The Culture War #42 - Fighting Woke Comics, Movies, And Music, Rise Of The Rippaverse w/Eric July
Host:
Tim Pool
Guests:
Eric July @EricDJuly (X) | RippaVerse.com
Ian Crossland @IanCrossland (X)
Producer:
Kellen Leeson @KellenPDL (X)
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On today's episode of the Culture War, we're going to talk about winning the Culture War.
And this is a lot to do with movies, video games, comic books especially.
But in order to win a Culture War, you have to make a culture.
Which is why, as we're getting started with this episode, I'm proud to say that, together again, TimCast's cover of Smokey Mike and the God King has debuted on iTunes at number one!
Honestly, it was kind of funny to wake up and be like... Normally, we put out a bunch of songs already.
And when we do, we're like, hey, let's see if we can make number one by the weekend or something.
And then, you know, maybe Friday night, it's like, yes, we hit it!
I wake up, the song's only been up since midnight.
So we're talking, like, people at three or four in the morning.
Buying the song and I wake up and Together Again by Smokey Mike and the God King performed and covered by us is number one on iTunes.
It bumped down a little bit as the day is winding on, but I guess when the song released, you know.
So we put out the song.
It's doing really, really well.
We're putting a bunch of marketing behind it.
For those that aren't familiar, we released this song.
It's out officially today at TheBestSongEver.com.
We took a song that was written by Jeremy Boring and Michael Knowles called Together Again, and they did this as a big F you to the music industry that was trying to lock them out.
Jeremy Boring had offered $150,000, 100 times the market rate to perform a song and was rejected.
I assume, I think Jeremy assumes it's for political reasons.
And so we did a modern version covering their song once again as we're going to team up with them.
We're going to give a middle finger to the music industry.
We're going to make music and we're going to chart.
They don't want to write about us.
They told us explicitly, F you.
So now we launched this song together, The Daily Wire.
We're both teaming up to promote it and we debuted on iTunes at number one.
Let's see how it goes.
I'm hoping that the song can chart fairly well and then we can continue to laugh at the music industry because they can't shut us out.
But speaking of industries trying to shut people out, hanging out with us today to talk about winning the culture war is Eric July.
Of the Ripaverse, you launched this new comic book series, and you're wildly successful now.
Do you want to introduce yourself?
unidentified
Yes, by the way, feels good to be back, man.
I appreciate y'all having me.
But yeah, Ripaverse, it was only, believe it or not, only a year and a half ago when I launched that thing, which is crazy, with ISOM, and then that turned into a $3.7 million campaign.
We had another multi-million dollar campaign after this and we just released our first non-ISOM product in AlphaCore number one, which was wrote by the great legendary Chuck Dixon.
And now that's a million dollar campaign.
So a lot has happened in a year and a half.
My life has been completely changed, but obviously for the better, man.
And I'm just, I'm really blessed to be in this, be in a situation, man.
I mean, we came up in an era where the out-of-print comic book stuff was at its apex, you know, in the 90s, where you had Batman the Animated Series, X-Men the Animated Series, you wanted to throw Spider-Man in there as well.
So, obviously, I was a little lucky, but my mother introduced me to Flash when I was a kid.
I mean, it was a rabbit hole from there.
So yeah, very, very early on was I, was I into comics.
I think every youngster kind of has this dream.
Oh, I be, I want to write this character or something like that when they get older.
Um, that I'll never actualize that because I'm in a way better position being able to do my own stuff.
Um, but yeah, man, it was, uh, the nineties just coming up in that era, man, it was hard not to be a comic book fan.
And so here comes this guy, Eric July, and he's like, I'm gonna make just regular comics, and bang, you're a millionaire.
unidentified
It happened literally just like that.
You word it that way, but that's exactly how it happened.
Obviously we have this reverse code of ethics is what we call it, and it's more of a guideline where my folks and the other writers and everything, where we say this is who we are.
This is what we're going to abide by, and this is something that the audience can hold us to.
And in it, we talk about some of the other issues, because a lot of it was content-related problems.
You talk about what is woke.
But there's other issues that I had with comic books as well.
Continuity issues, lack of canon, stuff like that.
And that's all stuff that we put in our code of ethics.
And we promised people a universe, not just like a one-off thing.
It wasn't a get-rich-quick scheme.
It was something that I wanted people to be able to get invested in.
I think that's why it worked, because we let people know who we were, what it is that we're trying to do.
We were very, very transparent.
But yeah, that demand, the Riververse show, that demand was truly there.
People have watched their characters, especially with the big two, be just completely bastardized, and they wanted an alternative, man.
That was always my thing, and I see a lot of people saying the same thing.
I'm like, dude, I don't care if you make a character who is, like, LGBTQ, black, white, Asian, whatever, just make the character.
Don't take Iron Man and turn Iron Man into a black woman.
unidentified
It used to be about action, like, if Wolverine, you know, Jean Grey and Cyclops were married, but Wolverine falls in love with Jean Grey, and like, you see a scene where they're talking and then Cyclops is like, whatever, and then it shows Wolverine and he's like, sad.
But then it goes on to the next area, action, action.
Nowadays, well, in these weird comics, you'll get like, Wolverine's sad.
The next scene will be Wolverine crying at the bed, like, I'm so sad, what's wrong?
I'm pretty sure if they were to write the Logan Scott Summers, Jean Grey, you know, Love Trist thing today... They'd show it in the bed and all that weird crap.
And they'd be like, Wolverine, we're not excluding you.
There was a bit where they also did some weird thing with, what's his name, from Guardians as well.
I think that was more of a shot at Chris Pratt, where they made him part of this weird threesome.
But yeah, they're trying to do this Thruple thing with Jean Grey and Cyclops as well as Wolverine.
That was right around the time that I completely unchecked it.
They're fucking Cyclops!
Watch your claws, Logan!
Don't open your eyes!
Not even joking!
Not even joking.
Nobody wants to read that stuff.
This is what's happening in the industry, is that these people are writing themselves often into these characters, and they've just effectively hijacked them.
I think that's what separates the greats.
I've had this discussion with Chuck Dixon a lot, and just being able to work with him, it really does show this, where he wants to get to know the characters.
He's not trying to say, what would I do as Chuck Dixon?
It's what the character would do.
And I'm going to write around that, and it can be a new, refreshing story.
Whereas with the mainstream cats, what we're getting is these people have their ideology or whatever social political position.
And really, to be fair, this is the only platform where they can even get away with it, because if they try to do their own thing with their own property, nobody's reading it.
But I think they're totally aware of that.
They're like, look, this is the only way that I can sort of platform this sort of stuff, so I'd rather run Batman into the ground.
I don't know if you guys know, there was a story Again, even if you take the sexuality stuff, they don't understand these characters.
There's a story where Batman recently was going over this, I guess it was a riot, if you want to call it that.
People were looting.
And Batman's gliding over it, and instead of, as Batman would do, somehow disperse this whole crowd, he basically says, yeah, these companies have insurance, and I got something else to do, basically.
So out of character, right?
Nobody, Batman would never do stuff like that, but you can tell that's the position of the writer that is.
Yeah, half-celestial, she's the daughter of Selune, the god of the moon, and, uh, she's a lesbian.
And so, when you save her, she finds, you know, she can, depending on how you play the game, find her love, Isabel, and then there's, like, they show the lesbian romance.
Someone made a mod to make Dame Aelin into Sir Aelin, a man.
That's all they said.
All they said is Aelin can be a man.
Here you go.
But it turns the relationship into a heterosexual one.
Nexus Mods, the modification website, banned the modification saying it removes diversity from the game so it's not allowed.
No, they're like, anything that removes diversity and inclusivity from video games will not be allowed on the site.
unidentified
That's part of the weird thing is that they think that forcing homosexuality means diversity, but the diversity is the ability to be homosexual or heterosexual.
Yeah, it's about being like, maybe some people wanted to see a straight relationship, maybe some people didn't.
But I think that shows the agenda of these people, as you were mentioning, is they're trying to force their worldview into your world and take from you your choice.
I mostly just watched cartoons, but I would read comics sometimes because we'd hang out at a comic shop to play Magic the Gathering.
And so I was, I never, I was never the person where it's like, Oh, I got it.
I can't wait for the next issue to come out.
Like what happens?
That was never.
unidentified
I used to walk this dog over to the comic shop and tie him up outside and go in and read JC comics and kind of, what were you like your top comics in the beginning?
Oh, in the beginning for sure.
It was Flash, Wally was Flash coming up, but all that detective comic stuff that Chuck ironically was, was writing at the time, Chuck Dixon.
You know, that was around the time you also had like Nightfall and Bane, all that, like, Man, what a time to kind of come up during that window.
People don't realize, I know you guys do, you read comics, but back in the day, when we're all sitting there waiting for the next episode of like The Boys to come out on Amazon Prime, comic books were that.
If you wanted a story, it's like the radio had their programs, but you, you're, I'm talking like 60s or whatever.
You were waiting for the next episode of your favorite show.
It was going to the comic book shop and the new comics out, all the flash, number seven, whatever.
And then you grab it and you're like, I got to read it.
unidentified
And you could also, it was like trading.
You could, they got, they wrote up in value because of low print runs.
So your comics, you take them into the comic shop and you could trade them in for other comics.
And like, you'd get one that would be the first appearance of like Carnage.
I have that, you know, that Spider-Man villain.
And it went up to $60.
I was like, oh my God, I put it in like a hard case.
Like I got it in the plastic box.
That was cool That's kind of done these do you find like print because printing is so prolific now on the with the internet and eBay Well, I do think it's still a demand.
There's that secondary market is still there.
It's just a it's a little different You know, we get creative with our stuff because we understand that is that collectability is is also part of the market So we do for example what is called?
Uh, Signature Series, uh, by CGC, right?
CGC.
So, um, that's the number one grader in comics.
Um, for people that don't know what that is, it's basically you get your, your comics.
If you take them to CGC, you get a little grade, you know, range nines States, whatever.
10 is Jim Mint.
That's the best you can, you can get.
Well, Signature Series is a new one that they kind of, uh, that, that we do a lot of where we'll sign it, right?
Like I have the writer assigned it.
I signed the ice.
Chuck Dixon signed AlphaCore books and he sent it to them and they get this gold label.
And so there's some collectability there as well.
And we also like try to limit our prints.
We do what is called a mass print for for a particular cover so we can always have in a stock.
They never have to go anywhere else to get it.
That's usually our cover deed.
But the other ones will like we'll let people know, hey, we only printed twenty seven thousand or whatever it is of of this one.
So it's still there.
It's just a little different.
We wanted to stay away from going too crazy.
We talk about the 90s.
That was one of the negative things.
Talk about the image boom as well, where it got crazy with those variants.
And that's still a problem that's plaguing this industry where these guys are coming out with obviously to kind of boost their numbers.
Ten, eleven, twelve different variants for the same book.
Right.
And.
And me personally, I'm not a fan of that.
Cool.
Yeah, so.
Did you ever think about printing like a gold cover, like literal gold cover or something and selling it for like 60 grand?
We could do, yeah, there's some creative.
I've seen some definitely guys in the independent market that do some creative one-off stuff.
They sell them.
We haven't done it yet, but I've seen guys say, hey, this is the only print of this particular cover.
But it's like, these things are so, they feel so good to have this thing, this piece of time.
New media doesn't have that.
unidentified
No, I think that is one of the things that I believe makes comics such a unique medium, is that I believe that aspect of it, and this is why we don't sell digital.
I know we get asked a lot, like, hey, why don't you do digital comics?
I'm like, I don't really see the demand there, number one.
And yeah, like it's something special about actually holding the physical product that's in your hand no matter what it is And reading it like me.
Yeah, I've read some digital comics But for me nothing beats being able to physically have it in your hand and starting to flip flip through it It's just a different experience.
Have you guys considered doing an animated series?
Yes, we did.
Um, we we dabbed first dabbed into like animation with Isom2's It was a trailer that we did.
It was a trailer that we did and we worked with another company.
But this next one that we did with the AlphaCore release, it's a longer format and it's more in-house with some of our own animators.
So it's about, I can't remember how long that is, like two and a half minutes maybe or something.
So we haven't quite done the longer form.
It's just a matter of of monetization is the creative thing that we gotta figure that bad boy out as far as how that's gonna look.
It might be just the age, cause you don't have to do 30 minutes.
That used to be, you know, 1990s again.
Like now we're in the age of like a two minute short, like a 30 second short on YouTube even.
I mean, media is becoming, especially with shorts, YouTube shorts promoting massively.
Everything's gotta be a minute.
TikTok did this to music.
Oh yeah.
People started putting out songs that it was just so weird.
So, oh man, you go to someone's Spotify, and they'll have a hit song you like, and there will be slow version, fast version, backwards version, and minute-long version, because they need to make multiple versions for TikTok instead of making music for people.
That happened so fast man because I mean we're my band backwards is finally about to start getting back into it and you know we're analyzing the market and how different it was even I mean we dropped our album that was like 2017 right now we're about to get back into it and it's like so much has changed from that time.
to now as far as how and I look I don't know if it's more of that's how people actually digest it's like what came first the chicken or the egg is it like the industry itself is trying to push people towards this sort of content or is it like an actual demand I don't really know I think it's a demand because there's so much more content okay so it takes a longer to search through a lot of It's better to get a clip of 30 different things in a half hour rather than one thing for 30 minutes.
Not necessarily better, but it's an option that people seem to be gravitating towards.
You went to see a show play, a band play or a musician play.
It would be for a little while.
You'd go to see a show and it's like an hour.
Then they put out recordings and now each song is a few minutes, but that album itself you play and it's like, you know, 20 minutes.
Now we're in the world of digital content, and you hear two minutes from one band, and now because of TikTok, you hear one minute from one person.
unidentified
The Beatles, a lot of their hits were two minutes and 20 seconds, two minutes and 30 seconds, like, most of their songs are really short, especially in the early days.
The technology is making everything shorter and shorter and smaller and smaller, faster and faster.
unidentified
It's like, again, what came first?
It is, I think, yeah, I probably agree with you on that, that it's a little bit of, it's a little bit of both, right?
And that, again, that's just the nature of all the technological, I guess, advancements, and to your point, Because everything's been more decentralized, which is a good thing, and people are able to create that could, and it used to be kind of a barrier of entry, now it's like, we can do podcasts, we can do music without having to have all that equipment that's worth tens of thousands of dollars.
So I get it, you got more people that are kind of entering into the game, which now folks have just...
What's crazy about the work you did and are doing with Riververse, there's a lot of people who would make the argument, oh comics just don't sell anymore.
The reality is, it is the infection of crackpot ideology.
I'll tell you, because you already basically said it, people who don't care about Batman, Absolutely.
like infiltrated these companies to write for Batman and make him something different.
And I think a lot of it is they want to inject their psychotic worldview.
Absolutely.
Using a popular IP.
That's why they always, that's why they don't make new characters.
Why is it that they're like, oh, we're going to take, you know, this character and turn it into a, you know, a gay woman or something like that, like South Park makes the joke.
It's because they're trying to force you to watch it.
I can't even imagine that if DC or Marvel came out with a new IP, it would do that well.
And you do, and it does well.
unidentified
Yeah, I think again, it goes back to the whole, like what we promised people to do.
Yeah, there was a demand that was built.
So in some ways, yeah, I hate to see these characters go in the direction that they're going, but I'm not oblivious.
I know that kind of helps us out.
Because it's like incentivizing people to go try something else which they may have not done in the past.
But also again, it goes back to like our promises of keeping up with our continuity and leaving a lot of that, all that political stuff out of what it is that we're trying to do and what we're doing as creatives.
And you bring up a good point because, you know, I guess the Ripperverse and the fact that it just exists in the capacity that it does, It disproves everything that they said when they just tried to justify all the goofy stuff it is that they would do.
So whether it be, hey, you guys, we have to make these other characters like a black version of Riri Williams, right?
You mentioned Iron Man, right?
So we have to make her because, well, you guys won't support a different property.
And that's just not true.
That's verifiably false.
And I think that's why we get the hatred that it is that we get because the Ripperverse proves that, yeah, I didn't have a starting point.
There was nobody else that was funding any of this.
Well, I mean, if you want to say that my following was a starting point, yeah, I give you that.
But it was just a brand new property, and we created it.
And if people want to go look at the numbers, you can.
Go check it out.
They will consider, because it has ISBN and the size of our books, because we're not releasing traditional floppies, a graphic novel.
We just looked at AlphaCore in comparison to the numbers that came out in November.
AlphaCore is the number one selling graphic novel in North America right now.
It's not even close, actually, if you're talking about the American companies.
Our actual competition is Manga, that of which we're third, right?
We're third behind them, so we're still top three.
But among superhero or author graphic novels, we are number one.
I watched the Static Shock show when I'm a kid, and it's my favorite superhero show, and it's about a young black kid who gets superpowers during a gang fight, and I'm like, it's very much written for inner-city, urban perspective and understanding.
Instead of doing something as incredible as that, and Static has gone on to get his own comic and to be included in other properties, and he's in Batman Beyond, like, he's utilizing a bunch of ways.
He's an excellent and amazing character, and I love how they utilize his ability for, like, Static, he can control electricity, so they do a bunch of really cool things with what that means.
Here's a new character.
There's your diversity.
In fact, the show very much was like an educational and, like, Oh yeah, it had a lot of social stuff that they talked about.
Yeah, his best friend, who's super intelligent, is gay.
And it was an episode where his dad's racist and he's gay and it's like, all that stuff's in there.
And it was fine.
It was done tastefully and well with a new character.
So when they say...
Oh, we have to make Iron Man into a black woman, otherwise no one will buy it.
They're lying.
What they're really saying is, we hate Iron Man.
We don't want this character.
unidentified
No, that's an absolute fact, and I'm going to blow your mind here.
Did you hear about what they did to Static recently?
No, don't do it!
Oh man, I got a good story for you.
So, one of these writers who kind of embodies everything that is wrong with comics, her name is Vita.
So what happened was, is that they adjusted it, and now he gets his powers from a Black Lives Matter sort of rally that literally happened.
And this was right out the gate, so they basically killed any momentum it is that they would have had trying to reboot all the Milestone characters, DC.
So I know the original comic is different from the cartoon, but the cartoon I thought was masterfully done.
Basically, Virgil Hawkins, I believe, right?
He's pressured into siding with one gang in a gang fight saying, you better come or else.
And he's like, I don't know what to do because these are the kids in his area.
These are the gangs that control everything.
They give him a gun.
He throws the gun into the harbor.
When the fight happens, there's a chemical explosion.
So all of these gang bangers get superpowers.
He's the only one there, basically, who doesn't want to be involved in this fight, thus he becomes the hero, most of the other guys become villains.
Eventually, some of the characters reform their lives, they go from villains to heroes, but it's a re- it's a- it's actually a really- The Big Bang was what they called the whole deal, yeah.
It's great, and then in the story they're like, bang babies, the big bang caused this thing.
It's cool how they made- how can we make it so there's a superhero and villains, and more villains than the hero?
Well it was a gang fight, these guys are self-interested, they don't care about their community, and they're villains, and this kid who was pressured into it becomes the hero.
And then they had great storylines where some of the bad guys realized the error of their ways, they reform.
Man, then I remember, yeah.
Now it's a Black Lives Matter rally, the cops were the bad guys, and here we go.
unidentified
Yeah, imagine that.
But no, it does represent everything it is that we've been discussing, and everything wrong with comics.
These guys are so ideologically obsessed that they go to infiltrate these.
Look, I started to know the real change around the 2010s.
This was the era of What do you call it all new all different right Marvel was what they called it where they would like trying to basically replace all the heroes and this is how you got like Jane Foster being Thor and all this other weird stuff all that all this stuff happened during that period of time but they it was almost like they were.
They do it out of spite, right?
They're upset that these crappy characters that they come up as alternatives, nobody's buying into it.
So they say, yeah, I'm going to just ruin the characters it is that you guys love and you guys enjoy.
And I'm going to make it about me.
I'm going to make it about my personal politics.
And I think that's the core issue.
It's like, this isn't who that character is, right?
The whole bit about Batman, for whatever reason, saying, yeah, they got insurance.
They'll be fine.
That's just such a non-Batman thing, and people know that.
I think it was the first animated Emmy ever when they rewrote Mr. Freeze's origin story.
From a one-dimensional villain who's like, I'm going to freeze you, Batman!
Into, my wife is dying and I'll do anything to save her life and I need to find, I need to get money and chemical resources to find a cure.
And it became very sad.
unidentified
I think with one of the issues maybe people are facing, like when you introduce a new character, you don't need to explain their background right away.
You can just drop them into the story.
Absolutely.
They're doing their thing and then later on... It's part of the fun, is finding that out.
I got a new character I was going to offer to the Ripperverse if you want it.
No, you can do the salesman and he throws razor blade papers, but his name is Psychosoma and he's a villain and he makes people feel sick.
You know, like psychosomatic and it's just psychosoma.
I don't know who he is or what he does, but you don't need the history of it right away.
I'll just give you an idea.
It's copywritten for the Ripperverse if you want it.
Free game, I love it.
How often do you guys make new guys?
So we have, it's a, so as far as our creative team, which again, I'm blessed to be in this position aware.
A guy like a Chuck Dixon is doing all this work for us.
He's allegedly one of the most prolific writers of all time.
Again, you guys know him as like the actual creator of Bane.
And having a guy like that around, man, it just is so it means so much to me as a creative, right?
Definitely as a writer, I've grown a lot.
But we have him.
We have also Jen and Sylvia Saska.
We just actually had a creative meeting because we're doing most of the stories between us three.
And there's always stories, like, let's say characters being created, right?
And we try to do it tasteful because continuity, again, is a big part of what it is that we do, so we can't go too willy-nilly.
As an example, we have this AlphaCore team.
It is that we've created.
I created and introduced them in Ice M1, but Chuck is writing the actual book for him, which that started going out last week to as far as fulfillment.
But it's a you know, we have this fictional city called Flores Park and they are a wing of the police department.
Like there's three guys with superpowers that not they're not mass vigilantes.
They actually work with the police force.
So you can imagine that that's a different dynamic.
And for it be it for villains or heroes that that that oddly, let's say, impacts the the city.
So we have to consider all of that, and we have our meetings.
We have our meetings daily.
Not necessarily daily, but every so often about, hey, I have this character idea, and it's going to impact the city this way, or it doesn't make sense for them to be in Flores Park.
We have all our creative meetings to try to hash that stuff out.
But yeah, we've started with, for example, the book that's coming out after After AlphaCore, hopefully around February, will be Yaira, which is wrote by Jen and Sylvia Saska.
It's another character that I've created.
But in these individual stories, they're creating characters as well.
What's happening?
Give me the overall.
What's going on in the universe?
For sure.
So we started out with a character known as Isom, right?
He's a character that, I guess that's everybody's introduction into the Riververse, right?
We started out with his book number one and book number two.
So he's a character that is, we're picking up where he had recently retired.
Well, he had long, let's say long retired for that matter.
He's living on his own ranch, doing his own thing, blue collar kind of work.
And we're picking up of him reconsidering, right?
Of putting his suit sort of back on.
So this whole story pops off with his sister.
There's a family friend that is interning at her company called Projexxus that she works at.
Think of it as like a biotech kind of company.
So she calls him because he has an old friend by the name of Darren Fontano, uh, that is, um, up to no good.
Let's say this, uh, up to no good.
And he ends up, um, let's say, I don't want to give a story away too much, but let's say that, that, that family friend gets kind of lost into his endeavors, uh, Darren Fontano's endeavors.
So, Altona, who is Isom's or Avery Sillman's sister, says, hey, can you just go check it out?
Right.
Just go check it out.
And that's when we kind of stuff starts to hit the fan.
He runs into Alphacore.
He runs into Yaira as well.
And out of that conflict with Darren Fontano, he ends up reconsidering putting his suit back on.
So what you're doing, you're getting introduced to this sort of fictional affluent city of Flores Park in itself.
By way of Isom.
And yes, you're meeting new characters along the way.
But it's very much, it feels kind of like this sort of living city.
Where especially with the introduction of alpha core with this wing of the police that that has powers and whatnot and I think that's what you learn the most about with alpha core one is how does a city like that look how does a city like that that has characters that are specifically tax.
To deal with who we call we call our superpowered beings accepts in our in our universe, but how does a city like that look like and you learn a lot about that and with alpha core number one and to me that that's the whole fun it is that we have here is that.
I grew up loving the universe kind of element, right?
It's not that every character needs to know each other, but I love the fact that, hey, this character, whatever they do, let's say that that may impact the world or the story of another character, right?
So this is all concepts that we have to kind of entertain as we're creating, and it's challenging, but it's so fun.
Is it on an alternate Earth?
This is all on Earth?
Yeah, look at it like a Earth that is... there's some bits and pieces that people are picking up on, especially like with the state of Texas, and that it doesn't necessarily look like it does in our real world.
I didn't want to just simply replicate what it was that we were doing.
I more so wanted to... or how the world is right now.
So there's some familiar elements, but look at it like it is different.
It is very much different from from the world that we live in, even in the state of Texas.
Are there cosmic entities in the realm yet?
Sort of.
You almost got me to spoil something.
I don't want to get too much into it.
Let's just say this.
In that vein, there is a character that we have introduced that floats along that line.
We want to keep it grounded now, but for sure, you mentioned Thanos.
You mentioned, let's say, Crisis on Infinite Earths as well.
Those are stories that I grew up in.
Granted, they may predate me a little bit in the 80s, but that was some of my first introduction to comic books, and I love that cosmic stuff.
What about the underground empire?
We and I some too.
There is a let's say kind of hellish sort of a realm.
It is that we start to we start to entertain a conversation.
That's how is a character by the name of a blood Ruth is her name and we kind of start to get inside to some of the fantasy elements, but you know, definitely if you're in that sort of underworldly stuff, I think I some to you that you love.
Yeah, that's more or less what they are, activists.
You got like CBR is a big one.
You have like Comics Beat.
Those guys, they know we exist, of course, you can't not.
They've got word to not cover anything about us because of, it's usually political reasons.
But there has been one, Bleedin' Cool I think is their name, I call them the Bleedin' something else, but they were the one mainstream kind of, hey we keep our hand on the pulse of the industry, that did write about ISOM-1, but it was more of a hit piece.
These guys don't like us.
Let's just say that.
And more so because, again, to our previous points, it detonates.
They're watching their arguments be destroyed in kind of real time.
That's what's the existence.
Hey, people won't like this type of character.
They won't like that type of character.
They won't get behind this character.
And the Ripperverse disproves all of that.
But also, these people feel as if they own the industry, right?
It's theirs, especially ideologically, and people like me, whether it be, let's say, non-leftists, let's call them that, creating is something that they do not feel as if we're supposed to be doing.
Don't just straight up try to crap on it.
They more so try to delegitimize our efforts.
Because, again, more so because of what it means to the industry itself.
That, number one, it shows that it can be done.
But it also shows that, well, people don't have much of a use to the mainstream anymore if there are going to be these alternatives that still kind of scratch that itch it is that people have for comics.
What has your comic done that should be offensive to any of these people?
I mean, by their standard, you've created a new IP wildly successful with a diverse cast of characters.
unidentified
Yeah, it does detonate again their arguments, but it goes to show that all that was nonsense.
That was never really their position.
They never cared about having these various types of characters or black superheroes.
That was never anything it is that they cared about.
That was all ideology.
So it all boils down to more so the political stuff.
For you guys that don't know, again, I bring up Chuck Dixon.
He sort of got blacklisted from the industry, despite him being one of the most prolific writers of all time.
Because he leans to the right, right?
Same can be said for Mike Barron, who's also doing a book for us called Gooding as well.
These are legends.
These guys have wrote all of these prominent characters from Batman to Punisher and as such.
And yet, because they think a little different on certain political topics, the industry doesn't want them around.
So I said, I mean, I guess their loss is my gain here, because these are very talented people.
But again, you have to understand, these guys infiltrated this industry, and they have a lot riding on the fact that, well, we get to destroy Batman, or we get to destroy Punisher, which they've certainly done as of recently.
I'm not making Mickey Mouse have superpowers, okay?
We're gonna make a comic book where Steamboat Willie, we basically finish out the Steamboat story and he's on the Steamboat because he's going to work some, you know, deals.
My thoughts are, I don't know if you guys agree with this, is you make the most, not apolitical, just make the most like, like, it's not about identity.
It's about badass dudes or women, like people, just awesome people.
They're just suffering and overcoming it.
Well, that's what our deal is.
I have largely left my politics at the door.
I believe there's just more creative ways to tell these sort of stories.
Yes, there are universal truths, good, evil, and all that, and we want that to be sort of understood.
But while I could have done that, and I think that's what a lot of people, when I launched ISOM, expected for it to happen.
Like, ISOM's gonna be this big ANCAP or whatever.
And I was like, nah, man, I wanted to challenge myself.
That's not who it is that he is.
I mean, hell, the second book that we release is a team of superhero cops, right?
Like, that's not necessarily that ANCAP.
Not necessarily, but that goes to show that, you know, I just wanted to give something that is very digestible, people can get in on, they can love it, and it shows that it can be done.
Comics have always been political.
They love to say that.
I would argue that maybe it has been, but just as Captain America was punching Nazis, he was also punching communists as well, which there's no balance.
I think that's the issue that a lot of people have right now with the mainstream comics is that it's just so far one way and who's being demonized is the other side.
It's gonna be... We're gonna make him look really gritty, and he's gonna have, like, combat gear and tactical armor.
And he's... And you know what we should do?
We should make it so that all the other characters are very realistic style of animation, except for the ultra-ripped, like, human-bodied but Steamboat Willie head character.
Steamboat Willie was the name of the cartoon, but Mickey and Minnie Mouse are both in it, so Minnie Mouse is available too.
Oh, dude.
We should make Minnie, like, Mickey and Minnie have a falling out, and Minnie goes full communist, tanky, and Mickey is like, you know, he tries to figure out who brainwashed her.
He's gotta like save her from the brainwashing.
Yeah.
He'll have like a Gadsden patch on his arm.
unidentified
Yeah.
And it's like a broadcast tower that's talking, but you don't know who the villain is, but you can hear it through the broadcast tower.
Do you guys sit around when you're creating new characters?
What's the ratio of creating concepts of lists of enemies and heroes versus actually putting it into fruition?
So we have a universe Bible.
It's actually why I brought one of our writers, or two of our writers, and Jen and Sylvia Saskia full-time to help kind of manage that, because I was doing it before, but they're going to help manage the entry.
So that's where everything starts.
It's more of conceptualizing, because I believe, and look, every writer's different, But I believe that you have to know the characters before you actually can put them in a believable story.
At least that's my approach.
So it's like, there's stuff that we've already documented about the character of Isom or Ingrid Valdez of Alphacore that the public doesn't know yet from reading the first three books.
They won't know that until later on because it's like, We need some sense of direction, but also we need to know the characters.
And we work with professionals that care enough to do that.
Before Chuck Dixon started writing Alphacore, we had a meeting and he wanted to know who these characters was.
It wasn't like, Hey, yeah, man, we're going to bring you on to do this book.
And then he just kind of just did his own thing.
No, it was more of, hey, I need to know who it is that these characters are.
So we start there, we conceptualize them first, and then we try to put them in a believable narrative.
So, you know, you don't have as much leeway when the character has already shown up somewhere and there's this established idea of who it is that they are.
But that's also the fun about the universe it is that we have, is that We're not even limited to a genre.
AlphaCore is very much a police procedural with superhero elements.
That's very much what it is.
Complete change of pace from the ISOM-1 that you guys have over there, even though that was their...
Their introduction, they got introduced in that book, but the story it is that they're in is a police procedural.
So we're not limited being at the beginning stages of this.
So it's funny, you mentioned some of those other elements and we get to entertain it all.
It doesn't mean that I need to put them in Flora's part.
I don't have to put them there.
I mean, it's an entire universe.
I can put them on another planet for that matter and it can still exist inside of this universe.
So the character creation point is such a therapeutic thing.
Uh, for us, again, I get to kind of come in and say, if I can conceptualize it and I can make sense of it, I can put it in the world.
When I think of them, I think of like, first I think of the realm that they're from, like the mountain people and they're like a bird man lives in the mountains, or like the tree people.
And then I'll think of like dudes with like crazy features or the underwater realm.
And then you got those.
And then the character kind of just like, well, who would live there?
That's the character.
Those are the people.
That's a good way to do it.
Again, I think even starting with sort of the city of Flores Park, a lot of that goes into it.
It's like, it's funny that Chuck, you know, he brought this up as well as he was writing.
He was like, this is very much a story that's believable to Texas.
Yeah, it's a different Texas, but it is Texan.
Um, uh, very much.
And we don't see a lot of that in mainstream, uh, comics, especially, uh, at all.
So, you know, that's the cool sort of things it is that we can, we get to do.
And because we're at very much the beginning stages, these writers are able to come in and, uh, tell a believable story to those characters, but they do have a bit of creative freedom, which is why I think it's so attractive, uh, for them to be working for the Riververse.
I think Miss Marvel might have been the last I gave it.
Infinity War, I feel like, is a That was a true ending?
Yeah, not Endgame.
The Infinity War.
Because Endgame was just like Member Berries, you know, we're going to bring all the characters together, we're all going to hold hands and sing songs about everything we did together, have a nice day.
unidentified
I don't get with, I didn't even watch the Infinity crap, the movies, because I'm so obsessed with the Infinity Gauntlet.
Why did they not introduce Adam Warlock and Silver Surfer?
Don't get me started, man.
That was one of the biggest drops.
Imagine that, bringing in, they also brought in Thanos' brother after After the Infinity Gauntlet arc was complete.
I think this is when we all started to see the cracks.
When I went to see Endgame, the scene where all the women come together, the audience groaned.
Because I was in Western Maryland when I went to see Endgame, and a lot of people were talking about how when they did the women's scene, everyone's like, woo!
They're clapping and cheering.
I'm like, not where I was.
They went, aw!
unidentified
That was so corny, man.
It was such a forced element.
Captain Marvel doesn't really even have an impact on...
They did it perfectly as far as for the finances and that they hyped the character up.
Kevin Feige's like, oh, she's the strongest in our universe.
So it tried to incentivize people, which it did.
I guess it made a billion dollars to see it.
But she had really no impact on the story per se.
She was like at the beginning of Endgame and then she shows up at the end and Dano still pushes her.
Like, first of all, what I've been saying from the get-go is if they wanted to do Captain Marvel as the lady version, Robin Wright is the actress for the job.
Because if you look at Robin Wright and you look at the character of Captain Marvel, you're like, oh yeah, she could totally play that role.
Plus, she's got more of a presence and a, like, I don't know how to say this, but a physical body.
Brie Larson's like a hundred pounds soaking wet and here she is grabbing Thanos and he's going, It's such a bad version of the character.
unidentified
I mean, it's a relatively new phenomena that she became Captain Marvel.
That was like, what, 2012 if I'm not mistaken?
So they fast-tracked that character into the universe for some odd reason.
The crazy thing is, I remember them talking about how Brie Larson was going to take over for Robert Downey Jr.
They, the MCU, Marvel Studios, did this thing where they would take lesser-known actors and actresses, put them in these roles of iconic characters, and they'd instantly be like, they would reach stardom.
All of a sudden, you know, they resurrect Robert Downey Jr.' 's career, then you get Chris Evans, all of a sudden, boom, he's A-lister.
But definitely doing that Spider-Man movie was big, and that was awesome, and everyone's screaming and cheering for when all the Spider-Men come together.
But so, you're right, so Captain Marvel is not, this character's not some iconic IP like Iron Man, like the Hulk, like Captain America.
And then they're like, we're gonna have, I bet they were thinking, we can have Brie Larson come in, take this character, it doesn't matter who we do, because they didn't think Iron Man was gonna be big.
Iron Man was one of their lesser IPs.
Spider-Man was the big Marvel intellectual property, but then Iron Man leads the MCU and becomes this multi-billion dollar character component of the franchise.
And they're thinking, Brie Larson will come in, Robert Downey Jr.
exits, and then she will be the recurring character throughout the next phase, the next arc.
But Brie Larson's unlikable, ultra-woke, snooty, and just, people were just like, we don't like her.
unidentified
Here's the thing, like, they got behind, and this is what it was, it was basically a repeat of All-New-All-Different, if you understand all these characters that they're introducing, including Riri Williams, right?
That, this is, these are recent phenomenons.
Ms.
Marvel, even for that matter.
Or Kamala Khan being Ms.
Marvel.
And that's what puts the MCU in such a tough spot right now in that they don't have anything to turn this thing around.
Look at what's on the horizon, Echo.
Or Black Captain America.
They're doing all that reshoots and stuff with that.
The Marvels made less money than the original Hulk.
unidentified
You know what it is?
It's Stan Lee, man.
He was Marvel Comics.
It was his creativity that made it good.
And when he died, Jack Kirby came in.
It was a team, but it was those guys.
And then it's not the name Marvel that makes it great.
It was the people that happened to be working with it.
Well, that's the thing, man.
If something like this is gonna work, you have to have people that are part of these products, that are part of the creation aspect of it, that actually care about it, right?
And that's what it just... I think the audience picks up on this.
I think that's part of why The Ripperverse is as successful as it is, is because, you know, they can see that, like, this is not just...
We're not just throwing out slop just to do it.
We actually are invested in this, and I don't get the sense that anybody feels that way about the Marvel Cinematic Universe, that the creators actually care, the writers actually care about any of these characters it is that they're writing.
Batman, I get everyone goes, yeah, but he's born rich and inherits all his money.
That's not the point.
The point is that Batman's character is this kid who experiences trauma and decides to solve problems by training himself to the peak of human physical condition and mental condition to be the best.
I love the general idea in comic book lore, given enough time, Batman can defeat any villain.
I love that with a crossover with Marvel, Batman defeats the Hulk.
How could a regular human with no powers defeat the Hulk?
He throws nerve gas, strikes his solar plexus, causing Hulk to inhale, Hulk passes out.
It's excellent writing, how they're like, this idea that you don't have to have superpowers, you don't have to be born with gifts, you can earn your way into being one of the greats.
I love Injustice League.
They're interrogating Superman, and some- I can't remember who it was, like they're interrogating a villain, it's like, I'll never talk!
And then Batman's like, let me handle this, whispers in his ear, and the guy goes, I'll tell you anything!
That what they're showing there is, obviously we don't know what Batman said, but they're showing that even Superman, the most powerful being on Earth, doesn't have the ability to manipulate or understand the human mind, but Batman, through training and understanding humans, can be more powerful than all of them.
Not to mention, Batman has the means of taking out any Justice League member.
He's basically the most powerful Justice League member.
When you look at, there's this great video comparing Captain America, the first movie, with Captain Marvel.
And Captain America is a scrawny kid who has a ton of physical ailments, but wants to serve his country so bad he tries to lie to get in.
He's got nothing powerful about him but his character, so he is chosen for the super soldier program.
The great scene where, uh, what is it, Tommy Lee?
He throws the dummy grenade, says, I don't want character, I want strong men!
And then all the guys run away, but Steve Rogers jumps on the grenade, and then, you know, Stanley teaches character smiles, like, that's the character that we want.
Captain Marvel's the opposite of that.
She was a snooty, self-entitled person who just had the power to begin with, and they were like, Jude Law's character is like, control your emotions.
It's like, what?
What is this?
What does that have to do with anything?
And then finally, in the end, she realizes she had the power all along, but the man was keeping her down, and she breaks the device and then uses her powers.
It's just like she's not deserving of this.
unidentified
Also, it sounds like they wrote that poorly.
If her emotions were suppressed, she wouldn't have robbed that guy for telling her to smile.
She was just a bad, and people say, no, you gotta understand, that's her character arc, that she was a bad person and she becomes a good person.
I'm like, nope, she's a bad person the whole time.
Like even in the end, she's still a bad person.
She gets revenge on the man who is telling her to suppress her emotions.
unidentified
And then, and then on top of that, like she leaves.
For what?
Because that was technically the movie takes place in the mid 90s and they took to my knowledge still haven't explained really.
Okay, you found out all this new stuff about you.
You're actually from Earth and all this other stuff.
You've stumbled across this information.
And instead of taking care of business on Earth, she goes and flies off for decades or however long that she's gone.
Doesn't age.
It doesn't age, obviously.
But no, the explanation is so corny because she's like, you remember that scene in Endgame where Rhodey asks her, what the hell have you been?
And she's like, well, y'all already had heroes.
And I'm like, Yeah, we should have explained that she was flying at the speed of light, so time was moving faster for everyone on Earth, but she only experienced a few seconds.
It was just, hey, she was basically like, yeah, granted, yeah, I found all this out about my family being from here, but yeah, I just went off.
So, in the MCU, they travel by using the jump points, where you can see the, uh, the grid-like structure open up, and then they jump from point to point.
That's how they bypass time dilation.
But, Captain Marvel can fly fast in the speed of light, so your explanation, I'm sorry, Ian, makes no sense, because in Endgame, she rescues Robert Downey Jr., Iron Man.
It was such a... it's a... they were set up for failure.
It sounds like it was a ripoff of Superman.
Like it was their version of Superman Marvel because they called him Mar-Vell and it was just like all it was was just this lame-ass Superman guy.
I think it was more of they wanted a a strong female character to write because you know you gotta understand around the time she was introduced you also had Wonder Woman was killing it for DC right and I think they wanted their it wasn't Scarlet I guess they felt like it wasn't Scarlet Witch they wanted that uber powerful like female character.
Oh I meant the original Captain Marvel's dude Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar-Mar- Well, he was far more interesting than... I mean, for people that don't know, that was such a prominent character in Marvel's history.
That was the first graphic novel produced by Marvel.
That was a huge book.
Very important character to Thanos' arc.
Obviously, that was the first big villain of Thanos.
And they turned him into a woman in the Captain Marvel, they made Ms.
Marvel Captain Marvel, though that happened in the books first and then they made Mar-Vell a woman and I remember wanting to throw my chicken strips at the I'm reading here that DC Comics sued Fawcett Comics for breach of copyright, claiming that Fawcett's Captain Marvel is too similar to Superman.
So they stopped publishing it in 1953, and then in the late 60s, they got the trademark Captain Marvel, and I guess then they were legally allowed to.
I do like how they often try to explain the powers in some scientific way.
I'm a fan of that.
unidentified
Yeah, for sure.
He was fleshed out.
All of them were fleshed out, especially once you start going into the late 50s, going into the 60s, where they were trying to... That was when the Green Lantern stuff started to switch up, and now Green Lantern, instead of it just being Alan Scott, it became the Green Lantern Corps, right?
And the ring, and all that stuff.
So yeah, they were fleshing out these characters.
I feel like it was very power oriented in the 30s and 40s.
It was like, hey, here's a guy that just does this really cool thing.
And Superman was their version of like, and I try to be fair to them because it's like, You couldn't imagine creating these characters, even like a Batman, and you're thinking as you're creating them, like, yeah, this character is gonna end up being like a fabric of American culture.
In that year, man, Stan Lee just had this creative... He was on fire.
Him and Jack were on fire.
Jack Kirby?
Yeah.
What a team.
They were on fire.
I mean going into like late late 50s going into this obviously Fantastic Four being their first family but I mean between the Thor's and the Hulk's and the you know obviously the Avengers if you want those Ant-Man's and Iron Man's of the world in there you can certainly throw that in there.
Obviously X-Men was the 60s as well when those got created as well.
That was such a crazy decade when you think about it.
And the original, the original idea, like when we look at X-Men now.
You have mutants and it's like there are mutants and there are humans and there's a conflict between them and back then that concept didn't matter and it didn't exist.
You'd see a guy firing a laser beam from his hand and they'd be like, who is this?
He goes, I'm a mutant.
And that's it.
There's no story.
There's no background.
Nobody cares.
But eventually they're like, Hey, we, we have something here with all of these mutants.
Why don't we make this a thing?
And then you end up with people are born with the X gene, which gives them mutant powers or whatever.
unidentified
Right.
Is it- you think it's safe to build, like, CRISPR children now, uh, in that vein?
And, like, all these genetically engineered- Yeah, I gotta- I gotta be honest.
Uh, The Boys and Gen V is basically a- operation- it was paperclip, right?
When we took the Nazi scientists?
The- they- The Boys is basically, we paperclip these Nazi scientists who are working on super soldier serums, they inject babies with it, because, uh, adults who get V will start to die, and they've- so they can temporarily get powers, but it just rots their brain out, but babies can adapt to it, and then it flows through their system as they get older, giving them powers.
So basically, I think The Boys is a great show.
I do think the politics are a little ham-fisted.
But the general idea was in the beginning, some people are born with powers, some people aren't.
Then you realize, actually, no.
This big corporation goes to a family and says, how would you like your kid to have superpowers?
Don't tell anyone ever or we'll kill you.
And then they inject the baby with some chemicals.
unidentified
Or it could be like there was a pole shift in 1993 and ever since it's like affected like 0.1% of the population and now there's like just these people that are twisted.
Yeah, it was a Netflix show, um... I can't remember what it was called.
But, uh, it's about, like, a group of friends in the 30s or something on, like, some expedition, and they end up discovering some, like, alien technology, which says, we're gonna grant you superpowers and gives all these people powers.
And then, the wave that gives them powers actually ripples across the planet, giving tons of people powers, which creates villains.
So in these comics, in a lot of comics, like Punisher, he's an anti-hero.
Vigilantes typically will help the police despite running from them.
Spider-Man's always helping cops but then running from them.
They're trying to arrest him.
Punisher, however, is kind of like a crazy guy, but he's an anti-hero.
You're right.
So we understand it.
So when you get someone like Phoenix Jones, who's a dude wearing, he's like an MMA fighter or something, puts on a costume and goes around trying to fight crime.
Yeah, he's not going to side with the people who are burning buildings down.
unidentified
Well, they like to think of themselves as the good guys.
And I think that actually is part of why their stories, a lot of these guys' stories just suck so bad because they really don't understand, again, what it takes to be Uh hero because I think it's um, you know, it's funny you bring up godlessness or whether they're immoral and they just don't understand whatever it may be These guys like when they're doing this goofy stuff.
They like to think they're the good guys, right?
so when batman flies over something and says they got insurance instead of dispersing of the That writer's writing that thinking like- You're allowed to do this.
Yes.
This is what a hero would do.
So they think of themselves as the good guys.
That's a, not to get too philosophical, but that's a hard villain, if you will, to combat.
You know what I mean?
Because you can't really appeal to their morals because they like to think of themselves as doing good.
I love that- If there was a villain in the Ripperverse that was a comic book writer, He was like, I don't know if he throws, he throws razor blade comics.
I love the scene in Watchmen when Owlman and Comedian fly over the riot and they jump down, like the music's playing and he's just shooting the rioters and he's like, I love this country.
That comic and that movie, Watchmen, that film, one of my favorite films of all time.
And I think it's underrated.
Not enough people have seen this movie.
It's so good.
I just, it's got the iconic line, I'm not locked up in here with you, you're locked up in here with me.
That was so good.
When Rorschach, the guy gets the shiv and then he grabs the food tray, blocks it and then throws boiling oil over the guy.
And then they're like, if that guy dies, this whole place is going to riot.
And he's just calm as a, you know, cool as a cucumber.
And then the dude reaches through, he ties his hands with the, with the, with the, with the towel or whatever.
So then they cut his arms off.
Dude, that movie's awesome.
unidentified
Did they ever explain how Rorschach, was he like super strong or was he just a martial artist?
Yeah, the Invincible Iron Man, 1973, Thanos' first appearance.
unidentified
What they would do is every group would have a villain or a set of villains, and then eventually those villains would cross over.
But, like, the Fantastic Four had Galactus, and then, like, Spider-Man had Doctor Octopus, and, like, they never, Galactus, you know, not until, but then you get the crossovers, and that's when I'm like, whoa.
I was watching a movie the other day with him in it.
But yeah, you start to see a version of that character.
I mean, you gotta understand, I mean, a lot of those guys were crossing over a lot, you know, too, even if we talk about, like, you know, Darkseid, because wasn't all that New God stuff, and I think, was that Kirby, if I'm not mistaken, that did, someone looked that up.
What's it called, New Gods?
The New Gods, yeah.
Which you got Apocalypse and all that stuff, I think that was, I think that was Kirby, if I'm not mistaken.
Yeah.
Yeah, see, so he was crossing over into, so you had a lot of that, right?
With, you know, a lot of these writers that were going right for the other team as well, so you can see some of that.
You get Ryan Reynolds playing Wade Wilson, and then in the end, it's some other guy who has blades coming out of his arms with no mouth, and he's like, he's a dead pool of powers.
I'm like, no, no, you can't just take the name and make a totally different character and claim that's the character in the movie.
unidentified
That's what the Marvel Cinematic Universe started to do as well.
Miss Marvel's powers are to stretch and grow, not to project energy.
unidentified
They were too chicken crap to give her her own powers.
I wonder why.
Maybe it was the Muslim thing?
I don't know if that had anything to do with anything.
Yeah, that was, they were too chicken crap to give her, which is ironic because they gave her the bands, right?
The bangles?
Which is more, well Mar-Vell had bands, Quasar was another one, which he replaced Mar-Vell as this sort of cosmic entity, and he had the band, so they gave her his stuff.
None of these characters are really, for the most part, recognizable.
And I think that's part of the destruction.
You know what I mean?
Look, I get it.
I think Hollywood is cocky.
I think they're arrogant.
I think they have a little bit of narcissism around them, right?
So, to me, it makes sense that they do stuff like that because the stories are all wrote for you.
Right, but I think that these guys are so arrogant that they feel like they have to put yeah, maybe they're ideologically possessed as well, but they got to put their own spin on it.
So that's why you get Adam Warlock acting the way that he does or X character act in the way that they do and it's so Out of character, because they feel like, well, I gotta put my own spin on it, because I can't just adapt somebody else's work.
There's a scene in Infinity Gauntlet number four where Spider-Man's like, wrestling with, it's the big green girl, I think it's Thanos' daughter, maybe it's... Oh, you're talking about...
Oh my god.
She's technically Nebula's sister.
Gamora.
Gamora.
And then they're wrestling and then in another shot you see like Spider-Man's on the ground and she's above him.
She's got a rock in her hand and then the next scene she just sees Spider-Man's body limp and there's all this blood on the rock and like it's like it just happens as an afterthought in the back.
Spider-Man dies.
I remember when they had to kill Wolverine.
He folded him up.
Did they do this in the movie?
He jumps at Thanos, shoves it into his chest and then Thanos just looks at him and then Wolverine's body turns to jelly and he just falls to pieces.
It's wild, dude.
Cyclops goes blasting at Thanos and then a cube is on his head and he falls on his knees and he suffocates to death while he's trying.
It's worth like, I think it's worth like 500 bucks.
If you get those first prints, you can probably make a little, if it's in good You know what really, really bummed me out is how they just totally screwed up the DC Extended Universe or whatever they were trying to call it.
The DC Cinematic Universe was just totally ruined.
And look, the, it was, it was kind of obvious what made the, the Marvel cinematic universe, uh, universe work.
They weren't trying to make a universe.
It was just at the end of Iron Man, they were promoting Thor.
That's it.
They were like the next movie's coming out.
And then eventually they realized, you know, we actually like all these movies are in the same reality, like same universe.
Right.
It's even obvious how, like, Thor Dark World people didn't like, and the Aether became the Reality Stone.
Sure, I guess.
They were trying to figure out a way to bring the Reality Stone into the- like, hey, why don't we do this big arc, and then obviously with Thor 3, you have Hela push over the Infinity Gauntlet with the Infinity Stones in it, and she goes, fake, because it was seen, I think in Thor 1 or whatever, that Odin had the Infinity Gauntlet, because they did not have a plan for this.
That version of him sucked as well, so it's not like they were doing Steppenwolf any sort of justice.
It's funny watching that relationship between these characters from Apocalypse when they were trying to introduce, because I think I could be wrong on that.
Isn't Steppenwolf, and somebody can look this up and fact check, I think he's technically Darkseid's uncle?
Not in the Justice League, but in the books.
Uh, in the New Gods, uh, books.
Um, if someone wants to fact check me, uh, on that, I'm pretty sure that he, he might- He is the uncle of Darkseid.
Yes, he's, he's, he's his uncle.
So yeah, uh, yeah.
So now everything's coming to me.
Cause you know, you read some of those New Gods books and, and like, he wasn't like, cooked to, to, to, to Darkseid like that.
He like, he didn't like him.
He was, he was aggressive with him and everything.
And you see in the, in the movie, in the movie, he's like this, like, I don't even know what to kind of explain how that character is.
Well, death, yeah, that's how, back in the gap, especially in the 80s and 90s, that was how you got the big boost, is you just killed off a character.
And it never lasted.
Hell, they recently killed off Ms.
Marvel, I don't know if you knew.
And then they brought her back, obviously, immediately.
Imagine killing a character Yeah, multiverse stuff breaks out.
I hate it.
I hate it.
That's why my favorite book, it's funny you talk about cosmic stuff, I just talked about the Crisis on Infinite Earths with DC was the one time where a publisher said, this multiverse shit is stupid, and we need to collapse it, and we need to streamline it.
Yeah, no more mutants Yeah, but then they were like yeah, but people still want to buy it like they still like the character Jubilee So then they just make her like a gun-toting little Asian woman or something It's like okay.
I guess like you didn't want to get rid of the character, but they don't have powers anymore.
unidentified
Yeah And that's uh, it's stuff like that with the Ripperverse that we see those mistakes like that's actually one of our code of ethics is we don't have a multiverse like that's it's it's written in like hey none of that stuff will ever exist there's only one one universe so you know and I don't want to ever rely on death as a gimmick like that that seems like a You're in trouble if you have to only way you can sell a book is like alright.
Let's just kill off the It'd be cool if there's a villain that's trying to open a portal to the multiverse, and they're like, if you do it, it will destroy everything.
And so they stop him.
It's funny, we wrote in ISOM 2, there's a conversation between, spoilers for our listeners out there, there's a conversation between ISOM and Blood Ruth, and they talk about this whole ordeal and About, like, different dimensions and all this stuff, and Isom is like, oh, so you mean like a multiverse?
And she's like, no, that's fictional nonsense.
Like, it's wrote into our universe.
Like, that's not a thing.
There's no... Isom spelled Mosey, I guess, spelled backwards, and now it's Isom, but he's, I don't know, Puerto Rican.
You make a villain trying to manipulate dimensions to explore the multiverse, and instead of any hero having to stop him, As soon as he turns the machine on, he instantly gets vaporized into dust.
And then they all say, wow, his science was absolute perfect.
100% correct the whole way.
There is no multiverse.
And that's it.
It can never be rewritten.
It can never be changed.
unidentified
No writer can come in and adjust it.
And no, it just dies instantly.
But no, what happened is, is the multiverse cheapened a lot of these characters.
Um, and that's what it's been used as.
That's their justification for making all these different versions of these characters.
Oh, in Marvel it's a million of them, and hell, even with DC, you know, it's a bunch of them, and oh, here's...
Here's this version of Superman's Black in this one, and he's President of the United States, and it's like, this shit is... To me, it's like you're cheapening your brand, number one, but how does a customer get invested?
And I think this is what did DC and Marvel in, because imagine, like, hey, you just watched a DC movie, and you liked, I don't know, Batman or whatever.
And then you say, hey, new generation of people, hey, I want to go learn more about these characters.
I'm going to go read some books.
Where do I start?
And then I have to basically turn this entire studio here into a whiteboard to try to explain to you, well, OK, you can't start at Batman number one, because there's like five of those, right?
Batman number ones, and oh, well, there was the new 52, and they rebooted everything.
And you have to go through all these explanations.
Oh, well, that version of Batman isn't, it's a different Batman.
Like, what happened where, in the United States, kids were like, I prefer what Japan is doing over what America's doing?
unidentified
I think there's two things.
I know some people are gonna attribute cost and all that other stuff.
It has nothing to do with it.
I think that, uh, it's just far more appealing and it's easier to get into.
Uh, cause like I said, I gotta get, I gotta get a chalkboard full of just, that'll take up this entire stu- three of these studios to explain who these character is.
Hey, you just now found out about One Piece, where do I start?
Number one.
Simple.
Start at number one.
It's a thousand volumes in.
Just start at number one.
Easy.
That's where you start.
And so it's easier to get into.
And also, again, they prioritize, and I know this is the easy answer, but it's the honest to God truth.
They prioritize entertaining the audience more than they... So if I got to choose between Gay Superman and Jujitsu Kaizen.
Like, it's a no-brainer, bro.
Like, it's a no-brainer.
Like, this is the better.
So it's just far more appealing.
And it sucks, because it's like, I could not imagine, like, Jim Shooter era Marvel in the 80s or something like that, and watching a Japanese come into your own country and kick your ass, and you do nothing about it.
It's actually worse than that.
What they tried to do, American creators, using that term loosely, Try to take credit for manga, right?
They say comics are booming and then you start looking at the numbers in depth and you're like, wait a minute, all those graphic novels that you're considering graphic novels, they're manga and they exploded in 2019 and 2020.
It's a comic where another kid, so for those that aren't familiar, Death Note is a story about a high school kid who gets a notebook that is used by Shinigami, that means death gods, grim reapers.
They use that to kill people and steal their life to add to their own.
That's the purpose of the death gods.
So one day a death god who has two, because he ripped off another death god, wants to have fun so he throws into the human world where a high school kid finds it and decides to become killer.
He's a Kira in the same Japanese, but he's basically the god of death.
Where he looks up stories of criminals, and then he executes them by writing their name in the book.
And the way it works is if you don't specify a cause of death in the book, within, I think, 28 days they die of a heart attack.
So then he just keeps writing down the name of all these criminals, and then one by one, all these criminals in jail start dropping dead.
So the whole, I'll tell you why this is a great story.
It's not about, there's the power, but you have this clever writing where, one of my favorite moments is, there's this international detective, only known as L, no one knows his name, and they task him, the international police, whatever, like, we gotta figure out how this guy is killing all these people because we know someone's doing it, because the names have to appear in news reports and then they drop dead later, so how is it being done?
So there's this broadcast where this guy appears on TV saying, um, Lind L. Taylor, I think was the name, and he's like, I am the Detective L. I am broadcasting worldwide to let Kira know, Killer know, we are going to find you.
So then, Yagami Light, the main character, says, I will show him that no one can defy me, and writes the name of the guy on the TV.
Who then dies instantly on the live broadcast, then the camera changes to just the L, and then a distorted voice says, you're in Japan.
And specifically in this prefecture, I know where you are.
We didn't broadcast this worldwide.
We tracked down where the first deaths were, and broadcast only in this area.
That person on TV was not me.
We're coming for you.
And it's like, that's awesome writing!
I'm sorry dude, I don't get that with gay Superman.
It's just better all around better inner entertainment.
That is the that's the core thing that I wish people would understand.
And if the American creatives had enough humility about them, they would just flat out admit that instead they act like the Industry's booming even though everybody sees that comic book unit sales are down.
Numbers that would have got people cancelled, got their books cancelled, are like at the top of the charts right now because they are not doing well and you have to be honest if you're gonna fix it.
Let me do, I would do one more because I've recently, I just, I'm watching Dr. Stone.
Are you familiar with that?
Yo, this is Magic School Bus for Japanese Kids.
It is like a children's entertainment anime, but it is so good, okay?
And I'm like, The story is, at some point, for some reason, a wave of green light petrifies everyone on Earth.
2,500 years later, this high school science prodigy wakes up, and then starts to figure out how to rebuild society, long story short.
So, it's like anime-style Magic School Bus, where he goes, If we're gonna rebuild society, we need to make glass!
And then they just explain the basic process of making glass, and it's like, showing them trying- and I'm like, There's no grand anything in A Dude Glassblowing, but it's a fun show, and I'm like, I don't get that from Gay Superman.
Uh, like, I don't want to spoil it because some of it is relatively new, but, uh, it's a great show, it's a great comic.
They're not afraid to have people be killed in conflict, I'm like, it's good.
And again, I, like, the world, MCU's gone to me.
It's just the stupidest garbage ever.
There's nothing clever about Ms.
Marvel.
That show was awful.
Just total garbage.
And now you've got, um, and it sucks with Loki, it's just multiverse garbled nonsense that there's nothing matters.
So the first season of Loki, I'm like, oh, okay, the time authority, what's he going to do?
And at the end of it, they're like, everything was changed and erased.
None of it mattered.
And I'm like, have a nice day.
I stopped watching.
unidentified
How can you look, think about what it is you just said.
And this has been the problem with comics as well.
Like, How do you get invested in something like that?
You can't.
It's like you're telling me to not be invested in it because you might change some stuff and nothing matters, right?
That's the problem with the whole multiversal aspect that I think, you know, people like the idea of this stuff, like, oh, here's Spider-Man, but instead of Spider-Man, he's this.
He's a Transformer Spider-Man now.
And it's like, yeah, OK, it's a cool idea, but nobody's buying this stuff.
Could you imagine if, from the beginning of these iconic characters, they never multiversed?
Maybe crossovers are fine, like that Spider-Man lives in the same world with mutants is fine, but imagine right now, we'd be on episode, what, like comic book number several thousand?
unidentified
Remember they used to go really high back in the day, now they'll reboot shit, you'd be lucky, get 20 issues out of it and then reboot it.
And what they could have done, is let's say Spider-Man starts, they never reboot, they never multiverse, Eventually spider-man's 50 years old and then there's a I can no longer do this There needs to be like a passing down of powers or something That connects the story in one go because what you have with like Dragon Ball for instance Dragon Ball starts Goku's a kid Dragon Ball Z. He's a young adult.
He's got a kid dragon the dragon GT or super I guess not GT.
I don't know.
It's kind of weird.
My point is now go at the second arc of Z Gohan's an adult.
He has his own kid.
So you're actually seeing the characters develop over time This is the continuity does not granted to be fair.
They made Dragon Ball GT.
It did its thing Nobody really liked it.
So they restarted with Dragon Ball super and it kind of rebooted it in a way but If they kept the story arc going where characters were aging, and these stories, like, the characters just passed on, or something like that happened, you'd have a continuity, and you'd be like, how do I understand this, where do I start?
It needed to be something like, well, there's several arcs, the origin arc of Magneto starts here, however, if you're trying to get something more modern, you don't want to go back to the 50s or whatever, you can start with episode 200, which gives a recap and starts you off, things like that.
It's like, I mean, again, if you're going to, you got to, whatever way that you write it, I mean, you got to set the rules up.
And I think that's the problem.
So even if they're aging slow or whatever the idea may be, you have to set those rules and establish them and don't treat it like it's an absolute free for all.
And that's what it is that the comics do.
And I think people don't understand how difficult that is for people to get in on this stuff.
It's like, again, if I have, I can't, you can't start at number one for any Batman because Well, Batman Rebirth is different from Batman and the New 52, which is different from the Batman before that.
So it's like, where do I start?
Well, I got to try to explain it to you.
Yes, some of the fun is getting lost in this stuff.
And yeah, there's going to be little things that the diehards know that the normies do not know.
I have absolutely no problem with that.
The issue is, is that for one, yeah, maybe you're not prioritizing entertainment, but also you're not making it easy for people to get in on it because they cared so much more about doing all this quote unquote cool stuff that they have 75.
Like the fact that there's that many Spider-Folk doesn't even make sense.
Spider-Folk.
No, I hate it.
I hate the whole Spider-Verse stuff.
I hate the whole web of spiders.
I remember when that stuff got introduced in comics.
I was like, this is the dumbest thing ever.
Ant-Made, Spider-Man, everybody's Spider-Man.
It's literal.
I didn't even make that thing up about the Transformer Spider-Man.
That is a literal thing.
It's a transform.
And I think of the kids Asian that, uh, that, uh, - Yeah, yeah, pilots it.
- They pilots that damn thing.
So it's like, you got this versus Spider-Man, this, it's like, you're cheapening the brand, man.
Why would I get into this? - I, these companies should be ashamed.
You know, I grew up with Batman, Superman, Spider-Man.
I used to watch Spider-Man, the animated series, and X-Men.
And that's what I had access to.
And then once I get a bit older, I'm a late teenager, I start reading anime and manga.
Well, actually I started reading it when I was like a younger teenager, but then I remember when every Wednesday I would wake up and I'd pull up the scanlation for the latest Naruto for like 10 years.
Every week I had to read the next issue from Shonen Jump and Marvel, DC, they lost me completely.
I was not interested in waiting for the next comic, I didn't care, because like you said, there's no story.
There's nothing to follow.
It's just a random version of Batman, and this version likes insurance companies apparently.
There's nothing to read.
With Naruto, it was like, as a kid I also watched Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z.
And so when I watch the episodes of Naruto, I'm like, oh wow, I can see the character growing, changing, getting new skills.
You have this arc where it's like, in the beginning, Naruto sucks.
Then he gets these abilities.
Then later, he's mastered this ability.
Then you get Shippuden, he's a little bit older.
And I'm reading, and it's like, if you jump from this episode, manga 100 to 200, you're gonna be like, whoa, what?
You go to Batman and you're like, Batman's electric now.
unidentified
Yeah, I don't know.
Nothing matters.
And I think definitely for the alternatives, I think the alternatives should really pay attention to those mistakes that were made by the major comic book publishers.
Because I think, again, it's the cheap gain that you may get of entry will Oh, well, look, oh, that's very cool.
Spider-Man is a Transformer now.
But are the people going to actually go buy it?
The answer is no, they're not actually, because there's no reason to get invested.
How did they pull off the transition of X-Men from the uncanny X-Men into 1991?
They released it again as number one, X-Men number one.
They were no longer uncanny, but it was Jim Lee and it was really good, the new X-Men.
And they committed to it for like, I don't know how many hundreds of episodes.
But how did they do it tastefully?
Were you reading it when they flipped?
Yeah, no, most definitely.
Well, back then, in general, there were a lot of high issues, right?
You used to get to issue 100, 200, and all that stuff.
Detective Comics, thousands.
You would get up in the issues, and I used to love that.
Now they're afraid of that because, again, they started to rely on the reboot thing as a gimmick.
It's like we're never going to see more sales than what we see with number one.
So anytime we get a chance to have a number one, definitely if it has a Batman or a Superman on it, we know that that's going to sell like hotcakes.
So they relied on that as a gimmick because the story is not what's selling it.
Now they're trying to focus solely on what's rare and what's...
Like a secondary market and all that sort of stuff.
They cared more about that element than they did the actual story.
So they're not selling you on anything, really, at all.
Because to your point, you pick up a book now, and it's going to be an unrecognizable character, top to bottom.
And again, you're not going to even have a true actual starting point.
I guess technically, It's like number one was 2016 I think was when that DC universe or rebirth period happened and then everybody got rebooted so you had Batman number one Superman number one and all that sort of stuff you had all that but again it was just it wasn't what four or five excuse me like five years ago prior to that Batman had just had a number one.
So they're not, they're not, they're rebooting their stuff.
They're afraid of high issues.
And again, the story is, that's on the back burner, man.
That's what it is right now.
It's all on the back burner.
Did you get a bunch of the good writers joined your team?
You were saying, what are the writers?
Chuck Dixon was the, he did the first non-ISOM story.
For people that don't know who Chuck Dixon is, again, he's one of the most prolific writers, not just like in comics, but like period.
Of all time again, you guys know him as the creator of Bane.
He's the one he's the care He's the man that create alongside my man's Graham Nolan Shout out to him as well He's doing a lot of cool stuff with his deal on with compass comics So I want to make sure I give him a shout out But Chuck's part of the team, he did a lot of, again, Bat, a lot of the Bat family stuff.
He did Detective Comics, he did, he also did some stuff with Marvel with Punisher as well.
Another group of writers, they are Tandem and the Saska Sisters.
They are, they did an incredible run of Black Widow called No Restraints Play, which we joke about it all the time, how they got that, how they got that past Marvel because it's actually Nat, Taking it to pedophiles.
You can believe Marvel, there was already two issues there before they realized, oh crap, we made this happen, now we gotta see it through.
They've also done some stuff with Marvel in the past.
They even have some unreleased work for DC as well.
They're with us, Mike Barron, aw, incredible talent.
He's arguably who did the definitive Punisher.
Mike Barron, you maybe know him as the Badger, done some stuff with the Badger as well, but these are talented OGs.
In particular and I knew definitely for my growth as a writer I had to have guys like that that I was surrounding myself with with this universe if it's gonna if it's gonna be taken serious and it's I want to say this the fact that those guys were even a free agent like freaking Chuck Dixon was even a free agent just goes to show how screwed the industry is.
Yeah what you were saying with your contracts are you public about what you do with your contracts to bring the writers in?
Yeah, they all get favorable contracts, definitely for characters it is that they create.
That's stuff that they're gonna be able to make money off of forever.
So if a character maybe ends up in a movie or something like that, or action figure for a character that they specifically created, They're gonna get a kickback for that every single time.
So that was a big attraction.
I pay these guys very well in terms of their page rates, top to bottom artists, as well as our writers.
And for these guys that are being part of the actual creative team, they get to reap the benefits from the stories it is that they're telling.
I have an idea that I want to tell you, I just don't know if I want to say it on air, because I want your company to launch it first.
You might be someone who for the first your first foray into that universe is Boruto and you're watching this young kid who's a ninja and they have like powers and stuff and then you can go back and decide to read the earlier arc.
This is what I was saying about like if we did spider-man this way So, you could watch Dragon Ball Z. You get a quick recap introduction to the characters, but it starts off its own story with these characters at this point.
And then you can always go back and watch Dragon Ball if you want to learn about the past and these things come up.
But it's one massive arc for decades.
unidentified
Yeah, for decades.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
Like, there's nothing... And manga shows that people will play the long game, right?
Like, again, we talk One Piece is how many volumes in?
The reason why it had a hard time coming to the United States is because Cartoon Network and a bunch of these other networks believed no kid would want to watch a ridiculously long story arc that they couldn't, it was too difficult to understand.
And so they wanted to make shows that were one-off episodes.
They thought continuity didn't matter, Spider-Man comes and does his thing, the story's over, everything resets in the next episode.
And then finally someone decided to bring in Dragon Ball Z and it instantly became one of the most popular shows among kids.
They've got statues of Goku and Lupin the Third and these prominent anime characters because they're like celebrities.
These iconic characters they have.
The U.S.
just, like, we're talking about 20 episodes of Batman, then restart.
We've got 18 different number ones and no one has any idea what's going on.
unidentified
Because again, they don't understand, and I hate that they insult the audience, especially of youngsters like that, right?
They think that they wouldn't want to keep up with a, like, long-term sort of storytelling.
And again, we have an example.
I would be thrilled if I was a youngster.
Let's say that I just discovered Batman, right?
Uh, and I'm like, Oh, wait a minute.
I can, you know, and maybe you get them on a ladder arc or whatever it is that he's, he's doing something different.
And then you're like, Oh, wait a minute.
There's, there's books.
that have been wrote for decades, I'm about to get lost in this.
Like, I'd be stoked.
I'm like, oh, well, I just not found out about them.
And there's mountains and mountains of source material that I get to get lost in.
It doesn't matter whether you're a youngster or an adult.
You get stoked about that sort of stuff.
Like, you know, you can imagine getting into Luffy late and you're like, oh, well, I got a thousand freaking volumes that I get to read and I get to collect.
Like, that's part of the fun.
And for whatever reason, modern creatives, especially at the corporate level, think that people don't want that.
The problem I think you're going to run into is, you know, you need to put in, you need to be putting out a book every week.
unidentified
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like we're speeding up for sure.
Our, um, that was one of the first things that we wanted to attack going into, uh, 2024, uh, is having, yeah, we released bigger books, but we want to make sure that we're speeding up our, our release calendars.
So it looks like Issam 1 is about the size of three conventional comics, or maybe four.
Give or take.
Four, yeah, about four.
So do you do one a month?
Is that the goal?
Well, the goal right now, it's a little longer than that because you think about it like four issues, that's going to be like four months worth of material.
So we, for example, with Issam 2, that dropped.
This has been the quickest release.
So Issam 2 came out like 3 months ago right?
And now we're already fulfilling AlphaCore.
So ideally, perfect world, once we really have our footing, I'd love to release a book a month.
What's the challenges you have between now and then?
A lot of it's infrastructural, like we had to, you know, because we do our own distribution, right?
That was a big thing about what it is that we created.
I didn't want to replicate the model of the big guys and using someone else as a distributor and we go directly to customers.
So a lot of it's like logistical stuff.
So making sure that, you know, a warehouse is big enough to get this material in and all that.
And we're now, we're sort of, we're basically there, which is why Right after this campaign ends, that's active right now, AlphaCore number one, technically ends on January 20th.
That's when the pre-order window technically is closed.
Right after that, I'd like to next month, that following month, go right into Yairo, the next book.
Do people subscribe to iSUM and then they just get mailed a copy every month and they get charged every month?
We've been releasing it in like a campaign format with iSUM 1, iSUM 2, and AlphaCore.
gyro will be the next one as well.
So we, we dump a bunch of like merchandise items with it as well that people can get.
And you can kind of just pick up, we have bundles as well.
That'll make it cheaper.
Uh, so people can pick up whatever it is they want.
And even if the campaign closes, we always are selling a version of that book.
So yeah, I, someone happened last year, but you can still go to reverse.com and get I some one.
You can even get it.
Of course, a perfect, we got like a $65 bundle that you can get.
I some one, you can get I some two and you can get out for core for only six.
It's like over 300 pages, right, of material.
So I would love to move to a subscription format.
Yeah, because if I could have done that in the 90s, I would have signed up $3 a month and I'd get an issue every week or whatever, $3 a week, and it's...
I would say Yyira 1, once that gets released after that, I think we're going to be moving away from the campaign format and doing a more pre-order format to where we can add a subscription element to it.
I would love that.
That way people don't have to think about it.
It's like, I just want everything Riververse.
All right, cool.
You sign up.
And you get the money up front to pay for infrastructure to make sure the stuff's out in six months.
Bingo.
But yeah, ideally, we're not going to be there.
I'm not going to say we're going to be there in 2024.
But Perfect World, I want to work to where a Ripaverse book, it's not going to be the same title, but a Ripaverse book, at least one, is released every month.
Are you hiring right now?
Are you expanding the company?
Yeah, so we just technically got fully staffed for uh, for our warehouse.
And that's the fun thing about it.
We're offering different types of jobs, right?
We have, yeah, the back office stuff and every, and the creative stuff, but you also got a physical presence because we do our own stuff with our books.
So, uh, you, we keep everybody up to date.
If you do go to reverse.com, you can see kind of the jobs and stuff.
It is that we're offering.
We're, we're still catching up to our demand and we're always growing.
There's a lot of opportunity.
A lot of people that work for me now were part of the community.
A lot of these guys got brought over that were part-time guys into full-time guys, even from the creative standpoint.
We recently brought on, I talked about the Saska Sisters.
They started off as just regular contractors.
Now they're on the team as lore masters as well as still doing the writing.
Kaden White's another one.
Big shout out to him.
Incredible artist.
He's done some covers for us.
He did our short box.
We released this cool little comic book short box that he did the artwork for.
He's now here full time.
So that I'd argue is to me The most fulfilling part of the Ripperverse is that I get to give people good-paying jobs, fair jobs, and we continue to grow, which means more job opportunities for the people that are out there.
Do people apply, like, on the web?
Do you have, like, Ripperverse.com?
Yeah, Ripperverse.com.
If we ever have any jobs that are available, like we recently had with our warehouse, they'll be able to submit their resumes and everything directly online.
Just go again, go to Ripperverse.com, and you'll see the jobs tab and all that, and we're right there.
Do you guys sell to comic shops?
Are comic shops still up and going?
We do!
Oh man, a lot of them have been closing down.
But our customer is direct to, is the customer.
Like, we do sell some.
We do have actual retailers portals.
So if there does happen to be people that are comic shop owners that do want to get in on a retail rate, they can go to ripperverse.com slash retailers and they can get in on that.
That is available for them and they can get some great rates.
Look, if you want to make money, On comics, you see our Ripperverse stuff.
Those are for sure going to go off of your shelves.
But that is available to them, but I'd argue well over 90% of our customer is the actual reader, which benefits us.
We cut out a lot of middlemen there.
How much is it?
So that one right there now is only $20.
So it was released at $35, now it's $20.
Our page rates have gotten more competitive with us printing more.
Nowadays, that is about as good of a book you're going to get.
The paper is above industry standard.
It's micelle as well.
We print quality.
That's what it is that we do.
We don't go the traditional, just regular approach with R. So that's 20.
The book right now is also the same page count.
It smells really good.
Oh yeah.
There's something about fresh paper.
even more competitive now with our, with our books as we continue to print them.
So we want to make sure we give you something that's going to last as well.
And we're, again, we're getting even more competitive with our, with our actual rate smells really good.
Oh yeah.
There's something about fresh paper.
Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.
You can't beat it.
It's printed right here in America as well.
And yeah, it's again, those are printed above the industry standard.
As far as the actual paper, paper stock, that is and again, it's my son.
It's not just traditional.
What's that?
What's my son?
So you probably will be able to tell, but if you open it really well, you'll notice that it's kind of sewn as far as just glued, as opposed to just glued.
That makes it kind of open well, read very, very well, and keeps it bound together.
Oh, without ripping the binding?
Yeah, that's one of my original Infinity Gauntlets, just the cover came off because I read it so many times.
Yeah, so that one's gonna last, man.
It's gonna be really good for you.
Movie!
Oh, it's funny.
I believe it was the guys over at Angel Studios were in this seat and they were talking about us on one of y'all's show.
Look, we got Ripperverse Studios.
I'm taking that very seriously.
There's two other wings of the Ripperverse that I would love for it to be very profitable for us.
That's obviously Riververse Studios and I want to enter into the toy market at some point as well.
But we started off with our animation stuff.
We did these kind of shorts.
We have some more stuff it is that we're working on with Riververse Studios as well.
If you guys want to go check that longer form animation, it's about two and a half minutes, you can go do that over at Riververse.com.
But I would love to enter into the live action.
I did a video not too long ago talking about video games.
I think some tabletop, and we've been reached out by some people that really are into that sort of stuff.
I didn't know the market was as big as it was, really, until I started the Riververse of tabletop gaming.
Hell, that's how some of these comic shops are able to thrive, because they're starting to sell a lot of the tabletop stuff.
So I've been doing some research there.
Uh, if there's a demand for that, I'd be down.
You could have a game just where, like, it's a bunch of squares, like, in rooms that appear as you go.
You, like, flip over a card, and that's the next room, and you have, like, six characters to choose from, six of the heroes, and each of them have different abilities.
One's got, like, long-range attack, one's got close-up, and then a bunch of the villains, or just cheap villains, like Dude in Green, like, monster with claws, and they just go through blast shit.
Like, it doesn't have to be uber-complex, and then it'll be in the Ripaverse universe, like, they'll just—the whole game can be in, like, a building.
Yeah, I would love to do all of that.
This is something that I'm taking very seriously.
This is why our release schedule sped up the way that it is.
You know, we're hustling because I don't want people to think that, hey, you know, we came out with I Sum 1.
It was a $3.7 million campaign and it was just, I'm just going to sit back, kind of kick back and I'm done here.
No, no, no.
I got to work immediately and I want to take stuff like that serious.
I would love to enter into gaming.
I would love to enter into Like movies and all that stuff.
We take it step by step.
We don't bite off more than we can chew.
But, you know, I want to be that competitive.
It'd be like each character has like three attacks and each of the attacks are on a cooldown.
So like you could do your long range attack, which goes six squares.
The second attack is a cone attack in front of him, like an arc.
And then his third ability would be like to jump back three spaces.
And if you use one, it goes on like you got to wait three turns before you can use that ability again.
Yeah.
And every character would have three different variable abilities.
That'd be Super easy to make.
More research about that.
I got humbled by the toy market recently, man.
Understanding how the margins are very thin on those, but I do believe that with that sort of gaming, I believe that the market's wide open for it.
And people are thirsty for it, man.
That's what this ultimately boils down to as we talk about culture.
And also people don't like giving their money to regurgitated crap.
them right uh so the fact that there's companies like ours that exist where people understand exactly where it is that i am on various issues um but we're here to create we're here to entertain first and foremost and at least you know you're not giving your money to a dick and also people don't like giving their money to regurgitated crap they want fresh stuff yes new stuff yeah and that's what it is that we're doing like we're we're trying to come up with unique concepts that's actually where we start with a lot of our characters that it is that we're we're creating stuff unorthodox this is why hell the first where it's not
just because i'm from texas that the first city that we're entertaining is florist park texas just because well that's not really a place where i don't know how the hell new york city has all this damn crime considering like superhero in the Marvel Universe is there.
But yeah, that's the type of stuff that is that we're entertaining.
We're trying to do things that are new and refreshing.
Perfect time to get in. - Ladies and gentlemen, we are about to go to have our Timcast Christmas party.
So it's gonna be a lot of fun.
A lot of people are gonna come hang out, but I appreciate all of you guys hanging out.
We're memeing the song, the best song ever.
So a bunch of people are tweeting about how they grew up listening to Smokey Mike and the God King, and there's one really good tweet where they're like, does Tim have no shame taking a timeless classic and mucking it up?
Like, what are we trying to conserve as conservatives?
It's really good.
So go to The Best Song Ever, buy the song for 69 cents if you want to help us at TimCast Music as well as The Daily Wire blast this song off, hit the charts if you want to support the work that we're doing.
You can follow me personally at TimCast.
Make sure you subscribe to Tenet, of course.
Eric, do you want to shout anything out?
unidentified
Yes.
Uh, you know, I'm at Eric D. July everywhere, but right now our active campaign is, uh, at ripperverse.com is AlphaCore.
Number one, it's already at 1.1 million.
I believe, uh, it's, it is the number is closing in on 1.2.
A great universe to get lost in, uh, for you guys that are looking for an alternative in a comic book spot.
And again, I appreciate y'all having me back here, man.
It's just a beautiful, that's the way comics should be.
It's like all the heroes, it's really, really, it was like a culmination moment of the heroes of the Marvel Universe coming together and just suffering to win.
