Welcome to The Corner Box, where your hosts, David Hedgecock and John Barber, lean into their decades of comic book industry experience, writing, drawing, editing, and publishing. They'll talk to fellow professionals, deep dive into influential and overlooked works, and analyze the state of the art and business of comics and pop culture. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box.
[00:28] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm a host, John Barber, and here is another host.
[00:35] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock. We did it, John. We did it.
[00:38] John: We're back with lots of plans and well-reasoned arguments about things, and just been ready to go.
[00:44] David: We're the most well-prepared podcast in all of comic book podcasts, I feel like.
[00:48] John: So, speaking of, yesterday, I drove to La Jolla, which is where Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler both died—not together. So, now I drive over to La Jolla to meet up with Nate Murray, our mutual friend and former coworker, and my current coworker, publisher over at PUG-W, where I work, and where they're publishing Signa, to pick up some signing cards and some actual Signa books. I actually have them. They're nearly there. They're on their way over right now, on a boat, or whatnot. Two things, I guess. This is actually the second set of samples we got, because they, very happy and very pleased with our printer—our mutual printer. We stole our printer from you—there was lettering, had the overprint wrong on some of the sound effects. So, it would have printed solid black, due to the incompetence of Chris Mowry, our letterer. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just joking. They caught it. We didn't even see it, and then we fixed the file and sent them back. Then we got new samples. Beautiful. Just really nice. I think, the nicest feeling book Andrew and I have ever been a part of. I don't know if that’s right, but it has a real nice feel to it.
[01:53] David: I'm telling you, John, the quality of the printing that we got—I think you have the same specs on your book as I’ve got on mine. Was yours 48 pages as well, John?
[02:04] John: Yes, but it's comic book size.
[02:07] David: Oh, you didn't do the oversize? Did you put a dust jacket on yours, or is this just the--? Yeah. You held up a picture of it. It looks nice. Don't you love the thickness of the paper, and the gorgeous binding? It's just a really nice—the printing quality is so good, and the customer service from those guys are great, too. I’m really happy with our mutual printer. We've been getting so much great feedback from the Fun Time Go customers for Super Kaiju Rock 'n Roller Derby Fun Time Go and Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians. Book #1 of both of those are out now, in customers’ hands. It seems like, a couple times a week, somebody's taking pictures of their book and just saying how happy they are with how it turned out. I’m really excited for Signa.
[02:48] John: Yeah, and I don’t mean to be just sitting around bragging about how nice it printed. Yeah, man, I think sometimes you get stuff—Kickstarters and stuff—you can tell it wasn't printed super well. It's fine, but sometimes there’s stuff that's amazing. Our guest last week, Kirt Burdick, his printing’s immaculate. It’s beautiful and really special, but sometimes it's not. This is just seriously the nicest printing we've had. The paper's so nice. The quality is really good. The colors jump off. So, anyway, I picked this up at the Starbucks in La Jolla. Nate's out there. He lives right across the street from there. We do a hand-off. It's pretty quick. He has to get back to do stuff. I have to get back to do stuff. So, talked for 5 minutes. I go inside to get a coffee for the ride home. Then the fire alert app that I have on my phone beeps, and I'm like, “oh, I wonder what's going on.” I look, and it's Gilman, which is the street we're on. I go outside. You can see the smoke from the parking lot.
[03:48] David: That's right. That happened yesterday.
[03:49] John: Yeah. I passed a fire truck on my way to the freeway, and by the time I got home, Nate had had to evacuate. The evacuation was rescinded. Everybody's back. I think everybody’s okay.
[04:04] David: It's the fire season in California right now. It's happening. There's another one down in the Chula Vista area. It's going right now. I don't know. It’s unseasonably warm this time of year. I was thinking back, last year, this time, it feels like it rained 30 times at this point last year, and we haven't had any rain this year. Yeah, anyway. Nobody’s here for the weather report, though, John. They're here for the comic books, buddy.
[04:30] John: Well, you know.
[04:31] David: Good, I guess. That's good for Dave Baker. I don't know if we can call Dave Baker a friend of the show anymore, though, because he has not been on—Yeah, maybe he's going to turn into our first archenemy. He's going to do a full heel turn, and we're going to have our first archenemy, because he hasn't been on the show in a while, John.
[04:50] John: No, not since #1. He's one of those guys that just buys the #1 issues.
[04:55] David: Yeah. That’s right. That was a great #1, though. I really liked it. So, John, I got a cool thing in today, too. I want to show you, since we're sharing stuff. This is really good for podcasts, because it's such a visual medium. Look at this gorgeous thing that came in the mail today.
[05:17] John: Oh, hey. It's shiny and […].
[05:19] David: Yeah, we're doing this thing for Fun Time Go stuff. We have these things for our Kickstarters, where if people sign up early before the campaign starts, we ask people to, “hey, give us a dollar and you'll sign up early, and we’ll give you these special wristbands—these VIP wristbands.” So, anybody that's got a VIP wristband—basically, during the campaign, we run extra contests, and stuff, during campaigns, and do giveaways, and things, and people that do the $1.00 VIP get, if we printed 50 of something, then the VIPs get the 1 through 10s, or the 1 through 15s, however many people there are, we give them the lower numbers, and I do little remarks in a ton of the books that I sign, because I sign all the books. So, I do a remark. We always make sure that the VIPs get the remarks, and stuff, and one of the things that we were doing this year, though, is if you've got a VIP wristband, we made ten of these gorgeous little metal foil backing board covers. So, it's the first appearance of our two main characters, Miss Mina and Harmony from Super Kaiju, together. It's a gorgeous piece of art by Jonathan Mills, who’s a fantastic artist. His work just came on my radar this past year, and I really like his stuff, and the colors by Ivan Nunes. If you go to funtimego, or check on my Instagram, you'll see a picture of it. It’s a lovely piece. I really love it.
Anyway, we made ten of these metal foil back covers, and the idea was, “hey, if you turn in your VIP wristband, then you'll get one of these 10 metal backing boards for free. Send in your wristband.” So, the response was crazy. We got so many people emailing us to request to get the print. Way more people than the 10 that we had available. It’s fun to do that stuff. We're going to keep doing more of that this year. So, trying to have a fun time at Fun Time Go, John.
[07:18] John: It's the cover from the comic, right? It's a cover as a backing board? When you said a backing board cover, this isn't a cover for a backing board?
[07:27] David: This is just a metal backing board with a metal foil print on it.
[07:35] John: If I want to protect my backing boards, I still have to buy a regular backing board protector before I put it in with my comic books.
[07:41] David: Yes. If you want to keep it safe, yeah. You’ve got to give it its own separate backing board before you put that into it’s backing board with your book. Absolutely, you should do that. Absolutely. That's how that works. I'm going deep down this collector rabbit hole, John.
[07:58] John: I guess so, yeah.
[08:00] David: You want to know what crazy silly thing that I got into this time?
[08:04] John: Oh, no.
[08:05] David: So, I don't know. Man, the collecting bug has really hit me in the last year and a half or so, and I think it's because I'm working so much more. I mean, obviously, still working in comics. The Conan the Barbarian stuff that we're doing—Oh, my God. It’s so much work. There’s so much to do. Holy moly, that's a big project. Who knew, John, that 50 years’ worth of comic book publishing—trying to collect all that and make sure that it's all archived correctly, and that all the files and assets are not corrupted or dirty and unusable –who knew that that would be a job that would require more than a few hours to take care of?
[08:43] John: Yeah. When Comcast or somebody buys the Conan rights in, I don't know, 18 months, or something, and then they just dump all your hard drives in the trash can or into the furnace, or whatever they do with them, it’ll all be worth it. No, I'm just kidding.
[09:03] David: Have you heard of a comic book called New Champions, John?
[09:05] John: Is it the Mark Waid one, with Miles Morales?
[09:09] David: No, you're way off. There was a Champions book that Jim Zub did a few years back that I quite enjoyed. I popped in and out of it, but I always enjoyed it, but anyway. As you know, and as our four listeners know, Spider-Boy is my jam, and I make a point of getting all the covers for every issue. I'm collecting all the covers for every issue of Spider-Boy, with the exception of #1, which I still haven't tried to get all of them, but slowly but surely, I'm sure I will, and some of the higher-end incentives, like the 1/100s, I'm like, “yeah, I don't want to pay all that money for that.” I feel like, at some point, that's going to come down, or maybe it won't Maybe it’ll get more popular and keep going up in price. I don't know. Anyway. I'm collecting Spider-Boy, and Spider-Boy has been associated, recently, with a new comic book called New Champions that just came out this January. So, Issue #1 just came out. So, I'm like, “oh, cool. I'm going to check it out.” So, I checked it out. I got the first issue, liked it a lot, and I was like, “oh, this is cool,” and there's a ton of new characters, but then, John, I found out that, no, this is not the first appearance of almost all of the characters in the first issue.
[10:27] John: Oh, no.
[10:28] David: Those sons of biscuits at Marvel. A little over a year ago, they did a New Champions cover variant program, where a ton of different Marvel Comics all featured, basically, the first cover appearance of all these new characters in this New Champions comic book. So, for the last 6-8 weeks, I've been searching frantically for all these covers. I’ve got a copy of Blade #4. I've never collected Blade in my life, and now I've got a copy of Blade #4 because it's got a New Champions variant cover. I’ve only got the New Champions variant cover of it, obviously, and there's 25 of them. I don't know. There's two dozen of these covers, which means two dozen new characters. I don’t even know. There’s only 5 that have appeared in the New Champions book, but apparently, maybe, they're all going to appear. I don't know. It's a whole thing. So, I'm trying to figure out how to get all these covers, and I watched, in real-time, over the last three weeks since this New Champions #1 came out, these New Champions variant covers went from cover price, or 20% cover price, to now, there's nothing available for less than $15. In three weeks, those New Champions variants—
[11:45] John: Wait, hold on. This is a recent Marvel comic. Is that higher or lower than cover price?
[11:53] David: Now, now, let's not complain about the cost of the comic. Come on. Comics are wildly undervalued. I don't think people appreciate how much work goes into even a bad comic book. Man, that's a lot of man hours in that. Anyway. So, I'm on the hunt, John. I’m on the hunt for these New Champion variants from a year and a half ago. I'm pretty close to having them all, and I bought all of them at cover price, or a buck or two more maybe, here and there, and now all of them are worth 2-3 times as much. It's crazy.
[12:27] John: Wow. You should’ve put all your money into it.
[12:30] David: I should have bought multiple copies of each one, and you know what? That's what I'm going to do next time, John, because that is wise, sage advice. That is exactly what I'm going to do, but it's distracting me, John. I was doing a good job with my very fine Avengers run. I’m digging into the 90s now, the Avengers ‘90 through ‘99. I'm searching for those, but I got distracted.
[12:57] John: Yeah, I'm certainly not the collector, but I definitely find myself distracted by stuff. I’ll talk about these things that I'm reading or I'm excited about, and then I'll realize, “oh, I just stopped doing that six months ago.” I just, this weekend, finished reading Corto Maltese. I think I started reading that from the beginning, I don't know, when we met. It was a long time ago. I'm reading these Corto Maltese books. I have all of them, except one, and they're all super expensive. I'm like, “fine. I'm just going to buy the expensive book.” I buy it, I read that one, and then I'm like, “well, yeah, that's good enough,” and then I just stopped reading it for 6 months, like I said. The thing I bought that thing in order to do, which is read the next volumes, I just decided not to do. I finally finished that. That's just an example of, “and then I just get distracted and start doing something else.” I started reading, like, “oh, I’ve got to dive into this instead.”
[13:49] David: That's exactly—That's so me right now. For better or worse, I've been reading a lot of older comic books lately. We've talked about it several times on the show, where we're diving into these 70s and 80s, and 90s books, here and there, and every time I'm reading one of those—I'm reading an issue of Groo from 2003, and in the middle of that, there's an advertisement for Scatterbrain, and I'm like, “what is Scatterbrain?” and I'm immediately out of the comic book, and I'm on eBay, looking up Scatterbrain just to figure out what it was, and then find out it's a four-issue series that suddenly, I have to own. Yeah, it’s a thing. So, I totally feel your pain on that one. The pain of distraction. By the way, I don't need to be getting Scatterbrain because I've got a lot of piles of comic books that I still need to read, and that's before I open up my apps and start reading stuff on my apps, which, John, I don't know if you have this, but I just got a subscription to Shonen Jump.
[14:46] John: Okay.
[14:47] David: Yeah, man.
[14:49] John: I’ve thought about doing that, but then it really is like, “I’ve still got two other subscriptions I am way behind on. Am I just going to be paying for a subscription and not reading it?” Okay. Is it just […] stuff, or what does it have?
[15:03] David: It's got a little bit of everything. I've just been diving into it. I literally just got it, I don't know, a week and a half ago. I was like, “man, it's $3 a month.” I've been getting more and more into the manga stuff, because I mean, it's not a well that I've really gone to very often. So, I've already got my money's worth, easily. So, it's cool, and I'm excited to talk a little bit more about manga in 2025, hopefully. That was one of the thoughts in my head around getting that.
[15:30] John: Yeah. I’m 100% with you. I've been reading more manga lately, as well, and really enjoying it, […] branch out and find the weird areas of manga that I'm not as familiar with. I just read Chainsaw Man a little bit ago. That was terrific. That’s fun.
[15:45] David: Yeah, I've been meaning to get into that one. It looks like fun. John, for the Signa book, now that it's in, do you have all the peripherals, all the extras? Now that it's coming in, all the peripheral stuff, is all that extra stuff done, too?
[15:58] John: It's coming together. I was really there to pick up signing plates. So, I've got to sign those, get them over—Andrew was out of the country till yesterday. So, I’ve got to get those done and send them over to Andrew, and there we go. It’ll all be coming shortly.
[16:11] David: Cool. That's exciting. Have you watched the new Creature Commandos cartoon, John?
[16:20] John: No, I have not.
[16:21] David: I am a big James Gunn fan. I'm getting more and more excited about this Superman movie, and I'm not a big Superman guy. I’m just not, but I’m excited to see what James Gunn does with it, because he's just a good storyteller, man. I like his style of storytelling. It goes back to Guardians of the Galaxy, but again, we've talked about Guardians of the Galaxy, but also the TV show, Peacemaker, which is fantastic, and now I watched the first episode or two of Creature Commandos. I thought it was great. I thought it was a great little animated feature. Super fun, and it got me thinking about Creature Commandos, of course. I think that was the point of it all. So, I was reminiscing about some of the different Creature Commandos that DC’s put out over the years. My favorite one, but I don't know that it's one that people are really super aware of. So, I thought maybe, if you wanted to, I would take a couple minutes to dive into it.
[17:12] John: Yeah, describing this as the Creature Commando series people probably aren't aware of probably didn't narrow it down terribly much, as to which one. It's one of those ones—obviously, James Gunn knows the comics really well and made his name on Guardians of the Galaxy, which was fairly obscure, in terms of Marvel stuff. I mean, not obscure for comics fans, but not Spider-Man or Wolverine, or something for the mainstream people. It was definitely something you had to convince people that “this is the thing you wanted to see.” So, it seems like that was maybe what he was going for on this. Although, I also think this started before the whole DCU thing, and it became the lead DCU thing.
[17:51] David: The one I'm talking about?
[17:52] John: Yeah.
[17:53] David: The Creature Commandos that I'm talking about is the ‘99/2000.
[17:56] John: Oh, I meant the TV show. It's the first one of the new continuity that James Gunn is establishing. It's the idea that his Suicide Squad and Peacemaker happened, but not quite like you saw. The characters in here are the ones that—all the voice actors are cast to play these characters in real life.
[18:20] David: Oh, really?
[18:21] John: Should they appear, I think.
[18:23] David: Okay.
[18:24] John: That was the whole setup, but I think this was originally conceived before he was in charge of the DC Universe. I don't know. I think they announced it before then. I don't know if there was any work done on it, or whatnot.
[18:36] David: Oh, interesting. Are you suggesting that the animation is going to become the comic book DCU version, as well?
[18:44] John: No. I meant the cinematic universe. This co-exists with the upcoming Superman movies, but overwrites Batman VS Superman, or whatever. That didn't happen. Creature Commandos did.
[18:57] David: So confusing. So, this Creature Commandos that I'm talking about is the comic book Creature Commandos. There were actually several versions of comic book Creature Commandos, as well, but the one that was my favorite, appealed to me, was the ‘99/2000 edition, written by legendary comic book artist and writer, Tim Truman, drawn by Scot Eaton, with inks by Ray Kryssing, and I'm telling you, man, one of the reasons I love this, I've always been a Truman fan. Tim Truman’s my jam. I like his stuff. That bit that he did on Hawkworld, back in the day, was so good, man.
[19:33] John: I love Hawkworld so much.
[19:35] David: Yeah, it was really good.
[19:36] John: Honestly, having read it fairly recently, my opinion is that it falls apart with Issue #3, but those first two issues are so good.
[19:45] David: It's a great series, and the art is just so lush and so good in that book. So, well, in Creature Commandos, though, it’s not Tim Truman drawing. It's Scot Eaton, but I think it's blessed with some of Scot Eaton's very best work, and I'm a fan of Scot Eaton. I think Scot Eaton was another Cross-Gen guy who—did I have that right? Do you remember that?
[20:08] John: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
[20:10] David: So, Scot Eaton was another one of those guys that went to Cross-Gen back in the day, in the mid-90s, or whenever it was, when Cross-Gen was starting up, and he was a B-level dude at Marvel, DC—I think more DC than Marvel—went to Cross-Gen, working in the studio with guys like Bart Sears and Olivier Coipel, and Paul Pelletier, and all these amazing artists. You can't help but get better, and he certainly did. By ’99/2000, he's gone through the Cross-Gen training, essentially, and comes out the other end, and I just feel this work is just fantastic and wildly underrated, in my opinion, but the Creature Commandos from ‘99/2000 is some of his best work.
[20:54] John: I don't mean to correct you. He didn't go to Cross-Gen till after that.
[21:00] David: Oh, he was in Cross-Gen after ‘99?
[21:02] John: Yeah.
[21:03] David: Oh, wow. Okay, I'm completely wrong then. Well, he was already fully formed then, because I'm telling you, this Creature Commandos is some of his best work, in my opinion. The way Kryssing’s inking is fantastic. The acting and modeling, and the storytelling, it's all there in this book. So, Creature Commandos by Truman and Eaton, it was an 8-issue miniseries, started around late-‘99/early-2000. You can find it on the DC Universe Infinite app, whatever it's called, and I'm sure that you can pick this up off of eBay, the whole collection, for a fairly decent price. It can’t possibly be that much, but it introduced all the classic characters, plus one or two new ones, and this story conceit is interesting. It's a little more sci-fi than I think previous versions of Creature Commandos were. It's still a military outfit, which I think, that's where its origins lie most deeply in, but it's a sci-fi piece. It’s an action-adventure sci-fi piece.
So, we're off-world almost the entire time. There's time warps and dimensional gateway jumps, and there's planets being taken over, a dozen at a time, from this mad ruler king, who's running through the galaxy and different dimensions, just taking over. There's hostile mega-corporations from Earth, who are basically selling the Earth out just for profit, and the Creature Commandos are thrust into all of this to stop this dimension-spanning tyrant from eventually getting to Earth and taking Earth out, and along the way, they meet a bunch of interesting characters in the cast. It’s fairly firmly built by the first issue, but you get interesting peripheral additions. In particular, there’s, in Issue #6 or #7, these creatures that call themselves Gnomes, but they don't look like traditional Dungeons and Dragons-type Gnomes, that are just these blue alien creatures that just happen to call themselves Gnomes. Anyway, they aid the Creature Commandos in this war against this big tyrant, they help the Creature Commandos. They have a way of speaking that's really, I don't know, charming and endearing, and are, I think, some of the best characters. The two best characters of the whole piece are the Gnome Wizard and his companion, who make an appearance, starting with Issue #6, and help the Creature Commandos eventually turn the tide and win the war against this tyrant.
Along the way, there's some other treachery happening amongst the villains themselves. You have the head despot, who in charge of the thing. His second-in-command, essentially, is partnering with his third-in-command to plot against the tyrant king and take his position, power struggle within the hierarchy. Wow, that is some bubble wrap that I'm popping.
[23:56] John: Is it Lunar New Year? Are you setting up a string of fireworks?
[24:00] David: So, anyway. I forgot where I was, but if you haven't had a chance, or if you haven't recently, give a look to Creature Commandos by Tim Truman and Scot Eaton. I definitely recommend it. It's a fun 8-issue series. It’s pretty light. It's not going to take a lot to get through it, and I hope if people do pick it up and take a look at it, that they take some time to appreciate the incredible level of detail and inventiveness that Scot Eaton brings to this particular story. There are pages where it's just—there's half-page splashes, from an aerial viewpoint, a birds-eye-view of this crazy lab that this mad scientist is working in, and that's just one panel on one page, and it's just hyper-detailed. Every node and wire, and computer bit, is in this room. It's just incredible attention to detail, and staging, and backgrounds. All the characters are really interesting and designed interestingly. I have to assume that Scot was probably responsible for the remodels, the remakes of the characters. They're all really fun and interesting.
Tim Truman’s script, it's almost like he wrote the script and then Scot did the art. Tim Truman wrote the full script. Here’s what I'm trying to figure this out, and this would be the only flaw in the piece, for me. It's Tim Truman who wrote the full script, and then Scot went in and drew it, but made whatever changes or adjustments, or missed the intention, here and there, and then they never gave it back to Tim to doctor the dialogue. So, there's these weird, disjointed moments where the dialogue doesn't quite match what's happening in the action. It's brief enough that it definitely doesn't ruin the piece, in any way, shape, or form. For, I think, somebody like me, who's been working professionally for a long time, I’m like, “what happened there? There's something weird happening there,” but it doesn't happen very often. It's just enough to throw me out of the piece for just a moment, just because, I don't know, I guess my editorial brain takes over and my fanboy brain takes a backseat, for a minute, but it certainly doesn't ruin the piece. There's some fun cameos by Sylvester Stallone. Sean Connery's in here. He makes a cameo. So, it’s a fun book. Great art. Good story. Highly recommend, and that is my recommendation for the week, John. Creature Commandos.
[26:30] John: Let me loop that back around to the beginning of what you said. These are not cheap on eBay, David. These are no longer cheap on eBay. Minimum, $70.00 to get the set of them.
[26:38] David: What? That's $10 a book. That's insane.
[26:43] John: There’s, evidently, a TV show that, I believe, we may have made. It was uncollected stuff. So, I don't know. I guess it's driving up the price. I have a paperback of the original Creature Commandos that J.M DeMatteis did. I don't remember who drew it. A bunch of different people over here.
[27:00] David: It’s a murderer's row of guys, actually. You know who's in it? I'm shocked that you don't remember right out of the gate.
[27:06] John: Oh, Dan Spiegle, posthumous friend of the show. He would be our friend, if only he'd known us.
[27:12] David: Absolutely. We're very likable people, John. I'm sure he would have liked us.
[27:16] John: I'm not familiar with the series you're talking about, which I guess, must have been the first actual Creature Commandos series, which I'm sure is pushing it, as well. The other ones are all in Weird War stories, and stuff like that—the original run of it. So, I'm sure that that #1 is the first Creature Commandos #1. It probably has some collectors going, but really nice logo. The logo on that comic’s really good looking. It holds up nicely.
[27:43] David: Yeah, it had a lot going for it. I'm surprised that they only got 8 issues out of that, because I’m telling you, it's fun to read that.
[27:50] John: Remember, I mean ‘99/2000, that’s pre-Ultimates and Marvel bankruptcy, and a lot of the good DC stuff, but stuff that people weren't reading.
[28:02] David: Everything pre-John Barber and David Hedgecock working professionally in comics, I think, was just a rough time. I don't think it's a coincidence that once we started working professionally in comic books, things started turning around in a big way.
[28:14] John: Yeah, things have been really good in comics, from the moment we stepped into it to the present day.
[28:20] David: Just going to leave that there. Just going to leave that hanging there. That's what I’ve got. That's what I’ve got for you. One more thing. Also, on the original Weird War Tales, the JM DeMatteis stuff, I'm excited to read that next, actually. The big reason being, well, JM DeMatteis is fantastic. I love his stuff, but there's some other writers in there that I think are pretty good. Bob Kanigher, Dave Manak, Mike Barr, but one of the artists on the Weird War Tales is Pat Broderick, and after reading that Micronauts, the first omnibus of Micronauts—there’s a ton of Pat Broderick art in there—man, I've got a new and growing appreciation for Pat Broderick's stuff from that time period. I mean, it seems like he was working everywhere, but I don't remember anyone ever talking about Pat Broderick, but he's got a lot of work out there.
[29:09] John: Yeah. People don't talk about him enough. You’re right. Yeah. It wasn't like that wasn't a great time. Creature Commandos wasn’t in a great time, I think, either. It was right in the DC implosion era, caught in that, again, really cool comics coming out. Not the most stable time, I think, if I'm remembering right when it is. Anyway.
[29:27] David: Maybe DC better not put out another Creature Commandos comic. It sounds like, every time they do, stuff's not going so great.
[29:35] John: Maybe I'm just being doomy. Maybe it was exactly the right time. I don't know.
[29:44] David: I do have one more thing for you, John, that I want to talk about today. Where are you at with the whole Jim Lee's return on the Hush 2?
[29:53] John: I like Hush. For all the making fun of it that I think we've done in the show of, the end was clearly changed, mid-flight, and then they did the actual ending later.
[30:06] David: Somehow made it worse.
[30:07] John: It would have been nice if that was the comic that Jason Todd came back in. That would have been a cool intuit, and it would have been a cool comic for Jason Todd to have come back in. No offense to the comic he did come back in. Maybe it's great. I don't remember. I love Jim Lee. I'm a giant Jim Lee fan.
[30:23] David: Are you?
[30:24] John: Yeah.
[30:25] David: I didn't know that.
[30:26] John: Yeah. He's really terrific. The stuff I really like of Jim Lee is the over-the-top science fiction aspects of it, from X-Men and WildC.A.T.S, and it's not exactly my absolute favorite version of Batman. He draws Batman really well. I really like it, but I when I think of the Batman artists I really like, I would learn more toward Dave McKean on Arkham Asylum than I would to Jim Lee.
[30:50] David: 100%. I would take Norm Breyfogle over Jim Lee on Batman. In fact, I would even maybe, probably, take Marshall Rogers over Jim Lee's Batman.
[31:03] John: Yeah, I would, too. Marshall Rogers, definitely, but I mean that's great. Jim Lee might take Marshall Rogers’ Batman over Jim Lee’s. I thought you were going to say you take Norm Breyfogle’s WildC.A.T.S over--
[31:17] David: He didn’t do WildC.A.T.S.
[31:18] John: No. That’s why I felt so insulted. The notion of Norm Breyfogle doing WildC.A.T.S was better than anything Jim Lee ever did with the characters. I'm enjoying the Last Halloween story right now. I'm having a good time reading that and seeing everybody doing their own thing, but as an homage for Tim Sale, having a good time with that story. I work with the former publisher of WildStorm and the former president of the Jim Lee Fan Club. So, Jim Lee comes up every once in a while.
[31:50] David: Shocking. Man, I forgot. I forgot that’s who you're working with.
[31:57] John: Yeah, and I mean, we're in comics in San Diego. Jim Lee was a big factor in comics in San Diego. There’s no way around that.
[32:03] David: Yeah, you were blocks away from the old WildStorm offices, if you were in La Jolla yesterday, right?
[32:10] John: I applied for WildStorm one time.
[32:11] David: Oh, you did?
[32:12] John: I did. I applied to work at WildStorm. I faxed the coloring department. I went in. They had an interview with Laura DePuy, who I believe is Laura Martin, and the thing I remember was that they’d been bought by DC. They were still in their La Jolla offices, which, by the way, that is the most crazy place you could plant a comic book publisher. That is some of the most expensive real estate in America. It was on the beach in La Jolla.
[32:39] David: Yeah, there is no more expensive business offices in all of San Diego County, for sure.
[32:45] John: The very next day was when AOL bought Time Warner. I remember that, and I’d never heard back from WildStorm. I've heard back from Laura since then, but yeah, “what do you want to see from Jim Lee?” has come up, and I'm not even—I want to see Jim Lee draw stuff. I like that he's drawing stuff. So, I'll be excited to see it. I don't know if there's some character I'd want him to do that he hasn't done. Is there a new thing I want to see him do? Am I itching for him to come back to Divine Right, or something else? Get back to Alpha Flight where he belongs? I don’t know.
[33:18] David: Punisher War Journal?
[33:20] John: Jim Lee, now, doing Punisher, I'd be on board with.
[33:22] David: Really? I'm not a huge Jim Lee guy. I don't think I am. I like his stuff, for sure, and his X-Men run was really great. I was really in love with Marc Silvestri's run on Uncanny X-Men already. For me, it really wasn’t that much of an upgrade. Marc Silvestri to Jim Lee, there wasn’t that big of a difference, for me, in terms of--
[33:45] John: Yeah, to me, looking at those things, I think it's especially true if you can dig up any of the Essential books that Marvel used to do, where they printed them in black and white. You can just see the line art on it. It's really interesting. When Jim Lee and Scott Williams come on, it just looks like the comic comes from 2 decades later than the previous issue. As good as Silvestri and Dan Green, as good as they are, and they're super good, I don't think Jim Lee is even a better artist than Marc Silvestri, but I just think the styling they started bringing to it just switched things up so much. The thing I always think about is, they go to Genosha, and Silvestri draws them all wearing baseball caps and driving jeeps, and then, 6 issues later, Jim Lee has them come back, and they're all riding hoverbikes and wearing […] body armor.
[34:37] David: Nice. So, yeah, that speaks to where I was going with this, when I started. I think you're right. I think it's the sci-fi aspects of Jim Lee's stuff, that future tech, and the more imaginative stuff is what I really liked about Jim Lee, and you don't get that with Batman. In Batman, it’s a very grounded, urban environment character, at its core. I feel like DC has gotten away from that so many times, but never to the betterment of Batman, in my opinion. It’s rare that when he gets outside of Gotham, there's an improvement on the story. God-level Batman is just not entertaining. I'm interested to see when he comes back. I think that retailers are going to remember Jim Lee on Batman the first time, more than any fans will. So, I think the ordering numbers on this thing are going to be big.
[35:33] John: Oh, massive. Yes, 100%.
[35:35] David: Yeah, which is great. I just hope there's a lot of sell-through.
[35:40] John: Yeah. One thing I am excited about, and this is the thing—I read the WildC.A.T.S Compendium over the holiday break, during my big stack of comics that I read over. That was the last one, and at the same time, reading some Sergio Toppi books, and thinking about how the Toppi stuff lives in this era, where you look at the Sergio Toppi page, and there's almost this dare of, “Yeah. Come on. Try to read this. There's a story here. Come on,” and then you read it, and it works. The storytelling actually works, but it's just on the knife’s edge of completely falling apart, but it isn’t, and that's what’s so cool about his stuff. So, I was thinking about that with the Jim Lee stuff, where those Image Comics, that era of comic-making with Jim Lee and Liefeld, and everybody. Everything was subservient to the impact of the moment on the page, I would argue. Characterization, or anything, was secondary to the characters posing in a cool way, and it looks awesome, all that stuff. Even the plot is secondary to “there's a bunch of really amazing stuff that can just have a huge visual impact to it.” I mean that as a value-neutral statement. I just think that's what the main thing about that stuff was. It’s not good or bad. It is what it’s doing.
[36:50] David: I would argue that it's way better.
[36:52] John: As you go through that, you get into these parts where sometimes a writer comes on and writes the stuff, and writes an interesting story, but you don't get what you want out of Jim Lee from it, because you’re getting that. Then Jim Lee becomes a storyteller, which he's good at, and it's fine, but it doesn't have that “wow. What's going on here?” And I don't know what the relationship was when they were making it, but when you got to the Travis Charest/James Robinson stuff, somehow that stuff melds together, where there is a greater depth to the story than there had been before, with no sacrifice made to the visuals to it. I have no idea what that was. It's the opposite of what you were saying with the script not matching the art on the Creature Commandos. The stuff just seems so tailored to what Charest with drawing, which couldn't possibly have been what anybody wrote. They could not be what James Robinson put in the script. There's six splash pages of different locations. Maybe that is what he wrote. I don’t know. Maybe he was just like, “I’m just going to tee this up, and he's going to knock it out, and then I'm going to figure out a way to add some depth to it.” There'll be these captions that just give this crazy amount of emotional depth to Pike, or somebody, some fifth-string WildC.A.T.S villain—A meaningless moment, but you have this caption that gives him this interiority that he didn't have, but not at the expense of him just looking really cool on the page that Charest drew.
Long-winded way of getting to, I feel like it has been a while since Jim Lee's been able to totally cut loose like that. Geoff Johns gives a lot of room to that. Maybe that's not fair. Maybe Geoff Johns absolutely does that, but Loeb is all about that. That, I'm excited about, just seeing somebody writing a bunch of two-page spreads for Jim Lee. I mean that in the absolute best way, and Loeb’s somebody that writes his stuff for the artist, we've talked about it before, probably to a greater degree than anybody. He and Geoff Johns used to be office mates. Is that a well-known fact?
[38:52] David: No. I think you mentioned that on one of the podcasts, but you didn’t elaborate. How do about that?
[38:56] John: When I was at Marvel, Jeph Loeb came over to Marvel, and Geoff Johns was still at DC, but for the production, more for the film stuff, they were in the same office. I think Allan Heinberg was involved in that, too.
[39:11] David: Wow, that's quite a room.
[39:12] John: Yeah, but you can see, I think with Geoff Johns, some of that Loeb-ness rubbing off, at a certain. So, by the time he's doing all the stuff with Jim Lee, on JLA, and stuff. It's well before then, but by then, it's very visual. Anyway, I'm excited to see Jim Lee do some big stuff. I don't know if it's the thing I'm most excited about Jim Lee doing, but I don't have a thing that I want to throw out there and be like, “this is what I want to see.”
[39:35] David: If you had a choice, would you go WildC.A.T.S, or would you go Uncanny X-Men?
[39:39] John: I'd like WildC.A.T.S to be a thing again. There's a nice depth to it, and there's interesting--
[39:46] David: I'd like X-Men to be a thing again, too. No, I'm just kidding. That was mean. I'm enjoying some of the X-Men stuff.
[39:51] John: I feel like Jim Lee doing Batman isn't as hardcore retro as I feel like him doing X-Men would be, because the stuff he designed on X-Men is so intrinsic to that period. X-Men ‘97 is the Jim Lee designs, and that's the retro X-Men that Marvel has. So, do you have Jim Lee come on and do that again? Well, it's not really the same world. He’s not the same artist. He's grown. That goes down to the thing we were talking about a couple weeks ago, or I was rambling about a couple weeks ago, that I want to see John Romita Jr. doing what guy-in-his-60s John Romita Jr. does, not what 19-year-old John Romita Jr. was doing. Same thing with Jim Lee. It's not going to have the same energy of Jim Lee, in his 20s, doing these, exactly the right designs for that time period, characters.
[40:39] David: I know what you. I was just talking about this with Chase, Editor-in-Chief of Fun Time Go. I brought up what, musically, I was trying to think of artists who were big in their early career, and then were able to come back 20-30 years later, whatever, and do something artistically fresh, new, interesting, in a new, different style. So, we were throwing that around, and one of the ones that Chase actually hit on, which I thought was absolutely 100% correct, was Johnny Cash. When Johnny Cash came back and did those American recordings, I mean, Johnny Cash had an entire career, and then, towards the end, he did those American recordings, which are—holy moly. Those things are amazing. Artistically, that is quite a Tour de Force that he put together. So, maybe that's what I am hoping for with some of these guys, like Jim Lee, coming back. I think, in a way, Marc Silvestri did deliver that with his Batman piece. Stylistically, it wasn't too far away from what he's done, but he sure did put an exclamation point on some stuff, and I know that took him a long time to do, but man, it was really an amazing work. So, my take on it is, I'm excited for it, but I feel like there's a lot of other things I would be more excited for Jim Lee doing. I don’t know what they are, because I know he's done other stuff. He's done Suicide Squad, and he did an original thing at DC just in the last few years, when they did that big launch where they had a bunch of new #1s and new heroes, like Sideways.
[42:09] John: Probably in my despair period. I don't remember that, at all.
[42:14] David: This he put out The Terrifics, and I think it was Sideways, or Sidelong, or Side—somebody in the audience is screaming, telling me the right name.
[42:23] John: That was the one where Rhino and Sandman team up to get wine, right? Sideways?
[42:28] David: That is a deep cut in a lot of different ways, man. Well done. With that, I think we’ve got to get out.
[42:35] John: All right. Good talking to you. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box. We'll be back next week. Goodbye.
[42:41] David: 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.
[00:28] John Barber: Hello, and welcome back to The Corner Box. I'm a host, John Barber, and here is another host.
[00:35] David Hedgecock: David Hedgecock. We did it, John. We did it.
[00:38] John: We're back with lots of plans and well-reasoned arguments about things, and just been ready to go.
[00:44] David: We're the most well-prepared podcast in all of comic book podcasts, I feel like.
[00:48] John: So, speaking of, yesterday, I drove to La Jolla, which is where Jim Thompson and Raymond Chandler both died—not together. So, now I drive over to La Jolla to meet up with Nate Murray, our mutual friend and former coworker, and my current coworker, publisher over at PUG-W, where I work, and where they're publishing Signa, to pick up some signing cards and some actual Signa books. I actually have them. They're nearly there. They're on their way over right now, on a boat, or whatnot. Two things, I guess. This is actually the second set of samples we got, because they, very happy and very pleased with our printer—our mutual printer. We stole our printer from you—there was lettering, had the overprint wrong on some of the sound effects. So, it would have printed solid black, due to the incompetence of Chris Mowry, our letterer. No, I'm just kidding. I'm just joking. They caught it. We didn't even see it, and then we fixed the file and sent them back. Then we got new samples. Beautiful. Just really nice. I think, the nicest feeling book Andrew and I have ever been a part of. I don't know if that’s right, but it has a real nice feel to it.
[01:53] David: I'm telling you, John, the quality of the printing that we got—I think you have the same specs on your book as I’ve got on mine. Was yours 48 pages as well, John?
[02:04] John: Yes, but it's comic book size.
[02:07] David: Oh, you didn't do the oversize? Did you put a dust jacket on yours, or is this just the--? Yeah. You held up a picture of it. It looks nice. Don't you love the thickness of the paper, and the gorgeous binding? It's just a really nice—the printing quality is so good, and the customer service from those guys are great, too. I’m really happy with our mutual printer. We've been getting so much great feedback from the Fun Time Go customers for Super Kaiju Rock 'n Roller Derby Fun Time Go and Miss Mina and the Midnight Guardians. Book #1 of both of those are out now, in customers’ hands. It seems like, a couple times a week, somebody's taking pictures of their book and just saying how happy they are with how it turned out. I’m really excited for Signa.
[02:48] John: Yeah, and I don’t mean to be just sitting around bragging about how nice it printed. Yeah, man, I think sometimes you get stuff—Kickstarters and stuff—you can tell it wasn't printed super well. It's fine, but sometimes there’s stuff that's amazing. Our guest last week, Kirt Burdick, his printing’s immaculate. It’s beautiful and really special, but sometimes it's not. This is just seriously the nicest printing we've had. The paper's so nice. The quality is really good. The colors jump off. So, anyway, I picked this up at the Starbucks in La Jolla. Nate's out there. He lives right across the street from there. We do a hand-off. It's pretty quick. He has to get back to do stuff. I have to get back to do stuff. So, talked for 5 minutes. I go inside to get a coffee for the ride home. Then the fire alert app that I have on my phone beeps, and I'm like, “oh, I wonder what's going on.” I look, and it's Gilman, which is the street we're on. I go outside. You can see the smoke from the parking lot.
[03:48] David: That's right. That happened yesterday.
[03:49] John: Yeah. I passed a fire truck on my way to the freeway, and by the time I got home, Nate had had to evacuate. The evacuation was rescinded. Everybody's back. I think everybody’s okay.
[04:04] David: It's the fire season in California right now. It's happening. There's another one down in the Chula Vista area. It's going right now. I don't know. It’s unseasonably warm this time of year. I was thinking back, last year, this time, it feels like it rained 30 times at this point last year, and we haven't had any rain this year. Yeah, anyway. Nobody’s here for the weather report, though, John. They're here for the comic books, buddy.
[04:30] John: Well, you know.
[04:31] David: Good, I guess. That's good for Dave Baker. I don't know if we can call Dave Baker a friend of the show anymore, though, because he has not been on—Yeah, maybe he's going to turn into our first archenemy. He's going to do a full heel turn, and we're going to have our first archenemy, because he hasn't been on the show in a while, John.
[04:50] John: No, not since #1. He's one of those guys that just buys the #1 issues.
[04:55] David: Yeah. That’s right. That was a great #1, though. I really liked it. So, John, I got a cool thing in today, too. I want to show you, since we're sharing stuff. This is really good for podcasts, because it's such a visual medium. Look at this gorgeous thing that came in the mail today.
[05:17] John: Oh, hey. It's shiny and […].
[05:19] David: Yeah, we're doing this thing for Fun Time Go stuff. We have these things for our Kickstarters, where if people sign up early before the campaign starts, we ask people to, “hey, give us a dollar and you'll sign up early, and we’ll give you these special wristbands—these VIP wristbands.” So, anybody that's got a VIP wristband—basically, during the campaign, we run extra contests, and stuff, during campaigns, and do giveaways, and things, and people that do the $1.00 VIP get, if we printed 50 of something, then the VIPs get the 1 through 10s, or the 1 through 15s, however many people there are, we give them the lower numbers, and I do little remarks in a ton of the books that I sign, because I sign all the books. So, I do a remark. We always make sure that the VIPs get the remarks, and stuff, and one of the things that we were doing this year, though, is if you've got a VIP wristband, we made ten of these gorgeous little metal foil backing board covers. So, it's the first appearance of our two main characters, Miss Mina and Harmony from Super Kaiju, together. It's a gorgeous piece of art by Jonathan Mills, who’s a fantastic artist. His work just came on my radar this past year, and I really like his stuff, and the colors by Ivan Nunes. If you go to funtimego, or check on my Instagram, you'll see a picture of it. It’s a lovely piece. I really love it.
Anyway, we made ten of these metal foil back covers, and the idea was, “hey, if you turn in your VIP wristband, then you'll get one of these 10 metal backing boards for free. Send in your wristband.” So, the response was crazy. We got so many people emailing us to request to get the print. Way more people than the 10 that we had available. It’s fun to do that stuff. We're going to keep doing more of that this year. So, trying to have a fun time at Fun Time Go, John.
[07:18] John: It's the cover from the comic, right? It's a cover as a backing board? When you said a backing board cover, this isn't a cover for a backing board?
[07:27] David: This is just a metal backing board with a metal foil print on it.
[07:35] John: If I want to protect my backing boards, I still have to buy a regular backing board protector before I put it in with my comic books.
[07:41] David: Yes. If you want to keep it safe, yeah. You’ve got to give it its own separate backing board before you put that into it’s backing board with your book. Absolutely, you should do that. Absolutely. That's how that works. I'm going deep down this collector rabbit hole, John.
[07:58] John: I guess so, yeah.
[08:00] David: You want to know what crazy silly thing that I got into this time?
[08:04] John: Oh, no.
[08:05] David: So, I don't know. Man, the collecting bug has really hit me in the last year and a half or so, and I think it's because I'm working so much more. I mean, obviously, still working in comics. The Conan the Barbarian stuff that we're doing—Oh, my God. It’s so much work. There’s so much to do. Holy moly, that's a big project. Who knew, John, that 50 years’ worth of comic book publishing—trying to collect all that and make sure that it's all archived correctly, and that all the files and assets are not corrupted or dirty and unusable –who knew that that would be a job that would require more than a few hours to take care of?
[08:43] John: Yeah. When Comcast or somebody buys the Conan rights in, I don't know, 18 months, or something, and then they just dump all your hard drives in the trash can or into the furnace, or whatever they do with them, it’ll all be worth it. No, I'm just kidding.
[09:03] David: Have you heard of a comic book called New Champions, John?
[09:05] John: Is it the Mark Waid one, with Miles Morales?
[09:09] David: No, you're way off. There was a Champions book that Jim Zub did a few years back that I quite enjoyed. I popped in and out of it, but I always enjoyed it, but anyway. As you know, and as our four listeners know, Spider-Boy is my jam, and I make a point of getting all the covers for every issue. I'm collecting all the covers for every issue of Spider-Boy, with the exception of #1, which I still haven't tried to get all of them, but slowly but surely, I'm sure I will, and some of the higher-end incentives, like the 1/100s, I'm like, “yeah, I don't want to pay all that money for that.” I feel like, at some point, that's going to come down, or maybe it won't Maybe it’ll get more popular and keep going up in price. I don't know. Anyway. I'm collecting Spider-Boy, and Spider-Boy has been associated, recently, with a new comic book called New Champions that just came out this January. So, Issue #1 just came out. So, I'm like, “oh, cool. I'm going to check it out.” So, I checked it out. I got the first issue, liked it a lot, and I was like, “oh, this is cool,” and there's a ton of new characters, but then, John, I found out that, no, this is not the first appearance of almost all of the characters in the first issue.
[10:27] John: Oh, no.
[10:28] David: Those sons of biscuits at Marvel. A little over a year ago, they did a New Champions cover variant program, where a ton of different Marvel Comics all featured, basically, the first cover appearance of all these new characters in this New Champions comic book. So, for the last 6-8 weeks, I've been searching frantically for all these covers. I’ve got a copy of Blade #4. I've never collected Blade in my life, and now I've got a copy of Blade #4 because it's got a New Champions variant cover. I’ve only got the New Champions variant cover of it, obviously, and there's 25 of them. I don't know. There's two dozen of these covers, which means two dozen new characters. I don’t even know. There’s only 5 that have appeared in the New Champions book, but apparently, maybe, they're all going to appear. I don't know. It's a whole thing. So, I'm trying to figure out how to get all these covers, and I watched, in real-time, over the last three weeks since this New Champions #1 came out, these New Champions variant covers went from cover price, or 20% cover price, to now, there's nothing available for less than $15. In three weeks, those New Champions variants—
[11:45] John: Wait, hold on. This is a recent Marvel comic. Is that higher or lower than cover price?
[11:53] David: Now, now, let's not complain about the cost of the comic. Come on. Comics are wildly undervalued. I don't think people appreciate how much work goes into even a bad comic book. Man, that's a lot of man hours in that. Anyway. So, I'm on the hunt, John. I’m on the hunt for these New Champion variants from a year and a half ago. I'm pretty close to having them all, and I bought all of them at cover price, or a buck or two more maybe, here and there, and now all of them are worth 2-3 times as much. It's crazy.
[12:27] John: Wow. You should’ve put all your money into it.
[12:30] David: I should have bought multiple copies of each one, and you know what? That's what I'm going to do next time, John, because that is wise, sage advice. That is exactly what I'm going to do, but it's distracting me, John. I was doing a good job with my very fine Avengers run. I’m digging into the 90s now, the Avengers ‘90 through ‘99. I'm searching for those, but I got distracted.
[12:57] John: Yeah, I'm certainly not the collector, but I definitely find myself distracted by stuff. I’ll talk about these things that I'm reading or I'm excited about, and then I'll realize, “oh, I just stopped doing that six months ago.” I just, this weekend, finished reading Corto Maltese. I think I started reading that from the beginning, I don't know, when we met. It was a long time ago. I'm reading these Corto Maltese books. I have all of them, except one, and they're all super expensive. I'm like, “fine. I'm just going to buy the expensive book.” I buy it, I read that one, and then I'm like, “well, yeah, that's good enough,” and then I just stopped reading it for 6 months, like I said. The thing I bought that thing in order to do, which is read the next volumes, I just decided not to do. I finally finished that. That's just an example of, “and then I just get distracted and start doing something else.” I started reading, like, “oh, I’ve got to dive into this instead.”
[13:49] David: That's exactly—That's so me right now. For better or worse, I've been reading a lot of older comic books lately. We've talked about it several times on the show, where we're diving into these 70s and 80s, and 90s books, here and there, and every time I'm reading one of those—I'm reading an issue of Groo from 2003, and in the middle of that, there's an advertisement for Scatterbrain, and I'm like, “what is Scatterbrain?” and I'm immediately out of the comic book, and I'm on eBay, looking up Scatterbrain just to figure out what it was, and then find out it's a four-issue series that suddenly, I have to own. Yeah, it’s a thing. So, I totally feel your pain on that one. The pain of distraction. By the way, I don't need to be getting Scatterbrain because I've got a lot of piles of comic books that I still need to read, and that's before I open up my apps and start reading stuff on my apps, which, John, I don't know if you have this, but I just got a subscription to Shonen Jump.
[14:46] John: Okay.
[14:47] David: Yeah, man.
[14:49] John: I’ve thought about doing that, but then it really is like, “I’ve still got two other subscriptions I am way behind on. Am I just going to be paying for a subscription and not reading it?” Okay. Is it just […] stuff, or what does it have?
[15:03] David: It's got a little bit of everything. I've just been diving into it. I literally just got it, I don't know, a week and a half ago. I was like, “man, it's $3 a month.” I've been getting more and more into the manga stuff, because I mean, it's not a well that I've really gone to very often. So, I've already got my money's worth, easily. So, it's cool, and I'm excited to talk a little bit more about manga in 2025, hopefully. That was one of the thoughts in my head around getting that.
[15:30] John: Yeah. I’m 100% with you. I've been reading more manga lately, as well, and really enjoying it, […] branch out and find the weird areas of manga that I'm not as familiar with. I just read Chainsaw Man a little bit ago. That was terrific. That’s fun.
[15:45] David: Yeah, I've been meaning to get into that one. It looks like fun. John, for the Signa book, now that it's in, do you have all the peripherals, all the extras? Now that it's coming in, all the peripheral stuff, is all that extra stuff done, too?
[15:58] John: It's coming together. I was really there to pick up signing plates. So, I've got to sign those, get them over—Andrew was out of the country till yesterday. So, I’ve got to get those done and send them over to Andrew, and there we go. It’ll all be coming shortly.
[16:11] David: Cool. That's exciting. Have you watched the new Creature Commandos cartoon, John?
[16:20] John: No, I have not.
[16:21] David: I am a big James Gunn fan. I'm getting more and more excited about this Superman movie, and I'm not a big Superman guy. I’m just not, but I’m excited to see what James Gunn does with it, because he's just a good storyteller, man. I like his style of storytelling. It goes back to Guardians of the Galaxy, but again, we've talked about Guardians of the Galaxy, but also the TV show, Peacemaker, which is fantastic, and now I watched the first episode or two of Creature Commandos. I thought it was great. I thought it was a great little animated feature. Super fun, and it got me thinking about Creature Commandos, of course. I think that was the point of it all. So, I was reminiscing about some of the different Creature Commandos that DC’s put out over the years. My favorite one, but I don't know that it's one that people are really super aware of. So, I thought maybe, if you wanted to, I would take a couple minutes to dive into it.
[17:12] John: Yeah, describing this as the Creature Commando series people probably aren't aware of probably didn't narrow it down terribly much, as to which one. It's one of those ones—obviously, James Gunn knows the comics really well and made his name on Guardians of the Galaxy, which was fairly obscure, in terms of Marvel stuff. I mean, not obscure for comics fans, but not Spider-Man or Wolverine, or something for the mainstream people. It was definitely something you had to convince people that “this is the thing you wanted to see.” So, it seems like that was maybe what he was going for on this. Although, I also think this started before the whole DCU thing, and it became the lead DCU thing.
[17:51] David: The one I'm talking about?
[17:52] John: Yeah.
[17:53] David: The Creature Commandos that I'm talking about is the ‘99/2000.
[17:56] John: Oh, I meant the TV show. It's the first one of the new continuity that James Gunn is establishing. It's the idea that his Suicide Squad and Peacemaker happened, but not quite like you saw. The characters in here are the ones that—all the voice actors are cast to play these characters in real life.
[18:20] David: Oh, really?
[18:21] John: Should they appear, I think.
[18:23] David: Okay.
[18:24] John: That was the whole setup, but I think this was originally conceived before he was in charge of the DC Universe. I don't know. I think they announced it before then. I don't know if there was any work done on it, or whatnot.
[18:36] David: Oh, interesting. Are you suggesting that the animation is going to become the comic book DCU version, as well?
[18:44] John: No. I meant the cinematic universe. This co-exists with the upcoming Superman movies, but overwrites Batman VS Superman, or whatever. That didn't happen. Creature Commandos did.
[18:57] David: So confusing. So, this Creature Commandos that I'm talking about is the comic book Creature Commandos. There were actually several versions of comic book Creature Commandos, as well, but the one that was my favorite, appealed to me, was the ‘99/2000 edition, written by legendary comic book artist and writer, Tim Truman, drawn by Scot Eaton, with inks by Ray Kryssing, and I'm telling you, man, one of the reasons I love this, I've always been a Truman fan. Tim Truman’s my jam. I like his stuff. That bit that he did on Hawkworld, back in the day, was so good, man.
[19:33] John: I love Hawkworld so much.
[19:35] David: Yeah, it was really good.
[19:36] John: Honestly, having read it fairly recently, my opinion is that it falls apart with Issue #3, but those first two issues are so good.
[19:45] David: It's a great series, and the art is just so lush and so good in that book. So, well, in Creature Commandos, though, it’s not Tim Truman drawing. It's Scot Eaton, but I think it's blessed with some of Scot Eaton's very best work, and I'm a fan of Scot Eaton. I think Scot Eaton was another Cross-Gen guy who—did I have that right? Do you remember that?
[20:08] John: Yeah, I’m pretty sure.
[20:10] David: So, Scot Eaton was another one of those guys that went to Cross-Gen back in the day, in the mid-90s, or whenever it was, when Cross-Gen was starting up, and he was a B-level dude at Marvel, DC—I think more DC than Marvel—went to Cross-Gen, working in the studio with guys like Bart Sears and Olivier Coipel, and Paul Pelletier, and all these amazing artists. You can't help but get better, and he certainly did. By ’99/2000, he's gone through the Cross-Gen training, essentially, and comes out the other end, and I just feel this work is just fantastic and wildly underrated, in my opinion, but the Creature Commandos from ‘99/2000 is some of his best work.
[20:54] John: I don't mean to correct you. He didn't go to Cross-Gen till after that.
[21:00] David: Oh, he was in Cross-Gen after ‘99?
[21:02] John: Yeah.
[21:03] David: Oh, wow. Okay, I'm completely wrong then. Well, he was already fully formed then, because I'm telling you, this Creature Commandos is some of his best work, in my opinion. The way Kryssing’s inking is fantastic. The acting and modeling, and the storytelling, it's all there in this book. So, Creature Commandos by Truman and Eaton, it was an 8-issue miniseries, started around late-‘99/early-2000. You can find it on the DC Universe Infinite app, whatever it's called, and I'm sure that you can pick this up off of eBay, the whole collection, for a fairly decent price. It can’t possibly be that much, but it introduced all the classic characters, plus one or two new ones, and this story conceit is interesting. It's a little more sci-fi than I think previous versions of Creature Commandos were. It's still a military outfit, which I think, that's where its origins lie most deeply in, but it's a sci-fi piece. It’s an action-adventure sci-fi piece.
So, we're off-world almost the entire time. There's time warps and dimensional gateway jumps, and there's planets being taken over, a dozen at a time, from this mad ruler king, who's running through the galaxy and different dimensions, just taking over. There's hostile mega-corporations from Earth, who are basically selling the Earth out just for profit, and the Creature Commandos are thrust into all of this to stop this dimension-spanning tyrant from eventually getting to Earth and taking Earth out, and along the way, they meet a bunch of interesting characters in the cast. It’s fairly firmly built by the first issue, but you get interesting peripheral additions. In particular, there’s, in Issue #6 or #7, these creatures that call themselves Gnomes, but they don't look like traditional Dungeons and Dragons-type Gnomes, that are just these blue alien creatures that just happen to call themselves Gnomes. Anyway, they aid the Creature Commandos in this war against this big tyrant, they help the Creature Commandos. They have a way of speaking that's really, I don't know, charming and endearing, and are, I think, some of the best characters. The two best characters of the whole piece are the Gnome Wizard and his companion, who make an appearance, starting with Issue #6, and help the Creature Commandos eventually turn the tide and win the war against this tyrant.
Along the way, there's some other treachery happening amongst the villains themselves. You have the head despot, who in charge of the thing. His second-in-command, essentially, is partnering with his third-in-command to plot against the tyrant king and take his position, power struggle within the hierarchy. Wow, that is some bubble wrap that I'm popping.
[23:56] John: Is it Lunar New Year? Are you setting up a string of fireworks?
[24:00] David: So, anyway. I forgot where I was, but if you haven't had a chance, or if you haven't recently, give a look to Creature Commandos by Tim Truman and Scot Eaton. I definitely recommend it. It's a fun 8-issue series. It’s pretty light. It's not going to take a lot to get through it, and I hope if people do pick it up and take a look at it, that they take some time to appreciate the incredible level of detail and inventiveness that Scot Eaton brings to this particular story. There are pages where it's just—there's half-page splashes, from an aerial viewpoint, a birds-eye-view of this crazy lab that this mad scientist is working in, and that's just one panel on one page, and it's just hyper-detailed. Every node and wire, and computer bit, is in this room. It's just incredible attention to detail, and staging, and backgrounds. All the characters are really interesting and designed interestingly. I have to assume that Scot was probably responsible for the remodels, the remakes of the characters. They're all really fun and interesting.
Tim Truman’s script, it's almost like he wrote the script and then Scot did the art. Tim Truman wrote the full script. Here’s what I'm trying to figure this out, and this would be the only flaw in the piece, for me. It's Tim Truman who wrote the full script, and then Scot went in and drew it, but made whatever changes or adjustments, or missed the intention, here and there, and then they never gave it back to Tim to doctor the dialogue. So, there's these weird, disjointed moments where the dialogue doesn't quite match what's happening in the action. It's brief enough that it definitely doesn't ruin the piece, in any way, shape, or form. For, I think, somebody like me, who's been working professionally for a long time, I’m like, “what happened there? There's something weird happening there,” but it doesn't happen very often. It's just enough to throw me out of the piece for just a moment, just because, I don't know, I guess my editorial brain takes over and my fanboy brain takes a backseat, for a minute, but it certainly doesn't ruin the piece. There's some fun cameos by Sylvester Stallone. Sean Connery's in here. He makes a cameo. So, it’s a fun book. Great art. Good story. Highly recommend, and that is my recommendation for the week, John. Creature Commandos.
[26:30] John: Let me loop that back around to the beginning of what you said. These are not cheap on eBay, David. These are no longer cheap on eBay. Minimum, $70.00 to get the set of them.
[26:38] David: What? That's $10 a book. That's insane.
[26:43] John: There’s, evidently, a TV show that, I believe, we may have made. It was uncollected stuff. So, I don't know. I guess it's driving up the price. I have a paperback of the original Creature Commandos that J.M DeMatteis did. I don't remember who drew it. A bunch of different people over here.
[27:00] David: It’s a murderer's row of guys, actually. You know who's in it? I'm shocked that you don't remember right out of the gate.
[27:06] John: Oh, Dan Spiegle, posthumous friend of the show. He would be our friend, if only he'd known us.
[27:12] David: Absolutely. We're very likable people, John. I'm sure he would have liked us.
[27:16] John: I'm not familiar with the series you're talking about, which I guess, must have been the first actual Creature Commandos series, which I'm sure is pushing it, as well. The other ones are all in Weird War stories, and stuff like that—the original run of it. So, I'm sure that that #1 is the first Creature Commandos #1. It probably has some collectors going, but really nice logo. The logo on that comic’s really good looking. It holds up nicely.
[27:43] David: Yeah, it had a lot going for it. I'm surprised that they only got 8 issues out of that, because I’m telling you, it's fun to read that.
[27:50] John: Remember, I mean ‘99/2000, that’s pre-Ultimates and Marvel bankruptcy, and a lot of the good DC stuff, but stuff that people weren't reading.
[28:02] David: Everything pre-John Barber and David Hedgecock working professionally in comics, I think, was just a rough time. I don't think it's a coincidence that once we started working professionally in comic books, things started turning around in a big way.
[28:14] John: Yeah, things have been really good in comics, from the moment we stepped into it to the present day.
[28:20] David: Just going to leave that there. Just going to leave that hanging there. That's what I’ve got. That's what I’ve got for you. One more thing. Also, on the original Weird War Tales, the JM DeMatteis stuff, I'm excited to read that next, actually. The big reason being, well, JM DeMatteis is fantastic. I love his stuff, but there's some other writers in there that I think are pretty good. Bob Kanigher, Dave Manak, Mike Barr, but one of the artists on the Weird War Tales is Pat Broderick, and after reading that Micronauts, the first omnibus of Micronauts—there’s a ton of Pat Broderick art in there—man, I've got a new and growing appreciation for Pat Broderick's stuff from that time period. I mean, it seems like he was working everywhere, but I don't remember anyone ever talking about Pat Broderick, but he's got a lot of work out there.
[29:09] John: Yeah. People don't talk about him enough. You’re right. Yeah. It wasn't like that wasn't a great time. Creature Commandos wasn’t in a great time, I think, either. It was right in the DC implosion era, caught in that, again, really cool comics coming out. Not the most stable time, I think, if I'm remembering right when it is. Anyway.
[29:27] David: Maybe DC better not put out another Creature Commandos comic. It sounds like, every time they do, stuff's not going so great.
[29:35] John: Maybe I'm just being doomy. Maybe it was exactly the right time. I don't know.
[29:44] David: I do have one more thing for you, John, that I want to talk about today. Where are you at with the whole Jim Lee's return on the Hush 2?
[29:53] John: I like Hush. For all the making fun of it that I think we've done in the show of, the end was clearly changed, mid-flight, and then they did the actual ending later.
[30:06] David: Somehow made it worse.
[30:07] John: It would have been nice if that was the comic that Jason Todd came back in. That would have been a cool intuit, and it would have been a cool comic for Jason Todd to have come back in. No offense to the comic he did come back in. Maybe it's great. I don't remember. I love Jim Lee. I'm a giant Jim Lee fan.
[30:23] David: Are you?
[30:24] John: Yeah.
[30:25] David: I didn't know that.
[30:26] John: Yeah. He's really terrific. The stuff I really like of Jim Lee is the over-the-top science fiction aspects of it, from X-Men and WildC.A.T.S, and it's not exactly my absolute favorite version of Batman. He draws Batman really well. I really like it, but I when I think of the Batman artists I really like, I would learn more toward Dave McKean on Arkham Asylum than I would to Jim Lee.
[30:50] David: 100%. I would take Norm Breyfogle over Jim Lee on Batman. In fact, I would even maybe, probably, take Marshall Rogers over Jim Lee's Batman.
[31:03] John: Yeah, I would, too. Marshall Rogers, definitely, but I mean that's great. Jim Lee might take Marshall Rogers’ Batman over Jim Lee’s. I thought you were going to say you take Norm Breyfogle’s WildC.A.T.S over--
[31:17] David: He didn’t do WildC.A.T.S.
[31:18] John: No. That’s why I felt so insulted. The notion of Norm Breyfogle doing WildC.A.T.S was better than anything Jim Lee ever did with the characters. I'm enjoying the Last Halloween story right now. I'm having a good time reading that and seeing everybody doing their own thing, but as an homage for Tim Sale, having a good time with that story. I work with the former publisher of WildStorm and the former president of the Jim Lee Fan Club. So, Jim Lee comes up every once in a while.
[31:50] David: Shocking. Man, I forgot. I forgot that’s who you're working with.
[31:57] John: Yeah, and I mean, we're in comics in San Diego. Jim Lee was a big factor in comics in San Diego. There’s no way around that.
[32:03] David: Yeah, you were blocks away from the old WildStorm offices, if you were in La Jolla yesterday, right?
[32:10] John: I applied for WildStorm one time.
[32:11] David: Oh, you did?
[32:12] John: I did. I applied to work at WildStorm. I faxed the coloring department. I went in. They had an interview with Laura DePuy, who I believe is Laura Martin, and the thing I remember was that they’d been bought by DC. They were still in their La Jolla offices, which, by the way, that is the most crazy place you could plant a comic book publisher. That is some of the most expensive real estate in America. It was on the beach in La Jolla.
[32:39] David: Yeah, there is no more expensive business offices in all of San Diego County, for sure.
[32:45] John: The very next day was when AOL bought Time Warner. I remember that, and I’d never heard back from WildStorm. I've heard back from Laura since then, but yeah, “what do you want to see from Jim Lee?” has come up, and I'm not even—I want to see Jim Lee draw stuff. I like that he's drawing stuff. So, I'll be excited to see it. I don't know if there's some character I'd want him to do that he hasn't done. Is there a new thing I want to see him do? Am I itching for him to come back to Divine Right, or something else? Get back to Alpha Flight where he belongs? I don’t know.
[33:18] David: Punisher War Journal?
[33:20] John: Jim Lee, now, doing Punisher, I'd be on board with.
[33:22] David: Really? I'm not a huge Jim Lee guy. I don't think I am. I like his stuff, for sure, and his X-Men run was really great. I was really in love with Marc Silvestri's run on Uncanny X-Men already. For me, it really wasn’t that much of an upgrade. Marc Silvestri to Jim Lee, there wasn’t that big of a difference, for me, in terms of--
[33:45] John: Yeah, to me, looking at those things, I think it's especially true if you can dig up any of the Essential books that Marvel used to do, where they printed them in black and white. You can just see the line art on it. It's really interesting. When Jim Lee and Scott Williams come on, it just looks like the comic comes from 2 decades later than the previous issue. As good as Silvestri and Dan Green, as good as they are, and they're super good, I don't think Jim Lee is even a better artist than Marc Silvestri, but I just think the styling they started bringing to it just switched things up so much. The thing I always think about is, they go to Genosha, and Silvestri draws them all wearing baseball caps and driving jeeps, and then, 6 issues later, Jim Lee has them come back, and they're all riding hoverbikes and wearing […] body armor.
[34:37] David: Nice. So, yeah, that speaks to where I was going with this, when I started. I think you're right. I think it's the sci-fi aspects of Jim Lee's stuff, that future tech, and the more imaginative stuff is what I really liked about Jim Lee, and you don't get that with Batman. In Batman, it’s a very grounded, urban environment character, at its core. I feel like DC has gotten away from that so many times, but never to the betterment of Batman, in my opinion. It’s rare that when he gets outside of Gotham, there's an improvement on the story. God-level Batman is just not entertaining. I'm interested to see when he comes back. I think that retailers are going to remember Jim Lee on Batman the first time, more than any fans will. So, I think the ordering numbers on this thing are going to be big.
[35:33] John: Oh, massive. Yes, 100%.
[35:35] David: Yeah, which is great. I just hope there's a lot of sell-through.
[35:40] John: Yeah. One thing I am excited about, and this is the thing—I read the WildC.A.T.S Compendium over the holiday break, during my big stack of comics that I read over. That was the last one, and at the same time, reading some Sergio Toppi books, and thinking about how the Toppi stuff lives in this era, where you look at the Sergio Toppi page, and there's almost this dare of, “Yeah. Come on. Try to read this. There's a story here. Come on,” and then you read it, and it works. The storytelling actually works, but it's just on the knife’s edge of completely falling apart, but it isn’t, and that's what’s so cool about his stuff. So, I was thinking about that with the Jim Lee stuff, where those Image Comics, that era of comic-making with Jim Lee and Liefeld, and everybody. Everything was subservient to the impact of the moment on the page, I would argue. Characterization, or anything, was secondary to the characters posing in a cool way, and it looks awesome, all that stuff. Even the plot is secondary to “there's a bunch of really amazing stuff that can just have a huge visual impact to it.” I mean that as a value-neutral statement. I just think that's what the main thing about that stuff was. It’s not good or bad. It is what it’s doing.
[36:50] David: I would argue that it's way better.
[36:52] John: As you go through that, you get into these parts where sometimes a writer comes on and writes the stuff, and writes an interesting story, but you don't get what you want out of Jim Lee from it, because you’re getting that. Then Jim Lee becomes a storyteller, which he's good at, and it's fine, but it doesn't have that “wow. What's going on here?” And I don't know what the relationship was when they were making it, but when you got to the Travis Charest/James Robinson stuff, somehow that stuff melds together, where there is a greater depth to the story than there had been before, with no sacrifice made to the visuals to it. I have no idea what that was. It's the opposite of what you were saying with the script not matching the art on the Creature Commandos. The stuff just seems so tailored to what Charest with drawing, which couldn't possibly have been what anybody wrote. They could not be what James Robinson put in the script. There's six splash pages of different locations. Maybe that is what he wrote. I don’t know. Maybe he was just like, “I’m just going to tee this up, and he's going to knock it out, and then I'm going to figure out a way to add some depth to it.” There'll be these captions that just give this crazy amount of emotional depth to Pike, or somebody, some fifth-string WildC.A.T.S villain—A meaningless moment, but you have this caption that gives him this interiority that he didn't have, but not at the expense of him just looking really cool on the page that Charest drew.
Long-winded way of getting to, I feel like it has been a while since Jim Lee's been able to totally cut loose like that. Geoff Johns gives a lot of room to that. Maybe that's not fair. Maybe Geoff Johns absolutely does that, but Loeb is all about that. That, I'm excited about, just seeing somebody writing a bunch of two-page spreads for Jim Lee. I mean that in the absolute best way, and Loeb’s somebody that writes his stuff for the artist, we've talked about it before, probably to a greater degree than anybody. He and Geoff Johns used to be office mates. Is that a well-known fact?
[38:52] David: No. I think you mentioned that on one of the podcasts, but you didn’t elaborate. How do about that?
[38:56] John: When I was at Marvel, Jeph Loeb came over to Marvel, and Geoff Johns was still at DC, but for the production, more for the film stuff, they were in the same office. I think Allan Heinberg was involved in that, too.
[39:11] David: Wow, that's quite a room.
[39:12] John: Yeah, but you can see, I think with Geoff Johns, some of that Loeb-ness rubbing off, at a certain. So, by the time he's doing all the stuff with Jim Lee, on JLA, and stuff. It's well before then, but by then, it's very visual. Anyway, I'm excited to see Jim Lee do some big stuff. I don't know if it's the thing I'm most excited about Jim Lee doing, but I don't have a thing that I want to throw out there and be like, “this is what I want to see.”
[39:35] David: If you had a choice, would you go WildC.A.T.S, or would you go Uncanny X-Men?
[39:39] John: I'd like WildC.A.T.S to be a thing again. There's a nice depth to it, and there's interesting--
[39:46] David: I'd like X-Men to be a thing again, too. No, I'm just kidding. That was mean. I'm enjoying some of the X-Men stuff.
[39:51] John: I feel like Jim Lee doing Batman isn't as hardcore retro as I feel like him doing X-Men would be, because the stuff he designed on X-Men is so intrinsic to that period. X-Men ‘97 is the Jim Lee designs, and that's the retro X-Men that Marvel has. So, do you have Jim Lee come on and do that again? Well, it's not really the same world. He’s not the same artist. He's grown. That goes down to the thing we were talking about a couple weeks ago, or I was rambling about a couple weeks ago, that I want to see John Romita Jr. doing what guy-in-his-60s John Romita Jr. does, not what 19-year-old John Romita Jr. was doing. Same thing with Jim Lee. It's not going to have the same energy of Jim Lee, in his 20s, doing these, exactly the right designs for that time period, characters.
[40:39] David: I know what you. I was just talking about this with Chase, Editor-in-Chief of Fun Time Go. I brought up what, musically, I was trying to think of artists who were big in their early career, and then were able to come back 20-30 years later, whatever, and do something artistically fresh, new, interesting, in a new, different style. So, we were throwing that around, and one of the ones that Chase actually hit on, which I thought was absolutely 100% correct, was Johnny Cash. When Johnny Cash came back and did those American recordings, I mean, Johnny Cash had an entire career, and then, towards the end, he did those American recordings, which are—holy moly. Those things are amazing. Artistically, that is quite a Tour de Force that he put together. So, maybe that's what I am hoping for with some of these guys, like Jim Lee, coming back. I think, in a way, Marc Silvestri did deliver that with his Batman piece. Stylistically, it wasn't too far away from what he's done, but he sure did put an exclamation point on some stuff, and I know that took him a long time to do, but man, it was really an amazing work. So, my take on it is, I'm excited for it, but I feel like there's a lot of other things I would be more excited for Jim Lee doing. I don’t know what they are, because I know he's done other stuff. He's done Suicide Squad, and he did an original thing at DC just in the last few years, when they did that big launch where they had a bunch of new #1s and new heroes, like Sideways.
[42:09] John: Probably in my despair period. I don't remember that, at all.
[42:14] David: This he put out The Terrifics, and I think it was Sideways, or Sidelong, or Side—somebody in the audience is screaming, telling me the right name.
[42:23] John: That was the one where Rhino and Sandman team up to get wine, right? Sideways?
[42:28] David: That is a deep cut in a lot of different ways, man. Well done. With that, I think we’ve got to get out.
[42:35] John: All right. Good talking to you. Thanks for joining us on The Corner Box. We'll be back next week. Goodbye.
[42:41] David: Bye.
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