 This event that's going on this weekend, for me, is something really important. It's something that I've been wanting to do for a long time on the West Coast. And we'll sort of get into some of that because I feel like there's a community of us out there. And I'm looking around this room right now and I see some of my, like people, you all are in my phone, right? You know, and I know you. And it's like we get together and we talk over coffee or we email back and forth. And we all run in our own individual circles. But it's time that we start to, I'll break into my Willie Dynamite sequence. We need to collect the vibes, right? And there's this opportunity. So that's like, I definitely, I hate when someone gets up and they have a political agenda. So we won't call my agenda political. We'll call it like community agenda or human agenda or whatever. But that's some of what we're gonna get into this afternoon. And we have extra time, right? Cuz the, so y'all are in here. And unless you gotta get up and go to the bathroom, like I've got that memory. I will see you on the streets of San Francisco and you walked out of my panel. So, but I also wanna keep it informal. So if there are questions, you can shout them out. If they're unlike what you were taught in school, which is there's no stupid questions, there are stupid questions. And I will clown you so hard. If you ask me one. So think before you speak. There's a reason why we all have one mouth but two ears. Or most of us have two ears except for, who is the guy who wrote that book? Thinking Grow Rich. His son didn't have any ears. Y'all, no one's read Thinking Grow Rich by, yeah, Napoleon Hill and his son had no ears. Remember that? He's talking about, anyway, that's off the beaten path. So let's get started, do you? Yeah. Okay, now I think it's more important cuz I have a chance to speak to David multiple times, but for you, you don't have that opportunity. So I only have a few questions for him. And then after that, I'm gonna give it over to you. And I guess you'll moderate your own? You wanna go ahead and get it? Okay, so I'm just gonna start. I go through a box pen because my back's bad. Okay, at the beginning, one question I have. Because certainly there's been a history of this in filmmaking, which is the area I'm more familiar with. But a lot of people start out as critics. Then they become creators. And I wanted to ask you, how does your work as a critic inform the work you do as a creative person? That's actually a really good question. Cuz a lot of people don't realize that I didn't really start out as a critic per se. In the 90s, I started publishing a zine. And for younger folks that don't know a zine is what a blog is today, right? And what you did was you knew somebody who worked at Kinkos before Kinkos got bought by FedEx. And you would find the midnight crew and you'd bring them like a bag of weed or a six pack of beer. And they would like photocop your zine for you. That was how I got started. And I always wanted to be a creator. I never really started out wanting to be a critic. And in the 90s, I was working on a documentary about black exploitation films. And this is, again, during the height of sort of the zine revolution in the 90s. And I had all these intricate notes that I had written to myself. Because when you watch, you know, Coffey Brown and, or Foxy Brown and Coffey and Sheva Baby all in one afternoon, you start to lose track of, well, you know, so I would write these little notes to myself, right? And those notes are what turned into Bad Asmopho, which was my zine, which then led to freelance work for magazines like Giant Robot and Rap Pages and some of the other publications that were going on. And so suddenly I was like a critic, like I was a journalist, which is like the most ludicrous thing you could possibly imagine because I'm not any of those things. At least I didn't think I was. And then that led to a job working at a major newspaper, which is even more ridiculous, right? This is back in the days when you could get a job without having a college degree, right? And so suddenly I had this job that I had to take seriously. And the thing was, is I love film, so I was always reading stuff about films. I always knew about it. And a lot of it was just about honing my craft as a critic, which I still don't think I was very good at it. But there came a point for me where I was like, oh, this is very unfulfilling, you know? And if you study like the French New Wave, most of those filmmakers were critics, right? And so not to compare myself to anyone from the French New Wave, but that's sort of what happened was I was tired of writing about other people's failed ineptitudes in filmmaking, right? So I just decided I need to do this. And the thing was, was because of that time I spent working as a journalist, mostly writing film reviews, but also writing book reviews, and also just being a fan, like you study the craft. Like if you're serious about it, you really study how it operates. And I don't want to get too critical of what I see passing for journalism now, because then again, I'll sound like an old man. I'll be the old back in my day, film critics, but there's a lot to be said for knowing what you're talking about. And so that sort of informed where I was gonna go as a creator, you know? And what are you laughing at, man? I easy right there, man. I easy is there's a panel with him tomorrow. What time is yours? 2.30, I'm moderating that. So that'll get raw too, raw and rugged. And he's a, anyway, so that's it. So for me, the thing is, is that you can be a fan your entire life, that's fine. And but at some point, I think what happens with a lot of us, especially when we are within a group that we, I could say marginalized, or I could say oppressed, and we know who those groups are, because as I look around this room, I would say all of us fall into one of those categories in one capacity or another, right? There's not just one monolithic group of oppressed people. We break down into little subsets and categories, right? But what happens is, is at some point, you begin to notice that you're not present, right? And especially when you're a critic, or someone who's looking at things analytically, you begin to recognize what's not there, what's missing, right? And that in and of itself becomes a form of oppression, right? And I'll mangle this quote, but Toni Morrison has a quote, which is, if there's a book that you wanna read and it's not out there, you have to write it. And at some point, I think a lot of us get to that point where it's like, okay, I really want this, but it's not there, and you're waiting, you know? Whether it's a film or a book or a comic book, and you, week after week, you're waiting and you're praying, and you're like, I just need this one thing. Well, the reality is, is you don't need just this one thing, that's like the beginning of the disease, right? It's the disease is no different than alcoholism or drug addiction, it manifests itself differently, but it's that disease, that need to no longer be invisible, that need to sort of break free from the oppression and the dehumanization that this society is really good at, you know? And once you recognize that, there's no turning back. And so for me, it was that moment of like, this moment of just going, okay, well, if no one else is gonna do it, I need to do it. And I might not do it that well, I might be bad at it, but at least I'm gonna try. And then of course, then you become like me, which is like this egomaniac who's like, if someone criticizes you, well, then do it yourself. If you don't, I had to do it myself. I had to go get the six pack of beer and go to the Kinkos at two o'clock in the morning and bribe the dude, you know? So it's like that. So I think that answered the question, right? All right, now since you've worked in so many different forms, I wonder if you could speak to how writing for a comic differs from writing a novel or a film script? A lot of it's, well, writing comics is the hardest, I think, for me. A lot of it, it's just, it's about the format. It's knowing that if I'm writing for a comic, I've got 20 to 24 pages that I need to fill per issue. So it's understanding the beats. Writing a novel is great until it's not, which is like usually about the halfway point where I realize, oh, I don't know where this is going. What am I gonna do? And then writing for film is, I don't like writing for film anymore. I, once in a while, I get an offer to write something and if they pay me, I'll do it. But film is like, I'm trying to think of the best analogy. Film is like that, is like the X that you're never gonna be completely over. You might be married, you might have kids, but it's that X, a friend of mine, Vernon Reed, the guitarist, I was talking to him and he said, you know, somewhere there's a person out there that will get you to do things you never thought she would do. Like they'll say to you, hey, will you be the getaway driver? And you'll be like, okay. And that's what film is like, right? Film is that X who's like, no baby, just hold the gun and point it at the people. And if somebody moves, shoot them. And you're looking at the gun, I don't wanna do it all, but I love you, so I will, you know. And so to me, the concept of writing film and then knowing the politics of the film industry is enough to not make me wanna do it. Because I'll have these ideas and then I come to my senses and go, okay, wait a sec. Like, it was a fight to get Selma made, you know, and it didn't get no awards and blah, blah, blah. And they're not gonna make Selma and they're definitely not gonna make my movie about Nat Turner actually being a time traveler from the future who comes to the past and slavery with a cyborg at his side, right? Do you know, so. What's going on? Yeah. Yeah. But so for me, it's just, it's a question of, you know, I don't know where Robert's right out there. Robert Love, who he and I did number 13 together. I mean, we're constantly bouncing ideas off of each other. For me, the most fulfilling medium is writing prose and books because it's the only medium that I know when push comes a shove, I can have 100% control over. Like, I can publish it myself. And that speaks to my inability to be in a committed relationship or whatever you wanna say, you know? But it's like, when I'm working with Robert, it's like, okay, I gotta think about there's another person here. I can't, you know, I can't do everything the way I wanna do it. And with film, there's more people there. I gotta get actors. I gotta get a director of photography. I gotta get an editor. Whereas if I'm writing a novel, it's just me and then whoever I get to edit it, maybe whoever I get to do the cover, but there's more control. So it's more fulfilling. But if you fail, then you've really failed. Like, if a comic doesn't work, I can always go, oh, hey, Robert didn't draw well. It's Robert's fault. You know, oh, John Jennings was late all the time, man. I wrote the script. Right here, it says three panels and my man drew six. I don't know what, you know, so you can always blame somebody else. And I'm at a point in my life where I'm just willing to take all the blame. So is that what led you to letter shaft yourself? Yeah. Well, the lettering is, so I lettered shaft myself. The lettering, Robert and I were doing number 13 over at Dark Horse and there was no budget to hire a letterer. And so Robert was like, well, I'll letter it. And I was like, man, you don't got the time to letter it. So I'll letter it, which I did not know how to do. So I taught myself that afternoon and you can see it throughout the entire run. But then with Dynamite, when I was doing shaft, as I was writing the script for shaft, the control freak in me took over and I was like, I don't want anyone messing with this script. Like people are talking about how raw and brutal the script is and it is. And I did not want somebody changing my profanity or anything like that and trying to water it down. So I thought, well, if I offer to letter it, it'll be my opportunity to be in control. So that's really how that came about. And I think once I'm done with shaft, I think I might be done lettering, I think. So you brought up the collaborative aspects of your work. Can you talk about working with the artist for shaft? Okay. Well, the artist for shaft is a young woman out of Brazil. I believe her name is pronounced Bilkis. Could be wrong. We've never actually talked, but Bilkis Eveli and she wasn't on my, Dynamite had asked for a list of artists and I supplied them with a list and then which they completely ignored. And then they sent me some character designs and they were like, well, what do you think of this artist? And I was like, oh, I recognize, I thought it was a him because that's sort of the mindset of the patriarchy that we all live in. If it's a name that you, there's no specific gender attached, we automatically assume it's a man. And I said, oh, I really like his work. And they said, well, it's a her. And I said, then I really like this person's work because that's my thing. I would love to work with women and people of color more than not to be rude than with white guys who that's what the industry is for the most part. And so once the first issue came in, there was no communication between her and I during the first issue. And then we kind of somehow managed to get each other's email address. It's almost like on the plantation, right? Like where publishers are like a plantation. They don't want the artist and the writer communicating if they can help it, you know? But I just started sending their emails and asking her specifically like, is there anything you wanna draw? And she was always responding, no, whatever is fine. But what I was doing was within my scripts I was trying to give her a lot of as much creative freedom as I possibly could to do. It's like in Shaft number two, there's the love scene, right? And all I wrote was love scene, draw whatever you want. And I was like, I'll leave it up to you. I didn't say how many panels it was gonna be. I just said, draw whatever you want. And she drew something far more tasteful than like I was figuring it would be far less tasteful but I was really happy with it. And so there's a lot of that sort of stuff now and it's like, okay, this is what I need to get through in the story but whatever you wanna do, do it. And I'd love to work with her again so we'll see what happens. But you don't know because a lot of times within the industry you're working with artists from Brazil or Argentina, a lot of South American artists. So you worry like are some of the nuances of what you're putting in the script gonna be lost. And so I've learned to write these really sparse scripts that don't get to, I'm not saying, he had a quizzical look upon his face as he, it's just like Shaft walks into the room and maybe I'll write he is mad. And then she turns in some amazing stuff. All right, so can you just talk a little bit about why you chose, I'll give you a long question here. Why Shaft and why the original story is rather than adaptation and then how you are actually infusing contemporary thing in the setting in the 1960s? Okay, so you might have to remember some of this question. Okay, so why Shaft first and foremost? I really wanted to do something original but I was looking at the concept or the notion that first off we live in a society where originality is actually punished, where they're constantly relaunching franchises and all that sort of stuff. We're only a matter of weeks away before they relaunch the Cannonball Run series. And Shia LaBeouf and Smokey and the Bandit or something like that. But I said I wanted to do a comic with a really strong black lead and I didn't want to be a superhero book. And I was like, well, let's be honest, that's never gonna sell. First off, you're not gonna find a publisher who wants to do it. Second of all, trying to convince readers to buy something that they haven't heard of that's gonna be really difficult. So I was like, okay, who are the characters that I could tell a story with? And I made a list, you know? And it was like, okay, well, I don't wanna do, first off, Marvel and DC aren't knocking on my door. At least they weren't knocking on my door now. Let me tell you something there, Ronnie. Anyway, so I sort of was like, okay, let's look realistically what's out there. And one of my dream projects was I wanted to do The Spook who sat by the door as a graphic novel. And so I had, and before Sam Greenlee had passed, he was still alive at this point. I've dealt with him in the past and he was very difficult to deal with. So I reached out to him and I was like, what do you think about doing Spook who sat by the door as a graphic novel? He never got back to me. But the answer to all the stories that I was trying to tell, I was like, I could tell most of these stories through the character of Shaft. I mean, to be honest with you, I could tell all these stories through, you pick any black character in comics and I could make it work. But I knew that Marvel wasn't necessarily gonna let me tell the stories I wanted to tell through Storm or Luke Cage. They might let me tell some of those stories. So eventually it was like all roads were leading to Shaft. And so I was like, okay, well, realistically, can I get this character? And you don't know until you try, right? So I found out, you know, Ernest Hyde even has been dead for a long time, but I reached out, I got his widow's contact info and I reached out to her and she was like, I think this is a great idea. She says, I don't, you know, we've got the literary rights because the character is based, there's the literary rights and there's the film rights. And I was talking to other people who were like, man, I've been trying to get Shaft for a long time. And I was like, well, did you try to get the literary rights? And then everybody said, I didn't even know it was a book first. Well, I was like, okay, well, first off, that's your problem because you were sending letters to Paramount or emails to Paramount or whomever and they're not even looking at them because they don't have the rights. They don't care, right? So I knew that there was potentially a second set of rights that nobody, a lot of people didn't know about. So I went after that Chris Clark, Tidyman, who in her own right is an amazing woman. She was, if memory serves me correctly, was the first white woman signed to Motown. And she was like her and Suzanne to pass for real tight and she co-wrote, Lady Sings the Blues and just she has a very interesting career. So I reached out to her like 24 hours later, she was like, okay, let's do this. Here's the, this is the attorney that you need to talk to the agency. And so we started that and then I went to, then it was time to find a publisher. And so that's another story in and of itself. So what was the other part of the question? Why Shaft? Shaft was because I knew that name would get attention. More than Slaughter, more than the Mac, more than Superfly. And who said what? Who said that? Okay, see, you're from, you're part of the congregation. You understand it. I can, I mentioned Willie Dynamite and you get all excited. But if you go outside into the larger mainstream, and the fact is is that Shaft, there's seven novels. Ernest Tiedemann wrote seven novels. And so there actually is a really rich literary history to draw from, far richer than the films. And that's the thing. Like if you're a fan of James Bond movies and then you read the Ian Fleming books, you're like, oh, wait a sec, there's something really, there's more to this character. Same thing with Shaft. And so that was the other thing too, was like there's this whole other well to draw from that's much deeper than the cinematic well. And so that's really what intrigued me about the character because I've read the books. I was dorky enough, geeky enough to go that far. And so it all kind of has had a fairytale ending at this point. Up till now, we'll knock on the wood, so. You can talk about keeping it within the time period. Yeah, okay. So that was the time period to me was crucial. One, people, first off, let's be honest. I feel like I'm preaching the choir. The original Shaft well came out in 1970, so this year is the 45th anniversary of Shaft. And if you look at where the world is today, where America is today, 1970 versus 2015, 45 years later, there's been some tremendous changes, some tremendous strides, but at the same time, this country still has not come nearly as far as we like to. They're very, even at the end of the day, the election of Barack Obama is very superficial by comparison, right? It's, yeah, okay, so Denzel Washington and Halle Berry won an Oscar on the same night, okay? And Obama is in his second term, but at the end of the day, black folks still are really, really poor, disproportionately locked up, disproportionately unemployed. There's so many problems that we're facing 45 years later, right? And to me, it was like the difference between telling a Shaft story set in the 60s and 70s versus a contemporary upgrade is like, there's not that much, to me, if you're writing a mystery, there's not that much challenge in writing a mystery where all someone has to do is type in something in Google or use a cell phone. And I was like, when you look at Shaft, as he was created as a literary character, he was in the books, it's very clear, when he was 17 years old, he was arrested and tried as an adult, and the judge gave him a choice, go to prison as an adult or join the military. This was in the early 1960s, within the lore that Tidyman created. So he went into, he chose to go to the Marines in 62-ish, and before his four years in the Marines were up, he gets shipped off to Vietnam. So he's not even 21 years old, and he's off in Vietnam. And where the books never gets clear is how long he was in Vietnam. So I kind of embellished that within the story that I was telling. But when you look at that, that concept of a poor kid who went through foster care, because he was an orphan, who was essentially institutionalized and turned into this sort of entity of paperwork and bureaucracy at a very young age, and then from that turned in, becomes criminalized before he's an adult, and then is taught to kill before he's an adult, and then is set back into the real world, to me that's a really interesting concept, right? The books never touched upon that nearly enough, but I felt like that's still going on today. So I don't need to set a story and have him be an Iraq war vet or an Afghani vet. I can still touch upon all these issues and have it be, there's something about, I think the American public, that if you're gonna give them a bitter pill to swallow, they want the expiration date to expire, right? So they'd rather read a story about a really screwed up war vet who is a victim of poverty and the prison industrial complex and have that story be set 40 years in the past, because it doesn't seem to have as much sting to it, and that was the thing, it's like, I'm gonna hit you as hard as I can. You're just not gonna, it's like the five finger death punch, you know? Like I give it to you and then you walk away and you don't die for three days, that's what I'm trying to do. So there's this one Kung Fu movie where you might even know the title of it, because you, well, maybe not, but whereas they have this thing called, it's the 100 Death Punch and they hit the dude and then you walk 100 steps and then you drop dead. Yeah, the heart explodes and there's this one Kung Fu movie from the 70s where my man gets hit with this punch but he only walks 99 steps and then someone carries him the last step and he has time to heal from it and that's what I'm like, I got the 100 step death punch, boy, I'll tell you how, bam! And then you walk away and then the 100 step, woo! What question I had when I was reading your book? Yeah, it's gritty and it's honest and I appreciate that. What I really appreciate was the intimacy of the book. So I wanted to talk to you about your choice to do the captions in first person, because I don't see that that often in a lot of books. And so I wanted to hope you can speak to that. Yeah, yeah. Well, in the comic, in the novels, in the Titanium novels that it's not, there's no first person narration, and which is sort of a departure from a lot of, you know, pulp fiction detective stories. And so I thought, well, how can I separate the comic from the shaft novels? How can I separate myself from Titanium and how can I bring new dimension to shaft? And so the obvious answer was we'll give it first person narration. But then the second step was like, okay, what is he going to be talking about? Because I didn't want it to be sort of stereotypical gum shoe stuff where he's like, she walked into my life. And I knew that, you know, I was like, let's use this as an opportunity to really get into the psyche of this guy. And let me try to write this in a way that the reader is never gonna be 100% sure when he's telling this story. Is he telling it as it's happening? Or is he telling it years down the road? And really just sort of get into, it's, and again, it goes back to like, what I was saying with that Toni Morrison quote, if there's a book you always wanted to read, I've read all seven shaft novels and as much as I enjoyed some of them, there was always something missing. And what was missing to me was like this, in one of the books, there's only one book that mentions him having flashbacks from Vietnam, right? And it was such a powerful sequence. And I was like, how come you didn't get more into this? And there was never anything about, he was an orphan and he never knew his dad and his mom died when he was like, two and a half or three years old. This is all established in the books, right? Which to me is like, a lot of that's stereotypical, right? It's like, oh, the black protagonist who has no parents, so therefore he exists in a world in which he's like this entity, this being of the lax humanity because he has no parental figures and he's raised within the culture of foster care and institutionalized child rearing, if you want to call it that. And... Isn't that normal? Exactly, but it can't, but there's also a normal aspect to that too. So if your options are to run with that concept and have him be a cliche and not really get into what does it mean to grow up without a father, right? Or to really start to explore what it means to grow up without a father, what it means to grow up without a mother, what it means to grow up in foster care and not just, especially within fiction, there's like the Oliver Twist orphan, you know? Or either you're Oliver Twist or you're Bruce Wayne, right? You know, what are you gonna be? And so to me it was like a lot about let's give him as much dimension as I possibly can both within a comic and within prose and really explore that. And so as I'm writing the novel, which is Shaft's Revenge, I find that it's like therapy for me because I grew up without a dad. My dad died when I was 18 months old and you would think it wouldn't mess you up that much, losing someone that you have no memory of, that there's nothing. It's like, yeah, so it's like, how do you lose something that you didn't know you had, right? But as I get older, I'm realizing how much it screwed me up. And so without giving away what's gonna happen in Shaft's Revenge, if Shaft finds out who his dad was and is actually part of it is like, oh, I'm now gonna have to kill the person who killed my dad who I never knew. And that's what the Revenge is all about really. So yeah, I just wanna give this character complexity that he's never had. And by default, give us a little bit of complexity that we seldom get in pop culture. For those of you who haven't read it, what I find amazing about this book is not only the nuances that you provide with Shaft, but the secondary characters. They're only in there for one or two panels. You've almost completely drawn them out in a way that I haven't seen in a lot of other books. So I just appreciate that a lot. Thank you. Again, it comes down to, we all want this, don't we? Like most of us want this, right? And so at some point, you all thought you were crazy at one point in your life, right? Like I'm looking at like you three right here in the second row. Like I don't know who you guys are. We've got my man with the glasses. We've got the green hoodie who's got her arms crossed because either she's cold or she's angry, but she's laughing so she can't be too angry. And we've got the sister next to her is like, don't talk about me, because I'm a, right? Now, so I don't know what your relationship is between the three of you. But at some point, there's probably a point in your lives where you thought you were crazy because you thought you were the only person thinking the thoughts you were thinking, right? Where you watch that movie and the black guy gets killed and you're like, is it just me or does the black guy always get killed, right? And then you get older and then you meet some other folks and somehow over the course of conversation, it slips out and you go, oh, wait a sec, you noticed that too? Yeah, I noticed that too. And then we all noticed it. And the thing is, is like black people as the supporting characters that are black, 99% of the time are there like as window dressing, right? There's nothing about them. And so they're not fleshed out characters. So my attitude was like, this might be my only chance to write a comic and it might be my only chance to write Shaft. So let me give everything that I will always wanted and somebody else is gonna appreciate it. At least Sean and John and Iizze will appreciate it. Now we appreciate it, thank you. Recently heard you on a podcast talking about the Shaft comic and someone was going on about how adult the content is. So one of the questions I wanted to ask you since you've written a young adult novel, if you plan on doing a comic for younger audience or even adapting your novel. Robert, do you wanna answer that? Again, this is Robert Love, co-creator. No, not even co-creator, really. The creator of number 13 and Robert just, the story with number 13, there were some images flashing up there a few minutes ago. I've known Robert forever and he calls me one day, he's like, hey man, this isn't what he really sounds like. You notice my impressions of everybody is the same. My impression of John Jennings and Robert Love are the same, hey man, I drew some pages. Do you wanna write a script for it? And I was like, okay. And so he sent me the pages and in a lot of ways it was that classic Marvel. In the beginning, that's a classic Stan Lee Jack Kirby style where I would just get these pages and then just start adding stuff and then it definitely became more collaborative. But Robert and I have been talking about this a lot and I'm hoping tomorrow we'll see this. I know for sure this happened in Harlem yesterday because I know from last year where I see these parents bringing their kids to these events and it doesn't matter if it's a big con or a little con and they walk by table after table and the parents say, oh no, don't look at that. That's not appropriate. And as much as I love comics and as much as I love writing comics with a lot of profanity and a lot of violence and sex and nudity, like comics aren't for adults. There's some that are for adults but right now there's too many and especially for children of color, right? Because we continue to be our, I talk about myself, I'm not a child anymore, I'm a child at heart, mind you. But our children continue to be excluded from that very elite group of those who get to escape reality for a little while and they get to escape but they don't get to escape. They don't have characters they can completely relate to and in the third issue of Shaft which comes out next month, there's this whole bit of narration where he's talking about the Wizard of Oz and he's talking about how the first time he saw Wizard of Oz was on a black and white television set so he didn't know that there was a difference between Kansas and Oz and even though he didn't know that he still couldn't figure out why Dorothy would wanna go back home because he never wanted to go home and I treat Harlem like this really terrible place for him and I always thought about that as like we sell them, get that luxury so Robert and I are constantly talking about we need to do a project that's for younger people and it's not to say that it's simplistic because we don't give young people enough credit for being as intelligent as they are especially young children of color, right? They're not nearly as dumb as we want that they're not as dumb and they're not as unaware and they're certainly not as invisible as mainstream entertainment treats them and to me it's like I don't wanna give them some throwaway feel good thing I mean we as a people unfortunately we're all excited over the new Star Wars movie because there's a black guy in it and I'll go see it but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's really for us but we keep getting tricked into thinking that it's for us and so I wanna create something that's for all young people but especially young people of color because I didn't have that, right? And now it's 30, 40 years later and it's still not there and it's like okay so we're doing something wrong like if it's not there for them now just as it wasn't there for us then it's not gonna be there 20 years from now and if we don't step up unfortunately as the elders, right? I mean John's over there going I don't wanna be no elder man but if we can, John said we could run over because I'm getting a signal from Aaron back there but good to meet you man we haven't met in person yet, how are you doing? I recognize you from the Google Hangouts Oh, okay, so John said we could run over a little yeah, we're good? Okay, all right, okay. Oh, okay, it looked like that we're out of time but yeah, no, I would love to see that's what I wanna do because again, we're not the last two Hobbit movies which weren't particularly good they had a black person in the background in one of the crowds, right? The second one and the third one, the third one and they had an Asian person in the background, right? Now the fact that I know this and noticed it is the problem because I've watched the extended cuts of all the Lord of the Rings movies, rewound them, is that a black person? No, that's just an orc, okay? Yeah, right? And it's that notion that we have that we have been totally excluded and I shouldn't have to just watch the second Matrix movie to get my fill of people of color in another world because I don't wanna watch that Benetton pseudo orgy scene over and over again, right? And it's not appropriate for young people and I hate to say that but it's like it is about young folks, like we have to spark their imaginations. Our society is good at dehumanizing us and this friend of mine who had dinner last night said, you know, when you're a black person you're born dehumanized, you're dehumanized in the womb and that was like really deep to me and I was like, our system is such that we come out and it's like not hello world, it's like the world is already against us and that's what I wanna try to change. So next year we'll have something out, right? Is that not in his head? See, y'all need to, you hold us accountable. But no, in Sean Taylor right over here, y'all my man Sean, who's really the influence for Shaft like in real life, cause he's the real life Shaft. But you know, your daughter's what, six? And you know, Sean talks about his daughter and I have a couple of God daughters and some nieces and Anna Godson and like I really, I feel responsibility for the world. If I can't influence the world they live in, the real world they live in, then I certainly can influence the fantasy world that they escape into to make their lives feel a little bit better. That's how I feel, so. I guess sort of as a follow up to that, I wanna go into that trailer for number 13 film. I don't know if many of you have seen it, but online there is an adaptation sort of like a preview trailer from the number 13 comic. So I would like to know if you could talk about that process and also where that might be going. We can talk about that right Robert, how that happened. The process was pretty simple. We did number 13 through Dark Horse and they for whatever reason didn't hold on to the entertainment rights outside of comics. So we had the freedom to do whatever we wanted with it. And my cousin is a partner in a production company down in LA called Big Machine and they do mostly commercials and television stuff. They wanted to start breaking into feature films which is not an easy thing to do. And so they approached Robert and I and said, hey we'd like to do a proof of concept trailer for number 13 movie which will hopefully allow us to get the money to do a feature. And they didn't have no money to offer us, but it was like okay, you know, whatever. And so I don't know about you, but I didn't think it was gonna turn out that good. Did you, the trailer? Yeah, it was very surprising. And not to discredit them, but we just weren't expecting that. And so they did the, it's online. I think the website is number 13.info or something like that. I should have brought it, but you'll show it tomorrow at your panel. What time's your panel tomorrow? 11.45, okay, so go see Robert and Jeremy. The Love Brothers. I love saying that, the Love Brothers. Because it sounds like a 1970s group, the Love Brothers with their big hit, Love Machine Unlimited. So yeah, we'll show the trailer. Yeah, yeah, so we'll show that trailer, go see that tomorrow. But so that's sort of how it came together. And it was really, it was this, you know, again, it comes back to what do you want out there? What do you want to create? What do you want to put out there? What do you think that's missing? And Robert and I both individually been through that. The Hollywood system where people are telling you how much they love your work and they want to option it and they want to do this and they don't, but they don't want to give you any money. And so my attitude was like, well, if we're going to go through that with somebody, we might as well go through it with somebody that I'm related to by blood, right? And so that's how we kind of got that deal going. And, you know, it took off. And so now we have a deal with legendary digital. And you know more about it. They had a meeting with a producer last week, right? And yeah. And so Friday, yeah. So there's, I feel pretty confident that there's going to be a number 13 movie. It might just be like a low budget sort of direct to Netflix sort of thing, but it's going to happen. And, you know, and at this point, they have not asked us the most painful question of all, which is, oh, do you mind if we change them into a white boy? At some point, at this point, no one's brought up. Like Big Machine and all of us are like, can't do it, but nobody on the legendary side has asked that question, which, you know, like when I wrote Super Justice Force, there were publishing houses that were like, well, if you turned your lead character into a white girl, we might be interested in taking the book. It's like, might or would be and no, you know? But I think I've been selfish enough with hogging all of the attention with the question, so I'm going to open it up to the audience. I have a question. My name's Juicy, and when I read the word black, black station. Black exploitation? I think not only chef, but black girl too. Okay. Black girl is black, black girl. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, to me, that was growing up in the seventh day of Iraq. That was black. I thought that was good to have chef and black, but what I'm going to say now, what I'm hearing today, chef was a person who grew up without father, and did that really matter then? We was glad to be on black beaches and have a movie to go to the sea. So, I think of black station, I think we got to play the Dracula, black girl. You know, Dracula wasn't a black girl, and you had chef, Dolomite. You said, well, that was black station area, but you were doing it in a comic book form. So, what does black station mean? What is black exploitation? This is not a plant, by the way. This gentleman is, but that's exactly what, that's... I don't want to cheer you, just I may be a woman. Okay, so that is the perfect question, because that's been on my mind for a while now. I just recorded the audio commentary for the Blackula Blu-ray that comes out. Yeah, who said that? Who said the what? And it was a really interesting experience. So, Blackula is coming out on Blu-ray. It's a double feature, Blackula and Scream, Blackula Scream. Together, one Blu-ray with an audio commentary by me, which hopefully they won't edit. And it was interesting because I recorded the commentary the day after the grand jury did an indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Mike Brown. And so, I wasn't a really, as I'm sure most of you all were, in a really bad mind space, you know. And at the end of the day, Blackula wasn't something I wanted to talk about at that particular moment. Until I got to the scene where the LAPD shot Blackula's love interest and killed her, even though she was unarmed. And I realized that I was watching a movie that was 40-something years old, and that nothing has changed. And that Blackula was really just, as with all these movies, we're manifestations of our fantasy and our needs and our desires in that moment, but they only went so far, which is fine at that time. You have to look at everything within the context. We can look at someone like Steppen Fetchett in the 30s and 40s and we can knock him. But if we don't understand what was going on then in the world of entertainment and in America, to knock Steppen Fetchett is really wrong, okay? At the end, Steppen Fetchett was an actor, Lincoln Perry was his real name, and he was famous for playing a character named Steppen Fetchett, we always talk like this, and he moved real slow. And nowadays, in that context, he's a very stereotypical, and you could say negative character, even back then. But you need to understand the bigger picture, right? And so when you look at a movie like Blackula or Shaft or any of the other Blacksploitation movies, and we understand sort of what they were providing the audience at the time, I think it's all well and good. I think there was problems within it, but there's problems within everything. There's problems within 12 years of slave. There's problems within Selma. There's problem within Tyler Perry movies, okay? We're not gonna get into the problems specifically right now, but what I realized about the Blacksploitation films now, you look at them 30, 40 years later, I see what was missing from them. And it wasn't necessarily anything we could get given that time and space, right? But now we're in an era where we can get that and we need to get that. And what we need is a greater sense. It's not just about providing an escape for an audience. It's not just about providing fantasy and helping to build our own mythological worlds. It's also about enlightenment and helping us regain our humanity in a greater sense than just getting revenge. And so that's when I start looking at the Kung Fu movies of the 70s and 80s, the Shaw Brothers movies, because those movies were always about, they were always very anti-colonialism. They're always about the oppressor breaking free of the oppressed, getting the revenge against the people who've done them wrong, right? Which is always very similar to the Blacksploitation movies. The big difference between a Kung Fu movie and a Blacksploitation movie is that the hero in a Kung Fu movie always existed in a reality in which he has history beyond oppression. And in America, we don't have that. Black people don't have that. We don't understand our history beyond the context of slavery. And so everything that we say and do is informed by this history of oppression. And we need to start thinking about ourselves as more than just oppressed people. We need to start thinking about ourselves going all the way back to Africa, even if we can't trace our roots back to Africa or back to the Caribbean or parts of South America. Doesn't matter if we don't know where we came from to know that we came from someplace else and that our history is more than just the history of oppression. And all Blacksploitation ever gave us was that. Was that sort of escape within the history of oppression? And so I'm still figuring it all out, but we're at a point where we need this sort of new wave, this new renaissance of Blacksploitation, which ultimately is just about providing an escape. It's about providing entertainment. It's about providing new mythological constructs and new forms of fantasy to entertain an audience. But we need to do a little bit more than that. So an audience needs to come out and knowing a little bit more about themselves and about the world around them. It's a combination of revenge and butt kicking and then sort of enlightenment too and finding that balance. That's what, that's my new thing. That's what I'm trying to do is how do we find that? Because you can do it. I mean, that's what so much of Asian cinema has been built around is, you know, like if you look at Kung Fu movies, all these movies are based on, not all of them, but a lot of them are based on real people. Wong Fai Hung was a real guy, whereas all we see are movies about an ex-slave, not about somebody, so that's what I really want to start doing. And that might not turn her being a time traveler going back in the past, so. Yes? What? Yeah. Anyone else? Yeah. You can hear her. Oh, Executioner Sal Lin is the one where they have the 100 step, 100 step death punch. I want to think that's important about, as you mentioned with the Kung Fu film, when they're fighting over martial arts style, they're fighting over their culture. Yes. Right? Not just fighting for revenge or, you know, faith, they're actually protecting their culture. Yeah. It's Shaolin versus Wu Tang, which to us is like, we don't really know what that means, but whereas, and it seems so ridiculous, and there was, I was watching this great documentary about Kung Fu movies, and they were showing two different versions of a translation, and how, when a lot of those movies were brought over to America and translated, either the dubbing or the subtitles would take a lot of the cultural nuance out of it, and so we don't fully understand what we're watching, which is another thing we need to understand, so. Any other questions? Yes, back there. Yeah, you can do it, you can do it. Okay. Yeah, so, yeah, so, how do you handle that with everybody's funding, financing, that kind of thing? So that is the question, how do we get our stuff made, and to whom we go to the end of it, how do we, well, the first part of that, the first, it's a multifaceted response to that that actually leads to more questions, but the first response is you just do it, right? Now there's certain things that require more money than others. Writing a novel doesn't require any money, it just requires time. Making a movie requires time and money slash resources, because there's ways you can make a movie without money or very little money. So the key is you just have to do it, right? You just have to get out there and make it. Now this presentation may be broadcast in some capacities, and I'll get in trouble for saying this, but I don't care. If you're a comic book creator and you take your project to Dark Horse, you're not gonna get treated that well, right? And I'm thankful for the work that Dark Horse has done for myself and Robert, but I'm probably never gonna do another project with Dark Horse again, unless they change the way they do their marketing and promotions, because at the end of the day, I've bought most of the copies of the trade paperback that have been sold, and then sold them at conventions, right? I'm responsible for a ton of the sales, and so is Robert, right? And so a lot of it comes down to how do you define success, right? So if I go to a publisher, we'll talk about in terms of comics, right? If I go to a publisher and say, hey, I've got this comic, and they go, okay, great, we're gonna publish it. We're not gonna give you a page rate because we don't give anybody a page rate, and we're gonna split the totals 50-50, and we're gonna own 50% of it, and then we're gonna control the entertainment rights and we'll decide who turns it into a movie. That's a bad deal, right? Okay, and then they do this, right? You sign this deal because you want your project out there, and then they only sell, if you're lucky, a few thousand units. I mean, if you're really lucky, you might sell 5,000 units, which isn't enough to meet their threshold, so you never get your 50%, okay? They claim they've lost money on you and they don't ever want to do business with you again, not because you did anything wrong, but because they're idiots and they don't know how to sell something. They don't know how to market to a black audience, right? That's another subject altogether, right? How do you market to a black audience? We don't need to get into that right now, but at the end of the day, Robert and myself, we can put in all that same time and energy creating a book, and maybe we'll only sell 2,000 to 3,000 units on our own, but we make every dime of that 2,000 to 3,000 units, and we still own the entertainment rights, and if it does well enough, and we just happen to be fortunate enough in that we know people, you know, we got family, we're connected, you know, we don't forget about it. You know, I can always go, call my cousin and go, hey, you guys want to do something with this? Or I can, you know, I can start asking around. So the key is how do you define success, right? So like, you know, I don't know where Stacey went, but Stacey Robinson is here, John Jennings is there, Stacey back there, John Jennings is back there, you know, Ashley Woods is right there, Aizay is there, Sean is there. These are all folks that are like, now I'm gonna say this and I'm gonna get in trouble at some point. Robert is one of them too. Every single one of these people was white, like we'd be rock stars in the industry. Tony Perrier back there, is Erica with you? There's Erica, okay? Like these folks ain't up and comers. These aren't people that are just getting started doing what they're doing and don't really know what they're doing. Like in this room right now is a level of genius. I'm not even putting myself, Dr. Gateward right here, right? There's a level of genius in this room that you can't get at San Diego, you can't get it in New York City, Comic-Con, you can't get it anywhere else, but it's in this room. And the fact of the matter is, is that we all know who we are, but no one else knows who we are. You know, like this shouldn't have to be a huge event for, I mean, entertainment weekly should be here right now. You know what I'm saying? Because at the end of the day, we're at make or break time in terms of how we're represented in popular culture. Like it's it, we're reaching a critical mass. And a good chunk of the people that are gonna change it are in this room. And if we don't change it, and there's some of those folks who were in Harlem yesterday, but if there ain't but about 50 or 60 of us. Keith Knight isn't here right now, but he's here this weekend. If we can't do it, it's never gonna happen. And then 20 years from now, we're gonna be having the same conversation. Most of us won't be there because we will have aged out. And we'll be like, oh, I don't wanna talk about this anymore. I've been having this conversation for 40 something years. So we have to change. I hate to use the comparison to hip hop, but we need to start selling stuff out the trunk of our car. You know, we need to prove to the industry. I mean, the comic book industry itself is the only industry that actually, actively takes a loaded shotgun and shoots itself in the foot on a daily basis. It's the only industry that says, hmm, how can we alienate everybody and not grow? You know? And I'm living proof of that right now. I've got a book. Shaft is the most well-reviewed comic out there right now. And we're not selling units. And retailers aren't ordering it. And I'm getting emails from people all over the country. Like, my store doesn't carry it. Where can I get it? And it's like, and that speaks to this big problem within the publishing, within the distribution, within the retail. And I don't have the answers other than to say, well, I got a box of them. Meet me after this is over. You got some cash. I'm good. I got my PayPal reader in my back pocket. And we're good. But that's it. We have to redefine our success and go, you know, I don't like chitlins, right? I can't stand chitlins. They're the nastiest thing I've ever written. Right? But some folks love them. And we as Black folks realize, have to understand that everything that we have in this country has always been the scraps and the remainders of what the dominant culture doesn't want anymore. And we have taken that and we've turned it from gourmet cooking, although again, chitlins is not necessarily my idea of gourmet cooking, but jazz and hip hop. And all these other things are the scraps of what society didn't want anymore. And we have to learn how to create our own success, our own wealth and support each other. And then sooner or later, they come after us, you know. Yeah. He did exodus. He's British. Yeah. Actors are British. Yeah. Is this thing? Is this money? That's what he does, right? On our tip, we want to tell the stories that we want to tell, but we're taking it to Hollywood. We're taking it to places that really don't want it, so to speak, because it's this big as far as they're concerned. But this big to us could be a universe. So I guess the challenge is, like you said, we don't do it our own, take a hip hop perspective of how to do it. It's not going to get down. We don't have the distributors. We don't have the manufacturers. We don't have the marketing. We don't have the infrastructure. We got our brothers and sisters in our neighborhood who, you know, your homies that you can call, say, hey, buy some books for us. They don't buy the books either. They just bootleg everything, man. Brothers just be like, hey, you got my comic. Yeah, I stole it. Until we get the corporations our own that are looking for our stories that are told by us, we will be having the same conversation 20, 30 years from now. Exactly. So we got to change them. I'll get to you in a second, but Sean's jumping out of this. Yeah. I think about that, though. I think that what happens with, especially Black American creatives, is that we think that America is the only spot that our stories are. We are in South America, the Caribbean, Europe, Russia. We speak Spanish. We speak French. We speak, I mean, I think if you get out of the ghetto that is the American-centric idea, and we look to make alliances and people in France. I mean, I wrote for a British hip hop magazine for 10 years for a lot of the players, and in Brooklyn, New York. For a British, I mean, so just being able to do that, being able to say that America is not ground zero. It's ground zero for oppression. But there's so much more that's out there and where we exist that we start making alliances internationally, I think that those stories are there. Because I mean, my wife and I were in the Philippines, but it was 1990, 2000. And we drove down to the most literally animals rainforest where the burnt-out church had Snoop Dogg spray paint on it. How the hell, like, you know, it was down here. So, I mean, our stories are everywhere. We're just not controlling our stories everywhere. So we have to actually out off of this and really go out further. I think, I mean, that's where we're gonna get a lot more of our impact. Good point. Hi, my name is Ricardo, and I head up an organization that does the Latino Comics Expo. We've been doing it for four years. So off the bat, we've got LatinoComicsExpo.com. Like us on Facebook. We wanna congratulate, we wanna congratulate you guys for doing this, John, Colette, Aaron, everybody. We've been doing our expo for four years, and it's been amazing. I mean, just to piggyback what you were saying about the young adults, I mean, a lot of the teenagers are into X-Men, Spider-Man. But the thing that we've been noticing at our expo for the last four years is like the little kids, their eyes wide, because they're looking for like Latino people of color superheroes, and their eyes get so big, and I go, we're getting the little kids. And then on the other spectrum, we've gotten so many seniors, so many older people with like tears in their eyes, saying, you know what, I waited my whole life for a Latino comic book, for a Latino superhero. So you guys are doing the right thing. We're in solidarity with you guys as well, too. This, like Sean says, this been our fourth year we had one, an expo. We got people from like from Chile trying to come down. We got from Mexico City, all the country. What is it? What is it? It just passed in October. No, so you mean it's coming up in this audience? Yeah, it's coming up. So we'll talk some more, because I'm coming up. Check it out. It's definitely coming up. So I'm saying, like to the brother back here, saying, you know what, I see so many like independently owner-created comics, selling stuff from the back of their cars. It's like a momentum that's getting bigger and bigger. So I think we're on the right track. Let's keep it going. Let's stay united. I'm just so proud of you guys, and I'm here to support if you guys need anything. And that's a beautiful thing, because I feel like, there is a sense of community, you know what I'm saying? I mean, things have gotten better. Things have gotten worse, you know? But it's like, I always tell people, you know, okay, like if I'm looking at comics, and I'm not seeing enough in terms of black folks, like, you know, there's some Native American brothers and sisters on the res that are really upset. You know what I'm saying? Because they ain't got nothing. They got Johnny Depp as Tonto. And it's like, it ain't working. Sorry, you know? Well, I'm sure we have about like 20, 25 artists that want to participate. This last year, we had about 100. Yeah. Almost like 40% were Latinas. That's what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. So it's like every year, it's been really, really hot. But I can have a regular question for you guys. I grew up in that 1973 generation. So my question for you is, how do you feel about like Superfly and Priest? That had such a big effect on us in South Central LA. And I'm just wondering as a character to maybe read. I love it all. I love, I love, because see, I grew up, I mean, I also grew up with, you know, in that era. And with, I think it's dangerous when we romanticize too much the drug dealers or the pimps. I think that that's a very dangerous thing. But it's also a very real thing. And it's like if I'm going to demonize the dope dealer, now I'm gonna demonize most of the people in my family, you know, because I grew up in a family of dope dealers. And those that weren't dealing dope were the town alcoholics, you know? So it's like, so that's very real. So the key is if you're gonna show that, how do you bring the humanity to that? You know, I've been doing a lot of research on the history of gangs in Harlem. And it's this fascinating thing. And it goes back to this, people, oppressed people do what they can to survive. And it's not like the average person who's slinging dope is sitting there twisting his mustache in a sinister way going, you know, how can I destroy my people? Everyone starts out thinking, how can I feed my people? And then something happens and something goes wrong. And, but you know, Superfly to me, if Dynamite keeps you around on Shaft long enough, you'll see some characters pop up in that world that we don't have the rights to, but you'll be like, is that Superfly? Is that the Mac? So yeah, that's what I would love to do. So I wanted to echo what this brother over here was saying in terms of the youth, because although I'm a librarian here at the main and I'm a dope librarian, I've worked at the branches for several years. And one of the things that I always try to do with comics slash graphic novels is use it as a tool for young people of color to say, hey, if you like reading, maybe you like this material. And depending on their age and their interest, I found it to be fairly effective. Parents are funny because they think a comic is not really reading. And I always try to let them know, it's just like we have to interpret the photos and you have to read. And so it's actually fairly complex what these young people are reading. And it's for me, I also use it as a bridge to get them interested in other literature, black literature, Latino literature, whatever I thought would get them to reading other things, other than graphic novels. And I think there are a lot of young people who are very stoked to see graphic novels where there are people of color as the main movers in that literature because I have a four-year-old and it's shocking to me how much the reading material for young people is still overwhelmingly white. And it's like that's not the world we live in. And that's not the world she's gonna inherit. So young people deserve literature. That is diverse. Like where our voice is really out there front and center. So I definitely applaud you and other creatives in here who are kind of keep on pushing forward. And I definitely look forward to tomorrow and seeing all of your things and the panels and so forth. Yeah, there's a lot of good stuff tomorrow. So your assignment, everybody you didn't know there was homework is not only to show up tomorrow, but it's to like get, bring at least one person with you. Cause not only are there a lot of panels like there's gonna be vendors set up and we're gonna be hustling and I'll have, I got stuff. And I got my PayPal now card reader so you don't even need cash. I'm good to go. I'll make the money. I gotta, you know, I gotta pay for the plane ticket. Yes. Yes, yes. Okay. So we have a lot of families in the single room side here. And my son and I lived like that for five years. And so if you like to be in a college, but anyway, he loves anime, but I would love to see kids, children and kids writing their stories. Yes. About poverty, I think a lot of world or city or stuff. And, you know, it's just amazing that between as well as they are under, you know, who live near here and, you know, the density of housing, the crime, the violence, the scaring, and it's getting subsidized. So, you know, you can get subsidized to provide digital stuff. Yeah, one thing you might wanna know is there are a number of children's workshops going on. It's part of this black comic festival. Yes, I don't have a schedule. What about for Aaron? I have one final question. We're gonna release it out here today because John Lewis, he wrote more than a month ago. And he would be here and come out on the 14th of February and talk about this. I thought it was so great that he wrote about the movie himself about his comic book form. And it's so interesting because I'm a baby boy but I was not a comic book person. But this is inspiring that it gives hope to the kids and everyone can read this in a comic book. Stuff that really happened. This is how I like to reverse black exploitation to me and see it's like it's a good thing from what I learned about black exploitation. Today, I near admit it was the best that we could be back in the 70s. But today, I think it's nice to have comic book form in history. Yeah, no. John Lewis will be here on the 14th in this building. He gives you a comic book. If the comic book's about summer, March, it is interesting. We have time for one more question? Yes. For all those names that you mentioned, where would I find this ability to be able to talk into that Jesus' dimension? John, where would we find the names? On Facebook, there's a couple groups. Let's see, there's the black comics. Some of the, like all the genius that's in this room. We're all on Facebook and Twitter, Concrete Park. If you're not checking out Concrete Park, Tony and Erica are back there. John has got like 5,000 different projects that he's working on. But if you get a list of all the people who are on panels today and tomorrow, all of us are on social media. And that's just, that becomes a who's list of who's doing stuff. Brandon Easton, Robert Love, his brother Jeremy, myself, Fua Richardson, John. So there's a lot of us here. We're here this weekend. But a lot of it's about connecting with folks because right now, if you look at this this is sort of a grassroots movement, right? We're a community building, but at the end of the day, this movement, we're still grassroots. We're not bamboo roots, right? And we want to become bamboo because bamboo is the strongest grass there is. Like people build houses out of it. So just connect with us over the course of the weekend. We'll talk, I'm on Facebook. Like I don't say no to nobody until I hit my limit. I'll say, unless it's a friend request from someone who's clearly in a bikini doing that. And I think, yeah, it's not real, so. But so we're gonna wrap it up. But please come out, check out everything the remainder of the day today.