The Corner Box S1Ep38 - Kurt Russell Saves the World or How (Not?) To Relaunch Comics

[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. Welcome to The Corner Box. I'm your host, John Barber, and with me, is

[00:35] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.

[00:37] John: We're different people.

[00:38] David: I feel like we do share your brain sometimes, though. I don't listen to our podcasts at all. I don't listen to it obsessively, all the time. I just happened to be listened to one of our recent podcasts where we were talking about the Silver Surfer: Parable, and it's crazy that I read Silver Surfer: Parable, and completely unbeknownst to you, I did that, and within 24 hours, you had already planned to read Silver Surfer: Parable. That’s wild.

[01:03] John: We also have two Kickstarters going at the same time, and no guests to upsell this time. We can't both go after Kirt. It'd be five Kickstarters.

[01:20] David: Which, I think, he did.

[01:23] John: No joke, I was excited. I popped around and all his stuff was missing.

[01:30] David: I picked up that Fae book that he was talking about. I had already pledged, but I added it. I don't know. Maybe I hadn't already pledged, because I don't think it had launched when we talked to him. Anyway, when it launched, I pledged, and I picked up that Fae book he was talking about because I didn't have one yet. You know who else joined both of our respective Kickstarters, John? Our podcast editor, Ed.

[01:51] John: Oh, yeah, that's right. Thank you, Ed.

[01:53] David: Thanks, Ed. We have our editor, Ed, who has been great, making us sound way more competent and eloquent than I am, certainly. So, he emailed us with the latest episode and also said that he’d joined both of our Kickstarter. So, I thought that was very sweet, and I really appreciate it.

[02:16] John: He's more than an editor.

[02:17] David: He's a golden god of podcasts.

[02:19] John: There you go.

[02:22] David: Anybody that can make this mess make sense has got to be some sort of Jack Kirby of podcast. So, John, speaking of your Kickstarter, Signa. Still available. By the time this comes out, your campaign is probably going to be right in the throes of the last few days. It’ll be a very exciting time for you, when this podcast is out, but tell me about your experience so far, just dealing with everything that you have to deal with. How's it been going for you?

[02:47] John: Yeah, it's been good. It's been great to have the team of people here, working at PUG-W. Nate Murray, who we both know, and Mason Rabinowitz, and do all the graphics we did, or did all the Kickstarter graphics, I should say. So, it's been really nice to have people helping. That's been great. I think I'd be losing my mind if I didn't, but it's been exciting. I don't know. It's been fun doing a bunch of interviews and stuff.

[03:10] David: I think that's cool that you're getting interviewed. I can't get an interview to save my life. Nobody wants to talk to me.

[03:16] John: Well, yeah. I mean, it was one of the benefits we have, timing it with the announcement of this publishing group that we're opening, and all that, but how is stuff going for you? Of course, make sure I don't miss a word of it, but it's the Super Kaiju Rock N Roller Derby Fun Time Go. I mean, the two campaigns are actually tracking remarkably similar, I think. I mean, they're pretty close. We were a few days apart, so it's hard to tell because, I mean, it isn't like day 15 is the same as day seven, or whatever. So, it isn't just add a certain amount to it and see where you're at.

[03:56] David: Yeah, my campaign’s four days after yours. I've got 18 days right now. As of this recording, you've got 14 days, but you're right. I'm just looking at your campaigns. I wonder where I'm going to be in four days, and that's where I've been, which is nice, and we both got the project we love from Kickstarter, which was very nice of Kickstarter to do that for both of us. You're on the kick track hotlist comics and comic books. That’s cool. I didn’t even know that was a thing.

[04:21] John: I don't know if they stayed on that. I'm not sure how that actually works.

[04:25] David: Yeah. I don't know how it works either, but yeah, for me, the campaign has been going really well. I've got a fantastic team as well, and I honestly don't know how somebody like Kirt is managing an entire campaign by himself. It's a lot of work. Just to keep up with the customer service side of it, being able to be available to answer all the comments, not just on the campaign itself, but on social media, and it's a lot. So, I'm very appreciative of the team that's been helping me out. Specifically, I've been using Murphey Luedke, who we had on the show a while back, if ever anybody remembers listening to that one. Murphey's just been a great help. She's definitely as advertised. She's done everything she said she would, and then some. So, she's really been a great help. She's the one that had the idea to do metallic foil raised metal posters for the campaign, which is by far and away the thing I'm most excited about, outside of just having the book in my hand. Those posters, they're giant, 24x36 posters, and they're foil. They're raised metal foil, and, man, they look good. The videos that we have of, we did a quick print proof. They're gorgeous, and I can't wait to just have one for myself, but I'm also excited for other people to have them. I think it's going to be really cool. If I was 16 years old, I would so want those things on my wall. It's so cool. I mean, I'm going to have it my wall on my wall anyway, but definitely if I was

[05:59] John: You’d have more of them on your wall.

[06:02] David: Anyway, I think I'm really excited for it, but outside of the excitement, I was telling you, I've got this weird low-hanging level of anxiety in the background, that's just tapping lightly at the back of my head all the time, and it's weird, because things are going pretty much as I expected. I'm glad and grateful for the results, and the people that have come out to support have been just incredibly nice, just across the board. There's not a single negative comment from anybody. Not a disparaging word. The comic book community, at least this aspect of the comic community, has just been nothing but supportive, and I'm really grateful for it, and knock on wood, everything's going well, but I don't know, man, I’ve just got this, I think it's that little imposter syndrome thing. Can you just tap in the back of my head going, “it's going to all fall apart in your hands. It's going to slip through your hands like a pile of sand any second now.”

So, I’ve got to just tell myself that it’s not real and keep doing what I'm doing, and have fun, which, I am having fun. It is an enjoyable thing, interacting directly with people on these campaigns and interacting directly with people that you know are going to read what you wrote or what you drew. I love that. I'm so excited for that. I can't wait for people to have the book in their hands just so I can talk to them about it and find out what they thought of it. That's where I'm at.

[07:24] John: That's thoughtful.

[07:26] David: And also, the other thing I'm happy about is that the cover that I thought was going to do really well is exactly the cover that's doing well. So, going to have some great covers, but I feel like this bikini cover’s going to do really well, and it did. It's doing well, but we're not here to talk about our Kickstarter campaigns, John. I think you have the great idea of talking about New Universe’s comic book universe startup. There’s been a little bit of news and lately in comic books about DC Comics starting up a new line, a fresh line of comic books.

[08:04] John: We should clarify that this isn't another New Universe podcast. You didn't accidentally jump back here. We're not going to talk about The Pitt and Star Brand. Well, sorry. We're not going to talk about The Pitt and Star Brand more than we usually do, which so far, I don't know what our track record is, but I know we've mentioned The Pitt in the last few episodes.

[08:31] David: In our defense, Kirt is the one that brought up The Pitt last time. We did not bring it up. He did.

[08:37] John: Well, after you brought up the New Universe. A few described that bookshelf format book at the end of the New Universe. What's it called? What's it called? That he brought up the Pitt out of nowhere. It is really the Ultimate style universes. There are definitely things that are similar to the Ultimate Universe before the Ultimate Universe came out, but I don't know. They had the exact same, well, they definitely didn't have the exact same motivation. I don't know if the philosophy behind them was the same. Maybe it was you could maybe make a case for some of that stuff, but the idea here is taking an existing comic book that is currently running as a franchise and starting it over without overriding the other one. Although, this is going to get real. We're not going to put apart divides here because it's worth looking at all the DC reboots over the past 40 years.

[09:35] David: The past 40 years? Over the past five years. 

[09:42] John: Well, yeah. So, we probably should have come in with a game plan.

[09:50] David: So, I was thinking about it. The preface of it was, for me, when I'm looking at universe creation and how that stuff came about, I think you get, well if you go way back, we're talking about alternate Earth storytelling. Pretty early in comic book history, you get the idea of, it's not called a multiverse but the idea of the multiverse. Flash historically goes to an alternate Earth where things are different, and I think that's where it has its origins.

[10:25] John: Yeah, even before The Flash went into that other universe. In the origin of The Flash and the first Barry Allen Flash comic, the first Silver Age Flash comic, he becomes The Flash because his favorite comic book when he was a kid was The Flash starring Jay Garrick. In that story, he takes a name out of from a comic book that exists in his world, and then later on, we find out that that comic existed in his world because of vibrational frequencies affecting the creators of the comic, and they were actually retelling the real-life adventures of something that’s happening in another reality.

[11:01] David: What a great concept, too. I love that. The vibrational energies, the other creative team is picking up on those, and that's how they're getting their inspiration for what they're doing.

[11:11] John: Yeah, the Silver Age of DC really was a reboot of all those characters, of Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman. It is funny that, especially Hawkman and Green Lantern, were guys that found some vaguely Egyptian-ish mystical artifact in the 1940s, and then in the 50s and 60s, they’re space cops, and even Barry Allen. I mean, he's a cop. They got very copy in the 40s and 50s, or in the 50s and 60s, I mean. Sorry, but they didn’t hard reboot Batman or Wonder Woman, or Superman, or Aquaman, I think the Green Arrow, I think, also didn't reboot. So, it’s weird that Barry Allen read comics that told him that Jay Garrick was The Flash, but he skipped the part where it tells him that Superman is Clark Kent, because both versions have Superman. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, the common wisdom is, they didn't expect there to be readers that were reading this stuff for more than a few years, but the people making these comics have been reading them, and I think, at some point, or at some level, we gloss over the fan-ness of even the early days of comics. There were people coming in that were fans of these earlier comics, wanting to bring them in, even if we look at the generation that was Paul Levitz and Wolverine creator, Roy Thomas, coming in. When they came in, that was really the people that totally grew up with comic books and really don't care about the characters. Anyway, sorry, I derailed there, but from the early days, you're right, there was this idea of these readers.

[13:00] David: I mean, I feel that's that Flash 123, for some reason, I think it's 123. That for me, it's first time you encounter that problem, or at least comic books seem to encounter that problem. The solution was, they're both true. They're both real. They both exist, and just happen to be a parallel universe, and then, by the time you hit the 90s, and the 2000s, suddenly, it's mandatory. Man, Peter Parker cannot get any older than he is right now. We’ve got to do something, and also, you've got flogging sales in the 2000s. So, that Ultimate line seemed pretty inspired, in that moment, to solve several problems, really

[13:41] John: Yeah, that gets interesting. That's where it gets into the new line that I think it's not actually, as we're saying, this is not actually announced yet, but Rich Johnston was posting about it on Bleeding Cool that they're doing Absolute comics. That's not official yet, is it? I think that's probably announcement.

[13:56] David: I think it might be official. I don't know. It's out there like it's official.

[14:00] John: Yeah, the prelude comic is.

[14:03] David: They’ve even talked about who's driving the bus on the Absolute line. Scott Snyder. So, I don't know. I feel like maybe it's a done deal.

[14:13] John: Oh, I think it is. I just don't know. I didn't realize it was a degree of which it's officially. The other big Ultimate-style launch that, I guess you could say in the last year or three/four months, has been the Ultimates line at Marvel. A hard reboot of the Ultimate line. The thing that I really was most fascinated with, looking at this, is the contexts for where those came from. What is the motivation? What is trying to get accomplished by restarting these characters from the beginning? I don't know that they match up to each other. I don't know that all of these choices make the same sense. Maybe they all make very different, perfectly applicable senses, but they're different.

[14:52] David: I don’t know what you mean.

[14:53] John: Okay, let me explain. That's what we're here for. So, I don't think I'm talking about a school with this, but my understanding is that the Secret Origin of the Ultimate line, beyond anything else, was that in the year 2000, Fox released an X Men movie, and that was a really big deal, because the 90s had seen the cratering of the comic book superhero movie genre after a huge 1989, when the Batman movie launched. That's probably a whole other thing to go into, of the weird miscalculations that were made, and we have gotten into that a bit, but by the end of the 90s, the superhero movie was not the genre that it has been for the past 20 years or whatever. It's been so dominant. It's hard to remember how weird it was that this is the first superhero team movie. This is the first time you were going to see a bunch of superheroes on the screen at the same time, outside of Sky High or something, where it was not real superheroes. They weren't superheroes who we were already familiar with from somewhere else. They weren't characters that already had a cartoon and already had 30 years of comic book history.

[16:00] David: You know what they did have that have though, John. I feel like you're just dismissing Sky High outright, because what they did have was Kurt Russell, and that's really all you ever need.

[16:12] John: They did not have Kurt Russell. Every movie that doesn't is a bit poorer for that. That would have been good. What if they made the X Men movie but had Kurt Russell playing all the roles?

[16:22] David: Can you imagine Kurt Russell as Logan?

[16:23] John: Sure.

[16:25] David: and Jean Grey? Storm sounds funnier.

[16:29] John: I'm going to blow them away. If Kurt Russell had delivered those lines. Just straight up playing, Kurt Russell wearing the costume and having white hair. That's all. Nothing untoward.

[16:46] David: I’ve got to digress a bit. We were talking about Monarch, the Godzilla TV show, and I was saying how I just thought it was okay. I think we were talking about I hadn't watched all the episodes. I will say, though, the thing that makes it slightly better than Okay, as soon as Kurt Russell shows up on screen, the TV show instantly gets better, and I'm saying that not joking at all. He immediately brings, I don't know what it is, a je ne sais quoi. I don't know. His presence in the show just instantly makes the whole thing better, and I don't know, I think that's because of his talent as an actor, and just as a dude, as a celebrity and a personality. He's a big deal in the show. So, when he shows up, I don't know, the show instantly is more fun, for me, when he's on there. So, I'm only saying it half-jokingly, “Sky High just needed Kurt Russell and didn't really actually need anything else.”

[17:44] John: There you go, but it also wasn't a massive hit that changes the face of movies forever. The X Men movie is probably the biggest thing that happened to the X Men, really, ever. Again, it's weird to say that now, but at that time, that was just such a such a cultural shift. Marvel stealth reentering the superhero genre with the Blade movie, which definitely falls in that category, except there wasn't a superhero genre of movies, really, those couple years earlier, and it was a cool action horror movie. Blade did it first, to be fair, but by 2000, the Matrix had really solidified, “You're going to dress in black leather and look cool, and that's rad,” Even though the Matrix, by the end of the first Matrix movie, Neo takes off and starts flying, you're like, “Oh, this is a superhero thing.” So, X Men took a lot of cues from that.

Also, another thing to set your Wayback Machine to and think about is, in the year 2000, there was a magazine called TV Guide, that was a super important magazine. For our younger viewers, listeners, it's going to blow your mind, but what you did was you bought a magazine at the grocery store, and it told you everything that was on TV on every channel for a whole week, and they had the regional listings, but then they had the national. The same feature articles and sections would be in the TV Guide throughout the entire country. This is a magazine that pretty much everybody bought, and it was a huge circulation magazine, even up to that point. It's one of the things we tried to explain that they used to have children ride bicycles to distribute news to people.

[19:33] David: Oh, man. Feeling really old right now. I think it's correct for you to describe these things, and it's just, oh, man.

[19:44] John: Well, even for us that were there and that lived, I mean, a good chunk of our lives before the year 2000, it's hard to remember how important something like that was. I don’t mean it was important, everybody was super excited about the next issue TV Guide, but I just mean, if you wanted to know what was on Channel 13 at eight o'clock, you had to have that, or your newspaper would have your TV listings, but it didn't feel as nice. TV Guide was the right size, you’d just have it by your phone. You'd have your TV.

[20:16] David: Your corded phone. That's where it stayed all the time. Okay, we're way off. Sorry. Turning into old man radio. Radio was a thing, guys.

[20:31] John: There was an eight-page X Men comics story. It was in TV Guide, timed to release around the movie, and I believe Claremont wrote it, and I have no recollection who drew it. I don't think I've ever read it, and this is a part where I hope I'm not talking too far out of school, but the internal reception of that comic at Marvel, and I came in several years afterwards, but the internal reception to that comic at Marvel seemed to be “this is incomprehensible,” and if you came in from X Men, you had this great opportunity to transfer a bunch of X Men movie viewers, into X Men comic book readers, and it was just a complicated lore-driven X Men story that didn't match up with what you saw on the screen, and I don't mean to place the blame of that on anybody. I'm sure that was a series of decisions that got made that made sense at the time, but then wound up with a result that wasn't maybe what everybody was looking for, or that enough people at Marvel were looking at and wanting something different. So, that led to the idea of “let's do an X Men comic, Ultimate X Men,” and that wasn’t what they were going to call it at the time. They were going to call it Ground Zero comics, which would have been a disaster the following year.

[21:40] David: Oh, my gosh.

[21:43] John: I think it was Brian Michael Bendis’s wife who was in marketing and stuff, and she was like, “You shouldn't call something Ground Zero because it's got a negative connotation with the zero on it. It eventually became the Ultimate line, but the idea was to do an X Men comic that if you came in from the movie, it was enough like the movie that it made sense. So, they're wearing black costumes, and they're just starting out, and they're young, and going back and starting over as though in the year 2000/2001, the X Men were just forming the way they did in the comics in 1963, and then with Spider Man, it was the same idea, except the Spider Man movie wasn't out yet. So, it was this preemptive “let's make a guess what they're going to do with a Spider Man movie. We know a Spider Man movie is coming. What's going to happen? Peter is going to be young. He's going to be getting his powers in in the early 21st century. He's a nerd. Now, what does that mean?” I believe Bill Jemas wrote up a treatment of it, and they brought in Brian Michael Bendis to write that, Mark Miller to write X Men. Andy Kubert drew X Men and Mark Bagley was on Spider Man.

[22:48] David: I feel like, was it Andy? I think it was Andy. Mr. A Kubert. I think it was Andy because I always liked Adam better of the two, and Andy was always the one that got the higher profile gigs for some reason.

[23:05] John: That was the idea of what the Ultimate line was, a new reader-friendly look, designed for people coming in from the movies, and around that time, superhero movies didn't look like they do now, that you'd had on TV, Buffy, and you had Smallville. Buffy was pretty much a superhero show, and Smallville was absolutely, but they didn't wear costumes, and even when Heroes came out a few years later, the idea of the costumes is still, aside from Spider Man, and then Batman just dresses in black and looks cool anyway, so that's fine, but everybody else, we don't want superhero costumes, and, then let's do full-on superhero costumes. So, that makes sense to me for the way in on that stuff, especially in that logic of the 2000 sales doldrums, like you were talking about, the idea that all the continuity and all the complexity of all the 40/50/60/70 years of storytelling was a barrier to entry on the stuff.

[24:11] David: It genuinely resolved those issues, I think, for a lot of people, because sales on the Ultimate line all across the board were really good out of the gate, and I think they continued to be for a while, and it's interesting that as the weight of continuity started getting layered onto those books, the reason for those books’ existence stopped being the reason, they weren't fulfilling that purpose any longer, and so that's when they started losing their popularity and notoriety. I think there was probably a little bit of a lowering of the level of talent on the books at a certain point, too, because if you look at Ultimate Spider Man, which is Bendis and Bagley for the first 100-plus issues, that book was probably one of Marvel's bestsellers the whole time. I'm guessing it was probably always top 20. It was certainly top 10 in the game for a long time. So, it's interesting, though. How do you capitalize on that?

[25:10] John: Well, what they really did is that the philosophy of the Ultimate line started spreading outside of the Ultimate line. It wasn't just about the lack of continuity. It was also about the cinematic styling of it, and Mark Miller and Brian Bendis write cinematically very differently, but they both write very cinematically, where Mark is really coming in with the high visual, your big moment writing, and Brian was choreographing conversations the way comic book writers used to choreograph fight scenes. He was writing the stuff more like a screenwriter would, where scenes had turns and stuff, and characters would talk things through, but it wouldn’t have an effect on the story, and you'd write the big action stuff, too, of course. The Ultimate Spider Man, famously, doesn't have Peter in costume for issues. I think part of that's the philosophy of superhero costumes are actually a little weird, but then when you started, that era of Marvel started spreading that out further, X Men became a major thing when they relaunched that with Grant Morrison, and again, it was the same thing where they were in non-superhero costumes. They were in uniform, but eventually, Brian Michael Bendis took over writing Ultimate X Men and David Finch was drawing it, and that's the team that took over Avengers for the huge relaunch of Avengers, and by that point, that cinematic visual, big visuals, big high talents style became the main thing at Marvel.

If you put your top three artists on the Ultimate books, you can't spread those same top three artists over 12 titles when that starts spreading out, and now the Avengers have to be that big. Now, the X Men have to be that big, and you could see point by point different titles blowing up. So, yeah, I think it was the combination of 10 years in, you have 10 years worth of continuity. That was definitely going on, and you're right that the talent level couldn't necessarily maintain consistently throughout all of that, and nobody was going to be as consistent as Mark Bagley on Spider Man. He's great. Yeah, eventually, you got to a point where I think the Ultimate line wasn't functioning the way it had before. It wasn't a way in, and it just became its own separate universe that the comics stood or fell on their own merits.

[27:41] David: It no longer serves the purpose that it served. Ultimately, that's what I think. Everything you said makes sense. If the purpose of the line is to clean up, streamline things, and it's got 10 years worth of continuity, that's not streamlining, and I think that's maybe why Miles Morales worked so well is because it was Bendis going back in and doing the same thing, but with all the experience of having done it already, and coming up with the Miles Morales character, and coming up with this idea of, it's still familiar. It's still things that you know, but we're going to push it just a little bit further outside your comfort zone than we did last time and see what happens, and it worked. You get your Miles Morales out of the Ultimate line. If you got nothing else the Ultimate line, you got Miles Morales out, and that's a huge win.

[28:39] John: Oh, absolutely, and you see that that becomes the shining beacon of what the Ultimate line was all about, even though that really wasn't what the Ultimate line is all about, was the Hail Mary pass to save the Ultimate line at the end, and it was great. It touched down. It did it, and they still had to close it down at the end. It was like, “Well, why do we have this one comic that works, and then these other comics” that, again, not detract from the merits of any individual comic because there were some good stuff being published then, but none of it was having the the huge cultural impact, and then it was also just separated from mainline Marvel Universe, which was selling Ultimate numbers at that point. There were definitely years where the Ultimate books just outsold the Marvel books, flat out, but they quickly changed, and full credit to Joe Quesada and Dan Buckley, and everybody at Marvel, Bill Jemas, and everybody that did all this stuff. They all made this thing work and then broke it by making the other thing work.

[29:42] David: That's a good way to put it.

[29:44] John: That's where it gets weird for me. This idea of the Absolute line and DC launching a line of comics, that I'm curious what the purpose of it is, because I have no idea what the DC continuity is. I don't even mean that in a negative way. I enjoy a whole lot of DC books right now. I read I think probably a Batman comic every week. At least, every two weeks, and they range from “this definitely is not the same Batman that's in the ongoing Batman series” to “I have no idea if this is the same Batman,” and the thing that really blows me away is there's no tying it to a movie reality because DC just made an Aquaman movie that they cut out film scenes of two different people playing Batman, neither of whom were the guy playing Batman in the ongoing Batman film series, who also is not the person who's playing Batman in the new relaunch of Batman. There are a couple other times that Marvel would do this. When they knew the Iron Man movie was coming out, in Marvel Studios is putting out, we didn't know what the Iron Man movie was going to be, but you could make guesses and it would be like, “he's probably not going to fight mystical villains. He's probably going to be fighting technological villains.” All these things.

So, Matt Fraction pitched an Iron Man series at one of the retreats that was exactly hitting the things that you were like, “well, this is probably what a movie version of Ironman is going to be.” It's an interesting new take on it. It's not just a thing the movie style, it’s just doing the same thing that movie would have to be, which is “what makes this character work? What makes that work in the present day? How can we make this modern but still reflect the character?” All those logical things, and it isn't so much that I don't think that they'll do a good job on the Absolute line. It might be absolutely spectacular, but it already has seeds that destroyed the Ultimate line already exist. There are about 50 really good Batman comics that come out every year already. There's no easier barrier to entry to pick up the Rafael Grampá Batman comic. It's already that, so I don't know. I'm curious what they're going to do with it, but I don't know. What do you think about all that nonsense?

[32:07] David: I'm with you. I think, once again, we're sharing a mind on this. I'm so confused by current what is within the DC Universe and what is not? I'm just like you. I feel like editorially or narratively, DC abandoned the idea of trying to have a really tight, cohesive, shared universe. They went “we've got a tight, cohesive, shared universe until we don't, until we want to do DC versus Vampires, and then we're a horror comic book company for a month or two.” I'm okay with that. I want to see Batman fighting vampires again. Kelly Jones did it before, I think, but we'll try it again. Even if Kelly Jones didn't do it before, he drew it like he did and so I always think the Kelly Jones version of Batman is a vampire book. Is that weird?

[33:03] John: No, they did the Batman turns into a vampire series. That was Elseworlds, Red Rain or something?

[33:11] David: Yeah, but he was on the main line for quite some time, on the main Batman book for quite some time, too. I just always think of that as Dracula Batman. Kelly Jones’ Batman was always Dracula Batman, even when he's not. Anyway, what was I talking about? Oh, yeah. Anyway, DC has got a lot of different versions, which for me as a consumer, I'm into it. I like it. I like having a random Beast World miniseries going across a bunch of books and wild continuity, where suddenly Beast Boy’s the biggest deal in all of comic books. Okay, sure. Let's try it. It seems like they keep just rebooting. Every year, they reboot. Maybe this is their attempt at bringing some cohesion back to their reboots and refocusing somehow on a more tightened continuity. The super speculator in me is like, “okay, is this like the James Gunn universe of DC Comics, where they're going to be working, not hand in hand with James Gunn, but they're going to know what James Gunn is trying to pull off, and they're going to follow that lead, so essentially do what the original Ultimate lines was trying to do, which is create content that better aligns with the movie so that when you come out of a movie theater, and you're excited about superhero comic books for the first time, there's a version of Batman or Aquaman or the Justice League, the James Gunn version is the version that you get to read when you go to the comic bookstore?” I think that might be just totally speculating what this might be about, which I think, that makes good sense to me. Go do that.

[35:04] John: I guess so, except all this stuff has been so movie-fied. We've seen so many of these different Batman movies. I mean, I generally enjoy Batman movies, but they're not that different. The Matt Reeves take on Batman isn't like, “Oh, man, I never thought of that watching the Christopher Nolan Batman.” The joke I always make is that bit Michael Keaton movie, he pulls off the mask and he doesn't have the black eyeliner on that you can see that he's wearing when he has a mask on. Well, the Matt Reeves movie asks, “What if he did?” Which is cool, and I enjoyed the movie. I like goth Batman wearing eyeliner or listening to Nirvana. That's cool. You did have this thing, up through the 2000s. Batman looks like Batman. I mean, you wouldn't send an artist, I would imagine, you wouldn't send an artist “here's the specific reference saying how long Batman's ears are, how long the blades on his gloves are.” You’d get the Kelly Jones one where he's got three-foot long ears, and it would be right next to somebody else drawing two-inch tall ears. I mean, even Dark Knight Returns has stubby little ears, and that's within three years of Dave McKean doing Arkham Asylum, where he's just a shadow, and the ears are infinitely long, depending on the angle.

Now, there's a Batman costume that has a specific emblem, that has a specific number of buckles on the shoes. Presumably, to one degree or another, that's what they're drawing, and the style of those costumes are influenced by the style of movie costume is picking up on comic book costumes and picking up on the Brian Hitch style of drawing realistic costumes from the early 2000s. How do you make these things more like a movie? But also, the thing that I don't know, I ramble on about a lot. When I walk out of DC Batman movie or DC Justice League movie, I'm more likely to want to watch another superhero movie, of which there are more than I will ever watch. I wish there was more content just like this that I could pay a lot more money for. I think that's that's tricky. This is a total straw man argument we are building to be opposed to a line that neither of us have anything against, and I think we'll probably like. Scott Snyder setting up. Okay, that's rad. That's neat. DC also has a history of doing stuff that's vaguely sounded Ultimate-ish, but absolutely didn't turn out to be that way, like the All-Star Line with All-Star Batman and All-Star Superman. That seemed like that was going to be an Ultimate competitor when it when it launched.

[38:08] David: yeah, good point.

[38:10] John: And it wasn't, and I don't know that it was intended to be.

[38:18] David: I think that might be it, and I applaud this. I think DC doesn't have any, what's the word? They don't have any precious babies anymore. Anything and everything can get thrown out if it's not performing. Hey, let's do this thing in DC, where Superman gets depowered and gets thrown out into space. I'm not thinking of anything specific when I say that. So, they market push that, and that storyline just doesn't do anything, doesn't have any juice. In the middle of that story, they're like “guess what? He's back. He's got a new costume,” and then that's the next issue. I applaud that. You know what? Hey, if it's not working, why just keep trying? We already did Clone Saga. Let's learn the lessons from the Clone Saga and not do that again, and no one can convince me that just because it's 20 or 30 years later that that thing is good. It's not, and it went on way longer than it ever had any right to, and if somebody at DC was in charge back then, that would have never made it past five issues.

[39:28] John: The thing I remember with Clone Saga, though, at that point, nothing was selling, except Clone Saga and Age of Apocalypse. You dropped into this world where I think even Age of Apocalypse is before that. I mean Clone Saga just sold. Nobody wanted it to go on that long. They had to keep going on that long because it was selling.

[39:44] David: I did not know that. Seriously, Clone Saga sold?

[39:47] John: Yeah, a lot. It's almost like the Arnold Schwarzenegger Mr. Freeze Batman movie. That movie made a lot of money. It wrecked the Batman franchise, and Clone Saga wrecked Spider Man, but it was going, it was generating cash. It's my understanding of it. This is all secondhand.

[40:15] David: Probably get on Comichron and look at look at the sales stats. Oh, that's interesting. I didn't know that. I thought it started strong because Amazing Spider Man was coming off a fairly decent run, from somebody, can't remember who. Didn't Clone Saga come after the Image founders left? Wasn't that right after that? So, they were looking for the thing. You know what, though? I think Tom Lyle was drawing some of that Amazing Spider Man stuff or some of that Clone Saga stuff, and Tom Lyle is badass and does not get enough credit. So, maybe it was Tom Lyle that saved Amazing Spider Man at that point. Rest in peace, Tom. Wow, man, that guy's badass. I got to meet him once. He was fantastic human being on top of that, but his Starman is my Starman, John.

[41:04] John: Oh, the purple. 

[41:07] David: Yeah, the purple-yellow costume Starman. Yeah, that's me. I own original art from that book.

[41:15] John: DC, the Earth-2 line. I don’t know if you remember the hardcover novels.

[41:19] David: Yeah. I didn't remember that until you brought it up, but yeah.

[41:22] John: And that was another Ultimate line. They had some really top talent that was trying to get the format that it seemed things were shifting towards, or that cheap and reasonable to be pursuing, and I am fuzzy when that stopped happening, because I think that went on way longer than I thought it did.

[41:40] David: They were coming out as graphic novels. Those things were all coming out as original graphic novels. So, I’ve got to think that some of those graphic novels got greenlit and were well into production by the time they were like, “Oops, we can't do this anymore,” and so it was cheaper to finish them and put them out than it was to just kill them completely.

[42:00] John: Yeah, I suppose. I mean, I think the last ones are probably the Yanick Paquette and Grant Morrison Wonder Woman. Yeah, it would be weird to not finish that and have that be something.

[42:09] David: Even the Black Label stuff is also another line of that. I guess, they're still doing some Black Label.

[42:16] John: Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think a bunch of Batman stuff.

[42:18] David: Is Grampá’s book Black Label?

[42:21] John: Yeah, that’s Black Label. That's all the stuff that seems like it's where we forget Vertigo was when it first launched or that early days where Sandman mystery theater, and even Sandman took place in the DC universe, and there would be some of the stories that were nebulously part of the DC universe. I feel like Black Label is that. Does it take place in continuity? Maybe. We can figure that out later for some of these. Great example, speaking of Starman, was Golden Age, by Paul Smith. That's an Elseworlds book, but it took place in the DC universe once the Starman series came out. That was the backstory for the province in the Starman series. I think likely it was that, where it's maybe, maybe not. With Grampá’s stuff, obviously, that's totally different. You can tell it's a different character. That's probably going into the weeds here a little too much.

[43:20] David: No, I think we're talking about creation of different universes to find audiences or bring in the same old tired damn superheroes to a new audience.

[43:32] John: The other thing I would suggest, I've been thinking about this, but I think maybe this is only true of Batman and Superman, and maybe that just cast this light on the other DC characters, where I think this is true. With at least a Batman Superman, if you said, what's the basic setup for Superman? I think we would pretty much agree, he's Clark Kent. He's a reporter at The Daily Planet. Lois Lane is his girlfriend, to some degree. She's a reporter at The Daily Planet. So is Jimmy Olsen. Perry White's their boss. Lex Luthor is the big bad guy. Whatever form he takes, he's the main villain for it. Superman also has a fortress of solitude in the north pole. If you don't do that with Superman, you are doing something different than the main version of Superman, and Batman, similar things. He lives in Wayne Manor. Alfred’s the butler. Dick Grayson is or was Robin. The Batcave is underneath there.

[44:27] David: His parents were killed in an alley.

[44:28] John: Yeah, and Joker is the biggest bad guy. If you tried to do that with Spider Man, it is much more ephemeral, and it starts to fall apart a lot faster. Spider Man frequently takes pictures for The Daily Bugle, but not for most of Spider Man's existence, really. He has a lot of other jobs that he does. You've got J. Jonah Jameson, but Betty Brandt isn't an ongoing concern with Spider Man. She's still in the comic. That was the love interest for the first couple years of Spider Man, and the supporting cast changes, and his life. He's in high school and he's in college, then he’s a young guy that’s married man, then he's not married. Never have been, and all these things that we all go through.

[45:18] David: Has a kid, and then he doesn't have a kid.

[45:20] John: Yeah. Digging in with some of the Marvel characters, I can see why having a baseline that matches up with some movie version of it would make a particular sense then, because it's not going to make sense if Spider Man's in high school in the movie and then you go and you read the comic and he's 30 years old, and he's dating a model or married to a model, and he's a scientist, and blah, blah, blah. I don't know. Does that make sense? The iconic versions of Superman and Batman are so iconic.

[45:54] David: What's the need for an Absolute line when it's basically all the Absolute line? I think that's where you're going with it.

[46:03] John: Yeah, or something like All-Star Superman makes more sense for Superman that now you've got this 12-issue Superman story that forever is going to be relevant and readable, or Dark Knight Returns, or whatever. I don’t know if there's anything really there to what I'm saying, but it makes the premise of an Ultimate Universe just strange, in that there are already a bunch of comics that I can read that are going to be similar enough to the movie version of it, unless something radically different happens in the movie, and you're right, they're going to follow that thing in there, but I mean, you don't get Scott Snyder to just follow what James Gunn is going to do.

[46:37] David: No, you don't, but maybe it's a general attitude shift. I really enjoy James Gunn movies. Guardians of the Galaxy came out of nowhere for me and, man, did I love it, and I loved all three volumes. I cried at the end of the of the third one. I don't think I've ever seen a trilogy of movies close out better than the way James Gunn closed out Guardians of the Galaxy. That was a love letter to Guardians of the Galaxy, the ending to that movie, where he definitively ended the story, and at the same time, set up so many potential ideas for new plots for them to take off from. He created a definitive ending, and then these beautiful launch points for Guardians of the Galaxies. There's 13 different movies that you could make that could be Guardians of the Galaxy 4 based on how that thing ended, but at the same time, it got a super satisfying ending. It was incredible, the way he pulled it off. I love it.

The James Gunn sensibility is lighter, it's more fun, it's more in the Marvel manner of storytelling. Heroes have problems and stuff, but in the Marvel Universe, you can take a second to be in awe of what these guys are doing, and there's a sense of joy in that. Whereas, on the DC side, it doesn't seem like you've got that as much. It's a little more of a serious place to live. I'm assuming James Gunn is going to bring a different sensibility, a different style of storytelling, where it is going to have those moments of just sheer joy and happiness, and a little less serious, potentially, because I don't see James Gunn doing another version of the thing. Look at his Suicide Squad. Look at what he did with, I mean, Peacemaker. The Peacemaker TV show is fantastic, and I think that's what you're going to see. I think that's the movies you're going to get from James Gunn in the DC Universe, and that's a different book than the books that they tell in the “main line” right now. So, maybe it's just a simple sensibility, a mind shift, in terms of that, “we're not going to take yourself so seriously.” It'd be interesting to see, John, and I'm glad that we've got all this on recording so that when all this wild speculation that we're making, we can go back eight months from now and look and see how wildly wrong we were about all of it.

[48:59] John: I didn't know we were recording a commercial. I guess, my mind wandered.

[49:07] David: Speaking of going dark, I think I just did. 

[49:09] John: The other part is that Marvel did just relaunch the Ultimate line a way very different from what the original Ultimate line was, which is the Ultimate Reed Richards had become a villain in Hickman’s comics, and Jonathan Hickman came back and had that character traveling in other universes, sabotaging the births of superheroes, so that didn't happen, and then some heroes undid that. So, superheroes did become superheroes, but Peter Parker gets bitten by the radioactive spider when he's married and has kids, and he's in his 30s, or however old he is, and it's setup like that. That one's fascinating to me. Just trying to wrap my head around why some of these things exist, which is what we've been talking about the whole time. I mean, that idea that there are a lot of Spider Man fans our age. We're around same age as Hickman. We can read the teenage Peter Parker and remember when we were teenagers because that was a big key part, but the teenagers in our lives are our children and having, “well, what if I was Spider Man?”

[50:14] David: and it worked.

[50:15] John: Yeah, well, I mean, it's selling great. I was trying to get caught up on everything last night, but I decided to watch the sign episode of Bluey, and then fall asleep. Hell of an emotional rollercoaster. I'm unclear what differentiates Ultimate Black Panther from just a take on T’Chala in the Marvel Universe right now. It seems solid but it isn't like “here's the weird radical difference that there is with Spider Man,” and then Peach Momoko’s X Men is entirely its own creature and that is the one that justifies its own existence by its own existence. That is not the take of X Men you're going to find other places. So, this is a unique take on X Men.

[51:05] David: Here's X Men by somebody who's never read X Men. I love it. I'm sure she's a fan. She can't possibly not be a fan of superhero comic books, just given her track record, but I am excited about that book. I'm shocked that Marvel went that direction. I guess, I shouldn't be because I know that Peach’s covers just sell like gangbusters, but that has got a reason to be out there because it's wildly different from anything else.

[51:34] John: Yeah, but it is weird that there are two comics in there that are tonally very similar to each other with Spider Man and Black Panther, in terms of the art style, writing style, they’re of a piece. X Men is not. Far from a slam on any of it.

[51:57] David: I think this is exactly the thing that needs to happen in the industry. We need a kick in the pants. The industry in this, I don't know what the sales are like, but when I hear things aren't as great as they were or whatever, it's not the rosiest picture, and it's like, “man, well, what's going to do that? Peach Momoko doing an X Man that you've never seen before,” because there's tons of people that are fans of hers, and there's tons of people who are heavily influenced by manga and anime, and she's right in that mix with the way she's telling her stories and her art style. So, why not give that a shot? Yes, please do, and me, as a longtime fan of Marvel, DC, I'm loving it, too, but I'm excited by that sort of thing. I'm excited. Ultimately, I don't think we're pooh-poohing the Absolute line. I think we're questioning why, but ultimately, I'm excited about it. I'm excited for throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, and I've certainly thrown a lot of money at that stuff along with probably a lot of other people, just to see, is this going to be the one that I'm going to enjoy? Is this the new fun rollercoaster ride that I get to jump on here early? Spider Boy, as an example.

[53:09] John: Yeah. It actually took me a while, though, to parse out what the premise of that Ultimate Spider Man comic was. I understood what's happening on the page. Three issues in, and I was like, “oh, that's what it is. If I got bitten by the spider,” because there is that part that's like the character in Spiderverse. It's Peter Parker in Spiderverse. He’s a guy in his 30s. He’s got kids, or he's like Tobey Maguire in the last Spider Man movie that Tobey Maguire was in, or that idea of there being a middle-aged Spider Man, or he's like Peter Parker in the Marvel Universe, and they're about the same age. It isn’t some radical difference the way “oh, my god, Peter Parker is 16 years old, but he's 16 years old in 2000, and that means he's not wearing a pocket protector and a vest. It means he's wearing a shirt over a t-shirt, and his haircut just looks like he watched too much anime in the late 90s.” That was radical because you hadn't seen that. You didn't have a bunch of versions of it. Now, there's nothing to versions of Spider Man and it's harder to be impactful with that. Although, again, like you said, it's selling well, and the Peach Momoko stuff, again, is the one that's a different version of X Men than you're going to find anywhere else right now.

[54:23] David: I think people are more excited about middle-aged Spider Man, though.

[54:25] John: Okay. I am, too. I like the comic.

[54:28] David: I mean, I personally am more excited about Peach Momoko. I personally am more excited about the new fresh hotness. What does that new interesting artistic voice that's coming out and doing something wildly different, or just doing or mixing the pieces in a way that I haven't seen before? I feel like Peach is doing that. I think Hickman with Spider Man is doing a little bit of that, but it is a lot more familiarity. I think it's working well because of that. It's comfort food, and it's also showing a version of Spider Man, I think people can relate to. The audience that's buying comic books, the audience is going to a comic bookshop, probably in their 40s, maybe 50s. I don't know that there's a lot of young people, younger than 35, that are making weekly trips to a comic store these days. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems like the audience is older, and so of course, they want to see somebody who looks like them in the comic book. A little older and has the same problems.

Also, what Spider Man was, that's what Spider Man has been the whole time. It's just that Spider Man wasn’t allowed to age with the rest of us, and so when comic books got into this weird space, of a constant turnover every three years, it started keeping the audience, and the audience started aging out, but it was still the same audience, and it wasn't refreshing. That makes perfect sense for us to have a version of Spider Man like this, that is, again, catering to the existing audience. Why not? Why wouldn't you do that? I think it's really smart, and I’m into it. I think the Spiderverse Peter Parker is just delightful, and they really do a great job with both those movies. He's a great character. He's got fun roles, and he's got a lot of heart, and they really play it well. So, why wouldn't I want to see that in my comic books as well?

[56:16] John: Yeah. All right. Well, thank you all very much for joining us here on The Corner Box. We will be back next week, and remember, kickstarter.com for Signa, and then also, whatever David does. Super Kaiju Rock N Roller Derby Fun Time Go.

[56:34] David: Yeah. You could just type in Super Kaiju. That works, too. Another delightful conversation, John. Thank you so much.

[56:41] John: Thank you. I will see you here next week on The Corner Box.

[56:44] David: Bye, everybody.

[56:45] John: Bye.

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