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With Great Power #273... 22 Panels with Ruben Bolling · 22 Panels - A Comic Book Podcast

0:02
Tad Eggleston: Good evening, everybody. Welcome back to 22 Panels. My guest tonight is political cartoonist and…
0:11
Tad Eggleston: author of Tom the Dancing Bug, Ruben Bolling. It's so funny. As I was introducing you, I got an alert that Jen Sorensen, who was the first political cartoonist that I had on, just put out her newsletter.
0:27
Ruben Bolling: I knew what?
0:27
Tad Eggleston: I got the email alert, and I'm like, oh, that was a fun conversation, too.
0:32
Ruben Bolling: Oh, that's great. She's wonderful, yeah, she's a friend.
0:34
Tad Eggleston: She is, she's amazing.
0:35
Ruben Bolling: She's from exactly the same kind of genre that I do.
0:38
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. I guess…
0:39
Ruben Bolling: It used to be Alternative News Weekly comics, and now on the web, yeah.
0:45
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, and, and the, the… I think you, Sorensen, and…
0:53
Tad Eggleston: Tom Tamaro are probably the three biggest examples of, like, multi-panel
0:59
Tad Eggleston: Story political cartooning, rather than single panel story.
1:05
Ruben Bolling: Right.
1:05
Tad Eggleston: statement.
1:06
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, there is… there's… yeah, it's a small… it's a small group, but, you know, when the alternative news weeklies were actually a thriving business, they used to have… the industry would have a convention.
1:19
Ruben Bolling: every year in a different city, mostly for editors and publishers and ad salesmen and all that, but the cartoonists would come.
1:28
Ruben Bolling: So that's how I got to know, you know, all of my peers, because usually it's hard for cartoonists, especially, you know, in, you know, comic strip cartoonists, to get to know each other. We're all over the country, and we just do our thing alone.
1:40
Ruben Bolling: So every year was like a convention of, of these.
1:43
Tad Eggleston: I'm… I mean…
1:44
Ruben Bolling: Turn it into cartoons.
1:45
Tad Eggleston: cons exist.
1:47
Ruben Bolling: Right, right.
1:48
Tad Eggleston: Part of it's for the fans, but a huge part of it is, like, so many cartoonists would never see the light of day or meet each other if it were for comic conventions.
2:01
Ruben Bolling: It's great, yeah. We're actually very social people. Well, but we're also a solitary lifestyle.
2:07
Tad Eggleston: We also tend to be a certain kind of social.
2:12
Ruben Bolling: Well, that's true.
2:13
Tad Eggleston: There's a lot of neurodiversity in comics, you know, so we're social if we feel safe.
2:19
Ruben Bolling: That's right. And we feel safe with each other, because when…
2:21
Tad Eggleston: Exactly!
2:22
Ruben Bolling: When I met these people, really, the first cartoonist that I met at these conventions, it was like meeting, like, my tribe. It was like, we're so similar. All these guys, Tom Tamaro, and Durf, and, you know, Keith Knight.
2:38
Tad Eggleston: You've had Derf on the show, too.
2:39
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, these are all my… these are all my buddies.
2:41
Tad Eggleston: Another baseball guy.
2:43
Ruben Bolling: Big time, big time. We went to a… we went to a convention, we were talking about baseball before we went on.
2:49
Tad Eggleston: Off-air, yeah, yeah.
2:50
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, so.
2:51
Tad Eggleston: Anybody who listens to this podcast knows that I get onto baseball.
2:54
Ruben Bolling: So we…
2:56
Ruben Bolling: Durf and I were at a library book convention. I had a bunch of kids' books out, and he, of course, has his books that are in libraries.
3:06
Ruben Bolling: And, and we were in San Francisco, and I, at the middle of the middle of the day, I said to, Darf, I was like, let's get out of here and go to a Giants game. And he's like, let's do it. And we… that's…
3:17
Ruben Bolling: Greatest time. We got burnt to a crisp.
3:20
Tad Eggleston: New ballpark or old ballpark?
3:21
Ruben Bolling: New ballpark. Okay. First time I was there, gorgeous. I've heard great things.
3:26
Tad Eggleston: things.
3:27
Ruben Bolling: the most beautiful, great garlic fries, and we got, yeah, burned. We were out in the outfield, and .
3:33
Tad Eggleston: Actually.
3:34
Ruben Bolling: The Oprahouses.
3:35
Tad Eggleston: The first time I was ever on television, Was it Candlestick Park?
3:41
Ruben Bolling: Oh, wow.
3:42
Tad Eggleston: JT Snow took a foul ball away from me. I mean, I let him, because I'm one of the fans that knows when it's the home team coming over, you kinda go like this, rather than like this.
3:54
Ruben Bolling: You didn't grab for the glove and try to yank the ball.
3:58
Tad Eggleston: No, no, no, JT Snow took a foul ball away from me, and then gave it to the pretty girl 3 seats over.
4:05
Tad Eggleston: And I'm like, dude…
4:09
Ruben Bolling: You're right there. You're right, you're a good look.
4:11
Tad Eggleston: I let you catch the ball.
4:15
Ruben Bolling: Nice.
4:16
Tad Eggleston: I was in the second row, even, like, you… you needed to come into my area, I wouldn't have been interfering.
4:23
Ruben Bolling: That's great. No, I went to Candlestick, too. I love, Candlestick Park.
4:27
Tad Eggleston: Damn.
4:28
Tad Eggleston: It was cold, but… Ironically, the second closest I ever… I mean, I've been to, like, 400-some-odd ballgames, and the only ball I've gotten was a squishy ball that Clark the Bear hid into the stands before a game.
4:43
Ruben Bolling: Last year. Really?
4:46
Tad Eggleston: Right. Haven't gotten… second close I've gotten, though, was literally… it was a crazy thing. My dad and I were at the Giants-Padres game, so it was actually Tony Gwynn that hit that foul ball.
4:58
Ruben Bolling: That'd be a good one to get.
4:59
Tad Eggleston: Right. So, we were at the Giants-Padres game that we had to… I so rarely do this, but we had a plane to catch.
5:09
Tad Eggleston: that we had to leave in the 11th inning to catch our plane to get back to Chicago, and I had 120 tickets for the Cubs game the next day.
5:19
Tad Eggleston: Where Sean Dunstan stole a ball from me.
5:23
Tad Eggleston: In the company.
5:23
Ruben Bolling: close.
5:25
Tad Eggleston: I was in the second row behind the Cubs bullpen, and I thought it was mine, and suddenly I heard cleats on the wood bench. And I looked down, and there was Sean, and he, I forgive for taking the ball, because he popped down on the field and fired it to Mark Grace for a double play.
5:41
Ruben Bolling: Can't…
5:42
Tad Eggleston: I can't argue with that.
5:44
Ruben Bolling: He's got a job to do.
5:46
Tad Eggleston: But then, it wound up being one of the rare, rare times that the Cubs and White Sox were in town on the same day.
5:54
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
5:55
Tad Eggleston: and I'd gone to…
5:58
Tad Eggleston: the game with my cousin, whose dad was a lawyer downtown, my uncle, so we went to his office after the game, and he's like, hey, I have tickets… I have the company tickets for the White Sox game tonight.
6:10
Ruben Bolling: So, I took in…
6:12
Tad Eggleston: 3 Major League Baseball games in…
6:16
Tad Eggleston: 3 different ballparks in two different cities.
6:21
Tad Eggleston: within 24 hours.
6:23
Ruben Bolling: Pretty nice. That's great.
6:25
Tad Eggleston: It wasn't… I can't argue with that.
6:27
Ruben Bolling: No.
6:28
Tad Eggleston: And not even a doubleheader in there, though double headers are great, I miss doubleheaders.
6:33
Ruben Bolling: So… Let's play too, as Ernie said.
6:37
Tad Eggleston: Oh.
6:39
Ruben Bolling: Okay.
6:40
Tad Eggleston: Though I always then remember the,
6:43
Tad Eggleston: the… the story that Buck O'Neill once told about when he was… he was,
6:49
Tad Eggleston: the coach for the Cubs, and Ernie… it was apparently a game in Houston before the Astrodome, and it was, like, 105 out on the field. And Ernie did the whole, let's Play 2, and just before the second game, running out, like…
7:05
Tad Eggleston: feints of exhaustion. I was like, I don't think you're playing too today, Aaron.
7:11
Ruben Bolling: Let's not play too.
7:12
Ruben Bolling: Let's stop at 1.
7:16
Tad Eggleston: But Buck says, Ernie still said it was a beautiful day for Mason.
7:22
Ruben Bolling: Beautiful.
7:23
Tad Eggleston: So before we fall too far down other rabbit holes, let's talk about your Kickstarter.
7:30
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
7:31
Tad Eggleston: Because we're going way, way back with this Kickstarter, aren't we?
7:34
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
7:35
Tad Eggleston: This is…
7:35
Ruben Bolling: The early days of Tom the Dancing Bug, yeah. Well, Clover Press has been,
7:42
Ruben Bolling: They've been amazing, and they have been committed to…
7:46
Ruben Bolling: publishing in trade paperbacks, the complete Tom the Dancing Bug library. Tom the Dancing Bug is a weekly comic strip.
7:55
Ruben Bolling: Social, political, satire, and absurdist humor, and we published, volumes 3 through 8
8:06
Ruben Bolling: chronologically, and we saved Volumes 1 and 2 from the earliest days of Tom the Dancing Bug for the end of the, for the completion.
8:16
Ruben Bolling: of the… of the complete Tom the Dancing Bug Library. Volumes 1 and 2 cover the first years 1990 to 1998. Every single Tom the Dancing Bug comic.
8:28
Ruben Bolling: from those years. So, the others were sold, in, in bookstores and, and, and Amazon, but we're doing this one on a Kickstarter, which, launched, I don't know when this will publish, but it launched as we're speaking.
8:44
Ruben Bolling: Just a few days ago.
8:46
Tad Eggleston: It launched a few days ago, it goes through November 20th. It is fully funded.
8:52
Tad Eggleston: Almost 13 times? Well, no.
8:55
Tad Eggleston: It's fully funded 13 times over.
8:57
Ruben Bolling: It's… it's going great. I'm so…
8:59
Tad Eggleston: I'm proud of.
8:59
Ruben Bolling: Things have…
9:00
Tad Eggleston: So at this point, you can go back it, and it's the same as buying it. There's no chance that it will not get fully funded anymore.
9:08
Ruben Bolling: No, no, no, this is… this is happening, and all the, all the bonus stuff is happening, too, so this is, this is your chance just basically to pre-order it, and what they tell me is it's your only chance, because once this is it, they're gonna, you know, just do the Kickstarter.
9:22
Tad Eggleston: Oh, they're not putting them out into stores.
9:25
Ruben Bolling: That's what they're telling me, yeah.
9:27
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
9:27
Ruben Bolling: This is the…
9:28
Tad Eggleston: I mean, that feels surprising, given…
9:32
Tad Eggleston: Given how well it's done on the Kickstarter.
9:36
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no, it's done great. Maybe, I mean, maybe it'll change their mind, but for now, there's no way to know. It's just…
9:41
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
9:41
Ruben Bolling: This is the plan as of now. So we'll see. Yeah. But I'm really gratified. You know, these books are the ones where I really, you know, gained my readership.
9:53
Tad Eggleston: There is a retailer tier, so I'm gonna… any of the retailers listening, in case they don't publish it, you don't get…
10:01
Tad Eggleston: 4 copies of each of 1 and 2. That's interesting, because that goes to what you said.
10:06
Ruben Bolling: $20. That was just added.
10:08
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
10:09
Ruben Bolling: Because I hadn't seen that before. I went to the… I went to the page today and saw that that was added. So maybe they're… maybe they are, changing that.
10:16
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, I… I think anytime you wind up raising $26,000 in your first couple of days.
10:26
Tad Eggleston: That means there's a demand. Well…
10:31
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no, the other books sold really well. I've just been so gratified by, you know, the way my…
10:38
Ruben Bolling: the readers of Tom Dancing Bug have really showed up, and… and that… and because of that, we're now gonna have, you know, 8 volumes. I mean, I'm… I'm like… I'm a comics fan, I'm a completist, and I… I just… it's… it means so much to me to have this stuff in print, and for people to have them.
10:55
Ruben Bolling: for those spines to line up on the bookshelf, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8. And it's my life's work. It's every… it's, it's my whole career.
11:05
Tad Eggleston: Probably not your entire life's work yet.
11:08
Ruben Bolling: I'm hoping I'll live to maybe, maybe do a… a Volume 9. We'll see.
11:12
Tad Eggleston: We'll see, if I…
11:14
Ruben Bolling: Exercise and eat healthy.
11:16
Tad Eggleston: Well, please exercise and eat healthy enough that, like, you can have a volume that's…
11:23
Tad Eggleston: more funny and less cynical and real than the most recent volume? I know. I know, because… well, that's… that's really to speak to the difference of volumes 1 and 2 are…
11:33
Ruben Bolling: just about apolitical. There's… there's not… you would never know from volumes 1 and 2 that this guy is going to evolve into someone who does mostly, at this point, now I'm doing mostly political, comics.
11:46
Ruben Bolling: That sort of changed with… with Trump. It would… it was getting more and more political.
11:51
Ruben Bolling: let's say I won't do it by years, but I'll do it by volume. Maybe volumes 4, 5, 6 became more political, and then 7 and 8 is just, like, it's the Trump show.
12:01
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I've been… I've been reading through…
12:04
Tad Eggleston: just this year on, on Go Comics.
12:07
Tad Eggleston: Over the last couple of days to get ready, and one of the things that I've really enjoyed is…
12:13
Tad Eggleston: that… you… And do you pick the old strip, or is somebody picking the old strip for you?
12:22
Ruben Bolling: Oh, the classics, yeah, every Thursday we do a classic. No, I pick them, but I pick them months in advance. Like, I'll just go through a year, like, now I'll do, like, 2016, and I'll just,
12:35
Ruben Bolling: I'll just go through and just, like, send them, you know, like, 30 comics from 2016. Those won't be complete, because I don't want to do stuff that's too topical.
12:45
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I'm just saying that altogether, too often.
12:49
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
12:50
Tad Eggleston: They're way too topical.
12:53
Ruben Bolling: Not the classics. The classics?
12:55
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I'm talking the classy!
12:56
Ruben Bolling: Oh, well, then I… then I messed up. Or else, sometimes I'll say, but I like this one, this is… or maybe it's not so old, or maybe it's about something that I think people will remember.
13:06
Tad Eggleston: Well, no, I just meant, like, it… A, it… it… How to put it?
13:14
Tad Eggleston: like, I had assumed it was deliberate, because so much of it, it's like… Oh, you're saying topical to today.
13:21
Ruben Bolling: Right, right. Relevant to today, yeah.
13:23
Tad Eggleston: Where I'm looking at it, and I'm like, oh, this is like… this is the way of saying, yes, it was like this in 2014!
13:32
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I guess that's…
13:34
Tad Eggleston: Does it also feel like it now?
13:36
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I guess that's just history, right? It repeats itself.
13:40
Ruben Bolling: These days feel unique. They definitely feel that way to me, but I guess the truth is that a lot of stuff has happened.
13:48
Tad Eggleston: Well, well, and, and, and, like, maybe I was, like… like…
13:54
Tad Eggleston: I was gonna give you even more credit, because I'm… I was sitting there going, like… because I've definitely seen this happen with a lot of political cartoonists, where it's like, you'll… like, Jen Sorensen will always, in her newsletter, go find
14:07
Tad Eggleston: A somewhat topical cartoon that she wrote.
14:10
Tad Eggleston: 10?
14:12
Ruben Bolling: Oh, yeah.
14:12
Tad Eggleston: It was 20 years ago. Well, we can always do that. I mean… Right.
14:16
Ruben Bolling: As we record this, Dick Cheney died today. Yep. So I had to go back and find my three… three of my Dick Cheney comics from way back in the day.
14:26
Tad Eggleston: Boris Comic.
14:28
Ruben Bolling: MacBook… yes!
14:30
Ruben Bolling: He just showed it to… he just, I just emailed with him. Matt Bors, he said, here's the comic.
14:35
Tad Eggleston: He's the 22 panelist guest.
14:38
Ruben Bolling: Oh, good, good. Matt is great, and he, yeah, so he emailed me today his new… his new comic, and, and got one of mine for… he curates a comics page for a magazine called In These Times. He asked for one of my comics to be in that, which he occ… which he often does.
14:57
Tad Eggleston: I pulled… I pulled that up…
14:59
Tad Eggleston: Specifically, because you mentioned it in your newsletter.
15:03
Ruben Bolling: Oh, okay.
15:04
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Like I say, I do a little bit of research. I don't do as much research as… I hit your Wikipedia page, I hit your newsletter, that's all you need, right?
15:12
Ruben Bolling: Awesome. And read some comics!
15:14
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no, thanks.
15:16
Tad Eggleston: No, actually, what I… I think what I love the most about the, the… the…
15:23
Tad Eggleston: the Matt Boers.
15:26
Tad Eggleston: like, the devils and the we-do-not-torture, I think everybody gets, and even the waterboarding is gonna, like…
15:35
Tad Eggleston: or the water bottle going along with waterboarding, I think most people will immediately get, but I immediately locked in onto that shotgun. I remember that wonderful episode of The Daily Show, where Jon Stewart started off with, Chaney got a gun?
15:52
Ruben Bolling: That's good.
15:55
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, and the guy he shot ended up, apologizing to… Apologizing to him. Yes, and that's, that's the sign of a…
16:03
Tad Eggleston: A number…
16:03
Ruben Bolling: There are 22%.
16:04
Tad Eggleston: panel's guest. I've had some cool guests, Ruben. I might not have a huge audience, but I've had some very cool guests.
16:12
Ruben Bolling: Who's.
16:12
Tad Eggleston: comic writer and Pulitzer Prize-winning,
16:17
Tad Eggleston: intelligence reporter, Spencer Ackerman, wrote the obituary for Cheney for The Nation today. Oh…
16:25
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, it was Steve Hood.
16:26
Tad Eggleston: It was every bit as good as his obituary of, of, da-da-da-da-da-da, Nixon's guy. Why can't I remember the name right now?
16:37
Tad Eggleston: Because I blocked it out of my head.
16:38
Ruben Bolling: Well, yeah, I didn't read the article, but I did see… I think I saw the headline, and it was, there have been some good ones. People are not afraid to.
16:47
Tad Eggleston: who was Nixon's… Secretary of State.
16:51
Ruben Bolling: Kissinger, your Kissinger?
16:53
Tad Eggleston: That's the word I was looking at. Yeah, yeah.
16:55
Tad Eggleston: ackerman did the Kissinger O-bit for Rolling Stone, too, and…
17:01
Tad Eggleston: Like, he… he knows how to do…
17:04
Ruben Bolling: He doesn't pull the punches, no. He will speak ill of the dead.
17:11
Tad Eggleston: I mean, he was kind enough not to at any point.
17:14
Tad Eggleston: I think he only once actually said the word hell for Cheney. He just often said things like, as he looks up on the world that he left behind.
17:27
Ruben Bolling: That's a… that's a… that's a kind way to imply where he's going. Very nice.
17:33
Tad Eggleston: Yeah… it is a weird day.
17:37
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
17:38
Tad Eggleston: We could have a Democratic Socialist Mayor of New York by the end of the day. Probably will.
17:45
Tad Eggleston: And Cheney couldn't stick around to find out.
17:48
Ruben Bolling: No, that would have… it would have killed him.
17:52
Tad Eggleston: Maybe it did. Maybe it was… maybe it was early exit polling.
17:56
Ruben Bolling: We… listen, we lived long enough that he actually became not… by far, not the, the worst guy, to hold, that kind of executive power.
18:08
Tad Eggleston: Well, I was, I was literally just talking to my wife about this, like…
18:12
Tad Eggleston: Because she discovered… and she forgot exactly who it is, so I'd have to go look it up, but she likes to listen to Conan O'Brien is looking for a Friend.
18:21
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
18:21
Tad Eggleston: Conan wants a friend of his podcast, and apparently he just had a couple of history podcast guys on.
18:26
Ruben Bolling: Oh, great.
18:27
Tad Eggleston: And she said they were actually great, because they were really good at going, you think this is bad? Well…
18:33
Ruben Bolling: Let us tell you!
18:34
Tad Eggleston: what story?
18:35
Ruben Bolling: I don't want to hear that. I don't want to hear the historical perspective that actually Trump isn't so bad.
18:42
Tad Eggleston: But doing it in a way that made her, like, I mean, because she gets that existential dread going on, so it's the ability to go, okay, of course. The world will survive Trump. It's not that Trump isn't bad, it's that there's hope for the world to survive.
18:56
Ruben Bolling: I get it, I get it. There's… there's room for that, but that's great.
19:01
Tad Eggleston: one of the things that I said to her that…
19:04
Tad Eggleston: I think about a lot, you know, because I'm a teacher, she's a teacher, we spend a lot of time around kids, and like, as much as older generations love to rip on millennials, rip on…
19:18
Tad Eggleston: Gen Z even more, what they totally don't get…
19:25
Tad Eggleston: Is that for anybody born post-9-11,
19:28
Tad Eggleston: This is the only world they've known.
19:31
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
19:31
Tad Eggleston: It's not getting worse for them.
19:33
Tad Eggleston: It just is. Every once in a while, they see something that their parents say is better, but they don't actually see it get better, they just see it not get worse for a while.
19:44
Ruben Bolling: Absolutely. I mean, look, if you're in high school now, Trump has been, made, either, elected, or campaigning, they're almost their whole, aware lives, so, so this is, this is it. This is what America is.
20:01
Tad Eggleston: And part of the reason I think that it feels so much harder now is, like.
20:08
Tad Eggleston: Reagan and Bush won were bad. I mean, Reagan in particular, bad. Very, very bad.
20:14
Tad Eggleston: like, War crimes and terror about the government, the economy, whatever.
20:20
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, well…
20:22
Tad Eggleston: But then we got 8 years of not getting worse.
20:26
Tad Eggleston: Not necessarily getting better, but not getting worse. And then Bush and Cheney!
20:31
Tad Eggleston: Bad. Really bad. More war crimes, more tearing apart the economy, almost destroyed the world economy. But then we got 8 years of…
20:40
Tad Eggleston: Not getting worse!
20:44
Ruben Bolling: You notice there's… that they… the things get… it's not just… it's… it's objective. I mean, things… things get worse
20:51
Ruben Bolling: the economic… the economy keeps falling apart under Republicans, and yet they still have the reputation of the ones who are, sober and careful and…
21:00
Tad Eggleston: For the first time ever, recent polling has American people trusting… trusting Democrats on the economy by, like, 2 points better than Republicans. Now, mind you, this is, like, 39 to 37, with 40% of the population not trusting either of them. Right, right.
21:22
Ruben Bolling: Well, it's about time we edged them out. We gotta… they gotta, build out… build on that lead. Keep showing those graphs.
21:32
Tad Eggleston: Well, but then, like, the real key, though, is…
21:36
Tad Eggleston: Then we have to do something with it.
21:39
Tad Eggleston: Not just… not let things get worse.
21:43
Ruben Bolling: Well, that's true, we've had… well…
21:45
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I mean, when you talk about those 8 years, those Democratic presidents who have been… who were in office for 8 years, one was triangulating and was deliberately moderate and conciliatory to Republicans, and the other one was just careful to a fault. And and Republicans are not.
22:05
Ruben Bolling: They get in there, and look at… well, they, you know, break things, and…
22:09
Tad Eggleston: I don't know anything about Project 2025. Hey! This guy! The guy that wrote Project 2025, I put him in charge of things!
22:17
Ruben Bolling: Right.
22:18
Tad Eggleston: What are you talking about? I never said I didn't know anything about Project 2025. Oh, wait! That interview!
22:27
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
22:29
Ruben Bolling: Well…
22:30
Tad Eggleston: Let's talk your history, because you have an interesting road to… political comics. You… you…
22:38
Tad Eggleston: you're a lawyer, or at least were, right?
22:41
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I was, I was, I went.
22:43
Tad Eggleston: And an undergrad in econ? Again, I'm only doing… And, and, like, not from…
22:50
Tad Eggleston: Not from nothing colleges, though. I'm one of the ones that, like, I'm starting to wonder how good Harvard Law School is, no offense.
23:00
Ruben Bolling: I'm the black sheep of… of the… of the.
23:03
Tad Eggleston: Based on some of.
23:04
Ruben Bolling: Substance.
23:05
Tad Eggleston: of the Supreme Court Harvard Law.
23:07
Ruben Bolling: Oh, I know.
23:08
Tad Eggleston: Gale Vogg?
23:10
Ruben Bolling: I know.
23:12
Ruben Bolling: No, I… what did I… I…
23:17
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no, I was trying to think of… the, yeah, there have been more, Supreme Court justices from Harvard Law School than cartoonists.
23:27
Ruben Bolling: Only one cartoonist. Several, several Supreme Court.
23:30
Tad Eggleston: Cartoon, it's only one cartoonist.
23:32
Ruben Bolling: No, they're… well…
23:33
Tad Eggleston: into that.
23:34
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, there's… I think there have been people who've done comics. I think as a… as a career, I think that's right.
23:43
Tad Eggleston: Because… cause there is… there is, and I don't… I'd have to look this guy up. Have you ever seen… there… there is a… a…
23:53
Tad Eggleston: Illustrated Guide to Law.
23:56
Ruben Bolling: Oh, okay.
23:56
Tad Eggleston: webcomic suit here, I'll share it with you.
23:59
Ruben Bolling: Even if there's two, we're still, we're still outnumbered by the Supreme Court judges.
24:05
Ruben Bolling: So we… so, yeah, I would… I did,
24:10
Ruben Bolling: Oh, you're gonna do a screen share. I did do, so I… I didn't realize that I could be a cartoonist until I was in law school. There was an ad in the law school newspaper for a cartoonist
24:24
Ruben Bolling: And
24:27
Ruben Bolling: I, I answered the ad. I figured I'm not… I'm not good, but I'll, you know, they're looking for one, so I'll raise my hand.
24:34
Ruben Bolling: And and, you know, I began doing comics there, and I really just found my voice there. I was never good before then.
24:41
Ruben Bolling: And then I really got, really got interested, in doing that. I was a lawyer.
24:48
Ruben Bolling: I quit to become a cartoonist, and quickly, after a few months, went back into law, and then I got jobs in finance.
24:59
Ruben Bolling: But…
25:00
Ruben Bolling: starting in 1990, while I was a lawyer and then in finance, I just did a comic strip every week, no matter what, and .
25:08
Tad Eggleston: See, I thought… I thought that people who didn't like the law became baseball writers, because, I mean, that's… that's what Craig Calcatera and… and,
25:18
Tad Eggleston: Brett Taylor are.
25:20
Ruben Bolling: There's a lot of lapsed lawyers… there's a lot of lapsed lawyers in every, in every field, restaurateurs, everything.
25:27
Tad Eggleston: I just… I've always thought it was funny that, like, the two guys…
25:32
Tad Eggleston: for the long… I mean, because Rob… Rob Nyers, my favorite were… yeah, still my favorite baseball writer, plus I was gonna give him a run for his money.
25:40
Tad Eggleston: But the two guys that, like, write daily, that I read all the time.
25:45
Tad Eggleston: Our Craig Calcatera, who started his blog when he was still a lawyer, was called Shyster Ball.
25:50
Ruben Bolling: Hmm.
25:51
Tad Eggleston: But eventually wound up leaving the law for NBC's Hardball Talk.
25:56
Tad Eggleston: And now has his own newsletter called Cup of Coffee. And I've always, A, loved his take on baseball, because he doesn't get too precious about the dumb stuff. He is statistically minded, but not so much so that he doesn't notice the beautiful stuff.
26:11
Ruben Bolling: Right.
26:12
Tad Eggleston: That sort of thing. And, particularly since he's,
26:16
Tad Eggleston: got his own newsletter, half of it goes to whatever the hell he wants to write about. So, you know, it can be political commentary, musical commentary, whatever, so he's just fun to read.
26:26
Tad Eggleston: But then I'm a die-hard Cubs fan, and Bleacher Nation was founded by Brett Taylor, who's also a lapsed lawyer.
26:33
Tad Eggleston: Ironically, they also both live in Columbus, Ohio, which made me really, really wonder, what was it about the law in Columbus, Ohio, that made people decide to write about baseball?
26:44
Ruben Bolling: There's just a lot of people who don't like practicing the law, but they're still loudmouths.
26:50
Tad Eggleston: And, who can't shut up, and will write, endlessly, so…
26:56
Ruben Bolling: A lot of writers… one, maybe two cartoonists from one particular law school. So,
27:03
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I just… and for a few years, I've only been doing comics, so these, these books, and my Inner Hive, which is a subscription service.
27:16
Ruben Bolling: Where people can subscribe to the comic.
27:19
Ruben Bolling: I just sort of expanded my revenue sources, and…
27:23
Ruben Bolling: I've been really happy and gratified and thankful for
27:28
Ruben Bolling: For everything that's happened in the last few years.
27:30
Ruben Bolling: Cause it's a lot better to…
27:33
Ruben Bolling: focus on my comics, and, you know, things that are ancillary to it, then…
27:39
Ruben Bolling: You know, you know, when my kids were little, I would, come home from work on one night a week, Thursdays, I would,
27:48
Ruben Bolling: get them in the bath, have dinner with them, get them in the bath, you know, my wife was doing all this stuff.
27:54
Ruben Bolling: And then when they went to bed, I would start drawing the comic, and I would pull an all-nighter every Thursday night, and then go to work on Friday.
28:02
Ruben Bolling: And, just keep my head low, and try not to… Right. Try not to schedule too much stuff for, Fridays. But I did that for… for years, and, you know, I just write it whenever I can, just on the… on the subway, you know.
28:17
Ruben Bolling: Trying to fall asleep, just whatever.
28:20
Ruben Bolling: So it was… it was really hard, but I've just always been driven. I've always loved it. I'm so proud to be a cartoonist. It's something I loved growing up, and I'm, and yeah.
28:30
Tad Eggleston: Was it something your firm knew about while you were doing it?
28:33
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I would always tell them, but I wouldn't talk about it much, so I did… I did feel as though I was kind of living a double life.
28:39
Ruben Bolling: everyone, you know, I would just sort of tell that, you know, I worked for Merrill Lynch for many years, and I was… I had a pretty big job there, and I would… I would just tell, like, my boss. They didn't really… they didn't care in the least. They were like, oh, okay. So anyway, about this, you know, that was about it.
28:58
Tad Eggleston: For or after you started getting political, though?
29:02
Ruben Bolling: This would have been… I'm just, I'm just thinking about…
29:05
Tad Eggleston: The billionaire ones.
29:06
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
29:07
Tad Eggleston: You know, I know…
29:08
Ruben Bolling: I'll tell you this, while I was doing that, I remember in particular, that was the particular time, like that 10-year period, when I was maybe less political and more, like, anti-corporate.
29:18
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
29:19
Ruben Bolling: And that was even, you know, my Merrill Lynch career ended…
29:25
Tad Eggleston: apolitically anti-corporate?
29:27
Ruben Bolling: Well, not.
29:28
Tad Eggleston: I mean, yeah.
29:29
Ruben Bolling: political, not about politicians. I would do less about…
29:32
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
29:32
Ruben Bolling: particular politician, but more about the nature of corporations, the nature of corporate life, and so, yeah, that… my Merrill Lynch career was ended by the financial crisis of 2008.
29:47
Tad Eggleston: So Chaney… So, I was writing about Cheney, Chaney Killed Your Financial Career.
29:55
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
29:56
Tad Eggleston: Gotta put this stuff on him today, he can't defend himself anymore.
30:00
Ruben Bolling: Right, that's right.
30:03
Ruben Bolling: So, yeah, it was… I've always… I've… yeah, so I had this double life, and now I'm just doing… just doing the comics, and, you know…
30:11
Tad Eggleston: think about it, doesn't that mean that we should thank Him?
30:15
Tad Eggleston: Because we have your comics.
30:17
Tad Eggleston: And if he hadn't destroyed the financial system… I don't know. Who knows? Maybe at some point you would have decided that the comics had to be let go, or…
30:26
Ruben Bolling: well, my… first of all, my comics clearly aren't worth that, but second of all, I was doing a comic every weekend then, too, so I do a comic every week, no matter what.
30:35
Ruben Bolling: That's what I found. It's been 35 years, and every.
30:39
Tad Eggleston: 35.
30:39
Ruben Bolling: Every ding-dong week. Yeah, the first one in the first Volume 1, of The Complete Tom Dancing Bug, Secret Origins, is, that starts with the comics in 1990. The first comic is a comic called Bad Fetus.
30:55
Tad Eggleston: Yes.
30:57
Ruben Bolling: I mean, I don't know if I… I don't know… but how do you call that one apolitical? Well, it's true. It's about something. I… when I say, you know, I write so much about Trump and…
31:09
Ruben Bolling: No, I understand. The specific things that he's doing. But it's true. But that one, even that one, there will be, like, there's many comics after that that are about, let's see, Schluff, a giant monster who comes to Earth and only to take naps, Human Man, a superhero who…
31:29
Tad Eggleston: I mean, Schluff, a giant alien who comes to America just to nap and…
31:35
Ruben Bolling: suck our resources up. Oh, come on, this is from 1992. You see, people… that's what happens. I do a comic, an old comic, that has to do with… that has totally absurdist, from 1992, and then…
31:48
Ruben Bolling: And then in the comments, there will be like, oh, this is about Trump.
31:53
Ruben Bolling: He's taken over our… I was literally just…
31:55
Tad Eggleston: You're just making the point that it drives me up the wall, because I think it's one of the reasons that people don't talk to each other anymore, is at this point.
32:04
Tad Eggleston: Like, everything has been made political by somebody.
32:08
Ruben Bolling: Right.
32:09
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
32:10
Tad Eggleston: To say you should be nice to somebody, it's political.
32:13
Ruben Bolling: Right? No, you shouldn't.
32:15
Ruben Bolling: Pinko?
32:16
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, that depends!
32:18
Ruben Bolling: Great.
32:18
Ruben Bolling: My… one of my favorite characters from the early days, who I don't use any… I should say, much anymore, I don't use anymore, is Charlie the Australopithecine. He's an ape-man from…
32:31
Ruben Bolling: the Pliocene Epoch, and he just lives in present day for… with no explanation, and I, you know, I just loved… love doing those. So yeah, they were just very… 1990s, especially, the early 90s, just very silly.
32:48
Tad Eggleston: Okay, you gotta be right on the… on the… the cartoonist thing, because I'm going through… famous…
32:56
Tad Eggleston: Harvard Law grads at… on Wikipedia, and you don't pop up until we get down to the other category.
33:03
Ruben Bolling: Which…
33:04
Tad Eggleston: It's underneath the sports figures category.
33:07
Ruben Bolling: Right, right. There's more sports figures from Harvard Law School than, than cartoon.
33:12
Tad Eggleston: I mean, don't get me wrong, most of them are, like, Owners?
33:19
Tad Eggleston: We're general managers.
33:20
Ruben Bolling: Sure.
33:21
Tad Eggleston: Though there's a hand… Eddie Grant?
33:23
Tad Eggleston: Harvard Eddy played baseball from 1905 to 1915.
33:29
Tad Eggleston: A couple of… Sailing bronze medalist.
33:37
Ruben Bolling: Freestyle swimmer, with multiple Olympic gold medals.
33:41
Ruben Bolling: Probably law school after that.
33:43
Tad Eggleston: Couple of figure skaters.
33:45
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
33:46
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, probably law school after that.
33:49
Tad Eggleston: And of course, you know, both Rob Manfred and Michael Weiner.
33:53
Tad Eggleston: So, like, it used to be that a couple Harvard Law grads had to go up against each other in baseball.
34:00
Tad Eggleston: Baseball, collective bargaining.
34:04
Ruben Bolling: That's right.
34:07
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, they, yeah, trained by the same professors.
34:12
Ruben Bolling: So, yeah.
34:14
Tad Eggleston: That's sad to me, because, like, Michael Weiner was cool, and Rob Manfred is so, so not.
34:23
Ruben Bolling: I don't know.
34:25
Tad Eggleston: He was probably… he was probably in with the Federalist crowd.
34:30
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, there was a…
34:31
Tad Eggleston: And Wiener might have written for the lampoon.
34:33
Tad Eggleston: Who knows?
34:37
Ruben Bolling: I'm sorry. I'll get done with this rabbit hole.
34:41
Tad Eggleston: That's okay. I'll switch… I'll switch screens. I'm just…
34:45
Ruben Bolling: I'm just glad I'm on there.
34:47
Ruben Bolling: I'm glad I made it.
34:49
Tad Eggleston: But, but, but yeah, no, it is, it is a, I mean, like…
34:57
Tad Eggleston: I get that you love cartooning, and therefore it became the weekly habit, and as I think about it, I… I can't think of anything that I've done every week for 35 years. Of course, I was 10 35 years ago, so, like, some things have changed.
35:11
Ruben Bolling: Well, I'll tell you, I mean, it wasn't just, like, a compulsion or a hobby. At the time that I was doing this, and, you know, bathing the kids, and I was, you know, every week in the Washington Post, and the Village Voice, and, you know, hundreds of newspapers, and syndicated, so…
35:28
Tad Eggleston: No, no, I know it was a job, too.
35:30
Ruben Bolling: grown. It had grown to that point, but, I just needed… yeah, I was just…
35:37
Ruben Bolling: At that time, I needed the day job, with 3 little kids.
35:41
Tad Eggleston: That's where I was going, like, overall, like…
35:45
Tad Eggleston: At least if one chooses that they… they have…
35:49
Tad Eggleston: we'll call it flexible morals and ethics, that there's more money to be made in your day jobs in the financial world. Yes, absolutely. …in the law world. I mean, how does…
36:04
Tad Eggleston: Somebody…
36:06
Ruben Bolling: Who, without trying very hard, could have wound up…
36:10
Tad Eggleston: like… working for Dick Cheney and Donald Trump.
36:16
Tad Eggleston: wind up, like, lampooning them instead. I mean, other than, like, first-hand knowledge and whatnot, but you had to make conscious decisions in there that, like.
36:25
Tad Eggleston: I mean, and I hope that most of them are just because you're a good guy and went, like, that's wrong, but it's fascinating to me when I see somebody with…
36:34
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no, I was never gonna…
36:35
Tad Eggleston: Particular pedigree that…
36:37
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I never would have been working for Donald Trump, but I could have just, like I said, I'm not gonna be a cartoonist, it makes no sense. I'm gonna just devote myself to my, you know, this career in law and then finance. That career probably would have gone better, probably.
36:57
Ruben Bolling: Given the fact that I was, you know, staying up all night, once a week. But no, but it went… it went well, and the cartooning did well. It was… it was really, it was a hard time, but also really, really exciting.
37:11
Tad Eggleston: And, I mean, clearly something that you enjoy.
37:15
Ruben Bolling: I remember one time with the… walking with my, my,
37:19
Ruben Bolling: daughter in a stroller walked by a newsstand, when there used to be newsstands in New York City, and seeing that I was, this was really a great moment. I saw… I was in the Village Voice, where I was every week.
37:34
Ruben Bolling: I was in the New York Times on the editorial page, and I was in that week's New Yorker, with a full-page spot.
37:41
Ruben Bolling: And, I had to, like, I would, like, it hit me, like, wow, that's, that's pretty good.
37:47
Tad Eggleston: Pull out a Sharpie and just sign them all for the future purchasers?
37:51
Ruben Bolling: I kept walking. I probably was late for a birthday party for my daughter.
37:59
Tad Eggleston: like, just as I… I mean, I've got… pulled up the Clover Press page, so I'm even just… I'm just looking at the covers of…
38:08
Tad Eggleston: Of your comic set.
38:09
Ruben Bolling: Man, I love designing. That was a great pleasure, because all the covers, many of the covers, are… evoke either a comic, an old comic, or a style of comic, or in one case Star Wars, in one case…
38:24
Ruben Bolling: Norman Rockwell, in one case, peanuts.
38:29
Tad Eggleston: Action Comics, Tintin.
38:35
Ruben Bolling: Yep.
38:36
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no.
38:36
Ruben Bolling: And then…
38:38
Tad Eggleston: That's exactly where I was going. One of my favorite questions to ask people, and I want to ask it even more of you, because you clearly have…
38:48
Tad Eggleston: a deep knowledge of different kinds of comics. You know, they show up in your work, in parody, in homage, in your styles.
38:58
Tad Eggleston: Give me your comics biography, and by that, I don't mean your bibliography. We know your bibliography, it's easy to find your bibliography. Talk to me about…
39:10
Tad Eggleston: like… The earliest comics you remember reading.
39:14
Tad Eggleston: the comics just started making you think, hey, I want to do this, kind of, you know, what made you…
39:21
Tad Eggleston: the ones who made you who you are. I mean, I know that I have comics, I'm like, oh, like, I read this, and it made me start looking at this differently. Like, talk to me about comics that have been meaningful.
39:33
Tad Eggleston: To you throughout your life, for whatever reason they've been meaningful.
39:37
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, this is a… it's a, you know, it's a lifelong conversation, and
39:42
Ruben Bolling: I guess the earliest would be, It All Starts With Peanuts was my favorite comic strip, and…
39:50
Ruben Bolling: I just loved it. It was so… I found it so beautiful, so funny. I mean, it was at a time when peanuts was, like, one of the number one pop culture phenomenons in the world. In the, let's say, when I was very little, in the late 60s, when I was a toddler.
40:09
Ruben Bolling: But then, Mad Magazine.
40:13
Ruben Bolling: was a huge, specific influence, because I would say, you know, years later, I loved MAD, and I would collect the paperbacks, and my brother and I would get the, the magazines.
40:26
Ruben Bolling: And I would say… that's a more specific influence, because years later, when I started the comic strip.
40:35
Ruben Bolling: Tom denancing bug, I think if I would have articulated what my idea was.
40:40
Ruben Bolling: It would have been that it's a mad magazine where I'm the entire gang of idiots. I'm Al Jaffe and Don Martin.
40:49
Ruben Bolling: you know, Dave Berg,
40:52
Ruben Bolling: I'm, you know, more Drucker. So…
40:56
Tad Eggleston: Okay, I want to start seeing marginal margins in your.
40:58
Ruben Bolling: It's Sergio, yeah, that's so… so… and actually what Tom Manticbug is, it's like… it's like a different style every week. It's… it's… I try to be, like, a different cartoonist every week.
41:10
Ruben Bolling: And then…
41:12
Ruben Bolling: Well, I grew to love superheroes and Spider-Man and Fantastic Four. That's one of the covers as a takeoff of Fantastic Four number one.
41:22
Ruben Bolling: As I got older, Doonesbury was a huge, influence, and I really loved those, and Bloom County
41:30
Ruben Bolling: And when I tried to be a cartoonist, I mentioned before, I tried to be a cartoonist in college, before law school.
41:37
Ruben Bolling: And I was unduly influenced by Doonesbury.
41:42
Ruben Bolling: I tried to be…
41:45
Ruben Bolling: I tried to be Gary Trudeau, and and I just was too derivative, and it wasn't good.
41:52
Ruben Bolling: And then, at a comic shop in, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I found
41:58
Ruben Bolling: Bill Griffith's, Zippy, Are We Having Fun Yet? which was a graphic novel featuring his, his, his character.
42:07
Ruben Bolling: And it just blew my mind, because it opened up
42:11
Ruben Bolling: I don't have to be like Gary Trudeau. I can be… it was just wild. Every page was filled with ideas that just was so exciting.
42:21
Ruben Bolling: And that… that was what really influenced my, you know, when it came time to sit down and submit a comic to the law school newspaper, I think it was Zippy and Thinking About Mad Magazine.
42:36
Ruben Bolling: And trying to be like, like, like those. More sketch-based, more premise-based, and, you know, almost like, SNL sketches. Each one's an SNL sketch.
42:48
Ruben Bolling: So those were… that was a, tremendous, influence.
42:53
Ruben Bolling: But yeah, I mean, just… just comics in general. And, you know, what I like to do is… I loved comics so much as a kid.
43:02
Ruben Bolling: One of the things that I find myself doing a lot is using older comics from when I was a kid, or even children's books. Like, I do a lot of Richard Scarry parodies, you know that children's author? These cute little animals in a busy town?
43:17
Ruben Bolling: And I just… I take them and then parody them in… for today's times.
43:24
Ruben Bolling: And I find that to be, you know, I'm sort of…
43:27
Ruben Bolling: thinking about this backwards, because I don't think about this consciously, but when I look at all the stuff I've done, it's pretty obvious
43:33
Ruben Bolling: that I find it interesting to take something like Richard Scarry, or Peanuts, or Calvin and Hobbes, and then bring it into the current day, and it's the juxtaposition of the innocence of what I love about those
43:47
Ruben Bolling: those old, older comics
43:50
Ruben Bolling: To what's going on today, I find very powerful. So I do a lot of parodies using that, the, those older, older comics from An Innocent Time.
44:01
Ruben Bolling: And it's… yeah.
44:04
Tad Eggleston: Richard Scarry's 21st Century Busy Town Jobs.
44:07
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
44:08
Tad Eggleston: Has happened a few times.
44:10
Ruben Bolling: Yes, I've done a number of those, and those are always,
44:13
Ruben Bolling: big hits. And, you know, it's so weird, because the day that I draw those, or the two days that I draw those, I'm drawing, like, these horrible things that are going on, literally, like, ICE kidnappings.
44:25
Ruben Bolling: But I'm drawing these cute animals, and I'm… I'm actually so happy, like, looking back and forth to, like, a Richard Scarry book, and, like, trying… I try to draw them, obviously, to make them my point, and also to be as, as, have as much fidelity as possible.
44:42
Ruben Bolling: I try to draw them as cute as possible, and as much like Richard Scarry as I possibly can, as my talents will allow me. So I'm having a wonderful day drawing these cute animals, and I kind of forget what it is that I'm drawing.
44:59
Ruben Bolling: Same thing with Peanuts. When I get to draw, I do these Peanuts parodies, and when I get to…
45:04
Ruben Bolling: draw, you know, Linus. I'm… I'm in… I'm in that world. I'm drawing… I'm looking at Schultz's comics, and I'm drawing Linus, and I'm… I'm basically desecrating what… what Schultz did, by.
45:17
Tad Eggleston: They're funny enough that I forgive you for what you've done with Calvin and Hobbes.
45:24
Ruben Bolling: Oh, I don't know if I can, because it's… it's horrible. I mean, Linus…
45:27
Ruben Bolling: He's my favorite character, or maybe person ever, and I've drawn him as a, as a Q, nut, instead of a peanut. And, so Ada can't forgive myself, but this is,
45:41
Ruben Bolling: This is what I find myself doing.
45:43
Tad Eggleston: I mean, like, I probably have… I mean, I love peanuts, but I probably think of Calvin and Hobbes the way you think of peanuts.
45:50
Ruben Bolling: Yes, no, I love Calhoun and whatnot, so…
45:52
Tad Eggleston: So, so, so, like…
45:54
Ruben Bolling: Every one of those…
45:56
Tad Eggleston: Don and John strips, I like. Oh, God.
45:59
Tad Eggleston: I laugh, and I want to strangle you. I want to go Homer Simpson on you.
46:04
Tad Eggleston: I'm… I… I hear you.
46:06
Ruben Bolling: I've done so many of those, yeah. Speaking of which…
46:11
Tad Eggleston: I'm gonna ask you to tell me about this, because I know what it evokes in me, but it's not clear enough that I'm certain that it's intentional. Hollingsworth Hound.
46:23
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
46:24
Tad Eggleston: Where do you feel like that comes from? Where are you?
46:26
Ruben Bolling: Oh, it's very specific. I was reading Karl Barks at the time. Okay.
46:31
Tad Eggleston: Okay.
46:31
Ruben Bolling: And, and you know, I…
46:33
Tad Eggleston: I was 99% certain.
46:34
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, yeah, it's like a cardboxy kind of, Looney Tunes, kind of.
46:40
Tad Eggleston: But I also particularly like that you flipped the dogs and the ducks.
46:44
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
46:45
Ruben Bolling: That's right. Well, flip them? I mean, like, the, the Beagle Boys, and… I, I just…
46:51
Tad Eggleston: Like, most of the dogs in Carl Parks are either the Beagle Boys, or they're, like, just everyday whatnot, and then you've got Scrooge McDuck as the big…
47:02
Ruben Bolling: Right, right. Well, what I… right, that's actually…
47:05
Tad Eggleston: The lucky duck that's, that's, that's…
47:07
Ruben Bolling: poor, and therefore doesn't have to pay taxes. Well, this was one of the… one of the best gifts I ever got was a, an editorial in the Wall Street Journal
47:17
Ruben Bolling: I think it was in 2002, that's when Lucky Ducky started, when they actually had an editorial that said.
47:23
Ruben Bolling: Poor people are lucky duckies, was the phrase they used, because they don't have to pay taxes.
47:29
Ruben Bolling: And that was so, you know, jaw-dropping that these, you know, the rich journalists in an ivory tower…
47:37
Tad Eggleston: Remember who wrote that? Because…
47:39
Ruben Bolling: I think it was, I think it was an editorial board, it was not a, not an op-ed piece, it was like a, the Wall Street Journal says.
47:46
Ruben Bolling: Poor people are lucky duckies, and so…
47:49
Tad Eggleston: In other words, they're… they're… they're yet another… I mean, because this is…
47:55
Tad Eggleston: the thing that's being, I think, hammered home by the most people talking about Dick Cheney today is, like, sure, he…
48:03
Tad Eggleston: he flipped and endorsed Kamala instead of Donald Trump, but, like, at no point did he realize… or did he recognize that, like, Trump uses the powers that he opened the door to.
48:17
Ruben Bolling: Oh, man, don't even… yes, absolutely. The, yeah, the expansion of the executive…
48:22
Tad Eggleston: I feel about the same way about
48:23
Tad Eggleston: Wall Street Journal editorial board. It's like, oh, oh, now you're finally getting that having a functioning government might be a good thing.
48:33
Tad Eggleston: Where were you 10 years ago?
48:36
Ruben Bolling: Exactly. Well, when I… when I saw that headline…
48:39
Tad Eggleston: 40!
48:40
Ruben Bolling: at the time I saw that headline, I was… I was,
48:43
Ruben Bolling: reading the, you know, I was collecting the Karl Barks comics for my kids and for myself.
48:49
Ruben Bolling: And so I just said, oh my god, this is so perfect to have, to be given this gift, and so I did a lucky ducky.
48:58
Ruben Bolling: One comic.
49:00
Ruben Bolling: And it… I just realized this is… this is a whole series, and it's just been fantastic. And now Hollingsworth Hound, who is his nemesis, who keeps calling, saying that Lucky Ducky… this… this rich dog who keeps thinking that Lucky Ducky always wins, because he's poor, he's had his own… he has his own solo comics, it's,
49:19
Ruben Bolling: I've done dozens of these, and yeah, the irony is just so rich. And then, again, I get to draw, like, Karl Barks for a day. It's a blast. I pull out the old comics and copy them.
49:33
Tad Eggleston: No, I, like, the only guy that I'll give, like…
49:39
Tad Eggleston: And you do a different thing, because you… you do the style and your own thing, whereas Bob…
49:47
Ruben Bolling: security.
49:47
Tad Eggleston: really, really copies, and then, like…
49:49
Ruben Bolling: You're gonna say security. Secretary, yeah.
49:52
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, he's a friend, and yeah, he is…
49:54
Tad Eggleston: Mine, too.
49:55
Ruben Bolling: He is uncanny.
49:57
Tad Eggleston: irregular. He is…
49:58
Ruben Bolling: he is the king of doing this. And believe me, if I were good enough, I would do that too, but instead, I sort of shine through. I get, like, 80% there, or 90% if I'm lucky.
50:15
Ruben Bolling: Some people have been very kind and said it's, you know, whatever percentage, but I know that I'm falling short, and that you can see me behind there, and you can't see Bob at all.
50:25
Ruben Bolling: You just see the character. But you can see me, and I sort of can forgive myself, or give myself some slack in thinking that, you know, you can see me, and maybe that helps the humor, because it's not perfectly there.
50:40
Ruben Bolling: I mean, particularly…
50:41
Tad Eggleston: because you guys are doing slightly different things, like, because he's… Generally adapting existing things.
50:51
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
50:51
Tad Eggleston: And sometimes using the choice of image to make statements, but not… As much having the…
51:02
Tad Eggleston: the words, like, whereas you're writing a story, so I think it would be jarring if it really felt like it was Calvin and Hobbes.
51:11
Ruben Bolling: That's interesting.
51:12
Tad Eggleston: Rather than… than… homage… does that make sense?
51:15
Ruben Bolling: Well, I can tell you this, Ted, it's not for a lack of trying. It's for a lack of time. Well put.
51:20
Ruben Bolling: So, I mean, if it happily… if it happily helps, then that's… that's great. I think satire…
51:25
Tad Eggleston: But there is one level of lack of trying, you know, John is not a tiger.
51:33
Ruben Bolling: John… oh, yeah.
51:34
Tad Eggleston: And John, John is not a tiger.
51:36
Ruben Bolling: No, no, I'm adapting it, right, exactly. I am changing things for the purposes of the story that I'm telling. So, yeah, you're referring to Donald and John is a, Trump and his…
51:50
Tad Eggleston: Imaginary… Imaginary publicist.
51:52
Ruben Bolling: are drawn like Calvin and Hobbes, the boy and his imaginary tiger. So, yeah, I'm drawing to a little and a big Trump, because his imaginary publicist is, in fact, him.
52:06
Ruben Bolling: And I've done a ton of those. But yeah, so I'm changing.
52:11
Tad Eggleston: And every one, I laugh and want to strangle you all at once.
52:15
Ruben Bolling: You know what?
52:16
Tad Eggleston: But I think if you'd made the imaginary publicist a tiger, I would really want to strangle you.
52:21
Ruben Bolling: No, that's right. I don't want to.
52:23
Tad Eggleston: I mean, even if it had been a tiger that looked like Trump, you know what I mean?
52:28
Ruben Bolling: I didn't think of that.
52:30
Tad Eggleston: So, so I think, I think that… just that…
52:37
Tad Eggleston: I mean, because I agree, you're probably about 80% on… I mean, like, with the barks, I wanted to ask rather than assume, just because I don't know all of my cartoonists well enough.
52:48
Tad Eggleston: That it wasn't possible.
52:50
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
52:51
Tad Eggleston: that you were doing somebody else, but they really looked like Duckburg dogs.
52:55
Ruben Bolling: No, no, yeah, but Lucky Ducky doesn't look like a Karl Barks duck, and that's deliberate. He has a little bit of Daffy Ducky DNA.
53:02
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I was about to say, he looks more like Daffy.
53:04
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, so I'm mixing things up. That wasn't supposed to be a direct parody of any things of, you know, let's say Donald Duck, so that was just evoking that. So, you know, I play different rules for each thing that I, each thing that I do.
53:20
Ruben Bolling: That's… that's for sure. But the… the… during the 2016 election,
53:29
Ruben Bolling: That was Trump's first one, yeah, okay.
53:33
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, believe it or not, there have only been two.
53:35
Ruben Bolling: I said, As a guy?
53:37
Tad Eggleston: Agency.
53:38
Ruben Bolling: He lost one. Well, he lost one. As it was closing in, I think it was in late October, I had… or maybe a little bit earlier, I had discovered this Donald and John format.
53:49
Ruben Bolling: And I had decided in late October I want to do a daily comic strip until the election for a month.
53:56
Ruben Bolling: of, of daily Donald and Johns, as though it was, like, Calvin and Hobbes. I actually had to talk to my family about it. I'm like, this is gonna be tough. I gotta do my comic strip, and my job, and do a daily comic strip. It's gonna be a sprint for a month, and we said I would do it.
54:12
Ruben Bolling: And it was Matt Boers, I went to Matt, because at the time he had a great comics website, The Nib, and I said, do you want to run a daily comic strip, Donald and John? And he was, like, all on board, and so…
54:25
Tad Eggleston: Remember?
54:25
Ruben Bolling: I knew Donald and John. It was… there was so much material, it was incredible. I was so sad when he ended the nib. That was… that was such a… Oh, you and me both my morning. Oh, you both, brother.
54:38
Tad Eggleston: rib.
54:38
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
54:39
Tad Eggleston: was the NIB newsletter.
54:40
Ruben Bolling: But, you know, what I told him at the time, and it's true, what it gave him time was to do other stuff.
54:45
Tad Eggleston: Oh, absolutely.
54:46
Ruben Bolling: And now he's, you know, doing all these great comic books, so that's, that's…
54:50
Tad Eggleston: His Justice Warriors are fantastic. I can't believe he's made Toxic Adventure something that I want to read.
54:57
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, it's wonderful, so he's, yeah.
55:00
Tad Eggleston: No, he's doing great, and I love him, and all that, but I miss my daily…
55:06
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, yeah, it was a… it was…
55:08
Tad Eggleston: political cartoons.
55:10
Ruben Bolling: It almost died a few times, or at least they kept changing, you know, it would be sponsored, it would be on a… a company would sponsor it and have it on their website, then they'd cancel it or go out of business, then he would… and he just scrambled and struggled to keep on doing that, and to keep on paying cartoonists for these kind of comics.
55:29
Ruben Bolling: And, you know, he fought a really good fight,
55:33
Ruben Bolling: And, now it's time for him to enjoy himself.
55:35
Tad Eggleston: No, I was.
55:37
Ruben Bolling: books.
55:37
Tad Eggleston: he was at… Cartoon's Crossroads, the…
55:42
Tad Eggleston: right after… I forget if he'd actually closed up shop, or if he'd just announced that he was closing up shop soon.
55:49
Tad Eggleston: So, so they turned the, the karaoke night into the, the Matt Bohr's nib send-off.
55:56
Ruben Bolling: Nice, yeah. I'm sorry I missed that, yeah.
55:59
Tad Eggleston: Caitlin McGurk sang my way to him.
56:02
Ruben Bolling: Oh, my gosh.
56:03
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
56:04
Ruben Bolling: Oh, man, I don't… Fantastic.
56:06
Tad Eggleston: night that I met Matt, so…
56:07
Ruben Bolling: Oh, great. I don't go to enough conventions, Nick, because for so many years, I had a job, and couldn't get away, and kids, but I'd like to start going tomorrow, because I always have a blast.
56:21
Tad Eggleston: I will say it again over the airwaves here, and for the first time to you.
56:28
Tad Eggleston: Comics… Cartoons Crossroad Columbus is the one that you should go to, whether you're invited and tabling or not. You should just go as a fan.
56:36
Ruben Bolling: I went to one.
56:38
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
56:38
Ruben Bolling: It was combined with a editorial cartoonist convention.
56:43
Ruben Bolling: But I think it was too.
56:44
Tad Eggleston: It often is.
56:45
Ruben Bolling: It was too close to COVID, and I think it was, it was not…
56:49
Tad Eggleston: Probably the one right before.
56:51
Ruben Bolling: It wasn't at full strength.
56:52
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
56:54
Ruben Bolling: And, so I, I felt as though it was a little, a little light.
56:58
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean, it's not a massive, massive convention, just because the way it works is, like…
57:06
Tad Eggleston: Wednesday and Thursday are essentially, like, classroom-type days.
57:11
Ruben Bolling: Right.
57:12
Tad Eggleston: Friday is… The beginning of more… Public-friendly… friendly,
57:23
Tad Eggleston: panels, but it's still all over at the Billy Ireland.
57:27
Ruben Bolling: Right?
57:27
Tad Eggleston: And then the two keynotes are that night at the…
57:31
Tad Eggleston: at the center, named for the guy that, that, like, was good friends with Epstein, so I don't like to name the center.
57:37
Ruben Bolling: Okay.
57:39
Tad Eggleston: His name's all over Ohio State, because…
57:42
Ruben Bolling: God.
57:42
Tad Eggleston: like, one of the richest guys in Ohio, but…
57:45
Ruben Bolling: Oh, jeez.
57:49
Tad Eggleston: But, like, so the two keynotes are there, and in between, they have their awards ceremony slash…
57:58
Tad Eggleston: Just like…
58:01
Tad Eggleston: reception, which, I mean, that's one of the cool things, is, like, the public is invited to the reception, so, like, you can hang out…
58:10
Tad Eggleston: with Art Spiegelman.
58:13
Tad Eggleston: Right. Having hors d'oeuvres prepared by the Ohio State Culinary Department.
58:22
Ruben Bolling: That's nice, yeah. No, I'm gonna give it another shot, because…
58:26
Tad Eggleston: And then Saturday and Sunday are over at the public library.
58:29
Ruben Bolling: Right.
58:30
Tad Eggleston: Where it's like… it's like a small press con, not a huge… Right.
58:34
Tad Eggleston: But small press con with… like, the problem is figuring out which panel to go to, and how to find time to also walk the floor, because at any given time, there are two panels that I want to be at.
58:48
Ruben Bolling: Sure. And I want to walk around and meet people and buy things. Yeah, no, it's great.
58:54
Tad Eggleston: But then their after-parties are on the schedule, too, so, like, you know that, oh…
59:00
Tad Eggleston: I can go karaoke with Nate Powell.
59:05
Tad Eggleston: It's.
59:06
Ruben Bolling: Good. The ones that I go to the most are, SBX and Mocha.
59:12
Tad Eggleston: SPX…
59:13
Ruben Bolling: Those are the ones that I.
59:14
Tad Eggleston: Do you want to get to?
59:18
Tad Eggleston: My friend Dennis goes to SPX every year.
59:23
Ruben Bolling: Hmm.
59:24
Tad Eggleston: and generally Mocha, because he's in… He's in Massachusetts now.
59:28
Ruben Bolling: Okay.
59:29
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, those are… those are the… they're easier for me to get to, and and they're great shows, and really.
59:36
Ruben Bolling: my kind of, you know, audience, as opposed to, like, you know, New York Comic-Con, or… Yeah, I know. Well, and that's, like, Cartoon's Crossroads is more that audience. Yes, absolutely. It just also is…
59:48
Tad Eggleston: Free is great.
59:50
Tad Eggleston: In terms of travel, the fact that Ohio State is a major college football town, but the convention is never on a football weekend, means that there is a plethora of inexpensive rental
1:00:03
Tad Eggleston: Hotel rooms, or…
1:00:04
Ruben Bolling: Hmm. Right.
1:00:07
Tad Eggleston: Vrbo…
1:00:09
Ruben Bolling: Great.
1:00:10
Tad Eggleston: Airbnb, whatever. I mean, I, I had a, like…
1:00:14
Tad Eggleston: Whole apartment to myself for 4 nights one year for, like, less than $200.
1:00:20
Tad Eggleston: Oh, wow.
1:00:21
Tad Eggleston: You know…
1:00:25
Ruben Bolling: That's great. Yeah, yeah, I gotta try it again.
1:00:27
Tad Eggleston: Yeah.
1:00:29
Tad Eggleston: Man, I gotta get to SPX, cause… I mean, they got the Ringos.
1:00:34
Tad Eggleston: SPX is… this is.
1:00:35
Ruben Bolling: SBXs, I don't… I'm not sure.
1:00:38
Tad Eggleston: I think it's the Ring Gosh. Yeah.
1:00:43
Tad Eggleston: It's still weird to me that when I said my friend Dennis, I mean my friend Dennis Kitchen, because…
1:00:49
Ruben Bolling: Oh, yes.
1:00:50
Tad Eggleston: Baseball buddies. We met at… we met at…
1:00:52
Ruben Bolling: Oh, there's a good picture.
1:00:53
Tad Eggleston: baseball buddies.
1:00:55
Ruben Bolling: Oh, wow.
1:00:56
Tad Eggleston: So I was having to remember, because… because, like, my surreal moment of the year was when his daughter won a Ringo, so I texted him to go, hey, Violet won a Ringo, and then I'm like, wait a minute.
1:01:08
Tad Eggleston: I just texted my friend Dennis, his daughter, Juana Ringo, and I did it completely, like, just like it was a thing that you do, what planet do I live on?
1:01:21
Ruben Bolling: That's great.
1:01:22
Tad Eggleston: stupid.
1:01:23
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I've seen him there at the.
1:01:26
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, he's there pretty much every year.
1:01:28
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:01:29
Tad Eggleston: I think. Because again, he's in Massachusetts now, so his two close ones are Mocha and…
1:01:35
Tad Eggleston: and SPX. Kitchen Sink is actually from Milwaukee, though, which is… which is…
1:01:41
Tad Eggleston: our other, because I live right between Chicago and Milwaukee. So, when he comes to visit family, I can shoot up there.
1:01:49
Ruben Bolling: Got it.
1:01:50
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, so… that actually… that leads perfectly to… this is one of my newer questions, but I like it.
1:01:58
Tad Eggleston: One of the things that I… have discovered… in my…
1:02:07
Tad Eggleston: 4 years next month of podcasting, so I've been in the…
1:02:10
Tad Eggleston: That the comics world is anything other than a fanboy for a relatively short period of time.
1:02:15
Ruben Bolling: is like… Congratulations.
1:02:17
Tad Eggleston: How many surreal experiences?
1:02:21
Tad Eggleston: or changes to my life have occurred just because I have a dinky little podcast. But more importantly, as I get to know more comics people, it seems like
1:02:31
Tad Eggleston: We all have this feeling, that person that, like, at one point was, oh my god, this person, and now it's just Joe. Or…
1:02:40
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
1:02:41
Tad Eggleston: Or… or, like, the first time I asked this question, I was asking…
1:02:46
Tad Eggleston: Matt Wagner, so, I mean, he had the great answer. He got asked to,
1:02:52
Tad Eggleston: co-write the Django Zorro series, with Quentin Tarantino, and, like, right up until the point where he was ringing Quentin's doorbell, he was certain that it was either a hoax, or Quentin was gonna bail out, and then he spent…
1:03:07
Tad Eggleston: a weekend launching movies and writing comics with Quentin Tarantino.
1:03:12
Ruben Bolling: Oh my god, it's great.
1:03:13
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:03:15
Tad Eggleston: So, like, what surreal either event or new normal has occurred to you? I mean, obviously, I'm not asking you to dish tea, I'm not asking you to, like…
1:03:26
Tad Eggleston: But, like, it's cool to me how close the community is, even when it's, like.
1:03:34
Tad Eggleston: I… I never would have introduced myself to Dennis Kitchen, but… but he was a friend of a friend, and she introduced me.
1:03:42
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, well… I guess a couple things come to mind.
1:03:48
Ruben Bolling: One is… one is… I…
1:03:50
Ruben Bolling: I really haven't really become friends with the people who were my heroes, and I've met a few. Matt Groening was a few years ahead of me, and I've met him a few times.
1:04:02
Ruben Bolling: we're not buddies or anything, I would love to be, but, you know, the truth is, the truth is… Okay, Matt, Matt, Matt…
1:04:08
Tad Eggleston: First, Ruben would love to be buddies, so Matt, I'm certain you're listening, Matt.
1:04:13
Tad Eggleston: and he's a cool guy, I'll vouch for Ruben. But also, my wife's the biggest Simpsons fan in the world, so if you want to come on 22 Panels, talk Simpsons, I'll talk life in hell with you, because…
1:04:25
Tad Eggleston: That's how long.
1:04:26
Ruben Bolling: Life and Hell, that's… that's what, that's it, Life and Hell and Simpsons, and so it was… it's always… I'm always so… and… and,
1:04:34
Ruben Bolling: Gary Trudeau, who I mentioned, you know, become, you know, friendly with him. They both have been so nice, and so they're both, like, you know, not… they're, like, sort of big brothers, a few…
1:04:45
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:04:45
Ruben Bolling: A few years ahead of me, but a huge, huge influences, and but, you know, not necessarily, you know, buddies who I can call up and, let's say, let's throw the frisbee around. Maybe the closest I've come to that really may be someone even older, and that's, Al Jaffe, who I met… Wow! I know.
1:05:06
Ruben Bolling: When it really… when I first… I was… it was so early. It was… I had just really started, and I was only in a few newspapers.
1:05:15
Ruben Bolling: And, I went to a party, And he was there.
1:05:20
Ruben Bolling: And I went over and introduced myself, and he knew who I was, and knew my comic strip. And that, that was an all-time…
1:05:27
Tad Eggleston: That's a crazy thing.
1:05:28
Ruben Bolling: I get that something.
1:05:29
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I joke about our low listenership.
1:05:33
Tad Eggleston: But one of the reasons, A, I'm not certain it's as low as some of my numbers say, and B, I'm certain that even if it's low, it's like…
1:05:46
Tad Eggleston: A people that like it, and B, people very much in the industry, because more than once, I've, like…
1:05:55
Tad Eggleston: handed my business card to somebody that I was almost scared to hand them the business card, and had them go, oh, I've listened to your stuff!
1:06:04
Ruben Bolling: Oh, that's… yeah, it's… I mean.
1:06:06
Tad Eggleston: And it's like…
1:06:06
Ruben Bolling: Especially for…
1:06:07
Tad Eggleston: What!
1:06:09
Ruben Bolling: hero, yeah, that's… well, that's… so that… that was thrilling. And then we did become friends. I mean, I had dinner with… dinners with him, and, you know, I'd see him at a party. We would always make our way to each other and hang out. I knew his wife.
1:06:23
Ruben Bolling: That was, you know, really wonderful. Maybe the closest I've come, you know, as a friend to someone who I regarded as a hero.
1:06:33
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, that's amazing.
1:06:34
Ruben Bolling: But when you say, like, a pinch-me moment, like, like, wow, I can't believe this, it will sound corny, but it really is true. Every, like, every day.
1:06:45
Ruben Bolling: I think how lucky I am for my readers, for the people that, people who are so enthusiastic about my comic strip that they, you know, join a subscription and pay money to get it.
1:06:59
Ruben Bolling: a day before it's published anywhere, who buy these books. I mean, I'm so amazed and grateful for that every day, because this is not… I'm not someone who, like, expected this, like, you know, grew up… growing up as, like, an artist, and like, yes, I'm gonna… I'm gonna be able.
1:07:16
Tad Eggleston: I don't think anybody in comics expects it.
1:07:20
Tad Eggleston: Even those who, like, expect it when they're high schoolers, but by the time they've been trying for 5 years, they realize that there's no money in comics.
1:07:27
Ruben Bolling: Right.
1:07:28
Tad Eggleston: And that no money has to be stretched among a lot of people.
1:07:33
Ruben Bolling: But I think there are people who grew up thinking, I'm gonna be an artist, and I'm gonna make a living at this, and then whatever obstacles they had, you know, once they make it, they're like, yeah, that's right, of course. And I've never felt that, I only feel…
1:07:45
Tad Eggleston: I mean, I suppose there might be, but I haven't met any yet.
1:07:48
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, I'm just so…
1:07:49
Tad Eggleston: I've talked to a lot of people on this podcast, Ruben. I haven't met any that, like…
1:07:56
Ruben Bolling: Well, it's just… it's just… that's where… that's my pinch-me moment every… every day, is that…
1:08:02
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I imagine.
1:08:03
Ruben Bolling: My god, there's enough people… Who like it, and then some people who love it.
1:08:10
Ruben Bolling: I'm just amazed by it, and that's what, you know, why I work so hard at it.
1:08:15
Tad Eggleston: I mean, that's another thing I actually love about this industry, is that…
1:08:21
Tad Eggleston: In general, the people are aware enough.
1:08:24
Tad Eggleston: That they appreciate.
1:08:26
Tad Eggleston: What successes they have.
1:08:28
Tad Eggleston: The people who like their stuff.
1:08:30
Tad Eggleston: You know, they don't get into the, you don't understand the blood, sweat, and tears I… you need to give me more respect.
1:08:37
Ruben Bolling: There's blood, sweat, and tears, but I don't feel as though I deserve any respect for it, but… so whatever I get, I'm so thankful for. So, yeah, I mean, these books are an incredible example. The fact that I have…
1:08:51
Ruben Bolling: You know, if you would…
1:08:52
Tad Eggleston: first Kickstarter?
1:08:53
Ruben Bolling: Yes, yeah, because they did… they…
1:08:56
Ruben Bolling: They did the other ones through, you know, traditional, you know, retailing.
1:09:01
Ruben Bolling: So these, these first two, they're only doing… they're, they're doing on this, on this Kickstarter, so this is my first.
1:09:07
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, they didn't… they didn't put it up specifically. Let me see if they… because I do remember it… it funded ridiculously…
1:09:16
Tad Eggleston: Funded on October 28th. Did it go live on the 28th, too?
1:09:23
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, so… like, I mean, two questions. First, were you watching?
1:09:30
Tad Eggleston: Because, like.
1:09:30
Ruben Bolling: I did watch. But, you know, what happened was…
1:09:36
Tad Eggleston: What does it feel like to see it spin.
1:09:38
Ruben Bolling: it's… it's, you know, it's fantastic, and… and I, I announced it to the Inner Hive, which is this subscription service, and, you know, they just, like, you know, it's just like Inner Hive assemble, and they just… they just rise to it, so, right. So, that was fantastic. And now we have a…
1:09:55
Ruben Bolling: you know, we have over 2 weeks left, and I'm just trying to get, you know, more people on board. I'd love to see this really get in a lot of people's hands, and I'm really proud of these comics. Most of them have never been seen, barely been seen by me since they were published. I don't, you know, I file them away.
1:10:13
Ruben Bolling: So… but they are really different from what I do now, and in some ways, they're the most audacious, work I've ever done, because I was…
1:10:22
Ruben Bolling: swinging for the fences every, every, every week, you know, doing crazy, stuff, and then seeing, you know, finding my voice. In order to do that, you gotta…
1:10:33
Ruben Bolling: you gotta really take big swings, and so, I have great fondness for this. And the characters, you know, you can see them develop. You can see them, you know, the first time that they show up, and then how they change.
1:10:45
Ruben Bolling: So, you see, you see, Godman, and Charlie, and Harvey Richards, lawyer for children.
1:10:55
Ruben Bolling: Which is, you know, was my most popular character for years, and I haven't used him in…
1:11:02
Ruben Bolling: Probably two decades.
1:11:04
Tad Eggleston: I mean, it feels like children need a lawyer right now.
1:11:09
Ruben Bolling: Harvey Richards, lawyer for Children was a guy who would, he would advise…
1:11:14
Tad Eggleston: children?
1:11:15
Ruben Bolling: He would advise children, but on their own laws. So, like, a kid would go to him and say,
1:11:20
Ruben Bolling: Someone… well, the biggest one was someone confused me of farting in these… so he would cite the law, he who smelled… he who smelt it dealt it.
1:11:31
Tad Eggleston: I love it.
1:11:34
Ruben Bolling: So I did a bunch of those, and that got, by far, the most interest from Hollywood of any of my characters. Of course. I got a.
1:11:42
Tad Eggleston: Particularly in the 90s?
1:11:45
Ruben Bolling: It was in the early 2000s that it was optioned, and then by Newline.
1:11:50
Ruben Bolling: Renewed option, then they purchased the character, lots of,
1:11:54
Ruben Bolling: lots of… of scripts developed by top scriptwriters. At one point, Stephen Colbert was in to play, Harvey Richards. He was, like, on end.
1:12:04
Tad Eggleston: Nice.
1:12:05
Ruben Bolling: At least I was told that by my producers.
1:12:07
Tad Eggleston: Nice. And then a year later, he was not in.
1:12:10
Tad Eggleston: So when you're his final, final guest, which clearly is gonna happen, that's gonna be your next wow moment.
1:12:18
Tad Eggleston: Oh, I need the Tom the Vanishing Bug Guy to be on.
1:12:21
Tad Eggleston: You'll say, were you really in on that mortgage? I was like, not only was I in, it's my next project!
1:12:28
Ruben Bolling: He was supposed to be… so he was supposedly working on a rewrite with his partner. That's what… that's what I was… and I was… was so excited.
1:12:36
Tad Eggleston: I mean, another one of my good friends…
1:12:39
Tad Eggleston: that I've developed because of this podcast is Christopher Cantwell, who does fantastic comics, but also created and wrote Halt and Catch Fire.
1:12:48
Tad Eggleston: the AMC TV series. So the number of crazy stories I've heard about things that…
1:12:56
Tad Eggleston: Almost were, or might have been, or…
1:13:00
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, no.
1:13:01
Tad Eggleston: Dragged out, or started years ago, and now they're finally…
1:13:04
Ruben Bolling: Sure, I mean, in the context…
1:13:06
Tad Eggleston: Hollywood is, like, the single weirdest place for writers.
1:13:09
Ruben Bolling: I had spent so much time working on this Harvey Richards project, when rewrites, and then I would write treatments.
1:13:16
Ruben Bolling: They would fly me out to Hollywood, and then I would do other meetings there, like general meetings, and then meetings about… and then I would try to pitch other stuff, and I had something going with Fox for a show, Cartoon Network. Nothing ever came of it. I was never able to turn anything into a… into a finished product.
1:13:34
Ruben Bolling: I got paid some stuff here and there, but…
1:13:37
Ruben Bolling: Never, never got it to work.
1:13:38
Tad Eggleston: Oh, that's… it's such a weird, weird…
1:13:43
Tad Eggleston: I had Sherman Alexion, and, and he…
1:13:47
Ruben Bolling: Hmm.
1:13:48
Tad Eggleston: he was hired to write the Daredevil movie. They put him on a plane to fly down, and…
1:13:55
Tad Eggleston: Signed the contracts, and while he was on the plane,
1:14:02
Tad Eggleston: I'm trying to remember who, who,
1:14:05
Tad Eggleston: directed the Daredevil movie, but he… I think it was Brett Ratner?
1:14:08
Tad Eggleston: Who'd just come off of… of…
1:14:13
Tad Eggleston: his… his Mission Impossible movie, so he was… he was the… the… the thing in Hollywood at the time.
1:14:21
Tad Eggleston: And they just landed him to do something else, and they asked him if there was anything else he wanted to do, and he said.
1:14:27
Tad Eggleston: I really want to do Daredevil, but… but he also really wanted to write it. So literally, while Sherman was in the air, thinking that he was flying to Hollywood to write the script.
1:14:39
Tad Eggleston: For his favorite comic book character.
1:14:41
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:14:43
Ruben Bolling: Someone else…
1:14:44
Tad Eggleston: somebody else.
1:14:45
Ruben Bolling: Oh, God.
1:14:46
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. He's on… he's on the studio president's private Jet! From Seattle to…
1:14:54
Ruben Bolling: At least he got that.
1:14:57
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, but he wound up flying… Mark Steven Johnson, it wasn't even… Mark Steven Johnson.
1:15:03
Ruben Bolling: Oh, okay.
1:15:05
Tad Eggleston: who… I don't know what he'd done…
1:15:07
Tad Eggleston: Before that. I guess he'd done Grumpy Old Men.
1:15:11
Ruben Bolling: Wow.
1:15:12
Tad Eggleston: How you go from grumpy old men to daredevil is…
1:15:18
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, he was considered the big gat. They wanted him.
1:15:23
Ruben Bolling: How do you want to write it?
1:15:25
Tad Eggleston: But he wanted to write it.
1:15:27
Ruben Bolling: Yep.
1:15:27
Tad Eggleston: So, so, Sherman got there, and, like, there was… he told me that he still remembered the secretary's name, because she's like, she was really nice. She's like, it's gonna be a minute off.
1:15:40
Tad Eggleston: Because apparently they were still in the…
1:15:43
Ruben Bolling: He was probably told by the secretary, and then… Yep. …had to leave, yeah.
1:15:46
Tad Eggleston: Yep, and they're like, we still have a… he's like, no, no, I don't want to stay… he booked himself a coach flight home.
1:15:54
Ruben Bolling: Oh, God.
1:15:55
Tad Eggleston: to the Hollywood fight.
1:15:57
Ruben Bolling: They should have flown him back.
1:15:58
Tad Eggleston: I think they do. On the jet. Well, not on the jet.
1:16:02
Ruben Bolling: Okay.
1:16:03
Tad Eggleston: Part of that was dumb luck. The jet just happened to be up there. It's not like they sent the jet up there. It was like, oh, the jet's out at this field anyway, so why don't you get on it, because it needs to come down here, and you might as well ride along. It's kind of like Samuel Alito's flights, you know? Oh, well, that seat was gonna be empty.
1:16:21
Ruben Bolling: Oh, so it's not a bribe.
1:16:24
Tad Eggleston: Right.
1:16:24
Ruben Bolling: Okay.
1:16:25
Tad Eggleston: Not a bride. If I… if I'd paid my own way, nobody would have sat in that seat.
1:16:34
Ruben Bolling: So it's meaningless, of course.
1:16:38
Tad Eggleston: Well, I mean… in.
1:16:41
Tad Eggleston: In a world where we managed to elect Donald Trump twice? Yeah. Yeah, it is pretty meaningless.
1:16:49
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, everything is meaningless now.
1:16:51
Tad Eggleston: It shouldn't be, like…
1:16:54
Tad Eggleston: biggest reason I want the House and Senate back is whether we can manage to actually impeach and convict them.
1:17:01
Tad Eggleston: We need very public, very loud impeachment hearings for at least four Supreme Court justices.
1:17:09
Tad Eggleston: I don't know if there's anything that you could actually impeach Gorsuch for, but… but…
1:17:16
Ruben Bolling: Well, we'll see, I don't know, we'll see what happens. It's… it's… there may not be… there may not be the usual elections that we expect.
1:17:24
Ruben Bolling: Hi.
1:17:25
Tad Eggleston: I'm not feeling good about that.
1:17:26
Ruben Bolling: No.
1:17:27
Tad Eggleston: No.
1:17:28
Tad Eggleston: yeah, no, it's an interesting world that we live in, Jamie.
1:17:34
Ruben Bolling: maybe I'll just go back to writing about drawing, Australopithecines and, giant aliens.
1:17:40
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, I mean, I hear the world was pretty boring in the 50s and 60s.
1:17:46
Tad Eggleston: Can we have that back, please?
1:17:51
Ruben Bolling: Interesting times. But not… but not the racist parts or the misogynist parts. Oh, you're trying to make a.
1:17:56
Tad Eggleston: Just the boring parts.
1:18:00
Tad Eggleston: Alright, I gotta ask my favorite closing question now.
1:18:05
Ruben Bolling: Great. Tell me something you'd love.
1:18:08
Tad Eggleston: Preferably a comic, but we don't have rules.
1:18:11
Tad Eggleston: Preferably storytelling, but again, with the rules.
1:18:15
Tad Eggleston: But something that you love.
1:18:18
Tad Eggleston: That not enough other people have experienced.
1:18:22
Tad Eggleston: And you want them to, so that you have more people to talk about it with.
1:18:28
Ruben Bolling: Hmm.
1:18:29
Ruben Bolling: Wow.
1:18:31
Ruben Bolling: Something that I… I'm gonna think… I'm gonna think of something that was the perfect thing to say after we, after we stopped this.
1:18:39
Tad Eggleston: This is actually why it's always my closing question, no matter how many times you've been on, because I'll get different answers every time.
1:18:49
Tad Eggleston: People often wind up looking at bookshelves behind them.
1:18:52
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, that's what.
1:18:53
Tad Eggleston: That's what it is.
1:18:54
Ruben Bolling: What do I, what do I, what is not, something that everyone knows about? And I would love it to be about…
1:19:00
Tad Eggleston: And this is… this is where I do say that that's why I phrase it the way that I phrase it, to give you lots of stuff, like, lots of openings, because I didn't say that not everybody knows about. I said not enough people around
1:19:12
Tad Eggleston: Not enough people. You want people to talk to it about. Like, Nate Powell, the last time he was on, said Jonathan Hickman X-Men comics, because he doesn't live in a world.
1:19:22
Ruben Bolling: that's full of Wednesday Warriors anymore, and he discovered the Hickman X-Men and became a Wednesday Warrior again, reading the whole Koa saga. Really? Oh, that's nice. Yeah, it's good… it's good to…
1:19:33
Tad Eggleston: You know, so, I mean, he literally listed one of the best-selling comics of the time.
1:19:39
Ruben Bolling: Right, but his specific… yes, of course.
1:19:42
Tad Eggleston: But he didn't have anybody to talk about. Whereas Andrew Iden, the last time he was on, went with his tomato garden.
1:19:49
Ruben Bolling: Oh, wow. Not enough people… but everyone's talking about that, though. That doesn't count.
1:19:53
Tad Eggleston: I mean, we are now. I need to go down just to taste tomatoes. I made him promise to put me up if I made it to North Carolina, because I can't talk to him about his tomatoes unless I taste his tomatoes.
1:20:06
Ruben Bolling: I, I think I'm gonna say, my, my colleagues. I think, I think, especially in this, in this world.
1:20:15
Ruben Bolling: I'm so… when I talked about those… the people that, were the other alternative newspaper cartoonists who I would hang out with at these conventions, I think these people did an…
1:20:27
Ruben Bolling: unbelievable job.
1:20:29
Tad Eggleston: All right, we gotta name some names.
1:20:31
Ruben Bolling: Inventing a new genre of cartooning.
1:20:35
Ruben Bolling: And so the… and really, they've been forgotten. There was a great… I will name names, but let me just say, there was a great exhibit at the Society of Illustrators in New York about.
1:20:47
Tad Eggleston: Still need to get to.
1:20:49
Ruben Bolling: Oh, so cool. Oh my god, it's the greatest thing. It's like a clubhouse for illustrators and cartoonists, with a bar.
1:20:58
Ruben Bolling: So it is, it is, I love that place. But they hadn't… they had a whole exhibit on a show about, you know, this, this, this group of cartoonists, who invented a new genre of cartooning, newspaper cartooning.
1:21:13
Ruben Bolling: That was, you know, really bold, and iconoclastic, and all different kinds.
1:21:21
Ruben Bolling: And so, you know, these, these names, like, you know, the people in these newspapers, we're, like, my buddies, Tom Tomorrow, Jen Sorensen you mentioned, but Durf and Keith Knight.
1:21:35
Ruben Bolling: Steven Notley, you know, some of the more… Chris Ware came from this world, so this, this…
1:21:44
Tad Eggleston: In which? That's the one name I didn't recognize. Steven.
1:21:47
Ruben Bolling: Steven… oh, did I say Steven?
1:21:50
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, you see Steven… something.
1:21:52
Ruben Bolling: Chris Ware, chris Ware, Keith Knight. Oh, Steve Nott… Steven Notley. Does a comic strip called Bob the Angry Flower.
1:22:02
Ruben Bolling: I'm gonna forget people. Ward Sutton, you know, I'm gonna forget really good name. Really good friends. Of course. But, you know, and then Mark Newgarten, it all, of course, it all came from
1:22:13
Ruben Bolling: Matt Groening and Linda Barry, and before them, Jules Pfeiffer, but I, you know, I think it's been… it's a forgotten, art form, and these, these, these people are… are fantastically, creative. Look at what Durf has gone on to do. He did a… he did a comic strip called The City.
1:22:33
Ruben Bolling: In lots of alternative papers, and now he's a, you know, an unbelievable graphic artist, graphic novelist.
1:22:40
Tad Eggleston: Well, I can't… I can't wait to see his new book. He was telling me about it some at CXC.
1:22:46
Tad Eggleston: And I think it just got announced, announced.
1:22:52
Ruben Bolling: Is it, oh, man, I've seen…
1:22:55
Tad Eggleston: out.
1:22:55
Ruben Bolling: I've seen pages from it.
1:22:56
Tad Eggleston: About cartoonists being…
1:23:03
Ruben Bolling: it's historical, I know…
1:23:04
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
1:23:05
Ruben Bolling: Because I've seen pages from it.
1:23:07
Tad Eggleston: But I wanna say it's about,
1:23:12
Tad Eggleston: one of the times where, like, cartoonists were under fire, so it might, it might be… like, everybody knows about,
1:23:22
Tad Eggleston: the Wortham hearings in the 50s, but there'd been all sorts of stuff… And, like…
1:23:29
Tad Eggleston: the teens and 20s about newspaper cartoons and rotting people's brains.
1:23:34
Ruben Bolling: Wow.
1:23:35
Tad Eggleston: It might, it might have been… About that? I don't remember.
1:23:39
Tad Eggleston: But yeah, no, I know it has to do… To do with cartoonish.
1:23:44
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:23:45
Ruben Bolling: Well, just look at the, yeah, that's just an example of the creativity that was, that was there with these, with these people. He blew me away when he went, went, you know, turned the corner into graphic novels.
1:23:55
Tad Eggleston: I actually… my… and I'm… I'm…
1:23:59
Tad Eggleston: I'm in the minority on this, but I think it's just because not enough people have,
1:24:07
Tad Eggleston: read it. My favorite book of his is actually trashed.
1:24:11
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, that's a great one. When he… because he was a garbage man.
1:24:14
Tad Eggleston: Right. Well, and that's one of the reasons it's…
1:24:19
Tad Eggleston: Its non-fiction element and its teaching element is so good, but it's also merged with.
1:24:27
Ruben Bolling: his experience.
1:24:28
Tad Eggleston: Very human…
1:24:29
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
1:24:31
Tad Eggleston: realistic fiction stories, because, you know, it makes it… made it clear to me, at least, that, like, this isn't… most of this didn't happen happen, but I used, kind of.
1:24:41
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:24:42
Tad Eggleston: My experience, like…
1:24:44
Tad Eggleston: Because generally, we get one or the other. We get to… we get to discover how something feels, or we get to discover, like, the facts and figures. So to have this artifact that had both woven together like that…
1:24:59
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, because in the book, he explains a lot about the way, cities actually deal with trash, and so… and, you know.
1:25:05
Tad Eggleston: and countries, and…
1:25:07
Ruben Bolling: Yeah. Right, right. So, there's that part, and then there's also sort of the narrative element of being a garbage man.
1:25:15
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, no, Durf is… Derf is super, super curl. Cool.
1:25:20
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:25:21
Tad Eggleston: as is Keith Knight. I mean, you got a good… good group of friends.
1:25:24
Ruben Bolling: Oh, I… yeah, I love those guys.
1:25:26
Tad Eggleston: on yet, but he and I text from time to time, mostly about baseball.
1:25:31
Ruben Bolling: He's another…
1:25:32
Tad Eggleston: He's a big Red Sox fan, and his son's in travel ball, and that's half the reason he hasn't been on, is every time we manage to schedule something, his son will wind up…
1:25:43
Tad Eggleston: Advancing further in the tournament than they expected, or whatever.
1:25:47
Ruben Bolling: Being a travel sports dad is, is tough, but he is, he's also a remarkable guy, so talented, and so smart.
1:25:56
Tad Eggleston: He also had a comic today in.
1:26:00
Ruben Bolling: Oh, he was also in these times.
1:26:02
Tad Eggleston: In these times.
1:26:03
Ruben Bolling: And a really good one, yeah.
1:26:04
Tad Eggleston: That's Matt Porce, and then the K Chronicles.
1:26:07
Tad Eggleston: And then U.
1:26:09
Tad Eggleston: And then Maddie Libchonsky, and then Jen.
1:26:13
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:26:14
Ruben Bolling: And then… Again, I'm proud to be in their company.
1:26:17
Tad Eggleston: that again.
1:26:18
Tad Eggleston: Matt got to be first and last student.
1:26:22
Ruben Bolling: It says prerogative.
1:26:23
Tad Eggleston: It is.
1:26:24
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, so that's, that's, that's what I, that's.
1:26:28
Tad Eggleston: No, that's a good one. I like that. And you both, both got to make it personal and give me and my readers quite the,
1:26:39
Tad Eggleston: reading list. For that matter, I… I… I'm gonna have to have you
1:26:44
Tad Eggleston: I'll send you what I managed to type while you were talking, and you'll have to add names to it. Oh, great. Because I didn't type fast enough. My finger… I'm not, like…
1:26:54
Tad Eggleston: I hear people complain about, like, the kids not having to take typing classes anymore, and I'm like, have you seen how many words a minute they can do on.
1:27:03
Ruben Bolling: I know. With their thumbs, yeah. Right!
1:27:05
Tad Eggleston: Who cares if they take typing classes? They can put a thousand words a minute on the page!
1:27:12
Ruben Bolling: Absolutely. I still do my touch typing with my, that I learned in 9th grade.
1:27:17
Ruben Bolling: For secretarial work.
1:27:20
Tad Eggleston: Well, Ruben, it has been a blast.
1:27:24
Ruben Bolling: Chad, it's really been fun.
1:27:26
Tad Eggleston: I feel like I made a friend.
1:27:28
Tad Eggleston: I hope so. I hope so. I love it when I make… I have literally made more friends in the last 4 years than I did in my entire teens.
1:27:37
Tad Eggleston: And probably almost as many as I made in, like, my first 40 years.
1:27:41
Ruben Bolling: That's great.
1:27:43
Tad Eggleston: Podcasting's a good gig. I found my tribe.
1:27:46
Ruben Bolling: There you go.
1:27:47
Tad Eggleston: Because we get to see face-to-face, we develop a little bit more of a bond than if we were just emailing or talking on the phone, and then we'll meet in person at a con, or…
1:28:00
Tad Eggleston: you know, I'll be traveling and say, hey, let's get a cup of coffee. You said you're in New York? I got lots of New York peeps now.
1:28:07
Ruben Bolling: Good. Come on over, yeah, do mocha.
1:28:09
Tad Eggleston: Yeah. Well, and I, like, one of my best friends lives in New Jersey, so I even have a place to stay.
1:28:17
Tad Eggleston: Where I can get into the city.
1:28:20
Ruben Bolling: easily, and that makes it easier on a… on a teacher salary, because that's always the problem with.
1:28:25
Tad Eggleston: The whole, like… Traveling.
1:28:28
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, you have to find a place to sleep. Right.
1:28:31
Tad Eggleston: Places… place to sleep that's cheap.
1:28:34
Ruben Bolling: Yes.
1:28:34
Tad Eggleston: So, for Ruben Bolling, the comic is Tom the Dancing Bug, it's on Kickstarter through November… 20th?
1:28:45
Ruben Bolling: November 20th.
1:28:45
Tad Eggleston: Pick up your copies now, or just go to Clover Press and buy the newer books, or hit your local comic shop.
1:28:51
Tad Eggleston: I could.
1:28:53
Ruben Bolling: Say you could find…
1:28:53
Tad Eggleston: If they don't, they can order them.
1:28:55
Ruben Bolling: You can find all information, at Clover Press. The easiest way is just to remember TomTheDancingBug.com.
1:29:03
Ruben Bolling: So…
1:29:04
Tad Eggleston: And you have a substack at Tom the Dancing Bug, and…
1:29:09
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, well, I have a newsletter, I have a weekly newsletter I've done since before Substack, so it's on various platforms. It's on Substack, it's on Patreon, it's on MailChimp, it's on whatever I can…
1:29:23
Tad Eggleston: So you're everywhere that people can possibly find to give you money, you'll be.
1:29:28
Ruben Bolling: Wherever, wherever fine newsletters are sold.
1:29:31
Tad Eggleston: Join the inner hive, I see it here.
1:29:34
Ruben Bolling: Yeah.
1:29:34
Tad Eggleston: Subscribe to the free newsletter.
1:29:37
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, yeah.
1:29:38
Ruben Bolling: Free one, too. A free option.
1:29:40
Tad Eggleston: Yeah, well, I mean…
1:29:42
Tad Eggleston: My wife and I were just talking about it, like, we're both on teacher salaries, and we don't like to think about how much we spend on substax and or campaign contributions, but at the same time, we can't imagine spending less.
1:29:57
Ruben Bolling: Because we…
1:29:58
Tad Eggleston: We are actually relatively careful about, like.
1:30:04
Tad Eggleston: I want this news, so I want to make certain that this news exists. I… I love this cartoonist, and I know altogether too well that.
1:30:13
Ruben Bolling: It's hard, but yeah, but there is…
1:30:14
Tad Eggleston: That they need the money.
1:30:16
Ruben Bolling: There's a fatigue with it, because, you know, now everyone's… everyone's got one, but, this is the way this economy works now. It used to be you could get my comic for free if you lived in the newspaper where it was run, and there were many.
1:30:29
Tad Eggleston: Well, and the biggest reason, and I know that you don't get quite as much money for it this way, the biggest reason that I haven't paid for one of your newsletters yet is I do have a Go Comic subscription, so I get…
1:30:40
Ruben Bolling: It's… however people… as long as you're reading. Like I said, I'm so thankful for readers.
1:30:46
Tad Eggleston: And I did, I was looking, I, I always forget how to find, find my, my…
1:30:53
Tad Eggleston: My backer number.
1:30:54
Tad Eggleston: Because it tells you, somewhere.
1:30:57
Tad Eggleston: like, where in line you were in the backing, and I think I was in single digits for your Kickstarter.
1:31:03
Ruben Bolling: Oh, did you… did you join the Kickstarter?
1:31:05
Tad Eggleston: Oh, yeah, I've been on the Kickstarter since, like…
1:31:10
Ruben Bolling: I didn't know that one. Thank you so much.
1:31:12
Tad Eggleston: I think I joined the Kickstarter before I got the message from Dustin.
1:31:16
Tad Eggleston: that the Kickstarter existed.
1:31:18
Ruben Bolling: Oh, man, thank you so much.
1:31:21
Tad Eggleston: Because I know…
1:31:22
Ruben Bolling: I hope you enjoy these books.
1:31:23
Tad Eggleston: I had… I had an alert for when it went live. That's… that's how long ago I…
1:31:28
Ruben Bolling: you know, as soon as Clover Press had put up the thing saying, we're doing this, I went.
1:31:33
Tad Eggleston: Remind me…
1:31:34
Ruben Bolling: Man, I really appreciate it, and I really hope you enjoy these books.
1:31:38
Tad Eggleston: I, I know.
1:31:39
Ruben Bolling: So proud of the stuff in there.
1:31:40
Tad Eggleston: I know I'll enjoy it. You know, I mean, I don't know how much you're involved in, in,
1:31:46
Tad Eggleston: Clover's probably handling your, your, your…
1:31:51
Tad Eggleston: your distribution, so… so you won't actually be… you won't actually be putting it in the thing, otherwise… otherwise I'd say, you know, I didn't pay for a signature, but if there happens to be one…
1:32:02
Ruben Bolling: But I'll just…
1:32:03
Tad Eggleston: Try to remember to bring it to New York.
1:32:04
Ruben Bolling: Yeah, bring it… bring it over. I'll… I'll draw some pictures in it.
1:32:08
Tad Eggleston: That'd be even better. It has been a pleasure. I'm certain we'll talk again. And, again, for Ruben Bowling, this has been 22 Panels, and we will see you after the next page.