 My work here on YouTube is supported by viewers. Please take a look at the link in the description below and visit my page at 50th Street where you can become a sponsor Star tunes. It's finally time for me to talk about this. I've mentioned it more than once Over the years. I've never actually reviewed it This is a real throwback a handful of oldsters Who see this video someday might remember this, but I doubt Very many people will I bought this in 1979 at Either my first or second comics convention in Houston of the Houston con At the shamrock Hilton. There's a picture of it here. It was torn down a few years later I actually took some super eight film of the Demolition of the building and if I ever dig that up, I may digitize it and show it someday This book was edited by the late Joan Winston who was very involved in Star Trek fandom culture in the 1970s She edited and wrote a few star trek related books. It is a collection of Nerd culture cartoons Which were pretty rare at the time only found in fandom really Much of the content of the book comes from this artist phil folio Who had made a name for himself? as a fan artist He had created these illustrated convention reports a few years earlier and They became the backbone of this particular book this book For me, it's very closely related to my earliest convention experience This particular story by folio here Is the one that really stuck with me I read this over and over many times this one page in particular. I found so funny Here's phil himself At a convention and he's seeing A fellow artist whose art is clearly inferior and yet the guy is winning all the auctions and Making money hand over fist with his terrible art. I used to doodle this bad star trek art In the margins of my school papers this bad blocky enterprise and klingon and Starfleet HQ And this uh and this bad Spot drawing here Anyway, this is not my original copy. I ordered this from ebay recently My original is in storage in florida. I ordered this because I met phil folio Last october and recorded an interview with him and we talked about this book And I knew I would see him again at emerald city. Here's me At emerald city with him Getting his autograph And he included his little throwback self-carecature from the 1970s Anyway, I recorded the interview back in october intending it to be an episode of the oluk show But I decided it belonged here I learned two things during this interview that shifted my entire worldview number one I've been mispronouncing his name for the last 35 years. The g is silent And number two I'll let you find that out Here's the video That's card All right, this is uh, this is keith It's uh 50th street, and I'm with phil folio Howdy This is I've I've made 75 80 episodes of the oluk show nice And this is the only the second time I've turned the camera around and gotten in front of it To talk to somebody. Well, they're gonna be looking at you. That's what he looks like Yeah, cool. Well tell my viewers are gonna need to know who you are. I know who you are So tell us about your career. I'm phil folio. I've been uh doing uh Work in science fiction and fantasy since Well, let's see, uh, I guess the first thing I did a lot of fan art and I won a fan artist hugo back in 1977 and 1978 Let's see 1980. I started doing work for dragon magazine. I did a series called what's new with philindixy Then I started a science fiction series called buckadoe's apcon for hire I Adapted robert aspirin's myth series with the first graphic novel myth adventures I did work for dc with stanley niss monsters and angel in the ape I've uh, yeah, yep. See I did an adult series called xenophile And there you go Um I and my wife did some cards for this game called. What was it magic the gathering? No, I don't know that one. No me neither, but uh, and then in 2000 we started Sorry 2001 we started publishing girl genius Which uh, was just a regular comic book series And uh was doing okay. I mean, you know, we printed about 20 000 copies each Which for an independent comic, which is all I've ever really done except for the dc stuff pretty good And was it when you say independent was that self-published or wasn't it? It wasn't self-published. Nope self-published And then in 2005 We were like, you know everybody's talking about these here web comics We should do a web comic so we took girl genius and we put it online for free We were the first person to do that to take an already monetized property And just give it away for nothing and people thought we were crazy. Yeah and within a year our readership had jumped from uh, like 20 000 to 200 000 and our sales tripled even though we were ostensibly giving it away for free So there you go. Okay. So you're a pioneer 21st century pioneer. That's right The and the hugo I I didn't know about the hugo. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Well hugo for best fan artists, you know Do they still do fan artists? I think this might have been the year they stopped doing it really. Yeah um, but then in like 2000 and In 2000 I think it was 2011. They started doing best graphic story for the hugos Okay, and we won that we did we did and we won twice more. Wow And then we removed ourselves from the category because it was just getting embarrassing so Okay, yeah, well, um, so Put down humble too. Okay. I'll do that I'll spell it with capital H. Oh, thank you. That's good. Um We already established yesterday that I First saw your work in star tunes and it's correct And I I was thinking it was 78 77. You say it was 79 79. Okay. Tell me about star tunes star tunes was a uh, this was reasonably soon after uh star wars had come out 77 And people were like, oh my gosh. Hey this science fiction stuff. That's cool And playboy which had a book line decided to Publish a book somebody sold them the idea of doing a uh book of science fiction cartoons And as one of the few science fiction cartoonists They uh, they called me up and they were like, hey, what do you want to do for this? I was like, okay So did you create the stuff in the book for star tunes? No as a matter of fact Because it looked to me like it was a collection It was a collection a lot of people did do stuff for the book, but I was able to use old stuff. I'd done A couple of conventions it kind of paid for me to come to their convention and write Up, you know, do a cartoon of my experiences at their conventions And that's what I that's where I wound up repackaging for the book. That was almost like half the book It was I I take a long time to tell a story From the fact that girl genius has been going on for 17 years now. Yeah, I had forgotten that that was playboy press Yes, but I remember now it was playboy. It was playboy. Would I lie to you? What was I doing buying playboy press books when it was a book, you know, what were you, you know Yeah, you weren't playing cards and yet you were buying ace paperbacks. Don't worry about it. The thing about the The the star tunes was that I I had just been to maybe two conventions at that point. Yeah And it was and it had like all convention culture it was like a Uh a primer for convention culture. Yes, and I was always I wasn't always an artist myself I make my living doing cartoons now So I really even at that age I identified with This Todd bake character you've written about who who who symbolizes bad convention art Oh, no, that's not fair. Todd Todd was a very nice man who you know, he's a real person Oh, really? Yes. I did not know that. No, he's a real person and you know We just kind of you know, just kind of back and forth rivalry rivalry. Yeah kind of a back and forth thing And you know, how was I to know I was going to immortalize him in this stupid book I had no idea Todd bake was real. Well, I'm learning all the time. There you go 35 years for me to learn this. There you go. There you go. But this this Todd bake character was Hi, Todd. I'm really sorry about that was winning was winning all the The the big auctions with his art with drawing stick figures of spot and In that particular case Todd was in fact emblematic of an entire class of artists who I had Less than charitable feeling story at the time. Yeah, I am a much more magnanimous person Yeah, with and with the your drawings of the convention security back in the day dresses old school klingons Oh, yes, and they're acting like that gave them license to to be real a-holes Yes, there were people who claimed that Well, I felt like you you you captured the convention experience at the time and that's what you were trying to do I was yes Okay, so Moving on from star teens sure um Talk talk about how many books you published with girl genius Well, the 16th one just came out and uh, january will be doing another Kickstarter for number 17 The like I said the story is up online on the website and it's free you could read the whole thing for free And yet people really like the experience of owning a book You can read a book anywhere So once a year we collect the new pages and we put it into a book And that's that's what goes up on the kickstarter than 16 of them Yes, what about the novels? When did you start doing the novels the novels? We always kind of wanted to do the novels because Uh, there's a lot of stuff Uh, graphic novels, do you like that signed? Okay Graphic novels and movies are very similar in many ways In that it's very hard to put in background information and world building and inner dialogue and stuff like that Which is pretty much what novels are made for right, you know It's pretty much the same story, but there's a lot more detail and there's You know some scenes that we couldn't really fit into the comic and stuff like that Now those we were thinking about publishing them ourselves because that's what we do but um Some people looked over our early drafts and was like, you know, you can get this published by a real publisher and so we did There you go Thank you. Who is who is your publisher for the novels? That's uh nightshade books And in england it's titan So are the uh The characters in the novels from the girl genius. It's the same story. It's the same story. It's the same story retold Like I said expanded and you know with more a more granular detail Okay, so girl genius is agatha. Yes, okay Oh, well you were mentioning buck gado before I remember buck gado And I remember not being able to convince Other young people that has pronounced gado. That is correct. Tell me about the buck gado story buck gado buck gado is a He's kind of like a private detective in space. I came up with him like in the mid 80s My challenge for the buck gado series is that I wanted to write a story where every page Had a gunfight or an explosion And you know I did it, you know, it worked out. Yeah, and uh But people really liked the character and they liked the world So I was able to expand it out and move beyond that. Yeah Um why the name gado was there a reason for that? I just thought it sounded good. Yeah I remember looking at the comics and trying to figure out why gado But I didn't see a theme. No, there was no theme. It's There was nothing really existential about it or anything. Like you said, it was just gunfire and explosion. Yep. Yep Tell me about the kick starters. So you've done kick starters for each of these. Oh, yeah, well not Let's see. What did we start doing kick starters? Oh, I think the last five books or so we've done as kick starters and they've been fully funded. Oh my gosh. Yes Like double triple sometimes. Wow. Yeah, what is your advice for doing a successful kick starter? Do you have a secret or? Well My secret for any creative endeavor is First of all and this is very important and a lot of people get this wrong Don't suck. No. Yeah. Yeah, of course. Yeah Make it super easy for people to give you money When people comment or have a problem communicate with them instantly Okay, you know When you're figuring out your costs Think of everything and not just printing but distribution and warehousing and You know cost of goods When you publish a book if you're going to get it If you're going to go through a distributor, you've got to multiply the cover price by five Because a distributor will take, you know, expect to buy that book at 60 percent 60 percent off And so if you can't make a profit selling it to the distributor You've made a terrible mistake And and people don't forget that, you know kick starter takes a percentage Taxes will take a percentage Just assume it's just going to cost you a bundle of money Anything new you want to talk about? Well, I'm working on the fourth girl genius novel along with kaya We're going to be my wife and co-writer We're going to be doing a Kickstarter for the next girl genius in january In March we're going to be doing a Kickstarter for a girl genius card game called the works Which came out like over a decade ago, but we're reissuing it with new art Is it something about that other card game the munchkins? Oh, yes, yes, steve jackson is going to be bringing out a girl genius munchkin set Uh, which will be kind of a companion to the Steampunk munchkin set that he brought out last year Uh, and that did so well and everybody was like, oh, I thought this was girl genius Is there going to be a girl genius and steve kind of threw his hands up and was like, yes, of course there is So um One question about your art style sure at which point did you switch from three fingers to four fingers? Gosh that was probably I was doing work for When I was doing the adaptation of robert aspirin's myth adventure series Because he was definitely a scheeve was definitely a a human character. So Right now os only has three fingers. So, uh, you know, it helped differentiate the two. Okay. I think that's it. Thank you very much Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Sure