The Corner Box

Sharing Turkeys and Giving Thanks on The Corner Box S2Ep10

• David & John • Season 2 • Episode 12

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John & David get together to celebrate the season of giving THANKS by discussing the comics that they’re thankful for! Then, keeping with the spirit, they discuss some comic book TURKEYS that weren’t quite what they should’ve been. Along the way, the guys talk about how to monetize a comics podcast, the Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul fight, and the importance of access to comics. Also, John has an incredible skill, and David finishes off another book.

Timestamp Segments

  • [01:09] John’s incredible skill.
  • [02:11] David’s exciting book news.
  • [06:46] How to monetize a comics podcast.
  • [08:59] Mike Tyson vs Jake Paul.
  • [11:12] Social media marketing attempts.
  • [17:43] John’s Turkey: Donna Matrix.
  • [25:07] David’s Turkey: Conan: Ravagers Out of Time.
  • [32:25] John’s Thankful: The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told.
  • [36:41] Access to comic books.
  • [41:31] David’s Thankful: Savage Dragon.
  • [48:45] Comics that age in real time.

Notable Quotes

  • “You can never take back quotes.”
  • “Everybody comes into stuff with different perspectives.”
  • “I don’t really watch The Simpsons, but I’d be sad if it went away.”

Relevant Links

DAVID's NEW BOOK IS KICKSTARTING!
Oh My Kirby! It's Happening! IT'S HAPPENING!

John is at PugW!
Pug Worldwide

For transcripts and show notes!
www.thecornerbox.club

Books Mentioned

Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.


[00:28] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm one host, John Barber, and with me, as always, is another host.


[00:35] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock.


[00:37] John: Yeah. I'm thankful to be here with you, David. It feels like every Thanksgiving we get together and talk about the same comics, and it's great. It's a warm feeling in this cold time of year. You can hear the scratching of little baby dog feet down there, perhaps. I don't know what's coming through.


[00:53] David: I’m glad to have a new dog in the office, John.


[00:54] John: Yes, she is a handful, but that's good. Puppies are good. I'm going to come down on the pro-puppy side of things, I guess. I'm thankful for puppies, but that's not all I'm thankful for, but that's not all we're here to talk about. So, welcome to our special Thanksgiving episode. So good, we decided to do it a second time, to make it even better, after somebody may have accidentally deleted it. Don’t know who.

 

[01:22] David: Yeah, here we are, once again.


[01:24] John: Yeah. I can't believe a whole year’s passed.


[01:29] David: John, to be fair, we've been doing this for over a year now, and that's the first time you’ve lost an episode. So, you're 70:1. If you had that record, you’re the Tom Brady of podcasts. That's an incredible record. You're the GOAT when it comes to handling the recording and handoff of said recording to someone else. You have that skill, like no other.


[01:57] John: Oh, boy. Well, alright. Sure.


[02:02] David: So, John, we are getting close to Thanksgiving, as we say this. Closer than we were last time we did this episode. I have some exciting news. About a month ago, a little over a month ago now, I did the Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians Kickstarter campaign, and as I've done with all the Kickstarters, well, both of the Kickstarters, the book’s done before I actually go to Kickstarter, because I don't want people to have to wait, or something happen where I can't deliver something. So, the book went straight to the printer as soon as we got the funds in from Kickstarter, and it's on its way here right now, John, and I'm super excited, and the printer that we used, we make mouse pads and cool sketch cards, and trading cards, and extra comic books, all the stuff, we make and print, and create in the United States. The only thing that I do overseas is the actual book itself, and that's because it's just so much more cost-efficient for us to do it that way. So, the book is done and printed. It’s on its way here, and it's very exciting, because I've got advanced copies now, and I'm just loving having another book that I wrote in my hands. Very satisfying feeling, but the thing about the printer that's really cool-- you're over there cracking up. I know it's nothing I'm saying.


[03:25] John: Oh, no. I was realizing that I was sitting there completely silent during all of that, and in real life, I’m actually like, “yeah. Good. Cool,” but I don't want to be making those noises, and also, the dog is just making a ton of noise. So, that's why I had it muted. I'm still here. I'm still listening, and I'm excited.


[03:41] David: So, the printer did this cool thing. They sent pictures of the progress of the printing, which is really nice. You don't usually get that from printers, but the other thing, they sent a video of the book being printed on the printing press, and then being collated and sorted, and stuff, and they put it to music. So, I got this really fun minute-and-a-half video of my book being printed and coming off the line, and being finished, and stacked, and put into boxes. It's really neat. So, I'm really happy that they did that. I'm really happy with this printer. The quality that they've been delivering is really top-notch, and just getting fun little stuff like that is just a nice little extra touch. So, I'm excited, John. We're going to be delivering the new book, Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians Book One. It's going to be with us the last week of November, and then we're going to turn around and start shipping it out right away, and the reason that we have to turn around and start shipping it out right away is because my next Kickstarter, John, is going to be starting December 10th.


[04:43] John: Oh, wow. Interesting. Okay.


[04:46] David: I'm lapping you, John. I don't even have your first book yet.


[04:49] John: I know. I'm aware. For everybody listening, it is coming. It's at the printer. It's all set. It'll be here probably right behind your second one, but go ahead. Apologies to everybody.


[05:01] David: I didn't mean to throw you under the bus there.


[05:04] John: We also thought we were done.


[05:05] David: I'm excited for it. So, the third Kickstarter is another Super Kaiju Rock 'n Roller Derby Fun Time Go book. So, I've got 2 properties. One is Super Kaiju Rock ‘n Roller Derby Fun Time Go. The other one is Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians. So, we've delivered the first book of each of the properties, and then the second book of Super Kaiju Rock ‘n Roller Derby Fun Time Go is going to launch on Kickstarter on December 10th. So, the book’s pretty much done. There's two more pages that need to get colored, and the book will be completely done. Well, we have to go into lettering, but it'll be completely done by the time we hit December 10th. So, I'm feeling really good about our progress and where we're at with things, and I'm really excited for this new book. I think I've learned a couple of things, writing, when you actually just do it for yourself. You might have been editing forever. You learn a couple of things. I'm surprising myself, John. Do you do that? When you're writing your books, do you surprise yourself? Do things happen, you're like, “whoa, I didn't know that was going to happen?”


[06:07] John: Yeah. I mean, I've always thought there's this magical moment, where stuff comes together, in a way that was inevitable, but I didn't know it was going to go that way. There’s little pieces that I'm like, “oh, that's actually tied in with that.” Those things come together, and that's always nice. It doesn't always happen, but it's always nice.


[06:28] David: That was all I had. I'm really enjoying making comic books, writing comic books, and doing all the printing and publishing. They've been very rewarding the last, I don't know, I guess it's been about six months now that I've been really actively doing this, where I'm writing the books. Really enjoying the process.


[06:43] John: That's really awesome. I actually have a tip for everybody out here, about monetizing podcasts, because I've just come up with a unique way of monetizing podcasts. So, David. That video you got from the printer. I got a video from that printer, as well, from a book that I worked on, but the book that I worked on was New Mutants #98 3D Edition. How much will you pay for that video?


[07:11] David: I would pay a decent amount for that, actually. You probably can get some dollars out of my wallet for that. If it's an NFT version of it, can you make an NFT video?


[07:24] John: If anybody from Marvel's listening, or Disney legal, at all, I'm joking.


[07:34] David: It's funny that you bring up the New Mutants #98 3D Edition, John, because just today, I got an offer from a seller on eBay, for a reduced, discounted price of New Mutants #98 3D. Now, John, I already own 3 copies of New Mutants #98 3D.


[07:49] John: Okay. That's 9 D’s, by the way.


[07:53] David: But I can buy another copy, own another copy, for less than cover price. They're wanting to sell it to me for $8.50, and the cover price is $9.99, John.


[08:05] John: Oh, wow.


[08:06] David: I don't think I can pass up that deal. I think I have to get another copy.


[08:10] John: No joke, the comic bookstore I go to had it racked with the incentive covers, and stuff. So, they had it at $15 from the get-go.


[08:17] David: Yeah. We go to the same comic store, and I saw that, and I almost bought that one, too. I didn't, because I was like, “I already bought 3 of these,” but if you're going to get it for less than cover price, I can't say no to that. That feels like I shouldn't be doing that, and it feels wrong.


[08:34] John: No, it's actually surprising. I know there are people who wanted them that could not get them. There was a delay, custom reorders, and those reorders were not able to get fulfilled. So, yeah. I don't know. Is it insider trading if I say it's a good investment? I think that's okay now. Actually, I'm sorry. There's not going to be any such thing as insider trading, by the time this airs. So, we're fine.


[08:56] David: Yeah, it's going away. John?


[09:00] John: Yeah.


[09:01] David: As we're talking, I don't want the listeners to get confused. We’ve got four people. We have to make sure we're holding their hand through these discussions, so they're not getting lost in the conversation. As we're talking, today is the day that Mike Tyson fights Jake Paul on Netflix. Now, when they first announced the idea of Mike Tyson fighting Jake Paul, I could not have cared less. Truly, could not have cared less, but as we are hours away from this fight, John, I have never been more excited for something than this fight, I think, in my life. The reason I say that is because people need to know how stupid I really am, but also, I am blown away by how good the social media marketing has been for this fight.

I fully believe that Mike Tyson has become completely unhinged and is probably stronger, faster, and a better fighter than he was, at the age of 20, and I don't know anything about Jake Paul, except that he's some social media star, of some sort, and has been doing it for years, but I'm worried for him. I don't want him to die tonight, but I think he might. I think if Tyson hits him one time, it's going to be really bad for him, and I can't wait to see it, but it made me think. So, over the course of the last several months, I went from literally completely uninterested, no chance in heck that I was going to watch it, to I am sitting here and we're hours away from the fight, and I'm planning the rest of my entire night out, because that's what I'm doing, and I'm really blown away. As it's been happening, all these little snippets and clips of Mike Tyson working out and boxing, and then comparing to what Jake Paul's doing, which is this very much compare and contrast stuff that they've been doing. I was like, “man, the social media marketing, it can be effective when it's done well,” and I was like “well, man, I should probably start doing stuff like that. I should probably be a little more active in the social media space.”

We do this podcast every single week, and I'm very proud of myself, and I'm proud of you for doing it, because I do feel this is one of the ways that we reach out to people and let them know what we're up to, and that we exist, and we're interested in comics. Well, what else could I do? So, I recently started reaching out to all these other podcasts and websites, and things, with my credentials and a pitch package, and showing off all the stuff we're doing, and I'm here to tell you, John, that I've already given up this idea that social media marketing is something for me, because I got nothing but crickets on the way back. I mean, I have never heard the deafening sound of silence more than what I have in the last six weeks. I think you might be the only person on the planet that is interested in talking to me. I've given up. I went out there, I gave it a shot, and it's too much. It’s too hard.


[12:19] John: Okay. That is not how you pitched this segment. All right.


[12:24] David: Well, that's the first half of it. The other half of it is, I did get one person interested in talking to me and someone else, at the same time, but not about anything that I'm doing, that I've created. They were interested in talking to me about the Conan the Barbarian and Savage Sword of Conan archives that, I don't know if I've said this on the podcast, but my company, Fun Time Go, the comic book arm of the stuff I do, it's basically just me and Chase, but Chase and I are the archival editors, for lack of a better term, for the entire Conan the Barbarian/Savage Sword of Conan archive. Every single comic book that's ever been made, magazine that's ever been made, Chase and I are the ones that are responsible for making sure that it's archived correctly and properly, and it's a really big job, because there's 50 years’ worth of continuous publishing, through several different publishers, but we're having a blast doing it. So, I was recently on a livestream talking about it, and I think the name of the livestream is Near Mint.


[13:31] John: Oh, yeah, I've been on Near Mint. That show’s great. Yeah, I've been on there talking about Conan.


[13:35] David: Oh, really?


[13:36] John: Yeah.


[13:37] David: I think he's a big Conan fan. So, that doesn't surprise me. So, we were talking about the Conan Omnibus and Savage Sword of Conan Omnibus with the near Mint guy. One of the other editors from Titan Publishing was there, who was handling a lot of the heavy lifting before Chase and I came on board. So, we were talking about the Conan Omnibus. So, one person did want to talk to about comic book stuff, but nothing that I'm doing.


[14:03] John: That's just the way it goes. I mean, not about you.


[14:06] David: Yeah. I don't take offense.


[14:08] John: Two things are funny about that. The fact that we both work on Conan stuff and are on a podcast together, are utterly unrelated, at least as far as I'm aware. It wasn't like one of us was like, “oh, we should be doing this,” and got the other. That didn't work that way. It is just the weirdness of business. We came at it from completely different sides of the thing.


[14:28] David: That is funny. Well, here's the thing, John. The folks over at Conan recognize excellence, obviously. So, it was only a matter of time before they found the both of us, one way or another, because we’re really good at what we do. Even though people don't want to talk to me about it, we're really good.


[14:49] John: Yeah. There we go. The other thing I was going to say is, I was lucky enough to be on another podcast, as well. It was his livestream. Friend of the show, Jeremy Whitley, invited me over to his podcast, Progressively Horrified.


[15:02] David: Oh, nice.


[15:03] John: Yeah. I was on there. I'm not actually sure-- it might be up now, as this goes live. Yeah, I had a great time there with Jeremy, Ben Khan, and Emily Martin.


[15:12] David: Did you guys talk about Hammer horror stuff?


[15:15] John: No, we're talking In a Violent Nature, which is a slasher movie from, I think it came out last year, and we had a good time. You get to hear me, you get to hear things falling apart at my home, and I have to be walking around, and at one point, making dinner, while this is going on, because of various events going on with kids outside of the podcast that we're not on the calendar, when I said that was a perfectly good time. So, I felt really bad, and I don't know how much my audio just gets messed up because of me being on my phone, instead of all this, but anyway, we had a great conversation. Good time.


[15:51] David: Well, I'm sure they're going to ask you to come back really soon.


[15:53] John: Yeah. They assured me, they would.


[15:59] David: I really like this topic. Even though we're going to do it again, I'm actually excited that we're doing it twice, and as I told you before we started, I swapped out one of my picks for this. So, it'll be all-new to you, as well as the listeners.


[16:16] John: I'm excited. Hopefully I’ve refined my bits on these. I'm definitely excited. So, it’s Thanksgiving. What are the two big things about Thanksgiving? Besides that WKRP in Cincinnati episode where they thought turkeys could fly, the two big things are turkeys and being thankful. We decided we'd pick, each, a comic that we were thankful for. Not a current one, necessarily. Something that, at some point in our life, we're just thankful we had, and a turkey – one that we maybe had some hopes for, whatever hopes we had for it, but it didn't work out, hopefully without offending anybody that we're friends with, or anything.


[17:02] David: Because you still have to work with people.


[17:04] John: Yeah. It's funny. We talked so much about your Kickstarter books earlier, it's funny to come back in and talk to him again later. No, I’m just kidding.


[17:20] David: Boo.


[17:21] John: Oh, no. I was kidding.


[17:23] David: I've got a quote from you saying that you like what I did. So, you can't take it back.


[17:28] John: Never. You can never take back quotes.


[17:30] David: So, John, let's get it rolling. Should we do the turkeys first, or the thankfuls first? Where do you want to start?


[17:35] John: Oh, why don't we do the turkeys first, and then we’ll end on something happy.


[17:39] David: That sounds like a good idea. End on a positive note. Do you want to start us out?


[17:44] John: I think I've mentioned a few times here, I have a real interest in digital comics and the early days of comics being made on computers and digitally. I was interested in that, at that time, and started to try to use a computer as soon as I could on some of the stuff. I don't think that's the only way to make comics. It was something I was interested in. Nowadays, that is not interesting. That is a normal thing that people do, but at a certain point in the 1980s, it was impossible. It was a pipe dream. That was a Star Trek thing, and then it became more possible, and I'd like to do an episode, a real deep dive, at some point, about early digital comics and the forays into that, but one of the big people involved in it was a guy named Mike Saenz. His first digital comic that he made was this one called Shatter, and this is made on a Mac Classic, the original Mac, which had a 72 DPI maximum output. I’m going to get into pedantic graphic designer nonsense here because nobody talks like this, but technically, DPI is not the same as PPI. So, if you have a resolution of a file in Photoshop, or whatever, the DPI is actually the microscopic dots that make up the dots that get printed, when you print something. So, it isn't the line screen dots that you see, if you look really closely at a printed comic book, or something. They're the dots that make up those dots.

On the original Mac, they were the same thing. It didn't matter. 72 DPI. You put this thing out, and it's only black and white. No gray. Just black or white, really chunky, has a real style to it, and that was what was interesting about it. It had the style that it looked super digital. It had the cyberpunk feel. From there, he did an Iron Man comic called Crash that took that idea and made it in color, and made it about Tony Stark in a Dark Knight Returns-ish story. I don't know how much you've ever seen these comics. Crash is appalling-looking. Shatter is neat and has a style to it, and Crash just looks wretched, and it's interestingly wretched. I don't mean to say that this is a thing without merit. If you look at the cover of this thing, it's super cool. If you Google it right now, Iron Man: Crash, you'll see this cover, and it looks like it was done in Illustrator today, and the funny thing is, it actually was done in Illustrator. They had Illustrator that long ago, and it wouldn't look exactly the same as you’d do it now, because the program is more advanced and you just handle things a little differently, but it still looks good. That's not how the interior art was done.

The interior art is just all over the place, and a lot of weird shortcuts that aren't really shortcuts, and stuff that just doesn't come together. Panels are visibly different resolutions right next to each other, and all this stuff. So, from there, the next really big one was this comic called Batman: Digital Justice. That was probably the biggest of any of those. That was all over the place.


[20:52] David: I feel like there was a moment where that was the biggest thing that DC was doing. All I kept hearing about was that graphic novel.


[21:01] John: Yeah. It was by Pepe Moreno, who was an assistant on Crash. He was an artist on Heavy Metal, European artist at a bunch of graphic novels, non-digital. It's better looking than Crash. It doesn't look great. You can see it's got a consistent idea to the way it looks. It's alright, and by that point, you’re into the early 90s, I think, around 1990, when Crash came out. Mike Saenz had gone off and made a piece of software that you could use to help yourself make comic books. At one point, I found the manual for this at a used bookstore, and then didn't buy it. Then later on, I regretted it. I'm like, “that’d be interesting to have and see what it was all about,” but he often did, I think, software design, video game stuff, but he has one more comic to his credit, and I'd never read it, and I was on this kick, and I read Shatter and Crash, and I went off on eBay, and it turns out, none of these are very expensive, and I think up his, to date, last digital comic, which was a comic from 1993 called Donna Matrix, tagline: built for pleasure! Programmed for destruction. She's the perfect killing machine! She's a 3D model. I mean, the art is a 3D model of a girl in leather lingerie and a fetish mask, carrying machine guns, and that's what you get. That's what the comic is.


[22:25] David: It sounds great. I’m in. You've described all the things that sound like it’d make a good comic.


[22:33] John: Here's the funny thing. I still haven't read this. I can't.


[22:37] David: You can't even bring yourself to read it.


[22:39] John: No. Here's the thing. For everybody, it's not a dirty comic. There's no nudity in this comic, whatsoever. It's just that premise and then a lot of 1993 3D. I'm sure it was very state-of-the-art, at that point, but it didn't look good then, and it really didn't age well. It was difficult to do, at that point, and it's all the stuff that is new and interesting. So, the back of the book has a making-of section, and the worst part is, it's got some of the sketches on paper, and it's like, “oh, that actually looks cool. Oh, that's a Mobius little design, this other guy, this SWAT team member has,” or something, and it just looks so much better in the hand drawing than it did in what actually came out. Again, in addition to a dominatrix, but also, I think, a dot matrix printer, or The Matrix, and the next issue, which we're all still waiting for, promises the perfect killing machine, as we've already established Donna Matrix is, is going to come up against the ultimate killing machine, Cyber Seal, like a Navy Seal, not like the adorable animal.


[23:55] David: Cyber Seal.


[23:57] John: Or an envelope which has been unopened. That's Cyber Seal.


[24:06] David: As we were talking, I did a quick search, and for those interested, you can find this on the Internet archive. Do a quick search for Donna Matrix. It should show up for you on the Internet archive. You can give it a look.


[24:23] John: Or as the ad on the inside of that cover would say, your mistress commands: order now, slaves, and there’s a card you can send them via regular mail, because that was the kind of mail they had then, that says, “yes, mistress. I will do as you command,” and you can include a check. I'm not sure if they'll still honor--


[24:42] David: It’s worth a try.


[24:44] John: But also, that is the most expensive option to try to get a copy of Donna Matrix #1 signed.


[24:59] David: Yeah. That's a turkey, John. Picked a good turkey on that one. My turkey pick, I think, it's pretty good. It actually goes back to what I was talking about earlier, about my work on Conan. So, being the Conan archivist, I've been reading a crap ton of Conan, and there's so much of it. It's so good. It's almost a dream job, because you're just sitting there, looking at awesome Conan art, reading cool stories, and Roy Thomas was already one of my all-time favorite writers, and he's all over Conan. He's the man. Well, my turkey is a Conan pick, and it is also by Roy Thomas, but it's called Conan: Ravagers Out of Time.


[25:54] John: Okay. I remember that title. I've never read it.


[25:58] David: Yes, John. That giant banana slug on the cover is the main villain of the piece.


[26:06] John: Wow.


[26:09] David: So, Conan: Ravagers Out of Time features Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonia's in there, and they even get back into the past, travel through time, and hook up with King Kull.


[26:24] John: Nice. Well, so far.


[26:26] David: Yeah. No, on the surface, you’re like, “yeah, man. Sign me up.” They plan to rob this gold mine, and the plan is mostly just going in with swords swinging, but it gets derailed by this sorcerer whose name is Rotath, and Rotath is dead but resurrects himself into the form of a giant yellow slug, and his deceased skeleton is inside of the giant yellow slug. Visually, that's what your main bad guy is. So, they're about to battle a giant mollusk, and then instead, get entangled into a time travel story, where they go back in time to meet up with King Kull, and then King Kull and Conan, they're 2 Alpha males, so there's this, I don't know, weird wang-swinging comparison stuff that happens in the dialogue, just tons of super testosterone-fueled over-the-top posturing. I don't think they're trying to be funny, and that's the thing that's funny. There's some really bad, Rotath has these weird villainous monologues that are super over-the-top. It's evil sorcerer school theatrical villainy that’s coming out, but it's delivered by a giant slug, and it really, constantly throws me out.


[28:19] John: That is funny. It is very clearly a giant slug. I was talking to our mutual friend Brendan Cahill a couple of weeks ago. In the last couple of years, I dove into a lot of old pulp stuff. You talked a little bit about that on here. The thing that he hadn't realized, and that I just assimilated, at some point, not really thought about it, was how much the early Conan stuff was the same as the early Lovecraft stuff. There's some characters that are shared between the two. There's references to each other. Those guys were friends, but the genesis of sword and sorcery was big, tough barbarian guys, fighting Cthulhu monsters. That was what early Conan was, and it switches a little bit as it goes on, and gets a little less metaphysical, I think. Somebody like Jim Zub would be able to answer that better than I can, but something out of time is a Lovecraft thing. He's got stories like that. I would have expected it to be that, and I wonder, did Roy Thomas write big banana slug?


[29:28] David: Yeah, I don't know. It’s very odd.


[29:31] John: Or did he get the pages back, and he's like, “oh, that’s a banana slug. I guess we'll cover it in dialogue.”


[29:40] David: Yeah, maybe. I don't know. The art is competently done. It's handled by Michael Docherty and Alfredo Alcala on the ink, and I'm a massive Alfredo Alcala fan. So, the art’s all there. On the surface, if somebody told me, “Hey, Roy Thomas, Michael Doherty, with Alfredo Alcala inks,” yeah, man. I'm in. I'm all over that, but it just doesn't come together quite right. It feels less like an epic Conan tale, and more like a giant grotesque lug in a B-grade monster movie marathon. The thing that you would watch on Saturday night with a bucket of popcorn, with nothing else to do. That's my turkey. I can't imagine, this is back in the glory days of 1992. So, you think about what's happening around that time.


[30:41] John: A lot of our readers might not remember that time. So, let me put in perspective. This is about a year before Donna Matrix came out.


[30:48] David: But, man, the price point on this thing was a whopping $9.95 for, I'm assuming, a 64-page original graphic novel. So, people were throwing down a pretty decent chunks of change for this bad boy.


[31:07] John: I hate paying $7.00 for a new comic, or whatever. I totally get that, but it is funny, when you see some of those prices from the 90s, and it's like, “oh, yeah, that’s about what you pay for it now.” I mean, Donna Matrix is $3. You wouldn't get this comic for $3, but there are comics that are at that price point, and the fact that, no joke, it's $20 to get an autographed copy of this comic that you're holding in your hand. I’m pretty sure it doesn't cost that right now, if you wanted to get an autographed copy of that comic. So, yeah, I don't know. Prices are weird. I mean, if you're really into slugs, Conan, Red Sonia, Kull, and Alfredo Alcala, you might still have to get this.


[31:48] David: This is the book for you.


[31:52] David: Yeah. I mean, if you're into B movies or oddball monster movie type stuff, I think this is the book for you, but otherwise, this is a bit of a turkey, and there's so much other Roy Thomas Conan out there that is of the most excellent superior quality that, I think, this might be one of the ones that should be pretty low on most people’s list. There’s my turkey, John.


[32:20] John: That’s probably fair. Good call. When this idea came up, it took me a while to think about, what was something that I was actually thankful for, not just something I liked, but something that I was happy to have, and there's a few. It's going to have to be something from, well, I guess wouldn't have to be something from my youth, but it probably would be, but when I was a kid, my grandma was sick, a lot, and some weekends, I’d just wind up going to the hospital and spending the day there with her. She lived for many years after that. It was just this one particular stretch of time, where it just seemed like that happened a lot. So, I'd go there and bring a bunch of comic books with me, but it was also a good way to get my parents to get me a paperback of something, of which there were 6, at that point, but having a nice thick thing to go read, but I think this one might have actually been a Christmas present, if I'm not mistaken, but you’d go to the shelf of books at Adventureland Comics, where they had them all facing out, that you can see them, and I remember this comic being there. It was DC's The Greatest Superman Stories Ever Told, and there's a bunch of comics with this title now. This is the first one of these with that title sequence. It was from 1988, the 50th anniversary of Superman. It has a weird, airbrushed John Byrne cover, because Byrne was doing Superman, at the time. It has gold ink on the cover, and my copy, you can see that the gold ink has shrunk on the cover. So, it no longer makes it all the way to the edges of the word “Superman,” which is bizarre.


[33:58] David: They weren't selling a lot of gold ink back in 1988, John. You just didn't know what you were going to get 30 years later.


[34:04] John: No, I guess not. Yeah. No, I didn't.


[34:07] David: We’ve got 30 years of technology that has improved the gold ink, dramatically, since 1980.


[34:13] John: Okay, if you'd invested in gold then, you'd be making out like a bandit now. So, what this is, obviously, it's the best Superman stories from different time periods, going from 1938 to 1988, and it's got early Siegel and Shuster stuff, all the way up to a John Byrne story. It has For The Man Who Has Everything, the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons story, but then it also has the story that that's riffing on, which is a Wayne Boring story from the 50s, where you see what would have happened to Krypton if Krypton hadn't exploded, and turns out Kal-El will become Superman, because he was always going to do that, and then Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, shortly before Watchmen, do a riff on that, where things don't work out. The thing that was interesting, to me, isn't just that it's a bunch of Superman stories. It was that this is my first seeing a bunch of stories, from different time periods, all about the same character, and seeing how times change, how approaches change, how styles change, and what's valued in the art and the writing, and everything, over time. There's an essay in the end by Robert Greenberger, where he talks about some of the stories that don't make it in, and Mike Gold has an essay early-on about which ones they picked. John Byrne has an essay just about his relationship to Superman, and all of those things add up, too, of this almost being one of the first pieces of that understanding that there's a greater world than what I'm seeing when I go into the comic bookstore, and a history of the medium, and things people know about when they know about the medium, and it made me interested in that, in addition to stuff.

It's got the original Superman-red Superman-blue story that, years later, after Superman died and came back, in the early 90s, he got split into two characters, and that's a reference to this old story, and I remember this being why I knew what that story was. I wouldn't have known that, at all, if I hadn't happened to get the one copy that Adventureland Comics had for Christmas that year. If somebody else had picked this up, there was no Amazon to go to. Maybe they'd be somewhere else, but you never know.


[36:27] David: I never knew that, John. I didn't know that. I didn't know that until the first time we did this podcast. How old were you, when that fell in your lap?


[36:36] John: I guess, I would have been 12. Something like that.


[36:41] David: I'm constantly fascinated by your level of access to stuff at that age. Man, because you had a comic bookshop that you could go to, at that age.


[36:51] John: Yeah. There was no shortage of comic bookshops, weirdly, in Fullerton, which is an adjacent city to Anaheim. I mean, there's no difference, but then once the 90s boom took off, they were all over the place. That area was lousy with them. That was where Extreme Studios was, as mentioned before. One of those stores had a bag that Liefeld drew when he was in high school, and the art store that I'd go to was the one that Extreme would go to, but I don't know if that mattered. I don't know. Maybe. I don't know why Orange County had a lot of comic bookstores.


[37:29] David: I feel like we never give comic bookshop retailers enough credit for their constant building of the fan base. You see weird pockets throughout the country, of where you're like, “why is Lubbock, TX in such a hotbed of comic books?” but it's because there was a comic bookshop there for 25/30 years that some dude who loved comic books was proselytizing to every kid that walked in the door, and you just get this huge upswell of comic book readers and comic book buyers. So, you get that, and comics are cool. So, then you get more stores in the area feeding that fan base. I guess that's how that works.

I have been noting, recently, how important comic bookshops still are, even today, in terms of their ability to bring in new readers and grow readership, and have a place to grow your fandom, or find things that might be cool. I've been listening to the Challengers Comic Podcast. They're a comic bookstore in Chicago. They sound like savvy guys. They talk about the business of comics quite a bit, from their perspective as retailers, and they sound like savvy guys, and from the photos and stuff that I’ve seen, it seems like they’ve got a really cool looking shop, and I just think, man, I wonder how many people have wandered into that store that they've been able to convert into lifelong comic book readers and comic book fans.


[39:06] John: Yeah, there's a weird inverse that I've also thought, that was interesting, when I was at Marvel, when I was living in New York, I would literally have to walk past a world-class comic bookshop on my way to get home. There was no way to avoid that, and it wasn't the only one I could walk to from that spot, at all. I mean, I was aware of it then, but that has to skew the way you look at the availability of comics, because your local comic shop isn't that good, unless you're in New York, London, LA, San Francisco, probably Portland, Seattle. There's a handful of cities that have shops at the level that Manhattan does. Of course, you want that. You want good comic shops where you live, but that doesn't help the people at those big companies understand what the realities of the regular fans are, if that makes any sense.


[40:01] David: For sure, yeah.


[40:02] John: If you walked into Forbidden Planet or Jim Hanley's Universe, and they didn't have a comic, that would be a thing to talk about the next day, “I went in. You couldn't even get it. We’ve got to keep our eye on that one.”


[40:16] David: Yeah. Interesting. That was me, on the other side of it. I lived in a wasteland, when it comes to access to comic books, and I was nowhere near it, which definitely, I've come to realize, talking to you, and talking to some of our guests, really slowed my education down quite a bit.


[40:35] John: Oh, interesting. Everybody comes into stuff with different perspectives, though. It’s not like, to get into the comic book club, you have to know who Superman-blue was when you were 12. That's not actually helpful. You're going to have your own things that led you to where you go, but it also probably is less frustrating, to me, as a kid, that I had a bunch of very good comic bookstores I could go to and get exposed to weird stuff, as opposed to not having one. That would just be more frustrating than overall damaging to somebody, if that makes sense.


[41:08] David: Certainly, I agree with that. Just, as a professional, I feel like I have had to play catch-up sometimes, because I just didn't get as early an indoctrination on some things. I feel like I'm pretty caught up now, but it took me a while. The thing that I'm thankful for, I briefly struggled to think about something that I haven't already mentioned on the show, because there's some obvious ones, for me, that I would go straight to, but I came up with one that I am incredibly thankful for, and it's a 1-2 punch, that's the same thing, but it's Erik Larsen in Savage Dragon. That's the thing that I am thankful for. So, Erik Larsen's been making comics for, I don't know, 30 years, it seems like. Maybe more. He first came up on Doom Patrol, where he took over for Steve Lightle, wasn't very well received, then followed Todd McFarlane on Amazing Spider-Man and Adjective-less Spider-Man, and through the years, has continued to do things at Marvel and DC. Did a run on Defenders and Nova. He did a bunch of stuff in Marvel Comics Presents, wrote Aquaman, did a little stint on Spawn, at one point, but the thing that he's most notable for, the last 30 years, is his creator-owned project, that he helped launch Image Comics with. Erik Larsen is one of the founders of Image Comics, and that's The Savage Dragon. So, Savage Dragon is Erik Larsen's creator-owned book. It is only one of the two books that debuted at Image Comics that is still in publication. The other one is Spawn, and it is the only one of the original 6/7?


[43:11] John: It was 7, but Portacio dropped out.


[43:14] David: It was health stuff, right?


[43:15] John: It was something that. It was some family or health stuff, or something like that, I think. I'm not sure. I forget, from the time, but he would still go on and do his comic, but he was announced as one of the original 7, but didn't actually have a 7th comic. Wetworks came out later.


[43:29] David: That's right. Thank you. So, he's the only guy who has a book coming out, he's still writing and drawing Savage Dragon. No one else has even come close to what he's done.


[43:42] John: Yeah, it's incredible.


[43:43] David: Yeah, it's an incredible run. I think he's lost a few marbles, at this point. I think he's going down the Dave Sim path, but thankfully I think it's a socially acceptable version of Dave Sim path, but it still seems to be getting a little weird, after doing 250-plus issues, sitting in a room by yourself, talking to yourself about Savage Dragon punching stuff. It's understandable why these people go a little crazy after so many issues. So, I took an extended holiday from Savage Dragon, for the last several years. Once I started not going to the comic bookstore every week, my Savage Dragon buying habits fell off, and I think I just took it for granted, like “it's always going to be there. I can just go get it and catch up when I want to,” but recently, in the last couple of months, I've been hitting the comic bookstore a little more often, and Savage Dragon’s there, and I purposely made an effort to jump back into it. So, I've always loved the book. It was originally about a dragon-looking character with a giant fin on his head, a green guy with fangs, who turns into a cop in Chicago, and beats up the bad guys. Larsen's, I think, well known for this huge proliferation of characters throughout the book. Deadly Duo, Freak Force, SuperPatriot, the laundry list of villains that he created for the book, and a lot of that stuff spun off into their own series with other creative talent helping out. The main book, though, always being Erik Larsen.

Famously, the Image guys did a crossover, at one point, I think, with Issue #13, at least it was Issue #13 of Savage Dragon, where each Image creator wrote and drew somebody else's book. So, Rob Liefeld did Shadowhawk and Jim Lee did Savage Dragon, and Erik Larsen was so adamant about having a complete run, that he actually eventually went back and redid his own version of Issue #13, and made that the cannon version.


[45:53] John: Totally different story. It wasn’t what […] Jim Lee did. It was just another thing that happened.


[45:54] David: “This is what it should have been,” yeah. Anyway, the run is intact and continues to move on. So, I jumped back into it recently, and one of the conceits that Larsen does is, his Savage Dragon ages in real time, in our time. So, a month passing here in our world, or in reality, is a month passing in his comic book. So, we have 30 years on, and the original Savage Dragon character’s, at some point, turned into a major villain and was killed, and it's his son who is now the Savage Dragon. Similar look, but definitely, differences. It's a different character, acts different, behaves different, younger character, but now, even that character is starting to get aged up into his mid-late-20s, I think, but entirely new scenarios. They’re in San Francisco now. He's got a completely different set of characters that are around him, but it's still a super fun superhero action-adventure story. Lots of punching and fighting. It's a little more horny than it used to be. There’s lot more boobs than there ever was in the first 150 issues. I'm not really clear on what that's about. Mickey Mouse shows up. I guess Mickey Mouse, the original Steamboat Willy Mickey Mouse, is now in public domain.


[47:18] John: Oh, my God. Really? Sorry. I knew that. I didn't know the Savage Dragon part. Okay.


[47:23] David: So, Erik Larsen brought Mickey Mouse into the Savage Dragon comic book, and turned Mickey Mouse into this pervy, horny dude that goes around grabbing girls’ butts, or something. It is funny. It's still very entertaining. I'm definitely still there for the superhero stuff, but the slightly horny part is just, I don't know. It's hard for me to understand, but I still am really enjoying it. I think it's a really good book, and I'm just really thankful to be able to have such an incredibly talented creator just in there, for the most part, every month, for such a long period of time, creating a really solid top-notch superhero work, or comic book work, that has influenced so many people, at this point. You mentioned it the last time we did this recording, we get guys like--


[48:14] John: Robert Kirkman. The most popular comic book writer.


[48:19] David: Ryan Ottley. So many guys influenced by that series.


[48:24] John: Yeah. Kirkman, if you're a fan of Invincible and you've never had Savage Dragon, it's just a big influence on it, even down to the style of the lettering. I think Russ Wooton was emulating Chris Eliopoulos, who he used to actually work for, I believe. I drift in and out of Savage Dragon, and then I pick it up. This just occurred to me, this time, is another character ages, where time passes in real time, anyway, I wouldn't say ages in real time, but time passes in real time, is Judge Dredd. So, if you read Judge Dredd in the 70s, that is now 50 years ago.


[48:59] David: Oh, I didn't know that.


[49:00] John: Yeah, well they fudge some of it, because Dredd doesn't age normally, and then I don't know what their excuse for some of the other characters is, but I remember when I started reading Judge Dredd, for a little while, in the early 2000s, one of my friends, who is English, was like, “Oh, who's chief Judge now?” and I'm like, “oh, it's Judge Hershey,” and he's like, “oh, interesting,” because at one point, she was the rookie cop that came in, and that's the way it goes. It’s the same way if I pick up X-Men and I haven't read it for a while. It's like, “what are Scott and Jean up to now? How are they going?” When you pick up Savage Dragon, though, it's like, “is this a different universe with the son of the character, and also, it's a sex comic now?” Judge Dredd isn’t a sex comic now. It's always so bizarre where Savage Dragon is, and it's not like it's not good, or anything, or not enjoyable or well done. It’s all that, but there's a part of, “I sure would like to see what Dragon and Rapture are up to now. No, I think they're both dead, and also, the world blew up somewhere in the middle of that.”


[50:11] David: Yeah, the entire universe collapsed in upon itself. This is an entirely different universe that you're in now, but I love those wild swings, and I don't know, that's what's fun about comics, right? The wild, over-the-top storytelling. There’s a version of that that is just super fun and satisfying, and sometimes, you just want that blockbuster popcorn movie kind of thing, and I think Erik Larsen's just always been able to deliver that with a side of, I don't know, fun quirkiness, indie heart to it, that has just always been really enjoyable.


[50:47] John: The Dave Sim connection is, their politics couldn't be further apar, I think. If you got into Cerebus for the Conan the Barbarian parody, by the time you got to Issue #300 and you've gone through the two years where it was Woody Allen analyzing the Bible, you're in a different comic. The comic is about what is on Dave Sim’s mind, and that's what Savage Dragon is there. Spawn is still around. McFarlane is still involved in it. If you pick up an issue of Spawn, it’s an issue of Spawn. I don't mean that it's not moved anywhere, or whatever, but it's basically a setup that is recognizable from where you were in Issue #1.


[51:29] David: Well, yeah, I think you touched on it with the Jean and Grey comment. It's going to be Jean and Grey. They're in a relationship. That generally hasn't changed. Overtime, they each date, other people (?), but it's always Jean and Gray, at the end of the day.


[51:48] John: Scott and Jean, yeah.


[51:] David: Sorry. What was I saying? Jean and Grey? Oh, my God. I think it's time to stop.


[51:57] John: It’s time for a glass of the ol’ Jean and Grey.


[52:02] David: All right.


[52:03] John: Yeah. No, but it is, it is like the first couple of years of Marvel, where there actually was genuine time and story progression, where Reed and Sue are dating, and maybe she'll go out with Namor, but then no, Reed and Sue stay together, and they get married, and they have a kid, and then they still have a kid 50 years later, but it’s like if that didn't stop and it just kept getting exponentially weird as it went on.


[52:29] David: Yeah, that's the perfect way to put it.

 

[52:31] John: Yeah. Good stuff. I take it for granted. It's one of those things, like The Simpsons, sometimes, where I don't really watch The Simpsons, but I'd be sad if it went away, and that reminds me, I should check out Savage Dragon.


[52:43] David: Not only would I be sad, but I would instantly go back and probably do a full watching of the last 15 seasons, just to catch up. So, well, John, I'm also thankful for you. Thanks for hanging out with me, and for entertaining all these fine folks, all four of these people that listen to us, for so many weeks.


[53:07] John: Yeah. I'm thankful for all four of you. Thanks for being here. No, it's been great. I look forward to this every week. Well, we’ll see you back here next week. See you all then. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box, and what is that? Delete.


[53:22] David: Jesus.


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