Interview | Alex de Campi

On occasion, Kara and Matt sit down by the fireplace (metaphorical) with creators to talk about their books, their process, and what they read themselves. Since some folks don’t have time for podcasts, we also transcribe these chats. Some parts of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity. Enjoy our interview with GRINDHOUSE’S Alex de Campi!

Kara Szamborski: Greetings, podcast listeners. It’s #kzamm and Matt, and today we’re talking with Alex de Campi.

Alex de Campi: Hello, everybody.

Matt Kolowski: Welcome, Alex. It’s a long time coming. The Dark Horse library is available on comiXology.

Alex: Ah, much rejoicing!

Matt: Grindhouse is finally available to comiXology readers. But the burning question I’ve had for the longest time for you is why leave the luxurious world of indie music videos and investment banking for comic books? Why?

Alex: Ha, ha, ha. Let me tell you about the tall indie music video dollar. It’s almost as tall as the comics dollar. I had some life changes. I still love directing music videos and commercials when I can. But for family reasons, I have to live in Maine with my family and take care of them.

Something I could do more remotely, like do it myself more full time, do a writing career was much better from that point of view. Also, yeah, because they said, “If you think you don’t make money off comic books, you should try music videos.”

$5,000 to do an entire video, barely, like, and by the time you pay the crew a quarter what they should professionally get, and have halfway decent kit, like you’re spending your own money to do post production. I swear to god I earn less than I would at McDonald’s schlepping fries.

Matt: I remember the old MTV “Making the Video” with like NSYNC and they’re upside down in gurneys. Is that what your life is like, directing music videos? You’re upside down on a gurney with these hunky men?

Alex: Wait, let me check. Is my name Joseph Kahn?

Matt: Negative.

Alex: Negative. Alas. No, I’ve had tremendous fun. I love, love, love film making. I’ve had a hard couple of years and I can’t afford a camera right now. I don’t even have a crappy DSLR to play with, which breaks my heart.

Because, like, much as I love Instagram and stuff, I would vastly, vastly love to have a real camera.

Kara: How did you make the jump from the music videos to deciding to write comics?

Alex: I’d always written comics. The comics came around the same time or slightly before the music videos. Because I started directing my first music videos in like 2006, and “Smoke” came out from IDW, which is my first comic book in 2005.

I also had work out from Tokyopop and Humanoids at that time. I was doing both at once when I was living in London. Then I had to move back to the US because my dad was dying of cancer.

The music video stuff went on hold. Everything went on hold, as you can imagine. I had a child. I was living in New York for a while. I still did the odd music video. That’s where I did the Frank Black and Viola Clark music video and then another one for Viola, because she’s awesome.

Last year I did a video for Joan as Police Woman, which I love doing. Joan Wasser is the most fabulous human being. I’m occasionally still doing things for select indie musicians even if I don’t make any money for it, because I really like who they are as human beings.

Kara: You’re really getting a full creative spectrum here. What’s next? Are you going to do oil painting or pottery or something to round it all out?

Alex: I do letter my own books, so I’m starting to disappear further into a craft hole. I did my own sketch cover at home, at Special Edition this past weekend through a strange set of circumstances mostly involving the Marvel editor, Heather Antos. It’s all her fault.

I spent all of Saturday in panels and signing books. I spent all of Sunday drawing My Little Pony culture mashups. It started off with sketching in her notebook. She had a Nightwing-themed notebook and she’s like, “Hey, Alex, you should draw something too,” even though I’m a writer. I said, “I can only draw two things, unicorns and pit bulls.” I offered to draw her a unicorn Dick (Grayson).

Kara: That’s amazing.

Matt: That is an amazing phrase.

Alex: I did a big unicorn Nightwing looking all emo and My Little Pony-version unicorn and then a little unicorn Robin, like, “Holy guacamole, Batman! .”

Kara: Are those on Twitter? Can we see those?

Alex: Those are on Twitter and Facebook.

Matt: “Grindhouse” from Dark Horse has some amazing pull quotes. “Most amazing read of the year.” “It will arouse, disgust, and shock you.” I have read it and I can say all of that is true but even better, the “Grindhouse” book itself started from you making jokes on Twitter.

Alex: I had finished “Ashes,” which is my other great big Dark Horse book, “Smoke: Ashes,” oh and “Archie vs. Predator,” of course, but that’s still ongoing. I’d finished Smoke, Ashes. Smoke was my 2005 IDW book. I belatedly did a sequel in 2012, which was a Kickstarter.

Pro tip: Do not decide to do a 250-page graphic novel as your first Kickstarter. I did and I did it through almost unbelievable blockades, changes, et cetera. I had to fire my artist, hire new artists. But admittedly I hired Rajko Guéra from “Scalped” and Colleen Duran and Bill Sienkiewicz.

So, there is that. And Carla Speed McNeil, who I right now collaborate with a lot. That seriously, that book gave me white hair.

And then I finished a script, an as yet unproduced horror graphic novel called “Margaret the Damned”, which is a book I’d dearly love to see in print someday. Though, it isn’t in any way conventional horror, so getting a graphic novel off the ground is almost impossible.

I was sitting on Twitter thinking, OK, what should I start next? I was so burned out of doing painful literary horror thrillers, I was like, “Fuck it. I want to write Bee Vixens from Mars.” And Twitter was like, “You should do that. That is a great idea.”

And so I did. The book got through. The book ruined me for pitching for other companies other than Dark Horse and Image forever, because I submitted the pitch to Brendon, my editor. Still my editor today. Wonderful human being, encourages all of my bad ideas.

It was approved by him, approved by the board, and through costing within 48 hours.

Kara: Oh, wow.

Alex: Which goes to show, if you do a comic about boobs and gore, it will get approved quickly. There we launched a pretty unknown writer, except in very, very comic-y circles. A pretty unknown artist, Chris Peterson, who’s then gone on to great things. And we sold a ton of books. So, yeah.

Our book is fun. It’s trashy, exploitation horror. It is two issue stories. Every story is different. They’re not connected. You don’t have to start anywhere with any particular one.

It goes from small town alien invasion sexplotation to women in prison to a creature feature to rape revenge to blaxploitation.

Exploring different grindhouse genres with different artists. The stories have very different flavors to them. But they’re all the ones where you punch your fist in the air at the end of the book and go, “Yeah!”

And then also, where if you’re a queer reader, a female reader, and/or a reader of color, you’re never going to get to the point in the book where you’re like, “oh, fuck you.”

I don’t know how to describe this to the mainstream majority reader, but as an underrepresented group in comics, there’s so many times when you’re reading away at a comic that would otherwise interest you, you get to this point. You go, “Really? Like, really? Fuck you.”

And that’s that. Especially in some horror and a lot of the exploitation stuff, because a lot of people don’t write exploitation as white, male power fantasies. I refer you to the other 900 comic books on the shelf if you want that.

So, yeah. We didn’t talk about that a lot when it first came out, that it was female heroes and there was some queer content and there are a lot of heroes of color, because I didn’t want to scare off comic book dude. I wanted the dude in the Green Lantern shirt to buy it also, and many of them did.

But now we have two trades out and we’re five issues into the new season. So, I feel like I can say this, “But hey, comic book guy. Lots of nipples. Lots of gore. It’s still really fun. Don’t worry. I have you covered, core audience.”

Kara: The secret’s out.

Alex: Yeah.

Kara: Do you have stories in the original Grindhouse run that you would want to revisit?

Alex: Well, we did revisit the first one, “Bee Vixens”, because the creative team had so much fun working together. I loved working with Nolan Woodard, the colorist, who is now exclusive at Marvel, but he carved out a little space for us.

And I wanted to get back with Chris Peterson to do another story, so we did another Garcia story. Garcia is our one-eyed Latina deputy who keeps running into small towns with alien bug problems, giant alien bugs. This time it’s ticks.

Kara: Oh, no.

Alex: We did a story called “Blood Lagoon”. That was issues three and four of the new season, whereas issues one and two were a really creepy, minimalist winter horror story with R.M. Guera from Scalped, and Giulia Brusco, who is the usual colorist, doing amazing colors.

I do love some of these stories a lot. I had so much fun with “Flesh Feast of the Devil Doll”, which was my story with Gary Erskine, which was the teen slasher. I love a good summer camp slasher. We all do.

One of the reasons Archie/Predator worked so well, is I was like, hey, this is a spring break slasher, and that’s how I’m going to write it. Everyone was like, “How do you mix these two things together?” By the way, I write “Archie vs Predator”. You should pick it up. It’s really funny.

Matt: Well, that leads into another question that we had, which was the resurgence of Archie books and this partnership with Dark Horse with Predator. How on Earth did Archie vs. Predator with Fernando come together? What was that process like?

Alex: Brendan called me one day. We were talking over some Grindhouse stuff, and it was maybe September, August of last year. He was like, “We’re doing this really weird crossover thing with Archie. It’s Archie vs. Predator. Would you be interested in writing that?” I was like, “I guess so.”

Matt: And he says, “It’s going to be an Archie style with Fernando Ruiz.” And I’m like, “OK.” Because, the Archie artists are amazing. I always say, you have to work really hard to make a line look that easy. And they can draw anything. Anything, anything, anything.

And comedy is hard to draw. Almost anybody can draw something exploding, but to do comedy is very tough indeed. So, I was psyched.

I met Fernando at New York Comic-Con. We shook hands. I have him Grindhouse. He was like, “This is going to be good.” The book was announced at New York Comic-Con, and everyone lost their mind. We’re like, “This is going to be a thing, isn’t it?”

We had no idea. We were making the book. I’m a solid C-list creator. I have people who really like my work, but I’ve generally not made a big deal of in that way. Suddenly, I found myself on a book that was the big announcement of New York Comic-Con last year.

Also, I had people queuing up at Special Edition for me to sign their books. I had wandered off with some friends from my table after being in panels all day. I was getting angry tweets like, “There’s a giant line at your table.”

And I’m like, “Really?” I don’t expect that to happen, so it’s all been really fun. So, yeah. I think the true origin of Archie/Predator was the Archie guys were all sitting around in a meeting going, “OK, so, we’ve done Archie/Kiss and we’ve done Archie/Glee. Who should Archie meet next?”

Somebody in the back, you know that guy in the back or gal in the back, because there always is, was like, “Predator!” And everyone went, “Yeah.”

Kara: Why not?

Archie vs. Predator so unusual because it’s the Archie house style, but the characters are getting de-spined all over the place. So, how did you decide who lives and who dies? Or, did you have a list of untouchable, un-murderable characters?

Alex: There is no such thing as untouchable.

Matt: Or, un-de-spine-able.

Alex: It was more about how we pace all the gruesome murder, and how we play it out. I was more worried about the pacing of the book than I was deciding who would live and who would die.

The Archie guys and gals were encouraging me from the beginning for it to be a mass slaughter. And so, I was more than happy to oblige them.

Matt: [laughs] That falls into another question that I had, because in Image you don’t have an editor. Like, it’s up to you. But working at Dark Horse and with the folks at Archie, you do get an editor.

So, what’s that process like, where you have that other hand with you, verses at another publisher where it’s almost all on you?

Alex: I loved having an editor. To be fair, a lot of Image creators hire editors for their book. You are not presented with an editor, but they will go and pay money to hire a professional editor.

Jamie Rich, who is now editor of Vertigo, is editing “Airboy”. Which is all fabulous and you should all buy it.

Matt: Amazing book, book of the year.

Alex: I love it so much. Don’t buy it for your kids. I can tell you that all of the partying stuff in Airboy is 110 percent legit. That is someone who has done all those things, said this, and also has done all those things. Anyway. So, lots of Image books do have editors. There is a content editor that goes through and makes sure you don’t have glaring typos or are forgetting to put word balloons in, or something like that. So, there is a quality safety net.

We’re very lucky with “No Mercy,” in that Karla, Jen and I all edit each other, and it’s a very, very good collaborative relationship. Saying that, if we had extra money I would hire an editor, to make life easier, because there is a lot of pressure.

I do feel very nervous carrying it all, because on No Mercy I even do the cover graphics. Karla does these beautiful covers, and then I splatter text all over them. It is a concern.

I’m working on my second Image book with Matt Southworth right now. I feel like sometimes we could definitely use an editor, because we’re working slightly differently from Karla and Jen, simply because he’s being much, much, much more experimental.

So, yeah. It’s definitely a thing. I love working with Brendan as well, possibly because he indulges all my bad ideas. We sit there and conversations like, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if we get Shia LaBeouf to do a Grindhouse backup strip, where he redrew the first three pages and put his name on it?”

Brendan said, “That’s the best idea ever. Let’s find his email and try to make it happen.” We emailed him, because we’re jerks, and asked him.

Matt: Did you get a poem back or something?

Alex: I don’t think we got anything back. I’m not sure. I’m going to check with Brendan. But, that made me sad, because I wanted that to happen.

Kara: Dear Mr. LaBeouf, if you’re listening, please email Alex immediately.

Alex: Yes, please do.

Matt: I’m sure he’s listening.

Alex: I want to publish your comic books in the back of my comic books. And they can even be my comic books with your name on them. I’m fine with that.

Matt: That’s a Kickstarter campaign waiting to happen. Or maybe even Kickstarter for an editor. I feel that writes itself.

Alex: Well, what I could do also, I could redraw Shia LaBeouf comics and put them at the back my comic book.

Matt: He would probably be totally OK with that, because that would be some kind of performance art that he would be into.

Alex: Exactly. And then we would have…

Kara: It would be like an endless loop.

Alex: …pop-ception. Like, we would have some crazy pop culture Inception loop going on.

And after the whole Spider-Woman cover thing went nuts, I emailed Brendan. I was like, “I would like Manara to do a cover for us, please.” And he was like, “That’s an amazing idea.”

Because I genuinely love Milo Manara’s art. But, he does one thing, and if you don’t art direct him, he’s going to deliver that thing. We did, in fact, employ Manara to do a cover. It will be the cover of our final issue of Grindhouse, Grindhouse Season Two, Issue Eight, which is a space sexploitaiton story.

And do you know what? He’s really easy to art direct. Like, “Hey, please draw this,” and then he draws it, and makes it look amazing.

I’ve worked with a lot of cover artists, including a lot of quite well known cover artists like Dan Panosian and Francavilla, who was nominated for an Eisner for covers in part because of his Grindhouse covers, which made me really happy that somebody at the Eisners had to type that in. Grimacing as they did, and then went and washed their hands. Menara, who is a legend, and you give them some basic art direction, and you know what? You’re paying them, and the professionals, and they do it. They do what you asked them to.

Our book is a sex book, so we wanted to go out with a bang. Many, many, many bangs. Lots of banging, lots of gore. That book, that issue, that’s the way. I’m going to hell for that. Among all the other things I’m going to hell for a lot of things, but that’s at the top of the list.

Kara: That’s the perfect lead in for our next question for you. So, we found this great quote about how you approach your writing, and what you choose to write. It’s, “Sometimes I want to write characters that would make the eight-year-old me really happy.”

What kind of eight year old were you, exactly?

Alex: That was specifically in reference to the current Grindhouse story on stands, which is Lady Danger. One thing we try to do in the Grindhouse book, it’s not like hipster grindhouse. It’s not an ironic reinterpretation.

I have watched a shit ton of old movies, violent, terrible movies at a young, young age, and I want to reproduce that feeling of watching them, that excitement, and that fun, that feeling for current readers.

But not Tarantino it. Neither do it like I’m too good for this, and going to cheekily reinterpret it, and not simply do exact homages to old movies. Hopefully you will never read any of Grindhouse and be able to tell what movies inspired it, other than very vaguely.

I always say that The Virgin Spring, the first Grindhouse film, was what inspired Bride of Blood. The Virgin Spring was a Bergman film, later remade as Last House on the Left. So there you go, one of the most violent movies ever made was a remake of a Bergman film. I bet you didn’t see that coming.

Matt: Spoilers.

Alex: Spoilers. And so, when I redid Lady Danger, a lot of blaxploitation films are against pushers, against the man trying to keep black people down, and they’re all very neighborhood based.

They did and often have great budgets, so even though Cleopatra Jones did get to go to Hong Kong in Casino of Gold (yay, Cleopatra Jones!) So when we did Lady Danger, we had this entire secret base in an abandoned projects building, and she has this pink and gold base, and a jet, and there are jet packs.

We wanted to make it really awesome, because a lot of the female superheroine stuff, obviously Ms Marvel is really awesome, but that’s more street-level stuff, too. But the love and, “wow,” has gone out of and lot of superhero comics.

The, “Yay, they have awesome stuff.” It’s all very dark and gritty, and also now comics are doing these giant summer-wide, “Who would win?” contests. It’s that, versus this, which is both Convergence and Secret Wars, amusingly.

And so, I wanted to do a book where she gets out of her job, puts on her clothes, gets into her jet, takes off vertically from her secret base in the middle of the neighborhood and jets off to save people. Yay, comics! Yay, superheroes! Superheroes with awesome things!

Matt: That’s the way it should be.

Alex: Exactly, exactly. And so, I’m having to do that in an indie exploitation book, because it’s not really being done elsewhere.

Matt: No. And there’s another thing that’s not being done in books, and that’s emoji. You mentioned it earlier, no one really has.

Alex: I am single-handedly fixing that problem.

Matt: You’re changing the emoji landscaping, books, and the, book in question is from Image, No Mercy has one of the best taglines for a new book. It was, “There will be blood and emoji.” So, what overall made you want to feed privileged teens to hungry coyotes in that book?

Alex: I would think everything in my motivation would be self-evident in your question. I love a good teen drama. I’ve seen every John Hughes film eight billion times.

But I’m also this strange person who likes violent Westerns and war films, so my idea of a perfect film is a John Hughes script, filmed by Sam Peckinpah. That’s pretty much what I’ve done.

The fun thing about comics is a printed medium is that we read them, so were reading them in a way that we read tweets, and read Facebook. And so, I can put in emoji, whereas you can’t really put emoji in a film. I probably could find a way, I could work on that.

Kara: I believe that. We believe you could find that way.

Alex: Because we read word balloons the way we read tweets. Why not use text abbreviations? Why not use emoji? Partially, in emoji, we all do languages constantly moving.

And it’s really fun and exciting to use the newer ways language is appearing and being utilized online, which is the main way we communicate with each other now.

And so, emoji, use of social media like iMessage, texting, Facebook, it’s all in No Mercy. Not even as something where we’re like, “Hey look, here’s a thing.” We do it, because it should feel natural, because that’s how we all function.

I don’t even really do it as much as, I’ve toned it down from the way 17 and 18-year-olds I know communicate with each other. Because if I showed the real way they did, all of the olds would be like, “I can’t read this.”

Already, I can’t read. There’s too many emoji, I don’t really like the emoji. I don’t use it. Sorry, that was my four year old coming in.

Kara: I loved reading No Mercy. I just discovered this book, prepping for this interview, and now it’s my new favorite thing, because I did studying abroad when I was in college, so all these characters, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I know you. I know ALL of you.”

Alex: Yes, exactly, and they’re all little pieces of me. Some of them, they might appear quite shallow when you first meet them, but they’re 17, 18 years old, and at that age you’re trying on new identities like pairs of jeans to see which one fits.

College is an amazing time of reinvention. Meeting new teens is a way to try out how you see yourself, and how you want to be.

Kara: I also thought it was interesting that No Mercy is weirdly similar to Kat & Mouse.

Alex: Yes.

Kara: Because they both have to do with these teenagers, but then you also really successfully employ the prevalent modes of communication of the day, like in Kat & Mouse they’re IMing one another.

Alex: Yeah.

Kara: They’re saying, “Parent over shoulder,” like stop typing to me, I was brought back to middle school so hard.

Alex: Yes. A writer’s first job is to listen. And so, you have to listen. Social media makes that incredibly easy. There’s no excuse now for getting that wrong, because it’s terrible to be consuming other people’s tweets and lives as research, but writers are parasites in some ways.

I’m saying this respectfully, and I’m changing things, but you do have to listen to how people are talking and communicating, and take note of it, and not just be writing how you, yourself would do things.

Again, it’s so easy with teenagers, because there is that wholehearted embracing of new technology and that feeling of invulnerability, which is a lot of fun. We’ve all done things in our teenage years, that by all rights, we should probably be dead, or in jail, or both.

Matt: The comment you make about listening is very true as well, for another piece of writing you did is for the Wonder Woman short that you had made.

Alex: Oh, that was so much fun. I loved that.

Matt: That really connected with so many people on Tumblr, especially. It’s almost like 200,000 likes, a few panels. The main question we had obviously is, when are you going to start doing a Wonder Woman series full time, obviously.

Alex: I don’t know. DC had been in the middle of a move to Burbank, and I don’t think Wonder Woman, their offices are very, very different. The Bat office is incredibly progressive, and risk-taking, and does all sorts of new and interesting things.

The Superman/Wonder Woman office is more traditional, and so I don’t think they’re is interested in what I was doing. The Sensation is done entirely separately. It’s really through the digital office, which is yet another group.

Luckily, the editor there, Kristy Quinn, is extremely innovative and, for DC, risk taking and wants to embrace new creators and new ways of telling stories, and new art styles. That’s why Sensation is so amazing, and you should buy all of it, because all of the stories are really good.

There’s some amazing, amazing stories in there that didn’t happen to get posted on Tumblr and go crazy viral. But there is a huge breadth of talent there, so sadly, it’s going to be a while before, if ever, I get to do more Wonder Woman.

That makes me sad, but these are large corporations making large corporate choices, and there is a Wonder Woman movie in the works, which means eight billion more people meddling in the decision-making process.

So, I’m afraid if people are really interested in seeing me do more Wonder Woman, they should go buy Lady Danger, and follow my other work, because it’s not going to happen. As much as I would really love it to happen, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon.

Matt: Kickstarter to get Alex back on Wonder Woman. There’s another Kickstarter idea.

Kara: Oh, yeah.

Matt: As drawn by Shia LaBoeuf.

Kara: It was great, because the way you wrote Wonder Woman, she sounded like an actual person.

Alex: And happy, and positive, and strong, and she got to punch space kaiju. If you’re going to do Wonder Woman, don’t have her running around the streets of Gotham fighting street crime. She’s Wonder Woman, she’s punching space monsters. She’s battling living planets, this is what she should do.

I have a really specific take on Wonder Woman, and if you look back on my Tumblr, which is unsurprisingly alexdecampi.tumblr.com, I wrote this whole thing about my view of Diana, which also got a ton of reblogs because Greg Rucka was like, “This is the greatest thing.” Which was a minor fangasm.

So if you’re interested, dig back in my Tumblr, and I talk a lot about my specific view of Diana and her feminism, and who she is. I do think she is modern, I do think she knows what Instagram is. She has a sense of humor, I think she’s strong, but not like in a strong female character kind of way.

She’s more like someone like Beyoncé or Rihanna, who understands what her public image is, and knows, inside herself, she may get frustrated by things about maintaining that public image. She knows how to do it, and she’s good at it.

My Diana, she walks into the Justice League building wearing a T-shirt that says “Social Justice Amazon,” and brings everyone muffins for breakfast. She’s that girl. And talks about whatever meme is happening right now, because she knows about it, and then punches space kaiju in her jet.

Kara: That’s incredible. I also loved how she had a different outfit for everything.

Alex: No shit. What woman wears the same outfit every day? Even women who are in jobs where you pretty much wear the same outfit every day, like investment bankers or people with a very specific image, they have variations of the black suit and white shirt. Small variations.

I’ve never understood why she would wear the same thing all the time. Obviously, you can have variations on that outfit the callback very specifically, make you think, “That is Wonder Woman’s costume.”

I’m not talking about like she suddenly shows up in a pink minidress. She can have stylistic variations on her clothes, in the way a fashion designer will have a theme for a show, and do several dresses that are stylistic variations on the same concept, or the same color scheme, or the same materials.

It starts with her coming back from doing flood relief near Karachi, which is an area in Pakistan that floods on a sadly regular basis. And she’s wearing a hijab. She’s got her hair covered. There’s a slight artistic miscommunication, and she’s is still showing a little more skin than she would have done.

But she’s still wearing an Indian type of outfit. Because she’s practical, and she knows that if she…she doesn’t want people to be uncomfortable dealing with her in life and death situations because of what she’s wearing.

So, she’s going to put on a darn hijab and wear it like something that’s a little bit different from her usual outfits, save the people, come back and change.

Kara: Into her space suit.

Alex: Into her space suit, because then she is in space. Like, she comes via Boom Tube. Boom, I love Boom Tubes. And then she’s in space, so she wears a spacesuit, even though she’s Diana and she probably could wear her strapless swimsuit thing outside.

But it has to be fashionable. That’s one of the great things that Fiona Staples has taught us with Saga. We know when clothes look good.

There’s a misperception that women are some fun wreckers on the sexy outfit stakes, and we’re not. We’re really not. We like sexy. We all own sexy outfits. However we define that in our head, we have an outfit in our closet that we would consider sexy, and we wear it.

It’s when the sexy outfit is so purely from the male gaze that you can’t believe a woman would wear it with a straight face. That’s when you start getting into problems. Or it seems like the mechanics of walking around in it would be, no.

Again, Willow Wilson, great writer, has great fun with that when Kamala Khan transforms herself into Ms. Marvel wearing the old politically incorrect outfit and finds that walking around in platform heels with a swimsuit thong that keeps riding up her butt is just not all…

Kara: The worst. Just the worst.

Alex: Yeah, pretty much the worst.

So, yeah. We can have a little more fun with superheros than we’re having now. I don’t know if it will ever happen, but I’d like to do it.

Kara: What are you reading now? What comics are you reading?

Alex: Golly, I don’t read a ton. I assume everyone else is reading Saga, Lazarus, and the Wicked + The Divine. If you’re not by now, my talking about it isn’t going to make you read it. So, we’re going to take that as a baseline. These are good books. You should read them.

I mentioned Airboy. There’s Dark Horse book about to come out in trade called “Ghost Train” (ed. correction: Ghost Fleet) that I really, really love by Donny Cates and Daniel Warren Johnson. You should also read Daniel’s webcomic “Space Mullet”, space-mullet.com. It’s their free comic.

I love the webcomic “Kill Six Billion Demons”, because it’s totally insane. Start from the beginning. Give yourself a lot of time, because it’s so well presented. You hover over the main page image, and the hover alt-text is something really interesting that pertains to the book.

And then the summary below isn’t just the usual, “Huh! Sorry this was late. I was at a convention. I hope you like it!” Like smile, emoji smile, emoji. Yes, we all read a lot of webcomics. I know because you laughed.

It’s more stuff relating to the story. Short stories, poems, bits of artifact text. Really, really amazingly well done mini-comic, webcomic.

What else am I reading? I’m going to forget everything, then I’m going to hang up and be like, “Oh shit.” I love Jon Tsuei’s and Eric Canete’s “Run Love Kill”. You have to get the first two issues together, though, because the first issue is a chase issue.

Then the second issue, you really start digging into the world. It’s so fascinating that you will be desperate, desperate, desperate to consume all of it at once, because it’s a really good sci-fi thriller, with a really well presented world. And Eric Canete art, which is genius.

Matt: Genius!

Alex: What else am I reading? Eric Stephenson is too good at stuff. I’m not just saying this because he’s like my uber editor at Image. If you haven’t been picking up “They’re Not Like Us”, from a formal point of view, from the formal craft of comics, it’s fascinating.

The cover is the first panel of the comic, and all the indices are on the outside. And then the comic is the rest of the pages of the book, with no ads and no stopping. And then the back cover is a quote. It works so well and it’s so immersive and so wonderful.

I wish I had thought of it. Darn you, Eric. And so I would highly recommend you get that. It’s on issue five or six now. My recommendations sometimes almost seem like they’re from 2012, because I’m that behind.

Matt: They’re all good so far. Those are all good recommendations.

Alex: What else? One thing you can pick up in trade from the new Dark Horse releases is something called “Vandroid” by two of my favorite artists, Tommy Lee Edwards and drawn by Dan McDaid.

It’s ‘80s action film about an android built by a man who designs custom vans, who has to solve this thriller caper. It’s wonderful if you like trashy. It’s called Vandroid. What else…the… I’ll think up more later, as I go.

Matt: That will keep us occupied for a while.

Kara: Yeah.

Matt: But Alex, I appreciate you taking the time out. I’m really excited for people to get immersed in Grindhouse, because there’s a lot to take in, and it’s way over the top and great. And obviously, Archie vs. Predator. We can remind people to check out “Valentine” too, from the olden days.

Alex: Which is still coming out very slowly. We have 14 episodes of Valentine out now. It’s my fantasy thriller with Christine Larsen. Christine’s in the middle of having a baby right now, so our schedule has somewhat slipped.

We get out a new episode every three to six months. I’m not even sorry. We just do.

Just deal with it.

Matt: Yeah.

Alex: And of course, “Smoke/Ashes”, which is my great, big literary thriller, now also available on comiXology, thanks to the Dark Horse books finally being out of jail.

Matt: Yeah, that’s right. And into our open arms.

Alex: Yes.

Matt: Well, Alex, thanks again. Kara, obviously, thanks to you for being here.

You’re the real star here.

Kara: Thank you, everyone.

Matt: Everyone!

Kara: Everyone deserves thanks.

Matt: We’ll talk to you soon, Alex. Thanks again.

Alex: You’re welcome. Take care.