UncleDad Selects: EP 15 Remaster of Talk w/ Five Time Eisner winner Dan Brereton( 2020 Halloween Special)

0:00 Now let's introduce our guest, but I'm not going to introduce him. Our new co-host, Mike, is going to introduce him. Mike, I think that just makes the most sense. What do you think? I mean, why not? Let's do it. Yeah. On this show, I just bring things on people. So as you should know that by now, right, Mike? Yeah. It's great at putting people on the spot, right? Oh, hell yes. Hell yes. Just watch out, Dan. Sorry to do that to you. Why'd you say his name? You didn't introduce him yet. Well, so I'm excited to introduce our new special guest. to the Uncle Dad Talks. And he's a friend of mine. He's also a five-time Eisner nominee. Whoa. My good friend, Dan Brereton. Hey, guys. Thanks for hanging on.

0:41 I've been doing a lot of these chats and podcasts lately, and they've been a lot of fun. So I'm really looking forward to the next six hours on the podcast with you guys. All right. Well, we definitely don't have six hours, but we'll trick that down to an hour. I really was kidding when I said six hours. Oh, okay. No worries. But what I do plan on doing, me and Mike just found this out the other day, is that I want to do a break the world record for the longest podcast in one episode. So I will have you on when we do that. Oh, okay. It'll be like the telethon? Yeah, it'll be a straight nonstop telethon.

1:21 Exactly, yeah. Podcast-a-thon? Podcast-a-thon, exactly, yeah. The record is almost 72 hours. So we're going to break it by doing 73. Hey, why not go for 80? Go for, you know, end day work week. What's funny is, could you imagine if we did that? That would just be insane. And Mike is already hesitant about doing the 72 hours. Yeah, this is, again, something that he sprung on me right here on the show. I had no idea. That's excessive. That's three days, right? Right. So three days plus an extra hour of just incoherent babbling in the 73rd hour. You're drooling. Oh, yeah. Yeah. But hey, if you make it that far, that's all that matters. All right. I don't want to tell you the meth addict. Yeah.

2:07 I don't know how it's going to go. All right guys dan thank you so much for being on the show i really appreciate it i've always heard nothing but great things about you obviously i know your work uh nocturnals is one of the greatest i think one of the greatest comic book series to be made i i have to tell you i i doubt you remember this and that's totally fine you and i actually did meet one time a long long time ago which was actually funny because it was the first day i met mike in my whole entire life, yeah it was a convention in sacramento and at that convention before i met you i actually met mike for the very first time and you were you were great you signed my i actually still have it it's an art i have to go find it but it's a lithograph that you did for the nocturnals and you had like so many left and it was one of my favorite pieces i have so thank you okay so it must be long how long ago is that that must have been a while ago oh yeah i know i've known mike since i was 16 i'm not 31 so oh my goodness basically yeah that's like 2000 or something well i don't know about that but yeah mike i'm not so good i think it was about 2006 2006 is probably when this happened. Yeah, yeah.

3:11 That sounds right. Yeah, which does sound about right, yeah. So, Mike, I'll let you kick it off with the experience here. Go ahead. We really just kind of want to get to know you. One of the things about Separate, Socialize that we like to give people stories on a very, like, deep level, as much as you're willing to express, of course. Yeah, so I want to have Mike start it off. You can ask the first question, then I'll kind of hop in here and there. But thank you again, Dan. Mike, go ahead. Yeah. So basically, Dan, we thought October would be a great month to have you on being that, you know, so much of your artwork is kind of centered around like Halloween and the colors of fall and kind of a very October-ish feeling very specifically with nocturnals, which is, you know, your own creation.

3:53 But let me just say really quick, I was 14 when I was first coming across dan's art so this was probably you know 45 years ago and that's about right yeah yeah i was i was collecting marvel trading cards and it was the marvel masterpieces in 93 and the ultra x-men fleer cards in 94 that you had done some artwork on and i was at a friend of mine's was a friend that we both have, Steve, and I was looking at the cards with his son, David, and David goes, yeah, my dad knows that guy. And I go, oh, no way.

4:39 The thought that I knew someone who knew someone that did that when I was 14 was just really exciting. Wow. I don't have bragging rights to a lot of things and I'm not the braggy type guy, but, Betzman trading card set. When they came to me to do card illustrations for it, they said, you can do as many as you can get done in a month. I think it was the month of October or November or something like that. And I did a total of 15 cards for the set. I beat out the person who had the second most cards was Bilson Kevitt. So I beat him out by one card to have the most cards in that set.

5:19 So that was pretty cool. And I don't think I can say that about much of anything else that was a collaborative type of thing. But that was a lot of fun. And that introduced me to the world of here are, you know, 45 cards for you to sign, please. Oh, not even please. Just put them down in front of me and then have me sign them in a comic shop and then have people in line saying, is your hand getting tired? Yeah, that never gets old. A group of fans. Then the ones that come up and that are courteous and warm. These guys are just like, I can't wait to flip these, I guess. I don't know. But it was still fun. I still get people coming up to me and mentioning those and stuff like that. That's pretty cool. I actually wasn't aware that you did those cards.

6:01 I mean, when those came out, I was only like, what, six? Yeah, I think my – did that come out – did those come out in 92 or 94? 94? I think 94. So they came out around the same time Hunter was born. Or I was doing them at the same time Hunter was born, around there. Wow. yeah and hunter's 26 now or almost 27 yeah oh wow yeah well it's amazing so then if you can can you tell us where mike may already know this but can you tell us where it all starts like where the art journey of yours starts i can go back pretty far when it comes to that i really feel like you know as far as what mike was also mentioning about halloween and october and fall and all that kind of stuff.

6:48 It starts very early for me because I remember, I have memories of my first Halloween where I was almost two. So I was a month shy of two years old. And I know some people will say, oh, I remember what it was like to be in the crib. It's not so much that. I think it's the trauma of the night is what stuck with me forever. And what I do, I've been told a lot of things about that night. But what I do remember is encountering three witches with a cauldron that was steaming. And these witches terrified me with their hag faces and their voices and saying they were going to put me in the pot and cook me and all this other stuff. You know, being very terrified and scared and crying. And then realizing that these were my aunts and my grandmother disguised for Halloween under these masks.

7:34 And the cauldron was full of dry ice and it was Halloween and we were in their driveway. I still remember that. People will say, Like my parents sometimes have said, or, or my aunt will say, how can you remember that? You were too young. I said, well, I remember things about your house. I remember that you guys had a seahorse water fountain that spit water into your pool and. My mom goes, she didn't have one of those. And Carol goes, yeah, actually we did. My Aunt Carol. So I think the reason I remember that and a couple of other key events from when I was around that age is because they stick with you and they're traumatic. Not necessarily in a terrifying way that scarred me for life. Although I was afraid of the dark and all those kinds of things happened during my childhood. But then my kids, you know. But Halloween was always special to me.

8:19 And even though I was really scared the first time, I think I picked up what it was all about. out. And the fact that I like to draw monsters from before I was in kindergarten, because monsters were easy to draw. No one could tell you were drawing a monster wrong. You didn't have that feeling of like, I don't know how to draw monsters. You could just draw a monster. You know, I mean, when it came to drawing other things, it's tougher. And so I used to draw monsters a lot. What was your favorite monster to draw real quick? When I was a kid, I used to draw like sort of these sort of lizardy, dinosaur looking things and dragons that was kind of the big thing i wasn't really into supernatural stuff i mean i wasn't into vampires or frankenstein or dracula none of that stuff introduced i mean and even godzilla i wasn't that interested in godzilla because you know it just seemed like a guy in a suit and they're kind of silly and stuff but i liked ultra man a lot yeah man was fighting monsters and he was cool and he you know but but i didn't really get into to supernatural stuff until I was older, until I was in teens.

9:18 Started reading Stephen King and getting into the work of Bernie Wrightson. Oh yes, Bernie Wrightson. And things like that. And then that, and you know, kind of out of getting out of science fiction and fantasy, and going more into horror. By the time Clyde Barker was a huge deal, I was just starting comics. So I was reading Clyde Barker. And I think Clyde Barker was the last of the big horror years for me until I started getting into crime fiction for a long time. So I was really into crime fiction. And now I read everything. You know, horror, fantasy, westerns, crime, sci-fi, historical novels, you know, just whatever, you know, autobiographies. I like to soak up whatever fascinates me, whatever is interesting to me at the time.

10:01 And I'll soak it up for a while and then I make everyone in the house around me crazy for six months while I can't stop talking about the Beatles or, you know, or Julius Caesar or whatever it is. Right, right. But I don't, I tend not to talk about the horror stuff for obvious reasons because I don't want to, you know, mess anyone's head up. Sure. But I love this time of year. I love fall. I love Halloween. I love all the stuff that goes with it. I'm sort of old school when it comes to Halloween. I mean, to me, Halloween isn't Jason and Freddy. Do you know what I mean? It's scarecrows and pumpkin jack-o'-lanterns and witches and ghosts and things like that. It's trick-or-treating and, like Mike said, orange, fall colors, orange and black.

10:44 And the nocturnals is, that's all in the nocturnals as well, except the nocturnals just isn't a Halloween comic. It's kind of a distillation of the things that I hold dear. And when I started doing the comic, it was definitely, let's do something that feels like crime fiction, but is horror and is Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and H.P. Lovecraft and Halloween and Hanna-Barbera and just, you know, like a sort of distillation of all these things that I loved and putting it together in a way that made sense. And at the time there were people who said, well, you're crossing all these genres together. It doesn't seem like it should work.

11:25 And I'm like, well, it works for me. And, um, I, you know, there weren't a lot of, um, sort of crimes slash horror hybrid, uh, things going on in comics at the time. And there weren't a lot of little girl characters either. That stuff started to come more in the nineties and the early two thousands, um, got more and more of that stuff. And, uh, you get more, you know, younger people with their different, um, uh. Backgrounds and, and influences coming into comics. And, and, you know, now look, look, look where it's gone it's it's directly influencing television and film and streaming shows and things like that so i can ridiculously heavy degree which is good you know which is good absolutely i do want to kind of jump in there real quick and um you mentioned uh bernie wrightson and for those who don't know uh bernie wrightson is probably one he's most famous for at least in my opinion he created a swamp thing right remember correctly right yeah and how many right when we yeah yeah yeah just so we can make sure we we credit those and then uh clive barker for those who don't know clive barker is a legendary horror author up there with stephen king and he's also done video games movies and whatnot pretty much everybody knows clive barker for hellraiser i would say yeah he uh he directed i guess the first two yeah first two hellraiser films he also is an he's a very accomplished and prolific artist he paints like yes yeah a lot um i actually have his a piece for he did for fangoria uh for

12:56 the special edition he did there's a i have to go get it but it's a very special piece he did like this beautiful like horrifying mask and it was the cover and i actually have that post yeah it's a yeah he's a nice guy too i i i did a signing with him because i back in in the early 90s i i did a comic graphic novel adaptation of one of his short stories called Dread from the Books of Blood. And Dread was my favorite story, and I was lucky enough to get to do that. It was a little bit of an arduous task because the adaptation was so literal, and there was so much of the prose that was in the story. And it's a story where not a lot of stuff happens in the beginning.

13:37 A lot of it's in the heads of the characters and stuff like that. But it was really great to be able to flex and work on something like that and try and expand my skill set, I guess, working on that. Although I did turn down a Wolverine Punisher graphic novel that Marvel offered me at the time. Oh, wow. Which they called License to Print Money and probably would have been. But in the Clive Barker thing, I don't think I saw a dime from past my page rate. But I did get to meet Clive. We did do a signing together. He's a very charming guy, very charismatic. Very talented and unfortunately no one knows where those films are to be able to put that book back in print because I'd like to see it back in print someday right right if you can find Dread if you can find it track it down it's.

14:23 It's fun it's a fun Clyde Barker horror sort of thing and it's probably the most straight up, horror that you'll see me have done because the stuff i do is more spooky than than disturbing you know um the way that clive's work is i would have loved to have done more stuff like that i just you tend to get um you tend to get uh kind of compartmentalized by people they want to put you in a box and and this guy's good at this stuff and they don't and they're comfortable having you there so you don't so you don't always get to expand so that when later on i mean I mean, I don't know, 10 or 12 years later, I was offered a chance to do historical fiction with Disney Italia on the last battle, which is Romans and Celts in the time of Julius Caesar.

15:15 That I kind of, I almost turned it down. I tried to turn it down three times because I just didn't think I was right for it. But then when I realized that I could invest myself in this story like I I couldn't any other through the characters. And then I kind of immersed myself in kind of a crash course in just sort of learning about that era. Because we don't cover that in school. Maybe they do a little bit now. But I immersed myself in 52 BC and what was going on there in Europe and the Roman Empire and the Celts and stuff like that. And that actually led to a great appreciation and love of history, especially ancient history. History but but i but the point is is that i was able to expand again because the thing that really, pushed me to do that book was well you know look what look what look at frank miller did frank miller did you know 300 and no one would have ever expected that from him if he can do 300 maybe this will be my 300 now it didn't turn out to be my 300 i mean it didn't go on to be a movie it didn't sell millions of copies it did fine in Italy and it did okay over here actually but it was kind of a one-off and that was fine I'm gonna be right back go ahead and continue I'm gonna be right back go ahead yeah so but.

16:27 We were talking about why did i we're talking oh yeah we're talking about clive barker and uh and and and we were talking about bernie wrightson earlier too and that was the job well yeah i mean you yeah i guess like being kind of being pigeonholed into doing a certain type of. Genre right but you do so much i mean you've done obviously your nocturnal and the last battle like you were mentioning, but I mean, you've done Punisher, you've done Batman, JLA, you did Iron Fist, and then you just did an X-Men story that's coming out soon too, right? Yeah, I have, you know, I've done not a ton of things for Marvel over the last 30 something years, but I've done quite a few things.

17:14 I've done some Thor stuff. The X-Men story came about last year when I was just finishing the campaign for my Giant Killer 20th anniversary hardcover was finishing up. And I was prepared to work on that book, putting that book together and doing new material for it and all this kind of stuff. And then I got a call from Alex Ross and he told me he was curating this anthology, this Marvel anthology, getting artists who he he liked and who he knew together to do short pieces, short stories for this anthology. And he said, you can do whatever you want. You can pick any characters from the Marvel universe, 10 pages.

17:57 You can write it. You can work with the writer, whatever you want to do. And then it was just up to me to kind of figure out, can I make this fit into my schedule? Do I want to turn this down? No, I don't want to turn this down, especially since I was going to ask Alex to do a pin-up for my Giant Killer book. Couldn't very well say no and then ask him for a pin-up. As it turned out, he did a wonderful pin-up and I said yes. And I took a lot of time to do the X-Men story, a lot more than I thought I would, actually. I thought I would work on it over maybe two months during the summer to do 10 pages. And it took me all the summer and into the fall. And I'm glad I did it. I saw some of the pages when you were working on it, and I think it's some of your best stuff. I mean, it's amazing.

18:42 Like, it's really fun. I appreciate hearing that, because I'm not sure how I feel about it, to be honest. I feel like I was looking way too much at Alex's stuff while I was doing it. I was looking at Dave Cochran's stuff a lot because I went back to that era. The story I did takes place the day after the events of Giant Size X-Men number one in 1975. Oh, wow. The style of Cochran, Cochran style, and even just the coloring and all that kind of stuff that was going on in that book really informed what I did. And I also didn't want to veer away from that too much with some of my crazy painterly stuff.

19:24 So I just tried to do the best job that I could. it and also looking at the way that alex was so such a master when it comes to the superhouse stuff i mean pretty much everything he tackles yeah it's always usually just amazing that is the worst thing an artist can do is just stare at alex ross's stuff while you're working do not do that that isn't bad yeah because i spent all summer feeling inadequate basically and feeling like i was trying to fill this person's shoes and no one told me to do that no that was not That was on me. I put that on myself. Can I say this real quickly? I generally mean this a hundred percent. We said this on the show in the past. I actually think your art is better than Alex Ross.

20:08 I truly mean that. Well, I'm sorry for you. Look, Alex Ross's work is great. It's amazing. I'm not saying it's not. I have some great pieces of his, but... There is just something about the way you, I don't know, it's just, I don't know, it's like. Well, it's a feeling that you can get when you look at yours. I mean, sure, you can look at Alex Ross's stuff and it looks like a picture was taken with incredible Photoshop work to make the shine really shine and whatnot. And yet he doesn't use Photoshop. He's a total Luddite. And that's the thing. And his mastery of technique is journeyman level.

20:50 I mean, there's nobody who can, there's very few people who can match or beat him when it comes to the technical aspect of how he's able to achieve effects. Mostly with just water-based medium, acrylic and watercolor, so successfully. And with this feeling of complete mastery of the surface and mastery of the technique and i feel like when i'm painting and i started painting i i kind of know where i'm gonna i know what i can do i understand technique and things like that but there's still this kind of like anything can happen feeling when i started painting and i like i said i have an idea of what i'm doing what i'm going to do but i don't have it down to like some minute compartmentalized detailed effort that i know ahead of time is going to happen i I just kind of go and do what I'm doing enough.

21:41 And it's funny because Alex and I used to say, he used to say, I wish I could get looser like you. And I'd say, well, I wish I could get tighter like you. So I think that one of the main things is Alex has this goal in mind, this job that he's doing, which is to not only knock your socks off, but to conform reality to his imagination. Nation so if he can imagine a thing he can make it look real for you and present it to you in a way that you'll believe it you know when you you know and look at any of the stuff you're talking about look at the look at the way he does call out the metal on colossal metal skin colossus you know there's a lot of thought and planning and analyzing in there and one episode is turning into like how awesome is alex ross well let me but let me but let me just flip back to me okay then that's what you want to do.

22:37 Yeah, let's do that. Alex, I can make a compliment because he liked what I did. He was happy. He was happy with what I did. Marvel seemed to be happy with what I did. They used my work to announce the project. They sneaked both of my big... I have a 10-page story. It has two splash pages. They showed both the splash pages right off the bat, which I was kind of not happy about. They kind of, you know, they sort of like blew the wad there a little early. But at the same time, I mean, there was such a great response to it that I was like, okay, all right, fine. Alex paid me, one of the compliments that he paid me was, he said, I noticed the way that you figured out Cyclops' visor and the way it works, the way that Dave Cockrum imagined it working is not the way I imagined it.

23:24 He said, you solved it in a way I never have. And that was it. That was like the best thing that I could think was like, wow, that's really cool. How lucky was I? You know? And that was just all about like, okay, how does this thing work? And, you know, when you're trying to draw something you've never drawn before, you should try and analyze it a little bit to understand it. I'm not saying I do that for everything, but for some reason, I got that part right. And I hope that people, a lot of people have told me who've seen the work, they say, wow, there's a lot of Dave Cockrum in there. I personally really don't see the Dave Cockrum because I wasn't trying so hard to do Dave Cockrum, which is easy. You could draw Wolverine's face a certain way. You can draw all the characters' faces a certain way. I didn't really do that.

24:06 I think the fact that there's so much primary colors in there and all these These characters are kind of crowded together. That invokes that time period. And when you guys see the book next month, it comes out in November, check it out. It's Marvel number two. Yeah. And then you did a variant cover for it too, right? I think that. Yeah. The stores have to order 25 and then one of your variant covers becomes available to them. Yeah. At the time, Alex hadn't actually painted a second cover. He'd only painted one cover for the series so far. And I guess he hadn't really spoken to him about doing the rest. Although I just assumed he was doing them all. And I think he is. So he said, well, maybe you should do the cover for issue two. I was like, okay.

24:50 I mean, are you doing it? I don't know. They haven't even talked to me about it. So then like a month or so later, this was like in November, I guess the editor said, do you want to do a variant cover? And I was like, yeah, sure. So I did. So I went back and did the X-Men. I'd been off of the X-Men for that story for about a month or so before I went back to it. And it was a lot easier because I was more, more, you know, familiar with the characters and how things work and you're painting them. But that cover is a one in 100, actually. Oh, one in 100. So yeah, a retailer has to order 100 copies to get one of those, which I'm not happy about, to be honest. I mean, that means that how many people, that means that less than one out of 100 people who buy the book are going to see that cover. Yeah.

25:35 I mean, you can see it online anytime you want. But you know all the people say oh it makes it more collectible that doesn't help me you know right yeah i think that's an interesting point of the idea of collectible versus getting it out there right because it's like i i buy comics weekly and it's nice to see like oh you know i got this cover that's one out of hundred but then when you think about it's kind of your point it's like well how many people have got to see the beauty of that cover right like not that many and it's like or how many people even get the chance to even have it really not that many right and what sucks even more so is that all these uh comic shops they end up charging you know you know after market price of whatever would be and it's just like you know yeah i get why they do that but at the same time yeah it's a sales technique to get now what's flattering the flattering part of it is i guess is that they thought that what i had done was special enough to be an incentive toward copies.

26:29 You know, I was just hoping I could get a bunch, you know, myself. You know, I could get a quantity of them. It actually turns out that there's a comic book chain that orders in really high... Guys, I'm on a podcast. Hey! Sorry. Maybe gave a... Go downstairs. Now. now i'll leave that in no okay go i know he knows now anyway maybe we are clear now i thought they knew so what's it so what's your when you're working on your own book like like nocturnals and then working on the story like this marvel x-men story you're doing obviously i would assume you have more, there's more feeling and interest when you're doing a nocturnal book, that's your own kind of baby, right?

27:26 Yeah. You know, that's obviously that's true. I mean, that's, you can't get around the fact that these characters are very personal. However, when it came to choosing what I was going to do for the anthology, I, the first character, I thought it was Conan. They said, you can't do Conan. That's, that's the only one we can't do. I was like, oh, okay, now what do I do then? And, you know, really it was kind of wide open there. You know, I think Steve Root had chosen the Fantastic Four and, but there were so many other things that no one had chosen the X-Men. And, and I thought, you know, that could be kind of, and Alex was like, yeah, you could sell those pages easy. It's like, well, I wasn't really thinking about that, but I guess, you know, I could have done 10 splash pages, but I.

28:09 When I thought about going back to that point in time, it was very personal to me because as a kid, that stuff was huge for me. And that was a huge deal because when I was reading comics, that was a book of new characters that no one had seen before. I mean, I remember seeing Wolverine when he showed up in the Hulk and being really excited that the Wolverine was back in X-Men. Yeah. And that was pretty cool because, I mean, up till then, I was just reading comics about characters that had been around before I even got into comics. Ghost Rider, Thor, Fantastic Four, Hulk, Avengers, Captain America, whatever.

28:50 So all those guys already existed, but these were brand new for us. Like when Howard the Duck number one came out, we were excited. I remember my friend down the street, my only other friend that collected comics when I was in elementary school, a kid who got me interested in comics, Eric Messinio, who I still can't find. Don't know where he is. I haven't seen him since I was 12, 11 or 12. Eric says, have you seen Howard the Duck? I go, what's that? This is a comic. I go, what is it? Like a kid comic? No, it's Marvel. Well, what is he? Is he a guy in a duck costume? No, he's a duck. I remember this conversation very explicitly because I was like dumbfounded. I didn't understand. You know, I hadn't seen him in a man thing. Yeah. So I somehow end up at 7-Eleven that week and I get a copy of number one and I'm like, God damn, he is a duck. Look at that.

29:38 But Spider-Man's on the cover and it's taking place in the Marvel universe and it's okay. And that was a big deal because it was new. Nova number one, big deal. She-Hulk number one. Even Dazzler was kind of a big deal. Dazzler number one. You know, a lot of people hate on Dazzler. I think Dazzler's kind of cool. Yeah, I mean, Dazzler, I think was just, it could have just been done a little more it's not you know what i don't think i don't know who who was it was who was the market for dazzler if i knew who the market was maybe it'd be easier to figure out more the disco market right that's what they created well i mean was it was it was it was it something they thought more female you know young like teenage girls would be interested in or young people could be i don't know you know maybe gotcha but yeah disco and and and kind of of mainstream maybe definitely x-men people were supposed to like it but i mean you know, i don't know i bought the first issue that was later anyway so so so part of me the the kid the 10 year old and me find this a very personal and i went back and i read reread a bunch of those issues to kind of get the feel of what the characters were like and you know how they react how they interact with each other and that kind of thing and you can see why thunderbird and And Sunfire left so soon because they were...

30:57 Angry and we already had kind of an angry guy in wolverine so wolverine became the angry guy outsider guy and they trimmed and trimmed and trimmed so my the idea that i had when i went discussing this with alex was what if all the x-men who were who actually after that giant says x-men number one the x-men split the old x-men split off from the new x-men he's isn't even there although he's in my story he's an avenger at this point but i put him in the story So the idea was, what if all the X-Men weren't together? What if they had actually stayed together as one big super group? How would that look? How would that be? What would that look like? You know, what if you had them all stuck in a room together? What would happen?

31:39 And that's, you know, that's basically the main thrust of my story is the interaction between them. And is this going to work? So it was like a slice of Marvel history that actually never took place. Hmm. Such a good look on it. Such a good look. So while I was working on it, I kept thinking, wow, this is a lot of work. Why is this first stage taking two weeks to do? I don't know. I think I felt a lot of pressure. And then I kept thinking, why didn't I just do death lock and kill raiding by killing Martians? That would have been so much easier. You know, rubble, flames, smoke. You know what I mean? So metal. I still, yeah, so metal.

32:19 And I still would love to do that. Maybe one day I will. you feel a similar type of situation when you're starting a nocturnal story like or is that so much more easy for you just to jump in the nocturnals there's so much stuff there's so much more stuff going on in my head with these characters a lot of it has to do with trying to figure out sometimes trying to figure out what the mysteries are behind some of these characters like the newer characters even some of the older characters and how to fit them all into the story in a way that they aren't just they're not just taking up space because they're supposed to be there because they're a nocturnal like in the new book that i'm working on now that i'm 50 pages into penciling that's right i'm 50 pages into penciling the next nocturnal book that could turn out to be half or less or more than half of the actual finished length at this point i'm not sure but and is that going to be published by you or yeah yeah it'll be it'll will will will fund it through kickstarter and eventually it'll get collected as part of like a three vaults part of a a.

33:21 An omnibus kind of thing I have to do the first. So there's two, two volumes worth of nocturnal stuff already. And then the third volume would be sinister path, which came out a couple of years ago and then this one, and then another one and they're kind of a trilogy. They all kind of work together. So that'll fit well together. Awesome. But on this one, there are three characters, three nocturnal characters on the story because there's just, there's too much. I mean, it's like superhero stories. is when you have a group, like an X-Men story or something, or Fantastic Four, X-Men, whatever it is. I say X-Men twice because I meant to say Avengers. But the point is that you have to up the ante so much when you're doing a superhero story because these characters are more and more powerful. Together, they're even more powerful.

34:07 You have to figure out ways to kind of hamstring them to make them weaker. Maybe one character dies or is in a coma or goes missing or who knows what. All these things happen. You split them into smaller teams and things like that. I've done all that stuff before. I've done that in Superhero comics. I've done it with my internals. So this time I thought, what if I just take some of them out of the equation? I took the least supernatural characters out of the equation because this story is a very supernatural kind of story. And if I have character X, Y, and Z in there, it's too much firepower. You know what I mean? And then you can tell a different kind of story. So that's what I'm trying this time around. So it's just Doc, Polychrome, Gunwitch, and Eve, and then the new, and then some of the new characters that appeared in, um, for the first time in Cinder Shepard, it was Nix and her son Ajax become the Hemlock family.

34:58 The Hemlock family are like the nocturnals that nobody knew about. They could have been around all this time, but our nocturnals never interacted with their nocturnal. Well, actually one of them did, but wasn't talking about it. And that's probably really confusing for people that haven't read Sinister Path, but go read it. You can, you know, go to Bud's, no, not, no, go to bigwow.com, bigwowart.com, and you can order it straight from us. Awesome. Straight from us. Since your Nocturnals are so rich in story, would you ever want to see it? Or has it ever been talked about being into a television show or a movie? You get bites on the line all the time. I mean, since the book first came out in 94 and 95, I've had interest from different producers and things like that.

35:43 The first person to call me about Nocturnals was a producer who worked for Richard Donner. And he was very interested in the work of a screenwriter named Andrew Kevin Walker, who had just written a film that was about to come out called Seven. So when they contacted me, Seven hadn't come out yet. And they sent me a copy of the script. to me. So we'd like to get this guy's eyes on Nocturnals and see what he would come up with. And I was like, great. And then my attorney, who's like my sort of entertainment lawyer, came back to me and said, well, they want a free option. We're not getting out any free options. And I understand all that. It's kind of how business works.

36:26 But at the same time, it would have been really cool if Andrew Kevin Walker had been attached to Nocturnals film. Because later on, he ended up writing Sleepy Hollow. wow amongst many other in it but if there were really spooky creepy things in that story that I thought this is exactly how. Going on all the time? Like a very Halloween type film. And the Sleepy Hollow film is like that, except there are all these elements that were cut out of Walker's script.

37:11 When I read that script, I thought, God, he would have been perfect. But over the years, there have been producers who have come to me. They always have some pitch. They almost never want to pay you any money up front. Sometimes you give them a free option because they have credits. Like Don Murphy, who was a producer on Natural Born Killers and quite a few other films. Films he had an option for a while and usually what it means is they have a deal with the studio and they'll take it to that studio and they'll think they can set it up there and if they don't kind of lose interest. As far as TV goes, it's a similar kind of thing. There's people who are interested in doing anime and stuff, television, movies, and things like that. You would think a streaming platform would be a good option for that, right?

37:55 Like a Netflix. Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's any medium where you couldn't do a cool Nocturnals thing. Maybe I'm biased, but for me, the Nocturnals is a comic that I wanted to see. I try to make a comic that I would want to read. And so if i if i'm a comic book fan who likes most of the stuff that we all like i can't see why it would be a loser i mean i'm talking with a with a producer right now about it nice there was one that was one you told me a while back my excitement though you know what i mean for the green until there's a green light down the road i just reserve i i i can't let myself get crazy excited about it i mean you used to do that you know yeah but it's just it's like it's like it's like working it's like panning for gold and working a claim you you just got to keep working at it and working at it and until you find the color you know yeah and sometimes you don't find it so the way i look at it is i've got this claim over here you want to go work it go ahead and work it i'm going to concentrate on on what i can control in my world which is doing comics and and doing artwork and telling the stories that I can tell.

39:05 And if someone comes along and wants to do nocturnals, and believe me, they come along and they talk a good talk, man. They'll get really excited about it. And then nothing happens. Can you mention someone who you did some work with that was a musician that was possibly interested in doing a nocturnals movie? Can we mention that? Yeah, Rob called. You can call me, email me once. This was i think it was after maybe the first or second halloween film had come out and he said hey what's your number i what's your current phone number i think i want to do a nocturnals movie, and i was like oh you know because i rob has just done halloween too or whatever so i mean we're talking about for those that don't know rob zombie right artwork yeah i didn't catch i love you did some artwork for two of his albums albums right that's right yes i did for Did you? I didn't know that.

39:58 You did artwork for Rob Zombie, huh? Yeah, I did the cover of the CD booklet for, not the cover of the CD, that's Basil Gogos. But the cover of the CD booklet for Hellbilly Deluxe, his first solo album. Wow. And then he did Hellbilly Deluxe 2 some years later, and then I did a piece in there, like a gatefold piece in there. Wow, imagine Rob Zombie doing nocturnals. Holy crap. Well, he was a fan of nocturnals. He did an intro for one of the books back in the late 90s. He and I talked about doing a Rob Zombie versus the Nocturnals comic wow and then you know he got this idea in the early 2000s that he wanted to do a Nocturnals film or you know so I let myself be excited for like 10 minutes, I was like wow that would be cool and again that's it'd be Rob's version of Nocturnals not mine right, You know, and I understand that I get seen enough movie adaptations to know that you're not necessarily going to get the same thing, especially with him.

40:52 But still, it would have been fun to see what he would have done with it. Can I ask, you know, it seems like you have a very specific vision. Would you ever want to just direct it yourself or write it yourself? Yes. Yeah. I actually have a screenplay that's been unfinished for a long time. And then I've got several different pitches where I've tweaked the Nocturnal's storyline or tweaked the setting or, you know, in various ways to present it more simply to a film audience. So I've spent a lot of time doing that and I don't do that anymore because it's time consuming and it's a waste of time until someone's paying you to do it.

41:32 What's the point? So, I mean, yeah. You think maybe doing an Indiegogo for a movie would be? No, no, no. No, I don't think so. I think I put my best foot forward when it comes to doing comics. I'm almost 55, so I don't know that this is the time to jump into a brand new career. Right, sure. Although I do really get excited about the idea of doing board games. That's something that I would like to do. That'd be cool. I could see a Nocturnal's board game. Yeah, I would like to do board games with my IP... It's something I've been talking, I've been working with a game designer and we're actually working on a Nocturnal's card game right now.

42:16 It's not like a Magic the Gathering type of thing, but you can play a different Nocturnal's character and it would be, but it's something that would be a lot easier to learn than Magic the Gathering. I don't know if Magic the Gathering is easy or hard to learn. I don't know, but. It's easier now, I can tell you that, but it was, yeah, it's still pretty hard. We're talking about doing that and we're talking about like we're you know we have a board game that we're that we've got in development really the thing with the board games is you have to have you have to have some some capital to to do those figures because the miniatures are important to me i want to do miniatures of characters and they have to be sculpted and i don't know how to do that right so we have to come up with the capital to to afford to put the miniatures out there so people can see what they're going to get although you can't just say oh there's any cool miniatures Give us some money. It doesn't work that way. Right, right. Obviously.

43:10 You know what's interesting is, do you play video games yourself or no? No. I can't. I get too caught into it and then I don't get any work done. Gotcha. So are you aware of a developer called Telltale Games? Video games? No, probably not. So I bring them up because Telltale is, they're known for making the Walking Dead video game. Basically a bunch of comic book video games in an important click adventure world. And so when I first played Fable, they made one by, I'm sure you know Fable from DC, right? Sure. Or Fable, sorry. Yeah. They did one for Fables and it's phenomenal. And when I played that the whole time, one of the thoughts I've had was like, wow, what if Telltale did a Nocturnals video game?

43:50 So my question is, what if there was a way to make a Nocturnals video game? Because I feel like that your property is perfect for that. Again, it's just sort of like, well, you know, a lot of this stuff happens when a book has popularity and has really strong sales. And I don't do nocturnals in a periodical fashion to where that's a thing. You know what I mean? Right, right. If I was doing a monthly nocturnals book through a publisher, or even a bi-monthly book through a publisher, we have a hell of a lot better chance of getting the sales up to get the attention of licensors who would want to do things like that.

44:34 I am in talks with an RPG company about doing a version of Nocturnals as an RPG, but it's not a Nocturnals RPG game. It would be a source book that you play in a pre-existing RPG. When you say RPG, do you mean tabletop? Not a board game, but yeah. Like D&D style? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. It'd be like if there was Dungeons & Dragons, but a Nocturnal source book. So you could play the Nocturnal's world with Dungeons & Dragons. That seems to be a common trend now, because I know there's a movie coming called Green Something, and they're doing the same thing. It's from A24. Green Ronin? maybe that might have been it i can't remember but it was green ronin green ronin did a game called mutants and mastermind back in the early 2000s and they did a nocturnal source book.

45:22 To play you could play you could play the mutants and masterminds game in the nocturnal world but we did a source book for that and i'm talking with them again about doing the same thing with this rpg that they're now that they're now doing but i can't really talk too much about that because we're not even like in the we're not we're not in early stages of talking about that absolutely Absolutely. But I like those guys. They're down to earth. They put out good product and it's very simple and clean. I mean, I'm up for all these kinds of things. I think it would be fun, you know, but the problem is, is if you get too caught up in that and then you start comparing... In yourself like well how come i don't have a tv show or how come i don't have this how come i don't have that really none of that stuff matters i mean there's a lot of people who get adaptations that are not that great yeah you know but it is hard as an artist to see especially when you know people or you've like kind of come up in the same aisles at comic cons doing art with these people and then all of a sudden you see one of them has a show on hulu or one of them's doing a Nate Page story in heavy metal or something like that.

46:24 And there is this kind of, for me, and I don't know if you feel it too, but like, it's almost like I feel like my career is slipping away from me or I made the wrong move somewhere. And it's hard not to go down a slide. It just like, yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. And then, you know, I used to, I used to get caught up in that a lot more. I just have to walk into a comic shop and look at the rack and see the covers and the project that I hadn't been called for. Right. I could have really done, I could have really knocked that one out of the park. You know, oh, I would have loved to have done that one. But you know what? Everybody gets that feeling. You know, I mean, who doesn't get that feeling? Very few people.

47:07 The thing is, is you have your own trajectory and you have to follow your trajectory your way. And if you're happy, you know, like, okay, you know, I don't have the fame of some other comic book people, but I'm comfortable right now and I'm not stressed out. I'm not unhappy. I have built up a decent fan base over the years that I can put out a Kickstarter art book, or I can put out a graphic novel, whatever it is. And it's not going to fall flat in its face for lack of interest. And that is nothing to sneeze at. You could always look at someone else's Kickstarter. I mean, there's people out there who no one has ever heard of who are doing comic book Kickstarters that are going crazy gangbusters, right? But why?

47:54 Sometimes it's the the subject matter sometimes because they have 40 variant covers of women in various stages of undress yeah oh that's so true yeah that is not yeah is that your trajectory it's not my trajectory if i wanted to do that i could do that right you know i i don't want to be known as that it's not of interest to me so right you mentioned our book thing and keep you got to be you got to just be true to your to your to yourself and into your your i don't want to say art because we're telling stories. So you have stories that you want to tell to, you got to just tell them to the best of your ability. And one of the things I really admire about you, Mike, is the fact that you didn't let a lot of things stop you from putting out a ton of work over your lifetime. So far, you've put out a lot of comic book work.

48:41 When you want something, you do it, you make time for it. And so many people don't do that. You know, some of us wait until some Some editor says, yes, we're going to hire you to do this thing. And then you sit there and you think, wow, well, I guess no editor's interested in the story I want to do, so it'll never get done. Well, that might be true. But then maybe what if you didn't have to wait for an editor or a publisher to be interested in publishing you or paying you? Because a lot of them will publish you if they don't have to pay you up front. Heck, most of them will. well. But what if there was a way that you could reach an audience and you didn't have to worry about what a publisher thought or whether or not they wanted to do it or whether they were going to bankroll it or if there was anyone that was going to buy it?

49:27 I'll tell you, Kickstarter has completely changed the game for a lot of us. I mean, my outlook on things has never been as exciting as when... I mean, the last time I got this excited about doing comics or doing anything was in the early 90s when I was doing Nocturnals. And I thought, wow, I mean, so I can just do... I can come up with a concept and I can do the comic and they'll pay me to do it. And I had that one more time with Giant Killer in 99. and then never again. You know what I mean? Well, that's not necessarily true. I mean, I worked with Oney on Dark Forever, Nocturnals Dark Forever, and Outskirts of Doom. But those opportunities don't come very often and they haven't come since 2000, I guess, where I had something that was personal to me that I took to someone and said, here, I want to do this. And they said, yeah, okay, we'll fund that.

50:18 You know, that's just, it's up to me to do that now. And I have a way to do it with Kickstarter. starter so i have a base of people who are who are who are waiting for me to do something and then there's a group of people who are new to things that come in later and then every time you do something you just hopefully add more people on to that that the audience and really it's about building your audience and and maintaining that on you and you've done you definitely have a following of fans who love nocturnal love your art i mean i'm one of them by how gunwitch tattooed on my arm yeah that's right many other people i have seen with with nocturnals tattoos as well but and you've released several nocturnals hardcovers and and also art books and you mentioned kickstarter and you just wrapped up kickstarter correct with a new art book children of the night yeah i i've been doing i mean what's going on nothing nothing.

51:21 There's something in the background you're saying it's entertaining let's hear it no no you're fine you're going i don't want people to get bored so yeah enough to do okay i think she just walked out of the shower anyways anyways continual dad so i was gonna i was just gonna say i i've been Okay, so I've been doing art books now for, I don't know, probably, I want to say 10 years. The first one, the first major color hardcover art book I put out through Image was, I think, in 2010 or 2011. And it was called The Goddess and the Monster. You can still find it. Actually, you can't. It's not in print, but you can still find it.

52:04 And that was like kind of like 20-year retrospective of my stuff at that point, maybe more than 20 years. And after that, I put out a few more. Hardcover art book collections with Big Wow Art, Steve Morgan, Big Wow Art. We put out Siren, Sorceress, Enchantress. And Enchantress was my first Kickstarter. And then after Enchantress Kickstarter, we did the Nocturnal's graphic novel Kickstarter. And then I've done three or four art books since then. I've done Mercenary. Then we did, I'm sorry, it's hard to keep track. Did Mercenary. Then we did Night Studio, In the Night Studio. Studio and after in the night studio we did night owls and then this year's kickstarter was children of night are you sensing that there's a theme i think there might be a theme there yeah but the uh the one we just finished was different from the other ones in that it had a a companion item which was an art portfolio called october lands and so october lands had some new stuff and some classic stuff that we put into a sort of like, you know, Halloween, October sort of feel portfolio.

53:16 And that also did really well. I love the portfolio format and I've been trying to kind of play around in that as much as I can in the last couple of years. We did a Nocturnal's Art Portfolio in 2017 and the Oktoberlands one is still available. And even though the Kickstarter for the book and the portfolio are over, if you go to the Kickstarter for Children of Night, there's a link on the page that takes you to my fulfillment people which is sidekick labs they actually print the trading cards that we've done like creeping flesh and the nocturnal trading card set and thank you mars attacks and things like that so they are going to be running the survey store so you can actually get on their mailing list right now and you and they'll let you know when the survey store is open so that you can get the book you get the portfolio we have other many other items on there that we're adding on. Cards, trading card sets.

54:05 We actually expanded the portfolio of another 19 plates that you could choose from with two more illustrated envelopes. So if you wanted to get. Almost 30 pieces, you could do that. You can build it up. And now I think they all, I'm not sure if they all come signed. I think they do though. Yeah. It's fun looking at some of your books, you know, your art books. And I've, I know one of the ways that you work when you're doing your, your paintings and drawings is that you'll use people to pose in the positions that you want to, to create in the, in the book.

54:47 And Yeah, you'll see it somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. I've been, I, that was the thing that in art school that they would always give you, you know, when I was an illustration major in art school, I went to CCAC in Oakland and then I transferred over to the Academy after two and a half years and finished my time there. And one of the big things with these contemporary illustrators who are teaching a lot of these courses was what they call scrap and scrap is photo reference. And so if you turn in a piece they would look at the hand and go did you shoot scrap for that hand and you'd be like no and they go well you could tell because that hand is weak one better drawing in that hand.

55:27 And so for them it was about hiring models or getting people in your family or friends to model for you shooting the photo reference and working from that so that everything looks accurate and no art directors are going to point at it or editors are going to point out and go go, that's funky. Can you fix that? And it's about skill and draftsmanship. And we were doing lots and lots of life drawing and painting from models and all that kind of stuff, you know, all day long, every day we were doing that. So you were working for models in the studio at school and you were photographing models for the work you were doing. And so when it came time to do comics, it was a natural progression. And what was kind of cool about it was some artists are better at drawing types than others.

56:11 Some artists have kind of a generic face they draw and they add a mustache or a certain color hair or a hat or glasses or a scar, whatever, you know, maybe they give them a big nose or a little nose, whatever, or no nose. They have these types, these archetypes, which is fine, you know, but then there's people who draw people that look real to you. Like Gene Colan's art, when he draws a person, that person looks like a real person. It's because usually it was based on somebody. And that's the same when you look at Norman in the Rockwell's work, Dean Cornwell, or I'm going back and back into the Golden Age of Illustration, but anytime, look at Drew Sturzen, the movie poster guy. Drew Sturzen's working for him in photo reference, obviously when he's doing Indiana Jones or whoever he's doing in a poster.

56:53 So that helps inform. And tell the story with even more power and strength. And it's fun because you get your friends together and your family together and you're telling a story together and you're doing a shoot and it feels, and it's not like making necessarily like making a film, but it's very close to it because you want people to emote. You want, it's not just taking a position where put your hand here. I need some of that, but you know, lighting and things like the lighting, super important when you're shooting reference for things. I mean, lighting is really important in my work. And so I want to get the lighting, lighting, right. And so one of the things that's fascinating to me is throwing the light on a subject and watching how it changes and how you can get emotional about something based on the lighting alone. Yeah.

57:38 Shadows light. That stuff is so important to, to storytelling. Well, especially with yours, because your, your work is so, it's such a feeling when, when you look at the colors that you use. And then like i i senior i met your dad but it's really fun to to see a character in in your i see your dad in the yeah the stories are often and it's my revenge on my my parents is to put them in comics actually they like it but when i was a kid they didn't understand my obsession with comics they were a little scared by it so i feel like those parents were rotting my brain one of my like really quickly i just already knows we do have to wrap it up soon here so i might go ahead and ask something then i'll do the wrap-up oh i was going to just say one of my favorite pieces that you did is actually surprised of me as the zombie what you did for my you're gonna say that a lot of fun yeah that was a lot i i really enjoyed doing i think was there more than one piece that was done for that there was yeah there was the front cover painting in the back with like an ink and and i did smash my head into one of your family photos wall when i was at your house that's a whole other story yeah we'll have to have dan back on again to talk about that.

59:01 Yeah fun well before we wrap it up dan one of the things we do on our on our show at the end of each episode we always ask every artist or actor whoever we have on the show is what comic book that you would recommend to our audience this week so now you can't say your own obviously we want to but we can't say no i know i don't want i don't that's not fun so what would you recommend for this week oh man you know i haven't been to a comic shop in a while because the last time i went to one there were too many people walking around without masks on it was super annoying annoying they let them in well yeah that's why i don't go to that shop right now i'm not going there i'll wait till name this shop name that shop fuck them i'm kidding i'm kidding I mean, I...

59:50 To be honest, I think, you know, I mean, when you're in your own store and they tell you that once you wear masks and people come into your shop and then decide to not wear them or take them off. Yeah. You can do what you can do, but then they're your customers and it's really hard. I mean, I walk into Walmart and see people with no mask, walk right in and no one even says anything. Yeah. Why don't they say something? Yeah. You know, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. I mean, I, I, all I can do is just protect myself as much as I can. And so I, but as far, this is not answering your question. I was like, yeah, that's a whole other episode. Maybe there's a COVID comic out there. Any comic book, any comic book you want. Now you know what happens when you get me on your show. You have to have, you have to have more time. Don't blame me. You blame Mike. Next time we won't have this problem.

1:00:37 I blame Mike. I blame only myself. As far as a comic book that I would recommend off the top of my head, I would recommend going back and find the trade paperback collections of of, ah, damn it. Oh, boy, oh, boy. Sorry, I'm just completely drawing a blank. No, you're okay. You're okay. Damn it. It's Tom Coker's book with, oh, you know what? I'll tell you what you should read. What's up? A great comic that I discovered when they hired me to do some covers for it, and I'd never heard of it before. It's called Mind Management. Okay. And it's this twisty, kind of psychological espionage thing that's just completely crazy by Matt Gint. He writes it. He does the art.

1:01:24 It is very much not mainstream, but you can tell there's a love of so many different things in this work. They come from comics, but also films and other things like that. But Mind Management is really cool. I did the variant coverage for the second series. But go back and find, actually, it's not even the second series. I guess it's the newest series. I think there's three volumes of collected stuff now. Awesome, awesome. Three thick volumes of comics, and they're great. it's about this sort of secret history of people who kind of have psychic powers and but it's plays completely against what you might expect that to be i have a copy here's my copies right here this is what the trades look like they look like workbooks oh yeah that's pretty cool my man has a report three of three cognizance operatives and their invisible influence including important Important details regarding your past involvement.

1:02:18 So it's about how events can happen in history and they can be erased from our mind. It's about how we, the secret society and groups that are planting ideas in our heads that we don't know about. It's fascinating. Wow. And I highly recommend it. That sounds like probably the best recommendation we've had so far on the show. So thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. Also, Manor Black by Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook is great. Yes, I did, you know, I did, I think, one or two covers for that. Maybe just, I think I've done two covers for that book. But I'm only saying because I did the covers, I read it. And I was like, this is cool. So this is good stuff too.

1:03:01 Cullen is a friend of mine, but I love the stuff he does. He did Dark Ark is a really fun comic. If you like monsters and Noah's Ark stories. Awesome. And demons and vampires and, you know, manticores. So, yeah, that's kind of, that goes back like, you know, to last year. But I think there's plenty to be said for the trade paperback shelves at your local comic shop. Awesome. Mike, do you have anything last, any last words you want to say? Yeah. Well, I just want to say, Dan, thanks. I feel like we got to have you on again at some point so we can talk some more because I feel like there's so much more I want to cover with you.

1:03:43 There's definitely going to be a part two. More of your processing. Yeah. If we can do a part two in November, that'd be great if you're down for that. Yeah, sure. Maybe after the X-Men book comes out, after Marvel number two comes. I call it the X-Men book, but it's not an X-Men book. It's an anthology. For sure. I share an issue with Alex Ross, Paolo Rivera. And Eric Powell, which means I am definitely a low man in the total poll, but I'm still looking forward to seeing. So hey, you're the high man in the total poll. Well, you don't have to say that. It's totally fine. No, it's true. Like I said, I am okay with all that. That's good. That's good. I'm okay with all that. You're an all human, Dan.

1:04:24 I love it. I'm trying to be. We will continue this in November. Thank you so much, Dan. We really appreciate you being here. Thank you for the recommendation. And to everybody listening, thank you guys for listening. And this is- Thank you guys. Yeah, this is the original format. This is how we started the show. And we haven't done it like this in a long time. This is Mike's first time actually co-hosting. So thank you. And I cannot wait for this to continue to grow with Mike. So again, thank you so much, Dan. Thank you so much, Mike. Thank you to everyone listening. Before I do say one last thing, Dan, do you want to give your Instagram or anything like that right now? Yeah, it's Dan Brereton Illustrator on Instagram. And I have a lot of Facebook pages, public pages, Dan Brereton Nocturnals, Dan Brereton.

1:05:07 So you can just throw a rock and you'll hit a Dan Brereton page on Facebook. That sounds amazing. Twitter and check out, check out the children and I kickstarter. If you guys are interested, if anyone's interested in finding any of my books, most of what I have, it's, it's available. It's on budsartbooks.com. They have really great prices on nocturnal books. And I, that's just the plain facts and anything you can't find there, you can try bigwowart.com and see what you can find that sounds thanks for having me absolutely uh mike thank you uh dan thank you everybody love each other take care of each other and we'll see you next week.