The Corner Box S1E20 - Chris Ryall and His Marvel Calendar Madness

[00:00] Intro: Welcome to The Corner Box, where we talk about comics as an industry and an art form. You never know where the discussion will go or who will show up to join host David Hedgecock and John Barber. Between them, they've spent decades writing, drawing, lettering, coloring, editing, editor-in-chiefing, and publishing comics. If you want to know the behind-the-scenes secrets, the highs and lows, the ins and outs of the best artistic medium in the world, then listen in and join us on The Corner Box.

[00:31] John Barber: Hi. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm John barber, and with me as always,

[00:37] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:38] John: I was going to say “frequently,” but then I realized, no, always.

[00:41] David: I'm always here, man.

[00:42] John: We are joined by a very special guests, as you might have seen if you clicked on the podcast. Chris Ryall.

[00:49] Chris Ryall: Hey, hey.

[00:50] John: That's Chris. Chris, as you probably know, was former editor-in-chief, former chief creative officer, former publisher of IDW.

[01:02] Chris: Former just kind of sums up my career.

[01:06] John: I was about to talk about what you're currently doing. Current publisher at Syzygy with Ashley Wood, where you're publishing A Haunted Girl Tales of Syzspense. All right. Then, the adaptation of Rain, that we actually talked a little bit about that a few podcasts ago, and also creating some really cool books for Abrams ComicArts, which is really why we're here.

[01:32] David: Can I add a couple things? I did the usual.

[01:34] John: As usual, you did actual work.

[01:37] David: No, no. We've known Chris for eight years now. At least, I have. John, you've known him longer, but I didn't realize what an accomplished man we have in our midst.

[01:49] Chris: Oh wait, where's this coming from? Is this Wikipedia?

[01:53] David: Filtered through ChatGPT. No, no, no, I didn't do that. I didn't do that this time.

[01:57] Chris: Chris has six fingers.

[02:02] David: Numerous Eagle Award nominations, Eisner nomination for Blood Son, Bram Stoker award for Shadow Show. I did not remember that at all. Co-creator of Zombies vs Robots with aforementioned Ashley. At IDW, spearheaded the launch of the Hasbro brands, which was a huge get for IDW and really put that company on the map, as well as Locke & Key, spearheaded that. Other brands that you brought to IDW or guiding force for IDW, Godzilla, Kiss, True Blood, Judge Dredd, Doctor Who, Ghostbusters. You wrote Infestation?

[02:36] Chris: I wrote some of it, yeah. I co-wrote some of it with Tom. I did a one-shot that was connected to it. That was basically just Bat Boy and my little gray alien character Archibald sitting in a bar making fun of other crossovers. That wasn't an integral part of the story, necessarily.

[02:54] David: And obviously spearheaded that whole event, I'm sure, and then of course, you wrote one or two issues of Rom.

[03:04] Chris: Yeah, not as many as I hoped, but some. You noticed all these properties that I touched ended up in other people's hands. I wrote Rom. Now, Rom’s back. Marvel handling that one. I wrote Kiss. Somebody else's publishing Kiss. I wrote some Transformers. That's elsewhere, so that's what I do is I send them out into the world for other people to make better.

[03:28] David: I don't think that's necessarily true. A lot of those brands that you're talking about stayed well in your hands for as long as you wanted them. I actually am interested to hear, you're a huge Rom fan, and I'm actually interested to hear what your take is or what what your feeling is on Marvel flirting with the potential idea of Rom being back in the universe in some way. How do you feel about that?

[03:53] Chris: Yeah, it's funny, I assumed it was just going to be reprint-only because anything beyond that not only becomes a licensing challenge now, but then potentially, if they did relicense Rom, and then the license lapses at some point, they get into the same situation they were in before, where they can't collect stuff, or they have to edit out scenes with Rom in them, so I don't know if they'll be doing new, but all the tie in covers that they're doing, where Rom is guest starring with Spider Man and Ms. Marvel, and others, kind of makes me wonder if they're dipping a toe just to see the way to do that, or if that's all just to help elevate the omnibus of a character that's been out of the public eye for decades. I mean, the nice thing is that, with that omnibus, and also, I don't know if this one's public yet, but with Micronauts, Marvel asked me to do the introductions for both omnibuses, so it's been fun not only to do that with them but also go back and just revisit and reread all those old comics again.

[04:54] David: For like the 30th time.

[04:57] Chris: Especially Rom. It's almost like song lyrics in my head at this point.

[05:03] David: Nice. Chris, we do this thing with everybody we've interviewed so far. I'd like to do it again, if John's okay with it. We always talk about the obscure or semi-obscure, or maybe not so obscure, comic book that really grabbed us, made us fanatics for comic books. I'm wondering, I'm kind of curious. I've never heard that story from you, I don't think. I'd love to hear what comic it was that grabbed you.

[05:28] Chris: I mean, early on, it was Marvel stuff. So, it was nothing overly obscure. Fantastic Four was the first book I ever read, first book I ever bought, first book I ever collected. So, it was the traditional ones. I had an older brother who was into comics, so he already had a big collection, which is what got me started, and then he used to lay down the law. We shared a room, which is terrible for a lot of reasons, but partly because we had to keep our comics separate from one another. I wasn't allowed to touch his stuff, but I also wasn't allowed to collect the stuff that he collected, so I would see that he had Hulk and Spider Man, but I wasn't allowed to read them or also buy my own copies, because he goes, “Well, I want you to buy stuff that I don't have,” so we split who owned what or who collected what, but only one of the two of us was able to read each other’s comics for a while.

[06:20] David: So, he could read everything you bought.

[06:23] Chris: Yeah, I would double his collection, and I couldn't touch his stuff, but he still got me into comics anyway. So, I love him for that, but I don't know, obscure. I mean, there were obscure Marvel books. I remember Human Fly and Shogun Warriors when I was a little kid. I didn't know what they were, but we didn't have that many chances at first issues, because it was Spider Man and Fantastic Four, and X Men were all hundreds of issues in, so when these first issues came out, I grabbed whatever they were, and they left a mark just for that reason, because it felt like they were buying in ways that a book I jumped into at issue 150, I didn't have that ownership over, but I don't know, first obscure book was, this is terrible, but I was about 10 or 11 years old, and I just got into X Men, and my local comic shop put a copy of Faust in my bag. “Hey kid. If you like Wolverine, you’re probably going to love Faust.” I take the comic home and I look at it and I'm like, “if my parents see this comic, they’re never going to bring me back to the comic store again.” So, I hid it and destroyed it, and just was traumatized by it. Sometimes, you watch rated R movies too soon. I definitely read Faust too soon.

[07:47] David: You said you were 10?

[07:49] Chris: Or 12. Somewhere at a point where I wasn’t ready for a book like Faust.

[07:55] David: That omnibus is coming out pretty soon, speaking of Faust.

[07:59] Chris: Somebody else wrote the intro for that one.

[08:04] David: Doesn't have to be obscure, what's the book that where you were like, “This is my jam, I am a fan of comic books moving forward”? Do you have that moment? I literally remember panel for panel, page for page of the thing that brought me in.

[08:19] Chris: Yeah, I mean, I got into X Men after the Byrne years, so that would probably be my answers had I bought those new, but the thing that I bought new that made the biggest mark was Daredevil, when Frank Miller was doing it. I jumped into books at weird times. The first issue that I ever picked up was the issue where Elektra got killed. So, I didn't know who she was, but I just knew that it mattered to the character, and there were ninjas, and there were assassins, and it was just darker and grittier than any big Chinese superhero team book I was reading, and that was about the point when Ninja movies were a thing, and I just kickstarted this entire interest in martial arts, and it's one of those that I would just go back and revisit all the time. I mean, it was a high watermark for me.

[09:12] John: I've been reading comics for a little while, but the first Batman comic I ever picked up on the stand, knowingly, as a comic fan, was issue three of year one, and it's probably the similar thing. I didn't know what was going on. I actually didn't know what the relationship chronologically was from that to Dark Knight, 50% through the story already, “is this year one after Dark Knight?” Because I read Dark Knight, weirdly. I definitely had a higher opinion of how the baseline level of quality of Batman comics than was probably appropriate. I'm like, “Oh, they must all be this good.”

[09:49] Chris: And they were for about one more issue.

[09:54] John: That’s the thing. I didn't know what's going on, but you could tell it’s something special. Yeah, it's interesting.

[09:58] Chris: It's funny how much those things still leave a mark so many years later, because I don't know if we just had less choices, so we reread the same thing over and over again, and it just imprinted on our brains, but yeah, or just the stuff you read at 12 just looms large in your mind.

[10:15] David: I think that's maybe more than anything. We were talking about this the other day. John said something that I thought was really poignant. I'm going to botch it, but John was saying how you maybe don't necessarily find what you like in those formative years, but what you're reading and looking at creates what you like and look at. It’s a chicken or an egg sort of discussion. Is it that you liked these things and then you went out and found them and those things imprinted on you, or did you read those things, and they were of a certain quality, and it imprinted on you and made you a fan of those things because of that? Like I said, John explained it much better the other day, but I really thought that was an interesting thought. Now, I don't know if I always loved Captain Carrot or if Captain Carrot was thrust upon me.

[11:12] John: I’ve got to listen to this podcast. It sounds like we say some really good stuff.

[11:19] Chris: The other thing is even before you know better or before you know names of creators, I remember looking through a comic and just noticing there was something special about the art in ways that other comics didn't stand out. So, you're right, there are things that resonate differently for you. I remember an early George Perez Avengers book where he was new. It was one of his earliest comics, wasn't fully formed by any means, but I remember the occasional panel where you're just like, “This guy's doing something different and better than a lot of these other comics I'm reading.” I remember that about John Byrne’s stuff, too, where there was something about it that I knew I liked it more than these other books. I didn't know how to articulate it. I didn't know why. I didn't even know that there were different people making these different books, but there was just something that just lodged in my head.

[12:10] David: I think even at that early age, I think you're able to identify talent.

[12:16] Chris: That’s the way art works. I mean, art lands differently on different people, and so there are just certain things. Those two guys just kind of epitomized my sense of what a superhero comic should look like, so that's always persisted.

[12:33] David: Switching gears a little bit. I love the story, Chris, that you tell about how you how you got into comic books, and when people come up and ask you “how do you get into comic books?” Your reply to that is always something I love. Would you mind relating that story?

[12:48] Chris: As far as working in comics?

[12:49] David: Yeah, how does someone break into comic books, Chris?

[12:53] Chris: Yeah, I tell people on this panel, just start out being the editor-in-chief of a comic company. That's all you’ve got to do, which is a completely just silly way to respond how I just fell into it through roundabout means, because there doesn't seem to be any easy or clear path into comics. I mean, other than just making a comic, which I was on a panel recently talking about that, and there's always been a case where people think that you're in the comic industry only when you are making a living only making comics. No, no, just make a comic, write a comic, draw a comic, and then you're in comics as much as anybody else. The economics of it don't matter as much as just making stuff, and making stuff that is in the comic book format and storytelling, and all that. Yeah, I got lucky in that I had my first official job in comics, other than I was writing about comics on the web and stuff like that, was editor-in-chief at IDW only because I was also the company's only editor, but I just got lucky. I knew one of the big creators there at the time, and the previous editor-in-chief was moving on. So, yeah, without having any external experience, editing, or putting together comics, I jumped in and fell into it, and stumbled through until I figured it out.

[14:15] David: And did incredibly well from the gate. Again, everybody we talked to has got some story of how they stumbled in, but it's the sticking, it's the staying, I think, that shows cream does always rise to the top, because obviously just in the brief outline that I threw out at the beginning of this, you've done some amazing stuff.

[14:42] Chris: I mean, that's kind of you to say but I will say, San Diego State has this massive comic collection, and you know, they display all these repeats all the time, and I went over there recently, and Ted Adams, who was one of IDW’s founders, as you guys know, has been putting a lot of his archives into the San Diego State’s archives. So, I was looking back at some of the old stuff, and I'm like, “oh my god, we put out just some,” I mean, direct isn't fair, but they don't all come up roses, but it was fun to look back and just remember those early days of all of us just doing what we love because we loved it, and making comics for pure reasons, even if they didn't necessarily always come out as great as we would have hoped. There was just a charm to it all.

[15:34] John: Today, available is the Mighty Marvel calendar book that you wrote for Abrams ComicArt, designed by all of our friend, Shawn Lee.

[15:43] Chris: Eisner winner, Shawn Lee.

[15:45] John: That's right. Yes. Yeah.

[15:47] David: Eisner award-winning designer, Shawn Lee.

[15:50] John: Yes. Also, fantastic letterer, and a few other things that he's good at. I mean, sorry, that sounded weird. I mean, he wears many hats, is what I was getting at. The book’s a reprint of the seven calendars that Marvel put out in the late 70s and early 80s, that almost exclusively featured new art and fun reminiscences, and then the calendar proper. The two things that struck me about it, this is what tied in with what you just said, one, is that some of the art is actually extraordinary. Some of that is so good. There are a couple of pieces where I'm just like, “this might be the best piece I've ever seen by this artist.” The other thing is, I don’t know the exact way to say this, but the lack of professionalism in the way that the calendar is put together, and I don't mean that it's amateurish. I mean that in the sense that they're goofy pictures of staffers, and it says their birthdays on all these calendars and some artists and stuff. Craig Russell's on one I have here, Archie Goodwin, but people you have to be pretty enmeshed in Marvel to know.

[17:00] Chris: Who is Danny Crespi and why is his birthday getting cited? And stuff like that. Yeah, I found it charming, because I mean, for a lot of reasons, but because I didn't know what any of these guys looked. There weren't photos of creators that you ever saw or if there were, they were in comics on newsprint. So, it was just these murky black ink spots where you're like, “I can't tell who that person is or what that looks like,” so the calendar is just a fun way to see what some of the people you love actually look like.

[17:30] John: The fascinating thing to me is imagining that period of Marvel compared to what Marvel is now, where this is the calendar that they've put out. You know what I mean? None of the art style guide style art. It's all cool art by the artists. was weird. Some weird stuff. Hulk jumping by Santa Claus, or Hulk dressed up as George Washington.

[17:51] Chris: Or if you really want to get into the weirdness of it, each one almost carried its own theme. One was an anniversary, one was focused on Spider Man, one was focused on Dr. Strange, which I brought by way of visual aid. I don't have the book yet, which is weird because it's out today. The weird thing about it was the 1976 calendar was celebrating America's bicentennial, so every image drops the Marvel characters into the Revolutionary War, and some of them are deeply weird. There's Black Panther fighting alongside someone Black Panther would not be fighting alongside in the war for independence. So, it's often that it's this historical curiosity, but also, like you say, to show the back cover that Doctor Strange, that's a speaking of Frank Miller earlier, that's a Frank Miller/Klaus chanson. They just didn't reprint the stuff, but it was always curious to me why these great pieces of art just didn't get a lot of of replay. You just never saw it again.

[18:55] David: Thor Benjamin Franklin in that ‘76 is chef's kiss. It's so good.

[19:03] Chris: Yeah, Morris Kumamoto got his photo in here. Does anybody remember the name? It's not a name that you saw in the bullpen bulletins very often, so I like that it also gave attention to a lot of the behind-the-scenes people.

[19:18] John: I know you've listened to every one of our podcasts, but the images you see were the ones that we conjured with our voices. We’re actually just audio only. 

[19:26] Chris: Okay, well, yeah, but I want you to see. I've listened but I listened to at five times speed. So, it's just a shrill whistle in my head.

[19:34] John: Okay. Nice. We should try recording it that way.

[19:37] David: We could do five times as many podcasts in the same amount of time that we're doing one now. That's a great idea, John.

[19:44] Chris: I mean, as far as calendar, it sounds odd to see that there's a book collecting calendars because I think most people think of calendars as a piece of stock photo or cover art, and then just a white grid of dates, but yeah, the great thing was that they filled the grid with trivia questions and clipart and photos of creators.

[20:04] David: It really is quite the historical document, in that regard, and it really does have so many fun little tidbits in it, and like John said, the artwork, there's some really great pieces in here.

[20:21] Chris: John Byrne and Gil Kane and Jim Starlin, and George Perez, and John Buscema, and Jack Kirby. Pieces that just were never reprinted, so I always wanted to get this stuff back into print. I had these calendars as a kid, and even along the way, I would find out what current year corresponded to those old calendars, and often just rehanging them on my wall, like 1978 dates match up to 2023, so the Spider Man calendar’s in my office right now, and childhood things I always wanted to see collected in a nice format. I'm glad we finally could, thanks to Abrams.

[20:56] John: We have known you for a long time. You've been talking with us for a very long time, and it's really nice to see it come to fruition, and also, I mean, we're just looking at the PDFs of it at this point.

[21:06] David: What is going to be the print format?

[21:09] Chris: 13x13 hardcover, and instead of do it like a wall hanging calendar, we didn't want to do where you've got to turn the book and look at it, art on top, dates on the bottom. The facing pages are each month. So, you get art on one side and then the facing calendar grid on the other side.

[21:25] David: but it'll be a standard reading experience?

[21:30] Chris: Like a vinyl record. A nice hardcover. Roy Thomas kindly did the intro, and Roy was the editor in chief at the time who started this whole calendar and wrote the first one. So, it was great to talk to him about it and get his little story.

[21:44] David: I'm so jealous of you getting the chance to talk to Roy Thomas. I feel like in the last couple years, I've always liked Roy Thomas, but I've got such a deeper appreciation for his work in the last couple of years, and just what an important presence he was, especially at this time, during these calendar years, but throughout comic history, Roy Thomas is, I think, a wildly under-appreciated figure who looms large in so many comic book works, and I was reading the introduction this morning, and just jealous that you had the chance to interview him, chat with him about this or anything.

[22:27] Chris: Well, yeah, and then I would keep fabricating reasons to go back to him, just to get him because almost every response would include an old story. So, I just wanted to hear more old stories. One other thing, there's a mention in one of the calendars. There was this event that Marvel did at Carnegie Hall, in New York, in 1972, and I remember only hearing whispers about, and seen a flyer, but there was no footage of it or anything, but there was a still photo of a Spider Man on stage next to Stan Lee, and I’d come to find out that that was Roy Thomas dressed in the Spider Man outfit costume. Don’t know if he still throws it on, but I mean, why wouldn't you?

[23:10] David: Probably never takes it off.

[23:13] Chris: Talking to him, and I talked to a couple of the other guys who contributed along the way, like Tony Isabella, wrote one of the calendars, and he gave me little bits that I included. Talked to Walter Simonson about the piece he did for the Hulk calendar. The Hulk peace is crazy. It's just such an odd dynamic angle that only Walter it can pull off. I think it features the Toad Man of all obscure characters. It’s a lot of fun.

[23:41] David: I just don't remember Walt ever doing Hulk.

[23:46] Chris: A rampaging Hulk, the black and white magazine.

[23:49] David: Okay. I don't think I've ever seen that, but it was a great Hulk. I loved it. The other thing that I thought was interesting, looking through, reminiscing through the piece as a whole, is that you can see that the Marvel's house style is very much Jack Kirby, in the early calendars, and then you get these outliers of maybe John Buscema is a little different or Gil Kane was a little bit different, but everybody, even the early George Perez stuff, there's a lot of Jack Kirby in all these pieces, and then as you get towards the end of it, you can see the influence of Byrne and Perez, and I guess John Romita Sr is maybe leading that edge in some ways.

[24:33] Chris: Rosita did a lot of the package art for Marvel back then. That was always Stan’s comic book ideal, was the John Romita style. So, the one place you don't see a ton of Jack Kirby is, the cover of this 1977 calendar was drawn by Jack Kirby, but in the back of the book, we show the original Kirby pencils and then you see the inked version, where it's inked by John Romita, and there's some considerable reworking of faces and bodies, especially on characters like Spider Man, which Spider Man was never a character Jack took to as well as he did other characters, so it's fun to see what he originally intended, and then the way Romita cleaned it up for the masses in the way that I think Stan liked for their outward facing merchandising.

[25:19] John: Yeah, yeah. Especially the Hulk is a totally different figure. That's wild. That's actually one of the things that really struck me, and I think you bring it up in the book a couple times is, this first calendar is 14 years into Marvel Comics existing, and that's wild. To me, the idea that this is the equivalent of 2009 to right now, was when Marvel started, and you're already in new world with Frank Brunner and Barry Windsor-Smith. Barry Windsor-Smith, I mean, I guess he's still signing it Barry Smith, but it looks like Barry Windsor-Smith. He's out of the Kirby era.

[26:00] Chris: Yeah, his Conan piece is great.

[26:03] John: Later stuff being being there. 14 years in. I never realized. I don't know, it never connected with me.

[26:10] Chris: Even when I saw this stuff as a kid, the Marvel universe of the 60s, it felt like ancient history because it was just something I never saw, or you saw in reprint books, so right, you forget how young it is, and how they were all just figuring things out. I mean, at this point, they were probably a third of the staff that we had when we were at IDW. It was just crazy how much they were accomplishing by with just such a small team pulling all this stuff together. Yeah, I was so enamored by these calendars when I was a kid that when we finally had all the Hasbro properties together, I was like, “well, that's enough characters and history and bits of trivia to allow me to make one of these calendars myself.” So, I started just scribbling it out, and it was so much work just to try to figure out. Now, it's a world where it's probably impossible to get approvals. There's just other factors that limit the things you can do and say in these types of pieces, so I don't think it ever would have worked, but I would love to just create one more calendar like this, but even in the computer era, it seemed like a ton of work. So, I can't imagine how much work versus the reward that this was for those guys back in the day.

[27:29] John: Yeah, it was even supplemental material. You have some David Anthony Kraft sketches for some of the formulaic ones, and yeah, realizing you had to go through, and he had to go through SketchUp. I mean, of course, that's what had to happen, but imagining finding, I don't know how many, 60 bad photos of nearly universally not super attractive people, half-toning them, and cutting them out by hand, and then dealing with everybody. There's one instance of that. I don't even remember who it was, but dealing with everybody invariably getting mad at you for every joke and just bad photo. If you imagine how you'd have to do this today, everybody will have their author photos of them staring off into the mid-distance, and really carefully photoshopped and cleaned up and everything.

[28:29] Chris: Yeah, these were clipped headshots from, I don't know, a group softball photo or something. Not that anybody was posing for.

[28:37] John: Except the one that was in the 1976 one, you have Stan Lee dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, which is awesome, and George Washington and thinking like, “oh, yeah, okay. They must have just added that on him,” but no, they didn't. Wait a minute. He had to put that on.

[28:58] Chris: I don't know he put that on for the calendar or if that was just a look he was sporting at the time. It's hard to know. Yeah, the 1976 calendar is definitely one that there's one of those historical disclaimers. Some of the artwork is amazing in it and all of that, but it's definitely not one that I think would be approached anywhere near the same way now.

[29:21] David: John, you say that everyone looks like they're not posed and they're random photos. There's one exception in my opinion, though. In 1980, the John Byrne photo is very much posed. He looks like he's L. Ron Hubbard. I don't really know what L. Ron Hubbard looks like, but he looks like he's the leader of a cult, is what what Byrne looks like in his photo.

[29:44] Chris: In 1980, doing X Men, he kind of was.

[29:49] David: Anyway, I thought that one really stood out to me. It's July 1980. Fantastic.

[29:56] John: Yes, but did you see July 1979 one where he is cosplaying as the leader or something.

[30:09] Chris: Yeah, and I don't imagine any of the creators in these calendars got approval over their photo or whatever manipulation was done to them. So, it was just, I don't know, having fun for fun’s sake, which is just something that you want to keep seeing more of. Abrams has been great about doing these kinds of books. They put out that value stamps book that just collects all these obscure little parts of comic history that you wonder who the audience is, then you realize the audience is us, all the people like us, and so it's fun to be able to contribute that same thing with all of these. I knew I held on to all these calendars for these decades for some reason.

[30:47] David: I like how you put that in your dedication for the book.

[30:53] Chris: Yeah, it's no longer just a wasted youth. It was all research.

[31:01] David: You have to go back and refile your taxes. The other thing that I thought was really cool about this is, I also have had a recent deeper appreciation for Herb Trimpe, and there's a couple pieces in here from Herb that are like, “Oh, wow, man. That guy's so good.”

[31:21] Chris: The Hulk wearing the George Washington.

[31:26] David: That one's fantastic.

[31:30] John: That was actually one of the ones I was thinking, the one with the group that The Brute That Shouted Love at The Heart of the World or whichever one.

[31:37] Chris: Oh, yeah, the Harlan Ellison.

[31:40] John: Yeah. That image is maybe the best Herb Trimpe drawing I've ever seen. I don't mean that to insult other Herb Trimpe drawings. That is a real nice one.

[31:49] Chris: That the human Jarella? Yeah, I mean, I always thought her when he inked himself. When he got a chance to ink himself, he was often his own best inker, other than Marie Severin, who I knew, who made everybody better, but yeah, I mean, again, that's why it’s fun to show these pieces because there's some great work in here. There's a Michael Golden Hulk image from 1981 that is just stunning because that was when everything Golden did was stunning.

[32:17] David: There's a Frank Miller Dr. Strange in there that I really liked, which I've never seen Frank Miller's Doctor Strange, which is wild to see that. I loved that one too. The fact that this is going to be blown up in these big 13x13 size. That size is going to be such a great showcase for this stuff.

[32:35] Chris: I was trying to figure out. 1980, I mean, Dr. Strange wasn't a character that was one of Marvel's biggest books, by any means. That was probably around the time they tried to bring him into the Hulk TV show, or he got his own TV movie or something like that that was just a bust, but you go “Why did Dr. Strange get his own calendar over, I don't know, there had to be bigger character for them at the time,” but then, as far as Frank Miller goes, there was an announcement, and ads ran in some of their books of a Dr Strange series that was going to be written by Roger Stone and drawn by Frank Miller that just never came to pass. I think it was right around the time Miller jumped on to Daredevil when Daredevil went monthly, so he had to let it go, but it's one of those announced but forever lost to history kind of series that you wonder how good it could have been and if it would have really elevated Dr. Strange. That seemed like it was their goal in 1980, but I could never quite figure out why because he wasn't otherwise a huge character for them at the time.

[33:41] David: I wonder if it did have something to do with that TV movie that came out, because it I feel like it was around that time.

[33:48] Chris: It was. They tried to make Daredevil and Thor and Dr. Strange into Hulk spinoffs, but they were all just not great.

[34:00] David: Says you.

[34:02] John: Another wild imaginary, or one that I was really blown away by, was again, she was credited as just Paty, but I guess Paty Cockrum.

[34:14] Chris: Yeah, it was Paty Greer and then Paty Cockrum, and then mostly just Paty.

[34:22] John: Oh, yeah, you're right. There was only one T. 

[34:24] Chris: Oh, the monsters that are a collage of all the monsters?

[34:28] John: Really? You talked about that in the intro to the calendar, that it would have been nice to have seen her do a regular book because she clearly could.

[34:36] Chris: The only the only other time I've ever seen her name was, she did a lot of the alien races in the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, but otherwise, I just think she was one of Romita’s writers in his department and did corrections and things like that, but never really got a chance to come into her own as an artist, but yeah, the piece she did with all those old Lee/Kirby monsters, it's so much fun, back when Groot was a villain.

[35:06] John: Oh, yeah. Oh yeah.

[35:08] David: The other thing that I really enjoyed about this is that, not only do every single day almost has got something in it. There's so much information just being piled in there, and they're all fun little Mighty Marvel fun little tidbits, but then there's all these fun little extras that they have, like the front and the back of the calendars. There's, what's it called, a wheel spin?

[35:39] Chris: Yeah, the design your own character contest that they did one year.

[35:43] David: There's all these cool little extras that they build into it, and there's a drawing of Stan Lee in the Loki outfit in the 1979 piece, which is crazy, and then, just the level of art in here. You’re just scrolling through and then there's a Gil Kane piece for Conan fighting revolutionaries. It just is mind blowing how good it is. It has no business being as good as it really is.

[36:18] Chris: Well, the fun thing was, I didn't know who some of the artists were, because in the first few, they didn't really credit anybody. You can find most of the credits online, but it was nice to finally have official word. There was this Fantastic Four piece in the 1976 calendar that is the Fantastic Four is leading, I don't know, the revolutionaries or something across the water and Reed's body’s stretched out like a bridge, and I always thought it was a George Perez and Joe Sinnott piece, but it's just Joe Sinnott on his own, and then you really noticed what a good artist he was just on his own, even when he wasn't inking other people, and of course, he drew a lot of comics on his own before we ever became aware of him as an inker, but it’s just fun to see that kind of stuff and be reminded how great some of these people were.

[37:07] David: There's some Gene Colan pieces in here, too, that are just so good, and I only ever think, I shouldn't, but when I think about Gene Colan, I think about Dracula before I think anything else, and he's doing so many other characters in these calendars, it’s just like man, it’s so nice to see Gene Colan doing other guys.

[37:25] Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think the Dracula piece he did really stands out. I always like the months, like October when they would do the Halloween themes and Christmas images in December, and all that, but yeah, Gene was another one that was just great, and Tom Palmer inked a bunch of these pieces, and just on this nice paper, you really get a sense of how great all these people were.

[37:45] John: It was really nice Gil Kane/Tom Palmer Death of Gwen Stacy image.

[37:51] Chris: Yeah, with the big Green Goblin face looming in the background. That’s an image you want hanging on your wall for 30 days.

[38:02] John: Well, yeah, I guess. Okay.

[38:08] David: There's the extreme close-up of the Incredible Hulk’s face that Jack Kirby does that I don't know if I want that for 30 days. It’s a great piece, but I don't know if I want that guy staring at me for 30 days.

[38:21] Chris: I'm sure you do. In fact, you can have that next year when 1979 matches up with 2024.

[38:26] David: Fantastic. That’s Perfect. This is way more entertaining than it has any right to be, Chris. I'm so glad that you went down this rabbit hole because this is a really great piece. Really, really good book.

[38:47] Chris: It's one of those things that I just wanted to do it for years, and in my previous role, I just couldn't quite make it happen. So, I was one of those, I was just determined to find some way, so there's just a few of those that I want to do just to please childhood me, and this is certainly one of them. So, yeah, I'm glad it all finally came together. I mean, just Shawn's design in the book is great. I don't know. The splash pages and clipart, and the way he put it all together works with the old design, but it doesn't feel dated. I'm really happy with how it all came out.

[39:27] John: Do you have more projects you can talk about at Abrams yet?

[39:30] Chris: I mean, there's a bunch that we're talking about there. The next one, I think, will mean something to the two of you guys, in particular, but I shouldn't say why just yet, but yeah. I mean, I got to work on the book with Charlie Kaufman amidst every other book he's involved in, which was great because I've liked Charlie and admired his work for a lot of years, so we've got a number of other books we want to do. Yeah, I can't wait to dig into more of this kind of stuff.

[40:03] David: And what about your other imprint, Zigzy?

[40:09] Chris: Let's see. So, this will hit in January, because it is January when we're recording this, obviously. It's the day the book comes out. I think, in February, I've got three books coming. I alternate between one and three titles a month. Just trying to be choosy about the kind of things we publish, which is always hard to define. I don't know how to really say what stuff we're looking for, other than just stuff that I like and think is cool, and doesn't necessarily feel completely interchangeable with any number of other publishers, which is, again, a nebulous thing, but yeah, just I don't know. Trying to find ways to not only work with people that I liked working with in the past, but also find ways to bring new people into the world.

[40:54] David: Your choice of Zoey Thorogood on that Rain book was just, what a great choice, and her stuff is so good. John turned me on to it.

[41:06] Chris: It's such an amazing book. At first, you hear somebody in their early 20s is writing an autobiography, like, “have you lived all that much yet?” And then you read the book and go, “That's brilliant.” Just her use of all the tools that comics offers. I don't know. I thought it was fantastic. I'm so happy that we could get her to do Rain at a point when she's already not really needing to work with other people.

[41:32] David: Yeah, but what a great choice. I mean, she just came out of left field for me. I didn't see that coming in at all, and boy, now she's 100% on my radar. I'm going to be picking up everything she does.

[41:43] Chris: Yeah, I mean. Comics are in a weird place, and there's so many of them that it's hard to do things that always break through, so you just try to find stuff that stands out as unique in one way or the other. I don't know. I still have fun making comics and working with people, and hopefully we can keep that going.

[42:00] David: Do you have a specific dream project, besides Rom, that you would like to scratch an itch?

[42:10] Chris: I don't know. I mean, I think it would be fun to write Fantastic Four because it’s the first comic I've ever read, but there's some things that I’d like to do through this imprint, that are extensions of novels or things along those lines. I'm working on a thing now that I'm not sure where it'll finally land, if it'll be a comic series or a graphic novel, but it's with a guy that I grew up just loving his work. A guy outside of comics, and it's amazing to me that we're now building this thing together, and It's a guy that John likes a lot, too. So again, I'll just allude to stuff that I can't talk too much about yet, but yeah, I mean, the dream stuff is always just working with people that I liked.

[42:57] David: You’re just anglin’ so we bring you back on. I can tell. I can see how you're working. John and I are wildly popular now, Chris, so we have to be really careful.

[43:11] Chris: Like Zoe, you will quickly eclipse the need for dealing with me and go on.

[43:20] David: Okay, well, anything else, John?

[43:22] John: Yeah, it kind of flew by, but yeah, that's what happens when you read a calendar on a podcast, I guess. I hope none of my stuff turned into the Chris Farley show. Just like, “oh, and then that one image is so good.”

[43:43] David: “You remember that image?”

[43:45] Chris: The good thing is they can because the book is on sale as of today.

[43:49] David: That's right. That's right. They can go out and get it right now. Trust us. It's well worth the money. I saw the price at the end, so I'm definitely I'm definitely in. You’ve sold at least one from this podcast.

[44:02] Chris: I was going to send you one for just having me on but yeah, even better. Thanks.

[44:06] David: Dammit. I’ve got to keep my mouth shut. Anything else, Chris, you want to add or anything else need to hype up?

[44:16] Chris: Well, the only other thing is I'm still working on Megalopolis, which is a graphic novel with Francis Coppola which is another one of those books that’s just too weird and cool to actually be real but somehow is. I mean, I don't know. The more I can surround myself with people like that, that I can just learn storytelling, and all of the different kinds of things.

[44:34] David: Yeah, just surround yourself with people like Francis Ford Coppola.

[44:38] Chris: Yeah, it's like just go be an editor-in-chief to Francis Coppola. I mean, the ability to talk to and learn from guys like that is just a continuing part of the education, which I just love.

[44:52] David: Sounds like another one we're going to have to have you on to talk about when it’s ready to go.

[44:56] Chris: I mean, I recommend getting Francis on instead of me, but sure, I'll do it, too.

[45:00] David: I really just want a bottle of wine from Francis, so I’ll to talk to you.

[45:04] John: Alright. Well, thank you for joining us, and I hope to see you again soon.

[45:08] David: Thanks, Chris. Thanks for coming.

[45:09] Chris: Thanks, guys.

[45:10] John: Should I hit record?

[45:11] David: Oh, yeah, hit record.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, tell your friends about us, leave a review and comments. Check out www.cornerbox.club for updates, and come back and join us next week for another episode of The Corner Box with John and David.