Process Party – Episode 40 – PHASE 2!

Study Group Comics has a podcast! Join hosts Zack Soto (Secret Voice, Power Button) & Mike Dawson (Rules For Dating My Daughter, Troop 142) as they discuss their own creative processes, comic art, family life, and a ton of other stuff.
Each episode finds a new guest from the world of comics joining Mike & Zack for an in depth conversation, and occasional guest segments from their pals around the world. Subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or a podcatcher of your choice, or via the embedded audio in the posts themselves.  (Yes, some of those links below are Amazon Affiliate links that kick a little bit our way if you click through to buy them. Mea Culpa)  Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, and check out Mike & Zack’s personal Patreon pages.

This episode: PHASE 2!

What’s Phase 2, you ask? Well, it’s not much, really. We just got to joking around about being relaxed from our respective recent vacations. Anyway, WELCOME TO PHASE 2!

This episode is actually One From The Vaults. Way back in April 2015, Mike and Zack had an extended chat on Mike’s old podcast TCJ Talkies, which was sort of a “book club” kinda thing. The two met in the glorious, unspoiled past to talk about one of the biggest superhero comics of the 1990s: Kingdom Come by Mark Waid & Alex Ross.

Here’s what Mike wrote about our talk in 2015:

“Cartoonist and publisher Zack Soto joins me in the Talkie Hutt for a chat about the DC Elseworlds classic Kingdom Come. Written by Mark Waid and illustrated by Alex Ross, this 1996 series tells a story set in a dark alternate DC universe, where all the fondly remembered iconic superheroes of our childhoods have stepped aside to make way for a new breed of irresponsible “gritty” metahumans, who are more interested in fighting one another than protecting Truth and Justice. It doesn’t take too deep a reading to see this plot as the old-guard superhero writers and artists grumping about the comics publishing upheavals of the 1990s, when grim antiheroes like the Punisher and Wolverine reigned supreme, and upstart, “undisciplined” comics publishers like Image burst onto the scene.

This book was a tricky one, because it’s very hard for me to reconcile how I feel about it. Which is apt, given that so much of that probably has to do with nostalgia, and Kingdom Come is nothing if not a several-hundred-page long, lushly watercolored wallow in the nostalgia pond. Zack and I spend a good amount of time talking about Alex Ross, and how unlike many Image cartoonists from those days (most notably Rob Liefeld), Ross doesn’t seem to have enjoyed a redemptive reevaluation amongst what you’d call the current “art-comics” crowd.

Also in this episode: an extended excerpt from a paper written on Kingdom Come by comics academic and Cartozia Tales publisher Isaac Cates, entitled “On The Literary Use of Superheroes; or Batman and Superman Fistfight in Heaven”, published in American Literature. Isaac was gracious enough to allow me to read a lengthy portion of his writing, which I am grateful for, as I felt it helped dig into the plot and themes of Kingdom Come in a direct way, and set up the ensuing conversation with Zack very well.”

This was a fun back and forth, and is in many ways a proto-Process Party! Hear our first inkling of rapport, here in this window to the past! 

BUT FIRST: Mike & Zack catch up after their travels, get excited about Patreon goals, talk about movie habits (& touch on Spider-Man: Homecoming), and have a Democratic Minute!

PS: DON’T FORGET! We’ve finally launched our super cool Process Party Patreon! If you enjoy the pod and want to help support us in what we do, now is your chance to kick in. There’s a few reward tiers available, including the low low $1/month, but if you subscribe at the $3/month level, you will get access to an exclusive Patreon-only weekly podcast feed! That’s a whole extra podcast for less than 1$/episode of the main feed!

If the main Process Party podcast is like being in the mix chatting with cartoonists at a convention party, Process Party: Real Talk is the afterparty, when the walls come down and the real talk, advice and gossip flow freely!  Every week we ask our guests to impart a little *extra* bit of wisdom, some nuts & bolts how-to info or philosophy, and of course a heavy dose of every cartoonist’s number one concern: GETTING PAID IN COMICS! These minisodes contain exclusive content not included in the regular podcast!

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