[00:00] Intro: 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 Season 2. With me, as always, is my great friend, Chase Marotz. You've been here from the beginning in this exciting, rebooted universe.
[00:40] Chase Marotz: Since Issue #1.
[00:41] John: Well, this is Issue #2.
[00:42] Chase Marotz: Well, we've been here since Issue #1.
[00:45] John: But also, there's several years, we've done this podcast solo, just you and me, with maybe Dave Baker showing up every once in a while.
[00:53] Chase: Issue #1 Volume 1.
[00:54] John: That’s right. Wait, what?
[00:57] David Hedgecock: Hey. I'm back from the mountains, John.
[01:01] John: What? It's David Hedgecock. I thought you didn't exist in this continuity.
[01:07] David: What? No, I've been here the whole time. What are you talking about?
[01:11] Chase: We got rebooted.
[01:13] David: Rebooted? Wait, am I out of the timeline?
[01:16] John: Oh, man.
[01:17] Chase: You're no longer canon.
[01:18] David: Did I get retro?
[01:20] John: I thought you were just part of The Corner Box Legends series of podcasts.
[01:24] David: The Elseworlds version?
[01:26] John: Yeah. Are you a vampire? Are you fighting Jack the Ripper? Are you whatever Thrillkiller was?
[01:32] David: Hedgecock by gas light. I miss one episode, and I get written out of the entire continuity. I can't believe I wasn't here for our new #1. You need a surprise guest for a second issue. So, here we are.
[01:48] John: That's true.
[01:49] David: Doing it. In a unique twist, the surprise guest is the regular host.
[01:55] John: Whoa.
[01:56] David: Yeah, we did it.
[01:57] John: If there isn't a more comics thing than that, there just isn't. I don't know. There isn't a more comics thing than that. You're not going to believe who shows up on page 20. It's the guy from the cover.
[02:11] David: Perfect. We are nailing this comic thing. It's no wonder we've been editors in comic books for so long. Chase is here, John.
[02:21] John: Chase, thanks for coming back.
[02:23] Chase: I'm glad you hit me back. After last time, I was worried I'd never see you guys again.
[02:27] David: So, I missed last episode because I was in the mountains, which was a bit of a bummer because I was very prepared. I read the first 12 chapters of Knightfall, and I took notes. I even took screenshots of things. So, I'm a bit bummed that I missed, but the mountains are the mountains, and if you can't get Wi-Fi, you can't get Wi-Fi, and I had a lovely time hanging out in a stream, drinking beer, and watching the sun go by. So, I guess it was worth it. Chase Marotz is here, back with us, John. I'm very excited to have him. I listened to the first episode, Season 2 Episode 1, the new #1, and I was dying laughing. You guys were cracking me up. It was a good one. So, maybe I should bow out more often. I think the podcast might improve without me hanging out.
[03:17] John: That might be true, but it's equally true for all of us. If this was just blank, just empty sound, what was that Steve Reich song that’s just silence? If we were just playing that, if we did that as a podcast, that’d be a better podcast.
[03:30] David: What's that thing where people make weird noises with their mouths, and that's just the whole thing?
[03:36] John: It's talking.
[03:38] David: The lip-smacking stuff. ASMR? If we just change this podcast to ASMR, I think we'd probably have more than three listeners, for sure.
[03:52] Chase: I don't know if I'm ready to sit here on Zoom, just smacking our lips at each other. I don't know if we're that close yet. I’ve only known you for 7 years.
[04:02] David: There's no part of that that I want.
[04:04] Chase: Thank God.
[04:06] David: All right. So, welcome to the ASMR Comic Podcast.
[04:13] John: As we're recording this, it's been a hell of a week for comics, and not in a good way. Back-to-back, we lost, almost the same age, and an extremely young age, John Cassaday and Karl Moline. We don't always bring up the people that have died in the weeks. There have been some huge people that we haven't mentioned, and that's no disrespect meant to them, but we both work with people that have known Cassaday, especially since day one, basically. I don't really have much to say. I think Cassaday was a massively important artist, in terms of some of the books that he worked on, but also, just the approach to art. He was penciling and inking stuff in an age when that wasn't super common. He wasn't coloring his work, but he was designing the work for digital coloring, in a way that a lot of people hadn't been, up to that point. He was very careful about where lettering was placed on his work and stuff, and here's a full school of what he was doing that was, I don't know, I think, really influential on the way comics art has gone since Planetary, since Astonishing X-Men.
Excuse me. I ran out of air. That wasn't me starting to cry. I just didn't take a breath. I didn't know him super well, but one time, at some convention, there was some big dinner. I don't remember what it was, but there were a bunch of tables there, just a bunch of people were there, and Cassaday was at the table I was at, but he wasn't there. He got there late, because he'd stayed out to watch the trailer drop for Dark Knight, and then he came back and just acted out the Dark Knight trailer for everybody at the table. “The Batman smashes into the car,” and would do that. So, that was pretty fun.
[05:51] David: That's pretty good. I don't have any real connection with him other than just being a fan of his work. Planetary was right up there at the top of my all-time list, for sure. Astonishing X-Men came at a time where the industry really needed it, and really delivered towards the end there of his more recent work. His launch of Star Wars at Marvel also was just a defining moment in comics. He's a giant looming large over the landscape, over the last 20 years or so, and it's too bad that we're not going to have more of his talents anymore. It's a real freaking sucky day.
[06:34] Chase: I didn't know him personally. I just knew him as a fan, but everybody I know who did meet him had nothing but just the highest praise for him, as an artist and a person. It's very sad. I hope that his family and the people he was friends with can find healing, because it’s hard to lose somebody that young, and I think, when they still seemed they had so much time left, and still recently, were putting out such great work.
[06:58] David: In this episode, we're going to be talking about the stuff we're reading these days, to switch gears a little bit, and one of the things that I decided to do, for obvious reasons, was do a deep dive back into Planetary, one of my all-time favorite books. I've probably read the whole series a couple of times, at least, but I was like, “oh. Time to do it again.” So, my first pick for new books that I'm reading was Planetary #1. It's 25 years now. The first issue came out April 1999. So, it's legitimately 25 years since that book launched, and Warren Ellis was already Warren Ellis in that moment, but boy, he was a different cat as a writer, in that moment. Still really just loved his stuff, but he was a lot more verbose than I remember him being, especially when you get a little bit later into that brief stint he did on Moon Knight where it was 2 words per book. I thought it was brilliant the way he handled Moon Knight, but it still reads really well. It still reads like a really cool Warren Ellis project, and Cassaday also was a lot. It's not Cassaday from Astonishing X-Men yet.
He's doing a six panel grid a lot. I don't know. You get more of the widescreen stuff. I feel like Cassaday played in that widescreen format a little bit. Bryan Hitch is probably the most famous for it, but I feel like Cassaday got in there, but he's not doing that with this first issue of Planetary, and some of the stuff that you see him doing later in that series, he changed, not necessarily his style, but the way he was doing storytelling. It's just interesting to see where that book starts, knowing where both of those careers go, and knowing where that book itself goes. So, I'm excited to read back into it. The way the first issue ends is also a very beautiful Warren Ellis/Cassaday moment, where the two lead characters are standing there and one of them says, “it's a strange world,” and the other one says, “let's keep it that way,” and I'm like, “amen, comics. Amen.”
[09:05] John: I haven’t read it in a few years. I remember those first issues, especially, every different genre that it tackled in every issue was done in such a different style, while still staying with Cassaday’s way he draws figures or whatever, where I remember that was one of the first ones to really confront bullet time, post-Matrix. I believe that launched at the exact same time as Authority, right?
[09:28] David: Yeah, right around the same time, for sure.
[09:30] John: If they didn't come out at the same time, the launches were tied together, or the post-Stormwatch relaunch was really tied in there, and yeah, seeing that at the same time that Hitch and Ellis were doing that low word count, big image, widescreen stuff, I remember that being a really interesting time.
[09:49] David: Authority #1 is May 1999. So, the next month.
[09:51] John: Okay. It's a miracle that comic is completed. He went back and completed that comic after Astonishing X-Men. I mean, this could have ended up like Fell or something, or newuniversal, just a little unfinished symphony.
[10:11] David: I forgot about that. I forgot that there was that long gap between issues, towards the end. There's several long gaps between issues, but there was a really long gap.
[10:20] John: I don’t remember exactly how it worked. I think, theoretically, he was still working on it while he was doing the Marvel stuff. Astonishing X-Men came out right after I started at Marvel, because there's maybe three or four months between the end of Morrison's run and the beginning of Astonishing, and that was right when I started at Marvel. It was post-Morrison. I think Planetary would come out super irregularly, but it was still coming out, but yeah, it just took a long time to really get finished. It's astounding that it was, both those guys being as busy as they were, at that point, at other publishers, kept it on there. I have no idea if Scott was still editing that stuff, at that point, though. I don't even know.
[10:58] Chase: Yeah, I'm not sure. I honestly need to go back and revisit it. It's been so long since I've even picked it up. I remember liking it, but I feel like it's high time to just go back and give it a reread.
[11:08] John: I remember one of the first issues was Hong Kong movies, which were still not exactly new, but I mean, in terms of their popularity in the US, but were still pretty close to that. It was still a handful of years earlier, where Hard Boiled had come out, or John Woo started doing the American stuff. So, it's got to be weird just to see all that stuff that was super modern when it was coming out, and like you said, David, it's now 25 years old.
[11:36] David: That's my first one, Joh. What do you got?
[11:37] John: I'm going to go with a Corner Box favorite, but I have something exciting with this one, the new issue of Groo, Sergio Aragones’ Groo the Wanderer. I was at the comic bookstore this week. I didn't know there was a new Groo. Almost missed it. So, I picked it up, I'm like, “oh, cool,” bring it home. I'm like, “yeah, I can't wait for it. I'm going to read it.” It's called Minstrel Melodies, reintroduces the Minstrel character who'd come in, in I think the beginning of the Marvel run, and he’s a rhyming performer and he sings. Minstrel in the medieval sense of the word. He sings songs, setting up what the story is going to be, and then it'll frame the story in it. So, I'm reading it, and I read the last Groo series and really enjoyed it. I'm like, “man, these guys have not missed a beat.” Super enjoying it.
This one opens up with a regular panel, Minstrel and his daughter are going into a town. Turn a page and it's an amazing two-page spread, a “where's Waldo?” kind of thing, just this town and the Minstrel’s in there. He's singing the songs. You have the song there that Mark Evanier asked to write all the rhyming words to, and there's just a zillion little people around, all of them doing something interesting and fun, and just a million little half-stories in there. So, I looked at that and was like, “this is incredible. This guy is older than The Rolling Stones and here's what he's knocking out. This is beautiful.” I actually put the comic down and was looking on eBay because I'm like, “I’ve got to read more Groo. I’ve got to catch up on some Groo stuff that I missed,” and I’m like, “what am I doing? I’ve got to get back to this.” Keep reading it.
Turn the page. The next page is a 2-page spread. The same two-page spread, except now everybody, having heard the word “Groo,” they're all running away from the Minstrel. So, it's the same setup, but everybody's now running away. Not a duplicate of the art, though. It's all completely redrawn. All the architecture is redrawn. You could tell lines don't match up exactly. It’s Aragonés. There's a lot of detail in it, and it's all real detail because everything is so clean and simple. So, if there's a million lines, that means there's a million people, because each one of those people is only one line. It's super clean and well done. If you had duplicated the background, great. No shame in that. That's fine. That's a perfectly reasonable place to do that. The fact that he redrew it and that I don't even know how he redrew it. Did he lightbox it and just move some of the lines? Was he just looking at it? I don't know, man. That guy's amazing. I'm blown away. It's a pretty funny bit. Turn the page again. Third two-page spread in a row, except now everybody's gone and they're off in the distance, running away, and the whole place is just empty, and you just see the emptiness of this town they've driven off. It's a great seven-page gag. It's really clever. Really funny. Technically, just so well done. I’m blown away.
So, I'm like, “okay, great,” and I'm reading the comics, having a good time. I’m like, “It's weird. This is another four-issue limited series. I remember, going back to the Epic days, it was almost always single-issue stories, and they were really good at that, but it's worth not having a single-issue story if you can have a four-issue story that gives you a sequence like that, where you have room to do something like that.” Then I get to the end of the comic. It was a one-issue story. This is going to be four single-issue stories that the Minstrel is introducing. So, I got the thing that I didn't think was even possible to have on there. I just thought this was an extraordinary single issue. More extraordinary that it's a single issue by people that have been making the same comic for over 40 years. I don't know. Just a really enjoyable issue. I don't know. It's really good. I had a great time with that one.
[15:08] David: I didn't know that there was a new issue out. I’ve got to get to the comic bookstore this weekend and grab one. I hope they're still around. I hope they still have some. That sounds incredible.
[15:19] John: I could’ve actually been showing you guys. I actually picked up the comic and then didn't.
[15:22] David: Yeah, you did, and then you're just looking at it. You're just looking at it below the camera. So, we can't actually see anything.
[15:30] John: I didn't want to ruin it, if you got it.
[15:32] Chase: Holy cow. People listening can't see it, but I can assure you, it's very beautiful.
[15:37] David: Who's the colorist on it?
[15:38] John: Carrie Strachan. Stan Sakai, of course, is lettering it. Yeah, I had recently read the Death of Groo graphic novel. The original colorist, Tom Luth, but it was painting. It was the blue line printing stuff. So, the color was painted. You also can tell a little bit of a difference, too. The colors are maybe a little more muted, but they're excellent. It's really good, really nicely done. She's a great addition to the team, which brings a little bit different of a feel to it, without that feel being unpleasant. She brings her own. Getting a new bass player on the band or something. It's not going to radically shift things up, but they might have their own little tricks to pulling off that are really good.
[16:15] David: Thanks for sharing that, John. It’s immediately on my list of things to get this weekend. ASAP. I don't know what else we could say about Groo and Sergio Aragonés, and Mark Evanier, that we already haven't, but for those listening, even though this is only the second episode of the podcast we've ever done, there’s a whole Season 1. We did a whole episode on Groo and Sergio Aragonés. So, jump back into the archives and listen to that one, because I think it's pretty good. We fanboy out on Sergio Aragonés pretty hard.
[16:44] John: Chase.
[16:45] Chase: Mine is actually very much the opposite of a prolific, hardworking cartoonist. I've been working my way through Peepshow because Issue #15 finally came out, unfortunately, after the death of creator, Joe Matt.
[16:56] John: Yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, definitely.
[16:59] Chase: So, I read Peepshow #15, and I've been flashing back and going back to the single issues, and I've been bittersweet, because I feel like, ultimately, it's very weird watching an addiction narrative unfold in what starts to be real-time, and then becomes no-time, and it gets so far removed from the events, as they happened, which I think the work suffers for, because just even revisiting the first six issues he did, each issue, people are reacting to things that happened in the previous issue. So, his girlfriend breaks up with him in Issue #2 because she read Issue #1. He deals with the fallout in Issue #3, and it’s very much a real portrait of this guy's life, as he's living life, and how his comic is impacting his life. It's postmodern literature. It's fantastic, and then, as his personal pornography problems started to affect his output, it just starts to get more and more removed from the time that anything happened, to the sense where Issue #15, about half of it is what was published in the Drawn & Quarterly 25, and then there's some new pages, but they're easily from years and years ago, and it leaps off on such a cliffhanger that it makes you feel sad that you didn't get more of his monstrous antics.
[18:12] John: Yeah, reading the last issue, the weirdest part was, I thought I'd be catching up on where Joe Matt was at. I hadn't read a bunch of issues in there. I have definitely not read all the Peepshow, and then reading it, that last issue took place 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, it was a crazy long time ago.
[18:29] Chase: Yeah, it's when he was pitching his show to HBO right after he left Canada, and I mean, there's just really nothing about the last 15 years of his life, living in Los Angeles, after he moved there. He's still a creep. I mean, he's still a porno-loving creep. So, some things never change, but it's an addiction narrative, and it feels like a lot of wasted potential, which is a bummer, but I'm glad they put something out. It feels like that's somebody who could have done a lot more, but maybe he couldn't have. I don't know. Maybe what makes it have this car crash compelling-ness is the fact that you were watching these dispatches of this rather unpleasant character ruining his life, but in a funny, weird way.
[19:09] John: That's an interesting way to frame it. When I was talking about it, there was a part of it, to me, that struck me, in that last issue, as that whole thing belonging to such a different era of alternative comics, when a straight white guy talking about how much he likes jerking off and likes young Asian women was a brave thing to put out there or something.
[19:28] Chase: It felt much more uncomfortable reading it now as a 38-year-old married man than it was when I discovered his work as a scuzzbag in my early 20s, and I think there's a lot more that you bring to it now that makes it a lot more complicated than it seemed the first time around.
[19:43] John: I mean, I feel like, unwittingly, an addiction narrative. This isn't him going and writing like, I don't know, the Basketball Diaries or something retrospective. He's writing in the middle of it and doesn't know that that's what he's doing, I thought.
[19:54] Chase: I totally agree with that. I think that's why, yeah, even though it's ultimately an addiction narrative, that's not focus of the narrative. The focus is on his own perversions, obsessions, and failings as a person, but that becomes so clear just by the nature of the work itself and the sporadic nature in which it came out, and the themes that he begins hyper-obsessively focusing on, by the end. It's an underground autobio comedy comic, but it's really a dark gross addiction narrative, and then his addiction happens to be jerking himself off to VHS pornography, which is a fucking wild thing to, A, get addicted to, and B, let everyone know that that's what it is. Not to make this too PG13 for the children listening at home.
[20:38] John: It's not all broken backs and guys stripping in alleyways. Sometimes, it gets dirty.
[20:44] Chase: Yeah. Exactly.
[20:50] David: You guys talk about this hifalutin comic book stuff, and then I'm going to come in with my next book, and it's Hellverine #1.
[21:01] Chase: That’s why we need you.
[21:03] David: I think my brain is rotted. I'm so much more interested in Hellverine #1 than I am in something like Peepshow #15. I appreciate the discussion greatly, but I'm not smart enough to even participate. I'm like, “hell yeah. Ghost Rider and Wolverine got mashed up, everybody. This stuff is radical.” Hellverine has fire claws, John. Fire claws.
[21:35] John: I really like seeing the stuff that I literally used to joke about at Marvel eventually becoming continuity. The Weapon Minus program, at one point, I was drunkenly suggesting that, and not to Rick Remender. So, Rick came in and brought it in. He didn’t get it from me or something, but my whole bit was that, “and then Conan would be would be Weapon Minus One, and then you get to Weapon Minus Zero, and it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex that falls in a fire, and then it comes up and it's red. It's Devil Dinosaur, and he's got claws that come out of his little Tyrannosaurus arms. That was my bit.
[22:16] David: It's not far removed.
[22:18] John: Exactly. Yeah. Again, not taking credit for any of that, at all. It was just funny that it's a lot of stuff, but Hellverine. Go ahead. Sorry.
[22:27] David: I mean, there's not much to say. Have you guys read it?
[22:30] John: I have not.
[22:31] Chase: Admittedly, no.
[22:33] David: The reason I picked it up is because Benjamin Percy, I think he's been really writing the hell out of comics books lately. The stuff he's been doing has been really good. I think he did some Wolverine stuff. He did some X-Force stuff. It’s the X-Force stuff that I was really enjoying. So, he's a guy that I've been enjoying and watching more and more. I feel like he's on the upswing. So, I was like, “oh, good. Why not give it a shot?” So, I read it off of the Marvel Universe Unlimited App. The whole idea is that Hellverine is this demonic force, Bagra-Ghul who's come to Earth and possessed Logan or Ghost Rider, and possesses Logan somehow, and he is Ghost Rider. I don't know. I didn’t really understand it. Apparently, this is not the first appearance of this character. There’s back history of this character, and I was not very entertained by it. I think, I'm out. One episode in and I'm like, “the fire claws on the cover were cool.”
[23:44] Chase: Yeah, it sounds like it was me specifically for you.
[23:48] David: Well, and also, like I said, Benjamin Percy, giving that guy a lot of credit. I do like his stuff, but this one just wasn't for me. It felt convoluted in a way that, I know that any comic could be somebody's first comic, and this didn't feel like that. This felt like I needed to know stuff about Hellverine. I was like, “I need to know stuff about Hellverine? Really? Can we just slash people with fire claws and ride a cool-ass motorcycle or something?” I just wasn't getting that. So, I'm out pretty quickly on that one. I don't think I'll make that recommendation. If somebody out there is listening and they want to explain to me who the heck Bagra-Ghul is and why I should care, I'd love to hear it. Like, I said, again, the art was rock solid. Julius Ohta does the art. He's rock solid. Ryan Stegman did the lead cover. I really liked it.
Ryan Stegman’s never been my favorite guy, but I think Jason Fabok and Ryan Stegman, the two of them, with their art in the last several months, have really thrown down the gauntlet, in my opinion. Those two guys are just really trying hard. The amount of detail they're throwing into every page, and they're trying to get really stylized and really cool, and really pushing themselves. You can tell. You can just see it, and I really appreciate that. So, this cover by Ryan Stegman’s definitely in that mix of Ryan trying to level himself up, and I think is leveling himself up, and again, Benjamin Percy, who’s the writer, I've really enjoyed his work recently. This one just wasn't my cup of tea, and it didn't feel like an inviting first issue. It didn't feel like I was invited to the party. I feel like I needed to know a lot of people to get in, and I just was not interested. So, that's my #2, John. That's my #2.
[25:43] Chase: You better be careful what you wish for, man. You're about to have the Bagra-Ghul gang all over your Twitter, telling you who that guy is. You have invited a maelstrom, my friend.
[25:54] David: I can't wait. I don't know. Maybe I'll get into it.
[25:57] Chase: The emojis just all over there. It's going to be crazy.
[26:00] David: Yeah. Fire skull emojis and claws.
[26:05] John: But all of that be promoting, what's his name again? Bagra-Ghul?
[26:09] David: Yeah, Bagra-Ghul.
[26:10] John: The Bagra-Ghul show on Disney+ that had gotten green-lit 10 months ago, and they have to get out.
[26:19] David: Fantastic.
[26:21] John: I just read the second issue, and really cemented that I've been enjoying it, is Blood Brothers Mother, by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso from DSTLRY. Azzarello is super hit-and-miss with me. Sometimes, I really like this stuff, and then sometimes, I don't particularly care for it. This is basically Cormac McCarthy meets Stand By Me. It’s these kids on this journey to try to find a few things, some of which aren't going to work out, you can already tell, or they know that they're not there anymore, but trying to find their mother, who's been taken away by a gunslinger that she knew from her previous life when she was a gunslinger, or something along those lines. Risso’s painting the art. It’s pretty beautiful looking. It's a cool, dark Western. So far, not as dark as Cormac McCarthy gets, but it definitely has that. Azzarello always aims for that feel, and I think this hits that feel, but I've generally been enjoying the stuff that DSTLRY has been putting out. I really like the format they use, where it's this oversized 48-page, the old Marvel graphic novel size. It encourages me to buy the issues, in a way, where I don't need to buy the paperback afterwards, because I can just slip these up on my shelf and get the best of both worlds, where I'm seeing it as it's coming out.
[27:45] David: Are they all square-bound or are they saddle stitch?
[27:47] Chase: Yeah.
[27:49] David: Square bound? Okay. I like that format for the right artist. I think that format is really cool. Risso is definitely a guy who probably works in that format. I love his art.
[27:59] Chase: Yeah, I've always liked his art quite a bit. Azzarello, also a hit-and-miss with me, although I appreciate him letting Batman have it all hang out. That was cool.
[28:12] John: Risso was doing a Torpedo series really recently, this series, Torpedo 1972. I don't know actually when he did it, but it was just coming out as comic books. I don't know if you've ever read any Torpedo. That's a comic that Alex Toth famously quit because the main character is too awful, too unpleasant. I love the hell out of Alex Toth’s art. I don't think we agree on too many topics other than I do agree with him that that main character is too awful and too pleasant to spend time with. Have you guys read it?
[28:41] Chase: No, I haven't, no. Although, having just talked about Peepshow, you can tell I love awful, unpleasant people you wouldn't want to spend time with. So, I'm intrigued.
[28:49] John: We reprinted it at IDW, I think IDW reprinted everything, except two stories, because those two stories are probably illegal to reprint. It probably depicts things that are illegal to depict in the United States. At least one of them. The other one is just awful, morally.
[29:11] David: Chase’s ears have never been more perked up than they are right now. Well, I've never seen him pay more attention than he’s doing right now.
[29:19] Chase: It's not true. I pay attention to everything. I'm just interested in, I don’t know. I'll Google it later.
[29:26] John: Blood Brothers Mother, stuff’s awful in it, but it's awful where it's supposed to be. You see something awful, your reaction is meant to be, “Oh, that's terrible,” not “ha-ha-ha,” like it might be with Torpedo. The format is super nice for the artist. It's interesting on the different DSTLRY books, seeing how some artists approach it in a more European way, with the higher panel counts and more density. Writers and artists, I guess, approach it like that. Some maybe just look at it like a regular comic page, just a little wider, and then some are somewhere in between, but Becky Cloonan and everybody else deservedly got an Eisner for Somna this year, which I thought was a great series. Similar milieu to the movie, The Witch. What's the name of that kind of horror movie?
[30:11] Chase: What they call the [A24] horror movies, or whatever? They're elevated.
[30:14] John: Yeah, but I mean, particularly where it's a rural setting and, and.
[30:18] Chase: Folk Horror?
[30:19] John: Folk Horror. That’s the word I couldn't think of. Blood Brothers Mother. A tough, violent western with kids.
[30:27] Chase: My next one, it's more along the lines of the Hellverine. At San Diego Comic Con, I just like to browse the back issue bins and look for little deals. I love finding just little sets of stuff, and I found the second Batman/Judge Dredd: Die Laughing. Joker finds the teleportation belt that takes him to Mega-City One. He hooks up with the Dark Judges, becomes a Dark Judge himself, and Batman has to go to Mega-City One to work with Dredd to stop it.
[30:52] John: Who did that one? I’m assuming it was Alan Grant and John Wagner.
[30:55] Chase: It was Alan Grant and John Wagner, and Glenn Fabry painted the first issue, and then Jim Murray painted the second issue. So, it’s fully painted, just super classic Dredd. I don't know. I really like Glenn Fabry. I think all these characters look oddly veiny, but I like that about them. It works for me. Just the level of weird detail. I just think this book, it's everything I like about Judge Dredd because, for me, Judge Dredd is a pitch-black comedy where none of the characters know they're in a pitch-black comedy, which is what makes it very, everything is so camp and slapstick, and the Dark Judges are so bananas, and I feel like the Joker becoming a Dark Judge just really fit in with this weird little world of heinous, clownish things happening, but it was a fun 2-issue read. I don't know.
It obviously wasn't a super deep story. It wasn't the best Dredd story. It wasn't the best Batman story, but I feel like, for two issues I paid $5 for, I got my $5 worth. I really liked reading it. This one was good. The Joker, as a Dark Judge, gets this power where his laugh is supersonic. So, he can hurt people with it. In this big dome, these hedonists are going to seal themselves off from the rest of the Mega-City One and just do their hedonistic things, cut off from society, but the Dark Judges and the Joker, and Dredd and Batman infiltrate the dome as it's getting sealed off. So, it's just the Dark Judges killing all of these absurd hedonists through this circus carnival-esque wild painted environment, while Dread and Batman fight the Dark Judges.
[32:25] David: That sounds great. With Glenn Fabry painted interiors in the first issue?
[32:29] Chase: Yeah, for the first issue, dude, and it looks, nobody listening can see this, but I assure you, it's fantastic.
[32:34] David: Man, that is a sweet, sweet spread right there.
[32:40] John: I'm not familiar with Glenn Fabry’s interior art, either, I guess, now that I think about it. I don't know.
[32:45] David: Alan Grant has rarely let me down. There's very few Alan Grant-penned books that I don't like. His stuff with Lobo was always super fun.
[32:53] Chase: Totally.
[32:54] John: Yeah, he’s super good.
[32:55] David: Yeah. That guy can write the hell out of a comic.
[32:58] Chase: I’m a sucker for anything with the Dark Judges, because Judge Mortis is my favorite one. Almost any commission I try and get, I just ask them to draw me Judge Mortis. I'm the only person in the world owns a Dan Parent Judge Mortis, and it looks great. It looks great.
[33:18] David: Longtime Archie Comics artist, Dan Parent, did a Judge Dredd Mortis for you?
[33:24] Chase: He didn't even know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote him, he's like, “Okay,” and then I came back like two days later. It was San Diego Comic Con. Not this most recent one, but the last one. He’d drawn the hell out of it. Really happy.
[33:39] David: That's fantastic. So, my next one, not really knowing anything about it, but I want to check it out, was Plastic Man No More. I'm not a big Plastic Man guy, but the artwork on the cover, in particular, just really caught my eye, and I liked it, and then I read the solicitation copy, and I thought it was really good, clever, and fun. So, I gave it a read, and I really thought was good. So, it's written by Chris Cantwell and drawn by Alex Lins. They just delivered a really great first issue, I guess, in a way, returning to his roots. He's really a down-on-his-luck character in this first issue, and I guess I can give away a little bit. I don't want to give away too much because it just came out, I think, but anyway, the idea is that Plastic Man has been zapped by some alien death ray of some sort, and it's degraded his body in a way that basically, the cumulative effect of all the damage that he's taken as Plastic Man over the years has now caught up to him, and he’s started to basically decompose. So, you get a really good look at Plastic Man's private life and where he is, as a human being, not as a superhero, and it’s an interesting take.
It's not the last version of Plastic Man that I encountered, but I'm willing to go with it. It seems like it's going to be a fun, interesting, character study. He's dealing with family issues and dealing with just his own mortality in a very real and meaningful way, and looking at who he thinks his friends are, and discovering that maybe they’re not the friends he thought they were, and I think it's a nice, interesting little contemplation on one man's life wrapped up in what seems to be an interesting little superhero side-tale, as well. So, I'm 100% in. Alex Lins's art is top-notch. He draws in two different styles in the book, and they're so different that I was like, “I can't believe this is the same guy. I don't know how he's actually doing it,” and Chris Cantwell’s got some really good dialogue, and the story moves along really well, and I'm just right into it, right from the start. It starts out great and finishes strong. So, I'm around for the whole series, for sure, based on the first issue, and definitely recommend that one. Really liked it.
[36:08] John: I had every intention last night of reading this comic, and then I sat down on the couch, and then found myself lying there in the dark at 1:00 in the morning, almost instantaneous. I'm looking forward to it even more now. I've got it right there behind me.
[36:25] David: Definitely worth a read, John. You're going to like it.
[36:26] John: Is that a threat? Are you threatening me? Did you come back, and—I’m just kidding. I don't know. Sorry. I was going to maybe try to go with more story-driven drama but it’s probably not worth.
[36:38] David: If you were better at improv, it might be worth it.
[36:40] Chase: I think all improv is bad.
[36:41] David: You think all improv is bad? What's that TV show? Whose Line Is It Anyway?
[36:46] John: Did I tell you my “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Story.
[36:49] David: No, but I want to hear it.
[36:50] John: I saw it live. I went and saw that show live. It was actually very entertaining. They were very good. They did do multiple retakes, but less than you would think. They were doing a really good job on it. The problem that I had, though, is that I saw it performed live on September 10th, 2001, and really was not able to talk about my experience seeing “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” for any length of time.
[37:14] Chase: Going to teach at NYU, I got dragged to so much garbage improv, dude. Good lord.
[37:23] John: My daughter, when she was 5 or 6, or so, maybe a little older, maybe 7, was in a kids improv class that I got to go to all the time. You weren’t allowed in the class, but I got to go to all the performances. My wife, surprisingly, found herself busy on a lot of those, at least a couple of those days, but not this guy, and I will say, the quality of 6- to 10-year-old children's improv is, let's call it variable.
[37:54] David: Okay. Let’s leave it there. I'm sure your daughter was delightful. She was the cream of the crop.
[38:03] John: Yes, in that her bits weren't just her going up and making fart noises. There was no shortage of that.
[38:09] David: I feel like maybe that would be for me. I feel like maybe I would be entertained by that. I think I might be into 10-year-old improv and didn't even know.
[38:16] John: It would be exactly like Hellverine. You'd be like, “oh, you guys are trying to be funny. You guys suck.”
[38:25] David: That sounds like a good op, just going to 10-year-old improv shows and just screaming “you guys suck,” just heckling 10-year-olds.
[38:37] John: I heard on Saturday morning, that's what got Doyle fired, because he rolled straight out into a kids improv class.
[38:44] David: That's what it was.
[38:45] John: I heard.
[38:46] Chase: Did you see that IDW is selling whiskey now?
[38:48] John: To children? To improv classes?
[38:51] Chase: No, I'm serious. Wynonna Earp branded whiskey.
[38:52] David: To anyone that will buy it. John, guess how many bottles of this whiskey that they made, though. Take a wild guess.
[39:02] John: Futurama joke, but it's either real high or real low. 10,000.
[39:06] David: 666.
[39:08] John: Oh, I get it.
[39:10] David: That's the response that I gave, too. Oh, I get it.
[39:18] Chase: Whose turn is it?
[39:20] David: It’s John's turn. We’ve got to get back, John. This is the last one, John. Make it good.
[39:24] John: Okay. So, the big deep dive that I've gotten into myself, probably another one that I'd want to try to harangue everybody into doing an episode about, is the European graphic novel series called Corto Maltese. It's another one that DW put out. It's another one I may have complained about in the past, in the expensive aftermarket prices of European graphic novels, where we're still at this place where I am missing one volume of it and it's going to cost me, at least, $100.
[39:50] David: Well, you got all the rest of them for free. Think about it that way.
[39:55] John: But it is one of things, if I mentioned it to everybody out here, “hey, you guys can go out and read Corto Maltese. So, here's what you do. Get about $1000 and go on eBay, and then you'll be able to read it.”
[40:05] Chase: I think I still have a few of those on my shelf. I’ve just not backed into them.
[40:09] John: It was a big fan of it because Hugo Pratt, who writes and draws Corto Maltese, was a huge influence on Paul Pope, and I was a big Paul Pope guy, when I was young, but Paul Pope was coming up right around when Hugo Pratt died. He also died pretty young, I believe. He was in his 60s or something, maybe. Corto Maltese is probably best known for Frank Miller being a huge fan of the character, and naming the country in Dark Knight Returns, Corto Maltese, which has gone on to become a just general location in DC Comics and TV, and movies, and stuff, but Corto Maltese is a seafaring adventure comic, set in the early 20th century, during World War One, a TinTin-type adventure, in a way. Hugo Pratt's art is just amazing. It's really cool. It's just a lot of solid black areas, and he was a huge Mill Caniff guy. You can see that evolving into Pratt’s style, and then you can definitely see the places where like, “oh, that's why Paul Pope draws mouths like that,” or whatever, all these little bits where he definitely picked up some drawing fundamentals in there. Paul Pope’s art brought in a lot of other stuff to it. I don't mean to say it was aping it or anything. The same way Pratt wasn't aping Caniff.
So, I hadn't read it in a long time. NBM put out some random stories and the late 80s, I think. Dean Mullaney at Euro Comics put out the complete Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese at IDW, over the course of a few years. It’s 12 volumes. It exactly mirrors the European volumes, which is weird because some of them are 60 pages and some of them are 200. It’s all over the place, but the thing that really blew me away, because I hadn't read it in a really long time, I'd maybe read a little bit of it when the volumes first started coming out, and now I'm sitting down and reading them in order. Going into that stuff, we've talked about this at length, but when you go into that stuff from the 70s, set in the past, from Europe, you're going to wind up with some uncomfortable bits, some parts where it's like, “I don't like that depiction of native people,” or whatever.
So, I fully expected to go into that, and you're hit with that right away, where there's a lot of cannibal-type people, people calling people cannibals, I mean, visually very native-style garb, but the thing that is extraordinary about this comic, especially for its time and place that it was made, is that that is not the attitude that comic takes, at all. That attitude is fully on those guys’ side. Corto Maltese has no allegiance to the European powers that are fighting. He's man-with-no-name-style. He's very much like Han solo. He's very Han Solo-style. He's just navigating this world, doesn't want anything to do with any side. He has no allegiance to the British side of this fight or the German side. This is just some European war that's going on, and the people that he meets in all the different places that he goes to are absolutely treated as equals to the European characters, and are as educated, and as well-spoken, and as fully developed as anybody, and it's surprising to see that.
Pratt had lived that life as a merchant seaman, and actually had lived some of this stuff, and had met some of these people. So, he was really talking about his own experiences, not just regurgitating fictions about these places. I'm sure a lot of it's not right. I'm sure a lot of it is not correctly presenting how the Māori people really were, but the intentionality of it is clear that it's not meant to be degrading to anybody, and it's not meant to be speaking down about anyone.
[43:47] Chase: I didn't know he'd been a merchant seaman, actually.
[43:49] John: Something like that. I might be getting details wrong.
[43:52] Chase: I just hear stuff like that, man, and it makes me like, “what if I'd done anything besides get heavy into Xbox in my early 20s?” I guess, we'll never know, but that's all.
[44:05] John: We all live our lives.
[44:07] Chase: Yeah, some of us more from one couch than others.
[44:12] John: He didn't have a head tattoo, man.
[44:14] Chase: That's true, yeah.
[44:15] John: He never will. You still can become a merchant seaman.
[44:19] Chase: It's time for me to learn to swim.
[44:20] John: They give you a boat.
[44:21] Chase: My wife finally sat me down the other day and she's like, “you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to wear shorts to the beach, dude. No more jeans to the beach. It's weird.” I don’t like wearing shorts very much. “Just get over it, dude. You’ve lived in San Diego for 8 years.”
[44:35] David: Your wife is not wrong in this.
[44:37] Chase: I know she’s not wrong.
[44:38] David: I generally agree. What if you just cut your pants at the knees?
[44:42] Chase: I don't own enough pair of pants to sacrifice them.
[44:45] David: Jesus, come on, man. Old Navy has always got jeans on sale. Just get Old Navy. Next time there's a sale, you buy yourself 3 or 4 pair of jeans, and then you can cut […].
[44:55] Chase: So many rules I'm under. Wear shorts to the beach. Don't do steroids.
[45:01] David: Yeah, you're tortured. Guess what just showed up in my e-mail. An advertisement for the limited-edition Wynonna Earp Whiskey. Now available. “IDW Publishing is thrilled to celebrate the Supernatural legacy of Wynonna Earp with this exclusive whiskey, crafted in honor of the to-be special, Vengeance, and limited to only 666 bottles. Infused with the bold spirit of the Earp family curse, this collector’s item is a must have for every fan. Share a toast with Wynonna and the gang, from purgatory to the fiery depths they brave.” That's just the start to that e-mail. All right, Chase, I think you've got one more, if you want.
[45:42] Chase: I just finished this. I posted it on my book club. It’s Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters, which I've had on my shelf forever, and it finally was my turn to choose the book club. So, I made everyone read a graphic novel with me. For several people, it was their first. I loved this book. I mean, have you guys both read it? Really sad. Really made me feel melancholy for days after I finished it.
[46:04] John: The story itself?
[46:05] Chase: The story itself. I think both things. I think it's another thing. I mean, not exactly in the way of Peepshow, but I think it's another book where just the structure and the time it took to make, and I think the way you can feel his age as an artist over some of the pages only enhances how much care and emotion went to bringing this thing to life. I think just the creation process and the physicality of the product itself enhanced this story, which is very sad. It seems like it's going to be this monster story, but then it very much becomes just about the way we're emotional monsters to each other, and the way that trauma can reverberate throughout everyone's life. It's murky, by the end, who the real monster is, and I guess, everyone, in their own way, is, and maybe it's intentional, but I feel like the only character that I didn't get to know, at all, was Bobby. It's the guy who becomes the literal Monster and is on the cover.
I feel like after he becomes a monster, he stops functioning as a character, except for this vehicle for everyone else to react to, and maybe that's the point, but I feel like I didn't really get any catharsis from him, at the end, because he was so non-vocal and there, in a way that everyone else wasn't, whereas I was getting all of these rich things about these people's past and relationships, and the way they feel about each other. I mean, outside of Bobby being a little boy who's terrorized by his father, and then a lost young man who joins the military, I feel like there was so much more that I wanted to know about this guy, and maybe that's the point. I don't mean to be presumptuous. I mean, I might have asked Barry Windsor-Smith, is that the point, or what's going on?
[47:34] John: Yeah, it did actually strike me a little bit like Peepshow, now that you mention it. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way, but it did feel like it was something from a different era than when it came out. I don't know. 20 years ago, that would have been the book of the year. That would have been the thing everybody was talking about. Whatever time.
[47:53] Chase: I mean, yeah, it took him, what, 30 years and it started as a Hulk pitch in the 80s?
[47:58] John: Allegedly, it started as a Hulk pitch. I think he caused huge rifts, as well, because I think he and Jim Shooter think Bill Mantlo stole parts of that graphic novel for his Hulk run. Do you know that story?
[48:10] Chase: No. Outside of knowing the basics of it, I hadn't dived into the why of it all and the riffs that it caused.
[48:19] John: I couldn't figure out from Monsters what was supposed to be the Hulk and what wasn't, because it's not set in the present day.
[48:26] Chase: It’s very wild. Yeah, I don't know how much changed from the original pitch, either. I mean, outside of him being this Hulk-like character, there's not a lot of Bruce Banner present.
[48:33] John: Maybe I'm wrong. I thought it was like the Adastra in Africa, where there were pages of it drawn with the Hulk, that were changed later, but the story is something that Bill Mantlo introduced that Bruce Banner was abused as a kid. I think the accusation was that it was lifted from this story or that he'd seen this story and put that in there. I don't think that it was definitive.
[49:04] Chase: Right, and I think we all know, just having edited stuff and it seen stuff, sometimes you get a pitch, and you get a pitch from someone else that has similarities, and they might not have seen it, but feelings can get hurt in that stuff, and yeah, maybe it was intentional. Maybe it wasn't. Having not been there, but there is room for crossover in some of these thematic things that can feel intentional when it’s not.
[49:27] John: The other part of that's sad, I don't know if sad is the right word, but when I was saying that, I wasn't trying to be facetious, that it is one of the only complete works by Barry Windsor-Smith that exists. So much of Barry Windsor Smith's career is this frustrating. There's a great run in Conan, there's Weapon X, then there's the Disaster of Storyteller. That was one of my favorite comics when that were coming out, and Fantagraphics put out the books of it, and if you've ever seen those, I've never been able to read them because they're so depressing, because as you're reading through this thing, the color disappears, and then the inks disappear, and then it’s just sketches, and then the story just is gone. It doesn't end. He never finished any of those stories. He has great issues of X-Men that he drew and stuff like that. He's obviously an incredible artist, but the parts where the guy that wrote and drew Weapon X, here's other comics he did, and it's Monsters and Adastra in Africa, and maybe Red Nails, and that's it.
[50:27] Chase: Yeah. No, totally.
[50:30] John: Sorry. He has Archer and Armstrong, but it's not like that ends. He has Rune.
[50:40] Chase: I definitely hear what you're saying. It feels like it's this very deeply personal, involved work, but it's not like he's someone like Alan Moore, who you can point to all of these different projects that he did, or all these different eras of his life, all of which meant something to him. I like the Conan art. I think that's one of the things that’s top-of-mind, as David and I've been doing the Conan archiving. So, I've just been going through so much of Barry Windsor-Smith’s old art. We put these omnibi’s together, and yeah, it’s wild to think of him laboring over this thing for three decades, longer gestating in his mind since the start as a pitch. I think it just puts the whole story in a different perspective than if this was just something that came out over a 2-year period. I think sometimes, the process of creation informs how you react to the creation.
[51:26] John: That’s a good way to put it.
[51:27] Chase: No, I really recommend it. It left me ruminating on it for a long time afterwards, which I think is the sign of any good work. I feel like Batman/Judge Dredd, I enjoyed that. I thought about it today. I'm not going to think about that book tomorrow and be like, “I have to sort out my feelings about all this. How did this make me [feel]?” There's some comics that just don't make you do that, and then the ones that do, I feel like it’s an accomplishment.
[51:54] John: Absolutely. Well, that's probably our show for today.
[51:56] David: I own every copy of Rune.
[51:58] Chase: I’d say you ordered them right now. You're on that eBay again.
[52:01] David: I already own those. I’ve owned those forever.
[52:04] John: Is the Conan/Rune crossover any good?
[52:07] David: I like it. No, it's a mess. All the Rune stuff is a big mess, and I don't need to derail this conversation. I was just trying to be funny because I have nothing to add to the serious conversation with Monsters, other than to say that I enjoyed it as well and it was depressing as fuck, and also, I thought that 30 years to create that was also in some ways depressing, not because it's not a quality work, but because it landed with such a thud within the comics reading community. To your point, John, at the beginning of the discussion, it never got talked about. It's weird that no one talked about it, or if it was talked about, I don't know, it didn't raise to the level of comic fandom the way I feel like it could have or should have, but I don't know. It's very odd. It was a very odd moment that people weren't talking about that. When that book came out, everyone should have been talking about that, and I think the last time Barry Windsor-Smith did something big, everybody talked about it. So, it was an odd thing. So, anyway, back to Rune, the thing I do know about. Rune had the Infinity Gems, John.
[53:13] John: Really?
[53:14] David: At least one of them, yeah.
[53:15] John: I read them. I don't remember Rune. I was definitely buying it because I was buying Barry Windsor-Smith, but that was not my […].
[53:22] David: They actively had to go into the Rune universe and get the Infinity Gem from Rune and bring it back to the Marvel U at some point, and they did do that. It was a thing that happened.
[53:35] Chase: David, just flashing back though, I feel like that's half the comics I talk about with you. Is it good? No, but I love it. That's your preferred book.
[53:48] David: Yeah. That's probably true. I don't know what that says about me. Anyway, John, I think we should wrap this one up. Chase, what do you think?
[53:59] Chase: Yeah, that sounds good. Thanks for having me back.
[54:01] John: Anytime.
[54:02] David: Thanks, everybody.
[54:03] John: Thanks a lot. We will be back next week, with more The Corner Box. The New Adventures of The Corner Box. Ultimate Corner Box.
[54:10] David: Ultimate Corner Box. Absolute Corner Box?
[54:14] John: That’s it, yes. See you all next week.
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 Season 2. With me, as always, is my great friend, Chase Marotz. You've been here from the beginning in this exciting, rebooted universe.
[00:40] Chase Marotz: Since Issue #1.
[00:41] John: Well, this is Issue #2.
[00:42] Chase Marotz: Well, we've been here since Issue #1.
[00:45] John: But also, there's several years, we've done this podcast solo, just you and me, with maybe Dave Baker showing up every once in a while.
[00:53] Chase: Issue #1 Volume 1.
[00:54] John: That’s right. Wait, what?
[00:57] David Hedgecock: Hey. I'm back from the mountains, John.
[01:01] John: What? It's David Hedgecock. I thought you didn't exist in this continuity.
[01:07] David: What? No, I've been here the whole time. What are you talking about?
[01:11] Chase: We got rebooted.
[01:13] David: Rebooted? Wait, am I out of the timeline?
[01:16] John: Oh, man.
[01:17] Chase: You're no longer canon.
[01:18] David: Did I get retro?
[01:20] John: I thought you were just part of The Corner Box Legends series of podcasts.
[01:24] David: The Elseworlds version?
[01:26] John: Yeah. Are you a vampire? Are you fighting Jack the Ripper? Are you whatever Thrillkiller was?
[01:32] David: Hedgecock by gas light. I miss one episode, and I get written out of the entire continuity. I can't believe I wasn't here for our new #1. You need a surprise guest for a second issue. So, here we are.
[01:48] John: That's true.
[01:49] David: Doing it. In a unique twist, the surprise guest is the regular host.
[01:55] John: Whoa.
[01:56] David: Yeah, we did it.
[01:57] John: If there isn't a more comics thing than that, there just isn't. I don't know. There isn't a more comics thing than that. You're not going to believe who shows up on page 20. It's the guy from the cover.
[02:11] David: Perfect. We are nailing this comic thing. It's no wonder we've been editors in comic books for so long. Chase is here, John.
[02:21] John: Chase, thanks for coming back.
[02:23] Chase: I'm glad you hit me back. After last time, I was worried I'd never see you guys again.
[02:27] David: So, I missed last episode because I was in the mountains, which was a bit of a bummer because I was very prepared. I read the first 12 chapters of Knightfall, and I took notes. I even took screenshots of things. So, I'm a bit bummed that I missed, but the mountains are the mountains, and if you can't get Wi-Fi, you can't get Wi-Fi, and I had a lovely time hanging out in a stream, drinking beer, and watching the sun go by. So, I guess it was worth it. Chase Marotz is here, back with us, John. I'm very excited to have him. I listened to the first episode, Season 2 Episode 1, the new #1, and I was dying laughing. You guys were cracking me up. It was a good one. So, maybe I should bow out more often. I think the podcast might improve without me hanging out.
[03:17] John: That might be true, but it's equally true for all of us. If this was just blank, just empty sound, what was that Steve Reich song that’s just silence? If we were just playing that, if we did that as a podcast, that’d be a better podcast.
[03:30] David: What's that thing where people make weird noises with their mouths, and that's just the whole thing?
[03:36] John: It's talking.
[03:38] David: The lip-smacking stuff. ASMR? If we just change this podcast to ASMR, I think we'd probably have more than three listeners, for sure.
[03:52] Chase: I don't know if I'm ready to sit here on Zoom, just smacking our lips at each other. I don't know if we're that close yet. I’ve only known you for 7 years.
[04:02] David: There's no part of that that I want.
[04:04] Chase: Thank God.
[04:06] David: All right. So, welcome to the ASMR Comic Podcast.
[04:13] John: As we're recording this, it's been a hell of a week for comics, and not in a good way. Back-to-back, we lost, almost the same age, and an extremely young age, John Cassaday and Karl Moline. We don't always bring up the people that have died in the weeks. There have been some huge people that we haven't mentioned, and that's no disrespect meant to them, but we both work with people that have known Cassaday, especially since day one, basically. I don't really have much to say. I think Cassaday was a massively important artist, in terms of some of the books that he worked on, but also, just the approach to art. He was penciling and inking stuff in an age when that wasn't super common. He wasn't coloring his work, but he was designing the work for digital coloring, in a way that a lot of people hadn't been, up to that point. He was very careful about where lettering was placed on his work and stuff, and here's a full school of what he was doing that was, I don't know, I think, really influential on the way comics art has gone since Planetary, since Astonishing X-Men.
Excuse me. I ran out of air. That wasn't me starting to cry. I just didn't take a breath. I didn't know him super well, but one time, at some convention, there was some big dinner. I don't remember what it was, but there were a bunch of tables there, just a bunch of people were there, and Cassaday was at the table I was at, but he wasn't there. He got there late, because he'd stayed out to watch the trailer drop for Dark Knight, and then he came back and just acted out the Dark Knight trailer for everybody at the table. “The Batman smashes into the car,” and would do that. So, that was pretty fun.
[05:51] David: That's pretty good. I don't have any real connection with him other than just being a fan of his work. Planetary was right up there at the top of my all-time list, for sure. Astonishing X-Men came at a time where the industry really needed it, and really delivered towards the end there of his more recent work. His launch of Star Wars at Marvel also was just a defining moment in comics. He's a giant looming large over the landscape, over the last 20 years or so, and it's too bad that we're not going to have more of his talents anymore. It's a real freaking sucky day.
[06:34] Chase: I didn't know him personally. I just knew him as a fan, but everybody I know who did meet him had nothing but just the highest praise for him, as an artist and a person. It's very sad. I hope that his family and the people he was friends with can find healing, because it’s hard to lose somebody that young, and I think, when they still seemed they had so much time left, and still recently, were putting out such great work.
[06:58] David: In this episode, we're going to be talking about the stuff we're reading these days, to switch gears a little bit, and one of the things that I decided to do, for obvious reasons, was do a deep dive back into Planetary, one of my all-time favorite books. I've probably read the whole series a couple of times, at least, but I was like, “oh. Time to do it again.” So, my first pick for new books that I'm reading was Planetary #1. It's 25 years now. The first issue came out April 1999. So, it's legitimately 25 years since that book launched, and Warren Ellis was already Warren Ellis in that moment, but boy, he was a different cat as a writer, in that moment. Still really just loved his stuff, but he was a lot more verbose than I remember him being, especially when you get a little bit later into that brief stint he did on Moon Knight where it was 2 words per book. I thought it was brilliant the way he handled Moon Knight, but it still reads really well. It still reads like a really cool Warren Ellis project, and Cassaday also was a lot. It's not Cassaday from Astonishing X-Men yet.
He's doing a six panel grid a lot. I don't know. You get more of the widescreen stuff. I feel like Cassaday played in that widescreen format a little bit. Bryan Hitch is probably the most famous for it, but I feel like Cassaday got in there, but he's not doing that with this first issue of Planetary, and some of the stuff that you see him doing later in that series, he changed, not necessarily his style, but the way he was doing storytelling. It's just interesting to see where that book starts, knowing where both of those careers go, and knowing where that book itself goes. So, I'm excited to read back into it. The way the first issue ends is also a very beautiful Warren Ellis/Cassaday moment, where the two lead characters are standing there and one of them says, “it's a strange world,” and the other one says, “let's keep it that way,” and I'm like, “amen, comics. Amen.”
[09:05] John: I haven’t read it in a few years. I remember those first issues, especially, every different genre that it tackled in every issue was done in such a different style, while still staying with Cassaday’s way he draws figures or whatever, where I remember that was one of the first ones to really confront bullet time, post-Matrix. I believe that launched at the exact same time as Authority, right?
[09:28] David: Yeah, right around the same time, for sure.
[09:30] John: If they didn't come out at the same time, the launches were tied together, or the post-Stormwatch relaunch was really tied in there, and yeah, seeing that at the same time that Hitch and Ellis were doing that low word count, big image, widescreen stuff, I remember that being a really interesting time.
[09:49] David: Authority #1 is May 1999. So, the next month.
[09:51] John: Okay. It's a miracle that comic is completed. He went back and completed that comic after Astonishing X-Men. I mean, this could have ended up like Fell or something, or newuniversal, just a little unfinished symphony.
[10:11] David: I forgot about that. I forgot that there was that long gap between issues, towards the end. There's several long gaps between issues, but there was a really long gap.
[10:20] John: I don’t remember exactly how it worked. I think, theoretically, he was still working on it while he was doing the Marvel stuff. Astonishing X-Men came out right after I started at Marvel, because there's maybe three or four months between the end of Morrison's run and the beginning of Astonishing, and that was right when I started at Marvel. It was post-Morrison. I think Planetary would come out super irregularly, but it was still coming out, but yeah, it just took a long time to really get finished. It's astounding that it was, both those guys being as busy as they were, at that point, at other publishers, kept it on there. I have no idea if Scott was still editing that stuff, at that point, though. I don't even know.
[10:58] Chase: Yeah, I'm not sure. I honestly need to go back and revisit it. It's been so long since I've even picked it up. I remember liking it, but I feel like it's high time to just go back and give it a reread.
[11:08] John: I remember one of the first issues was Hong Kong movies, which were still not exactly new, but I mean, in terms of their popularity in the US, but were still pretty close to that. It was still a handful of years earlier, where Hard Boiled had come out, or John Woo started doing the American stuff. So, it's got to be weird just to see all that stuff that was super modern when it was coming out, and like you said, David, it's now 25 years old.
[11:36] David: That's my first one, Joh. What do you got?
[11:37] John: I'm going to go with a Corner Box favorite, but I have something exciting with this one, the new issue of Groo, Sergio Aragones’ Groo the Wanderer. I was at the comic bookstore this week. I didn't know there was a new Groo. Almost missed it. So, I picked it up, I'm like, “oh, cool,” bring it home. I'm like, “yeah, I can't wait for it. I'm going to read it.” It's called Minstrel Melodies, reintroduces the Minstrel character who'd come in, in I think the beginning of the Marvel run, and he’s a rhyming performer and he sings. Minstrel in the medieval sense of the word. He sings songs, setting up what the story is going to be, and then it'll frame the story in it. So, I'm reading it, and I read the last Groo series and really enjoyed it. I'm like, “man, these guys have not missed a beat.” Super enjoying it.
This one opens up with a regular panel, Minstrel and his daughter are going into a town. Turn a page and it's an amazing two-page spread, a “where's Waldo?” kind of thing, just this town and the Minstrel’s in there. He's singing the songs. You have the song there that Mark Evanier asked to write all the rhyming words to, and there's just a zillion little people around, all of them doing something interesting and fun, and just a million little half-stories in there. So, I looked at that and was like, “this is incredible. This guy is older than The Rolling Stones and here's what he's knocking out. This is beautiful.” I actually put the comic down and was looking on eBay because I'm like, “I’ve got to read more Groo. I’ve got to catch up on some Groo stuff that I missed,” and I’m like, “what am I doing? I’ve got to get back to this.” Keep reading it.
Turn the page. The next page is a 2-page spread. The same two-page spread, except now everybody, having heard the word “Groo,” they're all running away from the Minstrel. So, it's the same setup, but everybody's now running away. Not a duplicate of the art, though. It's all completely redrawn. All the architecture is redrawn. You could tell lines don't match up exactly. It’s Aragonés. There's a lot of detail in it, and it's all real detail because everything is so clean and simple. So, if there's a million lines, that means there's a million people, because each one of those people is only one line. It's super clean and well done. If you had duplicated the background, great. No shame in that. That's fine. That's a perfectly reasonable place to do that. The fact that he redrew it and that I don't even know how he redrew it. Did he lightbox it and just move some of the lines? Was he just looking at it? I don't know, man. That guy's amazing. I'm blown away. It's a pretty funny bit. Turn the page again. Third two-page spread in a row, except now everybody's gone and they're off in the distance, running away, and the whole place is just empty, and you just see the emptiness of this town they've driven off. It's a great seven-page gag. It's really clever. Really funny. Technically, just so well done. I’m blown away.
So, I'm like, “okay, great,” and I'm reading the comics, having a good time. I’m like, “It's weird. This is another four-issue limited series. I remember, going back to the Epic days, it was almost always single-issue stories, and they were really good at that, but it's worth not having a single-issue story if you can have a four-issue story that gives you a sequence like that, where you have room to do something like that.” Then I get to the end of the comic. It was a one-issue story. This is going to be four single-issue stories that the Minstrel is introducing. So, I got the thing that I didn't think was even possible to have on there. I just thought this was an extraordinary single issue. More extraordinary that it's a single issue by people that have been making the same comic for over 40 years. I don't know. Just a really enjoyable issue. I don't know. It's really good. I had a great time with that one.
[15:08] David: I didn't know that there was a new issue out. I’ve got to get to the comic bookstore this weekend and grab one. I hope they're still around. I hope they still have some. That sounds incredible.
[15:19] John: I could’ve actually been showing you guys. I actually picked up the comic and then didn't.
[15:22] David: Yeah, you did, and then you're just looking at it. You're just looking at it below the camera. So, we can't actually see anything.
[15:30] John: I didn't want to ruin it, if you got it.
[15:32] Chase: Holy cow. People listening can't see it, but I can assure you, it's very beautiful.
[15:37] David: Who's the colorist on it?
[15:38] John: Carrie Strachan. Stan Sakai, of course, is lettering it. Yeah, I had recently read the Death of Groo graphic novel. The original colorist, Tom Luth, but it was painting. It was the blue line printing stuff. So, the color was painted. You also can tell a little bit of a difference, too. The colors are maybe a little more muted, but they're excellent. It's really good, really nicely done. She's a great addition to the team, which brings a little bit different of a feel to it, without that feel being unpleasant. She brings her own. Getting a new bass player on the band or something. It's not going to radically shift things up, but they might have their own little tricks to pulling off that are really good.
[16:15] David: Thanks for sharing that, John. It’s immediately on my list of things to get this weekend. ASAP. I don't know what else we could say about Groo and Sergio Aragonés, and Mark Evanier, that we already haven't, but for those listening, even though this is only the second episode of the podcast we've ever done, there’s a whole Season 1. We did a whole episode on Groo and Sergio Aragonés. So, jump back into the archives and listen to that one, because I think it's pretty good. We fanboy out on Sergio Aragonés pretty hard.
[16:44] John: Chase.
[16:45] Chase: Mine is actually very much the opposite of a prolific, hardworking cartoonist. I've been working my way through Peepshow because Issue #15 finally came out, unfortunately, after the death of creator, Joe Matt.
[16:56] John: Yeah, we talked about that. Yeah, definitely.
[16:59] Chase: So, I read Peepshow #15, and I've been flashing back and going back to the single issues, and I've been bittersweet, because I feel like, ultimately, it's very weird watching an addiction narrative unfold in what starts to be real-time, and then becomes no-time, and it gets so far removed from the events, as they happened, which I think the work suffers for, because just even revisiting the first six issues he did, each issue, people are reacting to things that happened in the previous issue. So, his girlfriend breaks up with him in Issue #2 because she read Issue #1. He deals with the fallout in Issue #3, and it’s very much a real portrait of this guy's life, as he's living life, and how his comic is impacting his life. It's postmodern literature. It's fantastic, and then, as his personal pornography problems started to affect his output, it just starts to get more and more removed from the time that anything happened, to the sense where Issue #15, about half of it is what was published in the Drawn & Quarterly 25, and then there's some new pages, but they're easily from years and years ago, and it leaps off on such a cliffhanger that it makes you feel sad that you didn't get more of his monstrous antics.
[18:12] John: Yeah, reading the last issue, the weirdest part was, I thought I'd be catching up on where Joe Matt was at. I hadn't read a bunch of issues in there. I have definitely not read all the Peepshow, and then reading it, that last issue took place 20 or 30 years ago. I mean, it was a crazy long time ago.
[18:29] Chase: Yeah, it's when he was pitching his show to HBO right after he left Canada, and I mean, there's just really nothing about the last 15 years of his life, living in Los Angeles, after he moved there. He's still a creep. I mean, he's still a porno-loving creep. So, some things never change, but it's an addiction narrative, and it feels like a lot of wasted potential, which is a bummer, but I'm glad they put something out. It feels like that's somebody who could have done a lot more, but maybe he couldn't have. I don't know. Maybe what makes it have this car crash compelling-ness is the fact that you were watching these dispatches of this rather unpleasant character ruining his life, but in a funny, weird way.
[19:09] John: That's an interesting way to frame it. When I was talking about it, there was a part of it, to me, that struck me, in that last issue, as that whole thing belonging to such a different era of alternative comics, when a straight white guy talking about how much he likes jerking off and likes young Asian women was a brave thing to put out there or something.
[19:28] Chase: It felt much more uncomfortable reading it now as a 38-year-old married man than it was when I discovered his work as a scuzzbag in my early 20s, and I think there's a lot more that you bring to it now that makes it a lot more complicated than it seemed the first time around.
[19:43] John: I mean, I feel like, unwittingly, an addiction narrative. This isn't him going and writing like, I don't know, the Basketball Diaries or something retrospective. He's writing in the middle of it and doesn't know that that's what he's doing, I thought.
[19:54] Chase: I totally agree with that. I think that's why, yeah, even though it's ultimately an addiction narrative, that's not focus of the narrative. The focus is on his own perversions, obsessions, and failings as a person, but that becomes so clear just by the nature of the work itself and the sporadic nature in which it came out, and the themes that he begins hyper-obsessively focusing on, by the end. It's an underground autobio comedy comic, but it's really a dark gross addiction narrative, and then his addiction happens to be jerking himself off to VHS pornography, which is a fucking wild thing to, A, get addicted to, and B, let everyone know that that's what it is. Not to make this too PG13 for the children listening at home.
[20:38] John: It's not all broken backs and guys stripping in alleyways. Sometimes, it gets dirty.
[20:44] Chase: Yeah. Exactly.
[20:50] David: You guys talk about this hifalutin comic book stuff, and then I'm going to come in with my next book, and it's Hellverine #1.
[21:01] Chase: That’s why we need you.
[21:03] David: I think my brain is rotted. I'm so much more interested in Hellverine #1 than I am in something like Peepshow #15. I appreciate the discussion greatly, but I'm not smart enough to even participate. I'm like, “hell yeah. Ghost Rider and Wolverine got mashed up, everybody. This stuff is radical.” Hellverine has fire claws, John. Fire claws.
[21:35] John: I really like seeing the stuff that I literally used to joke about at Marvel eventually becoming continuity. The Weapon Minus program, at one point, I was drunkenly suggesting that, and not to Rick Remender. So, Rick came in and brought it in. He didn’t get it from me or something, but my whole bit was that, “and then Conan would be would be Weapon Minus One, and then you get to Weapon Minus Zero, and it's a Tyrannosaurus Rex that falls in a fire, and then it comes up and it's red. It's Devil Dinosaur, and he's got claws that come out of his little Tyrannosaurus arms. That was my bit.
[22:16] David: It's not far removed.
[22:18] John: Exactly. Yeah. Again, not taking credit for any of that, at all. It was just funny that it's a lot of stuff, but Hellverine. Go ahead. Sorry.
[22:27] David: I mean, there's not much to say. Have you guys read it?
[22:30] John: I have not.
[22:31] Chase: Admittedly, no.
[22:33] David: The reason I picked it up is because Benjamin Percy, I think he's been really writing the hell out of comics books lately. The stuff he's been doing has been really good. I think he did some Wolverine stuff. He did some X-Force stuff. It’s the X-Force stuff that I was really enjoying. So, he's a guy that I've been enjoying and watching more and more. I feel like he's on the upswing. So, I was like, “oh, good. Why not give it a shot?” So, I read it off of the Marvel Universe Unlimited App. The whole idea is that Hellverine is this demonic force, Bagra-Ghul who's come to Earth and possessed Logan or Ghost Rider, and possesses Logan somehow, and he is Ghost Rider. I don't know. I didn’t really understand it. Apparently, this is not the first appearance of this character. There’s back history of this character, and I was not very entertained by it. I think, I'm out. One episode in and I'm like, “the fire claws on the cover were cool.”
[23:44] Chase: Yeah, it sounds like it was me specifically for you.
[23:48] David: Well, and also, like I said, Benjamin Percy, giving that guy a lot of credit. I do like his stuff, but this one just wasn't for me. It felt convoluted in a way that, I know that any comic could be somebody's first comic, and this didn't feel like that. This felt like I needed to know stuff about Hellverine. I was like, “I need to know stuff about Hellverine? Really? Can we just slash people with fire claws and ride a cool-ass motorcycle or something?” I just wasn't getting that. So, I'm out pretty quickly on that one. I don't think I'll make that recommendation. If somebody out there is listening and they want to explain to me who the heck Bagra-Ghul is and why I should care, I'd love to hear it. Like, I said, again, the art was rock solid. Julius Ohta does the art. He's rock solid. Ryan Stegman did the lead cover. I really liked it.
Ryan Stegman’s never been my favorite guy, but I think Jason Fabok and Ryan Stegman, the two of them, with their art in the last several months, have really thrown down the gauntlet, in my opinion. Those two guys are just really trying hard. The amount of detail they're throwing into every page, and they're trying to get really stylized and really cool, and really pushing themselves. You can tell. You can just see it, and I really appreciate that. So, this cover by Ryan Stegman’s definitely in that mix of Ryan trying to level himself up, and I think is leveling himself up, and again, Benjamin Percy, who’s the writer, I've really enjoyed his work recently. This one just wasn't my cup of tea, and it didn't feel like an inviting first issue. It didn't feel like I was invited to the party. I feel like I needed to know a lot of people to get in, and I just was not interested. So, that's my #2, John. That's my #2.
[25:43] Chase: You better be careful what you wish for, man. You're about to have the Bagra-Ghul gang all over your Twitter, telling you who that guy is. You have invited a maelstrom, my friend.
[25:54] David: I can't wait. I don't know. Maybe I'll get into it.
[25:57] Chase: The emojis just all over there. It's going to be crazy.
[26:00] David: Yeah. Fire skull emojis and claws.
[26:05] John: But all of that be promoting, what's his name again? Bagra-Ghul?
[26:09] David: Yeah, Bagra-Ghul.
[26:10] John: The Bagra-Ghul show on Disney+ that had gotten green-lit 10 months ago, and they have to get out.
[26:19] David: Fantastic.
[26:21] John: I just read the second issue, and really cemented that I've been enjoying it, is Blood Brothers Mother, by Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso from DSTLRY. Azzarello is super hit-and-miss with me. Sometimes, I really like this stuff, and then sometimes, I don't particularly care for it. This is basically Cormac McCarthy meets Stand By Me. It’s these kids on this journey to try to find a few things, some of which aren't going to work out, you can already tell, or they know that they're not there anymore, but trying to find their mother, who's been taken away by a gunslinger that she knew from her previous life when she was a gunslinger, or something along those lines. Risso’s painting the art. It’s pretty beautiful looking. It's a cool, dark Western. So far, not as dark as Cormac McCarthy gets, but it definitely has that. Azzarello always aims for that feel, and I think this hits that feel, but I've generally been enjoying the stuff that DSTLRY has been putting out. I really like the format they use, where it's this oversized 48-page, the old Marvel graphic novel size. It encourages me to buy the issues, in a way, where I don't need to buy the paperback afterwards, because I can just slip these up on my shelf and get the best of both worlds, where I'm seeing it as it's coming out.
[27:45] David: Are they all square-bound or are they saddle stitch?
[27:47] Chase: Yeah.
[27:49] David: Square bound? Okay. I like that format for the right artist. I think that format is really cool. Risso is definitely a guy who probably works in that format. I love his art.
[27:59] Chase: Yeah, I've always liked his art quite a bit. Azzarello, also a hit-and-miss with me, although I appreciate him letting Batman have it all hang out. That was cool.
[28:12] John: Risso was doing a Torpedo series really recently, this series, Torpedo 1972. I don't know actually when he did it, but it was just coming out as comic books. I don't know if you've ever read any Torpedo. That's a comic that Alex Toth famously quit because the main character is too awful, too unpleasant. I love the hell out of Alex Toth’s art. I don't think we agree on too many topics other than I do agree with him that that main character is too awful and too pleasant to spend time with. Have you guys read it?
[28:41] Chase: No, I haven't, no. Although, having just talked about Peepshow, you can tell I love awful, unpleasant people you wouldn't want to spend time with. So, I'm intrigued.
[28:49] John: We reprinted it at IDW, I think IDW reprinted everything, except two stories, because those two stories are probably illegal to reprint. It probably depicts things that are illegal to depict in the United States. At least one of them. The other one is just awful, morally.
[29:11] David: Chase’s ears have never been more perked up than they are right now. Well, I've never seen him pay more attention than he’s doing right now.
[29:19] Chase: It's not true. I pay attention to everything. I'm just interested in, I don’t know. I'll Google it later.
[29:26] John: Blood Brothers Mother, stuff’s awful in it, but it's awful where it's supposed to be. You see something awful, your reaction is meant to be, “Oh, that's terrible,” not “ha-ha-ha,” like it might be with Torpedo. The format is super nice for the artist. It's interesting on the different DSTLRY books, seeing how some artists approach it in a more European way, with the higher panel counts and more density. Writers and artists, I guess, approach it like that. Some maybe just look at it like a regular comic page, just a little wider, and then some are somewhere in between, but Becky Cloonan and everybody else deservedly got an Eisner for Somna this year, which I thought was a great series. Similar milieu to the movie, The Witch. What's the name of that kind of horror movie?
[30:11] Chase: What they call the [A24] horror movies, or whatever? They're elevated.
[30:14] John: Yeah, but I mean, particularly where it's a rural setting and, and.
[30:18] Chase: Folk Horror?
[30:19] John: Folk Horror. That’s the word I couldn't think of. Blood Brothers Mother. A tough, violent western with kids.
[30:27] Chase: My next one, it's more along the lines of the Hellverine. At San Diego Comic Con, I just like to browse the back issue bins and look for little deals. I love finding just little sets of stuff, and I found the second Batman/Judge Dredd: Die Laughing. Joker finds the teleportation belt that takes him to Mega-City One. He hooks up with the Dark Judges, becomes a Dark Judge himself, and Batman has to go to Mega-City One to work with Dredd to stop it.
[30:52] John: Who did that one? I’m assuming it was Alan Grant and John Wagner.
[30:55] Chase: It was Alan Grant and John Wagner, and Glenn Fabry painted the first issue, and then Jim Murray painted the second issue. So, it’s fully painted, just super classic Dredd. I don't know. I really like Glenn Fabry. I think all these characters look oddly veiny, but I like that about them. It works for me. Just the level of weird detail. I just think this book, it's everything I like about Judge Dredd because, for me, Judge Dredd is a pitch-black comedy where none of the characters know they're in a pitch-black comedy, which is what makes it very, everything is so camp and slapstick, and the Dark Judges are so bananas, and I feel like the Joker becoming a Dark Judge just really fit in with this weird little world of heinous, clownish things happening, but it was a fun 2-issue read. I don't know.
It obviously wasn't a super deep story. It wasn't the best Dredd story. It wasn't the best Batman story, but I feel like, for two issues I paid $5 for, I got my $5 worth. I really liked reading it. This one was good. The Joker, as a Dark Judge, gets this power where his laugh is supersonic. So, he can hurt people with it. In this big dome, these hedonists are going to seal themselves off from the rest of the Mega-City One and just do their hedonistic things, cut off from society, but the Dark Judges and the Joker, and Dredd and Batman infiltrate the dome as it's getting sealed off. So, it's just the Dark Judges killing all of these absurd hedonists through this circus carnival-esque wild painted environment, while Dread and Batman fight the Dark Judges.
[32:25] David: That sounds great. With Glenn Fabry painted interiors in the first issue?
[32:29] Chase: Yeah, for the first issue, dude, and it looks, nobody listening can see this, but I assure you, it's fantastic.
[32:34] David: Man, that is a sweet, sweet spread right there.
[32:40] John: I'm not familiar with Glenn Fabry’s interior art, either, I guess, now that I think about it. I don't know.
[32:45] David: Alan Grant has rarely let me down. There's very few Alan Grant-penned books that I don't like. His stuff with Lobo was always super fun.
[32:53] Chase: Totally.
[32:54] John: Yeah, he’s super good.
[32:55] David: Yeah. That guy can write the hell out of a comic.
[32:58] Chase: I’m a sucker for anything with the Dark Judges, because Judge Mortis is my favorite one. Almost any commission I try and get, I just ask them to draw me Judge Mortis. I'm the only person in the world owns a Dan Parent Judge Mortis, and it looks great. It looks great.
[33:18] David: Longtime Archie Comics artist, Dan Parent, did a Judge Dredd Mortis for you?
[33:24] Chase: He didn't even know what the hell I was talking about when I wrote him, he's like, “Okay,” and then I came back like two days later. It was San Diego Comic Con. Not this most recent one, but the last one. He’d drawn the hell out of it. Really happy.
[33:39] David: That's fantastic. So, my next one, not really knowing anything about it, but I want to check it out, was Plastic Man No More. I'm not a big Plastic Man guy, but the artwork on the cover, in particular, just really caught my eye, and I liked it, and then I read the solicitation copy, and I thought it was really good, clever, and fun. So, I gave it a read, and I really thought was good. So, it's written by Chris Cantwell and drawn by Alex Lins. They just delivered a really great first issue, I guess, in a way, returning to his roots. He's really a down-on-his-luck character in this first issue, and I guess I can give away a little bit. I don't want to give away too much because it just came out, I think, but anyway, the idea is that Plastic Man has been zapped by some alien death ray of some sort, and it's degraded his body in a way that basically, the cumulative effect of all the damage that he's taken as Plastic Man over the years has now caught up to him, and he’s started to basically decompose. So, you get a really good look at Plastic Man's private life and where he is, as a human being, not as a superhero, and it’s an interesting take.
It's not the last version of Plastic Man that I encountered, but I'm willing to go with it. It seems like it's going to be a fun, interesting, character study. He's dealing with family issues and dealing with just his own mortality in a very real and meaningful way, and looking at who he thinks his friends are, and discovering that maybe they’re not the friends he thought they were, and I think it's a nice, interesting little contemplation on one man's life wrapped up in what seems to be an interesting little superhero side-tale, as well. So, I'm 100% in. Alex Lins's art is top-notch. He draws in two different styles in the book, and they're so different that I was like, “I can't believe this is the same guy. I don't know how he's actually doing it,” and Chris Cantwell’s got some really good dialogue, and the story moves along really well, and I'm just right into it, right from the start. It starts out great and finishes strong. So, I'm around for the whole series, for sure, based on the first issue, and definitely recommend that one. Really liked it.
[36:08] John: I had every intention last night of reading this comic, and then I sat down on the couch, and then found myself lying there in the dark at 1:00 in the morning, almost instantaneous. I'm looking forward to it even more now. I've got it right there behind me.
[36:25] David: Definitely worth a read, John. You're going to like it.
[36:26] John: Is that a threat? Are you threatening me? Did you come back, and—I’m just kidding. I don't know. Sorry. I was going to maybe try to go with more story-driven drama but it’s probably not worth.
[36:38] David: If you were better at improv, it might be worth it.
[36:40] Chase: I think all improv is bad.
[36:41] David: You think all improv is bad? What's that TV show? Whose Line Is It Anyway?
[36:46] John: Did I tell you my “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” Story.
[36:49] David: No, but I want to hear it.
[36:50] John: I saw it live. I went and saw that show live. It was actually very entertaining. They were very good. They did do multiple retakes, but less than you would think. They were doing a really good job on it. The problem that I had, though, is that I saw it performed live on September 10th, 2001, and really was not able to talk about my experience seeing “Whose Line Is It Anyway?” for any length of time.
[37:14] Chase: Going to teach at NYU, I got dragged to so much garbage improv, dude. Good lord.
[37:23] John: My daughter, when she was 5 or 6, or so, maybe a little older, maybe 7, was in a kids improv class that I got to go to all the time. You weren’t allowed in the class, but I got to go to all the performances. My wife, surprisingly, found herself busy on a lot of those, at least a couple of those days, but not this guy, and I will say, the quality of 6- to 10-year-old children's improv is, let's call it variable.
[37:54] David: Okay. Let’s leave it there. I'm sure your daughter was delightful. She was the cream of the crop.
[38:03] John: Yes, in that her bits weren't just her going up and making fart noises. There was no shortage of that.
[38:09] David: I feel like maybe that would be for me. I feel like maybe I would be entertained by that. I think I might be into 10-year-old improv and didn't even know.
[38:16] John: It would be exactly like Hellverine. You'd be like, “oh, you guys are trying to be funny. You guys suck.”
[38:25] David: That sounds like a good op, just going to 10-year-old improv shows and just screaming “you guys suck,” just heckling 10-year-olds.
[38:37] John: I heard on Saturday morning, that's what got Doyle fired, because he rolled straight out into a kids improv class.
[38:44] David: That's what it was.
[38:45] John: I heard.
[38:46] Chase: Did you see that IDW is selling whiskey now?
[38:48] John: To children? To improv classes?
[38:51] Chase: No, I'm serious. Wynonna Earp branded whiskey.
[38:52] David: To anyone that will buy it. John, guess how many bottles of this whiskey that they made, though. Take a wild guess.
[39:02] John: Futurama joke, but it's either real high or real low. 10,000.
[39:06] David: 666.
[39:08] John: Oh, I get it.
[39:10] David: That's the response that I gave, too. Oh, I get it.
[39:18] Chase: Whose turn is it?
[39:20] David: It’s John's turn. We’ve got to get back, John. This is the last one, John. Make it good.
[39:24] John: Okay. So, the big deep dive that I've gotten into myself, probably another one that I'd want to try to harangue everybody into doing an episode about, is the European graphic novel series called Corto Maltese. It's another one that DW put out. It's another one I may have complained about in the past, in the expensive aftermarket prices of European graphic novels, where we're still at this place where I am missing one volume of it and it's going to cost me, at least, $100.
[39:50] David: Well, you got all the rest of them for free. Think about it that way.
[39:55] John: But it is one of things, if I mentioned it to everybody out here, “hey, you guys can go out and read Corto Maltese. So, here's what you do. Get about $1000 and go on eBay, and then you'll be able to read it.”
[40:05] Chase: I think I still have a few of those on my shelf. I’ve just not backed into them.
[40:09] John: It was a big fan of it because Hugo Pratt, who writes and draws Corto Maltese, was a huge influence on Paul Pope, and I was a big Paul Pope guy, when I was young, but Paul Pope was coming up right around when Hugo Pratt died. He also died pretty young, I believe. He was in his 60s or something, maybe. Corto Maltese is probably best known for Frank Miller being a huge fan of the character, and naming the country in Dark Knight Returns, Corto Maltese, which has gone on to become a just general location in DC Comics and TV, and movies, and stuff, but Corto Maltese is a seafaring adventure comic, set in the early 20th century, during World War One, a TinTin-type adventure, in a way. Hugo Pratt's art is just amazing. It's really cool. It's just a lot of solid black areas, and he was a huge Mill Caniff guy. You can see that evolving into Pratt’s style, and then you can definitely see the places where like, “oh, that's why Paul Pope draws mouths like that,” or whatever, all these little bits where he definitely picked up some drawing fundamentals in there. Paul Pope’s art brought in a lot of other stuff to it. I don't mean to say it was aping it or anything. The same way Pratt wasn't aping Caniff.
So, I hadn't read it in a long time. NBM put out some random stories and the late 80s, I think. Dean Mullaney at Euro Comics put out the complete Hugo Pratt Corto Maltese at IDW, over the course of a few years. It’s 12 volumes. It exactly mirrors the European volumes, which is weird because some of them are 60 pages and some of them are 200. It’s all over the place, but the thing that really blew me away, because I hadn't read it in a really long time, I'd maybe read a little bit of it when the volumes first started coming out, and now I'm sitting down and reading them in order. Going into that stuff, we've talked about this at length, but when you go into that stuff from the 70s, set in the past, from Europe, you're going to wind up with some uncomfortable bits, some parts where it's like, “I don't like that depiction of native people,” or whatever.
So, I fully expected to go into that, and you're hit with that right away, where there's a lot of cannibal-type people, people calling people cannibals, I mean, visually very native-style garb, but the thing that is extraordinary about this comic, especially for its time and place that it was made, is that that is not the attitude that comic takes, at all. That attitude is fully on those guys’ side. Corto Maltese has no allegiance to the European powers that are fighting. He's man-with-no-name-style. He's very much like Han solo. He's very Han Solo-style. He's just navigating this world, doesn't want anything to do with any side. He has no allegiance to the British side of this fight or the German side. This is just some European war that's going on, and the people that he meets in all the different places that he goes to are absolutely treated as equals to the European characters, and are as educated, and as well-spoken, and as fully developed as anybody, and it's surprising to see that.
Pratt had lived that life as a merchant seaman, and actually had lived some of this stuff, and had met some of these people. So, he was really talking about his own experiences, not just regurgitating fictions about these places. I'm sure a lot of it's not right. I'm sure a lot of it is not correctly presenting how the Māori people really were, but the intentionality of it is clear that it's not meant to be degrading to anybody, and it's not meant to be speaking down about anyone.
[43:47] Chase: I didn't know he'd been a merchant seaman, actually.
[43:49] John: Something like that. I might be getting details wrong.
[43:52] Chase: I just hear stuff like that, man, and it makes me like, “what if I'd done anything besides get heavy into Xbox in my early 20s?” I guess, we'll never know, but that's all.
[44:05] John: We all live our lives.
[44:07] Chase: Yeah, some of us more from one couch than others.
[44:12] John: He didn't have a head tattoo, man.
[44:14] Chase: That's true, yeah.
[44:15] John: He never will. You still can become a merchant seaman.
[44:19] Chase: It's time for me to learn to swim.
[44:20] John: They give you a boat.
[44:21] Chase: My wife finally sat me down the other day and she's like, “you’ve got to stop. You’ve got to wear shorts to the beach, dude. No more jeans to the beach. It's weird.” I don’t like wearing shorts very much. “Just get over it, dude. You’ve lived in San Diego for 8 years.”
[44:35] David: Your wife is not wrong in this.
[44:37] Chase: I know she’s not wrong.
[44:38] David: I generally agree. What if you just cut your pants at the knees?
[44:42] Chase: I don't own enough pair of pants to sacrifice them.
[44:45] David: Jesus, come on, man. Old Navy has always got jeans on sale. Just get Old Navy. Next time there's a sale, you buy yourself 3 or 4 pair of jeans, and then you can cut […].
[44:55] Chase: So many rules I'm under. Wear shorts to the beach. Don't do steroids.
[45:01] David: Yeah, you're tortured. Guess what just showed up in my e-mail. An advertisement for the limited-edition Wynonna Earp Whiskey. Now available. “IDW Publishing is thrilled to celebrate the Supernatural legacy of Wynonna Earp with this exclusive whiskey, crafted in honor of the to-be special, Vengeance, and limited to only 666 bottles. Infused with the bold spirit of the Earp family curse, this collector’s item is a must have for every fan. Share a toast with Wynonna and the gang, from purgatory to the fiery depths they brave.” That's just the start to that e-mail. All right, Chase, I think you've got one more, if you want.
[45:42] Chase: I just finished this. I posted it on my book club. It’s Barry Windsor-Smith’s Monsters, which I've had on my shelf forever, and it finally was my turn to choose the book club. So, I made everyone read a graphic novel with me. For several people, it was their first. I loved this book. I mean, have you guys both read it? Really sad. Really made me feel melancholy for days after I finished it.
[46:04] John: The story itself?
[46:05] Chase: The story itself. I think both things. I think it's another thing. I mean, not exactly in the way of Peepshow, but I think it's another book where just the structure and the time it took to make, and I think the way you can feel his age as an artist over some of the pages only enhances how much care and emotion went to bringing this thing to life. I think just the creation process and the physicality of the product itself enhanced this story, which is very sad. It seems like it's going to be this monster story, but then it very much becomes just about the way we're emotional monsters to each other, and the way that trauma can reverberate throughout everyone's life. It's murky, by the end, who the real monster is, and I guess, everyone, in their own way, is, and maybe it's intentional, but I feel like the only character that I didn't get to know, at all, was Bobby. It's the guy who becomes the literal Monster and is on the cover.
I feel like after he becomes a monster, he stops functioning as a character, except for this vehicle for everyone else to react to, and maybe that's the point, but I feel like I didn't really get any catharsis from him, at the end, because he was so non-vocal and there, in a way that everyone else wasn't, whereas I was getting all of these rich things about these people's past and relationships, and the way they feel about each other. I mean, outside of Bobby being a little boy who's terrorized by his father, and then a lost young man who joins the military, I feel like there was so much more that I wanted to know about this guy, and maybe that's the point. I don't mean to be presumptuous. I mean, I might have asked Barry Windsor-Smith, is that the point, or what's going on?
[47:34] John: Yeah, it did actually strike me a little bit like Peepshow, now that you mention it. I hadn't thought of it exactly that way, but it did feel like it was something from a different era than when it came out. I don't know. 20 years ago, that would have been the book of the year. That would have been the thing everybody was talking about. Whatever time.
[47:53] Chase: I mean, yeah, it took him, what, 30 years and it started as a Hulk pitch in the 80s?
[47:58] John: Allegedly, it started as a Hulk pitch. I think he caused huge rifts, as well, because I think he and Jim Shooter think Bill Mantlo stole parts of that graphic novel for his Hulk run. Do you know that story?
[48:10] Chase: No. Outside of knowing the basics of it, I hadn't dived into the why of it all and the riffs that it caused.
[48:19] John: I couldn't figure out from Monsters what was supposed to be the Hulk and what wasn't, because it's not set in the present day.
[48:26] Chase: It’s very wild. Yeah, I don't know how much changed from the original pitch, either. I mean, outside of him being this Hulk-like character, there's not a lot of Bruce Banner present.
[48:33] John: Maybe I'm wrong. I thought it was like the Adastra in Africa, where there were pages of it drawn with the Hulk, that were changed later, but the story is something that Bill Mantlo introduced that Bruce Banner was abused as a kid. I think the accusation was that it was lifted from this story or that he'd seen this story and put that in there. I don't think that it was definitive.
[49:04] Chase: Right, and I think we all know, just having edited stuff and it seen stuff, sometimes you get a pitch, and you get a pitch from someone else that has similarities, and they might not have seen it, but feelings can get hurt in that stuff, and yeah, maybe it was intentional. Maybe it wasn't. Having not been there, but there is room for crossover in some of these thematic things that can feel intentional when it’s not.
[49:27] John: The other part of that's sad, I don't know if sad is the right word, but when I was saying that, I wasn't trying to be facetious, that it is one of the only complete works by Barry Windsor-Smith that exists. So much of Barry Windsor Smith's career is this frustrating. There's a great run in Conan, there's Weapon X, then there's the Disaster of Storyteller. That was one of my favorite comics when that were coming out, and Fantagraphics put out the books of it, and if you've ever seen those, I've never been able to read them because they're so depressing, because as you're reading through this thing, the color disappears, and then the inks disappear, and then it’s just sketches, and then the story just is gone. It doesn't end. He never finished any of those stories. He has great issues of X-Men that he drew and stuff like that. He's obviously an incredible artist, but the parts where the guy that wrote and drew Weapon X, here's other comics he did, and it's Monsters and Adastra in Africa, and maybe Red Nails, and that's it.
[50:27] Chase: Yeah. No, totally.
[50:30] John: Sorry. He has Archer and Armstrong, but it's not like that ends. He has Rune.
[50:40] Chase: I definitely hear what you're saying. It feels like it's this very deeply personal, involved work, but it's not like he's someone like Alan Moore, who you can point to all of these different projects that he did, or all these different eras of his life, all of which meant something to him. I like the Conan art. I think that's one of the things that’s top-of-mind, as David and I've been doing the Conan archiving. So, I've just been going through so much of Barry Windsor-Smith’s old art. We put these omnibi’s together, and yeah, it’s wild to think of him laboring over this thing for three decades, longer gestating in his mind since the start as a pitch. I think it just puts the whole story in a different perspective than if this was just something that came out over a 2-year period. I think sometimes, the process of creation informs how you react to the creation.
[51:26] John: That’s a good way to put it.
[51:27] Chase: No, I really recommend it. It left me ruminating on it for a long time afterwards, which I think is the sign of any good work. I feel like Batman/Judge Dredd, I enjoyed that. I thought about it today. I'm not going to think about that book tomorrow and be like, “I have to sort out my feelings about all this. How did this make me [feel]?” There's some comics that just don't make you do that, and then the ones that do, I feel like it’s an accomplishment.
[51:54] John: Absolutely. Well, that's probably our show for today.
[51:56] David: I own every copy of Rune.
[51:58] Chase: I’d say you ordered them right now. You're on that eBay again.
[52:01] David: I already own those. I’ve owned those forever.
[52:04] John: Is the Conan/Rune crossover any good?
[52:07] David: I like it. No, it's a mess. All the Rune stuff is a big mess, and I don't need to derail this conversation. I was just trying to be funny because I have nothing to add to the serious conversation with Monsters, other than to say that I enjoyed it as well and it was depressing as fuck, and also, I thought that 30 years to create that was also in some ways depressing, not because it's not a quality work, but because it landed with such a thud within the comics reading community. To your point, John, at the beginning of the discussion, it never got talked about. It's weird that no one talked about it, or if it was talked about, I don't know, it didn't raise to the level of comic fandom the way I feel like it could have or should have, but I don't know. It's very odd. It was a very odd moment that people weren't talking about that. When that book came out, everyone should have been talking about that, and I think the last time Barry Windsor-Smith did something big, everybody talked about it. So, it was an odd thing. So, anyway, back to Rune, the thing I do know about. Rune had the Infinity Gems, John.
[53:13] John: Really?
[53:14] David: At least one of them, yeah.
[53:15] John: I read them. I don't remember Rune. I was definitely buying it because I was buying Barry Windsor-Smith, but that was not my […].
[53:22] David: They actively had to go into the Rune universe and get the Infinity Gem from Rune and bring it back to the Marvel U at some point, and they did do that. It was a thing that happened.
[53:35] Chase: David, just flashing back though, I feel like that's half the comics I talk about with you. Is it good? No, but I love it. That's your preferred book.
[53:48] David: Yeah. That's probably true. I don't know what that says about me. Anyway, John, I think we should wrap this one up. Chase, what do you think?
[53:59] Chase: Yeah, that sounds good. Thanks for having me back.
[54:01] John: Anytime.
[54:02] David: Thanks, everybody.
[54:03] John: Thanks a lot. We will be back next week, with more The Corner Box. The New Adventures of The Corner Box. Ultimate Corner Box.
[54:10] David: Ultimate Corner Box. Absolute Corner Box?
[54:14] John: That’s it, yes. See you all next week.
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.
