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Overview
The script reflects on a feeling of monotony in current media discussions and shares memorable experiences that break this pattern. It recalls a striking encounter with a woman exuding charisma and a creative Halloween duo portraying iconic characters. The speaker also discusses the appeal of unique, home-assembled costumes versus store-bought ones and mentions the comedic value in movies like ‘Shaun of the Dead.’ There’s a comparison to music concerts and a mention of the ‘Joker 2’ movie being a musical. Finally, the speaker laments the loss of regularly buying comics, reminiscing about the joy of the search and the once-in-a-decade opportunity to find rare editions.
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Transcription
[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Stephen: So while you’re adjusting your prettiness my background.
Alan: Yes.
Stephen: Created right before this with the AI in zoom. Now,
Alan: that’s very cool. I should have thought of doing a Halloween thing myself. That I [00:01:00] will have to look into that. All right.
Stephen: All I did there. Is that better? You can hear me
Alan: better.
Yes.
Stephen: All I did was I was looking for a background and it had the AI with the little box, so I just said, ah, give me a spooky Halloween cemetery. Bam, there it is. Now I got a background. And it, no copyright, worries until somebody actually sues and, whatever. That’s all another thing.
Alan: My appearance, I’m just trying to in settings somewhere, create your avatar. No, I have a green screen. I’m not virtual background. Maybe they don’t like Mac. It could be that, that it only runs on certain platforms. Yeah, I’m not seeing it for me, so I’ll stick with the colors there.
Stephen: That could be a a a corporate thing.
Microsoft might have said, here’s Zoom, we’ll give you this much money if you allow this only on Windows for X amount of time. As
Alan: we’ve laughed about, there still are things that either come out like much earlier or never for certain platforms. And what’s weird is you and I know how many of [00:02:00] the gaming engines and how you can really do things now wonderfully to be able to go cross platform with a minimum of isolate the I.
O. and all that kind of stuff. And yet there’s money to be found in making things exclusive. All the things that are going on, the fragmentation of the market for what channel something is on, and that now you need to have a Roku box or any Amazon has a whole thing now where you watch Amazon Prime Video, and maybe a tenth of their content is Amazon.
It’s all the other things, and sometimes there’s little charges, and sometimes you have to log in to make sure you get max. It’s cool to be an aggregator, but There, that whatever has happened to make it so that there’s ebb and flow. Hey, we used to have to pay for a big bundle, and then they unbundled, and now you have to pay for every single channel, so it’s the same as if you, and you have to do a little spreadsheet to say, am I paying?
72 total here, or is it worth getting the 66 package? Cause I save a little bit of money, but then I get things I don’t [00:03:00] want and all of it.
Stephen: And what it turns out, cause I, I pay for all of that and what it turns out is I’m like, okay, I don’t remember the last time I was on Netflix or this. And I’m like, so I was thinking, I can’t, and my mother goes, oh I was watching NCIS, so I’ll try and watch it real quick.
And I’m like, Don’t worry about it. Just go ahead. It’s gonna take you five years to watch all the NCIS. We’ll just keep the channel,
Alan: it’s funny, Alina and I look for things we can watch together. You know what I mean? I tend to like my science fiction or whatever, and she likes, we have different tastes in some ways.
But it’s a really nice thing when you say, oh, not only is it something we both want, but there’s six seasons of it. You’ve got, 78 episodes left to go. We’ve been watching The Rookie, and now we’re there’s no new rookies until January or something like that, and there’s got to be, someone’s got to come up with the right term, either a sniglet or a psychological term for, you binge something, and then it’s gone, and you have to wait for a while, and whatever that,
Oh,
Stephen: And
Alan: so
Stephen: I’m eagerly anticipating. [00:04:00] Okay. I got two things. I got a situation and this just, it’s an aggravating blow my mind thing. And you, especially of all people will totally understand this. So my uncle found a box of books, comic books from when he was a kid, we’re talking fifties in the sixties Looney tunes and Disney.
Alan: That’s old enough to be interesting and valuable, depending on what it is,
Stephen: they’re not pristine and mint condition, but they are really good. He hasn’t had them in bags and boards, but they’ve been in this box sealed in a good location for literally 5560 years. Hasn’t been talking
Alan: like Capone’s vault type stuff.
Nobody has touched it for a long time. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. They’re not again. They’re not, Oh, let’s put this up at South B’s auction that type level, but looking at them like, wow, these are in really good condition. They’re not falling apart or anything. And he’s I, these have been sitting around, maybe I’ll just get rid of them.
Colin said, Oh, I’d love to look at those. [00:05:00] He said, okay, we’ll see how much they are. And Colin said, okay. I’ll warn you with Looney Tunes, Disney, the old stuff. Yes, it’s old. It’s cool, but there’s not a lot of guys that collect it. There’s not a lot of people that buy it. So
Alan: resale value for a lot of that stuff, unless it’s original Karl Barks, like not from the sixties, but from the forties or something.
Okay.
Stephen: There might be a few, one or two because of a certain artist or something. But, and my uncle’s response was, Oh, if we get a dollar a book, that’s more than I had before, which is great. That sounds reasonable. Let’s take a look. Colin looked through it and he says, eh, there’s none that stand out as, oh my God, everybody looks for this.
But he knows a guy that’s all he does is collect those type of books and specializes.
Colin said, just setting the expectation. About a hundred bucks is what i would say the whole collection is worth everything a hundred bucks should i tell my guy and have him come down my uncle’s yeah go ahead tell him come down the guy drove an hour over an hour to get to look at the you know come to the store look at the books he’s looking at says i’ll give you a hundred fifty four [00:06:00] well that’s fifty dollars more than we said.
He goes, Oh no, I was hoping to get 500. You have no idea of what they’re worth. You haven’t touched them in years, but you think they’re worth 500. How do you think? So he said, no, I’m not going to sell them. I’ll just maybe give them the neighbors or something so that we’re going, the world is going to lose these.
They’re going to get destroyed and disappear. And that sickens my heart.
Alan: We’ve talked about this before. When you read about they’re doing current things, when one country attacks the other, one of the things they do is bomb the library. Library of Alexandra type law. And that’s, I’ve seen things, it’s sad.
We’re going to Detroit tomorrow, as a matter of fact, to go see Electroploid Orchestra with Jeff Lynne leading. Very cool. One of the it’s not a meme, it’s just a picture on the net, was of a a library that had been closed and abandoned, not cleared out, and not turned into another thing. Of course the roof [00:07:00] leaked, it leaked, and of course the water got in, and all these books I guess vandals got in and knocked him off the shelves.
So there’s a huge pile, sea of books, all water damage. Yeah. And it was just, my heart hurts. You know what I mean? That’s just so much. Not what should happen to good books should happen to a library. And that’s just such a wow. Civilization really took a left fucking turn to let that happen.
Stephen: But here’s the inspirational story.
I saw a thing, a story. I think it was Czechoslovakia, maybe that they were garbage men that they started saying, you know what, people just throw books out. We see books all the time. So they started rescuing them, cleaning them up and they made a library. Anybody in the community could come and get them.
Alan: Thank you. Cause I saw that same heartening story and that I was going to go there and then that’s really no, that’s fantastic though. Because that’s just what, for everyone, the heartbreaking case, there’s also I don’t know, a lady. [00:08:00] Retired, and she decided that she wanted to have people, especially kids, reading.
In retirement, she’s running like her bookmobile. Remember when those used to come around? They’d go from school to school, and they’d borrow two books. Colleen actually has a heartbreaking story of, she borrowed a book that before she knew how to read cursive, she didn’t realize the book was in cursive.
And out of her precious two books for that month, One of them was unreadable. It’s you could Rosetta Stone it. You could figure it out if you knew enough about, I think it was Babar or something like that, the, Babar the Elephant. But what a wonderful thing.
Everywhere this lady goes, she’s making people’s hearts sing. You know what I mean? It’s all tied together. I don’t know why this is. I went Cleveland Area Mensa had a discussion group on Saturday morning, went and visited, and then after I cut out, I went to the Bay Village area library, part of the Cuyahoga library system, because I’ll be speaking there in December on our, a capital idea.
It’s finally Colleen and I are doing the travelogue of all the state capitals that we visited over the last 20 years. 14 [00:09:00] out of 50. I go in, and I check out the room, and it’s just what I expected. It’s got one of those like overhead projectors that’s mounted to the ceiling, but then the cabling comes up through the big conference room, and you project on the screen, so good.
As long as I have HDMI, I’m compatible, because sometimes you go to an older library, and it’s I gotta bring my Adapter magic kit because I’m really not sure they’re going to be Windows oriented instead of Mac or they’re going to be just so old that you hope you have the nine pin instead of the 15
Stephen: version or whatever else I’m babbling just throw a screen and projector in your car.
Just in case
Alan: I’ve done that. I actually have my backup stuff so that if worse comes to worse, or you’re like, I’m sure I’ll be able to find a wall or even like the curtain. Of course, while I was there. I went and visited their comic books and graphic novels section, and they had, I’m behind, perpetually behind, because I’m not currently buying.
So I found all kinds of stuff. I’ll read the latest Hulk and the latest Doctor Strange and whatever else it might be. And so I muscled this stack. I don’t get a few. I get like a stack of [00:10:00] 25 or 30 comics. I’m at the checkout counter, and a dad comes in with his three kids sons and two daughters and a son, if I remember right, and they don’t walk in.
They thunder in because they can’t wait to get to this treasure that is the library. And I love that. And I even mentioned, to the lady that was helping me check out, is there any more heartening sight in the world? And kids are not only losing themselves in their phone they’re reading.
They’re really reading. That’s great. And they’re just can’t wait. They were
Stephen: running and giggling. And oh, it was just so good. So not really a change in topic, but talking about kids and getting that curmudgeonly. When I was a kid so Saturday I was out at the sinister horror fest at the Skyway drive in very fun little fast.
If you like horror related stuff, it’s a growing festival. It’s. Second year twice as big as it was last year. They have
Alan: books and music and makeup and I don’t even know Okay, so
Stephen: it had a little some [00:11:00] of that there were some independent horror film People, there’s some actors and directors.
They did have a band come in and play. They did do a costume contest. They did trick or treating. They did pumpkin carving. They had vendors. And then at night they had two screens, like a drive in and they showed horror movies. I got the watch experience. That’s great. Yeah, it’s a good little festival, but for the trick or treat.
There were so many kids that came up and had no costume on whatsoever, and I’m thinking I really want to say go away, you really can’t but they would come up and look in the bag. It says you got to say trick or treat first. They’re looking at me like, yeah, really? I’m like. You don’t get candy unless you say trick or treat.
Honestly, at least maintain that shred of the tradition. Yes, exactly. If you want
Alan: cartwheel, you’re asking him to say trick or treat. There was one
Stephen: girl that nailed it so much and I loved her immensely. She was dressed up as Wednesday from the Addams Family.
Alan: Sure. And it
Stephen: was [00:12:00] more from the 90s TV show and the black and white in the 60s or whatever.
It was a little bit of a combo of each, but they were pretty close to the same. So
Alan: I think the pigtails exact, okay.
Stephen: Yeah. The dress, but what sold it. She was so into this. She comes walking down back straight, looking straight ahead. Dead pan face turns into my booth, walks up, staring me directly in the eye.
And then just looks down, grabs a piece of candy. Drops it in her bucket, like looking at me the whole time. That’s back two steps and does this like really stiff curtsy, turns around and walks out. I love that you nailed it so much. That’s
Alan: so great.
Stephen: Better yet. After she got done trick or treating, and the family’s just walking around looking at stuff, she maintained it, kept the dead man face, and was carrying a cigar, a fake cigar, and acting like she’s smoking it the whole time.
Like Gomez,
Alan: exactly. Oh my god, kid, you are [00:13:00] amazing.
Stephen: I love that. Yeah, so that one girl was very heartening. Then there was A mother and a son doing Pennywise with the the kid and
Alan: Georgie exactly. The
Stephen: mother was Georgie in the rain slicker with a paper boat. And the kid was Pennywise face hair done up and carrying a red balloon.
He was good. He looked really good. He must’ve sat for a while and it wasn’t a, I went to the store and bought a costume. It was, we found pieces and put it together and did our face up. Those are the good ones. Those are the ones I like.
Alan: Wonderful. I think I mentioned last year, we got fewer, uh, trick or treaters than we’ve had in all the time that I’ve been in Lakewood.
And, what’s weird is we have our porch light on, we have the front door open, we’re showing we’re home. Because a lot of times we haven’t been, because we’ve been at Halloween, the big Halloween party in Chicago. We got 150 pack from Costco, and I, I’m ready to go, and like anybody that comes up, it’s we’ll take two, I’m not going to give all these away with a number of things.
And people would like to stop at the sidewalk and come up to the house. [00:14:00] And you’re gonna make me come out to you? You’re gonna I really don’t understand. A lot of times the kids don’t go out by themselves. The parents are with them. And I don’t know. Our house is not foreboding. It doesn’t look like someone’s going to jump out at you or that we’re the weirdos of the block or anything like that.
Stephen: Maybe they wonder because the last three years they weren’t giving out candy. Why now? And
Alan: right now it looks like, hey, come on in. The door is open. Don’t worry. We won’t. But,
Stephen: They do a lot of these trunker treats at the school parking lots the parks. So to the kids, it’s eh, do I want to walk around town for an hour and get a bag of candy or go to the park for 20 minutes and get a twice big bag of candy?
Alan: Yeah. Oftentimes we’ll make a point of, we’ll dress up, if either Colleen or I are going to hit the door, then I’ll be in my Viking outfit, or she’ll be, we’ll try to, whatever we last used for Halloween or something like that, that we can put the shreds together so that we’re not just a guy in sweats, or something like that, so it I still think that, I don’t know. I don’t even mind oh no, we got toilet paper. [00:15:00] That’s just part of Halloween, right? Kids out at one in the morning and they’re doing a little bit of pranking. You know what I mean? That’s the trick or treat part is there should be a trick that is the corresponding, hey, you didn’t give us the right candy, and honestly, we get. Costco is okay, but we don’t get the circus peanuts, the unidentifiable generic candy. We try to have something that’s at least chocolatey good, and not like we did the least we could, it’s, and I really think that what we should do is get like the boxes, and that way when everybody gets the full size Snickers, they’re gonna go, yeah!
And they’re just so excited. I know I’ve seen a cartoon like that where the Grim Reaper comes to a door and the little old mom is giving out candy, and he goes, I’m not here for the candy, I’m here for your soul. Oh, sorry, Snickers! Never mind, Margaret! You’re good! Yeah! Exactly! Whoever drew that one really captured the spirit of it.
Yeah.
Stephen: Here’s another update. The historical time travel app that I’m pushing on.
Alan: Yes. Where you’re doing shells of virtual reality. Yes. [00:16:00]
Stephen: Okay. So I’ve got a presentation made up and I’m like, huh, I should start going to some mental stuff and showing the presentation. Those people would love it.
I’m going to talk to the rotary and stuff to show the whole idea of what I’m doing because it could drum up. Hey, I know a guy who would love this to be involved with this and he has this or you know what my brother in law’s company would donate to this or, whatever it could be, but I met with one of the guys at the library about what library resources there are.
And he also runs the historical society locally. I’m looking at that great resource potential. Yes.
Alan: If they’ve got the archives that you could tap into for 1930s, route. Yeah.
Stephen: The issue is, Like the historical society, the archive of photos are digitized, but it’s not just open to anybody to go through and it’s 50 to get a picture and I’m like, holy [00:17:00] crap.
Yeah, I’m like I just want to look at it,
Alan: i, at one point, knowing that they had the Bill Watterson collection down in Columbus, like I, or Akron, maybe it’s Akron, anyway, like I, same thing, I was like I wear white gloves. I’m a totally respectful guy. Can I just see them? And they were like it’s usually only open to scholarly pursuits or, and they didn’t mention dollar amounts, but they really had it locked down because they’re worried about someone.
hurting them, stealing them, whatever else it might be. And there was going to be some kind of qualifications that I had to have. And as much as I’m a big fan, I’m not a scholar. You don’t even haven’t written the book yet. Maybe that’s the entree that you and I both have to get into the cool. H. P.
Lovecraft. Watterson archive is to write a book about things like those, so
Stephen: I thought about this and this is not, this is new. I wasn’t thinking about this. So I’m getting all these pictures, but I’m not actually using the picture itself in the app. So I’m not [00:18:00] using the picture itself to make money.
I’m not using the picture itself in any way at the only thing I’m using the picture for. So the designer has a reference to recreate the building as a 3D model, not even scanning the picture. It’s, so
Alan: it’s original work, even though it’s obviously based on it, but it isn’t just stealing the image,
Stephen: so I was thinking about that. I’m going to check on this. So if I get some books from the historical society that are collections of photos that somebody did about the history. I wouldn’t be using, I wouldn’t violate copyright by handing that to my designer and saying, here’s your reference pictures.
Because again,
Alan: that’s right. Cause that’s, copyright is not the Eiffel tower. It’s the image of the Eiffel tower on that day in that light, et cetera, et cetera. And and there’s, differences between there’s still things where there’s restricted use because it’s not only copyright it’s trademarked or it’s There’s reserve marks that go with, it’s so recognizable that you can’t, I [00:19:00] guess the thing also is, you can’t pass something off as, It’s the Eiffel Tower and not call it the Eiffel Tower.
Do you know what I mean? You’re not allowed to fraudulently misrepresent things and stuff like that. And then it’s how much do I change it? 10 percent? 20 percent? And then it’s an original work. This is the Eiffel Tower from Earth X. You know what I mean? And so they’re not allowed to use it? That kind of thing?
Stephen: It comes back to All the arguments we have with AI. So if I say, Hey, I create me a picture of Paris with the Eiffel Tower on a summer day, and it creates one. Is that violating copyright? People are saying no, it’s not. It’s no more than any other artist creating the same thing. So is what I’m doing.
I’m not scanning it and putting it in the app. I’m having an artist recreate it. So that, it’s something I’m going to have to check into. It’s definitely an interesting thing.
Alan: I’ll tell you, I really, I’m fascinated by this because There’s so much about what is copyrightable [00:20:00] or if something is in the public view, the Empire State Building, it you might not be able to make another building like it, but a picture of that, where I could walk up and take my own picture, there’s no restrictions, and I’m walking down the street, and I raise my camera I’m sure there’s a whole bunch of case law being decided about how many of those can you take without it being Overuse or something like
Stephen: that and what you use it for.
If any, basically, if anybody’s in public, if Brad Pitt’s in public and I take a picture of him he has no legal right to say, you can’t do that, you’re in public
Alan: use. Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: But. If I take a picture of Brad Pitt and then I put it on T-shirts and sell it, now he can come after me ’cause I’m making profit.
Alan: That’s right. Yeah. I know that. From contracts I’ve had a chance to look at in the course of my life, all those things have had to be added. You know what I mean? Everybody that worked in old tv, they find out if you didn’t talk about digital reuse and you know. You are missing out on, you still [00:21:00] have the right to not only the replaying of that particular episode, but any, what do they call it?
Resulting works or works that use enough of what the original premise is that you can’t just redo the honeymooners. You have to pay for the rights to the character names, the likeness on the sets, the likeness of the characters. And when we first started to have sampling in music.
I know there’s law that says specifically it’s six seconds is okay and seven seconds is too much, and it depends on what
Stephen: you’re doing with it too. Cause like video, if you’re using a clip and I honestly don’t know what I’m speaking out on my side of my head here.
But if you’re using a clip, and it’s being used like for education, or if you’re doing a review analysis, that’s different than just using a clip.
Alan: So there’s presentations nowadays ends with the big disclaimer page that says, I know that all the rights of every bit of artwork and every trailer that I showed during [00:22:00] this presentation, they all, of course, In here to the people that originally created it, but I get a cat can look upon a king I can talk about those things and I can give you a quick shot of what I’m talking about So that you know what I’m talking about as long as I don’t act as if I am the owner and the creator You know what?
I’m same thing. I made a little prop. I’m doing this for a free Mensa presentation or free library presentation So I almost always I just then and you know what if they’re gonna sue you they’re gonna sue you and if they’re decent then They won’t right Many interesting cases about like Lego and how various different companies that handled it really well or really poorly with if you want to have something become like part of the cultural consciousness, then you don’t mind Kleenex becoming the eponym, right?
The name for that thing, right? A lot is they fought for a long time to make sure that nobody called anything but Vaseline. It’s petroleum jelly. Otherwise, but don’t you want it to be that when people think of what your product is? I get puzzling. I, i, some, I know for instance that Lego [00:23:00] is one of the ones where they actually did a, an about face.
They really were quite restrictive about their Mindstorms things and how people were creating things that were only allowed. And then they said, the way that we’re going to get this thing to explode is to say, Hey everybody do anything you want and then just make sure that the Lego logo appears somewhere or that you say this was done using real Legos not Duplo or whatever else it might be.
And you saw the big exhibitions and the big there’s people that make a living now out of I’m going to recreate the Titanic.
Stephen: You know what I mean? Remember you know back when we first started going to concerts you couldn’t take pictures you couldn’t take a recording except for the dead.
The dead allowed it. They had a whole section. And then people started getting digital cameras and then it was on our phones and it’s they couldn’t stop everybody from their phone. And suddenly everybody’s taking pictures and people were, and YouTube and some of the artists were attacking people.
No, that’s art. You can’t, that’s copyright. You can’t post that. You can’t do this. And then suddenly somebody said, hold on a second. Do you [00:24:00] understand that we had pictures taken at every concert and we had videos taken that people shared all over. And we had more people coming to the concert and buying our tickets.
Alan: Like it’s
Stephen: Oh, really? Yeah. We made money. It was free advertising. And I, that’s the same type of thing, with movies, me and Colin were talking about it last night. We went and saw wild robot. I think it’s one of my favorite movies of the year. It was, see that it was so
Alan: good. We’ve stopped bringing popcorn into the house because it’s one of those things that Colleen can’t stop eating it, and it isn’t, you know what I mean?
So we, we are only gonna do it at movies now, but even then it’s I wanna go see Megaopolis, I’m wanna go see a wild robot. I can’t believe I didn’t see venom just came out, but something even, is Venom out? I thought Venom was still coming. Maybe it’s still coming out. Joker 2 just came out.
Joker 2. How was I not there Thursday at midnight? The tradition of every comic book movie. And yet, I don’t know, I just, maybe because we got the big screen TV at home and we just were not looking for date night in that way or whatever it is, but our [00:25:00] habits and tastes have changed.
Stephen: But but that we were talking about that and I was like, back in the day, you’d have a hit book.
They’d pay money to the author to say, I want to make a movie, but they’d say, there’s your money. Go away and shut up. We’re going to do whatever we want. And then we get. Movies that suck compared to the book or that aren’t as good. Some of them are, but a lot of them don’t. And they’re like Stephen King’s a great example.
There’s not many good movies. Absolutely. The one
Alan: that would tell you, everyone that I signed off on, they did not stay true at all to the inner of the book. What mini series are good. That’s okay. And I think like him, George Martin, a couple of them have started to be more involved now Yeah.
This is being. And then you can see the guiding hand on the rudder. It really is more like what you want that version of it to be. Yes!
Stephen: Yeah, and they found, Oh, if we let the author be a part of it, it’s not a a problem that it’s going to be drama and arguing, blah, blah, blah. They actually want the product succeed in there.
They’re very [00:26:00] helpful. And I, you can see that love in some of the movies. I know the new Salem’s lot is out. I haven’t watched it yet. Me and research, I’ll watch it for our annual horror fest. So we’ll see how that goes.
Alan: That’s, I think that some part of what, it doesn’t have to only be true to what went on in the book.
It has to be like, that character would not say that if it was the character that appeared in the book. There’s a spirit to things, if they’ve written that well, or You can’t change the ending or have it. You know what I mean? There’s any number of things that to me are the cardinal failings of where, wow, they went, how did Jason end up in space or something like that?
You know what I mean? They’re talking
Stephen: about that over the weekend.
Alan: But sometimes having said that, I know I’ve seen things where it was a mashup. You know what I mean? That it really was it started off as a zombie movie and then it became, you I don’t know, a rock concert? And sometimes those things that people are crafty enough that they’re really able to [00:27:00] pull off, that it’s like a foot in both camps, and the dynamism, the wit of it, from that odd pairing, there’s a whole series of books, right?
Pride and prejudice and zombies, remember? And and something’s whatever, sense and sensibility and sea serpents. And that was their own little niche where someone retold those very well worn stories, from who did Jane Eyre. It doesn’t matter. The fact that they were able to do Shaun of the Dead and things like that, where it was clearly a zombie movie, but it was a, like a lad movie, where guys just go to the pub and hang out, and they mine that for comedy. That I like that people have enough understanding of culture that they’re the ones that can do that. The people that are great apps, we just watched anchorman, but we haven’t seen it for 20 years. And oh, it’s misogynist.
It’s so wrong in its humor, but it’s really good in for the time they made fun of just the right things. You know what I mean? They made fun of the Judging a person by the hair? By the quality of their hair? Who would do that? TV anchors, for instance. That kind of thing. [00:28:00] It I like where, I don’t know, Seth Rogen is really good at, Jon Favreau they’re really good at, they’ve watched all the same things that we have and they throw, they call them Easter eggs or whatever, but all those little cultural references that like they really get what makes this interesting and cool and especially when they’re not only in a fantasy world that in the movie they’ll talk about that’s not what Captain America would do.
You know what I mean? That they reference the same things that we do about it. Those archetypes aren’t real things. They’re the movies and the books and the music that we’ve listened to. So I really like that well informed view of things,
Stephen: and I’ve never been upset by a movie that doesn’t do a book scene by scene identical.
What’s the point? It’s like going to a concert where they stand there and they play the songs from the album. And they sound exactly like they did in the album and they don’t do anything for it. This is supposed to be entertainment. I could go listen to the record and lay on my bed and I don’t have to watch you stand there, [00:29:00] so the people that get upset, it’s like they didn’t put this scene in the movie and this scene and this scene and this scene. And it sucked because you wouldn’t go see a five and a half hour movie. You want to, you want two hours or less.
Alan: Dune is unfilmable because the book itself is this thick.
You’re going to fit all that in, and now they’re doing it. It’s going to be three two hour movies to get it all in. We’re going to start mixing between Dune and Dune Messiah and Children of Dune, and they use the fact that there’s a trajectory of that plot that they start making references for.
Anyway, they’re smart about the whole history. Now there’s 20 of those, right? Because it wasn’t just Frank Herbert. It was also Brian Herbert and various collaborators.
Stephen: Kevin J. Anderson wrote it with
Alan: There’s the guy. Exactly. So It’s interesting. I’m conflicted about the complete album thing because a lot of times I don’t want them to just stand there and the robot could be playing this, but so many of the whole album, how many of an album become hits, like three out of 10, but there’s often great other songs on the album that they don’t play because they’re not the hits.
And so to hear that song that [00:30:00] you always wanted to hear live, it’s got. I dunno, yes, has done that a couple times, right? They did all close to the edge or fragile or whatever else it might be. And to hear cans and Brahms played live when they just never have done it. So far as I know Todd Rundgren.
I’m trying to think who else. We’ve seen a couple things where they do the whole album all the way through and it’s there’s also some people were really good at tracking albums where it had flow to it. got to a big crescendo at the end of side one and then you catch your breath and you flip the vinyl over and then it has another good kickoff on side two and that’s often how they would do the album is that they pause it thick as a brick you know first side and go into thick and so when I’ve seen that done it’s like they respect the album as an art form in and of itself there really was a reason for the tracking order and how it really ends with the great crescendo and then when the concert ends that way it’s almost like I don’t really need an encore.
I am so freaking happy that it ended just like the way the album used to end the long outro from the Yes album by Yes has [00:31:00] starts off with yours is no disgrace. I think ends with Starship Troopers. And it’s that’s just the way it should be.
Stephen: So it’s a shame that in the world today that kids don’t listen to and get full albums, their singles, that an artist could release a whole album.
Kids probably don’t even know the name of the album or what other tracks are on it other than the big hits,
Alan: I don’t think it’s only generational though because there still are like there’s a lot of kids that are into coheed and cambria or and maybe it’s cambria. I’m, not sure if I pronounced that I don’t know if I ever heard it said out loud They do a thing where the whole album is a story, and it isn’t, you can’t pick a single out of it without it really being out of context, you know what I mean? So there are still some groups that maybe the latest Dream Theater album is like a whole work instead of being individual cuts and stuff like that.
And I think there’s still fans that seek out the longer works because it, they like, there’s more to it.
Stephen: Styx did Kill Roy and that had a couple big hits, but it still was a story if [00:32:00] you listen to the whole album front to back,
Alan: right? It’s unfortunate you would mention that because that’s Oh, not one of their better albums.
Maybe they’re better. Maybe they should have had the two or three good songs and not try to make it into an opus. But anyway,
Stephen: But actually, I enjoyed them whenever I got it. I was what, 12 or something. So I’d never heard like a rock opera. I hadn’t heard all of Tommy or some of the other stuff.
So that was like my first intro to that. So there’s still some tracks that I enjoy because it has a memory thing,
Alan: I hear you. In fact, that and Paradise Theater both have the entire album hangs together well. Good for Styx for attempting those things. That was a lot of the first sign of that Dennis DeYoung wasn’t just a hit writer, that he actually had a show, a bigger work, like doing a Broadway show in mind, and then he defected from the group because he so much wanted to do that, play Pontius Pilate or something like that, and the group got tired of waiting for him to come back from that.
Dabbling in Broadway and stuff like that, right? I’m sure I’m pretty sure that’s [00:33:00] part of the sticks. Unfortunate breakup and stuff like that. So it’s
Stephen: funny you mentioned Broadway and stuff because that’s what the Joker 2 movie is supposed to be. It’s supposed to be a musical.
Alan: Interesting. Okay. Oh, you didn’t know that.
No, I did not. Oh yeah. I’m, what I know is that it’s, the Joker and Harley Quinn, so I’m curious to see how they played those things out. I remember the first one being like, it wasn’t a superhero movie. It was a character study. It was like, what happens when a guy goes mad, when a guy has like nowhere else to turn and so I’m thinking it’s going to be a little bit of that if you’ve already seen it.
Are there any other superhero things besides Joker and Quinn? You know what I mean? He doesn’t interact with Batman, for instance. I’m pretty sure.
Stephen: No, because, and this was the thing, like you said, about this particular set. It’s not related to any of the Batman movies. It’s not a part of any other world.
It’s its own separate thing. It’s not meant to be. The [00:34:00] epitome origin of the Joker if you’ve read the comics, if you’ve seen the movies and you come here expecting to see Joker’s origin, it’s not that it’s like you said, it’s its own unique viewpoint on the Joker yeah, I’ll tell you.
So
Alan: I have read. enough comics from the times when I wasn’t buying comics fully that they, a lot of the things they collect into the graphic novels, it’s 12 issues together. And a lot of what I’ve read them do with the Joker over the course of the last, let’s say 15 years, because that’s, it’s been a while since I’ve been buying regularly.
I’m not sure that I agree. I liked it when he was an individual and a force for chaos and crazy, but also occasionally funny. They’ve now tried to make him so much into an archvillain, and that there’s not only one Joker, there’s multiple versions of him, either from multiple dimensions and vibrational planes, or that there’s even been all along multiple Jokers, and that one of the reasons that the, [00:35:00] they’re trying to collect retcon thing.
So they explain here’s how why he really was a homicidal maniac over here, but was a goof over here. And here’s why he was very much a loner versus joining up with the secret society of super villains, that there actually were different people that assumed the mantle over the course of time.
And they each brought their own style is not the right word, their own craziness, their own insanity to it. And I I don’t know I was, I let a lot of the. inconsistencies go because he’s insane. I didn’t think you had to explain that it was actually different people. I really thought he, he might not just be insane, like chaotic and homicidal, but maybe have split personality, multiple personality disorder, whatever like that, or just based on his mood.
You know what I mean? A lot of how they portrayed it in the movies was he’s doing fine. Then he shoots one of his lieutenants because he felt bad. So don’t agree that they should have tried to bring logic to something that part of his really great power was how unpredictable he was because you didn’t know who he was going to be when he showed up that [00:36:00] day.
Maybe he’s a killer and otherwise he’s just doing it to get your goat like the Riddler versus, the homicidal and stuff like that. So anyway I just, that I, there’s a whole treatise about how much they’ve tried to do that with the Joker the, there’s, didn’t they also the Batman becomes the Joker, if this is any spoiler warnings, by the way, it’s all out there in comic books, and over the course, like I said, the last 15 years I’m catching up, like you’re catching up, I’m not trying to, any surprises for you, but one of those things where in an alternate history, Batman doesn’t It’s that he gets too much Joker gas and becomes like the Joker, right?
And because I’ve read them not in order. I don’t know that I’m saying the reason that this happened is because of this. It really could have been that I read a later one. And then when I read the why of it happened, it’s I liked how I filled it in better. I liked how I made the excuse for, this isn’t really in continuity, this isn’t canon, but here’s how it could have happened.
And then when they started to mix between all the different Earths, and the Superman from Kingdom Come is a different [00:37:00] Superman, and there’s Superboys, and there’s Batman and Robin, and multiple Batmen when he got his back broken, and Jean Claude Vallier had to take over, there’s been multiple people that have done it. And I like when I was reading it, I read everything and I really could keep track of it all. And so it’s been an interesting puzzle of my saying what’s going on here? Why is there now a Red Hulk? I knew there was a Red Hulk before I knew why there was a Red Hulk.
Who could it be? I think they did just they made that a mystery, right? They didn’t immediately reveal who the Red Hulk was. And so I guess I couldn’t have gotten that more than anyone else because we all were trying to get the mystery of, now there’s a Red Hulk, but he also seems to be militarily smart.
There’s a big clue. And I just read a series with the Hulk Vareen. Have you seen this one? There’s people nowadays that they’ve gotten. I love some things about comic books because I love the people that say, What would be cool is if this [00:38:00] happened. Once they started to have people capturing people’s DNA and saying the WeaponX program has been around for a long time and he’s not WeaponX as in Unknown, he’s WeaponX as in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Roman numerals.
So what happened to the I through IX how many are after him that are improved versions? And how do they do that? Because they captured Wolverine DNA or they, they, they started to do what if we combine other animal aspects that it’s not only like a human Wolverine, how about a human lion?
And that was from that the high evolutionary or whatever. So this guy came up with There is a weapons program still going on, and what if you gave someone like Wolverine and Hulk characteristics? So not only is he now an incredible strong engine of destruction, but he’s got the healing ability, he’s got adamantium claws, maybe an entire adamantium skeleton He was already unstoppable before now.
He’s double unstoppable. You know what I mean I, I like some of that is meant to be, I think, like, how far can I take this [00:39:00] before the fans go? All right. No, it’s ridiculous. Now you’re, the only thing we can do is shoot him off into the sun and maybe even that won’t kill him, you
Stephen: know what I mean?
Look what I dealt with though. I went from the early eighties To a lull of books and stuff and then the 90s when the books and comics exploded again for Star Wars up until 2014 where they said, okay, everything you’ve got is gone. We’re doing a whole new thing. So it’s all new history. So I’m like, I’ve got all new books to read, which is yay.
But they don’t tie into the old stuff. It’s all new history. So I’m like trying to keep it straight. It’s that classic comic book, split personality. I know two worlds. I’ve got two worlds in my head.
Alan: I, I, because I’ve been re reading some older stuff or finding new stuff that’s now been collected, I really, there’s something in my mind that wants it all to hang together, so I’m trying to find how it all links, was it some, someone got a hold of the Cosmic Cube and recreated the world in their [00:40:00] image? Or maybe it was the Zodiac Key? They’ve had a couple. It was the evil eye, the cosmic eye that Praetor John had, there’s been a couple things that really were like game changing, reality altering type things.
And if they do that well, it can be, almost always, unfortunately, it seems to be done, and then someone finds a way to defeat them, and it all goes back to the way it was. But once in a while, it’s like maybe that universe kept going, and that the one that we’re back in now, It’s just a different timeline, but that timeline of the X Men in the future where the Sentinels won, or the, Weird World, War World, Mojo World, that they’re all just separated by a very thin veil, and occasionally, they intrude.
So the whole thing of Watchmen And then finding a way to integrate the Watchmen universe into the DC universe. And then they actually had let’s, how did this go? They introduced things where a guy was really doing devilish things, but he looked a lot like Alfred. And so what Batman’s butler is now a [00:41:00] corrupted individual.
He’s a spy. He’s always been a spy. What’s going on with the Batman? And then they found a way to work that together so that it was actually. An alternate version, like from that, the Watchmen universe. I’m not sure if they’ve named that one. And a very, if you haven’t read it, they did on the doomsday clock, a sequel, a successor to the Watchmen.
It actually is very cool with so Superman, our guy, the mightiest, in, in the DC universe. What happens if he meets Dr. Manhattan who really controls things at the molecular level? And it did it, it handled it very well in terms of what are those beings represented, each of those universes and that they.
They didn’t end up like superheroes always do. Hey, I bumped into you. I don’t know why, but let’s have a fight. And then they resolve their differences. But there actually was a whole bunch of stuff of having to explain why they’re trying to preserve their universe, and a little bit The Marvel did this with where the [00:42:00] universes were collapsing and each universe was trying to stop itself from being one of the ones snuffed out.
So all the Reed Richards of all the various different universes, the smartest people in each universe, were getting together and trying to like, can we make a big plan? But then if one guy is so much a megalomaniac with all of his intelligence, he’s actually trying to make sure, absolutely sure, by betraying all the other Reeds, the Council of Reeds, that he’s going to be the one that wins.
I, I love where they, and a couple people like Jonathan Hickman Jeff Johns, they’ve gotten Grant Morrison, where they’ve really gotten a great view of how all this hangs together and that there really are Grant Morson at one point did a big chart of the DC Multi omniverse, whatever you call that all that collected and that indeed not only is Earth 1 and 2 and 3 and X and the crime syndicate world But like the Captain Carrot world is a real world and at the commandee future Destruction of like he really had [00:43:00] a way of here’s how they all are and a big bunch of spheres all floating in the bleed, the omniverse of this kind of thing.
And just the fact that someone could put together the catalog and not miss anything and actually show how they might interact in a way that like, really, you’re going to have, Captain Garrett, but I already had like in the inferior five, they, that universe, they talked about how There, there really might be a need for the people that defy logic.
You already had Mr. Mixtez Pitalik and Batmite, where they’ve got magical powers that let them just break the rules of reality, and so I know I’m jumping around, but what he did is final crisis on infinite Earths, there’s a succession of crises,
and
every single time I was impressed with, these guys really know their stuff.
They really have found a reason to say, here’s why the superboy of that. universe might have gone mad, and then you got a really crazy evil villain with all the power of Superman. What [00:44:00] do you do? You know what I mean? And the injustice world where, to bring it all together, the Joker kills Lois Lane, as I recall, and Superman breaks his code against killing, because he’s not Going to he can’t stop from killing the Joker and then that whole thing of well now Superman wants everything to be nice and peaceful And nothing like that ever happened again so he’s got to be a super fascist and control every aspect of the universe and the people that think freedom is a good Idea like the Batman now, they’re no longer rules fighting his pals Now there’s really the war going on there was between Captain America and Iron Man and maybe that’s a sign of our times to get comic book philosophical, that all the things that used to be they’re all trying to do their best.
And then you find out that some people are not only bad heroes, but anti heroes, and that they really will go further than others. And that the heroes still have to bring in, the killers, that, that if they don’t have a code against killing, how much are they going to enforce their own personal philosophical [00:45:00] worldview on a world that has, is bigger than they are.
And I think that’s what’s happening in the course of my lifetime, is that. We’ve seen all kinds of people that there used to be maybe an American dream and a certain set of principles. And a lot of people have abandoned that and actually said it should never have been that way. And so people are fighting for what, how do you want the world to be?
You know what I mean? Do you want it to make sense? Do you want it to be that are people inherently good? Are they inherently, if not evil, selfish? And and what happens when you have Extraordinary people put in extraordinary circumstances, or here it goes, faced with just an unwinnable situation.
Would they crack, or would they? It depends on the writer. It depends on the writer, too. Because some people really specialize in, they had a Justice League series where Ralph Dibny’s No, Ray Palmer’s wife got killed.
Stephen: Well, Dibney’s did too. That was part of the whole crisis.
Alan: Exactly. Identity crisis.
[00:46:00] Yeah. Identity crisis. And then finding out like which would have been the villain that was so insane and self centered enough that they would have killed someone knowing that if this ever gets out, Or will come after me. As I recall it turn out to be Dr. Light and that was in line with how he really was like a Rasputin level villain.
Yeah. That he really was a manipulator.
Stephen: But there was, I’ll have to go look at it again. It’s been so long. Jeez. But there wasn’t just him. There was a twist in there. There was somebody else that betrayed them too. One of the other women, or maybe she did something that he didn’t know about. There was something a little darker in there too.
You’re
Alan: exactly right. And so that’s, I want to go back and reread that because that really was a good book with a series of reveals about people are not always their best self. And just that, if you’re the wife of a superhero, who’s always out fighting crime, maybe you get lonely.
And then what if you [00:47:00] slip up and not to slip up, but do it quite purposefully, actually. And then how does the superhero deal with that? Finding out that this was not the wonderful, I don’t know, Iris West and the flash. I’m trying to think of other ones where they’ve introduced that.
Maybe things weren’t, I know for instance, that they did a whole bunch of stuff with Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne. That, He was a bad guy, like wife abusing type, bad guy. And what do the heroes do about that? I think that handled that first came up in the ultimates, but they already had the seeds sewn where Hank Pi was not mentally stable.
And that’s why he had the yellow jacket persona and he was an man and then giant man. And you could see him for as brilliant as he was, he did, he wasn’t stable. And then what happens if. And all that brilliance goes down a bad path, right? They’ve had and that wasn’t in the like rough 90s where everybody became an antihero.
They were already like sowing the seeds for that in the 70s. And that was really breakthrough comics back then where it’s
Stephen: Wow. Not all the [00:48:00] problems are super and world changing. There’s personal and that, I think that’s what they discovered and that’s why we’ve talked about that, how much the comics are, the modern pulps.
Are the modern soap operas for that or they’ve been just as long. Speaking of the Ultimates, though, you probably haven’t gotten to read the new Ultimates Have not, because I don’t think they’re,
Alan: I have mentioned that I have not gone to the store and gotten them, and I think.
You gave me one or that
Stephen: was the old ultimates. That was version three of the old ultimates. I believe this is the new stuff that just came out a few months ago that they’re still working on. They’re not even a year old yet. So I don’t think they’ve got a graphic novel of the collected works yet.
I’ve been really enjoying all of them. It’s one of those things I told Colin, I said, man, I don’t know. I hate saying, oh yeah, let’s get, 50 new comics a month added to my whole list, but I’ll check it out. And then it’s been like, oh, there’s a new one yet added on because it really is a [00:49:00] intermeshed thing going on and it’s been good stories.
That makes it rough. They know it’s
Alan: gone before and yet a new version of those kinds. See, so I don’t want to say this even though I’ve talked about it with Colleen. We’re okay. We’re safe in our house and our money and all that kind of stuff. And what do I miss the most of what I gave up to get here, to get to safety, to get to stability, is that, like I said, I haven’t been buying comics regularly for at least a decade, and I miss them terribly.
And so if I was to restart You know, I used to go through a wonderful place called M& M Distributors, and I, you could order them like two months in advance, get like a 40 percent discount very good pricing, and then never miss anything because they got everything from Diamond and various other distributors.
So you got not only the big two or three publishers, but like all the publishers. And I really would like to do that, and it would be, I’ll tell you, our episodes would be so interesting to be like, Alright, so I just restarted, [00:50:00] and now there’s ten different Batman titles, and here’s what, okay, what’s going on here?
And I think what’s going on here is this, and we talked about that, one of the things I’ve always loved about serial fiction like this is, if they’re coming out every month, I’m not just like turning my mind off in between. I’m thinking of, wow, the cliffhanger at the end of Doom Patrol, how are they going to get out of it?
And what does this new character’s introduction mean? Is Snapper Carr really going to be the villain in Justice League? All that kind of stuff. And honestly, I don’t know. A whole bunch of times I’ve guessed. Colleen makes fun of how often I guess what’s going on in the plot of a movie or something like that, but because of all this training and anticipating what might be.
And it’s is this the return of Dr. Doom? Is this, is it someone that we now, and now they got all the generational aspects. So it’s like, all right, Starman, I think I’ve talked about this before, was one of the best ones for the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children, that people who are arch enemies, you find out that the mist.
His daughter is one of the ones that’s now playing in the new Starman, just because that’s what you [00:51:00] do. I inherited this from my father, and you killed him or drove him mad or banished him to another universe? You’re gonna pay. And, or I need to outdo him. I have to do better than my dad did, so I have to rob a bigger bank, and I have to blow up more of the world.
Isn’t
Stephen: that kind of the whole basis of Gru and
Alan: the
Stephen: minions?
Alan: Yes, exactly. You know what I mean? I so much want to do it, and I know that it’s hundreds of dollars a month. If you’re trying to be a completist, things are not 2 anymore, they’re 5. 5 or 6. 5 or 6. Special issues. I’ve
Stephen: had a couple Spiderman come out that were 10.
Ah, I’ll have
Alan: to see. Maybe I won’t be a total completist. Maybe I’ll buy the things that I really missed and I want to see what they’ve done with them. Get the library for the rest. I
Stephen: well, here’s something that’ll that’ll get you going. Oh, why did you tell me that? Marvel’s had the rebooted it They’ve got a whole new mall ultimates world and I love it because it’s not just redoing all the old stuff How many times do we need the same stories beginning origin
Alan: the same?
[00:52:00] Yeah,
Stephen: this is Totally new and different. Almost every character is changed in significant ways. It’s been really cool. DC’s coming out with their own version of the Ultimates now, and it’s their own separate microverse or whatever, okay,
Alan: so a good time to jump on, if you will, to try to catch up on those things.
And then this is funny. I’ve been to, there’s not been a Comic Con here in Cleveland, or even in San Diego, other places, Chicago, Detroit, that I’ve gone there with my want list. It used to be that’s really what I did. I went to a couple of programs, but really what I was doing was hunting the boxes and trying to find a good copy in reasonable condition for a reasonable price.
And I saved up all my extra money for that Comic Con, or those, that I haven’t done in a long time. And that’s a really cool thing. I loved doing the treasure hunt. A little bit of like the first time that I ever bargained like I was in Marrakesh. You know what I mean? Okay, I got five books here and I know the total is 25, but can we go 20?
You know what I mean? It just was doing that [00:53:00] young with an adult. You’d always see them get a smile because there was like the kids. He doesn’t, he’s never done this before. Am I going to be hard on him? Or are going to say, Did you got it? You know what I mean? So and that the satisfaction of any collector of I went there and I was missing these particular three issues of Iron Man and now I got them and now my collection goes from 1 to 60 I got every single one Oh, a
Stephen: visceral joy.
Oh, yeah. Colin
Alan: single one of a series. Colin
Stephen: does that a lot. He’ll go to a show and come back and say, Oh, you got to see what I got. Look at this. Look at this. Look at this. But just sitting at the store sometimes Oh, some guy brought in a collection. Look what I got, you
Alan: know, it’s just like he’s through it.
And I love when it’s like, there’s certain things that I was looking for a long time in Chicago and never found them. They just were for some reason. Poorly distributed in Chicago. Everybody that bought them had them and when I first started to go out of town You know when I was out of college and had a car and could do that I used to I was so overspent [00:54:00] in Detroit or Pittsburgh or Milwaukee where they had these little cons and sometimes it was just I have been looking for this for so long that even at the unreasonable price, I just need to finally scratch this itch because if I don’t buy it now, will it be another 10 years before I see it again?
You know that, we talk about that like for Mad Magazine paperbacks, that a lot of how I bought them was not which one looked the funniest. It was, man, I’ve never seen three ring mad before. I have to buy it because I don’t know that I’m ever going to see it again. So scarcity drove a lot of that. And if you’re trying to get them all, it doesn’t really matter in what order you buy it, but it matters that you get the ones that are the fish that got away again.
You know what I mean? All right. Hey man,
Stephen: I got to get rolling. Got
Alan: a
Stephen: whole list of things still to do today.
Alan: I, I understand. It will I’ll let you know how my Thoughts are on restarting the process. Yeah, I love it. I’ll do it like in November for January. And that’ll be my gift to myself in the next [00:55:00] year is I’m going back into comic books.
We’ll see. I gotta show Colleen Hey, you know that money I’ve been making investing wise? I wouldn’t mind repurposing some of it now.
Stephen: I really, I do love the new ultimates. I think there’s four books, black Panther Spider Man, the ultimates. And Oh my gosh, the X Men for the ultimates.
It’s done by this Vietnam, Vietnamese artist in Almost traditional Vietnamese style. It looks like nothing you’ve gotten in comic books and it’s consistent it’s the whole thing. It’s done almost Vietnamese anime manga type look like anime. Okay, so is it Tang Ang? I think I’ve seen some of his stuff before I’d have to go look I don’t remember but Colin was Very excited, said, I love this artist and you’re gonna love it.
And I do love the art. I was like, so are people bitching about it? Because DC has a certain look, Marvel has a certain look, and it’s pretty much across the [00:56:00] board. This is different than all of that.
Alan: Stand really stands out. You’re just reading through them on stuff.
Stephen: Yeah. So the Batman, the version of the ultimates Batman is in my pools right now.
So I’m probably picking that up today. So I’ll see how good it is. So we’ll see. All right.
Alan: Yeah, I’ll tell you in brief. I’d hate to betray Colin and not be like make my trip to Rootstown once a week. And yet what I had was eminent where they think showed up to me double box. So they’re not never going to get damaged.
It’d be really tough to turn away from what was working so well before if they’re still doing it.
Stephen: Oh, yeah. Good luck. I know he tells me all the problems they have with all the Stuff now because Penguin distributes some of them. They get some from Diamond and when and they have so much
Alan: in case they got had like a more of demand than they expected and then it’s who gets them.
You know what? Yeah, he’s it’s a nightmare
Stephen: every week. Oh,
Alan: okay. All right. Take care of [00:57:00] Stephen. Always a pleasure. Later. Bye bye.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
