[00:00:00] Intro: 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.

[00:00:24] David: Hey everybody, welcome back to The Corner Box. My name's David Hedgecock, and with me as always, the one, the only, the man, the myth, the legend, the first inductee into the Transformers Hall of Fame—definitely in the Transformers Hall of Fame—my friend and yours, John Barber. Also with us, Chase Marotz. Hey!

[00:00:44] Chase Marotz: Thank you. It's good to be here semi-regularly.

[00:00:47] David: Yeah, Fun Time Go Editor-in-Chief, Chase Marotz. How you doing, Chase?

[00:00:51] Chase Marotz: I'm good. You know, it's Friday, I have my tickets to go see Project Hail Mary later with my lovely wife. We're going to get some pizza beforehand. It's really going to be a banner, banner night, I think.

[00:01:00] David: Wow. I have a stack of comic books to read this weekend. I don't have to do anything this weekend. I have excitingly been piling a stack of comic books in my den. Every night I add a couple more comic books, and I'm like, "I'm going to read all of these this weekend." I cannot wait. I've got like 50 comic books that I'm going to read. I'm about like a quarter into the Invincible Omnibus Volume 2. And that's not even part of what I'm going to read, but that's going to be in the stack too, and I've already got like 50 other comics. I don't know how I'm going to get through it all, but I know that I will.

[00:01:29] John: I had high hopes for that myself last night. I literally made it halfway through a comic and then woke up, and it was 1:30 in the morning. It certainly wasn't the fault of the comic, by the way.

[00:01:42] David: What is it when you got to talk about something because it's on your mind, like you're angry about it?

[00:01:47] John: "What's in David's craw?"

[00:01:51] David: No, it's not. No, that is not a new segment. "What's in David's Craw" is not a segment we're going to do. I think I just saw Chase throw up a little bit in his mouth.

[00:02:02] Chase Marotz: I actually think there are not enough haters anymore, and I really think we should bring them back. Like this sort of toxic positivity culture where everybody's like, "Let's not yuck each other's yum." I fucking hate it. Let's yuck more yums, dude, like let's go.

[00:02:12] David: Well, this is just a general, like—I'm not, I'm not signaling anybody out here, but it is something that's really frustrating me lately. Also, by the way, advertisement time. Fun Time Go, the publishing and consulting company that Chase and I run, we're getting ready to do another Kickstarter. This is going to be our sixth Kickstarter, and it is for Super Kaiju Rock n' Roller Derby Fun Time Go Book 3. The subtitle is Fuji Tengu Flames, John, in case you were wondering.

[00:02:39] John: All right. Love it. Looking forward to it.

[00:02:40] David: Go to get.funtimego.com to learn more about the book and the series. And also, if you want, you can get on our mailing list and grab a VIP, cool VIP silicon wristband if you pledge to the campaign. And the campaign starts on May 26th. Okay. Because we are getting ready to ramp up another Kickstarter, I've been paying a lot of attention to Kickstarter more than usual. And here's the thing, John, it's really driving me nuts that I am buying these Kickstarters—because I am, I am a very devout supporter of Kickstarter. Like not only do I use that system for my distribution, but I truly believe in it, and I support a ton of books on it. Many would say that I support too many books on it. I think if you look at my, if you look at my profile, it's like well over 350 campaigns that I've supported at this point. And I'm not just like, I'm not throwing like a dollar donation, I'm like buying like the physical copies of things. So, I got a lot of Kickstarter stuff that I probably don't need, but you know, I'm there to support. And here's the thing. I am starting to see a lot of campaigns that I supported on Kickstarter now showing up in the direct market in comic book stores, and it's the exact same product but like a quarter of the price. And also, more bells and whistles than the one that, that I supported. I don't want to like say that you shouldn't try to double-dip. Like please, go ahead and double-dip. Like if you can do something on Kickstarter and then you can sell it in the direct market and make some more money, that's, I think that's good. But can you at least, I don't know, change the covers or, you know, like the Kickstarter early adaptors, like—I feel like you're just, it's an insult to the audience. Like come on, man. Am I wrong thinking in that? Is that just like, should it just be like, "Oh, you know, early adaptors, they know they pay an extra premium and if somebody's getting the same thing for cheaper because it goes into direct market, then so be it"? Like, how do you guys deal with that?

[00:04:36] John: No, I totally agree. Like I fully respect people putting stuff out in the direct market. I definitely think it gives you a chance to get more eyes on it. And we were just talking last episode, right? What, what was it that I read? There was something I was reading, I was really excited about, and we're like, "Oh, yeah, I read the Kickstarter of that." I'm like, "Oh, man, I didn't even know that was a thing."

[00:04:54] David: It was the Andrew MacLean book that's coming out. Yeah. I might be talking exactly about that book when I'm talking about this rant.

[00:05:02] John: Really? But maybe not. Well, did that come out as a book-book when you got it, though? Or was it like comics? Or was it, was there a format difference?

[00:05:11] David: No, I got it as a full collection, not individual floppies.

[00:05:15] John: Well, I can see the format thing difference being a thing, though. I don't know. That's a good—that one's skirted the line. It's not actually the one—there's three projects in particular that I'm thinking about when I'm talking about this that I've seen over the course of the last, I don't know, three or four months.

[00:05:29] David: That one's not specifically one. It's skirting the line a little bit, but I haven't seen the comic book versions that are in the direct market, so I don't actually know how different it is from what I've got.

[00:05:36] John: Yeah, we've been talking about that with stuff in my life. I feel like the people that supported you early deserved to have something for their—of their own, in a format. I wouldn't say like never reprint those covers or something, you know? Like I wouldn't say never to anything. But I don't know that the cover should be the cover of the book. If you were into a collection of Super Kaiju, if you were to do a, you know, direct market versions of that, I, you know, it'd be cool to have different covers on them. And then if you do a nice deluxe hardcover collecting all, all of them that you've done so far, well, I wouldn't mind if all the covers were in the back of that book. Like that would be fine. That would be cool. Like that's, that's not a, that's not a thing. I feel like by then, it's—

[00:06:13] Chase Marotz: No, I agree with that. No one ever wanted to pre-order like a record to get like a worse version of it, right? Or just like the same thing. I think like, yeah, if you're, if you're spending triple on something because you believe in the project early, like that should be rewarded, right? You shouldn't just be used as like something to, to get a book out to a wider audience that can then consume it for cheaper, because it's like then you're like an investor but you're not reaping any of the benefits of like having invested in it.

[00:06:36] John: Yeah.

[00:06:37] Chase Marotz: Yeah, if you're going to put like a lot of money up for a project to happen, like you should presumably then like just get a piece of that project after, if you do it like, you know, a normal publisher would. But you know, I, I,'m with you there.

[00:06:47] David: One of the more egregious ones that's happened in the last, I don't know, probably 12 months is where the product arrived in comic book stores before I got my Kickstarter version.

[00:06:58] Chase Marotz: That is madness.

[00:06:59] David: And then I was like, "Oh, did I not Kickstarter that?" And thankfully I didn't, but I almost bought it in a store because I was like, "Oh, I don't, I don't have this. I must not have like, Kickstarted it." But I can swear I did. And thankfully, I was questioning enough that I pulled my phone out and looked it up before I bought it in the store and found that I had, in fact, bought it. And I didn't get it for another like two months.

[00:07:20] John: Wow.

[00:07:22] David: So, it had already come and gone, and everybody had talked about it, and I was having to avoid like people talking about it, and then I finally got mine.

[00:07:29] John: That's kind of crazy. I don't even know—that doesn't seem right.

[00:07:31] David: When I originally started doing the Fun Time Go stuff through Kickstarter, my thought was, "Okay, I'll build these for Kickstarter specifically, but I'll have—the way I'll build these is I'll be able to break them out into comic books for the direct market at some point down the road." And in my mind, it was always like at least 18 to 24 months after, you know, that book is delivered to Kickstarter people would be the earliest I would probably put it in the direct market. But now I'm like, I'm just building the book and I don't give a crap about what happens in direct marketing anymore. It's just like, the Kickstarter, the people that support me on Kickstarter, I hope you do, because that's probably going to be the only way we're going to we're going to do this. Maybe I'll throw some stuff up on eBay or maybe we'll do a Whatnot live show, but it'll be the actual like product that came out in Kickstarter. It definitely will not be on any of those platforms before people have it in their hands. Just something that's been bugging me. I feel like if enough of that sort of thing keeps happening, then people using the Kickstarter platform are going to start losing faith in the platform.

[00:08:30] John: Yeah.

[00:08:30] David: We're out here supporting you on these GoFundMe type platforms because we want to help you be creative, not because we want to help you be greedy. And there's a fine line there, and I feel like we're seeing some of these publishing companies sort of cross that line. As a supporter of them, it doesn't feel good to me.

[00:08:47] John: There you go. Lay down the law.

[00:08:50] David: Well, I wanted to do something else, John. We don't always just talk about comic books. Most of our days are spent making them. Can you talk about what you're working on?

[00:08:59] John: Some of it. Yeah.

[00:09:00] David: I saw some stuff solicited this morning. I was doing my final order cut-offs through Challengers Comics, which is where I pick up all my comics. I saw 3D Spider-Man #1, and I was like, "John had something to do with that book."

[00:09:15] John: Definitely. Yeah, that was one.

[00:09:16] David: I'm wondering what else you've been up to.

[00:09:18] John: We're wrapping up putting together the Secret Wars Kickstarter book that we Kickstarted at the end of last year. Working on the next Kickstarter, trying to wrap that book up before we solicit it, or at least get it to near completion. I can't quite talk about that yet, but it's another book with Marvel. Figuring out some plans here at PugW about some upcoming comics, which we should be able to talk about in the next like few weeks, but I can't today. Working on a kid's graphic novel that I don't particularly want to talk about—not that I don't want to talk about it because I'm very excited about it. It's not close enough to completion to be talking about, but I'm, I'm, I'm very excited about it.

[00:09:53] David: Oh, okay.

[00:09:58] John: Potentially another kid's graphic novel, which is another thing I totally can't talk about, but I was on the phone until late last night with people about that.

[00:10:02] David: A lot of NDA on this.

[00:10:08] John: A lot of NDA, a lot of NDA, a lot of super secret stuff. I feel like I haven't done anything. You know what I mean? Like, that's—I've been like completely vanished from the world. I feel like I, I haven't done anything. You know what? You put me on the spot here. Here's something I wasn't even sure I was going to tell anybody, but I'll tell everybody, and I'll embarrass myself into having to do it. I don't know if you can see that. I got some art board there behind me, some, some drawing paper. It says 40 sheets in there. There's only 39 in there because one of them is, is, is attached to a drawing board with drawings on it that I made of a comic book.

[00:10:34] David: What? What? John Barber drawing comics again? That's like—

[00:10:41] John: It's been a while. It's been a while, very long while, and I don't know if it's going to be any good. But I'm having a good time. The first time I left IDW, Tom Scioli said something to me that stuck with with me, where he was like, "Everybody should just go and, and draw a comic. If you write, if you're working on comics, you should go draw one." You know, and I'm like, "Well, I mean, I used to draw comics, that's how I, you know, got into this stuff. That was my background, art and design and stuff." But, "All right," you know, so I went out and bought some paper, bought some Micron pens. I was a, a, a dip pen guy, a brush guy, and then a digital guy. And I'm like, "Well, you know, these Microns might be the thing that's like right in the middle of there, where I can, uh—it's not, doesn't need all the fuss and muss of my dip, dip pens and brushes, but also has more of a tactile sense than the, uh, the computer," which, not that I have anything against that, but the, the, "not computer" appealed to me for this particular thing.

[00:11:28] Chase Marotz: I have some notes for computers, but you know, that's neither here nor there.

[00:11:32] John: No, right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:11:35] Chase Marotz: Well, AI is great, because what you can do is you can just tell it what you want, and it makes the pictures for you.

[00:11:38] John: That was a joke, that was a joke, that was a joke, that was a joke. Maybe it'll just burn out and, uh, it'll be another half-finished thing like my kids.

[00:11:47] David: Did you just say—

[00:11:47] John: I didn't abandon my kids, I didn't abandon my kids. That was another joke. That was like the AI thing, that wasn't true.

[00:11:53] David: That's exciting, John. I'm excited to, to learn that you're writing and drawing your own comic. You're writing it too, I'm assuming. You're just going to do that later. Have somebody else do it later, after you've already drawn it.

[00:12:00] John: That actually came up on that call last night, with saying, "Yeah, we have to write it before you start drawing, right?"

[00:12:06] Chase Marotz: Every time I'm writing like, for myself, when I'm writing and drawing a comic, I just like sort of write and draw stick figures at the same time on like letter paper and just like figure it out that way.

[00:12:16] John: Yeah, that's, totally, that's—yeah. I don't like—who has time to sit down and write a script for something you know you're going to draw yourself? It's just crazy. I have mixed feelings about that. I, I largely agree with you and then also, like, I've written scripts so I know how those work, so maybe I should be doing that on this stuff. So, I'm, I'm kind of—a little from Column A, a little from Column B, the thing I'm doing kind of lends itself to, to that.

[00:12:37] Chase Marotz: I just feel like I, I have so little time that I just try and condense every step, like, down into like as close as possible, which makes it like all worse overall but then at least like anything gets done.

[00:12:46] John: I really love, as listeners of the show have no doubt never want to hear again, I love Airtight Garage by Moebius. I think that is one of the all-time great comics anywhere by anybody. And he was doing exactly what you're saying. He's doing like the two pages that needed to get turned in that week were the ones that got written and drawn.

[00:13:05] Chase Marotz: Yeah.

[00:13:06] John: Yeah. The, the balancing act and the, the high-wire act of like holding that together for an, an extended narrative, that like absolutely does not work like a, you know, like, "I'm going to go to a movie and see a three-act structure that, that, that somebody's, uh, uh, pulled out of Save the Cat to the, down to the page numbers of the script." It does not lend itself to that, but the, the fact that he can pull it all together at the end and still make it somewhat coherent is, is like just so amazing to me. Like, that's a big inspiration. He's also very good at drawing. That part doesn't really come up in my life.

[00:13:36] David: Yeah, I'm with you.

[00:13:40] Chase Marotz: Yeah, we all have to work with the, the toolbox we have, right? That's—

[00:13:43] John: Yeah.

[00:13:44] Chase Marotz: Yeah.

[00:13:44] John: But I was also—like, when we were talking about THB, you know, a few weeks ago, a few months ago, the speed that, you know, Paul Pope would do a page. Maybe it wasn't perfect, but, you know, not only wasn't it perfect, but he didn't like the medium he used to draw that page. Well, the next page was a different medium, that's okay. You know what I mean? Ink washes? Nah, no ink washes. So, page five has ink washes and page six doesn't. That's fine.

[00:14:03] David: I was never able to get out of my own head enough to enjoy that part of the process. I was so noodly with my tools. I had so much trouble with my tools because it's training your hand, you know, it really is. And so, I was like, "Man, I'm just going to use this one tool until I can get what I need out of this one tool so I can at least eliminate that from the equation." I got to a point where I was using like a .5mm HB pencil lead on a mechanical pencil, and I drew everything with that pencil. Like, every single page of art I think I drew, I used that mechanical pencil. If that mechanical pencil didn't do what I wanted to do, I just forced it. Like, I would just figure out how to make what I wanted to do but not change tools. I was so afraid to like just pick up something else and, and use it. I don't think I'd be like that now, but who knows? Probably would. I have been playing with Procreate lately, and it is really wildly easy to use, man. It's crazy how easy it is. It is not hard to learn. It is an easy thing to pick up and use. And it fixes all your mistakes. It's, it's crazy how kind the line is in that thing.

[00:15:18] John: Oh.

[00:15:18] David: I'm proud of you, John. I'm glad you're picking up the, the pencil and doing some drawing. That's fantastic. That's what you're supposed to do.

[00:15:22] John: Thank you. I'm excited.

[00:15:25] David: Chase and I have got some stuff we can't talk about also.

[00:15:30] John: Oh.

[00:15:31] David: We just wrapped up a four-issue series for Heroic Signatures. But we worked with some great creators. I, we can probably take—say the creator names, right, Chase?

[00:15:40] Chase Marotz: Yeah, I don't see why not.

[00:15:42] David: We got to work with Jonathan Maberry, a five-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author, Jonathan Maberry. New York Times bestselling author, Jonathan Maberry. I know those things because it's in his signature of every single email he puts out. No, he's an amazing writer. He's a very good comic book writer. He wrote the, the heck out of this four-issue miniseries. Really fun to work with him on it. And, our friend Paul Pelletier drew it.

[00:16:05] John: Nice.

[00:16:06] David: Nice. And, we got David Garcia Cruz—did David Garcia Cruz color Transformers?

[00:16:10] Chase Marotz: Yeah, he was on Transformers for a while.

[00:16:10] David: Yeah. He colored this, this new series for us too.

[00:16:13] John: Nice.

[00:16:13] David: Pretty much wrapped it up, and, and now we're onto another original miniseries over there. We've also got a bunch of other stuff, but I'm hogging it, so I'll let Chase talk about some of the other stuff we've been doing.

[00:16:23] Chase Marotz: Like David mentioned earlier, we're doing the, the Savage Sword of Conan Re-Forged, which is like the recolored Savage Sword stories with like some of the original like, yeah, ads and in different pin-ups and stuff. Um, you know, because all those old Savage Sword issues had articles, so there's—it's like a nice little package of kind of recolored like articles and pin-ups and, and fun Savage Sword stories that we've picked out. So, I, uh, locked the next few issues of that. We're doing the, the Conan Omnibus, and, um, I've been trying to get back to, to drawing my, my next thing too.

[00:16:50] John: Oh, really?

[00:16:50] Chase Marotz: Yeah, Issue 2 of Darkroom. I finished six pages of it like three years ago, but I think I'm finally ready to begin again.

[00:16:57] John: Nice.

[00:16:58] David: My favorite thing about Darkroom is that you use a, um, an alias for your, for your credit.

[00:17:03] Chase Marotz: Mark Darkly's Darkroom by Mark Darkly.

[00:17:05] John: Oh, is it?

[00:17:08] David: I love that.

[00:17:08] Chase Marotz: It's a scantron instruction is where that alias comes from.

[00:17:11] John: Is it?

[00:17:12] Chase Marotz: Yeah, that's, that's what they tell you to do, like, "fill in the bubble, mark darkly."

[00:17:14] John: Oh.

[00:17:16] David: Oh, look at you, clever boy.

[00:17:18] John: Is this still used, scan—

[00:17:19] Chase Marotz: I made up the alias in college, so, yeah, it's good, it's a good—I don't know what the kids are up to now.

[00:17:23] John: I like it.

[00:17:24] David: We just got the advance copies of, Savage Sword of Conan Re-Forged #4. I'm super excited at, at how it turned out. We've been working with the same coloring crew. I think they're out of India. Is that right, Chase?

[00:17:35] Chase Marotz: No, they're Italian.

[00:17:36] David: Yes. Of course, they're Italian. We made sure they had some print copies the last couple issues, and we can really see how they're so dialing in their color schemes so that it's just, you know, showing up in print just really, really nicely. So, this Issue 4 of Re-Forged has got some John Buscema art in it. Well, it's all John Buscema art. Well, almost all John Buscema art. And man, it looks really good. And it really looks really good in color. The coloring job is, is really nice, really appropriate to the story. So, there's a Walt Simonson story in here too. Man, it's really fun to work on this stuff. We get to see all kinds of really cool art. That's what we've been doing. Oh, yeah. And we got a Kickstarter. Is our Kickstarter coming out in a couple weeks, I'm, I'm prepping for that. We're making the, the, the campaign videos and working up all the, uh, stretch goals and trying to figure out if we can reduce the cost, uh, of the books. So, I've been working to figure out some ways to make that happen. I think I figured it out. I think we're going to actually be able to drop the price on our core books, our core offerings. Hopefully, people will appreciate that. It seems like everything else in the planet right now is—inflation is like, got a chokehold on everything. So, I was thinking, "Well, what if we can—what if we can figure out a way to go the other way and, and, uh, drop the price a little bit for people?" So, I think I figured it out, so that, that, that feels good.

[00:19:00] John: You're just reducing the quality a little bit so that—of the writing and drawing, so that the, uh,

[00:19:03] David: We just, uh, started selling drugs on the side, and we're just using that to supplement the printing of the book now.

[00:19:09] John: Nice. Oh, sounds like a John Sabal issue where, like, the ink was printed in, like, cocaine, and you had to, like, scrape it off and then, like, refine it to something.

[00:19:16] David: Yeah, there you go.

[00:19:17] John: I mean, we all got to do something to, to get through 2026, why not drugs?

[00:19:21] David: John, so should we jump into our, "What John and David Read This Week, Last Week, A Week." I, what's it called again? I don't know. Anyway, Ed, hit it, Ed.

[00:19:36] Intro: Here's what John and David read this week! Yeah!

[00:19:42] John: I've got a long one that I think is worth talking about because it's really funny, but I've got a really quick thing I wanted to, to get in there. Picked up a bunch of stuff, and one of them was a, a comic called Nightmare from Extreme Studios. It's by Marat Mychaels. Rob Liefeld wrote the story, Robert Loren Fleming, did the, did the script. A number of things are terrific about this. One is that I got this thing, I had it sitting there, and in my head, it was called Night Strike. And I'm like, "Ah, I can't wait to read Night Strike." Then I picked it up and I'm like, "Oh, it's called Nightmare." And then I get to page 12 of it, and there's the advertisement for a different comic called, Operation: Night Strike, which featured Chapel, Battlestone, Al Simmons, Cabbot, and Dutch, which, uh, I'd forgotten about. I, I, I don't think I've ever read that. So, Nightmare is—like, it's kind of an Extreme Studios version of The Punisher. First—three panels on your first page. One of them is a shot of these buildings, and you're inside one of the buildings with this ballroom where there's these guys with guns. I never like those opening shots where it's just a bunch of buildings, because who cares, right? Like, let's get to the action. I don't like it when movie trailers do that. I think that's lazy. I think it's—

[00:20:42] Chase Marotz: You don't like the buildings? See, I, I like the buildings.

[00:20:44] John: You like the buildings? See, I—I don't know, I just like, like—

[00:20:46] Chase Marotz: No, I don't know. I just like, like, the buildings, man.

[00:20:48] John: You like the buildings, yeah? Here's the captions for that first panel. "It came to me in a dream." Well, not a bad opening line. "I saw the cities standing tall and proud, sheathed in sparkling armor, ready for anything. And I was the city." And it's like, "Wow, that makes that opening shot really meaningful." That's terrific. And that's the kind of thing that always works on these, like, sort of on the Extreme Studios books, where you have somebody additively adding to things. You know what I mean? Like, Fabian Nicieza was perfect on X-Force because the dialogue was witty and, and fun and didn't get in the way of the excitement, but it didn't, didn't just leave things hanging. The first issue of Youngblood, the very first version of that, you know, like, the original Youngblood #1, is the opposite of that, where nothing helps the comic, you know? Like, the coloring's not, not good, the lettering's terrible, the dialogue is just stuff like, "Get him!" you know, and stuff like that. Like, it doesn't, it doesn't carry it through. So, here, Robert Loren Fleming is really leaning into this. And this is the part I want to get to, because I haven't read the whole comic yet. Although, what I read was enough to get me to buy the complete set of them right before I, I got on this call. Page 3, Night Strike comes smashing in through the, the window of this mafia party, and it's a splash page with nine captions around Night Strike jumping in there. Now, here's the thing. This isn't like the greatest splash page, which I'm sure is—to Chase. Uh, you'll have to look it up yourself, listeners, but here's the cover. Like, the cover is just awesome, you know? Like, the cover is genuinely cool. Splash page is all right, you know? It's just a little silly. It's jumping crotch, crotch and knees first, you know?

[00:22:21] Chase Marotz: Yeah.

[00:22:22] John: Okay. This takes you on such a journey. "See, my class saw Man of La Mancha when I was eight years old. It's a musical about this senile old guy who thinks he's a knight in shining armor. He fights windmills, mistaking them for giants. I liked it so much I went out and bought the book it was based on, Don Quixote. Maybe it was because my name's Knight, Alec Knight, that I identify so strongly with that crazy old man. Or maybe it's because I'm Italian, and I thought that Don Quixote was one of us and would eventually run his own family. I almost became the wrong kind of Don before life slapped me back on the right track. Now, I'm tilting at windmills just like my old hero. Only my windmills are organized crime and the military-industrial complex."

[00:23:13] David: Yeah!

[00:23:14] John: "And if that sounds crazy to you, then you're probably one of those people who believe that the age of chivalry is dead and gone. Dead like my son, who expired in my arms. And gone like my wife, whose body is kept alive by tubes and machines."

[00:23:31] David: Hell yeah, dude. It's one page.

[00:23:35] John: Yeah, that should have been a whole comic book series. They shouldn't have released the whole comic book series and it was just that one page. I feel like I'm completely in on it, where Robert Loren Fleming is taking me on that, like—I'm not like laughing at the script, I'm like just like, "Yeah, that is over the top and absurd, and I totally love it."

[00:23:51] David: You're preaching to the choir, John, because not only have I read and own multiple copies of all issues of this book and the entire series, but I also own original art from the series.

[00:24:03] John: That's amazing.

[00:24:03] David: Not a single page, multiple pages of art, original art, from the Nightmare miniseries. I am a big fan.

[00:24:12] John: Yeah, and that page, like—it's so perfectly mid, mid-90s, it's so perfectly 1995. I don't know when this comes out, but it's a giant splash, there's no background, just a dude with some giant shoulder pads and cool knee pads, and practically non-existent ankles, and it's awesome. I love it so much. Every single muscle in his forearms and, and upper arms is clearly defined, more muscles than any human being has ever had in their upper body. Like, it's all there and then some. I love it. This is peak Marat Mychaels, Nightmare is like peak Marat Mychaels for me. Like, Brigade is great. In fact, Brigade #5, that might be peak Marat Mychaels, but I think it's Issue 5 where Roman comes in like in a big way.

[00:25:04] John: Yeah.

[00:25:13] David: And, oh man, that's some good stuff, dude. I'm telling you right now.

[00:25:21] John: Yep.

[00:25:21] David: I might own a couple splash pages from Brigade as well. Anyway, this is Marat Mychaels's finest. Like, the stuff that Marat Mychaels does today is, it's, I don't know. It's not for me. He does this thing called Do You Pooh? and it's like a Winnie the Pooh, Deadpool mash-up or something. I don't know.

[00:25:35] Chase Marotz: That's the most benign thing it could possibly be. I, I was very worried where you were going to go next with what it was.

[00:25:38] David: No, it's, yeah, it's some sort of like Winnie the Pooh-Deadpool mash-up parody thing. I, I don't actually know anything about it. But I see the art for it, like, some of the cover images for it, and I, it's just not for me. Uh, it's not my thing. But I think it does okay. I think he sells that stuff online and in convention, at conventions. I think, I think that's how he makes a living. So, I think there's a genuine fanbase around that thing, whatever it is. But, for me, 1995 Marat Mychaels is my Marat Mychaels, and I, I don't need in or want any other version of it. So, I'm super excited for you to read this, John.

[00:26:18] John: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:26:19] David: We might have to do a deep dive on Nightmare, the Nightmare miniseries, because I would love to talk about it.

[00:26:26] John: Marat actually did a, a variant cover for a comic I, I, I worked on pretty recently, and, uh, he—I think his drawing's real nice. It's like such a quality version of Extreme Studios stuff, which is always walking that, that edge between cool and just being a bunch of scribbles on a page, or whatever. I don't know, like—if you like this stuff, and I do, this is like a really good example of, of this stuff. I don't know, if you're watching like trashy kung-fu movies or something, sometimes they're just fun because they're just trashy and goofy, and, and, you know, it's fun because things don't work out. Sometimes there's like moments of like, "Oh, that's pretty nice." And this is more like that one.

[00:26:46] David: Yeah, yeah.

[00:27:06] John: Yeah.

[00:27:11] David: We have our, our guest on. We should, we should let Chase dive in here and, and, and let us know what he's been up to.

[00:27:16] Chase Marotz: It's, it's terrible. I'm, I'm like a guest on a comic book podcast and I read no comic books last week. It's because I, I've been working on a screenplay with a friend, and we just finished our first draft, which is lovely. That, that's a tale for another time, but, but now that we're doing edits, I wanted to go and like read a few screenplays to see how like, you know, actual people who get paid to do it are formatting things. And so, I read, um, the Reservoir Dogs screenplay, which was great but totally unhelpful because Quentin Tarantino is such a singular writer who's clearly like writing for himself to direct it, so it was, was—it was a massive read, but it didn't really help me in the slightest. And then, I found it at a used bookstore—and I haven't seen this movie—The Ice Storm. Do you ever see The Ice Storm?

[00:27:54] David: Never heard of it.

[00:27:55] Chase Marotz: It's like a drama movie by Ang Lee that came out in 1997. I kind of like that I haven't seen the movie because I'm sort of like just, you know—I'm going in cold and reading the screenplay. It's actually, um, actually quite good so far. It might get weird. I don't know if it's going to get weirder or not, but, you know, the first 20 pages have been pretty smashy.

[00:28:11] David: Do you think you're going to watch the movie afterwards to see what made it to the screen?

[00:28:15] Chase Marotz: I think I will, yeah. I feel like that's fun. And then, I also, um—I got Get Out in the mail today, which I'm also excited to check out, uh, next on my, my week of screenplay reading.

[00:28:25] David: Oh, look at you, just reading for work, basically.

[00:28:27] Chase Marotz: Yeah, I mean, it's, you know—

[00:28:29] David: Sometimes you got to do that. It's okay.

[00:28:31] Chase Marotz: I feel like there's, there's a lot to be learned from comic writing through screenwriting, because it's all just using like pictures and scenes and characters to, to communicate ideas visually and through dialogue. Like, yeah, there's some differences, but—

[00:28:40] David: I've seen movie scripts that I felt like, "Man, this is so much easier than writing a comic."

[00:28:43] Chase Marotz: Yeah.

[00:28:43] David: Like, a writer will set a scene and then couple pages of dialogue, and then back to a scene set, and that's it. It's like, "Man, that is so much easier than blocking out every single shot the way you have to do with a comic book." That is so infinitely easier.

[00:29:00] Chase Marotz: I mean, there's a lot more intentionality of, of motion in comics too, and I feel like you can tell when somebody who's written a lot of screenplays has made the transition to comics because they write stuff in a comic panel that you cannot possibly like do in one comic panel. Like, they have somebody like walking across a room to, to throw a punch and then duck another punch in one panel, and it's like, "That's not how this works. That's not how like any of this works."

[00:29:21] John: Yeah, definitely.

[00:29:23] David: Yeah, I've had that conversation more than once. Have I ever talked about the, reading the, the Sonic the Hedgehog script, John, on the show?

[00:29:31] John: No.

[00:29:32] David: This was years and years ago before Sonic the Hedgehog, the movie, came out, the first one.

[00:29:36] John: Yeah.

[00:29:37] David: I was at IDW and we had the, the Sonic the Hedgehog comic book license, we—I think they still do. So, Sega wanted us to go up to the, the main headquarters up there in Burbank and read the script, but they couldn't send it to us because it was strictly under lock and key and it was, you had to go in this special room and like you couldn't bring your phone and all this other stuff, like you had to sign papers, you know, giving away your firstborn kind of stuff. They wanted us to go up there to like read the script to kind of like get an idea of what was going to happen and see if there was any ways for us to like tease out some story for the comic book space. And as it turned out, there was no stories like leaning into the movie that we did.

[00:30:14] John: Not for lack of trying.

[00:30:18] David: But what we ended up doing instead was like we just had some really cool, fun reprint packages. We sort of went heavy on some reprint packages and just made sure that we had some good stuff in the ongoing. So, I went up there to read this script to, uh, get an idea of what the movie was about and see where and how we were going to be able to sort of tag onto it. So, I go into this room, John, and they literally lock us in the room. And they hand us like this, you know, this document, and it's inside an envelope, it's sealed. You open the document, it's got my name on every single page, watermarked on every single page is my name.

[00:30:55] John: Wow.

[00:30:56] David: It's like heavy-duty. Like, it was real secure. It wasn't like a real corporate like boardroom kind of situation, it was—it was a comfortable room. There was like couches and a lounge chair and a coffee table and stuff. I'm sitting on the couch, reading the script, and I get like maybe 10 minutes into this script, my jaw starts dropping because I'm like, "Oh no, is this really what they're going to shoot? Is this the film that they are going to make?" And the more I read, the more horrible this script is getting. Like, it's all over the place. There is not like—the first like 10 minutes of the movie Sonic's not even in it. What is this? What am I reading? And I'm like, "Well, okay, maybe it's going to make sense or like, I don't know." I keep reading it and by the end of the script, John, I'm sitting on a couch, and I'm like, "I'm going to fall asleep reading this script. It is so bad." And so, we, I finished reading it and like, you know, you knock on the door and they like come in, you have to like, you know, they seal things up and stuff. And the person that comes in is somebody who knows the script and has read the script, they're working within the movie. And they're like, "So, what'd you think?" you know, because they wanted our opinion too.

[00:32:01] John: Yeah.

[00:32:03] David: I said, "Well, what I think is IDW doesn't want to have—be involved with any of the movie tie-in stuff."

[00:32:15] John: [Laughs]

[00:32:16] David: And the guy was like, "What? What do you mean?" I'm like, "Well, we'll do something else. We don't want to be involved." The guy's like, "Well, I don't understand." And I said, "Can I be candid?" and he's like, "Well, yeah, of course." I said, "Well, I, I—this probably won't get out of this room, but at least somebody needs to know, this is the worst script I've, I think I've ever read."

[00:32:30] John: Oh, man.

[00:32:32] David: "It's so bad that I don't even—I can't even star—we would be here for three hours for me to give you all the notes I need to give you about this movie." And he's like, "What?" Hold on. And he like gets on the phone. And four more people come into the room, John.

[00:32:44] John: Oh man, oh Jesus.

[00:32:47] David: Now there's like five people in the room, and they've all got notepads, right? And they're like—and they're clearly from the movie side of things. And they're like, "Okay, wait, who are you?" And I'm like, "Look, man, I'm just," you know, "like, I'm the Editor-in-Chief," you know, "we manage the comic books." They're like, "Oh, the comic books, fantastic," you know, "thank you." So, they're like, "Okay, well, we heard that you have concerns." I'm like, "Are we really doing this? Like, am I going to get paid for consulting? Because I'm—" whatever. I'm like, "Okay, fine, what did I care if they," you know, "what are they going to do, fire me?" So, I'm like, "Okay, look, here's—" and I broke down the script for them and, and I broke down like, "Here's why this is a problem, do you understand?" and they're like, [gasping]

[00:33:26] John: [Laughs]

[00:33:26] David: It was like this moment of like—like they were so deep into it, or something, that they didn't know how bad some of the stuff did not connect. And I said, "I don't think we want to be involved because if this is what gets shot, you guys are in trouble." There was one particular thing, John, that I was like, "You can't do this. This is going to be bad," and that did not make it in the movie. So, it probably wasn't me, because I'm sure there's tons of other people, but like, my biggest note, like the thing I was like, "You can't do this," that—it didn't make the movie. So, I don't know, maybe I contributed a little bit. That movie that I read was not even remotely what the movie was.

[00:34:07] Chase Marotz: Was it like full frontal, like Robotnik sex scene, or like what was so like horrifying?

[00:34:12] David: They leaned into the owl lady at the beginning. They made that like half the movie. It was not a movie about Sonic, it was a movie about the owl lady for like the first half of the whole movie.

[00:34:20] Chase Marotz: No one cares about the owl lady.

[00:34:22] David: And just other stuff that was, just didn't make sense, and Sonic wasn't like, funny or carefree or—it was just weird. Now, that said, the final product, like the movie, I was not looking forward to seeing the movie, especially after the whole thing about his face looking weird.

[00:34:38] John: Right, right.

[00:34:39] David: And them going back in and having to fix it. When they showed his face, you know, the original face of Sonic, and they're like, the reaction to it was like, "This is the worst thing ever," I was like, "Of course, that's what they think because I read the script. They don't understand the property. They don't understand what makes Sonic, Sonic." But they fixed it all and, and I took my son to Sonic like opening day or like opening weekend. I really enjoyed it. I had a great time watching that movie. I thought it was a very good movie.

[00:35:03] John: Yeah.

[00:35:05] David: And I'm not exaggerating when I say some of the stuff that I thought, "This is going to be a real problem," in the final cut, in the visuals and stuff, it was—ah, I was wrong. Some stuff I was like, right about, but for the most part, they cleaned it all up. From what I read to what I saw on the screen was like, 180 degrees different. I was so thankful. I was like, "Oh man."

[00:35:24] Chase Marotz: When I was at Gameloft, we were doing the, the Amazing Spider-Man games tie-in, so I had to go up to the, the Marvel office in, in Manhattan, and they locked me in a room with the Amazing Spider-Man 2 script. There was this like whole Mary Jane sub-plot that was in there, which I—I think they actually shot, and then just like cut out of the movie after it was all done. But like, it was—it was a very different script on the page from what actually, like, actually made it into the movie that, that came out.

[00:35:47] John: Oh, the Andrew Garfield—

[00:35:48] Chase Marotz: Andrew Garfield one, yeah. Like they—I guess like they had Shailene Woodley as, uh, Mary Jane, and they actually like filmed this whole like, and it was—it was a significant chunk of the movie, like they must have cut out like 25 minutes of that movie.

[00:35:59] John: I forced myself to fall asleep watching that, I wish they would have cut another, uh, uh, 25 to 40 minutes.

[00:36:03] Chase Marotz: It was not very good, neither was the game I wrote that was based on it.

[00:36:08] John: [Laughs]

[00:36:09] David: I've been reading a little bit of Frank Miller.

[00:36:14] John: Oh, yeah.

[00:36:15] David: And, and so I read Dark Knight, Dark Knight 2, and Dark Knight 3. Uh, read all three of those. And then I started reading Dark Knight: Golden Child, which—or re-reading it, I should say.

[00:36:28] John: Yeah, yeah.

[00:36:30] David: So, I kind of want to talk about that next time.

[00:36:30] Chase Marotz: You have me on the podcast on a day you don't want to talk about Frank Miller? What are you—what are you doing?

[00:36:33] David: We can talk about it, we can talk—

[00:36:35] Chase Marotz: What are you doing?

[00:36:36] David: We can talk about it, but—but I haven't finished Golden Child. And the other thing that I, of course, is a re-read, but the other thing that I started reading was, for the first time ever, John, you're going to be proud of me, I'm trying to read Daredevil. I'm reading the Frank Miller Daredevil. I've read the first couple issues of that, and I like it. He's not writing it yet, it's still the other guy writing it. I can't remember his name off the top of

[00:36:55] John: Roger McKenzie. Neither could Frank Miller.

[00:36:58] David: [Laughs] Yeah. Anyway, I always, I always just skip to the, the Volume 2 when he starts writing it, uh, in the Frank Miller collections. I just—

[00:37:05] John: In the first issue, the editorial team makes this big deal of like, "Hey, we've found this new artist. He's super great, and he's amazing, and he's joined us. Welcome to the, you know, to the comic book, Frank Miller." Like, it's clear that everybody working on the, on Daredevil is excited to have Frank Miller drawing. And then, it goes into an issue that's kind of like—I don't have the context for like why Frank's stuff in his early stuff was so exciting. What—do you know anything about that, either one of you guys? Like, it looked like, it looked good, but it didn't—it wasn't like, "Oh, this is like the next George Pérez or this is the next," like, there wasn't anything about it that felt like, you know, unique or original or like, new. It felt like, you know, just a good Avengers hack. I don't know how big a deal it was for him to come on at that point, because somewhere—I don't know the chronology, maybe you do, Chase. I don't know the chronology of the Daredevil issues to like the Spider-Man annuals and the Spider-Man issues that he did.

[00:38:23] Chase Marotz: I'm not sure entirely.

[00:38:25] John: He did an Amazing Spider-Man Annual that Denny O'Neil wrote. Like, it was just really cool. It had like these, uh, newspaper-style headlines every chapter break, and it was, it was just a really impressive piece of storytelling. And if that happened before, I could see there being like this internal excitement, even if there wasn't like an external excitement yet. Like, it clearly doesn't pay out in those, in the Roger McKenzie issues. The thing people talk about that book now is from the Elektra story on. It's not like you'll read that now and just be like, "What a revelation." You'll be like, "Oh, somebody did a, the—did a Spirit story. Okay."

[00:38:55] David: Yeah.

[00:38:55] John: But, like, that's where it starts getting good. And then you get into these issues, if, I mean, I haven't read them in a while, but you get into these issues later on where there's just breathtaking stuff going on, like visually and just like the way he's telling stories and the cutting between places. Like Miller's stuff for me was always more about the writing and art together than it was about him drawing pretty pictures or something, you know?

[00:39:21] David: Yeah, same for me. Uh, uh, just the way it was presented, it seemed extra, even for Stan. You know, ultimately, they weren't wrong. Like Frank Miller, 300 is an incredible piece of art. That is a beautiful, beautiful—and some of the Sin City stuff is incredible and beautiful art, like, story aside, the artwork itself is like, amazing. You don't see it here. The one thing that I do see, that I recognize right off the bat, though, is that, and I don't know if he was super well-known for this, but the fight choreography is really, really good, in Daredevil, all—for like, right from the start, Frank Miller's fight choreography, it feels like he knows what he's doing. He's putting interesting fight scenes together, and in ways that I'm not seeing his contemporaries doing the same, same way. So, that is recognizable and definitely felt different. I'm kind of looking forward to reading more of it. It's better than I anticipated already, so, you know, stupid Daredevil in his full red costume.

[00:40:20] Chase Marotz: You don't like the red costume?

[00:40:21] David: He shoots the lights out twice in the, in the first issue that I read, to gain an advantage. Two different fights.

[00:40:27] Chase Marotz: Well, are you mad when like Batman like throws a batarang twice? I don't understand.

[00:40:30] David: I'm just bored by it. Like, this is—his only weapon is like, "I'm going to attack people in the dark and then I'm going to turn the lights out. Hahaha." It's dumb, it's boring.

[00:40:39] Chase Marotz: I won't have this ableist nonsense. He's a blind man. He's got to turn out the lights to fight.

[00:40:47] David: I'm reading it on the Marvel app, and the preamble is, Frank Miller drew a two-part story in, I think, Spectacular Spider-Man. And in the two-part Spectacular Spider-Man story, Spider-Man gets blinded somehow and can't see for most of the two issues that this story is taking place. And Daredevil like doesn't have like any like—like, "Hey, why don't you try this?" you know, like, as a blind man, he doesn't have any advice for Spider-Man to like make it through the next like 10 minutes of his life while he's swinging on a, on a Spider-line, like, Daredevil doesn't say, "Oh, hey, maybe don't do that because you're going to probably run into a wall." Like, there's no like help there from Daredevil.

[00:41:30] John: [Laughs] Daredevil's all like, "Oh, well, Spider-Man, uh, why don't you just use your, your special sense that tells you when things are, are, uh, going to be a danger to you? I'm sure you've got that, right?" and he's like, "Yeah, yeah, I do." And Daredevil's like, "What? Oh, you've got that and you can see? God damn it."

[00:41:46] David: I should probably look up the, which issue this is. You know what does happen in that issue, though, that, in this, uh, two-part Spectacular Spider-Man story, that I found really interesting? So, you know how Spider-Man has his little Spider tracers, right? He'll slap them on the back of a villain, and somehow the villain just never thinks to like, pat the top of his back, you know, and so the Spider tracer's there. Like the original AirTag.

[00:42:07] John: You and I only do that all the time because we read Spider-Man. Like, you and I are always like, checking out our backs, making sure we don't have anything on it because

[00:42:16] David: I'm constantly patting myself on the back, John, you've got that all on

[00:42:19] John: [Laughs]

[00:42:20] David: So, Spider-Man throws a Spider tracer, somehow on one of—because he's blind, but he somehow manages to get a Spider tracer on one of the bad guys. And the bad guy, like, you know, takes off, and he's like halfway across the city, and Spider-Man's struggling, you know, because he can't see, blah, blah, blah. And Daredevil's like, "Oh, I can help out." And he tunes in his Daredevil senses to the Spidey tracer, and uses the Spidey tracer to find the bad guy. So, he used the same exact like senses that Spider-Man has, to trace down the bad guy. I was like, "Man, that's wild and kind of a cool concept, that Spider-Man's not the only one that could use a Spider tracer to find someone, where Daredevil can do the exact same thing." And Daredevil even goes to the, like—you know, of course, it's comic book logic, but like even says out loud like, or thinks out loud, "Oh, I, I—I can't do this quite as well as Spider-Man, but I can do it." And I'm like, "Man, that's, that feels like a story that I want to know more about. I'm kind of into that." Like, Daredevil can just tap into other people's specific types of senses just because his senses are so sensitive?

[00:43:33] Chase Marotz: Ah, yeah, sensitive senses.

[00:43:35] David: I've never read that before, and I don't think anybody's ever acted on that since, but I feel like, "Man, that feels like canon, feels like something."

[00:43:42] Chase Marotz: You've, you've read Born Again, though, right, David? Like, you've read that one at least? Where the Kingpin finds out his identity and like, Karen Page sells him out for a fix?

[00:43:48] David: No, I haven't read that. I don't know, I don't know what you're talking about.

[00:43:52] Chase Marotz: Dude, so fucking good.

[00:43:53] John: That's, that's good.

[00:43:53] Chase Marotz: That's crazy that you haven't read that book.

[00:43:56] David: Daredevil's boring, dude. It's, I don't know, what you're talking about.

[00:43:59] Chase Marotz: Not boring, that's, that's bananas, man. That's, like,

[00:44:01] David: [Laughs]

[00:44:02] Chase Marotz: It's like two legendary comic creators operating at the height of their powers, like, it's, it's such a good book.

[00:44:06] David: If I want Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli, I just get Batman: Year One. That's—I'm fine. I got all I want. Did they do a Daredevil thing too?

[00:44:13] Chase Marotz: Yeah, Daredevil: Born Again, where Karen Page, who's a heroin addict, sells Matt Murdock's secret identity for like a, like a fix of heroin, and it gets back to the Kingpin, who—Daredevil is—and so he like, clandestinely ruins his life, tries to drive him towards a mental breakdown, and then like Daredevil has to like put his life back together. It's bananas.

[00:44:31] David: That sounds familiar, but I, I, yeah, I haven't read that.

[00:44:34] Chase Marotz: It's because it's been ripped off so many times, like, it's, it's essentially like the exact same story that Kevin Smith wrote when he relaunched Daredevil, but except like Mysterio bought his identity from the Kingpin, who already knew it. Like, it's, it's been like, it's been like redone so many times, but like, it's like, I'm your father is a cliché now, because like, it's been done to death, but like, when George Lucas did it the first time in Empire, like, that was the real deal, man. Born Again is so good.

[00:44:56] John: It is good.

[00:44:57] David: I'm trying, I'm trying. I'm trying to read some Daredevil. I'm going to read the Frank Miller Daredevil. We'll see how it goes. I'll, I'll keep you guys posted, but—

[00:45:05] Chase Marotz: I would also work in, fucking, Elektra Lives Again, which I think is my favorite Frank Miller art of all time, if not necessarily story. There's some full frontal nudity featuring Bullseye in it, you know, just—just in case that, that sweetens the pot for you.

[00:45:18] David: No, I'm out. I was already out, I'm more out now.

[00:45:21] Chase Marotz: Oh, it's really good.

[00:45:22] David: They put, they put the bullseye on Bullseye, yeah?

[00:45:25] John: I heard Ralph Macchio telling the story, or Ralph Macchio told to me the story, that when they were sending that to print, like, somebody had to, like, go over the book before it went out, and they, like, just distracted him as he was flipping through the pages with the nudity, so that they wouldn't stop him from putting that out.

[00:45:38] David: [Laughs]

[00:45:39] John: Ralph had this line that, like, "Frank Miller talks about Daredevil calling him back to the character. That was me. I called him." One of the greatest lines in all of Marvel Comics.

[00:45:49] David: [Laughs]

[00:45:50] John: I guess Jim Shooter wanted to take out and replace with, he is Captain America, leader of the Avengers, is the line, "He has a voice that could command a god, and does." Shooter wanted to nix that because it didn't call Captain America by name.

[00:46:03] Chase Marotz: Wow.

[00:46:04] David: Yeah, Shooter got that one wrong. I do think maybe we need to do a deep dive on Frank Miller a little bit, because I've also got the Comics Journal Library: Frank Miller interviews, from—

[00:46:15] Chase Marotz: I do too, dude, we were talking about this. I demand to be a guest when we do the Frank Miller deep dive. Like, I am, this is the only topic in my life that I'm like prepared to handle. Like, everything else about my life is, is barely being held together, but my knowledge of Frank Miller and ability to, like, like, riff on it, like, I'm there.

[00:46:27] David: Okay. These interviews are fantastic. It's the, it's from 19—between 1981 and 2003, these Comics Journal, uh, interviews, and it's, it's actually in a really gorgeous little, uh, square-bound package, too. Oh, well, oversized, square-bound package, there's some beautiful art in it. But it is, it is fascinating to read Frank Miller as a young artist and moving through, progressing through all these things that he's doing, and how his relationship to the medium changes and, you know, throughout it, and his relationship to his work changes. It's really, um, I'm just barely digging into the Dark Knight Returns interview right now, because each, each interview is just like a, pages long. You know, very Comics Journal-y, but fascinating, fascinating read. Somehow, I've fallen into a Frank Miller reading frenzy lately. I'd love to talk more about it at some point.

[00:47:25] Chase Marotz: Well, you heard it here first, true believers, preview of an upcoming Corner Box.

[00:47:29] David: Yep, yeah.

[00:47:33] John: So, this other thing that I read, and this actually I read over a period of a few weeks because I really slowed it down, because honest to God, no exaggeration, this is one of my favorite comics I've ever read. It's called Archie's Superhero Comics Digest Magazine #2. Now, at the time I was reading this, I thought there is no Issue 1, and there certainly isn't an Issue 3. But there actually is an Issue 1, it just has a slightly different title, the Archie's Superhero Special. This reprints a bunch of old Archie superhero stories, or stuff that's kind of like superhero stories, like, enough like a superhero story that you can kind of get away with putting it in there, which covers a gamut of things. I don't know very much about the Archie superheroes. I don't know very much about Archie, as, as longtime readers of the, show will know. I think I read a little Black Hood, which is one of the Archie superhero characters, because, I think I got, I think I got an issue of that a couple years ago because Alex Toth did, did some art on it.

[00:48:25] David: Cool.

[00:48:26] John: Black Hood is one of the Mighty Crusaders, I think, right?

[00:48:28] David: Yes.

[00:48:29] John: That actually doesn't come up in this, so I don't know if this predates the Mighty Crusaders, or what the deal is with that. I remember in, in the '90s, I think, DC got the license, and they did the Impact line, and there was a Mark Waid-Rick Veitch, Black Hood series, and I read some of that.

[00:48:44] David: Yes.

[00:48:45] John: That was a total reboot of the character, it was just like, it was like a, just a, keeping the name only, kind of thing. So, this opens up with a Black Hood story by Gray Morrow. And it's like, uh, the origin of Black Hood, and it's this, you know, very, very '70s adventure story.

[00:48:58] David: What year was that printed, John?

[00:49:01] John: 1979.

[00:49:01] David: Oh, okay. Okay, so, this is from 1979—okay, this is even—that make me even more excited.

[00:49:07] John: It's reprinting a bunch of like things that were full-size comics, and they are super tiny. And if I didn't have like reading glasses before this thing, like, this is what makes you like happy to have reading glasses, where it's like, "Oh, this thing that would be impossible for me to read without, I can."

[00:49:21] David: [Laughs] He just discovered reading glasses, it's so amazing.

[00:49:24] John: I'm like Daredevil finding out that from his point of view, Spider-Man's secret, superpower is sight, you know? Like, like—

[00:49:31] David: [Laughs] Excellence.

[00:49:33] John: "This is what is like for you all, the time? This is way easier. Well, the radar sense is good, but this is, man." I'm really sorry, everybody, about that joke. Gray Morrow is like, super realistic, artist, did a lot of like, black and white magazines I feel, he showed up in some DC stuff, maybe some Marvel stuff. But like, really like, photo-realistic. And the face is really cool, it's like everybody in here is wearing like, not just, a suit that's like two lines down the side and a little dit-dit-dit you know, along the side. They're wearing a specific suit, and they're driving a specific motorcycle, and it looks really stylish. It's probably not any more stylish than a '70s TV show, but it's still like for comics, at that time, like, everybody looks cool, their apartments are cool, feels really nice. A little trashy story, but I'm enjoying it so far. I get to the next story and it's, The Shield. At this point, a thing that I always forget, and maybe it's going to stick with me now, hits me, that, the Shield is the same as the Double Life of Private Strong. The Shield was the first patriotic superhero, who came out a couple months before Captain America did in, in 1941. And then, Double Life of Private Strong, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby come back and, and reboot the Shield after World War II. So, this is a, Double Life of Private Strong story, and I start reading it, I'm like, "Wait a minute, this is Jack Kirby." And it is. From what I read, this is actually around when he first starts penciling the stuff solo, without Joe Simon penciling it. So, it's, like, it's pre-FF #1 and everything, but it's looking kind of Kirby-ish, you know? Like, it's more, getting, getting some more Kirby in there. And the story is a goofy little story about, Private Strong is in the army, and, but he's also the superhero the Shield, so he has to, you know, go and, and be the Shield and go stop something, but then the general comes back and he's like, "You gold-bricking private, get back there and peel potatoes, you should have been on guard." And he's like, "Oh, all right," you know, and, they're all like—that's the setup. He does something, and then he gets caught by his commanding officer for goofing off. But he's really being the Shield and saving the world, you know? Then, I reach the next story, and this is when I know I'm into something really special. It's a character called The Fly. And I've never read a Fly comic before. There's a lot of them. I don't know very much about Robert Bernstein, who wrote it, or, Joe Rosenberger, who, who drew it, other than I appreciate their work quite a bit now. They're not credited in this comic, you'd best look this up online if you want to know who's doing any of these stories. A couple of them, you can see people signed it. But, The Fly opens up with—this lady is, it's very nicely drawn, really slick, really well, well-illustrated. This lady's up on a, on the side of a building, and she's an actress, and they're like, "Hey, be careful, you're going to fall off the side of that building for this photoshoot we're in." And she's like, "Don't be silly, I'm an acrobat, I can—gasp! as she falls off the building." Meanwhile, the Fly is flying by. There's a guy called the Fly, and he has the powers, not of a fly, but of all insects. And then he chose to call himself the Fly. But he can call on powers. Like, let's say, the way to defeat a villain is that your ass lights up. Spider-Man is in trouble, Batman can't do that, the Fly can, and does, do that. But, in this case, he's flying by and then he sees this beautiful lady falling off a building. He's like, "Whoa, I guess I'd better catch her." So, he flies over and he catches her, and she's like, "Oh, that was amazing. Would you like to go to my movie premiere?" and he goes, "Well, obviously, yeah, of course." So, he goes, as the Fly, to the movie premiere. He's still dressed in full superhero costume, walking down the red carpet with this actress, you know, a day later, or whatever, to the movie premiere. In his full superhero costume.

[05:312] John: Yeah, yeah.

[05:313] Chase Marotz: That is so—

[05:313] John: This is the part that gets me. She goes, "This picture is my first starring role, Fly. I hope the critics like it." To which he replies, "They will, Kim. Science fiction pictures are very popular now." At that point, I'm like, "What if that is what this guy is?" Like, what if that's what this character is, is this sort of guy that the actress who just fell into you while you were flying by and then invited you to a movie, she says she's worried about what the critics are going to think, and you respond just negating the question completely with, "Well, science fiction movies are popular," like, regardless of what you did on screen, it's fine. Like, not even understanding that you said that, right? So, they go in there, and, like any reasonable actress would say to the superhero that she took to her premiere, "There go the aliens chasing me again. It's a good thing they're just imaginary." To which the Fly replies, "You're wrong, Kim, they do exist." So, after the movie, he takes her over to his friend, the scientist's house. The scientist pressed a button, and the wall opens up, and this giant alien comes out, and she's like, "What?" and he's like, "Don't worry, it's a robot. It's not really an alien, it's a robot my scientist friend has made to do the, the robot." The scientist says, "I can regulate his behavior with this control panel. However, no one but I knows how to regulate the switches and, gasp! Professor, what's the matter?" Well, it's his heart, and the professor had a heart attack and falls onto the, onto the control

[05:440] David: [Laughs] Oh, and he fell on the control panel?

[05:441] John: Which causes—

[05:441] David: That's like the worst place to fall.

[05:446] John: Yeah. Well, you're not going to believe what it causes the alien robot to do, but it starts attacking everybody.

[05:452] David: [Laughs] I'm shocked.

[05:454] John: Sacre bleu. So, the Fly's like, "I'll try manipulating these dials and switches. Maybe, by accident, I might hit on the right combination and deactivate the creature." But seconds later, "It's no use. I don't know how to work this control table." So, the Fly gives up on that strategy. A really nice two-page spread here. I mean, this is all like super clean, really beautiful art. This is a well-crafted one of these stories. So, then the lady goes, and she starts working the control panel, and she does deactivate the robot. To which the Fly is just like, "Oh, you must have just hit the right random buttons." But there's no proof of that in the comic. Like, she might have just like—you might be able to look at this control panel and know how to work it, and she might have done that. And he just might not be smart enough or might not have looked, I don't know. So, then he, he goes to take the, the scientist, who is still alive—he's going to go take him to the hospital.

[05:541] David: [Laughs] I'm glad he didn't die. I was worried.

[05:543] John: Yeah, yeah. And he goes, "He's still alive, Kim, I must rush him to a hospital. You leave by car. That creature won't bother you now." And she goes, "No, he's out cold. I'll stop at the first police station and tell them what happened." But the car just doesn't start, it's broken. Then the robot comes after her again, chases her down, the Fly finally finds out that she's being chased, hunts the robot down, but the robot's fallen in love with her, you see.

[05:612] David: [Laughs] I seriously did not see that coming.

[05:615] John: Yeah, another like—you know, the army comes out, and then he steals a missile from them. The Fly shows up, and, he tries his buzz gun, but that doesn't do anything. He was afraid of that. "Professor Jalki told me weeks ago that he used rare metal alloys in making this, the creature. Don't look, Kim, I'll use my firefly radiance." And then, dude, I'm not kidding, his ass lights up.

[05:638] David: Awesome.

[05:639] John: Here's a picture of it, and that doesn't do anything, either. So, then he flies into him headlong, also doesn't do anything. So, finally, she finds a, a sign that says, "Danger: High tension wires," but it's actually high voltage wire. It's frayed open, and she goes, "Well, I can't take you coming after me. I'm going to, I'm going to kill myself. I'm going to throw myself into this electrical wiring to stop you." So, the robot reaches over and rushes at her to stop her from doing it, and she ducks out of the way, and he rams right into the electrical thing and dies. He's a robot or whatever robots do.

[05:712] Chase Marotz: Yeah.

[05:714] John: Like, the Fly literally did nothing, right?

[05:714] David: I feel like the girl saves the day both times.

[05:716] John: Except for when she fell off the building, and he happened to be flying by. But you know he's the main character because it's not called Lady Who Falls Off Buildings, it's called The Fly.

[05:726] David: The most effective thing he did was light his butt.

[05:727] John: And that didn't do anything. And that only had an impact on me.

[05:731] David: [Laughs]

[05:732] John: So, now I'm like—I'm super excited about this. This is fascinating. But then I get into who, who did the rest of this. The next story is a Wally Wood six-pager. There's a, a bunch of stories by, by Jerry Siegel, Superman, creator, another Black Hood by, written by Robin Snyder. Robin Snyder would go on to be—he's the guy that, that was like doing all the Steve Ditko stuff, right? Like, he was at all these Steve Ditko anthologies, and he was like Steve Ditko's kind of manager for, whatever, for years. And there's another Black Hood story by, by Neal Adams and Dick Giordano. More Simon and Kirby, a few other people I don't know, like, genuinely going between these, like, super well-drawn Wally Wood story. After I read the Wally Wood story, I went and I watched Brokeback Mountain and I watched Call Me by Your Name. And then I came back and I read this issue of The Jaguar, and I said, "Hmm, this issue of The Jaguar seems kind of gay." And I mean that like in a Nightmare on Elm Street 2 kind of like, you can reclaim this thing as being,

[05:824] Chase Marotz: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[05:826] John: —like, the subtext is very nearly text in this.

[05:829] David: [Laughs]

[05:830] John: Oh, sorry, not the Jaguar, Steel Sterling. I'm sorry.

[05:833] David: [Laughs] That's a better name.

[05:835] John: I think the Impact Comics Jaguar was drawn by Mike Parobeck. I loved that—the way he drew that stuff. I think it was Mike Parobeck. Steel Sterling, that was the one I meant to say. I'm—no offense intended, anyone on here. The story is called The Awesome Bravo. The opening—it's like one of those splash pages where it like throws you in the middle of it, you know, it's like almost acting like a cover, right? And it says, "Late one evening, Steel Sterling glimpses a handsome, costumed youth being pursued by a steel-helmeted adversary, zipping downward to interfere," and then he gets into this fight. It turns out that's just the start of the story. Like, that's just the thing you need to know to, to get the story going, is he spotted this handsome dude, and now he's trying to save him. We're in this like sort of brick building. You can kind of see a building behind it, but you can't tell a lot about, about either of those buildings, other than at this point I'm like, "Is this like a—are we on a movie set where we're watching like a, Hunchback of Notre Dame type thing?" It's a pretty cool drawing. Who's, who's the artist on this? It's like a costumed guy with a giant helmet on, and he's ramming his head into another dude who's falling through a hole in a brick wall.

[05:945] John: It's Paul Reinman is the, is the artist.

[05:947] David: Okay.

[05:948] John: I like it, it looks, really garish colors, like green in that, in that chartreuse, or whatever that is. So, that guy fights, Steel Sterling, turns out you're in a building that's, "building designed to kill unwary interlopers," and it's got like these—these arms that come out and cannons that come out. Okay. So, now I'm like, "Well, okay, we're in a special building that's designed for this." Here's the next piece of this clue, by the way. The Awesome Bravo, the handsome youth shows up. You know, he keeps saying something like that, like, there's, uh—they meet, and then they go for a walk through the zoo, right? He's dressed in this like sort of medieval frock with a cape, and like sort of the,

[01:00:23] David: Is that Steel Sterling, the guy, the guy with the—

[01:00:26] John: Well, Steel Sterling's the guy in red.

[01:00:28] David: Oh, okay.

[01:00:28] John: The guy on orange is the other guy.

[01:00:31] David: Oh, got it.

[01:00:31] John: He's the Awesome Bravo. But what I'm getting at is, I've never read a comic where I can't figure out what year it takes place in, at all. I don't know if this was set in the present day. I don't know if this was set in medieval times. And even when there's stuff that has to explain it, like, the zoo they walk to, you don't see enough of the zoo to be able to tell, "Is this like a royal zoo in 1500?" I mean, they, no joke, like, they used to keep elephants in the Tower of London, you know? Like, like, that's not a thing that you wouldn't have had. The technological stuff is like just weird enough that it could be Merlin, you know, like, like, some sort of like Copernicus or somebody building this thing in, in, in old—

[01:01:13] David: Steampunk situation.

[01:01:14] John: Yeah, all the buildings look like they could be from the 1500s to the present day. It could be in a city, and you're just seeing stuff. There's no answer. It never—like, that never resolves itself in this story. And it really got me thinking, like, would I know if I had read an issue of Batman and I didn't know anything about Batman, would I be like, "You know, why is this 11th century gargoyle running around a city?" But I think, like, they have a car or something. You know what I mean? I think there'd be—there's almost always something that lets you know that like, "This is, this is the era when they had telephones." Nothing here even tells you if there's electricity. You don't know.

[01:01:51] David: I'm going to go with medieval time period, just because of the way that handsome youth is dressed. I'm, I'm just going with that.

[01:01:55] John: The very next story, also drawn by Paul Reinman, has the exact same drawing of the exact same character in a different role, wearing the same costume, colored differently.

[01:02:08] David: [Laughs] It's not the same character. No, no, no, it's a totally different guy. It's just Paul Reinman likes drawing those sort of medieval tunics on characters.

[01:02:16] John: Fantastic. So, so, even like, that is a clue, isn't a clue.

[01:02:18] Chase Marotz: I'll bet you those tunics were comfortable. Bring it back.

[01:02:23] David: I can 100% get into the Robin Hood vibe. I'm down.

[01:02:28] John: There's a couple stories where there's like, the, the Archie—Archie kids, sometimes they're superheroes, so we get some stories where they're superheroes. Most of it's the, the Archie superhero stuff. There's another one called The Hangman, which, oh my god, what a dark way to go for your superhero. But, he's, uh—he's fighting this master of disguise who's wearing this orange suit, and he can just change his face. He could change his face to look like anything, but he's still wearing this orange suit, and that's how he figures it out, like, instantly. Like, you know, you're like, "Oh, well, in the reality of the story, he's going to be like Zartan or something, you're not going to know." But, uh, no, as soon as they interact, he's like, "Oh, you're the same guy from the car, because I can tell from the suit." Like, why did he—

[01:03:00] David: [Laughs] Why did he even bother changing his face?

[01:03:04] John: Yeah, that didn't like—didn't affect anything.

[01:03:08] David: Do you think the artist forgot what he was drawing, and so they had to just like throw a line in there about him being able to change his face?

[01:03:14] John: I've read enough Archie stuff to my kid now, like, start reading Archie in between One Pieces at this point. Like, there is such a lack of care put into some of those stories that like, it's not shocking that you get to these points where it's just like, here's a gimmick, and we're not going to pay it off. But so much of this is so goofy and so weird. I'm sorry, there is one more. This one has really neat art, like, genuinely looks, looks interesting and weird, The Beast in the Forest. It starts off with, "The horse of Odysseus was successful in its depiction of the, uh, surprise city of Troy." So, you're in this like ancient Greek scenario. It, uh, retells the, the story of, uh, Tantalus, the god Tantalus, and, and, you know, you go through this whole myth being retold. And then I get to the end, I'm like, "Wait a minute, no. There is no Tantalus. Tom DeFalco wrote his own Greek myth!"

[01:03:59] David: [Laughs] Ah, yes.

[01:04:02] John: "Tantalus."

[01:04:03] David: Yeah. Nice try.

[01:04:05] John: Uh, Jesse Santos wrote— absolutely makes sense for there to be an adaptation of some, you know, some part of the Greek, Greek mythology and there's just sound enough like it, like, the real characters to for it to be like, "Mmh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait a minute, no, that doesn't add up."

[01:04:20] David: [Laughs] It doesn't, but it's, uh—it's delightful. Like, The Chief, 22 pages, good enough, Tom DeFalco creates his own Greek—

[01:04:26] David: Man himself.

[01:04:28] John: Yeah. Like, all of stories are either genuinely good enough or like, just charming in their goofiness enough that I, I, I loved every minute of reading it. You know, making fun of some of the stuff, but like I, I, I was telling, uh, friend of the show, Mason, about The Fly, and I think he, he started reading some of this, just checking some of it out. And he, he described him perfectly as, like, "He's the anti-Spider-Man." You know, like, like, where, everything bad happens to Spider-Man. You know, like, this is just, the beautiful lady falls out of the sky, and she saves the day later. Also, I got to go to the movies for free. "You want to go to the movies?" "I love movies! Do they have hot dogs? I hope they have hot dogs, I'd love to get a hot dog and watch the movie. Oh, they have hot dogs!" I'm so charmed by that character as he exists in my head, uh, and on the page, but I mean like, uh, I don't know, I just, I want to read stories about that guy.

[01:05:18] Chase Marotz: Is he public domain yet? I mean, can we like bring this guy back?

[01:05:21] John: Every few years Archie unsuccessfully tries to relaunch these characters in, in some new form.

[01:05:26] David: I feel like the last iteration Rob Liefeld was going to was going to bring them back. He, he did like one issue of The Shield, and he was supposed to do more of that stuff. Maybe there's something else since then.

[01:05:36] John: Yeah, that's the last one that I know of, and I think we're working with Rob on Snake Eyes right in the middle of that.

[01:05:40] David: Oh, yeah, that's right.

[01:05:41] John: Things didn't work out.

[01:05:42] David: Shocking.

[01:05:43] John: With Archie?

[01:05:44] David: [Laughs] That sounds like you found a gem, John.

[01:05:48] John: Super excited about it, yeah.

[01:05:48] David: How much did you have to pay for that, like a thousand dollars?

[01:05:50] John: You'd be surprised. It turned out to be cheaper for me to get two copies of it when I got the first issue because, uh, uh, that was the better deal, so—

[01:05:59] Chase Marotz: And now you have one to give to a friend. You can give it to someone real special.

[01:06:00] David: Yeah, man. I'd save one for me. I, I want to read—

[01:06:02] Chase Marotz: It's like at the end of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York where that homeless woman helps Kevin and then like, instead of giving her like a warm meal or some help, he just like goes out and gives her a turtle dove ornament for the Christmas tree that she does not have because she's homeless. It'll be like that. And he's like, "Friends forever, you'll be like book buds."

[01:06:22] David: Oh, fantastic. Okay, well, thank you, John. I think we did a good business. Thank you, Chase, once again for joining—being on the show. Thank you, everybody, for listening in. Hope you got something out of that. I have no idea what we just did.

[01:06:30] John: [Laughs]

[01:06:30] David: But I enjoyed it. So,

[01:06:33] John: Yeah.

[01:06:33] David: I think that, in part, be all that matters.

[01:06:36] John: Yep.

[01:06:37] David: Thanks, everybody, for coming. We'll see you next week, uh, here on The Corner Box. Like and subscribe and tell a friend. Bye.

[01:06:39] John: Bye.

[01:06:40] Chase Marotz: Bye.

[01:06:41] David: Bye.

[01:06:43] Outro: This has been The Corner Box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five-star rating, it really helps. And join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics.