The Corner Box S1Ep36 - The All Positivity Episode

[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 hosts 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 in The Corner Box.

[00:31] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. This is David, and with me as always is my good friend

[00:37] John Barber: John.

[00:38] David: Hey, we're back. We didn't think we would be, but we are. No, I'm kidding. We just didn't know what the heck we were going to talk about this week, but we figured it out.

[00:47] John: Dave Baker's, as I understand, gone away to Spain to fight the fascists like Hemingway. I assume that's what he's doing.

[00:56] David: I think you're right.

[00:58] John: Yeah, I guess I might have leapt to some conclusions there.

[01:02] David: Dave's not with us this week. There's a little hole in my heart, but I think he's going to come back. I don't think we scared him away completely.

[01:09] John: Well, the sun also rises. Hope all of him makes it back, unlike characters in the Hemingway books.

[01:18] David: Three seconds in, we’ve derailed it already. That's got to be a record for us, John.

[01:23] John: Eating the heart of a lion, somewhere on the way back.

[01:26] David: You're just going to keep going with this, aren’t you? We thought we’d talk about the stuff we're reading recently. This is going to be the all-positivity episode of The Corner Box. We're going to talk about cool stuff that we're reading and try to get all three of our listeners excited about comic books.

[01:46] John: Sure. Yeah. I've been having a great time reading stuff lately. So, yeah, that sounds great.

[01:53] David: Yeah, John, I'm interested to hear what you've been reading. We haven't really talked. We've talked about a lot of comic book related stuff, but we haven't really talked about what we’re reading recently. Why don't you start us off?

[02:02] John: Well, yeah. So, one of my favorite current comics, right now, let's start there, because I’ve been enjoying stuff, is a comic called Rare Flavors. I don't know if you've seen it. It's from Boom! It's Ram V and Felipe Andrade, who did Laila Starr a couple of years ago.

[02:19] David: Is Ram V also an artist? Does he draw stuff, too? Yeah, I don't think I have either, but you know what? That guy has a really good eye for picking art talent to work with. I think he is really smart in his choices of collaborators. He's always got just the best dudes drawing his stories, even before he started working at DC and Marvel. Has he done work at Marvel? He's done work at Marvel.

[02:47] John: Yeah, he was writing, forgetting what he was writing. 

[02:50] David: He's doing mostly DC stuff right now. Anyway, even before he made it big, he would send pitch packages to me of stuff, and every single pitch package just always had an amazing unknown art talent with it, but they were always really good, and I was like, “Man, this guy is going some places just because he knows how to pick the right collaborators.” His stuff was really good, though. Obviously, he's really good. He's working all over the place, but I think one of his biggest talents is he just knows who to pick to work with.

[03:22] John: Yeah. Not only a good artist but writes stuff tailored to the artist or find the right artists for the stuff he's writing, or however you want to you want to say.

[03:30] David: Exactly. That's a much more accurate description. Right artists for the right project, or he writes to the artist strengths. However that's working, it's definitely a talent of his.

[03:39] John: I think Shelly Bond was the first person who mentioned him to me several years ago now. She has a good eye finding some of the talent early on, too. So, I’ve been interested in him since then, but I missed Laila Starr when it was coming out. I don't know. Maybe I just missed it. I'm not sure. That might have been in my Wilderness years. Rare Flavors, I was picking it up from issue one. It's the same team. It's a cannibalistic immortal, who hires a documentary filmmaker to record his life. The filmmaker doesn't know that's what he's gotten into, thinks he's filming a foodie documentary, somebody that goes around different places, tries different food. Mid-each issue, there's a recipe that gets done. Not just a page listing the recipe, but it unfolds in comic book format, intercut with the present-day narrative, and the preparation of the food, and the history of the food, and where the food comes from ties in with the main narrative, but I'm not super into all of that, but the story is very engaging everything. If that is the thing you like, here's the comic for you. Do not miss this. I would say that regardless. I mean, it's still a really good comic.

Filipe Andrade. I’m not sure if I'm saying his name right. The art’s extraordinary. It's so beautiful. Really, really cool. Really loose looking but so skilled in the way it's done. It reminds me a lot of Moebius. Not necessarily in the sense of the super detailed, illustrative style, but in that sense of the gestural drawing that suggests a complicated world but flows so well and is just a lot of fun to read.

[05:24] David: Is it an ongoing, or is it a self-contained project?

[05:29] John: I believe it’s self-contained. I think it's got an end coming up. It's up to issue four right now. That's actually a super good question. I've been caught by surprise in a couple of things that I thought were ongoings that all of a sudden ended, and I go, “Oh, okay. Next month. I'll miss it.”

[05:46] David: So, the cameraman, or the guy doing the documentary doesn't realize that the guy he's documenting is a cannibal, essentially?

[05:53] John: Well, I think when it starts, neither the cannibal nor the immortal part of it, but spoiler alerts, he might find out before the story's over. We're back. You didn't miss anything. No, I'm just kidding.

[06:08] David: That sounds cool. I feel like Filipe’s done some other stuff than that, but it's escaping me.

[06:12] John: I know him from Laila Starr, and I'm not sure. It’s a great question. I probably should have done

[06:20] David: A modicum of research.

[06:23] John: Yes. No, but I mean, I know the name. Despite my inability to know how to say it, I've read the name a bunch of times, but it’s super good. He did some Rocket stuff. Some Rocket Raccoon.

[06:37] David: Okay. Was that something you just picked up off the rack or did you hear about it somewhere?

[06:42] John: I mean, I think it's just come out online a few months ago. The same team from Leila Starr. I think that was a big hit for Boom! So, this was a book they did push, I think. Didn't do a ton of research to find out what it was. It was one of those, “Oh, it's pretty interesting,” and it is pretty interesting.

[07:01] David: Those are always fun. Discovery.

[07:04] John: It's not one of those stupid mainstream cannibal, immortal filmmaker, documentary books. We've all seen those. This is a really unique one. Everything about it really has character to it. I just find that really exciting. There's not a panel from this you couldn't pull out and have it feel like this book, which is what I've really been gravitating towards in the last, I don't know, year or so, I think, more so than stuff that's well done but looks like everything else, if that makes sense.

[07:32] David: Sure. Eclectic? Eccentric? This is one that I've just been reading. I also don't have a ton to say about it, but Tony Daniel, creator-owned project over at Image and launched it a couple of months ago, called Edenwood. Historically, I'm not a huge Tony Daniel fan. I certainly don't hate him, but I haven't really gone out of my way to follow his work, I guess, but for some reason, Edenwood sounded interesting to me, and I gave it a shot, and here's the quick spin on it. There's an eon-long series of multiverse wars between demons and witches, and it's come to Earth as its latest and final battleground. So, basically, there's this demonic land on Earth that's expanding outward and normal people are being pulled into this demonic land, or going into this demonic land, and then they can't get out, and time works differently there, and magic seems to be happening inside this demon land, and also outside. There's just a lot of twists and turns and spins, and characters age five years between one issue to the next. Really ambitious.

It's so much world-building, I think, in a really good way. There's a lot of concepts that he's throwing at the wall, but he’s doing it in a way that I can follow along, and I'm not the most careful reader at times. The narrative is really fun and interesting, and the characters are cool, and Tony's art looks just as good as it ever does, if not better, and the colorist that he has is just great. I'm pretty into it. I've really enjoyed it so far. I've read the first three issues. I think I'm a little behind. I think issue four and five might already be out. I think it's a five-issue series. Maybe it's a six-issue series, but I've really enjoyed it. I'm totally in, and I think I'm a bigger fan of Tony Daniels now than I was before. I hope this book does well for him. I'd like to see more of it. I hope he's able to do more beyond the five issues, but even if he doesn't do Edenwood, I hope he does more creator-owned stuff, because I think he's got some really fun, interesting, cool concepts. I'd much rather see him spending his time doing stuff like this than doing another issue of Batman.

[09:41] John: This might sound crazy, and I don't mean to tear anybody down to build somebody else up, but I was also not necessarily the biggest Tony Daniels fan. I was just flipping through some pages, but I completely missed Edenwood. Haven't even seen this. I don't know if I've seen his art in the last couple years, maybe, and this is great. I mean, to go back to what I was saying before, it looks more distinct and more Tony Daniel-ish than before. I feel like there's a bunch of other artists that I had lost track of over the course of, I don't know, five years-ish. People whose stuff I followed back at Marvel and DC books. Sometimes when I check in on them now, they seem more technically proficient but less interesting, and there's a general style that exists in a lot of stuff in mainstream comics, a particular filmic realistic style that goes into things.

[10:32] David: There's a certain program or two that I firmly believe is largely responsible for that. Wouldn't you agree? I mean, I see Poser or a version of Poser in so much stuff now, which, this is digressing a little bit, but I guess that's what we do. Artists, forever, throughout time in history, have used tools and tricks to make things look more sophisticated, more complicated than what it really was for them to do. So, using a program like Poser is cool, if it helps you draw more efficiently or better, or helps you get the pose right, but the problem is that if I know you use Poser, then you've taken the magic out of it for me. I don't want to know how you did the magic trick. I just want you to do the trick. Don't show me your hand. Don't tell me how you did it, because then I think that I can do it. I'm not interested in it anymore, because I know what you did. Use those programs, but you’ve got to hide it, man. You can't make it look like that, because then I know what you've done, and it’s not very interesting, because I know that, just with a little bit of practice, I could do that, too, and I don't want to feel that way when I'm looking at art. I understand why artists have gone down this path, because it is easier and it is more efficient, and you do get more accurate, “realistic” drawing styles out of it, but, man, it's not very interesting. So, yeah, Tony Daniel, I think, is a great example of somebody who's seemingly going away from that. Even if he's using that stuff, I don't know how he's doing it. I don't know how he's pulling that trick off, which is great.

[12:16] John: Yeah, and Poser, or whatever other contemporary program people are using now for foregrounds, I think a lot of it, too, is CG backgrounds have become a really big thing, which, on the one hand, makes sense, and it makes sense, especially in a world where, I don't actually know, I'm not saying this is true of Marvel and DC, I actually don't know, I don't think this is the case, but I mean, in a world where a lot of licensed stuff, they're very particular about things looking the right way, to a greater extent than 15 years ago. So, it definitely makes sense to do that. It also makes sense that if somebody built a model of the Sanctum Sanctorum or something, then they’ll share it with somebody else and then the next person that draws it doesn't have to do all the work. This stuff makes sense, but also, I think, you can lose some uniqueness with that, and again, I've no opposition to using computer stuff in comic book art. I was a big early adopter fan of that stuff. As soon as I could get a Wacom tablet in the 90s, I got one.

As soon as I could start drawing digitally, as soon as I could start lettering digitally, as soon as I could start doing all that stuff, I was doing it and following guys like Mark Badger and Scott McCloud, and we were doing that stuff before anybody else was. Kyle Baker, another one, but I think we had a lot of those guys, there was this period of “they're so good. They're so good. Oh, they’ve got a computer. They're terrible. Oh, they're good again.” There's some rough years with a lot of people where integrating stuff didn't work well. One of the things I always think about, and I don't think anybody involved in it would mind me saying this, is years ago, back before I started working on Transformers, I put our mutual friend, Brendan Cahill, in touch with my then-editor, Andy Schmidt, and Brendan started working on some of the Mike Costa Transformers series, and there was a sequence of these cars driving through this neighborhood and doing a car chase, as you might find in a Transformers comic.

Years later, Andrew Griffith, friend of the show, Andrew Griffith, Cigna co-creator, longtime collaborator, I remember him asking Brendan, “you're so good at drawing cars. How do you know how to do all that?” and Brendan’s like, “I don't give a shit about cars. I found some 3D models and I traced it.” It looked all of a piece. Some artists, like Stuart Immonen, who I think is one of, if not the best, artist in American comics in the last 20 years, also used a ton of CG models for vehicles and stuff. He’d build these models, and he’d use them in there, but he did integrate the stuff so flawlessly that it would look like it was the same style he was drawing the rest of Next Wave in or the rest of Ultimate X Men, or whatever it was, and when he’d get to something that’s really tech-heavy, like Star Wars, I think it's super helpful to have some of that stuff, but I have no idea what he used for Star Wars, but yeah, the stuff that I know of, he was doing. Somebody like Shawn Phillips that uses a lot of photo ref or used to use a lot of photo ref, maybe uses some CG stuff, went through a big period of time where he was drawing stuff on the computer. I don't think he’s current stuff he is, but throughout all of it, every one of those pages looks like a Shawn Phillips page, even times where he was really reffing stuff, it didn't call attention to itself. It still had the personality of the rest of the art.

[15:31] David: That’s exactly it, is hiding your hand, not showing how it's done. I think that's why a guy like Greg Land used to catch so much grief. He was doing the same thing that every other comic book artist was doing at that time, and today, but you could tell. People could pull up the Vogue magazine that he was using to trace, and it's like, “man, you’ve got to hide your hand. Come on. You're good enough to do that. Don't let me peek behind the curtain,” and I think he's actually better at it now. The last few things that I've seen with him, he started to play, I mean, I don't know. It's been in the last, probably, five years, I guess. He started playing with line weights. Just a simple change. He just started playing more with his line weight or maybe his inker did. I don't know. Somebody made a change there, and once he started playing with his line weights, it suddenly masked that really obvious part and made it more like “Oh, cool. I'm totally back in on Greg Land,” and all he did was start varying his line weights more, and that was enough for me. So, it doesn't even have to be big changes, I think, to do that.

[16:43] John: Yeah. I always thought Greg was an interesting case, because I've worked with him on a bunch of stuff, and I like Greg. The two things I thought were interesting is, one, yeah, unquestionably, sometimes he would use a reference that was a little too on the nose and a little too close to what was happening. That's for sure. It's weird because whenever he would draw, it would still look like a Greg Land page. It wouldn't look like he dropped a photo, and I talked to him at one point. He's very much looking for this thing of trying to make these characters look like fashion models, make these characters good looking, cool, realistic, but it was interesting to me that he would use the same reference multiple times. When you put them next to each other, you can see that it was different. If he had the same close up for Kitty Pryde as for Sue Storm, he would draw them different. They have the same eyes. So, I always thought that was funny. The other thing is, at that time, Justin Ponsor was his colorist, and Justin, I think, is one of the best colorists ever. RIP. One of my favorite people. 

[17:43] David: I agree. That guy was incredible. 

[17:46] John: One of the things he was really good at, I mean, I think he had a great skill in choosing colors, but he could also make the stuff look photorealistic, and he was not using the same reference images. I know that for a fact, because I was sending the pages to him. You know what I mean? I was the one who would give it to him. I knew I wasn't sending him the photo ref. So, when it came back, it would look even more photo-y because Justin would just render it like a photograph.

[18:13] David: That's funny.

[18:13] John: Yeah, if it had been rendered in flat color, it would’ve looked different.

[18:21] David: It might have been enough in and of itself. You're probably right. That's interesting. I've always enjoyed Greg Land-drawn books. I’ve never had a problem really with it. He was never one of my favorites. He was never one of those guys I was trying to seek out and really interested in exploring because of this, and now, like I said, I'm a little more interested in Greg Land now, just because of that. I guess, I don't know, I don't think it's apples to apples, but I'm more interested in Tony Daniel today than I was, maybe when he was doing his big DC run, with the New 52 and stuff, where he was taking over as writer/artist. I think that stuff certainly has served him well and has shown up here in this new work, so I'm really enjoying it. Definitely recommend it. Edenwood is great looking book, and the stories, it's fun, and it's all over the place, but in a way that I think totally makes sense, and the more questions raised, the better. So, I’m in. What have you got next, John?

[19:23] John: There's one I just picked up, I was interested in. This is actually a former Ram V collaborator on Swamp Thing, Mike Perkins. Somebody I love. I always love working with Mike. We worked with a lot of people recently who used to share a studio with Mike. He was in the studio with Drew Hennessy, and I think Paul might have been. Laura Martin definitely was because I called him up. It was Laura, Drew, and Mike were all in the same place. He's working with Dan Jurgens on a comic called The Bat-Man: First Knight. That's basically Batman 1939.

[19:56] David: That's out now?

[19:57] John: Yeah.

[19:58] David: That one caught my eye. I’m interested in that one, too. I can't wait to hear about this one.

[20:02] John: This one struck my interest in old comics, pulp-era stuff. It's exploring that era of things, and going back to the beginning of this podcast, we were talking about the different properties, there are different characters or something that are set now versus set in a specific historical time. Batman is a character that is set now. You go see a Batman movie, you do not expect it to be set in 1939. You don't expect it to be a period piece, unlike Dick Tracy or whatever were the counter examples we pulled out. Even though the Dick Tracy comic strip always took place in the present day, there's this quality about Dick Tracy feels of its time, or The Shadow, or something. So, this basically picks up around Detective 27 and sets up a more nuanced realistic take on that. It’s a modern comic set in that world. It's not drawn to look like a pulp, but he wears the costume from that. He's got the purple gloves, the weird ears that stick out to the side. He doesn't have a butler because Alfred didn't come until later. All that stuff. As it stands, I'm not sure if this is leading up to the Hugo Strange story from Batman #1, I believe. Maybe I'm saying the wrong issue. Maybe that was Detective 28. I can't remember. I'm sorry, but I don't know if it's set up to be specific stories, but it references the Detective 27 story as having happened, and that's where the Legend of Batman was coming about.

[21:30] David: Do you think this is a calculated move on DC’s part to copyright the original material again, in a way? Are these copyrights coming up pretty quick? I don't know. The way you're describing it, I'm totally interested in the book, but the way you're describing it makes me go, “is this just a ploy for them to basically just copyright the original versions of Batman in modern times so that they've now got a Batman who has the purple gloves and the weird ears and is set 1939 and has all the trappings of that first appearance? Are they protecting the copyright in that way?” This is so cynical of me.

[22:19] John: I can see that salting the earth or muddying the waters so much that, “well, yes. Batman doesn't have a butler is public domain, but Batman doesn't have a butler because Bruce Wayne went to college was created in 2024. So, that is still ours.” There’s a bit about Sherlock Holmes. Sherlock Holmes having self-doubt is still copyrighted. Sherlock Holmes can't question himself in works that aren't licensed. There's some part that the Conan Doyle estate pursues that comes from one of the later novels, but it's an emotional beat of Sherlock Holmes.

[23:01] David: Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's pretty smart. I don't know. I'm so cynical. This feels very cynical, but that would be a smart move on DC’s part, to do this exactly, and basically do like, “what if the copyright was available, or it was free and open again. How do we exploit that now before anybody else can?” Then, basically renew the copyright for another 100 years.

[23:38] John: Interesting. I don't really know if that's where it came from. It is also the thing, I mean, they do Batman 66, they have Batman 89, they've got Superman 78. That's definitely a thing I'd looked at and been like, “Well, why don't they do Batman 39 and Superman 38? I think the year of comics are probably their designation for things based on movies and TV. So, I was actually assuming it had gone that direction of Dan Jurgens and Mike Perkins talking somewhere and pitching it to DC of “what if we do Batman 39?” and they're like, “No, we're not going to do 39, but we'll do a Black Label book. We'll put it out in this different format. The 8.5x11 format.”

[24:14] David: That's got to be the way it happened. I'm far too cynical.

[24:17] John: Yeah, no clue, but Perkins’ art is super realistic now. It's interesting to see. I'm actually curious about some of the technique. He's inking himself. A lot of it looks very photo-y, but it looks of a piece. I don't mean that in a complain-y way. There are definitely a few panels where I was wondering how he worked on stuff, but that was more out of, I have seen his pencils a bunch and even though he's been inking himself forever, I'm more used to Drew Hennessy inking him and knowing what Drew put in there.

[24:49] David: Who’s doing the colors on it?

[24:51] John: Yeah, the colors are super cool. Mike Spicer.

[24:55] David: Mike Spicer. Yeah.

[24:56] John: I would actually say I liked the color even more reading the comic last night. The experience of reading it, as opposed to even just looking at the pages, is even better. I mean that wholly positively. It looks pretty good flipping through it. Really good color. Storytelling, too. It's pulpy, but it also brings in the stuff we would think about now in 1939. Hitler invading Poland is super important to this. The Depression. All these things directly come up as concerns that our characters are feeling.

[25:26] David: It's definitely a Black Label book, too. Just in the preview, there's some gruesome bits. It looks really cool. Full disclosure, I'm not a huge fan of Mike Perkins, but just in this preview alone, the Mike Spicer colors completely change it for me, and there's a splash page early-on, on page three. If anybody's just out there, you can just type in ‘Batman First Knight preview’ and it comes up pretty quick. There's a really cool splash page, which I'm assuming it's Commissioner Gordon and some police, and a bunch of reporters surrounding him, and they’re in this old-timey 1939 style, coming out of an Italian spaghetti house eatery place, and what a gorgeous page. What a great use of a splash page. I really liked that one. Looks great, and the colors are just really, really nice. Yeah, this looks good. I was already interested in this one. So, I'm glad to hear that it's worth picking up.

[26:24] John: There are some places where I question how fast somebody would start discussing anything when a guy dressed like a bat, who's just a myth in the town, comes smashing through the window of their synagogue. I feel like I would just be freaking out for at least a few seconds.

[26:42] David: And 100% run the other way.

[26:45] John: Not discussing current events with the guy. Yeah, no, I enjoyed it.

[26:49] David: Nice. You mentioned in an email, something about Moebius, and I didn't say anything to you, because I wanted to keep it as a little bit of a surprise, but guess what I was reading in the past week.

[27:06] John: Captain Carrot.

[27:08] David: Besides Captain Carrot.

[27:10] John: This is fascinating. All right.

[27:14] David: Take one guess.

[27:15] John: For specifically what it is? Incal?

[27:18] David: Nope.

[27:19] John: Oh, Silver Surfer.

[27:19] David: Silver Surfer: Parable. I'm interested to know why you were getting into Moebius stuff recently, and I can't even remember why I decided to get into it either. I don't know what it was, but I was just thinking about Silver Surfer. I've gone back and I started reading the original, I guess volume two run, the Marshall Rogers, Steve Engelhart, Ron Lim, Ron Mars. I've gone back and I've started reading from the beginning, six or seven issues in, and for some reason, in the back of my mind, I was like, “Man, there was a Silver Surfer Moebius thing that came out around this time somewhere,” and so I was like, “I want to read that.” I read it. This is the one I did a little bit of research on. So, I wanted to go through it because I thought you’ve got some Moebius stuff to talk about, too, so I want to talk about Silver Surfer.

[28:11] John: I'm excited to hear this because that is on my pile to read again tonight.

[28:19] David: I knew it. I knew. All right. So, a little bit about Silver Surfer: Parable. You can get these off of eBay. They're still super cheap.

[28:27] John: I've got one in arm's reach.

[28:30] David: That's fantastic. There's a really nice deluxe edition of it that's out there. That's also got some interesting interviews and stuff collected in the back. I think that might be the one that's on the Marvel app, which is where I read it. So, how it comes about is, I think, Stan and Moebius had never really met each other, but they were obviously fans of one another. Stan, sometime in 1980, it's a little fuzzy about where they meet, but there's one account where Stan says that he met Moebius at the Anaheim Book Fair in 1988, and then there's another account that says they met at the San Diego Comic Con. Either way, one of those two locations, they went to lunch, and during that lunch, Moebius’s agent said, “you guys should work together,” and then it just snowballed from there and actually ends up happening. So, Moebius says, “I like some of the other characters but the guy that I think is cool is Silver Surfer,” which of course, I don't know if he was baiting Stan or not, but Stan, of course, was going to jump at that. I think, famously Stan’s favorite character is Silver Surfer. Am I making that up? Is that a thing?

[29:35] John: I don't know.

[29:37] David: For some reason, in my head, I've always thought that Stan Lee's favorite character was Silver Surfer. Wasn't there a time where nobody could do Silver Surfer because Stan basically said, “no. That's my character and nobody can write him but me.” Am I making that up?

[29:49] John: Yeah, I really don't know.

[29:50] David: I'll have to do a little more research on that. See if I can find anything on it. In my head, I felt like that was true. So, anyway, they got together, and they did the book, and the story is about Galactus coming down to earth, and this is after Galactus has already promised not to not to mess with Earth. He's promised not to destroy it, but he comes down to earth, and he's hungry, and he tells all of humanity, basically, “I'm your God now, and you can do whatever you want,” and the idea is that he's going to facilitate, basically, man destroying themselves. So, once they've destroyed themselves, then he can go ahead and eat the planet. So, he hasn't reneged on the deal he made, but he still gets his way.

Immediately, stuff gets a little weird. Humanity starts getting a little loose. People start messing with one another. There's a self-styled prophet that says he's speaking to Galactus, and basically the Galactus ploy begins to work, but then, of course, Surfer steps in to show humanity a different path, and after a little bit of back and forth, there's this moment in which the self-styled prophet of Galactus, his sister decides to try to attack Galactus because she’s against what her brother's doing, and flies a plane into Galactus, and Galactus, of course, swats it, the girl starts falling out of the plane towards the ground to her death, and Silver Surfer sees that she's falling, and he goes to save her, but Galactus interferes, nonchalantly, not with malice of any sort, because Galactus doesn't have that, but he just interferes for some reason, and the girl does, in fact, die. She perishes, and the world is watching. So, Galactus, through his inaction and interference, humanity sees this and sees the Silver Surfer tries to try to save this woman, and then, everybody takes a step back away from the anarchy and the chaos, and they all stop worshipping Galactus and his concepts, and then Galactus sees that ploy didn't work, and he leaves. He's like, “Okay, well, that didn't work, but you know what? Humans are short-lived, and I'll be back. I have eons. I'll be back at some point, and it'll work the next time I try it,” but he leaves.

One way or another, he leaves and Silver Surfer remains, having free will basically, and then the epilogue of it is, humanity tries to start worshipping the Silver Surfer, because the Surfer has saved the Earth, but the Surfer’s like, “man, don't go down the same path. You just did this. Don't do it again,” but they're not listening, and so Silver Surfer, essentially pretends to want to be a dictator and rule the planet with an iron fist, in front of the United Nations Council, and in front of the world, and humans come to their senses a final time, like, “Oh, no,” and so, Silver Surfer goes away, misunderstood and somewhat hated, returning to the status quo of what had been set up, narratively, previously, and the only person who sees through Silver Surfer’s ploy is the former Galactus prophet, who is like, “No. Can't you see? He's doing this because he's lying to you. He's not telling the truth. He doesn't really mean that. He's doing it because he's trying to save us. You fools.” So, the one guy who needed to learn the lesson the most, does learn the lesson, I guess.

It's an interesting work. It was originally billed as a two-issue series, and there's a really great interview with Moebius in the back of the one that I was reading, where he describes the work as “difficult and painful. One of the toughest assignments I have ever had.” It sounds like, leading up to him starting this project, he was tortured. He didn't know how he was going to be able to accomplish what he had set in front of him, right up to the moment where basically the day he needs to start drawing this book, he didn't know how he was going to pull it off, but he obviously figured it out. He says something about this was his first time working in the Marvel method. Basically, this ends up being a 46-page book, and Stan Lee submitted a six-page plot for the whole story. So, Moebius describes the six-page plot as “fairly detailed. No breakdowns.” As it was reading between the lines, because Moebius talks about when he's working on Blueberry and some of those other works, it's detailed scripts that he's working from. Everything's broken down. So, this is wildly different than what he's used to. At first, I got the impression, I don't think he likes that. He wants that full script, but then he goes on to say he loved that way of working. He loved the Marvel method of working, and in fact, was saying that he's going to try to convince some of his other co-conspirators on other projects to maybe work this way as well.

I don't know if that actually happened, but he does say he loves that way of working, and that he loved the story. He thought it was wonderful, even though it was a difficult process for him, I think, ultimately, it sounds like it was pretty satisfying work for him. It's a strange story, especially in that time, because there's no POW! BANG! SMASH! action in the piece. It's a very contemplative piece about humanity and what it means to be a human, and so it's a very odd piece in that, but I think it's very much a Moebius piece in that way. Stan, himself, says that the pages were super easy to write, but ironically, it took him about three times longer to write than normal, because he was a nervous wreck, just working with Moebius and not wanting to screw it up, which I thought, true or not, I think that's charming of him to say.

[35:49] John: He took six hours to write it? He's very fast.

[35:58] David: I thought it was charming that, here's this guy, at this point, he's in the 90s. I mean, he's the publisher emeritus of Marvel Comics, the most wildly popular comic book publishing venture in North America, and he took this thing from nothing all the way to where it was, and had a lot to do with it, and there he is feeling nervous about working with somebody. I thought that was charming, but if you're going to be nervous about working with somebody, and you're Stan Lee, I guess Moebius is the guy that you would be nervous to work with. Let's see what else that was interesting. Oh, one of the big reasons that Moebius was interested in doing the piece was that he was really fascinated by American coloring, the way the printed page came out. He was really fascinated by the limitations, actually, of the printing. It was so limited, and the palette was so limited, that he wanted to really explore that and play around with that, and it sounds like it was quite a challenge. Once he actually got into it and started experiencing what he really had available to him, he was like, “it's even tougher than I thought it was,” and he showers praise on American colorists of that time, of that era, just for their ability to pull off all the things they were able to pulled off with such limited palette and tools, and the two of them, Stan Lee and Moebius, enjoyed the project so much that there was talk about them doing a second collaboration at some point. I don't think that ever materialized.

Overall, I thought it was really fascinating. It's a really good book. I like it. Moebius is all-time great, and there are moments in this book, where it's just fully Moebius. There's a full-page splash of Moebius, I think he's destroying a building, and it's just so great. Just incredible, and Moebius really does pick his spots. He's a genius at figuring out where to put the detail and where to leave it clean. He just really knows how to pick his moments and pick his spots, and he said something in the interview as well that I thought was interesting, that his mood and emotion determined how the page was going to come out, which was such an artist thing to say, but it really does reveal itself. When I hear that, and then I go in and look at the art, it really does reveal itself. “Oh, wow. He's of a certain mood right now. You can tell,” but it is a really good piece, and I will say that Stan Lee's dialogue in this is exceptional. It's very well written. The dialogue has a great pace to it. It's meaningful, and I mean, it's a top-notch book.

I don't think this thing blew the doors off of anybody back when it was released, in terms of sales, but I can understand why, because it was a very different type of superhero story than what I think people were used to at that time, for sure, and so I think it just was one of those pieces that people didn't really know what to do with it. Everybody knew it was these two giants of the industry. I don't think people really knew what to do with it, but on reflection, it really is a great piece, and it does deserve to be read and admired, and I was really glad to pick it up again. The last time I read it, I think it was, I don't know, 15. So, I didn't get it, but I certainly get it a lot more now. I really liked it. There's my essay on Silver Surfer: Parable. The end. By David.

[39:27] John: That was exactly when Marvel was reprinting a bunch of Moebius stuff through Epic. This is the exact same time, and that was the stuff you were seeing in Marvel age and stuff, was some of his art reproduced on newsprint.

[39:41] David: Oh, that's right. Yes, and that's where he was exposed to the different look of stuff, the coloring, and that's what’s mentioned.

[39:49] John: In Marvel, I mean, I remember them going way in a Moebius. I remember that seeming like a really big thing. I didn't know who he was around that time. I mean, he'd been big in the US for, I don't know, 15 years, at that point. I mean, going back to the mid-70s, I guess, when Heavy Metal was coming out. I don't know if he was the biggest artist coming out of Heavy Metal or if Marvel just said he was, and I believed them. I guess, there's limited people that it could have been. I’m pretty sure he was. I'm pretty sure Arzach was as iconic as it is, and the influence he had on comics in Europe, America, and Japan seems to outweigh whatever anybody else does. It seems to be way bigger than Felipe drew it, or anybody else. I have no idea. Well, it's old, but yeah, definitely seemed like he was inescapable at that point, but that would have been super weird to pick up on the newsstand, an issue of Silver Surfer, and find this.

[40:47] David: Yeah, it's different. The other thing that's interesting, and I think he might say something about this, too, is that at that point, Jack Kirby and John Buscema have been probably the main guys that have drawn them, and then you’ve probably got a little bit of Marshall Rogers and maybe a little bit of Ron Lim in there somewhere, but those guys are all probably drawing a very powerful Silver Surfer, and then Moebius comes along with this much more effete version that's graceful and effete. That's also 10-year-old me or nine-year-old me that picks that up on the stand like, “I thought I was getting a Silver Surfer comic book. What is this?”

[41:26] John: Yeah. Silver Surfer didn't really have an ongoing series until right around this time. I mean, you had the Buscema series, but that only lasted six issues, and he was a regular recurring character in Fantastic Four, whoever was doing Fantastic Four, but I think like you, when I think comic criticism, and I think trenchant comic criticism, I turned to the film Crimson Tide, where they have that section where Denzel Washington is breaking down between the two soldiers who were having a fight. Two sailors, I mean, between who is the best Silver Surfer artist. Is it Jack Kirby, or is it Moebius?

[42:04] David: Is that really in Crimson Tide? I don’t remember that at all.

[42:10] John: No joke, Quentin Tarantino did an uncredited rewrite on Crimson Tide because he was working with Tony Scott on True Romance. That's a Quentin Tarantino bit that's in there.

[42:19] David: Really? True Romance is one of the best written films of all time, in my opinion.

[42:24] John: Do you know what the original structure of it is?

[42:26] David: No, I don't.

[42:27] John: This is way off course now. The Blu-ray of it has an audio commentary by Quentin Tarantino, and Quentin Tarantino never does audio commentaries on his movies, but he did it on the Tony Scott one, which he loves. He loves the movie, but the screenplay was written like a Quentin Tarantino movie, where it's all out of chronological order. There's, I think, a fight in the beginning, and then they meet up with the Brad Pitt character who’s stoned, and they're like, “where are the characters?” and then you flashback to the beginning, and you see, the Brad Pitt character tells the story. Tony Scott shooting everything as written but switching the order around to make it a linear story. In the ending, Christian Slater dies, he gets killed, but in the re-edited version, it became a fairytale, and that ending just doesn't work. So, they have him surviving, and they go off together and have a happy ending, because of the way the structure works. They shot both endings. You could sit there with your remote control and watch the movie in the order Quentin Tarantino wrote it, and Tarantino doesn't seem to have a problem with that. I think he respected Tony Scott and how the movie turned out, but yeah. That's just fine.

[43:43] David: That's cool. You saw that on the Blu-ray?

[43:45] John: I mean, it's Quentin Tarantino. So, he's endlessly talking on the commentary. So, definitely, that was on there, but I knew some of that beforehand.

[43:52] David: Okay, that's cool.

[43:54] John: The logic of the fairytale thing was definitely from the Blu-ray. That's where I heard that. I don't think it's a mistake that those two artists, Moebius and Jack Kirby, are the ones that come up in that movie, even though these are the only 46 pages of Silver Surfer that Moebius ever drew. John Buscema drew hundreds of them, and John Buscema was a hell of an artist, but it isn't as visionary as Jack Kirby or Moebius, and those two versions of the Silver Surfer are something that transcends the goofiness of the character. There's this inherent goofiness. That surfboard. What? Why? Because surfing was really big in 1968. In Sesame Street, you have Snuffy because of the snuff films in the 70s.

[44:41] David: I don't think that's accurate. You might be mis-remembering that last part.

[44:47] John: No, but this trend that got, “let's do that in the comic,” but the character is so, I don't know, ethereal and weird, and I haven't read it for a long-time. I’m planning to read it in a few hours.

[45:04] David: I love that.

[45:10] John: When I was a kid, I was fully taken in, like I did with almost anything anybody told me, in terms of “this is an important comic book artist.” I feel lucky that they've mostly steered me right. They really could have used that power for more evil, I think, but anyway. I remember picking up one of the graphic novels.

[45:27] David: You’ve been reading Chick Tracts your whole life

[45:33] John: I picked up Long Tomorrow And Other Stories. I still have that copy, actually. I still read it this past week. That was one of the ones I re-read. I think, like you were saying, I didn't appreciate what was going on there, at the time. I was way too young to be reading, of all comics, that one, which probably has the only on-screen ejaculation in a Marvel comic. I can't think of another example of that. We did an issue of Kickass that had urine and brain matter on the cover. I think that’s something, but I don’t know if I fully appreciated what I was getting into, and then weirdly, I hadn't re-read most Moebius stuff in a long time. I mean, I think I've read The Incal in the last 20 years, but some of this other stuff I probably haven't in about that long, if not longer. The other week, I'd picked up, for $1 each, the four issues for Joe Kubert’s Tor series, from the Epic Heavy Hitter line. By the way, $6 original cover price. It seems like the same cover price you would pay, today, for that, in 1994 dollars. Anyway, but I was reading, and it was one of those things where I had this epiphany of just, the pure visual qualities of that storytelling was so well put together and poetic in the way it was drawn, and the next week, I went and picked up some other discount magazines, and I got an issue of Heavy Metal from the 70s. I was flipping through it, and it mostly looked like garbage, except you had a couple pages of the Airtight Garage from Moebius, and I was like, “that's exactly what I want to be reading. Why don't I actually just read a bunch of Moebius stuff that I have?”

I think there's something like 24 Marvel books that they put out, if you count the Blueberry stuff, and I think I've got around 20 of them. I'm missing four. I mean, I've got a bunch of the stuff from that time, and all that stuff is super out of print and super expensive, and I'm like, “Well, why don't I take advantage of actually having it?” I dove into it, and I've been loving it. I've just been really reveling in his artistry, the way he approaches this stuff. Throughout all those graphic novels, there's little essays introducing or doing afterwords for the stories, and they all sound like what you were just describing. That was very much the way he was talking about everything. I think that probably threw me at the time, too, where you'd read the story, and then Moebius would be like, “Well, I don't think that story worked,” and it's not self-deprecating, and it's not shitting on the story itself. I get what he's getting at that, “I was trying for something. The results were may be interesting, but it isn't like I didn't achieve what I was trying to do.” That doesn't mean the work is without worth.

All of that wraps up with this thing that I heard Howard Chaykin say on the Word Balloon Podcast the other week, where he was talking about the rise of AI is timed very well to coincide with the audience being divorced from the artist and being more focused on the product of the storytelling. I don't know if I'm describing it right. He said it much more eloquently, but that idea that you read a Batman comic and you're like, “they got Batman wrong,” as opposed to “I want to see what Frank Miller does with Batman, and I'm along for the journey of what this Artist is going to do with the story,” and even beyond licensed characters, so much stuff is commodified in that way, that when you go on and you can find books of these super specific genres, of Magical Cat teenager stories, the question isn't “what is this artist doing with these characters? How much does this fit the product that I want to buy, as a consumer of Magical Cat teenager stories?”

[49:40] David: Were we talking about that on the podcast, about just how algorithms? That sounds like something Dave Baker would have said. So, I feel like he probably said it, how the algorithms are essentially determining what people are searching or what people are looking for, the accessibility of things, I guess. People aren't going to search for an artist's name, necessarily, but they are going to search for Batman, and so the algorithms are going to feed you what you want, and thereby, you're going to search using those terms, potentially. It's a snake eating its own tail in a way, and I think, to your point, or Chaykin’s point, we're no longer interested in the artist’s take on a thing, just that the things that we are being created in some way. It's like, “I'm a fan of Johnny Cash, and I'm a fan of Taylor Swift, and so the artist that puts those two things together to make a song, it's a Johnny Cash song sung in the style of Taylor Swift, and isn't that neat and clever, and fun, and cool,” rather than us being interested in a singer/songwriter who takes those two influences and melds them together into something new to create their own unique style and voice, and something equally interesting, but done from a different place, basically. It's not this imitation, basically, but that seems to be what we're looking for as a society right now, is just that familiarity and that comfort.

[51:16] John: Yeah. I mean, Dave was talking about that on his actual podcast, his real podcast.

[51:20] David: Oh, is that where it was?

[51:23] John: He was talking about exactly that, and it's really trenchant and smart, but just what you said, that's really been on my mind, too, and yeah, that's a great way to put it. My two favorite musical performers of all time were David Bowie and Prince. So, my favorite living singer died twice in the same year when they died. Then I was listening to Janelle Monáe, who, literally one of her videos referenced this, but a lot of ways took elements from David Bowie and from Prince and turned them into something wholly different. You know what I mean? She's her own thing. As a fan of those two as well, I can see the influence, as opposed to what if Prince did Ziggy Stardust and did a guitar solo like Purple Rain in the middle of Ziggy Stardust? I'm sure you can find that online.

[52:19] David: I'm sure I can create that for you.

[52:21] John: Yeah, and the Moebius stuff really defies that. I’ve been thinking way too much about Moebius, and about the origins, and I could probably go on and ramble about that for a long time, and maybe that's an episode we should do, because I think he's an important and weird artist.

[52:38] David: I'm down for a Moebius. I got to read more than just Silve Surfer: Parable, though. I’ve got to catch up.

[52:42] John: Well, that's one of the tricks now is all of the stuff from that Marvel era, which was everything he'd done up through 1990, the Epic stuff was maybe 87 through 91, or somewhere around that time. One of the big works that Moebius did is the The Aedena Cycle or World of Edena, about this planet called Edena, and the second volume of that was actually published in English first. The Epic edition came out before the French. It was, I think, very close. At least the book claims it was, and then the third one came out in the Epic run but hadn't been drawn when the Epic run started. I mean, I think it came out in France first due to publication orders or something, but that was exactly what he was working on up to that point, but almost all of that stuff from 1990 and earlier is not in print anywhere.

[53:41] David: Because Marvel doesn't have a license for it anymore, I guess. 

[53:45] John: Marvel certainly doesn't, but it the Edena book is in print. Right now, the stuff that is in print is Parable, the Silver Surfer book, the stuff he did with Jodorowsky, Incal, Madwoman of the Sacred Heart, and Eyes Of The Cat are all at Humanoids. Then Dark Horse has the Moebius library, and it's the Edena book that has those three volumes of Edena, plus the final two volumes, which I've never read. So, those are all in one book. An art book, an interview book. I've never even heard of this until this past week, and I am excited to read it, books have a series called Inside Moebius, which Moebius is doing up until his death, which was him as a character in the story, meeting all of the characters from his stories. So, he meets Lieutenant Blueberry, Major Grubert, characters from Edena, all this stuff. It's very loosely drawn, apparently. That's interesting, too. Seeing some of the reviews and it's “this is like a sketchbook,” and then I saw a page and went “this is like a comic book. It's colored comic book pages.” It's just very gestural drawing, very loose. It's just a pure talent of it going down on the page, as opposed to filling in a bunch of details, but that's it. That's what's in print. So, if you want to read Airtight Garage, well, get ready to spend $150. If you want to read Arzach, and even Arzach, I don't have the Marvel one. I've got the terrible Dark Horse reprint from the early 90s, where instead of being giant 8.5x11 pages, they're 6x9 or something. They’re really tiny.

[55:26] David: That sounds disgusting.

[55:30] John: So, I have holes in my collection, some of which were filled by picking up those Dark Horse books when they were coming out in the mid to late 90s, but those are all out of print, too. Those aren't easy to find. So, it's really strange.

[55:42] David: Sorry, everybody. You can't read any of this stuff we're talking about.

[55:47] John: So, that got me going down this rabbit hole of just, there's not much of a market for English translations in America of European graphic novels. It's not manga. It's not superhero comics, but the aftermarket on that stuff is insane. When we were at IDW, Dean Mullaney was publishing with IDW, Corto Maltese, the Hugo Pratt series. Did the complete Corto Maltese. Every volume of it. Somehow, I don't have one volume. I've got all of them except one. I'm a Hugo Pratt fan. Love it. I've missed one of the books, possibly because all of those books look exactly the same, and there's no way to tell the difference between them. Unless you have two of them next to each other, they're the same cover 12 times, or 13 times. Maybe I just missed. I don't know. I didn't keep my comp, or I didn't get a comp of it, or whatever. So, I was like, “let me just check. Let me see if I can get that online.” Now, you're familiar with the internet that reaches throughout the world. I'm able to find one copy of this, which is a library copy that has the Dewey Decimal tab on it and then a bunch of library stamps inside, for $150.

[57:05] David: Holy guacamole. Really?

[57:07] John: A five-year-old book.

[57:09] David: Wow. That's crazy. Man, Hugo Pratt.

[57:16] John: But anyway, the Moebius stuff is a lot like that, too. Some of that stuff is really pricey.

[57:21] David: Do you think that Moebius is heavily reprinted in France, in his native country?

[57:26] John: That's a great question. You can get more editions of the stuff not in English. I don't know. Learn to speak French. 

[57:34] David: Well, I was just thinking that Baker, we can't get rid of, the ghost of Dave Baker’s here. He was telling us about that translation thing that he had on his phone, where he was just taking pictures or holding his camera over the word balloons and it was translating for him. So, I'm just going to do that. It would be a horrible thing if Moebius’s stuff was not widely collected and kept in print. What a weird thing to have happened. This guy who's a very important figure in graphic storytelling, who's not being collected aggressively. It'll be a very odd thing. I get it a little bit here in the United States, where you might have gaps just for reasons of licensing and things like that, but I would think, at least in his native tongue, that stuff, and the native publisher, who's got the long running rights to do that, I would think that it would be. Hopefully, it's well collected and well kept. 

[58:38] John: Yeah, and Dark Horse is putting out more books. They’ve got another one coming out this summer, but it's a 21st Century work. It was stuff he was he was doing post-

[58:49] David: Is Humanoid still around?

[58:52] John: Yeah. I don't know if some of this just does come down to rights stuff, because Humanoids clearly has the rights to all of the Jodorowsky collaborations, and all that stuff’s in print. Every once in a while, there'll be a humble bundle with Humanoids, and it'll have some of the Incal stuff, and I'll be like, “I should buy that so I can read the other Incal stuff that isn't the main book, and then I forget, and then I buy it again a couple years later when they do it a couple years later, but I actually opened those up, and even that stuff, they've gone back to using the original colors. At one point they'd re-colored all of it to look more modern and more like Ladrönn, who did Final Incal. At least the digital versions look very nice. It looks very well presented and everything, so I feel like that stuff's well served, but it is weird that you can't find Airtight Garage.

[59:35] David: Blueberry. Seems like we should have pretty easy access to that stuff still. Some smart publisher listening to this will pick it up, hopefully. We can get some cheaper copies.

[59:49] John: Yeah, we should probably wrap this up, because we’ve been talking for eight hours.

[59:53] David: I didn't think we were going to have much to talk about today, and we just went on and on, and on.

[59:57] John: Moebius stuff was good. What a weird coincidence. That's so fun.

[60:02] David: I know. I saw your email, like “I can’t believe this. This is so funny.”

[60:06] John: That happens so many times.

[60:07] David: Every week. Alright, John. That was fun. That’s your big deep dive Moebius right now, and some Boom! comics. Good for you for picking up a Boom! Studios book. Proud of you.

[60:25] John: Glad I could make you proud. I’m not crying.

[60:33] David: All right. Well, thanks, everybody, for listening to us ramble on about stuff we’re reading right now. Hopefully, you got something out of that. I definitely recommend Silver Surfer: Parable for some great Moebius work. Airtight Garage is now going to be on my shortlist because, man, I’m thinking back about how much I enjoyed some of that stuff back in the day.

[60:49] John: Airtight Garage is so good. That is one that I did not appreciate how good it is, because the story is ridiculous, but it’s so well done.

[60:58] David: So, stop listening to this because we’re going to do a Moebius episode at some point. This is all superfluous and unnecessary. Thanks, everybody, for coming. We will see you next time on The Corner Box.

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.