Dear Watchers: an omniversal comic book podcast

Rob: Welcome to Dear Watchers, a comic book Omniverse podcast where we do a deep dive into the multiverse.
Guido: We are traveling through the stories and the worlds that inspire and make up all the universes we love.
David:
Guido: And your watchers on this journey are Me, Guido, Me Rob, and an.
Rob: Extra very special guest member of the Council of Watchers, comics writer, blogger, podcaster, producer, director, editor and expert in all things pulp, David Avallone. Hi, David.
David: Hey, guys. Nice to thanks for having me on the show. Thank you.
Guido: Thank you for joining us.
David:
Rob:
Rob: I know Guido
Rob: is going to tell our community a little bit more about you.
Guido: Yes. And my gosh, there's a lot to tell. So I hope I do your work justice. David, you have activism and pulp storytelling in your blood from your family. You're a fellow New Jersey, in which we both are, and you have connections to upstate New York, which we both do. But your career. You have um directed films and shorts and music videos and comedy series. A pilot with Maria Bamford and James Or Baniac, which is very cool. I saw you just announced that you wrote an episode for an upcoming Warner Brothers animation thing. You are a podcaster on Pulp and Pulp Stories. You read Pulp Stories and go through the history and give commentary. And then, of course, you are a comic book writer of all of the Elvira books for Dynamite, the Betty Page and Betty Page Undapound, which we'll talk about for Dynamite, The Twilight Zone and The Shadow. That's one title combined. Some Zaro, some Doc Savage, some Vampirella. Uh you did a project drawing Blood with Kevin Eastman. That's a bit of a meta self parody. You contributed to the Love is Love anthology for IDW, which we love. And surely there is more out there. And out the week that this episode is airing is Elvira in Horror Land, a really awesome sort of sequel to Elvira meets Vincent Price, where she enters the universe of different horror movies. Lots more on that during our discussion, but just wow.
David: Thank you. Yeah, that sounds like a lot of stuff. It's a good thing I'm 56 years old. It explains how I had the time to get it all.
Rob: Well, like I said, though, on another interview, there's some people with 56 year olds with a lot shorter resume than that, though.
David: Well, I think it helps that I'm a restless sort, and I have tried any number of ways to make a buck and to express myself artistically. So you end up sort of being all over the map. I mean, before I was in the opening credits of movies, I was in the end credits of movies for a very long time as a grip, as a first assistant director, as a camera guy, like lighting, I've done a lot. I've never done makeup or hair. But uh aside from that there's still time. Yeah, there's still been I did my own makeup and hair today, so there's that. Some of that was sheer curiosity. Some of it was. I've uh always been I mean, at my best, I'll say I say yes to things and even things that I'm like, do I want to do that? I actually just got in. I think it's hilarious. I don't have a writing agent, but I have an acting agent, and I got a gig a couple of months ago playing a lawyer in a low budget movie for a day. And it was a thing where a friend who had just started with an agency reached out and said, hey, we get a lot of calls for middle aged dudes, and we're kind of a young hot people agency. So can you come in and not be the young, hot person? Sure. Uh i think I saw that you.
Rob: Were in La Confidential, which feels like the most dangerous.
David: Actually, believe it or not, there was a TV pilot that never went anywhere. Uh keifer Sutherland played um I'm spacing on his name, not Elrond, um uh had a pretty good cast, and I had a short bit as a news photographer in it, and it never got released. Never went anywhere, but it was again, a lot of the extra work I've done, I did extra work off and on for years was largely that sounds like a cool experience. When I was completely out of work once I signed up with central uh casting, this turns into a comic book story, by the way, and how extra casting lines work is. You register and you call in and you listen to a recording and you hear if they're looking for anybody like you. And then you call them. They never call you. So a couple of days after I registered, I got a phone call, and they said, hey, can you still fit into a size 36, 38 short, regular tuxedo? I said, yeah, one of those would fit me. And they said, well, we're uh coming down for a fitting. We're doing the shadow. And I said, because I'm nervous. And I was like, wow, am I going to the Cobalt club? And he was like, this script is top secret. How do you know it's a scene in the Cobalt Club? Because that's where the Shadow drinks, is martinis and hangs out with Margot Lane friend and companion. And they were like, wow, okay, then you know this character. So uh if you watch the movie when Margot enters, there's a man in glasses with his hands clasped in front of himself standing next to her just as she walks in. And uh so I'm uh in the shadow, which I thought was funny. And then I write the character.
Guido: That is so cool.
David: 20 some years later, I end up writing the character. They cut the scene, but I was in Deep uh impact also. And it was absolutely just a thing of like, do you want to go play a NASA scientist and go to Edwards Air Force Base and be in the large vehicle assembly room where they make Rockets. And I was like, that sounds awesome. So my career has been like, oh, I can go to Edwards Air Force Base and be a NASA scientist. That sounds cool.
Rob: That's going to be the next Dynamite mash up is The Shadow meets Deep Impact. And he has to stop the asteroid coming.
David: Given that he knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men, the Shadow might think asteroid could save a bit of time, really take a lot of stuff off my plate if I let the asteroid in.
Guido: There's a lifelong of storytelling that you've.
Rob: Had, and we're really excited to kind of dive a little bit deeper. We actually have three segments to kind of structure this conversation. So we have origins of the story, exploring Multiversity and pondering possibilities. So we normally explore an alternate universe with these. We are thrilled to speak with expert world builder David Avaloni in each of these sections. So with that, dear watchers, welcome to episode 43. And let's take a ride through the Oliverse with David Avaloni.
David: Thank you. Right now on this very show, you're going to get the answer to all your questions. Our amazing story begins a few years ago.
Rob: So for our origins of the story, we want your origin, David. So we have a few questions to kick things off.
Guido: Yeah. Uh can you tell us? So you do have this extraordinary history, and our listeners might not know about your legacy, but we want to know more about that and how you realized you wanted to tell stories. And then we have a lot of questions about how you do that and how you work. But how did you realize you wanted to be a story?
Rob: Of course, your father was a storyteller as well.
David: So in your bones, it seems for those who don't know, my father was a pulp fiction writer published uh between the years 1953 and 1985. He wrote roughly 200 published novels. And sort of like my career. And because he was an inspiration to me in every genre, he wrote as many Gothic romances as he wrote private eye novels, as he wrote TV tie ins and all of that kind of thing. A uh famous quote from him that I think his words to live by is a writer can write anything from a garden seed catalog to the Holy Bible. And sometimes it's the garden seed catalog, and you bear down and you write the garden seed catalog. You're lucky when it's not, but you still write it. And if you can, it's all autobiography up to a point. And you find the writer's job is, what do I know about garden seeds? What do I personally have to say about garden seeds? And if you can't answer that question about almost anything, it's going to be a Rocky road for you. And you're not uh going to end up producing a lot of readable work um uh to go all the way back because my father was a novelist, I don't think I particularly thought that was the direction I was going to go. And he was a huge film buff. And I think had he been born in my generation, he would have done what I did and wanted to be a filmmaker. And I made uh films from a pretty young age. I wrote from a pretty young age. I won a playwrighting contest in high school with something. I literally have always been fast. I literally wrote a play in homeroom and handed it in by third period and was like and it's like an incredibly derivative Twilight Zone thing, actually, um not literally, but it's an eerie story with a twist at the end and crazy uh derivative. But you do that. I was making Star Wars movies on Super Eight back when it was hard, back when you were scratching the laser blasts onto the actual celluloid. About that in Starlog magazine. I think uh I've always been a storyteller in that respect. And at the risk of sounding how it sounds, I realized relatively quickly that the ability to write. Oh, uh boy, can you cut a lot of corners when you can write? You can write uh a paper on a book. You read five pages of if you're smart and if you know how to write, you can develop an opinion on something in the first ten pages of novel and go, you know what? If I write my paper on this, I don't have to finish this book. So uh speed and the ability to sort of see uh story as it develops and you develop an eye for you spend your whole life reading stories and watching movies and plays, and you get a sense of narrative, you get a sense of to give a ridiculous uh example. And again, I'm um not trying to break my arm patting my own back, but I guess the twist ending M. Night Shyamalan has never surprised me once in his entire career. Uh six minutes into the 6th sense, I went, this story is only interesting if Bruce Willis is dead and he's wearing the same clothes he was wearing when he was shot. And no director is that lazy. No costume designer is so lazy, let's put him in the same suit he was shot in. It's like, that's significant. He's dead. So I then spent uh the rest of the movie going, none of the experts are looking at him. No one's making eye contact with you except the little kid who dead people. So, like, I spent that entire movie annoyed, waiting to be proven wrong and waiting for the twist to be something more clever or more interesting. Jacob's uh ladder. 20 minutes in, I went, if this is occurring at Owl Creek bridge, I am going to be so mad. Give me all these red herrings about Jacob's ladder and experimental drugs and then have it be a soldier dying on the table, having his last fantasy that was old when The Twilight Zone did it in 1962. Please don't do it. It's an Ambrose Beer story from the 19th century. But I think anyone that spends any time in their life picking apart story and how it works, it's impossible to not think, well, this isn't an interesting story unless that happens. So there's your twist. And I think if uh I hadn't been told that the $0.06 had a big twist, I wouldn't have been looking for it and I wouldn't have thought about it, but because I was like, oh, this thing has a twist ending. Well, there's only one twist presenting itself. There it is. It's all a large digression. Uh so I made films. Um i got out of College and started working in the film industry. I moved to Los Angeles. One of my best friends from youth is a guy named Mike Stern. Mike wrote all of the Star Wars role playing game stuff, and he hired me to write a book for the company for a different game. And then he hired me to write some Star Wars short stories, one of which, for whatever reason, Lucasfilm loved and made an action figure set and a pop up book. There's a Pulp Today episode about that uh story. I think it's called uh Star Wars Mandalorians and me because not for nothing. I wrote a story in which a Boba Fett and IG 88 fight and a friend of mine who's a Star Wars obsessive after Mandalorian dropped was like, so the first episode of Mandalorian was a guy in Mandalorian armor and an IG robot knocking heads. And given how much Felony and Favreau are obsessed with the toys and the holiday special and the Ewok movies and all of the, like, obscure shit, they probably saw the Battle of the Bounty Hunters. I don't think they read my short story. I think they saw the Battle of the Bounty Hunters action figure set and went, oh, yeah, that's cool looking. Let's do that. Anyway, all that to say, I've bounced around forever. I wrote some episodes of VR Troopers after working as a oh my gosh.
Rob: I love VR Troopers.
David: I wrote four episodes of VR Troopers, including the one where Caitlin splits in two. It's very significant to the mythology, but before uh that, I had been a grip on the Power Rangers for six months on the first season of the Power Rangers, and one of the directors uh of that went off to produce VR Troopers. And I said, I'm trying to get out of this glorified construction worker part of the industry. Give me a shot. And he let me uh pitch some episodes and he liked the pitches. And I got the gig. And then they canceled the show, which is sort of the story of my life. But I started making short films and bounced around the industry for a while. Had a very frustrating time trying to be a studio screenwriter in the nothing got made and no money changed hands after literally years of my time were wasted trying to do that. And that's when I started focusing on indie films. I literally said to myself after the third time it had happened that a development executive had made me do, like, multiple drafts and then lost faith in the project. I said, I'm not going to write anything that I can't shoot for under $200,000 not going to do it. And then I went through a long period of that good role in making some of those movies. And that didn't make me rich or famous either, which is fine. I always say I uh have an essay called Success or The Call Bluff. Everybody, when they're a teenager, says, I'll just sweep the stage. I just want to be in show business. And then they don't get that development deal when they're 24, and they go, this is bullshit. I'm going back to Duluth. And I never went back to Duluth, even though nobody offered me the development deal. But for 35 years, I woke up every morning and I haven't had a straight job in a very long time. And whether it's something that I'm proud of, that's great and awesome, and I love it, and it's an expression of my feelings and my thoughts and my talent, or if it's I'm just going to do this thing, but it's editing a movie. It's not putting up drywall. So I'd rather be editing a movie, even if it's one. But I was burning out on that in 2014. And a friend, uh a colleague, read an old script of mine and said, I can't help you in your film career, but I can introduce you to some comic book Editors. And she introduced me to Joe Ryban at Dynamite, and we really hit it off at San Diego ComicCon. And he said, I'll go back to New York and see what I can dig up for you. And Joe knows my background, and that has very much, I think, influenced the kind of things he's offered me. I think I got Betty Page because my dad wrote Detective novel set in the because I'm married to a retired burlesque dancer. Same with Elvira. I'm married to a show girl, so I get that and that world and that feeling better than uh most middle age straight guys. When I met Elvira, I introduced her uh to my wife, and she's like, I was so sure you were gay. And I said, Why is that? She's like, no straight man has ever been able to write my character worth shit.
Rob: Coming from her, that's the highest possible compliment.
David: She was like, you and John Paragon, man. You're the guys that uh can do it. And I said, Well, I'm married to a Showgirl. And to me, it's the sensibility. While there is definitely a queerness to the Elvira sensibility, and there always has been, even though she just came out of that closet yesterday, and I made um references again. I wasn't making a definitive statement about anything, but I had her say, we're here, we're queer. Get used to it in a comic. Couple of months before she came out, and it was one of those uh things where I put it in and she was referring to herself, invented price. But I put it in the script, and I was like, I'm really curious to see if Cassandra kicks this one back and says, no, I shouldn't say nailed right on through. I went, okay, maybe learned a thing. Maybe she didn't notice it. And then she came out in her memoir. I was like, well, score one for me. Um but I said, the sensibility. While there is a queerness to it, it's also ultimately, it's Beautiful woman doing ancient Jewish stand up comic, working blue in the cat skills at midnight. It's that persona to me. That's the persona. It's not so much a gay persona. It's this thing on uh send the kids out of the room. It's going to get a little blue. And Cassandra uh always pushes me bluer, which is funny. And every time I come up with I put something in that I think, oh, that's really filthy. I should maybe not do that. That's always the panel that I see on Instagram that someone has taken a screen grab of the very first issue when she runs into Mary Shelley and Byron and Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley says, we uh were looking for a friend when we came across your coffin. And she says, well, I hope you toweled it off afterwards. And I was like, wow, that is such a gross bodily fluid joke you're making in the first issue. And then Cassandra didn't flag it, and the audience loved it. And I was like, okay, so we can be making jizz jokes in the comic. Good to know. So um I don't know if that.
Guido: Well, it tells us right up front what you expect.
David: I don't know if that answers your question, but yeah, the storytelling thing has always been a part of my life. And even my mother was an activist, and that job is also storytelling. One of the things I talk about a lot in my abortion rights activism. I'm a history obsessive, uh and I think it's just not widely known that abortion was legal and uncontroversial in the United States in the late 19th century. That's also a story I tell, and um I think it's a responsibility to use that to get information across. And Americans are taught history very poorly by people who aren't storytellers. Uh i'm obsessed for various reasons uh with the life and times uh of Ulysses Grant. And when I tell people stories from his life story, they're like, wow, no one ever told me that in history class. I'm like, yeah, they're history mavens. They're not writers. They're not storytellers so much. But I read great history books when I was a kid, and they inspired me. They're such great stories. Grant's life is an amazing story that I'm still kind of like, how are there nine movies about Marilyn Monroe and not one about Ulysses Grant? We literally saved the entire country. It's an odd choice, but we need one more movie about Princess Di, though the through line there.
Rob: I feel like in reading about history and also, like you were saying, watching all movies and things like that is taking it in because I was always shocked when I went to art school, I always watched like, two movies every Friday, Saturday night with my best friend. And then I got to art school, and it was like all the people who wanted to be filmmakers who had never seen a black and white movie in their life. So I feel like for you, I feel like so much of both on the activism side and then, of course, uh in your writing side is absorbing what's already been put out into the world and then finding new ways to tell those kind of stories.
David: Oh, sure. Is that true? Yeah, absolutely. And tracking the history of the reason I did Pulp today as, like a timekiller pandemic project, and also, honestly, as an excuse to shave, like, I wanted an excuse to put on nice work. You look like a human being for five minutes every day. But part of it to me is I think it's so useful and necessary to know what your work is on the back of what your uh you know, I did a panel once about Zoro because I had written a Zoro comic, and I made a lot of jokes at the expense of Batman and a great comics writer and friend in the audience. Michael David is like, I got to keep bagging on Batman. I'm like, because he has no fun and Zoro has a lot of fun, and it's sad that he does the same job. Zoro is like this thing where you help out the poor people. This is actually kind of great, and I'm having a wonderful time doing it. And Batman is very unhappy about the whole thing in modern version. Uh but uh to write Batman and not understand Zoro and the Shadow and the Scarlet Pimpernel and Robin Hood, all these noblemen who fight to help out the peasants, that goes back to Moses. Man, it's uh so useful to know where you came from and what the tropes are and what's been done before. I am not a fan of Quentin Tarantino, and I have a joke about him, that his movies are trivia contests. And the reward for getting all the answers is you hate the movie. You recognize all of his influences you're like, so what are you bringing? What have you done for me? I know what Don Siegel has done for me. I know what Hong Kong action movies have done for me. What are you doing for this? And it's a neat I was talking online with some friends about Avatar um recently and Cameron is an amazing ripoff artist. But like Lucas, it's the remixing that makes it good. Not a lot of people notice this, um but aliens borrows a lot from the giant Ant movie. Them the little girl who's the only survivor who's like shellshocked from seeing the giant insect creatures that kill their family, the GI's underground in Catacombs with Flamethrowers. That's all from them. But one is a 1950s giant monster movie and one is a science fiction movie on another planet when George Lucas lifts uh the burning homestead scene from The Searchers and puts it on Tatoween. That's interesting. When Quentin Tarantino takes the briefing, the paratrooper Regiment scene out of The Dirty Dozen and puts it in Inglorious bastards. That's just another World War II commando. Let's the same movie, man. All you've added is profanity, which I'm sure Lee Marvin would have done if they'd let him. And he would have done it. And I love Brad Pitt. He would have done it better. Don't make me watch Brad Pitt and go. Lee Marvin did this so much better. And on that line in the original movie, you have Donald Sutherland and John Cassavetes. And these guys are nice, but not one of them is John Casavettes. Or don't make me compare you to the Avatar. One of the reasons that it's not as good as Alien, The Abyss is 2001, a Space Odyssey underwater. That's an interesting thing to do with 2000 and Space Odyssey. And to make Hal 9000 a Navy Seal who's suffering from pressure psychosis. I can't remember what it's called. That's an interesting take. And the aliens are under the water. Interesting take. Avatar, though, uh is just John Carter of Mars. But here's the twist. It's on an alien planet, right? That's the same. That's not different. That's actually exactly the same. You haven't changed. It would be great if Edgar Rice Burrows hadn't already done that to the White Savior story, then that would be something new. That would be an exciting remix. But when it's just Fern Gully meets Dejah Thoris, it's not. You haven't given me a new thing. And to me that's the you can have the references. I employ references in my work left and right and in Elvira, it's parody, which is a completely different thing than just taking the old idea and presenting it as your own. But when you take an old idea um Outland as an example, it's just high noon. But it's high noon on a moon of Jupiter. That's interesting. That's an interesting change. And if you don't ring that kind of change. What did you bring to the table? What did you bring to the party?
Guido: So how do you approach you have such a vast knowledge of story in all different mediums and you're talking about the ways of remixing and building on. How do you approach research for any of these projects where you are making references to existing properties? So much of your work is in existing properties. So how do you approach research?
David: Sometimes it's like, for example, with The Shadow, uh I did not read every shadow novel, and I did not read every shadow comic. I'm familiar enough with the character from the pulp, who is a very different character from the radio show, and I actually in a multiverseal way. I addressed that in Twilight's own The Shadow because I thought that was an interesting way to go with it. It's funny. I was talking to uh a great comic Strider named Si Sperrier when I was working on it, and I told him I'm doing Twilight Zone, The Shadow. And the first thing out of his mouth was like, oh, you got to go meta with that, right? Like, there's no other direction to go except meta. And I was like, exactly. There is no direction to go with Twilight on The Shadow except meta. I am a research nut. That doesn't necessarily mean, like, reading everything. Diane, God bless them, are not um obsessed with continuity. When they asked me to do Docs Average, I said, Do I have to follow? Because I'm not crazy about what people have been doing with Doc Savage at your company so much? And he's like, Nah, your own. Do whatever you want. And I followed Lester Dense RCA, Kenneth Robeson's uh continuity to a degree. Uh but I ignored every comic book that's ever been written about Doc Savage, pretty much because I wasn't asked to when I didn't need to. But where research comes in for me, more than in story, I'm always kind of amazed that people don't use research. Story is just lying there uh for you in research, waiting for you to uncover it. And when they asked me to do um a Doc Savage story, I said, I want to set it during the classic period, during the have this great book that I got from a great professor in College named Peter Skiff called The Timetables of History and uh reduces all of human history up to about 1978. For want of a better word. I call them Trivial Pursuit categories, daily life, arts and literature, science, politics, sports and leisure activities. And you get to see horizontal linkages, as they call it, between what was happening in the arts and what was long before Steve Martin wrote Picasso um at Delta Palmajeel. This is the professor that said to me, you can't have Picasso without Einstein and vice versa. You can't have Jean Paul. You can't have Albert Kamu without Heisenberg and vice versa, like the arts and the Sciences uh cosmology. You can't have The Empire Strikes Back without Sigmund Freud. Daddy uh is the boogeyman. What? You can't take yourself away from all of that stuff. So as an example, assigned to uh do mhm something set in the 1930s, I took out The Timetables of History, which is the name of the book. And I went to the 1930s and I was like, what's happening that Doc Savage would be interested in? And I found a volcano explosion in South Pacific, the rise of Japanese militarism, and the disappearance of Emilia Heart. Um those are all things that would interest Docs average somewhat. And then I decided, and this was really fascinating to me. Amelia Earhart, if you look into her, was, for her time, somewhat of a sexual Liberty. There is no evidence of any kind that she was LGBTQ plus in any way, shape or form. However, she spent the last ten years of her life lecturing at girls colleges, and she started an organization called the 99s because there were only 99 women with pilots licenses in the United States when she started it. It still exists, by the way, for female pilots. Doc Savage has a beautiful young cousin named Patricia Savage, who is an aviator in the original stories. So I went, well, she would be a member of the maybe she would be Amelia Earhart's secret girlfriend. And so I did this very 1938 things that hinged on a lesbian romance, or the very least, a buy romance, since Patricia seems interested in man and so is Amelia. And what I found sort of charming. It's uh not ambiguous. I don't overdo it, but it's not ambiguous in the story. Everyone over the age of 50 pretty much that read. It was like, I read reviews and heard people talking about it. And it would be like, Pat Savage convinces her cousin Doc to go after her best pal, Amelia Earhart. And reviewers under 30 was like, so these two lesbians didn't occur to them, even for us. I mean, in the first issue, Doc says to Pat, I know you loved her, Pat, but she's gone. The US Navy couldn't find her. I'm not going to be able to find her. And she says, You're Doc Savage. You're better than the US Navy. But I don't think that's an ambiguous line. I don't think that sounds like we're talking about two buddies. He doesn't say, I know she was your best friend. He says, I know you. And she has a framed picture of the two of them by her bedside. Again, not ambiguous, but for a certain audience that was used to a certain kind of thing in Doc Savage stories, it went sailing right over their heads or they didn't mind, which also means I portrayed it well. But I was fascinated by that generational uh divide.
Guido: Well, it's something I love about the way that you do pull on history and the history of the existing properties and the history of the culture and the history of just storytelling. Because there's this way where everything you're describing could make for a really dense, impenetrable story. But in fact, you are able to make it light and accessible on all these different levels so people can read it and take a bit of it, take more of it, take all of it, take different parts of it. That remixing idea I think you are really good at. And then you almost give the tools to the reader to sort of remix it in their mind. They take from it what they want and make it work.
David: I will give Bugs Bunny cartoons some credit for me understanding uh from a pretty early age that everything can operate on two levels. When I watch Bugs Bunny cartoons with my father, born in 1924 and the Gremlin in the 1940s, cartoon says, well, it ain't Wendell Wilkie. Wendell Wilkie is just a funny name. When you're eight years old, you laugh. I was very lucky. I had my father there who actually voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt to say Wendell Wilkie was an unsuccessful presidential candidate who ran against FDR. Just so that's what that joke is. You know, it's just a funny sounding name and it doesn't have to mean anything, but it's funnier. My favorite joke on The Simpsons this is complete is about references, and it's the opposite. One of the main differences between Family Guy and which I hate and The Simpsons is Family Guy thinks the reference is the joke. There's no joke. There's just here we've recreated a thing from a movie with our characters, and that's supposed to be funny. There's a thing on this. I once had a conversation with the late, great comedy writer Marshall SELER. It's where we talked about this joke for an hour. Robert Gule um shows up at Springfield Airport to play at Mr. Burns casino. Bart sends one of the kids to uh intercept him and bring him to his tree house casino. He brings him to the Treehouse casino. Robert Delay looks up and says, Is this the casino? I think I should call my manager. And Nelson says, Your manager said uh to shut up. And very kind of hurt and surprised. Robert Gallais says Vera said that. Now that's a great quote. That's really funny. He actually believes an eight year old in a vest telling him that his manager told him to shut up. He doesn't question it. He's like Vera said that. But I didn't find out till years later that Robert Gule famously was managed by his wife, Vera. So much funnier that it's not just his manager, uh but it's the real name of his manager and she was his wife. That is so exquisite a joke.
Guido: Right? And she told him to shut up.
David: If you don't know that Vera is a real person in the actual name of his manager. But Holy shit, if you know that, that is such a dense piling on of. And that's what I'm always trying to do is do the Vera says that joke where it's funny, if you get it, and if you don't know any of the history or any of the background, it's still funny. It's still a workable joke. And that's the thing I sort of aim for. And particularly the Elvira stuff is uh all jokes and it's uh all references. I want to do an Alvira Meat swamp thing. I've been trying to get them to negotiate this with DC Comics said in the main reason I want to do it is um I want Elvira to call John Constantine. I want her to make nothing but non stop jokes about stinging the police because John Constantine is so uh clearly drawn. John Toddleburn and Steve Bisett drew Sting and there's even one where he's pulling a boat and it says the unsinkable Gordon Sumner or something on the back. So just to have Elvira say, Listen, Sting, I've had about enough of you. Don't stand so close to me John Constantine turn on the red light to do that for like five issues and to call Swamp Thing Man thing every once in a while just to do that. Uh so that layer of I always try to um do both things. The joke that works if you know nothing and I worry about it. You read Elvira in Horrorland number one. I hope it makes sense if you haven't just watched Psycho because part of me is like the same uh thing with the future issues. It's like they're very specific parodies of things that happen in the movie. And I tried to really make the premise work that she's in the movie. The movie is unfolding at the pace the movie unfolds. It's always a question of where did I come in is kind of fun. And she laments that she's not back in the first scene with half naked John Gavin on the bed because that's fun compared to chased around by Anthony Perkins with a knife. So I hope it's funny. If uh you're not familiar with Psycho, I have no idea.
Guido: Yes, we don't know either because we are big horror movie and Hitchcock fans. But I think uh it works. Rob and I were talking about this because we were saying one of the levels in Horrorland of the narrative is also the production because you have jokes about the actors and obviously without spoiling you break uh the fourth wall of the production and someone shows up. But uh you also have the contextual character references which are pretty universally known. So I would imagine you can access that layer of the narrative. No matter how familiar you are with Psycho, you sort of know the set up. I um don't want to spoil it, but you have the reference to a completely different production that shows up there's all these different ways.
David: I wanted to set up the idea because I could do 20 page movie satires if I wanted to. Mad magazine, I think they're usually about eight or nine pages, ten pages. But I thought it would be more fun if every single issue refers to not just the franchises but the Ubers of the directors. I honestly think the best thing I've ever written mhm in my life is the solicit in previews for issue two of Alvarin Harland because it's like every Kubrick title I worked in, every Kubrick title I could into a single paragraph. And then the last line is something, something Barry Lyndon because it doesn't. I couldn't get Barry Lyndon. But here's the truth. Barry Linden is actually in The Shining parody, like Barry Linden is in the issue. I couldn't not do it. It's too funny. Yeah.
Guido: To go back and read that Solicit we knew we were ordering, so I don't think I read it.
David: It's one of my favorite things. When I read it, I wrote it. I sent it to Joe Ryman at Dynamite. I was like, I will never top this. Uh this is my greatest Solicit ever. As an aside, that was a career learning moment. That when I started, and they asked me to write my own Solicits, which, for those who are listening and don't know, there's a magazine called Previews World. It's a phone book size thing. You probably don't know what a phone book is. That goes to Comic Book Shop, which is a catalog of every Sears catalog is another dated reference catalog of every comic that's coming out in three or four months. And Comic Book Shop retailers look at it and they choose the comics and they order them, and you write a paragraph about your comic and why they should end to hype them up into buying it. And the first couple of months on my first comic, Legendary Vampirella, I tried so hard to write in a sort of bland advertising speak, and I hated it so much it was garden seed catalog stuff. And then I wrote the third Solicit, I think, and it's a steampunk story, so I can't remember the rest of the Solicit, uh but it was like, Vampirella does this, the villain does that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And everybody's wearing swimming goggles. For some reason, I can't explain it didn't uh get kicked back. And I was like, oh, okay, if I can be funny in these things, if I can try to express the tone of the book, because most Solicits really are. Batman faces the Joker as Bat Girl hung over a tank of piranhas in this month issue of Detective. They're usually fairly bland who fights who and what's happening. So being able to do them just completely goofy as hell. And again, particularly in the case of Elvira, it's uh a comedy book. So if they laugh reading the Solicit, you hope they will laugh reading the issue and we'll buy it.
Guido: Uh well, now you need to get them to put the Solicits in the collected editions, since they're also your voice. I had no idea. Yeah, I want that.
David: It's weird little corner of the industry. I'm sure that I have uh a hard time believing that anybody makes Neil Gaiman write a Solicit. I don't think that's happening anymore. But to me, like so many other things in show business, it's that thing of like, I could say you have a PR Department, you do it. But then I'm like, wouldn't you rather have control of that? Wouldn't you? Yeah, I know.
Rob: Paul Thomas Anderson took over all his trailers and I think commercials for his.
Rob: Movies because he was like, I don't.
Rob: Want other people telling these stories. These are my stories.
Rob: So I want to control every aspect of getting it out into the world.
David: Yeah. And again, there are definitely talented trailer writers in the world, but there are trailers where you go, oh, boy, did that misrepresent this thing. And I to this day think that Blade Runner is one of those movies that uh pretty much no one wants to talk about how it actually did when it came out, the reviews, it actually got that beloved classic how it actually did at the box office. And to me, the entire problem is coming off of The Empire Strikes Back in Raiders Lost Ark, they made a trailer for that audience. If you go back and look at the trailer we all saw for Blade Runner, it's mostly from two scenes in the movie, him chasing Zora and him fighting with Roy Batty. And that is uh not that movie. And when it had been released for a couple of months, when it was doing its second release, back when movies used to do that, when it moved from the big house to the multiplex and the postage stamp screen to run out the last of its days, they did a new trailer. The trailer was about his relationship with Sean Young, and it was set to the 1930 sounding love song from the movie. And I watched it and went, if I had seen that before opening night, I would have been prepared for this movie and I would have liked it so much more than I did. So that's another thing. When you control things like the solicitor in the trailer, it's like doing a live show. You can intro an artist in a way that absolutely fucking tanks them. And you can introduce an artist in a way that sets the audience up to love them.
Guido: You're setting expectations.
David: I did an act once in my wife's Burlesque show and a good MC who's a good guy. I had made the mistake of telling him I was going to do a weird act and all he talked about was how weird and unsettling the act was going to be. And the audience was like, when I got on stage and they were not prepared for it to be funny or anything, I sang It's Not Easy Being Green as William Shatner in a Star Trek uniform to a woman dressed as an Orion slave girl. I thought it was a really funny act. And actually she did a strip tease and I was in a tuxedo and I stripped out of it and had a Starfleet uniform underneath, having to spend each day the color of the trees. It was fun stuff.
Rob: Other uh people are going to see that. And go, I was told this was going to be weird and unsettling and this is perfectly normal, right?
David: But yeah, you can tank the act with the wrong intro. It's just the whole point of that. Exactly.
Guido: So we started talking about other worlds. I want to hear a little bit more about your relationship to multiverses.
David: I am your guide through these vast new realities. Uh follow me and ponder the question.
Guido: What if it's so present?
David: Knowing I was going to talk to you too this morning, I thought about so the first place that concept enters my consciousness is definitely Mirror mirror. It's definitely the Star Trek Mirror Universe episode because I couldn't have been older than six or seven. So that's my first parallel universe. And I was starting to read Sci-fi at that point, but I hadn't read a lot of it. And then The Crisis on Infinite Earths drops when I'm in College and I loved it. It's a beautiful piece of writing. I'm not uh enough of an obsessive DC Comics fan. There are parts of it that I tune out because I'm like, I don't know who these people are or what they're talking about or why I should care, but it's such an amazing Marv uh Wolfman's ability to do that is absolutely amazing. And I'm very proud of this. I've met more of a couple of times, and when I met him in a comic book store once, I mentioned in passing the reference to him an Animal Man, uh and he hadn't heard it. And there's an Animal Man episode issue, I can't remember which one. I was able to find it and show it to him where John Constantine visits a developmentally disabled kid playing in the sandbox with action uh figures and the little kid is saying, The Wolf Man, the Wolf Man destroyed all the universes. The Wolf Man killed everybody. And I said, I'm pretty sure that to you, Marv. I'm pretty sure that Grant Morrison. I'm pretty sure Grant Morrison's writing about you killing all the superheroes and eating the universe and all of that. But yeah, so that's always been and It's a Wonderful Life. It's a multiverseful story which is built on Christmas Carol, which is a multiversal story in its way. Here, look at this parallel universe where you're dead. Look at this parallel universe where you don't exist. So it's always been obviously a super compelling and interesting idea. And I've never had that sort of like playing with the major franchises ability with it. But I think, yeah, I'd say that I did two what if one Shots, which were called Altered States for Dynamite, and one of them was literally, what if Doc Savage was a caveman? And the other one was, what if the Shadow was in the future? And those were fun stories. But then the Twilight on the Shadow thing came up. Uh as is always the case with any licensed property, you go under the hood and you go, what am I actually working on here? What makes it work? You can so tell when someone and I will not name names works with a famous licensed property and they have no idea what's good about it and they have no idea what's bad about it. I will name names. If James Bond was raised by a crusty old caretaker. Mhm he's not an alcoholic psychopath who kills people for the government. It's a man without a father. You don't kill his father and then give him a replacement father. It's like, no, the psychology only makes sense because he's fatherless. He's parentless. He has a maiden aunt that sends him off the boarding school and he barely knows her. That's his family. And he fixates on him and the service because he's got nothing else. He doesn't have a family mansion in Scotland with a crusty old caretaker. That's not the character. So if you take your job seriously, you go under the hood. Well, what is the Twilight zone and what is the Shadow? The first thing that occurred to me is they're the same thing. The shadow is the Twilight zone as a person. If you think about the Twilight zone, it's an abstract concept. But what happens in the Twilight Zone? Ordinary people encounter the Twilight zone. Their weakness is revealed to them. And either two things happen. One of two things happen. They see their weakness and they deal with it and they change and they evolve into a better person. These are the episodes with happy endings. Or they are damned to be that person forever and punished severely for their failures of imagination, of kindness, of empathy, of all of the things that Rod Sterling believed in. So how do you do that to the shadow? The man who is the beating moral heart, the fist of God? He's God's vengeance. He knows what evil works in the hearts of men. So what evil could lurk in his heart? Well, I love the shadow, but he goes around gunning people down pretty savagely. Uh the first scene in the first Shadow novel, he sees uh a guy committing suicide and he saves his life. Oh, he's a great guy. He's a hero. And then he says to the guy whose life uh he saved, I own you now. I own your life. You have to do my bidding. From here until the day you die, I owe you more than the people you owe money to, which was the reason you were committing suicide. Now, because it's the 1930s, everyone is perfectly happy to be the shadows agent. But he's severe. And I went, okay, so the moral of the story of Twilight Zone, the Shadow is there is no justice without mercy. And the shadow lacks mercy. He doesn't understand mercy at all. So how do you teach the Shadow mercy? You show him how. He is one of the things that's the most inside baseball. And I would bet it probably that first issue probably doesn't work for a lot of people. And I have to live with that because you have to know that in the pulp magazines, Lamont Cranston is actually a real person who's not The Shadow. And The Shadow takes over his identity every now and again, but treats him like a fucking punk all the time. Lemon Cranston is at home putting his cutaway coat on, and he feels a chilling presence in the room. Turns around, and The Shadow, who's really a guy named Kent Allard, says, Take that off. I'm putting that on and going to the party tonight because I need to be undercover to meet these criminal bosses. And The Shadow shows up sometimes is go on a Safari in Africa. I need to be Lemon Cranston for three weeks. You need to fucking vanish. And Lamont does not have a choice. So the whole thing is about The Shadow sees that both Margo and Lamont see him as this kind of domineering hardass who is unkind. And he gets treated like a punk by himself and thrown out of the sanctum, sanctorum by The Shadow for being not worthy of being there. And then he sees himself through the fictional eyes of like, well, I'm kind of this goofball stage magician, in a way, in the radio show and then in the pulps on this guy with guns and knives, which is what I really am. And then he goes even further back to he uh finds himself in the body of Walter Gibson writing the first Shadow story. And that issue is absolutely my tribute to Naked Lunch and William Burroughs and everything about writing you've ever read. And there's a bit borrowed, this remixing. The Kafka short story in the Penal Colony is about mercy and about justice at a Penal colony. There's this tattoo machine that tattoos your uh crime on your back over and over with a needle until you die of it. And the warden is like, hey, isn't this great? And a journalist who he's brought is, like, the most inhumane, disgusting thing I've ever seen. And the guy has himself tied to the rack, and it tattoos be just on his back. So in my version of that, Kentallard Waltergibbson, the writer, finds himself on a sheet of paper with a giant typewriter key, writing the word justice. And the key keeps almost hitting him. Justice is going to crush you because you have no mercy. And then the fourth issue, we're back in the real world with the American Nazis um and all that. But that's a perfect example of it's, absolutely drawn from Naked Lunch and the typewriter attacking you. And in the Penal Colony without being even remotely like either of those things in an important way. It's a use of inspiration because I was like, how do I, you know, the job of genre. This is an important progression. And I've said this a million times, but I think it's always worth saying, why do we write in genre? Why don't we just write the great American novel about the marriage breaking up and the guy losing his job or what do you know? Why do we write about demons and monsters and the shadow and all that. It's because that's how it feels to be a human being. When you are wrestling with your demons, it feels bigger than any conventional thing where a guy is sitting at a bar staring off in the space, feeling bad about himself. When you write genre, wrestling with your demons involves actual demons, which is how it actually feels to people deep inside. So writing these characters, you're able to externalize, I always say, making the metaphor concrete, making the thing that exists in your mind, the thing that exists in your dreams and your fantasies, that's how we process these things. And that dream you had where you being chased by Xenomorphs from aliens, that was about something you're going through, and that's how your brain expresses it. So that's why we love it in art. That's why we love genre art, because it takes the thing that we're thinking about, and it makes it feel as big as it does in the heart. I could read a contemporary story about a kid dealing with grief, and it's not going to strike me as strongly as Hamlet meeting his father as a ghost. That's not real. That's fantasy. It's set 500 years ago in.
Guido: Why.
David: Am I Spacing on Denmark? It uh has no relevance to me, but it has more relevance to me uh than any number of modern novels about grief I've ever read.
Guido: I've mhm always been fascinated by it was at a mhm Comic Con a few years ago, I went to a panel about parasocial relationships and the research on the relationships we construct with characters and what role those play for us. And I found it really powerful. And I'm wondering, thinking about what you're saying then, what role do you think, like meta textual narratives, breaking the fourth wall? What role is that playing? What are we exercising? It feels like it's becoming really popular. You're using it. What is that doing for us when we break that fire?
David: That's a really great question. And I think partially, uh we all know we're watching art. We all know it's not real. So metatext is that moment in the dream where you go, but this is a dream, right? And some of my favorite things my entire life are metatexts. I think it is underappreciated that The um King is a meta text. It starts out with a filmmaker saying, I'm going to an island where there's a crazy monster, and I'm going to film a beauty in the Beast story, and it's going to be about how the beauty brings down the beast. And then he gets there and there's a real monster, and it kidnaps the real girl, and he puts down his camera and he picks up his gun. The movie doesn't get made, but it does. And you're watching it. And it's called King Kong. It's a meta text. The last paper I wrote in College, and I partially did it because a it's provocative thing to say because most people would not put these two movies in the same category. My last film, Paper in College, was about how King Kong and Fellini's Eight and a Half are the same movie because there are no giant apes in Felini's Eight and a Half. But it starts out with a filmmaker saying, I'm going to make a thing about my life and my memories and my fantasies and my dreams. And then the last ten minutes, he says, you know what? I'm not going to make that movie. And you're like, But I don't know, I kind of feel like I just watched that movie you've been describing all through the movie. And that's a powerful. There's a part of me that I get a little when Charlie Kaufman does adaptation and never goes, this is the most groundbreaking thing I've ever seen. It's like, I guess if you've never seen all that jazz or Eight and a Half or 1000 million other variations of that, this is very groundbreaking stuff. You're not going to break ground on the language um of dream and fantasy and film. Felini got there, Cursor got there, Bergman got there, Antonio got there. You're not going to do better than that. The thing is to do it. What do I have to say about it? And it's the same. Alvira has always had that knowing wink to the camera and the fourth wall breaking. And it's because those movies are so incredibly she's hosting movies that are incredible artifices. And the magic of them is that you still like, in Eight and a Half, the fact that the film keeps calling attention to the fact that its author is on screen talking about the film he's making and criticizing the film he's making, which is one of the great tricks Fellini teaches you if you're willing to listen, which is if you're doing something edgy that maybe doesn't work, call out that it maybe didn't work. He's got the long flashback to being a Catholic schoolboy getting punished for going to see a prostitute on the beach. And we dissolve out of that scene and he's sitting in a restaurant with the writer Domier, who goes, what does it mean?
Rob: I always say faulty does that in all that jazz too, where you're thinking, he does it, take off with me sequence. And you're supposed to think, Is this supposed to be good?
David: It's great dancing.
Rob: But are we meant to think, though? This is the character kind of commenting on, like, oh, this is my take on mainstream art.
David: Yeah, this song is terrible. And I have made it into this horny spectacle because I didn't know how the hell to dress up this terrible, terrible, awful song with these incredibly bad lyrics. But yeah, the character of Domier goes through the entirety of Eight and a Half, talking about how stupid the symbolism is and how childish and how see through and all of that. And he's not right? But by uh having him say it out loud, Fellini challenges the audience. Like, you agree with this guy. You weren't moved by that flashback. Really? Come on, you were. You cried a little bit when they punished the kid, didn't you? So, yeah, it is a valid form of expression uh and it's always been a valid form going all the way back. The beginning of storytelling. If you haven't read The Odyssey in a long time, one of the first stories ever really sat down, even though it started out orally. The first thing that will jump out at you as a modern storyteller is how incredibly complicated the narrative is. It starts at one period and then there's one flashback and then there's a flashback within a flashback. And then Odysseus tells a bunch of the story himself. And then the story moves forward in the second half of the book. But it's these nested flashbacks within flashbacks. And you're like, so people were doing flashbacks within flashbacks 4000 years ago. Got it. That's how not new meta text is. And literally the first line of the um Iliad is the author telling the goddess of storytelling to help him tell the story. I'm here. I'm telling you a story.
Speaker UNK: Yeah.
David: So pulling you out right there, like the fourth wall is broken in the first line of the Iliad sing muse of the, et cetera. So none of this stuff is new. It's all tools and how you use it to engage the audience. And you are walking a fine line when you do a meta thing and say, Here I am, I am the artist to a degree. We don't break the fourth wall in Drawing Blood, which we talked about. And you talked about a little bit in the intro. Drawing Blood is sort of, to use the best description of Cronenberg's uh Naked Lunch I've ever heard. It's an autobiographical Fantasia on the life of Kevin Eastman. All of the names have been changed. Um and in order to actually defeat the idea that it was autobiography, Kevin and I actually appear in the book and not as the authors of the book, but as two people walking by in the comic book community. And there is a lot of meta stuff in it, but it's a fictional story. And the thing about that, a friend of mine um wrote something about how most biopics suck. And I kind of agree. And the thing that always amazes me about that choice, literally, famously, the greatest film ever made, the one that's on all the best of all time lists is a biopic that changed all of the names so they could make it as fictional as humanly possible. If Orson Welles had made a movie about William Randolph first, no one would care. It wouldn't be a classic. It would be a piece of shit that was full of lies. But instead he wrote about Charles Foster Kane, a much more interesting person than William Randolph Hearst with a much more interesting life um and a much more fascinating soul. And it fascinates me. I remember particularly Born on the 4 July. I thought it was great when I saw it in a movie theater. And then I read up on Ron Kovak and I went, well, none of those things actually happened to him. I mean, the broadest stroke, he was injured in the Vietnam War and he spoke at an anti war. He gave an anti war speech at the Democratic convention in 1968. Those two things happened. Why just make a movie about a disabled war veteran, change the name and then you can tell whatever lies you want to tell. The worst one is actually A Beautiful Mind, which is appallingly, not based on the life of the guy. It says it's based on changes. His life is so much more interesting than that movie. Like in the movie, Ed Harris, representing his paranoid fantasy of the uh US government, has been working on code breaking to beat the Soviets in the real world. His delusion was that he was being set on the task of defeating UFOs. How could you possibly walk away from that idea in a movie? How could you not go like he thought he was working on the flying the anti flying saucer program with Ed Harris. That is fucking hilarious. But instead we got this like Tepid Cold War nonsense. He was bisexual. He had some maybe abusive relationships uh with his students. But no, um he's a devoted husband to Jennifer Connolly, as I'm sure we would all be given half the chance. I never um get that. To me, the constraints of the real story are fascinating sometimes. And to have to work within those constraints, every once in a while I come up with something I can't use that that's an anachronism. It doesn't work. I will say that I get into the weeds on it. There's a line in Dock Savage Ring of Fire where two of his guys are uh squabbling with one another and it's the big tough guy and the science nerd. And the big tough guy says to the science nerd in my original script, Listen, Young Tom Edison, get the radio working. Now, young Tom Edison is a real person, but I was thinking about the Mickey Rooney movie Young Tom Edison, which came out two years after that scene. So I changed it to Mark Tony, the inventor of the radio. Now he could have made a reference to Young Con Edison, but to me, the reference was to the movie. And if it's not the reference to the movie, it's not a good cultural joke. So it had to go. I wrote a Betty Page once where I wanted her to say do what now? And I heard that from Southern friends in the literally went on Facebook and said, My friends in the south ask your grandmothers if they said do what now? In the 1950s. And I actually found someone from the same town from Nashville, Tennessee, from Betty's and Byrons. And she was like, I just called my grandmother. She was very excited to talk to me. And she told me I waited until a half hour into the conversation so she wouldn't think that was the only reason I was calling. And I found out for you that white ladies in the 1950s did say, do what now? When confronted with something baffling, uh but I don't know if I answered. I don't think metafiction is a necessary component. It's a tool in the toolbox. And I think particularly when you're writing about art and your characters are artists, you can't kind of get around it. And I remember when I would try to write autobiographical things back in the day that were nakedly autobiographical, not using real names. But Felini went through that same process of I'll make the character based on me, a gossip reporter. I'll make him a young writer who writes plays. I'll do this, I'll do that. But eventually you get exhausted and you say, can I just be honest and make him a fucking filmmaker? Every director of a certain generation uh has done their version of Feline's Eight and a half. Paul Mazurski did again, talking about remixing his version of Felini eight and a half is called he uh did two, actually, one's called Alex in Wonderland, which is about a filmmaker. But his older, more mature work is called The Tempest. And it is Shakespeare's The Tempest, done in the style of Federico Fellini. And the main character is an architect instead of a filmmaker. And again, it's that thing of like, who else is creative works with an enormous crew. Things are being built for them, and they deal with clients, moneymen, et cetera, who may be crooks. He needed all of those elements. So he didn't make it about a filmmaker. But ultimately, you boil it down as well. I can uh write about it. I mean, you were talking before we went live about my video about the last weekend. Charles Jackson denied for years that it was about him. But he's about an alcoholic writer, and he was an alcoholic. And I get why he wanted to. It is called Alcoholics Anonymous. He did want to couch that a little bit. But in later years, he did go, yeah, I am an alcoholic. And I did write that book about an alcoholic writer. And it's very much about me. I'd like to wrap it all up. You wouldn't read last weekend and go, this is a uh work of meta fiction. This is a novel about a writer who has a drinking problem. But it is meta fiction. And you are uh reading the book just like eight and a half in King Kong. He fails to write anything. But I don't know about you. I'm sitting here reading a book by this alcoholic writer. It kind of seems like Don Burnham eventually got off his ass and wrote a whole novel that was turned into a pretty good movie that won the Oscar for best picture. So happy ending there. The book does not have a happy ending. And he was mad because the movie initially had the meta element, and I think it still ended up. But originally the movie ended with a very happy like, I'm going to sit down and write the Lost weekend, and then I'll all be better. And Jackson was kind of infuriated by that. He's like, that's not that book, though. That book is about mhm the guy that is not saved and that does not get out of it. That's a different person than me.
Guido: Well, I think that's what I've tried to I also love meta narratives. Like, you a part of why I think we do our podcast uh about alternate universes is because there's something pretty meta about them, because, like, you've been describing, you're sort of going into a story and you're twisting one thing around to see what happens. But I think what's true of both, like the last weekend example you just shared and what you do with Elvira, or what Elvira does with Elvira is they change your relationship as an audience, as a consumer to the story. And that's why I think I've always appreciated meta narratives because I feel a different connection to it. So even in the case of Elvira, it's not even that I can say or think that I have some relationship uh to the artist Cassandra Peterson. I don't. But by breaking that fourth wall, she's bringing me in a little bit. And then with the last weekend, knowing that the author had some of this experience and might have been working something out with it again gives me some other connection. So I think that relationship to how the story is being told is an important part of why these things resonate with people like you and me, and I'm sure many others.
David: It just occurred to me Groucho Marx's did it before Felini the whole thing of hanging a red flag on the thing that's dumb. In one of uh the musical interludes in uh Horse Feathers, he walks up to the camera and says, I'm stuck here, but you folks can go out into uh the lobby until this blows over. He says that while Chico is playing the piano or Harpo is playing the harp, he's like, yeah, I know you came here for the Zany comedy, and now my brothers are musicians. So we got to fucking do this now. But in a way that's like, oh, I'm going to stick around. Groucho might say something uh else funny about the music, but yeah, we're people consuming art, um and it takes a talent to do it. There are bad ways to do it. But that way of bringing the audience in and saying, we're all in this. We're all experiencing this story. When he does that, he brings you onto the set of the movie with him, or better still, he joins you in the movie theater and says, I can't go out and have a cigarette, but you can. So why don't you scramble for three minutes while the song plays out and it gives you an artificial feeling of closeness. But uh yeah, as you say, it's not necessary to have a meta narrative to do that. Things can um make you feel pulled in, obviously, in a lot of other ways, and to bring everything around to. I think this occurred to me while we were talking. One of the appeals of parallel universes and multiverses is we all have that Sliding Doors phenomenon all of us think about. What if I didn't exist? What if this. What if that and mhm a thing that I do, even in non parallel universe stories that I'm in love with as a writer actually, is to have a character encounter a shadow version of themselves um where they can go, this is me. If I hadn't done that, this is me. If I hadn't. And without getting political, there are some of my outrage with some of our fellow people on the left is when they can't get past the misogyny and the racism of American culture and even homophobia that they were born to. And part of it is because I can look at myself when I was a teenager and remember when I believe that class was more determinative than race, when I believe that being born poor was worse than being born black was harder. And it's easier to be angry at someone who's you 25 years ago, a complete fascist, someone who is not even remotely on your side. You can write them off, but when you see someone who's so close to getting it, they're so close. I said this dumb shit in College, and then I met people who weren't like me and I you need to get out and leave your meeting with the eight other straight white dudes who you agree with about Karl Marx and go talk to black people and women and LGBTQ folks and see what their lives are like. Talk to Latino activists and see what their lives are like. And that'll fucking rewrite your program right there. But I feel like there's a quote. It's either I don't want to say Orwell. Or Huxley. I'm spacing on who it is, but it's sort of like it's easiest to hate the things in other people that you remember hating in yourself. And so even in a non parallel universe story, you can have a character meet themselves as a completely different character, as a way of helping them see their own flaws and helping them evolve or note their own evolution and see the there is a degree to which I mean just as a complete out uh of left field, the crazy captain whose ship was destroyed by the Doomsday machine who tries to take over the Enterprise while Kirk is stuck on the Constitution in original Star Trek, he's this close to being Captain Kirk. He's Captain Kirk who couldn't handle it when his ship died and when he lost his whole crew like he's there. But for the Grace of God, this could have happened to me. I could have lost it. And that's just good writing to find the qualities in the villain where you go. You can see why I always think the villain has to have a point. When the villain monologues about the evils of the world or the villain monologues about what they're doing, it's way more interesting if you go, Well, yeah, but Jesus, not like that. I think it's underrated one of the most chilling lines ever in a movie. And it just passes by as a joke line in Goldfinger. When James Bond tells Goldfinger that his nerve gas attack on Fort Knox will kill 60,000, kill 60,000 people needlessly. And Goldfinger says American Motors kill that many every two years. That is one of the great existentialist lines of all time. Because if you really, again, get in under the hood, Goldfinger is saying after the Holocaust in World War II, you want to talk to me about 60,000 people? That's a significant let's talk about cigarettes, man. I'm going to kill less people than cigarettes when I attack Fort Knox. Why you want to mad at cigarettes? Me and my little nerve gas attack is just going to kill 60,000 people. What the heck are dropping the frigging bucket to you people? You killed that many people in a couple of hours in World War II. What do you give a shit? You incinerated that many people in a second at Hiroshima and you want to talk to me about 60,000 people? Come on, man. We're playing a bigger game than that. And I love it because he's wrong. He couldn't be more wrong. But you can go. You can see why a post war nihilist would absolutely go. All bets are off, man. Killing civilians. It's a thing we do now to get what we want. I don't give a shit if President Truman doesn't give a shit about incinerating 150,000 Japanese. I should give a shit about the residence of a small town in Kentucky that happens to have the gold deposits in it. Fuck them. To me, that's real genius writing is when you create an ethos for the villain that absolutely tracks instead of just, I'm doing evil things because I don't know, evil things are to be done.
Guido: Well, your description of that sort of shadow self and the role that plays in a narrative, it's making me think about what you were saying about the Twilight Zone shadow too, what you found in that. I'm almost starting to think this is like a work that defines you a lot because it has that in it. You said uh that part of it was like putting someone through something and sort of seeing what comes out on the other side, something dark. And it could go well, like in Twilight Zone ten or it could go poorly.
David: Well, again, when you're writing about a hero that is, there are, quote, unquote, perfect heroes that tend to make for relatively boring. But, like, even Superman can learn a thing. Batman should learn a thing. Definitely. It should be go to therapy. But, like, Batman could learn a thing. And the lessons can be sad. I wrote this Zoro story, and it's not really a narrative spoiler. Uh but Zoro does the one thing in his first story. And really, if you read the first Zoro story, once he freezes the people from the Alcal De, there's no reason for him ever to put the costume on ever again. And if you watch the movie, the final sword fight he has in civilian clothes, like, they're not fetishistic about his superhero costume. He wears it when he needs disguise. The minute everybody figures out he's Zoro, he stops dressing like that. And I did a thing called Zoro Swords of Hell, in which demons rise up out of the undead, conquistadors rise up out of the laboratory tar pits and take over Los Angeles. And Zoro is about to ride out and fight them in his street clothes. And there's a way in which it's giving the audience what they want. But to me, for him to just change into the costume, I couldn't justify it in my head. Why do that? And he's getting ready, and he's with the Padre that's known him since he was a little boy. And the Padre says, Don Diego Delavega is one of my best friends, and he's a wonderful man, and I admire him deeply. But the people need Zoro. The people need to see Zoro out there fighting the demons. They don't need some rich FOP on horseback. You need to be that guy to take care of this problem. And at the end of the story, he confronts the goddess of death and fights the Jaguar priest and all this stuff. And then he says, like, well, okay, I've done it again. I saved Los Angeles. And she says, you don't get how this works, do you? I think the line is, you're new to this game of gods and monsters. You uh don't get to not be Zoro ever again, man. And that's a lesson I learned from my father's life. That's a lesson I've learned over and over again in my own life. Any act of heroism. The reward for your act of heroism is, can we please have some more heroism from you? Hey, buddy, you can hit the bench. We got this. That is never the result of a heroic act, right? The result of a heroic act is, hey, man. Hey, buddy, could you put the Cape and the hat on again? Because we can't help ourselves. I mean, the greatest movie about it is High Noon, which I would love to live in the world of It's a Wonderful Life, but I'm afraid I live in the world of High Noon, where uh when you get in trouble, all of the people, all the people you saved, go, could you just get the fuck out of here so we don't have to stand up for you? That would be great. Frank Miller is coming back. He's like, yeah, and if we all just kind of stand together, we can stop Frank Miller. No, that risks our lives. Could you just get on a horse and take Grace Kelly and just get the fuck away from us? And sadly, I think that's a little close. I've been helped by friends in bad times. I don't want to say I haven't, but I think the human impulse to say, hey, Gary Cooper, thanks for all that help. Get the fuck away from us. Supporting you is now dangerous and problematic. So how about you leave us the hell alone and that's the world.
Guido: So before we get into what else uh is on your plate for the future, I want to talk a little bit more about Horror Land and Elvira. You have teleported characters before you've teleported them to other worlds. Uh and Betty Page unbound and even in the earlier Elvira stuff. But how do you come to decide to uh place Salvira in different movies? How'd you choose the movies? We're going to read more about movies.
David: You could choose from. Yeah, the original thing was that and this happens a lot with Dynamite. Elvira meets Vincent Price was supposed to be a four issue mini series. And then, you know, round about issue three, they say, hey, could you do a fifth? And I'm like, but the story really ends in number four. So I wanted to do a standalone and I thought about what I would do with um that. And I thought about the fact that I had had Vincent come out of a movie. He literally walks out of a house on Haunted Hill in the first issue. And I thought, what if you reverse that? What if you go back into the movie um and a lot of thoughts about what to do with that. And that fifth issue is largely honestly, it's about my life working on shitty low budget slashermovies in the main character, Darlan Wing. If you know your German uh wing, German is flugal. I worked with the actress Garland Flugel, who was delightful, and she passed away a few years ago, tragically young. So I wanted to do a little tribute to her, the director, Stanley Saliva, director of the creeping, crawler, crawling, creep movies. I don't think you need uh to be too tuned into pop culture to know who I'm making fun of, what horrible, abusive psychopath I am making fun of with that character. But when they said, let's do a sequel series without Vincent, I was like, uh well, I get in that issue on a cliffhanger and have her like, since she's stuck in the world of these horrible horror movies, what if I stick with that? And I thought a really great, funny cliffhanger was to show her standing in front of the Bates Motel on the last page, wondering where she was with her back to the sign. And um one of the nice things about my father's career is I became friends with some uh fairly legendary writers, including Robert Block, who wrote Psycho. So I made a Blocks Hotel and snowbase Hotel.
Guido: And I love the title of Harold. Issue one, Block Party, um issue two.
David: Again, though, my favorite title I've ever uh come up with, which is she's a Kubrick House. She's letting it all hang out. But yeah. So the first issue is my tribute to Psycho um and a little bit all uh things Hitchcock, though not as much as later. Second issue, she's a Kubrick House is obviously shining, but it uh ranges over some plenty of other movies in Hitchcock's career and to a degree in Jack Nicholson's career, because I realized that when Jack Torrance is chasing her with the axe, um he keeps spouting and named pop culture phrases out um come out like, I'm knocked by the hair of your Chinny chin chin. And here's Johnny. I was like, well, what's a good parody of here's Johnny and knocked by the hair of your Chinny chin chin. So literally, the entire time he's chasing them, he's spouting famous Jack Nicholls and lines for movies.
Rob: Two of Jack's most famous characters are the Joker and Jack Torrence, and uh they're both named Jackson. He was a very met.
David: I didn't have space, but I wanted to put a line in there. How unsettling is it for you that both your husband and your child have the same names as their characters? Does that make it worse? True. Have her say that to Shelley Deval. But yeah, so he's chasing her, saying, I want to be a better man. You can't handle the truth. Uh this town is gag in that. And I got to say, Sylvia Californo does the art on these. And for issue two, I uh said, I know this is hard. This is a big ask, but I'd really like every panel to have that Kubrick zero point perspective, framing and perspective. And she recreated it. And Holy shit, does that camera. That issue looks like Kubrick. Like the whole thing is very true to the Kubrick vision. Yeah. And then I just honestly uh mostly chose movies that um I either love or care about or I think are funny. I think The Shining is a mess, uh but I think it's a hilarious uh mess and it's a beautiful looking mess. And there's so much to make fun of in it. Uh there's so much funny that's just right there to just do it. Uh and then the third movie is going to be the third issue is the Alien franchise. It's mostly going to be Alien, but again, it's going to slip off in the same way that the first issue kind of shatters into other movies. So does the second one, and so does the third one. The fourth movie is going to be Nightmare on Elm Street, and I'm uh not a huge fan of those, but all of the artists involved, um including the cover artists, really wanted to do it. So I was like, okay. And to me, the Invading Dreams part is way more thematic to the story I'm telling than Crystal Lake or Halloween. Those aren't multiversal stories, but uh Nightmare in Elm Street is actually kind of a multiverse story. And the fifth issue, uh you're the first to hear it. It hasn't been solicited yet, but um that's uh going to be set very much in the David Cronenberg verse, starting with the Fly. Yeah, cool. But I'm pretty sure the last sport of the USX Machina character in the series is going to be Peter Weller. Playing William Multiverse is an authorial voice and all of that.
Guido: Rob spotted a yes, Betty Page on.
David: Beta reference in Betty Page.
Guido: I'm not familiar enough.
David: The character of Benway, who goes back to the second issue of Elroy Ben Way, who is uh Elon Hubbard, very obviously, but he's also not William um Burrows, but the William Burrows villain, Doctor Benway. I don't find Elrone's rhetorical style very interesting, but Dr. Ben uh Way is a great character. So writing a variation of Dr. Benway into and Naked Lunch is a very partially and that combination, uh that's what I'm talking about, about references. It's why the Venture Brothers is great when they introduce their Sean Connery character. He's James Bond, but he's also Alan Quartermain, but he's also Williamburg. He's living in Tangiers and shooting up drugs. And he has a house boy named Kiki. So it's never just the one. The Nick Fury character is Nick Fury, but he's also Huntress Thompson, and he's also trans. For some reason, it's not simply here's, that character here's Doctor Strange, but he has a surly teenage daughter. For some reason, Doctor Strange doesn't have a Sterling teenage daughter in any version of Doctor Strange. But it's funny to give Doctor Strange, especially because he's full of all of those Shakespearean pronouncements and very important lyrical dialogue. And then to have the girl looking at her phone with the tattoos standing next to him, it's just funny. So that's always the thing. If you're going to do Elron Hubbard, what can you do to make it not just Elron Hubbard? Because that's dull.
Rob: Do you think, David, as kind of a historian and also through your podcast Pulp Today, and through these writings, do you feel a responsibility or do you feel like you're also keeping some of these characters alive in some way? Because certainly I grew up watching the movie starring you, the Shadow.
David: It's alphabetical. Yeah, exactly.
Rob: My father was a big Shadow fan, even though that was coming out 30 years before him. But now it seems like those kind of characters have faded into the background a bit. So I'm curious, how do you feel.
David: About keeping those the most gratifying thing that ever happens with Pulp Today is when a stranger texts me or sends me a message somewhere and says, So now I have a stack of 20 books by my bed. I'm like that's exactly. If I can make you read these books, if I can make you interested in these books and the history and the characters and the movies and all that and yeah, I'm not one of those people. I am not are. You ruined my childhood, guy. I will never be. George Lucas can do whatever the hell he wants with Star Wars. I don't have to love it. And I know people 20 years younger than me that Attack the Clones is the best Star Wars movie for them and I'm not going to argue with them because I was twelve when Star Wars came out. They were twelve when Attack of the Clones came out. They are welcome to have Attack of the Clones. It is not for me. It was not made for me. I can get a little bit like I said, I bashed Skyfall earlier. If it was a good reimagining of James Bond, I would have less trouble with it. But the thing I will never do is say that somehow Skyfall Rob me of something that I had with James Bond. Raymond Chandler. Famously, someone asked him, what did you think about what do you think about what Hollywood has done to your books? And he went, My books are right there. Hollywood hasn't done it. What has Hollywood done in my book? I like to joke that my wife was very disappointed in 2006, um 2008. I think as promised, Chris Pine and Zachary Quinto did not um come to my house to shred my William uh Shatner DVDs. I was told I was promised by the internet that Star Trek had been destroyed. Uh my photo novels and the box set of the original series, all that had to go. My Bluray of Rafa gone. Chris uh Pine is coming for it, man. And she was like, when are Christmas coming over to shrink? Any time now, baby. We're really pulling for it. Um so I'm not that guy. Into Darkness is a terrible movie. It has nothing to do with how great The Wrath of Khan is that. It's a terrible movie. It's just not a good movie. But no one has taken anything from me. No one has made anything go away. I walked out of man of Steel uh which was playing at the Arc Light in Hollywood. It was across the street from a now closed business called Amoeba Books and Records and DVDs. I walked across the Street, I bought a beautiful Bluray of Superman the movie, and I went home and watched it. And you know who couldn't stop me? Zack Snyder. Zack Snyder cannot stop me. I can watch Chris Reeves till the end of time. And no matter what Zack Snyder does, I will still be able to watch Christopher Reeve until the end of time. From a writer, it offends me. When someone takes on a character they don't understand I mean, if you look at Watchmen on its surface, it is a beautiful Xerox of Dave Gibbons art from an incredible work. Uh the book is a profoundly anti violence, violence solves nothing book. The movie is made by someone who thinks violence is really fucking cool. That's all it takes to be dead wrong in every scene. And there's some great casting in it. Like Jeffrey Dean Morgan in every scene. I was like, this is the white Nick Fury I never got, because that's the Nick Fury I grew up with. And that even though it was supposedly based on Charlton characters, Allan Moore couldn't help making um that Nick Fury in Watchmen. But yeah, an artist interpreting a work that uh they do not grasp and they do not understand what it's about. And actually the best example, and I've said this before, Psycho. In the shot for shot remake of Psycho, Gus Vanzan adds a modern touch. And his modern touch is Vince uh Vaughn masturbating while he's watching Mary and Crane um in the shower. If he could masturbate, he would towel off and go to sleep. The book and the story is about sexual repression breeds violence. And to make a movie of Psycho, which is Psycho, in which Norman Bates is getting off, mhm shows that Gus Vanzan doesn't understand the first thing, not the third thing, not the 100 things he doesn't understand. And when you see that, I just go, why does he want does he like seeing pretty ladies murdered? Like, why are you drawn to a story that you do not understand? The only important thing to understand about Norman Bates is that he's sexually repressed and he murders out of sexual repression. Take that away from him. And what's the story about? And you could ask Zack Snyder. The story is about a decent man who wants to help people. How does your decent man that wants to help people do all of the things that he does in man of Steel, that fight he has in downtown Smallville, I'm like, there's a cornfield a mile away that you could have stood in. You could have stood in a cornfield. And then when um the army and General Zods guys came for you, you would have destroyed poor Joe Smith's crops, but you wouldn't have caused $3 million in property damage and threatened the lives of everyone that you grew up with. Why? And I get it, they want the spectacle. But Superman Two is not a particularly great movie. But again, talk about missing the point of the thing you're adapting. The whole point of the big fight in Metropolis in Superman Two is General Zod keeps threatening innocent civilians and Superman keeps going, Fuck, I can't have this fight here. He's going to keep throwing busses full of children at me, and I'm never going to win because I care about the people of Metropolis and he doesn't. And then man of Steel has him throw in General Zod through office buildings that are full of people. Superman cares too much to do that. But again, it's like, I still don't like it didn't destroy anything. There will be four more Superman where I am in my grave, and they will do some of them. Some will be good, some will be bad. Not my problem.
Guido: Uh i wonder if some of your comfort or willingness to accept that comes from being a fan of this long form serialized storytelling like Pulp is because I feel the same way as you. As a comic fan and someone who's read the same title and usually X Men for 35 years, I'm like, okay, it's been bad. And it upsets me in the moments when it's bad that someone is missing, like, what I think is great, but it's almost like this too shall pass, right? Like, I know it's going to keep going. And so, like, you're saying, the weirdest.
David: Idea in the world that we're owed your favorite restaurant closes and that sandwich you love, I'm sorry, it is gone forever. And you'll find another restaurant that you love. Another sandwich. That's fucking great. But it's never going to be that exact thing. I will never get the fourth season um of Star Trek with William Shatner. And you know what? If I had gotten it, it would have been produced by Fred Freeberger, and it probably would have sucked. It would have sucked worse than the third season. So maybe I'm lucky that I didn't get that fourth season. And Berman was in charge of Star Trek for forever. He was hostile to um stories with LGBTQ subtexts. So Star Trek was behind Liberal American society for 25 years because of one Jackass, maybe five jackasses. But that's sad. And that sucks. And they had an opportunity with Jazz mhm to really do something about it. And they didn't. They backed away from that issue as much as they possibly fucking could because they were cowards and Star Trek was never about cowardice. But it's like, what am I going to say to the people who are younger than me and that's their Star Trek? I mean, my Star Trek is racist and sexist left and right. The Klingons are like bad Fu Manchu. Chinese supervillains from 1930s Pulps. Actually, they look like killer Canes guys from 1930s pump. They're all Fu Manchu. That's horrible. There's the short skirts and the high boots on the women. That's ridiculous uh.
Speaker UNK: Impractical.
David: But also, you know, the heart was in the good place and that they did the best they could in the period. And that's all anyone can do. I think my work is extremely political. There are people who miss it entirely. I put a Comicsgate guy in an issue of a very what's the word? Generic comics gate guy in the uh 6th or 7th issue of Alvara. He's in hell in the circle of uh the Wrathful and her guide, who's clearly uh divine says, did you know that guy said, yeah, he had a blog or uh something called geek bully. How did he die? He had a stroke during a screening of The Last Jedi. His last words were, Mary Snoop. There was a dude who made five videos because he was convinced um it was him. I had never heard of him before in my life. No idea. The best thing is when someone does five YouTube videos about how you're obsessed with them, it's. But what had happened, though, was I had seen a couple of kind of right wing comicscape guys talking um about how much they love the book. And I was like, Well, let's let them know what side me and Cassandra Peterson are on here. Drawn to look like him. And honestly, it was drawn to look like somebody else that wasn't him. But that guy is such a cliche that they all kind of look like that guy. So he thought it was supposed to be him, right?
Guido: Exactly. There's a type, but.
David: It'S always going to be what I believe and what I stand for. And I'm very lucky that Cassandra and I are on the same page pretty much with our political beliefs. And when we did Alvara the Omega Ma'am, we kind of came up together. I came up with the post apocalyptic framework and uh the whole idea of, like, Trump telling people to take cleaning products during COVID would turn them into zombies. I think she came up with the idea that the mhm Mark of the zombie was bright Orange skin. I thought that was really important. Pretty sure that was one of her. We were on, like, a two hour long phone call, and I was taking notes, and I'm pretty sure that was she's like, oh, maybe they can be Orange. I was like, oh, yeah, that's a good gag. That was actually a funny guy. Very hard time getting the colorist. Walter Pereira is a great colorist, but he bought he just had a hard time imagining how Orange he kept doing, like, fairly realistic people who had been in a self Tanner for a while. I was like, no, Orange. Like, Gamora. Exactly. I said, Seriously, uh do a drag and drop on uh the color of a fucking traffic cone and use that. That is what I want. It's supposed to be ridiculous, but I think the first page with the zombies on it, we did five versions of it because Walter just didn't want to push it into ridiculous. I was like, no, man. I swear to you, I will be okay. Ridiculous. I had another great professor in College who had just pretty much escaped from behind the Iron Curtain from Hungary named Andre Huolish, currently still a director and a writer. And I was um making a World War II movie, and we started talking about the context of it, and I said, like, you do when you're 21. Well, I'm not merely making a political movie. And he said, David, there's no such thing as a non political movie. Even the choice to not comment is the choice to support the status quo. Mhm it can't be neutral. Yeah, there is no such thing as a non political movie. There's something political about every single choice you make, every direction you point a camera. So obviously that was said to me in 1086. That has stayed with me a very long time, uh but I don't see any reason to run away from it. And the greatest thing I can say about Dynamite, there um are a lot of reasons behind this, but they leave me very uh much alone to do what I want to do. The only pushback I have ever gotten from Dynamite has been legal issues involving Copyright and trademark and things we have to be careful about because it's not Mad Magazine. It's particularly tricky with satire and with Elvira. I thought about it, but I made the ultimate decision with Horror Land that it all has to be. We can draw likenesses of the actors, but actually he's Nick jackelson Norman Bates is Norbert Block because you can uh make jokes even within those jokes. And again, Mad Magazine would do that too. I think there's a joke in issue too where Scatmancruthers shows up and Elvira calls him Hollering as in Hollering instead of Hollering his um actual name. And Scatman uh actually says, I think that's what they call me, Mad Magazine too when she says it's so long ago, who remembers? I could go to my closet and pull out. I'm sure I have the Mad Magazine um with The Shining in it. And I think they did call him Hollering uh Hollering instead of Jack Torrance. It's Nick because it's the same first name as the actor Nick Torres. T-O-R-R-E-N-T-S as in Torrence of Blood, as.
Guido: In Internet lingo too.
David: So part of me wishes I could have just gone uh with Bates Motel and Norman Bates and Marian Crane and all of those names. What's funny is I don't change the names like Elvira calls out Stanley um in the second issue. I don't change Stanley Kubrick's name because he's not in that movie. But yeah, the only notes I get uh are like the first script for issue two of Twilight on the Shadow. It was Orson Wells and Magnus Morehead and Legal came back can't do it. And I sent them a thousand examples of movies that have Orson Wells as a character and they were like, we are not taking that risk.
Guido: So yeah, we noticed that change. And we're curious if maybe that estate.
David: Was particularly uh just a decision made by CBS and their lawyers because CBS owns Twilight Zone. The funny thing to me and I feel like I need to whisper this is the part that's super protected is their image, not the name. So actually the drawings of worse and well are more actionable than his name. But that's not a satire. I feel way free in now for an example, issue three, the Alien issue I had to write Sylvia Californo one of the big issues with Copyright and likeness rights and all that is particularly if you're selling it to sell something. So when we came to do the covers for the third issue, I was like, The Xenomorph can't be on these covers as it exists in the movies. Then Marvel Comics is going to go, we have the alien's license right now. What the fuck are you doing? So she literally like I said, you're going to have to do an alien. And I think she gave the alien Thanos Purple Chin and the mandibles from The Predator, and um she made him an amalgam of a bunch of other scifi villains. But it's a really tricky, especially with something like that. Uh it is a franchise, but it's like the look of the motel on the cover is not something they're going to really get us for. But I was like, we can't have the Xenomorph looking like the Xenomorph on the cover of the issue. And same thing with The Nightmare in Elm Street. We've got Elvira dressed as Freddy Krueger. We've got Cassandra recreated or not Cassandra. Cassandra. Sylvia recreated The Nightmare on Elm Street poster, except it's Elvira instead of the actress. And John Royal uh did Elvira in a bath with the hand of Freddie Kruger coming out of the water, which is just enough. And I think I haven't looked close, but I feel like there's a nail file and a screwdriver on his glove. So it's not like the original glove, but that stuff is really tricky and you don't want to wait into a you know, we should talk at least for a second with the Bay Page unbound the original idea there was that Dynamite wanted me to do Nick Baruchi. Uh the President wanted me to do sort of. It was about covers. Mhm wouldn't it be cool to have Betty Page as Vampirella, Betty Page as Red Sonia, Betty Page as Deja Thoris? And his idea was, look, she's an actress, she can be in movies, whatever. And I was like, that's fine. But I had introduced Yog Satoth, the HP Lovecraft great old one, in the Halloween special. Yogsatoth is an interdimensional bridge, he's the gate, and the Guardian of the gate is the paradoxical description of Yogzatha. So it's like if she pissed off the great old ones and they're coming back, I can do a whole thing where she's jumping through different dimensions and then in one dimension, in one dimension, she's the amparella. And actually, John Royal had done a cover that we had never used where she was Tinkerbell, and it was that cover. I was like, oh, my God, Tinkerbell, Tinkerbell uh versus Cthulhu. To wrap up the series is where I was. Uh i can't say it's the best thing I've ever written, but the most sheer pop culture joy I have ever gotten from writing anything was Tinkerbell versus Cthulhu and images like Peter Pan pulling back the Bolt on a Lewis machine gun from the 1920s. And going today would be to die would be an awfully big adventure that hits such a sweet spot of my way of reimagining fairy tale and classic characters. Peter Pan with a bulky World War I machine gun firing it at near lathat. Uh and I wish I could have done seven issues. I could have done 100 issues of that particular concept, because I don't know if it's as clear I should have thrown more dinosaurs in. But the basic idea for that was okay if she's Tinkerbell and we're going up against the great old ones. So what if Skull Island and Monster Island from the Godzilla pictures and Neverland, they're just one place. It's just one magical horror island with a bunch of crazy shit on it, including alligators that eat Pirates and shipwreck crocodiles that eat pilots. So being able to do all that in one issue was such a fucking joy. And my joke title for that series, which I did put in the solicits, was Crisis on Infinite Betty's. And uh there's a cover for the second issue by John Chandler where he recreated and I bought the art from him. I love him so much. He recreated Perez's beautiful cover, George Perez's beautiful cover for Crisis on Infinite Earth number one. But everyone is Betty, uh Superman is Betty, and Betty. It's that cover from Prices on Infinite Earth. But everyone is Betty Page. And again, it was a way of what are the multiple sides of Betty Page and how it played out in the comic. And I bet you anything that every writer that's come after me has ignored this completely. I didn't realize until I was done with it. Betty was later diagnosed with multiple personalities. Well, with bipolar at least. Well, I told a story where in 1954, she embodied four different people in four different universes and had fairly traumatic experiences in those bodies and souls. And in issue five, we discover that they're living in her brain. She has a library in her brain where they all talk to her. And I didn't do it intentionally, but when I was writing that issue, I went. And later she's diagnosed bipolar because she hears voices, because people are talking to her in her head. And Betty went through a lot of trauma in her real, actual life, and I kind of wanted to fictionalize it. But in the second half of Betty Page, I'm down. She's captured by aliens who tried to reprogram her, and they hit that wall of trauma. They uh hit her father molesting her, and the rape she endured in New York in the 1950s and 1940s and all that. And I didn't set out to write about that stuff, but I got to writing a scene where aliens were trying to rewrite turn her into a zombie. And I went from personal experience. When you try to rewrite your personality, what you get is that wall of trauma, and everything you ever live through is between you and that and being able to that's a pretty light hearted, entertaining book. The fact that I eventually got around to talking about her incredibly traumatic life in it in the context of a story where giant bees from outer space were trying to take over the world, I got to talk about how trauma shapes us. And to me, that is the fucking gig, man. Like, if you can have people experience a thing, and here's the thing that should keep you honest if you do this stuff for a living. We all know that we were affected by art. All of us, any artist that argues like, oh, man, I'm not trying to change anybody's mind. Bullshit. We all are the people we are, partially because of the art we consumed when we were kids. And I went through a very traumatic experience about eight years ago involving a family member and two things. I went to therapy. Things uh helped me get over it. But two things saved my life as much as therapy. The episode of Better Call Saul where Jimmy realizes that his beloved Hypochondriac brother, who he's been supporting 100% and who he loves more than anyone in the world, has been stabbing him in the back his entire life. That healed me. And it was very painful to watch. And then around the same time, I saw a three day series of Charles Schultz strips about the relationship between Lucy and Linus, and that uh completely yield me. I went, oh, Lucy has always been embarrassed by me. Lucy has always been a little ashamed by me. And the thing that offends her the most is I refuse to be ashamed by myself. She wants me to feel bad about myself, and I'm never going to feel bad about myself. And I'm going to turn to Charlie Brown and say, I'm going to keep patting birds on the head, even if it embarrasses Lucy. That's just who I got to be, man. And Charles Schultz from beyond the grave. Three comic strips written probably in the late 1960s, early 1970s helped me understand my relationship to my own sister better than anything anyone said to me in therapy. And once you identify that about the work that you do, you go, I have the opportunity to do that for someone else. I have the opportunity. I talked about it a little bit in the pulp today about Valace, but Philip K. Dick in that extremely meta, extremely autobiographical science fiction novel. Try writing autobiographical science fiction. Sometimes talks about going to a doctor who says something to him that makes him feel good about himself in such a way that it heals um him. And he says, it takes a real genius for people to know the one sentence you can tell to someone that's going to heal them. The tragedy of human life is almost any idiot can look at you and tell what the sentence is that will destroy you. But hate to genius, to know what the healing phrase is. So you can find that healing phrase in Friends. You can find it in the real world. You can find it in art. And when you find it in art, that scene where a character says something and you go, Yikes. The common meme for it now is I feel seen. I've changed quite a bit since I was single. But there's a line in Casino Royale, I was single for a very long time. Line in Casino Royale where he's bantering with Eva Green and he says, you're not my type anyway. And she says, I can't remember what she says. It's something like what? Smart, independent something? Uh and he says, Single. And I went, oh, I just remembered my thirty s real hard. And you're right. Maybe I shouldn't fool around with other people wives and girlfriends so much. If I had seen that, if that movie had come out when I was in my thirty s, it might have changed my dating habits. Uh that's a horrible thing to say. That is a nasty, lonely life you're living. Maybe I should stop living that life that you are. But anyway, I said too much.
Guido: Well, that's the reason people should go out and find your work, because they'll feel seen in some way. And we only read Betty Page onbound volume one. We're going to have to keep reading.
David: It because I don't know when it drops. I mean, the floppies are out there and you can probably find them on whatever uh comic ology is calling itself these days. They're supposed to do a volume, too. I haven't seen it yet, but yeah, the second volume. The first volume is a uh Crisis on Indefinite Betty's. The second volume is called Invasion of the Betty Snatchers. Um my tribute to everything in that uh where aliens make duplicates of people walking around the world. So it's a little bit Invasion of Body Snacks. Will the future you describe be averted?
Guido: So a Betty Page onbound volume two, collected edition. We have Horror Land first issue uh out the week this comes out. And what else is on the horizon? You're involved in the death of Elvira. That got Indiegogo.
David: Who bid on it. I'm hoping they have it by now because the book has been done a really long time.
Guido: No, we don't.
David: Speaking is one of those whenever later this uh is going to air. I'm hoping that that has happened yet.
Guido: Oh, good, you're excited.
David: There's some other Kickstarter stuff that I hope makes its way to the real world. I did a comic story and a uh short story in a Colshack anthology. If you remember Colshack, the Nightstar from the had the absolute joy of writing his uh origin story. I got to write Colshack as a teenager in Brooklyn, which is amazing fun. I'm working on a piece for a Shakespeare anthology. They asked me to do a Shakespeare horror piece and we'll say another word about research. My first thought was no one had out. None of the other people contributing had taken uh Richard III. I'm, like, the most obvious monster in the group, will do Richard III. And then I thought, what if you do the last scene of Richard III? But the opening is two English soldiers looking for him in the midst and hearing him cry out, A horse or horse, my Kingdom for a horse. And they're arguing over whether or not he's really a vampire. And that's why he's so high to kill. That's why he was able to seduce Princess Anne and marry her and all that, even though he killed her husband. And here's the crazy thing about research. I didn't know off the top in my head what year Richard the Third takes place. I only vaguely know the history of Vladimpor. I did some research for it for a buyer. Obviously, Richard III is killed literally six years after Vladim Paler. So, in fact, at that battle where Richard III is six years in a world without newspapers, that's fucking current events. But I was like, my curiosity was, wow, is vampire even a word in 1485 that these guys are going to know? And again, yeah, that would have stopped me because I'm an idiot. I would have said, oh, he's a Golem, he's a demon, whatever. I would have changed it to something. And then I looked up the battle where Richard III was killed, 1885. And then Vladimpa is like, 1480, 514 77. I was like, oh, I can totally have these guys saying there was that walkian King that like eight people and put heads on spikes. He's like, that guy. No, that's crazy. Those are just crazy. The Hungarians uh are nuts. You don't believe any of that or whatever, I guess. But yeah, research wins again, man. Richard III and Vlad the Impaler are fucking contemporaries. Who knew? Uh i don't know what that's going to be called. Shakespeare Unleashed, I think. And I have no idea when that Kickstarter launches. And I wrote a Blondie, an adaptation of a song by Blondie for Z Two comics that an artist named um Lisa Weber is drawing. It's only eight pages, but the thing is freaking gorgeous. And again, I don't know when that's coming out or even I assume Z Two is going to do some Blondie or New Wave or 80s collection. And it's an adaptation uh of Also Hearing You. It's an adaptation of the song Dreaming by Blondie from uh when you said Blondie, David.
Rob: My head instantly went to cereals in.
David: Dagwood because I was like, well, that's.
Rob: Perfectly up your alley is Blondie cereal.
David: I seriously have to put Blondie with a Dagwood sandwich in the background of one of those panels. I have to tell Lisa to do that. But I told her, because it's Dreaming. She's emulating the style somewhat of Windsor McKay and Little Nemo and all that. So the piece looks really beautiful so far. After not doing any shorts, I ended up doing, uh like, a Zillion shorts over the last year. And coming up a month or two after this show airs, will be the first issue of Savage Tales, which I um have an Allen Quartermain story uh and a Gulivar of Mars story, because I will try anything once. Uh and those are fun stories. And also the Alvira Vincent Price trade should be out in July.
Guido: Um great. Mhm and I hope Harland is not the end of your run.
David: I'm working on a kind of massive project with Cassandra. I can't say what it is yet, but it's going to be an original Glass. It's probably going to be a graphic novel and it's going to take a pretty long time to finish. So I'm working on it while I'm working on Elvira and Harleand. Right now, I'm writing issue three of Elvira and Harland and working my um way through all of the jokes about alien. When Ansel lets her in the airlock, she says, thanks, Bilbo, stuff like that. Uh i think the running gag in the alien issue is going to be the throwing or in the Brig. Uh when she correctly predicts what's going to happen next, someone's going to jump out of that guy's chest and you're all going to be scared. And like, next cut. Is she's in the break point not listening to me yet.
Guido: Well, we can't wait. So as we wrap up, please let people know how to find you, where to find you, where they can find Pulp today and about you.
David: The thing is, uh I do have a website called Davidavalonefreelance.com and that branches off to all of the things, and it usually has news and links and whatever. Uh i'm on Twitter, as at Davaloni, and again on the Twitter, there's a link tree that will take you to the Instagram and the Facebook and all of that kind of stuff. And it's pretty the nicest thing in the 21st century is this last name, which I got made fun of my entire childhood, makes me eminently Googleable. I feel sorry for anyone. Even Frank Miller probably has a harder time getting found on the internet than I do because there are a lot of people named Frank Miller.
Rob: They think he's the antagonist from High Noon.
David: From High Noon I did. The first time I saw his name Frank Miller, I thought Marshall Wilking gun that guy down in small town in the west. But yeah. So the nice thing is you Google my name, you get like a good ten pages before you get to Lieutenant uh David Avaloni, retired, who is now a lawyer who I believe is a veteran of Afghanistan, seemed like a very nice guy.
Guido: Well, we will also include links to your work and to find you on your website in our show notes. And I have been Guido and I have been Rob.
Rob: That is a wrap to your watchers. Thank you so much for listening. Please leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts and we will be back soon with another trip through the multiverse.
Guido: But the biggest thanks to our special guest David avaloni David. Thank you for your time you have so many projects you're working on. So we're so grateful for this time with us. Thank you and in the words of keep pondering the possibilities
David: you.