Issuu

THE

CB M I OO

Companion

BY ERIC HOUSTON

The Comic Book Podcast Companion by Eric Houston

Book Design by David Greenawalt Cover Art and Color by Mike Manley Proofreading by Eric Nolen-Weathington

Dedication:

To Tom Gerencher, who taught me how to write.

Special Thanks:

I would like to thank all of the podcasters and professionals who participated in this book for their help and enthusiasm. This book literally couldn’t exist without them. The same goes for everyone who provided art or photographs for the book, particularly Pat Loika, Mike Oliveri, and Tony Guagliardo. I would also like to thank John Morrow, David Greenawalt, Michael Eury, and everyone at TwoMorrows for their help and encouragement.

Trademarks and Copyrights:

The All-New Atom and all related characters, Batman, Ch’p, Chaselon, DC Archives Editions, Flash, Green Arrow/Black Canary and all related characters, Green Lantern, The Green Lantern Corps, Justice League of America and all related characters, Katma Tui, Power Girl, Superman, Tomar Re, and Wonder Woman TM and © Copyright 2009 DC Comics.

Alpha Flight and all related characters, The Awesome Slapstick, Captain America, Dazzler, Doctor Doom, Doctor Strange, Fantastic Four, Fantasy Masterpieces, Ghost Rider, Hulk, Iron Man and all related characters, Marvel Masterworks, Marvel Tales, New Mutants and all related characters, Phoenix, Punisher War Journal and all related characters, Spider-Man, Spidey: A Universe X Special, Tomb of Dracula, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Uncanny X-Men and all related characters, and Venom TM and © Copyright 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc. Astronaut Dad TM & © Copyright 2009 David Hopkins, Brent Schoonover, and Silent Devil, Inc. Powers and all related characters TM & © Copyright 2009 Jinxworld, Inc. Jon Sable TM & © Copyright 2009 NightSky Sable, LLC.

Nick Cardy: Behind the Art, Back Issue, and Rough Stuff TM & © Copyright 2009 TwoMorrows Publishing. Savage Dragon and Freak Force TM & © Copyright 2009 Erik Larsen. Around Comics TM 2009 Around Comics.

Word Balloon TM 2009 Shaky Productions.

Comic Book Queers TM 2009 Comic Book Queers.

The Crankcast and The 24 Hour Comic Book Podcast TM 2009 Chris Crank and Mike Norton. iFanboy TM 2009 iFanboy.

Quiet! Panelologists at Work TM 2009 Jon Sibley and Matt Watts.

TwoMorrows’ Tune-In Podcast TM 2009 TwoMorrows Publishing. The Pipeline Podcast TM 2009 Comic Book Resources. Comic Geek Speak TM 2009 Comic Geek Speak.

First Printing • June 2009 • Printed in Canada Softcover ISBN: 978-1-60549-018-2

Contents Introduction ........................................................................................4

Around Comics ...................................................................................5

Word Balloon ..................................................................................19

Creator Interview: Matt Fraction ....................................................30

Comic Book Queers ..........................................................................38

The Crankcast ..................................................................................45

Creator Interview: Tim Seeley ........................................................55

Remembering the 24 Hour Comic Book Podcast..........................................................................58

iFanboy ............................................................................................61

Quiet! Panelologists at Work ............................................................73

TwoMorrows’ Tune-In Podcast/ Collected Comics Library...................................................................82

Pipeline Podcast ................................................................................89

Creator Interview: Gene Colan ....................................................104

Comic Geek Speak..........................................................................107

How to Make Your Own Podcast......................................................121

Podcast Index ................................................................................123

THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 3

NTRODUCTION

About three years ago, All-Star Comics, the comic book store I had frequented every week for almost eight years, closed its doors forever. For the first time since I had started reading comics seriously, I no longer had a place to visit every Wednesday, not simply to buy my books (at that point you could already buy books off the Internet easily enough), but to hang out for a couple of hours and chew the fat with the shop owners and fellow customers about everything going on in comics. Once the Nineties boom, which had begun my own infatuation with comics, had ended, none of my friends at school cared to read comics anymore, and so the comic shop became my sole outlet for debating the issues of the day: “Is Hal Jordan really coming back;” “Who is this mysterious Adversary in Fables”; “Who is the Identity Crisis killer (I thought it was Captain Boomerang using the extra Atom belt and Mirror Master suit from his Suicide Squad days)?” Suddenly, that store was gone. To make matters worse, I moved from South Bend, Indiana to Saint Paul, Minnesota the following year. Now, I really didn’t have anyone to talk comics with. Even the couple of passing acquaintances back home that were comic fans were now hundreds of miles away. Sure, the Twin Cities were and are dotted with any number of terrific comics stores, but none of them were my store. Plus, my new job kept me too busy to really hang out there and try to strike up new friendships. So there I was, sitting at my desk one day, doing some mindless paperwork when I decided to take a break from work and check Newsarama. There, on the right side of the screen, in little type, was an ad for a John Byrne interview on a show called Around Comics. It was a podcast and, while I’d heard of such a thing before, I had yet to actually listen to one. Still, what I was doing hardly required much mental effort, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I was hooked immediately. I started by listening to archived episodes of Around Comics, but soon branched out to The Crankcast and Comic Geek Speak. Before long, I was a regular listener of iFanboy, Word Balloon, The Comic Book Queers, Quiet! Panelologists at Work, Pipeline, The Collected Comics Library, and many others. These shows entertained me at work and in the car. They reignited my enthusiasm for the medium and exposed me to new books, books like Matt Fraction’s brilliant Casanova, which I probably never would have picked up otherwise, but, more importantly, for the first time in years, I felt like I had someone to talk comics with. Sure, the conversation was a little one-sided at first, but via forum posts and e-mails, not to mention lengthy

4 | INTRODUCTION

interviews for a certain book from TwoMorrows, I really started to feel like part of a comics reading community again. I wasn’t alone, either. Listening to the e-mails and voice mails on each of these podcasts, I found out that my story was all too common. Time and again, listeners would write in, thanking the podcasters and singing the same tune. They didn’t have any friends in school or at work who liked comics, either. They had lost their favorite comic store or, worse, lived in an area too small or too rural to have one. Like me, they had found a community again, a community we were all part of together. Each of us had begun devouring our favorite podcasts with the same enthusiasm and anticipation we reserved for our favorite comics. It wasn’t long before I began to wonder what went on behind the scenes of my favorite podcasts, how the shows were made and what inspired the podcasters to make them. Looking around the Internet and digging through each show’s archives proved largely fruitless. For the most part, these were stories that hadn’t been told yet. I also figured I probably wasn’t alone in wanting to know these things, so I set out to write this book. I wanted to pull back the curtain for all of us faithful listeners, to find out more about the shows and the hosts themselves. I wanted to take a look at how the Internet had changed fandom, with podcasts creating the sort of communities that were once the sole domain of shops, letter columns, and fanzines. I wanted to talk to the comics professionals who have appeared on these shows, some of whom started out as fans on the Internet themselves and some of whom have had their careers forever changed by exposure from podcasts and the Internet. I wanted to put together a collection of stories and tips and tricks of the trade for those who wanted to start their own show after listening to so many but didn’t know where to start. I wanted to expose fellow fans to other great podcasts they may not have tried yet. And for those of you who haven’t listened to any podcasts yet but always wanted to, here’s a sampling of some of the best. Chances are, if you like the interview, you’ll love their show. Most of all, though, I wrote this book because I wanted to say thank you. Thank you all, podcaster and listener alike, for bringing this community into existence and for giving it a life all its own.

Eric Houston Saint Paul, MN January 3, 2009

AROUND COMICS

Chris Neseman, Brion “Sal” Salazar, and Tom Katers have been recording the Around Comics podcast from Chicago for almost four years now. Often joined by industry professionals and fellow podcasters alike, the Around Comics round table has insightfully and hilariously discussed everything from the ever-present single issue versus trade paperbacks debate to the growing trend of creator exclusive contracts at Marvel and DC. I sat down with Chris, Sal, and Tom after recording their May 16, 2008 episode at Chicago’s Dark Tower Comics and Collectibles to discuss everything in and around Around Comics. HOUSTON: Am I right in thinking Around Comics was your idea, Chris? CHRIS: No. It started with Sal and I at the same time. That was the genesis there. TOM: It was my idea. [laughter]

Around Comics hosts Christopher Neseman, Brion Salazar, and Tom Katers at the 2007 New York Comic Con. All photos in this chapter courtesy Around Comics, unless otherwise noted.

HOUSTON: I know you did some interviews for of ideas back and forth: what we wanted to do with Comic Geek Speak first. rd the show and the basic idea of it, because I hadn’t CHRIS: Yeah, it was their 43 and half episode and I really listened to many podcasts at that point and it e-mailed [Comic Geek Speak co-host] Bryan Deemer was relatively a new thing. Chris had listened more and asked him if he was coming to Wizard World than I did, but I thought it would be fun and someChicago in 2005 and they weren’t coming, so I said, thing to do. Both of us had really grown up reading “Well, I can get some on-the-floor interviews for you comics from a young age, but none of my friends and send them in.” Sal and I ended up going to the growing up were into comic books so it was a very show on that Saturday and ran around and were really singular thing for me. I read comics, but I didn’t really shocked at how accommodating the creators were. I talk about comics with anyone growing up and, at that was a terrible interviewer, but they were great in their point in my life, I was already in my thirties. responses and I sent them in to Bryan. That’s kind of TOM: It was over. [laughter] where I started as an interviewer and Sal can probaCHRIS: I came to work at the bly pick up on that weekend. same company that Sal worked SAL: I had actually met a at and I think the first week I bunch of people [at Wizard was there I hung up a Losers World Chicago] and just kind poster in my office and he was of hung out with a lot of the like, “You read comic books?” creators. Then, that Saturday, and I was like, “Yeah.” when Chris came interviewing SAL: So, yeah, we just sort of people, the idea of doing our put it together from that. The own podcast came up. The first couple of episodes were technical side of it was God-awful. We didn’t really know something that I knew that I what we were doing then. could handle. As far as a CHRIS: All Skype. website and the feed and Chris and Sal recording in a hotel room at Wizard World TOM: Loooong. that kind of thing, I knew that Chicago. Photo courtesy Pat Loika (patsCHRIS: Well, it was pre-Tom, so I could figure that out, so I ketch.blogspot.com). they were terrible. just said, “Let’s do our own SAL: Awful. [laughter] show at some point.” We didn’t really do it right away; CHRIS: A lot of tinkering around with different equipit took a little while before we decided to finally do it. ment and formats. CHRIS: Almost six moths. TOM: You couldn’t find the “interesting” button on SAL: It was a while before we got to it. We threw a lot your mixer. THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 5

vision for the show and being anal and stubborn, the direction of the show was going in ways I wasn’t enjoying nearly as much, and it just got to a point where we needed to stop and regroup and see if this was something we wanted to do, and luckily it was. We’re back. It’s different. It’s not as tight of a schedule. SAL: It was close to like— we weren’t sure if we were

going to stop completely. CHRIS: And it was starting to hurt Sal and my friendship a little bit because of the tension, and it’s not worth that. And Tom had tax season. TOM: I don’t really like the show. [laughter] SAL: Chris and I take the show far more seriously than Tom ever has. He just shows up to have a good time and doesn’t really care what happens. Chris and I took things way more seriously than we ever should have. CHRIS: But no regrets. No regrets. The first two years of the show, I’ll always look back on very fondly and I feel like we actually did something. It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. We made something very much out of nothing, but I’m proud of it. One of the things I’m most proud of is our involvement with the Hero Initiative. We got really involved with a great charity and I’d say, very probably, in the last year, we helped raise over $3,000 for the Hero Initiative, and that’s something that really matters. HOUSTON: Chris and Tom, in the meantime, you both started new podcasts, as well. CHRIS: He started one. I got roped into one. TOM: I regret it. It takes a long time. HOUSTON: Do you want to say anything about Tom Versus the JLA? TOM: It’s masochistic. It’s painful. I’m really looking 18 | AROUND COMICS

forward to the Detroit era. I’ve been reading an issue a day and it gets really boring sometimes. I mean, it doesn’t take a lot of time to do. I’ll probably end up doing it again. It’s harder in the summer because there’s stuff to do. CHRIS: Do you have nightmares where Diana walks into your bedroom and says, “Tom, why aren’t you on monitor duty?” TOM: No, I don’t think about it that much. I forgot about it one day. I got all the way to midnight and I was like, “Oh, man. I didn’t do a show. I got to do this show. Ahh!” It’s fine. I think it’s funny when people ask me, “How long until you get caught up with 2008?” and I’m like, “Forget that.” [laughter] That’s not going to happen. It might be another 20 years before I get around to that. I sort of regret doing it five days a week. CHRIS: Do you work ahead? Get several in the can? TOM: No, no, no, no. CHRIS: Really? You’re hardcore. TOM: It gets boring, sitting in the room for hours talking to yourself. You sound like a lunatic. They’re like the last thing I do every day. You would think I would plan ahead, but I wait until the last possible minute, like an hour before I go to bed. HOUSTON: What issue are you up to now? TOM: Number 230. The next issue is a JLA/JSA crossover then after those two issues is Justice League Detroit, so I’m really looking forward to that. I can’t stop though. I’m so close. Imagine if I did the whole thing. HOUSTON: Did you start with issue one? TOM: I did a blog of it for a while, but that was just ponderous. CHRIS: You skipped over the Gardner Fox stuff. TOM: It’s the same story every time. Aliens invade. They figure something out. CHRIS: The characterization—there’s no difference between Green Lantern and the Flash. TOM: It’s pretty flat. People have asked if I’m going to go back and do the earlier ones and I’m like, “No.” I did 100 blog posts and I’ll do 100 episodes. CHRIS: And 11 O’Clock Comics was just a chance for me to talk to two of my buddies, Vince B. and David Price. We talk about comics every Wednesday at 11 o’clock and it’s nice for me because I don’t have to host, I just get to be snarky.

WORD BALLOON

John Siuntres is the host of Word Balloon, the comic book conversation show. A vocal fan of talent from the Silver Age to today, John’s guests on this one-on-one interview show have included everyone from comic legends like Marty Pasko and Denny O’Neil to modern super-stars like Brian Michael Bendis and Greg Rucka. On March 9, 2008, John and I talked about how he took his experience from years of radio broadcasting and created one of the most respected shows in not only the world of comic book podcasting, but in the comics industry as a whole.

HOUSTON: What is Word Balloon is all about? SIUNTRES: Word Balloon is primarily a one-on-one interview show where I speak to mostly comic book creators. I’ve dabbled occasionally in talking to Word Balloon host John Siuntres. Photo courtesy Pat Loika other podcasters and other people around the (patsketch.blogspot.com). comic book business, but, normally, I talk to writers Dick Tracy strip and many other comic books in his and artists and I discuss not only their current books career, and Brian Azzarello, the 100 Bullets guy, and I and current stories but the thought process behind the thought, “Gee, I really don’t want to see these things craft, especially writers. I think my having a broadcast go to waste,” and I thought it would be fun to put up a and writing background, I’m always curious about how website and start posting these interviews. Maybe these storytellers go through their paces in terms of people would come and listen to them. how they construct a story and some of their influI hadn’t actually heard of the term podcasting at that ences and just the ideas they have as they put the stopoint, and it wasn’t until a couple of months later ries together. when one of my listeners told me, “You know, you’re really just doing a podcast, why don’t you place it in HOUSTON: How did Word Balloon first come about? the normal sort of aggregate places, like Podcast Alley How did you get the idea? and iTunes and make it available, because this is realSIUNTRES: Well, I had a career in radio broadcasting ly starting to happen.” So it was about three months in and the primary focus of it has been talk. I was workthat I decided to really make it a podcast, and that’s ing at a sports talk network, Sporting News Radio when the listenership really started to get bigger. Network, and had gone from being an active reporter I think my first big boost in terms of getting people to suddenly finding myself behind the scenes and not was the convention season of 2005. I was at Wizard having the opportunities to do interviews. So, in the World Chicago and, at that point, I had maybe 20 intersummer of 2005, I decided to possibly make a video views and burned documentary where I would be talking about my city of a CD of MP3s of Chicago and a bunch of history—the writing in Chicago a bunch of them and the various mystery writers and I thought it would and sort of circube interesting to include a comic book component to lated them that, given that things like Dick Tracy started with The around a lot of Chicago Tribune and also modern people like Brian creators, guys Azzarello writing 100 Bullets and also the Moonstone like Greg Rucka Comics as well publishing some mystery and susand Brian Bendis, pense stuff. I thought it would be kind of interesting Mark Waid, peoand give it a sort of different spin than the traditional ple like that were kind of documentary. there, some of So I worked with a friend of mine who was a videothe top writers grapher and got about four interviews done and my and stuff, and I friend found himself too busy to continue the project. really wanted So I found myself sitting with these great interviews Noted crime fiction writer and Dick Tracy scribe Max Allan Collins was one something I that had already been conducted, among them an of John’s first guests on Word Balloon. could get in their interview with Max Allen Collins, who used to write the Photo by Alan Light.

THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 19

C R E A T O R

I N T E R V I E W

MATT FRACTION A frequent and highly entertaining guest in the podcasting world, rising star Matt Fraction is the writer of numerous Marvel Comics titles, including The Uncanny X-Men and The Invincible Iron Man, as well as the creator-owned Casanova from Image comics. Perhaps part of the reason that Fraction is such an excellent and willing podcast guest is that he is first and foremost a comics fan, having started his career as a blogger and message board regular. On March 29, 2008, Matt and I talked about his experiences with podcasts and his journey from Internet fan to comics professional. HOUSTON: What was the first time you were on a podcast? FRACTION: I want to say it was either John Siuntres with Word Balloon or the guys from Around Comics, who, I believe, are on a podcast sabbatical at the moment. HOUSTON: I’m pretty sure it was Around Comics, too. What was that experience like for you? FRACTION: It was great, far less formal than any kind of interview. You know what I mean? It’s much more casual, much more laid back. It kind of gives you the chance to talk and riff off the top of your head instead of crafting exact answers, which is another kind of trap for me doing written interviews. If I have a questionnaire I can rewrite, I will rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it, so I sort of immediately realized that I’d much rather appear on the phone with somebody for 15, 20 minutes, half an hour than noodle around with a 13-question essay form for three weeks, which I quite easily can do.

Frequent podcast guest Matt Fraction. Photo by Pat Loika. patsketch.blogspot.com

HOUSTON: Was that the first time you had heard of podcasting? FRACTION: No, no, I had heard of them sort of from the Internet, I suppose. I was listening to a couple of them for quite a while. I’d listened to Siuntres for a while and Around Comics I started listening to, I think, fairly early on. I have a friend who actually really has a podcast problem. He has an addiction where he has to find the time in the day to keep up with all of the podcasts that he listens to. But no, I was familiar with it and listened to several.

HOUSTON: You were on Around Comics a couple of times and, at one point, you made a bet regarding the destruction of St. Louis. FRACTION: Somebody put that on Wikipedia, actually. It was right around the [2006 Cubs versus Cardinals] World Series, and I’m from Chicago. I’m a Cubs fan, and my two favorite teams in baseball are the Cubs and whoever’s beating the Cardinals and they were clearly poised to win the World Series and I didn’t like that. The Around Comics guys were Cards fans, so, yeah, I threatened to turn St. Louis into basically the Kenny of Casanova, where St. Louis got destroyed again and again as punishment just for the Cardinals, but, apparently, just being the Cardinals was punishment enough for the Cardinals. They’d taken care of punishing themselves, but forever that’s on my Wikipedia entry. No mention of the Cubs stuff.

HOUSTON: With that first appearance, who contacted whom? Did you contact them? FRACTION: No, I was contacted. I’m really bad at that self-promotion stuff. I’m really bad with walking into a store and introducing myself to retailers. I’m really bad with that. It’s really tough for me to do. It was great to be asked, very much an honor in its way.

HOUSTON: Will we see that in an upcoming Casanova? FRACTION: Actually, I tried to work that into World War Hulk. I wanted my World War Hulk issue to take place in St. Louis. It was the same basic issue, but it would have taken place in St. Louis instead of New York. It ended up being this sort of thing where I went over

30 | MATT FRACTION

and over with my editor about if I understood the premise of World War Hulk or if the premise shifted, but it ended up being a New York-based story. HOUSTON: What other podcasts have you been on since Around Comics? FRACTION: A lot. My memory fails me at the moment. Comic Geek Speak, I’ve done. I guess Fanboy Radio is a radio show and not a podcast. I’ve been on Word Balloon a couple of times now. I’ll basically do whatever podcast I can. In fact, I’m doing one tomorrow or Tuesday, I think. I love it. Podcasts are the best. HOUSTON: Who are you appearing with on Tuesday? FRACTION: I’d have to check my e-mail. I’ve had a really overwhelmingly busy month, so I can’t remember off the top of my head. It’s been something like seven-and-a-half issues this month and my eyes are bleeding. HOUSTON: So that’s Casanova, Punisher War Journal… FRACTION: This month I wrote the entirety of or

finished issues of Casanova, The Order, Immortal Iron Fist, Invincible Iron Man, Thor: Ages of Thunder, Punisher War Journal, and Uncanny X-Men and then, on top of that, there were interviews, PR for Iron Man and X-Men. I did Wizard World LA, and I have a sixmonth-old son. It’s been a really busy month. It’s a high-class problem to have. I’m not actually complaining, but, man, I could really use a nap. HOUSTON: Does the experience of doing a podcast change from podcast to podcast for you? FRACTION: It’s interesting. It does. It’s clearly talking to someone who knows your work and is clearly excited to talk to you about it as opposed to someone who has no idea of who I am or what I’ve done but has kind of read an interview about an interview. You know what I mean? I often do podcasts that I don’t understand why I’m on. They’ve never read a word I’ve written. Then there’s another sort of podcast where, not only have they never read a word I’ve written, they just know that I know other, more famous people. They really want me to see if Ed Brubaker can call in or if I can get Warren Ellis to call in. That’s always embarrassing, being used as a stepping-stone. With those people, I’m just as polite as possible, fulfill my obligation, and then ignore them for the rest of my life. HOUSTON: Speaking of that, talking to people who know your work, you were on a really excellent Comic Geek Speak where your friend Geoff Klock interviewed you. FRACTION: Yeah, that was tremendous. I sort of started off with Casanova as an independent book, a small press book, so my ego really allowed me to go out and peek at reviews. Geoff had written a really amazing piece about it, really giving the book a lot of thought. So I contacted him just to thank him, because he put in so much thought and effort writing these really well written, really funny, over the top, hyperbolic pieces about Casanova. So, when Casanova volume two was going to launch, I thought, “This will be great. I can sort of nerd out with Geoff for a while about the book,” and that was what we did with this very long, very crazy discussion about Casanova. HOUSTON: Now your career sort of started out on the Internet, right? FRACTION: Exactly.

HOUSTON: And that was writing articles for Comic Book Resources? Yeah, before that I started a sort of proto-blog called Savant that was really more a webzine than a blog, and that was sort of the reason I stopped doing it was the realization that we needed to update it daily instead of putting out seven articles, ten articles once a week instead of one a day. So, yeah, we sort of had

THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 31

creators. Brian K. Vaughn, on his board, announced the first year that he won “Best Near Queer Creator” and the fact that we characterize him as Kermit the Frog, which he is.

talk about, say, relationships, but you don’t seem at all afraid to talk about your relationships to your fans, or anything else. In fact, I think one of you even gave out their home phone number over the air. HOUSTON: How many STEVIE: Yeah, Eric gave listeners do you have? out his home phone ERIC: Like six or seven, number. I think it’s just I would say. because of that whole Realistically, and it idea of fostering a comvaries, we get at minimunity and feeling like, if Steve and Eric with listener Charles “Zan” mum 1,000 downloads we can’t talk about our Christensen of Prism Comics (www.prismcomics.org). a week. Every so often, personal lives on the Courtesy Charles Christensen. we’ll drift into the top show, how can we expect ten iTunes comic book podcasts, which is really amazour listeners to think of us as part of their circle of ing. Outside of the books section, that’s the thing that friends? makes me really hopeful about America. We have ERIC: Part of being queer is being out, you know what quite a few listeners and quite a few of them are I mean? We’ll talk about things when the mic is on straight guys. that are frank and personal and invite other people to participate in it, HOUSTON: That’s and it works for something I us. wanted to ask you about. Is it a HOUSTON: How pretty even did that work out straight/gay for you, giving out split? your phone numERIC: We have no ber? Did you get way of knowing any calls? because iTunes ERIC: None. Not doesn’t tell us. one. I think when I STEVIE: One of put my phone the reasons why number out there, we always joke it’s like, “No way.” about having a People didn’t majority of straight believe it. If listeners is that’s there’s going to Steve and frequent co-host Brett with listeners and contributors Jason Tucker and Jeff M. Ward at the 2008 Windy City Comic Con. the people we be some sort of were hearing from event around conwere the actual straight listeners. We were getting evention time, we’ll give out our phone number to all mails from people saying things like, “I’m married, but the people on the boards and start to organize things. you guys are really funny and I love comics and I It’s made convention time really great because we heard about you from Around Comics,” so we just sort know that, like this year, we got people from of ran with it. Plus, who is buying comics at our age? Minneapolis. I think next year the N3RDcast guys will Married straight men. come down. We’re out there to meet people and make friends, so you’ve got to do things like get your HOUSTON: It seems like you have a pretty close phone number out there. relationship with your fans. STEVIE: Well, not that close. There are some restrainHOUSTON: What can fans look forward to from ing orders. Comic Book Queers? STEVIE: Thy can look forward to a lot more episodes HOUSTON: You’re also really open with your fans. recorded in the nude. We’re not really making any While there are other podcasts like that, The claims for the future. We didn’t expect to be around this long. Crankcast, for instance, they will draw a line and not 44 | COMIC BOOK QUEERS

THE CRANKCAST Sometimes referred to as the Seinfeld of podcasts, The Crankcast is an amazingly funny show about nothing. Frequent topics include not only comics but TV, movies, pizza places, car troubles, and even the hunt for a cheap air conditioner, all discussed in a stream of consciousness style that makes fans feel as though they are listening not to a podcast, but to a conversation between two old friends, which, of course, is exactly what The Crankcast is. Perhaps more importantly to comic fans, these two friends are also both industry professionals. Mike Norton is the artist of such DC comics as Green Arrow/Black Canary and The All-New Atom, while co-host Chris Crank is a letterer and sometime cover artist for books like Tim Seeley’s Hack/Slash. On May 5, 2008, Mike, Crank, and I discussed their show’s origins, cult following, and its warts-and-all window into the day-to-day life of a comics professional.

HOUSTON: How did you two meet? CRANK: I first met Mike at Mid-Ohio Con in, like, 2001? NORTON: I don’t know dates. I’m bad with dates. Is that when we met? CRANK: It was 2002 or 2001. NORTON: Was it love at first sight? CRANK: It was. NORTON: No, it wasn’t. CRANK: No, I knew Mike Norton was a guy I wanted to know. NORTON: That sounds even gayer. [laughter]

A rare picture of Crankcast hosts Mike Norton and Chris Crank together. Photo courtesy David Glenn.

CRANK: No, it was like 2000 or 2001. It was Mid-Ohio Con and I had already been working for Devil’s Due at that point and Mike just knew [Devil’s Due President] Josh [Blalock] from cons and stuff. NORTON: Yeah, I’d seen him around at shows off and on. He’d been talking to me about him starting this company. Not even starting a company, but getting the G.I. Joe license and stuff. We sort of shared rooms a lot. You know how you find someone to split costs and stuff, and then when I met Crank was when he had started the company already. CRANK: Yeah, and I was there at Devil’s Due when G.I. Joe was starting. I guess when we met we went to a few bars and stuff and that’s how I first met Mike. It must have been 2001, because, when 2002 rolled around, he’d moved up to Chicago and started working at Devil’s Due. NORTON: I have no recollection of all of this. HOUSTON: How did the idea of doing The Crankcast come about? NORTON: It was kind of my idea. I listen to a lot of shows while I’m working, while I’m drawing all day. I can’t remember exactly anymore where I first got turned on to them. I think the first show I was listening to was Comic Geek Speak and Word Balloon was around then, too, but I was really excited about them. I wasn’t just listening to comic podcasts, either. I went up to Devil’s Due one day and I was just sort of going around saying how cool they were and telling Sam Wells he needed to do one. His wife was an improv actress and I told him that they should do one because it would be funny and I just seriously was looking for more content to listen to while I was drawTHE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 45

networking and new media. That’s what it’s all becoming. We’ve just got to get it to the average fan out there to let them know that these other avenues exist where you can get more information and connect with people they may not realize even existed before.

More podcasters! Clockwise from left, Matt of Comic Geek Speak, Chris Marshall, Josh Finney and Kat Rocha, creators of The Utopiates comic book, CGS’ Peter Rios, Mr. Phil and Charlito of Indie Spinner Rack, Jamie D, and Adam Murdough from CGS. Photo courtesy Comic Geek Speak. © Copyright 2009 Comic Geek Speak.

that makes it a lot easier. When I go on Chris’ show, we’re just sitting back in a comic book store recording and it’s just real easy to talk. That’s all. It’s kind of a no-brainer because we speak the same language. We speak comic book language and we speak podcasting language. It’s just very comfortable. HOUSTON: Since you’ve been with podcasting almost since the beginning, what opinions have you developed about the medium? MARSHALL: The medium is definitely more social and definitely more reaching out to the masses, and, as I said earlier, we, as podcasters, have an obligation to that and to reach out to other people. When you’re sitting around a table on a round table forum and it’s just four or five guys drinking beer with a microphone talking about comics, that doesn’t help comics and it doesn’t help podcasting. You’ve really got to go out there and talk to people who don’t know Chris takes it easy after a long day anything about this of podcasting. Photo courtesy technology and really Comic Geek Speak. © Copyright 2009 Comic Geek Speak. let them know about everything. Let them know about Facebook, let them know about Twitter, and let them know about RSS feeds and podcasting. Let them know about social 88 | TWOMORROWS TUNE-IN

HOUSTON: Do you think podcasting has a future and, if so, what is it? MARSHALL: I think it does have a future. I think a lot of it is going more video these days and vidcasting and, if you go to iTunes and you go to the podcasting page, it’s all corporate. It’s all PBS, NBC, and ESPN. It’s good, but it’s bad. Podcasting, especially for me, was a homegrown thing that was grown in your basement. It’s not just taking a TV show and rebroadcasting it or even a segment of a radio show like This American Life. It’s a radio show and Pardon the Interruption is a TV show on ESPN. It’s not podcasting. It’s going to take some time, but I think there is stuff out there, especially for really niche audiences like comic books or music, really the arts like that, and I think it can exist, but, like I said, it’s going to take a large amount of people to really, really push it, and it’s good when you see more companies like Ford and IBM embracing these technologies. That’s only going to reach out to other people and say, “Hey, I’m listening to this podcast from Ford. What other podcasts are out there?” and it’s going to make them dive really deep into iTunes and websites and their aggregators and find out that there’s a whole other world of other interests that are out there that people will seek out and find. HOUSTON: Podcasts seem fairly easy to start, too. It’s not terribly time-consuming or expensive. I think it’s a much easier fan medium to start than, say, a fanzine. MARSHALL: The costs involved are minimal, but, besides the cost of getting a mic and a mixer and good software, it’s the time investment. That’s where it really comes in. Can you do it every week on a regular basis, staying on topic and getting a good quality show out there? Don’t expect to have an audience in the first year. Don’t expect to get money, and what money you may get in the next few years is going to be very minimal sponsor-wise. You’re doing it for the love of comics. I didn’t get into it because I had sponsors or wanted to get free comics. I wanted to have an outlet for my interests in collected editions and I know people share my same interests. If you build it, they will come, and they have.

PIPELINE POD CAST On January 5th, 2005, Augie De Blieck Jr. launched The Pipeline Podcast, the first true comic book podcast. It’s four years and more than 200 episodes later and Augie is still going strong, offering news and opinions on each week’s new comic releases. Along with his written Pipeline column at Comic Book Resources, the podcast gives Augie the chance to express his comic reviews and opinions, just as he did during his days as a noted letter-hack in the 1990s. Augie took a couple of hours away from his new baby daughter to talk about his show, the podcasting medium, and how things have changed since his early days in comics fandom.

HOUSTON: We’ll get to our podcast in a couple of minutes, Augie, but this seems like a good opportunity to talk about comics fandom prior to the Internet, especially since your first real exposure to the world of comics fandom was through letter-hacking. DE BLIECK: Yeah. I started letter-hacking in 1991, I think. 1991 or 1992, somewhere in there. HOUSTON: What is a letter-hack? DE BLIECK: letterhacks are those people who were the most frequent letter writers back when comics would have that page in the back where fans would write in and editors would answer questions or just print positive letters from fans. Pipeline Podcast host Augie De There was a subset of Blieck, Jr. All images in this chapthose fans, the letterter courtesy Augie De Blieck, Jr., hacks, who basically unless otherwise noted. hacked out letters week after week and month after month. I was one of them for pretty much all of the ’90s and had about 400 printed over the course of those ten years and a little bit into the 2000s, but, as the letters columns really aren’t around anymore, there really aren’t any letter-hacks left. HOUSTON: How did you become a letter-hack? DE BLIECK: That’s a good question. I decided I wanted to be part of the comics, I guess, in some small way. I had writing aspirations back then and I knew I could string together sentences in a coherent manner, so I started writing letters. That was back in the day when I would print the letters out on my Commodore 64 printer and had to actually mail those in. A dot

matrix printer, by the way. I had to use a stamp and everything. There was no e-mail back then. So it was a matter of sitting myself down after reading a comic book and writing, in retrospect, like a couple of hundred words in a letter and sending that in and hoping that, maybe, three months later, you might see your name in there and, more often than not, you didn’t. The hit rate on letters printed versus letters written was not always a great ratio. If you’re writing five letters and you got one printed, you were in pretty good shape back then. HOUSTON: What books did you write to? DE BLIECK: At first, the Star Trek comic books over at DC. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation had both started out the previous year and I was sort of a regular in those letter columns and I had a few letters printed in Marvel Comics Presents. The big spot I got my letters printed was in The Savage Dragon, over at Image, where I pretty much had a letter printed every issue for about the first hundred issues or so, starting in issue six, I think it was. I had some printed in some of the duck books, too, which, I believe at that point Disney Comics was publishing themselves, before they went back to Gemstone, but the first comic that was my main home was definitely the Star Trek comics and then Savage Dragon was my home for the ’90s. HOUSTON: Why those books specifically? DE BLIECK: I don’t know. There was also a definite sense of community involved there more than anything else. I think, to a certain degree, they were accessible. DC Comics, back in the early ’90s, had two-page letters columns, so they printed more letters and, if they printed more letters, your chances of having a letter printed were higher. I had some early hits [at DC]. I don’t think I ever wrote more than three or four letters before the first one there was printed, so that kind of encouraged me along. Savage Dragon had even bigger returns THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 89

means I can take my time, and when I can take my time, I do better work. If I have to knock it out real quick, then it shows, and I try to be as honest and fair to the purchaser as I would be to my own family and try to get them a good one for their money. HOUSTON: That’s great to hear and I’ve certainly enjoyed hearing you interviewed on Comic Geek Speak and Around Comics. COLAN: Yeah. HOUSTON: Would you like to appear on more shows? COLAN: Oh, sure. I’m always open to interviews. It’s always a pleasure to tell stories about the business to young people coming up who want to know—who you got along with and who you didn’t and how did the editors treat you. There’s good and bad in all businesses and where the editors are difficult to deal with, but sometimes you get lucky and get a couple of editors who aren’t difficult to deal with, but, like everything else, there’s always someone to answer to. Hopefully, you’ll get somebody that’s really nice. You know, it’s a difficult business. You’re literally tied to the board. I mean, your whole life just goes by. I just want to tell you it’s very hard to have a family and watch them grow up and, actually, you’re more married to your work than you are to your family and that’s a big mistake. So much of us are caught up in the work we have to put out that we’re not too much aware of the time or the day or the hour or even the year. HOUSTON: It’s been great to hear your perspective on this. 106 | GENE COLON

He may be 81 years old, but Gene Colan’s pencils are more dynamic than ever, as seen in this amazing Iron Man commission. Courtesy Heritage Comics Auctions (www.ha.com). © Copyright 2009 Marvel Characters, Inc.

COLAN: [The Internet] has been wonderful to me. An awful lot of hard work, though. Well, no, it’s not so hard if you enjoy it. You have to enjoy it, no matter what it may be.

COMIC GEEK SPEAK Over the past four years, Philadelphia’s Comic Geek Speak has quickly grown into one of the most popular, and certainly the most prolific, comic book podcasts. Each and every week, Peter Rios, Bryan Deemer, Shane Kelly Mulholland, Matt, Adam Murdough, Jamie D, and Brian “Pants” Christman put out more shows than most other podcasters do in a month, each one filled with terrific insights about the world of comics, as well as a terrific sense of humor and the sort of chemistry that only exists among close friends. On April 6, 2008, these so-called speakers of geek were kind enough to take time away from uniting the world’s greatest heroes, one listener at a time, to talk about their show. HOUSTON: As we record this interview, Comic Geek Speak just celebrated another anniversary. BRYAN: Correct, our three years’.

Comic Geek Speak clockwise from left, Matt, Bryan Deemer, Brian Christman, Peter Rios, Jamie D, former member Kevin, Shane Kelly Mulholland, and Adam Murdough. All photos in this chapter courtesy Comic Geek Speak, unless otherwise noted. © Copyright 2009 Comic Geek Speak.

HOUSTON: How many episodes is that? BRYAN: Well, 400 numbered episodes, but we actually have over 500 episodes when you include all the various specials and such that we did. HOUSTON: I counted them up and came up with 534. PANTS: Oh, my God. BRYAN: That sounds about right. HOUSTON: That’s a hell of a lot of episodes. How have you done it? When so many other podcasts have come and gone, how have you not only stayed together, but also produced so many episodes? BRYAN: I’m sure Peter will have something to say on this too, but I’ll start off saying that I think the reason that we’re still producing episodes is simply because we’re friends. It’s fun to get together with or without the microphones, so having the microphones is an excuse to get together on a regular basis. I think if the podcast ended tomorrow, we wouldn’t see each other two or three times a week like we do now, and then seeing each other once a week would turn into once every two weeks and that would turn into once every three weeks and then life would start getting in the way more and more. As long as we have the podcast as a constant, it forces us to get together on a regular basis, which is a good thing. Peter, do you want to handle how we got to do so many episodes? PETER: A lot of it is just that there’s so much to talk about and so many people to talk to. There’s never a shortage of creators and never a shortage of good books to talk about and recommend and every week

something new excites us and every week we discover something else or somebody else and it just got to the point where we had the content to do five episodes a week, so let’s just do five episodes a week, like a real radio show. We’re on every day, for those listeners that listen to us at work especially. It’s funny, we’ve been doing this now for a few weeks and nobody has said anything. It’s like they assumed it’s been coming. HOUSTON: It seems like, if not five, it’s always been at least two or three episodes a week. BRYAN: Well, the first day that we ever recorded, Peter and I sat down and recorded two episodes back to back because it just seemed like, well, again, there was so much to talk about and if we were getting together… That’s the thing, we have to make an effort to get together, so, when we’re together, rather than just record one episode, which would be kind of a waste of time, we might as well record two or three, so if we’re going to get together one day a week, we may as well record two episodes and, at the beginning, that’s what we did. We’d just record two episodes and we said, “Okay. I’ll see you next week.” Then two became three and one day a week became two days a week and two episodes just becomes five and that’s how it just naturally progressed. HOUSTON: You talked about all being friends and having been friends and I think that comes across in each episode, but it begs the question: how did you all meet? JAMIE: It kind of goes back to when I was working with Bryan, back when he was 15, at a frozen yogurt THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 107

BRYAN: And I met Shane and Peter when we started doing Crusaders because Kevin and Mike knew you guys and we all got pulled together, and Matt just showed up at one Halloween party and that’s how I met him. MATT: Alex I’d met, who worked at Golden Eagle, and he took me to Shane’s to watch Star Wars, and then five years later I got back into the group. PETER: I remember Matt from Golden Eagle, actually. BRYAN: I met Murd in 1995 at a musical. ADAM: Exactly ten years after that, I ended up getting recruited into Comic Geek Speak. It’s almost like a cosmic event. SHANE: I’ve known various guys here for the better part of twelve years now and we started by hanging out and watching movies and playing games and it’s continued. What we talk about here is what we talk about there. HOUSTON: When you decided to do the podcast, was that Bryan’s idea? BRYAN: I read that fateful article in Wired magazine, February 2005. That started it all.

store in 1989. We got to be friends and we started talking about comics. I knew he was into comics. I even sold him some comics, X-Factors. BRYAN: Yeah, I bough your full run of X-Factor. JAMIE: We stayed friends even after I left there and got a job at the comic store. Bryan had left [the frozen yogurt store] and was looking for another parttime job, so I went to my boss and said I knew somebody who was good. Boom. He got hired there and we’ve been friends ever since. And the rest of the guys have been customers. Most all of us got together either through relatives or the shop. It seems like Golden Eagle is the one constant in our lives that kind of brought us together and we basically became friends out of that. There were other side projects that people had done, Crusaders and things like that. We kind of got together as a group of friends and it went from there. BRYAN: Jamie and I were friends first. Well, Matt and Murd’s friendship may have extended before ’89. ADAM: We’ve known each other for twenty years. BRYAN: We knew Kevin from working at the store, so then we knew Kevin. PETER: I knew Kevin from Golden Eagle, but also from doing the shows that we did together. SHANE: I knew Peter from Golden Eagle, hanging out on Wednesdays and met Kevin and Jamie and Matt. BRYAN: Then Pants I knew from shopping at Golden Eagle way back when. SHANE: And I knew Pants from working at Toys ’R’ Us. 108 | COMIC GEEK SPEAK

HOUSTON: Who hosted the first few episodes? BRYAN: Peter and I were solo for the first two and Shane was on the third? SHANE: Kevin was on the fourth. Jamie was on the fifth. PETER: Matt’s first show was the seventh. SHANE: Brian’s was 154? PANTS: About a year-and-a-half later. SHANE: Murd’s was Batman Begins. PETER: It was Bryan and I, and these guys would come in randomly here and there. It was weird because these guys would be in the room and we’d record two episodes and only bring one person on at a time. It was really kind of strange. JAMIE: I don’t think we had enough microphones. That was the problem. MATT: It was like we were being drafted. PETER: And we did do some regular duo episodes, and it wasn’t until episode 25 where we decided, from here on in, we’ll treat it as a group. Then in episode 36 we changed the opening from Bryan and I with special guests to whoever was on the episode. Everybody would just say their own names. BRYAN: That seems like such a monumental decision to decide to do it that way. JAMIE: The funny thing is, when you think about it, now, episode 25, to put out 25 episodes is, what, two weeks worth of work? Back then it was only two episodes at a time. HOUSTON: Hearing you talk, you get this picture of the show taking some time to come together, but I listened to some old episodes, like episode 20, which is the cartoon theme song episode, and, really, you guys already sounded like a well-oiled machine. BRYAN: That’s a great episode.

SHANE: One of my favorites. BRYAN: We kind of got lucky with the whole podcasting thing. We started early, which was a benefit because we got out there when there wasn’t as much competition, but also we just kind of walked into it in that when we get together it’s very gregarious, it’s very natural, and we’re all at ease with each other. That comes off in the episodes and it’s a chemistry that you can’t sit down and create on paper. It just kind of happens and we didn’t expect it to happen. We can’t change it. It’s just us. It is who we are and that’s just the way the episodes end up. JAMIE: You can’t explain it. We just all play well off each other. It’s weird to say we have comedy timing, but we do. It’s just something natural and it constantly goes back to the fact that we are friends and it’s just us talking to one another. We do this stuff all the time when we talk to one another. We even get dirtier when the mic isn’t in front of us. PANTS: We work blue. SHANE: I think Pants would still be called Pants if we’d never done the show. That would have come out. HOUSTON: Do you feel like you each bring a specific, unique quality to the show or is it more a question of the group dynamic? ADAM: We are a rainbow of geekiness. Each of us contributes something different to the spectrum, but we all come together to create a unified whole. JAMIE: I like the idea that we’re some kind of podcast Voltron. [laughter] PETER: Actually, the best judge of that question is actually the listeners. They’re the ones that have probably the most specific idea of the roles that we play or the roles that they see us as. They all have differences in their opinions or who they gravitate towards, but they’re pretty spot-on in saying what roles we bring to the cast as a whole. JAMIE: It all has to do with our age differences and our voices. If it’s happened once, it’s happened twenty times, where someone will come up to me and say they listen to me because I’m the older voice and it’s usually somebody who’s in my age group, late thirties, early forties, that they like to listen to me because I bring wisdom—I don’t want to say wisdom because I don’t want to toot my own horn. People come up to Shane and Pants and people say they love them because of their toys. Murd and Peter usually get the trivia geeks. Bryan gets the people who like his point of view as far as straightforward storytelling. Matt gets all the smartasses who just want to say what he says and just can’t. But Peter’s right. It is the listeners who really hit us head on. PETER: A lot of times we’ll get feedback from the listeners at the beginning of a new year and a lot of things I always see are things like they like Shane’s approach to the show because he’s not one to be controversial, but they enjoy it because they’re sort of

like him. They enjoy comics for what they are and he just says what he likes or says what he doesn’t like and that’s his point of view. They’ll say about Matt what Jamie said about Matt, but they like that about Matt not only because he’s funny but also because he sticks to his guns and there’s some truth behind what he’s saying. The listeners really do have a deeper knowledge of who we are. There are times when Brian “Pants” Christman wearing some of us have been the sweatshirt that gained him called stubborn. They his nickname. © Copyright 2009 Comic know that we’re not Geek Speak going to get out of the opinions that we have and they like that or they don’t like that. So that’s a question definitely for the listeners. SHANE: Or take something like the DMZ discussion. Bryan and Jamie like so many things almost across the board and then there’s one thing where they are total opposites of the entire world on and it’s a laugh riot to listen to them argue about it back and forth. PETER: And that’s the sort of episode that throws listeners off because they just assume we’re going to blanket like something because that’s the way the river flows, you know? Then we throw in an episode like that, and we don’t do it on purpose, but it makes everybody go, “Oh, yeah, they do have their own opinions.” ADAM: Listeners seem to almost enjoy the episodes where we disagree the most.

THE COMIC BOOK PODCAST COMPANION | 109