Pickup.
All right.
All right, here we go.
You ready to go? On your side.
Ready, baby.
Here we go. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Hey, yo. Welcome to geek freaks.
I am Frank, and I'm with Aubrey
Sanderson of Free Planet, a new comic from Image Comics.
How are you doing, Audrey?
I'm doing great, baby. Thank you for having me.
Great free planet.
Just to kind of throw it out there real quick.
You know, we talk about saga very much around here,
and I'm getting some saga vibes out of this.
Can you tell us a little bit about Free Planet?
Yeah, man. First of all, that's high praise.
Thank you.
You know, we do bring up saga in comparisons, right?
We tell people that Free Planet, it's a geopolitical space.
Opera is the genre, and we tell people that it is the complex
future history of East of West meets the interpersonal
soap opera drama of saga.
Right. So we're trying to we're trying to do both, right?
We're trying to do something complex, something rich, dense, even.
Right. But also something personal.
Something intensely personal and emotional with
big military sci fi action spread throughout.
It's where we try to hit all the notes, man.
And you have some very, very cool characters right off the bat.
Is it Talon the robot? Talon? Yeah.
Or are you fan favorite of mine?
I love em.
Bro. I, so I'll tell you a funny story.
I when I first got the first issue of Free Planet down
like Free Planet and free, it's different, man. It's.
There aren't other comics on the rack like this.
It's a very specific approach.
And I was a little nervous about it.
So I shown it to friends, and then I would hit them with a battery of questions.
I would interrogate them afterwards, just as like my market research rate.
And one of the questions I always ask was, who's your favorite character?
And I was shocked.
I was shocked that it was Talon, until I thought about it.
And we shouldn't spoil this because I think it's it's really good.
But yeah, you know, you're nodding.
You know, you know exactly what I like.
I realized I was like, oh, of course they love Talon.
And that if I'm being honest with you, that impacted our plans for the book.
I went back to the outline.
I went back into the outline and changed some things, just in light
of how much people were responding to Talon even at that early day.
I love hearing that it's the first place you went the record of easy, I love them.
Let's talk about where this idea comes from,
because I think, you know, with a lot of color books nowadays, sci
fi is a little bit on the outside of it, and you're doing a really good job
of using that sci fi lens to explore freedom and politics and stuff like that.
Where did this spark of an idea come from for you?
And yet.
You know, so the initial idea was very broad,
and it was really just a way to kind of explore
geopolitical dynamics without being either,
you know, without my self being hindered by real life factual accuracy
or the audience being hindered in their perceptions of things.
Right?
Because if you set something, if you do historical fiction,
no matter what the event is, people are going to come to it
with their own, already locked in notions of how to look at the different parties.
Right.
And that's something I wanted to get free of as well.
And, you know, that's how I started with the idea of space.
Venezuela, a planet with a powerful resource,
but all by itself on its own, stuck between big superpowers
and trying to slug it out and trying to figure out a way forward.
And from there, you know, asking myself questions about it,
it became apparent that it should be a brand new nation,
that they should have won a Revolutionary War and that, you know,
the more Jen and I talked about it and thought about it and worked on it,
it's been a minute since I've had anything on the shelves. Man.
And it's because I've been working.
I've been up on my mountain, figured this thing out.
And how I did it was research, just extensive amounts of research
into real life revolutions
and civil war and, you know, mostly the 20th century.
But going back deeper to hit the, you know, the US revolution, of course,
but also Russia and Cuba and Haiti and China
to get a perception of, you know, the different
factions and philosophies and political worldviews
that form these revolutionary coalitions, they struggle to move forward
and that that impacted not just this larger world
that every planet exists within, but the characters
who are all members of
they're all they all fought in the Revolutionary War,
but they all come from wildly diverse backgrounds,
and they have completely different ideas about what,
you know, actually is, you know, they founded the first completely
free planet in human history after fighting for candidates
from a brutal, corporate dominated oligarchy.
And now the hard part now is figuring out how to move forward and how to,
how to take what everybody wants
and find something that everyone will be okay with.
And it's complicated, and that's what it's all.
And that's what the book's all about.
That's that struggle
to, you know,
rectify different perception, different views of freedom.
Right.
And to really and to really bring those, all those things together
is what informs not just the geopolitical maneuvering,
but the military action and the interpersonal drama
on the satellite with Freedom Guards based out of.
Yeah.
And and, you know, speaking of the different ways,
what I'm harkening back to is that, like late 1700s France,
they had the revolution and it's very violent in the way it happens.
And and then so looking at what where they were at at the time,
like trying to figure out,
okay, what is too much at this point we had this violent revolution.
If we want peace, we have to scale back that violence
that's gotten us our freedom.
And you have military leaders
and these war generals that are together to try to defend this planet.
So what is too much freedom for these people?
Is there anything in particular that you wanted to explore in that realm?
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I think the central question of
Free Planet is
what, you know, what is freedom look like,
and what are we willing to sacrifice to get it right?
And that that encompasses a lot.
And, you know, I took a lot of, you know,
back to my research, one of the books that was really impactful.
And I read it twice all the way through was, the Dawn of Everything by David
Graeber and David Windrow and it's, you know,
it's a book of anthropology, but it's a wide ranging
historical anthropology that really digs into what is freedom.
And when did we start giving up these core human freedoms?
And that was a really influential
tome in terms of developing what Free Planet was really about.
And that's
exploring, you know, different perceptions
of freedom and different ways of organizing societies.
Right?
Inclusive not just of politics, but religion and philosophy
and economics and culture and how these things interact
with one another and make for really complex incentives
that result in, you know, strange bedfellows,
but also internecine animosity
between people who would, on the surface, seem to be on the same page.
Yeah.
You mentioned in the first book like you're free to go so far,
but when it starts going up against somebody else's freedom, that's the issue.
But then. Yeah, exactly. That's exactly right.
You know, and so like the scene, the scene
you're talking about, it's it's when I point to a lot
because I think it's indicative of the free planet approach in a few ways.
Right. And the first is layout.
It's a big spread.
You know, this is a book that has to be.
It was designed to be a print periodical, right?
Not digital because
we approached it in a very chicken iron sense.
Howard Chaiken was, he he's a dear friend of mine, and he.
I met Jed through him.
Jed is j was working as Howard's assistant when we first met.
And, you know, Howard's big innovation was viewing comics
not as a collection of panels, but a collection of pages and his belief
and I, I subscribe to it, is that pages are the fundamental,
foundational, fundamental storytelling unit of a comic,
and the interaction between panels, the way a page is laid out.
That's the magic of comics.
And we leaned directly into that.
There's a ton of spreads, and they are jam packed with visual information.
I for the first time ever, I did thumbnails before I script,
and that's to ensure that's to ensure
that everything I write is geared around these overwhelming visuals.
And the one that I'm talking about in the first.
When you brought up in the first issue, it's a big spread
and it has the Freedom Guard responding to a small landowner
who has been using his land the way that his family's used it
for generations, which is mining this uniquely powerful energy source.
Right.
And the Freedom Guard is there to tell him to knock it off in a firefight.
Breaks off, breaks out.
And they want him to stop
mining, stop extracting this fuel from the ground
in order that they can terraform and grow food.
Right.
They can start doing agriculture in that area.
And he refuses.
And, you know, on the surface, that seems authoritarian,
especially from a US perspective. Right?
Like that's that's like a villain on Yellowstone showing up, telling,
telling John Dutton what needs to be do with the love Yellowstone.
So yeah. Classic.
Tell it, tell it, tell it John Dutton what he needs to be doing with his land.
That's what it feels like, especially from the U.S.
perspective, where freedom is so baked into our founding mythology, right?
Our identity.
It's a thing that across the political spectrum.
Right.
This is the thing that we all believe and we we hold deeply important.
And so it feels very authoritarian and brutal.
But then you look at the rest of the spread, which has graphs and charts
and, you know, these historical captions that kind of give context
and sometimes provide added perspectives on what you're seeing.
You realize, oh, this planet, they're starving, they're running out of food.
And that's this is indicative of the formal approach
to Free Planet in terms of how we're using diverse visual elements like charts
and graphs and captions, and to build out these overwhelming spreads and visuals.
But it's also it's also indicative of the approach in that
it's not
simple, it's complex, it's difficult.
There's not there's not a direct metaphor here.
There's not. A friend of mine asked me, Daniel
Freedman, he's an incredible comic book writer.
He asked me,
you know, doing all this research that you did
because he you're talking about my bibliography.
And he said, do you know this research?
Do you
did you come to any conclusions like this free planet, like, figure out
like what the thing is?
And I say, well, no, absolutely not.
Because it's not what it's about. Right? Yeah.
The point is that there is no that is the definitive answer.
Right?
That's exactly right.
Like the point is to get you to think about it.
The point is for readers to have something to chew on this like
instead of just a ABCd narrative.
Right?
Just stretched out over five issues and then broken into pages.
This is a collection of oftentimes
discrete in that, you know, a spread is a scene, right?
If it's not the entirety of a scene, it's at least meaningful in and of itself.
There's no filler pages. There's certainly no filler issues.
This is designed to be an art object and literature.
It's it's designed to be both right.
And that it's something you need old and appreciate in your in.
And you're incentivized to do that by how wonderful it looks.
And in doing so, you're rewarded with a chance to live
in this world and ruminate over some complicated, complex stuff.
Man, it's it's been a. Joy ride like that.
Like, like you should walk away thinking about it.
Even when we're talking about that specific situation.
I found myself thinking like, well, if I had a seat at the table, I would say,
let's use the resources out of the mine to help buy food from other planets
or whatever, like you're you're wanting to be.
That's what sci fi does, right? It makes you walk away
thinking like, well, this is what I would tell Kirk to do.
You know, you change up, you know your playing.
That's exactly right. Yeah.
I mean, and that's,
you know, a lot of that classic sci fi is what we're harkening back to.
You know, I,
you know, when I was
formulating the idea of this planet, this like trying to go to go its own way,
be completely free and, you know, really based around personal autonomy.
It was heavily influenced by The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin.
It's one of my favorite, one of my favorite novels.
And I was talking, actually, I was talking to Howard about Howard
Chaiken, about it, and he's like, well, you need to record Wayne or Smith be Red
Claude Wayne or Smith, and like, I don't know, like it's earlier.
It's from the 60s and it's, it's bananas and I adore it.
And but it's like the text for not only Ursula Gwynn's
like, Hain ish cycle, but also, Frank Herbert's Dune.
Right? Like, it's it's a lot of farming.
A lot of just my being a.
Yeah, that's the thing.
And like, it's alarming how much these two kind of more
popular, more well known works today.
It's alarming how much they took from
Katrina Smith's, Instrumentality of Mankind.
Yeah. Oeuvre. Right.
And it's alarming, but that's also one of the really cool things about sci
fi is, you know, as ideas become tropes and get utilized and,
you know, it was our hope to be able to contribute to that, to play along.
And, you know,
I tried I, I took our advice and I read a bunch of chord Wiener Smith
and it was really valuable in terms of like thinking about this world.
But I'll tell you, it's that stuff.
Pales in like in terms of
influence, pales in comparison to the nonfiction research that I did.
You know, like like the, the esthetic.
Right.
This sheen kind of comes from classic sci fi stuff,
but what informs it, and I think this is true of if you look at
Katrina Smith, deeply, deeply knowledgeable
and enmeshed in global politics, right?
Geopolitics of his time.
If you look at Frank Herbert, deeply knowledgeable
of religion and anthropology and ecology.
Right.
Ursula Gwynne was the daughter of anthropologists herself.
Right.
So, like to catch up to these folks, I had to do a job
where I had to wear out my library card.
They had in order to get Aubra.
You're not allowed to come back.
I know they got they got sick of seeing me.
But because I needed
to, I need to learn enough to build the foundations of this thing.
Well, and touching on that,
I think one of the things that you add that I think might be not lacking,
but I focus in your book, is how grounded these stories can be, because
not to give any spoilers away, but I mean, like the
the scene that's in the cabin, it's on the last few pages.
They're that right there.
You're like, oh, that's going to ripple like crazy, you know?
And it's just there's one little things that can like change
how this entire planet works.
And just the discussion where you take someone aside
and you discuss what future looks like, what freedom looks like,
and that could change the direction that entire thing goes.
And so all these big geopolitical moves are happening, but it also brings it down
to very personal moments that can swing things back and forth very rapidly.
Thank you for saying that.
It was important to me, my previous work, I had,
you know, especially my dark horse stuff.
I, no one had to fight savage, savage hearts.
Which is with Jed and, worst dudes.
Even even though it's like, a worst case.
It's a very specific thing.
It's like 16.
It's for, like, lousy 16 year old boys.
It's very raunchy and silly, but all of those.
But all of those books I just listed really leaned into this
interpersonal soap opera.
I like writing that stuff, you know, I like writing romance.
I like writing, you know, people
dealing with their feelings in big visual ways.
Right? That's the thing I really enjoy.
So I didn't want to lose that.
And, you know,
when I was up on my mountain, man figuring out what Free Planet was going to
be, you know, I had a lot of boxes I needed to tick off in order
for me to be happy with where I was taking my work.
And one of them, you know, there were things I needed to maintain, right?
Like the the relentlessly visual nature of my work
and making sure that I'm not overwhelming.
Jed's contributions, which are immense
and I think are readily apparent to anybody who looks at this thing.
Yeah.
But among them, too, was maintaining these personal moments,
because I recognize that, you know, just
just doing the geopolitical and the military, like the sci fi
military stuff that would that could make for a really interesting, smart comment.
And that was on my mind.
I wanted to do something that was perceived as more cerebral
and complex than what I had done previously.
But I
knew that if we lost, you know, there's certain things people want from my work.
There are things people like about my work and I do want to lose.
But also to your point, man, like that's what grounds it.
That's what makes it important.
And for me, the the trick was in making sure that
the interpersonal drama wasn't incidental.
Right.
Like it wasn't it wasn't just something grafted on where guys were
fighting over the last cupcake in the commissary.
Right. Like that.
Like, or the canteen or whatever, you know, like that's,
that's it couldn't be stuff like that.
It had to be,
it had to be like everything else in the book,
deeply connected to these themes of what is freedom?
And, you know, what kind of discipline is required to maintain it.
That's another big running theme of this thing, right?
The discipline necessary for. Yeah.
And you could feel it coming for you.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, and it's, it's I don't know, I had a lot of those.
Right. Yeah.
And the way I ensured that
I have dossiers and
it's a massive kind of living word document
that I think things do with all of the characters,
including Jackson Crater, who's my favorite and shows up in issue two.
The.
I can give you a spoiler, little spoiler for him.
Okay.
Let me get through this first.
I'm sorry. Judge.
So I have all the characters have sections for each characters headings
and then underneath them, you know, and so,
you know, I have the background information, right?
What they did in the Revolutionary War, what planet they're from, they're kind of
class and socioeconomic background and like what religion they are.
There's multiple religions in this thing.
And then I have crucially, the most important part
subheadings for all the other characters under each heading for one character.
And that's where I explain where they agree
or disagree with these other characters.
And that that's the crux of it.
All right.
Like whenever there are,
whenever there is interpersonal drama, scratch the surface of it.
It's something we need to scratch.
What's beneath it is these conflicts, ideas
about freedom, sacrifice, discipline and authority,
those four things and how they interact with one another.
And it doesn't even need to be a big, explosive confrontation.
It could just be a conversation between two guys leaning against a vehicle
and just kind of talking about today's event.
And right there, you feel like I could be the third guy
sitting there talking about this as well.
And that makes you doesn't matter how many planets away it is, it
makes you feel like you're right there with them.
Hell yeah. I love hear that, brother. Thank you.
Of course. I want to talk a little bit about the artwork. Of course.
You thought you had talked
about how it's page by page and you really feel that panels exist?
Sure, but you feel like the color touches the very edge of the paper every time.
What was what was some of the intention with your artwork in this one?
With everything like that?
So, you know, I,
you know, I did for the first time ever, I did this, those thumbnails.
But I think it's important for me to point out, I don't send those to Jed.
I do thumbnails for me
so that I can write a script visually and I don't ever, like, lean on.
Just, do a five panel grid, right?
Just the pieces around and things like that.
It's a way of making sure that I edit my scripts as visual experiences,
and then I try and communicate that information textually through to Jed.
But almost without fail, he comes back with something better
because he's better at that than I am.
And I think that's that is the most significant part of Jed's genius.
Right? To look the pages.
The first thing you notice is what an incredible draftsman he is.
Because he can draw everything and he draws it beautifully and, the world.
And he and he doesn't skimp on detail.
He does not slack. He does not cut corners.
All pages.
Yeah. Yeah, dude. And there's not dead.
I mean, there's dead space, but even the dead space is filled with stuff.
That is thematically linked,
to what we're what is being discussed on the page.
And, you know, so he's incredibly diligent.
He's incredibly his incredible draftsman.
His actual his craft is outrageous.
Yeah, but the true Jed differentiator, the reason that Jed is the only one
who could have done this comic is his outrageous
skill at page design.
And that's that's why
I don't send him my thumbnails, because he's better at this stuff,
and he not only comes up with ways
to display the information that I asked to squeeze
onto a single page, he not only finds a way to do that,
but he finds ways to do it that are visually interesting
and, crucially, speak to what's being discussed.
He actually gauges with the material
and at every at every stage of development, this has been the case.
You know, it really was a game of one upsmanship with me
doing my extensive research and him doing outrageous amounts of design work.
Right.
Like if and this is not a thing anyone's expected to notice
in a first read, but we play,
you know, my my belief is that it warrants a couple reads at least.
And if you if you go through it again, you'll start seeing this stuff.
Different groups of people use different types of guns.
They get their power from different places.
That impacts the style of machinery and ships
and vehicles that they use, which as we as the series wears on,
we learn, also impacts their strategy and tactics in combat
and touches on it, you know, and is informed by economic realities.
It's all interlock because Jed and I are in
and we we have this idea that we want to explore,
and we just keep layering and layering more and more
and more on top of to make it more and more complex.
And Jed's the jitsu perfect partner for it.
I can't imagine doing it with anybody else.
Is there anything that Jed took on to his own that you find changes your story?
But it also was an improvement that you wanted to embrace?
Oh. Interesting.
So, I mean,
every time he sent over layouts, right.
It's like a real answer, right?
Like, because I do my thumbnails and, like, and I have a
if you go like digging on my Substack, you can find, I did a process post
like that shows my thumbnails and then his layouts
and then his inks and then the final so you can see the changes,
but, you know, and some of them were closer than others.
But he always makes changes to the actual storytelling that I adore.
I think early on in the design stage, you know, because I gave him
very, very
I gave him very broad descriptors for archetypes.
Right.
And they archetypes from classic sci fi combined with archetypes
from like real world revolutions.
Right? Okay. And
and so I sent him this list of archetypes.
And then he started doing design work and a lot of the character.
And this is the thing I like doing, because I like to let the character design
guide who the characters are.
And I think it's important to go the other way, too,
because some characters I did have more of an eye for.
But all of the characters, Jed took such a strong lead
in figuring out what these folks are going to look like,
and that impacted the story on a really profound level as well.
Yeah.
And then with your letterer,
did the jet do the lettering or did you guys have another letter?
No. Our letterer.
So, we're color by Victoria a stone.
Incredible.
It's my first time working with him, but will not be the last. So.
Right. So vibrant, wonderful, so lush.
And, letterer, was Taylor Esposito, who's lettered,
almost everything I've ever done.
He's my guy.
And he's, you know, both Victoria and Taylor
were very patient with Jed and I, both
because we have a vision for this book we know we want it to look like, and it
we go a few rounds of correction.
So we're very because we're, you know,
and we pride ourselves in the types of corrections in the notes that we ask for.
This is a we're not bad clients. Right.
And like we're not try that in blue right.
You know
let's see it in green actually. Right.
The notes that we give are you know from Jed,
they're things based on lighting effects and focal points.
They affect focal points on the page and how the page as a whole is read.
The color notes that I'm giving, for instance, are typically
thematic related in terms of how we're using different colors
and tones at different points in the book, and things
we want to keep consistent and callback to.
Maybe, you know. Right.
So the notes that we're giving are substantive,
but also based on a try on achieving a specific effect.
They're not random, they're not uninformed.
Right. And, you know,
Taylor, Taylor's incredibly patient with me,
and he's learned over the course of years, but it's because we share
we have a shared vision for the power and importance
of good comic book lettering.
Right? Yeah.
Taylor, too, is a student of,
Howard Chaikin and Ken Burns acts, collaborations.
Right.
And the way that those guys really innovated the integration
of lettering into comic book design.
Right.
And it's kind of like a and it's it harkens back a little bit to Kurtzman,
Harvey Kurtzman,
who used to do the layouts himself and draw the word balloons even.
Yeah.
But I think they really they ratcheted up to another degree
because it impacted page layout
in a way that, you know, Kurtzman typically stuck to a gridded approach.
And Taylor is game, and he's eager to explore
kind of the outer reaches of what like what counts as comics, right.
Like we do we do captions and word balloons, but we also do charts and graphs
and infographics and weird little displays and breakout boxes and stuff.
Almost like files, which means you kind of if it makes you feel like you have
like the inside knowledge of the the people in the story don't have.
That's. Well, that's exactly right.
That's I love that you pick that up.
That's exactly the intent,
you know, because it's the captions are written in a different voice.
They are they are a different character.
His name is Doctor August Ferrucci.
There's an email address in the back of every issue that you can write in
with questions about theory and history, because that's what this is.
It's a history book.
It's him giving the history of this revolution
in this new society that grew out of it.
And he knows way more than we do.
He knows how it ends.
But he's parceling information out as relevant
and to affect reader perceptions.
And sometimes even sometimes to even undercut them
or outright contradict what you're seeing on the page.
And it's again, it's it's a matter of separating.
So like, here's the back, here's the hindsight's 2020 view of what went down.
And then here's everybody who was theirs.
Separate entirely different perspective on what happened and what it meant.
So not to spoil anything, but are we looking at an unreliable
narrator in that sense?
Does he have an end goal for the reader like,
it's important that the reader believes
that this certain faction did best type of thing,
and so is
he kind of leading us down a path,
and we're supposed to visually see something different.
You know, I, I struggled and
made every have made every
effort for all just Ferrucci to play it down the middle.
Right. Okay.
And his, his voice and you know,
and he speaks factually about things, but, the voice of the narrator.
Doctor just Ferrucci he it's the.
So the reason I'm reading, I'm reading the Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas.
I'm reading it.
I read it for its second time right now. It's 1200 pages.
It's a monster.
I read, and I read, so I loved his writing so much.
And also it just seemed relevant.
I read his History of Cuba, which goes from like
when the Spanish when it from the English or vice versa.
All the way up to like into Castro.
Right. So it covers a huge amount of time.
It's massive.
And I love his voice because he makes every effort
to call it down the middle and to remain objective
cataloger of historical fact.
But he struggles, right?
Because it's sometimes there's, you know, you have to go by what people said,
and you trust them and can you believe them?
And different people say different numbers of casualties at this event.
And, you know, like any, any number of examples.
And, you know, I, I also did quite a bit of Murray Bookchin
reading who is a, an anarchist,
historian and philosopher, and he speaks viciously
about Hugh Thomas's work, about the Spanish Civil War specifically.
And he has, like all these civic complaints that I'm sure are correct.
Right.
So, like, I guess the point I'm making is are all
just for he, the narrator of the book, he tries to play it down
the middle and tries to, you know, give a fair accounting of both sides.
But even that is a choice.
Yeah, that's a good point.
Yeah. Right.
But even even the center part even, like, trying to, like,
you know, in any kind of political discussion
and even just the center path, that's not a neutral position.
Right?
Yeah.
I mean, I
it reminds me so much not to go off topic, but I'm a big fan of George R.R.
Martin's work, and we have fire and blood out.
And it's all the accounting. It's it's a major. Looking back.
And it's two main sources for like the dance of the Dragons is the guy
from the brothel like the entertainment from the brothel and the master
and it's like the masters, like, oh, they did things right.
And the guy with the brothers, like, nope, they hooked up.
And so I love that.
And then it's like,
as you're watching, of course, like the show or whatever, you're like,
oh, the guy from the brothel was right every time.
Yeah, I love I'm with you, man, I love and reliable.
Narrator I read for the first time over the pandemic.
I always thought, I always thought during height, if you read Wuthering Heights.
Oh, I haven't yet. No. Okay, so.
Adding it to the list.
It's like a weird turn to talk about the Bronco Faulkner's.
But, I read Wuthering Heights for the first time, and as a kid,
I always assumed it was like some kind of, like, steamy romance.
Because the book covers, it's always like this guy, like, you know,
standing in the wind and looking off a cliff, and a woman, and it just.
It felt like Jane Austen or something. Yeah.
Like your mom. Steamy now. Novels that you never look at and.
Yeah, yeah, it looks like it looks like a boring Fabio cover.
Oh my God. Yeah. Like, right. Like that's what it looked like.
Classic.
I didn't realize, but he told me he was like, no, dude, you need to read.
And he like, told me a little bit about it and I read it.
Oh, it is a revenge story
about the hardest, coldest man who's ever lived.
He's getting over everybody who wronged him.
It's.
It is.
And the reason I bring it up now is there's layers
of unreliable narrators, because the book is told.
It's told by her who wrote this stuff down.
He heard it from the housekeeper
of this family who's worked for them for like 40 years or something.
Right? Right. So you've got layers of people you do.
You have all these reasons not trust.
You know, I, I hesitate to call the narrator under a light.
What a great question.
I had to call him reliable, but he is biased.
I'll say that every and every.
Every historian is biased.
Yeah, every historian is.
And that's that's absolutely part of it.
And you get to see more of that specific point of view in the back matter.
Every issue has a few pages of back matter, which is brand
new essays written by me, but in the voice of doctor
all just for Roshi, with new painted illustrations,
hand-painted traditional media, just like the covers.
New two new painted illustrations from Jed in every issue.
The cover is gorgeous, by the way.
Just to throw that out there, hand painted, you could feel it.
It's definitely.
Jetsam.
I mean, like, yeah, it's it's obscene.
I keep finding strengths of his that I did not know that he had.
I didn't know he could paint like this.
He was like, oh, because I was like, you know, we need figure out a colorist
so we can get this cover done. He's like, oh, you know what?
I think I'm going to paint the cover.
I was like, perfect, do it. Yeah. Yes.
And it's like, I don't know.
I try and trip him up sometimes I'll be like, you know what?
Let's do a big Liefeld figure, like full body
on the left side of the page, like floating over the panels.
Right. Liefeld figure go right.
And I think because, like,
he doesn't draw anything like life out, he doesn't lay out pages like Rob Liefeld.
But goddamn if Jay doesn't nail it every single time, whether it's like 90
Image comics or 80 seinen manga
or 70s break or Belgian comics like whatever.
Weird stuff. That guy's got a cape. Go.
That's a thing. Like, it's exactly like that, dude.
It's exactly like that.
There's a thing in that. There's a thing in issue two.
And people will know it when they see it.
But it's I said, you know, out loaded for bare Liefeld style.
Just just load him up with weapons.
Let's see it. Right.
And he does. And it doesn't look anything like Liefeld.
But I mean, this is the genius of DJed and I think this is
this is the trick, right?
If you're an artist, inclusive of writers.
Right. If you're if you're creator
can't ever be trapped in mimicry.
Right. And you avoid this a few ways.
One is research, one is actual, you know, not watching movies
or reading other books, but actual research. Right?
Nonfiction reading.
The other one is when you do partake of other fiction, right?
When you read other comics or books or watch movies or TV shows, ensure
that what you're lifting from them is not just surface esthetic.
Ensure that what you're lifting is the foundational aspects of things
and how they work.
So when
when I say to Jed, draw a Liefeld figure, he doesn't pose them like Liefeld.
He doesn't compose it like Liefeld, but he captured
what works fundamentally about that approach
and then filters it back through his own storytelling esthetic.
And then why did I why did wildlife failed do that then?
That's kind of gives you an idea like,
oh, it's weak to make this thing pop and show.
Yeah, I see, okay, I guess. That's exactly it.
And he does it with all of this stuff, right?
Any with any kind of wacky layout I come up with or, you know.
Oh, I have an idea for this very specific infographic,
and I want you to draw it into the page amid the panels and stuff.
Right.
He is miraculously able to
better than just following orders.
Right?
Jed recognizes what it is that like the crux of what
I'm going for and the point of it and why we're including it,
and then he finds a better way to present that on the page.
It's when, you know, partners clash well together.
I want to give you another quick shout out real quick before we move on too far.
Taylor, your letterer.
One of the things I yeah amazing with with with talons were bubbles though
typically like when you see Ultron or whatever,
if it's a robotic voice, it's very, very robotic typeface.
Right.
But there was something with talons where it was like I actually had a
like double take on it where I was, you know what?
It is robotic, but it's not so far off everybody else.
And then as you read the book more, you're like,
oh, it's because he's closer to human than you'd expect any robot to be.
So I was like, it's just not quite human.
So it's not full of Ultron, you know, slanted all the stuff that I liked it.
It was a good touch.
I love, I love it, I love that you brought that up and as a reward,
for being such a perceptive reader, I'm going to claw you into something else.
And Free Plane is loaded with this kind of stuff
because we just layered so much things into it.
It's meant to be explored.
Basil who?
You don't.
Oh, you haven't seen this because I don't think he's actually spoken in this issue.
Basil is the big battle suit.
He's married to Katia, the big, muscly scientist.
Basil is a doctor. He's the.
He's the doctor for the Freedom Guard.
He's trapped in this giant metal suit.
You don't know what?
Like the big pink eye is either one of the big key guys. Correct?
It's like a porthole that he looks out of.
And we do not know.
We do not know why he's in that yet. That'll come later.
That'll get revealed later.
As with as well, a lot of stuff, but, a little spoiler when he's so Talon
has normal like human word balloons, but a different font.
Okay,
Basil in the big battle
suit has a normal font, but different word balloons.
Oh, so. Like almost going through a speaker, then it's like a human going.
That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
So it's so you get it, you get a couple.
So, you know, you get a couple different perspectives.
You get on the you get you get the the machine becoming human.
Yeah.
And you get the human trapped in a machine.
Right.
And this is and this is and this is why, this is why Taylor puts up with me.
Because it's two.
It's two and end. Right.
It's just it's not just try a different font.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
What maybe is were balloons a little different?
Right. It's to a specific end.
It's to a specific effect I was talking to.
So I'm gonna I'm gonna drop a name.
Sorry, I've already dropped a few, but,
Yeah, he gave us a blurb, so I feel like he giving me a blurb.
Sorry. I feel like it's fair for me to drop the name Jonathan Lethem.
Incredible.
He's one of my favorite novelists, and I'm,
I've known for many years because I was fortunate enough
to work on Omega the unknown that he did it.
Did he wrote it? Marvel.
I added a assistant editor on that book, and I've kept in touch with him,
and I was showing him Free Planet.
I printed out a bunch of books.
I wanted to see it in print, right, to be able to read it properly.
So I had like colored printouts, and they brought him to his house, and,
he made ham sandwiches, and we're looking at this thing
and chit chatting about it. So.
Yeah, it was pretty cool.
And he says, he says,
I was
telling him, you know, I'm were I worry every issue.
The Vittorio and Taylor are going to quit on us.
He's like, why?
I was like, because I was like, because I'm not just a nightmarish micromanager.
Because, like, I, and judge as bad as I am because we have a specific idea
of what we want to accomplish here and what we want to be doing.
And he stopped me.
He says, no, no, no, no, no, you're an auteur.
Yeah, that sounds better. Let's go, let's go. Yeah.
Well, what do you see a driver like that you can like, oh, this is fine art.
Okay, I get it. You did?
Yeah. That's right.
So. Yeah. No.
It's awful. It's. Yeah.
Those guys are incredible.
Like, the book would not work without the Taurean and Taylor.
And their contributions to this thing are immense.
And it's felt to, I'm going to throw my name out this that you drop a name for us.
Go ahead.
Robert Kirkman's got a blurb at the back of this thing too.
So make sure you guys check that out.
Good one. To. Me, I can.
I was, like, insanely hyper.
Yeah. Go for it's insanely high praise.
All the posts and it's on the poster and I have it up above my desk.
Guys, I'm just a shameless mark for, but I.
Would, you know, I'm stoked. Man.
I'm so stoked about this thing.
Rich, intricate world building.
Yeah, it is equal parts Dune, Clermont
and saga while being wholly original.
I mean.
That is good, That is insane.
Yeah, that's pretty.
Are we.
To argue with Robert the Robert Kurtz I know.
And look at it. Well, he knows how to do space opera stuff.
You knows what he's doing, man.
Yeah.
No, it it means a lot, you know, it's free planet is a big swing.
It's something it's different.
I think I started off this interview by saying there's not.
There aren't other books like Free Planet out there right now,
and I don't I don't know if I've ever seen one that's like Free Planet.
It's.
Yeah, it's designed differently.
It's designed to operate differently.
And it's a lot.
It's not a book. You you burn through quickly.
It's not a breezy read, but that's by design because it's, you know,
things need to be,
you know, if you want to chew on something that needs to be substantive.
Yeah, right.
What a weird what a weird, what a weird metaphor.
But we're. Stick with it, man. Yeah, it's. But it's.
Yeah, it's a big, chewy piece of meat free planet.
And you got to you got to ruminate on it, man.
Like a cow chew that could.
And it's it needed to be dense to accomplish that.
But I recognize that that's not a popular flavor right now.
It's something different.
A buddy of mine referred to it as counter-programming.
Yeah.
But if it has a moment right now, I would say like a really good
example is absolute man, Martian, and no Martian, the Martian Manhunter.
Great book. Gorgeous.
But that is kind of what I'm getting
with this, where it's like, this is closer to art.
It's more of a statement than it is for your flash in the pan,
read out real fast comic book, you know, and I think,
I think there might not be something before,
but there is something coming up where this book fits perfectly in it.
Hell yeah. I love hearing that, brother.
And that's why it's been, you know, it is different.
It's new,
and that's why it's meant so much to have all these blurbs from people
that they get it.
You know that, like that, folks who are so well placed in the industry
and so knowledgeable about comics and how they operate,
the fact that they recognize
that this is something worthwhile and this is something different and worth
paying attention to, is enormously gratifying.
I'm stoked.
I'm stoked for everybody else to get to read this thing finally.
Which you guys will be able to read this.
It's going to be on May 7th.
You guys can pick it up online, but I, of course
recommend you guys go to your local comic book shop and put on this.
But I want to make that I've been interrupted.
Make that even stronger.
Don't read this online.
It's going to be a nightmare.
It's yeah, charts and graphs and too much text.
And crucially, there's so many spreads.
And the simple fact of the matter is
you cannot appreciate a comic book spread digitally.
Yeah, the aspect ratios of whatever it is you're reading it on are off,
and you cannot appreciate the entirety of a spread.
And that's how this thing was built around.
It's built around you sitting on your couch, spending some time
with it, poring over this thing, being able to flip back and forth easily.
That's how it was designed.
And you're robbing yourself of that if you read it digitally.
I so just, you know, behind the scenes, I get everything as a PDF to kind of,
you know, read it beforehand. Sorry for you.
I have to like I always like to zoom in a lot.
So I get like kind of bubble by bubbles, like I really kind of absorb each of them.
But then I kept zoom back out.
Yeah, what a nightmare. What terror.
I tell people it's actively hostile to digital media effectively.
Thank you. One more.
Can I give one more?
I know you're trying to get me out of here. Now you're get for spoiler.
We do the spinning book gimmick.
Oh. You're on. Yeah, the whole book spent.
The whole book spins around, right, I hate it.
It's, Yeah, I started doing it.
I was like, why more people do this? And I.
And then I got halfway through, I'm like, oh, I get it.
It's difficult.
It's very difficult to plot out and plan.
And that's impossible with digital to.
And that's the other thing.
It's I don't know what it's going to look like in digital,
but it doesn't matter because it's not how it's meant to be read,
you know, and like, even and because the way we read,
we read left to right in this country.
So the way that you would want it to
spin is the opposite direction that PDF reader spin it.
So in order to read it digitally, your ass is going to,
but you get your preview copy, you're going to have to hit,
you're going to have to hit the spin button.
What,
three times, I don't know.
Yeah. Like I and this time all. The way back around to.
Get it time every single time to. Get it.
How do we take of you Aubrey. It's terrible.
It's dreadful.
Do not read the digital version.
You hate yourself.
I'm going to be getting the paper version first.
Oh, yes. By then.
Yeah. May 7th.
Make sure you guys had your local phone book shop.
If you have to go to free, go to image.com.
We'll have all the links in the description as well.
Image comics.com. Okay.
Thank you so much for joining me to Aubrey.
I had a great blast. Thank you for having me.
All right, guys, again, free planet local car workshop May 7th
link in the description. We'll see you guys next week. Bye.