Welcome to The Corner Box with David Hedgecock and John Barber. With decades of experience in all aspects of comic book production, David, John, and their guests will give you an in-depth and insightful look at the past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet—comics—and everything related to it.

[00:24] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. Welcome back, you hear me say? That's right. Even though this is a #1, we're in our third season of doing this nonsense. We couldn't be more happy to be here, talking with you about the thing that we all love more than almost anything else—comic books. I'm one of your hosts, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always—that's right: always—because even though this is a New #1, it's a reboot, a refresh, a remake of an old comic book podcast. It's still the same stuff. Anyway, with me, as always, is my good friend--

[01:02] John Barber: Hey. It's me, John Barber.

[01:04] David: John Barber. John, I already introduced once, and then immediately got distracted by something else, but that's okay. Welcome to the show, everybody. That's what we do here.

[01:13] John: Back to the basics, David. That's what this is. We lose every bit of ability to do openings. That's all gone. We’re back where we were in Episode #1. I was actually going to try to make a joke that this episode was going to be the actual things we did in the very first episode. I was going to have this back to the basics joke, but we didn't really talk about anything in the first episode. I'm looking through the timestamps on this, and it's “okay, yeah, we both started in here.” Black Hawk and Captain Carrot. That was there from the beginning.

[01:45] David: That was how we opened?

[01:46] John: Both of those have timestamps, and they’re Episode #1. We were at your home for Black Hawk and Captain Carrot news. The update, since September 26, 2023 is steady as she goes.

[01:59] David: Yep, you haven't missed anything, everybody, but don't worry—if something does change, we are the guys to let you know.

[02:06] John: Some Captain Carrot stuff happened.

[02:07] David: No, that's true. Some Captain Carrot stuff did. I did get some Captain Carrot original art from Paul Pelletier. Yeah, I did.

[02:13] John: Todd Nauck, right?

[02:14] David: That's right. I got two amazing pages from Todd Nauck. Oh, my gosh, they're so good. This is our New #1, John. We’ve got to take all the lessons we've learned from the first two seasons. We are starting the third year of doing this together. I can't believe it, A, but also, we've learned a lot about how to podcast, and we need to bring all of that experience and energy that we've learned from the last two years, and apply it now. This is our one chance to really wow new listeners. This is the chance to get 5 listeners, instead of 4, John.

[02:45] John: Yeah.

[02:46] David: Can you imagine?

[02:47] John: Yeah, that would be amazing.

[02:49] David: There's a 30 or 78% increase there. Something like that. That would be incredible. I think that would really move the needle for our ability to monetize this podcast.

[02:59] John: Yes. Send us money.

[03:02] David: This podcast does make somebody a lot of money. It's not me or you.

[03:04] John: It's probably worse for Ed, anyway.

[03:09] David: Yeah, no, I'm happy for Ed. Ed's had steady work for two years now. This is pretty incredible for him, but we're not here to talk about that, John. We're here to talk about comic books. We have a thrilling and exciting discussion today. It's a little mushy on my end. I've been struggling with what exactly it is that I've been thinking about. Shocking, but I wanted to get it off my chest and start talking about this stuff. Maybe our 5th listener—our new 5th listener—will chime in, at some point, on Spotify, or send us an email. I don't know how they would do either of those things, but join the conversation, and help us figure it out. Anyway.

[03:51] John: I do think—one thing to frame this discussion—a lot of times, we talk about stuff from the past. We don't revel in it, but we like old stuff. We both like stuff, not only nostalgically, but digging into the past, to things we were just talking about, like Richard Corben. A lot of that stuff was before either of us were born. We're digging into that stuff. This is really looking to the future, I think, and really thinking about what the future of comics holds, and what inflection point we're on, in terms of where comics go from here—what different directions they can go.

[04:20] David: Yeah, from two guys who pay a lot of attention to the industry. I'm talking about me and you, not two other guys, John. So, that's what we're going to talk about today. With our New #1, we're going to look towards the future, and one of the things that I've been noticing, or the thing that's been stuck in my head recently is, it feels like we are moving into a changing of the guard, in a couple of different ways, in comic books—maybe in pop culture, in general—but what that looks like, to me, so far, is that the audience demographics are changing. So, I think, the guys and gals who are buying comic books and driving the market are starting to completely age out of the medium, in a lot of ways, and it's weird for me, because I am the one that's aging out now.

I saw the generation ahead of me, the Boomer generation—I had friends—lots of friends—in my early career, as a comic book creator/publisher/artist. I saw a lot of people from the Boomer generation getting aged out, and they were pissed about it. I mean, a lot of real vitriol. I had a lot of conversations with people who are very much like, “comics aren't for me anymore,” and it was a weird thing to experience, in my late 20s and early 30s, because at that point, I couldn't have been more in love with comics, or what comics were doing, or how they were doing them, at that point. It was specifically, for me, the stuff that was being made—It felt like it was speaking to me, in a way that even the comics of my youth really didn't, but it wasn't speaking any longer to the generation ahead of me, the Boomer generation.

It was strange to see people who were friends not liking comic books anymore, and they were saying that it wasn't for them anymore, and I was having a completely opposite experience, where I was like, “oh, wow. It couldn't be more for me right now.” I didn't really understand what they were saying, because I would look at older comics, and be like, “yeah, those are great. I like those, too, but this new crop is really cool. I like this, too.” Now, though, that it's my turn, potentially, what we're starting to see is, the demographics are moving away from Gen X, moving on to the next generation before us. I think that's the Millennial generation. Hopefully, that's not a derogatory term. I don't know anymore. Who the market is focusing on, who the market is strongly trying to sell to, I think, is becoming less and less the generation—my generation, Gen X—and the way that I'm seeing that manifest itself, in the last year or two, is the stuff that's selling, obviously. That’s how you know.

So, I've been thinking a lot about “what am I seeing, and why am I seeing that, and what could that possibly mean?” And it's still, John, mushy in my head, but I wanted to start the conversation about it, and get your take on it, and genuinely, if anybody has an opinion, would love to hear it, about what we're seeing, and where we're going, and the good news for me, I guess, is that I don't think I'm going to be the old guy shaking my fist. Well, I am that guy, but when it comes to comic books, I'm excited for where the medium is headed, and I'm excited about, even though it definitely clearly is not “for me,” it's still totally for me. I'm down for what's happening next. I'm excited by it. I'm seeing and learning a whole new style of comic book that I didn't even know existed, in a way. So, I'm very excited by that, but I've always really been excited by the new in comic books. I've always been excited by the new story or the new character, or the new talent. So, at least for me, I feel like I'm in an envious position, in that I'm not angry that things are changing, or frustrated that I'm not getting the kinds of things that I “used to get.”

So, that's where we're going. That's where my head's at, and what I'm seeing is—it started before this, but I think one of the watershed moments that potentially has happened in the last two years, two large watershed moments have happened. One, the complete emergence, and dominance, of Daniel Warren Johnson with Transformers. Two, the complete dominance of Absolute Batman and Nick Dragotta. So, what am I talking about? What I'm seeing in those two guys, specifically, there's no question, those two guys are moving the needle, in a bigger way than anybody else. Now, Nick Dragotta has the benefit of Batman, as the wind in his sails, but make no mistake that book is successful because of the style of art that Nick Dragotta is bringing to it. There's no doubt in my mind. The influences that they're bringing are very different from the Jim Lees, and the Rob Liefelds, and the Erik Larsens, and the Marc Silvestris of the world. Those were the big, major breakout talents when I was mid-20s or early 20s/late teens—whenever that was. I guess, Liefeld and those guys all came around when I was 12 or 13, but they really emerged over the course of the next decade or so, and dominated the landscape with their particular style of art, and you saw a lot of people doing what they were doing, and doing that style. It was highly detailed, very noodly, tons of extra lines and marks on a paper to convey information, and the more detail, the better, and really posed and stylized types of art, and what we're seeing now is something very different from that.

In fact, we saw Jim Lee, in the last six months, put out a new Batman book, and when you compare the new Jim Lee Batman, and the hype around that, and the sales around that, and you compare it to Nick Dragotta's Batman, Absolute Batman #1, it's not even close. The sales are not even close. Absolute Batman is destroying everybody else, essentially, in terms of sales, and in terms of hype. The amount of people talking, and invested, and interested in Absolute Batman seems to be much higher than Jim Lee's Batman, and I think part of the reason is because of this changing of the guard, in terms of the people buying. So, what does that mean? What I think it means, and part of what I'm really trying to figure out, is that there's the Millennial generation, Gen Z, the new people who are investing more time, energy, and money into purchasing comic books, they grew up on manga, in a way that I certainly didn't.

My exposure to manga was whatever Frank Miller showed me, and I didn't really know that it was manga until somebody else told me, five years later, “oh, well, he's riffing off of this thing over here.” That was a manga. “Oh, wow, really? I had no idea. I thought it was just ninjas,” which I always thought was cool. Even guys like Rob Liefeld, he was riffing on some manga stuff—maybe not early in his career, but definitely during his career—and certainly became more and more influenced by it, over time, but you didn't really see it. It was still George Perez. It was still Neal Adams. It was still Jack Kirby. Those guys were the guys that were still the influences that we're bringing all these new guys to market, and this new style of talent is very much not that. I think they are very heavily influenced by Japanese manga—Japanese comic books. They're showing that in ways that we've never really seen before in North American comic books. So, Absolute Batman, Transformers.

[11:48] John: I think it's become inescapable in the last quarter century. If you're growing up with this stuff, you're growing up with manga. I think you're totally right. I've been digging into, just weirdly coincidentally, early releases in the US of manga stuff—late 80s, early 90s, VIZ stuff—and everything, then, had to pass through this filter of “is this going to sell in the US direct comic book market?” So, you’ve got a real particular type of manga in there, and you’ve got some masterpieces, of course. Akira fits in there really well, and that's a monumentally good manga, but you had the samurai stuff, you had the science fiction stuff, you had Shirow, and all the stuff that was directly impacting what Jim Lee and Liefeld were doing, and a lot of people picking this stuff up. My guess would be that Liefeld started picking this stuff up secondhand, via Frank Miller. I think, the scene where Shatterstar stabs himself, the same way Ronin stabs himself, is an homage to Frank Miller, not an homage to Lone Wolf and Cub.

[12:51] David: Oh, interesting.

[12:52] John: I totally do not disagree with you that Leifeld got massively into manga, at some point—just into the impact of the layouts, the fast reading, the movement—Not just on a superficial level, either, I would argue. There were people who would compose American comic book pages, but with pointy chins, for a while, in the 90s, and that's not what it was. It was more of a fundamental “here are some pacing thoughts that are different,” or whatever. I don't know. I totally agree. It's been something that's been—not even percolating—It's been really directly impacting things for a really long time. You're in a world where the Editor-in-Chief of Marvel got his start at Central Park Media, which was a manga translation company. That's where C.B. came from. He's well-steeped in Japanese culture, and you go back to those early days of the Jemas era at Marvel, and you started seeing some manga artists coming in, and having unsuccessful runs on Marvel Comics. Kia Asamiya, I think, does some stuff here, and the fit was weird. It's strange, and for a global culture, there still are these problems of fitting into the local styles, or whatever, and I think that came from a fan reaction. X-Men fans didn't want X-Men to look like a manga, at that time.

You've got people, now, that have so internalized, the stuff the same way a manga artist has internalized this, and a manga artist isn't like, “well, I'm going to draw like manga.” No. Everybody draws like specific artists that they picked up on, […] influences, and stuff. There's different schools of thought.

[14:29] David: You brought up a good point. I think that's where I'm going with this. Yeah, there's been this underground influence, or underlying influence, of some of this stuff, through the years, but it feels like now, there's a meaningful change in maybe the acceptance of that stuff, or the integration of that stuff into the way creators are doing comic books these days, and it's not just the look of the thing. It's the pacing. It's the storytelling aspects. It's the layouts of the page. It's just the general—I don't know—feel of the comic book. They’re really starting to embrace some of the tropes, and it's not just embracing—that's just what they do. It's internalized, in a way that it hasn't been internalized before, and it's internalized for not just the creative talent, but also for the customer. They’re very familiar with what that is. It's a comfort, for them. Looking at a Daniel Warren Johnson Transformer comic book is very comfortable. They understand how to read a Daniel Warren Johnson page. They understand the type of pacing that he's bringing to it. It all clicks in, because they've got years and years, and sometimes decades of reading experience of that style of storytelling.

I think that's why we're seeing somebody like Peach Momoko on Ultimate X-Men. No one's pushing back on that. In fact, it's probably one of the better selling X-Men titles. While you do hear people talking about their frustrations around, say, Uncanny X-Men or Adjective-Less X-Men, what I don't hear is people complaining about Ultimate X-Men, other than, occasionally, “I wish I got more,” which is the best complaint to ever have. It's like, “oh, you wish you got more story in each comic book.” In terms of the way she's telling the story, the way her art looks, the way she's designing the characters, all of that is not only accepted, but it's popular. It's the version that people are asking for. I don't know. I'm just now waking up to this idea, and I don't really know 100% where I'm going with it, yet. Something's different. Something has changed. It's definitely changed within the last, I would say, 18 months to two years, and I'm excited to see where it goes, because I'll tell you, man—Transformers, I really like that book, and Absolute Batman is a fun romp. I'm down. I like that. I like it when everything's OP and this Dragon Ball Z thing, where you go from losing to the bad guy bully down the street, to destroying planets, over the course of a storyline. Gurren Lagann is the best. It's the most macho anime I've ever seen in my life, by the way. Have you ever seen that one, John?

[17:08] John: No, I haven't.

[17:09] David: Oh, you’re going to like it. It's so fantastic. It's perfect. So, anyway, I think we're seeing a change there, and I'm interested to see, in the next year or two, how the big North American comic book companies, specifically Marvel and DC—but Image and Dark Horse, and IDW, and some of the others, to a lesser degree—if they even recognize that information, A, and B, how they ingest that, and make it part of what they're doing. I think, DC might be the ones that either understand it, or they're really good at falling into happy accidents, because not only did they put a guy like Nick Dragotta on Absolute Batman, but their whole comic line of $9.99 comics, the collector's comics—whatever they're called—those things are exactly the size of a manga, in terms of the dimensions. It's a classic manga size, and the price point is very familiar to people who buy manga, where you just get giant chunks of book for $10. So, DC clearly is seeing that part of it, and applying what they can do to try to mimic what manga in the United States is already doing. So, I think DC might be a little ahead of the curve on this one, or they're going to come to the full conclusion faster than others, and I think we're going to see more and more of this type of stuff, in the next 18 to 24 months.

[18:44] John: The one thing I'll maybe slightly take issue with is that I think there was a time where Marvel and DC were just like, “well, let's make things manga-sized. Let's just put them out manga-sized. That'll do the trick.”

[18:55] David: But that was wrong thinking, right?

[18:57] John: Yeah. Again, that stuff always comes off as putting the leather jacket on somebody, and pretending that they're cool, to me. I don't know that the Compact Comics are directly competing with manga, as much as it is. They're a little bigger than a standard manga. It doesn't fit on your manga shelf. There's manga that's that size. You're not wrong that it's not a size of manga, but it's also really close to the size of a trade paperback.

[19:25] David: Oh, okay. I didn't know that.

[19:27] John: So, I think there's a little bit of that, too, that it's going for readers—people that pick up books, and the price point is significantly lower than what you would pay for a paperback book. I mean, it is funny. Marvel’s are $15, their version of these that they started putting out. DC's are all $9.99.

[19:46] David: Here's the difference, though, John—Again, this is where I feel like it's the next level of that. You're talking about previous attempts at this, where it's like, “just make it a manga-sized, and then it’s going to sell,” but I think the subtle difference between some of the stuff that's been tried in the past, and what DC is doing now, is that DC isn't just putting it in a familiar size package, at a really familiar price point, which is a great price point, and this is the difference. They've curated the material in it, so that it's a complete story, satisfying read, and that, I think, is the difference, and that's where I think Marvel still is failing, because Marvel, $14.99, okay, I think you got the price point wrong a little bit, but more importantly, Marvel's just repackaging a trade paperback. It's just some random run in the middle of something. It's not the complete reading experience, and I think that's the difference. DC gets that piece of it, because that's what you get with a manga volume. It might be to-be-continued, but you know exactly what the next one is, because it's Volume 2, and I think DC is saying, “hey, here's everything, and there is no Volume 2 for some of these things. Those things might be coming,” and I know that they just released, or they're about to release, they announced Y: The Last Man, I think it was, and that's going to be in separate volumes.

So, I think it's the curation of the material, in particular. It's all those other things, but then the thing that next levels it is the curation of the material, and then finally, the cherry on top is that the audience for that product, that's what they're looking for—a complete reading experience that's a heavy lift, a lot of comics at a really great price, at a size that they can carry around easily in their backpack, or tucked under their arm, or whatever, and I just think it's all clicking, in a way that it hasn't before, and it's really interesting. It's cool. I'm totally interested in it. I like to see it happening. Guys like Daniel Warren Johnson and Nick Dragotta, they're not my jam, but I still love it. I'm completely falling in love with Nick Dragotta's character design. Oh, my God, the guy's next level with some of that stuff, and I do like the way he's composing pages, and the way he's telling the story.

[22:04] John: I don't know that Marvel did just pick random ones. I think before, what they started with were Daredevil: Born Again, which I think is exactly 100% the thing you're talking about. That has always been a thing you can pick up and understand, beginning, middle, and end of what it was without knowing a lot about Daredevil. I did that when I was a kid. I really remember buying that paperback at a B. Dalton, and not being totally enmeshed in Daredevil, at the time. You're right. The rest of them, at the beginning of these series, like the Black Panther series that Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze did, and Winter Soldier, the Captain America arc, and Hickman's Fantastic Four, but I think the problem Marvel runs into with this stuff is that they do not, and never have, had a bunch of standalone stories, the way DC does, and DC has always done that, and then also, I feel like DC got lucky with some of them. The Darwyn Cooke Catwoman run could fit in one of these books. That's dumb luck. If that went on for two more years, it doesn't fit. If it went on for a year less, […] do the graphic novel. All right. It doesn't fit, but again, flawless pick. That's a great pick.

I read the N.K. Jemisin-written Green Lantern Far Sector in there, and it didn't feel like reading a manga, to me. It felt like reading a novel, to me. It felt like I'm sitting down, and I'm reading, beginning-to-end, I'm going to have this whole novel in there, and it isn't just emulating manga. It isn't chasing the manga audience. It's chasing an audience that is aware of these characters, from movies, and stuff, but has never had a clear path to go, “and here's the thing you go and pick up. I remember seeing Infinity Gauntlet at an airport bookstore, when the—whatever it was—Infinity War, or whatever, came out—when the movie came out. I don't know. If you grew up with that—I know you love Infinity Gauntlet. I know there's a lot of good things to be said about Infinity Gauntlet. A different artist draws the back half of that. It's all so enmeshed in what Marvel continuity was right then, and weirdly, didn't have that much effect on Marvel continuity, either, because I don't think anybody thought it was going to be as big as it was, at that time.

[24:13] David: Which is weird, because it was a big thing, at the time. I think it did sell very well, and I do remember them promoting it, but you're right. It didn't seem to have any lasting impact, but maybe it's just because there wasn't any mutants in it, at that time. That could have very well been.

[24:30] John: My point is, what do you go and read? “You like Thor? Well, okay, here's the Jason Aaron Thor. It's pretty good.” Simonson? You read Thor: Journey Into Mystery, whatever, that he appeared in, the first one, because it's terrible. It's the worst of the Lee/Kirby creations, until Kirby comes back, and then it gets really good. I don't know Anyway, I agree with you that they're smart picks. Totally.

Here's something I'd posit, that I don't know that I'd really thought of before you were saying everything here. So, bear with me on this. I think this is going to be a multi-part thing that we talk about. I think this is going to be a thing we come back to, throughout the season, because I think there is more to talk about here, and there's a lot of stuff to unpack and start to try to understand and think about. When we were young, you had the first of the Image guys coming in, and the older readers hated that stuff, and kids really liked it. I was somewhere in the middle. I was too old and had read too many comics to be totally taken in by it. I don't mean that like hoodwinked. I just mean, “totally, this is the only thing that matters,” but it was super exciting. It was all super exciting. I was a big fan of that stuff, at the time. The stuff won me over, and I got into it, and those guys brought in a level of modern-day pop craftsmanship to the art that you didn't really see on a lot of comics, right up to that point. Like I've said before, but you go through there, you read the X-Men comics, and the first issue that Jim Lee and Scott Williams do looks like it's done 50 years after the issue before it, which was Marc Silvestri.

[26:11] David: The artist that the other Image artists are like, “he's the best.”

[26:16] John: I don't know. I have to imagine some of that was—well, Scott Williams inking was just so—he needs to be mentioned in the same breath as all of those artists, in terms of how influential that stuff was. You had Jim Lee not just drawing a suit that was 2 lines on the shoulders, and then a little zigzag, and then that's a suit. He was drawing a specific suit that he looked up in a magazine, and it was really fashionable, and cool. I think that was lacking in there. What I think that eventually led to is, you had these guys that, first of all, all wanted Scott Williams to ink them, and then that got a particular direction of inking craft that was really going on there, for a while, and a lot of finishing art, but that also led to a lot of artists that started penciling their line weights, and doing all this really detailed pencil stuff. They were penciling stuff as detailed as the stuff you were seeing in the final art. I think that eventually led into the early-2000s era of photorealism being a really dominant thing. Guys like Bryan Hitch and Steve McNiven, and Steve Epting. I mean, not that Steve Epting was exactly photorealistic. He could push that way. Jim Lee was still really big, because he could push that way. Some of the other artists got sidelined, for a little bit, in the 2000s.

Liefeld wasn't as big in the 2000s as he is now, and I think some of that was—his stuff fits in better with the kinetic world we're talking about now than it does with the photorealistic Bryan Hitch world. Alex Ross, of course. I mean, Alex Ross, I think, was somebody that really ushered that in. You can't overstate the first time you saw Marvels, and you were like, “oh, is this what they'd look like in real life, if there really were superheroes?” And now that's not a question. There's a zillion movies and TV shows that show you what superheroes would look like, but I think the photorealistic stuff led into a realism. I don't know. You've probably heard me babble about these theories, but you got into an era of the Babs Tarr Batgirl, I would argue Sophie Campbell on Jem, and David Aja on Hawkeye, a lot of artists like that, that were doing these completely realistic costumes. They maybe weren't drawing as photorealistically, but everything, mechanically, worked, in a way that you could completely cosplay these characters, without it being outrageous and ridiculous, the way Spawn would have been.

Everybody knows that's not how fabric works, but we still liked it. Everybody knows the tights aren't actually skintight. You can't see every muscle, but that was just the way people drew things, but then it got into a time where that wasn't what you'd have. I think that eventually leads to a boring style of art. Not that I don't love that stuff, in particular. I do love all those things I just mentioned. I think those three things are A-plus, in my opinion, but you get into the descendants of that, and comic storytelling became very cinematic, and became very focused on readability and ease for new readers to follow things, which is all good stuff, but it took away a lot of the tools of comics, and a lot of the things that made comics, comics, and not just movies on paper, and then when you started having these actual movies out there, you're competing a fake movie against an actual movie. I think we turned a corner on that, and I think that's why Daniel Warren Johnson Transformers was so big, beyond anything else was that, here was somebody not drawing realistic Transformers. Here was somebody not drawing cinematic storytelling. It's visceral and impactful, but it uses the tools of comics to do that. It maybe feels cinematic, but not in the same way that three horizontal panels on a page feels cinematic. Not to say that he's not influenced by film, but that he translates the film into the comics medium, instead of just emulating the film medium, if that makes sense.

[29:59] David: That makes sense.

[30:01] John: I think that's the thing that pulls everything together about the stuff you're talking about now. The Nick Dragotta stuff—I mean, when you first saw that Batman, you were like, “when was the last time somebody was allowed to draw Batman just looking nuts, and cool, and stylistic enough that you'd be like, ‘that's the Nick Dragotta Batman?’” I mean, I know it's a different character. That was why you read Todd McFarlane's Spider-Man, was to see how he drew the villains. What's he going to do with Electro? I feel like everything got so segmented into “here's how many buckles Batman has,” and not—I don’t know. There's this one Keith Giffen Secret Origins issue, where he draws Batman wearing a yellow Bat symbol, because his chest is always in shadow. So, the Bat symbol is yellow, and it looks so awesome. I always thought that looked cool. I read it a couple months ago, and it still looks cool, and that was something you would have never been allowed to do in 2012. People at Warner Brothers would have said, “no, here's the color that Batman's Bat is. Here's the ink breakdown of what shade of black it is.”

[31:09] David: Right. That's a good point, John. That's a good point. To your point, comic books can't, nor should they, compete with movies. That's folly.

[31:20] John: A similar thing—what happened with Image, where you had the Jim Shooter rules of how to draw—everything with a lot of medium shots, and really clear storytelling, which made sense when you were coming out of Marvel in the 70s, when some of that stuff is real hard to read, especially if you're not steeped in it, but the McFarlane stuff was just exciting. That stuff was all just cool and fun, and I think some of that got lost in technical proficiency and clarity. I'm going to argue against technical proficiency and clarity.

[31:56] David: Yeah, that was a good position to take, especially as an Editor-in-Chief of a company. That all tracks. That all makes sense. Maybe, I think it can be more than one thing. It doesn't have to be just one thing.

[32:09] John: Yeah, I think all this is a confluence of a billion things.

[32:12] David: Yeah, but that tracks. I think you're right. Maybe we are also seeing, to your point, there is a desperate need for the new—something fresh, something interesting, on the art side of things, in particular. We've seen this other style of storytelling, for quite some time now, and we're ready for something else. Yeah, I could totally see that as being part of it. So, there's another piece of this that I want to get into, but I think maybe we'll save it for next time. I want to look at, well, there's this new wave. There's the Nick Dragottas, and the Peach Momokos, and the Daniel Warren Johnsons of the world, and these guys are all coming up and telling stories in certain ways, and to the credit of guys like Scott Snyder. He's fully embracing some of that, I think, along with Nick Dragotta. It's not just the artists. I just think they're always the drivers of these buses. There's this current crop, this vanguard that's leading this new potential movement that I think is starting to appear, but I want to talk about who's maybe in the really alt-indie scene, or the alt-indie scene, what they're doing right now, because I think we might be seeing more of this in the future, and I just wanted to talk about some of those folks.

So, I think maybe we'll save that for next time, but thanks, John. I think this is the start of something. Maybe this is part of what we're doing in Season 3. I know, for Season 3, that we want to continue to do more of our deep dives. I know we've got a couple of stories planned there. So, for you, the listeners, we're going to do some more of that stuff. We definitely have more interviews planned. We’ve got Kirt Burdick coming up on the show, and I think he is going to plug into the other half of this conversation that we're having. So, I'm excited to hear from him, and get his take on some stuff. We're going to have some special guests back on the show. Chase Marotz, Editor-in-Chief of FunTimeGo is going to come on and join us a little more often, for a couple of shows. I don't know, John. What else? I'm excited for Season 3. I hope you are.

[34:07] John: Yeah. More interviews from people that haven't been on the show, as well.

[34:10] David: Yeah, for sure.

[34:11] John: Can't wait.

[34:12] David: All right. Well, thanks, everybody. Thanks to Listener #5 for joining us long-term. Wow, John, 5 regular listeners now.

[34:21] John: I'm going to have to take a shoe off to count, because I need the one finger to count off the other fingers.

[34:26] David: Yeah. Right.

[34:27] John: […] think of is a shoe.

[34:29] David: Maybe we should cap our listening audience at 5, then. Maybe we shouldn't let anybody else in.

[34:34] John: I only have one toe on each foot.

[34:36] David: I don't want to know what happened. I don't know what your mom […].

[34:38] John: But then you […]. It's the size of five toes.

[34:44] David: All right. More about John's big toe, next time. Bye.

[34:49] John: Toe-n in.

[34:50] David: Toe-n in next week. So stupid.

This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating. It really helps. Join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.