Comic Relief Podcast

Maico and I discussed some of our favorite and least favorite heroes and villains… and I made a cover based off of an Avengers cover for this episode…

The cover I was spoofing was Avengers #221 for anyone who was insanely curious… no one? Well fine, there it is to the left so you get an idea of what I was trying to do.

Anyway, it was a fun episode – because it was all very unscripted and unplanned as we just blabbed about the various characters, giving opinions about each thing someone suggested.

… due to a fan being right next to the mic when we recorded, and I thought it’d be funny to call it The Problem With Fans, making it sound like we were going to talk about Comic Book Fans. What we had ended up doing, however – is we were lucky enough to get sneak previews to the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie.

Not only did we get to see a preview of it, but it also happened to be in 3D – as well as lang on my birthday! So it was wins all the way around.

After walking out of Guardians of the Galaxy, I was convinced Marvel had made the perfect movie. Guardians of the Galaxy went down as my favorite Marvel MCU movie (and probably, still is) – because not only was it a huge surprise on how well it was done (it was based off the Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning version, which I was collecting comic wise, and not the futuristic Guardians of the Galaxy which is an entirely different roster of people)… Anyway, it also had an amazing soundtrack to go along with it.

Long Beach Comic Expo and hang out in Colleen’s booth (who owns and runs Wyng’d Lyon Creations – but, as fate would have it, and illness would strike Tawmis down for nearly two and a half weeks, so that he was unable to attend. Instead, Colleen, who was just going to be a special guest on the podcast, ended up filling Tawmis’ seat and being the co-pilot to the episode! It turned out to be an amazing, fun, episode! We also managed to interview Joy of Black Jack Comics. You can check out their website, Facebook page, as well as their twitter.

It was a lot of fun being at the Convention and hanging out with Colleen there. It was also pretty cool that the Long Beach Comix Expo Twitter account retweeted our tweet about being there (see there to the left!)

There were a lot of wonderful people in costume there – but one of the cool moments was once again, getting the opportunity to meet a lot of cool people…

This wasn’t the first time I’d met Stan Sakai – I think the first time was a few years back at San Diego Comic Con where I was getting a book autographed for my friend Adam, and I got to talking to Stan Sakai. And the guy is so… freaking… humble… and amazing… that, I walked away from that signing a fan of Stan forever. Each year since, I’ve either picked up a book (or a trade), just to speak with him and have him sign in.

He’s another one, like Whilce from WonderCon, that I wished, at some point, to ask if he had any free time in his day to do a 15 minute interview for our podcast – because just hearing him speak is absolutely amazing.

… was digging through some pictures and found these…

This had inspired me, for WonderCon 2014 to make our own badges…

I certainly do miss this fun, creativity the podcast often inspired in me.

… comic book games, specifically Marvel games.

We even played the X-Men 2 game on SEGA…

Watching this video still cracks me up. I feel like stuff like this would be fun to do.

… would be our seventh episode. And for this, I even created another set of custom shirts. Maico and I joked how crowds always give us anxiety (too many people who don’t understand personal space – who knew we were ahead of our time, comic 2020 when the pandemic hit). As I mentioned previously, I was really into DC’s The New 52 – and some of my favorite books were centered around the Lantern Corp (Green Lantern, Red Lantern, etc) – so I took the symbols, mashed them together and made this…

But what is that? Well, each of the Corp had their own symbol…

So then what does the symbol I made mean? Remember I mentioned Anxiety… the symbol spells Anxiety… or I should say the letters are hidden as symbols…

Anyway, we set up our booth there at SoCalComics and waited for the masses…

That’s also where we met Chad Cavanaugh for the first time – and this dude was incredible. He was dishing out and self publishing his comic called The Map and had plans for further issues and other comics. We’d go on to run into Chad several times (at other Free Comic Book Days and even at Conventions). Even had him on for a Star Wars podcast… more on that later.

I’ve not talked to Chad a lot since 2020, when, as previously mentioned, my wife had medical issues, that still persist – so I’ve been disconnected from a lot of people. I don’t think he does his comics anymore, since the link I had for it is no longer valid. I should hit him up and see what he’s been up to. He’s texted me about He-Man figures he’s found in the wild asking if I needed them and where to find them. But even that’s been awhile now.

And I love the image I’d made for that…

We also managed to rub elbows with some famous comic book folks…

I regret not asking Whilce Portacio if he had time to sit down and do a little bit of recording with us. I didn’t bring my computer and mic – but we could have easily recorded it on the phone.

I had met Joie Brown a few years prior at DragonCon back in 2011. She knew my friend, Lindsay Archer, who was also an artist. When I originally met Joie she was dressed up as Ms. Marvel (who most people now know as Captain Marvel) in her original costume (the one I know from Avengers comics and her own, original) series.

When I met her at DragonCon, that was pretty much the interaction – just small talk. Ended up, over the next two years, learning she was dishing out her own comic called Heavenly Kibble, Guardian Corgi.

So when I learned she was at WonderCon, we had stopped by to talk to her (not for the podcast) and pick up some of her comics to support her.

Joie has always been awesome people – though these days, I think she’s doing work for the animated show Family Guy (I could be wrong – I should shoot her an email and see how she’s doing!) and stuff like that, so her side comics have come to a halt.

Anyway, the episode itself ended up being relatively short, with Maico and I just going over what we’d seen at the Con and what we enjoyed.

This one, we really didn’t have a theme going into it. We just met up, and just started talking comics to see what came of it. This episode also has us interviewing (I think for the second time) a guest who was launching a Kickstarter. We would go on to keep doing guest interviews and had some very special ones… more on that later.

… and back then what was called The New 52. DC released 52 titles, all from a rebooted version of their universe. And I admit. I was hooked. The problem with getting into Batman or Superman, prior to that, is those issues were like on issue 600 and 900 respectively (roughly) – which makes it feel like you’ve missed so much content – and the idea of reverse collecting those back issues was both, overwhelming and going to be very, very, very expensive.

For this one I made an image, and it makes me laugh, because Maico complained about being the side kick in this version…

This is where we venture off from “what was considered mainstream” and cover some of the more “independent” comics… The irony being that we covered some stuff from Image Comics, who back in the 90s struck gold when the creatives left from Marvel and launched Image… but Image, these days? (And even back then when we were discussing image comics!) – They put themselves up there with Marvel and DC. Because Image was responsible for a comic that became a television show called The Walking Dead. These days the popularity of the show has dropped – back back in 2013, 2014, when we were talking Image – The Walking Dead was probably one of the hottest shows on television.

The image (no pun intended… I think) I used was based off an Image (OK, maybe the pun was intended, but not on purpose… not on my upper level brain… probably subconsciously!) that I used for this episode comes from an Image Comic.

You might notice that I am clearly nowhere near as talented as the original artist, right?