The Troubadour Podcast
"It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind." William Wordsworth The Troubadour Podcast invites you into a world where art is conversation and conversation is art. The conversations on this show will be with some living people and some dead writers of our past. I aim to make both equally entertaining and educational.In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads, which Wordsworth called an experiment to discover how far the language of everyday conversation is adapted to the purpose of poetic pleasure. With this publication, he set in motion the formal movement called "Romanticism." 220 years later the experiment is continued on this podcast. This podcast seeks to reach those of us who wish to improve our inner world, increase our stores of happiness, and yet not succumb to the mystical or the subjective.Here, in this place of the imagination, you will find many conversation with those humans creating things that interest the human mind.
The Troubadour Podcast
Reimagining Comics: An Artistic Journey W/Michael Morse
Find Michael Morse's art on instagram @themichaelmorse
What if comic books were more than just colorful stories for kids? Join me as I sit down with Michael Morse, an expert in comic book history and an artist with a penchant for Godzilla-inspired figurines. Michael reveals the complexities behind producing official merchandise and shares his mission to elevate comics as a respected art form.
This episode provides a fascinating look at the artistic processes behind comic book creation, drawing inspiration from Japanese kaiju genres and iconic American series like Watchmen. We compare the narrative techniques in comics to those in traditional literature, discussing how memory and time play crucial roles in storytelling. Michael's insights extend beyond the panels to touch on the cultural impact of comics and how these visual stories resonate with contemporary issues.
The history of American comics is richer than you might think. From the pioneering works of Winsor McCay to the underground revolution led by figures like Robert Crumb and Art Spiegelman, we chart the evolution of this vibrant medium. Discover how the Comics Code Authority shaped—and sometimes stifled—creative expression, and learn about the resurgence through underground comics and Marvel's bold moves. Whether you're a comic book aficionado or a casual reader, this episode highlights the artistic depth and cultural significance of comics, urging a reevaluation of their place in the world of art and literature.
Do you have theme music?
Speaker 2:Do you want to make me some?
Speaker 1:Dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Kirk's. Podcast. Yeah, yeah, yeah, there we go, thank you. That's $800. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, we could talk about it. We'll see how many toys I can sell for you. How about that? Well, all right, welcome to my studio. I wanted to talk to you. This is Michael Morse. Everybody, this is for everybody.
Speaker 1:Enough applause. Everybody sit down, Sit down everybody.
Speaker 2:Hey, you're speaking to my dreams of actually having a live studio audience at some point.
Speaker 1:Wait, you can't see all these people.
Speaker 2:Yes, well, yes, they are there in the imagination, which is the realm that we are here at, troubadour michael in the imagination, yeah yes, and now, michael and I, we met at uh, austin, shakespeare, where we did romeo and juliet. This is shakespeare in the park he was romeo, I was yeah, exactly, um, and hey, you know we switch roles every night that's a real thing, that happens. So for sure I don't think I'd have the skill to play either of those parts, let alone both of those parts.
Speaker 1:You don't think you could climb a ladder like our Romeo did. He was able to just glide up that ladder, our Romeo was athletic. He was exceptional.
Speaker 2:He was definitely exceptional.
Speaker 1:Some other productions around town.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, they get the big burly guys like me to do and it's not a good idea.
Speaker 1:Well, they have to have stairs instead of a ladder, Do they really? Yeah?
Speaker 2:In the lesser productions. I will not say lesser, not lesser. You said lesser. I did not say lesser, you just moved here.
Speaker 1:I said other okay, but you're saying they're not quality enough to do a lot.
Speaker 2:I'm saying that our romeo was exceptional, okay, I don't know if we should name him.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's okay, dane, dane parker I don't know if he's gonna he's, he's exceptional, he's a great guy yeah, I agree yeah we had a great.
Speaker 2:You guys should have seen it, you really yeah, some of them, I'm sure, did see it right. Um, I definitely talked about it enough, but I wanted to have you come on because we met during the show. I played the prince, you played Mercutio a plague on both your houses. I got to see you get dragged off the stage every day and sorry for spoilers.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, spoiling this Hundreds of years later. Yeah, spoiling this, spoiling Hundreds of years later.
Speaker 2:Yeah, spoiling this. And it was interesting because you told me you know you had just moved back here. You moved here for the first time, back here, back here. And you know I was talking to you about a friend of mine who collects Godzilla figurines and you're like, I make Godzilla figurines I do. Well, I don't godzilla?
Speaker 1:well, among things, but officially licensed, I make godzilla inspired figurines, yeah, that are legally, legally different from uh, from uh. Official godzilla merchandise yes, they're very different some. Someday there will be some official godzilla merchandise that I will have sculpted and or and or illustrated. Um well, that that's a whole other thing. Yeah, getting getting licensing rights, it's yeah that, especially with godzilla that's.
Speaker 2:I'm sure it's a very, very hot property.
Speaker 1:Yeah, for a good reason it's um, I will say it, it's from what I've heard from people that have licensed things. It's really the most important thing is that you can give them the amount of money they want to make from your product and also have a product that that is, uh, representational of you know a good representation of the brand, yeah, but also you need to be able to supply them with enough money to make it worth it for them so all it takes is money.
Speaker 2:Money is politics and politics is money, and so I wanted to have you on to talk about what you're creating, your inspiration, and then I know you also do a little bit of teaching and instructing on comic book history.
Speaker 2:I do that, and so what I was hoping we would talk about is among your art and all the stuff you do, you know, the history of comic books, maybe even a little bit of pulp literature. On this podcast, I talk a lot about classic poetry, classic literature, and it's really interesting to me the way that art has evolved and how it's evolved into today, so I thought it'd be an interesting conversation to talk about that.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, and I think you know, especially for an audience that comes here for highfalutin literature.
Speaker 1:I think it's important to explore the medium and talk about the medium, because it's, even to this day, is still a medium that doesn't get, at least in America. Yeah, comic books is, is a medium that does not get the respect it deserves, uh, for whatever reason. Um, how Western art has has evolved, uh, there's this clear separation between words and pictures and putting the two together, you know it makes highfalutin literature. People like, look at, not take it seriously as literature, because there are pictures, and then the stuffy art community looks down on comic art because there are words and also maybe because of styling. But, as I have a ton of examples here with me today and hopefully we can see that there is not just one style of illustration for comics, there's not just one approach, there's not just one genre.
Speaker 1:People use the term comic book as a genre when they mean superheroes, which are not. I mean, certainly in America, superheroes drove the creation and the formalization of the medium of comic books, but I don't want anyone to have the impression that that's the only type of story that's told in this medium. It's as as versatile as film, as versatile as as the novel. You can do anything you want with this. It's, um, and I have some very, very early examples I can, I can pick up and show you, and then I have some very recent examples and we can just talk about how things have changed, how things haven't changed, what goes into making these things, who decided more or less how these things are made, and things like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that seems to be a big inspiration for the artwork that you create.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so the artwork.
Speaker 2:It's like a sculpture. It's almost how I would call it. It's almost how I would call it. Comic books are a kind of admixture between a physical painting on a piece of paper with words. A sculpture has its own history and style to it, and then you have what might even be called pop sculptures and pop stuff, absolutely pop sculpture. But it does have where you're modeling something, you're creating, creating something, and it has a physical 3d and then also illustrating to the illustration is this is your illustration, this is my illustration and you can buy shirts.
Speaker 2:I have t-shirts for sale so explain to me what most of them don't have hairs stuck on them already.
Speaker 1:You have to supply your own hair, sorry sorry, I can't do that.
Speaker 2:Why you?
Speaker 1:you got to rub that in my face. Beard hairs come out. That's true.
Speaker 2:That's how I compensate for this, but OK, so first off, I wanted to ask you about big. So I want to say to everybody I am super ignorant about a lot of the like. I'm not, you know. I think you used to make fun of me on the cast for being the least pop culturey, knowledgeable person or something, among other things.
Speaker 1:Not specifically. We were all joking around and I hope you know that it was all in good fun not meant to be malicious.
Speaker 2:I was always trying to get everyone into my house because I was going to torture you like you tortured me on that, because you guys hazed me a little bit on the first.
Speaker 1:It was good natured ribbing. I hope you don't want, I hope you don't like, I hope you don't harbor any ill feelings about you'll find out.
Speaker 2:No, no, um, but okay, so. So I'm very ignorant about a lot of, especially like comic books and things of that nature, so I'm, you know, excited to learn more about it. But so forgive my ignorance about something that I've seen images like this, I know the overalls look like that's a hamburger joint, right?
Speaker 1:Also, this is not yeah, it's a hamburger mascot. This is not related to American comics, as we will be talking about also, but I mean, in a way, it is my approach to doing the artwork, the illustrations is very much rooted in American comic book creation, styling and or illustration techniques, primarily the concept of penciling and inking, breaking down into these different jobs, not just and also coloring, doing all these parts separately to bring it together to create this kind of artwork. It's primarily based in Japanese kaiju, tokusatsu. Kaiju is the Japanese. If you're not familiar with these terms, it literally translates to strange beast. It's kind of a general term for monster. If you ever hear the term. Daikaiju, that means giant monster, which would refer to Godzilla. Kaiju, that means giant monster, which would refer to godzilla, um, and then also in tokusatsu, which is special effects, um, movie and tv shows. Uh, ultraman is a very popular tokusatsu series. Uh, common writer godzilla is considered.
Speaker 2:Uh, yeah, I know that was there like like a video game there was.
Speaker 1:During your childhood, but it wasn't Ultraman, it was Ultraman yeah.
Speaker 2:But I'm thinking of something else. That was like a blue guy, actually A blue guy Because Ultraman is red right Red, yes, yeah, but isn't there one Red and silver? Okay, yeah, like flashbacks from my childhood.
Speaker 1:Now power rangers are no, not, not, no.
Speaker 2:But I'm saying that the power. So that's I'm too cool for power rangers. I was so old for power rangers actually when it came out I was like 12 or 13, so I was did not admit that.
Speaker 1:I mean I think that was kind of old in 1993 if you weren't, that's you weren't too old for it. Oh, was it 93?
Speaker 2:yeah okay, no, I was like seven, I guess, when I came, I guess, but I guess I kept watching it until I was like 13, 14 and I didn't admit it I gave it up pretty early when they changed casts I was like this is not, these are well, yeah, once the Pink Ranger left, that was it for me.
Speaker 1:Anyway, all right Hold on.
Speaker 2:Tell me about Power Rangers and how this connects.
Speaker 1:So how this connects. Well, I mean Power. Rangers originated in Japan, it seems Japanese A series of programs called part of a series called the Super Sentai series, actually created by a comic creator which I have a book by right here.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Shotaro Ishinomori, who created many, many very popular Japanese properties, including Kamen Rider and the Super.
Speaker 2:Sentai, that looks like one of the villains, right there.
Speaker 1:No, this is that's a hero. This is very much a hero. Yes, oh sorry everybody.
Speaker 2:It feels like one of the Power Ranger villains, almost.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, maybe there are. I have forgotten a lot about the woman who's up in? The moon about Rita Repulsa Like.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking of the woman who's up in the moon and she like, doesn't she have like little antenna things on her helmet?
Speaker 1:She has horns, yeah.
Speaker 2:Okay, that's what it is. It's all coming back to me from 30 years ago. I'm old, not 30, but that's Well it's approaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, no, it's 30. Over, yeah, no, it's 30,. Over 30.
Speaker 2:No, no, I mean I'm 39, so, oh my gosh.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you're right, Shotaro Ishinomori beautiful, beautiful artwork we can talk about that a little bit. Well, sorry tell me about this. So I mean this applies to, like you know, being exposed to Power Rangers and a little tiny bit to Ultraman. I experienced Ultraman through commercials for that video game, which I think you may remember I was a very small child.
Speaker 2:I remember these commercials and was like who is this guy? And it was.
Speaker 1:Ultraman. It was Ultraman, yeah, ultraman Toward the Future. There was a very short-lived TV series produced in the early 90s that got shown in the US. Tv series produced in the early 90s that got shown in the US.
Speaker 2:Anyway, so these little nuggets of Japanese pop culture, Godzilla also which is present throughout, you know various times throughout my life, your life. American lives as well, godzilla, I know, of course, yeah.
Speaker 3:American lives as well, well, godzilla, I know, of course, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So these little things got, you know, lodged into my brain also while I was exploring, you know, more specifically, american pop culture as well, getting into comic books, getting into Star Wars, things like that. Eventually, all these things got swirled together in my brain and wanted to, you know, poke their way out in in different ways in illustration, in sculpture and toy making and and things like that.
Speaker 2:So it's all. It's all all related. That's yeah, that's like one of the the you do many things, I think I do, I do way too yeah, you also create and you sell and and, by the way, yeah, so people can find you on Instagram.
Speaker 1:Instagram is the best place to.
Speaker 2:Find and buy. Stuff To find and buy. There is a link tree.
Speaker 1:There is a link tree.
Speaker 2:yes, and you make some of this stuff personalized. Do you make it personalized or not personalized, but on request.
Speaker 1:I can do custom figures. It's difficult. It's more expensive, I'm sure, and expensive to make a wholly custom thing. But if someone wanted to pay you enough I mean, if somebody wanted to pay me enough I could make time. Certainly, but it takes so much time to do this stuff and it's like I'm a very slow artist, which is why I don't produce a lot of comics. I do illustrations in comic style. I do occasionally produce um very, very, very tiny, small, very small comics. Um, well, if you have, links to that.
Speaker 2:I'll put it up so people can see it yeah, it's, yeah, I don't need to see it. But um is even the comics for sale?
Speaker 1:yeah, they are there's uh, I I have a just three that I've put together, that that I put in a little package of three. I need to do more. There's so many things. I just don't have time to do everything. This is my greatest enemy is time. Time passes faster than I can live it, unfortunately.
Speaker 2:That's just called life. That's the way it goes.
Speaker 1:It just gets faster and faster and faster. That's a comic right there Before you age.
Speaker 2:You need to make a comic about that, a story about time going faster and faster. I'm catching up to you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's just life I actually brought. We're skipping way ahead, but I was going to talk about Watchmen.
Speaker 2:I've heard about. I've seen the movie.
Speaker 1:I've never read the comic Movie while fairly faithful is kind of bad. Okay, if you liked it, that's fine. I did not. I mean, it was okay, I think, reading the book you would get more out of it than watching that movie, the movie. I mean, we're not here to trash the movie, it's my personal opinion. If you like the movie, that's, that's fine. And there's, there's a new animated movie, which I have, I have more hope for, and Of Watchmen, yeah, which.
Speaker 2:Because Watchmen's like a meta right, it's very, it's a, it's a satire or a commentary, almost.
Speaker 1:It. It is, in a way it's like the Boys, almost. Not as harsh as the Boys. The. Boys exists because of Watchmen.
Speaker 2:But the Boys is a clear commentary on the superheroes and real life and what the superheroes represent in our world.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's all the themes of Watchmen, yeah, and you know, skipping way ahead I was. You know if we're going through the history of you know, I've got stuff here from like 1905 pulled up on this page, but you know this particular issue that I brought here. So this is from the Absolute Edition, which is the ultra deluxe hardcover. Each individual issue was printed in a separate hardcover book, put into a beautiful slip case. Anyway, this is the fourth issue, which focuses on the character, the only superpowered character in Watchmen, Dr Manhattan. Dr Manhattan, as revealed in this story, experiences every moment of his life, at every moment of his life, yeah, which I think is uh like all at once.
Speaker 2:All at once, this time all in one, yeah, so like this. Is what if god were like his? So I'm an atheist, but the concept of god, especially in western, is omniscient, omnipresent, so he would have to feel everything all at once yeah that's kind of what this is supposed to be about yeah I remember that, yeah, and that's an interesting thing to play around with.
Speaker 1:For sure, very lucky very, very, yeah, um, very interesting thing, yeah, and it's.
Speaker 1:It's like I think reading this book, you know, made me think about the passage of time and how memory works and how you know, it just relates to a lot of things, like when you get older and you start to, when time speeds up, and things like didn't this just happen? No, that happened four years ago. And you're like, oh, four years ago it did not feel like four years ago, because when you're a child you're experiencing time in a way that you know it's like a year seems like a very long amount of time because that's a greater percentage of your life. This is something, a concept, that was explained to me recently and I was like, oh yeah, this makes total sense. So as we age, we get more of those years added on. That year does not seem like a big increment of time. Oh for sure. Yeah, when you're five years old, it's literally one-fifth of your life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:So it's a long time, it takes forever, and that's why it feels like when you I remember school you know 7th, 8th, even 9th, 10th, 10th, 11th, 12th grade it just felt like every year was forever. And now, when I think about a year, like when I'm planning my life right, I'm thinking about what I want to do in the next six months, next year it's like, oh, let me do these kinds of events. It really doesn't make that big of a difference. That it's oh well, you know what, let me do that? 2025. You know I'll do this. And yeah, next june it's not gonna be. But when I thought next june when I was 16, I was like next june I think that's why people put so much emphasis on, like their high school years, it's like that's, or even, yeah, into colleges as well.
Speaker 1:Uh, you know, it's just four years of your life and so much emphasis and so much of yourself gets formed in that time. But you know, looking at it now, I think it's's ridiculous to have to think about like that's, four years of like that doesn't define who I am, even though people may think of it as defining who they are, which I think is a shame. But anyway, this is the kind of thing that reading comics makes you think about.
Speaker 2:Well, but hold on. So can we talk about this for?
Speaker 1:a second.
Speaker 2:Because I'm fascinated by this concept of memory and then I think bringing it into this of you know, can um comic books rise to the level of great literature. Because I think, great literature definitely addresses this idea of memory, and a lot of different great works of art.
Speaker 1:I was just listening to Dipping your Madeline in tea and then going on for hundreds and hundreds of pages about the memories it evokes.
Speaker 2:Is that James Joyce or something? No?
Speaker 1:that's Proust.
Speaker 2:Oh, is that In Search of Time? Yeah, I've never read that one. I don't know. I'm a little bit afraid of that one. That one's a little big for me even, and I read big books, Like I read books that are a thousand pages, but that I don't know something about that.
Speaker 1:I think maybe if you just cut it down into small chunks like comic books, Nice segue that was good.
Speaker 2:So, but what I wanted to, yeah, so you know the memory and like the tell me about this story and others ones like it. What I was going to say, though real quick about this, is I was listening to a podcast with Jonathan Nolan, so Christopher Nolan's brother, and they've done. Do you know who that?
Speaker 1:is. I know who Christopher Nolan is. You know who Jonathan Nolan is.
Speaker 2:I'm not super familiar with his brother oh well, jonathan Nolan, so I think you should have learned. So he wrote the story for Dark Knight. Oh, okay, so he's the writer behind a lot of it right yeah, and you know, I like. Christopher.
Speaker 1:Nolan David S Goyer as well. He also what's that? David S Goyer, I believe, is also one of the screenwriters. Who's a comic writer, so I don't think, jonathan.
Speaker 2:Okay, I don't remember the details, for like.
Speaker 1:The Batman Begins. Anyway, go ahead your story.
Speaker 2:But no, it's okay because I find this stuff interesting. Hopefully you find this a little interesting, but like who gets credit and where it all works, the origins of stuff. So, jonathan Nolan.
Speaker 1:I'm pretty confident, wrote the original story basis for the Batman Be uh begins, which is the first, the first of the trilogy batman begins, heavily based in a couple different comics batman year one, frank miller, david masekelly and, um, you could even throw in um comic comic work that I have right here with me, batman.
Speaker 2:Is Robin dead.
Speaker 1:Probably I haven't actually read this yet you haven't.
Speaker 2:I just bought this. Let's just take a minute and read it.
Speaker 1:I just bought this. Yeah, I'm going to read this, his Most Epic Adventure, a 76-page novel in comics form. I'm going to read it and I'll get back to you in just a moment.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:So you think it's based a little bit on this uh, based on the work of uh, dennis o'neill and neil adams, their work on batman in the 70s, which introduced raz al ghul, talia al ghul.
Speaker 2:So raz al ghul is in this series essentially yeah, yeah, and he's in 70s well so yeah, I think jonathan nolan wrote like the basis of for what the script was anyway, but he did write for sure. He wrote the short story. That memento was turned into a story and that was Christopher Nolan's first breakup. So he did something before that, but that was his first real big movie was memento. The reason I'm talking about all this is Jonathan Nolan was on a podcast recently and I was listening to him talk about his experience in America because he's British, like his brother, obviously, but they had very different experiences. Oh okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 2:It's really interesting because if you listen to Jonathan Nolan's accent, he sounds American because his brother is like seven or eight years older.
Speaker 2:Because his brother is like seven or eight years older and so when his parents were you know, he was first nine years of his life for 10 years was in England and then, when he was nine or some early age, he moved here, but his brother stayed there to go to school because his brother was like 17. So he stayed there for prep school and then went to college or whatever, cambridge or whatever he went, but he, jonathan Nolan, came with his parents to america, okay, and then that was an age where he tried to understand america and, you know, everyone was making fun of him with his weird accent and so he tried to adapt it to and learn, and he changed his accent to a more american accent.
Speaker 2:I think I don't remember where he anyway, but he was talking about. When he was young and trying to understand american amer, he read Moby Dick.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:Moby Dick is one of my favorite novels. I love Moby Dick and this story, which is about Ishmael remembering this. So it's about memory. In a sense Ishmael is. I don't know if you've ever read it, but I've read a lot about it.
Speaker 1:I've never actually read.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Ishmael is telling a story about Call me Ishmael yeah, exactly About this adventure. He goes on with this crazy monomaniacal Captain Ahab going after this big fish. But a lot of it has to do with memory and there's scientific stuff and things like that. He does kind of address memory and Jonathan Nolan brings his own exposure from Moby Dick into his work, like, if you know, mementos, what is our memory?
Speaker 2:What is our memory? How does our memory affect our sense of ourselves? How does what we remember affect our approach to the world around us, to the people around us, to the way we've, you know, live and love and all that stuff and that, that, I think, is you know. So he took a literary concept or something that was, he was exposed to and what I would consider fine art, high literature, but he adapted in a way that I still think elevated film, elevated the story and, you know, into something that was really had a has a depth to it. So I'm just, you know, I'm trying to segue into like the Watchmen and like is. I will say it's not my favorite comic book in the world.
Speaker 1:It's not even my favorite work by Alan Moore, the writer. I do think it is an excellent gateway for people that and this is like kind of a universally accepted truth here that Watchmen is a great gateway for people who maybe don't look at superheroes as fodder for serious literature okay, and or don't look at the comic book medium as as a serious medium. I think it's it's a great stepping stone into the medium and into into superheroes, but into the medium itself. Um, it was definitely written for an adult audience in mind and definitely, um it it tackles some very big, very big issues.
Speaker 1:It tackles, you know, a lot of psychological issues like what kind of a sick person would have to like put on a costume and go out and fight crime. Like what, what you crime, the mentality that goes into that and how that can warp a person, how people's political views, what kind of political views a person would have to have to decide that justice doesn't work and that the justice, true justice, is only going to come from their fist. That's the kind of, you know, themes explored in this book and I think it's it's a great gateway into comics. Um, I think there are much better superhero stories um that like really embrace and talking about modern, modern stories um people who don't get Superman, like Superman gets trashed a lot, I think by a lot of people. For some reason I've never understood that. I've always loved Superman.
Speaker 2:I think reading oh, I'd love to talk about that because I have my hypothesis, but go ahead.
Speaker 1:Reading, I mean Superman. I would love to also talk about the history of Superman, but reading a book like All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, that I think is a better representation of the power of superhero comics, a certain view of psychology that would go into this. But I mean there's only one actual super-powered character in the whole book. All the other characters are, you know, more or less Batman-esque.
Speaker 2:You know costumed adventurers, that don't have— Although the movie makes them seem kind of super powered, I remember.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean Ozymandias has a high functioning brain that goes into things.
Speaker 2:That's right, okay, so it's like he's just really smart, I guess the way they portrayed it.
Speaker 1:He is rich like Batman and based on the Blue Beetle. So all the Watchmen characters are actually based on characters that were originally owned by a comic company called Charlton. Okay, charlton was bought well, the character, the IP, was bought by DC Comics in the early 80s. Alan Moore, the writer from the UK, wanted to actually use those characters in the story, but a lot of those characters were going to end up dead at the end, although it's really not really One character really dies in the whole story, or two characters, sorry, two Uh-oh Spoiler Spoiler.
Speaker 1:And so DC didn't want to let him destroy these characters. They just bought because they had plans for them. And so, with Dave Gibbons, the artist, who also deserves a lot of credit as well, used very, very clear inspiration from those Charlton characters to create brand new characters. Clear inspiration from those charlton characters to create brand new characters and and uh, story's probably better for it, um, anyway, that they are original characters. Um, oh, what are you showing me? I'm just opening to a page and just seeing a little of the artwork and you can see this is very, um, dave gibbons. His approach to this was very. His art style, I'd say, is very evolved from the very clean Silver Age style of comics, very clean, very graphic style which he maintains. That and then, with his layouts, really sticks to this nine-panel grid which is although here, next page, we see something different here this nine panel grid like, it's very like based in oh, there's some nudity, some comic nudity.
Speaker 2:I don't know if the age group of people watching this Well, you just upped it, Uh-oh, upped it, uh-oh, you just saw some blue some glowing blue junk.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mark, mark, yeah.
Speaker 2:Not for kids. No, no, I mean, you know this. Most of the stuff I do is well, this is, this is pretty tame.
Speaker 1:I have some work by Robert Crum in my bag over here which is far more, I mean.
Speaker 2:I mean, I think that's all fine. I don't know, We'll figure it out later, but anyway, okay. So I want to take a step back for a second. So I'm interested in the 19th century and great classic literature. I mean, for me the great example is the Joker, which comes from Victor Hugo, the man who Laughs.
Speaker 1:Well, from the movie version.
Speaker 2:Well, from the movie version of that, exactly so. It's like a aspect of that of Gwyn playing the name of of the character, and there was like an early silent film where he looks. You know he's got this permanent cut, but that's, that's from the book. And that's the description that um Hugo puts in the book of Gwynplaine is he is mutilated by the Comprachicos and that affects his worldview. The difference is that Joker becomes this horrific person whereas Gwynplaine's this, you know, benevolent person who's able to keep his soul Anyway. But I think there's still obviously a connection where people are pulling from this great literature of the past to create something, whether it's about memory, whether it's about story itself or whatever it is.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the entire concept of the superhero is from the Scarlet Pimpernel Sure, the secret identity putting on a costume, taking on this, you know, larger than life, other self to, you know, and that's, you know, heavily influenced. You know, Superman.
Speaker 2:As did Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean so, Edgar, yeah, Tarzan.
Speaker 2:So I taught both of those. I taught the Scarlet Pimpernel in eighth grade and I taught Princess of Mars to fifth graders.
Speaker 1:I mean, yeah, princess of Mars, I would say had a bigger influence probably, I mean on Siegel and Schuster, the creators of Superman, and Siegel and Schuster, the creators of Superman. So Superman is the most. And I'm not going to say arguably, I'm just going to flat out say he's the most important character in all of we'll say American comics.
Speaker 1:Oh sure, he kind of starts it all. Yeah, starts this avalanche, this snowball that turns into billion-dollar movies coming out every year now, and so all of that comes from. Siegel and Schuster were just normal kids from Cleveland. Actually, joe Schuster was Canadian but moved to Cleveland as a kid and so they were just fans of science fiction and fans of pulp novels, fans of the Shadow. The Shadow is a very, very important stepping stone. I actually don't know that. The Shadow is a rich gentleman who puts on a disguise. The Shadow knows it became popular on the radio. Orson Welles what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The shadow knows it's not really an Orson Welles impression. I need to work on that to really say that.
Speaker 2:By the next time you come on the podcast. Yes, I'll be Orson Welles the entire time and you've got to bring your guitar.
Speaker 1:Yes, absolutely I'll be singing Orson Welles, so anyway. So the shadow, a major character in the pulp novels. For those of you that are watching, I mean you've talked about pulp in the past. Watching, I mean you've talked about pulp in the past. But by the 1920s, 1930s things start to get a little more formalized, a little more. You know, early 1900s, late, you know, coming out of the late 1800s. You mentioned Jules Verne in our pre-show conversation, a little peek behind the curtain, um, uh, so um. By the 1920s, 1930s things start to get, you know, more formalized in in what you know what sells, uh, these these adventure and you know costume.
Speaker 1:The data comes in yeah, money, costumed adventurers like the shadow, uh, the phantom, other characters like that start to become popular, and this directly inspires the comic creators, and so the Shadow. There's a movie, you may remember it, from the 90s. Alec Baldwin was the star of it. The Alec- Baldwin yeah the Alec Baldwin, so Very, very popular character.
Speaker 2:Was it called the Shadow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, called the Shadow I don't remember that, back to Siegel and Schuster. They were a fan of all of this media coming out at the time and they started what people consider to be the first fanzine, a magazine produced by fans of science fiction yeah, that's the Shadow, and it was called Science Fiction. Like a magazine produced by fans of science fiction yeah, that's the Shadow and it was called Science Fiction. It was aptly. Aptly named In that they did pulp-style stories where Siegel would write them, schuster would do illustrations for the stories, how pulp worked. But they had dreams of appearing in newspapers, newspaper comics, which we're going to jump back and forth in time. Newspaper comics were what comics were.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, that's where the term pulp comes from.
Speaker 1:Well yeah.
Speaker 2:It was the material that they used to print the paper on and it was cheap and easy to make and mass produce yeah, right, but even newsprint is is different from like that pulp paper.
Speaker 1:That pulp paper is like closer.
Speaker 2:That's earlier version. Yeah, I think that's the.
Speaker 2:I think that's what like jules verne printed on something like that right yeah, that yeah very cheap, like more, like I'd say more like you know cheap coloring book kind of paper and this is where a lot of the, the idea of it being um cheap, you know the work itself being lesser than being, not as being more ephemeral, because it would you know, you'd throw it away right, like that's what you do with newspapers, like newspapers has that feeling of non-universality and I think that kind of but holds on to the.
Speaker 2:I mean it's funny that you say that improperly, but that's where a lot of the connotations come these guys over here.
Speaker 1:We can talk about these guys later. Uh, yeah, so I mean there is.
Speaker 2:I haven't told me who big bogey is. Yeah, oh, we'll get it. We'll get into that, where this is a winding, winding conversation.
Speaker 1:I've opened up this page to show you this. This is a comic strip from 1908. This is by Windsor McKay, who I would say was the first true master of the comics medium, at least in terms of American comics, which, you know, people, there's always people that will argue, you know you're not talking about European comics. But I mean focus is American comics. American comics influenced European, european influenced Japanese comics. In turn those comics influenced. So American comics were the first, would you say. People argue about that, I mean.
Speaker 2:I don't know.
Speaker 1:There's examples that I have not actually seen personally to confirm whether or not they actually include all of the elements that makes what we think of as a comic book a comic book. Earlier publications from from the uk uh, I mean, since the dawn of man, humans have been using images to tell stories. Uh, going back to the caves of las'Escal, where we see, you know, paintings done with fingers to illustrate mighty hunts back you know before. So anyway, let's leave that behind. So, you know, people have been using, like as I just said, using images to tell stories for as long as there's been humans, and so it takes a long time, like thousands and thousands and thousands of years, for it to formalize into what we can recognize as a comic.
Speaker 1:But we can look back at cave paintings, look back at Egyptian tombs, look back at there's cool art from South America. I don't know a terrible lot about it, but it does count. When we get into, I'd like, the 1700s. There's a creator named Josef Franz van Gootz who published a book called Leonardo and Blandine, which I think is, as far as I can tell, the earliest example I can find of a book of sequential art with captions. It's a whole novel about these two lovers and then something happens that I think.
Speaker 3:Leonardo. Something always happens. Leonardo probably dies. Blandine gets really sad. Poor lovers, they can never catch a play. Yeah, those lovers.
Speaker 2:Damn Shakespeare, romeo and Juliet. Yeah, it's a tragedy. People forget it's a tragedy.
Speaker 3:People forget. Yeah, shakespeare, romeo and Juliet, yeah, it's a tragedy. It's a tragedy, people forget, people forget.
Speaker 1:So you know, but when we start talking about comics like that really doesn't come about until the late 1800s and people will, you know, some people will be like oh, britain did it first. Maybe I have not, personally. You know that stuff is not widely available to view, even on the Internet, unfortunately that stuff is not widely available to view, even on the internet, but where we generally start talking about history is the mid-1890s.
Speaker 2:Richard F Altcult was the creator of a character called the Yellow Kid.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've seen that when I was looking up this stuff, so the Yellow Kid was the first—.
Speaker 2:Well, they consider the beginnings of modern comic books.
Speaker 1:Yes, and so the birth of the modern comic strip starts with the Yellow. Kid in 1896. And you know the term yellow journalism. Yes, okay, that is related to the Yellow Kid.
Speaker 2:Really so. William Randolph Hearst— I thought it was because the color of the journals were yellow.
Speaker 1:No, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:So william randolph hearst uh newspaper magnet uh inspiration for citizen kane back to orson welles, um. So it's all related, all of it's connected, uh. So that guy um noticed the popularity of uh richard f alcalt's uh characters, paid. Uh paid him a lot of money to bring the yellow kid into into his comic. Hogan's alley is the original name of the, the cartoon which became uh the comic known as yellow kid. So, um, people would buy the newspaper for the yellow kid, yeah, and then William Randolph Hearst would shove in his editorials around the comic strip. I see, so people are looking at this page for the comics and then getting this opinion.
Speaker 2:The opinion pieces. Yeah, the opinion pieces.
Speaker 1:And so this term yellow journalism directly refers to? Yeah, I never knew that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the opinion pieces and so this term, yellow journalism, directly refers to. Huh, yeah, I never knew that. Yeah, that's an interesting story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that's a term that a lot of people use. I always ask children I've known this term since childhood. Whenever I'm teaching this to children, I always ask if they've heard the term yellow journalism. And then no hands go up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know if it says taught today, I guess.
Speaker 1:Well, I, I, I was always a student of watching as much as I could, you know and like, not just stuff made for children, but you know all the stuff. I've always been ravenous for media yeah and consuming any, any bit of media I could, to learn as much as I could fit, as much as I possibly could in my brain, Anyway.
Speaker 2:so Well, it also depends, I think, on what grade you're teaching. To some degree, right?
Speaker 1:I mean yeah.
Speaker 2:Because I think I learned the term when I read Upton Sinclair, right that's. I mean that's when I don't know if I was seventh or eighth grade or something. So it was pretty late. It wasn't like I was in fifth grade and I could have told you what yellow journalism is but we learned it along. I could have, oh sorry, you could have a fifth grade yeah, yeah, well, I mean yeah, no, no, we each have different types of.
Speaker 1:I have expectations that everyone should know exactly what?
Speaker 1:no, I'm kidding, I'm kidding no um, no, I, I totally understand why a kid wouldn't know this term, but anyway, it's all related to comics. Back to this stuff, so comics medium. Unfortunately, this book I did not grab, the giant coffee table book that includes the yellow kid. There's only like a brief mention of him in this particular book that I have, this particular book that I have. But just a few years later, you know, brand new medium combining all of these different things that had existed before sequential storytelling speech balloons are a big part of it panels. You know that the sequences are all together, you know, on a single page and then eventually spread over multiple pages instead of like a single image per page, which is what that like leonardo and blandine story had. Um, all of these things come together late 1890s, uh, in newspaper comics. Just a few years later, um, I I'd say real masters emerge in the medium, one of the most important ones, who I don't think gets enough credit and is not as well-known today as he should be. Is this guy right here?
Speaker 2:I don't know why that makes me think just from looking at it from afar makes me look at War of the Worlds, Except it's a bed. It looks like the aliens from War of the Worlds except it's a bed, so it looks like the monster, the uh, aliens from war of the world.
Speaker 3:So this is uh windsor mckay welles, but the the comic book creation right, yeah because I don't know if it's a comic later.
Speaker 2:Obviously it was a short story and then there was a movie made of it. I don't know if there's like a comics in between there are comics of war of the worlds um it seems like it lends itself to a comic.
Speaker 1:Anyway. So this is Winsor McKay. This is his most well-known creation, little Nemo in Slumberland, and I just want you to look at this artwork and I encourage everyone watching, listening, however, you are consuming this.
Speaker 2:I'll put a link to it. Check out this man's work okay, tell us why you think this is so elevated so this is I.
Speaker 1:I wish I had examples to show of of the captain jammer kids, which is another very popular early comic strip uh and links.
Speaker 2:Later I'll put it for people and the yellow kid, uh, and that stuff.
Speaker 1:You know, it's clear, it's clear, it's, it's comics, it's, it's interesting, it's fun to see this primordial thing. Uh, people, I think, have this very false notion that old comics are more primitive yeah uh.
Speaker 1:But then you look at the work of windsor mckay here, and this is early 1900s. Windsoror McKay was also an innovator in the field of animation, which we can talk about too if you want, but just his draftsmanship, the way he illustrated his characters, but also his imagination really comes through. So Little Numo in Slumberland tells about the adventures of a young boy that when he falls asleep he wakes up in this amazing dream world where anything can happen and you can see how colorful it is. And this is the early 1900s. People think of this time as not being a time of color, not being a time of a big, big imagination and like, just like how he's warping, you know, the world of the characters I think is is like it's psychedelic before there was psychedelia like it's uh, it's just really incredible. It's really beautifully drawn, a lot of it. Uh, here we've got some other stuff.
Speaker 2:So some of the things you like about it are the it is colorful, it is imaginative. Yes, that's the crux for you.
Speaker 1:Exactly yeah, colorful, imaginative, and how big this is printed here. This is probably only a fourth of the actual size that it was printed. Oh, really. So newspapers used to be a lot bigger. So there actually is a. I believe there's two books in the series that collected all of the Little Nemo and Slumberland comics printed in the actual size that they were originally printed. So giant, giant books, okay.
Speaker 1:Giant books and it's just like imagine you know you're in 1908. You may not have indoor plumbing by that point in time Many people around the US did not have indoor plumbing in the early 1900s but you get a newspaper, you open it up and then you see these insane images. It's really incredible. I mean, this guy deserves you know, he deserves to be a household name, so uh, but recently his work was adapted into um, a netflix movie called nemo. Um, oh, okay uh, not finding. Not finding.
Speaker 2:Nemo.
Speaker 1:Different.
Speaker 2:Nemo. Yeah, this is really interesting. So my initial thought was to talk about literature broadly, but one thing that's coming out in our I'm going to call it our Nolan-esque podcast.
Speaker 2:Basically, I'm going to try to draw it all together into themes or something, but we're all over the place, which to me is fun. Hopefully you enjoy it. But one thing I'm pointing out, or I'm noticing and learning. So I'm learning stuff here. So I know a little bit about early 20th century American culture and cinema, for instance, and also theater to some degree, and there seems to be a parallel in the kinds of Absolutely, and what you're showing here, because you said a moment ago about you know, you open up, you don't have plumbing, you open up this thing and you have this wild adventure.
Speaker 2:And that was the same experience people had with cinema right. Is you'd be living out in the middle of nowhere. You know, maybe a two, three mile walk to any restaurant or somewhere you can get food on your own, rather than doing it on your own. You know cooking everything and then for a nickel, or you know you could go, when you went into town once a summer or something like that Into the Flickabox.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you can go and you can put in a nickel and you could see this wild adventure. Or you could see like you know a little. You put your face here and you'd see like two guys boxing.
Speaker 1:Those are called Nickelodeons, by the way. Yeah, that's where Nickelodeon?
Speaker 2:comes from, yeah, and there's, you know, or a guy like boxing a kangaroo, and this was a time when people were just putting the camera in front of whatever creators. They have this new ability to just quickly and just play with stuff. Because when you look at so, this is a book a friend of mine put together of some of the great, some of the best artworks in American museums, and it's not just American art, it's obviously all art, but it's classic art. And now I think that, in my opinion, as much as I love all this stuff, that's the finest art there is, and in a real way. And the reason is because you're, you know, an artist would spend sometimes years contemplating, planning, thinking about one perfect image.
Speaker 2:This is is such a different. Same thing with cinema, it's very different and it opens up a new kind of imaginative creativity. And I think it's as much as I think these are wonderful and there's like a deep value to that. It seems like one of the values to this is just that expansion of the imagination and the mind. The whole world, the universe, everything opens up in a way that I don't think is quite there, even with the grandmasters who, I think, paved the way for all of it and I think, for me in terms of depth.
Speaker 1:Well, the problem with the fine art world is that it spent centuries. It spent centuries like existing because it was paid for by the rich, paid for by the church that's a good, and so this is the kind of democratization. Yeah, the subject matter explored in that yeah as great as this artwork is, it came out of out of this very narrow you know view of what was allowed to be put into into.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so this is like the mind unleash this is exactly that's what happens in the 19th century, slowly, over time, and and you get that with pop culture and things of that nature, where you you know the, the early westerns that turned into western movies those were some of the earlier or the penny dreadfuls in europe and things like that it was just anybody with a pen, and paper or a typewriter or whatever could try and sell something and, and you know, get educated and make money that way and I think it's an interesting new way to create art and it's opened up whole new realms, that is, comic books and things of that nature.
Speaker 1:But Winsor McCay is also important. I mentioned that he's an innovator in animation as well, so he would do live shows where he would just draw in front of an audience, and so Little Nemo got adapted into a Broadway show. There were more people going to see windsor mckay drawing on a big board across the street than there were going to see the lavish broadway show in to attract more people to um to his his live shows he created by himself. Uh took I believe four years to create a cartoon that's called Gertie the Dinosaur. And if you look on YouTube, you can find it that sounds familiar.
Speaker 1:Yeah, gertie the Dinosaur was created to be projected at his live shows, and so he would be on stage and interacting with this life-size dinosaur. And so there's a part in the cartoon, if you watch it, where where pumpkins get, uh, get thrown into gertie's mouth. He would have a real pumpkin in his hand. You know, toss it off stage, it would look like it's going in into the. At the end of the cartoon he actually walks into the cartoon and gets lifted up on gertie's uh head. And this is like you, you know, so animation. So it like is related to what you were saying, how there's this explosion of the mind that people. You know mediums yeah.
Speaker 1:They have these, these tools and they have, you know, audiences that are hungry for something new. Art for the longest time was not meant for, you know, everybody. It was kind of in in Western culture at least it was for the elite essentially, sadly, for a long amount of time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most people did not get artwork of any real kind access to it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean you'd have to paint it yourself. Yeah, I mean you'd have to paint it yourself, but you know, no, I mean like no. What I'm saying is that you know, it's like you know, going off of what you just said, it's like it's not available. It wasn't available to any average person.
Speaker 2:Yeah, a peasant was not going to some fine person. Like most great artwork was actually at people's homes. Yes, but their homes, the rich homes, were manners and you know palaces and things like that.
Speaker 1:You would see, and that's where you'd see all the great art.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but yeah, if you like someone's hut, they weren't you know some, you know like they're living on dung and stuff like that. We're going way back, yeah, but no, I mean I think the burning of wood and dung is still pretty early, it's a couple hundred years and people are still normally doing that. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Anyway, but yeah, so I agree. So there's a kind of spreading out of the availability of art, which exploded in the demand of art, especially as people were getting more money, and so it makes sense that there'd be a democratization of art and there be art of the masses which is what pulp fiction essentially is.
Speaker 2:It's art for the masses, and so and that's one reason why I think it probably obviously, or it does have the kind of lowbrow feel to it or sense of it it's like oh, this is for the people, it's not for the intelligence, it's not for the high and mighty and the the but the thing, though, is that newspaper comics were never we're never treated as necessarily lowbrow.
Speaker 1:It wasn't until comic books came about.
Speaker 2:Cause there are a lot of political so political cartoons are part of it.
Speaker 1:Windsor McKay himself did political cartoons after he finished the initial run of Little Nemo and Slumberland. That was seen as a more elevated form, but comics were meant for an adult audience reading the newspaper, picking up a paper to learn about the news of the world. It was perceived as intellectual.
Speaker 1:But then when comics started to be compiled into magazine format initially it was popular Popular comics of the time would get compiled and reprinted. There's Yellow Kid magazines that are essentially comic books, just of yellow kid, and that's from, you know, 1900 or 1903, whenever, whenever, whenever those started to be published, um, by the 1930s, um it, the magazine format was kind of formalized into this size which more or less stands to this day, Comics started to be published. When people realized that these comic books, these magazines, were selling well and they were reprints of popular newspaper comics, they started to realize, publishers, that they can make more money by publishing all new comics because they would not have to pay new hungry cartoonists much money at all. It's kind of nefarious in a way. There's a lot of behind-the-scenes things that really, looking back on, were pretty terrible in terms of creators' rights and things like that. Like in terms of creators rights and things like that.
Speaker 1:Anyway, they, they publishers, realized that there was a market for magazines full of comics but they could do it a lot cheaper if they didn't have to pay licensing fees to already popular comics, and so that's like where superman came from. Superman, uh, siegel and schuster had meant, always meant that to be a newspaper comic and there's actually a bigger, more convoluted history of they used the Superman name three times, which we don't really have to go into, but anyway. So Superman was sold outright. It was initially drawn to be in a newspaper. Last minute they submitted it to a brand new comic magazine that was being put together. They got paid a very small amount of money, but they were hungry kids.
Speaker 2:Did they get the rights at all?
Speaker 1:They retained zero rights. That's too bad. There's been a lot of legal action over the years and because I feel like this was this before some of the the um copyright laws.
Speaker 2:I don't know the history of copyright laws, uh it's copyright laws also.
Speaker 1:It's a very complicated thing. I've I've looked a little into it, but it's it's like that's a whole other, a whole other thing yeah but I mean, but they didn't.
Speaker 1:National, national publications, which became dc, treated, you know, their work as work for hire, even though they created it independently. Uh, there has been legal action in recent years. Uh, now, superman comics say superman created by uh j Jerry Siegel, joe Shuster, with special permission from the Siegel family. So there's been some. They won some sort of battle there. I don't know the full details, but I mean Siegel's already dead, shuster's already dead. Their families have have won, uh, some small battle here.
Speaker 1:You know, these guys didn't live long enough to like actually profit from, from this billion dollar industry on, on any in any sort of you know way that you can say, oh well, they, they, they did pretty well for themselves. Like they, they really got screwed over over and I think they're the you know other creators of the time I think were better business people and and yeah, didn't didn't get screwed over in the way that that they especially got screwed over, um, anyway, um, but so they, they put this, uh, this comic together, bringing together all kinds of ideas. The newspaper reporter at this time was very much seen as a hero the muckrakers.
Speaker 2:I think under the 50s. Yeah, it's only after, I think, watergate or something, where they changed, started changing the anti-media, where we really stopped believing in the establishment as a society.
Speaker 1:But keep going. So they were heroes. They were very much heroes because they were spotlighting corruption and they were getting their hands dirty.
Speaker 2:They had the same kind of attire that a detective sometimes has with the overcoat. Exactly.
Speaker 1:And so you know, siegel and Schuster made this choice for a reason. Like, superman was a hero in two ways. You know, it wasn't just this costumed character, it was a reporter, which is, you know, upton Sinclair, who you mentioned earlier. You know, it's like it's the whole reason we have, you know, regulations for our food. It's the whole reason we have regulations for our food, which are, I think, pretty important to the development of society that we have these regulations for food. I don't know about your personal opinions about regulations, that's another story.
Speaker 1:I think it's important that we have regulations for food. I'm just going to throw that out there. I think it's good we have regulations for food. I'm just going to throw that out there.
Speaker 2:So you know, I think it's good we have safety for food. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:I agree. So the reporter, you know that wasn't just an arbitrary choice. Yeah.
Speaker 2:It wasn't just a random. Let's make him a reporter. Yeah, let's make Spider-Man a high school kid. There's thought behind it, yeah.
Speaker 1:But sticking with Superman, early Superman stories, he was not fighting aliens, he was not fighting yeah, they were just crooks. He was fighting crooks. But also, flat out, there's an early story where Clark Kent is appalled at the conditions of these tenement houses in town.
Speaker 2:So there's a kind of political angle.
Speaker 1:And so he makes the choice. Superman makes the choice to, with his bare hands, demolish a whole bunch of tenement houses to force the government to come in to build better quality housing for people. There's a story where Superman takes an arms dealer, a war profiteer, forces him to enlist and this is an insane story forces him to enlist in a foreign army that was fighting a war, so he could experience the horrors of war and see firsthand what what this?
Speaker 2:yeah, so it's justice and things like that.
Speaker 1:So it's like, you know, superheroes, you know, and there's a reason for that, get um. You know, people don't think of these stories as being superhero stories, as being relatable to everyday life, but they're, you know do people think that? I I believe they do oh, that doesn't make sense. Okay, we'll talk about that but I mean, obviously there's not people's superpowers, but there's I mean, it's a, it's a roller coaster, of sure, and we can talk about why that is. So I want to talk about this.
Speaker 2:When you just mentioned I, it's a roller coaster of, and we can talk about why that is. So I want to talk about this one you just mentioned. I think it's interesting. So here's one thing I do hear a lot of people complaining about, and that is the application of many of these, or the reapplication in their minds of many of these classic heroes into more modern views of justice and solving certain societal wrongs. Right? So there's a lot of people who complain about changing the color of certain heroes. So there's a lot of which, to me, makes no sense.
Speaker 2:It's such an arbitrary Because but, I mean what you're saying, what I agree with, like what makes sense is this is basically what comic books has always been about exactly it's about the application like it's an ideal person of some sort just created, and obviously with these superpowers that aren't real, and but they're dealing with real life things that we're dealing with in our lives yes, like race like gender, like sexuality and orientation. So that's what we're dealing with in our lives yes, like race, like gender, like sexuality and orientation.
Speaker 3:So that's what we're dealing with today in our culture in a lot of ways these, so it makes sense that they would do the same kind of things.
Speaker 2:But people are like, well, why don't you? Why do you?
Speaker 1:got to change everything the thing is, the whole point is that I feel like a lot of those people complaining have not actually read comics.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, well they're not really into the comics Like they probably. I mean, to be honest, they're like me in the sense that you know I don't agree with them, but in the sense of, yeah, I mean, I've watched some Superman stuff, I watched, you know, spider-man and Saturday morning cartoons casually and they have a kind of nostalgic feeling for me and I enjoy them for that purpose. So when they update it, that type of person who's not really into the art of it didn't get into the depth of what it was really trying to confront at that time. That doesn't appeal to me as much under them. Now, first of all, I don't want to throw myself under the bus. I do have that nostalgia, but I do also understand what the role of art is.
Speaker 2:And in this case they're trying to. Whether you agree with it or disagree, what they're trying to do is apply these archetypes to modern problems and modern issues.
Speaker 1:Which is the whole point in a sense to modern problems and modern issues. So, yeah, it's like something that you had mentioned in our texting back and forth about before.
Speaker 2:So everything good? I said was before the show. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1:But relating to things that you said and I gave it some thought, you wanted to relate, you wanted to talk about relation between, like mythology.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, ancient Greek mythology, in particular.
Speaker 1:So the deal is with, like ancient Greek mythology, you know that stuff was. Those stories were created to kind of explain the world, the universe.
Speaker 1:Yeah kind of explain the world, the universe, yeah, the world around people that, you know, if you haven't had centuries of science and centuries of people, you know, actively looking at every little thing, trying to figure out the actual reason, you know it was an entertaining way to understand the world. So by the time we get to the creation of the superhero, you know people still have a lot to learn about the world. They'll have a lot to use. Characters like you know, larger than life, we'll say gods to explain the world.
Speaker 1:Now there's an urge to instead, you know, instead of explaining the world, to confront the world with with the story and um, and so I think that that's a function, and it's been a function of superheroes from the beginning is that it's wish fulfillment in a lot of ways and not just in fanciful ways. It's not just, like you know, wishing for. You know it's wishing for societal change in a way that a single person could never actually do. But you know, people upset by crime, you know an individual person honestly can't do anything about crime. No-transcript. You know it allows people. You know it's this wish fulfillment, but then you know, over time this gets diluted and gets dumbed down and gets you know, and there's been this like flow.
Speaker 2:I've been doing this hand motion a lot, but there's, there's only get weird when people point it out.
Speaker 1:It's a roller coaster of realizing the power of the medium and realizing the power of this type of character to confront these ideas in society, and then people pulling back on that for whatever reason. One of the major reasons of that was the creation of the Comic Book Code Authority in the 1950s. So comic books, for those of you that aren't aware, were almost banned in the United States in the 1950s. So this psychiatrist by the name of Dr Frederick Wortham, who specialized in treating juvenile delinquents, he noticed a pattern that all these juvenile delinquents read comic books. Pre-code comic books were different in that comic books were read by everybody men, women, children and children. Even during that time some comics were thought of as lowbrow but very popular genres.
Speaker 1:At the end of what we call the golden age of comics were horror and crime comics which primarily appealed to, I would say, adults, maybe older kids, some younger kids got a hold of them anyway.
Speaker 1:The very lurid uh stories, um, very, you know, graphic, and maybe some of them, a lot of these stories, might seem tame, um, by today's uh, ultra gory sensibilities, but at the time and you know, there are still some very striking, like horror images that are still pretty like, oh Jesus. That was a big step to take to do this artwork. But so Frederick Wortham started blaming juvenile delinquency and started blaming bad behavior on kids' exposure to this lowbrow medium, as he probably thought, as many people thought, and this led to a panic. There were mass burnings of comic books. People would get together, have comic book bonfires to save the children. Frederick Wortham came to this conclusion that comic books were to blame for bad behavior, without realizing that good kids read the same comic books that adults men, women read these comic books as well, that there was no real link that you could be made, that, you know, honest link that could be made between these kids behavior and reading about, you know, vampires.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, this is a trend that goes back to ancient times and it continues to this day with video games.
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, in the 90s it was gangsters. Like.
Speaker 2:Eminem and Marilyn Manson was responsible for the. Columbine shooters and things like that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they blame the basketball diaries they blame, you know, like all kinds of they did.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the basketball diaries.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:What are they blaming that for?
Speaker 1:There's a dream sequence where in the basketball diaries, in the movie adaptation where I'm trying to remember, Well anyway, the point is that there's this series of things that I mean.
Speaker 2:This type of thing always happens where you'll have someone maybe pushing the boundaries or doing something new, and then a reaction and you could. I think this goes all the way back. Often it's a deep struggle between someone trying to create something new and then the conservative forces trying to henge down on him. I mean, socrates is a great ancient example where he's going to be executed or he is executed and he's on trial for corrupting the youth the religion of the youth, and it's literally all he's doing is basically just asking questions.
Speaker 2:He's like are you sure that that's justice? Like you, you know you, you told this slave to do this. Are you sure that that's the way to do it?
Speaker 2:you know, like he's not even saying no, he's just saying are you sure? Basically, uh, but anyway, the point is like you see that in every culture, a lot where there's and yeah, I think we're seeing that again now as a back, like I think we're right now living in the kind of swing back, like just right now, from just four or five years ago or six, seven, eight years ago, even where it seems like things were pushing forward. There are new strides, new types of things. I mean just you know, politically, like there's gay marriage was a lot, and now there's, like you know, this swing back right now, like as we speak, I think, happening, and I don't want to get in political or anything, but the point is that it's like a universal tug and pull and I think Wortham was an example of that where he did that.
Speaker 2:They did that in the 90s with the rap and they did that in the 2000s with violent video games.
Speaker 2:It keeps coming back. I am, you know you kind of were a little light on Wortham in terms of saying, like I don't know him, so I don't, I can't speak for him. But you know, I think this is true of in the in any of these eras when you have that happening. It's the example you said what's like, but it's not just bad kids who are reading, it's other. That's pretty easily to figure out. Like you don't, like he obviously has some kind of bias where he's looking at the facts in that way, because it's the same thing with video games, it's like. Or marilyn manson, it's like a lot of people listen to marilyn manson and none of them heard anybody yeah so how could you like say that that's the fundamental cause?
Speaker 2:well, I, I think because there's, but there's a. There's a deeper point I'm trying to make, which is the cultural that I think this pop art and you know you're seeing this with a lot of the I'm going to bring up the word like woke and the anti-woke, which is kind of the same kind of thing in a sense, when you have these people trying to do another kind of storytelling or whatever, and they are pushing a kind of message, which is what we were talking about. But then you have these other people who are like that's the devil, they're corrupting everybody and it's like okay. So to me that's not a healthy way to think about these types of narratives that people are trying to push. And I think Wortham is a good example, because it's like what we're living through today is just as relevant to exactly what happened in the 50s, where it's like let's you know the next step is let's start implementing some rules that start banning certain things.
Speaker 2:Let's penalize people. Let's you know who are telling stories that we don't agree with. Let's ban books and it's like that's not the right answer. Even if you don't agree, that's never the right answer.
Speaker 1:I think a lot of it. You know, society's uh problems all stem from this, this kind of urge I think of, of failing to try to see something from other people's perspectives, yeah, uh, and I think it's like the whole point of art yeah, exactly and so I think that you know, like that's part of you, you know, frederick Wortham.
Speaker 1:He, you know, was dealing with kids who had real issues and but failing to look beyond them, I really think it's. It's yeah, you know. You know you say that he had, you know, access to the, the information that everyone read comics.
Speaker 2:Well, you have an obligation as someone who puts forth something like that.
Speaker 1:I mean he did have an obligation, whether he chose to acknowledge that obligation or whether he chose to.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah to sensationalize things in order to sell a book.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, and I think that's what you're getting today or in the past. Yeah, you even get congressmen who are like this is killing everyone and it's like, again, that's not actually helpful.
Speaker 1:Yeah, comic books were put on trial and there were Senate trials. Well, they did the same thing with movies. Yeah, right, the House of American Activities. Yeah, the whole Red Scare. Yeah, huac and everything like that.
Speaker 2:It's the same thing. And then they did actually have a code and you could see the same thing in the history of cinema, where pre-code the Hays Code, I think it was called pre-that there was nudity in film. I remember there's a David O Selznick movie.
Speaker 1:Some brief nudity in King Kong.
Speaker 2:Yeah, King Kong I think, yeah, and I remember seeing Birds of Prey I think it's called which is an early David O Selznick movie he did King Kong and I remember watching it. And this is again early when I'm studying history of cinema a little bit. And again it's like silent, it's like the 20s and you see these women because it takes place on an island, like some captives or some American or whatever sailors go on this tropical island and they see these. It's like a paradise and there's like this scene where these women dive in to the ocean and they're fully naked and I'm like the hell, am I watching? This is the 1920s.
Speaker 2:But it's just an interesting thing that it's like and then all of a sudden, oh, this became really bad. Oh, you can't even sleep on the same bed. You have like a married couple sleeping in two different beds. And then you get like that whole image and I love lucy, it's like and it just, but the, the, it's the reaction of like this is so horrible to see this and it's going to corrupt and everyone's going to be, you know, uh, denigrated, and I, I just it. To me it's just an interesting part of the history. It's like artists are trying to figure out how to work within that world.
Speaker 1:And the same thing with comic books.
Speaker 1:So comic books were almost banned by the US government. Comic book industry rightfully freaked out and said hey, hey, hey, don't do this, we will come up with a code of conduct that the entire industry will have to follow. And they made this very, very long list with all kinds of things. You know obvious ones like you know no nudity. You know policemen, judges, uh, things like that are never to be depicted in a way to create mistrust in the forces of law. So, yeah, it's like there is no, it's like, all of a sudden, comics as a medium could not address corruption. They could not address important issues of the time which, prior to this, they were allowed to and did.
Speaker 2:Did comics have the same, so in movies? I know one of the aspects of the code was there had to be a kind of positive moral that ended so like you, could talk about negative, bad gangsters, but they couldn't like flourish at the end, like they had something bad had to happen, like the good guys essentially had to win, and that was part of which which, if you think about it from a artistic standpoint, is extremely constraining. If you want to explore darker themes, which I think you need to be able to do that.
Speaker 2:And you know, obviously we're able to do that now and I'm sure, just like with movies, you know I'm seeing complete parallels. I'm sure comics in the seventies had some kind of cause that that's the era when movies I think you know that's new Hollywood era they started doing different types of stories where it's more ambiguous endings when the code definitely lightened up.
Speaker 1:Well, and then they had almost like a new studio form, or stuff that was done outside the studio, but I'm saying the Comic Book Code Authority. That's when they lightened up.
Speaker 2:Okay so it wasn't like independent authors creating stuff.
Speaker 1:There was, but I'd say the effect of this kind of stuff, uh, the underground comics um, yeah, yeah, mr natural, uh robert is called mr natural is what this character is called is that um apply to what I'm thinking it's applying to?
Speaker 2:like he's just a natural man uh, he he actually.
Speaker 1:I I believe robert crumb intended him, uh or maybe unintentionally intended him to be like the yellow kid grown up um interesting. Uh, he, he, you know, wears. He's this kind of guru, kind of charlatan, kind of guy, um uh, who wears, uh, this long shirt, much like the yellow kid wore, uh, but so is that a shirt he's not wearing a shirt here, he's okay, that's a beard, that's a beard.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's, I'm gonna grow a beard like that.
Speaker 1:I can, we can find the yellow kid. Let's, let's try to find a page without too many penises on it. All right, I said yellow kid, I meant to say Mr Natural. Here's Mr Natural meets God. So prior to the code Meets God, meets God. Dang Prior to the comic book code authority, which we should find. I brought some Silver Age, so we're jumping back and forth in time. Classic Silver Age DC the Flash, carmine Infantino artwork. So Silver Age DC, the Flash, carmine Infantino uh artwork.
Speaker 2:So Silver Age is what era.
Speaker 1:Uh is the late fifties through the end of the sixties.
Speaker 2:Okay, so then Golden Age is thirties to fifties.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So I'd say like, the establishment of the comic book code authority ended the Golden Age of comics After that. So all this stuff was banned.
Speaker 2:Um, I mean, I think the Golden Age of Cinema is like 39 to 54 of studio cinema, something like that.
Speaker 1:So it roughly I mean comics starts, I'd say like 35. Some people will say like 38. People argue back and forth about yeah.
Speaker 2:I think nobody agrees.
Speaker 1:So roughly the same time of Golden Age of Cinema.
Speaker 2:And that's what I think of the Golden Age of Cinema. Some people would think that If you guys can see.
Speaker 1:So this is the stamp saying approved by the Comics Code Authority. Every comic book that hoped to be sold on a newsstand would have to have this stamp on it, although I believe Dell Comics, which published, like Disney and stuff, for whatever reason, they didn't have to use the Comic Code Authority stamp. I don't fully know the history of that. When?
Speaker 2:you say have to. That was just within the industry.
Speaker 1:Within the industry?
Speaker 2:yes, so it's just what they approved to do.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:And it was probably the distributors, the newsstands that acquired it Exactly to do yes, just like. And it was probably the distributors, the newsstands that acquired it. Yeah, because that's just like with the theater, so it's really the theaters who were who got together and made that happen for film when they said we won't put your film in if it's not these kinds of ratings, and they started like so the theaters had the rating system yeah yeah, it's really interesting, it's the same.
Speaker 1:Yeah, very, very closely related and linked.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, the same exact thing. I'm just kidding.
Speaker 1:I mean yeah, so anyway this had to be stamped on here. Now there's plenty of great comics from this time. I won't say that this like made great comics an impossibility, but this limited the content. Creators had to get more creative about how they address things. This led to comics also being looked down on, even more so than they were before, as being like stuff for kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Because that was probably what they modeled for more yeah right. It was more fit for them exactly based on the like, that's what they probably would have done for kids anyway yeah like they're not going to show them all the penises to the kids, yeah like so you know, you look at.
Speaker 1:so this is a book um of golden age comics and here here's, like some comics for kids, you know, featuring kids, featuring kids, little Lulu.
Speaker 2:That's before the code this is before the code, and so it's the same thing right, yeah, yeah, exactly so basically just eliminated the ability to do this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's like stunted the medium's growth. Yeah, but now, not everyone agreed with that, and there were plenty of kids that loved comics before the code, didn't love comics after the code. Yeah, when they grew up and started to create their own comics, uh, some of them decided to do that without any sort of uh hope of ever being published by a major publisher. The underground comic movement popped up in the 1960s uh, the most what music era is this. This is end of the 60s, so the psychedelic era.
Speaker 2:It's like punk Isn't punk, pretty punk, because this feels like a punk thing to do.
Speaker 1:It's a very punk thing before.
Speaker 2:When is punk starting?
Speaker 1:If we want to start, we don't have to talk about it, I know you have a lot to say. I could talk about that subject.
Speaker 2:I know you have a lot to say, but I'm just saying, like the parallels, yeah. I've never thought about the parallels before, but it's obviously an all the genres of.
Speaker 1:I mean there were underground rock and roll bands in the sixties doing wild things that were never recorded and never Um but it's the same kind of thing at the same kind of time, yeah, same kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Uh, so Robert Crumb is, uh, probably the most well-known um person who worked in the underground comics. There were lots of other other artists, um uh. Art Spiegelman is a very important one, who came out of the underground and then shifted to more what's now known as independent comics and more adult-oriented graphic novels and things like that. Robert Crumb and other people that worked these Zap Comics artists Zap Comics was a publication started by Robert Crumb crumb and then he was joined by by other cartoonists, uh of the time that were all devoted to pushing every boundary, every taboo they could possibly push. They did uh. So these comics are not for everybody. Some of them have aged very poorly, um, uh, but they're an important moment here because this is like the comics code authority at this time was still very much in effect.
Speaker 1:You know, great works of comics is is is a, you know, entirely different story. Some of them are very good. A lot of good things happened during this period. Uh, there was an opening up. A lot of great creators came out of this underground movement and ended up creating things that that are you know one literary awards and things like that. Um, things that that are you know, won literary awards and things like that. Um but uh. So while you know, the flash is appearing, this is also happening. Uh and oh at the same time. At the same time and I wouldn't say that that this necessarily um had a big impact initially on the Comics Code Authority, but definitely was a factor that led to how the direct market would open up in independent comics, how things would no longer be restricted by the Comics Code. But what really broke the Comics Code authority open was Marvel Comics. So Marvel Comics, the works of Stan Lee, with artists slash, co-creators slash. There's a lot of people now that love to trash Stan Lee Really. Yeah.
Speaker 1:It's a complicated issue. Uh, basically no. No one that that worked for for marvel during this time is a reliable source of information. Uh, jack kirby, include jack kirby. Uh, people give him a lot of credit and he deserves a lot of credit, uh, but doesn't deserve all the credit. But people uh, people like to to trash stanley say that, oh, it was all jack kirby's ideas. A lot of the ideas were jack kirby's, but stanley wove them all together. Every single word in marvel comics knows jack kirby would suggest dialogue. Whether or not stanley ever used that dialogue is up for debate.
Speaker 2:Um, yeah, you see this with every popular steve jobs and um yeah what's his name? The yeah wasniak. Like he's with every successful big creative, you always see this kind of you know who actually did what?
Speaker 1:who?
Speaker 2:deserves all the credit because creativity often does have you know. The creator is pulling from multiple strains, including including very smart people around them. Yeah. For sure who deserve a certain kind of credit. I mean the.
Speaker 1:Marvel artists deserve, you know, because Stan Lee was the writer for basically, I mean, there were some other writers, but he was basically the writer for every book that they published in the 1960s. Yeah, but he was basically the writer for every book that they published in the 1960s. Yeah, I mean, his brother, larry Lieber, was also a writer, especially of early Iron man stories and stuff. But anyway, going back to what we were talking about before, before we get into all that complicated who did what and who can be trusted when nobody can really be trusted? Memory, memory fails you unless you're unless you're dr manhattan, experiencing every moment of your life at every moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, or ishmael. Uh, well, yeah is ishmael, a reliable narrator yeah, exactly um, anyway.
Speaker 1:So stan lee, uh, marvel comics, uh, very popular on college campuses, also very popular in the late 60s on college campuses drugs. And so an anti-drug organization approached Stan Lee and Marvel to create a story that addressed the dangers of drugs. And so Stan Lee thought that was a great idea and did so in the Amazing Spider-Man create a story that addressed the dangers of drugs. And so Stanley thought that was a great idea and did so in the Amazing Spider-Man. Submitted the story Was that?
Speaker 2:the creation of the Amazing Spider-Man. No, no, no, no. Spider-man's already established and very popular, he just applied it to Applied it.
Speaker 1:So with artist Gil Kane told this story over three issues where Spider-Man's Peter Parker's best friend, harry Osborn, becomes addicted to the Green Goblin drug, and it shows the effect that this.
Speaker 2:That's funny. I didn't know that that this drug is having. So it's basically Reefer Madness.
Speaker 3:Well, not really Reefer Madness but, I, mean you know, kind of functioning in the same way kind of Done so in a more realistic way.
Speaker 1:reefer madness is, you know, very silly yeah, reefer madness.
Speaker 2:I'm meaning the 1950s and former, or like um. What do they call?
Speaker 1:it from the 30s? Was it the? 30s is it all the way back then?
Speaker 2:I don't know why I think 50s okay but, it's like the little images they would show in reels or whatever of people going crazy because they smoke.
Speaker 1:A little of grandma's jazz cabbage.
Speaker 2:That's a reference to.
Speaker 1:Awkwafina is Nora from Queens, a really funny show.
Speaker 2:Anyway, you're much cooler than I am. I don't know what the hell that is.
Speaker 1:Anyway, you're much cooler than I am. I don't know what the hell that is. So Stanley and artist Gil Kane created this story, submitted the first issue to the Comics Code Authority. You had to submit all of the comics to the governing body here to approve and slap their. Oftentimes they would reject things. They would have to make changes. They rejected the entire issue, uh, because it addressed drugs and that was like a complete no-no even though it was fighting drugs even though it was fighting drugs.
Speaker 1:Just the, the, the, the fact that it mentioned drug use uh, there was no gray area here, with with the comics code authority. Uh stanley made the bold decision to publish the book anyway and there was still even though you know this is many years removed from you know the senate hearings and all that stuff. There was still concern that, like newsstands, wouldn't carry the book. Uh, by this point in time people had forgotten about all that hoopla, really.
Speaker 2:That's a new generation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so the book got carried as normal it was like one of the best-selling comics of the time and got published and the Comics Code Authority, through this, realized that wait, okay, maybe we need to reevaluate these rules. And so, going into the 1970s, things open up and, you know, eventually leads to, you know, the comics code authority was still used by some companies into the 2000s, uh, but finally, um, finally went away. Uh, comic companies have a rating system now, most companies do.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:You pick up a new Marvel comic. It'll say teen or all ages.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to let people know what they're buying, for, who it's for and everything. Youtube does the same thing. Yeah. I mean every media company. Even if they don't start that way, they will often move that way anyway because, it makes a certain kind of business sense and also the advertisers want that right.
Speaker 2:That's where I think a lot of it probably originates. The advertisers don't want to be associated with certain kinds of things. So it's like, if you can tell them well, no, we're directing at teenagers, we're doing teenage type stuff, you can feel safe putting your ad in our comic book or I don't, whatever. I don't know if comic books had advertising it or not, because they sold it. You actually had to buy the comic. So did you. Did they ever have ads actually comic?
Speaker 1:books, yeah, yes, okay, okay, lots of ads. I figured.
Speaker 2:I just wasn't sure.
Speaker 1:But loaded with ads.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess I actually, now that I think about it, like I could even picture movies where it's like a kid will get a comic book and in the comic book it's like an ad for um, like invisible or uh, goggles that let you see through, like see through walls, like you know, you know what I'm saying?
Speaker 1:A Thor comic. I just grabbed some random modern comics. There's a Thor comic from recent time and also referencing Jack Kirby Thor cover there. And here we can just open up to the very first page. And here we have Lego, lego, star Wars, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean that's what.
Speaker 2:I figured, I just thought you know, just anyway. So you know, I'm trying to think of how to weave this all together in our Nolan-esque, but it's because it's interesting we have this connection between you. Know, one of the values that comics have is that it's a medium that allows you to confront issues of your day in using certain kind of idealistic archetypes. To me, when I think comic books, that's what I think of in a sense, when I think comic books, that's what I think of.
Speaker 2:In a sense, I don't necessarily think comic books are that inventive, and this is just me not knowing much about it, just knowing the superficial stuff. So I will contend that there's probably a sub-genre, an aspect of the less popular comics. There's the super popular stuff that's on Marvel and it's the billion dollar. You know it's the billion. But then there's the ones that are less red, but they also, they probably have a little bit more depth.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and and it's like, but that stuff also starts, you know, in the golden age, um, one of the most important creators, uh that came out of golden age superhero comics, uh, is also, uh, one of the innovators of the graphic novel, uh form, and that's will eisner. Let me, um, I've got some work of his in this uh big book as well. Sorry, I gotta flip through this. Okay, here we go. Um, in uh, the spirit. The spirit was a, you know, during created during this time of comic books being very popular, will Eisner started his own comic production company. They would create comics to sell to publishers. They'd give them a package, basically to publish, to publish. He saw the potential in comics as a storytelling medium, thought it was as vital and useful as film, as anything really.
Speaker 1:But comic books, like we've mentioned, uh looked down on as as being, like you know, less intelligent. Even during the golden age, when everyone read them, there was still this, this divide between, uh, the adult readers of of newspaper comics, uh, as opposed to the readers of comic books, um, you know, treating material as if it was cheaper and and than Willizer wanted to tell longer stories but have the newspaper comic, the people reading the news of the day, have them read his comics. So he approached syndicates and newspapers with this idea to have a comic book inserted into newspapers and that became what's known as the spirit section. So they wanted him to create a superhero. He really had no interest in superheroes, but he reached a compromise where he gave his main character you know the name the spirit gave him a mask and gloves, and so that made him a superhero, even though he doesn't really have superpowers. Um, he's, he's, it's more or less a detective character. Uh, and there's a lot of um like Will Eisner was a master of like everything that made a story Great, I think.
Speaker 1:Um, his stories are very funny at times. They're very sad at times. Some of them are full of action, others are more centered on human, true-to-life stories. There's romance, everything that makes a great story Will Eisner put into his comics. Now, there is also some unfortunate things that haven't aged well depictions of one character in particular who Will Eisner.
Speaker 1:Other respect is very respectful of the human condition, anyway, but in the spirit he really broke a lot of art boundaries, comics um to to experience, like you know, an artist and and writer who, during this very, very early days of comics, treated this medium seriously and and and approached, approached it in a way that he could tell like intellectual stories. Um, and then in his work in the 70s and up until his death in the 2000s, was focused on the graphic novel, most prominently a graphic novel called Contract with God, which told the stories about people living in a tenement house in New York City and very realistic, very heartbreaking, sometimes hopeful, sometimes just devastating stories about real people experiencing real things. This is a medium that is vital and is able to tell these great stories, and I can make you a list and I think I could change your mind about, I could remove your prejudices against the media I think you're misunderstanding what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 2:So well, I first off one, one point I'm making is that there's, there probably is two levels, or if not more, to comic books. So there is the more superficial, broadly you know, saturday morning cartoon level of comics, which Now I want to, just as a quick aside, like the Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker 1:As much as I love them as a kid, as much as I love them for, you know, nostalgic reasons Feels bad for kids today, you know yeah. Yeah, there's no Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker 2:I think we talked about this in the behind the at the Romeo and Juliet. Okay. Yeah, with a couple of people. It's like there's some young children there that never got to experience. You didn't have Saturday morning cartoons.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I can't believe, looking back on it it used to set my alarm for 8 am to get up on a Saturday when I did not have to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, just to see the Spider-Man.
Speaker 1:But those cartoons now going into the 90s, but those cartoons now going into the 90s, which is the time when you watched it yeah, Things did get more intelligent. But if you look at Saturday morning cartoons from the 60s through, I'd say that a lot of I'm not saying intelligent, well, no, I'm not calling them, that's not, I'm not. Yeah, there's an aspect, there's a.
Speaker 2:No, but so all I'm saying is like there's one. There's there's a? No, but so all I'm saying is like there's one. There's a very big difference between a 19th century I'm just using 19th century as an example the kind of characters that I think the great novelists you know, like the Jane Austens, the Victor Hugos, melvilles, even like there's a genre, there's something that happened for 200 years in particular with literature, and you could see this in other places. You see this in Shakespeare, you see this in Don Quixote, cervantes and things like this.
Speaker 2:There's a kind of depth and nuanced aspect to what they're discussing that I don't think is. And you see this in novels on some level today. But I think even novels today are lacking a lot of this. And you know, and even even novels that I really like, like I really like Michael Connelly type stuff, and he does a really good job, you know, in some he's an amazing writer in so many ways, but there's it's still not to the level where they're, you know, even like the Scarlett Pimpernel that you brought up, and where there's just a level of depth in the way that the inner conflicts that they're dealing with.
Speaker 1:I think you just haven't read the right comics and that's possible for sure, but what I am conceding.
Speaker 2:So I have read some comics and I have experienced all the big movies and I've seen the Saturday morning cartoons. So what I'm saying is there's probably the mass version of comic, but there's that bulk that almost everybody experiences a little bit of the Iron Mans, the big Batman movies and stories and the big Spider-Man movies, and that's our takeaway. Is that right? And then those are very superficial in a lot of ways, like it is basically just an archetypical, you know, type of story. That's not that, you know, nuanced in many ways and it's applied to modern problems that might deal with every college student or high school student at that era or whatever. And then there's a little bit more of the nuance for those kids and adults who dig deeper into the comic book genre.
Speaker 2:That's what I'm getting out of this what I'm saying is I'm not trying to denigrate the whole view Like I'm not trying to denigrate the whole view. I'm saying, like what I've seen you know when I've watched Superman and you know these other stories is there is an archetype story to it. It's the same kind of story over and over again in different ways, basically, and a lot of the comic book stuff that I've seen is that. But that's just the surface level entrance for everybody, and then when you dig deeper, there is more artistic nuances.
Speaker 1:So exactly, um, I mean I, I would say that is to some degree accurate. I will say that, like though you know, the movies are made to sell tickets. They're they're made to appeal to like as broad of a yeah, which is why that happens. Yeah, a comic book that now I'm not saying that that many of the movies aren't great in their, in their own. Yeah, I like a lot of them. They're fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, they're fun, exactly uh scorsese caught on roller coasters, and I mean it's a little mean, but it's a little. There's some truth to it where it feels like I. You know I don't walk away and have an epiphany about the universe in the way that I do when I read, like the man who Laughs, or Melville or Ryan Rand.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think you know again, I think this would be a great book for you to read. You think that would do that. I think it would open a great book for you to read you think that would do that. I think it would open up things more for you.
Speaker 2:Oh, open it up. Okay, open it up. I'll concede to that.
Speaker 1:And also I mean even though you've seen the movie I think that the experience of reading the book is far better than.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, I always agree with that.
Speaker 1:Well, not necessarily, but you'll get I mean that movie had to make a lot of. I mean it stayed fairly close and it's surprising that it like. I don't think the movie is very good, even though it did stay fairly close.
Speaker 2:It didn't blow my mind, that's for sure, yeah it didn't, I think. The boys did it in a bad way.
Speaker 1:What it has to cut out in order to work as a movie is all of that internal monologue.
Speaker 2:Well, that's always true of movies.
Speaker 1:Well, I know the things that you love about the novels, getting into the depth of the characters. That is here in the books, but it's like there's no room for that in the movies. Certainly, what I was trying to get at before about Saturday morning cartoons they really got dumbed down. So if you read Spider-Man comics from the 60s and then you watch the Spider-Man cartoon from the 60s, even though that cartoon is fun, it is a far step below the level of storytelling that is in the actual books, whenever these things get translated to other mediums. Now there are comics.
Speaker 1:Now, I don't want to say that every comic is great to appeal to. You know certain things um, meant to appeal to. You know, uh, a certain type of, um, a view of. You know masculinity, a certain type of view of, um, you know good and evil, um, there's, you know a lot of, like, less nuanced things and and I won't say that, you know, superhero comics mostly are that, um, I'd say it's a mix of. It really depends on writers. So, the same characters. There can be amazing stories by, uh, that writer leaves, someone else takes over. You know this is a continuing. You know we're still telling stories. Uh, it's essentially the same. You know, batman super. It's essentially the same Batman Superman. Those are essentially the same characters, the same people that they were in 1938, 1939.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And you know.
Speaker 2:Which is why I think they're more mythology.
Speaker 1:Yeah, in a sense, because that's what myths are.
Speaker 2:People are playing around with the same basic characteristics yeah.
Speaker 1:And then telling different types of you know stories with it yeah exactly, uh, but you know, you know there's varying, varying, lots of varying quality over that time, depending on writers, depending on artists, depending on the combination of writers, and you know it's. It's like I think you, you need to jump into the more like intentionally intellectual stuff, yeah, to be to be able to appreciate the stuff that maybe is not intentionally intellectual, that may have its own merits based on, but then I think it's a, it's a push and pull that you know. You know, for people that aren't into the medium, I really think that reading the right book can change your mind and really oh yeah, that's true of a lot of stuff, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, this is a whole other conversation you know, we haven't, we don't have time for yeah at this point.
Speaker 1:What time are we at? Now? We're, yeah, we're already over two hours. Oh no, not quite, but yeah, we're getting there, yeah, and we haven't even talked about my art much, yeah, so I want to talk.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, hopefully you'll come back and talk about that, but I wanted to put a kind of ribbon on this part and then look at your art for the next couple of minutes and wrap up.
Speaker 1:Absolutely.
Speaker 2:But what I think is interesting is there's something unique and a new kind of storytelling. Just the same thing with movies for me. I actually don't elevate movies above comic books or anything necessarily. I do elevate literary, pure literature, novels, poetry, for a particular couple of reasons of what's capable of being done in that realm, in the realm of just words, in terms of what it does for your mind. But that does not mean that there's anything wrong with any other medium by any stretch. That's just a view I have. But anyway, I do think that there's a lot of really interesting possibilities with the medium I've seen. You know, what I'd be curious to see is more of a unique kind of you know like. So there are these archetypes that are created, but the it's the real inner diversions and conflicts that I see in great literature of, especially the 19th century, which I'd be curious if that is possible in the medium absolutely in comics. Yes, okay.
Speaker 2:So yeah, I'd want to see something like that would be, at least as an interesting experience to, because I know they are all going to have arcs. They're going to have, you know, I'm sure, because all stories, all especially western stories, are going to have something where they start here and they learn something, even Achilles and Homer. He starts with one kind of experience and he moves into something very different.
Speaker 1:And Will Eisner's graphic novels. Those are really meant to be just portraits of ordinary people experiencing both the pains and the joys of ordinary life, and that's something that gets explored in literature quite a bit. Sure, that gets explored in comics as well. Literature takes more time with the words to describe things that you know a truly gifted comic artist can convey in you know a single panel of a comic.
Speaker 2:I understand that and, like I said, I was a film major, I a comic. I understand that and, like I said, I'm, I'm, I was a film major, I love film. I'm not, I'm not opposed to the medium of visuals at all, but I mean, you know, and we really do, I want to get to your art, but do you? Um, but you know about JRR disdain of some of Shakespeare's work? Okay, do you know about this?
Speaker 1:Not a lot. I've read a little about Tolkien and it's an interesting argument.
Speaker 2:Extensive. So he thinks that literature is the only like the word, is the only realm for fantasy and the reason. Again, I don't agree with him. Yeah, but.
Speaker 2:I'm just saying his argument, and the reason is essentially that when you're building elves and dwarves and all these things you want, like the realm should be within the imagination of the reader only, because once you put it in that image then that's the image Right. And so now that's solidified in my mind and my mind isn't able to create what an elf looks like in my head based on these descriptions. So there's a kind of missing of the work of a reader that doesn't happen as much. That I do think is now, by the the way, I think it also, you know, what he's missing is it opens up new realms of possibility. That is important and I think lovely and I love it.
Speaker 1:but I I do kind of sympathize with where he's coming from on some level I mean I can the value like I understand why he thinks that, even even though I don't agree with that.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm just saying there's a more active component to the reader in reading literature.
Speaker 1:I think reading comics is more active than you may realize it. Oh, it is active for sure. And it can be active and this is just a random page of this. I want to point out basic structure.
Speaker 2:I would say it's probably more active than movies, definitely more active than movies. Because movies will, with sound and music, really tell you how to feel and think, in a way that this only has a few elements which is visual and a few things that you know. So you have to kind of come up to the end of that Go ahead, and this is. And then we really got to move on here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is an example, or something brought up by the comic theorist Scott McCloud, that imagination is required and is engaged while reading comics because of the separation of the images into panels, that the space in between, inside the gutter, here, in between the panels, your imagination is kicking in and it's filling in the blanks. It's taking this information and drawing conclusions to, to make this panel worse within the sequence and that your mind is actually actively engaged.
Speaker 2:You are kind of doing that work.
Speaker 2:You're doing that work, for sure, yeah no I I like I said, I I would say that it's the same thing with, like I use the analogy of, uh, audiobooks versus reading. Is that when you listen, like if you, if you take, if you go to audible and you listen to a book that you really like and I again, people always think that I hate on all this stuff. I don't. I actually love audible. It's a great way to add to it, but it is a different experience than the read.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's different than yeah, and I would say it's a lesser experience of the word in a variety of ways, because if you look at an Audible book and you listen all the way to the end, you'll hear credits of they produced this to get a certain effect for you. There's a director, so there's not only the narrator, but there's a director. There's a sound designer, there's all these people that are putting it together in a package that will make it easier for you to digest. And what those people are doing in a sense or not in a sense, essentially, is they are interpreting some of the work for you.
Speaker 2:And that's why you'll get different audio books with different interpretations. Not in a sense, essentially is they are interpreting some of the work for you and that's why you'll get different audiobooks with different interpretations. Again, very valuable and this is something JRR Tolkien talked about as well, that while he read like Macbeth and didn't really like it he had certain criticisms, but he saw a really good interpretation of it, going back to the theater and stuff. The interpretation's an important and interesting part of that particular medium. We saw a really good interpretation of it, you know, going back to the theater and stuff, like the interpretations, important and interesting part of that, that particular medium. But the reason why I still think that the written word and the poet you know classic poetry and literature, which just words and no pictures has something really special and is very vital and I'll always defend it, um, despite all the other stuff, I don't want to ever like disparage.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think you're doing that, but I, I just um.
Speaker 2:Why I'm always so adamant about it is because it does have a very unique and one-of-a-kind experience for you as a human, of you doing the imaginative work. Now they're describing it, but you have to put the picture in your mind.
Speaker 2:If you read a script, you have to think about your own life experience, your own images, your own reading of comic books, your own reading of great art, and you bring to it the best of your mind and the writer brings to it the best of his or her mind, and that is just a special relationship. So you know, and I just don't want to denigrate any art like that, but that's why I always defend the reading, at least a little bit, of this, this great art, and there is a difference in hierarchically. I'm still convinced that that is the superior art in a sense, and that's just the way. I guess I, because it's all you as the reader and the interpretation is yours. But having said that, it's way harder, it takes way longer time and things like that. And that doesn't mean that you don't get great experiences, great emotional satisfaction, great emotional arcs, life-changing moments in movies and television. I'm a big fan of television. Television was always denigrated until just recently.
Speaker 2:Same thing and you look at Game of Thrones. I think there's a lot of controversy around that one or whatever and how it ended, but I think there's just wonderful art all over the place. But I'll always defend.
Speaker 1:We're in a second golden age of television. I think so. Yeah, yeah I think so, okay.
Speaker 2:So let's wrap up by so. We started by talking about your artwork a little bit. Let's come back, because it's all inspired by this. Well, it so like you have this expertise and knowledge.
Speaker 1:I will say that all of this is in my head and definitely comes out. And who the heck is Big Budgie? You still have never explained this.
Speaker 2:Like it's not Godzilla.
Speaker 1:It's legally not Godzilla. So holding up a book and then dropping the books and only talking about this for a second, so I think what inspired one of the stepping stones that inspired me to do this? Now, all of the superheroes, all of the other pop culture stuff, all in my head. I also have a big love of comedy and an appreciation of comedy in many different forms. But also, I think the exposure to comedy, to people like Mel Brooks, making fun of things, satirizing things or parodying things, satirizing things or parodying things, the exposure of like stuff, comics by Robert Crumb and stuff that you know, even though maybe content of it is not my favorite, but the fact that it exists is inspirational.
Speaker 2:So that's your inspiration.
Speaker 1:Yeah, like something that led into so my love of comedy, my love of you know I mentioned Mel Brooks and Steve Martin and people that Roxanne Roxanne the movie. Yeah, but then you're singing the police song there yeah. Okay, mixed genres yeah.
Speaker 2:That's Nolan man. Yeah, but then you're singing the police song there. Yeah, Okay, mixed genres. Yeah, that's Nolan man, it's just all coming.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's all connected. That's our argument for this podcast. Put this idea in my head that I've realized has been there from very young that nothing really needs to be taken seriously and that you can have fun with things and that you don't need permission to have fun with everything. So something that I got exposed to um many years ago and and I didn't realize and that it would be so important for me to see at that moment was, uh, the art bootleg action figure. So um, hmm.
Speaker 1:America you know we're focused on American stuff. I mean, I really should be talking about Japanese stuff as well, and maybe we'll get into a little of that here at the end. Here was exposed to in in the early two thousands and collected, you know, toys made by a company called kid robot and things like that Got exposed to some some different artists, um, that decorated uh, different kid robot toys and stuff. But I think what really opened my and and I had this, this kind of um, you know idea that I could also customize figures. But what really opened my mind is another thing that I put on the same level as Robert Crumb's work or Mel Brooks's work, which is thought of as very mainstream but it's also very subversive in a lot of ways is seeing the art bootleg, specifically the work of an artist named the Sucklord.
Speaker 2:Wait, is that his real name?
Speaker 1:Well, that's his art name. I saw his work in a comic book store in New York City years before I started making toys myself, and specifically a figure. It's a pink stormtrooper called uh the gay empire uh figure, and seeing this in a store, it like blew my mind as I was a wait, is this allowed? Is this like? Is lucasfilm. Okay, it was just.
Speaker 1:It opened my mind that like, wait, you don't need permission to do satire, to do things, yeah, to do satire. And parody laws are awesome. If you can justify something as a parody, you can do anything. Um, just fyi, folks in america, around the world maybe not so much, but um, here here in the us, um, and so I've tried my hand at at uh, this is, um is that a pink stormtrooper. No, this is not a pink stormtrooper. This is a bubblegum Chewbacca. This is called a figure called Chewy Babacca. It's for anyone that.
Speaker 2:Can you actually eat this, though? No, this is plastic.
Speaker 1:It's for anyone who has ever been watching Star Wars and thought well, what if Chewbacca was actually made of chewed up bubble gum instead of Because he's chew?
Speaker 2:Yeah, he's chewy.
Speaker 1:This idea. You know, pizza, the Hut.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Pizza the Hut. It's like something that's just so. That's the best.
Speaker 1:So you know exactly Pizza the Hut. It's like these ideas that are just so stupid, and the only point to them existing is that it's funny, and so that's something that's always been. You're making fun of the concept in a sense, I am, but in a loving way also.
Speaker 2:so like this kind of stuff baseballs is making fun in a loving way yeah, so I started collecting.
Speaker 1:I'm never content to just collect something, I have to also do that thing. So I started collecting. I had experimented with making. To just collect something, I have to also do that thing. So I started collecting. I had experimented with making some figures in an art class a few years before I started doing this kind of stuff, and it was always in the back of my head as something that I wanted to return to and do something with. When I started really getting into collecting Japanese monster toys, I realized that wait, I don't have to just collect them, I can make them myself. But you know, I couldn't. You know, I started off making more original monsters and I will return to these and do more stuff. It's just they don't sell as well as the stuff. That's, you know, referencing already existing ip, but this is a, a character I created called swamp hooky, uh, who is a is a friendly swamp months.
Speaker 2:Pookie, swamp, pookie. Yeah, one word one word um and you need to tell a story. Yeah, that's how you sell it right?
Speaker 1:well, I mean, there are stories and things, but um, there are stories. There is a tiny little comic that I have, uh pages that are not okay that are not you can see some of my sequential storytelling um. So this is um the cover, and then this is uh the pages swampuki, swampuki yeah just, yeah, just. Just don't put emphasis on any. It's like I created the name. What yeah on any of the syllables, kind of working like Japanese, so here we have we've got.
Speaker 1:This works better if it's cut up and you can see here, you can just take a look. So there's the character there. So I had always intended to when I started doing this, to just create original characters and original toys. But then you know the inner.
Speaker 2:Do you know what this says? Yes, okay, yeah, I put it there. I don't know. It might have just been like you know how, there was that trend of white people just putting Chinese, and I don't think they really knew what it meant. Sometimes Maybe it was like water or whatever.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it means flower viewing.
Speaker 1:So this is yeah, it's about Swampuki experiencing cherry blossoms in Japan. Um, and so, tokusatsu, you know, stuff we talked about at the beginning. Uh, that stuff is in my head, going into the creation of this sub, my, my love of Japanese toys, monster toys specifically and that's coming out. And then you know also the, the ideas coming from. You know, being exposed to underground comics, being exposed to parody movies, this whole idea that you know you can take ownership of things, you can twist it and turn it into something new. Uh, while still, you know that ended up making its way into my illustration. First, illustrations got such a good response I made them into stickers that I started making toys of those, those goofy mashup parody illustrations. So, uh, big bogey, um, here's, uh here we go here's the thing you're in what is big?
Speaker 1:big bogey is a mashup of, uh, of godzilla, but it's legally not godzilla. Uh god, the Bob's Big Boy hamburger mascot. So Bob's Big Boy in the Midwest called Frisch's Big Boy, the Big Boy-.
Speaker 2:Did it start in Austin?
Speaker 1:No, okay, no, I don't know if it was a. Midwest chain or a California chain.
Speaker 2:Okay, because the reason I say that is because there's a but it's probably not because it started here, but there's a bar not far from where I live here called Signs. Okay, and they have Big Boy, and they have like all these signs throughout the ages, throughout the different eras of Austin.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And so right in the center is a.
Speaker 1:Big Boy. Well, there's also Shoney's Big Boy as well. So depending on, I mean it's this Big Boy, well, there's also Shoney's Big Boy as well. So depending on, I mean it's this Big Boy, depending on what Godzilla, what region you're from Not legally On what era yeah not legally. What era you're from. The Big Boy could mean multiple things. A lot of people know the Big Boy from Austin Powers.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I did a show in the UK and Music show no an art toy show yeah, I travel around and uh sell my wares, uh, so at a show, pedal pedal my wares on the streets, yeah, on the streets. Convention in convention centers yeah, yeah, stuff like that uh yeah, not so much.
Speaker 1:I mean I could go to comic cons, it's just I probably more expensive. Yeah, well, I mean depends on on the convention yeah and also I I try to go where I think people will actually buy stuff. I'd yeah, that's an unproven market that you know people are going there for specific, specific things and encountering this, you know no that makes sense.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Anyway, in the UK I found that people that recognize the big boy recognized it from Austin Powers because there's a big boy statue there and they make jokes about the big boy in the first movie, and so a lot of people in California also identify with the big boy. Godzilla has more regional popularity than you would think. Right now we're in this golden age of Godzilla content. At the moment where Godzilla has become a big mainstream thing. There's a lot of new collectors, a lot of new people coming into Godzilla appreciating new collectors, a lot of new people coming into Godzilla appreciating.
Speaker 1:But people in California specifically, you know these two things of Godzilla there's, you know, a big, you know Godzilla-loving community in California. So that, combined with what people there consider a classic California Americana uh, the big boy, that mashup it did. You know I've sold many to people in California but around the world as well, uh, because there's also big boy in Japan as well. So, uh, someone from Japan who's maybe not aware of the history of of the big boy may think of this as two Japanese things being matched together, but it's my love of Americana and Big Boy has his own history in comics as well. Big Boy comics were created to be given out at Big Boy restaurants. Stan Lee wrote some Big Boy comics early on, which is interesting. That's just how this came about. I do it in different colors. This was a one-off.
Speaker 2:Is it one of your best sellers?
Speaker 1:Yes, yes definitely the best seller. So it's Big Boji, big Boji.
Speaker 2:What is the Boji though.
Speaker 1:So Godzilla's actual name is Gojira.
Speaker 2:I thought I actually knew that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, as a nickname. I don't know where I know that from Goji. And so mashing up Big Boy and Goji to Big Boji.
Speaker 2:That's what all creativity basically is integrations of different kinds. I mean it is. This is more on the nose.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah we get that but you know, there is thought.
Speaker 2:I mean Godzilla's, just you know nuclear blast, nuclear waste and a lizard.
Speaker 1:I mean yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Wait, so King Kong comes first. Right, yeah, 1933. Did they get inspiration for Godzilla from King Kong. Yes, because that's my boy Selznick.
Speaker 1:Eiji Tsuburaya, the special effects director for all the Showa or the early Showa era, because he passed away in 1969, 8. I forget the exact year. Anyway, he saw King Kong as as a child and that's what inspired him to go into special effect movie making. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, uh, and, and I believe he had intended to for the first Godzilla movie, to do stop motion animation like in King Kong, but there wasn't the budget for it or the time, and so that developed into the man in the suit and that developed into a whole, like you know, pop culture, staple in Japanese. You know pop culture, and so Eiji Tsuburaya was also the credited creator. His company created Ultraman, Japanese superhero, and so this is another popular figure. So this is, you know, these are, I realize these aren't the most maybe clever, but they're fun. They're fun, okay, people.
Speaker 1:This is Ultraman combined with Yakult, which is the Japanese yogurt drink, so it becomes Yakultraman. Is that what he is? That's what he is, okay. And so I used a real Yakult bottle and sculpted a head that I changed a little bit so it was legally not Ultraman, yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's these two different types of things that people could do with you, but primarily in terms of purchasing your work you have again. If you Google Michael Morse art toys, you'll see a variety of different options, See a variety of things.
Speaker 1:Instagram if you're interested in following me Instagram and I have a Facebook page as well. Michael Morse art toys. It's the Michael Morse on Instagram. But if you search for Michael Morse. That's M-r-s-e like the code but.
Speaker 2:But what I'm saying is so you have that, and then you do have the ability, if the price is right for a custom gift or something like that, someone requests.
Speaker 1:I mean I, I can sculpt because I, I mean, I have had requests to do that. It's like a matter of of time and money yeah uh, I, I barely have enough time.
Speaker 2:You know, it's like I can't just you don't really want to do it to some degree you prefer the mass stuff that you come up with yeah and then you sell to people and they buy it because it's your art yeah okay, uh, but still, if the art, if the price is right, if the price is the price is right. Yes, okay, I'm just curious like um so kirk right here on on screen is offering me a thousand dollars to sculpt him.
Speaker 1:A tiny figure, is that? Is that what you're?
Speaker 2:a tiny figure, yeah, tiny figure um, I think you need to raise your prices, man okay we'll talk about that later ten thousand dollars to sculpt something for him.
Speaker 1:Okay, there you go um, but yeah, throughout a number but any, I also brought, like you know, actual monster toys created by other, you know by. These are from japanese companies. Um, just so you can see kind of the aesthetic, uh, where I've taken the aesthetic from yeah um, this is a real godzilla figure created uh.
Speaker 1:This is a company called ccp and um, just so you can see the colors and and kind of styling of it. Uh, this is uh a figure created by sunguts. Sunguts is uh interesting name, but it's the name of uh, of the artist, uh sunguts. I don't know his actual name, but that's that's his art name and his company name and this is definitely it's. It's a parody, in its own way, of ultra man as well.
Speaker 2:This is uh, his original character I look like the swamp creature for the whatever the creature from this black lagoon, black lagoon.
Speaker 1:You think you? I think it looks like we're not color wise, but it looks like ultra man. But okay, I mean, if you want, if I okay, if you if you see that in it, I mean I guess it's just that maybe it's just because he's going like this, yeah and I just think of that that.
Speaker 2:You know he's like smashing stuff yeah in that film. I haven't seen that film in a long time, anyway, okay, so um just like you know this stuff, I started collecting this stuff.
Speaker 1:Uh, I, I also remove things from bags this is how I I also.
Speaker 2:I also remove things from bags. This is how I also. I also remove things from bags.
Speaker 1:This is how I package my stuff. This is a figure that I made called Egora, which is an egg.
Speaker 2:Egora.
Speaker 1:Egora, it's an egg with a monster eye in the yolk the monster eye is inspired by Hedera, which is a popular Godzilla foe, one that I really love, and I do too much artwork with Hedera. I keep saying I'm going to stop doing.
Speaker 2:Hedera stuff. That's a great prank for like April Fool's or something. Yeah, just have the egg. Just have the egg and just like put on someone's plate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, totally. If you want to use that for that, you can totally buy one from me and do that totally. If you want to use that for that, that's that, you can totally buy one for me and do that. Um. But so, um, I usually, you know, take them out of the bags, but this is how I package my stuff and um display them. These just don't have a display spot yet and I just thought I should have something to show you to as a reference for for styling.
Speaker 2:Um, that makes sense, yeah cool man all right, okay I got lots of other stuff, that's okay, let's, let's um, because we're getting on two and a half hours okay let's end it yeah, so why don't? You show one last one last one and and um, but I think the do some star wars parodies too I mean here, I mean here's chewy bubaka. This is uh this is way, this. This is a gold hip-hop medallion.
Speaker 1:It's called Robo Neckbreaker.
Speaker 2:Robo Neckbreaker, that's what it is yeah, there we go. I mean, you have a lot of different options. How often do you create new things?
Speaker 1:Not often enough. I've had some setbacks in the last year. My art, we'll call it my studio. My workspace got kind of demolished by a falling tree limb. And so yeah, I had to. I lost a lot of equipment and it took me a while to to reacquire things and and I've also moved in this time so.
Speaker 1:I'm, you know, in a new apartment now and set up to start painting. I have a show in just a few weeks, august 17th, in the DFW area, a show called Kaiju Go. It's my second time. It's the second show and my second time being there, so, depending on second time being there um so, depending there's um, there's an austin sci-fi fantasy convention okay have you heard?
Speaker 2:I can't remember what it's called. I have to look it up. My friend's wife is one of the editorial board members or something like that so um at some point you might want to look at. I don't know if you'd be interested, because they have a whole bunch of different types of yeah things that's right here in Austin. Yeah, definitely they bring some big-name people from fantasy, sci-fi. It's mostly about books, but I feel like there might be a connection.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do want to start doing more events in Austin. There are several independent toy makers in Austin, oh cool, and we've talked about doing a group event. Hopefully that will happen sometime soon. We were planning one that got canceled by the pandemic and then just never got around to putting that together. So hopefully we'll put that together soon and can come together and show some some weird, weird thing. This is a very niche art art form. It's popular around the world but in in a very small community around the world.
Speaker 1:So that's a great thing about the internet it allows you to connect to exactly yeah, like a lot of people trash instagram lately, uh I I would have zero sales, like, if not who trashes a?
Speaker 2:lot of people a lot of artists too, trash anything I mean things.
Speaker 1:Things have changed, algorithms have changed and they put emphasis on, you know, videos instead of photos, and it's like the user interface is yeah sure, that's what it's so that's, yeah, that's not as many people seem to be finding artwork there as as they used to. Yeah, it's about well, yeah, the the reels probably more so than the stories.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that's okay, that's okay, I mean, I do, I do like the.
Speaker 1:I think I thought it was stories, but well, the stories are people's, individual, like temporary, but no, the reels are the videos that I mean you can have in your story A reel and a story. You can have a story with a video in it, but the reels is what the emphasis is on, which is like Meta's version of TikTok, basically.
Speaker 2:Yeah, okay, yeah, okay yeah. Everyone has TikTok, because that's the big one. They all have their own version. Facebook has that. Yeah, yeah, I get it Okay, cool man Well thank you for.
Speaker 1:And with talking about yeah, with Meta yeah.
Speaker 2:But no so Michael Morse Art Toys.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Not com, but just Google that.
Speaker 1:Yes, go to Instagram the Michael Morse M-O-R-S-E. I'm living in a post like web address world.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, the only reason I think it's sometimes helpful is just to direct somebody to me. It is, it is, and it can be pretty.
Speaker 1:You know you need somebody, I get frustrated at the idea of having to pay GoDaddy every year.
Speaker 2:That's business, baby. What? Are you? Going to do. You got to do it. All right, man. Well, thank you for talking about comic books.
Speaker 1:It took a while and it could take even longer.
Speaker 2:I don't even think we even scratched the surface. We did not. We did not scratch the surface. I do hope we got together to some degree.
Speaker 1:Hopefully this is interesting for some of the viewers as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I wonder who are the two or three people who made it all the way to the end.
Speaker 1:Well, hopefully you'll cut it up. You got to do some editing here.
Speaker 2:Well, I'm going to have like the.
Speaker 1:Well, we'll talk about it afterwards. I'm not going to do the. There's a good, solid 10 minutes here and then the rest can go okay, so there we go.
Speaker 2:We'll talk about the editing afterwards, but thank you for coming thank you for having me it was fun and hopefully you'll come back and talk about comic books yeah, or or more, focus more on on on art how this, how this process works.
Speaker 1:I can demonstrate too, if you ever want to. That'd be fun.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I never thought about doing that, but yeah, like do a live one or something. Yeah, I could do that. That'd be cool. Okay, let's do that, all right, all right, man. Thank you Bye.