 Welcome back to Come Again TV, the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. I'm Shannon, and today on the show I'm going to be interviewing Hirokage Studios' creative director, artist, writer, and film director Eric Hector who also has a new movie coming out probably within the next year or so called Trick and Treats. So I actually, I've told Eric this story a few times. I actually met Eric way back in 1996. I was part of the Big Brother's Big Sisters program, and my big brother, because I was a little brother, he got me a tour at the original Hirokage Studios, and that was actually on February 20th of 1996. The only reason I remember that is because that's the day that Generation X, the movie, was premiering on Fox, and I was looking forward to watching that, and then Jason was like, hey, guess what? I got you a tour of a comic book studio. I'm like, wow, that's going to be hard. So we ended up taking the tour, and Eric showed me how he does comics. In fact, what he had on his easel was a picture of Mysterio he was drawing, and he was using an action figure with a ping-pong cut ping-pong ball over his head as like a model for it. It's really cool. It's crazy. I still have that drawing in that folder over there. I know exactly the drawing you're talking about. And before that, Eric owned a comic book shop in Mount Zion that when I was really little, my mom would always take us to like Kmart and McDonald's and stuff, and we'd always pass by this comic book shop. Never got to go in, but he had this sign up front of Superman and Spider-Man standing back to back that I was always amazed by. I painted that on a piece of plywood, and it's actually a copy of the back of that giant Superman Spider-Man team up. That was the backup cover of that. That's where I got that picture. I thought it was, but I wasn't sure because I had seen the picture years later. I was like, is that the same one? Because it's got the yellow background and everything that the sign had. So yeah, very memorable moment for me. But you are also an adjunct professor at Milliken University, which- No, I'm not adjunct. I'm full-time. Oh, you're full-time? Okay. What's the difference between- Adjuncts are part-time, so they come in to teach specific classes whereas a full-time professor. I'm an assistant professor in arts technology in the School of Art and Creative Media at Milliken University. The difference between adjunct and full-time is just like adjunct. They can only teach a couple classes, and there's some different qualifications. Sometimes you'll bring somebody in because they have a specific specialty in one thing. I'd started adjunct a long time ago teaching different adjunct things, but the goal was always to become- I know a lot of educators are uptight about this. Are you actually considered a professor or are you considered an instructor? I am. I'm a professor now. I wasn't to begin with. I've moved up through the ranks, but I'm actually an assistant professor now. So any of that I think it's like an assistant associate, and it goes assistant professor, associate professor, full professor, but any of those is a rank of professor. So I started out as a lecturer. Okay. And how exactly did that job come about? Because obviously, you've got a lot on your plate right now as it is. So was it something you pursued or did they approach you about that? A long, long time ago, when they were starting the Arts Technology Department, they had just talked to people in the community that were in that business, but I'm an alumni from Milliken. So I graduated from Milliken in 1992. That allowed me to do my internship at Marvel. It also is the place where I, which I'll- I can show you later, like, develop the method for coloring that got me into a lot of comic stuff. So I wanted to teach there to kind of give back because I wouldn't have been able to do any of the things I could do career-wise had I not been able to go to Milliken. And I think there are a lot of young people that have a lot of ambitions and things that they want to do. And the technology is so new and cool. I mean, like it was new when I was doing some of this stuff, but now the things that they can do. So I wanted to be there to help as much as I could, you know, to be able to to chat with them and to give, you know, to give back in a way because like I said, I couldn't have achieved any of the things I wanted to do without Milliken. It's interesting. You've actually mentioned quite a few of the things I was actually going to ask you about during the course of this interview. So let's just go in order. We'll circle back around to the comic book shop and then we'll go in linear order. How did- you started your comic book shop while you were in high school, right? How did that come about? Because most people aren't business owners whenever they're in high school. Well, I wanted to, I really liked comics. I wanted to work in professional comics. And people were always telling me like, oh, there's no way you'll be able to work in professional comics. I think that at that time, the odds were like the same as becoming a, you know, a sports star or something, just because it's such a small world. And so many people want to do it. And I had a comic book collection and I just really loved comics, especially Spider-Man. You know, that was like, you can see back there, there's a million Spider-Man. So that was something I really wanted to do. And there weren't a lot of comic stores around there. You know, one would open and then close. There just weren't any around. I was like, that would be a really cool thing to do. So my grandfather and my dad and I talked to them and said, we need to open this comic store. So with the help of them, we opened it. I ordered the books. I figured the whole thing out. We started buying collections and putting it together. And it was just something that I had always wanted to do. And so we just decided that'll be cool. And with my own selfish way, it added to my comic book collection. It's really cool that your dad and your grandpa were so supportive of you. You don't really see that a lot in families. Like they'll say they support you. And, you know, that support kind of goes to the extent of you can do anything you want to do. Just don't involve us. So that's really cool that your family actually helped you do that at such a young age. Oh yeah. My mom would bag and board comics. She'd sit in there like do the whole nine yards. It was, you know, it was like a family thing. And when I sold it, because I only ran it for a couple of years. And then I sold it to start college. And it gave me money while I was going through college. So my deal was I needed enough upfront to pay my grandfather and father back for starting a little store. You know, so and then the rest of the payments I took as monthly installments. And the deal was as long as until they paid me off. Not only did they have to pay me monthly installments, I got one of free of everything that came in the store, which was my other way of increasing my my comic book collection at the time. They say that collectors should never own stores. Do you agree with that or? Um, it worked out for me. I mean, I can totally see why not. But I wasn't necessarily running it as a pure on business. It was a business that also helped support my hobby. And I was, I was young. I mean, this was like 86, 87. I was just getting out of high school going into my first couple of years of like junior college and stuff. And so it was, it was, it was fun. I had a lot of good memories of that store. A lot of made a lot of friends who, you know, I've worked with a lot of the people who started working with me when I first started to rotate were people I've met at that store. So it was, I would definitely, it was definitely a positive experience. What was the name of your comic book? It was just called the comic store. And it just said comics and people would come into it. And I remember like, you know, I'm I'm a long-haired kid, you know, and they're like, what are you selling this store? I'm like comics. They're like, what else things that go with comics? And people just couldn't believe like, that's what the store was like, all these are comic books. Yeah, that's what we sell. Yeah. For as long as I remember, I remember passing by your shop and then the first comic book shop I actually went to was Hobby Horse over in Fairview Plaza. And he jacked up all the that's neither here than that. That's how I got into, I started with the trading cards, the Jim Lee X-Men cards, the Spider-Man cards, the Flare and Flare Ultra. Love those. And it was easy to get into the cards first because of the price on them. And you can learn about all these different characters without having to buy tons and tons of comics just to get caught up. Oh, yeah. That's something I think is sorely lacking in the industry today is those collect full cards. Yeah, they have the battle cards or whatever like broken on Magic the Gathering and stuff, but they don't actually have the collectible cards anymore. And I've actually been going back through eBay and buying all those cards whenever I'm able to. Oh, yeah. Yeah, cards, we colored a lot of cards too. And when we first started out, we colored, I've got examples of them over there. I can show you like, it's called collector's universe. And they were car and it was collector's cards were all of these different comic book artists. They created their own characters for these cards. So each card was like, you know, created by a well known artist. And then we got to color them. And the thing that was super cool was it was this was one of the earliest things we colored right after we started coloring for Marvel. We got this job so well, I was like, Oh my gosh. But the cards and like so anytime somebody would give us cards, I was super happy. But it was cool because on the back of the box was the first time that it not only said heroic age studios, but it had my name on it. And I always joke that I let my brother color a couple cards and stuff. And his name is a head of mine in the billing on the on the card thing. But it was, it was fun cards. Yeah, we did we've done cards from Marvel or no for DC, for that place, we did some spawn cards when the spawn had its collectible game. I've got the long spawn cards, the original spawn that are like, like that big. Oh, cool. Yeah. So you mentioned that you went to you attended Milliken University as a student before you became a professor. Can you tell me a little bit about your time as a student and what contributions led to you changing the comic book industry while you were there? I mean, Milliken, like I said, when I was a student there, it was really cool. We had like the first, you know, those little Macintosh computers on the box, Macpets or whatever those little ones were, where the screen was built into it. So we had Milliken had the first ones of those. And I was like, that was the most specific computer like I'd ever seen. And then they got an Apple to CI. And you know, since I wanted to do comic book stuff, that's what I was always trying to do. I was trying to figure out different ways to do different, you know, things in the computer, because I was trying to do my own comics. So being able to do that, while I was there, I read, oh gosh, Marvel Age was a book that they used to have that Marvel would put out. And in the back of it, it would like to talk about different things. And at one point, I think there was an article, Todd McFarland was doing Spider-Man at the time for Marvel. And it said something like Todd was looking into new digital ways to color books so that his art it would show off his very detailed art more. And I just happened to be doing that kind of coloring at the time, you know, for my own book, I was trying to figure out how to do that. And it was very difficult to use Photoshop. And this is like Photoshop, before they had point, whatever. This was like the original, like one of the second iteration. And it wasn't designed to color things. It was designed as a photo retouching thing. So you had to trick it and tweak it plus 300 DPI for a computer back then was crazy, like it, they couldn't really handle it. So you had to really play with different ways to make it work. And I wanted to make it work so I could publish my own book. Well, Todd saying that, you know, in that article, I was like, oh, yeah, there, you know, like, this is kind of what I'm working on. Well, also in the back of that book, then came out, you know, a while later, was were some things like where you could Marvel had an internship program was like, Oh, wow, that would be awesome. So I applied for that internship program at Millican, knowing, well, I don't know comic store, and I had, you know, I was trying, I know about production, and I'm trying to do this. And I was getting a BFA in commercial art and computer design from Millican. So all my projects had to do with comic book stuff and different things. So I applied for that internship. And they were like, yeah, we would like to take you, but the college internships at Marvel, if they back then, and this was in like 91, you know, like if they filled up, they kept who they had so they couldn't take new people. And all the college people said they decided to stay so they didn't have a new one. So I was all bummed out, like, you know, and I lived, you know, in Mount Zion, Illinois, my whole life, 10 to 5, you know, 5000 people, you know, and I was like, yeah, I want to, you know, stay in New York for three months and do this, but it just wasn't going to happen. Well, then just a couple of weeks before it was supposed, the internships were supposed to start, one of the interns, the college interns, for some reason that I don't know, could stay for the summer. So they called me and were like, can you get to New York in two weeks and be here and be able to do this? And I'm like, yes. So I went to New York and it was Fabian Nicieza, who was the one who chose me. He was the editor, Evan Skolnick was his assistant editor. And they chose me and Fabian said the reason he picked me is because I'd owned that comic store. And he was very interested in retail and how retail, you know, worked with, you know, like ordering books, you know, because it's about getting people to order those books in a specialty store back then, that was like a major revenue source. So he's very curious about that and the fact that I owned it is what put me to that point. And at that point, I was the farthest person that they had ever taken away from New York to do an internship. And I'm super grateful to Fabian Nicieza, Evan Skolnick. I would not have a career if not for them, you know, and the fact that they brought me on and helped me. And while I was there, I was showing them like there's this method of coloring. I showed some of the people I can production like this is this is this new thing about coloring that Todd was talking about, you know, and they're like, well, Todd doesn't work here anymore. He had left at that point to form image. I didn't know about that because that was, you know, they had gone and so I think it's like, I get dates confused with somewhere like right in that early 90s. Yeah, and back then you had to rely on magazines rather than the internet. Yeah, there was no like, oh, wow, you know, that was really crazy to me. So they had been forming image comics. So someone were like, well, yeah, but we color comics on the computer, you know, like some of the production people, you know, so it's like, yeah, but this is different. This was Photoshop. They were using a program, I think it was called Cobb Barrett that just made polygons. So and you could use that to color more sophisticated. But then after a while I came back, I was talking to Fabian showing him different things. And he was interested, you know, because these image comics are coming out and they have this kind of color. And so I was showing them examples of this. And it was on a book that I wanted to publish. You know, they were like super interested in that, but they were really interested in the color. You know, it's like, could you color like that for us? I'm like, oh, yeah, yeah, I can color like that. So we actually Evan Skolnick was editing Dr. Strange at the time. And we kind of snuck that through. And it was one of the first, it was one of the first monthly Marvel books ever to be colored in Photoshop. And I think it's Dr. Strange. I can't remember where the Dr. Strange sorcery cream 60 or 70 I was get the numbers confused. But we kind of snuck it through and Evan was like, you know, if this doesn't print, I'm going to lose my job, you know, you know, like if this thing doesn't print, right? I'm like, oh, yeah, it'll print. And they really took a big risk on me and a big gamble and all that. And when comics come out, and I can show you the like the original page breakdown of it, like the CMYK process that kind of explains it, when they come out, like back then, all the editors got on their desk, a copy of comics with no coverage just so they could see it on the print versions. And he called me the day those came out. And he's like, everybody's coming in my house, how come your colors look like that? They were like super happy with it. So for the audience, back then before this happened, comics, for those of you who don't know and many who do, they had dots in the artwork that made up like the it had a very distinct. Yeah, they're called they call them bende dots. And it was because I can grab a visual aid real quick. Sure. This is a page from Dr. Strange. This is the first thing that ever had heroic age studios name in it as coloring this and everything. So originally, if you look at Roy Lichtenstein painting, you know, it's made to look like old school comics with bende dots and everything, because you used to have to cut out colors and lay them on you would cut different percentages and the percentages are how many dots. So somebody would go, it's called the CMYK color just to show you this is our version of it. CMYK, we were coloring in Photoshop and the computer would break down the math. So it's K is black. C is for cyan, which is a blue color. Y is or M is for magenta, which is pink, and then you've got yellow. So at this point in time, you printed, send them to a plate, the plate would be burned, then they'd run yellow ink across that plate, pink ink across that plate, and the blue ink across that plate, and then the black ink across that plate. Originally, though, they didn't burn the plates to cut out, you had to cut percentages. So you'd have like, that's why a lot of characters had the same colors, they were easy to cut. So a pure red would be 100% magenta and 100% yellow. So you would call for like superman's cave, it's going to be 100, 100, like 100M, 100Y. So they would call out these numbers. So and people used to have to cut them out and lay them together. Then it got more sophisticated. So before the Photoshop method, they were using companies that would just create these polygons of shapes, of color, and they would call out, we want a 40, this and a 60, this. Well, with what we were doing, you didn't have to make a shape, you could paint it with the airbrush tool. You could do, I want one, you know, I want a 42 and a 53. So you could do a much more sophisticated kind of color. And there were other companies coming out like Alioptics and things, but they were still using, I believe, Cobb Barrett and those styles, they were just pushing that software as far as it would go. And then companies like ours were using Photoshop. And a lot of people tried to do this, but it was really difficult to do. There were a lot of tricks about making it work. And that's actually how we started, which I can say later, out working for other companies. So we actually owed the way comics are colored today to what you did in the basement of Millican on that small computer. I mean, there were other people that were doing similar things, it would have all happened, but we did change a lot of the industry and a lot of it is based on me in the basement of Kirkland because that's where the Mac lab used to be and Millican figuring this kind of stuff out. We were there at the very beginning, we changed a lot of things, a lot of the way things were done. You mentioned a couple of names like Fabian. You mentioned in class about meeting Stanley. What was it like working with such industry legends? I mean, they were all super good people. I mean, they tell you sometimes, you know, never meet your heroes. And like, I haven't really discovered that to be the case. Everybody that I have met has been great. I remember one of the best career moments was Bobby Chase, who was, I think the editor of the X titles at the time. I can't remember what else she was editing at the time, but we were at a convention and Stan was there and she came along with, oh, Stan, I want you to meet Eric. He works with us. He does call her and like introduce when I got to shake his hand and be introduced to as a co-worker. And I just, it was like super cool. I mean, he was like a super nice guy. Kid came up to him at a Comic Con, you know, like right there when we were talking, the kids like, Hey, Stan, Stan, I got a question for you. And he was like, what, you know, like what kid and he's like, how come they replaced the human torch with the robot in the, in the cartoon, the Fantastic Four cartoon. And he looks at this kid. He's like, it was a stupid thing, kid. Marvel does a lot of stupid things. And the kid just thought that was the greatest thing ever. You know, I mean, just super nice. And like, like I said, Fabian, you know, was written so many things, co-creator like Deadpool and stuff like that. He's also co-creator of one of my favorite characters, which is out of comics now, Outburst. Him and Dan Juergens created Outburst, which was Mitch Anderson in the death of Superman, the kid who, the skateboarder kid who hated Superman. And then after Superman died, he mourned Superman. And then years later, he comes in, he's a meta human now with Magnokinesis. And he's got this body suit and everything. Then Lex Luthor recruits him to lead the Superman of America. Then I think his final appearance, which was just a cameo in, I think, final crisis. And then they kind of replaced him with sideways a few years back. And on YouTube, everyone was talking about how sideways is the new Spider-Man or DC's answer to Spider-Man. No, Outburst was DC's answer to Spider-Man before sideways was. But so you started your Heroic Age Studios in 92. Can you tell me what led to that? Why you chose to go that route rather than staying and working full-time at Marvel or going to DC years? Well, they had asked me like, you know, when you do your internship, I had a semester to come back. And when I came back, one of the things that they had said is like, they had offered if I wanted to come back, they would see what they could do about making me like an assistant editor, you know, like the Punisher titles or something was one of the things they were talking about at the time. But developing this coloring and introducing that to them, that was something I could live in Central Illinois and bring Marvel money back here. I could also bring all my friends in. We could start a company. And it also allowed me, Marvel was also, that was right before they declared bankruptcy. And they had cut back a lot of staff. So had I gone to Marvel, it would be probably a first hired first fired situation. So it was better that I was here. You know, when they were reducing staff and doing different things, they were still sending me lots of work, you know, which was great. And I also then met people. There's the original Batman spawn crossover. And DC got Batman spawn and Marvel got 30 and image got spawn Batman. Well, at that point in time, what had happened is, you know, I've been working for Marvel a bit. And I started doing some stuff. And we did some of these cards. And then DC, I knew a gentleman who was printing all their negatives. And he was in Chicago. And DC was trying to print, you know, their Batman spawn, they colored it on Photoshop. And it was one of their first big books and it would not print. And it's like, they're like, why would this print? And so the guy who was trying to get the negative to run through the negatives, the press, it's because back then, not only did you have to print, you know, all of these plates, you know, like a negative to burn onto a plate, they printed them in four page flats. There's one, two, three, four of cyan, magenta, yellow and black, all that printing at 300 dpi. Now nowadays, any the littlest computer I've got spit out 300 dpi all day long, it doesn't care. But back then, to pull a blend on a 300 dpi page, you'd have to leave the room, you know, just one kind of plan. Well, there was no way this negative, this computer would print those negatives. So they couldn't print that book. So Mark Chiarella was another person I owe my entire career to, he was the art director at DC Comics, I believe at the time, him and Rick Taylor and different people who worked in production, Alison Gill, who worked, had worked in production at Marvel and DC, those are all production people, the people who make it print, the people who understand, you know, and Mark is like the bridge between the artists, the printers, he was like pure on art director, so everything caught his eye. We met in Chicago, and it was like, I'm like, I can, I can fix that book, I can make it print, because nobody knew what we were doing at the time was, we were printing, we were making this negative, the black at 300 dots per inch. So this one was high res, but we were doing these at like 75 dots per inch and nobody knew, because it's just the color. And it wasn't, you know, if you do a low res black line, you see the stair steps. If you do a low res color, nobody cares, you can't see it. So we went in and reduced all the plate sizes for some of this other stuff, and they just flying off the presses. And so we did that correction, you know, the artist who colored it was great, you know, beautiful stuff. Oh yeah. But it just wouldn't print because technically we had developed all these technical types of ways of doing it as we developed it. So I'm like, I can make that book print for you, changed it all, we, you know, and in an evening, one of my guys went through and just fixed it all out. And that was the DC version, the Batman Superman, with the almost Dark Knight-esque style cover. Yeah, yeah. And one of them, and yeah, I think Klaus Janssen, who inked Dark Knight, actually drew that or inked that cover. And I can't imagine one of the guys who worked with me just sat there all night and just like, boom. And we switched them all off, sent them back. And he's like, oh, yeah, he's flying off the presses. And from there DC was like, not only were they letting us color things then, we brought into which we'd been doing at Marvel, there was a new thing of known their books we would color, but then there were colors who had colored for years with markers or with lip of color dyes, like Dr. Martin's lip of touch dyes, which is what a lot of people do, color guides, then they would send them to those computer places where they would, you know, and they'd write 50, 40, 30, 100. And they would do simple color looks like we want heroic age to do ours. So they would still be giving us guides. So we'd started that with artists like, you know, John Kalis and Christie Shield, who was amazing. They helped us a lot in the industry. Christie Shield colored the original secret wars. Close friends with Jim Starling created Thanos, which got us coloring a lot of those kind of things, because they would not only do the color guides, and they'd send it to us to enhance them. Pat Gerhey, who created powers, you know, like, he would request us as I want heroic age to separate. So not only do we color, we did what was called separations. And we were also one of the earliest studios along with Jameson and Digital Chameleon and some others to get the title of separator. So we're we could color so be heroic age colorist or it can be heroic age separator where we took guides and then we interpreted them and we boosted them up and played with them and used all these techniques to make them really shine. Nowadays they've cut that middle person out generally, you know, so people because the computers are fast enough you can just color it however many dots print you want, digitally just paint right on it. But back then it was hard to do certain things like line holds that we figured out how to do, you know, red lines, different things that were standard converting them into this. So all those artists and people who requested us and people we worked with, you know, that's that really helped our career. There's so many people I could like list that were super awesome to work with and that were great to me. So was it whenever you started heroic age, was it like almost instant that you started getting all this work? Or was there like a little bit of a time where you know, like most business startups where, you know, you don't know if it's going to succeed because, you know, you don't have really have. Well, it was really pretty instant because when I, while I was going through Millican in the last couple of years, my goal was I was going to make my own comic. So I was working on my own comic and I brought in friends who I'd met at the comic bookstore or in high school and stuff like, you know, that had worked with me. So we all came together and we're like, oh, we're going to make our own comics. So we've been working on that. And then I did my internship one of my friends at the time, Ken Mesnard came with me just to live in New York just so I had, you know, because like the story I could tell you about that and how I survived in New York is crazy. You know, being a person from a town of 5,000 and having absolutely no money and you don't get paid for that internship. But so my friends and I were planning to put out comics, we'd work together doing stuff. So when I was showing them things, the examples I was showing them were our own books to go here's how we can color because I knew Fabian from the internship. Well, they were just like, we want you to color for us like that like almost immediately. So they just gave us color guides and then we showed them we could color on digitally. Yeah, let's do this. So it was immediate. Like, as far as that goes, because I was going through school planning to put out my own book had done that internship, and then had this technology that they all wanted. And you wanted to work with us. So it was great. They were sending us stuff. The hard part was going. And I've always learned to say yes. But can you call these books? I'm like, yes. I had one Macintosh to CI computer that I bought when I was still at Millican with the student discount. And there was like, how am I going to color all these things? I don't have any computers. And like, it took it took all of us together. I mean, at times I've had over 20 people working together with me on comics. Now the first people, you know, Ken Mesmer, Josh Ray, myself, Candice Jinsler, who worked with me for years and years. She was the first technical real hire, you know, I know her to this day. She's great. You know, Steve Mellon, I could list like a bunch of people that worked with me that just been amazing. But at first it was me and Ken. And then we grabbed Josh and Candy. And it was like, okay, how are we going to do this? We don't have enough machines and it took like you couldn't nowadays somebody will just color you because you can do it fast. Well, here, you have to have one person on several computers. So take like several of us, you know, to color one book. And the problem was no one was going to loan me any money to say at a small time bank to go, I need some money to buy some computers to color comics. And they're like, what? I need to borrow some money. I have Marvel is telling me they will give me all these books. You'll get your money back. I know it. It's guaranteed. But they're like, no. So that was another time where my grandfather helped me. Basically, and this is something I recommend to a lot of entrepreneurial people. You have family members and things. He had money in the bank in CDs. The bank wouldn't loan me money. Now they'd love to loan me money. Now you know, that was all proven. But back then it was not the case. And he was like, well, I get this much interest on these CDs. I'll loan you this money if you pay me more interest. So I paid him, it was less interest than I would have had to pay a bank. But he was making more interest on his money than he got from keeping it in the bank. And my grandfather was not rich, didn't graduate, graduated from the eighth grade. You know, I mean, I'm first generation college in my family. We do not come from any kind of money or any kind of same here. It's like, we didn't have that kind of stuff. But he had some money from his retirement in some CDs that was helping him retire. And so basically, if I could pull it out, take the money Marvel was giving us enough. So I mean, it was a real gamble and a sacrifice on his part. And he's like, he goes, you should borrow money from an old man like me, Eric, because I'll be dead soon. And then you can say, I don't know a living man, anything. So that is how I got enough money so that I mean, the books just came in. And then what I would do is take money from that and buy more computers so that I had enough with all of us to be able to color. And every time there'd be a brand new Macintosh would come out a little faster. So you can call a little better, you know, and so each time until I eventually started in my parents basement, moved to the top of an old grade school, and then bought a building, you know, I just started filling it up with computers that the place you were at in 96 around the curve from the police department. Was that your second location? It would be the third my parents basement first when we just had three or four of us. Then it went to the top of the old Dalton City grade school. I went to that great. Oh, really? Yeah, they gave me that for like, really low amount of money. Mr. Henderson, who was a Hendrickson who was, um, yeah, I was just getting confused. But he was the superintendent of schools when I was there. But then he was, you know, he was in control. So superintendents that are principal. So he was super helpful. This whole town has always been helpful to me. Mount Zion, Decatur. And they said, and he was like, well, we've got that old school and we'll let you rent it for, and I was like, oh, that'll be awesome. And I looked at the power bills because they're like, you'll have to pay some rent, not much, but you'll also have to pay the power bills. And I looked at the power bills and then it's like, well, it had 200 students there and the power bills weren't that much. What I didn't realize was all those little kids bodies is what kept that place warm and my power bills there were eating me alive. And I'm like, I'm paying it. And this was back in 91. I'm like, I'm paying $1,000. I can buy a building with that. So I did. I went there for kindergarten in half of first grade. We actually had to go outside and around the building down the stairs to the cafeteria. And then the gym was in a completely separate building. And in the wintertime, that was horrible. The kitchen got so hot, the cafeteria got so hot down there and everything. And then having to go outside back around the building in the middle of winter, they closed that down. I want to say just a couple of years after I left because I moved from there to enterprise. And Barbara Bax was my principal. She got married years later. And then whenever I got my arrow of light from Weeblows, she sent me a letter with newspaper clipping of me being in the Mount Zion Region News, seeing how proud she was on everything. And she became my principal later on at Mount Zion Grade, which is now her Oak Age studio. I wish I knew what happened to her because she was my favorite principal at the time. Such a sweet woman. If you're out there, if you come across this video or anyone out there who knows her comes across this video, let her see this. So that leads me. Your current building is the old Mount Zion Grade school. I just wanted to tell a story real quick. That school, it's so funny that it's now a comic book studio because when I was in fourth grade in Mrs. Heitz class, I had the death of Superman trade paper back. I actually brought it to school. And that woman hated comics with a passion. She caught me looking at it during class. We weren't doing anything. We were like watching a movie or something like that. And she caught me looking at it. She took that comic away from me. And my mom actually had to go down and get it back for me. And then at the end of the school year, we had like an auction type thing. You earned so many bucks or whatever during the school year doing good work. And there was a stack of comics that had Robocop versus Terminator, all the different parts to that and everything, and a few other comics. And I put a bid in on it. It was like a secret bid, you know, where you put the paper, your bid underneath and everything. And she saw my name and kind of threw my bid out so that a kid that put a much lower bid than I did got those comics. I was so pissed. And her classroom was like, you go down to the downstairs where the cafeteria slash gym was. It was that first room to the left. I never forgot that. It is interesting to see what certain people think. I mean, there were a lot of people in you know, education that were super supportive of what I wanted to do, my high school art teacher, my junior high art teacher, you know, like Mrs. James who became Mrs. York. And she would understood he wants to be in comics. I'm going to let him draw comics, you know, through my academic career at, you know, Millican different places, you know, there were some supporters, you know, some instructors were super supportive of comics, then there were others back and then, you know, the 1980s, early 90s who were very, no, that's a terrible low art form. And the ironic thing is, is now, you know, I teach at Millican, and like the class that, you know, I met you again in was a class on comics, where I had got it at one point, had to defend my like, you know, love of comics in American culture. Yeah. And it was like, when I was there as a student, you know, you had to kind of defend it. Now that I'm there as an instructor, I think the world has come around to acknowledging it as an American kind of art form that now, you know, all around the world has different types of comics, you know, like, you know, the manga styles and the, you know, the French styles and all of that. But a lot of the origin of comics, like what we think of comes from America. And I think that they've started to kind of recognize as an art form that America has had a lot of, you know, influence in, you know, and I think what helps with that are the films that have been coming out for the past little over a decade now, starting with Iron Man. Yeah, dates back to the 70s and the old serials before that, but they were actually taken seriously and popularized with Iron Man. I would go back even step for like, I think the Sam Raimi Spider-Man and the X-Men kind of opened that door that Iron Man kind of then just walked through. And you had Kevin Feige there with those original Iron, original X-Men ones, even like the Fox X-Men. And Tim Burton's Batman. Yeah. That one is absolutely everyone's top, you know. But even like after Batman, throughout the 90s, there were people were trying to redo that. Like you had the Phantom, the Shadow, Dick Tracy, which was in the 80s, late 80s, I believe, that never really got the hype that Batman did. And then you had like TV series like The Mantis, Night Man, and different, leaving the Flash TV series very much kind of trying to take that. Yeah. And I hadn't even heard of that series. I actually found the TV movie at Video Review in South Shores and rented it and took it home. I was like, why is it over? They need to turn this into a series. Years later, I discovered it was a series, but it's on CBS. And I was an ABC Fox family. We didn't really watch NBC or CBS. This was back in the day when you had three, four main channels. And if your family was into one or two of those channels, those were the only channels you won. And you were the remote control for dad going, turn it, turn it. There was nothing else. You got three channels and that's what you got. Yeah. And then you had like, let's see, Meteor Man. Did you ever see that? I've never seen that. People are constantly saying how Black Panther was the first Black superhero in cinema and everything. No, you had Meteor Man before that, which was a Black comedian who in real life, they decided to make him a superhero, Meteor Falls Earth, and he gets these powers, Superman-like powers. It was a straight to video type release, but then you had Steel, which it is campy, but it's also underrated too. Yeah, they just sent me a DC just the other day, sent me a Steel hardcover celebrating. I can't remember if it's like his 50th anniversary or his 20th year, something like the anniversary of that character. No, maybe it's 30 years. I can't remember what it is, but they just sent me a hardcover because wouldn't they hardcover these? If our names in them a lot of times, they'll send me one. So I got one, you know, I think it was like Harley Quinn's anniversary and then, and Steel was one of the characters. We had done some nice, you know, some stuff for them. So they sent me one. Cool. So speaking of movies, you're currently working on a movie that it was based on, it's based on a comic, right? No, it is based on a drawing I did of, like I told you, I was working on those comics. And this was way back, I mean, when I was super, you know, like in high school, you know, when I started working on the comics that we presented then to Marvel where they saw the coloring. Well, on the back of one, it was called the Univaliant was the name of the group that I put together and all of our friends and everybody were all working on different ones and make this connected universe thing way back then. And so what I had done is on the very back of it, I drew like a hundred and something villains that I wanted to use eventually if this were to continue on. And on the back, I had two characters trick and treat. And that evolved into this film. That's where I got these characters from. But it kind of made an evolution because what happened, we started, you know, since we started working at Marvel, then we started working at DC, then DC introduced us to people at Dark Horse who got us doing some of their separation work on some of their Star Wars projects and different things. And I think we did like a mask project and different stuff. The people at Dark Horse were wonderful to work with, just amazing. Started working for the people at Archie because I knew one of their editors really well. People at Archie are awesome. So we started working at all these different companies. Well, you could watch Dark Horse, you know, what they did is kind of started in comics, but then they moved into film. Well, I had always wanted to, I mean, I just like to tell stories. So I wanted to do kind of work in comics and I wanted to work in movies. So I'd been working in comics. I was like, I want to work in movies. You know, that's what I want to do. And we'd seen what they had done in like one of the earliest hires at Dark Horse. Actually, when they were looking for color places to work with because they're in their own in house people, but they wanted out of house people to Mark Chiarello and some of the editors at DC went, you should go to a brokerage. So they came to our studio when it was in that building, you know, and they toured through and started giving us that work. But talking to them about the movie stuff, you know, they started like Dr. Giggles and then Time Pop, you know, but then they hit with the mask and just really blew up. So we started investing in movie production equipment. We bought one of the first red epic dragons ever. My business partner Tim Linn is one of suggested that we look into that. We have one of the first ones of those. We got, you know, different. We got a grip truck, different things. We started doing commercial work, video work, you know, corporate videos, television commercials, you know, short films, anything that people would hire us to do all with the goal of building up, you know, and we started working on other people's movies. Well, the goal was to build up into our own film that, you know, because I want to write and direct. So I'd been writing and directing a lot of our commercial work, a lot of our corporate work and those kind of things. And, you know, helping with Tim to produce it. He would generally shoot and edit a lot of it. So what we did is kind of put together the idea of being able to do our own films. And when I went back, I have a book that has all of these characters, like a hundred and something characters copyrighted from all the way back in high school. So I have that just trove of different characters, different options, different things that I've been working on. And originally, I'd written a screenplay called Johnny Violence. That was the one I was going to put out first years ago. And right as I was looking around for that, like, you know, money for that, I got to meet Steve Jones, who did Henry Portrait of a serial killer, Wild Things, Dan Campbell, Kevin Bacon and Bill Murray. And he really helped me. Once again, another person, I mean, you know, I don't know who all your viewers are, but if anybody's watching this, who wants to get a career like that going, it's finding these mentors, these people who can help you that will offer their time. But he really liked the screenplay for Johnny Violence. He gave me some pointers, I rewrote it. So that was the first big screenplay I've written. But as I was trying to raise money for that, it was a long time ago, like Columbine happened, or like there's no way I'm going to get a Johnny Violence movie off the ground. So I just went back to doing the other stuff we've been doing, biding my time and went, I'd like to make horror. Horror is very forgivable. People get up as your first film. So what we ended up doing is taking some of those trick-and-treat characters and developing an eye-wroth screenplay that got a lot of attention. A lot of people in LA liked it and different things. So, but instead of having them fund it, because a lot of people in LA kept trying to raise the budget up, like it just started out, we're going to make this small, you know, film. And they're like, well, if you bring this much in, we'll bring this much in. And then, okay. And they had us in meetings, we were meeting with all sorts of big-name people out in LA, and they just kept raising the budget higher and higher and higher. So they got to $10 million and they were like, oh, we can't raise that. Let's just put it on the shelf. I'm like, no way. If you guys were so excited about this thing that you were going to give $10 million for a stack of papers that high in some illustrations that you and my friends have done to show what it was going to be like, we'll just take it back and make it again like we were going to do, like with the lower budget. But because of some of the things and the connections we met and the people we got to meet when we were out in LA, even though we made it in a lower budget, we were still able to bring a lot of resources to it, resources that we'd already built up, like that school you were talking about that you went to. One of the reasons we bought it was to get the gymnasium so we could build sets. Like the sets in here, you know, like I can show you later, are built in that, that old gym. Upstairs, we sold all the places and renovated them as an art center. So we've got photography, we've got dancers, we've got chiropractors, beauty salons, you know, a place where they teach music lessons, a recording studio, and all the old classrooms, what we needed was the gym to make trick and treats to build all the sets. And so we were like, that adds production value, but also the connection we made allowed us to, it has Malcolm McDowell in it, it's got Gary Busey in it. So no one will guess what this film cost. It COVID put us back about two years in finishing it, but the hope is we're just finishing up all the special effects. That's what I'm working on right now. When we get that done, we have some music and sound still to add to it, and then it's finished. So it's been a cool kind of thing. We've produced films for other people using our stuff, we've done different things, but this is the first writing directing we own the property, we produced it full on heroic age production. Can you give me the synopsis for the film? Yeah, it's basically, if you've ever heard the nursery rhyme, Peter Peter pumpkin either had a wife and couldn't keep her, put her in a pumpkin shell and there he kept her very well. The trick is how many pieces would you have to cut your wife into before she fit inside a pumpkin? And so that nursery rhyme is an 1800s nursery rhyme. So we built, we went to New Salem, which is a, for those of you who didn't know, from around here, it's like a thing that, you know, like the Abraham Lincoln style home back in the 1800s that reconstructed a whole village of log cabins. So we're like, okay, that's the 1800s. We'll go back there and we'll show where this nursery rhyme came from. So we show a gentleman, Peter, who thinks his wife is possessed by the devil and he's trying to get the devil out of his wife. And so through a series of different things that happens, he basically has to end up and cut her up into pieces and stuff from inside the jack-o'-lantern because jack-o'-lanterns bind demons. And this demon gets bound inside this thing, crunches down and that's the nursery rhyme. And then it flashes forward years later and you see that same pumpkin, but it looks like one of those candy, and I can show you that, I've got it here. It looks like one of those candy containers that kids carry around, but it's much more gruesome and everything. And it's sitting on this biker bar as a tip jar. And the bartender tells stories about it, like, oh yeah, it's the pumpkin from that legend. He killed a little girl like years ago in the fifties and all, you know, so he tells all these stories about it. Well, these young college students are out because of Halloween, they're going to go out and trick or treat. Oh, and Gary Busey thinks the pumpkin is real and is trying to steal it. And everybody in town thinks he's crazy. So he wants to get this pumpkin. He just kind of bookends the film with like that. But so these girls and their boyfriend, they're out just going to go bar hopping in their Halloween costumes. They, car breaks down, they get stuck at this biker bar. Well, the boyfriend, the main guy, gets killed by one of these bikers in the bar kind of accidentally just loses a temper. And they're like, they can't let these girls go because they'll all go to prison. So you think it's going to be like a saw or feeling like a torture, you know, where they kill all these girls because what really happens is the pumpkin, that's name is trick, starts talking in the main girl's head and teaches her how to trick all these guys from one at a time and kill them instead so that she could escape. But you don't know if it's in her head. And it's a coping mechanism of the pumpkin talking to her because she kind of has to sacrifice her friends a bit to buy herself time, or if it really is a demon possessed pumpkin. And then in the end, you kind of find out. And the cool part is the pumpkin that talks in her head the whole time is Malcolm McDowell. And that's like, he's just amazing in it. It's just so cool. You know what would be really cool to have like years ago, whenever I started YouTube and everything, I started doing my own short films and I did one on based on the Legend of Bloody Mary. And I had the star of one of the videos, her daughter seeing the Mary Mary quite contrary thing. But I had I slowed it way down, added a little bit of echo and some like music box music behind it and be really cool to put that Peter Peter pumpkin eater like that in the movie. It is. It's in the beginning and it's at the end. It has like a theme because it's like very plonka plonka kind of Tim Burton. Yeah, it's that's cool. So yeah, there's like little kids voices in the background here. So it's been pretty eerie. It's like it's got it's taken a long time because you know, it's not my full time deal. You know, it's you know, I teach at Millican. I do other heroic age projects. I'm always working on different things. But it's pretty much close to done. It's been a labor of love. And there's just so many people to thank, you know, like, Laura Richter, who's our producer on it, you know, Tim Lynn, who's my business partner shot and edited all, you know, my wife, you know, she helped to design it. My brother did all the props and sets. My wife decorated all the sets, helped with the costume that a ton of students from Millican also got to come and get some IMDB credits for it. So it's really led to a lot of good things. And you know, there's I'm sure there's a million people I'm forgetting to mention, but they're just excellent, excellent people. It helps all the actors, the actors, you know, you go on IMDB and you look through all those actors, just amazing people. You know, Lauren Desmond does like a killer performance. She's like, So are you shopping this for a cinematic release or Netflix, Amazon? We're helping to get like, there's several different places that are interested in looking at it. You know, we've got some people who are going to shop it around the forest once it's done. I'd like to get like limited theatrical and then, you know, it's because it's designed to sequel to make more of them. And then we have like a few films ready to go after that. And because of Illinois tax credits have just gotten better just recently, even there's a lot of people reaching out, you know, for those kind of things. So the goal would be to send this one out, partner with somebody who's going to play, put this out, limited theatrical and get it out there where people can see it and then make other films like go back and revisit Johnny violence and some of the others because we have I've got like three or four screenplays already ready to go. Heroic Age Studios, we've got copyrights on like 86 characters and different things. So we've got a lot of stuff ready to happen. You know, once the industry starts back up and everything, we wouldn't do any of this, you know, all of this is shot. It's already in the can. So writers and actors strike, you know, doesn't have anything to do with all we're really doing is putting some music. Most of the music has already been made in just in the edit suite, just inserting things into it and putting some special effects in it. So this was all shot and written and all that long, long before any of the strikes. What's the soundtrack for the film like? Is it is it like a a memorable sound track like they had back in the 80s and 90s where, you know, you had popular songs and stuff like that? Or is it? It doesn't have any songs. It's more orchestral. It has like the soundtrack track is Eric Watkins is doing that. He's a great composer, but like the 1800 stuff and anytime you see the pumpkin is very Blinka Blinka Tim Burton fantasy type thing. And then he did like industrial stuff for the more realistic biker bar parts because you're not supposed to know whether all the fantasy stuff are just stories and things in the main character's head. So it becomes a very fanciful thing. And then later on, things like, you know, the bikers and that is very real. So it has a much more cutting, you know, kind of modern soundtrack where it isn't like, you know, it's just tonalities and things. Nice. Speaking of filming and directing, if there was one comic book movie that has not been made that you could direct, what would it be? It would be a choice. It would be. I mean, like hasn't been made has never been made or because I'd love to do Superman. I think Superman, but I think James Gunn will do a good job. But I mean, I would love to do Superman. I have a Superman story for a movie that I think would be amazing. I'm actually at one time and said, if somebody, I would write somebody a $50,000 check right now to let me write the next Superman movie. Here you go. I don't, it doesn't, and I won't even take money for it. Just give me a percentage of what it makes above what you thought it would make, because I have such an idea to love so much. But you know, stuff like that never happens. If not, though, Fantastic Four, which I know is going to be made. Those are the two that I would really love to do, even though Spider-Man has always been like my favorite character. The other one, like if somebody just went really, I would like to make a Dr. Doom movie and do it as like a dark, mirrored version of like the Tony Stark story, which it would be, kind of throwback to that first Iron Man movie and make a movie just called Doom. You know, I think that would be awesome. I do kind of see Dr. Doom as Batman almost. He's got a lot of the same qualities. He's like the mirror of Batman, where Joker would be like the flip side of the coin of Batman. Dr. Doom is more like the mirror of him. So I think that would be really cool. I mean, just the intro alone, I told people on my intro for the Dr. Doom movie, you know, and be like, oh, that would be really cool, you know, because there's so many things I think you could tell that story, you know, just him alone, because part of you're going to be thinking, okay, is he a villain? Because you could do his intro, you could do the stuff with he and Dr. Stranger, gets his mother's soul out of hell, you can get so many cool, rich Dr. Doom stories, you could weave together into a movie that I think would take you back to some of those early Marvel movies, the feel that they had, and you're like, oh, yeah, this is kind of how that came. And I just feel sorry for Dr. Doom because they've been so many great, I mean, it used to always be people that ask, who are the greatest villains in comics? What would be Dr. Doom and the Joker? And the Joker is what, three people got an Academy Awards for playing the Joker, you know, like, and Dr. Doom, you look at all his cinematic attempts, you're like, that's not fair. My introduction to Dr. Doom was in a Spider-Man comic from the 60s or 70s. And he's hiding behind a fence, getting ready to trap Spider-Man or something. That was my introduction to him. So yeah, he's gotten a lot more love since then. And then I remember getting Doom 2099 is one of one of the first comics I actually bought. Oh, wow. So that and when I got into Spider-Man, I actually came into comics during the clone saga. Oh, so it gets a lot of heat, but it's got a special place in my heart because of that. We worked on some of that. We did we did like Ghost Rider 2099 for its first, like 10, 12 issues, I think. So what film would you say would be the one that inspired you to be a filmmaker? Oh, gosh, I mean, Star Wars, like the original Star Wars, I know everybody says that. Star Wars would probably be the one that inspired me to want to make movies. And my favorite film, though, is Wrath of Khan. I just think, you know, and people ask because I teach screenwriting, and I teach cinema, and I teach, you know, video production and things like that. And people are always expecting some super high-brow answer. And I do like a lot of different films. But just as far as something I love that I remember all the feelings I got in the theater, Wrath of Khan, and like the Empire Strikes Back, those are like, you're like, whoa. And both sequels, both the second movie in a series where people would, let's mix this up a bit, you know? So is there like a routine that you follow before you go into like directing mode, like film filming mode? Like whenever I was doing my short horror films, I would watch like the original Evil Dead right before I go and film. So is there like a routine you have in? I just like to, I like to do a lot of pre-planning. I just like to draw out everything first. I do, I do storyboards of everything. Sometimes I do overhead diagrams of everything. I work really closely with, with, you know, like Tim was my cinematographer on Trick and Treats and most of the stuff I do. So he kind of knows what I want. I do things where I draw and paint things. I'm very much involved with the way the sets look and the costumes look, so they all get this look based on here. These paintings match these paintings. I would draw them and Darren Moore, one of the best colorists I've had, you know, he's worked with him for years and years and years since he was right out of high school. He'll paint my drawings, but I'll give him the idea of what color scheme I want. And that lets me hand those kind of things off to people so they all know what they're doing. I've got a really great team of people I just, that I really trust and that, you know, are just fantastic at doing these things. And then while they're doing that, I like to sit and talk with the actors. And we had so many good actors on Trick and Treats that we could just sit and talk with and get in their head and, you know, collaborate with them, you know, I mean, our cast, like I said, I can't list them all, but go on IMDb and they're just great, great people, you know. And so that's what I do. I just basically, I do some drawings. I always have all my storyboards in the script drawn and folded up in my back pocket. I pull it out every time I get what I want. I just put a big X through that storyboard. I know I've got that when we move on and collaborate with people, I think in a lot of very panel-like when I think of things because of my comic book background. So a lot of times, you know, cinematographer, you know, like Tim or Patrick, who did some assistance cinematography work on this, but Tim and I will help with, like, I want it to look like this, but let's get some movement in it, you know, and they, because I think in moves or images that I want to create. And that's like Trick and Treats. There's about, you know, like four different iconic images. You've got a 90-something minute movie. I want at least four iconic images that people will look at and say, oh yeah, oh wow, oh yeah, that's different. Right. Where do you see the future of comic book movies in the next, over the course of the next decade or so? Like here recently, we've heard like from Martin Scorsese and stuff that comic book movies aren't real cinema, you know. Where do you see comic book movies actually evolving to? It's interesting. I mean, I don't know, you know, like everything, you know, westerns used to dominate for years and years and years, and then people got tired of westerns. You didn't see westerns a lot. To me, comic book movies are different in that there's a lot of movies that were created off comic books that nobody realizes are like, you know, there's like the TV series, what, End of the Fucking World. That was based on a super simple drawn comic book. Brief History of Violence. It went best to Adaptive Screenplay Academy Award. People don't look at that and think comic book. You know, so there's a lot of movies that will continue to come from comic books. Superhero genre is a little different. It may, people may kind of burn out on that for a while or because it's gotten now into where like you're getting the boys and things where it's taking that archetype apart. But it's just the same as everything else. People thought zombie movies were dead and then you come back with The Walking Dead. If somebody's got a good idea for it, once again, The Walking Dead, comic book will be. Comic books are every genre. You know, you've got western comics. You've got mystery comics. You've got horror comics. So I think comics will always be a good place to pull things from. You know, you've got a post apocalyptic comics. So comics is just, comics is a great art form. You've got manga, which a lot of younger people, you go, when I was a kid, Marvel and DC dominated the bookshelves. You know, now you've got a couple Marvel DC and you've got all of these manga books. And I think that's going to be a rich resource for people to pull. My wife and I, my wife and I watch Attack on Titan. I love Attack on Titan. I'm waiting for the last one to come out so I can finally see what's going on there. But you know, so you get, you get manga to animate. I think it's going to prove live action. I also think video games are going to become just like everybody catered to my generation because I'm old now and I have disposable income. And they assume he's going to take his kids to go to Universal and see Harry Potter land or Disney and see Star Wars land or Universal and see Marvel land because those are the things I love. Well, as our generation goes on, the new next generation comes up to have kids. I think it's brilliant what Universal's doing and getting that video game land because that's what I'm thinking is going to have. You know, it's like those kids grew up with those things. And when they start to have disposable income and want to take their kids to introduce some of the things they love, I think it's going to be, you know, more of the manga and the anime and the, and the, you know, video games and stuff. But Spider-Man will always be there, Superman, Batman. And comic books will always be a rich source of creative people because it doesn't take a lot of money to make your own comic book to express yourself and show a cool, clever idea you've got. And it's interesting too because for like the past couple decades, you know, you've had some of these superhero characters moving into anime like you had X-Men and Blade. Marvel really kind of started the idea of moving mainstream comic books, superheroes into anime for their animating movies and everything. And now you've got something like Sailor Moon Superman that just came out on HBO Max where, you know, does the whole change type Sailor Moon thing. And another series came out a few years back that is almost a spitting image of Sailor Moon. I used to tease my oldest daughter about it saying is just knock off Sailor Moon because it was doing the whole change scene and all that. I think they're cyclical. It's like, you know, you look at Disney doing animation, you know, I'm trying to get a certain aesthetic with its eyes and its faces and proportion. And then you see, you know, manga artists going, we want to take that style, we want to alter it and make it our own. And then, you know, comic book artists look back at that and go, okay, you know, and it's all artists influencing artists who influence other artists and the styles just keep building. And the cool thing is about computers and the stuff that we were able to do to get into comics. Now everybody can do that. I think that's the cool thing about movies and comics and things. It doesn't take, I mean, nobody's going to guess what trick and treats cost to make. But you don't have to be a billion dollar studio to make a high end movie now. You don't have to be a billion dollar publisher or a million dollar publisher to make a cool comic now. A lot of creativity is coming out a lot of places and a smaller audience that really loves the thing you make. Some of the best movies of all time were low budget movies like the original Saw, Evil Dead. Oh yeah. So this could be your launching pad. I think people would like it. I think it's a unique film and I don't think you've seen anything like it. So awesome. I've taken two of your classes and in both of them you talked about how your favorite superhero is obviously Spider-Man. What about the character drew you to him and made you connect with him? Spider-Man is just a good person. You know what I mean? Like Batman is, you know, obviously mental issues. You know, you're like, but, you know, he's cool. And Superman, you know, is like an iconic, you know, god, you know, like a, you know, Christ metaphor, you know, those kind of things. He's just beyond it. Spider-Man is just such a good person. I mean, if the world was filled with Peter Parker, at least, you know, when I was reading it, I don't know because I just kept up on it, but like the Peter Parker I grew up reading, if the world was filled with people like him, it would be a great place. I mean, he is driven by guilt because he did this one thing, but he just loves people so much and he's just trying to help. He's just a genuinely good person. And I think when you're young, you look into that and you have that same kind of feel of like the world better. It can be a better place. It can be, you know, and he just keeps trying no matter what. And they just, there's so many instances of Spider-Man that I just related to when I was young. And also too, it's like, he's a character that was, you know, what started in the 60s. You know, I was born in 1967. I remember like, oh, Spider-Man is dating this girl in high school. I remember reading Spider-Man when I was in high school, you know, who I was going out with versus in college. And I just grew up with him. I got to see him change and grow. It was really interesting to have a character that you could kind of evolve with and go through the stages of life with. Somebody who was relatable and somebody who was just a great decent person. You know, I think I always tell people it's like, you always want to have a friend named Sam from Lord of the Rings because you know, that's, and I think the same thing would register with, you know, with Spider-Man. You know, he just kind of a loner, but just a nice, decent, I got to help people no matter what it does person. And finally, what are some of the, it's a two-part question. What are some of the comics that Heroic Age has worked on? And what do you see for the future of Heroic Age Studios? Heroic Age Studios has worked, I mean, we have done a ton of comics. I can, you know, even pull through some of them. I mean, thousands of comics that we've worked on. Probably some of the more well-known ones is we did the color separation of Batman and Long Halloween. Just the other day, I mean, just like two weeks ago, they sent me a bunch of holographic covered things with Robert Pattison on them because they based that movie on Long Halloween. So DC sent me just a stack of all the different holocavers of that. So that's one of the more prestigious ones. We did that Grant Morrison JLA run from like number one to like up to 50. So a ton of those, you know, pretty well known Ghost Rider 2099. We did work on some of the Spider-Man clone stuff. We did the Spider-Man Batman crossover that was fun because I've got that comment. Oh really? Yes. Yeah, we did that. We did, gosh, what are some others that were like really fun? The Star Wars Shadows of the Empire for Dark Horse. That was cool. You know, we did, it's just, I like to touch on so many different things. You know, it's like it's about the collective of touching on pop culture stuff. So, you know, like we've colored Powerpuff Girls. We've colored, you know, like all the cartoon, most of the cartoon network shows. We did Justice League for the cartoon, but we also did House of Secrets, you know, for Vertigo. So we've done so many things. We've done, like, I was even looking at them, like, oh yeah, we did some Battlestar Galactica. I just like being able to touch on all the different things and having worked for Marvel DC, Archie Image, Disney Malibu, Acclaim, you know, like all these different companies and all these different properties. It's just been fun. And what about the future for Oak Age? The future, I think, is, you know, as we do a lot of projects, I do more illustrations now for people. I do commission illustrations. I do commission writing. I do commission illustration. We're working on some comic book projects for some clients right now. You know, more movie stuff, I think we're going to go in the direction of more, as I'm teaching more often and doing those things, things I can bring students in on, but also things that are a lot more about our creativity and our characters, much more writing and directing and, but projects of our own that we can put out. And just to be, I've gotten, like, said when I started out, when I was in high school, I remember sitting down like, it was like a week before we graduated. And I was sitting there with a, you know, a friend of mine and where everybody's talking about the future, you know, like, he's like, well, you know, what do you want to do to be successful? It's like, I want to be in comics and movies. Like, okay, so you're a success when your name's in a comic book, and that's what he said to me three years later. My name was in a comic book, you know, and through this time, I'm getting to put out movies that I've done. So what I want to do is be able to give back, give other people access to the things that I've had and help them and continue to write, illustrate, direct and things and not have not hustle as much, you know, like getting artists a lot about hustling and being out there. And now I know people more have done enough projects where there'll be a lot less about finding projects and a lot more about accepting projects that find us, you know, find Heroic Age. Finally, real quick. Sure. Whenever I went and met you at Heroic Age back in 96, you ended the tour by giving me a stack of comic books. And one of your employees said, boy, you're lucky, he never gives us comic books. So I wanted to return the favor and give you some copies of my books. Nice. That's awesome. Very cool. I've heard you talk about these. Yeah, this will be fun to read. Those were the only ones I had copies of on hand. These are the ones that are the, like the young readers. Yeah, like Goosebumps. Yeah, that's the true crime. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. If you enjoyed that video, make sure you hit the subscribe button right there, so you stay up to date on all things geek culture. Also, go ahead and check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched. I'm Shannon from Comic NTV, the only place on YouTube where all geek culture collides. Take care geeks.