Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock, and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential, and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art, and business of comics, and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.

[00:28] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome to The Corner Box. I’m one of your regular hosts, David Hedgecock. With me, as always, is my very good friend,

[00:35] John Barber: John Barber.

[00:36] David: Hey, John. How’re you doing, buddy?

[00:38] John: Healthy. How are you?

[00:40] David: I'm not so healthy. Man, I feel sorry for everybody listening this week. My voice is just a big scratching board.

[00:46] John: Put your masks back on, everybody.

[00:49] David: It's not Covid, John. It's not Covid. It's Flu A, whatever that means. I'm telling you, John, I have not been this sick in a very long time.

[00:57] John: I'm sorry to hear that.

[00:58] David: I got wiped out. I think I lost 10 lbs., which is actually not a bad thing. I didn't eat for 3 days. I couldn't eat. I was feeling miserable. I was just laying in bed, sleeping. I had a fever. I don't even know how bad the fever was, but not as hot as the fever that I have for comic books, John, and that's what I was doing when I was lucid and awake. I was reading.

[01:20] John: Wow. One of my fondest memories is me being really sick—So, I used to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then I stopped, when I was a kid, literally just as it got good in Season 3. So, a decade ago or so, my daughter was—It was probably about 10 years ago—I was finally watching all of them, and I get really sick, and I'm watching the season finale, where it's revealed that Picard's been turned into a Borg, and Riker says, “Fire.” It's the Battle of Wolf, whatever it is, Wolf [359], or whatever, that becomes the inciting incident for Deep Space Nine, which I was a big fan of and I had watched all of. All the Federation ships are gathered, all the Borg are there, and like I said, Riker says, “open fire on the Borg ship that's got Picard.” Cut to the end of the episode. Ordinarily, you have to wait months, if you'd been watching it live—obviously, I have it on Netflix. I’m ready to watch it right away […] if I'm sick. So, I go, and I lay in bed, and fever dream that I'm in the battle of Wolf [359] for 8 hours.

[02:19] David: That's amazing. You win.

[02:21] John: Nobody won the battle of Wolf [359], man. Mrs. Sisko, Jake's mom.

[02:28] David: The comic book industry is not winning right now.

[02:30] John: Yeah, it’s rough. It’s interesting to see what the fallout of Diamond is in all of its intricacies, and while we're recording this now, a bunch of publishers have announced pauses on projects, while this is sorted out, and probably, most disturbingly, the IDW annual report, shareholders report, indicated that Penguin Random House was going to pass the debt that they were owed by Diamond on to the publishers, which could be devastating—not just IDW, but IDW, honestly, having no inside knowledge on this, is probably one of the better positioned publishers for that. There's probably a lot of other publishers where that could just be really devastating.

[03:16] David: Yeah. I mean, you’ve got to think that, of that 9 million, IDW might have a 15% stake hold in something of that amount. So, it's a meaningful amount of money, but you and I don't work for IDW anymore, but reading the financials, you can see, they seem like they would be positioned well enough to weather that storm, but it's still a meaningful amount of money, and I don't know, maybe the IDW folks are just going to use that as the excuse to just close up, and just call it a day.

[03:44] John: Earlier today, as we were here, they announced four TV shows they were at different stages of development or production, and that seems like a timed announcement, to “but wait, no. Hey, we're okay.” Hopefully, they are okay, and also, a willingness to fight.

[04:00] David: So, you and I are talking about a bleeding cool article that came out just recently, and the bleeding cool article was a little, what would you say? Salacious in its headline of IDW closing down. It does say the statements made by IDW in those financial disclosures do say something to the effect of, “hey, this could really hurt us,” but reading further, it looks like it's a storm they can weather, and it does look like somehow they’re still operating at a loss, but the loss that they're operating at is half what it was a year ago. So, it seems like they're continuing to maybe right the ship. Maybe they’ll eventually be profitable again. So, yeah. They've just announced four new TV shows. I'm not worried about them, but the reason why it's interesting to me, John, is because IDW is one of the only publicly traded comic book publishing companies where you can actually see stuff like this. So, that's what makes IDW interesting, and why it's a talking point for so many, I think, and why IDW gets a level of scrutiny on the financial side that others don't, because Boom!’s not disclosing, Marvel and DC, they're folded into some mega corporation where none of that stuff's getting disclosed, in a way that's meaningful, or that you're understanding, but IDW’s financials are disclosed in a way that, “okay, this is exactly what these guys are doing. This is how they're doing.”

So, it's interesting for them to note that, “hey, this is a meaningful thing,” and when they say, “PRH is going to pass that loss on to the publishers,” well, maybe IDW can weather that storm, but how many other publishers can suffer a loss of $100,000/$200,000? It's dire, man. It's a little more dire, just on that alone—That part of the news alone, to me, was a lot more dire than I had originally thought this all was going to be.

[05:50] John: Yeah. Apparently, PRH is owed the most of any Diamond client, going into the bankruptcy, and I hadn't thought about that like that. It seemed like a company like IDW would have been looking at it like, “well, we dodged the bullet. We avoided this. We got out of here several years ago now.” I think it was the second publisher to go over there, third publisher—I forget the order, because I was there. So, I knew it was in the works before it was announced, but I don't know, man. This is maybe a conspiracy hat moment of this thing, but what we were talking about with Kirt the other week, about distribution, about PRH having a comic book publisher now, especially one that competes for licenses with other clients of PRH, you can see someone putting the screws on the other companies, if that's the case. The financial report from IDW was pointedly unclear about the situation. It wasn't just like it wasn’t clear. It was noting the lack of clarity about the deal, and that this is initial actions, or initial whatever.

[06:58] David: I do think it does state, in that article, that contractually, PRH can pass that loss on, and you're right, John. I hadn't thought about that. Of course, they're going to pass it on to their competition. Of course they are.

[07:13] John: Yeah.

[07:15] David: Because, you know what's going to make Boom! really explode in the next couple of years?

[07:21] John: Ninja Turtles and Star Trek?

[07:23] David: Them getting Ninja Turtles and Star Trek.

[07:26] John: Yep. Sonic and Godzilla. I want to make it clear, this is all this conspiracy hat stuff, from my point of view. There is also the reality that Penguin Random House Distribution is a different part of the company than publishing, and from experience, that does not necessarily mean that these two parts of a company are working in concert with each other, going pretty […].

[07:47] David: From experience, yeah.

[07:48] John: There's at least one major company that I know of that any deal between two branches of that company internally was a million times harder than any branch in an external partner, because those internal partners are competing for the same resources within the company, and it's better for a TV branch for publishing to do badly, so the TV branch looks better, in comparison, and that's not really the case, if you're teaming up with somebody else. There actually is a market force that plays the opposite way, and it makes it that the distributor is going to want more clients—not just the ones that are owned by their parent company.

[08:24] David: Yeah, that's a very good counter to the argument that you started. You have proposed the argument and countered yourself, as well. Well done, John. I'm very proud of you today. Man, we should just end the podcast right now. You just threw two little gold nuggets of thought there. I think we should just be like, “thanks, everybody. We're going home.” Fascinating. It's going to be interesting. IDW's bread and butter, for the most part is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and I think IDW has done a really good job of servicing that brand over the last 10/15 years. So, not only do you have the recent success of Last Ronin, and some of the spinoffs of Last Ronin, you got a really rock-solid 150 issues worth of Turtles by Tom Waltz and various artists, and Kevin Eastman, going back several years, and Sophie Campbell, yes, of course, and man, if I was a publisher with any amount of backing, I would spend everything getting that license.

[09:24] John: Yeah. I think that's one of the best licenses you could possibly have right now—is Ninja Turtles. Genuinely, no offense to other licenses, or other things, but that's a brand that has reinvented itself enough times over the years that there are fans of every age. Everybody knows what it is, from 5-year-olds to 40-year-olds, to 70-year-olds, in a general sense, and then the specifics of it being a comic book thing to start with. So, there's a lot of love for it in comic books. The only thing holding back, I think, that license is just how well IDW has always done with it over the years. This recently has been the biggest move IDW's done, which was bringing in Jason Aaron and a bunch of bigger-name artists to work on the series, when it had always been Tom Waltz, who's great. Friend of the show, Tom Waltz, especially in the Ninja Turtles community, probably 3rd to Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, in terms of brand recognition and love of the guy. He's literally somebody that, above the fold on an Amazon entry, if he writes a video game, they tell you, he wrote it. You don't see that in video games very often, if it's not George RR Martin, or something.

The thing another publisher would do, would be bring in a really big comic book writer, bring in a really big comic book artist, put them on there, and that's what IDW did, and did two tremendous sales, and Jason's great. I love the guy. The artists seem super good. I'll be honest, I’ve not been following all the comics, but I like the concept of it. The biggest thing preventing it from being like Transformers at Skybound is just how big IDW just made it. IDW just blew it up to being the biggest it's ever been there.

[11:03] David: So, the reason why we're talking about Turtles and Turtles license acquiring is because IDW has basically just floated the balloon that this might take them out. So, if IDW goes down, it's ready-made. You're going to swoop in and be the conquering hero. You're going to be the company that saved Turtles from oblivion, from temporary oblivion, or whatever that is, and you wouldn't have to potentially do a damn thing. Just Issue #7 by Jason Aaron and his team show up on your publishing schedule, you're just rolling, and then that sweet back-issue catalog money just starts rolling in, because you start reprinting and republishing all that stuff. I don't know if the independent publishing community, the heads of some of these other companies, I don't know if they're champing at the bit to get their hands on Turtles, but they should all be trying to take that away from IDW, or take that from IDW’s cold, dead hands, whatever comes to pass. I'm not wishing that on IDW, at all. As always, I am rooting for people over there. There are still people there that I admire, and I definitely want to see them have success.

[12:14] John: And Bobby Curnow, the editor of the series from Issue #1 through, I don't even remember, 130-something, very far into it—he was the editor as long as either of us were there. It started, I think, before either of us were there. Now, Editor-in-Chief there. Obviously, there's a lot of love with Turtles, and a lot of—yeah, I think he was well-liked.

[12:35] David: It's in good hands, with him paying attention to it, I think. I agree.

[12:38] John: When Last Ronin came out, and it was the bestselling comic when it was coming out, I always thought that that painted a big target on Ninja Turtles that hadn't been there before. It was probably IDW’s consistently bestselling book for a good run. For a while, it was Transformers and Turtles. Eventually, it was just Turtles, but they weren't set-the-world-on-fire numbers. They were solid numbers. They were very good. Everything added up to it being great, but it wasn't like--

[13:08] David: […] was just super rock-solid.

[13:11] John: Right, but then when Last Ronin starts selling 100,000-plus, at whatever it was, $9 or $8, or whatever, that's going to make people take notice, especially when it's not a gigantic creative team. Everybody on there was very good, but it was a Moneyball thing, aside from Kevin Eastman, who is on there. There were artists better than they had, not the reputation for, but they weren't Wizard Top 10 artists. That idea of putting big names on it, that always seemed like that could blow it up into the stratosphere, which it did, and you're right. The back catalogue of that is extraordinary. When you think about what the back catalogue of Ninja Turtles entails, in terms of very good comics from different time periods, there’s a lot. There’s 41 years now of always-pretty-good comics. The worst it gets is “that's all right.”

[14:14] David: The thing that Tom Waltz and Kevin Eastman did with their run was tie it all together. So, you've got this unifying series that ties it all back in and makes all of it relevant. Not that it's specifically set in continuity, but it all matters, because it's relevant in some way, shape, or form. It’s quite a back catalogue. Just the back catalogue itself is worth millions of dollars, in my opinion. You could mine that for years.

[14:46] John: Yeah, and this is a probably a worthwhile thing to think about, in terms of, let's say, back catalogs that were worth a whole lot four or five weeks ago, that are now, let's say-- as much as, there’s Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, Ninja Turtles is so much bigger than them. I'm not suggesting anything about anybody, at all, but there isn't a “well, here's one thing that could go wrong and ruin the whole thing.” Not even a Harry Potter-type situation. Yeah, Kevin's very involved in it, but it wasn't like—It seems bulletproof.

[15:22] David: Yeah. I do think Kevin Eastman himself, if something untoward happened to him, or something was found out, that he was doing, that was unsavory, which—that's not going to happen—that's not who Kevin is, but that might be a close one, because I do think Kevin is an ambassador for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and is a guiding light for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I still think he is that, in a lot of ways.

[15:46] John: But Seth Rogen produced the movie. There’s all this stuff. There's other people out there talking about it.

[15:52] David: I think that would be the closest, and I don't think it's close enough. I agree. I think you're right. I think it's about as bulletproof a property as you can probably find out there. Again, we're just messing around, speculating. We're not wishing ill on anyone, but if the Turtles license was available in 2025, for some reason, who do you think would pick it up?

[16:12] John: Again, this is something with no inside knowledge. I have no idea if anybody else was trying to do it. There was a renewal, I believe, not long after I left IDW. I couldn't talk about it if I did know about it, but I don’t. So, I literally just don't know if anybody was doing anything. That's one I could see Marvel going for. What would be cooler than actually having that really be what happened after Daredevil got hit with the mutagen?

[16:44] David: Yeah, that was pretty fun. Who owns Turtles? Viacom? I mean, it's Nickelodeon […] Viacom. Would Viacom give it to Disney to play with like that?

[16:55] John: That's a really […]. I hadn’t really thought about it.

[16:57] David: I don't know, but that's my first inclination. Marvel would eat that up. Marvel would be potentially one of the people with enough budget to back up the brink’s truck and actually make it happen, too. I could see DC doing it, too. I think Jim Lee's not afraid to go out on a limb for stuff like that. He’s shown a willingness to try stuff like that. Not recently, but historically. You've seen him do stuff like Warcraft. He's done a couple of movie-related things. He’s been out there, trying. I don't know why I think this, but I feel like he might have a bit of an affinity to the material, or maybe he just likes Kevin Eastman. I’m not sure.

[17:37] John: Well, his sister used to run the brand.

[17:40] David: Oh, yeah, right.

[17:42] John: At Viacom, Linda Lee […] in charge of—

[17:42] David: I forgot about that. That's right.

[17:48] John: She's at Hasbro now. He drew a Ninja Turtles cover for a ComiCon program a few years ago. So, yeah, no, I would definitely see that, and there's the tie that the Ninja Turtles are in, there's a video game tied to it. I am forgetting now—the Turtles are in Injustice, the DC fighting game.

[18:08] David: Oh, okay.

[18:09] John: There was a Turtle's DLC you could get. So, you could fight as the Turtles. So, that wouldn't be totally unprecedented, going in that direction with a DC thing.

[18:18] David: I would genuinely be shocked if Marvel or DC weren't the first ones to step up to try to grab it. I think this is an 8-figure deal. I think it could get up there.

[18:27] John: Yeah, it's probably one of the only ones that really could get up there. Yeah, any conspiracy stuff aside, I could see Boom! going for it, too, because that would be a big PRH thing.

[18:41] David: Yeah, for sure.

[18:43] John: I can also see them really pivoting, if I were Viacom, the way that that works, and doing a big push via Scholastic, or something, doing more of that kind of thing, but you are left with millions of dollars in sales on a back catalogue that, if you don't have a publisher for that back catalogue, that's real money for a publishing branch of even a big company. It isn’t like when we did the Clue comic, and probably made hundreds of dollars for Hasbro. That was a cool opportunity, it expands the brand, or whatever, but the Ninja Turtle stuff is just flat out, “Well, there's a bunch of money.”

[19:26] David: I love that Clue comic book we made.

[19:28] John: Both of them are good.

[19:29] David: What was the other one?

[19:30] John: Paul Allor [...] Dash Shaw did one.

[19:32] David: I edited the Dash Shaw one, but I don't remember the Paul Allor one.

[19:36] John: Oh, it must've been Bobby editing that. Yeah, Dash Shaw. They’re both good. I’ve got Dash Shaw’s new book sitting next to me. I haven't read it yet.

[19:46] David: Yeah, I heard good things about it. I haven’t talked to that guy in quite a while, but I hope he's doing well, and I want to pick up his new work. I love his work.

[19:56] John: Yeah. Agreed.

[20:00] David: Well, John, that's all I’ve got. What’ve you got?

[20:01] John: Okay, so, continuing on with troubling things about comics, and you seem to have a robust opinion about this, not being super big, but the other thing I think a lot of publishers are worried about right now is tariffs, and the possibility of a Kirt Burdick scenario coming true. Sorry, Kirt was talking tariffs when he was on here, but that genuinely is that weird possibility of “well, what if everything started costing twice as much?” We probably covered that pretty--I started saying that, and then I remembered, we talked about that a lot with Kirt.

[20:32] David: Man, Kirt just went on a tear with that. It really was out of nowhere, but yeah, I mean, I think what Kirt said, at the end, talking about that, was something that I agree with. For better or worse, I think the administration's trying to use that, is trying to weaponize that, in some ways, to just hold it over other countries’ heads, to try to gain whatever, points, or whatever we want from them. I don’t think there's going to be much, if any, tariffs actually enacted, because I think the actual effect of that, as you say, it could really hurt the comic book industry. A 25% increase in printing costs would result in a meaningful increase in the cost of comics, really rapidly.

[21:24] John: Currently, […] a viable same-cost alternative somewhere else.

[21:29] David: No, there just does not. People will be taking Sharpies, and changing the price on the covers of comics. It would change so fast. Here's the thing about that, though. I don't know. Politics. Whatever. Here's the thing about it that is a little frustrating, to me. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think that the people in comic books are—I don’t know. We're not placing a value on the things that we're doing. The stuff that we're doing is really hard. It takes a lot of people a lot of time to do it, and to only charge $5 for that, or $4 for that, it’s an incredibly reasonable price. Now, if you're not into that sort of thing, then fine. Find your entertainment somewhere else. Get it free. A lot of people are obviously doing that, but for me, I'm fine paying $5 for a comic book, because I understand, if you're giving me a quality thing, if there’s something I'm into, I’m into it. I'll give you $5. Great, because I know that everybody in that line of people that are getting that comic book into my hand, they're not doing it, sitting there going, “ha-ha-ha. We're going to gouge him for—we're going to charge $5 on this thing. We’re going to make a mint.” That's not what's happening. The margins are thin. You can make more money selling pizza, and the margins in restaurants are crazy thin.

So, I think that the mentality of all that is wrong. There's this weird scarcity mindset within the professional comic book community. There's so much handwringing. It's like, “oh, no. What if we raise the price again, and then we're going to lose everybody.” It is what it is. Find the people that don't mind paying for their entertainment. Instead of trying to go after a customer who's looking for a deal all the time, go after the customer who's looking for quality, and then build quality things. My mindset on this stuff is, I think, very different than what we see in a lot of the other comic book community. I don't want to make cheap things at a cheap price. I want to make really cool things, and then I'm going to charge what I have to charge to make a really cool thing. When you get it, you're going to love it, because it looks great, it reads great, and it's something that can sit on your shelf for a really long time, and you can be happy to have it. Every time you look at it, you’ll be like “man, that's a cool freaking book.” I don't want customers who are like, “oh, I want $0.10 off for that,” or “no, I don't want a bag and board, because I don't want to pay the extra $0.15 for that.” Then, dude, you're not my customer. That’s not the people that I’m looking for. So, I don't know. I think, as a community, the professional community needs to stop in this scarcity mindset, man. Start making cool stuff, and be proud of it, and charge what you have to charge to make that thing work.

[24:14] John: Yeah, I think there's something to that. Comics aren't going to compete with—I don't know even know if that's true. I was going to say, they aren’t going to compete with TV, but it's not like TV is in great shakes right now, either. Maybe this ties in with what you're saying, at some point, but there is a really weird phenomenon that has happened in our lifetimes, where the average cost of a lot of things, in terms of entertainment, has dropped significantly—Music being the prime example—and the industry that got wrecked the most by it, via stuff like Napster, downloads, and especially streaming, where I pay, whatever, $20.00 for my subscription to a music service, and I get everything. I used to spend $50/$60 a week on CDs, but that was 3 CDs. CDs were $15.00. When they were more than, they're like, “well, that's an expensive CD.” When they were less than that, it’s like, “that was a bargain.” That's where they left off. They were probably getting up to $17/$18 when they just dropped off the cliff and stopped existing. Movies and TV went that way, as well, in the sense that the TV industry decided to not have a revenue stream anymore, and just tried to increase stock values, which resulted in where TV is now, which is not as solid as it was a few years ago, let's say, and also, the reality that, if you want to watch every TV show, you're probably paying the same as you were paying for full-cable program, five years ago, but there were a couple of years where it got really cheap.

If I'm subscribed to Disney+, it feels like everything is free. I’m not charged if I watch Encanto and then I decide I want to watch Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I've got them both. I'm not buying Bedknobs and Broomsticks Blu-Ray to watch it, or something, and comics have that, sort of, but that’s not what comics pivoted to. It's still a way that Marvel makes money, having Marvel Unlimited, but that's not the main focus of Marvel, as a publisher, and that's still the unusual thing, is that if CDs had kept getting more expensive, or whatever format—if the next format of CDs had been tangible, if it had been a physical object you were holding, I'm sure those would be $25/$30 each now, or whatever, and the discussion would just be “everything's expensive,” but the fact that comics got more expensive, while other things didn't, where they stayed the same, or got cheaper on the consumer end, is weird, and there’s problems on it, where musicians don't make money selling albums like they used to, and all that. Yeah, I was hoping that’d all tie up into something by the time I got to the end. It does get to the model of smaller unit sales for more unit price, and getting the exact thing that the creator and the consumer both want, and are willing to shell out for.

[27:22] David: Yeah. I just think that if you're chasing the discount, you can't compete with free, and anybody who's looking for a discount can just get online and pirate a comic book, and read it for free, whenever they want, in a variety of different formats, that they can throw on, whatever, however they want it. They can get print-ready files for a lot of stuff. So, I just don't think you should try to cater to that type of customer—not to say that we should dismiss them, entirely. Of course, not. Comic books are a party. Everybody's invited, but the idea that we should be concerned or consumed with the idea that increasing the cost of a comic book $1 would destroy the industry is—what are we doing? We shouldn't be thinking that. We should be thinking about, “let's make the greatest thing ever made, and everyone that wants it is going to buy it.” It doesn't matter what we have to charge to do that. Charge enough to make a reasonable profit, so you can do it again.

I just don't like this handwringing around these potential increases in costs. Yes, it might push some people out of the hobby, because they can’t afford it anymore, and that stinks, but those people don't necessarily leave. They just find other ways to consume this stuff. You get on eBay, you find stuff for 25% off, whatever you're going to do. That's what I do, but the pursuit of the customer who is okay—who's looking for value, not looking for a discount—that's where the discussion should be going, in my opinion.

So, all this tariff and tax stuff, whatever, but it does bring up, in me, the thought, the discussion in my head is more about, well, I want customers who want value. I don't want customers who are worried about a 20% increase, because I want to be making things that they are super into. That's what my entertainment is.

Speaking of being entertained and super into stuff, John, I watched El Santo and the Blue Demon VS the Monsters. I don't think I've ever been more entertained in my entire life. I mean, God bless Kirt Burdick for bringing up the fact that there is luchador films from the 50s and 60s, starring a man named El Santo in a silver luchador mask, which he never takes off—not once in the entire film, John. Nor does his sidekick, the Blue Demon. Dude, have you watched it?

[29:51] John: I haven't watched it yet, no.

[29:52] David: All right, I’ve got to do this really quick, John. El Santo.

[29:57] John: He just put on the mask. He just put on the mask, guys. Shirt’s off.

[30:04] David: So, this flick is great, John. El Santo is just this macho luchador, just cruising around town. He's got a girlfriend. The girlfriend's got a dad. Everything's hunky-dory, and then boom—bad guy monsters show up, and they are ready to kick his behind. It's not super clear why they're wanting to do this, but it has something to do with his girlfriend, who he has to definitely protect, and her father, as well, who he definitely has to protect, and he does so with grace and style. At one point, the Blue Demon gets kidnapped by the mad scientist bad guy, who simultaneously finds the monsters in their environments and brings them out, and they are alive when he finds them, but then somehow, they're all dead, and he reanimates them. So, he controls them all, because he's reanimated them. It is very confusing. I have no idea what happened, but at a certain point—maybe it's because the translation wasn't great. I don’t know—but at certain point, he's finding them, they’re alive, and he's bringing them to himself, the mad scientist is, but then he puts them all in this machine with these little tinfoil hat things on, and he zaps them all, and he says that he has now brought them back to life, and because he's brought them back to life, now they're working for him. It's hard to bring Dracula back to life, John, but it was done.

So, you’ve got Dracula, you’ve got the Wolfman, you’ve got this crazy creature from the Black Lagoon thing that is just hilarious. They call it a Cyclops, but it's also a creature from the Black Lagoon, but it's only got one eye, but it's in the water, sometimes, and sometimes, it's not, and they're really fascinated with this close-up they do of his head. They’ve got this felt and clay, and weird animation thing that they do. It’s so good, John.

So, the Blue Demon gets kidnapped by the mad scientist and the monsters, and the scientist clones the Blue Demon, and then a new Blue Demon shows up, who's being controlled by the mad scientist. So, then the Blue Demon goes and fights El santo. So, there's a big battle, a wrestling battle, and there is no sign of designed choreography for these fights, whatsoever. It is absolutely, they got in the room, and the director was like, “okay. You guys are going to fight. Action!” So good.

So, a very important part of this movie is that the girlfriend of El Santo, he's trying to protect her, he’s very invested in his relationship with this girl, but the mad scientist decides to try to capture El Santo, at one point. So, he takes this girl and tells her, “Hey. Go get El Santo and seduce him, and have him come back.” So, you're like, “that's not going to work. He loves his girlfriend.” He comes of his house, she walks up to him, he’s like, “hey. What's up?” And she's all, “I want a ride,” and he's like, “yeah, you do. Let's get in the car.” He immediately takes her, drives her out into the woods, and starts trying to make out with her, and she's not asking to go to the woods, John. She’s asking for a ride home, and he's like, “I'll take you on a home. Sure, no problem.” Takes her out to the woods, parks his car, and starts trying to make out with her. Thankfully, the monsters show up, at that point. So, the moral dilemma I'm about to be thrown into, about whether El Santo is a hero or not, goes away, because the monsters show up, and then there's a big fight, but man, it was great, John. Fantastic movie. 4 Stars. Couldn't recommend it more. El Santo and the Blue Demon VS, I don't know, whatever it was, the Monsters, or whatever it was. It was great.

[33:59] John: I was trying to figure out which one it was.

[34:01] David: I'll try to put it in the show notes.

[34:03] John: Oh, yeah.

[34:05] David: But it was basically Dracula, Frankenstein, there's some zombies, but the zombies look exactly like Frankenstein. There’s no difference, but there's a difference in how he made them. The zombies have green paint on them, but one particular guy—none of the other ones—the other guys, their green paint stays, but one guy, I think he's just exceptionally sweaty or greasy, and the paint just does not stay on him, man. Every shot, he always starts with full paint, and then the very next shot, half of it’s melted, washed off the side of his face, because he’s sweating through it, or something. I don't know. So, all the zombies are green, except for the one, who's green-ish brown. Sometimes, he’s green. Sometimes, he's not. It's so good, John.

[34:52] John: Santo and Blue Demon VS the Monsters, I believe.

[34:55] David: Yes, that's it. That’s the one.

[34:57] John: Available from our friends at YouTube.

[35:00] David: Fantastic.

[35:01] John: […] a 16mm print of it or--

[35:05] David: No, but I'm telling you, John, see, I would pay for that. I would 100% pay for that. If somebody was like, “hey. The only way you can watch this is through this […],” I would have paid for it, and I would have been happy to pay for it, because I was wildly entertained. So, that's my thoughts on tariffs, John. You legitimately need to watch it. Kirt mentioned something about one vs Dracula. So, I'm thinking there's another one that's different from the one I watched. I am 100% going to be finding some more of these.

[35:38] John: There's a Wikipedia listing of all the movies. There's quite a few of them.

[35:42] David: I was reading up on El Santo himself, and he really was the most popular luchador of his time, super famous, and was the King of the Luchadores for 40 years, or something like that. The film stuff was his second career. He was just doing that on the side, but he's amazing. No one has acted better, with that much stuff on his face, since—who’s the guy that played Green Goblin in Spider-Man?

[36:07] John: Yeah.

[36:09] David: There was a good joke there. I bombed it.

[36:11] John: Okay. I'm excited to check that out.

[36:13] David: On Facebook, for Fun Time Go, we've got a private Facebook, and every Friday, I do a movie-so-bad-it's-good review. This one's going to be right up there. It’s coming soon. I think I burned your brain out on that one.

[36:27] John: Yeah. I don't know. I think I’m a little […].

[36:28] David: You didn't see that pivot, did you?

[36:30] John: No.

[36:32] David: Tax tariffs to luchador films of the 1950s.

[36:35] John: I don't know why I was almost expecting to talk about a 25-year-old Hellcat comic, or something, instead of luchadores.

[36:43] David: Save that for next time, John.

[36:44] John: One thing I did want to throw out, that we mention a bit about, to bring it back into comics and other things that we liked, things that I've been spending my evening reading. I had an almost religious epiphany about how much I like Walter Simonson. I thought I liked him the most, already, that you could, but I don't even understand it. The last week or so, I've been reading the Star Slammers book that IDW put out, that had all the Star Slammer stuff, because I read it when it came out, but rereading Ragnarök, and I liked it when it was out before, but I love that comic, and the reason I wanted to bring it up was because this has come up in the last couple episodes—that idea of, “what do I want veteran creators to be doing?” Something like Ragnarök is exactly it. I wish Ragnarök was one of the bestselling comics in the world, because it's cool and fun, and weird, and challenging, and everything, but it's everything I want from Walter Simonson. The premise of the series is, Ragnarök has happened, all of the Norse gods were destroyed, and somebody reawakens zombie Thor, and zombie Thor is trying to put things right.

It's not the Marvel Comics version of Thor, which Walter Simonsen, of course, is second only to Jack Kirby, in terms of influence on that character, but it's Walter's own version of the Norse version of Thor, with the knowledge that this guy also had a really big run on the Thor comic. It's not superhero-y. It's very Sword-and-Sorcery. Simonson also did a bunch of Elric comics with Michael Moorcock, and it's very Elric-y, which is right up my alley. The art is spectacular. He is so good at storytelling, and just seeing everything come into it, where he manages to pull in scenes that are very Sergio Toppi—we talked about him for a bit—but also ones that are just very Jack Kirby. I don’t mean it's aping that. Just, here's Simonson doing that type of storytelling, and I’ve been just having a great time rediscovering this and reading the whole thing. The way it synthesizes all these things—it’s got enough of a superhero thing that I like that he's doing that, because I think of his superhero stuff. It’s got enough of a European flair to it that like I that that was the influences that he had early on. Just straight ahead, “I'm going to tell a weird story where allegiances shift, and you don't know who's on what side, and grand Norse god sacrifices.” Thoroughly enjoyed it. Beautiful coloring by Laura Martin, and wonderful lettering by John Workman.

[39:20] David: Yeah, that's a good one, John, in terms of holding up “here's what you can do later in your career.” Walt Simonson, I think, has just, in general, been that guy. I don't know if we said this on the podcast, but my feeling is, Simonson is still so relevant and so fresh. When that guy throws something up on Instagram or Twitter, or something, and you see he's working on this giant landscape piece that's, I don't know, seven boards across, and it's just this gorgeous piece of art, that is just so relevant, so fresh, so now, and it's entirely him still, but it just feels so—man, it's impressive how that guy managed to stay modern, and Ragnarök is a perfect platform for that. I agree.

[40:12] John: He's one of the people that, whenever they put him on a retro project, on a Marvel book, or something that's set in—when he was doing X-Factor, or something, I don't know. I don't feel like he belongs there, in that his art, especially when he's writing it, when he's controlling the whole thing, and he's telling the stories in the way he's telling them, it's idiosyncratic enough that the stuff from 30 years ago still works, without feeling as 30 years ago as some stuff does, and the stuff from 10 years ago, when Ragnarök started, to three or four years ago, whenever the last Ragnarök ended, it all feels of a piece of Simonson, more than it does of a piece of the time that it's from, and it has that timeless quality. I mean, it's the difference between listening to a Top 40 band from 1986 versus the Nick Cave album from 1986. The Nick Cave album still sounds like the Nick Cave album. You can tell the influences, but it never sounded like the stuff that was coming out at the same time.

[41:11] David: Yeah. Interesting. That’s a good way to put that, John.

[41:14] John: And also, not trying to say this aimed at anybody, but he is as good as he ever was, if not better. There's not a loss of quality in this. There isn't some part where it’s like, “his line work isn't as good.” It’s like, “man, his line work is good.”

[41:30] David: Yeah. I guess there's that. 100%. It's still 100%.

[41:35] John: That's my luchador movie.

[41:38] David: Join us next time, everybody, when we talk about El Santo and the Blue Demon VS Dracula.

[41:46] John: And the Star Slammers. […] comic that is, by the way.

[41:49] David: You mentioned Hellcat, jokingly, but we're definitely going to talk about it, John. I’ve got some Hellcat stuff I want to talk about.

[41:55] John: Sounds good.

[41:56] David: Thanks, everybody, for coming. Appreciate you. Like and subscribe. Hit that like button. Put something in the comments. We'd love to hear from you. All right. Thanks, everybody. Bye.

[42:04] John: Bye.

Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates, and links at www.thecornerbox.club, and we’ll be back next week with more from David, and John, here at The Corner Box.