Peanut Butter Has Three Potty Words on The Corner Box - S2 Ep40

David and John dive headfirst into a collector’s dream haul of vintage Avengers comics, mourn the untimely demise of Marvel’s Spider-Boy series, and dissect the ambitious (but uneven) rollout of the Nacelleverse and the bold launch of the Neon Ichiban digital comics platform. Plus, a peanut butter joke that might just change the way you say lunch.

Transcript

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 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. Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm your host, John Barber, and with me as always is my good friend and cohost, David Hedgecock.

It may sound like I was the host, and I was you were the host. I didn't mean it that way. It's your show, really. Especially today, David, because it's David's rant stay. No.

I'm just kidding. It's not really. Kinda is. Kinda is. This is more to do with my lameness at coming up with ideas.

You always have an opinion, John. That's really that's really all that matters. Yes. Yeah. That's the key to the world.

I think you just It is. Yeah. They opened up a line of they answered a lot of questions. I'm glad I could help. Well, John, I do have some stuff to get off my chest today, but I thought I would start with a really fun and cool positive and a bit of a surprise for you.

Okay. I haven't shared this with you. So this is saved it for the podcast, John. Okay. So friend of the show, Joel Elad, went to lunch with him this week and had a wonderful chat as always.

Actually, went to dinner with him. It wasn't lunch. It was dinner. I was hanging out with him. He said, oh, I've got something for you.

I said, oh, what's that? And pulls out this big bag, John. It's a big red bag full of comic books. And I'm going through them. And half of them the first half of them are old Extreme Studios comic books because because, like, literally, every time I see Joel, he brings me another Rob Liefeld comic book of some sort, and they're always, like, you know, ratty.

And I and I and every time, I'm just, like, thrilled. Right? Like, this time I got an awesome comics annual or year end spectacular or something. I didn't even know it existed. And then the second half of it was early, very fine copies of a bunch of Avenger comic books, like, all pre January.

Most of them pre '60 issue 60. Woah. I was like, wow. These are cool. What what is this?

He's all, well, I know you're, you know, you're on that you know, that your your adventure of finding very fine Avengers, and I know that you've been looking for stuff under 100 now. He said, so I I put these together for you, you know, so you could I thought you'd like to take a look and see if you wanted any of them. I'm like, I probably want all of these, but, like, he the sticker tags are still on. I'm like, but I I can't afford these prices. Yep.

These these are these are some expensive books. Right? He's like, no. No. No.

It's not gonna cost you anything. I'm like, you can't give me these books. This this like, one of them is like a $250 book. Right? Yeah.

And he's all, no. No. No. I can't, and here's why. So a couple years ago, I was purging, like, everything out of my comic collection.

I was, like, downsizing. So some of the money from that downsizing, I purchased a couple of books. Now back in the day, there's this little known book, John. This little known black and white horror book that nobody had heard of and nobody was paying attention to. It was called The Walking Dead.

Okay. Now the reason why I was paying attention to this little known book called The Walking Dead is that the artist, Tony Moore, was, like, at that time, one of my favorite artists. I loved his stuff so much. And so when this book came out You were like, wait a minute. This is Toni Moore teamed up with the Battle Pope guy?

That was exactly my thought. And I'm like, I'm in. And so I bought a copy. I bought I bought a couple copies, and I didn't do what I was supposed to do with those. Like, they were totally beat up and ratted and messed up.

Right? So they they weren't really worth anything. So I gave it all to Joel. Joel sold it for me, basically. Joel's like, you know, because he's a he's a business guy.

He's a retailer. He's he knows who all the collectors are. So I gave him, like, I don't know, a couple thousand comic books, and he turned those into a little bit of money. It wasn't it wasn't like a ton, and he took his cut too. So anyway, so I took a little bit of that money, and I bought two copies of Walking Dead.

And I think I spent, like, a $100 for two copies. I got I got got a really good deal. Yeah. I just random comic book store, found it, and they were priced on sale or something. I don't remember.

So I kept one, and I the other one I was looking, I was like, man, this is a really good copy. It's really good. And so I gave it to Joel. I'm like, hey, Joel. I got two of these.

I know I got a good deal, but look at this book. And he's like, hey. Can I have this? And I'm like, well, sure. He's like, you know, saying, like, can I sell this, basically?

And I'm like, yeah. Sure. Like, of course. So coming back to dinner from the other day, he's all remember that Walking Dead number one you gave me. And I said, no.

Should I give you a Walking Dead number one? What was I thinking? He's all, remember that, you know, remember blah blah blah. You reminded me of this time. I'm like, oh, yeah.

Okay. Yeah. I remember that. He's all, well, I got it signed by Robert Kirkman and, in front of a CGC witness and then got it slapped, and it was an it turned came out to be a 9.8. Woah.

Okay. So he it's a signed Walking Dead number one in a 9.8. Right. So he then turned around and sold that for, like, almost $2,000. Oh, wow.

Okay. And so my cut of that was substantial, of course. And so that's how we got to, I can get the Avengers comic books for, quote, unquote, free. Joel, always hustling. First, I was like, you son of a gun.

You you did not pay, like, this much money for these comic books, and and you're gonna just give them off on me and, like, keep all the money that you've made. And then I started looking at the books. I'm like, damn it. He's right. I'm gonna do it.

I'm gonna totally let him keep the money on the to keep these comic books. So check it out, John. Yeah. I don't think what I got. I got Oh, man.

Yeah. The first appearance of the swordsman, Avengers number 19. And I'm telling you, man, it is a crisp copy. It is nice. Oh, yeah.

I got let's see. 1922232641626574, '78, '92, which is, like, one of my Alzheimer's. Oh, which one's that? Shit. What?

'92. This was, like, Eale Adams. Wow. And then '97, which is another great Gil Kang cover. Oh my god.

That's the, end of the The Kree Scroll. Yeah. The Kree Scroll war. Yeah. Yeah.

It's it's the end of that. And then, and then the other one that I've been I've been sitting on buying this one for a while. I've been wanting to buy it. It's a hard one to find, like, a really good copy of because there's a lot of black on the cover. Okay.

It's Avengers one zero five Oh. Where the beast comes in battling the brood. Oh, wow. Okay. But it I love this cover too.

Yeah. And it's a hard one to find, like, a decent copy because there's so much because, you know, it's got all this black on the side, so it's hard to find a decent copy that doesn't look super ad. Anyway, he got me, John. He got me good. To be honest, I would have never done the work that he did to, like, you know, get it signed and and get it slabbed and all that.

I wouldn't even known that, you know, that was a thing. For me, it was like a just a, you know, $50 that I spent. So the fact that I turned that $50 into it's probably, like, a thousand dollars worth of comic books. And, also, he he's selling them to me at half off. He's giving me a good deal too.

So it's it's all very up and up, and Joel's doing me a solid all around. So I'm very happy, John. I got I I got some really nice additions to my Avengers, run and stuff that I really wanted. That '92, '97, and 01/2005 in particular was I was excited to have those. So there you go.

Starting off with a positive, John. Yeah. That is cool. I don't think I've ever, like, had any comic book make that kind of money before. I've never had a win like that.

Yeah. One copy? How do you? No. I will.

Mine involved Joel and some last Ronin variants. Oh. I threw a lot of covers for that comic. Yeah. Those Ronin covers are probably worth even more now too.

It seems like Ronin's pretty still, holding up pretty well for Yeah. Yeah. It's the thing that's keeping IDW around at this point. Right? Like, turtles is Yeah.

You know, some heavy lifting over there. You know, beneath the trees where nobody sees is a a a nice a nice hit for them. And That's true. Star star trek stuff's going well. Yeah.

It seems like story wise, they're Yeah. Right. There's no idea. Like, it it's an yeah. I don't, yeah, I don't know what the sales or anything are.

Yeah. Yeah. Sonic. And it's hard to know anything anymore now that we don't have, like, the diamond catch all in terms of, like, what sales numbers are. It's weird weird times out there.

It could already have give you incorrect feelings for how something was doing because it was just checking one sales channel and was usually estimates. And it wasn't as I understand, it wasn't the stuff you saw in the public wasn't exactly apples to apples, but it was, you know, it was pretty close. It was a pretty good guide, and you could generally see, did this thing that was supposed to be a big direct market comic sell like it was supposed to sell in the direct market or whatever. No. It's like streaming.

Everybody just make up their own numbers, and people will act as though there's some veracity to unverified numbers given by people who have like, not only have a stake in it, but all they have is a stake in those numbers being high. Well, they're not selling advertising yet. They're just selling subscriptions. So I guess it doesn't really matter that much. Although, I guess, it does matter in terms of what they're paying on royalties and things like that.

Right? But for the for TV or for For TV, yeah, for TV and movies and stuff. Right? I mean, they actually wanna deflate those numbers in that sense. Yeah.

I guess. But they also want their I mean, like, it's all predicated on the stock value going up. There is no money in streaming. There is no money streaming TV shows. It is not possible for anyone on this planet to make money streaming television shows.

I feel like we've covered this before, John, but if we haven't, well, even if we haven't, I'm gonna say it again. There were I remember having a conversation with you one day. Yeah. But do you remember this conversation? We were talking about, like, somebody Disney or somebody had just announced that they were gonna start a streaming service.

Yeah. And you the smartest thing you said a lot of smart things working with you at IDW. We worked together somehow for that announcement, and you were like, in the next three years, there's gonna be a streaming war. And in the in the next two or three years, there's gonna be so much money spent in that space, and then it's all gonna collapse. And there's gonna be, like, one or two or three players left, and that's gonna be it.

And it's gonna be a bloodbath out there. And you, for the most part, I think, were pretty spot on with that. Yeah. It's an cock is Ride the cock. I think that's their I don't think that's one of their slogans.

Oh, really? No. I don't think Oh, man. I've just been I've been Maybe it's I've been yelling that in my living room, like, for a year. Jesus Christ.

Back to comics, Joe. Tangentially related to that joke. My son says this to me the other day. He says, don't say peanut butter. It has three potty words in it.

My what? He said, yeah. But, p, and the word for what only mans have, it rhymes with walls peanut butter. Right. Yeah.

That's pretty good. It rhymes with walls. How old is he now? Is he eight? Six.

Six? Oh, that is precious, dude. I'm glad you wrote that down. Speaking of the innocence of youth, John, as good as news as I had this week, I'm still feeling the rule down. Oh, man.

And that's because my favorite Marvel comic book is, being canceled, John. The thing that I've been using for the last year and a half to ignite the flame of my collecting habits has been shut down. And my pocketbook is very happy about that, but the rest of me is not. I didn't realize it had been that long. He told me what issue it was on too.

Like, not that I really against the book. I hadn't hadn't caught up on it. But I you know what I thought? I'm like, oh, I need to catch up on that. Not there's 20 issues behind it.

You know? But Yeah. Yeah. 20 issues and there's a annual. Yeah.

And there was a special done too back in December. There was the kid pool Spider Man special one shot that was done as well. So it's pretty good decent chunk, man. You know, almost two years worth of material in all. Yeah.

And Dan Slott writes the majority of it. I I don't think he did the kid pool special, and I'm I'm not sure he did the annual. Yeah. But I thought it'd be fun to just, like, quickly, like, reminisce about this book because it has been one of my favorites. And it is sort of like a youthful exuberant youth sort of book, which I think is one of the things that appealed to me.

There's there's a certain innocence to the stories and the storytelling that I really enjoyed. Like, the stakes were high, but they were never I don't know. There was danger and the stakes were high, but it was all done with innocence. And you never felt like there was gonna be a real true harm in anything. Like, everything was always the stories always ended in a way where the bad guy wasn't really all that bad.

You know? You didn't have the you kind of had the sneering, snarling bad guy, but played up, not because they were really bad, but because for circumstances. And Bailey Briggs, who is Spider Boy, has such a empathetic heart, and you see sort of the villains through his eyes in a lot of the stories. So you have empathy for those villains as well. So I really liked it.

I thought it was really clever books, really well done. I think last year, I pointed out, like, that puzzle man story in particular where that was really fun and clever and neat and well done. But I was thinking, you know, it also introduced some really cool characters. There was some villains like Madame Monstrosity, who essentially created Bailey Briggs' Spider Boy and also Boy Spider. There was Gutterball, which was a great character, Balloon Man, Killianair, who's like a a rich kid, social media influencer who, you know, becomes a villain, basically.

In later issues, they they introduced these brothers called the Bada brothers, who basically just throw bombs as badda boom, basically. So that that that was just this is just fun, you know, and clever. Spider Boy was introduced in Spider Man volume four issue number seven. That issue still goes for a pretty decent premium. So I think the popularity of the character is pretty high still.

So the reason the comic books are being canceled is because Dan Slott's moving over to DC to write Superman stories. Okay. And I I guess they decided to let Spider Boy go into the sunset until they could maybe find a new clan for him, a new writer for him Yeah. Which I kinda like. I I like that they're not trying to, like, force another writer and another artist onto the onto the book.

Rather, instead, just, like, let it go and then bring it back at some point probably with a new team and a fresh take, you know, hopefully, something similar. But, Humberto Ramos, I think I said all this stuff before, Ronald. I just wanna do a little reminisce. But the Ramos did the costume designs for it. I always love those costume designs.

Dan Slott created it. There was a kid pool crossover. One of the cool interesting things about Spider Boy that I liked too was that his Spider Sense would did not alert him to things that were putting him in danger, but he would touch an object that somebody else owned or had also touched and sense any danger that they might be in. And then he was almost compelled either through his powers or just through his own moral sense of good. If he was alerted to somebody else being in danger, he would just stop what he was doing and go try to help that person, which, again, really, enamored me to the character.

You know? Here's this he's in the middle of, like, school, and he's being dressed down for being late to school because he was just, you know, late because he was doing some superheroics. And then he somehow touches a notebook or something and realizes that a friend or or an acquaintance is in trouble. And even as he's getting in trouble for not being in school, he's basically running away from school again. Definitely going to cause problems for him, you know, but the more important thing to him is to go save this person, save the person that he's seen that is is in danger.

And that even applied to some of the villains in the story where he would go to try to, help them. So it was a fun series. I really enjoyed it. I'm bummed that it's ending. My pocketbook's kinda happy about it, and there's still plenty of, like, b covers and c covers and one in 25 covers and one in 50 covers that I can collect if I really feel the need.

So, I still have some collecting to do on it. So maybe in a way, it's good that it's ending because I can actually maybe eventually just get every iteration, every cover of of every issue. So, anyway, sadly, this is going. I'm bummed that that one's gonna gonna go, and I don't really have a replacement for it. I I was like, oh, maybe I'll try the new champions book because that's another, like, kinda youth movement sort of book.

It's just not sticking for me in the same way. Oh, wait for the next Spider Boy. I don't know. The next Spider Boy number one, not the next I didn't mean that metaphorically. I meant that literally wait for the yeah.

So Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see we'll see if if they keep him around. It it'll be interesting to see how Marvel handles that character now that, like, the lead architect of him is is gone.

Like, I'm sure that they will eventually find a way to do him, but there's there's so many Spider Man characters that that like, it's almost like, man, do they bother? Like, there's a 100,000 other Spider Man characters that they could choose to lean into instead of Spider Boys, but so we'll see. Yeah. That's a I guess that's a good question. Yeah.

Does Silk still have her own series? Like, or or is there? I don't think Silk does have her own series. I I haven't seen much of Silk around recently. You know what other character that I've not seen, like, prominently featured?

I think she's been around still, but that Spider Girl character, Aranya Yeah. I really liked her. I really liked that character design too. This was going back a few years when they first introduced her. She was, like, big for a minute and then doesn't seem like you see her around much anymore.

It's frustrating sometimes. As a fan, I can see how some people will get frustrated because if I'm a fan of, like, Spider Man, like, the focus is taken off of him. And then if I become a fan of some other character, they never get enough playtime anymore because there's so many. It's just like I think Marvel recently more than DC, but maybe that's not true. They've like, they have the the just a proliferation of versions of characters.

I mean, spot nobody more than Spider Man, I guess. But, like, even, I don't know, like, it's been a thing since since, like, Bucky became Captain America and and Dick Grayson was Batman that you'd have okay. Well, now I'll have two Batmans, and we'll have two Captains America. And the you know, and it it even sorta, you know, sorta changes where it's like, you know, it's it's Sam Wilson now instead of instead of, Bucky. Yeah.

You saw you have multiple Wolverines. Yeah. I mean, Miles Morales being the the, like, biggest one of them. But I think it goes back further than that for Spider Man. I think I think where you started getting the first iterations of Spider Man, that really, like, said, oh, this is a thing that that can work is when you got Venom who was an iteration off of Spider Man.

Right? Okay. But then soon after that, you got Carnage. And then when Carnage blew up also, I feel like it sort of ripped the lid off a little bit in the Spider Man universe in in particular, for that sort of stuff. And then and then you get the clone saga, which maybe put the genie back in the bottle for a little bit.

I don't know. The clone saga, it was and then Peter Parker goes back to being Spider Man, and it took years for it to be and then they all come back, and they're all Spider Man too. Right. Right. I know I thought about that with Venom and Carnage.

I guess that's right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Alright.

I'll buy that. Carnage was sort of the, like, the one where it's like, oh, we can just keep iterating. Right? We can keep iterating Venom over and over and over again. And then when that kept working, they're like, well, what if we do it with Spider Man two?

And I'm not saying that's exactly how it went down, but I just feel like over time, that's sort of like that's kinda how it went down. Anyway, Spider Boy. There's something else I'm a little bummed about. Have you heard of the Naselle verse, John? As a regular listener of the Corner Box, I have heard tell of it.

We talked about it. Oh, we Yeah. Sure. Yeah. No.

I don't remember what we talked about, but we I remember it came up. Yeah. I think we talked about it. Maybe I'm totally wrong. I but, yes, I know what the I've heard of the.

No. So Never heard of it. Can you explain it to me, David? I'm sorry. Okay.

So so the Nassell company I didn't know this. I'm just looking I just looked this this up just the just the other day and by the other day, I mean, about an hour ago. In 2024, Brian Volk Weiss announced that the Nassell company had acquired the rights to several intellectual properties, including RoboForce, Biker Mice from Mars, Sektars, Warriors of Symbion, the Great Garloo, the Wild West Cowboys of Moo Mesa, Power Lords, and Barnyard Command Ups. These were all, like, dip like, it disparate properties from different companies. As an example, RoboForce was Mattel.

Micromise from Mars was Pangea Corporation and Walt Disney. Sectors was a Coleco property. Wild West, Cowboys of Moon Mesa was Hasbro, and so on. So they were all in separate places. So one company, this nacelle company, required the rights to all of them.

And and in the comic books, sort of put them all in the same universe, or at least that's how it was marketed, that they were all under one sort of universal umbrella called the naysail verse. I don't think it was published by Oney Press, but I think it was published through Oney Press. Oh, okay. I'm not quite sure how that went down, but I don't think Oney Press acquired the license to do those books. I think it's some sort of partnership, which makes so much more sense to me after looking into it than it would if Oney Press had acquired the license to do this.

Yeah. No. Yeah. I think you're right. Yeah.

Yeah. This is more of a lion forge when we were at IDW kinda situation where somebody had all these rights. Right. Yeah. I think it's more of that situation.

So that makes way more business sense to me because when when they're first announcing, I was like, man, why was the Oni Press doing that? That's just not an Oni Press Yeah. Thing. They don't do a lot of licensed books, and the ones that they do are, like, Rick and Morty. You know, it's like, I don't know, which definitely fits for them.

Right? Like, it it just didn't feel like a good fit for them. But seeing that it's a partnership, and only press is sort of, like, acting as the co publisher, I guess, for lack of a better term. So when this was announced, I don't know a ton about those properties. Like, I think much like most people, like, what is RoboForce?

You know? Like, I vaguely heard of something called RoboForce, and and maybe I'd I don't know. Watched a cartoon of that or or seen a toy of that, but I don't really have the the RoboForce base. Like, you have, like, the whole like, it was like a big, platoon. Oh, nice.

Oh, and cute. Sort of. I mean, like, you go on through the side. Anyway, sorry. Fantastic.

Yeah. And then Biker Mice from Mars, I think, was a cartoon for, like, one season or or or two. Sectors, I remember maybe it was a cartoon too. I don't know. But it's maybe it was a video game.

I don't know. Anyway, all these are like, I have these vague familiarity to me. I've always been interested, John. Working in the comic book industry, I can't tell you how many times somebody has come to me and said, hey. Why don't you guys do Silver Hawks?

Yeah. It's like, dude, the reason we don't do Silver Hawks because there's not enough people that will buy that comic book. Like, the the the number of people that are Silver Hawk fans and the number of people that are Silver Hawk fans that will read a purchase a comic book, it's a pretty thin slice of the population, and it's hard to make those numbers work when you're paying licensing fees and getting the artists and the creators and all that stuff. And then at the end of it, you have to give it all to whoever is the license holder, so you don't even get to keep any of that at the end of the day after you've made it. It's hard to make money in that way.

Now, thankfully, somebody figured it out because I really did get tired of hearing people come to me saying, let's make Silver Hawks comics because there's a Silver Hawk comic now. Like, so somebody figured it out, hopefully. I I think it seems like they're doing pretty good over there with their 14 different covers on every issue. And I, as a fan of that stuff, like, I wanted to make a Silver Hawk comic book. I tried multiple times to figure out ways to, like, make that work.

Like, a a way to figure out how to make a Silver Hawks comic book work or whatever version of that we're talking about. Right? Here for, like, one year or two in the late eighties or early nineties or whatever the era was, And, you know, some people remember it quite fondly and have a real love of that thing, but it wasn't around long enough or there just isn't enough people gravitating to it to make a comic book make sense, at least on paper. Right? Like, somebody would have to take a flyer and hope for the best.

Right. So this naysal verse, when it comes out, I'm like, wow. This is this is a bunch of those sort of in the back of your, you know, back of your head kinda like, I think I remember that kind of properties. Yeah. And they did the one thing that I was like, oh, maybe that would work.

Like, you put it all in the same universe, kinda tie it together as a bigger event, and then each one sort of feeds off the other. That seems like a a way to make that works. So I was interested in the comic books. I'm like, I'm gonna pick these up. I don't remember what the order the order they were published in.

Mhmm. But the order that I picked them up in is I picked up Sektars first. Okay. Sektars, I was like, okay. It's not, like, the best book I've read, but it's okay.

Dennis Culver was the writer. Ramon Box was the artist. And they've both done other stuff, I think. And so I was a little disappointed, basically. Long story short, I I thought the covers were pretty nice, but the interiors were just very average, and the writing was pretty average too.

It didn't really do anything that made me really interested in the piece. And and I think the thing that they did, which also gets repeated in all the books, is that there's a big moment that everybody working on the project thinks is a big moment. Mhmm. And for people reading it, they have no idea what you're talking about. This is not a big moment for me because I don't know That big reveal is I don't know who that character is.

You just revealed. Like, it's not it's not important. And and the way the reveal is done, there's not, like, context to it. Right? Like, the context is outside of the comic book.

This person that we're showing you is important because in the cartoon from 1983, he was a big deal. But we are only revealing him here for the first time, and you have no context. So it's like, I don't know why I'm supposed to care. I I can tell I'm supposed to care, but but I don't care at all. Yeah.

You're supposed to be like, oh, like, I can't believe what they did to Skulk. Right. Yeah. And everybody working on the book is super excited when Skulk shows up. Right?

Right. But it's like, who is Sculk? I don't know. Like, I my association with this property is, like, I think I saw a cartoon twenty year thirty years ago, but I don't even know if I did that. Yeah.

So it really falls flat. So then I picked up RoboForce. So RoboForce, I was excited about because the writer was Melissa Flores. I didn't have a lot of, like, knowledge about Melissa Flores, but the thing that I did know about her was that she, was the cocreator of Phantasma. Phantasma is a new Ghost Rider character Oh.

Who's she's on roller skates, and she's got the big ponytail thing. She's in new champions now. Okay. And I really like, she showed up in Ghost Rider Robbie Reyes special number one a year or two ago. And I love the origin for her, and I love the character and the design of that character's fantastic.

I love the the character design. But So I was like, oh, cool. Like, Melissa Flores, I've enjoyed her work, so I'm I'm excited to give this a try. And, John, I'm here to tell you that I have never been more lost in a comic book than I was in Roboforce. Not only was it impenetrable, but it was boring.

There's nothing about it that made me want to find out anything about anything happening in the story. I was I was like, why did I buy all three issues of this? Because I just bought them off of eBay, you know, as a full set. Okay. Phil ripped off.

I was like, man, dang it. I I did not enjoy that at all. So I think Melissa Flores is a good writer. I've read stuff that I really enjoyed from her, but this was not that. It was not that at all.

And the and the artwork was it was hard to to look at. It was not it was not, very pleasant at all. So I'm like, okay. Well, you know, so far, this line's getting a c minus. Like, we're gonna c minus is like but it's still passing, John.

Still passing. Next one up is Power Lords. So I'll give Power Lords a shot. Power Lords had the good fortune of having an artist who was actually pretty interesting for me, Veeken Marion. Do you know who who that guy is?

No. So Veeken Marion, he's I think he's sort of starting to blow up a little bit more. I I think he's been around for a while, but he did some stuff on Green Lantern and did the a big Kickstarter recently, a book a big Kickstarter book recently that did really well. He's been around. He's done some stuff.

He's done some kind of work. He's got a very manga esque, like, sort of Joe Maduriera, like, twice removed sort of look to his stuff. Okay. Yeah. There's specific artists that I can't remember right now that I that I always associate with him.

So they got a mong ish kind of feel maybe, but it's also very detailed and very, yeah, I'm saying it's not out of any sort of politics, but out of this is Green Lantern. Like, very in the Ethan Van Sciver kind of mold of drawing Green Lantern or Gary Frank or something with more of a manga feel to it. Sure. Yeah. I guess she I can see I can see where you're going with that.

Yeah. Detailed costuming. It's not like, it's not manga in the sense that he's triangle faces and no and and cell shading or something. Yeah. Triangle faces.

I made that up. I meant pointy chins. I feel like he's done, like, a series of covers, like, battle damage covers or something. I might be attributing that incorrectly. But, anyway, he brought the goods, for for his work.

By far, his work, interior work is the best of anything that the Maceal verse had to offer, like, by a long, long stretch. Okay. And so the art, like, really kept me in the book, And the story was was okay. They kept it simple. You got your sort of antihero who goes off on his own for reasons and has to find, you know, the, the MacGuffin in order to save himself and save his people from the big bad villains who are also going after the thing.

It's a fun, easy story to understand and get through. And it also suffered just like the other books from these reveals that had no real meaning to anybody that wasn't, like, a hardcore fan of the property, but it brought in enough extra stuff that I felt it's the right way to do it. I felt like I was compelled to, like, learn more, but I knew enough from the comic itself to know that, oh, this is why he's this reveal is important. Right? Like, oh, it has a meaning within the story itself that I'm reading.

I don't have to go outside of the story to understand what's happening right now. It was pretty well done. There was Matt Hodgson and also Dennis Culver were the writers, so Dennis can bring it when he wants to, I guess. And then I finished off with, Biker Mice from Mars, and I think it goes back to Melissa Flores as the writer. And, man, once again, I was just like, I could not care less about a story if I try.

It was just it's just not good. It was not interesting. Like, way too many characters. None of them had any sort of gravitas or, like, you know, you didn't you didn't get to know or really care about anyone in any meaningful ways despite really awkward attempts to do that. Like, it just don't hit home at all.

And just a really soft ending that doesn't make a lot of sense, and I was just very disappointed. So overall, John, Naso verse has not been what I had hoped. It's like taking a bunch of c minus properties, and you got a c minus result. Like, I kinda feel like that's where I'm at right now. But next up is the GreatGarloo, John.

There's a GreatGarloo one shot. And I don't know what GreatGarloo is, but I like the name, so I'm probably gonna, like a dummy, I'm gonna go back and buy that too. What? So somehow, as much as I'm not enjoying any of this or barely enjoying any of this, I'm still buying all of it, John. What's wrong with me?

Oh my goodness. Yeah. I just looked up Great Garlu. I don't know. I have a couple of thoughts on that, I guess.

Like, did you read there was a, like, zero issue one shot that came out that probably Yeah. Everything, and that would have made everything real clear. That was a free comic book day. Right? I think it was free comic day.

I mean, no offense to everybody, but, like, I I like I got I was like, oh, this sounds interesting. And I reached out and picked it up, and then I flipped through it. And I was like, oh, I don't think I can. It kinda went back on the shelf. I I liked Sektars.

I had some Sektars toys. I had some Sektars comics because that was a comic series. I don't remember really anything about it. And there were ton of toys like that at that time. Roboforce is a funny one because the robots in that were all these weird fifties style robots that for a property that came out in the eighties.

Like, they looked weird in the eighties. Like, you looked at them, they're all like Dalix or something. You know? Like like, you know, they're not dynamic transformers or go bots or star ores or zooids or anything like that. So that was always weird.

And then this comic isn't even that though. So I feel like you get into that weird, like, what if you were the fan of that? Do you want the updated version of that? Like, I don't know. I feel like this is, like, a more clear version of one of the things that I think went wrong when we jammed all the Hasbro properties together when we were doing revolution at at IDW, which I loved everybody that I worked with.

I love the stories we told. I'm proud of what we did. But going back and, like, kinda looking at, well, what what worked and what didn't, you ran into to a problem that if you were a, like, if you were a mask fan, you're pinned down to a five year age range. You know what I mean? Like, the the or there's extenuating circumstances where your bigger little brother was super into or your bigger little sister was super into something.

The same thing with Micronauts, same thing with Rom. Although both of those had the weird had the double edged sword of the comics went on for a really long time. So there's a long window when you might have gotten into the comics of that, except we couldn't use the comic stuff because that wasn't owned by Hasbro or the cat you know, it's questionable who owns those stories. And Hasbro and Marvel being friendly weren't gonna try to rock the boat on that. So you have another group where it's like, okay.

Here's your years of that, you know, or I think when you brought in visionaries, you know, here's here's the group in that. The ages don't all overlap, and that doesn't create a wider palette for you that kinda just creates a narrower Venn diagram of who's gonna pick this stuff up, I I think, or, like, you know, what the what the fundamental thing is. I guess all that can get overcome if, you know, it's Watchmen that you're making or something. Doesn't sound like that's what's going on here. And this is definitely, like the great Garlu was a 1961 toy.

That's a whole other world than Sektars. Yeah. Oh. Yeah. I have no idea what so it was a 1961 toy.

I had no idea. I just saw the great Garlu, and that was part of the Nelson and A Silver. So I'm like, okay. I'll I'll I'll I haven't picked it up yet, but I'm I definitely will at some point for sure. I didn't know it.

I just I mean, I just googled it. I I like, I'm I Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's a popular enough thing that there's a super 7 figure of it for whatever that's worth. They're all popular enough for me to, like, recognize the name.

Right? Right. Like but, you know, I don't know if people younger than us would recognize some of these names, but they're all popular enough at some point for me to recognize the names. I thought the great Garlu was the great Gazoo from Flintstones. Nice.

Oh, man. That's a flashback right there. Yeah. What were they thinking when I put Gazoo in the Flintstones? What was that about?

I don't know. Like, I think you're you're right in pointing out that I was doing something like this makes sense if you own all of these characters. It absolutely doesn't make sense if you're licensing all these characters because the whole point of licensing something is it's got already a brand awareness to it. And it is funny to see Thundercats blow up like they did and then kind of yeah. It looks like bringing, you know, Silverhawks with them, you know, the same way.

Like, exactly the same way the Silverhawks came out in the eighties. There are a couple of people I've heard that, like, really believed in Thundercats. I didn't really I I don't think I would have guessed that it would have took off like it did when it launched. But Thundercats is, like, multiple levels above the stuff that we're talking about here in this naysayers. Yes.

Which is, yeah, which is why it makes sense to license Thundercats and make comic books. That seems like a challenging license, not like a power lords. Yeah. But exactly to your point, John, that if the Nacell company is supremely invested in getting comic books of these properties out because it's certainly a low cost r and d, you know, research and development arm for them to do comic books first. And they've already launched a Webtoon series off of RoboForce, I think.

So it certainly was part of a a bigger plan that they had going. So for them, in particular, I think it makes sense even even if they don't really see a return on the investment of, you know, in terms of comic book sales, the return investment in terms of just property development is probably pretty good and they can justify a lot of stuff. I just wish it had been a little bit better. I feel like ODi Press probably either wasn't allowed to step in and help out, you know, with some of this stuff or they didn't do their due diligence here to help a fledgling comic bookmaker being the naysail company, you know, into making the sort of decisions they needed to make to make it, like, better than it should have been. I hate saying it like that because I hate denigrating the the creative talent on these books.

But at the end of the day, the the fact of the matter is these are not good books, and somebody's gotta say it. Creators like Melissa Flores, I have read work from her that I really enjoyed. I know she can do it. She's got tons of credits to her name. So there's probably something else, some other cooks in the kitchen that are that are tying her hands in a way that maybe she's not able to do some of the things that she would normally do.

So I'm not, like, wanting to, like, point out anybody in terms of, like, oh, what's wrong with those, you know, creative talent? Because I don't think that's the case here. I think it's just a a confluence of a lot of, like, not necessarily bad decisions, but just not the best decisions. And if you wanted to blow these properties up, you needed to have some really good decisions. First of all, you had to have better art artistic talent than what you you've got on these books.

Not because, like, these guys can't do the job because they're all competent artists from what I could tell and and decent storytellers from what I could tell, But you gotta do a lot more than that if you're trying to bring up a whole new universe. You gotta blow people's socks off when you launch something like this. They didn't have the the horses to do that in this one on the art side at least. Yeah. So it's been a disappointing adventure for me.

Yeah. They must all be made by the Nacelle company, like you said. And and I'm sure it was again, it was like, I mean, it's weird because it's only Lion Forge is the company, and IDW did a similar thing with Lion Forge. And there was there's kinda some similar quality. I mean, some of it was very good.

I don't mean to insult all of it. Some of it was, like, less appropriate for the comic book direct market. You know, this maybe wasn't the right place for some of the stuff, let's say. Right. Not denigrating anything that we worked on more directly.

One of the differences, though, I think was that a a LionForge, I think, the beginning was doing a lot of license stuff or, some original IP, and this is, like, taking existing IP that there that somebody's bought and some holding company or something owns all these properties. It always strikes me as interesting when companies know what they have or don't know what they have in terms of trying to launch things at certain times. I I don't know if it makes sense. The BabbleTech franchise has gone through a number of different owners. It was, like, surprising to me that at the height of Transformers, nobody was trying to launch Battletech as a series of movies, or there wasn't a real big push to try to do that, at least to the degree that Sektor is being pushed now.

You know, I think everybody hopes that they're running into Guardians of the Galaxy or something, you know, where where you can pull something out of nothing or, you know, something that like like, turn a a joke or a sea level brand into a worldwide phenomenon. The thing that needs to happen is you throw put James Gunn on it. Right? Like, you get one of the most creative directors of the last fifteen years. Like, the guy's an incredible storyteller.

There were a bunch of pieces that happened along the way, though. Andy Schmidt put put together annihilation at Marvel, and then Bill Roseman came in and and put together it it was editing the team when Keith Giffen brought in these characters. And Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning did this with those characters. And somebody at the Marvel Studios writer's retreat thing pulled the property of Guardians of the Galaxy and wrote a screenplay about it to put that onto the radar of Marvel Studios that when they started approaching James Gunn, that was one of the properties they have or, you know, that's in their catalog. But, you know, I mean, like, stuff has to happen.

And, yeah, if you have the bet one of the best trailers of in the history of film, like like Yeah. No. You're right. You're right. You're right.

There's a lot there. I think there's an upper limit to some of the concepts, you know, here. Probably have more thoughts about the corporate mentalities vis a vis comic book launches coming up in a minute, but, that sounds like a good good business sum in the sell verse. Does nacelle have another meaning? I have no idea.

I won't even know if I'm saying it right. No. It is. It's like the nacelle like the nacelles are what the warp drive is attached to on the USS Enterprise. I didn't know that's what they were called.

Is that a term that was made up in Star Trek or is yeah. Right. I don't know. That's my question. John, within arm reach, John grabbed a Star Trek ship model with a camera to show me what he was talking about.

John, it's just, like, within your arm's reach. Had to bite. You got everything in that office, man. You know what you don't have in there, though, is your dog. Where's the dog, man?

She's she's locked downstairs. Yeah. Okay. Alright, John. I still think we should, try to be super really topical, John.

Okay. I've heard from the listeners, and they like it when we're topical. Do they? What? No.

That's all the way for you to say. No. I haven't heard from anybody. That goes. No.

No. Yes. No one says any. I've never heard a word from I actually, that's not true. We have I have had people say they do listen to podcast and they enjoy it and even brought up specific things that we've talked about.

So I know that they weren't just, like, blowing smoke. Alright. So, John, been talking a little bit about this recently, which is why I kinda wanna touch on it. But this week, a new company was announced, John. Neon Ichiban.

I think I'm saying that right. Do you know what this is, John? No. I don't. It's the newest digital comic book platform, John.

If you wanna read comics on your iPad or your iPhone, these guys are are saying that they're gonna be the ones to to go to. Instead of the Marvel Unlimited app or the DC Infinite app that you already have. You can do this instead. Alright. But they've got a lot of interesting things to make you think that this is the way to go.

They're the ones to jump on board with. Such as? According to the announcement, they're gonna they've got Marvel already on board Uh-huh. Which I thought was interesting. They're announced with Dark Horse, DC, Kodansha, Marvel, Oni, Vault, and I don't know how they did it.

They got distillery. Shocking. It's shocking that they could be able to get distillery. A little history behind this one though, John, because I find it interesting. And the the guy that sort of started and founded ComiXology Mhmm.

Which, if people remember, was sort of the original digit digital comic platform. It it won the digital comic platform, wars of the, early two thousand tens. Right? Comiteology sort of emerged as the go to platform for digital comic book purchasing. They had all the major players.

For a lot of people, that's how people were reading their comic books. You know, if you remember, ComiXology at one point was a really big deal. Like, real name in the industry, a real powerhouse. And, you know, I think the sales that ComiXology was bringing, the digital sales of Comixology was bringing to the various publishers, comic book publishers was not insignificant. It was a meaningful, percentage of profits when they were really cooking.

Mhmm. Comixology, though, and David Steinberger, who was one of the founders of Comixology, sold Comixology to Amazon. And Amazon proceeded to bury it deep and hard and sort of iterated into nonexistence to the point now that I don't even know how you would buy a comic book on Amazon, and I don't think Comixology even exists as a platform anymore. It doesn't exist as a separate platform. It exists as, like, a tag within Kindle, and there still is a ComiXology unlimited thing, like, a subscription to that, which is separate from Kindle unlimited.

But that is completely confusing based on everything else about, like, comic solos. Yeah. It's not a, like, hey. I've got an app, and I go in there and click a button and buy a book, which is what it was when it originally came out. So David Seiber sold ComiXology, eventually got shown the door, and, came back with one of the people that I think he was working with at Amazon, Chip Mosier.

Yeah. And they formed a publishing company, Distillery. Yeah. Distillery was interesting. They were using some really cool creative talent, and they were using interesting formats, comic book formats, nontraditional comic book formats to publish their work.

And I don't think they were doing any ongoings. Was was most of their stuff like OGN, or was it ongoings but, like, in these, like, longer reads and sort of nontraditional formats? Right? It's all I think it's all limited series in in a sort of, like, European graphic album format. They're forced you limited series of that or whatever, and then they're Right.

Collected into into hardcovers and softcovers. And they must have raised some decent capital around that because they they had some big names, like, really recognizable industry names. Like, it's the way that you would wanna try to roll out a new publishing company, like Yeah. Do interesting stories with interesting creators and and choose interesting formats that could set you apart. Like, on paper, it seemed like a great idea.

I I don't know how distillery is doing these days. I haven't really heard anybody talking about any of the the work coming out of there. If I was gonna start a publishing company today, there's two things that I would that I think I would need. One, I would want some sort of back catalog. Like, just like if I can get the rights to Conan, the Barbarian, right, that's got fifty years worth of comic book, publishing under its belt, all of it relatively above average.

Like Right. I can take that back catalog, and I can sell it a million different ways. And that alone would be enough to have a, you know, have a going interest, you know, for comic book publishing. And then I can use that back catalog to fund, like, whatever new creative, you know, things that that I would wanna do. And on the new creative stuff, relatively early on, you got to get a hit.

You gotta find a thing that people want. As soon as you figure out that they want it, you gotta just forgive them as much as they can force feed that thing until they're sick of it. As far as I can tell, distillery doesn't have either one of those things. Right? They don't have any big back catalog that they can sort of take advantage of, and they don't seem to have any, like, breakout hit that everybody's talking about that I've seen or or or have been made aware of.

Somnath is probably their the closest they had to. Somnath. I mean, as I brought up on here, I love that comic. I thought it was great. Becky Cloonath, Dantu Elote, but Becky Cloonath did an amazing job on that comic.

Blood Brothers Mother is one of my favorite ones. Yeah. For one of the best Eduardo Rizzo art. It's a weird world. Right?

Because who does talk about this right now? Like, the New Yorker is not gonna be caught talking about this stuff. Right? You know what I mean? Like, it it like, it doesn't fall into the categories that, like, Seth or Chris Ware or their modern descendants, you know, but still those two guys and and Dan Clouse.

Like, it's not that. It's not a literary they're either not literary fiction. It's not the superhero audience. Like, it's just it's the alternative comic book mainstream. Well, I don't know.

I mean, you do have stuff blowing up from image. I don't know. I I really enjoy the distillery catalog. I I don't like every series they put out. I haven't felt like I bought one of them, and I'm like, man, they tricked me into this.

Jimmy Colby's art in his current series, which, one for sorrow. So good. The only one issue out so far. Maybe one issue out. First of all, Tula Lote.

Oh my god, dude. She's jaw droppingly good. Yeah. I like to think that I was one of the early editors to recognize just how incredibly talented she was, throwing her on those covers that I did for Archangel years and years ago at this point. I had to fight to get her on those books too, which which was frustrating, but, I think I was proven right on that.

But yeah. Agreed. And I think you're right that some is probably the most breakout ish of that group, but it doesn't rise to the level of, like, awareness. But maybe you're right, John. Maybe it's because there's not a space for the the type of work that they're publishing.

Like, there's no nobody's talking in that space. One thing you could look at with those comics again, I think the quality is very high, and I enjoy quite a few of them. One thing you can I think, just just say without the sort of opinion tinting your voice in there is you can look at those and say, boy, those sure look expensive? That looks like that cost a lot of money to make that. Right.

Right. It's full of people that have a lot of other options, and they would this new publisher. And they would and they don't ship. And ships like a by by I mean, in my experience, by all accounts, I've ever heard a very good guy. I don't think I've ever heard anything negative about Chip from just about anybody.

Maybe I'm wrong, but, you know, so there's a there's a personal connection that he had, you know, that he made while he was working on cometsology stuff, launching the cometsology originals, and a lot of the same sort of talent carried over from that. But, man, you know, one of the weird things with Amazon buying ComiXology is Amazon is the, like, epitome of an online business in that it lost money for so long, but had its market cap continue to rise. So its stocks were always you know, it's always about stock prices, not about profit the way one might think of how US Steel might have worked in 1900. The stock prices in US Steel went up because they sold a lot of steel and made a lot of money. And stock prices on Amazon did not go up for that reason.

But, eventually, Amazon started making money, and, eventually, they had more money than God. And that meant that they would make decisions that were irrational or bizarre from any stance that wasn't Amazon, like buying the digital comic book platform and then it being more important that 30% of that doesn't go to Apple, so there's no in app purchases. Like, that's more important than anything else. You know, closing the window of distribution that somebody else had is more important than opening wider distribution for the medium of comics. But that model of of of what Amazon did, which is lose a lot of money for a real long time, became the model for digital businesses.

There's always been a part of comics that had that, but I feel like there's a lot of comics that have that model going for them now. What if we got a lot of money and just lost it? Right? Like, that seems to be the plan. The best way to start a, a million dollar comic book publishing company is to start with $10,000,000?

Yeah. I feel like we've seen it a few times where it's like, when you have the money backing you, what your job is is to, weave a tail for your investors that the profits are right around the corner. Like, that's what the business becomes, and then everything else is about serving that. And that works for about eighteen months. Right.

To two years. Then what what happens with tech companies is they either get bought by Google or Amazon, or they do they manage another round of funding, or they just disappear. I feel like there's a bunch of comic book companies that have that, like, even weirder ass version of it of of, like, you're making a bunch of comic books. This isn't a content farm, and that I can't imagine that James Tynion and Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Rizzo and Jacques and Chip Zarski and Francisco FrancoVillo and There's no way. God.

Who am I missing? I'm missing some big ones. Elsa Chartier, all of those people sign up for deals that are way out of their favor and that that that that give all the controlling interest and profits for their properties to the company that's producing them. I bet that didn't happen. I bet not.

What in the world are they selling? Then they're they're factory records, and you have that scene in twenty four hour party people where they go in and they're like, well, so we we buy you and we get the, the rights to Blue Monday. Oh, no. New order on Blue Monday. Like, that's great.

That's awesome as an artist and a a creator. But as a, I'm going to try to sell this business that's rough. And I, again, I don't know what the background on distillery is. I'm not I'm not really even talking specifically about them anymore. Yeah.

No. Right. We're talking about Ignition Press right now. We we stopped talking about distillery. I'm talking about Ignition Press now.

So distillery, or so David Steinberg, Chip Mosher, they're the they're the brains behind, former brains behind Comixology, sold to Amazon. Amazon shut it down. Right? Did a round of funding, picked up distillery. Now they're doing distillery.

But now they've announced that they're going back to they're creating a new version of ComiXology, this one not owned by Amazon, back to the good old days. And they've got all these people playing. Now the question that you, I think, are asking, John, which is not the direction I wanna go, but I'm interested in exploring if you want to, is Chip Bossier and David Steinberg raising another round of funding for this new venture because distillery is doing so well that they're ready to launch off of it or is distillery not doing well? And so they're scrambling to do something else, and they're like, let's do a thing that we were really successful at before. I feel like the jury's maybe not totally out on that, but, let's see what happens.

So my question about me on Ichiban, first of all, and I think it's already been answered, is why would anybody trust that the guys who sold ComiXology to Amazon had destroyed the digital comic publishing space? Why would you give them the keys of the kingdom again? Why would you do that? Like, why would you build like, no offense to David Steinberger. The dude rightfully sold out.

Yep. He launched himself off the backs of Marvel and DC and Image. Right? Sold his company to a big conglomerate and didn't give a flying flip about anything but the million bucks that he put in his pocket. And there's nothing wrong with that whatsoever.

He did nothing wrong. But if he comes back, you know, a couple years later and says, hey, guys. Let's do it again. Like, why? What what is the incentive?

You're just gonna do you're gonna do the exact same thing again. It's like, fool me once, you know, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I feel like we're in that situation. I don't know.

It's gonna be interesting to see where it goes from here. If if it actually launches, right, if they can actually get this thing off the ground, which I have reservations, but they've got the horses. If they've got Marvel and DC, they've got the horses. Also, Neon Ichiban is two white dudes that started the company. That's Yeah.

Wrong. Anyway, what would you do that? Like, I don't know. I think those guys tended to be good partners as human beings when they were working with publishers, so I can see that part of it. The fundamental thing that hits me though is that there's a lot of ways to get print books to people.

Right? Print has existed for about six hundred years, and we've figured out a lot of ways to get it to people. Right now, 75% of those ways are Amazon. Right. It's a big company.

It's a big company that throws its weight around and controls markets and stuff in ways that are often very troubling for the idea of nonmonolithic giant corporations, like, controlling everything. Like, Apple spent, like, fifteen years at one point convincing people not to wear watches, and then they launched a watch, And they tried to convince everybody to wear watches again, and they did. And it was a successful product. So it can happen. But I feel like if you're if you're on digital comics, they they've whittled you down.

They you're probably either there because you like bargains, you know, so you're buying all the stuff on, like, Humble Bundle or ComiXology sales, or you're reading Marvel and DC unlimited and ComiXology unlimited, and you're getting your comics a little bit later, but you're paying less. You like that, or you like the whole variety of having all the all the catalog or whatever. And then you've got people that are regular comic readers that want the convenience and the the the ease of of just clicking the thing and buying it on on the day it comes out. But I know a bunch of people that do, like, that that buy the Wednesday comics on ComiXology. Like, they still buy comics.

They don't go to the stores as much or whatever. That's, you know, perfectly reasonable. But it seems like distillery is trying to get into the collectible market, on these things. Especially with with Niamichiban, it seemed to be the big killer app part of it was that you could do autographs and sketches and stuff. That part seems a little tricky, but it also seems like, okay, we've we've fed everything into ComiXology.

Now it's all built into Kindle. Kindle is virtually ubiquitous. It can show up on almost any device. As if I'm a casual fan of any of the type I was just saying. What's my drive to come to this new place?

And for the collectors, they've been driven completely away from digital comics for a long time for obvious reasons. It it seems tricky to get them back. And I don't know the details of it, so maybe they figured this out. Maybe there's a way around it. But, like, if I get my autographed copy of Spider Boy and Humberto Ramos draws a sketch on the cover and then Marvel goes out of business.

That comic doesn't disappear. They still have it. We've all seen these companies disappear before, and the comics disappear. Like, if I were a collector, that'd be the question I would one, I don't have a physical thing I'm holding, and that seems to be a big part of collecting. But it is kinda neat that I could have a digital copy, and I could be like, look.

This is a I've got a one of a kind sketch that Tula Lotte did, a five minute sketch somewhere. It's I mean, that is kinda cool. It seems like they're trying to rebuild an audience that twenty years have been spent getting rid of is is tough. Tough. Yeah.

I think you've said it exactly right. It does seem like the the thing that they might be leaning into for their killer app piece is the is the NFT essentially, the, you know, having a a unique one of one. It seems like they went to great lengths to not use those three letters. Yeah. But come on.

That's exactly what it is. It's NFT. Alright, John. So to be continued, I think, for, Neon Ichiban, I wish them the best, I guess. But I don't know.

Boy, it's a it's a hard road. But they've cornered 80% of the market with at least they're announcing that they've cornered cornered at least 80% of the market. So that's a big step towards making it, possible. The only problem with that is that I'm gonna keep using the Marvel app. I'm gonna keep using the DC app.

I'm already getting all those books, so I don't know why I would maybe they'll explain how that all works at some point. We'll see. To be continued. Alright. Hi, John.

Well, thanks for another rip roaring conversation, man. I always enjoy these little chats that we have. You always, bring a new perspective to things, and I'm always Do I? I don't know. Yeah.

I was excited to hear hear what you have to say. You got some smart takes. And I'm sure that our audience agrees, all four of them. Yay. Thank you, guys.

Then we'll see all four of you and bring your friends next week for another, another exciting episode. Thank you all very much. Bye. Thanks for joining us, and please subscribe, rate, and tell your friends about us. You can find updates and links at cornerbox.club, and we'll be back next week with more from David and John here at the Corner Box.