[SPEAKER_01]: What's up, everybody?
[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Comic Book Club, I'm Alex.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm Pete, and we got another bonus episode for you right now with a great guy who we love talking about.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's a fantastic writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: He's got a new project that is coming to Kickstarter very soon.
[SPEAKER_01]: The first ever Kickstarter from a hoi comics called The Forgotten Divine, Liam Showed him and woke him back to the podcast, Mark Russell, Mark.
[SPEAKER_01]: Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, oh, my warrior.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, doing great.
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for having me, guys.
[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, that's a very excited talk about this.
[SPEAKER_01]: So let's start with something that may or may not be your department.
[SPEAKER_01]: How much do you know about why this is a hoist first kickstarter and what if it are things that need to you?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that probably is more Tom's department, but I think that the they chose this project specifically because it's a weird length.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's 64 pages long, so it would be a little long for like a one shot, but a little too short for a direct graphic novel for the stores.
[SPEAKER_00]: So this felt like a good project to take the plunge on to try to
[SPEAKER_00]: the fact that it's being crowdfunded and it's all this way means that we can make it any length we want it, which is a unique, it's a unique opportunity for a writer to just, especially in comics, to just make the story as long as it needs to be, not a page longer, not a page shorter, it's a rare opportunity, so I'm really grateful for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it shows, it's a very tight story.
[SPEAKER_01]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, let's talk about the content of the story, and then we can get back to the Kickstarter of it all, but just so folks know what's been put out there at least, and I should mention, though we don't have a date for the Kickstarter yet.
[SPEAKER_01]: There is a pre-launch page up so you can go to the Forgotten Divine by Mark Russell and Russ Braun.
[SPEAKER_01]: I believe it's the full title, probably search for the forgotten divide, and it'll help you Google that, forgotten divine comes right up.
[SPEAKER_02]: It's great on Google, Google.com, or we think it'd be here.
[SPEAKER_01]: any search engine, any search engine, Bing, Yeah, that's Jesus, that's Jesus, that's my go to.
[SPEAKER_01]: He died, did you know Chiefs died, actually?
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thanks for bringing that up.
[SPEAKER_02]: No problem.
[SPEAKER_01]: Anyway, what were you talking about?
[SPEAKER_01]: The content of the book.
[SPEAKER_01]: So the idea or at least what is out there is you have an unhoused veteran who's dealing with some,
[SPEAKER_01]: mental issues and may or may not be dreaming sci-fi landscapes alien atmospheres potentially things that come with that sort of thing.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's that's the gist of what I've gotten about it, but what else do you want to fill in if anything?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think that's the basic premise that he's a guy who was a an EOD, which means he
[SPEAKER_00]: would find landmines in Afghanistan during the war there and detonate them before they could kill anybody.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sort of becomes sort of a metaphor for, you know, his life as this sort of reluctant cult leader.
[SPEAKER_00]: But he begins having these visions of this alien world, this alien landscape that he doesn't know what to make of them other than maybe it's like a byproduct of his PTSD from being in Afghanistan.
[SPEAKER_00]: But then he starts beating other people who are having the same visions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he realized this is bigger than him.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a lot of ways, the community that he forms with these people, like that are all having these visions and trying to figure out what they mean, kind of gives him a purpose and a sense of direction in life he didn't have before.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a lot of ways strangely, this becomes the best thing that ever happened to him.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though it
[SPEAKER_00]: places them within this persecuted minority that becomes known as the forgotten divine.
[SPEAKER_01]: You are, I would say very well known as a satirical writer.
[SPEAKER_01]: You've written a lot of things over your career in different directions, but as we talked about before, you're always having these deeper and more thoughtful, ideas underlying it.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's not just about throwing
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanksgiving and everything in between.
[SPEAKER_01]: So what were you thinking about here?
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it about PTSD?
[SPEAKER_01]: Was it about cults a lot of things in a mix?
[SPEAKER_00]: How are you coming out of it?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was more about cults and
[SPEAKER_00]: At first, when I started conceiving this, I thought it would be kind of more satirical.
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought it would be more like a, like about how culture about like serving the, the emotional needs people in them rather than about the beliefs, but as it started writing it, it became very different became much more.
[SPEAKER_00]: sympathetic to the people in the cult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it's more about how we all are looking for meaning and that that when we find it it becomes harder it becomes hard to for anything else to matter and About how we create these rabbit holes for ourselves just because we feel like we finally belong somewhere and so I think it's more about how
[SPEAKER_00]: understanding a cult from the perspective of someone inside the cult and what they get out of it more than just looking at them as a bunch of crazy people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though the forgotten divine art scene is just a bunch of crazy people to everyone outside it to themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is like, the holders are a reality they can't explain to anybody else because they experience it in this weird dream like fashion and how isolating that feels from the rest of the world, but also how how much it makes you feel like a family to the other people who are having these visions.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I wanted to be more about that about how you, you know, um,
[SPEAKER_00]: This becomes the one thing that matters to people who are inside a group like this.
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, this is really a lot of interesting cool ideas.
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm very excited to read this.
[SPEAKER_02]: One thing you mentioned earlier that I wanted to kind of talk a little bit about is like, when you're writing for comics and they kind of, you know, 22 or whatever kind of pages and there's like page breaks and ads and stuff like that.
[SPEAKER_02]: it's just so much easier writing a story just to write the story and not thinking about like panel layouts and what you can fit on a page or is it just you're kind of used to it and it's not that big of a deal and I'm just trying to make a mountain out of a mobile.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I mean the breaking of page on a page is something that just happens naturally with my mind so I don't mind that because I like to think of a story visually but yeah it's really nice to think and not have to think in terms of pages, not have to think in terms of like
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like this issue is 20 pages and it must tell 20 percent of the story, you know, but just sort of tell the story and it allows you to do more interesting things the story telling in terms of the pacing and where you place reveals chapter breaks and how you tell a story, like a beat of the story and tell it's done.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story tells you when it's done, rather than you trying to force it into this format.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is that something then that you would like to play with more?
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, I'm sure if somebody was like, here's our million dollar contract right.
[SPEAKER_01]: Spiderman or whatever, you're not gonna be like, no thanks, I'm free for that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, there's nothing wrong with being a 20-page monthly comic writer and I've done that and I've loved it, but it is nice to have a change of pace, to be able to write something that just is like,
[SPEAKER_00]: It's own thing, and it's own length.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think one of the advantages of doing this, too, is that...
[SPEAKER_00]: One of the heartbreaking things for a comic book writer is if you write the best series you've ever written in your life, and it's five issues long, you write that knowing that most people are not going to get to issues four or five, as just the fact of like the way the comics industry work, sales work, whatever your sales are at issue number one, they're probably going to be about half that or worse by the time you get to issue four or five.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's always been a source of frustration for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the idea that people aren't reading till the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're not getting the whole story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if you do a project like this, where it all comes out, it's like one long extended one shot, you know, that now you know they're going to finish the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you know they're going to get to the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because so much of the meaning I try to pack into these stories, happens in the last 10, 20 pages.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I feel like if you don't read the last issue or if you don't get to the end, you're missing out on a lot of what I wanted to say with this.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of the real advantages of doing a story in a format like this is I can go to sleep at night knowing people will read this to the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I promise you, I'm going to read three fifths of it and then stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll read the fourth.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's not a guarantee.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I mean, this is something that you don't necessarily have to have a solution for, but this is like you're saying a perennial problem in comics is that a tradition that you get over time.
[SPEAKER_01]: How do you battle against that as a writer?
[SPEAKER_01]: Is there any way to battle against that with monthly comics or is just part and parcel with how old history works?
[SPEAKER_00]: This just might be copium on my part, but what I tell myself when I'm doing monthly comics is that in the end the issues while I'm happy people are getting them and buying them and comic shops.
[SPEAKER_00]: I really see them more as kind of like advanced promotional material for the books.
[SPEAKER_00]: Eventually they'll be books and people will buy the books and then they'll get the whole story.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what's frustrating to me is that a lot of times, you know, you haven't lost readers.
[SPEAKER_00]: the story, but a lot of times they physically cannot copy a locate a copy of issue number 4 of something or issue number 5, because comic shops will start carrying fewer and fewer numbers because they know that the attrition and sales.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what you don't want to have happen as a writer or as anyone is for somebody to be really investing your story or they're reading it every month and then suddenly they can't get issue 4.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like a year later, you know, it takes a year for the book to come out and by then they've completely forgotten about it and lost interest and lost all the momentum that they had.
[SPEAKER_00]: They don't even remember what the beginning of the story was and that's completely, you know, self-defeating as an art form.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so I'm always looking for ways around that.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is to write one shot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I mean, definitely on the Kickstarter of it all, and this is maybe not even necessarily a question so much as something, I think about a lot.
[SPEAKER_01]: I sort of railed against companies, maybe not as big, not the size of a hoi comics, but like Marvel or DC, or whatever, coming in to be like, we're doing a Kickstarter and like, come on guys, you have otherwise of doing this.
[SPEAKER_01]: But I've come around to the idea that something like this,
[SPEAKER_01]: It's giving the exact numbers to the exact people who actually want the comic versus a comic bookstore have it to make some sort of three-month-and-a-dance bet, but I think people want this.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm not quite sure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I ran a comic book publisher, what I would do is I would just publish issue ones of everything so that the comic shops have their get their sales and get pretty safe sales like they can usually move a number one no problem, it's the later issues that
[SPEAKER_00]: that stick around on shelves because they can't sell them and then go directly to trade.
[SPEAKER_00]: So the issue number one is out there in stores and the comic book stores can sell them knowing they're not going to have to probably waste any of them and then people could tell for a mission number one whether or not they like the story enough to wait for the book to come out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I would publish it so like issue number one comes out like say in May or June and then the book comes out like July or August.
[SPEAKER_00]: So don't know what you should number one until you got the whole book ready to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the way I would do it tomorrow because I don't, I don't like this huge lag between when somebody's excited for a story and is reading it and when the book comes out and I also don't like the fact that, you know,
[SPEAKER_00]: both the creative team and the comic book shop are left in the lurch with like issues for five and six that are sort of like languishing on shelves.
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, at the next Marvel Summit, I'll let them know that you should be running things.
[SPEAKER_02]: I sure will be very receptive to that.
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, honestly, though, I mean, a hoi is a company that feels like they're really trying to innovate and come at comic book sales in a very different way, try to gauge with readers in a different way.
[SPEAKER_01]: Is this something you've talked to Tom or anybody at all, about?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, maybe that's my next stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, I know it's a frustration they've experienced.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think, yeah, Hawaii has been very good about experimenting not only with new ways to reach fans, to be a delivery system for comics, but also the sorts of comics they published.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's been a one-out great stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and it's very edgy and stuff that you would not find from other publishers too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like there are one of the few publishers out there that I would buy, I would take a chance on a title just because it's a hoi.
[SPEAKER_01]: Nice.
[SPEAKER_01]: I wanted to ask you, I'm not going to spoil anything.
[SPEAKER_01]: I got to read the first seven pages, and I know they're not out there yet, so I won't mention any specifics.
[SPEAKER_01]: Except for one that I wanted to ask you about, there is a reference to a corn dog in here, which was a major feature of your run on X-Factor, is that an Easter egg for X-Factor or are we going to get more corn dogs?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or do you just really have a love of corn dogs?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's a corn dog thing, I tend to work them into a lot of stories for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: The corn dog was invented here in Portland, Oregon, and we're very proud of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a regional treat that has taken a conquer the world, and I think they're just very visual too.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard to draw, or you know, people look, you know, it's someone eating a cheeseburger or something, but a corn dog is very
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's very easy to draw on it, it's very striking.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's almost like, you know, in the 40s, when you're writing a film noir, you're filming a film noir, like they all got cigarettes because it's such a visual thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're holding this little stick.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's got this plume of smoke coming out of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, it's almost like the sands to the fog and the mystery of the screen.
[SPEAKER_00]: I feel like the corn dog might be that for comics.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, hungry boger holding a corn dog.
[SPEAKER_01]: Contrasting this, there are some really beautiful pages from Russ Braun, at least that I see my head.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's he like that out of the park?
[SPEAKER_00]: I can tell you, as someone who's seen the whole thing, especially towards the end when the mystery starts to become revealed.
[SPEAKER_00]: This artwork will blow you away.
[SPEAKER_02]: Now, I got to ask, is that one of your favorite things about writing, if I had your job, I feel like it would be just like, you send over a script and then you just get these amazing pages back.
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, what does that like for you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like Christmas every week because you see these things in your head as you're writing him and to see it actually drawn in better than you imagined, just like the biggest
[SPEAKER_01]: It's cool.
[SPEAKER_01]: Talking about the Kickstarter a little bit, I know we're still a ways off anything you can tease about that, the content, things people should get excited about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, there's a lot of twists and turns of the story.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I mentioned, the artwork is beautiful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Plus, there's some really amazing extras as part of the show.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of which, if I might be so, if I might shoot my own horn a little bit, is a variant cover as drawn by myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ah, nice.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you've ever wanted to wonder how underwhelming a mark vessel drawn cover would be.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now as your chance to,
[SPEAKER_00]: How much do I have to pledge to get a corn dog cover as well?
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I had talked to you like a month ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I could have done a giant corn dog or I could have done a hungry boger or just a poor dog.
[SPEAKER_01]: Pay an extra 25 bucks.
[SPEAKER_01]: You can add on a corn dog at the end.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the concept of Mike very covered is like...
[SPEAKER_00]: that this is somebody who's a member of the cult who's in like a metal asylum and they're either they're given like art materials to draw what they've been seeing and what they write what they come up with is this crazy collage of like cutouts and art and like little written lines that that are filling their head when they are having these dreams of the forgotten divine wow that sounds awesome way to see that
[SPEAKER_03]: Mark always great talking to you congrats in advance on the Kickstarter very excited to see it launch very excited to read three fifths of the book and I hope to talk to you soon
[SPEAKER_03]: And one week, there's no going to mind With their common sense of rules And it's been now that it's been a lot of lessons And it's been a lot of lessons
[SPEAKER_03]: They sit on crap, they've got turns and they left the secret loop And he's just a monkey, they're like fast, they're so fast So grab your ring, hammer, don't be late Or it goes, they're real, real, real