[00:00:02] Announcer: 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 is David Hedgecock and with me is my very good friend and co-host of the show, John Barber, that former Marvel editor, John Barber. How’s it going, John? 

[00:00:33] John: It’s all right. How are you? I’m doing great. 

[00:00:36] David: Well, I’m not doing great, John. Actually, I’m pretty gosh darn angry, I want everybody to understand like we’re all about positivity here. We really do. I like to think that we really do like focus on the positives around here. But there’s something that stuck in my craw this week and I want to get it off my chest so we can get to the good stuff. I feel like I’m going to explode. And there’s this podcast is for me to spout my nonsense. And so I’m going to do it. John, I have been enjoying a Marvel comic book, believe it or not. Captain America launched a few months ago. David, I don’t know if you heard America is celebrating its one quarter thousandth year anniversary. That’s an interesting way to put it. Yes, I have heard that one’s replies. It seems like the celebration has been a little mellow of late, but it’s almost 4th of July, and I feel like the country’s just going to throw a big party in a couple days. It’s going to be great.

[00:01:36] John: All joking aside, you know what? I feel like Captain America is the right, a good way to celebrate. I’m happy you’re going to have some uplifting, exciting news about Captain America. I always think of the scene where Frank Miller drew it, where he grabs the flag and he says, “I believe in one thing. I believe in the dream.” That’s my Captain America moment.

[00:01:54] David: Well, John Cling to that moment, Cling to it like it’s the only rock left a sea of awful. So Chip Zorowski and Valerius Sheedy launched a Captain America comic book a few months back and I’ve been enjoying it. But the artist, Valerius Sheedy, has barely been on the book. I think he did the first three, maybe four issues and then he, I don’t think he’s been back yet. So it’s been a really rough start on the art side, which is seemingly kind of typical of Marvel and this is, I’m going to get into this a little bit, so give me a little runway everybody. That seems like a kind of typical thing, which I have issues with and I will get to them. But I was willing to forgive that because I was enjoying the story and I wanted to see where it went and Chip Zdarsky seems to be the lead architect of the Marvel you right now he’s got Avengers Armageddon that’s sort of coming out of Captain America and it’s going to lead into a new Avengers title that’s starting I think in November or December of this year. And so Zdarski is sort of like the main man you know for the Marvel U right now and I want to follow. I want to see what he’s going to do and I’ve enjoyed what he’s been doing on Captain America so far but the art has been a problem for me and it has deterred my enjoyment of the book but not so much that I was thinking about stopping it until I got to the latest issue that I read. And I’m hesitant to actually point out what issue it was because I don’t want to throw anybody under the bus. But the art in this particular issue, a recent issue that I read, was so bad that I, as I’ve done occasionally over the course of the last few years, closed the book and threw it across the room and yelled at it. And here’s the thing, John, the art was so bad and it wasn’t bad in a way, and I feel like I’ve been saying this about Marvel books, it wasn’t bad in a way that it was rushed. It was rushed. You could tell that the art was rushed. Whoever the artist is did not have the time that he needed to do a proper job on the book. And I could see that the guy, if he did have time, probably does have some chops. But clearly, this was a rush job. There’s some pages in this thing, they’re just so rushed to the point of they should not have published the book. It is amateurish and rough. And it’s barely roughs. Like, remember how we were talking just last week about, we’d love to just see Tommy Lee Edwards just do just do roughs, you know, like crank out like pages and pages of roughs and it would be practically a perfect comic book. And it was just as roughs. This is not that, John, this is roughs by somebody who’s like 12 years old. I don’t know what is going on. It is so bad. And it’s so frustrating that it threw me completely out of the story. I couldn’t get over it. And it just continued to be bad, the whole issue. And so I’m like, why am I giving my money to this? There is nothing here. This is a lack of competence and a lack of just very basic storytelling chops. I don’t want to give up on the book because again, I have enjoyed it, but where am I the sucker? Where am I like, “Oh my God, I just paid $3.99, $4.99 for this book and they didn’t put five dollars worth of effort into it. Like they didn’t put a dollar’s worth of effort into it. Like where am I the one that’s like, okay, I have to vote with my dollar here. I can’t continue to support this. When do I cut myself off and say, okay, enough’s enough. And I think I’ve hit that point because it’s not like this was the first straw. This was the last straw in a series of straws. It made me think about like, why is this happening? And this that I want to talk about. And this is hopefully where we turn my leg just ranting into something, I don’t know, productive or constructive in some way. I don’t know. Maybe not. Let’s find out. But I was thinking, you know, you didn’t get this 10, 15, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, certainly like 30 years ago, because what would happen is if a book got so late that they were going to put out something that was this poorly crafted, they would have an inventory story in place and the editor would then put that inventory story in place. And there would just be a break in the book and issue whatever issue 27 would just be a filler and everybody knew it was a filler, but you got some cool, potentially interesting artists, right? To come in like Sam Keith draws up an issue of incredible Hulk. And you’re like, what, who’s this guy, right? Maybe it’s the same writer or maybe it’s a different writer. You know, it didn’t really matter that much. And as a consumer, I liked that. You know, I was into whatever the pace of the story was existing, but I was way more forgiving of that version of filling in than, than what I’m getting right now. It’s almost like we’ve lost the ability to do an inventory story. I think I know why, but I think it’s crushing the monthly. I think it’s crushing the value of the monthly comic book. And in a lot of ways, it will also kill the trades, the collections as well. Because if you’ve got just four issues of really cool stuff and then two more issues of just pedantic awfulness, it’s not something I want to spend 20 bucks on.

[00:07:33] John: Well, I think that right there is a big, has always been a tension since the trades became part of the ecosystem of the stuff, or the trades weren’t just for exceptional comics that were unusual, that how much you want to wreck the future of the comic for the present to the comic in terms of getting something out either quickly on time or having a fill-in. I will throw out, David, I think you could look back 30 years from today to 1996 and find a lot of Marvel Comics drawn exactly as poorly in many of the same ways as what you’re talking about.

[00:08:06] David: I sent you a screenshot. I would challenge you to find something done that poorly. I feel like I have encountered something that I’ve never encountered before with this. And I’ve encountered it a couple of times now. And it feels like something that needs to get addressed. And I think it’s part of the reason why people seem to be really down on Marvel right now. And so it’s a couple of things. First of all, I think we’ve lost the inventory story. And so the ability to allow a creative team to catch up and get that breathing room so that it can keep their four and a half week, five week schedule, but not destroy everything. We’ve lost it. of that inventory story has really caused problems. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I think has really changed the way we make comic books in 2026, as opposed to 1996, is that in 1996, there was a penciler, and there was an inker. And so if you had a penciler, who was behind, you could bring in a couple of good inkers, and they could save the pencils. Right? Yeah, you get a multiple anchors going in. And so you might get an inconsistent issue. You know, it might look like eight pages of, you know, art to bear, and then eight pages of somebody else like Randy Immerland or whoever the quality would be of a higher level, because those guys can take really rough pencils and turn them into something really much more nice and much more professional. Whereas today in 2026, so many artists are working digitally, that they’re inking themselves. So there’s no quick fix for like, oh, this guy’s just going to do the roughs and then we’re going to have these other three people come in and do inks because there’s no anchors anymore. Yeah. Right. So I think those two things are real high on the list of why stuff seems to be falling apart from me. I’m just trying to identify like what are the things that are happening that we can get back to or we can fix. And then the third thing I think is for whatever reason at Marvel in particular, the editorial voice at Marvel seems to be really weak right now. And if they knew that a Captain America book was going to launch and be going into Avengers Armageddon and then in a new Avengers title, you can’t tell me they didn’t know that, right? Then why didn’t they give Valerio Shidi enough time to manage his schedule in a way that he’s not just disappeared on the book after being like the guy that launched it. And it almost seems like it’s one of two things, like either it’s editorial didn’t know to do that, which is all on them, right? Or they weren’t allowed to do that, which is kind of also on them as well. Because you got to stand up for what is right for the book and what’s right for the property and ultimately what’s right for the company. If this was speedball number, you know, six, like whatever, like, I’m not talking about the third or fourth X-Men title in the line. I’m talking about Captain America with one of the biggest writers that Marvel has right now leading into one of the biggest events that they have, leading into one of their biggest tentpole books. And so it’s like, you got to go strength, man. You have to strength after strength. You can’t just come out of the gate and be good and then just disappear. What’s going on? Yeah. For the listener, John is just shaking his head and scratching it because he’s like, he’s like, I don’t know how to answer this because Dave was going scorched earth and I still want to keep a job in this industry.

[00:11:33] John: I do think that it’s the thing that happened that to some degree has always happened. You always wind up with those books that come out and something went wrong. And you know, it sounds like a lot of things went wrong on this. The biggest eye opening thing that I had way back when, when a little young John Barber started working at Marvel, because I knew, I was into comics and I knew the comics industry It wasn’t like I got in there and got disillusioned about how things were made. Far from it, actually. Quite the opposite. But one thing that I really learned was like, everything is made under the worst possible conditions the thing can be made under. And sometimes that catches up with you. So you wind up getting something so far. You’re right. Being able to call in Tom Palmer or something to come in and finish stuff. Keep people that could jump in and ink something. There were a couple times where I’d called Tom up and it was like a new artist doing a backup story or a short story somewhere. So I wound up doing a lot of stuff where it was like kind of tryout sort of things, you know, effectively fill in issues. You know, it’d be like, “Hey, Tom, this is a new guy. You can fix stuff.” I think losing that was a thing. One of the funny things about fill in issues though is I was tasked at one point to kind of come up with some fill in issues. Some of it was like, “We want to try out new artists. We want to have a place to try out new artists.” But also just like we’d have these inventory issues and we could use them. Most invariably they wound up being used as specials. I think they probably all got made. Some of them probably got made after I left though. But you have the problem that you’re talking about that like a writer doesn’t want a thing in the middle of their run. If you’re a big shot writer writing Avengers, you don’t want Joe Schmoe writing issue six in the middle of your story arc because that’s going to disrupt your audience. You’re going to get the blowback from it online. So what you know, things are much more immediate and fan focused than they were 40 or 50 years ago. and issues were kind of less existent in 1996 than they were in like 1986, I think. And even then, less than in 1976, I think. The other thing that you would have is that you’ve got that Captain America issue timed, that it needs to come out in relationship to where this Avengers event is coming out. And there isn’t an extra month. Like, there isn’t a month that you can put in there. That thing has to be the next thing that comes out. I’m not saying that’s necessarily a good reason, but all that happens. One real particular thing that came up was the idea of like, “Hey, make an evergreen Spider-Man story.” Now you could look at like Batman, right? Like, you know Batman. What’s the setup for Batman? He lives in the Batcave, or he lives in Wayne Manor. He has the Batcave, Alfred, the Joker, whatever. But what’s the setup for Spider-Man? Like that changes so much. It’s different now than it was three years ago. It’s different three years ago than it was five years ago. And it happens real fast. High school Peter, college Peter, Peter working at the Daily Bugle, Peter working at a lab, Peter owning a company, Peter being a photographer. And I think that the amount of status quo changes, whether they’re permanent or not, that are part of modern comics makes those villain issues more challenging than they were when things were relatively more stable, where Superman was always Superman. And there’d be a big thing every once in a while that he becomes a TV reporter in the seventies for a while. That was the new status quo that was going to go on. And I know this from other people who’ve written some fill-in issues that never got shown for other publishers, not for Marvel. Because I think DC was trying to do that at one point, maybe 15 years ago-ish. It was trying to kind of get fill-in issues going again. You just wound up with situations where issues were completely invalidated by other stories or couldn’t fit into things or the writers wanted more control over the characters, which is legitimate, which is why in certain ways, many comics are better than they were before, you do have a sort of ownership of the characters that you don’t have somebody else that’s gonna maybe that’s utter nonsense what I just said. The thing that you showed me wasn’t I don’t like the style. You know, it wasn’t like you’re reading invaders and Frank Springer draws an issue. You’re like, I don’t like the way Frank Springer draws because Frank Springer’s like an artist that draws the way he draws, right? This was like incompetence. This was a table is four feet tall on one end and less than 10 inches off the ground on the other end because of like crazy perspective. And for a lot of time where the comic companies were you’d get these pages in and you could hand it to somebody and they’d fix it. You know, somebody that would be working there that was able to do that stuff. And it’s ironic because it’s a lot easier to fix that stuff now than it was then. Having done a lot of sort of image tweaking on some of the work that I do, like I said, sort of the more advertising stuff than the purely artistically-driven comics part of things, I think I could fix that table and make it look like a table in about 45 seconds without using AI. I don’t mean like I’m going to type in make a table. I mean, like you could, you could use just Photoshop to fix that stuff. And I don’t know why nobody does that stuff. Again, it isn’t like you’re going to be hurting your artistic integrity. It’s like, obviously some, the artist couldn’t have met that. You know, no, nobody had wanted that.

[00:16:31] David: Clearly this is, I want to say, I hope, I hope that what I was looking at was like a four alarm fire. Right. Like, Everything went wrong. I hope that clearly everything went wrong. I know that if I was editing that book and it looked like that, everything had gone wrong. All my plans, everything I put in place, literally my A plan, my D plan, my C plan, my D plan, all of them collapsed on me and now I’m stuck where I’m stuck and this is what we have to do kind of thing situation. That’s what it looked like to me, right? In a normal scenario, when you’re looking at your six month or 12 month plan, you go, okay, I know that by issue four or by issue five, we’re gonna have to have a film artist. So we’ll have this little one shot that the regular writer will write. We’ll bring in this writer, artist to do that. And then we’ll move on or whatever. Absolute Wonder Woman is a perfect example of a train that’s running fairly well. It’s a well-oiled machine over there. Hayden Sherman has not drawn every issue of that book. There’s not been a single issue where I’ve ever felt like, oh, this is subpar. Every time they bring in somebody else, it’s like, this is just as, I love Hayden Sherman stuff. Like, I’m loving Hayden Sherman stuff more and more and more and more. I look at it and I’m completely satisfied with who they brought in to draw for that book. I’ve never once thought, oh, this doesn’t feel like it was planned this way, right? Like there’s a plan in place and this feels really great. And the story just keeps going and keeps getting better, even when Hayden Sherman’s not there. I feel the same way about absolute Batman. So why isn’t that happening on Captain America? Well, they probably did have those plans and, and, but it’s something clearly has gone even more wrong here. So that’s where I’m coming from. I was like, okay, well, you’ve got to have the one backstop here as an editor and as a company that pulls your butt out of this particular fire. Like you’re Marvel. You can’t do this. It’s, this is not acceptable. I’d rather you not publish it, you know? Like, just take two more weeks and be late and make it up in the double ship some time later, you know, if you have to. I don’t know.

[00:18:43] John: I’ve definitely been on the other side of that desk when everything went wrong. Maybe even in the last, like, 10 days. Uh-huh. So, yeah, definitely things can go wrong. I also would make calls where, you know, you’re under pressure to get the comic out. It’s got to go out on time. It’s a big deal, shipping late. I think Marvel really made an effort to write the ship in terms of shipping things late. You’ve known me for a while. That is not always my number one concern. And I’m definitely more, I think it was like a Lin-Wien line or something maybe about Watchmen or Buse Dick Giordano. Yeah, 15 years later, nobody ever says, “Boy, that comic sure was on time.”

[00:19:22] David: - Yeah, exactly.

[00:19:24] John: - But you’re under pressure to get stuff and you sort of take hits on some books where it’s like, “Okay, I’ll get X-Factor’s gonna get out this month.” You know, I mean, X-Factor’s gonna be on time, whatever I have to do. Even if Valentine De Landro still irritated with the methods that we managed to get that comic out. He’s a great artist and terrific guy. But Old Man Logan’s gonna be McNiven all the way. But even then, you know, you step in, you’re like, Laura Martin colored some pages in that. Dean White colored some pages. I can’t remember who else colored pages. And, you know, they knew Morrie well enough to do his style and, you know, you can’t really tell. So you sort of take the hits where you can. Yeah, sometimes things really go wrong. You are right. I think DC has been like that is it has been one of the huge strengths that they’ve been flying to, especially in the absolute line. Sorry, this is the other thing I was thinking of all you were saying this though. This Captain America issue is tied up as this event, right?

[00:20:15] David: I don’t see how it is. I think they are related, right? But I don’t see any reason why this particular issue of Captain America had to come out before or after any particular issue of anything. I don’t know what you need to do to fix this, but this should have been fixed better than it was.

[00:20:32] John: What I meant was, it’s part of this event ecosystem where there’s a bunch of stuff going on,

[00:20:37] David: there’s extra comics being made. Yeah. It’s probably part of that.

[00:20:43] John: You know, like I will say, I was a little surprised when I was reading DCKO, which I thought was terrific. And it did a thing that I think happens a lot in crossovers. Final Crisis was a funny one where it was like the crossovers were either absolutely integral to the story or they were irrelevant or contradictory to the story. But to some degree, that happens in like all crossovers. I felt like I would get tricked into buying some DC KO crossovers because I was enjoying the main story so much. And I was enjoying Night Fight so much that I’d pick up some other ones. And like almost universally, I’m like, man, I hate this. I hate this comic. It’s not like it wasn’t the same level of things fell apart as you’re showing here, but it was definitely there were there was a lot of like, like, this is the best artists they could find for this thing that it’s got so many eyes on it.

[00:21:29] David: Yeah, I felt that way about, uh, I’m just throwing people under the bus. I felt that way about Aquaman during the DC KO stuff. I was like, Oh, I’ll sample some Aquaman here. The team took a flyer on an artist who definitely shares promise. Like it’s your distinctive style, but it was just not ready for Aquaman, you know, not ready for the ongoing Aquaman series. They might still be on it. I don’t know. It was one of those things was like, oh, a year or two from now, this is probably gonna be hot. But it’s not right now.

[00:21:59] John: >> I think a lot of times editors will look at the crossover as an opportunity to get back on track that like, okay, Valerio is not gonna draw these issues. We’re gonna have three months. I’m just making this up. I don’t know. There could be any number of things with Valerio. I can’t remember. Did you ever work with him? >> No, I never worked with him. >> He did some D&D stuff at IDW, and then needed Bobby Kurnau’s about Battle Beasts. Battle Beasts. The, hey, we got about that. Before Fort Bendis sucked him into his ecosystem. Maybe they’re like, you look at it and it’s like, okay, I can get, you know, take three months off, get somebody else on it, try somebody else out. If everybody’s doing that, you’re not swapping A-Lister for A-Lister or even like A-Quality for A-Quality because people you have are all doing another book or whatever. So okay, you’re gonna try somebody else out. That probably contributes it to or might contribute to it too. Definitely. It’s counterintuitive, I think, because that is where you’re getting a lot of eyes on this book. And I would think that a lot of people would pick up Aquaman. And if it was, you know, I don’t know, like the David Finch Aquaman or something, you’d pick this thing up and you’d be just like, “Oh my God, this is great, you know, gotta keep reading this.”

[00:23:09] David: No.

[00:23:10] John: But I mean, that’s like as old as crossovers have been. Like if you look through like extinction agenda, it’s like it’s awful compared to the issues around it. It’s so rushed and just so many fill in artists wind up throwing, you know, showing up there in the end or in the middle.

[00:23:23] David: Yeah. Again, I know there’s extenuating service on this because nobody is working to make a comic book, to make a bad comic book. No one’s doing that. Everyone is putting in blood, sweat and tears. And that’s why I don’t want to name anybody or even call out the issue number, because I know that the intention is always almost always good. I think there’s a rare occasion where that’s not true. but for the most part, everybody’s got good intentions, everybody wants to put their best foot forward. But I just feel like, editorially speaking, at a company like Marvel, you have to be better. You have to have things in place for Armageddon hits. You’ve got to be able to put something in place. You’ve got to press the button and save the day. Like, you have to have that ready to go. And I don’t know why they don’t have that now, but that level of low quality, I am not buying that book anymore, Jon. I can’t do it. You can’t feed me that much mediocre, no matter how good the writing is, you can’t feed me that much mediocre art and then double down on that and slam me with that. Like, no, the answer is no. I’m out. I’m done. All right. I’m not going to do that anymore. I do not subscribe. Whatever’s going on over there, I hope it starts getting corrected. Anyway, we beating this dead horse even deader. Let’s move on. Let’s talk about some good stuff.

[00:24:45] John: Why? Stone’s good. Yeah. Okay.

[00:24:48] David: So remember, John, do you remember a couple of, I don’t know, it was a couple of months back. I was lamenting on the show like, oh, you know, we’ve with a loss of diamond distribution now very much in the rear view mirror at this point, we have disparate dist distributors, which means disparate distributor catalogs. And there is no Bible that, that we get that comic book shops get anymore where it’s got like everything that you could possibly order or comic book rise in one big thick, you know, catalog magazine that you can just buy for five bucks or four bucks, take home and flip through and know what’s going to come out in a couple months. You can’t do that anymore. Just it’s not available. And I was sort of lamenting that fact. And I know that there’s like digital versions of all these things. But again, it’s each company’s putting out like their own stuff and so hard to like, know or keep track. Well, guess what, John, Somebody clearly was listening to our podcast. - Oh, yeah. - They fixed it. - Oh, good. - It is fixed. It’s online, guess what it’s called? - Previews. - Comic previews. Previews.com. I just found this site the other day, Comicpreviews.com. It is easy to navigate. It’s super clean. You can search by product, by category, by publisher, by creator. It is amazing. I love it. It gives you the junior for August previews, like the catalog, but then it also tells you like, hey, here’s some feature products, here’s stuff that’s, here’s the new releases for, you know, the week of June 29th, you know, last Wednesday. And it seems to be super comprehensive. I can’t think of any publishers that are publishing, you know, amongst the big distributors, two comic book shops that are fully represented here. I’m very excited. This is a goldmine for me. - That’s cool. - Have you heard of this?

[00:26:26] John: - No, you know what I, so I talked a couple of weeks. months ago that I haven’t had a pull list in years. So after that, I started setting up a pull list at local comic shop. And they’ve got an online thing where you basically go through and you click through like every comic that’s coming out. Like I’ve just sort of uncovered a similar thing to

[00:26:49] David: this and I’m trying to find the name of it. So I shop at Challengers Comics out of Chicago. Clearly, I’m just online, they ship everything to me. Here’s the thing about Challengers though, This is what I love about Challengers Comics. I’ve subscribed to a lot of comic books and every week on Fridays, they send an email saying, hey, here’s all the final order cut off books.

[00:27:07] John: - Yeah.

[00:27:07] David: - And it’s like 10 or 11 pages worth of stuff. So you just go through and I’m already auto-subscribed to a bunch of stuff, but I’ll go through and just see if there’s anything that I wanted that maybe I missed like an issue of, back issue number 1067 or whatever is on FOC. I’ll make sure I get that. or I didn’t realize that there was an F cover to Giant-sized Youngblood, you know? So I just make sure I grab that ‘cause I am gonna have every single cover of Giant-sized Youngblood, John. So yeah, it’s great for challenges, but this comicpreviews.com has all of that and more. Like I was totally blown away when I stumbled on it the other day. And I just wanted our listeners to like, no, because this is like a better version of the Diamond Distributed Catalog for me as far as I’m concerned, because it’s much more searchable It’s easy to navigate and tons of big pictures on everything. Everything’s basically a full page ad practically. I really like it. It doesn’t cost anything. Some nerds doing all this hard work. I don’t know how they’re getting comms. They hope they are in some way, shape or form or eventually they will be. But God bless them because this is great.

[00:28:09] John: That’s cool. That is very cool.

[00:28:10] David: So see, John, we might bring a few things down, but we also lift up. It’s a little from call a little call and be here. We just call them like we see him. That’s the thing. We have to speak truth to power around here. That’s it. Okay. know about ComicPreview.com. I think that’s really cool. And clearly it was because we talked about it and they heard us. They immediately went out and launched this wonderful website based on our recommendations. So, yeah, you’re welcome and thank you. Josh, are we talking about John Burns?

[00:28:43] John: Yeah, sure. Yeah. A friend of the show, Chris Ryle, who’s been trying to put that thing together for a while and finally did. Yeah. Yeah. What am I talking about? I haven’t even said what we’re talking about people might not know I feel like everybody should know this is a wild

[00:28:56] David: Story though John this this truly is like a weird one, right? Yeah, like I know you know the story You know the story for about this look. This is what John Byrne legendary X-Men artists John Byrne Most people I think would agree that he’s the artist responsible for Probably the greatest run of X-Men stories ever told I don’t know that I’m a hundred percent on that Like I really do. And I’ve just recently read a lot of that stuff. Like the Dave Crockrum stuff for me hits so much better for me, but I’m certainly understanding of why other people would lean into the burn stuff instead. Anyway, greatest living X-Men artist, greatest X-Men artist of all time. John Byrne back in what I think it was like 2019, 2018 at some point, he was like, and this is all in his introduction. He was just fooling around and playing around with some pencils and needed something to draw. And so he just randomly penciled a page of an X-Men comic. This is how he tells it though, but I don’t know if this is, I don’t know, I don’t know if I believe this. I think this is a little more planned than the way he says it. And then everybody liked it. And then he just started drawing X-Men comics on his own, like just posting him to his little public website, his own little John Byrne website. And he was doing like a page a day, huh? And did a page a day for three years. Like he was Monday through Friday. He was pumping out five pages a week for three years of X-Men. No editorial oversight. He wasn’t doing it with Marvel. He wasn’t getting paid for it like nothing. He was literally doing this for fun. And what a weird way to have fun.

[00:30:27] John: Yeah, it is funny that that and making Star Trek photo comics are John Byrne’s fun.

[00:30:33] David: Also, dude, way to monetize your hobby. Some people say don’t make your job your hobby, but clearly there are exceptions. Yeah. So, so John Byrne has been drawing, was drawing this thing for like three years. And what he did was he took basically where he left the book and sort of said, okay, like, I’m going to treat it as if I stayed on the book and I became the writer. So it’s like classic X-Men stories featuring John Byrne art. They’re releasing it as a series of graphic novels. Yeah. It’s called Else When. And volume one just hit like a week ago.

[00:31:09] John: It hit like a bomb. It hit like an atomic bomb, man. It blew up in a good way. I mean, like, I meant the opposite of that if it sounded negative. I was being positive. No, it didn’t sound positive. You sound like, yeah, it’s like it

[00:31:21] David: blew up in the best possible way. Like everybody’s talking about this thing all of a sudden. I had pre-ordered it on Amazon because I knew Ryle was involved, you know, even though Chris doesn’t support us in any way, I like to support him. So I had pre-ordered mine. So it came in a mail. Also, Amazon sucks for getting Graphic novels and stuff banding every single time it’s just dropped into a box. That’s not like tightly fit. Oh, yeah You never look at you when it’s just banged around. There’s no like batting or anything

[00:31:45] John: It’s like man. These guys do not collect comic books. Yeah, and there was like you’re like an open shampoo bottle

[00:31:53] David: Yeah, my whole bottle of an ass is just dumped all powder all dumped all over the bug damn it I think I got like on Thursday So it was perfect timing because because I had a weekend free. I shot down with it on a Saturday John I’m not a huge John Byrne guy. I really, he doesn’t blow my hair back that much. I appreciate that other people like him, but he’s not really ever been fully my jam, but Elswin was 100% my jam, man. I really liked it. - That’s fun. - I enjoyed the heck out of it. It was really fun. It didn’t feel dated. It felt like classic, but it just felt like a really good, fun comic book. I think John Byrne was having a good time doing this and that joy, that sort of effortless joy of doing the thing, it comes off in the story, in the book. You can feel it. I just thought it was a fun, easy breezy story. And I was like, man, I enjoyed this X-Men comic book, graphic novel, whatever. It’s like, I think it was probably at least 10 issues worth of material that was in there. Maybe not 10. It’s a big thick book. It’s a ton of art and story. I bet it was probably about 10 issues worth of material. It’s probably the best 10 issues worth of X-Men comic books I’ve I’ve read in a long time and that’s not to like say that I haven’t enjoyed recent X-Men books like the Krakow stuff there was some of that stuff I enjoyed but this was just I don’t know it was just this really appealing and fun and the characters were memorable and distinct and they all had really unique interesting voices and it was it was the light.

[00:33:20] John: That’s cool. I in one way or another have been living with that book in the periphery of my head for years now in various guises and I think almost always involving Chris. But the idea of this thing has come up a number of times, the idea of making this thing. One of the things that was always really daunting about it is Burn was penciling it and lettering it, but I believe lettering it for like web resolution and putting it up online. So if you’re going to make it, you needed to color it, letter it, ink it, not in that order. Now, when you have that many issues, like that winds up being super expensive. That winds up being an expensive book to produce trying to hire good quality inking coloring all that stuff for ten issues

[00:34:01] David: Like you said that’s it and also it’s not just a ten issue commitment probably right? It’s like it’s a 30 issue commitment Like yeah, so this thing doesn’t come out of the gate hot really hot. Yeah, it’s a daunting task

[00:34:14] John: What’s your comp to it? Like what was the last burn sales that you saw like now? Today. Well, it’s a good idea Definitely do it. But a year ago, it was still questionable. Is this gonna land big? Is it gonna, you know, do whatever? I mean, I think it kind of needed a big publisher like Abrams putting it out. Here’s my story with that particular comic is I go into the comic book store. I don’t know if I mentioned I started a pull list. So this all ties together. This is pretty good. So I go in there, you guys say hi to everybody and they’re talking to somebody. I go over and I’m like picking stuff up off the shelf and then one of the guys brings over with a pull list. ‘cause I didn’t know if I had anything that would have come out this week, right? Like, I didn’t know how well I set it up. I think I forgot to do the FOC edition thing, you know, all that kind of stuff. There’s a lot of comics, so my pull list was taking a long time to put together as you scroll through every single comic that exists to find the ones you want. So I got up to, like, maybe L, and it was a big effort, and I never got back to do the rest of it. Anyway, I’m looking at the comics, and I’m like, “Oh, pick a bit of a good fist.” And they come over with a giant stack of comics and hand it to me. And I’m like, “Oh, well…” Including the new Mobius hardcover that came out. Followed over to the show, might have caught that I kind of like Mobius. At this point, I had the John Byrne book in my hand, picked it up, and I was like, “Oh, let’s see…” I flipped through it and I’m like, “Man, this looks fun! Like, this looks fun!” And I’ve seen this stuff so many times, like, seeing it in color, letter inked for the first time seeing Bern drawing, you know, these classic versions of the characters, you know, like he’s done other X-Men stuff, but it’s always been a little weird, you know, it’s been like, he’s done like the hidden years and it’s him doing the original X-Men. This is Bern doing the Bern X-Men. I’m like, oh, that was, so I was, you know, I’m ready to buy it and I could hand it this giant stack of stuff, including another like $30 hardcover. And it was a like absurdly expensive week at the comic book store. And I’m like, oh, you know what, I’m just going to set this down. I’m probably not going to be able to read it for a little bit anyway. I know the orders are big. I know these guys had mentioned it to me that they had a lot of interest in it, but it’s going to do like every other Abrams book does, which is be $8 on Amazon in three months. I’m like, “All right.” I set it back down. I spend a ton of money, go out, I get back to my desk, and I’m talking to a friend of the show, Mason. He’s like, “Oh, man. I managed to get a copy of the burn book.” I’m like, “What do you I mean, he goes, “Yeah, they’re already going for like $60 on eBay.” This is like, you know, Wednesday. This is the Wednesday they came out. This is the Wednesday afternoon they came out. So then I immediately go, “I made a mistake.” Obviously they’re long gone. I’m going to have to wait for a second, pray. That was my long-winded way of saying I haven’t read it, but it did. You sure did look fun.

[00:36:58] David: I don’t know. I think you can still get it, man. I’m looking on Amazon right now. It’s available to Burt. Oh no, I take that back. To bury the out of stock. All right.

[00:37:06] John: How many times that exact interaction has happened with Mason and myself? He’d look at it. Is Mason saying, “Oh, it’s on Amazon again.” Oh, no.

[00:37:17] David: I’m glad I picked it up because I kind of took a flyer on that. And really, half the reason was because I know the history of Chris Ral. Chris Ral has been a champion trying to get this thing together for quite some time. And it really does seem like it has come down a lot of times to just the mechanics of the budget. Like, how do you make this thing? I know it’s weird to say like the new John Byrne and X-Men stories would be a leap of faith, but it really was a big, a bit of a leap. I’m really glad it’s working out. I’ve really enjoyed the story and I’m a hundred percent on for whenever the next one’s ready. I will be there. Really enjoyed it. It’s not heavy. It’s just fun comic books.

[00:37:53] Announcer: It’s not heavy.

[00:37:53] David: It’s not trying to do anything but be a comic book. And Byrne is typical Byrne in a more charming way somehow in that you know how John Byrne feels the need to explain things. It’s not a mistake. This is why. This is why it’s that way. Or, no, it’s not really like that. It’s like this. I don’t know how to describe that, John.

[00:38:15] John: Here’s the thing. I don’t think I’ve ever talked to you about this to anybody. Every time I go on, it’s a small world at Disneyland. One time I was thinking about this. So now I think about me thinking about this thing every time. For some reason, I thought it’d be really funny if John John Byrne wrote a critique of “It’s a Small World.” And when he got to the end, and it’s America, and it’s got like the Old West, and it’s got Woody and Jesse from Toy Story imagining John Byrne furious. Woody and Jesse are not cowboys and cowgirls. They’re toys of cowboys and cowgirls. They don’t belong in the Old West. To me, that’s like my parody version of it. But it’s like him being mad that “Empire Strikes Back” happens because they won in into Star Wars and it’s a betrayal of your enjoyment of Star Wars to find out that the Empire continued on after the destruction of the Death Star. Or why does Desaude have a name like Desaude, you know, in An

[00:39:19] David: and remembers these characters. He still has a soft spot in his heart. Like nobody draws 30 issues of the comic book for free if they don’t have a soft spot in their heart for the characters. Clearly he’s got that. So I don’t know, for some reason his proclivities, his eccentricities and his storytelling are charming in this one. I really enjoy it.

[00:39:41] John: - Yeah, totally agree. None of that was actually meant to be insulting to John Byrne. I really–

[00:39:45] David: - No, it’s exactly, it describes what I’m trying talk about very well.

[00:39:50] John: Yeah. There’s like a funny quality about some things where it’s like when that wasn’t the thing that took over everything, it’s more fun to read some of the stuff, if that makes sense. Heroes Are Born is a great example of that. If you are a Marvel Comics fan and you’ve read Marvel Comics for 40 years or whatever, and then they relaunch all the heroes and the other heroes don’t exist anymore, you’re like, “I hate this. I want my guy back.” And when you get back to the world where it’s like, “No, my guy’s here. They’re fine. this weird side story that happened, you know, gives permission to enjoy it if you weren’t going to enjoy it before. That is actually isn’t my experience with it, but I’m just saying that I can imagine that sort of thing. If this is what X-Men were like on a monthly basis, it wouldn’t be as much fun. But the idea that this is like just burn doing a burn thing, that’s great. And that’s, I don’t know, it gets a little bit to the Simon Cinny part of it of like, I want Simon Cinny doing Ragnarok. You know, maybe this is what’d be cool to have burned it was X-Men go wild. Because I don’t think he’s not gonna go weird wild on it.

[00:40:50] David: That’s the thing that it was kind of fascinating is that I think that a lot of creators, you know, if they were just completely off the reservation, their tendency might be to go really bizarre, right? Like, just really get out there like, you know, mass destruction and do all kinds of crazy and take big swings, right? Yeah. This book is not that this book is like very much like the next issue of Uncanny X-Men. And it continues in that manner. That’s not to say that big things don’t happen and that new characters aren’t introduced and cool things aren’t happening. They are, but it’s well within like the editorial restrictions of what Marvel would have been doing then or does

[00:41:28] John: now. It’s also kind of fancy but also very John Byrne I think. Like it’s a very genuine thing with John Byrne. He wanted, he was doing X-Men because he loved X-Men. You know, he went into the hidden years, pro or con on that. He was doing it because he loved those comics. You know, those were the Yeah, I guess when the second print comes up and I have to get that I just feel like I’m disappointed

[00:41:47] David: I have to get the second printing because I’m an idiot for what it’s worth. I got a first printing but it’s so beat up. Oh Man John we’re burning late on time. We I ran too long at the beginning of this I’m sorry everybody for being such an angry angry boy

[00:42:02] Announcer: But we should talk about what we read this week. Here’s what John and David read this week

[00:42:08] David: What did you read this week John?

[00:42:09] John: Well, you know most of my week has been spent just passing out on the couch and waking up But I think I’ve been I’ve been picking away at is one of the best books I own and I got it back when I was at IDW back when we were in the offices at IDW so we were at IDW and The DC comps came in and I got I got a hold of this book and I remember saying to Scott Dunbier This might be the best book I own. I can’t wait to read it. Here we are making my way through it

[00:42:37] David: Seven years back

[00:42:40] John: And you finally picked it up. It’s the the DC Jack Kirby Bronze Age omnibus 1500 pages oh my

[00:42:51] David: Back you’re not planning on having any more children because that thing sitting in your lap is gonna do some damage

[00:42:55] John: Oh, yeah, it also it squished one of the ones I already had One of your kids yeah It’s super heavy like I know you you mentioned the burn book wasn’t heavy this one is it’s so so

[00:43:07] David: unwieldy. Like all omnibus. They look like such a good idea, you know? Like, oh man, I was just a giant chunk of reading on the, but the actual like reading of those things, it’s not as reader-friendly as one would hope. No, it’s definitely slowed me down in reading this,

[00:43:22] John: where it’s like, I can’t just sit and relax at night because I can’t relax holding this thing. And also if like the dog sits on me, like that’s it. I wouldn’t know what to do. So I love the 70s Jack Kirby DC stuff. Like that’s like my favorite Jack Kirby stuff. If somebody were to say I can only read one Jack Kirby comic, what should it be? It would be the fourth world stuff, you know, for me. Like that would be the thing I’d say. You got to read this. It’s the pure

[00:43:47] David: undilutedness of Jack Kirby coming in there. Still pretty much at the peak of his powers too. That’s the other piece of that. I really like his specific stuff. I really like his Return to

[00:43:57] John: to Marvel stuff. To me, I really enjoy all the stuff after that too, even when they’re not as good as New Gods. But it’s like real hard to be as good as New Gods. You know, like I can’t fault Silver Star that much for not being the path.

[00:44:14] David: I don’t know if this is true or not. I just I feel like Kirby, you know, by the time we hit the late 70s, early 80s, I don’t think that creatively he’s lost anything. I think he’s just looking to do other stuff. Doesn’t he kind of get into animation? You know, I think he hit me head.

[00:44:30] John: I think I was kind of going on around this time. He was even like Thunder of the Barbarian.

[00:44:35] David: Right. Which is incredible cartoon.

[00:44:38] John: Yeah.

[00:44:38] David: It was more than Thunder of the Barbarian. I did a couple other things. Well, you know, he got to LA and he was sort of really trying to get him to do what Stan did basically.

[00:44:47] John: Yeah. I think that went on for like a while even with comic work. But this book is not the new gods. This is all the stuff that isn’t new gods or commande from that period.

[00:44:56] David: Oh, okay.

[00:44:57] John: Which is still really good. The big runs on it, his run on the losers, the military combat, the full run of BOMAC, the one I actually want to talk about, the demon. A few odds and in stuff. He had a bunch of issues. The first issue special, a couple issues here and there. The Sandman series he co-created with Joe Simon and then that’s a whole thing by itself, by the way. Maybe that’s what we should be talking about, but I want to go with both superpowers series. All right, these are the toy lines. - Oh, nice. - The first series he plotted and then he wrote and drew the last issue. The second series, friend of the show, Paul Kupferberg, wrote Kirby Drew, the whole thing. Like I picked those up off the stands. Those definitely were the first Jack Kirby comics I bought.

[00:45:43] David: - Honestly, I didn’t even know those existed. Totally fascinated by that.

[00:45:47] John: - Yeah, and that’s exactly it. I’m like, can’t wait to read it. This is not gonna be as good as this other stuff I know. a toy tie-in thing. I’m not setting myself up for a huge disappointment. This is going to be life-changing. I’m just excited to get to that. But along the way, I got to read All of the Demon, which is a masterpiece. That is such a good comic. You’ve got a minute. I’ll ramble about what I was thinking about with this. I remember Ralph Macchio, another Ralph Macchio story from Marvel, when Jack Kerby came on to Black Panther and started drawing Black Panther. Ralph hated it. a lot of other fans didn’t like it because you’re coming off of this Don McGregor stuff where he was like writing this stuff about colonial Africa and dealing with like real, real things and getting into like real psychological depth. And then Kirby comes back and it’s the attack of the Toadman. It’s like it’s just super goofball Kirby stuff. Like from my point of view reading it years later, it was, it was kind of like what I was saying with the Heroes of War. It is taken out of the continuum from when it came from so I can just enjoy the Jack Kirby-ness of it. But what I was really thinking with the demon is that like how much this is Kirby becoming Kirby. I mean, this is all stuff I’ve been thinking about a lot, kind of half talking about on here for a while, but like this is such a pure Kirby-ness of it. And like, as I understand, like the Losers got the same kind of thing that you, Robert Kaniger is writing these gritty stories. There’s multiple stories of what eventually happens to the Losers, all of which are them getting killed in various ways, but Kirby’s, you’re doing Kirby Losers stuff. I haven’t read that stuff yet. really looking forward to reading that. I think that’s the next one I have, the last big one that I haven’t read any of. Super looking forward to that. But even in the demon, it’s like the premise of the demon, I don’t know how familiar you are with the character or the original version of it, starts off with the fall of Camelot. Riders are sieging old castle walls, and Merlin has a demon in Etrigan, and he casts a spell on Etrigan to turn him into a human. Then he cut to the present day of early 70s New York. And Jason Blood is a professional demonologist, just a regular guy, just a regular professional demonologist. Morgane Lefebvre, who’s Morgane Lefebvre, and they like, I don’t know why they spell different, they actually comes up in the story, I think she shows up and then Etrigan has to come back. Now, Jason Blood and his house has this like amazing apartment in New York, penthouse apartment with all these old demonology things in there. eventually in the run, some casually he has the Philosopher’s Stone. Like that doesn’t come up for a few issues. And then at one point he’s like, well, I’ve got the Philosopher’s Stone here. And then he’s got walls of portraits of his ancestors, all of whom look exactly like him because they’re all him because he’s been alive for however many thousands of years since the fall of Camelot. But he doesn’t know he’s the demon. Morgan Lefey shows up, he turns into the demon, and now he realizes he’s like a thousand years old. Now, this suggests, I think, for almost everybody, that there’s a couple things you’d really delve into. What’s it like suddenly finding out that you’re not just a normal demonologist? You’re an literal, actual demon, and you’ve been alive for a thousand years and you’ve had false memories or something? You don’t remember all the past that you’ve lived through. Also, I mean, just to bring this up, like a demon from hell? Is that what the wizard had? Is that what Merlin had? Was it an from actual literal hell? You’d think that would be like the forefront of the story, but none of that is brought up. Like that’s just like not an issue with any of it.

[00:49:17] David: - We’ve talked about this before, John. Religion is a lot, there’s a lot of hand-waving religion when it comes to comic books. Like we, religion is great, there’s a great storytelling component, like shorthand for stuff, but we’re not gonna really get into the religion. We’ve talked about it. - Yeah.

[00:49:30] John: Well, I don’t mean that, but I just mean like Merlin’s a good guy. Is the demon even a good guy?

[00:49:36] David: like, it’s a complicated job.

[00:49:39] John: - Sort of. It’s just like the thing that’s so fascinating about it is that like, if you are a regular comic book reader and you’re reading regular DC comic books in 1972, and there’s a lot of good ones, and they have this like certain emotional depth that they didn’t have a few years ago, not as much as they’d get later, but more than you have, you have this like rendering style that was always tending toward realism and getting more and more realistic and refined. And you pick this thing up and you’re like, “This is barely a story. This barely fits together into the pieces of a story.” And I can see where he didn’t, like a fan coming at it from that direction would have a completely different reaction than like I’m having where I’m coming at it from like, this is like the purest pure Kirby stuff that he’s dealing with these characters as ideas. This is like the, yeah, Jason Blood is the literal representation of a human that has these powers buried within them. He’s not, he doesn’t react like a human would. He reacts like this representation of it. He reacts like Zeus would or something. It’s grand. It’s bigger than everything else. And that’s all the stuff that, you know, all the Kirby stuff pushes towards that. And it’s always been going towards that. And it makes perfect sense to draw a line from “Challengers of the Unknown” to the beginning of “Fantastic Fooless” to the “Inhumans” to this. And you can see where these pieces get stripped away or changed or become refined into this pureness of Kirby. I was really thinking about those different ways to look at it. Like I think maybe the next time the demon shows up or shows up in a memorable ways and swamp thing when Alan Moore’s writing it, he definitely takes a different tact on it, right? Yeah, sure. And to tie it all in, eventually John Byrne comes in and does a demon series where he ignores everything that happened between the Kirby stuff and his comic. I don’t know, it was just fascinating, the pureness of Kirby and man, I really love that comic. Also, the part where he’s like the opposite of what we were talking about John Byrne, Jason blood becomes the demon by saying this rhyme and then he turns into the demon or other people can say it or he doesn’t need to say it or the philosopher’s stone can change him. All these things that just become story specific. At one point his girlfriend finds out he’s the demon, but I thought she’d known for half the run. I thought she found out an earlier issue and also her reaction is basically, “Ah!” And then the story continues. One of the funny things is he’s got his girlfriend and then he’s got his two best friends, one of whom’s a Madison Avenue advertising guy, and the other whom is this Sikh guy who works for the UN. Presumably he’s from India, although that’s a little unclear as opposed to being from America. He’s in New York, obviously. He’s got ESP, so he can read the demon’s mind and find out where Jason Bludd is. The thing that’s really interesting is, this isn’t like Haji in Johnny Quest or something. The ESP stuff is completely divorced from him happening to be Sikh. You meet this ESP teacher who’s a white guy at an institute in New York. It’s just like an interesting thing. You would have thought, it was nice to see. It was a positive thing. He’s absolutely in as much as anybody in a Jack Kirby comic is a regular guy, a regular guy who happens to have ESP, who says his name is occupation a lot when he describes things. As a representative to the UN, I feel this way. That kind of stuff.

[00:53:02] David: Nice.

[00:53:04] John: What an amazing book. What a cool book.

[00:53:05] David: Yeah, that sounds great. John, your weekly reads are always so good, even when you have them finished. I’ve been reading a ton lately. The one I want to talk about this week was a book from 2014 published by Dark Horse called “The Star Wars.” So if people don’t know or remember this, “The Star Wars” was an 8 issue miniseries that Dark Horse put out right at the end of them owning the license. It got collected in a couple of really cool ways, but I don’t think it really got talked about a lot since it came out because Dark Horse lost the license. I don’t know. It feels like it’s a bit of a lost gem. So I wanted to call it out because I really enjoyed it. And what it is, is it is an eight issue series that is telling the story of the Star Wars, which was the original motion picture rough draft of the Star Wars movie that George Lucas wrote. So this was like the first draft of Star Wars. And so It was a really cool and fascinating comic book to read because there are familiar elements, of course, but man, it’s radically different from the movie that ultimately gets made. So it was fun to like just see where things were coming from. Like Han Solo is like this weird looking green lizard alien guy. R2Talks just as much as 3PO and the names are spelled slightly differently. Anakin Skywalker is not Anakin Skywalker. He’s Anakin Starkiller. friend is Luke Skywalker. And Luke Skywalker is like a 50 year old, you know, man who’s got a great beard. And Luke Skywalker is already well versed in the force. So Anakin is sort of like the young Luke Skywalker prototype and Luke Skywalker in this one is more of the Ben Kenobi type. The artist by Mike Mayhew. Did Mike Mayhew do Batman First Night? He’s

[00:55:12] John: Oh, my Perkins. Okay. Yeah, Mike. Mike from like you like I work with a couple of times. He was a real like kind of photorealistic guy and the like around, whereas at Marvel, he got in trouble for reference referencing the King of Spain’s picture in a House of him thing like Magneto was like the King of Spain’s outfit. And I like that became news. He’s like the perfect artist for this Star Wars thing because he has this like super realistic style. And that is kind what you want from this is you want to imagine what it was going to be like as a movie.

[00:55:43] David: A hundred percent. He’s a great choice. They actually had, when they were publishing it in 2014, they had a skip month and in the skit after I think issue four and in the skip month, they did a issue zero, which was just sort of like a making of like sort of like the director’s cut, you know, where they got all the extras. That also was really cool to read because it gives you some insight into their thinking when they, because they had to basically redesign all the characters, because they’re not the same. There’s no one-to-one analogs. There’s very few one-to-one analogs in the book, and they didn’t want the book to look like the regular Star Wars book. They wanted to reflect the script that it was coming from. As far as I can tell, they’re very true to this rough draft script. They don’t veer from it very far. So Darth Vader doesn’t have a mask or a helmet. He is not a Jedi or a Sith. He’s just a regular dude, and he has no powers. The Death Star is called something totally different. It’s not called the Death Star. The Star Destroyers are like miniature, like one man pilot ships, but they kind of look the same. They’re called the Star Destroyers. So there’s all kinds of cool little interesting tidbits. It’s hard to describe the story other than like, it is just a different, it’s a different book. It’s a completely different story. Like if they made this movie, I wouldn’t like it. I don’t. I liked it. I liked the comic book, right? But it is definitely like you can see looking at this comic book, reading this comic book and knowing what the final movie looks like, the final draft of this eventually becomes. There’s so much tightening and condensing of this character in the Star Wars movie. In the comic book, it’s three different characters, right? Right. And so there’s tons of like condensing down. And it’s interesting how certain things survive all the way through. Like there is still a Cantina scene, but it’s a wildly different scene, ultimately. But he kept a lot of the elements of that Cantina scene, you know, that sort of the story elements of the plot, you know, that the canteen pushed forward. That’s still basically untouched. That’s still what they’re doing there. But you know, the players are different and the interaction is different. And it was really fun. I really enjoyed it. I read it so fast. I just plowed right through it. It’s a fairly dense book, but I just plowed right through it. I don’t think I would normally say I would be a fan of this type of art. Like it’s a little overly realistic for me, but it’s kind of a painterly style. And I don’t know, it just works perfectly for the piece. It feels like a book that probably would have been a lot bigger than it was over time if Dark Horse had retained the Star Wars license. Like you can read in the letters page in the back, the editors are kind of like, yeah, we’re kind of rushed here or we’re getting this thing out. Like, you know, we’re not going to have this license in six months. But they were able to get out a really nice high-end, uh, hardcover, slip case version of this book. And it’s too expensive for me, but, uh, if you’re into Star Wars, it definitely is worth checking out. I want to read the original rough draft of the script now. I wonder if it’s online somewhere. I haven’t had a chance to look.

[00:58:47] John: So when I was a kid, I had the like original like kids making of Star Wars book. You know, I had all like how they did the special effects and it had all the, you know, the pictures and stuff, but it also had like the Star Wars that might have been. And it was all these Ralph McQuarrie designs and all those little bits. There’s nothing you haven’t seen if you vaguely paid attention to Star Wars. There’s nothing that hasn’t been made into action figures now and stuff. But yeah, it’s exactly the stuff that was in here. It’s an interesting book because you don’t want it to be that good. If it was really good and you were like, “Oh, they screwed up,” that’s kind of worse. You want it to be interesting, you know? You want it to be like… It’s a weird way to go about making a book. Yeah, this part of the story doesn’t work. That’s why they didn’t do it. Right.

[00:59:33] David: Yeah. And there is definitely stuff that is in this book where it’s like, “Oh, I understand why he didn’t do that.” But that’s part of the fun and entertainment of it. And all the character designs, like I say, they are kind of new and original, but they are all based off of, like you say, a lot of the original designs and stuff. So anything that was sort of like from that original draft that was sort of left on the cutting room floor, the team picked it up and sort of used that as a launch pad for the ultimately, for the designs that they created for the book. There’s a lot of Flash Gordon influence in the art here and in the story, and they talk about that in the back matter of the book as well. How there was a lot of Flash Gordon influence on this piece in its original form. You know what I found out? This is kind of the side, but I wanted to bring it up because we’re talking about this. Did you know that Toshiro Mitsufune was asked to be Obi-Wan Kenobi?

[01:00:25] John: - I’ve heard that, I think, yeah.

[01:00:27] David: - That blew my mind. I literally found it out like a couple of days after I finished reading “The Star Wars.”

[01:00:32] John: - Oh, that’s funny, yeah.

[01:00:33] David: - That blew my mind. I can’t believe it, ‘cause famously, there is like some shot for shots between “New Hope” and “The Hidden Fortress,” right? - Right, yeah. - Which is one of Toshiro Mitsufune’s acting, He’s fantastic in that movie. So it would have been fascinating to get even more direct one to one between those two movies. And can you imagine if he was Obi-Wan Kenobi? That would have been so badass. I mean, I really like– what’s his name? - Elgin. - Thank you. He’s fantastic, of course, right? He’s an old war-dearing actor. I really would have liked to have seen that.

[01:01:10] John: I agree. And he’s also, Mifourai’s such a good actor. I don’t know what he would have done. Were you been like an older Yojimbo? Would you have been an older guy from Samurai? Would you have been the guy from High and Low, for goodness sake?

[01:01:24] David: - You know, I don’t know, man. But I really would love to have seen that. That would have been so cool. But Foonie is like top three for me, like one of the greatest actors of all time. That guy’s never been in a movie I didn’t love 1000%. So part of it is that he was in basically every Akira Krasawa film. But still, his films don’t work as much as they, that the show Mephuné is like a big reason why those movies work.

[01:01:48] John: Yeah, totally. And also, it isn’t like a Fistful of Dollars is kind of like Yojimbo or was like inspired by Yojimbo. Like Clint Eastwood, and that’s like a defining character for Clint Eastwood. Clint Eastwood is playing Mephuné. Like he’s 100% playing that character. The jokes are the same. Like nothing. I love Fistful of Dollars. I love Yojimbo.

[01:02:09] David: That’s one of my, that’s another one of my all-time favorites. Like, yeah, no, I’m right there with you. Amazing. So anyway, John, that’s what I read this week, the Star Wars. It was delightful. I really enjoyed it. They clearly, everybody that was involved with the book put a lot of time and energy and effort into it. You could tell, you know, they’re trying to make something really grand on a very grand scale with a comic book budget and a comic book timeline, but they largely pull it off. And I think that Mike Mayhew deserves some like real kudos. You can tell he did a lot of the heavy lifting on the same visually. And so hats off to him, really impressive feat that he pulled off with this book. I really enjoyed it. I definitely recommend it if you can find it. I don’t know what I paid for this, but I don’t think I paid much. I’m not a big fan of Star Wars comic books. I’m a fan of the movies, but I’ve never been a big fan of comic books. But this one got my attention. I can’t remember why it came to my attention, but I really enjoyed it. J.W. Rinsler was the writer for it. He adapted the script, the film script to comic books. I’ve never heard his name before, but did a fine job. So enjoyed it all the way around.

[01:03:11] John: There’s a newer predating this book, but like newer than when I was a kid and I had the making of a book, like this giant making of Star Wars book that really, really digs into what changes in every single draft of the script as they go for. Oh really? Yeah.

[01:03:25] David: This comic book, wet my appetite for that sort of thing. I’ve never been super interested in that for Star Wars at least, but this definitely wet my appetite for that sort of thing. Cool. All right. We should probably wrap it up. We’d love people to get back to whatever they were doing.

[01:03:38] John: All right.

[01:03:39] David: Thanks everybody for coming, thanks for listening. I hope you guys got a little something out of that. Go read Jack Kirby’s “The Demon.” Go read “The Star Wars.” Thanks everybody. Bye. Bye.

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