In this episode Hope Nicholson gets real about relationships.

Topics include the lens of fandom, non-answers to dating, sharing exes, the Grapevine, being a late bloomer, make the thing you want to read, Kickstarter budgets, smutty fanfiction, sex is weird, first kiss stories, Canadian comics, Miracleman, finding old comics, and what she’s reading!

DISCLAIMER: We’re all adults here, right? Right. We talk about sex in this one, folks. Put your headphones on.

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Transcript:

Kara : Welcome back to comiXology Conversations, your premiere source for interviews of people within the comics industry with your hosts, Slim and Kzam.

Matt : Hello.

Kara : Hi.

Matt :  Welcome back.

Kara : Welcome back. We are here today with Hope Nicholson who edited the Secret Loves of Geek Girls as well as contributing a story. Welcome.

Hope Nicholson: Hi.

Kara :  Secret Loves of Geek Girls, to those who don’t know, is an anthology of women who are geeks who are just talking about love and relationships and sex in the context of their geek fandoms. I identified with this book, like, so hard. It’s one thing to realize that other have similar shippy nerd interests as you and another thing entirely to read their introspective stories trying to sort out of these feels mean. Did you find during editing or compiling that was difficult getting contributors to open up or was the opposite occurring?

Hope Nicholson: No, not at all. In fact, one of my early emails I remember sending out to people said you can talk about things up to the limit of your comfort level. Don’t feel pushed to talk about more things that you’re comfortable with. I didn’t want anyone to come back a year later and be like oh god, I really wish I hadn’t written that and now my ex has read it and now I’m very self-conscious and I wish I could just pull it off the bookshelves. For that reason too, I said if there’s any relationships that have recently just ended or anything like that, maybe choose a different story to tell just because not enough time has probably passed to be able to get a bit of perspective on it. Even if you feel comfortable right this second, you might not feel comfortable in a few weeks’ time. I really wanted to make sure everyone was really just on board and comfortable and didn’t feel pushed to reveal intimate details unless they were absolutely ready to and, surprisingly, a lot of people were very ready and very willing to look at their lives in an intimate way.

Matt : Back to the topic of comfort level, this was a kind of anthology collection that I hadn’t read before because there’s a 50/50 split with prose and graphic storytelling. Did that help with the comfort level of the creators because they didn’t have to if they weren’t capable or didn’t know anyone to make like a 10-page strip, they could actually just write their own prose work to be included.

Hope Nicholson: Yeah, absolutely. Some of the people who wrote prose stories are actually comic book writers usually and so they were writing in a bit of different format than they were usually used to but some others did manage to hire illustrators and do a full comic strip. My initial idea for the project actually was going to be an all prose anthology so the fact that a few of the people came up and said I’d actually rather do a comic strip was something that I had to adapt to as I was developing the project. Then it kind of merged into about an even 50/50 split between prose and comic stories.

Matt :  You’re getting your bang for your buck in that book. Maybe you breeze through a page in a few minutes and then that changes when you read the prose book.

Hope Nicholson: I tried to make sure all the chapters, even the prose were fairly short, within five pages, just so that it didn’t feel like any of the stories really dragged on even if it wasn’t to your interest level, it’s going to be done pretty quick.

Kara : A theme that resonated with me while reading this was fictional stories and attractions helping us discover more about ourselves and what we’re attracted to and what we expect out of relationships. Was this a theme that emerged organically or was this one of the themes that you set out to conquer?

Hope Nicholson: I think it definitely emerged organically but it really highlighted the similarities a lot of fangirls have with each other. Even if you’re into different fandoms, if you’re a game designer, or if you’re a comic book nerd, or you just like to write about comics. The fact is, we all kind of view ourselves through this lens of fandom. We obsess ourselves with comic books, fantasy novels, video games, all these things because it helps us relate to the world in a way that we can’t just go out in the world and relate to people on our own. Because I lot of those themes came through of oh, I understood myself when I saw myself reflected in this or I understood myself by reading fan fiction or things like that. It just kind of happened organically and this is one of the those things that a lot of fan girls just share with each other without even consciously knowing it.

Matt : I think one of my favorite stories was where you go through the various stages of finally making the decision to go date and you go through the three different dates. It’s told to you in the way of I’m finally going to make this decision to try online dating and you go through each one. As a reader for me, I’m ready for them to say which one was the winning date, in a manner of speaking, but that wasn’t the kind of final judgment you’re supposed to make. As a reader, you’re like, okay, going through that process is the winning formula right there because so many people, especially geek girls, are afraid to just start that process. Going through it, there wasn’t the one man that was the winner but it was that comfort level now that I can do that and that confidence at the end of that story.

Hope Nicholson:  Yes, that was Stephanie Cooke’s story, Lungerella, I remember with illustrations by Dina Paglierello. They’re both Toronto based. I think that’s a common theme in the stories too, is the fear of dating. The worry about “am I doing this right?” and trying to push yourself past your comfort level a bit to see if maybe trying out dating is going to be the right thing or maybe it’s not and seeing what happens. It is a thing that I think a lot of us have to consciously push rather than just happen organically with dating and love and sex, which can be problematic too if you ever push yourself past your comfort level. A lot of the stories don’t really have a point so to speak. It’s about the experiences. It’s about knowing it’s okay. It’s about sharing it with each other and knowing that sometimes there is no answer. Sometimes it just really about trying some new and seeing where your story takes you.

Matt : I think even Sam Maggs’ story was similar about the ex and how she knew of another woman who had the same ex and they were like at odds for so long and then she finally realized that like what are we even doing? We kind of have this similarity that maybe we just talk to see other maybe we would be friends in normal circumstances.

Hope Nicholson: That’s how I met actually one of my closest friends too who is a contributor of the book, Brandy Dawley. I remember we were at Comic Book Ladies Night and I knew that she had dated a guy who had just recently broken up with me. I kind of like sidled over to her and muttered, “we know the same person, don’t we?” She looks at me and she’s like, “yeah, he’s a real asshole.” I’m like, “He IS!” He really is. We were kind of friends from that point on and it was weird to have that bonding over someone that kind of didn’t treat us right so to speak and similarly, one of her stories is about when we talk to each other about people who are bad to other women in the industry whether it’s in a personal or professional way, how by talking to each other about it, we can kind of hopefully prevent it from happening again because so many of the times we can’t actually make it public for various reasons.

Kara : Yeah, the Grapevine.

Hope Nicholson: Exactly. It’s a useful thing. It’s also very easy to that to turn into something else as well. Gossip is both a very valuable tool in kind of seeing ourselves and protecting ourselves but if a detail gets changed or if someone has any kind of malicious intent or if they just hear it wrong, it also can be very dangerous as well.

Kara :  We’re still living in a culture where people are really, really interested in when each other first has sex and loses their virginity. What made you decide to share your late bloomer story with a such a public audience?

Hope Nicholson: It was pretty nerve wracking to be honest, but the biggest thing is I’ve been talking about it to friends since I was a virgin. During that time period I found it really helped a lot and the relief I felt with talking to people about being a virgin for so long and the worry about it just really helped me process the whole thing. I felt like there’s probably a lot more people like that out there too. I felt my story might be able to help reach out to some of them and be like, I lost my virginity late and there was a time when I didn’t know if I ever would or if I wanted to, and that’s the biggest thing.

It’s not like there’s an easy solution where you’re like, oh no, I definitely want to lose my virginity and it’s just something that I have to wait until it happens. It’s, do I even want to? Am I going to lose a part of something that I feel makes me special or unique in some way? What if someone touches me and it’s gross and then I have to have awful thoughts about it in my head for the rest of my life, which luckily didn’t happen for the most part, although I can’t say it has never happened since then. Some experiences were pretty bad so I can’t even say that choosing to lose my virginity was the right decision or the wrong decision but in the end it was my decision and it worked out fine, but if I didn’t, it probably would have worked fine too, I just would have been having a lot more anxiety about sex.

Matt : The beginning of the book, too, I think even your kind of precursor to the story about why you wanted to put it together, but I think my favorite part, was it’s something that you would want to read yourself. You couldn’t find it but if it was out there, I would want to read it. I felt like that’s the ultimate distinction of why you should do anything really.

Hope Nicholson: Absolutely. I think if you know you want to read something and you think that other people would too, it’s a really good idea to just go make the project. That was the biggest thing. It wasn’t just me wanting to read it, but when I would get together with my female friends, we’d always end up talking about love and sex and dating and sharing our fears and our insecurities and things like maybe specifics, like, what kind of sex was best for us, or maybe it was kind of more general of what level our sex drives were at, some people being higher level and some people being much lower level, which isn’t something that’s discussed very often. People often discuss things about orientation and relationship types, but they don’t often talk about what level your actual hormones and your feelings about people play into relationships, but it’s a really important part too.

Matt : This Kickstarter I think is one of several that you’ve done. You’ve had the successful golden age Canadian character that we can talk about later, but what did you take from those to use for this Kickstarter knowing you’d have so many cogs in for this anthology series? Were there specific learnings that you took from the past to this one?

Hope Nicholson: Oh, absolutely. One of the biggest things is with the Nelvana and Brok Windsor, I had a lot of artists involved in it, and every single time you have an artist involved, you have a different level of funding and it can be very complicated to kind of organize and have those all shipped out on time. If something goes wrong, the whole project is delayed. With this project, I definitely made sure that because I had so many people involved as writers, illustrators, that there were fallback plans. Like, what happens if they can’t get their piece done? What are we going to do? Will that be okay with the funders? How will I approach that with them? That was a big learning experience, but I’m still learning. There are things that I knew at the beginning of the project that I feel completely different about now, especially in regards to budgeting and things like that, which is always a constantly evolving process when you have a lot of moving cogs. Yeah, I feel like I’m still learning the ropes as a publisher and hopefully every project gets better and more easier from this point on.

Matt : How do you even control, like, just the idea of me emailing upwards of 40-50 people and asking for a piece would be just so stressful. I would like lose my mind because then I’d have like the biggest spreadsheet ever and then like color coding.

Hope Nicholson: It is a big spreadsheet, yeah there’s a lot of color coding. There’s multiple tabs, it’s great. So many columns. It’s a good spreadsheet, I’m very proud of my spreadsheet.

Matt : Did you start out with all red and then it eventually is all green by the time the project shipped?

Hope Nicholson: Yeah, pretty much. With all the contributors, yeah they’ve all now paid to which is great. I have different columns that says when they’ve submitted their piece, if they’ve been paid their initial pay trade, if they’ve been paid their bonus pay trade, any other information needing about contact information things like that. It was a lot of work, definitely, but that part is the part I’m actually good at and that I actually really enjoy. It’s more the creative side that I’m kind of a bit, you know, I would like to just shove onto other people’s hands. Luckily, I had a great book designer, Megan Lavey-Heaton, who also wrote one of the stories in the book. She was able to take all those duties off my hands because it’s … I don’t really care about design that much. I want it to look good, I just have no opinions on what makes it look good.

Kara : That’s okay. That’s what teamwork is all about.

Hope Nicholson:  Yup, and delegation.

Matt :  The other one thing too that I noticed about the Kickstarter, that for whatever reason I guess I never thought of, was payment to the creators involved in the project. How do you commission an anthology at the onset of a Kickstarter? I guess I never just sat to think about that but you don’t even really start that process until you kind of have an inkling that you’re going to meet the goal. Obviously, why else would you commission something if it’s never going to get completed?

Hope Nicholson:  Yeah, that is always a tricky thing, especially when you’re working with new content because you would like to have art to showcase in the Kickstarter, but if you have no budget to pay for art, you shouldn’t be commissioning any art. There are some ways that you could either say, look, if it gets funded, you’ll receive this much amount and if it doesn’t, I’m sorry, you’re not, or you reach into your own pockets and you pay for the artwork for one or two pieces to showcase it and that is probably the best way to do it. Sometimes you have to put your own money into the Kickstarter in the beginning as well. For this project, I definitely paid for the … Gisèle made the cover art for the project and I believe I paid her after the fact after talking to her about it because we’ve worked on a few other projects together so she knows that I’m reliable and that it would work out. I had a good idea that it would be funded. If it didn’t, I definitely would have reached into my pockets and paid her because it’s a great piece of artwork.

Matt : You’d be over the border right now escaping everyone.

Hope Nicholson: Over what border? Here? You guys wouldn’t let me in.

Kara : You keep fixating on the Canada thing. I want to fixate on fan fiction instead for a second.

Matt : Do it, go ahead.

Kara : Fanfiction was another recurring theme in this book which I identified with and resonated with me because you’re growing up and you’re reading fanfiction and your friends read fanfiction and you’re like, cool, but it doesn’t really occur to you that even though you see thousands of people have read or liked certain things that other people are actually having similar fanfiction experiences as you are. Reading some of the stories in this book about people who discover things about themselves through fanfiction or just learning about relationships through fanfiction. I was like, oh yeah, that’s right. It’s not just me, other people do that too. We were wondering about this earlier, have you ever written fanfiction or just read?

Hope Nicholson: Definitely read a lot of fan fiction. It’s funny, Meags Fitzgerald’s story in Secret Loves of Geek Girls called Waxing Moon about her obsession with with Sailor Moon. I honestly felt that she was looking into my own past. I remember trying to load those Sailor Moon photos on a dial-up connection just so you could print them out and be like, see, isn’t this cool? Going to all the fanfiction sites and looking at fanart and everything and just how exciting that whole experience of content related to what you were watching or reading, but telling stories that the authors just for whatever reason couldn’t tell because it wasn’t part of the main storyline.

Of course, very quickly that turns to sex. I think it definitely must be that 90% of fanfiction, if not more, is sexually related because it is people trying out new concepts, new ideas of ways that excite them and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Sometimes it’s kind of disturbing to be honest but with it all being written, it’s a bit safer too to explore some of those methods. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily completely safe either, fan fiction. I think that sometimes the ideas kind of get propagated and spread around do lead to people being a bit confused about how sex actually works. For example, I used read a lot of slash as a lot of fangirls do.

Kara :  Yeah, I just raised my hand.

Matt :  With the audience.

Hope Nicholson: It’s okay. I’ve read a lot of things where it says a lot of women like slash which is male/male romantic or sexual relationships that occur between characters who are not actually in a romantic or sexual relationship in the main story because they like to see themselves as the main character. I don’t know whether that’s true. It might be partially true. It might be just because there’s a little bit of something transgressive about people breaking the friendship boundary and then having sex that’s very exciting, I’m not sure.

Kara : I have a theory about it. My theory about is, that it’s unfortunate, but there are more well-rounded male characters than well-rounded female characters, so it’s easier to see a male/male relationship in most media than it is the female/female relationship in most media. If it’s a same sex relationship, you remove the gender power dynamic from it. As opposed to being like, he’s the guy and she’s the girl you’re like, oh but they’re just two people who love each other and so that makes it a little more palatable.

Hope Nicholson: Yeah, definitely. It’s about kind of seeing yourselves in a relationship where it’s like equals. Unfortunately, yeah, a lot of our internal biases against women mean that even us when we’re looking at things like fanfiction, we don’t see that and we bring our own prejudice to the table and so it’s easier just to kind of read about guys and being like I get this. That can also be dangerous because a lot of slash fanfiction I read have very devious sexual practices. Things like lubrication just never enter play into a lot of fanfiction and it’s like that would be very dangerous if you actually engaged in that. Don’t listen to fanfiction about how to actually have sex.

Matt : I didn’t think about that about people that are not as experienced and only read that, I feel that could be like a giant wake up call in certain scenarios where they finally attempt their first relationship and it goes really poorly because their only knowledge is from certain fanfiction.

Hope Nicholson: It’s the same thing with traditional medium too. The way that sex is portrayed is never kind of how it actually is. Sex is weird and it’s funny a lot of times and it doesn’t work the way that you think it does. It’s not going to fade to black at a certain point and then you’re going to wake up freshly relaxed.

Kara :  With your makeup all perfect and your hair perfectly tousled?

Hope Nicholson:  Yeah, it’s weird. Sex is weird. That’s fine but a lot of fanfiction and a lot of the medium that fanfiction is based on just really does never bring that up.

Matt : I feel like that’s the title of your next anthology, “Sex is Weird.”

Kara :  Not even just the fic that talk about sex like the way, I remember I was like 15, super obsessed with the Teen Titans TV show, hanging out on the Robin Starfire Shrine online.

Hope Nicholson: Oh yeah, the shrines. I remember that.

Kara : I remember very vividly reading this 50-chapter fanfic that was just all building up to their first kiss. How perfect their first kiss was going to be. There was this villain who kidnapped Starfire because he also wanted her first kiss and they just made it into this big thing and so then I freaked out and didn’t kiss anyone forever because I was like, but it has to be perfect and they have to be my one true love. It was like the Disney thing I’m sure too. I just remember that fic and like looking back at it now, I’m like, oh my God, that fanfiction had this huge weird impact on my life for no reason other than it was just a story that was about characters that I liked where I was like, that’s how this works. That’s not how that works.

Hope Nicholson:Definitely, it’s not. I remember my first kiss felt kind of like kissing a dog. It was just wet and soggy and made my nose wrinkle up.

Matt : Was it your story where you said that you had another boy that licked you mouth? Was that your story?

Hope Nicholson: Yeah. I haven’t seen or talked to that guy for ten years so I pretty sure he won’t …

Matt : You know he listens to this show, I reached out to him. He’s outside the door right now come on in.

Hope Nicholson: I’m sure he would acknowledge, like, he did break up with me, so I’m sure he would acknowledge too that it was not a well-matched pair but at the time, you don’t know that. For me, I was just like, well, maybe I just don’t like guys at all, maybe I don’t like anything. Maybe all sex forever is just going to be weird and uncomfortable. When you have a bad experience that the first time, the first few times, you think that is the truth because you don’t know anything differently. You don’t know that maybe on the 50th time you’ll have sexual attraction to someone. You don’t know it’s a possibility and I think that can be really scary. You kind of tell yourselves a story that might not be true because you don’t have all the facts and there’s no way to know what the truth is sometimes and that’s scary. It’s okay to be scared I think.

Kara : My first kiss I made the advance because the guy was too shy and I was like, oh my God no, we’re right here. Why isn’t this happening? Then afterwards I remember feeling disappointed because I didn’t feel sparks or fireworks or whatever. He was like, what’s wrong? I quoted That 70s Show at him from something Jackie had said because I was like, let’s make sense of this situation. “It was hot and all but I didn’t really feel anything” and he was like, what?

Matt : What ever happened to that guy?

Kara : That’s way too long for this podcast.

Matt : Next anthology you can supply a prose work.

Kara : I’m just proving my point about using pop culture references as a lens through which to view relationships and stuff like that. Again, awesome book. I believe you had a question about Canada that you’re burning to ask.

Matt : I did. I wanted to come back to your previous Kickstarters because I was just so unaware. I was looking through them, the Golden Age of Canadian Superhero Comics. As an obviously ignorant American, I didn’t even know such a thing existed. I didn’t know that there was the Brok character. Was that a piece of your parents or even your grandparents history into comics? How did that connection happen for you?

Hope Nicholson: No, most Canadians have no idea too, which is for me the main reason why doing those projects was so important to me is that we tend to forget our own history in Canada. No offense but you guys are kind of like the sleeping giants to the south except you’re not sleeping at all. All of our pop culture is overwhelmed with you and that’s fine, you guys do what you need to do and we enjoy it. But it means that a lot of our culture gets wiped away, forgotten, and if there’s not constant reminders, it tends to kind of just fade away.

When I discovered these comics which was in my university, I was doing a comics project because if I could do any projects related to comics I would just push it into it. I wanted to look into the history of Canadian comics. I figured maybe there would be a few things like Captain Canuck and maybe I could segue in Alpha Flight or something like that. Then I discovered these 1940s comic characters at a time when Canadian comics were banned. I would go around talking to people, being like, have you heard about this, this is amazing. People would be like, no. Then every once in awhile in a blue moon at a comic convention someone would be like, oh yeah I’ve heard of those, I’ve seen one once ten years ago. I was like, someone needs to bring these back, I want to read these. For years I waited and no one did. I’m like, I guess I can do it and so I did.

Kara : That’s awesome. That was basically your whole thing of Secret Loves of Geek Girls. You were like, I have this idea, I guess I’ll go make it.

Hope Nicholson: Yeah, pretty much. If you’re not seeing what you want and if you think that you have the ability to do it, you probably do. You know the subject matter of whatever you want to do better than anyone else will, especially if you have a lot of passion about it. That’s why it’s a lot harder for me to take on freelance projects that aren’t related to my own kind of concepts because it’s really hard for me to shove that passion and that interest and that desire to deep dive into things into something that I’m not super enthusiastic about.

Matt :  On the topic of Canadian heroes, what about Bret the Hitman Hart from the WWF? Was he huge when you were growing up?

Hope Nicholson: Yeah, yeah. There were a lot of wrestlers that were big for me but I mean …

Matt : Kara is scowling at me for bringing up pro wrestling.

Hope Nicholson: I think I liked Andre the Giant the best.

Matt :  Really?

Hope Nicholson:  He was one of my favorites, and Bam Bam.

Matt : Bam Bam Bigelow, God rest his soul. Actually, two out of the three are dead.

Kara : Matt tries to bring things back to wrestling all the time because we’ve learned that there’s a huge overlap between nerds and wrestling fans.

Matt : It’s like they’re from alternate universes almost, the fans of wrestling that don’t read comics and vice versa. It’s like they’re from a different world but they’re identical really in fandom.

Kara : You’ve thought about this.

Matt : I’ve written head thesises, thesi.

Hope Nicholson: It’s a similar thing too. They dress up, they have good guys, they have bad guys, they have fights. For that, that’s all that wrestling is. There’s not really much nuance there to be honest. For comics, it’s a wider medium. You can tell a lot of different stories, not just punch you in the face.

Matt : Right, it always ends in the ring.

Kara : Is there wrestling fanfiction that I should know about?

Matt : My God, I think you have the rest of your afternoon plotted now, Googling wrestling fanfic. Oh, Lord.

Kara : I’m excited and nervous all at the same time.

Matt : You should be.

Kara : What will I learn about myself and spandex now?

Matt : What do you read in your free time? What would recommend to people to discover?

Hope Nicholson: I just bought the Trade of Kaptara recently. Chip Zdarsky and Kagan McLeod who are two nice Toronto boys. It’s great. It’s the most gorgeous drawn comic book I think is on the shelves and it’s really fun too. I’m only a few issues in but I’m hoping to finish off the trade pretty soon. Other than that, I’ve been reading a lot of archival comics for a new project I’m working on and so I’ve been reading a lot of old Eclipse comics from the 1980s. That’s been very interesting. I think we forget about … If we don’t keep re-telling our history, we forget about it. A lot of people don’t think of the 1980s as being a real hotbed of comic creativity but when you look at all the independent stuff that was being published at that time, they were really trying a lot of inventive things that kind of just got washed out in the ‘90s.

Matt : I recently started reading with the Marvel release of the Miracle Man stuff, which was kind of under the rug for decades because of legal stuff.

Hope Nicholson:  Back when I was a very bad student and doing bad things, I had downloaded I remember all the original Miracle Man scans and I obsessively read them. They were crazy.

Matt : They are. It doesn’t get kooky crazy because I love his Swamp Thing run so then I went to Miracle Man and read the first trade. I was like, I don’t get it. I don’t know why it’s so highly regarded. Then I read Volume 3 is where it really gets nutty when the stuff happens in the city.

Hope Nicholson: When young Miracle Man comes and then he’s like forget it, we’re just going to be a utopia afterwards because I’m the boss.

Matt : Yeah, that’s crazy.

Hope Nicholson: That is what a superhero would do because they would have all sorts of egomaniac ideas of power and thing like that. I’m not spoiling anything, hopefully.

Matt : I think that’s the end of Moore’s run but then Gaiman takes over and then takes it to the next level of craziness. It’s interesting that you say that we forget. If we forget about it, it’s just going to go away because I think that really did happen with that stuff and only now it’s our hope for a younger generation.

Hope Nicholson:  To me, it was so much exciting, Miracle Man than even Watchman to me. The great thing about having services like comiXology and things like that to tie it back into your guys is that people don’t need to download these scans from the internet anymore. They can read digital comics and give creators a fair wage for accessing it in ways that have never been possible before. I think that’s really amazing too.

Kara : The more I work in the comics industry, the more anytime anyone says anything like to me I’m just like, how dare you? Someone slaved over this for you.

Hope Nicholson: Yup but with comics that will never get another release and if it’s impossible to track down, it’s kind of difficult. That’s why I think archival projects are really, really good too because you’re helping to make it accessible to as many people as possible while doing it in a legitimate way.

Kara : Comics are great, is the moral of this story, and so are nerds.

Hope Nicholson: Miracle Man kind of ended up on a slash note too I remember because it ended at the very point when they like …

Kara : Wait, I haven’t read it, I haven’t read it but you had me at slash so maybe now I’ll go read it now.

Hope Nicholson: You could just order the last issue I’m sure and then read the slash parts.

Matt : That’s what’s even more interesting about Miracle Man, it’s become a Miracle Man show, in the re-release they’re going in a monthly release schedule. Even though it’s been done for decades, the re-release is going very slow and they’re only just on issue three of Gaiman’s run.

Hope Nicholson: I don’t know personally, I don’t really love that. I think it’s kind of weird and almost seems kind of like it’s milking people out of their money. Just release the trade and then just go to town with that and then start doing new issues. A month-by-month re-release of the original issues, I don’t think that’s any added benefit for content that’s already been put out there.

Matt : I think they’re getting brand new coloring as well so I wonder …

Hope Nicholson: I don’t like that coloring.

Matt :The original coloring, do you remember the coloring from the original first two or three issues was crazy. It was a greenish hue. It was very early on I guess in coloring techniques, it was craziness.

Hope Nicholson:  Like the early Star Wars comics where everyone is gray, uniforms are green and stuff like that.

Matt : Yeah, there was a lot of green going on.

Kara : Well, Hope we’re so glad that you could join us today to talk about this book. It’s fantastic. We hope everyone reads it everywhere, all the time, always on all their devices.

Matt : Absolutely. Hopefully, we can have you in for the next edition, “Sex Is Weird” coming in 2016.

Kara : Thank you.

Hope Nicholson: All right, thanks for having me.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)