The Masters of Comics with Austin Hough

all right what is up everyone welcome to another edition of the fam effect podcast as always i am your host the bushido geek aka the shogun of fandom joined as always by sam the man yeah and welcome to the new year we'll be fit it's well i guess it's the second episode of the new year but welcome to the new year yeah if my calculations are correct and they're usually not it should be the second episode but you know probably not so we'll find out we'll yeah we'll find out whenever i remember to edit it

two in the morning not like that doesn't happen all the time um so what have you been up to this last week sam dying exactly we're both dying so apologies in advance for a a death episode i'll change the title it's going to be called death episode but neither from each other no close enough for that i haven't seen you in a while yeah so welcome to the episode of coughing um but we got us we got a special episode here today one uh this was sam's first uh guest on on her own yeah so

there's a little there's a little uh audio clap i'll put in some clapping sounds like i'll just i'll throw in some audio clapping there for you yeah but we are joined by austin huff who has a pretty cool kickstarter going on right now which we're to dive into uh but you have a pretty interesting comic books like comic book story because a lot of people like they've been doing it for a long time or they've had stuff in the works for a long time you kind of just like all of a sudden one day we're

just like you know what i'm just going to write a really successful comic book and get like some really high profile names to do it with me how did and how did all this come about like what made you one day just go like you know what i'm just gonna you know it was a it's it's just a crazy story and it's like every time i think of okay well it began here i realized oh no it began there then it's just it goes so far back in time i'm uh 52 years old and uh

by trade i'm an insurance agent okay and i've always been into comic books and toys and i've collected toys from the 70s particularly action figures from the 70s made by a company called migo now these are eight inch action figures they come with clothes you remove the boots guns hats you know whatever and i started making my own custom action figures in the middle 1990s and you know as the dawn of the internet i found a bunch of other guys who were doing it so i wanted to get involved and i started doing it and

to date i probably made over about 650 different additional characters that go with the dc and marvel superhero lines from this toy company and about about around the same time i was watching some old episodes of the adam west tv show the batman show from 1966 and you know that those the villains that they had on that show they were so they were larger than life right oh yeah so i had this thought in my head i said god you know a cool villain on this show would be uh inspired by my favorite artist salvador

dali he's the guy that had um the melting clocks in his paintings for you youngsters who probably aren't familiar with his work but um i thought wow what a what a crazy character he would be he would be this artist with a palette of magic paint and he could paint himself out of any situation he got into so if he robs a bank he could simply paint a painting on the wall and jump into it and escape almost like going into a portal or another dimension well as soon as i thought of that guy i

kind of forgot about him as well and all of a sudden you know 30 years later whatever heck it was he popped into my head again when i was looking for new action figures to make and i was like man i'm running out of ideas there's only so many variations of spider-man i can make you know there's only so many obscure villains i can snag from old 1970s animated cartoons you know like the super friends or spider-man and his amazing friends or something so i created this action figure of this salvador dali inspired villain and

i named him surreal ordeal next thing i knew i was creating other characters that were inspired by my favorite artist to go with him so then all of a sudden i had this group of five super villain action figures that nobody but i knew about i'm the only one who like had any kind of a kinship with them i'm looking at these guys like these are great this could be some of my best work but if i put them out on the internet to show all of my friends right and i'm known worldwide for my

custom action figures they're going to look at them and say okay austin these are great but who the hell are they so i had to create backstories for them and i came up with origin stories for all five of them and i'm like wow these are actually pretty cool i really dig this i think i out did myself here and then i thought you know why don't i come out with or come up with a comic book story for these villains and i'll pit them up against batman and some other dc heroes and the next

thing i knew i was writing a plot summary that had all kinds of twists and turns and big reveals and stuff and i'm like you know i think i might have something here so i took it to my friend art balthazar who works for dc comics as an artist um he is world famous award-winning guy one of my best friends he lives about an hour and a half away from me and every three months every you know four times a year so we get together for lunch and i showed him my toys my action figures

he customizes action figures as well that's where we first met about 15 or 16 years ago and he read the plot summary he looked at the toys he's like man austin this is great this is really good he's like i think we could pitch this to the publisher of dc comics and he would go for it and i said really he's like yeah he's like c2e2 is coming up in a couple weeks this was in february of 2020 and he said you're going to be there i'm going to be there i'll introduce you and i'll

set up a meeting and i'm like wow that's fantastic well two weeks later the publisher of dc comics was let go dc just absolutely went into shambles they laid off 250 people and it was like okay what the heck do we do with this story you know what can i don't know anybody at marvel that i can go to and say hey we can flip it make it a spider-man story there was nobody at dc that we knew anymore um you know my buddy art he didn't know who he was supposed to supposed to report

to let alone who he was supposed to tell me to go talk to right so i just came up with the idea that you know what i am going to take this story i'm going to finish writing it out in full you know script form i was going to replace all of the dc characters that i was using like batman and green arrow and hawkman replaced them all with golden age public domain superheroes that had some kind of a following to them because if i'm going to write a story and self-publish this thing which is

what i ended up doing right if i'm going to do this i i don't necessarily want to have all of my own original characters i'd like to have some kind of uh um you know characters that have some kind of a following out there and if you know anything about public domain superhero characters they they all have some kind of following there are people who kind of shun dc and marvel and the mainstream you know big two and all they do is go for the public domain thing the kickstarter guys etc etc and i thought

okay this is going to be the perfect mashup so i took these golden age public domain superheroes i have them fighting against my original bad guys and then i just started doing some research like what is kickstarter how do i get artists interested in drawing my comic book et cetera et cetera and i determined from talking to a lot of people that the best thing to do is to go after your favorite name artists and get them to draw covers for you and then find less expensive but still equally talented artistically talented artists to do

the interior pages so that's what i did uh and i just started emailing and calling artists that i had met and known over the years from going to cons people that i knew in the business through like my friends art who's in the business and i i just set up set on a course to line people up the next thing i knew everybody that i talked to was like wow this sounds like a great idea this is like my favorite artist of all time you turned him into this really cool villain can i draw his

chapter and i'm like wait a second you want to draw interior pages you want to draw sequential art everybody told me that guys like you were good for a cover and that's about it and everybody i talked to was like man i want to do pages i want to do sequential art again you know these guys were big in my youth which was the 70s and 80s and they're not doing that kind of stuff anymore and they really miss it and they want to do it so next thing i knew i was gathering you know

as i would get one artist and he'd say call up this guy and that guy would say hey i'm in call up this guy here's this guy's email here's this guy's phone number next thing i knew i had our artists for the entire five issue series because it ended up after i scripted it out it was like 144 pages long so it was either going to be a graphic novel or was going to be five separate issues and i went around let's do five separate issues we'll do a couple variant covers on each one i

mean i had more artists wanting to work with me than i had pages in the book yeah you know i i have i have so many artists that i had to give guys like alternate covers that are only going to be available as 11 by 17 posters you know things like that um and you know if these guys they're all connected it's all a network of artists so if one guy if i go to one guy and say hey i just got alan weiss to to do an interior chapter they're like oh alan's doing it

i'll do it too and then you call the next guy and say well i got alan weiss and ron wilson to do it and they're like really you got alan weiss and ron wilson well i'm in too and then it just it was like domino's fault absolute snowball rolling down the hill you're absolutely right and that's where i'm at today and it's amazing when i go through my phone it's like holy cow i have this guy's phone number are you kidding me and i have this guy's phone number and you know that's how i ended

up getting a table at c2e2 one of one of the artists that's working with me alex savia who has done as much spider-man art as anybody that i know i mean he's been working on he's probably drawn something having to do with spider-man for marvel comics for over 30 consecutive years he did the web of spider-man comic book for at least 10 years and he until uh up until stan lee's death a couple years ago he was doing the daily newspaper spider-man comic strip that if you still got a newspaper it was in you know

the comic section in the back so i mean that guy he is just prolific when it comes to spider-man he lives down in florida he called me up and said i don't know if i'm coming to see to e2 or not but i asked the people at read pop if you could have my table and i said no kidding and that's how i got the table at c2e2 and i was able to coincide the first day of c2e2 with the first day of the relaunch of the kickstarter issue one for the masters and i mean

in the first two days you were there sam i mean i think i did over 10 grand in the first two days yeah you wow you funded within like the first day yeah 30 minutes uh-huh geez yeah yep and you know now we've got eight days left we're over twenty thousand um i think it's realistic that we're gonna top 25 because we're bringing in about 500 bucks a day and you know the kickstarter is always heavy at the beginning and it's heavy at the end and in the middle there's kind of like this valley so

i think we we we have an outside chance of making 30 grand okay yeah and that'd be pretty cool for one issue yeah yeah that's pretty impressive i think that'd be sick yeah i i i'd be pretty happy with that yeah so you kind of like there's a lot of times like we've had on a few people that you know are all doing kickstarters and in india and indie comic book guys and everything and you know it it's weird it's interesting the different hoops because you went straight to like like going crazy uh took uh

i think of a different phrase but like balls to the wall like just my middle name is go big or go home ah your signature must be a lawn yeah those scantron days had to be brutal when you were like austin oh man crap there's no room can i get a second scantron i have been practicing an autograph for years finally i get to use it nice yeah right no i get like i said it's gonna be the podcast of coughing is by the end we'll all just pass on on our keyboards and no no

i already took my nap today it's okay yeah cameron will be the one that cameron can come and and the end the recording later after like two hours um so what would you say is like so like like we kind of said you kind of came from this like just one day you were like you know what i really want to do this and you started going you know kind of going with it what was like that the biggest hiccup like early on um for you to kind of like wrap your head around and start

getting done i think the biggest hiccup was realizing how much money it was gonna be was gonna cost to produce this you know you don't realize you don't realize how much money it takes to produce one comic book you know you go to a comic book store and comic books are typically you know five bucks six bucks now when i was a kid first comic book i ever bought off the spinner rack at the drugstore was 25 cents so when you think about this what goes into a comic book well a comic book is usually

you know x amount of pages of content right so 16 18 20 however many pages you have well how much does each page cost well you've got to pay for the penciler you got to pay for the inker you've got to pay for the colorist and you have to pay for the letterer now that's just what goes into one page you also have an editor you also have you know think about marvel or dc or any of the big companies they have you know advertising uh staff they've got you know public relations it's so much

that goes into it but just to produce a comic book if you break it down and say okay if i really want to get good quality people you're going to pay 250 bucks a page for just the pencils at 150 bucks for the inking add another 100 bucks for the coloring and lettering that's what 400 that's 500 bucks a page minimum okay that's if you want to get name people now you take that you multiply it times 20 500 times 20 is what i said earlier i'm not going to math yeah don't ask me that

i'll give you a hint it's a lot of money yeah okay so where do you come up with this money you know you you sell fun through kickstarter or a crowdfunding page you look for investors you have to approach uh comic book stores and say hey is this something that you'd be interested in how do i get hooked up with you know getting my product out to you um and then you have to you know ask your wife if it's okay if you dip into the sink no that is very important yes it is it

is ask for forgiveness you know later you know right it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission mark like hey you're gonna see like a crazy charge in the credit card don't worry about it i'm already i'm already disputing it it's you don't gotta worry about it i got it this guy's got it down how long have you been married buddy i i'm not but you know i spent 10 years in sales so i just you know you learn you learn what to do yeah yeah you do you do but there's that's the biggest thing

if i'm being brutally honest it's you don't realize how expensive it is and you know you think about it even if even if it was half that cost even if it was 250 bucks a page and you want to do a 20-page comic book you're looking at 5 000 right there okay so and that doesn't even that doesn't even include printing the thing no it doesn't so you have to wonder what is marvel in dc what are they paying their top artists i mean they've got guys who come alex ross he has to command top

dollar jim lee top dollar you know guys like guys like that i'm i'm not even at the top tier of guys i met guys who like they had their their golden moments and they you know were were paid handsomely when when their rate was there and now it's like okay i i'm not getting a jim lee i'm not getting a a george perez or um you know any of these other guys who you know command the top dollar you know and alex ross my god he'd probably be 10 times expensive but but again if you

think about it if you were able to get a guy like alex ross or jim lee you probably would be bringing in a bigger audience and might be able to offset the cost of their work by getting more people to say yeah man i love that alex ross alternate cover i'm willing to pony up another 50 bucks or something right right okay can i ask so you got you said you got all of these like crazy artists that you like really like to do like some pages covers things like that what was the experience while

they were doing that we like working with them like was like what was the experience while i was working with them yeah like working with them getting the pages back like was it just like mind-blowing it it was my it is mind-blowing because i'm still doing that excuse me we have a five issue series like i said earlier each issue is already about fifty percent done okay okay um some issues are eighty percent done um and and getting the stuff in i mean it's amazing like you know i i would be out i remember vividly

i was in cincinnati with my buddy and we were driving around town and i received an email from mike grell mike grell is if you're not familiar with them you need to look up his work he is a legend he's a living legend the stuff he did including the legion of superheroes including uh warlord and green arrow long blondo hunters is amazing and i was able to get him to do just a cover for me and we're driving around town and all of a sudden i get this email notification it's from mike and i look

at my buddy who's even a bigger fan of micro than i am and i go scott i i just got the cover from mike growl you know i'm lucky i didn't you know mess my pants all right it's that kind of joy that you get um you know these guys for me it doesn't get any better than getting an email from mike grell or ron wilson or arbel jones with pages and covers even doodles you know joe staton is an amazing artist legend he uh he draws dick tracy he created e-man and just out of

the blue he he's sending me sketches and i'm looking at his sketches like that's considered a sketch joe really that's a sketch that's finished i don't need anything more than that it's it's utterly amazing uh you know the the connection with these guys and gals it's just unbelievable it's you totally fanboy the thing you know yeah totally fanboy huh no i've i've definitely been there like with people that we've been i've been able to talk to or um like was talking to dan jurgens who's the creator like i'm sure you know his creator booster goal

about trying to come on and still some back and forth on that but booster goal is like my all-time favorite so even getting like responses from that guy it was the same thing i was like i literally called my dad up and out he read comics a lot growing up and i was like you're not gonna believe who just emailed me back uh about about coming on the show like one of my all-time favorite artists of of all time yeah um so you so you've kind of you're getting ready for the kickstarter which is gonna

be the first issue um you said you have is five plan total if all five you know knock on wood go go according to plan do you is there plans for a continuation or do you think you have like another potential project uh that now that you've seen all the success you've been able to to to do are you do you have a good idea like okay i had this other idea maybe it's time to kind of uh see what comes of that well i've got all kinds of ideas i've got inventions in my head

i want to own a bed and breakfast someday you know all kinds of things that i have on my to-do list but the comic book thing that is going to be you know knock on wood is going to be an ongoing thing um all of the artists one of the things that we did was when i originally um proposed my story to these artists they wanted to recreate or reimagine these public domain heroes i told you about earlier they didn't want to leave them as they were drawn back in the 1940s they wanted to modernize

them so i gave them all the creative freedom to take the individual hero that was fighting the bad guy in that particular chapter they were writing and recreate them give them a new costume give them a new identity whatever they want to do well every artist that committed to doing that also told me that they would like to commit to drawing that individual superhero in their own title so we have six you know reimagined superheroes we very well could go on move on from here to six individual superhero titles not to mention i have been

fielding numerous scripts from people who are looking for you know a publishing company looking to be hooked up with artists so i've got a whole you know list of emails that i've put aside that i'm not going to tackle until this kickstarter is over but i've had people submit everything from horror to adult humor to religious stories and everything in between so i i i believe that this can go in other directions and we could probably have enough to be running two three four kickstarters at one time with two three four different topics okay okay

or if we're able to do it right and bring in enough money maybe we can actually get you know distributed to comic book stores that would be a wonderful thing yeah yeah but you know what that's that's pie in the sky you know i get it baby steps i tried you know i'm go big or go home but you know we we kind of have to do this systematically you don't want to get too ahead of yourself i don't want to get too ahead of myself no well i had a question about the heroes so

you said they're all like public domain so they're just like free how did you decide which heroes you wanted in there like did you do it to like match the villains or did you just be like these are my favorite they're going here a little bit of both sam what happened was is that back in the 70s and you guys you guys are a little bit younger than me so you might remember the animated show from a few years ago batman the brave and the bolt oh yeah love that show okay love that show right

well when i was a kid in the 70s i grew up with the brave and the bold comic book and it was one of my all-time favorite comic books and marvel had its own uh counterpart to that it was called marvel team up in brave and the bold as in the animated show batman would always team up with another superhero right yeah it would be batman and aquaman or batman and green arrow and so on and so forth and they would fight one villain and typically on their initial encounter with that villain they would lose

and then they would come back figure out what went wrong and they'd come back at the end and defeat the bad guy and that's how the story went well that's how i developed my script i had batman as the main hero and in each chapter against the five main villains he would team up with green arrow hawkman red tornado the atom and elongated man and the reason why i picked those heroes is because their powers fit well against the five villains and the way i wrote this story was in initial encounters against the bad guy

batman and you know the guest hero their powers wouldn't work really well against the initial villain they met up with but at the end they would swap partners and be able to take care of the villains batman would figure out what strength of his hero guest star would work well against the particular villain and he would make sure they matched up at the end and good would prevail over evil yadda yadda so so from the powers everything was power based i've had people say well why don't you have any female heroes in it i said

well you know because wonder woman doesn't stretch like elongated man or black canary doesn't fly like hawkman and so on and so forth so what i did was i made a list of all the heroes that i originally had in the story i called up a buddy of mine who lives up in toronto his name is darren wilshire now darren he owns temporal comics so for everybody out there go look up temporal comics on facebook look it up on kickstarter and support darren i call him the guru of public domain characters and i called him

up and i said and i've known darren for years and i called him up and i said hey he's another one of my migo friends i called him up and said hey i need replacements for batman and hawkman and green arrow i need them in the public domain and he's like okay so he did a bunch of research called me back up and said hey man i've got these guys i think would be perfect for what you're looking for we discussed it we said okay this is what we're going to do and we replaced all

of the dc heroes with the specific superheroes he found in the public domain i mean there were some guys that had long histories like the black owl who was our replacement for batman you know he this rich socialite guy during the day he fought crime at night very similar to batman uh he had a long run he was on a lot of covers i mean he had a good you know three four five year run back in the 40s and he has been reintroduced every so often by new publishing companies so he has a pretty

good track record and a good following but then there were guys like plymouth the rubber man who is our replacement for elongated man because we needed a stretchy guy okay um well plymouth the rubber man only appeared in one comic book back in like 1941 or 42. and it was one of those comic books that i call a serial comic book or an anthology comic book where it would have you know it would just be called whatever prize comics or cmo comics or whatever it was and there would be like 12 different stories about 12

different things like they'd have some superheroes in it they'd have some comedy they'd have some war stuff in it so you had plymo who this was the only comic he was ever in and i think was cmo comics back in 1941 or 42 and the thing was that it was eight pages long maybe 10 at the most he was this circus performer and he saved his girlfriend the trapeze artist from this dastardly ringleader okay and then he was never seen from again or heard from and it was a great opportunity to take this character that

had really no history and completely reinvent him recreate him make up the backstory and it's the creative freedom that you get from that kind of stuff is fantastic and there are people out there who actually know who he is from just that one appearance so for those people out there and even probably myself included a little bit what makes these characters public domain like what what exactly is the role they were never trademarked or copyrighted got it so now i've copyrighted and trademarked my version of the character you cannot use my version of the character

but you can use everything about the character that is in the public domain like the name i can't trademark the name i can trademark the logo i created for him okay i can copyright the way he looks but i can't trademark any of the backstory that i took from public domain like black owl's name is doug danville anybody else including you guys could create your own black owl named doug danville yeah you could say yeah tempting but if you take if you take any of the the way the character looks like for i'll give you

a great example batman has the scalloped cape right yeah that is trademarked by dc the spit curl the spit curl on superman's head yeah that kind of stuff so let's say superman was in the public domain you probably couldn't use the spit curl you know or use the exact logo on his chest if they created you know if they took a public domain character that's a bad example i i need to clarify that like if you look up the black owl um i changed his cape i changed his mask i put a logo on his

shirt you couldn't use that logo because it's my logo you could still create somebody and call them black owl but you have to make them somewhat different or you could duplicate exactly the way he was drawn back in the 40s okay do you do you plan like in the future to utilize more of these domain characters or i do okay yeah i think i think it's great man i got to tell you there are you know plenty of public domain websites out there um you know it's just like like encyclopedias online of public domain characters

it's unbelievable and there are there's nothing cooler to me than taking people's work that they did years and years ago and updating it and utilizing you know their vision from you know 80 some years ago and i give in my in my books i give credit to all of the original artists and all the original authors i actually give some of the cameo appearances as characters in my story uh name some buildings after them cities after them in my story so you know i want to make sure people understand that what i'm doing is an

homage it's a tribute to these men and women who who really laid the foundation for where we are today it's just it's just amazing when you go back and look at the history of comic books uh it's it's amazing it's so much more than superman and batman you know so much more i feel like some people forget that there's this like you said there's this history behind comics that's not just you know the justice league or you know the people that you're seeing on main screen tv or uh right or the marvel cinematic universe right

yeah you know the marvel cinematic universe as great as it is um there's still so much that you know people who only watch the movies think they know but they really don't know there's so much history behind these characters uh it's just it's just amazing yeah i i definitely agree it's because there's people like you said that you never really would even think to like oh this person's an actual hero or this person's a villain like right you know where is this coming from and it's definitely interesting where like just how much is out there

that you just never realized like you said that one uh person was in one uh one issue of something a whole comment from 40. yeah right way back in the 40s and then nothing ever since and it's it i mean i think i think there was just so much trial and error in the golden age of comics where there's just this like you said there's this treasure trove of people out there just kind of like waiting for like this next generation yeah and i don't think most of these people were even thinking about trademark and

copyright at the time they were just doing what they loved and if it made some money and they were able to put food on the table i think they were pretty happy you know yeah and then you've got you got guys who came along and just revolutionized everything like walt disney or stan lee yeah so what to you like so i know you said like you're it's not just like you're doing this because you you know have a talent for writing or drawing or something like that you're doing it because you're passionate about the the

things that you're doing what to you is like wait like what did you grow up reading you know what are like those those main comic book heroes or villains for you that were either inspiration or just like you'll still pick up the issues today kind of thing yeah absolutely the um uh i'm a bronze age baby i consider i consider the masters my my love letter to the bronze age first comic book i ever picked up i was five years old it was 1974 i went to the corner drug store with 50 cents i bought

a candy bar and i bought a comic book and it was the defenders and it was the cover of the defenders was uh illustrated by gil kane legend in comic books just an amazing artist and the interiors were drawn by salvi sema who to this day i still consider my favorite marvel comic artists um i was into the defenders i was into the avengers i was into the justice league of america spider-man and batman are my two favorite superheroes of all time and i think it's because their rogues gallery are so delicious i don't know

how well you can put it but you know both of them for one both are mortal they both can die and most of their villains are the same way when you think about batman the joker human penguin human two-faced human riddler catwoman mad hatter you know on and on and on human rarely does batman have a villain from outer space or you know somebody magical or some you know like like killer croc is a rarity you look at spider-man he's the same way craven the hunter doc mysterio green goblin they're all human yeah you know

rarely does he have the lizard and even the lizard is is human and he transforms i got out i got out of comic books uh got probably early 80s until the late 90s and what got me back into comic books was i was in a comic book store i was on traveling somewhere on a business trip in my car and i stopped at a comic book store i had a little bit of time to kill and i was in champaign illinois that's where university of illinois is and i found a comic book store on campus

and i walk in and all of a sudden just just screaming at me screaming my name austin come and look at me was this comic book of daredevil marvel had just reintroduced daredevil and they had kevin smith writing it and joe casada and jimmy palmati pencilling and inking it they were doing the art and it caught my attention and i picked up an issue next thing i knew i was hooked and those guys i feel are responsible for me getting back into comic books for getting back into customizing action figures and for ending up doing

this and i actually have become fairly friendly with jimmy palmati i met him a couple of years ago at a comic-con in cincinnati and i brought all my comic books that he had drawn in from back in the late 90s and i put him on his table and i said hey i introduced myself to him i said you and joe and kevin are the reason i got back into comic book collecting and i you even published one of my letters to the editor and he's like really he's like i used to pick those out and

i said yeah here it is and i opened up the comic book and i showed it to him he's like i remember this letter he proceeded to talk to me for like 15 or 20 minutes meanwhile the line behind me was just getting bigger and bigger and bigger his handlers was like jimmy we got to move on and he's drawing pictures of daredevil in my comic books for me and autographing everything and we actually became fairly friendly and we kept in touch and i reached out to him when i started doing this and he's actually

joined the team and he's going to ink two pages in the comic book he doesn't have a lot of time but there's a couple of guys who are working with me that are friends with him he's like i'll ink a page of each of these guys oh yeah awesome so having having the guy who got me back into comic books working on this project that's a dream come true that sounds crazy dream come true yeah wow okay well let's section off we're going to talk about you personally some of your hobbies and everything you said

that you started off making like your like personalized like action figures and things like that yeah what other hobbies do you have and things like that like that you do in your free time well i uh i mean i i that's my big thing the the custom action figures i'm also a big music fan so i have a you know record collection i collect records vinyl records uh mostly into um what i would call garage rock um if you know what garage rock is yeah i i i i know what it is when i hear

it i i don't know how i can describe it to you well i understand yeah so um it has a lot of punk vibe in it you know from everything from like the clash and the ramones to the the dead boys and the damn that kind of stuff but you know there's a lot of stuff that the beatles did and the stones did that's considered garage rock the doors um the replacements you know stuff like that to uh green day um but uh that's that's the big thing i i'm big into music i'm big into

uh toys i'm big into comic books i love movies and tv uh you know my wife and i were big fans of the binge watch on netflix you know that's always a good thing we just finished uh we just finished watching ted lasso the first two seasons which um oh it's such a wonderful show we watched the first couple episodes and we were kind of like yeah i don't know about this and we kind of shelved it for maybe a year and we just kept hearing so many of our friends saying you know what you

have to watch the show and we turned it back on and man we couldn't get through that thing fast enough it was fantastic so i'm always looking for shows where i can like root for somebody you know yeah there's there's too many shows and i don't know when this happened but there's too many shows where there's nobody that's really likable you know who who am i rooting for here we started to watch that show succession uh-huh okay yeah and everybody was like oh this is such a great show we got done with like two or

three episodes and we were like okay who are we rooting for in this thing like why am i what do i care right now why do i care we started uh yellowstone about a month ago with uh kevin costner and we felt the same way we got two or three episodes into it it's like okay and this is what we do it's like who are we rooting for here there was nobody to root for in that show and all i've heard is wonderful things about it but everybody in that show is like there's something bad

about them they're bullies or they're just bad people i don't want to watch that i got enough of that crap in my own life i just had to turn on the news right right but ted lasso you were rooting for everybody in ted lasso oh right see for me that's um i was really happy when they rebooted lost and lost in space like the old the old movie and so that that show that's on netflix now the last season just came out it's it's so it's so good like i love that stuff i'm gonna have

to put that down you know there's a show that i've always wanted to watch uh firefly okay yeah never watched it i i've heard nothing but great things about it the reboot of battlestar galactica is another one with edward james almost never watched that that's on the list but i think it happened it had to happen with like the sopranos oh where it was like where it was like you know and it starts out where you're like you find people to root for breaking bad i consider the greatest drama of all time it might be

the greatest television show of all time you know and at first you're cheering for walter white at first you're like oh yeah man i'm rooting for this guy he's got cancer he's trying to take care of his family but by the end they were all bad yeah they all broke bad literally literally since the anarchy is kind of like a similar show like that to me like i love sons of anarchy but it's the same kind of way where you you try to like root for the guys even though they're doing bad things but then

you you see a few of the key guys like slowly start to like cross that line you're like oh man like not what i do like no we watched the first couple seasons of sons of anarchy and it got to the point where it's like why are we rooting for the bad guys they're all bad they're doing so they're killing so many people right right i mean i lost i i lost interest in walking dead after negan showed up and you know all of a sudden he is like beating people with that baseball bat i'm

like okay i can't take this anymore right yeah i don't know if i'm getting old and maybe i'm sensitive because i'm a father i don't know yeah i i i feel the same way though with walking dead where it was like you're watching because it's a cool like drama about zombie apocalypse but then eventually there comes a line we were like all right not that many people would probably still be willing to just brutally murder what little people are still alive like right there'd be some sort of faith in humanity going on yeah i i

agree with you i just can't believe that we would be that tribal right yeah like stuff would go medieval but not to that extent like i'm going to go medieval yeah like i might be afraid when i get mad i'm just going to call me i'm going to go medieval because that that leads to there's a lot of things there that could uh that can be medieval about it that's right that's yeah yeah yeah so uh i'm just kind of curious as i know uh based on previous timelines we're gonna get ready to wrap up

in a little bit but for other people that are maybe kind of in the starting phases of maybe doing something and creating their own comic or maybe they've always wanted to do something like that they really didn't know where to start or what to do what advice would you give for people out there as a way to get started in something like this just get started just do it you know i have notebooks and notebooks and notebooks and you can ask my wife i would sit on the couch and i would be i have i

have scripts that i've written for future stories writing the masters i'd sit on the couch and i would just anything that came to me just fill right just fill it out or if you're a drawer if you're an artist draw don't stop and then find people who you want to emulate find people that you respect find people that you like oh i like the work of this guy i like the work of this gal and and approach them send out you know signals to them find them on facebook find them on twitter these people are

just regular people just like us they have families they live in houses they pay rent they have mortgages they need to eat you know they watch the same shows as we do you know all of the people that i've been working with you know we get on the phone and we'll talk business for you know five or ten minutes but then we find ourselves talking about fun things for 20 minutes for an hour right you know there's some guys that i've talked to on the phone for two and a half hours and you know most

of the time it's it's not anything about getting the comic book done that we're working on it's about all kinds of other things how's the family doing oh my kids in college oh yes so is mine well i got grandkids in college and you know whatever you need to you need to do it just do it just like nike said right just do it if you're a writer grab a notebook and always be writing my buddy art balthazar whenever we are out wherever we are together doesn't matter driving to a a comic-con up in milwaukee

going out to lunch at a hooters he's got a book with him where he is drawing i mean all the time that's what he does he draws it's kind of like you know paul mccartney or or insert your favorite rock star he's always got like some kind of notepad he's writing down ideas for a song whether it's the music whether it's the lyrics whatever it is that's what you have to do and then you have to chart a course you have to have a plan you know you come up with your plan you implement your

plan you measure the results and then you adjust that plan and make it even better that's how you do it i like that yeah yeah yeah yeah uh sam what what so what are some questions that you got here as we as we get ready to wrap up i know you said you had written some stuff down um my next main thing is so with the kickstarter and everything you get the comics your stretch goals things like that after this ends because this ends the 13th last day how can somebody how can somebody come and

get the comics after the kickstarter ends after after the kickstart is over we're going to set up a website where you can actually come and order additional copies or whatever you need to um so it it will it will flow into the next website the next issue and again this is just what our plan is there's there's four more issues after this one the plan is is to have four more kickstarters depending on how this goes and the next one goes that might change we might decide okay we're going to do all of these issues

on one kickstarter because it's been so successful we can get them all out or we're not 100 sure of that we're going to play it by ear but once this one is done we're going to migrate everything over to another website where people can actually go and pre-order or you know uh whenever the comic is ready if they miss the kickstarter you know i've already had people message me and say oh you know what money is tight i'm not going to be able to do it it's like don't worry about it we're funded everything's a

go we're going to get this thing done you'll be able to buy it in the future okay okay that's always my like biggest thing is like when we talk to people on here i was like great kickstarter now what about later like how can i get my hands on it yeah no we're going to make it available to everybody and you know for for those of you who just want a synopsis of the story it is just a traditional bronze age good guys versus bad guys story the bad guys are are gathered together all of

their powers come from uh are inspired by the art world you know we've got guys who have magic paint magic cameras you know all kinds of cool gadgets and stuff like that and essentially it's they're hired by this one guy this leader of the group he hires them to commit this the greatest art heist in the history of north america and the good guys are set to stop and that's it it's just a traditional good guys versus bad guy story there's a big reveal the reveal of the leader of the masters that should catch everybody

off guard i hope um the then there's a big double cross at the end and you know we've got some of the greatest artists of their era you know drawing this book yeah so it's it's if you are if you dig 1970s 1980s type of comic books you're going to love this okay i'm very excited to read it because like i backed it back at c32 because you were handing out um covers for people that back five dollars or more on the c32 thing and so here's mine lovely yeah that's a great one this was

a redraw of one of the justice league covers correct correct the one of the cool things i've been able to do is get original artists on some of my favorite comic book covers to recreate them but with my characters so the cover you have in your hand is the alternate cover for issue one it was uh penciled by bart sears inked by mark pennington and colored by mort todd now bart sears did the original version of that cover on justice league europe back in the late 80s early 90s and uh you know it was cool

that i was able to get a hold of him and he's like yeah i can recreate that cover with your characters it was just a wonderful thing and we've probably done that with i think maybe six to eight different covers you know contacting contacting people they did the original cover in 1978 and they're able to redo it with our characters that's a really cool thing yeah no i really enjoying they're creating homages to their own work yeah like you said it's a lot of those guys just are happy to re-kind of recreate like what what

they did 20 30 you know years ago you know you know what mark everybody and this isn't just the comic book industry this is the movie industry this is anything that does with the arts you know the food industry whatever they're always looking for the next big thing the next big thing that's going to make them a ton of money you know actors and artists and people in the art community they still have value and worth i think these these artists that are working with me they have never been better at their craft they've had

years to sharpen their skills hone their craft and also right now they are at the point in their lives where they don't have a ton of work to do like back in the 70s and 80s they were you know drawing 10 covers a month they had all these crazy deadlines now they can be much more focused they can pay much more attention to detail and and i i will take anything they're doing today over what they were doing 30 40 years ago they they are they are to me at the pinnacle at the height of

their skill level right now right right right yeah i think like you said it's it's it's there's just so much passion i think uh with some of this stuff and like again um sam obviously had more of a chance but like just when i was looking through the artwork and everything like i was just blown away by how good everything looked and uh it really does like you said it brings you back to i mean i got into comics pretty late but i generally prefer the older stuff you know i mean there's some newer stuff

that i still read obviously but um i generally will like a lot of the older stuff like i think sam knows she uh like messaged me one day and was like hey i'm at this comic book shop and they have the booster gold run like from the 80s they had literally the entire booster golden run except for like number six or something like that so i was like okay we're going to get this one and we're going to get this one yeah yeah waiting for mark i was like get get them all please like um

and i literally have them all and i just love it and it's i love like those old like 70s to like mid 80s is a lot of the stuff that i'm a huge huge fan of yeah that's that's the bronze age i was born in 1969 and i graduated high school in 1986. so those are the years that pretty much bookend the bronze age of comics 69 to 86 i mean i'm right there in the in the middle of the whole thing um so you know my whole youth was spent in the bronze age or

what's considered the bronze age and uh you know how can i not love it right right and you had this like like book on the your table at c2e2 with all the work in there and like you can you can tell them i flipped through every single page in there because i just enjoyed all the artwork that was in that little like packet yeah thanks yeah it's amazing stuff yeah uh so where can not only people find the kickstarter but information on like work you're doing or if um i know you said you had a

lot of people coming on there so is there any is there a good i mean obviously go with the kickstarter um is there any other central websites or social medias that anyone would need to be aware about yeah we're at power power comics inc on facebook power comics inc on instagram um my name austin huff on uh twitter and uh we'll be you know coming up with our own website you know really soon as well but you know the the social medias have been pretty much where i've been focusing my attention for the last year

uh you know building up we've got about almost 10 000 likes and follows on facebook we have over 2 000 follows on instagram so that's pretty much where i've been focusing my attention and then with kickstarter you know kickstarter is like a social media page all unto itself you know you really need to treat it like it's social media as opposed to just you know fundraising or crowdfunding however you want to call it it really is its own social media yeah yeah i agree and i think if i'm reading this right it's just uh so

it's kickstarter obviously.com project slash the masters and then uh you can go into and obviously it connects you to other things the slash the masters if you went if you just went to kickstarter.com and search for the masters it would it would come up it's under a projects we love so obviously kickstarter loves us which isn't a bad thing and um yeah and you know what we've we've blown our way our goal of 2500 we're at 20 grand right now 20 000 and some change 353. just just a little bit so you know every thousand

dollar increment here on out we're going to give away uh we're going to raffle off five autographed covers like you have those posters mm-hmm so we gave we raffled off five this morning because we crossed 20 grand mm-hmm i'll raffle off five more and so on and so forth until we run out of them but i think i think there's an outside chance we could get up to 30 grand in the next week yeah and that'd be really exciting man it would be fantastic yeah i'm hoping fingers crossed all right any other last things you'd

like to the people to know no no not really not that i can think i mean there's a ton of stuff but i don't think we have enough time no you said 60 minutes and we're like 59 we're about we're about we're like right at the mark of what you said you needed to be done by uh so we'll have to do a uh a part two uh after the kickstarter i would love to i really appreciate you guys for having me on no we'll bring out again that way we can talking to me at

c2e2 oh are you kidding you are an absolute pleasure absolutely divine that's one for 30 sam we're getting there see that's progress progress [Laughter] i know sam knows i was supposed to go to c2e2 and then um like had everything all set up and then a buddy of mine reached out and he was like hey i finally got my wedding rescheduled are you still good to be the best man i was like yeah yeah yeah when when you rescheduled for oh yeah december 12th uh yeah yeah i'm there man yeah um i'm there for you

buddy not gonna miss it all right i'm there you only get married once well yeah so maybe well maybe it's a puppy oh there's a door oh wait no i've got eight million questions about the dog kind of dog is that that is a pit bull what's the pit bull's name he went right for he went right for that chair the pit bull's name is ro as in row laryn from star trek puppy very nice yeah so to cause controversy and to add a topic for next time we have you come on soon uh star

trek or star wars star wars star wars okay uh dc or marvel i i probably would lean dc but it's only by a hair you you have to understand i'm i'm i'm a dcn marvel guy oh yeah the the only the only action figures i make are either in dc or marvel now the company that i uh model my toys after migo they had every license you could imagine back in the day planet of the apes star trek dukes of hazzard love boat i mean they had all kinds of crazy starsky and hutch but dc

and marvel are the only ones that i focus on i'm a dc and marvel guy but i'd say dc just by a hair and that might be that might be just because i'm such a big batman fan got it batman is 1a spider-man is 1b and again like i said earlier it's because of their rogues galleries yeah are you going to see the new uh batman movie oh of course i'm very i'm very excited for that because it's finally it's finally a take it like early batman which really hasn't been done at least not in

a cinematic way anyway did you guys see the new spider-man movie oh absolutely what did you think loved it amazing is it the best spider-man movie ever uh it's not yeah i don't i don't know about best spider-man i mean it's it's one of my more favorite marvel movies um but i had friends that were like oh it's the best marvel movie i've ever seen i'm like there's no way it's better than end game like i was like no i'm sorry game is still it's i don't think i don't think it's even the best spider-man

movie i think spider-man 2 with doc ock and i think um far from home with mysterio i think those were two better spiderman movies that one was very good i think i think this one was great you can't confuse quality with nostalgia right this this played on your heart strings right i mean when toby maguire came through that portal i was like oh yes crazy he's crazy yeah i mean he's my peter parker right yeah it was like a weird moment of seeing like three different generations of what you grew up watching and superheroes all

appear on the same screen at the same time right tell cameron i said hi everyone says hi bud yeah i know no cameron i know uh if this is your first time stealer i can't compete with this he really is he's really like the mascot he's the official mascot of the show i i started this podcast or i guess now it's become like a like a brand because of him um because i like i grew up obviously i'm a huge nerd but my my parents are the exact opposite you know my dad read a little

comics watched her little wrestling but like i discovered this is mostly everything i'm a fan of i discovered on my own or got lucky you know with getting nerdy or friends growing up and so a lot i know growing up i didn't know you know where to find all this information on stuff because my parents weren't able to help me and so when he like you know now he's four but when this podcast started he was just over two and you know he's starting to like recognize superheroes and uh comic books and like i've started

his own collection and you know he'll play like sega genesis with me and stuff and um i can answer all those questions because his dad is a huge huge nerd huge nerd yeah and so he's the reason that this started because i was like i think there's a there's a path here to help the next generation you know find the information that i you know could never find growing up well you get my vote for father of the year how about that okay i appreciate it one thing right all right there we go uh but

uh awesome like i said we i think sam would agree as well we'd love to have you on again when the kickstarter is done um just to talk about like and we can do that one live just talk about like what happened you know that the kickstarter is done what's the plans for um like sam asks like what's the plans for buying it down the road um and stuff like that um and we always say is to to all the guests we have come on well the ones we like anyway uh that uh if if

it even if it's like six months down the road if randomly you're starting something new whether it's maybe the kickstarter number two or number three or whatever it might be and you remember that we that you were on our show just send us a quick note like with the link and we'll if we can get you on again we will but if it's something where it's just like really quick we'll at least put out a tweet or a facebook post or we'll mention it on the next podcast like something uh just to help bring a

little recognition to it so that sounds great guys i appreciate you both and uh likewise if anything i can do to help you guys let me know appreciate that yeah i i will definitely uh keep in contact and uh yeah i think i think you definitely like you said you you definitely have some wisdom i think you can you can pass on to to people tell that to my kids get them in here as a as a fellow dad it's it's not going to work yeah and you know this already even with a four-year-old oh

yeah no yeah i'm the furthest thing from cool from him the only the only time i was remotely cool was when he was watching power ranger and i was like i was like yeah dad dad met the green and the the guy the green and white power ranger and he was like wait really and i was like yeah and then that was it like that was my one moment of of coolness and then it wore off i think you're cool mark thanks sam i think you're cool too mark well this is just a best overall

uh not that much um but like uh like anything that was mentioned that austin mentioned everybody as always will of course be in the description and everything like that um and because obviously kickstarters are a time thing um me and sam will be doing our best to put out some as much information as we can over the next uh eight days and even after because i know i think to at least a certain extent you can still donate after kickstarter has ended i think so there's like i can't remember how long it is it might

just be a couple days but i know you can still donate uh after a kickstarter has been done so of course even after we'll try to post another thing or two just to make sure that um you guys get a chance to but like you said make sure you go to the kickstarter search for the masters and back it as soon as you can i will be backing it as well uh later today just because i mean the artwork alone um i'm a huge sam knows this i mainly now go for artwork um and i

mean story two is important to me but i love just collecting just good artwork um and it reads though artwork's more important to me we'll get there look at that i can't read i can't do math i just like to look at pictures we're trying our best i'm just here to look pretty and i've already done a good job on that mission accomplished and we're we're debating on who's prettier we have a debate there is no debate my eyes thank you thank you thank you mark it's good yeah cameron cameron does what you're not wrong

it is cameron wins that's true cameron does win i am i am pretty wise aren't they you are yeah it was it was good i'll take third i just won't acknowledge that it's out of three i'll take fourth honestly right now you mark you're only three out of four so that's not good so yeah look at there we've already reached improvement and like sam you know you're at one person out of 30 that's uh that's liked you so you know we went from zero to i don't know what percentage that is me neither yeah i'm

not going to figure that out uh but to wrap up quickly here everyone just make sure if you didn't make it this far in the episode uh whatever you're listening to whether it's uh apple spotify uh whatever it might be make sure you subscribe and leave a review as well spotify does now uh also do reviews which is always super cool and just let us know what you think there's a lot of different ways to contact us but facebook and twitter are probably the best both both at phantom effect and if you do want to

support the show in a couple different ways but right now best ways is going to be to head to our patreon at phantom effect and our teespring where you can buy cool little merch and shirts and mugs and all of that really fun stuff and hopefully you guys are enjoying our new wednesday releases and get ready for lots of changes as we said there's just going to be a lot of fun things going on we got a lot of things in the works it's going to be a very busy year it's going to be a

little hectic yeah it's going to be a hectic year but it's going to be good and just make sure you stay in tune to every new episode every bright and early wednesday morning of the phantom effect podcast and if you somehow don't get tired of my voice you can also hear me on dad's anime stash live every sunday where we talk literally just anime um and lots of fun stuff i'm probably going to be way too busy soon i figured six podcasts is good right yeah shoot for six yeah yeah six will be working even

number yeah like why stop it two or three you know let's let's get it let's get a couple more out there um but that'll do it for this week just make sure we'll see you guys every wednesday bright and early bonus episodes when we can get the chance to do them will be on fridays and our little fandom experience tip of the week for you guys this time is going to be to try and experience more uh variety if you're a new to comics most comic book stores will have kind of a side uh panel

where it's the stuff that's not dc or marvel maybe it's uh like what would have been dark horse now dark horse isn't really around anymore but uh image comics is a really is a pretty uh big independent a lot of i've gotten some other people over the years uh but just to kind of experience more of the side comics with everything and we'll keep you guys with new and exciting fun content in this new year so hopefully everyone had a great new year and we'll see you guys next week bye thanks for having me