Listen to this episode on our podcast page or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform here. In the sixteenth episode of The Babylon Bee podcast, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann and creative director Ethan Nicolle are joined by graphic novelist Doug TenNapel, creator of the legendary videogame Earthworm Jim, the artist of the famous Five Iron Frenzy album covers, and writer/artist of several graphic novels. Doug is one of the most outspoken Christians in videogames and comics. He and his old team are bringing back Earthworm Jim in a new videogame and Doug has a new Earthworm Him comic book in the works. Check out his record-breaking Indiegogo Campaign before it ends on September 27th! Follow Doug TenNapel on Twitter Check out Doug's YouTube channel Listen to Doug and Ethan's other podcast, Audio Mullet (3:38) Disaster At Union Seminary As Giant, Angry Carnivorous Plant Does Not Accept Students' Apologies (9:59) Saudi Arabia Closes Down New Chick-Fil-A Location For Disappointing Lack Of Homophobia (13:42) Liberals Clarify Their Racism Is Actually Democratic Racist (16:58) Interview: Doug TenNapel talks about Earthworm Jim, the Five Iron Frenzy covers and more... (35:50) Hate Mail: People think Trump window at Liberty University is real. Referenced story: Liberty University Criticized After Unveiling Stained Glass Window Depicting Donald Trump (45:05) Subscriber Exclusive Portion: Doug tells his Carman story and talks about experiences working in the PC climate of Hollywood animation industry. Become a paid subscriber at https://babylonbee.com/plans
In a world of fake news, this is news you can trust.
You're listening to the Babylon Beef with your hosts, Kyle Mann and Ethan Nicole, drinking non-alcoholic beverages and owning the lips.
And they're all out of non-alcoholic beverages.
Hey, hey, we are here.
This is the Babylon Bee podcast.
Sipping on.
No, no.
Do you drink non-alcoholic beverages, Kyle?
I actually have one right in front of me here.
This is a monster energy iced tea.
That's true.
I'm drinking coffee, so I guess that counts.
It's all organic, non-GMO, gluten-free, locally sourced.
Free-range monsters.
Yeah.
We have a guest today on the podcast.
And some will know him, some will not.
Some will fear him.
Some will despise him.
Some will love him.
His name is an old, old friend of mine, Mr. Doug Tenaple.
Oh, yeah.
Now, that wasn't much.
That was a vague intro.
But accurate.
Vague, but accurate.
It pretty much covers everybody.
It covers everything.
Doug is the creator of the video game Earthworm Jim.
That's what he's best known for, but he's one of the most insane creative powerhouses that you'll ever meet.
He has an insane collection of books he's put out.
Comics, graphic novels.
So we're going to talk about that.
But he's also in the world of Christians.
He's known for being the Five Iron Frenzy cover art guy.
He's that, you see that word tenapel down there?
I remember I used to look at that like, what the heck is that?
What's a ten napel?
Yeah, five iron frenzy covers were a big part of my childhood.
And when I put two and two together, like, wait, Earthworm Jim guy and five iron frenzy cover guy.
It was like, you know, my mind just exploded.
Yeah, I have, I, uh, I am promiscuous with my artwork.
I'm everywhere.
Spreading artwork like diseases.
Like diseases.
I love the five iron guys.
They came up to me.
This is when they were first doing their first record.
I forgot what it was called, whatever it is.
And they said, you want to, these guys want you to do their album cover.
Will you consider it?
And I don't know if it was tooth and nail or five minute walk.
I can't remember which label it was.
But I just said, yeah, let me listen to it.
And if I like it, I'll do it.
And I liked it.
And I just, I did my first piece of art and said, this is what I'm doing.
And they put it on the album cover.
Wow.
And every time they would tour or anytime they were in town over, they'd stop in and I'd listen to their music and they'd give me records and all that.
And I just, I loved them.
Good kids.
Jeff the Girl and I were like email buddies or Facebook buddies.
We talked about ministry and stuff.
And Rhys is just a great creative guy.
Dennis Culp ended up being, we were like in a Bible study together back when that church Ecclesia Ethan that used to go to.
Too much of that way back in the day when it first started.
He and I were buddies.
It was neat.
Good times.
Good kids.
We'll dig into the juicy stuff on that.
We're going to get into the main topic, but we're first going to do some news stories.
You're going to join in on the, I forgot to tell you how this is going to be formatted.
So you're finding out right now.
Don't talk about it.
Just do it, Ethan.
So here we go.
We're going to do our stories of the week, everybody.
Every week, there are stories.
These are some of them.
Disaster at Union Seminary.
As giant, angry, carnivorous plant does not accept students' apologies.
Hey, you got a fancy new soundboard.
Can you do the little, uh, do you have like a dun dun dun or like a, uh, um, I have, uh, I have, what do I have?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's it.
Perfect.
You nailed it.
You totally nailed it what I was thinking.
I wanted like a dramatic.
I didn't have that pre organization.
You only get a certain amount.
A carnivorous plant.
I thought this was the B.
I thought you were going to play a bunch of joke articles and you lay down this actual article.
No.
Carnivorous plant that won't accept an apology.
I thought this was supposed to be.
It was so close to the real story.
Yeah, that thing was so bizarre.
I looked at it and said, how are we going to make this just so people know if you don't know?
There's this place called Union Seminary.
What's that mean?
They unify all the religions?
Yes.
Like every religion comes together?
I don't get...
The teachers are all part of the union.
Yeah, I'm a Republican, so I'm against Union Seminary just because it has the word union in the name.
Yeah, that's what it is.
No, it's become like the center for all Christian Marxist thought, basically.
They're like the very progressive seminary.
Gotcha.
All the wacky stuff always comes out of them.
So they all got together and they're apologizing to the plants for their climate sins.
Yeah, there's a beautiful picture that they put up, this tweet, where they have all these plants gathered into the center of the chapel, and this girl's like kneeling before them, asking forgiveness for her climate sins.
I am the root of all evil.
So do we all have climate sins that we want to connect?
What's your latest?
I use disposable diapers.
I once saw an interview with this guy.
Let it all out, Nathan.
He was talking about how he interviewed a serial killer and he justified his obsession with the serial killer as almost becoming his best friend.
Because he said, you know, we all do bad things.
Like, for instance, I use disposable diapers in my children, and that's basically murdering the planet.
And he like compared, he acted as if he was just as bad as the serial killer because he used disposable diapers.
Yeah, well, I mean, I don't see the problem there.
I'm from Tennessee, so we never sort our trash.
I throw away, it's so wonderful.
I throw away recyclable glass bottles, plastic bottles.
The beloved Miss Tenapel got a composter, I think just out of guilt, because it's purely optional.
I'm just going like, just buy more soil.
I'm not going to put my eggshells in that thing and coffee grounds.
Composter, yeah.
Yeah, so we just, we don't, in Tennessee, I laugh at everyone with the recycle bin.
It's purely voluntary.
And I'm like, nope.
Yeah, I don't know.
I mean, do we have laws out here?
Are we supposed to do it?
I do it just out of habit, but yeah.
Yeah, I do it just out of habit, but I don't know if it's yeah, just because I do it because we just don't have room in the trash can.
We got to like separate stuff out, otherwise it overflows.
Oh, yeah.
Shrugged actual trash into the cardboard boxes.
Look, they separate all this stuff at the recycling plant anyway.
So even if you separate the trash out, they don't take your word for it, knowing that Ethan will just go through it.
When he's out of room, he'll throw a diaper in the plastic recycler.
They actually go through it.
So if you just throw it all in there, it doesn't matter.
It'll all get separated.
I'm convinced with all the energy it takes to send a truck around a second time to pick up the recycles, to send out more plastic bins for everybody, and then to actually process this stuff.
I'm convinced that it's got to be way worse than making it better.
It's got to be evening out.
I don't know.
I noticed how Kyle got away with not answering this probably because he's afraid of getting shot by some environmentalist.
Oh, my climate sins?
What's your sin?
Yeah, climate sin.
Oh, your climate sin was the compost.
That's right.
I guess it's my turn.
I run the air to the AC.
That is all.
You just run it.
I run the air like a madman constantly.
Like my electricity bill is like $600.
We learned that if you keep it on, you actually save money.
Because my wife would obsessively turn it off and then only turn it on when it gets so hot we were all dying.
But then it's got to catch up.
Yeah, it has to catch up.
So if it keeps the house kind of cool and you can get the, the hardest part is getting your kids to keep the doors closed.
That, like, I wish that I had like, they need to make kid training BB guns.
Like something that is easy from across the room.
They're called air sauce.
Heck.
It's called air sauce.
I mean, they make BB guns.
Yeah, but BB guns are too...
You could go to jail for shooting with a BB gun, probably.
What about an airsoft gun?
Could you shoot your kid with an airsoft gun?
Oh, no, no.
Does this hurt enough?
If they're little enough, that scares them.
You get like a gas-powered one.
It stings pretty good.
I have one of those bug assault rifles where you shoot flies with salt.
It's been tempting.
I've used it on my dogs before just to let them be really bad.
That alone will get, that's already an environmental sin.
A plant wouldn't forgive you for that even.
You shot a dog with salt?
Table salt.
So are there, if, if you're feeling guilty, Kyle, about running the AC round the clock, are there any environmentalists in Arizona?
Because don't they have to run the AC all day just to live?
Yeah.
Yeah.
We were just in Arizona and it's like you go there, you have to bring a jacket because you go into the businesses and it's like 60 degrees when you go inside.
And there's some finger-wagging environmentalists sitting there going, use the right drinking straw, even though they're running the AC 24-7 in Arizona.
Keep from dying.
Did you see the story that was going around where someone was NPR or something that was saying the ideal temperature to keep your house at?
And it was like, oh, yeah, yeah.
80 degrees.
It was on NPR.
It was on NPR and they talked so slow that I fell asleep before they finished the sentence.
They were halfway through the word.
80 degrees is the optimal.
All right, let's talk about some Chick-fil-A.
Saudi Arabia closes down new Chick-fil-A location for disappointing lack of homophobia.
Did I ruin the punchline by going William Shatner on it?
Yeah.
Disappointing lack of homophobia.
Because this one does.
I remember when the first time I read it, it really catches you off guard at the end there.
They're like, oh, what?
They were so homophobic.
Such a letdown.
Well, you know why?
I originally wrote this and I said Saudi Arabia bans Chick-fil-A for homophobia.
Yeah, for homophobia.
Yeah, but I remember I saw that one.
And I was like, I get it.
And then I'm like, wait a minute, this joke doesn't make any sense.
So I just changed the end.
No homophobia.
Yeah.
So if your joke ever doesn't work, just completely reverse it.
That was a Babylon D headline I had to read two times and explain it to myself to understand it.
Well, it was our, I think I was our most shared story of the last week because that was pretty good.
So enough people got it.
Yeah, the danger with these is people always go, wait, did Chick-fil-A really open a Saudi Arabia location?
So you got to try to try to set it up so they'd get it.
The whole thing's a joke.
Yeah, I don't know what else to add to that.
We have nothing else.
Oh, we could get you.
We could add to that and get you in trouble.
Everything we could say would get us in trouble.
I bet Doug has some things to say.
Oh, yeah, I got all kinds of things to say.
Yeah.
Like, did they instill mattresses all around the Chick-fil-A in case they're throwing them off the roof?
Oh, dear.
Here it goes.
See, we knew Doug had things to say.
Kyle, why doesn't Matt make the headline?
What was it that happened that week?
There's a bunch of people laying in front of a Chick-fil-A in like Canada or something.
Yeah, that's kind of what inspired this is that whole...
What do they call that?
A dead out or something?
Yeah, a dead end.
It's a die-in.
A die-in.
A dead out, a die-in something.
Which kind of sounds like dying.
It's like you're dining at Chick-fil-A.
No, we're not dining at Chick-fil-A.
We're dying.
Are you dying in or eating out?
Are you dying in?
I liked how all the people in that die-in, they all just look like college kids.
Yeah, like they couldn't afford Chick-fil-A.
Probably they'd have to get some to buy it for them.
Yeah, it was like dial-o-riot, where they just like got the generic usual people in there.
And then it was like, any sign will do.
Like there was one on climate change.
One would be like on free the refugees.
And then they went out of Rainbow Flash.
They're indiscriminate.
They're like, what did just pick one?
They're really phoning it in.
I think it's real life Twitter.
Like that's just, they're out there just expressing opinions.
Doing real life Twitter.
They think real life works like Twitter.
You just yell things.
Yeah.
I think they had an earthquake at the Soros sign plant and they all got mixed up.
They said, I just grab anything.
Just grab any sign.
Anything I'll do.
Mine says, go mankind.
I was trying to think of a good wrestler name.
Mankind.
Mankind.
Yeah, that sounds like a really positive sign.
Go Mankind.
One guy has one of those Lipitor signs that's like may cause bleeding diarrhea or something.
That's a better example.
Just got the wrong one.
There was an article in the Toronto Star about this, this new Canadian Chick-fil-A.
And they said, eating at Chick-fil-A will increase the suffering of queer kids.
And then it said, Chick-fil-A has released poison into this city.
Wow.
Life is turning to a Batman episode.
More like the Toronto Red Star.
All right.
Our third story of the week.
Liberals clarify.
Their racism is actually democratic racism.
You're a much better headline deliverer than I am.
Wait, what happened to the musical intro?
Or is this all part of the same section?
You don't play that between each one?
No, yeah, I'm going to do it between each story.
I get to dead done.
If I could find like a good sound effect to put in between each story, maybe I'd do something.
But every time I try something, it sounds like too much.
Okay, so liberal racism is the good racism.
Yeah.
I assume, because anything, if you had.
Well, what the heck?
I just got a weird text.
But yeah.
That's so on topic.
Thanks, Ethan.
This is quite a bit.
I turned my phone over.
Real quality.
We're very distracted today.
We had a lot of problems today.
Just a little inside baseball on that one.
Kyle, you wrote this one.
Do you have something you want to say about it?
This is good stuff.
This is totally on.
This is rough.
This is totally on the rails.
The rails.
I'm so threatened because Doug told me our podcast sucked, and so now he's listening.
That's right.
And I was going to try to do a good job, and now I'm doing terrible.
No, and this is actually much better than that other one.
Well, it was a little rough early on.
You know, we were pretty woody.
It's still rough.
No, it's not rough.
Now it's like Rush Limbaugh.
I thought I was referring to the morning becomes eclectic when I first heard that.
First episode.
Okay, well.
Like socialism, when you add Democratic to it, it's like, it's not socialism, it's democratic socialism.
Yeah.
So Justin Trudeau, everyone's favorite prime minister.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Is it him?
It's probably pronounced Trudet.
Trudeau.
There's like a silent X in there.
They're always throwing crap into their words, the French.
So it actually, like, it totally cracks me up when the blackface photo stuff comes out because it's like, and then it just keeps coming out.
I know.
And it gets worse and worse.
And it's like, people are like, well, it was one instance.
And then they're like, well, actually, there's like seven of them.
And then they ask him and he's like, have you ever been in blackface since 2001 or 2004 or something?
And he's like, I'm not sure.
And you're like, how do you not, how do you not know?
That means I know something's coming.
Yeah, I can't recall.
I do not recall.
It's like, oh, I thought you meant brown face.
Yeah.
It just cracks me up.
He's got some kind of addiction.
Like this overwhelming, compulsive desire to put chew polish on his face or something.
I was just dying thinking about it.
Yeah, I've never done, I'm a borderline racist and I've never even put blackface on.
So how are these guys that are so sensitive, like always running around in blackface?
It is weird.
It's bizarre to me.
It's just absolutely bizarre to me.
Yeah, that's all we can say.
Well, with that, I'm excited because I have new sound equipment.
I'm trying to find this button I'm supposed to push.
I'm trying to fill in time while I'm looking for the button.
Kyle could fill in the time.
He's the audio.
Where is it?
Kyle, can't you?
Damn a criticism.
Can you edit this guy?
Aren't you a professor?
Yeah, I can edit.
Oh, here we go.
All right.
We're going to interview Doug now straight up.
Presenting an exclusive Babylon B interview.
And so here we are.
We're here with Doug Tenapel, the man behind Earthworm Jim in the Fireman Frenzy covers, and the most intense interview, the most intense Twitter guy you could ever follow.
I should have written you an intro.
If you can stand it.
If you can stand it.
Yeah, so I follow Doug on Twitter and it's like my whole MO with people that are critics or disagree with me.
Like I usually just ignore them.
Yeah.
And Doug's thing is like, I'm going to crush them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's fun for me to like vicariously live out Twitter arguments through Doug.
Yeah.
Yeah, I always want people to hate on me on Twitter because then I'm going to turn it into an entertaining event.
Yeah, you have fun with it.
You have fun with it, I can tell.
Yeah, it does sting.
You know, all critic, all criticism stings, but if you turn it into something entertaining, then it becomes something wonderful.
Like evacerating some imbecile or agreeing with them.
Like when they're like, Doug's the most hateful, idiot, mean-spirited, you know, probably closet homosexual if I ever mean.
I'll go like, oh, yeah, you totally got my number.
You nailed me, man.
That's correct.
I agree.
I've actually noticed that you've evolved in the way you respond to people because back in the day, you were a little more aggressive and harsh and now you've learned, you have become a little more, yeah, I think you're making it entertainment for other people rather than trying to.
I think maybe it's just the limitations of Twitter because you were an essay writer in your time.
Yeah, I would pack out all 140 characters every single time.
I think now it really is.
I would never respond if it was going to seriously, you know, if I was seriously trying to engage someone because the internet just does not care.
In fact, they actually think you're funnier if you're taking it seriously and trying to push back on them.
Right.
That's our culture.
Only traipses and insults now.
So the reason we're having you on at this very moment is because you are doing the Earthworm Jim Indiegogo.
You are bringing back Earthworm Jim.
You guys are working on a video game, but you also have a comic that you've been working on and you're like broken records with the amount of money.
Yeah, Earthworm Jim, this comic by one of the most hated men in comics and video games, absolutely attacked by the woke left in media.
Like I'm on so many blacklists, the video game magazines will not, they're told not to cover me.
Right.
And it set the number one record on Indiegogo's crowdfunding comics.
Yeah, I've seen that the amount of people that will they'll start up a tweet and they'll be like, everybody, we have to stop this.
This guy has to be taken down and apparently not working.
Well, I respond to them about five times and I eviscerate them on Twitter and then they start writing to each other, quit responding to him.
You're just bringing him more attention.
So they start shutting each other down, telling them not to not talk about me.
It is amazing the backfiring that happens when you start talking about, or when people on the internet talk about shutting somebody down, that generally helps them.
That's happened with us.
Yeah.
Well, if you get the thing that I think this is one of the benefits of Trump is he really did wake up the idea of pushing back that it's okay to push back.
Now, what that ended up doing is turning us as sour and bitter as the people that are complaining about us.
That's my fear, is that we went into the dumpster with them.
But at least you have permission now to speak back.
And before it was just like, you just kind of cower in silence as all your work dried up.
Yeah.
I did not have a thought after that.
So I'll continue.
I'm just, I'm saying I'm going to lose work and I'm going to lose followers.
But now I grew a thick enough skin where I go, I'm just going to, I don't care now.
Now they can, they, this is something I learned from Breitbart back when we were buddies.
He taught me about how to respond to media.
And he said, once they take everything away from you, they actually really awaken a different kind of dragon because they can't take anything else from you.
And I had gotten to that point where I was just like, I'm not ever going to look good to these people.
And I'm not, they're not going to hire me because they know I'm a Christian conservative or whatever.
So now they've just freed me.
And that's really what unleashed me to really not take into account what they say about me if it's unjustified.
If it's justified, I feel bad about it.
If it's unjustified, I'm just like, screw you.
I will absolutely rant about this 10 times more now because you're trying to get me to be quiet.
There's a special joy and a special freedom when you wake up from that.
It's like, they can't take anything else from me.
I'm free now.
Yeah, and it really works.
I mean, the model for what you're doing now, doing your Indiegogo self-funded books, you've been putting out these independent graphic novels.
I highly encourage people to look them up.
He's got an amazing library of work.
And you've done them all through independent, mostly through Image Comics.
Yeah, Image and Scholastic.
And then I started fearing getting fired from them because they do have some woke editors.
They've been very good to me.
But I'm just saying it's going to be a matter of time before they're buckled, you know, under all this Snopes anti-Chick-fil-A stuff.
That I just said, I'm going to go independent and start culling my own crowd of people who it's not that they agree with me because I have so many people in my audience.
Most of them disagree with me, frankly, but they're not the kind of people.
They believe in supporting work regardless of agreement.
And that's another reason why I wanted to talk about Earthworm Jim is we're closing the store this Friday.
It will no longer be available after late Friday.
And come and get the highest printed book.
It's going to be fantastic too.
It's a 9x12 hardbound edition.
I'm really proud of the story.
I've got a great team of artists that are working with me on coloring and lettering and book design.
So yeah, on Earthworm Jim, you know, it's one of your creations that doesn't have a lot of spirituality that's obvious, but I would love to hear the secret truth of Earthworm Jim's faith.
Sure.
If I was going to pin it down to a ideology that was going in me at the time, it is the meek will inherit the earth.
So here he's this idiot worm that is totally vulnerable, stupid, kind of like us, weak.
There's nothing weaker to become a superhero than a worm, but he's in an indestructible suit that is destined to save the universe.
So to me, that just made for great storytelling.
It was fun.
It wasn't deliberately Christian or anything, but it just, that stuff just courses through my veins.
That's pretty much the gospel.
Yeah, he's pretty much, he is a Christ figure of a hero.
And I think it's part of his appeal also is people love the idea of the kind of iconoclast of seeing the weak worm with this big, muscular, impenetrable body.
It's like he works as a character because of that.
There's kind of a conflict and a drama there.
And then as a storyteller, when I write and draw this comic, it gives me a lot of stuff to play with because the worm is always vulnerable.
So he's using his body as a shield, but if you hit him in the head, you know, you could take him out.
And so it creates conflict and humor opportunities.
And it was pretty easy.
I made this character 25 years ago.
So I'm very close to him.
I can write him.
It's easy.
And it's you that is going groovy in the game, right?
That's me.
I did his voice.
Not because I was the most talented voice actor, but just because I was just around when they had a microphone.
And they go, you created the character.
What's he sound like?
And I go, well, when he gets hit with a blaster, he goes, ow, and whoa, Nilly.
And, you know, it was just.
Can we get a better groovy from you than the one that Ethan just gave us?
I can try.
Let me try.
Here it goes.
Groovy.
I can't crack my voice like that now.
It's been 25 years.
I've run a lot of tobacco through me.
I got a Game Boy when I was young, and we had two games.
We had Super Mario Land, and we had Earthworm Jim.
And that's like how it was when we got a game system is we got like one game, maybe two, and we had those same games for years, and we just played them over and over.
So that was.
So Earthworm Jim passed the test.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, I think the colorful artwork on the cover, you know, like my parents would just go in the store and like, that looks funny.
Oh, yeah.
That looks fun.
I mean, that's literally like how people bought games back then.
We suspect that this worm is a Christian.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That artwork was done by Michael Kelsch, who is doing the, there's a making of book with this campaign also on Indiegogo.
Look up Earthworm Jim on Indiegogo.
He did the cover, a brand new cover for that.
And it's there.
You can see it on, it looks exactly like the classic 1990s game art, but it is beautiful work that Mike did.
It was actually like that cover art was kind of ahead of its time for video games.
Yeah, because I remember video game covers of like the early 90s were kind of pretty cheese ball.
Yeah.
The super realistic artwork for like pixelated games like Contra.
And then you'd see these like two bros with mullets.
And then you play the game and it's like eight pixels.
They look like they're made of stairs, stair steps.
How is that that game Adventure Island?
It's like a fat guy with a little hula skirt and a cap on, like a trucker cap.
And then you see like him painted like, ah, I don't want to see that.
Anyway.
So under the Five Iron Frenzy covers, you gave us a little background on that.
Yeah.
Any other cool Five Arm Frenzy stuff you want to tell us about?
Like, does Reese Roper know that you're a Nazi?
Probably.
He probably thinks I am because he's a full-blown communist.
He's a full-on, yeah, like Marxist or something.
Marxist communist.
But, you know, it's weird because for both of us being on opposite ends, me very far right, him very far left, you know, I think we knew better than to argue that.
So, but there's a real, I just am a huge fan of his.
I mean, I've seen it.
What a showman.
He can run a room.
In fact, I saw him just a couple years ago here in Nashville, where I'm sort of been like 20 years or something since I first started hanging with those guys.
He came, and I'm going like, this guy's an older man, like his real job is a nurse.
He came out here and he was dressed like Colonel Sanders.
He had a Colonel Sanders beard and mustache and white hair and the white suit, probably his commentary on the South or something.
And he just came running out, did a flip and like crashed into the drum set.
I'm going, that's the greatest rock star I've ever seen.
Remember, they were like known for being covered in stuffed animals or something like that for a while.
They have all these, their stage shows.
They're always insane.
That was a thing in like ska and punk culture for a while.
Like you all, every band had their thing.
Yeah, we wear funny hats.
We play naked.
When I was in a ska band, I had a rubber chicken on my football helmet.
There you go.
See?
Proving the point.
Their horn section was so tight, too.
Yeah.
That's Leono, what is it?
Ortega, Jeff the Girl, Dennis Culp, and who is the, Brad was the trumpet player?
Fantastic brass, which you got to have for a ska band, but theirs was really tight.
And like Dennis is like a, the trombone player is, is really kind of the, I think the musical genius of the group as far as organizing arrangements is he really knows music theory forward and back.
So just a real talented group.
Great.
And when I listened to him, there was nothing like it in Christianity, you know, and they wanted something that was art-wise, that was Christian, but nothing like it in Christianity, which I think my art's very, it's kind of punk rock and kind of unhinged and non-sequitur.
And it was just like a natural marriage.
I felt like they were kind of writing the soundtrack to a lot of my work.
Like it had that feel to it.
Yeah, I remember looking through the album cover for Five Iron Frenzy, the note, you know, the liner notes.
And I think, did you have a few pieces in there?
Yeah.
For our newest album ever with the guy with the goggles on.
Yeah, and I would do some, so I'd throw him some black and white interior art just to throw through the decorations.
Yeah.
Yeah, I remember I was always trying to interpret it like, oh, they're saying that these three like wolf-looking guys in the back are like Satan and the as a junior higher.
That's what we want to get.
We want to get Doug's interpretation of these covers, you know, the scoop.
Oddly enough, when I drew it, I did think of those three wolfy guys as kind of bad guys.
They're kind of among buildings.
There's kind of these weird-looking wolfy, they're in suits.
So the suit thing tied to ska, which, you know, capitalism.
And I thought they could be seen as evil or they could just be seen as kind of these bad little awesome ska guys, which I thought either.
I think Rhys Roper liked because he saw he's like, those are Wall Street wolves.
Yeah.
This is anti-capitalism in Wall Street.
Yeah, definitely.
I was, I mean, I was, I knew to play to him.
It looked, they were, they were greedy little business wolves.
And the guy, the main guy, is like this hero.
He has a trumpet on his forehead.
So instead of like the Mark of the Beast, he has the brass, which to me represented the Five Iron Frenzy.
He looks like he might be a skinhead, though.
Well, he's got the straitjacket, so I assume he's Trump.
Yeah.
I thought I saw him as someone who escaped in a sane asylum.
So they thought he was crazy.
The communists thought he was crazy.
Ironically, Rhys Roper's people.
And they locked him up, but he broke out with his brass, and he's out saving the world.
I don't know.
Something like that.
It was something like that.
It was fun.
I did all the art in a day.
I did a sketch.
I did the art.
I sent it to him.
And my rules were always: you can use this on the cover.
You can't put it on the back cover.
So you either have to use it or send it back to me.
And you never have to pay me for it.
Oh, so you did these all for free?
Always for free.
That was the rules.
I would say you don't have to pay me anything for it, but you have to use it on the cover.
You can't art direct me.
And if you don't like it, just send it back.
And they used them all.
Nice.
Wow.
So you did quantity is job one and the end is near or the end is here or whatever.
Yep.
And the end is near.
I did a clay one too.
Their live album was a sculpt of that guy.
Proof that the youth are revolting.
I love that one.
Yep.
And in fact, that quantity is job one.
That's one with the little, the green guy on it, right?
Who's kicking it?
And he's like skanking.
That was like a marker comp.
I did that in markers and I sent it to him.
And I go, this is what I'm thinking of.
They go, oh, we'll use that.
They used my marker comp.
You're like, oh, cool.
Oh, I literally, if I redrew it, I'd probably only ruin it.
So they were right.
When I was a kid, I would draw those little guys that are following the skanking guy.
Yeah, one of them, he's eating one or something, and he's up at night feeling guilty in bed.
It's something like that.
It was like a weird.
That might have been inside.
Yeah, I don't remember.
Yeah, they're like a rare part of the album that kind of tells the story.
I liked it.
I liked it.
What other band would let me do that?
Yeah, that's pretty cool.
That is pretty crazy.
I mean, besides Sandy Patty.
Michael W. Smith.
Besides Michael W. Smith.
He's got that one where he's in like the Argyle, those like diamonds, and he's looks like, oh my gosh, like, what have I done?
You know, what am I doing with my life?
I love that album.
That's his first one, wasn't it?
That you're talking about?
I think it was number, I think it was Michael W. Smith 2.
I think so.
I loved those first two albums.
Yeah, Michael W. Smith 2.
I listened to them.
This reminds me of a question that I mean to ask every guest we have, but I always forget.
So I need to ask you this stuff.
Sure.
Have you ever met Carmen?
I have not.
I have not.
But I have a great Carmen story.
Oh.
We're going to put that in the subscriber portion.
Okay, okay.
Because he did juicy stuff with a subscriber portion.
He has a Carmen story.
I've got a terrible Carmen story that is absolutely amazing.
And you guys got to subscribe to hear it because it is good.
And also less chance of lawsuits.
That too.
Yeah, because Carmen's got to pay for it to hear it.
You hear that, Carmen?
Subscribe so you can sue these guys.
Join Snopes.
Team Snopes.
Yes, Kaylee.
That's a pretty good look at those pieces of album artwork.
I feel like we could really dive in because I'm you realize this is an audio podcast, right?
I mean, there's no visuals.
Nobody can see them.
You'd have to have the visuals.
We'll put them, we'll link something in the show notes.
There's a link I can put in of all the covers on the Five Iron Principality.
If you guys want to see them, but we should describe them like this, like the captions do.
You know, when you're browsing the internet, they have the captions for blind people that describe the image.
I've never listened to those.
Green background.
Man stands holding five iron golf clubs.
Has anyone ever clicked one of those links on a podcast ever?
Those show notes.
I always hear him talking about that on ricochet.
It's like show notes.
I'm like, I can't even find that.
How am I going to?
I'm not going to click that.
Ethan's the only one.
I'm the only one who's never clicked on them.
I put them, I make them with such care.
I don't listen to podcasts.
Everyone else is studying them, and I'm the only one who's never clicked on them.
They're reading me.
All right.
Well, I think we should move on to hate mail.
Let's do it.
All right.
Let's do it.
Don't know which button it is.
This is going to be good.
Here we go.
It's the worst sound effect ever.
Here it goes.
Oh, keep forgetting the volume up.
We'll do it again.
Hold on.
Oh man, the studio's on fire.
We're going to do it again.
Hold on, hold on.
I really miss Adam Ford.
That's so creepy.
So terrible.
Was that I really miss Adam Fork?
What did he say?
Yes.
I really miss Adam Ford.
It's an ongoing gag that we've got a lot of hate mail that say it.
People saying they miss Adam Ford because he's the guy that originated the Babylon B.
The main guy, yeah.
Yeah.
And so we were using a sound effect where he just is saying that, and then it got suggested that we do like an auto-tune.
And my friend did an auto-tune, so we use it.
It sounds terrible.
Adam Ford.
I follow him on Twitter.
Okay.
Yeah, Adam's cool.
We're going to get him on here at some point.
Tell me about the mail, Ethan.
Okay, so the hate mail, we're not actually doing hate mail this week, but we're doing something that gets you pretty giddy because we did this article a while back.
I think Kyle wrote it.
I did the Photoshop.
The headline is Liberty University criticized after unveiling stained glass window depicting Donald Trump.
So there's this big stained glass window of Donald Trump up there, and he's got two thumbs up, and he's got like these American flag eagle wings coming out.
Again, is that Babylon B or is that real?
I honestly couldn't.
It's actually an old article, and it went viral again.
Someone discovered it and retweeted it or something.
And people started posting it saying it was real.
Oh, good.
And so there's all these, Mike, our friend Mike, me and Doug, I have a mutual friend, Mike Nelson of Riff Tracks, who he said he saw it in the wild.
He saw somebody posting it saying it was real.
He's like, I got to congratulate you on this one.
Oh, that's good.
I'm waiting for the Snopes fact check, though.
We haven't got it.
Yeah, no Snopes fact check.
It's weird.
Yeah, they lie with the sidewalk, so they just glance right at them and go, that's real.
Come on.
Well, it doesn't fit the narrative that only conservatives are fooled by satire because we've got a lot of people on the left here falling for it.
Now we get to see a lot of people on the left getting fooled by satire.
So we're going to read some of the comments that people made when they shared this.
It's pretty fantastic.
Okay, here's one.
Alert, not a joke.
Evangelical zombies at Liberty University are now worshiping the Trump stained glass window in church.
Confirmed.
Everything we suspected is true.
I like when it's like a joke.
They're literally sharing a joke.
Not a joke.
It's not a joke.
I've done the homework.
This one says, oh, wait.
Let's see.
We'll do this one.
I'm not a Bible expert, but I think a stained glass image of Trump in the chapel at Liberty University would have really peed off Moses just saying, can we say the P-word on this show?
Why Moses?
I know.
I guess the golden calf, maybe the golden calf thing.
I love it because that's their favorite argument is they take Bible quotes out of context.
Now, I could be wrong, but I don't think the Bible, I don't think Jesus would approve of, you know, whatever, and then show whatever a Christian is doing.
Yeah, I don't believe in the Bible, but hey, here's an argument against your from the Bible.
Here's one.
Trump is a Christian.
Now, Christian is spelled with a dollar sign instead of an S. Trump is a Christian.
Lying, adulterer, envy, pride, wrath, lust, gluttony, and greed.
Yep, that's Trump.
I like that with lying, he has the barfing emoticon, too.
So that's a woman, Jennifer.
Sorry, Jennifer.
Oh, sorry, Jennifer.
Yeah, we missed.
You just misgendered her.
Way to go.
Babylon.
We did gendered her.
This one's very simple, but I really just like imagining the way that this person delivered this verbally.
It's a woman named Sheila.
She goes, why would anyone do this?
She's like on her way.
She's on her fainting couch, clutching at her pearls.
What world do we live in?
My favorite is the lack of originality in all three of these that you know they're just repeating this for a choir.
They don't have to come up with any content.
Just like, look at this.
How utterly disgusting.
It's all caps.
Ever heard of separation of church and state?
Waste of time and money there.
Wait, how would that be?
How would that be separation?
I mean, well, I guess it's making it supposed to be the other way.
Like the church isn't supposed to control the government?
Yeah.
I guess it's the other way, too.
State not, I guess.
It doesn't work.
I feel like they would like that.
If it was Obama, they'd probably be while Obama was going to be.
They'd all go to that.
I feel like I finally found God's word.
I look up at the stained glass, and this is the only non-racist church in the world.
I now know it, that I'm in the right place.
We got one that just says, with lots of laughing emoticons, you can't make this stuff up.
Like, actually.
We literally made it up.
Yes, you can, believe it or not.
All right.
So this one was one of the ones that went big and viral.
This is a really big one.
This guy has a ton of followers.
He's bought a bunch of retweets.
I think he has like a PhD or something.
He's a professor.
Twitter handled his OMG, no to Trump.
Yeah.
So I like that.
I might have just doxed him.
Sorry.
And he says, if it's true that Liberty University has a large stained glass window of Trump in a new prayer room, which it appears to be, by the way, which there is spelled, oh yeah, which.
Like it's like a warlock.
Witch it appears to be.
There's no way for me to insult them.
They already insulted themselves way more than I ever could.
It's absolutely incredible.
I love it.
I like the witch it appears to be.
You think you like this?
But it's also like, how far did you research this to figure out that this was true?
Yeah.
You know, like, yeah, this appears to be true.
I checked out the site and it's legit.
Yeah.
Science.
I couldn't find it.
Science.
That's science.
I couldn't find it today.
I don't know if they deleted it or what, but there was somebody who clearly had read the article and they're using details from the article to say, I can't believe this is true.
Anyone who opposes my opinion on this is anti-science.
They're science deniers.
Science deniers.
I think that's covers them pretty good.
We had a lot.
I mean, some of these guys got a lot of retweets and shares.
There's some great greenhouse threads.
Let's do the last one.
I like this one.
The same university we've bought a million bucks in jet fuel from since Trump was elected.
A university selling jet fuel to the government tax exempt.
Are they waiting Liberty sells jet fuel?
I don't know.
I don't understand.
I have no idea.
Where did that come from?
If we had an intern, we'd have them Google it.
Liberty University, Trump, oil.
Man.
I don't know.
So, yeah, it was fun.
Just a little sample there.
I'd probably send myself.
I'd send my kids to Liberty if they did send oil to Trump.
Send them oil.
That would be a positive tax package.
I'm not sure.
Because they're not Trump enough.
It's like the Chick-fil-A in Saudi Arabia.
That was a good callback.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, we're going to continue the discussion with Doug behind our paywall, which is our subscriber program.
So if you want to get the rest of the podcast, go to BabylonB.com slash plans and you can join.
And he's going to tell his juicy Carmen story.
He also has a story from a...
I'm going to throw it down, but I hate telling my stories to the poor.
So we'll talk to the rest of you guys after that.
Yeah, shine your monocles up.
No, he has a story from when he worked in Hollywood, too.
He has some Hollywood stories, too.
Yeah, we're really interested to hear.
Hollywood oppression.
So do that.
And then, Doug, how can people visit you and check you out?
Forget visiting me.
Go to Indiegogo and put in Earthworm Jim and get the comic.
That's what we want.
Or they can follow me on Twitter.
If you really want to be offended, put in at Doug Tenapel on Twitter.
Beautiful.
So do that.
Yes.
So check out the Earthworm Jim Indiegogo.
It's going on for one more day after we publish this.
So you got about 24 hours to check that out.
All right.
All right, everybody.
Thanks, guys.
Yeah.
We'll talk to you guys next week.
Once this button loads up, I can hit this thing and do this.
Here we go.
Kyle and Ethan would like to thank Seth Dillon for paying the bills, Adam Ford for creating their job, the other writers for tirelessly pitching headlines, the subscribers, and you, the listener.