[♪♪♪] Welcome to the "Straight Pointers" podcast where seemingly ordinary people join us for extraordinary discussions. [♪♪♪] You're watching season 2, episode 21 of the "Straight Pointers" podcast. This episode was recorded on December 31, 2024. I'm your host, Jim Lawless. For more information about the show, including the show notes of this episode, please visit straightpointers.com. Rejoining the show today is the illustrious Rick Lundin. Rick, welcome back. Hi, Jim. Thanks. Thanks for having me back. Rick, I asked you to come back to the show here so that we could talk about some of your newer comics work, and that ended up in me asking some questions, and I want to ask about some of your old comics work, too. So I want to talk about a new miniseries you've got called the Bombardier. And I want to talk about an old work that you did for Doctor. But basically, it's a Doctor Who story. It was an adaptation of the Daleks Master Plan. Is that the title of it? Yes. It was an old 1965, '66, 12-part massive adventure back for Doctor Who back in the day. Okay. Well, let's start with present day. Where did the idea of the Bombardier come from? Well, funnily enough, back in around 2008, I had done a series called "100 Covers." And basically telling the adventures of this superhero team, all their adventures through only the covers of what would have been their comic run. And in the 70s or 80s of the 100 covers, I concocted this story where this old-time hero that hadn't been seen for decades, he was called "The Blue Bomber" back then. And there was an eight-part story covering him coming back to face this old foe of his Emperor Zo, who was a particularly nasty character. And it was a pretty big fun deal at the time, and years later, I couldn't get that confrontation between the Bombardier, or I should say "The Blue Bomber" and Emperor Zo. I couldn't get out of my head, and I kept thinking, "Boy, you know, because the whole point of 100 covers was I was never going to do any actual full issues to back up the covers because they were going to do all the heavy lifting. But I just couldn't get those characters out of my head. And so for years, the story was percolating and percolating and percolating. And eventually, I decided I've got to do it, I've got to tell this story a little bit differently than I saw in the cover that I had in the covers. But then I figured, and then I started really fleshing it off, fleshing it out. And it was about seven, eight years of just having to go over and over in my head. And then finally, it's spilled on in the paper. And it was the first time I've ever done a four-issue mini series like this. And it all came together. Okay, let's take a look at some of the pages that you sent me here. Exactly. Are we looking at here? Well, this is from issue one. And the call had gone out to try to contact the bombardier, formerly known as the Blue Bomber. I updated the name because there's a World War II tie-in to his orchridgion. And I figured out the bombardier would actually have a better sound to it. And so the army puts together a team to try to go to a bombardier island, where the bombardiers been for all these years, to try to contact him and enlist him in the cause. And in doing so, the army has enlisted the help of the battalion. The team that I did 100 covers about, and here we see the army is going into one of those large carrier planes where three of the saucer craft of the battalion are housed. And this is just a look at them prepping, and they're seeing these saucers for the first time, and they're going to be meeting the team. Okay. And this is a page from the same issue. Yes, this is after the team has landed on bombardier island. They didn't know what they were going to be facing. And it turns out that there has been some severe radiation leakage over the decades. And originally there was a testing site, animal testing on the site. Sure. That's always more keys. Oh, yes. Yeah. And wouldn't you know, decades of radiation had a bad effect on the wildlife. And this is the way they find out that these guys are like hanging around. And then big attack. Okay. This is the cover to issue two. You tell me what's going on here? Yes. This basically issue two is the first half of it is a flashback to see how the bombardier came to be. And how a very young version of Emperor Zou. This was there was a confrontation between the two of them in the bomber that was over Nagasaki on that fateful day. And they Emperor Zou at the time was a much younger agent of the empire. And he was going to try and sabotage the flight. But our young young man here he he forts the forts the sabotage. And they end up free falling along with the bomb over Nagasaki with with somewhat dire consequences for the both of them. Okay, this is also this this is a page from the same issue. Yes, this is a this is just a look at the bombardier himself as members of the battalion are in have been now been in contact with them. And basically waking him up from from a decades long sleep. And in doing so, he's got he has an excessive power that's built up, which triggers emergency emergency sirens in the in his home his home base. And he's going to have to release some of that energy and and we've got the red emergency lighting on as it as the whole thing reaches crisis point. Okay. And this is just a snippet from issue issue three, where we get we get a good look at present day Emperor Zou, and he's simply going to be having a chat with a prisoner. He has this was I wanted to add this so we could get a good look at who the main antagonist is of the series. Okay. And this is issue three, whereas issue two is we see some of the backstory of how the bombardier came to be issue three is some backstory on how Emperor Zou went from an operative back in World War two, to being a rather powerful figure in the underworld over the decades and just just an overview of how he got to that point. So tell me what roles you played in the development of, you know, the the paper version of this comic, were you the you did it all the lettering the digital linking the drawing. Yeah, everything. Yeah, I did. I did. Yeah. Start to finish. I did. I did everything. Is that common for independent comics developers creators nowadays. It really, you know, really depends on the person. Some people, it depends on how they've been brought up with, you know, with art in general. I myself being primarily over the years a storyboard artist for advertising for commercials. I always wanted to do everything by myself. I mean, you know, if you, if you're a lot in the comics world, the pencilers are sometimes quite often at the mercy of how good their anchors are. A bad anchor can just be horrible. But, you know, if your pencils aren't stellar, then a really great anchor could help and all that. But I just, I've always been a one man ban with that. So yeah, I feel a lot better taking care of all the different jobs myself. I could be. I'm sure I could improve at every job along the line, but I'm just more comfortable. And I, you know, it's really a matter of I also can't afford to pay a whole staff to come in and do all these other jobs. And I'd be, I'd be too, I'd probably be too, I'd be micromanaging along the way anyway. So I've got the best that I just do it all myself. And there's no deadline. So I could take as long as I want to make it to make it work for me. How long did this take you to put together? I would say, I'd say a couple months for each issue, doing it on the side if I, you know, had regular work to do or something like that. But when there's like nothing else going on, I probably take take care of an issue in a month. Okay. So what goes into the printing and selling and distribution of a paper comic. That's really changed quite a bit over the years. When I started doing it back in 1995. In 1995 through 2004, I was, whenever I had a comic, I wanted to get out there to the world. I would hop on to, I'd go through diamond distributors, which is the big comic distributor, you know, or they used to be not so much anymore. But. And I would, and there was a process there where you have to back then anyway, you would have, you had to show them that you had a professional looking book ready to go out and, you know, completed so they're not wasting their time. And then, then there'd be a timetable like say, I would, I would, if I sent all my materials in, because there is a catalog that comes out for the, for the solicitation for the retailers. So I would say, and as an example, I would send all my stuff in, in January, and that would, you know, to be to make the deadline to go into the previews catalog that would come out in March. And then the retailers would say how many copies they wanted of it. And then, ideally, if everything else goes to plan, you know, it would be printed up and hit the stands in May. So there's like a four month gap. Something between, and I'd also, I so had a Brenner printing down in Texas. They were usually my go to guys I think I believe they're still in business and I'd have everything ready to go. They get the numbers from diamond, how many they wanted. And then I'd say, okay, print up X amount back in 95, they had a, you really couldn't just say, oh, just print up 500 because the, the minimum print run back then was 3000. And how much, how much would that set you back to do 3000, 3000 copies of a 31 page comm 32 page comic in 94, 95. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't that bad because you knew you had money coming in from the orders from diamond. But really remember my, I want to say it was like, you know, I, I was going to say 1500 dollars for the 3000 copies but it was probably higher than that. It being the minimum. And of course, my orders didn't go anywhere near 3000 at the time. Because I, that's right, 95, I had the distinction. There wasn't, there wasn't a ton of, there wasn't a ton of independence doing this at the time through diamond. And I made the really brainy mistake of the very month that I was soliciting my first comic attack back in 95, that was the month where Marvel had decided to back out of diamond to try their own distribution. Well, I just threw everything, everything into the shredder everything I messed up my, my comic I'd put in the wrong section of the catalog with like toys or something like that. And they were good enough to like re solicit my book the month after in the proper section. But that was, you know, a whole process. And I also, I had to spend. I want to get an ad I wanted to buy an ad in the previews catalog, because that always helps. And I want to say that was like. $400 for, for a quarter page and something like that. But it helps the visibility when the retails are going through the catalog. And so this more or less was my process until 2004, when they double the ad rates. And, and I just took it out of my price range. And so I think we've monkey in the moon patrol is my last book through diamond. In 2004, and then beyond that it's like things were shifting over digital. And from that moment on, I had to shift over to the new digital places that was print on demand. I had originally gone with comic express which eventually went away. And now I think it's a and so that's where ever since then I've been putting all my stuff. On indie planet via coblam and selling digitally and then, you know, it's now become, you've got to try to tout it on social media as much as you can spread word as much as you can. Do whatever you can try to get the word out there and it's very different than than it used to be but a big shift but yeah it's it's a lot more inexpensive to go the digital route. It's tougher to get it's tougher to get the hits though and get sales because there's there's a lot of competition as well there are hundreds of thousands of books out there. All vying for attention so you just have to keep to keep looking away. In a process where you do most of the work on a computer now, how soon do you actually see a printed copy of your work, a proof copy that would be what the, you know, the folks that are ordering the comics would see. I'd like to say with coblam or indie planet. I think it's, it's fairly quick. I think usually once it's once the comics are up on sale on indie planet. I think once you order it I think you get it like within a week or something like that or two weeks tops. So it's just a matter. The only, I think the only real gap is they've got so many comics they're putting up on any planet that when I say okay because I had to order a copy myself to to see how it looks and if there's no mistakes I go okay please put it up on any planet. That could be three or four months before they actually get it up on any planet. Once it's on there and once it's up for sale then customers can get it fairly quickly I think. Okay. Let's talk about the other book that I mentioned which is really a rather large book I think it was 168 pages. This is your adaptation of the Doctor Who Dalek's Master Plan as a graphic novel. You tell us a little bit about how that came to be. It was 2011 and in 2013 it was going to be the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who and I'm a huge Doctor Who fan had been since 1980 and I got the notion and there's been a lot of missing episodes from the 1960s. First Doctor William Hartnell, second Doctor Patrick Troughton, missing a lot of episodes and one of the, I always felt was one of the greatest epic stories they ever had was the Dalek Master Plan and it was just, oh it was just a huge, you know, the 12 part story. They've never really had an epic quite that large before since and I always love the characters there's these larger than life characters like Mavic Chen, the guardian of the solar system. I mean, it was just fantastic and so I said well you know and I don't know why or what came over me but I decided oh you know what, I'm going to adapt the entire 12 part story into a graphic now. And so there was a website that actually had, they transcribed all the scripts from the missing episodes and so I printed out all the scripts and I went through and you know I edited out like this scene or that scene anything that was just basic padding Because there was a fair amount of padding in each episode, it'd be 12 parts and all that, and then I just said about doing it and one chapter at a time, and took about 18 months total to get it done. And, but, oh, Christian, he's going to kill me. And I, over at the old Casterberos website, Christian Collie. He was a very good guy he offered to put each of the chapters up on their website, what a week leading up to the big 50th anniversary is part of the celebration. And, and the problem was that we wanted to print them up. But it being BBC copyright copyrighted we really couldn't do that, but then I figured oh well let's let's have all proceeds all profits just go to charity the children in each charity that they had each year. And that gave us our in and the different online chapters were very popular and the, and we had, I don't know, a couple hundred copies printed up over in the UK, and sold a bunch made about 1800 pounds for children in need. And, and, and if anyone has, if anyone actually has printed copies now they're fairly rare, since there weren't that many printed up. But so that was all, you know, well and good, and when doing the story itself, I didn't, anyone who has seen it knows that, you know, I didn't, I didn't commit to doing strict likenesses for any of the characters, William Hart and all etc. Because I was basically drawing the characters themselves, and not the actors, and because there were, there was a lot of budgetary constraints back then, they really couldn't do too much they did, they did a wonderful job with, with what they had money wise on the sets, but like, for instance, there was an entire alien council, the Alliance teaming up with the Daleks, and they were, you know, each one was a different species, and me drawing them, I was able to, you know, have a lot more, a lot more fun making them look far more alien. There was one guy that had like, it was just like a globby stretchy guy would like black bumps all over him, and a very, you know, one guy was like in some kind of a container or whatever a liquid container, so I had, I had so much fun being able to make these characters that much more alien, something that the budget would never allowed for at the time, and, and also, and maybe my favorite character, the entire series Mavic Chen, the actor Kevin Stoney portrayed him in the, in the story, and he was, he has just this very operatic bold take on the character, and, and I, you know, so when drawing Mavic Chen, I wanted to make him, you know, larger than life, you know, a bigger guy with a barrel chest and just, you know, just match, I wanted the visual to really match the voice of the character, and, and that was, you know, that was just so enjoyable, it was so much fun, and even today, I've got, I still have people contacting me asking if they could get a copy of the PDF of the, of the, of the whole, the whole graphic novel, and so yeah, so it's, it was a whole big thing for the 50th anniversary. Now did you get any, did the folks that own the Doctor Who properties, did they contact you about this at all? No, I have never heard a word from them. I mean, I reached out to Doctor Who monthly, the monthly magazine for Doctor Who, just ahead of time telling them I was doing this, I reached out twice, never heard back. I don't know if they were, you know, if they were kind of like, oh no, we're not touching this because it's copyrighted. I don't know, although ironically, just a month or two ago, in their letters page of one of the latest issues. When someone wrote in on the letters page, put up a visual of the actual cover of the graphic novel, and said, oh, and it was really touting its virtues and all that, and I'm kind of like, oh, okay well 11 years too late but that's nice. You know, I got some attention. What's time to Doctor Who folks though. Well, that's true, that's true, and the speed at which time passes these days. Well, even children in need, the charity, we had contacted them to say we were doing this, and you know, you think it'd be all good and they wanted no part of any advertising for it or whatever, because again copyright. So, and so instead they ended up with about 1800 pounds for their for their charity so, you know, so that was, but yeah, I've never heard, I never heard anything in fact, upon prompting from another friend of mine in the UK. I had contacted Russell T Davies, like assistant or whatever, and sent him the PDF. And I never heard back I don't know if Russell ever saw it, read it, whatever. I thought I thought there'd be a good chance he might read it only because he's he's been an advocate of the comics in the past so don't know. Okay, so Rick, how does one support your work nowadays. Well, I do have a co fi page, and I think I don't know if I gave you the link for that to put in but I can, but on the co fi page. I'm, I've got numerous things I put something up. Oh, I put something up every Wednesday since that's comic day, and I just put up something new and different every week, whether it's, you know, one of the latest pieces of art I came up with, or if it's old. In the gallery there are different sections ones for 100 covers where I put up a different like once a month I put up different covers and give a little behind the scenes commentary and what went into it. Or I might have stages of a comic page, where I show every stage of a certain page from thumbnail, the pencil the ink, the tone, the color dialogue, etc, etc. And some people find that interesting, or I just do something from one of the 100 different stick figure designs I did different scenes. And I'm also now taking commissions. If anyone's interested in that. And, and so I tried to, I try to put something, you know, new and interesting up there. And every Wednesday, and I've been doing that for at least the better part of the year, and I and very soon, probably by mid year, I'm going to switch it to a subscription model, where everything will be for for $5 a month, you'll be able to get all the content. The one character that I do, the Swede, who's an assassin who prefers to use his hands, and gets created with the killing. He, he, I'm going to be doing a presenting an all new exclusive chapter of his exploits each month on the co five page after I go to the subscription model and all in all I think the the sheer tonnage of stuff that I put on there, I think for $5 a month that might that shouldn't be too bad, should be too big of an ask. You know, I don't, I don't do the kickstarter thing. I figured something a little bit simpler and there'll be, you know, extra bonuses and all that stuff for anyone who does subscribe so that's, and that's, you know, basically it. Yeah, is there anything else on the horizon for you in the next year? Um, I, I've gotten into this. There's a new set of brushes that I use in Photoshop. It's, I think a chromograph or something like that. It's, and it's the brushes that mimic the old dot pattern color systems that used to use back in the 60s and 70s. And it's just, it's so, it's so fun because you're actually putting the colors together like they used to do back in the day. And, and you could really get a really cool vintage look with the, with that process. They even give you a map, a chart of percentages of black cyan, yellow magenta to make this color that color or whatever. And I've done a few, a few bits and pieces utilizing that those colors. But Mickey and Madge, another comic series that I had done for the past few years. I'm putting together kind of like more or less a coffee table book. That will be available on Amazon, much like the, the suite is now that I'm going to have. Basically scenes, just one shot scenes of the different adventures of Mickey and Madge from all the different eras, planets, et cetera, et cetera, since it's time, space and magic. And, and I'm utilizing the, the, the dot pattern colors. So it's going to give it a bit of a vintage look. And so I'm putting that together and that, that's, that's one thing that I hope to have that come out sometime in 25. And, and in the meantime I'm working on more new chapters of the Swede, getting a good backlog for the, the co fi thing once that it's set up. And to promote all of this, I'm going to be going to at least one convention this year, hopefully two, if, if I get accepted in the C2E2 in April. And that's, that's in Chicago. Yes, that's, yes, C2E2 is in Chicago. That's going to be April 11 through 13 something like that mid April. And very tough to get in though. So I have yet to hear if I did, but I'm, but I definitely need to be at the fan expo. August 15th 17 that's in the Chicago suburbs. This coming year. So, and, and yeah, that's about it. Very good. Well, Rick, it was great having you back. I enjoyed the talk. I did as well. Thanks for having me, Jim. Great. Thank you. Okay. Thanks. Thank you all for watching today's show. Let's do this again soon. Take care. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (upbeat music)
