HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's our Christmas special!
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's Christmas!
BEN KISSEL
Put your clothes on, dad!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ugh.
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Henry and Marcus. We have a very special episode for you today, we are going to be joined by a fella, he's authored many, many books, but two of them are Blue Book, he did that with Dark Horse and Department of Truth which I've heard Marcus mention many, many times as one of his ultimate favorites.
MARCUS PARKS
It's my favorite book on the shelves right now.
BEN KISSEL
We're joined by James Tynion IV! Thanks for being here, James.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Dude.
JAMES TYNION IV
Thanks so much for having me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Thank you. And this is not just some cross promotional opportunity, all right. And anybody who says different, I will physically attack them in their home in front of their family.
BEN KISSEL
It seems like a cross promotional opportunity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, James Tynion who has become a good friend of you Marcus, you guys are all friends.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, friends and shit.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right? Or is that too far?
JAMES TYNION IV
No, no, no, we're friends.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
We're friends. He came to my going away party in New York City, we're friends.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good, good, good.
BEN KISSEL
It's one of the more difficult people to become friends with, the comic book, I'm not gonna say nerd, author. Because they can oftentimes reject love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let me put that on James first. James, is that true? Do comic book authors reject love or community?
JAMES TYNION IV
We're getting right into the real shit here. Yeah, oh absolutely. But I try to keep my heart open to love as often as I can.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Single?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
Wow. I have a chance!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But for those of you who don't know, James is one of the most talented artists in comic books right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Writers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Writers. But I view view writers as artists.
MARCUS PARKS
Okay yes but we must make the distinction if we're talking about comic books here.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I forget. Also yeah, why don't you draw? Yeah, brings me right there.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, great.
JAMES TYNION IV
I'm really, really bad. That's the main reason.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you draw out little pictures when you write? I mean this as a fellow writers of comic books.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So cross promotional, we're talking about your new book which is a series of anthology comics for Dark Horse called Blue Book which is all about tales of aliens. But is it just gonna be UFOs and aliens or is it gonna be a wider scope as well?
JAMES TYNION IV
So the main thread in every issue are UFO stories but then I'm running what I'm calling true weird tales in the backups-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
That's where we're going down all sorts of fun rabbit holes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I fucking love it.
JAMES TYNION IV
So like cryptids and hauntings and spontaneous human combustion. All that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Anomalous phenomena to wrap it up. And so we are also promoting our very first comic book for Dark Horse which is called Operation Sunshine that Marcus and I have been working on, Kissel actually threw some good ideas in there too.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. I'll yell a whole bunch of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But as a comic book writer, so this is the thing that Marcus and I as we go, how do you properly translate your vision from the page to an artist? Do you just lean on the artist to run with it? Is that the thing you're like where they say in movies it's good casting does all the work? Where it's like essentially if you have the right person it doesn't matter. Or do you draw out little things? We had one little sequence in our recent book that I drew out like a layer style, like the layout of a layer, like a map so they could use it.
JAMES TYNION IV
There have definitely been moments where I just don't have the words for what I'm trying to express and I need to do a horrifying doodle that tries to express it. But most of the time I do try to lean on my artists quite a bit. What I try to do is at the start of every project I write a crazy long document that's basically talking about the vibes of the story and the core ideas and all of the things that influenced me and all of that and then we have a bunch of back and forth conversations before we're even talking about the plot. So once they're up and running, I'll sort of set the emotional stage for the scene. But page to page my panel descriptions are usually pretty short. It's more like here's the character, here's their emotions, this is what they're doing. Next.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this is what real writers do. I think that that's good.
BEN KISSEL
I suppose that makes sense because at some you want them to create what they want to create because otherwise they're gonna loathe you if you give too much detail, they're like I'll fucking come up with this, it's fine, calm down.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's always the legend of Alan Moore's writing in comic books, which Alan Moore is widely considered to be the greatest comic book writer of all time. His scripts, every single panel is painstakingly described down to every tiny little detail. His comic book scripts for a 22 page comic will run well over 100 pages.
BEN KISSEL
But then if you're the artist I feel like it's just paint by numbers.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's not as fun.
MARCUS PARKS
What do you think?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you think?
BEN KISSEL
Mr. The Fourth?
JAMES TYNION IV
I think that when you're working with Alan Moore you know what you're getting into. But it is one of those things where like I've read some of those scripts and they're kind of stream of consciousness in this really, really wonderful way. Yes, he does break down all of the little pieces but he's also telling the artist what he's thinking about and all of that. It's almost like he's just dictating every thought he has about the comic and he's just letting the artist absorb that. I'm sure there are artists who hated that and I'm sure there are artists who absolutely loved that. But yeah, no, that is one of the cool things about comics is that as long as the script is just a sort of letter to the artist where they get to absorb and interpret everything. I like to lean on letting the artist interpret as much as they can because I got into this crazy business because I just wanted a bunch of cool comic book art.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
And I'm now at the point where I just get to hire and collaborate with a bunch of my favorite artists and then I just want to see them draw cool shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's so cool.
BEN KISSEL
James, have you ever had to fire an artist because they're putting hidden penises in the work? Because I saw this with Disney.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a great way to lead the conversation.
BEN KISSEL
I saw this with Disney. There was a person who circled all the penises.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We know this story.
BEN KISSEL
He was like look at all the dicks!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's in the coral of The Little Mermaid.
BEN KISSEL
It's weird.
JAMES TYNION IV
See I usually hire them for more work once I discover the hidden penises.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Well speaking of artists that you get to work with, I mean for your new book, for Blue Book, you get to work with Michael Avon Oeming to tell the Betty and Barney Hill story.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And Oeming's fucking amazing, he did Powers back in the 90s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh, I love Powers!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So did you request him specifically or was there something about his work that you thought this is the guy to tell the Betty and Barney Hill story? But before we get into that, do you want to give a quick refresh, Henry, on what the Betty and Barney Hill story is?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Betty and Barney Hill, they are an interracial couple I believe from I think upstate New York, I might be incorrect.
MARCUS PARKS
New Hampshire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
New Hampshire.
JAMES TYNION IV
New Hampshire.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were one of the first cases of alien abduction that became widely known. It's kind of where we saw the first kind of, besides Whitley Strieber, descriptions of grays. All of the traditional steps of an abduction were seen for the first time in the Betty and Barney Hill story.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So what was it about Oeming that you thought would be perfect for this?
JAMES TYNION IV
Well honestly it was very simple. I had started working on Department of Truth-
MARCUS PARKS
Which we'll get to, trust me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I started becoming friendly with Oeming because he was a big UFO nerd.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And like in particular he read I think it was issue #7 of DOT which is where I dug into Men In Black and I kind of dealt with UFO lore as part of the larger ideas behind Department of Truth. And so we started going back and forth and when I had the opportunities to fund the Blue Book series, it was like this is the person who I wanted to work with. And I originally thought we were gonna try to do something way further down the line. But I wanted to just like a few wild hairs that popped up in the the back... And I wanted to try my hand at adapting a story rather than just coming up with it, I wanted to work on something that was functionally nonfiction.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And then beyond that I was digging more and more into Fortean stories and esoterica of all kinds for DOT. I kept noticing the fact that a lot of these stories aren't as accessible as they used to be. When I was coming up, when I was growing up it was right during the like X-Files boom in the early 90s and there were all of these nonfiction books, "nonfiction" maybe in quotes in my middle school library about UFO encounters.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how I got into it. Because we grow up with it during that time period and then it was everywhere. The satanic panic actually allowed us to get a hold of all of this cool material because it was supposed to be a warning for children and shit like that. But it was just books of pentagrams.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And it was amazing and it was just and all of that stuff seeped into me and it became so much of the creative force of... It made me fascinated in all things strange/ And I wanted to tap into those original stories, particularly the ones that I felt had a real deep impact on kind of the folklore of UFO, everything UFOs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because that is such a keystone story, the Betty and Barney Hill story.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now when you go to tell that story, what is the direction of Blue Book? Is it sort of pulpy or are you digging deep? Is it the opposite, are you doing something where you're trying to portray the humanity of what happened or are you just going for like I'm telling a cool ass alien story?
JAMES TYNION IV
I wanted to strip it down pretty, I wanted to tell the story as directly as I could. Which is hard because it's something where it's a story that contradicts itself in like seven different places.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But she saw the constellations! She saw the star maps!
MARCUS PARKS
After he finishes, i want to ask about the star maps.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
The star maps is a point of contention but please continue.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I mean that's really what I wanted to tap into was... The way the whole idea started was at first I just wanted to tell the early part of their story, their initial encounter. Which their recounting of that initial encounter has always stayed pretty firm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Tight.
JAMES TYNION IV
There are a couple of little things like does he get a gun at one point that differs. He gets the gun in one of the tellings and then he never uses the gun. But then I wanted to weave all of these threads together and see if I could tell a fairly linear story that just kind of encapsulates the whole thing. And so we do it over five issues, like 20 pages each and it's the full life of mostly Betty Hill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Because she went on to become an important figure on the UFO circuit.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She did a lot of lectures, she was the one who really put the story forward because Barney Hill was, if you do believe the circumstances of his illnesses, the fact that he was given these dick warts by these aliens-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that his body was destroyed by whatever the hell it is they snaked up there to make him orgasm so hard in a way that was terrible, that's the only thing, that's what really scares me about it. It's the super hard, painful orgasm that you're supposed to do again and again and again while they're all staring at you. How do you go back to Betty?
MARCUS PARKS
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now every single time you go back to being with Betty, all you see is the gray with the little thin straw up your dick and your balls. God!
BEN KISSEL
Well you can think about anything in your head, just don't say it out loud. That'll help. That would help for sure. That's a great piece of merch though, I got abducted by aliens, all I got were these big old dick warts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Save it.
JAMES TYNION IV
I disagree.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Save it, all right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually past the holiday season, we're gonna wait for summer. So now that you dug in to the story, where do you stand on it?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well specifically what I want to ask you about is the star map because that's one of the things that I always found fascinating about the Betty and Barney Hill story.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You want to roll it out for the people that don't remember, who didn't do the fucking homework?
MARCUS PARKS
Didn't do the fucking homework. Yeah. Apparently Betty Hill was shown a star map while she was on the alien spaceship that shows like this is where we are. Basically them saying you don't have a reference for where we are but this is where we are.
BEN KISSEL
So they were blowing the dome off of Barney's cock and they showed her a map?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man. Because she she was already well serviced by Barney.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But she was able to later reproduce this map and it turned out that the map pointed towards Zeta Reticuli I believe was where was it where it pointed towards.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's where people look at this story and say well there's some truth to this because this woman is not an astronomer, she does not have any sort of background experience in astronomy. But then of course fucking Carl Sagan had to come out-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whatever. Well at least he was imaginative. He's not like Neil Degrasse Tyson who's such a reductivist.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And he's not like Joe Nickell who is just a straight up dickhead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Who I still like because of how big of a dickhead he is.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
But what Carl Sagan said is that map that Betty Hill drew could be pretty much placed anywhere on a star map and it could match up to something. What do you think? Do you think it's more Carl Sagan or do you think that maybe there's something to Betty's-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Judgment now!
JAMES TYNION IV
I think in all things I'm a natural skeptic but I have a deep fascination with all of this. So it's one of those things where it's compelling. It's a very compelling piece of this and there are definitely a handful of people, I forget the names, like a handful of astronomers who have said that actually it is very unlikely that she would get it this exact. But I mean I do think that the Carl Sagan point is very compelling.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
JAMES TYNION IV
But for me so much of it is about what happens when somebody encounters something that they just cannot explain and the stories they tell from it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Because it's just that element of it feels so powerful and so universal and it's like so many... And the fact that this story and it more than so many others has burned itself into our consciousness and the way we tell stories about aliens, all of that deeply fascinates me. So it's almost like I am open to everything happening as literally as possible but it also doesn't lose any of its fascination to me if it didn't.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unpacking the esoteric reminds me a lot of, so I do Jungian therapy which some people say it's not helping.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I do Jungian therapy and partially we talk about my day to day but when I have dreams she's like, (Borat voice) 'A nice!' Session is done, we can rip through the dream for an hour. But there's something that feels like that when you unpack the esoteric is that it's like when you are searching for details from a dream that you had.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where actually this thing happens to you and then as you are slowly ruminating over it, you walk down alleyways... Which this is where on the one side the cynical skeptic says like oh you're just making it up, right.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which I do understand that, I understand that feeling. But I actually feel like an open skeptic understands that your brain can examine something. It's also like when you're tripping.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Have you ever seen something? I've never seen something photo realistically in front of me when I'm tripping.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I have seen things that then I have chased down in my brain to sort of give shape to.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that seems like a lot of what happens in these types of people who experience a phenomenon.
JAMES TYNION IV
No, and I think the dream comparison is so, so direct because it's just like when you have a dream and then the next day when you are telling the story of the dream, you are creating connections that 100% did not exist while you were having the dream.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
Because the dream was a bunch of powerful emotions and little moments that are set as scenes that then-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Some is plot, a lot of it's vibe.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like writing a comic book.
JAMES TYNION IV
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where it's mostly vibe and then you're trying to explain vibe after the fact. It's that thing of like I was at my mom's house but it wasn't my mom's house but I knew that it was my mom's house.
JAMES TYNION IV
Exactly. And in that you sort of understand that the aspect of storytelling that is just your brain making sense and making a connection, the fact that there is a part of your brain that can just tell you the information that this is your mom's house without it looking like your mom's house, without it having any of the aspects of your mom's house but your brain makes that connection so powerfully. That it is one of those things where it's just like you encountered a being and it's just like every description you give of the being is different and it's like are they wearing little hats? Are they in little uniforms?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Seriously.
JAMES TYNION IV
Are they walking around naked?
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
JAMES TYNION IV
How many limbs do they have? And it's just like it's different every single time you approach it because it's like when you're giving voice to something that does not have any defined qualities.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Corporeal form.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. And of course when you're at your mom's house, you tend to have massive orgasms. And I think that's really what Barney taught us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is realy great. I actually am physically unable to orgasm at home.
MARCUS PARKS
Really?
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I can't do it.
MARCUS PARKS
Have you tried?
BEN KISSEL
You can write that down in a book, James.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sometimes, and I'm not even joking about this, I've went and masturbated in the car.
BEN KISSEL
Ugh, that's so much worse. That's illegal.
MARCUS PARKS
It's far worse.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I put a blanket over it, it's in the garage half the time.
BEN KISSEL
Well anyway.
MARCUS PARKS
It's far worse. Well James, speaking to our last point, I feel like let's move on to Department of Truth here.
BEN KISSEL
Well I just have one question though, James. When you're talking about something that's real like with Barney and Betty Hill, at the very least again real to the degree that it altered their entire life-
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Did you get any pushback when you're talking about real life people? Was anyone with the Betty or Barney Hill Institute, I don't know, were they like this is completely wrong? When you're dealing with someone? Because I mean you're telling their story, did anyone get upset?
JAMES TYNION IV
So far no.
BEN KISSEL
Okay good.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I mean I think at this point the benefit with a story like Betty and Barney Hill, and this is also part of why I gravitated towards that story, it's a story that's been told in many different places including newspapers and magazines that I got my hands on the original, I think it was Look Magazine interviews.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
JAMES TYNION IV
And those magazines are fucking huge by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In my storage unit I have a pile of them. Someone sent us one to Last Podcast a long time ago and I have the fucking stack of these UFO-
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I haven't gotten through them because again they take up so much room.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know where to put them.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I tried to make sure that I was drawing from many different sources, like I didn't have a single primary source. I did reference, I went and looked at 'The Interrupted Journey' was probably my favorite that I read out of everything that I read.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that's great.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I also made sure that I didn't pull directly from the transcripts, none of that direct dialogue is in that just because I didn't want to step on the rights.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
JAMES TYNION IV
But I wanted to capture the gist of it all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh sure.
JAMES TYNION IV
Because that has been retold many different times. So it's just something that I wanted to approach this the same way I would if I was telling a story about a real event, like a more traditionally journalistically verifiable event that had happened in the 60s. I would pull from many sources, I wouldn't pull from a single source.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like the Sandy Hook issue you're going to do is gonna be very carefully done but yet also interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know, I mean speaking at that point, Department of Truth, the book where basically I discovered your work just by seeing it on the shelves and I read Department of Truth and I got to the end of it and my first thought was this guy knows his shit. This guy absolutely knows his shit. And then I went to find you on Instagram and I was like oh fuck, he already follows me. All right, great, let's start talking about this stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah. I'm gonna have to catch you up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he knows. But for me talking about dreams and all that, for me I feel like Department of Truth is a book that's really about the nature of reality.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And what people make of it and what governments make of it. And to give a bit of a synopsis of it, I hope I can give a synopsis of this without getting too many spoilers because it's a book that unfolds so beautifully. It's a book about conspiracy in which the conspiracy within the conspiracy unfolds so slowly and so fucking masterfully that you wonder whether this is actually reality. It's like basically the Department of Truth is a department within the government that basically handles conspiracy but handles conspiracy as if every conspiracy is actually real. But I also don't want to spoil why they're real.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. That's some stuff Issue #1 stuff so I don't mind if you...
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Yeah, it's like basically flat earth is real but flat earth is real because people believe that flat earth is real, not because the earth is actually flat, it's the idea that if enough people believe that the earth is flat, then the earth will become flat and the earth will have always been flat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone has to fight against the belief.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. It's anti the Tinkerbell syndrome.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where you have to do the concept that all of it, just your creation of it from your mind allows it to be objectively real.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And the main character of the book is a guy who was a Satanic Panic child who had been in the Satanic Panic and had basically created a creature of his own, like one of those-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A homunculus.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Or created through belief his own sort of creature.
BEN KISSEL
Lil' Penny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Lil' Penny.
BEN KISSEL
That's how I understand. Lil' Penny, homunculus.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is true though. But going through and working on that style of project, cause you look at Grant Morrison talks about when he was working on his magnum opus, he was experiencing things because he was putting magic ritual in his works. Do you find when you are playing with your own ideas of objective reality, I know that it's obviously a creative endeavor but I feel in your brain you're still kind of putting yourself in the headspace of imagining this, literally that what you imagine is real. Because I do believe that. I believe that anything that has been imagined at some point in some way, shape, or in some fashion is real somewhere, someplace, right.
BEN KISSEL
(singing) Somewhere out there. Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But yeah, did it fuck with your life? Did it have real world implications?
MARCUS PARKS
I think the biggest real world implication is that it made me really fucking cynical.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
JAMES TYNION IV
It's one of those things where because I cover it from all angles, I cover it from the weird esoterica and deep dives into UFOs, we have a two parter about Bigfoot that I'm very proud of.
MARCUS PARKS
Dude, I don't know if I ever told you, I fucking loved your Bigfoot two parter.
JAMES TYNION IV
Thank you.
MARCUS PARKS
It's one of the most heartbreaking things I've ever read about Bigfoot in my life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's a lonely character.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's about a Bigfoot hunter and that's why it's great.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. No, and I wanted to in digging into those stories and especially the human stories of people's lives who can be destroyed when they fully succumb to an idea that's just outside the fabric of everyone's reality. But it was those stories and then also the stories of just the ways in which our government has shaped and policed its own history.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
JAMES TYNION IV
And the way that history is told to us. And it's happened around the same time as I travel a lot internationally for work now just going to different conventions and I work with a lot of international artists and it really just sharpens the fact that it's like oh yeah, most of history as taught to Americans was a propaganda effort.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. For generations. For generations.
JAMES TYNION IV
For generations. And then when the Soviet Union ended then they stopped, it's like they took the wheel off the car and then it's still driving, the car is still driving but nobody's directing it in certain ways. Which is honestly more chaotic and more fucked up. So it's just-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need to bring back the NWO is what you're saying.
BEN KISSEL
The NWO.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I say this all the time, we're in desperate need of the illuminati.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. No, I mean that is kind of the horrifying realization which is in a world where it's just that no two people believe the same version of the world is a terrifying world.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
JAMES TYNION IV
But that is the most individualistic world that that you can build where everyone is fully manifested into themselves. It's just it can't cohere. But then what you have to do to cohere a giant group of people is tell them a fictional story that inevitably fucks a whole bunch of people over. And it's terrifying.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, I'm celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ in 7 days. 5 days? Oh my lordy. Who is the hottest nerds out of all the cons you've been to?
JAMES TYNION IV
Jesus.
BEN KISSEL
What country?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is what we're doing. This is why this episode is out for everyone because we're gonna have our convo-
BEN KISSEL
I'll tell you, man. Some of those Comic-Cons...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then Kissel's asking the real questions that the real listener wants to know.
BEN KISSEL
Some of those Comic-Cons, man.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. I will say the most attractive comic book creator is Jorge Jiménez who drew Batman when I wrote Batman.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
If you ever go to his Instagram, he'll dress up like Superman sometimes and it's just like yeah, no, that tracks.
BEN KISSEL
Checks out.
MARCUS PARKS
I get that for you. James wrote Batman for how many years? 10 years? 10 years?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah, about 10 years.
BEN KISSEL
I love Batman, it's my favorite.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he wrote Batman for 10 years. You got any Batman questions for him?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I have a lot of Batman questions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god.
BEN KISSEL
Now is it possible-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is how we're trying to reach him.
MARCUS PARKS
We're trying to bring him in, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Is it possible if Batman can go back in time and save his parents, would he do it?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh boy. I mean yes, I think he would.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then he won't have to be Batman.
JAMES TYNION IV
But then it would create some weird time fragment that would then come and start destroying the future and then when he defeated that in the present, he would have to go back and he'd have to accept his parents' loss.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But then he has to kill his own parents.
BEN KISSEL
He has to kill his parents.
MARCUS PARKS
He has to go back and shoot Thomas and Martha in the fucking face, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
All right. Also follow up question-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But that in it. You wanna pitch that.
BEN KISSEL
That's a good multiverse. Tony Stark, Bruce Wayne. Who has more money?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh, Batman because it's like-
BEN KISSEL
Does he?
JAMES TYNION IV
Batman funded the Justice League Watchtower.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, that's right.
JAMES TYNION IV
I mean I guess Tony Stark built a skyscraper in the middle of Manhattan but people do that in real life. I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is a question I want to ask you just to roll around your head. I actually have brought this up several times on the show and you are a person that your head's been in this space for a long time. Why have we not seen an actual person attempt to be Batman? Why have we not seen-
BEN KISSEL
We did, in Seattle!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No but that was low rent.
MARCUS PARKS
Like a rich guy wanting to be Batman.
BEN KISSEL
Rich guys are not strong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just feel like they could have spent so much money. Bezos is getting cut.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah but he's tiny, he's idle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know but I don't really understand why we have not had one guy wanna make these things real.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah, no, I think about that a lot. I think it's mostly that they would die immediately if they tried.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, you'd just get killed. You get shot in the face.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you'd just get shot in the head.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
My final Batman question, nipples or no nipples on the suit? Because I watched the George Clooney one which is just, it's whatever, but he got big old nipples.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But then the Keaton one, very small nipples. And then the most recent Batman has no nipples at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's serious.
BEN KISSEL
So what do we want here?
JAMES TYNION IV
I accept bat nipples or no. I like a Batman that changes his costume every now and then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
So sometimes he can get the nipples out but he doesn't to.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. So maybe if it's wintertime he's got nipples.
JAMES TYNION IV
he's saving them for when he needs them, like culturally when we need Batman to have nipples, they'll be there for us.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
So speaking of Batman, you wrote Batman for 10 years, you wrote a ton great runs. But you left Batman this summer, it was actually treated as a pretty big deal in the comics industry. And it seems like the books that you write now, the stuff like Department of Truth, Nice House on the Left which is also-
BEN KISSEL
On the Lake.
MARCUS PARKS
Congratulations for the Eisner on that by the way.
JAMES TYNION IV
Thank you very much.
BEN KISSEL
Oh nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man, you're collecting them now.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
JAMES TYNION IV
No, I've got a whole line of them.
MARCUS PARKS
Two time Eisner award winner.
BEN KISSEL
Two time, two time, two time Eisner award winner.
MARCUS PARKS
So it seems like the books that you write that are your own property are horror books.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Was horror something that you just kind of wanted to do all along?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh absolutely. When I was in college I did my minor in film studies and I did a whole thing on international horror movies.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool.
JAMES TYNION IV
Horror as a genre has always really been really important to me. And part of it's because when I was a kid it scared the shit out of me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
JAMES TYNION IV
I would walk down the horror aisle at Blockbuster but I wouldn't make eye contact with any of the videos because then I would have horrifying nightmares. And it wasn't until I was in late high school, early college that I realized that the nightmares I was having about those covers was much scarier than what was in the movie. And then it was a year later that I realized that if I structured and wrote that down and then turned it in in a writing workshop, people enjoyed them.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's interesting. I didn't realize you went to Ghislaine Maxwell University as well where everyone gets a minor. Hello. So just lastly-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh my god.
BEN KISSEL
Just lastly when it comes to Batman because obviously now you're doing your own stuff-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're not even asking about the questions that we were asking about!
BEN KISSEL
No, I am!
MARCUS PARKS
I opened the floodgates and told him he could ask any Batman question he wanted.
BEN KISSEL
I'm opening it. I had a great Ghislaine Maxwell joke that gives me a question. When you're working for IP like that, is it nice and refreshing that you get to create your own stuff? Because I can imagine you write something about Batman and then someone's like that's not the way Batman would do it and you have to be like fucking all right, fine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you're right.
BEN KISSEL
Is it nice? Is it more liberating now?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh, 100%. There's no comparison. There's an obvious thrill getting to play with characters that the whole world loves. There is something thrilling-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You get to be the Batman guy. Sweet, yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah, I'll always be grateful that I had that opportunity but nothing is better than people connecting to something that you and the artist friends that I have created from whole cloth.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And then you get to rely on your own instincts. And honestly the most gratifying thing in the the last few years and this was part of why I left Batman is it's just my independent books started outselling Batman at a few key moments during the year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
JAMES TYNION IV
And I could sign on to continue my DC exclusive, continue another few years writing Batman or I can go all in.
BEN KISSEL
That's so cool.
JAMES TYNION IV
And I knew I couldn't do both. And that was the moment I was ready to go all in.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So cool.
BEN KISSEL
That's really fucking awesome when your work starts to outsell Batman. That's pretty awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so fucking cool.
JAMES TYNION IV
To be clear, it wasn't out selling it every single month.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But still.
BEN KISSEL
I know but to be in the league-
JAMES TYNION IV
It was a few months through the year the sales went up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's fucking awesome.
BEN KISSEL
That's awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so cool. Was there any specific moments that you remember that you were told no? Like did you pitch something for Batman? Is there anything that you pitched it for Batman and they're like no? Oh yeah, wasn't the big one was the Batman couldn't go to eat pussy?
MARCUS PARKS
That wasn't James' idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That wasn't you, right?
JAMES TYNION IV
That was the Harley Quinn animated series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Then someone at DC was stupid enough to let a real quote out into the world. Yeah. No, I mean for me the big shit that... A lot of times it was the most minor... It was like you would build a whole story around a character that you would find out like two issues into writing that you couldn't use that character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Jesus Christ.
JAMES TYNION IV
So that character was suddenly gonna be pulled out of your story halfway through and going to show up in another writer's book. And that happened a lot especially when I was starting out because I ended my 10 years on Batman on the title Batman, but I started out on a bunch of the side books. When you're doing the fourth most important Batman title, then the other three titles get to-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're getting Joker.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're getting Riddler. You can't use those guys.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, you're doing a lot of Mr. Zsasz stories.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah. And honestly my last Batman run I got a lot of attention because I was creating a lot of new characters for it. But part of the reason I was doing that was so nobody could tell me I couldn't do things with the character.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I'm just sick of dealing with IP.
MARCUS PARKS
That's great. You ended up creating Punchline is such a great addition to the Batman universe.
JAMES TYNION IV
Thank you very much.
MARCUS PARKS
That's very cool, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
James, can I ask you, all right, so you write all these horror things trying to scare us so much, what scares you?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why are you so scared? What's so scary about your brain? What's going on inside of your fucking mind that you decide to put it on us?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh god. I mean Department of Truth is really the one that lays out all of the shit I'm most scared about in the world right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
That is the one-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, thought viruses. Thought viruses run amok is one of those things that you can't... Because again you can't really talk about spoilers of the book but it's true. Not to get too into the weeds here but I think that what we saw on January 6, 2021, it was the ultimate example of a LARP going real. That was a thought, it was a thought on the internet and it then made itself real. And then the people that were a part of it barely understood that they had a thought virus and that's the reason why when they went they didn't tear the building apart, they were just as confused that they got there as anybody else. And then once they arrived they're taking pictures and acting like they're visiting because they he didn't understand that they just tried to take over the government.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know. Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean there was bad actors, there was bad actors, right? That's the problem.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The bad actors were riding everybody, all the morons.
JAMES TYNION IV
And right now the lot of the bad actors, they're not even particularly smart. They're good at fanning the flames.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Where it's just letting people lean into what they're naturally afraid of and all of this stuff and just dialing everything up to 11. And I mean this is the thing that scares me so much about the modern world is we're living in a time where bad ideas can spread faster than we understand their impact on the world. And it's just like you can see it is this kind of mimetic... Dangerous ideas spread very, very quickly in the current environment on the internet and all this stuff.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
JAMES TYNION IV
And it's just like I remember being a kid and the internet seemed like this big wonderful place that was going to open all these doors.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I went to EPCOT. I remember. EPCOT sold us a line of horseshit.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah. And it's just like we've seen like oh no, no, if you open all of those doors, it's just chaos. But to shut all those doors would be horrible now. So it's just like where does that leave us? And that tension is at the heart of a lot of the different books that I do. All of my books are like all about the horror of just living in the modern world and feeling kind of powerless in the face of it but still needing to conduct yourself to some degree in a moral or upstanding way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well I mean that's also the idea of the fear of the unknown because your other book, Nice House on the Lake which again I can't recommend enough, it's basically a group of friends get brought to a house on a lake by one of their other friends and then the world ends around them. And then they have to figure it out from there. Why are we here? Why did this person bring us here? What are we doing here? What's the point of all this? It's fucking terrifying. But yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like dreams.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a dream, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a dream I've had, I've had those types of scenarios. It's very, very scary.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So does that also work into the idea of just the unknown part?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
What can happen to the world around you?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. And it's just the fact that things that you don't understand can still have such huge impact on your life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And then the scarier thing is that understanding them does not change your ability to make it better.
MARCUS PARKS
That's the most terrifying part of Nice House is when they start to understand it and it doesn't matter.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That I think is a very big center of the esoteric movement is just that concept of people are really afraid of that, I think it's why they're afraid to get into the lines of thoughts that take you into these weird alleyways because they're really afraid that they'll get to the end of the understanding and still be fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You still gotta try to understand, you try to to throw yourself into these scenarios and then all right, I did all this legwork and I still have nowhere, I still don't know, it doesn't matter to me. Now I understand but it doesn't change anything about me.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And it's like well I feel like partially that's kind of more how do you get out of an existential crisis like that is that you kind of have to let it change you. Because to me in real life the issue is that the understanding should change you but we're all really holding onto our fucking paradigms, right?
BEN KISSEL
There you go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because I like my fucking Pumas, man.
BEN KISSEL
Pumas.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got these new Pumas on and I like these and so I can't give up the fucking paradigm because the paradigm led to me fucking getting these cool ass Pumas.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. Well and the more you learn, the more questions you have. I see you're from Milwaukee.
JAMES TYNION IV
I am.
BEN KISSEL
One thing that's interesting, I went to school in Milwaukee. Speaking of paradigm shifts, did you ever go to the Landmark Lanes?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yes, yes I did.
BEN KISSEL
Now this is one of the best places ever. It's a bowling alley, it has three fucking bars and an arcade. It is the greatest... We went there after we did our show at the Pabst Theater.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Oh shit, I loved that place!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
That was actually one of my favorite drinking experiences in America on tour. I loved that place.
BEN KISSEL
When you're super stressed, you can always just go to Landmark Lanes.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Get a Spotted Cow.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh yeah. I love me some New Glarus Brewery.
BEN KISSEL
I love New Glarus.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love Spotted Cow. People ask us all the time, how do you cleanse your brain?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When you're doing these processes and you're working these heavy... What do you do that's like throw away? I'm going to talk about on Side Stories this week because I'm obsessed with this story, this show called Knife or Death.
BEN KISSEL
Knife or Death! Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We were talking about an on Side Stories today but it's knifing competitions with the guys from Forged in Fire, right.
JAMES TYNION IV
Okay, that sounds fucking cool.
BEN KISSEL
I love Forged in Fire, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's people who should not be physically moving on camera and now they're the center of the story. It's fantastic.
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh my god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what do you do? How do you blow off steam? Do you have a big dick sucking machine?
BEN KISSEL
Maybe Batman does.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah, so there's the big dick sucking machine but I mean honestly this feels like such a cheap answer but the real thing is the way I cleanse my system is I write these comic books.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
It is just like it's taking all of the abstract anxiety in my head and it's just channeling it out into projects that I think look beautiful and all that. It short circuits the part of my brain that makes me think oh I should do something about some of these horrifying things and it's just like I'm gonna make a horror comic book.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
It works.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You'd be surprised, you're bringing more to the table making art necessarily, unless you're like... I feel like there's a difference between there are people that are artists activists that do like straight up activism mixed with their art.
BEN KISSEL
This activism term is getting a little bit overused by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
True.
BEN KISSEL
I see a lot of people's profiles where they just add the word activist now and I'm like I know you and you're not.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, we know that.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah, you do five tweets a day, that's not...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, that's hard.
BEN KISSEL
Activist.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's hard on the thumbs.
BEN KISSEL
I am like in the Iranian Revolution. I am on the front lines.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I feel like having a piece of art tell these stories and talk about these issues on a more allegorical front really helps people.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think that it kind of allows it to be wrapped around, you can wrap your head around it more easily and then you don't understand that you're learning lessons.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. No I think that that's exactly right. And I mean I also just I'll watch a nice animated movie or something like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
There are lots of ways to just sort of connect to the nice things. Every now and then I'll build up... A lot of times what I read is a lot of what I write, it's a lot of nonfiction esoteric shit and then real messed up horror. And then every now and then I'll just let a stack of 5 YA comics build up that I've heard are really, really fucking good and then I'll finally sit down and read them and I'll have a very emotional day in a really cathartic, beautiful, wonderful way.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
I don't know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So how does someone get to the heart of James Tynion? You said you were single, how does someone get there? How does someone become your side piece?
JAMES TYNION IV
Oh boy. Oh boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How do they get in there?
JAMES TYNION IV
I don't know, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How do they get in that big old head of yours? You know what I mean? Look at your head, so much room in there for someone to get in there.
JAMES TYNION IV
It is quite large.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You look like a young Francis Ford Coppola.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That is not a compliment.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Is it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah!
BEN KISSEL
Well just my final question.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it is.
BEN KISSEL
I don't know if anyone wants... Whatever. Okay. Allegorical, allegorical. We can now learn through all these niche markets like with Forged in Fire, you take a piece of raw steel and you make something out of it. And you can learn a lot of life lessons.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's alchemy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That and football. You learn a lot of lessons, stick-to-it-iveness and maybe you can win at the end. And comic books, you can teach a lot through your art form and things like that. So there is something really awesome about the niche markets now that people have found the best way for them to learn and it's just I think comic books are a fucking badass way to really understand the world.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And have you enjoyed the rise of comic books?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Because even when we were growing up it was still a little fringe, right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And now it's more mainstream than anything else.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Marcus got beat up for being a nerd, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Oh no, I definitely was in the days of getting beat up for having my X-Men.
BEN KISSEL
Do you feel like comic books are in the proper position in the zeitgeist, taken seriously enough?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah, I think they've definitely risen up so much and I say this as someone who works in western comics but manga is really doing the heavy lifting there in terms of just making everyone read it. But it is something that is amazing, it's amazing to see the breadth of what comics is. Cause especially when when I started reading regularly in the early 2000s when I was in high school, that was when you couldn't sell a comic book that didn't have a superhero in it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
And now we're back in a world where comics are not one type of thing, it's not just one genre that just has to dominate everything. And I say this with great love to superhero comics but it's just I am so fucking thrilled that I could read comics every week of the year and read something legitimately great without having to pick up a single superhero comic. The fact that we're getting that in this modern moment is really, really fucking cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I mean on my pull list right now I've got probably 10-15 books and one of them is a superhero comic and that's it. And it's fucking great.
JAMES TYNION IV
That's awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What superhero do you like?
MARCUS PARKS
I like the new JSA run. Or at least I'm starting on the new JSA run just because I love the Justice Society of America.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Is it different than the Justice League?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Justice Society's older.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's a fucking league and a society, you dummy. You dumb head.
MARCUS PARKS
I read the first issue and yeah, it was pretty good. Enough for me to read more. But that's the thing is that I keep putting superhero comics on my list and then dropping them after five issues because it's just sort of the same story getting told over and over again. But the cool thing about comics is that it's really American comics, you mentioned manga, American comics it feels like is starting to finally catch up with the rest of the world.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Because here in America because of the Comics Code Authority, the whole Fredric Wertham thing that we talked about-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's so weird, right?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's how American comics came to be superhero-centric. The rest of the world didn't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because the superhero comics were really used to, you could make really great propaganda out of them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, well you can make great propaganda and you could also do a fun cheesy story that kids would buy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But the rest of the world, they didn't get as narrow as we did.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. And it was never that it was only for kids, there was never the idea that the medium only existed for children's stories.
BEN KISSEL
There was one time when they made Captain America a nazi and that seemed to be really on the nose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No one liked it.
BEN KISSEL
Remember that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone was mad.
BEN KISSEL
Wasn't it 2015? You were like do we need Captain America to be a nazi?
MARCUS PARKS
Wasn't he just HYDRA? Not necessarily a nazi, he was HYDRA, right.
BEN KISSEL
But isn't HYDRA nazis?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
HYDRA is nazis.
BEN KISSEL
Aren't they?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, HYDRA is nazis but they also had nazis. That's the thing that doesn't make any sense. HYDRA is the nazis and the nazis-
JAMES TYNION IV
I'm having Twitter flashbacks from 2016.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, well we don't wanna do that to James Tynion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I also wanna say, so we are also doing this to promote our new book we're coming out with next year called Operation Sunshine, it's a vampire heist comic book story.
BEN KISSEL
Woo!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And my question is do you have any advice for us? We are now on Issue #3. How do we get better?
MARCUS PARKS
He's been giving us advice since Soul Plumber.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. I want more, I need it audibly. I want it audibly while I have him. Just any quick hits? Any quick hits you could say?
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So right now we're following a heist structure, right, a heist movie structure but then we're gonna try to rip it apart at the end.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah. Good. I mean honestly that would be my best advice is that you always want... There are a few key things that I try to go by is while you're writing it if at a certain point the characters don't feel like they're naturally moving in the direction of the how you outlined the plot, listen to the characters, don't listen to the old document.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yes!
JAMES TYNION IV
Sometimes you have to throw out the road map and it's a scary moment creatively but it will always lead to something better creatively.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay.
JAMES TYNION IV
Something is Killing the Children, I had a very different series in mind and then just Erica Slaughter just kept not going in the direction that I was writing in and I was like all right, I'm following her. And then now it's this big fucking series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
So just listen to your characters is the big thing. And then the other thing is I have a feeling that this isn't advice that you guys need but it's just don't pull away from the most visceral thing. It is one of those things where it's just lean into the most visceral emotion you can when it presents itself. Sometimes people kind of flinch away from those moments.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
JAMES TYNION IV
And it's just like you want to land in the messy uncomfortable feelings because those are the ones that I think especially comic readers especially when they've only read superhero comics and stuff like that, when they finally go outside of it and then they're presented with an uncomfortable feeling that they've never gotten from fiction before, it opens their brain in this really, really powerful way. It's the reason why so many people are so fond of the classic Vertigo comics, it's because they would read all the superhero stuff and then sometime when they were a teenager they picked up the first book that just challenged them and it's just like those readers will remember the challenge for the rest of their life.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's so cool. That's great advice.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, awesome. James Tynion IV-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The fourth.
BEN KISSEL
Thank you so much for being on the show man, it's an honor to speak with you and hope to see you 2023.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And James also wrote a story for the Last Comic Book on the Left.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah bro.
JAMES TYNION IV
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's gonna be coming out in February.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, that's coming out soon, we got Last Comic Book on the Left.
MARCUS PARKS
Thank you very much for doing that for us of course.
JAMES TYNION IV
I worked with Tyler Boss on that who did a fucking amazing job.
MARCUS PARKS
He did.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's real good. It's real fucking good.
MARCUS PARKS
And I also did get some advanced issues of Blue Book and it's fucking great. When it comes out, everybody pick it up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're gonna love it.
MARCUS PARKS
You're going to absolutely adore this book. It's so wonderful.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
JAMES TYNION IV
Thank you so much.
BEN KISSEL
All right everyone, there it was, our conversation with James Tynion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He's smart.
BEN KISSEL
He is smart.
MARCUS PARKS
He is smart.
BEN KISSEL
Well thank you all so much for supporting the show and thank you so much for listening.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And if you are in the LA area, come and check out me, Ed Larson, we're hosting a Classy Night Out pre New Year's Eve party so that you can be sick for the day that New Year's Eve happens. That's gonna be fine because then you get to build back up, you add that layer of reality to that honestly amateur night. It's December 30th, check it out, get tickets at the Pack website, we're gonna have a whole lot of shenanigans. We got all of them. My sister's gonna be there, some other people, we're gonna yell at you and it's gonna be fun. Wear a suit or not. Just cover yourself.
BEN KISSEL
Do we have anything else, guys?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no man. Do they even know it's Christmas time at all?
BEN KISSEL
All right, hail yourselves everyone!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan.
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.