The Corner Box S1Ep32 - A New Universe: The Hubs-Man Saves the Podcast

[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] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. This is David. We ran long last time on our thorough exploration of the New Universe. Stick around, but stay even longer for Dave Baker's bashing of Mort Weisinger. All right. Off we go.

Okay, next on the list is Spitfire and the Troubleshooters, created by Elliot R Brown and John Morelli. 13 issues. It was renamed Spitfire in issue 8 and then renamed again, Codename Spitfire, starting in issue 10, and then canceled in 13. Aided by five prankster students, Professor Jenny Swensen steals her father's M.A.X. Armor (a construction suit built for use in a variety of capacities) when she suspects his murderer intends to use it as a weapon of war.

[01:18] John Barber: “We built this combat suit. Somebody's going to use it for fighting.” I enjoyed, it was a big chunky Iron Man, it wasn't just a suit that you put on. It was a suit you just sit in, and it was cool. It was a girl version of Iron Man. You know what I mean? She was the genius scientist. That was neat.

[01:37] David: The only thing I remember, and the only reason I remember it is, well, Leifeld brought it up on his podcast the other day, is that Todd McFarlane drew issue 4 of that.

[01:47] John: Oh, I didn't even remember that. As much as I may have said I liked it, I might have stopped reading it on page four.

[01:54] David: Yeah, and then the last one was a Star Brand, created by Jim Shooter. 19 issues and an annual, and this one's about Ken Connell is given a power called the Star Brand by a mysterious visitor from space, who tells him to guard it well. Driven by his conscience, Connell struggles to find the most just and appropriate use for the Brand's unlimited power. Star Brand definitely is a thing that's carried on through even today.

[02:20] John: Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, that's a big part of the Hickman Avengers run, was all stuff with the Star Brand. I think there's a lot to go into with the recurring motif in Jim Shooter’s writing of the guy with infinite power and infinite abilities that is misunderstood by everyone around him and treated as though they were a villain, because that's core. That's The Beyonder, that’s Star Brand, that's the thing that keeps coming up in his stuff. That is funny in the god-like powerful Star Trek guy from season three.

[02:55] Dave Baker: Trelane?

[02:56] John: Any of them. I mean, that was every third episode in season three, but I’ve been imagining young Jim Shooter being like, “Yeah, I know what that's like. I identify with that guy.” The thing that he comes back to over and over.

[03:13] Dave: The thing that’s so interesting to me about Shooter is the fact that he got started so young and was so abused by the system.

[03:25] David: What do you mean abused by the system?

[03:26] Dave: I mean, he literally got abused by Mort Weisinger, moralizing? Or would call him up at all hours of the night and scream. He made him dance on the top of a table to get his paycheck when they went in.

[03:42] David: Are you serious?

[03:43] Dave: Yeah. Mort Weisinger was a monster. He would literally torture people and Mort Weisinger was the one who discovered Jim Shooter and gave him his first shot on Legion and Superboy, and I think a lot of Jim Shooter’s god complex, and a lot of his controlling nature comes from both a reaction to and a mimic of Mort Weisinger. In some good ways and some bad ways, but the thing that you just said, John, about, interesting that his whole thing is he has a god complex, is how much of that is, you have to be hardened by the system because the system is going to break you otherwise, and it just completely alters your personality going forward? Who would he have been if he hadn't been tortured as a 13-year-old or whatever?

[04:31] John: Yeah, it's funny because I do have a mixed admiration, especially for the amazing stuff. He was 13 when he started, or something like that. I mean, it's bonkers. I don't mean to imply that none of that is without reason, and yeah, that's a really good point.

[04:48] David: I mean, I didn't know that about him. I mean, obviously, I knew that he started at 13, but I didn't know that Mort Weisinger was a dick.

[04:54] Dave: Oh, yeah. He's one of my favorite people in comics, primarily because he was a liar. There's a lot of stuff in Julius Schwartz's autobiography that’s just “I loved Mort. We were friends since we were seven, and I never believed a word that man said.” There's all these weird anecdotes of him, because I think, Mort and Julie ran a literary agency together for a little while after high school, and then Julie got hired at National, and initially, they were trying to pull a backhanded thing where Mort would feed Julie all of his clients, so they would have a constant workflow, and ultimately, I think the agency ended up collapsing and then Mort tried to convince Malcolm Wheeler Nicholson or Harry Donenfeld, one of the two, to hire him to replace Julie, just full-on “”Fire that guy. I'm the one that’s secretly been the editor the whole time,” and when he was confronted by Julie about this, he was just like, “no, that wasn't me,” and at the time, he realized that Julie hired him to be his co-editor, and then years later, Julie found out, and they had this huge fracas about the way that he got in, was basically trying to push him out.

[06:16] David: Oh, my God. I have no room in my life for people like that.

[06:21] Dave: Yeah, me neither, but I love reading about it.

[06:24] David: Sure. Yeah, it's very entertaining. Just don't want that in my real life. Run away from that stuff. All the New Universe stuff was collected in and around the 20th anniversary of the New Universe, around 2006/2007, all the stuff we've been talking about was collected in trade paperbacks. I'm guessing that might be probably the easiest way to get some of this stuff, but any of this stuff can get picked up on eBay. I definitely recommend Displaced Paranormal 7. That was a fun read. I haven't gone back and read it in a while, but the last time I did, I still enjoyed it, and it's been in the last five or six years that I read it again. I need to check out that Psi-Force now. I feel like maybe I missed something there. So, towards the end of the run, after the first year, Jim Shooter is no longer working at Marvel, and so year two of New Universe, I think John Byrne comes in and helps to reset something. He importantly, I think, takes over Star Brand with issue 12, and issue 12 is where things get real serious, because Star Brand, the Ken Connell character, is confronted by the old man who gave him the Star Brand initially, and the old man wants his powers back. There's a fight, a bunch of people die during the fight, and Ken Connell decides to “Hey, I’ve got to get rid of these powers, because I don't want to be like that guy, ultimately.” So, he goes off into space.

Originally, he's going to go behind the moon to try to release the power, but then he thinks, “I'm going to be trapped on the moon. I don't want to do that.” So, he flies 10 miles up in the air instead, because that's safe, and decides to put all his power into a 10-pound weight or something, or a can, or something. He smacks his hand against a metal object and releases the power, and it turns into a massive multi-ton nuclear weapon, essentially, that radiates out within 50 miles, and he's over the city of Pittsburgh when it happens, and it basically just completely wipes out Pittsburgh, so half a million people, gone. Surrounding areas, gone, and the land has completely disappeared all the way down to the Earth's magma, and the thing that I found out, I vaguely remember this, but I was reminded of it today, and this is so John Byrne, is that Jim Shooter’s hometown is Pittsburgh. That is such a John Byrne thing to do. He's always doing that sort of thing. Get back at people in the comics. So, Pittsburgh's gone, and that all happens in the first New Universe original graphic novel, called The Pitt. So, John Byrne co-wrote that with Mark Gruenwald. Sal Buscema is drawing it. I think, Stan Drake is on finishes. I'm not familiar with Stan Drake. Should I be? It looks like Sal Buscema art. A little more brush than pen.

[09:36] John: He was the artist on Blondie. He was a comic strip artist. Just making sure I was thinking of the right guy, but yeah, he's a comic strip guy. Not the original Blondie, but he was around that time, I guess. Well, according to Wikipedia, around the time, that’s what he was doing.

[09:50] David: The weird thing about The Pitt is that it introduces this character called The Witness, which is this phantom-like character who's just floating around, and nobody can see him, and he's just feeling bad about himself because he's dead, or he's a ghost, but he's still alive, and no one can see him, and he sees Star Brand smack the can, and he knows that something bad's going to happen if he does it, but he can't stop him. So, he's completely ineffectual, and he shows up in this one thing in The Pitt, and he's just this character who's watching things, and then he's gone. Then you never see him again. He's not used in anything else that I remember, at least, and certainly not in the following graphic novels where they're the follow-ups to The Pitt. He's just this one-off character that never shows up again. I just hate the choice of narrative for that. So many other ways you can do that, and they chose that. That was just really dumb. The Witness.

[10:54] John: Just to add this in here, Stan Drake was the creator of the Heart of Juliet Jones, which was a comic strip that ran for 40 years, starting in the 50s.

[11:05] Dave: It's the best title for a strip, that I tried to read as a child and was like, “this is boring. I don't know what's going on.”

[11:15] David: The Heart of Juliet Jones?

[11:17] Dave: Yeah, it's an ongoing soap or a romance strip, and my memory is that it was really cool looking when I was a kid, and I was like, “this looks cool,” and then, because it's a serialized drama, it's like, “No, I can't go out this door with you” for one panel. The next panel is “you must,” and then the last panel is, “but can I?” and then you're done, and you're like, “what is it? Who are these people?”

[11:45] John: “This looks just like The Pitt. Where’s Star Brand?

[11:51] David: So, The Pitt is, I think, supposed to signify that it's the New New Universe, so things are going to be changed, and they retcon some stuff from here, where as an example, Justice is no longer an alien. He's actually a human who is being manipulated by another human who had Psi powers or something like that. I don't know. It gets weird, and some other stuff that they retcon to basically get back, I think, to the original premise, which is the White Event created all the superpowers. There's no aliens or anything like that. So, at this point, it's probably a little too late. The next graphic novel is The Draft, written by Mark Gruenwald and Fabian Nicieza. Art by Herb Trimpe, with a murderer's row of inkers, man. Kyle Baker, Michael Gustovich, Klaus Janson, Lee Weeks, and Keith Williams, all inking Herb Trimpe. Oh, man. The Kyle Baker pages, in particular, are really good. So, The Draft is another one-shot graphic novel, and the thing that's notable about that, that we've talked about in the past, for me, is that it introduces a character, named The Metallurgist, whose superpower is basically that he can control a 1949 Chevy hubcap. That's his power, and I just love that so much.

[13:16] Dave: Is that literally his ability?

[13:19] David: No, that's it. I'm not adding to that. That is literally the power.

[13:25] Dave: It's not like, “static shock, he has electricity powers, but he also can surf”?

[13:31] David: Just the hubcap.

[13:32] Dave: Just the hubcap?

[13:33] David: Yep. It's just the hubcap.

[13:36] Dave: This is amazing. I am now a huge fan of this.

[13:42] David: The only problem with Metallurgist is the name. Metallurgist? Really? Come on. You should have been the Hubcap or something like that. Captain Hubcap. Hubcap Hero. There's something in there.

[14:01] Dave: know what his life would entail when he became The Hubsman.

[14:16] David: So stupid.

[14:19] Dave: He gets struck by lightning and can hear hubcaps. You can just talk to hubcaps to know what their inner lives are like. They protect us. They keep us moving. These hubcaps have been under appreciated, and I, The Hubsman, will liberate them all.

[14:37] David: The Hubsman. I just love that it's so specific, too. They really are specific about it. It's a 1949 Chevy hubcap that he, actually, by the way, he's skateboarding down the road and the hubcap just starts following him, and that's how he knows he's got the power.

[15:03] Dave: This is like when I tried to explain to people why I love Skateman so much, and they're like, “that's not real,” and I'm like, “no, 100%, it's real,” and it was an IP play where Neal Adams was contracted by a movie company to make a comic that would tie into this movie, called Skateman, where a Vietnam vet would come back from the war and use his martial arts abilities, while wearing roller skates, to fight crime. It was overprinted, and it was the biggest failure in comics history for a decade. Filled with Skateman. Amazing.

[15:38] John: I mean, the hubcap guy, is the context in the story that it's showing that not everybody that’s got power has got useful powers?

[15:47] David: No, there's no real commentary on the powers in any of this stuff, and I get it. I think, again, one of the central concepts of the New Universe is that the characters have real problems, and they're in the real world. They're not going to put on a costume and start fighting bad guys. They're going to just be themselves, but now they've got this power, and that's how it's treated. There's not really a lot of acknowledgement about how he's dealing with the fact that he's got a hubcap, literally, following him around. There's a brief “Hey, isn't this cool?” but that's it. That's not really anything else to it. At some point, he figures out that he can fly on it. So, he can fly, or he can fly other people if they get on the hubcap, but it's not the most useful power because the hubcap is small. It's hard to stay on it. It's great.

[16:45] Dave: This is not a comic published by Marvel. This is a Michael DeForge award winning graphic novel. This probably lampoons the superhero industrial complex with the idea of The Hubsman, but also is simultaneously critiquing capitalism or something. You know what I mean?

[17:07] David: It's very much of a time. The Draft, in particular, is okay, The Pitt happens, and the US government's reaction to The Pitt is like “the Soviets did it” because nobody knows that Star Brand has done this thing. It's just happened, and people start calling it the Black Event, as opposed to the White Event and they start calling Pittsburgh, The Pitt. So, that's why The Draft actually happens and the US government's drafting people, and on the face of it, they're saying they're drafting everybody because they're preparing for whatever war that might be coming, with the Russians as the bad guys, but secretly, the government is drafting everybody because they're testing everybody to see if they're paranormal, and so all the paranormals are getting shipped off to a special training ground. When did the movie Full Metal Jacket come out? Because we have a lot of Full Metal Jacket in this book. There's a sergeant who's just the stereotypical drill sergeant, and he's awful. He's an asshole, but he also has a superpower, and the superpower is essentially to get into your mind and make you see and experience the most horrific things that you can possibly imagine as if they really happened to you in a moment.

[18:26] John: If you were literally living in a New Universe comic? Do you know that the guy that wrote the book that Full Metal Jacket was based on is Jason Aaron's?

[18:38] David: What? No.

[18:40] Dave: Yeah.

[18:42] David: Of course, Baker knows it, but I did not know that. That's fascinating.

[18:46] Dave: That's because I've read the other side, and they write about that in the introduction.

[18:51] John: Yeah.

[18:51] David: Oh, man, there's two of you now.

[18:58] Dave: We are unique individuals. A shared mutual obsession over niche media that really has no bearing in a larger social context, and quite frankly, is usually an impediment to our ability to interact with other humans, and that shared camaraderie with the two of the other people on this call. We're being shamed for it.

[19:21] John: Yeah, David.

[19:26] David: As always, I'm the outcast. Even in a group of outcasts, I'm the outcast. So, Nightmask, being the pathetic loser that he is, is part of this base camp of paranormals. His superpower is basically to go into people's dreams and hang out. So, he goes into the dreams of all the people with powers, the new recruits, basically, to make sure that they're not crazy, and he goes into the dreams of one of the characters, and he's like, “Oh, wow, this guy's definitely crazy,” but when he comes out of the dream, for whatever stupid reason, he goes, “he's fine.” So, they let him go, and of course, this character, who's not fine, gets put into solitary confinement for doing something stupid and cracks, and his power, I should probably remember that character's name, but anyway, we're going to call him Boomer. I can't remember what his name is. Boomer’s power is that he can teleport, but when he teleports, there's an explosion in the space that he leaves, and the further away he teleports, the bigger the explosion is.

So, at the end of The Draft, he teleports away from the camp and teleports himself right next to the President of the United States, who is definitely not Ronald Reagan, and then teleports far away again, and so at the end of the book, basically, there's this giant explosion, and that's where we're left off, but one great little epilogue piece is that the only person that survives is the president, who is not Ronald Reagan, because the president, who's definitely not Ronald Reagan, also has superpowers, and that's how The Draft ends. So, then we get into The War. So, this is the capstone of the entire New Universe within the moment. At this point, all the books are being canceled, and The War is supposed to be the thing that wraps the final bow on the whole thing. It's written by Doug Murray. What else has Doug Murray done?

[21:43] John: Didn’t he write ‘Nam? Wasn’t he a Vietnam guy?

[21:46] David: Oh, okay. Yeah, you might be right. Who's the Murray that did Supreme?

[21:53] John: Brian Murray?

[21:54] David: Yeah. Brian Murray. Art is by Tom Morgan. I remember, at that time, I was like, “oh, yeah, I like this Tom Morgan art,” but it doesn't hold up as well as I thought it might. It's okay. Anyway, by the time we get to The War, it's just a bunch of nonsense. Doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Boomer character’s just running around, exploding. Oh, the Boomer character gets mind-wiped by the Ayatollah, who's also got psionic superpowers and controls Boomer, and so Ayatollah is just basically sending Boomer out on Jihads. He’s  literally just going around the world, showing up in high-powered people's areas and then leaving, and leaving the explosion behind. Just terrorist bombing, suicide bombing, everywhere he goes, except obviously, there's no problems that he has to deal with, and then Nightmask, being the pathetic character that he is, is feeling all down and distraught with himself for saying that Boomer wasn't crazy in the first place.

So, he blames himself for all the things that Boomer’s doing, feeling horrible about himself, and super dumb and pathetic, but does manage to lure Boomer into a situation where he could pull a gun on him, and shoots and kills him. Just straight up kills him. He lures Boomer to come to where he is, through some dream scenario. Boomer shows up, and then instead of Boomer immediately leaving and killing Nightmask, Boomer hangs around, leaps at Nightmask to attack him, instead, again, of just teleporting away and exploding him, and Nightmask shoots him in the head and kills him. That's the end of that whole storyline. Nuclear missiles go off, the whole world, all the nuclear missiles, everybody's nuclear arsenal goes off, because of all the tensions that are happening between the various governments and factions stuff, so through various machinations, everyone fires their nuclear missiles, the missiles all land, but none of them explode because the Star Brand child, who's the child of the original Star Brand, who now has the Star Brand power, basically makes it so that nuclear weapons don't work.

That doesn't deter anybody. That miracle in and of itself doesn't calm anybody down, and so more war is about to happen, and the Star Brand basically just says, “Nope. No more war.” That's the end of it, and that's the end of the book, and that's how the New Universe closes down.

[24:44] John: Satisfying ending.

[24:45] Dave: Can we talk for a second about the naming conventions? There's a thing that happens in corporate comics. It's not always in corporate comics, but it's more there, where people obviously don't want to sell their best ideas down the river because the contracts are so bad and you're not being given ownership of anything that is successful. So, because of that, a lot of that reticence to use your own personal idiosyncrasies or specificity manifests in things being named generically, like The Pitt, The War. Even in a lot of Hickman’s stuff, The City, The Creator, The People. Sometimes, some people can make it work as a delineated aesthetic of “it's a minimalist thing that feels very grounded and realistic,” and sometimes it's like, “Guys, we can't have a little specificity? You can't put a little bit of yourself into this?”

[25:50] David: Well, when they do, that's how we end up with The Hubsman.

[25:54] Dave: I would rather read a hundred issues of The Hubsman. That is so weird. Take me to there. The thing I love about comics is that there's not a lot of gatekeepers and that you get weird stuff that gets through, and The Hubsman, even though I know that's not really the character's name, is a perfect example of how strange and beautiful, even when the medium is shitty, that it can be, because you're just like, “they made this? A hubcap? Not even multiple, but just a singular hubcap?” That’s great.

[26:34] David: I think you're right. I think the lack of specificity is a choice at times, but I think you're right. Sometimes, it's a business choice, not a storytelling choice, and therein lies the rub, I think.

[26:48] Dave: Yeah, I completely agree, and to be clear, I love Jonathan Hickman. I even like The Creator. I think that he's a fun villain, and every time he shows up, I'm like, “hell yeah. Look at that goofy helmeted motherfucker. Let's party.” Sometimes, in other contexts, you can feel when people are not incentivized to really put their shoulder into something.

[27:09] John: Yeah. Actually, that's funny, because in the Hickman Avengers run, when he introduced Thanos’s gang, I thought those had some of the greatest, most ridiculous names in modern comics, and then it made their way to the movies and stuff, like Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive. What a great name Corvus Glaive is. The Pitt actually makes sense as a starting point, because they turn Pittsburgh into a pit. It’s a pun. I get it. Four letters, “the,” and then go and do Draft and War, and how much were they distancing themselves from any of the New Universe stuff? I was never able to tell, even at the time. It's a weird bookshelf format ending to a series like that.

[27:58] David: That was definitely of a time. We've already countered that with something, the other day, too, that you were talking about.

[28:07] John: Yeah, it was. I think it was the Shadowline ones.

[28:11] David: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, Shadowline was supposed to end, I don't know if it actually did, but it was supposed to end in a high-priced graphic novel as well. I guess, I think is, “hey, there's only 10 people reading this, but if we charge them seven bucks instead of three bucks, we can break even on this thing and then wrap it up.” I guess.

[28:30] Dave: The New Gods end in The Hunger Dogs graphic novel because they ran out of runway. It's a weird, not trope, but an unfortunate business occurrence.

[28:40] David: I think around that time, John, do you think maybe it had something to do with the difference between the direct market and the newsstand distribution market? You can't do newsstand distribution for that, but maybe you can do a direct market version of it and it'll still pan out for you. Maybe that's what was happening. That certainly had something to do with the direct market trying to figure out how to make that work.

[29:08] John: I mean, there's something nice, I guess, about if you're really invested in Strikeforce Morituri, that they do put out Electric Undertow in the story so you can find out how it ends. I feel like now you just cut your losses and the story will just be unfinished.

[29:30] David: Thanks for indulging me, guys. I appreciate it.

[29:33] John: My last little thing. I mean, we've been on here for six hours now. Around the same time of the anniversary, New Universe comes back as Newuniversal by Warren Ellis and Salvador Larroca, who we were just talking about because we both just talked to him recently. I took over editing that after Larroca left and Steve Kurth came on, was penciling it. I think I remember massively screwing up a correction at one point, and I don't think I understood what the correction was, but I only want to get into that part of it, but that series ended when Warren Ellis, whose birthday it is today, Warren Ellis's computer crashed with a bunch of half-written scripts on it. In the time that was going to get caught back up on stuff, we decided to do a bunch of one-shots. One of them was one by Si Spurrier,  where due to a series of unfortunate events, the title is misspelled on the cover, but I wasn't there for some of it, but my fault, one called 1959. That was Kieron Gillen’s first I think paid comic, first work-for-hire comic. Warren Ellis and I decided we would lure Kieron in by naming it after a Sisters of Mercy song. There was a third one that never got published, by Jonathan Hickman, that was going to introduce a lot of stuff that wound up being in his Avengers run. So, a lot of the stuff with the Star Brand and stuff, I think, got its genesis in that script that he wrote, and it never, though he paid for everything.

[31:13] David: You still have that script. We're going to post it to the website, right?

[31:17] John: We're just going to draw it.

[31:21] David: Eisner nominated Dave Baker could draw the hell out of that. He just drew a magnum opus, John.

[31:30] John: The joke I was making about that is that all of Kieron Gillen’s career has existed between those two issues of Newuniversal, so if that next issue ever comes out, it's over.

[31:40] Dave: Yeah, for sure.

[31:42] David: Sorry, Kieron. I think it's fantastic that the entire Newuniversal project basically just stopped because Warren Ellis couldn't be bothered to recreate whatever he had on his computer.

[31:56] John: Well, one, stuff happened later, or stuff came out later. I don't know. Two was, there were other priorities. That wasn't the best-selling comic, and when he had to go back and redo stuff, Marvel was not prioritizing that as the number one thing he should be doing.

[32:12] Dave: Wasn’t that also the reason that Fell and Desolation Jones stopped as well? Am I remembering that wrong?

[32:20] John: That might be. I don't know. Some of that gets a little weird, I think. I don't know about Desolation Jones, and I think Fell got into some stuff behind the scenes.

[32:31] Dave: Oh, really? Oh, well, when we're not recording, maybe we definitely won't talk about this. I definitely do not want to know what that is.

[32:41] David: Similarly to how Ronald Reagan was definitely not the president in The Draft or The War. There's our New Universe podcast. I think there's going to be multiple podcasts.

[32:53] John: This podcast outlasted the New Universe.

[32:58] David: There was more time, energy, and thought put into the podcast about the New Universe than the New Universe itself. I think Mark Gruenwald had a genuine affection for the stuff that he did, because he really does go out of his way to bring back Displaced Paranormals in the Quasar stuff, and he really did try to make it all make a little bit of sense. There was even another miniseries in the 90s, I think, that was called Starfighters or Starblast. Maybe Starblast. Somebody listening to this, they're probably screaming at the fact that I called that one character Boomer. I think that character's name was Blowout. I think Mark actually did have a genuine affection for this stuff. If you can find any of his old interviews, he had a bunch of commentary about it, which was pretty cool to read. Anybody listening, if you're not bickering about the New Universe, go seek out those old Mark Grunewald editorials.

Well, Dave, thanks, again, for taking time out of your day. I know you're just spending most of your time now fending off all the people hounding you at your door, trying to bang it down, and trying to just touch you because of The Mary Tyler Moorehawk success. Just trying to get a little bit of that Mary Tyler Moorehawk-ness onto them and off of you. So, appreciate you taking some time with us.

[34:17] Dave: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to exist in a New Universe.

[34:25] David: We should just stop right there.

[34:27] John: Okay. See you next week.

[34:30] David: Thanks, everybody.

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