[SPEAKER_02]: What is up everybody?
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to Comic Book Club on Alex.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm Justin and we got a bonus episode for you here with two great guests.
[SPEAKER_02]: We're talking to Chris Stevens from Lighthouse and the legendary Steven are this set about the upcoming kickstarter for Steven's amazing project tyrant Chris Steven.
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome to the podcast.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you so much honor to be here.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is an honor to have you here.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very excited to talk about this now for those who don't know back in the day tyrant was a four issues series from spider baby graphics, which was Steven's imprint came out.
[SPEAKER_02]: Came went made a huge impact now.
[SPEAKER_02]: It is coming back for this Kickstarter, which is going to be posting pretty soon in the next two weeks.
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we could say Chris is that fair.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, sir.
[SPEAKER_02]: All right.
[SPEAKER_02]: So date TBD, but if you know anything about Kickstarter, there's a pre-launch page up.
[SPEAKER_02]: You can check it out at the set, Tyrant Deluxe Additions.
[SPEAKER_02]: And just to set up a little bit more here, then I'll stop talking.
[SPEAKER_02]: We'll start asking you guys questions.
[SPEAKER_02]: There's going to be two different additions that people can check out once the Kickstarter launches.
[SPEAKER_02]: But Steven, to take it way back,
[SPEAKER_02]: uh... tyrant is a dinosaur action book it was pretty huge when it came out it was as far as i'm aware never quite finished uh... what is it like to revisit it now
[SPEAKER_02]: two and a half-ish decades later, two and a three decades later.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's phenomenal, and not only wasn't quite finished, it was going to be a 15 to 20-year project, so it even wasn't quite born.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, the truth.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, my plan was the birth life and death of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, and I barely got through the birth, and then the entire direct sale market,
[SPEAKER_01]: imploded within a less than a year it went from 14 distributors that I've been working with when I was doing taboo a few years earlier to one, the diamond.
[SPEAKER_01]: And at that point it was no longer economically feasible to continue.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I regretfully pulled the plug on that and on Sprite of Baby Comics, which I had published two issues of prior to making my decision.
[SPEAKER_01]: So, you know, it feels unbelievable to me that this is happening.
[SPEAKER_01]: It took Chris a few years of courtship, actually, to arrive at this point, and one of the deciding factors was Jim Rug and the Leggrade Ed Piscores comics K-Fade episode on Tyrant that really prompted me finally saying yes to Chris.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've been working on it ever since.
[SPEAKER_01]: This has been
[SPEAKER_01]: At least two years into making at this point, between finding and excavating all the original art, ranging for the scanning of everything up to the standards that Jim Rogg, who's designing the book, and Sean Michael Robinson, who really set the bar high for the quality of the scans to get the best print quality imaginable.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, I'm, I'm giddy and, and still in disbelief at this stage.
[SPEAKER_03]: Before we get to the courtship, which we're going to tease as long as we can hear.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do want to ask you, Stephen, about like,
[SPEAKER_03]: What first drew you to this story?
[SPEAKER_03]: Like I feel like a dinosaur's are hard just from a storytelling perspective.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't imagine and and the actual, you know, creation of a book set then with, you know, not a ton of dialogue.
[SPEAKER_01]: Dinosaur are easy, Justin, you know, I'll tell you what I can't believe you.
[SPEAKER_01]: I tell you what's hard is, you know, the things I hate to draw, cars, buildings, anything to do with human beings and civilization.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, drawing prehistoric lifeforms has been my calling since age three and four.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Tyrant really was and still is a dream project for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: This is the dinosaur comic I always wish existed.
[SPEAKER_01]: Something that didn't involve
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, time travel or traveling to another planet or to a lost island or, you know, all the paleopop culture that I grew up with, most of which I absolutely love, you know, was primarily structured around certain science fiction tropes and fantasy tropes that would eventually get someone like myself as a viewer reader to the land with a dinosaurs lived
[SPEAKER_01]: My goal was to really immerse a reader like yourself in what the late Cretaceous era might have been like what being a lifeform at that time would have been like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I grew up reading not just dinosaur books.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was one of those kids that my mother taught me to read by reading to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was one of those kids that my mom would stop when she hit the name of a dinosaur.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I would say the name, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Because that's something she couldn't pronounce.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I already had it down.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, thankless source was my my guy back.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, yeah, and even then it's an anclosor and kylosor, you know, it's like I've heard a bunch of ways from paleontologists, so yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: So this really was the dream project when I was a kid when my favorite comics growing up in the silver age reading comics off the new stand was turx on of stone.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then the back of every issue there was a short.
[SPEAKER_01]: usually three to four page, back up feature called Young Earth, which would be this sort of non-sequiter self-standing story about one dinosaur or one woolly mammoth or a little later in the run, a caveman, and those were as close as I ever read to
[SPEAKER_01]: the kind of comic I wished existed at that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: And those little three and four page bytes were delightful and tantalizing, but I wanted just that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's all I wanted, all right.
[SPEAKER_01]: So a time it really was my dream project.
[SPEAKER_01]: I entered the field professionally around 1977 and ever since then, I had been trying to convince publishers and editors to give me a shot and nobody would.
[SPEAKER_01]: you know, they would come back with, oh, we have something just like what what you're talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it would turn out to be and I'm not exaggerating.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I was handed full scripts at times.
[SPEAKER_01]: And let's say it's a 22-page issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: It would be 18 pages of people in drawing rooms or in vehicles and four pages of, you know, finally making it to wherever the dinosaurs lived.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was nothing I was interested in doing.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, you know, that was me as a pair of hands.
[SPEAKER_01]: being presumed as a way of facilitating exactly the kind of comic story I didn't want to tell.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the stars all aligned, I don't think it's a coincidence that, you know, within the same year, the Great Ricardo Delgado launched Age of Reptiles, one of my all-time favorite comics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_01]: And, and I finally got Tyran off the ground.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've been talking about Tyrant for about five years prior to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'd actually be enjoying what I thought was going to be issue one.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first splash page I ever drew on my drawing board.
[SPEAKER_01]: was what became page one of tyrant number three, the chapter that takes place inside the egg.
[SPEAKER_01]: And as I was working on that, I realized, oh, I've got to give the backstory to this.
[SPEAKER_01]: Like, this is not the beginning of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Tyrant's mother laying the egg is the beginning of the story.
[SPEAKER_01]: In the meantime, you know, I got involved in a project with image comics, Jim Valentino,
[SPEAKER_01]: rang me up and invited me to do a project with and for him and that culminated in Alan Moore Rick Beach myself and a number of our friends like John Tottenham, Dave Gibbons, Don Simpson, Chester Brown collaborating on 1963, the six issue mini series that we did at image and I bring that big bring that up because that bank rolled my finally being free enough for a few years to
[SPEAKER_01]: bankrolled tyrant, just as a bankrolled Rick Beach finally doing his literal dream park project roaring ricks, rare bit themes, ricks comic of his dreams.
[SPEAKER_02]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, just to move over to you and get into the courtship, Richard and style.
[SPEAKER_02]: Why on you, and did you want to return to this all these years later?
[SPEAKER_02]: What drew you to the project and what finally convinced Steven?
[SPEAKER_03]: And name your favorite dinosaur.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, please.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, guys, it has to be the anglic source, you know, and I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Friends.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, Alex, I am the right age.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm the perfect age where I was a little boy in a small town that had a hole in the wall, catty cornered comic book shop next to a church.
[SPEAKER_00]: the guy sat behind the count counter in the darkness, smoking cigars and telling he's ball parts and comics were like, ah, you know, he was kind of like that, but that happened to be, you know, the timing of it who knows and, you know, the distribution back then was, it wasn't like every Wednesday was like new book Wednesday or whatever in the early 80.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I don't know exactly the the month or whatever, but for my memory of it, it was like,
[SPEAKER_00]: in my little boys mind the summer of swamp thing because it was when the anatomy lesson came out and it was every dc comic for I'm sure somebody out there is a story any of this stuff more than I am knows like the month and all that stuff but the dc comics ran a house ad that said you know swamp thing is coming and the anatomy lesson and this is the place.
[SPEAKER_00]: you know all that stuff and it eight years old it was just very mysterious and you know I knew what an anatomy was by eight but like to see it put into that context it just was like this mysterious thing and the older people in the store were all talking about it and you know I probably didn't read it or get my hands on a copy until I was 10 but you know for whatever reason I just got deep into comics at a very young age and
[SPEAKER_00]: Spend a lot of time by myself trying to figure out why is this comic affect me this way or why does it feel like this comic is actually happening when I'm reading it, but this comic I'm just reading and you know, all these thoughts of a little boy trying to figure stuff out and and
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I spent a lot of time with my comics.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was an only kid in my mom and grandma and raised me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And some of the voices of the writers and creators that became most prominent to me as I was growing up, almost became like, de facto father figures or family members or something along those lines.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just felt like I learned a lot, you know, growing up with those books.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Steve was always in my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: And by the time Steve did tyrant,
[SPEAKER_00]: The timeline for me sinks up where I'm kind of right out of high school.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know what the hell I'm doing with my life, you know, and things I loved comics and the love was still there, but I wasn't feeling it the same way.
[SPEAKER_00]: I, you know, you're getting a little older, your taste change, you're trying to figure shit out, maybe your idealistic, all that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that was an error when Paul Pope's THB started coming out, he, you know, he had done a couple self-published, you know, the untitled thing and the Dr. Richardson thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But THB started coming out, David Max Kabuki.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's slightly different vein, but still in that independent and hey, this is not super heroes and I love superhero.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just about, you know, growing beyond them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Something like Jeff Smith's bone that was that era and Steve with Tyrant that was all the same time really, you know, you can parse it out a year here, whatever, but it was all the same time.
[SPEAKER_00]: And and Tyrant hit me, maybe even stronger than any of those things because.
[SPEAKER_00]: The big difference to me was as great as as bone and and as great as Paul and Jeff Smith and and David Mack and those guys are and even those Smith is a little older than those guys and and you know different factors, but those guys were all just getting started really
[SPEAKER_00]: at that age, I was 19 or so, like a whole different thing because Steve, I was fully aware of it already helped push comics forward with the work he did.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went swamp thing and then as a publisher with the work with Taboo, you know, we wouldn't have from hell without Steve and from hell, you know, truly great comics ever made.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Tyrant hit me at the time when I was
[SPEAKER_00]: and had no clue how to do it because I had two women who raised me and I was special.
[SPEAKER_00]: I changed the light bulb.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was special, you know, and trying to figure out how to be a man was something that, you know, got active in my brain.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in some ways, and I don't know if I put this all together back then, I actually think Jim Rogues who's designing the books, I think it hit Jim who's a few years younger than me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it actually hit Jim more in a concrete
[SPEAKER_00]: When I look back on it, it was like, oh, here's a grown man doing grown man work.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, I knew Steven pushed comics, who were weird, but I also knew enough about the biography and stuff that he was probably in his early 40s at the time of Tyrant.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at 1940s, an old son of a bitch Steve, so I'm sorry about that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm an older son of a bitch.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, let me tell you.
[SPEAKER_00]: How dare you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now I'm offended.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, well, hey, I'm like a grandfather at this point, then, you know, without the kids.
[SPEAKER_00]: But no, so it was just Steve's, I said this in many of the talks we're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Stephen, our beset's a name that's just been in my head in a very real way since I was eight years old.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, the word that Steve's done, it just...
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, and the connective tissue.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like it's not just coming out of the air is I made a book that came out in 2015 that I published called Little Nemo Dream Another Dream, which was tribute to Windsor McKay's celebrated Little Nemo in Slumberland, you know, newspaper strips from the early part of the 19th from the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, that was dream, dream, dream another dream.
[SPEAKER_01]: The little boy Jack, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, little Nemo dream another dream and in there guys, you know, we invited, I forget the exact number.
[SPEAKER_00]: I see it different places to, you know, it's funny once, one thing says one, 12 and other says one, 44 and I don't have the book in my house.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's kind of, I can't check it, but it was over a hundred artists that we asked to comment, pay tribute to me and do a Nemo strip and in the process that took a couple years to put together, you could imagine.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Jim Rug, who I'd been friends with, I'd known Jim since the early 2000s.
[SPEAKER_00]: I met Jim through my good friend, Farrell Dowrimple, and I known Jim since Jim was still self-publishing street angel.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's very first original street angel single issues and Jim was the Nemo designer and contributing his own page and at one point in it Jim said to me, hey, did you know Steve beset did like a tyrant in slumberland page and it has nothing to do with this he just did it and and I was like, no, I had no idea about that and said to you like Steve beset and you know he didn't he had little idea that that would start me
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, talking in his ear about Steve for the next decade, you know, but the long story short, Jim and you know, we mean Steve connected the tire and page that Steve had done for, I believe a student anthology with Steve was teaching called Sundays.
[SPEAKER_00]: That paid what was slightly modified, included in the little Nemo collection.
[SPEAKER_00]: we were thrilled to have Steve in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: It felt right him being in there with, you know, guys like Bill's in Kavitch.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, just felt right.
[SPEAKER_00]: We wanted to have it was a real special thing for me from Steve to being in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we kept in touch and a little bit here in there just how are you on Facebook and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would see Steve's posts.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Tyrant was in my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: I sort of had the locus moon company that I had when we put the little Nemo book out.
[SPEAKER_00]: We own the comic book shop in Philly and we published some books and little Nemo sort of being the height of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that all sort of went away and it took me a while to regroup let's say, but when I did I started doing a lot of freelance editing and putting books together for people kind of like a book package and make you know putting creative teams together on projects and stuff like that and I did a lot of crowdfunding for other people and you know made about a million bucks in the last you know a few years or whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I just got sick of seeing the practices and, you know, I just wasn't happy with the partnerships and, you know, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't have a lot of time for it's easy to treat people right when you do these things and I just wanted to see if I could be in control of doing that myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Tyron started to grow in my mind of like, hey, I'm doing well with this freelance editing stuff and I'm sort of looking to do my own stuff again and, you know, what would be
[SPEAKER_00]: You know what what what what's what's the thing to do and I'm like well, man I've been thinking about tyrants and so I was you know since the mid 90s and Steven me have talked about a little he always says no when I bring it up, though But I went back and I said hey Steve, I'm I'm getting my stuff together And I'm doing pretty pretty okay with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm learning a lot of stuff and I'm taking another shot at making my own books How about tyrants?
[SPEAKER_00]: Deep like Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hope you're doing well.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and I said oh, okay
[SPEAKER_00]: All right, you know, the few months later, you know, I get, I get a thought in my head, hey Steve, how are you up there?
[SPEAKER_00]: You doing okay?
[SPEAKER_00]: How's the snow?
[SPEAKER_00]: What about tired, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And Steve's just, you know, hey Chris, it's flattering the work, you know, no, no, thanks.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you're like, this book made me a man, Steve, I need this for the world.
[SPEAKER_01]: You never said that to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm learning for the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, we got to keep these things interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's real.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, but no.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I had been talking to Jim about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, Jim weren't talking to Tom, you know, he was super busy with his stuff and I was trying to get my stuff established, but I would talk to Jim here and there.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'd say, I'll talk to him to Steve, or I'd talk to Steve about Tyron again, you know, so that kind of stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would always say to Jim, like, hey, you know, don't give up hope, you know, and then at one day,
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, maybe the facts of the story if we did the forensic who knows the, but my memory will be that it's Steve one day, you got a message from you, and it just said, hey Chris, how are you, and it was the link to the cartoonist cave, a tyrant video and it said have you seen this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I, it's, it's like I've said this a million times now and it's kind of like almost being shitty friend, but we're also busy and have our own interests.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love Jim, I knew Jim and had made K-fabe a big thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, Ed used to come, God bless Ed, Ed used to come to Philly when I had the stores and like hang out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I, you know, I knew Ed and all that stuff, but I just never watched.
[SPEAKER_00]: comics YouTube until like three months ago when I realized, you know, like, okay, you know, I got to figure this stuff out a little and, and it's been such a, it's so much fun, too.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to digress much, but it's really been fun doing this stuff and it just feels like said to Jim yesterday on the phone, the sense of community that I, it's, it's really beautiful thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, you're not sitting at the lunch table alone, you know, like everything likes this stuff and we're all excited to talk about this thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[UNKNOWN]: Fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: But no, I got that message from Steve and I saw it and I won't lie and Steve, I might never said this to you and I know you'll appreciate it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw it and you know, I don't have a ton of skill with this stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if I have anything, it's like I kind of maybe have a little intuition and I saw it and I just said this is going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, well, you were right.
[SPEAKER_00]: You were right.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't even click the video.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just because I knew Steve, I knew how Steve, I had enough of a sense of the regard Steve had for Jim and for Ed, and I, I, I.
[SPEAKER_00]: in my mind, the the the the math of its sort of just all at it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew Steve knew that they were both First of all, they were of the younger generation and the point of view they would have on the viability of bringing this thing back to market would be stimulating.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think to Steve, he would realize these are two successful younger creators and they're saying this thing will be a success.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there was that element
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I just knew Steve respected the hell out of Jim creatively.
[SPEAKER_00]: So once I saw it, I did get fairly confident it was going to happen.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it came together pretty quickly after that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Steve had said to me,
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, hey, you know, Jim road should design this.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you know, what do you say?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, well, yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so like it all just was, yeah, I think I called Jim that day or Texan say, could I call you?
[SPEAKER_00]: And just the well, guess what, buddy?
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, so yeah, I forget when that was, even I might have been a year and a half ago or something, but no, it was longer ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I, uh, been a year or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, one of the speed bumps, not to bring anybody down, but one of the speed bumps is my wife Marjorie and I are our son Michael came down with brain cancer, which took him in June of 2024 and I kind of, I didn't kind of, I put Chris and Jim, you know, on the waiting.
[SPEAKER_01]: Docket because we really had to get through that personal endurance test that that trial by fire.
[SPEAKER_01]: And but during that time, I still worked off and on on the project.
[SPEAKER_01]: I dug through, I mean, I've got over 50 years of artwork here.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm a pack right.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't throw anything out.
[SPEAKER_01]: I've got every purchase order from every distributor that
[SPEAKER_01]: the H-U-I-E library in Arkadell, if you are Arkansas, they've got a portion of my papers there, primarily related to Taboo.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so during that time, even with what was happening with our family, I began going to my flat files and assembling, trying to find every scrap of original art, every paste up in mechanical, everything connected with Tyrant.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Chris, you were wonderful,
[SPEAKER_01]: It was probably about six months after our son had died that I said, okay, let's go.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that would have been late summer, late fall 2024.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we've been working on it pretty steadily since then.
[SPEAKER_01]: It took all the, to make all the geographic arrangements, you know, for obvious reasons, and it's not a matter of trust with Chris or Jim, it's trust in FedEx, UPS, and the postal system.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't want to be moving this irreplaceable original art, you know, through the mail.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it took a little time to settle on, you know, who was willing to take on the enormous task of scanning.
[SPEAKER_01]: And particularly scanning up to the standards that Sean Michael Robinson and Jim Rugby acquired for the production of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Rick Fiji's oldest son Ezra, the chief, who I've known since he was about six months old.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my very good friend, Mark Mastel, both agreed to take on the thankless task of scanning not just the time and original art.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when Chris and Jim said to me, Steve,
[SPEAKER_01]: We want to do a complete addition.
[SPEAKER_01]: I forget what the, with the moniker we were using at the time was, Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: We were going with the masterpiece addition in the last year.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Chris wanted everything, like any dinosaur, anything I had ever done.
[SPEAKER_01]: And let me tell you, you know, despite the fact that there were a few venues where I could, where I could convince an editor to let me do it, there was a ton of work in my flat files.
[SPEAKER_03]: So let me ask you about that real quick.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, we're just continuing to work on this, even in all of this time this past year, just like, no, no, I'm sad to say just when I pulled the plug, I really pulled the plug.
[SPEAKER_01]: You really stopped.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so this is all the material from that time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Right, what there is is what you saw in issues one through four, there was some work done on issue five, including the color cover, which my friend Mark Martin had done the color work on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had all the text features for number five done.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I was working toward having that done in a month or two, but I stopped cold.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, when everything came down to diamond being the only game in town,
[SPEAKER_01]: Long story short, when I was publishing, the two major distributors in North America were diamond comics and capital city distribution.
[SPEAKER_01]: Diamonds paycheck paid the whole printing bill.
[SPEAKER_01]: Capital's check was pure profit right and and this meant it was viable and as soon as everything outs was gone every other distributor was gone and it was just down the diamond I knew I could pay my printing bill but that wasn't going to subsidize you know months to a year of work on individual issues it took me a year to do issue number three the the story inside the egg
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, so I really can't do a question just and I really pulled the plug.
[SPEAKER_01]: But what there is is all the dinosaurs stuff I had done prior to pulling the plug.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, the first comic story I ever did that was just pure dinosaurs was a story called Scraps when one of my cubored school classmates came for them with decided to do his own
[SPEAKER_01]: Tom Yates did an original story in there and adaptation of a Clark Ashland Smith story the 9th skeleton.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did this dinosaur story called Scraps.
[SPEAKER_01]: Scraps is in the completed edition.
[SPEAKER_01]: I still had all the original art.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Chris and Jim urged me to dig deeper.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I found the original art to the one page I had done to the joke-ubert school.
[SPEAKER_01]: we didn't have a yearbook, you know, there were only 23 of us in that first class, but we did a a zine called Mantacore and we each did a one-page comic story and mine was about a prehistoric man called Dark Time.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's going to be in the completed edition.
[SPEAKER_01]: And we're also going to include pages from we can't reprint entire stories that belong to Marvel and DC that I had done.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I did an ambush bug cameo for Robert Loring from Fleming and the Lake Great Keith Giffin.
[SPEAKER_01]: And they invited me to do whatever I want.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I mocked all of the war that time forgot.
[SPEAKER_01]: My favorite comic from the Silver Age featuring dinosaurs.
[SPEAKER_01]: We're going to include a page of that.
[SPEAKER_01]: That fair use would allow Chris and Jim and I include samples of the other work.
[SPEAKER_01]: So there's going to be glimpses, you know, sample pages out of my original art stash from earlier dinosaur stories I'd done for Marvel, for DC, for others.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's very good.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's going to be everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: As best as we humanly have been able to excavate from the geological sedimentary layers your own paleontology.
[SPEAKER_01]: My own paleontology, self paleontology, Justin.
[SPEAKER_01]: Your bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: My bones.
[SPEAKER_01]: And my paper.
[SPEAKER_01]: And believe me, paper is, you know, right now Jim has me looking for one piece of paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if I'm going to find it, but we're very serious about that piece of paper.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you what it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you tell us what the paper is?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me tell you what it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: Steve writes a really what's going to be one of the really special elements of this thing, especially for people who are deep fans of Steve's.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's about a 7,000 word essay, Steve wrote, that we will include in both the original
[SPEAKER_00]: and the complete edition.
[SPEAKER_00]: And in there, uh, you know, guys, I, Jesus, this is bad.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm, it's the joke you're better.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank God.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: The joke you're better.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a little, I'm a little under the weather in the brain.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could not find the postcard from Will Eisner, which thankfully you guys didn't know about until this minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: But so that may turn up too, Chris.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can
[SPEAKER_00]: and it's a letter from Joe Kubert to Steve set congratulating him on what he's accomplished with tyrant and me and Jim the heartless the heartless task masters that we are
[SPEAKER_00]: We read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We said Steve got this essay done.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's only 7,000 words, but we'll accept it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what can we do about this Kubrick letter?
[SPEAKER_00]: We need the real letter.
[SPEAKER_00]: And Steve said, she's guys, you know, like, I, you know, here we are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Steve, the only saving grace for that, my friends, so you don't have to search too much.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't know if we joked about this publicly yet, but there is the Joe Kubrick font.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, there is, but you know, the letter was written on Joe's CPA tan colored paper with the background drawing of Tor, his caveman character, and now we really need it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And Joe's signature is so distinctive, you know, and it's just Joe's.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like we were close enough, personally, that it was your son Joe, you know, not Joe Kubrick, just Joe.
[SPEAKER_01]: won't you guys do if I was like oh I actually have it here right now oh man well I would my first question Alexander would be okay so where'd you steal that from I would say that Sean Edgar told me that you were like super Steve historian and you were like super Steve historian and
[SPEAKER_00]: You know everything about comics, so I think I'll just say, oh, good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Alex, can you scan that?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was my exaggeration.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have over 15 four to five drawer metal file cabinets here in my basement library.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's somewhere in those, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I've kept everything.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's here.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I just haven't come across it yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: We'll follow.
[SPEAKER_02]: Steve, this is a little off the kick starter, but I'm curious.
[SPEAKER_02]: You've been essentially retired from comics for a bunch of years now.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now that Diamond is dead, do you have any urge to come back?
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, you know, the best advice I ever got back in the 80s, nearly 90s was from a good friend at that time, Dave Sim, who said, never go away.
[SPEAKER_01]: I never went away, Alexander.
[SPEAKER_01]: I retired from the American Comic industry, but during the, and I shifted gears, I began working the video retail and rental industry.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was a shareholder in first-run video.
[SPEAKER_01]: in Brattleboro, Vermont, the first super store in that part of New England.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I stayed there working my way up from clerk to co-manager and buyer until the spring of 2005 when I was invited to become part of the faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies, the James Sturm and Michelle Alley were launching in White River Junction, Vermont.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I then was teaching comics and graphic novels every day of the week for 15 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now, during that low period to your perceptions to the perceptions of comics fans, I was writing a weekly video review column for local newspapers, and I was illustrating minimum of one book a year for the boutique, her novel and short story collection,
[SPEAKER_01]: marketplace, publishers like cemetery dance and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I was, you know, I continued working as an artist, doing covers and interior illustrations for books, and I continued as a writer, more prolific than ever, doing not just a weekly column, but often interviewing filmmakers, and that would be an additional article that would appear in a given week.
[SPEAKER_01]: When I shifted gears into teaching, you know, 15 years of teaching comics and graphic novels, I was in a very hands-on day-to-day week-to-week working relationship with the new generation of creators out there.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it really felt like, you know, I always regretted that I could never pay back.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could, there was no way to give back.
[SPEAKER_01]: to Joe Cubert and Muriel Cubert and what they had done for me in Rick Beach and Tom Yates and Ron Zalmy and John Totelman and Tim Truman and all our friends and classmates at the Cubert school and it felt like teaching the next generation in this new
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a graduate level program you could earn your MFA if you had your prior degrees necessary to get a master fine arts degree this was a way of paying back and I'll never forget.
[SPEAKER_01]: It came up in conversation my second year at CCS I mentioned to James that you know I really wish there was some way like.
[SPEAKER_01]: I could go down to New Jersey and do a guest class once a month or something.
[SPEAKER_01]: And James said, Steve, don't kid yourself.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're paying back Joe every day you set foot in our classroom.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I realized he was, he was right.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, he wasn't blowing sunshine out my ass.
[SPEAKER_01]: He was right.
[SPEAKER_01]: And so in a way, I never went away.
[SPEAKER_01]: I accidentally just, you didn't get to see a lot of what I wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_01]: And right now, I mean, you know, for the two years that we've been working on this, Chris and Jim have had to take on other work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, we're all finding other ways to subsidize this time.
[SPEAKER_01]: We haven't earned a penny from this.
[SPEAKER_01]: If anything, we've expanded a great deal.
[SPEAKER_01]: of money time and energy on this project, I've subsidized the work with a whole new freelance career.
[SPEAKER_01]: I do bonus features for Blu-ray and 4K releases of all kinds of movies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I haven't gone looking for one job, they all come to me.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I've recently, I just self-published via Amazon's Kindle program.
[SPEAKER_01]: two volumes of S.R.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bassett's Tyrant presents Paleopop, their collections of articles I had written for a fanzine called Monster over the last 15, 20 years, and these are all the paleontological pop culture articles that I did articles, interviews, and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: And in the back pages, I did something I never done before, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: I like most authors have a list at the front of their book of, here's the other works by this author.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I finally did that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have one page of the work I've done as a graphic novelist and as a fiction, short fiction, a non-fiction writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: At 8.5, I have three pages listing all the DVD and Blu-ray bonus features I've done over the past two years.
[SPEAKER_01]: And this is what has subsidized the work on, on Tyrant, you know, the pay from that.
[SPEAKER_01]: So long story short, Alex, you know, I never went away.
[SPEAKER_01]: I just wasn't doing work.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was visible much in the comic market any longer.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did get to work with, um,
[SPEAKER_01]: editor Chris Duffy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I would say Chris is one of the four or five best editors I ever work with and not counting present company Chris and only work with Chris's.
[SPEAKER_01]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: Karen Burger got the best work out of me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anybody ever did on swamp thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chris Duffy invited me in.
[SPEAKER_01]: Most people don't realize I contributed to not one, not two, but three issues of SpongeBob comments.
[SPEAKER_01]: really.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes, I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I did.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do some homework.
[SPEAKER_01]: Chris would reach out to me and say, hey Steve, you know, we're doing an issue with the Crab Cake Monster.
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you want to draw the Crab Cake Monster portion of this story?
[SPEAKER_01]: And Derek Dryman was the writer artist that I work with.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I ended up doing and contributing to three stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it was a lot of fun.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it was
[SPEAKER_01]: Derek would send me his layouts, and then I would not just pencil, but fully ink my portion of the artwork, get that scan, send those files to Derek, and then he would incorporate into his SpongeBob art, because nobody but Derek was allowed to draw a SpongeBob in these particular stories.
[SPEAKER_01]: Even though I must say in the first story I did,
[SPEAKER_01]: I drew a hell of a sponge bob.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not going to happen to happen to happen to happen.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, whatever you get, what are we going to get at the kickstarter for Steven R. Besets is sponge bob, the original hard edition.
[SPEAKER_01]: I think I already collected them in the cover actually.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those, whoever the publisher was, I'm forgetting, did include two of the stories in their hard coverage.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also, I meet with Duffy about the rights, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I also for Chris Duffy.
[SPEAKER_01]: He did a book, a graphic novel of adaptation to World War I, poetry by soldiers and famous writers.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was called Above the Dreamless Sleep and I did a two-page
[SPEAKER_01]: I had to kill the SpongeBob characters because World War One was a terrible trench war.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it was fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over there, over
[SPEAKER_00]: dirt dryman is in all the letters pages of time.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, yeah, yeah, in fact, I published one of these cartoons.
[SPEAKER_01]: And if you want, yeah, that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll be lying if I did I didn't click on that until a couple months back and I'm reading them.
[SPEAKER_01]: Let's reach out to Derek.
[SPEAKER_01]: Maybe we could get permission or clearance to include a couple by SpongeBob pages to just make the point that you know that that legacy is funny how all this stuff fits together, you know.
[SPEAKER_01]: But Derek is in almost every letters page.
[SPEAKER_00]: He definitely is and he's breaking your stones in most of all.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and the first one he's like, stop with this pill and he told you, shit, I just want dinosaurs fighting each other, you know?
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: And then I actually, that actually prompted a couple of friends who were concerned about how long it took me to do each issue and they were like, that guy's right, like just do your devil dinosaur.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I'm sure you're both good with all this science crap, you know, I to kept the schedule better.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's for sure, but he wouldn't have been the comic I wanted it to be.
[SPEAKER_00]: One last word on Chris stuffy guys is he's the guy who keeps me from being able to say I'm the only man who got Steve a set to do comics in the last 20 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, it's not just Chris stuffy.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also did a lot of work.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did a lot of work for and in anthologies that Center for Cartoon Studies.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: But together.
[SPEAKER_01]: And
[SPEAKER_01]: some day, you know, with the permission of the surviving alum, we've unfortunately lost a few the COVID pandemic and so on.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'd love to do a print on demand book collecting that work that I had done in those anthologies because they were only seen by the students.
[SPEAKER_01]: Every year at CCS in fact, starting the third year of operation.
[SPEAKER_01]: So it would have been 12 to 13 years.
[SPEAKER_01]: We would start the spring semester with a two-week crash course project where the students would be broken up into teams and they had to create from scratch and complete a fully-printed full-color comic that they distributed at the end of the two weeks to their classmates, a full comic book.
[SPEAKER_01]: from beginning to end.
[SPEAKER_01]: They had to work as teams.
[SPEAKER_01]: It was a way of simulating how comic books used to be put together.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, monthly comics were put together very quickly and they had to be done within four weeks or they weren't a monthly comic.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I edited a team every year.
[SPEAKER_01]: So I've got 12 or 13 comics that I edited and occasionally I would ink a cover,
[SPEAKER_01]: or lend a hand to some of the sickest adpages we ever did because there would be parity adpages in these.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's a pretty significant body of work, too, that I did donate a complete collection of both
[SPEAKER_01]: sets of comics.
[SPEAKER_01]: One is in Columbia University's collection and the other one is in the Billy Ireland Museum collection in Columbus, Ohio.
[SPEAKER_01]: So that work is accessible to serious, die-hard researchers and fans who want to make the track and physically look at that work.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I'm sure there's a collection in the CCS library because they keep all those students print
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, we're seen in this, the, the community I was part of and not much beyond that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some of that work, though, was sold at conventions.
[SPEAKER_01]: And one of those pieces, Tyrant and Slumberland is the one that Jim Rogreg, that brought Chris Stevens and I together in the first place and Chris also invited me to participate in the goalem of Venice Beach project.
[SPEAKER_01]: Um, originally, I was approached to do one page, um, I'll let Chris describe the project to you.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I came back with a few pitches and proposals and what we settled on, worked better in two pages and not because I was getting paid the best page rate I ever gotten comics ever in my entire life.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Chris.
[SPEAKER_01]: Bye.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for stopping.
[SPEAKER_01]: It just worked better in the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's Chris fight continues.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just kidding.
[SPEAKER_01]: Take that Chris stuff.
[SPEAKER_01]: Actually, I was paid very well for SpongeBob, but the one thing is me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I would kill to edit SpongeBob.
[SPEAKER_00]: My wife loved SpongeBob.
[SPEAKER_00]: And when she started that 20 years ago, I just said to myself, what is going on.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm very shortly after I started saying who lives in a pineapple under the sea.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_01]: Our daughter Maya loves SpongeBob.
[SPEAKER_01]: I was jealous before we got our 40s now, you know.
[SPEAKER_02]: Before we got on this podcast, I told Justin, we got to turn the conversation to SpongeBob.
[SPEAKER_02]: But here we are.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's as if you didn't need.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's as if you didn't need.
[SPEAKER_02]: To get back to the Kickstarter really quickly, just sort of start to wrap up here.
[SPEAKER_02]: We've obviously touched about a lot of details of what people can expect.
[SPEAKER_02]: I know it's still TVD, you want to do a big splash when it actually comes, but anything you want to tease to get people to sign up on that pre-launch page.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely, Alex.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the Kickstarter will be the two main features are going to be the original art edition, which will be somewhere around 12 by 19, and you know, I think your audience is likely familiar with the Scott Dungbeer created artist edition format and
[SPEAKER_00]: We're doing our best to take that and, you know, hopefully maybe we can do some stuff with it that, you know, makes it stand out and we have the original art edition and then we have the completed edition that we've been talking about, which is going to be a comprehensively exhaustive collection of all of the tyrant related materials, any dinosaur related material Steve's ever done and Steve was talking about earlier there are certain elements of
[SPEAKER_00]: work that he did for you know certain publishers that would under fair use you know will be able to include little snippets of so it's going to be very you know comprehensively exhaustive and first was sliding these to us in the chat here I was saying a couple little things and wow it is awesome
[SPEAKER_03]: Those little pieces are such a nice, when you say complete, you mean it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't want to cut anybody off earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the things that gives me a lot of joy, and this is going to sound so funny, I know.
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the things that when we talk about the complete edition, that in the back of my mind, every time I talk about a gym, Steve, any time it comes up, I have my old partner from Locus Moon Andrew Carl, helping me behind the scenes, any time I talk about it, it's the fact that we're going to run Steve's correspondence with the printer.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how complete this thing will be.
[SPEAKER_00]: But as far as all items, Alex, yeah, I'm very excited.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jim rug is designing a black light poster set.
[SPEAKER_00]: So there'll be three Jim rug design black light poster.
[SPEAKER_00]: I love them.
[SPEAKER_01]: I love them.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, when I went to college in the 70s, I had a kill to have that in the room.
[SPEAKER_01]: And the bond was broken out in the morning by my roommate.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, it's like, oh, you're going to have a bond on one of the levels.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would have been nice, but we didn't go there.
[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't go.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm looking at Alex's shelf and I thought I saw one right behind the watchman.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't.
[SPEAKER_02]: Alex is good.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's the Sony.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've got that cool.
[SPEAKER_02]: That is a sought-acquired driver for that.
[SPEAKER_01]: I said, it's that kind of morning.
[SPEAKER_01]: I didn't know.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, no.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a watchman bog.
[SPEAKER_01]: Wait a minute.
[SPEAKER_01]: I see the logo underneath.
[SPEAKER_01]: That would be perfect.
[SPEAKER_02]: I've been smoked at 35 minutes ago.
[SPEAKER_01]: I did contribute some very unique items to the crowd funder that Chris can tell you about.
[SPEAKER_01]: Some one of a kind of the setwork is going to be part of the perks.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_00]: Black life poster set there will be a die cut slip case that people have the option of buying the complete edition with or without.
[SPEAKER_00]: The original art edition will come with a unique tip in signature plate and the complete edition will come with the option.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should say with the option.
[SPEAKER_00]: You have the option of getting the original art edition with a unique to the original art edition, especially designed by Jim signature plate and then the complete edition.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll have the option of getting it with or without its own unique tip in signature plate so there'll be two different signed by Steve design by Jim unique signature plates that will be bound into the different additions if you choose to purchase that.
[SPEAKER_00]: that edition.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're also going to have, and I'm going to send it to you, Steve.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just got it.
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to have a thousand piece, a jigsaw puzzle, which I think will be a lot of fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dinosaurs and puzzles, you know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, wow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow, the features, one of the features in the completed edition will be a reversible trip ditch.
[SPEAKER_00]: So reversible gatefold that folds out the length of three cover is basically.
[SPEAKER_00]: And on one side, it's color, the other side, black and white.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you'll see Steve's one of Steve's really iconic images that he created to use actually as a promotional image when he was doing this originally, back in the original single issue.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's better, baby time.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're going to turn that gym is already
[SPEAKER_00]: And I like Steve said, some of the most special things we have are hand painted ceramics that Steve's made and I have some of them sitting here, what's your show Steve, oh for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know only you guys can sit well my camera.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you see that that beautiful.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, that is very cool for anybody It's a triceratops.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, ceramic triceratops.
[SPEAKER_01]: I hand painted and I did a number of mugs.
[SPEAKER_01]: There's a mug up on that top shelf handle them with care now Chris.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh Second I thought you were just toss it back on the shelf and these were man these weren't mass produced each of them is hand painted and you didn't There's none other like them
[SPEAKER_02]: And for anybody listening, it's silhouettes to run a sorris sort of on a sunset type background check this thing out though, guys.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's a, again, for anybody listening, it doesn't fall out and painted dinosaur skull.
[SPEAKER_00]: A special item if it comes to me, come here.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is going to be, we haven't figured out the tier for this one yet.
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
[SPEAKER_03]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: There we go.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also provided I dug into my spider baby backstock and there's a carnivore art portfolio that I did back in 1989.
[SPEAKER_01]: I still had them in perfect condition.
[SPEAKER_01]: Those are part of the perks as well.
[SPEAKER_01]: The faces of fear, horror art portfolio with leather face on the cover.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I, I, I tried to provide as much as I could to Chris to really, you've been amazed grace this with some unique items that all of which I signed, including the ceramics are signed on the bottom of each piece.
[SPEAKER_02]: that is so cool this project is so cool guys thank you so much for taking the time to chat about it for anybody again who wants to check it out it's going to be on kickstarter very soon you can check it out at beset tyrant deluxe additions dashes between that but you could search for it on kickstarter you know how searching works Chris Steven thank you so much for taking the time we really appreciate it
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, our great pleasure, our great pleasure.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for inviting us aboard.
[SPEAKER_01]: If forever views, again, don't hesitate to reach out and ask.
[SPEAKER_01]: Before we get off, I need to mention a few things.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm a huxster, along with the crab funder.
[SPEAKER_01]: I have available on Amazon to volumes now of Paleopop.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find them everywhere in the world on Amazon.
[SPEAKER_01]: I also have three sketchbooks out, all monster sketchbooks, thoughtful creatures.
[SPEAKER_01]: brooding creatures and the brand new one that Mark Mastell who edited and curated this series and designed the books he and I put together in the mood for monsters which I particularly recommend if anyone's interested in my work because in there is my essay on why I love and draw monsters and that'll answer the question why I do this and that was one of your questions Justin why you're doing this well you're doing this pick up in the mood for monsters the answers are in
[SPEAKER_02]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_02]: Chris, Steven, thank you again so much for really looking forward to the Kickstarter.
[SPEAKER_02]: Have a lovely day.
[SPEAKER_03]: Great talking to you guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: SpongeBob forever.
[SPEAKER_02]: Take care.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'll let's just turn back to number one Get through the roots and make it, get, get, get One week, there's no gonna mind We'll take time and see ourselves And it's turn now, let's get it, I don't listen I don't know, but I don't know
[SPEAKER_04]: They sit on crappy couches, and they let the secret leak And he's a monkey, they'll let fast, let your best speak So grab your ring, hammer, don't be late, or it goes fair, fair