ComiXology Conversations | Seth Meyers

In this episode Seth Meyers discussed loving comics and then us loving him.

Topics include when Seth first got into comic books, Green Lantern giving up a month after he started, being more of a DC guy at first, spending money on booze instead of comics in college, living abroad, Hellblazer, Starman, Grant Morrison’s JLA, co-writing Spider-Man during the writer’s strike, working together with Kevin Maguire, Justice League being his Watchmen, meeting Kevin Maguire, JL on CW, getting back into comics with Joss Whedon’s X-Men and Brian Michael Bendis’s DD, digital comics on plane rides, using his large platform to share comics love, Matt being a dorky father and asking about kids and comics, just what does a talk show host’s schedule look like, and what he’s reading, and then we give some picks for Seth!

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Transcription:

Matt: Kara, this is the biggest show I’ve ever done.

Kara: Ever.

Matt: Hands down.

Kara: Absolutely.

Matt: We have a dear friend of the show now, we’re best friends. You might know him from Weekend Update, The Awesomes on Hulu, Late Night with, and general big shot, Seth Meyers. Welcome.

Seth: Thank you, guys. I’m so happy to be on the podcast.

Kara: We’re delighted to have you as a guest.

Matt: Absolutely, and I think what’s like a hidden gem, nugget of knowledge for you, Seth, is that most people maybe don’t realize if they don’t watch your show, but you’re a comic fan.

Seth: I am.

Matt: I think it came out recently with Sana from Marvel on the show, but how did it start for you? Everyone knows their own story, but what’s your story with comic books?

Seth: You know, I can very clearly remember the first comic book I ever bought, this is back, I’m forty-two years old, so you’re listeners that are age appropriate will remember when you would just sort of buying them at the supermarket on the spinning rack. I remember I bought a Green Lantern comic, and I remember that, I could always trace it back because the next issue of the Green Lantern was him spiking his ring and saying he quit, this is right before John Stewart took over from Hal Jordan, but I remember thinking, “I can’t believe I got into comics and a month later Green Lantern quits.” Terrible timing.

Kara: That’s crushing.

Seth: I was just a big comic book reader, I really was a more DC than Marvel growing up, but I would go once a week to the comic book store.

Matt: Now did you keep up with comics? I know a lot of people maybe like drift out when they get to college and they come back, but what was that like for you? Did you always make a trip to the supermarket, or did you eventually find a comic shop for yourself?

Seth: I drifted out in college, I think like a lot of people, and, you know, foolishly spent my money on things you can’t save, like alcohol instead of comics. Then I lived overseas and it made it a lot harder to buy them, and more expensive as well. Then I sort of came back from living abroad and I moved in with a college friend who had kept up with comics and he just sort of had boxes and boxes. He hooked me into the sort of things that I had missed over the years. I remember he was a big Hellblazer fan, Starman, at the time Grant Morrison was doing the Justice League. Those were all sort of the ones that got me back into it.

Kara: Yeah, what a time to get back to it.

Matt: It was.

Seth: It was great.

Kara: How did you go from being this fan, that fan finding that Green Lantern comic on that spinner rack to co-writing your own Spider-Man comic?

Seth: Well that was just sort of dumb luck. We, well, Bill Hader and I were asked sort of to do this on stage comic book interview show, and the night we did it the other guests were Bendis and Brubaker, and we got to be friendly with them, and got to meet some Marvel people and they sort of reached out and asked if there was ever something we wanted to do, Bill and I. Then there was a writers strike in 2007, so Bill and I sort of had a hundred days off work. I managed to write one measly comic, but it was really exciting because we had wanted Kevin Maguire to do the art for it, and Marvel was cool with that. That remains a real career highlight for me. [Editor’s Note: sadly, not available on comiXology]

Matt: Kevin Maguire I assume is a big, you know, highlight for you, because I think Justice League were around the era when you started, the Justice League run which is so historic and been homaged so often, you eventually got to work together.

Seth: Yeah. I mean I think, you know, I would certainly like a lot of people Watchmen was a big deal, Dark Knight Returns was a big deal, but I think even a bigger deal were those Justice League comics that were so funny. Like, you know, I wasn’t, they were funny without being humor comics, they were still superhero stuff, but, you know, the characters had personality, and that, you know, remains to this day, probably one of my favorite run for any comic ever. Yeah, it was great.

Here’s my even better story of how I met Kevin Maguire, because you will not believe this story. Which is, I was at a bar in the West Village for my birthday, and I went up to the bar to order a drink and this guy who was sitting there, and he he said, “Hey, I can tell it’s your birthday. Happy birthday.” I said, “Oh, thanks. I’m Seth Meyers,” and he said, “I’m Kevin Maguire.”

It’s not, again, it’s not the craziest name, so as my drink was coming, I said, “Do you mind if I ask what you do for a living, Kevin?” He said, “I’m a comic book artist,” and I lost my mind and told him that he was my all-time favorite artist. Oh, and then I went back, and again I kept getting more drinks and I went back, and I said, “Will you draw a picture for me for my birthday?” He drew a picture of me as Blue Beetle, and then a year later for my birthday, because we got to be friends, he did a very professional picture of me as Blue Beetle, which is still, to this day, my Twitter handle.

Kara: Obviously the best birthday ever, just hands down.

Seth: Oh, my god. I also one of those things where you go back you to your sort of backroom of friends and you say, “I just met Kevin Maguire,” and no one knows what you’re talking about.

Matt: I think that that run of Justice League would lend itself to like the perfect weekly like CW show of some kind. If they could ever get the rights to all those team members that would be amazing to watch.

Seth: Yeah. Well also, you know, there’s this darkness to everything DC does in film, and I think they do, obviously their television makes, they seem to be nailing more what I think people love about DC. It would be wonderful to use those characters, and it’s not like, you know, other than the Batman of it, it’s not like there are any A-listers in that group.

Kara: Yeah. I mean, I am a DC fan who is religiously watching everything on the CW, and my friends and I have a theory that they’re basically taking The Atom and just taking everything that was great about Blue Beetle from that JLI run and making it The Atom, because of like rights issues. You know, if that’s all I get, that’s all I get.

Seth: That’s not bad though, it’s not bad. Then it was right, because I was a DC person and then the next shift for me that happened with comics was when I got SNL in 2001 and, you know, was in walking distance to Midtown Comics, I just, at the time I’d always thought that if I had a disposal income all I would do is buy every comic. That was, that started my Marvel interest as well, so I sort of picked up. That was a good time too with everything that, you know, Brian Michael Bendis was doing with Daredevil and stuff, and the Joss Whedon run on X-Men. There were a lot of nice things I picked up then.

Matt: What I remember when I was moving I got back into comics, I think for the sole reason of, it was like the same thing with DVD’s. I stopped buying DVD’s just because I didn’t want to have the room anymore, and so I eventually started reading comics on our app eventually. Did you ever make the same transition where like some days you just don’t feel like getting out of bed so you just open the app and you just start reading? Because that’s what I do.

Seth: Yeah, for me it’s become really great for long plane rides, because I will sort of, you know, pile them up. My biggest mistake is forgetting to download them before I lose, you know, WiFi. Yeah, it’s great, you know, I go back and forth. Sometimes I’ll sort of fall off for three months and then I’ll just go and sort of fill up, and that’s really nice to read eight or nine at a time. Because the other thing was, you know, there was a time where I lived in LA where I was living the trade life, where I would just wait for things to come on trade. I’ve kind of consume comics all different ways over the years, but having it on the app is really fantastic.

Kara: How important, or not important, is it for you to share the medium of comics with your audience? Like when you had Sana Amanat from Marvel on the show it blew my mind, because I was like, “Wait, are actual comics mainstream now? Did I miss that?”

Seth: Well, you know, we’ve been lucky. You know, Bendis has been on, Fraction’s been on, we’ve had some other people, who are escaping me right now, mostly because when you do so many shows you forget everybody who’s been on. Yeah, you know, Sana, I’d read an article about her on Vox and just thought, “Oh, this would be such an interesting person to talk about this sort of thing.” You know, we had Ta-Nehisi on, you know, I think his Black Panther is out today, which I can’t wait to read.

You know, the thing I found is, you know, even though people were watching the show and maybe don’t read comics, everyone these days with, you know, how superheroes permeated culture, you know, they’re consuming some kind of superhero stuff. I think they find it interesting to listen to the kind of people who created it in the first place. Comic book people are by their very profession great story tellers, which is really all you need for a talk show guest.

Matt: Yeah. I remember -quick interlude- was when Kevin Smith was writing Daredevil I think, it was going to be a big deal because he was going to be on I think Letterman, and they were going to play like a trailer for the comic book. It was going to be like be the most crazy thing ever, and I think the ended up running out of time and they never played the trailer. Ages back, that was like the biggest deal ever.

Seth: Yeah. I mean it’s really, like one of the reasons you get excited about getting one of these shows, that I’m so lucky to have, is you get to kind of choose the kind of people that you would want to have conversations with, and I still really enjoy talking to people about comics.

Matt: Yeah. You recently had a child, so congratulations, obviously.

Seth: Than you.

Matt: My son’s five, when I had him, you know, I have these dreams of him reading like the same X-Men comics that I did, we’ll read them together, we’ll watch the animated series and all that. Have you had thoughts like that yet, about, you know, your loves of comics?

Seth: Yeah, well our executive producer here, who used to work with me at SNL, Mike Shoemaker, he for years, every time anyone who lives close to him has children he sends them like eight DC plush dolls that just go straight into the crib. I’ve been waiting for those a long time, very happy about it. Yeah, I can’t wait. I mean especially now because there is so much more kid friendly stuff than when I was a kid certainly. I think, you know, for my father, who wasn’t the biggest comic book fan, but certainly had read them when he was a kid, it took a long time until I was of an age where you could appreciate it. I’m looking forward to all of that.

Matt: One of my favorite shows is the Larry Sanders Show, you know, Garry Shandling obviously, but with you, your schedule would make my brain melt. Like interviewing two to three guests a day, we can barely handle one guest a week. What’s your day like? Do you just get up like so early and come home at the end of the night and just go out to dinner with your guests like on the Larry Sanders Show? That’s what I envision.

Seth: No, unfortunately there’s not as much dinner with the guests that you would want. I definitely worked, because at SNL you really lived with the host for a week, and you kind of never forget that, like there’s no one who hosted SNL in my time there that I wouldn’t sort of be able to talk to, like someone that I had taken one vacation with. Whereas people come in and out of these talk shows pretty quickly. You know, tonight it’ll be nice because Lena Dunham’s back for her third time, so there’s sort of more of a connection there than most guests.

You know, I get in there like 8:30, 9 in the morning and spend the first half of the day sort of writing the kind of things that we’re going to do in the show tonight, and then I spend a couple of hours preparing for the guests. I’ve also found the longer you do this, it’s not, it’s important to be prepared, but sort of the best interviews are the ones that don’t follow the script as much as kind of go off into the place that’s more interesting than whatever best laid plans you had.

Kara: Yeah. As seasoned interviewers ourself, we know this very well.

Matt: Yeah, of course. Veterans of the art form.

Seth: Exactly.

Kara: What comics are you reading now that you’re excited about?

Seth: I put off Saga for a long time, I finally caught up. Fantastic. Descender was one I really like, I really enjoyed that. Bitch Planet’s great. Autumnlands is a book I really enjoyed. Well I started from the beginning and read pretty much, there was an article about Hellboy, I reread all the Hellboys. I might redo all the Morrison Batman’s again, I was thinking about that. Rereading sometimes as much fun as reading it in the first place. I mean I will say like one of the, or not to stick my nose up at the big companies like Marvel and DC, but like, you know, with crossovers and with relaunches, it sometimes becomes really daunting to take on, you know, people within these bigger universes. I think, well, you know, the nice thing about Image is that as Brubaker does something, or, you know, Sex Criminals with Matt Fraction, you can kind of pick up in the beginning and not feel like you’ve missed anything by not reading the stuff that came before it.

Matt: Yeah, absolutely. They’re so good, everyone of those people have just been knocking it out of the park every time.

Seth: Yeah. It’s good. What else is, what am I missing? You guys have anything for me?

Kara: You are missing Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, it sounds like.

Seth: Yeah, okay. Now I got to be honest. Oh, Paper Girls I really like. I keep seeing, that keeps making lists, but I haven’t read it yet.

Kara: If you liked Justice League International, you will love Unbeatable Squirrel Girl.

Seth: I’m sold.

Matt: That actually reminds me of another book, you’ve probably already read, but The Superior Foes of Spider-Man?

Seth: No.

Kara: Oh, wow.

Matt: Oh, my gosh. That’s like Marvel’s version. That’s like the hapless Spider-Man rogues gallery book, it just follows them for like twelve issues or something.

Seth: I’m in.

Kara: Yeah, it’s a tight well done story. Yeah.

Matt: All right, well the next time we’ll talk we’ll get the review from you on those books.

Seth: Of those two. Great.

Matt: Seth, I appreciate you taking the time out. It was a treat chatting, and it was cool to hear your comic story.

Seth: All right, thank you so much, guys. I really appreciate it.

(Source: SoundCloud / comiXology)