[00:00:01] 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 is David Hedgecock. How you doing, John?
[00:00:32] John: I'm doing good.
[00:00:33] David: Once again, we're not alone. Right? You've had to wear a shirt two podcasts in a row. I know. It's getting hot in here. I hope you didn't do it for us. Who's that? Hey, welcome back to the show. I don't know why they came back after they were exposed to us the first time, but they did come back, John. Brennan Knight and Max Devinport. Welcome to the show. Brennan and Max.
[00:00:56] Brennan Knight: Thanks for having us.
[00:00:57] David: Brennan and Max, last time we talked to you guys. We're promoting, I believe it was issue three, of Tyrantfall, the comic book that you guys do together. What brings you back this time?
[00:01:07] Brennan Knight: Believe it or not, issue four. Tyrantfall four is coming to Kickstarter.
[00:01:11] David: I'm shocked that you want to talk to us when you have something to promote. And no other time, at any other time, if you reached out and said hello or anything, but here we are. Was that too harsh? We have a very popular podcast. We have a responsibility to our audience now. Like we have a lot of people listening to the show. And Max is one of like the two people that do listen. I might be both with a spoof account. Anyway, welcome back to the show, guys. It's nice to see you. We're going to talk a little bit about Tyrant Fall today. And we're going to talk a little bit about Kickstarter because, John, when everyone's getting this, it's going to be September 1st. And Tyrant Fall number four will be available on Kickstarter right now if it's September 1st. Like we're not talking in it September 1st, but everyone's listening on September. Do you understand that?
[00:01:57] John: Yeah, it's like one of those Einstein loop things.
[00:01:59] David: Anyway, "Tyrantfall #4" is available on Kickstarter right now if you're listening. It's the only thing available on Kickstarter, right? There is one other thing available, John. My book is also launching today.
[00:02:10] John: September is like a big time for Kickstarters, probably a few other cool comic stuff, but don't worry about those. Just buy these, because these are the two best. They are. That's all I know. I don't think we talked about this at all in the podcast, but I'm coming off a little bit of a Kickstarter high, the company that I work at, Pug. We just finished a half a million dollar Jim Lee campaign for the Jim Lee Artist Archive book. More excitingly, his St. George and Alpha Flight work at Marvel. Punisher as well. But no, it was super exciting. I just want to say that we actually had a successful campaign. Is there a term for like the opposite of bad news? I can't think of anything. It's never really come up before. I've never had to think about it before. But it seemed like good news the way this thing worked together. I think that's it.
[00:02:56] David: We're going to talk a little bit about Kickstarter today, John. And we're going to talk about a couple things. We're going to talk about how your campaign ended and just what that meant in terms of what you guys did and how you finished it. We're going to talk about the pre-launch for my campaign, this meet-in the Midnight Gardens book three, featuring artwork by the John Brothers, and the Tower and Fall pre-launch campaign and sort of like what everybody's been doing and what this group in particular has been doing to sort of prep for their Kickstarters and the things that they're trying to do to make it successful. Tell us a little bit about Tyrantfall. You know, this is your fourth campaign. You guys have had three successful campaigns. What are you doing to, like, you know, set the stage and set yourselves up for success? I'd love to hear a little bit about that, and I think our listeners would, too.
[00:03:40] Brennan Knight: Yeah, if you haven't heard of Tyrantfall before, the quick pitch is, what if Dragon Ball Z had been published in Heavy Metal Magazine? It's a fancy action story about this young woman who seeks to get revenge against this evil thing. When she fails, her revenge plan becomes an escape plan. And the dominoes that fall from there just lead to this full-on world war. It's full of crazy cool sci-fi tech. You've got these crazy characters, heavy metal style design on everything, and these awesome fight scenes that Max just brings to life.
[00:04:19] David: Brennan, I think heavy metal meets Dragon Ball Z is really a great description. I'm glad to hear that you're kind of It really does capture the essence of what you guys are doing. Not to say that it's derivative of either of those things, but it's a really fun, cool, interesting, new, unique mashup of those sorts of things. Max, your artwork is amazing. Really love it. By the time we get to issue three too, Max, I feel like you've really leveled up. You guys sent us the first three issues. I've been a Kickstarter supporter of all the books so far, but you sent us digital copies just so it has easy for us to get access to. And you started in a really strong spot, but the growth you've had over just these three issues is really really impressive. Your colorist is also really grown, I think. The colorist is Roman Stevens. Has he been the colorist for all three books as well? Yeah, he's really also like elevated his game. And I think so. It's really cool to watch, you know, Max, your line work elevate and then Roman's color work elevating. And so it's almost like an exponential growth for the book. Again, you guys started in a really strong spot. I've been supporting you all along, Max. You know, I've been a fan years forever. But wow, you guys, by the time we're Hittin' Issue 3. It's really getting some rarefied air in terms of the style and look of the book. I'm really excited to see where this goes from here. How far are you guys into Issue 4 in terms of the artwork?
[00:05:35] Max Davenport: Thanks, man. We are five pages in so far. Progress has been a little bit slower this time around. Issue 3 was all digital. Brennan was very gracious in letting me sort of explore that because I'd never done a full book digitally before. Because of that, I was able to sort of like experiment with a lot of different methods. and techniques that I'd always wanted to, but it always been under like too much deadline pressure to try because you don't want to spend two hours on something that's not going to work. But on the computer, it's just an easy undo. So I did that. And then I did a digital for a few more things after that. And ultimately realized I kind of hate it. It just doesn't really work for me. I keep zooming in and zooming in and zooming in. And I undo too much and like get everything like just perfect, which is like a classic pitfall of digital art. And I felt like spending more years to refine that. I'm sure I could get over it. But I don't. I'm already proficient with the traditional. I feel like I got what I needed out of the digital. So I'm back to traditional for issue four. And it's already like going much faster because I'm just so much more at home with it. And it feels great to like actually have a page to touch and feel, which I kind of forgot.
[00:06:45] David: You can also sell that original art after the fact, which doesn't suck. Hey, Brendan, I think the story has been rock solid from the start too. And I really like the journey you're taking us on. This was your first comic book, right?
[00:06:55] Brennan Knight: Yeah, I had a little short thing before this, but that was more hobbyist level stuff. This was like my first attempt at like, okay, I really want to be a professional comic book writer. So let me put a little more effort into it. Growing with the book has been very enlightening. I mean, just figuring out how to communicate the visions in my head to Max, figuring out pacing and stuff. It's been very interesting. It's been great that we do this once a year. So we have a whole year basically to level up our skills in that time. But it feels more natural now. I can kind of feel how I need to get the words out onto the script, what I need to describe. Fighting the urge to put a hundred panels on a page. We can just open it up a little bit. You know, this doesn't need to be six panels. This could honestly just be two panels, you know. So it's been a heck of a journey so far. And it is gratifying that every time we do this, it feels even more professional somehow.
[00:07:57] David: Has the Kickstarters been getting bigger for you or are they staying about the same? And tell us a little bit about what you're doing for your buildup to the campaign and how you're prepping for it.
[00:08:06] Brennan Knight: Yes, the Kickstarters have been tracking the same and the growth has been less in the money side, which you would want to see. But, you know, happy that it's just making the goal. But it's more on the backer side where the constant backers, the people that have been backing, Each issue has just grown. And new backer numbers have increased with each issue too. Besides issue one, because everyone was a new backer for that one. We've been getting a lot of return people and a good number of new people too. So that's always gratifying to see those two numbers go up that more people are being interested in it and more people are like, I'm sticking with this to see where it goes.
[00:08:48] Max Davenport: We've been trying to put a little bit more heat onto the pre-launch. I think we've started to to realize like that's where a lot of the impact comes from. Correct me if I'm wrong, Brennan, but I think it's been easy for like each campaign to be successful. And because of that, to not feel the need to sort of analyze what had happened. But what I think we realize is like, oh, we probably get a little bit more bang for a buck out of that launch week if we have like a more robust pre-launch campaign. So we've been trying to hit that a little bit harder this time.
[00:09:23] John: That seems like a shifting not just in you guys learning but like the or us learning but it seems like that's actually the way the platform's moving or has it just been me learning that?
[00:09:35] Brennan Knight: As far as I know, I try to study up on the bigger names in Kickstarter comic books that, you know, have consistent launches. The one big thing that I've seen actually is it feels like for people that don't have a strong following, yeah, you have to hit with a a very active pre-campaign. But once you have a strong enough following, you can do pre-campaign, let it sit for months, an occasional social media post here and there to get some new fresher eyes on it. But then after that, you are thankfully relying on a fan base. Yes, from what I've seen, if you're fairly new, if you don't have a lot of created books in your portfolio on Kickstarter, you are hitting It is pretty tough.
[00:10:25] Max Davenport: It's just Brennan and I really doing these. And most of that is on Brennan. We both have day jobs and we try to prepare like promotional content when we can. Brennan's been doing some great like reels and posts this time around. But yeah, between the day job that both of us have and the fact that I'm usually drawing the book while we're running the campaign and doing the run up to the campaign for stuff to fit in, all that stuff. But we try to get as much of it out as we can.
[00:10:52] David: I will say that's the one thing that I've been, and I'm fortunate in this, that I've been able to basically bankroll the book. My first two books, I was able to bankroll so that they were done, so that I wasn't worried about whether or not I was going to get this thing done. So once I got to the Kickstarter campaign, I was really able to focus just on the marketing of the campaign itself and really do the sales pitchy, you know, Stan Lee standing on my soapbox sort of stuff without the need of like, oh crap, my artist needs five more pages of script. I got to get that, you know, over to him. And I do think that made a difference for me, for sure. Like being able to focus completely on telling people about the work. And I think it works for you guys now is that I've got all the assets. I've got all the art for that book, right? Like I've got the covers and I've got the interior art so I can like, as much as without revealing anything, I can show as much of that stuff as I want. And it gives me a lot to talk about, you know, for the last two or three weeks, I've been showing pieces of art, like, every day or two new pieces of art. And I'm still holding stuff back. You know, right now as we're talking, we're still like, you know, 12 days away from the launch. As everyone's listening, though, it's launching right now. So go on Kickstarter and type Miss Mina in the search bar. And then go back to the search bar and type Tyrant Fall and play this out. And then go and type in Jim Lee and I don't know, see what happens. So now that you guys are in Tyrant Fall number four. you've got all these art assets from the first three books. I'm assuming that makes things easier for you, right? When you're doing all this promo stuff.
[00:12:25] Brennan Knight: Yeah. First issue has a lot of backstory panels. So I'm able to do that through those images into the general like world of Tyrantfall. Like get people like, what is the setting like? What are the kind of the stakes going on? I have all the issues, like you said. I can just update that with the new twist. The challenge becomes though, trying to keep that as concise as possible. So it's just not the wall of text. It just gets bigger and bigger. It's just trying to keep it down to just like as little as possible. Short sentences, different scenes to show. Yeah, I'm happy with what the page looks like now. I definitely think it could be better, but that's a me thing. And I just have to discover that myself.
[00:13:05] David: I am less and less precious about that particular thing. The thing that I have always known about, man, you really learn it when you start doing this stuff, is that social media, man, it just doesn't really exist more than like two seconds. So no matter what you put out there. Even if people are talking about it, they're going to talk about it for like two seconds and they're on to the next thing. So I don't know, just throw stuff at the wall and see what happens. That's kind of where I'm at at this point. I'm just going to talk and if it hits with somebody that one time, great. And if I don't remember what it was, who cares? Because I'm just going beyond the next thing, you know, in terms of talking. And if I make a mistake, it's fine. No one's going to even remember it three days from now, which is kind of freeing in a way.
[00:13:41] Brennan Knight: I remember for the last Kickstarter for Titanfall 3, I had this epiphany beforehand because I was, you know, it was like, I was looking at Twitter something. And someone I followed, I'm a big fan of their indie work, was like, oh, last days of this Kickstarter. And I was like, last days, I'm just hearing about it now. And I'm sure they've been posting, you look through their posts, they've been posting. I was like, there's just so much out there. And like you said, two seconds, you know, it keeps refreshing. So number three, I actually was posting and reposting so much. Twitter locked my account for like a couple hours because they thought it was fraudulent. They thought it was a bot. And I was like, no, I'm just promoting. I am putting stuff out there for people to see. It's what you have to do. You have to push it hard enough that you start to look like a bot. Fantastic.
[00:14:34] David: John, the Marvel Art of Jim Lee was the book. It's like oversized, right? It's like a hardcover.
[00:14:38] John: Yeah, 9x12 hardcover, slipcase, dust jacket, several slipcases. Still available for late orders. that you were working with Marvel on it. Having a partner like that on it, it's another thing to work through. You know what I mean? Like you need to... You gotta get approvals. Exactly. And it isn't just working with a company, you know, which is the thing we always kind of remember. It's working with these four people at a company. And those four people are, like all of us, doing way more than they should have to. You know, I'm not trying to talk at school, but it's like everything has to go through this pipeline. And we're not the only partner that Marvel has. We're not the only partner doing Kickstarters. We're not the only We're not the only people doing Kickstarter art books in August. But we actually, we were just doing a post-mortem on it and what worked and what didn't. One of the things we learned is that with all the moving parts, we need like a checklist. Like we need to be like the astronauts in the space shuttle about to take off where you have a list of everything as you're about to launch. And it's not there because you don't know what you're doing. And it's not there to speed things up. It's there to slow things down and make sure you do the things that you know you're doing. It wasn't like a rough patch really because we did pretty well. I think we're the highest grossing Marvel Kickstarter. Don't quote me on that if I'm wrong. So it's like a matter of degree or something. But it's like, oh, there's some stuff. I was telling Stuart more that it was launching at a certain time because I looked on Slack and didn't see the text that came in later, you know, or something like that. You know, like little things like that didn't affect anything. But we should be telling Stuart where we're at. We should be doing this. We should be doing that. It was all about the prelaunch campaign for us. If you signed up for a prelaunch, you got a free a copy of our Jim Lee X-Men number one 3D comic that we did a couple years ago. Not to like tick anybody off. You get that for free if you'd signed up and then you buy the thing. If you just wanted that, you can still add on and get it. It wasn't, we weren't keeping anything away from anybody. You know, we won, don't want to piss anybody off, but also don't, don't want to create a situation where it's like, well, if I can't get the whole set, I don't want the whole thing. Even though this was a, you know, an item, you could still buy on eBay. So maybe for the next one, there'll be something that's only available on the campaign, but I think we'll still . They'll probably do that same kind of thing. A free gift that's consequential enough to make you want to sign up, but not something you can only get that way if you find out about the thing late.
[00:16:55] David: I have that same thing. I have a checklist of 10 documents. All 10 of those documents basically have to be fully written out. A lot of it's like marketing stuff, right? It's like all my email marketing. So I write all the emails for the campaign. They're ready to go. They're plugged in. They're ready to go. My press kit is all completely written. I've identified all my Facebook ad marketing headlines in and stuff like that. I've got my Kickstarter, like here's what my pledge tiers are going to be. Here's what my add-ons are going to be. And here's what my stretch goals might be, right? And maybe what the stretch goal amounts will be. Stuff like that. It's been invaluable to have all those documents just like they're numbered one through 10. So I just know like all 10 of those have to be complete before I can really be serious about anything. Do I have all 10 of those things totally done when I pull the trigger on the pre-launch? Not always. But mostly. Yeah. Wow.
[00:17:48] John: The prelaunch gives you some room, though. I mean, you don't really have to have everything nailed down right in the prelaunch.
[00:17:53] David: Yeah. And also, the prelaunch also allows you, for me at least, it allows me to pivot. When I start doing my Facebook marketing ads, one of the reasons that I do this, and I've talked about this a little bit on the show, is that I'm doing A-B testing on which images are going to be the ones that people are gravitating to. Usually, shockingly, it's the images that show girls in tight outfits. But occasionally there's other stuff that tends to hit really well. Like a really cool Chuma Hill cover for Miss Meenum Book 3 is really outperforming what I thought it was going to. I love the piece. But Chuma Hill is a little bit of an acquired taste in some ways. And so when you learn about what images and what headlines and stuff are working better than others, then you can kind of, you want to tweak and pivot and change sort of like some of your messaging to make sure you're hitting like the stuff that's being received as the most successful or most popular ways to communicate.
[00:18:44] John: For instance, Jungle Rogue more than Puck from Alpha Flight. Yes. We learned that.
[00:18:50] David: That would have been a lesson I feel like came real fast and hit real hard.
[00:18:54] Max Davenport: I suppose you mean Jungle Rogue is more unsuccessful than Puck. Yes.
[00:19:00] David: Hey, everybody, we're going to take a brief pause right here to talk about my new Kickstarter campaign. Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians Book 3 is now live on Kickstarter. I'm super excited to share it with you. As you know, we don't do any advertising here on the show. We just do it out of the love of comic books. But if you have been looking for ways to support us, this is the way to do it. Head over to FuntimeGo.com. There will be a link there to take you to the new campaign, Miss Meena and the Midnight Guardians. What is Miss Meena and the Midnight Guardians? Well, it's the dawn of the 19th century and Dracula has nearly conquered Europe. His fangs are set on America's next. Only Mina Murray and a ragtag band of monstrous allies stand in his way. is hunting an ancient Amazonian tribe guarding a secret powerful enough to either crown Dracula the ruler of the world or end his reign forever. The race is on to discover the secret of the golden jaguar before darkness falls over the earth forever. That's the story. It is drawn by the incredible twin artistic group the Zhang Brothers. They have a manga-inspired artistic influence that I absolutely love. Written by me with covers by fantastic artists like Award-nominated cover artist Ludo Lullaby, Chuma Hill, and comic book legend Tony Harris, the artist responsible for Starman and Ex Machina. Go to FuntimeGo.com and check out the new Kickstarter. We're live until Friday, October 2nd, 2026. Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians, book three, live now on Kickstarter. Thank you in advance for your support. Now let's get back to the show.
[00:20:37] Max Davenport: One of your recent episodes, you did like a breakdown on your Kickstarter. I found that very helpful and insightful.
[00:20:47] David: I'm glad to hear that. It really was meant in the spirit of like just sharing information, sharing what I learned. It was some expensive lessons for me to learn. That podcast was the tip of the iceberg of the stuff that I'm doing, but I tried to give it as much of an overview of like the basics of it as I could.
[00:21:01] Max Davenport: The whole thing is so, at least from my point of view, Brennan, you probably have more insights because you're manning the whole thing yourself. But like from my point of view, the whole thing is so, like opaque and almost impenetrable. It's like, okay, you put a thing out and people give you money. What else is there to it? But there's like, you know, obviously there's so much more with how the algorithm works and how different types of things are weighted and the level of tracking you can do. And I really appreciated you sharing that experience because it's not so easily like the thing you were saying about A-B testing and being able to like, just market it literally with money that is not always available for everybody else and then sharing what you learn from that. It was really great to be able to listen to and sort of learn about that way. So that was cool. I'm curious if you had more luck or better returns on like Facebook versus Instagram versus, you know, whatever. If any one of those is like the clear outperformer.
[00:22:05] David: The way the ad manager works on Facebook is you plug in basically a dollar amount that you're willing to spend each day. and Facebook determines where they're going to show it. I say make it available to Instagram. I can turn that channel off if I want. But Facebook will just put it on all their channels essentially. And if they find a channel that's working more effectively than others, they'll throw more of the ad on that specific thing. It's not perfect, but Facebook ad managers is fairly decent. If you have a basic understanding of how to use it. I'm not a marketing guy at all. Like that's not my thing. But just with a basic understanding of how these things work. It will do a lot of that work for you in terms of like putting it in the right audience. As long as you give it parameters that you think are your customer, like have a real clear understanding of who your customer avatar is, like who is my customer, who's going to be the people most likely to read this book. As long as you have a real clear image in your head, that's realistic of who that type of person is, then Facebook can kind of take it from there in a lot of ways. Not always a case. Sometimes it's a bit of a struggle. And I've done all kinds of experimenting at this point now. This, you know, this is about to be our seventh campaign. But in general, that's the case. I hate to talk kindly about big mega corporations like Facebook, like Meta, but there's a reason why they make billions of dollars every two months. The stuff works. It doesn't work great, but it works good.
[00:23:25] Max Davenport: Yeah. For the kind of thing we're doing, where else are you going to take your stuff to a marketing firm or something and pay way more? As far as it being the option that's available to folks like us, it could be a lot worse, I suppose. John, I was curious, while you guys were doing the Jim Lee book, did you come across any art that you hadn't seen before that blew your socks off?
[00:23:54] John: Yeah, Scott Williams has some Xeroxes of pencils from X-Men number one that I think nobody's probably seen before. So that was kind of cool. The absolute craziest one. I don't know how well you remember all the Jim Lee, Uncanny X-Men stuff. One of the early issues during acts of when you first had Psylocke turning into Jim Lee Psylocke. And this is before she was in like the leather bikini when she was like just got in that and she's like in this armor kind of outfit. Like she was Lady Mandarin. There's a cover with her in the Mandarin. Jim Lee had drawn Wolverine in the background in the pencils. And then by the time it was inked, the Wolverine had been removed and replaced with a caption that said, enter the Mandarin. So there's a point where like saying the word the Mandarin was worth more to Marvel than a Jim Lee Wolverine drawing. Wow. That was a poor decision on the editor's part. It seems bonkers even in 1988. Yeah, that was the cover, right?
[00:24:49] David: Yeah, I remember that cover. I love that cover. Yeah, there's a Wolverine back there. Wow. Yeah, the original's in the book. That's awesome. Oh, cool.
[00:24:57] John: But that was the bonkers story. I'm not trying to advertise this book over here for you guys. But like, it was interesting to read the stories. I interviewed Bob Harris and he actually interviewed Jim Lee. We didn't think we're going to be able to do that but it worked out okay. Just to kind of get that narrative of how this career happened. You know what I mean? Like I remember when I was a kid you know seeing the stuff happening you know seeing the issues coming out but not really thinking through like what does it mean when he goes from Punisher to X-Men? How did he become friends with Will's Portacio? Like they were just assigned to each other. How did that work out into what it turned into? And then also crazily finding out that the original The original Wildstorm office, the original Homage Studios office, was behind the Denny's by my house, which I didn't realize. Also, you live in the same neighborhood as Kevin Eastman, too, right? Kevin moved. Yeah, Kevin lived here. Alex Sinclair still lives nearby. Scott Williams doesn't live far away. A lot of these guys that moved down for that still stayed in the area.
[00:25:53] David: So when you're stocking their house, do you have your camera with you? How are you doing that?
[00:25:56] John: Like, I grew up about a mile and a half from Extreme Studios. So now that's like two of the Image founders. Now that you've had close access to Rob Liefeld and haven't told me about it, Barber. You were a kid. You were blocks away from Rob Liefeld. Not once did you pick up the phone and tell me, like, hey, come over and hang out. I'm John Street from the Extreme Studios. You didn't do that one time in our youth. Just because I didn't know you at that time, John, doesn't excuse you. I might be getting off topic in this. Found this out a couple weeks ago, and I keep forgetting to bring this up on the podcast, because this is like the craziest news ever. You remember Revolutionary Comics that did the The Rock and Roll Comics in the 80s and 90s. You know, it'd be like the unauthorized Red Zeppelin and Nirvana and stuff. 1.1 miles from where I live right now is their office. I Google mapped it. Like, it's literally down Pomerato. I have so many questions. First of all, they're still around? No, no, no, that's where they were. That's where they're, like, I Googled their address from an old revolution.
[00:26:57] David: Why? You were just reading an old comic book? You're like, oh, that's a very close. That's nearby, I said.
[00:27:02] John: Actually, I was reading the Alistair Crowley, Inside and Outside cover section of that, where it's all just an excerpt from some of Crowley's books.
[00:27:10] David: Oh my god. Guys, we do this, what John and David read this week, and every week we talk about like one comic book that we read, and every single week, that's the kind of stuff John's bringing to the table. I just, he crushes me every week. Like, I'm talking about, you know, like, I don't know, whatever the latest X-Men issue is, and he's over here talking about rock and roll comics, which blows me out of the water every time. So that's a little bit of the prelaunch stuff. Do you guys do any, do you have an email list that you hit up or anything like that?
[00:27:39] Brennan Knight: I don't have an email, like a newsletter, email newsletter or anything at the moment. It's just been one of those things that's been on my mind, but sitting on the back burner, my son, who's almost three now, he's taking up a large portion of my brain space. So that's pushed a lot of things into the background. Rightfully so, man, that age is the best. Three years old, man, do soak it up and try to remember as much of it as you can. It goes by way too fast. He is hilarious. The other day, he was refusing to eat some food we were giving him. And amongst all of his nose and whatnot, he turned to my wife and said, I am a robot. I'm indestructible. And that ended the conversation. We were like, well, we can't fight that. All future attempts were abandoned right then and there. Brennan, I'm very curious. And I could be totally in the wrong frame of mind for this. Is there a little bit of your son in, The Fade Child predates him. I would not want to, me personally, I would not want to tie my son or my wife into the comic in any way because nothing dramatic could happen to them because I would want them to be safe all the time.
[00:28:51] David: I'm not sure The Fade Child is super safe. I feel like he's got a purpose, but I'm not sure it's going to be realized. I'm interested to see where you go with that guy.
[00:29:00] John: I have a real example of that in comics that's really funny. Andy Schmidt got Peter David to write this Madrox limited series. Peter always considered that that like relaunched his career. Like he always kind of thought like he was in maybe a little bit of trouble. But then the Madrox thing came out, you know, decades after that. That turned into X Factor. In X Factor, Madrox and I think Siren have a baby. Meanwhile, Andy Schmidt also has a baby. Peter David, I believe, sends Andy Schmidt a Madrox onesie for his baby. So he's got this little baby and it's, you know, like he's got six dots down the chest that Madrox has. The Multiple Man Has. That, I think, is used as a reference shot for a cover for an issue of the comic, when the baby's going to be born. Andy quits Marvel. I take over X-Factor, so I've got that thing hanging up on my wall. Then Peter writes the issue, and what happens is the baby's born, Madrox picks up the baby and reabsorbs it because it's just a dupe of him, not an actual separate baby. Oh! Yeah. So Schmitz calls me, he's like, what did you do to Kale?
[00:30:04] Brennan Knight: That's the kind of stuff I want to be completely divorced from.
[00:30:08] Max Davenport: With issue four, I'm thinking like, okay, he's kind of like this energetic, kind of like temperamental, almost like younger than his age, blonde boy. I'm like, maybe Brennan's like drawing from his son a little bit with some of these. It would have to be subconsciously because I could not willingly. I was coming at it like, oh, Brennan's such a good writer. Maybe he's like working like some of this stuff together or something like that.
[00:30:31] Brennan Knight: Whoever said I was a good writer.
[00:30:33] David: Every writer is working out issues on the page. That goes without saying.
[00:30:41] John: Is this the last issue? Is that what you guys said or did I misunderstand that?
[00:30:45] Brennan Knight: I mentioned this the last time we were here. I have like 30 something issues planned, planned in quotes, but the main focus has been on the first five issues. So issue five comes and ends and Max and I are like, don't want to do any more or, you know, we're just going to do anything. It's just like it's just financially just too much of a burden to do. Whatever the reason is. Whatever stops us at issue five, we can walk away knowing that we've left a solid story beginning, middle, and end. People that pick it up will feel like there's closure to it. It's room to grow from there, but it wraps up enough strings that you don't feel like they just ended it. Oh, oh no.
[00:31:30] David: I'm doing the same thing in my head. their story arcs. Roughly every four books that I'm doing is a story arc so that if for some reason I didn't do any more after that for whatever reasons after that chunk of four then it's a satisfying enough of an ending that people will be a little bit mad. I don't have to worry about that at this point. I still kind of am thinking in that direction but I've got like for Miss Mina I've got stuff through the first 16 books and it's wild and crazy and with Super Kaiju I think I figured out the the other day and I think that's probably going to be about 12 books. So as long as people keep supporting it the way they are, we will be able to get there.
[00:32:09] Max Davenport: It seems like that's like a great way to write generally. Like you never know what might happen. So if you can like build in like sort of checkpoints along the way, like I don't know why you wouldn't do that. Look at Game of Thrones, right? That was as successful as something could be. And it ended terribly because they didn't know what they were doing by the time they got there.
[00:32:28] David: Yeah, somebody didn't write the ending. So they had to make one up.
[00:32:31] Max Davenport: Yeah, with Tyrant Fall, as far as the story goes, we have been pitching it as Dragon Ball Z meets Tyrant Fall. Or, meets Tyrant Fall. Meets Heavy Metal. If you've been wondering where the Heavy Metal is at, not that it hasn't been there, but we are, like, fully bringing the Heavy Metal with this one.
[00:32:47] John: You'd see it in the preview. Yeah.
[00:32:49] David: You're diving a little bit more into the adult themes. Spice. There you go, Spice. And to be fair, also super violent. Yeah, I was gonna say, not that the other issues don't have a little of the spice to them, It's a very well-rounded book. I think I like it a lot. I want to take just a minute and talk about working with Max on Super Kaiju Rock and Roll Derby Fun Time Go. Yeah. So Max and I have known each other for our listeners. Max and I have known each other for a long time. I don't remember how we met, though. Do you remember, Max?
[00:33:20] Max Davenport: You've doubted this, and I could be wrong. I think I got your email from a podcast that I heard you on, and I was like, all right, I'm just going to shoot him an email. Wait, I gave my email over a podcast? What was I thinking? That was the same thing I was thinking before. You were the only one listening. It was a great podcast. I don't want to shout it out because they're not doing things anymore. And I don't know if there's like a sad story there, but it didn't have a huge listenership. I forget how I found out about it. I wouldn't be surprised if you didn't get like a ton of responses based on that interview. If memory serves, that's how I reached out. And then we got for some D&D stuff while you guys were at IDW and sort of the rest is history.
[00:34:05] David: I really wanted to get you on some work there but Dungeons and Dragons in particular was a which is where I thought you were a really good fit it's hard to get ours approved on that project and you also at the time at least you went fast enough to be able to put on interiors the way we would have so yeah you did some design work for me some of my favorite designs I think I actually bought that original artwork from you. Appreciate that. Yeah I love that stuff and then we've just sort of kept in touch with it so anyway for Superkaiju We do it all over our books. We do a main story and then we do backup stories. And so for the third issue of the backup story, I was like, oh man, Max would crush this story, I think. And so I reached out to you and you said, yes. It must have been before January, though, because I don't think I even had the script fully written. I just had the idea of the script.
[00:34:47] Max Davenport: I think initially it was definitely sometime in 2025, because in my archive, how I have everything organized during the 2025 folder. So it was definitely last year at some point. There you go. I don't think work started in earnest. until this year.
[00:35:00] David: I really enjoyed that collaboration. I thought you really knocked it out of the park. And that was a sort of a different way for me to write. You did these big double page spreads where the action was kind of like flowing across the page and there's not really panels. Like it's not panel to panel like work. When I was writing, I was like, this is so hard. This is going to be so hard. I don't even know how he's going to pull this off. And you crushed it, dude. You did an amazing job on it. Thanks, man. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. It was a really good. It was just a super pain in the ass and hard.
[00:35:28] Max Davenport: You know, Once I did the first one, I was like, okay, this isn't going to be easy, but I know how to like approach this now. And we had some like back and forth figuring out like exactly how to make something flow. But once we like got through those communications, it felt like it came pretty naturally. I draw everything really small first. So composition and layout was actually not that crazy. Once the compositions were locked in, it was just executing. So it went smoother than you might expect. in terms of the actual execution, it was difficult to plan out. Because she's like, I won't spoil it, but broadly, she moves left to right, as you would want to read it. But there are these giant chaotic fight scenes where even though she's moving left to right, each individual combat action can't necessarily take place left to right. So she's throwing shit, and people are shooting stuff at her, and you have to figure out all the different sight lines. It was a fun puzzle, which is whenever I get scared about something, I don't get scared, but whenever I get scared about something, I try to think of it as like a puzzle. And so once I started to like move those puzzle pieces around and get a handle on how to do that, it became actually a really fun challenge. I love that little project. I also can't talk about this, but I had a good little Heroes Con earlier this year and I ended up speaking to some folks at IDW who remain nameless. But those pages may help pave the way towards some work with IDW.
[00:37:09] David: Hey, there you go. Full circle. There you go. Did you like drawing that story? Was it a decent story?
[00:37:15] Max Davenport: Yes. Regarding the contents of the story, let's say I liked it for the personality. It was a great sequence. You know, it had a really satisfying like turn.
[00:37:29] David: I don't know if that's good. So I rely on other people. You're the only other person that's actually seen it outside of Chase. And Chase told me it was good too, but I pay him. So I guess I pay you. Anyway, the book will be out soon. It's right now. John, sorry, buddy. I didn't need to take over talking about my books. No, I'm good. I did that too. I think we should talk a little bit about Time and Falling and maybe wrap things up. Give the skinny one more time all the details there, Brennan, and then we should wrap this one up.
[00:37:58] Brennan Knight: Tyrantfall Dragon Ball Z if it was published in the Heavy Metal magazine. Issue 4 kind of picks up right after the events of Issue 3. The explosive ending of Issue 3. All the characters are kind of damaged by it and all of them try to seek safe refuge for a little bit. But of course in this world there's basically no such thing as safe refuge. So the clashes are starting up again and it's starting to tie some more strings together that will lead towards an epic fight in Issue 4 so really excited about that.
[00:38:30] David: I can't wait like I said I've been following it since the beginning definitely enjoying the series love Max's art and really enjoying the writing Brennan the characters are fully real and realized really glad to hear that you're going to keep pushing through to a fifth issue so wishing you guys the best and most success I am also going to remind everybody you probably already heard an ad for it and we've talked about it but Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians is launching today as well so you have two Kickstarter that you can check out. Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians. It's 1801, and it's the turn of the 19th century, and Mina Murray and her crew of misfit monstrosities are battling the forces of Dracula, the Vampire King, to find an ancient Amazonian tribe that's guarding a secret that could allow Dracula to control the world or to destroy him completely. That's the pitch. The Arts by the Jean Brothers has got a really cool, fresh, like, manga meets hammer horror film, sort of like a vibe to it and I hope everybody checks it out. So go to Kickstarter, type in Tyrant Fall, follow the link, and then once you're done pledging to that, get back into the search bar and type Miss Mina, and then check that one out too. And thanks everybody for indulging us on that one. John, anything else to add?
[00:39:46] John: I don't mean to muddy the waters in the Kickstarter stuff. This is an utterly unpaid thing that I have nothing to do with, but I just found out about today. Clive Barker is up on Kickstarter, kickstarting his next three books, his follow-up to books. He's got three books. He's also got almost a million dollars as of right now, but the campaign will still be going on. We've talked about Clive Barker a few times. I just want to throw that out. I'm super excited. Nobody I'd like to see make a big comeback more than Clive Barker. It looks like this is a good one. Max, do you have anything else?
[00:40:13] Max Davenport: Yes. Thank you, John. If anybody is interested in seeing more of my work outside of Super Kaiju or Turretfall, I have something cooking up with Mad Cave. I can't talk about it yet, but it could be pretty fun. So keep your eyes peeled in that direction. Thank you.
[00:40:30] David: We'll have to have it back on to break the big news when it's time.
[00:40:34] John: Brennan...Anything else going on?
[00:40:35] Brennan Knight: Like I said, Tyronfall takes up a lot of time. Day job, kiddo takes up time. Though I am trying to work on something and get another Kickstarter, a non-Tyronfall Kickstarter going hopefully sometime next year, you know, alternate Tyronfall one season, another book, another season. But as of now, nothing solid, but, you know, plenty of pots on the stovetop.
[00:40:57] David: Nice. We're one episode away from our season finale. Our listeners should know that next week, the big season finale is coming. And I am so excited for everybody to find out what that is, John. Who will live? Who will die? Things will never be the same. Even more exciting, though, John, after that, a new number one. Yeah. Hell yeah, man. We're going to get a new number one up in here. Our listenership is going to get boosted by at least two or three people. It's going to be amazing. All right. Thanks for coming, everybody. Appreciate y'all for coming in and listening. And we'll talk to you next week. Thanks, Brennan. Thanks, Max. Thanks, John. Bye. Thanks, guys.
[00:41:39] 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.