The Corner Box S1Ep28 - Comic Journalism, the Eisners, and Star Trek Fanfic

[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.

[00:30] John Barber: Hi, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm your host, John Barber, and with me,

[00:35] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:36] John: and also joining us is the namesake for the Eisner Awards, the man it’s named after, Mr. Dave Baker.

[00:46] Dave Baker: It’s me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

[00:49] John: Good to have you back. We had a good time talking about comics a couple of weeks ago, and this is spurred on by a text chain that you started, we were talking on about comics journalism, itself was spurred on by what's, I guess a couple of months ago at this point when you're listening to this, the Eisner Awards dropping print comics journalism as a category.

[01:10] David: Yeah, and then weirdly, just folding it into the book journalism piece as an afterthought.

[01:17] John: So, go. What was your most immediate reaction to it, Dave?

[01:23] Dave: My immediate reaction was just, this is par for the course. I want to love the Eisner Awards, and I think the main problem is that they're systemically under-supported from an institutional perspective. It's literally Jackie Estrada, and then two or three people who just take it on the chin in order to work as judges for free. They're not compensated for this. So, they're just doing it out of the love of comics, and I think that every year, there's some version of this story, of either certain groups not being recognized and respected for the valuable contributions that they make to the medium, or categories being moved around in ways that people don't agree with, or people who just shouldn't be nominated due to unsavory extracurricular activities, being nominated. I don't blame the institution itself. I almost am just a little saddened by the fact that there almost isn't an institution. This is our version of the Oscars, and I want to be excited about it every year and frankly, I go every year, and I love the Eisners. I'm the one guy in comics who sits in the back and tears up every time they show that photo of Roz and Jack Kirby dancing, and Jackie Estrada comes out and goes, “this is a dedication to the king and queen of comics, Jack Kirby and Roz,” and I'm like, “fuck yeah. This is great,” and it's just so awesome to see people getting their flowers and getting the respect that they deserve, and for the community to come together and everybody to just cheer each other on. It's really, really great, which is why when there's stuff like this, where there's valuable components of the industry that are just either systemically repressed or overlooked or disrespected, it sucks. We all complain that there's no comics journalism anymore. We all say comics journalism is dead, and then stuff like this only increases that conversation. It only politically increases the amount of passivity and lack of interest towards supporting journalism.

[03:25] David: I think the Eisners are a perfect turning point between that I think comics is constantly struggling with, and it's two things. There's the part of comic books that I love, which is the community around comic books. Comic books are this random collection of odd-balls and weirdos who all get together and don't really judge each other too much, and just celebrate this thing, this art form that we all like, and so there's this cool sense of community, and I think, that's where San Diego Comic Con itself and the Eisner specifically comes from. That's the origins. That's the roots of the Eisners, as far as I know. I'm not a journalist. I haven't done a deep dive on this stuff, but I think that's where it comes from. Jackie Estrada herself is the long-time running manager of this thing. So, it comes from the roots of this community, but then as comics have grown and matured, and become such a major piece of pop culture and, not more of a business, but there are professional and business aspects of it, where we have the potential to have more eyes on us as a business. That's the other side of the Eisners. You want to have those awards that count, that are meaningful, that say something, that when you go to the New York Times, on the front page says, “the Eisner Award winner for best comic book in 2024 is whoever.” That's what we're aspiring to, I think in a way, or that's what the comics profession is aspiring to in a way. We see the Avengers movie raking in billions of dollars, like, “wait a minute. We made that. Why aren't we getting that level of recognition, professionally?” And the Eisners is one of the ways I think that we could do that. So, they seem to be stuck between straddling both of those things, stuck trying to be this representative piece to a profession, while also being a representative piece to a community, and I think therein lies the problem, probably, and God bless you for enjoying going to the Eisners, Mr. Dave Baker.

[05:28] Dave: Before you jump in, John, I just have to say two things. One, I love the Eisners so much that in my wallet, every day, I carry this, which is a nominee seal that one of our friends jokingly put on our table when they got nominated for an Eisner, and I was like, “one day, we're going to have a book with this actual seal on it,” and I carry it around. This is my version of Jim Carrey writing a check to himself for a million dollars, and technically, I've already done it. We've gotten nominated for an Eisner.

[06:02] David: Look at you. You made that come into being just by carrying that thing around in your wallet. Good job, man. That's how you get things done.

[06:08] Dave: That would be cool, but also, just to clear up the point that you had about where the Eisners come from, in terms of an institutional perspective. The lineage there is that Fantagraphics was trying to generate awareness for non-superhero books and thought that they should have an institution somewhat similar to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the propaganda wing that the Oscars has served for the idea of going to the movies. So, in the late 80s, they started the Kirby Awards, where they approached Jack Kirby, and they were like, “Hey, can we have an awards show named after you, and we'll give out awards?” and Kirby was like, “okay. Cool.” Stogie cigar, whatever. The main guy behind this was a dude named Dave Olbrich. Dave Olbrich then worked with Fantagraphics, and at that point, he was an in-house employee at Fantagraphics, I believe, and he basically set up the Kirby Awards, they ran it for three, four, or five years, however many years, and because at that point in time, there wasn't a lot of non-superhero work being produced, Fantagraphics got a lot of nominations, A, because they were the people putting it on, and B, because that's the type of work they were trying to promote and drive attention towards. This caused a big fracas in the industry, where people were like, “this isn't a real comics award. This is just you guys trying to promote your own books,” which I think both of those things can be true. After this all explodes, Olbrich leaves Fantagraphics, they shut down the Kirby's, and he's like, “I want to basically do that same thing, because comics needs that, but it can't be associated with a singular publisher, because then everybody else gets pissed off and says it's rigged or nepotistic or whatever.” So, then he goes back to Kirby and says, “Hey, can I set the Kirby Awards up at San Diego Comic Con, and it will be distanced from all the publishers and all of the angers currently surrounding it?” At the time, Jack Kirby was like, “there's a lot of drama. I don't want my name being dragged through all of this.” So, Olbrich then went to a bunch of other people, ultimately deciding on Will Eisner, which is why the name is the Eisners and not the Kirby's, and why it's located at San Diego Comic Con.

[08:17] David: There you go. Thank you for that. I am smarter now.

[08:22] John: I know that history also. I didn't know it was as late in the history of everything as it was. I vaguely remember the Kirby Awards and the Harvey Awards, which are also sprung out of that same miasma of stuff.

[08:37] Dave: Totally. For me, I wish that the awards was called the Kirby Awards. I love the things that Will Eisner did. Obviously, hugely influential in the medium, but also, I think he has a few skeletons in his closet that Jack Kirby doesn't have, and I think Jack Kirby also, no matter how you skin the cat, contributed more to the medium. It's not fair to compare anyone against Jack Kirby.

[09:00] John: Yeah, I think that's true, and I think I try not to put any faith in people is where I was going with that, but Kirby is the one person that I've never heard anything that wasn't like, “that's pretty awesome. That's pretty cool about him.”

[09:13] David: I don't know if you heard it, Dave, but we had Scott Dunbier on the other day, and he was talking about, at 16 years old, he randomly calls up Jack Kirby on the phone, and Jack talks to him for 20 minutes and invites him over to lunch, and so 16 year old Scott Dunbier and his mom, get his mom into driving him over to Jack Kirby's house. His mom's sitting in the kitchen with Roz Kirby, Scott's in the living room hanging out with Jack Kirby for an hour, and then they have lunch. So, Kirby has this kid over, signs a ridiculous amount of comic books, and then feeds him lunch, and does an amazing Captain America sketch for him, and sends him on his way. Then, that's Jack Kirby. Holy moly, that guy was amazing.

[09:59] Dave: That's so cool, and then it's not just him either. There's so many people that I've run into that's had stories like that. It's shocking, but even not on an individual basis of one to one. There's a lot of people that have great stories about Eisner, too. I'm not saying he was a monster. I'm just saying, at certain points in time, maybe he sided on the wrong side of the fence on certain political issues or treating people professionally, in maybe ways that are less than admirable. Did Kirby do some of that stuff? I personally am not aware of anything that's remotely eyebrow-raising. The only thing I can think of is that he didn't give ownership to creators when he and Joe Simon had their publishing company, which is something that he obviously had lobbied for forever. Of the skeletons in your closet, I feel like that's a pretty minimal one.

[10:49] David: John, what's your take on this whole convincing, I guess, of the Eisners?

[10:53] John: One of the other things that I think the Eisners has to grapple with now is a dramatically changed comics landscape, not only in terms of who's reading comics, or who we’re selling comics to, or where we're selling them, or those things, but also where the creators of these comics are coming from. I feel like Hollywood has maintained, whether it's true or not, the story that there's a linear path that films take, and they start wherever, in silent movies, they move straight up, and then you wind up with Barbie and Oppenheimer, and it's a straight line there, and there aren't people coming in from totally different of filmmaking in a way that I think you do have that with comics now. At one point, if you were reading comics, you had to go to a comic bookstore and buy comics there, because that was where comic books were sold. Before that, you didn't have to. Before that, you could have been all these other places. That reality of “I like comics” isn't as much of a reality now as it is “I like stuff, and I'm going to make comics.” Think the grappling with what parts of the Eisners are forward looking and what parts are backwards looking or historical looking. It seems to be harder than it is with film, and maybe that's just my imagination. I mean, maybe that's not an accurate understanding of it, but there's a lot of people coming into comics that Kirby isn't an influence on them, Kirby isn't important to them, and it's not where I come from. There's nothing necessarily wrong with that.

If you yourself are Japanese, or you yourself grew up on manga, from wherever you are in the world, you're going to have a whole different set of people. You have to trace back really far to find that evolutionary dividing point between Kirby and that. You know what I mean? It exists. You can find that trace where everything lines up, but it's way far back. I don't know if the Eisners are grappling with that in the same way, when you have middle grade graphic novelists and kids book creators coming in there, which is great. The Eisner Award is actually weirdly meaningful to that stuff, in a way that it isn't necessarily meaningful to a comic bookstore. Your Wednesday Warriors, I don't know that they super care who wins the Eisner, outside of complaining that it should have been the series that they like, but the people going to Target and trying to figure out which kid's book to buy their kid, and they see one of them won an award, they don't know who Will Eisner is, probably, certainly, but “hey, it won an award. That's the one I'm going to pick,” which is a model that traditional publishing and Hollywood relies on.

[13:26] Dave: I think the thing that you're talking about, specifically about what percentage is forward and backward looking, is really interesting when viewed in context of the way that everything is structured for the awards. It's a gated nomination, where there's a closed-door panel of jurors that select all the nominations, but then the people who vote on those nominations are “industry professionals,” and as we both know, the industry professionals are not people that work at VIZ or Tokyopop or Kodansha. It's either people who work at the big two, or, frankly, amateur writers and artists who want to be professionals, and they submit a “hey, this is my webcomic, or this is my self-published thing,” and then they get allowed access to that behind the scenes, which I don't have any problem with that. I wish it was less centrally located in the big two superhero perspectives and aesthetics, because that's where the history of the direct market has been, so that's where the history of the awards has been, and it's a self-perpetuating cycle. A couple years ago, my friend Ben Passmore got nominated for Best Short Story for his book, Your Black Friend. That book is great. It's important in a way that most things that are on the ballot aren't, but because it was under the Shorts category, the thing that it was nominated against was one of Tom King’s Batman stories, where it was about Batman’s dog, and I'm not saying that that story was bad. I love Tom King as a writer. I think he's got an interesting voice and a perspective. What I'm saying, I think, a story deconstructing and analyzing systemic white superiority and white supremacy, and how it impacts us on a daily micro-aggression level, is maybe a little bit more meaningful to a reader than “Batman's got a dog. Isn't that cool?” Guess who won. Batman’s dog.

[15:26] John: There is that part of the Eisners that is the Academy Awards, if the Academy Awards’ big complaint was “what are they going to do now that superhero movies are tanking? What's going to win Best Picture now? What could they possibly do? Nolan stopped making Batman movies. What are they going to like?”

[15:46] David: I do think that the whole thing about the journalism thing being folded into another category, to me, was really “Yeah. Why are we even doing journalism in the Eisners to begin with?” To be honest, because journalism should have its own award. There's no journalism category at the Oscars. There's no journalism category in the Grammy’s. They're celebrating the work, not celebrating the discussion of the work. There are awards for the celebration of discussing the work, and I feel like that's maybe where that needs to go, and then hearing you guys talk makes me think even more. We're currently talking about the bifurcation of comic books in media, but maybe that's where this needs to go now. Maybe we've grown to a point where the Eisners are great for this specific type of thing, and we need to have other types of awards around journalism, for example, that shines a spotlight on who's doing really great journalism and just talk about that as a completely separate thing in potentially an entirely different manner, and I think that's always a lot of the issues, and it also, for me, continues to raise the level of, I don’t even know what the word would be, but we've become even more of a class act as an industry or as an art form by doing things like that.

[17:16] John: Heidi MacDonald had a lengthy response to it, and it did raise some interesting stuff. Somewhere that I thought about it, too, she jumped back into the idea of comics being a community in a way that some of these other places aren't, and that's why you have all this stuff wrapped up together. I would argue that I'm not sure comics are a community based on what I said, just out of if you’re coming from Tapas, if you're coming from webcomics, if you're coming from a different place, then you're coming from manga, then you're coming from superhero comics, then you're coming from underground comics, or 90s indie comics, or whatever. There are a lot of different places, but there's something that she mentioned in there, and I don't mean to turn this into a critic straw man argument against McDonald. It's not how I mean that. In comics, you see a lot of people going from journalism into writing comics or into making comics, and you don't see that in other mediums, which I don't really think is necessarily true. I mean, I think Francois Truffaut went from film critic to filmmaker. Obviously, the writer of the greatest film of all time, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, was Roger Ebert, and he moved on to making making movies. I don't know if some of it's the maturity of the medium or some of its just the mechanics of how journalism works. Up until the last couple years, or possibly earlier this week, you could make a living writing about music and movies, and you couldn't doing that with comics, or a handful of people maybe could do that writing about comics, but I mean, journalism is under such a collapse or a crush. I mean, even today, all of Sports Illustrated is being laid off within the next 90 days if they don't re-sign the licensing agreement. That stuff is unthinkable.

[19:06] David: I read a shocking statistic that said 28% of Americans get the majority of their news from TikTok, and I vomited in my mouth. So, yeah, there's a larger problem at play here, for sure, and comic books are just,

[19:31] Dave: I'm curious to hear why that is. From your perspective, why is that a bad thing?

[19:36] David: Because I'm old, so I think that there should be standards and educational priorities around journalism, and I think that you should have to have a certain level of journalistic education and/or experience in order to provide information to the public on a broad platform, and we have lost that entirely as a country, in particular, probably worldwide, we're losing that. I'm not necessarily for the centralization and then dissemination of information, because that's a lot of control into a very few things, but I do think that we should have rules and standards, and that those should be adhered to strictly, and that people should put a lot more weight on the people that are adhering to those standards and have that level of education when they're getting their news, and I don't think that that's happening if you're randomly scrolling through TikTok.

[20:43] Dave: So, I agree with a lot of what you said, but I think there's two pieces of information that would provide an interesting counterpoint. One, being that a lot of institutionalized news organizations, and, frankly, basic cable news, the 24-hour news cycle programs, have now realized that those numbers are dwindling exponentially, and there's no way to make money off of it. So, they've taken to basically doing what YouTube has done as a business model, where they're now taking clips and just uploading it everywhere off of the hopes of getting any traction, and to a large degree, it works. Now, I think there’s danger in that, because it's limited context and limited bite-sized versions of lengthier stories that, 9 times out of 10, have been context laundered to fit some narrative once they fit into a broader digital ecosystem. I think there's also a really scary component that when you had in a monoculture society, half hour news block, and all of our topics of the day are going to be discussed, and literally the both sides doctrine, which I'm not an advocate for, in terms of the way that maybe that nomenclature has been used politically in recent times, but the idea that you can't have a news as opinion. It's the news, and you have to present both sides of it, both positive and negative, but that gets really dangerous when it's served algorithmically to low-information voters or low-information citizens who maybe are getting, like you're saying, most of their news through this hyperfocus, hyper-interest, localized version of a larger contextualized story, is really scary. However, the double-edged sword here is, it's scary that everything is algorithmically served and niching down and driving people to radicalization. The other part of this is basic cable and terrestrial TV, and the standard way that information has been disseminated, we've all moved away from, culturally. So, how do we get this information in front of people so they know what's happening? The quickest, easiest, unfortunately, solution is social media, which also is dying, and probably won't be here soon. So, it's this weird, damned if you do, damned if you don't, thing.

[22:55] John: I mean, I think we're totally in a real flux period, because I think some of this stuff is going to have to be self-correcting. I don't mean to be blasé about this, but when you get to the point where you can't Google things anymore, when five years ago, you could Google something and find what you're looking for, and now it's so SEO driven, so algorithmically built, and everybody knows how to manipulate the system, and most of the answer is with cash, something's going to, and I don't mean this “well, we shouldn't care.” We should care. We should be figuring it out, but I do have some level of confidence that something will get figured out that will correct that. I mean, hopefully it isn't worse, because that can happen as well, and one of the things of losing comics journalism, not as a category in the Eisners, but as an actual thing, is finding your new comics, finding your new stuff. I think TikTok did replace that for a lot of people. It was a way to find new stuff that they wanted to see. TikTok is all built on that algorithm of “what's the next thing that's going to keep you going on it?” But at least people uploading stuff onto there, or talking to other people, I can see some level of that working, in terms of the stakes being “which good comics should you read?”

[24:12] David: And I think it's great for that. We got into a slightly bigger conversation there for a minute. 

[24:21] John: I'll go through my Apple news feed, and I'll read through there, and I don't know if it was because of the stories I clicked on or if this is just the way the thing works, but there has never been a bigger story in the history of mankind than Katt Williams being on that podcast a couple of weeks ago.

[24:39] David: I do love Katt Williams.

[24:42] John: That was all it was on my newsfeed for a while, and I don't know if I built that out of clicking on a couple things. I have definitely clicked on a couple things that have opened me up to, I'm going to find out about what's going on in the Dallas Fort Worth area a lot. I don't know. I don't live there. I don't know why I have that on my list of things. Just how skewed journalism is now, or how good we've gotten at skewing it, I guess, is maybe the way, I would say, because it's not like we didn't have the Spanish American War. This stuff's been going on forever, but we've just gotten so good at it, as a society. It seems like it's got to be coming to a breaking point. It’s not like local TV news was a good idea. That was terrible in the 80s and 90s, and the 24-hour news cycle is terrible, because it means you have to come up with a new story every few hours. There's no length. Everything has just gotten better at chopping stuff down to the point that, I don't know, is there further that it goes? Maybe there is, and I don't know, I'm just, once again, John rambling.

[25:48] David: No, it’s great. That's why we have you here, John. This is exactly why I wanted to do this with you. I love to hear you ramble. I want to bring it back to comics a little bit.

[26:01] Dave: I'm curious, from your guys’ perspective, you guys were both very high up at IDW, one of the major publishers in the direct market. How closely were you paying attention, tracking, campaigning for Eisner Award nominations or involvement, or anything?

[26:17] David: We would sit down as an editorial team and say, “Hey, what do we think is worthy?” John, you can correct me if I'm off on this, and then we would submit a list, just like every other publisher does. It was never from a place of, at least I don't recall it coming from a place of, “we need to get some attention on this book.” It was not a marketing endeavor. It was “what deserves it?” and if the editorial team’s like “Man, this book really deserves it,” then we would put that forward, and there wasn't too much outside of that. There was lots of things that weren't altruistic working at a major publisher, as they just are, but that one was largely just, “let's honor our creative talent and the ones that are deserving. Really try to push them forward.” Not that we really made stuff that we didn't believe in, because I don't feel like we did, but some stuff comes together and you made magic, and you want people to know about that.

[27:19] John: The Eisner is also seen really haphazard to me in a way that the Academy Awards definitely don't, like the Emmys don't, the Grammy’s do. The Grammy’s just seemed like nonsense, but you didn't know what they were going to go for this year, because it wasn't the same judges, consistently. You didn't know where they were going to go. There's definitely some books that had been nominated that I wouldn't have thought those would, even if they were from the publisher that I was working at, I don't know if those should have been up there. I don't know that they were actually that good compared to other things, and there's other stuff that was just like, “this is spectacular,” and they're never going to look at it. It was a miracle that, sorry, this is stupid next to what you just said about your friend's story next to Batman, the Batman dog story, but from the IDW perspective, there was what seems like a minor miracle that Star Trek got nominated for a continuing series because they would never go for licensed stuff. There was just a line that they wouldn't. Daredevil, sure, but if somebody else owned it and was licensed to it, no, that probably wasn't going to happen, which again, I don't think is the worst thing for an Awards to actually do. Despite having worked on a lot of licensed stuff, I don't think that's the most terrible thing that they could do, but you just didn't know. So, there are times where we would rule stuff out because it's like, “This isn't going to get nominated.”

[28:33] David: I've got two perfect examples of what you're talking about, John, because I worked on both. Definitely not bragging, but we did a book called Clue, from the board game, Clue: Candlestick, by Dash Shaw. One of the best things I've ever worked on. It was so tight, so well conceived, and so well executed, is a beautiful book, and there was no chance in heck that the Eisner Awards were going to even bother to open up that book, even though it was of Eisner quality, and then the same thing happened with Tom Scioli’s Go-Bots. Tom Scioli put together a Go-Bots comic book, it was fantastic. It was a meditation on artificial intelligence, and humanity, and beautifully drawn, beautifully colored, beautifully executed book. Because it had the word Go-Bot on it, it was just never going to get anything. It was tragic, but we knew, well, I knew, out of the gate that that was never going to get any recognition because of the fact that it had this “stigma” of being a licensed property, even though every other book nominated is essentially a licensed property, if you're looking at superheroes, in particular.

[29:43] John: For me, there was one where it was one year where everybody from Jem and the Holograms got nominated for Eisner Awards for non-Jem and the Holograms work.

[29:52] David: Yeah, another perfect example.

[29:55] Dave: I feel like every awards show has the things they favor and don't. Ignatz awards at SPX. I love SPX. It’s my favorite convention. Ignatz Awards does a great job celebrating independent cartoonists specifically, but there's also a lot of indie comics that are made by teams that will never be considered for anything, because it's not a single person doing it, and I understand the idea that this award show stands in opposition of everything else, and it's raison d’être is fucking cartoonists. We get it, all right, but you can't throw a bone to one team every year? There isn't a larger apparatus in connection with that show, because its whole existence is based off of self-published, DIY, small press, but with the Eisners, when there is a company, like Dark Horse, or IDW, or Boom, or even Marvel and DC, from your perspective, is there a way of those companies coming in and having conversation with the organization itself and being like, “look, X, Y, and Z things are weird. Shouldn't we do something about this?”

[31:00] John: I don't know that much about the specific inner workings of some of that. I was never a big awards guy, and I understand the reason for shining a spotlight on good works and that kind of thing. I recognize that and respect that part of it, and especially, like we were saying, in a world where a lot of the other paths that you would find that stuff are dwindling or maybe were never that healthy to begin with. I don't want to talk out of my ass because this is some stuff that I've intentionally not paid that much attention to, I mean the specific inner workings of the structural level that the Eisners operate at, but what I understand is that without a change of guard of who was running the Eisners, and how the Eisners are being run, that's not a conversation. 

[31:47] Dave: Interesting. If we were not recording, we can have a more frank conversation, because I have a lot of questions about how delicately you are dancing between the raindrops there.

[31:54] John: A big part is me dancing between the raindrops because I don't know all the facts. Some of this is I've heard somebody saying half of something and then pieced it together with something else that somebody said half of, and I made up the connective tissue. That's really the level that I want to not be talking shit about anybody about.

[32:09] David: We've got journalistic integrity here, Dave. We are a podcast of journalistic integrity, and as we've started to notice, we wield quite a bit of power now, so we have to be careful.

[32:24] Dave: Yeah, that corner box is starting to turn into a short box. Pretty soon, it might be a long box.

[32:35] David: Where do you guys go for your comic news now? To find out what might be something you'd be interested in and/or if there's heavy hitting stuff, where are you going?

[32:43] John: I don't have anything anymore. You know what I mean? I don't mean there's literally nothing. If Hassan recommends something on his video podcast, I'll buy it. I'll check it out.

[32:53] David: Who's this?

[32:54] Dave: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou?

[32:56] John: Yeah, sorry. Yes, I don't want to repeat what happened at the Eisners when his name was mispronounced, and I’m terrible with remembering people's names.

[33:07] Dave: Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou was a brilliant letterer. Also, does the YouTube show, Strip Panel Naked, and used to be the head of PanelXPanel. One of the more exciting minds in the scene, as they say.

[33:23] John: I wish I'd paid more attention to PanelXPanel. It's not like I didn't, but I wish I'd paid more attention to it when it was around, and some of its existence corresponded with, I feel like I always started with a bleak period of my life on this podcast. That's another podcast, I guess, but like a lot of it corresponded with that. So, literally right now, I would be way into that, if he'd launched that magazine today. I’d be there every month. What I've been doing lately, really, I mean, I've been going into the comic bookstore and just being surprised by what's there, and buying stuff.

[33:56] David: It sounds delightful.

[33:58] John: It is. I like it, and there's a part of me that, when I was growing up reading comics, I had a couple of friends, like my now stepbrother, Chris Biachi. He was into some comics. Mentioned before, my friend, Pat von Frisco, was into comics, but my other friends weren't. I had friend that was into music and the friends that were into golf. I had one who's a pro-level golfer. I didn't have a lot of people to talk to with that. So, most of that was just in my head, and I would just buy comics, and there were whole times where I was developing the stuff that I liked in comics that I had no idea what other people thought about it. Even going into college and stuff, most of my friends in college, I made some friends in comic stuff, like Brendan Cahill, that we both know, but my regular friend group, even in that time, wasn't hanging out with the comic kids. No offense or anything. I don't know how I would have done that.

[34:51] David: Yeah, same. I don't know how I would have even. Your experience exactly mirrors mine, in terms of my childhood, but that sounds pretty nice, to get back to a point where the pure version of old comic book buying, where you walk into the store and there's the latest issue of Uncanny X Men, and you don't know that somebody's going to die in that issue until you pick it up and read it. Whereas, these days, I know what's going to happen in all my comic books four months before it even happens.

[35:18] John: I try to go into the store as early as I can in the morning on Wednesday, before stuff sells out, and see what's come out and look at the number ones and stuff. I'm less likely to cold buy an Uncanny X Men that I don't know anything about than I am to buy something from Dark Horse or Oni, or Image or something, or Fantagraphics. How about you, Dave? What do you do?

[35:41] Dave: I listen to a bunch of comics podcasts. I listen to The Corner Box. Sometimes, I'm even lucky enough to not have to listen and I can hear it live. Off panel. I used to read PanelXPanel religiously, but it's currently on a hiatus/maybe done forever. I don't know. Also, Women Write About Comics is a really cool blog that I frankly haven't read that much of recently, but I used to be a religious reader of. Adventures in Poor Taste is again, but there's the legacy sites, like AIPT, whatever the fuck the acronym is for Adventures in Poor Taste. Bleeding Cool, The Beat, the regular places. The problem is that those places are so hyper focused on a specific thing that typically is focused around generating clicks and/or propping itself up with film and TV reviews, which 9 times out of 10, aren't that substantive to begin with, because TikTok and YouTube has devoured that space as well. I also watch a lot of YouTube explain-y, Think PC channels, that are all about either the manga industry, the anime industry, or some comics and film. Big sucker for four-hour video essay. What? You want to do a four-hour video essay on Abel Gance’s Napoleon Trilogy? I’m here for this. Although, to be fair, it's not a trilogy. I misspoke. It's a triptych. It's one film projected with three projectors. It's not a trilogy. I'm sorry, David. Jesus Christ, I’m sorry. Single film. Misspoke.

[37:19] David: Dave texted us the other day, talking about how he was watching some fanfic of Star Trek, going down this rabbit hole watching some guy who had made some Star Trek fanfic, and I couldn't have been more entertained just by the text alone.

[37:36] Dave: I've finished it now. I’ve finished it. Alright, so this is great. So, there's this guy. His name is James Cawley. He's an Elvis impersonator. He’s single. He doesn't have any fucking kids. He’s never been married. Shocking, I know. What he does with all of his Elvis impersonation money is, he has spent a decade building a screen-accurate replica of the bridge, the walkway, and Kirk's quarters of the Enterprise. So, because that's not enough, because that is just, “why would you build a thing if you’re not going to use it?” he has self-funded multiple feature films, and a full TV series, screen-accurate full episodes of Star Trek The Original Series, most of which are written by writers of the original series who are still alive, and starring a bunch of the actors from the show. So, George Takei and Walter Koenig, who play Chekov in the original show, appear in episodes as themselves. Well, not as George Takei, but as Sulu and Chekov, but it would be amazing if he was like, “I'm not Sulu. I'm George Takei.”

[38:57] David: That would be pretty great.

[38:58] Dave: But they're amazing. They're so good.

[39:01] David: Are they actually good? Or are they good because of what they are?

[39:05] Dave: It starts off really rough, because he basically made 11 episodes over 15 years or something like that. So, the first episodes are basically shot on high DV8 digital tape. They don't really look like the show. The sound effects are there, and people pretending to Uhura and Kirk and everybody running around the Enterprise, and it's fun to see the sets. Roundabout Episode Three though, is when our boy Walter Koenig shows up for the episode, To Serve All My Days, written by D.C. Fontana. Criminally underrated screenwriter. The episode is about, in season three of the original series, there's that episode where everybody starts aging rapidly but it doesn't affect our boy, Chekov. So, the high concept is what is years later, the aging thing caught up to him after he gets blasted with radiation? So, over the course of the show, they have a guy playing young Chekov, who's wearing a wig, in order to look like Davy Jones 60s-era Walter Koenig, and then they de-age Walter Koenig down to about 50 with makeup and a really shitty wig, in the middle, and then he starts hallucinating. So, there's scenes where Chekhov is talking to himself about the nature of duty and how it's important to leave earth, and the end of the episode, they have to get Chekov to do this special piloting maneuver. So, they get him onto the bridge, and there's 80-year-old Walter Koenig walking onto the bridge, wearing his yellow command jumper, and he sits down at the navigation chair, and James Cawley’s Kirk is like, “do you have what it takes for the task at hand, Mr. Chekov?” Walter Koenig turns to James Cawley and goes, “Yes, Captian,” and you've never seen a human so happy as James Cawley being called Captain by Walter Koenig. He's just beaming from the inside. He's just like, “I am the captain. With all my Elvis money, and I am the captain.” It is so good, and the whole series from that point on is just this insane fever dream of that he is Captain Kirk. It's fascinating.

[41:23] David: Is that on YouTube?

[41:24] Dave: It's all on YouTube.

[41:25] David: That’s fantastic. Because he can't monetize that. Well, maybe he's monetizing with advertising, but he can't legally do any of this.

[41:34] Dave: I don’t know how far we want to get into this.

[41:38] David: This is probably another podcast because I am fascinated. I definitely want to go down this rabbit hole, but I think we should save it for another time.

[41:46] Dave: Okay, all right. I'm just saying, you’re missing drama and a lawsuit. Strictures from Paramount now, because trying to make a whole production company to make your fan films. It's fine.

[42:00] David: Oh, god, that's amazing. People and their money.

[42:03] Dave: I'm going to go there. I'm going to go to that fucking Ticonderoga warehouse where he has all those set. I'm going to do this, goddamnit.

[42:18] David: All right. Well, to wrap up, I only get my news from ICV2, because they still talk a little bit about the business side of comics. I tend to go there and look at numbers and stuff. I do think Comics Beat still does a pretty decent job of trying to actually provide certain levels of valuable information along with entertainment stuff, not to say that comicbook.com, or Broken Frontier, or places like that aren't doing that, too. I'm still pretty impressed by what Heidi does over there.

[42:52] John: Have there have been pieces of comics journalism that have really struck you guys and stayed with you guys for years afterwards? Are there important things that you read that have made you think about things?

[43:03] David: I've honestly never really been into it until probably the last couple years when I feel like I've re-found my fandom in a way, but as an example of that sort of thing, the collection of Frank Miller interviews that I'm going through that the comics journals did back in the day. That's some fascinating reading, because you get these snapshots of Frank Miller just as he's coming on Daredevil, and everyone's like, “Who's this guy?” And then you get him doing Ronin and you get this Frank Miller starting to feel his oats a little bit, and he's starting to understand the business side of things, and then you get Dark Knight Frank Miller, and it's three different people almost, and it's fascinating to see how he's educating himself within the industry, going from treating it like an art form in his early days, but you can see that still always thinking forward. So, the comics journal for me has been great, in that regard. There's a couple other interviews that I've been reading like that, but the Frank Miller one, in particular, I really love, but only recently have I really started taking an interest in the history of comics. I've always been too busy just reading whatever's coming out on Wednesday. Who's got time to read? My stack keeps getting bigger, not smaller, and that's just the comic books.

[44:23] Dave: This is my crucible. I have a giant stack of books right here because the stuff that we're talking about right now is my catnip. Bill Shelley's body of work. I have his Otto Binder biography and his James Warren biography, not autobiography. Biography. Sorry, again, misspeaking. In a stack right here. The problem is they're underneath this tome. This is 50 years of Star Trek. I’ve got to read this stuff, too. How am I supposed to read all these books and make stuff? It's fucking impossible.

[45:01] John: Yeah, that really is true. I definitely feel that. Anytime I start to get into something and do something, I start to feel bad about the thing I'm not doing. I mean, I got really into video games for a while, not having played them since I was a little kid, and now, I sound like an idiot when I say this, I've been reading. So, that's been really getting in the way of my video game playing, and the last Zelda game is still sitting there, half-finished. It's maybe the best video game I've ever played. I think it's brilliant. I think it's a great game, but I want to go read, God, who knows? Whatever I go read. Whatever I say is going to be ridiculous.

[45:41] David: Babysitters Club.

[45:44] John: I don't know.

[45:45] Dave: Is it as ridiculous as the other thing that's on my to-read pile, which is Hollywood Gothic by David J. Skal, the Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Screen, the revised edition? I’ve got all this bullshit I want to read.

[45:59] John: That sounds fascinating.

[46:01] Dave: That’s the problem, is it's all fascinating, and there's not enough hours in the goddamn day.

[46:07] David: Part of my problem is that I'll say “I really want to read that. I really need to jump into that thing,” and then what I end up doing is watching Toxic Avenger 3, because I'm like, “it's eight o'clock at night. My brain’s feeling a little mushy. Do I really want to try to read this thing that I know I'm going to enjoy? Or do I want to just watch Toxic Avenger 3 for the 15th time so that I don’t have to really pay attention and just let my brain rot further?”

[46:35] Dave: Have you seen, I believe it's on Prime or maybe Tubi, I think it's called the World of Toxic, which is about the making of Toxic 3? Have you seen it?

[46:46] David: No. I heard famously that that one's persona non grata with the Troma and Lloyd Kaufman team, but I don't know anything. I’ll have to check that out. It’s on Tubi?

[46:57] Dave: Yeah, I believe it's either Tubi or Amazon Prime. I don't remember which one, but it's really interesting because the documentary was made as cheaply as the movie. So, they're just running around with a camcorder, and Lloyd Kaufman’s like every five minutes.

[47:14] David: Does Stan Lee make an appearance?

[47:16] Dave: No, he doesn’t.

[47:20] John: Dave Baker, you know Chase that we were just talking about earlier, who might very well be in the same room as David right now, used to work for Lloyd Kaufman? He knows him.

[47:30] Dave: How did I not know this?

[47:31] David: Chase interned at Troma films back in the day. Chase isn't here today, though. Otherwise, I’d bring him on, and we could really jump the shark on this thing.

[47:39] Dave: I'm going to have to be like “I have a little bird that's told me that you have Lloyd Kaufman stories. Tell me.”

[47:46] David: I don't know what this thing is about. This might be our best one yet.

[47:50] John: Journalism.

[47:52] Dave: When they were marketing the Villeneuve Dune movie, they were like “it's a sweeping romance between Zendaya and Timothée Chalamet,” and then she's in the movie for seven minutes. They're like “we’ve got you, sucker.”

[48:04] John: It's really between him and his mom.

[48:06] Dave: I mean, come on. Have you seen Rebecca Ferguson? No hate.

[48:12] John: All right. I think we should call it at that level.

[48:15] David: All right. I would like to call it.

[48:19] John: You’ve been trying to get out of this for an hour, David.

[48:21] David: At least. I was uncomfortable 40 minutes ago, when we started talking non-comic stuff. I was already like, “it's time for us to shut this down.”

[48:30] Dave: That's probably my fault.

[48:32] David: No, no, you're fine. It’s John’s fault.

[48:33] John: In our defense, we are wearing clothes.

[48:38] Dave: Currently. Stop the record button, John, we could just…

[48:45] David: Thanks, everybody.

[48:47] David: Join us next week for more of something of The Corner Box. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, David Baker, for coming back.

[48:55] David: Fantastic as always, Dave. Thanks so much. John, thank you for being you.

[49:00] John: Oh, I try.

[49:01] David: Thanks, everybody for listening to this. Whatever this is.

[49:04] John: Take care, and goodbye.

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.