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] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box, Season 3 Episode-- I don't even know what episode this is. Already, I've lost track, but with me is frequent guest host, Chase Marotz.

[00:35] Chase Marotz: Hey. It's good to be back. David's still bouging it up in France. So, you're stuck with me.

[00:41] John: Yeah. I'm reading some Roland Barthes, in celebration of that. So, David, I’m sure, when he comes back, he'll be all cultured, and everything, and I’ll be able to talk to him about semiotic theory, and stuff.

[00:51] Chase: Exactly.

[00:52] John: This is probably our last episode that isn't really hardcore semiotic.

[00:56] Chase: I would actually adore if David discovered this secret vein of bougie philosopher in France, and he just can't let it go when he gets back--becomes a critical theory podcast--grows a little mustache, smoking Gauloises, as they do.

[01:12] John: There we go. We want to put ourselves in the--I don't know--the embarrassment crosshairs, and admit to things that we think we should have read before, that we haven't. Goodness knows, there's no shortage of that, that I've talked about on here. So, there's stuff, like Supergirl--whatever the previous Supergirl series was by Tom King and Bilquis--

[01:30] Chase: I don't know how to pronounce it, because I've only ever seen it written, and never said.

[01:33] John: I've heard it said, and it's pronounced exactly like it's spelled, in a way that I constantly edit it in my head, that it isn't pronounced like it's spelled. So, I'm sorry. I'm a monster, but anyway.

[01:44] Chase: Can I take a brief digression here, and explain my trauma around never wanting to say these things that I've only seen? So, I was in college, and I was in a class about bodies of water, and the environment, and pollution, and stuff. We got assigned something to give a presentation on, and I got the River Thames, which, for everyone out there, is very much spelled, the Thames, and I had only ever seen it. So, I gave this 10-minute long presentation, where I pronounced it “the Thames” the entire time, and the only comment my professor had, at the very end, was he just look at me, he goes, “you mean the Thames, right?” And everyone laughed at me, and I died inside, and I've never recovered.

[02:24] John: That's terrible. This is something that's come up on the show a lot, because David doesn't know how to pronounce anyone's name, just like me. Obviously, that's a slam on David, but that's also a slam on me. That's not an insult on David. You should never be ashamed of not knowing how to pronounce something, because it means you learned it by reading.

[02:39] Chase: Yeah. This happened to me, again, actually, right after I moved to New York City for grad school. So, that was college. In grad school, I moved to New York City. I had a great time bumming around the city, and I was telling everybody of the many adventures I'd had that day on Houston Street, and again, I go through my whole spiel, and Julia Holloman, God bless her, ended up being a good friend, but she's from the city, and just this dry New York thing. She’s just staring me down. She goes, “Houston, but glad you had fun.” I'm like, “again?”. Again, never recovered. Haunts me to this day.

[03:13] John: That feels like a New York trap that they make for you. That feels like one of those things of--I mean, I lived in New York for a while, too. The first four years you're there, anytime you walk into a restaurant, or someplace that serves food--not a nice restaurant. A deli, or something--I don't know how to work that place. Which one of these three places that seem to be lines do I get into to get the thing I want? Which one is the one where it's—" and nobody's nice about it. Everybody treats you like you're the asshole for not having been here before. I don't know. I feel like that's true of the East Coast.

[03:51] Chase: I mean, it could have happened to me in Portland, because I recently moved to Portland, and it's spelled “Couch Street,” but they pronounce it “Cooch Street” here, which is, A, the worst way you can pronounce that word when you're talking about it with anyone, and B, yeah, it doesn't make any sense, but I luckily had learned that before I moved here. So, I did not make any faux pas.

[04:08] John: Yeah. I feel like it doesn't happen as much in Southern California. I don't mean this as I'm pro-Southern California. I like living in New York, because I'm not--again, not a slam.

[04:17] Chase: I love New York. I love SoCal.

[04:19] John: But I mean, it was the 1960s, before there was even an agreed upon way to pronounce Los Angeles, which is a ridiculous way to pronounce that.

[04:29] Chase: Last one, and I'll stop. When I was at the Home Depot the other day, I needed to go in, and it's pronounced “cock,” but it's spelled C-A-U-L-K. So, I go in, and I go up to the guy, and I'm like, “I’m looking for caulk,” and he goes, “what?” I’m like, “I'm looking for caulk,” and he's like, “no, I don't know. What are you looking for?” And I knew. Finally, I say, “I'm looking for some cock,” and he shouts to another guy in the aisle. He's like, “yo, this guy's here looking for some cock. Can you take him to it?” Just roasting me.

[05:00] John: Amazing. I should get a job at that Home Depot, because it's hard for me to not make that joke every time I see somebody.

[05:05] Chase: They really gave it to me. I think if I just got up and pronounced it right the first time, they wouldn't have given me such a hard time, but I think my mounting discomfort really just gave them the opening they needed. People can bully me more today for the comics I only recently read.

[05:18] John: No judgments, and again, there's a couple of them that are real bigger ones that I've already talked about here. So, I just didn't want to talk about them again. So, I've already gone through some embarrassing ones, of recent things that I should have read. I don't know if these are obscure. We'll see how it goes. I like finding new things, though. I think that's really fun, and I think that that's a problem that you get into, at a certain point, is you stop learning new things about the medium that you like, or just stuff, in general. It's really easy to retreat into just the stuff you already like, and not look at new stuff, but also not even expand the old stuff. That's one of the things with me, is that some of these are really old things that I'd just never paid attention to. This is a big one that we talked about here. I'd never read an Archie comic until about 8 weeks ago.

[06:10] Chase: Oh, man.

[06:11] John: I bought the Archie Digest the week they stopped making them. The week they change formats, where it's a little different format now.

[06:20] Chase: Yeah. Those are some of the first comics I read, actually.

[06:23] John: Yeah. So, I totally missed that. My son and I just read an Archie comic last night. We read the new Halloween Special. Entrenched in Archie now, 8 weeks later.

[06:36] Chase: He really draws you in, dude. You can see why Betty and Veronica are both after him. There's just something enchanting about him.

[06:42] John: Was that what's going on with them? No, I’m just kidding. Yeah, they sure do go to a lot of haunted houses that they think aren't haunted, but then turn out to be haunted. That happens a lot.

[06:55] Chase: It's wild how haunted Riverdale actually is.

[06:58] John: Oh, yeah. No, that's amazing. That was the thing that really attracted me to it.

[07:04] Chase: I actually read a couple of big things this year, and I guess I'll lead with the most surprising. I had not read Barry Windsor-Smith Wolverine: Weapon X, until 2 months ago.

[07:12] John: Yeah.

[07:13] Chase: Even though it's probably, arguably, one of the Top 3 most famous Wolverine stories, of all time, and Barry Windsor-Smith is an absolute legend. I mean, this cat can draw. That's readily apparent, in these pages.

[07:28] John: Not to jump on you for not having read it, but one of the other things about it is that, as great as Barry Windsor-Smith is, there isn't a lot of great Barry Windsor-Smith work. I mean, there's the Conan run, there's Weapon X, there's Monsters. I think we even talked about that, at one point.

[07:44] Chase: We did talk about Monsters, yeah.

[07:47] John: So, that's interesting. What do you think of it, reading it now, after everything?

[07:50] Chase: I liked it. I think it's one of those stories where I think I like the art, ultimately, better than I like the narrative, especially with, I think, the ending, and the false memory stuff. It took me a minute to wrap my head around where it was going, and I appreciated it. I don't think it stuck with me, in the way that it would have, had I read it as a younger person with less developed idiosyncratic tastes in comic books, but yeah, I enjoyed it.

[08:17] John: Yeah, I didn't read it when it was out in Marvel Comics Presents, but I read it when it came out in the first hardcover that came out. I remember buying that at this little store by Save On Drugs, or something. I can't remember the name of it. It's almost hard for me to wrap my mind around this part of it, but there weren't as many good Wolverine stories then. It's not like there weren't any. Wolverine, at that point, was Chris Claremont's Wolverine, and then other people also did some takes on Wolverine. There were a handful of things that were of really high quality, the way I think now there's a few, but the Wolverine limited series. I can't even remember if Meltdown had finished coming out yet, the Havok Wolverine series, with Kent Williams and Jon Muth, and the Simonsons. The lettering was really neat. I remember that being really amazing. It teaches you how to read the comic, and it's not […] you ordinarily read things in.

[09:07] Chase: There's a lot of cool stuff in here, and I think it's just also one of those books, where you hear it's the best Wolverine ever done for 20 years, and then you read it, and you're like, “this is very solid.” I think I was a victim of, you go into something with just such hype around it, and then it's probably how somebody would feel reading The Dark Knight Returns if they were a 35-year-old man, and they'd never read it before, after listening to me talk about it for 10 years. I don't know if The Dark Knight Returns could ever mean something to somebody who hadn't read it when I did, after hearing all of the hype about it, if that makes sense.

[09:38] John: Yeah, totally, and I mean, I think Dark Knight Returns is frankly better than Weapon X, though, too.

[09:44] Chase: I absolutely agree with that. Barry Windsor-Smith's art, though, is just jaw-dropping. I would love it if Scott did an Artist Edition of something like this, but I don't even know where all those pages might be.

[09:53] John: Yeah. I have no idea. Just imagining that coming out bi-weekly, as a feature, but--I don't know--right around then was when Sin City started coming out, and that was the same thing in Dark Horse Present. You don't get anything like that, in terms of--

[10:08] Chase: No. I'd to track down the original issues, because I have the 20th Anniversary Trade Paperback, but I almost feel like the glossy paper makes me lose a little bit of some of it, because these colors are just so saturated and crisp that I think, that newsprint moodier look, that I'm sure it had when you were first getting it, it probably looked even better than it does.

[10:31] John: I'd like to see that with a lot of Marvel comics, to be honest. I mean, everybody does it, but Marvel especially gets super crisp versions of the stuff they're doing. Actually, some of the more recent DC paperbacks have just had garbage reproduction, top to bottom, but Marvel tends to get scans off of film, and sharpen stuff up when they can, and I've colored a lot of that. I did a lot of that, where I went in and recolored the stuff to match the original coloring […] Marvel Books. It's frustrating. I love picking up--there were 60s reprints of 60s Marvel comics—late-60s of early and mid-60s stuff--that's really cheap, especially if you like them beat up, and I love doing that just to see the Kirby stuff in that format. It looks really nice on glossy paper, because you can really see everything about it, but there's just something really powerful about it forcing its way through the bad reproduction, and the newsprint, and stuff.

[11:23] Chase: Yeah, well, because I think that's how people drew and colored with “it was going to look that way” in mind, and I think you see it with films, too, where you have these super-high-def versions of older films, and you can almost feel they're on a sound stage, or these effects don't look nearly as good as when it was a little blurry, or a little rough around the edges. Sometimes, the really crisp remastering of everything, I think, doesn't respect it was drawn to work within these confines, and that's why certain choices were made.

[11:49] John: Yeah. I do think it gets tricky. I remember John Romita Jr. saying something to me about “in the old days, you used to draw stuff, so the coloring couldn't ruin it, and now you just leave stuff for the coloring to save it.”

[11:59] Chase: Exactly.

[12:00] John: I think the hardcover that I got might have been the worst of all possible worlds, but the original hardcover used the original color separations. So, all the printing dots were the same size as they were on the newsprint pages, but it was printed on glossy white paper. So, not only was it super bright colors, but the dots were so visible and so distracting to the detailed art.

[12:27] Chase: I think reproduction is definitely an art. I don't know if anybody is doing like-color reproductions super well right now. I feel like there is this instinct to put everything on glossy paper, to have it really saturated, really modern feeling. Actually, do you follow José Villarrubia on Instagram--Facebook, rather?

[12:44] John: No, I don't.

[12:45] Chase: He does these really great breakdowns. He'll take how pages look in these reproductions, and show how you can make it look closer to the original, while still having it have that remastered flavor, and I think that the stuff he's doing, and showing how these reproductions could work, I wish people would take some marching orders from, because obviously it's little panels and pages I'm seeing on Facebook, but his stuff looks really great, and I think he splits the difference between cleaning up the color versus totally getting it too close to the original, but not on the same yellow news stock, and instead, on the bright white glossy paper.

[13:19] John: Yeah. I got a book that came out from Zoop, Sky Masters. It's a comic strip by Jack Kirby, inked by Wally Wood. There's a huge section in the back of it explaining what they went into on the recoloring, but it's really beautiful. It's probably not a million miles away from what José would be coming up with. It's very faithful to the original, but it presents that better version of it that the artist would have wanted to have had. There is a part of it--I don't know that we should be saddled with Galactus having green shorts the first time he shows up. There's reasonable stuff to fix, because that was nobody's intention. That was just a color separator, at a place, or whatever. We veered off course. Weapon X is pretty neat. When it came to Wolverine, the bone claws--was your breath taken away when those popped out for the first time, and you were like, “wait a minute. That's not part of his gloves?”

[14:12] Chase: It was pretty cool. Especially the opening, the medical stuff, is so awesome, and I think, the first half of this book, really the first quarter, the stuff in the tank--all the scenes, the wires, and the putting metal on his body--that stuff is so cool, and it looks cool, and it's just very neat.

[14:35] John: I've been digging into older manga again recently, and I've been--I don't know--weirdly obsessed with the early manga that came over to the US, when everything still had to go through the comic book direct market, and they had to try to figure out what the format was of this, and you had to get the manga that would make sense for American comic book readers, at that time. You're getting Shirow, and you're getting Otomo, and the stuff, like Akira and Appleseed, and all that stuff that was very similar to what American comic audiences wanted. Sometimes, it was that weird mix of trying to figure out what that was, that you saw in early days of things, but one of the ones that I forget to think about in that category, or the one alternate version of that, was Rumiko Takahashi, who at the time was, at least according to the bios on the back of these books that I have, was possibly the most widely read comic book writer on planet Earth. She was a writer and artist. She still is.

[15:31] Chase: My manga knowledge is super shallow, though. I've not read very many of them.

[15:37] John: Her first big series was called Urusei Yatsura, or Lum. It was called both of those in the US, which is a big hit, according to Wikipedia. 35 million copies in circulation of its 34 Volumes. Then she did Maison Ikkoku. A circulation of 25 million over 15 Volumes. I guess, her biggest hit ever was Ranma 1/2, which ran from 1987 to 1996. According to Wikipedia, over 38 Volumes, sold 55 million copies in Japan.

[16:09] Chase: I hear stuff like that. I'm such a lazy piece of sh*t, dude. I've thrown my life away. Holy cow.

[16:14] John: The amazing thing there is that then she went straight into Inuyasha, which is a huge series in the US and Japan. This one started hitting when stuff started hitting day and date with America, or similar. You'd be reading a contemporary manga in America. That ran till 2008, sold 50 million copies in Japan. She's currently working on Mao. Never stops. She did 40 Volumes of a less popular Rin-Ne series. Popularity's definitely dropped down from Inuyasha, but Inuyasha was massive. So, I don't know. I'd read bits and pieces, here and there, but never actually really sat down and read the stuff. Weirdly, I had two volumes from the early days of VIZ in America. These are both just straight-up VIZ. When they came out as comics, I think VIZ had a partnership with Eclipse Comics. So, they were coming out from Eclipse. We got a Rumic World Trilogy, which is some of her early stuff, where she just had this loosely categorized series, called Rumic World, based on her name, and it was just short stories of different kinds, and they're silly, goofy, some of them are comedies, some of them are science fiction stories, some of them are Japanese folk tales, almost. Really fun stuff.

Really enjoyed it, and then Ranma 1/2, which again is our most popular one, and it's a parody of “chosen one going to a martial arts school” stories, where it's this girl that is the daughter of this guy that runs a martial art academy. She's 16. They're trying to get her to become engaged with this guy who's this great martial artist, who shows up at the studio, but before he shows up there, he's traveled to China with his father, and they both fell into these mystical wells. So, whenever he gets hit with cold water, he turns into a girl. Whenever he gets hit with warm water, he turns into a boy. Whenever dad gets hit with cold water, he turns into a panda. The panda can't talk, but the panda can hold up signs that say the words that it's trying to say. So, it comedically will just offer up a little sign, as it's standing there being a panda. Everybody's obviously really mad, especially when this guy's a panda. Why are you a panda? It's just goofy hijinks. It's just very funny, very silly. It gets into this weird territory where, at the time, I don't think there was any trans metaphor involved in this, whatsoever. It’s funny, because he's a girl now, and now he has to deal with that. She was going into the sauna, but then he got into hot water, and then he turned into a guy. Oh, no!

[18:37] Chase: Hilarity ensues.

[18:38] John: Yeah. There is a crazy amount of underage topless women in this comic, owing to the comedy of it.

[18:47] Chase: Interesting. Okay.

[18:48] John: It's not erotically presented, or anything, but the American scripter of this was Gerard Jones, comics’ Gary Glitter. Unfortunate, or maybe it turns out it was just research the whole time. He just had to figure out more about scripting this comic. I don't know.

[19:03] Chase: Yeah, right. All a huge misunderstanding.

[19:06] John: Yeah, what an almost Ranma 1/2-esque misunderstanding, but I found this laugh-out-loud funny, totally delightful. I don't know. It's so charming and so fun. I mean, I had these copies sitting in my shelves for I don't know how long--not since they came out. I definitely got them within this century, but I don't know why I never read them. I really enjoyed it. They're all in print. I mean, there's better versions of them than I have, rescripted, and the pages reading right-to-left. These are all left-to-right. So, they're all flipped.

[19:44] Chase: Okay.

[19:45] John: Really nice art, really delightful. I don't know. That's my story.

[19:48] Chase: Very cool. I know exactly how long it's been, but given this is the 20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, I finally read a WE3 by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely. People had been telling me to read it forever, and I never got around to it, until last week.

[20:05] John: Yeah, that's a pretty good one, too. 

[20:07] Chase: It is a good one. I feel like, for the first time, I really understood Frank Quitely as being a massively appealing artist, because I liked All-Star Superman, but I think just his panel layouts, and the level of detail in here, and the way he does violence, and stuff, on these pages, I absolutely understand it now. I get it.

[20:27] John: Yeah, the two-page spread where all the bullets are flying at you.

[20:31] Chase: That was really cool.

[20:32] John: I was at Marvel when that came out, and everybody was talking about that the next week.

[20:37] Chase: Yeah, and that's one of the earliest things in the book.

[20:39] John: Almost that statement of purpose that “this is the comic this is going to be.” On the one level, it's homeward bound, with robot animals. On the other hand, “look at this. Here's a two-page spread of bullets, and here's how we're drawing them.”

[20:52] Chase: There was this tension in the book, for me. I really thought the art was very good. The story was fun, but I think I have a level of squeamishness around animals being hurt, or in danger, that made it hard for me to click into enjoying the book, as it were. There are parts of the book I really enjoyed, but can I say I enjoyed the emotional experience of reading WE3? I don't know if I can get there. Especially, just as a pet owner, and a crappy, oftentimes, vegetarian.

[21:21] John: Yeah. 100% agree. Also, I think that's probably part of the book, too.

[21:24] Chase: Sure. Yeah, he's a smart enough writer. He knows what buttons he's pushing.

[21:29] John: And especially him, though. He's a vegetarian. He's very pro-animals. He's coming at it from that point of view. One time--I guess this had to have been 20 years ago-ish--I walk into the Virgin Megastore, and there was a copy on DVD of Requiem for a Dream for $5, and I'm like, “man, that's a great movie. $5? I got it,” and then I bring it home, and I'm like, “when the f*ck am I going to watch Requiem for a Dream?” When do I want to sit down, and just, “I'm just going to chill out, and watch some Requiem?” That is how I feel about WE3. In a lot of ways, it's my favorite of the Morrison/Quitely collaborations, but it's also probably the one I've read the least.

[22:08] Chase: Yeah. That's fair. I borrowed it from a friend. I'm like, “did you think it's good?” And he's like, “that's complicated, but yeah, you should read it,” and I think Sean, my pal, was ultimately proven right here.

[22:21] John: It's funny how that's become a genre in the last year or so. There's two or three big animal adventure comics.

[22:31] Chase: That's true. Even the movies now. I mean, they just released that horror movie from the POV of a dog, Good Boy, which is actually also the name of a 2023 Finnish movie, which is one of the weirdest movies I've ever seen in my whole life, and that Good Boy, and I have not seen the new Good Boy, which is, again, a horror movie from the point of view of a dog, the Good Boy that came out in 2023, it's about a woman who meets a millionaire, who checks all of her boxes on this dating app, but the one weird thing about him is, he has a roommate who insists on dressing and acting like a dog that lives with him, and pretends to be his dog.

[23:07] John: Wow.

[23:08] Chase: It goes off the rails, dude. It gets so f*cking weird. It's one of the wildest man-on-man bare-bottom spanking scenes I've ever seen in a non-pornographic movie. It's just too much.

[23:18] John: All right.

[23:19] Chase: Not that I've ever seen that in an adult movie, either. That's not what I seek out in my spare time, but it's narratively important.

[23:30] John: You Home Depoted yourself. Do you mind if I digress, for a moment?

[23:37] Chase: Let's wrap.

[23:38] John: Speaking of movies like that, with similar titles--I'm giving away what's going to happen, but I think it's pretty apparent--This is a story of me being an idiot, on top of me watching something that I should have watched. Have you seen the movie, The Green Knight?

[23:52] Chase: No, but I have seen the trailer for that movie.

[23:54] John: Okay, yeah. It's from a couple years ago. It definitely seems like the kind of thing that was up my alley, but I am so bad at seeing movies.

[24:01] Chase: Yeah. Likewise.

[24:02] John: I got in my head that I really wanted to watch this movie, and there's some podcasts that I listen to, or YouTube channels, where they've talked about it. So, I'm aware of what the movie is, and just with stuff I've been reading, and I'm like, “I'd really like to see that.” The problem with it, though, is I'm well aware that I'm walking into--at some point in your life, you're like, “when do people start to turn into old men?” And I'm well aware that this is it.

[24:27] Chase: It happened? You crossed the threshold?

[24:30] John: Just nonstop, in the story. That's all the story is. So, I'm like, “I really want to watch it.” The problem is, it's not available on any streaming service. You have to rent it. So, this is an impediment to me, because what's going to happen is, I'm going to rent it, put it on, fall asleep, because I'm just going to pass out, because I'm tired, and next night, I'm going to have to wake up, and then try to watch the whole thing. I mean, I guess I'll wake up before the next night, but I'll be up the next night, I'll be trying to watch the whole thing, and I'll either be stressed out, or even worse--I won't finish it--and then my 48-hour rental will expire, and then I'll have the sunk cost of “do I rent it again for the price I could have just practically bought it the first time, or do I just stew on that for the rest of my life, and never watch it?” None of this is high cost. I'm talking about a $4 rental. This isn't a $30 one that just came out.

[25:18] Chase: That you just do from your house. You don't even have to go to a place and work for it. You just do it from your couch.

[25:24] John: The reality is, I probably would watch it, but the thing is, that's still enough of a barrier of “am I really going to stay up long enough tonight? I don't know.” So, finally, I'm like, “I’m going to watch it.” So, I go on, I look for it on my TV, and I find it, but then I also find that it's available free, streaming on some weirdo service I've never heard of. It's got commercials, but I'm like, “yeah, that's all right. That solves my problem.” I select that, install it, go through the whole rigmarole that you have to do when you install a thing, because it definitely doesn't remember what you're trying to watch, and you have to go back, and you can't search in the thing. The app sucks. So, you have to go back to the top, get back over to it, and I start watching it, and I'm like, “man, this is weird.” It's a retelling of Gawain and the Green Knight. I might as well lean into the old-man-ness of this. It's an artsy take on it, there's a lot of quietness and contemplation, and oddness to it.

So, I'm watching this movie, and I'm like, “yeah, okay. That's what I was thinking, and it’s telling the story out of order. That's interesting, and the acting's really not very naturalistic, but I like stuff that's not naturalistic,” I'm telling myself. I keep watching it, and I'm like, “man, I don't know. I don't know if I like the way that this is actually coming together. The acting's really--I don't know--It's just not that great,” and then it just stops, and I'm like, “wait a minute. I haven't even been watching this an hour. This movie's over 2 hours long. It said it right before I hit play. Did I fall asleep? What happened?” And then I look, and I find, no, I've watched a different movie called The Green Knight.

I've been the grandma that walked into the grocery store and bought Transmorphers for their kid that's literally into robots, and then I start thinking more about that, though. I'm like, “wait a minute. That can't be what it is, because Green Knight wasn't a big hit. Nobody's going to make a fake Green Knight, in order to try to get people to watch that. It's a cult movie, at best. What's going on?” Also, key to this, I know who stars in it, and who directed this movie. I had to have forgotten that, in order for this story to take place. Even if I didn't remember the guy's name who directed it--which I don't--I remember he's one guy, and two guys directed this wrong movie that I watched--and clearly, it's not the right guy in the lead role. So, I look it up, and they Kickstarted it last year, or two years ago, after the real Green Knight movie came out. These guys Kickstart this short movie for thousands of dollars--not a lot of money--thousands of dollars of a budget. So, it's a labor of love by these guys making it, I guess, but what a weird thing to do, to be like, “I'm going to make a different artsy version of an old story that was just made into a movie that's exactly the thing people that would watch this would watch, but with a much higher budget,” and then I watched the real one. I rented it and watched it.

[28:08] Chase: Was it good? Was it worth a watch?

[28:09] John: Yeah, I liked it. It was very good. The other one isn't bad, either, if you want to watch a 52-minute version of it.

[28:17] Chase: I probably don't.

[28:18] John: No, but the actual theatrical movie by the guy that directed the Pete's Dragon remake is very good.

[28:24] Chase: Excellent. It's on my list. I'm going to spend the whole month of October watching this horrific schlock on Shudder, but then after that, I’ll watch other movies again.

[28:34] John: Yeah, and it's close enough to a horror movie that you could slide it into a horror--

[28:38] Chase: Okay, now we're talking.

[28:39] John: --if you wanted to. It's a dark fantasy movie. It'd be like watching a--I don't even know what it would be like, but it's got horror elements to it, if you really felt like it.

[28:49] Chase: I do watch a lot of movies.

[28:51] John: Yeah. See, I don't.

[28:52] Chase: This isn't exactly that, but I remember, I went and saw Pan's Labyrinth at the movie theater, and I got so lit up on Absinthe that I'd been mixing with Dr Pepper, because I was a 19-year-old in Canada, I think, at the time, and I didn't know any better, that I fell asleep for the last half hour of that movie, and I didn't see it again until years later, when it came out on DVD, because that was the way of the world then. What year did that come out? Am I making this story up? I think that tracks. 2006 film. Yeah, I was 19. Lisa and I went to Canada on spring break. We bought Absinthe at the liquor store and did not know what to do with it. So, we just mixed it with Dr Pepper, and then went to the movies, and I passed out, as is a custom for 19-year-olds on spring break.

[29:35] John: Yeah. On Absinthe on spring break.

[29:37] Chase: Took me a long time to finally see the end of that movie, which I did quite enjoy, once I finished it.

[29:43] John: Happy ending, as I recall. 

[29:44] Chase: Very uplifting.

[29:52] John: So, I was at the comic bookstore, SoCal Comics, down here, and they have a 4 for $10 section. So, I was looking through, and I don't remember what I was getting, but I needed another comic. One of the things I love are these DC 100-page Giants from the 70s.

[30:06] Chase: Oh, yeah.

[30:07] John: There's an issue of Detective Comics that's got Scott's favorite comic in there, and in my opinion, Detective Comics is the best. Archie Goodwin was editing it, and there's some great Batman stories in there, but there was also the Goodwin/Walter Simonson Manhunter as a backup story in those.

[30:20] Chase: Oh, awesome.

[30:22] John: I love them, because it's a collection of old stories that I haven't read. It's got the feel of trashy newsprint that really adds to the feel of all these stories. I see not that, but I see a giant Little Lulu and Tubby at Summer Camp. Now also, I've just recently gotten into Archie, as I mentioned. So, I picked up this Archie Digest, and I was just blown away by all these weird stories from different time periods. I'm like, “that's probably what I'm getting here.” I don't know anything about Little Lulu, but I loved Jay Stephen’s Dwellings from a couple years ago, which is a riff on Hot Stuff and Casper--that style, which in my mind is what Little Lulu vaguely falls into, again, not knowing anything about Little Lulu. So, I'm like, “man, it'd be fun to just to read one of the originals of some of this stuff, to get the references, and see what it was that inspired him.” I don't know. I always like doing that. So, I get home, and then unlike usual, I don't just sit this to the side and forget about it, and never read it, but I actually read it. So, I'm reading it, and you get introduced to Little Lulu, and she's about to go to camp. Alvin, this little boy, is messing around, black and white. So, this is 100 pages. There's 1 Juicy Fruit ad on the back, which is pretty impressive, in itself.

[31:39] Chase: Which also has its own little comic.

[31:41] John: Yeah, it's got its own high-quality comic, to be honest. Nicely drawn in 50s style. There's no ads in here besides that. All the rest of it is comics. It's different short stories, and even the inside, and front and back covers have a one-page black and white gag on them. So, there's a lot of stuff. So, I'm reading the first story, and it's about Little Lulu, and she's about to go to camp, and the gag is that all the girls that are going to the camp want to take their pets with them. So, they start loading up these boxes with the pets, and then meanwhile, her friend, Tubby, he wants to go to the boys’ camp, but his mom's not letting him go. So, he decides he's going to jump in, and hide in one of these things that they've stuck an animal in. He's going to replace the animal, and he's going to be in there. So, they load these up in the car, and Little Lulu's dad opens up the car, sees all the stuff in there. He says, “what is this?” She goes, “those are all the animals.” He goes, “no. Get them out,” and they get them out, and they leave them with the mom. The mom's like, “I'm going to return the animals after you guys go.” So, the dad drives off with Little Lulu in the car.

Tubby pops out of the thing that he's in, but then the actual gag is, Alvin pops out of the other one. The kid from the previous trip pops out of the other bag, because he was also trying to go, and he had also replaced the animal there, and I'm like, “that’s pretty solid storytelling. I'm really impressed by that,” and then as I keep reading--this is not a selection of different short stories from different time periods. These are all one continuous story, or one continuous narrative of this one particular summer. These are all new stories. The next story is about Tubby managing to get to camp, and then it alternates between the two camps, and they cross over, and the parents come. So, they're all individual stories with a beginning, middle, and an end, but they all add up into this one big story of the summer that Little Lulu's doing, and I was like, “this is extraordinarily well-written,” and there's some funny gags in there.

There's some stuff that--not a lot of stuff, but some stuff--you wouldn't really do today. Maybe having her friend be named Tubby is one of them, but even then, they're not making fun of him. All of Tubby's friends like Tubby. The only thing they don't like about him is when he plays violin, but he hates playing violin. So, they're all in agreement. So, when he has to play violin, they all hate it. So, everybody's fairly nice to each other. So, it isn't some horrible thing, or anything. There's some fat jokes, and stuff like that. So, I didn't know anything about it. So, I looked up what the whole story with Little Lulu is. It's actually called Marge's Little Lulu and Tubby at Summer Camp.

So, it's a comic strip by Marjorie Henderson Buell, who went by Marge. That was her pen name, just the shortened version of her first name, but when it came into the comic books is when it really took on a life of its own, and this guy named John Stanley was the writer on it. I do remember his name, because that was my cousin's first and middle name. So, whenever I heard the name, John Stanley, it stuck in my head, because that's the name of my cousin. He's hugely well respected. There's collections of his work from Fantagraphics, and Drawn and Quarterly, and stuff. Drawn and Quarterly publishes The Complete Little Lulu by John Stanley. Apparently, a lot of people know about this, and this is just something I stumbled into. So, I'm embarrassed that I never put together any of that stuff, who this was, with this comic that I picked up. Maybe a little embarrassed that I never thought that stuff was anything I'd be interested in, but no, I like it. It's pretty good, but the good part is, I love that I just got to go in, totally clean, and not have somebody telling me, “this is really good. You're really going to like this,” and just be like, “this is really good. I really like this,” and I'm like, “oh, no. A lot of people found that out. That's great.”

[35:11] Chase: Those bargain bin finds you get at comic stores sometimes are just fantastic.

[35:16] John: Yeah. The first one of those Detective Comics that I was talking about, that made me even want to buy this thing, I got at the quarter bin at Comic Castle in Fullerton when I was--I don't know—8 or 9, probably.

[35:28] Chase: Excellent.

[35:29] John: There’s a super thick Batman comic for 25c.  It doesn't look as cool as the ones where he's--I don't know--where Jason Todd's stealing car tires.

[35:38] Chase: Yeah, Jason Todd.

[35:43] John: Yeah. There we go.

[35:44] Chase: Look at us learning new things about old things.

[35:47] John: Yeah, they all seem pretty solid, to me. Check out Weapon X and WE3, if you haven't read it.

[35:51] Chase: Yeah, I'd recommend checking them out, certainly.

[36:00] Chase: This is a nice chat.

[36:01] John: Yeah, bide our time for David to come back.

[36:03] Chase: And then we can talk about Rob Liefeld again.

[36:06] John: He drew the bag at Comic Castle in Fullerton when I was a kid. Local high school student Rob Liefeld drew the bag for Comic Castle.

[36:16] Chase: Man, I'm in a subreddit that's just alignment chart fills, and they just do alignment charts, where it's three things up one side, and the one I stumbled on, it was “great artist, okay artist, bad artist, great writer, okay writer, bad writer,” and you try and fill in the square with who's a great writer, but a bad artist, and poor old Rob Liefeld, Reddit voted him as bad and bad, and I just know that somewhere, David felt a disturbance in the force, and he didn't know why. He's somewhere in the Cote d'Azur, just a cold knife cut through him, and he didn't know what it was from, but I think it was from that.

[36:53] John: Yeah. That's a timely fight for Reddit to be fighting.

[36:57] Chase: It's so goofy, dude. I feel like I am on a lot of comic subreddits, and I hate read them more than anything else. I'm fascinated by the bad opinions of people who claim to love comic books, especially because so many of them seem to hate comic books. I don't understand. You're so mad about--why do you even like them? Why are you reading these things?

[37:17] John: Yeah, everybody gets their joy their own way, I guess. I don't know. That's the beauty of comics. You get to pick what you're hate reading.

[37:25] Chase: Exactly. We should put a hate read in the future. A book you could not look away from, but it's enraged you.

[37:32] John: Oh, yeah. I know what mine would be.

[37:34] Chase: Oh, yeah?

[37:35] John: Batman: Odyssey.

[37:36] Chase: Oh, yeah. Oh, man, that's a good one.

[37:38] John: Yeah. I mean, I've never been happier to not be reading something than I was when I finished Batman: Odyssey.

[37:44] Chase: And yet, I still do have a copy on my shelf.

[37:46] John: I can't imagine I got rid of it. I think I put it in the garage. I tend to clear space, but I think it's in my garage right now. I’d regret it if I did get rid of it, because that's definitely the sort of thing you want to have.

[38:02] Chase: No, it is one of those things that you go back to, just to prove to other people how absurd it is. You can just go and grab that comic, and open up any page, and you're like, “isn't this the dumbest, most insane thing you've ever seen in your whole life?” And inevitably, yes, it is. It's almost impressive that there's not one part of that comic--It opens with Batman on a train, with a handgun. He's all covered in hair. Demented.

[38:27] John: Yeah.

[38:29] Chase: That's a good one. I feel like there's a whole episode of Batman: Odyssey.

[38:32] John: I guess. Did you read, I think it was called Blood, in the revamped Dark Horse Presents?

[38:38] Chase: No.

[38:39] John: It's very similar storytelling. Oh, well. Neal Adams.

[38:43] Chase: RIP Neal Adams. I'm convinced, dude, that he had a closet that was filled with two dozen of the same dark-blue button-down shirt, and two dozen Marvin the Martian ties, and that's the only thing he wore every day. The IDW booth was situated next to his booth several times, and every day, same outfit, but it was always crisp and clean, dude. He dresses like a cartoon character, or dressed, rather.

[39:05] John: Yeah, and I remember trying to convince Keith to put on the Care Bear costume when there was a Care Bear there.

[39:14] Chase: I remember that Care Bear.

[39:15] John: Charge Neal Adams--just charge at him like a bull.

[39:20] Chase: That would be very funny.

[39:23] John: Thank you for joining us, Chase.

[39:25] Chase: It's always nice to be here.

[39:26] John: We'll be back next week. Thank you for joining us. Bye.

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.