that's awesome. And, you know, that's… that,
• 43:26
  Tad Eggleston: noon concert, sponsored by K-Rock, where a thousand people showed up for the 264 contests.
• 43:33
  stephanfranck: Oh my god.
• 43:34
  Tad Eggleston: Thank you.
• 43:35
  stephanfranck: Well, and that's the thing that happened, like, in the late 80s, is it started to shift from, you know, just straight up, you know, country western to…
• 43:43
  stephanfranck: You know, punk rock and, you know, and all that stuff, you know?
• 43:48
  stephanfranck: So, I don't know, I lost my track. So,
• 43:53
  Tad Eggleston: Sorry, I just…
• 43:54
  stephanfranck: Oh, no, it's okay.
• 43:55
  Tad Eggleston: I'll stop with my rabbit holes.
• 43:57
  Dan Newland: This happens around here. You've been here enough times, probably, Stephan, to know that occasionally the train goes out of the station.
• 44:03
  stephanfranck: Yeah, I want my train… So, yeah, backstories, right? So, so the… why does… Dirty hairy, you know.
• 44:16
  stephanfranck: is dirty hair, it doesn't matter. What matters, he only exists…
• 44:21
  stephanfranck: as an actor, you know, Sean, right? It's in… it's the dramatic form. It's just… there's a goal, doesn't go your way, you try again. That's… that's… everything exists through that principle. And so, I… but I think in life.
• 44:40
  stephanfranck: we all get hung up with our backstories, with our parents, with whatever is the past, but at some point, you're like, but the past doesn't exist. The only thing that exists is the present.
• 44:51
  stephanfranck: what am I gonna do with it? That's on me. That's the only thing no one can take away from me, is what I'm going to do tomorrow, right? So, so she has to…
• 45:00
  stephanfranck: To get into this delayed adulthood.
• 45:05
  stephanfranck: Through that sort of ordeal.
• 45:07
  Tad Eggleston: I'm also just remembering.
• 45:09
  Dan Newland: Cool.
• 45:10
  Tad Eggleston: that we didn't really talk about the last time you and I talked, because it hadn't been released yet, and we talked some on the book club about
• 45:21
  Tad Eggleston: You know, she lost her parents, and then she was… Raised by his old partner, And his wife.
• 45:31
  Tad Eggleston: only his wife, got cancer.
• 45:34
  stephanfranck: Thanks.
• 45:35
  Tad Eggleston: And then she finds out that the partner, spoiler, spoiler, spoiler.
• 45:41
  Dan Newland: Do not go to the next sentence of what Tad is gonna say until you've finished the story. Right.
• 45:47
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 45:48
  Dan Newland: podcast right here, and don't get…
• 45:50
  Tad Eggleston: We already told them that earlier, but I'm gonna re.
• 45:53
  Dan Newland: emphasize it.
• 45:55
  Tad Eggleston: But then we find out that the partner, like.
• 45:59
  Tad Eggleston: Killed her dad. Killed her mom. Like… the partners…
• 46:05
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 46:05
  Tad Eggleston: But that… so, like, her father, she's not only lost her parents, she's lost two sets of parents, including…
• 46:14
  Tad Eggleston: The second one in, like, or the second father in, like, THE worst possible way.
• 46:20
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 46:22
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 46:24
  stephanfranck: The… I… I… you know, it's funny, like, the…
• 46:29
  stephanfranck: you really, like, something… sometimes do the… do things on instinct. You don't know why. I'm not, like, I'm talking a lot of theories, but I never think like that when I'm working. I always think after, it's like, oh, what did… you know, so I… it has to come out first, you know, from the…
• 46:48
  stephanfranck: from the gut, you know, and then… and then you go, like, if you've done it long enough, then you start to see, oh, I see what I was doing there, you know, but I didn't know it when I was doing it. But, so I always knew that
• 47:03
  stephanfranck: Lori, so the, you know, Mac's wife, when we find her, she has cancer.
• 47:11
  stephanfranck: I always knew, I just didn't know why, I always knew. And then it became clear to me that in a certain way, it's like…
• 47:20
  stephanfranck: I don't want to say poetic justice, because that would be a completely wrong… a wrong thing to say, but some way
• 47:26
  stephanfranck: karmically… spiritually related to… he's responsible for this nuclear incident, right, that happened, you know, for real, by the way, in the Valley, right? Santa Susanna Pass, that happened, right?
• 47:40
  stephanfranck: 250 times worse than Three Mile Island, right there in the middle of the valley, right? So that happened.
• 47:49
  stephanfranck: you know, and that's why all the guys who were connected, you know, to it kind of cleaned up the thing. They all died of cancer and stuff like that. So…
• 47:58
  stephanfranck: the fact that… so they live in the Valley, and his wife become ill, you'll never know. Again, this is one of those things that you don't want to… if you say it, if you, you know, then it becomes goofy, right? It's… it's not like, yeah, sure enough, she got cancer because of the radioactive shit that… no. It's not like that. It's more like life. You can't prove it, you don't know, you don't know. It's just like…
• 48:21
  stephanfranck: Life as a way to… just…
• 48:28
  stephanfranck: everything gets paid in full somehow, somewhere, in ways that, you know, you don't understand. You know what I'm saying? So… so that was a little bit of that. And, and also, she's the one who
• 48:43
  stephanfranck: feels like… she's gotten…
• 48:49
  stephanfranck: She's been in touch with her mortality, and with her seeing the end of the road.
• 48:57
  stephanfranck: In a way that he hasn't yet.
• 49:02
  stephanfranck: So I almost spoil details and stuff like that, but that's why she does what she does, because
• 49:07
  stephanfranck: You know, she… She, you know, she's… she's like, why are we even…
• 49:15
  stephanfranck: trying anymore, right? But he's still on the, you know, and then once that happens, then he goes on this final quest for,
• 49:24
  stephanfranck: some sort of… absolution, that I think, or, like, at least to be understood, like, he wants to be…
• 49:32
  stephanfranck: Un… you know… not forgive, it's too big a word, but he wants to…
• 49:38
  stephanfranck: It's… he wants to share some of the burden somehow through, you know.
• 49:43
  stephanfranck: her knowing and accepting, and like, I don't know what is… you know, and that's what she tells me, like, I don't know what you're… what you're trying to accomplish, you know, like, she's never gonna forgive him any of this, it's unforgivable, it's too far gone, but he's just shooting for the, you know…
• 49:59
  stephanfranck: So, there you go. And for people who haven't read, and I'm talking cryptically on purpose, so it's just, like, it sounds like a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo, but that you guys read it, so you guys know what I'm talking about.
• 50:13
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta channel Mark for a minute, and take us back a little bit.
• 50:19
  Tad Eggleston: Because you were talking about some of…
• 50:24
  Tad Eggleston: Are you talking about layouts being… not…
• 50:29
  Tad Eggleston: a time-consuming process for you, in part because of all the storyboards you've done. And I… I know if Mark had
• 50:36
  Tad Eggleston: One big criticism, it had to do with the number of Full-page or two-page
• 50:43
  Tad Eggleston: Spreads, and how that sometimes felt…
• 50:46
  Tad Eggleston: More like storyboards than… than… than a comic.
• 50:52
  Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna go on record again that I actually liked that for the pacing, but…
• 50:58
  Tad Eggleston: My question is actually, talk to me about the differences between storyboarding a…
• 51:07
  Tad Eggleston: Animation project, and laying out a comic.
• 51:11
  Tad Eggleston: Because I know there are similarities, but there are also some pretty big differences.
• 51:14
  stephanfranck: Yeah, It's very different.
• 51:21
  stephanfranck: Okay.
• 51:22
  stephanfranck: The… you know?
• 51:30
  stephanfranck: The thing that…
• 51:32
  stephanfranck: before I get into that, I'm just gonna… because I think it's true that there's a very unusual use of double spreads.
• 51:43
  stephanfranck: And, and it's, it's part of the…
• 51:48
  stephanfranck: You know, sometimes, you know, movies are, you know.
• 51:52
  stephanfranck: you have a John Wick movie, and you have an Altman movie. And the Altman movie is not cut like a John Wick movie, right?
• 52:03
  stephanfranck: So if you go see an Altman movie and go like, hey man, I just saw John Lick, that shit is moving, like, how is this not moving the same way? Because it's a different movie, and nothing wrong with any of them.
• 52:14
  stephanfranck: is just, it's a different beast, right? So, I think, like, there is a very experimental streak that, like I was saying, I like to experiment with stuff. I like to…
• 52:24
  stephanfranck: you know, push the art… try to push the art form in… in directions that, you know, and like, so the use of, they're experimental, and the use of the double spread
• 52:36
  stephanfranck: I'm using it to create this kind of… kind of dream state, almost like a dissociative sort of…
• 52:44
  stephanfranck: state when you're reading, when you're immersed in it, that sometimes may be successful, sometimes may not be successful, but that… that's sort of, like, the one I'm…
• 52:53
  stephanfranck: again, not that I'm intellectualizing it while I'm doing it, but looking back, I think that's what I'm reaching for and doing those. Now.
• 53:03
  stephanfranck: To your question, Yes, the two are related in the same way that…
• 53:11
  stephanfranck: You know, like, Chuck Jones? That's a quote, I love that quote, so I use it all the time, so if you… I told you already, just, I'm sorry. But,
• 53:19
  stephanfranck: Yo, Chuck Jones, was being asked…
• 53:25
  stephanfranck: what, you know, what do you… what should you… who should someone do to learn to draw? I say, go to the zoo and learn to draw the animals. And the person said, oh, to understand how they're all different?
• 53:35
  stephanfranck: And Chuck would say, no, To understand how they're all the same.
• 53:40
  stephanfranck: Right? And it's true, like, we all come from the same tree of life, right? Like, all the animals, somehow, when you start to see how things are the same, they're all the same. But they're also very different.
• 53:53
  stephanfranck: But they're the same. And so, visual storytelling, or storytelling in general, storytelling is storytelling, is storytelling, is storytelling. So, comic books, laying out comic books.
• 54:06
  stephanfranck: you know, and, and film, storyboarding for film.
• 54:16
  stephanfranck: Are exactly the same, in the same way that a cat and a horse are exactly the same.
• 54:21
  stephanfranck: But there's the same principle, same type of organs, same functions, it's the same idea, and it's the same logic.
• 54:30
  stephanfranck: But also, they're completely different, right? So… so that… that's… that's the link between the two. So technically,
• 54:40
  stephanfranck: You have all… A lot less real estate on a page.
• 54:47
  stephanfranck: than you would have in a film. And especially, it's not… it's in the… like, the…
• 54:55
  stephanfranck: The brush of time, like, the time brush you're painting with is a lot smaller In a movie, right?
• 55:06
  stephanfranck: Like, for instance, if you watch a movie like Ocean's Eleven.
• 55:09
  stephanfranck: Or any movie that, where you have a heist or some sort of fake-out, and then, you get to the point where
• 55:18
  stephanfranck: All of a sudden, The good guys pulled it off, and the mark is, like.
• 55:23
  stephanfranck: But my money's gone! And all of a sudden, you cut…
• 55:28
  stephanfranck: to, like, 15 scenes you've already seen in a movie, but you're seeing, like, 20 frames of them. Right? And just those 20 crucial frames, now you understand all these scenes differently, right? So there's very, very, very…
• 55:44
  stephanfranck: Fine time brush that you get to paint with.
• 55:48
  stephanfranck: In comics, time feels like it's moving in bigger blocks. You don't… you don't have the equivalent of
• 55:58
  stephanfranck: 20 frames, right? That happened… maybe you can do it one time, but you cannot do… if you were going to show all these 15… then it takes a full page, it takes a full spread.
• 56:10
  stephanfranck: then it feels like time is passing, you're noting that… right? So, so there's… so, comics…
• 56:17
  stephanfranck: are showing… you know, it's almost like these photos, you know, like, on your iPhone, like, those live photos, whatever they call them, that it's not a film, it's not a video, but it's a photo that kind of moves over, like, a second or two, right? So, I think of comic book panels more like
• 56:37
  stephanfranck: those type of moving photos. They show a little bit more time, whereas a frame of film is as
• 56:48
  stephanfranck: small an amount of time as your brain will remember, will process. And so… so, for instance,
• 56:59
  stephanfranck: I'm bringing up that… that thing with Ocean's Eleven because, if you've read Silver, you know, Silver is Ocean's Eleven in Dracula's Castle in a certain way, right? So you get to that point where you're like, oh my god, the good guys pulled it off!
• 57:14
  stephanfranck: and you go back to… you have to go back to all those moments, and now color them in a different… I mean, it's a black and white book, but you know what I mean? It, like, you know, shines a different light on them, so they take on a different meaning. So, it was…
• 57:29
  stephanfranck: when I started doing it, my first impulse as a filmmaker was to show every scene.
• 57:37
  stephanfranck: That, like, just like you would do in a movie. And then, again, you realize, okay, that takes 5 pages, or 4 pages, you know, and it completely breaks the flow of the story. So, I have to completely merge
• 57:53
  stephanfranck: the words and pictures. So, some of these ideas would have been shown, but not heard. Some would be, you know, heard, you know, you know, they say, show and… what was the… you know, have to be… you have to show, not tell. That's not really true. Sometimes you have to tell, not show, right? Even in movies. But, but,
• 58:14
  stephanfranck: But still, more than usual, sometimes comics compare to film, where film is 90% show-don't tell.
• 58:23
  stephanfranck: Comics is probably more like, 50%,
• 58:28
  stephanfranck: show and tell, right? Because, again, that paint… that time brush you're painting with is a little bit…
• 58:35
  stephanfranck: broader and not as fine, right? So… so something will have to come up in the dialogue, so artfully in the dialogue, some things will have to be said as captions, right? So, it's never
• 58:49
  stephanfranck: fully, fully…
• 58:51
  stephanfranck: visual storytelling, because there's… you will need the text to add that other layer that, in a movie, will also come across visually, but here, you don't have
• 59:04
  stephanfranck: high resu… high enough time resolution to fully do it with just a succession of images. The words will have to come into play in a different way. Does that make sense?
• 59:16
  Tad Eggleston: Yes.
• 59:17
  Tad Eggleston: I don't…
• 59:18
  Dan Newland: Follow-up, by the way, to really the first part of your answer.
• 59:23
  Dan Newland: you know, you talk about the… you're trying to do things differently, and… and… and the way… the way that the double-page spreads work and everything. And one question I had was, when… when you did your Kickstarter, when I was selecting which
• 59:37
  Dan Newland: Which type of PDF I wanted… Oh, yeah. During the… for… to download.
• 59:42
  stephanfranck: Yes, yes.
• 59:42
  Dan Newland: You get an option between 1 up and 2-up.
• 59:45
  stephanfranck: Yep.
• 59:46
  Dan Newland: What is your preferred format for people to read these books in?
• 59:50
  stephanfranck: 100% tu-up.
• 59:52
  Dan Newland: It is.
• 59:53
  stephanfranck: Because, I work The spread is my unit of storytelling.
• 1:00:00
  Dan Newland: That's what I was wondering, is it seemed to me, and I've got them in one-ups, because that's… I'm used to, you know, I read on my tablet, and… and as I was reading, and as we were talking, and then afterwards, and I'm getting ready for this, I'm like, I wonder if…
• 1:00:13
  Dan Newland: Within the context of the way you're doing it, you are really expecting, really, that people are taking in those two pages as a single experience, and then working through them, rather than
• 1:00:25
  Dan Newland: When you're doing the one-ups, that that's going to not really work all that well in some ways for what you're trying to do.
• 1:00:32
  stephanfranck: That's absolutely right. I have to say, and maybe it's a…
• 1:00:36
  stephanfranck: my fault, but I'm not… I mean, I like the digital, I mean, it's great that we can read digital, you know, it's easier to, you know, whatever, you know, but just for me, like, when I'm reading a comic book.
• 1:00:52
  stephanfranck: It's not the same for prose novel, but for a comic book, I feel like I'm never getting the exact full experience if I'm reading digital.
• 1:01:03
  stephanfranck: I like to be sitting on the couch.
• 1:01:05
  stephanfranck: with my Palomino mug, thank you very much, and and really… and so when you have the book open.
• 1:01:14
  stephanfranck: It's a spread.
• 1:01:15
  Dan Newland: Nope.
• 1:01:16
  stephanfranck: So, I'm reading for… this is my reading experience, so I'm drawing for that experience. So that's the optimal… which, again, it's not… it's not like… and so there was a question, you know.
• 1:01:30
  stephanfranck: It was very interesting, because, like.
• 1:01:32
  stephanfranck: I'm sure you know, like, the… The one page up.
• 1:01:37
  stephanfranck: that's a hotly contested, you know, topic, right? Because there are some people who insist that they want everything full page, so they're like, no, no, no, I don't care if it's a spread, just cut it in half, cut it in half. So I had enough people
• 1:01:53
  stephanfranck: Tell me that in a while, so that until the last campaign, if you are getting the one-up.
• 1:01:59
  stephanfranck: They… they were, like…
• 1:02:01
  stephanfranck: some of those spreads would be… and most of the spreads do work that way, because, like, you know, the spread, you never have the thing in the middle, right? You always have
• 1:02:12
  stephanfranck: a moment, a before and then after, like, the composition always favors one side or the other, right? So even if you do that, you can still read most of the pages. Sometimes it's a problem when the panels go across the two pages, like, sometimes I do it a few times where, like, the top panels go all the way across the spread, and then the second panel goes all the way across the spread. But even so, I make sure that
• 1:02:35
  stephanfranck: the top panel, you know, favors composition on the left, and the bottom panel favors composition on the right. So, worst case scenario, you can still always understand what's happening. But.
• 1:02:47
  stephanfranck: Enough people then protested against that.
• 1:02:52
  stephanfranck: then that for this time around, I reprocessed everything, so now if you're… if you got your one page up from this campaign, once it gets a double spread, then you get the double spread. So it's a bit annoying, because it's… it's smaller, so you may have to turn your iPad or whatever.
• 1:03:10
  stephanfranck: But that's ended up being the… the…
• 1:03:16
  stephanfranck: like, the popular demand was that I… there was this option was what most people wanted, so I did that.
• 1:03:23
  Tad Eggleston: That seems to be how most of the digital… comics…
• 1:03:28
  Dan Newland: You and Brian Michael Bendis are a good company, because all sorts of his stuff, he lays out a lot of his stuff for his artists, and he uses…
• 1:03:36
  Dan Newland: like, long horizontals all the time, and back in… back in the day, they didn't have all that processed, and it got really confusing on that. But that's… okay, that makes sense. So really.
• 1:03:48
  Dan Newland: Get a bigger monitor, or read it this way, or turn them sideways. The two-up is the way to just do it when reading your stuff, if you want to do it right. Or get a physical copy.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Physical, physical is ideal.
• 1:04:03
  Tad Eggleston: But I gotta say, Stephan, I have read my physicals, I think, twice apiece, but I've read the whole thing, like, 5 or 6 times, so if it weren't for the digital, I'd only have read it twice.
• 1:04:13
  stephanfranck: Digital. I'm just saying it's… I know. Because either I…
• 1:04:19
  stephanfranck: Well, I guess I don't have an iPad at the moment. I've had iPads over the years, I don't have one right now, so I don't have an iPad, and and when I'm working at my desk, you know, so when I am reading for pleasure, I don't want to be in front of my monitor either. Right, right. So, but I think that…
• 1:04:37
  stephanfranck: You have to…
• 1:04:40
  stephanfranck: embrace, sort of, like, the format, and work for the format, right? So, like, for instance, in the old days when they were, you know, printing, like, on, you know, comics on toilet paper, you know what I mean? You know, like, the big newsprint, da-da-da, you know, inkers had to ink a certain way.
• 1:04:58
  stephanfranck: Otherwise, it would not…
• 1:05:01
  stephanfranck: you know, it would look bad, right, if the lines were fine, or whatever. So, whatever the medium is, you have to… or the delivery system is… so this is said that for me, if I was going to go, okay, I'm really going to work for the digital experience, then I would conceive
• 1:05:19
  stephanfranck: of a scrolly, scrolly, you know, thing, like, because then anyone can, on your tablet, on your iPhone even, you can scroll, and to me.
• 1:05:29
  stephanfranck: Why not? It's just about.
• 1:05:31
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I'll say some of the vertical… I mean, the vertical scroll comics that actually embrace the format, rather than formatting themselves to easily be put into print.
• 1:05:45
  Tad Eggleston: Can sometimes be very special.
• 1:05:47
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, so to me, like, the page, the concept of the page, which I love, I love the, you know, I mean, I'm in love with pages. I see some on your walls back there, you know? That's coming from books, right? You know, if we're.
• 1:06:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you work digitally, so I can't buy any pages at Palomino, can I?
• 1:06:08
  stephanfranck: No. But the next one, the short story, will.
• 1:06:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, if you ever feel like taking one of the music scenes and just printing it up really, really high quality, -oh-oh. You got my address. Okay.
• 1:06:27
  stephanfranck: Yeah, no, so I think… I think you have to embrace the format, and like, if I do something for digital, then I really, with digital in mind, then I'll… I'll abandon the idea of the page, and I'll embrace the concept of the.
• 1:06:41
  Tad Eggleston: Have you thought about doing that?
• 1:06:43
  stephanfranck: No.
• 1:06:45
  Dan Newland: I love the page. I mean, you know, we…
• 1:06:48
  Tad Eggleston: I do too, I'm just…
• 1:06:49
  Dan Newland: find, like, you know, John Sables to get, or whatever elsewhere, and I still schlepped out to my garage and grabbed my box of first comics, and it's a pain.
• 1:06:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I'm just… I don't know, did any of you read…
• 1:07:01
  Tad Eggleston: Scott, and it's just about to get,
• 1:07:05
  Tad Eggleston: a new edition. Scott McCloud's follow-up to Understanding Comics was called Reinventing Comics. And digital comics were in their absolute infancy at the time. So he wrote about them, but he wrote about their possibilities more than…
• 1:07:21
  Tad Eggleston: like, their realities, and one of the things that he wrote about that I haven't really seen is the idea of the infinite canvas. That if you… if you had a…
• 1:07:33
  Tad Eggleston: digital comic, you could, if you were so inclined, create something that… that went…
• 1:07:42
  Tad Eggleston: As far as you want it in all directions.
• 1:07:45
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:07:47
  Dan Newland: That big thing of the Mississippi River that they took around back in Twain's Day, or whatever.
• 1:07:51
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:07:52
  Dan Newland: Yeah, full painting, and…
• 1:07:54
  Tad Eggleston: Dude, I'm.
• 1:07:55
  Dan Newland: Big things and took it around.
• 1:07:57
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I think, have any of you read, is it Jason Shigga that does, like, the choose-your-own-adventure type comics? Where you, like, follow a path, and then you have to pick which page to go to from there, and follow a path, and sometimes follow back? I mean, with an infinite…
• 1:08:13
  Tad Eggleston: Canvas, you could do some really…
• 1:08:17
  Tad Eggleston: convoluted and fascinating storytelling, where people had choices of which direction… I mean…
• 1:08:24
  stephanfranck: Then it becomes a different form of.
• 1:08:27
  Tad Eggleston: It is.
• 1:08:28
  stephanfranck: And you can start a game, a participatory kind of thing, and stuff like that.
• 1:08:32
  stephanfranck: which, Is not the tradition that I work in, you know, it just…
• 1:08:40
  Tad Eggleston: I wasn't necessarily pitching it to you as well.
• 1:08:42
  stephanfranck: I'm just thinking out loud.
• 1:08:44
  stephanfranck: It's always great. It's like games, right? Like, I've never gotten into games, and to me, they're completely valid, you know, art form, you know, storytelling on its own. It's just not something I've ever.
• 1:09:00
  Tad Eggleston: I think I'd be more likely to get into them if they required no skill.
• 1:09:05
  Tad Eggleston: If they were just choose-your-own-adventure games, rather than…
• 1:09:08
  Dan Newland: Every, like, decade.
• 1:09:09
  Tad Eggleston: Must press the button at the right time.
• 1:09:12
  Dan Newland: And I'm addicted to civilization for a week, and then I'm done.
• 1:09:15
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, I do that too. But mostly, I just get addicted to baseball. There you go.
• 1:09:20
  Dan Newland: So, so… Stephan, you had talked about something, and I think Tad…
• 1:09:25
  Dan Newland: sort of, sort of riffed on it as well. But that idea of re-reading and the like.
• 1:09:30
  Dan Newland: And one of the things you said was, you don't do backstory.
• 1:09:33
  Dan Newland: In the comics, right? And I can see that, because we're just dropped right in. We don't know why this guy is where he is, what happened to his wife, really. Some of that we get later on as it goes through.
• 1:09:46
  stephanfranck: Right.
• 1:09:46
  Dan Newland: But…
• 1:09:47
  Dan Newland: You also, obviously, are in love with this place and time, with the idea of the Palomino and all of this.
• 1:09:55
  Dan Newland: You've got a lot of backstory in the back matter, even though you don't put it into the panels.
• 1:10:01
  stephanfranck: Right.
• 1:10:01
  Dan Newland: So I feel like you still wanted us to really…
• 1:10:05
  Dan Newland: Experience the Palomino in the comment.
• 1:10:08
  Dan Newland: But then learn about it as well, so that we know more about it.
• 1:10:12
  Tad Eggleston: Dan was all over your back matter. I mean.
• 1:10:15
  Sean Harklerode: I love the… those back pages.
• 1:10:19
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:10:20
  Dan Newland: That… that's fascinating stuff, you know, talking to, like, the daughter and all of this.
• 1:10:24
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 1:10:24
  Dan Newland: I think that really feeds into the next times you read it, too. The Palomino then really does become more of a living place, because you know more about it.
• 1:10:32
  stephanfranck: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then it's fun to… to see, now that you know.
• 1:10:39
  stephanfranck: you re-read, and you're like, oh, I see what's happening there, and I didn't need to know that to follow the story, but guess what? The world extends beyond the confines of the page, which is what I was talking about earlier, you know?
• 1:10:53
  stephanfranck: Yeah, I mean, here's the… So, like…
• 1:10:59
  stephanfranck: My other great passion in life is music.
• 1:11:05
  stephanfranck: And the thing that I… Yeah, so I grew up doing comics and animation and music, and in fact.
• 1:11:14
  stephanfranck: I had this fork in the road, like…
• 1:11:18
  stephanfranck: You know, after, like, midway through college or whatever, where, like,
• 1:11:26
  stephanfranck: should I be a professional musician, or should I be a professional, you know, doing animation, comics, and whatever?
• 1:11:32
  Tad Eggleston: Is this where you're gonna tell me that Johnny Cash and Don Bluth called on the same day and offered you jobs?
• 1:11:39
  stephanfranck: No, no. Never met either of those gentlemen. However, the music that I loved, was,
• 1:11:51
  stephanfranck: I said it was rockabilly, and you know since you've read the Beckman, but, you know, that got me into country rock, you know, when you start following James Burton, and then pretty soon you're listening to Emil Harris and all that stuff, you know? And so, I just,
• 1:12:10
  stephanfranck: and so I found all those bands back when I was still in college in France, you know, like the Desert Rose Band, and, you know, and there was this, their first album.
• 1:12:23
  stephanfranck: had the, you know, there was the band in front of this Palomino sign, and I was like, fuck, what is this? Can I capture in my imagination? And then, so, I played music, you know, doing some touring and clubs and stuff until I finished college.
• 1:12:39
  stephanfranck: And then I started the animation career, like, and I moved to England, and blah blah blah, and so music, you know.
• 1:12:47
  stephanfranck: And then, when I was turning…
• 1:12:51
  stephanfranck: 30, almost, I want to say, so I was like, hey man, you know, you're getting old, you know, don't forget!
• 1:12:57
  stephanfranck: you, you know, if you don't… you know, and so I got back into music.
• 1:13:03
  stephanfranck: Big time. And so… but not… it was never for me… I never put the pressure on it to make enough money, you know, to live or anything. You know, it was just like… but, you know, so I just did it.
• 1:13:17
  stephanfranck: and I got to play and work with all those guys from the Palomino, all those guys that I… that I, learned to play,
• 1:13:27
  stephanfranck: listening to their records, or whatever, and I got to… the guys I interviewed in the book, I got to know them, become friends with them, we work together, we hang out, we… they became part of my life, and I became just a little part of their tradition. And so…
• 1:13:43
  stephanfranck: to me, it was obvious that this would be an amazing place to do a neo-noir story, you know? And also, what that place represented.
• 1:13:54
  stephanfranck: But yes, I have a lot of fondness for the place, for the time, for the people there, for the way of life.
• 1:14:02
  stephanfranck: And also, Because…
• 1:14:06
  stephanfranck: There's a guy that I talk about in the… who's passed away now a good 15 years ago, but his name was Archie Francis.
• 1:14:15
  stephanfranck: Who was the house drummer at the Palmetto for 4 years.
• 1:14:20
  stephanfranck: And who, by a complete fluke.
• 1:14:23
  stephanfranck: Because we get connected by the… through this other guy, there's a whole…
• 1:14:27
  stephanfranck: story, that's a crazy story, actually. But, this other guy called Elvis Covo. Have you heard of Elvis Covo?
• 1:14:36
  Tad Eggleston: I haven't.
• 1:14:37
  stephanfranck: Elvis Covo was… Like, a kind of…
• 1:14:43
  stephanfranck: child prodigy, pedal steel guitar player, guitar player, you know, grew up in Memphis, you know, and there's… there are stories about him that he had taught Elvis how to play the guitar, and stuff like that. And,
• 1:14:58
  stephanfranck: and so… and then he came to California, was kind of, sort of like a loose part of the wrecking crew, you know, worked on the million, you know, he played with Elvis Co. Anyways.
• 1:15:11
  stephanfranck: Lovely, lovely guy. And so, one night, I'm going with this other friend, I'm gonna stop with the name dropping, because it's annoying, but I just…
• 1:15:21
  stephanfranck: who's a really way, way better music, not even on the same planet than me, but we go to listen to Alvis Covo.
• 1:15:29
  stephanfranck: play with this jazz band out in the West Valley in this little joint called KC that looks like it's straight out of the Big Lebelsky. And so.
• 1:15:40
  stephanfranck: my friend sits with them, and I'm talking to Al.
• 1:15:44
  stephanfranck: And I'm like, hey, Al, what's this story about you teaching Ellis how to play the guitar? You know, and he goes like, oh, well, you know, when I was in Memphis, I was a kid, you know, living the projects, and you know, every, you know, me and my buddy, you know, Billy Burnett, we…
• 1:16:00
  stephanfranck: What? Did you just say?
• 1:16:03
  stephanfranck: yeah, me and my buddy Billy Burnett, you know, we'd have those jam sessions, and this kid Elvis would come out, you know, and
• 1:16:12
  stephanfranck: he always wanted to sit in, but he sucked, so we'd never let him sit, so I had to show him a few things on the guitars just so he could sit in with us, and then he tells me.
• 1:16:22
  stephanfranck: That… and then one day I get the call from Sun Records, and it's, Bill Black, right? Who's, Elvis is…
• 1:16:30
  stephanfranck: bass player, and says, hey, Al, we're going to, cut this side, that's a record with that stupid kid Elvis, just me and Scotty on guitar, and… how about you on Steel? You wanna… you wanna play with us? And Al said, guys, I don't play on that three-quart shit.
• 1:16:49
  Sean Harklerode: So…
• 1:16:51
  stephanfranck: So, I'm sitting with this guy, and he's like…
• 1:16:54
  stephanfranck: hey, who are you playing with at the time? And I'm like, oh, well, I guess it was the band that just broke up, and so I was like, well, you know, I know a guy who's looking for a guitar player. I was like, who? And he goes, like.
• 1:17:06
  stephanfranck: Archie Francis, you know Archie Francis? Like, no, he was the house drummer of the Palomino for 40 years, and then, you know, in his older age, you know, didn't really… like, he didn't want to drum anymore, so he… turns out, he was this insane songwriter.
• 1:17:25
  stephanfranck: Like, he had a book this thick of incredible songs that are just…
• 1:17:30
  stephanfranck: Poetry, pure poetry. Cowboy poetry. Anyways, and so, it turns out… He lives… he lived…
• 1:17:40
  stephanfranck: 200 yards from my house.
• 1:17:42
  Sean Harklerode: Explo.
• 1:17:44
  stephanfranck: We became friends, we started playing, and I played maybe 150 shows with him, I don't know, you know, it became a thing, you know, but then he passed away, unfortunately. But, but the point is.
• 1:17:56
  stephanfranck: that…
• 1:17:59
  stephanfranck: in Archie's days, which is, like, 60s, 70s, 80s, you could be a house drummer at the Palomino,
• 1:18:09
  stephanfranck: Do a few sessions here and there, and stuff like that.
• 1:18:12
  stephanfranck: and have… make a good living in LA, buy a house up here, you know, raise your family, and stuff like that. It was, you know.
• 1:18:22
  stephanfranck: and that you were a working musician, you know, in that way. And that doesn't exist anymore, right? And so, it became super clear to me that…
• 1:18:35
  stephanfranck: The working musician… that type of a working musician.
• 1:18:40
  stephanfranck: And of course, of course, they're still professional musicians, right? But I'm talking about that particular type of working musicians.
• 1:18:49
  stephanfranck: They were, like, the cannery in the coal mine.
• 1:18:53
  stephanfranck: for what happened to the American middle class in the last 40 years.
• 1:18:58
  stephanfranck: And so Palomino, in a way, became also
• 1:19:02
  stephanfranck: There's that in the background, that it's never really a point in the story, but it's all alive in every part of it, you know?
• 1:19:12
  stephanfranck: So, so that's the music thread, to me.
• 1:19:17
  Dan Newland: Pretty cool.
• 1:19:23
  Tad Eggleston: You lay down so many names that I don't know. You're gonna have to send me an emailed list.
• 1:19:28
  Tad Eggleston: Or, or, or just a, a playlist.
• 1:19:34
  stephanfranck: Well, Archie, Archie Francis, He's just a great guy, and
• 1:19:40
  stephanfranck: I got to produce his final… because he… he worked on a million…
• 1:19:48
  stephanfranck: with a million people, you know. Talk about Johnny Cash, he did play with Johnny Cash, he did play with Roger Miller, he played with all those guys, I mean, he played… anybody who walked through the…
• 1:19:58
  stephanfranck: the… the pal, you know, if they… if they didn't have their band with them, you know, the house band would, like, you know,
• 1:20:05
  stephanfranck: But… Why am I seeing this?
• 1:20:09
  stephanfranck: Lost my train of thought, on Archie.
• 1:20:14
  stephanfranck: Oh, so he was writing all the songs, and he, like, recorded, like, a track or two here and there, you know, but he never really did an album.
• 1:20:24
  stephanfranck: And I get to help him produce his album before he passed away.
• 1:20:29
  stephanfranck: And… which has some incredible people playing on it.
• 1:20:33
  stephanfranck: Which has,
• 1:20:37
  stephanfranck: Al Bruno. Al Bruno was also one of the top guitar players in town here in his day. He was Dick Clark's bandleader, and whatever, you know. And…
• 1:20:49
  stephanfranck: he was on the album, and that's the last recorded thing Al Bruno ever did, and that's also his,
• 1:20:57
  stephanfranck: He also passed on, you know?
• 1:20:59
  stephanfranck: So it was, like… Yeah, it's a very… it's became… it's a very personal project.
• 1:21:08
  stephanfranck: that… is deceptively strip of consciousness. It's, like, really very constructed, because after, like.
• 1:21:19
  stephanfranck: 40 years of doing this shit, I cannot write something that doesn't… somehow.
• 1:21:25
  stephanfranck: It gets structured the old-fashioned way we always do it, you know?
• 1:21:29
  stephanfranck: But it's… you… you read it, and you don't… I don't think you're feeling the structure, I think you're feeling the moments.
• 1:21:37
  stephanfranck: And a lot of them are very lived-in, a lot of them are, you know, one way or the other, you know.
• 1:21:44
  Tad Eggleston: Is that Money in the Bank, the name of the album?
• 1:21:47
  stephanfranck: Yeah, money at the bank, yeah, in the bank.
• 1:21:50
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:21:50
  stephanfranck: You know, it's funny, at his funeral, because the song… so his daughter, one of his daughters, spoke at the funeral and said, hey, his favorite song was, I don't Wanna Die with Money in the Bank. Guess what? Mission accomplished!
• 1:22:11
  stephanfranck: you know, he was such a character.
• 1:22:18
  Dan Newland: So, speaking.
• 1:22:18
  Tad Eggleston: Now I know what I'm listening to tomorrow in the hallways.
• 1:22:22
  Dan Newland: You mentioned that there are things in this that, like, as they pass by, you just don't understand, but you kind of deal with it?
• 1:22:30
  Dan Newland: And I had actually written down one thing, and I'm like, this is probably too obscure to even ask about.
• 1:22:37
  Dan Newland: Okay. Because we're on music, there's a point where they're getting ready to go out and play
• 1:22:43
  Dan Newland: At the Palomino.
• 1:22:45
  Dan Newland: And one of the guys, the guy who's playing the bass.
• 1:22:48
  Dan Newland: says London will not be calling Union… it's Union Avenue.
• 1:22:53
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 1:22:54
  Dan Newland: I assume you know what that means. What does that mean?
• 1:22:57
  stephanfranck: Well, so, you know, as you know, London Calling is the clash, right? And so, and Union Avenue is the street that Sun Records was on.
• 1:23:08
  Dan Newland: Okay.
• 1:23:10
  stephanfranck: So… so he's basically telling him, hey man, you're not gonna play any of that wild shit, right? We're doing it old style.
• 1:23:16
  Dan Newland: Less of the rock and more of the Billy going on this evening.
• 1:23:18
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
• 1:23:20
  stephanfranck: That's right.
• 1:23:21
  Dan Newland: Pretty cool.
• 1:23:24
  Tad Eggleston: See, just…
• 1:23:24
  Dan Newland: Maybe everybody else knew that. I did not know that.
• 1:23:28
  Tad Eggleston: I didn't, but just…
• 1:23:29
  stephanfranck: But that's the thing, right? It's just, like, you want those things that you get, you get what he's saying, you get the vibe.
• 1:23:37
  stephanfranck: But the specifics, you may or may not know, and you may or may not chase them, or, you know, but it's… that's what makes the world feel…
• 1:23:46
  stephanfranck: Like, it has a life on its own, you know?
• 1:23:49
  Dan Newland: Absolutely.
• 1:23:51
  Tad Eggleston: I, I just,
• 1:23:53
  Tad Eggleston: I've brought up a few times on the podcast that my family has a movie club that we get together once a week and talk about a movie, and it was actually my week to pick, and…
• 1:24:07
  Tad Eggleston: Serendipitously, I guess? The movie I picked this week was Jim Jarmous's…
• 1:24:13
  Tad Eggleston: mystery Train, so, like, as soon as you said Sun Records, I'm like, yeah, no. I was literally listening to the Sun singles in the hallway. Actually, I put together a playlist of all of the Sun and Stacks singles, so I had a random Sun and Stax singles going on in the hallway. It was my Memphis playlist.
• 1:24:32
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 1:24:32
  stephanfranck: You know, I'll tell you something, and maybe we can end on that, because believe it or not, I have to go back to work.
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: I gotta ask closing questions really quick, but say that, and then we'll end on…
• 1:24:44
  stephanfranck: What's, what's really interesting, I mean, I… I love that movie, Mystery Train, right? It's with this Japan… if people don't know, right, this Japanese tourist, you know, and the… it's a couple, young couple, and the, and his rockabilly, you know. Right.
• 1:25:01
  stephanfranck: So it's, in a way, a movie about cultural appropriation.
• 1:25:07
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:25:07
  stephanfranck: about, what, you know, when you…
• 1:25:16
  stephanfranck: when you have a culture like America, you know, had that resonates throughout the world.
• 1:25:24
  stephanfranck: You will be everywhere, but there's a level to which you will never be understood anywhere.
• 1:25:30
  stephanfranck: And so, growing up in France in the… in those years, you know, 70s, I was a little kid in 70s, but 80s mainly, you know,
• 1:25:41
  stephanfranck: you… You, you lived… in the cultural suburb of America.
• 1:25:50
  stephanfranck: And… and when you're in the… and you fall in love, just like the kid in Mystery Train, you fall in love with some of the aspects of it. Oh, I love the… but it's the surface thing. You don't…
• 1:26:03
  stephanfranck: understand, really, like… because you're not, and why should you? You live in a different country. But you've been marketed that culture, you've accepted it.
• 1:26:12
  stephanfranck: and now you're doing kind of your own thing with it in a weird way. So, like, me, who…
• 1:26:21
  stephanfranck: had this weird desire from an early age that I cannot explain, to live in America, to be an American, to just… there was something that spoke to me here.
• 1:26:31
  stephanfranck: The… my… a lot of my…
• 1:26:35
  stephanfranck: journey has been, like, I… I don't want to do it fake. I don't want to do it like it's cultural appropriation. I don't want to be that Japanese kid in… kid in… in… in… in Mr.
• 1:26:47
  Tad Eggleston: So you gotta give him credit for liking Carl Perkins so much.
• 1:26:50
  stephanfranck: Yeah, I love coffee, right?
• 1:26:54
  stephanfranck: So, yeah, I went to be here and plant my roots, and that the roots would extend culturally to where I could write a story like Palomino, and it would absolutely be lived in and not be…
• 1:27:08
  stephanfranck: the Palomino that I would have written 30 years ago when I lived in France.
• 1:27:14
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, closing questions so that you can go back to work, because you're a crazy man.
• 1:27:19
  Tad Eggleston: And because you're on the West Coast, it's a little bit earlier for you.
• 1:27:24
  stephanfranck: Okay.
• 1:27:29
  Tad Eggleston: I don't need to give the whole spiel, because I've given it to you before, but, like, this podcast and being involved in comics has, like, changed my life in wonderful and marvelous ways. I get to have surreal experiences, like this conversation.
• 1:27:46
  Tad Eggleston: on a regular basis. Like, in a way that if you'd told me when I was a kid, or even 30-something, that, oh, this is gonna be part of your life, I would have been like, yeah, fuck you.
• 1:28:01
  Tad Eggleston: So I've started collecting surreal experiences. Tell me… tell me something that you have gotten to experience because of this… this life in… in cartoons and comics.
• 1:28:13
  stephanfranck: There's, there's different.
• 1:28:16
  Tad Eggleston: And music. I mean, you kind of just gave us one.
• 1:28:20
  stephanfranck: Well…
• 1:28:21
  stephanfranck: There's so many, like, there's so many on the… on the animation movie side that I… I could… but I don't want to drop them, because they would be name-dropping in a way that I don't want to do. But let me just say that, yes, there's some rooms that I found myself in, and that I just, like.
• 1:28:40
  stephanfranck: the 8-year-old me was floating on the ceiling, like, how is this real? But…
• 1:28:47
  stephanfranck: musically, I'll give you a near miss that I, you know, since we've been talking a lot about Archie.
• 1:28:53
  stephanfranck: Archie,
• 1:28:56
  stephanfranck: you know, like to hang out at, because, you know, we recorded, Archie's record at, Pete Anderson's studio, you know, I don't know if you know who Pete Anderson is. He was, Dwight Yoakam's original
• 1:29:12
  stephanfranck: guitar player and producer, and then they start working together, but… but Char…
• 1:29:19
  stephanfranck: Archie is the one who introduced Dwight to Pete.
• 1:29:22
  stephanfranck: And put them together, and the rest is history, right? So we recorded the album at Pete's Studio in Burbank. And so…
• 1:29:31
  stephanfranck: Archie liked to hang out there, and he… one night he calls me, and he says, hey, man, do you wanna… I'm going to a piece to you, do you wanna come and hang out? Maybe I'll be, like, a little jam session, and, you know, it'll be really fun to, you know…
• 1:29:44
  stephanfranck: And I'm… I'm like… and I, you know, I was… I was working at Disney at the time, and I can't remember if I was working overtime, or I was just… I had a long day, I was just like, Archie, I'm just gonna pass.
• 1:29:55
  stephanfranck: And then he called… he goes, he calls me back the next day, and he says, man, you missed out. I was like, what are you talking about? And, like, we had, you know, Pete had Billy Gibbons in the studio, and we jammed all night long. And I was like, oh, fuck.
• 1:30:12
  Sean Harklerode: Huh.
• 1:30:12
  Dan Newland: I've been watching Billy Gibbons' videos just earlier today.
• 1:30:15
  stephanfranck: Good.
• 1:30:16
  Dan Newland: It's amazing.
• 1:30:17
  stephanfranck: I got, and I never met him, and then I never met him, but then that was… there you go. I could have met him, you know, fly on the wall, maybe pick up a guitar, you know, a little bit for 5 minutes, and, myself, I don't know, but it would have been, like, definitely a bucket list sort of, like.
• 1:30:37
  stephanfranck: Would you call it? Surreal experience?
• 1:30:40
  Tad Eggleston: Right?
• 1:30:41
  Sean Harklerode: Yeah.
• 1:30:42
  stephanfranck: That didn't happen, but sometimes they don't happen, but…
• 1:30:45
  Tad Eggleston: I mean… There's something surreal about, like, knowing somebody who you can…
• 1:30:53
  Tad Eggleston: say, oh, I… I talked to them, and they told me, hey, you know how you had work last night? Well, sucks to be you.
• 1:31:01
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 1:31:03
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:31:03
  Dan Newland: There's a note, by the way, as a guy from North Dakota, talking to somebody who's worked at Disney and is, you know, animating movies and doing all of this is similar to the Billy Gibbons experience, probably.
• 1:31:16
  Dan Newland: It's like, we don't have a lot of people hanging out at Disney here in, in North Dakota, so… it's, it's pretty cool.
• 1:31:23
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, no, no, when I found out that you worked on Iron Giant, I was like, oh, my.
• 1:31:28
  Dan Newland: Okay, nice.
• 1:31:29
  stephanfranck: Right, yeah.
• 1:31:30
  Tad Eggleston: my kid's childhood.
• 1:31:31
  Dan Newland: You know?
• 1:31:32
  Tad Eggleston: That was a… that was a multi-generational movie in my house.
• 1:31:36
  stephanfranck: It's really weird, because I have this one memory of, like, when we were in the middle of it.
• 1:31:42
  stephanfranck: And, like, the release was 6 months away, or something, and we were still working.
• 1:31:48
  stephanfranck: And I was looking at the first scenes in color and stuff like that, and I was like, cannot wait until the world sees this.
• 1:31:56
  Dan Newland: You know, those… there was, like…
• 1:31:57
  stephanfranck: 6 months! We have to wait 6 months! I cannot believe… And that was 30 years ago.
• 1:32:03
  stephanfranck: Fuck.
• 1:32:06
  Tad Eggleston: Alright, I always make you answer this question multiple times, just because I like to get your music recommendations, too. Tell me something you love!
• 1:32:15
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling.
• 1:32:17
  Tad Eggleston: Or preferably comics, but we don't have rules, preferably storytelling, but we don't have rules.
• 1:32:22
  stephanfranck: identified.
• 1:32:23
  Tad Eggleston: that you love.
• 1:32:24
  Tad Eggleston: That not enough people around you know about.
• 1:32:27
  stephanfranck: Pull them out.
• 1:32:30
  Tad Eggleston: And I need a music rec, too. So, comic and music.
• 1:32:43
  stephanfranck: Okay, I'm gonna start… With music first.
• 1:32:49
  stephanfranck: I'm going to… I think… and it's really having a comeback, because, I mean, as you guys know,
• 1:32:57
  stephanfranck: in Palomino, Eddie plays the pedal steel guitar at the, you know, at the Palomino. The real pedal steel guitar player at the Palomino was my pal, J.D. Manes.
• 1:33:10
  stephanfranck: who's…
• 1:33:11
  stephanfranck: just… just incredible, just incredible musician. There's so much soul in everything he does, and there's… and he plays… he has a sound when he plays the steel, like, the type of…
• 1:33:23
  stephanfranck: chords that he does that is completely unique, like, no one else does it like him. It's… you can… if you hear him in the track, you know… So if people don't know who J.D. Manes is.
• 1:33:34
  stephanfranck: M-E-N-E-S-S.
• 1:33:39
  stephanfranck: look him up, there's a lot of him, I'm sure, on YouTube, and look for records that he's on. It's… it's music that is,
• 1:33:49
  Tad Eggleston: J-D-J-A-Y-D-E-E.
• 1:33:53
  stephanfranck: Yeah, so in some places, that's the right way to do it, but sometimes people just write JD, because they don't know any better, so…
• 1:34:00
  Tad Eggleston: No, I know, I just… I wrote just JD, and it me.
• 1:34:04
  stephanfranck: So I would say, because I think let's not go after, like, artists who have records. Let's go after sidemen and musicians that are extraordinary and that maybe people don't know about, because they're behind the scenes. So go look up JD, he's amazing.
• 1:34:19
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I just did.
• 1:34:22
  stephanfranck: And, in terms of comics,
• 1:34:28
  stephanfranck: And I don't know if I should go back to the old days, or where should I go?
• 1:34:36
  stephanfranck: Not enough people know about… Okay, I'm gonna do a sort of… Because you mentioned Mettel Newland.
• 1:34:45
  stephanfranck: Earlier, So, as we all know, metallur Law, where
• 1:34:51
  stephanfranck: started by, like, 3 or 4 people, right? There was, like, Dione, who was, like, the publisher, the editor-in-chief, whatever. There was this guy, Franckas, who was the…
• 1:35:02
  stephanfranck: the money guy, and then the artists were Mobius and Drouet.
• 1:35:08
  stephanfranck: And I think people buying now in America know Mobius enough. I have the… maybe the only…
• 1:35:17
  stephanfranck: one of the very, very few pieces of original art that I own is, like, above my desk. It's a Batman by Mobius, a little sketch.
• 1:35:26
  stephanfranck: It's a story, that's a story for a different day. But, the,
• 1:35:33
  stephanfranck: But the other, so, like, it's like you had the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, right? So Mobius was the Beatles, and you had the Rolling Stones, like, the darker side was Drouet. And Drouet would…
• 1:35:45
  Tad Eggleston: I'm Sloan.
• 1:35:46
  stephanfranck: Yes, yeah, Lone Sloan, right? Delirious, all that stuff, the night.
• 1:35:51
  stephanfranck: And when you look at his space stuff, like the whole Lone Sloan, I think Delirious is part of Lone Sloan, or it's… whatever,
• 1:36:01
  stephanfranck: a lot of the… the imagery for the Galactic Empire in Star Wars.
• 1:36:08
  stephanfranck: is inspired by… Oh, yeah.
• 1:36:11
  stephanfranck: you know, like, even the helmet, you know, all that, you know, that stuff, like the Darsh, you know, the whole sort of space Nazi kind of vibe that is done in a way that's also not obvious. It's obviously it's what it is, but not in a cliched way.
• 1:36:28
  stephanfranck: that is very, very, very inspiring. So, like, when you watch Star Wars,
• 1:36:33
  stephanfranck: I think a lot of the Jedi side is an alien, like, random aliens, all that stuff is very inspired by Mobius and Messiere.
• 1:36:43
  stephanfranck: and a lot of the… who did Valerian, if people don't know, and a lot of the Empire, it's straight up Drouet. And Druyere always looked as…
• 1:36:55
  stephanfranck: a French guy trying to do Steve Ditko, if Steve Ditko was trying to copy Kirby.
• 1:37:03
  stephanfranck: And it came out as its own fucking thing, and…
• 1:37:08
  Tad Eggleston: It… in, in our Heavy Metal Book Club,
• 1:37:14
  Tad Eggleston: Dylan is a massive Gale fan.
• 1:37:18
  Tad Eggleston: When we were going through the issues where Gail was… was…
• 1:37:23
  Tad Eggleston: serialized. It was his favorite story every month.
• 1:37:28
  Tad Eggleston: And it's beautiful.
• 1:37:30
  Tad Eggleston: Absolutely beautiful.
• 1:37:33
  Tad Eggleston: So… Stephan, it is always, always a pleasure. I love having excuses to have you come talk.
• 1:37:41
  stephanfranck: Oh, it's my pleasure.
• 1:37:42
  Tad Eggleston: I loved it… I loved an opportunity to actually take… take Palomino out for a spin in our… in our Pulp Blotter book club.
• 1:37:53
  Tad Eggleston: It's kind of cool to take a book that I not only love that much, but by a creator who I consider a friend, and, like, introduce it to more people, and…
• 1:38:03
  Tad Eggleston: Go through the hole… I'm defending my friend, dammit, and you're making valid criticism, even though I don't agree!
• 1:38:14
  stephanfranck: I mean, like, it's… it's art, you know? It's just, like, everybody's point of view is valid, everybody's experience, is, the worst thing is…
• 1:38:25
  stephanfranck: Someone not having an experience.
• 1:38:28
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:38:28
  stephanfranck: Okay. No.
• 1:38:29
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, that's gonna be my last quick question, because, like…
• 1:38:34
  Tad Eggleston: I was almost afraid to ask you to talk with the group.
• 1:38:38
  Tad Eggleston: Because there'd been, like, more criticism that we sometimes get into. Like, we had to stop our run of reading Jimmy Palmiati's Jonah Hex, because we felt like we'd fallen into…
• 1:38:52
  Tad Eggleston: to the, the Chris Farley show. Remember Issue 42? That was awesome.
• 1:39:00
  Tad Eggleston: So, like, the fact that there was so much back and forth, I'm like.
• 1:39:06
  Tad Eggleston: I don't want anybody to be upset, but, like, when you responded, you, like, not only responded that you were down for it, but you'd listened to the episodes, and you're like, oh, yeah, no, this isn't necessarily gonna be easy, but I'm all over it.
• 1:39:22
  Tad Eggleston: And so, like, what's it like listening to, to your… Your, your, your work be… stripped apart.
• 1:39:33
  Tad Eggleston: in podcast form.
• 1:39:36
  stephanfranck: You know, that's what I do for a living. I mean, dude, I work in movies, you know? Like, it's, you know…
• 1:39:43
  stephanfranck: if I had, you know…
• 1:39:46
  stephanfranck: over the 35 years doing it, I think 34 and a half is, like, compiled time of people telling me what I'm doing wrong, you know?
• 1:39:56
  stephanfranck: This is… that's the job, you know, so… trust me, I think…
• 1:40:01
  stephanfranck: who took the time to, you know, took the trouble to read this book, which is very long, and that, you know, that some people, it connected with some people, it didn't connect with other people. Dude, I'm down, I'm here for the conversation.
• 1:40:21
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I think we all connected on some level.
• 1:40:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:40:25
  Dan Newland: I like that.
• 1:40:25
  Tad Eggleston: Dan actually, I think, binged the whole thing immediately.
• 1:40:28
  Dan Newland: I absolutely… I absolutely… I mean, it's…
• 1:40:31
  Dan Newland: I love film noir, and I love the old detective stuff, and I love, like, basically everything about this.
• 1:40:39
  Dan Newland: Really connected well with me.
• 1:40:40
  Dan Newland: what was interesting, I think, was once we sat down and really started going through it more, and you start analyzing the specifics.
• 1:40:50
  Dan Newland: you did interesting, different things, and different things sometimes hit people weird. You know, you weren't approaching comics in entirely the traditional way, and I think that's what made it fun and gave us some things to sort of dig into and sort of question our own, well…
• 1:41:07
  Dan Newland: How do I feel about… Reading comics.
• 1:41:10
  Dan Newland: as a… as a two-page spread, instead of the way I've been doing it for…
• 1:41:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:41:14
  Dan Newland: 40 years.
• 1:41:17
  stephanfranck: No, and the other thing that I'll say, too, is that from my… I just remember, like, when I was younger and buying CDs, right?
• 1:41:25
  stephanfranck: music series, right? And so, I just remember, like, being… when I lived in England, in London, I was a kid, yeah, I was a kid, I was young, it was my first job, you know?
• 1:41:35
  stephanfranck: And every Saturday, I would go to Seoul, like, to the Big Tower Rikers, or whatever they had, and I looked at… and, you know, you couldn't quite listen… you had to look at the covers, and so… and you'd get… I'd get, like.
• 1:41:48
  stephanfranck: 4 or 5 CDs and bring them back, you know, to my apartment, you know, on the other side of London, and then I would, like, listen to the, you know, and see what I got, right? And the stuff that I was, like, putting in, and like, this is awesome, right? I'd be bored of it.
• 1:42:06
  stephanfranck: Anytime, you know, and the stuff that would go like, this is a little bit weird, I'll listen to the other stuff, right?
• 1:42:13
  stephanfranck: Funny enough, that becomes my favorite… so you never know, you know, like, your relationship that we all have with artistic material changes, because we change, we see things differently, there's stuff that resonates with us.
• 1:42:28
  stephanfranck: That connect with our experience at some point.
• 1:42:31
  stephanfranck: That… at some other times it doesn't. It's also good, it's all part of the…
• 1:42:37
  stephanfranck: You know, that's what.
• 1:42:39
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I actually completely adore that type of album. Like, I remember R.E.M. had a 4-album run after Monster, where I didn't like a single one of them on the first listen.
• 1:42:51
  Tad Eggleston: But I love them all by the third.
• 1:42:53
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 1:42:54
  stephanfranck: And that's what you're listening to. So, there you go.
• 1:42:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:42:59
  Sean Harklerode: That's where I'm at with the new stones out.
• 1:43:02
  Tad Eggleston: Hi.
• 1:43:02
  stephanfranck: I'm sorry.
• 1:43:03
  Sean Harklerode: The new Rolling Stones album.
• 1:43:05
  stephanfranck: Oh, yeah, yeah.
• 1:43:06
  Sean Harklerode: I listened… the first time I listened to it, I was like, I don't know. But then, I've listened to it a couple more times, and…
• 1:43:13
  Sean Harklerode: You know, it's…
• 1:43:13
  stephanfranck: Yeah, you, you…
• 1:43:15
  Sean Harklerode: favorites.
• 1:43:16
  Tad Eggleston: Actually, for me, the all-timer for that is still…
• 1:43:22
  Tad Eggleston: Ben Fold's Lonely Avenue, which Nick Hornby did all the writing on.
• 1:43:29
  Tad Eggleston: And Nick Hornby's one of my… er, all the lyrical writing. Nick Hornby's one of my favorite writers, and I love Ben Folds. So, like, immediately, I'm like, I'm gonna love this album.
• 1:43:40
  Tad Eggleston: And I hated it the first listen.
• 1:43:43
  stephanfranck: Yeah.
• 1:43:43
  Tad Eggleston: Because it didn't feel like a Ben Foltz album.
• 1:43:45
  stephanfranck: Right, right.
• 1:43:47
  Tad Eggleston: And then I realized, oh, wait a minute, what it does feel like is a Nick Hornby album, if Nick Hornby could make music.
• 1:43:54
  Tad Eggleston: Rather than just write words. It's got that Memphis Lonely Avenue feel to it. It's got more of the…
• 1:44:02
  Tad Eggleston: the, the, the… The blues and, you know, it's not just your typical piano album.
• 1:44:13
  stephanfranck: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:44:13
  Tad Eggleston: And, like, each listen after that, it just grew on me, and now it's one of my favorite albums by anybody.
• 1:44:21
  stephanfranck: It's a living…
• 1:44:22
  Tad Eggleston: It's always weird like that, sometimes. Sean, who's playing drums for the Stones on the new album?
• 1:44:29
  Sean Harklerode: So there's,
• 1:44:31
  Sean Harklerode: There's a couple of people. There's one track that is using the last track that Charlie laid down.
• 1:44:40
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:44:41
  Sean Harklerode: I know McCartney's on bass on one of the songs.
• 1:44:46
  Tad Eggleston: Because, I mean, we brought up the.
• 1:44:48
  Sean Harklerode: Ringo came to a session, but he didn't play drums.
• 1:44:51
  Tad Eggleston: We brought up the Stones and the Beatles earlier for Mobius and Drew Ray, so since they came up again, like, I don't know how you can have such great bands with among the best drummers in history.
• 1:45:05
  Tad Eggleston: And both of the drummers are criminally underrated.
• 1:45:10
  Tad Eggleston: Criminally underrated.
• 1:45:12
  Sean Harklerode: Well, look, I saw…
• 1:45:14
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:45:14
  Sean Harklerode: to Mark, you know.
• 1:45:15
  Tad Eggleston: We gotta let Stephan go.
• 1:45:17
  Tad Eggleston: For… for 22 panels, this has been Stephan… Stephan Frank.
• 1:45:24
  stephanfranck: That's great.
• 1:45:25
  Tad Eggleston: And we will see you.
• 1:45:26
  stephanfranck: And so I just…
• 1:45:26
  Tad Eggleston: Go to the next page.
• 1:45:27
  stephanfranck: It's not the thing where I need to stay on the… so it's… we're live, or we're whatever, you… I can just log off, and you're good to go, right?
• 1:45:36
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, we're gonna stop recording right now.