[00:00-00:31] 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: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one of your hosts, John Barber, and with me as always, is the other one,

[00:38] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:39] John: The other host, not the other one. That actually sounded way worse than I meant it to. I'm sorry.

[00:48] David Hedgecock: I don't mind being the one. I can be Neo.

[00:51] John: Yes, yes. We're here to talk about all four matrix movies.

[00:58] David: Only the fourth one, and Animatrix. We'll talk about that one, too.

[01:06] John: Well, yeah, that's actually the second best one.

[01:08] David: The Animatrix? I guess it is. Actually, I haven’t thought about that. I think you're right.

[01:13] John: Yeah. Not even any offense to the other ones, necessarily. I just think that that's what slots in no matter what. Anyway, thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. An unusual topic, and talk about some of the stuff that David and I have been working on, but I know, David, you had something you wanted to talk about first?

[01:32] David: Oh, well, a couple of things. Before we jump into this pool of self-indulgence that we're planning on jumping into. First of all, John, I don't know if I've mentioned my obsession with Spider Boy enough, but for people who are just joining us, I think I'm becoming obsessed with Spider Boy, so I decided at some point in the last month or two that I wanted to actually collect Spider Boy, which is different from reading Spider Boy. Spider Boy, if you read it, you just grab an issue and you read it, you're like, “Oh, that was fun,” then you wait for the next one. Collecting is a very different thing, and I haven't collected a comic book or a comic book series, or tried to collect a comic book series in I don't even know how long it's been. It's been a really long time, and John, I'm here to tell you that collecting comic books in 2023 is very, very, very different from collecting comic books from the 90s or early 2000s. It is practically impossible to collect all of the covers. I don't think it is humanly possible for someone to have all the covers that came out around issue one, and it's because they're doing exclusives. Anybody can basically get a Spider Boy number one cover now. I'm doing homework and I'm researching this stuff, and every week or two, there's another cover that I didn't know about that exists, and of course, they're all limited to 1000 copies or whatever, and it's just impossible. I'm not going to spend 100 bucks to get the Zhang Yong Z. I can't remember the guy’s name, but I don't know what to do, because I really wanted to collect a comic book again, but I don't think it's even possible anymore, and I don't know what that means for comic book collecting in general, but I’m a pretty diehard avid comic book reader, and I wanted to enjoy a different aspect of the medium, and I don't know that I can. I think I'd been pushed out in just one track.

[03:40] John: That's interesting, because I mean, obviously, it's news to us because we worked at a company where, I think one point, IDW had the record for something like 100 variants of Godzilla comic, but I seem to recall giving you a bag of Snake Eyes: Deadgame cover. I don't know if it's actually okay for me to say this, but The Last Ronin covers bought the computer that I'm recording this on.

[04:09] David: You can say that. You don't work there anymore.

[04:12] John: Actual question for you. That's never really been a gene that I've had that one where I want to collect every version of something, and I was thinking about this last night, I was reading an old issue of GI Combat that I bought because that had a cool Neal Adams cover, and it was $2.50 at the comic book store I was at, it was an 80-page or one of those ones that I really liked from that era of when I was a baby and didn't see any of this stuff DC, and there's a crossword puzzle in it, which is funny just in itself. There's a crossword puzzle that Bob Rozakis, he's credited as the author of the crossword puzzle. Weirdly, the two S's in the name of it. I forget what the title of the crossword puzzle was, but the two S's are written like “SS.” A war comic. They've just come up with a story where they're killing a bunch of Nazis. So, it's presumably anti-Nazi in general, but it's still weird to see that SS logo in the middle of a logo for a crossword puzzle in 2023. I don't know what it felt like in 1977.

Okay, sorry, what I was getting to, whoever had owned that GI Combat partially filled in the crossword puzzle, and I was just like, “I love this. I love that somewhere, there was a kid who had this comic, liked it enough to do a couple of the easy ones, and then give up.” I like having that copy of GI Combat, whatever, more than I would have liked having a mint one, especially more than I would have liked having a slab one or something, one that I couldn't read it. To me, I just really liked that bit of it. So, I was thinking about the collector stuff, but on the covers, I think you and I, we've talked about this in the past, when we were working on comics that had a lot of covers was, the market for how the covers work is completely different from the way it was in the 1990s, where you'd have four covers, and you could walk into the store and get all four of them, and if a store was going to do a variant cover, they would have only been able to sell them to the people walking into the store. Now, those 1000 copies are sold to people all over the world who want to collect that cover, but it is interesting, like what you just said. So sorry, that's a long preamble to get to that part.

[06:18] David: I don't know. Obviously, I'm aware or I was aware of the comic book collecting cover aspect of things, because, as you say, we've made quite a few variant covers in our time, but the actual experience of it is new to me. I've not never wanted to, or had to, try to do something like this, and I like that this market exists, because I think it's a way for comic book retailers to recoup costs in a way that they can't necessarily. If you make a mistake, and you order 100 copies of Spider Boy number one, you're not really on the hook for 100 copies, because you can sell the one in 100 variant to that one big fan online or in your store, and you've recouped the cost of your entire purchase with that one variant. I like that. It reduces the risks for the retailers, it allows the retailers, if they know they've got a super collector that's in there, that's already committed to purchasing that book, it allows them to step out and try something that maybe they wouldn't normally, so I like it for that.

There's another set of risks involved that are pretty obvious to me, but on the surface, I think that's what it's trying to do, and I like that, but now that we've gotten into this, Marvel at least, with a program of allowing essentially anyone, an artist or retailer, I think literally anyone, if you just say, “hey, I'll buy 3000 copies, and here's the cover,” I think you can do it. I'm sure there's approvals involved with whatever cover you're having done, and then what happens, what I'm seeing in the space is, it's not just that single cover. There's the cover with the trade dress on it, there's the version variant of it, and then there's a black and white variant of it as well, the line art variant. So, that one retailer is on the hook for three more covers. Let's say you have 10 retailers that have done that. Suddenly, you've got 30 covers, and I don't think that's really an exaggeration, in this particular case. I think I'm already out, because it's so prolific, and there's so many that now I don't want to do it at all. So, now I've gone from, “hey, I'm going to buy all of them,” I set out with a mindset of “I want to collect this, I'm going to have some fun. I really like Spider Boy. I want to support Spider Boy. I want to support it, and I'm just going to get them all. Got to catch them all.” Six weeks later, I'm out. I'm like, “Oh, I can't do that. I'm not going to do that. It's virtually impossible, incredibly expensive, so instead, I'm just going to buy one. I'm just going to get the one copy.” Whereas, if you just had 10 covers, 20 covers in a program of what those covers were, and I knew what to do and how to get them, even if they were at a premium, it would feel like “okay, maybe I'll go for that.” I don't see a program. It's just whoever. There's no really big program involved, so I'm out. Maybe other people are like “no, that's the beauty of the chase, the hunt, the Easter eggs, finding them.” Maybe that's part of the fun of it, but maybe I need to think about it a little bit more, but I don’t think that’s for me.

[09:43] John: That really goes back, in a collector's way, to the same question that we were talking about, Chris Eliopoulos, when we talked to him, at what point does the Marvel movie stuff cross the point of the collectability of it is what drives it, versus the difficulty in collectability of it as it drives people away? There probably is some invisible threshold that gets crossed.

[10:03] David: I do think there should be a bar to it. I'm not saying that I want it to just be handed to me on a platter, necessarily, but the bar is just too high.

[10:18] John: It’s the weird part about collectability too, compared to what it was in the 90s. Variant covers aside, if I wanted all 12 issues of some comic, I go to my comic bookstore, and maybe they'd have them, maybe they wouldn't. I lived in an area that had a lot of comic bookstores, especially in that era, so there are weekends where I would just go, “Okay, I'm going to go to three college bookstores and try to buy the series that I wanted to catch up on, or that I heard was good, and I wanted to get the back issues of,” and I'd go to those, and again, I was super lucky being in a place that had a high proliferation of comic bookstores, and then you go to conventions, and then that was about it. There were a couple of mail order catalogs, would maybe have the stuff, or the ads in the comics from American comics or whatever, or Mile High, that would have that stuff for sale, but that was it. I mean, now it's, “do you want to pay that much?” That's the full question. I mean, I guess there's some searching sometimes. If they're not all listed in the back of the comic, you have to track down what exists, but once you find it, it isn't the search of “is it going to be here? Am I going to find it today? Am I going to find this thing I was looking for?” My friend Pat Vaughn Frisco is trying to buy all the Larry Hama GI Joe comics. I mean, you had a good amount of them, but there's a few of them. Late in the Marvel run, it gets really expensive, because the print runs were pretty low, but he's not going online to buy them. He likes going to conventions, going to WonderCon, and looking around, and hopefully you'll see the 6 issues he still needs.

[11:51] David: That's part of the fun of going to the convention for him.

[11:54] John: Yeah, but that's creating this artificial impediment to buying it that didn't used to exist. That's super interesting. Are there collectors that are buying all these? Is that who they're going for? Or are they just collectors that just like the ones without logos?

[12:10] David: I don't know. I don't know. I guess it’s just, is it a cool piece of art? The end. I mean, I guess there's something to saying, “hey, this is Spider Boy number one, and there's only 1000 copies of it,” but I don't know how that all shakes out. I don't know that it's for me. I think I'm going to be done. Maybe, I'll narrow my focus to maybe just the Marvel released covers, but even that, I don't know. I can't really get them all, and then, why get more than one? Just get the one because now I'm just reading it, which I'm totally going to do, and that's two different things for me. Reading the comic book is completely enjoyable, and I like that, and then there's the collecting of the comic book, and there's aspects of that that I love and enjoy, too. It's not like I don't collect other comic books. I'm working on a Dazzler run, but that is very different from, like I said, this new version of things. So, anyway. I don't know. I’m into Spider Boy. I don't know that I'm going to collect it, though. Here's the other thing I wanted to just mention to you, John. Do you remember the New Universe? Yeah, I know you do. Do you remember The War?

[13:26] John: Oh, yeah. Okay, that was after The Pitt.

[13:31] David: And The Draft. Yeah. It's The Pitt, then The Draft, and then The War, and The War shut down, basically, was the end of the New Universe.

[13:41] John: Yeah, The Pitt wasn't the end of the New Universe. It was the reboot, when John Byrne came on to Star Brand. He came on after that. Okay, sorry. The War.

[13:50] David: So, The War, it was the “okay, we're not doing anymore.” This is the one that shut it down, and I just found a complete run, all four issues of The War on eBay the other day for, I don't know, six bucks.

[14:07] John: Was it $1,000? $10,000? How much was it?

[14:10] David: Anyway, I'm super excited. It's coming. I'm going to read it. I can't wait. I think we're going to do a full podcast on The War. Maybe, we can do a full podcast on all three – The Pitt, The Draft, and The War.

[14:23] John: There's a whole section of weird books, like the Shadowline one that we were talking about the other week, or it was another one of these bookshelf format series that ended a run. You remember Strikeforce: Morituri? Yeah, that ends with Electric Undertow. That happened a lot, I guess.

[14:43] David: Was Wilce Portacio on Strikeforce: Morituri? Was he in that run? Or was it Larry Stroman? There's one or two artists on Strikeforce: Morituri that I remember like, “oh, I want to read that for that artist.” I think it was While Portacio, but there might have been some Larry Stroman there, too. I can't remember.

[15:01] John: Yeah, I know Stroman did Alien Legion. That was the stuff I remember him from. He might have done both.

[15:11] David: But one thing about The War, it's got one of my all-time favorite superheroes in it. Metallurgist.

[15:19] John: Metallurgist? I don't actually know that one.

[15:20] David: Oh, you don’t remember that one? Okay, Metallurgist, he's got a 1949 Chevy hubcap that he controls with his mind, and that's his superpower. He can fly, you can get on it, and you can fly around on it, but that's the superpower. That's awesome. 

[15:42] John: Outside your window.

[15:45] David: Isn’t that fantastic? I love that. Well, it's not a good name. Should have been The Hubcap or something. There's something better than The Hubcap, too, but you know what I mean. Anyway, The Hubcap. That's all I’ve got, John. We can get into the real stuff now. So, John and I are working on our own personal projects for the first time in quite some time, for me, and I think the same for John. So, we make comic books for other people and other companies, but we haven't done it for ourselves in some time, but we both are doing that. I think we stumbled on the idea around the same time, too. I think we both started our projects around the same time, but we haven't seen each other's projects, and so we're going to share our first opinions live and on the air with what we've read. So, I got John's book a couple of days ago, and I'm going to describe to him what I think the story is about, and then he's going to tell us what it's really about, and then John's going to do the same thing.

[16:50] John: What do we win? Are there prizes?

[16:54] David: The prize is our audience doesn't turn this off now. They actually listen all the way to the end. Okay, so, John, your book is called Cigna. Did I get that right? You've got quite the collaborators on this thing. Andrew Griffith, longtime Transformer artist is drawing it, and right out of the gate, John, Andrew’s giving it his all. I don't know if you noticed this, but wow, he's really giving a full effort on this one. He's drawing backgrounds. I haven't seen Andrew draw a background in probably 10 years. No, I’m kidding, that’s because I know Andrew is going to be listening to this. The world building is just beautiful and pronounced. Andrew seems to be, with this book, really engaged and thinking everything all the way through. It's like Avatar. I want it to be 3D because the depth of the art is so fully realized. I don't know who the colorist is, because you didn't say, and I'm going to be brutally honest with you, I think the colors are really solid, and I think you're going for a specific aesthetic with the colors, but they're a little more muted or lacking a certain amount of detail than I think Andrew is bringing to the table. It's not quite up to, and maybe I'm not seeing fully finished colors. I might be seeing a stage here, but I wish that there was a little more noodling, a little more detail in some of the colors, because Andrew’s art, there's a couple of double page splashes, where I'd love to see things pop a little bit more, with a little further separation of foreground, mid-ground, background, but that's not to say they're not great. I think that Andrew set quite a challenge for whoever is going to color this book, because he's got so much detail into it. You have to really step up your game and really match that challenge, and I think it's close, but I wish the art colorist was doing just a little bit more with all the massive amount of detail that's put into this thing, but overall, gorgeous, gorgeous art. Looks great. It's probably some of the best stuff I've seen Andrew do.

The mech of course is just spot on. The human characters, all the designs, their costuming, and the attention to the little details, like the gear that they're wearing, and the masks that they have, all these little details, just really, really fantastic. The story, I’m going to tell you the story, hopefully, I got it right, the story is about a girl, I guess her name's Necklace. I don't know. They call her Necklace. I didn't actually catch her full name anywhere in here. Maybe it's in a flashback. Ketna? Okay. Oh, yeah.

[19:56] John: Page one, panel two.

[19:57] David: I didn't take notes, John. Doing this on the fly. Ketna is our main protagonist, she's an interesting character. I don't know how much to give away, but this is a science fiction story. It's got a very grand scope and scale. Got some space Jesus stuff in here, which I thought was really fun. There's a war that's either ongoing or was in the recent past, and it's not quite clear what that war is about. Even the players in the piece don't know, I think, too much about it, which is a really cool mystery for me. So, there's a war going on, of some sort, or there was a war, robots have gained sentience, and they basically destroyed half of the earth and then flew away, but as they're flying away, they dropped a little bomb into the sun and turned it into a red sun, aging it potentially, or aging it so that it's now much larger and older, and much closer to its death, essentially. So, that's the world we're living in, and this has all happened within a span of maybe 100 years or so, or this all happened roughly 100 years previously, and now it's 100 years later, and humans have been dealing with the repercussions of this. Earth is devastated and potentially not even populated because the sun is so devastatingly dangerous now. The giant red sun is much closer to the earth. So, it’s potentially not even habitable.

Humans apparently are living on an asteroid in asteroid belts, probably further in the outer rims, and mining and treasure hunting for ancient artifacts seems to be something that's important or how people make a living, and that's what Ketna and the crew that she's with are doing. They're out searching through old habitats, abandoned habitats, and looking for ancient treasures, basically. So, that’s, I think, the setup for things, and Ketna is seemingly important right now because of something that she has, but I suspect there's more to it than just that, and that's what I got from your story. This is a juicy first issue. It is 32 full pages of art and story. So, people really get their bang for their buck. There's a couple of double-page splashes and a single-page splash in the book that are really nice, and I think really play to Andrew’s strengths really well. So, whoever wrote this thing, I think, set Andrew up for success pretty well.

[22:40] John: Andrew deserves some credit for that, too. We both came up with this stuff together. Andrew came to me with an idea a long time ago. It eventually morphed into this. So, I don't want to sound like he was the hired hand on this. Far from it. Cool. Well, thanks. Yeah, I mean, not many people have seen it.

[22:59] David: I loved it. I thought it was great. I like that there's snappy banter. It really moves the piece along. You do something that D.G. Chichester is not able to do, which is you are capable of placing captions with word balloons in a way that does not impede the enjoyment or reading of any individual page. I can follow along quite easily. It's a masterclass of “here's how you do this.” I just want to cut it out and send it on Twitter to D.G. Chichester.

[23:39] John: I feel like that might have been a little bit of that era, because I was reading some other comics and reminded of that post-Frank Miller doing first person captions in Daredevil. It seems like, especially in Dark Knight, seemed like everybody wanted to do that clipped, choppy style. That always bothered me as a kid. So, something I was able to affect as I was working on comics was, you're actually reading the stuff in an order. So, have the continued dialogue not have a locator caption in between the two lines of dialogue. Move the locator caption somewhere else in the panel or make it so it flows, and you can read it. Yeah, well, thank you. I worry about the captions; I always worry about there being too much stuff going on. There’s a lot to set up and you want to have the characters in there, all that stuff.

[24:27] David: There's a lot to set up. You set up a ton of stuff, and to be honest, on my first read, I totally enjoyed it, and then I read it again, and I picked up a lot more stuff. I don't know if that was purposeful, but I think that's the mark of a good comic, is to go through and read something and enjoy it, and then go through and read it again, like when you revisit a good movie. I've seen Office Space probably 1000 times and every single time I watch that movie, I catch something new and I'm like, “Oh, my god.”

[25:00] John: High praise. That's a good movie.

[25:02] David: So, now you tell me what you think it's about. Do you have a pitch for it yet? A high concept pitch? How do you sell this to a publisher, John?

[25:12] John: That's a separate story. The idea is, as humanity is doomed, this woman, Ketna Vora, awakens an artificial intelligence that seems to possibly hold the key to saving what's left of humanity, and that's her goal. I think there are parts of it that came out of pandemic living. I mean, probably a lot of it. During the pandemic, while everything was crashing down on you, what really would be crashing down on you, it would be if the sun was a red giant, and it was just staring at you, and red is much cooler than the Sun that we have now, but it's also much closer to the surface of the Earth. So, it's a lot hotter, and just that idea that this exists in a world where the people here can travel more efficiently throughout our solar system. Quite a bit more efficiently. We limit the amount of completely magical science fiction stuff that's in there. There's no faster than light travel, although that is actually a big piece of what the story is about, is the possibility of something like that existing, but they can no more travel to another star than we could do. It’d take decades and not be very useful if they did that anyway.

So, that's humanity facing this real world, this is the last generation or the maybe the last couple of generations, if they're lucky. This is just people trying to eke out what's left in a hopeless scenario, some of them denying the hopelessness, some embracing it, and this possibility of maybe there actually is hope in there after all. Somewhere in the process of making this, I don't know if you're a real news hound, I don't know if you follow the news very much, but AI stuff, people started talking about it a bit over the last year or so. This isn't dealing with ChatGPT. This isn't dealing with stuff like “is it stealing artists’ art and purporting to be creating something new?” or whatever. This thing, even 10 years ago, would have seemed crazy, but it is now a reality that this generation is going to have to face, what happens when you create an intelligence that is largely indistinguishable from a human intelligence, or superior in some ways, and what all that means, which is well-trod science fiction areas. I don't want to delve too much into that because you can all think of a million movies and then even more books and stuff that deal with it.

Hopefully, as we go on, you will reveal that we’re going at it from maybe a different point of view, but I guess Andrew and I do spend a lot of time working on Transformers together. I think there's a natural bit of it where we're coming back and asking “well, what does the AI think about all of this?” and not setting it up where the mechanical intelligence is the bad guy any more than anybody else is the bad guy. Although, clearly some really terrible stuff happened and more of what happened is going to get revealed as the series goes on. Issue two really gets into what the human hierarchy is now, and what life's like. All this said, the first issue is basically a big fight scene where a bunch of robots start attacking a bunch of people who are trying to scavenge stuff, and I mean, there's some flashbacks, and some other stuff happens, but this is all done through the lens of giant robots shooting at other giant robots.

[28:43] David: Yeah, let's make no mistake, it is definitely action-packed. You jump right into it. It's very action-packed. That's a good way to put it. There's no sitting around. For sure. Jumps right into it. So, what is the plan for how you're going to get this out to people?

[29:04] John: Very shortly, we'll be having a Kickstarter. We will definitely inform all of our listeners about that when that comes up. We're recording these far enough in advance that maybe that episode already aired. No, I'm just kidding. I think we'll make the effort to get these in the right order, and then it'll be released in comic bookstores in regular release, and the first release from the company that I work at, Pan-Universal Galactic Worldwide or PUG-W. We're running Kickstarter with them. Almost all of my career in working on this stuff has had some weird, compromised position of me being the editor of something and the writer of something else or whatever. Our first comic, the one that I'm writing, our first original comic, I think by the point that it comes out in comic bookstores, we’ll have had a couple of projects we're announcing that are special editions of other things.

[30:02] David: Yeah. Got some good stuff coming.

[30:03] John: Yeah, yeah, hopefully. The Conan Colossal Edition has already come out. As we're recording this, that's already crowdfunded and everything, but yeah, we're doing the crowdfunding just to kick things off and get some attention on it, and then that issue, and a different edition of that issue, and then the subsequent five issues will come out in bookstores through Lunar and Diamond.

[30:27] David: You're trying to do real business?

[30:29] John: Yeah, hopefully. Our colorist is Eisner Award Winner, Rhonda Patterson.

[30:37] David: Of course. As soon as you said her name, now I see it.

[30:43] John: We went through some effort to get to where we're at. We're still, I think at the point where some of those are definitely stuff that they're being fine-tuned. I think some of it really shows off Andrew’s art in a way that even colorists that I've really loved on Andrew haven't necessarily. So, yeah, overall, I'm pretty excited that, and then Chris Mowry, longtime Transformers writer and letterer, is our letterer. So, weirdly, everyone on the creative team has professionally written comics at IDW. So, I'm the most replaceable. There's no one on the team that can't just take over from me.

[31:19] David: Good thing you're the editor. You're the guy that can fire and hire as the editor. So, you're safe. Don't worry. You got your back, John.

[31:36] John: Why don't we go over and talk about yours a little bit, and maybe talk about some of the process and stuff like that.

[31:40] David: You had a little harder time with lettering. Yeah, I didn't have lettering on mine. So, you had a harder reading experience.

[31:48] John: Although, yours is further along, because it's completely colored, and that first issue is completely done, and it's like a million pages. It's 40 pages, I think, with all the backups and stuff.

[31:56] David: It's going to be a square bound. 48 pages total, square bound. Yeah.

[32:02] John: Genuinely embarrassed about this. I have forgotten the actual title of it, and none of the documents have the full title. They just have letters.

[32:11] David: It's okay. It's Super Kaiju Rock ‘n Roller Derby Fun Time Go. That's the name of the book.

[32:18] John: Okay. I knew it was really long, but I couldn't remember. So, this is a story about a present-day roller derby team, an all-girls roller derby team, who are going about doing roller derby stuff. It reminded me a little bit of Glow, or I think there was actually a movie about roller derbies but that's behind the scenes, although the roller derby is a different sport than wrestling, but it's a similar thing where, I don't know, there's theatricality to it. Meanwhile, in a Tomb Raider-ish scenario, a giant kaiju monster gets released, and then the two converge, and our team of roller derby-ists are, I imagine issue two doesn't begin with them dying and then just following the kaiju. I think they're going to become kaiju fighting warriors. Is that accurate?

[33:15] David: It's pretty close.

[33:18] John: Yeah, and the art is gorgeous. The art is super cool.

[33:23] David: Rolo Mallada.

[33:24] John: Somebody that I know you've known for a really long time.

[33:27] David: Yeah, I've worked with him forever.

[33:28] John: Oh, they're also in a band. I forgot. You took some inspiration from our Dave Baker episode, where we are talking about Buckaroo Banzai, where he's a brain surgeon and racecar driver, and rock star. This is obviously well underway, but the artist is doing the whole thing. He's coloring it and everything.

[33:51] David: Yeah, he's his own best colorist, so for the story, we decided to keep them doing that.

[33:57] John: Super cool looking, very detailed coloring, also very bold, very bright, and color choices that are super cool. Got some backup stories that I'm less familiar with what exactly is going on. Really cool variant covers. There's a Paul Pelletier one, who's been on the show before, Fico Ossio, our mutual friend, Netho Diaz. Did he do one? Okay. At least one that I'm forgetting. Can't find it at the moment.

[34:28] David: I don't know if I should actually mention all of them. Some of them are going to be surprises, but we've got some really big names. Nicoletta Baldari’s doing a wraparound cover for it. Paulina Ganucheau is doing a wraparound cover for it. Ed Benes is doing a hot girl cover for it, and some other big names, too. The big find for me, the artist that I wasn't aware of before this project, but that I'm super excited about, is the Xoeng Brothers, and they did a cover that just blew my socks up. I loved it. I loved it so much that I asked them to do some backup stuff for it as well. They're really great. I don't know how new they are, but they're new to me. So, they were one of the big new discoveries for me, in terms of art talent. Definitely want to work with them later.

[35:15] John: Yeah, I didn't know that either. I said, “Oh, yeah,” but that's because you showed it to me before. I learned about them after you did.

[35:20] David: But yeah, I think you pretty much got Super Kaiju Rock and Roller Derby Fun Time Go as the story of these four girls, a group of down on their luck, 20-somethings, and they’ve got too much talent, not enough money, and they get to know each other through their roller derby team, the Diva Demons, which is the sometimes best roller derby team in San Diego, but then they really become friends, and they bond when they form a band called The Burnouts. So, the girls tour the West, electrifying crowds with their physical prowess in the rink, and then I've just set it up that oftentimes, they're also doing a concert after the roller derby game. So, they electrified people in the rink, and then with their musical talent on stage, but they haven't really gotten their big break, they’re still, like I say, down on their luck, 20-somethings, and then the kaiju show up, and that’s where we start. It's a mash up of stuff I love, filmmaking that I love, which is the 70s, have these really cool, for me, it was a really cool time, probably just because the age I am, but I was too young to really enjoy this 70s culture, but looking back, there's a really fascinating pop culture beast. You had the Blaxploitation films of the 70s, and then you had Saturday afternoon Kung Fu, the Shaw Brothers Kung Fu cinema, and then you had all these kaiju movies that are finally making their way over to the States in really weird ways. So, all of that mashed together in my head, and this is what is coming out as a result.

[37:07] John: It's got a feeling of all those things, but it doesn't come off as being very retro, either, to me, at least visually, but writing wise too.

[37:16] David: I'm glad to hear that. I don't want it to feel like it's dated or of a specific era. It's supposed to be of this time, in terms of the look and feel of the story itself. I'm excited for it. Yeah, like you said, all the art for the first issue is now done. I've got a great letterer, an Eisner Award winning letterer, who's going to be handling the lettering and the design, and I'm going to Kickstart it. I don't have any plans for doing anything other than Kickstarter. I don't want it to turn into a lot of extra work on the business side, because I’ve got enough of that in my life. This is meant to be a fun project and a way for me to work with people who I really enjoy and respect, and love to work with. In fact, Rolando, the artist, I've known him probably for 10/15 years, and when I was at IDW, I would check in with him every couple of months, and I'd say, “hey Rolando, I want you to come do some work with me here over at IDW,” and he'd like, “no, I can't, man. I'm too busy. I'm too busy. I have too much to do. I can't do it.” So, probably for 10 years, Rolando has been saying that to me, “no, I can't. I don't have enough time. I'm too busy,” and last year, he sent me an email, he said, “Hey, I'm a little light on work. I'm looking for some work. Do you know of anybody that needs anything?” And I literally for 10 years, I hadn't heard those words come out of his mouth, so I immediately was like, “Yes, I'll have something for you on Wednesday,” and I had no idea what I was going to give him on Wednesday, but I knew it was going to be something because I wanted to jump at the chance to work with him, so this is what came out of that eventually, and now it's three scripts in. I've got plans for and I've plotted through the first four issues. Three scripts are done, and I've got plans for more if it ever happens, but we'll see. We'll see if people respond to it. It's not for me to decide.

[39:11] John: It seems like the real reason to do this is because you want to do it, more than anything else. What does it matter if anybody likes it, David?

[39:19] David: Yeah, well, I'm not going to do it if the collective says “sigh, ho hum, no thanks. Go back to the drawing board, try something else.” Well, I guess, it is self-indulgent that I want people to like it. Anyway. At least in some way, shape, or form, it needs to not pay for itself, but I guess, pay for itself.

[39:44] John: This is all your idea and then it was with Rolando.

[39:50] David: Very different from what you did. So, for me, I came up with all the characters, I came up with all the initial design concepts, wrote everything out, and then Rolo dug in and really added his spin to everything. This one's pretty much all me with just feedback and input from various people that I trust. Ron Marz edited the script for me and was really helpful in developing the first four-issue storyline. So, he's my editor on this, and Ron's been doing this stuff for 30 years. He knows a thing or two. He was really helpful, but this is all me, but yours is different. Did you say that Andrew came to you with the initial rough concept? How did that collaboration work?

[40:41] John: It started out years ago, and I'd actually forgotten this, but when I was an editor at IDW, he came up with this idea for some Transformers characters in a story that he wanted to do with some of them. It was vague, I don't know how much he had it nailed down, but what he sent to me was maybe a couple of paragraphs or something. Andrew and I would talk all the time, and Andrew and I worked on a comic called Robots in Disguise that then became Transformers, and then he was just working on other Transformers stuff all the time. So, we fairly consistently were working together, and were talking really frequently, usually in the writer/artist side of things. Sometimes he drew stuff I was editing. So, again, it’s murky and weird. Anyway, he pitched this idea, and it wasn't going to fit in with where the story was going. I don't remember the exact specifics of it, but we might have actually been heading towards the end of the run with Unicron, and all that stuff already at that point, but I remember saying to him, “Hey, that's a pretty cool idea. Would you be interested in turning that idea into something that's our own thing to work on?” So, we worked on that for a while, and this is how far back this goes.

A lot of the pieces that we thought were really clever wound up becoming, not in a direct way or anything, a lot of the stuff that wound up in the TV show, the Mandalorian, was similar to where our thinking was at that point. This is absurd to say now because even in those subsequent years, there are hundreds of hours of Star Wars dedicated to that time period, but that idea of there being “well, what happened when you have this big, vast empire and everything collapsed? What happens after that?” That seemed like an interesting story to us. So, a little bit of the inspiration of it, I think we took it to IDW. I don't know if it was actually going to go anywhere at IDW. We got some notes back and we both wound up working on other stuff, it just went in the backburner. We wound up doing other stuff. By then I was back as editor-in-chief, I think. It was right around the time that I came back. Years later, I guess, post-my exit there, I brought it back up with Andrew. I'll do this sometimes, which is I think weird from the writer point of view. Although, I don't know that that's actually how I approach comics a lot of times, but I just had this visual of this giant red sun just hanging over everything, and that being a powerful visual metaphor, the way the Space Needle was in Mike Grell’s Green Arrow.

You can always see it, no matter where you are in Seattle, but this one, you really wouldn't. This looming thing filling the sky, and they started taking some of the characters and stuff that we'd worked on, and really crafting a different story with them in a really different setting, and then Andrew and I bouncing stuff back and forth, and adding to it, and a bunch of times, where Andrew would send me an email, or you would text me at 11 at night, my time, which is two in the morning, his time, and I'm trying to go to sleep and he sends me this thing, and it's like, “well, what about this? Oh, my God, you're pulling up all his tracks? That’s horrible,” and then I'd be like, “well, actually, that's a good point, and that would let us do this.” So, there's a lot of that stuff. I think that adds to the packed amount of stuff that's in there, which is a thing that we'd always done. We've gone in and devised the history of the world and, like you said, in terms of the world building, Andrew, everything has to get designed. There's no “Here's the door handle. How do door handles work? Okay, you’ve got to see that for the first time.” So, it's a lot to throw on Andrew. All the history of the stuff has also got to be designed. Our Transformers run, a lot of times, we’re building on stuff that had happened before and playing up on old pieces and pulling things out, and recontextualizing, but here we don't have that, so everything's got to be built from the ground up.

[44:31] David: It's got a very, not in a bad way, but it does have the feeling of density. You really are just, with this first issue, scratching the surface, but there's so many cool ideas getting thrown at you. I was a little like, “oh man, mine's just a monster story, and it's not even…”

[44:56] John: It really is this action story, and then hopefully you’ve got these things that make you ask questions about it. There's probably some stuff that we know the answer to, that's just never going to come up. Not everything needs to get fully explained. We really make it immersive, and that is, I think, part of the big Star Wars influence that did remain with us is, this is a weird one if you didn't grow up with those movies as they were originally coming out, but you didn't know a bunch of stuff back when those first came out. I mean, now we live in a world where most of Star Wars is the Clone Wars TV show. I mean, not only is there “do you know what the Clone Wars are?” That's what most of it actually is. When we were kids, it was just throwaway line, “oh, I knew him back in the Clone Wars.” What was that? You can speculate on it. So, yeah, we liked that.

[45:50] David: When we were kids, Princess Leia and Luke Skywalker were an item for a long time, for many, many years.

[45:56] John: Yeah, you’re right. I mean, hopefully we have a little bit more of a plan of where things are going then, at that point where we're not going to wind up with a situation where that’s a weird kiss. 

[46:09] David: Yeah.

[46:10] John: We know, this stuff's going on there, but also, another thing we all lived through was the post-Lost era of TV, where every TV show had plans for a really great season three, and then they all got canceled by season one. We're putting it all out there. We're trying to make an engaging story here. There's just more stuff that you have built into it. I mean, obviously, there's a big mythology.

[46:37] David: There's a whole lot going on, but I didn't want the first issue to be that, as much as I want it to just be fun, just a romp.

[46:46] John: Yeah, and get to know the characters.

[46:49] David: Get to know the characters a little bit. Yeah, for sure. I need people to care about these girls first, before I start putting them through their paces.

[47:02] John: I think that's what you’ve got to do in a first issue, is get people to want to know what happens to the characters next. You don't have some of the storytelling things you can fall back on, that you can with a continuing series that existed outside of it, where you could put some twist on something and people would be like, “Oh, wow.” I mean, we've run into this, where there are parts of it, “is this actually a twist? Is anybody going to care that you find something out on page 10 that you didn't know on page five?” Hopefully, it works in a story sense, but you're not going to have those moments where it's just like, “oh, yeah, that's like what happened in Days of Future Past or something.”

[47:41] David: Right. Yeah. You don't have that. You're building that. What I try to do, without it being intrusive, is to have little things happening in issue one that pay off. If we get to issue four, if we get that lucky, it'll pay off there.

[48:01] John: Yeah, that totally makes sense.

[48:03] David: World building is an interesting muscle to flex, and to practice, but I'm having a blast with it. Mostly just because the art is just so good. So good. This guy, Rolo, he's from Uruguay, and I think he actually does a lot of work in and around Uruguay and South America, I think. So, you don't really see a lot of his stuff up here in North America, but boy, I mean, he's just a fully realized talent, and he's a triple threat. Pencils, inks, colors. The guy can, and fantastic storyteller. He’s really got a good storytelling sensibility, and sense of design, the whole thing, and Andrew, I think is the same way. Looking at that issue, I was like, “Man, this is probably the best I've ever seen Andrew,” and I've always liked Andrew’s stuff.

[49:03] John: I think so, too. I mean, I think this is. Hopefully, naturally I mean, he's gotten better. I don't think there was anything where he was hacking stuff out or anything like that. That's not how I mean it, but I think you're right, that this is just the best I've ever seen, and he and I have worked together so much for so long, there's got to rapport of how we can work on this stuff, where I mean, we're actually doing it Marvel style, where he's drawing it off of a plot, and then we're coming back and I'm adding the dialogue after that. I mean, every once in a while, we'll be like, “here's the line that needs to be there,” whatever, but we're pretty flexible with that stuff. We actually wound-up shifting pages around, which isn't a thing I think we'd ever done before, where it was like, “oh, this actually doesn't read right in the sequence. We need to break this up a little bit.” I don't know how apparent that is, and I don't know if I should say that out loud. 

[49:50] David: I wouldn’t have known that. I certainly couldn't tell that. It flows great.

[49:54] John: Well, that's all down to the dialogue, which is excellent.

[50:00] David: If it's possible, we'll throw links in the show notes. Is there anything else you want to say about Cigna?

[50:07] John: For me, I got into comics because it was a place where you could tell your own stories, and I felt like there wasn't a lot of that, at the time. I mean, in the sense, you couldn't easily make a movie at home or TV show at home, and the way that you can now, “easy”. I got luckily sidetracked into a lot of stuff. I mean, I'm really happy about the time I spent editing at different companies, and then the stuff I've gotten to write over the years. I mean, especially Transformers. I got to write almost a decade's worth of Transformers comics. That's nuts, and I felt like I got away with a lot, and I don't look at that and be like, “well, that's not me.” You know what I mean? That totally is. I mean, that's me and the collaborators, me and Andrew, me and Kay, and me and Livio, and everybody else who worked with it. I mean, don't leave anybody out, me and Alex, but there is something to “okay, this is absolutely ours.” There's no things we have to build in that we can't do this. Nobody is going to come in and tell us this, we can or can't do that. We have a great editor in Mason Rabinowitz, who works with me at PUB-W. He's terrific. He’ll tell us when something isn't working. He gives us notes. I mean, he saved issue two, he's the hero of that one. There's no rule. There's no “you can't do that.” So, it's really exciting to finally get to do this thing that I've always wanted to do, and haven't since I was doing webcomics, which was a while ago now, but how about you? Anything more you want to say about Super Kaiju Rock and Roller Derby Fun Time Go? Sorry. I wanted to say it.

[51:40] David: It's just a fun project, really. It was a chance to work with an artist who I love. I've had this idea floating around the back of my head for a long time. Every time I give the concept, tell the concept somebody, they're like, “that's fantastic,” so I finally just decided to sit down do it, but yeah, same way, I got into comic books, because I wanted to make comic books. So, I've managed to scratch that itch in all kinds of different ways, but this is definitely the way that I thought I would be doing it, or one of the ways. Being creative and actually creating new things is the way I thought I was going to be doing this. So, getting back to that after so many years has been really, really fun, really challenging, and hard. It's not easy, but very enjoyable at same time. So, I’m stoked. I can’t wait for people to see it. I’ve put my everything into this, because I really do want people to see it. I want a lot of people to see it. So, I’m hoping that it works, and I put my all into it. Well, by the time this is out, there's probably going to be some links. We'll throw those in the show notes so people can check it. John Barber is probably pretty good at social media. I'll probably have some stuff out there. I'm horrible at it. So, there probably won't be anything from me anywhere, but I’ll try.

[52:54] John: All right. Well, thank you all for joining us again, and listening to all this. We'll see you back next week. Believe we've got an exciting guest next week. Ties into what we're talking about, but not necessarily in the way you're thinking it's going. So, hope to see you there, and thank you again for joining us on The Corner Box. Thanks, David, for being here.

[53:13] David: Yeah, thank you, John. That was fun. Thanks for reading my comic book.

[53:16] John: Thank you for reading mine. It's great to see all the mistakes you found.

[53:20] David: I'll send that to you.

[53:24] John: Thank you, everyone. See you all next week. Bye.

[53:27] David: Thanks, everybody.

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