Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome back to the Capes and tights podcast right here on Capesandtights.com, i'm your host, Justin Soderbergh. This episode is once again brought to you by our friends over at Galactic Comics and Collectibles. At galactic comics and collectibles.com we welcome the Eisner winning writing duo, Hive Mind, better known as Jackson Lansing and Colin Kelly, to the podcast. Known for their work on Star Trek, Guardians of the Galaxy, Thunderbolts, Doom Strike, Green Arrow, and so much more. The upcoming Dark Horse Dungeons and Dragons series is being helmed by this duo as well. And over at IDW Dark the you'll never leave this place alive series starts today at your local comic book shop as well as the final issue next week of the Star Trek last Star Trep series. Star Trek series with the first volume is out now at your local comic book shop. But this is Jackson Lansing and Colin Kelly. But before you listen, follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Blue sky threads, Twitter, all those places. Rate, review, subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you find your podcast. You can watch the video portion of this podcast over on YouTube.com and as always, you can visit capesentice.com for so much more. This is Eisner winning writing duo Jackson Lansing and Colin Kelly of Hive Mind discussing comics and so much more. Enjoy everyone.
Welcome to the podcast, gentlemen. How are you guys today?
[00:01:24] Speaker B: Incredible. Glad to be here. Thanks for having us. Absolutely.
[00:01:26] Speaker C: It's really nice.
[00:01:27] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah, we were just talking about things stacking up and doing things like that and people throwing conventions in there. Are your comics coming out? When's your Comic Con?
[00:01:35] Speaker B: That's, it's like the second week of October right there at the beginning of October. So we'll basically be doing, we'll be doing that show. We'll come back, Never leave this place alive. Drops that Wednesday following that release.
[00:01:49] Speaker C: Yep, October 14th.
[00:01:51] Speaker B: And then last starship number 12 the week after that and then a couple weeks later, Dungeons and Dragons number one. It's like October to mid November is.
Yeah, that's our attack window. We've been working on that one for a minute. Turns out
[00:02:07] Speaker A: Adam Caesar, the author of the Clown in the Cornfield series, was on here once and he was talking about how this year a lot of his back books were coming out again. They're rereleasing them and for some reason all of his publishers got together and were like, yeah, it's all going to be between August and November for four books to come out. He's how the hell am I supposed to promote these things?
[00:02:26] Speaker B: Genuinely, genuinely. We, we. We've been asking the same thing of ourselves a little bit. Like, it was, like, it was a little easier was when we were on, like, six Marvel books at a time. You're just promoting to the same audience, right? So you're just kind of like, circling. You're doing the thing with this. We're like, on the one hand, I'm trying to talk to horror readers. I'm trying to talk to, like, independent comic creators. I'm trying to talk to people who are going to be, like, in for that idw, dark vibe on Never Leave. And then we're simultaneously talking Trekkies and all the new people we brought into Star Trek through Last Starship, and those are not the same audience. And then now we have this whole new audience over in the. In Dungeons and Dragons who a lot of them do not read comics and haven't read comics in a long time. And we're trying to. We're trying to bring them over to comics through this thing. So, like, it's legitimately three different audiences that were simultaneously trying to convince to pick up comics. And that's a lot of time you don't spend writing comics. You know what I mean? So I think, like, it's been fun to do the press, and I like it, but I'm kind of excited to, like, just get back in my writing cave and start producing some stories. You know what I mean?
[00:03:25] Speaker A: Absolutely. And it's funny. It's like some of those things. Like, idw, it has a couple of those books, and then there's Dungeon Dragon somewhere else. So it's like those, they can't. They're not like, talking to each other, being like, we're going to come up. Don't worry.
They've got a comic book coming out here. We'll wait a week. They just released whatever they want to release. And you could just do a Dungeons and Dragon interview, right? You could be like, hey, we're going to talk to someone about Dungeons and Dragons. But when I don't talk to idw, all your people over at idw, like, make sure you mention the comic book. Make sure you mention this comic book. It's like, it's a little bit.
[00:03:54] Speaker C: It's a little bit fun backwards. Like in this case. Idw, like, you know, I'd love to goof on everybody, but idw, especially their marketing team is so absolutely lovely. They're like, we're going to go crazy for you guys. And, and of course Talk about Dungeons and Dragons, right? It's been really, it's been really cool and supportive because I think the cool thing about doing all of this is like, ultimately, you know, we're not on a D and D podcast. We'll probably do some of those too. But, like, when it comes to comics, the great thing is we can just. We're just talking comics, right? Your audience is smart enough to understand, like, there are great comics in every genre. There are great comics in all corners of this. Like, you might just be a Batman fan, but when we're done talking to you about you'll never leave this place alive, you're gonna be like, oh, I'm gonna go give this little small horror story a try. A tryout, right? We were just getting a D and d copy number one. D&D number one copies out to people. And a lot of folks are like, I don't play dnd, but this rips, right?
[00:04:45] Speaker B: This is awesome.
[00:04:46] Speaker C: So I think the joy for us in doing this kind of thing, like, yes, we are. You know, sleep is great and we like more of it. But I think the cool thing here is like, really, it's just sharing our love for all of these projects and like sharing what it is that we find awesome about it besides the fact that we wrote them. Dust your shoulder off.
But like, you know, the kind of the stories and the legends and the process behind how these happen, sharing those stories and then just getting everyone excited about the really bitching nature of comic books. It would be great if they didn't all come out in the same five week window. That's very true. It's also my birthday. Hey, it's great.
But as writers, we've always kind of had. We have like spooky, spooky boy vibes, I think you could say. It's not like we exclusively write horror, but we do seem to have a lot of stuff come out in the October fall season regularly.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: There you go. I thought, I thought you're gonna say the listeners are smart enough to read your comics only like, I mean, they're smart enough to read. I mean, they know what are good comics out there. They know we can't do that.
[00:05:41] Speaker B: There's a lot of good comments. We don't do that. We don't do that.
I would, please, rather you read other people's comics as well. My God, there's too much good stuff out there to be only reading us. Geez, that'd be terrible.
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Greg came on, Greg Katzman came on and was on the podcast earlier in the year, and we talked like 50% of it about IDW comic books, but the other 50% was just talking about comic books. So it's like, at one point I'm like, well, you're technically on the clock, so you should probably stop promoting other people's comics. But let's just talk comics and all that stuff. He's like, yeah, let's just talk comics.
[00:06:08] Speaker B: So Greg's a real one, man. It's one of the reasons why he's amazing. We worked with him at Valiant, we worked with him here. He's, you know, he's one of the unsung heroes of this thing. I'm glad he was on the podcast because he should get more flu.
[00:06:19] Speaker A: He's. He's excellent. And Kim's also excellent doing on the trade and collected edition side of things too. But, I mean, IDW's been great as well. But you guys, as a team, you're ready to actually, what's so cool is, like, in between, I mean, I've been reading your stuff, but like, in between following you guys on Instagram and things like that and seeing your videos, you've been posting about a little bit, like, how it works as a team. It's kind of cool to get that, like, preview to some questions that I wanted to ask. But like, how working as a team, how it works and things like that.
My point, my question, I guess, really is like, you guys have working together for a long time. When IKEA comes together, can you still remember, like, whose idea was originally or does it matter at that point?
[00:06:57] Speaker B: I will tell you, there's very few ideas in the hive mind that at this point now I can say, oh, that was mine, or that was Collins.
There are certain times when, you know, like when, you know, we came in with some small sliver of an idea and that developed out, like, we have a project, we have a film thing that we have. Have sold a couple of times, like a TV show and as a movie and like a podcast we've sold a bunch of times. It never got actually made, but it has a really great sort of high concept idea at the center of it. I mean, for anybody who doesn't know what that means, just all. All that means is like, you can describe it in a. In a simple. In a simple, like one sentence, and you sort of get the idea of, like, oh, that's how it would all build out.
That that high concept came from Kong. I remember the. I like the date and time that he came in and he was like, it'd Be really interesting to try to tell a story like this because this doesn't. Never seen a story quite like this. And then you. We build that out. And so now, you know, over a decade after writing that project for the first time, I still think of that as like, well, that was Colin's idea. Like he, he came to the table with that. But then we built it out together so much. But most of our stuff doesn't work like that. Like, most of our stuff works by us having a conversation until the shared idea develops out of the conversation.
I think the sort of famed version of that recently was Kang the Conqueror, where Kang was just. We were both having a. It was in the middle of 2020, comic books had shut down. We were mostly just talking to each other to like stay.
[00:08:28] Speaker C: Yeah, we were processing our like pandemic trauma by talking about like what was troubling us and our families and kind of talking about fatherhood and you know, what it was like to have dads. Very complicated, very at times toxic relationships with our dads until that kind of created a time travel loop story about the toxic nature of, of, of, of masculine relationships and the kind of passed on trauma.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: And we literally had this moment where we said, and this I think was me, where I was like, man, the saddest or the crazy thing about this is as cool as an original as this is, this would be a better Conqueror story. And then that led to us being like, well, let's take a swing at it, because why not? And that became Conqueror and became our intro Marvel.
And that just came from a natural conversation that we were having about the nature of our relationships with our dads and that I think that's where the best of our stuff comes from. It's also, I think, why you'll have seen us on a lot of licensed work over the past few years. Because in some ways it's easier for us to collaborate and sort of execute on someone else's world and universe. I think when you come in on Star Trek, there's a lot of things that are already answered about that society, that system, that world. The characters are going to use all of that. And so it gives us a place to play where we don't have to have really, really, really high level arguments about like the nature of things. And we really get to work on, all right, what's our take on that? And that's. We get used in Hollywood in that regard a lot.
But over the last, I'd say three years, we found a real desire to start telling our own Stories again. It had been a long time since we'd done create our own. And so after doing Principles of Necromancy with Aidan Winkle and really feeling like that was, like, so new and so fresh and so original, and the outpouring of response, the Eisner nomination, all that was, like, really powerful for us. And so I was like, all right, given that, that felt so good, let's really lean in and let's start playing in that regard some more. And that's where Never Leave this Place Alive came from, where some stuff that you haven't yet heard of is coming from. There's some stuff, outside of comics, of a feature called Synthetic that got made. We've got a podcast called Prodigal that's in production right now.
All of these are original stories that are things where we're trying to get in and start telling our own things and start building those out in exciting ways. So ultimately, I think while everything comes from the hive mind, what we're trying to learn now is how to like or really re engage with now is how to tell those original news stories that don't need to, you know, hang on somebody else's universe.
And then the minute that we said we were going to do that, Dungeons and Dragons showed up and was like, hey, do you want the keys? So, like, we're all still hypocrites, right? Like, we're also like, oh, well, we got to take Dungeons and Dragons. We gotta do.
[00:11:12] Speaker A: Yeah, you can't miss an opportunity. Yeah, you can't miss that opportunity.
[00:11:15] Speaker B: That's too big an opportunity. Honestly, we would have missed a lot of opportunities. We have turned a lot of other stuff down in the last couple years.
That one we didn't turn down because it was D and D. Yeah, you know.
[00:11:27] Speaker C: You know, like, you hit choices. And I know it's comics, right? Like, we are not working in a mine, but at the same time, at the place where we are, it's like, you don't get into this without feeling a real love and power in being part of the legacy of these licensed characters. Right. You know, the first time you write Batman jump through window, you get shivers because you're like, I have now. It's a very small print, but I've put my print on Batman. So it's like when you get. When you get license, when you get offered a license, you know, you kind of analyze it from a different couple of different directions. But D and D is one of those ones where it's like you. You sit back and you flash forward to your deathbed. And you're like, colin, any regrets? And like one of them genuinely might have been like, he should have written Dungeons and Dragons. It's like, well, I can't let down old Colin. Like, that guy is about to get launched into space in his hermetically sealed thousand year old space capsule that we'll all have because I'm dying in 2257 after having my life artificially extended by becoming a SAP cyborg.
[00:12:23] Speaker B: By the way, have I told you
[00:12:24] Speaker C: about my new independent project? Colin Kelly is a half cyborg coming soon.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: Well, it's funny how you mentioned, like not missing an opportunity like that that like you guys are obviously promoting. You'll never leave this place alive again.
Create your own product. And, and not wanting to potentially miss out on something like Dungeons and dragons. On our 300th episode, we had Kevin Smith on and he was talking about how he actually turned down Daredevil, like they called him. And, and he was like, yeah, I just don't think I have a story for it. I don't want to ruin it. I don't want to do it. And then like within an hour of him saying no, he was like driving his car or something like that. He found like he like all of a sudden clicked and he called back and he's like, wait, wait, wait, wait, I've got a story. I want to do this. And like he said, to help propel the future of his writing comics. And then he said like, when they offered him Star Wars Marvel or you know, the Star Wars Marvel crossover, he's like, I'm not going to do that again. I'm not going to, I'm not going to say no and potentially miss out on something that I could, could be like a stamp on time. And so like, yeah, missing these opportunities, like, maybe it's not exactly the right time.
You're on your plan.
But yeah, you didn't want to miss out on something like Dungeons and Dragons. And again, I am not a Dungeons and Dragons player. I never have. I saw the movie, was phenomenal. And then I want to read comics because I'm into comics. And so that's where I might get my entry. And maybe, you know, next year when you talk again, I'll be playing Dungeons and Dragons on the weekends.
[00:13:44] Speaker C: I don't know.
[00:13:46] Speaker B: So, I mean, honestly, so that it was. You talk about time repeating itself, like with Kevin.
And we have a really similar thing in terms of the way that we've seen Star Trek evolve in comics and the way that we'd like to see Dungeons and Dragons evolving comics. And I think it became really apparent to us as we were stepping off Star Trek, which was always a plan so like zooming out 30,000ft. For anybody who's not aware, we've been on Star Trek for about seven years. We started on Star Trek on a book called Star Trek Here five went and did the ongoing Star Trek series alongside Star Trek Defiant with Chris Cantwell sort of architected that run for near on 65 issues of comics. Between those two books and the events and the Shaxx books and Morgan Hampton's Sons of Star Trek, I mean we were knee deep, neck deep really in Star Trek for a very, very long time.
And what we saw while we were sharing that one chair very uncomfortably was they had to build a two seat captain's chair for us. Starfleet, Starfleet original.
The.
I've got so many weird jokes to make about that. I'm not gonna make any of them. The weird thing about sort of like the thing that we could only see from our perspective was that the first time that we did a Star Trek book when we announced Star Trek Year 5 San Diego Comic Con in 2018 I think is when it was we were in a little tiny room shunted off to the side with like half filled with Star Trek kids.
[00:15:20] Speaker C: They're barely half filled. Yeah. A delightful, a delightfully a delightful small crowd who was very interested.
[00:15:26] Speaker B: Little small crowd of real heads.
Flash forward almost a decade to 2026. Right. Eight years later, we are at San Diego Comic Con. We're in the second biggest room at the convention. It is filled.
It is like standing room only, line out the door filled for Star Trek announcing Can't, Will's new book, Starly's new book and the end of last Starship.
[00:15:51] Speaker C: Specifically Star Trek comics. Right.
[00:15:53] Speaker B: It wasn't even Star Trek comics panel. So this is, this is new. This is, has not happened with Star Trek before. And we've, you know, for, for maybe it's, it's just cope or whatever because we're stepping off. But genuinely it feels to us like our mission was accomplished. What we tried to do when we came in on Star Trek was make the best damn comics we possibly could. We came in as comics creators first, Star Trek fans second, and then like, you know, like licensed guys third. Like we were not here to make Star Trek comics. We were here to make great comics and great Star Trek that everybody could find for either side. So the Star Trek fans would come over to comics, the comics fans would come over to Star Trek. And I know that we accomplished that goal. I've seen it, I've seen the physical evidence. I know the sales like I know it works, right? And which is a rare thing to get to know in comics that you did it.
And so as we were stepping off of that, Dungeons and Dragons called and D and D has the exact same problem. D and D has a certain height that retailers will order its comics at. And it's not a high number. There is a certain number of people who read Dungeons and Dragons comics and it's not a terribly high number. However, D and D is in a golden age. There's more D and D fans likely than there are Star Trek fans. D and D is now this gigantic massive thing buoyed by things like critical role. Who are our old friends from the, from our live streaming RPG days. Like buoyed by a lot of the things that have made this ecosystem work.
And now more people are wanting to play D and D or interested in the world of D and D than ever before.
But we're starting at ground floor again. We're starting back in that half filled tiny room where we're announcing this book and some people are getting psyched.
Our goal is in a few years when our ongoing is like well and truly through its, you know, we have at least a two year plan.
When we get to the end of that plan, I want to look and see have we done what we did on Star Trek? Can we do it again? Can we try to cross these streams and make comics stronger for the inclusion of D and D fans and D and D stronger for the inclusion of comics? And so that like it really was a consideration for us. We're like, are we really going to do this again? Are we going to, like, we just did this. Do we really want to do it again? And it's like, well, D and D deserves it. So yeah, like we do want to do it again.
[00:18:11] Speaker A: Yeah. It's the right project. Yes. The right, the right property, you should
[00:18:15] Speaker B: say the right property. And we're the right guys, I think that feel that way. But D and D, we're the guys.
[00:18:21] Speaker C: Yeah, we're. I think it's something that I've been told, I think we've heard a lot, is that we're some of the most enthusiastic guys around. Like, if you get it, like, we're just, we're pumped, right? We're not doing this. We're not. I mean, yeah, we're exhausted and tired constantly. But like this is. We're tired because we're Doing the thing that we love with all.
[00:18:36] Speaker A: All of.
[00:18:37] Speaker C: All of it, right? We're giving all of our juice to do the thing that we love. And our enthusiasm makes us, like, it gives us.
We're kind of like ambassadors for the project in a lot of ways. We are the ambassadors of the project. And I think sharing that enthusiasm is like the number one way to get someone excited, right? Like, people aren't going to come in and get a comic because they're like, my goodness. Oh, wow. The.
The back material is incredible. The back material is incredible. And we have all sorts of bitch and shit. But, like, they're going to come in because they're going to hear us talking about this, being enthusiastic and excited and be like, those guys sound really.
They seem like neat guys. We want to get in on that project. And I think that's the real magic of it is like, just cracking through the stiff facade that a lot of the cynicism that a lot of people have when it comes to licensed books and get at the squishy middle. And especially when it comes to D and D, it's like, look, D and D is just a feeling simulator, right? Like, it does so many great things, but at the core of it, it's about, like, putting down your cynicism and having fun with your friends.
And so I hope that we can kind of make that happen for the D and D brand and ideally fill that ballroom 20 in. Get that ballroom 20 filled in two years rather than eight years. I think we're going to be able to turn some stuff around.
[00:19:46] Speaker A: I think I just. I had Heather Antos on for Star Trek Day, and I said, hey, this is not because you're on or you two were coming on. I truly have felt that Star Trek has changed in a positive way without even reading a comic. I've read the comic, but someone could walk into my local comic book store and know it's different. Because five years ago, if you wanted a Star Trek comic book, you had to ask the guy to own the comic book shop. Hey, can I get the Star wars comic? Star Trek comic book. And he'd order a copy and put it in your box. And then when it came in, you know, that kind of thing. Now you walk in there, there's multiple Star Trek comics on the new comic shelf, on the shelves on the shelf. Like, he doesn't even ask anymore. He just puts them on the shelf. You know, the last Star Trek stuff, all the starship stuff, all going to be on the show, all that stuff's on the shelves ready to go for people to buy. You have to order it. And so I think that's the difference still, things like Doctor who comic books are like that for him. He's like, I order it for customers. I don't want to over order because it doesn't sell extremely well in his shop because every shop is different.
And he. So. But he says, you know, maybe Dungeons and Dragons, if it had been around for a long time, would have been that way. You guys changing it. And so that there is that feeling. And I said to Heather, I said it's because I wasn't. I was a fringe Star Trek fan. Like, I've seen the movies. If something came on, if a new movie came out, I'd watch it. This is great. But I wasn't clinging for like trying to get the next Star Trek thing. And when I read it's probably lower decks. The first run of volume of lower decks. I was like, this is where I can get. I can grab onto something because I don't need to know a ton.
I don't have to be like, oh, I need to know this, that and the other thing. I get what's going on. And then it was like red shirts and last Star Trek, all these comics that spoke to me as a comic book fan that I could then say, hey, I'm a Star Trek fan now too. And now when that new one comes out, I'm like clamoring to want to read the next Star Trek thing. And that's because you spoke to me as a comic book fan. All of you, you, Chris, everybody, Ryan, all the people who have been working on these things, Heather, editing it, you spoke to comic book fans. And I think that was huge. I think that was big and didn't make me feel stupid because I didn't know 60 years of Star Trek lore.
[00:21:57] Speaker B: Our buddy Hector Navarro put out a video today. Well, the day that we're recording this about his enjoyment of the Star Trek and talked a lot about what they've meant to him and how that's gone. And he says this thing that is like genuinely.
I heard it. Hearing out of somebody else's mouth was like healing to me. It was so lovely because I feel like I've been saying it behind the scenes for seven years, which is. He was like, honestly, I can recommend these comics to you even if you're not a Star Trek fan, even if you've never watched or read any Star Trek before.
Because in the same way that a superhero, you come in on a Superman comic and you Know that Superman has a rich history, like a rich publishing history of monthly comics for decades and decades and decades. And you know that you haven't read any all or any of that. You can still jump into a new Superman run and know that that's going to tell you a story. And then if you want to dig back, it's all there waiting for you. And that's the way we treated Star Trek, really. Never assume this is somebody's.
That somebody knows anything. Let's bring you in from the start. So, for instance, in Star Trek number one, like the very, very first issue, when we brought in, when we brought Cisco back from the wormhole, we start you right in the deep end. We start in the wormhole with Cisco. It's very esoteric, it's very weird. But that's no weirder than the opening of any John Hickman book. Like, we're just starting you in the fucking cosmic. And then we're going to pull you back in, right? But then as soon as we do that, as soon as we do the, you know, it's like you're going to go back out of the wormhole. Benjamin Cisco. And he goes, Jake. And then we go to a data page that's an article by Jake describing the world of the Federation to you and not doing it by saying like, all right, here's the recap for anybody who doesn't know Star Trek, but rather being like, as character building. Let's discuss where Jake's mindset is at by reading one of his articles and where he uses that article just happens to. To break down. Here's what the history of Star Trek is since Ephraim Cochrane. And so you as a fan, if you don't know anything about Star Trek, that one page that's embedded in the story is going to give you everything you need to know to get started. And jumped up and like, it's your. It's the opening crawl of Star Wars. We're going to give you enough and then you can jump in and all of the rest of it, you can backfill as you go. And I think, like, there's no distinction between the captains of the Enterprise and the members of the Justice League in this regard.
They are rich publishing histories and you can find them as you want to, but the new story should be accessible. And then it was, once we cracked that, then it was the crack. Then it was the real, like last, last frontier for us was last starship. Where we're saying, all right, now we're going to create an entirely New crew. We're going to create an entirely new text, a new era that nobody's seen before. We're going to build new Star Trek, like brand new Star Trek. We're going to put it right in front of you on a number one and we're going to make Star Trek very small on the logo and we're going to make the Last Starship very big. And we're only going to put one character that anybody's going to like, anybody around the world can recognize. And it's James Kirk who's like your Superman character. He's the one who you could drop into the middle of the jungle and say James T. Kirk. And they'll probably be like, oh, Enterprise. Like anyone you meet will know what you're talking about. Right.
So we were like, this was us trying to do the same thing and seeing if fans would show up for that. And then lo and behold, Last Starship has become not just a hit but one that we've really seen so many people come to Star Trek through. And we've had a lot of people come to us and be like, wow, this character's now one of my favorite Star Trek characters. Like Sato has some real heads now. That's great.
That's the ultimate justification of the very goal we all set out with at the very beginning of this thing. And it makes me very happy that you've, that you feel like you've changed in your relationship to Star Trek because I think that's, that was the goal for us the whole time was like make the best damn comics possible so that real comics fans, real comics has people who love this medium desperately can see how useful Star Trek is to growing that medium. You know that there's nothing else like it in comics. It is its own kind of science fiction thing that we don't get anywhere.
So like let's embrace it.
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Because I have read we've lived in a world of, I mean IP is dominating comics right now as a whole. Like it's just like not dominating but it's way more now than it ever has been where like the most random thing gets a comic book now, which is great, let's try it. If it gets a new reader, that's my big thing. It's like as long as someone comes to comics, if that's the way to bring them in there Post Malone is bringing people to comics. People, let's do this. Like let's, you know, whatever it may be, however, there are some where it was like, yeah, I guess that could be A comic. You know, I mean, like, there is this, like, when you're reading the story, you're just like. It just seems like an episode of that TV show from the 80s just in comic book form. It's so some of that is, like, nostalgic. This is great. I'm going to continue reading it because I loved it as a TV show and I'm getting this now in comic books because they're not making the TV show anymore. But some of it's like, okay, I see how. I see what they did there. It was cool. But like, that to me didn't feel the same way with some of these things. Like six Last starstrip or I mentioned red shirts or any of those ones that those books I've been reading at idw. It was that. And I'm hoping. And I feel like that's the glue that could potentially bring me into Dungeons and Dragons. And I think that's what's cool about it. It's like, if you guys speak to complicators, I think anybody. And again, Dungeons and Dragons is another name. People are going to go, I know that name at least.
[00:27:12] Speaker C: One of the fun things, the super fun thing about Dungeons and Dragons is that the feeling of diving into something and then being like, I don't understand what's going on. I guess I'm just going to strap in. Is every fantasy novel you've ever read, right? George R.R. martin does not give a shit about you understanding the world. He's going to toss you into it and say, like, catch up, nerds. And like, that is. That's the frison of, like, being 13 and picking up, you know, like a Brandon Sanderson book or bringing up Wheel of Time for the first time. You're like, this feels like I am in the deep. I know this is volume one. I feels like I'm in the deep end and I don't understand any of this. Awesome. I want to unravel this mystery. And it's something that we really expect in fantasy. And I do wonder, like, if it's something that the audience doesn't expect as normal in science fiction. I'm not sure, but we've definitely seen a lot more people in Star Trek nervous about, like, well, I don't know, the continuity. It's like, just does not give a shit.
[00:28:07] Speaker B: Like, please join us.
[00:28:08] Speaker C: We know that. But I do think there's just, like, there's a real excitement that turning into a value add. Right? You just bring up Superman. I think that's such a great point because it's like, yeah, we all remember the thrill of finishing our first Superman book or Batman or whatever. And being like, that was so cool.
Who is Scarecrow? I must know more immediately, right? And then you're digging in and now you've got a comics. Because comics, in a lot of ways are about discoverability, right? And then once you discover it for yourself, then you own it. Then it's part of your lore and your legacy. And I think that's going to be.
It's.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: It's funny how upset people get about not knowing too. Like, I guess to me, it's big. It's nice to me. Like, it's nice to me because, like I said, I'm a kind of guy. Like, so I have a convention that I'm helping facilitate here and in Maine, and Jim Butcher, the author's coming to the convention. And he's like. He's like, 27 books in the Dresden Files, right? And so I was like, I've never read any of them. So I'm like, okay, I'll start. Well, this one just came out. I'm like, well, maybe I should read them. And then I'm thinking to myself, do you think I can read all 27 books before he gets here? And I'm like, no, I can't. But I'm also like, why is it. Why do I get upset with myself for not knowing something? Like, to me, it's like, we should also have the okay that your Star Trek comics. I spoke to a non Star Trek fan, but also, like, should I have been upset that, like, if I didn't know who James T. Kirk was, that, like, I don't know. James T. Kirk is like. Like, I shouldn't be upset about this. Like, your stories worked with the character. I don't need to know when he was born or who his parents were, any of that stuff. I just need to know what he's doing in this book.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: The crazy thing about Last Starship is, so we always say there's only one canon character in Last Starship. Like, that's actually not true. There is a second canon character in that book. She's been on the book since issue one. The Borg Queen, Agnes Jurati. She is a character from the season, the second season of Star Picard.
If you know that, great.
You have some amount of understanding of her backstory. If you do not know that, fine. Literally, it will never come up. It will never come up. There is like one line where she's like, I'm fulfilling an old promise. And that's It. Everything else about that character, we're going to lean on characterization because we like the way that Alison Pill played that character. So we wanted to explore what that character would look like, plus centuries of growth. Right? But we've met so many people who've been like, this new original Borg Queen character is dope. And we're like, yeah, she's really great, isn't she? She's on this show. You can go watch it. But you don't like the fact that you don't need to.
That's like getting, Getting upset about that would be silly. Like, no, no, no.
[00:30:46] Speaker A: I gotta put this. Come up because I gotta go watch Picard because I can't.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: No, like, this was curated for you. Get to the end of that and then go back to the beginning of her journey and see how it started. Right. Like, and I think that's. That's a. Always a great way to do it. As Colin said, like, I want to know everything about Scarecrow. Let me lean into that. That's how I started in comics, man. Like, I. I picked up.
I picked up Batman Long Halloween.
And that book got me thinking about all of these other Batman characters, and suddenly I was reading every Batman book that I could find. But Batman Long Halloween was my entry point on Batman. And it gave me a tour of that universe in such a way that I could consume and consume and consume and consume until I had every Batman book in existence. That's eventually where you're going to go.
I just feel like every time we enter into a.
Into a new license, we're going to try to do that for you. That's what D D is. It's a tour of the forgotten realms. It uses 95% of their characters, of their world. In fact, Ed Greenberg, the creator of that entire setting, like the dude who's been writing this since day one, he shouted out the book today, called it a new classic. Like, big up the way that we write the characters. Like, that's insane. You get getting to do that with the creator still alive. Like, Roddenberry never gets to read our Trek comics, you know, but like, the creator of this setting is reading our books and is like talking about it. That continuity of effort and consideration, that continuity of creation, the way that we hand it off to the next generation.
That's one of the best things about comics, is that it is this great serialized medium and that every time you get to a new generation, you're going to have a new in. How many people are reading their first Martian Manhunter book because of Dennis King. Right. You know what I'm saying? Like, don't be sad because you weren't reading Martian Manhunter before. Psyched that there's a Martian Manhunter book that speaks to you now.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: And to be honest with you, any of these big universes, if you just stop reading for a couple of months, you're already behind, you're already lost. So trying to catch up is not really going to be there. I've read a recent comic book that came out last week on the shelf or two weeks ago, and I was like, I haven't read a comic book in this universe in a couple months. And now I feel lost. And so I already felt lost at that point. So it's like, you know, I see
[00:32:59] Speaker B: over your shoulder a copy of Thunderbolts Doom Strike number one.
So Doom Strike is a great example of this where like, hell yeah, bud.
[00:33:06] Speaker C: Thanks for the representation.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Yeah. So Doom Strike is a, like, that is a tie in comic to one world under Doom. It is a sequel comic to Thunderbolt World Strike, which isn't. Which is in and of itself a sequel comic to Captain America, Sentinel Liberty.
Right.
All of that is all one big continuous story of Bucky Barnes. And that four issue miniseries. Right. Or five issue miniseries. There at the end is the end of our Bucky Barnes plot. That's us putting down Bucky after. After several years. 42, I think 48, something like that issues on the character.
Do you need to read any of that to read Doom Strike? I would argue no.
I think Doom Strike sets you up exactly where it needs to. You're going to learn exactly what you need to. The first issue of that is going to see Shelbyville get blown up by a nuke. And that's going to reframe the entirety of how Thunderbolts move forward from there. You're going to lose Thunderbolts Mountain on page, like six. So don't even worry about what came before on that. Everything we do is about trying to take you. If we're basically. If the book says number one on it, it better be a number one. It better be able to be the first comic you ever read for that thing. And I think sometimes that's why, like, we've had a few times where I think our Number Ones have, like, kind of thrown people. Like Guardians, for instance. For instance, where like our Guardians number one is like, if you were reading Guardians before us, if you were reading the Al Ewing run and then you started our run, it would feel like they were completely different universes. Like you would Be like, I don't. Nothing about this old book is being represented in this new book. What is this? And it takes you until issue six for us to unpack. Okay, here's what happened. Here's why we're here. Here's what we're doing, right? But that first issue, it's because we're not thinking about, like, truthfully, we weren't thinking about trying to get returning Guardians fans. What we were trying to do was open up the Guardians market to a whole new audience of readers and then walk them back into all the amazing stuff. Because we love the walk you back into all the amazing stuff that Al did, but only after we've set our status quo and built out from there. You know, I think that's always what you want to do. Like, comics should always be approachable in that respect, especially in number ones.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: And as the years go on and on and on and on, it should be. How more difficult for people to catch up if, like, you. You can't always expect. I mean, there's people like, my son's 5, so by the time he's able to actually read comics, you're going to be like, okay, now here's all these long boxes. Read all of these before you touch anything new on this.
[00:35:29] Speaker C: Stories begin in 1939.
[00:35:32] Speaker A: His inheritance. My buddy just said a guy walked through the shop, was like, I got to sell my comics.
[00:35:35] Speaker C: Why?
[00:35:36] Speaker A: He goes, because if I have them any longer than this, my wife's going to have to deal with them when I'm dead and do that. And I'm like, okay, I kind of understand what you're saying here. Some of those comics that I have in my closet aren't worth anything. And my parent. My wife's going to have to get rid of them at some point.
[00:35:49] Speaker C: So I've kept my long boxes specifically because once you seal those up, we're going to be able to, like, we're going to be able to make a boat out of them.
[00:35:57] Speaker A: Yeah, See, you actually protect my walls. Long box.
[00:36:00] Speaker C: Become the barge on which I am burned for my grandpa.
[00:36:04] Speaker B: We're gonna do a. We're gonna do a long box Viking funeral.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: Except you're like, local comic book shop. Like, can I. Can I raffle through the box really quickly first to see if there's anything that I want, like, except, as I
[00:36:15] Speaker B: already mentioned, author, to make your funeral a book burning.
[00:36:22] Speaker C: You know what? I'm gonna put this one back on the. I'm gonna put this one back in the hopper. I guess I already mentioned that. I'm not gonna die until for at least another 220 years. And then I'm gonna have robotics.
So you know what?
[00:36:33] Speaker B: The.
[00:36:34] Speaker C: The book burning is a fake out. There are no books armed. That's just where I invited my enemies.
[00:36:39] Speaker A: Well, they're all going to deteriorate by then.
[00:36:41] Speaker C: Snakes Hot on fire. Snakes for my enemies.
[00:36:47] Speaker A: There's more snakes on this motherf in raft.
Well, so we talked about. We talked so much about, like building a comic book with a bunch of history without having to worry about the history as much. But like the name comes along and some of the characters, obviously you know the ship's names and some of those things are like, come over. But then you go over. Now you have to create. Now you create creator own stuff where you don't have to worry about any of that, except for you guys need to know that, like, you need to know where X, Y and Z character comes from to be able to make it believable. You can't be like, here's XYZ character, and then make up their backstory. I guess you could 10 issues later. But you want.
[00:37:25] Speaker B: You can. But a discerning reader will know the difference.
[00:37:27] Speaker A: Will know the difference. So, yes, you go from like having to do that to not having to do that. And I think I spoke with Chris Riel, former editor in chief of idw, this morning actually, and it was saying that this.
Not having to know the history of something like this, but creating it from the background and new and fresh is where I've been because of the things we mentioned about having to know a bunch of history. I haven't done a lot of personal for fun reading in the big two in recent years. Some here and there, but not Die Hard by a polist.
Five, 10 years ago was like 75% Marvel, like 5% DC. And the rest of it was just independent stuff. Now it's like the opposite, where the independent is like everything. And that's mainly because I pick up, you'll never leave this place alive blind. And I can enjoy it from issue one without having to think. And I think that's what's huge about this thing. And I think that that must be also relieving to duo of writers that you just have to worry about yourself and worry about how this story means anything to you guys so that you could portray it right on page.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, Never Leave is a really great example, I think, of this, where, you know, a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about are these big ongoings or these like 12 issue maxis like Last Starship, where, you know, Last Starship be like really, really meticulously plotted. Before we started, we always knew it was going to be 12 issues. Two volumes like designed to be a big 12 issue. You know, Brick, this is a three issue story.
You'll never leave this place alive. Only as in a story for three issues. So that's all we're doing. We are telling you a three act story the way that we would tell you a horror movie. And that's because in many ways this movie or this, this comic started life as a movie. It's been a movie, it's been a television show. It's been a lot of different things over the years as we've developed it out, we did a lot, we did like a year of work with it with a director named Adam Mortimer, who is a really wonderful director as a new movie coming out like literally right now.
And what we have discovered about this story over time, over many, many years of building it, is who exactly all these characters are. We know them deep. We know Fee Joplin very well. We know her father very well. We know her friends and the weird world that they've grown up in sequestered away from the rest of the world very well. We know that.
We know the deep level, the machinations of these parents to manipulate their children into a position that they get them to in the first issue of Never Leave this Place Alive. And we know how normally that procedure functions and how it's going to function this time. We know a lot about this book before we ever sit down to write it. And then what we do genuinely is really focus on information. Control how that information is delivered to you and in what ways it's delivered to you. So that we are not sitting down and being like, so here's a bunch of exposition. Let's tell you everything you need to know to get started here so that then you can be on a bet. No, you'll never leave. This place alive is a mystery. And this world, these secrets, these are mysteries to our main characters. They come in blind. And so when, when Fee, like Fee and her friends, they know what they've been told to know. They know what their parents have told them. And you as the audience are going to get a sense of what that is for the first 10 pages of the book or so. And then as the book progresses down its 40 page first issue, and then it's two 30 page, you know, issue two and issue three.
[00:40:56] Speaker C: Yeah, all oversized, all very reasonably priced.
[00:40:59] Speaker B: What you're going to be doing is diving deep into this and understanding these secrets at the time at which Fi and her friends are uncovering.
And so as we get towards the last issue, even to the last few pages of the book, there are going to be reveals that you as the audience are not going to see. Comic like this book is closed reveal on closed reveal on closed reveal on closed reveal. And so it looks like us opening the whole world by the end of issue one is really us just kicking that door open. Because what you're going to understand in two and what you're going to see happen in three are, I think, going to, like, make that the light coming through that door look a very different shape. Right. So it's fun. It. It's a much.
It's a very different challenge than writing a. Than writing a licensed novel, licensed book of any kind. Because we are not trading on your familiarity with anything.
All we're going to do is trade on your love for these characters. We have to make you fall in love with.
[00:41:58] Speaker C: Yeah. We have to make you. We have to make you fall in love with them. We need to make you care. Without the bat logo, without the generations of history, without the cultural impact. And then I think to your point of like, yeah, building out that we don't have the legacy to sit on, so we do need to then build that legacy within it. And I think one of the things we've been doing a lot when talking about never leave is, you know, we've been talking a lot about the. These characters for those folks who haven't yet cracked open the book, who haven't don't have it in their hands yet. It is out today at your local comic book shop. It is about five teenagers who grow up in this small, intentional community, which is basically a cult. As they kind of matriculate towards their 18th year, their birthdays, they're surrounded by their three families and the four houses they all live in. They've never made contact with the outside world. And they've all been really raised to be the little perfect versions of themselves. A perfect athlete, a perfect genius, a perfect artist.
And on their 18th birthday, it's finally going to be their time to finally step out into the world and become the people, the young adults that their parents have always trained them to be.
When they are taken out on the Ascendance trial, something that they've been training for their whole lives. And they think this is their graduation ceremony, in reality, it's brutal truth that, as we say, you'll never leave this Place alive.
That's the premise, right? And we've spent a lot of time talking about the. Falling in love with these characters, falling in love with the kind of strange machinations, the horror.
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Right.
[00:43:24] Speaker C: Obviously we're going to go for your heart. We're going to chase you through the woods. We're going to do, we're going to tell us story that's very, very devastating. But it's all built on the world that we have designed. Right. This is, this is a story with deep, deep storytelling roots and a story that actually starts far, far earlier than a lot of people might suspect. So that legacy of what has actually been going on, yes, we are catching up with the story in this moment because now is the time for the story that must be be told. But building that history of the world, even though it's not a creator owned, you still need to, or even though it is a creator owned and it's not a licensed work, you still need to approach it with the same kind of care and meticulous foundational building because that is where your character's truth is all going to come from. Right? And we've made it. No, you know, it's not, it's not a secret that these, the parents of these children might have alternate, might have, you know, darker motivations then perhaps they seem on page one.
That truth of their legacy, of their history is what gives this story the reality, the emotional reality. So that when we do hurt you, the reader later, and unfortunately we will hurt this. The story is coming from a pace of a place of pain, a place of really intentional choices on Jack and I's part as we kind of pick apart parts of our lives that we find this kind of pain and suffering in.
We only feel comfortable doing that because the emotional groundwork is all there.
We're not going to, we don't, we hate. We cannot, we will not allow ourselves to rush in and get a quick scare, a brutal death just because it's going to make you be like, right, that sucks, man.
[00:45:03] Speaker B: That's cheap.
[00:45:04] Speaker C: When we hurt you, we want to hurt you in the heart because we've earned that emotional tragedy. Right? And that only comes with really meticulously building the foundation of the world that you're exactly existing.
[00:45:15] Speaker A: You want people to come up to you at a table at a convention and be like, screw you.
[00:45:18] Speaker B: Yes, in all honesty, like last, last.
There are writers who've done that to me in the past and there's writers who've done that responsibly and writers who've done that irresponsibly. And I hope that we are doing it responsibly. Right. But yes, the goal here is to take these things, especially in a horror story, is to take something that you can love for or that you can love and that you can feel for and that you can empathize with and then make it scream, you know, and that that scream should be blood curdling. That scream should make you feel uncomfortable. And in comics where you can't pull off a jump scare the same way, where a cool monster design isn't so terrifying as it is awesome. Right? Like, we've done the. The Kaiju made of corpses in.
In Principles of Necromancy, we've shown you what a medieval brain transplant looks like. Like, we've done our weird, gross stuff that we've had fun there. But even there was the grossness. The point of principles. Absolutely not. The point of principles was Dr. Eyes as a character and unpacking him from issue to issue from perspective. Perspective. That's what the book's actually about. By the end of that book, you have a much better understanding of the monster Dr. Eyes is than the man that you start with. And so too is this book really an examination of these families and these kids and their relationships. And you're going to get a much better understanding of the. Of what is effectively our take on vampires by the end of this story.
But it is not one that's anchored in feeding you horror tropes. Right?
[00:46:52] Speaker C: Yeah, there's no vampires. This is about the themes.
[00:46:55] Speaker B: There's no fangs, none of that.
[00:46:56] Speaker C: The themes of generational trauma.
[00:46:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it's like this. And I wrote my review, too. Is like, it's unsettling. Like, this is unsettling. This to it that I love so much about, like, one of the fav words to use and. And from some of my favorite stories are is the word onset. Like, if it makes me feel different and not scared. Because, I mean, scared is one thing, but like you mentioned, it's. It's. It's. It's easy when you have a jump scare in a comp book. You just close the comp. You, like, put it down. Like you're like, oh, oops. Throw the comic book across the room in a movie or a play or any sort of, like, thing where you can't do it. Where's the remote? By the time the jump scare and the fear pull factor is over, you turn the TV off, and so it's already there. Like, it's. So it's in a book. In a. In a. In a graphic novel, in a comic book. It is. It's possible, but it's not as possible. Doesn't hit the same impact, but the unsettlingness of it and the, the ability to set it up. I mean, we're supposed to think and we're not going to spoil this, but, like, that these kids are super happy and they are happy to start off with here. So you built us up to the point where we're like, well, these kids enjoy being in this thing. This is amazing. And then it's gonna. Doesn't seem like it's gonna. You hint at the fact that it's not gonna go as well as they hope it's gonna go.
It was. That, to me, was the. What I saw the most is that these kids seemed like, yeah, why wouldn't you want to be there? It's, you know, you make.
[00:48:13] Speaker C: That's a. That's a fantastic point about. Because, you know, we always say internally that comics are actually an interactive medium. They're the most. One of the most interactive forms of passive story consumption. Right? Because with comics, you need to make the active choice to not only turn the pages, but engage with your eyes. You need to engage with your brain in order, even if it's subconsciously in order to put these panels together into something that is going to assemble into something emotional, right? And that is you opting into every single moment. The fact that you can put down the book, put down the comic at any point and be like, not for me. Right?
[00:48:48] Speaker A: A.
[00:48:49] Speaker C: That means that every comic is. Every page of a comic needs to be grabbing your attention in a way that other work doesn't. Thank God we have art, right? Thank God for the artist, because the art. Comics are an artist medium. But at the same time, I think that's one of the interesting things about horror within the medium is you need to be opting in.
The story needs to be so tasty. You need to be. Feel that dread. And you need to know that this is going to go bad. And yet you're still walking yourself into the trap, right? Like, yes, it's really horrifying when you're running through the woods and you fall into a pit. It's a lot fucking scarier when you see the giant fucking hole and know you got to walk into that hole and what you find in that hole is going to just suck. It's going to hurt so bad. And I think that's one of the joys we have of you'll never leave is like, we're forcing you to walk into the trauma and inviting you in.
[00:49:40] Speaker A: What sometimes is more scary, the actual event of it happening or like the twisted thought process, like the thanos of it all, the whole snapping your figure. And you know, this guy believes that he's doing what's right. Like, he honestly truthfully thinks that that is scary shit. Forget the actual outcome. It's the thought process. This person believes this. And so the parents in this thing, they believe what they're doing is correct. That's scary, man. That's frightening.
[00:50:09] Speaker B: And that's the thing I'm excited to unpack in issue two, because in issue one, the parents are a monolith. You were really, basically, you have all the other parents and you have Kev. And they've set up a little bit of dynamic where Fees dad clearly kind of works for them. He's more of a sort of groundskeeper type. He's really here, seemingly out of the way he describes it is like he keeps the trains running or like he keeps the place working. And that's why Fee is allowed to grow up in this context. Right?
What that relationship actually is, what Kev's relationship with these other parents is, but then also what these individual parents relationship is with each other. What's. What is different about Sonia and Garmin to you? Right?
The Peter's mother and father, Sarah and Sasha's mother and father, Sonia and Gar are not the same person. They are not a monolith. And they have different ways of seeing things. And by the end of issue three, you're really going to understand who they are and what is distinct about them.
The key to issue two is a character who you have not heard speak yet. She's been on panel a lot, but John's mother.
I'm sorry, Josh's mother. Josh's mother, John's wife Ruth, is one of the most important characters in the whole book. And so far she's been backgrounded fully because to the kids, she is not a present figure.
She is a. I think she speaks like, once or twice to Josh as he's getting ready for the ascendant's trial. And that's it.
She is a deeply, deeply important figure. And where she goes in issue two especially is like my favorite thing.
By the time you get to the end of issue three, what you understand about Kev and his own framework within all of this is going to continue to unpack what the story actually is, what these kids are actually going through, and what is going to be required of them to escape alive. If Ever. And I think that that unpack is, to us again, it gets back to, like, every story we do. You were saying, got to know your characters before you get started. Right. Because you don't want to be backfilling them later on.
Never Leave is a book that has a very limited cast.
It has the five parents, it has the five kids, and that's it.
Those five kids and five parents are each and every one of them their own anchors. And you can write this whole story from their perspective, and they all see it differently, and they're all going to encounter it.
[00:52:34] Speaker C: In fact, we probably have a version of it somewhere in the drafts where we have tried it from that perspective.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Yeah. You know, when you limit it, when you limit it to 3, it allows you this great opportunity to just unpack those. Like clockwork, I think, see the world that way.
[00:52:48] Speaker C: I think you just said something really interesting, Jack, which is something I hadn't really actually been considering.
When we talk about this book, a lot of the zeitgeist, the core, the impetus for this book was us looking outside the window and seeing the absolute chaos of the world that we live in and the fact that so much power is being held by the olds.
There's a gerontocracy in this nation that is holding onto far more of its share of power and wealth than it should ever have been allowed to mass in the first place. You know, we're not young guys at the same time, like, we are adults who feel that pressure of a world that is not being allowed to move on and that fury, right? We are adults, but I work with kids all the time. I teach it at college. And I see the wrath bubbling and burbling in the hearts of young people as they're like, what is this world that we're being given? I fucking hate it. I'm like, you, me, Same. My guy. It's taken us this long. Decades. And we still have not solved this problem.
But. And that very much is the energy of our issue. One, as these kids do see their parents as a monolith.
But we are. Jack and I are too empathetic. I think maybe we're just. It is. We are incapable of painting anyone with a singular color brush. Because the truth of the matter is, you know, the old air quotes, our parents, they're not toxic because they were born that way. They're toxic because of their own trauma, right? Their own choices, their own metastasized options that have led to them to those places like. And, you know, we've been bagging on we've been a lot of this is us talking about how our parents, our parents air quotes are like, you know, sucking the life out of the world and yada yada. We love our parents deeply, right? And I think the part of this is also like an issue too. We're going to see that humanity in the parents because there are no monsters in this world, right? There's people and the choices they've made and then what those choices have forged you into.
And a monster that you understand even as they're ripping your guts out is so much fucking scarier than just something that pops out of the woods. So like yes, our parents in the story, they're not good people.
One of them is.
One of them really wishes she could go back to being what she was, right? And I think that humanity is what makes it even more fucking scary.
[00:55:02] Speaker A: And it's like, it's an unsettling. It's. It's like I said, I've read the first issue, I haven't read anything else. But like I, I can't wait to dive in. But like, and also the, like the look at your, my child, like looking back at my childhood, like the fact I was spoiling them. But they smoke weed, the kids smoke weed at one point and then the parent that they like, they could smell it and things like that. Like the, the, the naiveted idea we're
[00:55:22] Speaker C: gonna get away with this, we'll never get caught.
[00:55:24] Speaker A: Like I think you walk to the street now with it being illegal and you know what the smell of marijuana smells like. And I'm like thought to myself like as a child, like, yeah, I want to smoke this blunt and then go home and be like, oh, my mom's not going to smell it. Oh, it was my friend. It wasn't me. It was like I was hanging out with so and so.
[00:55:38] Speaker C: Yeah, I still remember, I still remember
[00:55:40] Speaker B: my dad childhood, right? Like it's the weirdest thing. It's hard to remember sometimes when you're an adult how what innocence actually is. Because innocence is naivete.
Innocence is the general understanding that things are gonna work out, right? That you don't have to make things work out, that things will work out. And that even when you're a really smart kid, even when you have a lot of anxiety about your behavior, whatever, you still have a generalized understanding that the world is kind of an umbrella that's gonna protect you from the rain, right? And that's a very privileged scenario that we all grew up in.
Even just an American scenario, right? Because if you look at children in other places, they do not have that safety blanket. And their parents have to create a safety blanket around them. But like, we are in this context, really looking at that safety blanket and drawing it as hard as we can at the beginning, because that's what the book is. The book is about how the blanket is a lie.
And the thing that you recognize as an adult is the truth of that lie. And that's the horror of becoming an adult, is the. Is the way that you look up and go, oh, no, it's been raining on me the whole time.
And I had cope about it. I was being told it wasn't by my parents, by the government, by my schools, by. I was being told that I was under an umbrella. And now I'm tall enough to notice, oops, I wasn't. And all the while, I've been taking on this trauma.
[00:57:11] Speaker C: Right.
[00:57:11] Speaker B: And I think that's the. That's why we wanted to do a book about. It's about aging. It's not because I'm afraid of aging. It's the easiest thing to write.
[00:57:19] Speaker A: Like, the.
[00:57:19] Speaker B: It's the. It's look not to. Not to knock the substance. The substance is rat. But the.
[00:57:24] Speaker A: But.
[00:57:25] Speaker B: But the thematic of I'm getting older and I wish I used to be beautiful, I think that's a really like.
Like, we've played out that trope a lot in the.
I want to look at the other side.
We want to look at the other side of that and say what it's like to be young and realize that the rest of the world is envious of you and what it means to realize that you're under that glass case.
[00:57:51] Speaker A: Exactly.
So it's you two, but also Heather Vaughn.
You talk about your team. You have a third member of this team.
What did Heather bring to the world that you've created here that changed the way that you two saw it? Like, was there. Obviously you guys create this together, but like, this. This camaraderie in this team, this collaboration.
[00:58:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, look, to start, I'll set a baseline, and then I'll shut up. But like, the.
This. We've. We've said it on a few different podcasts. This is not what we had expected the book to look like when we started. When we started off, we had a much more, like, realist sort of style in mind, and I think we had, like, a sort of list of artists that we were looking for and talking to that were, like, very kind of, like, emotionally driven, but very, like, rendered and very cinematic. It had been such, like, a movie or TV thing in our heads. We really wanted. And I think the brilliance of Heather Vaughn, who Heather Antois brought in and introduced to us, and then we sort of flipped for it. The brilliance of Heather is that her work is a comic. Her work is not. This is not about trying to replicate some other kind of medium. It's not trying to create the same kind of, like, emotional core that you would get out of a film or television show where you're getting, like, a really clear emotional core out of the eyes or the face or the acting and whatever. She has all of that. But what her baseline is is, like, autobiography comics. It's like. Like indie books. This. This book feels and looks like something that you could. You could read as, like, a YA comic when it starts. And then.
Yeah, and then the fact that it opens up into the horror comic that it is, because Heather is also an incredible horror artist, that to us is like the. That's the magic.
[00:59:34] Speaker C: Yeah. She has, you know, folks who crack it open are going to see immediately that there's like a. There's a. There's a kindness, there's like a softness, I think autobiographical. There's a looseness that feels almost like a kid's sketchbook. Like, it feels a little bit like with this kind of sketchy, loose quality that I think really welcomes people into the story.
And then obviously, you know, we hit those two DPSs right in the middle of the tale as. As our. As our kids crunch down on their forbidden fruits and their entire worlds are turned upside down, that we see the. The.
The turn on what Heather's art can do. And I think for us, it all came together when we realized, which we didn't at the time, that she does her own color. Right. When you think about Heather Vaughn's art, you cannot just think about his pencils or inks, because it doesn't come together until you see the. The color that she uses to bring it all together. So while there's. The inks have the kind of sketchy, loose, you know, really empathetic flow to them. The colors are deliciously abstract.
And I think the tension between the very, like, yes, the colors are so loose, but they're so specific. There's so much intentionality behind every single color choice. Choice that it locks those. The sketchiness of the ink in and creates a.
I don't know, a disconnect within the brain.
[01:00:59] Speaker B: A little bit of a short circuit
[01:01:01] Speaker C: because you're looking at these beautiful, like these, you know, charming, loose kids and then seeing the kind of how trapped they are within this impressionistic color scheme. And then especially as we start hitting the psychedelia and start hitting kind of the deeper and darker themes, it all just comes together into something that is, I think, you know, Jack pointed out, uniquely a comic book.
And I think that is just like it's something that Heather. It's something that Heather Anto circling back around. It's what she was yelling at us from the very beginning, right? And even from the very beginning of our time on Star Trek. Don't make good Star Trek comics. Make good comics about Star Trek, right? And it's like, it's. It's the thing of no one is coming. Like, we all got tv, hbo, Max is right there, baby. Like, let's get comics that feel completely unique to the medium. And I think that can be something that we are a little left of center on. Just because Jack and I, we are. We do have to collaborate between ourselves so often.
The word is so important. And despite the fact that we do everything together, we don't actually visualize things in the same way. So aligning on an artist, if the art isn't going to be like photoreal. Heartbreaking, right? Great.
[01:02:08] Speaker B: We understand.
[01:02:09] Speaker C: We speak that language. As soon as we start to get to something that's a little bit more loose and a little bit more unexpected, then our alignment kind of starts to shift, which means that Heather Anto. So we've been kind of jokingly saying she's the only other person who has a hive mind. Letterman's jacket, she can come in and then kind of be the spoke by which the two of us can calibrate. And in that case, the scope was like, hey, Heather Vaughn's are Heather Vaughn's the team. Heather Vaughn's the game here, guys.
[01:02:34] Speaker A: Like, as someone who's read the book but not, not a creator on it, I, to me, I was like, this, this works. And especially like that, that psychedelic part you were talking about, it's like it seems like, I say easy, but it seems easy to do it on screen when they do that. It's like, okay, spin the person upside down a little bit like. But like trying to capture that on a comic book page and actually feel that what's going on on the page can be difficult. There's also. We've had this discussion in the comic book club that I'm part of that every month we read to a trip graphic novel is. We read Nail Biter and someone was like, I don't know, I feel like it was a little too cartoony, and I'm like, can you imagine, like, a photorealistic artist drawing this comic book? I would be like, my stomach would probably be churning seeing, like, him chewing his fingers and shit. And so to me, I'm like, there is this, like, when it. When you see it and you get it and you see the final finished product, you're like, okay, this makes so much sense. Like, you might have had it different in your head, but it makes so much sense. And I think a lot of readers are going to say, see that? And they're going to understand that. That. That, you know, the artwork might not be what everybody was expecting or hoping, but it's, like, going to fit. And they're like, this is what it is. It's amazing.
[01:03:40] Speaker C: It might not be what you want.
[01:03:42] Speaker A: Yes.
[01:03:43] Speaker C: But it is what you need. Yes.
[01:03:45] Speaker A: It's. It's that. It's that I didn't never knew I needed this in my life, but I definitely do.
I mean, the whole book's that to me, it was, like, one of those things that we've talked over the past with other creators and so on, that. That I now am at the point in my life where I'm like, there's so much stuff out there that, like, yes, I follow some characters, so you're like, oh, Captain America, whatever. But I also now follow creators. And so, like, if an artist is on a book or a writer's on a book, I'm like, even if it's nothing like the Dungeons and Dragons will be a perfect example. Has nothing to do with me. Hive minds on it. I'm gonna give it a shot because you haven't steered me wrong in the past. And I think that's what's huge on it to me. And so the same thing with Never idw Dark at this point has never steered me wrong. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna go there. You know, I'm gonna do that. And also, Heather told me that you guys are writing this because she kicked you and told you you couldn't write every Star Trek comic book there is. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She said that I needed to go to other people because, you know, hive mind would do all of it if I. If I asked them to do it famous.
[01:04:49] Speaker B: Famously, when we pitch Star Trek and Defiant, we were like, we're writing both. And she was like, no, no.
Thank God Chris Cantwell was available because he was the only name on our list for, like, guys that we would
[01:05:01] Speaker A: trust for it to take you. Yeah, yeah. It's funny. She's like, yeah, they're not, they, they would, they would have literally drawn or written everything if I let them.
[01:05:09] Speaker B: So we, we would, we have that in us. We love to do that. And frankly, that is the energy we're bringing to Dungeons and Dragons.
When people follow us over there, they will see we are.
Our scope is maybe not limited to a single ongoing. We have, we have some ideas and we want to play. But I mean, I think the thing that has been really beautiful about working with Heather all this time, and we say this as somebody who like. So we have an unannounced thing with Heather you won't hear about until next year, but we all were planning it this week. We got like an in person writers room together and we're like building this thing out together.
And it really reinforced for me something that's just very unique about our relationship with Heather. And one that I think, I hope readers find that it works for them too, because for us, it's just such a.
It's such a natural flow. She really understands how we tell story and also really understands where to check our instincts and where to make us rethink our things when we get too invested in something. She's really, really good at noting when.
How we need to get the audience invested in that, how we need to make that clearer.
And then she has just the best taste in the world in art. Like her art taste is beyond. So her ability to really understand how to cast a book with us is, is astonishing. Something that is going to be pushed to its limit by this next thing we're doing. I can't wait for people to see what that. What I even mean by that. But it's unlike anything anyone's ever done in comics, full stop. And I, and I can't wait to.
For this thing to live up here.
[01:06:42] Speaker A: Well, I say check that. I say, okay, hide minds doing this. I'm do this. I'm going to read this. But like now when you say, oh, you've done a project together, now you do another one, I could, you could be like, I don't know, reading the ingredients off the back of a cereal box. And I'd probably read it now because it's just, you know. Yeah, so. But I wanted to mention too, I wanted to make full of trauma in every bite that I forgot to mention about the Kang the Conqueror. One of my favorite artists, probably my favorite artists of all time is Michael Del Mundo. So those covers alone drew me in that series a lot. So like that that man Like, I don't understand how you can be that talented at drawing, also have a mind that works the way that. That works. To be able to say, this is what I'm going to draw. I just don't. Like, I know there's a bunch of people out there be like, it'd be badass if you drew this. But then they can't do that. They have to tell someone else to do it. But then there's the people like Michael who's like, it just. It works. It clicks.
My favorite cover is the Darth Vader with. With. With Anakin Skywalker in the mask. Like, it's a prison. And I'm like, how the hell did you even think of that?
[01:07:47] Speaker B: The one he did for Kang, that's him and Doom fighting against a clock. But they both ripped off the. The hands of the cloth and are using them like swords.
It's just like every. And you don't give him those ideas. Right. Like other. Other cover artists, generally, you want to prompt them. You want to be like, oh, we're thinking something like this. When you get Mike, Mike just comes to the table with the most conceptual stuff.
[01:08:12] Speaker A: The.
[01:08:13] Speaker B: Similar to the. To the Darth Vader one. The Kang turning the.
The hourglass and Nate trapped Inside. Right. It's the whole book in a single image. Like, he's so smart. And he was our first. He was our first answer. They were like, who do you want for covers? And I was like.
And he was. He was on in like an hour. He. He jumped at the chance, which to me is just still the nicest thing.
[01:08:37] Speaker A: Like, yeah, to me, it's like I. I collect series and I collect things and I collect. I'm a Scotty Young fan. So I've Scotty Young tattoos, like.
And so, yeah, I got Nova, Venom, Nightcrawler. I got the Run the Jewels.
[01:08:56] Speaker B: Yo, that's so cool.
[01:09:00] Speaker A: I got that for that.
[01:09:01] Speaker C: But.
[01:09:01] Speaker A: But yeah, so I'm a huge Scotty Young fan as a whole. And so I have Scotty Young bins, and then I've got a couple of bins over there of just dumb Uno covers. And the. The shitty things is. Is like one in 50s and the one in three hundreds. I'm like, you like, come on, man. Can you just do cover B's or C's or whatever it may be?
[01:09:20] Speaker C: And here I am.
I've got all of our, like, I've got all of our Scotty Young variants. One of the things that Marvel was good at doing was sending us comps, at least of Various period covers. So I've got. I don't know, I got a couple.
[01:09:31] Speaker A: See, my buddy who owns a local
[01:09:33] Speaker B: comic book, that was how I. That was genuinely how I knew we made it was we had a scour. Scotty.
[01:09:36] Speaker A: Scotty Young buddy that was like it for me, is also a Scotty Young fan. This past week, the dnx, the Blind. Like, there's a cover, and then there's like, four other covers, but they're all in the blind bags. And so we were sitting there like mad. I'm like, you're the shop owner. You can just open up every single one of those, and then we'll just find the ones we want. He's like, no, I'm not doing that. I'm like, God damn it, man.
I did open one blind bag and got another version of the COVID So it was nice. But, yeah, yeah, the COVID artists make a difference. And I do think that it's nice when it's the same artist, because then you get a taste of what's inside. But sometimes these variants, too, can be good, having these cover artists. But like, that Kang. The original reason why I went to the Kang was Kang's a badass character in the first place, but the covers alone was like, oh, let me get this in there. And then I read it. It was fantastic.
[01:10:22] Speaker C: So.
[01:10:23] Speaker A: And then it's never been. It's a downhill sense for me.
[01:10:25] Speaker C: Right?
[01:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah.
But, yeah, so you got. You guys are busy, so you got. Yeah. You'll never leave this place alive. October 14th at your local comic book shop. This did today, the day this episode drops next week is the 21st. Is the last issue of the Last Starship. The last issue of the last. That's just hard to say. Right.
[01:10:44] Speaker C: The last issue of the Last Starship. And I believe a few weeks ago, if we're traveling in time, the trade of the last issues, one through six, the first half of the Last Starship is also out at Europe, caught up.
[01:10:57] Speaker A: And then it's not until April until the next half comes out. So you got to go buy the single issues, go find those single issues and get caught up there. And then November 4th is the dungeons and Dragons. And then there's just. You're not slowing down. You're not stopping. You guys are working behind the scenes. I know you are, because you guys are lucky enough now to work in so many different characters in so many different worlds that you must. I mean, you must pinch yourselves at moment. You guys have to.
[01:11:24] Speaker C: Oh, my God. Yes. No. Like, we make the joke. We're tired all the time. But at the end of the day, you know, we look around our lives and we look that are like to do lists and it's like write this incredible character, touch this fantastic property, fulfill this childhood dream and you're like, wow, what a blessing. You know, I don't think we're working on a single thing that we're not doing because we are absolutely rabid about it. Whether it's creator owned or license, we are really, truly blessed to be able to be touching and working with and playing with just some really incredible, incredible properties, stories and mediums right now.
[01:11:57] Speaker B: Now I think it's, it's one of those things where, you know, we, we often say like, well, I don't want to speak for Colin. I am extremely bad at celebrating my wins. I don't know how to do it. I, I, a thing happens, a good thing happens and I go woo for like five seconds and then I'm on to the next crisis.
That's just how I work. I, I really don't know how to just like settle into like that was nice ever.
However, over the course of the last year, right, like I got to watch Charlie Cox perform our work in a movie. I got to meet Charlie and hang out and watch him do his thing. Like I got to watch him do a fight scene. I got to watch Charlie Cox do a hallway fight. Like that I wrote. That's insane.
Do I think about that every day? No. Do I think about it most days? No. But when I think about like what was, what have we done this year? That's just like a weird footnote in, in, in my, remember in our year,
[01:12:54] Speaker C: you know, remember that crazy thing where that company took us to that place because of the thing that's gonna, we
[01:13:00] Speaker B: can't talk about that yet, but we'll be able to talk about that really soon. There's like a whole secret thing we can't even talk about yet. Like we've had all of these like really incredible experiences over the last few years.
When, when the writer strike was going on, we did a Star Trek day on the writers strike and I was on strike with all the creators of Star Trek Deep Space Nine and a bunch of the actors who play the characters that we've been writing in the comics and they were all like complimentary about the comics and super cool and walked around. We all talked about Star Trek for hours, like peers. Right?
It's insane for me as a kid who grew up on that stuff that like, that, that stuff is like my religion that was like walking around with demigods. It was insane, right? Like, to me.
But again, do I think about it often? No, it just happens, and then you're on. And I think that that's one of those things that I'm like, I'm trying to get better at. And I encourage young creators and people who are, like, trying to climb the ladder and get their stuff out there, remember to, like, also sit with it.
[01:13:56] Speaker A: This.
[01:13:57] Speaker B: This shit is awesome. It's incredible that we get to do it. I'm so thankful for all the. There was a lot of difficulties for us at Marvel, but, man, am I proud of those books. Like, am I proud of our time on those characters when I go back in a heartbeat to write more of those characters? When we're ready, right? Like, yeah, dude.
Every time I meet somebody at a convention who Batman beyond is their first love, and they're so excited to see Neo Year and Neo Gothic because they didn't know there were new Batman beyond stories.
Those things matter. Each of these steps, those are things that buoy you. And then you go back in the lab and you make the donuts. Now it's time to. Now we make the best damn comics we can and hope that the next time we come up for air, there's another weird, cool, exciting experience waiting for us on the other side. And, like, you know, I don't. I don't want to. And I don't want it to sound like it's all just, like, meeting celebrities or whatever. Like, it's much more that. But it's much more that, like, fans engage with us and we see what the work means to people. And where those things cross is like, you know, that's why we do it. It's the genuine joy of this, of this medium. It certainly isn't what anybody's getting paid. You know what I mean? Like, we're doing this because we love it, and we're doing this because we need to do it and because we. Comics are a deeply important part of our life, and we're going to spend a. We've already spent a good portion of our life, and we'll likely spend the rest of it giving back to that medium and trying to push it forward in the ways that. That feel exciting to us.
[01:15:19] Speaker A: And I'm not speaking for any publishers, but you wouldn't be getting jobs if people didn't like your comics. Like, it's not like, you know what I mean? Like,
[01:15:28] Speaker C: it's like bringing us back down to earth by bringing it into, returning it. No by returning it to capitalism.
[01:15:34] Speaker A: No, but it's true, though. It's like one of those things that you've seen. I've interviewed people in 300 plus episodes that have written a title that is worth reading and then nothing. And it's not because solely, not solely because that's the only thing that they could do, but some of it, maybe the numbers weren't great.
So if people weren't buying and reading your comic books, they wouldn't be like, call a Colin Jackson. Like, you know, like, it's true. And so, you know, some people might. I mean, you know this. Not everybody likes your stuff, but a lot of people do. And so that's what's cool about it too. So, like, I think a lot of people out there is going to have that as long. As long as the more people like it than don't, you're good.
[01:16:14] Speaker B: You know, I'm. I'm just happy people have opinions. I'm good with it. I'm. If comics were a popularity contest, I'd be driving myself insane every day.
That's. That's not what this is about. What I, what I live for are the fans for whom this work means something and matters to them and everybody else. What I genuinely always say is like, oh, you haven't found the high mind book that you love yet. Keep reading. Like, genuinely, every book we do is a little bit different. Everything we do approaches very differently. The amount of times I've seen people come to me and be like, oh, this Guardians Run is my favorite thing. But I haven't read anything else you've done. Or I really love Captain America, but I haven't liked anything else you've done. Or I love Joyride, but I haven't read anything else you've done. Like, that's because these books are all very different. More people came into us on Clayface, a book that's very atypical for us at the time, but is now more typical for us. Right. Like, we are a very, very varied creative space. Like, what Colin I do can go as fun and goofy and silly and wild as some of the stuff we're doing on D and D and can go as dark and serious and unsettling as the stuff we're doing and never leave.
And we're going to, we're going to always swing across that framework. So I kind of don't want you to like everything we do. What I want is for you to find the books that really speak to you, that matter to you, and that those are the books that you're going to find that really, that you really love for us. Because God knows, I don't know. Not to compare myself to the best writer of all time, but, like, I'm. There's a lot of Stephen King books that totally suck, dude.
[01:17:45] Speaker A: Thank you, Jackson. Like that literally have said this on that, on that, that. On this podcast that I actually said, like, two years ago, I wrote a review of a backlisted Stephen King book and it was like, this wasn't very good and the movie adaptation was actually worse. And. And someone's like, how dare you? And I'm thinking myself, like, dude, I don't think he thinks everything he writes is good. So why do I'm. How am I supposed to think that?
He's written a bunch of good stuff, but they're not all home runs. Like, he lives. He lives down the street.
He lives down the street from me, technically. I mean, his house is not that like, it's like, yeah, it's like 20. It's like by my local comic book shop, 20 minutes away. And so I can like, just worship at the ground he walks on. But I don't need to. The truth of the matter is the book wasn't good and I didn't like it and so I moved on to the next one.
[01:18:29] Speaker C: So that's one. Like, we live in la. Celebrities everywhere. I feel like if I live down the street from Stephen King, that would just kind of be one of the weird things of like, yeah, I'm just hanging. I'm just playing kickball outside of the.
[01:18:40] Speaker B: His driveway.
[01:18:41] Speaker A: He used to walk. I live. So I live in Maine and it's small. And so Bangor, Maine is a smaller. It's a big city for Maine, but a small city nationwide. And he would go to the rental store as a kid. He just like walk in the movie gallery. He's just like renting a movie.
It's just a normal guy. And people treat him that way still when he's up visiting, because he comes up every once in a while. His son had an event here. Joe Hill had an event here. At one point he came and saw Joe and. And so. And so forth. So, yeah, it's just. I drive by it every day. The funny thing is I'm cynical about it. When I drive by the. To go to my comic book shop, I'm like, look at these tourists. Jesus. Like, because they all stand in front of his house, take pictures. So I'm always like, I'm high and mighty over them. Like, you guys are idiots.
Well, the Truth of the matter is I was like, I kind of want to see it. I don't have a picture of me in front of his house because I live here. So I'm like. But now I'm like, you're like, that
[01:19:28] Speaker B: picture is in my head.
[01:19:29] Speaker C: Yeah, that's just your living. That's just living.
[01:19:32] Speaker A: I feel like I need to now, though. I got all my friends have pictures in front of. They're like, why do I have a picture in front of there? But yeah, it was funny because I've had Christopher Golan up and. And. And a couple other. He's like, but I'm friends with his son. It seems weird to take a picture in front of his house. I'm like, no, just take a picture in front of himself. Everybody does it. Just do it.
[01:19:48] Speaker C: And then send it to Joe and be like, your house bro.
[01:19:51] Speaker A: And then attach a thing of my bad review of his dad's book.
[01:19:54] Speaker B: No.
[01:19:55] Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I love this.
[01:19:57] Speaker C: Oh, man, you're great at this.
[01:19:58] Speaker A: No, you're right, though. Not everything is good. You don't need to like every one of your stuff. But I think that one of the things that I love the most is I can read your stuff, if that makes any sense. Like there is badly written comics. And I think that's one of those things that whether you like the subject matter or like the end or like what happens in the book, if I can read the book and understand the book, that I'm happy and you guys are excellent at that. So that's. That's number one for us for out there. But yeah, grab all the stuff like out there. It's out there. Trades are available. But yeah, big dates today. Go to your local comic book shop, pick up. You'll never leave this place alive.
Hopefully you leave the comic book store alive. But we'll see. It's up in the air.
And then yeah, trade available for Star Trek, this Last Starship and all your
[01:20:39] Speaker B: Starship Volume one now.
And that's half the story right there. Really excited.
[01:20:45] Speaker A: So good. And you'll want the rest.
You'll read that and you will want to read the rest. That's what's great about. About it. So there's like, you just tell your go back to the local comic book shop and say, can you put an order in for the next volume?
[01:20:56] Speaker C: So it's on there when it's ready for it.
[01:20:57] Speaker A: But yeah, but yeah. I appreciate you guys taking the time out of your busy schedule to chat comics and all kinds of stuff on here. You guys are great. We'll get you guys back on in the future. We'll know you'll be. You'll have something to talk about. So we don't stop.
[01:21:09] Speaker B: We don't stop. Thank you so much for having us, man.
[01:21:11] Speaker A: This was absolutely. So. Yeah. Until next time.
[01:21:14] Speaker B: All right, Just for cheers, Sam.
