2016: Year in Review Roundtable w/ Special Guests!
In this podcast episode Lou and Slim bring in the media thinkfluencers!
Primary topic this episode: the year in review with special guests Calvin Reid (PUBLISHERS WEEKLY), Christian Holub (EW), Scott Rosenberg (AM NY), Heidi McDonald (COMICS BEAT). Other topics include the special extra guest host; our AC Unit in the room! It was very hot in there with so many people OK cut us a break.
CU Additions for November!
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Transcription:
Matt: It’s the end of the year! We want to look back together with some of the best and brightest available.
Heidi: When do we meet them?
Matt: They’re on their way.
Tia: This is a rowdy bunch.
Matt: This is very rowdy. Tia and I are here from the comiXologist podcast. We want to look back on the year, talk about our favorite moments, things of that nature, and we have some special guests, the influencers in the biz. One of them, a dear friend of the show, Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly, welcome, for the first time ever.
Calvin: Pleased to be here.
Matt: Calvin and I were reminiscing earlier, the last time we saw each other was in France and we were gallivanting around.
Calvin: Funny you should mention that, you and I hanging out in France at Angouleme.
Matt: That’s right. We’re having wine..
Calvin: Yes, one of the great comics festivals of the world.
Matt: Absolutely true. Next elite influencer on the podcast from one Entertainment Weekly, Christian Holub, welcome.
Christian: Thanks for having me.
Matt: Are you pumped right now, Christian? Be honest with me.
Christian: I’m pretty pumped. It was a good year. I have a lot to talk about.
Matt: One of the best. One of the most interesting years that I can recall.
Tia: It was a year, in any case.
Matt: We can’t argue that. Next in line, Scott Rosenberg from AM New York, welcome.
Scott: Glad to be here.
Matt: We were talking offline about pro wrestling and everyone almost jumped out the window for that period of two seconds.
Scott: I think it’s best for another podcast.
Tia: (Yes.)
Matt: We’ll save it for another time. We saved the best for last, Heidi MacDonald, Comics Beat, welcome, for the first time I think on the show.
Heidi: That’s right. Well, thank you for having me. It’s truly an honor to be here with this elite beat pow lineup of influencers and yapping on a podcast.
Matt: I know, right? This is the big one. We wanted to get together to talk with some dear friends about the year in review.
Tia: Yes, so I was thinking about what were standouts for me and things that I would want to remember after this year is over. If there were a time capsule for 2016, what would you want to preserve from comics for someone in 50, 100 years to find and think of us?
Calvin: What would I want to preserve? Let’s see, let me look at my side list here.
Matt: Besides our memories of France, which was earlier in the year.
Calvin: A specific comic or concept, I mean, certainly I can come up with a comic.
Matt: What’s the first thing that comes to your mind?
Calvin: Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is March: Book Three. Representative John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s award-winning acclaimed final concluding volume of the trilogy, his civil rights memoir. It’s a story of his life, and as a result, a story of the civil rights movement. I did one of the first interviews ever of him when the book started to see it go through the three volumes and to be so acclaimed, to be such a magnificent bestseller, all three volumes are bestsellers obviously. For those that you can’t see, I actually have a tie on, a rare and unusual occurrence. It’s also a national book award nominated title. I am going there tonight to cover it for Publishers Weekly, so I think that’s something that should go in the time capsule.
Matt: It also gave us the beautiful gift of all those Comic Con selfies, except instead of people taking selfies with a Red Tornado cosplay or whatever, it was with John Lewis.
Tia: It was John Lewis.
Matt: It was John Lewis roaming the floor in San Diego as himself.
Calvin: Right, and people taking pictures with him like, “This is better than any other thing I can get here.”
Tia: Let me ask you a question about this, because I agree that that series is amazing. What about it being a graphic novel as opposed to a work of non-fiction prose? What do you think the artwork contributed to making it a really compelling piece?
Calvin: I think the book does what comics always does. It puts the story together in a condensed and powerful form. It makes the language even more iconic, or literally it makes it iconic. I think that’s what comics do. It’s just another way to tell the story. It doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a prose version. He’s got a prose book out as well, and from what I understand, there’s some people circling him now to indeed do some other kinds of publishing, but this book is like every comic, every work of comics. To take these complex forms and create this really powerful visual concentrate, I just think it does for the storytelling something very distinct and unique. As opposed to a prose book, the comic format is in keeping with the unique power of that moment of the civil rights movement because the visual aspect of that was so important, the Selma riot and everything, it was so important that people saw that on their TV interrupting whatever.
Calvin: Even the cover of Book Three, and I actually talked with Nate Powell about it, and it’s a look at the Selma march and going over the bridge. He came up with another view. We have all these images in mind, the photos, the movie, even the return of President Barack Obama, but he came up with yet another way to see that bridge and to see the people on it that was really striking.
Heidi: I think what makes March Three, Calvin and I see a lot. I’m sure you guys do, as well. We see a lot of non-fiction comics coming through that are a comic book retelling of some famous event, and they’re well-intentioned but sometimes not well-executed. I think with March Three, and the whole trilogy, it really shows that you can do this. It’s a passion project, but Nate Powell is really the all-star. They’re all all-stars, but Nate Powell’s visualizations of this story is really what makes it a classic. That’s why Calvin’s wearing a suit today. Let’s really be blunt about it.
Calvin: Yes, because I’m not worthy.
Heidi: Yes, yes, yes. No, actually Calvin goes every year. He wears a suit every year.
Calvin: It’s my once a year suit day, national suit day.
Heidi: What I think of with comics, I think both Calvin and I are more into the graphic novel end of things as opposed to the serialized part of things. Amazon just came out with its best books list this morning, which I was looking at, and it’s a really wide range list and all the books on it are really excellent. I think in a lot of years, there will be one or two books that really stand out that are absolutely incredible, sort of like the year Saga came out, that’s all anyone could talk about, whereas I feel like this year, it’s more there’s a uniform level of excellence and fewer things that are groundbreaking in that way maybe.
For me, the year started out with a book, and Calvin and I have talked about this book many times, but Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart, which is just a heartbreaking memoir about the death of his daughter, but that was probably the first book I read this year and it stuck with me ever since. It’s just a testament to what comics can do, but there was a lot of other good stuff too, which we’ll get to.
Matt: Christian, what do you got for us?
Christian: It’s a toss up. I’m tempted to say Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther, but I think there will be plenty of other time to talk about everything that happened with Black Panther this year, so instead for this question … Oh, also I’m wearing a Black Panther t-shirt. You should probably be aware of that.
Tia: He’s also wearing a Black Panther mask. I’m kidding.
Christian: My voice seems filtered.
Heidi: It’s the socks that I really like.
Matt: No one is going to say anything.
Christian: I’ll take this question to highlight a different book that I really love and has only grown in my estimation, and that’s Monstress by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda. I hope I’m not butchering any names here.
Matt: That was beautiful.
Tia: Yes.
Christian: The first issue came out I think at the end of last year and was kind of an event in and of itself because it was double sized, but most of it has been this year, and the trade paperback is out this year, the first volume, and it is just a gorgeous book. Takeda’s art is very manga influenced, but I think she comes up with this unique concoction. One of the big flash points for me this year consuming comics where the industry just slowly, at least the mainstream serialized comics, slowly waking up more and more to diversity and not just making Captain America black for a little while, but bringing in diverse voices.
Sometimes I think the call for that, the way that it plays out on Tumblr or whatever, sometimes people start fetishizing diverse characters in a weird way. I think there’s a lot of people who watch Game of Thrones and cheer for Sansa and Daenerys to win just because they’re women or whatever, and there’s critiques of that because everyone on that show is kind of a horrible mass killer or whatever.
Matt: Never heard of that show.
Christian: Anyway, I think Monstress, which I’ve looked long and hard for male human characters in this book. There aren’t a lot of them. Most of them are women, whether they’re witches or warriors or slaves or cat wizards, and no one in this book is an innocent. The main character has this demonic presence inside of her and the way that that demon interacts with her, where it starts and ends is very unclear. It reminds me in some ways of the Hateful Eight, whereas in this moment where everybody’s just screaming at each other online all the time for no reason, or for reasons but just getting disproportionately mad because of how Twitter is set up, these pieces of art where everyone’s just kind of a mean, hurt, kind of raw, angry jerk or killer, those resonate with me because just the atmosphere feels right.
Monstress, this war-torn horribly ravaged world, and the beauty is inseparable from the horror because the whole time there’s this beautiful shapes passing in the sky and they’re dead gods, I think, so the characters are often telling each other, “That’s not good. That’s a bad thing. That’s a dead god.” I don’t know. There’s just something about it, the unique play of all these different influences, and just the refusal to give any easy answers, like it’s such a in depth world that they’ve created and the only way to understand it is to just dive into it and just get yourself absorbed in it because the book doesn’t give you any easy answers, but it does give you a lot of really cool stuff to look at.
Tia: Something that I really loved about Monstress in the beginning is when Maika talks about this power, this demonic power as the hunger. I feel like appetites and hunger are a theme early in the book because there are these witches who the way that they take on power is by actually consuming flesh of powerful creatures. There’s a lot of strife in the relationship between women and appetites historically, like sexual appetites, even actual taking in nourishment. Women are always supposed to be reducing themselves and denying their hungers, and I think that even some of these women are evil and they’re consuming things in a malevolent way, but it’s a nice exploration of the many sides of that relationship.
Christian: Yes, and just the manga influence, like the thing I keep thinking about in it is something like Naruto. I don’t think this device is uncommon in anime or manga, which is a young male protagonist having this same situation, like a powerful demon stuck inside of them, and the book is about them learning to master their inner demon and use that power nobly, just like every romance story about a young man or whatever. That story changes when it’s a woman I think, or the thematic residences of that because I don’t know, it’s just …
Tia: It has a more complicated real world metaphor.
Christian: Yes, exactly, and you don’t see it a lot, so it’s playing onto all these deep things. Like I said, the creators are not afraid to give you easy answers. Micah, without spoiling anything, gives into her hunger in bad ways a lot of the time, and of course that speaks to the war setting.
Tia: Right.
Christian: In addition to these witches that are vampirically consuming the energy of others and her, who has this monster that just needs to fed. There’s also just normal starving children, like normal refugees.
Matt: Mm-hmm, horrifying.
Scott: I liked it, too. I started reading the trade paperback, and it’s beautifully illustrated.
Matt: Yes. She’s a real talent.
Tia: Luminous.
Matt: All right, Scott. This is our time now.
Scott: All right.
Tia: Your time to talk about wrestling.
Matt: No, we won’t talk about wrestling, but Scott, what do you think about when you think back to 2016?
Scott: I would say the book that has really stuck with me the most, it’s a Dark Horse book, The Black Hammer with Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston. I don’t know if I’m saying it correct. It’s another family story, which he’s so good at doing, and it’s got these crazy riffs on some of the classic hero tropes and it’s beautifully drawn. This would have been a Vertigo book 15 years ago. It looks amazing. It tells this wonderful story. The characters are so well-developed and it touches on each per book. I think the new one came out today.
Matt: What’s the pitch for The Black Hammer, for those that maybe haven’t read it yet?
Scott: Sure. You have this superhero group who gets caught in this, it’s like a time …
Christian: It’s like exploring, and it’s a great year coming right after Secret Wars, because it’s kind of a play on all those events where all characters get retconned, like continuity, or how The New 52 knocked out all those sidekicks or whatever, and so the setup is like what happened to those characters.
Scott: Right. They’re calling this world, you have one, who’s this girl. She’s like a seven year old and she can’t grow but she’s much older now, and The Black Hammer is the Batman riff and Abraham Slam is more of a Doc Savage almost, I would say, sort of superhuman-esque and Gravitas and all that, and you have a Martian Manhunter type there, and they’re all stuck living in this town, some of them having to go hidden from this regular old town. You meanwhile have the ones who can go out in the world trying to survive and just live their lives, and the other ones are stuck there and going crazy a little bit. It’s so beautiful. Jeff, he’s always been great, and this is just another wonderful he’s turned out.
Matt: Yes. He’s had, Plutona I think came out this year, right? The miniseries?
Heidi: It debuted last year.
Christian: It was ..After Earth?
Heidi: Yes, After Death, he has that new book coming out, and all his Valiant work.
Christian: Anytime I talk to anyone about Jeff Lemire, it’s just like, “How does he do this?”
Calvin: He’s doing a book for …
Christian: A DC and Marvel book?…
Heidi: Yes, and at Simon and Schuster. Yes, I was just doing the previews. He has like four books coming, like four full on graphic novels coming out next year or something.
Calvin: His career path is really incredibly striking.
Heidi: He’s so versatile, too, like what you’re talking about. I haven’t been able to read Black Hammer yet, but you know what? I’m not going to do the podcast. I’m going to run home and read some comics.
Tia: We should just put Jeff Lemire in the time capsule, just preserve him for a while.
Christian: What I like about Black Hammer it’s just so well-done I think on every level, and it’s so complex. To sort of answer the question of how does Jeff Lemire have 24 hours in the day, is I talked to him about it before the story came out, and he actually sent me like three issues in advance. I was like, “Oh, that’s weird. That’s not usually how many you have on hand.” The way he explained it is this is an idea he’s been bouncing around forever and he’s come back and forth about it a couple times, so at this point, he basically has the whole series written already and I think it shows in how deep and complex the different plot machinations are. There’s a couple subplots and twists that we haven’t even mentioned yet, and what I really like about it these are all superhero tropes, qualities, that have been riffed on a lot by lots of genius creators over the years. I’m thinking primarily of, and I can’t remember the character’s name, but it’s the girl who’s older.
Scott: I’m terrible with names, but yes, it’s the little girl.
Christian: Because her power, she’s a Shazam. She’s a Captain Marvel. She’s a woman who switches into, but it’s reversed. Instead of a young boy switching into a man, it’s a woman switching into a young girl, and now she’s stuck in a young girl body even though she’s in her 50s or 60s or whatever. She keeps getting busted at this farm school where they’re trying to run undercover because she keeps going to smoke in the bathroom or whatever, and that Shazam thing, it was done so well by Alan Moore in Miracleman. I thought he tackled that concept, but all credit to Jeff for figuring out these new layers to these old ideas.
Matt: I think I read Miracleman for the first time this year.
Christian: Because it’s finally back. We finally figured it out.
Heidi: It did, but it was kind of like a squib, wasn’t it? It’s like, I’ve been waiting 20 years for it to come out and then it came out and I was like, “Oh, you know what? I already bought this illegally.”
Christian: Yes. The comics community has always been good about leaking to each other.
Heidi: Plus it was censored. They had to change some things and it wasn’t quite the same.
Matt: Yes. He came out with two different versions. An interesting digital release. Did you have another one?
Heidi: Yes, just to expand a little bit on Rosalie Lightning, this is a book by cartoonist Tom Hart. He is also married to cartoonist Leela Corman, and about five years ago, tragically, their young daughter died. She was two years old. She just died in her sleep, just the worst thing that you could ever have happen, and Tom really spent the next five years working on this book. He’s kind of obsessed, and they had another child, which they don’t really even talk about in the book. They had another daughter, but the book is about grief, but it’s also about how you go on and how you deal with depression. It doesn’t wallow in it. I think we can all have so much sympathy for the situation that you don’t need to make an excuse for how you would feel if it happened, but at the same time, it’s so expressive.
Calvin: As life keeps making demands, the usual mundane demands.
Heidi: Yes, and people trying to help, friends trying to help, friends doing things, which doesn’t help. At the end they do go to grief counseling and that does help in some ways, and I guess this book really is what kept Tom going in a lot of ways with it, and just to keep the spirit of his daughter alive in this way with this really powerful book. I don’t tell people who have children, I said, “You probably shouldn’t read it because it’s just so …”
Calvin: It’s the worst possible thing you can imagine.
Heidi: It’s devastating. It’s just one of the most devastating things.
Matt: I’m starting to tear up just thinking about it. I can’t deal.
Calvin: I read the whole thing in almost one sitting because I just knew I wasn’t going to pick it up again over a period of time, but it’s just an incredibly powerful work.
Heidi: It is, and I think Tom is known for his more cartoony books like the Hutch Owen series and so on, and he also really grew as a cartoonist in this book, I think, which shows that things that are very powerful bring out more in you. He’s good with it now I think. He went on a book tour. I met him, talked to him, and he has a school down in Florida in Gainesville called the Sequential Arts Workshop that he runs. They had just an art show here in conjunction with CAB, Comic Arts Brooklyn, but I do think Rosalie Lightning is a masterpiece. It’s a masterpiece born out of terrible, terrible tragedy, so it’s not anything where you could say, “Oh, this is how you do a book like that,” but it really is a masterpiece.
Matt: Going to download it immediately and cry on the train home.
Calvin: It’s not fun.
Matt: The last time I think I read a book like that was, I think it came out last year, The Story of My Tits, graphic novel that came out. That one was amazingly powerful. Beautiful book. What about movies? Should we shift into movies or TV, or do you have something you wanted to bring up, Tia?
Tia: I was just going to say I’ve cried in public reading comics before. There’s no shame.
Matt: Why stop now?
Tia: There’s no shame. Yes, why don’t we segue? You guys mentioned the show Game of Thrones. I’ve never heard of this. Maybe you could fill me in.
Matt: Is there even a season this year? I think maybe people are tired of Game of Thrones. What about Westworld? Does anybody else watch Westworld?
Heidi: I haven’t seen it at all, and so if you guys are going to go into it, it’s going to be spoiler town, so I’m just going to cover my ears.
Matt: The only thing I’ll say is it’s the first show that I’ve experienced that the discussion around it is more enjoyable than the show since Lost.
Christian: This is so funny because I’m a few weeks behind, so I surrender my spoiler shield. I know there’s been some big twists, so if you want to get into that, I’ve surrounded by right to that.
Tia: Scott, have you seen Westworld? No.
Christian: The way that I’ve watched Westworld weirdly is I’ve totally cut off the subreddit aspect of it. The way I’ve been doing it is I just watch it on Sunday and I just let it wash over me.
Matt: Simmer. Let it marinate.
Christian: And just marvel at the invention and the craziness and not try to drive myself insane thinking too much about it, which I think is funny because the show has one of the most scathing indictments of bad fandom recently. Ed Harris’ character, I’ve always read him as a manifestation of Gamergate, and he’s basically, and kind of these toxic impulses in fandom. The way I’ll illustrate that, it’s not going to sound pretty, but everyone who visits Westworld is like this. He’s just the worst version of it. It’s a western theme park filled by animatronic robots, and you as a guest, you pay however much.
Matt: 40 grand a day.
Christian: Yes, and you do whatever you want. There’s all these jokes about writers, too, because the writers spend all this time coming up with these complex narratives.
Matt: Ed Brubaker wrote an episode.
Heidi: Yes, I was going to say.
Christian: Those people, all they do is just put you in the middle of the street and shoot everyone or rape a bunch of people. Ed Harris in particular has this thing where for a long time, for every day he goes there, every night, he comes upon this couple, played by Evan Rachel Wood and James Marsden and he kills James Marsden and he rapes Evan Rachel Wood and he does that every night because the robots’ memories are blanked everyday, and then his role in the show is he becomes obsessed with figuring it out. There’s this map or whatever. There’s this secret level to the game that he’s trying to get, and so I’ve always read him as a comment on toxic fandom that would make Superboy-Prime proud.
Matt: That’s a very big … I haven’t seen that insight. When I first started watching it, I didn’t go into the subreddits or anything. I was like, “I don’t know if I like this show,” because there’s a lot of violence and there’s not a lot of good happening. Eventually, you start to find out that there’s a lot of fan theories about certain things. I’m like, “That’s kind of interesting.”
Christian: There’s two timelines.
Matt: Yes, allegedly. You start to dig in. I’m like, “Maybe I’m more interested in finding out what’s happening than actually enjoying the show.”
Tia: Yes. To be honest, this is a big reason why I haven’t been that interested in the show. I understand that it’s critiquing all of these things, but at the same time it’s also aestheticizing them, which I feel like is a little not as self-aware as I would hope.
Christian: There’s definitely a response where you can be like, you can’t have it both ways anymore.
Tia: Yes, so I have not …
Matt: What about TV for you? What have you been checking out?
Tia: I would put this to the group to see if I’m alone here. I find myself not really watching TV. I wait until I have a free weekend and then I just watch something in its entirety on Netflix or I buy the whole season on iTunes or Amazon. I don’t make an appointment to watch TV regularly anymore.
Heidi: Well, I just over the past few days, I have my new favorite TV show, which is Pitch.
Scott: Pitch is great!
Calvin: I haven’t seen it, and I want to see it so bad.
Heidi: I watched it last week when we were a little down in the dumps, for several reasons, one of which I’m a huge baseball fan and I miss my Gary, Keith, and Ron. When the game ends, I’m sad.
Matt: Isn’t it only like two weeks in between baseball seasons?
Heidi: I know it is, but I don’t know if I could ever get tired of listening …
Calvin: Only this year because of the world baseball classic, but that’s a whole other story.
Heidi: Yes.
Tia: This is the show where’s the woman who is …
Matt: Yes, the pitcher.
Calvin: I keep saying every week I’ve got to see this.
Heidi: Well, Calvin, I have seen it, so I’m going to talk about it.
Calvin: Please do. I want you to talk about it.
Heidi: Like I said, I was in a pretty bad mood, but not only does it fulfill your baseball needs, but it also has really strong female empowerment which is a really good message for right now. It is about the major league’s first female pitcher, which is far-fetched, but probably somewhat .0001 possible maybe someday, and there’s actually been a lot of fiction that has this. There was a movie about it. There was another TV show that was about it. There’s novels that all have this theme of the first female pitcher, so this show is done with the cooperation of major league baseball.
It’s set in Petco Park in San Diego, a place I’m very familiar with, going to Comic-Con. They even reference Comic-Con a couple times. They’re always showing the Gas Lamp District and the Hyatt and everything, the Omni, so I feel like it’s in my backyard. For a baseball fan, it’s just …
Scott: Oh, it’s fantastic.
Heidi: It’s like, this is what it actually would be like.
Scott: It’s really inside baseball, and that’s a real compliment.
Heidi: The character of the pitcher, Ginny Baker, is great. She’s a really great character, but I have to say, it has John … I always forget, Mark Paul Gosselaar as this over the hill catcher.
Matt: Zack Morris?
Heidi: Yes.
Scott: With a full beard. You don’t recognize him.
Heidi: And he put on like 20 pounds for the role because he’s this over the hill character. In the pilot episode, they’re trying to set him up as this playboy where he’s slapping her on the ass, so you’re like, “Alright, they’re going to be this kind of foil,” and then in the subsequent episodes, they really take his character in another direction. I’ve got to admit, he’s great. I just love watching him.
Matt: I’ve seen previews. I had no idea that that was him.
Calvin: I’ve read all the material leading up to it, all the stuff about how major league baseball was working with him.
Heidi: I never blitz a TV show. I never do, and I blitz this. That’s unheard of for me. Apparently the ratings are crap, so you better watch it.
Tia: All right.
Scott: Also, I just want to shout out, Dan Lauria is the coach, the father from The Wonder Years, and unbelievable. He should get a supporting nom. It’s amazing.
Heidi: Yes. It’s really well-done. I love Ali Larter. She plays this agent, like Ginny Baker’s agent. I have to say, it’s a feel good show. They don’t show her dealing with the horrible sexism or the misogyny.
Calvin: That she would probably actually face.
Scott: But they touch on it.
Heidi: They touch on it, and they realize that it’s there, but they don’t dwell on it. They deal with the other problems. I think they’re going to deal with it more in future episodes, but you do get the idea that she’s an amazing athlete. She’s been playing with men her whole life, so this isn’t like she’s like, “How do I do this?” She’s like, “I just want to be one of the guys. I just want to be on this team.” The best thing about it is that she’s not a superstar. She flounders. She gives up runs. Sometimes she’s wild, and then like a ballplayer. She’s a mid-level pitcher.
Scott: There was questions if they were going to send her back down.
Heidi: Yes, and so it makes her so much more sympathetic in that way.
Calvin: Interesting. I love it.
Scott: I’m glad you love it. I think it’s great, and people should watch it. The ratings are not good.
Heidi: Yes, I know.
Calvin: Yes, I want to see the show.
Matt: What about you, Scott?
Calvin: I may leave right now.
Christian: There’s a TV behind us. We can watch it for the next end of the show.
Tia: We’re going to screen Pitch over here while you guys talk.
Calvin: Can I talk about a movie? Or really a TV show, and this is no big deal. It’s Luke Cage. I love it. I don’t watch a lot of shows on TV. My wife is a binge watcher. I don’t really do that, but I just love the show. I think to me, it’s a lot better than some of the feature film superhero shows we’ve seen out there.
Tia: Absolutely.
Calvin: I love Mike Colter. I think he’s outstanding. I know there’s some criticism of him. Some people don’t like the pace of the show. I’m not one of those people.
Matt: Do you hold it as the highest television thing that Marvel has done so far?
Calvin: I wouldn’t go that far. I liked Daredevil, the first season, quite a bit.
Christian: The first season is much better.
Calvin: There you go. I’m told that Jessica Jones. I saw a few episodes. I liked it. My wife says it’s awesome. My wife gets a lot of play here. For me, Luke Cage has just been magnificently well-done, the acting, the script, the settings, updating a really corny hero for a different time and a different audience. I think they’ve done a fabulous job.
Christian: And they delve into other things, too. Such a common thing in superhero origin stories is someone like Wolverine, is they got experimented on, and it’s the same for Luke Cage, but again, a black guy getting experimented on, that’s a whole different history of Tuskegee and stuff like that.
Tia: They also really updated I think Mariah well, because you understand that she’s trying to protect her community and she has these really relatable motivations and ideas, but still is the villain, and it’s nice to see a woman be able to be a complicated villain, and they updated her from the stereotype origins. I think that Luke Cage is a great show this year.
Christian: We can move on, but I just have to shout out Mahershala Ali in Luke Cage, because he’s so good.
Calvin: Yes. There’s just good actors in every role.
Matt: What do you think, Scott? What do you got?
Scott: I think my high point on TV, I’m going to get a little sappy here, This is Us.
Heidi: That’s another show by the guy who does Pitch, isn’t it?
Scott: Yes, Dan Fogelberg.
Heidi: Dan Fogelberg, yes. All right.
Scott: A great show. It’s my replacement for Parenthood, which I miss so much.
Tia: Oh, I just binge watched that.
Scott: If you like that, you should watch This is Us.
Tia: I will.
Scott: It is a dense family thing. Have you seen it?
Heidi: No, I haven’t seen it.
Scott: Okay. Has anyone seen it here?
Calvin: I haven’t seen it, no.
Scott: There’s a huge twist in the first episode. I don’t want to spoil it because it’s so good, and you’ll not see it coming.
Matt: (They’re robots?)
Christian: They’re in Westworld.
Scott: Close. Aliens. It’s this complicated family story. The acting is really great. It’s very emotional, so if you have that kind of love of shows like Parenthood, this is the replacement for it.
Christian: It’s very popular around the EW office. They did a big cover story on it. I haven’t watched much of it. All love to Milo Ventimiglia.
Scott: Oh, so good.
Christian: It sounds like, Heidi, what you were saying about Pitch, talking about Westworld and I love Westworld, and those prestige dramas that really try to wrestle with these big issues of Westworld life and consciousness and repetition and stuff like that, but those aren’t the only stories you can tell. There’s so many great stories you can tell. TV is such a great format for telling family stories. The comics medium has certainly gone through these convulsions a couple times where you get really obsessed with dark storytelling or whatever, and then you remember you can still do really emotionally investing and paying off storytelling that’s not a character getting raped every episode or whatever.
Heidi: Yes. We haven’t even mentioned the TV sensation of the year, although I think Westworld probably …
Matt: Stranger Things.
Heidi: Stranger Things. I think it’s interesting. We were talking about this at Comic-Con a little bit this year, where this is so much TV now and it loses a little bit of the impact, like Walking Dead is in its seventh season, Game of Thrones is in its seventh season, and these are now Hall H attractions at Comic-Con, but there really isn’t anything that’s come along since then, but then now I think when Stranger Things broke through, it’s like, “Oh, guess what? You can still have that.” There’s so much. Look how many great things we’re talking about here that only half the panel has even seen, but yes, Stranger Things really broke through, and obviously Westworld is as well.
Christian: I think an underrated element in Stranger Things’ success is it’s only eight episodes.
Heidi: Yes, absolutely.
Christian: You can watch it so quickly.
Heidi: You just blast through.
Christian: You were talking about with Luke Cage, every Marvel Netflix show, season, has some kind of pacing problem.
Heidi: Yes.
Christian: I think Luke Cage is a little slow at first, whereas Jessica Jones and Daredevil hit the ground running and then hit weird lulls throughout. They should not be 13 episodes long. They should be eight or 10 episodes like Stranger Things.
Heidi: Yes, absolutely.
Christian: I hope that’s the lesson people take and not just, “Let’s take cute kids and make them dance at every awards show all year.”
Scott: It is an amazing time. I’ve heard people talk about all these shows. I haven’t seen any of them, but you can have these amazing shows that everyone actually hasn’t seen.
Calvin: Even though they’re getting really great reviews.
Matt: How about that Logan trailer? Anyone a big Wolverine fan?
Heidi: You never can go wrong with Wolverine and a young girl. This has been since Kitty Pryde.
Scott: And Johnny Cash.
Heidi: Yes. No, but seriously, Wolverine’s character, when Kitty Pryde joined the X-Men wave back in the day, he had this relationship with this 13-year-old girl, then it was Jubilee when Kitty Pryde got too old, then in the movies, they made it Rogue, Anna Paquin, and now it’s X23. It’s one of those, it always works. It’s like Alex Toth. 22 ideas about Wolverine always work. Put him with a young girl.
Tia: My objection to this, though, I get what it does. It makes Wolverine more likable and it makes the little girl seem like she’s really badass, but also you know what? Wolverine, can you just interact with a woman your own age?
Christian: They’re all dead. They all died. That’s why he’s so depressed.
Tia: Maybe a woman older than you.
Christian: It’s weird because I don’t think Frank Miller’s Wolverine story had that.
Matt: Yuriko could have been that a little bit, or Yukio, rather.
Heidi: She was passive, not a spunky young girl.
Christian: I’ve always seen it as either a tribute, whether intentional or not, to one of the foundational comics of the medium, which is Lone Wolf.
Matt: I was about to say that, yes.
Christian: Wolverine just fits so easily into that, like memoryless, kind of wandering samurai.
Matt: That book is so good.
Heidi: Miller was very influenced by it.
Tia: Why can’t he hang out with an older woman? Why can’t Wolverine hang out with an 80 year old lady?
Christian: Oh, I’d love that.
Tia: It would be the same dynamic.
Christian: It might not put fannies in the seat.
Scott: You get that with Captain America.
Tia: Exactly, exactly.
Christian: It’s weird because now that in the Marvel comics, Wolverine is dead or whatever and he’s replaced by X23 for now, who’s Wolverine, and now she has a younger clone of herself that she’s paling around with. There’s something about the Wolverine character that just needs a little girl with him.
Matt: It needs a young sidekick.
Heidi: It’s like The Professional. That’s another example of this.
Tia: Oh, yes.
Christian: Absolutely, yes.
Heidi: People love this hard bitten killer being tempered by, and as you say, it’s make her more of a badass. It wouldn’t work with, say, James Bond. If James Bond were paling around with a young girl, it would just be creepy and pedophile and unsavory.
Calvin: Superhero comics do this all the time.
Heidi: Well, yes.
Calvin: That’s the way we like our comics, apparently.
Heidi: Listen, I think the best trailer, even though it’s only 30 seconds long, was the Guardians of the Galaxy 2 trailer.
Tia: Oh, that was so fun.
Heidi: I cried when I saw it. I teared up.
Christian: Does looking at baby Groot just make you cry?
Calvin: I’ve only seen it once. I have to see it again.
Heidi: Just the whole idea that they were coming back.
Christian: I saw it whenever it first premiered, but I saw it in front of a movie recently, probably Dr. Strange, and the reaction in the crowd was just like, “Oh, thank God.” In those 30 seconds or whatever, they just hit everything that you love about it. They have Chris Pratt and Drax.
Matt: That movie really shocked me because when they first said they were going to make Guardians of the Galaxy, I was like, “That is going to be their first flop. There’s no way.” If they can make this a success, they can do anything they want.
Christian: They can do anything, and I think that’s how they took it. They were like, “All right.”
Matt: It was like carte blanche to do whatever they wanted.
Heidi: People were comparing it to Star Wars when it was coming out, which sounded very unlikely, and yet it did. It got these characters who you became so invested in and seeing them grow, and of course Chris Pratt is charming as hell and Rocket.
Matt: (Sexy.)
Heidi: They’ve promised they’re going to give Gamora a little bit more to do, make her and also Nebula a little bit more in the next one, and then when they come back, because come on, let’s be honest, if you saw it before Dr. Strange, no wonder, because that movie was like Lego set. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the yellow brick that goes where the origin is and here’s the blue brick that’s the vague villain with no personality who’s going to blow up the universe.”
Tia: Oh god, right? He shops at the same Sephora as Ronan the Accuser.
Heidi: I know, right? Also, every single Marvel movie is about the infinity stones.
Calvin: Yes, I was just saying that.
Christian: If you don’t think Guardians 2, they’re going to go to Soul World and get the Soul Gem, that’s absolutely what they’re going to go for.
Heidi: Of course.
Matt: What are they going to do for phase two with the Marvel films? They’ve been planting the seeds with the stones. What are they going to do for the next 10 years?
Christian: My assumption has always been, they’ll be like, “Listen, we don’t want to pay Robert Downey Jr. $50 million a year anymore,” and so I think eventually, and we’ll see if this works, this will be the testing point, is can we put out an Avengers movie or have an Avengers type thing that’s Black Panther and Dr. Strange and Captain Marvel and maybe some of the guardians?
Scott: They’re building to that. They’re building to that, because a lot of the doctors don’t want to do it anymore. They’re getting older, and how long can you have them do it?
Christian: I was honestly shocked that the Civil War movie, I don’t know if this is a spoiler, ends with both of them still alive. I thought that that was going to be the kickoff and Iron Man was going to die.
Heidi: Well, the only one who died is Quicksilver, who was owned by Fox, so funny.
Matt: Yes. I remember reading that the plan for the Infinity, I don’t know if they call it the Infinity War anymore, but they were going to try to make the new Avengers the new younger cast. I’d also heard that Kevin Feige admitted that they’ll probably recast these guys eventually, like James Bond.
Christian: Comics is rich with, “Oh, Captain America is old now,” or, “Someone else is Iron Man.”
Calvin: Is there a best film of the year? How many superhero films were there this year, five or six?
Matt: The Logan trailer was my best film.
Calvin: What?
Matt: The Logan trailer was my best film. I’ve seen it 100 times.
Heidi: I think Captain America: Civil War was the best.
Christian: Mine was Deadpool.
Heidi: Oh, hello, Deadpool. How could we forget Deadpool?
Tia: Yes, Deadpool.
Calvin: That’s the only one I didn’t see.
Heidi: What?
Matt: We might have been in France together.
Christian: You came back from France and they’re like, “Deadpool made $2 million or whatever.”
Matt: It’s funny you say that because when we were in France, I took some time off after, every poster I saw was Deadpool in Paris. They were really pushing it there.
Heidi: Le mortpool.
Matt: That’s what they were saying to me. I was like, “Get away from me.”
Calvin: The Jared Lewis of superheroes.
Tia: Being the feminist killjoy that I am, however, after Deadpool I was like, “If it had been his girlfriend who ended up ugly, they wouldn’t have ended up together at the end.”
Heidi: Yes, of course.
Tia: She of course remains beautiful the entire time.
Heidi: I felt that Deadpool, I was expecting people to really be up in arms about Deadpool because here’s a movie that makes fun of an elderly disabled woman of color, and that never came up really. It did a little bit, but there wasn’t any real outcry about it.
Matt: I wonder if it was because they were so overt about the character being so raunchy and fourth wall that it was almost like it allowed it.
Tia: Yes. I felt like she stuck up for herself in world, and so it didn’t feel like they were victimizing her.
Christian: It also helps that the opening sequence they make fun of themselves.
Matt: Like sets the tone.
Christian: Like, written by some idiot, or whatever the opening crawl is.
Heidi: Well, I think it’s also that Deadpool is a pansexual character himself. He makes so many jokes about being with men and doing things in the movie that it was hard to take him as, I don’t know, it seemed to play it all ways, I guess.
Tia: Yes. Did anyone see The Witch?
Matt: The Witch, the horror movie. Calvin doesn’t like horror movie. We talked about that.
Calvin: I’m not even sure I like superhero movies.
Tia: The Witch isn’t so much a horror movie, though, because it’s really not clear if there really is a witch. They maybe just went crazy.
Christian: It’s the latest entry in this kind of, I don’t know what we’re calling it, new horror, horror renaissance, indie horror, where the central tension and scare is not just a monster, but does the monster even exist? Prime example is one of my favorite movies, Babadook, from a couple years ago.
Matt: Oh god, the greatest horror movie I’ve ever seen.
Christian: These are all the Babadook’s children.
Matt: The Babadook might be a perfect film. It’s an amazing horror film.
Tia: It really is.
Christian: It’s amazing, and I think you see in things like, have you guys ever seen that picture floating around, it’s a Halloween party and they’re like, “I went to my friend’s Halloween dressed as Babadook, but it was more of a grownups drinking wine vibe.” It’s this grainy photo, all these people sitting on a couch drinking wine, but one of them is in a head to toe Babadook costume. Once I saw that, I was like, “It has entered the zeitgeist.”
Matt: The one movie I did see that I totally forgot about, I just logged into Letterbox to see what I watched this year, Midnight Special by Jeff Nichols.
Christian: Yes, I heard that was good.
Matt: It was really phenomenal. I know maybe people don’t like it, but it’s more of a film than a movie. It’s one of those. It’s about a father trying to protect his son and his son possesses some kind of special power, so he’s on the run. The government is after him. He’s got some kind of ability, and at the very end, you see where it comes from and I thought it was beautiful. Beautiful, rare film.
Heidi: Oh, I have one. Hail Caesar by the Coen Brothers. Kind of an acquired taste for Coen Brothers fans, kind of mixed reviews, but I felt it was amazing.
Christian: I have to see it again because …
Heidi: Amazing.
Tia: It’s been a long year.
Christian: I was a little underwhelmed when I saw it in theaters only because I had been so overexposed to trailers and they just did one of those things where they kept putting all the best jokes in the trailer.
Heidi: Yes.
Christian: I’ve only seen it once, and I need to see it again because seeing a Coen Brothers movie once is like you barely saw it at all.
Heidi: Exactly, and it kind of did cross Barton Fink with a serious man, which isn’t a natural mix, but it’s got this deep introspective existential doubt about why we’re here and why we even struggle to do things and why we try to be good with kind of why Hollywood sucks and is awful, but from the other side. It has Channing Tatum in an out and out tap dancing scene in a sailor suit.
Christian: He had to learn to tap dance to do that.
Heidi: Yes, and there’s also a mermaid, aquatic, and then at the end, I won’t give away the spoiler, but what happens at the end with the Russian sort of stuff …
Christian: There’s a lot of political stuff going on.
Heidi: Also, the character played by Alden Ehrenreich is so charming. When they said he was up for Han Solo, I was like, “This is the only one who can be young Han Solo.”
Christian: If you’re wondering why he’s Han Solo, then you’ll see this movie and you’ll be like, “Oh okay, I get it.” It’s Coen’s, their love letter to golden age Hollywood. It’s basically them doing a mime of all these different genres, because the main character is Josh Brolin, who’s a studio exec who keeps going around all these different films. There’s a silent, one of those mermaid swimming dancing things with Scarlett Johanssen and she’s this beautiful mermaid, but is of course dirty mouthed, and then Alden Ehrenreich is this cute kid in a western but he doesn’t really know how to do anything except to be in a western, and there’s the sailing film.
Heidi: But then it turns out he does know a thing or two.
Christian: Yes, exactly.
Heidi: The characters have all these nuances. Anyway, it’s a Coen Brothers movie.
Calvin: I forgot how much I liked that movie.
Christian: It’s the weird thing when you come to the end of the year. Coen Brothers, they always fill it with all these in jokes and stuff. You’re just never going to catch it the first way through, so I definitely need to revisit that.
Heidi: Yes. I’m pretty sure that as with all the great Coen Brothers movies, like The Big Lebowski and O Brother Where Art Thou, I’m pretty sure I can watch Hail Caesar at any moment, any scene over and over and over.
Christian: It’s a Coen comedy, right?
Calvin: There’s so many memorable characters.
Tia: It’s been a rough year, and moving forward into the next year, we want to end the year and end our round table extravaganza on a positive note. Can you guys talk about what was a moment this year that made you think, “I’m just so glad that I’m part of comics?”
Heidi: Oh, just about all of it.
Matt: I actually …
Tia: France.
Matt: France, being in France, oh my god. One thing I thought of this year, we interviewed the creative team behind Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.
Tia: That was just in New York Comic-Con.
Matt: That was just when we were in New York Comic-Con, living the life.
Tia: That’s right.
Matt: I think one of my favorite things is that in my opinion, I think Marvel is realizing the importance of these books so they’re putting the proper push behind them and allowing them to exist, to grow, to grow a new audience, to bring in new readers, and I think that’s one of my favorite moments of the year is that in my opinion, I could be totally wrong, Marvel is realizing how important those books are to a different community in comics that hasn’t been served and I’m super stoked.
Christian: It’s a work in progress still. I think they should have given Mockingbird much more time to find its audience, given that it was a non-name character. DC went through the same thing with Steve Orlando’s Midnighter series where that comic sold way better in trade paperback than it ever had in single issues, so they green light a spin-off series, Midnighter and Apollo, and it’s like you could skip that step if you just let these series with non-name characters, with original takes, give them a little time to grow their audience. These companies put out so many books, like Marvel’s putting out a solo Prowler series now or whatever, that it’s like, if you have something that some people are responding to, even if it’s not as many as you’d want, so I guess it’s good, I think they are learning, but I think that it’s still a work in progress.
Matt: Yes. Who else? Calvin?
Calvin: One thing, but there’s nuance to it, I’m really excited that the comics market, the size of the marketplace has hit a billion dollars, but that also means and what I’m seeing, all these new imprints, and we’ve talked about this, that are launching at trade book publishers, at independent presses, inside editions, which does illustrated books. What else? All of a sudden I’m forgetting, but It’s Alive, the IDW launch. Group Four started up a new line of reprints, bringing things back. Gallery 13, we mentioned this, so a billion dollar industry now combined, periodicals and books growing again. Manga is growing again. It’s just a really great time to be reading comics, working in comics. There’s other issues out there, but the category is just growing, and the American comics market offers more kinds of comics than ever before.
Matt: Scott.
Scott: For me this year, and this is comics tangentially, it’s a bigger thing, but just the celebration of Star Trek this year. I’ve really just found myself immersed in watching some of the old episodes and the movies and seeing a brighter future that we can all hope that maybe one day we can achieve it, if we have a future. The comics are really good right now. There’s a new TV show, which hopefully will be okay. I spent a lot of time writing about Star Trek this year and I think to me, that’s very enjoyable to me. I’m just falling apart here.
Matt: Star Trek makes us all emotional.
Heidi: Yes, right. Boldly go, man.
Scott: Yes.
Matt: What do you think, Heidi?
Heidi: I’m only half joking when I said all of it. I really do feel like comics certainly have their problems and there was a lot of culture wars in comics this year, but I think compared to the culture wars in other parts of the world …
Matt: It looks a little bit like small potatoes now, doesn’t it?
Heidi: Yes, very small potatoes, tiny french fries. I do think people who say comics is a cesspool, I’m like, “Well, at least we’re talking.” There’s way less division between the people who run Marvel comics than the fan on the street than there is between Vince McMahon and the fan in the stands. I just feel like comics are in a really great place. I’ve been excited everywhere. I was excited at San Diego Comic-Con this year. Calvin and I had breakfast with Margaret Atwood. She’s doing comics. I got to meet William Gibson, talk about stuff.
Matt: She was so excited about it.
Heidi: Right, right. She was so cool and I felt like Comic-Con this year was really cool, and everything found its level. Just last weekend or the weekend before, I went to Comic Arts Brooklyn. I came home with a stack of very expensive but wonderful indie comics by Noah Van Sciver and Michael DeForge and Katie Skelly, Connor Willumsen, just really good stuff. At Comic Arts Brooklyn, there’s this Latvian publisher, Kus Comics, and they put out these very small, they’re like maybe the size of a Moleskine, and the series of short stories by a lot of international cartoonists and they’re great. They’re like $6 each which is a little bit pricey, but they’re wonderful. They’re wonderful stories, so much thought.
They’re so mature, and just mature in the way that the use of the medium and the use of the themes, it’s not like … People always talk about The Master Race by Bernard Krigstein as this story, like, “Oh, isn’t this great? You can tell a story about the Holocaust.” It’s not like, “Wow, we can really do this now.” It’s just this understanding that this is what comics are now. I guess confidence is the word, really. Comics are the lone beacon for me in a dark world I guess, but as we’re coming past things going on in the world, I find myself back doing comics and moving on. I’m moving on. Acceptance. Stage six. Go read Black Panther.
Matt: Christian, what about you?
Christian: Yes, a couple quick hits. Since I mentioned Black Panther earlier, I feel like I should follow up on that because reading that first issue was probably one of my great comic moments of the year. Ta-Nehisi Coates as a writer I’ve loved for a long time. His Twitter personality is always great, and it was so cool to see him. The transition to comics can be bumpy for some people, but he just got it. You could tell that he was a Marvel nerd from way back and he knew how to do this. I thought that was an amazing first issue and they followed through.
The new issue is out today, issue eight, and getting that monthly has just been such a delight to me. It’s just all these things that I like about comics, this influx of new creators, just building up this world. Even though it’s called Black Panther, there’s this whole cast of women and people like that. There’s a lesbian romance and they’ve really taken pains to make that not exploitative or anything. I really like that series.
Heidi: You know, Brian Stelfreeze.
Christian: Yes.
Heidi: He has to be called out, too.
Christian: Oh, yes. When I say world building, all credit to Brian Stelfreeze for this beautiful world, making every character look different. This ranges not just across this sci-fi country of Wakanda, but there’s this whole thing in the spirit world simultaneously that Stelfreeze really brings to life.
The other big thing is DC Rebirth gives me a lot of hope. I’d kind of written off DC these past couple of years. I really fell off The New 52 bandwagon and was checked out, and what’s cool about DC Rebirth is instead of what The New 52 or things like it are, which like a Line Wide revamp, let’s get rid of the continuity and let’s just boil it down to sex and violence and ‘90s image and darkness and all that stuff.
I think it’s a big credit to DC that they figured out that that wasn’t working and instead of doing another hard reset, they learned the lesson from Marvel Now, whatever they called it in 2014, which is one thing that really got me back into superhero comics. That was Jonathan Hickman New Avengers and the Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie Young Avengers and Miss Marvel and Matt Fraction and David Aja’s Hawkeye.
The lesson to take from Marvel Now, which they have finally have, is just put talented people together who want to work together who have an idea for a character and you get these amazing things. You get Christopher Priest writing Deathstroke, which is still such an astounding sentence. I think when they revealed those titles, we were all just like, “What?” But it’s great. It’s a great comic that synthesizes Deathstroke’s weird origin stories and makes him compelling. Shout out to Detective Comics, which turned Batman into a superhero team book and it worked really well.
Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman I think is an embodiment of all the things I like about DC Rebirth. It’s really innovative. It even uses their double shipping really well because there’s two different stories going on, and they really made no bones about saying that Diana is queer or whatever. Rucka gave a really thoughtful interview about it. He explained all this positions the whole time, especially this moment, such a big year for the character. It’s her 75th anniversary, her first time on the big screen, pumping up for this movie next year. For them to just be like, “Oh yes, sure, she’s queer. Sure, she fell in love with women on Paradise Island,” or whatever, and just make it a part of the character and really de-emphasize some kind of romance with Steve Trevor or whatever. That gives me hope going forward. It’s one of those things. You can always count on Marvel to be pretty consistent, but when DC is good, then it all feels good.
Matt: Tia?
Tia: Earlier this year, my mom and I got matching Bitch Planet tattoos.
Heidi: Wow!
Christian: That’s amazing.
Tia: When I started working here about a year and a half ago, she told me about how when she was little she loved comics. She read Fantastic Four, she read Thor. This was such a vivid memory for her, her experience reading these comics, and then as she got older she felt like she got chased away. When I got this job, she rediscovered comics and she discovered there were things like Bitch Planet and more, I don’t know, I hate to say literary comics, but there were the superhero comics that she liked when she was a little girl, but there are also comics that deal with all sorts of other themes and genres and that it was just such a wide world, Calvin, kind of like what you were saying that it’s just growing so much.
Calvin: There’s something for everyone. It’s a great new world for American comics.
Tia: Yes, exactly. Having firsthand this experience of someone exploring this world, and that’s kind of what we do on the podcast, which I’ve gotten involved with this year, just helping people figure out what comics to love because there’s something out there for everyone. It’s been a great year for that.
Calvin: It hasn’t always been like that, but it is now. It’s growing even more. I just think that that’s what’s incredibly exciting, and being in France, if I may go back to that.
Matt: Always. We’ll always have France.
Calvin: You see a world of comics that are hard to even imagine. The French love their comics and they love all kinds of comics. Bande dessinee or whatever.
Calvin: Yes, bande dessinee. It’s just exciting. Comics in America have always been an incredibly important part of popular culture, but very often they were marginalized and pushed to the side. That’s changing, and we’ve just expanded and we’re not a one genre comics world any longer.
Heidi: I honestly think that American comics are giving French comics, I think they’re pretty much equal right now.
Calvin: Oh, I think so, too.
Heidi: Just the breadth of material that’s available in America that’s being produced and the range of things that are popular that are doing well that have a following. There’s so many web comics. We haven’t even touched on those. There’s just so many different things.
Calvin: Yes. We haven’t even touched on how Kickstarter is changing indie comics publishing by allowing people to raise money in ways unheard of.
Heidi: Oh yes, it’s a game changer, but yes, all these things are happening. I think we face a very uncertain future right now.
Calvin: Back to reality.
Heidi: Yes, back to reality, but I do think that comics will … Cheap entertainment traditionally does well in hard times.
Tia: Silver lining.
Scott: This will be the year of the political cartoon.
Heidi: Yes.
Matt: This episode will be a time capsule. Hopefully we’re still alive in 2017.
Calvin: I hope we sit around and actually listen to it.
Christian: We were so hopeful then, before the wasteland.
Matt: Heidi, thank you for coming on.
Heidi: Thank you for having us.
Matt: Scott, as always. Christian, thank you.
Scott: Thank you.
Christian: Thank you guys.
Matt: Calvin, you’re a delight. Tia, thank you so much. Maybe we’ll try this again next year. We’ll see how things went. Thanks everybody!