Storyboard Time with Jeff Parker! An interview about animation, Agents of Atlas, and studio life - The Short Box Podcast Ep. 447
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In this episode of The Short Box. Storyboards in animation, which is stuff that runs in real time, is pretty different from a comic book. And I saw this when I worked at Sony Animation because they had tons of people who used to work in comics and then decided, no, I want a regular job. And they went to work in animation. Even though they were all pretty badass artists with serious chops, they still had to learn the disciplines just like I did.
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how animation and TV work. The thing about what the artist is doing, it's really thinking. It's like, it's not their hand is just magically good and they make a great line or whatever. They're constantly solving tons of problems as they go along. That's what you gotta do when you're working in any visual medium. You're always problem solving. You're always figuring out what to set up, like how to move the characters through space in a way that makes everybody believe this is happening within your own story.
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It's not an easy job and it's not going to be replaced by some plagiarism program anytime soon.
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intro music plays
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Yo, Short Box Nation! Hello again, welcome back. It's another Wednesday, another new podcast. Thanks for pressing play today. If you're new, welcome to the show. My name is Badr and this is the Short Box Podcast, the comic book talk show that brings you the best conversations about your favorite comics with the people that put their blood, sweat, and tears into making them. This is episode 447. And today you'll hear from a tried and true industry veteran who has been working in comics since the mid-90s, starting out as an artist on various comics from Malibu and DC. But today...
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He's considered one of the most acclaimed writers still working in comics. I'm talking about writer and artist Jeff Parker. He's best known for writing comics such as Agents of Atlas, X-Men First Class, Batman 66, Aquaman, Future Quest, Thunderbolts, as well as sci-fi and adventure graphic novels like The Interman and Meteor Men. Jeff also worked as a storyboard artist on the Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, one of my favorite cartoons on Fox Network. Learn much later, it was actually a comic book based on Frank Miller and Jeff Darrow.
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That show used to come out in the late 90s if you want to feel old. More recently, you could find Jeff's name in writing and comics like last year's Dark Wing Duck, Negaduck series for Dynamite. And he's currently bringing the captivating world of Disney's Zootopia to comic book life with an all new monthly mystery adventure alongside artist Alessandro Rinaldi. Zootopia is also coming out through Dynamite Comics. We'll talk to Jeff on making the transition from artist to superstar writer, his thoughts on the comic industry today, and what it's like working with companies like Disney.
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Now, before I officially bring Jeff on, I'd like to shout out the people who helped me pay the bills and keep the lights on here at Short Box HQ. The Short Box is powered by Gotham City Limit, Jack's little premier shop for comics, collectibles, toys, and more. It's my personal comic shop. I frequent it every week. You guys know this by now. I recommend that if you're local to Jax or ever find yourself passing through Jax on vacation or on a road trip or something, go stop by Gotham City Limit. It's on South Side Boulevard, right next to the Tencent Town movie theater.
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Let them know you're a friend of the show. Hell, drop my name. Tell them Bada from the short box and shit, and I guarantee they'll take care of you and hook you up with some killer deals and discounts. And if you're not local dejected, let's say you can't make dejected, well check out their website, gotthamcdlimit.com. They got store exclusive comics on there as well as other collectibles. And certainly last but not least, I wanna give a big shout out to our new sponsor this quarter, Collective Con, AKA Northeast Florida's premier anime, comic, sci-fi, and pop culture event. Collective Con is happening on March 14th through the 16th.
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It's their 11th year show. They've got a lot of great celebrities, actors, voice actors, comic artists all showing up there. I won't go into the full list. You probably heard the ad and intro. But it's taking place here in Jacksonville at the Prime Osborne Convention Center. Single and three-day tickets are available on their website at collectivecon.com or you can hit the link in this episode showing us to go right there. Once again, Collective Con. It's back March 14th through the 16th. I know I'll be there. I hope to see you there too. And now, Shorebox Nation without further ado.
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Let's talk comics and process of a certified pro. Let's welcome Jeff Parker to the show. Hey Jeff, welcome to the Short Box. How you doing? Thanks for having me on. This is great. Yeah, Jeff, I am so glad we were able to make this happen. We tried a few times earlier this week, where you know life happens. I guess we ruined it up, yeah. Well, here's the thing, right? It gave me even more time. It gave me time to finish this very long, detailed.
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but amazing interview that you did with Tom Spurgeon with the comics reporter. Aw man, wasn't that guy great? He was amazing, like his line of questions has always been awesome, but there was something about kind of honing in on his train of thought, how he kind of moderated the discussion with you. I mean, he's an icon. He was easily one of the most thoughtful journalists, interviewers the medium ever had, and it's such a loss to have him gone.
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Yeah, it makes me want to go through some of these archive interviews on the Comic Reporter website. Oh yeah, there's some great stuff in there. You'll love it. Yeah, I can't wait. So I had time to catch up on that. Oh, and then I also got time to finish one of my favorite runs by you, Agents of Atlas. Oh good. Speaking of Agents of Atlas, I had a chance to stop into a local bookstore the other day. And I was like, I wonder what I could find by Jeff Hart. And I actually have them here with me. I was super excited to grab these because I don't own these in print edition.
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And one of these I have just recently read. I'll hold this up to the camera. But I picked up this Agents of Atlas versus Avengers and X-Men, which collects the two miniseries, Agents of Atlas versus X-Men and Avengers versus Atlas. And then a new one that I was reading on the Marvel Unlimited app for the first time. And I found it kind of serendipitous that I found a nice hardcover collection. But Agents of Atlas, volume one.
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that collects your 2000 and I think this is your 2006 run. Yeah, that was the whole intro. That's where it all starts. So I've never read this one. I read the second series that was in 2009. I think between that and then X-Men versus Agents of Atlas, that was my first conscious exposure to your work. And I've been, you know, I love those series. Those series are awesome. Can you tell me how this holds up for you personally, the Agents of Atlas stuff, when you look back at the series, considering that it was one of your
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I don't know if it was your longest run at Marvel, but I mean, it was a substantial chunk of your time at Marvel. Do any memories or lessons stand out to you? And I guess speaking of Tom Spurgeon, I want to say that he called it one of the best titles of the post-bankruptcy era of Marvel, which I was like, agreed. I'll take that. That was a great way to put it. No, I really loved working on that series. And I think from the outside, I'll
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what I could tell from fans writing about it. I think a lot of people assumed I just went in constantly pitching agents of Atlas to everybody. That's not what I did at all. Mark Paniccia approached me after he had read the what-if issue that it all sort of spins out of and we did our own version of and just thought, I don't know, I thought there's something here. Then I read it and I went, oh yeah. I got all excited like...
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It's like, why doesn't Nomura just swim up and then she's out of the story? She ought to be, she's like the Wonder Woman here. She ought to be in the whole thing and Jimmy Wu shouldn't be at a desk. He should be out in the field. And you know, all that stuff started coming together. There, it was one of those things where a lot of the office, a lot of the people in the various offices at Marvel liked it. So they would occasionally like, they get to it. Here's the way it really works. People don't think comics work like regular companies, but they do.
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They would get to say like the end of a quarter and they'd realize like, Oh, uh, we actually have some money left over and it's something you don't spend it. You don't get that money again. You know, so they often call me and the editor up and they, Hey, do you guys want to do like a three issue mini series and one of the Atlas characters or something like that? And I would always, yes, I always did. Cause I had tons of stories, uh, for them. Like.
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So we did the Uranian mini-series, we did a Gorilla Man mini-series, a one-shot with Nomura. So I just took every chance they gave me to jump in on them. It's one of those things where at the time, you know, Civil War and all that stuff was going on in the main Marvel books. We weren't really part of it. But that's also so people weren't paying attention to us as much as the other stuff.
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That's also why we got to do good stuff. No one was messing with us. We really got to go somewhere with the story. You see in the Dark Rain thing, we do a little thing with Norman Osborn and stuff like that and had the Sentry pop up. He gets taken down really quickly by Venus because everybody forgets Venus is the perfect one to throw against somebody super powerful.
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You take the fight out of them right away because they just start thinking about love. Let's put it in lightning. It's one of those things where I can't complain that Marvel didn't push it so much because it wouldn't have been what it was if they had been really behind it. There would have been too many cooks touching into the pot and it works the way it works because it's a relatively small group of people.
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guiding the vision of it, I think. And getting the, it's getting the tone just right. Yeah. Breivort, I remember, put me through the ringer with the original pitch. I just kept turning in the first issue over and over, ordered, and then later on he told me, he goes, well, now that we all know what it is, you should have pitched it as Marvel's Rat Pack. And I'm like- Wow, I can see that. Yeah, I'm like, that's great, and that's exactly what I should have done, and I wish you would notice that then.
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It saved me a lot of time, but it does work that way because we have more humor than a lot of the others. I thought it was kind of interesting. Even though they don't use the whole story that we had for Jimmy Woo where he's kind of recreated and rebooted to himself in the 50s as a young guy in the Marvel movies, it certainly seems like the writing and Randall Park kind of took the sort of...
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Jimmy's sort of simpler worldview from the thing, and has him just, they play it up a little bit for laughs because he's not the main character in Ant-Man or anything, but he's definitely somebody you can't take your eyes off of every time he pops up on screen. Oh, for sure. He had some great one-liners. You know, he's just kind of a likable guy. I think they definitely carried that over from the comics pretty well. Yeah, and everybody.
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I just slam everybody, everybody else. When you know, a lot of people, when they get a hold of Jimmy Wu, they think, we'll make him this bad-ass guy who does it. It's like, then he's just like everybody else. If you have him just come in being a very serious ass kicker, it's the fact that he's kind of a man out of time. And the way he perceives things and the way he forces the group to go to bed early and make sure they eat and, and, you know, he reminds me of a really good, especially in this, uh, 2006 run.
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He's a very likable, enthusiastic guy, and to your credit, he doesn't need to be the complete badass because he's got a bunch of badasses on the team, like M-11, Monkey Man, Nomura, like you said. And he kind of reads like, oh my god, why am I drawing a blank? Phil Jackson. He's like the Phil Jackson of comics. He's able to bring all these alpha, maybe not alpha males, well actually literally an alpha male monkey man. But anyways, he's able to bring all these alphas and these gods together.
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by just being likable, enthusiastic, honorable. They kind of see the best of themselves in him, even though everyone is kind of like a broken character. Yeah, they're the team, they're the, my take on them was always, they're the team of second chances. Like everybody, everybody in Atlas gets a second chance and they're making the most of it, you know? So like, and they don't leave each other behind. It's not a bunch of quibbling.
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One of my favorite issues from this particular run, I think it was issue, the end of issue four or five, they just kind of got done fighting amongst themselves in a major way due to a revelation. And when Jimmy Woo kind of steps up, when Jimmy Woo steps up and is like, guys, you know, we gotta stick together. We got a bigger mission at hand. And I think he says, now let's just shake. You know, let's make up. And the viewpoint from the,
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What is his name? Derek? He's the shield agent that's tagging along. Yeah, right. Derek Kanata. Yeah, I thought, Jeff, the way you wrote his internal monologue and being like, man, he's surrounded by literal super humans, robots, a monkey man, and he's the most inspiring. He's the glue that holds it all together. And I want to be the leader like Jimmy Woo's. I don't know, that really touched me as someone that also leads teams at works and is always thinking about how to be a leader. Great issue, man. Thank you.
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I feel like you got to, people are afraid to put sincerity in some of these stories, you know? I'm sorry, I feel like you got to do that and be a little vulnerable to make readers really connect. And then like later in one of the series you were mentioning, Derek is now like finding out like when S.H.I.E.L.D. is being disbanded in the greater Marvel story, you know, like he's literally worried about how to support his family and stuff like that. And Jimmy remembers him.
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You know, Jimmy comes back and says, can you kind of take charge of the whole underworld of Atlas, like our thing below San Francisco and help us out and brings them in so it's like that they always come back for everybody. And I don't know that to me, that appeals to me more than this is a cosmic scale story that, you know, blah, blah, blah, that something with the word war in it. And, you know, it's like.
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I feel like when you narrow the focus, you can really get some good stories that people will vibe with. Well said. It feels like just a very grounded and like the characters just feel real. Kudos on that. And I also want to give a shout out to the series artist at the time, Leonard Kirk. I felt like he drew exactly the art that was needed for this story, for this very grounded, sincere story. And Leonard Kirk ever since then has been one of my favorite artists. So it's been a treat. And I guess to the listeners who might be a little lost.
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this particular series, Agents of Atlas, all of it is available on the Marvel Unlimited app. In my case, I was lucky enough to find two very nice hard covers for Half Off at my local bookstore. So you can't beat the real books. I mean, go to Marvel Unlimited if you have to. But if your local shop is as good as his, go to that and get a book. Now, you're most known as a writer. But you started out as an artist. Do you miss doing interior work or mainline series? Do you, I guess, still keep your skills sharp? Do you draw?
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Like for your own personal self? I do still draw and like I did a, uh, Drew Moss and I did a Kickstarter book called Bliger about this tiger man who's, uh, chasing, tracking down these monsters on our world. And, uh, for that one, I was like, Oh, if I'm doing another original creation, I need to draw something. So I did an epilogue story in the back and I, like, I got to do it just to make sure I can still hang, you know,
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I'm probably not as good at making the deadlines like a lot of, there's some serious badass artists now working in the industry. I mean, you just look at anything and every year you're like, how are people this good? I don't understand. So that's one thing. And I also can write a lot faster than I can draw, which I think is usually the case probably. But the drawing helps me to...
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And I'd still draw comics every now and then and do some covers here and there. Cause I need to remember and not get too far away from what goes into a visual story. A lot of what my art is now is a lot of times I'll just do a layout of something to send to the artists. Cause it's like, I could sit there and hammer them with a mountain of words, or I could spend a few minutes drawing this rough and they would get exactly what
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Cause a lot of times when you describe something too much, it sounds like a lot of work and then you don't mean it that way. And you're like, no, no, no, it's actually very simple. And like, I'll do that and I'll do some layouts and everything, especially if people are getting behind and I think it'll help. And if they're not insulted by me doing layouts, I'll do layouts. Um, and it usually goes over well. I don't mean it to be like follow this exactly. I just mean it to like, here, get this idea. It's like your first idea or whatever. And then gives you a jumping off point.
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Because every artist looks at something and then thinks, no, I'd do it like this. But then you've already saved them tons of time from having to go to blank paper, put something down, and then maybe change it themselves later. Milk Kniff, who did Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon and stuff like that, when he was really successful later in life and Steve Canyon, he used to hire a guy to pencil the whole strip.
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And he was going to ink it, but then he would just change everything about it. And I often wonder like, who's that poor artist who never got to see his heart make it to the page. He literally just like paid the money so that he could get someone else's opinion that he would go, no, no, I do it like this. And then he'd just redraw the whole thing. And it's like, somebody must've been really frustrated and then occasionally happy when one of his bits made it in. And, and I've seen the art. It was all great.
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animation and storyboard background. Like you were doing storyboards for Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot at some point. How much did that career influence your approach to comic book making, whether that was drawing comics or writing comic books? Like are there any techniques that you would use or approaches or techniques that you would use for storyboards that would be applicable in comic books?
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Storyboards and animation, which is stuff that runs in real time, is pretty different from a comic book. For one thing, you have to obey the 180 degree rule generally. Comics artists, and I saw this when I worked at Sony Animation, because they had tons of people who used to work in comics and then decided, no, I want a regular job. They went to work in animation.
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pretty bad-ass artists with serious chops, they still had to learn the disciplines, just like I did, of how animation and TV work. And like, you can't just keep throwing a billion different settings in there. Usually you have like three key settings that you're seeing during a show. Because otherwise, what you're doing is creating just an enormous budget deficit where people are trying to like,
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Well, now somebody's got to draw this whole thing and figure out how they move around in it. And all these animators have to do tons more work than they were going to do. It's, it's a strange way of thinking. You know, you're only thinking in terms of this one aperture, like the, the screen shape. I think it's really good for people because you can, even though I like wacky layout panels and stuff like that in comics, you can, you can kind of rely on that a little too hard and get away from what's important in the story.
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or just like the acting and things like that. Doing stuff for live action like a cartoon really makes you do that. To jump back to Darwin Cook, he was there working on Men in Black while I was working on Big Guy and Rusty. I had been reading his stuff at DC that had just started coming out not that long ago. And so I was, every time he came in, I was bugging him about something he did or something he did over at Warner Animation and...
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He was happy to talk to me about all of that stuff. You know, we'd just sit around and blab about that. One of the things was the agent J and K men in black. I don't know if you ever watched the cartoon. Oh yeah. I actually seen the cartoon before I think I ever watched like the actual live action movies. I grew up big time on the Fox kids like network block. It was really good. Yeah. Oh yeah. They had a lot of good stuff. Even though they kept moving our cartoon all over to every time slot, people kept trying to follow it. And then they finally like.
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They said, Hey, this is, they left it somewhere for 10 minutes and it started doing really well. Fox kids was calling back Sony saying, Hey, we'd like some more seasons of big guy. And they were like, sorry, you guys kept moving it and not renewing anything. So everybody spread to the winds and is working on other cartoons now. So that was too bad. Cause I could have done more of that. And I thought it was a really well written show, but, uh, it was, oh yeah. I was saying Darwin did, uh,
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He did some redesigns of the characters to make them easier to animate. And no one paid attention. They never did it, but I remember swiping one of those from the office. Cause I just thought they were cool. I was like, Oh, this was good thinking. You know, he was really thinking like he did over working on the Batman animated stuff like Batman Beyond and everything, you know, how to make something so that, you know, artists are going to, you can see when there's not a strong design in a cartoon and they kind of warp around.
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and don't quite stay on model. And that's what my initial job was. I was a cleanup artist and I was supposed to go through to various storyboard directors and just redraw their stuff and do the in-between bits. Not all the in-betweening because that was done in South Korea. It was mainly to get all the characters on model as they were in the designs. You would think it was
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It would be easy after a while, but like then when I started just storyboarding, I would look back at it versus the designs and I would go, wow, I am wildly off model. I keep having, like, I do my own version of Rusty that does not look like what Rusty looks like when you look at the original picture. Um, it's so easy to do. And anyway, all of, all of those weird disciplines are very focused for cartoons and in comics, you're encouraged to, you know, do your own style and your own spin on everything.
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That can be a hard adjustment for artists to make when they're making the jump over to doing storyboards and animation. Is it interesting to you that, I don't know if ironic is the term here, but it's definitely like an inverse. You go from working as a storyboard or artist for an animated show to now writing a comic book based on an animated movie, and not just any animated movie. I learned, by the way, Jeff, that Zootopia was the third Disney animated movie to surpass one.
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billion dollars at the box office. I think it's still like number, it's in like the top 15 at this point. There's other animated movies that have surpassed a billion dollars, but still that's a huge accomplishment. Your thoughts on kind of like that inverse being, you know, working within animation to now writing a comic about animated movie. Like, is there any pressure to live up to any, you know, the success of the movie in the comic book? I mean, I know there's obviously like a difference, but do you feel any of that?
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To me, it seems kind of the opposite. I feel like people have absorbed that movie so hard, like I did, because I loved it when it came out. I was like, this is easily one of the best things Disney has done and I don't know when. I think that movie is part of what fans have called it, like their reconstruction era. It's like some fan made, you know, an era of like new movies that Disney was putting out at the time, like your FROZENS, your Zootopia's, and.
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around those movies. And since I'm such a 2D animation guy, you know, I like, I loved like, uh, you know, Lilo and Stitch. I was like, yeah, they're still doing 2D and then they quit doing it. So I was prepared to like, not like it. And then it was like, this is amazing. This is such a good movie. But with everybody coming into it, knowing the movie so well, it kind of clears the path for me and reminds me of when I did Batman 66.
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And that a lot of my job, I feel, is to make sure people hear those voices. You know, it's like this better, Judy better be acting in character and you can hear her voice and you better hear Nick Wilde doing his kind of thing. And, uh, so to me, it's all about like, you know, I'll watch a little scene or something to prepare, kind of getting the vibe and everything before I'm working on.
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the story because if they don't feel like the characters, then it doesn't work. So much of the humor and just the whole dynamic of it comes from the characters, which is the same thing you like in live action, I think. But yeah, it's weirdly not a lot of pressure. Disney actually was pretty easy. They're not always easy and I don't think they would ever claim to be. But once they approved our story, at least they've taken it pretty easy on me.
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So I guess I'm not accidentally doing anything that they're doing with the new movie, is what I interpret that as. And I seem to be staying in character, I guess, or they certainly let me hear it. Which by the way, I was actually pleasantly surprised to learn there's a Zootopia 2 coming out this year. I don't think they've dropped an official trailer. They're just like a really blurry camera footage for like D23, but it looks promising. It was one of my favorite movies.
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And I want to correct myself. I said Disney's Reconstruction Era. It's actually referred to as... Rantisons? Disney's Revival Era, a period of animated releases that began in 2008, Zootopia released in 2016. So it's like Zootopia, Frozen, Wreck-It Ralph, Big Hero 6, Ralph Breaks the Internet, which are some of my favorite movies. So I think it lives up to that. That makes more sense. I thought Reconstruction, that's not quite something I would use if we're talking about the American version. Yeah.
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Jeff, one thing I like about you is that you are always putting a spotlight on your collaborators with your artists. In this case, you know, talking about the Zootopia comic and Alessandro Rinaldi, you said something about him in an interview that I was like, that kind of got my wheels going. You said that Alessandro is doing what it took hundreds of animators to do in the movie by himself. And when you frame it that way, it reminds me of the role of a comic artist, you know,
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being your director, your camera guy, well maybe not, the director in a way. The costume guy, yeah. Yeah, like all of the, the lighting guy. The acting, you know, all of that. That's why a lot of people, you always see these people who come in from some other discipline and they think, hey, I wanna do comics. Like, yeah, here's where the real money is, man. Come on in. And they always quickly find out what an overwhelming amount of work it is if you aren't.
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someone who lived and breathed it pretty much early on, you know, and, and was always working on it and used to it. And it's why you can't just do AI and you can't say like, here's a prompt and give me a panel and you're just going to keep finding out, well, none of these make sense together. And besides the fact that everybody has six arms or whatever, you know, that they're going to find out that it just doesn't work. Yeah. The thing about
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what the artist is doing, it's really thinking. It's like, it's not their hand is just magically good and they make a great line or whatever. They're constantly solving tons of problems as they go along. And that's what you got to do when you're working in any visual medium. You're always problem solving. You're always figuring out what to set up, like how to move the characters through space in a way that makes everybody believe this is happening within your own story.
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say Alessandro Rinaldi, he can hold you on a panel by doing a lot of detail in a certain place so that you're really paying attention here and not just blasting through. Some people read comics too fast, by the way. That's always been a big gripe of mine. Of course, he has the Disney material to work with, what all those artists did. Then when you think of a room full of people doing all that work and computers rendering and all the stuff that's going on, and he's gotta make you feel that way.
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pretty much by doing a page a day. It's not an easy job. It's not gonna be replaced by some plagiarism program anytime soon. So, Alessandro is completely safe in his job. Yeah, now it's refreshing to hear, Jeff. That's actually a really good point. I didn't think about, you can get it to spit out an image, but...
30:02
to make a cohesive story is that the same program won't spit out the same two images. There's no consistency there. So there's no cohesion. So to your point, I never actually thought about that in terms of a defense to that conversation that I think a lot of people are having about what is AI's impact to comic books and can it change the industry or the landscape? And the more I hear writers like yourself and other industry professionals talk about it, it's like, well, there's a lot of nuances and intricacies that I'd-
30:31
just don't see AI replacing. No, that's why whenever you see somebody trying to do an AI comic, it inevitably is just some astronaut girl. You were thinking about the same one, yeah. I know exactly what you're talking about. It's always an astronaut girl, but I've seen multiple ones like this with a ton of thoughts, thought narratives going down, because really they can't figure out how to do one scene to another.
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You know, you start a lot of times on a page, you go, you have an establishing shot, like here's the city of Zootopia, uh, at the airport where all the blimps are landing and everything like that, and then start following a character around and there's just, there's no substitute for a human brain, uh, who has studied their craft, uh, figuring out the mechanics of all that. And then going up beyond that, how to make it look really cool. Like.
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simply just telling the story is hard enough. And then you gotta amp it up to another level like, yeah, but what about this page is cool? And what about this gets something about the characters that we love and wanna see? It's like there's so many levels there. You can't prompt your way to that. There's no substitution for that sort of thing. You've gotta put the work in. Well said. Now, Jeff, I wanna pivot from AI to talking more so about the people aspect of comic book making.
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Do you still live in Portland? Are you still based out of Portland? Yeah. OK. I do. What's in the water in Portland that makes it such a destination for and hub for comic creators and comic publishers? In your eyes, what is it about the Portland comic scene that is so enticing to other creators and just being such a major comic hub? I think it's just an evolution thing. Originally, everybody was in Manhattan. And that's simply because that's where all publishers were.
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You know, uh, so if you wanted to work on something, you had to go move to New York if you weren't already in New York, like say Jack Kirby and, uh, you know, and so people would see you because, you know, out of sight, out of mind, you've got to show up people like you can only get, like you were saying earlier, social media has been a godsend for people getting their artwork out there and us finding talents that need to be working.
32:58
But at the same time, you can only do so much as a faceless person sending out stuff. Sometimes you gotta go to a show or you gotta go to the offices and say, hey, I'm a living person who will meet your deadlines, that sort of thing, so that people know what's happening. And anyway, so once, to me, the big thing that, going back to those watershed moments, the big thing that changed before even digital was simply like FedEx.
33:26
And, uh, you know, DHL or whatever, like sending out, being able to send your pages in from another place. One, that was a huge help to cartoonists because then they didn't have to live in expensive New York and they could live somewhere cheaper and send their work in. Um, now I think a lot of people started kind of coming and visiting this area because of Dark Horse Comics, which started here because this is where Mike Richardson lived.
33:55
Uh, you know, so he did everything here. Uh, lots of people came out, uh, graduate to the Kubert school and everything, like Ron Randall. And, uh, and he would come out and then say like Carl Kiesel would come visit him and then like the area because in the rest of the country, no one used to know where Oregon was, they weren't even sure if it was on the coast, we just knew it was somewhere West and, uh, there's a trail and there's a game, but then once people started coming out to visit.
34:25
They liked it and it used to be cheap to live here. Even I didn't make it for the total cheap parts. I kind of came in like right as cheap stuff was going away. But then you get in and like suddenly you start building a community. You know, people just started coming out, visiting their friends. Became a self-perpetuating thing where people hear about Portland. They come out, you know, it had a big active music scene and just all the creative stuff.
34:50
Uh, and I think it was just one of those things where it started building up. Who knows where the next place will be. But again, artists tend to thrive where it's affordable and Portland, of course. It just like say like Greenwich village in the sixties being thrown up as, Oh, here's a real, real, uh, verdant artists kind of, uh, place to grow and blossom.
35:15
like now try to buy a place there or rent, even rent a place in the basement. And it's just going to be a fortune. And sadly, Portland has gotten expensive too. So I don't know. I think maybe somewhere in Ohio probably might be the next big comics, uh, sort of melting pot. Who knows. And I guess I just, you know, just as a Jax native in a little bias here, I'm gonna go ahead and throw Jacksonville, Florida. Could be there too. Very warm. Living is cheap here.
35:45
For now, at least. It's cheap, it's warm. It's the warm ocean, not the freezing ocean like we've got over here. Yeah, exactly. Jeff, you mentioned the studio that you're at, which you gave me a quick little tour in between a little tech issues we were having. The studio being Heliscope, and that's considered it's the largest collective of comics creators. You guys have cartoonists, illustrators, writers, concept designers, graphic novelists.
36:13
all based in downtown Portland at said studio. I was curious, who are some of the members of Helioscope? How did you get involved? Paint us the scenery, like what is it like working in that studio? The whole studio in my mind revolves around Steve Lieber, who's currently working on Metamorpho with Al Ewing. And they're doing a re-release of the Jimmy Olsen he and Fraction did. He's pretty much the center of the studio.
36:41
Without him, the whole thing falls apart. So yeah, there are people like him, uh, Ron Chan, who you may know from plants versus zombies, Colleen Coover, who sits between me and Steve, uh, who's been working on Bandit for the past few years and used to work with me on some of the X-Men first-class stuff, uh, which was a lot of fun. We've, we've had people go in and out all the time. Terry Dodson is still a member. And even though he actually lives out.
37:10
way outside of town, he's been getting into going to life drawing, which is great because it's like, come on, Terry Dodson draws about as good as you can draw, but he still thinks he needs to go to life drawing, you know? So he's been coming back into town, popping in the studio more often and going to his life drawing sessions at night. And we often host artists when they're hanging out in town and need somewhere to work.
37:35
You know, cause it's like, okay, we've got either drawing tables or we've got a tablet you can draw on something like that. To me, uh, the big draw of having a physical studio, everybody thinks the ideas, the ideal is working at home. The truth is you get sick of working in your own place and, uh, especially if your place is small. And, and even if it's not small artists and writers tend to either end up working in the attic or the basement.
38:03
and they don't get to work on the main floor because that's gotta be somebody's bedroom or something. So it's a, and you kind of go crazy, working by yourself. When you're out, sometimes like when you're having an uninspired day, all I gotta do is walk around the studio and see what people are working on. And then I get fired up and run back to my desk and start producing. Because I see somebody else doing something cool and then I like, oh yeah, that's what I'm supposed to be doing, something cool. And then I go.
38:33
run back and do it. I think in almost any town, you ought to try to find the other creatives like yourself. And it doesn't matter that you too don't have a similar style or approach or anything. Just the fact that someone else is over there doing something creative and you're doing it together, you'll be surprised how much more you'll produce. You'll get on a regular schedule. You'll start really turning. You won't.
39:00
drift all over the thing where you're up at three in the morning working and which is like it happens to everybody. But like the studio itself kind of forces us all into normal work hours like the rest of humanity has. So that's that right along itself is a good reason. Also I found an espresso maker for free and fixed it. So I brought that in and now we have good coffee all the time. Did they throw a parade for you because I could see you being heralded as a champion?
39:30
coffee and artists just go together? It does. It's like nothing makes you produce, especially in Portland where it rains all the time. That may also be part of the production thing here is the fact that you have to stay inside and get your work done because it's just cold and rainy outside. Now I might have to rethink my pitch to Jacksonville being the next comic cover. Yeah, everybody's just gonna wanna go out to the beach. Yeah, I know it's gonna get nothing done.
39:56
But on the topic of art really quick, I wanted to mention this really interesting article I found on Popverse. I don't know, I think it was from like last year, but the title is, "'DC Comic Creators' Dustin Nguyen, "'Tiny Howard, Jackson Landing, and Jeff Parker "'Reveal the One and Only Time You, "'As a Comic Creator Should Work for Free.' "'One, do you remember this "'or what you might have said at this panel?'
40:18
I really do not remember that. Okay, all good. What did I say? You said a free story. I think everyone on the panel was pretty much like, nah, you should never work for free, even if it's for exposure. But I think you were the one with a different take on this approach. You said, a free story led to 10 years of me working at Marvel. I woke up in the middle of night with a joke that was really funny. Then it goes on to say, noting that the sharing joke which featured Marvel characters led to years worth of work at Marvel, including your
40:46
you know, time writing Agents of Atlas, Thunderbolts, and Red Hulk. Does that, I guess, churn any memories? Yeah, no, I don't remember because it was for Ape Company. And what it actually was, it did have a joke that I ended up using in Agents of Atlas where a gorilla is firing four machine guns at the same time because, you know, four hands. Yeah, I think that was an issue one of this Agents of Atlas series. You know, M11's carrying him and he's shooting his plane off and that got spread all over the internet.
41:15
And I had done a version of that in this little 10 page story, which was just about apes fighting in world war II. And it was kind of me just doing a little homage to Joe Kubert. And it was just something where I got up in the middle of the night cause I couldn't stop thinking about the story. And so I did a rough thumbnail of everything, like what was in the story. And then, so I could go back to sleep and I don't do this a lot. Cause again, I was, I'm also mostly on the don't work for free crowd.
41:42
But when you're doing it for yourself, like I was doing, it's not really working for free, it's just something you want to make happen. And I did get paid for it, because a guy I know was doing a small comic and he ran it in there. And then the comic ended up with, editor I mentioned earlier, Mark Paniccia. And that was right when Mark had been given the task of doing the Marvel Adventures books.
42:10
And the whole marching orders of that series was they got tired of trying to do intro to Marvel books that looked like something kids might like. Kids never liked it. They decided, no, we won't make these look any different from the Marvel comics. These could be just the same artists, but they need to be standalone stories so kids and their parents aren't trying to find multiple parts of a story.
42:37
you know, when they're not used to reading comics and going into a shop all the time. So they just had to be done in one 22 pages. I should just ask him, but I, cause I keep speaking for him, but I think Mark was looking at it thinking, well, Jeff had no problem doing this in 10 pages. 22 ought to be a breeze, you know? And it kind of was, um, even though I would get like, I, like I did the Marvel Adventures Avengers book and that had a huge cast, um, but at the same time, it's like,
43:07
I was just, it was so fun to do. And they just went along with my craziest ideas. So I had a really good time on that, on all of those series. The first ones was Marvel Adventures Fantastic Four. So that was a lot of fun. It really helped me figure out how to end stories because I had that hard deadline of like, by page 22, this has to be a satisfying conclusion. That I think helped me so much in life
43:36
After doing a few dozen of those stories, you know how to land the plane or you at least know how to not completely screw yourself so that you get to the end and like, I've got nothing. Jeff, one thing about your career that I find fascinating is that there seems to be a good amount of an outsider perspective, at least my perspective, fresh restarts or new chapters and beginnings. You break in in the mid-90s. You're working at Malibu.
44:06
You're drawing like Wonder Woman, some other DC stuff, and then you pivot to drawing storyboards for animation, Big Eye and Rusty the Boy Robot. And then there's like a chunk of years where you're not working in comics, and then you get back in with the Marvel adventures, and then it just seems like your writing career just explodes once you're back at Marvel. Thunderbolts, Agents of Atlas, Hulk, and then obviously the DC stuff and now what you're doing.
44:34
with dynamite. At what point in your career did you feel like I made it? Never. Really? Yeah. I don't think you ever feel... It's weird. Somebody was saying just the other day, I just started on a thing and I suddenly feel like I've never done a story before. And I am absolutely related to that. You're like, oh, it's like I'm starting from scratch and I don't know what I'm doing. It's probably healthy. At least I'm going to tell myself that.
45:04
I feel like you should, if you can't approach it fresh and walk into it like that, you're probably doing repetitive stuff. And I really don't want to repeat myself, except once in a while, if I think there was a line or a scene or something in a story I did that no one really saw, I'll totally break that back out again. It's like, no, that was a good bit. I'm using that again. Sometimes I'll do it on purpose just to see if people will catch it.
45:33
The time period that it looks like I wasn't doing comics, I was doing my graphic novel, The Interman, which was, I was doing it in my spare time. So, and it was 120 some or 130 pages. And so it took me a few years and in my downtime to do it. So I was never really stopping with the comics, you know, and storyboards helped because storyboards paid well enough. Like I would work on a commercial or a music video.
46:02
Uh, that, you know, like if I didn't work for a couple of days, I could work on my comics and it was okay. I was still going to make my rent. You know, that sort of thing. That's when I was living in Los Angeles. I got asked what music videos have you saw reported? I just mentioned one the other day and like a lot of them were for bands I never heard of again. Yeah. When I done. Well, I can't remember who they are. Yeah. But I, I was joking on blue sky the other day about
46:30
Nelly playing at the Republican inauguration. And I was like, well, this is a bummer, man. That one of my favorite memories of storyboarding was working on one of his videos. They were shooting at Hollywood High. A lot of artists will get why this is important, but it was because I was able to come in and solve something really fast. And I had the great, uh, uh, setup of the fact that they had already the famous frames, the company that I was, uh, working through and they would.
46:59
they would represent you and take a cut and everything, but they'd find you a ton of work. So I went out there and they're shooting Batter Up, which I don't know if you remember the song or the video. Yeah, they were, I mean, as the name would apply, it was like a baseball field, right? They were all like going up. I feel like you just unlocked a memory of watching. Your Nelly knowledge is- Yeah, just been unlocked. Well, I mean, here's the thing. My sister was huge into Nelly at a time that I wasn't quite into like,
47:28
you know, like just mainstream music, especially like at that age. Um, but obviously like I'm familiar with a lot of that. I mean, am I, am I on the ball? Like, you know, I definitely, I just looked it up on YouTube really quick and the thumbnails. Yeah. I definitely remember this music video. Well, I had Sherman Hensley and I was like, Oh, that's right. And I'm walking with somebody and I was like, there's Sherman Hensley. And we're like, Oh wow. And it's like, I couldn't go bugging because he was, he was doing his own thing.
47:58
They had him, he did the George Jefferson dance and everything. And they were doing a riff on the good, on the, the moving on up theme song. And in that, but what I was there to work on was for the ride with me video, which was a takeoff of Smokey and the bandit. So like they're riding around like truckers and stuff like that on CBs. And, uh, the thing was I went in and I remember the, uh, the rep who sent me out there, he goes,
48:27
Yeah, we've had like three other guys go in. They don't like what anybody's doing. It's like, I don't know, maybe you, you do more cartoony stuff sometimes. Maybe you can figure it out. And I was like, well, and you feel like, oh man, I'm really walking into something because he had no idea what to tell me what it was. And I go out there to a trailer. That's, oh, they're at, they're shooting at Hollywood high and in Los Angeles. And.
48:54
And it's classic stuff like they do in movies. Like it's the middle of summer. So really all the grass would be burnt and brown, but they've painted all the grass to make it look like the baseball diamond and everything is a normal field. And every time I'm looking down and they're telling me like, don't step on that. You're going to get it all over your shoes. I was like, this is wild. This is class stuff. And, uh,
49:21
You know, and Nellie's up there doing the, at the pitcher's mound and they're, they're shooting bits of it. And then I go through and I go into a trailer and they like, yeah, we're doing this, uh, video that's like a trucker, smoky in the band at takeoff. And no one seems to get this. Like we want, uh, one of the girls, like you see on a mudflat, but more like a fly girl. And I guess people were having a hard time. Like, how am I going to make this fit the whole thing of the video? And it's like,
49:50
I gave her like a high weave and some big heels and stuff like that in the silhouette. It was the kind of thing like in animation it wouldn't have taken us any time to do. I swear in 20 minutes I was done and they went, thanks. And I was like, I felt like a hero and I was like, this was great. And if you look at the video, they put it really big on the back and the sides of the trucks. I think I'm going to go down an LA music video rabbit hole after this, which I'm kind of excited about because Jeff, right now the amount of cool points you have in my eyes is through the roof.
50:20
I did not know you worked on one of the better Nelly music videos. Yeah! You worked on multiple Nelly music videos! No, no, I just worked on the one. I just got to see the other one shoot. Okay, okay, okay, I got you. Because they were clearly doing them all back to back. That's the way they always do everything. I usually would come in doing storyboards. I was usually brought in really close to the time they were going to be shooting the actors and stuff.
50:45
And so I would have to like in a day, draw all these key scenes that the director had written down. And it is always funny to me. Like I liked going out because it's like one, they'll have food. I can eat that and, uh, and I can draw the craft service and. And then I'd be surprised. Like I would just draw in little things to fill in space. And then people were out hunting down props based on like some lamp or something I drew and I'm like, it can be anything. I really was just like a placeholder.
51:15
I just did that in a second. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to fit this vibe exactly. Well, that's back when music videos had like huge, like almost movie-sized budgets. I mean, maybe not movie-sized. Yeah, they did have big budgets. They had huge budgets. So I guess like, yeah, I guess they had enough money to waste time and resources looking for a very specific lamp. They did. And it almost feels like that is, that anecdote, I almost...
51:42
I feel like it's maybe echoed a few times throughout your career. Really, to boil it down, just being there at the right place, right time, and just being prepared. You mentioned that 10-page ape story that found its way to the Marvel editor. You got your opportunity, and that led to so many other titles. I guess I want to go back to my question that I brought up. I guess, why comics? What is it about the comic art form and industry?
52:12
that has kept you around so long when you've got the opportunity to do like storyboards and maybe go to all these other industries. What is it about comics? Maybe it's because of the fact that you just get to tell so many stories. And with a relatively small crew, you can put together something that sticks with people and do a whole comic. Like I do always wanna work in movies and things like that, but it's...
52:41
It's hard to do that. It's hard to get your vision through without it being compromised many times along the way. And yeah, comics, like anybody who can sit down and if you can draw and write, and if you can letter even, you know, or in color, like you can do the whole thing yourself, probably not that fast, but you can tell a whole story that sucks people in, you see people all the time, you know, like, um,
53:10
You know, you see Dave Bilkey doing stuff like Dog Man or Raina Teligmeier and all of her work, you know, that is some of the top selling comics in the country easily. You know, and you know it is because they don't even sell in comic stores. They sell in bookstores and they're in libraries and stuff like that. I mean, and like when
53:37
Bill Watterson used to do Calvin and Hobbes, you know, it's like, that's just him, uh, getting his whole vision out. Um, I like collaborating with other people, but I also like hogging the ball sometimes and doing more of this stuff. It is. I mean, it's, I think it's probably the difference of like, if you were acting, you know, you do a movie or something, then to let you get to work once or twice a year and
54:04
But if you work on stage, you get to go out every night for a long time and get that instant audience reaction. And that's like a drug for a lot of people. And I totally get that. I love, that's why I like doing the weekly series at Christmas time because you get to have reactions like instantly. And then like after a few days, another one's out. And it's kind of fun. It's almost like having a TV show.
54:34
But you're right, I should work in TV and movies. So, yeah. Well, Jeff, on the topic of collaborators, I've got a list of four artists that you've worked with throughout your years of being in comics that are some of my personal favorites. And I would love to hear any stories, memories, or words that come to mind when you hear these names, okay? Okay. And obviously this is not a very, you know, a comprehensive list of every artist. These are just some of my favorites.
55:02
Maybe you could share some stories at the end of this. But I'll start off with Kev Walker, who you worked with on the Thunderbolt series for Marvel in 2010, which was a personal favorite one of mine and I think my first introduction to Kev Walker. So what comes to mind when you think of Kev Walker? The great thing is when I started working with him, I was brought onto Thunderbolts a few issues before that. And
55:27
And I'm certain, pretty much at that point, I was just there to run out the clock on, uh, the version of the thunderbolts that Warren Ellis and Andy Diggle had been doing. And. I don't know. It was funny because the artists and I, uh, at the time, our stuff didn't really go together at all. I was like, a lot of people tell me they enjoyed it. I was like, this, I don't, I feel like our tones just clash terribly. Um, and then Kev came on.
55:58
And I wrote up the story the way I wanted to do it. I didn't know how Kev was going to approach it. But then he kind of came in with his big over the top stuff and his, uh, kind of mean sense of humor. And it hit the tone so dead on that then it sort of, it was like a power up where suddenly I could like, Oh, I can go farther with this because Kev can go farther with this, you know.
56:25
And it was funny because at first, like I'd write to the emails and Kev wouldn't respond to me. And I was like, man, does he not like me or something? What's going on? How come he ever says anything in the emails and stuff? But then at some point he just suddenly broke down, wrote me a long email and like, and we got along great. You know, he was just like, you get a lot of people, I don't know, trying to. Treat you like a.
56:53
their illustrator or something like that, who's just supposed to do their puppet shows or something like that. And I think he got that I wasn't that way and that like I was going to follow his leads often. So he felt a lot more freedom, I hope. Uh, cause we certainly had a blast on the thing. God, the guy's a super talent though. He's incredible. Well, yeah, absolute bad-ass. Oh, and Frank Martin was coloring him. And I felt like Frank was like, Frank's one of those guys who, uh,
57:24
He can like crack the code on any artist he works with. Like it may take him a couple of issues, but he'll figure out the right approach for them. And a lot of colorists, I don't think, as good as they are, can't do that. You know, a lot of people just simply do what they do that looks good. But that guy could focus on different artists and here's what's gonna look good with them. And he did it with Walker, he did it with Shelby, and he still does it every time I look at anything he's doing, I'm like, oh yeah, he's...
57:53
easily one of the best colors working. Agreed. All right, how does Mike Allred, who you worked with on Batman 66 for DC in 2013, give me one memorable story or memory, or I guess any key words when you think of Mike Allred. Yeah, Allred's great. He would always do the covers. Like they'd call and ask me like, what's gonna be in this issue? And I said, I think King Tut. Or something like that. Like we were often going so far ahead.
58:24
And it's like, uh, in some alligators, maybe, uh, crocodiles, I mean, because we're going to have killer croc, uh, be created in this and, um, and then he would go nuts on, you know, uh, already would do whatever he would do. And then a lot of times I would look at his and like, how can I make the story more fit this cover that he just came up with that didn't really have to do with what I was going to do. So it would kind of create a fun little back and forth where I would come up with something extra.
58:54
A lot of times just to make the, sometimes I would let it just simply not have anything to do with the story inside. It didn't matter as long as the cover looked good anyway. It was always fun watching his covers come in on that. But then they, he and his brother ended up, Lee ended up doing the final story of the series, where they, and it makes sense for the final story, but it's where they did the like explained the title sequence.
59:22
that you would see at the show where all the gangsters are coming in, they're fighting them. They actually went back and figured out a story to go with that, which I thought was pretty clever. That's a really cool way of looking at an existing thing and then finding the space. Where can I tell an interesting story from this one minor minutiae maybe thing? Yeah, they made it work. Yeah.
59:49
His creativity is like through the roof. So it doesn't surprise me. He found like, you know, one of my favorite initial disappointment that turned out to be great was, uh, on X-Men first class, we were doing an annual and Mike was supposed to be doing one of the stories. So I wrote it thinking very like, this is very all red stuff. He's going to like this. Uh, and it's where they go to a beatnik bar and, um, and then they have a weird hallucinations. And I thought, this is going to be,
01:00:18
right up his alley and then like Mike could only do like part of it, but he brought in Nick Dragata who I didn't know what it was like and yeah, Nick's new on the scene and uh, and then Nick drew it and it was amazing and I think, and I'm trying to remember if Mike inked it or Nick just inked it. Um, but, uh, that started a friendship for years, like Nick and I have worked together on tons of stuff.
01:00:46
Uh, stuff that's not even in like the regular big two comics and things and, uh, and have been good friends ever since. Uh, so that was, yeah, the one time Mike turned down a job still worked out. So, uh, yeah. And Nick, of course, is the king of the industry at the moment for working on, uh, absolute Batman. Uh, he's, he's such a good guy. Get him on the show. You'd have a good time with him. No, Jeff, if you can help me set that up, that'd be awesome. Okay.
01:01:15
No, I'd absolutely love to have Nick Dugout on the show. OK, and then what comes to mind when you think of Evan Doc Schaener, who you worked with on Future Quest for DC in 2016, which I find interesting in relation to your time as a story bar artist working on animation. You're working on this series that's bringing back classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons and bringing them into the DC forefront. What was it like working with Doc Schaener on that? Anything memorable?
01:01:44
Oh, it's fantastic. And that was like the culmination of our big run together because we had started working at dynamite on flash Gordon. I'm still really proud of those flash Gordon stories and Doc knocked it out of the park every time, um, he always like draws characters with a lot of heart. And that's one of the things like somebody else can do a very flashy one, but there's few people who can do like him where it's like, Oh my God, you just.
01:02:10
with a simple drawing made me care about this character I normally don't even like. Um, but that's the, that's the power that guy has. But then from there, that's when we went on to the, uh, the Johnny Quest stuff. And to get it back to Darwin Cook, I pretty sure it's because Darwin suggested, like, I think they initially talked to him about how to do a big crossover with Space Ghost and Johnny Quest and everybody. And Darwin had just read the Flash Gordon stuff.
01:02:40
And he said, get Parker and Shaner. Wow. And he's like, I'll help them, uh, do the, the, uh, the whole pitch for it. And he did. He initially gave me some cool scenes that he had thought of. He said, like, I don't know what the story is, but here's what I picture. Like Johnny and Haji zooming around in jet packs in the jungle, uh, the Everglades. And then they find the wrecked Phantom cruiser and stuff like that. And it was, it was perfect intro stuff. And
01:03:09
And it was exciting for me because I got to see that Darwin thought of stories came to him the same way they come to me where they don't quite all make sense yet, but I'm getting scenes that need to be there. And sometimes you have to go back and drop the scenes cause they don't work with whatever you came up with, but I made everything he said work. Um, yeah, that run was, was awesome. I mean, from the writing to the, I mean, obviously Doc Shaner and Steve rude at that too, you know, um,
01:03:35
The concept, I mean, it was a lot of fun. And as someone that grew up on Hannah Barbera cartoons, you know, there was that nostalgic fact. I think I actually ended up buying that series for my dad, who was kind of like falling out of comic books at the time, but like he found a lot of joy. Oh, he loved it. He wanted so much more. And I think, you know, DC knew they had something on their hands. Cause you know, the amount of series that spun out of, you know, that future quest series was, you know, it was an embarrassment to riches if you were a fan of Hannah Barbera cartoons. Yeah.
01:04:04
It works surprisingly well. Yeah. And, um, Evan's one of the easiest artists I ever had to work with. Cause I feel like he and I, uh, so thoroughly on the same wavelength. A lot of times, like I write a script for him different than I'd write for anyone else, like I will, cause I've gone back and looked at some of our scripts together. And it's like practically incomplete sentences. Cause I know he's going to know what I want. And, uh, it's like.
01:04:34
here's how you're going to do it. I know how you're going to do it. And then he just, he leaves that behind and does his own thing. Um, like one of the last things we got to work on, we did a, they were doing an anniversary special for Aquaman. And Evan had always wanted to work on Aquaman when I was writing it, but like it's, there was no room for it. And, uh, so I was like, Oh, can we ask Evan? Like he, he always wanted to do an Aquaman story and, uh, like
01:05:03
It's like, this will be fun to write one that's like a standalone story with him. And that's one of my favorite things he's ever done. I feel like he really killed on it. Um, so yeah, I always love working with him and, uh, it's so hopefully we'll get to work together again. It's like, he's just, he's easily one of my favorite collaborators. My fingers are crossed for sure. I would love to see you guys team back up. All right. And the last artist on my list, and this one's kind of like a two-fold question.
01:05:30
But also, I think very kind of topical considering the new Captain America movie that's coming out that'll feature said character here. But I wanted to hear your thoughts or what comes to mind when you think of Gabriel Hardman, who you worked for on a couple of series both on some Agents Atlas stuff, but also primarily on Hulk for Marvel in 2010. And you were coming right off of the Jeff Loeb and Ed McGinnis Hulk series where they introduced Red Hulk. So I guess, you know, I want to hear about your experience working with Gabriel Hardman. But also, what does it feel like?
01:06:01
You know, like you were working and writing Red Hulk and now you get to see him live action. Does that, I guess, do anything to you and your perspective on your career? Like, does it, I don't know, like I guess what are your thoughts on seeing like a character that you were writing for so long, finally make it to the big screen and the excitement for it? Yeah, I definitely wasn't picturing him as Harrison Ford. So that's pretty wild. Yeah, I still can't really see it.
01:06:27
It's weird, you know, I don't, in a way I don't feel connected to it at all. Cause I just feel like the comics, the thing that I was doing and this is something else, but then sometimes you'll watch it and you go, Oh, they used our thing like in a, the Aquaman movie, they used a lot of what Paul Pelletier and I were doing with, you know, Aquaman's mom. And, uh, you know, it was like, Oh, that, so you did read the comics and it was like, good, now give me some money. And, um,
01:06:56
Working with Hardman was always great. Uh, he's, he's a good friend and, uh, I loved when he came on to Atlas, especially because, you know, I was able to break it up so that like we had a separate timeline and we're, we're visiting Atlas in the fifties when they first started and he was the perfect person to do that because he doesn't even have to look up reference. He's seen so much of that stuff.
01:07:24
He could pull the cars and jets and clothes out of his head. Though he did research it obviously, but you know, it's like, he just nailed it so thoroughly. I was like, I loved working on Atlas with him. I felt like he really got a certain part of that, especially the final storyline that we did when they bring in the 3D man. All the stuff he did on that, I think was just a pinnacle.
01:07:51
All the Red Hulk stuff was great too, but I think he and I would have been happy continuing on for another year doing Atlas at that point as well. But we switched over to Red Hulk and I'm really proud of those stories too. I felt like we created some good villains that they still need to use. The Zero One character in Black Fog and all that sort of thing. And the other watcher that we had, Urevo. But the thing is, Hardman likes to write.
01:08:21
himself and he's a great writer. So I don't see us being able to team up in that way again, anytime soon. Because why would he? He's just going to come up with his own ideas and write them. When he's not storyboarding whatever the biggest budget movie is of the year, which he constantly is doing. It's always funny because you always find out later, yep, he storyboarded that one too. Most of the Christopher Nolan stuff, you know. Jeff, as someone that's been in the industry since
01:08:50
the mid 90s and you know, we're talking about the different changes that you've seen. I guess what are your thoughts on the comic industry today? I feel like the conversation that we're seeing a lot, especially like online is, you know, are comics dying? Are they in trouble with the, you know, popularity of manga and anime? And then now, you know, kind of staying topical, you know, we're seeing like the possibility of what do these potential tariffs, you know, look like for the comic industry and the price of comics, things like that. As someone that has seen, you know,
01:09:19
the industry kind of fluctuate in the good and the bad. I guess, what are your thoughts on the industry today? If you could change one thing about it that you feel like is long overdue, what would that be? All right, that's a good question. The one thing that can get around weirdness like tariffs and stuff like that would simply be if we just read them digitally more. Huh, so you're an advocate for better digital comics experience, or digital comics in general. All I care about is that stories get read.
01:09:49
You know, it's like, just cause I prefer them in book form. What here's what I going back to Batman 66. Um, at the time, I don't know if you remember this, but. Wasn't it a DC digital first? It was, it was D it was digital first. Good memory. And, uh, so we had to do the stories specifically to be read in the digital format, which is why you didn't get any full page splashes. It always broke. Two.
01:10:19
And so, and it was that way for a long time. And then at some point they said, okay, now we're not doing that. You can do it however you want to do it. But it was good practice for like, okay, having to think digitally. And it seemed to me with comixology happening at the time that it was just going to be, I figured like, oh, in a few years, we'll just be reading all monthlies digitally. And then we'll just buy the trades as a collection and paper. And they'll just sell like that. And I thought.
01:10:49
That's what I was sure was going to happen. And then Amazon bought Comixology and kind of forgot about it. And, uh, yeah, unfortunately, like I felt like we were really going somewhere and then it just dropped. Hopefully it'll start picking back up again. I think if somebody just makes a simple format in a way that everybody's comfortable with and they know how to get the books, cause that would really be a
01:11:18
a real equalizer where your smaller groups could potentially have as big as impact as any of the big companies. I don't see any downside to it. Then again, once you get enough that you've got enough material, you could just print a paperback. It's like everybody gets what they want. I'm hoping that instead of seeing this as a loss, we will take advantage of this.
01:11:45
trying to get digital comics going even harder this time. It's also a problem right now with diamond comics distribution is going through a lot in filing bankruptcy of I forget which number bankruptcy it is. I think it's chapter 11. Now that's the one where you keep going. Yeah, that's like just the corporate restructure. Yeah, you're trying to pay things off. Yeah, exactly.
01:12:12
But still everybody's scrambling, you know, it's like they want their books to come out and it's hard on stores. Stores are like suddenly having to look a billion different places to get their inventory. It's a scary time, but again, comics retailers like comics artists are multidisciplined and can do it. They may not like doing it, but watch, they'll figure it out because they're smart people. Again, it's scary, but comics somehow.
01:12:41
seems to weasel out of the rubble of everything that happens every time. So I'm pretty confident it'll keep doing it. Jeff, if you're confident, I'm confident. I like the message here. Comics will survive. Ladies and gents, this is the Short Box Podcast, and we just finished talking to Jeff Parker about his career in comics, transitioning from an artist to a writer, still being an artist at that, working with big companies like Disney and all the awesome stuff he's currently doing with Dynamite Entertainment, like the new Zootopia series.
01:13:10
which is available now. Issue two actually comes out February 12th, so that would be next week, or maybe even the same day this episode drops. Depends on how busy I am this week. Zootopia is available every month out through Dynamite Comics. If you wanna follow Jeff and stay up to date with everything he's got going on, I'll have some links to his website and socials in the show notes. Go give him a follow, all right? Jeff, do you got any parting words or shameless plug before we wrap up? Just go to your local shop and show them some love right now. They're anxious.
01:13:40
And just simply going in and getting a comic would, like when they're least expecting it, would be a nice move for both of you. I co-sign all of that, Jeff. That's a great way to end this show. There you have it, Short Bikes Nation. That's the end of the show. Thank you for hanging out. Thanks for being here. And a special shout out if you've made it this far. If you enjoyed this episode and you have some thoughts or comments that you wanna share with us.
01:14:07
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01:14:36
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01:15:05
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01:15:34
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