➡ The text discusses the criticism of modern Marvel and DC comics for focusing too much on dialogue and less on action. It also introduces Paranoid American, a comic publisher that explores mysteries and secrets of our world through their comics and podcast. The text also features an interview with John Bua, a comic enthusiast who started a YouTube channel to share his passion for comics during the COVID-19 lockdown. He discusses his journey, his interactions with other comic creators, and his love for board games.
➡ The speaker shares his love for comic books, reminiscing about his first comic, Fantastic Four 184, and how it sparked his lifelong obsession with comics. He talks about his experience working at a comic book store, where he often took his pay in comics. He also discusses the difference between Marvel and DC comics, expressing his preference for Marvel. The speaker fondly remembers the excitement of finding old comics in stationary stores and his quest to complete his collection of Frank Miller’s Daredevil series.
➡ The speaker discusses their opinions on various topics, including comic book characters, conspiracy theories, and the flat earth theory. They express frustration about changes to comic book characters’ appearances in movies, and then participate in a game rating their belief in different conspiracy theories. They share a story about a coworker who believes in the flat earth theory, and their own skepticism about it. They also mention their interest in the hollow earth theory, but doubt its validity.
➡ The speaker discusses various conspiracy theories and beliefs, including the moon landing, existence of dinosaurs, and the 9/11 attacks. They express skepticism about the official narrative of the Pentagon attack and the collapse of Building 7 during 9/11. They also discuss the possibility of extraterrestrial life, stating that while they would like to believe in aliens, they haven’t seen any compelling evidence. The speaker concludes by discussing the Lensman series, a space opera that inspired the Green Lantern Corps.
➡ The speaker discusses their belief in the existence of aliens and their skepticism towards spiritual entities like angels and demons. They also share their thoughts on conspiracy theories and the influence of belief on reality, using Batman as an example. They then introduce their comic book, “Heroic Tales,” which features a positive male character and is set in a city influenced by magic and science. The city’s inhabitants are affected by a misdirected magic spell, leading to unusual behaviors.
➡ The text discusses a comic book project involving a character named the patriarch and another character named the suit. The comic book is a 22-page story about the patriarch and an 8-page story about the suit’s journey to becoming a villain. The creator of the comic book shares his experiences with crowdfunding platforms and his plans for future issues. He also talks about his inspirations and the challenges he faced in bringing his comic book to life.
➡ The conversation revolves around the creation of a comic book, focusing on the character ‘the patriarch’. The creator discusses the importance of writing for the audience, not just for oneself, and the challenges of balancing multiple ideas in a single story. He also mentions the financial aspects of comic book production and distribution, including the rising costs of printing and shipping. The conversation ends with a promotion for ‘paranoid propaganda packs’ from paranoidamerican.com.
➡ Visit nasacomic.com for a 40-page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions, perfect for comic and conspiracy fans. Also, check out paranoidamerican.com for unique sticker sheets featuring cryptids, cults, and mysteries. These stickers are limited, so get yours quickly. The text also includes a personal reflection on life, emotions, and challenges, with a call to stay true to oneself.
➡ The speaker discusses their journey with comic books, from the old school military marine comics to the modern superhero ones. They express their dislike for certain characters like Lobo and Deadpool, and their initial distaste for Image comics, which later changed as the company improved. They also mention their shift from Marvel and DC to DC only, and how they view comic books as a form of pure imagination.
➡ The speaker discusses their love for comic books, highlighting how they often introduced concepts and ideas before they were seen in movies. They appreciate the unlimited imagination that comics offer, and the anticipation of waiting for the next issue. They also critique modern comics for not fully utilizing the limitless potential of the medium, often resorting to mundane scenarios instead of exciting, imaginative ones. They argue that comics should be more than just text messages and coffee shop conversations, but rather, they should be filled with action and adventure, just like the comics they grew up reading.
➡ The speaker discusses their love for comics, reminiscing about their first comic and the experience of buying it from a tobacco shop. They also talk about their journey of writing and self-publishing comics since 2012, and their admiration for Dark Horse and Image comics. They express concern about the changing atmosphere of comic book stores, noting that they used to be filled with kids but are now mostly frequented by older individuals.
➡ The speaker reminisces about the evolution of comic book stores, from being social hubs where fans would gather and debate, to becoming more commercialized and focused on sales. They recall a time when comic book stores were run by enthusiasts who turned their hobby into a business, often operating out of unconventional spaces like storage units or apartments. The speaker also notes the shift in the comic book store scene, with stores now focusing more on selling back issues, toys, or card games like Magic the Gathering.
➡ A comic enthusiast shares his experiences and observations about the evolution of comic conventions. He recalls the intimate, fan-focused conventions of the past where he could interact with comic creators and discuss the medium. However, he expresses disappointment with modern conventions, which he feels have become overcrowded, commercialized, and less about the comics themselves. He also highlights the struggles of comic creators who, despite their significant contributions to the industry, still face financial challenges.
➡ The text discusses the financial success of some comic book creators, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, while others struggle. It also explores the history of underground comics, including Tijuana Bibles, which were adult-themed comics created by unknown artists. The text mentions the shift in appreciation for Silver Age comics, which were initially seen as childish but are now valued for their innocence. Lastly, it delves into the influence of occultism in comics, referencing characters like Captain Marvel Junior and the rumored connection between Jack Parsons and the original Captain Marvel.
➡ Jack Parsons, a key figure in the creation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the space race, was deeply involved in the occult. He was friends with L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, who ended up stealing money and Parsons’ wife. This money was used to establish the Church of Scientology. The story also mentions a failed attempt to summon a supernatural entity and a storm that capsized Hubbard’s yacht, which some attribute to a spell cast by Parsons.
➡ The speaker enjoys discussing religion and mythology, and is particularly interested in the intersection of these topics with comic books. They mention a comic book about Joseph Smith created by Mark Allred for the Mormon church, and discuss the idea of comic books as magical sigils, a concept proposed by Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore. The speaker also expresses disappointment with Neil Gaiman’s casting choices for a TV adaptation of Sandman, arguing that the characters should embody duality rather than specific racial identities.

That’s like, the biggest criticism of modern marvel in DC is people sitting around in coffee shops talking. An example that I always give is, I want to say daredevil 145 or one around there somewhere. I’ll say 119. But it’s black widow and Daredevil. They’re living in San Francisco. And Natasha is like, are we a couple now? Are we exclusive? Do we want children? Like, where is this relationship going? And Daredevil’s like, well, you know how we live now. Is it right to have kids? And blah, blah, blah, what? That while that conversation is going on, they’re jumping off a skyscrapers, hitting flagpoles, flinging.

They stop a burglary, they stop a mugger. They save the kid who’s about to get hit by a car. If this was a modern Marvel comic, they would have been in a. In the kitchen holding a cup of coffee. Good evening, listeners, brave navigators of the enigmatic and the concealed. Have you ever felt the pull of the unanswered, the allure of the mysteries that shroud our existence? For more than a decade, a unique comic publisher has dared to dive into these mysteries, unafraid of the secrets they might uncover. This audacious entity is paranoid American. Welcome to the mystifying universe of the paranoid american podcast.

Launched in the year 2012, Paranoid American has been on a mission to decipher the encrypted secrets of our world. From the unnerving enigma of mkultra mind control, to the clandestine assemblies of secret societies, inspiring frontiers of forbidden technology, to the arcane patterns of occult symbols in our very own pop culture, they have committed to unveiling the concealed realities that lie just beneath the surface. Join us as we navigate these intricate landscapes, decoding the hidden scripts of our society and challenging the accepted perceptions of reality. Folks, I’ve got a big problem on my hands. There’s a company called Paranoid American making all these funny memes and comics.

Now, I’m a fair guy. I believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t cross the line. And if these AI Jethe dare to make fun of me, they’re crossing the line. This is your expedition into the realm of the extraordinary, the secret the shrouded. Come with us as we sift through the world’s grand mysteries, question the standardized narratives, and brave the cryptic labyrinth of the concealed truth. So strap yourselves in, broaden your horizons, and steal yourselves for a voyage into the enigmatic heart of the paranoid american podcast, where each story, every image, every revelation brings us one step closer to the elusive truth.

Welcome everybody to another paranoid american podcast. And today we’re both going to meet someone for the first time a little bit. So this is John Bua, and I’m going to introduce him. I’ll let him introduce himself, but I just want to note where I came across John as I was in another comic, sort of YouTube live stream, and someone popped into the chat and they were like, I just came from this channel called John’s Longbox, and it’s one of the best comic YouTube channels on the Internet. And I was like, all right, I had to go and check this out.

And I clicked on it and I saw this amazing collection of different comics and a lot of insight and probably way more of an expert on comics in general. So I figured, why? What better than just bring John’s lomboks in? John Boa so welcome to paranoid American. I think we’re going to have some fun in here. So tell people, first of all, where to find you, what you’re all about, and we’ll get into some other cool stuff. Yeah, I’ve got John’s longbox on YouTube, just like it’s spelled right there. You could look me up on YouTube, and I’ve been doing it for, geez, over three years now.

You know, it started during COVID It was a lockdown. I’m kind of an extroverted person. I like to talk about comics with people and nobody. I moved. I didn’t know anybody. So I just turned on a camera. My phone just started talking about comics for like a year and a half before I even got like more than three or four views on a, on a video. So it was just me talking to nobody. But, you know, you’re lonely during the lockdowns. And then RJ, from the fourth age, I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. I was just in his comments all the time, talking, and he was just talking about comic collections.

I was like, hey, RJ, I got 55,000 comics. And he was like, really? So I emailed him a picture of my collection. And then he just started talking to me. And he invited me on his channel because he wanted to start interviewing people. So I was his test monkey, and it was really bad. His camera kept turning off and, you know, the static and, you know, but, but it was, it was fun. So I said, why don’t you come on my channel and you’ll be my test monkey? And I really like talking to people. And since RJ had like 20,000 viewers, that gave me a little bit of credibility.

So I was like, you know what? I’m going to ask Mike Barron. And Mike Barron came up, and I had like, 150 subscribers. And so, you know, and then Mike Barron, oh, man, I was, I bombed so bad. You could look at my first Mike Barron interview. It was excruciating. But I just. And then I made a video about a red rooster and the saints, the allegiance arts of Mitch Breitwiser’s comics, how much I loved them, and they invited themselves on my channel so that would, you know, so now I’m like, oh, my God, I’m talking to, like, legit comic book people.

So I just said, you know what? I’m gonna, I’m gonna just ask everybody. Just gonna ask everybody and see what they say. A couple of people outright said no. A couple of people were polite, but as long as they didn’t say no, I still had a chance. You know what I mean? So I was asking, like, jim shooter. I was, you know, I’m still talking with Walt Simonson. Walt Simonson for two years, hasn’t said no. So I’m hoping that happens. You’re saying there’s a chance? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Until you say no. Like, like, I got, like, Tom DeFalco is coming on next week.

A Carol lay. I don’t know if you know her. She does. She did wonder woman for a while, so I just, just, you shoot. For the start, I’ve been asking, like, movie stars, and, you know, I just asked. Jim Butcher from the, from the Dresden files hasn’t said no. So, you know, you just, you don’t get what you don’t ask for. So that’s, that’s been my, that’s been my model. Just keep asking, keep asking, keep asking. You know, a few people said no, and then, like, a couple months later, I guess they checked me out and like, yeah, you know what? I’ll come on.

And it’s been fun. I just, I try to keep it drama free. I try to just talk about comics. You know, I’m also a board gamer, so I had a few board game celebrities come on and talk about that, but for the most, most part, it’s just comics. Sometimes board games. So that, that’s, that’s my story. And you said that you, you started this originally because you’re an extrovert and you couldn’t go out to comic shops, I assume, and just, like, chat people up about books. Has this replaced that? Like, you have it in channels? That, has it eventually replaced your need to go out comic shops or do you do that too? Still.

Well, my comic store closed years ago, so I’ve been getting comics from the discount comic book service. You know, I’ve been doing that for, like, close to ten years. So I get my comics mailed to me, and then when I moved to this area, I don’t. I don’t know anybody. You know, it’s. Let’s face it, as when you’re 50 years old, you don’t just want to be friends. So for, like, a year, I was just like, all right, I don’t know anybody. And then, uh, my wife pointed out that there was a comic book store and a game store, both within walking distance.

Shows you, because I just would wake up, go to work. I’m a construction worker. I wake it up at 04:00 in the morning. I’m coming home at 04:00 in the afternoon, and I’m just tired, you know? So she found. She’s an introvert, but she knows how much I like to go out and talk with people. So she found play. So I started going to the game store. Through the game store, I met a whole group of gamers. So that. That we. On Mondays and Tuesdays, we come to my house, we play board games, you know, then I went to a comic book store, but a comic book store.

Comic book people are a little bit more introverted. You know, it’s a solo activity. You buy your Batman, you sit home, you read Batman. So a weirdo like me just walking in, talking to everybody, you know, but the gamers, board games. You need people to play board games, you know, so that that was. That was easier. You sit down at the table, you play a game, you chitchat over a two hour game of ticket to ride, you know what I mean? That’s actually a really interesting dynamic I’d never considered before. And you’re absolutely right that the comic book is, like, a solo sport.

So you might have more. Introverts are like, why is this guy trying to chat me? New 52 title or whatever. And then when you go to the comic book store, people just buy their comics and leave. You know, like, when I was a kid, when we were all 50, we would hang out at the comic book store, talk. And then I worked in the comic, so I knew everybody that came in, and I loved, like, having the same conversation. Oh, the Fantastic Four this month, blah, blah, blah, Galactus. And then the next guy would come in, oh, the Fantastic Four this.

You know, and that. It was just easy because I worked there, and, you know, so it wasn’t weird. But now, if I’m going to hang out. Everybody’s younger than me. You know what I mean? You know what I mean? Yeah. You’re an OG now, right? Well, you know what I mean. And I don’t really like Marvel and DC. I get excited now about independent comics. So I’ll go to the comic book store, and I’m like, I’ll buy a back issue from 1978. Nobody wants to talk about that with me. So, you know, so I’ll go to the game store.

I’m sorry. Hey, kids, who wants to talk about Dazzler? Yeah, yeah, yeah. You guys want to talk about the original defenders? You know, Steve Gerber, who’s been dead for 15 years, you know? So can you remember your first comic? Yeah, absolutely. The first comic I ever bought with my own money was fantastic 4184, and it was a fantastic four. It was. Len Wein wrote it, george Perez drew it, and Joe Siddhart inked it. It was Fantastic Four versus the molecule man and claw. And it was just a bizarre story because Reed Richards lost his power. You know, they were coming back from.

From another adventure, and then another villain attacked. It was like, you were just thrown in the middle. So it made me realize I got to go back and get older issues. You know, the next issue I got to finish, you know what I mean? It was just like a weird. It was worth the work. I loved it so much. So in my mind, George Perez has always been the superhero artist, because that’s the first comic book. I have two older brothers, so I remember having some, like, justice League and justice society issues laying around the house, you know, and some flash.

But that was the first comic I bought. Sat down and read over and over and over again. And then I remember I got Thor 286 with Walt Simonson drawing with the Thor Smash and the Destroyers. And, you know, these were such, such good comics. So I, you know, Walt Simonson and George Perez, these are, like, lifelong obsessions with me. You know, coincidentally, they were my two first comics. And then I remember the first X Men I got was X Men 1112. They were, they were presumed lost in the Savage land, and Beast of Jean Grey and Xavier were, like, you know, like lamenting the death of the X Men, and then they cut to the X Men, you know, and I didn’t know who the X Men were.

The X Men, we forget they were bi monthly. They were this close to getting cancelled. I just happened to stumble upon it, you know, and I didn’t even know who the X Men were. And I, like, so I didn’t know their names. And for the most part, they didn’t have their masks on. So, like, I didn’t know who was who. Like, Colossus is this big blue metal guy. Like, this guy kind of has the same hair as. But it was worth the work. And I went and found, and then within about six months, a comic book store opened in my neighborhood.

And that was a game changer because back then, you got comics just when they came out on the newsstand, you know, on a spinner rack. And if you missed them, you missed them. But now there was a store that just sold comic books, you know, and then you went in and then you got all these titles that you never heard of before. You know, it was, it was just the most amazing thing. So I was, I was like, I gotta work here. You know, I would go once a week. I found out the new, the new comics used to come out, like, on Tuesdays, then it changed to Friday.

Then it was third, then it settled on Wednesday. And I used to be there and help the guy take the boxes out, put them on the shelves and count them. And then eventually he hired me. And I was there for, like, on and off for, like, six years at that comic store. I loved it. Such, such a fun job. I mean, some weeks I never got paid. I just took my pay in comics, you know, I loved it. You know, you’re getting high on your own supply a little bit. Exactly. Exactly. My mom used to tell me I gotta quit.

So she actually made me quit. And I worked in a supermarket because, you know, because I would have money, you know, I would work like, it’s. Then after the supermarket, I would go work part time at the comic book store. Then, you know, then I left the supermarket, went back to the comic books. Did the supermarket have a spinner rack? Because I remember growing up, my supermarkets, almost all of them had a spinner rack. No, my supermarket never had a spinner rack. No, but, like, the 711s, did you know the stationary stores? I don’t know if you remember stationary stores.

You know, there were small. Yeah, they stationary stores. They, they sold like, oak tag, you know, school supplies, cigarettes, candy, comic books, lotto. You know, they were these little, you know, more than a newsstand. You know, they were like a thing that doesn’t exist anymore. You’d go in there with your dad. Your dad would buy smokes, get a lottery ticket, comic books, candy. And then you’re like, oh, yeah, I have a project due. And you go in the back and you get, like, construction paper and loose leaf. They, you know, they were all over the place when I was a kid, and I loved them because they would just get comics and never return them.

So they would just have stacks and stacks and stacks. You’d go, that was like your last place because they were always old and beat up, but they. But they had older, older comics, you know, howie would forget to return them all. That was the best. I remember he had. I got the first daredevil with Frank Miller there, and I loved it. And I went back and he had, like, all of them, you know, except for one that I was missing, you know, and that became, like, an obsession to get the one Frank Miller daredevil that I was missing.

That was fun. Comics were so good back then. How could, how could we not be obsessed with them? I can’t help but notice that the first three that you mentioned actually, I mean, hell, like, the five or six that you ended up mentioning were all Marvel. And you mentioned that your brothers were kind of in the DC’s at Justice league, right? Not that they were into DC’s. It’s just, they just. I just happened to be around. But my older brothers, they just casually picked up a comic. So I think they were, because my older brother had a fantastic four poster in the room, like, since I was a kid.

Okay, so no family like Marvel versus DC Broad. No, no. But my friend Mike was into DC, and I didn’t like DC. Once you read, like, Frank Miller’s daredevil, and then you go to the same time at DC, and it’s like Batman’s going to another planet because somebody stole his costume. You know what I mean? It’s like, so I always thought that DC was for real little kids. And then when you got older, mature, you got Marvel comics, and he was like, yeah, no, because at the time, like, now I’m going back at the same time, like, 1970, 219 74, I’m getting a Jonah Hex comics.

And Sergeant Rock, these were not little kid comics, you know, but the, the Green Lantern and Flash, I thought were a little childlike. But. But it was almost like there was two companies within DC, you know, the war and the westerns. These were on par with Marvel as far as, like, adult situations and mature, you know, obviously still appropriate for the newsstand. But, man, rejoin a hex, that was not for little kids. You know, that was such good stuff, especially Sergeant Rock. I just read a sergeant Rock the other day that I was like this. This was, like, nerve wracking because it was, people were dying in a war, you know, houses were getting blown up.

Yeah, Sergeant Rock is kind of, like, along the vein of, like, the GI Joe and, like, a lot of just the old school military marine comic books that had, they were basically their own genre for the longest time. Right. That’s another thing, is now, like, mainstream comics, it’s, it’s, it’s all superheroes. You know, they had war, they had westerns, they had Sci-Fi they detective back, you know, in my memory. And then just before me, there was, like, girl comics that they called him, like, Millie the model and Kathy and, you know, and then even, like, Archie comics had, like, always at Harvey comics, they had, like, Wendy the witch and Sabrina.

Like, there was all of these different types. You didn’t. I remember wading through all, like, I don’t want Wendy. I don’t want Casper. I don’t. Oh, cool. Fantastic Four. These are good comics. The rest of these, now I’m reading old Justice League from the sixties, you know, the Julius Schwartz stuff where it’s just like, an alien has swapped your powers and you’re confused. And I’m enjoying them now as charming, almost like Scooby Doo stories. You know, they don’t. I guess I’m kind of tired of grim and gritty. You know, it’s been 40 years of grim and gritty.

Now I’m kind of really enjoying the old school silver hdc stuff. Where does, where does Lobo fit on your scale? I never liked Lobo. There’s a couple of characters I never liked. I never liked Lobo, and I never liked Deadpool. And I know that’s, and I never liked cable. There’s very similar deadpool and lobo. I kind of see them and, like, they break the fourth wall constantly. They’re snarky. They’re, like, self aware. Well, lobo, I always thought this is what a nerd thinks a cool guy is. Like, lobo is my favorite dc. You know what I mean? Like, like, when you’re, you, when you’re just, like, an introverted comic book guy, and you’re like, I’m gonna make the coolest guy.

He’s gonna have muscles and he’s gonna ride a motorcycle. He’s gonna curse. You know what I mean? Like, you’re not wrong, man. You’re not wrong. Yeah, I never, I never liked lobo. Uh, deadpool. I don’t like when characters break the fourth wall. And as much as I love john byrne, that she hulk, that still bothered me when she hulk broke the fourth wall, but I tolerated it because it was john byrne. What about rob liefeld? Pouches? Where, where are you at on these? I was one of the meanest people when it came, when it came to rob liefeld, I hated image comics.

You know, I started collecting comics in 1974. So, like, by the time image came out, you know, that was like, you young kids, you don’t like anything good anymore. Like, I hated the early, and I bought them, and all I could think of is, these aren’t good. These are just not good. They’re image. The stories suck, and I like the stories now, is this Max included? Because that’s image. There’s a few exceptions. Gen 13 was actually well written. I was going to bring that one up to, yeah, 13. Max. I was funny. I was just talking about Max last night.

Max was one of the first comics that I had the whole set. I read them every month, and then somewhere down the line, I’m like, I need to reread this. I’m not getting some of these references. And I didn’t miss an issue. So, like, some Max I really liked because it was Image comics, which I didn’t really have a high regard for, but that comic demanded a lot of the reader, so I had to sit down and, like, I think it was around issue ten, I had to sit down, like, turn off the music and just, this is what I’m doing.

I’m reading Max. It was, you know, I don’t want to say adult, because that always means, like, dirty or whatever, but it was a, it was a comic that demanded a lot from the reader, and I really respected it, you know, because I remember a guy in the comic store was telling me about the max. I’m like, that’s not the max. Like, yeah, this is picking up the issue. I’m like, I read that, you know, like, there was deeper layers to that comic. I really, I really liked Max. Are you, are you referencing when you were, when you’re saying, like, you’re talking about two different comics and you’re picking up, is this about how it was, you know, a person basically going through a mental breakdown and jumping out of sanity? Yeah.

And I was just, like, I was just reading it like a superhero book. You know what I mean? Right. It almost seems like he just teleports to, like, a fantasy dimension. He teleports back and, but why is he sleeping on the street in a while? Why is he crashing at the, yeah. And I didn’t get that it was a mental breakdown, you know what I mean? And so I was just like, okay, he’s literally going into the dreaming, and it’s like a superhero story. And I’m like, oh, I. This is on a whole level, another level, you know what I mean? And I.

So that. That was, like, the pit I thought was well written, but Max was the first image comics I thought that was like, okay, this. This company is pulling out because, like, I read, like, the Wildcats, youngblood, supreme, and I was like, it’s just splash pages posing, and half the time, the art really isn’t that good. I was never a fan of Rob Liefeld’s art, never liked it. And then all of a sudden, I’m gonna say around, like, 98 or so, image became so good. You know, if you remember, they got Alan Moore taking over Supreme.

I can’t remember. The writer that took over Wildcats with Brett Booth and Travis Charay were doing the art, and it just boomed. Then Warren Ells came out with planetary, and then image, I thought, was, like, the best, the best company for, I’d say, like, a good five, six years. So, you know, image took all the artists, but they. They were almost, like, dismissive of the writers for a long time, and then they even. I remember they hired Chuck Dixon to write profit, and I was really excited, and it still sucked. You know, I wonder, did they.

Did they edit Chuck Dixon, or did Chuck Dixon just do a paycheck, or did he just not get it? You know? Because I know, I forget that Michael swarinsky, he took a job for image, and he didn’t write. They just, you just, yeah, you will pay you to use your name, but we already got the comic done. We just need to. We need some clout. Yeah, we need. We need to credit a write. So I wonder if that’s what they did with that. But, uh, you know, and at the same time, it’s like they took all the talent for Marvel.

So if the nineties marvel was terrible. So I had a really bad taste in my mouth about image comics for a long time. You know, around 93, 94, 95, DC and Marvel sucked. Oh. But back to DC. The crisis on infinite earth changed everything. Then I became a DC freak. So I collected everything from DC and Marvel, from the crisis in infinite earth through about 2015, where I just dropped Marvel and DC. You were describing your initial impression of DC as maybe being a little bit juvenile, right? And then it kind of turned you off for a long time.

And I know a lot of. I mean, most people that I know outside of the Internet bubble of, like, my social media friends and stuff, right? But, like, most people, I know a lot of them still look at all comic books. I don’t care what label or title or anything. It’s all like, oh yeah, I’m not 14. Why do I, I’m just curious because, you know, 55,000, you know, you’re in your fifties, you’ve been collecting since the seventies. Could you make a compelling pitch to someone that’s, I don’t know, 45th, like you’re like a peer of youtland like a pitch to why you should, you should consider reading a comic book.

Well, it’s, to me, I don’t want to convince anybody to do anything they don’t want to do. Like, like if I got to twist somebody’s arm to read comics, I’m not going to twist somebody’s arm to sit down and play a board game with me. You the muscle here. You can be the good cop, I’ll be the bad cop. But you know, but like if somebody was to say like, you got a whole room dedicated to comic books, you got, I’ll say the same thing. It’s like, do you watch Star wars? You know, do you watch time bandits? Do you watch Game of Thrones? Do you watch it? Do you read novels? Because it, comic books are just pure imagination with no constraints all, you know, it’s just ideally the best comics, in my opinion, are a writer artist, one guy just from his brain drawing, and you could do whatever you want without, without a special effects budgethouse, you know, so, and I say you, whatever movie did you like? Comic books did it 1st 30 years ago.

And, you know, and it, which is why like I didn’t watch, like I didn’t read western comics and I didn’t read, you know, war comics as a kid because you could do it on tv, you could do it in the movies, but superheroes and for the most part, space stuff, you couldn’t really do it. Well, comics did it. Best comics had this unlimited imagination. Like, I remember what was in 92 when the Terminator, when the Terminator sequel came out, everybody was talking about the Terminator, and I was just like, yeah, Jack Kirby did that. That’s the absorbing man.

He did that in the sixties, you know, 30 years earlier, you know, the Matrix, they did stuff like that in the comics, you know, 2020 years earlier, you know, and I said, whatever you, whatever is cool in the movies, comics did it. And you know, people like, okay, but their argument is it’s expensive, you know, I’m paying $5, I’m getting a piece of a story, I gotta wait a month, you know, that’s all valid, and I understand that, but I’m just used to it, you know? I like waiting a month thinking about the story. Like, oh, where’s this gonna go? How’s this gonna happen? Rereading it, you know, looking at the art again, and then you get the story.

Like, oh, man, it went a different direction. Oh, yeah, I was right. I. It’s almost like the antithesis of modern social media consumption, right, where you’re not waiting a month between something that’s going to take you an hour maybe, to read through. Like, you can’t just, like, keep scrolling through and get to the end, right? It’s funny because my wife and I will get on, get interested in a tv show, and we’ll watch one episode, and I’m like, okay. And she’s like, what are you doing? I’m like, I gotta think about it. She gets so mad because to the point where she.

Yeah, she wants to binge it and see what’s going on. I’m like, no, I got to think about this. We want. That’s like comic books. I’ve taken over your brain. Like, what Game of Thrones came out? I think it was already up to the fourth season before I got interested in it. We watched it Sunday nights. Sunday nights was Game of Thrones. You know, we could have watched all the episodes, but we watched one episode every Sunday until we were caught up. And then once we were caught up, I think they came out once a week anyway.

But I wanted to think about it. You know, it was, you know, breaking Bad is the only show I ever binge watched, and I remember, like, three episodes. You know what I mean? Like, I could tell you what happened, but when people bring up stuff, I’m like, oh, yeah, that kind of happened. You know? And I can see that. I remember, like, a different culture, too, in, like, the nineties or even, like, the up until the two thousands where you’d see a show and you wouldn’t see it again for another week, but then you would talk about it with people for that next week, and you’d be theorizing on it and like, oh, wow, I didn’t think about that.

And, yeah, and it really does kind of hook its, like, sink its hooks a little bit deeper in your brain that way. Right? How many, you know, I could still almost talk word for a dialogue of the first star wars movie, you know? I mean, but do you remember what happened in the mandalorian? Because you watched it every day. You know, you watched all the whole season in a week, don’t hate me. I’ve never really liked Star Wars, I think I don’t hate you because wars movies. And that’s it. That’s it. And I just wanted to kind of reiterate something that you mentioned, because it’s honestly the best advice that I ever got when I started working in comics, and I think it was from Dana Carey, but he mentioned to me, I was asking, what should I do with these scripts and should I do comic and all this? And he basically said, think of comics as this realm where you can hire, like, all the special effects art there’s, and, like, the biggest set designs you can imagine, and it doesn’t cost any of that.

Like it, like, if you’re paying a certain rate or if you’re drawing it yourself and it takes you 20 hours to draw a page, like, the only difference is maybe 8 hours. Or if you were gonna do this as a movie or a tv show, it would be like, an $80 million budget for this scene. You can just draw it. And that’s actually not just what makes comics cool, but that’s a, that was, the advice is to exploit that. Like, make it so that your comic book would be the equivalent of, like, a billion dollar movie if someone actually had to create it.

And there’s no other medium still that really lets you do that. That’s, like, the biggest criticism of modern Marvel and DC is people sitting around in coffee shops talking. An example that I always give is, I want to say daredevil, 145 or 100, probably around there somewhere. I’ll say 119. But it’s black Widow and daredevil. They’re living in San Francisco. And Natasha is like, are we a couple now? You know, we, are we exclusive? Do we want children? Like, where is this relationship going? A daredevil’s like, well, you know how we live now. Is it right to have kids? And blah, blah, blah.

What? That while that conversation is going on, they’re jumping off a skyscrapers, hitting flagpoles, flinging. They stop a burglary. They stop a mugger. They save the kid who’s about to get hit by a cardinal. If this was a modern marvel comic, they would have been in a. In the kitchen holding a cup of coffee. You know what I mean? And, like, there’s nothing wrong with what they’re talking about. But like you said, the budget is infinite. They could have been flying in a rocket ship. They could have been teleporting through different dimensions on every other page.

Every time you turn that page, it could be a whole new world. You wouldn’t even have to have any exposition. You would just be like, oh, wow, this is cool. I’m in a comic. I like this. Yeah, right? So you’re absolutely right. That’s one of the things about it gives you cool. And if you’re making a comic book, like, again, there’s nothing. You got to have that panel of Matt Murdock getting out of bed, rubbing his head, going, oh, you know what I mean? I got this case today, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the next, all right, I need to work off this angst.

He puts on his suit and then goes outside, beats up people. But you know what I mean? A whole comic of, like, existential angst of sitting in the Starbucks, like, what do we. What is the nature of our relationship? I consider that’s another really good point, that modern marvel in particular. Yeah, but there’s a lot of people just sitting around and talking, laying in bathtubs on the phone and texting each other. Like, what are we doing here? Oh, that drives me nuts. When I see a comic and I see texts, you know what I mean? That drives me nuts.

It’s like, why is that? Because that’s the writer’s life. You know what I mean? Like, I look, you know, Jack Kirby, this guy fought in a war. You know, he raised kids. You know, he created everything. Stanley, you know, again, he went to war. He was working when he was 14 and going to Manhattan every day, you know, I don’t want to read. What was it? I think one of the last Marvel comics I got was champions. It was like Kamala Khan talking to one of the other teen superheroes, and it was text messages back and forth.

And it’s okay. There’s really no difference between a text message and a caption, if you want to think about it like that. But there was literally them holding a phone, and I’m reading the drawing of a phone with text messages. It’s like, this is supposed to be a comic book. Why aren’t they, you know, on a motorcycle, you know, screaming with a headset on, stopping a robbery, and then the other person is like, oh, yeah, I hear what you’re saying. Kamala, as she’s rescuing somebody who fell out of a plane and their parachute didn’t open. It’s.

You could get the same information out, but it’s just more fun this way, because I think this is all mean to say, but these people didn’t grow up reading comics. They just all of a sudden think comics are cool. So now they went in on it because comics are cool. I like comics because they’re cool. So that’s why I like comics. That’s how I want to write comics. But, you know, they, I always joke around, oh, you want to write comics? Let me see your comic collection. Like, if I was, you’re coming to me for a job writing comics or drawing comics.

Let me see your comic collection. You know, I don’t want to see your comixology report, your digital, I want to see dog eared comic books. I want to see long boxes that are frayed and, you know, that beloved. What was the first comic you ever read? You know, every, you asked me, that was when he first questioned every. Everybody who loves comics not only can tell you the first comic that they read, but I could tell you where I got it, you know who I shared it with. You know, me and Mike, my buddy, might go back and forth, and he was giving me a defenders comic, you know, as we were, like, like, he, he’s pretending to read my comic because he’s really watching to see if I’m getting excited reading that defenders comic at the same, you know, but you don’t get that modern comics anymore.

I’d love to have you read, like, my comic horoscope, based on the first comic I remember getting. You write comics? Yeah. So, yeah, I’ve been writing and self publishing comics since 2012. I was at Disney. I don’t blame you, because I’ve only recently come out of my little Heidi hole. Like, I was kind of the most introverted you could imagine, didn’t even tell anyone I was working on this stuff, and now I’ve got, like, a decade worth of it, so I’m out of my whole life. Stan Lee is gone, man. You got to promote yourself. Yeah, that’s true.

That’s true. And I want to know, like, what does the first comic that I remember buying for myself and falling in love with tell you about me? And just don’t hold back because you don’t know me personally anyways, so feel free to bring burn bridges and anything, but I know exactly. It was a Ralph snark comic from now comics, and I bought it from a tobacco shop that my dad went and got his cigarettes from and that I fell in love with Ralph Snart. Ralph Smart, if I remember correctly. That was first comics, and that was, like, ralph’s not private eye or something like that.

I don’t know if it was that. The, the one I remember was now comics. I don’t know if you started out on first. Yeah, I remember those. I got some Ralph’s, not comics. I’m not gonna say anything bad. You know, you bought it at a cigar shop. I remember there’s a cigar shop near me that had the indian out front and everything. Like the OG Optimo, I think it was called. It was near the supermarket. So when I was really, really looking for a comic, I would, I would ask to go food shopping with my parents, and we would go to the supernova.

I’m gonna go to the, go to the cigar shop. My parents knew I was looking for comic, but it was always like, the timer would go off because all the comics were on the same shelf with playboys and hustlers, you know what I mean? And so the guy would be helping people. Then he would see a little kid. He didn’t know if I was looking at comics or looking at stuff I should be looking at. You know, this is before the Internet. So, like, I’m like, look at. Look at. Trying to get, I was trying to get Marvel premiere number 49, the second half of the ant man story.

And I’m looking and looking and looking. But there’s a playboy right over there. So you’re like. And you open up the playboy, and it’s never opened up to a naked picture. So you’re like, and now the heart’s beating because, you know, it’s only a matter of time before he yells at me. And, you know, I found the, the ant man. I was like, oh, my God, this is so good. Paid for it, left. I love cigar shops. They always had, it was a good excuse to look at something you shouldn’t be looking at while pretending to look for comments.

I like to. You were starting to give me some really interesting, hot takes on image. Could I throw a couple others and just get your takes on around that time? You mentioned Terminator when the Terminator movie came out, and you’re like, oh, it’s already been done. I also remember one of the first comic books that blew my socks off because I was like, oh, comics can be for adult too. And it was a dark horse. And I believe they redid the Terminator and Terminator, two movies as comics, right? But that, and that was my first introduction to Dark Horse.

So what did, what did you think about Dark Horse and comics is amazing. They’re one of the, like, I gave up on Marvel and DC around 2015. I just, like, I just thought that they were disrespectful to the continuity. You know, you don’t get to rewrite Jack Kirby and Roy Thomas and all these guys. So I just, I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. But Dark Horse I still get, because Dark Horse is the home of, like, hellboy, and I am a Hellboy freak, I think, right now. Usagi. Yo, Jimbo. I’m looking over here because I know I got some usagi Yojimbo is Dark Horse, which is probably my favorite comic that’s still coming out.

I’m trying to think I get anything Mike McDowell, Hellboy related, but I got a lot of dark horse comics. They did, they did a series of, like, a superhero universe with Ghost X. I’m trying to remember the other characters, but I got all of those. Dark Horse was at one point that was like the up and coming, big deal comic book company concrete. Oh, my God, concrete was such a great comic. Yeah. I’m trying to remember what else Dark Horse had, and I’m mixing it up with first comics. I was going to say american flag, but that was first.

Yeah, Dark Horse was really good, and I still get them now. I’m curious to go look at what did I just order this month? Because I’m sure I got horse comics, but I still look through image, because image is a confederation of self owned credit, so you never know what’s going to happen that, that month. But I still get image. I still get dark horse fanta graphics. I always look through because loving rockets, I still like, and then, like, it’s like a small company, alternate comics. I pretty much get anything that they make, the ones that do the, on newsprint, and they’ve got, like, they’re cheap prices.

It’s like you can, you can get like a year’s worth of comics almost for $50. Sometimes when they have those, their last, well, unfortunately, that they’re, they’re only, like, crowdfunded. You know, you have to go online and find them now because comic book stores are getting weird. But, like, for like, $15, you’ll get, like, everything that they get. They offer for a couple of months. And, you know, and I was like, I don’t, I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know anything about $15 for a stack of comics. And they were all awesome, you know, awesome.

I’m looking over here, but I just, I just filed. That’s what I was doing today. I was filing comics all day. I assume that’s most days. If you’ve got a collection of, in case you’re wondering, I’m wearing this neck brace. I got to a car accident, and I literally broke my neck. So I had boxes of comics all on the floor, and my wife wouldn’t let me move them. But this is my fourth week, and I’m just going stir crazy. You know, she’s back in the office. She’s driving to the office today, so she’s, I’m just like, all right.

And I’m picking up boxes and filing things. I just can’t stand it anymore. It’s only so much a man can sit still and not do anything before they go crazy. You were, you were kind of mentioning how comic shops have gotten a little bit weird lately. What do you mean by that? No, it’s not the thing. Well, what I mean is, it’s what I, what I’m talking about is it’s a, when I was a kid, comic book stores were filled with kids. There was always kids throwing their bicycles down and, you know, stepping over bicycles. There was 100 kids in buying comics.

But now when you go into comics, a comic shop now, you don’t see kids. And you see people on the older side, like, you know, 45 year olds, you know, looking through comics. You know, you’re not just going to walk up to another 45 year old, hey, you like, you like latest issue, Spatman, you want to hang out? You want to talk? You know, they’re like, they got stuff to do. They got their own kids. They got a job. This is something that they, their wife is at the supermarket over there. They just got 25 minutes to get some stuff.

You know what I mean? So that’s what I mean. The comic book stores used to be, like, cool hangouts. You know, we would get our comics and either hang out in the store or hang out in front of the store. And who would win in a fight? Ben Grimm or Wolverine? And, you know, could Batman beat Green Lantern? And hours upon hours, you know, but you don’t see that anymore. They’re ghost towns. You’re totally right on that, too. And I kind of think because you mentioned earlier how comics were like a solo introverted kind of thing and games would be more social.

But, like, the town that I grew up in, they only had one comic book shop at least within, like, 20 miles. If you get your parents to drive you another 20, maybe there was another one. But what state are you in? This was in Florida. I’m still in Florida now. I’m in Orlando. But this was in south Florida right around, like, Fort Myers, Naples area way before it was developed. And there was a place called comics in the attic. And it was basically just a storage unit that would open up their door and they had, like, connected, but they had turned it into a legit shop, you know, like, it looked like a little dinky, you know what I mean? But.

And that almost forced me to socialize because they also had magic card tournaments there and comics and little collectibles and stuff. Stuff. So you might go there and want to be an introvert, but you’re surrounded by extroverts because there’s a bunch of people there playing games and stuff. So you get kind of, like, wrapped into all this. And it almost became, since it was the one place you could go as a kid, if you rode your bike there, if you had your parents drop you off, it was in the middle of a freaking storage unit, you know, like, industrial area.

So there wasn’t anything else around. So very often if you found yourself at this comic shop, you were there for two or 3 hours maybe, right? Like, that was the thing. That sounds fun. Yeah. There’s nothing else to do. I don’t know if you know Don chin, but he wrote radioactive adolescent black belt hamsters. He, his parents had a chinese restaurant, and he operated a comic book store from their apartment upstairs above the chinese restaurant, he said. So he would have people coming into his house, and he would be selling comics. And then he started getting so successful, he opened up a legit store.

So I love hearing that, like, these little, almost like speakeasies for comics 30 years ago too. So I guess to contrast it with, with today, I it would shock me if someone was like, yeah, I opened up a little comic shop, and it started doing gangbusters, and now we’re expanding. It’s like, you know, just printing money. That almost seems impossible, but that would seem like the biggest anomaly that I’d heard of in the, in the comic world for a while. All comic book stores now, either they’re concentrating on back issues or toys or magic the gathering.

You know, magic the gathering. Like, whether you’re a game store or comic book store, like, if you’re a nerd store stereotypical. It’s magic the gathering is. Or Pokemon or Lorcana, which is the new Disney magic the Gathering. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you get Locana at comic book stores? I thought that was only, like, a Disneyland, not the ones by me. The best comic book shop that I know is Bluebird, which is right here. Blackbird, which is right here in central Florida. And they just want an Eisner or something. But, yeah, they do, like, big Lorcana release events and games and all sorts.

Now I’m curious. I’ll go to the local comic book store, see if they sell Lorcana. Yeah, I want to ask, too, that I guess the difference between eighties, nineties comic book shops, wherever, rightfully, you would walk in and see a bunch of kids, sometimes 1020, 30, double digits. Now, if I go into a comic shop, even if there’s people in there, like, it would be packed if there was like, 15. And it wasn’t like a funko pop release date of some kind, where they just drop, like, the boys limited edition, where you’ve got, like, a line of people, but on just normal traffic.

And also, there’s, when I first started making my own comics, I had these, like, pie in the sky ideas that I would go to all the different local comic shops, and they would have my books on some, like, local creators shelf and all that. And I quickly realized over time that, oh, no, we have to pay, you know, Diamond X amount every month. We have to get this minimum amount, and we have to put those on the shelves because we already bought them, and we just don’t have room for anything. Maybe in, like, this dark, dingy corner behind, like, a black curtain.

And, like, so it almost, it almost seemed that I was expecting this, this, like, lift everyone up sort of environment with comic book shops. But it feels so much more corporate than I ever expected it to. Did that change at a certain point, or has that always been the case? You know, back. Back when, you know, when I was working at the comic book store, I didn’t know the business. I just knew the comics and the characters. You know, when I was a. When I was 19 years old, I opened up a pizzeria, and that’s when I started knowing business.

But it was the pizza business, and I would go to the comic book store. I was still buying my comics, you know, and it was funny because there was another comic book store across you for my pizzeria. And so I didn’t really know the ins and outs of the business, but I remember Larry took me to a retailer’s convention, you know, so this was, like, the first time I was seeing, like. But he, because he was super introverted, you know, he opened up the comic book store because he was into comics, and he stuttered, and he was a little awkward.

So it was kind of like, what else am I going to do with my life? Just, that’s my favorite kind of comic book store owner with someone that just has a collection so big that they have to justify it by turning it into a store. So they, they’re not like, I’m not a hoarder. I’m not an addict. It’s a business. You just described everything about comics, like, like the more esoteric, like, to the point where he would get so mad. He’s like, why these people, they should be moving beyond Batman now. They should be going into, you know, whatever.

I’m trying, like Mobius. And they should be moving from Mobius now to, like, you know, some esoteric comic that only makes 50 issues a month. You don’t mean, like, that’s, that’s what, that’s the way he still is. I’m still friends with him. He only goes to restaurants that only have one location because, like, oh, I mean, you know, that’s just the way he is. The hipster mentality. Yeah, he was hipster back, back in the seventies, you know. And, uh, so he took me to, with them, to the retailers, and then it was like, it was rowdy.

It was like, it was like, going, I was about to say Morton Downey Junior, but that’s probably a dated reference. I know who that is, though. He had, like, Jerry Springer show. Yeah, yeah, but very political version of Jerry Springer. Yeah. It was people yelling, like, you know, these comics suck, and I’m gonna lose my business. You know, here I thought we were gonna be like, discuss. Will Eisner once said, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it’s like all these angry people who, they didn’t have cash registers. They operated out of shoeboxes, you know, or cigar boxes, you know, because it was all people like Larry.

They just opened up comic book stores as an extension of their hobby, you know. And then Jim Henley would be there, like, the one guy who knew how to run a business. Like, a comic book store has a business. He was the one that, like, he is the first non creator to become a millionaire in comics. And he opened up a store in Staten Island, Jim Hanley’s universe. And he opened up, like, a bunch of Jim handle throughout Manhattan and Brooklyn and Staten island. And so he was, like, teaching people, like, this is how you, this is how you pay taxes.

This is how you use a cash register, you know. And Larry took a class from Jim hand, and I’ll never forget, we literally went from an optimo cigar box. His change, here’s a nickel. Oh, I don’t have a nickel. Here’s a quarter, you know, to a cash register with, with, you know, bringing things up and how to submit your taxes and everything after doing this course. But I remember we were sitting there and I was, I didn’t even realize that I was such a young kid. I’m sitting next to Neil Adams and Neil Adams daughter, you know, and I’m like, joy, you’re pretty.

You know, I’m, like, flirting. I’m, like, 14 years old, flirting with, like, a 19 year old girl, you know what I mean? She just was abused by me. And, you know, Neil Adams didn’t give me the time of day, but afterwards, I was like, you always sit next to Neil Adams. I was like, who’s Neil? I didn’t even know. And it was like, people yelling and screaming, you’re changing these comics, and I can’t sell them, you know? You know, what is wrong with you? Nobody wants. I can. And this was the nineties, you know, this is, you know, so I can only imagine how bad it got around 2014, 2015, you know, with all of these, you know, I remember the big deal was american flag.

What’s in how it shake had left american flag, and the new artists were inferior. And I’m sitting on stacks of american flag comics that I can’t sell, and blah, blah, blah. You know, I just remember it was like, I was embarrassed, you know, I was just sitting there like, I don’t know what to do. This, this is not what I expected. I thought it was going to be like, we’re going to a comic retailers convention, and, like, we were going to talk about Batman if he could beat up the thing. You know, I was just a super little kid, you know, they were talking about, like, not making rent and not.

I was like, oh, my God, this is like a real business. So that was, that was a change. I’m glad I went. You know, what do you, what do you think about modern comic conventions? And I realize you weren’t talking about a comic convention necessarily. Right, but what do you think about modern comic convention before we. I just want to tell this one guy was going around, and he was like, give me all your old comics, and I’ll trade them in for comics that people want. He goes, you know, and I forgot what he was doing.

So I just mean, Larry were all excited about, because we had, like, like, just boxes of, boxes of boxes of comics that we couldn’t sell. Amethyst and, you know, whatever. And he was just like, yeah. And he goes, but you goes, but once you deal with me, you got to keep dealing with me. And I was like, oh, yeah. So I just remember, stop going. I go, what happens if we don’t have comics for you one month? He goes, then I’ll have to pay you a visit. I’m like, this is shady. You know what I mean? Like, my spidey senses went on.

I was like, larry, we’re not going to work with this guy. He’s what? You know, I’m like, this guy’s trouble. I thought so. I think he was like some cop. So I don’t know. That was like, that was like my one business decision. We’re not dealing with this guy, you know, we’re not making you sleep with the fishes and they put you business. Bye. Well, he stayed in business another 1520 years after that. But I just remember that was like, my one business I’m getting. I’m getting. He was like, okay, okay. But anyway, what you say about modern comic conventions? Well, because the way that you’re describing how you had one expectation when you went to this retailers conference versus what it was actually like, and I kind of think the same thing about modern comic book conventions.

You’ve never been to one before, and you’re like, I love comics. I can’t wait to show up and talk about comic books with people all day. And you go to a comic book convention in 2024. It see, and me, there’s my own bias speaking. You show up and you’re like, oh, everyone here is just here to, like, get a picture taken with a tv star, or they’re here to see the new preview of, like, a movie coming out, and no one actually cares about the comic book medium at that point. You’re absolutely right. I remember going, I grew up on Long island, and there was comic conventions in the Holiday inn, and I’m trying to remember what they were called.

And I remember going there, and Bill Willingham, who’s now a superstar, he did the comic fables, but at the time, he was doing elementals, and that was my comic. Oh, man, I love that comic. That, to me, was, to me, that was like the watchman before watchmen. That was like, the first superhero comic to, like, have logical consequences, you know? And I, like, it was grim and gritty before. Grim and gritty, you know? But it was still firmly a superhero.com. and I remember going to that convention, and I must have Bill Willingham, to his credit, didn’t say, get out of here, little kid.

You bothered me. I hung out with him and talked to him. You know, I was watching him draw panels. You know what I mean? He autographed my comics, and I went around and I bought other comics. I remember talking to, like, carmine Infantino and Roy Thomas. I talked with Walt Simonson, you know, literally, talked because it wasn’t a mob scene. And I was maybe 1516 years old, still a kid, and, you know, with an armful of comics, talking about, you know, raider, a bill, and all this stuff. And then years later, you know, I met my wife, and I’m like, hey, let’s go to New York Comic Con.

So we went to Manhattan, to the Javits center, to comic Con, and she loved it. I was, like, nervous. But we went to a panel, and it was all old timers. It was Carmine and Fantino and I think Don Heck, and was some of the last appearances of these ancient first generation Marvel guys. And we just sat, and there must have been, like, 20 people in this panel. What a crime that these living legends were all there. And it was almost like they sat among us. They didn’t sit on the stage. We just sat in a circle talking and telling old stories.

And my wife loved it. It was so good, you know, then we went. We bought some comics. We went to the diner. We went to a few places in Manhattan and came home. We did that five years in a row. And then the last year, it was just like, we couldn’t. Couldn’t move. Everybody’s in costume. 900 girls are dressed as Harley Quinn, you know, and none of them can mention what comic she debuted. Name, name five comics right now. Right, right. But they were movie Harley Quinn. They weren’t even animated series Harley Quinnipood. And it was just crowded.

And I remember talking to a couple of vendors, and they were livid. You know, once you got, you. Once you went to all the vendors they store, you could walk around. I was like, oh, you know, where no one’s actually there? Like, yeah, I paid five grand for this freaking tiny little space, and nobody’s buying comics. Everybody’s here to be, you know, you know, this guy likes Heath Ledger, and this girl looks like Harley. Now we’re peeling back some. Some old wounds and pouring some salt in. Yeah, they were livid. And then I remember my niece is like, hey, Uncle John, I’m gonna go to comic convention.

I got a Harley Quinn custom, and I’m like, you’re grounded. She’s like, buy comics, you know, at a comic convention. No, I’m there. I’m there to watch movies. What do you mean? Yeah, so it was. It was like, movie stars and, you know, all about the tv shows. I remember the last time we went to the Javits center for the convention and Fringe, that show, fringe was the big thing. So, like, you went all the actors for Fringe and Josh Sweden’s the Dollhouse, you know, so I haven’t been to Comic Con since Fringe, so that’s God knows how many years that is.

Ten years. We’ll talk about, I’m like, you know, I’ll go to local comics, you know, maybe closer to 20, but whatever. Yeah, who’s counting? How long ago? Jeez, I think we’ve been to one since then, now that I think about it. But I’ll go to smaller cons by me, you know, because it’s, it’s, it’s. It’s local people like you that make comics, and then, and then it’s like, you can actually talk to the creators. Like, Larry Hama was there. I was able to talk to Larry Hama. You know, as much as he hated being there, you know, you could tell he was not happy.

I’m trying to punch or just sour. He’s just sour. Cause he wants to retire. But he didn’t make enough money to retire. You know, he wants to sit on the beach. You know, this guy wrote, you know, they’re making movies based on his comics, and the guy still has to go to a convention. You know, it’s kind of embarrassing. Like, hey, you know, it’s this close to onlyfans, you know what I mean? Hey, you want to talk to me? Give me money for an autograph. You know, he wants to. He wants to hang out. He wants to live on.

The guy did savage sort of Conan for 25 years of the best comics ever, and he can’t afford to retiree. It’s. It’s sad, actually. You know, it was, was being in comic books ever as lucrative as little kids wanted to imagine it to be, or was it just like one in a million? Well, you know, Stan Lee, obviously, Jack Kirby, we forget he was, like, a millionaire before he even did Fantastic Four. Number one. He was doing. He had newspaper strips. He had his own studio. I’d like to think will Eisner made money. You know, John Byrd retired.

He doesn’t. He only does what he feels like doing. I know George Perez retired earlier. There’s a couple of people that made. Look at Mark. Mark Miller. You know, he just, he just sold everything to a, to Netflix for millions even. I had him on my channel, and that’s one of his pitches. He’d like a draw comics. You want to do a four issue series for me? Become a millionaire, you know? Yes. You know what I mean? That so, you know, there are people making money, but, like, for every Mark Moore. Yeah, you have, like, a.

I’m trying to think Larry Hammer, who’s signing autographs in a convention, miserable. You know, I try to be as nice as possible, but you could just see it in his eyes. He’s like, you know, guys close to 80 years old, and he needs to go to conventions. That’s. That’s kind of sad. You know, you’d like to think that they want to go to conventions, but, you know, maybe not an 80. Maybe not an 80. You know, you were talking a little bit earlier, too, about how a certain point you kind of fell out with caring about Marvel and DC and image and any of, like, the big publishers at that point, you started looking at smaller ones.

And one of, one of the fascinations that I’ve got, and it wasn’t because they were really necessarily around as much when I was a kid, but when I found my dad comic stash, and he had, like, zap comics, and he had a whole bunch of, like, our crumb comics. Oh, okay. And then I found out about a whole different subgenre that isn’t just underground comics. And I think that that’s what you would consider, like, zap in our chrome would be underground. C O M I X. That’s kind of like the way they would go by. But then there’s, like, a subset, maybe you can correct me, of Tijuana Bibles, which are, like, previous to the underground comic scene, which I think was like tail end of the sixties, early seventies, but like, fifties and sixties.

Are there any, like, known Tijuana Bible titles or artists or writers that would be, like, a shortcut to find some of them, because I go into comic shops, and even if I’m going, like, cross country, if I’m doing conventions, I’ll pop in, I’ll ask for Tijuana bibles, and half the time, people don’t even know what the heck you’re talking about. They don’t even know what you’re talking about. For anybody watching, a Tijuana bible was basically, they were made in, in Mexico by local artists. So a lot of times we don’t know who wrote them and drew them.

I do know that, like, Steve Ditko was rumored to do a few of them, and he denies it, you know, but people say that this is Ditko’s artwork or a real facsimile thereof. I think Joe Stanton did a couple. The guy I always forget, Siegel and Schuster, I think it was Schuster did the art. He did Tijuana bibles for a while, too. Yeah, but. But those are the few people that we know, but they were basically dirty comics. So it would be a booby comic of Wonder Woman. You know, Steve Trevor would tie Wonder Woman up, take her clothes off.

I don’t know if they got x rated, but they got saucy for the times, you know, and yeah, they sold. You’d get a bit truck stops and, you know, underground head shops and things like that. So nowadays I. They don’t need to make it because you could go on Kickstarter and get full on x rated comics, you know, you, I don’t know if you remember, like Omaha the cat Dancer and melody, you know, kids kitchen sink comics was making full on porn comics. It was cherry pop tart, you know, I actually find those in like, the dollar long boxes in my local shop.

Sometimes I’ll find like a melody just like in there. Yeah, melody, I thought was a great comic, actually. It was originally called the Orgies of abetiba. It was set in french speaking Quebec, I think. Then it was recollected and redrawn because she, the artist, the writer drew it, and it wasn’t that good. They got a new artist to redraw it. They called it melody, the confession of a stripper. It was like six issues. I’m making like an all ages, wholesome superhero comic book, but I’m not a prude. I have a full set of Omaha the Cat Dancer and Joe Matt’s peep show, which should not be read by normal good humans.

He’s like the most detestable person, but I find him fascinating. These old fan of graphics and kitchen sink comics. I’m trying to think of other, but yeah. So then, like, I got a american splendor. That was, that one actually, was actually fairly popular because I got one of the underground Robert Crumb comics that made it to the mainstream. That was like a breakthrough success. And they’re excellent. I never got them. You know, I was like those dirty hippies. I was a punk rocker. I didn’t want to have anything to do with the hippies. But now as an adult, I’m like, I want to get.

I want to get some of the american Harvey seeker of these american splendor comics. So. So me being an anal retentive person, I had to get the first issue and it was excellent. So now I’ve been buying collections because finding those stuff in good condition for a reasonable price is ridiculous. So I’ve been buying collected, you know, fanny graphics. If you go to their website, they’ll make good hardcover collections of all that stuff. And, you know, it’s good stuff. These guys were talented, you know, very strict sort of submission policy. It’s got to be, like, never digital.

It’s got to be like, send them all the originals, and they really select things that are pretty, like, great. They’ve got, like, merit to them. And whenever they have those damn Black Friday sales, it’s like, it always takes a little chunk out of me. Yeah. I never liked silver age comics for the longest time. I always thought they were hokey and silly and childlike, and now I’m loving the innocence of Superman fighting mixuplic, who’s grand scheme is to turn everybody green or purple or elephant noses, you know what I mean? It’s like, I don’t know. I just like, oh, man, the world is getting to be really, really weird.

And it’s just something like, all right, I’m gonna go read an early Justice League. When a space alien comes to Earth and just swaps everybody’s powers. Oh, what a dilemma. You know? Now Superman’s Aquaman, you know, who cares? But. Who cares? But I, you know, and I just love the fact that Superman’s like, I can’t be Aquaman. And Aquaman’s like, yeah, I could be Superman, you know? Yeah. For one of them, it was an upgrade, for sure. Exactly. The old Fawcett comics, I’m really trying to get them. I bought a collection of a Captain Marvel Junior.

The Mac Brown boys. Oh, my God. You know, they’re so good. You know, they’re so good. I think Captain Marvel Junior was the first introduction to sabacc too, which is one of, like, the OG references to real specific and explicit occultism in comics. Yeah, it was Satan. Azazel. Azazel. Belial, Baphomet. I can’t remember the last two. Yeah, yeah. But it was, it was hard. Yeah. Have you ever heard, I want to just, I’ll preface this with saying that I think I only, like, 10% can be swayed on this, but I’ve heard it repeated very often, especially when I get into a cult, esoteric topics and comic books, and that’s this rumor again.

10% maybe that Jack Parson’s dad was named Marvel and that somehow he might have been a sort of the original Captain Marvel. He, he was a captain, and his name was Marvel, and he was friends with Fawcett, the guy who founded. Yeah, I, it’s funny. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that he was friends. It’s funny that you said that because I have proof, but I play a role playing game. Anytime I’m on camera, I talk about this role playing game called villains and vigilantes. It came out in the eighties, and it’s a superhero dungeons and dragons.

There’s an adventure where they time traveled, and they meet Jack Parsons and the Jet propulsion Laboratory, and they meet the original captain Marvel, Jack Parsons father, who was a secret agent. And he also might somehow have inspired James Bond. So the guy who somehow inspired James Bond also inspired Captain Marvel, who really, his name was Captain Marvelous. And here’s a funny story. Is Jack Parsons the son? And I’m confusing because it’s also tied to Lovecraft through Captain Marvel. Jack Parsons father, he knew somebody that was a friends with one of the Lovecraft people. This is all brand new news to me.

I’m a big conspiracy. I love all this stuff. And also, one of the Jack Parsons friends was the 12th generation descendant of Rabbi Ben ibn Joseph, who was supposedly the person who created the golem. So you had all of these literal occultists all hanging out, forming the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which created our space race program. You know, they created solid fuel. And without Jack Parsons and this, we never would have made it to the moon. And then, of course, they got some of the nazis later on to work it. And these guys were famous occultists. But the story that I love of Jack Parsons is he got interested in the occult when he was twelve years old.

And I forget which book that he got on. This is supposed to be true. He got this book and he summoned the devil. And the devil traumatized him so much that he gave up the occult until he was in his twenties. And then he went back into. So I always like what happened. You know, there’s a book called strange, but there’s a great book that I read. It’s all about Jack Parsons and his occultism. But he ended up buying a house in San Diego, and you could stay there, provided you were an occultist, a Scientist, or some sort of artist.

And why can’t I think of his name, the guy who founded Scientology? Oh, L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard stayed there, and L. Ron Hubbard became the chief financial officer of his church. Why can’t I think of the name of it? But they followed out Scientology. Yeah. Dynamics. This is before Scientology. Scientology didn’t exist yet, but Jack Parsons formed. Oh, this is the OTO, isn’t it? Or golden ot. Yes, yes. The occult order of Thelema or something like that. And. And Bordeaux tempo Temple ordeal. Some, yeah. And he was their chief, and he, they were going to summon the great mother, and they said they had this ritual, and then there was.

This is the moon child ritual that they went out into the middle of the desert, and they had Marjorie Cameron, and they were trying to ingest, invoke a storm, this beautiful redhead with green eyes and everything like that. So Jack Parson and her would have sex in front of everybody, trying to summon the great beast. Meanwhile, what’s his name, Elrond Hubbard, was embezzling his. All the money took 20 grand, and Jack Parsons wife, who was 16 years old, underage and flew, who took off to Florida. So when all of a sudden, Jack Parsons like, where’s all my money? Where’s my wife? And he went after her.

And supposedly he cast a spell and made a storm. And L. Ron Hubbard’s yacht actually got caught in a storm and capsized, and he got arrested. And the Scientologists, when you bring this up to him, the Scientologists say, yeah, l. Ron Hubbard was a secret agent who infiltrated to rescue this underage girl. That’s their story. To make L. Ron Howard the hero. But L. Ron Harvard then took that 20 grand and used that to found the sea. And the Church of Scientology all embezzled from Jack Parsons and Alan Moore. The reason why I know this story is Alan Moore wrote that in a comic as part of tomorrow’s stories in the Church of Scientology.

He said, we’re going to sue you into oblivion. So that story was never released. So I heard him talk about it in an interview, and I’m like, who’s this Jack Parsons? And then because of that, I. Why can’t I think of the name of the book? It’s something called straight, but there’s a tv series about it. Strange Angels, the name of the tv series. There’s a book. Yeah, this. There’s a book called Strange angel that the tv show is based on. It’s excellent. L. Ron Hubbard. Jack Parsons to the point you’re going to laugh because you’re paranoid american.

Before I met my wife, one of my hobbies was trying to get recruited by colts. And I would, you know, I was working in Manhattan, and I’d go hang out at Washington Square park and sit there and look like lost. And people would come up, hey, you want to go to a party? And then I would go off to a Scientology party, and, you know, hey, and then I would start talking. Didn’t 1972 the Food and Drug Administration raid? I, you know, clear water and say that these e meters don’t really work, that there’s no scientific.

So I’m the only person that you will ever meet that got thrown out of a Scientology recruitment drive. That’s actually not true. That’s actually not true, because when I was at Disney, I had. I’ll make this the shortest version of this story ever. But one of the guys that I worked at Disney in animation is the Royal Disney post production here in Orlando. But he told me this story that when he was over by, like, Cal Arts and. And he got recruited into Scientology, and he made his way all the way up to the point where they start giving you some kind of audits.

And one of the audits is you sit into a room with another Scientology supposed to be like, a level above you, and you stare at each other. And some people, they’ll break down crying, or some people will have all sorts of emotional reactions just to staring at someone for, like, ten or 15 minutes. And my friend that I work with, he was a much older guy, and he had this most infectious laugh. And as soon as he would sit down to do these audits, he’d start, like. And he’d start chuckling, and then he would break down, do a.

Laughter. And the auditor would start laughing too, because they couldn’t resist. And they had to keep replacing the auditor with, like, the manager and then the manager, and he kept making everyone break down. And at a certain point, they told him, like, you’re not ready for that. Like, Scientology is not for you. Because they couldn’t admit that they didn’t have someone that was so high up, that was so clear that they were from his infectious laughter. It was like he was the freaking, like, game genie of Scientology recruitment. Yeah, I was holding the e meters, and I’m just like, you know, I could go outside and have a gatorade, and that’ll change my electrolytes and resistance.

I’m an electrician. All you’re doing is measuring the resist, the electrical resistance of my body. That could change by my dinner. So I said, you must. I said, you imply science in the term, so where’s your control? You know, you got to have charts and everything like that. So let me see what these meetings mean. Because, like, again, if I want to get this, I’ll go out and have a gatorade, and that’ll change the conductivity, and that’ll change everything. Do you have a. You know, what is the rubric to change scores? If you. If I tell you that I had two gatorades before coming in, they’re like, get out.

And this is, like, the most corporate of all cults that you could try in court, right? So, like, did you have a wish list? Like, if any. Any cult could have recruited you where you’re, like, hoping for the process church to knock on your door or something? Which church? You heard the process church, which is apparently where son of Sam was supposed to be. The undermire had all these secret meetings, and they were all orchestrated by the process church. No. So if you haven’t heard of that, was there one that you had heard of? And you’re like, man, I really hope they get the family.

The family was. They were actually coming to my apartment and having meetings, and I didn’t believe, but I just was like, tell me more. Tell me more about. And then, you know, my wife, extrovert behavior, by the way. My wife moved in, and, like, they called up and, you know, they’ll, my wife’s like, you got to give this up. You got to give this up. So I gave up trying to get recruited by cults. My wife. Are there. Are there any national cults that you and I don’t want to say that you would have wanted to join, but do you feel like you most.

It might have been the most susceptible to, even if it, like, geographically wouldn’t work out? No. I mean, when I lived in Long Beach, New York, it was very acidic neighborhood, and the hasidic Jews used to come to my door, and I used to invite them in, and we would have talks. You know, we would talk about the kabbalah, you know, and everything like that. And then my roommate was an optician Christian from Egypt, and he had, you know, a funny looking cross, you know, not like a regular cross. Like it had loops and everything like that.

And finally one of the rabbis saw that. He goes, are you jewish? I said, no, I never said I was jewish. And he made, like, abjurations to protect himself or whatever, left. And then they told. They stopped coming. But I enjoyed sitting down with, you know, I like talking about religion with people. Like, that’s. I have a degree in ancient history with a minor in theology, you know, so I like all this stuff. I don’t necessarily believe in all of it, but I’m fascinated. You know, I’ll talk. I’ll talk to you about greek mythology the same way I’ll talk about the Old Testament, the same way I’ll talk about the Mormon.

When I lived out in Albuquerque, the Mormons used to come to the door. We would sit and talk about the Book of Mormon. You know, are there or any mormon comics, even if it’s not overt, are there any that are like, oh, this is clearly the story of Joe, Joseph Smith or solar babies or something. Battlestar Galactica is more. Right. Yeah. Like, almost explicitly so. Right. And I don’t know if you know Mark Allred, who did Mad Men. A madman, rather. Excuse me, madman. He did a silver surfer series with Dan Slott at Marvel. He did for his Mormon mission.

He did the golden plates. And he did a comic book of Joseph Smith and the Gold. And I’m gonna get published. Yeah, I’m trying to get a copy of it. I think it’s like something that you can only get in the mormon church because he did it for the mormon church. But I love his art. He’s one of my favorites. He’s been on my favorite. Is it called the golden plates ever? I’d love to get a copy of it. Is that the name of. It is called the golden plates? I think it’s called the golden plates.

Yeah. I’m gonna. If I can track that one down, I’ll let you know because that actually sounds fascinating to me, and I’m curious too. Have you ever heard of the book by Christopher Noel, the our godswear spandex? No. No. So I recommend it. It’s a little bit dated now. I think I read it, like, 20 plus years ago. But it’s basically a book about all of the influence of the original DC and Marvel characters and the ancient gods that they were all based on. That’s right up my alley. And, like. And like, the religious upbringings, a lot of the original creators and how a lot of these links aren’t just sort of arbitrary like that.

Like, there was actually rooted in them. Gets into, like, the golem magic and stuff. It’s a fascinating book. Yeah. The thing is, the golem, you know, Superman is Moses from Siegel and Schultzer. You know, there is, you know, and Marston made Wonder Woman, like, the female supreme being, you know, into bondage and everything. There’s a lot of Diana, which is basically artemis the huntress, which kind of all falls in line with lot. So I guess this, this leads me to maybe get into some more woo woo sort of topic here. But there’s, I think. I’m pretty sure it was Neil Gaiman.

It might have been Neil Gaiman or Alan Moore, but I think Neil Gaiman made this claim that comic books to him are magical sigils. And that, like, the more time that you kind of put into this graphic sigil and you put out into the world that it has real magic behind it. That sounds like Khaled. Moore? Yeah. Do you prescribe to that at all? I remember I was big into Carl Sagan growing up. Carl Sagan was, like, one of the guys that just. Just really influenced me. And to me, he’s, like, the first person to really turn magic into, like, not magic turned science into, like, awe.

You know, like, as a little kid, it was always Jack Kirby, John Romita, and all this stuff. But then Carl Sagan came along and, like, got me to look at planets and, you know, black holes and think about, like, the majesty of science. And I’ll never forget what he said. He goes. He goes, isn’t it magic to think that you could just look at these symbols on a piece of dead tree and the thoughts of a person long dead are transmitted into your brain? Because isn’t that magic? You know, he’s talking about writing, you know? So in that respect, comic books are magic.

You know what I mean? Like, I’m looking that directly into Jack Kirby’s imagination. You know, when you read Olmack, Omac is, like, prophetic. Like, to me, that that series, I think it lasted eight issues. It’s the most prophetic of Jack Kirby’s career of a man whose unlimited imagination. That book, to me, is the peak of his. I read that, and it’s like. It’s almost like prophecies, you know? He’s talking about cell phones. He’s talking about fascist governments. He’s talking about people who trade in convenience for. For government control. You know, stuff like in the seventies. Yeah, I know that was already done in, like, by George Orwell and stuff like that.

But it just. And look at the new gods. Everybody had the mother box that was a cell phone, you know, things like that. I just think that that is magic. You know, reading a comp Alamo is not wrong. But I also think Alan Moore likes to exaggerate things, to be an edgy. He’s still, like, an edgy 16 year old kid. He definitely visits hot topic, or his equivalent of hot topic very often. You know, he worships that. That snake God. And I can’t remember the name of the snake God, but the whole people who worship the snake God, they created a puppethe and controlled it.

This is back in, like, I don’t even know, like, the year 600. And they let everybody know it was a puppet. But the fact that you worship this puppet, you’re worshiping the idea that knowing that it’s a puppet means that you still recognize the fact that even a puppet could be divine. Like, yeah, so he worships this puppet. Because he knows that it’s not a God, but the fact that it’s not a God means it’s closer to divinity, you know, and she’s like, do you even believe this, Alan? Like, you just found something kooky and, you know, but you’re brilliant, and I still love you.

You know, he’s like, the one guy that could, like, just come out and tell me I’m an ass. And I’m like, okay, alan, I’m an ass. Him and John burn in such a compelling way, though, that you might also be like, damn, I guess I am. You know, like, it sounds like I’m name dropping. But Mark Muller was on my channel, and he said he knows Alan Moore. He said, he is the sweetest, nicest guy in person. He goes, but he doesn’t really give interviews. And then somebody said something, that somebody said something, and he goes, he goes, he sounds more crotchety than he actually is.

He goes, but he’s, you know, that’s him and John Burnham, my two holy grails. I would love to have those two guys on my channel. Channel talk to them. Yeah. I would say that the more occult and esoteric you are in nature, the less your statements will survive a game of telephone. Like, they’ll break down within one iteration of that. And then I just love the idea that Alan Moore and Grant Morrison are two wizards that have been battling each other through their comics for the past 20 years. You know, for some reason, they have a feud.

But then again, do they really have a feud? This could just be like a kayfabe thing. Who knows? But I’ve heard this referred to as almost like an Alistair Crowley versus, as Rudolph Hess, which was like an OG sort of wizard battle that. Yeah, Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman might be in one of these as well. Well, it sounds like Neil Gaiman’s losing about his news lately. Yeah, on a long enough timeline. I got so mad because Sandman is one of my favorite comics. It’s like a comic that was near and dear to me throughout my poorest college years.

I still made sure that I got the newest issue of Sandman, and then I’ve seen a tv show is being made about it, and I. And I just got so mad that the. That the woman cast is death. I didn’t care that it was a black woman, but I was just can’t. That the character of death is supposed to be this duality. It’s, you know, she’s not caucasian. The endless are white, like alabaster. You know, they’re nothing. My skin color, they’re alabaster and they have black hair and they wear black clothes. They’re duality, because death is also life.

Dream is also reality. Design is also destruction. Delirium is also delight. Like, they’re embodiments of dilemmas. They’re black and white, not caucasian and negro or hispanic and asian or whatever. So I said, I don’t care that you cast a black woman. I said, but she should absolutely be. And he’s like, oh, you want her in whiteface because you’re a racist. And I was just like, Neil, I know you’re smarter than this. You know, you’re just nothing but a disappointment. You know what I mean? Like I said, there’s no point even considering entertaining this conversation anymore. You know what I’m talking about? But whatever.

But there’s the company line, too, that you notice, and I would say the same. I mean, we might as well be talking about the Snow white remake. Make, we might as well be talking about the one for me that you might not care as much about because you said you weren’t huge on Deadpool. But I was so dominant, domino, I was like my first comic book crush ever. But before Jean Grey or before rogue or any, like, they were up there, but Domino, for some reason. So, yeah, that one I’ll never forgive. As soon as it started.

I like that actress, too. I do too much John candy in Spaceballs, man, I couldn’t get over it. You know, it’s, it’s like, you know, they cast a, why can’t I think of her name? Zoe Saldada, what to be Gamora. And Gamora’s green. So they cast a dark woman, put green makeup on it. And I mean, the cast, whoever you want, we got CGI, we got makeup, you know, you know, but Domino, that’s supposed, she’s supposed to look like a domino. So she’s supposed to be black with, you know, with white. And, you know, another one is supposed to be, be just black and white.

That’s, that’s part of the character. I don’t know why we’re going to get dangerously into some crotchety old man. Yeah, I have no tolerance for race swap, gender swap. I, that’s not the character. And, oh, this is the thing that gets me mad about Alan, about Neil Gaiman is he said on, in an interview, because if you are a fan of Batman and they’re going to make a Batman movie, and then you go to see the movie and it’s a guy in a yellow trench coat, with a pet bat solving crimes. That’s not the character that you want.

That’s not the character you love. People want to see their characters on the screen. And then when I say I wanted to see death as a dilemma, as black and white, you know, not an abstract black and white, not human skin tones. He are. You are racist. Okay, okay. You know what I’m talking about. You created the character. You know? You know exactly. Don’t. Don’t play dumb with me, Neil. I’m not a racist. And you opened open up your arcrum comic watching, like, reading mammys. Yes. You know, you said, too, that you’re a big conspiracy theory fan.

So that’s a perfect segue. I’ve got a quick little segment. It’s like 10 seconds long, and then it’s going to lead into, like, a little game show kind of segment. I’ll explain the rules in a second. Sure. Hey, conspiracy buffs, I double dare you to take some PCP, the paranormal conspiracy probe. On your marks. Get set and go. All right, the rules are pretty simple. I’m just going to mention a certain topic, and you’re going to give me a one to ten rating on how much credibility you give it. So, for example, if I said rate Bigfoot one to ten on how much you believe Bigfoot exists, where would you put that on that scale? Bigfoot.

Bigfoot. It’s funny. I’m fascinated with Bigfoot, but I never really thought about, is he real or not? I’d say out of all the conspiracy theories, or we would have found Bigfoot by now. All right, with. With Bigfoot being a four as a baseline, what about Mothman one? Any other cryptid? Chupacabra. Chupacabra. I’d say a seven. There could be some sort of mutant or mutated animal, you know, doing something. Or, you know, we had that tiger in India that killed 36 humans because it had an injured foot and it couldn’t hunt a. You know what I mean? Right.

I think it translates directly to, like, goat sucker. So anything that could drink the blood of a goat could technically be a chupacabra. Yeah. So there could be some sort of animal or even a crazy person. I like, I like how this is going already, man. There’s, like, some logic behind these. How about flat earth, one to ten? It’s funny. One of my co workers is a flat earthere. And does he call you a globetard? No, but he started laughing one day because I went to Iceland for my 50th birthday. My wife treated me to a trip to Iceland.

And there’s a part in Iceland where you could literally touch the european tectonic plate and the north american tectonic plate. If you watch Game of Thrones, it was the blood gates. There was like a little narrow pass, and then they cgi’d a little fence, and, you know, but if you take away this, it’s. It’s in Iceland. So they filmed a lot of the north parts of Game of Thrones and ice. So I was there and I was telling the story, and he wasn’t even, you know, he was in the room where we were all working, and he’s just like.

And he says, what a tectonic plate. So I’m explaining that I didn’t know he was a flat earther. And then a couple of days later, me and my friends are having a game night in a bar. We would go to a bar and play games. And he showed up. Like, I didn’t invite him. I just. He just heard me talking about the game night. So he showed up and he got drunk. Then he just started going off on everybody not believing in the flat earth. And one of the guys in my game group works. Works for the Weather Channel.

He’s a shill. So he took out a cell phone and he started showing him satellite. He had access to satellites to wear the satellites. He was a scientist. She’s like, what am I looking at? He goes, here’s Tokyo. Here’s Moscow. You know, these. These are weather satellites. I have the codes and I, you know, could. I don’t know that’s real. I don’t any. Anything anybody said, any proof whatsoever. I don’t know if that’s real. That could be computer generated. So I finally said to him, as you’re an electrician, you’re doing pretty good. I said, do you have a friend? He got all mad at me.

I said, do you have a friend? Because you could. Your friend could stay here, you could go to Tokyo, you call your friend and zoom each other, and it’s going to be dark over there, a light over here, or vice versa. That could only happen if the earth is curved, I should say. Not necessarily. I mean, I’ve been down these flat earth rabbit holes, and there is an explanation for every single anomaly you can think of. But the one that you just mentioned would be explained away by a localized sun or multiple localized suns that are literally.

I think some of the claims are that they’re 30,000 miles away or something. I don’t know how the math works out of that. It’s one of the explanations that got him mad. And it’s funny because he’s also, he’s a black afro centrist. You know, blacks invented computers 10,000 years ago and everything. So the next day at work, I was busting his balls. I was talking to another guy, knowing that he’s listening, and I said that there’s no Africa, you know? And my friend was like, what are you talking about? And he. He wasn’t in on it.

He didn’t realize I was busting his balls. So he’s taking out his phone. I go, I don’t know. That’s nothing that could be generated. His name was Eric. I go, Eric, do you see how ridiculous you sound? So does this mean you put flat earth at a one, a two, a zero, five, a zero? Okay, how about the concept of hollow Earth? I love Hollow Earth. If any of them. I want to be real. That’s the one. I want to be real. But I do believe that there’s hollow structures that I know for a fact out in Albuquerque that there’s these volcanic tubes.

If you saw that movie evolution, they actually talk about it, but there’s a tube network throughout the whole southwest into Mexico, and I think up, like, North Dakota, that are unexplored. And I do think that there’s government headquarters and, you know, they use them for transport. Know, some say that there’s trains that could actually go from, like, California to DC to New York or whatever, but I don’t necessarily think the earth is hollow. I mean, I do think that there’s large chambers, but, uh, you know, can we fly it? And then there’s another sun and there’s dinosaurs.

That would be so cool. But zero. Yeah. Then we’re getting into, like, Tarzan area, where he goes inside, right? Isn’t that what it’s actually has a pretty strong, like, eugenic background to it if you look into it. But anyway, that’s for another show, a couple more ones on these one to ten scales, because I’m curious that a human being has stepped foot on the moon in the last 100 years. Any country, any program. I was in an astronomy class in Albuquerque, and one of the things that we did was, first off, it was funny because we talked about astronomy versus astrology.

When the teacher talked about how it was astronomy, not astrology, and one girl got up, it was livid. How dare you talk about astrology? That’s not a science. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And she left. And he goes, there’s usually two every semester. Total Capricorn, total Capricorn. Yeah. You should have said that on the way out. So that would have been funny if he said that. But one of the things that we did was we went and looked at the telescopes and we looked at the debris on the moon. So he says, like the little reflectors, you mean? Yeah.

He goes, so we’ve been on the moon, you know, he goes, we, we looked and saw the. Because Albuquerque, New Mexico, has really good conditions for telescopes, you know, and they go, so we’ve been there. He goes, but if you want to argue, we’ve never been there. He goes, we’ve been there. He goes, but the only argument that I could see people making is when, you know. So there you go. So are you, are you a ten, that human being? I mean, I could, you could see all the debris clear as day. Can you? Telescopes? Yeah.

Unless this guy put a film over the telescope, you know, because we were moving holographic projections or who knows? It’s painted on there like it’s a matte painting. So, I mean, I’m curious, though, are you like a nine on this or a ten on this? Like ten. We’ve been to the, how about one to ten rating on the footage that was shown in the late sixties of the Apollo eleven mission of people walking on the moon. How real do you think that footage was that? You know, you could cast a lot of doubts on that, but I believe it’s real.

I believe it’s real. Ten real or like nine real? Ten. How about the existence of conventional dinosaurs? You walk into the Museum of natural History, see a big T. Rex skeleton. How accurate do you think that is on one to ten? I think there were dinosaurs. I was really sad to find out that the brontosaurus wasn’t real, that it was a mistake. But the earth is billions of years old. There were so many cool, cool creatures that existed. I still think that there’s undiscovered creatures now. I don’t think it. I know people like, they were demons and stuff like that, but no, they were dinosaurs.

Okay, it’s ten 910. Fire breathing, flying dragons having existed at any point in history. I wish, I wish, I wish. I just can’t believe in fire breathing flying dragons. I mean, did we find petrodons or pterodons? I don’t, I don’t know. You know what? You know what? Did they spit a combustible saliva that burst? Who knows? Who knows? I’ll say a five and then I guess last one. There is no official order, but 911 was an inside job. No, no, I don’t think it was an inside job, but I think Pentagon was, was set up once they knew that 911 was happening and they, they blew up the Pentagon.

I mean, I, how does a plane fly that low? You know what I mean? Guys who had just trained. So I, the Pentagon, I think is some shenanigans, but I was there at 911. Planes hit the, you know, I saw it. My brother was there, saw it. My brother’s father, he saw the planes coming and he was in the twin towers. But I will say that they abused it. They went, they took advantage of it. And I know I’ll catch hell for saying this, but most of the firemen that died, they died robbing the basement. It was all gold and jewelry exchanges.

They didn’t save anybody. They just went in. And when that ladder 1224, they found jeans, they found gold bracelets. These guys will, everybody was looting. The freaking things fell down. So I’ve never heard that before. Yeah. What about building seven isn’t building? Because a lot of people point to bills say ignore the twin towers. Why did building seven, the thing that didn’t even get hit, just completely fell into a different, my buddy John was in charge of the safety. He was one of the OSHa guys who was assigned to that building. And he literally was standing in front of the doors keeping the firemen out.

He said the firemen were just going in and taking tvs in front of furniture and stuff. He’s like, so they were literally like fist fighting. But, uh, I don’t know, man, I don’t know how that building blew up that, that one. If you, you could convince me that that was an inside job too, right? Well, that one had, that one didn’t get hit by anything, right? Maybe debris and just in the proximity of heat. But there was also, uh, and I’m not, I’m not fishing or trying to convert you yet. We don’t have enough time for me to convert you.

Maybe one day. But the twin towers and in particular building seven were just loaded with asbestos. And the amount of money it would have taken to kind of remove it and retrofit it and replace the asbestos, it was cheaper to just knock it down. But then youve got all sorts of, so kind of the way that you described the Pentagon, like, oh, heres an opportunity for us to do this thing that weve been wanting to do, could have been a thing for building seven. I dont know. Theres also the Shanksville where the plane just kind of explode, vaporize in the middle of the sky.

I don’t know, it’s. I mean, I always say I work in Manhattan construction where I worked at buildings where we were sweeping the glass out, you know, of nearby building from, from, you know, from the shattering, the impacts and, you know, that’s, that’s how close we were. But, uh, I do think that the two, I think those crazies went and hijacked planes and that, but I just don’t see how, how guys who took like two classes on flying a plane could fly a plane that low to hit, hit the Pentagon, you know? How tall is the Pentagon? 30ft.

You know, they flew 30ft above, above the ground. I don’t buy it. You know, the impact, it should have been like across the whole top instead of just one side of the hole. The lack of the record. And if anybody, you know, anybody says that the government to the good guys, there’s a conspiracy theory that it’s so, um, we could, we could keep going on. I do want to wrap this up. Just maybe you didn’t ask much. Space alien. I thought that was gonna be number one. Do you believe in space? Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, actually, yeah, let’s do two of those.

Because I want to know, do you believe in grays in particular? Little gray space aliens, one to ten? I want there to be space aliens. And at the same time, it would be terrifying if there was space aliens. But, uh, I haven’t seen any convincing proof. I’m a cynical, I don’t believe in anything. You know, I don’t believe in anything unless you could prove it to me. You know, like, you know, I’m like, the onus of the argument is on the. You say the space aliens, then you got to provide me. So the default is there are until I know that there are.

But I really want there to be space aliens. And I haven’t seen any, any compelling proof that there are. You know, everybody that was abducted was always a, is always a goofball. There’s always a story. But man, I read all of those blue book cases and everything like that because they’re so fun and they’re so cool and the universe is so big. Like, you think would just be a shame that we were the only living things. But like, is it. We’re just distance keeping us apart? Like, is there something about science we just don’t understand? You know, like, is there a prime directive and they’re hiding from us? Yeah, we don’t.

We’re just too dumb to interact with? Or is it like something even terror? Like, thank God they haven’t seen us yet. You know, like, how bad would it be? You know? Like. Or, I mean, the. The other aspect, too, would be like, the Zechariah sitchin aspect of that. We, like, we are this alien ant farm. Like, we were put here to mind precious minerals, you know what I mean? And extract them. And then once we’ve kind of exhausted the resource, then they swoop in and they take it all from us. Do you ever read the Lensman? I don’t think I’m familiar with that, no.

Lensman is, like, the first space opera. I think the first book was written in the twenties, and I think the last book, it was the fifties, but it was the inspiration for Green Lantern Corps. I got really into the novels and pulps that inspired the superheroes, but the Lensman was the original Green Lantern corps. But what I liked about the space there is the space races, but they’re so alien that it doesn’t matter. Like, we’ll land on the same planets, and they have different concerns, different needs that, like, we just move out of each other’s ways.

And to me, that’s how I think aliens would be. Like, what are the odds that they need our metal? Because if they could fly through space, they got all the. Like, what could the earth possibly offer us? A space faring civilization, you know what I mean? Oh, you guys got carbon. We need carbon. You know, the human spirit. That’s what it is, or whatever. If there are spacefaring humans, they look at us like. Like we look at, like, the primitives in the brazilian forests. Like, you know, I mean, that’s kind of how I see it, too, is even if there were extraterrestrials, they would, like, we would be the exit.

You don’t pull off. You’re like, let’s take the next exit, honey. This one doesn’t look too safe, because think of it, they must have, like, cold fusion and, like, you know, they breathe different, they eat different stuff. Their chemistry must be totally different. They would have, no, they would probably be more interested in Neptune and Jupiter than Earth, you know, and for good. Well, so I guess. Where’s your number at, though? If we’re talking space aliens, one to ten, you want to believe that you’re 50 50, you know, it’s. Yeah, it’s a 50 50, you know? How about if I.

Because I feel like this is sort of the other, the pendulum swinging to their side. What about angels and demons? Do you give them a five two, or do you have a more firm stance? I’m closer to zero. What is it that makes aliens that you haven’t seen any proof of? A five, but angels and demons are a zero because there’s no proof of other realms you could look up. We could see other planets. There’s measurable planets now, through Hubble telescopes. We could see other stars. But where are these other dimensions? We, you know, that. That is purely hypothetical.

That is pure wish fulfillment. You know, ghosts, like, to me, a vampire or not a vampire, but, like, a werewolf is more realistic than an angel or a demon, you know? I know right now because I guess we call it ghost is in the angel demon category. Yeah. The spiritual stuff, like, where we can’t. There’s no empirical data, so, yeah, I err on the side of. Show me the data, you know, so I like this. Is there anything else that we did that I should have asked you in this one to ten that you would like to answer? Do you have a go to conspiracy theory that’s your favorite? If someone’s like, hey, Andy Kaufman’s still alive.

He faked his death. He’s hanging out. He’s hanging out with Elvis somewhere still now. Yeah, well, Elvis. Do you think that at any point, you don’t have to say, like, he’s alive right now in 2024, Elvis, that that guy died, they were. They were poisoning him. You know, Colonel Tom was feeding him pills to rob him blind. I don’t think. I don’t think they meant to kill him, you know? Same with Michael Jackson, you know? But when. When your cash cow says, give me this, you give it to him. Just like John Belushi, you know? I like what the judge said to the woman who sold John Belushi the drugs.

Like, yeah, when John Belushi asks you for cocaine, you give it to him. And then the judge said, yeah, well, then if you said no, then somebody else would be going to jail, you know, you’re going. I know. Also, keep this in mind, just because I don’t believe in the occult. I do believe that other people believe in the occult, you know? Well, that almost seems obvious. Like, I don’t think anyone can really dispute that, because my wife is going through a very religious awakening right now, and she’s, like, praying. Like, she cries, I’m gonna go to heaven.

And you’re not. You know what? Uh. You’ll forgive me. You did. That’s the one that you should say, oh, he’ll forgive me. That’s kind of. It’s kind of his thing, but, uh, you know, but, like, you know, the Epstein island people 100%. They were doing wacky stuff. Whether they believe it or it’s just, you know, I believe, like I said, I try to get recruited by cults. Those people, like, I don’t know if the head of the Scientology people believe in all this nonsense, but people believe in that nonsense. And, you know, there are people that there’s people that worship Baphomet.

Whether Baphomet is real or not is not, is besides the point, you know, and in an Alan Moore way, just like that puppet God that he worships, then he’s real. You know, if it’s a good point, if you’re, if you’re, like a super occultist, like, you might not actually believe in a literal baphomet, but just the symbol itself. And worshiping the archetype is like an aggregor that becomes just as important if it’s affecting the real world. That’s, that’s Alan Mars argument. Baphomet exists because it’s affecting the real world. If somebody’s, if I’m, like, doing, making crosses and investigating because I believe that somebody else believes in baphomet, it baphomets affecting the real world.

It’s affecting my actions. So therefore, baphomet exists. You know, and that’s the argument that he makes, that Batman exists because, you know, there’s people that collect Batman stuff and go out of their way to do this for Batman. And, you know, they’re writing Batman comics that they’re getting paid and you know what I mean? So Batman is affecting the real world. So in an Alan Morris sense, Batman exists. And I guess as a little poke to Alan Moore, but I’m not going to be able to help imagining a guy in a yellow raincoat with a bat on his shoulder every time I hear Batman now.

So now, now that Batman also exists, even if it’s just within me and you and Neil Gaiman. Thank you, Neil. So you mentioned you’ve got a campaign going right now to do, like, a full pitch. Like, tell me on it. Okay. Uh, if, uh, let me, uh, if you want to share a screen or something, feel free. Just making sure I’m sharing the correct thing. Uh, yeah, you got it. You got to bring it on. But there you go. I have a comic out right now. It’s on fun, my comic, I got 195 backers. You know, this is my first campaign.

You know, 5000. Yeah, I did another thousand on Kickstart. But this is heroic tales. The name of the comic is heroic tales. Here’s the COVID It’s drawn by Renzo Rodriguez, written by me. And the first issue debuts the patriarch. And the patriarch is. He’s everything that’s good about masculinity I got real tired of in culture today. Everybody talk in bed about toxic masculinity and whatever. So he’s everything that’s positive about Mendez. He’s a good father. He’s a devoted husband. He’s a beloved superhero. He’s a good guy. And this is a variant cover drawn by Pat Broderick, one of my favorite comic book artists.

And then this is where he lives. This is what he wants to do. He wants to go home with his seven children. That’s his wife down there in the purple trot. Wife? Yeah. They homestead, they homeschool, because, let’s face it, there’s crazy supervillains in the world, so there’s a reason why they’re off the grid. I’ll tell that story around issue three. And this is all he wants to do. But he patrols Science City now. Science City you’ll like, because this is where my conspiracy theory stuff comes in. Science City is built by Yuma, Arizona, and it was designed by Ian Strange, who’s an architect and also a magician.

So it’s built based on magic symbols and magic sigils and everything. And it’s there to harness science and magic. You know, when I. When I was out in Albuquerque, outside of Yuma, Arizona, everybody was like, oh, the leeline here, all ley lines here, and the magic and everything like that. And you got it. It’s beautiful. There is something magical in the air, whether you believe it or not, you know, natural. So I was like, this is a perfect place. And then I read that outside of Yuma, Arizona, the desert, you could harness solar energy and power a city? So I was like, there you go, my comic book.

So this guy, he took the solar power and the magic ley lines and designed the perfect utopian city. But unfortunately, the industrialist Philip Manning didn’t build it to the exact specifications. Can you see this statue of the colossus of Rhodes in the back? Oh, yeah. Faintly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was supposed to be a spire, and all the magic and Leyline energy was supposed to be dispersed through the spire, and everybody was supposed to have perfect harmony, but instead, it’s a statue of the man who built the city. So that magic is the wrong frequency. And now we get people who wake up dressed like thirties gangsters and rob banks.

Because I wanted to be like, you know, how come Gotham City has guys who dress up like penguins and clowns but not Baltimore. Seattle doesn’t have any clown killers. You know, there has to be something about Gotham City. So this is the reason why people go nuts. And Science City, because of this magic spell that was improperly cast. And then he gets beautiful showgirls. He does everything ostentatiously in Rob’s banks. And then the patriarch, you know, shows up. So I just wanted to show off the beautiful colors and the wonderful art by Renzo. You know how many pages of this? It’s a 22 page story of the patriarch and then an eight page story of the suit.

The mayor of Science City, how he became a supervillain. Because if you know me, the politicians are always the bad guys. So it’s the day that the suit made a decision, became a bad guy. So that’s set in the past, because next issue, you’ll see a more older version of Lucius Cain, who goes by the name of the suit, end up. So it’s 22 pages, patriarch, eight pages of unheroic tales featuring the suit, and then a couple of fake ads on a letters page. $10, complete story. You don’t, you know, you don’t have to wait nine months to get.

Part two is a metallic coin that. That I love. Coins. A beer. A beer glass, because, you know, he’s a dad, so you gotta have a beer. And. And I will show you. I’m going to show the Kickstarter, if you don’t mind. Yeah, please. Because I have a variant cover on the Kickstarter drawn by Michael T. Gilbert. So you could get this on Kickstarter, or you could get the Patrick Pat Broderick on fun, my comic, you know, and this. I’m doing pretty good too. And now and then I also have a Michael T. Michael Gustavich cover that’ll be on Indiegogo.

So I wanted to go on all three platforms with something different. Are you staggering these, or do you have all three campaigns running at the same time? They were supposed to be staggered, but I did the fun, my comic, for four months instead of two months by accident. And once I hit launch, I couldn’t change it. So it was supposed to be staggered, but it gave people longer time to buy the comic. Don’t tell anybody, but when Indiegogo’s done, I’m gonna take all the covers and give, like, a second chance campaign, and you can get everything on fun, my comic.

Fun, my comic, is gonna be the home, because they don’t. Luke, the owner of fun, my comic, he’s one of us. He’s a comic book guy. You know, he doesn’t do shadow banning. He doesn’t care about your politics. He just. He has follow these rules. And your comic could be on my. He’s awesome fun. My comic is absolutely phenomenal. I’m still trying to crack that nuthenne, like, like, Luke Reese shared and tweeted and, like, did all the promo, I think, that he possibly could for one of the books that I ran. And it got like $80 on.

Go on, fund my comic. And it did great on, like, the corporate. I’m still trying to transfer over there, but I don’t know. Did I say the wrong thing? Do I have. Is there, like, a secret handshake that I have to know to court the audience of? Well, it’s promotion. Like, this is gonna sound mean, but I didn’t know you had a comic. I didn’t know you had a channel until you reached out to me. You know what I mean? Mean, I’m not gonna radar. Well, what’s the name of your comic? So actually I’ve got. Well, we’ll do tip for die here, because here’s my channel.

We’ll talk. Accepted. Already accepted that. So I’ve been. I’ve released, I think, ten different titles between this and last year. I just saw this today. Never go. Yeah. You’ve come across. You just maybe didn’t know as me, but. But I didn’t know was you. Yeah, I’ve been working on a this for over five years. It’s got three different artists that I’ve known. Two of them came from the Joe Kubert school. So it’s. It’s got some really good talent inside of it’s 40 pages. It’s all about Stanley Kubrick directing the moon landings. And I’ve such a clever idea for a comic.

Like 2 hours ago, I just saw this on Twitter. Oh, there you go. See, some of the marketing’s working a little bit, but. Yeah, this book, and we were talking about a whole bunch of, like, you were talking about the Epstein island thing. I’ve got a book called Frazzledrip Fun House that’s kind of about that one stuff. I believe so. Yeah. Well, I’ll have to. I’ll have to send you some little teasers from my whole catalog, but. Yeah, this. This is what I’ve been doing for the last twelve years, is conspiracy theories meets your writer. I’m a writer.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I can’t draw to save my life. Yeah, I got her oak tales. We’re already working on issue two of her oak tales. And issue two is going to feature the patriarch. He’s my flagship character. So every issue is going to have the patriarch, but then I’m going to have a shorter other superhero story. So I got issue number two is going to debut a character, Mary sue. And Mary sue is perfect woman. And the trials and tribulations of being the perfect woman. Her name is Sue Su. It’s a chinese name. Her family came from.

They fled communist China because they were, they were Roman Catholics in communist China. They fled in the fifties, you know, and they opened up a little corner store, and then their son turned it into a big supermarket. And now it’s like a Walmart. So it’s Sue Mart. So she’s rich, she’s beautiful, she’s a PhD. She’s 22 years old and a genius, and she’s perfect. But I love this premise. And you said the patriarch’s your first foray into publishing your own book at this point, yes. Why did it take this long? Because I didn’t think I could, you know, I didn’t think it was possible.

I, you know, I. I’ve been role playing a superhero game with my buddies since, since we were 14 years old. And I have not even joking. I must have like a thousand superhero character of NPC’s and then their characters. So, you know, the world of the heroic tales is my world that I’ve been working on for 40 years. So I know the world inside and out. I have to change a few things because, you know, when you’re playing role playing games, you steal stuff from Marvel and DC. But now that I’m doing, I have to change a few things.

But anyway, what was the thing that made you go from thinking, oh, I can’t do that to like, oh, I, so I started listening to your boy Zach, diversity in comics. I don’t know if you’re familiar with him. You know, now he’s comics matter. And he made a comic, and I’m like, wow, he made a comic and I saw he made a killing. But then I told you, RJ from the fourth age brought me on his channel and, you know, we were interviewing each other. He made a comic. I’m like, wow, a bunch of people are making comics.

Like, I didn’t realize there was this indie scene of people making their own comics. So I started writing my screen script and my channel started picking up, and then I had Jim shooter on my channel and like, everybody’s like, oh, this guy John Longbox, and like, I got to make it now, you know, strike while the iron is hot. You know, my star isn’t going to rise any higher. You know, what, am I going to wait three years? And people like, didn’t that guy have Jim shooter on his channel once you. I think so. I just put everything in motion.

Smart. Yeah. I wish you better than I thought I would do. I think you’re doing phenomenal, especially for a first run. Like, all. All my first projects, I think that the goals were pretty much, like, $500, and if. When I hit it, I was ecstatic. So you’re pushing the numbers that seem like it’s proven the model, and it proves that you’re doing something that people want to read. I mean, I’m breaking even right now, so it’s not like I’m making any money. I mean, if you were to look at the whole landscape, that kind of makes you in, like, the top 5%.

I would. I would admit, just breaking even probably puts you in indie comics in the top 5%. Yeah. You know, I have a team. I got Renzo Rodriguez doing my art, you know, and I got Daniel de la Silva Rodriguez doing the color. I got Oscar Carano doing the colors for the backup, and Ron Mosicki doing the art for the backup. These guys get paid instantly. You know what I mean? Instantly. Before I do anything out. And, you know, I’m taking the first issue on the arm, and now I got that six grand to make. The second issue is the way I’m looking at it.

So I’m just. I’m just hoping now, if I could just. If I could make ten issues and it only cost me six grand, like, I have no illusions of making any money or retiring, you know, I’m a construction worker. I do okay, but this. This is my goal is to. You don’t think Disney is going to want to option your patriarch? Yeah, they already told me that they want to get Lizzo to play the patriarchy. I’m going to sign the paperwork tomorrow. Well, yeah, call me from your lambo. That’ll probably have, like, the little hot tub and the phone and all that stuff.

Or you can call me from Epstein island, because I think that’s the next topic. John, thank you so much for talking to me. This was actually a huge pleasure, man. We talked shop for a while. We got into all different angles. Uh, you even shut all. Just gotta say hello to me, you know, I’ll talk. You gotta pull. You gotta do some work to pull me out of my. My hidey hole sometimes, but I’ll absolutely. Come on. If you ever want to talk more shop, you know, let people. I think that NASA comic is such a great premise.

You know, you got to come on and start telling people about that. That’s an awesome premise. It’s so close. Clever. It’s such a clever premise, and I love it. And I think you really love it too. Like, I’ve also over my, I guess, like, course of doing these independent comics is that at a certain point, you realize that you got to write it for other people to enjoy, too, not just yourself. Like, it can’t just all be inside of John’s d and d head because, you know why all this stuff is happening and all these cool little interactions.

But this NASA comic is the first one in a very long time that I feel like it can stand by itself on the merit of the story and the art. Like, I don’t know. I’m in love with it. Like, this is a comic that I would have loved to have found in a shop. Like, I would be all over the screen. Yeah. When I originally wrote the first script for heroic tales, my friends were like, I don’t care. This is your role playing game. Vomited on a page. And I was like, yeah, but it’s brilliant, and it’s great.

And they’re like, no, this is just too much. Like, they said, pick one character. Tell that character story. You know? And I was like, all right, I’ll pick the patriarch. Why are you picking the patriarch? I’m like, because I think it’s important to have, like, a positive male character. You know, he’s a good father. They’re like, okay, good. So they forced me to defend all my decisions, and I think they absolutely made the right choice. So I went from world building the vomit comic, you know, to a focused story about. About a character that I think you’ll like, and then every issue, you’ll.

You’ll learn more about the world. Like, you already know more about the world than you get from the issue, because I was telling you, because I knew you were into conspiracy theories. You know, I like. I like the term vomit comic. I’ve made my own one up. I was calling mine first one the kitchen sink comic, but now I’m going to call vomit comic. I’ll give you credit. You know, you read, you get excited. So it’s also, like, in my mind, it’s, like, the inverse of a band that comes out and releases an amazing debut album.

You know, like. Like a nirvana. I don’t know. I’m dating myself, but, like, a band will come out with this amazing debut album, and then they’re kind of, like, trying to match that, and everyone’s always like, play your first album. They’re like, oh, my God, I hate this. Like, what about all my new stuff? And it’s because they had, like, 20 years, right? Or some cases, like, ten, you know, 510 years to work it out and pick, like, the absolute best. And then once they get a record deal now, it’s like, okay, now do what took you ten years in one year and do it every year for the next.

And that’s kind of what happens with a comic too, but it doesn’t work. It’s not the same formula where it’s, like, all the best part. Like, maybe it is, but in my experience, like, the first book that I wrote and a lot of other independent comics, the first one they write, it’s like every damn thought they’ve ever had over the last 20 years crammed into this one story. And if you’ve got good friends, like, I guess you did, they’re like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Like, pick the one. Like, if you’re at a toy store, right? You’re, like, a little.

A little kid, and you’re, like, grabbing every single thing in the aisle, and your parents are like, pick one. Look at it this way. You’re making. You’re making a soup, and you’re putting everything you like in that soup. I wish I’ve done before. Yeah, I’ll throw some ketchup in there and a little bit. This is good too. Yeah, this is. Then you make it a garbage soup. You know what I mean? Too much. Sometimes you end up with jungle juice too, which is just. Yeah, you never know. But that’s. That’s slow. So I pulled back, focused, and like I said, then I was.

I called it heroic tales because every issue was gonna have a different character. And then I realized, am I gonna shoot myself in the foot? Everybody seems to like the patriarchate, and the next issue is another character, then the third. By the time I get back to the patriarch, it’s five years later, and people like, yeah, well, yeah, kind of. Yeah, man. Yeah. He’s gonna be the focal point, you know? And then I’ll tell. But I have these other characters. Like, I have a Batman story I want to tell, you know, Superman. I have a conspiracy theory.

You know, he’s kind of like Rorschach conspiracy theory guy. I’m in, man. I’m already told. Cheap date when it comes to conspiracy theories. Yeah, well, I also feel like I’m only charging $10 for the comic, you know, because comics supposed to be accessible, you know, that’s supposed to be cheap, accessible, free shipping. Well, I can’t do that. Yeah, I bet not. Yeah, I was going to say, well, because I mean, again, I started in 2012 and in 2012, even if I was doing a short run with like a local print like Kablam here in Orlando, which I don’t use anymore, they got really expensive.

But even back then I could get a book for maybe eighty cents, a dollar if I was doing a fairly big short run. And then the shipping was, I don’t know, $3, $4. But now, man, prices have like tripled on both fronts. I like when you were going through your rewards and I saw a $10 comic and a freaking glass, like a tumbler glass for $20. Like how does that, how does the math even work, man? Do you have like filipino children working in your basement producing all this stuff? No, but then it adds the shipping on afterwards, so it was another.

So you know what I mean? Yeah. God help you if you’re in Australia. You’re basically having New York and you want to pick it up. I, you know, I got guys at work that uh, yeah, well they just give me $10, especially if you don’t order another one next month. Maybe they just come pay you a little visit. Paranoid American. All right, thanks, John. I’ll let you go, man. We’re going to connect again. This was so much fun. I appreciate your time on my channel. We’ll talk about your comics. Give, give one more shout out to tell people where they can find you and follow you.

I’m at John’s longbox on YouTube and, and you could go to find my comic and look at heroic tales. And if you’re into Kickstarter, you could go to Kickstarter, look at heroic tales and then next in and I think about three more weeks, I’m going to go to Indiegogo and look up heroic tales. But I think my next campaign, I’m just going to stay on for my comic. I think, I think I’m just dividing it too much, spreading it out, too. I bounced back around on that. So, yeah, I’ll keep in touch with you and see how it works out for you.

And if you spread back al, it’s, it’s hard to know how the hell this industry works anymore. Well, I never did it before, so I didn’t know. You know, I’m learning every day. I can’t wait to, I can’t wait to start fulfilling. That’s going to, I’m going to make every mistake in the book again. All right, man, I’ll see you for the next one. Thanks to. See ya. Bye bye. Spread the word with propaganda packs all for just $40 shipped@paranoidamerican.com paranoid propaganda packs we got facts on these sticker slaps so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs these huge all weather slaps will last in public for years to come remind citizens that birds are not real self immolation is an option and might make you magnetic do your part and get a propaganda pack today from paranoidamerican.com we got paranoid propaganda packs we got facts on these sticker slaps so grab yourself a stack and go attack with these paranoid propaganda packs what are you waiting for? Go to paranoidamerican.com right now and get a paranoid, paranoid propaganda pack ready for a cosmic conspiracy about Stanley Kubrick, moon landings, and the CIA? Go visit nasacomic.com dot nasacomic.com CIA’s biggest.com Stanley Kubrick song that’s why we’re singing this song about nasacomic.com go visit nasacomic.com Go visit nasacomic.com yeah, go visit nasacomic.com that’socomic Dot CIA’s biggest con Stanley Kubrick put us on that’s why we’re singing this song about nasacomic.com go visit nasacomic.com Go visit nasacomic.com yeah, go visit NASA.

Never a straight answer is a 40 page comic about Stanley Kubrick directing the Apollo space missions. Yeah, go visit nasacomic.com this is the perfect read for comic Kubrick or conspiracy fans of all ages. For more details, visit nasacomic.com. favorite conspiracy stickers they’ll make you smile and snicker. False threads and secret society. All of these and more. My sticker sheets. Explore the unique with paranoid american sticker sheets. Unearth tales of cryptids, cults, and mysteries through each sticker. These won’t last long. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com. snickers girls, flags and secret society. All of these. What the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with paranoid american sticker sheets.

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