The Corner Box S1Ep22 - The Chris Eliopoulos Interview: Complex Continuity and the Tik Tok Era

[00:00-00:30] 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.

[00:30] John Barber: Hi. Welcome to The Corner Box. I'm John Barber, one of your hosts, and we are back with part two of our interview with comic book letterer, writer, and artist, and children's book artists, and animation producer, Chris Eliopoulos. In comic strips, who are your big influences? I'm going to make a wild guess. I mean, obviously, I know it but you're wearing a Snoopy T-shirt and drinking from a Snoopy mug. Going to take a shot there, but I can see the Bill Watterson stuff, especially, in Franklin Richards, and I think it was evident in the Desperate Times era and significantly less so as you went on. Were those the big ones for you or were there other ones?

[01:11] Chris: Yeah, when I was a little kid, my uncle owned a remainder book company. So, if publishers had leftover books, he would buy them for really cheap and then sell them to libraries or schools, or whatever it was, and on Saturdays, my parents would take us to his warehouse and they had these giant metal bins with one-off books or damaged books or whatever, and I would climb into this metal cage and read books the whole day, and they had all these Peanuts pocketbooks. Do you like the idea that I’m the kid in the cage?

[01:44] John: It's like Thunderdome with Peanuts books.

[01:46] Chris: Yes, exactly. So, I would read them all, and he'd be like, “take them. We're just throwing them away. You can keep them.” So, I again, like my comics, I still have those books in my studio. So, Peanuts was a huge inspiration, and then as I got older, I read some other strips, but the ones that really landed were Bloom County, Calvin and Hobbes, they were really the big focus for me. Peanuts was austere and very clean, but emotional, just like my emotion book, and I felt like I understood these kids and what they were feeling, and then you look at comics through the 70s, and they got very simplistic and very not great, and then you have this guy, Bill Watterson, come in, who's drawing phenomenally interesting things, and in my head, I went, “these can be really, really good. You don't have to make them simple and bad. They can be really good.”

So, that was a big influence, and then the humor of Bloom County, at the time, that was the first comic that made me laugh out loud. I've been lucky that I got to meet Berkeley Breathed at a convention, and he was a very nice guy, very thoughtful, and then this past year, I got to go, and I did an event at the Schultz Museum up in Santa Rosa. His wife, Jeannie, was there, and she brought me to his studio. I got to sit at Schultz’s desk, and she fed us and stuff. It was an amazing day.

[03:12] David: Wow, that sounds amazing.

[03:14] Chris: Yeah. It was the thrill of a lifetime. You're sitting at the desk of the man who shaped who you’ve become. It was insane, and then they brought me down to the vault and brought out original artwork for me to just sit there and look at, and it was the day, so now, I just have to get Watterson on, I'll hit all bases.

[03:35] David: What did you think of his new book?

[03:37] Chris: I thought it was interesting. You go in there thinking it's going to be Calvin and Hobbes. It's not. It's totally something different. I liked some of the artwork. I thought it was really good. The story was like, “what are you trying to say?” But look, he's earned the right to try something totally out there.

[04:00] Chris: I was excited that it came out. I didn't know what to expect, either, but I was excited that it was what it was, because he's just not trying to do or be something that he doesn't want to do or be. Obviously, this is like, “Hey, this is a passion project. This is exactly what I want to do, and I'm not trying to be commercial or try to appease my existing fan base. I'm going to do what I want to do,” and artistically, I was really like, “oh, wow. I really appreciate that. I really like that.”

[04:29] Chris: Yeah, he's done a little bit of cartooning here and there for things. He did this wonderful poster for Strips, which is a documentary on comic strips. He actually is in it. He was interviewed and his voices on it, but that's the thing, too. You knew that book was going to sell gangbusters because it has his name on it, so he could do anything. So, the publisher was willing to do it because they knew they would sell and then he had the ability to just do what made him happy, which is a great place to do. I hope to be there, someday, where I can just be like, “I'm putting out what I want to put out and you're going to publish it, and that's that.” I don't know if it'll ever happen but it's a nice thought to have. So, now, do you want to get into the nitty gritty about how comics, the business, sucks?

[05:15] John: Yeah, name names. God knows David does.

[05:23] Chris: Oh, does he? Does he just go right down the rabbit hole?

[05:26] John: Every once in a while, where I’ve had to be like, “I have to deal with these people.”

[05:31] Chris: I'm going to get a call. It's not even the people, so much as it is, what are our goals? I have been thinking in my head about the mainstream comic book market. I know this is going to be a three-hour episode, and it reminds me of model railroading. Now, hear me out. Back in the day, you could, as a parent, as a child, you could go into a toy store, and they would always have model railroads there for sale, and it was a thing. Kids always wanted model railroads. I remember as a kid, it was the thing, and then they disappeared from toy stores and went into specialty shops. I saw those. When my kids were little, in the late 90s, early 2000s, you had sporadic ones, and maybe there was a convention of these guys. Now, you don't see them anywhere. You can order some stuff online.

Fans are either really, really old, or you've got the parents who’ve got little kids that are into trains, and you're never getting in between that, and I think that's what we've been doing with comics. We're in that early-2000s of model railroading, where we've limited the market down to the diehards, that were afraid to reach out into new formats and new locations, and we're losing readers. They're dying, literally. They're getting older. There's only so much they can do, and I feel like we need to start expanding. That's what I was trying to do with Franklin and Pen Avengers, to reach out to new markets, and we're seeing that in a lot of the Raina Telgemeier books, the Dave Pilkey books that are comics, but for kids. I think we need to start doing that, but I don't know how we break out of the stranglehold of just comic shops, because we want to keep them alive. We want to keep them going, but we also want to run that market, but a lot of the comic companies really want to keep those stores going. If you can tell me how to do it, I'd love to hear.

[07:26] John: No, it's an interesting question, and something we've actually talked about quite a bit on here. Obviously, that's the thing that I think occupies a lot of everybody's thoughts. I found it interesting. My daughter's generation, she's 12 now, I've said this a few times in here, but they have no separation between a prose book and a graphic novel, in terms of being in any material form. My daughter says she likes graphic novels, but I think there's a part of her that's just lazy and doesn't want to read all those words, but she's doing great in English class. I mean, she's nailing it there. My son loves reading everything. I've had the opportunity to read, I think, something like 18 Babysitters Club graphic novels in the last probably 45 days now, not having read any in the last three weeks. He just got super into them. So, I was reading them all to him because my daughter and I've been into them.

When we looked at the DC middle-grade YA program from a couple of years ago, there were a couple of things in there that did super well. The Kami Garcia stuff. Those did super well. There's some that did, I don’t know if you've ever seen some of the numbers on there, but they did not. There are some that it's extraordinary that you could put out a comic with that character, let alone with a writer of the caliber that they had on their input, and it sells that few copies of something, and I think there's a big part where there's no path from reading Babysitters Club, or Raina Telgemeier, or whatever, to being like, “well, the next thing I want to read has Cat Woman in it.” You might get to that in a different way, but that's a totally different thing. It's a weird dichotomy to have, because those characters have never been more popular and prevalent in mass culture than, well, I mean, to be fair, than they were 18 months ago. Graphic novels have never been more part of mainstream culture in a way that they're not looked down upon. There's maybe a barrier with some teachers still, but not like it would have been when we were kids. This doesn't make sense to ask that question.

I didn't go to comic bookstores regularly for a while, and I've started going every week, the last, I don't know, six months or so, something like that, and I've been loving it, and I've been picking up a lot of weird, interesting stuff. There's a lot of cool stuff out there. There's cool stuff from the big publishers, too, but there's cool stuff that isn't the mainstream. One of the things that appealed to me about comics when I was a kid was that sense of like, “I'm getting away with something with this.” I was growing up in the Comics Not Just for Kids era, and when you're a kid, that's like, “oh, well, then, I want that. That's perfect,” but a lot of the graphic novels aren't that. You're not getting away with it. A lot of mainstream graphic novels you're buying at Target, and I don't mean to cast a shadow, dispersions over all of them. I frickin love Babysitters Club, but they're very mainstream. They're very much for the kids that are doing well.

[10:08] Chris: Yeah, no. Well, I mean, that's the thing. It's a different market. You're serving a different demographic. You're serving a different marketplace, and it's weird, because it's never counted as part of the comics industry when they do the sales charts and stuff. It's always like, “that is a separate entity, because it's not being sold in comic shops.”

[10:27] David: Dog Man is a massive success, as I'm sure you know, so we are selling comic books, and we are selling comic books to the kids. It's that translation from that mass market to the direct market that I think there's no connection there, and I think there's a lot of different ways to approach that. I've been looking at manga a lot, just recently, and how manga translates to anime, which then translates into this mass product, and then the manga leads the pack, in terms of IP awareness, but then the anime blows the lid off, which then leads back to sales for the manga, and I think kids just need something where they feel, and this is everybody, where they feel like the value proposition is there for them, because no one is more broke than a 12 year old. So, if they can get 200 pages of a thing for 10 bucks, why would they ever go to a comic bookshop to pay $5 for 20 pages?

The math doesn't math, and I think we need to figure out a little bit more of that on this side of the pond, where we've got enough, and we've got it. These movies and stuff, Teen Titans Go feels like the thing, that opportunity, or that whatever that is. There's something there. When Teen Titans Go was a really popular cartoon, why weren't we making Teen Titan Go pocketbooks? The $7 version, and maybe it just didn't translate. Maybe we were and it just doesn't translate, but I mean, the awareness of something like Teen Titans Go, I think that's the right path. We just have to have the product available in a way that funnels it to the direct market consumer or turns them into direct market consumers. Maybe that's more ads in the backs of magazines, saying “go to your local comic shop. 1-800-comic book,” things like that. I don't know.

[12:38] Chris: I will say, coming out of the comics industry and then going into mainstream publishing, there is a huge difference, in terms of marketing and sales and their ability to factor in costs, including, when we do our books, part of the deal is an agreement on how much they're going to spend on marketing, and I think we don't see that in comics very well. That's what I was saying. I'm all for keeping the monthly comics, going to comic shops, and we've got that market, whatever that market is, whatever they say, there's 100,000 people that are doing this. Although, if you go to a comic convention, there's a lot more, but there's got to be different formats and different venues to sell.

My kids, they grew up on Marvel. I mean, literally they were the right age to that when they were little kids. We were going to see all the Marvel movies a week before they came out. They had every opportunity to get into the comics. I got every comic because I was on every comp list. I've given them all the comics. Never read them. They got into anime, manga. When they were in high school, which is interesting, they fell in love with The Walking Dead TV show, and I'm like, “Yeah, well, I know the guy that created it,” and they were like “what?” Head explodes, and I talked to Robert at a convention, and he literally dumped a ton of books, a ton of action figures, on my kids. They eventually did read The Walking Dead for a time, but then stopped. Now, all of a sudden, they're older, and they watch Invincible, and they're like, “We’ve got to get the comic,” and I'm like, “yeah,” but they don't, and I don't know why, because they watch a lot of anime, and I don't know if it's last year, two years ago, one son gave the other son, I can't even tell you how many volume, thing of manga, of this one series they love, and the kid read through it in a week, and it was literally two-foot-long thing. So, I don't know what we can do in the mainstream. I'm talking DC, Marvel, Image, all those guys, how you get different formats put together and get them out in the marketplaces where we can reach these people.

[14:57] David: It could also be, Chris, I'm just spit balling a little bit, just as you were talking, little things are lighting up in my brain. It could also just be that people don't want to read superhero comic books, and the direct market in particular, at least the mainstream’s understanding of direct market is that that's what it is. Watching this superhero movie is different from reading a superhero comic book, and if you told me, “Hey, go to this place over here, and there's horror comics and sci fi comics, and all-ages comics for kids,” and that was what I was going into, I might be much more interested, if I was a non-comic guy, than to go try out, but right now, when you say comic book in North America, it's Spider Man and Batman, and if I'm not interested in superheroes, why would I explore that? And maybe that's what's going on with your kids. They're finding manga that speaks to them because it's not that. It's sci-fi or horror.

[16:01] Chris: A lot of is, I forget the name of it. It's the sword battling, Naruto-style stuff, but those are superheroes, too. They're in costume. They're battling, that kind of thing, but that it's very soap opera-esque. I think there's that level of kids can't get into the mainstream. When I say mainstream, Marvel, DC, the continuity is out of control. You don't know what's going on. They're not made for a kid. I mean, how many times, as an adult, I couldn't give my kids a comic to read because it was just too graphic for them. When I was coming out with stuff, and I would say, I have this Franklin Richards, parents would say, is that all nudity and violence? That's all that comics are. There's a perception there that that's what it is. How do you break that stigma? I tried with Franklin. I had the Fantastic Four in there, and there were hints to it. Pet Avengers are superheroes, but they're just animals. There's ways we can do it.

[16:55] John: You actually just go back to that, and you can see the impact Pet Avengers had. I mean, I can think of 30 other comics about the pets of superheroes that have come out since Pet Avengers, and one theatrical film. That did have a big impact on it.

[17:11] Chris: Not benefiting me at all.

[17:13] John: Well, classic comics. That's how comics work. I know you don’t like people explaining your job to you, but maybe. 

[17:23] Chris: Alright, thanks, John. I need somebody younger than me to tell me. Funny because Marvel and DC are doing a lot of this outreach to other publishers, like Penguin Random House and others, and they're having them publish superhero comics, and I don't think they're doing it right. I definitely think that Raven stuff was great for the tween market, that Kami did. I thought that worked out well. A lot of it is also, the kids don't know who these characters are, and you have to introduce them, totally sight unseen, and not presented as spandex. Call them superheroes if you want but put them in something different. I've thought about this for years. Ever since I started doing Franklin, I saw my kids that couldn't even read mainstream comics, even though I got them all for free. Where do you go? What do you do? And recently, I know this is not going to air for a little while, but there was like, “just make them good.” Well, a lot of them are really good. That's not the problem. The problem is marketing, format, distribution. Those kinds of issues play a lot into it.

[18:32] John: There is something, I think, built into anime that directs people to the manga in a way. I reversed the pronunciation on both, drive people to the manga in a real way, where I think there's a real effect with the number of, well not Marvel, superhero TV shows, superhero movies. You remember when WB was all the Berlanti DC shows? I enjoyed them. When I finished an episode of Arrow, the next thing I wanted to do wasn't go out and read an Arrow comic. It was watching an episode of The Flash, and I'm at a point now where I don't know if there's enough hours in my lifetime to get caught up on the Marvel stuff I haven't watched yet, and the same thing with the video game. I love the Sony Spider Man video games, and when I'm done with them, it does not lead me to want to go see what's going on in Amazing Spider Man. It wants me to go play Arkham again, or something. I think there's a real problem, the real thing that other mediums got as good at superheroes as comics did, possibly better, and started doing it in a way that was hitting a lot of the points that I think comics had. I mean, there was a time where I hadn't read Captain America in a while, but I felt like I knew where the character was because I've watched all the movies. When I was a kid, if you wanted to know about Captain America, it was buy a comic book or nothing. There was nothing else.

[20:02] Chris: Yeah, but even now, my kids grew up with the Marvel movies, starting with WandaVision. They haven't seen a Marvel thing since, because they’re making the same mistake that the comics made, which is, everything is leading into the next story. It's all continuity. If you miss something, the moment in the next series doesn't make sense or doesn't have an impact because you didn't watch the previous one. I think people want self-contained stories right now. Although, like you said, manga and anime, it just goes on and on and on for decades.

[20:33] John: But it's one story. It is that one story.

[20:36] Chris: and there's no crossovers to 18 other characters in books, and you don't have to buy 15 different books to get to this story, you get that story, especially when the manga, they put them into trade. I know they come out in magazines, where there's multiple things, but you can get those trades that are self-contained, which are great.

[20:52] David: That's a really good point. I do think that does serve to make things easy. If I want One Piece, then there's 30 volumes, but I start at one and I proceed. If I want to read Spider Man, there's seven different types of Spider Man. I don't even know where to start. Miles Morales versus Peter Parker?

[21:15] Chris: Spider Boy and whatever else is coming.

[21:19] John: If you pick up a number one, you have to have read the four issues preceding that number one, somehow.

[21:25] David: Or know they exist.

[21:29] John: I feel like I’m the old man complaining about this stuff in the 80s.

[21:33] David: That's what we do on this podcast.

[21:38] John: With the amount of data that exists in the world today, I'd be really interested in somebody doing an analysis at what point the continuity goes from being the thing that drives you to the next thing, the way it surely did in the 1960s in Marvel comics. I just read the issue where the Fantastic Four first meet Dr. Strange, and it's like, “oh, we need some help. I know somebody. A guy named Dr. Strange,” and Thing’s like, “I don't know if he's real. We'll find out,” and that surely would have led you to go check out Dr. Strange. The same way, everything in the Marvel Universe is pushing you forward toward endgame lifted up Ant Man 2, lifted up Captain Marvel, lifted up all these ones that were really tangentially related to it, but it still felt like it was connected to it, but not in a way that it was having negative effects, and I think you're right, right around WandaVision time, post-Endgame, I mean, a bunch of stuff happened that contributed to it. Some of them out of Marvel's hands, some of them very much that complexity going on. Now, it seems like I need to have watched three TV shows in order to see this next movie, as opposed to, I can't wait to see what happens with these characters next. I’ve got to see that other movie. I don't know. What level of complexity, how many nodes have to be coming together.

[22:52] Chris: You remember, the beginning was smart. The beginning of it was Stan just hinting at something else. “Oh, we remember Thor. He's in that other book.” You knew they were in the same world, but it wasn't contingent, like you had to read the last issue of Thor to know what was going on this one. Even into the 80s, I remember, there was a series of Thor, where Manhattan goes under snow in the middle of the summer, and they just hinted at it in other books where snow starts to come down, what the heck's going on? Check out Thor number blah, blah, blah. That was it. You didn’t have to see it. You didn't need to know. It wasn't so impactful. Like, “oh, my god, the snow is here. It's the biggest tragedy known to man,” and you're just like, “why? It's not that.” Whereas now, in all comics, it's almost like they reference everything so far back, because we're all nerds, and we all have to know all the continuity, and so you say, “oh, remember in issue five of Fantastic Four, this happened, and it has a direct impact on this thing 40 years, 50/60 years later.” For a new reader, they're like, “I'm out. I can't.”

[23:58] John: The internet provides a feedback loop, too, of people online giving you the immediate reactions to it are the ones that do know the 40 years of continuity that fast. It's hard for anybody to look at that and separate out that it’s actually a really small percentage of the people that are actually reading are the ones that are not on social media, but the ones are actively posting about comics on social media. That mathematically isn't a big percentage of readers.

[24:22] Chris: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, too, is to most adults, comics are juvenile. On the other side. I was just thinking Saga would be a great book for a mainstream audience. It's not superheroes. It's sci-fi. It's all that stuff that you would want it to be, and it does great in the marketplace. I just wonder, would that do well in mainstream? If they had behind them, Penguin Random House’s marketing machine, would that be a big thing? I guess I'm grasping at straws here trying to figure out what the problem is and what we can do. I mean, I think it's multipronged. That's the problem.

[25:07] David: I do think another piece of it is, you need to put the biggest name creators on the biggest properties, and then do big runs, and we haven't had that in a long time, either, because, as a creator, if I get wildly popular, if I'm really big, the last thing to do is non-creator owned work. I'm going to immediately take all that heat and all that energy, and I'm going to go off and create my own thing that I own.

[25:32] Chris: Which, like you're saying, comes down to paying creators something worth. The old days, as I sound like an old man, like John, initially, you would come up through the smaller comics companies, and you would work at getting better, to the point where you were professional. It was like the minor leagues, and once that happened, you got into the majors, you got into Marvel, DC, and your career was set. You were making good money, you were doing well. It seems now, it's the opposite. You start your career at Marvel, DC, build up a fan base, you go off into your own self-published or creator-owned books somewhere else, and that's where you make your real money, and then you could sell it and option that out and make sure that you’re working.

[26:11] David: and God bless them. For the individual creator, that might be a good path, but for the industry as a whole, might not necessarily be the best path, because if X Men is the bestselling book, or Spider Man is the bestselling book, and we had the best creative talent on it, then we're going to sell exponentially more of that than that best creator selling his thing that he owns, that he created, and it's just because it's heat on heat. Spider Man is the hottest thing, and then you take the hottest creator and you put it on top of it, it's like throwing gasoline on a fire. Those things individually are doing fine, but together, they could do something even more, and then once you've got more, you've got more money. Once you've got more money, you can do more marketing. Once you can do more marketing, you can get more money. So on and so forth, but we have an absence of that, and have had an absence of that on top of the other things we're talking about, for quite some time, I think, and the industry needs to pay its creative talent, and we need to change the business model, in my opinion. The royalty structure needs to change, ownership structures need to change at the big two, and I know it'll never happen, but if and when it does, a lot of these problems are going to go away. We are going to see a healthier marketplace, but right now we're playing with old systems and outdated modes of business, and it's not going to get better until those things get fixed.

[27:30] Chris: Boy, you just said a mouthful. That's it? I mean, that's the way to end it, though. I mean, that's exactly what we need to do, but I'll go off in the meanwhile, make my kids’ books, do my TV show.

[27:39] David: I mean, exactly. I mean, like I said, I think for the individual creator who's been able to build themselves a repertoire and a fan base, you can make a really great living, and who needs comic books, at the end of the day?

[27:54] Chris: We love them. That's why. That's the problem.

[27:58] David: Love doesn't put food on the table.

[28:00] Chris: It doesn't. I mean, but I still do comics, if you think about it. A lot of these books that we do, they are panel-to-panel storytelling. We did the Batman, the Wonder Woman, and the Superman. We tried to make them panel-driven so you could read it like it was a comic book, get people into it, but again, like you said, I wonder, people like “Oh, that's cute,” but they're not taking their kids to go and pick up the next issue of Wonder Woman. That's not on their radar. My goal, my thought would be, you have to reach for the kids because we have to get them in. I don't think we're going to get adults reading comics again, if they've not done that for years or never did it.

[28:38] David: I think, if something's good, people will gravitate towards it. They just have to be aware of its existence. Saga is an example. Saga’s so good. If we had a healthier industry as a whole, if Spider Man was selling a million copies a month and that money was in the industry, then Saga probably would be bigger. The rising tide lifts all ships. I think Saga could be a bigger thing. Something like Walking Dead proves that, in a way, I think.

[29:06] Chris: I wonder how many people do go back to read the comics after watching the show, though.

[29:11] David: I'm pretty sure Walking Dead did a pretty good business when that show came out, I'm pretty sure. Kirkland didn’t become one of the Image partners because of Walking Dead.

[29:20] Chris: I mean, again, if you talk about it, too, it's not superhero based. It's horror. It’s black and white, which was different than everybody's perceptions of what comics are. I blame John. When it all comes down to it, it’s John's fault.

[29:37] David: I do that every day.

[29:40] John: I do think it'll be interesting to see what happens when the generations that grew up on the post-Raina Telgemeier middle grade graphic novels become adults, whether publishing will be serving them adult comics or whether that will create a problem. Right now, the market for adult graphic novels is, I mean, Saga and Ed Brubaker, Shawn Phillips.

[30:10] David: Maus, which is 50 years old now.

[30:13] John: Well, yeah. I mean, besides the era, there are the one-offs and the ones that blow up.

[30:18] David: To your point, the YA graphic novel section is getting more and more well-served. There's a lot of options there. You just read 18 YA young reader graphic novels to your son. Where does an adult go for that?

[30:33] John: I mean, the first generation of that is graduating from college now. People who were reading Babysitters Club in 2004 are getting up there. Maybe they graduated from junior college. As I do the math. 20 years, not 22.

[30:52] Chris: I'm getting 14-year-old kids coming up to me saying “I grew up on your Ordinary People books,” and it blows your mind when you think about it. I remember, I was watching, or reading something, an article about a librarian, because of all the stuff that's going on in libraries, and this one kid she was talking to wanted to read this graphic novel, and asked if it was embarrassing. “Would people laugh at me?” It was a teenager asking if they would be embarrassed, and people would laugh at them for reading the book, and the librarian was trying to say, “No, you're reading. You just go do your thing. Don't worry about people.” I worry that we still have that after a certain age. The stigma of “reading comics is not real reading,” and because I would love to see a Saga or Walking Dead or whatever, or Invincible are great for adults. I mean, having the right marketing team behind it or having it out in a place that people are aware of it, and it's marketed in a way that people go, “Oh, this is the coolest thing ever to have,” and it's so sad, because you've got Disney behind Marvel, where they could really step up and say, “this is the new hottest thing” and mold people's perceptions, but they don't do it. I don't know. I'm at a loss guys.

[32:02] John: We didn't solve comics.

[32:07] Chris: No, come on. I wanted you to solve it for me.

[32:09] David: Well, we gave you lots of answers. Listen back. Hooray, comics.

[32:14] Chris: We love them. So, I mean, that's the thing. You just want to see them go on.

[32:18] John: On the positive side, we do live in a world where there are million selling graphic novels in the form of Dog Man or whatever, that isn't a world that happened before. I think, there's a big bifurcation, and there's a lot of people reading Tapas and reading the stuff on their phones that, like you said, that if you look at, I don't know, whatever comic, well, are there any comics websites left? Whatever comics websites are cracking this stuff, they don't count that as mainstream comics, but it's comics. This stuff evolves. The places move.

[32:50] Chris: I mean, I would also say that there's an issue with attention spans. The TikTok era. We're losing. Even my kids, they can't watch movies from the 80s and 90s, because it's just like, “Alright, I'm bored. Let's go,” keep going and looking at their phones. Taking the time to read and go slow is something the next generation is having an issue with, because everything is social media, is your phones.

[33:15] David: Somebody was telling me, whether it's active participation and passive participation with your entertainment. That's one thing. I heard this phrase the other day, and I was like, “oh, man, that's perfect.” Social media is the junk food of entertainment. It's just this quick thing that you eat, and it's salty, fatty goodness for a minute there, but it's empty calories. It's not really anything. There's no bite there to it. There's no substance to it. So, I think there's a lot of that happening right now. There's a lot of junk food entertainment on social media, and it's hard to find the stuff that has real substance, the real entertainment value, the stuff that's good for you. The healthy stuff.

[33:54] Chris: I mean, I wonder if comic strips would make a resurgence somehow in that vein, if we’re talking comics, just because it's a quick, short thing. It's interesting. I've been doing these TikToks, where I just draw, I think of a character, and my TikTok has grown like crazy, and I'm like, “is this a thing that people are looking for? Do I have to reach out into a new market?

[34:19] David: Turn it into performance comic strips, where you work out the idea ahead of time, then you just draw the finished strip live, cut that to a minute, and then that's the new version of a comic strip.

[34:32] Chris: I don't know. My kids, they're 24 now, and I mentioned a movie, and we own it. I've gotten it. I bought the movie, and he's like, “Yeah, I saw it on TikTok.” I'm like, “how do you see it on TikTok?” He's like, “I get through the, whatever, one-minute bits of that, and I follow through the movie.” I'm like, “but you're not seeing the whole movie.” He goes, “I get the gist of it.” The head explodes and you just want to be like, “it's also about the enjoyment of getting through a story.” If they want, it's just no, no, give me that, give me the beats, and let's move on. So, maybe we need to get rid of the decompressed storytelling and get right to the old telling a Spider Man origin story in, what was it, eight pages or something like that, or 16 pages and done, and out.

[35:15] David: Days of Future Past was done in, what, 50-something pages? It's two issues.

[35:21] Chris: Alright. Thanks for solving comics for me.

[35:23] John: Thanks for stopping by.

[35:25] David: Chris, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a true pleasure. It's been nice to get to know you a little bit.

[35:31] Chris: Thanks for letting me force myself on you. I appreciate it.

[35:33] John: At some point, I'd love to talk to you more about some of the business stuff, of you forming Virtual Calligraphy. A lot of people I really liked working with are at Virtual Calligraphy.

[35:42] Chris: I mean, we can definitely do the whole business side of it and talk that at some point. I'm always around. I’m not working anyway.

[35:51] David: We talked about a couple of your projects. Is there anything, in particular, you're plugging right now that we need to be aware of?

[35:58] Chris: Well, I'm on book tour from January 10 through the 25th. So, we released a thing. So, look for me around the country. My book is ‘I Am Ruth Bader Ginsburg,’ and then in the Spring, I have my own book called ‘The Imaginoodles,’ which is coming out. It's about a chipmunk, a hedgehog, and a lizard, as one does. I've been getting some good feedback, and I forget the name of this thing, bought a bunch of copies ahead of time to distribute, so I'm feeling like this one might be a good one, and then all my old backlog, go to my website, Chriseliopoulos.com, and you can probably find, or go on Amazon. I'm everywhere on Amazon.

[36:41] David: Yeah, I was going to say, ‘I Am Ruth Bader Ginsburg’ is already available for pre-order on Amazon. Imaginoodles is probably not up there yet. It is? For pre-order as well? Okay, great, and then it's Chriseliopoulos.com.

[36:54] Chris: Correct.

[36:55] David: I'm going to let you spell your last name.

[36:57] Chris: Eliopoulos or go look in the comic book and you'll find it somewhere. God knows there's enough of them.

[37:07] John: Thanks very much. Great to talk to you.

[37:09] Chris: And it's good seeing you, man.

[37:10] David: Thanks, everybody.

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.