Intro
00:01
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. Past, present, and future of the most exciting medium on the planet, comics, and everything related to it.

John
00:23
Hello and welcome back to the Corner Box. I'm one host, John Barber, and with me as always, what do we have to open this week?

David
00:32
David Hedgecock.

John
00:34
All right. I probably complained about Amazon's produce if you order a whole food delivery. I guess this would be like libel if it wasn't true.

John
00:44
They give you bad produce. We could do that. Like we could open up like mushrooms and see if they've already gone bad when they get delivered.

David
00:50
What level of decadence are you living in over there that you're getting your groceries delivered to your house, John? It's this is not the pandemic. I don't know. You still live in New York.

John
00:59
That's what you did.

David
01:00
Oh, really? Is that a thing in New York?

John
01:02
Honestly, that's where we started and part of that was that the local supermarket. Like you just might not have asparagus that week, you know, or that day. It isn't like a a a supermarket here in San Diego where you're definitely gonna have all the spices. You know, or it's weird if you don't. Any listeners that we manage to keep after opening all those blind bags have just left.

David
01:24
We closed the last two episodes with blind bag opening and we finally got off blind bags and we open with talking about groceries and spice racks. It's like, what are we doing? Here's the thing, John.

David
01:36
The meaning to tell you this plus I'm glad we're talking talking about it on air. I had a I had a conversation with our publisher, the cornerbox. club publisher, Schmiegel Horton Flucker.

John
01:46
How is Schmeagel?

David
01:47
Shemigo's doing great. Uh and he called me into his office and he he was actually in a good mood for once. He said that our numbers are up. So he has extended the season, John.

John
01:57
Oh my goodness.

David
01:58
We thought we were only going to have fifty-two uh episodes of this podcast, but Schmiegel's uh given us the green light to uh do a few more. So we have been given the ability to close out the season uh appropriately. You know, we can close all the storylines that we've that we thought we were just gonna have to truncate, but now we can like finish things the way we want to.

David
02:17
uh before the new number one. So we're gonna do a couple more episodes before our season finale, John. Thanks to Schmeagel and uh thanks to all of our listeners who made it happen.

John
02:25
That's great news, because let me tell you about cucumbers when they come to my house.

David
02:29
Yeah, perfect. John, we're not here to talk about groceries or any of that stuff. We're here to talk about comic books. We're definitely not here to open blind bags, John. I still don't have my Rob Leifeld cover. I I'm frustrated.

John
02:42
Yeah, it's weird. I like I feel like this could be evidence in a class action lawsuit about randomization.

David
02:49
I was talking to a friend of the show, Joel Elad. Joel's very savvy when it comes to comic book retail and and and so of course he's already up on all the blind bag stuff. And I said and I told him what happened and he was like Yeah, of course.

David
03:01
And I said, what do you mean? Of course, he's like, that is exactly how gambling works, David. They they entice you with a few little like breadcrumbs.

David
03:09
But they never give you the big win because then you're done. Like of course they're not going to give you the big win. And I was like, oh man, that that's uh that's horrible and it makes perfect sense.

David
03:20
Like yeah, it really is gambling. I don't know that I'm into the blind bag thing. I think that might be the last blind bags.

David
03:25
I try to sample all the different variations of collecting, but I I might be done with that one. Did you read the future issues? Red issue one and then I read issue two And then I ended up in the same conundrum that you are in that I kind of want to read issue seven, but also I don't really want to spoil the issues Three, four, five, six.

David
03:42
Although I have to say, after reading the first two issues, so now I'm two issues into this, right? I I got to read the second issue. I actually think I read the second issue the day it came out in comic book stores, so I didn't really get an advanced preview of that.

David
03:55
But I read it and uh not super into it, John. I'm not uh it's the worst of all outcomes, really. It really is.

David
04:03
I I'm like Wow, I was super invested in this thing and by issue two. I'm like, oh I don't I don't know that I really like this that much. Some qualifiers to that because I don't want to turn people off from terminal.

David
04:14
I need terminal to do really well because I got a lot of copies of Terminal now and I I need them to go up in value and on EV. So everybody listening should be l reading Terminal and everybody should buy it, be buying it. And if anybody needs a copy of issue two or issue seven, please hit us up in the comments and I will hook you up for a premium.

David
04:32
Uh the art is spectacular. I d honestly don't think I have enjoyed Andy Kabert's work more than I'm enjoying it on this particular series. He's inking himself.

David
04:42
I don't know how unusual that is. But man, his inkline is really nice. I haven't seen him in regular comic, you know, working in regular comics for a long time, but he's certainly has been taking the lessons that he's teaching at the Kubernetes school and applying them to his own work because he's never looked better as far as I'm concerned.

David
05:00
So really enjoying it and the colors the name of the colors is escaping me right now I don't have in front of me, but the colors are also spectacular. So there's something about Joe Casey, I think, and there's a certain amount of Joe Caseyness to this book, and I'm pretty sure that's the thing that's turning me off. I don't think I'm a fan of Joe Casey, and I want to be, but I'm just not.

John
05:22
The Cubert Brothers are both like amazing in that they you know it like it's a weird thing because you talk about you hear about Nepo babies a lot, right? You know, here's here's a dynasty of comic book artists. Those two and Katie Kubert, uh the editor and every once in a while if you look at comics from the eighties you find one that's lettered by one of them You know what I mean? Like these guys were like professional letterers on things at a you know, because they're good enough for that.

David
05:46
At age like twelve or thirteen they were lettering

John
05:48
I remember I was working on Ultimate Fantastic Four when Andy was was drawing it. I was working with him and Warren Ellis was writing it and I don't mean this disparagingly, but like Warren would sometimes get behind on stuff. There was an issue or two of it.

John
06:01
that Andy basically did off of a outline. It was like more Marvel style. It wasn't like full script.

John
06:07
He wrote the story, but he went back and then he wrote the dialogue. I think Marvel style is probably a good way to describe it. Like it's definitely a way that I have bored.

John
06:12
It's cool. But it was interesting to see a thing that like Warren Ellis is really about the storytelling and about the rhythms and stuff like that. And it was interesting to see somebody else handling his story with him, handling those things, which Andy was totally capable of.

John
06:27
But also because Andy was like doing this peg panel by panel breakdown, he would letter in all these sound effects of like Nihilis making, you know, his wings flapping or something. And Warren Ellis never uses sound effects. Right.

John
06:39
It's like the one place where there's sound effects in Warren Ellis comic.

David
06:42
I wanna did anybody notice that? Did anybody like write in, fans write in and be like, what's up with those sound effects? I don't remember.

David
06:48
That's totally a Warren Ellis thing, but I don't know that I would have noticed that if it wasn't pointed out to me. I've always been a bigger fan of Adam Kubert. I mean, they're very similar, right?

David
06:58
I feel like over time, Andy Kubert, he's the more famous of the two brothers. He seems to be the one that's has this works on the slightly higher profile stuff. But I've always liked Adam's work better.

David
07:08
But again, the work that Andy Kubert's doing on terminals definitely like my favorite work of his. I hold it just as high as any of the work that his brother's done. So I'm probably gonna stick around, like all jokes aside.

David
07:19
I'm probably gonna stick around at least to issue seven.

John
07:22
Yeah. Well I wanna see the finch stuff. I can't wait to see Finch drawing it.

David
07:29
Yeah, I'm gonna stick around, but I'm hoping that the story improves. And and I think I said this before and the reason why I kind of went whole hog on buying terminal is I do have faith in Robert Kirkman's ability to do long form storytelling. Clearly he knows how to tell a story over time.

David
07:46
and make month in and month out really cool, interesting books. So I've got faith in that team and I'll probably stick around for a while, but yeah yeah with Terrell Number Two, I was like, if this was any other team of creative I would be out after issue two, but I'm willing to give this uh particular team a little bit more time to OLS into something slightly more entertaining than what the the second issue was. I I and I like the first issue too and so I'm willing to give another one, but uh it was not it was not my favorite.

John
08:15
I I like that you're gonna give 'em more time than the uh twenty-one copies of uh the comic that you bought by issue two.

David
08:23
I've already bought in two years worth of material from them. They're like, yeah, we're good. Speaking of collections, John, did you hear about the absolute Batman Deluxe editions?

John
08:32
No! This is great. I'm very excited for this.

David
08:35
So I've been I think I told you I've been picking up Absolute Batman in uh in print again. I started with like, I don't know, fifteen or sixteen, somewhere around there. Yeah.

David
08:43
A little bit before they introduced the new Robins stuff I start buying the physical copies because it's like, you know, I really love this I really love this book. It's really fun. And it's, you know, during gangbusters for everybody, I might as well jump on the jam bandwagon.

David
08:54
Cause I read all my DC and Marvel stuff. in the app. But I didn't want to wait for Abs Bat anymore.

David
09:00
And so I started collecting the physical copies. But they just announced the Absolute Batman hardcover deluxe editions. It's going to collect the first 14 issues of Absolute Batman.

David
09:10
I think there might be the Arkham one shot and maybe the anniversary, the Daniel Warren Johnson anniversary issue. I think that's gonna be in there as well And it was for like fifty bucks. And I'm like, man, I think I'm gonna stop collecting the single issues again and move over to just collecting those hardcovers because it looks pretty fantastic and that's a pretty fantastic deal.

David
09:31
So I'm off the monthlies on absolute Batman, uh starting pretty soon here because I think I want to just get those hardcover collections. They're definitely gonna be coming out, right? They'll keep doing that.

David
09:41
The only problem is that it doesn't come out until like next year, but I can go back to reading it in the digital version. Yeah, I think I have to wait like a month before it comes out, but it's not that bad. It's not even a month.

David
09:57
Oh yeah.

John
09:59
That's cool. And that's a that's a cool format. I bought a couple of those at Comic Con actually.

David
10:02
Neat. I'm kind of excited for that. I think I'm uh switching over to to that format for uh absolute Batman for my absolute Batman reading.

John
10:09
Goodness. You know what I read was I read uh yesterday a few brand new issues that weren't collected yet. What?

John
10:16
Yeah, yeah. Various times in my life I have shifted over to buying the hardcovers or buying the trade paperbacks or whatever. I might buy the book just to have an excuse for the absolute Batman again, you know, because uh and have it in a nice collection that I can pick up and read.

John
10:29
And that's silly because I've spent a lot of money if you add up all that uh on those issues already. But I do like that feeling of being able to sit down and read, you know, a stack of comics like I used to do as we get older, many things change. And sometimes there's like these these simple pleasures that you used to like that are less there sometimes.

John
10:46
I like comics no matter what But while I still have this opportunity to go to a comic book store and buy a bunch of things, I like doing that. Now I'm saying this because I'm talking myself into it. Because I've got like a giant stack from the last few weeks that I haven't read.

David
11:00
I think literally every single listener to the podcast just nodded their head in brotherhood with with that statement.

John
11:07
Yeah, yeah. You know, I would say something like don't you want to keep up week to week on on uh or you know, month to month on absolute Batman? Uh but I I mean I think I I'm gonna be like rushing to catch up before the paperback comes out for the issues I haven't read.

John
11:19
And that's like one of my favorite comics. You know what I mean? Like it isn't like this is like some dregs that I'm just not getting to.

John
11:24
I've been kind of intentionally saving it because it's like, oh, you know, read some stuff that I don't think I'm gonna like as much or whatever. But anyway. Last night I got excited because there were there were four number one issues that came out last week.

John
11:35
More than that actually, but but four that were reboots of series that I had, you know, some degree of familiarity with. And I was kind of excited about about all of them. Uh three of them were from DC, uh, where they had the the new wave of their next level with the Teen Titans.

John
11:49
by uh Kyle Higgins and uh Danielle Dinicolo. I don't know if that's correct.

David
11:54
I don't either, but we know what you're talking about.

John
11:56
And then uh Legion of Superheroes by uh Josh Williamson and Hayden Sherman And uh Doom Patrol by uh Darcy Van Polgeest and Nico Hendrikon. That was the one I was like really most excited about. And then also coming out was the new Archie. by uh Ben H. Winters and Fabio Moon.

Outro
12:13
Oh yeah.

John
12:13
My my son's now been on another uh tear on on Archie stuff. After we finished our little Lulu uh digest, we we dove back into some Archies that we hadn't read, you know, some recent Archie digests

David
12:23
Are you still reading the books to him or is he starting to read stuff to you yet? Yeah. He can read now, right?

John
12:29
Like I mean this is kinda like going to bed kind of thing, you know, so it's like that like not necessarily the technical inability to read as much as the I don't know, go to sleep kid kind of thing. Incidentally doesn't work.

David
12:42
Well no, a little Lulu's amazing. You're like, how are you gonna fall asleep when there's somebody's reading you a little Lulu comic?

John
12:47
Yeah, very ineffective. I have a thing I want to talk about about Doom Patrol, and it's gonna go to crazy Tom, but just real quick before we get there, I was real impressed by the new Archie reboot. I was kind of expecting something like the Mark Wade Fiona Staples reboot from Hang on Your Hat from ten years ago.

John
13:03
That's when that pause ago That's when that pause in saga was Right. Like that's the part that really gets me. Okay, if that Archie comic is that old, sure.

John
13:12
That time where they paused working on saga because she was drawing Archie. That was ten years ago. I don't know.

John
13:19
But I thought it was gonna be kind of like that where it was like you know it's g you know it's gonna be a Riverdale light kind of thing where it it kind of brings all the characters in and puts them in the modern world and puts more of a modern spin on it. What I wasn't expecting and what was happy to get was this is basically just a regular archie comic just executed at a extremely high level and not deliberately following a particular drawing style. It's drawn like Fabio Moon's drawing it.

John
13:44
You know, he's drawing the Archi characters, you can tell who they are, but he's not trying to d draw like Dan DiCarlo or something. It's not on model. That makes sense.

John
13:52
There's there's a eight page sequence that ends in a doofy joke. It's kind of a better joke than you usually get, I think. It's up there with the better ones.

John
14:00
It's a good example of it. Right, right. And the art's just you're really cool and and and really spectacular, but it absolutely does not go out of its way to like modernize it more than a regular archie that you read today.

David
14:11
It has always been, you know. Really interesting.

John
14:13
They're into like fifties cars and they go to, you know, Pop's uh chocolate shop. It's you know, this retro malt shop that they go to. I thought it was a really fun way to go about it. I don't know how successful it'll be.

David
14:23
I don't know if anybody wanted anything like this, but I picked it up because Stuart Eminem did the cover and I was like, man, you don't get to see Stuart Eminem very often anymore. So I picked it up for that, but I was also kind of intrigued by the whole Onipressness of it. Like OG Comics is like a comic book publisher.

David
14:39
Why are they farming out their properties? But maybe that's the direction they're going. They're just gonna ha let other publishers publish their stuff now and they'll just collect it in little digest collections and take it to the supermarket.

David
14:50
Yeah. I don't think they're doing that anymore either though, although maybe they are.

John
14:52
No, they are.

David
14:53
They are? You've still seen them? Okay.

John
14:54
Absolutely. That's what we've been reading.

David
14:57
I get all my groceries delivered to my house, so I don't know what's looking like.

John
15:01
You get your comics delivered to your house.

David
15:03
Sure, I do. There's no reason for that.

John
15:07
Teen Titans was a heck of a lot of fun, because like none of the Teen Titans characters are part of the Teen Titans. You know what I mean? There's no Starfire, there's no Beast Boy.

David
15:15
It's a new Teen Titans.

John
15:16
Yeah, so it's like Mr. Terrific's Kid. Like that's the whole setup is that like Jason Todd finds out that Mr. Terrific's Kid has been using a server, uh an online server called Teen Titans. Y he does a the natural thing you do, which is you call Dick Grayson and tell him that and then Dick calls uh mister Terrific and tells him that It's like that fun kind of night wing style DC universe, you know, where everybody's just a phone call away and they take advantage of that. You know, it's like that corner of the universe But it's like oh here's these new kids, here's Cheshire's kid, you know and like all these like weird secondary characters coming out.

David
15:48
I didn't know Mr. Terrific had a kid

John
15:49
I didn't whoa I didn't either.

David
15:50
This is all a lot of this is all clearly he's already pre-existing character.

John
15:56
Presumably, yeah. Like this definitely doesn't feel like I'm missing out on something by not knowing who they are. You know, like i uh i if this is the first appearance great if it isn't great. Legion of superheroes, man, that's good. Legion of Superheroes is really good.

David
16:10
I'm so excited to hear that. Hayden Sherman, I love his work and I was really hoping that the book was gonna be good because I wanted just see more Hayden Sherman art and maybe hopefully enjoy his story too. So I'm glad to hear that.

John
16:21
There's some pretty impressive stuff in there.

David
16:23
I'm just waiting for my delivery. I think it's uh coming any day now.

John
16:27
All right. But here's the thing I want to go off the rails and talk about, David. Doom patrol.

John
16:35
This is kinda the one I was like most looking forward to. Spoiler alert, I loved it. I thought it was great.

John
16:39
Really enjoyable issue. It was the first one I read, and I'm like, man, that was that was terrific when I got to the end. One of the cool things that I realized reading it I went back and I counted the pages because I was like, man, a lot of stuff happened in there, but there were like a lot of splashes too.

John
16:51
It's like 24 pages. Like all these are a little extra length without them uh saying anything about it. I don't know if DC's doing that a lot or if it's just on these number ones.

John
16:59
But that was pretty nice. Gave the story the room it needed.

David
17:01
What was the price point on those things? Were they all $4. 99?

John
17:04
$3. 99.

David
17:05
Oh, 399.

John
17:07
Yeah. Love Nico Hendricon. I edited him on a a Machine Man serial in Marvel Comics Presents. Uh we did a couple I don't know, one or two issues of Doctor Strange together at one point too, or uh with me writing and him him drawing.

David
17:20
Yeah, the one you wrote? Yeah.

John
17:21
Darcy Van Van Polgeest is the uh writer of Littlebird. Little bird, exactly. Was Littlebird the first one in the Darcy wrote both of them.

John
17:29
He wrote both of them. And then the second one. When word is the first one.

John
17:31
Was it a prequel? I don't know. I'm forgetting.

John
17:33
No. I loved the Grant Orson and Richard Case Doom Patrol. That was one of my absolute favorite comics And it falls into that category of things that I've realized in the last like couple of years that I I never explored outside of that. And it never it like it doesn't make sense.

John
17:47
Like I preemptively wasn't interested in Rachel Pollock's doing patrol because like, oh, it's just gonna be like somebody ripping off Grant Morrison. I don't agree with that idea, but 15-year-old me or whatever I was when this is happening, you know, definitely was like, you know, I want something that's as cool as Grant Morrison, not more of it. And I don't know, it might have been great.

John
18:03
I mean, I know it's collected. I I look forward to reading it at some point. But I also never went back and read like the old stuff.

John
18:08
And usually I just kind of skip over Doom Patrol. I read the Gerard Way uh series. And kind of drifted away from that when I drifted away from everything.

John
18:16
So I don't think that had anything to do with the series. But that had like the characters I liked where it was like Danny the Street and Dorothy and uh all those great Grant Morrison characters.

David
18:24
I don't know if you ever read that series. Never. Okay.

David
18:27
We talked about this. Grant Morrison's too smart for me. I can't understand him.

John
18:30
Yeah, yeah. And that was like that was like the earliest yeah, some of the earliest stuff you were seeing of his or I was seeing of his and such a weird comic and so delightful. Anyway, so this is another one that kind of goes back to the roots and gives you your your original Doom Patrol characters.

John
18:42
Uh you know what, I had read a little bit of the Paul Cup one. I forgot friend of the show, Paul Cupperg, uh the one who brought back to it never grabbed me. I read an issue that like Eric Larson drew 'cause there was like a Superman crossover and I remember not liking Eric Larson's art.

John
18:55
But uh again, I was wrong. I love Eric Larson's art, but there's just another in a long line of bad opinions about Doom Patrol I've had.

David
19:01
That was where Larson cut his teeth, right? And then he went from Doom Patrol straight over to Spider-Man amazing Spider-Man, I think.

John
19:07
It was pretty quick. Yeah. Yeah.

John
19:09
End result, loved this comic. But here's the thing I wanted to concentrate on, or I want to jump in on is the the opening sequence of the story is a three-page sequence with the chief. Niles Calder, the Professor X of the Doom Patrol, like the wheelchair bound leader of the of the Doom Patrol.

John
19:24
The sequence is he's sitting there typing on a typewriter, like an actual manual typewriter, a note saying these visions or this this thing has returned and he's for some reason typing this note. You don't know why. Intercuts between the typewriter typing and what he's typing with uh shots of him or him in the room, like a little uh narration going on, but you see him typing, cut to the typewriter.

John
19:44
Cut back to the room, cut to the typewriter, cut back to him typing, cut back to the typewriter, right? Six panels alternating in or intercutting between these two.

David
19:53
Okay.

John
19:53
So there's like an infinite number of ways you could lay out a page like that, assuming it got written, right? But that intercutting back and forth to me suggests a grid. Right.

John
20:02
Like that seems like that's probably the smartest way to do it is something that's like fairly evenly broken up. Maybe there's other ways you can do it, but I think you're gonna start at least thinking about a grid when you're doing it. Here's another little bit of backstory on this if you want it.

John
20:14
I don't know if this is worth going into. I finally read Adventures in the Screen Trade. by William Goldman, which is a amazing book.

John
20:22
He wrote the bookend movie of Princess Bride and Marathon Man, and he wrote the screenplay to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance. kid and and just one of the all-time great screenwriters and Adventures in the Screen Trade is one of the all-time great books about screenwriting, which I'd always heard, but I didn't realize how great. And it is super great.

John
20:40
There's this part of it in the end where he adapts his own story and then goes and asks other people in movies for like their feedback on it and they kinda you know, so you have like a hairdresser going in and and re reviewing his script about what the what or the costume or you know what the costumes would have to be and like an editor film order and like how you would have to edit it and then you're finally a director and it's Walter Hill and he gets into how much he doesn't like the story because of these things that are gonna be hard on the director. So they're like really closely looking at it. Meanwhile, I've been watching, while I've been working on other stuff, I've had playing a uh a cartoonist K-Fabe where they're going through the last issue of Watchmen with Dave Gibbons, the artist of Watchmen.

John
21:18
Page by page. Yeah, yeah. It's amazing.

John
21:22
Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you've ever read Watchmen. It's a structurally complex story.

John
21:27
And it's always y visual motifs and callbacks to things and it you know, it's like fascinating to see this. Not every comic can take the sort of scrutiny that they're giving Watchmen there, but Watchmen absolutely can. You know, like there's a lot of comics out there where if you go through and you start analyzing why did the artist draw this?

John
21:44
Why was this like this? Sometimes there's no reason. You know what I mean?

John
21:47
Like sometimes it's not thought out very well Right. Sometimes there's comics that are okay, that are good, or that are fun, or that have other things that carry you through that. If somebody's telling an amazing story about their life, and they're not that great a cartoonist.

John
21:59
Well, I mean, that can carry it. That could be enough. But you're not going to get a lot out of going through and being like, why is that line there?

John
22:05
Why is that corridor circular? It's circular because it refers back to the smiley face emblem on page one, panel one of Watchmen. And it's a recurring vote motif.

John
22:14
And it keeps you keep seeing that and it keeps getting lit yellow and stuff. Like that is a true thing. You see this throughout Watchmen, that smiley face motif.

John
22:21
In Watchmen there are electric vehicle charging stations. And this is in a world where those didn't exist yet. Those weren't real things when Watchmen came out.

John
22:28
But they had electric cars in it the plugs that you'd plug your car into. It looked like it had like two eyes and it kind of resembled a smiley face. The plugs themselves look like like yellow smiley faces.

John
22:38
I don't know if you remember that in Watchmen, but it's just kind of a little thing. You see it next to the newsstand and stuff. Spoiler alert, this thing happens in New York and it kind of gets blown up.

John
22:46
And you see one of these electric vehicle charging stations and it's ticked over and it's got the blood drop on it or you know, soot or something falling just like it does on a comedian's badge in page one Which mirrors the five seconds to midnight doomsday clock motif that they have through the whole thing, which is the final cover. So you see that thing on this electric vehicle charging station plug. And Dave Gibbons is saying, uh we we got lucky on this one because uh even though most of these things were like a character's walking down a a corridor and an icicle forms the minute hand and the figure state forms the hour hand or There's a shot of Adrian White and he has his hands raised up in the air in victory, but it's at an angle such that it exactly matches the five minutes to midnight.

John
23:30
symbol and the foreshortening makes one arm the hour hand and one arm the other hand. And this is all scripted. This is all an Allen Moore script.

John
23:36
You've got this vehicle charging station and Dave Gibbons says Luckily, my wife noticed that the plugs looked like faces. So by the time we got to the last issue, I thought to add a little dot here, so it looked like it dripped on there. So that whole thing was accidental throughout throughout all of Watchmen.

John
23:52
Nobody realized that was going on until like Dave Gibbons' wife saw it. And presumably like the same as the rest of us thought that was intentional because of all the other intentional stuff. Take a random issue of Avengers from nineteen seventy-five, you know, and and it's not going to hold up to that level of scrutiny, even if it's a good comic, right?

David
24:09
Yeah, no, it's it's not meant for that.

John
24:12
So this is the crazy town I'm going into as I start reading this Doom Patrol.

David
24:16
You're gonna hold this particular comic book up. to watchmen levels of scrutiny. Is that what you're saying? That's where it just gets crazy.

John
24:22
Because I like this comic, but this one thing on is on page one just drove me nuts.

David
24:28
I mean your hair is like all standing us up straight. It looks like you haven't slept in days.

John
24:34
David, my hair has turned white So you have him typing, right? And whenever he types, there's a tick, tick, tick, tick, tick of the typewriter.

David
24:44
So in panels one, three, and five, you see the character typing. And in those panels at the bottom, do you see a tick-tick tick as if he is typing? Is that right?

John
24:55
Yes. And also in some of the other panels you have it. So the first panel is a is a a shot of him typing.

John
25:00
There's a a narration, uh an omniscient narration. And then you hear the tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Next panel, you see Doom files, entry number two fifteen, the nightmare has returned.

John
25:11
Then you go to the next panel and you see someone else in the room, picture the of the old Doom Patrol in the room, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.

Outro
25:17
Go to the next panel, you're back on the typewriter, tick, tick, tick, ding.

John
25:21
Go to the next panel, and it's a close-up of the chief. Kushunk, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. Next panel, back on the typewriter.

John
25:28
Ding. Right. All right, all reasonable.

John
25:32
A thing I often think about is that sometimes there's careless lettering in comics where the letterer will in the effort to make everything readable, will place like text in image in a way that you would never put text in real life, right? And that always kinda bothers me. Yeah, there is a a limit to how much that can bother me because you have to have it readable as well.

John
25:52
Can't have stuff that just like uh key parts get cut off or something like that I would always try to do that. I would try to add more that you don't need that can get cut off so it looks like a real thing. And that sort of carelessness of lettering when you just throw the the text on there, that kind of bothers me.

John
26:07
Now this comic is not carelessly lettered. Right. DC's standards of lettering have like super gone up in the last two years, I think.

David
26:16
That's an interesting observation. What I don't think I've heard you say anything like that in the last couple of years about DC. What's the Impetus for that comment. What's making you feel that way? That that the lettering is improved.

John
26:27
Hassan Atmani Allahu. He's come in and he's lettering everything at the end. No, he's not.

John
26:33
But the level of storytelling involvement that he puts into his lettering and the thoughtfulness that he puts into balloon shapes for particular comics, for lettering styles for particular comics, for effects you can do to integrate the lettering in the art, and for stuff you can do to just carry the story along. has had a r an effect on DC lettering, I think. Like he does letter a lot of comics there.

John
26:55
I don't think he letters very many, if any, at Marvel, because I think Marvel tends to be the Chris Eliopoulos virtual calligraphy style lettering. DC, you know, looked exactly like that as well

David
27:09
Starkings footprint still looms large over over everything.

John
27:12
Yeah. Star Kings is doing Conan. Oh, and R. I. P. Dave Lanfear of Comicraft Oh terrible to bring up what I'm talking about, but uh when you look at the Comic Craft lettering on Conan, like it's a very traditional adventure comic. Uh, you know, the uh it is not like traditional like Barry Windsor Smith traditional, it's traditional like nineties, like like like late nineties Polished lettering, like not any of the excesses that you may be adding that time, you know, that gets a little streamlined from that. But Hassan stuff is like just taking digital lettering and taking a different attitude toward it, where lettering isn't meant to just recede, where lettering isn't meant to be a

David
27:52
I think it's fascinating that you are noting that I think he's too much. I think he's gone too far. While I appreciate the attempt of what he's trying to do.

David
28:02
And I because when I was lettering a bunch of books back in the day, I feel like I was sort of stretching, trying to stretch things in the directions that he's stretching. But what I I learned and what I think what my personal preference aesthetic is is the traditional version of lettering where you don't notice it. Like the voices are more flowing from your mind and onto the page, the lettering and the balloons, you know, they're meant to be seamless.

David
28:31
They're meant not to be noticed. And I don't feel that way about his work. I feel like he is inserting himself into the artistry of the piece in a way that is outside of the bounds of the lettering artistry.

David
28:45
It's not like I hate it on some level. I guess it's been a while. Maybe we should be pushing the boundaries a little bit here, and he certainly is.

David
28:52
But I don't know that I like the aesthetic. I don't know that I like his I think he's too much. So it's interesting for you to say that.

David
28:57
The reason why I'm so fascinated by this is because, man, I am such a lettering snob. Oh my god, I am like the worst Oh, on a Funtime Go comic book. Like there's literally like two letters in the industry that I will work with.

David
29:10
And if neither of them are available, then I'm not making a comic book. Because I am such a snob for lettering and balloon placement and things like that.

Outro
29:19
Yeah.

David
29:19
And sound effects. Like if I don't have the right people that I'm working with, nothing drives me nuts more than bad lettering or even just average lettering. So I haven't noticed that though across the line.

David
29:30
What you're saying makes perfect sense to me that and I'm totally tracking. So I've completely derailed you. I just find it fascinating.

David
29:37
Uh let's let's get back to the show.

John
29:39
That's kind of what this is, is because secretly this thing that bothers me is a way to talk about a lot of different aspects of comic books, right? But w like one thing you can definitely say about about him versus a lot of people that do digital lettering, if you make a continuum from, well, here's a guy that had a computer to Hassan on the other side of things. You watch Strip Panel Naked, this is a guy who thinks a lot about comic book storytelling. Whether it's effective or not, he's at least trying to work in a milieu of comic book storytelling.

David
30:05
Yeah. I appreciate the attempt. Well, I think I appreciate the attempt.

John
30:09
You don't have to agree with me, but I do think that he's had an effect on DC lettering.

David
30:13
Yeah, you're right. I'm blown away that I This is the first I've been thinking about it, but now now I'm not gonna be able to think about anything else but every DC book I read for the next three months. But yeah, go ahead.

John
30:23
In the case of the rest of Doom Patrol, like all of the balloons have like kind of a scratchy sort of outline to them that matches uh Nico's art more than like a smooth line might. Not that you couldn't do a smooth line on it. It's just like that contrast with it.

John
30:35
This is sort of meant to look more integrated and built into it. And you can see that in this thing. And it and like I genuinely can't tell if somehow Nico did the lettering of the tick-tick ticks or if the letterer did it.

John
30:49
Like this was a Marvel comic, and no offense to Marvel, if this is a m or or Joe or Josephino or anybody that I love that I I love working with. I can tell when they've lettered it and when the artist has lettered it 99 times out of a hundred. Anyway, six panels, shot, reverse, like that's what we're going for in this.

John
31:05
So just kind of going through in my head, how could you lay out those six panels? It kind of suggests a grid or that at least a grid is something you should start with. You could do six horizontal panels stacked on top of each other, and they'd be kind of thin.

John
31:17
But it's still within like the range of a movie aspect ratio. It wouldn't be super weird. You could read it straight down.

John
31:24
That could be a way to go. It's a little weird though and you wind up with like a small chief in the chief panels. You could do six panels vertically.

John
31:32
That'd be crazy They'd be really darrow. They'd be really tall. Maybe McFarlane has done that.

John
31:38
Almost certainly he has. Yeah. And I've always thought, like, if you imagine being David McClaney and getting and like having to do dialogue on that, none of the pounds are the width of a word.

John
31:46
So that's probably not going to work. So then you're looking at like, okay, well you divide it into a a grid grid. The classic six-panel grid is like the Jack Kirby six-panel grid.

David
31:54
The Steve Dicko special.

John
31:56
Well Steve Ditko does a nine-panel grid. No, you're right.

David
31:59
Thank you for correcting me on that.

John
32:00
Ditko was like the exception because the rest of Marvel didn't a six-panel grid following Kirby. Kirby's stuff became the Marvel template. It's three vertical tiers each of two panels.

John
32:10
You know, one, two, down a row, one, two, down a row, one, two. I think. If you had to pick only one comic book layout you could use in the medium of comics, I'd probably vote for that.

John
32:20
Like that's a real durable, steady, useful thing. But if he used that here, what would happen is that all of your panels of the chief would be on the left column and all of your panels of the typewriter would be on the right column. That's a cool effect, but that's not shot Reverse shot.

John
32:35
It doesn't bounce you back and forth. It takes you up and down. And that's interesting, but that might not be, and presumably isn't what they wanted to do here.

John
32:43
Like that's not gonna work. And there's a you know, the you could throw out a question here of like, well, shot reverse shot is a movie thing. Should we be doing stuff in comics that are more the comic thing?

John
32:52
There's stacked panels like that. There's no equivalency of that in movies. That's a comics thing.

John
32:57
That's really neat. But the funny thing is, my counterpoint anyway, would be shot reverse shot originated in comics. It predates movies.

John
33:05
It was in comics before there were movies. You go back to like Randolph Toffler and stuff, he was doing that. So this is a comics native thing, going shot, reversing it, and seeing what's there.

John
33:15
That is a comics thing. So even putting on my like high-minded comics hat. Okay, you could do that.

John
33:20
The other grid you could do. is to divide it into two tiers, you know one on the top, one on the bottom. Each one has three panels in it.

John
33:26
So they're tall, narrow panels, but that works great for the chief. That's what they actually selected, right? Does that make sense?

John
33:32
So yeah, like a the the top panel is going to be top left is chief. Typewriter. It's a photo of the Doom Patrol, but effectively chief.

John
33:39
Then back to typewriter, chief, typewriter. If you really want to get weird with it, it creates two V shapes that are intersecting the way the uh the Freemason symbol does. You know, if you want to get real conspiratorial about it, that's great.

John
33:53
That actually has a little bit of resonance into Doom Patrol history and Grant Morrison and his Illuminati stuff that you would pull into his stories from that era. Probably not the effect. that is actually being thought about, but still there in the same way that those smiley face electric cars are, presumably.

John
34:12
But whatever the case, like it makes a really n nice pattern to it. Everybody can just go online and Google this. It's gotta be up in a preview somewhere.

John
34:19
But the funny thing about this is that you see that it's shot reverse shot before you even see what the scene is, right? Like your mind is processing you're gonna be cutting between two things before you know what two things are gonna be cutting between.

David
34:31
Yeah, before you even read, yeah

John
34:32
Yeah. It's obvious. That's a cool effect.

John
34:35
Like I said, what it does is it makes these vertical panels, which means that you can't fit very much into the typewriter panels. the lines in the typewriter panels have to be fairly short. Again, this isn't carelessly done, so it looks really nice.

John
34:46
It doesn't look like it's just dropped in there. But you go down each of these lines, okay, you can read the whole thing. And then you get to that last panel and it ends with the word surprise.

John
34:55
And the word surprise goes about two-thirds of the way across the uh the line length of the other lines and it dings. Typewriters don't do that. That's not how typewriters work.

John
35:05
So if you're looking at these sound effects as if they're just generic typewriter sound effects, okay, fine. You know, like that's fine. You'd have just tack, tack, tack, tak, tac, tac, tack, and then a montage where you see the whole thing written.

John
35:16
Right. And that's fine. And that's how most comics I think probably would handle it.

John
35:20
But then I started really thinking about it and what's going on here. And if you look at it, you go tick-tick tick-tick tick. He stops.

John
35:27
And you see the first sentence. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ding. Now again, if you look at that, the panel that it dinged on, you're on the second line.

John
35:36
So he could have hit return and then a carriage return before it dinged, except the word in the second line, it ends with the word does, it doesn't go as far as the first line did. So if it's dinging on the second line, it should have dinged on the first line. Okay.

John
35:52
And then it goes to shunk. It's a shock. Yeah.

John
35:56
If this sound effect actually exists in the real world and isn't just a generic sound effect of a typewriter. That's the one time you go to the second line. All this adds up if that's what happens.

John
36:07
Because then he goes tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, ding. If that had been two lines, They would have been about equal in length, and you would have hit the ding on each one of those, and you would have stopped typing on the end of the sentence. But instead, by the second ding, you're on the fourth line.

John
36:22
And the fourth line, that surprise, like I said, nowhere near the other lines of the ends. So now I'm sitting there thinking, either these guys don't know how typewriters work or they don't give a shit and they want to demonstrate that fact to us. First thing.

John
36:38
That's the first thing you want to know about Doom Patrol is that typewriters aren't going to work like typewriters. So literally the next two pages that complete the sequence, that's all I'm thinking about. I just keep thinking about like, what is this comic that I'm reading?

John
36:52
Did they halfway care? Uh like I don't know. Page four, you cut over to the rest of the characters and fully on board.

John
36:59
Pulled right back in. My mind's clear, enjoyed the hell out of the story. Beautiful art, terrific writing, just r real, real crazy way to go about the Doom Patrol.

John
37:10
Like I love it. They're rescuing lost cats. That's where it starts off And like, can you believe we used to be superheroes?

John
37:17
And it gets better and better and you really enjoy it. These great splash pages So I I was trying to figure out what had happened. Did Nico draw the stuff into the art so the tick-tick-ticks were where they were?

John
37:29
Did they all just decide that nobody's gonna think about it that hard? So it doesn't matter. I mean it doesn't. It's a great comic.

John
37:35
Go read it. Like this shouldn't bother you. But that's the thing that was like, I don't know, there's something about that.

John
37:40
Like the problem is the panels are too narrow to fit the length of the line in the typewriter and still have it be readable. I don't think that would be a problem on page 16. Like by page 16, I'm sold.

John
37:52
I'm in this world. I'm completely invested. Page one, that's a problem for me.

John
37:57
Like page one, like that really bothers me. Like this is how you're introducing Watchmen. You know, like it like it's like if the guy's posing the comedian's badge and water flows uphill or something.

John
38:09
You know what I mean? Something you know it doesn't do.

David
38:13
The one panel the blood's on the button and on the next panel the the there's no blood, like there's it's missing or the blood splotch is different.

John
38:20
Yeah, well that's See, it's not quite that like level of carelessness though. You know what I mean? Like I like there's a whole shit ton of Extreme Studios comics that I like that are careless.

David
38:30
Yeah, but that's you know what you're getting when you go into it. You have a certain specific but this book for you had not established what it was yet before was already throwing you into this conundrum of are we trying to be Watchmen, are we trying to be Extreme Studios? So you're like, which one are you?

John
38:45
Yeah, that but then like every piece of evidence points to this was extremely well thought out. Assuming the tics were were written by Darcy or or or even assuming they were drawn by by Nico Where those ticks and those dings and those cachunks all fall make absolute sense with the words you're seeing, if the words you're seeing had been put in the right place. And it really makes it look like the words that you're seeing were put in the wrong place.

John
39:09
And that's the part that bothers me If you're not going to draw Cable's gun the same ever, I'm not going to get bothered by that. They just the gun's always different. That's fine.

John
39:16
But here's here's a world where everything is set up that this would make a lot of sense. If it made sense, but it doesn't. And I don't know. Yeah.

John
39:23
But again, a great comic. Really loved it. If you were editing this comic and you saw that Would that cross your mind at all?

David
39:30
I think it would hit me in the script, but it probably would certainly hit me in the lettering phase because that tick-tick tick and the ding and cachunk. For someone my age is a very, very specific and set program. The ding tells you you're at the end of the page.

David
39:45
The kashunk is the return back to the beginning of the new page. So if that doesn't match up with the number of lines on the page that the reader's seeing, then you've got a problem and you need to fix, yeah, adjust the SFX to match. what the art's doing.

David
40:00
A hundred percent you would do that. Especially in the opening, as you say, it's the first page of a brand new series. You gotta get that kind of detail right, or if you're not getting it right and you're purposefully getting it wrong

John
40:12
Yeah.

David
40:13
You better know that that and you better and you better pay that off. You probably need to pay that off in the first issue because otherwise I think this particular issue, John, though, it sounds like it's maybe just old heads like uh us, like like it I it could very well be that If you're 30, you've never heard of typewriter before.

John
40:31
I mean Nico definitely isn't. Like he's he's our age.

David
40:35
Oh, okay.

John
40:36
Yeah. I have no idea how old Darcy is. Again, given that every other part of it was written as though there was an absolute complete understanding of the sounds that this thing would make. I mean I think it just came down to the The pages aren't wide enough, so do you do you change the minimum amount that you need to change, which is the line breaks and the typewriter, because it still gets the same words across and it still gets the same sounds and it still gets the same thing? And only a jerk like me is gonna sit there and think about that, like interrupt the story.

David
41:03
That's uh that's going, John. That's a level of uh autism that I have not seen you exhibit very, very often. I like it.

David
41:13
By the way, Darcy then Pole Geist, the other miniseries they wrote that Ian uh Beltram Drew was called Precious Metal, and it was the follow-up to Little Bird. Little Bird was the first one, Precious Metal. I have no interest in that book.

David
41:28
But now I do. So maybe a little accent was fortuitous for them. Hey everybody, we're gonna take a brief pause right here to talk about my new Kickstarter campaign.

David
41:38
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.

David
41:47
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'll be a link there to take you to the new campaign Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians what is Miss Mina 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.

David
42:09
Only Mina Murray and a ragtag band of monstrous allies stand in his way. The vampire king 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!

David
42:30
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 Isaac Ward.

David
42:45
Nominated cover artist Ludo Lullaby, Chubajill, and Comic Book Legend Tony Harris, the artist responsible For Starman and XMacina. Go to funtimego. com and check out the new Kickstarter.

David
42:58
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.

David
43:07
Support, now let's get back to the show. DC's been making some cool announcements of of like that thing that you were talking about last episode or a couple episodes ago about you know you would kind of cut your teeth at image and then you would go over to Marvel and do like a big thing and then come back to image and do a big thing. It feels like DC has sort of picked up that vibe a little bit with some of the image creators that they're pulling over onto DC books, especially with this latest round of announcements and sort of what they're doing right now.

David
43:33
Which is cool. That's a great way to go. I'm I'm I am a creator forward sort of reader.

David
43:39
I like Batman. I like Superman. I like Wonder Woman.

David
43:41
But I don't by them unless it's Daniel Warren Johnson doing Wonder Woman. You know, if you're doing Wonder Woman, I stand in line for that. But if it's just another issue of Wonder Woman.

David
43:52
I'm not there for Wonder Woman. I'm there for whoever the creative talent is. I follow talent more than I follow the characters, which I think is uh not typical.

David
43:59
I think most people buy Batman because It's Batman.

Outro
44:02
Yeah.

David
44:02
And they don't care who's writing and drawing it. They just love Batman, which is a perfectly valid and fine way to read comic books. I there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever. I just think. I think I'm the weird one that I'm more into like the creative I think that's not uncommon with comic book creators, but I think you're right of of people that are that are like pure fans.

John
44:19
The other way also isn't uncommon with comic book creators. either. There are comic book creators that are just fans of Batman or whatever and and want to write Batman.

John
44:29
I don't tend to think those are the ones that I get that attracted to most of the time. But I remember like Bendis talking about that decades ago, you know, that He had to have that learning curve. For him, the Avengers was, oh, cool, John Busema's drawing it and Tom Palmer's Inking Him or something.

John
44:44
Not I'm going to read it every month. In the realization that people kind of treat it more like a sports team, even to the point that like there are Avengers fans that hated Brian's Avengers, but liked the experience of hating Brian's Avengers. the same way you get mad about the the pitching staff on your favorite baseball team or like you you're like you know your baseball team sucks this year, but they're still your baseball team.

John
45:05
And you being able to complain about how they suck gives you joy. You know?

David
45:09
Yeah, exactly. And that's how I do my sports too. I'm totally like a a homer for certain teams and it doesn't matter who's on the team, I'm gonna root for that team.

David
45:18
That's not how I do my comic books. I'm all about the creative talent that's doing it. I'm all about the minds behind the characters.

David
45:28
John, we should probably do uh what we read this week and then get out of here, man. We've we've been talking for a while already. I thought I did.

David
45:34
Oh.

Outro
45:35
Here's what John and David read this week! Yeah.

David
45:39
It's perfect. So anyway, John, there's what I read this week. I'm a little behind.

David
45:44
I don't have my box of uh new comic books yet, but I have been keeping up on all my reading. Uh man, I'm telling you, John, I've been on a tear the last couple months. I've been reading so many comic books.

David
45:52
Even though I've been reading tons and tons of comic books, the pile is not is not getting bigger, but the pile's not getting smaller either. I I don't know what I have done here. I gotta I gotta Figure out a way to I don't know.

David
46:03
Maybe I just need to I don't even want to say it, but maybe I should stop buying comic for like a month just to like try to That's not gonna happen.

John
46:10
I gotta stop finding like a good deal on Captain Harlock hardcovers on eBay right then. Like that's what I gotta stop doing.

David
46:20
I gotta stop seeing the news of oh absolute Batman hardcover edition and immediately going to Amazon and pre-ordering it. That's what I have to stop doing. You know what I got in the mail the other day, uh the couple days ago, John?

David
46:33
And I had no idea that I bought this. This is how bad it is. I got the Scooby-Doo Transformer mashup, the toy.

John
46:42
Oh wow, okay you didn't know that was the thing?

David
46:44
They took the mystery machine and turned it into a transformer.

John
46:49
Okay

David
46:50
And then they gave you the heads of all four of the care d Daphne and Luke and John and you know all of them. Sure. So you could put the different head on each of the different transformers and had has a couple accessories to like finish, you know, the look of Fred or whatever it is.

David
47:07
And then there's a sub-transformer. That is the Scooby-Doo transformer. It's actually really awesome.

David
47:15
And when it came in the mail, I was like, I have zero recollection of purchasing this, but I'm so glad I did. It's awesome. I love it.

David
47:24
I'm buying way too much nerd shit. That's where I'm at. So John, I've on this Garth Innes game, I talked about uh Streets of Glory.

David
47:31
And I mentioned, I teased that I was going to read Just a Pilgrim. And guess what, John?

John
47:35
I don't know, dude. Could be anything.

David
47:37
I read Just a Pilgrim. Not only did I read Just a Pilgrim, the original five-issue series. But I also read Just the Pilgrim Garden of Eden, uh, the four-issue series follow-up.

David
47:46
Man, I'm ready to read another Garthana's book right now, man. I'm telling you, it is so good. For those who aren't familiar, Just the Pilgrim, it's the it's an apocalyptic wasteland, a future Earth.

David
47:56
For some reason the sun has grown bigger and it has essentially burned all the water, all the oceans, all the water off of planet Earth. With the exception of like if you go way deep down, like into the Mariana's trench, right, there's still water to be found and and and things like that. So humans have largely been killed, all life forms on the planet, and everyone's sort of living this desert, uh desolate wasteland, struggling to survive.

David
48:21
And into this uh wasteland strolls uh the pilgrim And we learn over the course of the first series that the pilgrim before the sun expanded and destroyed civilization, he was a former soldier. Who went crazy and turned into a cannibal, ate like twenty different people and before he was caught and thrown into this insane asylum. But now he's, you know, back out and uh he has found God.

David
48:48
So he's no longer eating people and he's like basically trying to live a godly life. in this desolate wasteland and seemingly wanting to do good, but by the end of the first series we find that oh it's not as he's not as altruistic. as maybe we once thought.

David
49:04
So it's a really fun read because it is very much like taking preacher and pushing the the preacher the the religious piece. of Preacher and pushing it to the other extreme. I think in Preacher, you know, your your main character has sort of a laissez-faire um attitude in in sort of connection with his God.

David
49:25
Whereas in just the pilgrim, you know, he's by the book Bible thumper. Like he is quoting scripture throughout the entire series, speaking with God and relying on God for what to do, which plays to the character because this character is clearly before the apocalypse was a lost soul who went truly crazy. And he's found religion while in prison th through the teachings of a priest who comes to him on a weekly or daily basis over the course of years while he's in prison and sort of helps him come to God.

David
49:57
It's a really cool and well thought out read. And then it's also just this the most Garth Inus of Garth in his they're all Garth Innis books, right? Like In the first mini series, the pilgrim happens upon these travelers, uh, these nomads who are trying to find a new place to live that's more secure and safe and maybe has more food and water than where they were coming from.

David
50:18
and the pilgrim protects them from a band of militaristic nomads who have sort of taken over the area as these travelers are going through the countryside. So this military group attacks them and the pilgrim essentially saves them. And while they're traveling though, one of the group, as an example of how Garth Innis this book is, one of the one of these guys who's kind of a annoying guy.

David
50:43
gets caught and sucked into this hole by a monster and the rest of the travelers are like, Oh my god, he you know the monster ate him and killed him and the pilgrim's like, No no no, he's he's probably still alive. We if we go down there quickly we can still save him. And so he gathers a few people with him, they go down into this hole with guns and they destroy the monster and save the guy, but The reason why the guy wasn't eaten is because the monster impregnates the humans with other little monsters.

David
51:13
And so this guy comes out of the hole looking like a giant eight foot nutsack, basically. It's just disgusting. It's so disgusting.

David
51:23
And inside of him are all this monsters, babies. And they start basically just like pouring out of his skin one after another. And then they kill the monsters as they come out of his skin and they kill like twenty or thirty of these things and then the there's no more in there.

David
51:37
But the guy Still walks around is like this giant, you know, ball sack basically. And that's kind of the joke, is that he's a bit of a ball sack. So it's it's that kind of stuff that's also happening.

David
51:48
Like there's just like meditation on you know, religion and and it and the relationship of religion to society. And then at the same time, there's also a dude walking around like a giant ball sack. Very entertaining.

David
51:59
Carlos Squera. a while ago I talked about reading the uh miniseries, stainless steel rap miniseries, uh or maybe there's a couple of miniseries that Carlos Square uh wrote. And and Carlos Scara is like in in England, I think, is a much more celebrated artist than he is here in the States You know, he's famously created Judge Dredd, the visual look of Judge Dredd, also well known for his co-creation or creation of Strontium Dog.

David
52:22
Anyway. I didn't have a really good appreciation of Carlos Square until I was reading that Stainless Steel Rat series and I was like, oh man, this guy is really good. Like, man, he is good, good.

David
52:33
And This Just of Pilgrim stuff just solidified that for me. The art is it is a bit of an acquired taste, but man, Carlos Scar knows how to tell a story so well. And the art is just gorgeous.

David
52:44
Once you've acquired the taste for his art style, like I I can't get enough of it. scare of stuff at some point because after reading the Justa Pilgrim first series and the follow-up, I can't get enough of that guy's art. I'd really like to hear it.

David
53:01
So that series concludes horrifically that essentially the the nomads that he was the travelers that he was trying to protect all end up dying. None of them make it and the militaristic people who were trying to attack the the travelers also all end up dying and the only one of course that survives is just a pilgrim is the pilgrim uh himself. In the follow-up miniseries is called Garden of Eden and the Pilgrim goes down into the Marianas Trench for reasons I can't quite remember And comes upon some people who are building a space shuttle to go out into space.

David
53:34
They're a bunch of science nerds and they've all got the genome and the DNA of every single almost all the sa animals and plant life that's existed on the planet for various reasons. They've got access to this stuff and they've got the ability to create a rocket ship. There's a little bit of hand waving there to like make it all work, but it's fine.

David
53:51
He makes a point of not making a point. It works. Various things happen and turns into a uh Noah's Ark.

David
53:57
sort of situation, but a noise arc situation with the pilgrim inserted into the middle of it, so everything dies, almost nothing survives. And it's a great send-off for the series. I think NS purposefully sort of puts a bow on the story at the end in a way that there's really no coming back to this mini.

David
54:14
I when I was reading the first mini-series, I was like, man. I can't believe they only did one more miniseries after this. I could have seen this going on for a long time.

David
54:21
After you read the second miniseries, it's like Innis did a 10 issue like storyline or two arcs and then he was like, okay, I I've said enough with this character. And sort of puts a bow on it. So it's a really satisfying read.

David
54:33
Uh if you can get both, they're super cheap on eBay. I think I I'm not even kidding. I think I paid like eight bucks for all ten issues on eBay for for another like five bucks for shipping or whatever it was.

David
54:44
So it was well worth it. Um and they're easy to grab off eBay. Black Bowl Publishing put out some cool stuff at that time.

Outro
54:50
The editor for the series was Jimmy Palmiati. Whoa.

David
54:54
Yeah, yeah, and I was a lot of I was a little like, what Jimmy Palmiotti, but but if you recall, around the time that Black Bull Publishing was around, uh it was it was towards the tail end of Marvel Knights and Joe Casado famously was, you know, the co-editor with Jimmy Palmiotti on the Marvel Knights stuff. And so it kind of actually tracked, like, oh, Joe Cassada sort of went to Marvel and Jimmy Palmiani for a time went to Black Bowl publishing So Jimmy Palmiotti had a great eye. That team was fantastic.

David
55:23
And there's a couple other series now that I saw, uh, you know, because there's ads in the back of the book for the other Blackpool. comic books. Um there's something called gate crashers, which I I don't remember at all.

David
55:34
And I think uh Amanda Connor is the artist for it, of course, because you know that's Palmiotti's wife. But Mark Wade wrote it and I'm like, man, I gotta check that out. I know I don't remember that like at all.

David
55:46
So anyway, now I'm gonna find some there might be some other Black Bull comic books that are out there that might be worth checking out. My appreciation for Jimmy Palmiotti as an editor, uh, on top of everything else that guy's done, I I I think he's a very accomplished comic book creator just on his own. But uh my my appreciation for his editing skills is has gone up as well.

David
56:06
It's it's great, great book. Put together a great book, put together a great team. really super interested in the other stuff that he was uh editing uh for that publisher.

John
56:15
That's awesome. Yeah, no Jimmy's great.

David
56:17
Yeah. Oh, that's cool. And that's it, John. That's what I read this week.

John
56:19
I've read Just a Pilgrim. I remember being a really good Garthenis story, j but that's about all I remember I didn't remember it had the same premise as Cigna, my my uh with the sun. Here's me learning that, uh, everybody.

John
56:33
Um I don't in any way mean to speak for Garth, but it's interesting. So he he would have loved Carlos Esquerza growing up. You know what I mean?

John
56:41
Like that would have been like his I mean, you guys it would have been like a teenager or something or No, he he actually in the back in the letters column of

David
56:48
Justin Pogan because there was a letters page where Garth Innes, he's the one that's doing all the responses. He talks about the fact that he was a huge Esquirez a fan and that that working with him is is a highlight, you know, of his career. I I think he's already at this point he's already worked with the Squares on some stuff.

David
57:05
Maybe on some of the preacher stuff. I think the Squares did a couple issues, but I know he did at least a mini-series. with Ennis that was a preacher like side project.

John
57:13
He did like almost all of the one-shots, like Sane of Killovers.

David
57:17
I think you're right.

John
57:17
That's right.

David
57:18
Again, at the time, like I I didn't have a real appreciation, but now I kind of want to go back and and look at that to revisit some of that stuff with uh sort of a a better appreciation of what Carlos was doing.

John
57:29
Yeah, he's he's real good for Garth too. Like he's he he's got a a like a grime to his stuff, like just a like a dirtiness and and and everything's lived in and beat up. For sure. Yeah, no, that's fantastic.

David
57:43
Well, John, I th I think we've done a good business. What do you think?

John
57:46
Yes. More typewriters, vegetables, and bags of comics coming your way. As we round out season two.

David
57:54
Season three, John. This is season three, not season two. We're on season three. We're about to start season four, John. We've done been been doing this for three full almost three full years.

John
58:02
But David, it's it's it's It's summer twenty twenty five. How could we be in uh all right.

David
58:08
Big thanks to uh Schmeagel for uh giving us a few extra uh episodes to round out season three. That's great. That was great news, and thanks to everybody for listening. Uh and Keeping the numbers up where we can uh finish this thing correctly uh before we launch into a new number one.

John
58:22
Yeah. We'll be back with more next week. Bye.

Outro
58:25
This has been the corner box with David and John. Please take a moment and give us a five 5-star rating, it really helps, and join us again next week for another dive into the wonderful world of comics

David
58:40
Good luck with that one, Ed. Good luck trying to make that entertaining. The first part was rough because we fucking tired talking about terminal bags again, but uh you you saved us with your talk about typewriters. Alright, I'm gonna stop the recording.