The Corner Box

The Next James Bond and Creator's Get Vocal at The Corner Box S2Ep28

• David & John • Season 2 • Episode 28

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John and David talk about the financial struggles of comic book creators, how freelancers can effect lasting change, and the sad business practices of corporate comics companies. Also, David pays creators more than Marvel, and John writes an inspired James Bond movie script.

Timestamp Segments

  • [01:10] The show’s newfound popularity.
  • [01:37] The financial problems at Marvel.
  • [10:14] How change will happen.
  • [12:43] Join the FunTimeGo campaign!
  • [13:42] The craziest thing about comics.
  • [16:37] Marvel’s double-damning response.
  • [19:33] David writes a superhero comic.
  • [24:08] James Bond News.
  • [25:19] The plot of Bond 26.
  • [28:58] This episode’s topic.

Notable Quotes

  • “They should be paying what the artist is worth.”
  • “This is the most opinionated version of The Corner Box we’ve ever done.”
  • “Sometimes, the world is enough.”

Relevant Links

David's Fun Stuff!
Miss Mina VIP Launches Here!

John is at PugW!
Pug Worldwide

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] David Hedgecock: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to The Corner Box. I’m your host, David Hedgecock, and with me, as always, is my other host.


[00:34] John Barber: John--


[00:35] David: --and good friend.


[00:37] John: So close.


[00:40] David: It's such a simple thing. John, I'm excited to be on the podcast with you this week. This is the first time we haven't had a guest with us in—I don't even—a month, literally.


[00:51] John: Did you notice my new shirt?


[00:53] David: Oh, I did not. That's rad. Death of Power. Nice.


[00:57] John: It’s like we have Kirt on the show.


[00:58] David: Yeah, Kirt's the new favorite. Dave's dead to us, I think. He's our archenemy now. He doesn't even listen to this. So, he doesn't even know.


[01:04] John: He’ll just be collecting all the Eisner money.


[01:07] David: Yeah, all that fat cash that the Eisner rewards bring you. John, we're very popular. We’ve had so many people that we've been talking to, lately. I’m shocked at how popular we've become. No comment. I've been enjoying all our conversations with all the fantastic folks, like Pat Shand, and Tony Fleecs, and Stephanie Williams, and Elizabeth Brei. What a great list of guests we've had. I'm very proud of us for such a cool and diverse group that we've brought in, to have all our listeners listen to, but they're not here, this time, John. It's just me and you. Have you seen the stuff going on? The social medias have been all aflutter with the latest dust-up that's happened. I thought it might be interesting to get your take on it. There was a recent post by a very well-known artist. Primarily, he worked at Marvel. I don’t know. I guess he's done work at DC, as well.


[01:57] John: I would actually think of him more as a primary DC artist, because he did the Lil Gotham.


[02:02] David: That's true. Good point. Dustin Nguyen posted recently, where he basically just said “F everybody that's working at Marvel right now. Stop screwing over creators. I’ve been working there for 15 years. Never had a single raise,” and just basically saying they're never getting another cover out of him, ever, and that he's tired of their minimum wage BS, and man, did it light a fire under a lot of people. The amount of reposts and comments that came through, after him making that comment, were pretty impressive, and the reason why it struck me is because I feel like we've been directly, at least I have been, directly or indirectly saying the problem at Marvel is exactly this. If you want good talent, you’ve got to pay for quality, and Marvel just doesn't seem to be willing, able, or interested in doing that, right now, and Marvel’s seeing the effects of that. I don't think Marvel's ever been weaker than it is right now, and that is not good for this industry. I think, for a long time, they've been coasting on their reputation, and finally, maybe some cracks are showing from that.


[03:08] John: I do want to say, I don’t agree with that. I want to make it clear to my corporate overlords. Also, just to throw it out there that Dustin was very polite to everyone he works with, and seemed to go out of his way to make it clear that wasn't a “screw everybody that's there.” It's a “screw the financial situation,” not the editorial team he's working with.


[03:26] David: Good clarification. I read it as him railing against the corporate overlords, not necessarily the people that are working—the people on the ground, the boots on the ground, the people that are working the day-to-day. Yeah. Good point.


[03:39] John: I only say that because actually just met him, within the last couple of weeks, for various reasons. He seemed like a very nice guy. So, I didn’t want to impugn his reputation for being nice. It is bonkers in that the financials have not gone up for the creators over the years. That is a very serious problem. I mean, that is tough, and then, in the meantime, other venues, like we often talk about, have come up. You can reach out directly to fans. You can do all these different ways of doing things, where that stranglehold just doesn't exist anymore, both in terms of making reputations, and in terms of financial compensation, when you're there. My advice to anybody is just, know what you're doing, what you're getting out of it, and at certain points, places aren't going to be the right place, but yeah, I would like to see everybody get paid more.


[04:31] David: I just find it really detrimental, overall, to the success of the industry, as a whole. Some of the stuff that he outlines is talking about royalties for foreign sales. Having worked in the backside of things, I understand that royalties on foreign sales is a difficult thing to navigate and manage, for the publisher themselves. It is hard to make a guarantee of a royalty on something, when you don't even know, you can't verify, in some cases, what you sold, or haven't. So, I understand the logistics of it, but when you're dealing with a corporation like Marvel, I would like to think that they have the ability, and the resources, to codify those things, in a way that you can offer a royalty on a foreign subscription, and the other thing that was really distressing—and again, I know that it's frustrating that a lot of what Marvel does, these days, a lot of where they make their money, is on merchandising and licensing. So, when you have somebody create a really kick-ass image for you, that's a cover for a comic book, and they’re being compensated for a cover for a comic book, and then you go and take that cover, as a comic book, and use it on bed sheets and pillows, and toy design, and statues—hey, man. Come on.

At a certain point, let's be fair to the artist who created that piece for you. You're turning that into 17 different revenue streams. It's not fair for you to have just paid them for the one revenue stream. At a certain point, it's gross, and I think that that's another way for you to be like, “hey, maybe we can't pay you a page rate right here, but hey, if we do these merchandising things, if it hits certain targets, then you get a kickback on that stuff, or we pay you again for that thing,” rather than just saying, “we own it, completely, and entirely, and we never have to pay for it again,” and I know that Marvel can do that. So, that's why they do it, but I think that we are seeing a lot of savvy artists saying, “I don't need that, and I'm going to do something different, and I can make just as much money, or more, without engaging with Marvel,” and again, ultimately, at least in the North American marketplace, that is detrimental to comic books, as a whole, regardless of what type of comic book you're trying to make, what kind of stories you're telling. A healthy Marvel is still, even in 2025, good for the industry.


[06:52] John: What's distressing about that, too, is that that was exactly what caused Image. That's exactly the inciting incident, a McFarland cover on a T-shirt somewhere, where he wasn't getting paid, or at least that was the reason that they presented, was “here's this thing, or whatever, the straw that broke the camel's back,” or whatever you want to call that.


[07:10] David: Yeah, and they’re still being done. In the interim, or since Dustin made that post, a few other creators have chimed in, and then you just see, “that's poor practices.” Zoe Thorogood—you and I, probably one of our favorite creators of the last two years—chimes in, and says she got offered to do a design, a Spider-Man design for some new Spider-Man character, and she was like, “that'll be fun.” They threw $100 at her to do some quick, easy designs. It sounds like she was compensated, for whatever she was compensated for, but then they turned that into a cover, and she wasn't compensated further, and that's not right. At that point, you're not even moving outside the publishing. You're still within the comic book publishing, and you just got a cover for $100, and that’s not cool, man. Also, the artist wasn't designing that as a cover. So, now you've got this thing that is a cover, not necessarily representing the artist, in a way that they want to be represented on a cover. So, it's a double-whammy—A, I didn’t get paid, and B, my work is being shown, in a way that it's not how I intended it to be shown. So, it just feels very backwards, and not good for anyone.

This sort of thing is not sustainable, I don't think, and I worry that, at a certain point, Marvel's practices—they're already resulting, in my opinion, in a diminished Marvel, and again, I really don't think it's editorial, or the people on the ground, that are intentionally making inferior product, but they are, because they're handcuffed by whatever it is they're being handcuffed with. I just hope that Dustin's call-to-arms is not a call-to-arms for artists to abandon Marvel, but rather a call for Marvel to change their practices a little bit, and improve their offerings, so that people can work for them, because at the end of the day, I know all these artists, at least in the North American market, they want to work for Marvel. They want to draw Spider-Man. They want to draw Iron Man. I still think that most of them are doing comics because of the Marvel superhero milieu. So, it's sad that you would be forced to take other work, rather than the work that you would prefer to do, because of business practices. What a horrible thing to get in the way of a creative endeavor. That's my two cents, John.


[09:43] John: Yeah, there's no extricating the business practices from the working on characters somebody else owns.


[09:48] David: Right, but there's--


[09:49] John: No, your point remains. I'm not trying to defend the other side on that. I just meant, owning something is owning something. Working on somebody else's thing is working on somebody else's thing, and those are always separated by a divide. It isn't necessarily that one is more profitable than the other, for sure, as anybody that's ever self-published their own comics when they were in college knows. There's also the part of, man, we’ve both been around long enough that the same things come up, so many times, and it's frustrating when they don't change for the better, or maybe the target moves, because there was a time where the Internet was pointing at Boom!, and being like, “here's a Boom! rate,” and now you mentioned, Yanick Paquette, I think, that was pointing at Boom!, and being like, “well, they're paying me more.”


[10:41] David: Yeah, “they're paying more than Marvel.” Yeah, it's like, “oh---"


[10:45] John: Maybe there was a shift there. You can look at a point where Boom! clearly started pulling people away from higher rates. So, presumably, they were paying higher rates. That’s what I was trying to say. It’s a much more competitive market, in terms of places that people can go with their comics, now, than it used to be.


[11:03] David: I'm glad that it's a thing that's being discussed, because that's how change happens. I'm glad that Dustin was willing to—and I do think that, he even says it, potentially to his detriment, he's bringing this topic up, and what he feels is an inequality within the industry, and that's how things are going to change, is by freelancers basically speaking up, and we've talked about this before, and if freelancers ever decide to organize and unionize, in some way, shape, or form, so that they can have these conversations, so people do know what the structures are, and what page rates can look like, then maybe we can get some change there. It's not going to come from Marvel, because Marvel is going to continue to do what they're doing, and as long as they're top dog in the industry, and still command, still making profits, in the manner that they're making them, they're not going to change. I don't think that Marvel—The corporate structure of Marvel is probably looking quarter-to-quarter, not year-to-year, or five years down the road, or 10 years down the road, the way, maybe they were, in 1985. So, as long as each quarter is in the green, and they're showing some version of growth that is measurable and quantifiable, then they're just going to keep doing what they're doing. It's up to the freelancers, I think, to organize and refuse, basically, to work until the system is more in their favor, which when you look at regular publishing, or you look at other things—that's a given, in other creative industries. It's not the opposite of the norm, anyway.


[12:43] Ladies, and gentlemen, let's give it up for our entertainers. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be right back.


[12:49] David: Hey, Corner Box Clubbers. David here, and I've got something fun for you. My new Kickstarter campaign is launching soon, and I want you to be part of it. Just head over to funtimego.com, and click the VIP Banner up at the top of the site. That's your ALL-ACCESS PASS to our new book, Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians, plus some seriously cool perks. If you sign up for our VIP package, you're going to get a GUARANTEED Remark Edition of the next book that comes out, you get offers for exclusive discounts and incentives, TONS of free giveaways, during and after the campaign, and you also get access to our private Facebook group, where we do sneak peeks, and talk about the podcast, give bad movie reviews, and generally, have a fun time. So, don't miss out. Go to funtimego.com, sign up, and get in on the fun.


[13:36] All right, ladies, and gentlemen, back to what you came for. Give it up for more of The Corner Box.


[13:43] John: One of the craziest things about comics, more than anything else, is that on the writing side of comics, even a low comics page rate, you hear writers complain about this, but not the way that artists do, because there are fewer paying venues for writing, at a low end of things, than there used to be, if that makes sense. There’s not the Saturday Evening Post, like there was in the 1930s, is what I'm getting at with that. There's a lot of great venues for writers. I'm not complaining about that. You do see more writers coming from novels, coming in, writing comics, in the last several years, because it is harder to write a comic, probably. It isn't easy. The distance between writing a short story and writing a comic script isn't super far. The difference between doing an illustration somewhere and drawing a 20-page comic is extraordinary. There's a huge gap there, and even drawing an illustration for a magazine, or something, when that was a regular thing people would do, and drawing a page of a comic. The page of a comic is hard. You're doing stuff that is—if you ask commercial artists, “well, you’re going to draw 20 pages, each one with three to five different illustrations on them. The character has to look the same. You have to draw backgrounds. You have to create things on the fly, when incidental characters show up, or you might even have to be creating a key character for that story, just on the fly. Nobody's going to think about it, because it's not a new superhero character. It's just a guy that shows up, or whatever.”

That is certainly a place where, when you're drawing the stuff, and you look anywhere else, where people are paying for illustrations, it's just a different world. Comics, they've always been that, and there is no way that any comic company could be paying five times the rate of--I don’t know who commissions illustrations now—a full-page illustration in Wired Magazine, for every page of a 20-page comic. The math on that totally doesn't work out, and we've been on the other side of it, where we've seen how that math cannot work out on things. It is so hard to draw comics. You can see why there's a lot of artists that have moved away from drawing interior comics, into drawing covers, or into selling prints, and all that stuff, because it's easier and more lucrative. That's even, what Dustin's talking about is covers, not even the interior pages, and I think that, at the very least, that's got to be a thing that they start promoting, especially as variant cover are so important to the sales of everything. When you start looking at that, as a cover artist, and you're like, “well, they're making how many more copies of this comic, because I did another cover on it? I should be getting more than a few $100 for this. That's what’s making this comic sell.”


[16:37] David: Instead—how did you say Yanick's name? Yanick Paquette? Is that what you said? So, in his statement, the other thing that felt very damning, to me, was that, and again, this is anecdotal, and it's from him, but what he's saying is that everybody else is paying a higher page rate than Marvel, and Marvel's response to that is, “but you can make more money doing a Marvel cover in the aftermarket, selling the original art,” which is double-damning, in my opinion, because now what Marvel's doing is saying, “we don't have to pay you, because somebody else will,” and that's not how business works, dude. That's not how good business works, I should say. That's tantamount to Walmart being like, “we're going to show all our employees how to sign up for food stamps, so the government can supplement the income, so we don't have to.” That’s poor business practices, in my opinion. I'm offended by that, and if that's true, if somebody at Marvel’s saying that, again, it’s gross, and it shouldn't be that way.

They should be paying what the artist is worth. The original art should not be a consideration in anybody's equation, in that negotiation, whatsoever, on both sides, but the fact that it is, it's very frustrating, and what you're going to get, is what we're getting. Not only are you getting cover artists moving away and just doing their own thing, but we've certainly seen—to your point, John, we’re losing interior artists, left and right. A lot of the guys that have been the mainstay guys, like Mark Bagley and John Romita Jr., these guys are slowing down and/or retiring. We're not seeing a fresh new crop of super exciting people, at Marvel, at least. Again, there's always exceptions to this rule, but you're not seeing that fresh crop of fresh faces that are just blowing doors off people and getting people excited, and again, ultimately, that's going to be a problem, and I think we're already seeing that.

So, anyway, I'm glad that the conversation started. I obviously have my thoughts about it—very strong thoughts on it, but it's because I want Marvel to succeed. I want the Big 2, Marvel and DC, to have lots of success, because their success still is tied to the direct market and comic book shops, and I want all those places to thrive, and I want freelancers to be able to work at these places without feeling like they're being taken advantage of, and I think that is really important for the long-term health of the industry. I'm glad this was brought up, and I hope the conversation continues outside of this flurry of activity, because it sounds like it's necessary and needed.


[19:28] John: Where can an artist get a good deal, David?


[19:32] David: FunTimeGo, baby. Oh, guess what? Speaking of superhero artists, I am working with two of the most amazing superhero artists of the last 20 years. I'm making a superhero comic book, John. For the first time ever, I'm making a superhero comic.


[19:47] John: Oh, I was thinking about the first one from FunTimeGo, and everything. I hadn't even really pulled it out that far. That is a first. Wow, okay. Yeah. First David Hedgecock superhero book.


[19:58] David: I've never tried it before. So, this is the first one, and of course, it has certain themes that we at FunTimeGo follow, but check it out. Bart Sears, John. Bart Sears. Legendary artist, Bart Sears, the man who was responsible for all of the best Wizard covers from the first couple of years of Wizard Magazine, and Justice League Europe. Do you remember Justice League Europe, John?


[20:23] John: Absolutely, yes.


[20:24] David: That was some fantastic work, and he was responsible for the first 2, 2½ years of that book. He never missed.


[20:31] John: I don't know where this is going to go, but continuing piling on Marvel. For the first time, I saw pictures of what Modok looked like in whatever movie Modok appeared in. Oh, goodness. I don't know if that looked really great, but that made me think about Bart Sears and Christopher Priest’s run on Captain America and Falcon, who had a real—that's the Modok I think of, is Modok repeating “Only for killing,” and Bart Sears’ absolutely bonkers art in that, where every single page had a full-figure drawing of a character on it. I was enamored with that book. I mean this in a positive way. He's a cool artist. I know he's one of your all-time favorites, right?


[21:12] David: I'm like a kid in a candy store right now, getting to work with him, because he's done a bunch of design—he did all the design work for all the main characters of the new series, and I just found out that I'm paying more for design work than Marvel. So, that feels good.


[21:27] John: Use it as a cover.


[21:30] David: Yeah. Not pay him. I'm going to do that. He's drawn one of the stories. The script’s done. So, he's working on the story. So, it's very fun to have this legendary guy, who's been in the industry for 30 years, and has always been in-demand, doing stuff for my very dumb superhero comic book, and then the other guy is Juan José Ryp. Do you know Juan José Ryp?


[21:56] John: Oh, yeah, absolutely. I genuinely have been following him since Avatar--publisher Avatar. Not any of the other things that are called Avatar. I don’t know. I think I’ve met him once, somewhere, but yeah. Big fan. Back at the time I was at Marvel, he always seemed like one of the best artists that was not at the Big 2, at that point. I was like, “man, why don't we get him?” It was him and Capullo, when Capullo was still doing all the Spawn stuff. Again, I mean that positive. They were cool artists.


[22:31] David: He's so good in so much detail. He's Jeff Darrow-esque in the amount of detail that he throws into it, and it all works. It's all great. He did a run with Benjamin Percy—is that right?—on Wolverine. He wrapped it up, about a year ago—he wrapped his up his run on Wolverine with Benjamin Percy, and it is fantastic, man. The level of inventiveness in that run, that him and Benjamin put together, is just really fantastic, great, and just some gorgeous stuff. I couldn't believe that he had availability, but I think I figured out how, because, John, he's got all that level of detail, and he cranked out pages so fast, and so detailed, and so gorgeous, and I don't know how he did it. Some of these guys just blow me away. Their ability—I don't know how they do it. It's like Sergio Aragonés reincarnated as a superhero artist. It's wild how fast he turns stuff around. He could be like a Kirby. I think he could literally do 3 books a month, as fast as he is, but the level of quality is through the roof. I’d like to think that after doing this for 15-plus years, I know when somebody's hacking something out, and when somebody's giving it a full effort, and this stuff is full effort, man. It is gorgeous.


[23:46] John: Nice, yeah.


[23:47] David: So, I'm excited about that, and I don't know how I got derailed talking about my own stuff, but I'm excited to be working with a couple of superhero guys, and like I said, I think I'm paying them higher rates than Marvel. So, I feel good about that. I’m feeling good about myself.


[23:59] John: The originals won't sell for as much, though.


[24:02] David: Brutal. Brutal.


[24:08] John: I had one thing that I wanted to bring up. This will help me, I think, transition over to our main topic. So, you've been following the James Bond news, right? That the James Bond franchise has moved out of the control of the Broccoli family, that has controlled the film rights to it from the beginning. Cubby Broccoli, and then Barbara Broccoli.


[24:27] David: Yeah, they sold it, right?


[24:29] John: So, it was part of MGM. MGM was acquired by Amazon, or the MGM catalog was acquired by Amazon. So, Amazon had owned a part of the rights, but the Broccolis still had creative control over the property. So, they couldn't go off and make—I’m saying this, because this has happened with James Bond—The Broccolis couldn't go off and make their own James Bond movies, which is what Never Say Never was—somebody else having the rights to make their own James Bond movies. They got in an impasse with Amazon about the creative future for James Bond, and then eventually, yeah, they just sold their controlling interest.


[25:07] David: Oh, I didn't realize that's how it went down. They basically just threw their hands up, and were like, “okay, fine. Just buy it from us, and you do whatever you want,” kind of thing?


[25:15] John: I mean, I guess that's basically where it wound up.


[25:17] David: Oh, okay. I wasn't following all that.


[25:18] John: Well, there you go. That’s the story. I have the following, on good authority, that the plot of Bond 26 was going to involve General Gogol, the KGB chief who appeared in the Bond movies, I think, from The Spy Who Loved Me, through the Dalton films. I don't know if you remember all those.


[25:36] David: Yeah.


[25:37] John: So, in the Bond 26 treatment, he's now President of Russia, and he's engaged in this failed invasion of a former Soviet state, and then the Russian money is running short, and Gogol’s running out of options for maintaining power, but fortunately for him, in this treatment, a rebooted version of Hugo Drax, the villain from Moonraker, offers him a path forward. Drax has this big plan to unite all these totalitarian regimes under him, and the new backstory to Drax, to set him up as a villain, is that his family wealth comes from apartheid gem mines, and he's used that money before, […] a Moonraker-style private space-fleet stuff, to launch a line of electric cars. Now, the gag in the movie is that, instead of being environmentally positive, these electric cars required mining of rare earth materials, which is done in an environmentally damaging way. Then, also to really drive home the villainous, all the cars are built with a bunch of special gadgets that reference past Bond movie car gadgets, like satellite uplinks, and mobile driving, but even though the car, when you buy it, has all the gadgets, you have to pay extra to use them, and this pays off in a scheme where Moneypenny has to navigate this artificial intelligence system to buy access to the gadgets that Bond needs.

There’s hints that there's also a past for Hugo Drax, involving underground drilling machines, like Elliot Carver had in the Michelle Yeoh Bond movie. Anyway, Drax and Gogol unite the resources to try to get an aging real estate mogul-turned-TV presenter and wrestling promoter—It was a second-act sequence, where Bond fights New Jaws in an MMA octagon, but they get this guy installed as the President of the United States, where he'll turn the US into an ally of Gogol’s regime, and thus be the linchpin to Drax’s Goldfinger-like Confederation of Criminal Nations.


[27:21] David: I hate this movie.


[27:24] John: From this President’s point-of-view, he’ll be able to open hotels and golf courses all across Russia, much the same way that Drax sees the opportunity of eliminating domestic regulations and international sanctions, to let him start selling Drax cars everywhere, and use Drax spaceships everywhere, and eventually, plant a Drax flag on Mars, which admittedly gets a little Sci-fi-nonsense-y, but there's also some weird backstory with this president character, where in a previous movie, it turns out he was the US president, but had clearly turned bad when he ordered his followers to storm the US Capitol building, and Bond and Felix Leiter stop him, in the previous movie, and then, even that President's own political party, having been put in danger, they turn against him, and Bond 26 gets a little hand-wavy with how that guy can recover, in terms of public opinion, and be the linchpin of Drax’s plan, but there's a bunch of stuff about Drax buying up a social media platform that the president-turned-villain was banned from, and letting the president back on to it, and then also allowing Gogol’s Cyberagents to plant stories, targeting other candidates, playing them as the opposite of whatever the observer wants them to be, even when those stories are contradictory. I assume that part would have gotten a little bit less vague, and more coherent, but for unknown reasons, Jeff Bezos pulled the plug, rested control of Barbara Broccoli, and there was a weird Doctor Strangelove homage, where Drax can't help but Sieg Heil-ing at a victory rally, at one point.


[28:52] David: Oh, man. Yeah, why did Jeff Bezos pull the plug on that? I don’t--


[28:57] John: No idea, but transition—So, sometimes you need some comfort food from your comics, like […].


[29:07] David: Sometimes, you just need to get away, John.


[29:09] John: I feel like that's probably a lot of reasons why people read comics. Not everybody. I don’t feel like that's why I read comics, necessarily, but I think there's a lot of people that, there is that—They want to read their comics, because it makes them feel comfortable, it makes them happy, and we all want that, sometimes. We all have the movies we go to, the albums we put on, books we've re-read a few times, maybe.


[29:30] David: Comfort food.


[29:32] John: Yeah. So, I thought it would be fun to talk about some of our comfort food comics.


[29:36] David: Yeah, I love this idea.


[29:38] John: Our preamble went 45 minutes. So, I don't know if we're going go through […] that, but--


[29:44] David: Should we hold it off? Should we just call it an episode, and talk about this next time? I don't know. We’re already so far into it.


[29:52] John: Yeah.


[29:53] David: Maybe we just say, “well, that's not what we want to about, but we'll talk about it next time on The Corner Box.


[30:00] John: Yeah. Should we?


[30:01] David: Yeah, I think we should, because we're already at 45 minutes. I’ve got 4 things to talk about. I've got literally 5 pages of notes, John.


[30:08] John: I may have taken too much time for the Bond joke.


[30:11] David: No, I went on and on about Marvel. I did not know I had that much in me about it, but I did, apparently. All right, well, that's not what we were going to talk about, at all, today, John, but I think that's enough. I think we've hit our listeners over the head, about as hard as we possibly could, about a few things. This is the most opinionated version of The Corner Box, I think, we've ever done.


[30:34] John: Hot takes episode.


[30:36] David: Yeah. Hot takes. Well, John, thanks for letting me get some stuff off my chest, and congratulations on your James Bond script. I think that's fantastic. Did you really find that somewhere, or did you put that together?


[30:51] John: Yeah, I wrote that.


[30:52] David: Yeah, that's fantastic, dude. That is beautiful. That is, chef's kiss, all the way. Well done. Applause, all around.


[30:58] John: Well, I should say, the world helped.


[31:03] David: “Help” is a strong word in that sentence.


[31:06] John: Sometimes, the world is enough.


[31:11] David: Nice. All right. Thanks for coming, everybody. I hope you had a good time on this very unusual episode of The Corner Box. We'll be back next week, and we'll be much more milk, toast, and Pavlovian in our love of things. I don't know. Oh, wait—like and subscribe, and tell your friends. Bye.


Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates, and links at www.thecornerbox.club, and we’ll be back next week with more from David, and John, here at The Corner Box.