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 your host, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is my good friend

[00:34] John Barber: John Barber.

[00:35] David: John Barber. We're doing the second part of a two-part series for you all, called Comfort Comics. We're leaning into all the things comfortable right now. With the world going crazy, I thought it might be fun to talk about some things that are fun and pleasurable. So, we're going to rejoin our podcast, already in progress. All right, John. That's my #2. What do you got?

[01:00] John: Okay, I'm going to go with another blast from the past. They all have to be, to some degree.

[01:05] David: Yeah, I think so

[01:06] John: But Daredevil is, by far, my most recent one of these. The other ones are ones that I was into when I was a kid. Another one that Frank Miller made an impact on, Lone Wolf and Cub, the Kazuo Koike/Goseki Kojima manga series about masterless samurai, turned into a series of movies. I’ve actually never watched the movies.

[01:26] David: I haven't, either. I have the first one saved on my list to watch, and I haven't gotten around to it, even though it's been over a year since I threw it on there.

[01:36] John: Did you ever watch Bob's Burgers, the TV show?

[01:39] David: Yeah, I haven't watched it in a while, but I do like that show when I do watch it.

[01:42] John: They have an ongoing bit, where Bob and Louise are fans of the equivalent of that movie series. They meet the star of the series, and they have a showing at the restaurant.

[01:54] David: Oh, that's cool. The Lone Wolf and Cub, my first real exposure to that, where I actually sat down and started reading it, was when Dark Horse put out those big, thick […]  books, and I don't even know how many there were. There's 20 or 30 of those things, but each one was priced at $10, and it was 200 pages worth of material. Each one was these super thick volumes, and I bought every single one of those, and read every single one, cover-to-cover, and loved every single bit of that story. That is a good one, John, because that's comfort food. That's a big meal, man. That will take a while to get through, but all of it is fantastic.

[02:29] John: Yeah. I started reading it when, I think--was it First Comics that was putting it out?

[02:35] David: Yeah. I think it was First.

[02:37] John: Yeah. 

[02:38] David: With the Frank Miller covers, right?

[02:40] John: Right. It was Miller covers, and it was Sienkiewicz for the second year, or something. So, it was hitting my favorite people. The series was clearly a big influence on Ronin. A lot of Ronin has direct references to that. It’s like that, mashed up with Druillet and Mobius--that merging of the East and West. I was into it from that point-of-view, but this is in the early days of manga. So, they were putting him out in these 64-page, maybe, square-bound comics, each one, reprinting one chapter, but it’s very episodic. So, the chapters pretty much stood on their own. Weirdly, they did not start in the beginning. They skipped a bunch of the early stuff, and started several stories into it, and I drifted off well before that series ended. Other things just got in the way, it got too expensive—Whatever. I remember thinking, at the time, when I went back, and read it, when Dark Horse put out those books you're talking about, that this is the longest I've gone from starting reading a series to finishing reading a series, ever. It was just a 15- or 20-year gap in there, to read this thing.

[03:44] David: How does one get into that series these days? Does Dark Horse even have the rights to that stuff anymore? I wonder how you get into that series these days.

[03:52] John: I thought Dark Horse maybe did. I don't know.

[03:55] David: Maybe they do. I don't know. I don't know how it's being collected these days. I have the full--Well, I don't even know what size that is. The size that Dark Horse put them out in is 1/4 of a sheet of paper--If you folded a sheet of paper down to 1/4 size, or maybe 1/3 of a size--that's what you got. It’s very small. I always wondered--I don't actually know the answer to this--what the original size of the art was in the manga. Was it a standard? What was the size?

[04:22] John: Yeah. So, here's the weird part--and I might not be completely correct about everything--but the format is called Bunkoban, and it's a Japanese format. Apparently, the creators insisted that that's how Dark Horse put it out. It looks like it is still available from Dark Horse. They’ve, since then, put it out in these slightly bigger, just regular manga-sized omnibuses, that are mad thick.

[04:47] David: Yeah, that’s 3 inches thick.

[04:50] John: Yeah, it's over 700 pages now. Dark Horse does that with a bunch of their stuff. I think that’s how Innocent is coming out—as 3 volumes in each one. The way I understand it--I don't know if this still holds true, because in urban Japan, space is at such a premium--permanent collections would be smaller, rather than bigger. So, you could have—this book is so revered that you have this version of it, you can keep on your shelves, and it doesn't take up a depreciable percentage of your apartment in Tokyo.

[05:22] David: Okay, got it.

[05:23] John: Again, I don't know the logic, and that holds true, but that was the philosophy behind it, I guess. It's bonkers, because the art is so nice, so detailed--that's when I want an 11 by 17. The other thing is, again, I'm not sure if this is still like this now, but manga, traditionally, was printed on the worst paper you could find, with the worst printing you could find, and I mean, stuff like that just makes American comics look like they're Taschen books, or something. You pick up a manga, and the color of the paper might change halfway through, and the printing on that stuff--it would be real bad. The manga magazines were basically the same size as an American comic book, and then when they reprinted them, they'd reprint them in that 6 by 9-ish format. The art would be shrunk down, but the printing would be a lot better, in balance. You're seeing it better. So, I assume it was drawn at that same scale, but then the weird little books are--that's the way to read it, because it's the way that exists, but I wish it wasn't. That's the only way I've experienced most of the story.

[06:32] David: Same. Yeah. I've always been curious what it looks like, because the artwork--as you say, it deserves to be really appreciated, and the format that it's in--not that you can't appreciate it, but I certainly feel like if it was larger, it’d be even more appreciated. There's a lot of detail in there that you get, but it looks like--you're holding up that big, thick 700-page omnibus, and that's a more traditional manga size, 6 by 9. So, even that is an improvement, I would think, as long as you're not trying to read stuff in the gap of that. That's not a flat binding that you’ve got there.

[07:06] John: No. It opens up better than you'd think.

[07:09] David: Okay. All right.

[07:10] John: Yeah. The story is--it's a masterless samurai and his son. The first third of it is them just doing mercenary hits on things, the next third of it is them making their way back to Edo, and then the last third of it is them fighting their way against the false Shogun, if I remember it all right--Something like that. The one thing I do remember that is really important, that I feel like everybody gets wrong when they do their riffs on Lone Wolf and Cub, is that this is not a story about a samurai protecting his child on an adventure.

[07:42] David: Absolutely not. It's about a samurai imperiling his child.

[07:46] John: In the beginning of it, he makes Daigoro, his son, choose between the sword and the ball, and if he chooses the ball, he's going to kill Daigoro, so that he can go and be in heaven with his mother. He chooses the sword. So, that means he's going on the path to Hell.

[08:05] David: With his dad.

[08:07] John: Yeah. He's not only imperiling him, but in his belief, taking him to hell.

[08:12] David: Yeah. Yeah, man. It's intense. It is intense. You're right. There is a key difference there, from the people that try to riff off of that, and what it actually is. There is a missing ingredient there, in a lot of that stuff, and that is the ingredient that's missing. You’re 100% right. That's a very good, astute observation, John.

[08:32] John: But nevertheless, he's adorable, and he's got a baby cart that is basically the James Bond car, with all of these gadgets, and […] out of it, by the end. It’s a lot of fun, and very gruesome. Another one of my favorite comics of all time is this one where he has to meet the Buddha, and he has to kill this Buddhist priest, but he goes and confronts him but can't do it. So, he has to meditate his way into feeling nothing, and then go kill him, but he can't do it. Nothing prevents him, except the intensity of this priest. So, then in the end, he leaps, and lands in front of the priest, and the priest looks at him, and in the original translation, the priest says, “magnificent,” and then his head splits open, and his whole body splits open, and all his blood pours out. It's all stuff like that. There's a lot of people getting whacked in the back of their heads, and their eyes popping out.

[09:30] David: It's good, clean fun, John. That's a great one. I like that one a lot. Here's my third one, John. As you know, there's a big movie coming out this summer--Superman. Friend of the show, James Gunn--he's not really a friend of the show, but I like his stuff. James Gunn is all-in on the superhero stuff, and there's been several rumors that his inspiration is being pulled from the Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis—Is that how you say JM’s last name?

[09:57] John: I don't know. Chris Ryall told me, that's how you say it, one time, but then he doesn't pronounce it that way, and he made fun of me for saying it. So, maybe I made that up. Maybe he didn't really tell me that. It might just be DeMatteis, like it looks like.

[10:11] David: DeMatteis. I don't know. I say Kubert. So, what do I know?

[10:15] John: Yeah. Whatever you're not saying.

[10:18] David: Almost certainly. So, he's been strongly influenced by the Justice League. So, that's my third pick, John. Justice League, and Justice League International, but really focusing on the first 25 issues of that series. There is some fantastic work that happens beyond the first 25 issues, but I thought, just to keep it concise for our listeners, those first 25 issues are just a delight. When they came on the scene, and even to this day, just wildly different from what you normally see in superhero comics, with a level of just character development and pathos that you just don't really--comic books just don't take the time to do this anymore, in superhero comics, in particular. The first eight issues of it is Justice League, and then it moves over to being Justice League International, I believe, for issues 9 through whatever. I think, eventually, it turns into Justice League America, but I don't remember or recall. Maybe around somewhere in the 50s--issue 50 or 51, or something, it turns into Justice League America.

Anyway, we're talking about the first 25 issues. So, the first eight issues is Justice Leage. Beyond that, Justice League International. Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis are the writers, and the art is primarily by Kevin Maguire, with a little bit of Ty Templeton, mixed in towards the end there, and maybe a little bit in-between, but, man, what a revelation. Kevin Maguire burst upon the scene with Justice League, and just brought a whole new level of character acting and facial expressions to superhero comic books that nobody had ever even seen before. The dude was doing stuff that nobody had ever seen before. The character acting in the this run is just top-notch, and perfectly matches the absurdity and humor that Keith Giffen and JM were trying to bring to it, I think. So, where this Justice League comes in, it's after Crisis on Infinite Earths, which reinvented everything, including the Justice League, and out of that, eventually, comes Keith Giffen’s Justice League pitch, in this book.

I'm sure it's been recounted many times, but there's a story that I love, about Keith Giffen, and I think it was, Archie Goodwin is the early editor on this series, potentially. Maybe I'm getting that wrong. I don't remember who the editor was, but it was somebody with a recognizable name. Anyway, Keith Giffen was known around the office. He was already pretty well-known, or established, I think, because of his Legion of Super-Heroes stuff. I think he'd maybe even done some Ambush Bug, at this point, but apparently, famously, he was walking by--I'm just going to say Archie Goodwin--the editor of Justice League. He's walking by Archie Goodwin's office every week, and he would just peek his head in the door, and just whisper “Justice League,” and just do that every week, for months, and then finally, he poked his head in, one Friday, and Archie Goodwin’s like, “get in here,” and had Keith Giffen pitch him on what he wanted to do with Justice League, and then, they were off to the races, and they actually got it going.

So, the interesting thing about this Justice League is, it's really got a more of a sitcom storytelling approach to it. Like I said, it's played for comedy. Lots of really fun, witty banter. Lots of interpersonal conflicts, with Guy Gardner getting into it with basically everybody, but specifically, famously, Batman, who knocks him out with one punch. Whenever you hear the expression, “one punch,” called up in a comic book conversation, the reference is Batman punching out Guy Gardner with one punch, and it's been replicated, or homaged, several times, since then. Kevin Maguire--I talked about the art. The lineup was great, and it's funny, because I don't know if this is true, but it feels like, through stories, anecdotes, you learn that the lineup for this iteration of the Justice League, they weren't even allowed to access certain heavy-hitters. Superman wasn't even allowed. So, they had to make do with, basically, who they could get. So, the lineup was a really interesting one, to start. Batman, who—actually, thank God, they got him. I think they probably had to do some heavy lifting to get him, but he was available.

So, Batman is the default de facto leader of the group. Martian Manhunter. You get a Green Lantern, but not the Green Lantern that you think you're going to get. You get Guy Gardner, and then Blue Beetle, and Booster Gold, Black Canary, Captain Marvel's in there, Shazam, Doctor Fate, Mister Miracle, and Oberon. Fairly early-on, you get Maxwell Lord, as the benefactor of the group, and the lineup was curious, one, because you don't have the Big Trinity—Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman. So, you've got these not-quite-second-rate character heroes, but it's not the first-rate guys that are in there, but it really serves to--I mean, they really make it work, man. They really take that restriction, and run with it, and turn it into a strength. So, later editions, you get Rocket Red, and Fire, and Ice, and even Lobo joins the team, briefly. I think, because they weren't shackled to the stayed and very specific story beats and character personalities of a lot of the bigger-tier characters, they got to do what they wanted to do. Martian Manhunter--what was he into? He was into M&M's or Reese's Pieces, or something.

[15:48] John: Oreos. He was into Oreos.

[15:49] David: Oreos. Thank you.

[15:51] John: […] the new DC version of Oreos, but in the original one, he was eating Oreos.

[15:56] David: Yeah. You just get weird, funny, quirky little things like that, or you get this really fun buddy cop between Booster Gold and Blue Beetle you can't really do anywhere else, and Guy Gardner, as a Green Lantern, he's just a super jerk. They knock him in the head, and he gets amnesia, and while he's knocked in the head, for several issues, he's the kindest, nicest guy on the whole team, and one of the characters, Ice, she meets him for the first time, as he's this kind, nice person, and she goes on a date with him, because she thinks he's charming, and then eventually, he gets hit in the head again. I think Lobo, actually, is the one that hits him again. So, Batman basically knocks him into a charming, kind guy, and then when he comes back, or when Lobo knocks him back into his old personality, he's a jerk again, and Ice, who was falling in love with this guy, realizes, “it's not quite what I had gotten into here.” It was just fun, dysfunctional team dynamics that really made for some really good comedy, and that's all I got for that one. I just think, great, fun story. Again, light-hearted, popcorn movie-type stuff, sitcom-level superhero storytelling, with some fantastic early art by Kevin Maguire, some of Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis’ best writing, best work together, and they have a long career of working together well, and also. for relevance, pretty sure this is the stuff that James Gunn is leaning into, in terms of inspiration for how he's setting up the DC Cinematic Universe. So, there we go. That's my third one, John.

[17:36] John: Yeah. I can't even tell you how close this was to being one of mine. This is down to the wire. That was going to be it. DC Comics in 1986, that, in its entirety, is a place I like to go back. There's always been a part of me that's like, “that's comics,” even though, in retrospect--I didn't know it, at the time--but, such a mess of things of, like you're saying--I believe the original plan was that this is going to be the Grant Morrison Justice League. This is going to be all the big guns, and like you said, they couldn't use them, and it wasn't like they could. It was nebulous how much Superman was in the Justice League. Wonder Woman flat-out had no longer ever been in the Justice League, and no one had ever met her yet, at this point, but Barry Allen had died. So, there had been a Justice League that had Barry Allen on it, and Suicide Squad was coming out, and required there to be all this history of all these characters. So, it's all just funny, in terms of the continuity stuff, but yeah, I mean, that's where Guy Gardner became Guy Gardener. I mean, he was just a much-more-insignificant character in Green Lantern, at that point.

[18:43] David: Yeah, for sure.

[18:44] John: It’s where Lobo became Lobo.

[18:47] David: For sure.

[18:48] John: Giffen had already created him in Omega Men, but he was wearing spandex in that, and everything. Great series. I love it. You can see its influence on so much stuff. Yeah, totally right. Beautiful art. Good stuff.

[19:02] Ladies, and gentlemen, let's give it up for our entertainers.We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.

[19:08] David: Hey, Corner Box Clubbers. David here, and I've got something fun for you. My new Kickstarter campaign is launching soon, and I want you to be part of it. Just head over to FunTimeGo.com, and click the VIP banner up at the top of the site. That's your All Access pass to our new book, Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians, plus some seriously cool perks. If you sign up for our VIP Package, you're going to get a GUARANTEED Remark Edition of the next book that comes out, you get offers for exclusive discounts and incentives, tons of free giveaways, during and after the campaign, and you also get access to our Private Facebook Group, where we do sneak peeks, and talk about the podcast, give bad movie reviews, and generally, have a fun time. So, don't miss out. Go to FunTimeGo.com, sign up, and get in on the fun.

[19:55] All right, ladies, and gentlemen. Back to what you came for. Give it up for more of The Corner Box.

[20:03] John: My third one, not picking that, might be a little controversial, but this is definitely one, where I have to separate artist from art, and maybe even the last half of it from the first half of it, but a real comfort zone, for me, and I discovered this a year or two ago. It is the early issues of Cerebus by Dave Sim.

[20:24] David: You took a left turn there. I thought you were going Sandman, but you’re going Cerebus. Okay.

[20:28] John: Yeah. I need more time on Sandman. Sandman is definitely a comfort food one. It's not, at the moment. I […] time on that one.

[20:36] David: Gotcha.

[20:37] John: Dave Sim, at one point during the creation of this series, decided he was going to write and draw this comic for 30 years, and do 300 issues, and then did. Very difficult to argue that he didn't go mad during that, at least, to some degree. I don't know. I don't even know if that's the right way to say it. I don't mean that in a legal way. Don't sue me, please. I’ve got to imagine that would do stuff to your head, but he came out of there widely regarded as a misogynist, and with some attitudes that are not super positive. Early-on, though, that was absolutely not the impression that you had in it. I don't even mean early-on. I mean, for the first 15 years of Cerebus, that was the opposite, 180°, from what you would think, going into this.

[21:18] David: Yeah. I mean, he was the gold standard of independent publishing, for a decade--2 decades, for sure. Everybody looked to him. If you were trying to figure out how to self-publish a comic book, you tried to talk to Dave Sim, at some point, if you were trying to do it seriously.

[21:34] John: And the two things that really get me on that--sorry, this is a comic that starts off as a Conan parody, but it's an aardvark, and then it moves away from being a Conan parody, and gets into weirder stuff. The first 25 issues aren't super good. The first ones are real rough, but I still really enjoy that, because there's that part of--when I was in high school, and I was reading this stuff, it was about as good as I was, those first few issues, and it was like, “I can do this. I can really do this.” So, that was a big part of it. Very insightful, in his writing and characterization, and his dialogue, especially, and the combination of dialogue and lettering, as the series goes on, is just unparalleled. You would have characters show up and parody their speech patterns. So, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards show up and talk in funny versions of the way those characters talk, and it's just dead-on. The lettering just gives you all the intonations that you get. It's really incredible stuff. It’s really the first part of it that I'm talking here, that’s the super comfort stuff.

When I was reading it, it was coming out as Cerebus Biweekly. So, he was doing the regular series, and then he had a biweekly reprint, that started from Issue #1, and every two weeks, you'd get another reprint issue. He had pioneered doing paperbacks of comics with The Swords of Cerebus paperbacks, and then he let them go out of print, and did these--they called them phonebooks, where each one is about 25 issues, which was unheard of, at that time. So, the Swords of Cerebus stuff went out of print, but they had these introductions to each issue, where he'd walk you through his thought process on what was going on, when he made that issue, and Dave Sim loves to write. He loves to just ramble on with every detail about these things, and for young John, seeing that stuff, and “that's how you make a comic,” there was nothing like it. There was no Internet that you could go on. There were how-to guides, but they didn't get into the nitty-gritty of, “and then I got to this next issue, and I didn't know what to write,” and the travails of making a comic, and the artistic thoughts that go into it, and then simultaneous with that, or more or less simultaneous with that, in the main Cerebus series, he started doing a guide to self-publishing that he’d later print, as its own book, multiple times, I think, and he was just going into this detail that nobody else had.

“Here's the pencils I use. Here's the pens I use. Here's what the problems are with the pens,” and I ate that up, and just learned so much from that. So much of my understanding of the tools and mechanics of making comics come from that guide. So, it was about publishing. It was about “here's how you solicit to Diamond,” all that stuff that I would do, but it really was “Here’s what I'm thinking about when I'm doing layouts. The inker isn't thinking about composition. The inker's thinking about lines,” and all these different pieces that--I don't know--there's nothing it then. I learned a whole lot, and those early stories--I ran into cover price copies of The Swords of Cerebus books. So, I started rereading those a couple of years ago. I think I just wound up spiraling off, and doing something else, instead, like I always do, but just seeing those first ones, I'm like, “man, I love this.” I know that Issue #5 of Cerebus isn't very good, but it was the first one I read, and it just takes me back to that spot, and to that education I was getting, and to watching somebody grow from being an enthusiastic amateur into an incredible practitioner of the comic art, and then maybe going past that into something worse. Everything's got problems.

[25:34] David: Yeah, I think if you live long enough, John, you eventually have a heel turn or two. Yeah, man, my exposure to Cerebus is very limited, because I didn't have access to comic bookshops, in a way that made that accessible, to me. That wasn't going to be at the local 7/11. So, I just wasn't going to have access to it, but really, actually my first exposure was his Self-Publishing Guide, and that thing was my Bible, for sure. I read that thing, cover-to-cover. I wore that thing out, because I had read it so many times, and it really does bring me back, you talking about it, because you're right--The Internet wasn't around, man. You didn't know. Everything was just this magic black box that you didn't really have any insight into what was happening on the other side of it, or inside of it, and the self-guide really shined a light on a lot of what you had to do. I think I also learned about specific types of pen nibs and brushes, in that book. I think that’s where I learned about that stuff, as well. It's funny.

[26:42] John: Yeah, and it was very specific to him, but it was also, at that time, the professional tools you used were a Hunt 102 or a Winsor & Newton Series 7 brush, and that bears out. That's what Jae Lee was inking with, and that's what Scott Williams was inking with.

[27:06] David: That is exactly what people were using. To this day, I think they're still using it, a lot of them--the ones that aren't using a Cintiq. I have really wanted to jump into those first early parody issues of Cerebus, because I do think that's, specifically, my jam, is watching a creative talent learn how to make a comic book. I find it quite entertaining, and endearing, to watch people's growth, in that way, and I've always wanted to go back in and grab those, and do it. I just never got around to it, I think, because by the time I really got interested, I jumped into his current--whatever the current issues were. I tried to get in, some time around Guys.

[27:49] John: Oh, yeah, it's--

[27:52] David: Yeah, and the first issue of the Guys storyline was actually pretty funny, and I was like, “I like that. That's pretty funny,” and then, oh, man, it got impenetrable very quickly, thereafter. I hung around for another couple of issues, and I was like, “this is not for me, at all. It's not for me.” So, yeah, I still have it in the back of my head that I'd like to check out those early issues. Also, I'm a sucker for Conan stuff, and sword and sorcery-type stuff. So, I feel like maybe, even if it's parody, I might still find it to be fun.

[28:26] John: A joke that I didn't really fully appreciate, when I was a kid, was he has a character named Elrod, who is a parody of Elric, and John now, me, I'm a huge Michael Moorcock fan, and Elric is one of my favorite characters. So, it's a real self-aware Conan take. If you don't know Elric, it's where Conan is strong and tanned, Elric’s weak and pale, and can only live on herbs, or via the souls that his sword sucks out of people. The Dave Sim is Elrod, and he looks like Barry Windsor Smith's drawing of Elric, but he talks like Foghorn Leghorn, and it's hilarious. It's such a pompous character. A lot of Sandman came from Elric--a lot of that pomposity, and arrogance, and stuff that's in there, and just having him doing all that, and having a sword named Seersucker.

[29:33] David: Yeah. The humorous piece of that seems like it might be interesting. That's a good one, John. I’ve got one more. I'll save this for next time we do a deep dive.

[29:42] John: Cool. Well, those are some fun comics. A wide range of things.

[29:47] David: We're all over the place—mostly, in the past, but I think that's part of what comfort food is supposed to be, John.

[29:52] John: Yeah. I do take comfort in reading current comics. I feel weird and bad if I'm not reading current comics, in a strange way. Well, Hush 2 is halfway in-between. It's both old and new, right? So, you can read Hush 2. You can pull us all back to the beginning, and my giant Hush 2. Fun stuff. Definitely in the past, but hey, that's where--I don't know--I like new stuff, too. It just doesn't seem like it's comfort food. That's us going to Richard Blais's restaurant. Not going to--

[30:25] David: Oh, God.

[30:27] John: I don't know. Anyway.

[30:29] David: We're crashing and burning.

[30:31] John: For more awkward transitions, and weird stuff, we'll be here in 7 days, or so. So, come back. Thanks a lot. See you next week. Thanks for joining us.

[30:43] David: Bye, everybody.

[30:45] And now, another clip from the outtake files.

[30:49] David: Let's give it a shot here--and with that, everybody, we're going to pause, and—I don't like any of that. Okay, let me try again. 3-2-1—we'll join our podcast, as it's going forward—some sh*t like that. I don't know. So, we'll rejoin our podcast—our podcast—Goddammit. So, we'll rejoin our podcast in—as it's going. What is it called when something's already going? Damn it. Let me see. So, we're going to rejoin our podcast as—what is that word? Already in progress. That's what I was looking for. So, we're going to rejoin our progress—Sh*t. Damn it. So, we're going to rejoin our podcast, already in progress. Sorry, Ed. There's got to be something there you can use. Sorry. All right, man. Good luck. This is the third time I've done this. So, I'm not doing it again. I'm sure you can figure something out. All right, bye. Dammit.

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.