Leaving DC Comics Over Wokeness | A Bee Interview With Gabe Eltaeb
Writer and artist Gabe Eltaeb gave up his dream job of working at DC Comics when they turned their back on their characters and on America. Gabe joins the Babylon Bee to discuss how wokeness is infesting America's cultural institutions from top to bottom and what he's doing to be the change he wants to see in the world. Gabe has recently worked on the Rippaverse with Eric D. July and he has a new project you can support: Truth. Justice. American Way: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/truth-justice-american-way#/
And I just walked away like that because DC Comics isn't my source.
God is my source.
And I'm like, I will not be a part of this.
All right, everyone.
Well, thanks for joining us.
Thank you for joining us, Gabe.
This is going to be a great discussion about, you know, woke comics.
Yeah, love woke.
That's what you're doing now.
Why don't you tell us a little bit about your story?
I mean, you did illustrated legit comics.
Yeah.
When I was 13, I saw X-Men issue one at my friend Sean Bandy's house.
And I was like, what is this?
And I never bought comics before because I didn't have a lot of money.
I grew up with, you know, single mother sometimes.
We had a few stepdads in the picture.
But I'd always loved to draw since I was a little, little boy.
And the first thing I remember drawing was Star Wars Space Battles in the back of my grandparents' restaurant.
I'd pull out butcher paper and draw like X-Wings and TIE Fighters.
Three years old, I'm doing this.
So I always loved to draw.
And then I knew about comics, but I never bought them.
And I saw that comic at Sean Bandy's house.
Jim Lee was the illustrator, highest-selling comic book of all time in America.
8 million or something copies sold of this book in 1992.
And comics had a boom in 1992, like the housing boom or the tech boom.
Comics had a boom from like 89 to 93 or something like that.
Then a crash.
But that's what got me into it.
I decided right there.
I think I was 13 or 12.
I decided in that moment I was going to beat Jim Lee.
I was going to be his friend.
I was going to work for him.
I was going to be a comic book.
I decided right there what I was going to be the rest of my life.
And, you know, I went to college.
I did comic strips.
I told you before the show, like a Dilbert Garfield style, that was a highly award-winning one called Higher Education.
I wrote the jokes.
That's why I admire you guys here at the Babylon Beast so much because you write all these great jokes.
I repost your stuff all the time, by the way.
So I'll bill you guys.
Thank you.
I've never reposted your comics.
Good, good, good.
But yeah, I did like comedy strips in college.
I met Frank Cho.
He's a legendary like pin up cheesecake artist in comics.
Like sexy babes is his thing.
And I loved his work.
I went up to him at the Comic-Con in 2007.
You loved his sexy babe work?
Yes.
I love.
Like as a teenage boy or no, I mean, I was 22.
Okay.
And I went up to him and I said, how did you get into comics, Frank?
And he said, oh, I did a comedy strip at the University of Maryland.
So when I went back to the University of Northern Colorado that August, I walked into the school paper and said, your comics suck.
They're not funny.
Here are some of my drawings.
And they hired me on the spot.
So I did that for like the next two and a half years.
And then I got a job working at like a Halloween prop manufacturer.
The biggest one in the country is in the town I went to college in.
And I did like concept art for haunted houses and things like that.
And then I was hanging out on the internet and talking to comic book people I like and started getting little jobs here and there.
Started doing independent comics.
Image Comics is a smaller company.
And then in 2007, my favorite artist from when I was 13 posted on his blog looking for a staff colorist, DC Comics Warner Brothers.
It was three in the morning.
I had just finished some other independent comics.
I was like, I don't want to color this Superman thing.
And I click on the blog post and 59 people had already colored this Superman drawing and they were all terrible.
I'm like, well, I'm better than this.
So I colored it up, emailed it to him, told him who I was.
And this is my dream artist that I swore I would work for when I was 13.
And I'm at football practice like, well, two weeks later, I was a pop warner coach for my son's eight-year-old team.
Undefeated league champions, by the way, that year.
Bittersweet Bengals.
Let's go.
Congratulations.
And hey, they allowed three touchdowns that year.
It's a great team.
And I get a phone call at practice, like, hey, this is Eddie Choi, Jim Lee's assistant.
You know, we'd like to offer you the job.
It's like, who's that bear?
And no, it was legit.
But we couldn't stay in Colorado.
Like, it was a staff job torturing us, you know, 100 yards from the ocean in La Jolla, California, which for those of you that don't know, that is like one of the richest zip codes in America, if not the world.
You've been to La Jolla, right?
Like, okay, you know, La Jolla is like, well, that's what the comedy story is.
Yeah.
So I worked there from January 2nd of 2008 until they closed everything like in 2010 and everything moved to Burbank.
And then you get DC Entertainment with all the CW shows and all the movies since like 2010 or 2011.
So I went freelance.
So I started working for, I still work for them, but as a freelancer, no more staff.
So I started working out of my house.
But then I could work for other people.
So I worked for Robert Kirkman, you know, The Walking Dead.
I worked for him on some comics.
I worked on Star Wars.
And remember.
Three years old, I'm drawing Star Wars Space Battles, my original thing.
So I've got to live so many of my dreams.
God has blessed me so much as an artist.
I get to work for my favorite.
I got his phone number right now.
I could call my favorite artist right now.
We're kind of on the outs right now.
Let's do it.
Let's call him up.
Let's call him.
I mean, he gave me my career at DC.
You know, I have my difficulties with the choices they make, but I can't be disrespectful and pretend he didn't pick me and, you know, hire.
And he personally hired me.
Another artist that worked there told me it was like down to a vote between some guys.
And Jim said, no, I like this guy.
So to me, I'm just humbled.
Like, God bless me.
Like, my favorite artist thinks I'm good and hired me.
Like, that blows my mind.
And I worked at DC Comics from, yeah, 2008 until a year ago.
And it, we all know when woke started, like 2013 or 14, it started getting steam, right?
We're like, that was weird.
And then you just, and then, well, that was weird.
You know, it's just, it's like a drumbeat.
And it just started getting weird.
And you kept thinking maybe it would go away or like, oh, no one's going to keep digging at more.
And it just kept growing and growing.
You're totally right.
It's like DC Comics at the time, like publishing like 80 comic books a month.
I'm like, wow, those 10 books are weird.
And then like three months later, it's like, those 20 books are weird.
And I'm over here.
And then, you know, three years later, it's like, wow, those 63 books are weird.
And then finally they send me this anti-American Superman book to work on.
I'm like, this is what I get for not saying anything.
This is what you get.
You want to just put your head down and pretend nothing's happening because it's not happening to you.
And I was telling Dan earlier, it's like, this is very serious to me because politics is downstream from culture.
And socialism is always evil.
And it's always, join my club today for today's election day, voting day.
I made this hat.
This is my anti-socialist social club.
My father escaped Gaddafi's socialist regime, right?
He came here in the early mid-70s.
And my father spoke out against him there.
And they killed my dad's friends.
And my dad is on a list to be arrested and killed.
They killed my grandfather in an accident, Gaddafi's goons.
And I don't know my family on the Libyan side.
I don't know them at all.
I've never met them.
I know some of their names.
I've said hello to like three of them on Facebook.
I don't know these people.
And I don't even know how to be sad about that.
I would assume the two of you know both sides of your family.
And this auntie and that uncle and cousin crazy and grandma makes this thing at Christmas or whatever.
And I don't have any of that because of socialism, you know?
And it's heartbreaking, but I'm not sad because I don't know what I missed, but I know I missed something.
You know, I don't even speak Arabic.
I know nothing about myself in that regard because of a socialist dictator.
You know, I see how my dad has suffered.
He didn't see his siblings for 40 years.
And when they killed Gaddafi, he finally went home.
He could go home and visit his brothers and sisters.
They're old now.
He doesn't know his nieces and nephews.
His parents died.
He didn't go to the, or grandpa was killed, but he didn't go to the funerals, nothing.
And it robbed us of that.
And on my mom's side, the Mexican side, like my grandpa, someone named Duran came from Spain in like the 1700s.
So I am the American dream.
Like my mom said, we're here before it was America.
On my dad's side, we just got here.
I'm a first-generation immigrant.
And I know what that kind of stuff does to people from firsthand experience, myself and my father.
And I'm not going to be a part of Warner Brothers and DC Comics propagating that nonsense here, saying that America sucks.
I say, no, you suck, DC Comics.
America does not suck.
Like America is the reason we have this stuff.
And it's no coincidence I'm wearing this, you know, and this couldn't be more American because I bought this at a Bucky's in Texas.
The Bucky's truck stop in Texas.
Shout out to Bucky's.
The one day I don't have my Bucky's mug.
Right.
The beaver nuggets.
Bucky mug.
Yeah.
Oh, they're so good.
Eight pounds of beaver nuggets.
Just, you know, fill my casket with beaver nuggets.
Please.
But, you know, that's what matters to me about this stuff because it's like, oh, it's comic books.
It's silly.
It's people punching each other.
It absolutely is.
But at the same time, politics is downstream from culture.
And in the West, culture is hanging on by a thread.
And we lost our culture because of entertainment.
Conservative Christian people like my family made a huge mistake in their calculus in the last 50 years.
They said, you know what?
All those dirty rock and rollers and those perverted movie weirdos and all that stuff.
I was raised that way.
My mom's like that, David Bowie.
And I hate David Bowie and Prince unreasonably because my mom told me how filthy they were when I was like five.
So I was like, those guys, you know, I can't stand them.
But that was a mistake to abandon the arts and not train people up from when they were young to make good art.
If you look at the foundations of Western art, it was celebrating the culture, celebrating truth and beauty, beautiful sculpture, those beautiful Roman and Greek, the Roman copies of the Greek and all that, the beautiful art of the Catholic churches and all that.
It celebrated its culture.
It didn't denigrate it like Homer Simpson and Al Bundy and Archie Bunker telling you that father is an idiot.
You know, meanwhile, father made everything in this room.
Father made all the vaccines.
Father made all the air conditioning and filtered water.
And if you make artwork and movies and comics and all this stuff, I need some water.
Hold on.
I told you I talk a lot.
If you make all this art for these decades and decades on end that is just negative about our culture, you will teach children that that is what's true.
And the Bible says faith without works is dead.
So you act on what you believe.
And if you believe that fathers are Homer Simpson, you will act that way and you will disrespect them and you will not appreciate what they did.
And you will think marriage is a joke and you will think hard work is a joke and you will think America is a joke.
And if you believe those things and act them, you will destroy this culture and we will have nothing.
And that's why you see what's happening.
Because the right or the conservative, I guess the non-woke, we gave up on the arts, most of us.
Not me.
I've been drawn since I was three.
But most people gave up on the arts.
So now we don't have enough conservative people in the arts because we ceded that ground to them.
So I left DC Comics angrily.
I humiliated them.
And I would, the only regret I have about leaving DC Comics is that I didn't do it sooner and I didn't do it harder.
I made global news.
You can look it up.
I was news around the globe for like two days straight.
I was getting, I got a phone call from someone in Europe that saw my story.
Somehow he tracked me down and he was so inspired that I was standing up to woke and this and that.
And it was because they want to change Superman's slogan, truth, justice in a better world.
How dare you?
You know, I was telling one of you before the show that I, my favorite artist, Jim Lee, and I have such mixed feelings.
Like I adore the guy because he inspired me and gave me my career, but I chewed him out after that.
I contacted him directly and I let him know, this isn't right.
You're a first, you're an immigrant.
You're born in Seoul, South Korea, Jim.
And you're a millionaire here.
You go to movie premieres.
You're famous.
You are AAA list at all the Comic-Cons.
Everyone loves you.
And you're a great artist, dude.
But South Korea didn't give you what you have.
America did.
How dare you allow stuff like that to go on?
And he tried to tell me, oh, well, there's things I don't know.
And when things are less polarized, we can have a discussion about this.
Like, there's nothing to discuss here.
This isn't complicated.
You want to make some anti-American Superman style here?
Make a new one.
We're creatives, aren't we?
Well, show me how creative you are.
Make something new.
But the thing about the social justice warriors in the woke is they can't.
They can't do that.
So they jump on 80 years of Batman's momentum and fame and slap their ugly woke politics on it like a bumper sticker and they ruin it.
You know, I liken it to McDonald's.
Like say McDonald's is starting out.
They have hamburgers, shakes, fries, right?
Three things.
And multiple burgers, you know, a double burger, cheeseburger, bacon burger.
And someone woke comes along and says, hey, you don't have enough seafood representation on your menu.
Now, the smart businessman would say, let's add a filet of fish.
You know, now we'll have seven sandwiches.
The woke person says, get rid of your beef.
All the sandwiches are fish now.
Well, then you go right out of business because you got rid of Superman.
You got rid of Batman and you replace him with garbage that, and not necessarily garbage, but you got rid of your ones that are great, that have a built-in fan base.
So you can have your agenda that's about your narcissism or whatever.
So I'm not against it.
So gay Superman is like a filet of fish.
Yes, exactly.
But I would say there's people say, oh, you left because he's bisexual.
You're homophobic.
Absolutely not.
The first book I ever did for DC Comics is The Midnighter.
And I like him.
And he's an analog of Batman.
He's like a street tough guy in black leather and this and that.
And he's gay.
And his boyfriend is Apollo, who's kind of like a Superman analog.
That's another DC.
Those are DC characters.
It's like, so do those.
Those sold.
People like those characters.
I like The Midnighter because he's like cartoonishly violent.
And the book isn't about him being gay.
It's fine that he's gay.
Nobody cares.
Gay people are real.
They belong in movies and stories.
But to take something that is one thing and then to change it into your agenda, you're being dishonest and selfish and everybody knows it.
And that's the problem we have with woke.
If you want to write woke Lord of the Rings, then write it as its own new thing and show me how talented you are.
Don't jump on the skill of Tolkien or C.S. Lewis or George Lucas, the skill they have.
Use their fame and momentum to put your agenda.
Show us all how good you are, what a great artist and writer you are, and make yours some whole cloth.
Because Grant Morrison and Mark Miller did that when they created The Midnighter.
And if I didn't like gay people or gay characters, why would I work on that book?
That was the first book I ever did at DC Comics.
And I worked on The Authority that has more gay heroes in it too.
I don't care about stuff like that.
I don't.
Gay people are real.
I don't hate them or fear them or anything like that.
I love them.
They're all God's children.
Everybody is.
But woke is not about art.
Woke is disrespectful to art because art, everyone says art is subjective.
No, it isn't.
Art is patterns.
That's all we're when you write a joke, when you make music, the chords, it's patterns.
And when you successfully create a pattern, people are pleased.
That's why you feel good when you look at art.
And when you write a story, it has A, B, C, D logic.
And then you slam in pink-haired, weirdo, woke politics, you break the story.
I'll let you guys ask me some questions, but I'll end on this.
The problem with woke is it breaks the verisimilitude of a story.
And this is the joke I've told before about it.
We can believe in Jon Snow and we can believe in dragons, right?
He's Game of Thrones.
He's like, oh, I can't beat this dragon.
I got to get out of here.
So I'm getting away in a 2004 Jeep Wrangler.
You know, Jon Snow just drives away.
We'd all be like, well, that doesn't make sense.
I can believe in a Jeep less than I can believe in a dragon because it doesn't have verisimilitude.
And when you cram woke into stuff, you break.
Versimilitude means the story agrees with itself.
And when you say Superman doesn't believe in Truth, Justice of the American way, you're breaking that story.
So not only is it politically and ethically bad, it's just artistically bad.
All right, enough rant.
So that's the answer to who I am.
Thanks for being here.
That's all the time.
I told you.
That is honestly, you talk a lot, but that's one of the best explanations of this, you know, what's going on with the culture in that sense that I've heard.
Your turn.
I mean, we all know about bisexual Superman, the song.
Right.
Son of Superman.
We've heard of like these big stories that come out.
What are the craziest woke things that you saw in the comics industry before you bail?
Well, in the woke Superman book, we had to develop a new character that didn't take off and nobody cares about the woke writer of it, Tom Taylor, Tom Taylor, because he's Australian.
And he had a new superheroine, a woman, and of course she was black.
And of course, she had the shaved sides on the head.
And of course, the minute she met Superman, she like grabbed his hand and judo flipped him over because, of course, she's stronger than him.
And it's just, I remember we were going through the design phase, and John Timms is just a master illustrator.
He was illustrating and I was doing like the color painting on his illustrations.
And he had like five or six iterations of her.
And like, you know, they picked the one with the shaved head.
And I'm like, guys, this will be the third black woman with shaved sides this year at DC Comics.
I'm not kidding.
There are two new Green Lantern girl females, both black, both with the shaved sides.
I'm like, this is a cliche, guys.
So what about like a Beyoncé's got like long blonde hair?
I haven't seen that on a black woman in comics.
At least I don't think I have.
You want one of those old sexy babe drawings that you like to say?
Right, right, right, yeah.
Like, let's, let's, that's another thing.
Okay, there it is.
Thank you for saying that.
One thing the woke hates is men enjoying female sexuality.
Yeah.
That's dirty.
Well, it's traditional masculinity and traditional femininity.
If men like it, then it's perverted and rapey and cringy and all this.
No, it isn't.
I'm never going to apologize for liking women.
And I think a lot of people agree with me because there's 8 billion people on earth.
That's a lot of people.
And we didn't come out of the ground.
You know what I'm saying?
I think a lot of people like women, you know, I'm not alone in this.
And whenever there were big boobs in a comic or a nice bot or whatever on a female character, the editors would like send a note like, hey, you got to redraw that and make it smaller.
So I would go out of my way to render like just the most just rim lighting and double light and highlight everything.
The butt cheek, I would go out of my way.
I remember the editor like, can you tone those down a little bit?
And she even had the editor one time, so I was doing the color, like painting it.
And the other guy was doing the black and white, the line art.
I remember she had him redraw that it was a queen and her dress was like this, like a normal low-cut.
She had him redraw it up to like here.
Like, you know, what are you going to put him in a hijab next?
Or what are we doing?
You know, those are my people.
I'm the Arab one.
What are you talking about?
So, yeah.
Emma asks you whether we have to edit this part out.
You're leaving it in.
Okay.
Okay.
Good.
Oh, am I not allowed to show Manchest?
Very few of our guests have pulled their.
Okay.
You know, I understand.
You don't want your female audience to go crazy.
Well, right, exactly.
It's a Christian podcast, you know.
Oh, okay.
Well, can't make the women stumble.
Right, right.
That's true.
True.
But back to the shaved, the shaved head characters.
Yeah, I mean, stuff like that was open, but it was.
Now, did you have to work on stuff you disagreed with like that?
And did you just get to the breaking point where you had to work on that stuff?
Yeah, I had to work on it, but it was always not so woke that it was egregious where I couldn't do it.
It was just annoying.
It was stuff like, we're going to raise her collar on her shirt.
It's like, okay, up, down, like, you're dumb, like, for doing that, but okay, I'll do it.
But once they told me to work on a book that says America sucks, I'm like, I'm out of here.
I don't care how much I wanted this, how hard I worked for this.
Like, I told you, I decided when I was 13.
And when I quit working there, I was 43, right?
I'm 44 now.
So that's 30 years of dreaming of that.
And I just walked away like that because DC Comics isn't my source.
God is my source.
And I'm like, I will not be a part of this.
And God wanted you to have the big boob character.
Right.
Absolutely.
Now when you were Sorry go ahead No, no, go ahead.
When you were working there for years before the sort of woke stuff took over, were you always open about your own cultural and political beliefs?
Like, did people know that there?
Or was it an event kind of where you had to come out and say, hey, I disagree?
That's what's happening.
You can't be really in Hollywood.
You know, and it is Hollywood.
Tough, but I see I was open about it, I think, for most of the time I was there.
It definitely got worse and harder to do that.
But yeah, no, I was just curious what your experience was.
He's like the only one who's gotten away with it.
You can say, you know, back in 2008 and nine, I think you could say you were conservative where I'm like, oh, whatever.
But, but I didn't really talk about it much at all because it wasn't so politicized.
It wasn't so crazy.
Because in life, you got to have something to push on.
You can't just push, right?
So the left wasn't going crazy in 2008 and 9.
At least I didn't notice it.
So I didn't really think about it much.
I was just thinking about getting my work done.
And they were just normal superhero stories.
They weren't overly woke or anything.
But I remember when woke started in comics, like the line of demarcation to me is this cover by this wonderful illustrator, Raphael Alberti.
It was a Batgirl cover and it was an homage to the killing joke from 1986, one of the highest-selling books of all time.
And the Joker has Batgirl from behind.
He's got a gun to her head and she's crying, right?
And it's all black.
It's amazing.
It looks like they're coming out of shadow.
DC Comics like canceled that cover.
And I don't know if they pulped those books, like destroyed them and never published them, or maybe they never printed them in the first place.
But there was like, you know, five people on Twitter crying that this reminded them of like physical assault or, you know, something like that.
You can't publish stuff like this.
And at the time, I thought it was a weird anomaly.
And I debated one of my buddies who's a comic artist.
He's like, well, if it upsets me, when I said, no, I almost said his name.
I don't want to say it because I don't want to have him think I'm attacking him.
But I told him, buddy, like we're artists.
And like heroes, I don't know if you know, they always almost die and then they win in the end.
That's kind of how adventure action stories work.
Joker's got her now.
I guarantee you she's going to get out of it by page 22, you know, or next issue at the latest.
She's not going to die.
And it just, to me, that's stupid.
This is a very traumatic story, but I'm going to tell it anyway.
When I was a little boy, my stepfather started beating up my mom and my brother was upstairs and was fighting with him too.
And I was down in the garage and this was an explosively abusive man and all this bad stuff.
And I mean, the kind of thing where I'm laying in bed for years, wondering if he's going to like beat us up or kill us at night.
You know, you're trying to sleep as an 11-year-old like that.
But I've always been big.
I'm 6'4.
And even at 11, I was six feet tall or whatever.
I'm a big guy.
And I was in the car downstairs waiting to go to the store.
And they were fighting physically.
He pushed my mom.
She put a hole in the drywall.
My brother's punching him.
And my brother's a strong guy too.
He's defending my mom.
And I said, this is it.
And I grabbed an axe off the wall of the garage and ran upstairs.
I didn't hit him with it, but I was like, you know, leave my mom and brother alone.
And I tell that story to tell this.
I was watching the Daredevil show on Netflix years ago.
And like a pimp or something is beating up Daredevil's mom.
And he like grabs an axe or a hammer or something and kills the guy and defends his mom.
Now watching that, it flashed me back.
What I didn't do is call Disney and Netflix and say, you have to cancel this show because my stepdad was a bad person and I got into a really hairy situation when I was 11.
And when I saw the bat girl thing, it's like, you can't cancel that just because someone, like, if we canceled everything in fiction that reminded some real person of a real tragedy, we just wouldn't tell any stories.
Because everything and every story has happened to somebody, basically.
And isn't that the whole point of a story?
Yeah, you want to see the good guy prevail over that violence and that evil character.
I was talking to Dan before I came in here.
C.S. Lewis has this quote.
And he says, we don't tell children that fairy tales to tell them that dragons are real.
They already know dragons are real.
We tell children fairy tales to tell them dragons can be defeated.
And again, when you want to have woke stories and put everything down and every father's Archie Bunker, Homer Simpson, you know, America sucks and blah, blah, blah.
You're not telling kids the right thing with your stories.
People can be so much more than they believe.
And they just have to be told it and shown it and then practice it.
And I think most people, they let the miracle of their very existence go by and they lead these lives of unremarkable, no accomplishments, and they're really sad.
And all they needed was for someone to inspire them and encourage them.
And I know I can do that with stories because when I think about what I'm doing in life, I think of movies.
I think of parables from the Bible and stuff like that.
When I left DC Comics, this is how I pay my mortgage.
I got two adult children, but they live with me, you know.
And I got my wife and the mortgage and everything.
San Diego is not cheap.
And this is how I make money.
And I'm going to leave it.
And I don't have a job lined up.
And like Indiana Jones in the third movie, he steps into the chasm and there's the invisible rock bridge.
And it's the leap of faith.
And I remember picturing that and praying to God.
I said, God, don't let me fall here.
I'm going to do something I'm supposed to do and leave DC on principle because this is evil, what they're asking me to do.
I'm going to trust you and step into this hole.
Do not let me fall.
And I was lifted higher than ever.
I make way more money now.
I've lost weight, my marriage, everything.
Everything's better.
But I couldn't see that bridge.
And that's why stories are important because I think about Indiana Jones doing that.
I think about Hans Solo being super selfish and he wants his money.
I'm like, hey, good luck, kid, with these Death Star people.
Whoa, crazy.
And then he has a crisis of conscience and he comes back in the first movie and he helps save his friends.
Like those aren't just entertaining movies.
Those were life lessons that you can be more than you thought you could be.
And what is more beautiful than someone like Superman who has all the power in the world to do anything to anyone?
And no, you can't touch him.
He can fly and laser beams and freeze you.
He even turned back time in that one movie.
Like he can do anything.
He could be a tyrant king of the earth.
And what does he do?
He has restraint and love and mercy and kindness instead.
And what does that teach us about what we can do?
We say, oh, well, I can be powerful, but I can still be kind.
I don't have to be a tyrant or be boss.
Like you learn such important things from stories, you know?
So I think to use our skills as artists, we are some of the most highly skilled artists in the world, me and my friends and the people in my industry.
To use that for evil, it's an insult to God, in my opinion.
End of interview.
Now, are the Pizza Hut X-Men comics that I collected in the 90s worth anything?
I think, I think like $5 million a piece.
Oh, good.
I've said that.
Oh, nice.
That's awesome.
Right.
Now, those are rubles.
I don't know the exchange rate.
Now, what's your opinion of the Star Wars universe, where it's been going, where Disney's been taking it?
And what was your experience like working on Star Wars?
All right.
I drew TIE Fighters and X-Wings as well as a kid, but I wasn't very good at it.
All right.
You asked me Star Wars.
We're going to.
I'm going to go into Star Wars.
Some of my secret shame.
This will be the last question, and then we'll be out of time.
Really?
Oh, my goodness.
Okay.
Well, I assume you're going to.
Right, right.
Well, I started drawing Star Wars at three.
It was the first thing I remember drawing.
And I went freelance.
Remember, DC Comics moved to Burbank, so I went freelance so I could work for DC and now I could work for everyone.
I worked on the relaunch of Star Wars in 2013 or 14.
And Star Wars had been cold since the prequel movies.
Nothing had happened.
No TV, no movies.
Comic book sales were just flat.
And Brian Wood, a great writer, Carlos Downe, a great illustrator, and me as the color paint guy, we relaunched Star Wars 1 and it took place between the first and second movies, Empire and A New Hope.
And it was all your classic characters.
Nothing woke and it sold a jillion copies.
We went to seven different covers.
You know, a comic book has a cover.
Well, if it sells good enough, they'll make a second cover and a third cover, like third edition.
And I think we went seven printings on that.
And it was just a hit, an absolute hit.
And three months into that run, this was a hit comic book, a runaway hit.
Disney bought Star Wars.
And I'll always wonder, was the success of this book in some small part?
Disney said, you know what?
We will buy Star Wars.
Because I'm sure a deal with George Lucas and Disney, that's a years-long deal.
$4 billion deal they're negotiating.
But I can't help but think we have this like runaway hit with this comic book and the deal closes three months later.
And now I hate woke Star Wars.
We don't need to go into that.
Everyone knows it's garbage.
And I'm like, is this like a Greek tragedy?
The thing I love the most, Star Wars, I helped ruin it.
Did I?
Like, you know how was it, who was it?
Oedipus ends up like killing his own father and murdering his mother, the Greek tragedy.
You know, the Greek tragedies.
Like, did I help ruin Star Wars?
So I'll always wonder.
You made it too successful and then it had to fall.
Right.
But, you know, again, this is just, God always blesses me.
And I'm just so humbled.
In that Star Wars comic, Brian Wood wrote like the stealth squadron that Princess Leia had, and they were black X-Wings with orange and red stripes on them instead.
They were versed instead of the white, gray ones.
You guys have been to Disneyland and you've been to the Star Wars land, right?
Have you seen the life-size black X-Wing?
Yeah.
That was me.
Oh, awesome.
And the blue and white Princess Leia X-Wing?
You've seen it there, right?
Life-size?
That was me.
So I'm like, wow, this kid drawing X-Wings in his grandparents' restaurant, some color schemes he made up exist in real life at Disneyland now.
And Disneyland is one of my favorite places.
As a creative, I just loved it.
It's done so well.
Now, I have some friends visiting next month.
Can you get us Disneyland tickets?
I can.
I will charge you a little over cost because I'm going to have to just buy them for cost.
So, yeah, I could do that.
Sure.
But no, I love Walt Disney's one of my heroes.
Man, if you guys look into his life story and biography and all that, I've never been back east.
And for my 25th wedding anniversary, it's a year ago next week, I drove cross-country and went to Disney World from San Diego.
I went from one beach to the other out coast.
And it was just, if you've been to the four parks there, it's just a work of art from stem to stern.
I can't believe how gorgeous it is.
I love the ones out here too.
And I remember the last night of our trip standing under the Epcot ball looking up at it.
And I don't cry.
Like there's dust in the air, I think, or something goes on, a wind.
But I just was looking at that Epcot ball and the starry sky and the beautiful weather that time of year, November in Florida, and there's like rainbow lights going.
And I'm just like, anything is possible, man.
This guy from Marceline, Kansas, where he wasn't rich, Walt Disney.
Look what he did.
Look how much joy and what they're doing to his company now.
But look at the joy he's brought to the world.
And I want to be inspired like that by him.
And I want to inspire people like that and tell people out there, look what happened to me.
I gave up on my childhood dream and my life is better than ever.
And if you have to do the right thing in your life and you're scared, do it.
Always follow the law, but do not capitulate to evil because that's all it takes is for all of us to go, is it over yet?
Like, is he dumb?
Like, someone has to say something.
I played a lot of football.
I coached it forever.
And coach had those slogans up, you know?
It doesn't take any hard work to hustle and just slogans in the weight room, locker room.
But one I'll never forget.
And I don't know who.
Someone told me it was Martin Luther King.
Someone told me it was this guy.
I don't know who it is.
But it was, if not us, who, if not now, when?
I remember that being in our locker room in high school.
And that always stuck with me.
Like, well, if I don't do it, who's going to do it?
You know what I mean?
So I want to encourage you guys and anyone out there, if you got to stand up to woke or something, do it.
You know, you trust God and do it.
And you're going to be all right.
You can never go wrong doing the right thing.
There's no, Mark Shareff, great Denver Bronco, my favorite football team.
He said, his dad always says, there's no wrong way to do the right thing.
Right.
So, you know.
Yeah, now, do you still root for the Chargers now that they're in LA?
No, I never rooted for the Chargers.
I'm a Denver Bronco fan through and through.
So they lost the bye week, you know, not doing too bad.
Now, so you worked on the Ripper Verse.
Yes.
And now you've got your own comic.
Justice America.
Oh, you want to?
I'm going to bust it.
Yeah, show us what you've been working on now.
Yeah.
I don't know.
Where's camera?
How many is there a lot of boobs in this?
What?
Well, at least two per woman, you know, usually.
My brother was telling me that in the car.
We were talking the way up.
I don't know if you guys can get it closer.
Maybe we can put it up as a.
Yeah, that's a good idea.
But yeah, that's crazy.
Yes.
Truth, Justice, American Way.
If DC Comics doesn't want to use that slogan, that's a comic book I have with David Williams and Gary Martin.
That's like a barbarian type character.
Yeah, that's a villain named Volkov, means wolf in Russian.
And the creepy looking one is El Kukui.
That is the boogeyman in Spanish.
Oh, man.
Cultural appropriation, right?
That's right.
That's right.
But yeah, I'm having a lot of fun drawing that.
And if you go to indiegogo.com, you can buy that.
And I think we've already raised $127,000.
So let's double that.
Let's keep going.
And let's just raise as much as we can on that.
And the first thing with that book is to entertain.
That's my first goal.
Not to be anti-woke or conservative, like moral scold.
Nobody needs that.
And it's not left-wing, it's not right-wing.
It's just adventure.
So if you like Star Wars, you like Indiana Jones, all these things that inspired me, that's what we're doing here.
You know, we're just having fun and then lifting you up with a message.
So you can have that moment where you're thinking about Indiana Jones stepping into that dark chasm and you can do it in life when you read my book.
It'll entertain you and inspire you.
That's what it's about.
And of course, I've been 20-something years a professional, and Gary Martin has been like 40-something years a professional.
I mean, that's decades and decades of experience between us, you know, working on this stuff.
So we're 60 years.
Yeah, we're at the highest levels of quality you're going to get.
So totally entertained.
So please buy that today if you can hear the sound of my voice.
You know, please check that out.
Truth, Justice, American Way on Indiegogo.com.
So coming up next for Babylon B subscribers.
I am more intelligent, you know, than to think something so stupid as you are a conservative and that defines you completely.
Was it Vonnegut that said, I contain multitudes?
You know, I'm not just black or just gay or just a woman.
Like, we have some of those things.
Right.
I am everyone.
But I mean, we're complex people.
We're all very similar, too.
This has been another edition of the Be Weekly from the dedicated team of certified fake news journalists you can trust here at the Babylon Bee.