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Transcript

With Great Power #283... 22 Panels with the American Caper Team · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

• 0:01
  Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels, coming to you tonight from Modern Age Comics in Algonquin for the first time, so that's kind of exciting.
• 0:12
  Tad Eggleston: And with me is the crew from American Caper. We have Laszlo, David Lapham, and editor Shelly Bond. How is everybody doing?
• 0:23
  Lazlow: It's great. I just got, Issue 2 sent to me by Dark Horse, the… Oh, nice!
• 0:28
  Tad Eggleston: Nice.
• 0:28
  Lazlow: off the presses before it goes in stores on December 24th, so…
• 0:32
  Shelly Bond: Wow, they must like you a lot at Dark Horse.
• 0:35
  Lazlow: They must.
• 0:36
  David Lapham: No.
• 0:37
  Lazlow: It's nice to… nice to get this before it's officially…
• 0:42
  Lazlow: On the street, as they say.
• 0:44
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 0:45
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so who wants to give you the front counter pitch? That's… that's how I like to start. I like… I like to start with somebody, you know, somebody walks into the shop and goes, I like crime comics, or doesn't even know they like crime comics. They watch…
• 1:01
  Tad Eggleston: They watch Pulp Fiction, and you're selling them American caper, something like that.
• 1:06
  Shelly Bond: Laszlo, you are the ultimate.
• 1:09
  Shelly Bond: Hitch.
• 1:10
  David Lapham: Keep the sales. Yeah.
• 1:12
  Shelly Bond: The Prince of Pitches. The Pitch Man of the Year. Go for it.
• 1:16
  Lazlow: Well, The idea behind American Caper was that Dan Hauser and I, who have written a lot
• 1:24
  Lazlow: on games like Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption.
• 1:27
  Lazlow: wanted to tell an American crime story and tell it in comics.
• 1:33
  Lazlow: Rather than in interactive… games, or linear animation, and so…
• 1:41
  Lazlow: He had this idea about some escaped convicts, Who hijack a van.
• 1:48
  Lazlow: full of, immigrants who are being smuggled from Mexico.
• 1:54
  Lazlow: And the three convicts had to…
• 1:57
  Lazlow: Wyoming, in this fictional town called Verona, and end up crashing between these two houses in this neighborhood.
• 2:04
  Lazlow: And on one side, we have a degenerate lawyer who's given into gambling and seeing his career
• 2:14
  Lazlow: Go into the realm of defending awful human beings.
• 2:18
  Lazlow: And his wife has been radicalized by the internet and turned from one political side to the other, and has gone completely crazy. And then next door, they've got the perfect Mormon family with the hot Mormon wife and the beautiful, blonde Mormon children, but the Mormon husband is a…
• 2:36
  Lazlow: Hitman.
• 2:37
  Lazlow: for, for his Mormon boss, and they are… both families are intertwined in a real estate deal to build a luxury golf course.
• 2:46
  Lazlow: And, and then we have a slew of other characters, and we follow these two families, we follow the people in the van, and the convicts, and this maniac,
• 2:58
  Lazlow: from Wall Street, who… billionaire who moved to Wyoming to play cowboy.
• 3:03
  Lazlow: And, exposes a bit too much of himself at times. So it's a real sprawling story about,
• 3:13
  Lazlow: American crime, which is basically, real estate, politics, and plastic surgery.
• 3:23
  Tad Eggleston: And whack jobs.
• 3:25
  Lazlow: And whack jobs. There's a lot of… Dan Houser came up with all those characters that people love.
• 3:31
  Lazlow: from those games, and it's, this really does feel like kind of a GTA mixed with Red Dead.
• 3:38
  Lazlow: Story, because it's set in…
• 3:41
  Lazlow: beautiful Wyoming, and he felt that that was a place that was ripe for For telling a story.
• 3:49
  Tad Eggleston: So, how did Shelly and David come on board?
• 3:54
  David Lapham: What else?
• 3:54
  Lazlow: Well…
• 3:55
  David Lapham: We should go next, yeah. Nope.
• 3:56
  Lazlow: Well, we didn't know what we are… we didn't know what we were doing. We've never made a comic before.
• 4:02
  Lazlow: And so, you know, we've…
• 4:04
  Lazlow: We started writing scripts, and then it became obvious that this is…
• 4:11
  Lazlow: That you need a professional.
• 4:13
  Shelly Bond: They tried every… and they tried to hire everyone else imaginable, And then they hired me.
• 4:21
  Tad Eggleston: If it wasn't top of your list, I'm very disappointed.
• 4:23
  Lazlow: Well, what was crazy is,
• 4:28
  Lazlow: A woman that we work with here came in and said, I've got a great idea for American Caper.
• 4:35
  Lazlow: Shelley Bond, and started rattling off all the books that she brought to life, and I was like, that's one of my favorites, that's one of my favorites, that's one of my favorites, and so…
• 4:45
  Lazlow: And then she put this team together. She, she said, David Lapham is who you should have
• 4:52
  Lazlow: be the artist, on this. We did some early character exploration with, Simon Bisley.
• 5:00
  Lazlow: on it, she's like, David Lapham will do prime storytelling and bring your scripts to life, and…
• 5:09
  Lazlow: paired him up with Chris Anderson to do finishes and inks, and it was a team that had never been tried before.
• 5:16
  Lazlow: And she said, for this, you've got to have Lee Lowridge for…
• 5:21
  Lazlow: for colors, and get, Nate Picos for… for all the…
• 5:26
  Lazlow: Just amazing lettering that he does, and so we were like.
• 5:31
  Tad Eggleston: Literally wrote the book on it.
• 5:32
  Lazlow: Yeah, so we were, like, excellent, and…
• 5:36
  Lazlow: It's, we did several of these issues, had no publisher.
• 5:41
  Lazlow: And once we had a few of them done, then we went out and spoke with all of the
• 5:47
  Lazlow: all of the usual suspects, and Dark Horse was the perfect partner that we chose.
• 5:55
  Lazlow: And it's been… it's… it's been fantastic.
• 5:59
  Lazlow: And I went to my first Comic-Con this summer with David Lapham and Shelley Bond, and, you know, every…
• 6:05
  Lazlow: Every famous artist and writer We're running up to them, like it was always…
• 6:11
  Shelly Bond: Let's not, let's not push it.
• 6:14
  Tad Eggleston: Shelly, I've been at cons with you.
• 6:16
  Shelly Bond: No, I think it was David.
• 6:17
  Tad Eggleston: Been at cons with you, Shelly.
• 6:19
  Shelly Bond: Hey, David… David doesn't leave his house too often, because he's… he draws with his hands and both feet.
• 6:27
  Shelly Bond: That's how fast he is.
• 6:28
  Tad Eggleston: Believe that.
• 6:30
  Lazlow: So, but I'm curious, David, what… when Shelly came to you about this project, you know, you get offered a lot of
• 6:37
  Lazlow: a lot of work, so… Yeah. What made you say, like, I'm gonna help these clowns get this thing
• 6:45
  Lazlow: right place.
• 6:47
  David Lapham: Well, I mean, you know, anytime Shelly calls, it's a serious thing, and you know it's going to be a good project.
• 6:56
  Shelly Bond: Oh, boy.
• 6:58
  Shelly Bond: Wait a minute. That was the answer I was expecting. He is saying that with his fingers crossed, with his toes crossed, and he's still drawing issue 11 of American Paper.
• 7:08
  David Lapham: I'm doing it with my feet, so… Go ahead. I have the…
• 7:13
  Shelly Bond: Don't let me interrupt anybody, ever again.
• 7:18
  David Lapham: No, yes, but that is… is true. Like, Shelly believes in her project, so she's not gonna… she's not gonna come,
• 7:27
  David Lapham: To me, or to any other, artist, unless she believes in it.
• 7:32
  David Lapham: So.
• 7:33
  Tad Eggleston: for pairing.
• 7:34
  David Lapham: And she, she, she, appealed to me as,
• 7:40
  David Lapham: Working with Chris, and like…
• 7:43
  David Lapham: you know, being, like, the veteran, and Chris was just sort of getting into comics from the storyboarding world, and…
• 7:53
  David Lapham: so she, appealed to me in sort of a pay-it-forward kind of way.
• 8:00
  Shelly Bond: Well, and also, I think it's fair to say, David, that
• 8:03
  Shelly Bond: I consider you, or maybe I just read it somewhere, that you are considered one of the greatest American storytellers of my generation.
• 8:14
  Shelly Bond: Which I know I've been quoted as saying, and it may or may not be true, but I thought you were the perfect person to bring in on the front end, and I knew it was probably going to be impossible for you to
• 8:25
  Shelly Bond: Help with the storytelling, both, in the layouts and also just in the pacing.
• 8:35
  Shelly Bond: and the pencils and inks, and I thought it really was a good opportunity to let you work on…
• 8:42
  Shelly Bond: Pencils to the point where you felt comfortable leaving them in someone else's able hands.
• 8:47
  David Lapham: Right.
• 8:48
  David Lapham: Right. Yeah, and that was a big… and also the part you said about being,
• 8:54
  David Lapham: sort of part of a team, I mean,
• 8:57
  David Lapham: Dan and Lazzle had these scripts and these stories, but they were also really open to, you know, us getting on these, getting together for these meetings and, and…
• 9:08
  David Lapham: sort of crafting the ideas and the story into the structure of the comic book, and open to ideas of what things might work, might work better, or maybe we can play, you know, get the same result, but we do it this way,
• 9:27
  David Lapham: And, just that collaborative nature of it, which is really, really rare.
• 9:34
  David Lapham: In comics, even though…
• 9:36
  David Lapham: Even though what I do, or what Maria and I do, like, on Stray Bullets, where we're just a tight team and we do it all ourselves, that's super rare. But also, even with teams where it's, like, writer, pencil or inker, so on, it's usually all separate, going through an editor.
• 9:53
  David Lapham: where everybody's siloed and, just, just pumps out their, their part. And this, we all really work together. We work back and forth, we, we have a lot of Zoom meetings, if someone has an idea, we throw it out. And,
• 10:13
  David Lapham: ultimately goes through Laszlo, and then… and then Dan. Dan, who's not… is in the Zoom meetings as much, so he's sort of, at times, like, the unseen force. Like, we all come up with something, and it's like.
• 10:26
  David Lapham: Can we get it past Dan?
• 10:29
  David Lapham: Yeah, I'm gonna think of this.
• 10:30
  Lazlow: Yeah, that's… that's…
• 10:31
  David Lapham: It's.
• 10:33
  Lazlow: That's what's fun about it, is, like, Dan will write the script, and then I'll go through and do…
• 10:39
  Lazlow: and edit, and add some dialogue, and add a couple of scenes here and there where I think it's appropriate, and then I'll send that to
• 10:49
  Lazlow: David and Shelly, and then they send their notes back.
• 10:54
  Lazlow: And I'll go to Dan and say, you know, they think we should…
• 10:59
  Lazlow: Save this scene for the next issue, or we should bring the one that we had planned for two issues ahead, bring it forward.
• 11:07
  Lazlow: And… and get to this. And, you know, it's a lot of helpful notes, and so…
• 11:14
  Lazlow: Dan and I'll talk through them.
• 11:17
  Lazlow: you know, I'll make some of the changes, I'll send him scenes to rewrite or to add on to.
• 11:24
  Lazlow: And then I send that script back to Shelly and David, and they're like, okay, this is now good to go to thumbnails.
• 11:33
  Lazlow: And so…
• 11:34
  Shelly Bond: Start kickboxing again.
• 11:36
  Lazlow: And…
• 11:37
  Shelly Bond: will be like, alright, it's better, but can we also consider this? I will say that this is my first experience editing as a freelance editor with a company that's known for making games and not making comics, and I've heard all the horror stories.
• 11:55
  Shelly Bond: One of the reasons I took the job is because I could tell from the first time I met with Dan, who I met a few months before I met with Laszlo.
• 12:04
  Shelly Bond: I knew that he…
• 12:06
  Shelly Bond: Totally respected the comic book process, and that he was really legit when he said that he wanted to collaborate.
• 12:16
  Shelly Bond: And I asked him to his face, are you just looking into making a comic because you want to make it into a film? And he said, no, I want to make a comic book series because it's cool. And so that was the moment I was like.
• 12:29
  Shelly Bond: I'm totally in, because I got the impression that he was also…
• 12:34
  Shelly Bond: pretty good about leaving ego at the door. We're all throwing ink at this idea, you know, from the very early scripts, which, Laszlo, I think you'd be the first to admit, are written like audio scripts, because you guys had just finished your audio fiction project, A Better Paradise.
• 12:54
  Shelly Bond: And I read the scripts, and the first thing I thought to myself was, what do they want to really see on the page? Because I know what I'm seeing. That's when it really occurred to me that if I brought David into the mix.
• 13:07
  Shelly Bond: We could really get a comic that was…
• 13:11
  Shelly Bond: Unlike anything anyone has seen for many, many years, because he really has those overall visceral chops with not only this pacing, but the dialogue that kicks in, working towards the page turns.
• 13:26
  Shelly Bond: pulling things out widescreen, or then going into his classic 8-panel grid. And of course, when I mentioned David, my husband was eavesdropping, and as soon as I hung up the phone, he said to me, well, you just talked yourself out of a job. If you get David Lapham in, they're gonna be like, why do we need Shelly Bond? We've got
• 13:46
  Shelly Bond: And I'm just like, alright, Phillip, go away. Go away now. They're not gonna realize that it's the Lapum-bond connection.
• 13:52
  Shelly Bond: That makes this a fierce story.
• 13:55
  Tad Eggleston: It is. So, that segues nicely into, What?
• 14:05
  Tad Eggleston: about the story, or what about the medium decided… or made you decide you wanted to make a comic story? You know, I mean, you… you…
• 14:15
  Tad Eggleston: You've done video games, you've done the audio play.
• 14:18
  Tad Eggleston: Comics is a new medium. What made you decide
• 14:23
  Tad Eggleston: Or was it Dan that decided it? I assume it was the two of you together, the way you talked at the beginning. What made you go…
• 14:29
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, this is a comic story.
• 14:32
  Lazlow: Well, Dan was a fan of comics in the UK growing up, and I was a very avid collector from the age of
• 14:42
  Lazlow: 5, when they actually sold, you know, comic books at grocery stores and drugstores and…
• 14:47
  Lazlow: and things like that. And… We have always loved
• 14:54
  Lazlow: Storytelling in different media, and the restrictions that those have, and it's a new creative challenge.
• 15:05
  Lazlow: And when we started Absurd Ventures, you know, we both
• 15:08
  Lazlow: left Rockstar Games, I was after 19 years at him, 22,
• 15:13
  Lazlow: And he said, you know, let's do…
• 15:16
  Lazlow: let's do some new things, because, like, I've got a couple of ideas for…
• 15:21
  Lazlow: for two games, both of which are currently in production. We have two teams working on those. And he goes, and I… I loved doing the…
• 15:31
  Lazlow: the animated… Series and shorts that you could watch inside
• 15:37
  Lazlow: Inside Grand Theft Auto, and there was even animated shorts inside Red Dead Redemption that looked like old-timey, early 1900s cartoons, and…
• 15:47
  Lazlow: you know, we're also known for all the radio that we created in the GTA series, and we'd have a lot of talk radio on that, you know, that was all satirical. And with…
• 15:59
  Lazlow: in those early days, it's like, I also… I really want to do a comic book, and I said, that sounds like a blast. Now, when we worked on a game called Max Payne 3 years ago.
• 16:11
  Lazlow: He did a quick project with making a comic book that revolved around that.
• 16:19
  Lazlow: that story.
• 16:21
  Lazlow: And we considered… making a comic that you could read inside Grand Theft Auto, and we never…
• 16:30
  Lazlow: Got around to it, and… So this was…
• 16:35
  Lazlow: this was a labor of love. We, you know, it was never a com… like, when we started laying out the story and the characters, it was never like a, oh, this would be great for FX or HBO. It's like, that's never the conversation. It was like, let's do…
• 16:52
  Lazlow: let's do something fun in print media, right? Which there's not… not a lot of that
• 16:58
  Lazlow: going on anymore, and that's what I've… I've loved about this. This has also gotten me back
• 17:04
  Lazlow: into comics on a deeper level. Like, I'm going to my local comic shop now every… every week, and I'm discovering.
• 17:11
  Tad Eggleston: new books, and… Alright, plug your local comic shop.
• 17:16
  Lazlow: Pulp Fiction in, in Culver City.
• 17:20
  Lazlow: And so, it's been a… it's… it's been a great experience, and I… I think… the…
• 17:29
  Lazlow: the thing that's been amazing about having David and Shelly guiding us through this is…
• 17:35
  Lazlow: You know, a lot of our instincts were right, but there's also a lot of our instincts were wrong for some of the storytelling and some of the things that we did in some of the scripts, and… and so, you know, they've…
• 17:50
  Lazlow: David, on his thumbs, makes dialogue suggestions. He says, I would kill this line, I would add a line here, referring to the FBI agent from two issues ago, and the thing that they did there, and so…
• 18:03
  Lazlow: you know, those… once we get to a final script, which I'm also realizing that the scripts are never final, but Dan and I will sit here in this office.
• 18:12
  Tad Eggleston: Well, sure they are, when it… when it prints.
• 18:14
  Lazlow: Yeah, we do.
• 18:15
  Shelly Bond: It's actually when it's corrected for the trade, and it prints again.
• 18:18
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's right, that's right.
• 18:20
  Shelly Bond: I say they're liquid. I say Scripps are liquid.
• 18:23
  Lazlow: But, you know, we'll do… we'll do a read-through, and then…
• 18:26
  Lazlow: One of the great things about David's
• 18:29
  Lazlow: storytelling, and I spent hours on issue 7 today, as we're working on the lettering. There's pages that are amazing.
• 18:40
  Lazlow: And Shelly's like, we need some dialogue here. Like, there's, you know, there's a lot going on here, let's add some dialogue. So, you know, right up until the… the…
• 18:51
  Lazlow: the lettering goes to Nate, we're still making dialogue revisions and adding copy and cutting copy.
• 19:01
  Shelly Bond: Well, and that's because that's how…
• 19:04
  Shelly Bond: comics are edited old school, and that's the only way I can do it. And I'm not convinced anyone makes comics like that anymore.
• 19:12
  Shelly Bond: And if they do, I salute them. But, you know, you really have to…
• 19:18
  Shelly Bond: Come to grips with the fact that
• 19:20
  Shelly Bond: it's not over until it's really right. And you have a finite amount of time to make it as perfect as possible. And the best thing about working with Laszlo and Dan and the whole team at Absurd Ventures is that
• 19:33
  Shelly Bond: We had enough lead time to really do this right, and David is such a pro that no matter what, he gets X amount of pages done every week. Now, I don't know when he sleeps, but he claims he does on occasion.
• 19:49
  Tad Eggleston: He's doing how many books right now, David?
• 19:53
  David Lapham: Oh, no, no, not It looks like.
• 19:55
  Tad Eggleston: I know that they're actually done, they just…
• 19:58
  David Lapham: Yeah, I'm doing that many books.
• 20:00
  Tad Eggleston: out.
• 20:00
  David Lapham: That's coming out from, from Skybound now that Maria and I had done, pre-pandemic.
• 20:08
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, okay.
• 20:08
  David Lapham: So it's.
• 20:09
  Tad Eggleston: I've been sitting around for a while.
• 20:10
  David Lapham: Yeah, yeah, so that, I guess, you know, so that was being set on, and then I have other stuff that's, you know…
• 20:16
  Tad Eggleston: I got stuff at Bad Idea, and… Yeah.
• 20:19
  David Lapham: A lot of that.
• 20:20
  Tad Eggleston: insurance.
• 20:20
  David Lapham: and DC Owning.
• 20:24
  David Lapham: Yeah, and then, mostly it's just this and the,
• 20:28
  David Lapham: Right now, and, and, Oni's been, throwing me a lot of the EC… Right.
• 20:35
  Shelly Bond: And I think it's fair to say that it's the ticking clock that's so critical for crime thrillers and for monthly comics. I think that the beauty of the monthly is that, you know, it's got a finite amount of time, and if you have a nice long lead time, you can work with a company like Absurd Ventures.
• 20:54
  Shelly Bond: Throw them in the deep end, as long as they're willing to, you know, tread water with you, and take some of the notes, apply the notes, and… and…
• 21:04
  Shelly Bond: you know, see how the process happens, and I still work with the old-school vertigo.
• 21:11
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 21:11
  Shelly Bond: philosophy that, like, the ballooning and the thumbs
• 21:16
  Shelly Bond: are the best stage and the earliest stage to get the pacing right. And I'm… I know that a lot of people just go right to pencils or inks, and I think that's a huge mistake. David can probably speak more about that, succinctly.
• 21:30
  David Lapham: Yeah, I mean, I've worked all different kind of ways, like, even on our own book, when we do straight bullets, it's like, I've done thumbnails, I've done…
• 21:39
  David Lapham: just go for it, Fullscripts, notes, like… but the more you can… more you can do, especially, like, in a collaborative setting like this, it's like…
• 21:51
  David Lapham: The thumbs are really, really great to do, to,
• 21:55
  David Lapham: Once we… the script's at a certain point, it's like, let's put this down and see how things develop visually, because…
• 22:01
  David Lapham: you can only do so much, it's… I mean, it's a visual medium, so you can only do so much, like, on the written page. And you could spend all… you could spend days, like, trying to conceive a scene, but depending on, like, if it takes place on, like, a horse farm, it's, like, depending on…
• 22:21
  David Lapham: You know, how me or any artist, like, decides to draw the barn or draw the landscape, but it could literally change the whole way that the scene plays out.
• 22:32
  David Lapham: So, at a certain point, we just gotta get it down, and the thumbs are perfect for that, for everybody to see, and
• 22:40
  David Lapham: And get on the same page, and make adjustments, and then, you learn, like, what dialogue you could maybe get rid of.
• 22:48
  David Lapham: Because we're seeing it on the page, and then…
• 22:51
  David Lapham: What we might want to add, or, or,
• 22:54
  David Lapham: Because there's a natural tendency, I think, when you just… when you just have the page, you're right, you're obviously… some of the dialogue you're writing is sort of to describe a visual that appears in your head, but then when you've drawn the visual.
• 23:06
  David Lapham: You may not need that anymore.
• 23:09
  Shelly Bond: And I think it's that repetition that the editor has to be really aware of. And I think, in this case, I feel like we're all so,
• 23:20
  Shelly Bond: focused on the big picture and the little picture together. I think because Laszlo, told me that he was a huge fan of a lot of my books.
• 23:29
  Shelly Bond: Which I still haven't given him the official Bond quiz.
• 23:33
  Shelly Bond: On the, over 50,000 pages of comics I've edited, but I know he loved Fables. I mean, I think we should just do that right now.
• 23:42
  Lazlow: We'll do that one day. I will fail it. But Laszlo was…
• 23:47
  Shelly Bond: seemed to be fascinated by the whole process, and I kind of believed him and took him up on it. And so, yeah, we all kind of jumped in
• 23:55
  Shelly Bond: We jumped off the cliff together with this, and it's been… it's been really fun. And this is a case of me customizing my editing style, because I haven't worked for a big company in many years. Tad, you know that. You've been a huge supporter of Off-Register Press.
• 24:10
  Shelly Bond: Which I run with my absolute favorite artist of all time, who's not American.
• 24:15
  Shelly Bond: Philip Bond. I have to plug Phillip for a minute. But this is,
• 24:21
  Shelly Bond: Customizing my editing was, just something odd that I didn't even consider, and I absolutely love it. I love what we've worked out here as a process, and I hope it shows in the monthly series.
• 24:35
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, the first two issues are amazing.
• 24:37
  Lazlow: Oh, thank you. When I was first speaking with Dark Horse, I said, so, you know, Dan and I have written this comic, we've got Shelly, we've got David, we've got Chris.
• 24:45
  Lazlow: Lee, and they said, cool, so how many… how many issues? Four? Six? And I said, we're going for 12.
• 24:52
  Lazlow: We're going for 12 issues, and so, because we've got a lot of interesting characters, and we find out more about all of them throughout it, and then, you know, of course.
• 25:03
  Lazlow: people die. But… which I've got a great quote here.
• 25:09
  Shelly Bond: Oh, no.
• 25:09
  Lazlow: from Shelly, from January 3rd of this year, I also think people should die Because…
• 25:16
  Shelly Bond: Well…
• 25:16
  Lazlow: Because I was telling her some of my thoughts… You had a shirt?
• 25:19
  Lazlow: Yeah, I was telling her some of my thoughts, so I was like, I think this, I think this, and she goes, yeah, I also think some people should die, so I was like…
• 25:26
  Shelly Bond: the ensemble cast that keeps growing can get unwieldy, and so, yeah, that's… that's where David comes in, because I don't think… I don't think David, like, has ever met a body he can't mutilate on paper.
• 25:41
  Lazlow: Now make…
• 25:41
  Tad Eggleston: Sounds about right.
• 25:42
  Shelly Bond: loss statement.
• 25:44
  Tad Eggleston: for the right reason. Let's put this in context, right?
• 25:47
  Lazlow: Yeah.
• 25:48
  David Lapham: Yeah.
• 25:49
  Lazlow: Issue… Issue 2 comes out on Christmas Eve, and I just got pencils for issue 11.
• 25:58
  Lazlow: from David, like, 30, 40 minutes ago.
• 26:02
  Lazlow: the first half of the pencils, and so… and we're writing 12 at the moment, and like Shelly said, I like this lead time. It somewhat reminds me of video game development, in that you've got
• 26:15
  Lazlow: You're working far ahead, that allows you to make creative changes to your earlier work, because
• 26:24
  Lazlow: Similar to video games, with this project, you're writing it as you go.
• 26:30
  Lazlow: you know, people have this idea with a video game that you've got this huge script, you know, you write the thing, and you're like, we're gonna go make a video game of this. It's not like that at all. You've got the story arc.
• 26:39
  Lazlow: You've got the beats throughout the entire arc. You've got the character descriptions and character models and… and designs and so forth, but you're writing the thing as you go.
• 26:51
  Lazlow: And you get to make creative pivots and changes, and so, you know, there's…
• 26:57
  Lazlow: there's people that we were like, this deplorable person is definitely gonna… gonna die early on, and they're like, you know, I'm starting to kind of…
• 27:05
  Lazlow: like, not like them, but I think that's one of the great things about the characters in this series, is that you see
• 27:13
  Lazlow: You… you see people going down the wrong path, or what sent them down that path, and, you know, for… for all the characters, we try to give them
• 27:25
  Lazlow: there's some kind of humanity there, even if they are a horrible person, and you just want to reach through the page, especially with, like, William, the degenerate lawyer, be like, stop, stop making bad decisions.
• 27:39
  Tad Eggleston: So, Shelly and David, when you saw the early scripts, you already talked about, like, the need to work on them, but I'm certain that something hooked you, something made you go, I mean, just…
• 27:54
  Tad Eggleston: both from knowing Shelly and from looking at the art on this, like…
• 27:59
  Tad Eggleston: This wasn't something that you're like, oh, okay, you put enough zeros on the check. There was…
• 28:06
  Tad Eggleston: There's clearly a low… work. What? What?
• 28:09
  David Lapham: It was bananas. It's just kind of like… I mean, it's a crime, but it's, like, there's a… quite a big cast. We're following all different kinds of people.
• 28:21
  David Lapham: And there's just so many… everyone's got a little bit of, insanity.
• 28:29
  David Lapham: In their own way.
• 28:31
  David Lapham: And I mean, the degenerate lawyer with the,
• 28:38
  David Lapham: With the, you know, hot wings and gambling addiction, and the red-pilled wife is like the straight man.
• 28:47
  David Lapham: Of the story.
• 28:50
  Tad Eggleston: I just have to say right now, Laszlo, David Lapham, who wrote Stray Bullets and Young Liars, just called your book Bananas. Yeah. I don't think there can be a higher compliment.
• 29:06
  David Lapham: Yeah, it's, it's fun, and it plays, because…
• 29:10
  David Lapham: Like, with Stray Bolts, like, Stray Bolts is crime, but it's, it's not… Cops and robbers crying.
• 29:18
  David Lapham: You know, it's people. And this isn't… this isn't exactly that, but it is a lot… it is these domestic settings, it is houses and people, and they're not all, you know, specifically, like, drug runners and crime lords and… and… and cops, and…
• 29:35
  David Lapham: There's a couple people like that, but mostly they're just, people who are severely… We deranged, yeah.
• 29:43
  Shelly Bond: Yes, and I will say that, to me, what really got me was the aspect of the caper, because it's my favorite kind of crime story, and I always thought Stray Bullets was very much following in the school of a caper, because
• 29:55
  Shelly Bond: However nasty and crude and dirty it got, it was always fucking hilarious to me.
• 30:01
  Tad Eggleston: dope.
• 30:02
  Shelly Bond: Eventually, you know, after I… after I cried my eyeballs out.
• 30:07
  Shelly Bond: I would somehow find something really funny, and there was always that moment where
• 30:12
  Shelly Bond: cool beans, you know, like, a catchphrase would come up, and it would just take me back to… to why I loved the series in the first place. So yeah, to me.
• 30:22
  Shelly Bond: it was a no-brainer to bring David on.
• 30:25
  Tad Eggleston: I, I think he's.
• 30:26
  Shelly Bond: understood that.
• 30:27
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I've been known to describe stray bullets as Pulp Fiction on speed.
• 30:34
  Shelly Bond: Yeah, that's a good one.
• 30:36
  Tad Eggleston: So, yeah, no, as soon as I started reading the first issue of American Caper, I'm like, yes, this had to be a David Ladman book.
• 30:47
  Shelly Bond: I'll give you two very quick responses for the question that you threw to David, which is, you know, what was it about the book that pulled me in? Really, two things that Laszlo and Dan did right in the first two issues. First and foremost.
• 31:03
  Shelly Bond: they asked to have men cry. Now, how many comic books have, like, real men crying? Come on. Like, not many. So I thought that was fantastic. Like, it showed, like, a range.
• 31:17
  Shelly Bond: They sold me on the heroine… the main hero or heroine of the book being this ex-beauty queen.
• 31:26
  Shelly Bond: this badass female character named Eva, and I was hooked
• 31:32
  Shelly Bond: by her immediately, by how they wrote her cadence. You know, a lot of guys in comics, I won't mention any names, Tad, don't grill me, I will not mention any names, but most men that write women in comics, even if they're talented, write a very stock female character.
• 31:48
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 31:49
  Shelly Bond: the same…
• 31:49
  Tad Eggleston: I don't, I don't have to…
• 31:51
  Shelly Bond: Buff girl, you know?
• 31:52
  Tad Eggleston: It's way, way easier to list the men that don't write a stock female character.
• 31:59
  Shelly Bond: So, I thought they really did a good job with Eva's character. And also.
• 32:06
  Shelly Bond: Second reason, Marty Bloman gets his junk out, and David Lapham has never drawn geriatric scrotum, and he was really excited when I offered that to him as part of it.
• 32:18
  Tad Eggleston: Is it possible that he's never… there was no geriatric scrotum in Young Liars? I thought we went there.
• 32:24
  Shelly Bond: I'm pretty sure there wasn't. But I found it strange that both this book has a character named Orson.
• 32:32
  Shelly Bond: And David has a character named Orson and Strabel.
• 32:35
  Tad Eggleston: Is it love?
• 32:36
  David Lapham: Different characters, but…
• 32:37
  Shelly Bond: I'm sure there's a love of Orson Welles between… Dan Laszlo and David?
• 32:44
  Shelly Bond: That we'll probably talk about some other time.
• 32:47
  Shelly Bond: But yeah, geriatric scrotum. David, was it a first for you?
• 32:51
  David Lapham: To draw? I mean, if not, I've walked it out.
• 32:55
  Lazlow: Which is also very funny.
• 32:57
  Shelly Bond: It's impossible, right? We have to ask Maria next time about that.
• 33:00
  David Lapham: Yeah, yeah, I mean, yeah.
• 33:03
  Lazlow: That's… you know, it is a crime comedy. It's… it's not, political in that, you know.
• 33:12
  Lazlow: GTA wasn't… the storyline and characters of that wasn't necessarily political. However, we made fun of everybody.
• 33:21
  Lazlow: We satirized everybody with equal enthusiasm, and…
• 33:27
  Lazlow: I think the other thing, going back to your question earlier, Tad, about what What was exciting about this
• 33:34
  Lazlow: Coming up with this fictional…
• 33:36
  Lazlow: town, and these fictional characters, and what are the stores, and, you know, what's the media in the world? That's world building, and it's the same thing
• 33:47
  Lazlow: You do when you create a video game. It's a completely blank canvas, and you have to create this world that feels lived in.
• 33:56
  Lazlow: And, you know, I'll be going through pages that I've… I've looked at some of these pages 20, 30 times as we've gone through the rounds of coloring and everything else, and I'll see some…
• 34:08
  Lazlow: shit that David put in the background, and I'm like, wow. Yeah. That's… that's amazing. And so, like, he's the perfect…
• 34:17
  Lazlow: partner for… for… for worldbuilding, and… and, you know, making… making this place feel lived in, and… and also just seeing all these characters that have been corrupted by various things, whether it's religion, social media.
• 34:34
  Lazlow: Politics, money, you know, we found it.
• 34:39
  David Lapham: real life. Funny.
• 34:40
  Lazlow: Yeah.
• 34:41
  Shelly Bond: you're aware?
• 34:42
  Lazlow: it's… it's… it's, I just… like, the whole midlife crisis of Marty Blowman, who, you know, these…
• 34:50
  Lazlow: Dan and I are fascinated with these people that, you know, they're over 50, they've made hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars.
• 34:59
  Lazlow: And they're just obsessed with never dying, and this… and they think that since they're so smart at technology.
• 35:08
  Lazlow: or Silicon Valley, or Wall Street, that they should be able to live forever and tell everybody else how to live and think. And so, you know, Marty Bloman is constantly
• 35:21
  Lazlow: shooting up some youth serum, or HGH, or coming out of a cryo chamber in a Speedo.
• 35:27
  Shelly Bond: It's…
• 35:28
  Lazlow: Funny stuff.
• 35:30
  Shelly Bond: With his… with his 5-foot-tall white cowboy hat.
• 35:34
  Shelly Bond: And I think David had mentioned not too long ago that
• 35:38
  Shelly Bond: One of the great things about Marty is that actually he…
• 35:42
  Shelly Bond: He kinda has a kind heart, even though he is one of those bloated billionaires who's, like, a little nuts and wants to run around and play cowboy. David, I kinda recall you mentioning that you thought he had… he was kinda… had a bigger heart than most of the characters.
• 35:58
  David Lapham: Yeah, I think I… I think I might have said that at that moment in the story. But yeah, no, I, I think he, I think he does. He's sort of,
• 36:05
  David Lapham: he's oblivious, like… like most people are, and especially people with that much money. But, yeah, he wants everybody to be happy around him, and .
• 36:16
  Tad Eggleston: I was about to say, is that… is that a comparison thing, or he's kind of a small guy, so is it as a percentage of his body weight?
• 36:25
  David Lapham: A small guy. But yeah, I don't think he's got the… he doesn't… they don't run him with the small… small guy complex.
• 36:32
  Shelly Bond: Yeah, and Jack, I think the big hat counters that a little bit.
• 36:36
  Tad Eggleston: That's true.
• 36:37
  Shelly Bond: But it doesn't seem to bother him, which I also think was rather unique. I think the easy way out for that character would be to give him that small guy, you know, bravado, but he doesn't have it.
• 36:49
  Lazlow: Yeah.
• 36:50
  Shelly Bond: That's what's unique about… about working with Lazzlo and Dan, is, like, they're, you know, they're not going to give you just stock characters.
• 36:57
  Lazlow: And a lot of these characters are lost in fantasy, where, you know, William, the degenerate lawyer, goes and does cowboy cosplay.
• 37:07
  Lazlow: And his son is lost in video game fantasy, but is super awkward.
• 37:13
  Lazlow: with girls. His daughter…
• 37:16
  Lazlow: is… has gone super left-wing crazy, and is sort of lost in that fantasy, and his wife has gone, conspiracy crazy, and is prepping for the end times with all kinds of, you know, machine guns and… and everything else, and Marty's…
• 37:34
  Lazlow: living this fantasy of, you know, on a ranch, learning how to harvest bull semen, and play cowboy.
• 37:43
  Shelly Bond: His wife is on vacation with her rich girlfriends.
• 37:46
  Lazlow: which you never see her. Which, I think we're gonna… we're gonna… we're gonna fix that. But then also, just the story of these, and it's even more…
• 37:57
  Lazlow: appropriate now, of these people escaping horrendous circumstances.
• 38:04
  Lazlow: South of the border to try to come make a new life.
• 38:09
  Lazlow: And, you know, at first you're thinking, oh, you know, these are just some…
• 38:14
  Lazlow: some Mexican immigrants who are coming into the country illegally, but then you realize that one of them has got a
• 38:21
  Lazlow: Pretty crazy backstory of her… her,
• 38:27
  Lazlow: Her life as a poor,
• 38:30
  Lazlow: a poor peasant girl on a farm in Mexico to becoming a supermodel, to getting mixed up with the
• 38:37
  Lazlow: with the Mexican, you know, drug cartels, and, you know, we know quite a bit about, about drug cartels, because we researched those for many years with the Grand Theft Auto series, so… including meeting some of those maniacs, so…
• 38:58
  Shelly Bond: Do you mind if we talk about the covers for…
• 39:01
  Tad Eggleston: Not at all.
• 39:03
  Shelly Bond: I, I just want to say.
• 39:05
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, Tyler Boss is one of my favorite artists.
• 39:08
  Shelly Bond: He's amazing.
• 39:09
  Tad Eggleston: So for the A covers, you know…
• 39:11
  Tad Eggleston: And, you know, you got some impressive variants, too.
• 39:15
  Shelly Bond: I can't wait for David's. I love that eyeball.
• 39:18
  Tad Eggleston: You have a history of eyeball coverage, I think.
• 39:22
  David Lapham: I've done it a few times. Yeah, I say circles… circles always work. My, 22 panels that always work, I would put the circle.
• 39:32
  Shelly Bond: I love it, though. Tad, I'm glad you noticed, because that was the pitch that David had
• 39:38
  Shelly Bond: for that variant cover that we shared with Laszlo and Dan. You know, it just seemed to make sense, you know, that issue 4 is the only issue that David actually does all of the art. And it wasn't because we wanted
• 39:53
  Shelly Bond: to just push Chris out. Chris has been doing an amazing job, but I think we were trying to catch up on the schedule. And in the early days last year, you know, there sometimes is a little bit of a bump, and…
• 40:05
  Shelly Bond: it was a great opportunity for David to really flex. There's a scene in Issue 4 where we have double-page spreads.
• 40:12
  Shelly Bond: That go on and on. I'm not gonna say how many pages, but I haven't seen David do storytelling like this, ever.
• 40:21
  Shelly Bond: And it's.
• 40:21
  Tad Eggleston: All I'm saying is, I expect PDFs in my inbox sometime soon.
• 40:26
  Shelly Bond: We'll think about it. I have to say, I always…
• 40:32
  Shelly Bond: expect people to, like, bring their A-game.
• 40:35
  Shelly Bond: And sometimes when they don't, I tap them on the back, you know, or shake them, and that's never the case with David. I think even when he…
• 40:45
  Shelly Bond: doesn't try. He somehow…
• 40:47
  Tad Eggleston: have anything other than an ambulance?
• 40:49
  Shelly Bond: blind.
• 40:52
  David Lapham: Well, that's the fun… that's the fun. The fun is… the story is telling the story. It is. Storytelling, the.
• 40:59
  Lazlow: Yeah. Otherwise, why bother? With the covers, I really wrestled with, do we have… because there's some series that, you know, the covers are kind of… each one's a variation on the one before, but they've got this really…
• 41:16
  Lazlow: Like, this continuity of the graphic style, and… And I really…
• 41:22
  Lazlow: debated and had long conversations with Shelly about it, and…
• 41:27
  Lazlow: where we ended up with Tyler, you know, he's got that… the first issue.
• 41:31
  Lazlow: With that bison dead in the road, and the van driving off into the distance, and and then in the second one, we've got all these great icons from these images that represent
• 41:45
  Lazlow: items that are in the book, you know, a donut, and a bloody shovel, and… And so, every…
• 41:55
  Lazlow: every issue, I'll put a bunch of ideas together, Shelly will send me some ideas, and then we just, you know, have this conversation with
• 42:03
  Lazlow: with Tyler, and get his ideas and sketches, and I kind of… we've done, like, a couple of homages to…
• 42:11
  Lazlow: classic paintings. I don't want to, sort of, ruin some of the Tyler covers that are coming
• 42:17
  Lazlow: Coming up, but it's… it's been fun so that it doesn't all feel samey, and so that it's… since there are so many different characters, and it is a sprawling
• 42:30
  Lazlow: caper, to have these, you know, on the stand, and I…
• 42:36
  Lazlow: it was an amazing moment for me, going into the comic shop and seeing, you know, American Caper there, with all these other books, you know, some of my imposter syndrome evaporated for about 15 seconds.
• 42:51
  Lazlow: And then, you know, I'll read other people's books, and I'll be like, oh my god, they're geniuses, I'm a failure.
• 43:00
  Shelly Bond: I think we would have booted you out long ago if we didn't think that you actually delivered.
• 43:05
  Lazlow: Right.
• 43:05
  Shelly Bond: And I honestly have to say, like, you know, I did not realize this was going to be a job that would last over a period of 6 or 8 months.
• 43:14
  Shelly Bond: They renewed my freelance editing contract, and it wasn't a question whether I wanted to. I absolutely wanted to stay a part of the team as long as I could, because it was just really…
• 43:26
  Shelly Bond: feeling right. You know, I've missed the monthly periodical.
• 43:31
  Shelly Bond: I still believe in it, it's in my bones, and I was thrilled that they… that this team had it in them to just go for broke, and just go for 12 issues.
• 43:42
  Shelly Bond: And the key that I've been trying to share with all the retailers and all the fans out there is that unlike a lot of other books that come out with a number 1, and you don't see a number 2 for 6 months because something happened.
• 43:55
  Shelly Bond: You can count on this book. Not only will it be at your store, in your poll list, reliable.
• 44:03
  Shelly Bond: in your inbox every 30 days, you're getting more story for your money. You're getting
• 44:11
  Shelly Bond: 26 story in our pages, which is not the average number.
• 44:16
  Tad Eggleston: that… Or more. Periodical comics have.
• 44:20
  Shelly Bond: And included in those pages.
• 44:23
  Shelly Bond: is often a fake ad, which, by the way, I love, because it adds to the tapestry, and Tad knows.
• 44:30
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 44:31
  Shelly Bond: As a loyal Black Crown reader, Philip and.
• 44:33
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 44:34
  Shelly Bond: had so much fun crafting our fake ads. Well, Laszlo is responsible for so many of the fake ads in the
• 44:42
  Shelly Bond: radio Laszlo, segments and stuff from GTA, as my son reminds me over and over again whenever he comes home from college. So, it was like a no-brainer to suggest to Laszlo, like, hey, why don't you write some of those for the comic, because
• 44:59
  Shelly Bond: There definitely are times where the characters in the story
• 45:04
  Shelly Bond: require us to kind of push the pages around a bit. Sew those back-to-back double-page spreads, three in a row.
• 45:12
  Shelly Bond: land properly. So sometimes you do need an ad to kind of land on a left-hand page or a right-hand page so you get that page turn.
• 45:21
  Shelly Bond: Laszlo, tell us you did not have fun writing those fake ads.
• 45:25
  Lazlow: Oh, I mean, Dan and I love making satirical ads. We started in 2001, making fake radio commercials for Grand Theft Auto 3, and with every game.
• 45:36
  Lazlow: We went from doing, you know, fake ads on the radio to then fake ads on the in-game
• 45:42
  Lazlow: TV that you could watch, along… we also made all the fake TV shows, and… not fake, but…
• 45:48
  Lazlow: satirical between, 2D animation and actual motion-captured 3D
• 45:53
  Lazlow: Short films and everything like that. And then,
• 45:57
  Lazlow: you know, for GTA 4, we created a fake in-game internet that you could scroll through, and it just, like Shelly said, it adds to the…
• 46:07
  Lazlow: to the world building. My first job, like, at the end of college and after college was making commercials at a… at a rock station.
• 46:18
  Lazlow: And so, when I moved to New York, and I was working at a modern rock station, and
• 46:25
  Lazlow: was syndicated doing a feature about technology and games and the internet, and… which was sort of a novel concept, and starting in 95. But I was still making a lot of
• 46:37
  Lazlow: radio commercials, and then I started making TV commercials, and then when I… met Dan…
• 46:43
  Lazlow: And he said, hey, we're doing this game, and we want to put, you know, fake radio DJs in there with, you know, making fun of American radio, and…
• 46:52
  Lazlow: and the imaging in between, and radio commercials, I was like, finally, because, you know, it was all the stuff that we wanted to do at the radio station.
• 47:01
  Lazlow: making… making fun of these things, and I'd worked at ad agencies and everything else, and so doing the…
• 47:09
  Lazlow: Doing the fake ads, it's part of the world building, because for some of the things in this book, you'll see an ad for something.
• 47:17
  Lazlow: like, Wolfrock Ranch, which is this, you know, super fancy cosplay…
• 47:21
  Lazlow: Experience, where you can go play a cowboy and…
• 47:25
  Lazlow: You know, spend some time with a painted lady, is that what they call them? A lady of the night, and drink whiskey and spit into the fire, and…
• 47:35
  Lazlow: And… and… and, you know, act manly. But that's, like, you know, that's a… that's part of the storyline, so we're like, we should do… we should do ads for that.
• 47:47
  Lazlow: And…
• 47:49
  Lazlow: But I… I will have to say, when I… when I went to my… so my first Comic-Con was this summer, where we launched American Caper. We announced
• 47:59
  Lazlow: It wasn't even out yet. We had an ash can.
• 48:02
  Lazlow: And, that was, I was terrified, but thankfully, Shelly, who's been to over 300 Comic-Cons going back to 1897,
• 48:15
  Shelly Bond: But I don't look a day over 26.
• 48:18
  Lazlow: You know, it was… it was great having her there.
• 48:20
  David Lapham: when it was in the old Hotel San Diego.
• 48:23
  Lazlow: You know, and walking around with David Lapham, I'll never forget, we were going up an escalator, and someone screamed, David Lapham!
• 48:32
  Lazlow: Libs! So…
• 48:35
  Lazlow: It was, it was… it was a… it was an amazing experience, and what I was not ready for was the level of cosplay.
• 48:45
  Lazlow: At that, I mean, it was just amazing. I can… I can… I can barely throw on jeans and a t-shirt every day, and these people had costumes they'd worked on for years.
• 48:58
  Shelly Bond: I'll bet we'll get a few people playing, Marty Blowman.
• 49:03
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, just wait till next year.
• 49:04
  Shelly Bond: Right. When it's your characters. Poor David is sweating this one. Right now, he's sweating this. He's like, no way.
• 49:11
  Lazlow: I… Dan and I made…
• 49:12
  David Lapham: Oh, no.
• 49:14
  Lazlow: Dan and I did a cartoon, like a 12-minute animated show inside Grand Theft Auto
• 49:22
  Lazlow: called Princess Robot Bubblegum, and it was a spoof of… anime.
• 49:26
  Lazlow: And it was so on the nose about how ridiculous and misogynistic,
• 49:33
  Lazlow: the anime is, and such a satire of it, that in the Japanese version of the game, they wanted us to edit part of it out, but it started as a radio commercial that we did. It was a movie trailer for an anime
• 49:46
  Lazlow: an anime film, called Princess Robot Pubblegum.
• 49:51
  Lazlow: And I went to this, party, and this woman came up, and she was dressed
• 49:58
  Lazlow: as that character from the radio commercial, she's like, I'm Princess Robot Bubblegum, I'm the character that you created, and it was such a mind-blowing moment, and I went to Dan.
• 50:07
  Lazlow: And I said, well, people are cosplaying is this anime character from a radio commercial that we put inside the game. And he's like, well, then we should just make the… we should just make the full 2D…
• 50:18
  Lazlow: animation for the next game, and, and spoof that genre. So, we love satire, we love, you know, comedic crime.
• 50:28
  Lazlow: stories, and I… I feel like it comes through in American caper, and the reception's been good so far.
• 50:35
  Lazlow: So… and you said you've read the first two issues?
• 50:38
  Tad Eggleston: First two issues.
• 50:40
  Tad Eggleston: Lovin' it.
• 50:40
  Lazlow: So, it's.
• 50:41
  Tad Eggleston: I've read the first two issues a couple of times now.
• 50:44
  Shelly Bond: Oh, damn. Oh, boy. Hopefully you didn't catch any editing mistakes.
• 50:48
  Lazlow: It… it…
• 50:49
  Tad Eggleston: Well, if I had, you would have heard from me already.
• 50:51
  Shelly Bond: That's true.
• 50:53
  Lazlow: Yeah, it… It keeps going farther off the rails, these people, so…
• 50:59
  Tad Eggleston: I… I cannot wait, I mean, it feels like we're just getting… just getting going.
• 51:08
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, part of that is my experience with David and Shelly. Like, I can see how people could look at these first two issues and go, oh my god, they're pedal to metal, and I'm looking at them going, oh, so they're starting at 60, but getting ready to rev up into, like, triple digits.
• 51:26
  David Lapham: Yeah, I think so. It doesn't… it doesn't let up. There's just… there's so many characters and so much,
• 51:32
  David Lapham: So much going on.
• 51:34
  Shelly Bond: So much going wrong.
• 51:36
  David Lapham: Yeah.
• 51:39
  Tad Eggleston: Or write as a reader.
• 51:42
  Shelly Bond: Oh, for sure, for sure. No, I think.
• 51:46
  David Lapham: Only if you have to be one of these people is it.
• 51:48
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right, right. If you're one of the characters, going very, very wrong.
• 51:54
  Shelly Bond: And I think that's the fun, especially in these
• 51:57
  Shelly Bond: strange social and political times. Like, this is the kind of book to get lost in. You know, you really aren't sure what's gonna happen next, but you know it's gonna be way worse than what you expect. And that, to me, is the beauty of comics.
• 52:15
  Tad Eggleston: And you both want to like everybody and want to dislike everybody all at once?
• 52:20
  Tad Eggleston: Which is a neat trick to pull off.
• 52:24
  Tad Eggleston: It's a half-track.
• 52:26
  Shelly Bond: Marty would say.
• 52:29
  Lazlow: Yeah, definitely. It's, I mean, I'm…
• 52:33
  Lazlow: you know, it's still every issue, I'm very nervous about to see what, you know.
• 52:39
  Lazlow: people think, and the reception, but we made this because we wanted to do a comic, and we thought it would be a fun process. We've learned…
• 52:49
  Lazlow: a lot, you know, going to Shelley Bond and David Lapham Comics, School 101. So… but it's, you know.
• 52:59
  Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, Shelly wrote the one-on-one, but I feel like if you're working with Lapum 2, you're at least in a 400-level class.
• 53:06
  Shelly Bond: Whoa.
• 53:08
  Lazlow: Exactly, well, it…
• 53:11
  Shelly Bond: It must be said, though, that it really is the beauty of the team, too. I mean, I really do think that Chris Anderson adds a lot of texture, a lot of.
• 53:22
  David Lapham: Oh, yeah.
• 53:23
  Shelly Bond: pretty realism.
• 53:24
  Lazlow: Darkness and grit.
• 53:25
  David Lapham: Darkness, yes. And a lot of to the satire.
• 53:29
  Shelly Bond: Yes.
• 53:29
  David Lapham: Matt, the way he can, exaggerate.
• 53:33
  David Lapham: Yeah.
• 53:34
  Shelly Bond: And yet… and I think he does a really good job of making sure that
• 53:39
  Shelly Bond: he honors David's… what David calls rough pencils, which are basically pencils to anyone else with eyeballs, but David calls them rough pencils.
• 53:48
  David Lapham: But I think, Chris.
• 53:49
  Shelly Bond: Has been really good right from the jump at honoring what's there on the paper, but then putting his own, style and twist on it.
• 54:01
  Shelly Bond: given it, I think, a unique look, which again, then Lee Lovrich comes in and just throws a lot of his, you know, incredible, monochromatic,
• 54:11
  Shelly Bond: High octane palette.
• 54:13
  Shelly Bond: onto the book. And, you know, Lee is someone who David and I have worked with for 25 years, and so it is really neat to see his reaction to Chris's finishes over David's rough pencils. It's really pretty cool.
• 54:29
  Tad Eggleston: David, you haven't… you haven't been inked a lot. You generally do your own inking.
• 54:37
  David Lapham: I do, yeah.
• 54:38
  Tad Eggleston: What was it like out of the gate to give up that final project?
• 54:44
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, you're clearly happy now.
• 54:46
  David Lapham: Yeah, no, no, no, I'm happy, and I had seen, what Chris could do before, you know, what he was bringing, and…
• 54:54
  David Lapham: a lot of the earlier, early, character model sheets that he had done, and, he had done some of the, some of the fake ads, as I was talking to, to Shelly about coming, on board. And so, yeah, it was exciting, it was exciting.
• 55:12
  David Lapham: I mean, mostly it's a,
• 55:15
  David Lapham: You know, just doing your own, inks on it, just, to me, it's just a practical thing, it's like, you have to pencil less.
• 55:25
  Lazlow: You know.
• 55:26
  David Lapham: And… but at the same token, that's one of the good things here, is, like, I'm not… I'm basically penciling about to the point that I would pencil.
• 55:35
  David Lapham: If I were gonna ink myself.
• 55:38
  David Lapham: And then Chris is able to just take it and do his interpretation on it, which is terrific.
• 55:44
  Shelly Bond: And I think it must be said that it's the editor's job
• 55:48
  Shelly Bond: to do a test sample before anyone says, yeah, you're hired, and I think that's another thing that people don't do anymore. Like, to me, something can work really well in your head, and you can say, oh, I would put
• 56:02
  Shelly Bond: Charles Burns over anybody, because he's just an exquisite anchor. Well, you know, maybe he wouldn't look great on a certain
• 56:11
  Shelly Bond: penciler. You just don't know. Some people really don't, mix well on paper. And…
• 56:20
  Shelly Bond: That's the beauty of having someone come in and saying, hey, let's do a sample page. Let's see what it looks like. And that's when the editor talks to both
• 56:29
  Shelly Bond: Chris and David, and then, obviously, I had to present it to Dan and Laszlo as well, as an option. And so, we all talked. It wasn't like some kind of surreptitious going behind someone's back. It was all very much straight up, hey, this is an idea.
• 56:47
  Shelly Bond: let's see how this works. And it just fucking worked great. So, I have to say, I'm really proud of the team, and I really respect that everybody not only brings their A-game, but everybody is open to…
• 57:00
  Shelly Bond: commenting on the pages of something isn't quite landing. You know, we're all in this to make the story
• 57:07
  Shelly Bond: And the art, as great as it can be.
• 57:10
  David Lapham: And I have to say, to Chris's credit, too, it's like, so if you're gonna,
• 57:14
  David Lapham: you know, work with me and come in and ink over me, that, like, I draw a lot of stuff on the page. you know, I set characters in the scene, so there's lots of, backgrounds and lots of…
• 57:31
  David Lapham: elements, and furniture, and things on the furniture, and all of this kind of stuff. And, you know.
• 57:38
  David Lapham: you have to be willing to go in on that, and do all those details and everything, and Chris is not only, like, in with both feet, like, he adds stuff, he adds, like, as I was saying, he adds, texture, and he vibes into the… to all the little bits, and…
• 57:55
  David Lapham: And,
• 57:57
  David Lapham: And that… which increases this, the, sort of this… the satire of this Americana that we're creating.
• 58:05
  Shelly Bond: It's so true, and I think it's fair to say you can see Chris's heroes based on the type of crosshatching he might do on a particular character's face, or the shadow work. You know, sometimes you'll see a page that looks very Toth-inspired, that
• 58:20
  Shelly Bond: perhaps was laid out that way by David. I'm thinking of the last page that Chris just inked that he turned in an hour ago for issue 10. I mean, it could be a cover. It was so dynamic.
• 58:31
  David Lapham: I didn't see that.
• 58:32
  Shelly Bond: it was very Toth-inspired. But yet, you can see some Bernie Wrightson in the right places. So, it's incredible. And that, to me.
• 58:40
  Shelly Bond: Is part of the joy of editing a monthly book.
• 58:44
  Shelly Bond: when you find that click, and we all know it was there with Mark Buckingham and Steve Lealoha, and to find another team.
• 58:52
  Shelly Bond: on a monthly book like this, to me, that's the magic of comics, and that's the joy of editing.
• 58:59
  Shelly Bond: Mic drop.
• 59:01
  Tad Eggleston: You're great at mic drops.
• 59:04
  Tad Eggleston: So I'm gonna pick up the mic and say, Leslow, this is your first comic.
• 59:09
  Tad Eggleston: So, what has surprised you about working in the medium? What… what… have you gotten pages back and looked at and gone, oh, that's so much more than I thought we were doing here? Like, what… what…
• 59:26
  Tad Eggleston: What didn't you know coming in That has excited you.
• 59:31
  Tad Eggleston: I'm assuming there's something. I'm assuming that you're not sitting there going, oh, I thought this was gonna be great, and now I'm just slogging through it.
• 59:39
  Lazlow: No, it's, it's, to be honest, it reminds me of when I…
• 59:46
  Lazlow: went to a rock station in Missouri in college to get an internship, and the program director said to me.
• 59:53
  Lazlow: you're a fan of radio, and I said, I've been listening to… I've been a radio nut my whole life.
• 59:59
  Lazlow: I love it, I've always wanted to work on this medium. And he said, you will…
• 1:00:05
  Lazlow: After you start working here, you will never listen to radio the same way again.
• 1:00:10
  Lazlow: And, you know, to go from experiencing radio as a consumer, to as someone who helps make it, to experience video games as a consumer, to then somebody who's helping make it.
• 1:00:22
  Lazlow: comic books, I was just so used to that polished.
• 1:00:27
  Lazlow: issue of Fables, and it's just, you're going through as a consumer, you're like, this is amazing.
• 1:00:33
  Lazlow: You have zero concept how much
• 1:00:36
  Lazlow: how much work this is, and I…
• 1:00:38
  Lazlow: I was really stunned by how many times I'm touching a page.
• 1:00:46
  Lazlow: And… and, you know, from…
• 1:00:50
  Lazlow: and how many, you know, script revisions that we're doing, and, you know, this might be a unique process, based on this team, because I know that some writers just write the script and send it to the artists and be like, have at it.
• 1:01:04
  Lazlow: But, you know, from the…
• 1:01:06
  Lazlow: from the thumbnails, to the rough pencils, to then Chris's, like, every page to the… to the lettering draft that we do, where we're, you know, placing all the balloons.
• 1:01:19
  Lazlow: Moving things around, it's… It's like all…
• 1:01:25
  Lazlow: great art, which I consider comic books to be a great art medium.
• 1:01:32
  Lazlow: it's a lot of work, but when it's done right, it just feels right, and it… it just flows. And the, it's… I was… I was… I was surprised, you know, I… as a…
• 1:01:47
  Lazlow: And I've seen the back pages and, you know, in a lot of comic books and trades over the years of, like, here's part of our process, you know, here's the script, and here's some pencils, but until you're actually in the trenches.
• 1:02:02
  Lazlow: with, you know, veterans and super talent, like Chris and David and Lee and Shelly,
• 1:02:11
  Lazlow: It's… and Nate, you know, you don't… Each of these brings…
• 1:02:18
  Lazlow: things to the table that… that takes it to a whole other level. So, I mean, you know, Nate does his lettering pass after we do our
• 1:02:27
  Lazlow: our rough lettering ballooning passes. And then you see stuff that he does, and you're like, oh, that's brilliant, we should actually add another line over here, or we should, you know.
• 1:02:37
  Lazlow: We should do some more of this. So, yeah, surprised at how much hard work this is, but damn is it satisfying. Who knows if it's gonna go anywhere, but…
• 1:02:49
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I feel like this one,
• 1:02:53
  Tad Eggleston: with comics, you've got two lifespans. You've got the single-issue lifespan, and you've got the trade paperback lifespan. I hope that this does great in single issues, but this is going to be a trade that's on shelves of comic shops forever.
• 1:03:09
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, I haven't even read it all, but just based on what I've seen already, this is not gonna be one…
• 1:03:17
  Tad Eggleston: Good comic shops will have it.
• 1:03:19
  Tad Eggleston: With stray bullets, with criminal, with…
• 1:03:22
  Shelly Bond: Hydra bullets.
• 1:03:24
  Shelly Bond: 100 bullets.
• 1:03:25
  Shelly Bond: That's what I think. It really felt to me like the kind of Vertigo book that I would have edited, as part of, you know, my crime area, had I still been at Vertigo. And I really do think it stands on its own at this point, because of the
• 1:03:43
  Shelly Bond: no fear factor from Laszlo and Dan, and the rest of the Absurd Ventures team, and also Dark Horse. I'm going to give a shout out to the rest of our editorial team. We do work in tandem with Daniel Shabon, who is great, and he's based.
• 1:03:58
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, one of these days, I gotta reach out to him. I know he's the lesser Chabon brother, but, you know…
• 1:04:04
  Shelly Bond: Well, he's the lifeline between all of us and Dark Horse, which is our publisher, so he really keeps us on track with the schedule, and his accomplices, Foster and Chuck.
• 1:04:19
  Shelly Bond: do a terrific job, and we, of course, work with Jesse Cortez, who is the assistant editor, who's part of Absurd Ventures. So, it's a sprawling team, which is appropriate for a book like American Caper that has a sprawling cast.
• 1:04:34
  Shelly Bond: Of unhinged characters.
• 1:04:37
  Tad Eggleston: Well, and I did notice that at least at Absurd Ventures, it says you're starting with 12 issues, so we can hope that you love it and come back for…
• 1:04:48
  Tad Eggleston: For more. I don't want to take up too… too much of your time, but I have a couple questions that I like to ask everybody. One of them's newer, so Shelly hasn't even officially had to answer it, and the other one's just an old standby.
• 1:05:06
  Tad Eggleston: as I'm entering the fifth season of 22 Panels, I… I… I… I…
• 1:05:13
  Tad Eggleston: am constantly just awestruck by how surreal my life has been, by the number of people that I now think of as friends that used to be names on pages of my favorite books, or the experiences that I've gotten to have just because I host a dinky podcast, and… and…
• 1:05:32
  Tad Eggleston: I know that that's, like.
• 1:05:35
  Tad Eggleston: equal for pretty much everybody in the industry. Everybody I ask has the one story of.
• 1:05:41
  Tad Eggleston: Meeting their hero at a con, or… or having… having their hero come up to them, or… or having the fan that… that… that…
• 1:05:50
  Tad Eggleston: told them something about their book that just struck them, so I've been collecting surreal stories. It sounds like Laszlo even has some already, like Escalators with David Lapham.
• 1:06:03
  Tad Eggleston: So, share a surreal story from your time in comics, that thing that, like, you think about and go, man, if I'd never made a comic book, this never would have happened, and man, is that cool.
• 1:06:19
  David Lapham: Okay. Shelly, I know you have a million of them.
• 1:06:21
  Shelly Bond: then we'll let David go first.
• 1:06:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:06:24
  David Lapham: Oh, I… yeah, I mean, there are… there are probably, if I think about it, probably a lot, even with not… not doing, many, conventions and being out there for… for quite a while now, but,
• 1:06:40
  David Lapham: I mean, the very, like, very first time I was out, that we did Stray Bolts, our first,
• 1:06:47
  David Lapham: Comic-Con, it was… it was amazing, it was amazing. The fan response was unbelievable, and sort of blew our minds. I got to meet, like, my ultimate hero was Steve Rude, and I got to meet him.
• 1:07:00
  David Lapham: At, Golden Apple after the, after the con.
• 1:07:08
  Shelly Bond: Wow.
• 1:07:08
  David Lapham: Thank you.
• 1:07:08
  Shelly Bond: Did you… how… how… were you sweating? Did you stutter?
• 1:07:13
  Tad Eggleston: I mean, it looks like he's sweating right now. Right? He's just remembering.
• 1:07:17
  David Lapham: It was really, you know, mostly, yeah, I mean, that, that's,
• 1:07:24
  David Lapham: Luckily, I'm there with Maria, my collaborator, and my wife, and, like, she's calm and cool and gets, you know, along with everybody, so I can…
• 1:07:37
  David Lapham: I have found that most of the.
• 1:07:39
  Tad Eggleston: Genius men in comics have the wife that takes care of all the business and keeping them on track and calm. That includes.
• 1:07:46
  David Lapham: Yeah, and creatively as well, like, when we write all of our stuff.
• 1:07:51
  David Lapham: Together, through, through, early on, I, I got to, We got to meet,
• 1:08:01
  David Lapham: Quentin Tarantino and Sam Jackson and Robert Forrester, when we got to go to the set of Jackie Brown.
• 1:08:09
  Tad Eggleston: the house.
• 1:08:10
  David Lapham: It was really cool. That was really cool.
• 1:08:12
  Tad Eggleston: You're the second person that has had a Quentin story, because Matt Wagner was on, and he got to write… he got to write Django Zorro with Quentin, and…
• 1:08:23
  David Lapham: Oh, that's funny.
• 1:08:24
  Tad Eggleston: didn't believe it was gonna happen until he got there and rang the bell and Quentin answered the door. Until then, he was certain that, like.
• 1:08:32
  David Lapham: It was gonna fall apart. We almost did a Jackie Brown comic.
• 1:08:37
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
• 1:08:37
  David Lapham: We were at San Diego that one year in this,
• 1:08:42
  David Lapham: woman comes up, and she's so excited, knows all about straight bullets, and is super effusive, and she's just got all these comics, and she's a big fan. She says that she's Quinton's mom.
• 1:08:54
  David Lapham: And, and we're like, oh, okay then, yeah, that's nice.
• 1:09:01
  David Lapham: And it turned out, actually, yes, she was Quinton's mom, and then through her, we met more people on Quinton's team, and they wanted to do a comic of Jackie Brown, and then,
• 1:09:15
  David Lapham: And, they loved straight bullets, and they wanted us to do the book, and
• 1:09:22
  David Lapham: And we went back and forth for a while, and ultimately, like, they just, they sort of ran out of just sort of time for it all to come together. But it was very cool, we got to meet everybody, and it was, and going to the set, and, it was surprising. Like, Sam, Jackson was a huge comic fan.
• 1:09:41
  David Lapham: I knew Stray Bullets, which was, like… I mean… Okay.
• 1:09:46
  Tad Eggleston: And now we've got a deeper list of people that I need on 22 panels to talk content.
• 1:09:49
  David Lapham: Yeah.
• 1:09:51
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
• 1:09:52
  David Lapham: He's a big, big comic fan, and the nicest guy we met was Robert Forrester.
• 1:09:57
  David Lapham: Who didn't know anything about comics, but he was just the coolest guy, and super nice, and like…
• 1:10:02
  Tad Eggleston: And he must have changed, because I knew somebody who had him as a substitute teacher when he was younger, and apparently he wasn't a very nice substitute teacher.
• 1:10:10
  David Lapham: Oh, really?
• 1:10:12
  Tad Eggleston: She said she liked him as an actor, but she didn't like him as a substitute.
• 1:10:16
  Shelly Bond: Check this off, kid.
• 1:10:17
  Tad Eggleston: It is, it's a really tough.
• 1:10:19
  Shelly Bond: I mean, you know, my mom was a teacher for years. That's a tough gig.
• 1:10:23
  Tad Eggleston: It is. I'm a teacher, I get it. But I just… I love that, like, you immediately changed my overall pictures of Robert Forrester, because you're talking about him being sweet, and I've heard of…
• 1:10:35
  David Lapham: She was in middle school at the time, which is, like.
• 1:10:38
  Tad Eggleston: the hardest time to be a sub, so…
• 1:10:41
  David Lapham: Right?
• 1:10:42
  David Lapham: He showed us where they, where they hide all the… well, they hide all the candy bars in the, in the food trailer, and yeah, all the good stuff.
• 1:10:50
  Lazlow: Shelly, what's your story?
• 1:10:52
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:10:52
  Shelly Bond: Whew! Alright.
• 1:10:55
  Shelly Bond: I feel like I might have told Tad my stories, so I'm gonna, like… That's always possible. I'm gonna rattle off a couple of, ideas, and you pick one, Tad, because I know we have to wrap up really soon, but I've got an almost… these are the missed opportunities, these are the almost-got-em stories that I love.
• 1:11:14
  Shelly Bond: One was David Bowie, and one was Cheap Trick. So which one do you want to hear?
• 1:11:19
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, we gotta go with the Bowie.
• 1:11:20
  Shelly Bond: Okay.
• 1:11:21
  Tad Eggleston: I love Cheap Trick, I'm from Chicago, they're from Rockford, but we gotta go Bowie.
• 1:11:26
  Shelly Bond: Well, the Bowie story is… is tragic, because…
• 1:11:30
  Shelly Bond: As you know, Tad, and I'm sure Laszlo and David know this story too, I discovered David Bowie at summer camp, 1974, rebel rebel on the radio. I was the youngest camper, 8 years old.
• 1:11:42
  Shelly Bond: And just fell in love with Bowie's vibe, everything about Bowie. And so, he's pretty much changed my whole life, and…
• 1:11:49
  Shelly Bond: you know, being in comics, it seemed like a natural thing. Reach out to Bowie, get him to do a memoir, or something else, right?
• 1:11:57
  Shelly Bond: Who knows what it could have been.
• 1:11:59
  Shelly Bond: So there were many times I would send a stack of vertigo books to his…
• 1:12:04
  Shelly Bond: you know, wherever. I would sometimes send to the record company, sometimes send to Isolar Productions, and…
• 1:12:12
  Shelly Bond: got a hit.
• 1:12:13
  Shelly Bond: I was, believe it or not, on the train to New York City, and one of my neighbors was telling me how she was secretly, working with a famous composer, and as we were chatting, there was a Bowie connection there.
• 1:12:28
  Shelly Bond: And she said, oh, I'm very good friends with Bowie's manager. I think I can get you a meeting. So, of course, I fainted.
• 1:12:36
  Shelly Bond: I came to very quickly thereafter, and I had a meeting.
• 1:12:40
  Shelly Bond: So, it must have been around, 2001, when Paul Pope was doing heavy liquid and 100%.
• 1:12:48
  Tad Eggleston: I just talked to Paul.
• 1:12:50
  Shelly Bond: Oh, okay, so, you know, I'm take… I'm carrying, and this is, like, 57th Street.
• 1:12:55
  Shelly Bond: I'm walking from the DC offices, at 53rd and Broadway, and I'm carrying my own books. So you can imagine me, you know, I'm 5'5 in 3-inch platforms, so I'm walking with a stack of books. I can barely see over the books, but I've got all the goods, all my best vertigo stuff that I edited.
• 1:13:14
  Shelly Bond: get to the office. The office happens to be in the same building as my dermatologist, but that's another story for another time.
• 1:13:22
  Shelly Bond: But the management office was just cool. I walk in, I'm shaking, I'm nervous. I knew Bowie wasn't gonna be there, but this was the closest I was gonna get, okay? So, the manager is awesome.
• 1:13:35
  Shelly Bond: As soon as he says hi to me, he sees I can't shake his hand, because I've got a tower of books, comics in front of me. He's like, please, come in, have a seat on the couch. I dump the books on a coffee table. He's like, have a coffee, have some stuff, we're chatting. He is so nice.
• 1:13:50
  Shelly Bond: I explain my spiel, who I am, what I want to do, Bowie, etc, and we're just chatting about art and comics for about 40 minutes, and he says, Shelly, I think this is the coolest thing, and I know that David loves comics, read comics, he's so well read.
• 1:14:07
  Shelly Bond: one of two things is gonna happen. I'm gonna pick up the phone and call him over the next day or two.
• 1:14:14
  Shelly Bond: And you're gonna hear from me in a week.
• 1:14:17
  Shelly Bond: Or you're not gonna hear from me again. He's just so busy, and as much as I think he'd be very interested, and he probably knows vertigo as an imprint.
• 1:14:27
  Shelly Bond: it's just a timing thing. He's just in demand. So, you know, I said, hey, I'm just thrilled to leave you with the comics, and it was great to meet you, and… and I'll send you a Hanukkah card.
• 1:14:37
  Shelly Bond: And I did, and I never heard from him again. But it was a hell of a meeting, and I really respect that he was straight with me. And that's exactly how I like to be with people as well. I didn't want to just sit around, like.
• 1:14:51
  Shelly Bond: Twiddling my thumbs, I also didn't want to harass him.
• 1:14:54
  Shelly Bond: So I liked his… I liked how he left me, and I thought that was very cool. But yeah, I was pretty gutted, but then I had to move on, you know? So I've been trying my whole career.
• 1:15:04
  Shelly Bond: to celebrate the music and comics connection, because it was Lovin' Rockets that pulled me in, you know, by the lapel.
• 1:15:13
  Shelly Bond: But cheap trick, you never know.
• 1:15:16
  Tad Eggleston: Next time I'll ask about Cheap Trick.
• 1:15:19
  Shelly Bond: Alright, it's a day.
• 1:15:21
  Tad Eggleston: Hell yeah.
• 1:15:23
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, Laszlo, you got less comics time, so you gotta… if you gotta use the world of video games instead.
• 1:15:29
  Lazlow: 12.
• 1:15:29
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:15:30
  Lazlow: I'll say, like, two moments when I was at Comic-Con, San Diego, Shelly's like, hey, I want you to meet my friend. She pulls me over, like, 20 feet, and it's Bill Zinkiewicz, and I was like, oh, wow, wow.
• 1:15:49
  Tad Eggleston: That's how I felt when I met Bill Sienkiewicz.
• 1:15:52
  Lazlow: And the other one…
• 1:15:53
  Tad Eggleston: on the show yet, but that's how I felt.
• 1:15:56
  Lazlow: a friend of mine, who I…
• 1:15:59
  Lazlow: we became friends, like, three and a half years ago. She's a brilliant writer, and has written on HBO shows and in video games, including, The Last of Us, and,
• 1:16:14
  Lazlow: I said to her, I was like, hey, Dan and I are doing a comic book, and she's like, oh, a buddy of mine does comics. I'll put you, you know, put you guys on a text thread to chat. It was Ed Brubaker.
• 1:16:26
  Lazlow: That was… That was, an interesting one. For…
• 1:16:31
  Lazlow: For video games, you know, over the years, we… we stopped working with celebrities, like, early on.
• 1:16:39
  Lazlow: we cast celebrities, but as the games got bigger, and the time demands were such that it was just difficult, and working actors were… or celebrities that reached out to us that were like, I would love to work with you guys.
• 1:16:56
  Lazlow: But I was doing this syndicated radio feature called The Technophile, which was this 60-second, update on technology and the internet and such that I'd spoken of. I did that from 95 to 2007, and a PR person sent me a thing that said,
• 1:17:12
  Lazlow: Will Wheaton has got a book that he's written, and, you know, we're doing press interviews. Do you want to, you know, get a couple of sound bites from him? I'll send the
• 1:17:21
  Lazlow: Send the… send this book.
• 1:17:23
  Lazlow: And, you know, watching… I was a big Star Trek fan, and watching Next Generation, it was like, somebody like me was on the bridge of that ship, and it felt cool. It wasn't just a bunch of, you know, older people, it was like, oh.
• 1:17:38
  Lazlow: So, great, there's a young… a young person on it. So I was a huge fan.
• 1:17:43
  Lazlow: So, they were like, he's gonna call you at 2 o'clock, and I go, okay, I'm not gonna say Star Trek, don't say Star Trek, don't say Star Trek, right? Because I just… I'm gonna talk to him about his book, and I'm, you know…
• 1:17:54
  Lazlow: so many of those people, it's like, they're… I'm sure they get tired of, you know, being asked the same things and all this kind of thing.
• 1:18:03
  Lazlow: And so, calls, and they said, hey, I won't take up much of your time, I just need to, you know, do a quick 5-10 minute interview about the book, and I'll pull some soundbites. And he goes,
• 1:18:13
  Lazlow: I have to tell you something, I was like, what? He goes, I'm, like, a massive fan of yours. I love your work, and I was like, wow, okay, well, then, since we're saying that, I'm a big fan of yours. And so, we ended up talking for, like, an hour and a half, and became good friends, and it was, it was a…
• 1:18:30
  Lazlow: It was a sweet, sweet moment, in my career, so…
• 1:18:35
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 1:18:38
  Lazlow: But I, you know, I don't have the stories like Shelly and David, but…
• 1:18:42
  Tad Eggleston: Those are good stories.
• 1:18:44
  Tad Eggleston: It's good stories.
• 1:18:45
  Lazlow: I'm glad you like American Caper. I look forward to hearing what you think about issues 3, 4, and 5.
• 1:18:51
  Tad Eggleston: You'll hear as soon as I read them.
• 1:18:53
  Lazlow: And so…
• 1:18:54
  Shelly Bond: 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12, coming at you monthly.
• 1:18:58
  Tad Eggleston: Exactly. But now I gotta ask the standard final question. Tell me something you love.
• 1:19:03
  Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules. Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules. But something that you love, that not enough people around you have experienced, and you want them to, so that you have more people to discuss it with.
• 1:19:18
  David Lapham: Oh, boy.
• 1:19:19
  Lazlow: David.
• 1:19:21
  David Lapham: Why me? I mean.
• 1:19:25
  Tad Eggleston: Shelly's the one that should be prepared.
• 1:19:27
  Tad Eggleston: every time.
• 1:19:28
  Lazlow: I know the answer to that, it's Popeye.
• 1:19:31
  David Lapham: bye? Yeah.
• 1:19:32
  David Lapham: That's true.
• 1:19:34
  David Lapham: Popeyes, like, the thing. My thing.
• 1:19:37
  Tad Eggleston: like, like, original…
• 1:19:39
  David Lapham: Yeah, EC Seeger, Popeye. That's the only Popeye. Like, you get…
• 1:19:43
  Tad Eggleston: Okay, I just wanted to make… I mean, it could be.
• 1:19:44
  David Lapham: Yeah, no, totally.
• 1:19:45
  Tad Eggleston: thing.
• 1:19:45
  David Lapham: Seeger's Popeye, very early on, in comics,
• 1:19:52
  David Lapham: Evan Dworkin and Sarah Dyer were like, you gotta be pop… this is, like, totally your vibe. And they gave us, some Popeye volumes.
• 1:20:02
  Tad Eggleston: So if you've been getting the Phantograph.
• 1:20:04
  David Lapham: graphics collections. We were, like, crazy for it.
• 1:20:07
  David Lapham: That's, like, our ultimate… You know.
• 1:20:13
  Tad Eggleston: Beta Graphics has been putting out really nice collections. Have you been grabbing those as they come out?
• 1:20:18
  David Lapham: Yeah, well, I have to,
• 1:20:23
  David Lapham: Like, these ones.
• 1:20:24
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:20:25
  David Lapham: Yeah, I've had those for a long time with them. Before that, we had these ones. See, I have them handy.
• 1:20:32
  Shelly Bond: Exactly.
• 1:20:34
  Tad Eggleston: Thanks.
• 1:20:35
  David Lapham: So, yeah, I mean, that's the whole thing, so I think.
• 1:20:37
  Tad Eggleston: We have a comic strip book club, and the next one is Pogo, but we've been talking about doing Popeyes, so if we do, you're gonna have to come back and join us.
• 1:20:46
  David Lapham: Cool. Yeah.
• 1:20:48
  Tad Eggleston: But Bob Sikoriak and Karl Krumholz and I talk comic strips.
• 1:20:54
  Tad Eggleston: Roughly 3 times a year.
• 1:20:56
  David Lapham: Yeah, it's great, great stuff.
• 1:20:59
  Lazlow: So what's…
• 1:20:59
  David Lapham: I, I, I, you should know more about it, because I've loved it, I love it, you know?
• 1:21:04
  Tad Eggleston: But there's a lot, a lot I don't know.
• 1:21:07
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm still learning, particularly with the strips.
• 1:21:11
  Tad Eggleston: But there's so many great ones.
• 1:21:13
  Shelly Bond: I've been really into Ernie Bush Miller's.
• 1:21:17
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah.
• 1:21:18
  Shelly Bond: And Olivia Jane, and I can't wait for Caroline Cash.
• 1:21:21
  Tad Eggleston: Hailing cash, yeah.
• 1:21:23
  Shelly Bond: That'd be great. But as far as, things I love, because I don't want to repeat myself, I've been on this show before, and I've mentioned all kinds of things. I might have even mentioned stray bullets once or 10 times. But today, I want to talk about… I want to talk about this badass female illustrator, Katie Skelly.
• 1:21:42
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love Katie.
• 1:21:43
  Shelly Bond: The book may.
• 1:21:43
  Tad Eggleston: She's got a book coming up soon.
• 1:21:46
  Shelly Bond: She's got a book called Heaven coming out next year by Phantographics that I hear is tremendous, but maids…
• 1:21:52
  Shelly Bond: Blew my time.
• 1:21:54
  Tad Eggleston: Oh, I love maids.
• 1:21:55
  Shelly Bond: Mage is incredible. They're gonna be re-releasing it. I've bought at least 6 copies to give to people as gifts. Not everybody thanks me. It is the best retelling
• 1:22:08
  Shelly Bond: of the famous film, The Maids.
• 1:22:12
  Shelly Bond: And she does a better job than this famous, wonderful film.
• 1:22:17
  Shelly Bond: I cannot…
• 1:22:18
  Tad Eggleston: That's so good.
• 1:22:19
  Shelly Bond: talk about this any more than I've just talked about it. I love character. Fine Maids, Katie Rocks.
• 1:22:26
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:22:27
  Shelly Bond: Incredible storyteller.
• 1:22:28
  Tad Eggleston: I'll plug her podcast, too. Yeah. She's got a great podcast.
• 1:22:32
  Shelly Bond: Thick lines, right?
• 1:22:33
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, thick lines.
• 1:22:34
  Shelly Bond: Sally Madden, yeah.
• 1:22:35
  Tad Eggleston: Right.
• 1:22:37
  Tad Eggleston: Right, right.
• 1:22:37
  Shelly Bond: Laszlo, over to you.
• 1:22:39
  Lazlow: Three things that, at least in the last couple of years, that I consider
• 1:22:48
  Lazlow: that I want to tell everybody about. The first one, this is ridiculous, but,
• 1:22:53
  Lazlow: the Ryobi, cordless nail gun, because I bought a dump of a house, and I've been doing lots of,
• 1:23:00
  David Lapham: We have one of those.
• 1:23:02
  Lazlow: Bro, that thing is so much fun, like, I just want to find things to shoot with it, so I do a lot more repair, because I've got this cordless gale gun, and I'll have to be hauling a compressor around. That's fun. The other thing is a game I've been playing on the Steam Deck called Dispatch, which you're dispatching superheroes.
• 1:23:22
  Lazlow: That… that's… that's a lot of fun, and it's… it's like an animated… it's like you're watching an animated TV show that then cuts into gameplay, and you have to make decision trees with… with dialogue.
• 1:23:33
  Lazlow: And you have to figure out which superheroes to send to which altercations, called dispatch, that's…
• 1:23:41
  Lazlow: that's a fun game that's… that's doing really well that I just discovered, like, 2-3 weeks ago. And then finally, now that I'm going, you know, visiting lots of comic shops, and haven't really been frequenting comic shops like I…
• 1:23:54
  Lazlow: used to. I went to the comic book store that I… that I went to growing up in Oklahoma, and when I was telling them about American Caper, and how excited, I would be if they actually carried it, because that would, you know, and then I could buy a copy next time I'm in town visiting family.
• 1:24:12
  Lazlow: I always like to ask, and it reminds me of going to record stores, and I used to work at a record store, when you could go in and ask people who are
• 1:24:20
  Lazlow: inhaling culture for a living, and they can sort of get a sense of what you're, you know, what you like, and they recommend something that you're just like, wow. And they said, here's a book that we're big fans of, in the shop.
• 1:24:37
  Lazlow: Called Beneath the Trees Where Nobody Sees.
• 1:24:40
  Tad Eggleston: he sees. Oh, Patrick Horvath.
• 1:24:42
  Lazlow: And I… I,
• 1:24:44
  Lazlow: So I picked it up, and I was reading on the plane, and I… I started handing it to people here in the office. I'm like, you gotta check this out. And then, at the Revenge of block party.
• 1:24:57
  Lazlow: I actually met him.
• 1:24:59
  Tad Eggleston: to beat him.
• 1:24:59
  Lazlow: And, which is… He's.
• 1:25:01
  Tad Eggleston: guy.
• 1:25:02
  Lazlow: was super cool, and I gave him a copy of, of American Caper, and we exchanged info, and…
• 1:25:07
  Lazlow: And, I just… I… what… I love the creative industry, and meeting other creative people, and…
• 1:25:15
  Lazlow: when you get into those… I mean…
• 1:25:18
  Lazlow: the conversations that I have with Shelly and David and Chris, it's, you know, it's because they're extremely creative people, and it's,
• 1:25:27
  Lazlow: it's exciting, it's invigorating, it pushes you to be more creative. So, those are my three nail guns…
• 1:25:33
  Tad Eggleston: Those, those are great.
• 1:25:35
  Tad Eggleston: Though Shelly was trying to make you say, fast time, comic book editing.
• 1:25:40
  Shelly Bond: What are you accusing me of, Tad? I got you this… this exclusive interview, Ted.
• 1:25:45
  Tad Eggleston: No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
• 1:25:46
  Shelly Bond: Excuse me.
• 1:25:47
  Tad Eggleston: Shelly was… Shelly was reminding me to plug… reminding me to plug Fast Times and Comic Book Editing. What's that one? Oh, iDoppelganger. I can't wait to have that in my hands.
• 1:25:58
  Shelly Bond: Yeah, you were one of the backers, I hope you're excited.
• 1:26:01
  Tad Eggleston: us.
• 1:26:01
  Shelly Bond: Got it. Books are gonna land…
• 1:26:03
  Tad Eggleston: Excited.
• 1:26:04
  Shelly Bond: Books Landing on 12-15.
• 1:26:06
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm looking forward to it.
• 1:26:09
  Shelly Bond: nose crossed.
• 1:26:10
  Shelly Bond: David Lapham as he's drawing with his fingers and ankles and toes crossed.
• 1:26:15
  Tad Eggleston: draws, like nobody's business. I mean, like, so, so, are you better right-handed or left-handed and, and, right foot or left foot?
• 1:26:29
  David Lapham: It depends. If you don't like it, then it was with the left.
• 1:26:32
  Lazlow: Right.
• 1:26:33
  Tad Eggleston: So.
• 1:26:35
  Lazlow: Thanks for having us on.
• 1:26:37
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I'm gonna wrap us up really quick. I did wear my Orioles cap today to remind me to ask David, you have a panel at an Orioles game, and a wonderful picture of Eddie Murray hitting…
• 1:26:50
  Tad Eggleston: Kidding.
• 1:26:51
  Tad Eggleston: Are you a baseball fan?
• 1:26:52
  David Lapham: He's my favorite, yeah.
• 1:26:53
  Tad Eggleston: Okay.
• 1:26:54
  David Lapham: I don't, I don't actually follow baseball so much anymore, just, it's like, because it requires so much time.
• 1:27:00
  David Lapham: That's fair. You know? But I grew up, Orioles fan, Murray and Ripken, and… My…
• 1:27:08
  Tad Eggleston: My wife made me a t-shirt of that panel.
• 1:27:11
  David Lapham: Oh, that's awesome.
• 1:27:12
  Tad Eggleston: I have an Eddie Murray.
• 1:27:13
  David Lapham: Awesome.
• 1:27:14
  Tad Eggleston: David Lapham Eddie Murray t-shirt.
• 1:27:16
  David Lapham: A childhood friend who, lived in New Jersey, near me, and we were friends, and he moved down.
• 1:27:22
  David Lapham: to Maryland, and I'd go spend summers down there, and his family was a huge sports family, so we…
• 1:27:29
  David Lapham: So, through them, I went to lots of games, lots of Orioles games.
• 1:27:32
  David Lapham: And, Eddie Murray was the magical.
• 1:27:36
  David Lapham: Yeah. It was like, they had the chant, the Eddie chant, Eddie, Eddie, and it just felt like his batting average was, like, 900…
• 1:27:46
  David Lapham: I mean, he's really… I know he's super up there, like, on the all-time Grand Slam list and all that, so, I mean, he was a clutch, clutch…
• 1:27:54
  Tad Eggleston: 3,000 hits, 500 home runs, he had a good career.
• 1:27:58
  David Lapham: Yep, yep. And for years, over your years, he was, like, especially the… in the 70s, late 70s, and then into the early 80s, he was basically considered, like, the most feared…
• 1:28:09
  Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
• 1:28:09
  David Lapham: Well, and from both sides of the plate. Yeah. So you couldn't… you couldn't play the platoon game against him.
• 1:28:15
  Shelly Bond: And here, I thought David Lapham's favorite sport was roller skating. Silly me!
• 1:28:22
  Shelly Bond: Silly me.
• 1:28:25
  Tad Eggleston: Well, of course I had to find the baseball panel, Shelly, you know that about me.
• 1:28:29
  Tad Eggleston: I try to forget that about most people, I'm not a sports person. I understand. I'm not a sports person either, I'm a baseball person.
• 1:28:36
  Tad Eggleston: Very different.
• 1:28:38
  Tad Eggleston: Anyway…
• 1:28:39
  Tad Eggleston: For Laszlo, David Lapham, and Shelley Bond, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.